Only Solitaire: G.
Starostin's Record Reviews, Reloaded
A-B
Intro Notes
Beyond
this page the reader will find a bunch of superficial reviews of pop music records,
spanning the chronological distance of about a century's worth of recording and
of the tastes and judgements of one individual. If there
is a primary purpose to all this writing, it can be described as inescapable
egotistic self-assertion over one's record collection, something that each and
every individual with a record collection, a computer, and an ability to string
together a few coherent lines of text is entitled to as long as «freedom of
speech» has any meaning.
Each review tends to
consist of a small bundle of facts about the recording (for larger bundles of
facts, please refer to specialized literature on the artist), a self-honest
attempt to describe the music in accessible and meaningful terms, and a few
subjective, but systematic, opinions on the overall value of the record. No «ratings»
are given — rating the value of any record on a numeric scale is fun, but not
necessarily harmless fun — except for an overall «thumbs up» or «thumbs down»
decision, triggered by considerations of direct, irrational likeability (the «heart»
reaction) or by more rational ideas of «artistic importance», «relevance», and «innovation»
(the «brain» reaction). A record may be liked, but not respected, or vice
versa. However, it does not necessarily need to be both liked and respected to
get the thumbs in an upward position.
Reviews are separated
in seven chronological categories — artists of the pre-Beatles era covering
everything (mostly blues, R&B, and rockabilly) from the 1920s, then six
more sections covering relatively distinct chronological periods. Within these,
artists are slowly reviewed in alphabetic order. At the current rate, I may never get beyond the
letter C, but I do not really care. This is not science,
and getting anywhere is not the main purpose.
Potential readers are
encouraged to browse through these texts, and, perhaps, even to follow certain
recommendations (if they have not yet heard the record in question), provided
they have at least a few points of intersection with the opinions offered
below. If, on the other hand, it turns out that we come from different planets,
there is no reason whatsoever for you, dear reader, to waste your time on what
you will unquestionably label as «drivel». There may be other, better reviews
waiting for you out there, or, perhaps, you would like to follow your own
uninfluenced destiny in this matter. By all means, then, I welcome you to do
just that.
Contra my past
experience with the HTML version of Only Solitaire, I do not add any more
reader comments to my reviews. However,
I welcome additional or dissenting opinions on the forum, and I promise to
correct any factual, grammatical, or stylistical mistakes and/or typos that you
spot (fairly easy to do when it is all in a single file).
Last note: for fun and additional entertainment value, some of the songs in the track list preceding the review are hyperlinked to Youtube videos — but only in cases where there really is an accompanying video clip or live performance that I think is worth one's love (or hate), not when it's just an audio track over a bunch of boring photos. Enjoy — or don't enjoy.
The «Two Cents» Page.
For those who have no need of lengthy reviews,
here's just one or two quick thoughts and summaries on all the artists I have
covered. Do not forget, though, that even Britney Spears cannot be fully
described in two sentences, so these should by no means be taken for final and
definitive judgements. Build or burn at your own risk.
Note: ☺ Smileys indicate
artists well worth getting acquainted with; ○ blank circles are for okay
ones who may have reasons to own fan bases but do not rise beyond
"decent"; ☻ anti-smileys are just what they are — artists who
are only here because of public notoriety and (perhaps) limited historical
significance, but they can also be great fodder to make fun of. I'm sure they don't mind — they're supposed to
be cool, understanding people in any case.
1920-1960
☺Albert King: On a good day, this could be my favourite of
all the «big fat electric blues gurus». The man had a long, fluctuating,
career, but one that is actually worth following for at least one whole decade,
unlike that of so many blues purists; in the mid-1970s Fate ceased to mate him
with good supporting musicians, but for a whole ten years before that, he was
the blues spirit of Stax Records, providing a unique synthesis of the Chicago
style with classic R'n'B that, as strange as it may sound, nobody else at the
time was willing, or able, to replicate. Plus, he really was one of Eric
Clapton's most respected teachers circa the Cream period — it is a downright injustice
to love Disraeli Gears and ignore
this guy. Possible starting point: Born Under A Bad Sign
(1967).
○ Alberta Hunter: Lady Gracious of 1920s vaudeville-blues and
also the most spectacular late comeback in blues history. A bit too refined to
relate to on a personal level, but well worth worshipping on a universal one. Possible
starting point: Any decent compilation that cleans the sound up well
enough, or, for the comeback period, Amtrak
Blues (1980).
☺Amos Milburn: One of the three or four kings of the «jump
blues» craze of the late 1940s / early 1950s, nicely distinguished from the
others by his tremendous piano playing — a forefather of the rock'n'roll form
and one of the first purveyors of the rock'n'roll spirit ('Down The Road
Apiece' certainly rocks the house down). Possible
starting point: Blues, Barrelhouse
& Boogie-Woogie is an excellent 3-CD set that covers most of the
important points, but it's out of print; in its absence, any reasonable
compilation will do (even the short ones usually have all the classics, but you
gotta make sure that these are the original 1940s/1950s recordings).
○ Arthur Crudup: One of the first electric bluesmen and, in a
way, the progenitor of Elvis ('That's All Right, Mama'; 'My Baby Left Me') —
unfortunately, he only performed (I cannot even say «wrote») two songs in his
lifetime, the Slow Blues one and the Fast Proto-Rockabilly one, and once you
have tasted the two, there is little reason to taste a hundred more exactly
like them. All around nice dude, though. Very clean. Possible starting point: Any compilation that has the songs
mentioned above. Go for the original versions, not re-recordings — this guy is
mostly treasurable as a part of history, and why would you want to own fake
history?
☺B. B. King: Having reigned as active King of the blues-de-luxe style for more than half a
century — grand, flaring brass, piano, and strings arrangements have been going
hand-in-hand with the man's singing and playing ever since the late 1940s — B.
B. leaves us with such a huge legacy that it is almost impossible to make
recommendations. Possible starting points:
Live At The Regal (1965) is frequently
considered a landmark in live electric blues performance; Completely Well (1969) may be King at the peak of his studio
powers. Generally, though, a B. B. King album is as good as are the musicians,
songwriters, and producers involved with it. And if you decide to simply stick
with a best-of compilation, nobody is going to blame you, either.
○ Barbecue Bob:
One of the earliest forefathers of «Piedmont Blues», whatever that means in a
non-purely-geographical sense; cool voice, similar in seductive power to Blind
Willie McTell (but also capable of growling), and an interesting, if notably
limited, guitar playing technique in which dum-drum-dum-drum «flailing» freely
alternates with slide passages. Like most of the ancient bluesmen, this one,
too, is mighty repetitive, but he only recorded for about three years before
kicking the bucket, making this more forgivable than in others. Possible starting point: Any compilation
that has the major classics — 'Mississippi Heavy Water Blues', 'Motherless
Child', and that ultimate Depression anthem, 'We Sure Got Hard Times'.
☺Bessie
Smith: The Empress.
Perhaps not the most versatile, nuanced, diverse, or seductive urban blues
performer of the 1920s, but assuredly the most «titanic» of them all, and the
one who was the least afraid to pour pure gut feeling into the material, no
matter how old-fashioned or generic. Also, probably, the easiest blues queen
of the decade to get into — not least because most of her records have been
cleaned up and remastered so well by Columbia. Possible starting point: Any single compilation will do, as long as
the early years are covered.
○ Big
Bill Broonzy: The
overall nice gentleman of ye olde country blues that afforded himself a solid
place in history through three things: (a) recording like crazy over three
decades of a generally very monotonous career; (b) being one of the first
American bluesmen to heavily tour overseas in the 1950s, thus procuring front
row seats in the hearts of blues-thirsty European audiences; (c) overall nice
gentlemanship and all. Hugely overrated, but still good enough for half a CD
worth of solid guitar technique and occasionally adequate songwriting.
☺Big Joe Turner: A figure of tremendous historical importance and a potential source of kick-ass
entertainment even today, but proceed with care: the Big Joe formula is as
drastically limited as all of pop music's pre-1960's formulae. The bare
necessities of life include finding a decent compilation of Joe's 1930s/1940s
material, when he and his piano pal Pete Johnson ruled over jump blues and
boogie-woogie; and then, of course, a compilation of his 1950s Atlantic hits,
when, almost coincidentally, an already aging Big Joe became one of the
co-founders of rock'n'roll. In-depth analysis of Turner's career should be
left to pros and nuts.
○ Big Joe
Williams: The
direct ancestor to the much better known Muddy Waters — burly, smelly, scary
blues music directly from the Delta. Big Joe's distnctive features involve a
slightly special type of sound produced by his unique nine-string guitar;
authorship or, at least, appropriation of such classics as 'Highway 51' and
'Baby Please Don't Go'; and particular recording longevity — throughout the
1950s and 1960s, he was one of the most successfully and prolongedly marketed
guardians of classic Delta blues.
☺Big Mama Thornton: One of blues' and R&B's greatest leading
ladies — who, unfortunately, had the unluck to be Texas-based for most of her
career, and ended up getting far fewer chances to prove her greatness than many
of the more prominent figures of her age. As it is, she is mostly known for
having recorded the original 'Hound Dog' and also providing fellow Texan Janis
Joplin with one of her biggest hits ('Ball And Chain') — but there are plenty
of other burly, brawny, incendiary gems in her catalog, and, although her
«golden age» in terms of 45s were the 1950s, she managed to keep a respectable
artistic profile until at least the mid-1970s.
☺Bill Haley: The father of 'Rock Around The Clock' does
not need to strive for immortality: cheap (or expensive) compilations of the
Comets' couple dozen major successes from the mid- to late-Fifties are always
available, and they faithfully represent the cream of his rock'n'roll legacy.
Beyond that, fans might explore his slow rise to fame through a career in
country-western and early white R'n'B, or his quick fall from fame through a
career as the Twist King of Mexico, but, honestly, there is no pressing need.
It is important, however, to hear as
much from his Decca period as possible — not just the hits, but the
mini-«concept» albums as well.
☺Billie Holiday: The most idiosyncratic and deeply personal
jazz singer of the pre-rock'n'roll era; while I normally refrain from reviewing
jazz artists, her influence on all spheres of popular music, including pop,
folk, soft-rock, etc., has been tremendous – having written only a handful of
original compositions in her lifetime, she is still the fairy godmother of a
huge number of female (and some male) singer-songwriters. What Bessie Smith
started, she brought to completion — a shift from «mannered» singing, in which
emotionality was veiled with conventional theatrical moves and tactics, to a
style where the singer is no longer afraid to show the singer's own personality.
Surely the only person who could almost make even a song like ʽCheek To
Cheekʼ come to life (well, not quite, but she tried) deserves a page of
her own.
☺Blind Blake: Either Georgia's, or Virginia's, or Florida's
pride and glory (seems to be more different states vying for the right to his
birthplace than Greek cities for Homer's). The father of «ragtime guitar», one
of the first genuine, «provable» (through his recordings) virtuosos of the instrument,
and, seemingly, an overall nice guy, despite loads of personal problems,
typical of early pre-War bluesmen. Unfortunately, most of his recordings were
done for Paramount in pre-Depression times, which means awful sound quality.
Still, there are some compilations out there that try to do their best cleaning
up the sound — so it might be better to hunt for these 1-CD best-of recordings
rather than the complete 4-CD Document series, especially since these also
include a lot of filler (much of the slow blues pieces that B.B. played were
fairly generic).
○ Blind
Boy Fuller: One of
the most prolific, commercially successful, and predictably forgotten ragtime
/ Piedmont blues players of the pre-war era. The man had it all: a nice singing
voice, a steady, unerring, professional playing technique, close-to-ideal
studio conditions, and a profitable recording contract. The problem is, he only
played about ten to twelve songs throughout his career, each one of which was
re-recorded about the same number of times (sometimes even without changing
the lyrics, just the title). Still, everybody needs to at least hear ʽRag
Mama Ragʼ and ʽLog Cabin Bluesʼ — classics of the genre. And the
man that gave a title to the best Rolling Stones live album cannot be
altogether forgettable.
☺Blind Lemon
Jefferson: Nobody
played guitar in the 1920s like this guy, and few people, until Hendrix came
along thirty-five years later, allowed their instrument that much freedom,
especially when working from within a form as initially restricted as the
blues. One of the few completely indispensable acoustic-blues artists for any
aspiring musician, and particularly recommendable for «generic blues» haters as
a possible remedy for the anti-blues attitude. But keep in mind that his work
is rather uneven; it is advisable to concentrate on the early material from
1926-27 (ʽRabbit Foot Bluesʼ and the classic ʽMatch Box
Bluesʼ, in particular, are undying classics).
☺Blind
Willie Johnson:
This guy only recorded about an hour and a half total of music during his brief
late 1920s / early 1930s career, but what an hour and a half. Rough, dark,
scary gospel-blues, sung by Captain Beefheart's grandfather and Tom Waits'
great-grandfather and played with unparalleled slide guitar technique. Hugely
influential on the entire blues and roots-rock scene, but still in a class of
his own — essential listening for the ages.
☺Blind
Willie McTell: With
his cheery, youthful tenor and energetic style of 12-string guitar playing,
Blind Willie McTell was one of the most «optimistic-sounding» bluesmen of the
pre-war era, and he never lost that taste for life even after his recording
sessions virtually ground to a halt. That is not quite the impression one gets from Bob Dylan's take on the man
(McTell was a huge spiritual influence on Bob, but in a strictly Bob-controlled
environment), but it might be even better, because loud, lively 12-string
country blues was never the commonest commodity.
○ Bo Carter: This country bump... er, gentleman cut an immense number of sides in the 1930s, despite
never having had more than a simply competent country-blues singing style and a
professional, but never all that individualistic manner of string-picking. The
main reason for his success were his lyrics, which pushed the sexual innuendo
level of generic 12-bar blues to an absolute, some might say almost surreal
peak — honestly, AC/DC at their dirtiest have nothing on this guy, and the
«give-the-people-what-they-want» public slurped and salivated accordingly.
Collecting all his works has been easy ever since they have all been assembled
in the Document series, but it is also the textbook definition of overkill: the
regular listener only needs, at most, a representative single-disc compilation
(actually, five or six songs in total will do the trick — make sure
ʽPlease Warm My Wienerʼ is one of the selections).
☺Bo Diddley: No rock'n'roll collection will ever be
complete or representative without a solid collection of Bo's early singles —
the tribal «Bo Diddley beat» alone is one of the foundation stones of rock
music, but Bo actually pioneered much more than that, and did it all with such
verve that those early singles still sound totally fresh today (especially with
a good remastering job). His innovative streak, like that of most «early
rockers», was quite brief — already by the early Sixties, he was mostly coming
up with re-combinations of previous successes — but the same cannot be said of
the energy level of his performances, which never sagged one bit even in the
direst of times. And he did make a brief exciting comeback in the early
Seventies, reinventing himself as a heavy funkster at a time when most of his
contemporaries were quite content with the status of «generic oldies act».
☺Bobby
"Blue" Bland: Despite his not-particularly-attractive family name, Bobby has stuck
far more often in the «True Blue» rather than the «Bland» department throughout
his career. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he managed to stay aloof,
resonant, competent, and commercially successful (on a modest level) for three decades — giving a good name to
soul-blues in the 1950s, 1960s, and even the 1970s, when his style and
production became predictably glossier, but still retained that classy spark.
His major weakness is over-productivity: even as late as the 1990s, he was
still steadily releasing a new LP every two years or so, most of which were and
still are surprisingly listenable, but not altogether necessary. But a good,
comprehensive overview of his Duke Records years (1950s-1960s) belongs in
everybody's collection.
☺Brenda Lee: «Little Miss Dynamite» started out in the
mid-Fifties as one of only two ladies who could successfully compete with the
emerging male rockers on their territory (the other one being Wanda Jackson) —
some of her early singles energized the listener with near-genuine Elvis-type
energy, rendered all the more fascinating when you realized she had developed
that energy while still in her early teens. Unfortunately, in a matter of
several years, the initial punch had dissipated, and she was soon marketed by
her Nashville supervisors as a fluffy, run-of-the-mill balladeer and
uninventive second-rate interpreter of «golden oldies and silver youngies»;
with but a tiny handful of exceptions, nothing beyond 1961's All The Way is really recommendable,
and the best way to get to know Brenda is through a compilation that focuses on
her Fifties' material.
○ Brownie
McGhee: The most,
actually, that could be said about Brownie McGhee is that he was a cool,
easy-going black dude who professionally played some very nice acoustic blues
in many different styles (mainly Delta and Piedmont, though) — for the most
part, though, he made his name by simply outlasting everybody else and managing
to maintain a public profile in the 1950s and the 1960s, when most of his
«authentic» pre-war contemporaries had already gone down the drain. Brownie is
simply Brownie — he does not have much of an individual style, but he is never
less than listenable, and often more than charming. Thus, any of his
recordings, be it the early 1940s singles, the numerous 1950s duets with Sonny
Terry on harmonica, or the later, more fully arranged band albums, are just
about equally recommendable. But be careful, he's got a veritable boatload of
them.
☺Buddy Holly: One of the few rock'n'rollers from the
pre-Beatles era to go «against the grain» of the generally brutal / rebellious
image associated with the movement — Buddy's image was notoriously non-flashy,
«nerdy» even in comparison, but it was really his excellent gift for creative
songwriting that makes him one of the most important giants of the era, and a
huge influence on the entire pop scene of the Sixties and beyond. The average
modern listener might not be too impressed with the original recordings,
suffering as they are from mediocre production values and a general lack of
flashiness in Buddy's singing or playing, but nothing can hide the man's
lovable charisma, or the genius of his best melodies — too bad he didn't have
at least a couple extra years to leave behind a bigger bunch. A representative
collection of Buddy's singles should be part of everybody's collection, but it
is probably wise to avoid all the numerous rip-offs that his manager and
producer, Norman Petty, released in overdubbed versions after his demise: with
just a few exceptions, they are comprised of scrapped outtakes that never
sounded too good to begin with, much less when they got «spiced up» with
additional instrumentation that never belonged there in the first place.
○ Buddy Moss: A legendary, but seriously underrated,
country blues player from Atlanta, largely obscured by flashier competition
from Blind Blake to Blind Willie McTell to Blind Boy Fuller (sort of a pattern
there — perhaps if he'd been Blind
Buddy Moss, things would have turned out differently). Unlike all those guys,
Buddy was not much of an «entertainer», playing only a minimum of
dance-oriented ragtime blues stuff; his specialty was the rigid 12-bar form,
which he enlivened and enlightened with a marvelously fluent, inventive style
of rhythm and lead playing. However, such an approach made his unique
personality much harder to discern, and he never had that entrancing, mystical,
«demonic» aura that later made white boys so attracted to the likes of Robert
Johnson or Charlie Patton. In addition, he seems to have been relatively humble
and shy — and then there was this weird accident of his being jailed for
murdering his wife in 1935, something that seems to have never been properly
proven, yet it cut his career short at the time and he never recovered. Most of
his stuff sounds «the same», but still, every blues fan should at least own a
representative compilation with ʽOh Lawdy Mamaʼ on it.
☺Bukka White: One of the most revered country blues players
of the 1930s, the man actually only made a small handful of extremely
influential recordings in that decade. It is hard to claim that he had an
instantly recognizable / completely distinct identity, being influenced by just
about everybody from Blind Lemon Jefferson to Blind Willie Johnson to Charley
Patton, but it might just be that versatility, and general ability to impose
his own rough, slightly bear-like, but lovable personality on all these styles,
that makes his classic recordings (ʽPo' Boyʼ, ʽShake 'Em On
Downʼ, ʽSic 'Em Dogs Onʼ, etc.) into such a treat. Like many
other survivors, he made a comeback in the 1960s, but most of his late-period
recordings are either faithful recreations of the old stuff or somewhat
misguided attempts to step into the shoes of the new generation of Chicago
bluesmen — it is recommendable to simply stick to the old pre-war stuff,
particularly since all of it fits in
quite niftily on a single-CD compilation.
1960-1966
☺13th Floor Elevators: Coming out of Texas, no
less, these guys were the original lords of hardcore psychedelia, fanatically understood
as a musical/lyrical philosophy of genuine soul liberation, rather than
merely a bunch of trippy circus sonic effects. This allowed the band to succesfully
blow the minds of everyone who was not afraid of them (and, in 1966-67, such
people were still rather scarce in numbers) — over the course of a whole two
albums. Then, predictably, bandleader Roky Erickson blew his own mind, and the band ground to a halt by the end of the
1960s, leaving behind a confused, but still exciting legacy (although Roky
himself still managed to have a hit-and-miss solo career for the next forty
years). Possible starting point: The Psychedelic Sounds Of...
(1966).
☺Action, The: Their way of combining R'n'B with Brit-pop
was original and nice; too bad they never even had a chance to record a proper
album. Possible starting point: The Ultimate Action collects in one
package most of their reasons for existence.
☺Alan Price: Outside of the UK, this man is arguably known
mostly for his role in The Animals — his organ playing on ʽThe House Of
The Rising Sunʼ has always been his primary (if not only) visit card. However,
upon leaving The Animals over creative disagreements with Eric Burdon, Alan
embarked on a solo career that, for a while, made him one of the most quintessentially British solo
artists of his time. Beginning with somewhat unremarkable sets of R&B covers
and then falling under serious Randy Newman influence, Price honed and
perfected his songwriting skills to the extent of producing at least 2-3
conceptual albums of melodically pleasing and catchy, lyrically intelligent,
and atmospherically moving tunes. His artistry has always been conservative
(although he did embrace some funk and disco in the late 1970s), but his views
on life were anything but, and his sincerity, humility, and overall sense of
taste usually manage to show through even when he is running out of inspiration
— actually, when he is running out of inspiration, he prefers not to record at
all: the majority of his solo output is concentrated in the 1970s, after which
recording output becomes more rare and generally less satisfactory. Possible starting point: O Lucky Man! (1973), the soundtrack to
Lindsay Anderson's movie, is usually acknowledged as his highest points, but
the two non-soundtrack LPs that follow it are quite the little masterpieces in
their own right as well.
○ Albert Collins: One of the most easily recognizable electric
blues players, with a tone so sharp, crisp, and crunchy that his bizarre
fixation on all things cold and cool (see his album titles) becomes less and
less bizarre, the more you listen to him. The down side (not uncommon for blues
players, one might say) is a certain, ahem, similarity
to most of his work, but even in that respect he is better than many others,
dabbling in novel sonic experimentation and always displaying a strong sense of
humor that could not even be quenched by terminal cancer, from which he died in
1993. Possible starting point: The Cool Sound Of Albert Collins, a
compilation of his first, trail blazing singles; Ice Pickin' (1978) is, for good reason, is considered the peak of
his LP period.
☺Alex Harvey: His work with The Sensational Band is
Scottish glam-rock theater at its flashiest and bizarrest, but without
guitarist Zal Cleminson he's like a fish out of water. Possible starting
point: Framed (1972) or Next! (1973). Avoid (for the first
time, at least) all of the pre-Sensational Band stuff.
☺Animals, The: Early British R'n'B (1964-65) at its finest —
Eric Burdon's brawn and Alan Price's electric organ make an explosive combo. Later
Animals are, however, mostly a vehicle for Burdon's ego — an acquired taste at
best. Possible starting point: The Animals On Tour (1965).
☺Aretha Franklin: The Queen
of Soul will forever remain the Queen, even though her active reign lasted only
approximately 1/10th the length of her entire career.
The universal consensus to which I completely subscribe is that the classic
period lasted from 1967 to 1972 (maybe 1973) during her stay at Atlantic
Records. Everything else is merely a footnote, or a lengthy series of historical
illustrations about how bad songwriting and worse conceptions of mainstream
musical evolution consistently ruined a great artist. Possible starting point: Young, Gifted And Black (1972) —
Aretha at her maturest — or, for a simpler, fresher perspective, Lady Soul
(1967).
☺Arthur Alexander: Mostly known for having both the Beatles
('Anna', 'Soldier Of Love') and the Stones ('You Better Move On') cover his
songs, Alexander was, in effect, a seriously underrated pioneer of heartbreak
country-soul, with a relatively small catalog, most of which has been a
commercial failure regardless of the time period or label, but is surprisingly
consistent, enjoyable, and faithful to his artistic spirit. Well worth getting
to know. Possible starting point: The Greatest (1989) is the most
detailed and easily available compilation on the market.
☺Association, The: Once loud and proud, now unjustly forgotten
heroes of West Coast «sunshine pop» — inoffensive, sweet music that still
somehow managed to be cool due to the band just as willingly embracing
psychedelia and electric guitar riffage as they were willing to embrace
barbershop quartet values. Some fine singles ('Along Comes Mary', etc.) are
their primary claim to non-oblivion, but their best albums tend to grow on you,
too. Possible starting point: Insight Out (1967).
○ Barbara
Lewis: A minor
talent on the Atlantic R&B market, Barbara Lewis had the misfortune of
being just a wee bit too timid and old-fashioned to make much of a difference —
but she did have a nice, deep and silky singing voice, and she even had her own
songwriting talent, writing all the songs for her debut album (no mean feat for
a black lady in the early Sixties). Unfortunately, after just one smash hit
(ʽHello Strangerʼ), her commercial status quickly waned, and very soon
she was barred from songwriting and saddled with subpar material, only very
rarely alternating with an occasional new hit (ʽBaby I'm Yoursʼ). A
cautious shift to «groovier» songs in the late Sixties did not help, and by
1970, Barbara Lewis was little more than a one-hit or two-hit memory,
immortalized in that capacity on various Atlantic R&B compilations. Possible starting point: Hello Stranger (1963) for all those
interested in how an early Atlantic album where the performer herself did all
the songwriting could sound (spoiler: not too
hot) — provided you can find it in the first place. Otherwise, just stick to
compilations.
○ Barbarians, The: Minor garage «wonder» from Massachusets,
whose main claim to fame was their hook-armed drummer and his novelty signature
tune, 'Moulty'. Their lonely LP (Are You
A Boy Or Are You A Girl, 1966) is no better and no worse than the average
garage album — three or four fun, inspired tunes drowned in a sea of pointless
filler. We will never even know if they really had potential or if they hadn't.
☺Beach Boys, The: One of the greatest American bands of the
century, the Beach Boys never had the luck of the Beatles — their personal
growth from melodically impeccable, but «spiritually lightweight»
entertainment to some of the greatest musical innovators of their generation
(mostly courtesy of gifted brother Brian Wilson) has somehow eluded the general
mainstream public, and continues to be generally confined to the «musically
oriented» sphere of people. This is partially due to unpleasant American
marketing strategies, and partially to the tension within the band itself
(where the «Mike Love Fraction» had always remained content with being viewed
as «The Fun Fun Fun band» rather than «The Heroes And Villains Band»), but,
fortunately, all stereotypes can be easily overcome with the most minor of
efforts — just follow these recommendations: Possible starting point: Pet
Sounds (1966) — if you are new to the Beach Boys, it is best to start with
their artistic peak before risking to fall victim to the stereotypes. «Fun Fun
Fun» people will probably prefer All
Summer Long (1964) or Today!
(1965), whereas those who are looking for challenges should investigate Friends (1968); and the recently issued
SMiLe Sessions (2011) are an
obligatory musical lesson history for everyone who is willing to take such
lessons.
☺Beatles, The: Four insignificant hoodlums from one of
Britain's most God-forsaken locations who
somehow managed to dupe a large part of the world into considering them the
most important musical phenomenon of the XXth century. In all honesty, I can
only hope that you avoid the fate of all the brainless sheep zombified by
industry bosses and PR agents, including yours truly. But if you, too, are
prepared to lay your brain on the altar... possible
starting point: Please Please Me
(1963) and onwards from there, not missing one beat. Must avoid: Most of the compilations, except for those that contain
non-LP and archival material. Those brainless sheep who only know their Beatles
through ʽYesterdayʼ and ʽHey Judeʼ are on the really low end of the food chain.
○ Beau Brummels, The: Although this bunch of cute San Franciscan
folkies is mostly remembered for ʽLaugh, Laughʼ, a classic early folk-pop
single included on the Nuggets
compilation, for a very brief period, they were one of the major hopes of the
US folk-pop scene, before being completely eclipsed by the more daring and
adventurous Byrds. Still, they made it as far as the psychedelic era (1967) and
even the post-psychedelic era (1968), with a bunch of nice, if relatively
feeble, albums — and, today, remain a subtle hidden delicacy for the «true
connoisseur». Possible starting point:
Introducing The Beau Brummels (1965)
has all the classic and semi-classic early hits; Triangle (1967) is sometimes hailed as a lost masterpiece, but is
less typical of the band's «regular» sound.
○ Billy Fury: Great Britain's pride and joy for a brief
period of about one or two years — in the pre-Beatles era, this guy was the
most commercially successful and «authentic» of all the young British admirers
of the rock'n'roll sounds coming from overseas. Billy could do a mean Elvis impersonation,
wrote his own songs, highly derivative of rockabilly and R&B but with a
hint at originality nevertheless, and struck a cool pose with the babes.
Unfortunately, his decision to tie his own fate to that of American rock'n'roll
inevitably ensured that he «burned out», that is, switched to soft pop and
balladry, even before the Beatles
came along and put the last nail in the coffin. These days, Billy Fury is
little more than a historical relic, but a sympathetic one if you attempt to
concentrate on his rockabilly stuff. Possible
starting point: The Sound Of Fury
(1960) is his only LP that is really worth having — everything else of merit
can be easily gotten through a compilation (or not gotten at all, big deal).
○ Billy Preston: Most people only know Billy through his
short-term association with the Beatles, and it is hard to blame them — even if
the guy actually had a long and prolific solo career where the Beatles were
only a transient ingredient. Starting out as an organ instrumentalist,
advancing into gospel and gospel-pop, proceeding from there into the realm of
fun 'n' fluffy dance-pop, Billy never wrote or played anything genuinely
«great» — his chief weapon is charisma, which makes it very hard to criticize
him, because how can one say anything explicitly bad about such a charming person? All of his output up to the
1980s, when generic adult contemporary and soulless electro-pop got the better
of him, is perfectly listenable, and still works as fun,
positive-vibration-loaded background muzak. Possible
starting point: That's The Way God
Planned It (1969), his first vocal album, has one of his biggest hits, cool
guest star contributions, and is actually available on CD as part of the old
Apple catalog — start from there and go in both directions if you feel a bit
peckish for more.
☺Birds, The: Not to be confused with their far luckier
Y-shaped American competitors, this is just a very short-lived, garage-oriented
early British R&B outfit, most notable for introducing Ron Wood to the
world — the 17-year old guitar-playing, song-writing (but, fortunately, not yet
singing) prodigy. In their brief lifetime, they only managed a small bunch of
singles, all of which would be quite worthwhile for fans of the Invasion — and
now they have all been niftily collected on a single, well-packaged
compilation (The Collectors' Guide To
Rare British Birds).
○ Blues Incorporated: An early London-based «revolving doors»
blues/jazz/R&B outfit whose chief claim to fame was in launching the early
careers of at least 50% of everyone who ever mattered on the British
blues/jazz/R&B scene, from Mick Jagger to Jimmy Page. Bandleader Alexis
Korner had a good taste in music and a good eye for talented people —
unfortunately, he did not have a tremendous amount of talent himself, and few,
if any, of B.I.'s original records offer anything other than historical
interest. Possible starting point: R&B From The Marquee (1962) is
arguably the first serious R&B LP to have been recorded and released on
British shores, but At The Cavern
(1964) gives an overall better impression of Blues Incorporated at their
wildest live (which was never all that
wild, granted). (Almost) never awful and (almost) always competent, but
(almost) completely losing out to the less purist and more aggressive
competition of the time, from the Animals to the Yardbirds.
○ Blues Magoos: One of those strictly B-level psycho/garage
outfits — captured in their prime and glory on Nuggets with two classic singles, ʽ(We Ain't Got) Nothin'
Yetʼ and ʽTobacco Roadʼ, but quite spotty, inconsistent, and
derivative otherwise. Of specific interest is the fact that there were really
two completely different stages of this band — the original psychedelic
incarnation, led by Bronx-based Emil Thielhelm (a.k.a. «Peppy Castro») and
Ralph Scala, and the late-1960s incarnation, with Peppy as the only original
member leading the band in an entirely new direction, based on jazz-rock and
R&B rather than pop. This latter incarnation, despite never having had
anything resembling a good singer, almost
came close to working out an exciting sound, before also falling apart due to
lack of commercial success — but their two albums may be worth checking out of
sheer curiosity. Possible starting point:
Psychedelic Lollipop (1966) has all
the great songs, but even that one has plenty of filler.
○ Blues Project, The: Today, this band is mostly remembered for two
things: (a) giving a proper start to Al Kooper's long and illustrious career in
show biz; (b) ʽFlute Thingʼ, an accidentally brilliant piece of
«psycho-roots» fusion that rightfully counts among the finest instrumentals of
the mid-1960s. As for the rest of it — the intentions and aspirations of The
Blues Project were as noble and intelligent as those of your average team of
five Jewish kids from Brooklyn, but somehow they just didn't happen to have
the proper means of carrying out their idea of blues / jazz / folk /
psychedelia synthesis, certainly not in the era of Cream and Hendrix. Detailed
acquaintance with their career should probably be reserved for the historically
inclined. Possible starting point: Projections (1966) has approximately
99% of their best stuff, and is the only album that does (after a while) belong
in everybody's collection.
☺Bob Dylan: This guy deserves no special introduction,
other than simply stating the obvious — his is the single greatest mind in the
history of «pop culture» in the second half of the 20th century, and if you do
not agree, you stand no chance of a successful mind-meld with the owner of Only
Solitaire. If you happen to be a newcomer to the world of His Bobness, there is
no way you could do with a single point of entry. A decent starting selection
would be The Freewheelin' (1963) for
the early acoustic period, Highway 61
Revisited (1965) for the early electric period, and Blood On The Tracks (1975) for the «torturedly introspective»
period of the mid-1970s; follow it up with the subtler, a bit less accessible
pleasures of Blonde On Blonde
(1966), John Wesley Harding (1967), Desire (1976), and the startling
late-period comeback of Time Out Of Mind
(1997); no fewer than these six albums would be enough for a fair initial
assessment, and if you still remain unconverted, too bad.
○ Bobby Fuller: Best known for his rendition of The Crickets' ʽI Fought The
Lawʼ, which he turned into a major hit that was later expropriated by The
Clash, Bobby Fuller was not really as much of a «rebel» (which the song might
falsely suggest) as a nice American lad who liked Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, The
Beach Boys, and (trans-Atlantically) The Beatles, and innocently wanted to be a
little bit of each as late as 1965-66, even after Dylan had gone electric and
shit. Other than ʽI Fought The Lawʼ, he had a small bunch of nice —
thoroughly derivative, but well-hooked — pop singles, and could perhaps have
gone on to bigger things if not for his mysterious death in mid-1966 at the age
of 24, which also contributed to his «legend». A footnote, really, but worth a
quick retro-glance. Possible starting
point: Since his band, The Bobby Fuller Four, only had one-and-a-half
proper LPs out, and both freely mixed mini-gems with mini-turds, any compilation
that has ʽI Fought The Lawʼ, ʽAnother Sad And Lonely
Nightʼ, and ʽLet Her Danceʼ on it will probably suffice for a
representative introduction.
☺Booker T &
The MGs: Perhaps Booker T.
Jones and his pals will generally be remembered as the greatest backing band
in the classic age of R&B — but that does not mean that their own career
should be negligible, or mercilessly reduced to ʽGreen Onionsʼ (one
of the most influential simplistic-genius grooves of the Sixties) and maybe
ʽHip Hug-Herʼ. Expectedly, a lot of their instrumentals was just
filler — novel and/or forgettable covers of contemporary and older hits — yet
every once in a while they came out with interesting, thoughtful compositions,
or at least bold, arrogant moves (like covering Abbey Road in its entirety). Additionally, how likely are you to
become convinced that Booker T. & The MG's were indeed the finest R&B combo of their era if they are
always obscured by some lead singer? It is only on their solo records that you
can easily and leisurely appreciate the holy goodness created by the interplay
of these four little giants of simple, but tasteful Afro-American (actually, mixed)
entertainment — a goodness they managed to carry all the way into the early
Seventies, before fading away right when smooth funk and disco began ruining
the lives of R&B veterans. Possible
starting point: Well, ʽGreen Onionsʼ is on Green Onions, so it sort of makes sense to start at the very start
— and then see if you really only need a good compilation from these guys (the
most common and sensible choice) or if your taste for R&B runs towards the
subtle and minuscule.
☺Brenda
Holloway: A one-hit wonder
from Motown, chiefly remembered for ʽEvery Little Bit Hurtsʼ, that
actually deserves much more — deeply talented as a singer and modestly as a
songwriter, she resisted being groomed, schooled, and pigeonholed to such an
extent that the majority of recordings she made for Motown in the 1960s
remained shelved for decades, and came to light only recently, re-establishing
her as a top star of the era. To be sure, there's a lot of filler, but she had
her own brand of grace, elegance, and subtlety that very few of Motown's female
superstars could top. Although her typical pigeonholed image is that of weepy
torch ballad singer, she could do upbeat R&B, loud soul, and even a little
jazz — as rarely as she was offered a chance to do so. Anyway, now that the
vaults have been opened, any lover of classic Motown owns it to himself to have
a copy of 2005's Motown Anthology,
which includes both of the albums she recorded for the label (one released and
one shelved) as well as lots of fun rarities.
☺Brian
Wilson [← Beach Boys]: Brian
Wilson's solo career began at a relatively late date — although his dominance
in The Beach Boys came to a crash in mid-1967, it was not until the late
Eighties that he was able to begin to cope with his psychological and
physiological problems, and that, among other things, meant launching a solo
career where he could finally express his artistic muse without having to bow
down to commercial pressure or come to terms with Mike Love. By all means, that
solo career has been miles above anything that «The Beach Boys» put out since
the late 1970s, and yet, buyer/listener beware: even though Brian's songwriting
genius had never truly left him, and even if his naïve idealism can still
be endearing in an «old man child» way, he still tends to depend on his
collaborators — songwriters and producers who know their way around the man but
who do not have the tenth part of his genius and often do not understand how he
should be handled. As a result, Brian's solo output is very hit and miss: unfortunately, great songs tend to be mixed with
filler and embarrassments on almost every album, so there's just no way around
it. Possible starting point: the
eponymous Brian Wilson (1988),
despite lame late Eighties production, is still arguably the closest he ever
got to recapturing the «teen symphony» spirit of Pet Sounds and Smile.
After that, it's all up to you.
☺Buddy Guy: One of the longest and toughest survivors of
the classic Chicago school of electric blues, although, curiously, his true
rise to fame only took place in the 1990s, when, after a rather sketchy four
decades of a hit-and-miss solo career mostly spent in the shadow of other
guitar greats, he unexpectedly emerged as the principal flag-bearer for the Old
Blues Guard. Frankly speaking, Buddy is really not that great — for all his undeniable prowess with the axe, he was
never much of a songwriter, and his singing and showmanship were always too
derivative of others (be it Muddy, James Brown, or Hendrix) to deserve anything
more than casual respect. Additionally, his disproportionally huge post-1990
discography constantly fluctuates between flashes of energized inspiration and
generic commercialized blandness — and he spends way too much time cultivating
his «blues patriarch» image. For all those flaws, he can be a tremendous axeman, one of the few who really succeeded in
reflecting Hendrix's influence and bringing it back home to Chicago; and everybody
needs at least a little Buddy in the collection (though it is quite telling of
people if you see their «blues shelf» stocked with Buddy Guy and nothing else).
Possible starting point: You might
skip the early stuff and head directly to Sweet
Tea (2001), one of the man's most inspired and sonically unusual records
from the revival period; from there on, it's your bet, but be prepared for lots
of inconsistency.
☺Buffalo
Springfield: This
band lasted way too little, and was arguably more important for launching the
careers of Stephen Stills and Neil Young than for building up a significant
amount of autonomous legacy — even its best preserved classics, like ʽFor
What It's Worthʼ and ʽI Am A Childʼ, are rather associated with
individual members of the band than with a collective spirit. Nevertheless, the
three short records that they left behind are stuffed with excellent songwriting
and performing — they really did take
«folk-rock», allegedly invented by the Byrds, to a whole new level, much
emphasizing the «rock» aspect because of Stills' and Young's love of the distorted
electric guitar sound, and you can almost watch them mature as songwriters in
real time from the first to the second and third albums. Possible starting point: Since they only had three albums, why
should one choose a starting point in the first place? Well, if you insist, the
first two records are the obvious choices, but do not underestimate Last Time Around (1968) either — even
as a contractual obligation, the album is still highly consistent and
entertaining.
☺Butterfield Blues
Band, The: One of
America's first and best white boy blues-rock bands, led by the Chicago-bred
harp wiz Paul Butterfield and featuring Mike Bloomfield, arguably the first
American electric guitar hero to emerge in the wake of the British invasion.
The band began with a huge promise, playing an exciting mix of rocking covers
and inventive originals; unfortunately, Bloomfield quit very early on, and from
1967 onwards, the band had been steadily deteriorating, drifting into
genericity and rather flaccid jazz-rock. Possible
starting point: East-West (1966)
is the acclaimed masterpiece, and it does feature the combined talents of
Butterfield and Bloomfield applied to a variety of genres — their most serious
and exciting attempt to get out of the restricted blues-rock mold and get into
something bigger. The eponymous debut album, though less original, kicks some
serious ass, too — but be wary about everything they recorded after Bloomfield's
departure.
☺Byrds, The: While The Byrds have never been my favorite
American band from the Sixties — I suppose they have always had too strict a
limit on pop hooks for my taste, and not quite enough sense of humor for the
time — they would certainly be in my Top Five, and should probably be in
anybody's, as befits a band that pretty much invented the «folk rock» formula
(being the first to bring Dylan to mass audiences outside Greenwich Village),
worked at the crossroads of pop, folk, country, jazz, and psychedelia,
sheltered at least three or four quality songwriters, and produced supersongs
as diverse as ʻEight Miles Highʼ and ʻTurn! Turn! Turn!ʼ.
Even their deeply troubled history of personal relations, with lineup changes
occurring between almost every single record, was somehow in keeping with their
endless need for change, progress, and self-improvement, and even their
blunders could be as fascinating as their achievements. So even if you fail to
fall in love with the band (and they can
sound a little bland and dated in the modern era), the very journey through
their catalog is practically guaranteed to be one intriguing ride. Possible starting point: With a band
like this, I'd definitely recommend starting from the very beginning, with Mr. Tambourine Man (1965), even if it
may not necessarily be their most consistent set of songs; my personal
preference lies with Fourth Dimension
(1966), but you'll get there soon enough anyway if you just follow the
chronostream.
1967-1970
○ 5th Dimension,
The: Jury still out.
☺Affinity: Very minor British art-rock band from 1969-70
that only managed to put out one self-titled album in its lifetime and record
enough stuff for another to be released archivally a quarter century later.
Nothing particularly unique — just pleasant, solid art-rock with two of the
most underused, if not exactly underrated, lady talents in British music of
that era (Linda Hoyle and Vivienne McAuliffe, consequently). Possible starting point: Affinity (1970).
☺Al Green: The most consistent, not to mention sexiest,
dude in 1970s soul, before he switched from working part time for the Lord to a
24-hour-a-day job; he's never really recovered. To fall in love with him would
be predictable and corny; to ignore him — criminal. Possible starting point:
I'm Still In Love With You (1972).
☺Al Kooper: The man who is, at best, known as the organ
player behind 'Like A Rolling Stone' and the founder of Blood, Sweat &
Tears, has actually had a much more intelligent, soulful, and diverse solo
career than that of quite a few of his much better known Sixties peers —
impeded only by intentionally staying out of the limelight and avoiding serious
publicity. Possible starting point: I Stand Alone (1968) and then proceed
from there — the man never made a truly bad record, and just about everything
in his 1968-73 run of LPs is brilliant.
☺Al Stewart: Frequently mistaken for a one-hit wonder
(1976's 'Year Of The Cat'), Al has, in fact, had one of the longest, most
consistent, and most intelligent careers in British folk-rock, going for
simple, steady hooks and simple, understandable lyrics (many of which directly
relate to various historical topics) that never annoy or distract. If he
doesn't blow your mind, he may still have a good chance at stealing your heart.
Possible starting point: Past, Present & Future (1973).
☺Alice
Cooper: The
undisputed master of titillating cheap thrills, but much more witty and musically
talented than those who are only familiar with the image will tell you. Possible
starting point: Killer (1971) for Alice Cooper the more
musically-oriented band, Welcome To My Nightmare (1975) for Alice
Cooper the more show-oriented solo artist.
☺Allman Brothers Band,
The: The one and only band
that suffices to save the reputation of «Southern Rock» — or maybe not, because
at their best, the Allmans always transcended the clichéd franework of
SR (unlike, say, Lynyrd Skynyrd). The only band to have, during various stages
of their history, hosted four of the
greatest guitar players of all time (not even the Yardbirds could boast that
much), not to mention grouping and regrouping and pulling it all together five times in history, each of them a
success (in 1969, 1973, 1979, 1990, and 2003 respectively) — a legend that has
no equals, which you gotta admit even if you hate blues-rock, country-rock, and
long psychedelic jams with a vengeance. Possible
starting point: At Fillmore East
(1971) — the Bros. reputation primarily rests upon their live shows. My
personal studio favorite is Brothers And
Sisters (1973), but it is also easily the most directly «Southern» album
they ever made, and post-dates the Duane Allman era, so buyer beware.
○ Amboy Dukes, The: These guys started out around the Summer of
Love as a curious, if not tremendously exciting, mix of Detroit garage rock and
typically American psychedelia. Then Steve Farmer left, taking most of the
American psychedelia with him, and eventually, after a few
transitional-experimental period pieces, the Dukes simply became the backing
band for the early stages of America's enfant
terrible, Ted Nugent. Possible
starting point: Journey To The
Center Of The Mind (1968) is the obvious bet for classic early Dukes, but
if you are more interested in the wild heart of Uncle Ted, Call Of The Wild (1973) is inexpendable for the jaded hard rocker.
☻Amon Düül:
This loosely connected «commune» of several bohemian-artistic souls in Southern
Germany is mainly credited with serving as the launchpad of their far more
musically gifted and inventive younger brethren, Amon Düül II, and
for a good reason: most of their own
musical output revolves around one mastodontic jam session in 1969, curious for
a peep at its ritualistic atmosphere, but for little else. One brief listen to Psychedelic Underground (1969) should
suffice for anyone.
☺Amon Düül II: The luckier offshoot of the original Amon
Düül, these guys invented a direction of «Krautrock» that was
perhaps the closest in sound to «progressive rock» tendencies of the early
1970s, but still exclusively their own – a wild, elegantly brutal jungle-rock
sound, dense and atmospheric to the point of literally, rather than formally,
blowing your mind away. Possible starting
point: Yeti (1970), then
proceeding all the way to 1975's Made In
Germany (with a much lighter, poppier, song-based rather than jam-based
sound, but still exceptional).
○ Amon Düül (UK): This is another
split-off, this time from Amon Düül II, led by that band's former
guitarist Jon Weinzierl. Relocating to England, they released four albums in
the 1980s under the name of «Amon Düül»; these days, to avoid
confusion, they are always mentioned with the «UK» suffix. First two records
are quite recommendable for art-rock and art-pop lovers; last two, recorded as
a collaboration with Hawkwind's poetic guru Bob Calvert, are skippable. Possible starting point: Hawk Meets Penguin (1982).
☺Andrew Lloyd Webber: Starting out as a (perhaps accidental, but
nobody realized it at the time) grand musical hero of the rock generation, with
what is, in my opinion, unquestionably the most stunning «rock opera» ever
written by mortal man, Sir Andrew rather quickly evolved into a generic fluff
writer for the stage; but even at his fluffiest and most derivative, his talent
for wiring himself into the listener's brain rarely left him, and most of his
musicals still rise quite highly above the average «generic Broadway show». Possible starting point: Either the
original cast version (1970) or the movie soundtrack version (1973) of Jesus Christ Superstar, depending on
personal preferences — essential listening for every Homo sapiens on the planet.
☺Aphrodite's Child: Before Vangelis Papathanassiou firmly
embraced the world of electronics as his best chance to leave an artistic mark
on humanity, he spent three years as the creative backbone of a young,
idealistic, heavily bearded Greek art-pop band — which, believe it or not, also
jump-started the career of Demis Roussos, «The Singing Kaftan» and subsequent
bane of East European pop. Together, they made music that was occasionally
corny, sometimes unintentionally derivative and hilarious, but still much,
much better than one would prematurely guess. Melodic, memorable, and at the
same time daring and experimental: these guys only managed to have three albums
out in their lifetime, but all are well worth getting to know. Possible starting point: 666 (1972) is their most well-known
concept album about you-know-what, but the other two, more immediately
accessible and single-oriented, are no slouches either.
☺Argent: Rod Argent's switch from the idealistic
baroque-pop of the Zombies to no less idealistic «symphonic rock» of the early
1970s has, for the most part, been ignored by contemporaries and subsequent
generations alike — mostly because he never succeeded in carving out a unique
identity on that particular stage, so that even the best stuff of Argent always
comes across as a «second-hand» project. On the other hand, the songwriting
team of Rod Argent / Chris White / Russ Ballard was a strong competitor on that
scene; they may have retained a bit of popularity only through their singalong
anthems like ʽHold Your Head Upʼ and ʽGod Gave Rock'n'Roll To
Youʼ, but there is a lot more to enjoy in the catalog, including far more
tasteful, complex, and stimulating entries. Possible starting point: Argent
(1970) is still very close in style to late-era Zombies (a must-have for any
fan of Odessey And Oracle) — from
there, it is best to simply proceed in chronological order and stop wherever
you feel like stopping.
☺Arthur Brown: Unlike most other «crazy geniuses» of the
Golden Age of Psychedelia, this guy, having made his name with outrageous
antics and proto-glam theatrics in 1967-68, went on to have a long, varied,
unpredictable, and confusing career: the only two things that most of his
albums have in common are his semi-operatic, highly expressive and quite unique
vocals, and the complete lack of ability to sell more than three copies of each.
Nevertheless, he is well worth exploring — his sidekicks (Vince Crane, Andy
Dalby, etc.) often provided him with first-rate musical backing, and his
complete dedication to the ideals of peace, love, wild sex, and schizophrenia
is always admirable. Possible starting
point: The Crazy World Of Arthur
Brown (1968), his introduction to the general public, is still his only LP
that people usually remember, for a good reason; but I also heartily recommend Requiem (1982), one of the least
stereotypical electronic albums of the decade and one of the most curious
«post-apocalyptic symphonies» ever written.
☺Band, The: If you want to learn all about «Americana»...
you got a long road ahead of you, but if you want to know how it is possible
for a company of Canadian rock'n'roll intellectuals (yes, the two words do not
agree well with each other, but The Band have always been a walking
contradiction anyway) to swallow «Americana» as a whole and spit it out with a
modern man twist, The Band are there for you — in the 1960s, they may not have
been the first to present an updated take on tradition, dubbed «roots-rock» for
lack of a better term, but they were the ones to do it in the most
encyclopaedic, ambitious, and technically elaborate way ever seen (enough to
deal an ultimately mortal blow to the artistic career of Eric Clapton, who
pretty much rejected his Cream legacy upon hearing their first album). Setting
aside pretentiousness and occasional boredom (even the best «roots-rock» is
occasionally boring), The Band did produce some of the most beautiful and deep
music of their generation — although it might require reaching a certain age,
or state of mind, to truly appreciate it. Possible
starting point: Music From Big Pink
(1968) for those who want their music more «artsy», or The Band (1969) for all the hardcore bearded folkies who want it as
«rootsy» as possible.
☺Bee Gees, The: Opinions on The Bee Gees run the entire gamut
from «heartless commercial leeches, unleashed upon humanity as punishment for
its loss of cultural orientation» to «immaculate craftsmen and experienced
connoisseurs of the human heart in all of its aspects». The fact that they are
forever inscribed in the history of music is indisputable — no other act has
managed to embody so much of the pop spirit of both the Sixties and the
Seventies, and the journey from ʽHolidayʼ and
ʽMassachusetsʼ to ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ and ʽStayin'
Aliveʼ is one of the bizarrest journeys in art history. Personally, I
think that the most natural — not to mention the most psychologically interesting
— relationship with the Bee Gees should be one of love-and-hate, and hope to
have reflected it somewhat in the reviews. Possible
starting point: The Bee Gees 1st
(1967) — their teenage Australian output aside, the proper way to deal with the
Bee Gees is to start at the beginning and then stop wherever one feels like
stopping, be it at the first split of the band in 1970, or at the move to the
States in 1973, or at the transition to disco gloss in 1975-76, or at the
dreary slide into bland adult contemporary in the 1980s.
☺Black Sabbath: The fathers of Heavy Metal as we know and
love, tolerate, or abhor it — regardless of any particular attitude, metal is
here to stay, and we have Tony Iommi to thank for its crushing riffs, Geezer
Butler to thank for its not-give-a-damn attitude about using primitive,
well-battered clichés for the lyrics, and Ozzy Osbourne to thank for
daring to deliver these lyrics in one of rock's most classic examples of
substituting mental illness for vocal technique. Most of all, of course, we
have to thank the industrial aura of Birmingham and its factories, leaving a
permanent trace in Tony Iommi's «iron fingers» and their interaction with the
electric guitar. One of the silliest and most seductive combinations of
individual talents ever seen in music, Black Sabbath in their prime produced a
lengthy string of the heaviest and
catchiest songs in the business; once Ozzy left and was replaced by a series of
ever-worsening singers, things got much patchier, and Black Sabbath became very
much of a «niche» band — but that don't have no backwards effect, and even
after all these years, everybody still likes ʽParanoidʼ and
ʽChildren Of The Graveʼ without having to swear the metalhead oath of
loyalty. Possible starting point: Paranoid (1970) for the big classic rock
radio hits or Master Of Reality
(1971) for the single heaviest experience in musical history will do nicely,
but nobody is through with Sabbath before going through the entire «big six»
from 1970's self-titled debut to 1975's Sabotage
(the latter being arguably the single greatest «art-metal» album ever
released).
☺Blind Faith: This super-brief project of building a new
band and a new musical synthesis from the building components of Cream and
Traffic could have a future, but didn't — mostly due to serious
technical/structural mistakes committed at the very beginning. It did yield a
few classic songs, though, all of which are to be found on the band's only
eponymous album (1969): filler notwithstanding, it does belong in every classic
rock lover's collection.
○ Blodwyn Pig: A strictly second-rate «prog-roots» band from
the early 1970s, led by former Jethro Tull guitarist Mick Abrahams and modestly
visionary brass / woodwinds wiz Jack Lancaster. Due to a conflict of interests
(Lancaster was pushing the band in a BS&T / Chicago-type jazz rock
direction, whereas Abrahams was more interested in heavy blues rock), the
ensemble only released two original albums, although there would be occasional
reunions, or an occasional revival of the Blodwyn Pig moniker for some of
Mick's solo albums. Possible starting
point: Ahead Rings Out (1969) is
their most critically acclaimed LP, although I think they actually got a little
bit more «interesting» on the second album — anyway, if you are already
acquainted with one, there is no reason not to hear the other.
○ Blood, Sweat & Tears: A great beginning marred with an ensuing
career that ran for too long without any sense of purpose. Formed out of the
ashes of Blues Project, these guys stood at the source of the whole «jazz-rock»
genre, merging blues, rock, and pop with a «big band» style that could also
somehow be sensitive and intimate. Then they ditched sensitive and intimate guy
Al Kooper, replaced him with Tom Jones-influenced David Clayton-Thomas, and
went steadily downhill for the next decade. That said, unlike their primary
competition in the genre (Chicago), Blood, Sweat & Tears never once
betrayed their roots — they did lightly flirt with prog, glam, funk, and disco,
but never allowed themselves to descend into thoroughly cheesy «adult contemporary»
muzak or place gloss and slickness above professional musicianship. Few of
their albums beyond the first two or three are worth owning, but very few are
ideologically disgusting, either. Possible
starting point: Child Is Father To
The Man (1968) is a golden classic and the band's only masterpiece, but for
a more «representative» introduction to their post-Kooper image, Blood, Sweat & Tears (1969) is also
recommendable.
○ Bloodrock: Doom-rock, Texan style! Well... not really.
Maybe think of it more as a slightly B-movie-oriented local variant of Grand
Funk Railroad. This band, let by grizzly-voiced Jim Rutledge and local guitar
god Lee Pickens, combined rowdy American rock and roll with a tinge of overseas
artsiness and psychedelia, and threw in a bit of trashy titillation
(ʽD.O.A.ʼ, their most famous song, is one of the lyrically goriest
creations of the early 1970s). They weren't great, but they were solid —
certainly less devoid of talent than so many other hard rock acts at the time
who could never understand the value of a good riff. Unfortunately, the fun
only lasted for about three years, upon which both of the band's most interesting members departed and left it in
the hands of the keyboard player — who teamed up with a future Christian rock
singer and tried to turn the band into a third-rate prog-rock act, so please
ignore those last two albums. Possible
starting point: Bloodrock (1970)
is the natural place to start, I guess, although the big hit single was from
the second album. Actually, they were pretty consistent before the big plunge.
○ Blossom Toes: This outfit is mainly noticeable for
releasing two albums in the late 1960s that sound like two entirely different
bands. The debut, from 1967, is a swirling kaleidoscope of authentically
British psychedelia — nothing produced by a genius, just an amazing whirlwind
of musical ideas that replace each other like fireworks: not a lot of
substance, but so much flash that your head will spin anyway. The second album,
from 1969, substitutes psychedelia for heavy rock brutality and social
consciousness a-plenty — nothing works on its own, but playing the two LPs back-to-back
can be fun. Trivia note: guitarist and one of the two chief songwriters, Jim
Cregan, would go on to become a Rod Stewart sidekick, and bears his share of
responsibility for some of Rod's most horrendous records. Possible starting point: We
Are Ever So Clean (1967), naturally, has a slightly higher share of
endurable songs than its hard-rock follow-up.
○ Blue Cheer: Kings of the marginal «brutal, but friendly»
psycho-metal West Coast movement, these guys are responsible for some of the
wildest, noisiest, dumbest music made in the late 1960s — and indirectly
responsible for, or at least presaging the later blossoming of a whole slew of
«heavy-and-silly» subgenres, from KISS to Hawkwind, not to mention «stoner
rock», «sludge metal», etc. Not surprisingly, much of what they did sounds
seriously dated and, worse, seriously boring these days, but still, at their
best, Blue Cheer were like nobody else and had their own brand of twisted-sick,
but ultimately safe charm. Unfortunately, their heyday lasted for only about a
year — followed by the band turning into a revolving-door experiment,
struggling to find new directions (usually without much success), falling
apart, then reconvening in the mid-Eighties to spend two more decades as a
third-rate heavy metal outfit. Possible
starting point: Vincebus Eruptum
(1968) is their only LP to actually deserve recognition as an album, or even as
a minor classic; start there, then proceed at your own risk.
○ Bobby Womack: Mostly known to the world as the author of
the Rolling Stones' ʽIt's All Over Nowʼ (well, okay, so he was to me,
for a long time), this one-time member of The Valentinos and a near-legitimate
successor of Sam Cooke, who took him under his wing at one time, actually had a
very interesting, varied, and unpredictable solo career. In the early days, he
played a mean guitar, sang in a mean voice, and had a knack both for original
songwriting and turning other people's songs on their heads, producing quite a
few respectable outings in the R&B and funk genres. Eventually, he kind of
fizzled out, lowered his defenses to disco and electro-funk, lost interest in
music altogether, only to re-emerge in 2012 as a bizarre ghost of the past,
croaking out confessional tunes to Damon Albarn's electronic experiments (!).
All in all, while there are relatively few unforgettable Bobby Womack tunes,
Bobby Womack himself as a musical character is quite unforgettable. Possible starting point: Communication (1971) and Understanding (1972) tend to be
regarded as the high points of his funky period, but really, just about
everything prior to the late 1970s, when he got sucked up by the disco bog,
could qualify as a good start.
☺Bonzo Dog (Doo-Dah)
Band: The musical
equivalent of Monty Python, this merry troop led by jazz-influenced pop
pranksters Viv Stanshall and Neil Innes actually had more intelligent insights
into the roots, side effects, and limitations of the mid-to-late 1960s pop
scene than anybody else — no wonder they were like the court jesters by the
side of then-current royalty (the Beatles, who contributed quite a bit to the
Bonzos' notability). The Bonzos' appeal is primarily comedic, but they had
serious melodic potential, too, as well as a strong experimental side. Although
they were very much a «product of
1967», and, like the Beatles, were forced to split by the merciless hand of
time as the Sixties closed up, the music has survived, and songs like ʽThe
Equestrian Statueʼ or ʽUrban Spacemanʼ will be just as welcome
in the 21st century as they were at the height of flower power. Possible starting point: The Doughnut In Granny's Greenhouse
(1968) is their peak in terms of seriousness and complexity, but Gorilla (1967) and Tadpoles (1969) have most of the catchy funny songs.
○ Box Tops, The: Alex Chilton's first band — one that took the
world by surprise with ʽThe Letterʼ, when the 17-year old sung it
with all the determination and desperation of a grizzled soulster smack dab in
the middle of the Summer of Love. For several years, they were listed among the
royalty of Memphis soul («blue-eyed soul», that is), churning out catchy,
likeable, darkly romantic singles and albums that showed comparable amounts of
love for black R&B and white baroque art-pop. However, they never
functioned all that well as an actual band,
whether it came to playing skills or songwriting abilities, and ultimately
floundered in an era that called for bigger ambitions and broader horizons even
on commercial pop singles. The mega-success of ʽThe Letterʼ, which
was later covered by everybody and their grandmother, ensured that the band was
not completely forgotten, but only registered admirers of mid-Sixties art-pop
and blue-eyed soul need bother seeking out their entire catalog. Possible starting point: Well, if you're
game, it still makes sense to begin with the big ones — The Letter/Neon Rainbow (1967) has the main claim to fame, as well
as lots of pleasant, inoffensive pastiches to go along with it.
○ Brinsley Schwarz: This band, named after its uncannily named
guitar player, was largely the brainchild of Nick Lowe, the principal
songwriter and singer, and is usually extolled as the visiting card for the
British «pub rock» scene of the early 1970s — honest, down-to-earth music that
tried to stay away from both the progressive and the glam excesses of the day.
Truth be told, they are no great shakes, though: Lowe and his pals had a good
sense of taste, but neither the songwriting nor the playing stand serious
competition with the leading acts of the day, and they let themselves be way
too seriosly influenced by their betters, so that many of the songs explicitly
sound like «Van Morrison-lite», «The Band-lite», even «Flying Burrito
Brothers-lite», and the Burritos weren't exactly a lead zeppelin themselves! A
few good songs here and there, a nice attitude on the whole, but it is not
difficult to understand why the band was ultimately forgotten and now only
lives on in the memories of serious connoisseurs. Possible starting point: Nervous
On The Road (1973) is arguably their most fully realised effort, but if you
want slower, subtler, more ambitious material, just go about them
chronologically.
1971-1976
☺10cc: Smart, inventive, sarcastic, complex, catchy,
British pop music for hip people — yes, the thing was not invented in the 2000s
or even the 1990s, it all starts here as early as 1972 (still in Manchester,
though). So, what's not to like? Well — nearly everything, except for the first
four or five albums, since the departure of two crucial band members in 1976
left 10cc without a proper creative backbone, and they quickly degenerated into
a routine, embarrassing mainstream pop act. But their first four years in the
business — the word «stellar» should definitely be in there somewhere. Possible
starting point: Sheet Music (1974).
☺ABBA: To admire these Swedes' «values» in pop music
doesn't begin to define bad taste. But if you make even a mild attempt to deny
their melodic genius, count yourself blacklisted. Possible starting point:
Arrival (1976) or The Album (1978).
☺AC/DC: You probably have to be Scottish-born
Australian to take rock'n'roll to the highest peaks of headbanging absurdity.
If so, thank God for giving us Scotland and Australia. Possible starting
point: Let There Be Rock (1977) or Back In Black (1980).
☺Aerosmith: These guys had one of the most befuddling
careers in history: from the world's dirtiest, snappiest, sleaziest band in the
1970s («the American Stones»), in a desperate attempt to stay hip, they mutated
into the world's biggest sellout act by kowtowing to hair metal values and
helping establish the MTV brand of teen rock. They HAVE been quite young at
heart even in the worst of days, though. Possible starting point: Toys In The
Attic (1975).
☺Alan Parsons Project,
The / Alan Parsons: «Prog-rock
lite» for those who love their Pink Floyd for the dreaminess and the catchy
choruses rather than the sharp edges. Still, the duo of Eric Woolfson and Alan
Parsons can come up with these choruses like few others in the business, and
their deep, icy dreaminess is theirs and theirs only. At their best, the
Project were interesting, intelligent, and involving, and their music still
lingers. Possible starting point: Tales Of Mystery And Imagination (1976)
and then all the way to the mid-Eighties, when they started to falter.
☺Alan Stivell: In the 1970s, this guy almost singlehandedly
defined «Celtic Rock», not merely recreating traditional Breton music with the
help of the traditional Celtic harp (as reconstructed by his father), but
synthesizing it with the achievements of progressive rock as well. Complex, but
quite accessible, and at times emotionally devastating music. Possible starting point: Renaissance De La Harpe Celtique
(1972) is his international artistic breakthrough, but Symphonie Celtique (1979) is the magnum opus that puts his Celtic soul in the proper context of
world music, and he really hasn't been as good ever since.
☺Amazing Blondel: One of the most delightful hoaxes in pop
music history, these guys, at their early 1970s peak, created a masterful
illusion of being serious progressive rockers, interested in creating a modern
day version of Elizabethan court music. What they really did was play sissy folk-pop on archaic instruments, but they
still ended up doing it with such elegance and friendliness that who the heck
could care about «authenticity»? Just ignore their unfortunate post-1973 slide
into generic soft-rock, after the departure of their chief songwriter. Possible starting point: Evensong (1970), and the following two
records are also classic.
☺Armageddon: An extremely short-lived, one-album
«hard-prog» band consisting of former members of Renaissance and Steamhammer
with Keith Relf on lead vocals. Kind of like a cross between Yes and the
Yardbirds — well worth checking out, even though I probably wouldn't go as far
as to call it a «lost masterpiece». The album is Armageddon (1975).
☺Ash Ra Tempel / Ashra: A «Krautrock» band that essentially
represents the vision of German guitar prodigy Manuel Göttsching
(although, in the earliest incarnation, the vision was shared by future
electroniz wizard Klaus Schulze as well). The «Ash Ra Tempel» phase covers the
first half of the 1970s, with the music, a unique brand of atmospheric «cosmic
rock», evenly split between electronics and guitars; the «Ashra» phase,
beginning in 1976, places a heavier emphasis on electronic arrangements and
ambience, although many albums are still well worth checking out. Göttsching
is not God, but he is a fantastic player and a visionary, not to mention a
grand influence on the whole electronic genre — there is no escape from getting
to know these guys. Possible starting
point: Ash Ra Tempel (1971).
☺Atomic Rooster: The project of former Arthur Brown sideman,
organist Vincent Crane, and (during its peak years) rough-minded guitar player
John Du Cann. Most people only know of the band because future ELP drum god
Carl Palmer played on its first album (technically justifying the «supergroup»
tag for ELP), which is a shame, because, at its best, Rooster played excellent,
gritty, and slightly disturbing hard-art-rock, tinged with Crane's
schizophrenia and fed by Du Cann's fine riff-creating skills. Too bad they got
lost on the back shelf of the early 1970s prog movement — high time to dig 'em
up again. Possible starting point: Death Walks Behind You (1970).
○ Average White Band,
The: Best proof in the
world, indeed, that «average white people» can play «average black R'n'B» as
authentically as «average black people» — a bunch of dedicated Scotsmen who
decided that, unlike most of their colleagues in the early 1970s, who were
quite happy to play Scottish-flavored pub rock, they would instead try to compete
with the likes of Tower Of Power and Earth, Wind & Fire. Their first few
albums are quite up to those standards, actually, and worth seeking out if you
are a heavy aficionado of 1970's R&B. However, like most of their
competition, they overstayed their welcome, running the formula into the
ground, eaten up by disco and 1980's electronics. Overall, more of a historical
curio, although some of the early grooves, spliced together, would make for
about 40 minutes of mini-greatness. Possible
starting point: AWB (1974) —
their American debut has most of the classics, including ʽPick Up The
Piecesʼ, although the first album, Show
Your Hand (1973), might be more consistent.
○ Bad Company: In the mid-1970s, these guys set out on the
brave task of making hard rock cuddly, safe, and palatable for truckers and
housewives alike, ensuring their immortal presence on what would become
«classic rock radio». In their defense, for a brief while they had a decent
sound, passable riffs and vocal hooks, and one of rock music's proverbially
sexiest singers. But there is also no denying that they played a serious part
in the trivialization and «boring-ification» of rock music as such — far from
being the main or only culprits, they do have a hot corner in Hell reserved for
the lot of them for at least several hundred thousand years. Possible starting point: Bad Company (1974) — their only record
that is really worth listening to all the way, and it's far more than just my
opinion. Start from there and stop whenever you've had enough, and definitely stay away from everything
post-1979.
☺Badfinger: The best quasi-scientific proof that Luck
exists is that Badfinger never got any of it. Sometimes labeled as a
two-three-hit-wonder of an early 1970s Beatles clone, this band was really
more of a spiritual than formal descendant of the Beatles — they tried to
transplant Beatlesque sunny, poppy idealism into the 1970s, while at the same
time working strictly within a traditional «rock band» format. In the end, they
involuntarily ended up among the pioneers of power-pop, which didn't help them
one bit. Poor management, wrong marketing, personal problems, psychic
disturbances, suicides — everything that could go wrong, did go wrong at one
time or other. Fascinating story, and not half-bad music, either (just do not
try to judge it by proper Beatlesque standards — take it in the context of
James Taylor instead, and everything will be fine). Possible starting point: No
Dice (1970) or Straight Up
(1971) have most of the major hits and lots of delicious non-filler, but Wish You Were Here (1974) might be
Badfinger at their most accomplished.
○ Baker Gurvitz Army: Ginger Baker served in more bands than he's
got fingers and toes (and his drummer abilities may lead to suggest that he's
got more than most): this one, formed in the mid-1970s with brothers Paul and
Adrian Gurvitz, formerly of Gun, was the closest he ever came to embracing
«progressive» rock, and the results are... well, whatever one could expect from
hybridizing a professional, but mediocre prog band with the gingerest drummer
in the world. Yes, it actually worked, even if only for a brief while. Possible starting point: Elysian Encounter (1975), but they
really only have three records out, and the third one goes way too far in the
direction of funky dance beats (guess even Ginger Baker-led prog bands need
to earn a living).
☺Banco
Del Mutuo Soccorso:
One of the two great long-named «symph-prog» gifts from Italy to the
progressive rock movement (the other one was Premiata Forneria Marconi), this
band used to have a unique sound, shaped out of a merger between British
progressive rock, the American jazz scene, and the Italian folk / pop
tradition, and masterminded by two highly talented brother keyboardists (Gianni
and Vittorio Nocenzi) and a gifted, if occasionally corny, vocalist (Francesco
DiGiacomo). Their overall story is typical of the average progressive band — a
brief formative period, a series of stunning masterpieces of the genre, a
confused period of experiment and adjustment, an embarrassingly awful «pop
sellout» catastrophe, and a semi-successful «reputation revival» — but the
quality of their finest albums is anything but average. A must-hear for
everyone who is serious about 1970s music. Possible
starting point: Darwin! (1972)
is the usual critical favorite, mainly because of the innovative concept, but
melody-wise, the follow-up Io Sono Nato
Libero (1973) is arguably even better.
○ Barclay
James Harvest: When
they started out, they were an idealistic, mildly charismatic, undoubtedly
talented bunch of second-tier art-rockers. They loved the Beatles, the Bee
Gees, the Moody Blues, Procol Harum, Pink Floyd, and Gustav Mahler. They wrote
catchy and impressive, if seriously derivative, songs. They could get better or
they could get worse. They chose the latter, and, somewhere around 1974,
started a slow, steady, step-by-step descent into mediocrity, platitudes,
oceans of cheese, and, finally, an atrociously icky adult contemporary sound —
an exemplary journey into the depths of bad taste. Quite a sad story, really,
but worth checking out for the very intrigue of it. Possible starting point: Barclay
James Harvest (1970) — just start out with the very first record they did,
and stop whenever you feel like stopping: the overall curve has its little ups
from time to time, but the overall direction is steady downwards.
☺Be-Bop
Deluxe: Unfortunately,
the image of these guys (this guy, to be more precise: Be-Bop Deluxe were never
much more than a rotating set of backing players to support the songwriting,
singing, and guitar playing of multi-talent kid Bill Nelson) was not distinctive
enough to carve them out a perennial niche in the public conscience. But at his
best, Nelson combined the oddity and experimentalism of David Bowie with the
theatricality of Peter Hammill, and played a far meaner guitar than either of
those, or most of those who worked with them. Early Be-Bop Deluxe records are
mainly glam-influenced guitar extravaganzas, with little attention to hooks but
lots of attention to going wherever one's fingers wish to take you to; later
Be-Bop Deluxe cuts down improvisation in favor of a more disciplined approach
to songwriting, although the band never managed to make the proper transition
to New Wave stylistics (before doing that, Nelson simply split them, and then
continued operating as a solo artist). Anyway, a band that is well worth
getting to know for all fans of «intellectually oriented kick-ass rock'n'roll»,
or whatever. Possible starting point:
Sunburst Finish (1976) may be
Nelson's perfect balance between memorable songwriting and guitar heroics —
earlier albums swing too much towards the latter, later albums droop too much
towards the former.
☺Betty Davis: A veritable «monster» of a woman,
surprisingly little remembered these days despite not only having been married
to Miles Davis for several years, but also releasing three of the fiercest,
wildest, badass-est funk albums of the mid-1970s. Compared to other performers
on the funk/R&B scene, Betty was not much of a singer, but she compensated
for this with a presence that pretty much melted all living matter for miles
around as long as she was getting it on. The three albums she cut were not all
that musically innovative, but her backing band was always able to put on just
the right groove for the «nasty gal» — the shock value that those records had
back then has, of course, become seriously depreciated with the passing of time
(now that we got Britney and Miley, who cares?), but, fortunately, the music
still remains quite invigorating. Possible
starting point: Betty Davis
(1973) is her first and arguably best shot, but, really, what's a measly-short
three-album pack to anyone those days? Just get 'em all.
☺Big Star: The most critically acclaimed outfit of the
«Power Pop Big Three» of the early 1970s (along with Badfinger and the
Raspberries). Like Badfinger, Alex Chilton and Chris Bell spent most of their
lives either hopping on fast-moving bandwagons and breaking their legs in the
process, or going against the tide and getting drowned — which did not prevent
them from achieving cult status in due time, and influencing a whole lot of
more successful, but quite frequently less talented people in their wake. At
his best, Bell was an almost McCartney-level hookmeister and craftsman, while
Chilton could display his inner demons with a Lennon-level force of expressivity,
although neither of the two could be said to have always been at his respective best. But their collected output,
patchy as it is, is so scarce that it is well worth ignoring the petty flaws
and just grabbing all of it, particularly if you are a fan of either
intelligent guitar-based pop music or deranged/disturbed artistic personalities
(or both). Possible starting point: #1 Record (1972) is where it all begins
and, in my opinion, it really does not get any better than this, although by
the time of Third (1975) it gets
very, very, very different.
☺Bill Withers: There are two songs in the popular conscience
that are tightly associated with Bill Withers: ʽAin't No Sunshineʼ
and ʽLean On Meʼ, of which only the former gives a proper glimpse of
the psychological depths to which this unusual fellow could penetrate in his
prime. Although classified as an R&B performer, in reality Bill's early
albums merged elements of «black» R&B and «white» singer-songwriting,
achieving a brilliant, insightful, and sometimes downright creepy synthesis
that was completely unique even for its time. Later on, unfortunately, as
commercial pressure towards mediocrity gradually got the better of the artist,
he did make a transition to rather
ordinary, run-of-the-mill, accentuate-the-positive R&B — probably the best
thing about late Bill Withers is that he had the good sense of completely
cutting down his solo career before it was too
late. But those early albums, ooh boy. Possible
starting point: Just As I Am
(1971). The second LP is just as strong; from there, proceed chronologically
and stop at will.
○ Billy Joel: Few people in the pop music business polarize
the simple folk more than Mr. Joel. For some, he is an absolute melodic genius,
a sincere chameleon who managed to crack the core of just about every popular
style one can think of, and still remained himself in the process, while
providing a whole generation (maybe two) with an unbeatable backlog of some of
the catchiest tunes in the world. For others, Billy «Attila» Joel is an
annoying professional hack, pandering to the lowest common denominator with
diluted, de-intellectualized, cornified distortions of pop and especially rock
music, putting his vile stamp on everything he can lay his hands on and pretending
to be «Mr. Rock & Roll» when he is really a second-rate music hall
entertainer. In short, Billy Joel is a fascinating, colorful figure, and a real
gas to either love or hate with every
fiber of your soul. For obvious reasons, I tend to side with the haters' camp,
but even I do have to admit that sometimes, I hate the concept of a Billy Joel far more than the actual music — and that,
for all his sins against good taste, the man never made even a single truly
«awful» album. Possible starting point:
The Stranger (1977), beginning his
long romance with master producer Phil Ramone, is classic Billy that even some
of the haters have to like — start from there and work your way in both
directions, to the early L.A. days or the later New York triumphs.
☺Blue Öyster Cult: Do not mistake this band for just another
crude, lumpy hard rock act of the 1970s — in reality, at their best the Cult
merged «cheap» arena-rock trappings with a post-modernist / bohemian / New
York-ish sensibility in a way that makes them likable for truck drivers and intellectuals alike; come to think
of it, you could say they were the
musical equivalent of an intellectual truck driver, or something of the sort.
Managed and lyrically aided by such rock critics and pop visionaries as Sandy
Pearlman and Richard Meltzer, and being perfectly accomplished musicians and
songwriters in their own right, they released a set of truly classic albums
that please the body and stimulate the mind, before the Eighties chewed them up
and spat them out with no particular place to go. Possible starting point: the self-titled debut album (1972) remains
my personal favorite due to its particularly sinister sound that they later
traded for a less enigmatic approach — the most reasonable way to go is to
start from there and work your way up to that particular point where they do
not interest you any more (which may significantly differ, because they went
through several creative metamorphoses in the late 1970s, in the early 1980s,
and then again in the mid-1980s).
○ Bo Hansson: Anyone in the mood for some classic-era
Scandinavian progressive rock? Check out this guy — a lonesome, moody,
imaginative multi-instrumentalist (keyboards preferred over guitars, but
everything is possible) with a penchant for getting inspirations from fantasy
novels: his 1970 Swedish debut, later translated into English as Music Inspired By The Lord Of The Rings,
is the first LP in history completely
dedicated to J.R.R. The music itself is usually a mix of folk, pop, and jazz
motives, moody, occasionally to the point of «haunting», but more generally,
inobtrusive and not particularly energetic or dynamic — «elevator prog», so to
speak, but done with enough taste and imagination to warm a solitary autumnal
evening or two. Possible starting point:
Lord Of The Rings (1970) is
Hansson's only record to have ever enjoyed any commercial success, but the
three other instrumental titles that followed do not really fall behind in
quality. However, if the debut feels a little limp and saggy to you, it's
probably not worth it to bother with the rest of Bo's catalog.
☺Bob Marley: Bob Marley is not the be-all-end-all of
reggae music, if you really want to immerse yourself in the genre — better to
say that Bob Marley was an «event in itself», a guy who used his Jamaican
reggae background as a foundation for a major merger of reggae, rock, pop, and
Rastafari proselytism. I have a very
hard time getting sentimental to his message (hard as it is to separate the
good ol' goodness-and-kindness from all the Haile Selassie fluff), but, much to
his honor, Bob never forgot the musicality behind the message — The Wailers,
both in the classic Peter Tosh era and in the «glossier» era that followed,
were always mega-masters of the groove, the hook, and the drive. Possible starting point: In terms of
general accessibility, Catch A Fire
(1973) is where The Wailers first shifted from a more «hardcore» reggae groove
to a more open, eclectic range of influences. In terms of breathtaking scope, Exodus (1977) is still Marley's magnum opus — ol' Moses himself would be
proud of this homage.
○ Bonnie Raitt: The Queen of Inoffensively Middle-of-the-Road
Blues Rock, Bonnie Raitt is hardly a great proposition when you want music that
is at least a little rough around the edges and shakes you up rather than cools
you down. Her most interesting period of artistic existence, I think, was in
the very early days, when her biggest influence was Sippie Wallace and when
each of her records offered a modern-day-updated take on the female urban blues
stylistics of the 1920s — an approach that allowed her to retain some
individuality even in an age when blues-rock albums came and went for a dime a
dozen. Pretty soon, however, she got streamlined and became rather poorly
distinguishable in the crowds, apart from her easily recognizable raspy voice
(still not that unique) and impressive slide guitar playing skills (still not that exceptional). If it weren't for the
cheesy marketing strategy that miraculously put her on top in 1989 with one of
her most boring, adult-contemporary-oriented albums, nobody from the statistic
majority would probably remember the lady now — but that's the way life goes. Possible starting point: in most such
cases, it is best to start at the beginning and stop whenever the going gets
too rough (or, in this situation, too smooth), so Bonnie Raitt (1971) is certainly a much better bet than the commercially
successful Nick Of Time (1989) or
even Sweet Forgiveness (1977), when
she was still drinking and partying and being properly impolite.
☺Brand X: One of the more interesting fusion bands of
the late 1970s, these guys, when they were ate their best,
thrived much more on group interplay and meaningful melodic themes than
showcasing their flashiness — the usual bane of so many bands introducing «jazz
models» into a rock setting. The core of the band consisted of John Goodsall on
guitar and Percy Jones on bass, with none other than Phil Collins himself
supplying the drum work when free from his other innumerable obligations (in
fact, a listen to at least the band's first album is a must for everybody who
wants to put together an objective picture of the man before the effigy-burning
ritual), and most of their stuff ranges from comfortably listenable to
emotionally impressive — in fact, even some (not all) of the later reunion
albums are worth checking out. Possible
starting point: by all means,
begin with the beginning — Unorthodox Behaviour (1976) should provide
the best reason for this band's existence, and then you can see for yourself if
you need any more.
☺Brian Eno: Arguably one of the most significant figures
in 20th century music — not just because of his solo career, but also because
of his innumerable collaborations with other artists, including production
work and general artistic guidance. Simply put, Eno is a rare example of a
three-in-one package: he has an insdisputable pop genius, capable of coming up
with first-rate, unforgettable melodies (at least, in his prime); he is one of
the first and most successful wizards of electronic technology; and he is a
master of «intellectual spirituality», constantly working at the intersection
of science and magic so that the former does not extinguish the latter, and the
latter is intensified by the former. That said, one should probably exercise
caution when getting into Eno — most of his output since the late Seventies has
been in the «ambient» genre, and if you just throw on Music For Airports without a prior understanding of where its
author is coming from, consequences can be dire. The best way is probably to
start out with his «holy foursome» futuristic pop masterpieces from 1973-77,
then slowly progress into more demanding territory (there's a lot of
«intermediate» releases in his catalog, halfway between pop and pure ambient
that can ease the transition). Possible
starting point: All four of those albums are required listening, so Here Come The Warm Jets (1973) is a
natural start, whereas Before And After
Science (1977) is a perfectly constructed «musical contrast shower» that
starts in pop territory and ends in proto-New Age. From there, you can proceed
into the vast oceans of ambience and minimalism if you dare.
☺Bruce Springsteen: Years of listening to The Boss and thinking
about the relative merits of his output have solidified and clarified my
love/hate relationship with the man who made some significant trade-offs
between talent, vision, and mass popularity in his lifetime. Of all the «important»
artists to ever achieve that mass popularity, Springsteen is arguably the most
problematic: the more his fame and fortune increased, the simpler his melodies
and the less interesting his lyrics became, although, fair enough, they were
still often surprisingly efficient. I admire the guy as the ultimate showman
with the ultimate in showman teams (the legendary E Street Band, without whose
help, let's face it, the man is almost nothing), and I feel emotionally
overwhelmed by a large part of his output, old or new, yet I have always had
and continue to have reservations — there is simply something not quite right with the 50-ton
spiritual pressure that he exerts on you night and day, regardless of whether
it's an actual soulful epic or his bulldozer take on rock'n'roll like
ʽCadillac Ranchʼ. In other words, I prefer to stay on this side of
the fence and let the man stay on his
side — reserving my unrestricted love for those who do not have to fight so
hard to wrench it from me (like Dylan, for instance). But apart from that, has
there ever been anyone to channel and re-distribute that blue-collar energy
with more power and efficiency than Springsteen? Probably not. That formula may
seem so simple, even a child with some muscle could master it, and yet, just
look at, oh I dunno, John Mellencamp to see how hard it is to properly deliver something so simple. Possible starting point: It is
impossible to hear just one Springsteen album if you have decided to make a
first acquaintance with the character. The
Wild, The Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle (1974) is a young Boss still
making music of surprising melodic and lyrical complexity and experimenting
with his musical language. Born To Run
(1975) sets the Springsteen formula in action, sacrificing experiment and
musicality for the sake of sheer, unbridled power. However, my personal
favorite is Darkness On The Edge Of Town
(1978) — a near-perfect combination of those hooks, that power, and, yes, the darkness, such an important component of
those great songs of his where he sets aside the populism and confronts his
demons for a while.
☺Budgie: With so many first-rate innovative heavy rock
bands in the late Sixties and early Seventies, these guys arrived just a bit
too late on the scene to make much of an impact or even develop a fully
independent style — at their best, they usually sounded like a slightly more
«intelligent» Black Sabbath with slightly weaker (but still awesome) riffs.
Also presaging early Rush, perhaps, what with their bass player sounding like a
roughcut first model of Geddy Lee and all. Nevertheless, this Welsh trio is
fairly respectable as far as songwriting and playing goes, and if you are
thirsty for more high quality Seventies' heaviness without running the risk of
finding yourself face to face with a bunch of bland, unmemorable, third-rate
clones, by all means feel free to explore those records — Tony Bourge was the
most diligent and gifted of the first batch of Iommi's disciples, and there's
always a chance that one might find Burke Shelley's vocal tone less irritating
than Ozzy's (although both are really an acquired taste). Possible starting point: Never
Turn Your Back On A Friend (1973) is typically mentioned as the one where
it all gelled perfectly for Budgie, but, really, just about anything from 1970
to 1975 is comparable in (usually high) quality. Like most of their ilk, they
began faltering as the New Wave age dawned on them, and never truly recovered,
despite some frantic attempts and ill-fated lineup changes — but for about five
years, they were the real thing.
1976-1989
○ 10,000 Maniacs: Liberal-guilt-ridden college-folk-rock,
intelligent (rather than intellectual) almost to the point of suffocation, but
nice and harmless enough to forgive for an almost complete lack of hooks. Think
a female-driven version of R.E.M. with all the technical skill but almost none
of the talent. Still, Natalie Merchant is an undeniable presence, and Robert
Buck's guitar sound is a tasty sort of juice to steep oneself in from time to
time. Possible starting point: MTV Unplugged (1993): functions as a
solid best-of collection. Proceed from there only if you happen to be totally
mad about it.
○ ABC: What do you get when you cross generic, but
catchy synth-pop with the troubled sensibility of a decadent singer-songwriter
whose idol is Bryan Ferry? That's right — Martin Fry and his interchangeable
gang of sometimes eccentric, sometimes simply professional buddies. Sometimes
considered a purely one-album wonder of the early New Wave era in the UK, they
actually have an interesting, if very uneven and never all that breathtaking,
back catalog. Possible starting point:
unquestionably The Lexicon Of Love
(1982), but they do have other
records.
☺Accept: German metal's pride and joy. Udo
Dierkschneider's voice + Wolf Hoffmann's riffs = headbanging incarnate, as
long as you disregard the inane lyrics (at least they're socially conscious). Possible
starting point: Restless & Wild (1982).
☺Adam And The Ants/Adam Ant: The glam rock spectacle à la
Bowie/Bolan, updated for the post-punk audience. Adam Ant has no deep message
to convey to the public — he is merely a fascinating exhibitionist, for whom
dressing up as a pirate was no less important than providing a catchy hook. But
he did both things with verve, and that verve makes many of his former hits
still fresh and enjoyable for those who want to bother. Possible starting
point: Kings Of The Wild Frontier
(1980) for the band, or Friend Or Foe
(1982) for the solo artist — there is not that much difference.
☺Adolescents: Pioneering Orange County hardcore punk since
1980. Like every hardcore band with a bit of self-respect, staked their entire
reputation on the explosive debut record, a hardcore classic if there ever was
one, and spent the rest of their lives experimenting (miserably), bickering
(wildly), falling apart (permanently), reuniting (occasionally), and saving
most of the ass-kicking for live shows well into the 21st century. Possible starting point: Adolescents (1980) — nothing else they
did even comes close, really.
☺Adrian Belew: King Crimson's (Frank Zappa's, David Bowie's,
Talking Heads' etc.) lead guitarist makes music that is equal part weird
bizarre shit and traditional melodic pop, perfectly satisfying the world's most
blessed minority of middle-roaders. Possible starting point: Young
Lions (1990) for more pop, Desire Caught By The Tail (1986) for more
weirdness.
☺Adverts, The: One of Britain's finest punk-rock outfits —
actually, at their best these guys were more like heavy, crunchy, but melodic
pop-rock, yet viciously infected with the punk spirit of 1977. Faded into
obscurity after releasing one classic, timeless album and one respectable, but
misunderstood attempt to move on, although band leader T.V. Smith's solo career
is worth checking out as well. If none of this is enough to convert you, then
maybe the fact of having the hottest female bass player in the entire history
of punk will. Possible starting point:
Crossing The Red Sea With The Adverts
(1978).
☺Agent Orange: These guys' identity is usually defined as
that of the «fathers of surf-punk», although, in reality, surf-rock influences
only constituted a minor part of their sound (yeah, they covered 'Misirlou' and
'Pipeline' all right). What sometimes gets lost behind the label is the fact
that Mike Palm's band was responsible for creating some of the catchiest
melodies in hardcore punk, period, oxymoronous as that may sound — too bad they
only release something like one album per decade. Possible starting point: Living
In Darkness (1981).
○ Agnostic Front: Although this band has not had any single
album out for me to like, their position
as that of a leading force in New York hardcore in the early 1980s cannot be
denied. As far away from «poppy» or «catchy» as it ever gets, closer in
attitude to «grindcore» than to any of their forefathers in the punk movement,
they used to be the meanest badasses around. They also had a pretty turbulent
history, with constant lineup changes (vocalist Roger Miret and guitarist
Vinnie Stigma have, however, stuck together through thick and thin), and an
odd, never-ending, procedure of switching between «genuine hardcore» and
«crossover metalcore». Pretty interesting from an overall cultural stance. The
«songs», however, are mostly garbage. Possible
starting point: Victim In Pain
(1984) is the legendary debut — just proceed from there if you're seduced, and
stop whenever and wherever you like.
○ A-Ha: Norway's ambiguous contribution to the world
of pop excellence. They had the mistake of having their biggest hits (which
were not necessarily their best songs) in the «synth pop» genre in the
mid-Eighties, but it may be worth a journey through the sea of cheese if you
have run out of solid pop melodies, powerful romantic singing, and
semi-successful attempts of mutating from teen idols to «mature artists». Possible
starting point: Scoundrel Days (1986).
☻Alcatrazz:
Utterly flat «soul-metal» from the mid-Eighties, sort of like Gary Moore
without all the cool guiar riffs, but with twice as much testosterone. Mainly
notorious for jump-starting the solo career of Yngwie Malmsteen and earning
music industry points for Steve Vai. A couple good songs on their last and
least popular album do not help matters much. Possible starting point:
Stay away altogether. There are better things in life.
☺Angry Samoans: At the forefront of the LA hardcore scene,
these guys were way too intellectual to create intellectual music, coming up
instead with some of the harshest, most offensive and demented tunes to grace
the punk movement — most of them tuneful and professional at the same time.
They were only really good for one album and a few singles, but that is sort of
essential for a hardcore band, too. Possible starting point: Back
From Samoa (1982).
○ Anthrax:
Third-run heroes of the thrash metal kingdom, behind Metallica and Slayer
(fourth-run to some, actually, if you add Megadeth to the list). Distinguished
from their brethren by a specific, comic-book-fueled sense of humour, aptly
displayed in the mid-1980s; less fortunate ever since they became more serious,
though. Possible starting point: Among The Living (1987).
☺Art Of Noise, The: Not just pioneers of sampling techniques, but
actually one of the best bands that tried to take the silliest excesses of the
1980s and reinterpret them as the beginning of a new musical era and mentality.
It did not really work out in the end, but it left behind a bunch of albums
that really sound like nothing else. Possible starting point: Who's Afraid Of The Art Of Noise?
(1984).
○ Arthur Russell:
One of the oddest and hippest «forgotten heroes» of the modernist era of pop.
An omnivorous multi-instrumentalist and an effective songwriter in all sorts of
genres, Russell preferred two styles throughout his life: avantgarde
cello-driven sonic landscapes and wildly experimental dance-pop grooves with
complex, unpredictable arrangements. If that already sounds bizarre to you,
there is more: collaboration with about a million side projects that no one outside
the so-called «No Wave» scene has heard about, reluctance to put out records
due to a bad case of perfectionalism, and dying from AIDS less than a year
after Freddie Mercury. Bottomline: run, don't walk — but do not necessarily
expect «genius», as today's hipsters will be instructing you. Possible starting point: The World Of Arthur Russell (2004).
○ Asia: Where the
1970s had Boston, Styx, and Journey, the 1980s had Asia: «progressive rock»
stripped of its complexity and innovation, beefed up with repetitive pop hooks,
and retaining all of its pretentiousness and pomp. If we further emphasize the
«Eighties» aspect of it, with all the pop metal and corny electronic overtones,
this sounds like a recipé for something genuinely awful, and in many
ways it is. Asia's saving grace, however, is that the band was originally
dominated by «serious» veteran proggers — a team assembled from the ashes of
ELP, King Crimson, and Yes — adding a touch of class that is nearly always
there, even on the most wretched of songs. Eventually, they lost most of the
founding fathers and went in the direction of near-total garbage, but in recent
years the founding fathers patched it up, so today, the old boys are still
touring the world and writing «prog-lite» for the undemanding consumer.
○ Associates, The:
A Scottish band, led by operatically gifted doom-and-gloomsman Billy McKenzie
and inventive non-virtuoso guitarist Alan Rankine — the first album is sort of
a «Roxy Music meets The Cars» kind of thing, from then on it's more like «Roxy
Music meets Depeche Mode», with the band steadily going from guitar-oriented
New Wave rock to artsy synth-pop within two years. With Rankine quitting,
McKenzie descended into cheap emptiness over the rest of the decade, then,
unable to re-ascend properly, committed suicide. Not an «essential» band for
getting to know the era, but one worth getting to know in the end. Possible starting point: The Affectionate Punch (1979), as the
band's only genuinely «rocking» album, but, overall, everything up to and
including Perhaps (1985) is
recommendable — stay away from McKenzie's late Eighties stuff, though, it's
mostly just generic dance pop with very little creativity.
☺Aztec Camera: A one-man band led by yet another Scottish
wonderchild, Roddy Frame; often lumped in with the late New Wave movement on
the strength of its debut record, but really more of a «troubled
singer-songwriter» project, going through lots of vastly different stages
(ranging from Dire Straits-ish philosophic blues to formulaic dance-pop to
shiny guitar-led pop-rock etc.) in which Roddy’s artistic persona is the only
permanent link — smart, romantic, complex, idealistic, stimulating, but
sometimes a little overbearing through the denseness of the lyrics. Rarely remembered
today because they could never solidly occupy one particular niche of the
market, not overtly consistent, but well worth checking out — a full CD’s worth
of the best Aztec Camera tunes would qualify as one of the finest pop
collections of the 1980s/1990s. Possible
starting point: Either High Land,
Hard Rain (1983) — New Wave pop was never done better on a bedrock of
acoustic guitars, or Stray (1990) —
Roddy’s attempt at building his own White
Album is predictably not all that it could be, but still a big success.
○ B-52's, The:
Greatest «intellectual party band» of all time — these guys were arguably one
of the most lightweight New Wave acts in existence, but they managed to
capitalize on that fact, and turn their very shallowness into an amazingly
seductive musical philosophy. Neither depressive nor mentorial, the B-52's at
their best offer speedy dance rhythms, unforgettable hooks, terrific harmonies
contrasting with hilarious / annoying nerdy guy recitals, boundless lyrical
references, and a surprisingly consistent discography over the years (although
their mainstream commercial success in the late 1980s did come at certain
expenses). If somehow the kitschy, reckless antics of Fred Schneider, Kate
Pierson, and Cindy Wilson leave you cold or, worse, indignant, try readjusting
your wavelengths — I cannot imagine anybody but the most hardcore puritan
unmoved by the likes of ʽRock Lobsterʼ. Possible starting point: The
B-52's (1979) is the one that started it all, and it has by far their most
classic numbers — proceed from there and just stop at will.
○ Bad Brains: On paper (and upon first sight and sound)
these guys seem unique — a 1970s black band that started out in a jazz-fusion
vein, then quickly switched to punk and became the pioneering force in the
speedy hardcore movement, then added an aggressive reggae side to its pedigree.
Unfortunately, the novelty of it all only lasted for a few years, after which
the «amazing madness» waned, a more generic and boring metallic component
replaced the fun of old, and the band switched to a draggy, utterly mediocre
existence for the rest of its career. Possible
starting point: Black Dots
(recorded in 1979, released only in 1996) is a set of early demos that captures
the band at their freshest and least forgettable; of the official «numeric»
releases, Rock For Light (1983)
probably has the best songs from both their hardcore and their reggae stocks.
○ Bad Religion: Obviously, many bands can lay claim to being
«the AC/DC of hardcore punk» — considering how formally limited the style is
in the first place. But Bad Religion may have laid the most tenacious of these
claims, releasing a steady, unbroken stream of exactly same-sounding
«three-chord-based» albums over the years. Their saving grace is total, 100%
commitment, fueled by frontman Greg Graffin's fanatical leftist faith and main
guitarist Brett Gurewitz's ongoing mission to keep the gap between speedy punk
rock and colorful power pop bridged as securely as possible. Possible starting point: Suffer (1988), after half a decade of
swaying to and fro, finalizes and stabilizes the Bad Religion formula forever
(later albums tend to slow down the tempos of some of the songs, not always to
the band's advantage) — for non-fans, this might be all the Bad Religion they
really need; fans, however, will need to assemble the complete catalog, since
not even the worst Bad Religion album is that
much worse than the best one. And as of 2013, they show no signs of stopping.
☺Bangles: They may have sold out the «Paisley
Underground» to corporate greed back in the mid-1980s, but they were still one
of the most charming, intelligent, and tasteful girl bands in an era when
«commercially oriented pop music» had all but officially gained the status of
lethal biological weapon. Corporate machinery, unfortunately aided by an
untimely alliance with Prince, destroyed the band fairly quickly, but for a few
years out there, simple pop music did not get much better than that. Possible starting point: All Over The Place (1984) is
unquestionably their best — a proper mix of jangly folk rock, old-school garage
aggressiveness, and modernistic relevance that, unfortunately, they would
never quite recapture the same way again.
○ Bathory: One of the quirkiest Scandinavian metal bands
out there — Bathory was essentially a one-man project, with all of its
material written, and fairly often, though not always, played and recorded by
the reclusive loner Quorthon (because of this, live appearances by Bathory
were few and far in between, something highly atypical for a metal band). As if
that weren't enough, Quorthon himself went through several distinct stages in
his career, starting out as the quintessential, Satan-owned, prophet of speedy
black metal with fabulous verve and horrendously lo-fi production, then
gradually inventing «epic Viking metal», matching medieval pomp with
efficiently brutal riffs and vicious attitudes, then descending into mediocre
thrash territory, then returning back to his Viking roots with such a vengeance
that his heart finally gave out in 2004. Even if your heart is thoroughly
immune towards extreme forms of heavy metal, you will still have to admit that
the Bathory journey is in a class of its own, and that Quorthon's personality
deserves all the curiosity it can get. Possible
starting point: Hammerheart
(1990) is often listed among the pioneering releases of «Viking metal», and, at
the very least, deserves an educational listen, although I do share the opinion
that it also contains Quorthon's most inspired musical passages. Black metal
fans would need to go back in time from there, while epic metal fans would have
to go forward (but disregard the mediocre-to-awful thrash homages from the
mid-1990s).
○ Bats, The: More like «New Zealand's Favorite Fruit Bats».
Led by the indomitable Robert Scott, these guys came up with a vastly
unoriginal, but mildly individualistic and pleasant formula in the late 1980s
— «folk-pop-rock» with jangly guitars, weak, but persistent hooks, and humble,
but tasteful attitudes. Not too smart, not too stupid, not too loud, not too
quiet, not too minimalistic, not too overdone. The formula works OK for about
two or three records (not necessarily in chronological order), but then, of
course, gets a little wearisome. Possible
starting point: with this type of bands, the debut often remains their best
offering, and, indeed, Daddy's Highway
(1987) has probably never been topped by these guys, even though they have
remained consistently listenable through the years.
☺Bauhaus: These guys have penetrated all the textbooks
as the fathers of «Goth rock», a tagline that is sure to discredit them in the
eyes of subculture-haters before they have a chance to hear even one note
played/sung by the two-headed beast that is Peter Murphy and Daniel Ash. In reality,
although the band's visual image and artistic philosophy are inextricably tied
to the early Eighties and seem to have dated rather badly, their brand of «New
Wave rock theater» still sounds unique and exciting to this very day, and the
early albums are chock-full of unforgettable tunes — more like a darker, more
abrasive update of early Roxy Music than a generic poseur celebration of
suicidal depression. Those hairstyles and outfits may be worth just a chuckle
now, but Murphy's potential of hypnotizing the listener, and Ash's potential to
send the listener into a paroxysmal state with his guitar escapades, remains
steadfast well into the 21st century. Possible
starting point: Advisable to start off from where it starts — In The Flat Field (1980) kicks more ass
and generates more hook-filled excitement than later, somewhat more
contemplative releases, but given the shortness of the band's career, you won't
have far to go anyway.
○ Beat Happening: Led by three professional non-players and
non-players from Olympia, Washington, this para-holy trinity quickly rose to
the ranks of Great Gods of Lo-Fi by figuring out a truly great gimmick — how to
impersonate a bunch of talented, trying, but rough-cut and untrained 12-year
olds aspiring for pop greatness. Their «classic» records will spook off just
about anybody who has perfect pitch, but for the rest of us there's quite a bit
of sweet, innocent, seductive charm in their best songs, which combine
quasi-naive twee-pop attitudes with subtle sarcasm and occasional dark humor.
Unfortunately, the gimmick got old pretty quickly, and it was not until their
very last album that they made a serious effort to bring their image and style
up to speed, by which time it was too late. Possible
starting point: Beat Happening
(1985) is where it's at — if the album charms you rather than horrifies you
with its minimalistic riffs, tinny sound, and intentionally off-key singing,
proceed further at your own risk.
○ Big Black: Basically just a vehicle for the sick, but
highly artistic fantasies of sonic wizard Steve Albini, Big Black lasted only
about half a decade, which allowed them to fully explore the formula — crooked
tales of human ugliness, perversity, and idiocy set to mechanical, intentionally
«soulless» drum machine beats and some of the most vicious and aurally
uncomfortable guitar tones in music history. As far removed from yer average
«hardcore» sound as possible for a band with its roots firmly rooted in
hardcore, this music is definitely not for the feeble-minded, but Albini goes
far beyond simplistic «shock value»: he is really one of the most vivid
painters of the «dark underbelly» of the Eighties. Possible starting point: Atomizer
(1986) is the band's most finely printed calling card, but do not miss the
early EPs, either — no Big Black song delivers as strong and basic a punch as
ʽCablesʼ.
☺Billy Bragg: I am
always cautious about hardcore leftists, and even more cautious about hardcore
leftists in music, but Billy Bragg builds up a pretty good case — over thirty
years, he has displayed much more intelligence in both his melodies and his
words than the average hardcore leftist, and he has usually managed to
integrate his politics and his personal issues in such a way as not to irritate
the listener too much by either of the two. Beginning as an
«electrobusker» (playing his songs to the sound of nothing but an amplified
six-string), he then gradually learned to make good use of backing bands,
merging punk, pop, and folk in a traditionalist manner while always singing of
current issues. He is not a great songwriter, but over the years he has refined
both his sense of melody and his personal charisma to the extent that his music
actually grows more endearing as he grows older — a rare enough thing for
rockers. Possible starting point: Don't Try This At Home (1991) probably
has the largest concentration of cool songs from the man, although it tells you
nothing about his electro-busking, or about his interpretations of Woody
Guthrie with Wilco, or about his finding a perfect melancholic serenity in his
later years, so the catalog is well worth exploring beyond this one point.
☺Birthday Party, The: Nick Cave cut his teeth — and sank them
pretty deep in the flesh of stagnant bourgeois morality, too — while providing
lead vocals and violent stage behavior for this classic Australian band of the
post-punk era. With the equally maniacal guitarist Rowland S. Howard as second
principal member, The Birthday Party fused hardcore punk, avantgarde jazz,
Goth, and several other influences to create a sound that was truly one of a
kind, even for the late 1970s / early 1980s and their overwhelming explosion of
new talents. There may have been innumerable cases of «madmen» of rock
history, but very few were able to raise to the same heights as this band did —
maybe only The Stooges, whose «modernized» descendants Cave and Howard would
appear to be. Possible starting point:
For those who want a «gentler» introduction to the Party, Prayers On Fire (1981) is probably the optimal point of entry. For
those who are not afraid to go all the way right away, Junkyard (1982) would be this band's insaniest masterpiece.
☺Black Flag: Invention of hardcore punk — should that even
count as an achievement, considering how many crappy bands followed in its
wake? (Besides, hardcore was really invented by Bad Brains, but let's not fight
about this, boys and girls). What should
count as an achievement is that band leader Greg Ginn managed to come up with a
fairly unique guitar playing style — he really married punk to avantgarde jazz
in a way few other players could, or cared to — and that, at the band's peak,
the showmanship of Henry Rollins complemented Ginn's guitar fireworks to
perfection. Their discography is quite varied, which is both a blessing (few
things are more irritating than a lengthy discography from a generic hardcore band) and a curse,
because some of Ginn's experimentation sounds downright stupid these days, but
at least there's something in there for everyone. Possible starting point: Damaged
(1981) is the acknowledged classic and one of the most revered punk albums of
the decade, so there is no question about where to start. From there on, you're
on your own — read the reviews, and trust your instincts.
☺Blind Guardian: These German purveyors of speed, power, and
fantasy metal have been so relentless in honing their skills at Bombast-A-Rama
that even those who hate pomp and pretense in pop music with all their might
will have to admit a certain level of
respect for the hard-to-beat lionine roar of Hansi Kürsch or the melodic
gift of lead guitarist André Olbrich. Those who love their pop music grand, arrogant, and exciting will have a
never ending aural feast with these guys, though — especially those who also
have a soft spot for Tolkien, Stephen King, and Dungeons and Dragons. Their
basic goals have remained pretty much unchanged since the very beginning, but
the style has evolved from a more speed-oriented and brutal-metallic onslaught
in the early days to a more symphonic, «melodic» sound as the years went by;
depending on this, most fans will probably have their hearts yearning for the
former or the latter. Possible starting
point: Imaginations From The Other
Side (1995) represents fair middle ground between earlier, harsher B. G.
and later, «orchestral» B. G.; start here, perhaps, and then move away
backwards or forwards depending on which aspects you find more to your liking,
if any.
☺Blondie: The greatest «pop-rock» band of the New Wave
era that ever lived — although the very name of the band and its image, with
frontvixen Debbie Harry always at the center of attention and the rest of the
members always intentionally lurking in the shadows, often leads to misguided
interpretations: general audiences think of Blondie in the same category as
Donna Summer and Chic (due to the disco attractiveness of ʽHeart Of
Glassʼ), and «intellectual» audiences sometimes dismiss them for the same
reason. DON'T! These guys were smart, sharp, tasteful, diverse, and dynamic:
their classic albums belong on the shelf of everybody who has no aversion
towards pop music in general, and likes one's own pop music with a grain of salt
and a touch of spice. Even when they crossed over into the 1980s, got a bit
darker and more depressed, they did not begin to suck — it's just that they
were so tightly associated with liveliness and springliness that nobody wanted
to take any of that gloomy crap from their favorite band. Even when the band
regrouped in the late 1990s, this was done under the condition that they would
not become a nostalgia act, but would bravely try to saddle and harness the
ongoing processes in pop music — to mixed effect, unfortunately, given the
overall awful state of pop music in the 2000s, but still, at least
theoretically admirable in spirit. Possible
starting point: Parallel Lines
(1978) is an indisputable classic and an acknowledged milestone in the history
of pop, yet this is a band that deserves to be studied through and through, so
I'd personally recommend to start right from the self-titled Blondie (1976) and work your way from
there.
☻Bon Jovi: There may be no single better example in the
history of music to prove that «long-term popularity» and «accessibility» are
not always a good thing. From the very beginning, Jon Bon Jovi and his pals
made it clear that first and foremost, they were after mass popularity — mega-mass popularity — and that the best
way to ensure that popularity was the KISSS formula: «Keep It Simple, Stupid,
and Serious». After all, you cannot deny that the one major difference that
separates ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ from something like ʽRock And
Roll All Nightʼ is in that additional S: headbanging to ʽLivin' On A
Prayerʼ makes you imagine that you are not just headbanging — you are headbanging for a spiritual cause. For
almost thirty years now, Bon Jovi, equipped with just a few drops of talent,
have been bottling cheap spirituality for the masses, and doing fairly well for
themselves in the process. Which, in this reviewer's eyes at least, makes them
one of the most fascinatingly disgusting acts in the entire pop/rock business. Possible starting point: With a band
like this, it only makes sense to start with the officially acknowledged
cornerstone of their legacy — Slippery
When Wet (1986), whose key track at least features the most creative
gimmick in their history of music-making (the talkbox grunt, of course).
○ Boomtown Rats, The: Although the only song by these guys that has
solidly entered public conscience is arguably ʽI Don't Like Mondaysʼ,
they used to be commercially successful, regularly putting hit singles on the
charts in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. Ironically, even though they are
usually listed as a «punk/New Wave» act, The Boomtown Rats were really at their
best when doing straightforward, ballsy rock'n'roll, delivered with plenty of
guts, spittle, and humor by their pair of guitarists and potentially
mesmerizing frontman Bob Geldof. The more they strayed away from rock'n'roll
and into the risky waters of synth-pop, though, the more they tended to look
like copycats of their betters — and then there's the matter of Geldof's own
transformation from ruffled street-rock hero into the closest thing the world
has ever seen to a real planet-saving Superman: the more wonderful he became as
a sensitive, self-sacrificing human being, the more boring he got as a
musician. Alas, this inevitably happens to the best of us. Possible starting point: A
Tonic For The Troops (1978) — the perfect transition album from «classic
rock» to «New Wave», with just the right combination of brawns and brain from
these guys and probably their best song ever (ʽRat Trapʼ).
○ Boston: Tom Scholz may have been a genius of
technology, a wizard of guitar tone, and a self-standing self-made cultural
hero, but none of that mattered when it came to taste and intelligence, of which
he could only muster enough for one classic album, which most classic rock
radio listeners know by heart without ever having bought a copy. Give the man
his due — he pretty much invented the default understanding of «arena rock»...
in a basement, and that's gotta count
for something. But do not give the man more
than his due, and unless you are a mad completist, do not bother with anything
Boston-related past the 1970s. Whoever you are, your ears deserve better than
rote, formulaic, monotonous, grossly overproduced and overdramatized pomp. Possible starting point: Boston (1976) is and will always be one
of the all-time classics — love or hate that style, the mastership cannot be
denied. Beyond there lies nothing, even if there are occasional enthusiasts who
also root for the band's second album.
○ Bruford: In between the 1973-1974 and the 1981-1984
marks of King Crimson, prog drummer extraordinaire Bill Bruford happened to
lead his own band, producing three albums that, in a better world, might have
been of certain interest to fans of groundbreaking progressive rock, but as it
happens, can be only of limited interest to fans of that rather
self-sufficient, off-the-cuff genre called «jazz-rock fusion». For the most
part, this is professional, but bland and uninventive fusion with no particular
place to go — the only exception being the band's first album, Feels Good To Me (1977), which had an
actual «symphonic» strain to it and featured a dazzling assortment of guests to
provide both spice and substance, including the enigmatic and underrated
singer-songwriter Annette Peacock.
☺Buggles: Not only did Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes
announce the coming of the «Video Age» with a conveniently concocted title to
their biggest hit, but they pretty much laid down the basic rules for
intelligent commercial synth-pop — songs that could be maddeningly catchy, impossibly
modern, and yet also composed with care and inspiration. Of course, even if one
perceives the irony of the lyrics and the whole approach (using the latest
trendiest technologies to deplore the fate of a world overwhelmed with
technology), some of the music may seem off-putting because of the overall
«cheesiness» of the arrangements, hooks, and vocals; but the Buggles were one
of the very few bands who seem to have been perfectly aware of this from the
very beginning, and took themselves firmly tongue-in-cheek. Unfortunately, they
only stuck around for one pop masterpiece before participating in one of the
weirdest musical mergers in history (with Yes,
no less, proving that you can marry any two musical genres on the map with at
least some success), and when they came back for a second, much less
satisfactory album, it was already too late to carry on the Buggles program.
Forget ʽVideo Killed The Radio Starʼ, though — ʽJohnny On The
Monorailʼ is really where it's at. Possible
starting point: The Age Of Plastic
(1980) is, by all means, the one and only place to start with these guys.
☺Butthole
Surfers: The good
old American underground has churned out plenty of weird bands in its lifetime
— so much, in fact, that it is almost impossible in this here 21st century to
understand what really constitutes «weird» any more — but Butthole Surfers
were definitely one of the leading brands of «weird» for about a decade, from
their early messy noise-punk days in the early Eighties to the more organized,
glossy, yet still deliciously wild sound of the early Nineties, when for a very
brief time they almost seemed poised for overground
popularity, even despite retaining the word «butthole» in their group name. The
common association is with Gibby Haynes, the band's crazy frontman who looked
and sounded like a post-modern take on Iggy Pop or a less seriously
self-centered take on Birthday Party-era Nick Cave — however, the band's
musical attractions stay mostly with Paul Leary, a terrific guitar player who
seemed to be much more inspired by Hendrix and Syd Barrett than by the contemporary
heavy metal or alt-rock crowds, and was equally gifted with the ability to
churn out cool retro-riffs and make
deliciously fuzzy psychedelic noise. The band kind of lost direction by the end
of the millennium, losing a large part of its youthful energy and hooliganry,
but those early albums still hold up in all their hilariousness and
recklessness. And yes, they're a musical band first and foremost — like Zappa,
they consider intentionally «offensive» content as their legitimate shield from
idiots and amateurs, but behind that shield, they can rock your heart out,
though for what it's worth, I probably wouldn't ever call them «master
tunesmiths» (they seem far more skilled at running rings around other people's
ideas than generating their own, but that, too, is an art that requires major
skill). Possible starting point: Locust Abortion Technician (1987) is
arguably their most (dis)cohesive statement, but if you want to dip your foot
into something easier first, Independent
Worm Saloon (1993) is probably their best compromise between «madness» and
«accessibility».
☺Buzzcocks: The most direct British equivalent of the
Ramones — this is punk rock, yes, but with a personal rather than social
orientation, and with more emphasis on catchy vocal and instrumental hooks
than anger, loudness, and abrasiveness. Over a short span of no more than three
years, the Buzzcocks left behind an impressive legacy of punchy, pointy songs
that are all but impossible to get out of your head — and they weren't above
experimenting with various adjacent genres, either, though they never truly
made the transition into «New Wave» (perhaps, for the better). Fortunately,
they had the good sense to disband before the Eighties caught up with them and
imposed their absurd standards; unfortunately,
Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle decided it appropriate to bring the band back
into existence once the grunge wave hit both shores of the Atlantic, feeding us
a steady stream of mediocre-to-poor releases for more than ten years. Most
informed people will probably tell you to embrace as much classic-era Buzzcocks
as possible, and stay away from the reunion era — and, surprise surprise, I am
one of these people, too (although their latest, The Way, wasn't too bad,
honestly). Possible starting point:
There's no getting around it — the Buzzcocks were the late Seventies' greatest
«singles band», and the Singles Going
Steady (1979) compilation has been, and always will be, the most
resplendent monument to their greatness. However, all of the three early LPs
are worth getting as well — without them, you will never know the full
potential and scope of these guys at their peak.
1989-1998
○ 808 State: These imaginative Mancunians used to be one
of the hottest things in the entire electronic movement; today, they are
mostly mentioned as «a primary influence on Aphex Twin» (not that one day
Richard D. James will not suffer the same fate — fame and fortune are fairly
fleeting flimsies when we're talking digital art). Still, if you are into
«intelligent dance music» at all, 808 State are an indispensable component of
the genre, and much more human (and «humanistic») than so many others. Possible starting point: Newbuild (1988).
○ Aaliyah: Her sweetness and «innocence» make her R'n'B
listenable, and her collaboration with Timbaland make some of it interesting. But,
at the end of it all, her tragedy will not make her the Aretha of 1990s. Possible
starting point: One In A Million (1996).
○ Afghan Whigs, The: These Cincinnati kids originally relocated to
Seattle just in time to be jumped on the grunge bandwagon, but they made their
critical reputation not so much by mastering the official grunge textbook as
by interbreeding grunge with singer-songwriter introspection and soul/R'n'B
influences, mainly courtesy of the artistic soul of frontman Greg Dulli.
Songwriting was always a big problem, though. Possible starting point: Gentlemen
(1993) has the best combination of «Whig essence» and interesting melodies, but
the much more deviating 1965 (1998)
is arguably their most original contribution to the world of rock'n'roll.
☺Aimee Mann: Just my idea of a perfect female
singer-songwriter: melodicity, beautiful voice, non-overbearing, but meaningful
lyrics, consistency, humor — all in limited, but sufficient doses. Possible
starting point: Bachelor No. 2 (2000).
○ AIR: Kings of French elevator music. One exemplary
record of the genre plus an endless series of attempts to improve upon it,
always leaving you pleased and dissatisfied at the same time. Possible
starting point: Moon Safari (1998).
☻Alanis
Morissette:
Mediocre talent, overall nice girl, inadequate success, confused heritage,
awful horse grin (especially when she was in her prime), good set of pipes, too
few good songs, made history, currently unmaking it. Possible starting
point: Jagged Little Pill (1995).
☺Alice In
Chains: Seattle has
seen plenty of grunge bands, but not one has combined metallic chops, pop
catchiness, and the suicidal horror of drug addiction in a more intelligent and
exciting manner than the late Layne Staley and the not-too-late Jerry Cantrell.
Easily the most terrifying band of the 1990s, and thus, probably not for
everybody's ears. Possible starting point: Dirt (1992).
○ Amon Tobin: One
of the most tirelessly experimental electronic wizards of our time, the Brazilian-born
Amon Adonai Santos de Araujo Tobin (or just Cujo for short) made his name as an
awesome mediator between the arts of drum'n'bass and old-school jazz, creating
a sound so unique, it's a total wonder it managed to be accessible at the same
time. Since then, he's branched out in a variety of sonic directions, but, to
the best of my predictive power, it is the «Miles Davis meets Squarepusher»
vibe that he is going to be remembered for. Possible
starting point: Supermodified
(2000).
○ Amorphis: Even
in the middle of the overproductive Scandinavian / Finnish death metal scene,
in the mid-1990s Amorphis stood out loud and proud — starting out as a
competent, but generic death metal band, then morphing (sorry!) into a largely
unpredictable, archi-creative prog-metal unit, concocting a melting pot of
folk, jazz, and symphonic influences, bonud by fresh metal riffs and a great
sense of taste. Unfortunately, ever since the late 1990s they have been moving
into duller directions, corrupting themselves with alt-rock sludge and evolving
into formula. Be, therefore, very wary with what you pick. Possible starting point: Elegy (1996), then proceed in both
directions from there, stopping at will.
○ Anathema: The
life story of this Liverpudlian outfit is, in some ways, no less amazing than
the life story of that other little
band from Liverpool — starting out as a fairly generic and conventional
«dead-brides-and-dark-despair» doom metal band, they gradually evolved into
art-metal and then into a mix of Porcupine Tree-style neo-prog and
Radiohead-style neo-mope-rock, taking two decades to make the transition from
Darkness to Light and ultimately emerging as a sort of born-again harbinger of
post-mortem transcendence with their latest batch of albums. Unfortunately,
the Cavanagh brothers, forming the core of the band, are as good at being
pretentious, ambitious, and ecstatic about their beliefs as they are bad at
writing great music — even at their best, they have an «ambient-atmospheric»
approach to songwriting that can very quickly get annoying and boring; most of
their tricks are fairly predictable, and most of their influences, from Pink
Floyd to Radiohead to Coldplay, are too easily identifiable, making them a
«poor man's» version of all these bands at best. So, proceed at your own risk. Possible starting point: Alternative 4 (1998) is where they
really started to break out of the original narrow formula, and it probably has
their best song ever (ʽFragile Dreamsʼ), but even that one is hardly
a masterpiece.
○ Änglågård:
Motivated, inspired, but hugely derivative Swedish revivalists of the classic
1970's prog rock of Genesis, Yes, King Crimson, Gentle Giant, you name it.
Their flaws are obvious and evident, but with a brief legacy encompassing two
studio and one live albums, they simply didn't have time to make them overwhelm
the positives. Possible starting point: Hybris (1992).
○ Angra: Brazilian
gods of power metal, who started off well enough in the mid-Nineties by trying
to merge the genre with all sorts of outside influences, from symphonic to
Brazilian folk. Then they lost their best member and became... just a regular
power metal band, of potential interest to power metal fans. Possible
starting point: Holy Land (1996).
☻Ani DiFranco:
This Earth-dwelling Valkyrie of Civil Liberties is an inexhaustible source of
flaming spirits. In compensation, her progenitors forgot to endow her with a
proper songwriting talent, but she has solved the problem by writing so much
that it is actually possible to make a full length CD of quality stuff culled
from over 15 hour-long records. She used to be a great guitar player, too, but
coincidentally abandoned her unique style at the same time that she gave up on
trying to write decent music. Most transparent argument ever that music
and political / social agenda should be eating from different tables. Possible
starting point: Dilate (1996).
☺ Aphex Twin: As often as one gets
depictions of Richard D. James as the intangible Zeus of the Electronic
Olympus, he might still rather be its Hermes, the trickster clown: he has
mastered the craft so well that, instead of bowing down to his equipment, he
condescends to it, and you never really know how serious the guy is. Also, he may or may not be a genius,
but he is definitely one of the most creative-idea-packed people of the turn of
the century era, so it is essential to at least try him out even if electronic
music generally leaves you cold. Possible
starting point: Richard D. James
Album (1996).
○ Apoptygma Berzerk:
The brainchild of pale-faced Norwegian lunatic Stephan Groth; the band
(essentially, one-man band with various session hands coming and going) has
slowly evolved from a mix of industrial, Goth, and synth-pop to a relatively
unsophisticated brand of art-techno to a somewhat more interesting style of
electropop, and is still evolving. Groth has some sort of tricky proto-emo
appeal and an odd knack of improving upon bad or passable Eighties' hits, for
which he deserves my respect; he also has a serious fan base among worshippers
of «electronic body music», but this detail is of little interest to me. Possible starting point: You And Me Against The World (2005),
but for more «typical» A. B., Soli Deo
Gloria (1993) is a much more informative introduction.
☺ Apples In Stereo, The: These guys'
long strange trip began under the banner of resurrecting the cheerful
pop-psychedelic spirit of the Sixties (in a modernized indie format) and ended
up as a never ending, mathematically grounded tribute to a whole series of Rob
Schneider's musical heroes (Jeff Lynne is the latest in line). One has to
appreciate the dedication: they took it so seriously that, somewhere along the
way, they even learned to write good songs. Possible
starting point: The Discovery Of A
World Inside The Moone (2000).
○ Arab Strap: Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton were a
Scottish duo that based an entire career on writing long, dark, monotonous,
impressionistic electro-folk tales based around drinking and fucking as the
top two activities for modern day young people. Eventually, they grew up,
realized there's more to life than this and ended their partnership on a
somewhat more optimistic note. Their career is fun to trace, but not so much
fun to enjoy, unless you are really
ready to empathise. They do somewhat sound like no one else, though. Possible starting point: Mad For Sadness (1999).
○ Arch Enemy: The product of creative brothers Michael and
Christopher Amott, Arch Enemy are a «melodic death metal» band from Sweden,
originally notable simply for a quick progress from completely generic act to
one of the genre's most reliable dazzling riff providers. Then they changed
their lead growler for Angela Gossow and became notable as «that band with the
hot chick who claims direct descent from Lucifer». Eventually, they sort of
degenerated to the level of a very limited formula, like almost all metal bands
do, but at the height of their powers, they did deliver a small bunch of
classic records that might be of interest to everyone who can stand a little
heavy music with growling vocals. Possible
starting point: Burning Bridges
(1999) probably has the best songs, but for those who, like me, much prefer to
be charmed by Gossow, Wages Of Sin
(2001) would be preferable.
○ Archers Of Loaf: For a brief moment in the mid-Nineties, these
guys were quite a hot thing on college rock radio stations; but ever since they
fell apart, they have been generally relegated to «connoisseur delight» status.
But this is not because their brand of grunge-based indie rock stemmed from the
East Coast (Chapel Hill) rather than the obligatory Northwest. Rather, it is because
they placed more emphasis on «ambiguity», «intelligence», and «artsiness» than
on in-yer-face hooks and on sentiments with which the average teen could
connect on an easy and regular basis. That said, I could not say that any of
the band members had any tremendous musical gifts; at best, they could develop
a curious «guitar-weaving» technique that made them stand out from the pack,
but that is not always enough to make an appropriately great song. Still, a
band well worth getting to know if you're a young romantic intellectual with a
spiteful nature. Possible starting point:
Icky Mettle (1994) is their
acclaimed debut, but it is not my fav — anyway, they only have four studio
albums out in toto, and each has its moments.
○ Ash: Ireland's biggest gift to «alternative rock».
The leader, Tim Wheeler, seems like a talented guy, hopelessly chained down by
the «rock» conventions — most Ash records are very frustrating, because they
always sound like they could have been so
much better without the compressed, stiffening production, and the forced
emphasis on loudness, distortion, and power chords, when, at heart, Wheeler is
really just an old-school roots-rock and guitar-pop fan with a big old heart. Possible starting point: A-Z Series (2010) – I think the band
actually got much better as the years went by, and their decision to switch
from LP format to an ongoing series of single releases was a great move,
allowing to reduce the amounts of filler. But if you demand an LP as the
starting point, then Free All Angels
(2001) is the poppiest and bestest of 'em all.
○ At The Drive-In: Legendary heroes of Texan «post-hardcore»,
these progenitors of the far more interesting Mars Volta made their mark on
rock history with a small batch of highly challenging albums, and I am still
not sure if the challenge was all that justified. Energy, passion, intelligence,
and loud distorted guitars are all there, but songwriting has always been these
guys' biggest problem. Possible starting
point: Relationship Of Command
(2000) is their most diverse and «accessible» album — if it hits you, work your
way backwards from there, if it doesn't, it is probably recommendable to stay
away from the earlier, even more sparse records.
○ Atheist: «Tech death metal» from Florida, these guys
made three albums in the late 1980s / early 1990s that made a small, but stern
group of admirers and critics very happy — with a synthesis of thrash / death
metal clichés (speed, heaviness, apocalyptic vibe, growling vocals, the
works) and elements of modern jazz / Latin melodicity and unpredictability.
This «intellectualized» version of moshpit fury is, at worst, curious, and at
best, fascinating. Recently reformed, but no longer all that fresh or
interesting, stick to the early days. Possible
starting point: Unquestionable
Presence (1991) is usually selected as the high watermark, although,
personally, it wearies me out quicker than the slightly more subdued and
diverse Elements (1993).
○ Autechre: The electronic pride of Manchester — Autechre
consists of Rob Brown and Sean Booth, who have made it their life's work to
combine the essence of ambient, industrial, and free-form avantgarde music
inside the small brain of a microchip and conjure the illusion that it is the
microchip itself that is operating the brain. If listening to early Autechre is
like walking through the robot-operated factories of the Snow Queen, then
«mature» Autechre is the soundtrack to the busy life of veteran nanites
hurrying for the nanorobot race. Unfortunately, since most of this music
operates on the intellectual rather than emotional level, and is best enjoyed
in the company of a Stephen Hawking bestseller, there is quite a bit of
redundancy in the Autechre catalog, to say the least. Possible starting point: Tri
Repetae (1995) is probably the best summary of early Autechre; Confield (2001) is for the truly adventurous
hero who likes his Modern Art with serious French fries and bacon on the side.
☺Auteurs, The: Really only just one auteur: well-educated, misanthropic, highly ambitious Brit kid
Luke Haines, feigning an actual «band» with a little help from his friends.
Sometimes hailed as being among the first — and unjustly unsung — heroes of
Britpop, The Auteurs are not so much about breaking musical barriers (although
the music is always careful enough to avoid the boring clichés of
«alt-rock») as they are about being a launchpad for Haines' «auteur vision»: if
you feel partial to his confused / confusing mix of snobbery, world-hatred, and
nostalgia for the blessed times when art seemed to be changing the world, you
will love all of The Auteurs' catalog (not to mention Luke's subsequent
projects). If you are only in it for the chord changes, well... this is
passable, not unpleasant Nineties' electric pop with cello overtones. Possible starting point: New Wave (1993) is The Auteurs at their
freshest, and then just proceed from there until you get enough — four albums
ain't that much of a catalog, anyway.
○ Ayreon: Sometimes mistaken for an actual «band»,
Ayreon is really the artistic moniker of Arjen Lucassen, an eccentric Dutch
guy specializing in prog-metal fantasies. What sets him apart from hundreds of
similar acts is ambition: Lucassen's goal is to become the Wagner of rock
music, and for almost two decades he has been steadily hammering out his «Ring»
— huge, sprawling prog-metal operas, each one stretched over 2 CDs and
featuring guest vocalists from every symph- or power-metal band to have ever
walked the Earth. Accusing this guy
of cheesiness is like accusing cheese of cheesiness — whether you will be able
to see his good sides behind the cheese is a different, much more complex,
matter. Possible starting point: Universal Migrator (2000) is probably
his peak, particularly the progressive-oriented Pt. 1, not so much the metal-oriented Pt. 2 — but when each following album so very consciously tries to
«outpeak» its predecessor, it is hard to speak in terms of highs and lows.
○ Babes
In Toyland: Along
with Hole, this other pack of «kinderwhores», led by Kat Bjelland, heavily
added to the overall glory of Minneapolis in the early 1990s. Without any particular instrumental
or songwriting talent to their name, they mostly depended on sheer energy and
Kat's sometimes genuinely scary ability to rise to ever new levels of heavy
rock hysteria — at their best, they were like the perfect 1990s band to vent one's frustration to, particularly if
you were a girl, and in some way, some of their stuff (usually the fast, chuggy
ones without delving too deep into the mystery of one's sexual nature) still
sounds fresh today. For a band that only released three proper LPs they do
have quite a bit of filler, though. Possible
starting point: Spanking Machine
(1990), released just before the grunge craze hit and made them «sludgify»
their sound, has most of the best songs, even though Fontanelle (1992) was a bigger critical and commercial hit.
○ Bardo Pond: Roll shoegaze, stoner rock, and ambient into
one lump, soak it in psychedelic sauce, and what you have is Bardo Pond,
Philadelphia's musical gift to the world of dangerous chemical substances. For
the most part, these guys specialize in lengthy, sprawling sonic scapes that
allegedly represent direct musical equivalents of tripping — meaning that most
of their albums are generally interchangeable, although the early ones are
still more recommendable due to the freshness of approach. Possible starting point: Amanita
(1996) is arguably their most critically recognized effort, so why not go
along?
○ Barenaked
Ladies: This
occasionally delightful, but just as frequently annoying Canadian nerd-rock
outfit elicits decidedly mixed feelings. At their best, Steve Page and Ed
Robertson, the band's driving force, could crank out smart, funny, educated,
and fairly catchy folk-pop and power-pop tunes on par with the best
singer-songwriters of the 1990s. However, already at a very early stage in the
band's career, they became so afraid of getting pigeonholed into the «pop
joker» category, along with They Might Be Giants and the rest of them, that
they launched a «maturation» process — learning how to write deadly serious
and deadly boring alt-rock and adult
contemporary material (still loaded with thoughtful and creative lyrics so
that the critical press could be properly sucked up to). This essentially means
that, for every great Barenaked Ladies power pop anthem, there is a comparably
awful Barenaked Ladies «roots-rocker» — listener beware, unless said listener,
like so many high school and college kids in the early 1990s, grew up with the
Ladies as a fashion icon; for everybody else, I am afraid, most of their stuff
will be anything but timeless. Possible starting point: Gordon (1992) illustrates their
«quirky» side best of all — start there and proceed with caution; I would
advise focusing on subsequent «quirky» albums, like Stunt and Maroon, rather
than the «serious» stuff, and definitely
recommend forgetting about the band altogether upon the departure of Page after
Snacktime! (2008).
○ Bark
Psychosis: A
strange combo, essentially a one-man band (with a bunch of rotating collaborators)
represented by enigmatic British visionary Graham Sutton who, if you like to
stick to critical exaggerations, singlehandedly invented «post-rock» circa
1994. Well, not really: what he really did was take the grand vision of Talk
Talk's Mark Hollis and scale it down to a somewhat more humbly, more homely
state, making music that may easily sound deadly boring one minute and deeply
penetrating the next one. On the whole, I would assess anybody's chances at
enjoying or abhorring this shapeless synthesis of soft rock, smooth jazz, dark
folk, and electronica around 50/50, but give it a try anyway — they only have
had two complete albums out in three decades, anyway, which is a rather
respectable feat: with this kind of formula, less demanding artists could have
slapped out a new boring record every six months or so. Possible starting point: Hex
(1994) has, indeed, been the album to
have caused the appearance of the term «post-rock», so it's well worth getting
to know at least for historical purposes.
☺Beck: This guy is honestly amazing — one of the
best songwr... er, visionaries of his
generation, I'd say. Few people have been more successful in meaningfully
synthesizing «old school» musical directions, from pre-war blues and folk to
Sixties' pop and psychedelia, with the hip 'n' cool urban culture of the 1990s
and beyond. It is all the more fascinating that the man's individual strengths
are almost negligible (he is a mediocre instrumentalist, a technically poor
singer, and a copycat melody writer), yet in the end, his creativity and gift
for self-expression know no limits, especially when he teams up with helpful
producers like the Dust Brothers (to create head-spinning party grooves) or
Nigel Godrich (to wallow in self-pity and bring on the end of the world). Possible starting point: I'd advise to
bypass the early «anti-folk» rehearsal crap and start right off with Mellow Gold (1994) and then go all the
way to the end — most of the man's albums do not repeat themselves, although it
is not highly likely you will love all of them equally.
☺Belle
And Sebastian: Another
bunch of melancholic, but friendly Scottish people, led by the mildly autistic,
isolationist musical persona of Steve Murdoch and featuring an assortment of
chamber pop players with great taste in arrangements. Over the years, Murdoch has gradually grown from «that little kid
sitting doodling in the back of the class while the big bullies run the world
around him» to «that grown-up little kid who is now waging his war with the
bullies from a position of increased self-confidence», as the music of Belle
& Sebastian made a jump from moody chamber-folk to a more upbeat and ironic
style of power-pop, and chances are that you might easily get to like «early
B&S» but not «late B&S», or vice versa. Possible starting point: for the early period, the universally
acclaimed masterpiece is If You're
Feeling Sinister (1996), but if you are in the mood for additional
diversity and ringing electric guitar melodies, I'd recommend beginning with Dear Catastrophe Waitress (2004)
instead.
☺Ben Folds (Five): Ben Folds is a nice little guy from North
Carolina who has managed to invent a pretty nifty format for himself in the
1990s — his band, The Ben Folds Five, was actually a «power trio» with a
piano-playing rather than guitar-tooting frontman, that-a-way, combining the
piano pop legacy of Elton John and Billy Joel with the versatility of Cream. In
their prime, the Five were unstoppable — Ben Folds churned out mighty pop hooks
and imbued them with modern irony, whereas the rhythm section supplied some of
the most monstruous energy ever heard in «sissy pop» music. Things went
downhill when the trio split up: Ben was able to carry on as a «mature» solo
artist for some time, but gradually, his hooks became mushy, and his introspective
lyrics and atmospheres became repetitive. By the time the band decided to
reunite (circa 2012), it seems to have been too late to start all over again,
but while they're still at it, some hope does remain. Possible starting point: Whatever
& Ever Amen (1997) probably showcases the original band's strengths
more concisely than any other album, although, to be honest, all three of their
original albums are minor classics in their own rights.
○ Beth Orton: This British singer-songwriter, a little too
refined for her own good, started out strong as one of the chief figures in the
«folktronica» movement — not exactly the female Beck, but, with the help of a
few good friends (like William Orbit), she was able to combine folk-based
singer-songwriting craft with creative digital arrangements, merging past and
future in an enjoyable and respectable fashion. Then pride and purism got the
better of her, and throughout the 21st century she has been reinventing herself
as a quintessential folk-based songwriter. Unfortunately, her composing,
playing, and singing talents are not exceptional, and unless her later records
were to be your very first acquaintance with folk-rock as such, chances are
that you will be bored stiff rather than deeply moved with them. Possible starting point: Perversely
enough, my favorite record of hers is SuperPinkyMandy
(1993), the most electronic-sounding album she'd ever put out and later on,
disowned and thrown out of print by Beth herself; if you are afraid to go along
with such an iconoclastic preference, Trailerpark
(1996) is the obvious choice to start before the strong sides of the lady start
dwindling away and the weak sides begin taking over.
○ Bettie
Serveert: Critically
acclaimed, but forever-underground Dutch indie rock band. Smart, pretentious,
sometimes annoyingly hip leading lady Carol van Dijk serves as its main
attraction, along with not-too-original, but extremely competent, diverse, and
tasteful lead guitar player Peter Visser. The band's discography suffers from a
tendency to produce underwritten material, distinguished by a «look at us,
we're so Neil Young» or «look at us, we're so Lou Reed» or «look at us, we're
so Joni Mitchell» feel — but in between all the second-hand imitations, there
lurks a genuine spirit, and every now and then, they show they can master the
form-to-substance match as good as anyone. Possible
starting point: With a band of this kind, it makes sense to start at the
very beginning, which is Palomine
(1992). From there on, it really depends on whether you manage to establish an
emotional link with Carol's vibe. If you do not, leave them be, but before you
do, do check out Oh, Mayhem (2013) —
the band at its poppiest and least pretentious.
○ Beulah: Loosely tied up with the «Elephant 6»
collective in form and strongly in spirit, this band was the brainchild of San
Franciscans Mike Kurosky (who provided most of the writing and ideological
marrow) and Bill Swan (who... uh... played most of the trumpet parts) and its purpose was to take over the world by restoring its musical
preferences to the Beatles, the Kinks, the Beach Boys, Love, and just a little
Pink Floyd, while at the same time making the music more artistically palatable
to the cool tastes of cool contemporary audiences. The result was a string of
albums that boast some of the lushest and tastiest sound in late 1990s / early
2000s art-pop. Unfortunately, Kurosky's songwriting genius never quite managed
to match the undeniable strength of his love for his musical idols, and
ultimately, Beulah failed at finding their own face and letting the people
understand what it was exactly that they added to that old legacy — at least,
such is my conception of these guys, loosely supported by the fact that they
spent most of their time struggling to capture their market, and finally
dissolved when it became clear that no one was buying their stuff. Great form —
questionable substance. Possible starting
point: I think they came closest to «meaningful» music with their third
album, The Coast Is Never Clear
(2001), which might be the most rational place to start with them. If you find
it too pretentious or too phoney, though, don't even try bothering with the
rest.
○ Bikini Kill: Leaders of the «riot grrrrl» movement, these
girls (and one guy!) pretty much embodied the whole «feminist punk» idea in
the first half of the 1990s, being so aggressive and ideologically
supercharged that they even had the balls to denounce Courtney Love as a phoney
(well, she was, wasn't she?).
Rudimentary musicianship implied that the band positioned themselves as
socially conscious rabble-rousers rather than «artists», but that did not
prevent them from evolving — where the first songs are loud, noisy, hysterical,
and amateurish, eventually they would start moving into more melodic territory.
Unfortunately, that evolution also made them implode already after their second
LP, just as they were getting ready to expand their ideological palette to
include a bit of music, just for a change. Possible
starting point: Anywhere, given that their discography is so short. The
second LP should be more «listenable» from the average music lover's viewpoint,
but Pussy Whipped (1993) is
certainly far more «quintessential» as far as letting one hear what these gals
were really all about.
☺Björk: One of the greatest and most unique talents
of the 1990s, Björk's transition into the 21st century has been rather
lackluster in comparison — but this is only because anything will seem lackluster next to the string of spectacular
masterpieces that this curious Icelandic sprite had created at her peak. Like
so many other idiosyncratic great ones, from Bob Dylan to Kate Bush, her music
and image usually provoke extreme forms of adoration or extreme syndromes of
irritation, but there is no denying that she brought a hitherto unknown style
of artistic expression to the decade, taking full advantage of her genetic
oddities (the voice and the mind) to
amaze us at a time when we'd thought we'd seen and heard it all, mostly. Her
ideas on songwriting, arranging, and mixing that odd voice in with the acoustic
and electronic textures have all entered the golden textbook, but above all
that, there is also a seductive human
component — the feel of the idealistic, uncorrupted human being reveling in
the wonders of the world — that converts all the bizarreness and uniqueness
into genius. Sadly, this has somehow deteriorated in the last decades as her
fame seems to have gotten the better of her, but who really judges a genius on
the basis of his/her failures? Possible
starting point: From Debut
(1993) and right up to Vespertine
(2001), Björk is unstoppable, and each album has its own face; later on,
proceed at your own risk.
☺Black
Box Recorder: One
out of several «same basic idea, widely different execution» projects of
Bitter Brit Luke Haines, this one lasted for about five years and involved the
cooperation of former Jesus and Mary Chain member John Moore and ice-cold,
lovely and deadly Sarah Nixey as the principal vocal channel through which
Haines and Moore poured their misanthropic and claustrophobic sentiments, as
well as their love-and-hate relationship with the United Kingdom. Their legacy
is relatively small — three original LPs and one more of leftovers — but most
of it is priceless: catchy, shivery, beautiful, and creepy art-pop songs, with
imaginative acoustic, electric, and electronic arrangements and an
unforgettable vocal tone that seeps under your skin like refrigerant from a
deliberately out-of-order air cooler. Rarely has steaming bile been delivered
with such seductive grace; unfortunately, for that very reason this is one of
those bands which, although perfectly accessible, will never be too popular
among the general crowds. But then, I guess you're not from the general crowd
anyway, are you, Mr. Reader? Possible
starting point: England Made Me
(1998) is their first and arguably their best, but there is no sense whatsoever
in not getting acquainted with the rest of their catalog, since each following
album has a musical character of its own.
○ Black Crowes: In the late 1980s, these guys emerged to
cleverly occupy an empty niche — old school blues-rock and roots-rock, played
with plenty of old-school dirt, sleaze, distortion, and irreverence: the «bad
retro boys» of rock'n'roll music, quite a sight for the sore eyes of the baby
boomer musical press. On the surface, the Robinson brothers and their team
certainly qualify, but their main problem is not even in lacking proper musical
genius (as songwriters, I would never place them within a mile of Aerosmith or
Lynyrd Skynyrd, let alone the Stones or Led Zep): their main problem is the
extremely conscious «revivalist» attitude, as they have always seemed to revere
and sanctify the past, much like the Greenwich Village purists did with folk
music in the pre-Dylan era. Subsequently, I can't help it if I have always
found their stuff excruciatingly boring on the average — they have a handful of
accidental successes, all right, but on the whole, they seem like perfect proof
of the statement that you can admire the past, but you cannot truly bring it
back. Possible starting point: The
first two or three albums are usually extolled as «certified classics», but
the single largest amount of good songs they wrote, I think, is contained on By Your Side (1999) — a controversial
decision on my part, yet it wouldn't hurt to check out this overlooked album in
addition to acquainting yourself with the Rolling Stone recommendations.
○ Blackmore's
Night: His Deep
Purple and Rainbow days behind him, Ritchie Blackmore finally discovered his
one and only true self: playing Renaissance-inspired folk-pop behind the back
(and ample bosom) of lady Candice Night, a former Long Island resident who went
from Blackmore fan to Blackmore partner to Blackmore spouse over a period of
twenty years. Together, they have already released close to a dozen records,
all of them very similar in style, covering old and contemporary material as
well as writing quasi-original tunes with the sole purpose of using them as
entertainment for the dinner guests of King Henry VIII. As a rule, it's all
very corny-sounding, and should never
be taken for the real thing — Blackmore's Night strive for fantasy amusement,
not for «authenticity»; keeping that in mind, the early albums do have some
catchy tunes on them, and Candice Night is always mildly pleasant in her
delivery, though never truly outstanding. Possible
starting point: Fires At Midnight
(2001) arguably has the largest percentage of catchy and / or inventive
numbers; you might want to define the number of further BN albums you want to
hear relative to the excitement level generated by the title track, or
ʽHome Againʼ.
☺Blur: One of the flashiest symbols of «Britpop» in
the 1990s, Blur wrote some of the best songs of the decade without being
particularly innovative — from Madchester influences to shoegaze influences to
early Britpoppers like Suede to American indie-rock heroes like Sonic Youth,
they thrived on swallowing other people's ideas and reworking them in a more
accessible, enjoyable, and meaningful way (much like the Beatles, don't you
think?). With Damon «Mick Jagger» Albarn serving as their primary billboardish,
hipper-than-hip attraction, and Graham «Keith Richards» Coxon generally
supplying the no-bull melodic basis for the songs, they were virtually
unstoppable in both their «British» phase and their «Americanized» one — that
is, before Coxon quit and the band dragged on through one more album on flash
power alone, no substance. In the late 2000s, they got back together, but looks
like that glorious decade won't be recaptured in any way any time soon. Possible starting point: Parklife (1994) usually holds the
maximum amount of votes for the most quintessential Blur album, but really,
this is one of those bands where it wouldn't hurt to check out the entire
catalog, even including their weakest albums that bookmark their career from
both ends (Leisure and Think Tank).
○ Boards
Of Canada: Scotland's
national banner of electronic pride — two guys with plenty of circuits who made
themselves look really big in the 1990s by integrating club beats, fuzzy ambient
soundscapes, and a flashy modern art philosophy that somehow linked it all to
memories of childhood, campfires, and other «natural» stuff. Personally, I find
them tremendously overrated, their artistic synthesis mostly inefficient, and
their music more often boring than not («elevator electronics»), yet somehow,
they actually managed to push the appropriate buttons at the time, ensuring
themselves a solid place in the electronic pantheon of the 1990s — go figure, I
will probably never understand the tricky laws of functioning that apply in
this electronic business. Possible
starting point: Music Has The Right
To Children (1998) is «generally acknowledged» to be their masterpiece, but
their only record to which I found myself warming up at least partially was The Campfire Headphase (2005), where
they found a quirky, novel way of marrying their electronics to acoustic and
electric guitars — naturally, they never expanded on that synthesis and soon
returned to their old boring ways.
☺Boo
Radleys, The: These
Brits originally appeared on the intersection of the shoegazing wave and the
Madchester wave, combining dreamy-fuzzy atmospherics with metronomic funky
dancebeats, but never managing to override the success or vision of My Bloody
Valentine. Eventually, under the guidance of chief songwriter Martin Carr and
his ghostly-crooner-style vocally endowed partner Sice, they ended up casting
off the dark cloak and revealing their secret — namely, that, like so many
other people, they wanted to be The Beatles of the 1990s. Whether they actually
had the balls to carry out the promise is debatable (critical and popular
opinion are vastly divided), but the scope of their musical searching and the
quality of their songwriting steadily improved up to the very end, when,
disillusioned with relative lack of popular success, the Boos finally called it
a day. Not a «great» group by any means, but a significant chapter in the
history of UK music in the 1990s nonetheless. Possible starting point: somewhat contrary to the general
consensus, I consider Kingsize
(1998), their last record, to be their most fully, diversely, and intelligently
realized offering — one could easily start from there and work one's way
backwards.
☻Boris: This experimental (and extremely productive) Japanese trio is a perfect example of why I
do not think much of «Japanese rock» in general, even if it is not nice to
generalize from one example. They started out as an extremist noise combo,
churning out albums that threatened to out-Merzbow Merzbow itself, and
commanded attention if only for the arrogance of their extremism. Later on,
they moved to all sorts of different formats, playing a variety of hard rock
styles, being heavily influenced by atmospheric post-rock, even toying with the
J-pop format on occasion, and making quite a name for themselves in the
hipster underground with the unpredictability of their music and the diversity
of their album sleeves. However, on the whole, I find them utterly derivative,
quite devoid of creative genius (the best thing they can claim for themselves
is the thick, crushing tone of their guitarist, a sultry lady who calls herself
Wata), way overproductive, and, with
just a few exceptions, unable to come up with any good reasons for the
existence of their music. Possible
starting point: Flood (2000), an
early exercise in heavy atmospherics, is arguably one of their
easiest-tolerated albums and their one single most successful stab at an original
vision. Should you, by chance, be totally
«flooded» with it, feel free to expand back and forward into their catalog — then you will be «flooded» quite
literally.
☺Brainiac: This short-lived alt-rock band from the
mid-Nineties, whose creative anabasis was tragically cut short by the
accidental death of key member Tim Taylor, will be of at least passable
interest to all fans of the «quirky» and «crazy» segments of the post-punk
scene. Heavily influenced by both the Pixies and the grunge scene that came after the Pixies, but leaving out
most of the angst and anger and replacing them with loud, abrasive, but
inoffensive weirdness, these guys combined elements of punk, avantgarde, and
electronica to push out a really distinctive sound: rather monotonous in
impression and largely centered around just one mood, but cool enough to keep
the listener happy for most of the average thirty minutes that each of their
albums lasts. Not the best music of the Nineties, for sure, but not to be
completely forgotten, either. Possible
starting point: Bonsai Superstar
(1994) is arguably Brainiac at their most «mature» and «balanced», but the
other two records are well worth checking out as well.
☺Breeders, The: An autonomous offshoot off the venerable stem
of the Pixies, the Breeders began life as a vehicle for the songwriting,
singing, and playing talents of their eccentric, motherly lady bass player Kim
Deal; later on, with the addition of her much less talented, but spiritually
similar sister Kelley, they became a somewhat haunting,
«femme-fatale-and-her-shadow» presence on the indie scene. More often than
that, they were a haunting absence on the indie scene, only releasing an album
every half-decade or so. Nowhere near as essential listening as the actual
Pixies, they still might easily become the pet favorite of anybody susceptible
to Kim Deal's charisma-enigma aura: she has a one-of-a-kind knack for tiny,
but deep-sinking vocal and instrumental hooks, to which the production of
Steve Albini (a lifelong pal of theirs) usually adds extra sharpness. Possible starting point: The first one, Pod (1990), has the label of being
their most «legendary» offering, especially after its endorsement by Kurt
Cobain, but my own favourite is the second one — Last Splash (1993) is indie-rock at its most befuddling and catchy.
○ Brian
Jonestown Massacre, The: This is essentially just a cool, flashy, and appropriately hooliganish
brand name for the production of one Anton Newcombe, a hazy, lazy, and
dangerous Californian who has allegedly competed with all the original Stones
not only in matters of music, but also in matters of hard drug consumption —
and, unlike the Stones, he seems to actually be composing much, if not most, of
his music while on drugs. So, if you want to know what real «music on drugs» sounds like, know that it sounds as if you
took one riff from some 1960s psychedelic rock tune, turned it into a
groove/vamp, looped it for five/seven/ten minutes at a slow speed or, at best,
mid-tempo, spiced it up with various sonic effects, and repeated the same process
for dozens of songs and then dozens of albums in a row — yes, this is basically
the formula behind most of The BJM's music, and it is quite amazing that
sometimes it actually works. Possible
starting point: Take It From The
Man! (1996) is probably Anton's first fully fleshed out record, on which he
renounces most of the hip underground trends of the late 1980s / early 1990s
and concentrates on answering the question, «what would the Rolling Stones'
music sound like in 1968 if they let Brian Jones do all the work?» It must be
noted, though, that subsequently the BJM go into a real creative slump, out of
which Newcombe only emerged, for a brief period, with My Bloody Underground (2008), a noticeably darker, angrier, more hard
rocking reinvention of the same formula, in full accordance with his plan «to
keep music evil». Hopefully he'll just keep himself
alive long enough to restore music to its proper levels of evilness.
○ Built To
Spill: One of the
pillars of Nineties' indie rock, the brainchild of guitar wizard and strict
musical philosopher Doug Martsch, this band has a very dedicated fanbase, but one has to come to terms with the fact
that it is really all about Doug
Martsch and his guitar — which he plays fairly well, but most of all he is fond
of overdubbing multiple guitar parts to create «polymelodies» that can be
psychedelically overwhelming, but can also be confusing and seemingly meaningless.
In other words, this is a band that is very easy to respect, but not so easy to
love: one of those «much too smart for their own good» cases. Also, most of
their albums sound the same, with minor nuances distinguishing one from the
other, and it is not clear to me that for the past fifteen years Doug Martsch
has actually managed to get a really
new word in, instead of just re-chewing the same old truisms. He does
consistently play a real mean guitar, though, and maybe that's all there should
be to it, after all. Possible starting
point: Perfect From Now On
(1997) is usually acknowledged as their first «great» offering, and it's
certainly not bad, so why not start here?
1998-2017
☺Adebisi Shank: Funny Irish math-rockers who supplement their
passion for calculated riffs, complex tapping techniques, and polygonal song
structures with old-school garage-rock energy and plenty of both kick-ass
attitude and humor. Real fun stuff,
and the bass guitarist plays with a bag over his head — if that does not bawl you over, you're probably a Justin Bieber fan or
something. Possible starting point: This Is The Album Of A Band Called Adebisi
Shank (2008) — fascinating title, isn't it? And the second one is even
better.
☺Adele: Big
girl with big... vocals, suffering
from the biggest problem of our fin-de-siecle's artificial intellectualism:
premature maturity — why so serious???? — but at least her maturity seems
somewhat genuine, in the face of so many repugnant fakers. Possible
starting point: 21 (2011), then
proceed backwards in time to 19
(2008).
○ Agalloch: A rare case of a critically successful «black/folk
metal» band of purely American origin. Based on, for the most part, the
Scandinavian metal scene, these guys have managed to invent an eternal winter
world all their own. Memorable melody does not count for much in it, but atmosphere
certainly does, and if snow-covered pine trees against grey, sunless skies are the thing to trigger your deepest
emotions, Agalloch offer an excellent soundtrack to this triggering. Possible starting point: The Mantle (2002).
○ Agnes Obel: Jury
still out.
○ Akron/Family: Professional weirdos from Oregon. Initial
purpose: integrate meditative rootsy folk with whatever comes along. Along came
electronic hooliganry, free-form jazz, psychedelia, and absurdism. At their
best, they have developed a lovable ultra-modern take on Sixties idealism for
people who only smoke their mushrooms picked fresh from Derrida's backyard. At
their worst, they are simply a huge, smelly, frustrating musical question mark.
Possible starting point: Love Is Simple (2007).
○ Alabama Shakes: Judgement postponed until they follow their
debut album up with something else. Read the review.
○ Alcest: One of the projects of a lonesome French
musician who calls himself ʽNeigeʼ. At his best, the guy creates
repetitive, but highly atmospheric, somewhat otherworldly soundscapes by combining
elements shoegaze, black metal, New Age, and traditional French pop. At his
worst, he does exactly the same, but bores instead of mesmerizing. A curious
phenomenon, although I am afraid that, as in so many other similar situations,
his first album will forever remain his best one. Possible starting point: Souvenirs
D'Un Autre Monde (2007).
☻Alicia Keys: Epic fail. First two albums have some good
songs, but if she continues to slide down the predictable chute of Tough Girl
With Melisma, I prefer Nazism. Possible starting point: The Diary Of
Alicia Keys (2003).
☺Allo Darlin': So far, a charming twee pop outfit with a
romantically intelligent and intelligently romantic Elizabeth Morris and a
bunch of instrumental backers churning out feather-light, but frequently pretty
and well-written music. So far with but two albums to stake their reputation
on, and the second one is disappointing, but be sure to check out the debut: Allo Darlin' (2010).
○ Alt-J: Jury
still out.
○ Amy Winehouse: Her personal problems overshadow her talent
as far as the press goes, but I am certain she can be trusted with modernizing
jazz music; it is up to the future to change that can to must. 2011 update: Well, the future is
upon us — heck, of all the people to trust with modernizing jazz music we had
to trust this incorrigible junkie. RIP Amy, we can only hope that at least
these two albums will be remembered fondly. Possible starting point: Back
To Black (2007).
○ And
You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead: Their desire to be bigger than everything
else sometimes pays off, and that's the best thing I can say about them. Overrated,
but a cultural phenomenon for sure. Possible starting point: Source
Tags & Codes (2000).
☺Andrew Bird: Violin music for intellectual snobs. More
precisely, music from a well-educated guy significantly endowed with creative
forces; erroneously pigeonholed as a «neo-swing» artist at first, Bird has
merged folk, jazz, chamber pop, psychedelia, and whatever else comes his way
into a literate melancholic-romantic brew all his own. The only downside is
that now he has a steady formula, and it can eventually get on one's nerves. Possible starting point: The Swimming
Hour (2001).
○ Angel Olsen: This lady may not be alone in her intense
desire to adapt traditional values of singer-songwriting to the modern age (her
inspirations are all over the place, from Roy Orbison to Joni Mitchell and from
Leonard Cohen to Stevie Nicks), but she has a stronger personality than most of
the competition, including a cool vocal range, the ability to go from crooning
and moaning to wailing and screaming if the situation demands it, and
impressive lyrical skills that do not allow to easily laugh off her ongoing
exploration of the woman spirit. That said, her melodic skills are tremendously
derivative, her atmospheric fixations monotonous, and her musicianship deeply
secondary to her Artistry — which might suffice, perhaps, for putting her in
the pantheon of the 2010s, but hardly elevates her over her many influences. Possible starting point: My Woman (2016), her third album, is
the one that will probably be less boring for the general listener than the
previous two.
○ Animal
Collective: Called
the biggest thing of the 00's by the smallest army of fans of the 00's, which,
sadly, means that, unless you're Klaatu's cousin twice removed, you probably
won't enjoy them. I don't, but I'm certainly intrigued by these Beach Boys from
a not so parallel world. Possible starting point: Merriweather Post
Pavilion (2009).
○ Antlers, The: Led by Brooklyn-based Peter Silberman (for
the first two records, actually, just a solo project for the man), this indie
outfit has big, idealistic ambitions which are at times hard to balance with
the somewhat modest talent — but the man does have a beautiful, if occasionally
arch-whiny, voice, and a knack for hammering out angelic atmosphere and (more
rarely) strong melodies. Possible
starting point: In The Attic Of The
Universe (2007); 2009's Hospice
is the band's critically acclaimed breakthrough, but, IMHO, is actually their
weakest offering, seducing people through its ambitiousness rather than real
quality.
○ Antony And The Johnsons:
With his early 19th century vocals, masochistic tendencies, androgynous
image, and swirling mystical arrangements, Antony Hegarty is perfect (un)easy
listening for one album, maybe two. It becomes harder to take his
spiritualistic theater seriously when you understand that he has nothing else
whatsoever up his sleeve, though. Possible starting point: I Am A
Bird Now (2005).
☺ Arcade Fire: Now this is really one of the biggest — both
literally and figuratively — bands of the 00's. Big
polyphonic sound, catchy tunes, sensitive and smart mindsets, they have not become
critical darlings for nothing. Spread
the word, brother. Possible starting point: Funeral (2004).
☻Architecture
In Helsinki: The
most intriguing thing about this Australian octet is their band name —
considering that their music has nothing whatsoever to do with Finland — and
also the baffling way in which they crash-dumped their initially promising
career into total disaster. The first two albums were a questionable, but at
least somewhat idiosyncratic and thought-provoking mixture of twee-pop,
electronica, and surrealism. Then, for some reason, they replaced the psychedelia
and atmospherics with a strong dance-pop component, without a good idea of how
to handle the latter; and, since the overall level of songwriting was never
impressive to begin with, their later creations range mostly from «bland and
forgettable» to «unintentionally awful». Possible
starting point: Fans of absurdist indie-pop might want to briefly check out
In Case We Die (2005), then think
carefully about whether they are interested in anything else.
○ Arctic Monkeys: Intelligent British lads with great taste in
influences — way too great to develop an interesting enough style of their
own. They have mastered their instruments, but they still have to learn to
write good melodies to go along with them. Possible starting point: Whatever
People Say I Am... (2006).
○ Art Brut: These «neo-punk»-rockers of the Noughties
don't write great melodies (haven't all great punk rock melodies already been
written?) but compensate for it by being one of the smartest acts around to
play it so utterly dumb, intelligently updating Ramonaesthetics for the next
millennium. Hardly essential, but loads of fun for the thinking punker. Possible
starting point: Bang Bang Rock & Roll (2005).
☺Austra: Essentially a solo electronic project of the
Canadian talent Katie Stelmanis, Austra has added a fresh and inspiring touch
to the old synth-pop formula that's almost surprising for the 2010s — at least
on her first album, Stelmanis made a serious effort to write lots of
interesting and relatively complex (but still catchy) melodies, as well as make
good use of her classically trained vocals to create a somewhat unique
atmosphere, combining Gothic and twee elements at the same time. Think of this
as the illegitimate little daughter of Depeche Mode, raised on Belle &
Sebastian, or something like that. Unfortunately, as it happens so often, voice
and image got stronger over time as melodies grew weaker, but so far, there's
still hope for a brighter future. Possible
starting point: Feel It Break
(2011) is, for now, the uncontested classic.
○ Avalanches, The: A «plunderphonics» outfit from Australia that
takes its plundering duties so seriously, they only managed to have one LP out
over more than ten years of existence. Since
I Left You (2001) has been hailed by many as a classic of the genre — and
there is probably no harm in checking it out: at best, you will be enthralled
by its loud, burly journey through the world of 1970s R&B samples and noise
screens, and at worst, you will own some certifiable fodder for the average
intellectual dance party.
☺Avett Brothers,
The: Originally a
«neo-bluegrass» band from North Carolina led by two real brothers, Seth and
Scott, these guys have since evolved into a more wide-reaching
roots-music-extravaganza. Limited vocalists and instrumentalists, they mainly
get by on the strength and inventiveness of their songwriting and an
unabashedly naïve sentimentality (for which, as it turns out, many people
are quite starving in the 2000s). If you can stand the lame banjo playing,
their rich catalog does have folksy treasures a-plenty. Possible starting point: A
Carolina Jubilee (2003), their first long player, and proceed from there —
the lads are fairly consistent.
○ Avril Lavigne: The proverbially manufactured «bad girl» of
the '00s, Canada's hottest gift to the world of MTV since Alanis Morissette.
Her big advantage over most competition is not that she co-writes her own songs
(these days, you never know anyway), but that the songs are, for the most part,
harmless, fun, and sometimes interestingly written bubblegum pop trash. As long
as she keeps those Serious Artistic Ambitions down, she is one of America's
relatively more palatable mainstream turds, if one ever feels the need to
flagellate one's elitist nature. Possible
starting point: The Best Damn Thing
(2007).
○ Badly Drawn
Boy: Damon Gough is
a visually unattractive, painfully intellectual, deeply introvert virgin
(okay, not really true — apparently, he's married with children) who comes from
different parts of England, wears a furry hat as his trademark and, for over a
decade, has been trying to become a new Nick Drake and Brian Wilson for his generation, with degrees of success
usually ranging from «deadly boring» to «wait a moment, there just might be
something there». General critical consensus, which I am somewhat in agreement
with, is that he started out at his highest peak and has been steadily going
downhill ever since, but hey, he's only 42 years old as of now. Maybe his
children will eventually teach him greatness. Oh wait, he's a virgin. Possible starting point: The Hour Of Bewilderbeast (2000).
☺ Band Of Horses: More indie-roots-rock from the heartland
(Arizona or something), with Ben "Big Beard" Bridwell handling most
of the songwriting, singing, and ideological duties. Fortunately, he doth have
a serious gift for lovely melody, and even if that does not automatically
qualify him as the 21st century Neil Young, it means that each of the band's
albums so far has been better than the previous one. So may we yet live to see
Keith Richards induce Bridwell into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Possible
starting point: Infinite Arms
(2010).
☺Baroness: Heavy metal dudes from Savannah, Georgia.
Actually, «heavy metal dudes» is a bit impolite, as they set their minds on
musical evolution from the very beginning — starting out in quirky math-rock
mode, then opting for a more accessible, brawny, anthemic «battle sound», then
adding a surprisingly efficient introspective / melancholic side to the
experience. No «genius» as such, perhaps, but the band is really among the most
interesting and intelligent «heavyweights» out there, at the moment. Possible starting point: Probably Red Album (2007) — their first full LP,
arguably the brawniest and ballsiest one; start out there for fun reasons and
work your way up as the band attempts to woo you over with more and more
seriousness.
○ Bat For Lashes: A pseudonym for Natasha Khan (as if anyone
with such a name really needed one), a one-woman band who, at her best,
combines trash mysticism with interesting musical ideas culled from various
alleys of art-rock and post-rock, and, at her worst — way more often than
necessary — combines trash mysticism with nothing else. Possible starting point: Fur
And Gold (2006), but I would recommend avoiding the (so far, only)
follow-up.
○ BATS: «Math-rock» combined with a punk attitude —
like a Discipline-era King Crimson
out of the slums; all too befitting for a bunch of wild Dubliners who decided
to vent their frustration in polygonal shapes rather than chaotic waves of
feedback. Just two albums so far, but highly promising ones, even if their
odd combination of street attitudes with refined intellectualism is not likely
to win the band too many fans. Possible
starting point: Red In Tooth &
Claw (2009).
○ Battles: Another
«math-rock» outfit from the depths of New York City, this one managed to become
more noticeable than other such units for its strange mix of avantgardist
art-rock with electronica, going as far as to produce the rock-instrumentation
equivalent of what used to be synthesized with computers. Slight, but fun and
thought-provoking. Possible starting
point: Mirrored (2007).
○ Beach House: Dream-pop male/female duo from Baltimore who devote
most of their time to writing the soundtrack to an imaginary Carlos Castaneda
rewrite of Alice In Wonderland. But this is not as bad as
it may sound: their friendly guitar-and-organ sound represents one of those
cases where the soundtrack can make the content completely irrelevant. Possible starting point: Devotion (2008).
○ Beachwood
Sparks: A Californian
band that offer a pleasant, but not altogether substantial, mix of soft
country-rock and psychedelia — 21st century «space cowboy-ism» as it is, taking
its major cues from late period Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers, but pushing
ever and ever further into «dreamland» and even ambient territory.
Unfortunately, the band members are neither awesome instrumentalists nor
talented songwriters, and usually try to compensate with predictable atmosphere-generating
technologies (droning, echo, multi-tracked harmonies, etc.). Possible starting point: Beachwood Sparks (2000) is the band at
its least lethargic — with each subsequent release, they only dive deeper and
deeper into somnambulant territory, so proceed with caution, and remember about
Dorothy and the poppy field.
☺Bees, The: Two light-hearted guys and a bunch of sidemen
from the Isle of Wight. Although their first album came out in 2002, their
knowledge of music and willingness to be influenced by it seems to have stopped
around 1975; they have mastered the basic techniques of sunshine pop, garage
proto-punk, modest art-rock, various «black» genres of the early 1970s (from
funk to Caribbean), and nothing else. Fortunately, they also have a good ear
for melody: an absolute must-hear for all lovers of intelligent retro-pop. Possible starting point: Sunshine Hit Me (2002).
○ Beirut: Essentially
a one-man band dominated by Zachary Condon, a one-of-a-kind project that could
be subtitled «Reflections of a young New Mexican on the wide outside world of
Europe». The young New Mexican loves ukuleles, heavy brass, and accordeons,
does not know or care about how to write memorable songs, and flaunts around
his innocent charisma; depending on your immunity level, you will probably love
or hate this. Possible starting point:
Gulag Orkestar (2006).
☺Beta Band,
The: Critically
acclaimed Scottish genre-hoppers who managed to accompany the turn of the
millennium by marrying Sixties' folk-rock and psychedelia to all the trappings
of the modern age (electronica, hip-hop, trip-hop, etc.) before deciding that,
in the end, they only wanted to be a bunch of melancholic space-rockers.
Decoding their creations is an elegant intellectual pleasure, but falling in
love with them is a much more difficult proposition. Possible starting
point: The Three EPs (1998).
☻Beyoncé: Even more so after starting her own solo
career, free from the format limitations of Destiny's Child, Beyoncé
Knowles-Carter seems to have become one of the musical fashion symbols of the
2000s. Strong, healthy, beautiful, on the cutting edge of production /
technology, she is no less than this decade's symbol of glossy perfection. Like
every such symbol, she is not at all devoid of talent — good voice,
self-assured personality, and even a limited amount of composing skills all
present. Nevertheless, on the large scale it all comes back to the same
perversion of the «give the people what they want» principle, surreptitiously
transmutated into «give the people what we will make them want». Clichéd
lyrics, plastic, soulless musical arrangements, prevalence of image over
substance, in short, all the usual things that have, for a long time now,
separated «new school R&B» from «old school R&B». This is not to say
that there isn't at least a small bunch of impressive grooves to be found on
Beyoncé records, but overall, her «sexy black lady» persona comes across
every bit as artificial as, say, Britney's «slutty white tramp» image. Possible starting point: B'Day (2007) arguably shows the dame at
her most «experimental» — if you find nothing to like about that one, you
shouldn't probably even bother with the rest.
○ Black Dice: This electronic outfit from Brooklyn started
out on a tremendously promising note — their first two albums are not so much
proper «electronic music» as they are a sort of «electronic jungle», painting
bizarre and intriguing landscapes that, unlike most of the electronics I have
heard, transport you to forests, mountains, and beaches rather than the usually
expected «outer space» environment. Unfortunately, just two albums into their
exploration, they switched to a much less interesting direction — more
danceable, more noisy, more abrasive, but also more generic and offering much
less food for the imagination. Possible
starting point: Creature Comforts
(2004) is my unquestionable favorite, although critical opinion tends to praise
the previous album, Beaches And Canyons,
even more highly.
☺Black Keys,
The: A guitar-drums
duo (no bass!) from Akron, Ohio,
these guys have done some impressively serious work convincing their native
country, if not the world, that they might just be the single best «rock and
roll» act of the new millennium. Initially drawing upon such influences as «dark»
boogie-blues, garage-punk, and proto-metal, they have since expanded into all
sorts of new directions. Songwriting may be hit-and-miss, but their sense of
style is nearly always impeccable. Not to be missed! Possible starting point: The
Big Come Up (2002) — or, if minimalism pisses you off, there is no going
wrong with the band's latest, El Camino
(2011).
○ Black Lips: A «flower punk» band from Georgia, originally
famous not so much for their music as for their provocative public behaviour,
partially built on idolizing the likes of crazy man G. G. Allin; all the while,
though, they were slowly forging their craft, eventually emerging as smart and
professional synthesizers of the modern spirit with 1960's garage-rock and adjacent
genres. They have lots of drawbacks: they can't sing, can't play, can't write
memorable songs, and have lots of fond feelings for this awful thing called
«lo-fi», but at least points 1 and 2 are neglectable for a punk band, and they
compensate point 3 with intelligence, diversity, and an overall fun atmosphere
that, on a good day, may be quite contagious. Possible starting point: Good
Bad Not Evil (2007) — some of their most successful songs here, and mostly
free from the evils of lo-fi for a change. Disturbed fans of lo-fi punk will prefer the earlier stuff from the hooligan
days.
○ Black Mountain: Neo-hippies from Canada — bearded, smelly,
5-to-1 male-to-female ratio, the works — that make fun music (apocalyptic /
sci-fi psychedelia) which alternately evokes 1967, 1970, and 1973. No great
shakes, but they write nice songs, they mean well, and they can serve as a
strong ladder that leads both into the future and the past. Provided
they have a future, of course; the band is quite a fresh one. Possible
starting point: In The Future (2008).
○ Blitzen
Trapper: A
retro-oriented band from Portland, Oregon, led by young intellectual visionary
Eric Earley, whose vision is, at worst, always sufficient to turn Blitzen
Trapper albums into pleasant listening and, at best, could almost hint at an
entirely new, exciting way to integrate the good old «Americana» into the 21st
century. Unfortunately, the band's several latest albums have been too heavy on
modesty, humility, and style, and rather too light on genuinely interesting melodies.
But they're not done yet! Possible
starting point: Blitzen Trapper
(2003), still unsurpassed, I think, even by such later-period critical
breakthroughs as Wild Mountain Nation
(2007).
○ Bloc Party: Overhyped UK indie sensation. First album
showed terrific musicianship and energy; second album mostly just showed
energy; third album showed crap electronic dance shit. The steady downward
curve probably has to do with band leader Kele Okereke's hyperinflation; I am
secretly hoping that one of these days he'll just fly off in space and the rest
of the band will simply return to playing their instruments. Possible
starting point: Silent Alarm (2005).
○ Blood
Brothers, The: This
bunch of musical extremists from Seattle managed to build themselves up quite
a solid reputation during their decade together, and it is not difficult to see
why: not many «post-hardcore» acts can combine their level of technicality,
complexity, intricate verbosity, and barbarous intensity. Unfortunately, their
vocals (ranging from all-out screamo on the early records to nastily insane
screechy whine on the late ones) can be a major put-off, and their intentional
condescension towards hooks (typical of most «post-hardcore» acts, I'd say)
makes the individual compositions way too often indistinguishable from one
another. I can tacitly acknowledge the artistry, but find no pleasure or
enlightenment in the music. Possible
starting point: Burn, Piano Island,
Burn! (2003) is usually listed as their masterpiece; later records contain
more elements of subtlety, but I actually think that, if these guys are ever at their best, they are more likely
to be so on the early, all-out-frontal-assault albums.
○ Blood Ceremony: A highly retro-oriented Canadian band, led by
songwriter/guitarist Sean Kennedy and flute-wielding frontwoman Alia O'Brien,
these guys never make the slightest attempt to mask their influences — they
play as if they were a modern day Black Sabbath with Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson
on flute and the Doors' Ray Manzarek on the organ. Except they also pretend to
be taking Sabbath's occult and satanic motives seriously: with endless references to witches, wizards, dark magic,
and pagan practices, they clearly enjoy getting into character so much that the
Church should have already been at their heels, if it weren't so busy these
days fighting abortions, gay marriages, and evolution theory. The songs are not
very good (they are way too busy mimicking their predecessors to develop as
songwriters), and the playing is rather primitive even by the standards of 1970
(think Uriah Heep level or something like that), but every now and then they
still fall upon a good riff, and somehow their costume dramaticism ends up on
the fun side of things rather than on the pretentiously irritating one. Nothing
special, but worth checking out if you're one of those «where has all the good
music faded away to since 1975?» types, and particularly if you prefer Black
Sabbath's 13 over any other album
released in the 21st century by anyone under 50.
☻Bon Iver: Unfortunately, Justin Vernon of Wisconsin is
prepared to enter the musical annals — if I were responsible for those annals,
though, it would only have been under the subtitle of «the guy who drove the
last spike in the credibility of indie-folk». Hailed by the «independent
musical press» as one of the greatest things to happen to music in the late
2000s, «Bon Iver» actually gets by almost exclusively on the power of the
heart-on-the-sleeve attitude, which he understands as lots of minimalistic
acoustic guitar, lots of falsetto, and (on his latest record) lots of
atmospheric chimes, electronic noises, and lazy slide guitar sliding. For the
most part, this is awfully derivative, awfully clumsy, awfully pretentious,
and awfully boring. If ever the indie scene needed its own equivalent of Justin
Bieber, this is it. (And they're both Justins, too!).
☻Books, The: A creative duo from the depths of New York
City: this already sounds dangerous, and it is – although one of the members is
a talented guitarist, and the other one a professional cellist, their main
passion is collecting samples and setting them to bits and scraps of folksy melodies.
Supposedly this type of art form is to be deciphered as «a symbolic depiction
of life in all of its numerous apparitions», but whether the actual «music»
stirs up amazement, emotional turmoil, or intellectual awakening is up to you
to decide. Personally, I admit that this stuff can be occasionally funny and
occasionally smart, but 90% of the time it is just irritating, pointless, and
needlessly provocative (seriously stimulating the «Contemporary Art Must Die»
movement). Fortunately, as of 2012, the project
seems to be finally dead. Possible
starting point: The Way Out
(2010) is the most «musical» of their albums; if, perchance, you happen to be
overwhelmed, feel free to subject your brain to the early stuff as well.
○ Botch: A short-lived «metalcore» band from Tacoma,
Washington, these guys left behind a very brief, but allegedly influential
legacy of just two albums, and are now acknowledged as early pioneers of «math
rock» — with their angular, bizarrely twisted guitar melodies in sharp contrast
with the usual styles of thrash, pop, or fantasy metal, not to mention the
grunge scene, dominant in the Northwest at the time and reputedly alergic and
hostile to Botch, which explains (partially) why the band was so short-lived.
To enjoy, or even respect them, you unfortunately have to get past the annoying
formulaic scream-shit-vocals of their lead shit-vocalist, but if you do manage
the effort, some of the songs are really quite smart, and go a long way in
dragging the metal genre out of its generic conventions (not that you'd notice
that if you mainly concentrated on the vocals, though). Possible starting point: Of the two albums, We Are The Romans (1999) is unquestionably the most ambitious and
the least predictable. But if you have the faintest interest in this kind of
music in the first place, you'll probably end up checking out both anyway.
○ Brand New: This
band is sometimes called one of the few «emo» bands that are really worth
listening to... but I don't know about that, really. Their creative
curve shows some progress, as they went from your typical teenage-issue
breakup-focused shit-rock combo to worrying about deeper, subtler, grander
issues (human suffering, end of the world, whatever), but outside of a few
occasional flashes of atmospheric brilliance, their hooks still tend to be
flat, and their singing still relies way too heavily on formulaic screeching to
be truly resonant. If this is truly the best that «emo» has to offer, I am
scared to even begin thinking about the worst. Possible starting point: If The
Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me (2006) does not already seduce you with
its title, let me just remark that this is
the album that has the largest amount of well-written songs on it, hands down.
Which is still not that much, but... you wanted the best, hell, you got it.
☻Bright Eyes: Look no further than this «band» (actually, a
shapeless, constantly shifting conglomeration of Nebraskan musicians under the
leadership of adolescent guru Conor Oberst) to understand why so many people
file «indie» in the cuss word register. With but a microscopic spoonful of
songwriting talent, skyscraper-high pretense coupled with a complete lack of
any sense of humor and self-irony, and a singing style specially developed to
make milk curdle, Conor Oberst somehow managed to earn lots of respect from
the critical community, based, it seems, mainly on the criterion of «sincerity»
— and semi-decent poetic skills. On the personal scale, he may be an admirable
fellow, but the music of Bright Eyes is mainly based on rehashing primitive
folk, country, and, sometimes, «alt-rock» patterns; sometimes it boasts highly
elaborate, atmospheric arrangements, making it the equivalent of a rotting
corpse, immaculately dressed up to the latest fashion. Possible starting point: there isn't one, really, but if you are
genuinely curious, at least stay away from Conor's earliest,
bedroom-quality-recorded albums — hi-fi Bright Eyes is bad enough, but lo-fi
Bright Eyes generates hatred vibes at a thousand per second.
○ British
Sea Power: Guess
where these guys come from. Yes, you
got it almost right: Brighton rather
than Dover, but the margin of error is minimal on the overall scale of the
Universe, which also happens to be the scale against which these guys measure
most of their music. Huge, overwhelming, sprawling waves of sound that are,
indeed, «oceanic» in atmosphere, but their ambition goes way over the limited
— and, historically speaking, mostly obsolete — pretense of the actual British
sea power. Accordingly, the band positions itself at the «sincere / romantic /
heart-wrenching» flank of the indie army rather than its «cynical / po-mo»
flank, and often comes across as the British equivalent of Arcade Fire. Their
biggest problem — not an unusual development for the indie crowds — is writing
memorable melodies: the average B.S.P. hook is kinda blunt and dumb, but it is
so well concealed by all the guitars / keyboards / strings / drums / background
vocals that you might be forever overwhelmed and seduced way before your conscience
strips away all the shrink wraps. Then again, maybe not. Possible starting point: Open
Season (2005) — the one that seems to have the densest accumulation of
guitar hooks.
☻Britney Spears:
Want it or not, here is an icon of the turn of the millennium, and, unlike certain
other artificially crafted mainstream icons (most «boy bands» included, for
instance), her career is actually worth an explorative peek — from a certain
point of view, Britney has had a fascinating journey of ups-and-downs,
perfectly illustrating everything that's wrong (and a few tiny things that are
right) with today's corporate industry. Awful, yes, but not «boring» in the
sense of album after album of monotonous primitive pap that all sounds the same
— Britney's primitive pap, masterminded by some of the most deliciously hideous
pervs in the business, flew from Lolita bubblegum teen-pop to modern R&B
to sex goddess trance to robotic electropop to «Lady Gaga for those with a
limited sense of humor». At the very least, she provokes thought, and that is
more than I could say about Taylor Swift (now there is your quintessential boredom). Possible starting point: Just look at all the album covers and
you'll know where to start.
☺Broadcast: Just another electronic indie outfit from
Birmingham? Well, not quite, because the charming duo of James Cargill and
Trish Keenan (constituting the core of the band) is actually responsible for
some of the loveliest, if a bit too icy, art-pop melodies to come from the UK
in a decade that was, technically, stuffed with high quality art-pop melodies —
but it took the instrumental and production skills of Cargill and the vocal
talent of Keenan to spice them up with actual magic. The band's
«electrono-psychedelic barrel organ» approach was not very diverse and quite
derivative (after all, they inherited a whoppin' huge tradition all the way
from Cocteau Twins and up to Stereolab), but they managed adding their own individual
touch, which makes it all the more sad that, with Trish Keenan's tragic demise
in 2011, Broadcast are gone from our sight way too early. Possible starting point: They only had time for three proper LPs,
so just start with The Noise Made By
People (2000) and go all the way to Tender
Buttons (2005), which I consider to be their best.
○ Broken
Social Scene: A
huge pack of idealistic Canadians with genuine artistic credentials, tolerable,
if not amazing musicianship, and a taste for huge, sprawling musical landscapes.
Sounds like yet another huge pack of
idealistic Canadians we know, but the problem is that the songwriters in Arcade
Fire have elements of genius and bleeding hearts to match, whereas Brendan
Canning and Kevin Drew, the leaders of BSS, may simply be too smart for their
own good. If your vibes are on the same wavelength as mine, a tasteful, but
ultimately forgettable listen is guaranteed. Possible starting point: You
Forgot It In People (2002) is usually quoted as the band's high point, and
who am I to argue when it comes to this «humbly megalomaniac» indie crap?
○ Burial: This UK-based loner (known to the authorities
under the less colorful name of William Bevan) specializes in electronic
synthesis that is often formally classified as a form of dubstep, but in reality
is the musical equivalent of the world slowly rebuilding itself after the
nuclear apocalypse. At least, this is the kind of visual interpretation that
helps me get interested in whatever
the gentleman has to offer; yours may be different, but the undeniable fact is
that Burial's odd aproach to combining dubstep rhythmics, ambient
instrumentation, and ironically deconstructed R&B samples is evocative, regardless of what it is
that it actually evokes. Possible
starting point: Burial (2006) is
where it all begins in earnest, although the follow-up, Untrue (2007), got more critical and commercial success — but I do
think that the best way to tackle this guy is in strict chronological order.
Part 1. Before The Rock'n'Roll
Band Era (1920-1960)
THE BIG BLUES (1962)
1) Let's Have A Natural Ball;
2) What Can I Do To Change Your Mind?; 3) I Get Evil; 4) Had You Told It Like
It Was (It Wouldn't Be Like It Is); 5) This Morning; 6) I Walked All Night
Long; 7) Don't Throw Your Love On Me Too Strong; 8) Travelin' To California; 9)
I've Made Nights By Myself; 10) This Funny Feeling; 11) Ooh-Ee Baby; 12) Dyna
Flow.
Albert King had actually been cutting records
since 1953, but they were few and far between; he did not properly emerge on
the blues scene until the early Sixties, and thus, missed the chance to be
inscribed into the «premier league» of Chicago's electric blues pioneers that
unleashed Mick Jagger into this world. However, that was not a big problem:
apparently, unlike other players who had it fast, cool, and then burnt out
early, the man needed a long gestation period for himself.
King's first LP is one of those — quite
numerous — records that, today, will not make a big impression on anyone but
the finest blues connoisseur (or, vice versa, some poor fellow who has never
heard a blues record before). Twelve sides, rather evenly divided into slow blues
and fast blues, with a minor touch of rumba here and there to spice up the
proceedings, all wedged deeply into the existing formulae of the day. The «fatness»
of the sound, achieved by throwing in brass sections, sax solos, and female
back-up vocalists, certainly contrasts with, for instance, the more restricted
approach of Muddy Waters, but still, by 1962 this kind of «blues-soul» sound
was the word of the day, with everyone from Otis Rush to Ray Charles to Freddie
and, of course, B. B. King contributing to it with as much as they had to say.
Considering that, as a singer or blueswailer, Albert
King is just about as competent as they are (and I would timidly suggest that he
has got a lot less vocal versatility than his king-brother Freddie), just about
the only thing of interest on the album is his guitar playing. But even here
you will have to judge it by the standards of 1962 rather than those of today,
when these licks are, like, all printed out on the first page of every
beginner's blues course. Back then, however, King's playing was sharp, clean,
and precise, much more polished than the classic Fifties sound of guys like
Elmore James or Otis Rush. To some people, this sort of blues-de-luxe, with
clean, unerring licks and bends backed up with slick production and horns,
might have been anticlimactic — exactly the same way that some people today
continue to find B. «B. for Burger» King anticlimactic. But then, it's all
just different angles of show-biz, right?
The commonly mentioned highlight is the
successful single 'Don't Throw Your Love On Me Too Strong': three minutes of
utterly generic slow blues played by an utterly awesome master of the trade. The
opening licks slice the speakers nice and sharp, but, other than that, the only
thing that makes it more notable than the other three-minute pieces on here is
that it happened to be released as a single — and the others did not. (Tough
luck.)
Eye-catching tunes include the nifty fast
opener 'Let's Have A Natural Ball', a brass-driven piece of jump blues where
Albert makes a respctable attempt at turning into Big Joe Turner circa 1940,
but still ends up wooing you with his guitar playing rather than singing
ability; the morose retro lounge-spirit-infested 'Had You Told It Like It Was',
somewhat flattened by the supporting girl singers who don't seem to have a real
clue as to who that big guy with the guitar really is; and 'I Get Evil', lyrics-wise,
the same song as Chuck Berry's 'Don't Lie To Me', but music-wise, anticipating
the notorious shuffle of 'Cross-Cut Saw' five years later.
Anticlimactic moments are few (the happy pop
song 'This Funny Feeling', all vocal harmonies and no guitar at all, should
rather have been done by the likes of The Shirelles, I would think), but if you
jumped at this with high expectations, the whole experience can be
anticlimactic, and if you did not, you might as well tolerate Albert King
imitating a Motown girl group — trust me, you won't ever get a second chance.
From the intellect's point of view, one could
appeal to historic importance and respect for pure professionalism, but the
gut feeling is a bit too suppressed with the monotonousness of it all, trumping
any intellectual cards that might show up, and turns this into a thumbs down — professional respect alone is
sometimes not enough.
BORN UNDER A BAD SIGN (1967)
1) Born Under A Bad Sign; 2)
Crosscut Saw; 3) Kansas City; 4) Oh, Pretty Woman; 5) Down Don't Bother Me; 6)
The Hunter; 7) I Almost Lost My Mind; 8) Personal Manager; 9) Laundromat Blues;
10) As The Years Go
Passing By; 11) The Very Thought Of You.
The only serious difference between this classic
album and King's previous recordings is that Born Under A Bad Sign —
technically, just a singles' collection from his early years on Stax — has
Booker T. and the MGs on all or most of the tracks. But what a difference. For
instance, Donald «Duck» Dunn is one of those few session players who have,
early on, realized that if a bass guitar can sound menacing and
dangerous, then it should sound menacing and dangerous. There's also The
Memphis Horns, one of the tightest ever brass sections, to add extra sharpness
to the proceedings. And King himself must have understood that he had to rise
to the challenge, if he was not to get lost against such a monstruously
professional background.
So the title track is, arguably, one of the
most famous blues tunes ever recorded — a brilliant combination of a simple,
but devastatingly memorable riff that just exemplifies the word «threatening»,
and a lyrical twist that deserves to be carved in stone on the tombs of miriads
of losers around the world: "If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no
luck at all". A year later, Cream did the song justice, but they never
beat it — not least because they just could not identify so well with the
feeling as the performer. At least they had the good taste of omitting the
verse about how "I can't read, I don't know how to write, my whole life
has been one big fight".
These fat, blistering, arrogant tunes that, for
a short time at least, breathed new life into generic blues, recapturing the
old fire and brimstone of Muddy and Wolf but setting it within an entirely
modern (for 1967) context, just keep coming: 'Crosscut Saw' (whose guitar licks
Clapton shamelessly, but skillfully, appropriated for 'Strange Brew'), 'Oh
Pretty Woman' (where the bass borders on early metal), 'The Hunter', 'Personal
Manager' — forget about the countless imitators who have not a single excuse
for putting their product on the market, this is the real thing.
In between, Albert sandwiches a few tender blues
ballads that are also inventive — the tender flute on 'I Almost Lost My Mind',
the brass-piano interplay on the longing, complaintive 'As The Years Go Passing
By', the light jazz tinge of 'The Very Thought Of You' (which, for personal
reasons, reminds me of all those lounge-style Keith Richards' album closers on
late period Stones' albums), it all makes up for a diverse experience. Nothing
better confirms King's profound inspiration at the time than the fact that each
of these songs has its own personal identity — quite unlike The Big Blues,
where half of the songs at least sounded like carbon copies of each other. (Of
course, a large percentage of the thanks goes to the Stax army.)
Arguably, Born Under A Bad Sign is the
last great — and I mean great, in terms of both defining its epoch and
influencing the epochs to come — blues album recorded by a pre-rock'n'roll era
artist, and at the same time beautiful proof that Fifties' artists, with a
little extra wit and a little outside help, had every chance of not only surviving
in the changing times, but even ruling them. It belongs in every music lover's
collection, and if you are that particular music lover who idolizes and
fetishizes hate for «generic blues», my advice is to simply forget that generic
blues exists and just treasure this one record.
To commemorate this event, heart and brain
shake hands (do brains have hands?) in this debate, and both hurry to the
podium at the same rate to provide a mighty thumbs
up. Even despite the rather useless inclusion of 'Kansas City', a
tune better left to Little Richard.
LIVE WIRE/BLUES POWER (1968)
1) Watermelon Man; 2) Blues Power; 3) Night
Stomp; 4) Blues At Sunrise; 5) Please Love Me; 6) Look Out.
"A permanent member of the Fillmore
family, a great guitarist — this is Mr. Albert King!" History buffs
should pay particular attention to the word 'permanent' on behalf of the
announcer: it shows that flower power kids, contrary to rumours, were not
bred with the specific purpose of being compatible with trippy jams of the
Jefferson Airplane and the like, but, on the contrary, were quite susceptible
to all kinds of music, including grandfather-oriented stuff like Albert King,
who could be electric for all he liked, but who, after all, just played
straightforward old blues.
On the other hand, maybe it is simply all due
to King's personal charisma which he lays down on the audience much thicker
than the actual licks he plays. If anything, Live Wire gives a great image
of him as a showman, never forgetting that interacting with the audience is the
most vital part of his show. All through the songs, particularly 'Blues Power',
he keeps talking to the people, telling them little bits of stories, asking
them questions, getting them on their feet, teasing them with bits of silence
followed by musical explosions, and despite the fact that his arsenal of guitar
tricks is limited and they start repeating themselves heavily after a while, he
makes the audience love this game so much that the applause is just as heavy on
the last numbers as on the first ones — even though, to tell the truth, there
isn't all that much, musically, to distinguish the last numbers from the first.
It is also obvious just how intent he is on
keeping his cool. Big man, big guitar, big sound, standing calm and collected,
playing it slow and meticulous, every now and then letting out a lightning bolt
of notes, but also every now and then just keeping it down, self-assured and
content about just knowing that he can do whatever he wants on that
instrument — he just won't, if he doesn't want to. He is no flamboyant
eccentric like Jimi Hendrix, way above playing with his teeth; but every once
in a while he just lets out this bit of insane laughter — "ha ha!" — translated
into layman speak as: «yes brother, pretty simple for me, could be pretty simple
for you, too, but no dice, brother, it's me on that stage, and you in that
audience». Then he lets rip, and everyone is plugged back in his seat, mouth
open, ears ringing.
Of course, «letting rip» is as relative as you
would expect. Predictably, while playing live, King goes for lengthier solos,
and he is neither as inventive nor as technically efficient as the white British
guy with the slow hand that spent a lot of time ripping him off. There are two
types of solos here: the fast one and the slow one, and that is all you need to
know. But it is not the solos themselves that are important: it's the Presence.
They should be taken together with the stage patter, with the ha-ha's, with the
aahs and oohs, and particularly with the long rant at the start of 'Blues
Power': "Everybody understands the blues...". Is that really true?
Perhaps the whole essence of the blues is also in the Presence. And, boring or
not in purely musical terms, this album conveys blues Presence better than any
other recording from 1968.
Not that the heart has managed to convince the
brain of it — the latter is not supposed to rationally understand things like «presence»
— but at least it has managed to let the brain stay out of the way for a bit, allowing
Live Wire to receive a solid thumbs up
for capturing a great showman at the top of his show powers.
YEARS GONE BY (1969)
1) Wrapped Up In Love Again;
2) You Don't Love Me; 3) Cockroach; 4) Killing Floor; 5) Lonely Man; 6) If The
Washing Don't Get You The Rinsing Will; 7) Drowning On Dry Land; 8) Drowning On
Dry Land (Instrumental); 9) Heart Fixing Business; 10) You Threw Your Love On
Me Too Strong; 11) The Sky Is Crying.
Obviously, you do not change a winning formula;
and, like almost every formulaic follow-up to an epochal album, Years Gone
By is less interesting and exciting than Born Under A Bad Sign, but
still a great romp for the freshly converted fan.
I do not hear any new techniques, tones, or
licks on Years, but that is to be expected. What is actually a bit more
sad is that Booker T. and the MGs, still faithfully backing King, have stepped
back into the shade, putting almost all the emphasis on King's guitar and
personality; and no matter how adorable his guitar and his personality are,
they are exactly the same as before. 'Cockroach' is the highlight because of
King's playful attitude — come on, isn't it old-fashioned fun to hear a big old
blues guy complain about cockroaches crawling down his arms and legs because
he'd been thrown out of his house by his baby? — but on the lyrically amusing
'Heart Fixing Business' and 'If The Washing Don't Get You' he doesn't really
do much except for just sing and play, and so these tunes are no better and no
worse than the ordinary everyday mid-tempo/slow blues from Albert.
No surprise that the best track is the one on
which he gets the most interplay between himself and the backing band,
particularly the horns — an instrumental rendition of the blues standard 'You
Don't Love Me' (which the average listener probably knows through the entirely
different Allman Bros. version), with the horns carrying the main theme. This
is unusual, smooth, and impressive; blues-de-luxe at its grandest. Apart from
that, it's all just decent blues. Thumbs up
out of general practice and politeness, but prepare to be gallantly bored if
you are not deep into the electric 12-bar enterprise. Still, even this
«generic» level is miles above the «generic» level of his upcoming career on
Tomato.
BLUES FOR ELVIS: KING DOES THE KING'S THINGS (1970)
1) Hound Dog; 2) That's All
Right; 3) All Shook Up; 4) Jailhouse Rock; 5) Heartbreak Hotel; 6) Don't Be
Cruel; 7) One Night; 8) Blue Suede Shoes; 9) Love Me Tender.
A fun idea — a tribute from one King to
another; and quite novel at the time, since having jaded bluesmen
systematically covering jaded rock'n'rollers was a pretty rare occasion. The
album may have been triggered by Elvis' recent comeback, but the songs are all
old — completely in line with all the cool people, Albert King did not think
that any of Elvis' post-Army stuff merited his serious attention. (And I,
personally, would not be happy at the prospect of hearing Albert's passionate
take on 'Are You Lonesome Tonight'!)
Unfortunately, it is not nearly as exciting as
one might suppose it could have been. King and the Stax people do their best to
rearrange the old standards in ways that would, at the same time, preserve the
basic melody and structure, but also be true to Albert's own style, and it
doesn't always work. Or, rather, it mostly works, but the resulting sound is
surprisingly ordinary. Same licks as on Bad Sign, but the horns and the
rhythm section lack the latter album's inspiration. Also, listening to Albert sing
Elvis is somewhat disconcerting; I'd rather the entire record were
instrumental, like his take on 'One Night', where he does «the King's thing»
with his guitar much better than with his voice.
The best numbers are those where he gets a
chance to stretch out and jam a bit, like the slow, ominous take on 'That's All
Right Mama' (you'd think he could have reverted to the style of Arthur
Crudup's original, but he does it in a much darker fashion), or the jazzified,
«loungified» six minute reworking of 'Heartbreak Hotel'. These are classic, if
not too outstanding, King material. The rest may take a hike in the thumbs down direction — but, out of mere
historical and stylistic curiosity, it is recommendable to listen to this at
least once.
LOVEJOY (1971)
1) Honky Tonk Women; 2) Bay
Area Blues; 3) Corrina, Corrina; 4) She Caught The Katy (And Left Me A Mule To
Ride); 5) For The Love Of A Woman; 6) Lovejoy, Ill.; 7) Everybody Wants To Go
To Heaven; 8) Going Back To Iuka; 9) Like A Road Leading Home.
Is it interesting to hear Albert King's take on
the Rolling Stones? I have my doubts. Earlier, the Rolling Stones took the
blues and turned it into sweaty rock'n'roll; now King is taking their sweaty
rock'n'roll back from them and turning it back into the blues. His fluid,
tasteful solo is definitely superior to Keith Richards' in terms of technical
skill, but Keith Richards' solo on 'Honky Tonk Women' is the heart and soul of
the Rolling Stones, and Albert King's solo on his cover version is — well, just
another Albert King solo.
On the other hand, at least this cover version
is curious enough to merit a special review paragraph: most of the other tunes
here are impossible to describe in any terms that are different from the ones
used previously. That does not mean that the playing is bad or boring — on the
contrary, Lovejoy is simply another excellent King record from his peak
years. Rocking and occasionally ironic: 'Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven' is
certainly remarkable not for using the exact same melody as 'Have You Ever
Loved A Woman', but for following the title up with the sly remark — '...but
nobody wants to die'.
The only big surprise comes at the end, with a «neo-gospel»
ballad ('Like A Road Leading Home') where Albert tries something that he had never
done before — singing and playing with a «tender soul» approach, more common on
country-rock records by idealistic young whitebread snappers than on old
burnt-out blues guys' contributions. However, atypical as this approach is for
Albert, he pulls the deal off splendidly, and non-jaded listeners may even shed
a tear or two over his plea of 'turn around, turn around, turn around and I'll
be there', or over the closing passionate guitar solo, or even over the female
backing vocals.
Other than that, just dig in. There are some
cool, light-headed, loose funky jams worth any music lover's time — heck,
almost anything with Booker T. & The MGs on it is worth any music lover's
time. Thumbs up, although this is
becoming a routine thing.
I'LL PLAY THE BLUES FOR YOU (1972)
1) I'll Play The Blues For You;
2) Little Brother; 3) Breaking Up Somebody's Home; 4) High Cost Of Loving; 5)
I'll Be Doggone; 6) Answer To The Laundromat Blues; 7) Don't Burn Down The
Bridge; 8) Angel Of Mercy.
A most important change of scenery. This time
around, instead of Booker T. & The MG's, Albert teams up with the Bar-Kays
for an overall sound that is more funk-flavoured R'n'B than traditional blues,
and it works — his old licks, stewed in this new setting, suddenly acquire a
new freshness. It turns out that they are fully compatible with syncopated
bass and wah-wah rhythms, and can easily carry on a lengthy funk jam the same
way they'd carried on all the lengthy blues jams.
Obviously, like all the older generation
bluesmen who had the luck to become or go on being commercial and critical
stars in the 1960s, King was reluctant to see his name drop off the charts or
get dirtied with the tag of «irrelevance», so some sort of modernization was in
order; and, fortunately for humanity, this was still early Seventies, when funk
was young and fresh and totally progressive in essence, and the Bar-Kays could
play it as well as anyone. One thing most funk people did not have,
though, was a great traditional guitarist to back them up — and this means that
there is every reason in the world to listen to I'll Play The Blues For You
even after you have heard all the George Clinton and James Brown and Sly Stone
classics from this era.
There could only be one way in which the
results would have turned out catastrophic: that is, if Albert started
reinventing himself as some sort of funk superstar to show off rather than just
play and sing. This is more or less how things are on the album's unluckiest
track, a syncopated groove reworking of Marvin Gaye's pop standard 'I'll Be
Doggone'. Recorded live, it incorporates some fairly forced audience
interaction where Albert admits to wanting to play a James Brown before the
fans ('can I go to the bridge?' and all that), and this is just not him
— he sounds nowhere near as self-assured as when asking his San Francisco
albums if they 'can dig it' on the live albums from 1968. Wanting to funk it up
is one thing, but playing with James Brown at James' own game is quite another.
However, this is just an exception. Everywhere
else King is being quite moderate, wisely leaving the «renovation» to his
backing band, himself satisfied with pouring the same old wine into new winebags.
The hit title track, a pompous piece of blues-soul in the vein of B. B. King,
is deeply emotional; 'Breaking Up Somebody's Home' rocks harder than anything
on his last two albums; and 'Don't Burn Down The Bridge' has as much
soul-wrenching blues power as it has knee-jerking funk power.
I would not go as far as to call these songs «masterpieces»,
but if ever there was a reason for Albert King to go on recording new music,
this bit of restyling is that reason — in fact, it is hard to think of any
other way in which he could have successfully freshened up his approach. In
terms of actual influence, I'll Play The Blues For You does not even
begin to compare with Born Under A Bad Sign, but in terms of
self-contained musical progress, it is King's most clever and inspired album
ever since, and it deserves all the thumbs up
it can get from both the mind and the heart.
I WANNA GET FUNKY (1974)
1) I Wanna Get Funky; 2)
Playing On Me; 3) Walking The Back Streets And Crying; 4) 'Til My Back Ain't
Got No Bone; 5) Flat Tire; 6) I Can't Hear Nothing But The Blues; 7) Travelin'
Man; 8) Crosscut Saw; 9) That's What The Blues Is All About.
Second time around, the Bar-Kays seem even more
confident about knowing how to present King in a modernized neon light. Due to
certain star configurations, it could no longer happen that King be
commercially successful, or that the critics continue paying him the proper
attention; but with time leveling out the inequalities, more and more people
should be returning to this period in Albert's career as containing some of his
most underrated records.
The official statement is right here at the
beginning: "I wanna get funky, I wanna get down", the man proclaims,
but, fortunately, not in a hyped-up, rhythm-heavy James Brown kind of way,
which does not fit in with King's stateliness one iota. It is a slow-moving, «lumbering»
even, grumbling and growling R'n'B number, bolsterous and braggy on the
surface but consciously sad and tired deep within. The catch is, he really
wants to get funky, but without ceasing to be bluesy — because it would be
unimaginable for Albert King to sacrifice the blues.
The Bar-Kays understand that wish and respect
it. 'Playing On Me' is certainly quite funky, and 'Flat Tire' even more so —
'Flat Tire', in fact, borders on disco, and has all the wah-wah stuff and all
the chicken scratch guitar playing you need, but King brazenly keeps on playing
his old licks, just adapting them a little bit for the new rhythmic structures.
Both are fun, danceable, and emotional numbers played with verve, as hot as
anything that the Seventies' funk scene was capable of yielding. Somewhat less
satisfactory is the funky reworking of 'Crosscut Saw' — perhaps King himself
realized that, since midway through the song he reverts the band back to the
original rhythmics and finishes the song in a much more traditional manner.
Interwoven between the dance material are more
classic-style slow blues numbers, not particularly exceptional but not
throwaways either; 'Walking The Back Streets And Crying' is aiming for a very
high level of desperation, highlighted by shrill-pitched brass blasts from the
Memphis Horns, and he also delivers one of the most piercing solos of his
career on 'I Can't Hear Nothing But The Blues', effectively putting a stop to
claims that he had not produced a single new guitar lick since 1967 (provided
such claims were ever voiced).
Fresh, invigorated, modernized, but not
desecrated — I Wanna Get Funky is a blueprint model for how all of the
old blues heroes should have steered their careers past their prime, and the
way I hear it, Albert is still in his prime. The brain is amazed at how
intelligent this is, the heart just keeps singing along to the grooves, and a thumbs up is guaranteed from both.
ALBERT (1976)
1) Guitar Man; 2) I'm Ready;
3) Ain't Nothing You Can Do; 4) I Don't Care What My Baby Do; 5) Change Of
Pace; 6) My Babe; 7) Running Out Of Steam; 8) Rub My Back; 9) (Ain't It) A Real
Good Sign.
Albert King himself is like a big bulging rock:
he may lose a bit from weathering every now and then, but you cannot really
tell unless you reconstruct the original size a million years back. The purity
of the waters around him, though, is quite heavily dependent on how many oil
tankers got sunk in them recently. And if the stench gets too unbearable, will
you still be able to admire the rock? You will probably be too busy searching
for your gas mask.
At the height of his funky Bar-Kays period,
King left Stax — the most unfortunate move of his career — and joined the small
label Utopia. Not that he had much choice: Stax had been suffering from major
financial problems for a few years, and by the end of 1975, was forced into
bankruptcy. But regardless of whether he did have a choice or not, the effect
was predictably tragic. All of a sudden, despite the voice, guitar licks, and
tunefulness still being there, nothing else is.
Purists will want to hate Albert with
all their strength, since it pushes King further down the commercial track,
with the addition of poppy female choruses and disco basslines; it may even
seem that the guitar itself is frequently pushed back, letting the typically
Seventies party atmosphere take centerstage. I do not think this should
necessarily be a problem; King hadn't been a rigid blues purist since at least
1966, and there was no reason why he should suddenly become one in 1976, and
besides, «black party music» in 1976 was not necessarily a bad thing: if you
can stand Chic, you can stand Albert King with a disco beat.
The problem is that the backing band — and
there is a whole army of backup musicians listed in the credits, none of whom
I've ever heard about previously — is fairly rote. These are generic session
hacks, doing their job faithfully but without any sort of inspiration. The
opening track, 'Guitar Man', had every chance to become an outstanding rousing
funky brawl, but the way they do it — it's just okay. The drummer just drums,
the bass player just lays down a stiff rhythm, the backup singers chant "guitar
man, guitar man, let's get it on, guitar man, guitar man" as if someone
wound them up for a five-minute period, and even King himself, distraught by
this stiffness, plays in a perfunctory manner, hiding deep down in the mix in
an ashamed manner.
The same is true of everything on the album —
there are no serious lapses of taste, but neither the slow blues numbers
('Ain't Nothing You Can Do', 'Rub My Back'), nor the more upbeat ones ('My
Babe') register as «having that extra special something». It is always better
understood in comparison — for instance, one is advised to play King's version
of 'I'm Ready' along with Muddy Waters' original. The latter made you want to
run and hide; the former makes you wonder just how bored one should have really
been to record this tripe.
It is all moderately pleasant, but there were
millions of records like this, no better or worse, made in 1976, and it is a
pity to see giants compete with mediocrity. Thumbs
down; I cannot even recommend one deserving song off the album. Maybe
'I Don't Care What My Baby Do' — it has a curious flute part. More interesting
than most guitar parts on here.
TRUCKLOAD OF LOVIN' (1976)
1) Cold Women With Warm Hearts;
2) Gonna Make It Somehow; 3) Sensation, Communication Together; 4) I'm Your
Mate; 5) Truck Load Of Lovin'; 6) Hold Hands With One Another; 7) Cadillac Assembly Line;
8) Nobody Wants A Loser.
The expected sequel to Albert, every bit
as forgettable for the exact same reasons. Its only difference is that King is
trying even harder to reinvent himself as a cheesy party-poppin' funkster, but
his «funk» is becoming blander with each passing minute. The guitar, on these
numbers, sounds like a limp accessory to simplistic dance rhythms and
loud-as-hell female backup vocalists, all of them probably sporting huge Afros,
colorful dresses, and cocaine-heavy handbags — the usual Seventies drill. At
least, this is the picture that immediately springs to mind once you hear them
go "why don't you hold hands with one another, love all your sisters and
brothers" ('Hold Hands With One Another', a slightly better-than-awful
disco number that might have been appropriate for KC & The Sunshine Band,
but as for King, I would rather hear him doing Chopin).
As usual, «reinvention» continues to go hand in
hand with the traditional style; purists will be more thoroughly pleased with
the seven-minute jam on 'Sensation, Communication Together', but I think the
only track on the album that even vaguely reminds of the old glories is
'Cadillac Assembly Line', whose dark strings arrangement in the background
adds at least a pinch of depth to the proceedings. Everything else is starkly
lite, and gets as sure a thumbs down as
I have ever witnessed. Must-avoid, unless nothing gives you a bigger boner than
sterile 1970s R'n'B (and even then, I'm sure there's literally thousands of
albums to take precedence).
KING ALBERT (1977)
1) Love Shock; 2) You Upset Me
Baby; 3) Chump Chance; 4) Let Me Rock You Easy; 5) Boot Lace; 6) Love Mechanic;
7) Call My Job; 8) Good Time Charlie.
May actually be a slight improvement over the
last two efforts. At least this time around there are no outward
embarrassments: the pure blues quotient is raised in comparison to the funk/disco
component, and even for the funk/disco component, they make a half-hearted,
ultimately unsuccessful, but nevertheless honest attempt to bring it closer to
the steamy-smoky sound of King's mid-Seventies Stax releases — with a little
less gloss and a little less coke-soaked happiness.
Even so, it is hard to find a single song worth
including on any representative retrospective compilation. Maybe 'Good Time
Charlie', a soul-blues number that finishes the album on a slightly more
elevated note than everything else. It only has a brief guitar solo, with the
rest of the song dedicated to Albert's impersonating a little emotional drama,
and although by his highest standards this is absolutely forgettable, it
sounds tremendously humane next to all these mechanical creations like 'Chump
Chance' or 'Love Mechanic'.
The really sad thing is that there is no
feeling of the guitar as the album-driving instrument — and what, may I ask, is
the point of listening to a non-guitar-centered Albert King record? Obviously,
he soloes on every track, but either the solos are short, or they are drowned
out in the mix; and even when they are not, they are so pro forma that
you just can tell exactly how much King actually cared for this material. Not
one bit. Thumbs down.
LIVE BLUES (1977)
1) Watermelon Man; 2) Don't
Burn Down The Bridge; 3) Blues At Sunrise; 4) That's What The Blues Is All
About; 5) Stormy Monday; 6) Kansas City; 7) I'm Gonna Call You As Soon As The
Sun Goes Down; 8) Matchbox Holds My Clothes; 9) Jam In A Flat; 10) As The Years
Go Passing By; 11) Overall Junction; 12) I'll Play The Blues For You.
Also available as simply Live, and — I
believe — as Blues From The Road, with the latter spread over 2 CDs and
featuring the entire performance, whereas current, and most widespread,
editions of Live Blues truncate some of the lengthier numbers ('Jam In A
Flat').
According to most sources, the tracks here were
recorded at Montreux in 1975, but the exact date does not matter as long as it
is clearly understood that the album reflects the "Tomato King", without
any backing from Stax. Also, on some of the songs you might be surprised by a
very non-King style of playing, particularly 'As The Years Go Passing By'; this
is because Albert is backed by Irish guitar hero Rory Gallagher, and sometimes
even condescends to duelling with him — which makes for just about the most
exciting moments on this otherwise standard fare disc.
By 1975, King didn't have anything left to
prove, and it was one thing to play before an unexperienced, but demanding
audience of Frisco hippies whom you had to convert to your own faith, and quite
another to present yourself to a jaded Montreux audience of professional jazz
and blues junkies who knew exactly what they were going to get and who weren't
at all ready to take no bull from the man. So he played it straight,
predictable, and devoid of surprises. The backing band is slack and lazy.
Gallagher does not overplay. The selections are the same old chestnuts. The
licks are known by heart. Good album. Nice album. Let's move on.
THE PINCH (1977)
1) The Blues Don't Change; 2)
I'm Doing Fine; 3) Nice To Be Nice (Ain't That Nice); 4) Oh, Pretty Woman; 5)
King Of Kings; 6) Feel The Need; 7) Firing Line (I Don't Play With Your Woman,
You Don't Play With Mine); 8) The Pinch Paid Off, Pt. 1; 9) The Pinch Paid Off,
Pt. 2; 10) I Can't Stand The Rain; 11) Ain't It Beautiful.
Taking the «1977» date at face value, one might
be astonished at a sudden leap in quality — all of a sudden, King can be interesting
once again without going onstage. But we are still in Kansas, and miracles do
not happen as frequently here as we would like them to: The Pinch is, in
reality, a collection of outtakes from 1973-74 sessions, released by Fantasy
Records (who had by then acquired control over the entire Stax backlog) to
compete commercially with King's Tomato output — frankly speaking, though,
there is no competition whatsoever, as this record is well worth all of King's «tomatoes»
put together.
The first track opens the session on such a
chivalrous note, in fact, that the album was later reissued under the name The
Blues Don't Change (or perhaps the company just decided to withdraw the
original suggestive album cover, depicting that part of the female form with which
the word 'pinch' is quite commonly associated). Hymns to blues power are King's
forte, since few artists of his stature are more tightly connected to the
12-bar form than Albert, and, thus, few are entitled to getting pompous and
religious on the subject better than the man. You just know you have to
trust him when he tells you 'I know the blues don't change', never mind the
fact that this song was rolling in the stores on a parallel chronological
basis with doodoo like 'Love Mechanic'.
On everything else, you know the Stax people
will be there with their chuggy rhythms, and the Memphis Horns will be all
funky and sweaty and cooking. Perhaps the remake of 'Oh, Pretty Woman' was not
necessary (they decide to plcuk most of the anger out of the song), but the hot
funk jam 'King Of Kings' (J. C. just got to be shaking his booty to that
one), the long, complex R'n'B saga of 'The Pinch Paid Off', the quiet
spookiness of 'I'm Doing Fine' — masterpieces or not, these are fine,
well-played, driving tunes with all members of the team obviously interested in
delivering quality entertainment rather than making some quick bucks on King's
coattails.
A massive thumbs up,
then, and I will put in a few superfluous exclamation marks as well —
!!!!!!!!!!! there !!!!!!!! — so that the reader does not miss them and takes
the trouble to single this record out of Albert's pool of late 1970's «tomato
mediocrity» and have it round out the trilogy of his precious funk period
offerings, together with I'll Play The Blues For You and I Wanna Get
Funky.
NEW ORLEANS HEAT (1978)
1) Get Out Of My Life Woman;
2) Born Under A Bad Sign; 3) The Feeling; 4) We All Wanna Boogie; 5) The Very
Thought Of You; 6) I Got The Blues; 7) I Get Evil; 8) Angel Of Mercy; 9) Flat
Tire.
At the same time that The Pinch floated
adrift in space, attracting only the most dedicated King fans where it should
have attracted everybody, King's new "original" release, New
Orleans Heat, was actively promoted by Tomato Records — for a moot purpose;
it is neither better nor worse than King's average Tomato album, and that's not
a compliment.
They did try a new move on him, teaming him up
with famous R'n'B producer Allen Toussaint, responsible for long strings of
1960's and 1970's hits by a long stream of artists. But they miscalculated:
Toussaint is an excellent composer and arranger, yet he knows fairly little
about how to integrate these talents with a first-rate has-been blues guitar
legend.
Albert was getting old, and he could be excused
for not mastering any new licks or techniques at this stage; this meant generally
just re-recording old standards ('Born Under A Bad Sign', 'I Get Evil', 'Angel
Of Mercy', 'The Very Thought Of You' — it's always depressing to see these
endless lists of remakes on old giants' records), with a lengthy generic blues
jam thrown in for good measure ('I Got The Blues' — not the Rolling Stones
song, unfortunately) and Toussaint's own 'Get Out Of My Life, Woman' completing
the picture.
None of this is enlightening. Production values
are high, as should be expected of Toussaint, but the backing band is clearly
not interested in working with King; they hack all the backing out
professionally and with very little spark. Some oldies are just plain ruined —
the formerly snappy 'Born Under A Bad Sign' collapses under the weight of
cheesy female choruses, for instance — and by the time 'I Got The Blues', with
its totally robotic background, passes the five-minute mark (out of its nine
minutes), I'm screaming for mercy.
King's own spirits do not seem all that high to
me; he plays it safe and simple, with his guitar very much in the background
much of the time. It all gets so bad that, in the end, the only number that
sticks with me is the record's corniest — the lame funk workout 'We All Wanna
Boogie', just because a corny Albert King at least raises more interest than a
boring, by-the-book Albert King. Too bad. Totally thumbs
down.
CROSSCUT SAW: ALBERT KING IN SAN FRANCISCO (1983)
1)
Honey Bee; 2) Ask Me No Questions; 3) I'm Gonna Move To The Outskirts Of Town;
4) They Made The Queen Welcome; 5) Floodin' In California; 6) I Found Love In
The Food Stamp Line; 7) Match Box Blues; 8) Crosscut Saw; 9) Why You So Mean To
Me.
After a lengthy break from recording, King
reemerged for a two-album stunt in the Eighties, on Fantasy Records — the same
label that had earlier bought out the Stax catalog, which does not, however,
mean that it also bought out Stax's creativity and inspiration. The best I can
say about this "comeback" is that, technically, this is a
comeback: first time in years, King releases a pure blues album. No frills.
Strictly 12-bar, strictly guitar-bass-drums, and some piano to boot.
Since the man's playing and singing have not
deteriorated one bit, regardless of all the perturbations during the Tomato
years, Crosscut Saw is definitely a must for fans. However, evaluating
it in its historical context means recalling that we already know all these
licks by heart, and that each new solo will be painfully predictable. This
could have been compensated by dazzling efforts on the part of the rhythm
section, but this new band of Albert's just seems to have no individuality
whatsoever. Even when they pick up the tempo and start to boogie a little bit
('They Made The Queen Welcome'), I do not feel any genuine rock'n'roll
excitement. These are paid people who do their job and little else.
In short, a huge disappointment. Having fully
reembraced his blues roots, King has unvoluntarily joined the
Eighties-up-to-present "blues revival" — a movement beautifully fit
for mid-level barrooms and restaurants, but little else. I would bet anything
that "Larry Burton" on rhythm guitar, "Michael Llorens" on
drums, "Tony Llorens" on piano, whoever they are — actually, Larry
Burton at least is a slightly well-known solo blues artist nowadays — were
totally overjoyed to have the honor of backing a giant like King, but the sad
truth is, they just don't do this giant any justice, steering him in the
safest, most uninteresting direction possible. And a particular ugh goes for
Tony Llorens' cheap piano tone.
To add insult to injury, the record is crowned
by a remake of a remake (!!): a new recording of 'Crosscut Saw' which, with its
two parts, imitates the re-recording of 'Crosscut Saw' on I Wanna Get Funky.
Thumbs down, no doubt about it; instead
of wasting your money, if you really need another Albert King record, trace
down some old archive or live release from the early Seventies.
I'M IN A PHONE BOOTH, BABY (1984)
1) Phone Booth; 2) Dust My
Broom; 3) The Sky Is Crying; 4) Brother, Go Ahead And Take Her; 5) Your Bread
Ain't Done; 6) Firing Line (I Don't Play With Your Woman, You Don't Play With
Mine); 7) The Game Goes On; 8) Truck Load Of Lovin'; 9) You Gotta Sacrifice.
King's final studio album — not just for
Fantasy, but altogether — is a slight improvement over the total lifelessness
of Crosscut Saw, but not by much. You know things cannot be particularly
good if he starts remaking his own Tomato-era material ('Truck Load Of Lovin'),
or if the best tracks on the album turn out to be million-year old Elmore James
standards like 'Dust My Broom' and 'The Sky Is Crying'.
Alas, by this time it is evident that the
problem lies with Albert as much as it lies with his sidemen. He is given more
opportunity to show off, the backing band does not get in the way so obnoxiously,
and they even bring back the horn players to try and valiantly recreate, as
genuinely as possible, a classic Stax environment. But it does not work; King
clearly cannot be driven into action. He just keeps playing the same tired old
licks over and over again. Every doggone second of the album is more
predictable than the next United Nations session, and what could be more safe
and predictable than that?..
Following Phone Booth, King retired for
good, and that was the wisest decision he could have made; after all, no one
could, or should, have banned him from recreating his past glories live as
often as he wanted, and there was quite obviously no chance left at shaping
some future ones. He spent eight more years occasionally resting and
occasionally touring, before passing away in 1992; some live releases may be
available from these years, but they are strictly for fans, particularly those
who had the bad luck of never seeing the man live in action himself.
It should, nevertheless, be stressed that the
man never "sold out" completely, despite the occasionally lame
trend-following on some of the Tomato records; he just slowly faded out. Pretty
much all the interesting material he released from 1976 to 1984 could be stored
on half an audio CD, yet none of these records tarnish his reputation the way,
say, Rod Stewart's last thirty years have pretty much annihilated his. Ignore
them if you do not worship the man like the celestial bulldozer some think he
is, and concentrate on his Stax legacy, which will remain forever as some of
the most passionate and inventive electric blues music captured on record.
ADDENDA:
WEDNESDAY NIGHT IN SAN FRANCISCO (1968/1990)
1) Watermelon Man; 2) Why You
Mean To Me; 3) I Get Evil; 4) Got To Be Some Changes; 5) Personal Manager; 6)
Born Under A Bad Sign; 7) Don't Throw Your Love On Me So Strong.
Twenty years after Live Wire established
Albert's reputation as the ultimate live bluesman once and for all, someone had
the great idea to go ahead and release a set of additional performances
from the same Fillmore dates that produced the original album. For Albert King
fans, this is not less than a Godsend. For everyone else, it should be
perfectly clear why Live Wire, upon initial release, was not made into a
double album: back in 1968, people sort of looked ascance at releasing the same
album twice, much less at the same time.
There is nothing new whatsoever — the songs
have different titles, but they're still the same two numbers: fast blues and
slow blues. Even the improvisational solos are more or less the same, because,
obviously, it's hard to expect Albert learning a bunch of new tricks in a
matter of 24 hours. And, alas, such classic numbers as 'Born Under A Bad Sign'
and 'Personal Manager', freed from the tight guidance of the Memphis Horns,
pale in respect to their studio counterparts.
King gets somewhat more prominent backing from
James Washington on the organ, but that's about the only difference I feel.
Everything else is the same. Rating this thing is useless — either you love
Albert and you get it, or you respect and like Albert and you have no need for
it whatsoever, or you hate Albert and you have one more excuse for accusing
the music industry of overproduction.
THURSDAY NIGHT IN SAN FRANCISCO (1968/1990)
1) San-Ho-Zay; 2) You Upset Me
Baby; 3) Call It Stormy Monday; 4) Every Day I Have The Blues; 5) Drifting
Blues; 6) I've Made Nights By Myself; 7) Crosscut Saw; 8) I'm Gonna Move To The
Outskirts Of Town; 9) Ooh-Ee-Baby.
It is not very hard to guess that this album
does not deserve an independent review. All I can say is that, perhaps, it is
quite a rational decision to market King's performances as a set of three independent
records, rather than lump them all together into a deluxe 3-CD set to be sold
at exorbitant prices. I seriously doubt that even a dedicated fan will be able
to sit through all three discs in a row without developing a chronic syndrome
of déjà vu. Even if they are so very careful to pick all the
right tracks so there's no overlap with the preceding two records, all the
licks are still the same — after a short while, you can start predicting the
near-exact phrase Albert is gonna pick out after a particular verse.
But it is worth a little bit of money,
at least, to hear the King say a touching goodbye to his Fillmore audiences at
the end of 'Ooh-Ee-Baby' — "it'll be October before I can get back, got to
go back East, I wish I could take everybody from San Francisco with me, mighty
mighty groovy people". It's easy to get tired of the repetitive guitar
playing, perhaps, but it is impossible to get tired of the charisma. Nice guy
all around.
LIVE '69 (1969; 2003)
1) Introduction; 2) Why Are
You So Mean To Me; 3) As The Years Go Passing By; 4) Please Come Back To Me; 5)
Crosscut Saw; 6) Personal Manager.
For those who just can't get enough of
«prime-time era» King, this relatively recent archival release from Tomato's
vaults will temporarily quench their thirst. Unlike the Fillmore sets, this
show was recorded on May 29, 1969 at a small club in Wisconsin, offering a
chance to assess Albert in a somewhat more intimate and informal setting rather
than Bill Graham's «kingly» environment. The sound and mix quality is not
perfect, but decent enough not to pay it a lot of attention — at least, the
guitar was properly miked, and whenever the big guy gets to solo (which,
predictably, occupies about 80% of the running time), his wailing rises high
and above everything else, including the horns section (which he'd only added
recently — not that it matters a lot, since the horns are actually quite poorly
miked, and never add much to the overall sound).
The setlist is short and far from perfect: at
the center of the album sits ʽPlease Come Back To Meʼ, a completely
generic piece of 12-bar blues stretched out to a 17-minute running time. Albert
puts in as much fire as he can, but even he cannot help repeating all of his
trademark licks and bends for at least several times over those seventeen
minutes, and if you already know them by heart from the Fillmore days, you
won't be particularly happy having to go through them all over again. On the
other hand, this is at least partially compensated by the only (I think) officially released live version of ʽAs The
Years Go Passing Byʼ from the Sixties — sung and played beautifully, with
a couple soul-probing solos where «every note counts», and with the guitar so
high in the mix and the club acoustics so pressing in on you that the
experience can be quite mind-blowing.
For serious fans, I think, the inclusion of
that song alone is well worth the price; most of the others would probably be
happier if some of the jamming were cut to make way for a ʽBorn Under A
Bad Signʼ or, at least, for more contemporary material (from Years Gone By, for instance) —
represented here only by a brief instrumental snippet of ʽYou Don't Love
Meʼ in the introduction. On the other hand, Live '69 is as good a first introduction into the live blues power
of Albert King as anything else. Also, the basic guitar tone is thicker and
lower here than the thin, shrill tone we hear on the Fillmore records —
probably a different set of amps, since the man seems to be playing the same
Flying-V model as usual. So if you like your King «plumper» rather than
«leaner», this record might even have a small edge on the classic Fillmore
stuff, from that aspect at least.
THE LOST SESSION (1971; 1986)
1) She Won't Gimme No Lovin';
2) Cold In Hand; 3) Stop Lying; 4) All The Way Down; 5) Tell Me What True Love
Is; 6) Down The Road I Go; 7) Money Lovin' Women; 8) Sun Gone Down (take 1); 9)
Brand New Razor; 10) Sun Gone Down (take 2).
When you're climbing up the rugged heights of
that awesome garbage heap called popular music, remember this: not everything
that is lost obligatorily deserves to be found. In fact, more often than
not there is a pretty good reason for The Thing to have gotten lost. Of course,
if you're a scientist, this golden rule does not apply in the least — but this
is why it would be nice if quite a few of these CDs, instead of silly rating
stickers, bore something more informative, like, «FOR HISTORICAL RESEARCH AND
SEXUAL GRATIFICATION PURPOSES ONLY».
The Lost Session is not even well-qualified for the former. It
is simply ten chunks of a lengthy jam that Albert took part in at Wolfman Jack
Studios in L. A. in August 1971, in collaboration with British blues guru John
Mayall. The liner notes, written by Lee Hildebrand in a very clear and
intelligent manner, make the best justification possible for this
collaboration, explaining that the gentlemen wanted to do something radically
different from Albert's usual Stax style, and that they achieved it by fusing
together "Delta blues, British blues, and Los Angeles jazz".
This is a great way of putting it, but I, for
one, do not so easily understand the charms of a synthesis between "Delta
blues" and "British blues", given that the latter is essentially
a derived function of the former (so there's something vaguely incestuous about
that picture). And as for 'Los Angeles jazz', it is essentially represented by
a couple of sax and trumpet solos on a couple of the jams; they do sound
different from the instrumental passages on King's regular albums, but they're
hardly more eyebrow-raising than, say, AC/DC's one and only use of bagpipes on
one and only one of their songs — and you hardly bought the album for that
moment.
So, if the very idea of a partnership between a
giant of American and a giant of British blues is enough to get you shaking,
feel free to get lost in The Session. But if, overwhelmed by the flood
of electric blues albums, you feel more like getting your kicks out of the
'real special' ones, I doubt this archive release passes the test. I cannot
even name one particular highlight. Musicianship is fine, sound is clean, but
the thumbs are down all the same. Give me the Stax sound over
this unexperimental experiment any time of day.
BLUES AT SUNRISE (1973; 1988)
1) Don't Burn Down The Bridge
('Cause You Might Wanna Come Back Across); 2) I Believe To My Soul; 3) For The
Love Of A Woman; 4) Blues At Sunrise; 5) I'll Play The Blues For You; 6) Little
Brother (Make A Way); 7) Roadhouse Blues.
This is a pretty good example of Albert's early
1970s live sound, well worth owning if only because he somehow missed
releasing a live album back then, in its own time, which would make Blues At
Sunrise a significant addition to the blues addict's collection. Recorded
in July 1973 at the famous Montreux Festival, it catches King at the early stage
of his "funkier" period, so the setlist is predictably heavy on songs
from I'll Play The Blues For You with a few respectable oldies, like the
title track, thrown on for balance.
The affair is certainly less stripped than the
Fillmore concerts: King is backed by a full brass section — understandable,
since his records from that period depend even more on the horns than Born
Under A Bad Sign — and also his second guitarist, Donald Kinsey, is given
quite a bit of prominence, even "dueling" with the King on the
lengthier jams. He's quite competent, but it's also quite likely that Albert
let him take center stage only to emphasize his own brilliance (a morally
questionable trick that Eric Clapton so loves to reproduce during his own
shows).
Another reason to own this is that King is
exploring heavier, more "electrified" guitar tones in this live
setting, than the thin, shrill tone he is usually known for on his studio and
earlier live records. Listening to these performances in their chronological
place, one can get the impression that he was just given this new guitar two
days ago and wanted to test its abilities — there's plenty of new licks here
that aren't usually associated with King, and his reliance on the power of
vibrato is entirely unprecedented; he ends up sounding like Hendrix from time
to time. You only have to go back once to the studio version of 'Don't Burn
Down The Bridge' to understand that this Montreux version blows it away
completely — provided you respect "heavy blues", of course, and do
not hold the conviction that extra heaviness kills off the delicate subtleties
and is much better suited for emotionally deaf nitwits.
For fact lovers, 'I Believe To My Soul' is
the original Ray Charles tune (somewhat sad to hear it without the trademark
piano chords, though), and King even preserves the old lyrics ('...when you
know my name is Ray' — do we?); 'Roadhouse Blues', however, is not the
Doors song, but rather just another generic ten-minute jam that sounds exactly
like the other generic ten-minute jam ('Blues At Sunrise'). But it's
Albert King, and it's a cool sound, especially when after the so-so solo of
Kinsey comes the shotgun blast of Albert. Also, 'For The Love Of A Woman' is
set to the exact rhythm pattern of 'Crossroads' as arranged by Cream during
their live performances, so for all it's worth, you might think of this
performance as King's tribute to Cream. Oh, and thumbs are up, of course. This is quite definitely
treasurable.
FUNKY LONDON (1972-1974?; 1994)
1) Cold Sweat; 2) Can't You
See What You're Doing To Me; 3) Funky London; 4) Lonesome; 5) Bad Luck; 6)
Sweet Fingers; 7) Finger On The Trigger; 8) Driving Wheel; 9) Lovingest Woman
In Town..
A bunch of outtakes from some of King's Stax
sessions from the early Seventies (possibly earlier as well, I'm not informed
of the recording dates). The review will be brief: there is only one track here
that guarantees the purchase, which is the instrumental cover of James Brown's
'Cold Sweat' — King's worship of Brown could be out of place when he tried to
imitate Brown's audience teasing manners on stage, but it worked all right when
he simply did funky James Brown numbers with his faithful rhythm section,
embellishing them with his blues licks. This here 'Cold Sweat' chugs along
almost as fine as the original, and will also please those who dislike Brown's
neglect for melody, because that's exactly what King's guitar adds to the
proceedings.
Everything else is stuff we have heard a
million times in better or equal quality. Most of it is by
the numbers blues that, to me, gives the impression of rehearsal material,
performed in warm-up purposes before the recording of King's truly serious
contributions to his official albums. It's all tight and solid, but strictly
sparkless. The title track, another funky instrumental, stands out a little simply
by being funkier than the rest, but 'Cold Sweat' displays more energy and
enthusiasm.
I have this on a CD that's paired with the earlier semi-official Live
At Wattstax album, recorded at about the same time as Blues At Sunrise,
and in terms of basic passion, it is much better, except all of its songs
('Killing Floor', 'I'll Play The Blues For You', etc.) have already been played
live with the same fire on other releases. Bottomline: all of this is heavily
expendable, although not for the dedicated fan.
IN SESSION WITH STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN (1983; 1999)
1) Call It Stormy Monday; 2)
Old Times; 3) Pride And Joy; 4) Ask Me No Questions; 5) Pep Talk; 6) Blues At
Sunrise; 7) Turn It Over; 8) Overall Junction; 9) Match Box Blues; 10) Who Is
Stevie; 11) Don't Lie To Me.
A recording that pits one of the greatest blues
stars of the «old school» against one of the brightest blues legends of the
«new school» should be predictably boring and boringly predictable, and In Session does not dissapoint — it is
so by-the-bookishly great that I could not tolerate its presence in the
foreground for even five seconds before my attention would slip away to
something different. Which, of course, does not in the least prohibit this
recording, and also the accompanying video program, from enduring and enjoying
a legendary status.
Although both the album and the video obviously
belong in the discographies of both artists, the field here largely belongs to
King — he is, after all, the older one, and does his best to appear in the role
of the wise master teacher (on ʽPep Talkʼ, he is hilariously pushing
Stevie towards perfectionism: "the better you get, the harder you work,
you can't say, ʽI've got it madeʼ... you're already pretty good, but
you're gonna get better" — "that's the whole point", the Texas
kid replies humbly and politely, instead of "fuck you dad" which he
was probably thinking at the moment). It is said that, when he was approached
about recording a session with Vaughan, he initially declined, not knowing who
Vaughan was — then realized it was the «little Stevie» he'd allowed to sit in
with himself during some of his earlier Texas shows, and once it became clear
that the session could be conducted in this «father-son» manner, things started
getting easier.
Anyway, what we have here is a selection of blues
classics, mostly from the standard repertoire of Albert's, with one Stevie
number (ʽPride And Joyʼ) graciously accepted for balance (the video
and audio releases have significantly differing tracklists, by the way, so any
fan should consider owning both), and interrupted by bits of studio banter,
mostly from King reminiscing about the old times (such as playing ʽBlues
At Sunriseʼ at the Fillmore with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin at the same time). Stevie, on the verge of his big
breakthrough, is in good form, and Albert was never in bad form as long as the
material was adequate. The obvious question is — how are they up for teamwork,
and does that teamwork offer any extra revelations?
One thing I must confess is that, throughout
the endless blues jamming, I was not always able to tell who of the two was
taking the lead (referring to the audio soundtrack only, of course). As different
as King's and Vaughan's blues playing styles generally are, when seated
together and focused on the same thing, the two players seem to have drifted
almost uncomfortably close to each other, with Stevie in particular wanting to
impress Albert by feeding him back trademark Albert licks (or, when asked for
it, as on ʽBlues At Sunriseʼ, some trademark Hendrix licks:
"this is where you gotta play Jimi's part", King says, and the
disciple obeys). Albert himself also rises to the occasion and plays the whole
show as fluent, loud, screechy, and well-rounded as possible: no flubs or
retro-style minimalist passages that would date him as somebody out of the
1950s.
The result is a curious «merger» that,
paradoxically, seems to lower the sheer entertainment value of the experience —
with two blues greats trading solos played in similar styles, what's the major
use of having them engage in these lengthy jams at all? In the end, it all
looks more like a textbook of possible blues licks, created by the two with
the aim of educating their audiences about the blues rather than having
themselves some fun. As a textbook, it is beyond reproach: you could hardly
wish for a more awesome combination
of stellar players if you are in the mood for some star-powered blues-rock. But
I do not think that either Stevie or Albert are at their most «natural» here —
to achieve that proverbial «chemistry», they play it too safe around each
other.
Most of the reviews I've encountered for In Session were glowing, but I really
wonder how many of them weren't already following a pre-set bias (if you get Vaughan and King together on
one record, and if they find a way to
gel together, then this has to be
good because there is no way it could ever be bad). Well, actually, there are
relatively few of these «super-sessions» that would eclipse the individual
highlights of the superstars, and this is no exception — to truly appreciate
these people, you need to look at them separately, not together. Did they make
history on that night? Would be hard to deny that. Isn't it great to have a
whole hour of high-quality footage of Albert King's playing (so rare to come
across in general)? Sure is. Did I have a right to expect more than what I got? Yes, I did. No, I did not. Why should this super-session be different from any
other super-session?..
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 1 (1921-1923)
1) He's A Darn Good Man (To
Have Hanging 'Round); 2) How Long, Sweet Daddy, How Long; 3) Bring Back The
Joys; 4) Some Day Sweetheart; 5) Down Hearted Blues; 6) Why Did You Pick Me Up
When I Was Down; 7) Gonna Have You — Ain't Gonna Leave You Alone; 8) Daddy
Blues; 9) Don't Pan Me; 10) After All These Years; 11) I'm Going Away Just To
Wear You Off My Mind (take 1); 12) I'm Going Away Just To Wear You Off My Mind
(take 2); 13) Jazzin' Baby Blues (take 1); 14) Jazzin' Baby Blues (take 2); 15)
You Can't Have It All; 16) Lonesome Monday Morning Blues; 17) Come On Home; 18)
You Shall Reap Just What You Sow; 19) T'Ain't Nobody's Biz-ness; 20) If You
Want To Keep Your Daddy Home; 21) Bleeding Hearted Blues; 22) Chirping The
Blues.
Blues queens of the 1920s generally fall into three categories. There are the Power Gals, whose trick is to overwhelm the listener with superhuman strength and passion — could be just brute force, like Ma Rainey, or mixed with subtlety, as in the case of Empress Bessie, but power and aggression are the key in all cases. Then there are the Hooligans, like Mamie Smith or Lucille Hegamin, who sound like screechy, sexy, mischievous schoolgirls that are out there to have a very naughty time, above everything else. These ones sound more dated today, but are a terrific reflection of the swingin' era none the less.
Then there's the third, initially least noticeable, but eventually recognizable category: the stately, no-bull "Ladies of the Blues", those that generally avoid the more salacious, wang-wangy side of the blues, and try to push it closer to the white crooners of the day. Among these, Alberta Hunter was arguably the leader. The approach did not pay off well: history generally prefers those who like to take a little risk, and it is possible that Hunter's name would have been wiped off the slate entirely — and unjustly — had she not had the luck of getting a "comeback" chance in her late years, the only blues queen of younger days to actually record and perform live for a bewildered generation five or six decades removed from her golden age.
As it is, she has a slightly better chance to appear on the pages of musical encyclopaedias than, say, Ethel Waters, and this is good news, since these early tunes are quite enjoyable. The first volume of Complete Recorded Works collects all of the records cut for, first, the Black Swan label and then Paramount, who lured her over with a better contract after the initial two singles, in 1921-1923, along with a couple well-preserved alternate takes. Sound quality is tolerable — you get to hear not only the voice, but the musical accompaniment as well, generally provided on the piano by the notorious Fletcher Henderson. (The Complete Recorded Works series never bother much about removing any hiss-and-scratch, though, so do not expect Fletcher Henderson to be the only accompaniment).
Connoisseurs of Bessie Smith will undoubtedly
recognize some of her own later standards — 'Down Hearted Blues', 'T'Ain't
Nobody's Bizness', and 'Bleeding Hearted Blues' are all here, and as much as
Bessie makes them her own, Alberta's renditions, although more
"croony" and generic in tone and arrangement, are quite worth hearing
as well (not to mention the trifling fact that 'Down Hearted Blues' was
actually written by her). Adhering closely to the respectable standards
of ladies' conduct, she allows but tiny drops of overt sentiment; you have to
get past the conventionalities of the genre to get at the "heart"
behind it, and if you do not succeed, you are not to be blamed — I myself find
the superficial trappings more enticing than the essence, and have a hard time
rethinking that.
Still, in between her lovely and rather idiosyncratic voice, Henderson's tasteful and inventive piano playing, and generally well-chosen blues (or, rather, "vaudeville-blues") standards, these early records are fine party-poppers, with only the cracks and hisses threatening to turn them into party-poopers. Thumbs up.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 2 (1923-1924)
1) Someone Else Will Take Your
Place; 2) Vamping Brown; 3) You Can Have My Man If He Comes To See You Too; 4)
Aggravatin' Papa; 5) I'm Going Away To Wear You Off My Mind; 6) Loveless Love;
7) You Can Take My Man But You Can't Keep Him Long; 8) Bring It With You When
You Come; 9) Mistreated Blues; 10) Michigan Water Blues (take 2); 11) Down
South Blues; 12) Michigan Water Blues (take 4); 13) Stingaree Blues; 14) You
Can't Do What My Last Man Did; 15) Experience Blues; 16) Sad 'n' Lonely Blues;
17) Miss Anna Brown; 18) Maybe Someday (take 1); 19) Maybe Someday (take 2);
20) Old Fashioned Love; 21) If The Rest Of The World Don't Want You; 22) It's
Gonna Be A Cold, Cold Winter; 23) Parlor Social De Luxe.
The second volume is somewhat less exciting
than the first (if the term «exciting» is at all applicable to these discs);
it has a notably lower proportion of «classic» numbers — 'Aggravatin' Papa',
perhaps, and 'Down South Blues', it has a notably higher proportion of awfully
sounding tracks, especially at the beginning — hold on to your ears, it does
get better as it goes along; and it certainly does not contain any unexpected
surprises. Peculiarities that catch the ear a little firmer include the
unusually strongly delivered 'Bring It With You When You Come' and a silly
comic dialog with jazz drummer Sonny Greer on the last track.
Covered material is also generally quite light
here: even a song like 'Sad 'n' Lonely Blues' is delivered with enough gaiety to
make you forget about its title and return to its deep-hidden meaning only
when the hangover sets in. But then, with all due respect, Alberta ain't no
Bessie, and these early tracks ain't nothing but gallant, high-class
entertainment.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 3 (1924-1927)
1) Everybody Loves My Baby; 2)
Texas Moaner Blues; 3) Nobody Knows The Way I Feel 'Dis Morning; 4) Early Every
Morn; 5) Cake Walking Babies (From Home); 6) Your Jelly Roll Is Good; 7) Take
That Thing Away; 8) Everybody Does It Now; 9) A Master Man With A Master Mind;
10) Don't Want It All; 11) I'm Hard To Satisfy; 12) Empty Cellar Blues; 13)
Double Crossin' Papa; 14) You For Me, Me For You; 15) I'm Tired Blues; 16)
Wasn't It Nice?; 17) Everybody Mess Around; 18) Don't Forget To Mess Around;
19) Heebie Jeebies; 20) I'll Forgive You 'Cause I Love You; 21) I'm Gonna Lose
Myself Way Down In Louisville; 22) My Old Daddy's Got A Brand New Way To Love;
23) I'm Down Right Now But I Won't Be Down Always.
The third volume in the series is arguably the
best. First, there is a dramatic increase in sound quality: for all the hype
around Paramount, its records were known for horrendously low fidelity, and
even if that was not the main reason for Alberta's jump to Gennett in 1924 and
then to Okeh in 1925, it is still mighty fine for the fans that she did make
that jump. The Gennett records, in particular, sound unusually crisp and sharp;
alas, the songs on them are not among Alberta's best material. The cracks and
pops come back on Okeh, but in a moderate manner.
With such an increase in quality, one can
finally start noticing all the subtle nuances in Hunter's singing: she was,
quite clearly, maturing as a singer, perhaps striving to bring out all her
hitherto undisclosed sides under the pressures of competition; by the end of
1923, the "Blues Queens" era had mobilized a veritable swarm of
mighty singers, and it was certainly harder to compete with Ma Rainey and
Bessie Smith than with Lucille Hegamin and Mamie Smith. But Alberta almost
rises to the challenge, toughening up her act, yet still sounding
"lady-like". 'You For Me, Me For You', for instance, where she is
only accompanied by a modest piano backing, is a great example: strong and
protective, but gentle in overtones.
She even engages in singing more provocative
stuff, rich on double-entendres — on one record at least (Okeh 8268), where the
A-side is 'Take That Thing Away' (what thing?) and the B-side is 'Your
Jelly Roll Is Good' (no comment necessary). And she lets her hair down on
faster, merrier, speakeasy-friendly numbers more frequently than before (the
classic chestnut 'Cake Walking Babies (From Home)'; 'Heebie Jeebies', etc.).
All in all, fans of the Roaring Decade will probably get a kick out of at least
half of these performances. There's also supposed to be some Louis Armstrong
backup on a few of them, but I do not know where exactly.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 4 (1927-c. 1946)
1) Sugar; 2) Beale Street
Blues; 3) I'm Going To See My Ma; 4) Gimme All The Love You Got; 5) My
Particular Man; 6) Driftin' Tide; 7) You Can't Tell The Difference After Dark;
8) Second Hand Man; 9) Send Me A Man; 10) Chirpin' The Blues; 11) Downhearted
Blues; 12) I'll See You Go; 13) Fine And Mellow; 14) Yelping Blues; 15) Someday,
Sweetheart; 16) The Love I Have For You; 17) My Castle's Rockin'; 18)
Boogie-Woogie Swing; 19) I Won't Let You Down; 20) Take Your Big Hands Off; 21)
He's Got A Punch Like Joe Louis.
Unlike so many other blues queens, Alberta
Hunter did not have her career seriously cut down by the Depression, because
even in her prime she would not have too many recordings, and by 1927, sessions
had all but ended, with the lady embarking on a lengthy revue trip to Europe
and, then, eventually and gradually, shifting to other lines of duty (such as
troop entertaining) and, after the war, going to nursing school and engaging in
healthcare.
Paradoxically, it is exactly this career
fluctuation that makes Vol. 4 into the most intriguing and diverse unit
in the series. It has no big hits or classics and represents a patchwork of
scattered sessions, with much of the material even remaining unreleased for
half a century and some of it with uncertain recording dates. But, with
improving recording technologies, her singing has never been clearer and
cleaner, and her vaudeville repertoire never as variegated.
The real gem here are the first three songs, from
a 1927 session where Alberta is backed by Fats Waller on organ — a pretty
exotic arrangement for the time, and she rises to the task admirably,
particularly on 'Sugar', where she faithfully tries to sound like sugar
herself, and her sucrosey notes, meshing with Waller's virtuoso playing and
creaky old production, yield a truly phantasmagoric effect. (Especially
knockout-like if you hear it after playing the previous three volumes one after
the other with no breaks.)
The second gem is a long-lost New York session
from 1935, on which she is backed by piano and very prominent acoustic guitar,
resulting in a Lonnie Johnson kind of sound; the highlight is 'Driftin' Tide',
more of a crooner than anything blues-like in form, but with Hunter's blues
sensitivity replacing the croon. Different, but likable.
Later sessions, from 1939 and the early 1940s,
are even more of a hodge-podge: traditional blues, whitebread ballads, early
boogie-woogie, whatever works. Complete is not quite the right word for
it, seeing as how no material from her European sessions is present, but it is
debatable whether the latter holds any importance (she used to record
straightforward pop material with Jack Jackson's orchestra). As for these late
numbers, none of them were hits, but who cares? From 1921 to 1946, there's
really only two types of Alberta Hunter records: the good ones are those that
you can hear and the bad ones are those that you cannot, and — technological
progress be blessed — on this volume, there are no bad ones.
AMTRAK BLUES (1980)
1) The Darktown Strutters Ball;
2) Nobody Knows You When
You're Down And Out; 3) I'm Having A Good Time; 4) Always; 5) My Handy Man
Ain't Handy No More; 6) Amtrak Blues; 7) Old Fashioned Love; 8) Sweet Georgia
Brown; 9) A Good Man Is Hard To Find; 10) I've Got A Mind To Ramble.
In 1954, Alberta Hunter quit show business for
good — or so it seemed — and embarked on a nursing career instead, for a bunch
of personal reasons (such as shock from her mother's death) and some objective
ones — such as not really being needed in the business any longer. For more
than twenty years, she did nothing but nursing, with just a couple spontaneous
guest appearances on recordings by «old artists», e. g. the somewhat
uncomfortably titled Songs We Taught Your Mother project from 1961,
where she sang together with Lucille Hegamin and Victoria Spivey, being
unquestionably the biggest star of the three.
In 1977 her hospital promptly gave Alberta her
walking papers, probably expecting the lady to dine with Bessie Smith any day
now — ironically, this turned out to be one of the most convenient firing
events in history, as it prompted Hunter to try out the stage once more. Too
old to nurse, too young to die, just the right age to perform, she thought, so
she started trying out various places in the Village — wisest choice of all
possible ones — and ended up with a triumphant comeback, first on stage, then
on film (in Robert Altman's Remember My Name), finally on record, signed
to Columbia and releasing four albums before finally kicking it in 1984.
The only one that is still easy to find today
is Amtrak Blues from 1980, ten songs from Alberta's deep-reaching back
catalog (odd enough, though, only 'Old Fashioned Love' overlaps with her 1920s
recordings) that Columbia wisely let her record with the Gerald Cook quartet (a
band of pros almost as seasoned as Alberta herself) rather than any unexperienced
young whippersnappers: as a result, the sound is fully authentic and never
«retro».
On its own, Amtrak Blues is a pretty
little jazz-blues collection that makes up for excellent background music. But
it goes without saying that it is not the kind of album that should really be
appreciated «on its own». The point is that it is an album from 1980, recorded
by an artist whose date of birth is usually given as 1895 — if, «on its own»,
it were barely listenable, it would still have been a priceless historical
document, but if, «on its own», it is enjoyable, it is nothing less than
a historical masterpiece.
Of course, Hunter's voice now sounds like an
old woman's voice is supposed to sound: deep, croaking, gruff, a far cry from
the gallant silkiness of her old records (at least, what frequencies of that
gallant silkiness one can still make out from behind the wall of hiss). But
then she is not singing opera, she is groaning the blues, and this age-bound
change gives her the same kind of grit that, in the 1920s, actually defined her
competition — like Ma Rainey or Memphis Minnie. Now, in the Reagan era, it
makes her the last remaning spokesperson for all these ladies; she is
more than Alberta Hunter, she is Blues Queen Incarnate.
And she does sing well — not just «well for
someone over 80», but «well for anyone who sings the blues». She charms you
with her slyness, such as, for instance, starting out slow and cool on the
first verse of 'The Darktown Strutters' Ball' before charging up the tempo and
inviting everyone to bop along as if 'old age' were a purely psychological
concept (which it is). Even on the sinuous double entendre numbers —
such as 'My Handy Man Ain't Handy No More' — there is no trace of the
ridiculous. Certainly, no one can stop the skepticist from complaining about
lines like 'he churns my butter' coming from the lips of an octogenarian. But I
would pity the skepticist, unable to feel the still young spirit behind the old
body.
For most people, including myself, the evident
highlight would be 'Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out', simply because
it is the most outstanding and well-known composition on here, and because
Hunter does it full justice (from Bessie's classic repertoire, she also sings
'A Good Man Is Hard To Find'; being the last of the great old divas still alive
and kicking, she did a great job promoting and preserving the memory of her
generation). Yet, of course, Amtrak Blues is not about individual songs
— it is about the pleasures of survival against all odds, and it is so wildly
successful on the intellectual level that it seriously influences the emotional
level as well, and gets a decisive thumbs up
from both.
THE GLORY OF ALBERTA HUNTER (1982)
1) Ezequiel Saw The Wheel; 2)
I've Had Enough; 3) Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams; 4) Some Of These Days; 5) The
Glory Of Love; 6) You Can't Tell The Difference After Dark; 7) I Love You Much
Too Much; 8) I Cried For You; 9) The Love I Have For You; 10) Sometimes I'm
Happy; 11) Give Me That Old Time Religion.
Amtrak Blues is the best known (and the only easily available) album from Alberta's
later days, but, in fact, she really hits her second stride with The
Glory, released but two years before her death. The difference may not be
too crucial, but I believe I smell it — here is a singer that no longer feels
even the least bit uncomfortable about being over 80, boosted by a new wave of
public and critical success, re-accustomed once more to entertaining audiences
and singing «into the can», as they used to say.
The Glory has a little bit of everything: blues, jazz, cabaret, schmaltz, even
two gospel numbers that bookmark the record's two ends. The worst numbers —
ballads whose sentimentalism obscures their melodic value — are still
entertaining as retrothings, respectable if only for the performer's tenacity;
and the best numbers are fun on their very own.
Unsurprisingly, the two major highlights are
the ones on which Ms. Hunter gets real down and dirty: a re-recording of 'You
Can't Tell The Difference After Dark', and 'I've Had Enough' which, to the best
of my knowledge, was not a part of her previous studio repertoire. The former
has, of course, acquired a triple entendre by now: 'I may not be so
appealin', but I've got that certain feelin', she tells us with a little mix
of pride and embarrassment, 'and you can't tell the difference after dark'. You
bet your life we can't.
'I've Had Enough (Alberta's Blues)', in the
meantime, gives us the toughest incarnation of Alberta Hunter ever found on any
record of her career — you'd generally expect this kind of material from the
likes of Big Mama Thornton. But she pulls it off splendidly, wrapping things up
with an unforgettable coda of bye-byes to her brutal lover: 'goodbye, sayonara,
au revoir, kalimera, auf Wiedersehen, bonne nuit... ah yeah — hasta la vista!..
ouch... get lost!' A little forced, perhaps, and she mispronounces kalimera
as kalismera, but the main intention was to get us hooked and charmed,
and she got us hooked and charmed.
That intention is so strong, in fact, that she
even sings in Yiddish on one track ('I Love You Much Too Much'), and
saves the album's most upbeat performances, the catchy vaudeville of 'Sometimes
I'm Happy' and the breakneck gospel trance of 'Give Me That Old Time Religion',
for last. Perhaps these songs will not linger too long in anybody's memory, but
the point is, as long as the record is playing, you sense a feeling of
ecstasy, a "wow, now here is someone who really enjoys living and gets a
true kick out of it!" reaction. Then you realize that «someone» is 87
years old, and that you have just been shown a standard of living that you
yourself will never ever be able to reach — but at least you have some sort of
ideal to aspire to.
For this ray of optimism and bout of
enthusiasm, the perfectly titled Glory Of Alberta Hunter gets a glorious
thumbs up. She had the time to record one
more LP — Look For The Silver Lining (1983), unfortunately, almost
impossible to find — before finally kicking it in 1984, but I am pretty sure
that, whatever her current occupation in Paradise is, it has little to do with
nursing. Bet my own salvation that God can't tell much difference after dark,
either.
BLUES, BARRELHOUSE & BOOGIE WOOGIE (1946-1955; 1996)
CD I: 1) After
Midnite; 2) My Baby's Boogying; 3) Down The Road Apiece; 4)
Amos' Blues; 5) Amos' Boogie; 6) Operation Blues; 7) Cinch Blues; 8) Everything
I Do Is Wrong; 9) Blues At Sundown; 10) Money Hustlin' Woman; 11) Sad And Blue;
12) Mean Woman; 13) Aladdin Boogie; 14) Nickel Plated Baby; 15) Real Gone; 16)
Rainy Weather Blues; 17) Train Whistle Blues; 18) Train Time Blues; 19) Bye
Bye Boogie; 20) Pot Luck Boogie; 21) It's A Married Woman; 22) My Tortured
Mind; CD II: 1) Hold Me Baby; 2) Chicken Shack Boogie; 3)
Hard Driving Blues; 4) I'm Gonna Leave You; 5) Pool-Playing Blues; 6) Rocky
Road Blues (take 1); 7) Rocky Road Blues (take 2); 8) Lonesome For The Blues;
9) Slow Down Blues; 10) Anybody's Blues; 11) It Took A Long, Long Time; 12)
Wolf On The River; 13) Frank's Blues; 14) Empty Arms Blues; 15) A&M Blues;
16) Won't You Kinda Think It Over; 17) Jitterbug Fashion Parade; 18) My Luck Is
Bound To Change; 19) Roomin' House Boogie; 20) Walkin' Blues; 21) Blue And
Lonesome; 22) Let's Make Christmas Merry, Baby; CD III: 1) Drifting Blues; 2)
Untitled Boogie; 3) Melting Blues; 4) Boogie Woogie; 5) Atomic Baby; 6) Sax
Shack Boogie; 7) Birmingham Bounce; 8) Let's Rock A While; 9) Hard Luck Blues;
10) Two Years Of Torture; 11) Bad Bad Whiskey; 12)
Tears, Tears, Tears; 13) Put Something In My Hand; 14) Trouble In Mind; 15)
Flying Home; 16) Let Me Go Home, Whiskey; 17) Please Mr. Johnson; 18) Let's
Have A Party; 19) One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer; 20) Good, Good Whiskey;
21) After Awhile; 22) I Guess I'll Go.
Jump blues is an all but completely forgotten
genre these days, having miserably fallen through the cracks — too primitive
and formulaic for jazz fans, too wimpy for rock'n'rollers; the fact that the
best of the «jumpers» managed to create a unique vibe of sorts, partially
borrowed, but also partially wiped out by rock'n'roll, is not enough to make
people remember names like Big Joe Turner and Wynonie Harris — only the fact
that Elvis covered both the former ('Shake, Rattle & Roll') and the latter
('Good Rockin' Tonight') is.
Unfortunately, Elvis did not cover Amos Milburn
(Chuck Berry and John Lee Hooker did, but their reputation, even pooled, is
still no match for the King), and his current popularity amounts to little more
than a footnote. Injustice a-plenty: unlike Big Joe and Wynonie, great
powerhouse belters whose talents, nevertheless, can be fully assessed by
sampling three or four of their best recordings, Milburn was one of the very
few jump blues performers whose main talent lay in the playing — simply put, he
was one of the most accomplished pianists of his epoch. Naturally, it makes no
sense to compare him to the likes of demi-gods like Art Tatum, as he was way
more limited in scope and technique by the very nature of the popular
entertainment genre. But as far as that genre went, Milburn can honestly be
said to have explored every nook and cranny.
For those totally unfamiliar with the man,
let's just say that his sound was a direct influence on Fats Domino, as well as
Chuck Berry's Johnnie Johnson — some of the piano runs on 'Down The Road
Apiece' made it directly on to Chuck's version, and from there, became
distributed between Keith Richards and Ian Stewart on the Stones' version — and
on Jerry Lee Lewis. The latter, certainly, banged on his keys with way more
reckless abandon than Amos could ever allow himself, but lagged far behind in
terms of technique and inventiveness. In all, Milburn probably was to the
piano, during the late 1940s, much the same as T-Bone Walker was to the
electric guitar: the inventor of a new language, one that would take firm hold
a decade later, and then go on living without a good memory of its own
forefather.
The completest way to get acknowledged with
Milburn's legacy is through the five- or six-volume Chronological Classics series that attempts to collect all of his
recordings for the Aladdin label from 1946 to 1957, although I believe the
label only got as far as 1953 before going bankrupt, and some of these volumes
are already notoriously hard to get at a normal price. There was also a
limited-time-issue boxset of 7 CDs, The
Complete Aladdin Recordings, which, last time I checked it out, went for
$425 on Amazon, and sky's the limit. But, of course, these buys are for the
nutty ones; regular guys like us can find perfect satisfaction in smaller
collections, since, like every respectable performer from that time period, Amos
was never above recording the exact same tune over and over and over again.
Blues,
Barrelhouse & Boogie-Woogie
is a currently out-of-print, but still findable, 3-CD compilation of what
somebody thought to be the best and most representative tracks of Milburn's top
recording years. It does not have all
the big hits — like the dusky ballad 'Bewildered', for instance, which can be
found on additional smaller compilations — but it does have around 95% of them,
along with lots of lesser B-sides and, so I gather, a bunch of stuff from the
vaults as well. The tracks are more or less arranged in chronological order of
recording, and the sound quality is as fine as one could demand from the era;
no need to turn on the «Forced Ignorance of Cracks and Hisses» switch in the
back of your mind.
Listening to these recordings on a
track-by-track basis clearly establishes that Milburn's best stuff was recorded
around 1946-48, when the major attraction was Amos himself: his unexceptional,
but nice singing voice, and his exceptional, if formula-limited, piano playing.
As time went by, he started relying more on his backing bands: a lot of
electric guitar and brass soloing eventually pushes the piano out of focus,
which is too bad, since the electric guitar is not T-Bone Walker level and the
brass ain't no Tympany Five. Also, the rate of boogie-woogie to slow blues
gradually decreases throughout the years, especially after Milburn fell upon
the winning formula of the «drinking shuffle» with 'Bad, Bad Whiskey' in 1950
— a formula that subdued and charmed black drinkers all across the States, but
did not obligatorily surmise fast rhythms or flashy playing.
In those early years, though, Milburn was
magic, as evidenced already on 'After Midnite' that opens the album. Generic
slow-moving 12-bar blues? Sure. For that matter, Chuck Berry's 'In The Wee Wee
Hours' is the exact same song. But Johnnie Johnson was just a supporting
player on that tune, his ivories buried deep in the background; Milburn, who
came earlier, pushes them up front, and accompanies each of the generic sung
bars with a different improvised run. He is a good master of «sonic painting» —
listen to how the line "the blues is falling, just like drops of
rain" is immediately followed by piano-generated drops of rain ('Rainy
Weather Blues') — and an even better mathematician-as-musician: the long
instrumental workout on 'Down The Road Apiece' is a prime example of melodic
calculation, with amazingly elegant, symmetric constructions materializing from
under his fingers in an endless sequence (as I already hinted at, this «engineering»
approach was well understood and respected by both Berry and Richards on their
respective versions — actually, listening to all three versions in a row makes
it clear that Keith must have been
inspired by the original as well).
Stuff like 'Amos' Boogie' is «rock'n'roll in
all but name», as they say, and a lot more ass-kicking than much of the stuff
that bears that name just because it happened to come out later. Even if
Milburn was not the only accomplished boogie player around town at the time,
there are still few, if any, other places where you can hear such a distilled
sound. Meade Lux Lewis, perhaps, or Pete Johnson, but the former did not record
all that much, and the latter always got overshadowed by whoever he was
accompanying. This here is pristine stuff.
The material on the two later-period discs is
not as consistently exciting, yet there are still classic R'n'B hits out there
that are well worth getting to know: the humorous 'Chicken Shack Boogie', its
equally humorous remake as 'Sax Shack Boogie', and, of course, out of all the
innumerable drinking songs — 'One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer', which most
people know as that John Lee Hooker classic, but the song was just as relevant
to Milburn.
Still, it is worth repeating that it is
possible to play the sixty-six tracks on here in a row without going mad, which is much more than could be said about most
of Milburn's competition during those years. Like everybody else, he was
churning these recordings out like newspapers, without giving any serious
thought to «individuality» or «innovation» — it's just the old 45s going out of
print and the new ones replacing them. But, being stuck in the role of a
commercial entertainer, he could still have the mindset of a freedom-riding
improviser, and as similar as all these tunes are, only a very select few
repeat each other note-for-note. (Granted, this may not hold for his entire output — we probably owe a big
thank you to those responsible for the selection). If that is not enough to
freeze the man in whatever Hall of Fame is willing to contain him, I don't know
what is. Thumbs
up, of course.
THE MOTOWN SESSIONS (1962-1964; 1996)
1) My
Daily Prayer; 2) My Baby Gave Me Another Chance; 3) I'm In My Wine; 4) I'll
Make It Up To You Somehow; 5) Don't Be No Fool; 6) In The Middle Of The Night;
7) Chicken Shack Boogie; 8) Bad Bad Whiskey; 9) One Bourbon, One Scotch, One
Beer; 10) It's A Long, Long Time; 11) I'm Gonna Tell My Mama; 12) Bewildered;
13) Darling How Long; 14) Hold Me Baby; 15) Baby You Thrill Me; 16) I Wanna Go
Home; 17) Mama's Boy; 18) I'll Leave You In His Care.
So jump blues could never hold its own against
the onslaught of rock'n'roll, with Little Richard and Chuck Berry whisking away
its black audiences and then the white rockers sealing its fate completely. Not
that Milburn's last years with Aladdin records really passed under the glowing
sign of the boogie — he was clearly drifting more and more towards the «blues»
side of his personality, but even there he was clearly losing out to electric
Chicago stuff.
No big surprise that in 1957 Aladdin finally
went down, and brought Amos down with it. Being less lucky than Big Joe Turner,
who succeeded in finding a safe 1950s haven on Atlantic (and was probably the
only big star of jump blues to make a profitable transition to R'n'B), Milburn
hung around several different labels without too many results (I could not
easily locate the recordings he made for Ace, King, or others) — resurfacing
one last time on Motown records in the early Sixties, with Berry Gordy probably
just taking pity on the guy.
For Motown, Milburn settled on simply
re-recording the old classics. He cut a bunch of singles and even an entire —
his first and only — LP, confusingly entitled Return Of The Blues Boss (even though, to the best of my knowledge,
no one ever knew him under such a nick name, not even in his best days).
Nothing sold or charted, and not even Gordy could hold the guy on the label
for more than two years, whereupon Milburn went into complete oblivion, had a
stroke in 1972, a leg amputated in 1975, and died five years later.
Frankly speaking, though, these Motown
recordings are solid evidence that either Amos really was washed up by 1962, or, more likely, that there was not a
single person around him that knew the way to make his talents serve the new
decade. All of these eighteen tracks sound well enough, but Milburn's greatest
strength — the fantastic piano playing — is criminally understated; on half of
the tracks, he is not given the proper chance to shine at all, and on the other
half, the piano is criminally buried in the mix. This may be in accordance with
Motown's general emphasis on ensemble playing, with the vocalist(s) being the only
element of the sound that is allowed to stick out, but in this case, why sign
the guy at all? He certainly has always had a nice singing voice, but in the
world of the early 1960s, with Ben E. King, Clyde McPhatter, Smokey Robinson,
and James Brown ruling the waves, what chance could the faux-titled «blues
boss» ever have?
In the end, The Motown Sessions may be of minor interest not so much to fans of
the old boogie woogie sound, but rather to... Stevie Wonder completists, since
«Little Stevie» is credited for contributing harmonica parts on some of the
tracks. All that's left is to issue a warning — do not mistake these
re-recordings of 'Chicken Shack Boogie', 'One Bourbon', 'Bad Bad Whiskey' and
other classics for the originals. Remember, an Amos Milburn original must have
the piano in the role of lead vocalist — and the vocals accompanying it. Not
vice versa. Thumbs
down.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 1 (1941-1946)
1) Black Pony Blues; 2) Death
Valley Blues; 3) Kind Lover Blues; 4) If I Get Lucky; 5) Standing At My Window;
6) Gonna Follow My Baby; 7) Give Me A 32-20; 8) My Mama Don't Allow Me; 9) Mean
Old 'Frisco Blues; 10) Raised To My Hand; 11) Cool Disposition; 12) Who's Been
Foolin' You; 13) Rock Me Mama; 14) Keep Your Arms Around Me; 15) Dirt Road
Blues; 16) I'm In The Mood; 17) She's Gone; 18) Ethel Mae; 19) So Glad You're
Mine; 20) Boy Friend Blues; 21) No More Lovers; 22) You Got To Reap; 23)
Chicago Blues; 24) That's Your Red Wagon.
Arthur «Big Boy» Crudup — the respectable
layman will know this name only with the blessing of Elvis, and even then, only
if the respectable layman cares to look at the songwriting credits. Who knows,
perhaps without Arthur Crudup there would have been no Elvis as such; it is the
reworking of 'That's All Right Mama', after all, that truly caught the ear of
Sam Philips and jumpstarted the King's career.
The respectable layman also knows that at least
one more big Elvis hit, 'My Baby Left Me', is also credited to Crudup. The
respectable would, perhaps, want to ask how come they are the exact same song
with different sets of lyrics — and be surprised in learning that, throughout
his entire recording career, Arthur Crudup only wrote two songs, which,
for lack of a better terminology, we shall hereby call The Slow One and The
Fast One. From 1941 to 1954, he cut around a hundred sides that, at
best, constituted minor variations on these two pillars of his career, and, at
worst, only differed as to the lyrics. (Although even the lyrics get recycled. E.
g., the song 'That's All Right Mama' is not even present on this first volume,
but the immortal lines — 'that's all right, mama, any way you do' — can
already be found on two or three other cuts).
The fact that Crudup's records actually found
reasonable commercial success in the 1940s will seem all the more mind-boggling
once you realize just how simple the formula is. Arthur never was a great singer,
whining and wheezing his way through the songs as certainly does not
befit a true «Big Boy», and his guitar playing, particularly compared to such
blues greats of the day as Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red, or Lonnie Johnson, is
at best rudimentary. Historically speaking, he was one of the pioneers of the
electric guitar — along with the similarly minimalistic John Lee Hooker and the
far more technical T-Bone Walker — but his sound was really just amplified
acoustic, sometimes hard to tell from true unplugged; certainly this could not
be a determining factor.
We would hit closer to home if we suggested
that «Big Boy», in the world of popular blues-based entertainment, was one of
the earliest propagators of the Keep It Simple Stupid approach; his direct
heir was Jimmy Reed, and from then on — innumerable swarms of rockabilly
pioneers, who were all too happy to blow on the coals of rock and roll
excitement that lie at the heart of Crudup's Fast One, and sometimes on the
coals of straightahead macho minimalism that make up the bulk of Crudup's Slow
One.
Back in 1941, listeners were happy to have this
non-sophistication — yearning for a simple, accessible groove with a little
bit of raw animalism (too much raw animalism, as displayed by Mississippi gurus
like Charley Patton and Son House, would
be way too scary for the respectable layman). Today, we may want to listen to
this for altogether different reasons, combining historic curiosity with
strange spiritual/intellectual urges — such as the urge to judge Arthur's
grooves as turning non-sophistication into art, intentionally sacrificing
complexity and progress in favor of something utterly free and natural, even
though he himself certainly never saw it that way: he just kind of sort
of liked to play guitar, to the best of his ability, and must have been deeply
and profoundly shocked to find these records selling.
On a minor side note, he does sound a
little bit like Robert Johnson from time to time — similar «whining» style,
similar simplistic guitar accompaniment (although, in Johnson's case, it was deceptively
simplistic) — and it may be so that people bought his records through some odd
association. Perhaps, somehow, he symbolized that creepy Delta magnetism
better than anybody else in some listeners' eyes and ears. Perhaps not.
Discussing the actual titles would be
completely useless. 'Rock Me Mama' is the best known one ('rock me mama — one
time — before I go' is, after all, a classic line), and 'So Glad You're Mine'
is another Slow One that Elvis put his mark on a decade later. Only about five
or six of these 24 numbers are Fast Ones; in the early 1940s, that kind of
«blues-boogie» was still a novelty compared to the more traditional slow
12-bar form, so if you are more interested in Crudup as the pioneer of rock
and roll, skip to the next volume.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 2 (1946-1949)
1) Crudup's After Hours; 2) I
Want My Lovin'; 3) That's All Right; 4) I Don't Know It; 5) Cry Your Blues
Away; 6) Crudup's Vicksburg Blues; 7) Gonna Be Some Changes Made; 8) Train Fare
Blues; 9) Katie Mae; 10) Hey Mama, Everything's All Right; 11) Hoodoo Lady Blues;
12) Lonesome World To Me; 13) Roberta Blues; 14) Just Like A Spider; 15) Some
Day; 16) That's Why I'm Lonesome; 17) Tired Of Worry; 18) Dust My Broom; 19)
Hand Me Down My Walking Cane; 20) Shout Sister Shout; 21) Come Back Baby; 22)
You Know That I Love You.
If there is one change from «Big Boy»'s early
1940s to late 1940s style, it is a drastic shift of the proportional rate of
the Slow One to the Fast One. Crudup's soul may have been more in the Slow One,
but the real money was coming in on the Fast One; thus, out of the 22 songs on
this album, 10 are the Fast One and 12 are the Slow One, whereas on the first
volume the Fast One first appeared in the guise of 'Mean Old Frisco Blues' and
only gained its positions very gradually.
This is the period during which 'That's All
Right (Mama)' was recorded — but in the context of the album, it is not even
the most energetic incarnation of the Fast One; personally, I would rather vote
for 'I Want My Lovin', the exact same tune, but with some very nifty jazz drumming
driving Arthur to play and sing it with a tad more wildness. Of course, these
are truly microscopical differences we are speaking about, but what else is
there to speak about when you deal with an artist who is not above re-recording
the same 12-bar blues as 'Ethel Mae' the first time and then 'Katie Mae' the
second time around?
Pretty much the only Fast One here that is not
'That's All Right' is 'Shout Sister Shout', a fun piece of Big Joe Turner-ish
jump blues; and pretty much the only Slow Ones of particular notice are his
interpretations of 'Dust My Broom' and 'Hand Me Down My Walking Cane', since it
is most likely his simplistic style of trilling that served as the inspiration
for Elmore James. (Do not quote me on that, though). The rest is the rest:
'Gonna Be Some Changes Made' is as deceiving a song title as I have ever come
across.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 3 (1949-1952)
1) Mercy Blues; 2) She's Just
Like Caldonia; 3) Mean Old Santa Fe; 4) Behind Closed Doors; 5) She Ain't
Nothin' But Trouble; 6) Oo-Wee Darling; 7) Anytime Is The Right Time; 8) My
Baby Left Me; 9) Nobody Wants Me; 10) Star Bootlegger; 11) Too Much
Competition; 12) Second Man Blues; 13) Pearly Lee; 14) Love Me Mama; 15) Never
No More; 16) Where Did You Stay Last Night?; 17) I'm Gonna Dig Myself A Hole;
18) I'm Gonna Dig Myself A Hole (alt. take); 19) Goin' Back To Georgia; 20) Mr.
So And So; 21) Do It If You Want To; 22) Keep On Drinkin'.
As the 1950s drew near, Big Boy finally decided
to vary the formula — if only a little bit. He got himself a new guitar sound,
explicitly more electrified and thick than before, learned a few extra chords
(or so it would seem), and even dared to tread on the previously untrodden turf
of a few giants. 'Anytime Is The Right Time', for instance, is a soft and sweet
blues ballad in the vein of Lonnie Johnson; and for 'Nobody Wants Me', he
assumes a plaintive lyrical tone that evokes the blues queens of the 1920s.
This is pretty much it, though. Except for
those two songs and tiny signs of evolution as a player (and the generally much
improved sound quality, but, what with the passing of time, this is to be
expected), everything else is still The Slow One and The Fast One; and The Fast
One is, once again, giving up its positions (the ratio on this volume is 13 : 8
in favor of The Slow One, not counting one alternate take), while The Slow One,
if that is even possible, becomes even more generic than before — out of the
13, at least seven or eight start out with the exact same ringing chords. Alas,
no «Guess That Melody» game for Arthur Crudup, I'm afraid.
Of course, this is also the volume that has 'My
Baby Left Me' on it, and it has pretty much the same atmospheric spirit — a
little dark, a little depressed, yet all very playful — that Elvis managed to
preserve with his cover. Which should not detract from realizing that it is
the exact same song as 'That's All Right (Mama)', or even that pretty much all
of its lyrics had already appeared on previous recordings of The Fast One,
usually in sizable chunks.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 4 (1952-1954)
1) Worried About You Baby; 2)
Late In The Evening; 3) Lookin' For My Baby; 4) Nelvina; 5) My Baby Boogies All
The Time; 6) I Wonder; 7) Baby I've Been Mistreated; 8) You Didn't Mean A Word;
9) Open Your Book; 10) Tears In My Eyes; 11) Tears In My Eyes (alternate take);
12) Gonna Find My Baby; 13) Make A Little Love; 14) I Love My Baby; 15) My Wife
And Women; 16) The War Is Over; 17) Fall On Your Knees And Pray; 18) If You
Ever Been To Georgia; 19) Help Me To Bear This Heavy Load; 20) I Love You; 21)
She's Got No Hair; 22) Looka There, She's Got No Hair; 23) I Love Her Just The
Same.
The last Crudup volume in the Document series
covers two and a half more years in his career before he went into semi-retirement,
supposedly out of disgust with the record labels cheating him out of
hard-earned cash (frankly speaking, it is possible to understand the record
labels — how many times over and over again can you pay an artist for recording
the exact same song?). The catalyst might have actually been Elvis' recording
of 'That's Alright (Mama)', for which Big Boy never got any royalties — but
then he didn't really write it, either.
Anyway, this is probably the most
«full-sounding» Crudup album out there, as he essays to diversify his act by
trying on different melodies and instrumentation. The sessions that cover the
stretch from 'My Baby Boogies All The Time' to 'Make A Little Love' add an
aggressive harmonica player, and the whole shenanigan occasionally resembles a
weaker version of Son House's voodoo ritual. Then, starting with 'I Love My
Baby', the harmonica is either replaced or supported by sax, and some of the
tracks start sounding as if they want to capture the light groove of Atlantic
R'n'B — including perhaps the oddest song in the Crudup catalog, the comic romp
of 'Looka There, She's Got No Hair' (present here in two versions, one light,
with brass and harmonica and whiny clownish singing, one dark, with grittier
electric guitar, no brass, and a much more growly performance).
None of this helped make Arthur a big star once
again — in the blues world, people were hungry for edgier atmosphere (Muddy) or
blistering guitar playing (Elmore), and in the world of flashy entertainment,
early rock'n'roll was replacing jump blues, and «Big Boy», unfortunately, was
not nearly as big as to be able to recast himself in any of these moulds.
Little innocent tricks, like putting out a song called 'The War Is Over' as a
present to Korean veterans, did not help either. So it is no big surprise that
the Document series stops at 1954 — there was no place for Arthur Crudup in the
musical world of 1955. And, despite all the attempts at change, this is
probably the least essential chapter in the man's history.
MEAN OL' FRISCO (1962)
1) Mean Ol' Frisco; 2) I'm In
The Mood; 3) That's All Right; 4) Standin' At My Window; 5) Angel Child; 6)
Katie Mae; 7) Look On Yonder Wall; 8) Dig Myself A Hole; 9) If I Get Lucky; 10)
Death Valley Blues; 11) I Love Her Just The Same; 12) Angel Child; 13) Rock Me
Mama; 14) Ethel Mae; 15) My Mama Don't Allow Me.
Fire Records was a small independent
black-owned label, set up in 1959 with the purpose of holding up black artists
— either old, struggling ones, or new, inexperienced ones — against the seas of
troubles. Among the old, struggling ones, they happened to pick up Arthur, and
Arthur responded to the pickup by faithfully re-recording a bunch of avatars
of the Slow One and a bunch of avatars of the Fast One.
The only reason to listen to Mean Ol' Frisco
is, for those who really like «Big Boy» for his art rather than historic
importance, the fact that he sounds pretty much the same as usual, but the production
values are, naturally, much higher and the cracks and hisses are eliminated, so
that one can assess and enjoy his blatantly poor guitar playing with no
obstacles in sight. To be fair, it is a little different; in fact, he seems to
have picked up a few more chords during the first decade of retirement — but
certainly not enough to catch up on his superiors, nor even enough to make the
Slow One and the Fast One significantly different from what they used to be.
LOOK ON YONDER'S WALL (1969)
1) Look On Yonder's Wall; 2)
Questionnaire Blues; 3) Keep Your Hands Off That Woman; 4) That's All Right; 5)
Rock Me Mama; 6) Katie Mae; 7) Dust My Broom; 8) Landlord Blues; 9) Coal Black
Mare; 10) Life Is Just A Gamble; 11) Walk Out On My Road; 12) I'm All Alone;
13) You'll Be Old Before Your Time; 14) Ramblin' Blues; 15) When I Lost My Baby.
Finally, for those who would want to check out
the utterly modernized, up-to-date Big Boy, there is this disc, assembled from
Arthur's late Sixties — I'm guessing around 1967-69 — sessions for Delmark
Records. Willie Dixon, who did accompany Arthur on at least some of his late
Sixties sessions, is apparently not present — two different bass players, one
of which I do not know, and the other one of which is Ransom Knowling, Arthur's
original bass player for 'That's All Right', are listed among the credits — and
there is also regularly a second guitarist, assuming all the «melodic» duties
as Big Boy simply slices up the growling rhythm chords. This is a nice change,
but the second guitarist is no Elmore James or Albert King, so it does not
affect the situation much.
The only bit of variety is that some of the songs are accompanied by a little studio banter, letting you know that Big Boy's singing style did not vary all that much from his talking one. Otherwise, it just makes up for the finest sounding, but least intriguing version of the Crudup Groove for those who do not like the vibe of the late 1940s hollow-body electric (or, more properly, «electrified») guitar. Nothing else. Soon afterwards, he would once again stop recording, and soon after that, he would die, as that was pretty much the last productive option to choose. But he lived a good life, and left behind two good records — The Slow One and The Fast One. That is, after all, two good records more than most artists in this world have ever produced.
SINGIN' THE BLUES (1956)
1) Please Love Me; 2) You
Upset Me Baby; 3) Everyday (I Have The Blues); 4) Bad Luck; 5) Three O'Clock
Blues; 6) Blind Love; 7) Woke Up This Morning; 8) You Know I Love You; 9) Sweet
Little Angel; 10) Ten Long Years; 11) Did You Ever Love A Woman; 12) Crying
Won't Help You.
B. B. King's singles on RPM records started
flowing as early as 1949, but most of his career was LP-oriented, and so it
makes sense to choose, as our point of departure, this 1956 collection that
puts together the majority of his best singles from 1951 to 1955 (a more
comprehensive overview of the early years can probably be found on some later
anthologies, but, as far as I am able to tell, there is no single collection
that puts together all of his early material).
Many of these songs were huge hits on the blues
and R&B charts — but, for some reason, missed attracting white audiences,
far more enthralled with the likes of Muddy Waters and Elmore James at the
time. Look up the biographies of blues/R&B-enthralled British Invaders, for
instance, and you will rarely see B. B. mentioned as an influence, except,
perhaps, by just a few oddjobs like Eric Clapton, and only in retrospect.
Reason? Too clean.
Already from the get-go, B. B. positioned
himself as the king of «Blues-de-Luxe»: respectable playing for respectable
gentlemen. Take a look at the album cover: with his big fat Gibson, pin-striped
suit and tie, he looks like the black equivalent of Bill Haley. The same
applies to music: smooth, mid-tempo, backed by professional jazz musicians with
big brassy arrangements. And, to make matters worse, the guy puts as much
emphasis on his singing as he does on his playing — the most tasteless
thing in blues, ever! But then, what do you really want from a guy one of whose
primary idols in life has been Frank Sinatra?
All of this easily explains why B. B. did not
become a household name among white audiences until the late Sixties and particularly
the early Seventies. It also explains why these early singles are not really
the «milestones» they are sometimes pronounced to be. For blues lovers, 'Every
Day I Have The Blues' is one of the cornerstones of the genre, but definitely not
because of this original version of King's, a whopping 2:49 in length and only
featuring a brief, minimalistic solo — he had to popularize it, and a dozen
other big hits, in a live context to achieve this result, and he had to wait at
least ten more years for it.
Singin' The Blues is no more of a milestone in the evolution of
electric blues than contemporary records by the other King (Albert) — or, for
that matter, earlier records by T-Bone Walker. Most of the time, B. B. plays
relatively standard, predictable licks that do not differ all that much from
the regular techniques of the epoch; more importantly, the compact form of the
45"-tailored ditty does not allow him the slightest opportunity to stretch
out, improvise, or develop a theme.
If there is one reason to listen to
these singles at all, it is the singing. Unquestionably, at this point B. B.
King was the most vocally-endowed blues performer in the business (and would
remain so until the emergence of a strong competitor in Freddie King), and his
manner of phrasing and vocalizing owes much more to urban semi-crooners like
Leroy Carr and Lonnie Johnson, not to mention white lounge performers (to whom
the man must have lent quite a serious ear), than to hoarse growlers from the
Delta. This makes it hard to associate his music with the devil, who, as I have
heard, is gravely allergic to falsetto, and prefers to make serious deals with
the likes of John Lee Hooker. But, when dealing with B. B. King, it is wise to
remember that blues had been alternately serving as a genre of lounge
entertainment since the day it was born, and to try and approach him from the
same way one would approach Sinatra or Neil Diamond: prima facie a
respectable entertainer who will try to stir up — gracefully and cautiously to
some, blandly and boringly to others — the human parts of your soul, not
the animal parts.
In fact, I think I «got» this record — and B.
B.'s studio style in general — when I thought of it as sort of a Clyde
McPhatter album with the doo-wop harmonies and strings replaced by searing
electric guitar. Many people, I think, share this dream with me: to hear Clyde
McPhatter with an atmosphere of grit inside of sap. Well, you need not look
further than the original versions of 'Three O'Clock Blues' or 'Did You Ever
Love A Woman' to get what you want. Thumbs up;
this may be «seminal» material indeed — but not for the reasons it is
usually proclaimed as such.
THE BLUES (1958)
1) Why Does Everything Happen
To Me; 2) Ruby Lee; 3) When My Heart Beats Like A Hammer; 4) Past Day; 5)
Boogie Woogie Woman; 6) Early Every Morning; 7) I Want To Get Married; 8) That
Ain't The Way To Do It; 9) Troubles, Troubles, Troubles; 10) Don't You Want A
Man Like Me; 11) You Know I Go For You; 12) What Can I Do?.
Singin' The Blues is at least historically important in that it
collects B. B.'s hit singles from an entire half-decade; by the time it became
necessary to issue a follow-up, with LPs slowly, but steadily taking on as a
medium at least as important as the 45", the golden vaults were exhausted,
and so, this and the following several LPs are extremely uneven on the
commercial scale.
On the other hand, The Blues is where
King truly begins to demonstrate traces of stylistic versatility and show how
easily he can adapt himself to different times. If the debut LP was mostly limited
to «hardcore blues» and «blues ballads», here we have ourselves some bossa nova
('Ruby Lee', 'Don't You Want A Man Like Me'), some stompin' boogie ('Boogie
Woogie Woman', 'That Ain't The Way To Do It'), and even a timid attempt at a
rawer rockabilly sound ('Early Every Morning').
It is quite transparent that B. B. is trying to
toughen up his image: there are practically no attempts at crooning, and most
of the «soul» attitude is sacrificed in order to make space for more
rock'n'roll. However, just like before, the songs are simply way too short, and
have been cut way too quickly, for any of this material to acquire some
individuality, and, from the first track to the last, it merely plays as
acceptable background music with stylish (for their time) guitar licks.
The only «classic» hit here was 'When My Heart
Beats Like A Hammer', which, in its studio version, is simply one more indistinguishable
example of blues-de-luxe (slow tempo, brass section, soulful vocals,
recognizable soloing, B. B. had like a million of these songs out back in those
days); seek out various live versions to explore its true potential. The
«sleeper» is 'Early Every Morning', which does have one of the best examples of
King's fast playing on record (much more fluent and complex than Chuck Berry's,
but also, predictably, less ass-kicking).
B. B. KING WAILS (1959)
1) Sweet Thing; 2) I've Got
Papers On You, Baby; 3) Tomorrow Is Another Day; 4) Come By Here; 5) The Fool;
6) I Love You So; 7) The Woman I Love; 8) We Can't Make It; 9) Treat Me Right;
10) Time To Say Goodbye.
He wails all right, but he does not play all
that much. Credited to «B. B. King And His Orchestra», the record is an even
more clearly pronounced effort to promote B. B. as a lounge entertainer,
downplaying his guitar skills and concentrating on the power of his voice.
There are, in fact, several tracks on here where he doesn't produce a single
lick — such as the ridiculous 'Come By Here', a «family arrangement» of
'Kumbaya' with new (and even sillier) lyrics, or the generic doo-wop of 'I Love
You So'.
This cannot work, and it does not work. No one
should doubt the powers of B. B. King as a blues singer — always was one of the
absolute best out there — but his voice only works to its fullest when he gives
it the proper competition from the guitar. Competing with crooners like Clyde
McPhatter, or even comparably bulky R'n'B-ers like Big Joe Turner, is,
however, an entirely useless thing, and whoever took the decision of drowning
King's guitar in orchestral arrangements must have had only recently switched
to working in the music industry from an earplug factory.
About half of this surprisingly short album
(ten tracks only) is still vintage B. B., with some fiery playing on tracks
like 'The Woman I Love' and 'Treat Me Right', but, on the other hand, these are
tracks that add little, if anything, to the stylistics already displayed on the
previous two albums. 'The Fool' and 'Time To Say Goodbye' were the singles, but
neither is a classic; 'The Fool' is also one of those guitarless tracks that should
have been left to crooners.
The recent CD reissue of the album is arguably
a better proposition than the original, due to the inclusion of a few bonus
tracks that have B. B. playing not with his own orchestra, but with
Count Basie and Tommy Dorsey instead; the Count Basie version of 'Everyday I
Have The Blues', in particular, is probably a must-hear for fans of both
artists. Which does not save the record itself from a disappointed thumbs down, regardless.
B. B. KING SINGS SPIRITUALS (1959)
1) Precious Lord; 2) Save A
Seat For Me; 3) Ole Time Religion; 4) Swing Low Sweet Chariot; 5) Servant's
Prayer; 6) Jesus Gave Me Water; 7) I Never Heard A Man; 8) Army Of The Lord; 9)
I Am Willing To Run All The Way; 10) I'm Working On The Building.
Far be it from us to say that B. B. King is a
poor singer — he has a nice, endearing, sometimes almost silky tone that never
grates or annoys.
Further be it from us to say that B. B. King is
not a spiritually sensible man — regardless of how much money he has made and
how much of it he has not given away to the poor, there is little reason to
doubt his sincere faith in the Lord (who has, among other things, provided him
with all that money).
Still further be it from us to say that B. B.
King has no right, or reason, or business recording an entire album of gospel
tunes if he feels like it — especially considering that, every once in a while,
everyone deserves at least a brief change from the 12-bar mold, and going into
gospel is nowhere near as cringeworthy as, say, going into crooning.
And be it as furthest of the furthest from us
as possible to say that B. B. King Sings Spirituals is a proverbially bad
album. If you have not suffered priest abuse, be it Catholic or Protestant; if
you have no 19th century-style racial prejudices; and if you can stand a little
musical take on «ol' time religion» propelled by good singing and good organ
playing, the record cannot be put down on its own merits.
None of which, however, prevents me from
stating the obvious: I cannot think of a reason why anyone would want to hear,
much less own, a B. B. King album with no guitar on it whatsoever. B. B.
King is a guitar player, period. If he does not want to play his guitar, let
him not play his guitar in front of his parents, his children, his close
friends, or his mirror. In this life, B. B. King has one and only one social
purpose (that matters, anyway), and that is playing his guitar. I can
understand that he did not want to be pigeonholed. I can do nothing about it —
I want to pigeonhole him, and I will pigeonhole him. Call me
Dubyah if you will — but this is a thumbs down.
THE GREAT B. B. KING (1960)
1) Sweet Sixteen; 2) (I'm
Gonna) Quit You Baby; 3) I Was Blind; 4) What Can I Do; 5) Someday Baby; 6)
Sneakin' Around; 7) I Had A Woman; 8) Be Careful With A Fool; 9) Whole Lot Of
Lovin'; 10) Days Of Old.
Back to the blues at least, even if, like most
other albums from that period, this is another mish-mash of all kinds of
different tracks from all kinds of different years. The selection had been made
around exactly one new hit: B. B.'s rendition of 'Sweet Sixteen', originally
made popular by Big Joe Turner on Atlantic Records.
Back in 1960, B. B. was no Big Joe when it came
to solid body mass (he would catch up pretty soon, though), but, after singing
all these spirituals, he was in greater vocal shape than ever, and for this
little bit of soap drama, he gives Big Joe quite a run for his money. The only
solo on this blues rant takes place at the beginning, and the whole piece runs for
over six minutes, covering both sides of the single — but the emphasis is
really on the interplay between B. B.'s vocals and the weep and wail of the
guitar. Arguably, 'Sweet Sixteen' is the first truly classic B. B. studio recording
— live, like most other tunes, it would simply become a foundation for
passionate instrumental blueswailing, but the studio original has its own
modest charm.
The rest of the tracks are mostly blues,
although diluted by occasional shades of doo-wop-tinged gospel ('I Was Blind'),
doo-wop-tinged lounge entertainment ('Sneakin' Around'), and boogie-woogie
('Days Of Old'). The blues, too, is diversified: on 'Whole Lot Of Lovin', for
instance, B. B. tries out some Elmore James (i. e. goes for the 'Dust My Broom'
riff), and slow and mid-tempos alternate frequently enough to make one at least
notice the in-between song breaks. Plus, as intuitive as it may sound, he
seems to go for sharper, crisper tones, rougher cut-offs and shriller notes,
toughening it up for a more demanding audience, perhaps? (Not that I have any
idea of the absolute chronology of any of those recordings).
If Singin' The Blues was important for
being his first, then The Great B. B. King is important for bringing the
man back from the mischievous temptation of becoming a crooner or a gospel
performer, kicking back into the blues idiom with a vengeance. Thumbs up.
MY KIND OF BLUES (1960)
1) You Done Lost Your Good
Thing Now; 2) Mr. Pawn Broker; 3) Understand; 4) Someday Baby; 5) Driving
Wheel; 6) Walking Dr. Bill; 7) My Own Fault, Darling; 8) Cat Fish Blues; 9)
Hold That Train; 10) Please Set A Date.
Somewhat of a turning point on B. B.'s personal
highway; according to his own memory (which has little choice but to be
trusted, given an utter lack of independent sources), this was his first album
recorded as a proper album — over one single recording session with one single
small backing band — and in full accordance with his own vision of the blues. My
Kind Of Blues indeed: the title is far more meaningful in this instance
than all the Great B. B. Kings in the world.
It is not hard to believe the story. If you
want to hear a fresh, young, not-yet-overweight B. B. King sing and play stark
blues — no lounge entertainment, no spirituals, no experimentation with teenage
music styles etc. — My Kind Of Blues is the obvious choice. There
is no single particular standout; technically, the «heavy» bit is the opening
number, 'You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now', which takes five minutes of
intense build-up to deliver its point, but it is hardly any more jaw-dropping
than the rest of the record.
Which is hardly jaw-dropping at all, to tell
the truth, but merely one of those basic delights which make the enlightened
blues fan happy. All 12-bar, all formula-worshipping, but with B. B. acting in
the role of B. B. to fill in the function variable, My Kind Of Blues is
unassailable as long as we agree that B. B.'s guitar playing style itself is
unassailable. Because, finally, he is given plenty of room to express himself,
unconfined to the limitations of the 2:30 single and unhampered by any fat
brass section.
Come to think of it, the first thirty seconds
of 'You Done Lost...' may almost be announcing the start of a new era for the
electric guitar — that of the loud, pompous, soulful blues guitar introduction,
abused by millions since then but, arguably, never truly surpassed. And
although none of the solos that King plays on this album are as flashy as the
ones he would soon be throwing around on stage, most of them deserve to be
listened to with special attention. Sometimes he starts playing against the
melody. Sometimes he toys around with the volume, puncturing the value of short
bits of silence within long bits of loudness. All of the time he is
being flawless — not a single mistake, not a single clumsy transition, and all
this within lengthy series of relatively complex licks that explore all the
possibilities offered to them by the limited time frame.
All of this has been replicated and surpassed
many times since 1960, so that today My Kind Of Blues can be revered
only for its historical importance. But enjoyed it can be purely for
itself. Unquestionably a thumbs up.
KING OF THE BLUES (1960)
1) I've Got A Right To Love My
Baby; 2) What Way To Go; 3) Long Nights; 4) Feel Like A Million; 5) I'll
Survive; 6) Good Man Gone Bad; 7) If I Lost You; 8) You're On The Top; 9)
Partin' Time; 10) I'm King.
It is almost impossible to determine whether King
Of The Blues was released before or after My Kind Of Blues, but, in
the long run, it does not make much difference: all through the decade, «real»
albums like the latter continued to be released side by side with pseudo-albums
that continued to combine new tracks, old tracks, hardcore blues, and usually
lame excursions into other genres. At least King Of The Blues mostly
sticks to hardcore; but the big brass sound is back, and the level of
inspiration falls down once again.
Like The Great B. B. King, this is a
single-supporting LP, except the hit single is nowhere near as epochal as
'Sweet Sixteen': it is 'Got A Right To Love My Baby', announced by thick
pompous fanfares and placing B. B. in some remote corner so that his voice
echoes all over the studio — a regular gimmick on this record, supposed to add
explicit stateliness — perhaps, even Godliness — to a personality that'd be
much better off radiating them implicitly. Truthfully, the song is no better
and no worse than the other nine cuts of this blues-de-luxe, most of which are
structured around a big brass riff, although B. B. faithfully soloes on every
track.
One could speculate that the whole idea was to
press down the «king, king, king» image on the audiences, given the diminishing
popularity of blues artists, and that the album title, the ever-increasing
pompousness of the delivery, and the inclusion of a track specifically called
'I'm King' all intended to reinstate the people's belief in B. B. But with the
emergence of another King — Freddie — that same year, with the big smash of
'Have You Ever Loved A Woman', far more searing, brutal, and immediate than all
of King Of The Blues put together, the idea was doomed. «Mainstreamers»
went for totally safe white crooners, and «alternativers» rather went for
Freddie, Muddy, and Elmore. Efforts like these could only plop through the
cracks.
Of course, in retrospect, all of this is nice
and perfectly listenable as tasteful background music (muzak). But in its
context, King Of The Blues kinda sucks — like most albums that
contain the word 'King' and actually intend to mean it. To paraphrase a
semi-fictional Roman, "Listen, king of the blues — where is your
kingdom?.."
BLUES FOR ME (1961)
1) Bad Case Of Love; 2) Get
Out Of Here; 3) Bad Luck Soul; 4) Shut Your Mouth; 5) Baby, Look At You; 6)
You're Breaking My Heart; 7) My Reward; 8) Don't Cry Anymore; 9) Blues For Me;
10) Just Like A Woman.
B. B. King goes... twisting, at least on
the opening number, 'Bad Case Of Love'; for any similar artist with a similar
gesture today, we'd call this yet another exercise in self-prostituting, but
for B. B. King, this was, no doubt, just another brave attempt to break down
the walls between genres. He twists pretty damn good, too; I guess his moves
are a little rustier than Chubby Checker's, but he can sure play the guitar a
whole lot better.
But seriously, Blues For Me is just
another by-the-book record that only distinguishes itself in two ways from its
predecessor. The bad way is that it brings back the syrupy orchestrated ballads
('My Reward'). The good way is that there are quite a few fast numbers, and
'Bad Case Of Love' — the lead single — is actually the least surprising of
them, because B. B. also tries out grittier, Chuck Berry-style rock'n'roll,
replete with true Berry-style licks and rollicking Johnny Johnson-style piano
('Just Like A Woman'), and even — dare I say it? — Ventures-style surf-rock
(the totally mismatchingly named title track).
As for pure guitar power, the real highlight is
probably 'You're Breaking My Heart', if only because it is graciously given a
weighty four minutes to properly unwind. Not that it makes a lot of difference
or anything. Overall, just another enjoyable, but completely predictable page
in the man's conservative almanac.
BLUES IN MY HEART (1962)
1) You're Gonna Miss Me; 2)
Got 'Em Bad; 3) Troubles Don't Last; 4) Your Letter; 5) I Can't Explain; 6) The
Wrong Road; 7) I Need You Baby; 8) So Many Roads; 9) Down Hearted; 10) Strange
Things.
How do you tell a corporate profanation of the
art of B. B. King from a shackle-free celebration of the art of B. B. King?
Simple. If all the ballads, rumbas, and twists make you miss the blues, you're
in for the whoring. If, on the contrary, all the blues makes you miss the
rumbas and twists, you know you're in for the real stuff.
At this particular session, there really was
quite a big deal of blues in B. B.'s heart. In fact, there is so much blues in
his heart, it ends up sharing the fate of too much fat in the broth of the proverbial
greedy innkeeper who was promised to be paid by the spot. Meaning, of course, that
all of the songs sound so much the same, it takes a significant attention span
to notice the breaks.
It must have been a fun session, but with the
exact same mid-tempo 12-bar structure all over the place, there is hardly an
album that can make a worse case against the limitations of the blues. 'Down
Hearted', a.k.a. 'How Blue Can You Get', is taken at a wee bit slower tempo and
sounds a little bit more personal ('I gave you seven children, and now you
wanna give 'em back' is as classic as a blues line can get), which is probably
why it got a single release, but, as far as I know, it was not a big hit
anyway. The rest are all interchangeable.
On the positive side, if you survive one intent
listen to this, King's ensuing output will look like the epitome of diversity
in comparison — and so, by the way, will almost every other electric blues
album released ever since. This is, like, the utmost in hardcore 12-bar; and I
used to think Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac could be boring. You live, you learn.
EASY LISTENING BLUES (1962)
1) Easy Listening Blues; 2)
Blues For Me; 3) Night Long; 4) Confessin'; 5) Don't Touch; 6) Slow Walk; 7)
Walking; 8) Hully Gully; 9) Shoutin' The Blues; 10) Rambler.
Very easy listening blues. So easy, in fact, that you do not even have to
stress out your aural nerves responsible for picking up and transmitting the
human voice — there is none. After a whole album of non-playing B. B. King (Spirituals),
Crown Records have invented yet another way to market the hypermarketable: a whole
album of non-singing B. B. King.
It does, however, serve one important purpose:
make one understand how integral King's vocals are to his sound. When we pay
for the man, we pay for the pair; anything less than that and you are ripped
off mercilessly. The playing on these ten tracks is no better and no worse than
elsewhere — perhaps even a wee bit better than last time around, since, once
again, you get diversity: regular mid-tempo 12-bar stuff interspersed with a
little boogie, a little rumba, and a little twist. But without the vocals, none
of the songs have any actual sense.
Of course, Easy Listening is supposed to
mean «stuff you put on while doing housework, so that all the bypassers learn
you have real good taste». But here is the shameful secret: I thought pretty
much all of B. B. King's albums from the Crown era (and quite a few from
later periods) are «easy listening», and I never expected the stakes were only
waiting to be lowered. Am I wrong? Are we supposed to listen to the previous
ten albums as if they had lots of deep, penetrating stuff to tell us? I do not
really buy it. B. B. King's primary function is entertainment, and this album
is low-quality entertainment because it deprives us of a deserved half of it. Thumbs down.
B. B. KING (1963)
1) Going Home; 2) The Letter;
3) You Never Know; 4) Please Remember Me; 5) Come Back Baby; 6) You Won't
Listen; 7) Sundown; 8) You Shouldn't Have Left; 9) House Rocker/Boogie Rock;
10) Shake Yours.
Sometime in late 1962 or early 1963, B. B. King
switched record labels, relocating from RPM to ABC; in the long run, this
turned out to be a crucial move for his career, but at the moment it just
seemed like exchanging three decent letters of the alphabet for three other
ones (although symbolically placed at the top of the alphabet).
Consequently, some sources claim that B. B. King, another in a series
of album titles so absolutely stunning in their inexhaustible creativity, was
released on the RPM label already after the man's departure, consisting of a
mish-mash of tracks recorded at various sessions spanning from 1957 to 1963.
On the surface, this does not make that much
difference considering that most B. B. King albums for RPM were just
like that. But with these ten songs, the mix-up is arguably felt sharper than
ever, because the sound quality wobbles quite drastically from track to track,
indicating that the studio was really scraping out the bottom of the bottom.
Surprisingly, if we disregard the lack of technical coherence, B. B. King
has a pretty good pacing and diversity to it: fast blues, slow blues, and
ballads alternate quite intelligently, and King's playing is no less incendiary
than we already know it, so, despite the understandable lack of hits, the album
gives you a pretty good overview of B. B.'s strong sides, and cleverly hides
most of the weak ones.
The highlight is 'Going Home', an early example
of tight, biting blues-rock, in fact, one of the first signs that B. B. King
might be capable of adapting to the rougher, brutal times lying straight ahead
(although the brass backing still manages to Vegasify the proceedings). As the
album opener, it gives an impression of looking into the future, which then
slowly mutates into the impression of not forgetting the past: at the end of
the album, 'Shake Yours' is a completely traditional jump blues number, a
little bit of shy guitar drowned in a sea of shouting and ear-bursting trombone
and trumpet explosions in Wynonie Harris style.
Of course, one should not overestimate the
diversity of an album where four slow blues tracks (three of them — in a row)
start off with the exact same chord sequence, but, still, in the context of
King's overall output for RPM/Crown, B. B. King is as good a way to say
good-bye as it was possible. And, just to keep up the good old tradition, note
that later on it was occasionally re-released under the much more memorable
title The Soul Of B. B. King.
MR. BLUES (1963)
1) Young Dreamers; 2) By
Myself; 3) Chains Of Love; 4) A Mother's Love; 5) Blues At Midnight; 6)
Sneakin' Around; 7) On My Road Of Honor; 8) Tomorrow Night; 9) My Baby's Comin'
Home; 10) Guess Who; 11) You Ask Me; 12) I'm Gonna Sit In 'Til You Give In.
Six of one, half dozen of another; what is the
deep sense of changing labels if you keep doing the same old shit? On most of his
first album for ABC Records, «Mr. Blues» does not even pick up the guitar;
instead, once again they try to market him as a soulful crooner, meaning that
the fans will be forced to sit through the orchestrated garbage of 'Young
Dreamers' and 'A Mother's Love' in order to get to the scraps of 'Blues At
Midnight', the only real blues number on the record with a strong guitar
solo (and, ironically, also King's best vocal performance).
If there is some sort of saving grace, it is a
feeling of diversity which, for the most part, had been lacking on the Crown
albums. One hardcore blues number, three or four rotten ballads, a couple
slow-paced R'n'B shouters, some boogie — for B. B.'s usual range this is quite
a kaleidoscope. And when he is not pulling an (already sold out) Lonnie Johnson
on 'Tomorrow Night', trying to outsweeten the sweetness of the strings, he is
pulling a much more effective Big Joe Turner on 'Chains Of Love' (a conscious
attempt at repeating the success of the near-identical 'Sweet Sixteen'), or
rocking his socks off on 'My Baby's Comin' Home', where the Maxwell Davis
Orchestra blends in with his guitar playing to near-perfection.
These are the good points — but it is evident
that they do not outweigh the bad ones, at the very least, there is nothing
whatsoever on Mr. Blues to suggest that King's future career would be so
radically different from his first decade of hits and misses. At the very
least, Mr. Blues shows quite clearly that his creative growth would owe
much more to changing expectations and shifting public tastes than to any
particularities in his record contract. In short, God bless the Sixties (which,
to make this point clear, had not yet begun in 1963).
LIVE AT THE REGAL (1965)
1) Every Day I Have The Blues;
2) Sweet Little Angel; 3) It's My Own Fault; 4) How Blue Can You Get?; 5)
Please Love Me; 6) You Upset Me Baby; 7) Worry, Worry; 8) Woke Up This Morning;
9) You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now; 10) Help The Poor.
Eventually, someone got it right: even if the
live album format was not nearly as obligatory a companion for a performing
artist in 1965 as it would be in just a few years, few people deserved a switch
to that format any more than the B. B. of the Kings. Unfortunately, Live At
The Regal's huge reputation has been causing an almost equally huge
backlash in recent years — what with most people falling for the «wanna know
what B. B. King sounds like? Try out Live At The Regal» trap, or, even
worse, the «wanna know what the blues is all about? How about getting Live
At The Regal?» travesty.
But it does not work that way. According to
hearsay, King himself never considered the final product to be all that great,
which is telling, coming from someone who quite obviously is his own biggest fan.
Listening to the Regal performance out of context is entirely useless;
for most people, it will merely sound like an adequate blues concert. And
reading all the rave-ups about how this is one of the most «fiery»,
«incendiary», «exciting», «involving» etc. performances of its time — come on
now, who do these guys think they're kidding? Jerry Lee Lewis' Live At The
Star Club — now that's excitement. Live At The Regal is
polite entertainment.
Still, even today, with those early days of
electric blues magic long concealed from us by the trash heaps of generic
12-bar hacks, all it takes to give Regal the appreciation it deserves is
to listen to the twelve or so studio LPs that B. B. had to put out in order to
gain the precious right to include a recording mike on stage. There, he was
cornered; on stage, he is unleashed, and as clichéd as this phrase may
sound, there is no better context in which to insert it. Playing whatever
he wants, however he wants to play it, and for as long as he
wants to play it (well, all right, in 1965 he still had himself some time
constraints), the man finally gets to show that there is so much more behind
the polished surface of his hit singles — enough to convince even fans of the
grimmer blues of Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker of his worthiness.
Some of the songs are played as
several-movements «blues suites», where all it takes is a slight change of key
in between bars to move from one type of wail to another; this may actually be
better than inserting all the usual breaks, because there is no pretense of
playing different songs, and the breaks, where they are present,
generally indicate the transition into a general sub-style, of which B. B. has
developed many: jump blues ('Every Day I Have The Blues'), boogie blues ('Please
Love Me'), rumba blues ('Woke Up This Morning'), and soul blues ('Help The
Poor').
Like every self-respecting entertainer, King
likes to address the crowds — most often, over a musical background from his
backing band — and his ad-libbed bits diversify the atmosphere, serving either
as thematic links in between numbers (e. g. the seamless transition from 'Sweet
Little Angel' to 'It's My Own Fault') or as justifications of the song's
existence (for 'How Blue Can You Get?', he says, "...I would like you to
pay attention to the lyrics, not so much to my singing or the band" —
right on the money, because the song is lyrically arresting).
The unquestionable centerpiece of the album
lies in the six and a half minutes of 'Worry, Worry', for the first time ever
giving us an extended blues solo — two minutes of subtle blueswailing that sets
the benchmark for so many things to come: this is not just generic
improvisation, but an attempt to «play human» with the guitar, alternating
bends, wobbles, stops, and starts in completely unpredictable and yet
completely melodic ways. (Not to mention one of B. B.'s most impressive
falsetto parts on record).
Understandably, Live At The Regal's
historical importance — this is, after all, one of the few albums that are
directly responsible for the birth of blues-rock as such — has forever overshadowed
its hands-down value (much like, I must add, that of James Brown's Live At
The Apollo, if it's all about barbecuing sacred cows). But then there is
also no better spot to locate, assess, digest, and enjoy a young,
rough-spirited, easy-going, eager to please, and, at the same time, not yet
corporally or spiritually overweight king of the blues than Live At The
Regal; even if it is no independent masterpiece, it is still a unique piece
of history and identity. A sacred cow, after all, does not become sacred for
nothing. Thumbs up.
BLUES IS KING (1967)
1) Introduction; 2) Waitin' On
You; 3) Introduction; 4) Gambler's Blues; 5) Tired Of Your Jive; 6) Night Life;
7) Buzz Me; 8) Don't Answer The Door; 9) Blind Love; 10) I Know What You're
Puttin' Down; 11) Baby Get Lost; 12) Gonna Keep On Loving You.
Quite a few fans consider this rough follow-up
to Live At The Regal as the superior experience, and they might just as
well be right. The only problem is, despite being a fully official album, Blues
Is King plays all the way through at solid bootleg quality — the sound is
awfully thin and sparse. You do get to hear all of the instruments, but you
hardly get to be overwhelmed by anything close to a coherent wall-of-sound.
Still, this is quite definitely a marking-time
record; where Live At The Regal finally showed us the proper way to
enjoy B. B. King's music, Blues Is King is the first firm proof of his
ability to make the transition from one musical era into another without losing
any of his relevancy or public appeal. Recorded in late 1966, at a time when
white guitar heroes like Beck and Clapton had already started to revolutionize
the role of their instrument in the world of pop music, and when the world was
one step away from Jimi's stage appearance, Blues Is King shows that B.
B. was firmly hip to the times, willing to get louder, shriller, and even a
little dirtier to keep up with all the young British whippersnappers.
The singing is as solid as always, but the spotlight
is 100% on «Lucille», which even gets its own introduction in the spoken
credits section; most of the tracks feature mid-size extended solos that keep
getting more and more complex and inventive and intense and «talkative». No
single track stands out — curiously, the set list does not include any of his
bigger hits — and there are no pompous blues medleys to underscore the «regal»
status of the man, but everything is as sweaty/gritty as it could possibly get
at the time, and the saxophone/organ backing is no slouch, either (especially
awesome are the sax/guitar duets such as during the coda to 'Buzz Me').
Actually, the set list is somewhat more
monotonous than on Regal: slow blues and fast blues is all you get to
hear, so, coupled with the tinny sound, this may not register at the top range
of King's live albums. But for the diehard fan, this may be the one
particular B. B. King experience to trump all the others: stark, staunch,
uncompromising, loud, and who cares about the sound quality? the dirtier it is,
the higher the chance it'll be your own personal love affair with the LP and
no-fuckin'-body other's. Thumbs up, in
support of this elitist idea.
BLUES ON TOP OF BLUES (1968)
1) Heartbreaker; 2) Losing
Faith In You; 3) Dance With Me; 4) That's Wrong Little Mama; 5) Having My Say;
6) I'm Not Wanted Anymore; 7) Worried Dream; 8) Paying The Cost To Be The Boss;
9) Until I Found You; 10) I'm Gonna Do What They Do To Me; 11) Raining In My
Heart; 12) Now That You've Lost Me.
At first, this seems decent; at the very least,
much better than King's unhappy debut for ABC five years earlier (and, odd as
it is, only his third studio album in five years altogether; Confessin' The
Blues from 1967 was the second one, but it is almost impossible to find
these days, and not very relevant either, since it was one of those lame
attempts to get B. B. by on the strength of his voice alone, replacing Lucille
with horns and strings).
The problem is, without particularly serious concentration
on the numbers, I caught myself realizing that I did not notice that much
guitar on this record, either. All the songs feature big band arrangements, led
by Johnny Pate, and for each of these numbers that rarely go over three minutes,
King gets lots of singing, but only a few bars of soloing. When you do get to
hear the notes, they are as crisp as it gets, showcasing his polished and
improved sound from the late Sixties, but you will not get the chance too
often.
The material, as expected, veers between
straightforward 12-bar and explorations in closely connected territory, e. g.
Lonnie Johnson-style balladry ('Losing Faith In You') and danceable blues-rock
('That's Wrong Little Mama', guessable as a response to 'That's Alright Mama').
The lead single was 'Paying The Cost To Be The Boss', probably the correct
choice since it hits the harshest (without adding much that we did not know
about the man, of course). The second single was 'I'm Gonna Do What They Do To
Me', probably the correct choice since it hits the second harshest (without
adding much that we did not know about 'Paying The Cost To Be The Boss').
In its historical context, however, the album
sounds hopelessly dated even by the standards of 1968. The record is made in
strict accordance with the same old rules: short songs, big horns, modest
solos, a complete lack of exploration. Its only saving grace is the clean,
modern-sounding production, but if you listen to blues for clarity of sound
rather than force of expression, you'd better stick to the likes of Robert
Cray.
LUCILLE (1968)
1) Lucille; 2) You Move Me So;
3) Country Girl; 4) No Money, No Luck; 5) I Need Your Love; 6) Rainin' All The
Time; 7) I'm With You; 8) Stop Putting The Hurt On Me; 9) Watch Yourself.
Somehow, in between all the mediocre releases
and excessive concentration on the live spirit and the fact that, in one short
year, the man would make the final mighty crossover with 'The Thrill Is Gone',
we all missed the simple truth: Lucille, from (late?) 1968, is the first
consistently great studio album to bear B. B. King's name on it.
And his guitar's, too, for that matter.
It may not become your favourite, or mine, or
the average blues lover's, but it is the first album on which the King is
truly, straightforwardly, unequivocally doing the King's thing: not just
playing the blues, but also loving it, near-physically, without having to
experience coitus interruptus every two minutes. It's all blues, no
venturing into strange territories, and the tunes take as much time as they
need to build up, develop, and crash down.
Which, in the case of the title track, is ten
minutes — King's first, and fully successful, attempt at bringing down
barriers. Of course, his lengthy public declaration of love for his guitar is
pompous, pretentious, and overblown, but with two decades of hit-making,
blues-wailing, and belly-growing behind his back, he has every right to this atmosphere.
The little monolog he delivers over the course of the song — as clumsy and
clichéd as parts of it are, it's all sincere, and when, after yet
another «response» from the guitar, he says "I doubt if you can feel it
like I do", there is no reason to think he is just being haughty.
"Lucille don't wanna play nothing but the
blues", he says, "if I could sing pop tunes like Frank Sinatra or
Sammy Davis Jr., I don't think I still could do it". Sounds pretty blunt,
when you start thinking of all those times when the man was forced to sing all
those pop tunes — in a way, this is King's declaration of independence.
"But I can get a little Frank, a little Sammy, a little Ray Charles in
there, in fact, all the people with soul in this", he then adds, so as not
to offend the mighty colleagues in show-business — plus, he's kind of right
about it, too.
On the other side of the record, King bookmarks
the proceedings with six minutes of 'Watch Yourself' (it is mighty faster,
though, so the overall number of bars must be pretty much the same as on
'Lucille') — again, the first time we see him truly stretch out in the studio,
never letting the accompanying sax overshadow the playing, going bar over bar
inventing new guitar figures on the spot; nothing particularly dazzling in the
technical sense, but gives you a great rundown on the man's improvising style.
In between these two peaks of freedom, there's
seven lesser, shorter songs that need no individual commenting (and not all of
them are equally satisfactory — for instance, Peter Green clearly took 'I Need
Your Love So Bad' closer to heart than B. B., who gives it a far more
perfunctory rendition), but all of them benefit greatly from this spiritual
uplifting that seems to have taken place sometime in mid-1968.
In short, even if, technically, Lucille
is just another slab of generic big-band blues, it is still one of the best
generic big-band blues albums of 1968, and, no matter how many changes King
would later go through, it is here that he is in peak form; 'Lucille' and
'Watch Yourself', at the very least, are required listening for every blue note
lover. Thumbs up.
LIVE & WELL (1969)
1) Don't Answer The Door; 2)
Just A Little Love; 3) My Mood; 4) Sweet Little Angel; 5) Please Accept My
Love; 6) I Want You So Bad; 7) Friends; 8) Get Off My Back Woman; 9) Let's Get
Down To Business; 10) Why I Sing The Blues.
The title is a bit misleading in the logical
department. Only the first half of it is Live — recorded at the Village
Gate in NYC — which would presume that only the second half of it is Well;
but, in fact, this is a damn fine record all the way through, with B. B.'s
studio output finally catching up with the rawness and intensity of his live
playing.
Although the playing, singing, and recording
quality here are solid throughout, two particular tracks stand out, and, hardly
by coincidence, they also bookmark the beginning and the end. As «the king» is
announced on stage, he launches into 'Don't Answer The Door' with a lengthy,
stunning solo, making great use of volume levels, stops-and-starts, and even
prolonged vibratos that is, arguably, his first seriously «experimental» bit of
playing captured on record. As good as the rest of the show may be, somehow it
never lives up to King pulling all the stops on those first few bars — but
then, perhaps, just a little is enough.
On the studio half, the respective opus magnum
is, of course, the eight-minute sprawl of 'Why I Sing The Blues', King's first
— I think — major social statement, on which he is not so much speaking for
himself as basically answering, in poetic form, the question that we most often
see answered in sociological form: yep, you guessed it, he is singing the blues
because that is simply the most natural thing to sing for the likes of his
people. The simplicity of the idea, however, becomes grandeur as B. B. comes
up with a suitable arrangement (deep, rumbly, gotta love that monster distorted
bass line that the band probably copped from Sly & The Family Stone) and
lets it roll for as long as him and «Lucille» can take it.
One more argument, by the way, why longer
B. B. King is better B. B. King: most of the other tunes are too short
in their genericity to make any sort of lasting impression, but the ones that
roll over five minutes are endowed with serious staying power. This rule of
thumb does not apply too well to 'Friends', I admit, but that is because
'Friends' is merely an instrumental blues jam with B. B. trading licks with his
jazzy counterpart Hugh McCracken, while both are accompanied in the background
by Al Kooper's piano playing. Somehow, though, McCracken and Kooper come out
wasted on the record — perhaps a little intimidated by the bulk of The King
hanging over them to show their best chops? Still a nice document of three
greats having it out in public.
As a tiny bonus, some of the jokes on the live
part are not bad — e. g., B. B.'s merry "we got a brand new tune for you
here tonight, it's so new the band don't know it, you don't know it — and I
don't know it... but we're gonna try". Humour — where would true blues be
without a sense of one? Thumbs up.
COMPLETELY WELL (1969)
1) So Excited; 2) No Good; 3)
You're Losin' Me; 4) What Happened; 5) Confessin' The Blues; 6) Key To My Kingdom;
7) Crying Won't Help You; 8) You're Mean; 9) The Thrill Is Gone.
Produced by Bill Szymczyk (who is usually known
as the guiding hand behind The James Gang and, more notably, the Eagles, but is
a good guy all the same, neh), just like its predecessor and essentially more
of the same — same band, same swagger, same style, same acute desire to
modernize and assimilate that new funky sound the kids dig so much.
The big hit, however, had nothing to do with
the new funky sound; it was 'The Thrill Is Gone', a song that more or less set
the template for how to merge 12-bar blues with «adult contemporary». Not that
the term itself existed in 1969, but you know what I mean: without this song,
there'd be no Gary Moore, and both Eric Clapton's and Stevie Ray Vaughan's
careers would miss at least one of their facets. Not the best one, of course,
but I am merely trying to point out how influential the song turned out to be —
no judgement passed.
The judgement on the song itself would, of
course, be unequivocally positive. No matter how many recordings B. B. had cut
in the past, he'd never really tried out the «dark soul» approach along the
lines of, say, Ray Charles' 'Unchain My Heart'. In fact, the whole thing sort
of evaded the attention of prime time blues players, with maybe one or two
notable exceptions like those pioneering mid-Fifties singles from Otis Rush. 'Thrill
Is Gone' glaringly exploits that gap, and gives us, first time ever — at
least, in the eyes of this particular white-man reviewer — a B. B. King that
rises high above the idea of «entertainment».
People frequently talk about Szymczyk's strings
arrangement as almost the cornerstone of the entire composition, even though
the strings were an afterthought, a late addition after the number had already
been cut and everyone understood this was something different.
Minimalistic, but expressive guitar, singing on the verge of tears (for once,
without a trace of showman-like mannerisms), and deeply reaching, deadly
serious bass lines and electric piano flourishes — solid business for sure. If
you want, you may even search for still deeper interpretations: for instance,
the louder, the more frantically B. B. is yelling that "I'm free now baby,
I'm free from your spell", the clearer you understand that he is anything but
free, and that the song, in his interpretation, is, above all else, about
self-deception, and that the gloomy arrangement is supposed to underscore how
tragically chained the protagonist is to his destiny...
...but enough of this. It's a swell performance
that made B. B. King the big hero of white audiences looking for deep emotions
from black men, and all the better. The rest of the album, mind you, is
fairly different; so much so that one could even think of 'Thrill' as a special
last minute add-on to ring the soul bells for the likes of Eric Clapton. There
are the usual rip-roaring blues-rock bravados, of which the opening number 'So
Excited' is particularly notable, highlighted — no, not by the usual
wailing monologs from Lucille, but rather from Hugh McCracken's gruff, rhythmic
wah-wah solo, with a combination of tone and melody quite unheard of in 1969,
similar to Jimi's workout on 'Voodoo Chile', but more humble and somewhat more
«swampy» in attitude, however you decide to interpret that epithet.
Other notable tracks include a very upbeat,
very determined frontal assault on 'Confessin' The Blues'; a cool funky
collective workout on 'You're Losin' Me'; and a sprawling sixteen-minute jam
('Crying Won't Help You/You're Mean') for which one just got to have
patience — the true fire does not ignite until B. B. and McCracken start
trading licks between each other, pretty soon erupting into a red-hot guitar
battle with sparks flying off everywhere. (They sort of run it in the ground,
eventually — "whach'all trying to do, kill me?" B. B. complains in
the last seconds, jokingly, of course, because he knows real well, himself,
that this killer band is only there to bring out the best in himself).
Thus, as much as the whole experience is
overshadowed by the grand — and fully deserved — success of 'Thrill', Completely
Well is a perfectly apt title for the album, and should probably be among
everybody's first B. B. King purchases: late Sixties blues-rock at its finest. Thumbs up.
INDIANOLA MISSISSIPPI SEEDS (1970)
1) Nobody Loves Me But My
Mother; 2) You're Still My Woman; 3) Ask Me No Questions; 4) Until I'm Dead And
Cold; 5) King's Special; 6) Ain't Gonna Worry My Life Anymore; 7) Chains And
Things; 8) Go Underground; 9) Hummingbird.
Going on in the right direction — the album may
seem like either a carbon copy of Completely Well or a masterful expansion
on its strong sides, depending on one's overall attitude towards B. B. King's
«crossover era», but it's enjoyable in either case. This time around, Szymczyk
teamed the man with an even huger throng of pop people, not the least of them
Carole King herself, who does not contribute to the songwriting, but plays a
steady R'n'B-ish piano on more than half of the tracks; second and third on the
bill are Joe Walsh and Leon Russell, and you are well encouraged to do more
research on the credits yourself — there's a ton of different people here.
Everything works, right from the start, as B.
B. in person plays some mighty fine Delta blues chords on the electric piano,
singing "nobody loves me but my mother, and she could be jiving too"
— for one minute and twenty seconds, before the whole band crashes into a rocking
performance of 'You're Still My Woman'. An unsubtle way to remind us that the
King still remembers his roots, but necessary, perhaps, since the rest of the
album takes us pretty far away from the Delta in form, and it may require a
little refreshening to make us well aware that it is still firmly rooted in the
Delta in spirit.
Szymczyk may be overdoing the strings thing at
times — now that the gimmick worked so well on 'Thrill Is Gone', he keeps the
small orchestra in tow on a constant basis, ready to jump out and contribute
each time B. B. switches into ballad mode, and sometimes even beyond that. That
said, Jimmie Haskell's arrangements are modest and never get in the way of more
important things — on 'You're Still My Woman', they not only do not overshadow
the star of the show, but they even leave plenty of space for Carole King to
show that she could always earn her living playing the honky-tonk thing in
blues bars in the unlikely situation that the royalties were to run out.
The jamming is kept under stricter control this
time: there is a five-minute instrumental, 'King's Special', with a brilliant
guitar-piano duel between B. B. and Leon Russell, and a short bit of fooling
around opens 'Ain't Gonna Worry My Life Anymore', but, overall, meandering
improvs are eskewed in favor of lengthier solo bits on regular songs, which
keeps the general customer better satisfied without alienating the
artistically demanding audience either.
The only downside is that a couple of tracks,
most notably 'Chains And Things', are an obvious attempt to recreate the
success of 'Thrill Is Gone' — but, obviously, you cannot artificially recreate
divine inspiration, and so the album remains without that ultimate
megaton-kicker to push it over the threshold that separates «best-of-the-best»
from «better-than-the-best». Leon Russell offers another chance with his own
'Hummingbird', a song that goes from darkly romantic blues ballad to all-out gospel
choir anthem, and everything is splendid except that King has no guitar solos
on the number, which prevents it from falling into the category of «B. B. King
songs one cannot do without» — in my eyes at least, you can easily do without
any B. B. King song on which Lucille gets a square treatment.
Yet these are minor quibbles. King himself, on
occasion, has stated that Indianola might have been his biggest
artistic statement, and, without being petty about all the details, it is easy
to understand that opinion. The man was clearly on a roll: surrounded by great
musicians and songwriters, a producer who understood how to update his old
sound for the new age without compromising it, and enough creative freedom to
revel in, he was clearly having the greatest time of his life, much like his
namesake Albert, whose career was also peaking around the same years — a great
time for the rejuvenation of classic electric blues. Thumbs up, of course.
LIVE IN COOK COUNTY JAIL (1970)
1) Introduction; 2) Everyday I
Have The Blues; 3) How Blue Can You Get; 4) Worry, Worry, Worry; 5) 3 O'Clock
Blues; 6) Sweet Sixteen; 7) The Thrill Is Gone; 8) Please Accept My Love.
The «live prison album» genre, jump-started by
Johnny Cash with his Folsom Prison record in 1968, is not a very large
one — not everybody has the guts to win over this particular slice of the
audience, let alone all the technical difficulties. Nevertheless, putting out a
live prison album almost certainly guarantees critical respect, because, after
all, what in the world can be truer to the spirit of rock'n'roll than working up
a sweat before a bunch of Cool Hand Lukes, the true heroes of rock'n'roll?
Thus, even though Live In Cook County Jail
is by no means King's best live album, it has garnered comparable acclaim; yet
that acclaim is, I believe, triggered more by the unforgettable rounds of
booing with which the inmates welcome the announcement of the presence of the
local sheriff and the chief justice at the start of the show, making up for a
classic live moment that really threatens to blow B. B. himself off the stage.
Could, in fact, be argued that there is more genuine blues to be heard in
those boos than in whatever follows. (Actually, there is a complex back story
to the making of the album — apparently, a series of live shows by well-known
stars at that jail was part of the new warden's plan to win over the inmates'
trust in his ongoing battle with the «barn bosses», even though none of that is
reflected in the performance in any way).
What follows is, actually, a very solid
performance, but a very straightforward, as well: King understands that these
two thousand guys in front of him won't take bullshit for an answer, and so he
just runs through his biggest hits, without forcing himself to condense them
but without too many improvisational or jamming bits, either. He spans his
entire career, from '3 O'Clock Blues' right up to 'Thrill Is Gone', and shows
us that the old magic works fine on the current criminals by launching into his
usual «man — woman» monolog on 'Worry, Worry' — the audience's response makes
it clearly seen that this is the kind of sermon they are quite ready to listen
to.
The only other thing I can say is that 'The
Thrill Is Gone', like I predicted, works beautifully even without the cellos
(but to name it the ultimate live rendition of this song, like some have done,
is a bit of a stretch); but overall, there is just too few songs here to merit
individual comments — which brings us to the vital question of why the heck has
the entire performance not been released on CD as of yet? Surely they do
not mean that the whole show lasted for just over half an hour? What is their
problem? What are they hiding?
B. B. KING IN LONDON (1971)
1) Caldonia; 2) Blue Shadows;
3) Alexis' Boogie; 4) We Can't Agree; 5) Ghetto Woman; 6) Wet Hayshark; 7) Part
Time Love; 8) Power Of The Blues; 9) Ain't Nobody Home.
A solid recording betrayed by high
expectations. Following the early 1970s trend of teaming up vintage old
bluesmen with the new generation of British blues-rockers (Muddy Waters,
Howlin' Wolf and a few other veterans joined the fray as well), B. B. goes to
London, gets chain-linked with pretty much everyone the recording people could
catch unawares, and records a friendly jam session that is... merely decent.
It is better for us all not to know, or radically
forget who exactly plays what on which track (the credits list no fewer than twenty
eight backers for Lucille and her man). Instead, major blues fans may just
agree in between themselves that 'Caldonia' rocks pretty well for a mid-size
party to be entertained in between all the skinny-dipping; that 'Blue Shadows'
and 'Ghetto Woman', with moderate success, recreate the smoky gloom of
'Thrill', especially the latter with its inventive strings arrangement; that
'Alexis' Boogie' gives you a rare chance to hear the King churn it out on the
acoustic (unless, of course, that is not the King at all, but then why would it
be on a King record?); that 'Power Of The Blues' is no 'Blues Power' (hands up
for Clapton); and that the organ playing lends a nice extra shade to 'Ain't
Nobody Home'.
But if one starts winding up, as in "Peter
Green is here and I can't even tell where! Are all these guys just wetting
their pants in the presence of the Lord?", etc., then, of course, In
London is a mighty failure and all that money it took to transport B. B.
across the Atlantic should have rather gone to the poor (not to mention that
there are so many people playing on here, everyone's share of royalties could
hardly have covered even bathroom expenses).
In any case, with a set-up like this, at worst,
you get «mediocre» results; a blues session recorded in 1971 between B. B. and
British rock royalty could lack the proper spark of inspiration, but it
couldn't be anything less than professional and tasteful — the production- and
age-induced rut into which rootsy music would sink by the middle of the decade
had not set in yet. So, if not particularly exciting, this is all adequately
listenable; thumbs up.
L. A. MIDNIGHT (1972)
1) I Got Some Help I Don't
Need; 2) Help The Poor; 3) Can't You Hear Me Talking; 4) Midnight; 5) Sweet
Sixteen; 6) I've Been Blue Too Long; 7) Lucille's Granny.
If you happen to be big fans of Jesse Ed Davis
and Joe Walsh, this one's for you: for about sixteen minutes, the album is
nothing but a big show-off during which the White, Red (Jesse was fully Native
American), and Black race compete for supremacy on fully friendly terms. It is
fairly solid, easy-going, fluid jamming, but depends a lot on what you expect
from a jam session — if you have heard plenty of them, this one probably isn't
going to blow your mind or change your life. Some critics accused the guitar
heroes of too much meandering and not meshing well; they may be right, because
each of them plays in a different style, but, uh, what's wrong with that?
Apart from the jams, much of the album is
formally expendable. There is a re-recording of 'Sweet Sixteen', for instance,
with updated lyrics about Vietnam, but it adds no extra dimensions to the
original; a fierce fully instrumental take on 'Help The Poor'; and a couple
more mid-tempo blues de luxe numbers that are... okay.
Nevertheless, the fact that the album has not
been released on CD is a doggone shame — any middle-of-the-road recording from
King's peak years is still miles ahead of the overproduced crap from his later
years that is constantly choking the bargain bins. For blues fans at least,
this is a must-have: three blues-rock giants breathing the same studio air,
imagine that! Thumbs up, modestly and
humbly.
GUESS WHO (1972)
1) Summer In The City; 2) Just
Can't Please You; 3) Any Other Way; 4) You Don't Know Nothin' About Love; 5)
Found What I Need; 6) Neighborhood Affair; 7) It Takes A Young Girl; 8) Better
Lovin' Man; 9) Guess Who; 10) Shouldn't Have Left Me; 11) Five Long Years.
Not that dumb a title, considering that the
proceedings open with a Lovin' Spoonful cover — then again, B. B. has always
been omnivorous, open to bluesy reworkings of everything from Beethoven to the
Beatles. Overall, though, it is way too easy to guess who, especially since way
too many songs on here dishearteningly hearken back to King's overproduced,
underperformed balladeering style of the early Sixties.
Somehow, upon returning from London, B. B.
managed to lose all the great musicians that backed him up on the 1968-1970
albums, and the result is mere languid competence. Dropping the jams,
restraining the guitar in favour of ensemble playing dominated by keyboards and
horns, selecting formulaic material — all of this is a very sharp drop in quality,
for no apparent reason other than unlucky circumstances.
The major highlight should have been
'Five Long Years', perfectly tailored to suit B. B.'s blues-de-luxe formula,
but it does not work too well, I'm afraid: Lucille has a tough time out there, pinned
down by all the horns and, for some reason, opting for a smooth, tender tone
rather than «blazing sharp» which is really what is needed. Even so, it is the
most outstanding track on the entire album bar the unexpected, not-unpleasant
but not-highly-rewarding surprise of B. B. playing out the gentle melancholy of
'Summer In The City'.
Some people care for the title track — I do
not. It's as if King decided to mix in a little bit of that Champs-Elysées
style with his blues pattern, and the cheesy sentimentality, swimming in pools
of orchestral and keyboard sap, kills off all the healthy antibodies. Thumbs down.
TO KNOW YOU IS TO LOVE YOU (1973)
1) I Like To Live The Love; 2)
Respect Yourself; 3) Who Are You; 4) Love; 5) I Can't Leave; 6) To Know You Is
To Love You; 7) Oh To Me; 8) Thank You For Loving The Blues.
Little known, little appreciated, To Know
You is still B. B. King's juiciest attempt at an almost proper R'n'B album,
with an absolute minimum of 12-bar and lots of rhythm. Recorded with the
Memphis horns and the Philly rhythm section, this was done at the exactly right
time, with B. B.'s competitor Albert King riding a similar brand of sound with
albums like I'll Play The Blues For You and I Wanna Get Funky.
Well, B. B. ended up wanting to get funky, too.
For the first time in a long, long while, if
not ever, even those tracks on which King plays very little, if any, guitar,
are perfectly enjoyable — just for the simple joy of listening to all these musicians
gelling so perfectly, the bass, drums, rhythm guitars, keyboards, and horns
whirling like freshly-oiled cogs in one of the world's smoothest-running
musical machines. And when the big man starts to play, Lucille's sound is
giving a smoother, slicker coating than usual, which is perfectly all right
with this kind of ambience (although it would probably not work at all on something
like Completely Well).
The obvious hit, highlight, and constant
presence in the Church of the Latter Day Compilations, is the title track,
written for King by Stevie Wonder himself (and, once you know that, you will
realize that B. B.'s singing, too, is tentatively following Stevie's usual
vocal modulations — perhaps it would have worked even better as a duet between
the two). It is soulful, passionate, religious, and quite long, allowing it to
work both as a moving love song and as a hot, pristine jam instead of
failing at both; every single player shines like the sun.
It may be impossible to outdo the Staple
Singers at their cut-out job, but the King still does his best at bringing a
comparable amount of sincerity and conviction into his singing, and carves out
a suitable weeping set of riffs for Lucille. 'I Like To Live The Love', the
record's other hit, has no lead guitar at all and is happy enough to function
within the generic dance-pop formula of the first half of the decade — could,
perhaps, benefit from an Al Green at the helm rather than the relatively rugged
delivery of old man B. B., but it is still a charming song, and not entirely
gritless, either, if only for the iron groove that has it locked in its grip
from first to last second.
'I Can't Leave' is the only song that reverts
us fully to the standard 12-bar blues-de-luxe formula, but in the overall
context it blends in well (what other B. B. King album could be said to contain
one generic blues song for the sake of diversity?), and then there is also a
traditional spoken blues piece at the end that thanks us for loving the blues
and slowly melts away in a hushed, minimalistic jam with some of the most
subtle passages in B. B.'s career.
It all works, and once again goes to show just
how greatly a super-professional R'n'B band and a brilliant blues guitarist can
complement each other. Now if only somebody had, at least once, thought to
finish off the picture by bringing in a genius songwriter and a mindblowing
singer... but, possibly, so many cooks would have killed off the broth. Let us
be happy with what we have and hope that the album, only recently restored in
print, will eventually solidify in its classic status. Thumbs up and a must-have for any fan of
Seventies' R&B (not so sure about hardcore blues lovers, though — but let
us not forget that B. B. King as such is hardly music for blues purists).
KING SIZE (1977)
1) Don't You Lie To Me; 2) I
Wonder Why; 3) I Just Wanna Make Love To You; 4) Your Lovin' Turned Me On; 5)
Slow And Easy; 6) Got My Mojo Working; 7) Walking In The Sun; 8) Mother For Ya;
9) The Same Love That Made Me Laugh; 10) It's Just A Matter Of Time.
In between 1973 and 1977, King somehow cut down
on studio material, releasing a couple live albums in tandem with blueswailer
Bobby Bland (who, contrary to one's instinctive predilection for puns, is not
really as bland as one would expect him to be) and a couple compilations. When
he finally returned with King Size
in 1977, nobody really needed him any more; his music had completely gone off
the cutting edge, and since then, most of his hits have been superstar duets
(of which the cunning old fox has had plenty, but at least it is a less generally questionable way of
making money than advertising with Burger King).
This, however, does not mean that no post-1973
album from Old King B. B. merits listening. This particular recording,
assembled from several sessions with mostly unknown players, is, for instance,
pretty swell. Why? Well, it's probably got the longest version of 'Don't You
Lie To Me' ever recorded — were Chuck Berry to duckwalk all the way through it,
the results would have laid to rest every single «if I walked this way...» joke
in the world — and it's got a modern take on the dirty old blues 'Mother Fuyer'
(from the same old stock of thinly veiled, but technically unsuable
rhythm'n'blues classics as Bull Moose Jackson/Aerosmith's 'Big Ten Inch
Record') — and, hearken to this, it's got the only disco rearrangement of 'Got
My Mojo Working' that I know of. Surely that would mean something, to hear one
king of the blues paying tribute to another king of the blues with a dorky
disco bassline behind his back.
Anyway, most of the material is pretty old, and
King does not play a whole lot of blistering guitar, but the arrangements work,
and the emphasis is very much on real, live, interactive playing. At the height
of the disco era, one could have expected far worse. It's all smooth and slick,
but the grooves are non-boring; in comparison, B. B.'s colleague Albert King's
albums from the same period are far more depressing, recorded by people who
clearly only did this for the money. King
Size, at its worst, is steadily professional, and at its best — e. g. the
little bit of jamming that follows 'I Just Wanna Make Love To You' — is as
incendiary as a B. B. King track can ever be.
MIDNIGHT BELIEVER (1978)
1) When It All Comes Down (I'll
Still Be Around); 2) Midnight Believer; 3) I Just Can't Leave Your Love
Alone; 4) Hold On (I Feel
Our Love Is Changing); 5) Never Make A Move Too Soon; 6) A World Full Of
Strangers; 7) Let Me Make You Cry A Little Longer.
Another excellent idea — match B. B. King, the
tumbleweed connection of the blues world, with The Crusaders, one of the
longest living jazz-pop bands that never had any reason to live that long.
Together, they make good music: the band offers the old blues guru guy fat and
tight musical backing, and the old blues guru guy pays them back with his
regular lyrical spark that, for a moment, adds sense and purpose to their
interplay. (Coincidentally or not, they released their biggest commercial
success, Street Life, the following
year, but I have never been able to get my mind focused on even one track on
that album from beginning to end.)
Most of the material is original, written by
The Crusaders themselves or in collaboration with Will Jennings, and follows
the regular R'n'B patterns of the epoch (without any serious concessions to
disco), but is very clearly geared towards King: all the blues and ballad
pieces fit his style of singing, and there is also surprisingly more guitar
playing from him on all the songs than even on some of his pure blues albums
(where «pure», much more often than wanted, means «letting the horns guys do
all the work while I satisfy my inner crooner»).
The two regular blues-rock numbers ('When It
All Comes Down', 'Never Make A Move Too Soon') are fun due to all the extra
touches — such as the gospel choir on the former and the loose party attitude
on the latter; the sentimental ballad ('Hold On') is respectably arranged, with
Lucille always louder than the soft lethargic Seventies piano sound; the funk
comes properly equipped with clenched teeth and gripped fists ('A World Full Of
Strangers'); and the retro-swing number 'I Just Can't Leave Your Love Alone'
simply comes out of nowhere, suddenly replacing the disco bar with a speakeasy
for four happy minutes.
It wouldn't make sense to rave and rant in
detail about any of these songs, but the participants are clearly delighted to
work with each other — and, even if unbeatable clinchers like 'Thrill Is Gone'
could not be produced any longer, this is still the next best thing: a B. B.
King album whose production and entertainment values are so consistently high,
I could never sustain a case against even one of these songs. It is albums like
Midnight Believer that should
encourage you, the listener, to defy the odds and dig around in interminable
discographies of «has-beens»: critics may eventually lose interest in the old
dogs and leave them forever locked in the one-star collar, but that's just
because they always go after the cutting-edge thing. Midnight Believer cuts no edges; it is simply a charming album that
shows old man King going both with the grain and against it at the same time. Thumbs up.
TAKE IT HOME (1979)
1) Better Not Look Down; 2)
Same Old Story (Same Old Song); 3) Happy Birthday Blues; 4) I've Always Been Lonely;
5) Second-Hand Woman; 6) Tonight I'm Gonna Make You A Star; 7) The Beginning Of
The End; 8) A Story Everybody Knows; 9) Take It Home.
It's not bad, but something did not click this
second time around. Simply put, there is a bit too much Crusaders on the album,
and not enough King for me. Midnight
Believer was a good mix of styles that gave us casual, non-hardcore
listeners the best possible formula: B. B.'s blues essence interspersed with
various catchy distractions. On Take It
Home, the distractions have all but dissolved the essence.
King sings passionately enough, but Lucille,
once again, finds itself playing second, if not twenty second, fiddle to all
of the Crusaders' diddle; on most, perhaps all, of these numbers it's as if nobody
had the patience to let the old man find a good, meaningful groove for these
songs, and just went along with the second take before he even began getting
into the spirit. Who cares anyway, if you're gonna mix that guitar below all
the saxes and keyboards and gospel backing vocals?
Which is a pity, because the songs, generally
credited to Will Jennings and Joe Sample, are decent: nothing too original,
mostly just slight modifications of old blues rock and R'n'B warhorses, but
nevertheless modified and rearranged to the point of justifying that generic
late Seventies funky soul sound (and, once again, not a single swig of disco,
although 'A Story Everybody Knows', the cheesiest number on the record, comes
somewhat close). The title track is a particularly uplifting anthem, the kind
of totally by-the-numbers, but still sweet and charming, R'n'B number that
today's R'n'B artists have completely lost the knack of churning out — and King
is able to let his singing go with the flow, but the guitar playing, alas,
seriously lags behind.
The only number here that I find deserving of
truly classic status is the short, almost inconspicuous 'Beginning Of The
End', distinguished by its subtle buildup: first verse rhythmless — second with
the rhythm section joining in — third with the brass backup really pushing it,
all the way to King's ecstatic final. Up to the point, heavy on the good old
guitar sound, and admirably modest. Of course, there is something ominous in
the fact that the best song on a 1979 B. B. King album bears such a title, but,
after all, the end has to begin
somewhere. I cannot bring myself to issuing a thumbs down — I honestly enjoyed
most of this platter — but it is still disappointing, considering how lucky
King turned out to be in the late seventies, evading the disco temptation and
staying firmly routed in the «true sound», and how he failed to make good use
of that luck.
THERE MUST BE A BETTER WORLD SOMEWHERE (1981)
1) Life Ain't Nothing But A
Party; 2) Born Again Human; 3) There Must Be A Better World Somewhere; 4) The
Victim; 5) More, More, More; 6) You're Going With Me.
There must be a... strange atypical sound to
this album that I cannot quite put my finger on, making it at least a good
candidate for King's most «subtly curious» pieces of the new decade. With only
six songs, most of which intentionally — and intentionally absurdly — crash the
three/four minute barrier for no logical reason, and the same meandering,
wobbly, slow tempo on four out of six, it's almost as if King saw to it that
everyone was properly stoned for the sessions, or, at least, stripped of focus.
Including himself.
This is probably why, every now and then, the
songs not just cease to be showcases for Lucille — after all, King is well
known for his modest handling of the spotlight — but become sprawling brass
battles between saxes, trumpets, and trombones; sometimes the purple elephants
take over, and the band suddenly thinks they are The Glenn Miller Orchestra. It
happens at the end of the first song, then is immediately repeated at the
beginning of the second, and on we go. Then it sort of dawns on the big old guy
that he is here to play his guitar, and the blues is back, but the Glenn Miller
guys aren't giving up too soon, resulting in something midway from polyphony to
cacophony, all of it over a stumbling drum pattern whose bearer is just as
drunk as everyone else.
Okay, I may be inventing things here. Actually,
the playing is quite collected — it was simply a not too successful effort to
explain that King never used to sound quite
like this, good and bad judgements aside. And I have a pretty good idea of who
might be the major disturber of the peace: Malcolm John Rebennack, Jr., commonly
known as Dr. John, credited here both as a piano player and one of the chief
songwriters, as well as producer. If anyone can drag B. B. out of his respectable,
but sleazy world of night clubs and bow ties into the disreputable universe of
alligators on marijuana, it must be
the man. He hasn't done his best, but he did try.
After all, who else would contribute a song
entitled 'Life Ain't Nothing But A Party' to the B. B. King canon? And sit
behind his back, taking good care that B. B. really gets in the spirit of it
and all? This is a fine collaboration between two veterans who have something
in common — namely, the ability to just lay back and enjoy life while it ain't
over yet — and if only, in between all the enjoyment, they wouldn't be
forgetting to play their instruments from time to time, There Must Be... could have become a minor classic of the urban
blues genre for both. As it is, their spirits come off as way too seriously
diluted by disturbing factors. Still a thumbs up; hard times would be lurking around the
corner, but for now, King scored yet another success in evading them — in the
light of his collaboration with The Crusaders going sort of sour, exchanging
them, even briefly, for Dr. John was the smartest move he could have gone for
in 1981, and he did go for it.
LOVE ME TENDER (1982)
1) One Of Those Nights; 2)
Love Me Tender; 3) Don't Change On Me; 4) (I'd Be) A Legend In My Time; 5)
You've Always Got The Blues; 6) Nightlife/Please Send Me Someone To Love; 7)
You And Me, Me And You; 8) Since I Met You Baby; 9) Time Is A Thief; 10) A
World I Never Made.
As skippable as this particular album is, one
certainly cannot accuse B. B. of stalling. One year prior to Love Me Tender he was munching on gumbo
in the company of Dr. John, before that, tried to save funky soul from disco
clutches in the company of the appropriately named Crusaders, and now we
discover him in Nashville, with the local playing and singing pros steering him
through a series of country-pop, country-R'n'B, and occasional country-blues
standards.
Admittedly, the man himself had high hopes for
the record, and, in his own liner notes, described it as one of the best albums
in his career. But, in all fairness, this has to do with the uncomfortable fact
that King always thought of himself as at
least as good a singer as a guitar player, if not better (hence all the Sings Spirituals records and other
crap), and Love Me Tender is, again,
for those who love their guru when he opens his mouth, not when he jerks his
fingers.
The big question, of course, is whether you
want to hear another version of 'Love Me Tender' in the first place, let alone
from the cavities of somebody whose pet dream of becoming a black Sinatra you
might not necessarily endorse. And also, whether you want to hear it played
à la Eighties Nashville, in which the professionalism and versatility
of country music had by then become as corrupted by laziness and the big bucks
as classic R'n'B had deteriorated at Atlantic Studios. For every bit of slide
guitar plucked with the utmost indifference, you get cheap synth orchestration,
cheap chiming keyboards, and a rhythm section that seems to have confused
minimalism with obligatory hack-work.
The irony of it all is that B. B. King really tries hard: apart from the meaningless
covers of the title track and 'Since I Met You Baby', and a strange,
unneccessary decision to segue 'Nightlife' into 'Please Send Me Someone To
Love', he sings most of these songs in a heartfelt, confessional mode as if it
all really mattered. But the complete lack of any serious effort other than
pure «pro forma» on the part of his musicians kills the spirit over and over
again — to the effect that the only track that made me take notice was 'You And
Me, Me And You', one that dumped all intimacy and concentrated on a funky
dance groove. Light, expendable, but at least fun, which is more than could be
said about the rest of this boredom. Thumbs down.
BLUES 'N' JAZZ (1983)
1) Inflation Blues; 2) Broken
Heart; 3) Sell My Monkey; 4) Heed My Warning; 5) Teardrops From My Eyes; 6)
Rainbow Riot; 7) Darlin' You Know I Love You; 8) Make Love To Me; 9) I Can't
Let You Go.
The perfect antidote to the «plastic country»
of Love Me Tender — a much-needed
return to the kind of generic blues-de-luxe that has always been owned by the
man. Unfortunately, this also means that you get no surprises, and that the
resulting LP really works best if, together with me, you are on this
chronological journey through the man's career. Otherwise, there is really no
reason whatsoever to prefer it to similar records from the previous three
decades — except for, perhaps, reasonably clearer production.
The whole thing is very strictly Chicago blues,
with a couple retro forays into jump blues ('Sell My Monkey', although, strictly
speaking, this is still not far from Chicago, considering, e. g., Elmore
James' love for the style), a couple re-recordings of older tunes, etc. The
sole exception is King's unexpected cover of the early Atlantic R'n'B classic,
'Teardrops From My Eyes'. B. B. is certainly no Ruth Brown (he does attempt to
give the lyrics a more «genuine» reading than the former Miss Rhythm, shaky
voice and all, but I still vote for the lady's exalted, sexy-as-hell delivery
instead), but he gives the song an exquisite guitar backing instead of the
original brass accompaniment, and there is an extended vibraphone solo, of all things — did you think the «jazz» in the
title was just an empty flourish? — that makes it a pretty unique track for Mr.
King.
But even 'Teardrops' is an old song, and,
altogether, the King has not been so straightforwardly nostalgic since... well,
since the times when sounding this-a way was anything but nostalgic. (Leaving aside, that is, the fact that the lyrics to
the old number 'Inflation Blues' must have sounded fairly relevant back in the
day — come to think of it, here is one song that may never want to go out of
style). Relistening to this living relic must have been an aftershock to the
man himself — the only explanation for why he had to go out and produce one of
his worst ever albums immediately afterward. Why? Because nothing gets people,
particularly bluesmen, in the mood for brutal crap as much as the acute feeling
of sounding outdated.
SIX SILVER STRINGS (1985)
1) Six Silver Strings; 2) Big
Boss Man; 3) In The
Midnight Hour; 4) Into
The Night; 5) My Lucille;
6) Memory Lane; 7) My Guitar Sings The Blues; 8) Double Trouble.
Not many kind words can be applied to this
album, but one thing definitely makes it worth checking out. If you glance at
the track list, you will naturally expect track two, 'Big Boss Man', to be B.
B. King's professional, but most likely uninspiring rendition of Jimmy Reed's
old blues classic. Few things in this world can be more confusing, then, than
getting around to it and hearing the easily recognizable dance beats and piano
rhythms of... Michael Jackson's 'Billie Jean'. Trust me, there is something
transcendental about the experience. Absurdist to the core, and yet completely
unintentional at the same time. One of those classic moments in the history of
human ridiculousness that almost ends up justifying it.
Unfortunately, only if most of this album matched the silliness standard of 'Big Boss
Jean', would there be some decent reason to talk about it. As it is, King's
50th album, as it so gloriously states on the golden seal of the front cover,
is a pretty gloomy affair. After the stark retro approach of Blues'n'Jazz, B. B. moves into the
opposite direction: the Eighties bug finally caught up with the man, and, with
a couple of exceptions that might have been outtakes from earlier sessions ('My
Guitar Sings The Blues'), all of this suffers from typical overproduction —
plastic electronic drums, synthesizers, etc., and an almost complete
dehumanization of the playing: King's vocals and guitar are your only friends
throughout, and do they ever feel lonely.
It is quite ironic that the material itself is
not half-bad: old standards like Wilson Pickett's 'In The Midnight Hour', under
normal conditions, would agree with King's style perfectly, and there are some
fine new songs, too — the title track and 'Memory Lane' are touching nostalgic
ballads; 'My Lucille' is one of those honest anthems to B. B.'s primary working
tool that can do no wrong; and even corny arena rock like 'Into The Night',
given the proper treatment, could have given King a serious chance to tame the
genre (the song was written and recorded specially for the soundtrack of John
Landis' flop movie of the same name, and it's probably the best thing about the
movie, even if that's hardly saying much).
But, over the years, it has emerged fairly
clearly that, unless one indiscriminately finds all B. B. King albums equally
exchangeable in terms of general goodness, a B. B. King album is really only
as good as the individual talents whose songwriting, producing, and playing matches
King's own; and Six Silver Strings,
instead of The Crusaders or Dr. John or Joe Walsh at least, has the man
surrounded by faceless, if friendly, hacks. Certainly, he has to be commended
for succumbing to crap values so late in his career — his namesake Albert, in
comparison, had been overwhelmed and overpowered since at least 1976 — but
that is hardly relevant to the overall thumbs down that Six Silver Strings deserves on its own.
SPOTLIGHT ON LUCILLE (1986)
1) Slidin' And Glidin'; 2)
Blues With B. B.; 3) King Of Guitar; 4) Jump With B. B.; 5) 38th Street Blues;
6) Feedin' The Rock; 7) Just Like A Woman; 8) Step It Up; 9) Calypso Jazz; 10)
Easy Listening Blues; 11) Shoutin' The Blues; 12) Powerhouse.
It should be mentioned here that, for at least a
few decades since B. B.'s original departure from RPM Records in 1962, that
label, along with its legal inheritors, had been steadily pumping out further
product, carefully measuring out small chunks of whatever Lucille's old fiancée
happened to leave behind in the vaults before the move. The result is something
like five or seven or ten or twelve (nobody really knows except for the most
well-educated of B. B.'s discographers, and they are all dangerous people) LPs
that nobody has any real reason to hear, let alone write about; his original
official RPM output was always inconsistent, so what's to be said about
outtakes?
Spotlight
On Lucille may be deemed a
valuable exception, though. Released in 1986, it deceptively sported a quite
contemporary photo of the man, possibly duping quite a few fans into thinking
they were paying money for B. B.'s latest greatest. Well, they weren't, and
what a good thing that was: instead of getting another patchy bunch of crappy
Eighties product, they were in for a real treat — with the spotlight on
Lucille, indeed, this is a collection of instrumentals, mostly recorded around
1960-61. Only a few of them had been previously released.
If something like Easy Listening Blues, King's earliest completely instrumental
album, was only so-so because the master sessions failed to extract the proper
effort from the man, Spotlight has
the compilation benefit. It seems to have been assembled with enough love for
the man's talent to include not just any
instrumentals with Lucille on top, but those where the playing really mattered.
The surprising highlight, for instance, is a ten-minute long jam ('Blues With
B. B.') that proves, once and for all, that King did go for long improvisatory jams in those days; he just could not
dream of being able to put them on record, what with the 12 songs/3 minutes
each reservations that kept American popular music stalled for so long.
Of course, these were still the early days; B.
B. had not yet significantly increased his number of guitar tones, had not
fully mastered the art of vibrato, had not learned to flash his minimalistic
style at the listener. But he was already well-versed in many kinds of playing
styles, and Spotlight takes good
care reminding us of the fact that he was not merely an expressive 12-bar
stylist ('Slidin' And Glidin', 'King Of Guitar'), but that he loved to boogie
('38th Street Blues'), shuffle ('Feedin' The Rock'), bop ('Just Like A Woman'),
rhumba ('Calypso Jazz'), and do big-band jazz with the boys ('Powerhouse').
A few of the instrumentals feature brass solos
from the band as well, which is not a problem — the balance is near-ideal, with
the brass offering occasionally necessary relief from Lucille's never changing
high-pitched tone, but never ever letting us forget who is really the man in
charge. And B. B. is truly in charge throughout, contributing remarkably
similar, but never quite identical solos. The ten-minute long jam is not a
masterpiece, but it may really be one of the few, if not the only, historical
trace of the man taking as much time as he wanted to develop a musical idea
back in the early Sixties, and officially released lengthy blues jams from 1960
may be counted on the fingers of one hand — for all we know, one might think
blues jamming as such was invented in the UK of 1965 and 1966 rather than where
you'd actually expect it to happen.
In short, this,
rather than the miserably modernized Six
Silver Strings, should have been B. B.'s proper 50th album — these days, it
sounds far more fresh and far less dated than everything the man was recording
in 1986 in person. Thumbs up.
KING OF BLUES (1989)
1) (You've Become A) Habit To
Me; 2) Drowning In The Sea Of Love; 3) Can't Get Enough; 4) Standing On The
Edge; 5) Go On; 6) Let's Straighten It Out; 7) Change In Your Lovin'; 8)
Undercover Man; 9) Lay Another Log On The Fire; 10) Business With My Baby; 11)
Take Off Your Shoes.
Not to be confused with the old King Of The Blues LP, nor with various
compilations of the same name that, truth be told, generally bear it with much
more confidence than this overproduced curio piece. Overproduced, but not
nearly as worthless as its predecessor. King teamed up with moderately better
corporate songwriters this time, and at least there is some real music coming
out of the speakers here, rather than the dehumanized electronic dribble into
which ye olde classic R'n'B was rapidly deteriorating.
In other words, the record had a slight chance
of becoming B. B.'s Midnight Believer
for the 1980s. He does not come across as totally uninspired, his sidemen write
some tolerable pop ditties and funk rockers, do not make the mistake of
saddling him with power ballads, and bring in little-known, but tolerable pros
on bass and sax. Alas, they go on to forget two things. First, the man they're
dealing with is the king of the blues — that is, after all, what the title says
— and, in that respect, there is surprisingly little blues on the album.
Second, behind all the keyboards and saxes they forget that the king is here to
play his guitar. Not through any evil intent, I'm sure: they just forget. And
when they remember, it is sometimes better if they didn't, because on several
tracks it clearly looks like Lucille is being run through some yucky synth
effect, completely losing the King thing to it.
One excellent number is 'Lay Another Log On The
Fire', a hot'n'heavy soul screamer in B. B.'s best traditions, with Lucille
clean and crisp, breaking through the sax-and-background-vocals of the
blues-de-luxe arrangement as confidently as if she had not just been sterilized
with synthesizer treatment at all. A few other tracks at the end, such as
'Business With My Baby Tonight', also have a relatively clean sound — perhaps
they were recorded in a different session — but remember that in order to get
around to them, you have to pass through the mind-numbing chorus of 'Standing
On The Edge' (repeated something like a million times), the drum machines of
'Drowning In The Sea Of Love', the corporate hit-writing machinery of
'Undercover Man', and other things too morally corrupt to mention.
I freely admit to being a little thrilled with
'(You've Become A) Habit To Me', though. Despite the cheesy synths, and the
treated Lucille sound, the song rides a lean, mean bass line, and establishes
a cool atmosphere through the cooperation between that bass and King's vocals.
Just one of those several thousand Eighties-recorded songs that had the bad
luck to be generated in the mainstream strongholds of that decade, and deserve
a rebirth under proper conditions. Couldn't exactly confirm the same for the
rest of the material, though, so thumbs down — just in case.
LIVE AT SAN QUENTIN (1990)
1) Intro; 2) Let The Good
Times Roll; 3) Every Day I Have The Blues; 4) A Whole Lot Of Lovin'; 5) Sweet
Little Angel; 6) Never Make A Move Too Soon; 7) Into The Night; 8) Ain't
Nobody's Business; 9) The Thrill Is Gone; 10) Peace To The World; 11) Nobody
Loves Me But My Mother; 12) Sweet Sixteen; 13) Rock Me Baby.
Another album — another live album — another
live prison album. Apparently, San Quentin's metal detectors filtered out most
of the synthesizers and electronic drums, meaning that it is just another
regular B. B. King live album, not any better than the average B. B. King live
album, but hardly worse, either, which is respectable given the man's age at
the time (sixty-five). But enough of me for now, let us hear what Michael G.
from the All Music Guide has to say about the record:
«B. B.
King's pleas to the literally captive audience for a round of applause for the
guards watching over the prisoners on his first live album in nearly a decade
is almost laughable. Unlike Johnny Cash's smirking irony on his album recorded
at the same facility in 1969, where you can sense Cash's disdain for the
captors is just as strong as the inmates', King seems to be totally oblivious
to the fact that these are prisoners being held against their will. And that's
the problem with this competent, if unremarkable, record: King is merely going
through the motions. He could just as well be playing to a blue-blooded
audience under the stars at some shed in the Midwest.»
I do not want to make a habit of quoting other
people's reviews, but in this particular case, I spent quite some time
wondering whether to laugh or cry, so apparently this particular judgement is
worth a quote. For some reason, I'd always thought that normally entertainers entertain — that's their day job — and when
they perform before a bunch of inmates, they normally go on entertaining,
particularly since inmates may be in more need of entertainment than us free
(for now) citizens. And, just like the much older Cooks County album, King's San
Quentin gives the inmates their fair share of solid entertainment. His
worst «crime» may be in trying to get a few cheers for the warden from the
audience (resulting in a healthy, voluminous BOOO!), but hey, the warden gave
him a medal out there, he was only trying to return the kindness.
Comparing this well-meaning, good-natured — and
obviously quite well enjoyed by the audience — performance with Cash's album,
just because both happened to be recorded at the same place, does not even
begin to miss the point, because there is no point to be missed. (Of course, B.
B. should have known better when he was selecting the location; comparisons
would be absolutely inevitable). Cash, most of his life, played «the thinking
man's country», and his small set of prison albums did not so much intend to
entertain as to stimulate (and reducing his approach to «smirking irony» and
«disdain for the captors» is almost demeaning, as if the reviewer wanted to
make some sort of Angela Davis out of the man). King is an entertainer all the
way through, but an honest, passionate, and talented one.
So yes, the first song is 'Let The Good Times
Roll', and those who have not heard the album can be understood with their
reservations. For those who have, all that matters is that the band plays it
well, the ol' man hollers like he's twenty years old, and when he calls in for
audience participation, the entire hall explodes with a "let the good
times roll!" as if they were all sitting "under the stars at some
shed in the Midwest". And that's the biggest asset of this record: King
may be going through the motions for all I know, but the people out there are
genuinely happy.
If there is something to complain about on a
serious rather than socially pseudo-concerned basis, it's that the band is a
little rough, almost as if some of the inmates were actually sitting in, and
this takes its toll on classics like 'Thrill Is Gone' (rushed and perfunctory —
for a comparably dazzling performance from the same era, check out the live
version from Montreux 1993).
Also, although the only «new» live number, 'Into The Night', stripped from its
Eighties production, somehow fits in with the oldies, there was hardly any need
to insert the studio recording of the cheerful, but dumb 'Peace To The World'
in the middle and covering it in fake applause. (And I am ready to concede a point to Mr. M. G. of the All-Music Guide
here: "Let's all get together and bring peace to the world" are
obvious lines for that obligatory audience participation bit, but in San
Quentin? Not even the Soviet Union went that
far in its correction policies. And not everyone is smart enough to understand
that it was, in fact, a studio track).
Other than all that, just another good B. B.
King live album — well, any B. B. King live album is a good one unless the
sound quality is crappy, and San Quentin got fabulous acoustics. Johnny Cash
already figured that out. Thumbs up.
LIVE AT THE APOLLO (1991)
1) When Love Comes To Town; 2)
Sweet Sixteen; 3) The Thrill Is Gone; 4) Ain't Nobody's Bizness; 5) Paying The
Cost To Be The Boss; 6) All Over Again; 7) Nightlife; 8) Since I Met You Baby;
9) Guess Who; 10) Peace To The World.
Not content with filling in the shoes of Johnny Cash, less than a year later B.
B. went out again and, this time, tried on those of James Brown. (Live At Leeds, Live At Budokan, and Live In
Red Square are all titles that we expect to see in the next two or three
centuries, regardless of whether Mr. King already got there or is still biding
his time). It is not entirely clear if the folks at the Apollo wanted the man
that much more than the inmates at San Quentin, but it is entirely clear that
King, at least, seems to feel more at home over here than over there (then
again, come to think of it, who wouldn't?
Leadbelly, perhaps?). This is reflected not just in the generally cooler
swagger of the actual performances, but also in the decrease of the amount of
stage banter — with no need to soothe or sway the appreciative crowd, B. B.
just buries himself in the singing and playing, reducing audience participation
to a bare minimum.
There is a huge backing band here, the Philip
Morris Super Band led by piano great Gene Harris, ensuring the ideal
blues-de-luxe accompaniment, although some have complained that the band's
talents have pretty much been wasted: King does not provide a lot of breathing
space, nor does he budge away from his typical material into jazzier territory.
On the other hand, this is a B. B.
King live album, and he had let other people overshadow his playing and singing
so many times in his life that, sometimes, a great professional band may suffer
becoming a great professional backing band — and it does that with plenty of
verve and understanding. (Gene Harris does have a few juicy piano solos, if you
are wondering).
The setlist is almost completely predictable; the
only drop of fresh blood is U2's contribution to the catalog, the perfectly
B.-B.-Kingish blues-pop-rocker 'When Love Comes To Town' (which here almost ends up sounding like one
of his 1950s hits, rather than the modern, Bonified version on U2's Rattle & Hum). On the other hand,
he resuscitates some long-time oldies, e. g. 'All Over Again', sort of King's
personal equivalent of the tragic theater of 'St. James Infirmary', lyrically
diluted for the public at large, and Ivory Joe Hunter's 'Since I Met You Baby',
a song that also fits his easy-going, nice-mannered persona to a tee.
The good news is that the man is in top form,
the band is well-oiled, and most of the songs are classic; of the latter day
live albums from King, Apollo is one
of the most obvious choices. The bad news is that it may all be a little too slick — the setlist is too choked with crowdpleasers, and King
is playing it all too safe, never
soloing for too long and not taking any chances. 'The Thrill Is Gone', for
instance, fades out before it even crosses the four-minute mark, despite the
fact that, normally, it is one of King's usual improvisation launchpads. He
only gets to truly stretch out on 'All Over Again', much less so on 'Sweet
Sixteen'.
Yes, he can certainly be excused for wanting to
go out there and make a «proper» live album for all the nice ladies and
gentlemen who have been so good to him over the years — but that is no excuse for not releasing that real
live album that the fans would really want from him. It is amazing to realize
how many times people have witnessed the man ripping Live At The Regal to shreds while onstage — yet, for some bizarre
reason, he still has not authorized the release of an official live album to
prove that to non-concert-goers.
THERE IS ALWAYS ONE MORE TIME (1991)
1) I'm Moving On; 2) Back In L.A.; 3) The
Blues Come Over Me; 4) Fool Me Once; 5) The Lowdown; 6) Mean And Evil; 7)
Something Up My Sleeve; 8) Roll, Roll, Roll; 9) There Is Always One More Time.
A modest return to form after two of the man's
worst studio albums in a row. With the Eighties over, it became possible to
return to nicer production values — the poison-synths and drum machines are
gone, replaced by more normal playing. To B. B.'s credit, he would, from now
on, be for the most part free of the technophilia bug, meaning that one does
not run a serious risk of sticking with something atrocious even when picking
up any of his latest albums at random.
The bad news is that King's backing band here
is just as faceless as the robots on those Eighties records. Jim Keltner is a
solid drummer with an immaculate pedigree, but he is a great addition to an
already solid team, not some amazing percussion wizard who can make sticks and
stones come alive; the bass player, whoever he is, just plays bass; and the
keyboard players, instead of playing decent instruments, rely on those
dead-sounding electronic pianos that seemed to have been all the rage in
blues-rock around the time (they're still around, of course, but their sound
range seems to have at least slightly improved with the passing years). No
brass backing whatsoever, for unknown reasons (hard times?). Lucille seems to
have been the only living soul on the album, but King uses her sparingly, and
even when he does, we have the usual problem — her voice is way too thin to
properly arrive at us from behind the keyboard muck.
It's all a pity, because there are some good
songs here: most of the album had been written through the collaborative
effort of Will Jennings and Joe Sample — the same team that gave him his good
stuff during the 1978-79 stint with The Crusaders — and, just like before,
their contributions are spotty, but enjoyable. Most importantly, the melodies
return that gritty, aggressive feel that King's records from the last decade
generally missed. 'I'm Moving On' opens the album on a note of such triumphant
decision that, with a better arrangement, the song should have been a triumphant
comeback for the old boy, but with those keyboards... eh.
Some of the tracks are fine mood pieces: 'Back
In L. A.' is one of those laid back «city of good and evil» anthems that can be
either cheap cliché mixes or inspired new takes on the old thing, and
I'd vote for the latter; 'The Blues Come Over Me' certifiedly does have the
blues come over him (and somebody gives him a bit of proper piano backing, for
once!); and 'Mean And Evil' is simply fun — the big man is always at his best
when putting the blame on his woman. That's what all big men manage to do best of all, anyway.
But clearly, the magnum opus here is the title
track, written by and dedicated to the late Doc Pomus, the second-rate genius
(well, not all great somgwriters can be first-rate) behind lots of classic
R&B hits and drunken Dr. John rave-ups. Although King tends to sing well
throughout the whole album, this particular performance is obviously and
understandably his most emotional, and it's got what the rest of the album don't
got — a grand rippin' guitar solo at the end, with Jim Keltner finally latching
on to something of value and showing why they made a good choice in inviting
him to the sessions.
Most people will probably shrug their shoulders
upon reading King's "This is the best album I've recorded in my
career" in the liner notes, and start looking around for invisible ink
traces of "...since the previous one". Perhaps, though, it was not
merely a trivial marketing move: the cool thing about King is, he's always lived
for the moment, and it may simply mean that, while recording One More Time, he'd simply forgotten
about — or, perhaps, intentionally stripped himself of — all memories of past
experiences. Who knows, maybe that's the sort of thing that allows him to live
up to 80+ years and not feel worried about it. Fact is, he doesn't really feel like he's 66 years old on here. And
I feel fine, too, about giving this a thumbs up, despite the undeniable blandness of the
sound — and the simple truth that this is, of course, not the best album he's recorded in his career. Come to think of
it, what's he ever done to tell his
listeners what is best and what is worst? Who does he think he is — Stephen
Thomas Erlewine?
BLUES SUMMIT (1993)
1) Playin’ With My Friends; 2)
Since I Met You Baby; 3) I Pity The Fool; 4) You Shook Me; 5) Something You
Got; 6) There’s Something On Your Mind; 7) Little By Little; 8) Stormy Monday;
9) You’re The Boss; 10) We’re Gonna Make It; 11) I Gotta Move Out Of This
Neighborhood/Nobody Loves Me But My Mother; 12) Everybody’s Had The Blues.
You know for sure that something is not right
when, all of a sudden, the king does not show up any more without laying his
head on the shoulders of his courtiers. B. B. had enjoyed an occasional duet
or two in the past, but starting in the early Nineties, he switched to duet
mode on an almost full-time basis. It might not even have been for money
reasons, more for the psychological factor: all of these stars, young and old,
getting together and paying homage to the one and only would automatically mean
that the one and only was still the one and only.
From a purely technical point of view, Blues
Summit is unbeatable. King sings, Lucille wails, and the guests range from
forgotten, but still venerable has-beens (Ruth Brown, Irma Thomas) to grizzly
old veterans who only get better with age (Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker) to newer
stars with plenty of potential (Robert Cray). The songs are diverse enough —
from pure 12-bar to boogie blues to R’n’B — and some of the numbers bravely go
over five, six, seven minutes to let the agents show their full force.
From a more feelings-based point of view, Blues
Summit is excruciatingly stiff, lifeless, and boring. All of these guests
know perfectly well what they are there for — to tip their hat to the big man —
and the matters of courtesy and politeness consistently take over matters of
excitement and emotionality. This album is not another stop on B. B.’s own
journey, it’s a set of five-minute detours on everybody else’s journeys to take
a look at the old curio man. A fun project, but essentially meaningless: glitzy
blues free of true soul, but full of gross mannerisms, best illustrated by the
forced «sobbing» on the re-recording of ‘Nobody Loves Me But My Mother’.
There are some excellent bits of guitar
interplay, though, particularly on the Albert Collins duet (‘Stormy Monday’)
and the Joe Louis Walker one (‘Everybody’s Had The Blues’); on the other hand,
the numbers with Buddy Guy (a clumsily choreographed ‘I Pity The Fool’) and
John Lee Hooker (‘You Shook Me’, with annoyingly overacted stuttering from
Hooker) are almost completely wasted. Lots of ladies add generically powerful
urban blues vocals to five of the tracks, with disastrous effect — they all try
to match King’s singing style so closely that it is almost impossible to
distinguish Katie Webster from Koko Taylor, or Etta James from Irma Thomas,
even though in real life they all have significantly different personalities.
If this review read like a typical blurb out of
the All-Music Guide, it is because Blues Summit is exactly the kind of
album for which the All-Music Guide has been invented: a huge credits list from
which to draw on trivia, and zero artistic significance that makes it a great
target for the «You’d think that... but then again, no» formula. And an
AMG-style review deserves an AMG-style closing line — how about this: «As far
as we can tell, B. B. King has regained his regalia, at the expense of
relinquishing his relevance».
DEUCES WILD (1997)
1) If You Love Me; 2) The
Thrill Is Gone; 3) Rock Me Baby; 4) Please Send Me Someone To Love; 5) Baby I
Love You; 6) Ain't Nobody Home; 7) Pauly's Birthday Boogie; 8) There Must Be A
Better World Somewhere; 9) Confessin' The Blues; 10) Hummingbird; 11) Bring It
On Home To Me; 12) Paying The Cost To Be The Boss; 13) Let The Good Times Roll;
14) Dangerous Mood; 15) Crying Won't Help You; 16) Night Life.
King's second duets album in a row — third, actually, if one counts Lucille & Friends from 1995, which
looks like a compilation of previously released and unreleased tracks from
multiple sessions — would seem to confirm the suspicion that he had completely
relegated himself to «elder sideman» status, forever satisfied with selling
his records on the strength of other people's names. But at least he is getting
better at it: Deuces Wild is a far
more interesting record than Blues
Summit, for a number of reasons.
First, the guest list is more diverse and, in
places, unpredictable. It is no surprise, and hardly a guarantee of success,
to see Eric Clapton or the entirety of the Rolling Stones sucking up to the
King — but what about Van Morrison or Willie Nelson? Dave Gilmour on second
guitar? Jools Holland and his honky-tonk? Ex-Roxy Music guy Paul Carrack? Let's
face it, there ain't a single professional musician in this world that would seriously mind having a go at it
with the King himself, and this time around, the King took notice and expanded
his formerly tight list of generic blues friends so much that at least a few
interesting things were bound to happen. And, of course, a few boring or ugly
ones, but when you're being random like that, it's heads or tails all over
again with each new track.
Highlights: 'If You Love Me', a Van Morrison
song written and sung by Van Morrison while B. B. produces moody background in
the background. Sweet. Tracy Chapman's weirdly wobbly vocals on 'The Thrill Is
Gone', offering yet another spirited reinvention of the song. Bizarre. 'Pauly's
Birthday Boogie' with Jools Holland — instrumental jump-blues from days long
gone by, the King rocking us back to the innocent days of the 1950s. Nostalgic.
'Hummingbird' — nobody needs to be a huge fan of Dionne Warwick, but the song
had always called for a female performance, and she is more than adequate on
supporting her man out here. Romantic. 'Night Life' — Willie Nelson makes this
clichéd old standard sound nicely personal again: you can't go wrong,
anyway, with the most intelligent-sounding voice in country music lending it
extra credence. Smart.
Lowlights: neither Clapton nor Jagger are at
their best, the former taking all due precautions not to outplay the master and
ending up sounding bland (the same problem that also marred the duo's
full-fledged collaboration, Riding With
The King), and the latter not really having sounded all that impressive on any 12-bar blues numbers since at least
1966 or so (I mean, the Stones' rendition of 'Stop Breaking Down' is
astoundingly great, but purely because of its guitar sound, not due to the
vocals). There is also a silly rap number with Heavy D somewhere out there that
does not justify its existence — you don't
do rap when you're 72 years old; trust me, there are much better ways to show
the young 'uns you're in real great shape.
The rest fluctuates somewhere in the middle
(Bonnie Raitt is good, Joe Cocker not so good, Marty Stuart and Zucchero make
me yawn, Mick Hucknall nearly outsings the man, etc.), still enough to keep
things slightly above average and, in
general, justify this duet format. It does not seem so much a question of gelling — they all get in the swing easy
enough — as it is a question of refreshing:
for every guest that honestly brings stuff to the table, there is another one
that only takes from it. Still a thumbs up — after the stiffness of Blues Summit, this one is the epitome
of liveliness in comparison. Particular thanks should probably go to veteran
producer John Porter — either for doing things right, or for staying out of the
way long enough to make them come right, I don't exactly know which.
BLUES ON THE BAYOU (1998)
1) Blues Boys Tune; 2) Bad
Case Of Love; 3) I'll Survive; 4) Mean Ole' World; 5) Blues Man; 6) Broken
Promise; 7) Darlin' What Happened; 8) Shake It Up And Go; 9) Blues We Like; 10)
Good Man Gone Bad; 11) If I Lost You; 12) Tell Me Baby; 13) I Got Some Outside
Help I Don't Need; 14) Blues In G; 15) If That Ain't It I Quit.
This recording, as close to really good as it
is far from really great, is perhaps the closest King ever got, in his later
years, to recapturing the vibe of his early years. The liner notes emphasize
this return to basics, but nothing emphasizes it as well as the music itself.
Straightahead generic 12-bar, no bull attached. No duets, no super-guest-stars,
no fancy-wancy hi-tech production tricks, no particular concept, no hit single,
and, best of all, no forced attempts at «proving» something. Just a basic blues
session for a basic blues guy, working his stuff and loving it.
The predictable down side is that there is
nothing to cling to. The setlist is a mix of old standards with a few new,
spur-of-the-moment compositions; the backing is fabulously professional and
fabulously devoted to staying in the back (it is, after all, rather rude to
compete with The King, especially considering he's about as old as all of his
players put together); and there is not a single lick here we haven't already
heard on earlier records.
Individually, I could perhaps recommend the
opening instrumental 'Blues Boys Tune', one of the few, if not the only, pure soul-blues
entry here, giving the man ampler possibilities of stretching out; the boogie
number 'Shake It Up And Go', an unfrequent occasion of the man cheating on Lucille
in favour of an acoustic; and the barroom shakedown of 'If That Ain't It I
Quit', with the title constituting the song's only lyrical line.
Collectively, it all adds up to yet another
nice disc to put up during partytime or to encourage your grandparents in the
«see here, Grandaddy, that's how old
folks are supposed to exorcise their boredom» manner. Big additional question
mark about the album title — there is nothing even vaguely bayou-like on the record, cleanest-style Chicago blues
imaginable. But in all other respects, it's an honest down-to-earth offering,
so thumbs up.
Bring back the duets now, maybe?
LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL (1999)
1) Ain't Nobody Here But Us
Chickens; 2) Is You Is, Or Is You Ain't (My Baby); 3) Beware, Brother, Beware;
4) Somebody Done Changed The Lock On My Door; 5) Ain't That Just Like A Woman;
6) Cho Choo Ch'Boogie; 7) Buzz Me; 8) Early In The Mornin'; 9) I'm Gonna Move
To The Outskirts Of Town; 10) Jack, You're Dead!; 11) Knock Me A Kiss; 12) Let
The Good Times Roll; 13) Caldonia; 14) It's A Great, Great Pleasure; 15) Rusty
Dusty Blues; 16) Sure Had A Wonderful Time Last Night; 17) Saturday Night Fish
Fry; 18) Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out.
Ten years on, this album has obviously lost any
relevance it might have ever possessed, but in 1999 it may have done a decent job of introducing a handful of young B. B.
King fans (yes, the brand name does indeed attract young fans on a continuous
basis) to the legacy of Louis Jordan, a whoppin' eighteen cuts from which are
faithfully covered here by King, assisted on piano — and, once, on vocals — by
none other than Dr. John.
Naturally, Louis Jordan was as much of a
seasoned pro and underrated genius at his
schtick — jump blues and swing — as B. B. King was at his; naturally, it is
just as unlikely for B. B. King to excel at Jordan-style jazz as it would have
been unlikely for Jordan to excel at King-style blues. That B. B. was a devout
fan of Jordan is beyond doubt: he'd already covered 'Let The Good Times Roll'
on many an occasion, and his entertainment style borrowed lots of its
easy-going elements from Jordan's. But to do an entire album of Jordan tunes, including prime Louis cuts whose musical
table tennis between Jordan and his band is supposed to take one's breath away
like nothing else, that takes quite a bit of gall. How the man came up with
the idea in the first place, we'll never know. The big questions are — (a) does
he pull it off? and (b) what's the payoff?
Surprisingly, it all works. Had B. B.
concentrated on Jordan's slow blues stuff, such as 'I'm Gonna Move To The
Outskirts Of Town' or the album-closing 'Nobody Knows You' (which Jordan never
«owned» as such but, apparently, covered), he would have turned it into just
another blues album — a regularly good blues album, perhaps, well suited to
King's style and persona, but it would be rather silly to call it a Louis
Jordan tribute album. On the contrary, most of the album is devoted to Jordan's
fast, rollickin' numbers that give B. B. a chance to flash his boogie licks — a
chance that he doesn't use nearly as often as he should, usually ceding the
spotlight to Dr. John and the brass section and concentrating on the singing.
This is where he is bound to lose: no matter
how easy-going and inspired his backing band is, nobody can beat the original
Tympany Five, and no matter how convincing and authentic B. B. is in his
phrasing, he wasn't born with it the way Jordan always seemed to be. B. B.'s
guitar and Dr. John's piano are the two edges that they have over the original,
but the original was all about singing and brass interplay — it's a little
like trying to improve on Chuck Berry by adding a master church organ player to
'Brown Eyed Handsome Man'.
It is admirable that the end result is as much
fun as it really is, but, honestly, at best Let The Good Times Roll is a one-time listen to admire the man's
lively spirit: let us not forget that the man was a whoppin' seventy-four years old while boppin' and
groovin' to the merry sounds of 'Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens' (in
comparison, Jordan was sixty-seven when he died, and pretty much stopped
boppin' and groovin' upon reaching the age of fifty). For that alone, it definitely
deserves a thumbs
up, and now go do yourself a favour — pick up one of those cheap Jordan
compilations available everywhere, and 'Let The Good Times Roll'!
MAKIN' LOVE IS GOOD FOR YOU (2000)
1) I Got To Leave This Woman;
2) Since I Fell For You; 3) I Know; 4) Peace Of Mind; 5) Monday Woman; 6) Ain't
Nobody Like My Baby; 7) Makin' Love Is Good For You; 8) Don't Go No Farther; 9)
Actions Speak Louder Than Words; 10) What You Bet; 11) You're On Top; 12) Too
Good To You Baby; 13) I'm In The Wrong Business; 14) She's My Baby.
"Makin' love is good for you", King
tells us with the complacency of a man who really knows what he's talking about
— implying that, perhaps, makin' love is still good for him, too, regardless of the discrepancy between the year 2000 and
his own birthdate, usually given as 1925. Admittedly, it is great to know that
the guy is still doing well in the life-enjoying department. Unfortunately, it
is the only great thing about this album.
(Well, perhaps, other than letting us know that
all of these years he's been "in the wrong business": "Should've
been like Michael Jackson when I was the age of five / But I chose this guitar,
now I'm broke and can't survive" — ha ha. Then again, considering the
man's embarrassing stunt for Burger King two years later, perhaps he was being serious. No one can contest,
after all, that the King of Pop did
make a hell of a lot more dough than the King of Blues — on the other hand,
whose life has been the longer and happier one?).
Anyway, Makin'
Love is simply one more Blues On The
Bayou: exact same band, exact same production, exact same styles and exact
same evenness bordering on the boring, or maybe just plain boring — the
«bordering» explained by the fact that it takes some guts to call a B. B. King
album «boring». However, having already digested most of the man's discography,
we now know what kind of things the man is really capable of, and few, if any,
of these heights are scaled on Makin'
Love's relatively timid and tepid workouts.
I wish I could recommend an outstanding solo or
vocal part, but I cannot. 'I'm In The Wrong Business' is, indeed, a fun curio
and a potential laugh riot for the jaded B. B. fan, just because the lyrics are
so outrageous. As for the guitar licks — each one of these you've heard a
million times by now, and, at the very least, owning Blues On The Bayou automatically makes owning Makin' Love a complete waste of your money. Choose one and leave
the other for your enemy.
REFLECTIONS (2003)
1) Exactly Like You; 2) On My
Word Of Honor; 3) I Want A Little Girl; 4) I'll String Along With You; 5) I
Need You; 6) A Mother's Love; 7) (I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons; 8)
Neighborhood Affair; 9) Tomorrow Night; 10) There I've Said It Again; 11)
Always On My Mind; 12) Cross My Heart; 13) What A Wonderful World.
It's been quite some time since B. B.
concentrated exclusively on his sentimental side, so he can certainly be
excused for spending a well-tucked evening with The Great American Cornbook on
his lap. More than that, he can be excused for triggering a predictable series
of associations: «Old time balladry» + «78 years of age» + «an album called Reflections» → «nostalgia» /
«looking back on that long long road» / «that old, tired noble heart» →
RESPECT.
None of which surmises that anyone will ever be
interested in hearing this album more than once — the usual fate for about 70%
of King's output, for sure, but Reflections
doesn't even make for decent party music this time, unless you're talking about
your grandparents' high school reunion party, and even in that case it is not
clear why they would want to hear B. B. King impersonating Nat King Cole,
Armstrong, and Dionne Warwick instead of the real thing.
Factual data are scarce and uninteresting. The
arrangements are loud and bombastic, with lots of brass and strings and very
little guitar, although, to be honest, when B. B. is in the mood for a soulful solo, he does it admirably well, e. g.
'On My Word Of Honor'. There is a strangely large amount of steel and slide
guitar, too, which may be puzzling for those who are well aware of the man's
monogamy, but, apparently, most, if not all, of those parts are played by wiz
kid Doyle Bramhall II. It gives the proceedings a slightly Nashvillified whiff,
too, which is OK by me — anything to
take the emphasis off that high school ballroom spirit is welcome.
Maybe — a very uncertain maybe — but still, maybe the album could have been turned
into something vaguely more interesting had its production not been entrusted
to Simon Climie, the man almost single-handedly responsible for strangling Eric
Clapton's mid-1990s comeback in the cradle and, consequently, for making the
Clapton/King collaboration (Riding With
The King) ten times less the experience that it could have been. The man
has an unparalleled gift for sucking life, energy, and brawn out of anything —
he could probably make Manowar sound like Bread without them noticing. On the
other hand, it is not clear how exactly would it be possible to breathe new
life into those dusty old standards, especially if the artist behind them is a
dusty old relic himself (no offense). Thumbs down — avoid unless you're on a really
acute sentimental kick.
80 (2005)
1) Early In The Morning; 2)
Tired Of Your Jive; 3) The Thrill Is Gone; 4) Need Your Love So Bad; 5) Ain't
Nobody Home; 6) Hummingbird; 7) All Over Again; 8) Drivin' Wheel; 9) There Must
Be A Better World Somewhere; 10) Never Make Your Move Too Soon; 11) Funny How
Time Slips Away; 12) Rock This House.
Another jubilee, another batch of boring,
uncomfortable duets. But there is an extra kick here, as compared to King's
earlier gueststar-studded records: it is rather fun to hear the 80-year old
grangrandaddy outsing (nearly always) and outplay (occasionally) most of his
guests, including those who had not yet been born when the man was already
cutting sides, and who, at this point, are as much «elder statesmen» of popular
music as he is, and sometimes more.
I mean, it must have been a pretty cruel joke
on King's part to drag Roger Daltrey in the studio: the poor guy sounds
completely out of voice, breath, and life-supporting devices trying to outdo
his 19-year-older partner on the rough blues verses of 'Never Make Your Move
Too Soon', whereas B. B. still delivers those lines almost exactly the same
way as he did thirty years earlier. Ditto for Elton John on 'Rock This House',
the album's only uptempo number that closes the proceedings on a good-timey
retro-Fifties note — but perhaps bringing in Doctor John instead of Elton would have spiced things up in a more
amusing manner.
The rest of the duets are not exactly pitiful,
but there is nothing on here that would, somehow, confirm that this particular person placed his/her
stamp on this particular song for any
respectable reason. Most of the people are just wasted — either because, as is
often the case, they were only too happy to hide behind the wall of B. B.'s
years (if so, why the hell did they join him in the studio at all?), or
because, perhaps out of a lack of experience of working with the King, they
didn't quite understand what to do and how to do it.
Van Morrison: sings a 12-bar blues tune without
any passion at all, perhaps because 12-bar blues is simply not his
forté. Billy Gibbons: there is no place for classic ZZ Top irony on a B.
B. King song. Eric Clapton: hollow, manneristic soloing on 'Thrill Is Gone',
possibly because he is trying to do it King-style — isn't it a little odd,
considering that King is playing on the very same track? Sheryl Crow: she can
write a good song or two, but crooning the blues? Might as well bring in
Madonna. John Mayer: the Big Boring Guitar Hero of our time, adding absolutely
nothing to 'Hummingbird' and I am still not sure subtracting how much. Etc.
etc.
The only
track that might be worth tracking down is the duet with Bobby Bland on 'Funny
How Time Slips Away' — unlike most other pairings, the Bland/King collaboration
goes back to the mid-Seventies, and the two have a good way of understanding
and complementing each other; their «conversation» is simultaneously amusing
and touching, justifiedly nostalgic in tone, and does not feel one bit
strained.
Everything else does. If it qualifies as a
birthday present, it must be one of those «Official Important» presents that
so often spoil all the fun at jubilees — you know, getting something very
solemn-looking, very expensive, and completely useless. Anybody celebrating his
80th jubilee and still having a recording and performing career is OK in my
book at least out of sheer respect
(and, while we're at it, King still occasionally smokes and blazes in concert,
even if he has to sit rather than stand throughout the whole show); but in this
case, it is the man that we want to hear, not his (lack of) interaction with
his deliberately or coincidentally wooden partners. I'm sorry, Mr King, but the
duets just have to go. Thumbs down.
ONE KIND FAVOR (2008)
1) See That My Grave Is Kept
Clean; 2) I Get So Weary; 3) Get These Blues Off Me; 4) How Many More Years; 5)
Waiting For Your Call; 6) My Love Is Down; 7) The World Is Gone Wrong; 8) Blues
Before Sunrise; 9) Midnight Blues; 10) Backwater Blues; 11) Sitting On Top Of
The World; 12) Tomorrow Night.
There is definitely an attempt to find some sort of different edge here; unfortunately, in
the long run One Kind Favor still
ends up being «just another B. B. King album». Of course, one should never
forget that it is «just another B. B. King album recorded at the age of 83» —
at this point, each new release from the man is a must-hear, if only as a
source of inspiration for all of us low-down quitters like Mick Jagger and
Angus Young.
Good news involve producer T-Bone Burnett, who
has dedicated much of his life to finding a perfect balance between
progressive technology and archaistic atmosphere; one more return of Dr. John,
whose piano playing is often enough to make even a turd burst into flowers; and
a number of golden oldies that had never before received the B. B. King touch.
Bad news are that T-Bone's production style and King's standard idiom do not
mesh well together; that most of the extra studio musicians are little more
than paid professionals; and that most of the golden oldies are standard 12-bar
fare — and do we really need another version of 'Tomorrow Night',
what with Reflections released a
mere five years earlier?
Granted, the album starts out tremendously
well. Blind Lemon's 'See That My Grave Is Kept Clean', whose lyrics also lend
the album its title, obviously has a lot of relevance for King these days, and
even though there is no reason to think that he meant it as a final musical
gesture, he clearly sings it testament-style, in a wearier voice than usual.
Meanwhile, Burnett surrounds his delivery with dark, swampy atmosphere, with a
muffling effect on Jim Keltner's drums and a thin organ membrane that is more
felt than heard. Nothing of the kind can be found on any other B. B. King album
— this is the finest intro-bait we've had from the man in maybe thirty years or
so.
Alas, already on the second track, even though
the production values mostly remain the same, the magic starts to dissipate.
Had they concentrated on darker, deeper material throughout, One Kind Favor would truly be
different. But this is where B. B.'s self-imposed limitations step in: he is
such a big-hearted optimist that he can never stay steeped in doom and gloom
for too long. Entertainment has been
his motto all these years, and what kind of an entertainer would want to spend
an entire hour depressing his audiences?
Throughout all of the remaining eleven tracks,
Burnett is pretty much helpless. He still puts that echo on the drums, brings
the bass high up in the mix to make things run in a jazzier vein, buries
Lucille under waves of brass and keyboards — no dice. There is a physical limit
to what you can do with the 12-bar form delivered by an 83-year old whose style
of playing and guitar tones have not changed all that much ever since they
learned how to run electricity through a six-string.
Also, it worries me to say this, but it does
seem like King is honestly sounding a
little tired and worn down here: the singing is quieter, shakier, and, overall,
somewhat less expressive than it had been even three years earlier on the 80th
jubilee album. This may be one of the reasons why 'See That My Grave Is Kept
Clean' works so well on the senses — and why all the other songs do not. In
this situation, he could perhaps concentrate more on the playing than on the
singing, and on the slow mood pieces rather than aggressive mid-tempo
blues-rock ('Backwater Blues' and 'Waiting For Your Call', both of them
seriously overlong, still work better than something like 'How Many More Years'
in this setting). On the other hand, the last time it happened, his idea of a
slow mood piece was the sweet lounge sound of Reflections, and that's no salvation either.
What to do, then? Retire? Apparently, that is
not going to happen as long as the man is physically capable of doing something
to that guitar. All that is left us is sit back and endure: as long as the King
refrains from embarrassments (say, a duet with Eminem or a production deal with
the Bama Boyz), everything that he records until his demise (currently
scheduled for the aftermath of World War III from a bad cold caught on Keith
Richards' funeral) is going to be listened to with the proper reverence. As
for One Kind Favor, I'd like to give
it a thumbs down, but it does have one terrific performance, and in any case,
we are way, way past the thumbs stage on here.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 1 (1927-1928)
1) Barbecue Blues; 2) Cloudy
Sky Blues; 3) Mississippi Heavy Water Blues; 4) Mamma You Don't Suit Me; 5)
Brown-Skin Gal; 6) Honey You Don't Know My Mind; 7) Poor Boy A Long Ways From
Home; 8) When The Saints Go Marching In; 9) Jesus' Blood Can Make Me Whole; 10)
Easy Rider Don't You Deny My Name; 11) Thinkin' Funny Blues; 12) My Mistake
Blues; 13) Motherless Child Blues; 14) How Long Pretty Mama; 15) It Won't Be
Long Now Pt. 1; 16) It Won't Be Long Now Pt. 2; 17) Crooked Woman Blues; 18)
'Fo Day Creep; 19) Blind Pig Blues; 20) Waycross Georgia Blues; 21) Goin' Up
The Country; 22) Chocolate To The Bone; 23) Hurry And Bring It Back Home.
Barbecue Bob broiled barbecues, boiled
bouillons, and... uh... brewed bouillabaisse? In between that and other
culinary delights, he played guitar and, in stark contrast to Barbecue Bill,
Barbecue Tom, Dick, and Harry, got put in history when, through Columbia
Records talent scout man Dan Hornsby, he was offered the chance to record some
of his playing and singing for the rapidly growing acoustic blues market.
Actually, his real name was Robert Hicks, and he wasn't half bad, but it is
highly likely that most people bought his records all based on the «singing
cook» gimmick. One of the only two photos of the man that we know has him wearing
an apron — even though, upon starting to make some real money in the record
business, the apron must have been making its reappearance for promo reasons
only.
Barbecue Bob is usually lumped in together with
the «Piedmont Blues» style, because of his Georgian origins. He wasn't,
however, one of the true Piedmont innovators: compared to real fabulous greats
who almost seemed to come from nowhere, like Blind Blake, his «flailing» style
of playing was much simpler and more traditional. He mostly played the
12-string, and wasn't half bad at sliding (sometimes he manages to «flail» and
slide at the same time), but overall, it is no crime to state that he was not a great player, not according to
these here ears. But as a representative of one long gone generic kind of
sound, he's all right. For all we know, that's just about the way them old
Negroes would play this thing in 1897, or even before that, once they got
acquainted with the guitar and started playing them like the white folks would
play the banjo. So that's gotta count for something.
Bob was much better at singing, though,
sounding like a slightly less versatile, but somewhat grizzlier, less explicitly
«effeminate» early version of Blind Willie McTell; after a while, his timbre
becomes unmistakable, and his feel for the blues easily equates that of the
greats of that era. Furthermore, as much as the limited formula did allow, he
tried to somehow diversify his played and sung parts — echoes of old folk
songs, newer country sounds, and spirituals (a nice pre-Armstrong take on
'When The Saints' included), all ran through his friendly tone that mixes
friendliness and pain in just the right proportion.
Two of Bob's better known songs are on this
first volume, covering his 1927-28 years: 'Mississippi Heavy Water Blues',
commemorating a series of floods so close to everyone's hearts that the song
made him into a hitmaker almost overnight, and 'Motherless Child', best known
today, perhaps, through Clapton's cover on From The Cradle — for which Eric humbly reproduced, almost note
for note, Bob's «simplistic» rolling-droning rhythm, and did a good job at it,
but only improved on the original in terms of sound quality. Many of the other
titles are recognizable as well, but it is these two that constitute the
cornerstone of the barbecue man's legacy, and it will sure harm none to get to
know them in their 1927 incarnations.
Especially since the sound quality is quite
remarkable; although Paramount was the leading force on the country/Delta blues
market during the pre-Depression years, Columbia had the better engineering
department, and all of Bob's sides are consistently listenable — whereas, for
instance, trying to listen to all of Blind Lemon Jefferson's output in a row is
a very serious challenge.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 2 (1928-1929)
1) Mississippi Low-Levee
Blues; 2) Ease It To Me Blues; 3) She's Gone Blues; 4) Cold Wave Blues; 5) Beggin'
For Love; 6) Bad Time Blues; 7) Meat Man Pete; 8) Dollar Down Blues; 9) It Just
Won't Hay; 10) It's Just Too Bad; 11) Good Time Rounder; 12) Honey You're Going
Too Fast; 13) Red Hot Mama Papa's Going To Cool You Down; 14) California Blues;
15) It's A Funny Little Thing; 16) Black Skunk Blues; 17) Yo Yo Blues; 18)
Trouble Done Bore Me Down; 19) Freeze To Me Mama; 20) Me And My Whiskey; 21)
Unnamed Blues.
Bob's second year at Columbia clearly showed
that the man wasn't going anywhere special, but it's not as if anyone expected
progress. On the contrary, everyone expected, and demanded, nothing but
remakes of the old hits; symbolically, the album opens with 'Mississippi
Low-Levee Blues', which is simply 'Mississippi Heavy Water Blues' with a new
set of lyrics. There are also a couple rewrites of 'Motherless Child' here, and
lots of fast dance-blues numbers all set to the same pattern ('It Just Won't
Hay' and its clones).
Dirty song of the day: 'Meat Man Pete', of
course, in which Bob is all excited to tell us all about "Peter's
meat" which is "always fresh" (for some reason, he doesn't do
the popular verse which mentions his "boneless ham"). However, it
must also be mentioned that Hicks' songs are not all that heavy on dirty double
entendres — the barbecue man preferred a cleaner approach.
On the positive side, it seems that the more
time Hicks spent in the studio, the more he was getting into his instrument.
The simple «flailing» technique is still there all over the place, but generally
there is more emphasis on his slide playing, and almost every number, no matter
how primitive, has plenty of little flourishes and, sometimes, even
counter-melodic lines that show how honestly the cooking bluesman was trying to
hold his own territory against giants like Blind Lemon. It is hardly a crime
that he never got around to matching Jefferson's creativity. He did beat him in
the vocal department, though, in a «technical» manner at least — easily going
from growl to falsetto and then to his regular tenor whenever the situation
called for it. But not in the «personality» department — his drinking songs,
such as 'Me And My Whiskey', do not really betray the soul of a goddamn
drinking man.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 3 (1929-1930)
1) She Moves It Just Right; 2)
Tellin' It To You; 3) Yo-Yo Blues No. 2; 4) She Shook Her Gin; 5) We Sure Got
Hard Times; 6) Twistin' That Stuff; 7) Monkey And The Baboon; 8) Spider And The
Fly; 9) Darktown Gambling Pt. 1; 10) Darktown Gambling Pt. 2; 11) Jambooger
Blues; 12) It Just Won't Quit; 13) Atlanta Moan; 14) New Mojo Blues; 15) Doin'
The Scraunch; 16) I'm On My Way Down Home; 17) Diddle-Da-Diddle; 18) She Looks
So Good; 19) She's Coming Back Some Cold Rainy Day.
Like most country bluesmen with only their
guitar to keep them company, at first Barbecue Bob did not suffer from
Depression effects nearly as much as the urban blues queens — apparently, his
rate of recording just wobbled a bit, rather than crumble. But he certainly was
no Hollywood millionnaire, either, and his 'We Sure Got Hard Times' is one of
those symbolic tunes of the era whose names are so prone to becoming clichéd
in our minds without remembering where it all comes from. He must have taken
some inspiration from Blind Blake, probably, the first country bluesman not
afraid to inject some political bite in his lyrics — "Just before election,
you was talking about how you was going to vote / And after election was over,
your head's down like a billygoat" (ironically, he did not live long
enough to see FDR in power).
Other than this landmark, Vol. 3 boasts a couple curious novelty tunes ('Monkey And The Baboon')
and a few darker-than-usual numbers like 'Spider And The Fly', as well as a
silly two-part «skit» called 'Darktown Gambling', in which Bob plays and sings a
tiny bit and then spends something like five minutes quarrelling with his
brother Charley Lincoln over a crap game. (Period historians and etnographers
ahoy!). In terms of guitar technique or recording quality, there are no changes
whatsoever.
Perhaps the biggest individual attraction of Vol. 3, though, are the last four
tracks, credited to «The Georgia Cotton Pickers» — a one-time band assembled
from Bob, Curley Weaver on second guitar, and newcomer Buddy Moss on
harmonica; Buddy would go on to become one of the most important East Coast
bluesmen, but here he is just an aspiring sideman learning his craft from the
masters of action — Bob and Curley — quite happy to even be allowed to blow his
harp quietly in the background. They do Blind Blake ('Diddle-Da-Diddle', an
easily recognizable retitling of 'Diddie Wah Diddie'), 'Sittin' On Top Of The
World' renamed as 'I'm On My Way Down Home', and a couple other generic blues
pieces. If I am correct in my reckoning, it is Curley who plays lead, mostly,
and does it far more elegantly than Bob ever could — on the other hand, it is
Bob who is responsible for all the vocals, and performs with far more
expression than Curley could ever muster on his
records. Quid pro quo all over the place.
Sadly, these few recordings by the Pickers in
December 1930 were the last for Bob. Hard times caught up with him pretty soon:
for the following several months, he was out of work, and then, at the peak of
unluckiness, got carried away with influenza, pneumonia, and tuberculosis on October 21, 1931. It is highly unlikely that he
would have gone on to bigger and better things had he stayed alive, so, from a
completist-reviewer's cynical-pragmatic point of view, he did good, but from
the humanist point of view — well, the best we can do is go on ensuring that
the world remembers his best creations, such as 'Motherless Child' etc., for at
least a little while longer.
THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS, VOL. 1 (1923-1924)
CD I: 1) Downhearted Blues; 2)
Gulf Coast Blues; 3) Aggravatin' Papa; 4) Beale Street Mama; 5) Baby Won't You
Please Come Home; 6) Oh! Daddy Blues; 7) 'Tain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do; 8)
Keeps On A-Rainin' (Papa, He Can't Make No Time); 9) Mama's Got The Blues; 10)
Outside Of That; 11) Bleeding Hearted Blues; 12) Lady Luck Blues; 13) Yodling
Blues; 14) Midnight Blues; 15) If You Don't, I Know Who Will; 16) Nobody In
Town Can Bake A Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine; 17) Jailhouse Blues; 18) St. Louis
Gal; 19) Sam Jones Blues; CD II: 1) Graveyard Dream Blues; 2) Cemetery Blues;
3) Far Away Blues; 4) I'm Going Back To My Used To Be; 5) Whoa, Tillie, Take
Your Time; 6) My Sweetie Went Away; 7) Any Woman's Blues; 8) Chicago Bound
Blues; 9) Mistreatin' Daddy; 10) Frosty Morning Blues; 11) Haunted House Blues;
12) Eavesdropper's Blues; 13) Easy Come, Easy Go Blues; 14) Sorrowful Blues;
15) Pinchbacks — Take 'Em Away!; 16) Rocking Chair Blues; 17) Ticket Agent,
Ease Your Window Down; 18) Bo Weavil Blues; 19) Hateful Blues.
Typically, one's acquaintance with the «urban blues»
of the roaring decade begins with Bessie Smith — and, also typically, ends
there, because it takes the modern listener a long time to get settled into
that creaky, hissy, monotonous, faraway groove, and not everyone can make it at all, much
less become interested in exploring that groove even further. Still, it is not
very difficult to understand what exactly was it that charmed audiences back
then in this kind of music — and what it is that makes the retro-fan share the
same sentiments almost a century later.
It is much harder to understand and
explain what it is, exactly, that sets Bessie Smith so far apart from all the
other innumerable «blues queens» of the day: Ma Rainey, Mamie Smith, Clara
Smith, Alberta Hunter, Lucille Hegamin, Ida Cox, Sippie Wallace... the list is
really endless, and all of them were first-rate entertainers in their
own right. And yet, it is not just some arbitrary historian's choice that
randomly picked Bessie from this crowd and set her on a particularly impressive
pedestal. The fact is that the blues boom of the 1920s did not properly
set in until the arrival of Bessie, and, even though she was far from the first
blues queen to appear on record (Mamie Smith had her beat by three years at
least), it was she that, almost overnight, turned the blues recording business
from a modest kingdom into a huge empire — rightfully earning the title of «Empress
Of The Blues», under which she was billed throughout most of the decade.
The reason certainly does not lie in the music, or the arrangements.
Song-wise, Bessie was recording more or less the same compositions as everyone
else — sometimes borrowing songs that had already become hits with her
competition, sometimes giving them away, according to the common rules of the
trade. As for the accompaniment, it is certainly hard to complain: almost from
the beginning, after a brief stint with pianist and (rather ruthless) promo man
Clarence Williams, her main partner was Fletcher Henderson, one of the biggest
piano men of the decade, whose tireless «flourishing» graces a lot of these
tracks and seriously raises the stakes in the beauty department. But still,
there is no denying that many blues queens back then got prime backing from dexterous
jazz and blues musicians.
Obviously, the public was buying not because it wanted to hear more of
Fletcher Henderson, but because it needed all the magic it could get from
Bessie herself. So, what was that magic, and can we still perceive it, being so
far removed from its time?
The way I see it, Bessie represented the first step on a long emotional
journey whose purpose is to free performing art from its performing conventions
and to imbue it with realistic emotion. When you listen to the other «queens»
of the time, what you get is essentially show-biz. Now do not get me wrong:
when you listen to Bessie, what you get is also show-biz. But the first
show-biz is show-biz presented as show-biz, whereas Bessie's show-biz is
awesomely more life-like. Roughly speaking, she sings it like she means it, while
such performers as Mamie Smith or Alberta Hunter would sing it like they were
expected to sing it.
This point will become very simple and obvious if, for instance, one
listens to Alberta Hunter's 'Downhearted Blues' and Bessie's rendition of the
same song — her very first recorded side — in a row. Hunter is cute, elegant,
and pleasant; she hits all the right notes, but, essentially, sounds like she
is mostly doing it just for the applause. Her 'gee, but it's hard to love
someone, when that someone don't love you' certainly does not sound like it is
really coming from someone in painful love with someone else. Bessie, ditching
the lightweight vaudeville horns, with nothing but Clarence Williams'
minimalistic piano behind her back, takes it to a whole different level. It is
not just that her voice is deeper and stronger; it is that she really modulates
it to fit the lyrics and the general mood, actually putting the blues back into
the blues where the blues belong.
Formally, much of this is still «vaudeville» rather than true blues,
but emotionally, this is troubled music, and even though Bessie's own troubled
times, aside from some tumultuous personal relations, ended pretty soon after
she began her recording career, this never impacted her ability to deliver music
that people could properly relate to, rather than just use it for parties. Can
people still relate to it? Well, take my own case: while I have learned to
enjoy female urban blues as such, almost none of it has managed to seriously
stick in my mind — and yet, at the same time, 'Downhearted Blues', 'Gulf Coast
Blues', 'Baby Won't You Please Come Home', the absolutely powerhouse 'Tain't
Nobody's Bizness If I Do' (a classic that nearly every bluesman has performed
since and not a single one has performed better), 'Lady Luck Blues' — these are
just some of the tunes from this first volume of recordings that have struck a
deep chord with me.
Keep in mind that I mentioned «first step»: in 1923, «emotional» blues
singing was too young yet to include screaming one's head off, going from
shrill to hushed in a matter of seconds, or ad-libbing whatever impulse came
into your head like crazy. The inexperienced listener should not be expecting
a Janis Joplin here, or an Aretha Franklin, or even a Billie Holiday, even
though all three were clearly indebted to Bessie, directly or indirectly (and
Billie, in particular, used to sing quite a bit of Bessie's material). In
essence, this is traditional, gimmick-free singing — but very human, very
approachable, and, while we're at it, quite powerful: most of the «strong,
independent» women of the more recent eras of pop music really sound like
vague, insecure bimbos next to the strength and confidence that Smith exudes on
almost every performance.
Obviously, the Complete Recordings series, even for giants like Bessie,
are overkill, and she does not always sing with the same level of intensity,
not to mention that much of the material just does not have any pre-written
hooks to latch on to. There is also a horrendous recording that, for some
stupid marketing reason, pairs Bessie with Clara Smith, a decent performer in
her own rights — but together they form The Hungry Cat Duo, singing so
drastically off-key that the only purpose of it must have been to imply that
they should never be put on the same record again.
But this is obligatory nitpicking — when you strive for completism, you
should know beforehand that not everything is going to be great. On the
positive side, these cannot even be called the formative years: Bessie was
just as fantastic on her first records as she was on her last — fresher, in
fact, and with an overall higher proportion of truly timeless classics. Only
historians need access to all the 38 tracks on here, but regular music lovers
who do not have access to at least a dozen have missed a good friend. Thumbs up.
THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS, VOL. 2 (1924-1925)
CD I: 1) Frankie Blues; 2)
Moonshine Blues; 3) Louisiana Low Down Blues; 4) Mountain Top Blues; 5) Work
House Blues; 6) House Rent Blues; 7) Salt Water Blues; 8) Rainy Weather Blues;
9) Weeping Willow Blues; 10) The Bye Bye Blues; 11) Sing Sing Prison Blues; 12)
Follow The Deal On Down; 13) Sinful Blues; 14) Woman's Trouble Blues; 15) Love
Me Daddy Blues; 16) Dying Gambler's Blues; 17) The St. Louis Blues; 18)
Reckless Blues; 19) Sobbin' Hearted Blues; CD II: 1) Cold In Hand Blues; 2)
You've Been A Good Ole Wagon; 3) Cake Walkin' Babies (From Home); 4) The Yellow
Dog Blues; 5) Soft Pedal Blues; 6) Dixie Flyer Blues; 7) Nashville Women's
Blues; 8) Careless Love Blues; 9) J. C. Holmes Blues; 10) I Ain't Goin' To Play
Second Fiddle; 11) He's Gone Blues; 12) Nobody's Blues But Mine; 13) I Ain't
Got Nobody; 14) My Man Blues; 15) New Gulf Coast Blues; 16) Florida Bound
Blues; 17) At The Christmas Ball; 18) I've Been Mistreated (And I Don't Like
It).
The second volume is just as indispensable as
the first. It was during this particular period that Smith
crashed the last barriers, conquering Detroit and Chicago, teaming up with the
hottest players around, gaining the title of «Empress of the Blues» and
becoming the most highly paid black performer of her time. If none of this
shows on the actual recordings, well, blame it on genre requirements: Bessie
was paid, first and foremost, for being unhappy on record, and she honestly
earned every cent of that pay. Her backing musicians may not have always been
taking this idea of unhappiness too seriously — as evidenced by their
occasional cheesy insertion of phrases from Chopin's 'Funeral March' into the
playing — but she herself was dedicated to it at every session, no matter what
her own private circumstances were at the time.
Two major piece of news are in order. First, starting from the third
track of the second disc, Bessie enters the advanced age of electrical
recording; some of her contemporaries had to adjust their style in order to
sing into the microphone, but Bessie seemed to latch on to the new technique immediately
— in fact, celebrating it with her biggest band and her liveliest song so far:
'Cake Walkin' Babies (From Home)'. This is pretty much the only example of
Bessie's cakewalk that you can hear, but a prime one; her «rocking» numbers,
few as they were, shook the floor with more power than any other kind of music
at the time, and it is great to hear her singing captured so magnificently
with the new recording technology.
Second, the collection includes the several sides Bessie recorded in
January 1925 with Louis Armstrong, including the famous 'St. Louis Blues' and
the less famous, but, in my opinion, far more subtle and touching 'You've Been
A Good Ole Wagon'. The latter is an old vaudeville tune on the unhappy
consequences of impotence, but Bessie insists on turning it from an overtly
comic number into a tale of personal grief. (Then again, surely it is no
laughing matter when the man «done broke down» — if you're going to dump him
for that reason, a little sympathy may not hurt).
That said, it has generally been recognized, and
I subscribe to the recognition, that Armstrong's backing did not gel ideally
with Bessie's singing, or, at least, that these particular tracks are not all
that «cornet-important» when compared to songs recorded with Joe Smith,
Bessie's regular player (no personal relation, though). Louis
is technically perfect as usual, but he may be just a tad too happy with his
instrument where Bessie would need a more somber manner of playing. Had they
spent more time together, he would probably have adjusted better to her style
— but even as it is, we got ourselves a one-of-a-kind memento of two giants
together at their respective peaks.
Other than that, there are no big surprises, and, as usual, 37 songs in
chronological order make it hard to see the inspired masterpieces from simply
solid workmanship, but time has ensured that, eighty years from then, not a
single one of them comes across as crappy or tasteless. And it was a good idea
to make the final break with 'I've Been Mistreated (And I Don't Like It)', the
most openly aggressive and threatening tune out of the bunch — if the last
half-dozen tracks made the mistake of lulling you, the last one will punch you
in the guts and leave you aching for more.
THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS, VOL. 3 (1925-1928)
CD I: 1) Red Mountain Blues;
2) Golden Rule Blues; 3) Lonesome Desert Blues; 4) Them Has Been Blues; 5)
Squeeze Me; 6) What's The Matter Now; 7) I Want Every Bit Of It; 8) Jazzbo
Brown From Memphis Town; 9) The Gin House Blues; 10) Money Blues; 11) Baby
Doll; 12) Hard Driving Papa; 13) Lost Your Head Blues; 14) Hard Time Blues; 15)
Honey Man Blues; 16) One And Two Blues; 17) Young Woman's Blues; 18) Preachin'
The Blues; 19) Backwater Blues; 20) After You've Gone; 21) Alexander's Ragtime
Band; CD II: 1) Muddy Water (A Mississippi Moan); 2) There'll Be A Hot Time
In The Old Town Tonight; 3) Trombone Cholly; 4) Send Me To The 'Lectric Chair;
5) Them's Graveyard Words; 6) Hot Spring Blues; 7) Sweet Mistreater; 8) Lock
And Key; 9) Mean Old Bed Bug Blues; 10) Homeless Blues; 11) Looking For My Man
Blues; 12) Dyin' By The Hour; 13) Foolish Man Blues; 14) Thinking Blues; 15)
Pickpocket Blues; 16) I Used To Be Your Sweet Mama; 17) I'd Rather Be Dead And
Buried In My Grave; 18) I'd Rather Be Dead And Buried In My Grave (alt. take).
Heard from the perspective of our utterly spoiled modern-day ears that
quickly get tired of repetition, Vol. 3, covering Bessie's years of
prime glam and luxury, is somewhat of an intuitive letdown; but from the
perspective of contemporary audiences, there is hardly even one small sign here
that Ms. Smith might somehow be «losing it». After all, her voice and emotional
force are going as strong as ever, and her backing players are still the top of
the crop — when you have Fletcher Henderson, Coleman Hawkins, and James P.
Johnson all delighted to back the lady, you know her fortunes have not changed
much.
But in terms of classic individual performances, Vol. 3 does not
add much to what we already know. The first disc is livened up by occasional
dance numbers, such as 'Jazzbo Brown From Memphis Town' and the energetic
performance of the classic 'Alexander's Ragtime Band', where Hawkins, Joe
Smith, and Henderson fight it out in the background while Bessie shouts it out
as if her own salary drastically depended upon her being able to draw as many
neighbours as possible to the virtues of Alexander's Ragtime Band (well, in a
way, it was). But the second half is much more subdued, and, to a large extent,
dominated by second- and third-rate songs that do not deserve special mention
(except for such trivia bits as Bessie being, once in a while, backed by guitar
rather than piano, e. g., 'Mean Old Bed Bug Blues' — but, unfortunately, the
player is no Lonnie Johnson and no Blind Lemon).
Well-recognized classics would likely include 'The Gin House Blues',
the first of Bessie's autobiographical relays of her troubled relations with
alcohol; 'After You've Gone', with a big band arrangement and an intentionally
epic feel, as Bessie fulfills the relatively easy task of obliterating Marion
Harris' original by injecting realism and power into the recording; and the
even more anthemic 'Muddy Water (A Mississippi Moan)' — no realism here to
speak of, because the «Chattanooga gal» hardly ever set foot in the Delta (then
again, neither did John Fogerty, and that is no reason to turn down 'Proud
Mary' or 'Green River'), however, her goal is not to recreate any kind of
swampy atmosphere, but rather to use the lyrics as a general metaphor for the
idea of being proud of one's home and homeland, wherever and whatever that is,
and she makes it into one of the stateliest performances of her entire career.
The final outburst — 'My heart cries out for muddy water!' — is unforgettable.
A minor half-funny, half-sad oddity that also deserves to be singled out is 'Send Me To The 'Lectric Chair', departing from the general blues structure and featuring one of the most repetitive choruses in history, with Bessie repeating 'judge, judge, please Mr. Judge' in the same robotic manner for about thirty times or so, weirdly contrasting with the far more expressive verse melody where she explains that 'I had my knife and went insane, and the rest you ought to know'. Hardly a classic, but definitely a bizarre stand-out in a collection that, for the modern listener at least, threatens to render one of the most impressive blues performers in history less and less impressive with each following track.
THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS, VOL. 4 (1928-1930)
CD I: 1) He's Got Me Goin'; 2)
It Won't Be You; 3) Spider Man Blues; 4) Empty Bed Blues (part 1); 5) Empty Bed
Blues (part 2); 6) Put It Right Here (Or Keep It Out There); 7) Yes Indeed He
Do!; 8) Devil's Gonna Git You; 9) You Ought To Be Ashamed; 10) Washwoman's
Blues; 11) Slow And Easy Man; 12) Poor Man's Blues; 13) Please Help Me Get Him
Out Of My Mind; 14) Me And My Gin; 15) I'm Wild About That Thing; 16) You've
Got To Give Me Some; 17) Kitchen Man; 18) I've Got What It Takes (But It Breaks
My Heart To Give It Away); 19) Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out; 20)
Take It Right Back ('Cause I Don't Want It Here); CD II: 1) Standin' In The
Rain Blues; 2) It Makes My Love Come Down; 3) Wasted Life Blues; 4) Dirty
No-Gooder's Blues; 5) Blue Spirit Blues; 6) Worn Out Papa Blues; 7) You Don't
Understand; 8) Don't Cry Baby; 9) Keep It To Yourself; 10) New Orleans Hop
Scop Blues; 11) See If I'll Care; 12) Baby Have Pity On Me; 13) On Revival Day;
14) Moan, You Moaners; 15) Hustlin' Dan; 16) Black Mountain Blues; 17) In The
House Blues; 18) Long Old Road; 19) Blue Blues; 20) Shipwreck.
It is amusing to learn that 'Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out'
— a song originally written by Bessie's minor competition Ida Cox, but
eventually immortalized by the Empress — was recorded in 1929, immediately
bringing on associations with the Wall Street crash and subsequent demise of
the blues industry on the whole, and Bessie's in particular. How painfully autobiographical,
one might say.
Yet it is twice as amusing to know that the
actual recording took place on May 15 of that year — more than five actual
months before the beginning of the Depression. As prophetic as the song now
sounds, when Bessie put it in the can, it was just another unhappy blues anthem
with Ms. Smith, at that moment — not exactly a millionnaire, but certainly
pretty well-off, singing "Once I lived the life of a
millionnaire..." as if that past tense were spoken in all sincerity.
Atmosphere? Unhappy, for sure, but nowhere near miserable: the emphasis is on
frustration — Bessie makes herself sound mighty pissed off at having so
stupidly squandered her fortunes, with a whiff of threat that echoes Timon of
Athens.
I guess she brought it on herself, though —
obviously God could not refuse such a fervent plea for bitter misery, and had
little choice but to bring down the stock market. The economic history of the
States is well observed by the statistics: Bessie cut 18 sides in 1928, 18
sides in 1929, but only 8 in 1930 (and only two in 1931!). Some of these eight
sides were real strange, too, like 'On Revival Day' and 'Moan, You Moaners',
the first and last pure gospel tracks that Bessie (whose relations with the
Lord were, in general, not very amicable) ever did, and she did them well, even
though I would not welcome the idea of a whole collection of such tunes;
Bessie's powerhouse assault works well in a gospel context, but if, for some
reason, one should want a longer, more detailed exposure to the genre, it
requires such levels of subtlety as Bessie never possessed (unlike, for
instance, Mahalia Jackson).
Nevertheless, let us not forget that all of 1928
and most of 1929 were still part of the roaring years, and there are quite a
few tracks here that stand out fairly well, satisfying quite a few different
tastes. Hungry for sleazy and salacious? The sprawling, two-part 'Empty Bed
Blues', replete with Charlie Green's sexy trombone grunts, features lyrics that
would make AC/DC and KISS members nervously blush in the distance ('He boiled
my first cabbage and he made it awful hot / When he put in the bacon, it
overflowed the pot' — I wonder what Tipper Gore would have to say about that.
Then again, with her level of understanding, she'd probably suggest it as the
soundtrack for Ready Steady Cook). If that is not enough, how about
'Kitchen Man'? Eddie Lang's Lonnie Johnson-style guitar, sinuously sliding along,
is the perfect accompaniment for lines like 'Oh how that boy can open clam, no
one else can touch my ham', and she likes his sausage meat, too, if you know
what I mean.
If you want serious and troubled, there is 'Me
And My Gin', simply an undisputable classic masterpiece; Bessie's 'Stay away
from me, 'cause I'm in my sin' transparently shows how the blues is, in fact,
true Devil's music a whole decade before the advent of Robert Johnson. And if
it does not, certainly 'Blue Spirit Blues' does, as she unfurls a panorama of
hellish visions straight from Bald Mountain; a song even more ominously
prophetic than 'Nobody...', recorded on October 11 — less than two weeks before
the whole world truly went to hell.
If you want strong-willed quasi-feminist anthems,
you can go no further than 'Put It Right Here (Or Keep It Out There)', where
she explicitly states that no man can, or will, use her up financially — and
the even more scorching 'I've Got What It Takes (But It Breaks My Heart To Give
It Away)', in which the lady protagonist refuses to bail out her
good-for-nothing guy because 'I've been saving it up for a long long time, to
give it away would be more than a crime'. One may question the judgement, but
not the determination.
To sum it up, Vol. 4 seems to pick up
the pace that was somewhat slowed down on Vol. 3, and if it does not
have the highest ratio of classic-to-filler, it certainly does have the most
diverse portfolio. People occasionally complain that, by the time 1930 rolls
along, her voice had started showing signs of wearing down, e. g. on such
numbers as 'Hustlin' Dan' and 'Black Mountain Blues', but, first of all, I
simply do not hear it, and second, even if this is true, it is still
impossible: Bessie's voice is of the particular kind that usually stays immune
to any troubles, be they smoke, drug, or age-related. The worst she could do
was flub a note or two if she came in the studio drunk, but we are not exactly
talking opera singers here. She was always in great form.
THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS, VOL. 5 (1931-1933)
CD I: 1) Need A Little Sugar
In My Bowl; 2) Safety Mama; 3) Do Your Duty; 4) Gimme A Pigfoot; 5) Take Me For
A Buggy Ride; 6) I'm Down In The Dumps; 7) The Yellow Dog Blues; 8) Soft Pedal
Blues; 9) Nashville Women's Blues; 10) Careless Love Blues; 11) Muddy Water;
12) St. Louis Blue Soundtrack — Band Intro; 13) Crap Game; 14) St. Louis Blues;
CD II: Ruby Smith interviews.
Yes, it would have certainly been an unforgivable mistake on the part
of Columbia Records not to end this series of excellent quality catalog
repackagings with at least one total rip-off. The last installment in the
Bessie Smith saga, just as all the previous ones, is a fully priced 2-CD
package, out of which the non-historian really needs a grand total of six songs.
Of course, it would have been fairly easy to squeeze those six onto the
remaining disc space of Vol. 4 — but would that count as the true raffinated
sparkle of Columbia's marketing genius?
Let us see what else we have here. First, a bunch of crappy-sounding outtakes from a 1925 session: five crackling cuts, all of which we have already heard in superior versions on Vol. 2. Just what we need to hear in order to truly comprehend the giant stature of the Empress. Second, three tracks that reproduce, in complete form, the soundtrack to the short film St. Louis Blues, shot in 1929 and featuring Bessie's only preserved live appearance. The footage (which you can, and should, see on Youtube) is obviously priceless, and the semi-live rendition of 'St. Louis Blues' itself, on which Bessie is backed not by Armstrong, but a huge black choir instead, is nice to have on CD, but the six-minute dialog sequence ('Crap Game') is a complete waste of space unless you want to have a crash course in African American Vernacular as spoken in the 1920s (except the sound quality is so awful you would still need subtitles).
Finally, the entire second disc is only
indirectly related to Bessie; it is an interview CD, where Bessie's
niece-by-marriage, Ruby Smith, recounts her memories of Bessie in a
grueling seventy-minute session. Which is fine and dandy, but you might just as
well read a book about Bessie rather than spend all this time trying to
sort the wheat from the chaff and separate objective fact from biased personal
feeling — never for one moment able to understand why exactly does this
need to co-exist in one package with Bessie's actual music.
Unfortunately, what with all the ripping-off,
the six real songs that make this «Final Chapter» worth owning are all
classics, unexpendable for even the casual Bessie lover. Two date from a
lonesome super-short session in 1931, four more from a similarly brief stunt in
1933; this is all that Bessie had the opportunity to produce in her last
decade, before a complete goodbye to the recording industry and, eventually, a
tragic death in a car accident in 1937.
The songs are pure vaudeville, no blues — urban
blues was not something the people took to as lightly in the hungry 1930s as
they did in the booming 1920s (it is, after all, one thing to listen about
someone being miserable when you yourself are reasonably content, but a whole
different story when your own misery is comparable). 'Need A Little Sugar In My
Bowl' is arguably the dirtiest song Bessie ever did (she also needs a hot dog
between her rolls, and other delights too scandalous to mention), yet somehow
she manages to transform this pure anthem of lust into a song of soulful
mourning, almost as if all the sugar and hot dog references had some further
spiritual connotations attached. Accustomed as we are to all the cock rock
hits on classic rock radio, it is hardly surprising to see words of love used
as a metaphor for sex — but using culinary words as metaphors for sex and
meta-metaphors for love, that is something else totally.
The last four songs from 1933 almost play as a
mini-musical: Bessie demands of her man that he 'Do Your Duty' (same one as
above, apparently), lets it all hang out on 'Gimme A Pigfoot' (and a bottle of
beer, even though Prohibition was still in action), after the hangover, gets
unusually sentimental ('Take Me For A Buggy Ride'), and, finally, gets dumped
by both the guy and whoever else she could possibly be dumped by ('I'm Down In
The Dumps'). Everything Bessie ever had is in these four tunes: arrogance,
recklessness, sweetness, misery, determination, humour, sadness, the whole
palette. Obviously, she had no idea this was going to be her musical testament,
but that's how it turned out, and these four tunes are as perfect a swan song
for the lady as Abbey Road would be for the Beatles.
ALL THE CLASSIC SIDES 1928-1937 (2004)
Writing on Big Bill from a record-based
standpoint is pretty hard: out of all the pre-war / post-war country bluesmen,
he was one of the most prolific, and, predictably, this translates into tons
and tons and tons of nearly identical performances, differentiated only through
their lyrical content (and even then, that lyrical content rarely advances
beyond a reshuffling of standard blues clichés, a process that could as
well have been machine-generated).
Thus, attempting to review all of Big Bill's
output through, say, the Complete
Recorded Works In Chronological Order series would be quite detrimental to
one's health. We are therefore going to speed up that process by relying,
instead, on the JSP Records series, which have conveniently packaged
everything that the man recorded in between 1928 and 1951 into three cozy boxsets,
neatly equipped with minimal, but informative detail on the dates, locations,
and participants of Broonzy's sessions.
Immediate warning: unless you are a true
old-time blues aficionado, you really
do not need any of these boxsets. The first one, in particular, includes a
grand total of 129 tracks (and I am not even going to bother reproducing them
all here) that, in between themselves, probably contain not more than 20 different
melodies (and I am afraid I am being rather generous). Worse, JSP is one of
those «honest» completist-targeted labels that only performs the most minimal
remastering job on the tracks; and since during his earliest years Big Bill mostly
recorded for Paramount, a label notorious for its piss-poor recording equipment
(in a similar way and with far more criminal consequences, they butchered
most of Blind Lemon Jefferson's recordings), only about a third of these
recordings is technically «enjoyable» — the rest crackles way too much even for
my non-audiophile ears. For any purposes other than history immersion, you will
do better with a compilation that concentrates on the highlights and cleans
them up, e. g. Living Era's These Blues
Are Doggin' Me (my first experience with Big Bill) or Yazoo's The Young Big Bill Broonzy.
What are
these highlights, though? Tough to say. When William Lee Conley Broonzy first
got around to recording, the two big markets for the blues — piano-based urban
stuff and guitar-based country/Delta stuff — had already been well
established, and it took him quite a while to make any impact on either; but
when he finally did, he made an impact on both. In a certain way, he
synthesized them: even on this first boxset, there are as many connections to
Leroy Carr in his performances as there are to Memphis Minnie.
Already his first recordings for Paramount in
the late 1920s show an accomplished guitarist with an individual style. But Big
Bill's force was not in the jaw-dropping technicality of the playing (typical
of Lonnie Johnson and others), nor in the unpredictability of the chords he'd
be producing (typical of Blind Lemon): from a layman's point of view, I would
describe it as a meticulous approach to the construction of his melodies. If
his rags are derivative of Blind Blake's, they are «cleaner» and almost
mathematically smoother — 'Guitar Rag' and 'Saturday Night Rub' are classic
tracks that drive the form to its utter perfection, and everything that comes
afterwards is just a show-off (the way Steve Howe does it with 'The Clap'). And
replicating his country-blues shuffles must be one hell of a satisfactory
exercise for all scale-practicing guitarists out there — the sonic symmetry of
tracks like 'I Can't Be Satisfied' is orgasmic.
There is also the matter of speed and
precision: be sure that you get to hear the 1932 Vocalion release of 'How You
Want It Done' and not the later re-recordings that simplify the guitar lines.
On this particular performance, Big Bill simply machine-guns the song, an
approach that I have not heard from any white blues-rocker with the possible
exception of AC/DC's rhythm track to 'Baby Please Don't Go', and even there
they never tried to work around that particular groove, based around a
super-cool flat-picking technique. (Maybe to «refined» white bluesmen like Eric
the technique seemed primitive, but one thing's for sure — it kicks far more
ass than a whole ton of much more exquisite playing styles).
Most of Big Bill's best stuff from his first
decade of recording is found on the first two out of five CDs — generally,
Chicago-based recordings with a friend or two sitting in on second guitar
and/or bass. As time went by, he became more comfortable with small combos that
included a piano player or a little bit of brass backing, and, perversely, the
more his recordings sold, the less genuinely interesting they became — much of
this stuff is pure lounge entertainment, a bit of ragtime, a bit of swing, all
delivered in Big Bill's nice, but utterly non-special, voice and with his
guitar technique often sacrificed, melted away in the overall band sound.
Depression-era audiences liked that — we don't have to, ever so spoiled by the
strange idea that one has always got to emphasize one's strengths rather than
humbly shoving them behind one's back. Fortunately, as later recordings would
show, the mid-Thirties might have kept down Big Bill's real talents, but they
certainly didn't extinguish them.
VOL. 2: 1937-1940 (2005)
There is a damn good reason why JSP hesitated
to go on slapping the name All The
Classic Sides on Big Bill's second chronological boxset, covering the
immediately pre-war years, going with the rather dry academic subtitle Annotated Discography instead — because
none of these sides are, in any way, truly classic. Of the three huge sets, the
middle one is easily the worst, and it looks like it ain't just my opinion: out of Vol. 2's grand total of 101 tracks, only one ('Just A Dream') made it onto the 26-track career retrospective
These Blues Are Doggin' Me. One!
Why? Simple. By 1937, Bill had firmly sunk into
a winning formula: playing smooth, steady, a little bit «mannered» mid-tempo
blues and some modestly polite boogie-woogie, accompanied with small combos in
which he was merely one of the guys. The formula worked, and the records sold,
as steadily as they could during all the hard times. People liked the sound,
and at one point, legendary promoter John Hammond even got the man to play
Carnegie Hall as part of his From
Spirituals To Swing shows that introduced America's white elites to black
devil music.
But success and recognition somehow came at the
expense of sacrificing identity. Listen hard and you will understand that Big
Bill is still as accomplished a player as he used to be on these sessions —
but listen really hard, or else the
guitar will be completely lost behind the other instruments. He almost never
solos, frequently sticks to the simplest boogie patterns, and even on those few
tracks where his guitar is amplified, it is exceedingly hard to get impressed.
Some time during these years, Broonzy started
trying to compensate by writing more original material; but «original
material» at the time basically meant writing new lyrics to pre-existing melodies,
and in 1940, the man hadn't yet found a proper way to insert little melodic
twists that would prompt later generations to re-record and reinterpret his
songs. On the contrary, the highlights of this
volume are generally songs previously made into hits by other people — such as
'Louise Louise Blues', a 1936 success for Johnny Temple (later expropriated by
John Lee Hooker). But some of the lyrics are
interesting, like the imaginary alpha-dog contest between Big Bill and his
competitor Blind Boy Fuller on 'Jivin' Mr. Fuller Blues'.
Anyway, each one of these 101 tracks is
pleasantly listenable, but overall, these are the sagging mid-period years in
between Big Bill Broonzy the Dashing, Innovative Guitar Player and Big Bill
Broonzy the Grand Maître of the Blues, preparing the grounds for
Chicago's electric blues revolution and at the same time immortalizing
acoustic blues for European audiences. Refined lovers of the pre-war small
blues combo sound will need this (especially since Bill's piano and
trumpet-playing pals almost always have their own cool grooves going on), but I
agree to stand by those compilers who normally skip this period in their
retrospectives.
VOL. 3: THE WAR AND POSTWAR YEARS 1940-1951 (2007)
The last of the three big bulging boxsets is
unquestionably the best in overall sound quality, for purely chronological
reasons, but also questionably the best overall, or, at least, a great
emotional improvement over the steady, unnerving sounds of Vol. 2. Two reasons are at play here.
First, some time around 1941, as if somehow
fueled by the dark wartime premonitions, Big Bill became a classic hit
songwriter. He certainly never overcame the formula, but somehow he managed to
give it a few unique twists that immortalized some of its representatives. That
single year yielded such legendary stuff as 'All By Myself', an exceptionally
lively, self-confident piece of boogie (with, finally, a well-expressed
acoustic solo from the man himself) later appropriated by Fats Domino; 'I Feel
So Good', an even more optimistic
statement of utter satisfaction, whose macho potential would eventually be
fully realized by Muddy Waters; and, of course, 'Key To The Highway', Bill's
existentialist masterpiece No. 1, today far more tightly associated with Derek
& The Claptonos — but defenders of the faith would almost certainly claim
that Bill is way more suited to feeling the lonesome-wanderer message of the
song than some clean white middle class boy from Surrey.
These classics still have to be plucked out
from a bed of same-sounding, not particularly involving musical rocks. But
then along comes war, and from 1942 to 1945 Big Bill, just like everybody
else, had serious trouble recording anything, what with the shellac deficit and
all. Then, in the immediate post-war years, people needed to be happy, and much
of his late 1940s material consists of rough, tough, foot-stomping boogie,
occasionally spilling into «jump blues» as such ('Big Bill's Boogie', etc.) — unfortunately,
this kind of music was much better done by burly shouters (Big Joe Turner,
Wynonie Harris etc.) or much more seriously instrumentally endowed artists
(Amos Milburn, Louis Jordan etc.).
However, it all ends January 4, 1949, on the
date of Bill's recording session, credited to «Big Bill Broonzy & His Fat
Four». That day, he was still doing the same small-combo boogie that made his
fortunes so well-established, but his image so little-distinguishable (although
a little bit of change was in the air, with his guitar parts clearly much more
prominent than the backing band). Then, exactly one month later, the combo is
dropped, and for the rest of his studio recording time in the States, Bill
makes a decisive move back into the realm of acoustic-based music — with a
heavy injection of traditional folk music into his blues structures, ranging
from bluegrass motives to, you know, the Pete Seeger kind of stuff.
That stretch has sometimes been decried as
risky (in fact, the liner notes themselves suggest that the move was
«foolhardy»), but I cannot think of any other word than «refreshing» after
nearly two decades of samey stuff that only yielded one truly impressive
pre-war year of successful and influential songwriting. Not only does the man's
moving away from boogie give him a chance to come up with some original, quirky
chord changes ('Hey, Hey' so impressed Clapton that he would start off his Unplugged concert with the song forty-five
years later — played in the exact same manner as Bill does it, no better, no
worse), he even allows himself to revisit that style of rapid-fire flat-picking
that had once made 'How You Want It Done' so unforgettable, this time, on the
old folk standard 'John Henry'.
In all, Vol.
3 runs an impressive gamut — all the way from Bill's songwriting maturation
of 1941 to the transformation into the elder statesman of the grassroots
commune by 1951, with the slow wisened-up sound of 'Trouble In Mind' wrapping
things up. It could, and perhaps should, be said that Broonzy's place in the
blues is somewhat overrated simply because he'd managed to swamp his much more
talented competition with the sheer size of his output; altogether, these three
sets amount to over three hundred sides, out of which I'd be hard-pressed to
choose more than a dozen real favourites. (Then there's another, more serious,
reason, which will be discussed in the next review). But you could also say the
same about B. B. King — and, unlike the latter, Big Bill never recorded anything cringeworthy; never even «sold
out» the way that, for instance, Lonnie Johnson did when he switched from
technically amazing blues and jazz guitar pieces to smooth, lazy balladeering.
There is never a point at which these unending samey-sounding blues and boogie
pieces become «insufferable», and for a bundle of three hundred cuts, that's
saying something.
SINGS FOLK SONGS (1956)
1) Backwater Blues; 2) This
Train; 3) I Don't Want No Woman; 4) Martha; 5) Tell Me Who; 6) Bill Bailey; 7)
Big Bill Blues; 8) Goin' Down This Road; 9) Tell Me What Kind Of Man Jesus Is;
10) Alberta; 11) Glory Of Love; 12) Careless Love.
In 1951, the best thing possible happened to
Big Bill: as part of a folk music revue, he got signed on a tour to Europe —
and thus, almost unintentionally, became the Old World's chief gateway into the
world of American blues and folk right until his death in 1958, upon which the
crown passed to Muddy Waters. Not the best blues singer, far from the best
blues player, not much of a unique innovator, yet with a once-in-a-lifetime
chance to impress and inspire thousands of college kids across the Atlantic.
For a period of about five or six years, Big
Bill toured back and forth quite extensively, leaving behind lots of
recordings, mostly live, that would be useless to review separately, since he
never troubled himself to vary his sets all that much. Sings Folk Songs, recorded for Moses Asch' Folkways (later
Smithsonian) Records in 1956, is a very typical representative. (It is also the
cleanest sounding Broonzy album you'll ever hear). The set mostly consists of
various Appalachian-style stuff, mixed with gospel dance music, ballads, and
just one or two straightahead blues numbers, and, as nice as it sounds, its
chief value is historical — the best way to get your kicks out of it is imagine
yourself as a young British student in the early Fifties, sitting in a small
audience listening to this strange black dude singing music from the «deep
heart» of a strange new world.
Every reviewer and biographer will always point
out the obvious fact that Big Bill only played acoustic guitar on those tours,
even though his studio recordings from the past decade did not shy away from
amplified instrumentation. (All the more reason for European audiences to be
stunned when Muddy abruptly took over with the Chicago style). Nor does he ever
try to launch into boogie or «hokum blues»; it is well possible that he
understood what the audience really wanted — an aura of «rustic holiness» around
that music — and that's exactly what he gave, even if his impassioned
renditions of folk-spirituals, to him, were just another style of popular
entertainment that he fed the «intelligent» public. To each his own.
For some reason, my version of the album omits
'John Henry' (always the high point of the show, allowing him to really stretch
out on one of the few «gimmicky» styles of acoustic playing that was available
to him), but most regular versions have it, so if you feel like holding this
historical document close to your heart, make sure that 'John Henry' is part of
the proceedings. I'd also say that he plays one of the tightest and most
expressive versions of 'Goin' Down This Road Feelin' Bad' I've ever heard —
beats Woody Guthrie and the Grateful Dead all to hell. Overall, though, I do
not feel empowered enough to rave on about how effectively this music transmits
all the pain, suffering, hopes, and dreams accumulated in the souls of the
Negro people over three hundred years of slavery, but I'll admit that good old
Bill sure knew how to make a name — and some decent wages — for himself on the
base of that legacy. And he certainly wasn't bad at what he was
doing — just a bit overrated by way of lucky promotion breaks.
SHOUT, RATTLE & ROLL (1938-1954; 2005)
Big Joe Turner's firm place in history is that
of «The Man They Stole Rock'n'Roll Away From», «they», of course, surmising
Bill Haley and then Elvis Presley, both of whom made a bigger hit out of
'Shake, Rattle & Roll' than Big Joe could ever aspire to. Only with creepy
black guy music gradually assuming its honored and hallowed place in
mainstream musical press, Big Joe's R'n'B hits for Atlantic, in retrospect,
eventually garnered the proper accolades.
What remains sometimes unclear to the average
eye is that Bog Joe certainly did not
start kicking major ass with 'Honey Hush' and 'Shake, Rattle & Roll' in
boring 1954 — an impression one could get, subconsciously, if introduced to Big
Joe through the retrospective Atlantic boxset, on which he appears around 1951,
singing slow, languid, but burly ballads before, all of a sudden, launching
into crazyass boogie three years later. In fact, he was already kicking that
ass when Elvis was all of a mighty three
years old — way back in exciting 1938, when him and his partner,
boogie-woogie pianist hellraiser Pete Johnson, were spotted by John Hammond,
brought to New York to perform at Carnegie Hall, and soon afterwards signed
with Vocalion.
This is where the story begins for this 4-CD
Proper Records compilation, sadly, out of print now, but one of the finest
retrospectives of Big Joe's pre-Atlantic years; these days, an easier buy is
JSP Records' All The Classic Hits
1938-1952, which has a little more material (5 CDs instead of 4) but does
not, however, incorporate all of Proper's tracks either. My review will be of
more concern for the overall pre-Atlantic period, anyway, rather than
specifically targeted at any particular CD edition.
It should be noted that, for some reason, Big
Joe, as of now, still has not
received the «complete-in-chronological-order» treatment from any of the
collectors' labels that have nevertheless given that honor to many much lesser
artists — go figure — and complete discographies, with little chance of total
success, have to be scrambled together from various compilations. Shout, Rattle & Roll, however,
contains more than enough material to build up a proper picture of the man, and
its omissions will trouble the obstinate fan and the historian far more than
the casual listener.
Anyway, the story begins in 1938, and oh boy,
what a fine beginning, these early boogie-woogie tracks with just Big Joe
belting it out over Pete Johnson's rapid-fire proto-rock'n'roll. The lyrics
don't matter — most of the time, they just seem improvised on the spot,
extracted and mixed out of a mass-produced set of formulae ("I got a gal,
she lives upon the hill..." etc.); what matters is the generated heat, and
these two guys could generate plenty of it without even a rhythm session, let
alone a big band. 'Roll
'Em Pete' is, of course, one of those pre-war tunes that one must necessarily
hear before one dies, and fully deserves the status of «one of the earliest
rock'n'roll songs»; but 'Cafe Society Rag', on which Pete is joined by not one,
but two other piano giants of the
times — Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis — is no less deserving of your
attention, even if it's not really rock'n'roll. But who ever proved ragtime
cannot rock?
As time went by, Big Joe began preferring to be
recorded with bigger bands, and develop a soulful approach in addition to
hellraising. To me, he never ever sounds equally convincing in that emploi: I
love the big burly guy when he is being the big burly guy, not when he gives us
the big burly guy's best impression of a sentimental oaf. But, to his great
honor, he never ever mutated into the sentimental oaf completely, not even during the wartime and postwar years when the
demand for soul-soothing sap and sentimentality increased so much that
crooners and balladeers almost threatened to exterminate the world of popular
music altogether.
In addition to cutting one single after another
of similar-sounding, but always exciting jump blues, Big Joe had a solid knack
of teaming up with all sorts of mega-players — or, rather, the mega-players
always liked it when Big Joe came around, because what better stimulus can
there be to tighten up one's playing than have it matched with one of the
greatest blues shouters in the area? Credits here range from the already
mentioned Meade Lux Lewis to Coleman Hawkins (a cheerful version of 'Shake It
And Break It', originally made important by the grim Charley Patton); the
incomparable Art Tatum (Big Joe dropped by Art's band in 1941 to sing 'Rock Me
Mama'); Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew (some cuts from the early 1950s, right
before his move to Atlantic), and plenty of others.
Even so, after cavorting with all that jazz
nobility, Big Joe still took the time to get together with ol' Pete Johnson
occasionally; their two-part tour-de-force on 'Around The Clock' from 1947 is
one of the compilation's major highlights, and was later appropriated by Chuck
Berry to form the basis of 'Reelin' And Rockin'. Right next to is the slightly
cornily staged, but still entertaining 'Battle Of The Blues' between two of the
epoch's biggest belters — Big Joe and Wynonie Harris, and as much as I respect
Mr. Harris, my sympathies are clearly on Big Joe's side.
Of course, as a singer, Big Joe does not have
the required versatility to easily last one through one hundred tracks of
material — were it not for the constant rotation of musical whizz kids, at some
point the monotonousness would be unbearable. He pretty much sings everything
in the same key, tone, and manner, be it blues, ballad, or boogie-woogie:
subtlety and modulation be damned. If the public did not clearly catch on to
his style in the very beginning, there is little wonder that he couldn't locate
the proper market for fifteen years after the fact, not before Ahmet Ertegun
started having all the right ideas about correlating him with proper material.
Still, it should be stated very clearly that
those fifteen years were not merely a
preliminary footnote to the Atlantic period, and that stuff on the level of 'Roll
'Em Pete', 'Around The Clock', and 'Café Society Rag' is every bit as much a cornerstone
of XXth century American pop music legacy as 'Shake, Rattle & Roll'. In
the light of which, thumbs up despite all the filler; as for the Atlantic
period, this will be taken up in the next review, since the Proper Records
boxset stops dead in its tracks around 1954, right in the middle of that
period.
JOE TURNER/ROCKIN' THE BLUES (1951-1956; 2000)
1) Shake, Rattle & Roll;
2) Flip, Flop & Fly; 3) Feeling
Happy; 4) Well, All Right; 5) The Chicken And The Hawk; 6) Boogie Woogie
Country Girl; 7) Honey Hush; 8) Corrine, Corrina; 9) Midnight Special; 10) Hide
And Seek; 11) Oke-She-Moke-She-Pop; 12) Crawdad Hole; 13) Sweet Sixteen; 14)
Chains Of Love; 15) (We're Gonna) Jump For Joy; 16) Teen Age Letter; 17) Love
Roller Coaster; 18) Lipstick, Powder And Paint; 19) Morning, Noon And Night;
20) I Need A Girl; 21) Red Sails In The Sunset; 22) Blues In The Night; 23)
After A While; 24) World Of Trouble; 25) Trouble In Mind; 26) TV Mama; 27) You
Know I Love You; 28) Still In Love.
Again, this album, or, rather, couple of albums
on one CD, is a non-album, or, rather a couple of non-albums. Joe Turner is a compilation of Joe's
biggest hits from the Atlantic years; Rockin'
The Blues, coming out a little bit later, is a compilation of Joe's
medium-size hits from the Atlantic years. Together, this 28-song package
contains all of Joe Turner from 1951 to 1956 that one really needs to hear —
and no one who has not heard it can ever claim to have properly understood the
genesis of rock'n'roll.
Fortunately, Big Joe's Atlantic career seems to
have easily withstood the test of time, and all of these recordings sound just
as spick and span today as they did half a century ago. Pre-war purists may
show off all they want, but R'n'B does
affect one's nerve centers mighty more effectively when it's driven by a
well-oiled boogie-woogie rhythm section with a big and clean drum sound, not to
mention ever-improving standards of sound capture that finally allow backing
bands to sound just as tight on record as they do in nightclubs.
Funny enough, the man who made his first big
impact on the musical world with the proto-rock'n' roll of 'Roll 'Em Pete'
started off on Ahmet Ertegun's label at a slow pace: the first two years were
mostly dedicated to slow loungey blues and ballads. 'Chains Of Love', 'Sweet Sixteen',
'Still In Love', that sort of thing; well in line with Atlantic's general
standards, professionally and cleanly recorded, sung with Big Joe's usual
soulful brawn (even his sappiest tunes have a bit of the Neanderthal spirit to
them, which makes it so much easier to stomach than Bing Crosby).
The big break comes in 1953 with 'Honey Hush': "Let
it roll like a big wheel, in the Georgia cotton fields!". It ain't
nothing Big Joe hadn't really done before, including the famous opening line
which must have already figured in at least several of his 1940s recordings. All
it takes is a few subtle production twists, and a wonderful «Zeitgeist» to
carry it along to a success among young audiences, much huger than anything Big
Joe could have hoped for in the previous decade.
'Honey Hush', 'Shake, Rattle & Roll',
'Flip, Flop & Fly', 'The Chicken And The Hawk' — they're all the same song,
really, also in line with the general style of work of all pre-war artists, but
already the sprouts of the new age of popular music are beginning to show,
because each of the numbers has a tiny individual angle of its own: a different
hook in the chorus, a variation on a brass riff, an unexpected bit of
vocalizing (like the famous "Hi-ho Silver!" on 'Honey Hush'). R'n'B
changed the face of jump blues, and this means that there will always be a
reason to put on a jump blues record (simply because it gives you a different
kind of feeling); but the primary goal of jump blues was to let people have a
good time, and in terms of good-time-giving, jump blues is to R'n'B what Intel
8088 is to a Pentium.
It must also be said that Big Joe's hit records
on Atlantic, after 'Honey Hush', were much less diverse than the material in
general. The man did not always rock out to the exact same formula: 'Boogie
Woogie Country Girl' and 'Teen Age Letter', for instance, follow entirely
different recipés. Then, towards the end of that hit run, he started
experimenting with speeding up old folk blues standards: the boogie version of
'Corrine Corrina' came first, the dance avatar of 'Midnight Special' came next,
and both just completely chucked away the pain and anguish of the working class
and replaced them with mindless good-time party atmosphere. Karl Marx must have
been turning over in his grave, but the face of popular music didn't much care
for that.
There always remains the issue of whiteys
«stealing» this music from Big Joe and his brethren: I think that time will
slowly heal this wound, and eventually those billions of miles that separate Big
Joe's popularity from Elvis' will accelerate their shrinking, even if they will
be doing this for the wrong reason (instead of more people learning about Big
Joe, more people will start forgetting about Elvis). Nevertheless, it is hard
to deny that Elvis' version of 'Shake, Rattle & Roll' is wilder and crazier than Big Joe's: deeper, louder, speedier,
and, above all, the kids really loved it when the stingy aggressiveness of the
electric guitar solo ushered out the jazzy smoothness of the saxophone, which,
in the 1950s, was still more of an outdated leftover from the swinging 1930s
and 1940s than a «progressive» instrument (it took the birth of jazz-rock to
redeem it). And, personally, I'll always take the awesome distorted sound of
the Burnette brothers' version of 'Honey Hush' over the original...
...which is not to say that the original ain't
pretty awesome in its own right. "Come over here, woman, stop all that
yakety-yak, don't make me nervous, I'm holding a baseball bat", despite
the poor rhyming scheme, still has to rank as one of the most delightfully
provocative lines of all time (a duet with Aretha Franklin would probably
shorten all the circuits). This is golden stuff, very much of its time and
still timeless, and also a perfect introduction to the world of «older» R'n'B
for those who are heavily spoiled by modern values and attitudes and need a
safe and steady passageway to the vaults. Thumbs up.
THE BOSS OF THE BLUES (1956)
1) Cherry Red; 2) Roll 'Em
Pete; 3) I Want A Little Girl; 4) Low Down Dog; 5) Wee Baby Blues; 6) You're
Driving Me Crazy; 7) How Long Blues; 8) Morning Glories; 9) St. Louis Blues;
10) Piney Brown Blues.
One of the most easily available original LPs
from Big Joe's career, it also explains fairly well why the popularity of the
Boss, miraculously surviving into the 1950s, never made it past that decade.
His signing up with Atlantic was an accident. It could have been Wynonie
Harris, or any out of a dozen other jump blues shouters of the previous decade,
all of which had their own charisma, too. Granted, Big Joe was a bit brawnier
than most, but it doesn't matter that
much: Fortune smiled upon the man by crossing his paths with Ahmet Ertegun,
who modernized his sound in a way that the kids could dig. But did he like that modernization, he himself?
Possibly, but I see no way he could have loved
it. Playing with big jazz bands for fifteen years, then having to dump it all
in favour of all these tiny combos with (comparatively) primitive musicianship,
I don't really see how he could honestly dig stuff like 'The Chicken And The
Hawk' etc. Some of the feelings, at
least, must have been akin to grizzled old blues-rockers of the 1960s and 1970s
having to adjust their sound to the abysmal electronic values of the 1980s so
they could still have record contracts.
It should come as no surprise, then, that, once
re-established as a hitmaker, Big Joe would quickly want to profit from it by
going all retro. The Boss Of The Blues
is only part of the album's title: the subtitle, in honestly equally large
letters, reads Joe Turner Sings Kansas
City Jazz, and that is exactly what he does. Reunited with old piano pal
Pete Johnson and attracting a large crew of professional jazzmen, many of them
with Count Basie service time records, Big Joe records a bunch of old
standards, all or most of which he'd already cut for Vocalion in the pre-war
years. This time, of course, recording quality is much higher, and song lengths
have been pumped up — just like before, this isn't Big Joe's show all the time,
but unlike before, musicians really
get to stretch out like they are supposed to be on a respectable jazz record,
not on a boogie single.
The result is a technically excellent,
spiritually satisfactory, but, in the end, somewhat hollow piece of lounge jazz
nostalgia. Hollow, because 'Roll 'Em Pete', for instance, is given a full arrangement
instead of the original piano-only recording, and this allows the real Pete to
take it just a bit — just a tiny bit! — easier than before, and no amount of
rhythm swing or brass wailing can compensate for the ferocious boogie soul of
the original. Clearly, Big Joe is pining for them old times, and if you forget
the context, you can almost see the
good old times, but if at the height of his new-found success he was still pining for the good old times,
clearly, something was not quite
right at the time. Yet still a thumbs up for all those who love good old jazz and
blues played by respectable masters of the trade. Some of the sax and trumpet
solos are mighty damn good.
TEXAS STYLE (1971)
1) Money First; 2) Hide And
Seek; 3) I've Got A Pocket Full Of Pencils; 4) Rock Me Baby; 5) Cherry Red; 6)
Texas Style; 7) T.V. Mama; 8) T'Ain't Nobody's Business; 9) Morning Glory; 10*)
Rock Me Baby (take 1).
Big Joe kept on making records all the way into
the 1960s and 1970s; his last LP on Pablo Records came out in 1984,
approximately a year before his demise. Most of these albums, however, are
tremendously hard to find, and once you do
find them, it is tremendously hard to understand what in the world made you
look for them in the first place. They weren't popular, they weren't revered,
and the only real differences between all of them concern who, where, and when
is accompanying Big Joe on this particular date. Because you can always count
on Big Joe to sound exactly the same. The guy never lets you down, but after a
very short while, it becomes extremely boring to be standing so high up all of
the time.
Reviewing the couple dozen or so albums that
the man recorded in between 1956 and 1985 would be even more excruciating than
an attempt to collect all of them; so here is just one example, the result of
an inspired, but hardly phenomenal blues & jazz session in 1971, recently
re-released with bonus tracks and all. All of the songs, of course, are old
standards; recording quality is not altogether good, with Joe himself kept
oddly down in the mix as if the entire band were gathered around one mike except for Joe in a faraway corner.
The players, however, are distinctive. On piano
we have Milt Buckner, famous for having once popularized the Hammond organ as
well as allegedly inventing «block chords» (although that particular credit
goes to at least half a dozen different people depending on one's biases); he
takes a few magnificent solos, particularly on 'Nobody's Business', way beyond
anything Pete Johnson ever had to offer (although, to be fair, on the speedier
numbers Buckner never manages to let his hair down as convincingly as Pete).
And on bass, we have Slam Stewart, a guy with a unique style of bowing his
instrument and humming along at the same time. Granted, most of the time the
resulting sound is indistinguishable from creative farting in your tuba, but
the trick is that the guy has no tuba and does not actually fart. For the
first couple of times, Slam's gimmick has some fun novelty value — later on, it
becomes unbearable (which is probably why not a lot of jazzmen have copied the
technique), but, fortunately, he does not do it on every track.
Needless to say that, for 1971, all of this is
as abysmally retro as could be; and also, I will probably not be mistaken by
much if I say that, for all of those nearly thirty years, Big Joe has not come
up with even one semi-original idea. (A couple of songs here are technically
«new», but in reality they are just old melodies set to reshuffled lyrics). Still,
there is some deeply felt satisfaction that in 1971, he could still sound as
reckless and brawny as he did in 1938. All the sadder it is too realize that
all of that tenaciousness and energy was essentially wasted on lots of
self-repetition and subpar by-the-book recordings. At least this one has Milt
Buckner.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 1 (1935-1941; 1991)
1) Little Leg Woman; 2)
Somebody's Been Borrowing That Stuff; 3) Providence Help The Poor People; 4) 49
Highway Blues; 5) My Grey Pony; 6) Stepfather Blues; 7) Baby Please Don't Go;
8) Stack O' Dollars; 9) Wild Cow Blues; 10) Worried Man Blues; 11) I Know You
Gonna Miss Me; 12) Rootin' Ground Hog; 13) Brother James; 14) I Won't Be In
Hard Luck No More; 15) Crawlin' King Snake; 16) I'm Getting Wild About Her; 17)
Peach Orchard Mama; 18) Meet Me Around The Corner; 19) Throw A Boogie Woogie;
20) North Wind Blues; 21) Please Don't Go; 22) Highway 49; 23) Someday Baby;
24) Break 'Em On Down.
What is Big Joe Williams' personal claim to
fame? Supposedly there's two of them. First, he was the most notorious bluesman
ever to use a one-of-a-kind nine-string guitar, making his sound impossible to
replicate for those with impaired craftsman skills. Second, he was allegedly
the first artist to record 'Baby Please Don't Go' and 'Crawlin' King Snake' —
golden standards of the blues and blues-rock repertoire, especially the former,
although, granted, it's a long path of evolution between Big Joe's version and
AC/DC's.
Both of these claims to fame may and, perhaps,
should be witnessed on this album, which faithfully collects everything the
man recorded for the Bluebird label as the man's country was marching through
Depression and on to war. Ironically, once you do hear the album, you begin to understand that neither of the
claims translates to a musical revelation. The original 'Baby Please Don't Go',
backed with a homebrewed fiddle part and wobbly hands-and-feet percussive
rhythms, turns out to have been merely one of the innumerable variations on a
traditional folk dance tune (the "baby please don't go" verse may
have been authored by Joe, but immediately afterwards he launches into the much
older "turn your lights down low" sequence), as is 'Crawlin' King
Snake', which, as the track listing shows, began its life as 'Rootin' Ground
Hog' — if it makes you wonder what in the world made the former popular and
the latter unknown, just try imagine Jim Morrison, thirty-five years later,
singing "I'm a rootin' ground hog, and I'm a-rootin' both night and
day" instead of "I'm the crawlin' king snake, and I rule my den"
(actually, Jim used John Lee Hooker's version, which rewrote the original
lines completely).
Same thing with the nine string guitar: the
extra strings may be making the sound a bit different, but not to the extent of
making it completely stand out from the rest, at least, not for the common ear.
There are conflicting accounts as to whatever made him do it — such as breaking
a peg on a guitar he was unable to replace and modifying it with an additional
flange with four pegs; or, even more probable, intentionally tampering with the
instrument so that nobody would be tempted to steal it, in the good old
cash-hungry Depression days. In any case, it was a curious gimmick that
influenced the sound without revolutionizing it.
So what's the big deal at all? The big deal is
that Big Joe Williams is probably the most natural predecessor to the
dark-devil-blues of John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, both of which have
covered his songs and, overall, must have been seriously inspired by his
attitudes. His playing is not «virtuoso», but he uses his guitar in many ways,
never giving a damn about clean melodic lines: his own inspiration must have
been Blind Lemon Jefferson, with his well-known disdain for following
restrictions. His guitar «rings» and «wails» not any more often than it pounds
and prances, going from blues to boogie and back in a jiffy, derailing and
confusing the senses.
Lyrically and thematically, Big Joe's songs are
a «menace»: not somber-apocalyptic à
la Charley Patton or ecstatically-apocalyptic à la Son House, no, Big Joe was way too grounded for that
kind of stuff, but he was a dangerous man, and usually sang songs from that
point of view. No light entertainment here; this is not music to get cuddly and comfortable to (and, contrary to
occasional popular beliefs, far from all original acoustic Delta blues is
creepy as hell), although Big Joe's voice is high and clean enough to
contribute to the lack of comfort — on that scale, he could never compete with
Patton, or with John Lee Hooker, for that matter.
This combination of factors is enough to
respect Big Joe for being a separate link in his own rights in the blues chain
rather than an insubstantial imitator of somebody else's greatness. Plus, the
quality of these Bluebird recordings is pretty strong, and on some of the
tracks he is accompanied by the harmonica playing of his biggest competitor on
the label, Sonny Boy Williamson (I), which is also a good boost for
conaisseurs.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 2 (1945-1949; 1991)
1) Drop Down Blues; 2) Somebody's
Been Worryin'; 3) Wanita; 4) Vitamin A; 5) His Spirit Lives On;
6) Baby Please Don't Go; 7) Stack Of Dollars; 8) Mellow Apples; 9)
Wild Cow Moan; 10) P Vine Blues; 11) Bad And Weakhearted Blues; 12)
King Biscuit Stomp; 13) I'm A Highway Man; 14) Banta Rooster Blues; 15)
Mean Step Father Blues; 16) House Lady Blues; 17) Don't You Leave Me
Here; 18) Jivin' Woman; 19) She's A Married Woman; 20) Walking
Blues; 21) Atlanta Town.
The second half of the 1940s was a very
unstable time for Big Joe: most of these tracks stem from but three sessions,
one final piece of work for the Bluebird label in 1945, a large session for Columbia
in 1947, and a very small one for Bullet Records in Nashville in 1949. (The
last two segments on the album, defying the «complete recorded works in
chronological order» ideology, are actually said to date back to 1935 — the first, and sonically very creaky,
examples of Big Joe's presence on record).
Putting aside the usual criticisms (lack of
diversity etc.), the first two sessions are invaluable in that they give us
some of the best recorded examples of Big Joe and Sonny Boy Williamson playing
together — in fact, Sonny Boy is always the real star on here, exploring
harmonica potential as best as he can. In many ways, these tracks may be said
to represent the equivalent of the Muddy Waters / Little Walter team a decade
later — Big Joe is the big, burly, dangerous presence, and Sonny Boy is his
subtler squire that does not seem to be posing as big a «threat», but in reality
may exercise an even higher influence on your subconscious than the Big Guy.
Quite a few of these songs follow a boogie
pattern, too ('King Biscuit Stomp', etc.), with a strong, modestly thunderous
rhythm session; naturally, these numbers could not hope to outdo the jump blues
heroes of the time in terms of ass-kicking (what with the lack of equally strong
vocalists or a big brass section), but Sonny Boy does all he can to compensate
for the lack of oompah — on most of the fast-moving, rabble-rousing tracks his
harp parts rock out quite strong.
In the interim, one cute historical curio is
'His Spirit Lives On', a little semi-original blues number with a bit of a
gospel flair to it, dedicated to the memory of the freshly passed FDR; unlike
the majority of mainstream «patriotic» numbers of the era, these made-on-order
tributes from concurrent Delta musicians are always interesting, if only
because of a complete lack of pathos — Big Joe delivers lines like "he's
gone, but his spirit lives on" with more or less the same attitude that he
adopts for "sail on, my little honey bee, sail on", and even if that
begs for the question — did he or didn't he actually give a damn about FDR? —
in the end, the question is totally irrelevant, because, regardless of the
answer, it is still a much cooler way to see FDR off than any pathetic
patriotic anthem one might have come up with instead.
The two songs from 1949 are interesting in
that, for the first time, we expressly notice Big Joe's endorsement of
electricity; by the mid-1950's, he would always play amplified — apparently, it
suited his personality and emphasized the subtle uniqueness of his nine-string
sound. He did not, however, have a lot of opportunities to record during those
years: outshone by Muddy and the Chicago school, and deprived of a strong
record label to back him up, from 1949 and up to 1958 his only recordings were
for obscure or semi-legal labels that had no impact whatsoever, and are almost
impossible to find nowadays. Even Complete
Recorded Works have refrained from searching — the series stops right here
in 1949, ignoring the «dark years» between Big Joe's heyday as a presence on
the 78 rpm market and his re-emergence as a blues veteran on the LP market ten
years later.
PINEY WOODS BLUES (1958)
1) Baby, Please Don't Go; 2)
Drop Down Mama; 3) Mellow Peaches; 4) No More Whiskey; 5) Tailor Made Babe; 6)
Big Joe Talking; 7) Some Day Baby; 8) Good Morning Little Schoolgirl; 9) Peach
Orchard Mama; 10) Juanita; 11) Shetland Pony Blues; 12) Omaha Blues.
In 1958, Big Joe re-emerged as one of the proud
bearers of pre-war Americana on the newly formed Delmark Records: Piney Woods Blues was the label's
second LP (for the record, The Dirty
Dozens by Speckled Red was the first, and boy, were those dozens ever
dirty). The trick worked out fine: not aiming at capturing any major markets,
Delmark introduced Big Joe, along with lots of other artists, to new
generations that could hardly be bothered tracking down old sizzling 78s. If
they couldn't have Robert Johnson, and if they couldn't get Muddy Waters to switch
back to acoustic, Big Joe was their guy.
Captured in St. Louis, mostly solo, but on some
tracks, also backed by J. D. Short on harmonica and guitar, Big Joe runs
through eleven numbers from his standard repertoire here (the twelfth track,
'Big Joe Talking', is true to its title; supposedly he is telling exciting
tales about meeting Leadbelly in prison and stuff, but the only word group that
my ears were able to distinguish was "corn whiskey"). All the playing
is strictly acoustic; my guess is that, as it often happened, nice-meaning guys
wanted to let Big Joe go for that «authentic» sound, when he, most likely,
would not have minded adding a little amplification to the proceedings. But if
there was a target audience for this
stuff in the first place, it'd mostly consist of college intellectuals, and in
1958, most college intellectuals still thought of amplification as murdering
the art spirit.
Anyway, the sound is clean, so Big Joe's
playing style can be enjoyed here with more general ease than on the original
recordings. On the down side, J. D. Short cannot replace Sonny Boy, and Big
Joe's taking on some of Sonny Boy's own trademark material (e. g. 'Good Morning
Little Schoolgirl') is interesting, but generally useless. On the up side, old
acoustic bluesmen on their late period records sometimes tend to stretch out,
diversifying and embellishing the old melodies with all sorts of extra
flourishes (Skip James is a classic example — his uniqueness is easier appreciated
on stuff he recorded in the 1960s than in his «heyday»). So, 'Baby Please Don't
Go' is changed almost beyond recognition, from a simple threatening shuffle
into a freedom-oriented performance where almost no two bars sound the same. This
is probably the first time that post-war listeners were able to really
appreciate the art of alternating tough, grumbly boogie lines flowing in and
out of lyrical country-blues passages, all coming from the same guitar — in
crystal clear sound quality. That's got to count for something.
As boring as acoustic blues may be sometimes,
Big Joe definitely commits himself to proving the opposite here; in a way, this
style of playing is more interesting
than the impressive, but repetitive phrasing of a Robert Johnson. So, thumbs up,
of course.
BLUES ON HIGHWAY 49 (1961)
1) Highway 49; 2) Overhaul
Your Machine; 3) Blues Left Texas; 4) No. 13 Highway; 5) Down In The Bottoms;
6) Poor Beggar; 7) That Thing's In Town; 8) Walk On, Little Girl; 9) Tiajuana
Blues; 10) 45 Blues; 11) Arkansas Woman; 12) Four Corners Of The World.
This particular Delmark recording was made in
July, 1961, in Chicago. This time Big Joe is accompanied throughout by his old
associate Ransom Knowling on bass — and nothing else; playing, predictably,
his old nine-string acoustic without amplification. None of the songs overlap
with Piney Woods Blues — in fact,
few of the songs, bar the title track, overlap with any of Big Joe's previous
recordings, which is nice to know theoretically but, in the long run, does not
make that much of a difference. A new Big Joe Williams song, after all, is just
an old B.J.W. song with new lyrics, not much more.
There is a little bit more boogie on here than
on Piney Woods Blues ('Down In The
Bottoms', 'That Thing's In Town'), and it is played with a little more verve —
Knowling's help on these numbers is particularly important, reasserting the
toe-tapping factor, and Joe's ability to play rhythm and lead at the same time
seems to be improving with age: it is ironic to think that Arthur "Big
Boy" Crudup made himself a whole living out of recording endless clones of
the same song as 'That Thing's In Town', and yet he was never able to play it
as well as Big Joe does here.
Out of the proper blues numbers, though, the
only one worth saving is 'Four Corners Of The World'. There is a reason why it
closes the album — upon hearing it, there is really no need to hear anything
else. It's longer than all the other slow blues numbers; it's got the loudest
bass part of them all; it has Big Joe hollering at the top of his powers; and
it's got him playing all of the tricks he knows. The only thing here that even
begins to approach «essential» status.
WALKING BLUES (1961)
1) Levee Camp Blues; 2) Low
Down Dirty Shame; 3) Gambling Man; 4) Ain’t Gonna Rain No More; 5) Feel So
Good; 6) Prowling Ground Hog; 7) Back Home Again; 8) Sugar Babe; 9) Tell Me
Mama; 10) Studio Blues; 11) I’m A Fool About My Baby; 12) 38 Pistol Blues; 13)
Pearly Mae; 14) Walking Blues; 15) Highway 45; 16) Meet Me At The Bottom; 17)
Skinny Mama; 18) Jockey Ride Blues; 19) Coal And Iceman Blues; 20) Army Man
Blues; 21) Black Gal; 22) Pallet On The Floor.
For precision sake, it should be mentioned that
this collection originally came out as two LPs: Blues For 9 Strings
in 1961 (the last 12 songs) and Studio Blues in 1966 (the first 10).
Both were, however, recorded during the same session in 1961, with a small
combo involving Larry Johnson on harmonica and the great Willie Dixon himself
on bass (usually, with Big Joe around, one hardly gets to hear anybody else
properly anyway, but Big Willie was the bass player to rip at the
strings with the kind of thick ferocity that agreed with Big Joe’s style better
than any other playing style).
By now, it was relatively clear what Delmark,
Folkways and the others were trying to do: short of «authentic» pre-war blues
artists, yet faced with the ever-increasing demand for genuine Delta blues on
the part of the younger generation, they expected of a happy find like Big Joe
the complete recreation of the entire Delta repertoire, no less. Of the 24
songs recorded during these sessions, only a very minor portion overlaps with
previous recordings. Instead, Joe covers songs made famous by Son House (‘Levee
Camp Blues’), Big Bill Broonzy (‘I Feel So Good’), and probably others (many of
the titles I simply do not recognize, but, clearly, there is no talk of original
composing here).
It goes without saying that the substitute is
not ideal: Big Joe has his own middle-of-the-road style, and taking on the
entire Delta legacy is a bit like the Grateful Dead taking on the entire legacy
of American popular music: formally, they pull it off, but who will remember
Jerry Garcia for playing ‘Johnny B. Goode’ or ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’
instead of ‘Dark Star’ when no one has so far taken care to burn all of Chuck
Berry’s and Rev. Gary Davis’ records?
But I have to admit that Big Joe’s take on
‘Feel So Good’ is still pretty amusing, with the song slightly sped up and
boogified. Joe even tries out some quasi-rockabilly licks in the solo: some of
these all but demand being accompanied by duckwalking, and I am pretty sure
that the man, unlike many of his peers, did not turn a deaf ear to those hot
new sounds on 1950s radio.
Overall, this is probably the best choice for
post-war Big Joe: the session is long, well-recorded, diverse (covering all of
Big Joe’s proper bases and touching upon many others), and, like I said, Big
Joe’s gruff and gritty playing style is a perfect match with Dixon’s amazing
blues bass skills. Some of the tracks, especially fast ones like ‘Tell Me
Mama’, are worth it just for Willie’s fat, but smooth runs alone. Thumbs up.
BACK TO THE COUNTRY (1964)
1) Ain't Gonna Be Your Lowdown
Dog; 2) Annie Mae; 3) You Can Stay Out; 4) Mean Backstabber; 5) Worry You Off
My Mind; 6) Miss Ida B; 7) Put On Your Nightcap; 8) Woody Woodpecker; 9) I Got
My Ticket; 10) Shake Your Boogie; 11) See See Rider; 12) Blues Everywhere I Go;
13) Worried And Lonesome; 14) My Black Woman; 15) The Moon Is Rising; 16) Down The
Line; 17) My Baby Left Me A Mule To Ride; 18) Desert Blues; 19) Breakdown.
The distinguishing factor here is the constant accompaniment of Willie Lee Harris on
harmonica and Jimmy Brown on fiddle (he also takes lead vocals quite a few
times). This gives you a laid-back, front porch atmosphere. Blue moon rising,
'gators in the swamp, jambalaya on the bayou, that sort of thing (I'm too lazy
to go hunting for additional Delta / Louisiana clichés). Unfortunately,
it sort of leaves open the question of whether anyone would give a damn if,
surreptitiously, they snatched Big Joe from under our noses and replaced him
with Average Joe.
The trio gets a fairly authentic sound, to be
sure, but the collective powers of Brown and Harris cannot replace the solitary
power of Willie Dixon's bass, and Big Joe does not seem to be particularly
trying. He is doing what he is expected to be doing — recreating the atmosphere
of a friendly get-together — and if that is what you want to hear, an honest
1964 recreation of an amicable musical encounter between three amicable black
country-blues musicians around 1934, that is exactly what you are going to get.
But at his best, Big Joe is an exciting entertainer, energetic and
unpredictable, and in the settings of a friendly get-together, there is no need
to be an exciting entertainer, since there's no one to entertain anyway.
Meaning that these twenty tracks (many of which
are not repeated from earlier recordings, but it never really matters) are
mildly interesting for one listen unless you are a Delta dweller all by
yourself, but, overall, it is not going to displace Walking Blues as the one late period Big Joe album to own if you
really have to own one.
CLASSIC DELTA BLUES (1964)
1) Rollin' And Tumblin'; 2)
Hellhound On My Trail; 3) Bird's Nest Bound; 4) Crossroads Blues; 5) Special
Rider; 6) Pony Blues; 7) Pea Vine Special; 8) Walking Blues; 9) Dirt Road
Blues; 10) Banty Rooster Blues; 11) Terraplane Blues; 12) Jinx Blues.
Far from the last «original» Big Joe
Williams album (the man went on recording all through the 1970s, although the
average pace was certainly less prolific), Classic
Delta Blues will, nevertheless, be his last record to get a brief
individual mention here. The ones
that came after are way too hard to find these days, and the payoff cannot be
imagined as substantial anyway.
The pleasure of Classic Delta Blues is mainly in that, after several years of being
set up as part of a small blues combo, this time around Big Joe gets completely
solo billing. He also switches to 6-string rather than his usual 9-string
guitar, which might, in theory, look like he's downplaying his own special
thing, but believe me, he is not. On the contrary, out of all of his post-war
LPs, this one is the most authentically Big-Joe-ish record of them all.
Back in Chicago, Big Joe is consigned to the
cares of engineer Norman Dayton and producer Pete Welding, who do the best
thing possible in this situation: leave Big Joe completely alone and merely
ensure that the captured sound be provided with some depth and a small echo
layer, to get the proper «playing from inside a deep well» atmosphere. Combined
with the fact that, for this session, Big Joe has selected to play almost
exclusively the tunes of Charley Patton and Robert Johnson — blues'
«tormented loners» par excellence —
this makes up for cool results.
Fact is, Big Joe is overall a better blues
singer (at least, certainly a scarier
blues singer, at times, sounding like the direct predecessor to Howlin' Wolf)
than both Johnson and Patton — as good as Robert's original 'Hellhound On My
Trail' and 'Crossroads Blues' are, I can certainly see how some could think
that the song deserves a deeper, more «hellish» vocal reading than Johnson's
almost effeminate whine, and Big Joe's interpretation here suits the bill
perfectly. And how wise of him, too, to have held off these recordings right
until being left all alone in the studio, with no second fiddle to spoil the
«just me and the devil» effect.
Simply put, some musicians are born for bands
and some are born for nobody but themselves, and Classic Delta Blues explicitly shows that Big Joe is at his very
best when no one is there to bug him about setting up a «party atmosphere». As
classic as his recordings with such giants as Sonny Boy Williamson or Willie
Dixon could be, he tends to wither up next to these guys. But give him some
echo, a dark, personal-apocalyptic tune or two, and suddenly he turns into Mr.
Deep Blues Incarnate. This is an exceptional LP — highly recommended. Thumbs up.
THEY CALLED ME BIG MAMA (1950-1954; 2005)
1) All Right Baby; 2) Bad Luck
Got My Man; 3) Partnership Blues; 4) Mischievous Boogie; 5) I'm All Fed Up; 6) Cotton
Picking Blues; 7) Everytime I Think Of You; 8) No Jody For Me; 9) Let Your
Tears Fall Baby; 10) They Call Me Big Mama; 11) Walking Blues; 12) Hound Dog;
13) Just Can't Help Myself; 14) Nightmare; 15) Rockabye Baby; 16) Hard Times;
17) I've Searched The World Over; 18) I Ain't No Fool Either; 19) The Big
Change; 20) I Smell A Rat; 21) Yes Baby; 22) Willie Mae's Blues; 23) Stop
Hoppin' On Me.
Houston-based Peacock Records was never the
hottest place in the musical business, lasting just a little over twenty years
before merging with ABC and then later with MCA. This, most likely, explains
why they never managed to make a real big star out of Big Mama Thornton. Had
she the chance to be picked up by someone like Atlantic, she would
unquestionably have been the bulgiest, brawniest, bulliest boss mama out there
— Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker would have never stood the field.
As it happened, her records never got enough
promotion, and, in fact, there weren't all that many records either — all
through the Fifties, she only managed to cut less than two dozen 45s and not a
single LP (available discographies do not even list any compilations). The
musical arrangements were professional, but somewhat outdated — most of her
slow ballad numbers are done with a lounge jazz tinge, and the fast rockers are
seriously on the 1940s jump blues side — and, although on most of these
recordings she is backed by a fairly serious outfit (the Johnny Otis Band, with
Johnny himself manning the vibraphones), I simply do not believe that Johnny's
big band style could ever be the perfect environment for Willie Mae Thornton.
This compilation, released by Proper Records,
is definitely the ideal guide through
Mama's early years; it seems to omit very little, presents all the recordings
in chronological order, and features excellent liner notes for each track. If
anyone knows anything at all, he/she is bound to have at least heard of one song here — the original
recording of Leiber-Stoller's 'Hound Dog' (which, according to the liner
notes, Mama tried to pass for her own composition, but nobody messes around
with two smart Jewish kids, not even a big fat Afro-American woman) which, in
my humble opinion, is way superior to the Elvis version, if only for the fact
that it does not repeat the exact same two verses over and over again. (Now if
only Mama could have gotten ahold of Scotty Moore in time...).
There is more to that, however: Big Mama was a
great actor, an exciting character impersonation, and, coming from an old
tradition of strong woman singers castigating their wimpy men for not living up
to their standards, she now adds post-war spunk and fury to Bessie Smith's
pre-war restraint on numbers such as 'I Ain't No Fool Either' and 'I Smell A
Rat' (the latter, also from Leiber and Stoller, is as worthy a companion to
'Hound Dog' as could have ever been desired). But her talents do not stop at
aggressive belting: she is also fantastic at loud, prayerish blues howling
('Cotton Picking Blues', 'Walking Blues', 'Hard Times', 'I've Searched The
World Over', etc.).
One style that does not fit her at all is
romantic jazz: 'Just Can't Help Myself', a sort of crippled, easily
recognizable reworking of 'Blue Moon', goes absolutely nowhere — you'd get more
promising results out of Ozzy Osbourne singing Wagner arias: Big Mama just
wasn't all that knowledgeable about subtle and tender aspects of romance, I'm
afraid. Fortunately, there's only about one or two tracks like this altogether
on the album, and it's a good thing 'Just Can't Help Myself' is immediately
followed by 'Nightmare' (Leiber-Stoller strike again!), a mildly creepy duet between
Big Mama and Johnny Otis' vibraphone that sets things straight again — Big
Mama's man finally dumped her (hell, anybody
would after hearing her express her romantic feelings on 'Just Can't Help
Myself'), and she is hurting as hell, and it works.
If you can live with the fact that all of these
twenty three songs are really just five or six (remember, this is still the pre-rock'n'roll era, and even
Leiber and Stoller, who did so much to diversify the world of primitive pop
music, were still in their teens when writing 'Hound Dog'), They Called Me Big Mama (named, by the
way, after Willie Mae's bit of brave self-irony: "they call me Big Mama,
cuz I weigh three hundred pounds") is a tight ball of energy and fun, and
you will even discern the apparent influence on a fellow Texan — Janis, whose
debt to Big Mama would not be paid off until more than a decade later. Of all
Fifties' artists, Etta James was probably the only one comparable — and even
Etta never had Leiber and Stoller working for her.
THE ORIGINAL HOUND DOG (1950-1957; 1990)
1) Hound Dog; 2) Walking Blues;
3) My Man Called Me; 4) Cotton Picking Blues; 5) Willie Mae's Trouble; 6) The
Big Change; 7) I Smell A Rat; 8) I Just Can't Help Myself; 9) They Call Me Big
Mama; 10) Hard Times; 11) I Ain't No Fool Either; 12) You Don't Move Me No
More; 13) Let Your Tears Fall Baby; 14) I've Searched The World Over; 15) Rock
A Bye Baby; 16) How Come; 17) Nightmare; 18) Stop A-Hoppin' On Me; 19) Laugh,
Laugh, Laugh; 20) Just Like A Dog (Barking Up The Wrong Tree); 21) The
Fish; 22) Mischievous Boogie.
Unfortunately, for the time being nobody has
bothered collecting all of Mama's output during the Peacock years in one
package — even if all of it could have easily fit on two CDs. They Called Me Big Mama is beautiful in
its dedication to completeness and chronological order, but it only covers
stuff up to 1954 (due to the 50-year copyright limit, as it goes with all of
Proper Records). To understand what went on with B. M. for the next three
years, one has to resort to additional, «authorized» compilations, most of
which are nowhere near as good: they sacrilegiously mess up chronology, add and
omit stuff at will, and, like all normal compilations, tend to give the
listener a general feel and idea rather than systematic knowledge.
The original and still easiest-to-get of these,
on CD, is The Original Hound Dog,
whose very title reveals its mission — generous education for the layman: «You
thought the world began with Elvis? Think again, son!» Most of the material
predictably overlaps with They Called Me,
but at least there are six songs on here that date from after 1954, a small
bunch of singles that Big Mama still had in store for Peacock before parting
ways in 1957.
It may not be worth spending your money on both
collections unless you are a true fan of this meaty 'n' sweaty brand of
R&B, but the extra cuts are good, and show a bit of development — 'You
Don't Move Me No More', in particular, shows that they'd finally started
noticing the achievements of rock'n'roll down there in Texas by the middle of
the decade, and there is some admirably gruff, deliciously primitive,
proto-garage one-note soloing on that track. Another great slab of early
rock'n'roll is 'Just Like A Dog' — turns out that, during the instrumental breaks,
Big Mama's vocal teasings and urgings mesh much better with electric guitar
playing than the more traditional saxophone solos.
On the down side, 'The Fish' is way too retro for Big Mama (the kind of
hokey material that only works well with humorous people like Louis Jordan),
and the other three songs are nothing particularly special. Also, if you
cannot find this disc, there is a
shorter alternative called Hound Dog:
The Peacock Recordings, which has
only 18 tracks in total, but still includes all the six necessary tracks ('My
Man Called Me', 'You Don't Move Me No More', 'How Come', 'Laugh Laugh Laugh',
'Just Like A Dog', 'The Fish'). May be worth it if going real cheap.
IN EUROPE (1966)
1) Swing It On Home; 2) Sweet
Little Angel; 3) Little Red Rooster; 4) Unlucky Girl; 5) Hound Dog; 6) My Heavy
Load; 7) School Boy; 8) Down-Home Shakedown; 9) Your Love Is Where It Ought To
Be; 10) Session Blues.
The «American Folk Blues Festival», regularly
held in various European locations from 1962 to 1966, was a fine thing not just
for European audiences, most of which had never seen «authentic blues in
action» before, but for the performers themselves as well — lots of people
who'd never catch the proper opportunity to get together and work on something
collective in their native homeland now, all of a sudden, had the chance to
pool their talents overseas.
Big Mama's first ever LP release is one of the
finest manifestations of that opportunity. In between the Peacock years and
this mid-Sixties «European revival», she'd lost none of the power or the
spirit, but now, instead of the Johnny Otis band, which was never really a
proper match for her, she is backed by such giants of the trade as slide guitar
master Mississippi Fred McDowell, piano wiz Eddie Boyd, Little Walter's drummer
Fred Below, harmonica king Big Walter Horton, and a young and fiery Buddy Guy
on electric guitar.
Obviously, this mixed backing is not very much
a unified «team» (having Big Walter and Buddy Guy play on the same tracks is
somewhat of a novelty thing), but it still makes for exciting listening, and
the players take good care not to overshadow Big Mama — this is a Willie Mae
album first and foremost. She also throws in some of her extra talents, never
evident in the Fifties, such as occasional drumming and harmonica playing:
'Down-Home Shakedown' is a cool duet between herself and Big Walter, on which
she more than stands up to the contest.
Vocals still take precedence, naturally, and,
with reverential support from Buddy, Mama gives us a fairly sexy 'Little Red
Rooster' (punctuated by naturalistic imitations of all the animals mentioned
in the lyrics, no less); an inspired 'Sweet Little Angel' which she models
after the B. B. King version and, IMHO, sings with more expression than B. B. himself;
and a fine-rocking remake of 'Hound Dog' that trades in guitar solos for
harmonica ones, yet still holds together more tightly than the original.
Of special note are several tracks recorded
away from the band, with only Fred McDowell backing Willie Mae on slide
guitar; 'My Heavy Load' is the particular highlight, five centuries of toil and
trouble converted into five minutes of deep Delta blues. This is the kind of
material that Big Mama never got to record at the peak of her popularity, being
marketed as, above all, a rowdy-bawdy entertainer with a big-band style —
unsurprisingly, she is just as good at it as she is at barking off male losers
in her classic hits.
In
Europe is available in many
different editions, including tons of bonus tracks (I am listing the shortest
original one), sometimes also paired with select tracks (or even the entirety
of?) the sessions recorded with the Muddy Waters Band; whichever one you
happen to track down will work. This is an absolute must for anyone with at least
a modest interest in blues history or rootsy music in general — mind you, this
is not just some old has-been
re-recording his/her former classics with better sound quality and worse
authenticity, this is a strong, diverse record showing a still flourishing
talent from several different sides, only a few of which we had previous access
to. A strong, excited thumbs up here.
WITH THE MUDDY WATERS BAND (1966)
1) I'm Feeling Alright; 2)
Sometimes I Have A Heartache; 3) Black Rat; 4) Life Goes On; 5) Everything
Gonna Be Alright; 6) Big Mama's Bumble Bee Blues; 7) Gimme A Penny; 8) Looking
The World Over; 9) I Feel The Way I Feel; 10) Guide Me Home; 11) Black Rat; 12)
Wrapped Tight; 13) Gimme A Penny; 14) Big Mama's Shuffle; 15) Since I Fell For
You; 16) I'm Feeling Alright; 17) Big Mama's Blues.
Chris Strachwitz, president of Texas-based
Arhoolie Records, was, in 1966, best known for securing the publishing rights
to Country Joe & The Fish's 'Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die', a song that
millions of draft dodgers were only too happy to pay good money for if it
helped them better articulate their arguments. Not being too sure about where
and how to spend all that money, Strachwitz, a good person at heart,
considered caring about Texan dispossessed, and, as fate would have it, fell
upon Big Mama's freshly issued In Europe.
Like every good American patriot should, the
Silesian-born Christian Alexander Maria, Graf Strachwitz von Groß-Zauche und Camminetz was a wee bit
annoyed about blossoming American talent only able to secure a market in
Europe. Thereupon, he personally got hold of Big Mama, flew her to San
Francisco, and there, on April 25, 1966, teamed her up with the-then current
backing band for Muddy Waters: Sammy Lawhorn on guitar, the fabulous James
Cotton on harmonica, the magnificent Otis Spann on piano, a less-known but
no-less-fluent Luther Johnson on bass, and Francis Clay on drums. Muddy himself
adds some guitar on a few of the tracks, but never sings one note, leaving all
the juicy bits to the lady.
The session was
originally released in 1967, possibly (it is hard to find concise information) under
the presumptuous name The Queen At Monterey (presumptuous and misleading — any album like that in
1967 would have given the impression that Big Mama performed at the famous
Monterey Pop festival, when, in fact, the whole thing was not at all up her
alley; but, considering that Janis Joplin did
perform her 'Ball And Chain' at the venue, the misleading may have been intentional)
and containing ten tracks; today, it is widely available under the quoted name
as a 17-song CD edition, although three are just alternate takes. And,
naturally, every serious blues lover should take advantage of that availability
while it lasts.
The big difference from In Europe is that, this time around, there is no mighty fine
aspiring young guitar superstar to outshine the rest of the performers: in
fact, Muddy and Sammy are all the time kept relatively low in the mix, rarely,
if ever, get to solo, and the emphasis the whole time is on collective playing,
with the guitars, Spann's jazz-influenced pianos, and Cotton's relentless
harmonica blowing all going on together at the same time — and still, over all
that din, Big Mama has them all beat whenever she opens her mouth.
The proceedings are also much more sternly
blueslike, with no 'Hound Dog' in sight, just lotsa 12-bar and straightforward
blues-rock and blues-balladry. We do get to evaluate Willie Mae's
harmonica-blowing skills once more, on 'Big Mama's Shuffle', but overall, this
is not a highly diverse affair, and individual songs are not particularly
discussable. Not that it matters. What matters is that you should download
yourself the first twenty seconds of 'I'm Feelin' Alright', and then decide for
yourself if the connection between shuffling piano, blues harmonica, heavy as
hell bass guitar, and Mama's tough brawn is as unique and rousing as it seems
to me.
Because, in a way, Big Mama was the female blues performer to correlate
almost directly with Muddy Waters as the
male blues performer, and the decision to team her up with Muddy's perfect
backing was a stroke of German genius on the part of Graf Strachwitz. Alas, the
teaming up was performed a decade too late for the whole venture to succeed
commercially — in 1967, few people had retained an active interest for Muddy
himself, let alone a former one-hit wonder appropriating Muddy's band — but
today, now that time has flattened out past decades, the proud blues
connoisseur can boast of this little jewel as the best pure blues album of
1966-67, if he so wishes, and even maintain that this was Willie Mae's finest
hour, even despite the lack of Leiber-Stoller presence. Thumbs up.
STRONGER THAN DIRT (1969)
1) Born Under A Bad Sign; 2)
Hound Dog; 3) Ball And Chain; 4) Summertime; 5) Rollin' Stone; 6) Let's Go Get
Stoned; 7) Funky Broadway; 8) That Lucky Old Sun; 9) Ain't Nothin' You Can Do;
10) I Shall Be Released.
As far as I was able to dig it out, Big Mama
recorded her original version of 'Ball 'n' Chain', with Edward «Bee» Houston on
electric guitar in vintage Chicago-style, as late as January 1968 — curious,
considering that, as we all know, fellow Texan and big Willie Mae fan Janis
Joplin was already singing the song live as early as 1967 (Monterey Pop, etc.).
Unless I'm missing some crucial facts, Janis must have caught Big Mama in a
live performance. Regardless, Janis' megastardom in 1967, in the usual manner,
brought its bit of recognition to those artists that were at least partially
responsible for that stardom, and that meant new opportunities for Willie Mae,
too.
Stronger
Than Dirt, released by
Arhoolie in 1969, is a fun, but not very successful, attempt to make use of
these opportunities. A hodge-podge of oldies and contemporary songs set to a
«modernistic big band sound», the album is just as eclectic as the late
Sixties usually required — a little blues, a little boogie, a little R'n'B, a
little soul, and the song selection is calculated so meticulously you'd think
they hired a professional astronomer to do that. 'Ball And Chain' is re-recorded
for the session, since Janis had already showed how to make it into a selling
hit; and since Janis had the power, it was only too natural to pass the ball
back and, in Janis' own steps this time, cover 'Summertime'.
'Born Under A Bad Sign' — a hit for Albert
King, then popularized among white audiences by Cream. 'Funky Broadway' —
Wilson Pickett had been really hot with that one not more than one year ago.
'Let's Go Get Stoned'... odd choice for a straight working black gal from the
heart of Texas, but who cares? She even tries on a little Bob Dylan, because,
well, you weren't really supposed to be a solid commercial proposition in those
days unless you tried on a little Bob Dylan. (Of course, you could be exempt if
your name sounded anything like Paul McCartney or Mick Jagger, but that was
obviously not the case here).
The results are mixed and, overall, sort of
pathetic. In 1969, Willie Mae was as powerful a singer as she'd been twenty
years earlier, but she was every bit as unsuited to varying the original formula.
Case in point — the nightmare-awful rendition of 'I Shall Be Released', a song
that dies on the spot and slowly decays in a cloud of heavy stinking once it is
deprived of subtlety; Big Mama, as is her custom, charges through the tune like
a brave cavalry regiment, and one in which every single soldier and every single horse have just had
ample access to the local pub as well. 'Born Under A Bad Sign' is brawny, but
also thoroughly flushed of its doom-laden atmosphere — with the elimination of
the song's original monster riff (that Cream, by the way, took great care to
preserve and build upon), it retains plenty of volume but loses most of the
«presence». For 'Summertime', Willie Mae tries to preserve the atmosphere of
poorly hidden depression and sarcasm that Janis gave the song, but, again,
lacks the appropriate finesse. And so on. Finally, why in the world would we
need yet another re-recording of
'Hound Dog'?
It is quite telling that not a single one of
these numbers (except for 'Hound Dog' and 'Ball And Chain', of course) became a
live staple for Big Mama, as the next year's live album would soon demonstrate
— unlike the awesome repertoire displayed on her 1966 recordings. It is still
interesting to listen through it at least once, for instructive purposes: to
understand what an artist's artistic limitations may look like, in the flesh
(since, under normal conditions, artists tend to hide these limitations rather than flaunt them in our face) — and,
perhaps, to gain a better appreciation for the original songs, in a comparative
perspective. But other than that, it's a flip-floppy thumbs down all the way.
THE WAY IT IS (1970)
1) Little Red Rooster; 2) One
Black Rat; 3) Rock Me Baby; 4) Wade In The Water; 5) Sweet Little Angel; 6)
Baby Please / Mojo Workin'; 7) Watermelon Man; 8) Don't Need No Doctor.
Now here is an album title that actually
matches the contents. Recorded at some L.A. club with Big Mama's then-current
touring band (including Eddie "Bee" Houston on guitar, George
"Harmonica" Smith on, oddly enough, harmonica, Flip "They
Forgot To Stroke My Ego With A Nick" Graham on bass, and J. D. "Not
Jack" Nicholson on piano), it actually had the luck to be remastered and
put out on CD, just so that everybody could see it as #153,288 on the Amazon
Music Bestsellers List, just a tiny bit below Kidz Bop Vol. 20 in Big Mama's amazing post-mortem comeback to rule
the musical world.
Other than Big Mama's, or the record label's,
strange fascination with either clipping song names ('Baby Please' is 'Baby
Please Don't Go', of course) or completely changing them ('Don't Need No
Doctor' is really 'Goin' Down Slow') — probably for cash reasons, so that
«Willie Mae Thornton» could appear on the songwriting credits without too much
of a hassle — The Way It Is is
really an excellent screenshot of the lady's state of affairs in 1970. And the
lady was certainly in much better shape than her best student: around the same
time that the teacher was belting it out like there was no tomorrow among
enthusiastic L.A. clubgoing crowds, just a few miles away the Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Mortuary was busy flame-consuming the drug-soaked body
of the student. Ironic, isn't it.
Anyway, this whole thing is mostly in the slow
blues vein, only 'One Black Rat' breaks up the mood with a fast, classic
R&B-ish beat and wild harmonica solos to remind the listener of what it
used to be like on Peacock Records. But Big Mama always does slow blues the Big
Mama way — the tempos may be slow, but the adrenaline level never drops below
the one required for the craziest boogie. For the sakes of diversity, she
includes a gospel number ('Wade In The Water') and a jazz standard (the
lyricized version of Herbie Hancock's 'Watermelon Man', replete with a
semi-improvised «street brawn» with the watermelon man in question), both of
which are done fine — she's got enough sense not to butcher the original killer
melody of 'Watermelon Man' like she did with some stuff on Stronger Than Dirt — but that's just diversity of source material
for you, not diversity of approach. If there's one person in this world who'd always
be talking to God in the same tone she'd be addressing a watermelon man, that's
Willie Mae.
The medley of 'Baby Please Don't Go' and 'Got
My Mojo Workin' is interesting in that the former is taken at a super-slow,
creeping tempo (in stark contrast to the then-popular rock version), slower even
than the original Big Joe Williams version — then, midway through, blam, we
launch into the tribal jungle dance of 'Mojo', almost in consolatory
compensation for the lull. As for longer
outstanding moments, well, "Bee" Houston has a couple of fine,
fluent, very «contemporary» blues solos on 'Little Red Rooster' and 'Sweet
Little Angel': he was clearly the most up-to-date player in Big Mama's band,
and not only is his playing here every bit as good as the notes one hears on
concurrent B. B. King records, some of the climactic trills actually go well over King's technical threshold. Where
is this guy's solo career?
A fun record, in general, not at all let down
even by Big Mama's pompous bits of Vegas-y banter, typical side effects as they
are of an overtly proud to be overtly polite black performer before an overtly
proud to be overtly receptive white audience (well, that's more or less how it
used to be in those still somewhat racially tense old times). Thumbs up.
JAIL (1975)
1) Little Red Rooster; 2) Ball
'n' Chain; 3) Jail; 4) Hound Dog; 5) Rock Me Baby; 6) Sheriff O. E. & Me;
7) Oh Happy Day.
Information on Big Mama's whereabouts during
the first half of the 1970s is sketchy at best. There seems to have been at
least one album of gospel tunes (Saved,
dated in different sources to either 1971 and 1973; all I know for sure is that
the release was on Pentagram Records, and yes, she does cover 'Swing Low Sweet Chariot', so do not expect huge massive
surprises), and there may have been occasional guest appearances here and
there.
But the «essential Big Mama» truly resurfaces
only in five years time, and with another live album — and a classic one.
Released on Vanguard, Jail is culled
from two different performances at Monroe State Prison in Monroe, Washington
and Oregon State Reformatory in Eugene, Oregon (I am, of course, listing this
detailed information just in case you ever turn up there and get a chance to
chat with an eighty-year old inmate). And even if one could say that Big Mama
was merely following a trend here, already well established by Johnny Cash and
B. B. King and others, who's to deny that Willie Mae, with her brusque and
rowdy ways, wouldn't be the perfect
rhythm & blues advertiser in that kind of environment?
The emphasis here is not merely on giving the
people a good time, but, as it is with the best of prison albums, on giving
them a realistically good time. Two
of the songs — the slow blues of the title track and the happy shuffle of 'Sheriff
O. E. & Me' — relate directly to prison time issues, and then there's 'Ball
'n' Chain', whose title, in a setting like this, would be very easy to take
literally. 'Jail' is, of course, the album's centerpiece, with the darkest
guitar solos and the grinniest grin on Mama's face, no doubt, as she introduces
herself: "Well, here I am again — sitting down in this old rotten jail..."
much to the inmates' delirious delight.
The album's got minor surprises — 'Little Red
Rooster', for instance, is not what you'd think, but rather an entirely
different, much faster boogie number, quite a kickass opener; 'Hound Dog' is
probably the second best, maybe even the first
best rendition in Mama's catalog, with a chuggy, funky rhythm guitar part
supplanting the original accompaniment; and 'Oh, Happy Day' (which, I believe,
was also recorded for the Saved
album) is a rare occasion to hear Willie Mae sing gospel pop — in a reasonably
restrained and fun way, with the band heartedly accelerating towards the end
(too bad the record fades out for some reason).
For the record, the band includes George
"Harmonica" Smith on Turkish komuz (nah, just joking), J. D. Nichols
on piano, Bill Potter dominating much of the overall sound on tenor sax, and
the trusty Eddie Huston on stinging guitar, augmented by Steve Wachsman on
second guitar (maybe it's Steve who plays the cool funky part on 'Hound Dog', I
don't really know). The album itself is generally available these days on the
3-CD long Complete Vanguard Recordings
collection, a very welcome addition to your
collection if you dig «Americana» at all. We'll get around to the rest of it
soon enough; in the meantime — thumbs up, no questions asked.
SASSY MAMA! (1975)
1) Rolling Stone; 2) Lost
City; 3) Mr. Cool; 4) Big Mama's New Love; 5) Private Number; 6) Sassy Mama; 7)
Everybody's Happy (But Me).
Nearly forgotten, two decades past her alleged
«prime», and having seriously lost weight, which all but forfeited the claim to
the honorary «Big» prefix, Willie Mae Thornton just so happened to record the
best album of her entire career. The only
album, might I say — the only other time she went into the studio to cut a
brand new set of tunes specially for the occasion was on Stronger Than Dirt, and, like I mentioned earlier, there were all
sorts of problems with that LP.
There are only seven songs, the session players
are mostly unknown, and the sales must have been so low that the recorded
sequel, Big Mama Swings, was shelved
upon completion, not to see the light of day before the Complete Vanguard Recordings compilation actually showed us that
the sequel was not half bad, either. But it is the best possible album Big Mama
could have done in the 1970s, and boy, should we ever be glad that she did do
it.
How it happened, we do not know, but,
apparently, Big Mama found herself uncontrolled and unmarketed by anyone — not
a soul on her record label must have given a damn about what the kind of sound
she should be associated with, so she just went ahead and did it all on her
own. "I, I, uh... I'll do it like this", she introduces 'Private
Number', singing the first bars a cappella, with the band gradually catching up
with her, and that's symbolic of the entire album.
But the band is very much involved, too. The
songs roll on for six, seven, eight minutes easily, not as jam sessions — as
lengthy blues confessions that unroll as dialogs, trialogs, and quadrilogs
between Willie Mae and her piano, guitar, and sax soloists. There's a general
atmosphere of total freedom, hearty fun, and, at the core of it, somber
seriousness. 'Mr. Cool', the centerpiece, clocks in at 7:45, but there is
hardly any problem with that, since Big Mama needs her bit players to warm her
up gradually, until the ecstatic, climactic conclusion.
Obviously, there was no hope of the album
making any kind of impression in 1975, when most of the interest in «black
music» was focused on its dance aspects, but so much more the reason to clear
up this mistake and recognize Sassy
Mama! as one of the finest things black music had to offer in the year of
'Love To Love You Baby'. And do not make the mistake of getting it on its own,
because, like I already said, the long-lost companion piece, Big Mama Swings, offers more of the
same — exactly the same, which is why
I refrain from giving it a separate review, but exactly the same level of
awesomeness, culminating in 'Happy Me', which should be recognized as one of
Big Mama's finest, on the same level with 'Ball & Chain' at least. Suffice
it to say that it is probably the darkest, grimmest soul-blues piece ever to feature that kind of title,
bizarre and intriguing in its paradoxal nature. And if the first album already
is an unquestionable thumbs up, the two together request getting your
big toes up as well.
Alas, just as Mama hit that kind of peak,
something happened — either her health finally gave out altogether, or the
label stripped her of studio time, but, anyway, all of her post-1975 recordings
are extremely scarce, hard to find, and even controversial. Discographies list
an LP called Mama's Pride, released
in 1978, but hardly ever with a track listing, so it is not even clear if it
was a new recording in the first place. There are also some archival live
recordings from around 1977, said to be quite good (which I can believe) but also
difficult to find. Then there was a car accident, but she still managed to
perform at Newport in 1983. Then, like so many other heroes of the past, Big
Mama passed away quietly somewhere in L.A. in 1984.
THE EARLY YEARS (1947-1954; 2008)
CD I: 1) Too Many Parties, Too
Many Pals; 2) Four Leave Clover Blues; 3) Candy Kisses; 4) Tennessee Border; 5)
The Covered Wagon Rolled Right Along; 6) Yodel Your Blues Away; 7) Behind The
Eight Ball; 8) Foolish Questions; 9) Deal Me A Hand; 10) Ten Gallon Stetson;
11) Susan Van Dusen; 12) I'm Not To Blame; 13) Loveless Blues; 14) Stand Up And
Be Counted; 15) I'm Gonna Dry Every Tear With A Kiss; 16) Why Do I Cry Over You;
17) My Sweet Little Girl From Nevada; 18) My Palomino And I; 19) Rocket '88; 20)
Tearstains On My Heart; 21) Down Deep In My Heart; 22) Green Tree Boogie; 23)
I'm Crying; 24) Pretty Baby; 25) Ten Gallon Stetson; 26) Why Do I Cry Over You.
CD II: 1) A Year Ago This
Christmas; 2) I Don't Want To Be Alone This Christmas; 3) Juke Box Cannonball;
4) Sundown Boogie; 5) Rock The Joint; 6) Icy Heart; 7) Dance With A Dolly; 8)
Rocking Chair On The Moon; 9) I'm Lonesome; 10) A Sweet Bunch Of Roses; 11)
Please Make Up Your Fickle Mind; 12) My Heart Tells Me (I'm In Love With You);
13) Stop Beatin' Around The Mulberry Bush; 14) Real Rock Drive; 15) Crazy Man,
Crazy; 16) Whatcha Gonna Do; 17) Pat-A-Cake; 18) Fractured; 19) Live It Up; 20)
Farewell, So Long, Goodbye; 21) I'll Be True; 22) Ten Little Indians; 23) Yes
Indeed; 24) Chatanooga Choo Choo; 25) Straight Jacket; 26) Jukebox Cannonball;
27) Within This Broken Heart Of Mine.
As iconic as the image of Bill Haley opening
the floodgates for rock music with 'Rock Around The Clock' became more than
fifty years ago, it has always been noticeable that, unlike the absolute
majority of rockabilly's teenage idols of the mid-Fifties, Haley was the only
one to stem from the previous
generation. This, and nothing else, is what makes him unique, sort of the white
equivalent to Big Joe Turner — no small coincidence that both performers initiated their runs of rock / rhythm & blues
fame with the same song ('Shake, Rattle, & Roll').
Unlike Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Buddy, etc.,
Haley was active on the pop music scene since at least 1947, working in the most
down-to-earth genre for white performers — country-western. And his transition
to rockabilly was not sudden and unpredictable, but gradual, with a slow and
careful drift towards «rowdier» forms of music; which does not for a moment
diminish the importance of this evolution — because just how many other country-western acts, cramming the
1940s / 1950s market, could boast such a successful and innovative crossover?
The answer, I believe, is straightforward: not one.
A short while ago, though, it was relatively
hard to lay one's hands on any of Bill's pre-'Rock Around The Clock', or, at
least, pre-'Crazy Man Crazy' recordings. The classic hit singles got reissue
after reissue, of course, but if you wanted to see the roots, you had to hunt
down old 45s (even the LP treatment would only be provided to Bill once he had
solidified his position as that of a national hitmaker). In recent years, with
CD markets hungry for rarities, this has fortunately changed. First and
foremost, for the real man there is the German Bear Family 5-CD boxset (The Real Birth Of Rock'n'Roll 1946-1954)
which pretty much contains everything
the man has put on record during those years with all of his bands, including
side projects backing Curly Herdman, Lou Graham etc., right down to acetates,
special radio versions and even ad jingles.
But for wimps like me and you, the more easily
available, not-so-exhaustive (and not-so-exhausting!) 2-CD JSP Records release
The Early Years might just do the
trick. It omits most of the alternative versions, acetate rarities, side
projects etc., but still manages to faithfully put together all of the «proper»
recordings that Haley did for several major labels, culminating in a long-term
partnership with Essex in the early 1950s, but before the move to Decca —
stopping right at the arrival of the 'Rock Around The Clock' period. Everything
else is either for the academician or the crazy man crazy (the two categories
also frequently overlap).
We begin with the so-called «Four Aces Of
Western Swing» and Haley's first singles for the appropriately titled Cowboy
Records. This is just regular country-western pap ('Tennessee Border' etc.),
although 'Yodel Your Blues Away' is noticeable for a huge slap-bass sound, and you
also get to acknowledge Bill's professional yodelling technique (as in, «you try doing that...»). In 1949, «Four
Aces» are replaced with «Bill Haley & The Saddlemen», but otherwise,
relatively little changes — for two more years, the boys go on doing generic
country-western. A teeny-weeny bit of proto-boogie can be seen on such tunes as
'Ten Gallon Stetson', but, frankly, the only occasional point of interest here
is steel guitar playing from Billy Williamson, one of Haley's oldest and
bestest colleagues, whose melodic and, occasionally, experimental soundmaking
sometimes saves these numbers from mind-numbing mediocrity.
The first true step up arrives during the
band's brief stint with Holiday Records — Haley's take on Jackie Brenston's
'Rocket '88', which, according to some, comes much closer to claiming the title
of the «earliest rock'n'roll song» than the original. Really hard to say,
though. Haley's take got the slap-bass rockabilly thing going on, and stinging
guitar solos instead of R'n'B-ish saxes, but Ike Turner did provide the distorted
rhythm guitar on the original. So... who cares? The real important news is
that, having heard 'Rocket '88' breaking the waves, Haley clearly smelled a
change in the weather, and, unlike 99% of his peers, made the brave — and risky
— decision to go along with it. Risky, because in 1951, this whole «crossover»
business was more or less unheard of. If you'd already saddled up the palomino,
they'd be expected to pry you out of the saddle on your ultimately last
go-round.
For a while, Haley's band continued recording
in the western style, but after the initial modest success of 'Rocket '88',
they would regularly include boogie numbers into the set. On this collection,
watch out particularly for 'Green Tree Boogie' (think Sun years-style Elvis
with a steel guitar accompaniment!), 'Jukebox Cannon Ball' (still much more
country than rockabilly, but with a hard-and-fast-driving rhythm that might not
have-a-been-to-a-likin' of the regular cowboy crowd), 'Sundown Boogie', and,
particularly, 'Rock This Joint', a rearrangement of an old jump blues standard
that is, for all purposes, simply a slightly earlier and wimpier, but equally
fun-spirited version of 'Rock Around The Clock' (from 1952).
It was around that time that the «Saddlemen»
took the right decision of changing their name to «The Comets» — none too soon,
considering how much the sound was toughened and sped up in those early years.
For 'Rock This Joint', the band moved over to the Essex label, and hired their
first drummer, although his presence is not really felt well enough until the
first of the Comets 45s on which both
sides rocked out — 'Stop Beating Around The Mulberry Bush' and the fantastic
'Real Rock Drive' (with the piano guy trying on a delightfully minimalistic,
Duke Ellington-ish air and two lead guitars weaving around each other with
great tact and delicacy).
Then there is 'Crazy Man, Crazy', which is not the first rockabilly number put out
by Haley, but which was the first one to make any serious impact on the charts
— and its "go, everybody, go, go, go!" still holds up as inflammable
fun after all these years, no matter how burdened it has become with its
historical symbolism. And with the song's success, the band's country-western
inclinations fizzle out altogether. The ten final tracks on this compilation,
covering late 1953 and early 1954, are all uptempo, upbeat, starkly rocking
numbers that rank right there together with Haley's classic Decca recordings.
Yes, it is worth it to wade through
all the yawn-inducing generic cowboy crap (becoming the next Hank Williams
was never an option, anyway) to reach these little gems — 'Fractured',
'What'cha Gonna Do', 'I'll Be True', even the gospel-done-as-boogie 'Yes
Indeed!' (a clear precursor to the much more popular Decca-era reinvention of
'The Saints'), and the sax-driven instrumental 'Straight Jacket' all represent
1950s pop music at its best.
In fact, I am being totally serious about
listening to both CDs in their chronological sequence, instead of immediately
skipping ahead to the tasty stuff — because what they show us here is one of
the, if not the single most
interesting and exciting evolution stories on the pre-Beatles pop scene (post Beatles, of course, artistic
evolution became the norm of day, and it was not even always a good thing). It
was a real long way from 'Candy Kisses' to 'Crazy Man, Crazy', and, by the
standards of the time, six years was not that
large a period to cover it. And hence, an unquestionable thumbs up for the achievement, even
if I will probably never want to listen to anything pre-'Rocket '88' again.
ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK (1955)
1) Rock Around The Clock; 2)
Shake, Rattle & Roll; 3) A.B.C. Boogie; 4) Thirteen Women; 5) Razzle Dazzle; 6) Two
Hound Dogs; 7) Dim, Dim The Lights; 8) Happy Baby; 9) Birth Of The Boogie; 10)
Mambo Rock; 11) Burn That Candle; 12) Rock A-Beatin' Boogie.
Bill's first bunch of rock'n'roll singles was
so groundbreaking that, after a brief while, people started saying stuff like
«well, yeah, it's groundbreaking, but it isn't really all that good — now where did we put that Sun Sessions CD, or that Chuck Berry
Chess years boxset?» Today, though, it is high time to re-evaluate this stuff,
along with Douglas Sirk movies and other 1950's memorabilia that, in some people's views, should be assessed
as much more than packages of nostalgia for our grand- and grand-grand-parents.
Rock
Around The Clock is an early
Decca compilation that collects six consecutive A- and B-sides for Bill and his
Comets, beginning with 'Rock Around The Clock' itself and all the way to 'Rock
A-Beatin' Boogie'. Although 'Clock' was indeed, chronologically, the first
single on here, it did not become a big hit until someone got the bright idea
to include it in the soundtrack to Blackboard
Jungle. Actually, Haley's first major «rock and roll era» hit was the
lyrically sanitized version of Big Joe Turner's 'Shake, Rattle & Roll' —
an earlier Decca compilation placed huger emphasis on that song, naming the LP after it, but I am not dedicating a
separate review to Shake, Rattle &
Roll because it's an 8-song mini-LP, and all of its material would
eventually be incorporated into Rock
Around The Clock, once the song started getting popular.
So what's the deal with these six 45s? Clearly,
this is the finest «small» set of Bill Haley & the Comets in existence —
the birth of a new type of music, and a 100%-motivated band that's only too
happy to serve as the midwife. It is
clean-sounding and sanitized. Haley was, above all, a professional
entertainer, certainly not interested in coming across as «rebellious»,
«aggressive», etc. Now that you think about it, wild stories about teen riots
across the States and the UK during the initial run of Rock Around The Clock (the second,
not the first movie to feature the song) just seem so tremendously inadequate,
considering the utterly peaceful and friendly message of the tune. How did it
all come to this? Surely, when The Comets recorded the song, they were simply
thinking that they were doing some good old jump blues, in just a slightly
crazier and speedier way than it used to be. The last thing on their mind was
to awake the sleeping dragon in the American (let alone Western, or worldwide)
teenager.
Not that they felt too terrified or unhappy
when they did realize what they'd done — because, as soon as 'Shake, Rattle
& Roll' and 'Rock Around The Clock' hit the big time, Haley's country-western
past was all but forgotten. And this is why this album rules: what you get is
12 tracks of non-stop, no-holds-barred boogie, with great danceable grooves
from the first to the last number. It may be «softer» than whatever came after
it — not musically, but mood-wise — and some of it may be dumber than one would
like to (Al Russel's 'ABC Boogie' comes to mind as a really pathetic and
unconvincing juxtaposition of school and rock'n'roll values, next to Chuck
Berry's 'Ring Ring Goes The Bell'), but each single song is FUN.
Of course, we might as well mention the
technical aspects of these guys. Simplistic rock'n'roll depends, tooth and
claw, upon the individual prowess of the players, and the Comets had one of the
hottest rhythm sections around (simple double-bass lines and drum fills, but
each note and each hit is delivered with the motivation of a bulldozer), and a
great lead guitarist in the newly-arrived Franny Beecher (check out the
fantastically melodic solo on 'Happy Baby'). (Beecher replaced the prematurely
deceased Danny Cedrone, who was no quack himself, responsible for the whacky
wobbly soloing on 'Rock Around The Clock'). And even if Bill himself could
never, by a long stretch, called a «great» vocalist, these days his decidedly
non-rock'n'rollish vocals not only seem perfectly suited for the Comets' sound,
they can also be a nice change from the «rougher» performers — well, sometimes
one can be expected to want oneself
some rock'n'roll as lightweight entertainment, and these singles cut it like
nothing else.
From time to time, there might be a relatively
more «daring» number — for instance, not only does 'Thirteen Women' implicitly
convey every man's wish to get it on with several lovely ladies at once, but it
also mentions the H-Bomb as one possible way to get that wish accomplished, all
set to an ominous, if not exactly apocalyptic, combination of sax riff and lead
guitar siren. It was the B-side to 'Rock Around The Clock', and, in some ways,
it is almost the better song out of the two, if you can believe that.
But overall, all of this stuff is completely
innocent and toothless, perfect not only for the «middle ground-oriented» teens
from 1950s happy American families, but, most of the time, even for their parents,
if they'd only be willing to loosen up just for a moment (actually, it is hard
to understand how any American parent at the time who had, at least once in
his/her life, somersaulted to a wild performance by a big jazz band or a jump
blues combo — and there must have been many of these — could, even in theory,
object to the Comets even at their
very wildest). And yet, at the same time, even fifty years after the fact, you
can still feel the freshness and inspiration of these recordings. Perhaps
this is not the proverbial spirit of
rock'n'roll that you find here, but then it is the proverbial spirit of
rock'n'roll's elder, slightly less rebellion-prone, brother. Thumbs up.
ROCK'N'ROLL STAGE SHOW (1956)
1) Calling All Comets; 2)
Rockin' Thru The Rye; 3) A Rockin' Little Tune; 4) Hide And Seek; 5) Hey Then,
There Now; 6) Goofin' Around; 7) Hook, Line And Sinker; 8) Rudy's Rock; 9) Choo
Choo Ch'Boogie; 10) Blue Comet Blues; 11) Hot Dog Buddy Buddy; 12) Tonight's
The Night.
This one puts together a few more singles, but
also adds some LP-only tracks, a first for Bill. In addition, to reflect the
burgeoning democratic spirit, the emphasis is more on The Comets than on Bill Haley.
A few of the numbers are complete instrumentals, and plenty of lead vocal time
is given to guitarists Franny Beecher and Billy Williamson, so that Bill
himself only handles the lead on four numbers in toto.
Of these, 'Rockin' Thru The Rye' is the obvious
highlight, not least because it is the first attempt to adapt a classic old bit
of poetry to the newly emerged rockabilly genre — Robert Burns' 'Comin' Thro'
The Rye' is given an unexpected twist, but, since the latter had originally
been written in the style of a party folk tune, it would make perfect sense to
adapt it to contemporary folk values,
and the band does fine, placing another early rockabilly classic under their
belt.
Some of the new tunes sound a little silly and
hoedown-ish (even in 1956, it would be a little distasteful to start a song
called 'A Rockin' Little Tune' with the sound of an accordeon, no matter how
well played). But in general, the instrumentals are fine. Rudy Pompilli's sax
has rarely ventured on a wilder spree than on 'Calling All Comets', and it
sounds particularly delicious when punctuated by wild-west-style twang-twangs
from Beecher's guitar. Beecher himself gets to rip it up on 'Goofin' Around',
playing sped-up jazzy licks like a maniac schoolboy (presaging a similar, if
much more progressive, attitude from Ten Years After's Alvin Lee), and on 'Blue
Comet Blues', one of those compositions that lies at the foundations of «blues
rock» as a genre, even if no one would probably remember this, what with «blues
rock» always being associated with the likes of John Mayall and Canned Heat.
Overall, this LP does not pack nearly as much
punch as its predecessor — mostly due to the fact of already incorporating bits
of the «early LP spirit», which presupposed and demanded a certain amount of
filler — but the material shows that the band was still moving forward, all
excited about these new sonic perspectives and dying to try out different
approaches, even if not all of them seemed to work. Still an essential listen
for anyone who takes 1950s pop music seriously — thumbs up without a single doubt.
ROCKIN' THE OLDIES (1957)
1) The Dipsy Doodle; 2) You
Can't Stop Me From Dreaming; 3) Apple Blossom Time; 4) Moon Over
Miami; 5) Is It True What They Say About Dixie?; 6) Carolina In The
Morning; 7) Miss You; 8) Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone; 9) Ain't Misbehavin';
10) One Sweet Letter From You; 11) I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A
Letter; 12) Somebody Else Is Taking My Place.
Conceptual! This might not have been the very
first time that The Comets tried to mine the golden oldies territory for
inspiration, but it certainly was the
very first time they — or, for that matter, anybody, gaining the band an extra point for innovation — attempted
to «rock the oldies» over the course of an entire LP. Twelve rusty old
standarts from the Songbook here, dusted off and polished late Fifties style,
for your pleasure and mine.
Overall, it is not the finest moment in Bill
Haley's story. The album yielded no hits (although 'The Dipsy Doodle' was
released as a single): teen fans must not have been particularly happy about
dancing to all these titles they knew (and abhorred) from their parents'
records, and the parents, predictably, would not be thrilled to hear their old
favorites transformed into the Devil's music. If the original idea was to offer
some sort of a compromise, it was doomed from the start. But now, in
retrospect, when titles like 'Apple Blossom Time' and 'Carolina In The Morning'
no longer provoke the kind of allergies that they used to, and Bill Haley's
brand of rock'n'roll is, in itself, an antique as quaint as the swing movement
that it was meant to replace, Rockin'
The Oldies is, once again, a fun, and instructive, thing to behold.
With The Comets in top instrumental form, and
all the standards revved up properly, these songs are hardly that much worse than the band's original
hits. It is true that most of them get very similar arrangements, the original
melodies are drastically simplified, and the overall atmosphere is too lightweight
even for Haley's standards. The one true rocking number on the record is not
even 'Dipsy Doodle', it is the even faster 'You Can't Stop Me From Dreaming',
depending for its life on Beecher's one-note guitar «shots» and boogie solos.
All the other oldies do seem to be «rocked» indeed, but that doesn't really make
them rock, if you know what I mean.
Some of this is quite similar in tone and mood to Carl Perkins' early brand of
country-bop, except that The Comets are far more fluent and professional than
Carl's backing band. Forgettable overall, but, like I said, a fairly
interesting, non-trivial move at the time.
ROCKIN' AROUND THE WORLD (1958)
1) Pretty Alouette; 2) Me
Rock-A-Hula; 3) Wooden Shoe Rock; 4) Vive La Rock And Roll; 5) Come Rock With
Me; 6) Jamaica D.J.; 7) Piccadilly Rock; 8) Rockin' Matilda; 9) Rockin' Rollin'
Schnitzelbank; 10) Rockin' Rita; 11) Oriental Rock; 12) El Rocko.
The birth of worldbeat! Forget Peter Gabriel
and Paul Simon — this is where it all begins. Well, from one possible perspective at least. Although it would be tough to
suspect Mr. Haley of a particularly high level of sophistication, Rockin' Around The World shows that his
knowledge and love of pop music was hardly limited to contemporary American
forms. On this second «conceptual» album, the point (gimmick) is to take bits and
pieces of traditional folk tunes and generic «ethnic» melodies and mold them in
a rock'n'roll-ish form, along the same lines they did it with the old swing and
lounge tunes on their previous record.
Overall, it's a fairly silly idea, and it
results in a fairly silly sound. But a hilariously
silly sound all the same — and it is, at the very least, interesting and
amusing to see how much effort the band, and Bill in person, had put into
creating these odd concoctions: rewriting the lyrics, to insert all sorts of
«rocking» references, speeding up the tempos, sometimes recycling old vocal
lines and riffs to make the final effect more convincing, and so on.
For instance, all of us are well used to Elvis'
transformation of 'O Sole Mio' into 'It's Now Or Never', which basically
amounts to a new set of English lyrics and the addition of a steady pop rhythmic
base. Few of us know that two years before
the fact, Haley took the same tune, did all those things, but also sped up the
tempo, set up a boogie bass line, threw out the sap (while still leaving the
romance), and ended up with 'Come Rock With Me'. Who'd be the winner? Elvis —
just because he happened to have a so much grander singing voice? Or Bill —
who did a far more successful job of showing how much unrealized potential
that melody had in the first place?
Purists and PC types these days would probably
castigate Haley for almost completely identifying «The World» with «The Western World»: other than a brief
incorporation of some unspecified Middle Eastern motives into 'Oriental Rock',
and steel guitarist Billy Williamson's imitation of the Caribbean accent on
'Jamaica D. J.' (which the aforementioned PC types these days would, no doubt,
dub racist), all of the source
material essentially stems from Europe (France, Germany, England, Holland) or,
at best, Latin America. No attempts to put Australian aboriginal music to a
good old rock beat. But one has to remember that the record was not motivated
by deeply thought out «artistry», or by any Sixties-triggered feel of liberal
guilt: most likely, Haley and his record label (Decca) simply thought that this
would be a good way to bring the new sound of rock'n'roll closer to the ears of
as many immigrant minorities in the US as possible. (Still no Chinese Rock,
though. We'd have to wait until the Ramones for that).
It is not likely that the Comets would have any
more success at that than they had at wooing teenagers' mothers with the
sweet-and-rocking sounds of Rockin' The
Oldies. Would a conservative citizen of French origin be able to admire
the re-write of 'Frère Jacques' as 'Vive La Rock And Roll'? And would a
not so conservative citizen of French origin, already sick to death of
'Frère Jacques', find new respect for the song if he found out he could
dance all night to it at the local ballroom? As a marketing move, I fail to see
the smartness in this thing, and, once again, the album garnered not one single
hit or classic.
But as a curious pop experiment that would be
fun for younger generations to dig out fifty years after the fact, Rockin' Around The World is, I believe,
a total gas. The only way one can truly enjoy all these proverbial ditties
these days (for the record, Haley's range also covers 'London Bridge Is Falling
Down', 'Hawaiian War Chant', and 'La
Cucaracha' in one go — I feel silly even typing out all these names) is from a
deconstructivist point of view, and, without knowing it, Haley went on record
as their first, or one of the first, post-modern interpreters. Too bad there
was nobody to see it from that point of view back in 1958 — had the record made
more of an impact on musical minds, who knows, maybe rock music could have
turned into an art form several years earlier. Or maybe I'm exaggerating.
Anyway, well worth a listen: thumbs up.
ROCKIN' THE JOINT (1958)
1) Rock The Joint; 2) Move It
On Over; 3) How Many; 4) See You Later Alligator; 5) The Beak Speaks; 6) Forty
Cups Of Coffee; 7) The Saints Rock And Roll; 8) Sway With Me; 9) It's A Sin;
10) Burn That Candle; 11) Rock Lomond; 12) Rip It Up.
Experiments, innovation, and conceptual LPs
aside, what we really love the Comets for are their hit singles — and Rockin' The Joint, released in late
1958, did a relatively legit job of scooping up Haley's non-LP singles from the
previous two years. Unlike the LPs, the singles never messed around with the
basic formula, but in 1956-58 the band was still fresh, the rock'n'roll spirit
was still young and ambitious, and there were plenty of cozy little twists and
hooks one could decorate one's rockabilly output with.
'See You Later Alligator' and 'The Saints Rock
And Roll' alone suffice to procure this record the title of
second-most-important Bill Haley release out of the «original» bunch. Actually,
it suffices to hear the original
version of the tune by Bobby Charles to understand Haley's genius — how he
took a funny, catchy, but unexceptional novelty number and transformed it into
one of the quintessential rock'n'roll anthems of its era. Likewise, his cover
version of 'The Saints' is one of the very few that is still listenable after
all these years — its boogie drive works every single time, and it acts much
stronger on the brain than the awful realization that you are, in fact, listening to a version of 'The Saints', in a sane
state of mind and completely of your own free will.
As subjective as the impression might be, it
seems to me that the general kick-ass energy level actually rose during these years, mainly because
of the instrumentalists getting deeper and deeper into the groove. Check out
the instrumental break on 'Alligator' — Rudy and Franny taking it out on each
other with shrill, frantic sax blasts and sharp guitar «shots» — or the
tremendous climax of 'Saints', with the sax shooting see-through holes in your
speakers. It is these moments that almost
make you forget how Bill Haley got into the rock'n'roll business almost by
accident; as close as the Comets get to actually sounding «dangerous» rather
than just providing lighthearted entertainment for the young 'uns at the top of
the era's technological power.
Of course, we still reserve the rights to place
a few complaints. 'Rock The Joint' rocks the joint alright, but is a fairly
close-imitating rewrite of 'Rock Around The Clock'; 'Move It On Over' cannot
hope to improve on Hank Williams' original, since Hank not only had a sharper
and more seductive personality than Bill could ever aspire to, but was himself
as close to real rock'n'roll with that particular song as one ever got to
rock'n'roll in the Fourties; 'It's A Sin' is a rather draggy half-hearted
return to country-western; 'Rock Lomond' should have rather been placed on Rockin' The Oldies; and 'Burn That
Candle' was already released on an earlier LP.
This is all not
mentioning that some of Bill's finest singles of the period, for some reason,
did not make the grade. I am
primarily speaking of 'Teenager's Mother', a surprisingly grim indictment of
the stubborn parents of today, "'cause the same thing that's worrying you
is the same thing you used to do yourself"; 'Rockin' Rollin' Rover', one
of the happiest tunes about a dog ever written; and 'Don't Knock The Rock', the
title track to the movie of the same name which was basically a follow-up to Rock Around The Clock, but failed to
replicate its success.
Still, these complaints are all anachronistic —
Rockin' The Joint has long since
been retired from the catalog, and today you will most likely find all these
songs on compilations: the best ones on best-of, the complete ones on Decca's
boxsets. So, essentially, the point of this review was merely to alert you to
the power of 'See You Later Alligator', especially if your notion of
«rock'n'roll oldie» does not extend far beyond Led Zep and Grand Funk Railroad.
To that aim, a big thumbs up for the record.
BILL HALEY'S CHICKS (1959)
1) Whoa Mabel!; 2) Ida, Sweet
As Apple Cider; 3) Eloise; 4) Dinah; 5) Skinny Minnie; 6) Mary, Mary Lou; 7)
Sweet Sue, Just You; 8) B. B. Betty; 9) Charmaine; 10) Corrine, Corrina; 11)
Marie; 12) Lean Jean.
Had more artists adopted that practice after
Bill Haley — namely, building a concept LP around successful hit singles —
art-rock would have been born, baptized, graduated, become the basic laughing
stock currency of the Addison DeWitts of pop music, and buried six feet under
way before the hippie movement even started. So thank you, artists. Which does
not, however, mean that all of these
«concepts» were equally laughable on their own terms.
Since the concept of Bill Haley's Chicks is, this time around, restricted to song titles
and choruses, rather than actual music
themes, this suggests that the man's penultimate LP for Decca would sound less
«odd» to the common ear, but might have the potential to beat all those other
experimental records in terms of sheer entertainment. Which is exactly what it
is. The success of 'Skinny Minnie' brings on the idea of an entire suite of
songs that namedrop Bill Haley's «chicks» — some of them original ones, some on
loan from much older artists.
The bad
news is that, whenever Haley went fishing for covers, he'd be delving into the
Songbook — so that there is still a lot of overlap here with the spirit of Rockin' The Oldies, not necessarily a
good thing, no matter how much rockabilly makeup is slapped on the faces of
these old swing numbers and crooner tunes. I mean, 'Charmaine'? The most
popular version of that song was recorded in 1951 by The Mantovani Orchestra;
need I say anything more?
The good
news is that there are many sides to this story. For instance, it gave Bill a
pretext to cover Big Joe Turner one more time: his 'Corrine, Corrina' relates
to Turner's version the exact same way as 'Shake, Rattle, & Roll', that is,
transforms the black teen's R&B into the white teen's rockabilly with the purest
of intentions — let 'em shake hands in genuine interracial friendship, especially
considering that all four songs were recorded by artists who were, themselves, way out of their teenage years. It also
has a spotlight reserved for Billy Williamson, providing a funny, slightly
asthmatic-paranoid-sounding lead vocal on the original composition 'B. B.
Betty' (but, unfortunately, no solo steel guitar part). And the chorus of
'Whoa Mabel!' may have provided the inspiration for Procol Harum's Keith Reed
ten years later.
'Skinny Minnie' is still the key track — Bill's
last «gold» classic for Decca, or, in fact, last gold classic ever, since the Warner years would not
yield any more proverbial standards for the rock'n'roll hall of fame.
Concept-wise, it was probably Bill's attempt to one-up Larry Williams and his
'Bony Moronie', but musically, it's quite original, and its charmingly dated
hilariousness is all its own, along with its unforgettable trill-based melody.
Fans of Franny Beecher will have to be
disappointed, though: he only gets to shine thoroughly on Irving Berlin's
'Marie' — most of the other songs either do not have solos at all, or all the
soloing goes to Rudy on the sax. Whether this, in any way, reflected a rift
between Bill and Franny that led to their parting ways in 1960, or was simply
an incidental matter, I have no current way of knowing, but that's just the way
it is. Almost prevents me from giving the record a thumbs up, but, after all, the
bright world of rockabilly does not begin and end with guitar solos. Give it up
for brass, too, unless we're talking modern jazz festivals.
STRICTLY INSTRUMENTAL (1959)
1) Joey's Song; 2) Music,
Music, Music; 3) Mack The Knife; 4) In A Little Spanish Town; 5) Two Shadows;
6) Shaky; 7) Strictly Instrumental; 8) Skokiaan; 9) Puerto Rican Peddlar; 10)
Drowsy Waters; 11) Chiquita Linda; 12) The Cat Walk.
Well, perhaps not really strictly — there are, after all, several bits of vocal
harmonies scattered here and there, and, last time I heard, the Comets were
still belting out CHIQUITA LINDA! CHIQUITA LINDA! like crazy on track no. 11.
But that should not detract from the fact that Bill Haley ended his love
affair with Decca in the usual consistent manner, with another «proto-conceptual»
record, this time one on which he himself was nothing more than the least well
heard bit player in the midst of seasoned instrumental professionals. (He is out there, though; there seems to be
some documental proof — although, frankly, who'd care?).
If simple instrumental music for lightweight
entertainment purposes, from those good old days when this meant having real
bands set up a groove, rather than one DJ and a set of cables, means anything
to you at all, Strictly Instrumental
is as good a Comets album as any other one. How can any album that opens with
such a deliciously unforgettable rendition of Joe Reisman's 'Joey's Song' not
be good? If, after but one concentrated listen, you can easily get the theme
out of your head, I'd be afraid to inherit your central nervous system. (Of
course, for some people that might be
a negative — way too annoyingly catchy! — but for me, that'd only be a problem
if we had scientific proof for the jaded old theory that catchy pop music was
invented by sneaky capitalists turning people away from the pressing issues of
class struggle. Last time I heard, Chomsky was still working on that).
Anyway, 'Joey's Song' is a classic, as is the
Comets' rendition of 'Skokiaan', which takes the Zimbabwean original and gives
it, first time ever, a supertight foundation and a glossy modern sheen. The
only problem with most of these covers is that none of them really pass for
genuine rock and roll: I mean, 'Mack The Knife'? Beecher totally smokes with
his little fills and whoops all over the place, but in between all the Kurt
Weill and all the Mabel Wayne, we tend to get lost in Rockin' The Oldies territory all over again, and this time, the
oldies aren't even «rocked» all that much. There's some sub-standard country
('Drowsy Blues'), some toothless cha-cha-cha ('Puerto Rican Peddlar'), and some
tap dancing ('Music! Music! Music!') — all of them sounding inoffensively
retro, but not representing the Comets at their best.
Thus, apart from 'Joey's Song' and 'Skokiaan',
I would only advise paying closer attention to two Beecher/Williamson
originals: 'Shaky', a proto-blues-rock groove that does, indeed, utilize «shaky»
guitar tones throughout (about as far out as the original Comets ever ventured
with experimental sonic textures), and 'The Catwalk', the grumbliest and
«blackest»-sounding shuffle out here, the only song on which, perhaps, an
Elmore James would not refuse to jam along. Other than that, it was an
interesting, but rather modest, way to terminate the most important phase of
the band's career.
PS. Actually, add 'Chiquita Linda' to that list
— not because of the silly main theme, but because of the fabulous boogie solo
that Beecher plays from 1:13 to 1:41. Say what you will, but that guy could really
hit it when in the proper mood, no matter how inappropriate the setting.
BILL HALEY AND HIS COMETS (1960)
1) Rock Around The Clock; 2) I
Almost Lost My Mind; 3) Blue Suede Shoes; 4) Blueberry Hill; 5) My Special Angel;
6) Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On; 7) Crazy Man Crazy; 8) Kansas City; 9) Love Letters
In Again; 10) I'm In Love Again; 11) Shake, Rattle And Roll; 12) Stagger Lee.
If you want to know why rock'n'roll almost died
a miserable death around 1960, take a listen to this album — in context, of
course. The Comets' move to Warner Bros. was supposed (I assume) to give the
band's career a shot in the arm, but no one expected the needle to contain
morphine. In fact, the band was still quite intact, the leader well-groomed and
smiling as usual, and the music was still unquestionably categorized as
rock'n'roll. But on December 25, 1959, Father Christmas told the world to start
waiting around for the Beatles, and the world followed his orders.
The fact that Haley's first album for Warners
begins with an almost note-for-note loyal re-recording of 'Rock Around The
Clock' is actually the least worriesome aspect of the album. Sure, it's got a
little bit less of the youthful energy that fed the original, and there was no
need for anyone who cared about his old 45s to waste time on comparing the two
versions. But at least it's solid Haley-style rhythm & blues material which
Haley always did best.
Much more problematic is that Warners saddled
the Comets — or, perhaps, the Comets saddled themselves, I am not entirely sure
of the situation — with rock'n'roll hit material from the past few years that even
innocent teens of the late 1950s would have never guessed to associate with
Bill, let alone all of us today. Let's face it: «Bill Haley Rock» is, more or
less, a thing in itself. 'Rock Around The Clock', 'See You Later Alligator',
'Razzle Dazzle', 'Rockin' Through The Rye' — there's a reason we mostly know Bill through all these songs that seemed so
tailormade for The Comets, very few artists of note (or solid reputation) have
dared cover them in the ensuing decades. Everyone wanted to sing Chuck Berry,
Little Richard, and Gene Vincent; nobody wanted to sing Bill Haley & The
Comets, and not just because The
Comets were slicker, older, and «more conformist» than the truly wild guys of
rock'n'roll (which they were, of course) — also because The Comets had their
own brand of sound which, for quite a few young American and British
whippersnappers, was pretty tough to reproduce.
But here, what we encounter is exactly the
downside of it. As the band switches to covering Carl Perkins ('Blue Suede
Shoes'), Fats Domino ('Blueberry Hill' and
'I'm In Love Again'), Jerry Lee Lewis ('Whole Lotta Shaking Going On'), and
Little Richard ('Kansas City'), it's not just us wondering why the hell they'd want to do it — it seems like
they themselves are not quite sure of why they are doing it, either. This is
the only explanation I have for the fact that not once over this entire record was I actually motivated to stop
whatever it was I was doing at the time, and marvel at the sharpness and
inventiveness of a Franny Beecher solo. It's not as if there were no Franny Beecher
solos here — there are quite a few, they just seem... superfluous, as does most of the record.
The only number here that does show invention
is a brand new rearrangement of 'Shake, Rattle And Roll'. But since
«invention», in this case, simply means doing it with more swing and less
aggression than the original, who cares? We all know which version is going to make it to God's personal hall of fame.
'Crazy Man Crazy' is actually much better, sticking both to the letter and the
spirit of the original.
It isn't ugly
or anything (except for the sappy tearjerker ballads), because the Comets were
still keeping hot, and if you have never heard another version of 'Blue Suede
Shoes' or 'Whole Lotta Shaking', these ones might at least do as temporary
substitutes without spoiling your taste. But it is the first Bill Haley album
that has no reason to exist — whatsoever, not even in the shape of a single
two-minute-long «lost gem» or anything. It is for situations like these that
the term «jumping the shark» was invented; this was certainly not the complete
end for Haley as a pleasure-providing artist, but the obvious career-breaking
point at which the man completely lost his «relevance», once and for all. And
who knows — it might all have been triggered by just one erroneous marketing
decision.
HALEY'S JUKE BOX (1960)
1) Singing The Blues; 2) Candy
Kisses; 3) No Letter Today; 4) This Is The Thanks I Get; 5) Bouquet Of Roses;
6) There's A New Moon Over My Shoulder; 7) Cold Cold Heart; 8) The Wild Side Of
Life; 9) Anytime; 10) Afraid; 11) I Don't Hurt Anymore; 12) Detour.
Perhaps they thought the move would be fresh —
go back to the old country roots, but still making use of their rockabilly
experience, not to mention advances in recording and producing technology. But
the country-western market, although far from «dead» in 1960 (the day the
market for country-western dies is when they cut off electricity support for
everything south of the Mason-Dixon line), had closed for Haley five years
earlier, and since he never was that big a fixture on it in the first place,
the commercial strategy behind this venture remains fuzzy. Perhaps — who knows?
— it was simply a nostalgia fit on Bill's part. After all, the man loved country-western, as hard as it is
to believe for us slick city dwellers who might think that, once you have turned
your back on cowboy music, you can only return to it at gunpoint.
Anyway, there are two good points about this
record. First, not all of these tunes suck. Some are taken at fast tempos,
reminding the forgetful that country-western does indeed lie at the heart of
rockabilly; and some have been chosen from the limited tasteful sectors of the
pool, e. g. 'Cold Cold Heart', which is, after all, Hank Williams, and thus
somewhat exempt from contempt. Second, the Comets are still a well-oiled band
that has not lost its brawny energy behind all the seasoned professionalism,
and they give these tunes all they've got. Predictably, the show is very much
stolen away by Billy Williamson, the steel guitarist, but on the uptempo
numbers they also find plenty of space for Beecher and Pompilli's solos.
However, the only song that I could see making
it onto a best-of collection is Paul Westmoreland's 'Detour': fast,
singalong-ish, distinguished by a great soloing duet between Williamson and
Beecher, where the first one plays an almost psychedelic pedal steel part, and
the latter swiftly undercuts it with sharp boogie-woogie licks. A fabulous
performance, unfortunately, buried at the end of an album that, overall, made
no impression on anyone — and, unsurprisingly, heralded the end of Haley's
short and sweet relationship with Warner Bros., and, subsequently, a swift
drift towards total oblivion.
TWISTIN' KNIGHTS AT THE ROUND TABLE (1962)
1) Lullaby Of Birdland Twist;
2) Twist Marie; 3) One-Two-Three Twist; 4) Down By The Riverside Twist; 5) Queen
Of The Twisters; 6) Caravan Twist; 7) I Want A Little Girl; 8) Whistlin' And
Walkin' Twist; 9) Florida Twist; 10) Eight More Miles To Louisville.
From around 1961 — upon Haley's departure from
Warners — the Comets' discography becomes a nightmare. Although Bill honestly
and faithfully recorded material throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the absolute
majority of these albums have forever been out of print, and for understandable
reasons: this absolute majority consists of innumerable re-recordings of older
classics, occasionally varied by attempts to place the Haley stamp on
contemporary hits, of interest only because of the novelty value (who knew
Haley actually covered
CCR's 'Who'll Stop The Rain'? Certainly not me, until I started digging a
bit. Was I intrigued? Probably. Did it make me happy? Not even unexpectedly so.).
Since I have no plans — and no easy
opportunities, either — to become an obsessed vinyl collector, I have little
choice but to save myself the troubles of untangling the intricacies of Bill's
late period discography, and merely run through a couple of the more easily
available titles. First and foremost, it may be of use to know that, in the
early Sixties, after all the setbacks, Bill and his band finally found
themselves a profitable niche — reimagining themselves as «Kings of the Twist»
and, since in the States that crown could not be contested from Chubby Checker,
relocating to Mexico, where Bill could freely and fluently sing in Spanish,
well enough to earn the respect of all the local caballeros, and, who knows,
maybe even a few señoritas (although one would be hard pressed to find
someone less close to the stereotype
of a Latin lover than Mr. Haley).
A bunch of twist-related albums were released
on the Mexican Dimsa label in the process, none of them easily available, and
most of them, I'm pretty sure, sounding like carbon copies of each other.
However, the Comets' skill at twist-a-gaining can be conveniently appreciated
through a rare enough twist session recorded in the States — a live album, recorded during a couple of
nights in March 1962 at some NYC joint called «Round Table» (hence the
oh-so-funny name). Among other places, all of these tracks have resurfaced on
the 6-CD The Warner Brothers And More
boxset — «more» apparently meaning «extra recordings made in some respectable places in the early 1960s,
rather than in some shitty Mexican dump».
Anyway, if you care for twist at all — and there is no reason not to care about twist, unless, as it
used to be in Soviet times, you were force-fed it instead of rock'n'roll, just as it happened with disco ten years
later — The Comets actually managed to make a strong pro-twist argument here.
This is still the «classic» version of the band: only Franny Beecher had left
in the middle of their twistin' career, but for this particular live session he
actually rejoined his old pals, so you do get to hear his take on the twist
thing. As for Billy Williamson, Rudy Pompilli, and, of course, Bill himself —
they honestly seem to enjoy what they're doing.
The band's biggest and catchiest hit in that
vein ('Florida Twist') is played here, and it is all but impossible to not get
involved even if you detest the campy atmosphere. But every now and then they
remember to throw in a snappy bite out of the past: as innocent as the title of
'Silbando Y Caminando' ('Whistling And Walking') is, the song is graced by a
great pop-rock melody, with a thicker guitar tone, and also more improvisatory
and chaotic playing from Beecher than was ever heard in the 1950s. The band
also twistifies 'Caravan', which does not lose much from the rearrangement,
and, in fact, manages to sound heavier and gruffer than the original.
In short, the only two not-too-fun numbers on
here are the slow ones: '1-2-3 Twist' is a theoretically amusing, but not too
exciting attempt at marrying twist with slow waltz, and the lounge balladry
intermission with 'I Want A Little Girl' fails because it's a vocal-oriented
number, the likes of which Haley could never pull off next to his idol Big Joe
Turner. Everything else, twist or not, is happy fun rock-a-twist that actually
deserves to be heard more these days,
instead of being confined to Tarantino-style movie soundtracks. Come to think
of it, the tastes of Mexican audiences weren't that bad in 1962. Minor thumbs up.
ROCK-A-ROUND THE CLOCK KING (1964)
1) See You Later Alligator; 2)
ABC Boogie; 3) Panic; 4) I've Got News For Hugh; 5) Don't Mess Around; 6) The
Wobble; 7) This Is Goodbye, Goodbye; 8) Train Of Sin; 9) Altar Of Love; 10)
Helena; 11*) Yakety Sax.
Okay... apparently, in 1964 Haley's career
still mostly revolved around Mexico and the Orfeon label, for which he was
churning out new records faster than the Mexican government could import
vinyl. Some of them might be good, too, judging by the high quality of the Round Table album; however, these days
it is easier to have access to this lonely session that Bill and the boys cut
in January '64 (in Las Vegas?) for the US Guest Star record label.
With Johnny Kay on lead guitar and the rest of
the band still sweating it out like they did in the old days, this ten-song
record, extracted from the depths of the large Bear Family 6-CD set (and I am
taking the liberty of augmenting it with an enthusiastic run through 'Yakety
Sax', taken from the same session), shows that, yes indeed, in 1964 the Comets
still sounded swell, even if they were utterly and hopelessly irrelevant. Not
entirely behind the times, though: the production is fuller and richer than
usual, and Kay was clearly a guitar player of the next generation, not as inventive
or aggressive as Beecher, but in full control of new, fuller tones. Listen to
the solo on 'See You Later, Alligator': it is not as sharp as the original, but
it is definitely power-poppier. That there guitar is just smiling at you, with
a rich, juicy tone.
The record is not all just re-recordings of
older standards, either: after the couple of obligatory opening «reminders» of
why we were all into Haley in the first place, the band goes on to play various
dance numbers that may have all been minor hits in their day, but most of which
I do not recognize at all. That is not the problem, though; the problem is, the
album is way too slow — too many
mid-tempo shuffles, not enough boogie. (Odd enough, one of the most boogie-oriented
numbers here is the gospel-tinged 'Train Of Sin'!).
Decent listen, but no, no lost gems here or
anything. And as for 'Yakety Sax', well, they really shouldn't have covered it
— apparently, not every sax player
can play the yakety-sax, and Rudy Pompilli, well, he's one of the best, but on
this version at least, he does not give
it his best, and any performance of 'Yakety Sax' that is not absolutely
top-yakety will sound just stupid.
The same applies to most of the other songs here. Still, Johnny Kay was a
decent guitarist, and fans of early Sixties electric pop guitar might need to
look into this.
SCRAPBOOK / LIVE IN NEW YORK (1969)
1) Shake, Rattle & Roll;
2) Dance Around The Clock; 3) Rip It Up; 4) Night Train; 5) Guitar Boogie; 6)
Razzle Dazzle; 7) You Are My Sunshine; 8) Rock-A-Beatin' Boogie; 9) Skinnie
Minnie; 10) Johnny B Goode; 11) Kansas City; 12) Rock Around The Clock; 13)
When The Saints Go Marching In; 14) Rudy's Rock; 15) Rock The Joint; 16)
Fingers On Fire; 17) See You Later Alligator; 18) Wipe Out; 19) There Goes My
Everything; 20) Alabama Bound; 21) Whole Lot Of Shakin' Going On; 22) Rock
Around The Clock.
Haley's mid- to late-1960s recordings still
remain a mish-mash of hard-to-find stuff, mostly on Mexican labels or
semi-important American ones that preferred to release occasional compilations
of older stuff than take any new sessions from Bill — understandably so,
because even the new sessions would mostly consist of re-recordings of the old
stuff.
Consequently, I do not think that we are
missing much if there still has not
been made a meticulous attempt to scoop all the results of those sessions in
one comprehensive package. By 1965-66, the Comets were a fixed «oldies act» –
in fact, they could have easily become one three years earlier, if not for
Bill's brilliant decision to occupy the vacant throne of the Mexican King of
Twist – and the only thing that could have rejuvenated that act would be to
get Jimmy Page to play lead guitar in the band. Instead, they settled on a Nick
Masters, who was okay, but lacked the freshness of Franny Beecher anyway.
One well-illustrative slice of this late-period
version of the Comets can be scraped off of the already mentioned 6-CD Bear
Family set — a full recording of the band's live performance in 1969 at the
Bitter End in New York, following up on the heels of their performance at MSG,
organized by promoter Richard Nader as part of his «Rock'n'Roll Revival»
program. Part of the show was originally released in 1970 (on the Kama Sutra label,
I believe) as Bill Haley's Scrapbook;
other parts were subsequently released under various titles, including Live In New York in the early 1980s,
but, as far as I can tell, this CD edition is the first one to properly arrange
and reproduce the entire show, including announcements, stage banter, and an
encore performance of 'Rock Around The Clock', done twice over the course of the show.
It's a fairly decent and enjoyable concert –
even if most of Haley's banter is of a decidedly nostalgic character, so much
so that you can easily sense the genuine sadness behind the invoked cheeriness:
even though Haley himself was only 44 at the time, it is clear that the people
in the audience were looking at the man as a curious relic, and the
eight-minute standing ovation, described in the liner notes, that he was
«honored with» at the MSG show, only proves that – whoever heard of an
eight-minute standing ovation for Jimi Hendrix, for instance?
Nevertheless, the performances themselves are
anything but nostalgic. There is no
attempt to recreate any «genuine Fifties atmosphere»: the sound is full, the
amplification quite modern, the guitar tones thick and solid. The setlist is
not solely composed of golden Haley classics (although most of the major hits
are played), but intersperses them with a good helping of classics by other
early rock masters ('Johnny B Goode', 'Kansas City', 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Going
On', all wisely sung by Nick Masters because the style is unsuitable for
Haley's voice); a few excursions in good old country-western; and some solo
showcases for individual band members – including a brief, economic drum solo
on 'Wipe Out', Masters' flashy jazz guitar runs on 'Fingers On Fire', and, of
course, 'Rudy's Rock' – Rudy Pompilli, at the time, was the only original Comet
besides Bill himself, and accordingly gets the second biggest applause from
all present.
Although there are no particular standouts
here, and no real reason for anybody (except for really kind-hearted people) to hunt for this performance, it is
still a thumbs
up. The «Rock'n'Roll Revival» franchise itself was an event of some
historical significance – one of the first intentional attempts to somehow
«enshrine» the living history of rock'n'roll – and Haley managed to supply just
the right vibe for it: nostalgic, slightly elegiac, but dignified and
entertaining enough to show the somewhat illiterate youngsters that the
forefathers of rock'n'roll did not earn their bread, and their accolades, for
nothing.
ROCK AROUND THE COUNTRY (1971)
1) Dance Around The Clock; 2)
Games People Play; 3) A Little Piece At A Time; 4) I Wouldn't Have Missed It
For The World; 5) Bony Moronie; 6) There's A New Moon Over My Shoulder; 7) Me
And Bobby McGee; 8) How Many; 9) Who'll Stop The Rain; 10) Pink Eyed Pussycat;
11) Travelin' Band; 12) No Letter Today.
In late 1970, Bill and the band turned up in
Nashville, where they went in the studio for a couple of days to cut the very
last record that you can actually find talked
about in even the most detailed account
of Bill's career. Even so, Rock Around
The Country, the last Haley album to have ever mattered in some way, has
never been released on CD, aside from a few separate cuts that ended up on
obscure collections; I am reviewing a shabby vinyl rip here, reveling around in
the crackling and hissing like a vintage master.
Should it be released on CD? Well, it's not like Bill
Haley, in 1970, could spearhead a revolution in country-rock. But it does
indicate an intelligent change of sound that the band was able to undergo.
With a solid mix of oldies (some of them well-seasoned chestnuts, like 'How
Many' and 'There's A New Moon', some never tried before, like 'Bony Moronie')
and contemporary material, and a thicker, denser sound that makes good use of
most of Nashville's arsenal, Rock Around
The Country shows that, had Haley been able to overcome his personal
problems, the Comets might have become a more respectable institution, say,
touring in support of Willie Nelson or something like that.
Not that I really
like Haley's interpretation of 'Who'll Stop The Rain', which, just as it used
to be fifteen years before, suffers from the usual problem: significant
reduction of heat level compared to the original. Where Fogerty sang the song
with an «optimistic-apocalyptic» fire in his throat, Bill sings it as if he
were taking a pleasant stroll in the park. But then again, who knows, perhaps
there's a time and a place for this mild take on the source material as well.
(The other CCR number, 'Travelin'
Band', is much weirder — taken at the fast tempo of the original, it is sung by
Nick Masters in a hoarse, trebly voice that sounds not unlike Lemmy from
Mötörhead. For a few seconds out there, I was afraid it was Mötörhead!).
On the other hand, Kristofferson's 'Me & Bobby
McGee' is given a delicious treat, with Bill capturing the heart and soul of
the tune to a tee. (Not that there's much to capture, but it's a good song all
the same). And even if he takes the straightforward pain out of his rendition
of Joe South's 'Games People Play', replacing it with frolicky catchiness, at
least the thoughtful lyrics are left alone — and, when you take it all
together, it turns out that the Comets were actually quite picky about the kind
of contemporary material to take over. (Okay, so was Dolly Parton, who also covered
'Games People Play' the previous year — but it's not like anybody ever cared
about what exactly Dolly Parton was singing, right?).
Considering that 'Bony Moronie' is still the
same friendly pub-rocker Larry Williams wanted it to be, and that 'Pink Eyed
Pussycat' features the gimmick of band members howling and whining like actual
cats, and that there is only one generic country ballad on the entire album — I
certainly vote for having it on CD, sooner or later. At the very least, it is
unquestionably better than any studio album that Elvis released in the 1970s —
very rooty-tooty and down-to-earth, with none of the overblown, out-distant
Vegasy schmaltz from the King.
Unfortunately, it was also more or less the end
of the road for Bill. Everything else that he'd cut until his untimely death
from a brain tumor in 1981 was mostly rehashings and re-recordings, so much so
that I cannot even find solid evidence for at least one more album that could,
like Rock Around The Country, be
thought of as a real LP. So this is
probably the most fitting place for us to say goodbye, and go rip it up in
other places. Thumbs
up.
LADY DAY: THE MASTER TAKES AND SINGLES (1933-1944; 2007)
CD I: 1) I Wished On The Moon;
2) What A Little Moonlight Can Do; 3) Miss Brown To You; 4) If You Were Mine;
5) These 'N' That 'N' Those; 6) You Let Me Down; 7) Spreadin' Rhythm Around; 8)
Life Begins When You're In Love; 9) It's Like Reaching For The Moon; 10) These
Foolish Things; 11) I Cried For You; 12) Did I Remember?; 13) No Regrets; 14) Summertime;
15) Billie's Blues; 16) A Fine Romance; 17) One, Two, Button Your Shoe; 18) Easy
To Love; 19) The Way You Look Tonight; 20) Pennies From Heaven; CD II: 1)
That's Life I Guess; 2) I Can't Give You Anything But Love; 3) I've Got My Love
To Keep Me Warm; 4) He Ain't Got Rhythm; 5) This Year's Kisses; 6) Why Was I
Born?; 7) I Must Have That Man; 8) The Mood That I'm In; 9) You Showed Me The
Way; 10) My Last Affair; 11) Moanin' Low; 12) Where Is The Sun?; 13) Let's Call
The Whole Thing Off; 14) They Can't Take That Away From Me; 15) Don't Know If
I'm Comin' Or Goin'; 16) I'll Get By; 17) Mean To Me; 18) Foolin' Myself; 19) Easy
Living; 20) I'll Never Be The Same; CD III: 1) Me, Myself And I; 2) A Sailboat In
The Moonlight; 3) Without Your Love; 4) Trav'lin' All Alone; 5) He's Funny That
Way; 6) Nice Work If You Can Get It; 7) Things Are Looking Up; 8) My Man; 9) Can't
Help Lovin' Dat Man; 10) When You're Smiling; 11) On The Sentimental Side; 12) When
A Woman Loves A Man; 13) You Go To My Head; 14) I'm Gonna Lock My Heart (And
Throw Away The Key); 15) The Very Thought Of You; 16) I Can't Get Started; 17) More
Than You Know; 18) Sugar; 19) Long Gone Blues; 20) Some Other Spring; CD IV: 1)
Them There Eyes; 2) Swing, Brother, Swing; 3) Night And Day; 4) The Man I Love;
5) Body And Soul; 6) Falling In Love Again; 7) Laughing At Life; 8) Time On My
Hands; 9) St. Louis Blues; 10) Loveless Love; 11) Let's Do It; 12) Georgia On
My Mind; 13) All Of Me; 14) God Bless The Child; 15) Am I Blue?; 16) I Cover The
Waterfront; 17) Love Me Or Leave Me; 18) Gloomy Sunday; 19) It's A Sin To Tell A
Lie; 20) Until The Real Thing Comes Along.
The Real Man, starting off his exploration of
Lady Day's career, will, of course, want to own the expansive edition of The Complete Billie Holiday On Columbia:
10CDs that flush the archives out completely, with all the preserved alternate
takes that allow The Real Man to explore every nook and notch in the Lady's
deliveries. However, for the humble purposes of humble reviewing, this
abbreviated 4-CD version will do nicely. Coming out something like six years after the complete edition (because,
otherwise, how many people would be saving their money?), it simply contains
what it says it contains — the master takes, originally released on the
Brunswick and Vocalion subdivisions of Columbia. And, unless you are a
committed jazz historian, these 4 CDs are exactly what you are going to be
listening to anyway.
How does one review Billie Holiday? Well, how
does one write about vocal jazz in general? For the most part, one either
doesn't, or does it in a somewhat condescending manner: jazz reviews are rarely
satisfying for the «average customer», since most jazz reviewers tend to write
from the «inside» perspective: either you «get it» and «are with us», in which
case describing the music will be superfluous, or you «don't get it» and «are
an outsider», in which case describing the music will be futile. Jazz people
rarely bother with seductive advertising (to my big surprise, even more rarely
than classical people — probably because jazz audiences are still a little bit
more numerous. But don't worry, a few more years of Taylor Swift and that'll
pass, too).
Anyway, while I have no plans of ever turning
systematically to jazz reviews, Billie Holiday is one of those cherished
exceptions, and I certainly have no intention to review her as a «jazz artist»,
even though, technically, she sure wasn't a Delta blueswoman or a Nashville
country primadonna. On these 80 recordings that span the first decade of her
career, she is frequently backed by some of the hottest players on the scene
(Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Roy Eldridge, Lester Young, etc.), but each of
the recordings still belongs to her and her only. In the definition of Billie
as «vocal jazz» it is almost exclusively the «vocal» part that matters, and
this is why she managed to serve as a role model for so many people, a lot of
them having very little or nothing to do with «jazz» as a matter of fact.
Same goes for the material. All of her life,
and never as faithfully as on these early Columbia singles, Billie sang very
little outside of the regular Tin Pan Alley stuff. And, as I have done this in
many other places, I must repeat that «The Great American Songbook», per se, does very little for me. Safe,
cuddly, monotonous, predictable, easy-going, overtly commercial stuff, you know
how it goes — not denying the melodic talents of Irving Berlin or anything, but
there has always been way too much
yawn-inducing formula in that business. Not that I'm stating anything more
revealing than a trivial fact here; however, another trivial fact is that most
of these a-dollar-a-dozen compositions were primarily intended as basic
vehicles for interpreters. And of all the interpreters, few could be bigger
originals than Billie.
Because, really, leave it to Lady Day to take
these mechanical constructions and treat them as human product. Start off from the beginning: the 1935 recording of
'I Wished On The Moon'.
Compare it with Bing
Crosby's version from The Big Broadcast (same year). Now, who really needs
to be told about the difference in attitudes? First time around, I hear a human
being; second time around, I hear a trained mechanical songbird (no disrespect
to Crosby — it takes lotsa time and skill to train a mechanical songbird, yet...). These days, we are accustomed to singers sounding as human
beings, which is why the impact has worn off and may not be noticeable to those
who only compare Billie with post-Billie. The simple fact is that, without
Billie, there would be no post-Billie. The world needed a Billie, and it was so
fantastic that along came Billie.
Although the liner notes to the album try to
painstakingly differentiate between the «great», the «good», and the «so-so» on
these 4 CDs, I am in no position to do that. I certainly feel the difference
when it comes to those few cases in which Billie also comes forward as a
songwriter. On 'Billie's Blues', her first official credit, she does not really
do a lot of writing: the song is a generic piece of «urban blues», however,
what makes it special is the fact that it is, indeed, the only true piece of
blues on the record, and, while it does not immediately make Billie into
Bessie's heir, it pushes her personality into the stale urban blues formula,
revitalizing it for the future. Later on, she repeats the same formula (but in
a slower, more languid manner) on 'Long Gone Blues' (from 1939). And then, her
third and last credit on the album is 'God Bless The Child' from 1941, which,
even on its own, has far more credibility than all the other songs on here —
and, in the hands of the author, becomes a moody, bitter masterpiece for
eternity.
As for the rest... highlights, lowlights, who
cares? Some songs are catchier and more playful than others, some moodier, some
more romantic, some have pleasant trumpet solos or piano intros, some do not.
Since this is only the first decade, Billie's voice is represented here in its
freshest and purest form, without the crackling, hissing, and «white noise» it
would be saddled with later on, as her health quickly faded. Not everyone finds
this an advantage — since Billie never was a «master technician» in the first
place, having next to no range and a rather limited set of moods to sing in,
some people actually prefer her «struggling» with the singing, believing that
it adds even more «humanity» to the overall effect. That may be so, but, on the
other hand, the neophyte will certainly find more pleasure in listening to a
healthy young woman than a raspy wreck, and on no other collection will you
find Billie's voice in as great a condition as here.
And that voice? Take another comparison:
Annette Hanshaw's 'I Must
Have That Man' from 1928 with Billie's version that
came almost a decade later. Both are fine takes, but Hanshaw's is clearly
following the lyrics: the tone is delicate, but firm and stern, closely
matching the message of the title. Billie sings the same words, but she is not
going for any sort of explicit «toughness». Listeners could be foolish enough
to suggest that she simply does not pay attention to the lyrics, singing
everything in the only way her limited possibilities allow her to sing — and
they may be right about the limited possibilities, but that is exactly what is
so clever about the whole thing: try, somehow, to wiggle it out — to play the
tough girl with all the frailty that you can muster. The effect is intriguing,
paradoxical, and, most importantly, it works. I don't know how or why, but that
is what's usually being referred to as «magic», and, for the moment at least, I
am quite content with that explanation.
«Reviewing» the individual songs one by one is
an obvious waste of time and space: just get this whole thing, in toto. Nobody is forcing you to sit
through all the 80 tracks in one sitting, but even if this ever happens, there
is nothing painful in the experience — as monotonous as the atmosphere is, I
cannot imagine Lady Day's singing become annoying:
somehow, she's got this perfect vocal setting that does not «overdo» or
«underdo» one single parameter. Getting tired of Janis Joplin's screaming, of
Joan Baez' shredding, of Ella Fitzgerald's rough-and-toughness, of Nancy
Sinatra's «look-at-me-I'm-so-hip-to-the-Sixties-ness» — that I understand. But
tired of Billie Holiday? That's, like, tired of living. Thumbs up.
THE COMMODORE MASTER TAKES (1939-1944; 2000)
1) Strange Fruit; 2) Yesterdays;
3) Fine And Mellow; 4) I Gotta Right To Sing The Blues; 5) How Am I To Know?;
6) My Old Flame; 7) I'll Get By; 8) I Cover The Waterfront; 9) I'll Be Seeing
You; 10) I'm Yours; 11) Embraceable You; 12) As Time Goes By; 13) He's Funny
That Way; 14) Lover, Come Back To Me; 15) Billie's Blues; 16) On The Sunny Side
Of The Street.
It almost goes without saying that this here is
the most important batch of tunes in Billie history (and a fantastic choice for
a first-time introduction), and that the importance is mainly due to the
presence of 'Strange Fruit'. It goes without further saying that, in order to
fully appreciate the impact of the song, one would have to stick around in
1939, a time when it took real guts to perform this kind of material (and,
indeed, Billie was genuinely afraid
of singing it at first). But if the tune's direct shock impact has — thank God!
— gradually dissipated over the years, this original recording has lost none of
its original smoky mystique.
In fact, on a gut level I do not even associate
it with the specific issue of Southern lynching (how could I, without ever
learning the peculiarities of rural life racism?); all I know is that Billie is
impersonating a sibyl here, drawing out the clumsy syllables in a state of
trance, in a semi-dazed, semi-stoned manner, but still realizing, somewhere
deep in the subconscious, that something important and devastating is coming
out of her throat. Then, that final "bitter... crop!" escapes like
the last agonizing wail of a brought down animal — a far cry from the pretty,
but «conventional» coda flourishes she'd previously given the world within Columbia's
walls.
It was indeed a song like no other, and,
whatever one might say, it is a
standout in her catalog that has no equals — not just because of a rare case of
real social turbulence reflected in the lyrics, but also because she rose so
admirably to the occasion. However, the brilliance of the song and the
particular performance should not, by any means, obscure the brilliance — and
importance — of the other 15 tunes on here: three recorded on the same session
of April 20, 1939, and twelve more cut at several dates in March/April, 1944.
Billie's collaboration with Commodore Records did not take long — first time
simply because Columbia refused to accept 'Strange Fruit', second time in a
brief interim between the lady's time on Columbia and Decca — but it turned
over quite an important page in her life.
Essentially, Columbia Records had Billie play a
«significant bit part» in upbeat, stompy big-band entertainment, with loud
brass, rousing tempos, and lots of soloing, in between which she would barely
have time to throw in a verse or two. It was good, because the bands were good,
but it certainly did not offer the proper support for the talent. The tunes on
Commodore, on the other hand, even if they did not always feature a
significantly smaller number of players, are overall more quiet, relaxed, and
give Billie more room to sing, meditate, and shine. Already on the first
session, 'Strange Fruit' is augmented with 'Fine And Mellow', another one of
Billie's «originals» — in actuality, a generic urban blues set to new lyrics,
but, considering how rarely Columbia let Billie engage in competition with
Bessie Smith, it is telling that Commodore gave her this very chance on her
very first outing with the label.
It is fun to engage in comparison here. For
instance, the original Columbia recording of 'I'll Get By', with more than a
minute of trumpet solos before Billie comes in — and an almost immediate
entrance on the Commodore version, with very brief guitar and piano solos in
the middle. The nearly rhythmless (next to the Columbia version), bass-less 'I
Cover The Waterfront'. 'He's Funny That Way' recast as a dark, melancholic
late-night piano ballad instead of a jolly, careless swing like it used to be.
And so on — although at least half of the selections on this disc were all new,
never recorded by Billie on any of her Columbia dates. ('How Am I To Know?',
with its spine-tingling "Ohhh..." rhyming with the title, is a
particular highlight).
What makes this short Commodore collection so
uniquely valuable is that it represents this perfect sort of crossroads that
is likely to satisfy everyone. The Columbia recordings may seem too «gay»,
drowning Billie out in a swarm of swing entertainers. The Decca recordings may
seem too sappy because of all the strings. The Verve period is where the lady
started going hoarse. All of these «defects» may be easily overlooked, and, in
fact, many people do not consider them defects at all. But these sixteen
tracks, spearheaded by 'Strange Fruit', are pure, blameless perfection. Kudos
to Milt Gabler for producing the stuff and showing Billie in the most suitable
light anyone could ever suit to her. Thumbs up without further questions.
(PS: the review is based on the single-disc
edition, but there is also The Complete
Commodore Recordings, with multiple additional alternate takes spread over
two CDs. Inescapable for the completist, but, given my acquaintance with The Complete Billie Holiday On Verve,
must be a bit of an unnecessary overkill for the layman).
THE COMPLETE DECCA RECORDINGS (1944-1950; 1991)
CD I: 1) Lover Man (Oh, Where
Can You Be?); 2) No More; 3) No More (Alternate); 4) That Ole Devil Called Love;
5) Don't Explain (First Version); 6) Big Stuff (First Version); 7) Don't
Explain; 8) Big Stuff (Second Version); 9) You Better Go Now; 10) What Is This
Thing Called Love; 11) Good Morning Heartache; 12) No Good Man (Previously
Unissued Alternate); 13) No Good Man; 14) Big Stuff (Previously Unissued
Breakdown and Chatter); 15) Big Stuff (Previously Unissued Third Version); 16)
Big Stuff; 17) Baby, I Don't Cry Over You (Previously Unissued Alternate); 18)
Baby, I Don't Cry Over You; 19) I'll Look Around (Previously Unissued
Alternate); 20) I'll Look Around; 21) The Blues Are Brewin'; 22) Guilty
(Previously Unissued Alternate); 23) Guilty (Previously Unissued Breakdown and
Chatter); 24) Guilty; 25) Deep Song; 26) There Is No Greater Love;
CD II: 1) Easy Living; 2)
Solitude (Previously Unissued Alternate); 3) Solitude; 4) Weep No More; 5)
Girls Were Made To Take Care Of Boys; 6) I Loves You Porgy; 7) My Man (Mon Homme)
(Previously Unissued Alternate); 8) My Man (Mon Homme); 9) 'Tain't Nobody's
Business If I Do (Previously Unissued Alternate); 10) 'Tain't Nobody's Business
If I Do; 11) Baby Get Lost; 12) Keeps On A-Rainin'; 13) Them There Eyes; 14) Do
Your Duty; 15) Gimme A Pigfoot (And A Bottle Of Beer); 16) You Can't Lose A
Broken Heart; 17) My Sweet Hunk O' Trash; 18) Now Or Never; 19) You're My
Thrill; 20) Crazy He Calls Me; 21) Please Tell Me Now; 22) Somebody's On My Mind;
23) God Bless The Child; 24) This Is Heaven to Me.
It was Milt Gabler who arranged for Billie's
transfer to Decca, where she could hope for at least as efficient a degree of
promotion as on Columbia. True enough, it was only during the Decca years that
she became a commercial superstar (and a heroin wreck as a side effect),
starting with 'Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be)', one of the biggest hits of
1944 and, from then on, one of the lady's signature tunes — even if it has no
more than a hundredth part of the snap-and-bite of 'Strange Fruit' (but let us
not forget to be realistic: there was no way that 'Strange Fruit' could have
been a commercial hit back in its time).
Strange enough, during her six years at Decca,
Billie did not record all that much. Where Columbia's and Verve's Complete boxsets each include around 10
CDs, the Complete Decca boxset —
alternate outtakes and all — only includes two. One of the reasons must have
been drug trouble (she spent most of 1947 and early 1948 in court / prison),
but even in her «law-free» years, relatively few sessions were held. Of these,
the earliest bunch is the most historically important, because it introduces a
new element in Billie's world: orchestration.
Frankly, I cannot allow myself to «like» these
string arrangements. They are generic, Hollywoodish, Broadway musical-ish,
whatever. According to legend, Billie requested strings herself for 'Lover
Man', and was extremely pleased to finally get them. Perhaps she felt she was
crossing some sort of line there — the line that separated a local
mini-celebrity from a big national star. If the presence of strings boosted her
confidence, so be it, especially since her vocal work on these mid-Fourties
recordings is impeccable. But in retrospect, it almost looks like her very
essence is giving battle to these
strings — the very unusualness of her vocal approach clashes so vehemently
against the formulaic nature of the orchestral arrangements, it is almost as if
her brain wanted to do it, but her soul was all against it.
Leave it to Billie, though — for all I know,
she could have been backed by trivial synth-pop arrangements and still sound
like nothing else. On all of these recordings, her vocals still show no serious
signs of wear and tear, and the humane depth of expression that peaked during
her Commodore sessions remains so much intact that individual highlights are
unselectable: all of these songs are just about equally great, regardless of
the intrinsic melodic potential of each individual tune (which, honestly, much
of the time I still cannot tell apart).
Special reference must only be made to a few
«unusual» stunts pulled off by Lady Day in the late 1940s. First, there is a
whole bunch of Bessie Smith covers here, and they are the only true disappointment
of the set for me: for some reason, she chose to perform some of the Empress of
the Blues' most «aggressive» numbers — 'Do Your Duty' and 'Gimme A Pigfoot', in
particular, are no match for Bessie's temper and brawn, and cannot be easily
recast in Billie's mold; she seems to be stuck somewhere in between a radical
reinvention and a faithful tribute, failing at both. 'T'Ain't Nobody's
Business' goes along better, since the song's message is «brawny» only on the
surface — at the bottom of it, it is a wife's declaration of her right to be
beaten by her husband, and Billie rightfully gives it the same vibe she gives
her classic number 'My Man'. (Any feminist extolling Miss Holiday as an icon
should take a close listen here).
Far more successful are the two duets with
Louis Armstrong — 'My Sweet Hunk O' Trash', in particular, with its bittersweet
dialog between the two legends, is awesome beyond belief (Billie and Satchmo
would also work together in New Orleans,
Billie's only movie — in general, a disaster, but with one unforgettable scene at
least). There are also a few tracks on which Billie is backed by The
Stardusters, a proto-doo-wop vocal group, but this approach does not work at
all. Lady Day is incompatible with extraneous harmonies. A duet with Louis — by
all means, but any attempt at «glamorizing» her sound belies its essence.
Overall, the Decca recordings will be most
valuable to those who treasure the lady in fine voice: by 1952 (the beginning
of her Verve LP-dominated period), it was already crack(l)ing. The abundance
of alternate versions is a bonus for completists and fine specialists only,
since the alternate takes do not usually differ all that much from the
officially released versions. That said, the Armstrong/Holiday duets are
priceless; 'Lover Man' is a historical watermark that should be familiar to
everyone; and even the strings, provided they annoy you in the first place,
eventually go away, replaced by steady small jazz combo arrangements like it
used to be. Thus, thumbs up without any further doubts on the
subject.
BILLIE HOLIDAY SINGS (1952)
1) East Of The Sun; 2) Blue
Moon; 3) You Go To My Head; 4) You Turned The Tables On Me; 5) Easy To Love; 6)
These Foolish Things; 7) I Only Have Eyes For You; 8) Solitude; 9) Everything I
Have Is Yours; 10) Love For Sale; 11) Moonglow; 12) Tenderly.
This and almost all of the following LPs that
were released for Billie in the 1950s (with the exception of the final small
bunch for Columbia) are all available in one package on the monumental Complete Billie Holiday On Verve
package. However, I would not dare write about it in one single sweep. It
covers an evolutionary period that is way
too long for one single review: starting off with Billie still in perfect form,
at the top of her vocal and emotional powers, and ending with a wreck of a
woman, although still perversely fascinating. I would also not recommend
forking a hundred bucks over for the package unless you are a history buff —
there are too many alternate takes, too many crappy lo-fi session recordings
and pure banter.
Another reason for splitting this monolith
monster is that, in the 1950s, the concept of an LP was already fully fleshed
out, and much, if not most, of Billie's recording output was originally put out
by Clef Records (later to be absorbed in Verve) as LPs. Not that there was
anything «conceptual» about it, except in a couple of cases, but, for the most
part, the records did correlate with specific mini-sessions and a certain
chronology of events. This first one, for instance, was recorded in its
entirety on March 26, 1952, and released as Billie Holiday Sings with eight tracks, then, four years later,
re-released under the title Solitude,
with four additional tracks from the same sessions. And, with none other than
the legendary Oscar Peterson himself manning the piano, the results were bound
to be quite individualistic.
Neither this, nor any of the following reviews
could be long. Most of the material that Billie recorded with Clef (Verve) was
either re-recordings of earlier stuff, or similar compositions from the
Songbook: all that matters is Billie's own state at the time and degree of
dedication to the material, and, sometimes, the accompaniment. Here, with
Peterson at the helm, we get a moody, quiet, nocturnal set for a half hour of
melancholic relaxation: sometimes with a lighter punch ('Blue Moon'), sometimes
with a darker one ('Love For Sale'). The production is unexpectedly echoey,
almost as if you were listening to Billie standing in a vast hallway — a little
strange, considering that the voice, in early 1952, is still as impeccable as
ever.
The obvious highlight for me is 'Solitude',
particularly when compared with the earlier Decca version — overloaded with
strings that obscured the singer. Here, even despite the confusing echo, the
song finally matches its title (although it might have worked even better as a
minimalistic duet between Billie and Oscar, without the accompanying trumpet).
But, as is almost always the case, there are really no lowlights — here be a
must-have for all lovers of «penthouse jazz». Plus, arguably, the best version
of 'These Foolish Things' she ever did.
AN EVENING WITH BILLIE HOLIDAY (1953)
1) Stormy Weather; 2) Lover
Come Back To Me; 3) My Man; 4) He's Funny That Way; 5) Yesterdays; 6) Tenderly;
7) I Can't Face The Music; 8) Remember.
Billie's second LP for Clef/Verve contains the
results of two further sessions from 1952; one from April 1, with more or less
the same backing band as on Billie
Holiday Sings, one from July 27, with several changes (different brass
section, and Freddie Green replacing Barney Kessel on guitar), but still
musically dominated by Oscar Peterson's piano, so that only serious jazz
connoisseurs will be able to tell the difference.
The material is once again evenly spread
between re-recordings of older numbers and introduction of new ones. Of the
new songs, 'Stormy Weather' is the acknowledged highlight; it is one of the
very few Billie tunes that she opens herself, with a few accappella notes,
immediately placing the emphasis on vocals and nothing but vocals, transforming Ethel Waters' original croon-fest into
something ten times as intimate, genuine, and artistically unconventional — not
that there'd be anything surprising about the procedure as late as 1952.
Of the re-recordings, 'Lover, Come Back To Me'
is taken at about twice the tempo of the original Commodore recording, but
keeping the brass in the background and Peterson's piano in the foreground
still avoids turning the song into an entertaining rave-up à la Columbia years — the album was supposed to be as
stylistically uniform and mood-setting as its predecessor, so the fast tempo
adds diversity without breaking up the vibe. 'Yesterdays' is a stylistic
improvement over the Commodore version, with Peterson switching to electric
organ (probably the first time ever on a Billie record), and the fast swinging
section of the second half sharper and more pronounced.
On the other hand, re-recordings of 'My Man'
and 'He's Funny That Way' are somewhat superfluous. But that's the way it goes
with The Songbook — every time you switch to a different record label, you are
supposed to redo it all over again (provided you are an accomplished, well-selling
artist). After all, why should Columbia and Commodore profit from a 'He's Funny
That Way' by B. Holiday, when her current contract is with Verve? Come to think
of it, it is a miracle that the lady still managed to sound so convincing and
authentic on each of these re-recordings, geared primarily towards cash flow.
That's some really great love out there for material which, per se, was mostly
mediocre to begin with.
BILLIE HOLIDAY (1954)
1) Love For Sale; 2) Moonglow;
3) Everything I Have Is Yours; 4) If The Moon Turns Green; 5) Autumn In New
York; 6) How Deep Is The Ocean; 7) What A Little Moonlight Can Do; 8) I Cried For
You.
This unconspicuously titled album from 1954 is
mainly notable for containing tracks from two recording sessions that were
quite distant chronologically. The first five songs were recorded in April 1952
(the same one that yielded much of the material for An Evening); the last three — exactly two years later. The backing
band is very much the same: Oscar Peterson mans the piano in both cases, Ray
Brown is on bass and Charlie Shavers on trumpet. (Herb Ellis replaces Barney
Kessel on guitar, but neither is particularly noticeable).
What is, however, unmistakably different is
Billie herself. The 1952 sessions have already been talked about before; here,
of particular note is the exquisite lonesome-melancholic rendition of 'Autumn
In New York' (comparing this to the
syrupy lounge version of Sarah Vaughan, among others, reveals the utter triumph
of simple intelligence and humane vulnerability over gloss and operatic
technique), although, as usual, all the other performances are first-rate as
well.
The last three songs, however, feature Billie's
voice in the initial phases of decline – losing some of her frequencies (never
all that abundant to begin with) and beginning to acquire that unmistakable
«old lady rasp» that she managed to be saddled with without actually turning
into an old lady, due to substance abuse. It is only the beginning, though;
here, the main effect is simply that the singing gets lower and «deeper». It is
unclear if they put Shavers' trumpet on top of everything in order to «mask»
that weakness — probably just a coincidence. But that's how it is.
In any case, the fast, playful versions of
'What A Little Moonlight Can Do' and 'I Cried For You' are still excellent, and
the album as a whole has no lowlights, despite the incoherence of its two
parts. Recommendable, if only for the beautiful 'Autumn In New York'.
AT JAZZ AT THE PHILHARMONIC (1954)
1) Body And Soul; 2) Strange
Fruit; 3) Trav'lin' Light; 4) He's Funny That Way; 5) The Man I Love; 6) Gee
Baby, Ain't I Good To You; 7) All Of Me; 8) Billie's Blues.
Although this album was not released until
1954, the actual recordings date from 1945 and 1946, when Billie was an active
participator in Norman Granz's «Jazz At The Philharmonic» touring program (and,
since Granz was also the founder of Clef Records, to which Billie was signed in
the 1950s, it was only a matter of time before he would make these recordings
public on his own label). The actual dates are February 12, 1945 (first two
songs) and October 3, 1946 (second two songs) at the Shrine Auditorium in Los
Angeles; and June 3, 1946 at Carnegie Hall for the last four songs. All of the
material has now been included on the Complete
Verve boxset, including a couple more live tracks of very scratchy quality
from 1946, and four more live performances of far better quality from 1947.
Considering that there are very few
live-not-in-the-studio recordings from Billie at all, this is a record of
historical importance; considering that these are the earliest available live
recordings from Billie, it is a record of tremendous
historical importance. Considering that the second track on here is 'Strange
Fruit', it is also a record of tense curiosity: how does it go with the
audience? are there any traces of nervousness in Billie's voice (other than a
couple of precautionary coughs during the piano intro)? Not to worry: the
applause is as strong as ever, and the singing matches the original studio
recording fairly closely.
The setlist, as we can see, is completely
standard; the only «new» tune, 'Trav'lin' Light', was originally recorded by
Billie for Paul Whiteman's big band in 1942, and re-arranged here as a minimalistic
lounge ballad, with no one but Ken Kersey at the piano — another case of a
«jazz standard» on which Lady Day was but a bit player transformed into a
vulnerable confession, spotlight on the frail human soul and all that.
Unfortunately, live recording was still new and
inexperienced in the 1940s, so there is no getting away from the «thin» quality
of the vocals; hopefully, this will be nobody's introduction to Billie, or one
might subconsciously develop an impression of the lady as a «whiner». Naturally,
JATP is for the seasoned admirer
rather than the novice. But, as the only complete live album to capture her in
full control of her powers, it is at least a unique technical phenomenon, if
not necessarily a unique emotional experience.
STAY WITH ME (1955)
1) I Wished On The Moon; 2) Ain't
Misbehavin' (I'm Savin' My Love For You); 3) Everything Happens To Me; 4) Say
It Isn't So; 5) I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm; 6) Always; 7) Do Nothing Till
You Hear From Me.
Apparently, the date of release is somewhat
off: various sources conflict in placing Stay
With Me either in 1958 or in 1959. But chronologically, this is where it
belongs: all of the songs were recorded during one session, held by Billie on
February 14, 1955, backed by Tony Scott and his Orchestra. On that particular
date, the «Orchestra» happened to contain trumpeter Charlie Shavers, already a
Billie regular; drummer Cozy Cole, whose talents and personality would later influence
a certain Colin Flooks to change his name to Cozy Powell; guitar player Billy
Bauer, notable for influential avantgarde work with sax player Lee Konitz; and
other important musicians with important pedigrees. Not counting Tony Scott
himself and his near-unique way of playing the clarinet (to post-electronic
ears, it may sound like he's using a MIDI interface!).
In short, lots of second-tier talent assembled
to record a fairly mediocre record. All of the tunes are generic oldies, most
of them already covered by Billie up to several times, and she herself
certainly was not in a good enough form to match the lighthearted gaiety of all
this Broadway glitz. Her voice keeps cracking, sometimes even in important
spots, and its worn-off character gives the whole affair a nostalgic sheen —
from now on, you can feel that Billie is getting «out of time». Not that there
wasn't still a huge audience out there for soft lounge vocal jazz, but this was, after all, the beginning of the
rock'n'roll era, and Billie's ever-worsening health problems could hardly
benefit her in these times of tough competition.
Still, taken entirely on its own, the session
is not at all worthless. In a way, it is a return to the good old Columbia
days: Billie is just playing the role of «yet another instrument» in a band setting.
On most of the tracks, she takes the lead at the beginning, then cedes her spot
to the soloists, then returns at the end — this is why the tracks start getting
bulkier, up to nearly seven minutes on 'I Wished On The Moon'. And, given her
condition (and also the fact that nobody at this point would give a fig about
hearing those actual songs one more
time), this is just the right way to go about it. There's plenty of tasteful
guitar soloing from Bauer, and fine, exquisite parts from Shavers, and, as I
already said, those odd, atmospheric, in a way, almost «psychedelic» clarinet
exercises from Tony Scott himself. Check out 'I Wished On The Moon' and,
particularly, 'Everything Happens To Me' — the playing is as diverse and
soulful as it gets on such things.
It may sound sad that, for the first time ever,
Billie's backing band may be pulling the attention away from her, but, technically speaking, they save the record,
wrestling it out a thumbs up at the last moment, so to speak. That
said, the faster-paced numbers, such as 'Always' and 'I've Got My Love To Keep
Me Warm', are still unsatisfactory — at this time, Billie is already unable to
convincingly communicate lighthearted joy as she was in the 1930s. As far as
I'm concerned, she should have stuck exclusively to darker stuff — but then again,
they might think too much moroseness would damage sales, since, anyway, most
record-buyers couldn't tell genuine joy from simulated joy even if each record
bore a sticker saying "WARNING: ALL
HAPPINESS ON THIS ALBUM MANUFACTURED FROM ARTIFICIAL MATERIALS. NO GUARANTEES."
MUSIC FOR TORCHING (1955)
1) It Had To Be You; 2) Come
Rain Or Come Shine; 3) I Don't Want To Cry Anymore; 4) I Don't Stand A Ghost Of
A Chance With You; 5) A Fine Romance; 6) Gone With The Wind; 7) I Get A Kick
Out Of You; 8) Isn't This A Lovely Day.
Groping blindly in the dark, perhaps, but this
session from August 1955 seems to me to find Billie in a slightly better state
than her previous one, and the entire record is a highlight of her last years
on Clef/Verve. All of the material, with the exception of 'A Fine Romance' that
she did earlier for Columbia, is recorded for the first time, even if The
Songbook is still the only available source. Of the session players, only Benny
Carter stands out on alto saxophone; the rest provide solid backing rather than
counterpoints. But that's fine: on this record, Billie had no desperate need of
any counterpoints. She carries it all with bravery and finesse.
We get as far into the past here as 'It Had To
Be You', which was originally recorded in 1924 by several people, including
Marion Harris; but in order to appreciate Billie's version, it is, of course,
advisable to select something glitzy in contrast – the Barbra Streisand take,
perhaps? Or, if this seems unjust and skewed, we could do with respectable earlier interpretations, such as Betty
Hutton's. But they are all normal in
their emotional impact. Billie, on the other hand, with each passing year
seems to have been descending into an emotional world all her own — so much so
that some might fall for the trap and declare this here singing cold,
perfunctory, and passionless.
That would be a wrong move — if anything, her
purely technical tricks over the years became more diverse and subtle. The
ever-slowing tempos give her plenty of space to stretch out the syllables,
practice that little vibrato, and control her «creaky» and «breathy» levels
with the same precision that a Jimi Hendrix might control his whammy bar. And
it may be that I am writing about it in this
particular review simply because she is so perfectly captured on this album,
too: for once, her voice looms large and heavy over all the instruments without
any distracting echo effects. Then again, I may be just imagining things to
fill up space.
Anyway, as usual, there are no high- or
lowlights, and the album is quite aptly titled, even if, upon second thought,
something like 80% of all of Billie's recordings are certified «torch songs».
(May also be the reason why 'A Fine Romance', with its slightly cheerier
attitude and faster tempo, sits here somewhat uncomfortably among all the
gloom – but it's still a first-rate recording). Hence, another thumbs up,
and, in addition to it all, finally a version of 'Come Rain Or Come Shine' that
one can always throw on without a hint of embarrassment. Too bad Billie didn't
have the time to record all the
popular songs of the first half of the XXth century – that would be a great
excuse for burning up so much schlocky vinyl.
VELVET MOOD (1956)
1) Prelude To A Kiss; 2) When
Your Lover Has Gone; 3) Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone; 4) Nice Work
If You Can Get It; 5) I Got A Right To Sing The Blues; 6) What's New?; 7) I
Hadn't Anyone Till You; 8) Everything I Have Is Yours.
Not a lot to say here, since, apparently, all
of the songs date from the same session as Music
For Torching — same players, same type of repertoire, same level of
inspiration. So much the same that, apparently, the album has not been
re-released since its original market venture, even if, all things considered, it
could have constituted a tremendously strong double-LP package on one CD. But,
in any case, all of the tracks are out there on Complete Verve.
Re-recordings here include 'Nice Work If You
Can Get It' — another of the lady's old Columbia upbeat rocking horses, and,
consequently, another odd choice on an album dominated by smoky melancholy
blues; 'Everything I Have Is Yours', which she'd already cut for Verve two
years ago, but essays here once again in a slightly higher register; and the
Commodore years classic 'I Got A Right To Sing The Blues', taken here at a
slower pace, ornated with a pompous trumpet backing and featuring a long guitar
solo from Barney Kessel — in other words, treated as «blues-de-luxe» rather
than a brief aggressive outburst. Not very convincing, but passable.
Although, as usual, the record is very even,
and its predictability is only disrupted in the subtlest of ways (e. g. Jimmy
Rowles playing celeste on 'I Hadn't Anyone Till You'), my own tastes choose the
1931 standart 'When Your Lover Has Gone' as the outstanding highlight (a
choice in which, surprisingly, I happen to coincide with the late James Dean,
who declared it his favorite song). There is just something utterly mysterious
about her phrasing on the title line — Billie may not be the master of complex
technique, but she is the master of tone and pitch. The 4:32-4:58 segment of
the song is, like, the ultimate benchmark in high quality choice of wavelength,
if you know what I mean. More thumbs coming up.
LADY SINGS THE BLUES (1956)
1) Lady Sings The Blues; 2) Trav'lin'
Light; 3) I Must Have That Man; 4) Some Other Spring; 5) Strange Fruit; 6) No
Good Man; 7) God Bless The Child; 8) Good Morning Heartache; 9) Love Me Or
Leave Me; 10) Too Marvelous For Words; 11) Willow Weep For Me; 12) I Thought
About You.
This is not a very important release for those
who savor Billie's career in chronological order; nevertheless, it is still
one of her best-known late period albums, since it is somewhat conceptual –
released as a «companion piece» to her famous autobiography of the same name:
ghostwritten, actually, by William Dufty from Billie's recollections, but
still historically important for a number of reasons (a black artist candidly
writing about the intricacies of childhood abuse and heroin addiction was
still quite a novel thing in 1956). The franchise then culminated in a couple
shows at Carnegie Hall in December, where Billie's performances were
accompanied by readouts from the book (a large chunk of the show is available
on the Complete Verve boxset as
well).
Thus, Lady
Sings The Blues is somewhat of a retrospective album – all re-recordings,
except for the title track, specially written by Billie herself for the
occasion, and, today, one of her visit cards, along with 'Strange Fruit' and
'God Bless The Child', which, not coincidentally, are also rerecorded for this
session of June 1956. (Four of the songs are, however, taken from an earlier
session in September 1954, again, creating a slightly uncomfortable dissonance
between two different stages of the lady's voice).
The backing tracks on the session are nothing
outstanding to write home about (where have you gone, Mr. Peterson?), and the
old classics are not exactly reinvented, either: the best I can say about this
performance of 'Strange Fruit' is that the subtle horror is still there,
neither grown nor diminished. In a way, one could say that, as Billie got
older, her voice was compensating for extra hoarseness and creakiness with an
additional thin thread of wisdom-and-experience, so I could understand someone
preferring this version of 'God Bless The Child', burdened with twenty-five
additional years of ups and downs, to the original Columbia recording.
But then it may just be better to take this
record as one large whole — lady does not so much sing the blues here as she
sings her past, alternating darker and lighter numbers to come up with an adequate
representation of her own importance. And 1956 was an important year for her: on the heels of clever (and totally
justifiable, in this case) marketing, she at least had the pleasure of receiving
widespread acclaim and acceptance — crowned with the Carnegie Hall performances
— during her lifetime, even if she did not get to enjoy it too long.
BODY AND SOUL (1957)
1) Body And Soul; 2) They
Can't Take That Away From Me; 3) Darn That Dream; 4) Let's Call The Whole Thing
Off; 5) Comes Love; 6) Gee Baby, Ain't I Good To You?; 7) Embraceable You; 8)
Moonlight In Vermont.
Billie's last recording sessions for Verve,
former Clef, were held in January 1957 and yielded enough new material for
three albums, but, unfortunately, not enough for even one properly autonomous
review. They simply continue the trend of Music
For Torching and Velvet Mood,
with another batch of re-recordings of old Columbia and Commodore day cuts,
mixed with barrel-scraping as the lady and her backing crew keep searching for
Tin Pan Alley material that has, so far, managed to avoid the Holiday touch.
And, just as before, the effect of these songs
depends on whether Billie and the band decide to cast them in their original
«playful» mood, or reinterpret them in a darker and more personal-intimate
vein. Thus, 'Let's Call The Whole Thing Off' with its dialectal humor works
poorly; 'Gee Baby, Ain't I Good To You?', with its slower tempo and bluesy
atmosphere, works better, but is still cast in a «light entertainment for
gentlemen with big purses» manner. But 'Comes Love', pinned to an ominous
opening electric guitar riff from Barney Kessel and punctuated by Harry Edison's
equally ominous trumpet lines, works achingly well — they almost manage to turn
it into some sort of somber German cabaret-style vaudeville number à la Marlene Dietrich (only with
a less mannequinnish singer), a style not entirely familiar to Billie up to
this point.
Other highlights include the title track and
'Embraceable You', both expanded to twice the running length of the original
versions, not so much by the instrumental interludes (Barney Kessel does get a
nice moody guitar solo in addition to all the trumpets and saxes), as they are
by drastic slowing down of tempos — the slower it gets, the more thin nuances
can be squeezed inside the vocalization of each single syllable.
That said, it does seem a little nagging that,
as late as 1957, Billie was so stubbornly clinging to the same formula. No one
would ask her to sing Chuck Berry, of course, but jazz and pop sensibilities,
by the late 1950s, had evolved way beyond pre-War Tin Pan Alley. Her early
recordings for Verve could, from a certain point of view, still be considered
mildly «hip», but these ones almost could be accused of «lazy conservatism» —
now that the lady's status as a living legend was codified, she could be
covering the entire works of Ira Gershwin and Rodgers & Hammerstein in
chronological (or alphabetical) order and there would still be a market for
this.
On the other hand, let's face it — Billie
Holiday is one of the very few reasons that the entire works of Rodgers &
Hammerstein still have to be remembered fondly; and in 1957, there could be no
better frontperson for the Tin Pan Alley mindset than Billie. Which makes this
strong ignorance of the changing times all the more intriguing — «unyielding
old guard», etc. (In reality, though, it would be stupid to expect Billie to
«modernize» her setlists: the idea that an artist must constantly «progress» in
order to retain credibility did not yet exist in the 1950s).
SONGS FOR DISTINGUE LOVERS (1957)
1) Day In, Day Out; 2) A Foggy
Day; 3) Stars Fell On Alabama; 4) One For My Baby; 5) Just One Of Those Things;
6) I Don't Know What Time It Was.
The second album released from the same
sessions as Body And Soul, Songs For Distingué Lovers
commands even fewer words than its predecessor. It also has fewer songs (just
six titles), not to mention the exact same backing musicians, general attitude,
and chronological set of songs — not a single one going back to anything later
than 1943.
One single difference is that, on this
particular batch, not a single track is a re-recording — all six were selected
as brand new «experimental» puppies for the lady to sink her (rottin') teeth
in. But that only makes the album harder to assess on its own, since there is
nothing to compare it to — unless we start seriously discussing what it is
exactly that the lady brings to 'One For My Baby' that is so different from
Sinatra's classic version. Well, just about the same thing that distinguishes any other tune tackled by both Holiday
and Sinatra — she's her, and he's him.
For some reason, when re-released forty years
later on CD, it was Songs For
Distingué Lovers rather than the two albums around it that got the
first privilege — with six more songs from Body
And Soul and All Or Nothing At All
tacked on as bonuses. Perhaps the Verve people thought the exquisite French
epithet «classy», unlike the others; the fact that they even used it at all
back in 1957 means that they were consciously trying to market Billie as
«penthouse» music for rich romantic couples... which, to me, seems like cheapening
the issue.
The arrangements — yes, all of them typically
«penthouse» arrangements; but the idea of «spiritually enjoying» Billie sing
with half-drawn shades, a glass of Bordeaux, and a «that special someone» in an
evening dress seems rather cheap and, in any case, much too stereotypical for a
singer as dismissive of stereotypes as Billie. Above all else, all of these songs
reflect pain, and it is rather hard
to enjoy pain, let alone with a glass
of Bordeaux (although, come to think of it, a big enough glass could make it
easy to enjoy anything). Even though there is nothing even remotely close in
spirit to a 'God Bless The Child' on Songs
For Distingué Lovers, all of these songs — never mind the syrupy or
corny lyrics — are delivered in Billie's usual late-period ragged tones, and
these tones are not «enjoyable»: they are «experienceable», and, as such, do
not really require any additional settings, substances, or seductions.
ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL (1958)
1) Do Nothing Till You Hear
From Me; 2) Cheek To Cheek; 3) Ill Wind; 4) Speak Low; 5) We'll Be Together
Again; 6) All Or Nothing At All; 7) Sophisticated Lady; 8) April In Paris; 9) I
Wished On The Moon; 10) But Not For Me; 11) Say It Isn't So; 12) Our Love Is
Here To Stay.
Last of the three albums from the January 1957
sessions, and, consequently, Billie's last album for Verve. Once again, a mixed
bag here, combining songs that were almost tailor-made for the lady; songs
which she is able to permanently mark with her seal of approval; and a few annoying
missteps that should have never been tried at all — yes, I am talking about ʽCheek To Cheekʼ, a song that was
genuinely corny from the beginning even for Irving Berlin's standards, and one
that could not ever be successfully «holidayed» even with a change in tonality.
For that matter, ʽI Wished On The Moonʼ, reprised here from its
original 1935 incarnation, also sounds like a bit of sorry nostalgia — at this
point in her career, conveying pure, naïve joy was an impossibility.
Conversely, the highlights would probably
include Duke Ellington's ʽDo Nothing Till You Hear From Meʼ — slow,
lazy, subversive, and with just a tiny pinch of sarcasm in the "...and you
never will" resolution of each chorus; Harold Arlen's ʽIll
Windʼ, with a mini-epic bluesy arrangement and excellent guitar-vocal
dueting between Billie and Barney Kessel; and the cute rumba-jazz of
ʽSpeak Lowʼ, which, if I am not mistaken, must be the only time
Billie ever took on Kurt Weill in her entire career. I wish I could say the
same about the title track (e. g. about how Billie destroys Sinatra's version
or something like that), but it sounds fairly hookless to me.
With Ellington, Weill, and the «early blue-eyed
soul» representative Frankie Laine (ʽWe'll Be Together Againʼ)
sharing the same album with the obligatory G.A.S. representatives, All Or Nothing At All is, technically,
one of Billie's most «diverse» LPs; but, of course, all of the songs are
processed more or less in the same way, reducing surprise effects and novelty
factors. Still, barring ʽCheek To Cheekʼ which, for me, is one of
the few true moments of displeasure in Billie's late career period, it proves
that the 1957 sessions, as always, were consistent throughout, and I would give
all three albums one collective thumbs up — put all the songs together, fish out
the «too happy» ones, and Billie's going out of Verve with plenty of verve.
LADY IN SATIN (1958)
1) I'm A Fool To Want You; 2)
For Heaven's Sake; 3) You Don't Know What Love Is; 4) I Get Along Without You
Very Well; 5) For All We Know; 6) Violets For Your Furs; 7) You've Changed; 8)
It's Easy To Remember; 9) But Beautiful; 10) Glad To Be Unhappy; 11) I'll Be
Around; 12) The End Of A Love Affair.
It is a little ironic that Billie's final
completed record was recorded for the very same label that hosted her original
recordings — by early 1958, she was out of Verve and back on Columbia. Of
course, by that time it was already impossible for Columbia to present her the
same way they did in the 1930s, that is, lightweight jazz entertainment with a
pinch of intelligence and a shot of individuality — Billie was so frail
already that trying to rev her up would, at worst, have killed her, at best,
have made her sound utterly ridiculous.
Instead, to celebrate this new re-beginning and
try out something different, the entire album was recorded with strings — a
full orchestra conducted by Ray Ellis. This was not the first time Billie was
being backed that way: most of her Decca sessions included lush strings. But,
odd enough, this seems to be her most well-known recording on which she has
orchestral support — either because it happened to be her last record, or,
maybe, because her voice was so thin and crackling, it's almost as if the
orchestra were shining through it all the time. On her Decca records, the violins
tend to stay in the background; here, Ray Ellis dominates the proceedings at
least as much as the lady herself, perhaps more.
Lush orchestral backing was quite en vogue at the time for jazz singers
and crooners (e. g. on Ella's Songbooks),
and Billie herself never specifically preferred small combos to big bands — in
fact, she seems to have had the time, before her death, to acknowledge Lady In Satin as her personal
favorite. The arrangements themselves will probably fail to please those who
are allergic to syrup: going very heavy on strings and very light on brass,
adding a moody (if not to say «ghostly») background choir for most of the
songs, conventional, predictable, and completely indistinguishable from each
other. So will the songs — just a bunch of additional stuff from the Songbook,
all of them new for Billie but still feeling as if she'd already sung them all
before. Nothing too bluesy, nothing too jazzy, nothing too fast, almost
everything lethargically slow. No highlights, no lowlights. In fact, why
bother at all?
Well, for one thing, the whole album sounds
like a testament. She was not explicitly dying yet (still had more than a year
to go), but it is clear that all of the systems were failing, and this physical
deterioration and pain somehow got... not «reflected» in the performance, but
rather «converted» into the performance, if you can follow the difference. Her
voice occasionally quivers as if in silent tears, but these are neither «real»
tears nor «fake» tears, rather like a slightly mannered, theatrical take on suffering
delivered by a genuinely suffering person. If this does not suffice to describe
her performance, let me just state that the performance is simply unique —
except it has to be listened to very closely (one or two songs at a time may be
enough; there is no need to sit through the entire session if you do not feel
like it), and your mind has to set the orchestra back a few feet to suck in all
the pain. Pain, pain, pain. The Songbook was never really intended for that
kind of pain — it's a wonder the whole thing worked in the end.
Note, though, that weak or strong, Billie never
ever lost her knack at phrasing, her ability to place her own accents within
each performance. This is why her voice, even at its crackliest and feeblest,
still stands the test; complaints about her lack of singing power in these late
years are useless, since, at this point, it was her weakness itself that gave
her extra power, the kind of which she could never have twenty years earlier.
It is a power to conjure pity, but «pity» as some sort of noble emotion, rather
than just the gut feeling you get when bypassing a legless hobo. If it were the
latter, we would just «pity» the lady — «oh God, she must have been in some real deep shit back then» — and forget Lady In Satin in favor of her earlier
records (even the late-period Verve sessions sound like Ode To Joy in comparison to this). But there is this deep, weird
attractive force here that elevates the record to genuine tragic status; and
this, in a sense, almost makes Lady In
Satin the most important album in her career — despite its numerous flaws,
or, rather, due to these flaws.
Never make the mistake of making this your introduction to Billie (some of the
«best-of» jazz lists I have seen were stupid enough to make it «the obligatory
B. H. inclusion» instead of the much more diagnostic Commodore sessions), but
never make the mistake of bypassing it, either, if you care at all about the
reflection of pain in art. At a certain point, if you get into it pretty deep, Lady In Satin is almost terrifying. But
there is probably no need to wind it up to that effect; Billie herself, always
the icon of restraint and elegance, would probably not want us to judge it that
way. She probably wouldn't say no to a simple thumbs up, though.
LAST RECORDING (1959)
1) All Of You; 2) Sometimes
I'm Happy; 3) You Took Advantage Of Me; 4) When It's Sleepy Time Down South; 5)
There'll Be Some Changes Made; 6) 'Deed I Do; 7) Don't Worry 'bout Me; 8) All The
Way; 9) Just One More Chance; 10) It's Not For Me To Say; 11) I'll Never Smile
Again; 12) Baby, Won't You Please Come Back.
It might actually be a good idea to forget about this album entirely, and
let history record that it was Lady In
Satin that served as Billie's swan song; well, technically it did, since
this «follow-up», originally titled just Billie
Holiday, was not released until a few days (or weeks) after the lady's
death in July 1959 (for the record, from complications brought about by liver
cirrhosis, rather than the stereotypical «overdosing» — not that she never
overdosed, of course).
The sessions, held in March 1959, were again
directed by Ray Ellis, although this time, the orchestra took a few steps
back, letting a jazz band in. As much as we could all be skeptical about Ray's
orchestral sentimentality clashing with Billie's style, I almost sort of miss it on this album. Clearly, the idea
was to record something a little lighter, poppier, more upbeat and perhaps even
optimistic. And maybe — maybe —
Billie was even up for it: at the very least, her voice noticeably crackles
less and sounds a little more vibrant and ringing throughout the sessions,
somehow almost free of the «old woman rasp» so frequently catching up with her
on the last Verve albums and on Lady In
Satin.
But it does not sound very natural or
believable, this attempt at previewing the sound and style of Nancy Wilson. At
least, not in the overall context. Billie's voice and strength may have been
failing in the Fifties, yet she and her producers countered this with finding
the right mood for those levels — all that quiet nocturnal melancholy for
penthouse clients etc. Now, just as she was entering the last months of her
career, even if nobody knew it (but many still sensed it), Columbia tried to
get her to cheer up again, right to the levels of twenty years ago. Even
without all this knowledge, the fakeness of the effort shines through; with this knowledge, the album stirs up
all sorts of unpleasant feelings, starting with pity and ending with disgust
(or, rather, vice versa, because the album opener, ʽAll Of Youʼ,
beats all the other tracks in terms of upbeatness and happiness and sounds
particularly skewed).
Of course, from a certain historical point of
view, these sessions could have been a sort of «musical therapy», and if they
made Billie happy for three days in the midst of the misery, that is just good.
And it would be ridiculous to say that these performances are «wooden» or
«emotionless»: Billie never ever recorded if she didn't feel like recording, as
all the huge archive boxsets prove to us these days. But for the «listener»,
not the «biographer», this Last
Recording is useless. If you want a genuinely happy Billie, go for the early Columbia years; if you want a
genuinely miserable Billie, go for Lady
In Satin; if you live in a penthouse, go for the Verve collection. This
record is just a collector's memento, little more, and, although it is not
«awful» by any means, I still give it a thumbs down — the only explicit one in Lady
Day's entire discography.
This pretty much completes the discography
runthrough. In addition to the material collected on these LPs and later-issued
boxsets, the archives contain numerous alternate takes, demos, etc., most of
which you can find on even bigger boxsets, but I do not recommend going for
«Complete Verve», etc., unless Billie is your life or unless you are attracted
to the coolness of having these bulky objects gathering dust (and, perhaps,
accumulating collectible value) on your shelves. It is a very good thing that
they are available, though: they serve to emphasize Billie's legendary status
and ensure a modest, but stable, level of popularity among future generations
of listeners. At the expense of other, unjustly forgotten, legends, perhaps —
yet why should we complain that, if there must be only one female jazz vocalist remembered from the pre-rock'n'roll era,
it should be Billie? She was not simply following the rules of the formula,
nor was she setting them; all her life, she worked against the current, and the fact that for the most part she did so
without outstepping the limits of The Songbook only makes it more admirable.
Like the Beatles in their professional sphere, or like Shakespeare in his,
this is one hell of a legend to deserve «unforgettable» status, no matter how
trite that may sound to hard-working connoisseurs of the genre.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 1 (1926-1927)
1) Dying Blues; 2) Ashley St.
Blues; 3) Early Morning Blues; 4) West Coast Blues; 5) Early Morning Blues; 6)
Too Tight; 7) Blake's Worried Blues; 8) Come On Boys Let's Do That Messin'
Around; 9) Tampa Bound; 10) Skeedle Loo Doo Blues (take 1); 11) Skeedle Loo Doo
Blues (take 2); 12) Stonewall Street Blues; 13) State Street Blues; 14) Down
The Country; 15) Black Biting Bee Blues; 16) Wilson Dam; 17) Buck-Town Blues;
18) Black Dog Blues; 19) One Time Blues; 20) Bad Feelings Blues; 21) Dry Bone
Shuffle (take 3); 22) That Will Never Happen No More; 23) Brownskin Mama Blues
(take 2); 24) Hard Road Blues; 25) Hey Hey Daddy Blues; 26) Sea Board Stomp.
Arthur Phelps, a.k.a. Arthur Blake, a.k.a.
«Blind» Blake (because, back in the day, what was a blind black boy to do but
to play blindingly blisterous blues guitar?), only recorded for Paramount for
eight years (1926-1932), before the Depression drove him out on the road, where
he either drank himself to death or got run over by a streetcar (accounts
differ). I would be lying like a dirty dog, or a surprisingly exalted fanboy,
if I told you that everything he
recorded during those years deserves to be heard. Yet Blind Blake is still a
tremendously important figure in the early growth of country blues; anyone
interested in this type of music at all is obliged to have at least a one-disc
collection (the 23-track long Best Of
Blind Blake will do nicely).
The Document series did a good job of
collecting all of the man's known output on four discs, though (with the usual
reservation about sound quality: everything here is quite crackly-hissy, not as
awful, perhaps, as on Charley Patton records, but still, reflecting the usual
lack of quality control for Paramount). The first volume goes heavy on filler,
since on several of the tracks Blake is simply heard as a backing player for
urban blues performer Leola Wilson — a Bessie Smith wannabe with a smaller set
of lungs and an annoying nasal twang. And, honoring the contract, perhaps,
Blake honestly does nothing but back up the singer — his playing on these slow
numbers is utterly by the book, in fact, it almost seems as if he did not have
any major liking for this type of music, simply playing for cash while he had
the chance.
The first glimpse of Blake's greatness comes
with ʽWest Coast Bluesʼ, jammed in between two takes of the much more
straightforward 12-bar ʽEarly Morning Bluesʼ. It is the first example
of his «ragtime blues», essentially a transferral of the genre's piano chord
sequences to a guitar-based setting, which gives the music a decidedly rustic,
rather than urban, flavor, but preserves all the toe-tappiness and playfulness.
A «throwaway» instrumental dance number with a number of Blake's own spoken
«directions» to the dancers, it shows a level of technicality that was quite
rare even from jazz players at the time.
Then come the fully worded tunes — ʽCome
On Boys, Let's Do That Messin' Aroundʼ, which, true to its name, already
shows Blake «messin' around» with the chords as they go (showing his famous
ability to «scatter» a musical line and then quickly pick it up together from
the pieces for the next bar); and ʽSkeddle Loo Doo Bluesʼ, which does
the same, but with an increase in tempo. With more and more confidence gained
in the process, the man even starts to show off on others' records —
ʽWilson Damʼ, on which he backs Leola Wilson again, already has the
player eclipsing the singer, as he changes keys in between verse lines and
plays arrogant little flourishes even as Leola is singing, pulling away the
attention.
Instrumental diversity is not the key here —
one of the tracks features a lonesome kazoo accompanying the guitar, and there
are a couple of instances of «rattlebone» percussion — but every time Blake
picks up speed, that ceases to be an issue. It all culminates in the last track
on the disc, ʽSea Board Stompʼ, where the man pulls all the stops: sometimes
slipping into one-bar long waltz tempos, sometimes spinning sentimental folksy
phrasing, then effortlessly going back into ragtime mode, then showing a bit
of sliding technique, then going into a brief bluesy interlude, then
«scattering» the melody and picking it up again — basically, this is everything
you need to know about Blind Blake rolled into one.
ʽSea Board Stompʼ alone would have
earned this early collection a thumbs up; the fact that it is loaded with about a
dozen not-too-interesting slow blues numbers (and even these tend to be «decorated»
by the end of the disc) should certainly be disregarded, since Blind Blake was
a man of his times, and recorded what the people of his times wanted to hear —
and the demand for generic 12-bar blues was greater back then than it has been
ever since. Well, maybe not «greater», but «holier» or something, if you get my
drift.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 2 (1927-1928)
1) You Gonna Quit Me Blues; 2) Steel Mill Blues;
3) Southern Rag; 4) He's In The Jailhouse Now; 5) Wabash Rag; 6) Doggin' Me Mama
Blues; 7) C. C. Pill Blues; 8) Hot Potatoes; 9) Southbound Rag; 10) Pay Day Daddy
Blues; 11) Elzadie's Policy Blues; 12)
Goodbye Mama Moan; 13) Tootie Blues; 14) That Lovin' I Crave; 15) That Lonesome
Rave; 16) Terrible Murder Blues; 17) Leavin' Gal Blues; 18) No Dough Blues; 19)
Lead Hearted Blues; 20) Let Your Love Come Down; 21) Rumblin' And Ramblin' Boa Constrictor
Blues; 22) Bootlig Rum Dum Blues; 23) Detroit Bound Blues; 24) Beulah Land; 25)
Panther Squall Blues.
The ratio of mediocre to great on this second
volume is more or less the same (as is the ratio of crackle to cleanliness).
Early highlights of late 1927 include ʽSouthern Ragʼ, which features
some of the most complex guitar runs recorded at that time — people amazed at
the ability of Robert Johnson to play rhythm and melody simultaneously should
take a listen to this, where at times
it sounds like there are three guitars playing at once, where there is only one
(and somehow he also manages to rap out brief accounts of Southern life as
well); and a solid version of ʽHe's In The Jailhouse Nowʼ with the
original, political lyrics ("Remember last election / Everybody was in action")
rather than the depoliticized tale of crime and punishment, popularized by
Jimmie Rodgers and then, further on down the line, in Oh Brother Where Art Thou? Particularly of note is Blake's
suddenly-turned-gravelly voice as he changes the refrain from "He's in the
jailhouse now" to "He's in the graveyard now" — a classic moment
in country blues history, I'd say.
Further on down the line, we get some
diversity: on ʽDoggin' Me Mama Bluesʼ, Jimmy Bertrand all but steals
away the spotlight with a funny xylophone part, while Blake is content with
providing rather ordinary accompaniment; and on ʽC. C. Pill Bluesʼ,
he is paired with Johnny Dodds on clarinet — incidentally, this happens to be
one of Ry Cooder's favourite pre-war recordings, due to the sheer added value
of all the talent involved (apparently, Dodds is considered to be one of the
pre-Benny Goodman era clarinet greats). Bertrand, meanwhile, switches to slide
whistle, an instrument rarely heard in principle and almost never as a
counterpart to acoustic blues performances in particular.
Later on, Blake is again accompanying singers,
such as Elzadie Robinson and Bertha Henderson; however, neither of the two is
tremendously interesting, and neither seems to have had any interest in
supporting Blake's interest in ragtime guitar, preferring to stick to
generically slow urban blues. We do get to see the man in some exciting piano
action, though, on ʽLet Your Love Come Downʼ, which proves that he was just as adept on the
ivory keys as he was on the strings (hardly surprising, though: you'd have to
learn your ragtime on the piano first, before transposing it to guitar). But
overall, for most of early 1928 Blind Blake was generally engaged in playing
so-so urban blues, even when playing solo, exactly the way that, say, a Leroy
Carr would perform it on piano. The worst thing about these performances is not
even the lack of a proper territory to show off his technique, but rather the
very fact that urban blues sifted through an old-time Delta attitude is almost
a contradiction in terms. «Urban blues» is generally middle-class
entertainment, whereas Delta blues grows on much lower depths, and both require
different skills and attitudes to be successful.
«Smooth» players like Lonnie Johnson could get
away with it — Lonnie was quite «urbanized» in his soul and sound; Blind Blake,
on the other hand, was a figure cut out for dance frenzy, debauchery, and drinking
(which is why the former lived to a ripe old age, and the latter only left us
one single photograph). So give me ʽSouthern Ragʼ and ʽHe's In
The Jailhouse Nowʼ over boring material like ʽDetroit Bound
Bluesʼ any day. For these songs alone, the second volume earns another
certified thumbs
up; but filler will always be filler, no matter how many
thin-grained subtleties a jaded listener's ear can locate in the blueness of
the man's blue notes.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 3 (1928-1929)
1) Elzadie's Policy Blues; 2)
Pay Day Daddy Blues; 3) Walkin' Across The Country; 4) Search Warrant Blues; 5)
Ramblin' Mama Blues; 6) New Style Of Loving; 7) Back Door Slam Blues; 8)
Notoriety Woman Blues; 9) Cold Hearted Mama Blues; 10) Low Down Loving Gal; 11)
Sweet Papa Low Down; 12) Poker Woman Blues; 13) Doing A Stretch; 14) Fightin'
The Jug; 15) Hookworm Blues; 16) Slippery Rag; 17) Hastings Street; 18) Diddie
Wah Diddie; 19) Too Tight Blues No. 2; 20) Chump Man Blues; 21) Ice Man Blues;
22) Police Dog Blues; 23) I Was Afraid Of That Pt. 2; 24) Georgia Bound; 25)
Keep It Home.
Vol.
3 of Blind Blake's starts out
rather inauspiciously, with a couple of fairly bland Elzadie Robinson urban
blues tunes which are then followed with lotsa lotsa slow blues, most of them
with hideous sound quality that prevents from discerning any tricks and
flourishes even if Blake actually had them on these tracks — and I am quite
unsure of that. (He gets particularly lazy on tracks like ʽSearch Warrant
Bluesʼ, whose recording session must have caught him in an utterly uninspired
state, or an utterly inebriated one). These six or seven slow blues laments are
really only noticeable for the lyrics, which have been occasionally accused of
excessive (even for the times) misogyny ("to keep her quiet, I knocked her
teeth out her mouth" etc.). But since Blake hardly ever comes across as a
pathological character, we should still ascribe these bleak feelings to
then-current conventions. Good old happy times, when «bitch-slapping» was the
norm and nobody wanted to be left out of
the fun.
The real
fun — musical fun — starts only on the eleventh number (ʽSweet Papa Low
Downʼ), the first feel-good number on the CD, and Blind Blake's fingers
only really worked wonders when they were feeling good: here be a nifty little
Charleston with some cornet and xylophone accompaniment, and Blake himself
happily mumbling and dee-daa-daaing under his nose as he spins his tricky
ragtime chords.
From there, as we move on to 1929 and the last
months of nationwide happiness, it is all steadily uphill once again:
ʽHookworm Bluesʼ, with a funny guitar/piano soloing duet;
ʽSlippery Ragʼ, which is anything but
slippery — in fact, it features some of Blake's most complex soloing; and, most
importantly, ʽDiddie Wah Diddieʼ, one of his signature tunes (nothing
to do with the much later Bo Diddley song of the same name) that introduced the
line "I wish somebody could tell me what diddie wah diddie means"
into popular culture.
Best of the lot is concealed at the end:
ʽGeorgia Boundʼ, also done in a ragtime tuning, recorded with a rare
degree of cleanness, sung with an unexpected sweet natural tenderness, and
bursting into diverse, but always optimistic solo melodies after each verse.
The melody may be well known from a million other performances (it is exactly
the same as Robert Johnson's ʽFrom Four Until Lateʼ), but, with Blake
at the helm, a good melody will always bear individual traces, regardless of
how well we know it. If you do not play guitar, these sounds may well taunt you
into trying — and if you do, you might as well quit, because you'll never beat
this kind of sound, no matter how technically simple it might seem to the
modern player. Thumbs
up.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 4 (1929-1932)
1) Sweet Jivin' Mama; 2)
Lonesome Christmas Blues; 3) Third Degree Blues; 4) Guitar Chimes; 5) Blind
Arthur's Breakdown; 6) Baby Lou Blues; 7) Cold Love Blues; 8) Papa Charlie
Jackson And Blind Blake Talk About It, pt. 1; 9) Papa Charlie Jackson And Blind
Blake Talk About It, pt. 2; 10) Stingaree Man Blues; 11) Itching Heel; 12)
You've Got What I Want; 13) Cherry Hill Blues; 14) Diddie Wah Diddie No. 2; 15)
Hard Pushing Papa; 16) What A Low Down Place The Jailhouse Is; 17) Ain't Gonna
Do That No More; 18) Playing Policy Blues; 19) Righteous Blues; 20) Rope
Stretching Blues, pt. 2; 21) Rope Stretching Blues, pt. 1; 22) Champagne
Charlie Is My Name; 23) Depression's Gone From Me Blues.
The last volume in the series is,
unfortunately, quite far from great — not an atypical situation for the old
bluesmen, decimated by life on the road, heavy drinking, and Depression
depression no less harder than the rock generation youngsters would be
decimated by their problems. Two excellent
pre-Depression sides may be found early on: ʽGuitar Chimesʼ, a slow
blues shuffle that does indeed begin with some nifty «chiming», and the faster
ragtime guitar showcase ʽBlind Arthur's Breakdownʼ — probably the
last time you can hear the man relatively unburdened with atrocious hiss and
crackle, doing his fabulously inimitable stuff.
The two-part «dialog» between Blake and Papa
Charlie Jackson on the banjo, done in the form of a traveling minstrel show, is
an excellent historical document, but the awful sound quality makes it all but
impossible to understand the dialog as such, and they do concentrate on verbal
exchange quite a bit more than on instrumental exchange. Then there are several
more numbers on which Blake backs Irene Scruggs (tracks 10-13) — her vocals are
a bit more distinctive and playful than those of the man's previous female
partners, but the only well-audible highlight is ʽItching Heelʼ,
where Blake plays it slow and cautious, but occasionally breaks into ragtime
frenzy, changing the mood from passive-aggressive to comical.
By 1930, Blind Blake predictably had his studio
time cut severely — and, according to most accounts, packed it with extra
drinking instead, so that most of these late-period recordings were hardly up
to the standards set in earlier years. The two-part ʽRope Stretchin'
Bluesʼ is among his grimmest offerings, sung and played with tragic
intonations that seem more heartfelt than ever before (hard times taking their
toll?). ʽChampagne Charlie Is My Nameʼ is an old Victorian music hall
number that is so different in mood and style from Blake's usual repertoire
that people have even expressed doubts about whether it is Blind Blake at all —
one of those little mysteries that drives obsessive people crazy. No reason,
though, why Blind Blake shouldn't
have tried to make a different recording, especially considering that his
standard blues repertoire was selling poorly. He could have been experimenting
with his image a bit, deliberately choosing something upbeat and «jolly» to
cheer people up — no wonder that the last track on here, a cover of the well-known
standart ʽSittin' On Top Of The Worldʼ, is re-titled
ʽDepression's Gone From Me Bluesʼ.
Depression would really be gone from Blind Blake several years later, when,
unemployed and penniless, he would die from pulmonary tuberculosis (according
to a recently discovered death certificate for one Arthur Blake in Milwaukee,
provided, of course, that there is no coincidence involved). Had he lived, he
would, of course, be eventually rediscovered and dragged out by an Alan Lomax,
but, as it is, all we have left is just one photo, cleverly spread in four
different dimensions on four different album sleeves for the Document series —
gradually zooming away from us as the years roll by. Technically, this last
volume is the weakest of the lot and, accordingly, gets a thumbs down, but if you are hunting for the whole package rather
than a best-of, there is no sense in bypassing it: with just four CDs worth of
material from one of the era's most renowned and innovative guitar players,
who'd want to intentionally ignore even his twilight years?
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 1 (1935-1936)
1) Baby, I Don't Have To
Worry; 2) I'm A Rattlesnakin' Daddy; 3) I'm Climbin' On Top Of The Hill; 4)
Ain't It A Cryin' Shame; 5) Looking For My Woman; 6) Rag Mama Rag (take 1); 7)
Rag Mama Rag (take 2); 8) Baby, You Gotta Change Your Mind; 9) Evil Hearted
Woman; 10) My Brownskin Sugar Plum; 11) Somebody's Been Playing With That
Thing; 12) Log Cabin Blues (take 1); 13) Log Cabin Blues (take 2); 14) Homesick
And Lonesome Blues; 15) Walkin' My Troubles Away (take 1); 16) Walkin' My
Troubles Away (take 2); 17) Black And Tan; 18) Keep Away From My Woman (take
1); 19) Keep Away From My Woman (take 2); 20) Babe, You Got To Do Better; 21)
Big Bed Blues; 22) Truckin' My Blues Away; 23) She's Funny That Way; 24) Cat
Man Blues (take 1).
Unless you are an obsessed-dedicated pre-War
blues aficionado, you really do not need any Blind Boy Fuller in your
collection. The man did not have a unique singing ability, did not innovate any
particular guitar playing techniques, did not write up any classic tunes (although
a small handful of titles still have a strong historic connection to his name),
and, overall, would wind up on most people's personal accounts as one blind boy
too many.
Still, there must have been a reason why Fulton
Allen, a.k.a. Blind Boy Fuller, was one of the hottest things on the black
music market back in his day — «his day» lasting for all of five years, from
Blind Boy's first recordings for ARC in 1935 and up to his death of
drink-related causes in 1941. Truth is, while there is nothing particularly
outstanding or mind-blowing on these records, they sound very, very nice. Building on the already several
decades old «Piedmont» tradition, Fuller had himself a clean, professional,
entertaining sound which he must have masterminded himself: all of these
recordings are as clean and «sharp» as possible for the recording standards of
the mid-Thirties. From the modern listener's point of view, switching to this
music from Blind Blake or Blind Lemon Jefferson, both of them several times as
inventive and unpredictable in their playing as Fuller, will be refreshing if
only for the fact that his sound was captured several times as successfully on
disc as that of his predecessors.
Although most of the melodies from these early
sessions will be instantly recognizable to all lovers of bluesy/raggy
varieties of Americana, only the title of ʽRag Mama Ragʼ is probably
acknowledged as a «classic title», since this bit of fast-tempo ragtime blues
has been covered many times since (and even become a point of departure for The
Band's own ʽRag Mama Ragʼ in 1969, even if musically, their song had
nothing whatsoever to do with the original title). Everything about the tune is
subtly infectious, particularly Fuller's accomplished, if never spectacular,
scat singing, and the only thing that dampens the excitement is that he went on
to re-record the exact same thing under several extra titles (in fact, it is
repeated immediately after the original couple of takes, at a slightly slower
tempo, as ʽBaby You Gotta Change Your Mindʼ).
Another highlight is ʽLog Cabin
Bluesʼ, which the average listener usually knows as Robert Johnson's
ʽThey're Red Hotʼ (ʽHot Tamalesʼ), recorded a couple years
later (but it does not really matter — it's not as if it was Fuller who wrote
this melody). It gives us a good chance to enjoy Fuller's playing technique,
which was quite accomplished: no eye-popping tricks, but not a single mistake,
either, and perfect self-control while singing scat, holding down the rhythm,
and playing fast ragtime chords at the same time.
He was also a fairly pleasant slow blues player
as well: where a Blind Blake could, for instance, easily «laze» his way through
a 12-bar blues, playing minimalistic trivial accompaniment just for the sake of
asserting his weight («I'm the greatest anyway, do I really need to prove it
one more time?»), Fuller fills even the most generic songs like ʽBaby, I
Don't Have To Worryʼ with simple, but effective little flourishes that
cleverly mask the tunes' paucity of basic ideas.
But in general slow, pensive blues is not this
guy's main line of work: most of his music is supposed to be danced to
(ʽTruckin' My Blues Awayʼ, ʽShe's Funny That Wayʼ, etc.),
and sounds fairly happy on the surface at least. It is this combination of
upbeat friendliness, lightness, professionalism, and good recording quality
that, in the end, mattered on the market back in its day. And those few people
who, these days, keep a well-oiled time machine to pre-war America in their
backyard, will probably get to know and like these tunes much more than the
rest of us, who, at best, only have a passing historic interest in those days
when you didn't have anywhere to plug yourself in while playing the blues. Me,
I don't care much for time machines if they take me away from my PC interface,
but thumbs up
anyway.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 2 (1936-1937)
1) Cat Man Blues (take 2); 2)
When Your Gal Packs Up And Leaves; 3) Mama, Let Me Lay It On You; 4) If You
Don't Give Me What I Want; 5) Boots And Shoes; 6) Truckin' My Blues Away No. 2
(take 1); 7) Truckin' My Blues Away No. 2 (take 2); 8) Sweet Honey Hole; 9)
Untrue Blues; 10) Tom Cat Blues; 11) My Baby Don't Mean Me No Good; 12) Been
Your Dog; 13) My Best Gal Gonna Leave Me; 14) Wires All Down; 15) Let Me
Squeeze Your Lemon; 16) Death Alley; 17) Mamie (take 1); 18) Mamie (take 2);
19) New Oh Red!; 20) If You See My Pigmeat; 21) Stingy Mama; 22) Why Don't My
Baby Write To Me; 23) Some Day You're Gonna Be Sorry; 24) You Never Can Tell.
Fulton Allen was so thoroughly consistent in
his lifetime that it is a fairly hard task finding even one «standout» track
among the output he recorded in between April 29, 1936 and July 12, 1937. Well,
actually there is ʽMama, Let Me Lay It On Youʼ, which, if I am not
mistaken (and it is very easy to make
a mistake in this slippery who-made-who business), is either the first or one
of the very first recordings of what would later become ʽBaby Let Me
Follow You Downʼ and be popularized for all the white guys by Dylan and
the Animals. In all honesty, it is essentially but a slowed down, mildly
sentimentalized variant of Blind Boy's ragtime blues — but at least it's a
slightly different melody, which is more than can usually be expected.
Other than that, Fuller is recording even more
versions of ʽTruckin' My Blues Awayʼ; continuing to revel in double
entendres with titles like ʽLet Me Squeeze Your Lemonʼ and,
particularly, ʽIf You See My Pigmeatʼ (yes, «pigmeat» is an endearing term reserved by the author for his
sweetheart — what a life, eh?); and, for some reason, concentrates almost
exclusively on slow or mid-tempo blues — upbeat dance tunes are limited to just
ʽIf You Don't Give Me What I Wantʼ and the new revision of
ʽTruckinʼ: hilarious scat singing on both of them, but just two
upbeat tunes over one year? Were the times too hard, or was re-recording the
exact same melody more than three times in a row a bit unnerving even for the
artist himself?
In the end, the most interesting song of the
lot is probably ʽNew Oh Red!ʼ:
the «old» one was recorded in the same year by the Harlem Hamfats, but it is
even more fun to see Blind Boy Fuller try to take on this jazz-pop number,
considering that this playing style had not been his personal cup of tea at
all. He rises to the challenge admirably, coming up with one of the most
«rocking» numbers in his catalog. Strange enough, he did not go on to re-record it under fifteen different titles — maybe
the Hamfats bribed him to stay away from their material. Instead, he just went
on to play more 12-bar blues: the last three or four tracks here are
melodically indistinguishable from contemporary Robert Johnson material (even
if the playing styles are, of course, wildly different). However, his technique
is still complex, diverse, fluent, and self-assured enough to make sitting
through bits and pieces of this stuff easy and pleasant — something I couldn't
exactly say about, say, Arthur Crudup (who, however, had the advantage of a
creakier, whinier, otherworldlier voice than Blind Boy Fuller's amicably
ordinary one).
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 3 (1937)
1) Put You Back In The Jail;
2) Walking And Looking Blues; 3) Bulldog Blues; 4) Where My Woman Usta Lay; 5)
Working Man Blues; 6) Weeping Willow; 7) Corrine, What Make You Treat Me So; 8)
Stealing Bo-Hog; 9) Worried And Evil Man Blues; 10) Bulldog Blues; 11) Break Of
Day Blues; 12) Oh Zee Zas Rag; 13) Throw Your Ya Yas Back In Jail; 14) Snake
Woman Blues; 15) Mojo Hidin' Woman; 16) Steel Hearted Woman; 17) Ain't No
Gettin' Along; 18) Careless Love; 19) New Louise, Louise Blues; 20) Mistreater,
You're Going To Be Sorry; 21) Bye Bye Baby Blues; 22) Looking For My Woman No.
2.
Man, was Blind Boy Fuller ever in demand in
1937! This third disc in the series only barely manages to cover his output
recorded from July 12 and ending on December 15 that year — starting just as
the infamous recession of 1937 began rolling in and cutting down jobs, so that
the title of the first song on here, ʽPut You Back In The Jailʼ,
looks a little too close for comfort. And yet, apparently Fuller's singles
were still selling like hotcakes, despite sounding not a wee bit different from
what he'd already put out. (ʽPut You Back In The Jailʼ, while we're
on the subject, was almost immediately re-recorded as ʽThrow Your Ya Yas
Back In Jailʼ).
The only peculiarity of these sessions is that
the three last tracks were recorded with legendary harmonica player Sonny Terry
(who had already played with Fuller earlier in a blues trio), giving the man a
chance to «reinvent» three older tunes in a flashier way than usual.
Unfortunately, Terry is given very little space to shine – two very brief
solos and some rhythm-accompanying lead lines that are rather poorly captured
by the mikes. Apparently, it had to be demonstrated very clearly just who was the boss in the studio.
Other than that, minor ear-catching highlights include
ʽOh Zee Zas Ragʼ (a new bit of fast ragtime, and it does not seem to
have the exact same melody as
ʽRag Mama Ragʼ!); and the dirgey mood of ʽWeeping Willowʼ,
for which he also seems to have mastered a new chord or two (and then, just a
few months later, duly re-recorded it as ʽAin't No Gettin' Alongʼ —
and Blind Boy Fuller was actually so lazy, unlike most other re-recorders, he
didn't even bother writing new lyrics for the songs he re-recorded: he just
took out a different line to use as the new title). There is also a very good
take on the traditional standard ʽCareless Loveʼ, one of the
«bluesiest» ones during that era (Lonnie Johnson, despite being a far superior
player to Fuller, did that one almost in crooner mode; and Bessie is beyond
competition in any case); and I suppose that Big Bill Broonzy recorded
ʽLouise, Louise Bluesʼ somewhat earlier than Blind Boy (otherwise,
why slap on a ʽNewʼ
subtitle?), but I like Blind Boy's purely acoustic version much better than Big
Bill's, who recorded it over one of his «hide-behind-the-piano» periods. Crisp,
clean, sharp, as perfect as simple, unassuming 12-bar blues ever gets. Well,
supposedly 1937 was a good year for
somebody other than Uncle Joe over in Soviet Russia.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 4 (1937-1938)
1) Shaggy Like A Bear; 2) Ten
O'Clock Peeper; 3) Hungry Calf Blues; 4) Too Many Women Blues; 5) Oozin' You
Off My Mind; 6) Shake That Shimmy; 7) Heart Ease Blues; 8) I'm Going To Move
(To The Edge Of Town); 9) Pistol Slapper Blues; 10) Mean And No Good Woman;
11) Georgia Ham Mama; 12) Piccolo Rag; 13) Funny Feeling Blues; 14) Painful
Hearted Man; 15) You've Got To Move It Out; 16) Mama, Let Me Lay It On You No.
2; 17) Meat Shakin' Woman; 18) I'm A Good Stem Winder; 19) What's That Smells Like
Fish; 20) She's A Truckin' Little Baby; 21) Jivin' Woman Blues; 22) You're
Laughing Now.
Man, was Blind Boy Fuller ever in demand in
1938!... sorry. Right until the unfortunate moment when he shot his wife in the
leg — apparently, the «Meat Shakin' Woman» refused to believe that he was
really such «A Good Stem Winder» and maliciously avoided a direct answer to the
question «What's That Smells Like Fish». Which meant that Blind Boy eventually
had to «Move (To The Edge Of Town)» and halt his recording activities until
1940. But not before recording a couple dozen more unique, unrepeatable
examples of his songwriting craft.
Vol.
4 has lots more songs that
Fuller recorded with Sonny Terry, as well as accompanied by a second guitarist
(Dipper Boy Council), which predictably gives us a fuller, but not necessarily
better sound. Occasional progress is seen in that two subsequent takes on the
exact same melody may now feature different sets of lyrics — for instance,
ʽShake That Shimmyʼ and ʽHeart Ease Bluesʼ are still the
same song, but you couldn't genuinely tell that by simply looking at the lyrics
sheet. (Not that there's any available — not that it's a big problem, either).
Only one song on the whole volume deserves
special mention, especially because, for some reason, not every single-CD
Blind Boy Fuller compilation includes it, even though they all should. This is
ʽJivin' Woman Bluesʼ, a very different example of ragtime guitar
playing than everything Fuller had played up to that point, with a slower tempo,
a more bluegrassy feel, and a complex, but catchy picking pattern, echoes of
which you could eventually hear on Fleetwood Mac's ʽNever Going Back
Againʼ (with plenty of buffers along the way, of course).
Minor «experiments» can also be heard on
ʽMeat Shakin' Womanʼ and maybe one or two other numbers that passed
me by, but you'd really need an aural magnifying glass to concentrate on that.
Which makes the time scale of Vol. 4
Blind Boy's most skippable period so far. It does, however, seem to feature an
exceedingly large number of double
entendres — if you ever thought it was up to rockers to invent the
«popularity booster through excessive profanity», here's living proof that
«sleazing up» your music was a well-oiled technique before the war. Question:
How do you sell more copies of your
song called ʽLog Cabin Bluesʼ? Answer: Re-record it under the title
ʽWhat's That Smells Like Fishʼ. Do not overestimate the decency of
the average record buyer.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 5 (1938-1940)
1) Stop Jivin' Me, Mama; 2)
Long Time Trucker; 3) Big House Bound; 4) Flyin' Airplane Blues; 5) Get Your Ya
Yas Out; 6) Jitterbug Rag; 7) Screaming And Crying Blues; 8) Blacksnakin'
Jiver; 9) I Don't Care How Long; 10) You've Got Something There; 11) Baby, Quit
Your Low Down Ways (take 1); 12) Baby, Quit Your Low Down Ways (take 2); 13) It
Doesn't Matter, Baby; 14) Black Bottom Blues; 15) I Crave My Pig Meat; 16) Big
Leg Woman Gets My Pay; 17) I'm A Stranger Here; 18) Red's Got The Piccolo
Blues; 19) I Want Some Of Your Pie; 20) Jivin' Big Bill Blues; 21) Woman, You
Better Wake Up; 22) Step It Up And Go; 23) Worn Out Engine Blues.
This one is going to be very short: although
the fifth volume covers a longer time period than the fourth, it yields even
fewer pretexts to write anything meaningful. Oh yes: this late 1938 session
gave us the title of the best live album by the Rolling Stones — ʽGet Your
Ya-Ya's Outʼ may be just another rewrite of ʽLog Cabin Bluesʼ, but
it was well worth it in the end.
At the other end of the album, ʽStep It Up
And Goʼ is probably the
first recording of this song that actually uses this title, under which it
would later be recorded by plenty of other people (Bob Dylan's version is what
comes to mind first). But we cannot even give Fuller complete credit, since the
merry little jug band dance tune dates back to at least 1932, when it was still
called ʽBottle It Up And Goʼ. Fuller's variant is competent, but
that's about it.
So, instead of trying desperately to write
something about the music on here, let me just throw in a fun fact —
apparently, it turns out that, due to his short prison term for the
wife-shooting «accident», Blind Boy Fuller never made it to the From Spirituals To Swing show that John
Hammond presented in Carnegie Hall. Big Bill Broonzy did, though, and who knows
if that event, which introduced jazz and blues music in an «academic» manner
to «respectable» white audiences, was not partially responsible for future
developments of popular tastes? Imagine music lovers not taking after Big Bill
Broonzy (who flowed straight into Muddy Waters, who flowed straight into everything
else), but after Blind Boy Fuller? The guy missed his little chance at world
domination here: one drunken shot in the leg, and Piedmont blues was never the
same after that...
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 6 (1940)
1) Blue And Worried Man; 2)
Passenger Train Woman; 3) Shake It, Baby; 4) Somebody's Been Talkin'; 5) Three
Ball Blues; 6) Little Woman, You're So Sweet; 7) Harmonica Stomp; 8) Good
Feeling Blues; 9) You Can't Hide From The Lord; 10) Twelve Gates To The City;
11) Crooked Woman Blues; 12) I Don't Want No Skinny Woman; 13) Bus Rider Blues;
14) You Got To Have Your Dollar; 15) Lost Lover Blues; 16) Thousand Woman
Blues; 17) Bye Bye, Baby; 18) When You Are Gone; 19) No Stranger Now; 20) Must
Have Been My Jesus; 21) Jesus Is A Holy Man; 22) Precious Lord; 23) Night
Rambling Woman.
Fuller's last two sessions date from March and
June 1940, both of them in the company of Sonny Terry on harmonica and Bull
City Red on washboard. The three of them gel best under conditions of complete
democracy — ʽHarmonica Stompʼ is a lot of fun, with Fuller adding
bits of semi-scat falsetto for rowdiness' sakes — unfortunately, these
conditions are rarely met, and most of the time we just get more rehashes of
the same old blues and ragtime stereotypes.
The only notable change is that both times,
Fuller adds gospel to the repertoire: starting with ʽTwelve Gates To The
Cityʼ, originally popularized by the Rev. Gary Davis, and ending with the
spiritual rave-up of ʽJesus Is A Holy Manʼ. This comes off as a bit
of surprise, since appeals to the Lord were not a known part of the man's
repertoire — in fact, he usually preferred sin to repentance. It is possible, that with his steadily
failing health and all, he was trying to get a last minute ticket. None of
these gospel covers, however, would fare all too well in restoring his position
at the Lord's knees: Fuller's voice is too weak to stir up religious
enthusiasm, and his guitar tricks are much better suited for fun-oriented songs
than serious praise-the-lord material.
He does develop a tired, worn out, «authentic»
rasp towards the end of the last session, suggesting total exhaustion — but
maybe he was just tired on that particular evening. Overall, the session was
quite Robert Johnson-ish in nature, all dark, depressing blues with nary a
single good time rag stomp to be found. Blind Boy Fuller's death date is
usually cited as February 13, 1941, but it is also known that he underwent a
serious surgical operation in July 1940, which probably explains all this descent
into bleakness and preachiness. Alas, I cannot honestly say that either of
these translates into great music — they just add a few logical final touches
to the portrait.
Altogether, as is already evident by now, the
six CDs that are needed to cover all of Blind Boy Fuller's legacy are murderous
overkill: my intuitive best-guess estimate is that he recorded every single
melody in his repertoire at least three or four times, and some of them as much
as ten or twelve. Yet the very fact that he actually got the chance to record
so much — a chance that was never available for quite a few of his superior
colleagues — is quite telling: he was treasured for sheer reliability. Most of
his major achievements may already be found on the first two volumes of this set
— but each and every volume is fully listenable; even in his last year, Fuller
never showed any decline in professionalism. For six steady years, his blues
machine rolled on without a hitch, and it might have rolled on for decades
longer, had not God suddenly felt an acute desire to hear ʽLog Cabin
Bluesʼ live. Must have worn out his stack of 45s.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 1 (1925-1926)
1) I Want To Be Like Jesus In
My Heart; 2) All I Want Is That Pure Religion; 3) Got The Blues; 4) Long
Lonesome Blues; 5) Booster Blues; 6) Dry Southern Blues; 7) Black Horse Blues;
8) Corinna Blues; 9) Got The Blues; 10) Long Lonesome Blues; 11) Jack O'
Diamond Blues (take 1); 12) Jack O' Diamond Blues (take 2); 13) Chock
House Blues; 14) Beggin' Back; 15) Old Rounder Blues; 16) Stocking Feet Blues;
17) That Black Snake Moan; 18) Wartime Blues; 19) Broke And Hungry; 20) Shuckin'
Sugar Blues; 21) Booger Rooger Blues; 22) Rabbit Foot Blues; 23) Bad Luck
Blues.
The cool thing about Blind Lemon Jefferson is
not that he was the first country blues «superstar», the person to make the «tough black guy with acoustic guitar
wailing into the mike» image marketable and profitable, opening the doors for dozens
of followers. Many of these followers could get the job done on their own. The truly cool thing about Blind Lemon is
that, at his best, he played that country blues like no one else, with a level
of creative freedom, inventiveness, and unpredictability that was never
matched by any of these followers. Forget Robert Johnson and Big Bill Broonzy:
they have nothing on this guy when it
comes to taking the basic blues idiom and stripping it free of boredom. In all
honesty, I think Blind Lemon's stature among his pre-war acoustic blues
colleagues should be deemed equal to that of Hendrix in the 1960s.
Unfortunately, Blind Lemon made all of his
recordings on the shittiest of all major labels in the 1920s: Paramount. Had he
hit it big with the likes of Columbia, it would have been much easier to appreciate
his works today, as they would not be covered by almost unbreachable walls of
hiss and crackle, from under which the thin, subtle, suffocated guitar lines
feebly call out for your attention. Note: if you are new to Blind Lemon, do not, at all costs, begin right off
the bat with the Complete series on
the Document label — the songs here have not been properly cleaned up or
remastered. Go with Yazoo's The Best Of instead: it has most of the
highlights, and the people out there did a laudable job of removing much of the
original tape hiss, even though it still sounds like crap. But in this business
of studying in pre-war music, you have to commit yourself to distinguishing
between different sorts and flavors of crap.
I am still reviewing the Document series simply
because of completism, although it should be stated that, like everyone else at
the time, Blind Lemon was never about «originality». He was, however, about
«inspiration», and he could easily record the same song in a routine, boring,
perfunctory manner when he was not in the spirit, or as a jaw-dropping
exploration of the limits of sound when he was. And in his earliest years,
fortunately, he happened to be in the
spirit way more often than out of it.
For some reason, the man's first two recordings,
from December 1925, Chicago, are in the gospel genre (they were even credited
to a pseudonym — «Deacon L. J. Bates»). But even the first track already gives
a brief glimpse of the man's love for flourishes, with mandolin-style trills
disrupting the steady choppy flow of the melody and adding an almost
sentimental touch. It also introduces his unique voice, an odd combination of
«whiny» and «earthy»: Blind Lemon was the first of the great blues «wailers»,
oozing loneliness and soul torment a whole decade prior to Robert Johnson. Of
course, ʽI Want To Be Like Jesus In My Heartʼ actually oozes humility
and friendship rather than loneliness, but that's just the beginning.
Most of the songs that follow are played in the
standard 12-bar blues pattern and are generally interchangeable in terms of
basic structure. But that's not the gist of it: real excitement comes from
watching Blind Lemon fuck that structure from each possible point of entry, if
you pardon the rudeness of the metaphor. The early sessions actually let you
see the evolution. For instance, on ʽDry Southern Bluesʼ, one of the
man's earliest hits, the choppy ragtime-influenced pattern is technically accomplished
and almost «danceable», but stays more or less the same throughout. (Sidenote:
it also marks the first appearance of the "when the train left the
station, it had two lights on behind" line, later to become the lyrical
cornerstone of Johnson's ʽLove In Vainʼ). ʽLong Lonesome
Bluesʼ is also strictly disciplined, although the melodic potential is
already much wider, with little high-pitched country flourishes played at top
speed in between the choppy rhythm work, and an occasional trill or two woven
into the mesh.
But then at the end of Vol. 1, you already get stuff like ʽRabbit Foot Bluesʼ,
which just might be the single greatest «fight the structural limits!»
statement of the entire decade. On that track, almost every single bar comes
out different — slowed down, sped up, played choppy, played lyrical,
syncopated, trilled, aggressive, super-calm, whatever, but never losing track
of the root notes, so that nobody could accuse the man of just fooling around.
The effect is utterly confusing: the song has no general mood or «aura» per se,
just a whirring flash of different feelings. It cannot be qualified as
straightahead entertainment, because it's hard for the listener to even follow
it rhythmically, but it isn't an intimate emotional lament, either. What is
it? I have no idea, really. An avantgarde experiment, at least in the context
of its usual genre.
Most of the other tracks are less outrageous,
with one or two chord patterns dominating over the rest, but even so, each side
chooses its own pattern, and the only thing that prevents us from enjoying
this diversity to its fullest is the ugly crackle wall. The one track that
stands out the most is ʽJack O' Diamond Bluesʼ, presented here in two
takes: a spirited wail set to a threatening slide guitar part (a relatively
rare occasion: Blind Lemon did not employ slide techniques too often). That
despairing yell of "jack o' diaaaaaamond's a hard card to play!" must
have raised plenty of hairs back in 1926 — time, and shellac rot, have dimmed
its impact, but with a little time-travelling effort on the part of your mind,
it is still possible to recreate that feeling.
Since these early sessions capture Blind Lemon
at his youngest and freshest, unspoiled by commercial success, booze, or
boredom, Vol. 1 is simply one of the
greatest blues «albums» of the pre-war era, period. The horrendous sound
quality poisons the effect, for sure, but in compensation, just put on
ʽRabbit Foot Bluesʼ in the highest quality you can find and ask
yourself: who ever afterwards played acoustic (or electric) guitar just like that? ... That's right. Most of the
time, people are trapped by the blues, and show no strength of will to spring
the trap. Hilarious, then, that the very first person who made authentic
country blues into a household name had already shown how to spring it way back
in 1925. Unfortunately, very few people understood the lesson, and most of them
just got it wrong. Thumbs up
for something so way ahead of its time — or, more precisely, so out of any sort of timeline.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 2 (1927)
1) Black Snake Moan; 2) Match
Box Blues; 3) Easy Rider Blues; 4) Match Box Blues; 5) Match Box Blues; 6) Rising
High Water Blues; 7) Weary Dog Blues; 8) Right Of Way Blues; 9) Teddy Bear
Blues; 10) Black Snake Dream Blues; 11) Hot Dogs; 12) He Arose From The Dead;
13) Stuck Sorrow Blues; 14) Rambler Blues; 15) Chinch Bug Blues; 16) Deceitful
Brownskin Blues; 17) Sunshine Special; 18) Gone Dead On You Blues; 19) Where
Shall I Be?; 20) See That My Grave's Kept Clean; 21) One Dime Blues; 22) Lonesome
House Blues.
The obvious towering highlight of Blind Lemon's
output in 1927 is ʽMatch Box Bluesʼ — not because it has anything to
do with matchboxes, and not even because it was later covered by Carl Perkins,
Jerry Lee Lewis, and eventually the Beatles (the lyrics only have one verse
that overlaps anyway, and the melody... 12-bar blues is only whatever your
inspiration makes out of 12-bar blues, in any case). It's just that it happens
to be the best sounding Blind Lemon song: during a brief stint at O'Keh records
rather than Paramount, he cut one single (with ʽBlack Snake Moanʼ as
the B-side) that, today, allows us to appreciate his guitar magic unhindered by
crackle (well, there is still a little bit left, but it only helps the
atmosphere).
I still feel that ʽRabbit Foot Bluesʼ
is the man's one true classic on which he pulled all the stops, but ʽMatch
Boxʼ does not linger far behind — chops, flourishes, trills, rhythmic
traps and counterpoints, and then an out-of-nowhere boogie line for the last
verse. The technique is impressive for its time, but it is not the technique
that counts (for sheer speed and complexity, Lonnie Johnson had Blind Lemon
beat all the way), it is this amazing freedom of form: normally, you'd expect
the flourishes and key changes to happen after
the man sings his line — Jefferson does that while singing, so that it is his voice, occasionally, that becomes
the rhythm instrument, while the guitar just goes wherever it wants to.
The demand for the record was actually so big
that, as soon as Blind Lemon returned to Paramount, he was pressed into
cutting two more takes — both of them in Paramount's standardly awful quality,
yet it is still curious to compare all three recordings, since no two out of
the lot are completely identical. The boogie line may come in earlier, the
intro may play an entirely different chord sequence, and, in general, it seems
as if the man had no set plan when launching into the performance at all. Pure free flight.
This does not apply to all of Blind Lemon's material, of course. Some of the songs are
quite tight and disciplined, such as ʽRight Of Way Bluesʼ, which is
all based around one dark, menacing line winding its way upwards after each
vocal turn — but it is such a creepy line, way over any generic 12-bar
standards of the day, that the song is still a minor masterpiece. To compensate
for the eeriness, there is ʽHot Dogsʼ, a fast little dance number
credited to «Blind Lemon Jefferson and His Feet» (the latter are indeed well
audible), and then ʽHe Arose From The Deadʼ, sung in Blind Lemon's
most sentimental croon to a very similar melody. (And why shouldn't one be merrily tapping one's foot to the story of the
Resurrection? Happy end and all).
Somewhat more questionable is the inclusion of
several numbers on which Jefferson switches guitar for a piano accompaniment: I
am not sure if he played the instrument himself (he did know how, according to
reports) or if Paramount brought in a session musician, but the playing on
ʽTeddy Bear Bluesʼ and other piano-led tunes is nothing special, and
Blind Lemon is not that miraculous a
singer to just fall for his voice and nothing else (well, Eric Clapton never
learned his lesson, either). It's not
bad, but, as a guitar player, Blind Lemon is worth looking into even at his
laziest and tiredest — as a singer, he's just one of the many greats of his
era.
Besides, his finest vocal performance on Vol. 2 is on a guitar-led track anyway:
ʽSee That My Grave Is Kept Cleanʼ, which Bob Dylan would later record
trying to emulate some of Lemon's actual modulations — to very good effect, for
that matter, even if the fact remains that one is the original and the other
one is a tribute act. Musical testaments like this were still a rarity in 1927,
even among blues singers, and Jefferson's howling, while not particularly
«shivery» per se, still feels a little uncomfortable. The guy was a
commercially successful, near-prosperous, respectable bluesman-entertainer, yet
here he is wailing about impending death and diminished returns in the
afterlife. He only had two more years to live.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 3 (1928)
1) Blind Lemon's Pentitentiary
Blues; 2) 'Lectric Chair Blues; 3) See That My Grave Is Kept Clean; 4) Lemon's
Worried Blues; 5) Mean Jumper Blues; 6) Balky Mule Blues; 7) Change My Luck
Blues; 8) Prison Cell Blues; 9) Lemon's Cannon Ball Moan; 10) Long Lastin'
Lovin'; 11) Piney Woods Money Mama; 12) Low Down Mojo Blues; 13) Competition
Bed Blues; 14) Lock Step Blues; 15) Hangman's Blues; 16) Sad News Blues; 17) How
Long How Long; 18) Christmas Eve Blues; 19) Happy New Years Blues; 20) Maltese
Cat Blues; 21) D B Blues.
Strange as it is, Blind Lemon's output got
steadily less interesting as the years went by. None of the sides that he cut
over 1928-29 even begin to match the inventiveness and freedom of ʽRabbit
Foot Bluesʼ or ʽMatch Box Bluesʼ. And, considering the fact that
it takes a lot to make anybody's jaw
drop over a bunch of crackling, poorly recorded pre-war acoustic blues, the
effect is inevitable: dis-ap-point-ment a-plenty.
This third volume does contain an alternate
version of ʽSee That My Grave Is Kept Cleanʼ that actually improves
upon the original: do not miss Blind Lemon following up on the line "have
you ever heard the church bell toll?" with an actual imitation of the
church bell (no such thing in the first take from 1927), along with other
little tricks. But then his blues style shifts to a subtler, more countrified
style, with fewer unpredictable tempo or key changes — it is almost as if he
were willing to downplay his guitar prowess a little bit in order to
concentrate more on the singing. One could almost argue in terms of a
«sellout» — the average record buyer certainly paid more attention to the voice
than the guitar, and somebody had to pay for the fuel for his brand new Ford,
after all (and don't forget the chauffeur).
Nobody can argue that Blind Lemon did not have a cool singing voice — he reaches
a particular high with his singing on ʽPrison Cell Bluesʼ, dragging
out the end of each line in an alternating series of high-pitched wails or low
growls quite effectively, even if his authenticity on the subject cannot be
compared with Leadbelly's, for obvious reasons. But most of the time, that
singing is just normal, and the songs
could benefit from a little more guitar punch.
That Blind Lemon strived for commerciality is
made particularly obvious by his covering ʽHow Long How Long Bluesʼ,
a big 1928 hit for Leroy Carr — with Blind Lemon's piano player a weak shadow
of Carr himself, and Blind Lemon's vocals shamelessly copping Carr's
intonations and phrasing. Other than pure envy, there was no reason for him to
play such a copycat. By late 1928, the man's playing degenerates almost
completely: tracks like ʽHappy New Year Bluesʼ are built on the
simplest of rhythms, and betray an amazing superstar-style laziness — «they'll
buy anything I put out, anyway, as long as I wish them a happy new year and
all».
And it's not as if something heavy fell on his
head, making him forget how to play: some of the steam would be eventually
picked up once again next year. No, it was a deliberate stylistic reorientation,
an attempt to «urbanize» himself by hitting it big as a singer, not as a player.
Yet it did not help improve his career, and proved particularly disastrous in
the long run: today, there is every reason to admire the man for ʽRabbit
Footʼ, but if it is passionate blues singing from the pre-war era that you
are after, even the aforementioned Leroy Carr will be a better bet.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 4 (1929)
1) Eagle
Eyed Mama; 2) Dynamite Blues; 3) Disgusted Blues ; 4) Competition Bed Blues; 5) Sad News Blues; 6)
Peach Orchard Blues; 7) Oil Well Blues; 8) Tin Cup Blues; 9) Big Night Blues;
10) Empty House Blues; 11) Saturday Night Spender Blues; 12) That Black Snake
Moan No. 2; 13) Bed Springs Blues; 14) Yo Yo Blues; 15) Mosquito Moan; 16)
Southern Woman Blues; 17) Bakershop Blues; 18) Pneumonia Blues; 19) Long
Distance Moan; 20) That Crawlin' Baby Blues; 21) Fence Breakin' Yellin' Blues;
22) Cat Man Blues; 23) The Cheaters Spell; 24) Bootin' Me 'Bout.
It would be nice to be able to say that Blind
Lemon managed to «rebound» in the last year of his life, but he didn't. Most of
these recordings are slow, steady, relatively formulaic blues pieces that focus
on the man's singing rather than playing. Only once, towards the very very end, does he all of a sudden remember
the way it used to be — ʽThat Crawlin' Baby Bluesʼ is a
merry-rollickin' series of guitar fireworks, almost up to the standarts of
ʽRabbit Foot Bluesʼ, played with plenty of fire and abandon. Which
makes the context look even more strange, proving that the man did not «forget»
how to be amazing, but really, truly, consciously chose not to.
The rest of the recordings range from very
simple and feeble-sounding performances (ʽEagle Eyed Mamaʼ) to
slightly more inventive, but monotonous (ʽDynamite Bluesʼ, built on a
series of pretty flourishes that all sound the same, gruesomely discrediting
the title), to occasional slow-growers (ʽBed Spring Bluesʼ, strummed
quietly and lazily, but in reality with lots of interesting chord changes that
require pressing your ear close to the speaker). On the lyrical side, there is
a clear tendency to emphasize «dirty» subjects and double entendres — a
tendency that, oddly enough, is frequently noticeable among pre-war
blues-rockers as they grow in fame and fortune... somebody should probably
inform Mick Jagger.
Blind Lemon's last session was held on
September 24, 1929 – exactly one month prior to «Black Thursday»; Blind Lemon's
death date is usually listed as December 19, 1929. No, he didn't die of a heart
attack because his stocks were lost; the most likely version is that he froze
to death, being lost in a snowstorm – drunk, presumably? In any case, it is
somewhat telling that he never survived into the Depression era, missing the chance
to become one of its great bards, like Charlie Patton. These recordings from
1928-29 clearly see him veering further and further into «urbanized»
territory, a safer and quieter harbor, moderately attractive for conservatively
minded black and white audiences alike.
And there is nothing wrong with that — except
that this move to «higher ground» almost cost the man his integrity. Chances
are, had he survived into the 1930s or even later, his early records would be
regarded as somewhat of a «crazy anomaly», created in his younger, reckless,
wildest days. (Actually, something similar would happen to Big Bill Broonzy,
whose earliest records are also his most interesting from a technical
standpoint). As it is, we have a fifty-fifty type of proportion, and it is not
surprising that most of the compilations prefer to focus on the first fifty: Yazoo's
The Best Of features 17 selections
from 1925-27, 4 dated 1928, and only 2 dated 1929. I totally agree with that
ratio.
THE COMPLETE BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON (1927-1931; 1993)
1) I Know His Blood Can Make
Me Whole; 2) Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed; 3) It's Nobody's Fault But Mine; 4) Mother's
Children Have A Hard Time; 5) Dark Was The Night - Cold Was The Ground; 6) If I
Had My Way I'd Tear The Building Down; 7) I'm Gonna Run To The City Of Refuge;
8) Jesus Is Coming Soon; 9) Lord I Just Can't Keep From Crying; 10) Keep Your
Lamp Trimmed And Burning; 11) Let Your Light Shine On Me; 12) God Don't Never
Change; 13) Bye And Bye I'm Goin' To See The King; 14) Sweeter As The Years
Roll By; 15) You'll Need Somebody On Your Bond; 16) When The War Was On; 17)
Praise God I'm Satisfied; 18) Take Your Burden To The Lord And Leave It There;
19) Take Your Stand; 20) God Moves On The Water; 21) Can't Nobody Hide From God;
22) If It Had Not Been For Jesus; 23) Go To Me With That Land; 24) The Rain
Don't Fall On Me; 25) Trouble Will Soon Be Over; 26) The Soul Of A Man; 27)
Everybody Ought To Treat A Stranger Right; 28) Church, I'm Fully Saved To-Day;
29) John The Revelator; 30) You're Gonna Need Somebody On Your Bond.
I do not generally insist on pushing pre-war
blues on people. It takes a long time and a lot of effort to get paid off.
Poor sound quality, monotonous sequences of interchangeable compositions, ascetic
arrangements — we'll just have to accept that this stuff is «not for
everybody», and that most listeners will simply be paying their respects by
throwing on a Charlie Patton or a Leadbelly record. We all suspect that
Leadbelly «felt» ʽMidnight Specialʼ much more intensely than John
Fogerty (if only because the latter never did actual time, unlike the former),
but Leadbelly's original gathers 200,000 views on Youtube while CCR's versions
count millions, and that's the way it's going to stay, and nothing's gonna
change that fact.
But there are certain moments when the general
rule has to be forfeited, and this is one of them. Everybody with even a passing interest in XXth century popular
music must know about Blind Willie Johnson, one of the most unique — and
mysterious — musical figures of that century. And everyone must own at least
one single-CD collection of his greatest songs (such as Dark Was The Night), although, considering that his entire legacy
consists of just thirty sides recorded over a three-year period, it might be
more productive to go straight away for Columbia's 2-CD Complete package. Yes, some of these thirty songs do sound the
same. No, this is not supposed to tire out the listener. Yes, this is
terrifying genius on the prowl. No, I'm being serious.
If you know your «classic rock» well enough,
you will probably recognize a good third of the titles straight away — Blind
Willie was covered quite extensively. Bob Dylan liked him for his grizzled
earthiness. Eric Clapton admired him for his delicate soulfulness. Led Zeppelin
respected him for his desperate madness. Nick Cave fancied him for his
apocalyptic attitude. Ry Cooder worshipped him for his transcendental
mysticism. And Peter, Paul and Mary just dug him because the songs were catchy
and all.
So what is the secret of Blind Willie's
popularity? In his short lifetime, he was never a massive commercial presence,
and post-mortem, he never succeeded in becoming a «legend» of Robert Johnson's
caliber, having steadily remained «the musician's musician». Most probably,
this is just because the man was too
weird for his own time, too far ahead of it for the average listener to
overcome the confusion and understand what it is really all about.
The first thing people will tell you is that Blind
Willie was a masterful slide player. According to legend, he preferred playing
with a knife on the strings rather than the proverbial «bottleneck», but this
is hard to verify by simply listening to the records. He did play a lot of
slide guitar, much more so than the average picking bluesman from the same time
— and it was hardly a coincidence that most of his material was thematically
in the «gospel blues» sub-genre: of all the numerous particular proofs that
properly played slide guitar is the champion of Soul in Sound, few manage to
be as convincing as Blind Willie Johnson's.
The second
thing is, of course, Blind Willie's voice. He had a natural tenor, which can be
heard on a handful of these songs, but most of the time he would intentionally
lower it to a gravelly «false bass», which sounded as if the guitar strings
were not the only thing across which
he was sliding that knife. Simply put, the man was there before Tom Waits,
before Captain Beefheart, before Howlin' Wolf, even before Charlie Patton — the
first well-known example of an artist playing hell with his voice for a nice
little horrorshow effect.
Of course, Blind Willie did not invent that effect. It all goes back to
apocalyptically minded old black preachers invoking the Old Testamental spirits
of Moses and the Prophets. But he was one of the first, if not the first, performer to put it on
record, singlehandedly responsible for creating the «dark gospel blues» style.
And, as far as I know, he still remains the single best representative of that
style, because gospel and blues soon went their own ways, with blues inheriting
most of the darkness and gospel turning to a more optimistic outlook on things,
for good reason — if all they sang in church was Blind Willie Johnson material,
Satanists would eventually start joining the Church instead of trying to burn
it down.
However, Johnson's most popular song is
ʽDark Was The Night, Cold Was The Groundʼ, where there is very little
singing as such — mostly just a series of wordless sighs and moans. Technically,
it's an impressionistic illustration of the sufferings of Jesus, but in
retrospect, it is probably the first «mood piece» ever put on record in popular
music history: call it «proto-ambient», if you like, created with just a series
of isolated slide licks that never come together in a rhythmic whole. Sure
can't tap your feet to that stuff.
Just feel lonely and lost in space.
His second
most popular song is probably ʽNobody's Fault But Mineʼ, built upon a
magnificent swirling slide riff, later burnt down to the ground and
reconstructed from the ashes by Led Zeppelin on Presence. Without the slide guitar, it would simply be one more
preachy message: "If I don't read it my soul be lost, nobody's fault but
mine". With the slide, you don't
even pay much attention to the lyrics — in fact, Blind Willie was also one of
the first people to introduce the practice of leaving certain vocal lines unfinished
and letting the guitar finish the message instead. Of course, the gravelly
voice, shredding your ear nerves, and the thin wail of the slide sound nothing
like each other. He's the man, and the slide is his woman, and they're both
unhappy in their own way, and... (this
should be followed by one of those key Marxist-tinged phrases about the music
reflecting the hundreds of years of poor underdogs and black slaves suffering,
but this review already looks stupid enough without having to run even more
stuff into the ground).
Speaking of women, on about a third of these
numbers Willie is accompanied by his wife, Willie B. Harris, who normally stands
a little farther away from the mike and provides «echoing» vocals (ʽJohn
The Revelatorʼ, etc.). This could be seen as a softening, «commercializing»
factor, but in reality, the contrast between her «normal» backup and Johnson's
earthy growl is sometimes even weirder than his solo numbers — on ʽChurch,
I'm Fully Saved To-Dayʼ it seems as if their parts were overdubbed from
two different performances, so dissimilar are the attitudes: the quiet, calm,
moderately pretty delivery of the wife against the animal growling of the
husband.
On the other hand, Willie was capable of tenderness — on ʽLet Your Light Shine On
Meʼ, he alternates tense growling with a delicate croon, and the
self-imposed laryngitis is not in evidence on ʽBye And Bye I'm Goin' To
See The Kingʼ, which, incidentally, also features some of his most
technically complex slide runs. This does not have any philosophical
implications — it only goes to show that the sequence of thirty seconds is not
as stubbornly monotonous as it could be. There are different tempos, different
keys, different vocal modulations, a little bit of ambience, Willie Harris'
support or lack thereof, songs you know from later covers, songs you don't know
from later covers, in short, you won't be bored unless you really want to.
The only thing that the progressive listener
has to bear with is that all of the
songs, indeed, are of a gospel nature. Blind Willie meant it seriously and
never succumbed to the pleasures of singing about black snakes, log cabins, and
ya-yas instead of doing «the right thing». But who cares? In a way, this
collection is the acoustic blues equivalent of Black Sabbath's Master Of Reality: Christian songs
delivered in a manner that is decidedly frightening and unsettling for most
good Christians. Whoever claimed that Robert Johnson's music sounded
«dangerous»? There is hardly a moment more dangerous-sounding in Depression-era
music than Blind Willie going "We done told you, God done warned you,
Jesus comin' soon". This here guy doesn't joke around with his Apocalypse,
he's earnestly waiting for it to spring out from behind the corner.
Total thumbs up — and repeat: this is one of the three
or four most important pre-war compilations that your collection might be
missing. In a way, it even sounds surprisingly modern: as I said, Blind Willie
was so far ahead of his time that, had they frozen him up before his death from
malaria in 1945, he'd have fit in very well inside today's lo-fi movement. Any
lo-fi aficionados out there? You don't know what you're missing.
BLIND WILLIE McTELL
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 1 (1927-1931)
1) Writin' Paper Blues; 2) Stole
Rider Blues; 3) Mama, 'Tain't Long Fo' Day; 4) Mr. McTell Got The
Blues (take 1); 5) Mr. McTell Got The Blues (take 2); 6) Three Women
Blues; 7) Dark Night Blues; 8) Statesboro Blues; 9) Loving Talking Blues;
10) Atlanta Strut; 11) Travelin' Blues; 12) Come On Around To My House Mama;
13) Kind Mama; 14) Teasing Brown; 15) Drive Away Blues; 16) This Is Not The
Stove To Brown Your Bread; 17) Love Changing Blues; 18) Talkin' To Myself; 19) Razor
Ball; 20) Southern Can Is Mine; 21) Broke Down Engine Blues; 22) Stomp Down
Rider; 23) Scarey Day Blues.
The usual way, these days, to learn about Blind
Willie McTell is through Bob Dylan — you have to become enough of a fan to get
around to The Bootleg Series, hear
how "no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell", and form
yourself the image of an old, weary, troubled, Old Testament-style
blueswailer, lambasting the evils of society with his art as nobody listens and
the hopelessly corrupt world crumbles all around his blind eyes and rusty
guitar.
Then you finally develop the incentive to go
check out the real Blind Willie
McTell, and if you only came to him after
the Dylan song (like I did, although the two experiences weren't directly
connected), you are in for quite a shock. The real Willie McTell, not the one invented by Dylan, but the one who
was actually born in Thomson, Georgia, on May 5, 1898, was nothing like that
image. Yes, he could occasionally
sing slow, moderately depressed blues, but in general, the music he played was
light, ragtime-influenced Piedmont blues, sung in a sweet, almost «romantic»
tenor that could even be mistaken for a white singer's voice.
(To get off the Dylan topic — if you really
want my opinion, I think that the protagonist of ʽBlind Willie
McTellʼ is not only a «collective-allegorical» figure, but is really much
closer in attitude to Blind Willie Johnson,
who was just as big an influence on Dylan as McTell and probably even more than
that, in the early days at least. It's simply that "no one can sing the
blues like Blind Willie Johnson"
does not fit into the song's rhythm-and-rhyme structure, and trivia like that
never bothered Bob for one second. He did cover McTell's repertoire with
ʽBroke Down Engineʼ and ʽDeliaʼ, but only ten years after the original recording of
ʽBlind Willie McTellʼ).
Anyway, Willie McTell was twenty-nine years old
when he first entered Victor Records' studio in Atlanta, and, unlike many, many
other bluesmen of the time who were more or less the same age when they started
out, Willie sounds exactly his age: in a blues world of raspers, howlers, growlers,
and grumblers he comes across as almost a crooner, except that there is a
light, pleasant nasal twang to his voice that prevents it from becoming overtly
sweet and sappy.
Arguably, the voice helps Willie to establish
an even sharper identity than his playing — which is perfectly adequate for a
Piedmont-style picker, but its only truly outstanding aspect is that McTell
mostly uses a 12-string guitar, so the overall sound is «fuller» and «busier»,
yet also more «fussy» than, say, Blind Boy Fuller's; to each his own choice of
favorite. Every now and then, though, Willie is practicing his inventiveness —
nowhere more so than on ʽAtlanta Strutʼ, a total classic of the
ragtime blues genre where Willie's guitar gradually builds up a complete
picture of life bustling on the streets of Atlanta, from crowing roosters to
slide-pickin' passers by.
Sympathetic, danceable, bouncy ragtime
entertainment stuff is certainly Willie's major trade during these early
years: ʽCome On Around To My Houseʼ, ʽKind Mamaʼ, ʽRazor
Bluesʼ, and ʽSouthern Can Is Mineʼ are all highlights of the
genre, even if all are essentially interchangeable and never venture far away
from standard formula. But compare Blind Boy Fuller's ʽLog Cabin
Bluesʼ with McTell's ʽCome On Around To My Houseʼ (essentially
the same song) and McTell clearly emerges as the more lyrical, «frail» type.
It's hard to imagine ladies swooning over Fuller, but Willie must have been
quite a charmer.
Of the more straightforward blues numbers,
ʽStatesboro Bluesʼ is quite well known for its popularization by
the Allman Brothers, but, as you can probably tell, the original has almost
nothing to do with the cover — McTell turns it into a mandolin-like ringfest,
where Duane Allman would later turn it into a launchpad for some mighty slide
riff exploration. It is rather ʽBroke Down Engineʼ that already
sounds like a highlight here, decades
before receiving the Dylan treatment — one of the most acutely «stressed»
numbers in Willie's repertoire. And again, even though the song is built on a
memorable guitar line, regularly interrupted by gloomy bass notes, it is the voice
that takes the cake: Willie cannot make it rumble, but he can make it tremble,
and when he is not conveying lightheartedness and happiness, he can sure as
heck convey «little man» insecurity and paranoia. In such moments, he sometimes
ends up reminding me of Ray Davies circa Muswell
Hillbillies, regardless of how appropriate the comparison really is.
Overall, it's fairly hard to talk about
individual songs, as usual, but, unlike
similar collections by Blind Boy Fuller, McTell's recordings, assembled in
chronological order, are easier to listen to without skipping track after
track. It might have something to do with his vocal versatility, or, perhaps,
with the relatively high amount of playing freedom he allowed himself — paying
less attention to total precision and more to expressivity. In any case, the
presence of ʽAtlanta Strutʼ alone is sufficient ground for a thumbs up,
and when you have it on the same disc with ʽBroke Down Engineʼ and
ʽStatesboro Bluesʼ, not even a whole bunch of languid filler could
pull them back down.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 2 (1931-1933)
1) Rough Alley Blues; 2)
Experience Blues; 3) Painful Blues; 4) Low Rider's Blues; 5) Georgia Rag; 6)
Low Down Blues; 7) Rollin' Mama Blues; 8) Lonesome Day Blues; 9) Mama, Let Me
Scoop For You; 10) Searching The Desert For The Blues; 11) Warm It Up To Me;
12) It's Your Time To Worry; 13) It's A Good Little Thing; 14) You Was Born To
Die; 15) Lord Have Mercy If You Please; 16) Don't You See How This World Made A
Change; 17) Savannah Mama; 18) Broke Down Engine; 19) Broke Down Engine No. 2;
20) My Baby's Gone; 21) Love-Makin' Mama; 22) Death Room Blues; 23) Death Cell
Blues; 24) Lord, Send Me An Angel.
The second volume here is every bit as good as
the first; together they form the main bulk of Willie's legacy, and it would
all be going down from there. Still from 1931, here comes ʽGeorgia
Ragʼ, a rewritten take on what used to be ʽWabash Ragʼ in the
hands of Blind Blake — now it is faster, fussier, and Willie's trembling tenor
gives it an extra whiff of tenseness, even madness, that makes his performance
less formulaic and more personal; an interesting feeling, that, considering
that the song is essentially just another harmless dance tune.
Both on this session and on the ones that are
dated to 1933, McTell is regularly accompanied by female singers — Mary Willis,
Ruth Day, or his own wife, Kate Williams (also known as «Ruby Glaze», unless
that was really a different gal, which is still a matter of debate). The result
is a batch of appropriately salacious slow-tempo blues (ʽRollin' Mama
Bluesʼ, etc.) on which the pair exchanges politically incorrect double
entendres; elsewhere, the lady singer just supplies occasional one-liners as
sarcastic «counterpoints» to McTell's lyrical outpouring (ʽSearching The
Desert For The Bluesʼ) or sings backup on ragtime choruses (ʽWarm It
Up To Meʼ). If there is any general effect from this, it is only a
gradual dissipation of McTell's «loner» image — this way, he comes across as a
cheery guy who likes himself some female company. For comparison, somebody like
Blind Lemon Jefferson comes across as a morose guy who only sings about getting himself some female
company... but is a bit too scary to ever get any. (Which wasn't true in real
life, of course, but we are talking about artistic personae here, not about
real people of flesh and blood).
Other points of note involve two sides of
blues-gospel material recorded in tandem with Curley Weaver (ʽLord Have
Mercyʼ, in particular, has some nice, stinging slide guitar);
ʽSavannah Mamaʼ, arguably featuring Willie's best slide licks on
record — that honey-smooth intro, in particular, has entered the repertoire of
just about every active slide player on the blues-rock scene; and two more
takes on the never-out-of-fashion ʽBroke Down Engineʼ (at least the
recording quality has somewhat improved).
But the most famous piece is probably
ʽDeath Cell Bluesʼ — for easily understandable social reasons. The
funny thing is, Blind Willie radiated so much optimism at his peak that even
this bleak tale of an innocent fella hanging around death row conveys no feeling
of panic, depression, or despair. Then again, that might just be the point —
where else do you have that one perfect spot to stay cool, calm, and collected
other than in your little death cell? A double-sided record with ʽBroke
Down Engineʼ on Side A and ʽDeath Cell Bluesʼ on Side B could
aspire to the status of «the most depressed pre-war single, bar none», but
Willie wouldn't have it.
If there is
depression, it is hidden so deep that you'll have to wait for Your Official
Guide To The Blues to reassure you that Blind Willie McTell does personify the
social troubles and personal humiliation of the Little (Black) Man. It's simply
that it is hard for us to discern without the help of the Official Guide. But
with or without external aid, Vol. 2
is a thumbs up
— a pleasant, upbeat, merry little collection that implies sadness rather than conveys
it, a clever artistic trick that many a present day indie kid could seriously
benefit from.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 3 (1933-1935)
1) B & O Blues, No. 2 (take
1); 2) B & O Blues, No. 2 (take 2); 3) Weary Hearted Blues; 4) Bell Street
Lightnin'; 5) Southern Can Mama; 6) Runnin' Me Crazy; 7) East St. Louis Blues;
8) Ain't It Grand To Be A Christian; 9) We Got To Meet Death One Day (take 1);
10) We Got To Meet Death One Day (take 2); 11) Don't Let Nobody Turn You
Around; 12) I Got Religion, I'm So Glad; 13) Dying Gambler; 14) God Don't Like
It; 15) Bell Street Blues; 16) Let Me Play With Yo' Yo-Yo; 17) Lay Some Flowers
On My Grave; 18) Ticket Agent Blues; 19) Cold Winter Day; 20) Your Time To
Worry; 21) Cooling Board Blues; 22) Hillbilly Willie's Blues.
Hardly essential, but still somewhat worth the
while: there is nothing of importance or specific interest that Willie could
heap on top of his legacy from late 1933 to 1935 — but he was still versatile,
young-sounding, and occasionally inspired with his instrument and his pipes. So
even if a large chunk of these tunes consists of re-recordings under slightly
transfigured titles (ʽSouthern Can Mamaʼ, ʽYour Time To Worryʼ,
etc.), they are still modestly amusing if the original versions happen not to
be available.
On the other
hand, if you do play the earlier ʽSouthern Can Is Mineʼ back-to-back
with the newer ʽSouthern Can Mamaʼ, the difference is striking — the
1935 recording is somewhat slower, a bit lazier, and there are signs of deterioration in Willie's voice: it is obviously
lower, the diction is a little slurred, and there is a nasty quiver in there
somewhere which, unfortunately, betrays a preoccupation with the bottle that
might have been far stronger than preoccupation with his music. In the light of
this suspicion, tunes like ʽBell Street Bluesʼ ("I live down in
Bell Street Alley, just as drunk as I can be") take on an autobiographic
sheen — not that the whole thing were somewhat unpredictable among pre-war
bluesmen (or post-war, for that matter).
Quite a large section here, most of it dating
from a single session in 1935, consists of gospel material, where Willie is
joined by his wife Kate — their duet sounding like an intentional imitation of
the style developed by Blind Willie Johnson and Willie Harris, but far less
successful: neither McTell's guitar runs, even when he switches to slide, nor
his whiskey-addled vocals, nor the pharyngeal singing style of Kate can stand
competition with the veritable master of the genre. Fortunately, none of these
Lord-addressed blues sermons would stop Willie from asking his gal to ʽLet
Me Play With Yo' Yo-Yoʼ ("I will let you play with mine") in
between professing his gladness about getting religion and asking us to
ʽLay Some Flowers On My Graveʼ. That's what we call a real dedication to the cause.
Possibly out of being desperate for a hit,
McTell even turns to country — ʽHillbilly Willie's Bluesʼ not only
sounds like something out of Fiddlin' John Carson's repertoire, but Willie even
attempts to fake a white Southern accent, maybe relying on the fact that his normal voice always sounded relatively
«non-black». It's... an odd oddity, or something, and it may not be
coincidental that it was also his last recording to be made in about five
years.
In the end, the only «classic» performance on
the entire Vol. 3 that deserves to
be heard is ʽEast St. Louis Bluesʼ, recorded with Curley Weaver and
featuring a particularly sensitive-delicate delivery — even the lyrics here
are quite complex for a generic old blues song: "she tried to make me
bleed by the rattlings of her tongue" is one hell of a line, and the whole
thing is tender, bittersweet and intimate on some hard-to-understand level.
Alas, it was recorded in 1933, and exactly one year on from that, Blind Willie
McTell was pretty much done as a «force to be reckoned with» — any album that
begins with the likes of ʽEast St. Louis Bluesʼ and ends with the
likes of ʽHillbilly Willieʼ would suggest that even to a reviewer
utterly unfamiliar with the facts.
THE COMPLETE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS RECORDS (1940)
1) Just As Well Get Ready; 2)
Monologue On Accidents; 3) Boll Weevil; 4) Delia; 5) Dying Crapshooters Blues;
6) Will Fox; 7) I Got To Cross The River Jordan; 8) Monologue On Old Songs; 9)
Amazing Grace; 10) Monologue On The History Of The Blues; 11) King Edward
Blues; 12) Murderer's Home Blues; 13) Kill-It-Kid Rag; 14) I Got To Cross De
River O' Jordan.
There is an extremely interesting moment here,
at the very beginning of the record, when John Lomax, armed with vintage
recording equipment, is trying to press Blind Willie into remembering
«complaining songs», specifically, complaining about «colored people mistreated
by whites». Then it sort of turns out that Blind Willie doesn’t know any.
Lomax, audibly stupefied, keeps on pushing — “you don’t know any complaining songs? Something like
ʽAin’t It Hard To Be A Niggerʼ?” Nope. The only «complaining» songs,
says Willie, “have them all together, they have references to everybody”.
Which is totally true, actually, not just in
Willie’s case, but almost everybody’s — the racial issue on these pre-war
records is practically non-existent, and 99% of the “complaining songs” mostly
complain about being down on one’s luck — women problems, job problems,
sometimes even political problems, but never
skin color problems; and this allows people like Blind Willie McTell and, say,
Jimmie Rodgers easily develop a certain spiritual unity, the white man’s problems
being essentially the same as the black man’s. And it’s not even a question of
tabooing the issue for fear of retribution — it’s simply a fact of accepting
segregation as an unshakable norm, something that is now hard to imagine even
in those «wild» places where Blind Willie spent his childhood, but was fairly
common in 1940.
What was still not all that common in 1940 were travelling ethnographers and
musicologists, seeking out «local talent» to help them preserve musical
folklore; Lomax had already made his own reputation at the time, but few people
followed in his footsteps, since few people were aware that, already back then, «folk wisdom» was on its way out —
in a matter of two more decades, it would complete its migration from cotton
fields and steel mills to college campuses and Village coffeehouses. It does
seem like Blind Willie, who hadn’t been able to get a new record deal for five
years already, was aware, and eagerly took the chance. On this relatively short
collection he winds his way through a rather diverse selection (none of these
songs show up on his official records from 1927 to 1935), occasionally going
off into monologues or brief interviews on the history of the blues movement in
general and his own role in it in particular.
Nothing on here is essential, but the whole
thing could have been much worse. Lomax doesn’t get into Willie’s way all that
much, especially after the «complaining songs» fiasco; the monologues are not
particularly informative, certainly not for the modern Wikipedianist, but are
fortunately short and few (besides, McTell's vision and arrangement of the
chronology of the blues is an interesting bit to listen to); and the songs,
as I already said, are fairly diverse — ʽDying Crapshooters Bluesʼ
is a Jimmie Rodgers «jailhouse-blues» type number, ʽWill Foxʼ is old Appalachean
folk dance style or something, ʽKill-It-Kidʼ is Willie's trademark
reggae style, ʽI Got To Cross The River Jordanʼ is, understandably,
in the gospel vein, and there is even a little original number that Willie
dedicated to the honorable King Edward after the abdication crisis of 1936
(nice of Lomax to come along just in time to record it). The man even plays a
brief slide guitar version of ʽAmazing Graceʼ, sounding not unlike
Blind Willie Johnson (just add some deep moaning and it will be almost like
ʽDark Was The Nightʼ).
In the end, it might not be quite a «genuine Blind
Willie McTell album» — rather, it's McTell giving his own account on the music
he grew up with, kinda like Paul McCartney playing Buddy Holly songs on an
acoustic guitar before the camera: useful for kids who ain't never heard of Buddy
Holly, but not all that worthy on its own. But, of course, McTell has the clear
advantage, since many of these numbers simply weren't recorded in his childhood
— and he works all these styles with soul, competence, and humor. Thumbs up.
ATLANTA TWELVE STRING (1949; 1972)
1) Kill
It Kid; 2) The Razor Ball; 3) Little
Delia; 4) Broke Down Engine Blues; 5) Dying Crapshooter's Blues; 6) Pinetop's
Boogie Woogie; 7) Blues Around Midnight; 8) Last Dime Blues; 9) On The Cooling
Board; 10) Motherless Children Have A Hard Time; 11) I Got To Cross The River
Jordan; 12) You Got To Die; 13) Ain't It Grand To Live A Christian; 14) Pearly
Gates; 15) Soon This Morning.
Willie's post-war recordings, typically for
most acoustic blues performers who peaked in the 1930s, were few; only two session
periods are generally known, one of which, from 1949, is well represented on
this album (as a single LP, it was released already in 1972), all of the songs
having been recorded for the newly-formed Atlantic label, but only a couple of
them released at the original time of recording.
The good news: since the label was Atlantic and
the year was 1949, this is the cleanest, sharpest-sounding McTell album of them
all. If you cannot stand hiss or crackle, Atlanta
Twelve String is your safest bet for assessing McTell's playing style —
particularly convenient since he remembers to re-record some of his biggest
hits (ʽBroke Down Engineʼ, ʽRazor Ballʼ) before heading off
into the barroom / gospel blues directions that he already tried to popularize
in 1940.
The bad news is that his voice continues to
show signs of serious weathering. Still expressive, but seriously lower than it
used to be, it no longer has that unique youthfulness of old, yet at the same
time is not gruff and rough enough to compete with the Ruffled Old Bluesman
image of his peers. As for the playing, it is still precise and technical, but
after the rousing opener (ʽKill-It-Kidʼ), he does not do any more
ragtime numbers, and some of his tricks are not represented here at all — you
will still have to search for the likes of ʽGeorgia Ragʼ to
appreciate the man's full potential.
Still, at least one of the tracks here is
utterly wonderful — ʽPinetop's Boogie Woodieʼ, a musical / vocal
guide to a traditional dance; not because it is particularly complex or
emotional, it just got the spirit, sounding like a little time capsule back to
the age where you could be taught your dance moves by an old black guy with a
guitar. But yeah, that old black guy does do a beautiful sprinkly-chimy guitar
move at the end of each round.
There are a couple extra Blind Willie Johnson
tributes here (ʽMotherless Childrenʼ), and some stately solemn gospel
anthems (ʽPearly Gatesʼ), but they are not as successful. For all the
diversity of his interests, McTell was a playful performer, and whenever his
performance lacks playfulness, it inevitably loses out to competition. In a
way, he was doomed by his own age — as he got more and more «mature», he was
drifting into all these «serious» genres where he did not have as much
competence. "She's a real kind mama, lookin' for another man" is, and
will always be, as great as Willie McTell ever gets, and these 1949 sessions,
unfortunately, have very few such songs. Not that there are any downright bad
performances, though — and, like I said, the very fact that this is the only
«clean» recording from the man that one is ever going to get automatically
makes it eligible for a modest thumbs up.
LAST SESSION (1956; 1961)
1) Baby, It Must Be Love; 2)
The Dying Crapshooter's Blues; 3) Don't Forget It; 4) Kill It Kid; 5) That Will
Never Happen No More; 6) Goodbye Blues; 7) Salty Dog; 8) Early Life; 9) Beedle
Um Bum; 10) A Married Man's A Fool; 11) A To Z Blues; 12) Wabash Cannonball;
13) Pal Of Mine.
Blind Willie died of a stroke in 1959, after
having served a couple years as preacher in one of Atlanta's churches; so we
are rather lucky to have this disc, the results of a homebrewed session recorded
in the home of an Atlanta record store manager in 1956. Long out of favor with
record studios, Willie seems to have been simply playing on street corners,
when he got this last chance to leave another trace of himself for mankind —
captured on a simple tape recorder, but in surprisingly good quality (the
store manager must have been a good technician). Even more surprising is that
Willie himself was in pretty good quality on that day: there is hardly a moment
during these thirty minutes where you'd get the impression of wallowing in
unsurmountable misery.
In fact, I'd even go as far as notice that even
his voice is in slightly better shape than it is on the 1949 recordings: it
reflects the expected age-caused deepening / lowering, but there are no shades
of hoarseness whatsoever — and he definitely does not sound like a fifty-eight year old here, bent with age, worries,
alcoholism, and public rejection.
This might be the only reason why one would
want to take a listen to this Last
Session: most of the songs are either re-recordings of earlier stuff, or
sound close enough to the early stuff to be interpreted as re-recordings.
Interestingly, he concentrates here mostly on uptempo dance or «joke» numbers —
except for ʽDyin' Crapshooter Bluesʼ, preceded by a long story about
how the writing of the song was based on real life events, and the melancholic
blues sermon of ʽA Married Man's A Foolʼ, almost everything else is
in the jiggly-funny way of things, and that's good — we have concentrated on
old bluesmen singing about their troubles way too much to properly notice the
other side of the mirror.
So, overall, this album does not make much
sense or bring on much enjoyment outside the context, but it is an extremely
important last chapter in the story of the life of one William Samuel McTier,
who did not quite live such a life of bluesy mystery as Bob Dylan would have
one believe, but whose real life and
achievements, once you contrast them with the life and achievements of his
peers, might actually seem all the more intriguing by their relative lack of
intrigue. The man led a decent, quiet life with a well-balanced ratio of joy
and sadness where joy would always be coming out on top in the end. Hell of a
healthy attitude, I'd say.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 1 (1927-1931)
1) Good Old Turnip Greens; 2)
Bungalow Blues; 3) Mary Blues; 4) Electrocuted Blues (Electric Chair Blues); 5)
Corrine Corrina; 6) East Jackson Blues; 7) I'm An Old Bumble Bee; 8) Mean
Feeling Blues; 9) I've Got The Whole World In My Hand; 10) She's Your Cook But
She Burns My Bread Sometimes; 11) Same Thing That The Cats Fight About; 12)
Time Is Tight Like That; 13) My Pencil Won't Write No More; 14) Banana In Your
Fruit Basket; 15) Pin In Your Cushion; 16) Pussy Cat Blues; 17) Ram Rod Daddy;
18) Loveless Love; 19) I Love That Thing; 20) Backache Blues; 21) Sorry
Feeling Blues; 22) Baby, When You Marry; 23) Boot It; 24) Twist It, Baby.
Armenter Chatmon, better known as Bo Carter,
was hardly what you could call a great blues singer. He had a typical
blueswailer's voice, standard professional phrasing, and an undisputed feeling
for the music, but no individuality whatsoever — where a Charlie Patton or a
Blind Willie McTell, or maybe even a Leroy Carr are always recognizable through
their unique tones, modes, and tricks, Bo Carter is just a «generic» singing
bluesman.
Moreover, Armenter Chatmon was hardly what you could
call a great blues player. He certainly knew his fair share of chords, and he
could play lead lines well enough over rhythm chords for the listener not to
get too annoyed, but he mostly played slow and steady, and when he played fast,
he was no match for the likes of Blind Blake, Lonnie Johnson, or even Blind
Willie McTell. He did know how to play it closer to the blues ideal (for black
audiences), or to the country standards (for white ones), but his limits in
both directions seem pretty obvious.
Furthermore, Armenter Chatmon did relatively
little to advance any of the genres that he perused. Of the 24 songs on this
first volume, for instance, maybe only about four or five follow distinctly
different melodies, and not a single one goes one step beyond simple formulaic
entertainment. Try as you might, you will not find the «pain and anguish and
suffering of the oppressed black minorities» in this man's music: most of his
recording life, he just worked for his money and seemed to be quite happy and
content when he could get some. (Major exception on his earliest recordings:
ʽGood Old Turnip Greensʼ is an old folk song that deals precisely
with the issue of segregation and social injustice. But it is funny how
quickly he went from that to... er...).
So why
did he get it? How come did Bo Carter become one of his era's most famous, most
prolific (over 100 sides cut in about 10 years), most publicly beloved
performers? The answer is simple: Bo Carter was a really dirty, salacious,
innuendo-scattering son-of-a-bitch. As popular as all those double entendres
were on the blues market, Bo Carter had everybody else eating from the palm of
his hand in that department. From "let me put my banana in your fruit
basket, then I'll be satisfied" to "let me stick my pin in your
cushion, 'cause your cushion's so soft and warm" to the less joyous
"the lead's all gone, this pencil won't write no more", this Man
(with a big M) meant so much business that buying his records must have been
the next best thing for those who couldn't lay their hands on a smuggled copy
of Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Okay, so other than that, Bo had his merits. He
played with the Mississippi Sheiks, for black and white audiences alike, which
earned him extra popularity. He recorded the original ʽCorrine, Corrinaʼ,
accompanied by Papa Charlie McCoy on fiddle and vocals, back in 1928 (although
he certainly did not write the song
— just copyrighted it). And he was capable of authentic melancholy blues as
well (ʽSorry Feeling Bluesʼ). And he could even yodel in a credible
fashion (ʽBaby, When You Marryʼ).
So there may be occasional reasons other than «historic
snicker» to listen to this stuff. But not a lot of them. The main reason are
the words — you'll have to search high and low to find that many sexual
innuendos crammed on one disc. It is hard to tell just how many of them were
invented by Bo in person (I think he started out with the traditional stuff,
then took off on an individual flight with all the references to pencils, pins,
and ram rods), but this was definitely an area where he could be both an avid
collector and an ardent inventor at the same time.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 2 (1931-1934)
1) So
Long, Baby, So Long; 2) The Law Gonna Step On You; 3) Pig Meat Is What I Crave;
4) Howling Tom Cat Blues; 5) Ants In My Pants; 6) Blue Runner Blues; 7) I've
Got A Case Of Mashin' It; 8) You Don't Love Me No More; 9) What Kind Of Scent
Is This; 10) Pretty Baby; 11) I Want You To Know; 12) Last Go Round; 13) I Keep
On Spending My Change; 14) Baby, How Can It Be?; 15) Bo Carter Special; 16) Beans;
17) Nobody's Business; 18) Queen Bee;
19) Tellin' You 'Bout It; 20) Please Don't Drive Me From Your Door; 21) Pin In
Your Cushion; 22) Banana In The Fruit Basket.
This and the following reviews are going to be
quite short, because, frankly, once you've heard one Bo Carter song — okay, two
— all right, three — you've heard
three Bo Carter songs, and you'd have to be a seriously obsessed person to crave for more Bo Carter material with
the same force that he keeps craving for more pig meat (and we all know the
deep metaphor underlying «pig meat»... unless this is really subtle
anti-Semitic propaganda, hiding under a veil of sexual urges. Makes one want to
check out if Bo ever was on Henry Ford's payroll. Alternatively, ʽPig Meat
Is What I Craveʼ would be a great title for a hardcore punk album).
One couldn't accuse Bo of a complete lack of
creativity: for instance, it takes a wicked sense of humor to take
ʽSittin' On Top Of The Worldʼ and transform it into a song called
ʽAnts In My Pantsʼ. And once you get around to his remake of the
ragtime classic ʽLog Cabin Bluesʼ, here retitled as
ʽBeansʼ and featuring such lyrics as "I don't want no more
navy beans / Boys I don't want no more / I don't want no more navy beans / They're
'bout to make my stomach sore / I ate them last night / And the night before / When
I got through, I couldn't shut my door", Mr. Bo Carter suddenly emerges as
the Weird Al Yankovic of his generation — except that, unlike Weird Al, Bo is
rarely mentioned as a «parodist» in blues histories.
But that is really
what he is, and this is why his lyrical, plaintive, serious side (ʽSo
Long, Baby, So Longʼ; ʽYou Don't Love Me No Moreʼ) is never as
interesting as his goofy, risqué side, which lets you in on a wholly
different meaning for the word «broadcast» (ʽBo Carter Specialʼ –
"Bo Carter is a man, he broadcasts all over this land... when I get to use
my broadcaster, it goes all round and round, and the women receiving are sure
to put their men down"), or sets you a-thinkin' on the intricacies of
female anatomy (ʽWhat Kind Of Scent Is Thisʼ) less explicitly, but arguably
more productively, than any given textbook on the subject.
From a pure musical
standpoint, the best numbers here are guitar-fiddle duets with Papa Charlie:
ʽTellin' You 'Bout Itʼ, ʽQueen Beeʼ, and a couple others — I
would say that Bo was a better team player than solo artist, and hearing his
simple, but steady 12-bar picking serving as base for Charlie's inventive runs
and flourishes is a mini-delight. Unfortunately, most of the 1931-1934 tracks
are solo efforts, and are generally only as good as the lyrics are (and by
«good» I, of course, mean «salacious»). A couple of them are also in awful
sound quality (ʽI Want You To Knowʼ is played at about twice less the
volume than the other songs, for instance), although that is not the general
rule. Overall, Vol. 2 is a notch
below Vol. 1 — simply not enough
elegant fiddle duets or dirty macho jokes to properly stand the competition.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 3 (1934-1936)
1) Howlin'
Tom Cat Blues; 2) Don't Cross Lay Your Daddy; 3) Who Broke The Latch?; 4) Don't
Do It No More; 5) Skin Ball Blues; 6) Shoe Blues; 7) Please Warm My Wiener; 8) She's
Gonna Crawl Back Home To You; 9) Let Me Roll Your Lemon; 10) Mashing That Thing;
11) Blue Runner Blues; 12) Fifty-Fifty With Me; 13) To Her Burying Ground; 14) When
Your Left Eye Go To Jumping; 15) Ride My Mule; 16) T Baby Blues; 17) I Get The
Blues; 18) Spotted Sow Blues; 19) Rolling Blues; 20) All Around Man; 21) Fat
Mouth Blues; 22) You Better Know Your Business.
"Won't you please warm my wiener, 'cause
it really don't feel right cold". This just might be Bo's badassest
refrain of all time; in the «gross» department, the tune certainly beats
ʽLet Me Roll Your Lemonʼ, recorded around the same time — we all know
the endless references to rolling and squeezing lemons from the blues-rock
explosion of the 1960s / 1970s, but not even Robert Plant seemed to mention
anything about «warming wieners» either during studio hours or over the course
of endless live improvisations. But wait, what are we talking about? Surely
that was just an innocent tune, penned by Bo for a hot dog stand publicity
campaign. Every good wiener needs some advertising, after all.
The bad news — the very bad news — is, however, that in 1935 Bo significantly cut down
on suggestive innuendos and re-oriented his lyrics towards more
«family-friendly», traditional blues clichés, even going as far as to
re-write some of his softporn classics: thus, ʽPin In Your Cushionʼ
becomes ʽI Get The Bluesʼ, and «your cushion is so soft and warm» becomes «your loving is so soft and warm» — now ain't that a shame? Self-censorship in action.
In a flash, this removes the only good reason
why anyone should ever give a damn about Bo Carter in the first place.
Everything else remains — the decent level of playing, the pleasant vocal style
— but is hardly enough to perk up any blues connoisseur's specific interest.
The overall formula varies only once, on ʽTo Her Burying Groundʼ and
the next track, where Bo is accompanied, for the first time ever, by a honky
tonk piano, trying on the shoes of an urban blues performer à la Leroy Carr. But who really
cares?
Okay, so at some point he does ask his baby to
ʽride my muleʼ, and there is a ʽSpotted Sow Bluesʼ which is
somewhat of a variation on ʽLittle Red Roosterʼ, except it does seem
to correctly refer to female rather than male anatomy. But honestly, neither of
these seems half as exploratory and inventive as the masterful fleshy
allegories produced by the man in his early years. Hence, the 1935-36 period
for Bo Carter can be characterized as a «slump». I mean, Frank Zappa, when he
was not pouring forth obscenities, could at least shut up 'n' play his guitar.
But what's a Bo Carter to do if he runs out of dirty jokes? It's amazing that
he could actually keep up the same steady flow of recordings.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 4 (1936-1938)
1) It's Too Wet; 2) Dinner
Blues; 3) Ain't Nobody Got It; 4) Cigarette Blues; 5) Pussy Cat Blues; 6) The
Ins And Outs Of My Girl; 7) All Around Man (part 2); 8) Bo Carter's Advice; 9)
Doubled Up In A Knot; 10) Worried G Blues; 11) Your Biscuits Are Big Enough For
Me; 12) Don't Mash My Digger So Deep; 13) Flea On Me; 14) Got To Work
Somewhere; 15) Sue Cow; 16) Shake 'Em On Down; 17) A Girl For Every Day Of The
Week; 18) Trouble In Blues; 19) World In A Jug; 20) Who's Been Here; 21)
Whiskey Blues; 22) Shoo That Chicken.
Vol.
4 is clearly an improvement
over Vol. 3 — simple statistics
shows that Bo is actively back to the world of innuendos and double entendres:
even one lone title like ʽThe Ins And Outs Of My Girlʼ is enough to
regain the honors, and that's not even mentioning the actual lyrics ("She
got something that I really do love / It ain't in her stocking, and you know
it's just above").
Musically, the 1936-38 sessions are very
sparse: no harmonica or piano accompaniment, and Bo's own guitar skills were not
exactly improving (although everything is perfectly listenable as usual). But
lyrically, he was on such a roll that it only makes sense to turn this review
into a set of mini-quotes. Say, from ʽCigarette Bluesʼ: "Just
draw on my cigarette baby / Until you make my good ashes come". Or from
ʽYour Biscuits Are Good Enough For Meʼ: "Some men don't care for
biscuits / They like the doggone fat bun". From ʽAll Around
Manʼ: "Now I ain't no milkman / I ain't no milkman's son / I can pull
your titties till the milkman comes". Want some more? Well, think of this
as the «free tour introduction».
Only a tiny handful of songs veer away from the
carnal subject this time — of which only one number, ʽGot To Work
Somewhereʼ, deserves special mention: it is Bo's first (I think) and most
straightforward number that directly addresses Depression issues, and although
he performs it the same «humble» way as he sings and plays everything else, it
shouldn't pass by unnoticed: without an occasional excourse into tragedy of
this kind, Bo's image of a «sexual clown» could have passed for genuine
identity rather than an entertaining act. But this here song gives us a guy in
the same turmoil and distress like everybody else at the time — "beneath
this mask I am wearing a frown" indeed.
Of course, one frown is just enough: half a
dozen more sides like this and the effect would have been washed out with
boredom. So it's a good thing that ʽGot To Workʼ is stuck here
somewhere in the middle, and that the collection starts off with ʽIt's Too
Wetʼ (what is too wet? Why, Bo's
shirt is too wet — what did you think of?..) and ends with the
equally playful ʽShoo That Chickenʼ (because he interferes with
"my loving at night"). Welcome back to the state of predictable
reliability, Mr. Carter. The 1930s wouldn't have been what they were without
you.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 5 (1938-1940)
1) Let's Get Drunk Again; 2) Some
Day; 3) Old Devil; 4) Country Fool; 5) Santa Claus; 6) Be My Salty Dog; 7) Five
Dollar Bill; 8) Ways Like A Crawfish; 9) Brown-Skin Woman; 10) Lucille,
Lucille; 11) The Country Farm Blues; 12) Border Of New Mexico Blues; 13)
Arrangement For Me Blues; 14) Lock The Lock; 15) Trouble, Oh Trouble; 16) Baby
Ruth; 17) My Baby; 18) Policy Blues; 19) Tush Hog Blues; 20) My Little Mind;
21) Honey; 22) What You Want Your Daddy To Do.
At some time in the mid- or late 1930s, Bo
Carter is reported to have become Blind Bo Carter; and, although the blindness
factor never prevented many of his competitors to find and hold on to success,
for Bo it was one of the factors that contributed to the decline of his career
— probably coupled with other reasons, of course, such as obligatory alcohol
abuse and the general decline in popularity of acoustic blues. As late as 1940,
he was still recording at his usual rate for the Bluebird label, but then the
recordings stop abruptly, and for the next twenty-four years right until his
death in 1964, there is no information on any subsequent recording activities.
Whether it was the blindness or other personal
troubles haunting him at the time, recordings from these two last years are not
much fun: once again, Bo reverts to «generic» blues, leaving behind most of his
colorful double entendres. Many of these tunes are, in fact, recorded in the
Robert Johnson vein: it wouldn't be surprising to learn that Bo caught wind of
Robert's death, and tried to recast himself as Johnson's successor — at the
very least, some of these tracks so deliberately try to copy Johnson's melodies
and moods (e. g. ʽBorder Of New Mexico Bluesʼ rewrites ʽSweet
Home Chicagoʼ) that a coincidence is unthinkable.
Not that this works as anything other than a
curio: Bo's vocals do not have the faintest trace of Johnson's insecurity /
vulnerability, and his playing, although, perhaps, at this point not any less
complex per se than Johnson's, is nowhere near his choppy, aggressive style.
Robert Johnson was, as far as we can tell, a possessed man; Bo Carter was just
an agreeable country sleazeball.
Anyway, the only track on this last volume that
stands out at least a little is ʽLet's Get Drunk Againʼ, because Bo
did relatively few «drinking songs» in his career, and for this one, adopted
his best «crooner / yodeller» pose and even thought of an original guitar
flourish. Another track that could
have been a standout is ʽOld Devil Bluesʼ, quite an ancient folk
standard with some impressive finger-flashing picking — except it also fits in
the «why can't I be like Robert?» category and inevitably loses out in the
competition due to lackluster singing.
All in all, once you take all the five volumes
into consideration, the final verdict is obvious — pick ten to twelve of the
man's riskiest songs about wieners, cushions, biscuits, and pig meat, throw in
two or three «serious» exercises for good measure, and you got yourself more of
The Bo Carter Experience than you'll ever need. Maybe if the old man actually knew his records would be collected,
remastered, and reissued long past his glory days, he would bother assigning
them a little more individuality. Then again, he probably wouldn't give a damn
anyway, as long as the public kept buying the stuff.
BO DIDDLEY
1) Bo Diddley; 2) I'm A Man;
3) Bring It To Jerome; 4) Before You Accuse Me; 5) Hey Bo Diddley; 6) Dearest
Darling; 7) Hush Your Mouth; 8) Say Boss Man; 9) Diddley Daddy; 10) Diddy Wah
Diddy; 11) Who Do You Love; 12) Pretty Thing.
I must say
that I have never been a huge fan of the «Bo Diddley beat». When it comes to
rocking the very foundations of my existence, Chuck Berry's riffs, Jerry Lee
Lewis' piano assassinations, and Scottie Moore's rockabilly backing of Elvis'
legend have always taken precedence over this somewhat rigid formula —
essentially just an electrified rendering of a traditional Juba dance. At
first, of course, it was a magnificent invention: ʽBo Diddleyʼ (the
song), recorded in 1955, sounded like nothing else at the time. The numerous
variations that followed, though, rarely, if ever, improved upon the original
impression — so that even most of the British fans of Bo Diddley were usually
quite content with covering just one of them (the Stones only did
ʽMonaʼ; the Animals only did ʽPretty Thingʼ, and then
wrote ʽThe Story Of Bo Diddleyʼ as a joke response).
What is much harder to realize — not until you
decide to seriously immerse yourself in the man's creativity — is that there is
much, much more to Bo Diddley than the proverbial, and occasionally tiresome
«Diddley beat». For instance, this here «debut album», which is not really a
proper album but rather just a collection of several of his A- and B-sides
from 1955 to 1958, only has three out of twelve tunes following the D.b.:
ʽBo Diddleyʼ, ʽHush Your Mouthʼ, and ʽPretty
Thingʼ. Of the others, some could
have had the D.b. (ʽHey Bo Diddleyʼ, for instance, predictably sung
to the same vocal melody as ʽBo Diddleyʼ), but don't. Others are
altogether quite removed from the formula, and follow different paths of
inspiration — many of them, in my own view, far more inspirational than the
D.b.
Like Chuck Berry, Bo was somewhat of an anomaly
for Chicago's Chess Records, specializing in less explicitly dance-oriented
electric bluesmen, from Muddy to Wolf to Little Walter to Buddy Guy. But they
hooked onto him pretty hard all the same: rock'n'roll was becoming a household
name, and these astute Chicago businessmen needed their own rock stars to stand
the competition. Not that Bo couldn't or wouldn't do straightahead blues. There
is at least one example on this record — ʽBefore You Accuse Meʼ,
although even here Bo could not resist speeding up the tempo so that the final
result looks like a cross between old-fashioned blues and new-fashioned boogie.
(The 1970 cover version by Creedence is appropriately more sharp and polished,
but the song still firmly belongs in 1957).
But Bo's biggest blues-based hit was anything but straightahead — ʽI'm A
Manʼ takes Muddy's ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ and basically just
deconstructs it; it's as if Bo heard the song and said, "that first bar,
man, that's the shit, do we really need anything else here?" As
dumb as the decision sounds, in its own context it's a fine example of brutal
genius, right out there vying for first place with ʽLouie Louieʼ and
the like. The Who were the perfect band to cover this symbol of mythic-status
virility; the Yardbirds, slight less so; too bad it was too slow for Mötörhead.
Muddy actually retorted with his own ʽMannish Boyʼ, which was
essentially the same song with slightly different lyrics — and maybe Muddy made
a finer job with that one, because his singing captured the spirit better than
Bo's, but Bo was there first — «The Originator» strikes again.
What else is there? Well, the idea of stringing
the entire song on one chord, for instance, which, since we already mentioned
Mötörhead, is the genuine precursor to the «jackhammer» method of
headbanging. ʽHey Bo Diddleyʼ is done that way, but the more fabulous
instance is ʽWho Do You Loveʼ, with its aggressive lead lines
scattered along the road — and those beautiful lyrics: "I walk 47 miles of
barbed wire, I use a cobra snake for a necktie... I got a brand new chimney
made on top, made out of human skull..." Not a lot of black lyricists used
that sort of voodooistic imagery as lightly as old Bo. But the gamble paid off
— even The Doors covered the song during their live shows. (How does one get
Jim Morrison inside a telephone booth? Write "cobra snake" and
"human skull" on the walls).
And that still ain't all. There's ʽDiddley
Daddyʼ, opening with one of the simplest, yet most elegant guitar figures
of the decade — one which Billy Boy Arnold, present at the session, nixed from
Bo and quickly inserted in his own ʽI Wish You Wouldʼ, and that is
how all of us British Invasion fans know it (from the Yardbirds cover;
ʽDiddley Daddyʼ itself evaded hit status in the UK, although the
Stones and others did play it live). There's ʽDiddy Wah Diddyʼ, which
takes a «dance-blues» pattern of Muddy's, adds a playful, poppy melody
resolution, and makes for a great single that's bluesy, funny, catchy, and
weird at the same time — an ideal fit for a young, teeth-cutting Captain
Beefheart in 1966. And there is ʽSay Boss Manʼ, a lesser known tune
that shows Bo perfectly at home with ʽJim Dandyʼ-style danceable
R'n'B.
In short, Bo Diddley, like Jimmy Reed, was a
sacrilegious blues renegade, which is why we love them both — except that Jimmy
Reed was perfectly happy to find one basic formula and stick to it like glue
until his last teeth fell out, whereas Bo, as this album shows, was a restless
seeker: and in three years' time, he had found more than many bluesmen of the
highest caliber had found in several decades. The Diddley beat was just one of
these finds, and, as the first one and the one that made him a star, it was
bound to become a repetitive trademark; but there is very little that is
repetitive, monotonous, or just plain boring about Bo Diddley, an album where I myself knew most of the songs before
hearing it. Thumbs
up, totally.
GO BO DIDDLEY (1959)
1) Crackin' Up; 2) I'm Sorry;
3) Bo's Guitar; 4) Willie And Lillie; 5) You Don't Love Me (You Don't Care); 6)
Say Man; 7) The Great Grandfather; 8) Oh Yeah; 9) Don't Let It Go; 10) Little
Girl; 11) Dearest Darling; 12) The Clock Strikes Twelve.
There was literally no way that any second, or
third, or fourth LP of Bo's could have the same impact or be as consistent as
the first. Go Bo Diddley isn't
exactly «scraping the barrels»: its bulk consists of new singles that the man
released in late 1958 / 1959, and it actually shows him trying out some new
styles and directions. But not all of these new ones should have been tried,
and some of the old ones should have been left on the shelf as well.
Bad news first. ʽI'm Sorryʼ
transparently proves that doo-wop, of
all things, is completely incompatible with Bo's style of doing stuff —
awfully produced, with almost parodic back vocals rising out of coal pits, and Bo
himself sounding completely out of his pattern. Elvis, perhaps, could be slick
enough to sing doo-wop; Bo Diddley trying to be «The Cardinals» is more like
the Sex Pistols trying to be «Van Der Graaf Generator». ʽLittle
Girlʼ seems to intrude on the turf of New Orleanian barroom bluesmen like
Professor Longhair, and Bo doesn't quite master the sort of nonchalant drunken
swagger that it takes to make these things loveable (just go for the real thing
instead — the Professor has a great knack for getting you all sauced up without
a single physical drop of the stuff). Then there's the rehashing: ʽOh
Yeahʼ is a response to Muddy's ʽMannish Boyʼ which was a
response to Bo's ʽI'm A Manʼ which was a response to Muddy's
ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ... well, you get the point.
The most oddball selection is ʽThe Clock Strikes
Twelveʼ, which starts out as one more variation on the same subject,
completely instrumental this time, with Bo playing the violin — original as hell, but it's safe to say that Jascha Heifetz
probably wouldn't be impressed. Still, for a few moments out there, I am
ashamed — or thrilled? — to say, I couldn't actually understand if it really
was a violin, or if it was a particularly inventive part blown by Little Walter
on his harmonica. I am not sure if this counts as a positive recommendation, it's
just the way it is.
But in between the clear-cut failures and the
odd, controversial moments there are still plenty of unassailable highlights.
ʽCrackin' Upʼ, later «informally» covered by the Stones and formally
by Paul McCartney in 1988, is the man's finest Latin-groove-based number, with
an incredibly catchy guitar loop firmly ensuring that misogyny will live
forever (actually, the lyrics aren't strictly misogynist — «frustrated
husband»-ist would be more accurate). ʽYou Don't Love Meʼ is the
ever-on-the-watchout Bo stealing the carpet from under the feet of Slim Harpo —
it's a variation on ʽGot Love If You Want Itʼ that, in terms of
sharpness, energy, and professionalism, destroys the original completely,
although it did not help Bo expropriate the original: British bands like the
Kinks and the Yardbirds still got stuck covering Slim Harpo. And ʽSay
Manʼ, with Bo and his maracas shaker Jerome Green trading off stupid jokes
and friendly mutual insults to a samba beat, is yet another first — a mixture
of time-honored «Afro-American comedy» and new-fangled R&B that all the
white kids around the world must have been really thrilled to hear. (That said,
the jokes themselves are really, really
dumb. They probably should have hired some of Louis Jordan's songwriters
instead).
Much less known — and lacking on most of the
short compilations — are such clever little nuggets as the instrumental
ʽBo's Guitarʼ, which combines a distant variation on the «Diddley
beat» with shards of surfing-style melodies (Bo the Omnivorous must have been
intensely listening to Duane Eddy's earliest recordings), and ʽThe Great Grandfatherʼ,
Bo's take on something really archaic
— ye olde Negro working song, a style he tackles with much more convincing
force and spirit than doo-wop. Maybe his moans and groans that bookend the
verses aren't nearly as authentic as, say, Leadbelly's, but «authentic» is a
relative term; for a hard-working black guy on the 1950s Chicago scene, you
couldn't expect any better.
For some reason, they also reissued
ʽDearest Darlingʼ from Bo
Diddley — by mistake, perhaps — but in the end, Go Bo Diddley does not have even a single clear example of the «Diddley beat», even if ʽBo's
Guitarʼ and ʽSay Manʼ come somewhat close. Instead, we get a
smatter of diversity that, in sheer objective terms, might even beat the debut,
with the subjective exception that not everything works so well this time. Most
things do, though, confirming Diddley's reputation as «the man who wanted to
do everything» and somehow got pigeonholed into one single, simple formula
anyway. Well, that is why we are here to try and remedy this with a single,
simple thumbs up.
HAVE GUITAR WILL TRAVEL (1960)
1) She's Alright; 2) Cops And
Robbers; 3) Run Diddley Daddy; 4) Mumblin' Guitar; 5) I Need You Baby (Mona);
6) Say Man, Back Again; 7) Nursery Rhyme; 8) I Love You So; 9) Spanish Guitar;
10) Dancing Girl; 11) Come On Baby.
This is where things start getting a little
stale. To flesh out Bo's third LP, they had to reach as deep down as 1956 — and
what they brought out was ʽCops And Robbersʼ, a wannabe-hilarious
blues shuffle with mostly talking vocals that tell a story about... well, look
at the title. Perhaps in 1956 it was still a novelty, but in between 1956 and
1960 we had ourselves The Coasters, who, with the aid of Leiber & Stoller,
took that whole «comedy / R&B» fusion to a level against which Bo Diddley
could not hold up. Uninteresting musically and not very funny, the song is one
of Bo's ultimately failed experiments, and the fact that they had to
resuscitate it in order to complete the album is quite telling.
The other «oldie» is the much better known
ʽI Need You (Mona)ʼ, mostly due to having been covered on the Stones'
first album (as well as Britain's sexiest, but completely forgotten, band of
the early Sixties, The Liverbirds, who seem to have covered almost all of Bo's
catalog in their microscopically short heyday) — which is, of course, merely a
variation on the classic Diddley beat, and was covered mainly due to its
lyrics, since UK bands narrating the peculiarities of Bo's biography (had they
stuck to the original ʽBo Diddleyʼ) naturally felt a little odd.
Another relatively recent single, from 1959, is
even less exciting: a straightforward follow-up to ʽSay Manʼ
(ʽSay Man, Back Againʼ) with another bunch of crude jokes exchanged
between Bo and Jerome, and its B-side, ʽShe's Alrightʼ, a loud
R&B rave-up along the lines of Ray Charles or The Isley Brothers — except
that neither Bo himself, nor his backing band really had the vocal
qualifications; the crudeness of the execution may not be quite as embarrassing
as his struggles with doo-wop (after all, this is at least a rousing number, and one wouldn't expect
Bo Diddley to completely miss the boat on anything «rousing»), but it is still
a relative failure.
Stuff gets a bit better when Mr. Otha Ellas
Bates struts into the studio in a focused state of mind and starts recording a
chunk of new material tailor-made for the LP itself. ʽMumblin'
Guitarʼ is an instrumental built around one sole gimmick — make the guitar
«mumble», as you guessed — and the result is a dirty, sludgy piece of controlled
chaos that could seriously compete with Link Wray on a certain level. The other
instrumental is ʽSpanish Guitarʼ: here, the Bo Diddley beat is indeed
combined with an amusingly amateurish «Spanish guitar» part, although he still
slips into blues and rock'n'roll modes every now and then. Not a masterpiece,
but at least hearing Bo try out unfamiliar musical styles on his guitar is
more exciting than hearing him sing
in unfamiliar music styles; I'd rather listen to him «ineptly» incorporating
flamenco elements than lending his voice to doo-wop and soul interpretations.
Good stuff also includes ʽRun Diddley
Daddyʼ, a fun pop-rocker that is not
a musical sequel to ʽDiddley Daddyʼ, and ʽCome On Babyʼ,
another fun pop-rocker that makes the best possible use of about five piano
notes and three bass notes, or something like that. But there is also
ʽDancing Girlʼ, with a much-too-easily recognizable variation on the
Diddley beat (actually, it sounds like the exact mathematical average of
ʽBo Diddleyʼ and ʽDiddley Daddyʼ), and a couple more
re-writes... overall, the sessions did help to save face a bit, but not a lot.
Two decent instrumentals, a bunch of scraps, re-writes, and variations does not
a good album make, and it is little wonder that this particular one is rather
hard to find on CD — and that the only song off it to regularly appear on
compilations is ʽMonaʼ — and that we probably have Mick Jagger to
thank for that — so thank you, Mick Jagger, but the album overall still gets a thumbs down.
IN THE SPOTLIGHT (1960)
1) Road Runner; 2) Story Of Bo
Diddley; 3) Scuttle Bug; 4) Signifying Blues; 5) Let Me In; 6) Limber; 7) Love
Me; 8) Craw-Dad; 9) Walkin' And Talkin'; 10) Travelin' West; 11) Deed And Deed
I Do; 12) Live My Life.
Frankly speaking, only one song on this album is in an undeniable spotlight — a grim
contrast with Bo's fabulous run of highlights two years ago. ʽRoad Runnerʼ
not only features one of the most famous special effects in guitar world
history (how many guitar strings have been killed by ardent teenagers trying to
master it?), it is also quite a serious milestone in the development of the
hard rock sound — just listen to that low bass grumble; whoever had a sound
like that in the 1950s? No wonder all the Brit bands loved the song like crazy,
particularly the Animals, who were among the lucky few to actually understand
how Bo does the «speeding up» trick, and the Who — Pete Townshend loved to
capitalize on the heaviness of that riff in his live shows (and you can even
see him doing a silly duck walk to it in The
Kids Are Alright as late as 1975).
ʽRoad Runnerʼ is probably the last
one of Bo's «seminal» classics, and the best of all of his «masculinity-asserting»
tunes (ʽI'm A Manʼ is, after all, a bit too blunt, too slow, and
certainly not as inventive). Unfortunately, the rest of In A Spotlight never even begins
to come close. For instance, the only other track here that was a single is
ʽWalkin' And Talkinʼ, which begins like an uninspired, slowed-down
rip-off of The Coasters' ʽAlong Came Jonesʼ, with comparable
melodies, waa-oohs, and even lyrics — before going into a rather boring chorus
that Leiber and Stoller would probably find way below their level of
acceptability.
And most of the album tracks either go on to
show the formulae digging in, or represent half-hearted, usually failed
experiments. The main charm of ʽThe Story Of Bo Diddleyʼ is in its
bright, tinkly, adventurous piano part. ʽSignifying Bluesʼ is
basically just ʽSay Man Vol. 3ʼ. ʽCraw-Dadʼ is a local
variation on the Diddley beat, completely forgettable. ʽLive My Lifeʼ
is a bastard brother of ʽBefore You Accuse Meʼ... you get my drift.
The «experiments» are at least occasionally
intriguing: ʽScuttle Bugʼ, for instance, is mostly a piano-driven
instrumental shuffle, a little New Orleanian in spirit, as if Fats Domino
decided to move to the colder climate of Chicago all of a sudden.
ʽLimberʼ shows a sudden interest in the ʽBanana Boat Songʼ,
but Bo Diddley and the Caribbean do not mesh well together — the man is just
too fussy by nature to achieve the proper level of relaxation. And ʽLove
Meʼ is Bo's first excourse into the world of «deep soul»... if only he
weren't so vocally challenged for the purpose. (Sam Cooke would probably throw
up on the spot).
Of course, it is still fun to see him try, and
Bo Diddley's failures can sometimes be more exciting and involving than other
people's successes. But it is the album's structure that deals it the worst
blow of all — like I said, few things can withstand the force of ʽRoad
Runnerʼ, and even fewer when they catch our hero in a general state of
creative confusion. The only other song here to feature an original melody, a
sense of completeness, and an aura of freshness, is ʽDeed And Deed I
Doʼ, a nice mix of folk-pop and twangy surf, but it is (almost literally)
child's play next to the opening monster. No album with ʽRoad Runnerʼ
on it deserves being humiliated with a thumbs down, but know that you are more
or less safe if you just own it on a compilation. Well, on second thought, get
ʽScuttle Bugʼ, too, for all the nice piano work.
BO DIDDLEY IS A GUNSLINGER (1960)
1) Gun Slinger; 2) Ride On
Josephine; 3) Doing The Crawdaddy; 4) Cadillac; 5) Somewhere; 6) Cheyenne; 7)
Sixteen Tons; 8) Whoa Mule; 9) No More Lovin'; 10) Diddling; 11*) Working Man;
12*) Do What I Say; 13*) Prisoner Of Love; 14*) Googlia Moo; 15*) Better Watch
Yourself.
The first of several «Bo Diddley is a...» type
of records, starting out in an almost «conceptual» manner and then proceeding
in whatever non-conceptual directions the original concept might have pushed
the music. In other words — a nice pretext here for Mr. Bo to show off in some
nice Western gear on the front cover. But whaddaya want, The Magnificent Seven came out that year, after all, and why
shouldn't Afro-American rock'n'rollers have loved it, too?
The good news is: Ennio Morricone was not yet
working with Sergio Leone, so there is no danger of hearing Bo try out his own
interpretation of ʽThe Good, The Bad, And The Uglyʼ. The bad news is
that the proposed scenario might have
been — who knows? — more exciting than hear Bo slap on a lyrical, attitud-inal,
and, sometimes, musical country-western sheen on everything we'd already heard
before. The ugly news, then, to
dispense with the trio, is that this album contains what might be the worst
cover of ʽSomewhere Over The Rainbowʼ ever recorded by a human
being. (At least, in the pre-1980s era.)
But cheer up: in the end, Bo Diddley Is A Gunslinger is a pretty funny concept, and a fairly
exciting musical ride. What I mean is, anybody who appreciates, say, Weird Al
Yankovic's bag of parody tricks, has no reason to cringe at the idea of Bo
Diddley expropriating other people's ideas, adapting them to his own playing
style, and coming out with something that is a shameless rip-off and a
hilarious parody at the same time. The most important thing, though, is the
humor and the playfulness of it all. If you have something against playing with
Uncle Bo, stay away. If you're willing to accept the Gunslinger's rules,
though... excitement awaits, crude as it may be.
The title track ever so slightly modifies the
Bo Diddley beat (actually, the drums play without syncopation, whereas the
guitars still syncopate, and this creates a slightly irritating, but
clever aural effect) to give us another
episode of ʽThe Story Of Bo Diddleyʼ, this time set at the «O-K
Corral». After that, Western references float away, only to resurface on
ʽCheyenneʼ, which is basically a synthesis
— literally! — of the Coasters' ʽAlong Came Jonesʼ (again!) and
LaVern Baker's ʽJim Dandyʼ, taking the "and then?"s from
the former and the "waaah-oooh"s from the latter. Both are classics
of the comedy-R'n'B substyle, and the synthesis works much better than a separate
cover of each would have had — and what is
that «bubbling» percussion? Sounds just
like certain patterns of electronic drums circa early 1980s. Later on, it
reappears on ʽWhoa Mule (Shine)ʼ, a stop-and-start blues-pop account
of a Southern mule, where its clippity-clop does resemble a mule's slow,
steady pace, instead of the light horsey gallop on ʽCheyenneʼ.
Clever!
The most often covered songs on the record
would probably be ʽRide On Josephineʼ (George Thorogood had a
version) — a Diddley-style rewrite of Chuck Berry's ʽMaybelleneʼ,
with a different chorus but essentially the same verses; and
ʽCadillacʼ, done by the Kinks on their debut album — here, with a
saxophone-adorned arrangement, which Gene Barge contributes in well-imitated
King Curtis style. Again, though, it is not the saxophone itself that matters (we
can all just go listen to the real King instead), but its interplay with the
distorted lumps, shards, and splinters of sound spluttered by Bo and his second
guitarist (Peggy Jones) in all directions. And then there is ʽSixteen
Tonsʼ by Merle Travis, a track that Ed Sullivan, for some reason, once
expected Bo to perform on his show, and got pretty upset when the man played
ʽBo Diddleyʼ instead. Don't worry, Mr. Sullivan — Bo Diddley takes
his responsibilities seriously. A five-year wait period is actually quite a
sign of respect. And it's a nice cover, too.
Overall, the only true misfires are the ballads
— once again, Bo proves that he's no ladies' man when it comes to wearing your
heart on your sleeve: ʽNo More Lovinʼ is clumsy, rotten doo-wop, and
ʽSomewhere...ʼ ... oh my God. (Then again, I never even liked that
song in the movie — and I never really liked the movie — and I never ever liked
a single cover of that song — and for some reason, Eric Clapton performed it
live during my only live Eric Clapton experience — okay, I'm probably not the right person to pronounce
judgement in this case).
But apart from that, Gunslinger is an oddball of an album in that it is not all that
different in scope or freshness from the two that precede it, but somehow, is
still hammered together in a more concise, exciting, and intriguing manner. Not
surprisingly, unlike those two, Gunslinger
has been remastered and issued on CD,
with a bunch of bonus tracks (of which the wannabe-ancient road workin' song
ʽWorking Manʼ is the finest), and is well worth locating. Thumbs up.
BO DIDDLEY IS A LOVER (1961)
1) Not Guilty; 2) Hong Kong
Mississippi; 3) You're Looking Good; 4) Bo's Vacation; 5) Congo; 6) Bo's Blues;
7) Bo Diddley Is A Lover; 8) Aztec; 9) Back Home; 10) Bo Diddley Is Loose; 11)
Love Is A Secret; 12) Quick Draw.
This one finds Bo slipping further and further
into «comic» mood — with no fewer than four
songs directly referring to him in their title, and no fewer than just about
everything else being a veiled or unveiled account of Bo Diddley's adventures,
either, with jokes, gags, puns, and musical slapstick all over the place. Not
surprisingly, the more this man talks about himself, the less he somehow seems
to be able to say. And no matter how irresistible the LP title might have been
for the ladies — at least those well-versed in the art of mirror-reading — this
was the first of Bo's LPs not to yield even one single radio classic or fan
favorite.
But this does not necessarily mean that the
record is a complete failure. First, there are some top notch instrumentals. On
ʽCongoʼ, Bo recycles the string-scratching trick of
ʽRoadrunnerʼ, this time imitating a jet plane engine rather than a
Harley Davidson, then engages in some playful surf soloing à la Duane Eddy, all the while strutting his stuff and
shaking his shimmy in classic Bo fashion. And on ʽAztecʼ, he leads
the listener into Spanish territory — again, not really trying to emulate any
of the masters of Latin art (which would have been an obvious embarrassment),
but rather with the purpose of doing a little bit of deconstruction, randomly
swapping the predictably simplified chords with squeaks, squirts, scratches,
and rumbles. This is not «parody» — just good old Bo trying to place his
personal mark on yet another style.
Elsewhere, it looks like all he is doing is
recycling, re-recycling, and re-re-recycling ideas that have already been in
heavy use for about five years. But repeated listens show that, even at this
time, each song has just a little bit of individuality, that one little «shift»
in texture that prevents it from completely repeating its predecessors. It
might be a slight change in the beat, one extra note in the riff, one
transposed chord, some prominently placed backup vocals from the man's loyal
female staff... something, and it all rocks fairly hard (which is also a
plus, considering the general softening of US «mainstream» rock'n'roll
standards in the early 1960s — besides, Bo was the only one of the major black
rockers left at that time, with Little Richard going to church and Chuck Berry
going to jail).
For instance, ʽNot Guiltyʼ is a
nursery-rhyme-style dialog between Bo and his backups, with a Chuck
Berry-influenced lead guitar part, suitable for a steady 4/4 beat, set against
the syncopated Bo Diddley beat — a good example of Bo's «sonic illusion»
technique where your ear is slightly thrown off course by the dissonance.
Another Chuckified number is ʽBo Diddley Is Looseʼ, where the lead
guitar carries on a sharp, but merry dialog with Bo in the vein of ʽCarolʼ
and ʽLittle Queenieʼ: the licks may be borrowed, but the party
atmosphere is all Bo anyway. And ʽYou're Looking Goodʼ is among his
most convincing speedy R'n'B numbers — for once, the wobbly guitar patterns and
the Isley Brothers attitude are combined to fine effect.
Open missteps and blunders are arguably limited
to the generic 12-bar ʽBo's Bluesʼ, which does sound like an
unintended parody — controversial as that might sound, Bo has less feeling for
the slow 12-bar form than Mick Jagger, and is unable to do anything interesting
for it; and to the happy R'n'B ballad ʽLove Is A Secretʼ, which, on
top of it all, is rendered physically unlistenable by the never-ending backup
crooning (three minutes of high-pitched ooh-wee-oohs that only pause to catch a
breath from time to time is straightahead torture for the ears — forget
waterboarding, this is the real
deal).
Everything else ranges from «curiously nice» to
«pleasantly mediocre»: a clear-cut step down from the weirdness / fun level of Gunslinger, but the man is still
willing to combine brains, brawn, soul, and ego to good effect — the main
problem is that, this time around, there has been just a little too much ego
thrown in the pot, overshadowing the rest of the ingredients. Still, a modest thumbs up
here for one of the few «real rock'n'roll» albums of 1961.
BO DIDDLEY (1962)
1) I Can Tell; 2) Mr.
Khrushchev; 3) Diddling; 4) Give Me A Break (Man); 5) Who May Your Lover Be; 6)
Bo's Bounce; 7) You Can't Judge A Book By The Cover; 8) Babes In The Woods; 9)
Sad Sack; 10) Mama Don't Allow No Twistin'; 11) You All Green; 12) Bo's Twist.
In early 1962, Bo Diddley finished up the «roleplaying
trilogy» with Bo Diddley Is A Twister,
an album that has never been released on CD and which I have not been able to
locate — and I assume that there must have been a good reason, because Bo
Diddley might certainly be a lover, or even a gunslinger, by nature, but a
twister only by temporary trade. (Actually, the few tracks I have heard are
anything but generic twist — for Bo
to sound like Chubby Checker, he should have had brain surgery).
Anyway, that record is probably best left
forgotten, but he did rebound later on in the year, with a second self-titled
album that housed his last single of any major importance — Willie Dixon's
ʽYou Can't Judge A Book By The Coverʼ, maybe the catchiest song in
the entire history of bodiddleyism, hiding a macho substance ("I look
like a farmer, but I'm a lover" — agriculturalists all over the world,
take arms) behind an innocently happy blues-pop melody. So happy, in fact, that
even the Monkees ended up covering it — there is a hilarious version on Live 1967 that does a good job of
linking their «commercial act» to the «authentic rock'n'roll» legacy.
The other memorable highlight was ʽI Can
Tellʼ, just as catchy and surprisingly «moody» for Bo — normally, his
slow-moving numbers are dismissable, but the sexy build-up to the chorus bark
("grrr-I know you don't lorrrve me no more!") is so diligently
crafted this time that even Muddy could use a hint. Covered that same year in
an unnecessarily sped up and vastly inferior version by Johnny Kidd, and God
knows who else.
Sandwiched in between the two classics, as
usual, is a bunch of total filler mixed with some tasty, if rather under-realized
ideas. ʽMr. Khrushchevʼ is at least priceless for substituting the
ubiquitous "Hey, Bo Diddley!" with the much fresher — and highly
relevant for 1962 — "Hey, Khrushchev!" (unfortunately, Nikita
Sergeyevich's personal reaction to the summons remains strictly hidden by his
biographers). ʽBabes In The Woodsʼ has a stupid title and even
sillier backup vocals, but the muttering-stuttering gimmick in the chorus
still sticks with you, love it or hate it.
Overall, there is lots of purely instrumental
stuff on the record, which is good — even if, at this point, new rhythms almost
completely cease to appear, each such track is still a good chance to say
something individual without resorting to lyrical and vocal silliness. ʽGive
Me A Break (Man)ʼ is like a condensed two-minute instrumental variation
on ʽYou Can't Judge A Bookʼ — faster, louder, and I bet Jimi himself
must have learned a lot from that guitar rumble (his typical arrangement of
ʽKilling Floorʼ at least is certainly based on those patterns). The new ʽDiddlingʼ (not the same
as on Gunslinger) is surprisingly
mean and lean for the usually happy Bo, and ʽSad Sackʼ continues Bo's
experiments with different sorts of scraping, scratching, and sliding guitar
noises —another small step on the way to turn the guitar into a talking apparatus.
Thus, one more modest thumbs up here: two highlights and
next to no lowlights is just enough for a Bo Diddley record circa 1962 to be
recommendable. (Of course, you can also just get the highlights on compilations,
but some of these have the nerve to omit ʽI Can Tellʼ, so be wary).
BO DIDDLEY & COMPANY (1963)
1) (Extra Read All About) Ben;
2) Help Out; 3) Diana; 4) Bo's A Lumber Jack; 5) Lazy Women; 6) Mama Mia; 7)
Rock'n'Roll; 8) Gimme Gimme; 9) Put The Shoes On Willie; 10) Pretty Girl; 11)
Same Old Thing; 12) Met You On Saturday; 13) Little Girl; 14) Cookie Headed
Diddley.
In the footsteps of Peggy Jones, we welcome
Norma-Jean Wofford, a.k.a. «The Duchess», a.k.a. «The Sister», as Bo used to
present her on tour, even though she was in reality more like a goddaughter;
apparently, Bo taught her his playing style himself when she was still
underage. The two cut a fine, dashing pair for the European market — the cover
photo alone does the job nicely, and even The Animals were so impressed that
they included a Duchess reference in their tribute (ʽThe Story Of Bo
Diddleyʼ — they, apparently, did fall for the «sister» story). And yes,
indeed, few things on Earth were hotter than watching Norma-Jean swing that axe
next to her mentor, in some provocative outfit or other, on a mid-1960s TV
show.
In the studio, though, it did not work out that
well: The Duchess was about as good as Peggy Jones, offering steady choppy
support whenever it seemed appropriate to Bo to go off on a wild tangent, but
she never had any ambitions (or, perhaps, any ability) to go beyond whatever
she was taught by the main man. Their interplay on such numbers as ʽHelp
Outʼ sounds fabulous, but not exactly fresh, and the same goes for the
overall judgement on the record.
The only song here that really swung over some
of the British fans was ʽPretty Girlʼ, later covered by the Yardbirds
on Five Live — good choice, one of
the fastest and catchiest ditties here, completely guitar-driven, rather than,
for instance, ʽLazy Womenʼ, which gives the piano a more prominent
function. Bad news is, Bo seems to finally be running out even of variations on the old chord
progressions; and his overseas fans were hardly ready to fall under the charm
of songs that emphasize the lyrics and the comic vibe over the music.
Modest successes and surprises would include
ʽDianaʼ, sort of a wild, over-the-top revival of ʽMonaʼ
(actually, more of a vocal / instrumental cross between ʽMonaʼ and
ʽBo Diddleyʼ); ʽBo's A Lumber Jackʼ, a swaggery, swampy rap
punctuated by atmospheric tricks — evil laughter, percussive imitation of
falling trees, wild screams of "TIMBER!" and other stuff that was
sort of far out for the likes of 1963; and ʽRock'n'Rollʼ, which
honors its title by limiting itself to just one line ("I love myself some
rock'n'roll") — then, at some point, Bo launches into scat singing and
gets himself rudely interrupted ("hey baby, that's not rock'n'roll, that's
JAZZ!..") Diddley humor. No, I
mean, it was funny back in its day,
honest. With some reservations, it's even funny today.
Other than that and minus a couple lowlights
(such as the rote balladry of ʽMet You On Saturdayʼ), this is just
another reliable, but less and less memorable Bo Diddley album. Which is a
little sad, because if only the man's rambunctious spirit could still be tied
to inventive songwriting in 1963, he could easily have become that one
particular rocker to survive the transition into the early 1960s — virtually no
one in the States rocked as hard at the time (admittedly, that was the reason
why he preferred Europe). But somehow, «the originator» must have thought that
he had totally paid his dues in «originating» — or, perhaps, that bringing in
such a hot figure as The Duchess could count as «originating» in itself. Well,
who knows.
SURFIN' WITH BO DIDDLEY (1963)
1) What Did I Say; 2) White
Silver Sands; 3) Surfboard Cha Cha; 4) Surf Sink Or Swim; 5) Piggy Back
Surfers; 6) Surfer's Love Call; 7) Twisting Waves; 8) Wishy Washy; 9)
Hucklebuck; 10) Old Man River; 11) Oops He Slipped; 12) Low Tide.
Allegedly, this is as much of an oddity in Bo's
catalog as Bo Diddley Is A Twister,
except that this time around I actually got to hear a crackly LP rip of these
twelve tunes — recorded by Bo at the height of the surf-rock craze, in a
strange, transparently misguided attempt to fool the young fans of Jan &
Dean and the Beach Boys. After all, somebody must have thought, Bo is not on
the album photo, and them kids these days will spring for anything with a tidal
wave on the sleeve — you gotta be real
dumb, after all, to listen to surf muzak in the first place.
Now the image of a «Surfin' Bo Diddley» would
not be all that far removed from the image of Disney's dancing hippos, or that
of King Arthur on ice, but, surprisingly, that is not what is wrong with this
album. As a matter of fact, very few of its tunes, despite the misleading
surf-related titles, have anything to do with surf-rock at all: the whole
thing is basically an R&B album, almost completely instrumental and mostly
drawing upon Ray Charles, Booker T. & The MGs, and a little bit of
old-fashioned Chicago blues for inspiration.
The real
bad news is that it does not sound much like a Bo Diddley album. Maybe that was
the point — make a Bo Diddley album that does not sound like one. But when the
artist already has an established style, such experiments more often fail than
succeed, and Surfin' is no
exception. For the first time ever, the guitar as such — at least, audible,
significant guitar — does not enter in the picture until the third track:
ʽWhat Did I Sayʼ is a sax-and-keyboards-dominated rearrangement of
Ray's ʽWhat'd I Sayʼ, and ʽWhite Silver Sandsʼ is a merry,
upbeat, brass-based instrumental that seems to have been recorded while Bo and
The Duchess were enjoying a snack in the cafeteria around the corner. Only on
ʽSurfboard Cha Chaʼ does the six-string make its first appearance,
playing a melody that is more... um, Del Shannon than Bo Diddley.
The biggest surprise of the album is that
numbers with titles like ʽSurf Sink Or Swimʼ, which you would expect
to sound like The Ventures, sound instead like ʽGreen Onionsʼ — crisp,
aggressive, deceptively simplistic early blues-boogie-rock. The biggest
disappointment is that there is hardly any need to hear them if you can simply
go for the real thing instead. Likewise, ʽPiggy Back Surfersʼ is really
the old blues of ʽMe And My Chauffeurʼ, wrapped up in a little twang.
And ʽSurfer's Love Callʼ, one of the LP's few vocal tunes, is nowhere
near a ʽSurfer Girlʼ in style — it is more like a drunken, good-time
Mardi Gras number, with Bo occasionally breaking into yodelling instead of bellowing.
Some fine surfing out there on 'em pretty Alpine meadows.
The album's most radical rearrangement is that
of ʽOl' Man Riverʼ, the one tune that Bo really tries to turn into a
surf-pop song (and, perhaps, having a vocal part on top would have made the
effort more noticeable). If that were
the overall pattern — try to «surf-ify» various non-surf-related stuff — the
album could have had some value as a novelty piece. Instead, the overall
pattern seems to be just duping the listener by putting false titles on
formulaic R&B and blues-rock standards. In a way, that is novel, too, and you could almost say
that this is Bo's subtle send-up of the whole «jump on somebody else's
bandwagon» movement, but that don't necessarily make it a rewarding listen. Thumbs down,
in all honesty.
BO DIDDLEY'S BEACH PARTY (1963)
1) Memphis; 2) Gunslinger; 3)
Hey Bo Diddley; 4) Old Smokey; 5) Bo Diddley's Dog; 6) I'm All Right; 7) Mr.
Custer; 8) Bo's Waltz; 9) What's Buggin' You; 10) Road Runner.
Few of the great rockers of the 1950s lived
long enough, to put out a great live rock'n'roll record. Not surprisingly, Bo
Diddley's first live album was recorded almost at the same time as Jerry Lee
Lewis' — with about a year's difference — and both were lucky enough to capture
them still in their performing prime, even if no longer a vital critical and
commercial presence. Bo Diddley's Beach
Party certainly sounds like a crap name for a great rock'n'roll record, but
what can you do if it was, actually, like, recorded at the Beach Club in Myrtle
Beach, South Carolina? (At least it wasn't really recorded directly on the beach, as one could suggest from
looking at the cover). The important thing is, it is actually Bo Diddley's
finest album of the decade — worth every ounce of praise that has slowly, but
steadily accumulated over it through the efforts of historically-oriented
critics, like Ritchie Unterberger, Bruce Eder, and that annoying hipster next
door.
Anyway, the sound is shitty (come to think of
it, if this were recorded on a beach,
right after a volleyball party, I wouldn't actually be surprised, but then
again, this was 1963), the songs are
nothing new, and neither Bo nor The Duchess have bothered to learn any dazzling
new moves for the show, but that doesn't matter one little bit. What does matter is that this is the most
«tribalistic»-sounding LP released up to that date — James Brown, fine as he
is in so many other respects, does not even begin to come close. This is Mr.
Bo doing his thang, leading the audience in a cult dance around the bonfire,
never minding the melody as long as the groove is enough to keep the spirit
(and the spirits) properly agitated. In fact, he doesn't even mind the lyrics —
half of the songs have no words other than scattered howls, yells, and hollers,
and even those that are supposed to have had some words, forget all about them
(ʽRoadrunnerʼ). And who cares? We all know Bo Diddley can't sing
anyway. That's not exactly why he was born into this world.
The setlist has practically nothing to do with
Bo as a hitmaker — other than ʽRoadrunnerʼ, deprived of its lyrics
(but featuring a funny little intro tidbit on the origins of the song), and
ʽHey Bo Diddleyʼ, which is certainly not included here because it was a hit, most of the songs are not
too well known, and, in fact, most of them just function as excuses for setting
up a twin-guitar groove where, typically, The Duchess keeps up the grinding
rhythm, and Bo either sends down his cascades of machine-gun fire against it
or joins his «sister» in perfect, or intentionally non-perfect, sync. The
approach does not differ much regardless of whether he is working on
well-rehearsed chestnuts like ʽHey Bo Diddleyʼ or
ʽGunslingerʼ, leading a «diddlified» take on fellow Chuck Berry's
ʽMemphis Tennesseeʼ, or choosing a less distinctly African, but equally
raucous power level on the rearrangement of ʽOld Smokeyʼ.
One tune that most people probably know off
here is ʽI'm Alrightʼ, since the Stones got that one from Bo early on
in their act, and turned it into one of their own live highlights throughout 1964-65.
The difference is amusing, although, unfortunately, not exactly in Bo's
balance: Bo does indeed sound like «he's alright», simply giving himself and
his listeners one more feel-good kick, whereas Jagger would often turn the song
into something overtly psychotic, sometimes bordering on desperate — maybe not
intentionally, but that's the way it turned out. Still, there is no getting
away from the fact that the riff is pure Bo, and also that Jagger couldn't
credibly «parrot» the way Bo does all that amicable hollering; in any way, it
is more fun to just compare and spot the differences than to draw subjective
judgements.
Bo is, first and foremost, an entertainer, and
he does everything in his power to entertain — howling (quite authentically)
on ʽBo Diddley's Dogʼ, luring the audiences into silly, «slumbery»
waltzing before unexpectedly crashing back into the Diddley groove (ʽBo's
Waltzʼ), slipping in jokes and anecdotes, making whatever funny guitar
noises he can think of in 1963, etc. etc. But entertainment comes in different
flavors, and this one is wilder, more reckless, and far more targeted at the
«beast within» than just about anything there was at the time. Come to think of
it, the naturalistic lo-fi sound is actually on Bo's side here — clean, clear
sound separation would only help reveal the technical weaknesses; when it all
sticks together, the guitars, bass, drums, and even Jerome Green's maracas
become a testosteronic monster.
It is too bad that practically none of this was
captured on film — Bo's TV appearances from the late 1950s / early 1960s are
scarcer than hen's teeth, and he was notoriously «tamer» inside the TV studio
than when hidden from the camera's eye. This particular show, on the contrary,
is rumored to have been broken up by the cops when tension got too high (with
Jerome Green all but stagediving into the crowds), and that certainly seems
believable, as the whole show is nothing but one large, crude, effective
audience provocation. Total thumbs up to this little glimpse of the
«rock'n'roll underground» in the pre-garage rock era (which it definitely
influenced).
TWO GREAT GUITARS (1964)
1) Liverpool Drive; 2) Chuck's
Beat; 3) When The Saints Go Marching In; 4) Bo's Beat; 5*) Fireball; 6*) Stay
Sharp; 7*) Chuckwalk; 8*) Stinkey.
More of an historical curiosity here than an
actual good album — but a terrific historical curiosity all the same. This was
the first of several «star power» projects that Chess Records briefly toyed
with in the Sixties, before realizing their commercial uselessness: getting Bo
Diddley and Chuck Berry to play on
the same record. Recorded in March 1964 at Tel Mar Studios, released later that
year, the album is never remembered as a particular highlight for any of those
guys; however, in some ways it is a rather unique artefact of the era. Even if
you find it horrible, you won't ever forget how you found it horrible, that is for sure.
The original LP consisted of just four tracks:
two short instrumentals, each provided by one of the two guitar heroes in their
own trademark styles, and two long ones, symmetrically titled ʽChuck's
Beatʼ and ʽBo's Beatʼ (since the latter is four minutes longer
than the former, I used that as a feeble, but valid pretext to review the album
under the Bo Diddley section). The long ones are fairly accurate with their
titles — although both guitarists are quite active on both of them, trading solos
between each other in a friendly competition, ʽChuck's Beatʼ has Bo
«guesting» on a Chuck-led recording, set to the beat of ʽMemphis
Tennesseeʼ, and ʽBo's Beatʼ sees Chuck returning the favor and
trying to adapt his style to a typical Diddley beat number.
Both of the long jams sort of settle the
long-standing debate of who was there first with a pop number running over ten
minutes — Love, with their ʽRevelationʼ, or the Rolling Stones, with
their ʽGoin' Homeʼ. Two years prior to that, here we have two
already-veteran rockers, licking each other first for ten, then for fourteen
minutes in a row — and their record company being perfectly happy to release
the results commercially, in an age of two-minute pop songs.
The very fact is fascinating, even if the jams
themselves are nothing to write home about: twenty-four minutes of Bo and Chuck
emptying their bags of tricks, most of which we have already known for about
five years. There might not have been even a single newly invented chord
sequence over all this endless jamming and soloing. The whole experience makes
it very easy to understand why, in their everyday life, these guys preferred to
stick to short outbursts rather than lengthy jam pieces. Nevertheless, the
experience is perversely fascinating — seeing them stretch out so bravely in
those early, pre-jam band times. And it's kinda funny to try and imagine the
stuff played out in their heads, too. Like when, at 7:24 into ʽChuck's
Beatʼ, Berry breaks into his «goose-quacking» solo mode, and then... «oh
shit, ain't that the third time
already?.. better drop this, quickly, before they take notice...» Then,
twenty-five seconds later: «Aw heck, I can't play anything else anyway, so why
bother looking? A solo is a solo». And he restarts the goose-quack mode again,
fourth time over.
In «compact» mode, the instrumentals make more
sense: ʽLiverpool Driveʼ, with its three minutes, is just the right
size for Chuck to deliver a short and sweet set of riffs and solos, and Bo's
take on ʽWhen The Saints Go Marching Inʼ is a fine sample of
«diddlifying» the classic New Orleanian atmosphere — putting the tribal beat
back where it was originated. On the other hand, they lack the novelty factor
of the jams: neither of the two is likely to ever take the place of
ʽLittle Queenieʼ or ʽDiddley Daddyʼ in anyone's hearts,
whereas the jams — these jams you will definitely be remembering years from now
on, at least on a purely factual basis.
The CD release of the album threw on a few
bonus tracks, probably released during the same session, and, judged on their
own, they might actually be the best there is: ʽFireballʼ, as
behooves any song called ʽFireballʼ (see Deep Purple), is fast and
tense, based on a speedy boogie pickin' pattern, probably copped from the likes
of Big Bill Broonzy; and ʽStinkeyʼ experiments with phasing a bit,
creating a lively noisy environment against which sharper, more focused licks
are played — the result is a great swampy feel, with well-bred, goal-oriented
bullfrogs croaking out of the generally mucky, oozy depths.
Overall, a strange project indeed, but one that
adds a somewhat interesting page in both histories of the «two great guitars».
Supposedly, any prominent people in the jazz world, listening to this stuff
back for some random reason back in 1964, would have scoffed at the poorness of
the techniques and sparseness of ideas. They would be absolutely right, too.
But everybody has to have a start somewhere — so, in a way, these simplistic
sessions were paving the road to all the great achievements of rock-oriented jam
bands, some of which were only a couple of years away from these humble
beginnings. So, sort of a thumbs up for historical importance and general
weirdness, but otherwise, only recommended for hardcore rockabilly collectors.
HEY! GOOD LOOKIN' (1965)
1) Hey! Good Lookin'; 2) Mush
Mouth Millie; 3) Bo Diddley's Hoot Nanny; 4) London Stomp; 5) Let's Walk A
While; 6) Rooster Stew; 7) La La La; 8) Yeah Yeah Yeah; 9) Rain Man; 10) I
Wonder Why People Don't Like Me; 11) Brother Bear; 12) Mummy Walk.
Two
Great Guitars might have been
an oddity, but at least it left a stronger impression than Bo's regular studio
albums from the same era. This one belongs in about the same class as Bo Diddley & Company — as solidly
masterminded and produced as anything the man could knock off in his sleep. But
with the musical world growing more and more demanding by early 1965, and slowly
awakening to the idea that «progress» could and should not only come
«naturally», but could also be permanently stimulated, the idea of making a
1965 record that sounded so firmly like 1957 was getting colder and colder by
the minute. This one didn't sell at all, and I don't blame anyone — were I
alive and buying LPs in 1965, I probably wouldn't buy it either.
The only track here that suggests a certain
awareness of one's surroundings is ʽLondon Stompʼ, a dance-blues
number that crudely parodies a bunch of English accents, all based on Bo's
recent experiences in the trans-Atlantic cradle of the English language. Just a
novelty number, but one well worth a listen — after all, surely all that
tolerance towards the legions of white British boys imitating the walks and
talks of grizzled black bluesmen entitles us to hearing the grizzled black
bluesman returning the favor. Then again, a parody is only a parody, however
funny it may be (and this one ain't particularly
funny).
Everything else is just standard Bo fare. The
title track is no Hank Williams cover, but simply another pomp-and-stomp
opening number to exploit the Diddley beat, even if it opens with a couple of
deceptive licks that Bo might have learned from the Chuck Berry sessions — then
integrates them into the old beat to the point of disintegration. ʽI
Wonder Why People Don't Like Meʼ is a decent Motown stylization — and the
lyrics, with their tongue-in-cheek rags-to-riches story, might actually be a
subtle jab at the typical «Motown star» of the time (especially appropriate
for Bo, who was struggling for survival at the time and must have been fairly
envious of all the young, smooth, soulful whippersnappers like Marvin Gaye).
The rest? For the most part, just variations
upon variations, with semi-catchy recycled vocal grooves at best and no
particularly curious guitar parts whatsoever. The best Bo Diddley song of the epoch
was not even included on the original LP for some reason — this is the grim,
parent-scaring ʽMama, Keep Your Big Mouth Shutʼ, in which the man
gallantly asks the matron of the family to refrain from interfering in his
romantic relations with her daughter. (And the guy was worrying about why
nobody was buying his records!). It
does seem to crop up on some editions, though, so do try to hear Hey! Good Lookin' in its company — the
only way to ensure that Bo actually did
have some bite left in late '64 / early '65.
Oh yes, ʽMummy Walkʼ is rather
amusing as well ("hey little girl, I mean a-you in yellow, I don't wanna
see you do the mummy walk with the other fellow" is one of the classic
lines of the pre-Patti Smith era, in any case). But on the other hand, you
should also suspect that something is wrong when two songs in a row are called
ʽLa La Laʼ and "Yeah Yeah Yeahʼ; and when you actually
hear them, you will most likely go from suspicion to somewhere else, much less
pleasant. Overall, a thumbs down — lack of diversity or originality
is one thing, but simply remaking your own history, going round and round in
circles, is another thing. An annoying thing.
500% MORE MAN (1965)
1) 500% More Man; 2) Let Me
Pass; 3) Stop My Monkey; 4) Greasy Spoon; 5) Tonight Is Ours; 6) Root Hoot; 7)
Hey Red Riding Hood; 8) Let The Kids Dance; 9) He's So Mad; 10) Soul Food; 11)
Corn Bread; 12) Somebody Beat Me.
«500% more self-plagiarizing», to be more
precise. Even if nobody was buying Bo's records any longer, that still did not stop the man from putting
out two whole LPs in 1965 — and, to be fair, seemingly enjoying every minute of
it, although by now he seems to be making his fourth or fifth circle around the
same old tree.
The title track, as can be easily guessed, is
yet another remake of ʽI'm A Manʼ, out here to reassert our hero's
reliable virility in an age of quickly changing trends and fads. Other than the
reassuring lyrics ("more man than you ever seen", "I'm still
round here, baby, and I let the good time roll", etc.), the only reasons
to ever listen to this track had only been there in 1965; today, with the man
finally gone for good, listening to ʽ500% More Manʼ instead of the original would be a
strange occupation indeed.
The other
tracks are... well, two things of note: first, The Cookies — Bo's backing band
of high-pitched cat-girls — are present on almost every number, which seems
more likely to give us a headache than a feeling of awe and wonder,
particularly since most of the backing vocals are so goddamn repetitive (I
mean, how could a man not go mad if
every goddamn bar on ʽHe's So Madʼ is stuffed with the robotic chant
of "oh yeaaah... he's so mad... oh yeaaah... he's so mad"?). It only
gets completely intolerable once, when they follow Bo up on a sweet ballad
(ʽTonight Is Oursʼ), delivered with the usual clumsiness, but
overall, the girls definitely overstate their value on this album, which should
have been called 500% More Cookies —
with a special disclaimer for those with cholesterol troubles.
On the other hand, there are some really good
guitar parts on the record, too. ʽLet Me Passʼ, once the old school
ʽDiddley Daddyʼ introduction is over, sees an attempt to merge the
gap between Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, by having Bo play more Berry licks than
on Two Guitars (where each player
was more like an «intruder» in the other one's groove). A whole series of other
tunes, conceived in the standard blues idiom, features variegated bluesy lead
lines and solos, which could perhaps be appreciated better if not for the
Cookies — who finally shut up on ʽCorn Breadʼ, one of the finest blues
shuffles in Bo's repertoire, even though that is not saying very much: Bo will probably never be
counted among the blues giants, not only because of limited playing technique,
but chiefly because of the lightweight joking attitude. Yet in many ways,
lightweight joking blues shuffles may be preferable to those that take
themselves too seriously — a properly executed «guitar fart» disrupting a
generic chord progression can go a long way.
For the record, that trademark Bo Diddley
humor, ambiguous as it is, is very much alive: you get Bo retelling the story
of Little Red Riding Hood (he makes for quite a credible big bad wolf), drawing
on the spirit of The Coasters in a tragic story of fucking it up in Las Vegas
(ʽSomebody Beat Meʼ), complaining about being jinxed by his woman
(ʽRoot Hootʼ), in short — pretending to still live life to its
fullest. Somehow, it all manages to wind me up a little stronger than Hey! Good Lookin', but only by a brief
margin — unless I do a good job convincing myself that, at this point, I am
mostly listening to Bo Diddley for the comedy routine, the endless rewrites
drag my attention down anyway. Well, it does have this surge in 12-bar blues
and Chuck Berry influence, so I guess it at least enables us to move on
without a proper thumbs down ritual.
THE ORIGINATOR (1966)
1) Pills; 2) Jo-Ann; 3) Two
Flies; 4) Yakky Doodle; 5) What Do You Know About Love; 6) Do The Frog; 7) Back
To School; 8) You Ain't Bad; 9) Love You Baby; 10) Limbo; 11) Background To A
Music; 12) Puttentang (Nursery Rhyme); 13) Africa Speaks; 14) We're Gonna Get
Married.
This hodgey-podgey mess would be Bo's last
self-sustained album of the 1960s: other than two «supersessions» with Muddy
and Howlin' Wolf, he would be refraining from recording new material over the
«psychedelic years» — finally realizing, perhaps, that one of the last things
the world was truly interested in at the time was yet another helping of the
good old Bo Diddley beat. Thus, The
Originator, coming out in early 1966, became Bo's goodbye to his decimated
pack of fans — for the next four years, he would sink in the shadows, biding
his time and thinking about building himself a brand new image from scratch.
In the meantime, this album throws together a
bunch of widely varying, chronologically scattered stuff — ʽPillsʼ,
for instance, was a minor hit going back all the way to 1961; ʽJo
Annʼ was a single from the less commercially fruitful year of 1964;
ʽLimboʼ is a re-recording of ʽLimberʼ from In The Spotlight (faster, cooler, and
spiced up with a snazzy dose of «yakety sax»); and I have no idea how much of
the rest was specially recorded for these sessions, but the very fact that «The
Originator» had to stretch out so far back in time shows that even the mighty
Bo, with his seemingly unending supply of optimistic energy, was feeling
disoriented.
Of course, in some subtle way drawing attention to an old song called
ʽPillsʼ in 1966 was a novel move — "she went through my head,
through my head, while I was layin' in the hospital bed" sounds highly
relevant, and «edgy», for the circumstances. Plus, it does feature one of Bo's
catchiest melodies, even if he almost certainly nicked it off some Cuban dance
or something. The bad news is, you still get this song on most of Bo's
compilations, so its presence alone does not justify finding out how well The Originator matches its title in toto.
What else is there? Well, actually, a few of
the tracks are funny blurbs with individualistic twists. ʽTwo Fliesʼ
acts out a dialog between... two flies (how did you know?), set to a generic shuffle beat, but kinda funny (Bo has
always been a better actor than singer anyway). ʽBackground To A
Musicʼ has Bo speaking in the name of the «background» itself, demonstrating
several of his well known rhythmic techniques at a staged «job interview». Most
unusual and eccentric of all is ʽAfrica Speaksʼ, which is a natural
round-the-fire tribal chant with, indeed, authentic Africans involved in the
chanting — a bit of realistic «world beat» way, way before these things became
natural in pop music, and hence, doing a bit of justice to «The Originator».
On the other hand, there are still predictable
lows — rough, rote ballads (ʽWhat Do You Know About Loveʼ), perfunctory
rehashes of the Diddley beat (ʽYakky Doodleʼ almost reads like a Bo
Diddley cover of the Rolling Stones' cover of Bo Diddley's ʽI Need
Youʼ), unsuccessful attempts at inventing pseudo-new dance moves (ʽDo
The Frogʼ), and a strange pro-school sermon (ʽBack To Schoolʼ)
dominated by an electric organ so poorly tuned that the result is almost
completely unlistenable (or maybe the engineer accidentally wiped his ass with
the tapes before starting work on the final masters).
Overall, it's all in the same ballpark as Bo's
albums from the three previous years — a bit less monotonous than 500% More Man, perhaps, but certainly
unfit for a proper «goodbye record»: not that Bo ever planned turning it into a
goodbye record, of course — however, the
one most wise decision he could have done in 1966 was take a long,
well-deserved break, and turn into a careful «listener» for a while, instead of
persisting in the mostly discredited emploi of «the originator». That he did,
and we are all grateful.
NB: do not
confuse the LP The Originator with a
much later 2-CD compilation also called the same. It is definitely true that a
collection of Bo's bestest deserves being called The Originator far more than a third-hand-derivative LP which
originates insect dialogs and spoken confessions of musical patterns, but rules
are rules: the original Originator
originated first, and even if the origination of the unoriginal Originator originally originated prior
to the original Originator, this
originates no originality for the unoriginal Originator as such. Is this an original statement or what?..
THE BLACK GLADIATOR (1970)
1) Elephant Man; 2) You, Bo
Diddley; 3) Black Soul; 4) Power House; 5) If The Bible's Right; 6) I've Got A
Feeling; 7) Shut Up, Woman; 8) Hot Buttered Blues; 9) Funky Fly; 10) I Don't
Like You.
For an «early rocker» from the 1950s to do
something worthwhile in the age of Led Zeppelin, Lou Reed, and Amon
Düül II, he would really have to divide himself by zero — children of
the «un-accelerated era» as they were, in most cases, their mentalities just
could not cope with the idea of having to modify and adapt their styles every
two years or so. By 1967, Bo's engine had stalled completely, and he wisely
retired from the business, biding his time, rethinking his attitudes, and
waiting for a suitable opportunity.
The opportunity eventually came in the
emergence of the funk scene — with James Brown, Sly Stone, George Clinton, etc.
establishing a whole brand new, powerhouse market for black music, Bo Diddley
sensed that there just might be a small corner in that market for himself as
well. After all, wasn't Bo Diddley the original «funkster»? Single-chord
groove-based African dance music and all? So he didn't exactly invent
syncopation or the «chicken-scratch», but these are just tiny technical details
— of course, The Originator had a right to stake his claim here, and that is
just what he is doing on The Black
Gladiator (a title that James Brown must have envied).
Few people know about this record, and a small
handful of those that do has predictably dismissed it — «Bo Diddley having
nothing better to do than to jump on the funk bandwagon, with expectedly
laughable results etc.». Hold on, brothers and sisters. Maybe this is just a chronology effect: after so many same-sounding,
self-plagiarizing, openly mediocre albums from Bo in the mid-Sixties, The Black Gladiator simply comes
through as a stunning ray of light by sheer contrast. But it is also an
objective fact, I suppose, that as the first hole-burning electric laser beams
of ʽElephant Manʼ cut through the speakers, everyone will just have
to realize that, at the very least, Bo has managed to turn over a heavy page
here — the likes of which most of his original colleagues were never able to
deal with.
The trick is that The Black Gladiator is not really an attempt to make a «generic
funk album with Bo Diddley's name on it»; it is an attempt to make a Bo Diddley
album with a strong funky undercurrent. ʽElephant Manʼ, ʽBlack
Soulʼ, ʽI've Got A Feelingʼ (nothing to do with the Beatles
song), and ʽFunky Flyʼ — all of these «jams with vocal support» are
really quite close in melodic structure to the «old» Bo Diddley. But the guitar
tones are tougher, snappier, occasionally even acid-drenched; the old pianos
are replaced with loud, jerky, stuttering organ passages; and the overall level
of volume, «dirt», and grittiness is completely in keeping with the standards
of 1970, even if one good listen is enough to understand that the man in charge
must have had his basic schtick worked out at least a decade earlier.
Nor is the album particularly monotonous. The
four titles listed above do sound very close, but there is also a mad,
ear-piercing «dance-gospel» celebration
(ʽIf The Bible's Rightʼ); several old-fashioned 12-bar blues numbers,
either just modernized for the psychedelic blues-rock era (ʽHot Buttered
Bluesʼ — a somewhat misguided retort to Isaac Hayes' ʽHot Buttered
Soulʼ), or milking the «Bo Diddley persona» for exaggerated comical
misogyny (ʽShut Up, Womanʼ); an update of the «hey, Bo Diddley»
routine (ʽYou, Bo Diddleyʼ — "who's the greatest man in
town"?) with a well-engineered funkified variant of the Diddley beat.
Oddball-est of all is the next installment in
the ʽSay Manʼ series: ʽI Don't Like Youʼ is a joke dialog
between Bo and another of his female sidekicks (possibly Cookie Vee) which is
not only set to a funky groove as well, but also unexpectedly shows Bo's
operatic side, as he occasionally breaks out in mock-Spanish serenading — taken
out of context, this would simply look dumb, but in the context of this totally freaked out, hyperbolic extravagance
makes for a grand flashy finale to the album, fifty percent silly pomp and fifty
percent hilarious self-irony.
All in all, this is an exhilarating experience.
It ain't much in the way of new melodies, but it is a near-perfect update on
Bo's personality — somehow, The Black
Gladiator manages to sound completely different from the old stuff and yet,
at the same time, preserve each and every element that is necessary to make a
Bo Diddley out of an Ellas McDaniel. But remember — this record must be played loud from the very first
notes, because if you are not sucked in by the first beats of ʽElephant
Manʼ, you might miss the train altogether. Thumbs up.
ANOTHER DIMENSION (1971)
1) The Shape I'm In; 2) I Love
You More Than You'll Ever Know; 3) Pollution; 4) Bad Moon Rising; 5) Down On
The Corner; 6) I Said Shut Up, Woman; 7) Bad Side Of The Moon; 8) Lodi; 9) Go
For Broke.
We might quibble all we want about the
money-talks attitudes of record industry bosses, but from a certain angle the
behavior of the guys at Chess was beyond reproach: despite Bo Diddley being an
utterly miserable seller for almost a decade now, somebody was still out there thinking and thinking —
trying to come up with ideas that would at least justify continuing to grant
him studio time, let alone help him raise a profit. Dressing the man up as The Black Gladiator did not work — the
funk audiences of James and Sly were not amused. So the next move was planned —
saddle the man with some contemporary material. «Bo Diddley Sings All The Great
American Hits» and the like.
Would that
work? With Muddy and his psychedelically tinged Electric Mud two years earlier, it did not. There was hardly one
chance in a thousand that it would turn out for the better with Bo. Then again,
occasionally it did work — Ike & Tina Turner did manage to appropriate
CCR's ʽProud Maryʼ, and then there always were Ray and Aretha,
capable of turning other people's gold into their own platinum, or at least
vice versa. And ol' Bo Diddley — well, at the very least, he always seemed
kinda smart: who knows, he just might have that magic touch.
Allegedly, Bo himself had no intent of doing a
cover album, but had to play along in order to appease the bosses. If that was
the way it was, though, he certainly went to the limits of his loyalty for
Chess: there are very few, if any, signs of disinterest here. On the other hand
— Another Dimension is a success of
a curiosity rather than a failure. Not only do you get to hear melodies and
arrangements on a Bo Diddley record that you would never have gotten otherwise,
but he does his best to get into the spirit of each covered song, and shows an
impressive emotional range that goes way beyond the usual clowning.
For instance, I would never in a million years
have bet that he'd be able to pull off Al Kooper's ʽMore Than You'll Ever
Knowʼ — this is so much not a Bo Diddley song at all, he might have had
better luck with Beethoven's 9th, right? But he offers a soulful, respectable
delivery that hits all the right chords anyway: rougher and grittier than the
original, perhaps, which was all drenched in romantic tragedy, and thus
nowhere near as chillin' to the bone — but the fact is, most people in the
world could not do justice to that song (including most of the lead vocalists
for Blood, Sweat & Tears themselves), and Bo almost does. It is at least worth it just to hear him do it from
beginning to end, rather than just switch the stereo off in horror.
Much the same applies to much of the rest.
Three CCR covers might seem like overkill (unless it was all done in a «I'm The
Man, I'm not going for just one wimpy
cover like that Turner couple»), but other than the glammy female backup
vocals, they are all done good. ʽThe Shape I'm Inʼ, selected for
single release, might seem like a particularly bizarre choice — but Bo nails
down the unhappy insecurity in Richard Manuel's voice very well, and the
replacement of Hudson's modernistic synth soloing with a more traditional
R&B-ish brass section is not a bad idea either. Much weirder, probably, is
the cover of Elton John's ʽBad Side Of The Moonʼ — not only because
it is the only overseas cover on here, and the only one selected from a fresh
new arrival (Elton was barely just a year or so into his stardom), but also
because Taupin's cryptic lyrics are a particularly tough nut for poor old Bo to
crack. Still, the band gets a good groove.
The other three selections are relatively
original — relatively, because ʽI Said Shut Up Womanʼ is, as
expected, a direct sequel to ʽShut Up Womanʼ, building on the same
one chord sequence, albeit in a more distorted, noisy manner this time.
ʽPollutionʼ is an original funk-rocker that finds Bo worrying about
the environment (move over, Marvin Gaye), but, more importantly, puts up a hot
load of sharp guitar tones — again, something that is fairly atypical for Bo,
generally used to far «sloppier» playing, but delivered with pure kick-ass
honesty. And then there is some more lite-acid funk on the instrumental
ʽGo For Brokeʼ, with complex beats, jazzy piano, brass fills,
acoustic funky rhythms, and psychedelic guitar soloing — so much of it
happening at the same time that the piece definitely warrants extra listens.
The worst thing one can say about Another Dimension is that it is not
really a Bo Diddley album. ʽShut Up Womanʼ and maybe some vocal fills
on ʽPollutionʼ are classic Bo; the rest is chameleon attitude. That is a pretty bad thing. But for anybody
interested in Bo Diddley «as a whole», with the smallest bit of curiosity as
to how the man's «up» and «down» periods hold on to each other, Another Dimension is a must-hear. On
its own, it is, at best, just a moderately pleasant listen; in the overall
context of Bo's career, it reveals some important things about the man that may
seriously correct one's perspective on «The Originator». In fact, sometimes,
every once in a while, it helps if «The Originator» briefly becomes «The
Copycat» — I believe that Bo's take on ʽMore Than You'll Ever Knowʼ,
in particular, says much more about the man here than would yet another remake
of ʽHey Bo Diddleyʼ or ʽI'm A Manʼ. Thumbs up.
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN (1972)
1) I've Had It Hard; 2) Woman;
3) Look At Grandma; 4) A Good Thing; 5) Bad Trip; 6) Hey Jerome; 7)
Infatuation; 8) Take It All Off; 9) Bo Diddley-itis.
Well, we have just very narrowly escaped from
making the review for Britney Spears' ...Baby
One More Time conclude the reviewing season of 2012 — a fairly creepy omen
would that be. Instead, we are
concluding it with something much more solid, if about three hundred times less
known — the finest record that Bo Diddley got to cut in the studio over the
third, and most underrated, decade of his artistic career.
By all means, Another Dimension was not a bad album, but neither was it really
true to the Bo Diddley spirit, and after it predictably failed to sell, the
people at Chess showed enough glimpses of intellect to let Bo go on and do his
own thang once again — and that he did. Where
It All Began is really a misleading title: usually, we expect them to be
reserved for archival albums of early outtakes, or at least for straightforward
nostalgic throwbacks. However, if there is
a nostalgic throwback here, it is not too stretched out — the album returns
to the steam-funk of Black Gladiator,
and builds up from there. If anything, the title is rather an indirect hint
that Bo Diddley, in 1972, if he really puts his back to it, can be just as
kick-ass as he used to be fifteen years earlier. And you know what? I'm almost
convinced.
The record is a little more polished and a
little less noisy than Black Gladiator,
and we see the classic old Bo Diddley beat return on a couple of numbers, so
overall, Bo is taking fewer risks here. But the overall sound of Gladiator — heavy, deep, echoey, and
quite modern — remains stable, and now it is being supported by cleaner,
sharper production; guest appearances by drummer Johnny Otis on one track and
guitarist Shuggie Otis on another; and fabulous backup vocal arrangements, with
Connie Redmond at the head of the team, and she is good enough to even take the
lead on ʽA Good Thingʼ — and bury poor little Bo deep in the ground
in the process. (The man was careful enough not to let his backup singers take
the spotlight most of the time — but every once in a while, still let down his
guard).
Each side of the LP is dominated by a lengthy
jam: ʽBad Tripʼ, true to its name, is a devoted exercise in acid
funk, whereas ʽBo Diddley-itisʼ is somewhat more traditional —
faster, sloppier, and tribalistic. Both, however, are excellent by their own
standards. ʽBad Tripʼ features six minutes of aggressive and
surprisingly complex guitar pyrotechnics (courtesy of Bo himself and second guitarist
Tom Thompson) — if played sufficiently loud, the track compares quite favorably
to contemporary Funkadelic workouts. And ʽBo Diddley-itisʼ is just a
wild party freakout — now, in 1972, Bo can finally allow himself to stretch out
without any serious limits in the studio, in a manner that, in the 1950s and
1960s, had to be reserved for local club gigs.
In between, we have lots of shorter, catchier,
sunnier «funk-pop» numbers, often with interesting guitar themes — so
interesting, in fact, that one cannot help but wonder how in the world did Bo
manage to stay away so completely from exploring new note sequences throughout
most of the 1960s. Yes, so ʽI've Had It Hardʼ starts things out on a
more than familiar note of «chug, chu-chu-chug-chug, CHUG CHUG», but even there
the second guitar plays something more melodic and curious over Bo's basic
rhythm, while the girls in the back invent a new way of chanting "diddley
bo diddley bo diddley bo diddley bo diddley".
Then there is ʽWomanʼ, pinned to a
wobbly «post-bluesy» riff that would not be out of place on a Television record
(yes, they did something quite similar for ʽMarquee Moonʼ); the
fantastically catchy, hilarious ʽLook At Grandmaʼ, again dominated by
the girls' harmonies; the gritty twin-guitar jam on ʽHey Jeromeʼ; a
not-half-bad take on the sunny soul side with ʽInfatuationʼ; and Bo
strutting his macho stuff with ʽTake It All Offʼ — again, a song not
at all memorable for its «dirty» vocalization, but rather for the excellent
guitar/bass/back vocals interplay.
In fact, amazing as it seems, there is not a
single weak cut on the record. Perhaps it cannot really compete in flimsy terms
of «relevance» with the big black music of the day — perhaps it is nohere near
as far out as Funkadelic, really, and perhaps the rhythms and the riffs are
mostly «old-school», because, well, one cannot demand of a Fifties idol that he
completely re-learn his craft with every new decade. But on its own terms, Where It All Began shows no signs of
weariness — every note is punched out with religious enthusiasm, and the entire
team shows wonders of group coordination. A heavily underrated groovy jam
masterpiece here — dig it out and learn how to surprise your local hipster
parties. Thumbs
up.
THE LONDON BO DIDDLEY SESSIONS (1973)
1) Don't Want No Lyin' Woman;
2) Bo Diddley; 3) Going Down; 4) Make A Hit Record; 5) Bo-Jam; 6)
Husband-In-Law; 7) Do The Robot; 8) Sneakers On A Rooster; 9) Get Out Of My
Life.
And the story goes on: no sooner does Bo find
himself a comfortable, modern-sounding, tradition-respecting groove to slip
in, than his record label, anxious to make just a few cents more on the name,
steers him into a «fashionable» direction. This time, «fashion» involves
teeming up with a bunch of British blues-rock players, following in the sagging
footsteps of Howlin' Wolf (who had the misfortune to actually make his record a stable seller, ensuring
trouble for all of his colleagues), Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and (from a
different label) B. B. King. The logic remains the same — with UK
blues-rockers conquering the original turf of old Chicago bluesmen, both
critically and commercially, old Chicago bluesmen are now in need of the big
names in the business to sell their
records. And, of course, the big names in the business could get all snub-nosed and haughty — but why should they? These
are their idols, after all, and no Eric Clapton or Rory Gallagher could ever
get arrogant enough to claim that they have already advanced to the point where
no B. B. King or Muddy could catch up with them. Be it the truth or not.
Problem is, once they finally decided to repeat
the trick with Bo Diddley, all the good guys had already been taken, or,
perhaps, had decided that they'd already paid their dues in full. In fact, it
turns out that much, if not most, of the recordings here were really made in
Chicago, and only a few of the songs really stem from London studios — just enough
to barely justify the name of the album. Most of the players are little-known
American session men; the only UK credit that I feebly recognize is guitar
player Ray Fenwick, famous for the immortal nugget ʽCrawdaddy Simoneʼ
recorded during his brief stay with the Syndicats, but it is not clear which of
the tracks feature his playing, and, in any case, there is nothing here that
would even remotely approach the primordial wildness of ʽCrawdaddy
Simoneʼ.
Basically, this is just another set of rather
restrained, unexceptional blues-rock and funk-rock, nowhere near the level of
excitement and unpredictability of either Black
Gladiator or Where It All Began.
To see that point, try playing ʽBad Tripʼ and ʽDo The
Robotʼ back-to-back: the former is an evil monster of acid funk, the
latter — merely a professional workout, with plenty of people in the studio but
not a single one daring to take any chances: six minutes go by in vain
expectation that something will
finally break out of this, but what exactly can break out when everybody just
keeps politely saying «after you, Mr. Second Guitarist!» or «no, no, Mr.
Organist, I insist!...» or «don't mind me, ladies and gentlemen of the rhythm
section, I'm just sitting in the corner here, adding some high-pitched funky salt
licks to this nice soup you got cooking».
Many of the songs are spoiled off the bat with
a «de-luxe» big brass section — such as the boogie-blues of ʽDon't Want
No Lyin' Womanʼ, where the only thing of note is Connie Redmond's
powerhouse vocalizing; Bo, on the other hand, cannot truly break through the
wall of guitars, organs, and brass that not only cancel out each other's
effectiveness, but also cancel out the validity of the leading artist. The same
disappointment concerns some of the funkier numbers as well, e.g.
ʽHusband-In-Lawʼ and ʽGoing Downʼ.
Overall, like most of the London Sessions series, the chemistry here is quite weak, and the
record very rarely rises above «listenable». The re-recording of ʽBo
Diddleyʼ with new lyrics is smooth and mildly catchy (mainly due to the
amusing invention of the "oooooh... ouch!" harmony trick);
ʽMake A Hit Recordʼ, with Bo trying out the «stuttering» technique of
delivery, is funny for the first minute (and utterly annoying for the
remaining four); and only the album closer ʽGet Out Of My Lifeʼ is in
any way reminiscent of the scary bite of Bo at his funky best — all of a sudden,
it's like both the rhythm and lead guitars have received clearance for extra
aggression, and, for all of our patience, we are rewarded with ass-kicking
crunch. Maybe it was an outtake from the previous year — I have no idea, but I
wouldn't be surprised.
By that time, however, The London Sessions have already lost whatever credibility the
title could offer — the album as a whole can only serve as further evidence of
the ineptness of the old labels to take the fates of their old artists into
their own hands. Hence, worth a listen or two, but nothing helps to rescue The London Sessions from the good old thumbs down,
unless you just love the «old school» so much that you have no desire to
distinguish between the exceptional and the run-of-the-mill sorts of material.
BIG BAD BO (1974)
1) Bite You; 2) He's Got All
The Whiskey; 3) Hit Or Miss; 4) You've Got A Lot Of Nerve; 5) Stop The Pusher;
6) Evelee; 7) I've Been Workin'.
This one is sometimes called Bo's «jazz album»,
mainly because some of the session players here were relatively big names on
the jazz market, and a very strong brass presence is felt on most of the
tracks. However, there are no «jazz» compositions on here as such — most of it
is the same old funk that Bo had practiced all over the early Seventies, with a
bit of B. B. King-ish «blues-de-luxe» thrown in for good (actually, bad)
measure. And there is no need to feel disappointed: Bo Diddley feels at home
with funky grooves, yet whether he would feel equally at home trying to make
his Bitches Brew remains
questionable. Fortunately, perhaps, we shall never know.
There are only seven tracks this time, and it
does not help the album that the longest one, ʽEveleeʼ, is a slow
12-bar blues that we really do not
need from Bo — the vocals are powerful, but blunt, the harmonica player,
walking in the footsteps of Little Walter, seems to be too small to take a peek
out of the footprint, and the rest of the arrangement is nothing that B. B.
King's backing band could not do just as well or much better. The fact that it
takes its time so leisurely is strongly indicative of filler — and bizarre,
since danceable funky grooves that take their time are not only more
understandable and enjoyable, but are right up Bo's alley as well.
Because, other than ʽEveleeʼ, the
other six tracks are all welcome additions to the catalog — particularly
ʽBite Youʼ, which could arguably be called Bo's last genuine Chess
classic. Playing the big bad (horny) wolf to a snappy funky bassline as the
brass machine works it out like a newbuilt factory — this may not be as
delightfully psycho-chaotic as the best stuff on Black Gladiator, but it still totally ranks in overall body
temperature with whatever James Brown was doing at the time (although,
presumably, Bo's backing band is a little less fluent).
There is also a noble, and surprisingly gritty,
anti-drug diatribe (ʽStop The Pusherʼ) that sounds totally believable
— Bo's "don't buy, and the pusher will die" is probably as
straightforward and anthemic as he ever advanced with instructive social statements,
and it is tied to a harsh and lean, «we-really-mean-business» bass/guitar
interplay that helps drive the point home. Remember this, kids: if you wanna
make a musical social statement that bites, make sure it's really a musical social statement, and an
interesting one, not just a variation on «Just Say No» set to the melody of
ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ or something like that.
Bobby Charles' ʽHe's Got All The
Whiskeyʼ is saved from monotonousness by nice guitar and bass flourishes
all over the place (in terms of whatever the bass guitar is doing here, it is
probably the jazziest number on
here); ʽYou've Got A Lot Of Nerveʼ is optimistic R&B with a bit
of a pub flavor — just the kind of music that Ray Davies was pushing for so
hard in his Everybody's In Show-Biz
period, except that Bo rules it far more masterfully; and ʽI've Been
Workin'ʼ finishes the album with a little «bleak soul», on a more ominous
and desperate note than everything else — for the most part, Big Bad Bo is either uplifting, or
humorous, or both, but this last number lays on some brassy and bass-y darkness;
and there is something ironic, I guess, that the last track on Bo's last album
for Chess bears the title of ʽI've Been Workin'ʼ and a slight aura of
depression — seeing as how it has been more than a decade since he had his last
bit of commercial success with the label. On the other hand, it makes no sense
to read too much sense in any single
Bo Diddley track: the man was not exactly known for being a master of subtle
nuances.
Anyway, thumbs up for Big
Bad Bo — a winner both in terms of spirit and impressive, if not utterly
jaw-dropping, musicianship, and not a bad way to say goodbye to the label that
had been Bo's home for twenty years. It is a little sad that, after all, this
«funky renaissance» period, so healthy to Bo's own persona and sounding so
doggone underrated from the point of view of the 21st century, never caught on
with the public back in its own time — but, apparently, playing good music was
not enough: you had to build yourself up the appropriate image to go with that,
something that James Brown was still capable of doing, but not ol' Bo, whose
rectangular guitar and sexy female sidekicks were just about as far as he was
willing to go in the visual entertainment department. Maybe a boa constrictor
around the neck would have helped — unfortunately, no snake could properly
withstand being shook up by the Diddley beat.
THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF ROCK'N'ROLL (1976)
1) Ride The Water (part 1); 2)
Not Fade Away; 3) Kill My Body; 4) Drag On; 5) Ride The Water (part 2); 6) I'm
A Man; 7) Hey! Bo Diddley; 8) Who Do You Love; 9) Bo Diddley's A Gunslinger;
10) I'm A Man.
A very strange record. Apparently, upon leaving
Chess, Bo Diddley went into complete commercial retirement, as far as any
toying with major labels was concerned. Yet, in 1976, he was still «invited» by
a guy called Ron Terry to guest-star on a special RCA release — according to
the title, supposed to celebrate «the 20th anniversary of rock'n'roll», but
even if, out of general niceness, we decide to agree that rock'n'roll was
indeed invented in 1956 and not one year earlier (or later), it is still not
clear why (a) of all the early rock'n'rollers, the 20th anniversary of
rock'n'roll should be primarily and exclusively associated with Bo Diddley; (b)
why, instead of letting Bo Diddley himself mastermind the project, they made
him sing a bunch of Ron Terry songs on Side A — and then let a bunch of other guys cover his material on Side B.
Never mind, we should probably blame it on the
overall craziness of the mid-1970s — any time period that produces the likes of
Lisztomania is bound to contain ten
times as many «odd» projects as it contains «insane» ones. This is one of the
curious oddities, and it is not even particularly bad: it is merely inadequate
to its purpose, and it is the first album in Bo Diddley's discography which
really, genuinely loses Bo Diddley as
a bit player among the general ambience.
Speaking of ambience, you would be pressed real
hard to find a better application for the «too many cooks» line than this
album. The roster includes, among others, such names as Leslie West, Elvin
Bishop, Joe Cocker, Roger McGuinn, Keith Moon, Albert Lee, and even Billy Joel
(!). But instead of bringing them out, one by one, and making this into some
sort of studio-based Last Waltz celebration,
Ron Terry goes for broke and crams them all together — at least, that is how it
is on the 16-minute jam that occupies all of Side B (supposedly, they are not
all there at the same time on Side A).
The results are predictable: the jam is
extravagantly overproduced, so much so that it is impossible to latch on to
anything in particular. There seems to be a lot of enthusiasm and energy, but
you can never really tell if it is really like that or if it is just because
there are so many players and singers out there at the same time. And in the
end, it's all just the same old Bo Diddley stuff — maybe Albert Lee's guitar
makes it flow more smoothly and with many more flourishes than the original
versions, but the question is whether these versions need this smooth flow. As far as I understand it, turning Bo
Diddley songs into «academic-style blues-rock», even with superb players at
the helm, kinda drop-kicks the initial purpose of these songs.
As for Ron Terry's songs on the first side,
they are odd, too. He must have written them with Bo in mind, and particularly,
with Bo's predilection for the sexy funky sounds of the decade. But these here
are not so much straightahead funk grooves as creepily suggestive «swamp blues»
with a funky undercurrent. ʽRide The Waterʼ, opening and closing Side
A, would probably be better suited for the likes of a Screamin' Jay Hawkins,
who could have, perhaps, given an appropriately spooky, joker-ish performance
against these slow tempos, repetitive wah-wah chords, and minimalistic bass
punches. Mr. Bo Diddley just ain't evil enough for the swamp — let alone for an
attempt to take Buddy Holly's lightweight, amicable ʽNot Fade Awayʼ
and infect it with the devilish swamp blues virus as well.
There is no reason to hunt for this curio,
unless obsession has already gotten the better of you — but if you do come
across it, a spin or two won't hurt. The «Bo Diddley jam» might actually work
if you play it real loud without stopping, all the way through — who knows, at
some point all the innumerable instruments and voices might eventually fall
together, blow a hole in your soul and make you see the light. And the first
side, well... this is the last time you get to hear a still relatively young
Bo Diddley sing some original material — the next twenty years would be spent
in occasional touring, serious relaxation, and some home studio recording
sessions, but no official releases. So that might be reason enough to regard
this disc as a little «farewell gift from the boys», and get acquainted with it
as a little piece of history.
LIVE AT THE RITZ (1988)
1) Road Runner; 2) I'm A Man;
3) Crackin' Up; 4) Hey! Bo Diddley; 5) Plynth (Water Down The Drain); 6) Ooh La
La; 7) They Don't Make Outlaws Like They Used To; 8) Honky Tonk Women; 9) Money
To Ronnie; 10) Who Do You Love.
Bo's recording activity throughout the late
Seventies and the Eighties was about as high as any activity you'd expect from
a bear in prolonged hibernation. He did record and distribute several
cassette-only albums, produced in his own home studio in Archer, Florida, and
fairly hard to locate these days (although they are sometimes offered as
digital downloads): Ain't It Good To Be
Free («...ain't it a bummer that nobody really cares?») in 1983, and Breaking Through The B.S. («...because
Ol' Man Bo can still do better than goddamn Pump!») in 1989. I have not heard them, know next to nothing about
them, and have a deep suspicion that neither is a masterpiece — but that
suspicion don't amount to no fact, so you might wanna be on the lookout if you
think an Eighties' album from Bo Diddley looks like a sufficiently kinky
proposition.
The only Eighties' record with Bo's active
participation that is readily available today is this concert album, recorded
in New York in November 1987 by the short-lived «Gunslingers» project,
involving Bo Diddley and Ronnie Wood. Considering that 1987-88 was the only
period in the history of mankind during which The Rolling Stones had «ceased to
be», the project actually had a theoretical chance at longevity — purely
theoretical, that is, because already the first experiment showed that the
matching was far from perfect.
Technically, Live At The Ritz may, and should, be included into both artists'
discographies, but I prefer to review it under the Bo Diddley section, because
(a) Bo's the older one, (b) the ratio of Bo to Ron songs here is approximately
3/2 (and only if we formally count ʽHonky Tonk Womenʼ as a Ronnie
Wood song; ʽMoney To Ronnieʼ, despite the title, is a semi-improvised
blues jam with Bo taking control), (c) Bo starts off the show as well as closes
it, (d) the event was clearly of more importance to Bo than to Ronnie — it's
one thing to simply fool around on the stage with one of your idols, and
another thing to get your first major label record out in twelve years, even if
you have to share it with some grinning clown from England who prefers to jump
around the stage rather than actually play guitar (okay, so it wasn't nearly as
bad in 1988 as it is now).
The problem is that a good live Bo Diddley show
needs a good live Bo Diddley backing band — and the people assembled on that
stage had fairly little to do with that. The rhythm section, consisting of
Debby Hastings on bass and Mike Fink on drums, is fairly flat-footed (they
can't even set up a proper Diddley beat on ʽHey! Bo Diddleyʼ); the
keyboard player (Hal Goldstein) occasionally switches from regular old piano —
the only keyboard instrument suitable
for this kind of event — to state-of-the-art synthesizers, killing most of the
joy on ʽCrackin' Upʼ; and as much as the presence of two of the
Temptations (David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks, the latter also playing
harmonica and occasional keyboards) could adorn the show... it didn't.
Above all else, the mix is quite poor: Bo's own
rhythm playing is rarely elevated from anything other than background din, and
Ronnie's leads (some, if not many, if not most of them actually supplied by
third guitarist Jim Satten) are sometimes barely audible against the huge drum
sound (remember, the late Eighties were a drummer's paradise — everybody used
to think that amplifying the drum sound gives you complete, absolute power
over the listener). All in all, the ambience just isn't that great for a real
sweaty rock'n'roll show.
The other side of the business is, of course,
that Ronnie has no business taking
part in Bo's stuff, and Bo has no business whatsoever to strut along on
Ronnie's material. As good as all that material is on its own, I fail to see
where it is that the two actually help out each other — unless we begin to
count harmony singing, and I'd rather we don't (everybody knows that Ronnie is
the only person in the world who sings even worse than Keith Richards, and
using Bo Diddley as the resident «Auto-Tuner» is hardly a good solution to the
problem). Ronnie gets a few of his trademark bluesy slide leads, e. g. on
ʽI'm A Manʼ, but Bo Diddley songs are not solo guitar vehicles, and
the leads aren't stunning enough to justify turning them into such vehicles.
And whether Bo is actually doing anything
on Ronnie's numbers, I have not been able to find out.
The Ronnie-led chunk part of the album is
actually better than the Bo-led majority part, if only because the backing band
is so clearly geared towards more «modern» numbers than the oldies. The
performance of Ronnie's ʽOutlawsʼ, for instance, approaches
first-rate barroom-boogie rock'n'roll, and he gets in a rough, but expressive
slide-fest on ʽPlynth (Water Down The Drain)ʼ, which also
incorporates contrasting bits of ʽAmazing Graceʼ and ʽProdigal
Sonʼ. (The decision to also include ʽHonky Tonk Womenʼ was
either due to audience pressure — or, perhaps, Ronnie always had that secret
craving to finally wrestle the classic solo away from Keith. Spoiler bit: Keith
is still the winner).
Still, this is never really «bad» — it is
saddled with too many problems to reach «classic lost gig» status, but both of
the gig's protagonists clearly had themselves some fun; it simply failed to be
perfectly captured on the recording. Historically, it was important for the
effort to drag Bo, a little bit at least, back into the spotlight and show
that, at the age of sixty, he personally had not lost it at all: guitar chops
intact, powerhouse voice still well-powered. A little more sad is the
realization that he was actually dragged out of a deep freeze — having him play
on that stage with all those people is like watching some resuscitated
pre-historical mammal put in a cage with its modern descendants. But, on the
other hand, he doesn't seem to mind, bother, or show any serious discomfort
about this — so let us not look at this from pessimistic angles, either.
A MAN AMONGST MEN (1996)
1) Bo Diddley Is Crazy; 2) Can
I Walk You Home; 3) Hey Baby; 4) I Can't Stand It; 5) He's Got A Key; 6) A Man
Amongst Men; 7) Coatimundi; 8) That Mule; 9) Kids Don't Do It; 10) Oops! Bo
Diddley.
This is Bo's one and only «proper» studio LP in
the last thirty years of his career — «proper» meaning «distributed on an
official commercial basis» (through Atlantic Records), but also «properly
recorded», meaning a professional studio instead of Bo's bedroom, and also
«properly available» (meaning it's still out of print, but at least you can
ruffle through used CD bins on a regular basis with high chances of success).
It ain't no great shakes, and it might even be
a bit below certain expectations (and a bit above other certain expectations),
but in any case, it is a respectable career bookmark. A Bo Diddley album from
a nearly 70-year old Bo Diddley has only one point to prove — namely, that the
rock'n'roll spirit can, and should, be still alive in 70-year olds — and it
does that in the form of a test: can you guess
that the album was recorded by a 70-year old, or does it sound ageless? Naturally,
for everybody who has the faintest idea of who Bo Diddley is, the test is
rigged from the beginning, but my own guess is that I probably couldn't guess.
As Bo was drawn in more and more into the
Stones' circle of contacts — first the Ron Wood alliance, followed by a joint
public appearance in 1994, singing ʽWho Do You Loveʼ — it is no
wonder that much of the playing and production here is masterminded by Ronnie
and Keith, and that fact alone ensures a certain level of gritty quality. Other
pieces of the puzzle include Stevie Ray's brother Jimmie Vaughan, lending a
proper Texan flavour to the proceedings; Johnny "Guitar" Watson,
deepening and nearly-monopolizing that Texan flavour; and such old vets of the
business as Billy Boy Arnold on harp and Johnnie Johnson on piano. Throw in
«The Shirelles» on back vocals (quotation marks reflect my lack of knowledge as
to how many of the original «Shirelles» are actually involved — one? two?), and
that is altogether more guest star presence than Bo ever had to back him up at
any single moment in his career, including even the primordial soup of 20th Anniversary Of Rock'n'Roll.
This actually creates a problem — the end
result looks too much like a glitzy all-star jam, with Bo merely guesting on
his own record, something of which you could never accuse any of his original
albums right up to 1974. Worse, even though most of the songs are credited to
Bo (they must have all agreed that the old man needed the royalties more than
anybody else), they don't really
always sound like Bo Diddley songs. There is too little syncopation, too little
funk, too little «tribal jamming» involved — in fact, about a third of this stuff
sounds like typical Ronnie Wood boogie, another third is «Texan roots rock» à la Stevie Ray, and the final
third is «modernized Bo Diddley for today's kids» material: glossy, even, and
way too loud due to a whole army of cooks stirring the broth at the same time.
That said, it is still a fun record, and a fun
«Bo Diddley-blessed» record, at that. ʽBo Diddley Is Crazyʼ is
rigidly based on ʽWho Do You Loveʼ, and even if Bo's own rhythm
guitar nearly gets lost under all the overdubs, his singing does not — and that
deep caveman rumble is certainly far from an old man's croak. And he certainly
ain't lost his wits, either: verses like "All I wanna do is play my music
and make people happy / I don't wanna be an old drunk like my pappy"
pretty much summarize the man's lifelong credo like nothing else. So even if
the backing track is not very imaginative, the whole thing is still a fun-filled
fast-paced romp — as is ʽOops! Bo Diddleyʼ that bookmarks the album
from the other side (although the latter is seriously overlong, with the band
fooling around for over seven minutes repeating the same licks over and over
again).
In between, we have some slow boring 12-bar
blues (ʽThat Muleʼ, mainly for fans of Billy Boy's harp blowing);
Texan blues-rock shuffle (ʽCan I Walk You Homeʼ), occasionally used
as a new bag for old wine (ʽA Man Amongst Menʼ, which is basically
like a sped-up ʽI'm A Manʼ); one obligatory tribute to the «Diddley
beat», adorned with harmonica vs. slide guitar conversations (ʽHey
Babyʼ); one slow swampy funk groove (ʽI Can't Stand Itʼ); one
reggae tribute to ʽCrackin' Upʼ (ʽCoatimundiʼ, definitely
running overtime); and even one exercise in funkified hip-hop, targeted at the
young ones, with Bo's own grandson joining in on the messaging (ʽKids
Don't Do Itʼ) — «stay in school and get your Ph.D!» hints fairly well at
the scope of Bo's goal-setting. (Problem is, I wouldn't mind the corniness if I
knew for certain there'd be even one
kid in the world, black or white, who could ever claim that his or her life was
irrevocably changed by a thorough listen to this song. As it is, I suppose it
was mostly the grandfathers who heard it).
So, at the very least, even if not all of this
is typical Bo Diddley material, it's still a diverse set of moods and styles,
which makes for a fitting conclusion to Bo's career — reminding of the good old
days when the man was ready to try out nearly everything. Add it up to the
perfect vocal form throughout (Bo even makes a fairly good rapper, much as I
tend to snuff that form), and the
fact that, whatever be the faults and flaws of the production, Keith Richards,
Ronnie Wood, and Jimmie Vaughan are far more exciting guitar players than...
(well, they could have gotten him Lenny Kravitz, or a stiff academician like
Robert Cray — there's millions of them out there) — and altogether, it's almost
awesome that Bo did get a chance to give us a proper musical goodbye with this
record. And it is not bad, either, that although he still had twelve years left
to try and repeat it, he either chose not to or did not get a second chance — one was perfectly enough for a solid thumbs up,
two might have been excessive: A Man
Amongst Men as a «goodbye» is far more effective than as a «welcome back».
BOBBY "BLUE" BLAND
THE "3B" BLUES BOY – THE EARLY YEARS: 1952-1959 (1991)
1) No
Blow, No Show; 2) Wise Man's Blues; 3) Army Blues; 4) Lost Lover Blues; 5) It's
My Life Baby; 6) Honey Bee; 7) Time Out; 8) A Million Miles From Nowhere; 9) Woke
Up Screaming; 10) You've Got Bad Intentions; 11) I Can't Put You Down Baby; 12)
I Don't Believe; 13) I Learned My Lesson; 14) I Smell Trouble; 15) Don't Want
No Woman; 16) Further Up The Road; 17) Teach Me; 18) Bobby's Blues; 19) You Got
Me; 20) Loan A Helping Hand; 21) Last Night; 22) Little Boy Blue; 23) You Did
Me Wrong; 24) I Lost Sight Of The World; 25) Wishing Well.
Other than the kinda dumb subtitle, this
collection is a pretty damn good way to get a good picture of Robert Calvin
Bland, a.k.a. Bobby "Blue" Bland, in his formative years, when his
steady coming sets of singles were not yet reworked into LPs on a consistent
basis. There are other compilations on the market as well, and some might be a
little (but not a lot) more comprehensive, but the 25 recordings collected
here capture all of his sides and sub-periods, except for a few of the earliest
recordings that were made for Chess rather than Duke records — so that the rest
is essentially for completists.
The biggest turn-off in Bobby Bland's career is
probably Bobby Bland's own name — whatever sort of singer would want to be
associated with «bland», anyway? — but that bias is pretty easy to overcome
once Mr. Bland gets his anything-but-bland vocal cords operating. Granted,
throughout the 1950s, he wasn't that much of a «genre innovator»: in fact, the
earliest stuff consists of rather generic jump blues, in the tradition of
Wynonie Harris and Big Joe Turner, and then starts drifting towards slow, moody
«blues-de-luxe» with a little bit of soul to it, kind of like a Big Mama
Thornton (in pants), nothing particularly extraordinary in terms of composition
or arrangement — the blues is just the blues, after all.
Two things drag these recordings out of
potential mediocrity. First, the arrangements are sharp and punchy. The first
few songs rely on saxophones and vibraphones for most of the mood, but after
Bobby returns from the Army (an unhappy predicament of his lamented over in
ʽArmy Bluesʼ), the emphasis shifts on to the guitar, and there is
some damn fine guitar playing on these songs — as far as I can tell, B. B. King
is not here (despite being tightly associated with Bobby as one of Memphis'
original «Beale Streeters» circa 1951-52), but Clarence Hollimon, Roy Gaines,
and, occasionally, Pat Hare, all of them fine 1950s players in their own
rights, are just as good, and kick far more ass than is usually expected of a
singing frontman's backers. Already ʽHoney Beeʼ, from around 1955,
has a terrifically tight, concentrated rock'n'roll solo, and it hardly ever
stops from there — Bobby's guitarists play within and around his phrasing all
the time, and he is wise enough to let the recordings transform into duets
rather than have the spotlight permanently occupied by his own persona.
But the main thing, of course, is the singing.
Bobby Bland may be «bland» indeed in that he's no Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf
— no big-time voodoo practitioner, just a full-time popular entertainer, like
his good friend B. B. In that
category, however, the man was essentially peerless already back then. The
first great example is ʽLost Lover's Bluesʼ, where he gets to
modulate his voice at top range, doing the best thing about a 12-bar blues
delivery that can be done — build it up to a climax instead of delivering three
interchangeable verses in a row. Later on, the same psychotic falsetto appears
in a couple dozen more numbers, but he is being careful about not overdoing it,
and there are numerous other emplois tested out — rougher, softer, barkier,
croonier, higher, lower, whatever: the guy was testing out approach after
approach, obsessed with working out his own style, and it is fun to watch him
doing that. (Certainly more fun than sitting through twenty Jimmy Reed songs in
a row, no matter how «cooler» Jimmy's «anti-mainstream» style might seem to
British boys at the time).
Pat Hare, the wonder guitarist of James
Cotton's ʽCotton Crop Bluesʼ fare (hyperbolically called the «first
heavy metal song» by those out on a mission to return the stolen back to its
owners, but still a damn fine track, by the way), is present only on a few
songs here — but he does contribute aggressive, nasty lead guitar to
ʽFarther Up The Roadʼ, a number that we usually know as ʽFurther
On Up The Roadʼ, in a sped-up version or batch of versions performed by
Clapton, but yes, Bobby Bland recorded it first, and here it is in all its
primal awesomeness. It was a hit, too, as was ʽLittle Boy Blueʼ, a
slow R&B dance number that eventually whips itself into total vocal frenzy
(a James Brown influence is in the works here), but the rest of the singles
mostly didn't manage to chart anywhere high, which is sort of strange — this is
all definitely Top-10 material for any sorts of blues or R&B charts — and a
little unfortunate, because many of these songs show a rough and tough side to
the guy that would be seriously downplayed in his commercially gold period.
Random subjective highlights, for me, would
also include ʽI Woke Up Screamingʼ (impersonating lovestruck
paranoia is a particularly successful venture for Bobby), ʽI Smell
Troubleʼ, ʽYou've Got Bad Intentionsʼ... well, just about
anything where he gets to unwind that fabulous waaah-waaah of his. Too bad
there are so few fast tunes — just ʽHoney Beeʼ and ʽLoan Me A
Helping Handʼ — but there are also no hyper-sappy ballads (ʽLast
Nightʼ is sort of an exception, but it's not like it's got any strings or
anything), and at the end, there is at least one excellent
«world-at-an-end»-style lament — ʽI Lost Sight Of The Worldʼ, on
which Bobby is accompanied by a frantic flute part rather than guitar. In the
end, it is all probably much more diverse than one could ever hope from a
popular entertainer in the 1950s, and there is not a single reason not to give
the collection a firm thumbs up. It is not yet the Bobby Bland of ʽI Pity The Foolʼ's fame, but in some
respects, it's actually better.
TWO STEPS FROM THE BLUES (1961)
1) Two Steps From The Blues;
2) Cry, Cry, Cry; 3) I'm Not Ashamed; 4) Don't Cry No More; 5) Lead Me On; 6) I
Pity The Fool; 7) I've Got To Forget You; 8) Little Boy Blue; 9) St. James
Infirmary; 10) I'll Take Care Of You; 11) Don't Want No Woman; 12) I've Been
Wrong So Long.
Like most «LPs» from the era, this is not a
real «album», but rather a collection of singles scattered over five years of
recording — the earliest tunes here, like ʽLittle Boy Blueʼ, go all
the way back to 1957. However, this streak certainly has a more coherent flavor
to it than 1952-1959 (actually, the
bulk of the material was recorded over just two sessions in late 1960 with the
same band), and for all it is worth, could
be considered a wholesome set. Particularly seeing as how it is often seen as
the ultimate best set in Bobby's career.
Most of the songs, as on Bobby's earlier
singles for Duke Records, are credited to «Deadric Malone», formally a
pseudonym for Don Robey, who was the owner of the label and had a reputation
of a violent thug, forcing anonymous songwriters to yield him all the credit —
so that, in the end, nobody knows who really wrote ʽCry, Cry, Cryʼ or
ʽI Pity The Foolʼ and whether they really had their fingernails
pulled in the basement by Don Robey or if it was just a matter of an extra
bottle or two and a drunken signature on a white sheet of paper. But who cares
if it's just music that we have to be concerned about? The shady aspects of the
music industry are supposed to come and go — the music is here to stay.
ʽTwo Steps From The Bluesʼ — the song
— is a masterful piece of work that belongs to no genre in particular. Part
time blues, part time vocal jazz, part time doo-wop, part time New Orleanian
funeral music, it is a giant step forward for Bobby and Duke Records in general
in terms of production. No longer do the boys sound like Wynonie Harris with
extra electric guitar — the sound is fully fleshed out and rehearsed, with
guitars, pianos, horns, and vocals sharing near-equal parts of the cut, and
each partner bringing on a little something from a different area.
It actually helps that Bobby is not associated
with any particular instrument other than his voice — not being a guitar hero
like B. B. King or a piano whiz like Ray Charles — and that, at the same time,
his backing band is given a fairly free hand to do whatever it chooses to do,
so they all do whatever they do best, particularly Wayne Bennett on guitar and
Teddy Reynolds on piano (the brass section is too large to type them all in). Behind
the vocals, there is always some sort of battle going on, usually between the
guitar and the brass, and most of this stuff would be brilliant even without
Bobby Bland — the sheer dynamics of ʽCry, Cry, Cryʼ and ʽI Pity
The Foolʼ put them way above the average R&B level of the times.
Still, the immediate memorability is all due to
the vocal hooks and «temperatures». Along with the improved production values,
we have an extra level of smoothness and steadiness achieved here — Bobby rolls
into 1960 as one of the most technically accomplished vocalists of his generation;
in fact, if we eliminate the «over-affected» people like Clyde McPhatter from
the starting line, his only real competition back then is Sam Cooke, and Sam
was too much into his emploi of «sweet ladies' man» to try on gritty
«screamers» like ʽCry, Cry, Cryʼ (although he had his own advantages
and know-hows, obviously). Actually, come to think of it, Bobby himself must
have influenced subsequent developments of Sam's career — I hear definite echos
of ʽLead Me Onʼ in ʽA Change Is Gonna Comeʼ, for instance.
There is plenty of soul throughout and not the
slightest ounce of cheap sentimentality. Orchestral arrangements appear only
once, on ʽLead Me Onʼ, and they are heavier on flutes and cellos than
on violins — together with the backing vocals, this gives the song an anthemic
gospel flavor rather than a balladeering one. The lush
«I-will-always-love-you» ballads often have an oddly dark undercurrent
(ʽI'll Take Care Of Youʼ, colored with a rather ominous organ part;
ʽI've Been Wrong So Longʼ, a chivalrous love confession led by an
equally ominous guitar line that could be counted as a predecessor to Albert
King's ʽBorn Under A Bad Signʼ), and to top it all, there is a fine
take on ʽSt. James Infirmaryʼ (with heavily euphemized lyrics, but still...)
— overall, the album matches its name fairly well.
Two
Steps From The Blues ain't
«scary» or «evil» — it's all in the line of respectable adult entertainment —
but it is highly intelligent, innovative, and deep-reaching adult entertainment,
and then there is that voice. Two steps from the blues? One step from a
masterpiece, and only because some of the basic melodies still sound like minor
variations on all-too familiar themes (which shouldn't be surprising
considering all the «anonymous authorship»), and some of the songs break away
from the stylistics (like the uptempo, atypically misogynistic, flashy
electric-guitar-driven, ʽDon't Want No Womanʼ — although I do like
the song a lot), reminding us that this is, after all, a mixed-up bag in the end.
Still, thumbs up
without the slightest doubt.
HERE'S THE MAN!!! (1962)
1) 36-22-36; 2) You're The One
(That I Adore); 3) Turn On Your Love Light; 4) Who Will The Next Fool Be; 5)
You're Worth It All; 6) Blues In The Night; 7) Your Friends; 8) Ain't That
Lovin' You; 9) Jelly Jelly Jelly; 10) Twistin' Up The Road; 11) Stormy Monday
Blues.
This quick follow-up to Two Steps is not as universally lauded or included in any «golden
fund» anthologies — in fact, it is not even available as such on CD, and has to
be re-cobbled together from larger Duke Records collections — however,
quality-wise, it is maybe only half a notch below Two Steps, and only because the instrumental focus is slightly
shifted from individual instruments to «big band flavor», with a Vegasy touch
to some of the numbers that wasn't there before. Also, there was really no need to remake ʽFurther On Up
The Roadʼ as ʽTwistin' Up The Roadʼ — as if there was no other
way to let us know the chronological setting of the record. You can hardly
twist to the re-make anyway: it gets stuck somewhere midway between gritty
blues-rock and dance entertainment.
But this is the one that has ʽTurn On Your
Lovelightʼ on it, a number we usually know from Pigpen's classic
20-minute workouts on Grateful Dead concerts — and no matter how much we respect
the Grateful Dead, the two-and-a-half minute original cannot be beat: Pigpen is
no Bobby Bland when it comes to winding yourself up in a gospel-soul frenzy,
and the song's big selling point is Joe Scott's original brass arrangement,
combining boogie discipline with New Orleanian excitement (there is an echo of
ʽSaintsʼ in there somewhere).
This is also the one that has the definitive version of ʽStormy
Mondayʼ on it — well, possibly the second definitive after T-Bone Walker's
original recording, but it was this one that must have inspired everybody from
the Allman Brothers to Clapton: Bobby gets in character with such verve and
authenticity as T-Bone never could (not being much of a great singer), and
Wayne Bennett's lead guitar playing is every bit as good, and probably several
bits better, than Walker's — he gives the song a laid-back, jazzy vibe with
just the faintest, subtlest traces of anxiety and paranoia, and in between the
two of them, a classic soulful update on a pioneering electric blues classic is
produced. If you are sick and tired of the recent ten millionth cover of
ʽStormy Mondayʼ recorded by yet another generic blues outfit, put
yourself in the context of 1962 and it may be easier to understand why the
song has inspired such an annoyingly massive legacy.
Other recognizable tunes include Billy
Eckstine's ʽJelly, Jellyʼ (later also appropriated by the Allmans
for Brothers And Sisters), done in a
somewhat «loungey» fashion; Charlie Rich's ʽWho Will The Next Fool
Be?ʼ; and a version of ʽBlues In The Nightʼ that is no better or
worse than the legions of versions of ʽBlues In The Nightʼ recorded
over the years. However, none of these are as much fun as is
ʽ36-22-36ʼ, where Bobby's backers yell out the measurements with such
force, you'd think the sincerity of his love confessions depended on it in a
direct proportion. (Not that there'd be anything surprising about it).
The album only has 11 tracks: as you re-cobble
the sequencing from various compilations, it would make sense to expand it to
12 by not forgetting ʽHow Does A Cheatin' Woman Feelʼ, a great, but
forgotten B-side from the same year with yet another fine vocal/guitar duet
from Bobby and Wayne — denser and moodier than on ʽStormy Mondayʼ,
and adding the much needed extra darkness and depression to a record whose
only flaw is a small excess of sentimentalism for a supposedly «blues» album.
Oh sure, it inherits the «urban blues» tradition rather than the «Delta blues»
one, but still, there has to be a good balance between the happy Bobby and the
unhappy Bobby. Restore this balance with ʽCheatin' Womanʼ, and that's
a surefire thumbs
up for you.
CALL ON ME / THAT'S THE WAY LOVE IS (1963)
1) Call On Me; 2) The Feeling
Is Gone; 3) Honky Tonk; 4) Cry, Lover, Cry; 5) Wishing Well; 6) Share Your Love
With Me; 7) That's The Way Love Is; 8) Care For Me; 9) No Sweeter Girl; 10)
Bobby's Blues; 11) Ain't It A Good Thing; 12) Queen For A Day.
Going down a little bit here, as the hits start
to slowly merge with the filler and the arrangements start getting a bit samier
and the moods get mushier — ʽWishing Wellʼ and ʽBobby's
Bluesʼ are the toughest numbers on here, but also the oldest, going all
the way back to the 1950s and, consequently, quite out of tune with newer,
better produced material. On most of that material, however, Bobby now has to
compete with Clyde McPhatter and Ben E. King — ʽCall On Meʼ is
basically his ʽStand By Meʼ, although the song is a bit too cuddly
and playful to rank among the great soul masterpieces of the era. The horns
have a nice run, though.
At least two of the songs here are in some way
associated with The Band. ʽShare Your Love With Meʼ was covered on Moondog Matinee — in a version that
rivaled the soulful original quite well (Richard Manuel certainly had just the
right amount of soul in his voice to match Bobby's, if not quite the right
amount of technique); and ʽHonky Tonkʼ they used to do in their early
days as «Levon & The Hawks». However, this time around that's about it:
most of the songs failed to become household names, including ʽThat's The
Way Love Isʼ which, unfortunately, faded out of sight as the
Whitfield/Strong by the same name far eclipsed its fame in 1967.
Bobby's singing is beyond reproach — at this
point, he would be beyond reproach even singing phone numbers from his notebook
— but the vibe throughout is centered around mellow, «innocent» twisting and
shuffling and mainly provided by horns. When there is at least some guitar and
keyboard involvement, as on ʽAin't It A Good Thingʼ, it works very
well; at other times, it gets monotonous, or even soporific.
Especially because there just seems to be too
many blues ballads, not enough «blues blues». «Darker» numbers include
ʽThe Feeling Is Goneʼ, with the album's grimmest bassline and gloomiest
vocals — and the two old outtakes from the 1950s, possibly thrown on at the
last moment to add just a pinch of grit to all the sweetness, but to no avail: Call On Me clearly states that Bobby
made his choice — possibly in the overall context of the «mellowing» moods of
1963, not yet shaken by the Invasion — and the choice is «family-friendly».
That said, if we have to have
«family-friendly» from 1963, I'd rather take it from Bobby Bland than any
random teen idol from the same epoch — this guy, at least, manages to stay
well-grounded even on the most syrupy numbers.
AIN'T NOTHING YOU CAN DO (1964)
1) Ain't Nothing You Can Do;
2) If I Hadn't Called You Back; 3) Today; 4) Steal Away; 5) After It's Too
Late; 6) I'm Gonna Cry; 7) Loneliness Hurts; 8) When You Put Me Down; 9) If You
Could Read My Mind; 10) Reconsider Baby; 11) Black Night; 12) Blind Man.
The title track here was Bobby's highest entry
into the pop charts — hitting No. 20 at just about the same time The Beatles
finally broke through in the States, ensuring that nothing else by Bobby Bland
would ever hit No. 19 from now on. It is a fairly successful attempt to cast
Bobby as an upbeat romantic R&B troubadour in the vein of Arthur Alexander
(and Bobby sure can make use of all those extra decibels), and a good example
of a careful build-up strategy — with not only the voice, but the repetitive
brass backing as well gaining in pitch and volume as time goes by. Van
Morrison, at least, was impressed enough to cover the song a decade later.
Nevertheless, the whole thing in general is
rather standard Bobby fare for the times, with almost no big surprises, no
saddening letdowns, and nothing all that much to distinguish Bobby
"Blue" Bland circa 1964 from Bobby "Blue" Bland circa 1963.
The one real highlight, to me, is not
even the title track, but Bobby's rendition of Charles Brown's ʽBlack
Nightʼ — arguably better than the original, or any other version of the
song that exists: Arthur Alexander's sped-up recording, for instance,
accidentally drained it of all the dread and desperation — whereas Bobby's version,
with tense 'n' subtle guitar 'n' piano backing, really puts the «black» in the
«night», if you know what I mean. It is just such a goddamn pity how Bobby was
primarily concentrating on «happier» material at the time, because it is stuff
like ʽBlack Nightʼ, really, that brings out the finest qualities in
his voice — including just a tinge of genuine spookiness, one that separates
him lock stock and barrel from the crowds of crass lounge lizards.
The B-side of ʽBlack Nightʼ was
ʽBlind Manʼ, which closes the album on a relatively «rocking» note,
dark bassline, screeching guitar, hysterical vocals and all — incidentally,
that way the record ends in a much darker, «harder» vein than it began,
however, the main bulk of the songs still consists of pleasant, light-spirited,
quickly forgettable R&B, destined for rapid consumption and moving on,
helping to promote that fairly stereotypical picture of pre-British Invasion
mainstream American pop entertainment that we are fed by our musical history
books. The more accurate truth, of course, is that it is simply more difficult
to go fishing for pearls in that age — the payoff is still there, as evidenced
by ʽAin't Nothing You Can Doʼ and ʽBlack Nightʼ, but nobody
really has to endure all the «pleasant mediocrity» in between.
THE SOUL OF THE
MAN (1966)
1) I Can't Stop; 2) Back In
The Same Old Bag; 3) Deep In My Soul; 4) Reach Right Out; 5) Ain't Nobody's
Business; 6) Fever; 7) Too Late For Tears; 8) Let's Get Together; 9) Soul
Stretch; 10) Dear Bobby; 11) Playgirl.
We are now launching into the third double CD
of Bobby's Duke recordings — That Did
It!, covering the man's career from 1966 to 1972, and including, among
other things, the near-complete Soul Of
The Man LP from 1966 (every song except for ʽSoul Stretchʼ, a
Stax-ish instrumental with some nicely wailing electric guitar licks, but instrumentals on a Bobby Bland album?
That's like heavy metal on a Beach Boys album!).
And looks like it has been well worth the wait.
Now that American pop music, black and white alike, had scraped off some of the
excessive sentimentality and «comfort» of the early 1960s, it was high time to
get back to business — with Atlantic, Motown, King, and other labels flashing
hot new R&B sounds, now influenced «in reverse» by the rock'n'roll scene,
even Bobby Bland could be expected to deliver something grittier than his last
two records, and he did.
ʽI Can't Stopʼ starts us off somewhat
deceptively, as one of those typical I-vi-IV-V numbers all of us have heard one
hundred too many of, but eventually, with an abrupt key change, we have a
transformation from sentimental ballad to ecstatic gospel for the bridge —
somewhat reminiscent of the move from verse to chorus in Clapton's
ʽPresence Of The Lordʼ three years later, and maybe not totally coincidental,
either.
However, that is nothing compared with
ʽBack In The Same Old Bagʼ, which opens directly with a «biting»
rhythm guitar pattern and has Bobby roaring and bawling over a wall of
serious-minded guitar and brass parts — the word ʽBagʼ in the title
may hint at a tad of jealousy towards the recent hero of ʽBrand New
Bagʼ, but the song actually invades the territory of Wilson Pickett and
Otis Redding rather than the Godfather of Soul, and does it with lots of verve,
although I sure wish those guitar licks eventually came together in some
memorable riff.
From then on, the ballads are kept to the level
of «bare necessities» — and mostly take on the form of deep soul (ʽDeep In
My Soulʼ — DUH!) or, for once, a passionate soul dialog between Bobby and
Vi Campbell. Everything else is rigidly, or, rather, non-rigidly groovy, with
the exception of a blues-de-luxe take on ʽAin't Nobody's Businessʼ
(a good one, but the song has been covered by way too many people for me to
value any of those versions much over Bessie Smith's original) — even
ʽFeverʼ is set to a full-band arrangement, with the guitar guy trying
to remember how to play ʽSmokestack Lightningʼ, for some reason.
Other than the first two notes, he fails, but it still makes the arrangement
fun.
Of all the originals, ʽLet's Get
Togetherʼ is probably the best, a breezy sunny ditty with seductive girl harmonies
— almost like a blueprint for all of Al Green's early career before he learned
to make his own, one and only use of his one and only voice. Or it may be the
Ray Charles-reminiscent ʽToo Late For Tearsʼ. Or it may be anything
else — no, these are not «great», unforgettable songs, they all follow a
particular formula, but it is good to see it tested on Bobby with all the
right, tasteful, state-of-the-art ingredients of classic mid-Sixties soul. Thumbs up.
PS. One of the more interesting non-LP songs
from the period, worth looking for, is ʽGood Time Charlie, Pt. 1ʼ
(never heard ʽPt. 2ʼ, but it might be an instrumental coda) — this is Bobby's straight answer to
ʽPapa's Got A Brand New Bagʼ and ʽI Feel Goodʼ at the same
time, and even if it is (naturally) nowhere near as innovative in the musical
department, at least Bobby got Mr. Brown sorely beat in the vocal department.
TOUCH OF THE
BLUES (1967)
1) A Touch Of The Blues; 2)
Set Me Free; 3) That Did It; 4) Road Of Broken Hearted Men; 5) Sweet Loving; 6)
Driftin' Blues; 7) Sweet Lips Of Joy; 8) Sad Feeling; 9) Shoes; 10) One Horse
Town.
Since there was no reason to change the formula
of Soul Of The Man — unless Bobby
wanted to go psychedelic or baroque-pop, which he most certainly did not — this
is a rather faithful follow-up, without any noticeable innovations and,
therefore, a little less exciting from a reviewer's point of view. Two of the
songs are from «outside» sources — ʽThat Did Itʼ, a leisurely blues
shuffle contributed by Dave Clark, and a cover of the old standard
ʽDriftin' Bluesʼ; everything else is credited to our old
acquaintance «Deadric Malone», and whether or not Don Robey was using anonymous
outside contractors this time, the songs are not particularly interesting or
memorable.
ʽShoesʼ is kind of a strange number,
as it echoes ʽSunnyʼ in its vocal arrangements and no less than
Procol Harum's ʽConquistadorʼ in one of its bass lines. However, it
is clumsily written, and the brass and chimes overdubs produce a confused,
chaotic feeling — almost as if some deadbeat took the near-perfect structure of
ʽSunnyʼ, twisted it far enough to avoid a plagiarism suit, and ended
up producing an only semi-functional entity. Not even Bobby can do a lot with
it, because this sort of soul-pop approach is not in his style.
The real highlights, therefore, are probably
the title track, a moody chunk of dark blues-soul where Bobby's pleading /
growling, whooping female harmonies, and some tasteful jazzy guitar licks yield
an excellent combination; ʽSad Feelingʼ, which builds up towards a
frenzied James Brown-ian chorus through thick brass swagger and slow funky
guitar; and ʽOne Horse Townʼ, which is essentially more of the same,
but a little more upbeat.
Overall, repeated listenings are rewarding — in
actuality, almost each track has some nifty lead guitar work, even if the
guitar almost never gets the spotlight to itself, and in terms of production,
the dialog between guitar and brass may really be enhanced here, compared to
the standard of the previous year. Add to this the complete lack of sappy
ballads (most of the sentimentality here is expressed in upbeat, danceable pop
form, as on ʽSweet Lips Of Joyʼ), and it all makes for thirty more
swell minutes of a Bobby "Blue" Bland experience that you will never
ever forget... while it keeps playing in your player, that is. Thumbs up.
SPOTLIGHTING THE
MAN (1969)
1) Chains Of Love; 2) Georgia
On My Mind; 3) Since I Fell For You; 4) Who Can I Turn To; 5) Wouldn't You Rather
Have Me; 6) Rockin' In The Same Old Boat; 7) I'm On My Way; 8) Ask Me About Nothin';
9) You Ought To Be Ashamed; 10) Gotta Get To Know You.
Bobby's last complete LP for Duke Records is a
fitting goodbye, even if it was never intended as such (Bobby went on to
produce an additional bunch of singles in 1970-71, before the label folded and
he eventually became free of the Don Robey servitude). Nothing is fundamentally
different from the Soul Of The Man
formula, but the songs seem just a tad better written (or selected from early
sources) and just a teensy bit more rock-oriented.
Actually, there is at least one fabulous
masterpiece on here: ʽRockin' In The Same Old Boatʼ should
unquestionably be in Bobby's Top 10, a hot, dark, sweaty, swampy, psycho-jazzy,
almost «acid-rockish» monster of a soul blues rant, with some of the moodiest
brass and guitar lines crossing each other in the history of the genre — and
the vocal delivery ain't no slouch either, featuring Bobby at his most tense
and strung out, eventually whipping himself up into a paranoid frenzy. This is
some real shit out there, and all I
can say is, way too bad that Bobby
only tried this darker, scarier approach every once in a while — so as not to
creep out the sentimentally minded segment of his audience, I guess.
Those latter will by far prefer the lush
one-two punch opening sequence of ʽChains Of Loveʼ (appropriately
orchestrated and romanticized, but wonderfully sung all the same) and
ʽGeorgia On My Mindʼ, for which Bobby does everything in his power to
outperform Uncle Ray, but inevitably fails due to genetic inhibitions (on a
strictly technical level, Uncle Ray may have limited powers compared to
Bobby's, but it is his rasp and wheeze that give his ʽGeorgiaʼ the
edge — Bobby is just too perfect to
make the results as comparably interesting). Furthermore, we simply happen to
know these songs all too well to complain about one more competent rendition.
However, as far as I am concerned, neither of them holds a candle not only to
ʽSame Old Boatʼ, but also to ʽI'm On My Wayʼ, marked by
another bring-the-house-down vocal performance and top notch brass / electric
guitar backing — tense is the key:
Bobby the heart-breaker always takes a step back to Bobby the broken-hearted.
Overall, it may simply be so that the ratio of
«dark» to «light» on this record is more heavily tilted towards the dark side,
with minor-key moods and plaintive atmospheres ruling the day. ʽAsk Me
About Nothin'ʼ, ʽYou Ought To Be Ashamedʼ — these titles speak
for themselves, and the arrangements are appropriately funereal and depressed,
and the effect is predictably classy. Perhaps Don Robey was a shameless con man ripping off the R&B scene and using the
spoils to dress up his protegé, but even if it were really so, he sure
did it with style — everything here is perfectly on the level, and sometimes on
a higher level than concurrent Atlantic and Motown productions. (In fact, by
1969 both labels were already on the verge of slipping into the smooth orchestrated
banality of the Diana-Ross-Roberta-Flack 1970s — nothing of the sort here).
It all ends up with a brief unexpected triumph
of exuberance — ʽGotta Get To Know Youʼ, with its anthemic brass,
chimes, pianos, strings, and backing harmonies is a fab conclusion, a
large-scale R&B dance number that should have, by all means, opened rather than closed the album,
giving it a tremendous kick-start. But as it is, it winds up the proceedings
on a surprising and promising rather than predictably sentimental note, and I
applaud the sequencing. Altogether, this is all as good as it ever gets with
this relatively limited, but classy formula — thumbs up.
HIS CALIFORNIA
ALBUM (1973)
1) This Time I'm Gone For
Good; 2) Up And Down World; 3) It's Not The Spotlight; 4) (If Loving You Is
Wrong) I Don't Want To Be Right; 5) Goin' Down Slow; 6) The Right Place At The
Right Time; 7) Help Me Through The Day; 8) Where My Baby Went; 9) Friday The
13th Child; 10) I've Got To Use My Imagination.
The start of an entirely new life for Bobby — a
new label (Dunhill); a new producer (Steve Barri, famous for having produced at
least a little something by at least half of the major American hitmakers of
the day); and, overall, a thoroughly new style, as we move into yet another
decade, Bobby's third one, where he would feel right at home. No wonder he
would soon be teaming up with B. B. King in a triumphant swell of pride: they
were pretty much the only veterans of the pre-rock'n'roll era astute enough to
move with the tide, not against it.
His
California Album was not a
huge hit, but it sold steadily, and the lead-off single, ʽThis Time I'm
Done For Goodʼ, a leftover from his ex-boss «Deadric Malone», even hit the
Top 50 on the pop charts for the first time since 1964. For a good reason, too:
the production style is distinctly «contemporary», with a thick orchestral
layer (piano / organ / strings) and
wailing electric guitar and a big fat
post-funk-revolution bassline — but Bobby's soul hollering remains on exactly
the same wavelength as it was twenty years earlier, and that is the best news
of all: after all, we don't want the guy competing with the likes of Barry
White, do we?
Actually, there is nothing wrong whatsoever
with stereotypical 1970s production when the band shows a good balance between
muscle and flex; and although the names of these session musicians do not
immediately ring a bell, there are actually a few unsung heroes here — Max
Bennett on bass, who had played with everyone from Peggy Lee to Frank Zappa;
Larry Carlton on guitar (and a few other people who would eventually become
members of The Crusaders); Ernie Watts on sax; and others too numerous to
mention, but, for the most part, veterans of the jazz / blues scene, more interested
in simply keeping up with the changing times rather than with the dropping tastes.
And in terms of taste, California Album
is just about perfect: all soul, no sap.
On a couple of the tracks, the band even gets
fairly heavy, nowhere more so than on the album closer, a cover of Gladys
Knight's ʽI've Got To Use My Imaginationʼ that buries the original —
transforming it from a relatively lightweight dance number into a slowed down,
fang-baring, grumbly blues-rock stomp. But this is, of course, not very
typical: usually, the band is content enough wallowing in light-hearted grooves
itself, just not dance-oriented.
And everything works. ʽIt's Not The
Spotlightʼ is a Gerry Goffin song that we usually know in soft takes — Rod
Stewart's, or Barry Goldberg's, or Beth Orton's, whatever; here, the song is given
the royal production treatment, with an almost gospel backing, several guitar
and «snowy organ» overdubs, and one of those thunderous «oh Lowwrrrd!» roars
from Bobby every now and then for an extra thrill — the end result is uplifting
and exciting without losing the subtlety of the original version.
ʽ(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want To
Be Rightʼ was a major hit for Luther Ingram, spurred on to notability for
the controversial lyrics (openly romanticizing and glorifying adultery was a
bit over the top even for «The Me Decade») — and although Ingram's performance
was quite credible and respectable, the instrumental backing on Bobby's record
far surpasses the comparably thin arrangement on his single from 1972.
ʽHelp Me Through The Dayʼ is a Leon Russell song, and Leon Russell
songs are always done better by somebody who is not Leon Russell, be they black
singers, white singers, or little pink blobs from Aldebaran. ʽGoin' Down
Slowʼ has been done by just about everybody in the rootsy business, but
even here the band is able to find a moderately original, aggressive brass/bass
groove and stick to it steadily for five minutes (with some fairly nifty
jamming taking up a large chunk of the time).
In short, this is nothing short of a «modest
masterpiece» of early 1970's soul — coming from a 1950's survivor, no less —
and a thorough must-hear for all lovers of the genre who like their instrumentation
to be polyphonic, tasteful, yet somewhat restrained instead of going all the
way à la Funkadelic. If
anything, the lack of saccharine ballads alone makes this a real gem in its
niche, for the standards of 1973. Thumbs up all the way: for some reason, the
average reviews of the album generally tend to be lukewarm, but I prefer to
ascribe this to historical accidence, or maybe just the general reluctance to
highly back-rate any album that has the word California in the title ever since the Eagles set us on the road of
no return.
DREAMER (1974)
1) Ain't No Love In The Heart
Of City; 2) I Wouldn't Treat A Dog (The Way You Treat Me); 3) Lovin' On
Borrowed Time; 4) When You Come To The End Of Your Road; 5) I Ain't Gonna Be
The First To Cry; 6) Dreamer; 7) Yolanda; 8) Twenty-Four Hour Blues; 9) Cold
Day In Hell; 10) Who's Foolin' Who.
I do not know most of these guys who supplied
Bobby with the material for Dreamer,
but they sure did a fine job in ensuring its coherence. The dark, smoky soul
atmospherics of California Album
has been expanded to full length — one peep at the lengthy song titles is more
or less enough to understand what this is all going to be about. This time,
there isn't even any ʽIt's Not The Spotlightʼ-type material: just
about every song here comes from the point of view of a none-too-happy blues
guy, and he makes the best of his backing band to let you know it.
Consequently, this is one of the gloomiest albums of 1974, and even if,
formally, at this point Bobby was supposed to plough the same field with the
likes of Donny Hathaway, in spirit Dreamer is much closer to the tense,
paranoid funk masters of its era.
The album pretty much picks up from where
ʽI've Got To Use My Imaginationʼ left us last time around:
ʽAin't No Love In The Heart Of The Cityʼ also has a threatening heavy
riff, although it comes and goes rather than stay with you all the time, while
ringing funky syncopes and strings keep a more constant presence. It is the perfect urban blues anthem of 1974 —
the verses may seem to simply deal with yet another broken heart story, but the
refrain ("ain't no love in the heart of the city... ain't no love, ain't
no pity") has a more universalist spirit, and the fact that the song
became a big hit is quite telling: the whole experience is so loaded with
mid-1970s decadent melancholia, everybody with subconscious expectations of the
end of the world must have bought a copy for oneself, and one more for each of
one's best friends.
The second single, ʽI Wouldn't Treat A Dog
(The Way You Treated Me)ʼ, is a bit more intimate, but the title and the
related vocal hook were harsh enough to pick the public's attention all the
same, and it still works — the song is assigned a proto-disco beat, but this is
more for experimentation's sake than commercial reasons: nothing else here
invites you to dance, least of all Bobby's vocals, as he is still capable of
giving the old «she done me wrong» yarn a fresh tonal spin. One funky guitar in
the right speaker, one bluesy guitar in the left speaker, quiet organ in the
back, ominous brass riffs in front — perfectly tasteful and meaningful
combination.
There is not much to say about the following
tracks: they all probe the same moods in much the same tasteful ways. There is
only one song I actively dislike: ʽYolandaʼ has the brass section in
Vegasy mode, and Bobby's chorus of "oh Yolanda, why you forsake me?"
shows an irritatingly cheesy «Tom Jones»-style spirit that clashes quite
uncomfortably with the rest of the album — I am sure that this came about by
accident rather than intention, but I would be much happier anyway to have
this over-acted piece replaced by something more substantial. The other mildly
merry tune here, the album closer ʽWho's Foolin' Whoʼ, could
theoretically be spoiled by excessive emphasis on backing vocals from Bobby's
girls, but at least it is a formal blues-rock number with screeching solos and
aggressive singing — no «Vegas effect» whatsoever.
As much as I struggle to write about individual
songs, I am still quite glad about this consistent monotonousness — at this
point, the more gloomy funk-blues, predictably arranged and performed, this
guy gets to sing, the more good it does for his reputation. No syrup, no sap,
and only a tiny slice of cheese: Dreamer
is one of the few islands of taste and even «class» (and I don't like to abuse
that word) in a sea of mainstream sludge on the «unadventurous mainstream» pop
market of 1974. Thumbs
up.
TOGETHER FOR THE
FIRST TIME... LIVE (1975)
1) 3 O'Clock Blues; 2) It's My
Own Fault; 3) Driftin' Blues; 4) That's The Way Love Is; 5) I'm Sorry; 6) I'll
Take Care Of You; 7) Don't Cry No More; 8) Don't Answer The Door; 9) Medley;
10) Why I Sing The Blues; 11) Goin' Down Slow; 12) I Like To Live The Love.
Technically, this record should have probably
been filed under «B. B. King»: B. B. is officially given first billing on the
set, and besides, he plays and sings,
whereas Bobby, unfortunately, never took the time to properly master an
instrument — not even a tambourine. But since B. B.'s discography is so much
more vast anyway, we will bring in some balance and give Bobby extra credit. He
sure needs more credit from us than B. B. does, anyway.
This is a beautiful little sprawling double LP,
recorded in one take in some cheap sleazy L. A. bar (correction: actually, at
Western Recorders, Studio 1, but, allegedly, the audience was real, and rowdy
enough to suggest that they did mask the studio as a cheap sleazy bar) — much of
it improvised and almost all of it without any serious pre-planning or
rehearsal. It got panned by Rolling Stone upon release and continues, out of
subconscious respect for tradition, to garner cool reprimands from
mainstream-os: the All-Music Guide review mumbles something about the atmosphere
being «too relaxed» and a lack of flying sparks — as if they were expecting the
Dead Kennedys or something. For Christ's sake, these guys are public entertainers: their job has always been
to entertain, and, having gotten together, this is what they do at twice the
effort and twice the effect. Despite the critics, the album sold real well, and
in this particular case, I am completely on the side of the buying public.
On the technical side, nothing is new. The setlist
is comprised mainly of those songs that were already big hits or personal
favorites of B. B.'s or Bobby's — it is rather symbolic that they open with
ʽ3 O'Clock Bluesʼ, which was the very first commercially successful
recording for King in 1952. The singing and playing are exactly what you would
expect from both gentlemen circa 1975 (you may set your expectations pretty
high, but no particular surprises). And the «novelty» of the «together for the
first time» announcement will, of course, be dampened for everybody who knows
that B. B. and Bobby spent an awful lot of time together in the 1950s as the
«Beale Street Boys» in Memphis. They may be recording
for the first time together, but they gel like old pals — because they are old pals.
And this is, of course, the cornerstone of the
album's charm. Even if it is a commercial project, it has all the trappings of
a loose, free-flowing, informal party — just two guys showing off before each
other and a bunch of friends, cocky but amicable. Almost every track has them
shooting off insider jokes at each other, trading funny (or not so funny)
one-liners and offside remarks, and, overall, having a great time — or at least
simulating a great time so well that I honestly couldn't tell it for the real
thing.
True enough, there is very little «blues» here
if what you want is serious heart tension rather than a friendly party
environment. The atmosphere only gets bleak and smoky maybe just a couple of
times — for instance, when they put a temporary stop to the banter as Bobby
launches into a heartbroken rendition of ʽI'll Take Care Of Youʼ:
then, almost as if they simultaneously realized that things are getting too
«heavy», just as the last note of the song is sprung, they launch into the
uptempo, uplifting ʽDon't Cry No Moreʼ to compensate. The other track
where they try to go over the head of the «party mood» is ʽGoin' Down
Slowʼ, with a mighty build-up towards the end — but the show is still
brought to a final stop with ʽI Like To Live The Loveʼ, a recent hit
for B. B. that has nothing for you but one hundred percent positive vibrations.
And there is nothing wrong with that.
"Some people say that the kind of blues we're getting into now are
ʽslick bluesʼ", B. B. remarks as they wind up ʽI'm
Sorryʼ, "and I don't think so, I think they're just telling it like
it is", and there certainly is a serious slice of truth to that remark. In
1975, both of these guys were respectable stars (if not superstars), with
plenty of reputation, public acclaim, and money to spare — so would a tense,
tragically-flavored performance, floating in misery and anger, be «telling it
like it is»? What they do here, in addition to being professionally performed
and recorded, is all perfectly natural, a fine document of their time that,
even today, will make for terrific evening party accompaniment. Thumbs up,
totally.
GET ON DOWN WITH
BOBBY BLAND (1975)
1) I Take It On Home; 2) Today
I Started Loving You Again; 3) You've Always Got The Blues; 4) I Hate You; 5)
You've Never Been This Far Before; 6) If Fingerprints Showed Up On Skin; 7)
Someone To Give My Love To; 8) Too Far Gone; 9) You're Gonna Love Yourself (In
The Morning).
More like «Let It Down With Bobby Bland»,
actually. After the success of the California
Album / Dreamer formula, yet another modest reinvention could not hurt,
and heading in a country-blues direction was not necessarily a bad thing...
well, come to think of it, in 1975 it probably was — the next bad thing to going disco. Nashville people come into the
picture and while they do not exactly steal it from our hero, they sort of tug
the rug from under his feet.
The only excuse for «sterilizing» production
values and opting for a smoother, slicker sound in the post-Duke era was that
the resulting smoke, darkness, and desperation were an excellent compensation.
Now, however, sterile production values remain, but the depth is gone — Bobby
is covering newer and older country classics that were never written with
himself in mind, and, for the most part, are so melodically faceless that only
a strong — and appropriately selected
— personality could make them work. Bobby's personality is a strong one, by
all means, but whether it has really been appropriately selected for these
songs is questionable.
Technically, it all works if you have
sufficient respect for Merle Haggard, Freddie Hart, Charlie Rich, and Kris
Kristofferson: the arrangements are deep and lush, the backing vocals sensual
and sexy, and Bobby gets into the whole thing like a pro, whether or not it was
his own idea. But emotionally, the whole thing wallows in syrup rather than
anything else — so much so that even a song called ʽI Hate Youʼ
really spells ʽI Love Youʼ (and is about as musically intriguing or
spiritually involving as either of these titles).
And most importantly, there is simply no room
for Bobby to show off what he's got: these songs do not imply build-ups,
contrasts, growls, snorts, hysterics, or gospel undertones. They may work —
occasionally — when sung by lazy, offensive, unshaved, whiskey-soaked white
guys, but not when sung by a hard-working, amicable, clean-cut, and
(presumably) sober Bobby «Blue» Bland. At least when Ray Charles did this kind
of thing more than a decade earlier, it was novel and benefitted from the
overall freshness of approach, the overall healthier climate of 1960s pop, and
the overall genius of Ray; this piece, however, uncomfortably reminds of the
subtly evil sides of that legacy. Thumbs down.
TOGETHER AGAIN...
LIVE (1976)
1) Let The Good Times Roll; 2)
Stormy Monday Blues / Strange Things Happen; 3) Feel So Bad; 4) Mother-In-Law
Blues / Mean Old World; 5) Everyday (I Have The Blues); 6) The Thrill Is Gone /
I Ain't Gonna Be The First One To Cry.
With the unexpected commercial success of Bobby
and B.B.'s benefit, it was only a matter of time before we would see the
formula repeated, and here we are: recorded at the Coconut Grove in L.A. on an
unspecified date in 1976, this time, before a larger audience, in a less
intimate fashion, and in a shortened format: only a single LP that focuses on
lengthy, semi-improvised workouts and medleys rather than a representative
selection from the catalog.
The problem is that the setting has irrevocably
changed. First Time was, indeed, the
first time, an unpredictable attempt at getting themselves captured in a
natural, loose, relaxed environment. Two years later, what we have is a firmly
established, commercially-footed «star duet» that behaves appropriately: the
friendly stage banter is cut short and, where it is still preserved, feels more
theatrical and forced, the performed songs include big hits (they did not see
it fit to perform ʽThe Thrill Is Goneʼ on their first record, but
they almost feel obliged to do it now), and, worst of all, both the playing and
the singing (particularly the playing) feel even lazier than before — as if the
stars were confident now that the people in the audience are there to just look
at them sharing the stage together. Well, they do make an impressive pair,
sight-wise, that has to be admitted.
Arguably, the major highlight is Chuck Willis'
ʽFeel So Badʼ, derailing the proceedings from the restrictive blues
patterns in favor of a little spirited syncopation and allowing Bobby to whip
himself up into his trademark frenzy — because, frankly speaking, stuff like
ʽLet The Good Times Rollʼ is far better suited to B.B.'s
self-contented, round-bellied mode of bellowing than Bobby's subtler-soulful
style. This is eight minutes of first-rate hot groovin', and I sure wish the
entire record would be like that instead of giving us yet another version of
ʽStormy Monday Bluesʼ (what
could they possibly do with it that we do not know by heart already?) or
ʽEveryday I Have The Bluesʼ, which usually works well as a brief show
opener to give the audience a quick initial workover, but here is made into a
completely autonomous and overlong performance.
Admittedly, ʽThe Thrill Is Goneʼ gets
an inventive bit of reworking: first, they play out a «shyness» scene, with B.
B. expressing «doubts» about whether they should be cutting the song, then,
once the band is in full swing, Bobby starts wooing the audience, getting a
«Viola Jackson» lady to take over the lead on one verse — talk about a master
class in simulating spontaneity. But in any case, the song never works well
with a host of cooks minding the broth — it is essentially a very intimate
chamber piece, and switching vocals between B. B., Bobby, and an
out-of-the-blue guest vocalist, no matter how gifted, is a corny idea in the
first place.
Little surprise, in the end, that the record
generally gets much more of a critical thrashing than its predecessor, and, as
far as I know, did not at all sell comparably well — bringing an understandable
halt to the franchise. It may still be worth a listen (I do not see how a
well-recorded live album by B. B. and Bobby could even theoretically be a
«total catastrophe» — unless they permanently switch to hip-hop duets or
something), but, er, well, «the thrill is gone», I guess.
REFLECTIONS IN
BLUE (1977)
1) The Soul Of A Man; 2) I'll
Be Your Fool Once More; 3) Sittin' On A Poor Man's Throne; 4) I Intend To Take
Your Place; 5) It Ain't The Real Thing; 6) It's All Over; 7) If I Weren't A
Gambler; 8) Five Long Years; 9) I Got The Same Old Blues.
Back to normal. Good title, good album sleeve,
good song selection, good backing band. No attempt to repeat the country
debacle. No dabbling in trashy disco or other styles that are not hardwired to
Bobby's stem cells. Just the usual — a little blues, a little soul, a little
urban atmosphere, a little smoky darkness, and we are completely back to the
style of Dreamer.
Supposedly, that should complete the review,
but I will try to add just a few specifics. ʽI Got The Same Old
Bluesʼ was already one of J. J. Cale's most frequently covered numbers,
but this is the first time it was done in style by an accomplished soul vocalist,
and the original vibe is right up Bobby's alley — and, by the way, whoever is
out there trying to match his vocal tension with loosely flowing blues-rock
guitar pirouettes is no slouch either.
Conversely, one could say that the blues
classic ʽFive Long Yearsʼ is butchered with extra strings,
slower-than-necessary tempos, butter-soft guitar soloing, and too much
tenderness in some of the verses — but this is really a thorough «soul
reinvention» of a blues number, not just a sissied-up cover, and the new look at
least makes it feel more novel and curious than if we just had ourselves one
more generic cover of ʽFive Long Yearsʼ.
The best songs, however, are probably Bobby's
own ʽSoul Of A Manʼ, taken at a jumpier tempo and molded somewhat in
the «anthemic» vein characteristic of blaxploitation movie soundtracks of the
time; and the funky ʽSittin' On A Poor Man's Throneʼ (swampy wah-wah
croaks over R&B strings à la
1970s are always welcome). But in reality, the album is simply very even: no
great victories, not a single serious misstep. A good listen on a tired old
evening, and very little to write about — thumbs up, and be done with it.
COME FLY WITH ME
(1978)
1) Come Fly With Me; 2) Lady
Lonely; 3) Night Games; 4) To Be Friends; 5) I'm Just Your Man; 6) Love To See
You Smile; 7) You Can Count On Me; 8) This Bitter Earth; 9) Ain't God Something.
Well, apparently, someone thought that Bobby «Bland» was getting a bit too «acid» for
a time that called for more and more mindless entertainment loaded with
positive emotions. So ABC Records called in a bunch of corporate songwriters,
most of whom are a complete mystery to me (R&B stalwart Tyrone Davis is the
only name I recognize on one of the credits), and saddled Bobby with a set that
put his lonely, depressed, soulful persona in the trash bin — calling on the
«ladies' man» persona. Oh well. At least it ain't disco, and at least nobody is
forcing him to switch to the falsetto register.
The record is professional enough not to sound
awful, and Bobby certainly has enough qualifications to play the ladies' man
convincingly — in fact, I'd go farther than that and say that the title track
does have an uplifting funk-pop hook, and that its guitar / brass / flute /
chimes / strings arrangement (no effort spared, so it seems) is very well
done. Nor can I deny the relative catchiness and even occasional seductiveness
of several other songs on here — for instance, the sexy purr of "if you
feel the need, go ahead and cry" of the female backup on ʽLady
Lonelyʼ, or the anthemic chorus of ʽLove To See You Smileʼ,
which could almost pass for
sincerity, if only it weren't so utterly dated by its late-1970s formalities.
And yet, no matter how slick, overproduced, or
interchangeable one might have found Bobby's major efforts of the decade, when
the man was in «tragic» mode, he was really on — demanding nothing but the
smokiest from his backing band and playing the broken-hearted card for all it
could be worth. In this here happy-sappy mode, though, no matter how much
professionalism he keeps demanding from his backers, the songs just don't hit
hard enough to merit a comeback — just one more of those albums that is okay
while it lasts, then forgotten in a flash. Maybe the title track and ʽLove
To See You Smileʼ are worth salvaging for anthology packages. But as for the
rest, even the one lonesome gospel number, saved for last (with a somewhat
sacrilegious title — doesn't ʽAin't God Somethingʼ sound just a
bit... inappropriate?), feels more like a local newsreel (he was nailed to the
cross and all that) than a moment of inspiration. In other words, the balance
between «soul» and «craft» is completely upset in favour of the latter. No
wonder, then, that the album has never been released on CD — from this point
on, Bobby's records are becoming increasingly hard to find anywhere except for
Ebay and used vinyl bins, and there is nothing coincidental in this period
being marked off by Come Fly With Me.
I FEEL GOOD, I
FEEL FINE (1979)
1) I Feel Good, I Feel Fine;
2) I Can't Take No Mo'; 3) Little Mama; 4) Tit For Tat; 5) Someone To Belong
To; 6) Soon As The Weather Breaks; 7) In His Eyes; 8) Red Sails In The Sunset.
All right, this one does not even deserve three
paragraphs. Apparently, two ladies approached Bobby on the corner, each
planting a kiss on one of his aging cheeks, and convinced him to go disco. And
even if the anti-disco backlash had already started by that time, how can you
just say no, with two lovely ladies planting kisses on your cheeks? The only
thing to do is to hop it up and go — with the six-minute title track announcing
that trouble is finally over, and now
you are listening to a Bobby Bland album for the hip dance grooves, none of
that depressing «deep soul» stuff that might lead you to dark thoughts of...
never mind. In fact, it would even be best for him not to sing at all — and he doesn't (on the title
track, that is).
The most hideous realisation of all, though, is
that the silly hop-along title track, with the ladies chanting "I feel
good, I feel fine, it's alright" as if they were advertising Prozac, is the
best thing on the album — once Bobby
cuts in on the second track, the tempos start slowing down (without losing the
disco skeleton), and things start getting less fun and more serious without any
adequate compositional, instrumental, or
vocal merit to justify the change in style. Strings and brass almost completely
drown out guitars and even keyboards; gospel (ʽIn His Eyesʼ), blues
(ʽI Can't Take No Mo'), balladry, and pop are sifted through the same
sieve; the lyrics accordingly suck (I swear I remember something along the
lines of "you are my magnet, I am your dragnet"), as do some of the
song titles (ʽTit For Tatʼ? — yep, very 1979-ish indeed); and
although Bobby dutifully attacks all these monsters like a pro, he can do
nothing worthwhile, saddled with this kind of material. Thumbs down for the sleeve
alone, although we'd only seen the beginning of the slide.
FIRST CLASS BLUES
(1987)
1) Two Steps From The Blues;
2) St. James Infirmary; 3) Members Only; 4) Sunday Morning Love; 5) In The
Ghetto; 6) Sweet Woman's Love; 7) Angel; 8) I've Just Got To Know; 9) Can We
Make Love Tonight?; 10) After All; 11) I Hear You Thinkin'; 12) Straight From
The Shoulder; 13) Love Me Or Leave Me; 14) Second Hand Heart; 15) Walkin'
& Talkin' & Singin' The Blues; 16) Heart, Open Up Again.
Bobby's records of the first half of the 1980s,
caught in the short, but sadly prolific period between his nasty fall from
artistic grace and the start of the CD era, are fairly hard to come by these
days — an Ebay enthusiast would probably have few problems getting his hands on
most of them, but why? Hint # 1: Sweet Vibrations (1980), Try Me, I'm Real (1981), and Here We Go Again (1982) each feature a
hot young lady on the album sleeve — and only Tell Mr. Bland (1983) features a hot young lady next to Mr. Bland
in person. Hint # 2: the first song on Sweet
Vibrations actually bears the name of ʽSweet Vibratorʼ, which
must be the lowest point in Mr. Bland's career, ever, even if the song were to have a melody of the highest
caliber.
Anyway, judging by the few snippets of some of
the songs that I did manage to hear, not all of this stuff is utterly awful —
in fact, one of the reasons these
albums may have disappeared without a trace is that, after the disco
embarrassment, Bobby made no effort whatsoever to adapt to the electro-pop
standards of the new decade. Just the same old story all over again — perfectly
evident on his first CD, First Class
Blues, which combined the «best» selections off his previous two albums, Members Only (1985) and After All (1986) with two re-recordings
of old classics (ʽTwo Steps From The Bluesʼ and ʽSt. James'
Infirmaryʼ).
Quotation marks around «best» are necessary for
the simple reason that, at this point, there is really no best or worst, no
good or bad, no ups or downs in Bobby's suitcase — slow blues, blues-rock, and
balladry are all on the same level of technicality and inspiration. The backing
musicians are real enough, but sound like they're mostly in it for the money
(the joke is on them, of course, since all the money to be made on Bobby Bland was
made at least a decade ago). The drums and keyboards have the predictable
electronic sheen; the guitars are professional and modestly tasteful (no
pop-metal influence detected), worthy of a Robert Cray on an effortless day
(«formally better than shit, but less impressive than shit», that is).
Probably the biggest piece of news is that
Bobby's voice has not lost a single frequency in five years — only the grunting
/ snorting habit has become more irritating, what with the tendency to succumb
to it on just about every song that
builds up a tense atmosphere. Consequently, those who just love Bobby B. for
being Bobby B. will love First Class
Blues as usual — as long as Bobby's vocal cords are in order and the
arrangements follow traditional patterns, who's to claim that anything here is
actually second class?
However, those who are willing to discriminate will probably yawn and cringe at the
routineness (not awfulness, but routineness) of the arrangements, and at the
fact that pretty much the same emotional load is spread over Vegasy ballads
like ʽMembers Onlyʼ, Vegasy blues like ʽSunday Morning
Loveʼ, and old-time «socially relevant» songs like ʽIn The
Ghettoʼ (personally, I've never been much of a fan of the Elvis version,
but at least it used to convey something special — here, the song does not even
begin to stand out against the background). It's all listenable, for sure, but
generic mid-1980s blues arrangements are a couple notches below generic
mid-1970s blues arrangements (yes, the grass was greener and all that), and in
the absence of any compensating factors of «surprise», this is altogether a thumbs down
type of album, even if, probably, not the same kind of a thumbs down album as
the one that has ʽSweet Vibratorʼ on it.
BLUES YOU CAN USE
(1987)
1) Get Your Money Where You
Spend Your Time; 2) Spending My Life With You; 3) Our First Blues Song; 4)
Restless Feelin's; 5) 24 Hours A Day; 6) I've Got A Problem; 7) Let's Part As
Friends; 8) For The Last Time; 9) There's No Easy Way To Say Goodbye.
It should probably be mentioned that, since
1985, Bobby Bland had been signed to Malaco Records, probably the largest and
most fashion-independent Southern label that saw its mission in preserving the
old ways — and that, although the move did not bring him a lot of financial
stability, it certainly helped him recover and keep his integrity after all
those strange MCA records with stiff models on the sleeves had nearly destroyed
it. Thus, even if the Malaco house band is not the best there is, or could be
(although, in 1987, who can really tell?), it is a house band, and these late Eighties' records of Bobby's sound as
respectable as they could at the time. The electronic keyboards are dull, the
horns are mechanistic, and the rhythm section uninventive, but this is blues,
soul, and R&B music done the good old way, in styles that feel natural for
Bobby. That is no big reason to ever use this kind of blues, but it is reason
enough not to feel ashamed or sorry for the guy. Except when he keeps snorting,
that is.
The variety is not too bad here, from the old
upbeat, fast-tempo 12-bar blues-rock formula (ʽ24 Hours A Dayʼ) to
funky R&B with rambling guitars and horns (ʽGet Your Moneyʼ) to
old-style soul with a touch of flute (ʽRestless Feelin'sʼ) to slow
blues-de-luxe (ʽI've Got A Problemʼ) — and, of course, plenty of
torchy bluesy balladry for the old lady fans, culminating in ʽThere's No
Easy Way To Say Goodbyeʼ, a song that clearly hints at the inescapable:
this guy is not going away any time
soon. Alas, as usual, there are no curious insights to be gained from the
songs; the best that they can amount to is to simply sound decent.
The problem is somehow connected, I suppose, to
the fact that most of Bobby's songwriters here are completely unknown — this is
all derivative, clichéd hack material, without any sense of humor or
attempts at individual melodic twists. Ted Jarrett, the songwriter star of
«Nashville R&B», is the only guy to have at least a bit of information
available on him (he contributes the bouncy ʽ24 Hours A Dayʼ, the
album's most fun, but still completely generic number), but who is Larry
Addison? Who is Robert A. Johnson? (Thank God for the «A.», or one could have
thought the unthinkable). Who are all these people and why do they have careers
in songwriting? At this point, it would have been far more pleasant if Bobby
just stuck to old chestnuts — heck, even an album of Sinatra covers would be
preferable.
MIDNIGHT RUN (1989)
1) You've Got To Hurt Before
You Heal; 2) Lay Love Aside; 3) Kiss Me To The Music; 4) Keep It A Secret; 5)
Take Off Your Shoes; 6) Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone; 7) If I Don't Get
Involved; 8) I'm Not Ashamed To Sing The Blues; 9) Midnight Run; 10) Starting
All Over Again.
No surprises, although, fortunately, the
classic covers are back — there is no way Bobby could go wrong with his
(predictable, but wonderful all the same) interpretation of ʽAin't No
Sunshineʼ, or with the old Mel & Tim ballad ʽStarting All Over
Againʼ, which makes here for a somewhat more optimistic and uplifting
conclusion than last time's ʽThere's No Easy Way To Say Goodbyeʼ,
and the funny thing is that one doesn't even have to listen to either in order to understand that.
Still, two oldies' covers on a late period
Bobby Bland album is too few, because the remaining songs are again provided by
his sidemen, and are not in the least memorable. Just like last time, there is
exactly one «fun» 12-bar blues (ʽTake Off Your Shoesʼ), nice while
it's on; and then, like every self-respecting old bluesman, Bobby commands
himself a song that explains why exactly he is still hanging around after so
many years (ʽI'm Not Ashamed To Sing The Bluesʼ — actually, a song
like that did make sense in 1989,
when the popularity of the blues was only just beginning to recover after a
decade-long snooze; that said, it's not as if the song smells of any particular
heroism or self-sacrifice).
Additionally, ʽYou've Got To Hurtʼ
opens the album on a powerful epic-ballad note; ʽLay Love Asideʼ tries
to echo Bobby's dance-oriented R&B grooves of the mid-1970s; and the title
track straightens out a reggae groove as the band does indeed search a little
bit to expand its horizons. Neither the epic thing, nor the dance thing, nor
the reggae schtick feature any outstanding musicianship or musical ideas, but
at least there seems to be a bit more emphasis on guitars and strings rather
than synthesizers, and a bit more diversity, which would altogether indicate an
upward movement of the curve. If anyone still cared, that is. Anyway,
expressing the same idea in commercial terms — better grab Midnight Run for a quarter than Blues You Can Use for a nickel.
PORTRAIT OF THE
BLUES (1991)
1) Ain't No Love For Sale; 2)
Hurtin' Love; 3) These Are The Things That A Woman Needs; 4) I Can Take You To
Heaven Tonight; 5) The Last One To Know; 6) Just Take My Love; 7) I Just Won't
Be Your Fool Anymore; 8) She's Puttin' Something In My Food; 9) When Hearts
Grow Cold; 10) Let Love Have Its Way.
Just as I was winding myself up into the
brain-wrecking procedure of writing something «original» on Bobby's fifth or
sixth Malaco album, news came in that Bobby passed away on June 23rd, 2013 —
nothing to be particularly sorry
about, since the man seems to have lived a long and generally satisfying,
well-deserved life that most of us could only envy. It would seem natural to
dedicate this review to his memory, but then, like all of his late period
records, this isn't a particularly outstanding album to deserve a «specially
dedicated» review. Rather, let us just hope this entire set of Bobby Bland
reviews somehow helps to keep that memory alive.
Anyway, Portrait
Of The Blues sounds almost completely the same way as Midnight Run. There are two relative highlights, placed at the very
start. ʽAin't No Love For Saleʼ is a moody throwback to the days of
ʽAin't No Love In The Heart Of The Cityʼ (the title of the latter is
even chanted in the background, just in case somebody happened to miss the
stylistic link), with a bit more tension than usual, generated not only by
Bobby's vocals, but also by some pretty exquisite Clapton-esque guitar work
(not sure who exactly is responsible — the liner notes list about four or five
different guitarists, none of whom are all that familiar). Then ʽHurtin'
Loveʼ completely switches the mood from desperate to optimistic, and the
lead instrument switches to organ from guitar — an equally dexterous part. No
melodic inventions whatsoever, just good vibes.
From there on, the album slows down a bit,
loosens up, and becomes the usual always-nice, never-grabby sequence of blues
ballads and lite funk, only shifting gears once on ʽShe's Puttin'
Something In My Foodʼ (slow blues-de-luxe that sounds like every other
blues-de-luxe number ever recorded, but the song title and the misogynist
sentiments do look funny wedged in between all the romantic libations
elsewhere).
As usual, most of the titles are «written» by
Bobby's Malaco sidemen (quotation marks indicate that the actual writing has
mostly been confined to the lyrics, and even these mainly consist of
rearranging pre-available sets of blues idioms, in the good old folk
tradition), and once again they decide to cut down on the covers — in every
other respect, arrangements and production do not differ from Midnight Run one iota.
YEARS OF TEARS
(1993)
1) Somewhere Between Right
& Wrong; 2) There's A Stranger In My House; 3) Hole In The Wall; 4) Years
Of Tears To Go; 5) Hurtin' Time Again; 6) I Just Tripped On A Piece Of Your
Broken Heart; 7) Sweet Lady Love; 8) Love Of Mine; 9) I've Got To Have Your
Love Tonight; 10) You Put The Hurt On A Hurtin' Man.
It takes serious experience, and a large pot of
desire to waste your time and strength on something as strange as that, to
track and mark down all the tiny mood fluctuations from one late period Bobby
Bland album to another (and with a little less politeness, you could scratch
«late period»). Being neither experienced nor desirous, I can only say that I vaguely suspect a relative fall back
into the somber and the tragic on the appropriately named Years Of Tears. Whether it is simply an astute artistic move or the
whole thing was triggered by something personal, I do not know. The important
thing is, there's a lot of hurting to go through on this album, and, as usual,
it is not being gone through all that convincingly.
Changes to the old formula involve... nothing — the most «different» thing on
the entire album is the little old-school echoey arpeggio that introduces
ʽSomewhere Between Right & Wrongʼ, immediately to become a nice,
but totally ordinary Fifties-progression-based soul number. ʽYears Of
Tears To Goʼ and ʽI Just Tripped On A Piece Of Your Broken
Heartʼ (gotta love those titles that Bobby's sidemen seem to be generating
for him on an algorithmic basis) are two more long, deluxe shows of the spirit,
and the rest is more or less evenly split between sentimental ballads and angry
12-bar stuff (of which ʽHole In The Wallʼ, about Bobby's party-loving
partner, is probably the tightest and the most lyrically suggestive, but, as
usual, that ain't saying much). ʽYou Put The Hurt On A Hurtin' Manʼ has
a poppier and, therefore, more memorable chorus but not much of a hurtin'
atmosphere, despite repeating the word twice in the same title.
Other than that, the only thing there is to say
is that Bobby cuts down on the snorting a little bit — I may be off, not having
done the proper calculations and all, but it seems as if, on the whole, those
animal noises have been somewhat subdued. Whether this is a sign of increased
modesty, or just advanced age, I have no idea.
SAD STREET (1995)
1) Double Trouble; 2) Sad
Street; 3) God Bless The Child; 4) Tonight's The Night; 5) My Heart's Been
Broken Again; 6) I've Got A Twenty Room House; 7) Mind Your Own Business; 8) I
Wanna Tell You About The Blues; 9) I Had A Dream Last Night; 10) Let's Have
Some Fun.
And here is the news. First, Bobby covers
ʽGod Bless The Childʼ. The song is capable of yielding to the man,
yet I wonder just how adequately he could get into it at the moment — Billie
Holiday had written it just as she was getting out (tentatively) of financial
straits, whereas Bobby's well-being had not generally been called into problem
for about thirty years or so. As good as the song is, this reading is
completely perfunctory, and I'd rather see Bobby do perfunctory readings of
less personal numbers.
For that matter, his other cover choice — of Rod Stewart's bedroom anthem ʽTonight's
The Nightʼ — is far more appropriate, even if the old man does feel the
need to change the "let me come inside" line to something less
provocative ("let your lovelight shine" or something like that, I
already forgot), and even if the song is just as gauche here and now as it used
to be when Rod The No Longer Mod used it to help solve the demographic problem.
But that's Bobby, all right.
Next, it is really all about Bobby Bland and
his odd team of late-period songwriters to take the name of an old blues
classic about poverty and rejection (ʽDouble Troubleʼ) and apply it
to something more morally ambiguous: "I've got double trouble between my
woman and my wife / My wife runs my pocketbook and my woman is running my
life". It's a decent enough, slow-running, nostalgically recorded piece of
blues-de-luxe, but somehow these new-fangled attempts at taking century-old
lyrical clichés and reinventing them seem a little corny these days,
don't they?
Maybe not quite as corny as the title track,
though — the album's attempt at a Significant Social Statement: seven minutes
of somewhat uncertain complaining about how "the streets used to be filled
with love, but all you hear about now is blood". Considering that Bobby
Bland, the troubadour of broken hearts and carnal passions, had very rarely
taken to heart the problems of society at large, this particular stab at a
«grass-was-greener» sermon is a failure, despite some impressive ingredients
(such as a grim wah-wah lead line crawling along those sad streets, sometimes
threatening to erupt in a poisonous solo but never capitalizing on the
promise). Somehow I doubt that the streets of Bobby's childhood were filled
with that much more love than wherever he was spending his advanced years in
1995 — but then again, who knows. Maybe it's just his way of expressing
dissatisfaction on the illegal immigration issue.
Finally, the really odd one out on this album is ʽI Had A Dream Last
Nightʼ — from the title, one would never guess that the song is a
thoroughly nostalgic disco number, replete with disco strings and disco back
vocals à la 1977. The band
seems so happy with being able to establish such a perfect facsimile, they
forget to switch off the tape when the song is over and just keep on grooving
for an extra two or three minutes. Nowhere near a great number, of course, but
enough to give the reviewer an opportunity to add one more paragraph.
All of which, in the end, amounts to no less
than five songs that merit a special mention — making Sad Street a record-breaking album in Bobby Bland's post-1970s
career, but still not enough to guide it over the «great for fans, useless for
everybody else» threshold.
LIVE ON BEALE
STREET (1998)
1) Intro; 2) When Your Love Is
Not Around; 3) That's The Way Love Is; 4) Love Of Mine; 5) As Soon As The
Weather Breaks; 6) Farther On Up The Road; 7) I Pity The Fool; 8) Ain't No
Sunshine When She's Gone; 9) St. James Infirmary; 10) I'll Take Care Of You;
11) Get Your Money Where You Spend Your Time; 12) You've Got To Hurt Before You
Heal; 13) Sunday Morning Love; 14) If You're Gonna Walk On My Love; 15) Bobby
Rush / Johnnie Taylor Introduction; 16) Stormy Monday; 17) Double Trouble /
She's Puttin' Somethin' In My Food; 18) Members Only; 19) 24 Hours A Day.
Yes, it does look as if this was recorded live
on Beale Street — at the New Daisy Theater, to be more precise; a symbolic
gesture, easily interpreted by anyone who has not yet forgotten the humble
beginnings of Bobby Bland's career. Additionally, it is the first (and only)
proper live album in Bobby's discography (not counting the joint Bobby Bland /
B. B. King albums), so it is only natural that the elderly gentleman should
choose the city that gave birth to his career for this particular recording.
Considering that, by the mid-1990s, Bobby's
Malaco backing band had left behind most of the electronic excesses and seemed
happy to just play old-fashioned blues behind Bobby's back, Live On Beale Street does not seem
particularly far removed from something like Sad Street or Years Of Tears
— let alone the fact that Bobby himself, apparently, considered these late
period albums authentic and respectable enough to include a lot of that new
material into his setlists. So, at least half — more than half, come to think of it — of the album is dedicated to
the post-1984 Malaco stuff, lightly peppered and salted with some predictable
old hits from the Duke days. So lightly, in fact, that both ʽI Pity The
Foolʼ and ʽFarther On Up The Roadʼ are reduced to medley-status
items, trimmed and tamed in sheer disproportion to their dignity.
Consequently, the bad news is that this is not a live career retrospective, and the
album does not make much sense if you have already heard all those studio
albums. On the other hand, the good news is that Live On Beale Street offers a great opportunity to just dump all the studio albums, and remain
perfectly contented with this impressive sampler — all of the samples being
played live, without the excessive production gloss of the studio, before a
homely, receptive audience where Bobby feels right at home.
Notable curios, as far as I can remember,
include: (a) an audience participation bit on ʽAin't No Sunshineʼ,
roughly interrupted by Bobby when they get it wrong ("now wait a minute,
I'd like for you to help me, but somebody got too many ʽI knowsʼ out
there..."); (b) a rather messy medley for which Bobby drags out fellow
soul-bluesman Johnnie Taylor and fellow «folk-funkster» Bobby Rush for aid,
whereupon they merrily deconstruct and bury ʽStormy Monday Bluesʼ;
and for (c), I'd like to be able to let you know that Bobby keeps the snorts to
a minimum, but I am not exactly sure if 5 or 6 times in 60 minutes counts as a
«minimum», and even these calculations are very crude. Anyway, he does snort,
including on songs where he never snorted before (ʽSt. James Infirmaryʼ
— almost a sacrilege, that one).
But overall, the man and his band are in fine form throughout, and clearly enjoying what
they're doing here. Also, to the pleasure of all blues-loving people, the show
has been released on DVD, and watching the whole thing definitely makes more
sense than just listening — Bobby's facial expressions and idiosyncratic love
affair with the mike add a lot for entertainment value. Ultimately, a decisive
thumbs up
here for something not particularly great, but pleasantly outstanding on a
conveyer belt of smooth «neo-retro-blues» LPs.
MEMPHIS MONDAY MORNING
(1998)
1) I'm Bobby B; 2) I Don't
Want No Kickin' In My Stall; 3) There's A Rat Loose In My House; 4) The Truth
Will Set You Free; 5) Memphis Monday Morning; 6) I'm Glad; 7) My Baby Is The
Only One; 8) I Hate Missin' You; 9) You Left Me With The Blues; 10) Lookin' For
Some Tush.
Very little unpredictable stuff here, either.
The punch is in Bobby's age — he cut this at the age of 69, and he still snorts
it out the same way he did thirty years ago. In fact, at this point he even
allows himself a bit of straightforward swagger, opening the album with the
uptempo cut ʽI'm Bobby Bʼ, written and performed in the
been-there-done-that-licked-'em-all manner that is so typical of old school
R&B artists, but, let us admit that honestly, had rarely, if ever, appeared
previously on a Bobby B record. So if, at 69, he finally yields to the
temptation of calling himself the greatest, let him. Anybody who does not turn
to liquid shit at that age deserves a little self-flattery, and Memphis Monday Morning has the man
going as strong as ever.
The songs do tend to drag — particularly the
title track, creeping at a snail's pace for almost nine minutes, not to mention
that its late evening vibe, lounge piano and sunset trumpet romanticism
included, does not particularly well agree with the word «morning» in the
title. Some of the generic blues-de-luxe numbers, like ʽThere's A Rat
Loose In My Houseʼ, also go on for absurdly long time periods, although it
could be said that Bobby's band, after all these years, simply gels together
so well that it makes them reluctant to stop.
But on the positive side, the whole album has
but one blues ballad (ʽTruth Will Set You Freeʼ), and it is a good
one, with sparse, but clever brass arrangements and an atmosphere that seems
totally lifted off from some early Solomon Burke torch song. In fact, if
possible, the entirety of Memphis Monday
Morning sounds more retro and oblivious to «modern blues standards» than
any previously released Malaco recording — which is great news for Bobby, even
if it does surmise surreptitiously rewriting old classics: ʽMy Baby Is
The Only Oneʼ, for instance, lifts its main vocal / instrumental melody
directly from Sam Cooke's ʽTwistin' The Night Awayʼ. But there is no
way we could use this a pretext for incrimination: at this point, Bobby B. has
nothing left to prove, nor do his resident songwriters.
That said, the last two tracks of the album
seem like last-minute additions that do
try to prove something new. ʽYou Left Me With The Bluesʼ switches the
mood from «old school R&B» to «new school R&B», with programmed beats,
looped funky leads, synthesizers (which were previously dormant), and even a
few forced «ughs!» from the man. It isn't nauseatingly bad, but it does spoil
the overall feeling a bit. But the real
surprise is the short and surprisingly kick-ass (hard rock riffage and all)
cover of ZZ Top's ʽTushʼ — a style that Bobby B. had never before
approached in his whole life, and for a 69-year old guy, he tackles it with
more gusto than could be expected. So why didn't this guy try on some authentic
rock'n'roll shoes decades ago? Or, at the very least, offered his services as
lead vocalist for Grand Funk Railroad?..
BLUES AT MIDNIGHT
(2003)
1) Where Do I Go From Here; 2)
I Caught The Blues From Someone Else; 3) You Hit The Nail On The Head; 4) I've
Got The Blues At Midnight; 5) Baby What's Wrong With You; 6) What A Wonderful
World; 7) My Sunday's Comin' Soon; 8) This Man-Woman Thing; 9) The Only Thing
Missing Is You; 10) I'm A Blues Man; 11) Ghetto Nights.
Old age finally caught up with Mr. Bland at the
turn of the millennium: Blues At
Midnight was his first new album in five
years rather than two (the usual interval for his entire life at Malaco), and,
as fate would have it, his last album altogether — it was certainly not
intended to be a swan song, but the next ten years of Bobby's life were spent
without further ventures to the recording studio. Kind of ominously ironic,
then, that the first song on his last album just had to be titled ʽWhere
Do I Go From Hereʼ — verily and indeed ever so.
In fact, the shadow of the nearing end does
loom over the entire record, and, when seen from that angle, Blues At Midnight may end up looking
like the most interesting, touching, and thought-provoking record of Bobby's
entire post-1970s career. As long as he was still relatively hale and hardy,
and set up with a low-budget, but solid 'n' steady recording contract, he had
little to care about other than recording whatever came his way, as long as it
had that beat and gave him plenty of room to insert an explosive snort or two.
Now that he has bypassed that 70-year-old mark beyond which even Mick Jagger
starts having problems, it almost feels, subconsciously, as if his next record
were an attempt at summarizing something — and even though all the songs, as
usual, are credited to his corporate songwriting team, they must have caught
that hint, and made sure that Blues At
Midnight, in many ways, sounded like some sort of a last confession.
Formally, ʽWhere Do I Go From Hereʼ
is just another blues lament on lost love topics, but Bobby delivers it with
just a little more tension than usual, and the brass / organ / guitar / backing
vocals combo seems ready to assist him as best they can. Later on, three of the
tracks feature the word «blues» in the title — a record-breaking streak for
Bobby — and they are all meaningful: ʽI Caught The Blues From Someone
Elseʼ is a bitter rocker that examines the roots of getting into the
business (well, not really, but could be...); ʽI've Got The Blues At
Midnightʼ is a passable, but 100%-Bobby interpretation of what the blues
is all about (12:00 A.M., and you're still not getting any); and ʽI'm A
Blues Manʼ, starting off with slide guitar, harmonica, our favorite snort,
and "I was raised up on Jimmy Reed" (what? you were a contemporary
of Jimmy Reed, Bobby!), is a kind of tune that Bobby never really tried before
— this sort of semi-authentic swamp-blues was almost as far removed from his
brand of blues-de-luxe as, say, heavy metal. All the more curious to see him
try and assert this legacy thus late in his career — with a direct invocation
of the spirits of Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and the rest.
The «magnum opus» of the album, however, is its
last track. ʽGhetto Nightsʼ is a slow, moody shuffle, very much in
the vein of Bobby's mid-1970s «blacksploitation» period, with similar production
and socially-oriented sentimentalism, and suitably loaded with atmospheric
overdubs (such as the superimposition of a police radio transcript to simulate
an actual ghetto environment). There is no attempt at a universalist statement
here, such as on ʽSad Streetʼ, and, in fact, the lyrics do not even
directly deal with issues of poverty / crime / etc., but this only helps the
track gain in subtlety — it may not be a masterpiece, but it is one of the
moodiest, bleakest-sounding things Bobby had the luck to record ever since his
image-makers in the late 1970s decided that «dark» and «shivery» are unsuitable
epithets for suave ladies' man Bobby B.
I guess I should
stress that none of these songs are genuine masterpieces (as usual, they are
too generic and middle-of-the-road for that), and that there is plenty of
completely routine filler as well, let alone the irritating detail that Bobby really takes his time while stretching
out on the coda to almost every one of these songs: only a (rather shaky) cover
of ʽWhat A Wonderful Worldʼ sticks to a three-minute length —
everything else, for some reason, must
have from one to two or three extra minutes of Bobby trading signal calls with
his female backing vocalists across the studio hall, even such dumb 12-bar
exercises as ʽYou Hit The Nail On The Headʼ (and you did it so many
times, Bobby, that little remains of the hammer, much less the nail).
Still, I would like to end this with a thumbs up
— not merely out of general respect for the recently deceased Bobby B., but
continuing to insist that Blues At
Midnight is moving and meaningful (in spots), not to mention that Bobby's
vocal abilities remain almost completely unimpaired to the very end. Whether
there is some sort of uncomfortably intriguing premonition here or not, is up
to you to decide — but, as far as my own sixth sense is concerned, the record
rises just one small inch above mere
routine professionalism, and that is enough to recommend it.
GRANDMA WHAT GREAT SONGS YOU SANG! (1959)
1) Some Of These Days; 2)
Pennies From Heaven; 3) Baby Face; 4) A Good Man Is Hard To Find; 5) Just
Because; 6) Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye; 7) Ballin' The Jack; 8) Rock-A-Bye Your
Baby With A Dixie Melody; 9) Pretty Baby; 10) Side By Side; 11) Back In Your
Own Back Yard; 12) St. Louis Blues.
When Brenda Lee set out to record her first LP
in early 1959, she had already been a big star for three years, ever since
stunning the nation with her red-hot ʽJambalayaʼ back in 1956 at the
tender age of 11 (of course, Decca Records couldn't resist the temptation to
label her as «Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old)» — the old adagio of «where
there's publicity, there's cheating» strikes again). More than that, she was
already known as «Little Miss Dynamite», having recorded her deadliest
rock'n'roll explosion in 1957 — and thus, choosing a selection of pre-war
(pre-Depression, in fact, which is accurately reflected in the album title)
ditties for her first LP must have been somewhat anti-climactic for the fans.
Of course, by 1959 the initial wave of
rock'n'roll enthusiasm was already breaking, with well-combed «teen idols» gradually
replacing the rebels for a while, and it may have been judged a prudent career
move for the girl to switch from the «aggressiveness» of ʽDynamiteʼ
and ʽRockin' Around The Christmas Treeʼ to something more tame and
traditional. Ironically — perhaps by some sort of subconscious inertia — it is Grandma... that turned out to be one of
the rockiest and brawniest albums in Brenda's huge catalog.
Recorded in two sessions at a Nashville studio,
the album has no «ballads» as such — it is comprised of old popular dance,
vaudeville, and white blues songs, not surprisingly, some of which had
previously already entered the rock'n'roll repertoire (for instance, Little
Richard did ʽBaby Faceʼ, and Elvis, of course, covered ʽJust
Becauseʼ, with both of Brenda's interpretations rather doing homage to their versions than the originals). The
arrangements, despite a plethora of studio musicians, are generally sparse and
homely, with at least as much emphasis on rockabilly guitar as there is on
brass — and then, of course, there are the vocals.
There is not much subtlety, thoughtfulness,
depth, or flexibility in these vocals — and neither could one rigorously demand
all of that from a 14-year old who had the nerve to take on Sophie Tucker and Bessie Smith at the same time
(kicking off the album with the former and closing with the latter). But there
is power, intensity, and plenty of swagger — rustic, unrefined swagger of the
rock'n'roll era, that is, not the subtle emancipated swagger of the days of
old. Other than one (not particularly tragic) misstep — she does a rather
wooden take on ʽPennies From Heavenʼ, especially compared with the
Billie Holiday version — it all works.
Brenda's trademark «roar» that she already
flashed with gusto on her earliest records is only briefly heard here on
ʽJust Becauseʼ (which might, vocally, be even more impressive than
the Elvis version) — but even without roaring, she is pretty good at
overpowering the listener on all those songs where the listener (a hopeless
male) has to be overpowered (by a strong female). It does help to remember that
the girl was 14: for a fully grown-up performer, these takes on the «classics»
can seem a little strained, or a little shaky, or, on the contrary, a little
over-the-top, as if the performer really felt herself in need of «proving»
something — which she, of course, was, as would be every 14-year old taking on the
burden of recording ʽSt. Louis Bluesʼ for commercial release.
Me certainly not being a big fan of the pre-war
popular song, I do recognize that it is not the sheetnotes that matter in most
such cases — it is the attitude; and there is
a tiny bit of punkish arrogance in the attitude that Brenda adopts for these
performances, meaning that, crazy as it might seem to some, I'd rather listen
to this than to, say, Bing Crosby singing the same songs. Yet even Bing Crosby
fans will probably find the album to their liking. Also, just for the record,
early guitar hero Hank Garland (whom most people will probably recognize from Presley's
ʽLittle Sisterʼ) is responsible for most of the lead playing on the
album — one more reason for a merry little thumbs up.
BRENDA LEE (1960)
1) Dynamite; 2) Weep No More
My Baby; 3) Jambalaya (On The Bayou); 4) (If I'm Dreaming) Just Let Me Dream;
5) Be My Love Again; 6) My Baby Likes Western Guys; 7) Sweet Nothin's; 8) I'm
Sorry; 9) That's All You Gotta Do; 10) Heading Home; 11) Wee Wee Willies; 12)
Let's Jump The Broomstick.
Unlike later albums, this self-titled release
was actually recorded over several different sessions that took place between
1958 and 1960 — which is a good thing, since rock'n'roll was still a hot thing
on the charts and in people's minds when the sessions began, and, consequently,
Brenda Lee is the rockiest,
liveliest set of songs in the lady's career. Hard as it is to believe for those
who have some idea of a faint outline of Brenda's career, only one of these twelve songs is a sentimental
ballad — and it happens to be her signature tune at that. The rest is either
rockabilly or dance-oriented country-western, with a little bit of twisting and
New Orleans for extra diversity.
Several of the tracks had been earlier released
as singles, and are presented here in remade versions: ʽJambalayaʼ,
for instance, which was Brenda's first nationwide success at the age of 11, is
slightly sped up and nourished with some King Curtis-style sax, while
ʽDynamiteʼ, the single that got her the famous nickname, is
embellished with extra strings and backing vocals. Needless to say, the
originals are a bit rougher and tougher, but these versions are still quite
wholesome, and hold up well on their own: Brenda's pirate snarl on the
"jambalaya, cold fish pie and filet gumbo" line used to literally
send shivers down my spine, and still does — it probably does take a 13-year
old to produce that kind of effect.
But it is really ʽDynamiteʼ that
exemplifies early Brenda Lee — way down in history, way before there ever was a
ʽBaby Hit Me One More Timeʼ, there was this little girl, much younger
than Britney, who bellowed "If I might do all the things / I'd love to do
tonight / Then I would love you dear / With all my might... I just explode like
dynamite!" and you were almost ready to commit a capital crime by
actually believing what she sang. Of
course, the arrangement is very innocent, done in gentle Nashville style, and
the kid-rock melody is vaudeville-turned-rockabilly, but the song is still a
significant milestone — no other white girl, not even Wanda Jackson, who was
Brenda's chief (and only?) competitor at the time, could afford to let herself that loose back in the late Fifties. And
there is nothing in the song that would diminish its freshness and excitement
today — this is not simply some sort of «American Idol» thing, it is a daring,
bravura performance that could not have been the result of merely memorizing
a set formula.
Unfortunately, ʽDynamiteʼ did not do
as well on the charts as ʽI'm Sorryʼ, which first gained popularity
as a B-side, then rose to #1 as an A-side, and eventually became the song to be forever associated with
Brenda. It is a decent ballad that she honestly pushes towards greatness —
where her earliest songs, for understandable reasons of age, valued adrenaline
over depth and subtlety, this lost love confession prompted her to add dynamics
and flexibility, and I guess it does mark the transition from child phenomenon
to mature artist. But the fact that ʽI'm Sorryʼ became the first song
to make her a household name also resulted in the inevitable — a tendency to
drift farther and farther into syrupy ballad territory, and away from the
rockabilly turf that gave her birth and nurtured her to this maturity.
But we are running ahead here, because, like I
said, most of Brenda Lee is still
deep in kick-ass territory, or, adjusting to the circumstances, in «pat-ass»
territory. Most of the songs are contributed by outside songwriters and are
derivative to the core, but that does not matter as long as the source
inspiration was fun in the first place, and it was: ʽLet's Jump The
Broomstickʼ clearly owes a lot to Little Richard's ʽSlippin' And
Slidin'ʼ, and it is nice to hear Brenda pay this kind of tribute, even if
the cumulative effect is (predictably) a little less overwhelming. (The song
was covered a decade later by Sandy Denny, who managed to make it bluesy and
ominous instead of whirlygig-funny — a curious feat).
Other highlights include ʽMy Baby Likes
Western Guysʼ, where the protagonist complains about her lover's Western
TV show obsession impeding the lovemaking process (it is a funny song, believe me, though not quite on the Coasters
level); ʽSweet Nothin'sʼ, credited to Ronnie Self, the author of
ʽI'm Sorryʼ, and giving Brenda the opportunity to sound a little
foxy; and ʽThat's All You Gotta Doʼ, the former A-side of ʽI'm
Sorryʼ, which is just a sweet fast pop-rocker — sort of Motown-lite that
the early Beatles would have loved. As for lowlights... well, some of the tunes
are less memorable than others — that is to be expected — but there is hardly a
single song on here that wouldn't be fun at
all, or would have Ms. Lee try and perform something way beyond her reach
or understanding.
I would
go as far as suggest that, for 1960, Brenda
Lee constitutes an essential listen. Even if we want to believe that the
teen phenomenon was completely «manufactured», there is nothing on the record
itself to suggest that. The music is nowhere near groundbreaking, but it is
consistently fun, and to have an underage female rocker shake your world in an
age when most of the male «veteran» rockers were giving up their positions must
have been awesome: yes, the arrangements are wimpy, but they are not completely
smooth and sterile — and that voice is anything but wimpy. Thumbs up without further questions: for those who
prefer to deal in original LPs rather than compilations, Brenda Lee is the real deal about this girl.
THIS IS... BRENDA (1960)
1) When My Dreamboat Comes
Home; 2) I Want To Be Wanted; 3) Just A Little; 4) Pretend; 5) Love And Learn;
6) Teach Me Tonight; 7) Hallelujah I Love Him So; 8) Walkin' To New Orleans; 9)
Blueberry Hill; 10) We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, And Me); 11) Build A Big
Fence; 12) If I Didn't Care.
Brenda's second LP from 1960 was already a much
tighter affair: recorded in about six months' time (as opposed to two years),
although still in six separate sessions, showcasing the obsessive perfectionism
of her Nashville team. In keeping up with the times — and the times were
significantly influenced by whatever Elvis was doing ever since his return
from the army — the record moves farther away from the rockabilly spirit: this
time, nearly half of the songs are ballads, and the rest drift between soft,
careful, politely danceable Brill Building pop and Southern rhythm and blues.
There is still a thin rebellious streak running through the record, but it gets
harder to discern it behind the layers of conventionalism, particularly in the
songwriting.
The album's big hit, in fact, one of Brenda's
biggest, was ʽI Want To Be Wantedʼ, an English translation of an
Italian pop song — but, fair enough, Brenda did manage to almost completely
strip the tune of its theatrical Italian flavor and imbue it with some
Nashville tough-girl stuffing instead: where its Italian versions (Tony
Dallara, etc.) were troubadourish (wimpy, that is), the new English words
("I wanna be wanted right now, not tomorrow, but right now!") are
sung by Brenda with such power that it's pretty easy to see how the song was
destined for red-hot number-oneness in an era of sexual build-up — you could
almost see the Beatles as a response to this desperate plea for release. The
song itself is a trifle, but the interpretation is pure gold.
There is more to that story: the choice of
cover tunes also includes ʽTeach Me Tonightʼ (again, sung with such
determination that one wonders who'd be teaching whom), and Betty Chotas'
ʽJust A Littleʼ with a decidedly hooliganish drawl in the chorus. I
am not implying that the whole album goes like that, or even that these
particular songs have a notably stronger erotic effect than so much competition
at the time — but I am implying that
some of this stuff must have sounded fairly risqué for a 16-year old (even
if the exact age still remains undetectable on the record), and that thinking
of This Is... Brenda in these terms
adds some much-needed thrill.
Particularly since she is still too young to
bring in any sophisticated nuance: the purely romantic ballads, such as
ʽPretendʼ and ʽIf I Didn't Careʼ, suffer from too much
formula, and when it comes to covers of well-known songs, there is not much she
is able to add to the legacy of ʽBlueberry Hillʼ (the speeding up
and the playful hiccup are not much help), or to Ray Charles' ʽHallelujah
I Love Her Soʼ (except to change the «her» to «him»). They're fun (good
songs that are very hard to spoil in the first place), but never essential.
Musically, we are offered the same expert
Nashville backing here as usual, with more strings and less guitar work than
I'd like to hear and only one truly inventive, «muffled» sax solo from Boots
Randolph on the ʽLove & Learnʼ shuffle. Still, this is all
generally within the pop-rock formula of the time, with tight limits set on
sentimentality quotas — it is only the lack of one or two outstanding displays
of fast-paced joyful aggressiveness, like ʽDynamiteʼ, that are
indicative of the curve having narrowly passed its peak; and even without a
ʽDynamiteʼ to its name, This
Is... Brenda is one of the girl's best and naturally deserves a thumbs up.
EMOTIONS (1961)
1) Emotions; 2) Just Another
Lie; 3) If You Love Me (Really Love Me); 4) Crazy Talk; 5) When I Fall In Love;
6) Around The World; 7) Swanee River Rock; 8) Will You Love Me Tomorrow; 9) I'm
Learning About Love; 10) Georgia On My Mind; 11) Cry; 12) I'm In The Mood For
Love.
Same stylistics, same production team, same
relentless perfectionism (seven
different recording sessions now, after the six of This Is... Brenda), same balanced mix of bearded oldies, recent
oldies, and freshly written corporate material. The only difference: out of 12
songs, two-thirds are ballads, fair and square, bringing that train still
farther and farther away from the girl's rockabilly past — and, considering
that the title track predictably made it into the Top 10, this line of development
only seemed more and more viable as the months and years went by and the
«little Miss Dynamite» was all set to grow into a «mature» Nashville queen.
Fortunately, the Nashville production team
still keeps a firm grip on the limits of good taste, so that the strings are
rarely overbearing, and sometimes actually border on delicious — ʽJust Another
Lieʼ, a new number loosely based on some of Chuck Willis' tunes, instead
of formulaic orchestration, has a haunting solo violin part that comes in
through an imaginary archway midway through, and gives the tune a little bit of
a Stephane Grappelli feel.
The title track does have such a powerhouse delivery
that its choice for a single was understandable: the musical backing is
non-descript, but this is the first time in Brenda's career when she seems to
perfectly understand the power of dynamic modulation, and, true to the song's
title, tries to convey not one, but several different types of emotions over
those three minutes — listen to the big kick of "EMOTIONS, please set me
free!..." after the first few quiet bars of the chorus, and you'll see
what I mean.
Elsewhere, she takes on Edith Piaf (ʽIf You
Love Meʼ), understandably, with little success, but then again, one
shouldn't necessarily be aware that the song is originally a French tune; the
Shirelles and Carole King (ʽWill You Love Me Tomorrowʼ), with far
more success, even though I do believe nobody ever invested as much personal
feeling into that song as its original author; and Ray Charles (we won't be
saying «Hoagy Carmichael», really), with ʽGeorgia On My Mindʼ — a
competent version, but only weathered old men can really do justice to that song
(or, at least, those who successfully pretend
to be weathered old men, like Richard Manuel from The Band).
Of the four upbeat tunes, ʽCrazy
Talkʼ is a fun little wannabe-classic, where guitar, sax, and vocals do
indeed come together in a bit of «crazy talk»; and the B-side ʽI'm
Learning About Loveʼ, despite the suspicious title, is in fact a jumpy
pop-rocker, with the most vivacious tone on the album and a welcome return of
the old «pirate growl» from Little Miss Dynamite.
So, on the whole, one might subtract one or two
of the more faceless ballads (like ʽWhen I Fall In Loveʼ), or smirk a
bit about such childish cover material as the theme tune from Around The World In 80 Days, but Emotions still delivers... well, emotions. feeling glossy, but lively and
cheery, and for that, gets its duly thumbs up.
ALL THE WAY (1961)
1) Lover Come Back To Me; 2)
All The Way; 3) Dum Dum; 4) On The Sunny Side Of The Street; 5) Talkin' 'Bout
You; 6) Someone To Love Me; 7) Do I Worry; 8) Tragedy; 9) Kansas City; 10) Eventually;
11) Speak To Me Pretty; 12) The Big Chance.
Definitely a step back up from Emotions — in fact, this one LP should
probably rank as one of Brenda's most well-balanced, stylish, and intelligent
records, as far as her pop formula could carry all these things. The
ballad-to-rocker ratio is normalized to about fifty-fifty; the actual ballads
and rockers are diverse, once again with a clever mix of ancient oldies, recent
oldies, and newly penned material — and somehow, most of this stuff happens to be designed or re-designed with
flashy vocal and / or instrumental twists, well suited to Brenda's vocal
abilities and the musical skills of her Nashville backers — and every once in
a while, the music rises well above the usual easy-listening pablum levels and
becomes almost endearing.
Thus, ʽLover Come Back To Meʼ is
updated here to match the demands of early 1960s dance-pop («rock'n'roll» would
be too tough a term), but it's almost odd to hear Brenda sing the chorus line
in such an obviously commanding tone ("LOVER! come back TO ME!")
where most of the jazz greats who sang it before her used a more pleading or
generally neutral approach — and she sang it at a far earlier age, too, but
then again, maybe «teenage rebellion» is where it's at. Then, right off the
bat, she goes for another song that
is at least partly associated with Billie Holiday (the title track), and does
it equally full justice — the «grand finale» puts a pretty heavy tax on her
vocal skills, but it all pays off.
Some of the newly written ballads are genuinely
interesting — ʽTragedyʼ, stuck somewhere in between country-western
and doo-wop, is brilliantly modulated, nicely hooked, and should be every bit
as respectable as the best known Elvis ballads from the same period; ʽEventuallyʼ,
written by Ronnie Self of ʽI'm Sorryʼ's fame, is a juicy moody bit
with a subtle threat and an unusual and unpredictable dissection of the word
"eventually" that may sound forced and uncouth at first, but will get
intriguing later as you try to deduce its phonetic symbolism. (Nice and tasty
echoing of the vocals by the violins, too).
ʽEventuallyʼ eventually emerged as the
B-side to the album's single, Jackie DeShannon's ʽDum Dumʼ, which
rose to No. 4 on the charts and is considerably (though not unimaginably)
tougher and sexier than its title would have one believe — especially with
Brenda adopting her «pirate» tone for most of the song's duration, except for
the chorus resolution, where, for a brief titillating flash, the pirate is
revealed as a vixen before putting the mask back on again. The expectable Ray
Charles impersonation (ʽTalkin' 'Bout Youʼ) is too restrained to be
of much interest, but her ʽKansas Cityʼ is fun and defiant enough
("they got some crazy little men
there, I'm gonna get me one") to rank up there with all the other
ʽKansas Citiesʼ in the world, including the Beatles.
The rest of the tracks may not deserve special
mention or discussion, but the bottomline is that it's all consistently
entertaining and rarely, if ever, «tacky»: it was not in Brenda's style to take
on material that she was unable to handle, and, additionally, this time around,
it just so happened that her outside contributors were on a roll, providing her
with catchy stuff. It's all fluffy, but when you're barely pushing 18, there is
nothing wrong in singing fluff if you do it adequately, and All The Way is perfectly adequate —
let's face it, forcing Brenda Lee to sing ʽStrange Fruitʼ at this
juncture would not have been a
particularly wise move. Thumbs up.
SINCERELY, BRENDA LEE (1962)
1) You Always Hurt The One You
Love; 2) Lazy River; 3) You've Got Me Crying Again; 4) It's The Talk Of The
Town; 5) Send Me Some Lovin'; 6) How Deep Is The Ocean; 7) I'll Always Be In
Love With You; 8) I Miss You So; 9) Fools Rush In; 10) Only You (And You
Alone); 11) Hold Me; 12) I'll Be Seeing You.
The first big misstep in Brenda's career — and
it's not even as if the times themselves were pressing her into taking it. The
musical climate, in early 1962, was much the same as in late 1961, and Brenda's
team of musicians, arrangers, and corporate songwriters had not changed much,
either, but all the same, someone came up with this ridiculous idea of
recording an album consisting of nothing but
old Tin Pan Alley stuff, increasing the old quota of about 20-30% to a baffling
100%. Most likely, in an age where people still regarded rockabilly and
dance-pop as passable kiddie stuff (not entirely without reason), this move was
to signalize «maturation» — and if it was impossible to market Brenda as the
next Peggy Lee, well, then she'd at least have to be the next Doris Day. Not
Doris Day? Okay, how about the next Connie Francis?
If you like Brenda Lee in general (like I do), and if you honestly cherish
pre-rock'n'roll era pop standards in general (like I don't), Sincerely will be right up your alley.
From a general point of view on how these songs should be sung and played for
maximum effect, Brenda and her band do a competent job — nothing but sheer
professionalism from everybody. But the girl did not make the original grade
with ʽFools Rush Inʼ: she made it by taking a rowdy Hank Williams
song and rowdying it up even further, and this is why she stood out in the
first place. When, on the other hand, she tries to convince us that ʽYou
Always Hurt The One You Loveʼ, she is doing no better (and no worse) a job
than a whole army of her good-looking colleagues in the same business.
The only song on the entire album that is still
sung with faint echoes of her «pirate voice» is Hoagy Carmichael's ʽLazy
Riverʼ — unquestionably the album's highest point, especially since
Brenda's delivery stays happily ignorant of the sentimentalism that one should
naturally expect to be packed together with these lyrics: she mouths those
"rub away your troubles, dream a dream with me" in such a commanding
tone, you'd be all the wiser to quickly take that advice, or else you'll get
your ass whupped with that trombone solo — it means real business.
The lack of sugary sentimentalism is the only
saving grace that lets one live through the other eleven ballads — but even so,
it gets so monotonous so early on that it might be hard discerning where one
song stops and the next one begins: that refreshing diversity that made All The Way so easily digestible no
longer exists in the confines of this particular formula. Fortunately for us
all today, the general public back in 1962 was not particularly impressed,
either, and the album seriously dipped in the charts as compared to its
predecessor — or, perhaps, this was simply the result of the decision not to put
out any accompanying singles. I mean, even in the «saggy» little period between
Chuck Berry and the Beatles, a cover of Doris Fisher or Hoagy Carmichael was
probably not anybody's best bet for a jukebox attraction. Not a «bad» record
altogether (at this time in history, Brenda and her band were physically
incapable of putting down a proverbially «bad» record), but a relative thumbs down
all the same.
BRENDA, THAT'S ALL (1962)
1) I'm Sitting On Top Of The
World; 2) Fool #1; 3) White Silver Sands; 4) Just Out Of Reach; 5) Sweethearts
On Parade; 6) It's A Lonesome Old Town; 7) Organ Grinder's Swing; 8) Gonna Find
Me A Bluebird; 9) Why Me?; 10) Valley Of Tears; 11) Someday You'll Want Me To
Want You; 12) You Can Depend On Me.
Fortunately for all of us who like a good
friendly beat for our pop ditties, this album rectifies the mistake of Sincerely and returns to the tried and
true: a balanced mix of «adult» and «teen» pop, without any one side trumping
any of the others (although, as is always the case, my internal teen keeps
gaining the upper hand over my external adult). Technically, perhaps, this is
not altogether true, as the ballads numerically dominate over the bop stuff — 8
to 4, to be precise — but only the last three songs present a genuinely noticeable
uninterrupted romantic stretch. Elsewhere, the sound is moderately and
acceptably diverse, even if the songs themselves still tend to come from the
pre-war era: notably, not a single recent teen pop standard is getting covered.
Predictably, both of the singles were ballads:
ʽYou Can Depend On Meʼ is a bluesy one, previously tackled by
Armstrong and Nat King Cole, and ʽFool #1ʼ is a freshly written
country waltz, first tried on by Loretta Lynn before hitting the charts in
Brenda's version. Nothing of particular interest can be said about either one
— the melodies are thoroughly generic, the arrangements fairly trite, and the
singer certainly does not seem too interested in adding any subtle nuances,
because, really, there is only so much one can do with this sort of material.
Things get much
more interesting, in relative comparison, on the upbeat stuff, particularly on
two songs. The organ-led speedy blues-pop of ʽWhite Silver Sandsʼ
puts more of a rock'n'roll spirit in the song than the Don Rondo original from
1957 — leave it to the pirate girl to teach the suave baritone how to get that
blood boiling. And ʽOrgan Grinder's Swingʼ is even more «piratish» in
nature, putting a hooligan twist on a song that had been in need of
rejuvenating ever since Ella Fitzgerald cut it with the Savoy Eight back in
1936, and, true to the song title, featuring cool organ swing a-plenty.
Other than that, there is not much to say,
unless one is ready to take a crash course in writing about minor emotional
inflections in stereotypically patterned country ballads. The worst thing about
all of them is that they prevent Brenda's backing band from showing their chops
— guitars, organs, saxes, the works, all of it only really comes out when the
strings lose their monopoly, and this only happens during the anti-romantic
breaks. But this was late 1962, after
all, back when some people were beginning to think they'd finally done away
with the rock'n'roll craze...
ALL ALONE AM I (1963)
1) All Alone Am I; 2) By
Myself; 3) (I Left My Heart) In San Francisco; 4) It's All Right With Me; 5) My
Colouring Book; 6) My Prayer; 7) Lover; 8) All By Myself; 9) What Kind Of Fool
Am I; 10) Come Rain Or Come Shine; 11) I Hadn't Anyone Till You; 12) Fly Me To
The Moon.
Recorded in late 1962, released in February
1963, forgotten, I suppose, as soon as its lead single fell off the charts. And
this time even the lead single, although it did rise to No. 3 on the charts,
does not help out the situation — a sentimental adult pop waltz, sung with
plenty of power but no subtlety whatsoever. The harpsichord adds a nice touch
of anti-mediocrity, but there is only so long a distance I am willing to go as
far as my admiration for Brenda Lee is concerned: a corny mainstream standart
is a corny mainstream standart, period.
The subject of loneliness seems to have been
raised to conceptual heights here — apart from the title track, one finds both ʽBy
Myselfʼ and ʽAll By
Myselfʼ (yes, they are two different songs: the latter from Irving
Berlin's songbook, the former a recent composition), and then there is the
sleeve photo on which the girl does seem sort of lonely. In fact, that
purple-dress-on-black style would suggest some musical «doom and gloom» to go
along, but the arrangements make no effort to genuinely convey any dark
emotions. Everything's glossed up again, with strings, pianos, and,
occasionally, harps and harmonicas (as on the impossibly, almost Sesame
Street-like «angelified» rendition of ʽMy Coloring Bookʼ) providing
all the perks.
Most of the toughness that can be elicited from
the performer here comes on fast-paced jazz-pop numbers, both new (ʽBy
Myselfʼ) and old (a funny cover of the old Rodgers & Hart chestnut
ʽLoverʼ, with Brenda's trademark «stern» approach), but even these
are limited to two or three tracks. As for the rest — well, ʽMy
Prayerʼ is probably as solemn and anthemic as she ever got to that point,
but that does not mean this «regal» approach really suits her. Altogether, the
whole thing is another disaster on par with Sincerely, and a good example of Decca's utmost stupidity in the
early Sixties when it came to making the best use of their artists. But we all
know that — «guitar bands are on their way out» and all the rest. Thumbs down.
LET ME SING (1963)
1) Night And Day; 2) The End
Of The World; 3) Our Day Will Come; 4) You're The Reason I'm Living; 5) Break
It To Me Gently; 6) Where Are You; 7) When Your Lover Has Gone; 8) Losing You;
9) I Wanna Be Around; 10) Out In The Cold Again; 11) At Last; 12) There Goes My
Heart.
No conceptual foundation this time, but no
significant difference, either, except for a minor tactical twist: other than
the opening ʽNight And Dayʼ and maybe just one or two other oldies,
the majority of the songs come from recent success stories — Bobby Darin,
Skeeter Davis, those kinds of people. If anything, though, it only means that
polite, Disney-ish ballads occupy the space that could have been dedicated to fun retro jazz romps: if Brenda Lee is
prohibited to sing rock'n'roll, she could have at least been warming our hearts
with some of that old swing. But Let Me
Sing is targeted exclusively at «respectable parents» circa 1963, and no
one else.
Already sickening strings are now joined, on at
least a third of the songs, by the greatest evil of all — croony backup vocals
that successfully recreate the atmosphere of Bambi: nineteen forty-two all over again (ʽYou're The Reason
I'm Livingʼ, ʽThere Goes My Heartʼ, etc.). Brenda herself sounds
strong and confident in the midst of all this sugarland, but strength and
confidence are wasted on this kind of material with these kinds of
arrangements. Besides, many of these songs are not even intended to be sung
with strength and confidence — if there is
a substantial point to a song like ʽBreak It To Me Gentlyʼ, it is
pretty much lost on the singer. If somebody asked me in that particular way
to «break it to me gently», I'd rather run and hide.
Anyway, the two oldies that open the two sides
of the LP (ʽNight And Dayʼ, ʽWhen Your Lover Has Goneʼ)
preserve some of the playful fun, and are altogether acceptable, if
dispensable. The rest is mainly just awful songs in awful arrangements, sung by
a singer who was not born to sing this kind of material, period. Another thumbs down,
of course — don't let anyone fool you into suggesting that «time has been kind
to this stuff...».
BY REQUEST (1964)
1) More; 2) Days Of Wine And
Roses; 3) Danke Schoen; 4) Tammy; 5) Why Don't You Believe Me; 6) I Love You
Because; 7) As Usual; 8) Blue Velvet; 9) My Whole World Is Falling Down; 10) I
Wonder; 11) I'm Confessin'; 12) The Grass Is Greener.
By May 5, 1964, when this album was officially
released on Decca, the States had already been wriggling in the clutch of
Beatlemania for several months — but, naturally, you wouldn't even begin to
whiff it on By Request. By whose
request? Certainly not by request of those rebellious teens who could have
embraced stuff like ʽDynamiteʼ eight years ago — more likely, by
request of their parents who were secretly hoping that this new trans-Atlantic
craze might pass them by even faster than the older, homebrewed rockabilly
madness.
In retrospect, this album is even more awful
than its predecessor. The only song that barely escapes the sacchariney
quicksand of lush ballads is ʽMy Whole World Is Falling Downʼ, a
jovial mix of pop and R&B that would have felt right at home on a Manfred
Mann album — the joviality being particularly neat in the light of the song's
tragic lyrics. On a record like All The
Way, the track would have been a nice, energetic, forgettable bit of filler
— here, it is a giant among songs that... well, in retrospect, some people have
developed a nostalgic kick for this sort of mush, but I wonder just how many of
them can honestly stand a song like ʽTammyʼ, which arguably embodies
all of the very worst aspects of «mainstream pop» in the early 1960s.
"Does my darling feel what I feel when he comes here?.." Oh, please!
«Highlights» include an unnecessary attempt at
appropriating ʽBlue Velvetʼ (the song is hardly any good on its own,
but at least The Clovers gave it some color); Wayne Newton's ʽDanke
Schoenʼ, sung with the same Yiddish accent ("danke shaayne!..")
and preserving all the neo-cabaret corniness of the original; and a lushly
orchestrated ʽDays Of Wine & Rosesʼ — I must say that I am a sucker for ʽMoon Riverʼ
when it comes to Henry Mancini (probably due to the obligatory childhood crush
on Audrey Hepburn), but not this one. Why not ʽMoon Riverʼ? Whoever
chooses ʽDays Of Wine & Rosesʼ over ʽMoon Riverʼ
deserves a wicked thumbs down for that reason alone. Better
still, why can't she just cover the Pink Panther Theme? At her best, she
certainly used to be more of a «pink panther» than a «Tammy's in love (woo woo
woo woo)».
SINGS TOP TEEN HITS (1965)
1) Dancing In The Streets; 2)
The Crying Game; 3) Thanks A Lot; 4) Let It Be Me; 5) He Loves You; 6) Snap
Your Fingers; 7) Wishin' & Hopin'; 8) Funny How Time Slips Away; 9) Is It
True; 10) Can't Buy Me Love; 11) Always Something There To Remind Me; 12) When
You Loved Me.
The most insulting thing about this album is
its title. Granted, in February 1965 the world was still a few months away from
ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ and ʽSatisfactionʼ, so Decca Records
could still be somewhat justified in «wishin' & hopin'» that this new wave
of rock'n'roll craziness would be over them as soon as this next bunch of
teenagers starts getting serious about life. But the title is still
condescending — as in, well, you know, our little lady usually sings mature, responsible material that treats human relationships from a healthy, adult perspective ("Tammy, Tammy, Tammy's in love!"), but
sure, we understand the need to cater to this newfangled teen market as well,
and we don't really want to let those silly kids feel too left out, so here, as an experiment, is Ms. Brenda Lee doing a
couple of those weird «Beetles» songs for our dear, if a little misguided,
offspring. Now run along, little boys and girls, and make way for some serious musicians that your parents
endorse — like Tony Bennett.
Actually, both of the Beatles covers are among
the highlights here — Brenda had not yet completely forgotten what the
rock'n'roll spirit was all about, and she nails the vocals on both with the
good old abandon. Funny tidbit: even though the song is officially listed as
ʽHe Loves Youʼ, Brenda
sings the original lyrics without changing the pronoun — and understandably so,
because the idiots at Decca failed to realize that the song involves three
rather than two characters, and that turning it into ʽhe loves youʼ
could have easily made the song into a gay rights anthem. Oh well, at least
they bothered to preserve the electric guitar solo on ʽCan't Buy Me
Loveʼ.
Most of the other songs, though... well, they
were certainly hits, but it is somewhat questionable whether all of them were
truly «teen» hits. ʽLet It Be
Meʼ was covered by the Everleys, it is true, and there is plenty of Brill
Building and Motown material on here, but the accent is very rarely on
rock'n'roll even in its lightest form — most of the covers are lush ballads,
soft-pop, or country with «crossover» appeal, and there is a nasty tendency to
butcher some of the songs (for instance, ʽThe Crying Gameʼ was a very
interesting song when recorded by Dave Berry, mainly due to Big Jim Sullivan's
pioneering use of the wah-wah — here it is all replaced by the usual mushy
strings). The Beatles covers are fun to hear, as is ʽDancing In The
Streetsʼ — a song ideally suited for all the raunch and fire that
Brenda's voice can generate — and, at the very least, the concept allows her
to devote some space to fluffy, but
upbeat material like ʽSnap Your Fingersʼ and ʽThanks A
Lotʼ: these aren't great songs, but in between all of them, they make Brenda Lee Sings Some Decca Executives
Favorites They're Too Ashamed To Admit, So They Pose As Teens vastly
preferable to Brenda Lee, By Request Of
Some Other Decca Executives Who Do Not Pose As Teens But It's Not As If We Have
To Respect Them For That.
The corniest moment on the record is saved for
last: a teen idol-type candy piece called ʽWhen You Loved Meʼ, whose
first verse goes "When you loved me / You took the stars / Down from the
skies / Then you put them in my eyes" — I don't know about you, but my first reaction was "Oh man, that
must have really hurt!" But this
is actually a good sign, a crystal clear message from the industry that nothing
has changed in a profound manner: the Beatles will come and go just the same
way as Martha & The Vandellas or Dave Berry or Dusty Springfield, but
Serious Good Taste by Responsible Adults will always prevail in the end. And
it's always useful to be in the know, regardless of whether the news is
pleasant or disappointing.
THE VERSATILE BRENDA LEE (1965)
1) Yesterday's Gone; 2) Dear
Heart; 3) I Still Miss Someone; 4) How Glad I Am; 5) Almost There; 6) Don't
Blame Me; 7) Willow Weep For Me; 8) Truly Truly True; 9) Love Letters; 10) The
Birds And The Bees; 11) La Vie En Rose; 12) Maybe.
And by «versatile», I presume, they mean «one
that can perform everything, from
lightweight pre-war popular songs to profound contemporary material by our
illustrious songwriters, like ʽThe Birds And The Beesʼ, for example».
Well, truth be told, they may be right, if they are going not with the third
meaning of the word in Webster's dictionary («turning with ease from one thing
to another»), but with the first one — «capable of being turned round». It must
have took quite a bit of turning round, I'd say, to end up with a cover of
ʽLa Vie En Roseʼ on one's hands in the middle of 1965.
The album doth add insult to injury by opening
in a dishonestly deceitful manner — ʽYesterday's Goneʼ, a fluke hit
for the wimpy UK folk-rock duo Chad & Jeremy, is unexpectedly arranged in a
rock'n'roll manner, with gruff electric guitars and a King Curtis-style
saxophone solo. Not exactly «hard», but probably the toughest sound on a Brenda
Lee album in about two years, making the listener salivate for more. But
already track number two is ʽDear Heartʼ, a thick syrup concocted by
Henry Mancini for Andy Williams, with backing vocals that you thought you'd
heard the last of in Disney classics from the previous decade. And off we go...
In all honesty, the interpretation of
ʽWillow Weep For Meʼ is
extremely «versatile», not to mention powerful, and ʽHow Glad I Amʼ
is quite competitive when it comes to comparison with the Nancy Wilson original
— where Nancy has the upper hand in subtle modulation, Brenda fights back with
sheer volume and determination. It is also interesting that her version of
ʽLove Lettersʼ managed to predate Elvis' hit rendition by about a
year — not that either of them matters all that much in the grand scheme of
things.
But a thumbs down all the same, since everything
else is (by now) traditionally rotten, including
ʽThe Birds And The Beesʼ, which must be one of the worst love songs
ever written in an upbeat pop manner (no wonder Jewel Akens never had another
hit in his whole life). Bad songs, worse arrangements, formally impeccable, but
fully predictable vocals, and, worst of all, the realization that this was all
made in the summer of '65... well, couldn't they at least let her cover ʽAll I Really Want To Doʼ? Maybe
we'd have no need for Cher then.
TOO MANY RIVERS (1965)
1) It's Not Unusual; 2) Call
Me Irresponsible; 3) Too Many Rivers; 4) Who Can I Turn To (When Nobody Needs
Me); 5) Whispering; 6) Stormy Weather; 7) Hello Dolly; 8) Unforgettable; 9)
Everybody Loves Somebody; 10) No One; 11) Truer Than True; 12) Think.
Country songwriter Harlan Howard provided
Brenda with the hit for this album — the title track rose to No. 13 on the
charts, her highest achievement since ʽAs Usualʼ two years before. As
far as generic country balladry goes, ʽToo Many Riversʼ is hardly the
worst kind: if only they'd thought of a better set of clothes for the song than
the usual lush strings and cloudy aah-oohs... but the days of curiosities in
guitar, sax, and keyboard arrangements were long gone by then. Still, a
rockin'-horse country song for a hit is always better than a glob of syrup.
Other than that, let's see: Tom Jones... Judy
Garland... Shirley Bassey... Nat King Cole... Dean Martin... Hello Dolly... a couple pre-war
standards... well, you get the gist. And you do know that you are in general
trouble listening to Brenda's mid-1960s albums, and in double trouble when ʽHello Dollyʼ turns out to be one of
the highlights — but somehow, done in a fast tempo, rock-and-roll style, oddly
enough, it is (at least, I'd certainly take it over Streisand, but then again,
I'd take almost anything over
Streisand, so forget it).
But altogether, if the previous two albums
might seem like the last twists and twitches of agony, curious to watch from a
sadistic perspective, this one is rigor
mortis setting in — Vegas stuff, regurgitation of the «Songbook», schmaltz
and glitz all the way. No doubt, somewhere
in the world there may hide a genuinely devoted fan or two, or three, that
could secretly wish for a complete set of Songbooks from Brenda Lee the way we
got them from Ella — then again, there might also be some people out there
who'd like their refrigerators to play their CDs, and their CD players to press
their pants. What Brenda does on this, and many other, records, is not fundamentally
different, and deserves nothing other than yet another thumbs down — although stealing
the title track and ʽHello Dollyʼ for your playlist would be a
merciful gesture.
BYE BYE BLUES (1966)
1) A Taste Of Honey; 2) Good
Life; 3) Flowers On The Wall; 4) Shadow Of Your Smile; 5) Remember Me When; 6)
Softly As I Leave You; 7) Bye Bye Blues; 8) Make The World Go Away; 9)
September In The Rain; 10) Rusty Bells; 11) What A Difference A Day Made; 12)
Yesterday.
The funniest part about observing this stage of
Brenda's career is the emergence of this «alternate music universe», reflected
in her (or, rather, her producers') selection of contemporary material. In this
alternate universe, the Beatles were masters of torch balladeering, competing
with Sanremo Festival pros over the amount of tears they could wring out of
the eyes of the audience (so who's the winner, ladies and gentlemen of the
jury: ʽYesterdayʼ or ʽSoftly As I Leave Youʼ?); the «teen
pop» singles market was most effectively represented by The Statler Brothers
(ʽFlowers On The Wallʼ — who needs Bob Dylan when you can just as
effectively cover all the serious problems of the world by "smoking
cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo"?);
and the latest, trendiest, most cutting-edge achievement in the world of
Western music was recognized as the Love
Theme from The Sandpiper (ʽThe Shadow Of Your Smileʼ).
As much as we'd like to snicker on the issue,
though, the era is not so remote yet as to become completely shrouded in myth —
and yes, it is important to remember that there were many people in early 1966 who did live in that alternate universe;
in fact, most people over 30, and
plenty of those under, probably did. The problem with Brenda Lee was that most
of those people, if they really
needed the love theme from The Sandpiper, could just stick with the original,
and usually did; there was little that Ms. Lee or her faceless,
string-dependent backing band could add.
Amusingly, the only single from the album
(which, formally, preceded it in late '65) was ʽRusty Bellsʼ, a lush
ballad with a «message»: "Rusty bells, rusty bells, pity those who've gone
astray, ring again and help them find the way" — nothing less than a socially conscious statement, so the
people behind the lady must have felt some
sort of tinkle, that, perhaps, in the era of ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ
and ʽA Change Is Gonna Comeʼ, something
is required from time to time even from the high priests of the schmaltz
variety. It didn't work; the single stalled at No. 33 and marked the
next-to-last time any of Brenda's singles would get in the Top 40.
Other than that, the only salvageable tracks
are: (a) an interesting jazzy take on ʽA Taste Of Honeyʼ, with powerful
brass backing overriding the strings for once, and (b) a few decent takes on
oldies — the title track and ʽWhat A Difference A Day Madeʼ show a
bit of pensive depth that the saccharine-riddled «contemporary material» covers
replace with shallow romantic glitz. In other words, this is where the
superiority of the pre-war Songbook over the post-war Songbook is established
quite transparently. Well, there must be some
meaning to the process of relistening to these records more than fifty years
on.
COMING ON STRONG (1966)
1) Coming On Strong; 2) You
Don't Have To Say You Love Me; 3) Summer Wind; 4) Kiss Away; 5) Call Me; 6)
What Now My Love; 7) Uptight; 8) Crying Time; 9) Strangers In The Night; 10)
Sweet Dreams; 11) You Got Your Troubles; 12) Somewhere.
I count a grand total of three impressively produced, Motown-aping tracks on this album, released
just in time for the opening of the Christmas market of 1966. The best known of
the lot is, of course, the title track — which, despite its brash, brass-'n'-harmony-stuffed
production, was actually written by «Little David Wilkins» of Nashville,
launching his own career in the process. In an age where people hungered for
more and more red-hot Supremes and Marvelettes material, ʽComing On
Strongʼ nailed that vibe, and miraculously skyrocketed Brenda all the way
to No. 11 on the charts — it is only the utmost stupidity of the music industry
people that they did not manage to capitalize on this success, and reinvent
Ms. Lee as a fun, groovy, but strong-willed dance-pop personality. A little
grooming, a little coaching, a little extra makeup, and she could have been
fashioned as a white Diana Ross; they were even born in the same year.
Or maybe a white Stevie Wonder, because another bona fide Motown simulation
captured here is ʽUptightʼ, where she gets caught up in the fun so
much, there is even a brief remembrance of her old school «pirate» voice —
nothing to make you forget the original hit, but, again, the flame is
successfully carried over. Then it gets a little less invigorating on the third
«upbeat» number of the album, a cover of ʽYou Got Your Troublesʼ,
which was a hit for The Fortunes the year before, but they try out the same
combination with the brass fanfares, and even if it is a little slower and feels
a little less suited for Brenda's singing style than ʽComing On
Strongʼ, it's still a winner.
Unfortunately, what we have lodged in between
is the same old shit — ʽYou Don't Have To Say You Love Meʼ (she was
covering Dusty Springfield, but the bitter irony is that once again, Brenda's version would be soon
competing with Elvis, and guess who'd win), ʽStrangers In The Nightʼ
(yeah right), ʽSomewhereʼ... well, you get the drift. Still, having
even three songs here that constitute an attempt to remold the image was a
grand achievement for Brenda, in the context of pretty much everything she did
before — and this tiny Motownish step was, at the very least, more convincing
and much less forced than the «sings teen hits» embarrassment.
REFLECTIONS IN BLUE (1967)
1) Here's That Rainy Day; 2)
You'll Never Know; 3) Baby Won't You Please Come Home; 4) Can't Help Falling In
Love; 5) I'll Only Miss Him When I Think Of Him; 6) Am I Blue; 7) If I Had You;
8) Close To You; 9) Little Girl Blue; 10) I Will Wait For You.
This one's sort of a cult favorite — all of a
sudden, Brenda's producers decided to add an unexpected twist to her
balladeering image, and recast her in the image of a moody vocal jazz performer,
sort of like a Rosemary Cloonie or a Blossom Dearie. Normally, that's a smart
move: you can allow yourself to remain sweet, sappy, and sentimental, but at
the same time pretend to true emotional depth and gain points with the critics.
But does it really work with Brenda Lee?
I mean, we all have to ask ourselves that
question at least twice — if only to beat the common prejudice against
«turf-shifting»: naturally, Brenda
Lee is not a well-trained or deeply experienced jazz singer, and one either
has to be completely ignorant of that field, or allow a certain degree of
tolerance for the «amateur intruder», in order to judge the whole thing
impartially. It also makes matters twice as bad when, like your humble servant,
one has fairly little tolerance for «vocal jazz», particularly orchestrated
sentimental vocal jazz, in the first place, and requires a performer of
outstandingly unique quality (such as Ms. Billie) to override the intolerance.
That said, it's not as if the problems of Reflections In Blue were all that
different from all of Brenda's problems in the post-1962 era. There are no
technical flaws to her voice, but the delivery on all these songs — regardless
of whether they deal with loss of love or discovery — is always the same: loud,
powerful, professional, monotonous, predictable, and perfunctory. Okay, so she
respects the melody and the lyrics sheet, but that works fine for an evening's
entertainment in a local jazz club, not for a record with supposed replay
value. Okay, so some of the songs are
acknowledged classics of the genre, but the overriding lush strings reduce
them all to the lowest common denominator. And whoever came up with the
sequencing that places the old aching classic Bessie Smith tune ʽBaby
Won't You Please Come Homeʼ right next to ʽCan't Help Falling In
Loveʼ should be hung, drawn, and quartered.
In any case, all credibility goes out the
window when an album like this finishes on such a patho-bombastic note as
ʽI Will Wait For Youʼ: nothing against Umbrellas of Cherbourg in general, but they fit in with Bessie
Smith about as well as milk with pickles. I am not saying that Brenda was
completely «out of it» — I mean, let's face it, 1967 was as much the year of
Barbra Streisand as it was the year of Jimi Hendrix — I do mean, however, that Reflections In Blue crudely and cruelly
nipped the «para-Motown transformation», attempted with ʽComing On
Strongʼ, in the bud, and that, in the end, it won her nothing. Yes, in
terms of song selection and overall image, it is a step forward from the
totally empty balladeering of yesterday, but one that still would not allow the
girl to properly compete with the big names. A historical curio, worth getting
to know for reasons of perspective, but for little else. Oh well, at least it somehow stands out from all those other
faceless albums, so indistinguishable from one another.
FOR THE FIRST TIME (1968)
1) Cabaret; 2) There's A Kind
Of Hush; 3) Basin Street Blues; 4) Windy; 5) Night And Day; 6) One Of Those
Songs; 7) Mood Indigo; 8) Can't Take My Eyes Off You; 9) 59th Street Bridge
Song; 10) Anything Goes; 11) I Gotta Right To Sing The Blues.
But wait, here is another late-Sixties Brenda Lee album that somehow stands out, and
this time, in a more refined or, at least, more fun manner than Reflections In Blue. The twist here is
a collaboration with famed Dixieland clarinetist Pete Fountain — which is what
the title refers to, of course, and what did you think it might refer to?.. — and since the overall quality of
Brenda's albums had always depended on what sort of musicians were given the
green light on them, and given Fountain's hitherto impeccable jazz credentials,
one could finally expect something more-than-just-pitiful even before putting
on the record.
These expectations are fulfilled only
partially, because, in general, the arrangements are still based on glitz and
glamour, the vibe is one of fluffy cabaret entertainment (it suffices only to
look at what particular number has been chosen as the introduction to the LP),
and the year may only be guessed as 1968 if you look long enough at the song
titles — pre-war standards like ʽAnything Goesʼ are in the minority
next to contemporary hits from 1966 and 1967, but whoever produced the album
must not have thought much of Sgt.
Pepper, let alone the Monterey Pop Festival.
On the other
hand, though, the songs are generally lively and Dixieland-ish a-plenty, which
at the very least means there is little danger of falling asleep; and the
addition of Fountain as a working partner works fine, just as expected — the
man has a swell tone (or, rather, variety of tones) and a seductive old-timey
playfulness that perfectly matches the same in Brenda's voice. So yes, they
take Simon & Garfunkel's ʽ59th Street Bridge Songʼ and spoil its
cozy little vibe with orchestration, but if you filter the superfluous strings
past your ears, what remains is a cutesy-friendly dialog between the voice and
the clarinet — one that understands that vibe and cherishes it. Then they also
take Jimmy Durante's joke number ʽOne Of Those Songsʼ, crack its vibe, speed it up, and come out with
something that, musically at least, beats the original (well, music-wise, anybody
could beat Jimmy Durante — the man was about comedy, not about hitting notes —
but they do retain the humor punch as well).
This dialog works within any setting — modern, ancient, folksy, jazzy, bluesy, with or
without a huge brass backing, with or without gushing / pouring strings, it's
as if this «vicinity of the talking clarinet» were giving a new sense of
existence to Brenda's singing, and even if it does not help her override her
usual limitations (on the whole, the clarinet shows a much higher degree of subtlety
than the voice), it is still that one missing ingredient that makes For The First Time her best album by far since the very early 1960s, which
isn't saying all that much, but at least it does deserve a thumbs up — too bad it was all just
a one-night stand.
JOHNNY ONE TIME (1969)
1) Johnny One Time; 2) Traces;
3) If You Go Away; 4) Bring Me Sunshine; 5) Help Yourself; 6) Let It Be Me; 7)
For Once In My Life; 8) This Girl's In Love With You; 9) Matelot; 10) The
Letter; 11) Walk Away.
No Pete Fountain — no extra ray of light to
illuminate the dullness. Brenda's last album of the decade is at least not
nearly as lethargic as Reflections In
Blue, and surprisingly diverse in comparison to most of her mid-Sixties
stuff; but the diversity is not propped up by any interesting musicianship —
everything is simply drenched in the usual strings, brass, and big orchestral
pomp of her Vegas style arrangements. And (big surprise) she is not maturing much
as a singer, either. Her take on Brel's ʽIf You Go Awayʼ is just
plain terrible.
The title track was actually a small hit, her
commercially strongest showing in about two years — as far as lush country
ballads go, this one is far from the worst and features a strong vocal buildup:
not highly likely an advanced musical listener will be ready to shed tears for
the poor girl swindled by the protagonist, but he might want to tip that hat
to the dynamic punch as we slowly ride the indignation wave all the way to the
top. It is fairly well crafted, at least, and deserved a much more tasteful
arrangement.
There are some upbeat pop covers here that are
perfectly listenable (ʽHelp Yourselfʼ), some honest and respectable,
but unnecessary R&B covers (ʽFor Once In My Lifeʼ is a very good
early Stevie Wonder song, but if you substitute Stevie Wonder for Brenda Lee,
you are not going to get a
mind-opening perspective on the limitless potential of the melody), an
obligatory take on ʽThe Letterʼ (everybody who ever did covers at the
time just had to cover ʽThe
Letterʼ — too bad the song was not actually written by Alex Chilton, or
his financial troubles would be non-existent), and... well, all that other stuff. Diverse? Yes. Memorable?
Well, if the title of the album is Johnny
One Time, what would you expect?
And on this note, we are going to finally cut
the umbilical cord. The following year, Brenda Lee would release Memphis Portrait, an album that would
announce a full turn towards country — and stay there for most of the 1970s,
1980s, and beyond. These records are relatively hard to get (even as vinyl
rips), even less rewarding to listen to, and besides, I have little interest in
reviewing country music, particularly of that order. All I can say is that it
was probably a wise decision — as a generic Nashville singer, Brenda could cut
it quite convincingly, and it was probably simpler and humbler for her to go
that way than go on hanging on the lower fringes of the charts with one
faceless, embarrassing pop record after another.
She pretty much dropped out of the recording
business after 1991, but last we heard, she did put out a record of gospel duets in 2007, with Dolly Parton,
Alison Krauss, and Emmylou Harris among the participants — and she still looked
quite attractive on the cover (yes, even the hair stays pretty much in the same
configuration as always). We can only hope that her life has been happy and
healthy, that it will continue in the same way for years to come, and that, God
help us, she won't ever get any ideas
about staging a «rock'n'roll comeback» («Last Woman Standing» or something of
that kind).
THE COMPLETE BROWNIE McGHEE (1940-1941; 1994)
CD I: 1) Picking
My Tomatoes; 2) Me And My Dog Blues; 3) Born For Bad Luck; 4) I'm Callin' Daisy;
5) Step It Up And Go; 6) My Barkin' Bulldog Blues; 7) Let Me Tell You 'Bout My
Baby; 8) Prison Woman Blues; 9) Back Door Stranger; 10) Be Good To Me; 11) Not
Guilty Blues; 12) Coal Miner Blues; 13) Step It Up And Go No. 2; 14) Money
Spending Woman; 15) Death Of Blind Boy Fuller #1; 16) Death Of Blind Boy Fuller
#2; 17) Got To Find My Little Woman; 18) I'm A Black Woman's Man #1; 19) I'm A
Black Woman's Man #2; 20) Dealing With The Devil; 21) Double Trouble #1; 22)
Double Trouble #2; 23) Woman, I'm Done.
CD
II: 1) Key To My Door; 2) Million Lonesome Women; 3) Ain't No Tellin'; 4) Try
Me One More Time; 5) I Want To See Jesus; 6) Done What My Lord Said; 7) I Want
King Jesus; 8) What Will I Do (Without The Lord); 9) Key To The Highway 70 #1;
10) Key To The Highway 70 #2; 11) I Don't Believe In Love; 12) So Much Trouble;
13) Good-Bye Now; 14) Jealous Of My Woman; 15) Unfair Blues; 16) Barbecue Any
Old Time; 17) Workingman's Blues; 18) Sinful Disposition Woman; 19) Back Home
Blues; 20) Deep Sea Diver; 21) It Must Be Love; 22) Studio Chatter; 23) Swing,
Soldier, Swing #1; 24) Swing, Soldier, Swing #2.
Any album that says Complete is rarely so, and, of course, this one is nowhere near a
true «complete», not even close — but it does
contain all or most of the recordings that Walter Brown McGhee, a.k.a.
«Brownie», made for Okeh and Columbia Records in 1940-41. Apparently, the
labels hired him because of growing demand on what would later be known as
«Piedmont blues»: their chief star in that genre, Blind Boy Fuller, was selling
reasonably well, but was not altogether reliable (certainly not in the wake of
a brief prison term in 1938, and especially
after having died in 1941), so they thought it wouldn't hurt to hire one more
guitar-playing kid.
Brownie, who was self-taught and also used to
sing with a local harmony group in Kingsport, Tennessee, must have been one of
the smoothest, steadiest, «normal-est» country blues people in existence. He
cherished his rural roughness, never going for a «slick» urbanized attitude,
but he never imposed that roughness
on people, either — everything he plays here is supposed to entertain, not
scare people or induce any sort of religious or just plain soulful haze.
Granted, in today's world it would have hardly counted as entertainment,
either, because Brownie's motto may be decoded as «nothing out of the ordinary, just 12-bar blues guitar playing and
by-the-book blues singing». Disregarding slight alternations in tempos (to some
of these tunes you sit and tap your foot, to some of them you jiggle and
wiggle), the absolute majority of these 47 tracks are completely
interchangeable.
Even when Brownie pays tribute to his deceased
mentor, Blind Boy Fuller, captured here in two subsequent takes, there is not a
shred of extra emotion in his voice and not a single alternation in the regular
chord sequences. Some might attribute this to lack of talent, others, on the
contrary, will praise the man for keeping a steady footing and not allowing to
sacrifice his «realistic» manner of performing for empty ritualistic purposes.
Who really knows? But, naturally, it is best not to judge ʽDeath Of Blind
Boy Fullerʼ on its own, and, instead, try to get a general feel for Brownie's
unassuming playing over the course of those 2 CDs (although, unless you are
using this for background purposes, I certainly wouldn't recommend forcing
yourself to sit through all the 47 tracks at once — pretty soon you will be
getting the obligatory Groundhog Day
feeling).
On most of the tracks, Blind Boy is not
completely alone, but fairly often he is being backed only by a washboard
percussion player (Bull City Red or Washboard Slim) and/or a harmonica partner
(Jordan Webb; later on, Sonny Terry joins in for a couple of tracks, but the
real partnership between Brownie and Sonny would not truly begin until after
the war). The washboard adds a little extra liveliness and, considering
Brownie's almost «pedantic» approach to guitar playing, sometimes sounds like the actual lead instrument — but still, this
is mostly a solo endeavour, and it is only because McGhee's playing technique
is so similar on most of the tracks that one's attention might eventually shift
to the scraping, grating, clicking, and clanging of percussion.
Most of the songs happened to be captured in
pristine clarity (at least, for 1940), so there is at least one serious
advantage to this package: if you want a solid, «no-nonsense», comprehensive,
perfectly listenable sample of pre-war country blues, this just might be the package to get. Unless you happen to
be a seriously refined blues scholar, there is nothing particularly distinctive
about it, but this is also what makes these songs such a perfect primer for getting
into the spirit of what it was all about — without getting carried too far away
by Charlie Patton's subhuman growling, Bo Carter's obscene innuendos, Lonnie
Johnson's virtuoso soloing, Blind Willie McTell's «woman voice», etc. etc. In
addition, Brownie puts his «generic stamp» on a variety of styles — ragtime,
jug band, gospel — enough to assess the general range of popular black
entertainment.
So it's all quite instructive, and those who
have the patience to sit through it all will be rewarded at the end with a
double-take bouncy guitar duet between Brownie and Buddy Moss from October
1941, back when Buddy was freshly released from jail and eager to reclaim his
status of one of the hottest players on the East Coast. However, flashy guitar
sparring is simply not what this is
all about — more like it's all about a handy, well-illustrated manual for every
aspiring acoustic blues player. Great sound, perfect self-assurance, total lack
of individual personality: the hard-to-catch «folk spirit» speaking directly to
the listener. Thumbs
up, if only for this strange feeling of «total impersonality» that
emanates from every pore of the record.
THE FOLKWAYS YEARS (1945-1959; 1991)
1) Daisy; 2) Rising Sun; 3)
Careless Love; 4) Cholly Blues; 5) Just A Dream; 6) Pawn Shop Blues; 7)
Hangman's Blues; 8) Livin' With The Blues; 9) 'Fore Day Creep; 10) Me And
Sonny; 11) Raise A Ruckus Tonight; 12) Betty And Dupree; 13) Long Gone; 14)
Grievin' Hearted Blues; 15) I'm Gonna Tell God How You Treat Me; 16) Can't Help
Myself; 17) Pallet On The Floor.
In between 1945 and 1959, Brownie recorded at
least six different albums of acoustic blues and «para-blues» material for
Folkways records, all of them still preserved in the Smithsonian archives and
available if one looks really hard... but on the whole, they have been long
since out of print, and the most common (and the only recommendable) way to get
yourself acknowledged with Brownie's musical life throughout that period is
through this generous 17-song sampler that claims to collect most of the
highlights.
It is interesting, but perhaps expectable,
that, unlike so many of his pals from pre-war times, McGhee never really «faded
away»: he continued to release small quantities of 45s throughout the late
1940s, and then, by the early 1950s, tied a steady knot with Folkways,
performing either solo (on the majority of these tracks) or as part of a guitar
/ harmonica duo with Sonny Terry (on a minority of the tracks, although the two
went on to cut quite a few LPs together). He was, to a certain extent, marketed
as a «survivor» already in the 1950s, and, along with Big Bill Broonzy and a
couple other people, played the part of a wond'rous living fossil, to be
admired by Village scholars and schoolboys — played it fairly well, as this
collection demonstrates, because first and foremost it sounds like an honest,
meticulously planned and executed «blues manual».
Unlike his earlier recordings for Columbia,
where Brownie seemed too hard pressed into a single «Piedmont» formula, this
Folkways stuff is, well, not exactly «all over the place», but still fairly
diverse by comparison. Already the third track is a take on the old vaudeville
number ʽCareless Loveʼ (which Brownie possibly picked up from Blind
Boy Fuller, but which really used to be a staple for the urban blues queens in
the 1920s). ʽHangman's Bluesʼ is an almost haunting shuffle, a «dark
ballad» that adds intimacy, personality, and depth to Brownie's hitherto rather
faceless character. ʽRaise A Ruckus Tonightʼ stems from some old
minstrel show and attempts to do exactly what the doctor prescribed.
ʽLong Goneʼ experiments a little bit with the vocals, as Brownie
clones himself by echoing each of his lines, and with the guitar playing (a
rather strange, hard to describe, picking style here). ʽI'm Gonna Tell
God...ʼ speaks for itself — actually, it could be described as danceable
«country-gospel blues», if only to pick your interest for a bit.
Some of Brownie's soloing here is quite
admirable, too, particularly on extended tunes like ʽCholly Bluesʼ
where you can hear proto-rockabilly chord sequences that would later be all the
rage on Carl Perkins (and, subsequently, Beatles) albums; and on the comic
blues number ʽDaisyʼ, he tries to transplant his subtle sense of
humor into his instrument, with partial success. But, where possible, he leaves
the solo spotlight to Sonny Terry (ʽLiving With The Bluesʼ), unquestionably
the more virtuoso player of the two — their friendship touchingly acknowledged
in ʽMe And Sonnyʼ, which Brownie actually performs solo, perhaps as a
surprise present to his friend.
Basically, if you only want a primer of
Brownie's work, Folkways Years is a
better bet than the pre-war recordings — better quality, not enough running
time to start getting way too redundant, and both Brownie and Sonny are still
well in their prime and «raisin' a ruckus» wherever possible. Neither the war
nor a steady record contract were enough to transform McGhee into a jaw-dropping,
inimitable master guitarist or a unique singer, of course, but at least this
emergence as a «living blues icon» has prompted him to put down on record a
more diverse and representative portfolio than ever before — so the according thumbs up
go not just to him, but to Moses Asch as well, the founding father of Folkways
Records, directly responsible for hours upon hours of quasi-religious joy for
authentic blues aficionados.
BLUES IS TRUTH (1976)
1) The Blues Had A Baby; 2)
I'm Going To Keep On Loving; 3) Walk On; 4) Rainy Day; 5) Christina; 6) Don't
Dog Your Woman; 7) Mean And Evil; 8) Wine Sporty Orty; 9) Blues Is Truth; 10)
Bunkhouse; 11) Key To The Highway; 12) Blues On Parade.
Formally speaking, Brownie McGhee had a
veritable shitload of albums released for the listening pleasures of Greenwich
Village crusaders in the last four decades of his life, but most of them were
released as part of the «Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee» duo act, where Sonny
was usually billed first and Brownie humbly came second (although there were
multiple exceptions, too). In any case, we will use this as a loophole to
postpone reviews of some of these
albums (talking separately about each of them would be cruel and unwarranted
punishment, considering that, as rumor has it, almost every show that the two played together in any club or cafeteria
had been captured on tape, not to mention studio sessions).
As for Brownie solo, he had considerably few
sessions in comparison, and most of those are not altogether easy to find or
not particularly worth finding. I will limit myself to this one album, recorded
in May 1976 with a bunch of friends at Minot Sound Studios in White Plains, NY;
friends included Bobby Foster and Louisiana Red on guitars, Sugar Blue on
harmonica, Sammy Price on piano, Alex Blake on bass, and Brian Brake on drums —
actually, one hell of a band, when you start researching all of these guys'
pedigrees, and, since Brownie himself only plays acoustic guitar and sings, his
presence here is more of a «guiding hand» than of a legendary dominator — he
conducts, gives orders on soloing, but his personal
role in this friendly get-together is limited; then again, when you got such a
great band playing for you, keeping a low profile might just be the most
sensible thing to do anyway.
As easily as I usually get bored with generic
electric blues albums, these twelve songs keep the fun quotient high and the
friendly atmosphere dense throughout. There is a sensible level of diversity
as they pay tribute to multiple blues styles (Chicago, Delta, New Orleans; even
jump blues is covered with a version of Stick McGhee's ʽDrinkin' Wine
Spo-Dee-O-Deeʼ, here retitled as ʽWine Sporty Ortyʼ), and almost
everybody gets to shine one way or another — Louisiana Red and his slinky slide
leads are the obvious number one pretender, but the real musical superhero of
the album is Alex Blake, whose bass parts are completely individual and
independent, and often have much more to say than the guitars of his
colleagues.
Curiously, the album kicks off with a newly
written tune, ʽThe Blues Had A Babyʼ ("and they named it rock'n'roll"),
which would fairly soon be appropriated by Muddy Waters for his comeback LP, Hard Again — considering that there is
fairly little rock'n'roll on this record, but I guess that this was just a
subtle reminder of sorts, Brownie's message to the kids about how there is more
to life than rock'n'roll, and Blues Is
Truth in general is not a bad way to prove that.
It is interesting, however, that there are no
signs here whatsoever of Brownie's original vibe, the entertainment-oriented,
bluesman-meets-hillbilly-style «Piedmont blues»; above everything else, Brownie
knew very well who the buying clientele would be — white college kids — and
what the clientele would want to hear (Chicago teachers of white electric
bluesmen). I am not going as far as to suggest that ʽKey To The
Highwayʼ was included due to the song's popularization by Eric Clapton,
but this could have been one of the factors, too. Not that this is a complaint
or anything — with Blake's basslines and Red's guitar playing, the album goes
down easily and pleasantly, and anybody who'd try to put down a 1915-born
popular entertainer for «giving the people exactly what they want» would have
to have no sensibility whatsoever. In any case, for an album of this kind, Blues Is Truth is seriously above
average level, and clearly deserves a thumbs up.
THE «CHIRPING» CRICKETS (1957)
1) Oh Boy; 2) Not Fade Away;
3) You've Got Love; 4) Maybe Baby; 5) It's Too Late; 6) Tell Me How; 7) That'll
Be The Day; 8) I'm Lookin' For Someone To Love; 9) An Empty Cup (And A Broken
Date); 10) Send Me Some Lovin'; 11) Last Night; 12) Rock Me My Baby.
If you listen to all of the Beatles' officially
released recordings in chronological order, the very first song you are going
to hear will be ʽThat'll Be The Dayʼ, pressed by the Quarrymen in
1958, approximately one year after the song had appeared on the Brunswick label
as the first official single by The Crickets. Naturally, this is no matter of
coincidence since, by all accounts, Buddy Holly was the single greatest influence (out of many) on the Beatles, at
least up until the band's «musical globalization» in 1965.
At first, it might even seem a little bizarre.
When Buddy made the world aware of his existence, in mid-1957, «rock and roll»
had already been firmly established — Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Carl
Perkins, Elvis, even Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis were all recognized
stars, with a bunch of hit singles safely tucked under their belts; Buddy was a
relative latecomer to this parade of flashy, rebellious personalities. Compared
to each of them separately, he did not seem to stand much of a competitive
chance. Never a technically great singer; never a particularly gifted or fluent
instrumental player; definitely nowhere near an «onstage volcano» in terms of
performance — just a normal, quiet Texas kid, happy enough to wear a neatly
pressed tuxedo and bowtie, with a proper haircut and with those silly thick
glasses that really made him look more like an aspiring Ivy League freshman
than a rock'n'roller.
So what exactly did Buddy Holly bring to the
table that was not already on it? Hope,
I'd say. For all those thousands of kids who were not blessed with the vocal
cords of an Elvis, or the natural dynamism of a Jerry Lee, or the cool looks of
a Gene Vincent, it was Buddy who conveyed the message — what matters is not the
flashiness of style, what matters is substance.
Buddy's major achievements all lie in the field of songwriting. Had he mostly
stuck to covering other people's material, he would have remained but a small
footnote in the history of popular music, as his first LP proves without a
doubt: out of the 12 numbers on Chirping
Crickets, the ones that stay with you are almost always those where Buddy
is credited as chief songwriter.
I will not shy away from saying that I almost
always prefer other people's covers of Buddy's material to the originals. Even
that early Quarrymen cover of ʽThat'll Be The Dayʼ sounds almost as good as Buddy's (and would
have sounded even better had the lads had access to better studio equipment).
ʽNot Fade Awayʼ would eventually be expropriated, toughened up, and
set for early anthemic status by the Stones. And when John Lennon later covered
Buddy's interpretation of ʽSend Me Some Lovin'ʼ on his Rock And Roll album, he raised the bar
tenfold in the vocal department, adding explicit emotional torment where Holly
only hinted at it.
But none of that mattered back in 1957 — and
even though it matters today, it is also a pretext to try and figure out why,
in the long run, these early songs have survived and are still listenable today.
Sure enough, there is some stuff on this Crickets debut that is not all that listenable. In particular,
«The Picks», a New Mexican family vocal outfit, provide a rather awful
doo-wop-style backing, spoiling much of the ballad component of the album
(ʽLast Nightʼ, etc.) — not that Buddy Holly himself was ever made for
doo-wop, of course, but it also has to be kept in mind that, like everything
else at the time, The Chirping Crickets
was really just a bunch of cool singles surrounded by obligatory filler.
We will disregard the filler, then, and focus
all the attention on the classics: ʽThat'll Be The Dayʼ and ʽNot
Fade Awayʼ as the best known; ʽMaybe Babyʼ, ʽTell Me
Howʼ, ʽI'm Looking For Someone To Loveʼ as their lesser worthy
brethren. First and foremost, this is not «threatening» music: Buddy was not a
«rebel», he had a thoroughly «pop» conscience through and through, and the
music avoids dark bass lines, distortion, aggression, etc., as much as possible
(just look at how the «spooky», «tribal» Bo Diddley beat is niftily transformed
into a happy celebration of love and fidelity on ʽNot Fade Awayʼ). At
the same time, it is not «cheesy» pop — it is jangly, guitar-based pop, no
strings, pianos, or production slickness attached, something that even the rough'n'tough
garage-rock crowds of the early 1960s would find easy to appreciate. Most
importantly, it all just sounds natural
and realistic. Where Ricky Nelson
(whose public image appeared the same year as Buddy) gave the impression of
«glossy manufacture» from the start, Buddy simply is as buddy does.
What I really mean to say is that Holly
compensates for his technical flaws with evident charisma — present everywhere,
not just in his looks (always clean, never glossy), but also in his sweet,
shaky, naturally-stuttery vocals, and in his guitar playing, with delicate,
memorable phrasing that sometimes mimicks Carl Perkins or Scotty Moore, but
just as frequently consists of original lines (unfortunately, «The Picks» too
often overshadow them — ʽMaybe Babyʼ could have been so much better
without all the waah-waahs and the pa-da-dams). The songwriting ideas might
have been replicated and enhanced, but the personality could not: Buddy Holly
offers that perfect compromise between the «gruff rocker» and the «teen idol»
that is actually much harder to attain than it might look upon first sight.
As for the rating, The Chirping Crickets has way too much filler on it for a regular thumbs up,
but if we introduce «The Fifties' Correction» and only rate it in accordance
with the quality of the singles, which we should, things will obviously change.
That said, unlike the self-titled follow-up, Chirping Crickets is hardly worth hunting for if you already have
all the best stuff on a compilation — filler is filler, and nobody should be
obliged to associate Buddy with doo-wop ballads (or hear him sing songs written
by Roy Orbison, for that matter).
BUDDY HOLLY (1958)
1) I'm Gonna Love You Too; 2)
Peggy Sue; 3) Look At Me; 4) Listen To Me; 5) Valley Of Tears; 6) Ready Teddy;
7) Every Day; 8) Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues; 9) Words Of Love; 10) (You're
So Square) Baby I Don't Care; 11) Rave On; 12) Little Baby.
It so happened that, as little time as he had
on this Earth, Buddy had enough of it for two formal careers — as the
semi-anonymous leader of «The Crickets» and as a solo artist. The only real difference,
however, was that «The Crickets» worked together with «The Picks» and had this
rather dippy tendency to drift off into doo-wop territory. Consequently, of the
two full-fledged LPs released by Buddy in his lifetime, the self-titled Buddy
Holly is, on the whole, a better showcase for his songwriting talents and
personal charisma — even if, as all pop LPs of the time, it neither succeeds in
being totally filler-free, nor even tries to.
To be more precise, the inclusion of
ʽReady Teddyʼ and ʽBaby I Don't Careʼ, two songs typically
associated with Elvis (and Little Richard), has more of a symbolic nature to it
— Buddy openly aligning himself with the «rockers» — than actual entertainment
value: Buddy is not capable of outplaying the king and his backing band on the
toughness-and-tightness field, nor is he trying to open up some new dimension
in these songs (one could argue that they are way too proverbially
one-dimensional to be openable up to anything else, but that is not true —
Lennon, for instance, would later reinvent ʽReady Teddyʼ quite
radically, if not, some would say, for the better). Same goes for Fats Domino's
ʽValley Of Tearsʼ, which should really have been left to Fats; Buddy
Holly and New Orleans were not meant for each other.
But I will take rock'n'roll filler over doo-wop
filler any day, particularly if the filler in question is interspersed with the
single largest number of indisputable original classics on a Buddy album.
ʽPeggy Sueʼ, ʽI'm Gonna Love You Tooʼ, ʽWords Of
Loveʼ, ʽRave Onʼ, ʽEvery Dayʼ — each of these is practically
an instution in itself, at least if we judge objectively, on the basis of
received accolades and tributary covers. As simple and natural as these
melodies sound, most of them were
actually written by Buddy — on a pre-existing basis of blues, folk, and country
chord sequences, but with his own unique input that increased the catchiness
value several dozen per cent.
ʽPeggy Sueʼ, in particular, had a
strange kind of magic to it that won the hearts of both Lennon and McCartney — and it would be sad to think that it
only had to do with the insane paradiddles of Jerry Allison, because the song
works fine even without its percussive thunderstorm (look for a charming
McCartney solo acoustic performance from 1975); actually, the vocal melody,
replete with all the hiccups, pretty much sets the standard for
«not-one-note-wasted catchy pop formula», and must have served as the guiding
star for the Beatles throughout their career, and I am not talking solely
about the early days, either. The lyrics, the subject, the mood — trivial to
quasi-embarrassment; the vocal movement is all that matters. (There is even a
bit of playfully fake «darkness» as the bridge cuts in with an almost
threatening «pretty pretty pretty pretty Peggy Sue...» before the sun comes out
again — a musical red herring if there ever was one, within a two-minute pop
song, that is).
Instrumental-wise, ʽWords Of Loveʼ is
the winner, although I must sternly state that the song was brought to sonic
perfection by the Beatles and George Martin — they saw the amazing potential of
that sweetly-stinging guitar ring, only hinted at in Petty's original
production, and realized all of it; I am almost sure that Buddy himself, had he
had the chance, would have acknowledged the superiority of Harrison's playing
and Martin's production. Nevertheless, this here is the original, and even if
the vocal melody may seem too sappy, the guitar lines provide the very
foundation of the «jangle-pop» skyscraper, to be erected by millions of Buddy's
followers. This here was a man who was taking the art of sweet sentimental
balladry away from professional hacks, armed with orchestras and crooning
vocalists, and giving it to legions of kids with guitars, almost singlehandedly.
Some of those kids would do it better; few, if any, would do it before.
Next to these two, Buddy's more
rock'n'roll-oriented originals look a bit more pale, but still, ʽRave
Onʼ and ʽI'm Gonna Love You Tooʼ combine the pop catchiness with
a fast rock beat so well that both (especially the latter) could be considered
as the blueprint for the Ramones' entirely career (well, almost) — dumb,
catchy, unbeatable, unforgettable. In chronological terms, though, they
represent no major improvements over ʽOh Boyʼ or ʽMaybe
Babyʼ, and, generally, it was quite clear from this second album that
crude «rock'n'roll» was not something that Buddy would be looking to in the
future, saving his best songwriting ideas for calmer, less rowdy stuff. And, of
course, as long as those would be smart
ideas, there was nothing wrong with that. Filler or no filler, Buddy Holly is an unquestionable thumbs up
— and plus, if you get the original album, you get to see the man without the glasses for a change, and
whaddaya know, he does not look any less pretty nor any less intelligent, even
though he could probably hardly see the camera when they were clicking that
shutter...
THAT'LL BE THE DAY (1958)
1) You Are My One Desire; 2)
Blue Days, Black Nights; 3) Modern Don Juan; 4) Rock Around With Ollie Vee; 5)
Ting A Ling; 6) Girl On My Mind; 7) That'll Be The Day; 8) Love Me; 9) Changing
All Those Changes; 10) Don't Come Back Knockin'; 11) Midnight Shift.
Technically, this album should have been listed
as Buddy's first: all of the songs here are taken from his first recording
sessions for Decca, held at various dates throughout 1956, approximately one
year prior to finding success with Brunswick. The story goes that, since
Buddy's first singles with Decca flopped and the label was not quite sure what
to make of him, they simply did not renew his contract — but as time went by
and he eventually started treading the road to stardom, all these early tunes,
including all the flop singles as well as a number of outtakes, were hastily
cobbled together for an LP; easily done since Decca still held the rights to
all of them.
In retrospect, the Decca decision was just
another silly Decca decision, for which the label is so well-known — but, to be
perfectly honest, these earliest recordings are
rather suspicious. First and foremost, Side A is almost entirely devoid of
originals. Three of the songs are credited to Don Guess, Buddy's buddy and
original bass fiddle player, and are little more than average doo-wop
(ʽGirl On My Mindʼ) or second-hand rockabilly (ʽModern Don
Juanʼ). Much better and gutsier is ʽRock Around With Ollie
Veeʼ, credited to Buddy's original lead guitarist Sonny Curtis — the
players get into this one with an almost unexpected ferocity, although flat
production and Buddy's vocal limitations remain inescapable curses in this
style.
Following Elvis' love for old and recent
Atlantic hits, Buddy, too, tried to follow suit by choosing The Clovers'
ʽTing-A-Lingʼ, one of the greatest odes to teenage libido of its
time, and this time, he even managed well enough to slip into character, with a
suitably hysterical vocal tone, but here as well, the attempt to transform
professionally synthesized R&B into snappy rockabilly is altogether
half-hearted — neither the musicians nor the technicians were quite up to the
task.
The second half of the album is dominated by
the title track, which is the original
recording of ʽThat'll Be The Dayʼ — slower, looser, without vocal
harmonies, operating at about half the potential of the re-recorded version
and very well illustrating the difference between early tentative Buddy and
later, more self-assured and goal-oriented Buddy. The originals that surround
it are decent (the B-side ʽLove Meʼ and ʽChanging All Those
Changesʼ in particular), but still do not advance far beyond standard
rockabilly or sped-up country-western.
In other words, one would have to be really
mean to blame Decca for not spotting the future genius of ʽPeggy Sueʼ
or ʽWords Of Loveʼ in these cautious first moves at playing with
one's own artistic identity — and, considering that Buddy got his new contract
with Brunswick, which was legally under Decca anyway, the industry bosses
cannot be said to have treated the boy too cruelly. It does, however, show that
Buddy's beginnings were humble; he seems to have had limited aspirations as a
songwriter, being quite content with sharing songwriting duties with his fellow
bandmates, and only gradually came to realise where his major strength resided.
To that end, That'll Be The Day is
more of a historical document than a «success» or «failure», and it is also an
early precursor to the dark tendency of stuffing way more Buddy Holly down our
throats than it would be useful for his posthumous reputation — but, on the
other hand, at least these are authentic studio recordings that properly bear
the artist's signature: since the album was released while Buddy was still
alive, nobody had the nerve to tamper with the tracks.
THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY VOL. 1-2 (1959/1960)
Vol. I: 1) Raining In My
Heart; 2) Early In The Morning; 3) Peggy Sue; 4) Maybe Baby; 5) Everyday; 6)
Rave On; 7) That'll Be The Day; 8) Heartbeat; 9) Think It Over; 10) Oh Boy; 11)
It's So Easy; 12) It Doesn't Matter Anymore.
Vol. II: 1) Peggy Sue Got
Married; 2) Well... All Right; 3) What To Do; 4) That Makes It Tough; 5) Now
We're One; 6) Take Your Time; 7) Crying, Waiting, Hoping; 8) True Love Ways; 9)
Learning The Game; 10) Little Baby; 11) Moondreams; 12) That's What They Say.
As every respectable conspirologist is aware
of, or should be aware of, if he is
in need of respectability, what happened on February 3, 1959, was that Roger
Arthur Peterson, piloting the Beechcraft Bonanza N3794N, was discreetly bribed
by one Paul McCartney, a suspicious (but handsome)-looking British teenager
seriously envious of the songwriting abilities and competing good looks of
Buddy Holly, to crashland the Bonanza in some swamp, ravine, or cornfield, an
operation carried out successfully, although, to this very day, no one knows
why the pilot never thought of his own survival, or where Paul McCartney got
the money. But at least this is a more fun conspiracy to think of than blaming
the FBI / CIA, as usual. (Those, of course, were too busy anyway setting Chuck
Berry up with an underage waitress at the moment).
Whatever the circumstances, the bad news were
that Buddy (along with Ritchie Valens of ʽLa Bambaʼ's fame and J. P.
Richardson of ʽChantilly Laceʼ's fame) was, indeed, dead, and that we
were therefore deprived of satisfying our curiosity as to where his talent
would have led him in the golden decade of rock music. The partially
consolatory news were that, prior to dying, he left behind an impressive
stockpile of unfinished recordings — one that would keep the small market
satisfied for years and years to come, even though most of the recordings had
to be tampered with in order to acquire «commercially viable» form, and the
tamperings were not always up to par (a rather unpleasant side of the music
business here, with the same story to be repeated a decade later for the
prematurely departed Jimi Hendrix).
The vaults were opened less than a month after
the funeral, although the first installation was modest: The Buddy Holly Story consisted almost entirely of A- and B-sides
released during the artist's lifetime, with only one exception (ʽIt
Doesn't Matter Anymoreʼ / ʽRaining In My Heartʼ only came out at
about the same time as the LP). Less than a year later, in response to the high
chart performance of the album, Vol. 2
followed — an entirely different story altogether, consisting mainly out of
«from-the-vaults» stuff, much of it coming from Buddy's last acoustic session
on December 8, 1958, where he was laying down demos, armed with nothing but his
voice and guitar. Naturally, it was deemed that the sound had to be brought up
to standards, and... well, at least those
results were significantly better than some of the sacrileges to follow.
Since the two LPs have this fundamental difference,
it is a bit of a cheat to write about the first and second volumes in the same
review, but, actually, an entire half of the songs on The Buddy Holly Story proper were already present on LPs released
in Buddy's lifetime, and mentioned in earlier reviews, which would make a
separate entry a little superfluous. Out of the other six, the cover of Bobby
Darin's ʽEarly In The Morningʼ is fun, but not particularly
interesting, being essentially a re-write-lite of Ray Charles' ʽI Got A
Womanʼ; ʽThink It Overʼ is a bit of 12-bar blues redone in a pop
format, cute, catchy, but achieving pop perfection only a little bit later, in
1961, when Ernie Maresca and Dion recast it as ʽThe Wandererʼ; and
ʽHeartbeatʼ shows some Cuban influence in its melody, even though
Buddy's vocals remain quite steadfast in «folk-pop» territory, making for a fun
contrast.
The veritable masterpiece here is arguably
ʽIt's So Easyʼ, which very much sets the standard for the «inventive
upbeat guitar-based pop song» of the next decade: catchy (and multi-part)
chorus, multi-part verse, highly melodic solo, and a certain vocal/guitar
unity, working towards making the listener feel alright. Not to mention the
Crickets' usual roughness-round-the-edges to put a dense checkmark in the «for rebellious
teenagers» rather than «for respectable middle class audiences» square — those
ragged guitar licks are definitely for kids, not their parents.
By the time of his final official sessions,
however, Buddy was showing some disturbing signs of agreeing to «water down»
his sound: not only was ʽIt Doesn't Matter Anymoreʼ written by Paul
Anka (not particularly frightening, since the song is very much in the folk-pop
idiom and could just as well be sung by, say, the Everly Brothers), but it also
featured the orchestral overdubs of Dick Jacobs, while ʽRaining In My
Heartʼ, with the same orchestration, was credited to the songwriting team
of F. and B. Bryant, resident hitwriters for the same Everlys. Jacobs'
arrangements are careful and moderately tasteful, with interesting and
memorable parts written for the harp, but Buddy's vocals are too weak to
properly handle the demands of either song — he does his best, yet he still has
to strain and stretch on all the complicated bits — and it only goes to show that,
songwriting being his greatest gift, he has very little business integrating
his own persona into songs written by other people.
This is why Vol. 2, almost entirely consisting of Buddy originals (with the
exception of Bobby Darin's rather inane ʽNow We're Oneʼ and Norman
Petty's overtly sentimental ballad ʽMoondreamsʼ, exacerbated with a
wannabe-Heifetz salon violin solo), is, in a way, more consistent than the
hit-laden original, and perhaps even more indicative of those artistic roads
that Buddy might have followed. Granted, ʽPeggy Sue Got Marriedʼ was
a rather silly idea for a follow-up to ʽPeggy Sueʼ proper (although
back in 1958-59, the habit of releasing an inferior «sequel» that had the same
melody as the major hit was still an absolute commonality). But its follow-up
on the record is ʽWell... All Rightʼ, a song so ahead of its own
time that it would sound perfectly in its right place a whole decade later when
Blind Faith integrated it on their own self-titled album — a successful attempt
on Buddy's part to add a «thoughtfully mature» component to the usual «teenagers
in love» subject. Not only is the melodic structure here highly unusual even
for the folk-pop standards of the era, but there is also an attractive
philosophical ring to the way Buddy mumbles "we'll live and love with all
our might... our lifetime of love will be all right", indicating that
"those foolish kids" might actually be far more ready than their own
parents.
Another well-known highlight here is
ʽCrying, Waiting, Hopingʼ, a song particularly famous for its clever
overdubbing by the rest of the Crickets, who had to work with Buddy's demo and
fill in the «echo» vocals for the title, one of the few «post-Buddy» creative
decisions on his work that has become universally accepted even after the
original demo had surfaced — probably because without the echo vocals the
little ladder that Buddy has constructed in the place of the vocal melody
seems to be naturally lacking several steps, which his co-workers are only too
happy to be able to fill in. This
particular tune the Beatles did not improve on, when they played it live on the
BBC — maybe because they highlighted the wrong George on it (Harrison, whose
vocal performance was quite flat compared to Buddy's, instead of Martin, who
may have given them a few clues on how to gloss it up properly).
A deeper dig will, however, also uncover less
familiar highlights — such as ʽLearning The Gameʼ, with its
melancholy-meditative flair, ʽTake Your Timeʼ, with an inventive
organ backing (probably posthumous as well), and ʽThat Makes It
Toughʼ, with another strained vocal delivery, but curious in how it
borrows the basic structure from generic country and tries to fuse it with the
grandiose flair of anthemic pop balladry.
In between all of these, the two volumes of Story do an excellent job of showing
just about all of the man's strong and
weak points alike — where the man comes from, where he's been to, and where he
would be a-headin' if fate had been kinder. Speculating on the issue is
useless; there is no evidence that, out of all the early heroes of the
rock'n'roll era, Buddy could have been the one to overcome the «Fifties'
Curse», but it is also true that, of all his contemporaries, he showed the
least interest in clinging to an established formula, experimenting with words,
chords, and moods to the bitter end, and not letting success go to his head.
Would that have helped him retain vitality and relevance in the British
Invasion era? I guess only Paul McCartney can tell.
REMINISCING (1963)
1) Reminiscing; 2) Slippin'
And Slidin'; 3) Bo Diddley; 4) Wait Till The Sun Shines, Nellie; 5) Baby, Won't
You Come Out Tonight; 6) Brown Eyed Handsome Man; 7) Because I Love You; 8)
It's Not My Fault; 9) I'm Gonna Set My Foot Down; 10) Changing All Those
Changes; 11) Rock-A-Bye-Rock.
I do not know why it took Norman Petty almost
three years to realize the benefits that could be gained from continuing to
milk Buddy's archives. However, since Reminiscing
came out in February '63, it certainly was not tied in to the British
Invasion, which had not yet begun, and could not have caused additional
interest in the dead man behind it all. More likely, it was caused by a growing
deficit in Petty's own pockets.
In any case, neither this particular record,
nor any of its three or four follow-ups, released through the 1960s, have any
reason to exist these days, what with
all of Buddy's undubbed demos, outtakes, rehearsals etc. now legally available
on various boxsets and rarities collections. But just for the sake of history,
and also for the sake of letting you know that these overdubbed recordings were
never quite as terrible as devoted
fans often proclaim them to be, I suppose that a word or two is in order at
least about the first few of these mutants.
So, the story as it stands: Reminiscing is a set of eleven Holly /
Crickets tunes, originally recorded from 1956 to 1958, then left in the can
until 1962, when Petty hired the Fireballs, a now-forgotten but
then-modestly-popular rockabilly band, to bring the tapes to completion. Unlike
«The Apartment Tapes», which were just Buddy and his acoustic, these songs, however, ranged from
acoustic demos to semi-completed tracks that already had the Crickets playing
on them, so Petty basically had one band play on top of the other every now and
then — no wonder the sound is, mildly speaking, a bit messy in places.
That said, the Fireballs were a bona fide rock
band like any other, and, at the very least, these overdubs make sense. The
main problem of Reminiscing is not
the tampering — it is the lack of high quality material. For sure, Buddy was a
prolific recorder, but he wasn't that
good of a songwriter to strike out a new great tune every day. After the
«Apartment Tunes» had all made their appearance, in one form or another, on Story, the majority of what was left in
the vaults turned out to be covers of other people's stuff — and given that
Buddy's covers of other people on his regular
LPs were rarely the focus of attention, what could one expect to find at the
bottom of the barrel? I wouldn't go as far as to say that Petty was doing Buddy
a huge reputational disservice, but there is not a single song here that could
count as a lost gem (okay, maybe one).
About half of the tracks are well-known
standards by Buddy's rock'n'roller competitors or imitations of these
competitors (ʽI'm Gonna Set My Foot Downʼ is a transparent copy of
Roy Orbison's ʽOoby Doobyʼ with a little bit of ʽEverybody's
Trying To Be My Baby / Blue Suede Shoesʼ thrown in for good measure).
Sometimes the arrangements are drastically experimental, but not to a
reasonable effect — the attempt to reinvent Little Richard's ʽSlippin' And
Slidin'ʼ as a slow «shuffle», with heavy emphasis on voice modulation, is
sort of weird for weirdness sake, and was, I believe, rightfully abandoned by
the artist because the song ceased to make sense. Elsewhere, we have Buddy
trying on the shoes of Bo Diddley (ʽBo Diddleyʼ) and Chuck Berry
(ʽBrown Eyed Handsome Manʼ) — decent homages, but completely
unnecessary.
That one song which could qualify for posterity
gave the album itself its title: a leftover from a session where Buddy was
backed by sax master King Curtis. Although ʽReminiscingʼ is formally
credited to the sax guy, it is reported that Buddy was the author, and that he
handed the credit over to Curtis in acknowledgement of the man agreeing to play
for him. Not that the composition is particularly original, but the
Buddy/Curtis combination is, and it kind of makes one sad that the same
combination was not tried out on some of Buddy's better songs.
Of the other originals, ʽBecause I Love
Youʼ is a bit too draggy, monotonous, and simplistic to influence me with
its tenderness, and the rest is rather generic rockabilly that might or might
not date back to Buddy's earliest, not particularly adventurous sessions — all
in all, if you were truly «reminiscing» about the man back in 1963, just
hearing his voice on yet another bunch of tunes must have been an extraordinary
experience, but now that it's all one for the newer generations, Reminiscing is understandably easier
associated with Petty's pettiness than with Holly's holiness, if you get my
drift. Therefore, a thumbs down here, even if the title track is
well worth a spin or two in the playlist of your choice.
SHOWCASE (1964)
1) Shake, Rattle And Roll; 2)
Rock Around With Ollie Vee; 3) Honky Tonk; 4) I Guess I Was Just A Fool; 5)
Umm, Oh Yeah; 6) You're The One; 7) Blue Suede Shoes; 8) Come Back Baby; 9) Rip
It Up; 10) Love's Made A Fool Of You; 11) Gone; 12) Girl On My Mind.
Just one more of these and we're done. Showcase followed fairly quickly after Reminiscing, since the latter sold
poorly, but steadily, and was even more of a pathetic cash-in — this time, the
buying public had learned its lesson and remained completely unimpressed, not
to mention that, by May 1964, Beatlemania was on in full force, and the kids
had plenty of stuff to worry about other than a bunch of decade-old outtakes,
crudely overdubbed and revealing nothing particularly new about the artist. Not
even a King Curtis duet this time around.
Instead, what we get is mostly songs from the
same early 1956 Nashville sessions that yielded the relatively lackluster That'll Be The Day LP (in fact, two of
the songs, ʽRock Around With Ollie Veeʼ and ʽGirl On My
Mindʼ, seem to have simply been carried over from that album, maybe in
slightly remixed form). As usual, half-finished outtakes and demos rule the day,
and, as usual, my beef is not so much with the «sacrilegious» overdubs as it is
with most of the songs being just plain uninteresting.
There is quite a fair share of Holly originals
here, to be sure, but they reflect the earliest and most derivative period of
Buddy as a songwriter, and, for the most part, we either hear pedestrian
country-western (ʽI Guess I Was Just A Foolʼ), or half-developed
predecessors of better songs: ʽLove's Made A Fool Of Youʼ already
tries to spice up the country-western flavor by borrowing the Bo Diddley beat,
soon to take full shape in the form of ʽNot Fade Awayʼ, and
ʽYou're The Oneʼ, left here in its original acoustic demo
incarnation, sows the seeds of ʽPeggy Sueʼ and several other
classics. Consequently, they do have historical value, but if we are talking
historical value rather than pure entertainment, why all the overdubs?
As for the covers, there is even less to add to
what has been said before: no matter how many Buddy versions of classic
non-Buddy rock'n'roll hits get added to the catalog, there is simply no way
they can add anything to the originals. In some difficult, incomprehensible way
it may be «fun» to hear how Buddy does ʽShake, Rattle & Rollʼ or
ʽBlue Suede Shoesʼ, just to rest assured how deeply integrated he
always was with the fearless rockabilly crowd, but that's about it.
The finalized album predictably gets another thumbs down.
Throughout the 1960s, Petty would then continue squeezing out «bastardized»
releases (such as Holly In The Hills
from 1965 and Giant from as late as
1969), but they get progressively more difficult to find on CD and, in any
case, have become formally obsolete now that most of the original, undubbed,
tapes have been officially released on various compilations of rarities, so we
shall spare ourselves the hassle of promoting Petty's questionable understanding
of musical ethics and just move on.
DOWN THE LINE (1948-1959/2009)
CD I: 1) My Two-Timin' Woman;
2) Footprints In The Snow; 3) Flower Of My Heart; 4) Door To My Heart; 5)
Soft Place In My Heart; 6) Gotta Get You Near Me Blues; 7) I Gambled My Heart;
8) You And I Are Through; 9) Down The Line; 10) Baby, Let's Play House; 11)
Moonlight Baby (Baby, Won't You Come Out Tonight); 12) I Guess I Was Just A
Fool; 13) Don't Come Back Knockin'; 14) Love Me; 15) Gone; 16) Gone [alternate take];
17) Have You Ever Been Lonely [alternate take]; 18) Have You Ever Been Lonely;
19) Brown-Eyed Handsome Man; 20) Good Rockin' Tonight; 21) Rip It Up; 22) Blue
Monday; 23) Honky Tonk; 24) Blue Suede Shoes; 25) Shake Rattle and Roll [partial];
26) Bo Diddley; 27) Ain't Got No Home; 28) Holly Hop.
CD
II: 1) Last Night [undubbed]; 2) Not Fade Away [partial alternate overdub]; 3)
Peggy Sue [alternate take]; 4) Oh Boy! [undubbed]; 5) That's My Desire; 6) Take
Your Time; 7) Fool's Paradise [alternate take]; 8) Fool's Paradise [undubbed master];
9) Fool's Paradise [alternate #2 undubbed]; 10) Think It Over [take 1]; 11)
Think It Over [take 2]; 12) Think It Over [take 3]; 13) Love's Made A Fool Of
You [undubbed]; 14) That'll Be The Day (Greetings To Bob Thiele); 15) That'll
Be The Day (Greetings To Murray Deutsch); 16) That's What They Say (With
Fragment); 17) What To Do; 18) Peggy Sue Got Married; 19) That Makes It Tough;
20) Crying, Waiting, Hoping; 21) Learning The Game; 22) Wait Till The Sun
Shines Nellie; 23) Slippin' And Slidin' [slow version #1]; 24) Slippin' And
Slidin' [slow version #2]; 25) Slippin' And Slidin' [fast version]; 26) Buddy
& Maria Elena Talking In Apartment (Dialogue); 27) Dearest [fragment]; 28)
Dearest; 29) Untitled Instrumental; 30) Love Is Strange; 31) Smokey Joe's
Café.
While this package is not completely-thoroughly
exhaustive, as any serious Holly fan will tell you, it contains everything and
much more than the «average Joe», interested in taking a serious glance at
Buddy's underwater part of the iceberg, would ever want to hear. In fact,
everybody's best bet at a comprehensive Buddy-shrine would probably be to own
one of the larger, multi-disc collections of «official» stuff, and this
double-CD package of rarities (many of them officially released for the first
time here) as a supporting companion.
All the tracks are arranged here in strict
chronological order — to such an extent that Disc 1 is properly «The Formative
Years» and Disc 2 is «The Blossom Years» (just two of them, really, from early
1957 to early 1959). Sound quality ranges from unlistenable, especially on the
earliest recordings, to decent on the later ones, but most importantly,
everything is undubbed — including «The Apartment Demos», which, up until
2009, could only be heard in their original form with the aid of your local
friendly bootlegger. Not that a song like ʽCrying, Waiting, Hopingʼ
is really supposed to be so very much better in its demo form than in the
studio-completed Crickets arrangement (with «echo» vocals and everything) — but
it goes without saying that one should have free access to the original artist
version as well.
The first disc is interesting mostly in
«journey» terms. The first track is a home recording of a 12-year old Buddy
playing guitar and singing Hank Snow's ʽMy Two-Timin' Womanʼ — the
voice not yet broken, a delightful kiddie soprano that duly disappears five
years later on the second track, ʽFootprints In The Snowʼ. Recording
quality for these home tapes is abysmal, but it's a miracle they exist at all
— apparently, Buddy borrowed a wire recorder from a friend who worked in a
music shop for the Hank Snow cover, and the results managed to survive.
Later on, several tracks document the «Buddy
& Bob» duo — a bunch of country and bluegrass tunes that, as a rule, are
rather facelessly played, sung, and recorded, but hardly «bad» for high school
entertainment level (it seems that most of them were self-penned as well,
scoring them additional points for derivative creativity). The transition
occurs by the time they reach the last of these: ʽDown The Lineʼ,
which gives the name to the entire compilation, is where they make the
definitive move from country-western to rockabilly aesthetics (odd as it is,
the song has nothing to do with Roy Orbison's own ʽDown The Lineʼ,
which would only be released one year later, in 1956 rather than June 1955). No
wonder — Elvis had just left the building.
From there onwards, the rest of Disc 1 mostly
consists of Buddy hitting on everyone: Elvis, Chuck, Little Richard, Bo
Diddley, etc., gradually groping for his own style, but certainly not finding
it all at once — he even goes as far as to cover Clarence "Frogman"
Henry's ʽAin't Got No Homeʼ, despite having no qualification
whatsoever to match the Frogman's vocal «talents», but it's actually a good
thing, since no one would probably want to see Holly stuck in the role of a
voice clown, mimicking little girls and lonely frogs all his life.
As Disc 2 rolls along, we finally emerge from
the stage of «intriguing historical document» and get rewarded by demos,
alternate versions, and rehearsal takes of the real classic stuff. Some of
these are a bit of an overkill, e. g. three consecutive versions of ʽThink
It Overʼ — a classic number all right, but not exactly a ʽStrawberry
Fields Foreverʼ for us to be so
much interested in the slowly unfurling story of its creation. But the acoustic
«Apartment Demos», without any echo effects on Buddy's voice or electric rhythm
parts obscuring the man's original melodies, are quite a treasure — the only
thing I am not sure about is the inclusion of three and a half minutes of
conversation between Buddy and his wife in the same apartment, which I tend to
skip because it makes you feel uneasy, like spying on the man's underwear.
Studio chatter during work hours is one thing, but this here is kinda personal.
(Besides, Maria Elena's croaky Puerto Rican laughter is only marginally more
irritating than Buddy's Texan guffaw, if you'll excuse me for these slurry
particularities). Additionally, there is a fast
version of ʽSlippin' and Slidin'ʼ here, showing that Buddy probably
gave up on the bad idea of slowing down the song before forgetting about it altogether;
an undubbed ʽLove Is Strangeʼ, notorious for having once served as Buddy's
last «original» minor chart entry as late as 1969; and even a cover of
ʽSmokey Joe's Caféʼ, showcasing the man's interest in the
comical (Robins/Coasters) side of Atlantic R&B — or maybe just in the
songwriting talents of Leiber & Stoller.
All in all, for «historical and cultural
significance», this package gets a natural thumbs up, but do keep in mind that its
«entertainment value» is limited — I seriously doubt that anybody would want to
listen to the first disc more than once, and the «golden core» of the second
disc altogether takes up about twenty minutes, not more: the rest is all
alternate takes, false starts, jingles, and oddities. On the other hand,
considering that Buddy's artistic evolution was arguably one of the most
interesting musical stories of the early rock'n'roll movement, there is hardly
another Fifties' rock'n'roller of the same caliber that would be more deserving
of such an intelligently assembled package. And, come to think of it, was there
another Fifties' rock'n'roller that had the luck to be captured on tape at the
tender age of twelve?
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 1 (1933)
1) Bye Bye Mama; 2) Daddy
Don't Care; 3) Red River Blues; 4) Cold Country Blues; 5) Prowling Woman; 6)
TB's Killing Me; 7) When I'm Dead And Gone; 8) Hard Time Blues; 9) Prowlin'
Gambler Blues; 10) Hard Road Blues; 11) Jealous Hearted Man; 12) Midnight
Rambler; 13) Best Gal; 14) Restless Night Blues; 15) Married Man Blues; 16)
Somebody Keeps Calling Me; 17) Back To My Used To Be; 18) Back To My Used To Be
No. 2; 19) Can't Use You No More; 20) Can't Use You No More No. 2; 21)
Travelin' Blues; 22) Bachelor's Blues; 23) Broke Down Engine.
Wherever Buddy Moss is not falling through the
cracks of history, sources tend to present him as a sort of «missing link»
between Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller — the inelegant part of this view
being that Buddy Moss wasn't blind, and the elegant part of it being that his
peak career period did fall on those
exact years when Blind Blake was already gone, and Blind Boy Fuller did not yet
start recording, namely, 1933-34. On the other hand, Buddy himself vehemently
denied being influenced by anybody (liar liar), and his own influence on Fuller
is debatable. Best strategy would simply be to take the man on his own terms.
Actually, judging at least by Buddy's earliest
recordings, his playing style, temperament, and musical attitude were quite
different from both of these visually challenged gentlemen. In particular, he
played very little of that «Piedmont», ragtime-oriented blues — Blind Blake's
style was fast, jerky, entertaining, bodily-provocative, but Buddy strictly
sticks to the slow 12-bar form, very canonical, very clean, mostly devoid of
individualistic twists, yet with an extremely professional and dexterously
flowing sound. Modern listeners will find nothing particularly revealing about
this form, but it seems to have been relatively rare on the streets of Atlanta
in 1933, dominated as they were by Blind Willie McTell's ʽGeorgia
Ragʼ and stuff.
On the whole, Buddy's sound should probably be
considered as one of the closest predecessors of Chicago blues — even more so
than Robert Johnson, who usually worked alone, whereas Buddy, on many, if not
most, of his recordings is accompanied by a second guitarist (usually Curley
Weaver), giving them a fuller, «band-like» sound: if you just added some
electricity, you'd have yourself a 1953 as early as 1933. On the technical
side, Buddy is a much more skilled lead player than Johnson: be it straight or
slide, the best part of all these blues is invariably the solo, where he plays
varied, fluent, expressive runs, very precise, very well put together, less
imaginative and unpredictable than, say, Blind Lemon Jefferson's, but pretty
much unmatched by any other formalistic 12-bar guru in the business at the
time. And if there was one guitarist from whom Elmore James was likely to cop
his famous ʽDust My Broomʼ lick, Buddy is as good a candidate as any
(ʽTB's Killing Meʼ, ʽWhen I'm Dead And Goneʼ).
The downside is obvious, too: of the 23 tracks
on this first volume of his legacy that captures most of the 1933 experience,
just about every single one is completely interchangeable with every other one.
Occasionally, he switches from regular acoustic to slide, and from one backing
guitarist to another, but the tempos and basic structures stay consistently
the same, and unless you are a maniacal 12-bar fanatic, there is no reason
whatsoever why you should listen to more than two or three songs at a time
(sound quality, by the way, shifts quite significantly from tune to tune, but
about half of the songs have a very tolerable level of crackling — which is
nice to know, considering Columbia's typically less-than-royal quality
treatment of its country blues artists).
On a trivia note, it is funny that one of the
tracks here is called ʽMidnight Ramblerʼ — nothing to do with the
Stones classic, but giving a rather precise indication as to how the bad boys
came up with that title; Buddy's tune, in comparison, is quite harmless and
inoffensive, infused with the regular blues yearning and moaning, but without
any traces of psychopathology. In fact, as far as we know, Buddy himself was a
fairly easy-going, friendly fellow, thoroughly uninterested in cultivating any
mystical or «spiritually driven» image of himself — his singing is pleasant,
but perfunctory, his antics / gimmicks / special sonic tricks are
non-existent, and his only real love / interest lies in making that guitar
sing the blues. A completely one-trick pony here, but give the pony a break —
it takes a little genius to perform that trick so well.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 2 (1933-1934)
1) Broke Down Engine No. 2
(take 1); 2) Broke Down Engine No. 2 (take 2); 3) B & O Blues No. 2; 4)
Some Lonesome Day (take 1); 5) Some Lonesome Day (take 2); 6) New Lovin'
Blues; 7) Unkind Woman; 8) When The Hearse Roll Me From My Door; 9) Insane
Blues; 10) Tricks Ain't Walking No More; 11) Stinging Bull Nettle; 12) Oh Lordy
Mama; 13) Dough Rolling Papa; 14) Some Lonesome Day; 15) Misery Man Blues; 16)
Jinx Man Blues; 17) Evil Hearted Woman; 18) Too Dog Gone Jealous; 19) Someday
Baby (I'll Have Mine); 20) Love Me, Baby, Love Me; 21) Sleepless Night; 22)
Shake It All Night Long.
The second volume of Buddy's complete oeuvres
(to be precise, complete pre-war oeuvres) covers a one-year period from
September 1933 to August 1934 and runs pretty much in a straight, unbroken line
together with the first one, so it is not highly likely you will find any
serious differences from the first volume, other than perhaps a larger
percentage of completely solo (single guitar) tracks, and just a few scattered
attempts to introduce syncopated «dance blues» patterns in the repertoire
(ʽTricks Ain't Walking No Moreʼ) that broaden the range, but do not
add extra insights that hadn't already been there with Blind Blake.
One song from these sessions that has managed
to make a little history is ʽOh Lordy Mamaʼ, later known as ʽHey
Lawdy Mamaʼ and remade by countless artists from Count Basie and Louis Armstrong
to Freddie King and even Cream (who played the song for the BBC and later
merged it with Albert King's ʽCrosscut Sawʼ to make a ʽStrange
Brewʼ indeed). Musically, it sounds exactly the same way as about a dozen
other songs in Buddy's catalog (country-blues with a boogie bass line to it),
but it goes to show how much fuss just a teensy-weensy bit of variety in the
12-bar world can make — here, inserting the «hookline» of "oh lordy
mama..." after each first line of the verse, which gives a funny illusion
of extra complexity and «progressiveness» compared to the more rigid
three-line-verse formula. Just an illusion, really, but sometimes an illusion
is all it takes to gain additional popularity.
On the other hand, Buddy is just too good a
guitarist to be continuously recycling exactly the same ideas, and serious
blues fans with a good ear for nuance will most certainly be able to single out
unusual takes — for instance, ʽDough Rolling Papaʼ makes some
interesting stop-and-starts between the regular bars, and the melody is played
as if the bass strings and the higher strings were holding a busy dialog with
each other rather than working in tandem; the opening notes of ʽSomeday
Baby (I'll Have Mine)ʼ are quite pretty-poetic; and the final track from
the 1934 sessions (ʽShake It All Night Longʼ) ends the period on a
musically/lyrically joyful rather than melancholic note. If only half of the
other songs did not begin with the exact same note sequence (the
pre-proto-ʽDust My Broomʼ pattern), I'm sure Buddy's legacy would
have enjoyed more attention today; as it is, admiring all of these twenty-two
tracks in straight sequence is more of a business for fanatical connoisseurs or
students of acoustic blues playing techniques.
COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 3 (1935-1941)
1) Gravy Server; 2) Going To
Your Funeral In A V8 Ford; 3) My Baby Won't Pay Me No Mind; 4) Undertaker
Blues; 5) Oh Lordy Mama No. 2; 6) Worrysome Woman; 7) Your Hard Head Will Bring
You Sorrow Some Day; 8) Can't Use You No More; 9) See What You Done Done; 10)
Stop Hanging Around; 11) On My Way; 12) How About You; 13) Talking About My
Time; 14) You Got To Give Me Some Of It; 15) Mistreated Boy; 16) You Need A Woman;
17) Joy Rag; 18) Little Angel Blues; 19) Struggle Buggie; 20) I'm Sittin' Here
Tonight; 21) Baby You're The One For Me; 22) Unfinished Business.
By mid-1935, it sort of seemed that nothing
could seriously threaten or derail Buddy's career — Depression factors were not
harming modest, but steady sales, and in an attempt to revitalize the formula,
Buddy got himself a new partner: the "Singing Christian" Josh White
(also known as Pinewood Tom), who was actually more of a guitar player than singer
before gangrene ate up his left hand in 1936. The bulk of the tracks on this
third volume consists of material that Buddy and Josh recorded together:
usually, White merely supplies second guitar, but some of the tracks are
sympathetic gospel duets, well in the tradition of Blind Willie Johnson (ʽHow
About Youʼ), or folksy dance numbers (ʽYou Got To Give Me Some Of
Itʼ), and this gives Buddy an opportunity to try his hand at something
other than straightforward 12-bar blues. The best of these numbers, however, is
ʽOn My Wayʼ, on which Buddy wrings a juicy slide tone out of his
guitar; unfortunately, the only solo is in the brief introduction.
Unfortunately, in 1936 Buddy Moss happened to
shoot and kill his wife — or, at least, so said the jury, leading to a life
sentence in prison; knowledgeable people sometimes insist that guilt was never
proven beyond reasonable doubt and that the sentence was racially biased, but
whatever be the case, the sentence broke up a promising career that was almost
on the verge of becoming minimally diverse. Josh White went his own way, and
Buddy lingered in prison for five years before his old record labels finally
secured parole for their former star (hard to believe, yes, but there was a
time when people at Columbia would be willing to bribe parole boards in order to
help out their has-beens whose further commercial viability was quite under
question).
The newly released Buddy, however, arrived back
in the studio right on the brink of war, and with restrictions on shellac use
coming into effect, only had time for one more session — held in October 1941
with such illustrious friends as Brownie McGhee on guitar and piano, and Sonny
Terry on harmonica. With a small and well-qualified band behind his back, this
last seven-song section is the liveliest part of the record, and Buddy is in
great spirit, whether churning out energetic «proto-rock'n'roll» (ʽJoy
Ragʼ, ʽStruggle Buggieʼ), more old-fashioned ragtime dance blues
(ʽI'm Sittin' Here Tonightʼ) or the old 12-bar material (ʽYou
Need A Womanʼ).
And then it was all over in a flash: shellac
restrictions, loss of contract, waning of interest in country blues, oblivion,
the whole package, for more than twenty years. To be perfectly frank, Buddy
never really stood a chance like, say, Big Bill Broonzy — his style was much
more rigid, «academic» (crude, but working, epithet), and not particularly
appealing to mass audiences. Big Bill usually sounded like he cared, first and
foremost, about giving the listener a good time: Buddy was more about
expressing his love for country blues, which was far more abundant in his own
heart than in the hearts of his listeners (myself included, frankly speaking),
and seems to have had relatively little concern for showmanship — never a
useful thing in a competitive environment, regardless of all the
honesty/integrity that goes along with it. Anyway, bottomline is: these three
volumes of Buddy's recordings from the 1930s are actually well worth sitting
through, one by one, if you feel a deep affinity for this sort of music — and
even if you do not, they work totally fine as a classy background tapestry of
fine acoustic blues playing.
ATLANTA BLUES LEGEND (1967)
1) Hurry Home; 2) Red River;
3) Pushin' It; 4) Comin' Back; 5) How I Feel Today; 6) That'll Never Happen No
More; 7) Oh Lawdy Mama; 8) I'm Sitting On Top Of The World; 9) Kansas City; 10)
It Was The Weary Hour Night; 11) Chesterfield; 12) I've Got To Keep To The
Highway; 13) Come On Around To My House; 14) Step It Up And Go; 15) Everyday
Seems Like Sunday; 16) I Got A Woman, Don't Mean Me No Good; 17) Betty And
Dupree; 18) Every Day, Every Day.
Like many other fellow bluesmen, Buddy Moss was
rediscovered and dragged out into the limelight in the 1960s, in the middle of
the new «blues boom» that hit both sides of the Atlantic. Due to his natural
humility and shyness, though, he was never able to capitalize on the rediscovery
— never made it over to England, where he could have easily claimed hero
status; his live appearances at festivals were few and far in between; and
his new recorded output was quite slim compared to, say, Big Bill Broonzy or
the commercially successful duo of Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. But he
probably didn't mind — according to some sources, he seems to have been drawn
into the whole revival thing entirely by accident (upon having been seen by
some blues fans backstage after a Josh White show).
This record was originally released in 1967 and
contained a large portion of Buddy's live appearance at a Washington, D. C.
concert in June 1966; the CD issue expanded it with a bunch of extra tracks
that Moss recorded for Columbia in Nashville around the same time — those,
however, remained unreleased for about thirty years. On the studio tracks,
Buddy plays and sings almost entirely by himself, with only Jeff Espina on
harmonica to accompany the guitar; for the Washington show, they are further
joined by John Jackson on second guitar.
As it usually happens with these revivals,
there is some overlap with the old stuff, but not a huge lot: audiences were
expecting to hear «popular» blues songs rather than obscurities, so that Buddy
adds stuff like ʽStep It Up And Goʼ to his repertoire which he never
got around to recording in the pre-war era (but Blind Boy Fuller and Brownie
McGhee both did), or even ʽEvery Day (I Have The Blues)ʼ, a song that
was first recorded by Pinetop Sparks in 1935, but which most people in the
1950s and 1960s probably associated with B. B. King. However, this is no reason
to complain — on the contrary, it is very good to hear the old guy «forced» to
expand his horizons, combining revised versions of his old classics (ʽLawdy
Mamaʼ etc.) with stuff that he heard from others, or maybe even played in
the old days, but never got around to record.
I will not comment on the individual tracks,
since doing so requires a much deeper understanding of the basics of acoustic
blues than I have, but the overall gut feeling is that thirty years of uninvolvement
in the musical business had a negative influence on the man's fingers (the
playing is just a wee bit «sloppier» and less focused than its used to be), but
a positive influence on the man's mind — instead of relying largely on stock
phrasing, he takes plenty of opportunities to explore, find additional tricks,
make the guitar chirp, squeak, and chime whenever possible. Even on the studio
outtakes, the tracks sometimes run over four minutes, and several of the
concert numbers run over five — meaning that the man had found freedom from the
technical requirements of the three-minute single and that he intended to use
it. His singing, unfortunately, had declined due to aging, but that is not a
big problem: Buddy was always a competent, never an outstanding vocalist, and
«competent» ones get extra bonuses as they age.
Given that, out of everything that Buddy
recorded and released in his «comeback» era (not much altogether), this is the
most easily available package, it is highly recommendable — sound quality is
very decent (the Washington concert is almost entirely free from audience
noises, with everyone sitting very quietly, just an occasional snicker or two
at Buddy's occasional in-between-lines jokes), relative diversity (12-bar
blues, ragtime blues, jump blues, folk, etc.) is guaranteed, «blues
authenticity» is indisputable; thumbs up without question. But, of course, if you
want to properly «relive history», without relying exclusively on nostalgic
product, check out the crackling oldies as well — Atlanta Blues Legend lays a heavy emphasis on the «legend» bit, and
it will always be only a substitute for «the real thing».
ABERDEEN MISSISSIPPI BLUES (1930-1940; 2003)
1) The New Frisco Train; 2)
The Panama Limited; 3) I Am In The Heavenly Way; 4) Promise True And Grand; 5)
Pinebluff Arkansas; 6) Shake 'Em On Down; 7) Sic 'Em Dogs On; 8) Po' Boy; 9)
Black Train Blues; 10) Strange Place Blues; 11) When Can I Change My Clothes; 12)
Sleepy Man Blues; 13) Parchman Farm Blues; 14) Good Gin Blues; 15) High Fever
Blues; 16) District Attorney; 17) Fixin' To Die Blues; 18) Aberdeen Mississippi
Blues; 19) Bukka's Jitterbug Swing; 20) Special Stream Line.
One standard problem with reviewing thoroughly
assembled collections of pre-war blues material is their expectable
monotonousness — successful artists cutting dozens and dozens and dozens of
sides that sounded all the same, simply because it was sometimes simpler and
cheaper to cut a new side in the studio than re-release an old one. In that
respect, Aberdeen Mississippi Blues,
a near-exhaustive archive collection issued on the Document Records label, is a
heart-warming and fairly unique exception. It manages to collect almost everything that Bukka White
managed to record in a whole decade, between 1930 and 1940, and in widely
varying, and sometimes quite intriguing, conditions at that. Since he was so
notoriously un-prolific, this makes the collection read like a thrilling life
story, quickly moving from chapter to chapter with a complex plotline.
Chapter 1: May 1930. A young and aspiring
Washington White on vocal and guitar, backed by Napoleon Harrison on second
guitar, cuts two sides for Victor Records in Memphis — both reflecting his
life-long preference for trains, not just in the lyrics, but also in the music:
that steel-bodied National guitar chugs along at top volume like a good
old-fashioned choo-choo, speeding up, slowing down, pistons puffing, whistles
blowing. He talks more than sings on both tracks, but that's perfectly suitable
for these two little travelogs that immediately set the man up as a fairly
unique talent, and rather align him with Leadbelly than, say, the ragtime blues
school that was all the rage in the late 1920s / early 1930s. Just as you have
finished pigeonholing him, though, he unexpectedly turns around and cuts two
more, completely different tracks — dark, gruff gospel blues in the style of
Blind Willie Johnson, backed by an unidentified «Miss Minnie», usually speculated
to have been Memphis Minnie, but without definite proof.
Chapter 2: September 1937. A slightly older,
but no less aspiring Bukka White on vocal and guitar, backed by an unknown
second guitarist, cuts two sides for Vocalion in Chicago. Chicago! — and what
we now hear is gruff, tense, slightly paranoid 12-bar blues on ʽPinebluff
Arkansasʼ and ʽShake 'Em On Downʼ; the latter would eventually
become one of the most celebrated blues pieces of its era, not the least
because an untrained ear could easily confuse Bukka's hollering and playing on
this track with Robert Johnson's. Already he sounds like a man possessed — for
the moment, though, possessed primarily by libidinous urges.
Chapter 3: May 1939. A slightly less aspiring
Bukka White, locked up in Parchman Farm in Mississippi for shooting a man in
the leg, records two tracks for John Lomax on his portable equipment. This
recording, ʽSic 'Em Dogs Onʼ and ʽPo' Boyʼ, soon acquires
legendary status as well — not only for the rather specific conditions in which
it was produced, but also because it unleashes the full spectrum of Bukka's
talents: the combination of his deep, rumbling vocal vibrato and his
aggressive playing (few people would dare to be as brutal when playing slide)
really sounds like nothing else at the time. The closest comparison would
probably be Charley Patton now, although nobody could accuse Bukka of the same
levels of insanity.
Chapter 4: March 1940. Not the most legendary,
but the largest, cleanest, and most informative chapter of 'em all. Back in
Chicago, with only Washboard Sam to keep him company (three guesses as to
Washboard Sam's preferred instrument of choice). Trains, alcohol, prison,
sickness, madness, death, cemetery — not necessarily in that order, but you
could easily program the results of that session to read like a short,
comprehensive biography. ʽParchman Farm Bluesʼ, recalling personal experience;
ʽGood Gin Bluesʼ, dealing with personal conditions; and particularly
ʽFixin' To Die Bluesʼ, dealing with morose presentiments but in a
surprisingly lively fashion (Dylan would later redo the song in a grim,
desperate style, more easily understandable for the average white ear) — these
are some of the highlights, although the entire session was quite even (must be
the washboard effect).
It should be remembered that, although many of
the songs sound similar, they never truly repeat each other. Booker T.'s playing
style, much like that of Big Joe Williams, relied on brute force and raw
feeling more than exquisite technique, but he knew all he cared to about
nuances and flourishes, and on the general pre-war scale of «folk artistry vs.
popular entertainment» his own little black dot goes almost all the way to the
left. Every bit as essential as Johnson, Patton, and Leadbelly, and every bit
as enjoyable for that long gone earthy vibe, these four chapters and their
sixty minutes are not to be missed by anybody — thumbs up a-plenty.
Technical P.S.: In between this CD and the
confusingly titled Complete Bukka White
from a decade back, be sure to give your preference to the Document release: Complete really only covers the 1937
and 1940 Chicago sessions, and it is nowhere near as fun or instructive to have
Bukka without the early train / gospel records or the quintessential prison
session with Lomax.
MISSISSIPPI BLUES (1964)
1) Aberdeen Mississippi Blues;
2) Parchman Farm Blues; 3) Shake 'Em On Down; 4) I Am The Heavenly Way; 5)
Atlanta Special; 6) Drunk Man Blues; 7) Army Blues; 8) Remembrance Of Charlie
Patton; 9) New Orleans Streamline; 10) Poor Boy Long Ways From Home; 11) Baby
Please Don't Go.
Like so many of his blues pals, Booker T.
«Bukka» White was rediscovered in 1963 (by John Fahey, a notorious musician in
his own right), and with the acoustic blues boom revival in full swing, almost
immediately landed a small contract with Fahey's Takoma Records, who got him a
recording session in Memphis and released the results under the laconic title
of Mississippi Blues (on CD, this
record usually goes under the title of The
Sonet Blues Story, since, apparently, the European distribution rights were
handed over to the Swedish Sonet label).
Bukka is completely alone for this session — no
second guitarist, no harmonica, no backup singers, not even a washboard —
which is probably the main reason to hear and own it if you already have his
pre-war recordings (a secondary reason is the expectedly improved sound
quality, but the old stuff really wasn't that bad, compared to some of Blind
Lemon Jefferson's or Charley Patton's records, for instance). The songs, with
but a few exceptions, also cover the same repertoire, although some of the
titles are new: ʽThe New 'Frisco Trainʼ becomes ʽThe Atlanta
Specialʼ, and ʽPo' Boyʼ becomes a lengthier ʽPoor Boy, Long
Ways From Homeʼ. Weirdest of all, ʽParchman Farm Bluesʼ is not
really ʽParchman Farm Bluesʼ, but rather ʽWhen Can I Change My
Clothesʼ — a blatant mistake that has, nevertheless, steadily persisted on
all subsequent releases (just goes to show you how much people actually listen
to these things).
It is hard to tell whether the man was in top
form while making these recordings (some have suggested a bit of a tired strain
to at least some of the tracks), but he does make an effort to pass this off as
an evening of public entertainment — regularly interspersing sung parts with
snippets of talkin' blues to cheer up the audience, and creating the illusion of
a band by sometimes ad libbing stuff like "play it while I get me a
cigarette!" before launching into a solo passage, even though there really
ain't nobody but us chickens in the studio. One of the tracks is completely
non-musical: four minutes of small anecdotes about Charley Patton, Bukka's
personal idol and greatest influence (although there has been some speculation
that he was merely thinking these stories all up to please Fahey, who was a big
fan of Patton).
Other than that, the session does not open up a
lot of previously unknown sides to Mr. White. He plays piano instead of guitar
on one track (ʽDrunk Man Bluesʼ), not particularly well or anything,
and covers Big Joe Williams' ʽBaby Please Don't Goʼ — credibly, but
not embettering the original or, for that matter, the Muddy Waters Chicago
version. His old standards show that twenty five years outside the studio have
not diminished his guitar skills in the slightest, nor has there been any
strain on the vocals, but neither has he thought of any additional ways to
reinvent or embellish those tunes. Still, the album is well worth a thumbs up
at least for the tastes of those who worry too much about the rusty quality of
pre-war blues recordings. For Bukka, these songs still remained his lifeblood
in 1963 — this is much more than a nostalgic facsimile — and from a technical
point, his rough, but effective playing style should be much easier to study
based on this session than on anything from the early days.
MEMPHIS HOT SHOTS (1968)
1) Bed Spring Blues; 2)
Aberdeen Mississippi Blues; 3) Drifting Blues; 4) (Brand New) Decoration Blues;
5) Baby Please Don't Go; 6) Give Me An Old, Old Lady; 7) Got Sick And Tired; 8)
World Boogie; 9) School Learning; 10) Old Man Tom; 11) Gibson Town.
A major misstep here. As the 1960s wore on and
Bukka made more and more public appearances, he saw that the «proper» way to go
for most folks was with a backing band, and opted for one of his own. The
results, released on Mike Vernon's blues-oriented Blue Horizon label, were not
too good — nowhere near as ridiculous as the album cover (we do not even know
if it is Bukka himself in the space suit, but who cares? would it cease to be
ridiculous if we knew for sure it ain't him?), but fairly dull all the same.
I do not know any of the players — no big
surprise, considering that some of them are hiding behind pseudonyms, such as
«Anchor» on bass and «Harmonica Boy» on guess-what, and that the actual level
of musicianship is utterly pedestrian, slightly above high school level, perhaps,
but not even on the level of a third-rate British Invasion R&B band.
Apparently, the intent is to try and recreate some sort of Chicago blues
atmosphere, with a suitably swampy studio attitude, to match the achievements
of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, but the only person who'd want to seriously
compare «Harmonica Boy» with Little Walter would be a person who never heard
one note played by Little Walter.
Worse still, Bukka himself is trying to get
into the same pattern — howling, screaming, and roaring in prime Chicago
fashion instead of retaining his trademark cotton field mumble that he inherited
from Charley Patton. It's okay, but it just ain't him: it's a rather pale copy of the Howlin' Wolf approach. It's as
if John Lennon suddenly decided to become Bruce Springsteen, or Mick Jagger
suddenly decided to become Sting, just because they happened to sell more at
the time. The plus side here is that this also brings about a huge change of
the repertoire: other than a couple perennial oldies, most of the songs here
are new, with titles that I do not recognize (were they actually made up on the
spot?) and melodies mostly taken from classic Chicago blues recordings. The
minus side is — why exactly do I need to hear this?
The best material here is strictly solo: the
band takes a break on ʽDrifting Bluesʼ and several other tunes,
leaving Bukka alone (or, at most, with a second acoustic guitarist) to exorcise
his demons. The vocals are still somewhat inadequate, with too much forced
Wolf-style gargling, but at least the lack of inferior musical backing is
refreshing, and it becomes easier to assess the amount of sincerity and genuine
passion in the man's presence. And, honestly, he just does not seem to be in
the right state of mind doing this thang — I count this as a misguided
experiment from top to bottom and give it a thumbs down, although blues
historians will probably want to own Memphis
Hot Shots all the same, if only as an example of a curious, one-of-a-kind
configuration. Not that old bluesmen didn't have their fair share of
embarrassing misses, but they were all embarrassing in their own idiosyncratic
embarrassing ways. At the very least, I don't recall Mississippi John Hurt or
Skip James dressing in space suits, that's for sure.
BIG DADDY (1974)
1) Black Cat Bone Blues; 2)
1936 Triggertoe; 3) Crying Holy Unto The Lord; 4) Shake My Hand Blues; 5) Sic
'Em Dogs On; 6) Gibson Hill; 7) Mama Don' 'Low; 8) Hot Springs Arkansas; 9)
Jelly Roll Morton Man; 10) Black Crepe Blues; 11) Glory Bound Train; 12) Aberdeen
Mississippi Blues; 13) Hobo Blues.
While this album, recorded just three years
prior to Bukka's demise from cancer, corrects the blunder of Memphis Hot Shots, no longer trying to
recast the artist in a wholly unsuitable image, I cannot honestly say that Big Daddy generates much inspiration.
Unless you have pre-generated yourself the mindset of "big old blues
legend with acoustic guitar = I'm loving it!", I am not sure that these
recordings could serve as a good introduction to the world of archaic country
blues in general, or Bukka White as its particular representative.
Here he is, all on his own with nothing but the
guitar to provide company, running through a selection of the usual classics,
mixed in with a few obscurities or rearrangements (ʽJelly Roll Morton
Manʼ is the same as ʽGibson Hillʼ, with a new set of lyrics —
and, come to think of it, ʽHobo Bluesʼ is also the exact same song).
As the man gets ever older, his voice gets ever gruffer and closer to that
Howlin' Wolf standard, but that's just the problem: it doesn't quite rise up to the same standard, but
it does reduce all of the songs to just about the same emotional state, roughly
translated as «don't mess around with the man», which is not how it used to be in pre-war years.
Likewise, Bukka's guitar playing is not what it
used to be. «Deteriorating» is not the right word for it, since he can still
send off those slide runs like he used to, and slap those strings with the same
brute force when necessary. But something seems missing — I'm not exactly sure
what, but maybe that would simply be the will to come up with free-flowing
guitar phrasing on the spur of the moment, rather than relying on «fossilized»,
thoroughly predictable stock lines. Naturally, this cannot be construed as an accusation
— nobody really expects an inventive, energetic pulse from a 65-year old
bluesman — but it also means that, whatever the popular stereotype might be, a
young bluesman with a guitar is still generally preferable to an old bluesman
with a guitar. Especially when the old bluesman's guitar starts getting rather
dangerously out of tune towards the end of the session...
Anyway, the bottomline is simply that there is
nothing «wrong» with Big Daddy, but
forty minutes of it will most likely get you bored, and it will add nothing to
your understanding of the man and his history, except formal proof that the man
did retain enough vocal and instrumental competence right up to his final
years. But you probably could guess that as it is, couldn't you?
ADDENDA:
1963 ISN'T 1962 (1963/1994)
1) Streamline Special; 2)
Drunken Leroy Blues; 3) Fixin' To Die; 4) Midnight Twister; 5) Aberdeen Blues;
6) Vaseline Head Woman; 7) Jump; 8) Jack O'Diamonds; 9) Chi Chi Boogie; 10)
1963 Isn't 1962; 11) Boogie 'Til Dubuque; 12) Driftin' And Driftin'; 13)
Corinna Corinna.
Not released officially until 1994, this
little-known recording might actually be the best post-war slice of Booker T.
to be found on the digital circuit. The reason why it took so long to see the
light of day is technical — this is a relatively poor quality tape recording,
with a lot of distracting hiss running through it, that John Fahey and Ed
Denson took of Bukka in the process of «rediscovering» him in November 1963,
exactly one year after Dylan had covered ʽFixin' To Dieʼ and brought
the name back to public attention.
But poor quality aside, this is the only
post-war document to capture Bukka «unprepared», in a homely environment,
without any special new strategy of studio behavior, and, consequently, without
the man trying to be like somebody else (Chicago bluesmen, for instance). Mississippi Blues, recorded soon
afterwards, would still be relatively fresh and come close to matching this
attitude — yet even there, the man was already set on «giving the people what
they want», that is, well-recorded recreations of his classic pre-war hits.
Here, as you can see from the setlist, those hits are almost nowhere to be
found — no ʽShake 'Em On Downʼ, no ʽSic 'Em Dogs Onʼ, no
ʽParchman Farmʼ, just whatever Bukka felt like playing at that
particular moment.
And he felt like playing lots of different
things in free format, be it an almost epic-length version of one of his train
tales (ʽStreamline Specialʼ), interspersed with streaks of rapped
quasi-autobiographic dialog, or short stretches of boogie improvisation
(ʽJumpʼ, ʽBoogie 'Til Dubuqueʼ) that, interestingly, would
not reappear on his post-1963 studio recordings, since, apparently,
dance-oriented boogie-blues was not what Bukka's main target audience was
expecting from the man. All in all, the main distinguishing feature of 1963 Isn't 1962 is the apparent lack of
reverence for this business — Bukka
was not yet fully aware of how «sacred» the new blues fans were finding that
kind of music, and his laid-back mode here might really not have been all too
appropriate for market demands circa 1963. But it's all right now, half a
century later.
Of particular interest here is the brief cover
of ʽJack O' Diamondsʼ, a song usually associated with Blind Lemon
Jefferson — Bukka gives us a rougher, faster, more rambunctious version, but
still punctuated with plenty of weeping outbursts from the slide guitar to
preserve the song's tragic outlook (but his own "Jack o' diamonds is a
hard card to play!" sounds pissed-off and frustrated next to Jefferson's
almost-sobbing delivery). Great slide moments abound on the album in general,
for that matter — weird as it is, this homemade tape gives the impression of
the man really trying to prove his
best on the instrument, much more so than on his soon-to-come streak of comparatively
inferior studio recordings. And his will to improvise and create is most amply
illustrated by the title of the title track, even if the tune itself is generic
12-bar stuff.
So, if you can stand a little hiss and crackle,
1963 Isn't 1962 might be your best
bet for a post-war companion to Bukka's pre-war recordings. The general rule
holds here: as long as all those old faded «stars» of a goneby era were content
with staying what they were, their recordings were full of genuine spirit —
when, on the other hand, they were trying to «match the expectations of the
times» or anything like that, things immediately began going sour. This one is
quite sweet, by that standard, and gets a respectable thumbs up.
Part 2. The Early Rock'n'Roll
Bands Era (1960-1966)
THE PSYCHEDELIC SOUNDS OF THE 13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS (1966)
1) You're Gonna Miss Me; 2)
Roller Coaster; 3) Splash 1 (Now I'm Home); 4) Reverberation; 5) Don't Fall
Down; 6) Fire Engine; 7) Thru The Rhythm; 8) You Don't Know; 9) Kingdom Of
Heaven; 10) Monkey Island; 11) Tried To Hide.
Pseudo-cool people like to hunt for insanity on
record (as if there weren't already enough insanity in life — sometimes in the life of the pseudo-cool people themselves).
So all the pseudo-cool people should be tremendously pseudo-happy at the news
that here, certified and approved, is one of the first completely insane
records ever made. Obscure, for a long time well-studied only by rock
connoisseurs, for a long time only available on CD in a truly horrendous,
glutinous mix where one could not decide where exactly it was that the electric
guitar ended and the electric jug started, today it emerges as one of the top «revolutionary»
albums of 1966 — no mean feat for the year of Revolver, Pet Sounds, Blonde On Blonde, and Freak Out!.
When Roky Erickson and his Texan pals went into
the studio, «psychedelia» as an established style or attitude did not yet
exist. People were already getting influenced by LSD and Indian music and
esoteric teachings and nose rubbings, but the inclinations were still somewhat
spontaneous, lacking proper structure and pretense. The 13th Floor
Elevators, despite spending most of their time in mushroom-like states, were
among the first psychedelic pop bands to simply exude this pretense — there was a band that knew exactly what they
were doing, and believed they knew exactly why
they were doing it.
One need not go further than the original liner
notes: "Recently, it has become
possible for man to chemically alter his mental state and thus alter his point
of view... he can then restructure his thinking and change his language so that
his thoughts bear more relation to his life and his problems, therefore
approaching them more sanely...". Think hard about what they are
saying here. You, the consumer, are only sane once you have chemically altered
your inborn mental state. It is before
that alteration that you are insane, not after. Don't you miss the Sixties?
We have no true way of knowing if the actual
songs had been written or recorded while the band members were «chemically
altering their mental states». Personally, I doubt it. After all, it still remains
to be scientifically proven that listenable music can emerge out of a «stoned»,
rather than just «stone-oriented», human mind. What is, however, undeniable is
that this music, even for its time, is, uh, kind of kinky (and certainly not in a Davies brothers way). Two ringing /
stinging guitars (Roky Erikson and Stacy Sutherland) combine elements of folk,
blues, and boogie. A gimmicky «electric jug» is reserved for a separate band
member (Tommy Hall), and it keeps buzzing around every single melody, like an
obstinate bumble-bee that just will not
go away because it has no other purpose in its life than to make your life a living nightmare.
And, fresh out of a paleolithic cavern, a wild
young lead vocalist — also Roky Erikson — whose style ranges from nasty incomprehensible
babbling to wild Indian witchdoctor screaming, so high-pitched and piercing that
the superstitious conquistadors would not have stood a chance with it. Naturally,
nothing ever grows on bare soil, and one can easily see both the Stones' and
the Byrds' influence on these guys — but in no way are they consciously trying
to sound like either. They are merely the sons of their times, trying to be
fathers to the times to come.
The big original highlight is the single
'You're Gonna Miss Me', compatible enough with the band's garage-rock roots to
have been included on the original Nuggets, but perhaps not truly representative of their
quintessential style. It is a little more simple and blunt than the rest of it,
a little faster, a little more accessible, but also proverbially wild. The main
attraction is Roky's subtle buildup towards the «wild cat in heat»-style
chorus — he may be singing about how it is the girl that is going to miss him, but we all understand that it is
the protagonist who is thrashing around, tortured by prolonged sexual
abstinence and whatever emotional demons might be harassing him along the way.
Even the electric jug is in its perfect place here, emphasizing the obsessive
paranoia and overall wriggly-wiggliness. A red-hot classic.
However, nothing else on the record rocks with
the same power, or is even supposed to rock with the same power. As the band
makes the transition from singles realm into the world of conceptual LP-ism, the
overall emphasis shifts from «head banging» to the above-mentioned «mind
altering». One ominous, mysterious (and, occasionally, genuinely creepy) mantra/dirge
follows another, as Roky and Co. try to firmly keep one foot in the territory
of «marketable pop rock», and the other one in the land of spiritual
enlightenment. For us, the former means that we can at least hope for catchy
choruses, and the latter translates to a happy mariage between acid propaganda
and the wonders of the electric jug. (Speaking of the electric jug, that thing
gets seriously annoying much faster than acid propaganda, since acid can at
least be propagated in a variety of curious ways, whereas the only thing that the
electric jug can provide is a silly bubbling noise that does little beyond
getting on one's nerves. For that matter, can you even tune an electric
jug, and how? Does one boil water in it to achieve a sharper tone?)
Nevertheless, this mixture of crummy novelty
with memorable pop choruses works admirably, once you get used to the jug. Among
other highlights, 'Splash 1 (Now I'm Home)' is a very pretty, melancholic
Byrds-style ballad (although, if Roger McGuinn wrote and recorded it, it would
have been even better, because the guitars are really played in a very
rudimentary manner); I rank the chorus of "and now I'm home to stay" along
with the tenderest refrains the Byrds themselves ever created. In stark
contrast, the immediately following 'Reverberation' is sharp, echoey, and mean;
its buildup evokes visions of an acid-fuelled apocalypse that sounds as grand
and breathtaking on record as it would, no doubt, have been in real life, had
Roky Erickson somehow managed to magically draw the rest of the world into his
own shattered reality. But it is the music that really counts — the song's
nasty, jagged blues riff is far more impressive than its deranged lyrics.
The record does not offer much in the way of
stylistic diversity, mainly because all the different influences are synthesized
into the same admirable, if monotonous type of sound, and sometimes, once you are
almost ready to tell one song from another, the crucial moment is spoiled by
the electric jug that permeates everything like sodium glutamate. Hence, as
tremendously important (in historical terms) as this record is, it would
probably help if one sits through it with a little help from one's friends, if
you know what Ringo means here. Me being a strict no-sayer, I always end up
praising the album more for its «revolutionary» status than a desire to sit
through it over and over again — although the gut feeling does occasionally
remind (especially when stuff like 'Reverberation' and 'Fire Engine' is on)
that it is quite possible to dig this music with a completely unaltered mind,
even if, I am sure, Roky Erikson himself would disagree. Hence, thumbs up
from both the intellectual and the emotional sides of the living organism.
PS. As I said, the original CD release sounded very murky, but the album was finally
remastered in fine quality, so that the electric jug now goes its own way and
Roky's decibels go their own way.
Additionally, new releases usually have from 4 up to something like 10 bonus
tracks, most of them culled from the band's live performances at The Avalon Ballroom.
These have the advantage of being real
live tracks, unlike the fake Live
entry in the band's discography – but accompanied with the disadvantage of a
truly evil sound quality that even the best remastering cannot remaster. Which
is a pity, since the band was quite diverse and experimental on stage – running
six-minute long aggressive covers of 'You Really Got Me', 'Gloria', etc.
EASTER EVERYWHERE (1967)
1) Slip Inside This House; 2)
Slide Machine; 3) She Lives (In A Time Of Her Own); 4) Nobody To Love; 5) Baby
Blue; 6) Earthquake; 7) Dust; 8) I've Got Levitation; 9) I Had To Tell You; 10)
Postures (Leave Your Body Behind).
Where can you go from the
blues-folk-garage-psycho insanity of the Elevators' debut? The choices aren't
particularly overwhelming, but there is still some room left for manoeuvring,
enough so that the band's fans seem to be almost equally split in two over
preferring this or that as their favourite first choice for the band.
On Easter Everywhere, the Elevators are
no longer a garage band. Nothing on here even tries to recapture the primal
punk power of 'You're Gonna Miss Me', and only a few songs go for the psychedelic
fury of 'Reverberation' and the like: most notably, the faster-moving
'Earthquake' and 'I've Got Levitation', two tracks that break up the druggy
monotonousness of the album and fully justify their titles — 'Earthquake' is as
threatening as a real earthquake should be (well, at least around five points
on the Richter scale), and 'I've Got Levitation' for a brief moment could convince
you that you have got it indeed.
Elsewhere, this is strictly slow to mid-tempo
psycho-folk, more Byrds and Jefferson Airplane in nature than Sonics, with the
incessant electric jug providing first extra trippiness and then extra aggravation.
The good news is that almost each of the songs — and they're as much songs as
they're sermons, replete with Roky's acid admonitions — has a hook; the bad
news is that too many of them drive this hook home merely by repeating it over
and over, as is particularly the case with the album opener, the
"epic" 'Slip Inside This House'. "Epic" because of its
eight-minute length more than anything else.
One forgotten, completely overlooked little gem
on here is guitarist Stacy Sutherland's 'Nobody To Love', a beautiful pop
rocker very much in the vein of the Byrds (even with similar dreamy vocal
arrangements), but also based on a scorching lead guitar line that is at once
hard-rocking and, shall we say, impressionistic? Visionary? Since it does not
have Roky's demented stamp on it, people usually pass it by, but here's hoping
history will slowly recognize that Sutherland was as important to this band as
Roky was, and sometimes more so.
Enigmatic remains the issue of why the band
also decided to include a cover of Dylan's 'It's All Over Now, Baby Blue'. It
is given a haunting, beautiful arrangement, with echo-laden electric guitar
notes dripping all over you like stalactites in a cave, but that doesn't solve
the question. Maybe Roky saw something in the lyrics that fit in particularly
well with his inner chaos. Or maybe they just thought they could do it better
than the Byrds.
Easter Everywhere is certainly not recommendable for those who
mostly dug the debut for its sheer rocking power. But for those who'd rather
prefer a solid helping of mushrooms along with the musical experience, it
delivers the goods with even more efficiency. Me being more of a rocker at
heart than a lunatic, I prefer the brain to get the upper hand and
condescendingly offer this a thumbs up
for a few really good songs, general innovative value and historical
importance. The heart, however, prefers to keep silent unless it is pumped into
action by 'I've Got Levitation' or driven to tears by 'Nobody To Love'.
LIVE (1968)
1) Before You Accuse Me; 2)
She Lives In A Time Of Her Own; 3) Tried To Hide; 4) You Gotta Take That Girl;
5) I'm Gonna Love You Too; 6) Everybody Needs Somebody To Love; 7) I've Got
Levitation; 8) You Can't Hurt Me Anymore; 9) Roller Coaster; 10) You're Gonna
Miss Me.
The ultimate sham: a fake live album,
consisting of a bunch of studio outtakes with overdubbed crowd noises. The
Elevators were certainly notorious for their wild live shows, which explains
the record company's desire to put out a live album for the fans — problem is,
as some actual live recordings that have since surfaced as bonus tracks or
bootlegs clearly show, they either did not have the funds to buy proper
recording equipment or maybe the band just couldn't be bothered to bother. So
why bother, in fact, when you can simply take some studio recordings, throw on
some applause, and leave the fans sorting it out with each other over whether
this is really live or a fake? (Obviously, the real serious fans would figure
out the real state of affairs in no time, but "real serious fans" do
not usually constitute the majority of the buyers, even if we're talking
obscure cult figures like the Elevators).
Hardliners have since disowned the record, and
it's immoral to criticize their decision; softliners, however, have rightly
pointed out that, if one manages to abstract oneself from the crowd noises, one
is at least left with extra studio material from the band — material that was
so scarce in the first place that even a sham like this can be tolerated. Maybe
someday, when the business of reissuing old classic material finally falls into
the hands of a new age King Solomon, someone will wash out the
"audience" and simply release these outtakes as they really were;
until then, it's all up to our power of imagination.
Not that there are any revelations. Alternate
versions of classic tunes from the band's two albums are extremely similar to
the standard versions — in fact, I am quite positive that 'You're Gonna Miss
Me' is simply the standard version as is, and probably one or two others
are, too. The real meat, therefore, is quite lean: two originals and three
covers from some of the band's earliest sessions, back when they weren't so
much psychedelic but more R'n'B and garage-oriented. Their takes on Bo Diddley's
'Before You Accuse Me', Buddy Holly's 'I'm Gonna Love You Too' and Solomon
Burke's 'Everybody Needs Somebody To Love' are saved by Roky's proverbial
ferociousness (musically, you'd be much better off with the originals or
covers by Creedence, Blondie, and the Stones, to name a few); 'You Gotta Take
That Girl' is an attempt to write an actual Buddy Holly-style song, and a good
one; and 'You Can't Hurt Me Anymore' is arguably the only song that would
reasonably fit in on The Psychedelic Sounds, but it would probably not
be a highlight.
Naturally, the brain is left with no choice but
to insist upon a thumbs down — a sham is
a sham, and there is nothing ethical about not recognizing it. However, if you
are even a semi-completist, your doom is to succumb. The most honourable way to
succumb, of course, would be to come into possession of the 3-CD box The
Psychedelic World Of The 13th Floor Elevators (unfortunately, out of
print, but not undiscoverable altogether), where Live is but a small
chunk of addenda among the three original studio albums — and a bunch
of real live performances from '66 and '67, although, predictably, in far worse
quality. The electric jug does come through very clearly, though, wherever it
is present.
BULL OF THE WOODS (1969)
1) Livin' On; 2) Barnyard
Blues; 3) Til Then; 4) Never Another; 5) Rose And The Thorn; 6) Down By The
River; 7) Scarlet And Gold; 8) Street Song; 9) Dear Dr Doom; 10) With You; 11)
May The Circle Remain Unbroken.
With Roky Erickson gone disfunctional and Stacy
Sutherland assuming main responsibility for the band's artistic future, what do
you think could have happened? It wouldn't take a genius to predict that the
music would become more accessible, more "cultured", more melodic
(after all, Sutherland's contributions on the previous albums were all that
way), but also much less distinctive and with much fewer reasons to exist.
All these predictions are fulfilled to a tee:
with Bull Of The Woods, the Elevators showed that they no longer had any
particularly beautiful place to go, and gracefully ceased to exist as a band
soon afterwards, saving the world a ton of precious vinyl (to be spent on
Chicago and Foreigner records instead). But also, with Bull Of The Woods
they delivered a record that goes down nice on the ears and has its fair share
of excellent melodies for those who treasure and stockpile music based on the
emotional meaning of its chord sequences rather than its historical importance.
And the best thing of all: NO MORE ELECTRIC
JUG!
Highlights that every Sixties fan will like
include 'Till Then', another Byrds-like folk-rocker with 'airy' guitars that
make 'Eight Miles High' sound more like 'Half A Mile High' (not that 'Eight
Miles High' isn't a better song in the long run, but for all their airiness,
the Byrds never really sounded that high up in the air); the mystical 'Rose And
The Thorn', very much like the Stones circa Their Satanic Majesties' Request;
the kiddie Monkees-like 'Dr. Doom' with its tin soldier martial trumpets and
wispy vocal harmonies; and the closing gorgeous atonality of 'May The Circle
Remain Unbroken', which is more of a mantra than a song but, in that capacity,
forms a suitably unusual conclusion to the record. (Twenty-five years later,
Neil Young took those guitar cascades, lowered the tone and made the entire
soundtrack to Dead Man on that model).
In fact, on second thought, maybe it's not even
the relative absence of Roky and his madness that lets down the record, but
rather its late-coming in the face of the rapidly changing music scene and
values. Bull Of The Woods is like a slightly commercialized and
sanitized Easter Everywhere, but in 1968-69 there was already no place
for another Easter Everywhere: technically, spiritually, and even
rationally musical values had already overstepped it. Neither Pink Floyd nor
the Byrds nor even the Jefferson Airplane themselves were doing that kind of
trippiness any longer. So, as odd as it is to say it, this album, recorded in
1968, was dated stone dead... by one year.
That's what my gruff brain keeps telling me, at
any rate, while the heart is grooving to the record's mellow sounds and quietly
awarding it a thumbs up. Which,
unfortunately, does not commit too many of its melodies to said heart for any
respectable amount of time.
THE ULTIMATE ACTION (1965-1968; 1980)
1) I'll Keep On Holding On; 2)
Harlem Shuffle; 3) Never Ever; 4) Twenty Fourth Hour; 5) Since I Lost My Baby;
6) In My Lonely Room; 7) Hey Sha-Lo-Ney; 8) Shadows And Reflections;
9) Something Has Hit Me; 10) The Place; 11) The Cissy; 12) Baby You've Got It;
13) I Love You (Yeah!); 14) Land Of A Thousand Dances.
The Action should probably hold the official
title of "Best 60s Band To Never Release An Album". However, an
LP-worth of a few great singles and a ton of filler — which is almost certainly
what an Action album would have looked like, judging by the value of Rolled
Gold — can't really measure again such a solid collection of excellent
singles as placed on this CD.
The Action were a band doomed for early death,
because they couldn't properly establish themselves as a songwriting act at an
age when you either were a songwriter or you went back to your local
manufacturing plant. Not that they were awful at songwriting: the few originals
contained here, such as the funny kiddie song 'Never Ever' and the cheery
singalong 'Twenty Forth Hour', are lovable and fit in well with the rest. But
apparently, they just couldn't establish an individual style that they'd be
better at than their cover art.
Because one would be hard pressed to find a
better British interpreter of the melodic school of American R'n'B than The
Action around 1966-67. Maybe the Beatles — and it's hardly a coincidence that
The Action were signed to work with George Martin, of all people — but by 1966,
the Beatles had already distanced themselves from other people's works, and
thus missed the chance of applying the technical and musical innovations of the
period to the same old rock'n'roll and Motown pop numbers they showed so much
respect for from 1963 to 1965.
Not the Action, though. Taking these trusty
Motown and Atlantic numbers, they would carefully extract the essence, discard
the production excesses, clean up the flaws, rearrange them for strict
power-pop, guitar-bass-drums consumption, and make songs that combined the
melodicity and soulfulness of the originals with the straightforwardness and
determined energy of Britpop. And, in all fairness, they made this material
rock out far better than the Beatles.
For some reason, the public didn't appreciate
that — maybe because in Britain, Motown was running out of fashion, or else
folks just wanted the original thing (can't blame them). The band's highest
charting single, a cover of the Marvelettes' 'I'll Keep On Holding On', only
reached something like No. 47 on the charts, even though it blows the original
away — the guitars never shimmered that way on Motown records, and the bass
was never so determined to have its own way, and the harmonies were never that
well produced.
Likewise, they manage to put to shame Martha
and the Vandellas ('In My Lonely Room'), Bob & Earl ('The Harlem Shuffle'),
and even Chris Kenner (the best cover of 'Land Of 1000 Dances' I've ever
heard). Sometimes the gloss that cover artists try to put over the originals
squeezes all soul out of them, but believe me, this is not the case with the
Action: they understand well just where the hook lies, and give it their all —
it's only up to George Martin to brush off all remaining dust. Of course, if
they wanted to do James Brown, that'd be a whole different thing, but they
never did, because their schtick was melody, not rhythm.
Out of the 14 cuts on this collection, there is
not one bad choice (I do think that Carole King's 'Just Once In My Life' is one
of her schmaltzier and more overwrought tunes, but when you hear it without
strings, it's actually good!). It's pretty predictable from the onset, and
contains no great breakthroughs, but it's still a unique type of sound that no
one except this band had in 1966 and that no one will almost certainly have
ever after. Which is why, mentally and cordially, I have no doubts about
keeping my thumbs up for this as long as
I live.
ROLLED GOLD (1967-1968; 2002)
1) Come Around; 2) Something To
Say; 3) Love Is All; 4) Icarus; 5) Strange Roads; 6) Things You Cannot See; 7)
Brain; 8) Look At The View; 9) Climbing Up The Wall; 10) Really Doesn't Matter;
11) I'm A Stranger; 12) Little Boy; 13) Follow Me; 14) In My Dream; 15) In My
Dream (demo).
This is one of those few records that factually
deserve the title "lost" — a collection of demos as well as quite
fully shaped recordings that the Action produced during their final years of
existence but never got around to release officially. After rotting in the
vaults for decades, they were eventually released in the 1990s, first under the
title Brain, then the somewhat flashier Rolled Gold. Those who
love the Sixties, but also like their music polished and tend to shy away from
raw archive releases, need not worry: Rolled Gold plays very much like a
real, completed album, albeit one with slightly lower production values than
expected.
This was an important time for The Action — on
one hand, they were on the verge of breaking up, but at the same time, they
were also trying to throw off the cover-band image and try their hand at
original artistry: most or all of these tunes are self-penned and show a
certain determination to develop an identity of their own. Unfortunately, they
were a bit too late at it. Most of these tracks sound like they belong in late
1966/early 1967, but by late 1967/early 1968 all the Major Artists of the time
were already moving away from the good old values of psychedelic Brit-pop,
usually making the transgression to symphonic art-rock — or
"regressing" towards bluesier or folkier values. So, Rolled Gold
ended just a wee bit out of its time.
Today, of course, the dark wide year-long gap
between 1966 and 1968 doesn't appear all that dark and all that wide to us any
longer, and we have little problem judging the Action's late-period releases on
the same scale as, e. g., the Who in their Quick One period. Thus, most
responses one is likely to find to Rolled Gold follow the "great
lost masterpiece" pattern — since few people other than dedicated Sixties
aficionados are liable to be listening to it in the first place.
That may be an exaggeration. First, in terms of
"uniqueness of sound", I'd say that the Action's R'n'B covers were
fresher and more individualistic. On Rolled Gold, the band basically
just jumps on the well-worn psychedelic bandwagon; before that, they had a
gimmick of their own that no one else could replicate. Another thing is that,
once faced with the task of developing their own songwriting style, they seem
to subconsciously transfer their older R'n'B values on it, in that all the
songs still share that hyperactive, 'get-up-and-dance' style: everything
is loud, ringing guitars, massive drumming, heavy bass, non-stop power-pop, which
is great for those who love the style but may be a little tiring for those who
prefer some variety (uh, a ballad or two, perhaps?) Third, not all the songs
are really well-written, and hooks are frequently sacrificed in favour of
adrenaline — nothing unusual about it, of course.
But even so, Rolled Gold is absolutely
indispensable for those who love all these things clumped together. Ringing
guitars and rushing idealism — how can you beat this? My favourite tracks come
right at the end, with 'Follow Me', built on a spiralling, distorted electric
riff and rushing off at a much faster tempo than most of the other tracks,
faithfully reflecting the invocation in its title; and two versions of 'In My
Dream', a delightful combination of the pastoral and the psychedelic, truly worthy
of holding its own against all the great acid anthems of its time. But your
favourite tracks may be different — when everything sounds so similar, that's
where the battle of tastes will always rage the fiercest.
Once it's time for decision-taking, the brain,
flattered as it might be that the record's original title alluded to none other
than itself, prefers to slight Rolled Gold as a formally successful, but
intellectually unchallenging response to the times. The heart, however, being
a sucker for guitar-driven power pop, overrules the brain with a thumbs up. Masterpiece or no masterpiece, The
Action never recorded bad music, and not liking them is the listener's loss,
not the authors'.
THE PRICE TO PLAY (1966)
1) Barefooting; 2) Just Once
In My Life; 3) Going Down Slow; 4) Getting Mighty Crowded; 5) Honky Tonk; 6)
Move On Drifter; 7) Mercy Mercy; 8) Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever; 9) Ain't
That Peculiar; 10) I Can't Turn You Loose; 11) Critic's Choice; 12) Hi-Lili,
Hi-Lo; 13*) Any Day Now; 14*) Never Be Sick On Sunday; 15*) I Put A Spell On
You; 16*) Iechyd-Da; 17*) Take Me Home; 18*) Willow Weep For Me; 19*) Yours
Until Tomorrow; 20*) Simon Smith And The Amazing Dancing Bear; 21*) Who Cares;
22*) Shame.
After Alan Price parted way with The Animals,
it took him quite a bit of time to find the proper footing, and at the moment
when it came to recording his first album, that time had not yet arrived. As an
organ player, Price formed an essential part of the band's R&B sound — as a
leader of his own band, The Alan Price Set, and being responsible for the
material, the arrangements, and the singing, he was nowhere near as effective
as Burdon as long as he made the mistake of standing on the same R&B turf.
Indeed, The
Price To Play, which came out in the same year as The Animals' first
«priceless» (sorry for even more inevitable puns) album, Animalisms, could have most of its songs recorded by the actual
Animals, and nobody would feel the difference — there's quite a comparable
selection of rock'n'roll, blues, soul, pop, and R&B, maybe with a slightly
less hard edge than Burdon would give it all, but that could have easily been
remedied. There ain't a single original composition in sight, and although
there is no question about Alan actually loving all this stuff, «loving» a song
is hardly the only requirement necessary to make your version of it
outstanding.
As an R&B singer, Price hits the right
notes, but he is not too powerful, nor is he endowed with some stunningly
idiosyncratic vocal timbre — you'd probably have a much harder time trying to
memorize his identity on this album than you'd have with, say, Manfred Mann's
Paul Jones. As for his keyboard playing, The
Price To Play is very definitively a band
album, not a solo showcase, democratically allowing all members of The Alan
Price Set to flaunt their talents: not a good idea, I'd say, seeing as how Alan
is the most gifted musician of the lot, and how so much time is taken away from
him and donated to the brass players. (On the trivia side, the drummer for this
lot is none other than Alan White, whom we would all come to really know later
as Bill Bruford's replacement in Yes. No Tales
From Topographic Oceans preview here, though).
Not surprisingly, the organ-led instrumentals,
such as ʻHonky Tonkʼ and ʻCritic's Choiceʼ, are the most
exciting tracks in this lot — on the former, Alan gets to spread his playing
wings wider than he could ever allow himself in The Animals. Otherwise, all you
really have to do is admire his good taste in R&B covers, but really, you
are not missing all that much in life if you do not hear him running through a British-disciplined ʻI Can't
Turn You Looseʼ or a smooth, poppy variant of Don Covay's ʻMercy,
Mercyʼ, which only one year before was covered by the Stones in a far
snappier, edgier manner. And if you want a real corny, catchy version of
ʻHi-Lili, Hi-Loʼ, you do not have to go farther than the Manfred Mann
version, also from 1965. Ultimately, for most of these tunes, Alan came a
little too late and a little too senselessly.
The CD reissue of the album does somehow pump
up its value, by throwing on ten additional tracks from contemporary singles
and EPs. This includes Alan's first significant solo commercial success in the
UK, an organ-led version of ʻI Put A Spell On Youʼ — slyly and subtly
re-written and re-arranged so that musically and atmospherically, it brings on
associations with ʻHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ (even the solo in the
instrumental break begins with precisely the same chords as the
ʻHouseʼ solo); and, more importantly, ʻSimon Smith And The
Amazing Dancing Bearʼ, an early song by Randy Newman that introduced Alan
to music-hall values and pretty much turned his entire subsequent career
around. Both tunes are quite nice, even if, as of then, neither of them still
suggested that Price would ever become a successful songwriter in his own
rights.
Anyway, criticisms aside, it all feels good,
friendly, and professional — listening to the record is guaranteed to not cause
any harm whatsoever. But clearly, if this
were to become Price's regular output, then leaving The Animals would have been
the biggest blunder he ever made in his life. Fortunately, he was quick enough
to realize that himself.
A PRICE ON HIS HEAD (1967)
1) The House That Jack Built; 2)
She's Got Another Pair Of Shoes; 3) Come And Dance With Me; 4) On This Side Of
Goodbye; 5) So Long Dad; 6) No One Ever Hurt So Bad; 7) Don't Do That Again; 8)
Tickle Me; 9) Grim Fairy Tale; 10) Living Without You; 11) Happy Land; 12) To
Ramona; 13*) Biggest Night Of Her Life; 14*) Don't Stop The Carnival; 15*) The
Time Has Come; 16*) When I Was A Cowboy; 17*) Tappy Tortoise; 18*) Love Story;
19*) My Old Kentucky Home; 20*) Trimdon Grange Explosion; 21*) Falling In Love
Again; 22*) Sunshine And Rain; 23*) Is There Anybody Out There; 24*) Not Born
To Follow.
Apparently, ʻSimon Smithʼ worked so
well that, for a brief while at least, Alan Price decided to become for Randy
Newman what The Byrds used to be for Bob Dylan — there's a whoppin' seven Newman covers on this album
itself, and a few more among the 11 bonus tracks that were kindly added by the
Repertoire label when the album was released on CD, all culled from contemporary
singles and whatnot. Throw in an extra Dylan cover and a Goffin/King one, and
you will almost be missing out on the
fact that there are also four Alan Price originals, which is about four more
than on the previous record — a major step in the direction of artistic
independence and the establishment of the man's personal identity.
Of the four songs, ʻShe's Got Another Pair
Of Shoesʼ is a meatily arranged R&B number, not particularly original
or exciting — sort of like a calmed-down James Brown tune, only distinguished
with a fluent, but weirdly out-of-tune piano solo. The other three, however,
are firmly in the then-current Brit-pop vein, with vaudeville and music hall
influences all over, but no traces of that «English haughtiness» that sometimes
turns people away from (and, more rarely, on to) this kind of material — in
other words, there's no danger of Alan Price ever developing the airs of a
David Bowie or a Robert Fripp (come to think of it, his Newcastle-Durham
background would probably be incompatible with such attitudes).
ʻThe House That Jack Builtʼ, in
particular, is a catchy piece of lyrical absurdity, stuck somewhere between
Dylan and Monty Python and oozing abstract sarcasm over its rise-up-and-shine
arrangement, all pianos and woodwinds and morning breeze. ʻDon't Do That
Againʼ is more slight in nature, but is actually even more catchy, a half-comical number on personal relationship issues
that shows an actual talent for vocal hooks — not an ability you'd suspect Mr.
Price of owning based on his earlier career; and ʻGrim Fairy Taleʼ, a
song that calls out loud for a tuxedo and top hat, is quite a serious
compositional stake, with several distinct parts seamlessly merged together in
a mini-suite that niftily shifts between ironically-happy and melancholic
moods.
Of course, these are only his first efforts,
and as far as meaningful-emotional compositions go, most of the covered Randy
Newman tunes here are superior — in fact, Newman is an obvious influence on
Price himself as songwriter; but at least Alan's interpretations of Randy's
material do the material perfect justice — and, if you have a hard time warming
up to Randy's creaky voice and raw, rambling arrangements (you shouldn't, but
it would be understandable), then Price's smooth, pleasant deliveries and the
tight control that he has over his brass section will be just right for a first
impression. (Same as the Byrds/Dylan relationship, yes). At the same time, I
cannot say that he really goes all the way to make the songs more interesting:
in the case of ʻLiving Without Youʼ, for instance, I'd rather either
go for the creaky-croaky original, or for the complete blazing power-pop
reinvention of Manfred Mann — Price's version is middle of the road, retaining
the minimal, demo-style piano arrangement, but not adding anything particularly
outstanding in the vocal department. Just nice. (Admittedly, ʻNo One Ever
Hurt This Badʼ is given an
excellent coating of brass, guitar, and keyboards).
The bonus tracks generally add more of the same
(for instance, ʻNot Born To Followʼ is yet another Goffin/King
cover), but also shows Alan dabbling around in various strands of folk —
American (ʻMy Old Kentucky Homeʼ) as well as British (ʻTrimdon
Grange Explosionʼ, taking you all the way back to an unfortunate event in
1882). The selection is so comprehensive, though, that it covers all of Price's
subsequent output all the way to 1970, meaning that you get his excellent
self-penned single ʻSunshine And Rainʼ, a piece of shiny funk-pop
with an outstanding kaleidoscopic arrangement of brass, mandolins,
psycho-keyboards that never overshadows the classy vocal hook. Overall, in
between the original album and the bonus tracks, if you filter out a dozen or
so throwaways, you are still left with a good LP's worth of very solid
material, so unlike the debut, this one gets a well-deserved thumbs up.
Hardly essential listening, but a must-own for all lovers of intelligent
late-Sixties Brit-pop (and, come to think of it, there wasn't really that much of it in the late Sixties).
O LUCKY MAN! (1973)
1) O Lucky Man!; 2) Poor
People; 3) Sell Sell; 4) Pastoral; 5) Arrival; 6) Look Over Your Shoulder; 7)
Justice; 8) My Home Town; 9) Changes; 10) O Lucky Man! (reprise).
I am not a big fan of Malcolm McDowell movies,
regardless of whether it's Kubrick, Lindsay Anderson, or, God help us, Tinto
Brass at the steering wheel — there's just something about the guy and the
kinds of scripts he is involved in, some sort of off-putting mix of hipness,
ugliness, pretentiousness, and shock value that I just cannot bring myself to
enjoy. So it is hardly a surprise that as of now, I have not even seen O Lucky Man! (I have seen If..., and have
no big wish to spend three more hours of my life on an Anderson/McDowell
collaboration) — however, I am happy to say that you do not at all need to see
the movie in order to be delighted by the soundtrack, which constitutes a
perfectly autonomous and self-sufficient Alan Price album on its own (actually,
mini-album: the whole thing, unlike the movie, is over in a measly 25 minutes,
because Alan, unlike most soundtrack composers, seems to have written precisely
as much music as he knew could make it onto the final cut. Ever thought about
how it must feel to write a 9-minute instrumental with only thirty seconds of
it making it to the actual movie? Well, apparently Price managed to circumvent
that problem).
Anyway, the reason why this thing works is
because Alan wrote it as a sort of abstract conceptual suite on matters of
everyday existence in contemporary England — ideologically, it reads like a Ray
Davies album in the tradition of Arthur
and Lola, and, for that matter, is
far more impressive, musically and
lyrically, than Davies' own rock opera Preservation
from that same year. Most importantly, it is the album that truly announced the
arrival of Alan Price, intelligent and talented songwriter with his own tale to
tell. It did not sell much and yielded no hit singles (at least, not until
1987, when ʻChangesʼ was used to advertise Volkswagen Golf), but it
nicely set the stage for his biggest commercial success with Between Today And Yesterday, and it
still sounds fresh and exciting after all these years.
The music, as usual, is a somewhat conservative
mix of British music hall and American R&B (more of the former than of the
latter), almost completely ignoring the hottest trends of 1973: the only number
here that does not sound like it could have been recorded in 1968 is the funk
rocker ʻSell Sellʼ, which cleverly takes the aggression and
frustration inherent in funk rhythms and wah-wah solos and channels it into a
spiked-tongue condemnation of commercialism. At four minutes, it is the longest
song on the album, as Price allows himself to stretch out a bit on an extended
organ solo, but the groove is sharp and quite involving, even if the vocal hook
owes quite a bit to ʻHarlem Shuffleʼ — then again, Price's composing
skills should probably be described,
in general, as «an ability to create interesting variations on other people's
melodies», be it in the rhythm & blues paradigm or in the traditional pop
one.
At least on ʻSell Sellʼ cynical words
are matched by cynical-sounding music; on the whole, though, the album makes
its living by contrasting bitter lyrics with pretty melodies — ʻLook Over
Your Shoulderʼ, for instance, is a catchy vaudeville tune, replete with
falsetto la-la's and stuff, whose ultimate message is "without that dream
you are nothing... you have to find out for yourself that dream is dead".
(La la la la and all that). ʻJusticeʼ, floating on a raft of
quasi-Mexican acoustic guitar, states that "we all want justice but you
got to have money to buy it" in the slyest possible tone and with the
friendliest of atmospheres. ʻPoor Peopleʼ sounds a little like Billy
Joel, but the good sort of Billy Joel
when he is not being too full of himself and banality, but actually manages to
combine humility with catchiness. And ʻChangesʼ, which is, in fact,
based on ʻWhat A Friend We Have In Jesusʼ, states that "love
must always change to sorrow, and everyone must play the game", declared
with as much enthusiasm as a proclamation of faith in salvation and life
everlasting.
And it all works fine, including a bunch of pretty
instrumentals (the lyrical piano bit on ʻPastoralʼ; the
quasi-progressive piano/organ interplay on ʻArrivalʼ) and two
versions of the title track that rock harder than everything else and are a
little reminiscent of poppier material by The Who like ʻLong Live
Rockʼ. And best of all, you really do not need any movies to enjoy it —
although, admittedly, it may be worth seeing the movie if only because Price is
featured in it himself, playing the role of a Greek chorus providing commentary
on the action. I'm happy enough to just have the commentary without the action,
and give it a self-standing thumbs up.
BETWEEN TODAY AND YESTERDAY (1974)
1) Left Over People; 2) Away,
Away; 3) Between Today And Yesterday; 4) In Times Like These; 5) Under The Sun;
6) Jarrow Song; 7) City Lights; 8) Look At My Face; 9) Angel Eyes; 10) You're
Telling Me; 11) Dream Of Delight; 12) Between Today And Yesterday.
The success of O Lucky Man! must have popped the cork off Alan's little bottle of
hitherto hidden ambitions, because he very quickly followed it up with the most
«serious» album in his career so far, and maybe ever — Between Today And Yesterday is a full-fledged conceptual piece
about everyday life (today and yesterday) in Northern England, a sort of epic
«Ode to Geordie» that will clearly strike the biggest chord of all with
Tyneside people, but might just as well appeal to everyone concerned with the
struggle and strife of ordinary people living in small, depressed towns all
over the world — the "left over people" of the album's introductory
song.
It is not some sort of breathtaking
masterpiece, no; Price is neither the master of the heart-tugging musical hook,
nor is he some fabulous unique singer who'd be capable of making his shopping
notes come alive under vocal pressure. But he's got style, taste, basic
songwriting capacities, and, above all else, he knows what he's doing and what
he's singing about — this is a tactful, honest record, and with repeated
listens, it gets under your skin through sheer humility and understatement
alone, never mind the melodicity and the pleasant arrangements. If there's any
reason why it could hardly hope to become a major international hit like some
Kinks album, it's because it is even more «British» musically than any given
Kinks album — with but a small handful of bluesy exceptions, it's all
vaudeville and music hall (although the Randy Newman influence is also very
keenly felt throughout).
In the UK, he did (rather unsurprisingly)
achieve his biggest commercial success with the record, which rose to #9 on the
charts; and the single ʻJarrow Songʼ reached #6, which would be the
last time ever he'd crack the top 10 on the single charts — an excellent song,
too, commemorating the Jarrow March of 1936 with a slightly-merrily-drunk anthemic
chorus and a cool structure, where the old-school music hall verse-chorus
segments are written from the point of view of the original participants of
the March and the more modern, rockier bridge section is written from the
author's point of view ("I can see them, I can feel them, I can hear them
/ As if they were here today"), until the author finally merges the past
with the present ("My name is little Alan Price..."). It's cool,
creative, sensitive, complex — precisely the way one should be writing songs of
social protest if one does not want them to be here today and forgotten
tomorrow — and arguably one of the finest glorifications of the "Geordie
boys" ever written, though probably too convoluted and too personal to be adopted as a high school anthem anywhere in
Tyneside.
The album as a whole is conceptually divided into the "Yesterday" and "Today" parts, corresponding to its two sides — and the "Yesterday" part, I'd say, is somewhat superior, since that is where he most fully unleashes his arrangement skills, with colorful use of brass, keyboards, and orchestration. ʻLeft Over Peopleʼ and ʻIn Times Like Theseʼ continue the good old tradition of sarcastic social criticism under the sauce of cheerful, catchy vaudeville; and ʻAway, Awayʼ is a touching, but not overtly sentimental account of wives seeing their husbands off to work in the morning. Probably the most underrated of all these is ʻUnder The Sunʼ, a lush orchestrated ballad where, for once, the weakness of Alan's voice works strongly in his favor — the strain, the shaky intonations, the occasional slip-ups make it all far more human than if Engelbert Humperdinck ever wanted to have a go at the stuff.
The "today" side, which was probably
intended to sound more «modern», is slightly patchier for that reason — this is
where we meet the somewhat corny synthesizers of ʻAngel Eyesʼ and the
substandard «modern R&B» number ʻCity Lightsʼ; however, I am
quite partial to the slow, bitter-burning blues of ʻYou're Telling
Meʼ, with some good old Animals-style organ soloing and quietly
understated guitar runs, and I cannot quite decide if ʻDream Of
Delightʼ sounds more like Crosby, Stills & Nash or like James Taylor,
but on the whole, it's a decent acoustic ballad, although it remains in sore
need of a decent hook to rise above pure «atmosphere».
The link that ties both sides together is the
title track, first presented in a stripped down piano arrangement and then
expanded to a full wall-of-sound arrangement, with tempestuous strings, a loud
rhythm section, and a gradual vocal crescendo. The basic melody is a bit
generic (remember Badfinger's ʻMidnight Callerʼ?), but this does not
prevent the song from reaching an epic climax. The point of the song, so it
seems, is to tell us that nothing ever changes, and "draw the shades"
and "let me drink black wine" — sort of a resigned conclusion, not
particularly alleviated by the fact that most of these songs have either a
tender or a humorous nature to them, because once again, like Roger wrote,
"quiet desperation is the English way", and it's as if Price made
this entire record to prove him right.
Anyway, do not expect any grand melodic
breakthroughs here; the record is to be enjoyed somewhere at the crossroads of
an intelligent concept, a charismatic personality, and deep musical experience
rather than because of outstanding songwriting genius or illuminating social
philosophy. Its purpose is to entertain your tired ears while at the same time
making you feel some compassion for the underdog — the kind of thing that we
normally expect from people like Billy Bragg, yet, as it turns out, Price had
the whole punk movement beat here for about two or three years, and he didn't
even have to resort to chainsaw buzz or «electro-busking» here. Patchy in
places, yes, but unquestionably a high point of his career, well worth another thumbs up.
METROPOLITAN MAN (1975)
1) Papers; 2) Fools Gold; 3)
Nobody Can; 4) A Little Inch; 5) Changing Partners; 6) Mama Divine; 7) Too Many
People; 8) Keep On Rollin'; 9) It's Not Easy; 10) Sweet P; 11) The Drinker's
Curse.
The relative success of Between Today & Yesterday made Alan invest in an attempt to
repeat the same approach, but on a slightly humbler scale — this, too, is
largely a conceptual, and this time an even more personal album about the past
and the present, but lacking the elements of grandeur that may have appealed to
the «progressively trained» buyers in 1974. Actually, it is this low-key
attitude that may explain why its predecessor sold reasonably well, whereas Metropolitan Man seems to have bombed,
and even in retrospect remains totally obscure (not even a measly review at the
All-Music Guide!) When in reality it is every bit as good as its predecessor
and maybe even better — at least in terms of consistency.
The fact that there are no grand, stately
compositions here in the vein of ʽJarrow Songʼ or ʽBetween
Today And Yesterdayʼ might even be positive, because Mr. Price, with his
passion for homely pubs, quiet provincial life, and cozy vaudeville, is far
from your poster boy for Grand Statements — he has neither the compositional
nor the vocal talent for that. But he'd honed his compositional and vocal
talents well enough to ensure that Metropolitan
Man has not a single bad, or, more precisely, not a single unattractive
song on it. It's a wonderful combination of diverse melodies, stretching across
several distinct genres, tasteful arrangements, clever lyrics, and a rainbow of
joyful sadness and optimistic melancholy that arches all the way from Tyneside
to Randy Newman's Brooklyn.
Song-by-song, it might easily be his single
best set. Even if the man never succeeded in inventing his own sub-genre or
anything, here he excels at practically every genre. On the dynamic side,
ʽPapersʼ is a brilliantly multi-layered power-pop piece, with an
ecstatic slide guitar lead part ruling over a bedrock of pianos, synthesizers,
and brass as the man himself launches into a biting condemnation of the yellow
press; ʽNobody Canʼ is somewhat of a musical and lyrical answer to Elton's ʽCrocodile Rockʼ, every bit
as catchy as the latter but not as superficially corny; and ʽChanging
Partnersʼ is a hilariously loving parody on Fifties' rock'n'roll, with
Alan going all Jerry Lee Lewis on the piano, mock-stadium applause mixed in for
«authenticity», and the guitar man going expectedly batshit crazy on the solo.
Things are subtler and much more moving on the
ballad side — ʽFool's Goldʼ, at the least, should have been a
classic, with a really choking chord change introduced in the long solo organ
intro and then reprised in the vocal melody; this is, once again, Price taking
a lesson from the sad side of Paul McCartney and Badfinger, and matching it to
his own memories and experiences accumulated during his musical career. For
ʽA Little Inchʼ, his lead guitarist, whoever he is, borrows the
«weeping slide» style of George Harrison and uses it admirably in combination
with Alan's own weepy tale of an unsuccessful love affair. Even the
orchestrated schmaltz-pop of ʽIt's Not Easyʼ creeps under your skin,
by means of Price's weak, gently trembling voice.
In addition to all that, you get a fun calypso
romp with a supercatchy chorus (ʽMama Divineʼ), a tight, slightly Exile On Main Street-ish R&B/gospel
groove riding a cooler-than-hell bassline (ʽToo Many Peopleʼ), a dark
New Orleanian blues shuffle with swampy harmonica (ʽKeep On
Rollin'ʼ), a 100% Randy Newman rip-off that should by all means be
reserved for some future Pixar movie (ʽSweet Pʼ), and a plaintive «me
and my piano» coda that should, of course, be played by the pianist late at
night when the only clients left at the bar are those unable to leave the place
on all fours (ʽThe Drinker's Curseʼ). Lascivious, spiritual, ominous,
empathetic, depressed but unyielding — there's your emotional variety contained
in this little bunch alone, and there's more: the album brings a whole new
dimension to the understanding of what it is to be a true «metropolitan man».
Why this whole thing is not considered a
timeless classic is understandable — a low-key personality like Price, without
a lot of brazenly original ideas, is not going to attract a lot of attention.
Why the album is so completely neglected is a different question — even though
it has been released on CD, I don't exactly see lost treasure hunters flocking
towards it in sufficient numbers. In such situations, even a measly, but strong
thumbs up
on a «maverick review blog» can be of a little help, and we here at Only
Solitaire are happy to provide, particularly since most of us, I'm sure, will
find an easy way to relate to at least parts of this record.
PERFORMING PRICE (1975)
1) Arrival; 2) O Lucky Man!;
3) Left Over People; 4) Away Away; 5) Under The Sun; 6) In Times Like These; 7)
Simon Smith And The Amazing Dancing Bear; 8) Poor People; 9) Sell Sell; 10)
Justice; 11) Look Over Your Shoulder; 12) Too Many People; 13) Nobody Can; 14)
Keep On Rollin'; 15) City Lights; 16) You're Telling Me / Is There Anybody Out
There; 17) Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo; 18) Sweet P; 19) I Put A Spell On You; 20) It Takes
Me Back; 21) Between Today And Yesterday; 22) Changes; 23) O Lucky Man!
(reprise).
Another year, another pun. Actually, the price
was right on the money here, because it's a double live album which now comes
for the price of a single CD (provided you can find it at all) — and it
captures the man at the absolute peak of his solo career, so much so that he
plays pretty much the entire Lucky Man!
soundtrack, and a huge huge chunk of stuff from Between Today & Yesterday. Indeed, the setlist is the
highlight of the show — 90% is from his last three records (apparently, Metropolitan Man was still in the
works, so there's only four songs from that one as a preview of things to
come), with three hit singles from the 1960s thrown in as golden oldie bonuses,
and not a single Animals song in sight (I'm not sure he ever dared to do
ʽRising Sunʼ on his own, no matter how much the public would probably
love to hear him have a go).
The principal problem is predictable: all the
songs are played relatively safe, sticking close to studio arrangements, and
Alan is so busy trying to get the best out of his weak voice that he almost
completely concentrates on «getting it right». Which he does, most of the time,
but as good as it must have been for the paying audience, I don't exactly see
the performance opening any new dimensions for these tunes. I absolutely do not
mind hearing the songs once again — they're all great, and getting them all
assembled in one place is nice, and you can use it as extra confirmation of
the fact that at least for a three-year period, Alan Price somehow emerged as
one of Britain's top-level songwriters, but that's about it.
Stage-wise, Alan is as humble as ever, usually
cutting the banter down to regular thank you's and occasional brief
explanations of what the next song is about; there's a little bit of audience
interaction for the chorus of ʽIn Times Like Theseʼ, but that's
about it. There are no soloing or jamming detours whatsoever — the band
obviously follows strict instructions to stick to the rules, and the rules are
so strict that they even brought an orchestra along to reproduce all the lush
string parts. (By the way, the concert was apparently held in January 1975
somewhere in London and parts of it were also transmitted for a TV show — you
can easily catch a few glimpses on YouTube these days). Eventually, it just
leaves you in a situation where the only thing left to do is wonder, «what is
he going to leave out anyway?» And he leaves out most of the weak stuff, yes,
but for some reason they also don't do ʽThe Jarrow Songʼ —
considering that it was one of his biggest hits, that's a tough one to explain.
On the whole, a nice, polite, gentlemanly,
feel-good experience, but not really
worth a thumbs up, unless one wants to specially elevate Mr. Price just for the
sake of his overall nice vibe. On the plus side, the man loyally did his 1970s duty
and left us with a double live LP, even despite never claiming to be a
progressive rock or a heavy metal artist. (Actually, that should have been a triple live LP to satisfy all the
conditions, but for somebody who never engaged in twenty-minute long symph-rock
suites, that'd have been one real tough challenge).
SHOUTS ACROSS THE STREET (1976)
1) Glass Mountain; 2) The
Waste Land; 3) Leave It All To Me; 4) Hungry For Love; 5) I Know When I've Had
Enough; 6) Shouts Across The Street; 7) I Just Got Love; 8) Don't Stop; 9) The
World's Going Down On Me; 10) Cherie; 11) Don't Try; 12) Farewell Goodbye.
This next record from Alan seems almost
deliberately «low key» and even plain regressive, compared to the vivid
panoramas of provincial British life that he set up on his last three. I mean,
being serious about your native country is fine and dandy, right? But you can't
do it forever; a man needs a break every now and then, and so Shouts Across The Street is a much
lighter and a much less inventive affair. Here, we see Mr. Price falling back
on some good old blues-rock and R&B grooves, as well as retaining his
passion for vaudeville, but throwing out most of the social realism and
replacing it with simpler tales of love, lust, misery, and happiness.
Not that it's bad or anything — «low key» is
fine by me if the grooves are strong and the frontman is attractive, and as
long as Alan is not impersonating Billy Joel or Barry White, he's doing okay.
Unfortunately, he does impersonate
Billy (ʽLeave It All To Meʼ) and Barry (ʽDon't Stopʼ) at
least a couple of times, and these songs just sound like uncomfortable attempts
at sounding «modern» for 1976; ʽDon't Stopʼ is a particularly corny flop,
with embarrassing falsetto "baby, baby, baby"s and a soft-romantic
piano-embellished funk groove that would at least require the presence of a
uniquely sexy vocalist (like Al Greene) before it could even begin fulfilling
its pragmatic purpose (bedding hot chicks). All that's missing here is a gold
medallion on a hairy chest, but we don't even know if Alan had enough hair for
the purpose — and in any case, he always had it better with a bowtie on.
On the other hand, all of the tunes here that
have a more «retro» sound to them work better: even silly-named tracks like
ʽHungry For Loveʼ, with a fun blues-based pop-rock melody and a memorable
guitar line (played on something that sounds very close to 10cc's
"Gizmo" guitar), are acceptable, not to mention happy barroom
shuffles like ʽI Know When I've Had Enoughʼ or lusty romps like
ʽThe Waste Landʼ. On most of these tracks, Alan plays a careless
clown, but his vocal and musical charisma have sure grown since his mid-Sixties
singles, and he is now much less shy and reserved when getting into character, which
makes him fairly convincing when impersonating either the chauvinist gigolo on
ʽI Knowʼ or the midnight stalker on ʽWaste Landʼ (okay, so
neither of these set positive social examples, but it's tough to stay clean all
the time).
For something more serious, keep your eyes and
ears on ʽThe World's Going Down On Meʼ, starting out with a chord
sequence not unlike Harrison's ʽIsn't It A Pityʼ (so you can slap the
«epic» label on it without reservation), but never really diving into the
depths of misery: instead, it tries for an optimistic-sounding chorus that
contrasts lyrical lamentation ("I think the world's going down on me / You
can't imagine what I've seen") with beautiful falsetto resolutions of the
chorus melody and a wall of sound with soaring organs and guitars — works
beautifully when you want to aggrandize your misery and raise it to the status
of Universal Tragedy, thus offering yourself some consolation in the process.
Still, by the time you get to the end, those
final lines of "Farewell, goodbye / I hope I didn't make you cry"
might seem self-ironic — to fans eager for more musical tales of Geordie life
and social allegories, Shouts Across The
Street may well have been a solid disappointment, and, of course, it did
absolutely nothing to revive the man's briefly successful commercial career.
Granted, it may well have been a conscious move away from being stereotyped as
a new «working class hero», but in any case, the deed was done: the album ended
his flirt with fame and fortune once and for all, and from then on, nothing
would help — not even the brief reunion with his former band a year later,
which took place right in the middle of the «punk revolution» and was doomed
from the start anyway. And yet, now that we've left those times far behind and
feel ourselves free to judge musical records based just on their feel-good
quotient rather than their throbbing relevance at the time, Shouts Across The Street does come
across as a fun listening experience on the whole (ʽDon't Stopʼ and
an occasional «cock-rock» misfire like ʽI Just Got Loveʼ aside), and I
could hardly deny it a thumbs up — after all, it's only rock'n'roll and
all that.
ALAN PRICE (1977)
1) Rainbow's End; 2) I've Been
Hurt; 3) I Wanna Dance; 4) Let Yourself Go; 5) Just For You; 6) I'm A Gambler;
7) Poor Boy; 8) The Same Love; 9) Is It Right; 10) Life Is Good; 11) The Thrill.
I am not quite sure if this was recorded and
released before or immediately after the first attempt at the original Animals'
reunion... but who cares? It's not as if you can see any faint echoes of
«Animalisms» in this album, which seems to be continuing in the same direction
as its predecessor — glossing Alan's image as that of a clean-cut entertainer
with equal respect to vintage and modern forms of said entertainment. For sure,
this «between today and yesterday» angle makes for a mildly interesting listen,
but in fact the album's only saving grace is Price's humble charisma that even
a bowtie cannot totally melt away.
The record is a stylistic hodge-podge — there's
gospel soul (ʽRainbow's Endʼ), discofied pop rock (ʽI've Been
Hurtʼ), sugary folk pop (ʽI Wanna Danceʼ), funk-pop (ʽLet
Yourself Goʼ), Billy Joel-esque balladry (ʽJust For Youʼ),
glossed-over rock'n'roll (ʽI'm A Gamblerʼ), and later on, there'll be
some blues, some country, some vaudeville... no two songs really sound alike,
which would have probably made the album a masterpiece if all the tunes had
something new and stunning to say in their respective genres. Which they do
not; but Price sings them all in his usual lovable voice, and oversees
arrangements that avoid contemporary gimmicks and concentrate on quite
traditional and well-constructed guitar and organ solos. (The screechy guitar
solo on ʽLife Is Goodʼ is particularly well rounded — I have no idea
who Rod Hendry, the officially credited guitar player, is, but if he's alive
and well, please tell him that somebody still cares).
Most importantly, the «new» elements, such as
the very well noticeable disco bassline on ʽI've Been Hurtʼ, are quite
harmlessly integrated with old stylistics — really, that song sounds just like good
old time barroom entertainment, just with an extra «hop quotient» thrown in for
the sake of modernity. And I suppose that on ʽI'm A Gamblerʼ, Alan
delivers a solo on the newly manufactured Polymoog synth, because you just
don't get that sound from him or anybody else prior to those times, but it just
adds a slightly «technophile» aspect to take away the generic flavor of this
otherwise completely run-of-the-mill boogie number.
The only real standout on the album is
ʽRainbow's Endʼ, which could have easily fit on any of Alan's
conceptual records — a soulful, self-questioning epic with great interaction
between the almost operatic lead vocal part (terrific falsetto flourishes at the
end of each line) and the gospel-style backing vocals. Unfortunately, it sets
the wrong tone for the record: had it been placed at the end, it might have
mildly stunned us as a sort of ʽDay In The Lifeʼ conclusion to the
overall «whimsy» of the album — as it is, it serves as an inadequately grand
introduction to lots of pleasant, but simplistic entertainment (although
ʽLife Is Goodʼ, near the end of the record, tries to somewhat remedy
the situation and bring back the epic vibe — especially with that guitar solo —
but it is not as originally written as ʽRainbow's Endʼ).
Still a thumbs up, though: the overall combination of
diversity, modest energy, occasional hooks, and personal charisma ensure that
this is one of those «high-mediocre» albums where nothing specifically stands
out, but the collective humor, emotionality, and taste produces a positive vibe
all the same. Generic entertainment, yes, and, again, a far cry from the man's
lucky streak of 1973-75, but «if all generic entertainment were like this»...
and you can finish this one up in any way you personally prefer.
ENGLAND MY ENGLAND (1978)
1) England My England; 2) This
Ain't Your Lucky Day; 3) Mama Don't Go Home; 4) Groovy Times; 5) Baby Of Mine;
6) I Love You Too; 7) Those Tender Lips; 8) Citizens Of The World Unite; 9)
Help From You; 10) Pity The Poor Boy.
Odd how, when you listen to these records by
«second rate» artists peaking in the early-to-mid Seventies, you get this sharp
feeling of «gradually winding down» — each next album being ever so slightly
inferior compared to its predecessor, but slightly, slightly, so that the
contrast is felt particularly between extremes rather than neighbors. Compared
to Alan Price, England My England is merely suffering from a tiny extra touch of
disco and a tiny extra touch of Billy Joel-itis (Joel-light-is, I mean), but then if you play it next to Lucky Man!, well...
Again, hardly a single song here sounds really
embarrassing, but this is only because the author relies too much on the tried
and true: vaudeville, R&B clichés, soft funky grooves, conventional
ballad structures — and his usual humble charisma, which is by far the only
thing that has not deteriorated, because, well, that's just a fact of nature. Again,
the songs are divided between love ballads, love-sex grooves, and a few
sociopolitical declarations thrown in for old times' sake — such as the title
track, which starts out sounding more like a Russian folk song than a patriotic
English anthem, somehow redeems itself in the chorus ("we are your
children, oh England, don't cry!"), and still leaves behind a confused impression,
particularly when Alan begins to scat-sing to these Russian cossack dance
moves. There's also ʽCitizens Of The World Uniteʼ, which only lacks a
proper Barry Gibb falsetto to have been a big hit at Studio 54, which — no
doubt about it — was the place for
citizens of the world to unite at the time.
I struggle to single out any highlights, but
arguably ʽGroovy Timesʼ is Price's finest moment here, starting out
as one of those unremarkable soft funk grooves only to have him launch into an
extended, warm, gentle, and classy jazz piano solo that sounds absolutely
fabulous even on top of the most generic and glossy arrangement imaginable.
Another track that stands out after a few listens is ʽHelp From Youʼ,
a slow piece of soul with an impressive vocal buildup — and it is quite
strategically placed near the end of the album, so that after a series of
quiet, unassuming, humble grooves you get this one particular spiritual
statement where the man gives it his all, suddenly becoming a vocal powerhouse
for six minutes and not losing an ounce of his usual sincerity at that.
Overall, this is by no means a bad record; it
merely confirms the man's complete resignation from any truly «creative» angle,
let alone the more demanding «experimental», but the mix of ancient and modern
stylistic influences is still intelligent (it is not often, after all, that you
find Phil Spector-style vocal harmonies, Ray Charles-style keyboards and disco basslines on the same album),
the man's aura is still pleasant, and as far as generic entertainment from 1978
is concerned, this is a far better proposition than a great percentage of
chart-hitting disco burners.
RISING SUN (1980)
1) The House Of The Rising
Sun; 2) I'm Coming Back; 3) Mr. Sunbeam; 4) Love You True; 5) Perfect Lady; 6)
Wake Up; 7) The Love That I Needed; 8) I Have Tried; 9) Don't Make Me Suffer;
10) Music In The City.
Well, you knew it would happen some day, and
that day would be the beginning of the end — the day that Alan Price finally
resorts to re-recording ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ. Looking at how he
trimmed the song title for the album title, and at all the stereotypical
Japanese paraphernalia on the album sleeve, I sort of hoped that he'd at least
go for a pseudo-Japanese arrangement, for amusement's sake — but no, the
arrangement is fairly uninventive, with a slightly funkified beat and a wailing
saxophone part replacing the original guitar melody (the organ solo is, of
course, preserved, though it's nowhere near as tense as it used to be).
Surprisingly, Alan sings the thing really well, almost on Burdon's level, which just goes to show how much
confidence he had gained as a singer over the past decade — but still, was that
really necessary?..
Because the rest of the record is just
completely incompatible with the re-recording: it's almost as if the latter was
forced on the man by his record label or something, as they were worrying about
the impending lack of sales and all. (People are stupid, see, and they have
this uncontrollable urge to buy everything that has ʽHouse Of The Rising
Sunʼ stamped on it — 100% success if it is also accompanied by a picture
of a bikini-clad geisha). All the songs are very lightweight, unpretentious,
lyrically simplistic (but with a few fun Newman-style twists woven in here and
there) and reflecting Alan's by now traditional integration of old school
vaudeville and new school dance-pop. No social observations or philosophical
undercurrents whatsoever.
Actually, that's nothing to be ashamed of,
because the record is fun — harmless,
fluffy fun. Even when he takes a merry country jig (ʽPerfect Ladyʼ),
replaces the banjo part with bubbly-funky, synthetically treated guitar and the
fiddle part with a really stupid-sounding synth, it still works, because the
whole thing is a musical joke, and this time the joke's on the instrumentation.
It's maddeningly catchy, too, even if (like so many other songs of his) the man
probably pilfered it from some country record that I've never heard. The same
applies to the majority of the material: these songs sound more like
lighthearted parodies of various musical genres than sincere exercises in any
of them, which is probably what makes the album ultimately enjoyable rather
than embarrassing.
Anyway, here is a quick run through the
«highlights»: ʽI'm Coming Backʼ sounds like a send-up of Cheap
Trick-ish power pop, everything very ecstatic, but with an ironic smile behind
all the hystrionic guitar soloing and vocal roaring; ʽWake Upʼ
borrows the opening piano line of ʽMess Aroundʼ for its own purposes
— a comedic send-up of the "get up and work" idea; ʽThe Love
That I Neededʼ and ʽDon't Make Me Sufferʼ are old school pop
rock, with female vocal harmonies, pleasant chorus resolutions and no ambition
whatsoever; and ʽMusic In The Cityʼ caps things off with the album's
only straightforward disco number that, once again, sounds pretty
tongue-in-cheek to me, although — I admit — this might simply be due to the
overall strangeness of the idea of the Animals' keyboardist and Malcolm
McDowell's soul mate doing disco.
I really really like one song here — the straightforward
cabaret number ʽMr. Sunbeamʼ. Of all the tunes here, this one seems
to be the only one to capture some of Alan's patented Englishness, including
some awesomely quirky lyrical lines ("It's tough at the top, but rougher
at the bottom / And positively boring in between") and a properly sunny
attitude for those of us who feel down and out. Simple as it is, this is the
one that could have easily fit in on any of his mid-Seventies masterpieces. But
one song, of course, is not enough to salvage the record from the misdemeanor
of «fluffiness», and the re-recording of ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ
(which, by the way, on this record is directly
credited to Alan Price, not even listed as «traditional, arr. by Alan
Price» as it used to be — did they think nobody would notice?), decent or not,
is still an unforgivable artistic gaffe, so no thumbs up here.
LIBERTY (1989)
1) Fool's In Love; 2)
Everything But Love; 3) Days Like These; 4) Bad Dream; 5) Double Love; 6)
Changes; 7) Mania Ureania; 8) Liberty; 9) Say It Isn't True; 10) Free With Me;
11) Man Overboard.
In the 1980s, Alan's musical activity abruptly
decreased, which now seems kind of a good thing, given the general
inauspiciousness of that decade for veteran rockers. Discographies of that period
are vague and contradictory, which probably has to do with the fact that, once
his contract with Jet Records had expired, he found himself without a permanent
record label, and whenever he did choose to record something, it could only be
picked up by some minor team for a very limited release. As far as I can tell,
he did manage to put out an album of old folk cover tunes (but also including
Dylan's ʽGirl Of (sic!) The
North Countryʼ), called Geordie
Roots And Branches, in 1982 on a local Newcastle label; and then there's Travellin' Man from 1986, for some
reason released on the Jamaica-based Trojan Records and largely consisting of
covers of New Orleanian music from Snooks Eaglin to Fats Domino. Good luck
finding these in any form — nobody ever thought of properly digitalizing either
— but something tells me that you won't miss too much if you never hear Mr.
Price digging all the way down to his Geordie roots or confessing his burning
love for Louisiana bayous.
The first and only Eighties' album that is available on CD (because that was the
way it was originally released) is Liberty.
It consists largely of original material (although a re-recording of
ʽChangesʼ was still thrown in, probably in the same vain hope of
boosting sales a little bit that had already made Alan cheapen his act with the
new-and-not-improved ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ at the beginning of
the decade), but most of the songs were co-written by Price with guitar player
Steve Grant, formerly of the band Top Secret that was managed by Chas Chandler.
The band itself only had one LP out in 1981, but apparently, Steve and his
brother Pete Grant (on bass) got acquainted with Alan through Chas, and
eventually got together as almost equal partners to try and help Alan get back
in show business.
The result is pretty much what you'd expect
from Price at this point. There seems to be no force in the world that would tear
him from his beloved vaudeville and Randy Newmanisms, but just as he was always
okay about combining them with contemporary trends in the Seventies (disco
etc.), so is he willing to try out some Eighties' clichés here. So get
ready for some really plastic and corny electronic keyboards, even cornier
electronic echo on the drums, and at least one or two very, very bad songs on
the fringe of arena-rock, synth-pop, and hair metal (ʽFree With Meʼ,
where Mr. Price confesses that "I really want a woman with me
tonight" as if he were Bryan Adams to really awful synths and
testosteronic guitar solos).
On the other hand, ten years of relative
inactivity have not completely extinguished his songwriting talents, and
there's still a nice stack of good taste that cannot be totally hidden from
view by corny arrangements. The record is bookmarked by two catchy, fun pop
rockers — ʽFool's In Loveʼ is harmless danceable vaudeville, and
ʽMan Overboardʼ, despite the grim title, is an upbeat, ʽDon't
Stopʼ-like power pop number whose charm largely consists of making you
sing "throw me down another line, this man's overboard" as if you
were celebrating rather than panicking. In between, there's decent New
Orleanian R&B (ʽEverything But Loveʼ), a surprisingly gripping
funk rocker with a "girl we gotta get out of this place" message
(ʽBad Dreamʼ), and a completely unexpected baroque-pop number about
the illusion of liberty (title track) with orchestration straight out of 1967 —
probably the only song here that would feel well at home on any of the records
from his classic period.
That does not mean that the record should have
included boring adult contemporary balladry like ʽDouble Loveʼ, or a
completely unnecessary eight-minute long Epic Cover of Jackson Browne's
ʽSay It Isn't Trueʼ, or the energy-wasting New Wave rocker
ʽMania Ureaniaʼ; nor does it mean that it is, in any way, an
improvement over his middle-of-the-road albums from 1976 to 1980, although it
does seem to have a higher percentage of «socially conscious» tunes than any of
those. But this is by-the-book social consciousness, not really supported by
equal feeling within the music, and, as I said, only the title track truly
gives away the same sensitive, emotional Alan Price who used to be such an
enchanting spokesman for the North. Overall, quite listenable and suffering
much less from Eighties' overproduction than it could, and Steve Grant makes a
decent songwriting (if not necessarily guitar-playing) partner for the man, but
certainly not the kind of «big comeback» that could be hoped for after ten
years of near-silence.
A GIGSTER'S LIFE FOR ME (1995)
1) Boom Boom; 2) Rockin'
Pneumonia And The Boogie-Woogie Flu; 3) Rollin' Like A Pebble In The Sand; 4) I
Put A Spell On You; 5) Good Times / Bad Woman; 6) Some Change; 7) Enough Is
Enough; 8) Whatcha Gonna Do; 9) A Gigster's Life For Me; 10) (I Got) Business
With The Blues; 11) How You've Changed; 12) Old Love; 13) What Am I Living For;
14) Say It Isn't True.
Liberty was pretty much the last of Alan Price's
attempts to record a more or less complete LP of new material. Either he ran
out of inspiration, or he just got tired of all his records selling poorly (he
probably makes more royalties off ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ these
days than he does off his entire solo career anyway), or both, but anyway, the
fact remains that Alan Price as a productive songwriter entered a period of
decline in the 1980s and kicked the bucket in the 1990s.
Playing and touring was another matter, though,
and for those purposes, sometime around 1994 Alan formed a «supergroup» of
sorts, called The Electric Blues Company and featuring some of his old friends
and colleagues — Peter Grant, who already played with him in the 1980s, on
bass; Bobby Tench (formerly a sideman with Van Morrison, Freddie King, Jeff
Beck, Ginger Baker, and many other far more famous people than himself) on
guitar; and Zoot Money, one of Britain's most renowned sidemen, on guitar and
keyboards. (Drummer Martin Wilde is the only dark horse, and I can sort of see
why).
For the most part, these guys just played
together, soending a lot of time on the road; in between touring, they did,
however, venture into the studio as well, recording the dull-titled Covers in 1994 (haven't heard that one
and would be very reluctant to try it out — not another version of ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ, dear
Lord!), and the slightly more colorful Gigster's
Life For Me in 1995, which was picked up by Sanctuary's «Masters Of Blues»
series and for that reason remains the somewhat easier available album of the
two. And, clearly, the more interesting, because it focuses on slightly more
obscure material than Covers, as
well as offers at least a couple Price originals for those few admirers who are
always waiting.
Unfortunately, unlike the surprisingly enthusiastic
Thom Jurek from the All-Music Guide who even resorted to the word
"terrific" to describe the album, I can only confess to having been
deeply and profoundly bored all through Gigster's
Life's inadequate hour-plus running length. Unless you just got to have yourself some
retro-oriented, uninventive, run-of-the-mill blues-rock from 1995, the record
has very little to recommend it, and, most importantly, it does not sound like
a proper Alan Price record — true to its name and nature, it sounds like the
results of a session on which Alan Price is a bit player. He does not even sing
lead vocals on most of the tracks (Bobby Tench and Zoot Money handle them, and
both sound like your average rockabilly singer in the local bar on a Saturday
night), although on the rare occasion when he does, the level of excitement sweeps up considerably: for instance,
Rudy Toombes' ʽRollin' Like A Pebble In The Sandʼ is a nice jazzy
ballad — nothing special, just nice.
But there is nothing nice whatsoever about limp
versions of old classics like ʽBoom Boomʼ or ʽRockin'
Pneumoniaʼ, played with some pretense to rock'n'roll energy but sounding
totally uninspired and pro forma. There is nothing nice about yet another version of ʽI Put A Spell
On Youʼ — even the old rendition from the late Sixties was nowhere near
the true capacities of Alan Price, and how could he ever hope to compete with
the likes of Screaming Jay Hawkins or John Fogerty thirty years later? There's
nothing nice about a long, lazy, unfocused rendition of ʽWhat Am I Living
Forʼ, a three-minute R&B song at best that has been slowed down to
five. There's totally nothing nice about yet another version of Jackson
Browne's ʽSay It Isn't Trueʼ — eleven minutes? you must be joking.
Most ridiculous of all, there is nothing nice about the band selecting, out of
all of Eric Clapton's catalog, ʽOld Loveʼ from the Journeyman album: I have actually
always thought that this blues ballad has potential, but it was not properly
realized with the original arrangement and neither was it properly performed
here (Eric can sometimes make the song come to life in concert, and maybe these
guys could, too — who really knows? — but in the studio, it only shows a brief
sign of pulse in the transition from verse to chorus).
The only thing I can say in favor of the record
is that Bobby Tench is a damn good guitar player when he really puts his heart
to it — based on some of his solos (most notably on the Boz Scaggs cover
ʽSome Changeʼ and on the Peter Green cover ʽWhatcha Gonna
Doʼ), I wouldn't really mind seeing him live. Sharp, crispy tone, great
control over sustained notes, kick-ass punchy licks, the works. But even that
is only present on just a few songs. As for Alan's originals, the title track,
co-written with Bobby, is an unconvincing stab at pop-reggae, and only
ʽHow You've Changedʼ features him in his trademark Randy Newmanesque
mode, but the song is too slow and the vocal hook is too lazy to make much of a
difference.
Bottomline is: if the guys actually had a good
time recording this memento of themselves in the studio, we should all be happy
for their veteran egos, God bless 'em and all. But as for everybody else, the
record deserves, at best, a cursory listen, just so you could make sure that
Alan Price was indeed alive and well in the 1990s (we know that, as of 2016, he
is still alive, but I know next to nothing of any touring or recording
activities of his in the past ten years), and a thumbs down just because I'm
pretty sure these guys could do better if they wanted to do better, but they
probably just didn't want to.
THE COOL SOUND OF ALBERT COLLINS (1958-1965)
1) Frosty; 2) Hot 'n' Cold; 3)
Frost Bite; 4) Tremble; 5) Thaw Out; 6) Dyin' Flu; 7) Don't Lose Your Cool; 8)
Backstroke; 9) Cool Aide; 10) Shiver And Shake; 11) Icy Blue; 12) Snow Cone
Pt. 1; 13) Snow Cone Pt. 2; 14*) Defrost; 15*) I Don't Know; 16*) Cookin'
Catfish; 17*) Takin' My Time; 18*) Freeze; 19*) Soul Road; 20*) Homesick; 21*)
Sippin' Soda; 22*) Albert's Alley; 23*) Collins' Shuffle.
It is fairly well possible to like electric
blues without even having heard of
Albert Collins — the man had, more or less, formed a clique within himself.
During his lifetime, he could occasionally be found guest-starring at an Eric
Clapton performance or duetting with B. B. King, but his records were nearly
always released through minor labels, and he hadn't had much commercial success
ever since his first, most profitable, batch of singles established him as a
presence back in the late Fifties. And yet, no serious history of electric
blues can do without Albert Collins.
It took this gritty guy from Texas a long, long
time to firmly settle down in the studio. His first band was assembled in 1952,
but he didn't get a contract until 1958, first with Kangaroo Records and then
with Hall-Way — labels that no one outside of Texas probably knows these days.
The first singles, like 'Freeze', sold reasonably well, but either they didn't
sell well enough for a major label to take proper interest in yet another blues
axeman, or the axeman himself wasn't interested in getting any attention from
the biggies. So, unlike B. B. King, whose LPs, baked at astonishing speed and
almost completely indistinguishable from each other, rained on the market all
through the 1960s, Collins did not have an actual LP release until 1968.
He did cut singles at a regular rate, though,
and fortunately for all of us, many of these were collected and released as The Cool Sound Of Albert Collins in
1965, then re-released as Truckin' With
Albert Collins in 1969. The twelve songs included on that album were far
from a comprehensive overview of the man's formative years, though, and it is
advisable to seek out an extended version of the album with 23 tracks, on an
obscure (bootleg-running?) label called Blue City Records — granted, the bonus
tracks on my copy sound transferred from crackly vinyl, but the sound quality
on the songs themselves is clear and enjoyable.
So what's the deal with the «cool» guy Albert
Collins? Let's start off with a provocative hyperbole: Albert Collins
single-handedly invented the heavy blues-rock of the 1960s before the 1960s
even began, and without Albert Collins, there would never have been a Jimi
Hendrix, a Cream, or a Led Zeppelin. Getting fairly interesting there, isn't
it?
One of the man's nicknames was «The Razor
Blade» — a brilliant metaphor, since this is exactly what his sound feels like
on at least half of these tracks. He himself, however, was much more a fan of
«snowy» and «icy» metaphors — just cast a brief look at the titles of his
instrumental performances. His ice and snow are, however, not the Gothic-style
snow-covered forests with howling winds and prowling wolves attached; rather,
they are the crunch and crackle of crystallized substances under the heavy
blows of the alpinist's icepick on an energetic, sun-filled day of mountaineering,
if you pardon so much emphasis on metaphors.
Part of Albert's freshness and uniqueness at
the time was his use of non-standard tunings, partly responsible for his having
a fat, robust tone, contrasting with the generally thin, wimpy sound of most
competition. But the major thing
about him was that he was not afraid to throw overboard the well-known bag of
guitar clichés and, in a way, invent his own guitar language — one that
was not afraid of its technical simplicity, betting it all on pure expression.
Some of the better guitarists of that age, like Otis Rush and Freddie King,
were teaching their guitars to feel and to ache; Collins taught his to speak
and to act.
Take 'Freeze', his breakthrough: the whole tune
is essentially based around a repetitive three-note sequence — Albert does not
even bother taking a solo, leaving these embellishing matters to the sax
player. But the sound of these three notes is great — steadily going down from
a high screaming pitch, in a way that no one made their guitar scream in 1958,
to a low distorted grumble, the way only Link Wray would allow himself to grumble,
and Link Wray played an entirely different style of music anyway. Daringly
minimalistic, so much so that the whole thing could have easily been
misunderstood as unprofessional, but leaving an impression like nothing else.
Albert's rhythmic basis, contrastingly, is
rather generic for its era: yer basic boogies, shuffles, rhumbas, even an
uncomfortable attempt at surf-rock on 'Icy Blue' — virtually no mid-tempo or slow 12-bar blues,
though, which is quite fitting for his personality: none of that «soul» thing,
which quite a few others can, and will, do much better than he can and even more others can, and will, do much
worse. The Cool Sound is cool
indeed, in that it rocks your world all the way. Vocal numbers are at a
minimum: 'Dyin' Flu' shows that the man can sing, but also shows that singing
is not one of his strong sides. And when he does, almost reluctantly, feel like
slowing down for a bit of pure blues, he still makes his guitar whine, choke,
sputter, and even go cluck-cluck instead of doing it «the regular way»
('Cookin' Catfish'). What a guy.
It may have been almost criminally
underappreciated at the time, but the man is really intent on avoiding endless self-repetition on the solos,
putting all his trust into these minimalistic hooks. His brass and keyboard
buddies generally handle the improvising duties, professionally, but without
any major spark, as if the whole thing were a manifesto — down with the solo,
long live the well-variated riff. Or, sometimes, the riff's awesome
interaction with the funky bassline — 'Thaw Out', later appropriated by Hendrix
himself and remade as 'Driving South'. This impression alone is enough to
guarantee a thumbs
up — and then there is all this reverent dedication to one particular
semantic field, way before these things started to become naturally regulated
by segregating market demands.
LOVE CAN BE FOUND ANYWHERE (EVEN IN A GUITAR) (1968)
1) Do The Sissy; 2) Collins'
Mix; 3) Let's Get It Together; 4) Got A Good Thing Goin'; 5) All About My Girl;
6) Doin' My Thing; 7) Let's Get It Together Again; 8) Ain't Got Time; 9)
Turnin' On; 10) Whatcha Say; 11) Pushin'; 12) Stump Poker.
This and the following couple of albums are
most readily available today in the form of a 2-CD package called The Complete Imperial Recordings, which
makes sense: all three are in a similar style and none of the three would
pretend to be a thematically coherent «album» in any sense: Albert Collins may
have, through sheer lack of luck (and, perhaps, stinging interest as well),
only arrived on the LP market in the era when pop music became to be regarded
as art — but he himself was a traditional type of entertainer above everything
else. He had an entertaining formula, and he wasn't proud enough to try and
transcend it. As for luck — sooner or later, it was bound to change, and in
this case, we have to be grateful to Canned Heat, some of the members of which
were as kind as to grab the man by the collar and get him to a proper recording
studio and a proper contract that would, at last, allow him to switch to
larger chunks of vinyl.
Mind you, though, that Collins' formula is not
at all thoroughly rooted in the era of his first singles. On the contrary, Love Can Be Found Anywhere has a
decidedly modern sound for 1968, as can be seen already from the opening track:
'Do The Sissy' is a jerky funk instrumental that is, in my opinion, as wildly
driving as any good number on any James Brown record — with the acknowledged
defect of having no James Brown on it (Albert's own 'uh!'s are clearly influenced
by Mr. Brown, but it takes a little more than just saying 'uh!' to conjure the
same spirit), but with the acknowledged advantage of having a fine, expressive
lead guitar player that Brown's funk records of the period are in such sore
need of. Too bad the two never had a chance to get together (at least, not to
my limited knowledge).
When Albert is not being funky all over our
asses, he sticks to more old-school R'n'B, e. g. on 'Doin' My Thing',
thematically close to the classic 'Green Onions', or the celebratory 'Turnin'
On'. Rhythmic patterns may have changed a bit, but not his style: the fav thing
to do is still to play short, stinging note clusters that remind one of brief
telephone-transmitted replies — conciseness and laconicity incarnate. 12-bar
blues is kept to a minimum: the lonely vocal number 'Got A Good Thing Goin' is
the only representative (a good one, but nothing spectacular).
The finest guitar work on the album is arguably
on 'Pushin', a cool piece of boogie with 1:25 minutes of precise, passionate
soloing, after which, for the remaining minute, the baton is passed on to the
organ and brass players. The whole thing, due in part to Albert's minimalism,
is very much a band affair, and Collins' Texan colleagues are perfectly qualified
— bass, organ, brass, everything quite professional and well on the level of
even Stax-Volt, I'd say. So Love Can Be
Found Anywhere is a decent find not just for fans of guitar wanking (a
thing that Collins never really stooped to, come to think of it), but for any
admirer of the good old R'n'B groove of 1968, which, in my humble opinion, no
other groove in popular black music has ever managed to outdo since then. Thumbs up.
TRASH TALKIN' (1969)
1) Harris County Line-Up; 2)
Conversation With Collins; 3) Jawing; 4) Grapeland Gossip; 5) Chatterbox; 6)
Trash Talkin'; 7) Baby What You Want Me To Do/Rock Me Baby; 8) Lip Service; 9)
Things That I Used To Do; 10) Back Yard Back Talk; 11) Tongue Lashing; 12) And
Then It Started Raining.
Another smooth release, predictably
arse-kicking in the same old ways, but this time, without anything truly
sticking out like 'Do The Sissy'. Albert certainly spreads out here:
sequence-wise, the album is impeccable, with similar-sounding numbers stuck far
apart from each other, so that even if there are now two slow generic 12-bar
blues, by the time you get to the second one, you already have all the luck to
forget about the first one. And even then, they're different: 'Conversation
With Collins' has full emphasis on Albert's guitar (and vocal) skills, whereas
'Things That I Used To Do' gets a full-on brass arrangement.
Other than that, there is some lively, upbeat
Texan boogie ('Harris County Line-Up', 'Grapeland Gossip', title track); a
couple more funk experiments, this time with somewhat deeper and darker moods
('Jawing', 'Lip Service'); a few patches of gritty blues-rock ('Chatterbox'; a
cover of Jimmy Reed's 'Baby What You Want Me To Do' that sounds every bit as
stoned as the original, except Albert clearly has more teeth than Reed has ever had, and I mean literally); some old school R'n'B on
which Albert does battle with his brass section ('Back Yard Back Talk', 'Tongue
Lashing'), and even some sort of spiritual-sentimental roots-rock thing that
could have been recorded by the likes of The Band as a warm-up for something
more serious ('And Then It Started Raining') — in any case, it's a nice moody
finish, and Bob Dylan himself provides harmonica. Or, to be more accurate,
someone who must have taken virtual lessons from Bob Dylan.
In all, just another OK album from an era that,
honestly, had a larger percentage share of OK albums than any other one I know
of. Not to be bought separately, but perfectly fitting in the middle of the
2-CD Imperial Recordings collection.
THE COMPLEAT ALBERT COLLINS (1970)
1) Soul Food; 2) Jam It Up; 3)
Do What You Want To Do; 4) Black Bottom Bayou; 5) Junkey Monkey; 6) 69 Underpass
Roadside Inn; 7) I Need You So; 8) Bitsey; 9) Cool 'n' Collards; 10) Blend Down
And Jam; 11) Sweet 'n' Sour; 12) Swamp Sauce.
Boy, what a seriously deceptive title. Unless
it was, from the very beginning, designed not to make any sense at all, the
only logical reaction is that, with this release, Albert Collins has severed
all ties with his past and disowned all of his legacy. But this is clearly not
the case, since he still went on to play the old stuff in concert! So no, make
sense it does not.
Nevertheless, there are some stylistic changes
at hand here; good ones, too. The album is, overall, more of a rocking affair,
with less emphasis on brass instrumentation and more on fiery guitar and funky
rhythms. With 'Jam It Up' and its progressive addition of instruments, Collins
is openly moving into King Curtis' and Sly Stone's territory, and he holds his
ground well: the Texan boys cook with verve, and Albert's usual mini-blasts of
icicle-sharp notes are the perfect emotional stingers on top of the groove. He
is also exploring the world of guitar effects, achieving a psycho wobbly one on
'Soul Food' (must be one of those «Leslie cabinets» or something) and various
minor, less noticeable, variations on the other tracks.
More questionable is the move into country
territory on 'Black Bottom Bayou', which seems to be just an excuse to try and
deliver one of his minimalistic solos over a waltz tempo — I am still not
entirely sure why we needed to hear that, nor why it was necessary to end the
overall jolly record on a silly yodeling note ('Swamp Sauce', which could have
been a funny joke without the vocals but quickly turns into an annoying one with them).
But there are just too many hot funky grooves
on here to make the odd country excourses too much of a problem. 'Soul Food',
'Jam It Up', 'Bitsey', 'Cool 'n' Collards' are all worthy additions to the
Collins canon, no matter how little they differ from each other and how little
description they all merit. It should be very clearly restated, though, that
the rhythm section — especially the bass player, who lays on fast, variegated,
complex lines along with the best of the Stax-Volt people — is as much
responsible for the energy and pleasantness of the grooves as Albert himself.
So kudos to the band leader for focusing our attention on his bit players as he
introduces them, one by one, on 'Jam It Up'. Thumbs up, of course.
ALIVE & COOL (1971)
1) Introduction Instrumental;
2) How Blue Can You Get; 3) Thaw Out; 4) So Tired; 5) Funky; 6) Deep Freeze; 7)
Baby What You Want Me To Do; 8) Mustang Sally; 9) Backstroke.
Recorded at the Fillmore in 1969, so the label
says (not clear if it's East or West, or though), but possibly not intended for
immediate live release: the sound quality is downright awful, maybe just half a
step up from bootleg quality, and, in fact, I would not be surprised to learn
that the original LP was pressed
from some bootleg tapes.
Which is actually very sad, because the only
reason one would want to listen to Albert Collins in the first place are those
little hard-to-capture, impossible-to-describe nuances in his tone and phrasing
that make him different from millions of similar blueswailers; but there is
just no way you can get them properly in this setting, when the guitar reaches
out to you from under a heavy set of muffling pillows.
All the more pity because the setlist is
strong, intelligently combining past boogie hits ('Thaw Out', 'Deep Freeze')
with contemporary funky material ('Funky' speaks for itself, and Collins'
version of 'Mustang Sally' may be the least generic rendition of this old
standard that you will ever hear, if only because he just employs the song's
skeleton as a basis for some hot jamming) and only a couple formulaic 12-bar
blues numbers ('How Blue Can You Get'; an almost ironically somnambulous
version of 'Baby What You Want Me To Do', with Collins mimicking Jimmy Reed's
manner of singing without resorting to serious use of the teeth or tongue even closer than he did in the
studio).
Goddamn sound quality does not let you enjoy
Al's backing band properly either, no matter how tight they get on both the
funky and the bluesy stuff. There are some really wild organ solos, though; my
favourite is on 'Deep Freeze', where the organist tortures the instrument in a
manner almost reminiscent of Keith Emerson's behaviour, and begs for the
question — did The Nice and Albert Collins ever share the billing?). But all in
all, recommendable only for well-established fans; the ones unconvinced of
Albert Collins' worthiness would do better to seek out the later, more
technically polished live recordings first.
THERE'S GOTTA BE A CHANGE (1972)
1) There's Gotta Be A Change;
2) In Love Witcha; 3) Stickin'; 4) Today Ain't Like Yesterday; 5) Somethin' On
My Mind; 6) Frog Jumpin'; 7) I Got A Mind To Travel; 8) Get Your Business
Straight; 9) Fade Away.
Despite the promising title, the album never
lives up to its title, but then, come to think of it, even the title track does
not live up to its opening lines: right upon admitting that "There's got
to be a change, things just can't stay the same", Albert concedes that
"I've played the blues so long, ain't nothing left for me to do — I just
can't give it up, if I do, my life will be through". Well... guess we'll
just have to live with that.
Some slight change is perhaps visible in that
the 12-bar form makes for a more vivid presence than usual (seven minutes of
'In Love Witcha'; the brass-heavy blues-de-luxe of 'Today Ain't Yesterday' and
'I Got A Mind To Travel'), and that Albert's solos rely a bit more on technique
and flourishes than usual, which is not nice, a betrayal of individual style,
and there is no reason why anyone should choose these performances over, say,
Canned Heat.
Much more interesting is the double assault of
'Somethin' On My Mind' and 'Frog Jumpin', especially once the boppy first part
jumps into the oddly kiddie-sounding half-ska, half-proto-disco headbanging
craze of the second. Alas, all of this is less than four minutes of pure fun
compared to the nearly twenty minutes
of merely okay electric blues.
The only true highlight, and one definitive
song to treasure off this record, is the album closer 'Fade Away', arguably
Collins' moodiest number, with a fast-rocking and a slow-paced part, both of
them equally well-endowed with apocalyptic overtones. Almost no guitar, but
none is needed: emphasis is on the angst-filled vocal melody, danger-warning
background female vocals and an overwhelmingly mighty «thunderstorm brass»
arrangement. As unbelievable as it is that such a generic album may finish off
on such a blast — better believe it, or prepare to be deprived of a deeply
buried little masterpiece.
ICE PICKIN' (1978)
1) Honey, Hush!; 2) When The
Welfare Turns Its Back On You; 3) Ice Pick; 4) Cold, Cold Feeling; 5)
Too Tired; 6) Master
Charge; 7) Conversation
With Collins; 8) Avalanche.
For technical reasons, in 1973 Albert once
again found himself without a record label, but him being «The Ice Man» and
all, he took it cool and made good use of the next five years just tightening
up his act, writing new tunes, and waiting for Fortune's next big break to come
and tap Albert Collins on the shoulder rather than Albert Collins hunting for
that big break and wrecking his nervous system. The (un)expected break came in
1977, when he landed a contract with Alligator Records in Chicago and staged
his biggest comeback, ever.
Chronologically, this coincided with Muddy
Waters' similar «comeback» with Hard
Again; but Muddy's refreshening was very much the result of hard work on
the part of Johnny Winter and a team of fresh young bluesmen from a new generation
of roots-rockers, whereas Ice Pickin',
as damn good as the backing musicians are, primarily depends on Albert's own
songwriting, singing and, of course, ice-pickin', that is, string-bendin'.
The big difference between this and Albert's
Imperial records is — to hell with modesty and humility; this is Collins' own
show all the way. When he doesn't play, he sings, when he doesn't sing he
plays, and the sax and keyboard players are only there to add background juice.
Pretentious, perhaps, but why should anyone sacrifice concrete quality for
discrete equality? 'Avalanche' has two and a half minutes of the finest,
scorchiest, sharpest boogie soloing you'll hear anywhere, and it's fairly
inventive, too, alternating jazz, blues, and rock'n'roll phrasing, all recorded
in a clean, shrill, fail-less tone; a rare case of perfect balance between
intellectual mastery of the form and pure kickass energy.
This is just one of the highlights. 'Cold, Cold
Feeling' drops the restraint as well, becoming one of Collins' most soulful
blues ballads. 'Honey, Hush!' is an update of the Stax-Volt thing for the already
mentioned new and tighter generation of players, although primary emphasis is
still on the adventures of Albert's stuttering guitar. The most memorable
track, though, is a new, seriously updated and toughened version of 'Conversation
With Collins' from Trash Talkin', a
slow, predictably generic, piece of talking blues on which family man Al plays
out an imaginary family drama centered on nightlife adventures of his errant
wife (amusingly, his real wife Gwen
was a loving partner who actually wrote some of the material for him, including
the funny banking satire 'Master Charge'): the little bit towards the end
during which he impersonates a scowling husband's reaction with his guitar is
priceless, and should belong in all the annals of the art of «emotion
transfer».
Maybe it is not a coincidence that this is
Albert's first album in many, many years to return to the topics of coldness
and ice — things that almost seem to work as some sort of good luck charm for
the man. If Ice Pickin' seems less
varied and experimental than some of the 1969-72 albums, it is only for the
greater good of humanity: Collins's true forté is his ability to make
his own Lucille talk like no other Lucille in the world, not genre-hopping. On Ice Pickin', that ability is flashed
brighter than ever before: only the early singles can compete, but even the
early singles are too constrained by the minimalism. Thumbs up, of course.
FROSTBITE (1980)
1) If You Love Me Like You Say;
2) Blue Monday Hangover; 3) I Got A Problem; 4) The Highway Is Like A Woman;
5) Brick; 6) Don't Go
Reaching Across My Plate; 7) Give Me My Blues; 8) Snowed In.
Very close to the successful formula of Ice Pickin' and, therefore, nowhere
near as interesting, but with the same band, same style, and new waves of
inspiration triggered by the sales of the previous album, Frostbite never really lets down if you do not expect too much. If
anything, Albert gets even more revved up on some of the numbers, e. g. 'If
You Love Me Like You Say' and especially the fast-paced 'Brick', on which he
clearly shows, once and for all, that he only used to do minimalistic solos
because he wanted to: there is a lot
of fast, flashy, and clean playing here that could have easily inspired even a
young Stevie Ray Vaughan.
There is also a slight feeling of ease all across the album, as the man
relies less and less on traditional recipés and injects more of his own
personal ideas and sense of humour. 'The Highway Is Like A Woman' is a fairly
original batch of metaphors, and, to my knowledge, contains the first creative
use of the "slippery and/when wet" double entendre six years before
Bon Jovi spoiled all the fun. 'Don't Go Reaching Across My Plate' is actually a
moody, sax-driven lounge number decrying ill
table manners, for God's sake — in a fairly literal way, too.
Best of all, and a true classic in the «what
this instrument is capable of», genre, is the nine-minute epic 'Snowed In',
telling a harsh tale of getting about during a particularly harsh Chicago
winter. Not only is Albert completely in his «frosty» element here, but he uses
the time wisely, alternating standard 12-bar soloing with lots of funny guitar
noises, as he imitates the sound of snow crunching under one's feet, the sound
of keys rattling against door locks, and, of course, sets of futile attempts to
rev up the frosted engine. One serious listen to this track, and there is just
no way that you won't be able to single Mr. Collins out of the endless line of
generic blues players.
There is no way, either, that anyone could like
Ice Pickin' and dislike Frostbite; with the frontman and the
band in good form throughout, just another thumbs up for Mr. «Razor Blade».
FROZEN ALIVE! (1981)
1) Frosty; 2) Angel Of Mercy;
3) I Got That Feeling; 4) Caldonia; 5) Things I Used To Do; 6) Got A Mind To
Travel; 7) Cold Cuts.
Clean, well-recorded, concise, diverse, up to
the point, this just might be the ultimate Albert Collins live experience,
recorded during a several-night stand at the Union Bar in Minneapolis, in a
setting ideally suited for Albert Collins the small-club guy — one cannot see
it, unfortunately, but during some of the songs he would stroll up to an
occasional table or two and sit with the customers while playing. Now that's
what I call real «audience participation» — none of that «Houston are you ready
to rock» crap.
The setlist is limited to seven numbers, but
all of Albert's sides are duly represented. The kick-ass guitar monster is out
there on the lead-in number, his old hit 'Frosty', and 'Got A Mind To Travel',
by the end of which he has all but set fire to the instrument in one of
blues-rock's classiest cases of «tension build-up». The slow-burning blues
thing is dealt with on 'Angel Of Mercy'. The funk is taken care of on 'I Got
That Feeling'. The retro boogie schtick is delivered on 'Caldonia'. Yer old-time
R'n'B, horns and all, is served with 'Things I Used To Do'. And, finally, just
so you'll always remember that the man's backing band is no slouch, either,
bass player Johnny B. Gayden is allowed a lengthy — and fairly awesome — bass
solo on the album closer, 'Cold Cuts', during which he goes from funk to jazz
to rumba to a few other places, truly entertaining the dazzled audience rather
than just showing off his technical skills.
If this isn't an all-time classic, it is merely
for the fact that Albert is not equally good at all those different things he
does — only the last two numbers, with the insane soloing on 'Got A Mind' and
the bassist's spot, are what I'd label «jaw-dropping». And you would probably
have to be there to feel the full
impact of the happening. But if you are considering a limited collection of
Collins-related material, Frozen Alive!
should still be one of the few first choices. At the very least, it is recorded
in far superior quality to Alive &
Cool, even despite the barroom ambience. Thus, thumbs up with no further questions
asked.
DON'T LOSE YOUR COOL (1983)
1) Get To Gettin'; 2) My Mind
Is Trying To Leave Me; 3) I'm Broke; 4) Don't Lose Your Cool; 5) When A Guitar
Plays The Blues; 6) But I Was Cool!; 7) Melt Down; 8) Ego Trip; 9) Quicksand.
This is basically Ice Pickin', Vol. 3, deserving an ever-decreasing volume of
innovative reviewing content. The title track, as you may remember, is an old
old instrumental from almost three decades ago, and Albert's decision to
re-record it is a bit disturbing, indicating a gradual shift into the «elder
statesmen» category. Of course, it is twice as long, and the old riffs have
lost none of their blockheaded charm, and now they are augmented by about two
minutes of blazing solos that prove Albert's adeptness at both minimalism and grand flash, but...
...well, at the very least nobody can accuse
the man of losing his cool. Later on, he turns the joke on himself with the
novelty number 'But I Was Cool!', which continues the style of 'Don't Go Reaching
Across My Plate' from the last record. The novelty includes an "OH
SHIIIIIT!" blasted at the top of Albert's lungs if you want a whiff of
uniqueness, and the song is really not very funny, but at least it is something
to discuss.
The rest is standard fare early-Eighties
Collins: 'I'm Broke' is catchy R'n'B, 'When A Guitar Plays The Blues' is
burning soul (although, ashamed as I am to admit, Albert's solos on these
burning soul numbers never manage to burn up my soul), 'Ego Trip' is well-oiled funk, and 'My Mind Is Trying To
Leave Me' is seven and a half minutes of professional, but undistinguished
blues-de-luxe. The formula works well, but, unlike AC/DC, Albert never bothers
much about coming up with memorable riffs, and his personal arsenal of solo
licks, although replenished and repainted on Ice Pickin', has not undergone any further renovations since then.
In the end, 'I'm Broke' is really fun, and 'But
I Was Cool!' is annoying, but weird, and it is also nice to see the man
stubbornly stick to the old, but fresh and lively playing and arranging style,
with none of the early Eighties' fancy-pants soul-killin' production excesses. Thumbs up,
automatically, for any album that sounds like this — but recommended more for hardcore
blues musicians and technicians rather than anyone else.
LIVE IN JAPAN (1984)
1) Listen Here!; 2) Tired Man;
3) If Trouble Was Money; 4) Jealous Man; 5) Stormy Monday; 6) Skatin'; 7) All
About My Girl.
Two live albums in four years is a bit of an
overkill, but few can resist the temptation of adding a Live In Japan credit to their name at one time or another, since,
after all, it is a scientifically proven fact that the proximity of Mount Fuji
significantly increases the precision of your playing, and that the close presence
of the Imperial Family is sufficient to make the mikes pick up such ultra
frequencies as normally remain undetected by the best equipment under standard
conditions.
Other than that, there is not much that makes Live In Japan (recorded, actually, on December
21, 1982) deserving of a special review. Only the setlist is unusual,
consisting mostly of numbers that cannot be found on any of Albert's studio
recordings — with the sole exception of 'All About My Girl' from Love Can Be Found Anywhere, here extended
to thrice its original length and turned into an exciting dialog between the
guitar and the backing saxophone. But all of the substitutions are generally
standard fare, concentrating on slow-tempo 12-bar and fast-paced boogie.
The idea was probably not to repeat too much
from Frozen Alive!, but by
concentrating on «rarities», Albert, or whoever else is behind the sequencing,
loses the diversity part of the attraction: there is really nothing too
thrilling about including two
lengthy, same-sounding, draggy blues workouts ('If Trouble Was Money' and
'Stormy Monday') on the same record. Thus, despite the fact that sound quality
is indeed near-perfect, and the fact that Albert plays with all of his usual inspiration
(no surprise here), I could not recommend this to anybody but the direst fans
of either Albert Collins or the
Imperial Family.
COLD SNAP (1986)
1) Cash Talkin' (The
Workingman's Blues); 2) Bending Like A Willow Tree; 3) A Good Fool Is Hard To Find;
4) Lights Are On But Nobody's Home; 5) I Ain't Drunk; 6) Hooked
On You; 7) Too Many Dirty Dishes; 8) Snatchin' It Back; 9) Fake ID.
Albert's last album for Alligator is sometimes
decried for finally falling prey to Eighties' production excesses, but,
honestly, all it takes to hush down the detractors is play it back to back with
Eric Clapton's August, released at
about the same time. Yes, there seems to be some electronic echo effects forced
on the drummer, but that's about the total extent — you can deduce the decade, but there are no significant attempts to
«modernize» (i. e., «sterilize») neither the sound of Albert himself, nor that
of his backing band.
The real problem is that it is simply more of
the same: Ice Pickin' Vol. 4. (You
kinda sorta begin to get the idea when you line up all four LPs and start
looking at the album sleeves in succession). Only two of the tracks merit
separate commenting. 'I Ain't Drunk (I'm Just Drinkin')' says it all in the
title: as old as its Chuck Berry-spin-off-dance-blues groove may be, it is a
fun tune to have lying around when you need justification for alcohol intake. And
on the near-obligatory gimmick performance 'Too Many Dirty Dishes', the Master
aptly coerces the Telecaster into imitating the sounds of scrubbing pots,
pans, and glasses, as he is mumbling stuff like "You wait 'til that woman
get home, I'm scrappin' all these pots for her" under his nose. As usual,
it is not so much hilarious as it is mildly amusing, but all the sound effects are cool, in a hard-to-understand way.
Of the other tunes, the best instrumental
performances are on the rocking album opener 'Cash Talkin' and on the more
rocking album closing instrumental 'Fake ID' — but it is nothing we have not
heard before. The horns work well on the lengthy blues-de-luxe of 'Lights Are
On' and not so well on the way-too-poppy 'Hooked On You'. Frankly, I cannot
even begin to discern whether the band sounds tired or inspired — they've been
at it so long now, it seems like in 1986 Albert was able to achieve this kind
of level while sleepwalking. Which is admirable and terrifying at the same
time.
ICEMAN (1991)
1) Mr. Collins, Mr. Collins;
2) Iceman; 3) Don’t Mistake Kindness For Weakness; 4) Travellin’ South; 5) Put
The Shoe On The Other Foot; 6) I’m Beginning To Wonder; 7) Head Rag; 8) The
Hawk; 9) Blues For Gabe; 10) Mr. Collins, Mr. Collins (faded version).
The gods were so angry with Collins for selling
out to a major label (Virgin, or, more precisely, its subsidiary Pointblank),
that they sent him to hell with liver cancer two years later. But apparently
none of the gods took the trouble of actually listening to the album, because
there is nothing whatsoever that would seriously set it apart from his
Alligator records. Its main flaw is recyclism, not sellout-ism. With Johnny
Gayden still on bass, and Albert and his wife in tight control of the
songwriting, performing, arranging, and production, no doctoring is involved —
and I am not even sure this is so much of a plus.
The only thing about Iceman that’s
memorable is the little funky guitar grumble that opens the album, and a
worried female chorus that retorts: “Mr. Collins, Mr. Collins... please, Mr.
Collins... DON’T PLAY SO LOUD!” And, in general, Mr. Collins obliges. There are
almost no fiery outbursts that could, in the end, save face even for the
weakest of his Alligator albums: ‘Blues For Gabe’, for instance, an
instrumental that closes the album and could be expected to blow away the roof,
is unpleasantly tepid, and puts as much of a spotlight on the guitar as it does
on the organ and trombone solos, a real crime when it comes to Collins.
Everything is professional, but there is truly
nothing here that is not a rewrite of some earlier success (or misfire), and
the only way to admire Iceman is for the man’s tenacity: true, he has
firmly wedged the formula into the ground, but he managed to bravely carry it
through the disco, New Wave, synth pop, hair metal, and grunge eras without
even pretending to notice that any of these eras really took place. Not even
Virgin record executives could make him admit this. From that angle, Iceman
is deserving of deep respect (and how many 60-year old bluesmen can sustain
that level of energy, anyway? Buddy Guy, perhaps) — but from any other, it is
stunningly weak, with no strength left at all to come up with even modestly new
ideas. At least ‘I Ain’t Drunk’ had the novelty factor to it, and then there
were all these tunes on which he used the guitar for cool special effects, but
no such luck here: Iceman is the kind of album the man could easily
produce at the rate of a dozen a day. Thumbs down.
LIVE '92-'93 (1995)
1) Iceman; 2) Lights Are On But Nobody's
Home; 3) If You Love Me Like You Say; 4) Put The Shoe On The Other Foot; 5)
Frosty; 6) Travelin' South; 7) Talkin' Woman; 8) My Woman Has A Black Cat Bone;
9) I Ain't Drunk; 10) T-Bone Shuffle.
One thing of note about this posthumous release
is that there is no telling any significant difference between the tracks
recorded in 1992 (at a couple US gigs) and in 1993 (at the Montreux Jazz
Festival) — even though, while playing at Montreux, Albert was well aware that
he had about three months left to live, having been diagnosed with lung and
liver cancer a month prior to the gig. It helps a lot to keep that in mind
while listening, because, otherwise, well, it's just another live Albert
Collins album, right?
A pretty good one, actually, even if the
setlist is a bit too heavy on material from his latest, and not particularly
inspired, pair of albums. But, surprise surprise, the songs come alive:
'Iceman' is one minute shorter because it's taken at a slightly faster tempo,
and the solos are crisper and more fierce than they were in the studio, where
the production surreptitiously muffled and sanitized them. The funky 'Put The
Shoe On The Other Foot', on the other hand, is extended, giving the bass player
more chances to flaunt his chugging awesomeness, and putting Albert into
«stinging» mode at least twice, which he never achieved on the song in the
studio.
The lowlight is 'I Ain't Drunk', which loses
much of its effect by paying little attention to the precise, comic timing of
the original — the band speeds it up, loosens its grip, and still insists on passing it off as a
joke number, with Albert's «improvised» chat with the band members about
whether he really is drunk or, well,
just drinking. But that's just one notable misstep, and they immediately cover
up for it by playing the harshest, bristliest rendition of 'T-Bone Shuffle'
ever.
So maybe there really isn't one single lick on
here that Albert hasn't played for your pleasure before, but I am a big context
devotee, and the context here consists of two details: (a) this here is a nearly dead man, and he is still playing
like all hellhounds were on his trail and the guitar was his equivalent of a
big fat cudgel; (b) this here is a man who had battled all his life to maintain
his integrity in the studio, and when the studio tried to take away the
smallest part of his integrity, he put it all in his stage playing to show us
that he certainly ain't «bending like a willow tree». He just passed away
quietly in November 1993, untamed to the last. Thumbs up for having been the Master
of the Telecaster for thirty-five years, unchallenged.
THE ICEMAN AT MOUNT FUJI (1992; 2005)
1) Iceman; 2) Put The Shoe On
The Other Foot; 3) Lights Are On But Nobody's Home; 4) If You Love Me Like You
Say; 5) Same Old Thing; 6) Travelin' South; 7) Iceman; 8) Put The Shoe On The
Other Foot; 9) Lights Are On But Nobody's Home; 10) Honey Hush; 11) Same Old
Thing; 12) Frosty.
We say goodbye to «Master of the Telecaster»
with this archive release, available both on CD and DVD, that captures a
smokin' August 1992 performance at the Mt. Fuji Jazz Festival, on the sweet
banks of Lake Yamanaka. (Another archival CD/DVD product from the same time is Live At Montreux, but, since bits of
that performance had already been previously released on Live '92-'93, dedicating special space to it would be overkill).
Albert played two relatively brief sets that
day, both of which are included on the CD and may be discomforting for the
novice — to a large extent, they are identical, except for two songs (and even
then, 'Travelin' South' and 'Frosty' are both fast boogies, and 'If You Love
Me...' and 'Honey Hush' are both mid-tempo blues-rock) and a slightly extended
and more aggressive 'Iceman' in the second set. Considering that all of this
material had already been played for the '92-'93
shows, the album is clearly redundant.
I wish I could say that these performances blow
the US live tracks away, but, frankly, they don't — they are equally good, no
more, no less. It is unfair to say that Collins' playing style did not change
over the years. Comparing these fast, complex, and quite modern-sounding bursts
of licks to the much simpler, much less developed (but always inventive) style
of his late 1950s / early 1960s playing, it is nothing short of amazing how
easily he made the transgression from «Fifties electric blues player» to «rock
era electric blues player», one of the very, very few veterans of his generation
to be able to manage that (in a way, not even B. B. King, in all of his
lifetime, had managed to truly break the chains that tied him to his formative
years).
But there is a limit to any kind of evolution,
and where you can expect from, say, Eric Clapton to play at least something different every night — to add
up an unpredictable twist or two on the spur of the particular moment (not that
it always happens, mind you, but you are
entitled to expect it) — you cannot expect it from The Iceman, who simply goes
out on tour and delivers what he is used to delivering. Not to mean that these
solos are note-for-note identical with '92-'93,
but what kind of an obsessed maniac would really want to compare them
note-for-note?
In short, if you already have '92-'93, don't bother with the CD (the
DVD might be fun, though). If you don't, and Mt. Fuji, being the more recent issue of the two, is lying close at
hand, go for it, but keep in mind that you are really getting six songs (okay,
eight at most) for the price of twelve.
ALEX HARVEY
ALEX HARVEY AND HIS SOUL BAND (1964)
1) Framed; 2) I Ain't Worrying
Baby; 3) Backwater Blues; 4) Let The Good Times Roll; 5) Going Home; 6) I've
Got My Mojo Working; 7) Teensville USA; 8) New Orleans; 9) Bo Diddley Is A
Gunslinger; 10) When I Grow Too Old To Rock; 11) Evil Hearted Man; 12) I Just
Wanna Make Love To You; 13) The Blind Man; 14) Reeling And Rocking.
Out of those people whose musical career took
years and years to get off the ground, Alex Harvey must hold an indisputable
record. Success and notability weren't his until the launching of The
Sensational Alex Harvey Band in 1972 — yet The Alex Harvey Soul Band was active
and kicking around the circuits of Scotland and lands to the south since at
least 1959, when the Beatles were still the Quarrymen and Elvis was still in
the army.
But was there anything particularly worthwhile
about the Soul Band? No, except for perhaps a damn fine good taste in selecting
their cover material (the scarce information we have on this page from Harvey's
past does not include anything on original songwriting). They performed quite a
lot of diverse material, almost completely shutting out the more
"commercialized" US and UK pop hits and concentrating instead on
everything from rockabilly to R'n'B to electric blues to even digging out and
rearranging old pre-war blues standards (Harvey's special predilection for
these golden oldies would result in an entire album dedicated to them — see
below). In all that, they arguably had little or no competition on the
British/Scottish scene of the early Sixties.
This is where the praise comes to a dead end,
though, because the band's only album, as far as I'm concerned, holds only
meager historic interest. It was recorded on the heels of their (traditional
for all British bands of the period) big break on the Hamburg club scene, and
dressed up as a "live" album, with overdubbed audience noises,
although the sound quality is way too good for anyone to be duped — it
may have been, and probably was, live in the studio, but that's about as live
as it gets. The fourteen songs faithfully run the gamut of whatever was listed
above, and everything is done with a proper amount of professionalism and,
perhaps, even some excitement, yet there is nothing in these performances that
somehow improves on the originals or, more important, changes them into
something worth hearing on its own.
Harvey himself, although blessed with a
powerful voice, was still light years away from capturing his tragic madman
stage persona, and, although he is nowhere near as obnoxious on this record as
he is on The Blues, simply makes no competition to the other guys in the
business. His sidemen are competent, but competent the way your local barroom
band would be competent after having played in the barroom each night for five
years. The "edge" is missing, if you know what I mean. If you don't,
see for yourself — try to compare the band's performance of Leiber &
Stoller & The Coasters' 'Framed' with the song's radical reworking on the
same-titled debut from The Sensational Alex Harvey Band eight years later. The
latter is a demented rock theater masterpiece; the former is... a cover of
Leiber & Stoller & The Coasters' 'Framed'.
In short, this is a pretty bland album if you
take it in the context of Johnny Kidd & The Pirates (who rocked out
better), the Beatles (who had better songs), the Beach Boys (who had better
vocals), the Dave Clark 5 (who had a riskier and edgier sax player), the
Animals (who had a crazier frontman), the Rolling Stones (who had a far more
dangerous and provocative sound), the Americans (who wrote all these songs that
Harvey covered), the Russians (who had just flown Gagarin into space three
years ago), and the Romulans (each of whom looked more handsome than Alex Harvey
could ever hope to get). If you manage to strip away the context, it all comes
across in a far more positive light, but I guess Avril Lavigne could also be
thought of as the epitome of punk if one didn't know anything about punk. Thumbs down from the heart that did not manage to
get wound up, and likewise from the brain that tried to justify the album's
existence but found it easier to justify Asian despotism.
THE BLUES (1964)
1) Trouble In Mind; 2) Honey
Bee; 3) I Learned About Women; 4) Danger Zone; 5) The Riddle Song; 6) Waltzing
Matilda; 7) TB Blues; 8) The Big Rock Candy Mountain; 9) The Michigan Massacre;
10) No Peace; 11) Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out; 12) St. James
Infirmary; 13) Strange Fruit; 14) Kisses Sweeter Than Wine; 15) Good God
Almighty.
The Blues, an absolute discographic rarity these days, was recorded at the tail
end of Alex Harvey & His Soul Band's career — in fact, by the time it was
recorded the "band" consisted of just about Alex himself and his
brother Leslie (later of Stone The Crows fame, still later of the "first
noted guitarist to have himself electrocuted on stage" fame). Information
on the circumstances and participants of this recording is very limited, of
course, but since the only instruments on it are an acoustic guitar (presumably
played by Alex) and an electric guitar (presumably played by Leslie), I imagine
that's about all the information we're ever gonna get.
Do not worry about the record being
practically unavailable — it is so for a good reason, because The Blues
is simply not a very good album. It is fairly unique for its times,
though. Back when everyone else in Britain was busy jumping on the R'n'B wagon,
and the only blues style that got attention and respect was Chicago electric
stuff, Alex Harvey was willing to dig deeper and go further than that. No
'Little Red Rooster' or 'Rollin' Stone' will be found here; he covers some
really old and (at that time at least) obscure tunes that come from the pre-war
era — although I have a weird feeling that his sources were mostly white
players, old folk, country-blues and bluegrass stuff (e. g. Woody Guthrie or Jimmy
Rogers, whose 'TB Blues' is covered), because I only recognize 'Nobody Knows
You When You're Down And Out' and, of course, 'Strange Fruit' as songs made
popular by black performers. Certainly 'Waltzing Matilda' and 'The Big Rock
Candy Mountain' have little to do with the blues as such — but they're pretty
old tunes all the same, and some people do have this manner of calling
everything released before the Fifties as 'blues' unless it's Bing Crosby.
Stylistically and manner-wise, The Blues
is a bit similar to the atittude of the Holy Modal Rounders on the other side
of the ocean: very irreverent, rather paranoid, relatively unpredictable. But
not as funny or inventive. And quite likely to induce headaches, because
Harvey, in his overriding desire to sound off-the-cuff and different,
overscreams. A few tunes are pleasantly quiet and modest, but much, if not most
of the time, they turn into screamfests where any hope of subtlety is lost.
Take the same 'TB Blues', for instance: Rogers' original, sung in his usual
sweet, lulling voice, worked so well exactly because of the gruesome
dis-coherence between the death-wrapped lyrics and the sugary, nonchalant
voice, but Harvey's take on it doesn't even sound authentic when he
imitates an agonizing man's paranoia — it sounds drastically overplayed, not
funny, not terrifying, just annoying.
Annoying is the word, which I have some time ago sworn not to abuse, but there's
hardly a better chance to use it in all sincerity than in this review. Most of
these songs are annoying. 'Trouble In Mind' — annoying. 'Danger Zone' —
annoying. 'No Peace' — annoying. 'St. James Infirmary' — very annoying. Thank
God at least 'Strange Fruit' isn't annoying, but even so it's only notable for
historic reasons, because I cannot imagine any sort of spiritual or material
need for anyone to listen to a 'Strange Fruit' that is not done by a Billie
Holiday or, at least, a Nina Simone.
In short, it's not hard to understand why
Harvey had no hopes of making it big at the time, or why this stage of his
career has not gotten a better treatment in retrospect. For 1964, this was way
too weird, for any decade later than that, this is way too boring and annoying.
And although, from a purely brainy-intellectual point of view, I am sometimes
tempted to thumbs-up the record, my heart always overrides this decision with a
no-go thumbs down all the way.
ROMAN WALL BLUES (1969)
1) Midnight Moses; 2) Hello
L.A., Bye Bye Birmingham; 3) Broken Hearted Fairytale; 4) Donna; 5) Roman Wall
Blues; 6) Jumping Jack Flash; 7) Hammer Song; 8) Let My Bluebird Sing; 9)
Maxine; 10) Down At Bart's Place; 11) Candy.
After several years of relative inactivity,
during which Harvey's main bit of public visibility was working with the
original team for Hair, Alex tried to revive his fortunes and assembled
a full rock band to produce his first true "formal" album as a solo
artist. Considering that these days, you're lucky if you even come upon it in
an old pile of recycled vinyl, you can imagine just how successful it was.
Thank God for the digital era.
Then again, maybe not. The more I listen to Roman
Wall Blues, the better I understand just how much of a difference The
Sensational A. H. Band really made. Roman Wall Blues has it all —
Harvey's genius-madman image, the post-modernist lyrics, the inventive and
deconstructive songwriting, the stylistic diversity — but it doesn't have the
one ingredient that really matters: well-played music. Maybe if you make a
serious effort and evaluate this on its own, forgetting all about the
tremendous musicianship of the aptly titled Sensational Band, it will be easier
to warm up to the tunes. But there is really no need to: in the light of Framed
and all that followed, Roman Wall Blues is just a prelude, a rehearsal,
a weak demo version of the delights to come.
Alex himself must have known that, because he
took the trouble of re-recording some of the best songs on this collection — such
as the blues-rock rave-up of 'Midnight Moses', or the dark quasi-folk of
'Hammer Song' — with the Sensational Band. This is very laudable, but in the
meantime it does not excuse the limp blues-and-brass backing on this
record, and I am not even mentioning cases when it ceases to be backing
and starts to be fronting — as on the exquisitely boring four-minute jam
'Down At Bart's Place'.
The worst problem, though, is that with poor
musical backing, Harvey continues to sound annoying rather than exciting.
Depending on your constituency, you can think of his take on 'Jumping Jack
Flash', for instance, as a masterful exercise in deconstruction, or as a silly
clownish parody whose aims and goals are uncertain and whose effects range from
neutral to negative. I prefer 'neutral', but that means the track simply has no
reason to exist. They even re-record one song from Hair ('Donna'), but
it doesn't go anywhere serious either.
I certainly understand why the record bombed —
it's one of those albums you don't really know what to do with. It doesn't rock
hard enough, it isn't nearly as funny as it could be, the hooks aren't
tremendous, and the mood is neither heartily sincere nor explicitly insincere.
It sort of slips through your fingers and through your ears, and few of
us like records that slip through, so it's a thumbs
down, from both the heart that finds itself offended for not being
offered any emotional food and the brain that does not feel intellectually
satisfied, either.
THE JOKER IS WILD (1972)
1) The Joker Is Wild; 2)
Penicillin Blues; 3) Make Love To You; 4) I'm Just A Man; 5) He Ain't Heavy,
He's My Brother; 6) Hare Krishna/Willie The Pimp; 7) Flying Saucer's Daughter.
Another failed effort, also relatively hard to
locate for a good reason. It is unclear who exactly is backing Alex on the
album; accounts are contradictory, but at least one point of view is that all
the members of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band were already on board for this
session. I find this unlikely to be true, and completely baffling if it is
true, because in that case there is no rational explanation at all to the
miraculous transition from the unfunny boredom of The Joker Is Wild into
the hilarious hard-rocking dementia of Framed.
Basically, Harvey is dragging on his
"humorous" deconstruction schtick, with almost uniformly disastrous
results. His take on heavy blues-rock, illustrated by 'Penicillin Blues', is
like some early Led Zeppelin or Jeff Beck exercise in 12-bardom, but without
any of the amazing guitar pyrotechnics; instead, we just get a bunch of
self-consciously "dirty" lyrics that are neither primitive enough to
be convincing nor subtle enough to be enjoyable. (Case in point: 'you got such
bad blood baby, looks like you need a shot — but I want to have you turn around,
'cause I wanna see everything else that you've got'. What is this, high
school?).
It is just as painful to listen to Harvey's
interpretations of 'I Just Wanna Make Love To You' (too ugly to be sleazy), 'He
Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother' (the level of parody is about the same as if you
and I got drunk in a downtown bar and started karaokeing), and Zappa's 'Willie
The Pimp'; the latter is tied together in a medley with 'Hare Krishna' (!), and
neither is funny or fun. Maybe this can be someone else's idea of humour, but I
find myself completely unable to even raise a smile — and this is coming from
the exact same man who, several months later, went on to make one of the
most joyful records of the decade!
About the only thing that vaguely manages to
entertain is the closing number, 'Flying Saucer's Daughter', a satire on heavy
psychedelia where the music is marginally more complex and heavier on the
sonic effects, and the lyrics marginally elevate beyond schoolboy pap. Even so,
its fire and fury are pitiful next to the fire and fury of 'St. Anthony' (the
album closer on Framed), and the tune has very little individual value.
So, it goes without saying that this is a thumbs
down in all respects — and the overall conclusion is that you just
can skip the entire career of Mr. Harvey prior to the Sensational Band
altogether. Apparently, though, sometime in mid-'72 the Flying Saucer's
Daughter tweaked Mr. Harvey's brain a bit, and he's never been the same
afterwards, to the great delight of all of us.
FRAMED (1972)
1) Framed; 2) Hammer Song;
3) Midnight Moses; 4)
Isobel Goudie; 5) Buff's Bar Blues; 6) I Just Want To Make Love To
You; 7) Hole In Her Stocking; 8) There's No Lights On The
Christmas Tree, Mama; 9) St. Anthony.
By late 1972, Harvey had permanently teamed up
with fellow Scotsmen band Tear Gas (from Glasgow), led by guitar wiz Zal
Cleminson, and the results were astounding. All of a sudden, in a matter of
moments, the exact same musical approach which, on Harvey's first solo albums,
sounded stupid and boring at the same time, turns out to be both intelligent
and exciting.
It was up to Cleminson to transform Harvey's
act from weak lounge-like parody into one of the toughest, raunchiest glam-acts
of the decade. You get fat crunchy riffs à la Sweet, but more memorable,
wall-of-sound guitar overdubs that David Bowie never dreamed of, and, where the
need arises for it, a brawny Glasgow barroom-rock atmosphere to rival the
drunken-est escapades of Slade. But all over it Harvey's pre-post-modern
persona still looms as large as ever, and now, when it has a solid musical
backbone, it's no longer laughable, but rather hilarious — and, at times,
sincerely intimidating.
Just for a laugh, it is advisable to play the
old and the new versions of 'Midnight Moses' back to back. Unless you're a
staunch hard-rock hater, I can't even visualize the perspective of someone
willing to prefer the original, what with all the fury that Cleminson invests
in this reworking. The brass section has been retained for 'I Just Want To Make
Love To You', but now it's also being propped up by terrific guitar work, not
to mention the tight rhythm section, and now the extended coda is involving,
not excruciating.
Whether it is the old stuff or the new stuff,
there is nary a weak spot on the entire album. Leiber and Stoller's 'Framed' is
recast as a slow, plodding, mammoth Seventies' rocker; 'Isobel Goudie' is
Harvey's tongue-in-cheek contribution to the progressive excesses of the age,
replete with dark distorted organ chords and smooth transitions between
quiet/hypnotic and loud/bedazzling (as would probably befit a song about a
creepy Scottish witch!); we then get our feet firmly back on the ground with
'Buff's Bar Blues', Harvey's best-ever drinking song with a jaw-dropping guitar
solo from Zal (but what sort of a drinking song would ever include a verse
like 'drinking up Spumanti, reading John McLain, his sister in the grubber and
his brother was the same' — and who the heck is John McLain anyway, and how do
you even spell him properly?); we get a wonderful retro vaudeville number
('There's No Lights On The Christmas Tree, Mother' — apparently because
'They're Burning Big Louie Tonight'); and we round things up with the
sacrilegious naughtiness of 'St. Anthony', a track that not only throws a suspicious
light on the nature of St. Anthony's temptation (and even his true ability to
resist it), but also wraps the poor saint in a web of wah-wah and not so
wah-wah guitars that raise some of the loudest ruckus and rumpus to come out of
the British Isles in the early part of the decade.
In short, Framed is a fascinating
musical journey, and double so when it is taken in the context of all the
disasters of the previous limp decade of Harvey's career. Wholesale admirers of
the man's talent and personality will argue that it took the arrival of the
sarcastic spasms of the glam rock era to properly put Alex in his place, while
in the Sixties he was simply steadily being ahead of his time, and they may be right,
too, but the fact is, being ahead of one's time is not always a good thing —
"ahead of the times" may be just as disastrous in terms of pure
listenable power as "behind the times", and if it took Cleminson's
hard-rock backing to make Harvey sound like an ironic versatile showman rather
than silly irritating clown, no one is required to wreck one's brains trying to
spot the future ironic versatile showman of 1972 in the silly irritating clown
of 1969 or earlier. And this is certainly not downplaying Harvey's own
achievements: I doubt that the work of Tear Gas could have easily stood the
test of time without being linked to Harvey's personality, either. The
Harvey/Cleminson match was — no second opinion about it — clearly made in
Heaven, and if they had to wait ten or twelve years to find each other, well,
who are we to judge Heaven's judgement? Thumbs up.
NEXT (1973)
1) Swampsnake; 2) Gang Bang;
3) The Faith Healer;
4) Giddy-Up-A-Ding-Dong; 5) Next;
6) Vambo Marble Eye; 7) The Last Of The Teenage Idols.
The loony carnival continues on Next, an
album that stretches the capacities of the band to the limit — in fact, to the
limit of becoming offensive, as not a few people even today express genuine
indignation at a song whose chorus goes 'Ain't nothing like a gang bang to blow
your blues away'. Well, what do you know: offensive for sure, but who could
argue with the truth of it?
Next is not afraid to take risks, not only lyrical, but plenty of musical
ones as well. There's only seven tracks, one of them multi-part, one — a
lengthy, slow-developing art-rock romp, and the rest are an even wilder
mish-mash of styles than Framed; but this is to be expected from the
sort of meaningless, but exciting and titillating "rock cabaret" that
Harvey and the gang are going for. The question is, does it excite enough?
Under the musical leadership of Cleminson, it certainly does, enough for it to
be completely unnecessary to make sense of it all.
Then, come to think of it, there is a
general sensible thread running through the whole thing: sex, sex, sex, sleaze,
and sex again. It is beyond any reasonable doubt that Bon Scott, in his stage
and studio persona, must have been hugely influenced by the Harvey of Next,
a fact rendered even more plausible by the brawny Scottish heritage of both
gentlemen. But The Sensational Alex Harvey Band was, of course, a more
adventurous outfit than AC/DC, and in their everlasting quest for more
raunchiness, they channel as many naughty spirits as they are able to find the
proper seats for within the confines of one record. The spirit of barroom brawl
on 'Gang Bang'; the spirit of Southern rock on 'Swampsnake'; the spirit of
heavy metal on 'Faith Healer'; the spirit of rockabilly on 'Giddy Up'; the
spirit of doo-wop on the outro section of 'Last Of Teenage Idols'; and, wildest
of all, the evil Voodoo spirit on 'Vambo Marble Eye', a veritable Ogoun
Badagris of a rock tune, all covered in the fireclouds of Cleminson's wah-wah
playing.
Once all these spirits have taken their places,
I cannot see how an album like Next could fail to be one of glam-rock's
quintessential statements, a record that perfectly holds its own alongside Electric
Warrior or even Ziggy Stardust. Speaking of the latter, one exact
thing Bowie and Harvey had in common was an adoration for Jacques Brel; the
title track is a tango arrangement of the latter's 'Au Suivant', with an
excellent translation/reinterpretation of the lyrics and perfect placement —
it cuts across the middle of the record, interrupting the schizophrenic spirit
dance for a few minutes of intelligent pause, as if the tired actors, clowns,
and mimes took their masks off to catch their breath. Allowed to wallow in
their misery a little while. Then it's show time again, and Harvey's/Brel's
promise — 'I'll do anything to get out of life, to survive, not ever to be
next!' — is cut short as the masks are up to the ominous wah-wah intro to
'Vambo'.
Of course, Next, like all Harvey albums,
is clownish, meaning that it will never be able to achieve the same level of
critical respect as Ziggy. In the eyes of the thinking person, it's more
like a spoof on Ziggy-type material than an independent thinking
person's artistic statement. But every now and then, clowns come closer to the
uncomfortable truth than thinking persons, and, besides, Harvey wisely
alternates between the clown's clown and the tragic clown — the latter is
mainly seen on 'Next', but also emerges later during the first part of 'Last Of
The Teenage Idols', where the tragic clown seems to be making fun of the
clown's clown. There's real substance here behind the cabaret, which is how
things should indeed go with all high-class cabaret; it only takes a willingness
to go beyond the smut of the twenty seven guys of 'Gang Bang' to realize that.
Last hurrah should go to Cleminson, who
continues honing his musical skills — the guitar playing on 'Vambo Marble Eye'
and 'Faith Healer' is exceptional, and his tango riffage in unison with the
piano on 'Next' is a perfect desperate foil for Harvey's perfect desperate
singing. There is a great video of a performance of 'Next' from the Old Grey
Whistle Test with Zal, in his trademark Pierrot makeup that he always donned
at the band's live performances, not only plays, but mimes along to Alex's
singing: the two make quite a lovely couple. Thumbs
up on all the tracks, unanimously agreed upon by the heart and brain
departments alike.
THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM (1974)
1) The Hot City Symphony, Part 1:
Vambo; 2) The Hot City
Symphony, Part 2: Man In The Jar; 3) River Of Love; 4) Long Hair Music; 5) Sergeant Fury; 6) Weights
Made Of Lead; 7) Money Honey/Impossible Dream; 8) Tomahawk Kid; 9) Anthem.
God loves a third: The Impossible Dream
concludes the trilogy of Alex Harvey records that no honest rock music lover
should live without. If there's a breach in this fortress, it's that by now we
know what to expect, and the record offers no amazing new surprises. You'll
have the crunchy hard rock, you'll have the vaudeville and music hall, you'll
have the generic blues-rock made non-generic through sagacious arrangements,
you'll have a little bit of sensitive soulfulness, and you'll have the usual
puzzled feeling of not understanding how much on here comes from the heart and
how much goes as an appendage to Zal Cleminson's clown makeup.
But then, this is probably expected, and the
good news is, the Sensational Band's style is so thoroughly and utterly
demented that, once they're on a roll, nothing can be truly predicted. Take
even the weakest tracks on here: 'Weights Made Of Lead' is standard 'Green
Onions'-style 12-bar, but certainly Booker T. & the MGs would have never
thought of spicing the song up with such a fun clavinet-imitating funky guitar
part as Cleminson invents for the recording. 'Sergeant Fury', in theory, should
bore to sleep everyone who shivers at the name of Fred Astaire, but it is
hardly possible to resist the energy of the song, or the cheesy, but seductive
gay overtones in Alex's chorus of 'I wanna be rich and famous, I wanna be just
the same as the stars that shine on the Christmas tree...'. In short, even
where it's "common", it's a ton of fun; and where it is less than a
ton of fun, it is never common.
Yet in all seriousness, The Impossible Dream
is centered around two major compositions. 'Hot City Symphony' features two
parts, the first of which is a slower, but not any less overwhelming reworking
of 'Vambo' (by now, 'Vambo' was Harvey's scenic alter ego), and the second a
Zappa-influenced mock-detective story about a 'Man In The Jar' (who 'wanna get
out' and is 'smashing the glass', so be careful!). Running over thirteen
minutes, it doesn't feel one second overlong since you should be too busy
following the misfortunes of the man in the jar to care about anything else.
But the album's true piece de resistance
is 'Anthem', a song that begs for usage of this word even if it already weren't
its title. Here, after fooling around with us for the duration of almost
another entire record, Harvey suddenly turns around 180 degrees and yields a
song of tremendous personal power, or, perhaps, even national power — he does
not usually parade his Scottish heritage on record, preferring it to seep
through unconsciously, but here he hauls out the bagpipes (in fact, he'd even
regularly haul out the pipers onstage) and leads the band in a glorious
spiritual chant à la "Hey Jude", but with a religious
twist provided by the angelic vocals of Vicky Silva; unfortunately, I am unable
to locate any extra info on who she was, but it is her inspired performance, by
all means, that rips the song out of its classy, but traditionally-based
Scottish music flowerbed and skyrockets it way up to seventh heaven.
To call the tune "pretentious" would
be the equivalent of remarking, with a straight face, that the Grand Canyon —
in case you didn't know — is pretty deep. The real question is whether you're
overwhelmed or not, and I am overwhelmed. I am, in fact, saddened:
Harvey's 'although it's true I'm worried now, I won't be worried long' may have
been just a gospel cliché when he recorded the tune, but it proved only
too true, and if you trace the live performance of the tune on Youtube you'll
see how many people are offering their R.I.P.s: this is the anthem of
Harvey's life, and it's also the ultimate funeral song if there ever was one.
(And it's difficult for me to believe that it has not served as an inspiration
for McCartney's 'Mull Of Kintyre', although, of course, all anthemic Scottish music
does sound pretty much the same).
For 'Anthem' and 'Hot City Symphony' alone, the
brain and heart would gladly unite in a joyful tandem and lift their thumbs up high, but honestly, I can't find one
truly weak spot on the album. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll smash your head
up against the wall — and yes, you'll be offered plenty of cheese, but haven't
you heard? Scottish cheese is pretty damn good.
TOMORROW BELONGS TO ME (1975)
1) Action Strasse; 2) Snake
Bite; 3) Soul In Chains; 4) The Tale Of The Giant Stone Eater; 5) Ribs And
Balls; 6) Give My
Compliments To The Chef; 7) Sharks Teeth; 8) Shake That Thing; 9) Tomorrow
Belongs To Me; 10) To Be Continued.
This is probably the most Zappa-like album ever
recorded by the band — in light of the presence of unpredictable multi-part
whacko stories like 'The Tale Of The Giant Stone Eater' and the big fan
favorite 'Give My Compliments To The Chef'. Thus it will have the most appeal
to those who appreciate the zany theatricality of Harvey, but may cause a
slight fall off for those (like me) who only appreciate it as long as it's
propelled by the musical skills of Clemenson.
Not that the latter aren't evident on here, but
the balance is clearly tipped in favor of Alex, with Zal stepping somewhat out
of the way; he is felt throughout, but not always heard. The only Big
Riff, for instance, that manages to be memorized after a bunch of listens is
the one that drives 'Snake Bite' — and only because it's a clever variation on
the riff of 'Whole Lotta Love'. But even on that track, as well as most others,
the band is downplaying their hard rock component and concentrating on a
mixture of vaudeville, art-pop, and basic barroom brawl instead. ('Ribs And Balls'
is the lone exception, but it's just a small interlude between the
"epic" compositions).
Therefore, to truly love this album, you must
truly love 'The Tale Of The Giant Stone Eater'. It isn't catchy, its several
sections aren't particularly wonderful in the melody department, and the whole
"rock theater" schtick isn't even novel any more. But the band still
manage to gather themselves and give Harvey's over-the-top delivery of this
harrowing tale of stone shortage and dying trees a properly over-the-top
musical backing. The odd truth is, this should probably be seen rather than
heard, but no footage of any live performance has surfaced, nor can this be
found on any live album — so I'm not even sure it was ever performed
live. It's odd, and it requires a seriously acquired taste to be loved.
The other piece on here which clearly contains
a chunk of Harvey's soul is 'Give My Compliments To The Chef'. It's more solid
dynamically, slowly unwrapping from a quiet electric piano led dirge to all-out
rock fury, stuffed with obscure, Dylan-style, lyrics ('Leo sits behind the
desk, he wanna see the woman cooking gravy, nobody sent no argument and I gotta
go and join the Royal Navy') and "progressive" synthesizer squeaks
and bleeps. It's meaningless if you try to take it apart, but somehow works
when strung together, like the last desperate rant of the seasoned madman,
driven to the very brink of existence by our nice society.
And only a seasoned madman, I guess, would want
to end the album with a completely straightforward, dead-on serious rendition
of 'Tomorrow Belongs To Me', a song which unsuspecting fans could mistake for
an honest, heartfelt attempt to recreate the serenity and solemnity of
'Anthem', but also one which those who are aware of its true origins might be
appalled at (if you happen to be in the first category, it's a great stimulus
to check out the pleasures of Cabaret). It is rumored that Harvey
allowed himself to appear on the German stage dressed up as Hitler, and this is
just another bit of uncomfortable titillation that the man thrived upon. You'll
find it either fascinating or disgusting, but, in all cases, thought-provoking.
My gut reaction is that Tomorrow Belongs To
Me, with its heavier than usual emphasis on the Show rather than the Music,
is a notable step down from the previous trilogy of albums; but it is still
consistently interesting, and, given that my brain respects it more than my
heart loves it, I'd like to give it an intellectually-motivated thumbs up with the possibility of further warming
up to it in the future. But experience tells me there'll always be unusual
individuals in all corners of the world that would be simply delighted to hum
'The Tale Of The Giant Stone Eater' in the shower, so, all you unusual
individuals, this one's for you!
LIVE (1975)
1) Fanfare; 2) Faith Healer;
3) Tomahawk Kid; 4) Vambo; 5) Give My Compliments To The Chef; 6) Delilah; 7) Framed.
Strange that, in the era of triple live albums de
luxe, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band decided to go along with just one
LP's worth of material, giving the listener but a snippet of all the delights
that constituted their live show. Where is the hard rock punch of 'Midnight
Moses'? The tango tragicality of 'Next'? The film-noir satire of 'Man In The
Jar'? The cathartic solemnity of 'Anthem'? The only explanation is that,
perhaps, the band consciously did not want to give any pretext for being
associated with the pomp of progressive rock; but in retrospect, they hardly
needed to be afraid. It's a good thing that, at least, we now have a solid
bunch of releases from the archives to remedy that early mistake.
Granted, Live only works well if you
have no idea what a SAHB live show actually looked like (or, perhaps, on
the contrary, it doesn't work well unless you have some sort of
idea). At their peak, the band put out a theatrical show second to no one, with
the possible exception of Alice Cooper if you're into all that decapitated
dolls and live snakes stuff. Zal Cleminson's Pierrot makeup and proto-KISS
stage antics were a big part of it, of course, but Alex provided the lion's
share of entertainment, with each number sporting a different personality
tailored after the song's "message", and his grimacing and miming
alone were worth seeing the show; unfortunately, very few of them were captured
on tape, but what there is is some of the funniest, most cleverly staged
and most impossible to ignore video material from the decade.
Without the visuals, one could easily complain
about a number like 'Framed' extended to a ten-minute running time, during much
of which the band does not even play anything; in between, Alex is busy
changing clothes (onstage), tearing through paper prison walls (I presume),
stuffing a pair of freshly-licked stockings in his mouth (at least, that's what
he does in most of the preserved filmed versions), and running through the
entire emotional palette while trying to convince the audience of his
innocence, asking if they believe him in between each phrase. It isn't particularly
deep, of course, but it's great old-timey entertainment, and it has no way of
being well translated onto a picture-deprived recording.
On the good side, the band did deliver great
overdriven music on stage; 'Vambo', in particular, shines during its extended
instrumental break where Zal is given ample time to demonstrate his impressive
chops (and no drum solo!), and the other songs are, expectedly,
"dirtier" and more aggressive in their delivery than the better polished
studio versions. By way of track listing, we're usually expecting some small
surprise on every deserving live album; here, said surprise consists of Tom
Jones' 'Delilah', which was actually a regular presence at the band's
mid-Seventies show but somehow never made it onto a studio album. It's one of
their best stabs at deconstruction, perfectly capturing the catchy melody of
the original but, at the same time, wildly mocking its inescapable schmaltz
(the very idea of Alex Harvey giving a Tom Jones impersonation is enough to
tear the canopy off the altar).
Since this is, after all, a great band at their
live peak, I cannot help but put my thumbs up
in total approval; but the track listing isn't entirely satisfactory (choosing
'Tomahawk Kid' over 'Midnight Moses' was simply wrong), and if someone
somewhere out there, for once in someone's life, decided to do good, Live
would have been re-packaged with a thoroughly expanded track list, and with an
added bonus DVD containing whatever can be salvaged from the band's thin
archival collection of live footage. Such a release would have been absolutely
priceless, and recommendable above even the best SAHB studio records. Until
then, we can't get no satisfaction.
THE PENTHOUSE TAPES (1975)
1) I Wanna Have You Back; 2)
Jungle Jenny; 3) Runaway;
4) Love Story; 5) School's Out; 6) Goodnight Irene; 7) Say You're Mine (Every
Cowboy Song); 8) Gamblin'
Bar Room Blues; 9) Crazy Horses; 10) Cheek To Cheek.
Usually, the decision to record an all-covers
album serves as a sharp separation marker between the artist's "classic
years" and the "creative slump" — The Band and Todd Rundgren
immediately come to mind. This is not a God-enforced rule: David Bowie, for
instance, somehow managed to form an exception to it. But the Sensational Alex
Harvey Band, unfortunately, did not.
This is a strange collection: beginning with
two original — and not half-bad — numbers, but then dedicating most of the rest
of its space to Harvey's "deconstructions", which are, to put it
mildly, hit-and-miss. It's almost as if they'd started recording a proper
album, but then ran out of ideas midway through studio time and decided to fool
around instead. Tomorrow Belongs To Me may have been avaricious in
respect to catchy melodies, but it still bubbled with creativity; Penthouse
Tapes is the band arrogantly coasting, and they're loving it.
The selection is very, very Harveyesque: today,
post-modernist freaks have arguably tried out every combination and concoction
that is mathematically possible, but in 1976, only on an Alex Harvey record —
not even on a Frank Zappa one — could you discover Del Shannon shaking hands
with Jethro Tull, Irving Berlin ride in tandem with Alice Cooper, and Leadbelly
and Jimmy Rogers sharing the apartment with the Osmonds. The very idea to put
prog, glam, and pre-war blues together was so novel it could sell the album on
its own. Today, though, it's dated in the nasty sense of the word: it doesn't
really matter how outlandish your idea is unless you have the chops, brains,
and guts to get it to work properly.
And out of all these numbers, nothing manages
to captivate me with one exception: 'Gamblin' Barroom Blues'. I don't even know
why. But I'm guessing that Alex sensed some sort of special common bond between
himself and Rogers — both had a penchant for giving themselves up to bouts of
drunken loneliness, and despite all of Harvey's trademark wildness, nowhere
ever in his live show does he come across as more believable than when he
morphs into this miserable, pitiful little guy. The swagger of 'School's Out'
goes nowhere — it is impossible for him to surpass the dark fires of Alice —
but the retro-sadness of 'Gamblin' Barroom Blues' hits hard, much harder, at
least, than all of his stiff pre-war blues workouts on The Blues.
As for the originals, 'I Wanna Have You Back'
is competent barroom rock in the 'Gang Bang' vein, and 'Jungle Jenny' is a
Tarzan tale that does get to be both hilarious and insinuating ('Jungle Jenny
can't get any'). There's also, I believe, some sort of cowboy original midway
through the record, but I probably forgot about it for a reason. So, a couple
good ones, but not enough to prevent me from thumbs
down-ing the album, as I absolutely fail to see the point of these
covers, and I deeply resent the idea of Harvey dragging the band down to the
level of his pre-Sensational days. Zal Cleminson does not deserve to be
wasted that way.
SAHB STORIES (1976)
1) Dance To Your Daddy; 2)
Amos Moses; 3) Jungle Rubout; 4) Sirocco; 5) Boston Tea Party; 6)
Sultan's Choice; 7) $25 For A Massage; 8) Dogs Of War.
Recovering from the temporary bout of
"all-coveritis", Harvey, Cleminson and Co. go back to relying upon
their own forces, as they deliver yet another serving of the usual stylistic
melange. SAHB Stories is not one of their most acclaimed albums (even
though, surprisingly enough, it brought them their highest bit of commercial
success with the single release of 'Boston Tea Party') — it came out at a time
when the Harvey formula was quickly becoming obsolete, and 'punk' values were
replacing 'glam' at an alarming rate. But, ripped out of its historical
context, it can proudly measure up to any other solid SAHB album of the decade.
It is dark, though. As you look back on the
band's career, you can definitely see the early comic overtones gradually
recede and give way to a much bleaker vision of the world. At some point, you
no longer have any lightweight vaudeville, and even basic headbanging
rock'n'roll is beginning to be presented with a strong touch of bitter lemon.
Looking at the lyrics to some of these songs, it's relatively easy to crack the
usual smile, but the music, per se, is not smile-inducing at all. 'Dance To
Your Daddy', for instance, would seem like a title destined to accompany some
cute pop-rock ditty, but why, then, is its main riff so reminiscent of
Zeppelin's 'Immigrant Song', and what do all the aethereal bursts of synth
soloing and angel choirs have to do with it?
Indeed, most of the time the band is bent on
one of two things: churning out grim, unfriendly riffage ('Amos Moses'; the
unbearably catchy 'Sultan's Choice') or engaging in ominous, unsettling
atmospherics (the never-ending, but somewhat hypnotic 'Sirocco'). Every once in
a while they venture out into funky territory ('Jungle Rub Out' and especially
'$25 For A Massage', also reminiscent of Zeppelin, but this time of their funk
explorations on Physical Graffiti), yet impression-wise, these numbers
do not stray too far from the overall darkness. Even 'Boston Tea Party' itself,
no matter how much it seduces us with its superficially friendly singalong chorus
of 'Are you going, are you going to the Boston Tea Party?' — the one whose
superficial friendliness sold it so well to British audiences in 1976 — recalls
the whole story of American independence in a bitter vein, and that chorus is
oddly unengaging: it transfers neither joy nor sorrow, getting stuck in your
head for a reason that is impossible to understand.
It may be so that the band was simply caught in
a state of confusion and tiredness, and Harvey was already suffering from his spine
problems. It may have been a conscious decision to 'morose up' their act. The
bottomline is that the album is a downer, from the initial deception of 'Dance
To Your Daddy' and right down to the openly sadistic, murderous conclusion of
'Dogs Of War', one of the most hateful tracks ever recorded by the band (and
something tells me they really meant it). But downers can be
masterpieces, and far be it from me to accuse these songs of slackness or total
'genericness'; most are fabulous creations, with the utmost care paid to the
smallest details — things like 'Sirocco' may be fairly simple in their basic
execution, but what matters is the impressionistic sonic landscape painted by
all sorts of unpredictable brushstrokes from the band's array of guitars and
keyboards. (It doesn't exactly give out an impression of a real sirocco —
rather a pre-feeling of one — but it hardly matters).
Since it is also quite consistent — not one
track that feels completely out of place — the brain and heart department
concur in their thumbs up, although it is
still unclear which of the two is more instrumental in this decision. The heart
rather goes after the basic charms of 'Sultan's Choice' (top-notch riff +
catchy chorus + on-the-edge lyrics that could be about sex slave trade = first
rate gut level pleasure), but the brain is most impressed with the likes of
'Dogs Of War', so we'll just leave them at that and move along.
ROCK DRILL (1977)
1) Rock Drill; 2) The
Dolphins; 3) Rock'n'Roll; 4) King Kong; 5) Booids; 6) Who Murdered Sex; 7) Nightmare
City; 8) Water Beastie; 9) Mrs. Blackhouse.
After SAHB Stories, Harvey and the
Sensational Band temporarily parted ways, for reasons which are not easy to
understand in retrospect. All I know is that Harvey needed some time off to
tend to his ailing backbone, and he also engaged on a typically Harvey-style
weird project: a spoken word album about the Loch Ness monster (!). In his
absence, the remaining four recorded and released a record of their own,
suitably titled Fourplay, which bombed commercially and got lambasted
critically. I have not heard it; given Cleminson's presence on it, it may not
have been all that bad. But apparently the split made everybody feel
uncomfortable, and, in a year's time, Harvey and the boys were back together —
although with one irreplaceable loss already: keyboardist Hugh McKenna,
replaced by a weaker choice in Tommy Eyre (previously known as the guy who
played the organ on Joe Cocker's 'With A Little Help From My Friends').
Still, none of them seemed happy. Harvey was
still ailing (and also depressed about the recent death of his brother). The
music scene was changing, making their sounds and styles less and less
"relevant" with each passing month. And Cleminson, perhaps, was also
thinking about a change of scenery: right after this record, he accepted the
proposal to join Nazareth as a second guitarist. Things looked pretty dark, and
this is a dark record. The very title, Rock Drill, does not seem to
strive to make the listener happy, and its cover — a grim suit of armor against
a shadowy background — is the most eerie and depressing sleeve the band ever
put out. To say nothing of the first impression once the music actually starts
playing — the growling synthesizer tones that welcome you out of the depths of
hell are a far cry from the generally light and cheery intros on most other
SAHB albums.
Yet it is not a bad album. It is pretty bad if
one approaches it expecting another typical slab of flashy SAHB cabaret,
alternating crazy headbanging with good biting humor and just an occasional
streak of darkness to make things more serious. Rock Drill thrives on
the darkness: it cranks up SAHB's progressive, complex side to the max, with
the only light number, an innocent country rocker called 'Mrs. Blackhouse',
thrown on at the end in a totally who-the-heck-cares manner. Hence, the
possibility of disappointment — unjust. What kind of music would you be
writing under the circumstances listed above, anyway?
It may be true that the results downplay
Harvey's main strength: theatricality. For instance, 'The Dolphins' is a solid
six-minute mini-epic, but it is the kind of material that we'd rather associate
with the likes of Rush, or just about any other seriously-minded second- or
third-generation prog rock outfit. Its lengthy romantic guitar solos and solemn
piano riffs leave Alex with very little to do — he is simply belting out the
lyrics, without at all "getting into character". Yet this lack of
uniqueness should not discredit the music, which is quite evocative by itself.
Also, Harvey is much more prominently featured
on the second side, where it is his presence, after all, that adds the proper
bite to the faceless boogie of 'Who Murdered Sex?', the faceful punkish boogie
of 'Nightmare City', and the album's generally acknowledged highlight — 'Water
Beastie', probably a leftover from Harvey's solo album on Loch Ness, forever
memorable upon first listen due to the unbeatable chorus: 'Look at the monster,
look at the monster, look at the monster in distress'. If these numbers are
generally less flashy and more "dim" than we'd like them to be, this
does not mean that they will not, in time, be able to speak to you the same way
some of Harvey's more immediately impressive material can. Come to think of it,
'Who Murdered Sex' and 'The Dolphins' are, in a way, more intellectually
rewarding than 'Framed', even if the latter is so much more basic fun.
All of this means that Rock Drill is
unquestionably a thumbs up for me,
particularly for the brain department, although the heart sometimes gets a
mighty adrenaline rush as well — especially mid-way through 'Dolphins', when
Cleminson's solo breaks through the grayness and mud and soars up to heaven in
a last desperate swan song for the original band. No great shakes, the record,
but a fittingly, instructively grim (and thought-provoking) terminus.
THE MAFIA STOLE MY GUITAR (1979)
1) Don's Delight; 2) Back In The
Depot; 3) Wait For Me Mama; 4) The Mafia Stole My Guitar; 5) Shakin' All Over;
6) The Whalers (Thar She Blows); 7) Oh Spartacus!; 8) Just A Gigolo / I Ain't
Got Nobody.
Harvey's first true solo album in seven years,
despite being recorded with an entirely different band, picks up exactly where Rock
Drill left us off: less humor and goofiness, more torment and
introspection. Perhaps sensing that almost no distance was left to run, Alex
continues to concentrate on long, semi-confessional epics, somewhat poor on
musical ideas but very rich on lyrics (which you can't make out anyway, since
the older he got, the more prominently he retreated back to his Scottish
accent).
And it's a success. Over the years spent with
the SAHB, Harvey gradually completed his transformation from funny clown to
sad clown, but where the funny clown was hilariously sarcastic, the sad clown
now reaches serious depths that the first decade of Harvey's career never even
hinted at. The Mafia Stole My Guitar is an honest, personal, and
gradually more and more captivating piece of work; I miss Cleminson sorely —
and so, apparently, did Harvey himself, given that he even inserted an indirect
grudge on the subject into the very title of the record — and new guitarist
Matthew Cang, although competent, merely supplies the riffs without being the
determining force in the band; but the fact of the matter is that this
particular record can live and not die without Zal's presence, when something
like The Joker Is Wild never could.
Of course, Harvey wouldn't be Harvey if the
record were wiped clear of its wildcards: Louis Prima's 'Just A Gigolo/I Ain't
Nobody' sternly reminds the listener that lounge entertainment still is, and
will always be, Harvey's musical cradle, and the over-arranged, wildly
futuristic arrangement of 'Shakin' All Over' may be one of the weirdest tracks
Alex ever cut — but also effective, since, now that I think of it, the song's
chuggin' riffage as originally practiced by Johnny Kidd and then the Who, just begs
for a little "sci-fi treatment".
But the bulk of the record is occupied by the
epics I mentioned — six minutes for 'Back In The Depot', five for the title
track, seven each for 'Wait For Me Mama' and 'The Whalers'. Written as
relatively simple, slow-to-mid-tempo "singer-songwriter" style
panoramas, occasionally changing keys ('Back In The Depot' picks up speed at
the end, 'The Whalers' turns into an aggressive rocker midway through before
calming down again), occasionally built on ferocious hard riffage (title
track), I can still see how many people would find them boring; they display
neither the manic energy of a Springsteen nor the cool chops of a classic era
prog-rock band.
In fact, they all depend on whether one has
succeeded in getting Harvey's quintessential charisma under one's skin or not.
Assessing the lyrics might help; 'The Whalers', for instance, uses the whaling
process as a barely concealed metaphor for the vanity of fame and success
('I'll throw the carcass on the boil, sell my soul for bloody oil'). But one
doesn't even need much English, I guess, to get the impression that this is a
level of rock theater dangerously bordering on real life depression and
disillusionment. Throughout, Harvey sings without a single trace of the
recklessness and invigoration of old — it's all painful, so much so that in
places, the singing almost dissolves into laryngeal gulps and growls. But it's
all meaningful, and I'm willing to buy into it.
So it's essentially that kind of a record where
the brain cannot help you all that much — the only serious "musical
creativity" goes into 'Shakin' All Over', everything else has to do with
self-pity and world weariness and poor health and Nazareth. But I do feel for
the man, and I understand self-pity and world weariness and poor health and
even Nazareth, and 'The Whalers' at least is beautiful in its ugliness, enough
to shed a tear or two and to warrant a thumbs up,
with the brain gallantly ceasing the right of final decision to the emotional
reaction. This might just be the most proverbially "sincere" album
from Harvey, and by the age of 44, everyone has a right to record a
proverbially sincere album and expect some love and respect for it.
THE SOLDIER ON THE WALL (1983)
1) Mitzi; 2) Billy Bolero; 3)
Snowshoes Thompson; 4) Roman Wall Blues; 5) The Poet And I; 6) Nervous; 7)
Carry The Water; 8) Flowers Mr. Florist; 9) The Poet And I (Reprise).
Perhaps by the time the early Eighties rolled
along, Alex was bracing himself to regain his stardom: with his new band,
"The Electric Cowboys", he resumed touring and entered once more into
the recording studio. With his tragic, untimely death on February 4, 1982, from
a massive heart attack, all hopes were extinguished.
All we have left from this stage in his career
is Soldier On The Wall, a posthumous release that puts together
semi-finished (or so I hope) tracks from those last sessions and credits them
to solo Alex Harvey. And, as is the usual situation with such cases, it is
rendered more interesting by the shadow of death that looms, unforeseen, but
threatening, over it — most of the songs, whether we want it or not, will tend
to associate with the man's demise and acquire an extra mystical aura from the
depths of our own subconscious. Which, although gruesome, is still a good
thing, because otherwise Soldier On The Wall does not look much like a
record that could have restored Harvey's stardom, much less add something truly
important to his overall legacy.
In general terms of meaning and atmosphere,
it's the same old Alex: a little clownish, a little sad, a little pompous, a
little introspective. In terms of arrangement, it suffers from an acute case of
synthesizer-itis: the ugly Eighties' keyboard sound is all over the record, and
the yucky blobs of electronic poison that announce the album opener, 'Mitzi',
backed by equally yucky electronic drums, spoil most of the song's pleasures.
Zal! Where are you, Zal? 'Billy's Bolero' is an interesting attempt at
combining martial rhythmics with country-western, but, again, its being dominated
by that half-dead sound immediately dates it, in the bad sense of the word.
The keyboards temporarily leave the stage on a
couple of real obscure covers — Buddy Ebsen and Tennessee Ernie Ford's
'Snowshoe Thompson', a cheerful folkie rave about California's most famous
mailman ('mush man mush man mush man go!'), and 'The Poet And I', an
instrumental composition by Frank Mills to which Harvey added his own lyrics, a
mish-mash of folk imagery loosely based on the works of Robert Burns. Thus do
Native America and Old Scotland shake hands over the album's A- and B-side, and
the rowdy craziness of the former greatly complements the bagpipe stateliness
of the latter (which almost manages to ascend the same height as 'Anthem' one
decade prior to it).
Some decently rocking tunes on the second side
manage, in addition to these two highlights, to save the album from a complete
disaster, but overall, its musical hide leaves a lot to be desired. It's so
very sad, for instance, that Harvey never left behind a SAHB version of 'Roman
Wall Blues' — a tense, personal, more-than-anti-war song that he first recorded
in 1969, with a limp, boring band, and then waited until 1982 to re-record,
when its impact was so much subdued by lifeless electronica. Sad, because even
through the cheap sci-fi murk of these keyboards it is still possible to hear
Alex Harvey the likeable loner, too smart for his own good. But a thumbs down all the same — this is simply not a
kind of record to which one will turn frequently as long as all the SAHB
catalog is at one's reach.
ADDENDA:
LIVE AT THE BBC (1972-1977/2009)
CD I: 1) Midnight Moses; 2)
St. Anthony; 3) Framed; 4) There's No Lights On The Christmas Tree, Mother; 5)
Hole In Her Stocking; 6) Dance To The Music; 7) The Faith Healer; 8) Midnight
Moses; 9) Gang Bang; 10) The Last Of The Teenage Idols; 11) Giddy Up A Ding
Dong; CD II: 1) Next; 2) The Faith Healer; 3) Give My Compliments To The Chef;
4) Delilah; 5) Boston Tea Party; 6) Pick It Up And Kick It; 7) Smouldering.
Many, if not all, of these tracks had surfaced
earlier on various smaller releases, but in 2009, finally, someone did the job
right and gathered everything that could be salvaged from SAHB's radio
appearances in one place. The result is, of course, patchy, but just about
everything apart from the last two tracks seriously rules.
The first disc contains full recordings of
SAHB's two radio concerts from 1972 and 1973, respectively, with only one
track ('Midnight Moses') duplicated — since the first show was promoting Framed
and the second was promoting Next, what you get is a selection of
highlights from both albums. I would not say they are necessarily better than
the studio counterparts; since all the songs are still fresh, they mostly tend
to stick to reproducing the originals ('Framed', for instance, does not yet get
the extended audience participation workout), except Harvey is a little more
loose and Zal is a little more ass-kicking, just what you'd expect from a live
performance.
The only surprise in the tracklisting is a
cover of Sly & The Family Stone's 'Dance To The Music', and it is
understandable the band would soon drop it from the setlist: well-rehearsed and
well-meaning, but a bunch of mock-rocking Glasgow dudes doing one of the
Sixties' most classic funk numbers, head-and-tails-oriented on Sly's
"family style", can hardly be expected to work all that well (there is
some ferocious bass work, though). My advice is to stick to Harvey originals.
The second disc traces the band's evolution
through several other worthy recreations of their hits onstage (taken from the
Old Grey Whistle Test and Top Of The Pops, no less), where the definitive
highlight is Harvey's possessed rendition of 'Next' (it has also survived on
video, and works much better in that form), although the other four tunes are
at most one notch below. Unfortunately, the album peters out quite badly,
allocating unnecessary space for two performances of the SAHB without Harvey
(recorded during Alex's leave of absence in between SAHB Stories and Rock
Drill), with 'Smouldering', in particular, sounding like very, very bad
Foreigner. But I suppose they had to use some of that material to fill out
empty space (Disc 2 is pretty short as it is, compared to disc 1).
Regardless, this is a sure-fire thumbs up, even if it does support my thesis that
"radio concerts" are not a very faithful representation of any band's
live sound — most probably, recording "live in the studio" still
triggers that part of the players' brain which is responsible for
"studio" (clean, polished sound) rather than "live" (give
'em the show of their life), and it conveys the hypnotizing power of SAHB much less
effectively than the Live album, or other archive releases that let you
hear full shows from actual tours. But the pleasure is undeniable.
HOT CITY (1974/2009)
1) Vambo; 2) Man In The Jar;
3) Hey You; 4) Long Haired Music; 5) Sergeant Fury; 6) Tomahawk Kid; 7) Ace In
The Hole; 8) Weights Made Of Lead; 9) Last Train.
The latest Harvey-related release "from
the vaults" is only recommendable to serious fans with solid Scottish
heritage. Hot City is the title of a shelved album that SAHB attempted
to record in early 1974 — however, disappointed with the results, they
abandoned the sessions and came back later in the year to re-record most of the
tracks as The Impossible Dream. So, essentially, what you get is just an
earlier version of that record, minus 'River Of Love' and 'The Impossible Dream'
itself, plus just one previously unknown track — the vaudeville number 'Ace In
The Hole'.
It is all quite perfectly listenable and
enjoyable: these are not demo tapes, but full-fledged, expertly produced
recordings (on part of the sessions, they worked with veteran Kinks and Who
producer Shel Talmy). Whether, however, they are better in any way than
The Impossible Dream is debatable: obviously, Harvey did not think so,
and me, I am somewhat reluctant to waste time over any sort of detailed
comparison. Based on a few rag-taggy observations (for instance, the relative
shortness of 'Man In The Jar'), I'd say Hot City is somewhat less
theatrical than what it eventually became (this might have been the ultimate
reason for Harvey not getting along with straightforward rock'n'roller Talmy).
But that's really rag-taggy.
Also, 'Anthem' (here still bearing the original
title 'Last Train') is much longer here, with the 'anthemic' part of it fully played
twice, first as an intro and then as an outro. I agree with the band that it
does not work; the "preview" of the majestic Scottish melody in the
beginning sort of acts like a silly spoiler, and they were wise to remove it in
the final version.
Bottomline: if The Impossible Dream
figures on your list of 100 Greatest Albums Of All Time, Hot City is a
must. At best, you will have the opportunity to enjoy your favourite record the
way it has never been heard before, and at worst, you'll get some useful
insights into its origins. But something tells me I am not addressing a heck of
a lot of people in this paragraph.
THE ANIMALS
1) The House Of The Rising Sun;
2) The Girl Can't Help It; 3) Blue Feeling; 4) Baby Let
Me Take You Home; 5) The Right Time; 6) Talkin' 'Bout You; 7) Around And Around; 8) I'm
In Love Again; 9) Gonna
Send You Back To Walker; 10) Memphis Tennessee; 11) I'm Mad Again; 12) I've
Been Around.
This and the following two albums are most
easily acquired today on the 2-CD set entitled The Complete Animals —
but "complete" only as far as their 1964-1965 Columbia recordings go,
i. e. representing the "Alan Price" era in which the band had not yet
turned into the custom-made vehicle for propagating Eric Burdon's limitless
ego, but, rather, was simply one of the tightest, strak-raving-maddest British
R'n'B combos that ever came out of Newcastle-on-Tyme. (Now that is a statement
that'll be pretty hard to beat).
Eric Burdon, at this point, is merely the vocalist:
an essential part of the band, the rough, rowdy, ballsy exterior, its
bullroarer communicator. Alan Price is the organist, creating grim, moody atmospheres
derivative of Ray Charles but in a class of their own. Hilton Valentine is the
guitar player — nothing particularly special but it was he who first put on
record the arpeggios of 'House Of The Rising Sun', and that alone should
suffice. And the rhythm section is... decent.
As with most British bands of the period, it is
of no principal importance whether the reviews center around their US or UK
discographies — none of the albums were intended as 'concept' pieces, and, in
the case of the Animals, producer Mickie Most could care less about proper
track sequencing regardless of the side of the Atlantic ocean that sequencing
was delivered to. US discographies are cozier in that respect, since the
albums tend to be more numerous at the expense of including material that, in
the UK, was only issued on 45s, but it really makes no difference.
Anyway, The Animals — the American
version, which, for some reason, happened to come out about a month earlier
than the UK counterpart — does faithfully include the band's two first singles,
plus seven LP tracks that would also be on the UK album and 'Blue Feeling',
which would later be used as the B-side to 'Boom Boom'. The sequencing is a
mess indeed, but, more importantly, there is not a single Animals original:
all of the tunes are blues / R'n'B / rockabilly covers, with 'House Of The
Rising Sun' thrown in for good measure. So, how does it measure up today?
Still great. At the intersection of Burdon's
vocals and Price's organ playing, the Animals had developed a unique sound
that made these songs their own and make even such universal chestnuts as Chuck
Berry's 'Around And Around' or Ray Charles' 'The Right Time' well worth hearing
in these versions. Price, in particular, almost singlehandedly turns the electric
organ into a rock weapon as powerful as the electric guitar; his playing may be
simpler and more "rootsy" and traditional than that of his main
concurrent on the instrument — Rod Argent of the Zombies — but, before his
successful quest of conquering the organ, no one had ever explored its
potential so thoroughly. On the fast numbers, Price-led instrumental passages
create an atmosphere of proto-psychedelia that must have driven rock'n'roll
dancers punch-drunk in 1964 ('Talkin' 'Bout You'); and the slow ones, through
his subtle uses of various effects and volume levels, are transformed from
generic blues into artsy explorations of human emotion ('I'm Mad Again').
As for Eric, it is tremendously hard to
understand and describe the secret of his singing. He never had much range,
and his "powerhouse" delivery, shocking and stunning in 1964, has
long since been beaten by far throatier powerhouse vocalists like Noddy Holder
of Slade. But perhaps it is exactly the combination of the powerhouse approach
with a certain amount of refined finesse and intelligence — something Noddy
could never have been suspected of — that does the trick. Burdon knows how to
play with his voice and intrigue the listener with this play; he knows the
value of silence and quiet just as he knows the value of all-out screaming, and
he, perhaps best of all the early British R'n'B-ers, had mastered the voodoo
art of classic bluesmen and R'n'B-ers who could easily lure the audience into a
trance through simple repetition of the simplest phrases. You will know what I
mean if, just like me, you will not feel that 'Talkin' 'Bout You' has lasted
all of seven minutes, a record-breaker in 1964.
In between these two masters of the trade, even
thoroughly lightweight tracks like 'Baby Let Me Take You Home' (copped by the
band from Dylan's earlier 'Baby Let Me Follow You Down') are delightful, although
I personally lean towards the darker stuff, like 'I'm Mad Again', arguably the
most believable impersonation of a nervous breakdown in British pop music up to
that time. The only catch is that the darker stuff is in the minority here — in
their earliest days, the band liked to rave and rock their audience more than
it liked to hypnotize it. But can we blame them?
Then again, of course, few things could be
darker than 'The House Of The Rising Sun', which has not lost one ounce of its
terrifying power ever since. Its historical influence can hardly be overrated
— it may not have singlehandedly invented 'folk-rock', but it certainly was one
of the earliest indications that pop music made by young rebellious people
could have brains and soul in addition to brawn and lust. It also served as an
important watermark in the evolution of rock lyrics: apparently, Burdon did not
feel as comfortable as Dylan about singing 'it's been the ruin of many a poor
girl, and me, o God, I'm one', and changed 'girl' to 'boy' — immediately and,
probably, unintentionally, transforming it from a tragic, but generic, folk
lament of a brothel-locked girl with family troubles into an equally tragic,
but far more mysterious — mystical, in fact — plight of The Disspirited
Young Man, with no common idea whatsoever of what "The House Of The Rising
Sun" really is or should represent.
The historical side should then be reinforced
by mentioning the record-breaking length of 4:29 for a single release (kudos to
Mickie Most for greenlighting the idea), and the emotional side — by mentioning
the fantastic crescendo, as the song slowly and steadily gains in volume,
beginning with little other than Valentine's arpeggios and then gradually
becoming a bloody battlefield between Burdon's epic vocal stand and Price's keyboard-generated
tempest. For all its purposes, for all its simplicity, it is most certainly
"art rock" at its earliest and freshest, and that organ solo should
be canonized; is there anything like an "organ solo Hall of Fame"?
So the album should be getting a thumbs up even if it had nothing but 'House' on it
— in terms of historical importance, that's probably just the way it goes — but
its overall sound is such a delight that I am even happy about relistening to
the band being proverbially mega-repetitive and ultra-monotonous on 'Memphis
Tennessee'. Classic.
THE ANIMALS ON TOUR (1965)
1) Boom Boom; 2) How You've
Changed; 3) Mess Around; 4) Bright Lights Big City; 5) I Believe To My Soul; 6)
Worried Life Blues; 7) Let The Good Times Roll; 8) I Ain't Got You; 9)
Hallelujah I Love Her So; 10) I'm Crying; 11) Dimples;
12) She Said Yeah.
This is not a live album (for some reason,
American companies had a predilection for slapping the On Tour moniker
onto British band releases — the Who had a similar trick played on them — as if
these words might have had some magical influences on record buyers), but
rather a mishmash of studio tracks partially carried over from the British LP Animals
and partially previewing the British LP Animal Tracks, not to be
confused with the later American LP Animal Tracks (yes, the two sides of
the Atlantic are different worlds and people on one side do not have to know
anything about the other. And if they want to know, they have to do
serious research on it).
There is no single classic track on here that
could hold up to the grandeur of 'House Of The Rising Sun' — few songs could —
but, overall, it is a definite stylistic improvement over the debut. We can still
hear ferocious rock'n'roll — Ray Charles' 'Mess Around' and Larry Williams'
'She Said Yeah' are perfect for the rave crowd, as is the band's first
post-'House' single, the Burdon / Price-penned 'I'm Crying' — but it is also
much heavier on slow, moody blues and soul numbers, which the band shapes more
and more in its own image.
John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed, in particular,
are unrecognizable. When Hooker recorded 'Boom Boom' and 'Dimples' in the
early Sixties, they were quiet, grim, gloomy, scary tracks: one could just see
the hellbound old Negro sitting on the street, creeping out little girls by
mumbling 'I like the way you walk, I like the way you talk' under his breath. Under
Burdon's heavy hand, both become loud, brawny, and quite unsubtle expressions
of drunken lust — there are no nuances or suggestions, it's all hanging out in
the open, but there is a place for that, too, especially when he unfurls the
battle cry of 'Come on, let's shake it!' and the rest of the band start impersonating
a gang of hoodlums sweeping through town.
Jimmy Reed's 'Bright Lights, Big City', on the
other hand, which used to be just another one of an innumerable series of
totally sound-alike Jimmy Reed songs, is transformed from something plain and
unsubtle into a little symphony, with a new quiet mid-section and ad-libbed
lyrics in which Eric names all the city perils that conspire to turn his girl
loose — 'long Cadillacs... Rolls Royce... men with money... cigarettes...
flamenco... scotch... bourbon...'; an exciting rearrangement that further
confirms my suspicions about Jimmy Reed as mostly a "songwriting
vehicle" for other people to expand on his ideas (or, rather, idea, I'm
not sure Jimmy ever had more than one) and build flowery gardens on top of
them.
The slower numbers — blues and soul things like
'How You've Changed', 'I Believe To My Soul', and 'Worried Life Blues' — take
more time to sink in (and also require inborn tolerance for the 12-bar form),
but the Price vs. Burdon contests that are at the center of each are well worth
the price of admission. Eric always lets his brawn do most of the talking, but
there is always a bit of soul behind it, and his sense of theatricality, as he
unfurls the broken-hearted drama before the listener, is unparalleled for
1965, whereas Price is Price, showing himself completely worthy of imitating
and expanding on Ray Charles' piano style.
So, while this is not a "true" album
in any way, its consistency level is higher than on any other collection of the
band's early output. Nevertheless, a thumbs up
judgement applied to it individually will be of little practical use, since
today it is only available as a scattered sub-set on The Complete
Animals; and it does not even have a proper chronological sense, since, in
terms of dates of recording, On Tour is all over the place.
ANIMAL TRACKS (1965)
1) We've Gotta Get Out Of This
Place; 2) Take It Easy; 3) Bring It On Home To Me;
4) The Story Of Bo Diddley; 5) Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood;
6) I Can't Believe It; 7) Club-A-Gogo; 8) Roberta; 9) Bury My Body; 10) For
Miss Caulker.
Again, this American release, this time
following the same-titled UK album after a four month delay, has virtually
nothing to do with it — only two tracks intersect ('Roberta' and 'For
Miss Caulker'), whereas most of the other numbers on the British Tracks
are really the same as the ones on the American Tour. On the other hand,
the title when applied to the American record actually makes more sense: these
are indeed 'tracks', a.k.a. 'leftovers' — an even more than usually discoherent
mess of tracks, some cut as early as 1964, some as late as summer 1965, by
which time Price had already left the band, replaced by Dave Rowberry. (Rowberry
is a fine organist in his own right, but prefers to stay in the shadows — listen
to how subtly hidden he keeps himself in the mix on 'We've Gotta Get Out Of
This Place', for the most part — so this means transforming the band into a
guitar-driven powerhorse, under Eric's undisputed rule.)
The result is weird. It would be an
exaggeration to say that, over two years, the Animals' sound had covered a
distance of any number of light years, but, let's face it, songs like the
straight up raver 'Club-A-Gogo' are very different from songs like
'Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood' — imagine a record that is half Please
Please Me and half Help! and you'll know what I mean. This is not to
say that any of the songs are bad; on the contrary, Animal Tracks is as
consistent in pure quality as its predecessors and maybe more. But it's a
decidedly odd mix.
Its two superheroes bookmark Side A: 'Don't Let
Me Be Misunderstood', Price and Burdon's last triumph together as they borrow a
tune from Nina Simone and show no intention of giving it back, and 'We've Gotta
Get Out Of This Place', the classic Mann-Weill escapist anthem that showed the
world the Animals could hold their ground even without Price — for a little
while, at least. It is Burdon who leads the band on both numbers, showing that
his gruff wildman persona can be shaped into a painful, personal, sensitive
mold just as easily as it can be employed for the needs of acute social
statements. His 'I'm just a soul whose intentions are good... oh Lord, please
don't let me be misunderstood' and 'we gotta get out of this place, girl,
there's a better life for me and you' are delivered almost in the same tone —
and yet they mean two entirely different things.
He also gives a decent, if very unfaithful, Sam
Cooke impression ('Bring It On Home'), shows himself capable of handling old
folk blues ('Bury My Body', which these jokers manage to turn into a sweaty
R'n'B workout at the end anyway), and jokes at his own ineptitude in
impersonating Bo Diddley ('The Story Of Bo Diddley'). The latter, by the way,
although it is chronologically one of the earliest recordings here, already
presages Burdon's future overstated love for pompous verbosity and
'propheteering' as he extends 'The Story' way beyond Bo Diddley and turns it
into a lengthy narrative of rock'n'roll history up to the present day. Later
experiments in this style would for the most part be awful, but this particular
bit of narration — no doubt, due to its extremely tongue-in-cheek character —
is still a laugh riot, especially when Eric starts imitating Bobby Vee ('take
good care of my baby...').
The review would be incomplete if I did not
mention the band's last single for Columbia, which does not form part of this
LP but rightfully concludes the 2-CD package of The Complete Animals.
Roger Atkins' 'It's My
Life' follows the winning formula of 'We've Gotta Get Out...' — same cool,
swaggery melody, same bravado in the singing, same self-assertive atmosphere,
plus a great, epoch-defining guitar riff to go along with it, making it perhaps
the quintessential Animals song (no Price, though).
For some reason, I have always admired its
B-side, a Burdon "original" called 'I'm Going To Change The World',
even more, despite the obvious fact that Eric simply recycles the exact same
riff and comes up with just one melodic part instead of three different ones —
but what a part! As if in honest compensation, he winds his mechanisms up to
the limit and over the limit, on the verge of pushing his larynx all the way
down his trachea, even if that's what it takes him to change the world. If
'It's My Life' is, after all, a proper pop culture creation, then 'I'm Going To
Change The World', stripping it of all embellishments, is the punkiest
statement from these guys, right up there in terms of sheer power with 'My
Generation' from the same year.
But, of course, as an album Animal Tracks
has no significance whatsoever, and the predictable thumbs
up only refer to the songs, not the meaningless non-principle of
their collocation. It does give you all the odds and ends on one plate, though,
and this is, in a way, convenient. And if, like me, you also hold the opinion
that there was no finer moment for the Animals than the ever-so-brief 1964-65
period, well, there is really no sense in bickering as long as you have all
that first rate material to consume.
ANIMALISMS (1966)
1) One Monkey Don't Stop No
Show; 2) Maudie; 3) Outcast; 4) Sweet Little Sixteen; 5) You're On My Mind; 6)
Clapping; 7) Gin House Blues; 8) Squeeze Her Tease Her; 9) What Am I Living
For; 10) I Put A Spell On You; 11) That's All I Am To You; 12) She'll Return
It; 13*) Inside Looking
Out; 14*) Don't Bring
Me Down; 15*) Cheating; 16*) Help Me Girl; 17*) See See Rider; 18*) I
Just Wanna Make Love To You; 19*) Boom Boom; 20*) Big Boss Man; 21*) Pretty
Thing; 22*) Don't Bring Me Down (stereo); 23*) See See Rider (stereo); 24*)
Help Me Girl (stereo); 25*) Cheating (stereo).
The original Animals' last album is
conveniently available today as a monumentally expanded collection, twice the
size of the original, also including all of their 45s from around 1966, outtakes,
stereo mixes, and even, as a very special bonus, the band's earliest EP from
way back in 1963, so that the commonest layman may easily assess the length of
the road traveled.
Animalisms is, in fact, a transitional record. After 'It's My Life', boosted by
commercial success but also fed up with the dependency on producer Mickie
Most's material, the Animals — by now, entirely in Burdon's hands — switched
from EMI to Decca in an attempt to toughen and roughen up their original sound,
on the verge of leaking and collapsing under commercial pressures (or so they
thought; back in 1966, everything was so mixed up that «commercial» and «artsy»
pressures were frequently impossible to separate from one another).
They still have not learned to write original
material, though, and, for the most part, still exploit the same old
vaults of blues, R'n'B, and rockabilly. Without Price, and in light of the
changing times, they sound different: louder, brawnier, darker even than
before: Chas Chandler's bass rises high up in the mix, as is evident already on
the opening seconds of 'One Monkey Don't Stop No Show', and Valentine's guitar
says goodbye to the shrill squeaking of yesterday and fully embraces garage
noise as its ideal (although he still goes light on the feedback). Yet it
cannot really be said that all of this manages to improve on the previous two
years.
The album's two greatest numbers are, in fact,
not on the album — they are the hit singles 'Don't Bring Me Down' (a
Goffin-King original, and nothing whatsoever to do with the ELO disco
hit) and 'Inside Looking Out' (in a rare glimpse of happiness, credited to the
band members themselves, although most people probably know it through the
Grand Funk version). These rank high up there with the very best. Eric is on
fire, the boys supply him with cool guitar and organ riffs, and an A+ in the
tension-building department is guaranteed for both. 'Inside Looking Out', in
particular, is one of those simple, but unforgettable hard rock classics that
serve as the perfect illustration to the 'Spirit Of '66'. The Yardbirds have
some of those, too.
Sometimes you can't help but wonder — what was
it, exactly, that prevented the original lineup from simply sitting down and
writing a bunch more of these numbers to put up on the next LP, instead
of filling it to the brim with cover material of such widely ranging quality?
Was it modesty, or even self-humiliation? Wild, unbridled love for
trans-Atlantic music dictating their hand in the studio? Elementary laziness? Or
real true inability? The latter choice is the most dubious: lack of talent has
never prevented «The Artist» to clog the world with his refuse. I go for a
combination of the other three.
That said, 'Maudie' is a great dirty piece of
talking blues arranged as proto-punk rock (the band never fails with
John Lee Hooker — he's like their closet songwriter!); Bessie Smith's 'Gin
House Blues' is a little too overtly theatrical, but Eric's sincerity is not
to be doubted; and Chuck Willis' 'What Am I Living For?' is given a lush, deep
arrangement that makes the original sound like a hastily pre-recorded demo. On
the other hand, tunes they should not have touched include Screamin' Jay
Hawkins' 'I Put A Spell On You' — Burdon singing Hawkins? might just as well
hunt elephant with a baseball bat — and 'Sweet Little Sixteen' (who the hell
needs another cover of it, and in 1966 at that?).
The rest of the tracks can be further split
down the same line, and in the end, Animalisms is a severe
disappointment — a generally good record that only gives tiny hints at how
excellent this band could have become with a bit more verve. At that moment,
the world needed lots and lots of songs of the caliber of 'Inside Looking Out'.
Instead, it got one more 'Sweet Little Sixteen' — and, worst of all, by the end
of the year Burdon was so strung out that he'd simply confused his laziness
for writing good conventional songs with The Artist's disdain for writing good
conventional songs. This led to near-catastrophic results, not the least of
which was the dissolution of the original band; and we have, I guess, to be
glad that they still left behind even such scraps as they did leave behind.
For these scraps, they still win — with much
difficulty — a thumbs up from the
department of the heart, but from a rational point of view, Eric Burdon should
be strapped to a time machine, transferred back into 1966 and forced to remain
there until coming out with a whole album of songs like 'Inside Looking Out'.
Sweet, sweet punishment!
WINDS OF CHANGE (1967)
1) Winds Of Change; 2) Poem By
The Sea; 3) Paint It Black;
4) The Black Plague; 5) Yes I Am Experienced; 6) San Franciscan Nights; 7)
Man-Woman; 8) Hotel Hell; 9) Good Times; 10) Anything; 11) It's All Meat.
By the end of 1966, Burdon's ego got the best
of him. Disbanding what remained of the original lineup, he assembled an
entirely new team — people who only knew him as Eric The Great and would,
therefore, kowtow before his will — and re-christened it «Eric Burdon & The
Animals»: first part for honesty's sake, second part so that people would go on
buying the records. People were not that easily duped: Winds Of Change
only got as high as No. 42 on the Billboard, and each of the three following
records only sank lower and lower.
No one is to blame but Eric. As the scene of
pop music was exploding from the cumulative talents, invading «high art»
territory and splitting into dozens of distinct genres, all of this bliss went
to his head — and caused irreversible reactions. Suddenly, Burdon began to
think of himself as a prophet of the new movement, that one individual whose
responsibility included not only summarizing the achievements of his contemporaries
— in an artistic form, of course — but also creating an entirely new synthetic
form of art itself, where the lines between music, poetry, theater, and social
philosophy would no longer exist. The idea took complete hold of him, and his
new band of talented, but submissive musical companions (slaves?) was to help
him realize it.
It is not to be denied that Eric Burdon, in
1967, before he became old and ugly and began to re-record 'The House Of The
Rising Sun' for peanuts, was still young, fresh, powerful, and talented. But
even so, there was hardly any other artist at the time, both in Britain and
overseas, who would be less suited for this grandiose venture than the Animals
frontman. Drastically inexperienced as a songwriter, not playing any actual
instrument, his best talent was lending his voice to rearrangements of classic
blues and R'n'B. Prophet? Guru? You must be joking.
Winds Of Change is — in my opinion, has always been — one of
those proverbial records that give the late Sixties their bad name. We
sometimes tend to forget that, for each true artistic breakthrough, there were
ten silly, badly dated «experiments», and few have dated worse than Burdon's
original declaration of creative freedom. Out of the record's 11 tracks, more
than half are not «songs» at all, but Statements with a capital S-.
The title track States Change, recounting the
history of popular music for the past half century. 'Poem By The Sea' States
Romance, presenting Burdon as the tormented loner. 'Paint It Black' States
Stream-Of-Conscience, taking a compact pop number from the hands of the Rolling
Stones and showing how much farther you can go with it (but why should you?).
'The Black Plague' States Serious Art — where would we be without a little
medieval influence, to link The Now with The Then? 'Yes I Am Experienced'
States Dialog — because if Jimi Hendrix asks 'Are You Experienced?', someone has
to answer. Guess who that someone is. And so on.
Basically, the first side of the album is so
explicitly weak that, for a long time, it was painting my overall impression of
the whole thing — black, black, black. With minimalistic musical backing, it is
a one man show all the way, and the show combines peak-level naïveness and
idealism with unbridled pomp so clumsily and unattractively that it must take a
very special mind to fall under its charm. Besides, it is pretty doggone hard
to fall under the charm of 'Winds Of Change' when that wretched sitar and
John Weider's violin keep blasting at your ears all at the same time.
The flipside, however, does have several
traditionally-oriented songs, mostly rhythmic mid-tempo ballads with pleasant
arrangement touches (cute baroque guitar flourishes on 'San Francisco Nights',
Morricone-style brass flashes on 'Hotel Hell', strings gushing on 'Anything',
etc.), as well as one heavy rocker ('It's All Meat') that also preaches ('When
Erkel Darbies walks, when Eric Clapton talks... it's all meat on the same
bone!'), but, at least, does rock.
These songs, credited to the entire band — much
to Burdon's honor, although that gives very little indication as to who was the
driving force behind the melodies — are well-written and touching, much more so
than all the impressionism and preachiness on the first side. (The worst bit,
by the way, a long percussion-backed rambling, in a flash of brilliant
provocativeness entitled 'Man — Woman', has surreptitiously made it onto Side
Two, fucking things up even in this relatively safe haven). 'San Francisco
Nights' and 'Good Times' have, over the years, held up so as to even be
occasionally covered by other artists. Alas, back in sunny 1967 Burdon probably
thought that it would be 'Poem By The Sea' and 'The Black Plague' that truly
represented the spirit of the times.
Certainly, Winds Of Change is unique
enough for its age, and, intellectually, it would be unjust not to notice that
uniqueness. But it is poor, shrivelled uniqueness, like the swimming pool scene
in The Graduate, one that withers and dies with time, and it would be
equally unjust not to notice that. I once used to think that Winds Of
Change was the worst thing ever to come out of the decade. Clearly,
that was an exaggeration, triggered by the staggering discrepancy between the
classic material of the early Animals and this incomprehensible, unforgivable
change. At least it is mildly interesting, and the ballads are fine. But my
overall negative judgement — thumbs down,
down, down! — stays the same.
THE TWAIN SHALL MEET (1968)
1) Monterey; 2) Just The
Thought; 3) Closer To The Truth; 4) No Self Pity; 5) Orange And Red Beams; 6)
Sky Pilot; 7) We Love You Lil; 8) All Is One.
No matter how dated or downright silly we may
find Burdon's output from this period in general, the sheer amount of creative
passion is astonishing: no less than three albums — one of them a double
LP! — had been released by the band in 1968, which would, perhaps, be normal
for the likes of Frank Zappa, but certainly not for the rowdy Brit who, only a
couple years ago, had serious problems about coming up with any kind of
original material.
It would be highly irreverent to disrespect the
enthusiasm, much less doubt its sincerity. And, beyond that, parts of The
Twain Shall Meet work as fascinating period pieces, absolutely unimaginable
today. It is easy to smile at the ongoing naïveness such as seen in
'Monterey', Burdon's fanboy report on The Festival where, once again, he
succumbs to the historiographic temptations of listing all the greats ('The
Grateful Dead blew everybody's mind... Jimi Hendrix, baby, believe me, set the
world on fire...'). It may be hard for us today not to judge Monterey from the
point of view of such pompous, but safe and cozy events like Woodstock '99 or
Live 8, but back in 1968, standards were different.
Plus, from a different point of view, 'Monterey'
is just a cool sitar-driven psychedelic rocker with an impassioned vocal
performance — nothing wrong about that. Melody, drive, and real sentiment, a
definite improvement over 'Winds Of Change'. The other highlight for the ages
is 'Sky Pilot', Burdon's anti-war anthem replete with blazing guitar solos and
air battle overdubs and, more importantly, one of the catchiest choruses ever
recorded: 'Sky pilot, sky pilot, how high can you fly? — you'll never, never,
never reach the sky!' Most importantly, though, it gives us an ultra-serious
Eric in an «epic» mood, which we have not properly — that is, within the
context of a real song rather than merely a musical sermon — experienced ever
since the recording of 'House Of The Rising Sun'. The effect, predictably, is
magnificent.
The rest of the material is far more
experimental, and, therefore, hit-and-miss. In the good news, there is not a
lot of preaching, as the boys concentrate more on revolutionizing the world of
music than on giving us a good metaphysical grounding for it; so, no unlistenable
trash like 'Winds Of Change' or 'Man — Woman'. In the bad news,
«revolutionizing» still, quite frequently, means «vandalizing». Side 2, after
the opening punch of 'Sky Pilot', does not deserve more than one historical
listen, consisting of a lengthy, powerful, but extremely monotonous guitar
freakout ('We Love You Lil') and a drunken psychedelic jam ('All Is One') where
the idea is to cram as many different instruments as possible into the
framework and make us believe that they are all one — nice try, but one need
not go further than Gustav Mahler to find that out, and the Animals do not
qualify as serious competition.
The first side is marred by a couple non-Burdon
sung tunes ('Orange And Red Beams', in particular, is a pretty weak Danny
McCulloch original, and his voice is a very ugly counterpoint to Burdon's,
sounding as if Eric, out of pure misery, brought in a weak old semi-demented
relative to give him his last chance), as well as silly production ideas (as
Mark Prindle best put it, "Why does half of 'Closer To The Truth' sound
like it was recorded on an empty aluminum can jammed into a tape recorder, and
the other half sound like a drunken guitarist wobbling back and forth across a
room?"). Nevertheless, 'Closer To The Truth' does rock, and a couple other
psychedelic tunes are real psychedelic tunes rather than sad psychedelic
nonsense.
There definitely is progress here, and the new
band is beginning to find solid middle ground between unbridled experiment and
conservatism; but whoever hates Winds Of Change will most likely not be
bawled over by The Twain Shall Meet, either, if only because the twain shall
meet, but, at this point, they have not met yet. Still, no record that has 'Sky
Pilot' and 'Monterey' on it deserves anything less than a thumbs up, because the heart cannot be denied.
EVERY ONE OF US (1968)
1) White Houses; 2) Uppers And
Downers; 3) Serenade To A Sweet Lady; 4) The Immigrant Lad; 5) Year Of The
Guru; 6) St. James Infirmary; 7) New York 1963 - America 1968.
Like many other artists in 1968, Burdon must
have also, at one point, sensed the uncomfortable feeling of having lost firm
ground under his feet. Tangerine trees and marmalade skies are all right for a
day, but dwell in their neighbourhood too long and you'll end up like Syd
Barrett or Skip Spence. Even if you decide to move house, sometimes only a
radical antidote will suffice — such as, for instance, a grim-faced,
illusion-free, grit-filled record dealing with the fates of the working class.
Such as Every One Of Us by Eric Burdon & The Animals.
Change is apparent from looking at the album
cover — a black-and-white (no coloured rainbows!) photo of the band members,
staring morosely into space while Eric, in a ragged overcoat and a worker's
cap, is drilling you with subtle scorn, as if asking «What have YOU done to
improve the conditions of the working man, you sad refuse of our oppressive
society?» Thus, it is with an uneasy, troubled heart that we begin our listen,
expecting the worst to come.
Surprisingly, this shift in direction has been
helpful. The tone of the album is just as preachy as that of its two
predecessors, but it would seem a bit strange to preach about such
down-to-earth matters in the form of rambling sonic collages or mantras, so the
band, this time quite firmly, retreats back to the song format. And
there are good songs — and most of them originals! Even the lengthy folksy
drones, like 'The Immigrant Lad', or the first six minutes of 'New York
1963...', where Eric recounts his impressions of his first trans-Atlantic visit
('And when I got to 'Mer-r-r-r-ica, I say, it blew my mind!'), are touching,
and the opener, 'White Houses', is one of the sweetest little shuffles to have
ever come from the man.
At the core of the album, however, is a fully
successful updating of the blazing hard sounds of yore. Eric had not given us
fresh performances of traditional R'n'B since at least 1966, but here he
returns with a vengeance to put his stamp on 'St. James' Infirmary', arranged
as the musical equivalent of a haunting movie thriller — starts out slow,
deep, and dark, then gradually unfurls into a sonic nightmare. Eerie backing
vocals, wailing guitar solos, Eric in the further stages of possession, a
little honesty plus a little theater goes a long, long way.
In terms of importance and unusualness,
however, it is still trumped by Eric's original 'Year Of The Guru'. Not only is
this the first — to the best of my knowledge — straightforward indictment of
«professional spiritual leadership» on a pop record ('Sexy Sadie' was not only
more oblique, but also came out later in the year), it is also one of the first
examples of «white rap» on such a record, and fairly well grounded, too,
because there would be no better way to convey Burdon's anger than with such a
rapid-fire delivery on the perils of guru-trusting. But not even the lyrics
themselves are as hilarious and aggressive at the same time as the song's
chaotic coda and Eric's demented cries of 'Gotta get a guru, gotta get a guru,
a groovy groovy guru!' — a coda that summarizes the epoch's disillusionment in
crash courses in spiritual enlightenment better than any lengthy treatise on
the subject.
Alas, the flaws of Every One Of Us are
just as obvious as its successes. If the staged conversation between two silly
cockneys on Side A and the black fighter pilot confession on Side B somehow
fail to annoy you (they are not that long, after all), then the
ten-minute 'I wanna be free — you can never be free!' jam that concludes 'New
York 1963 — America 1968' most certainly will. Usually, such things happen when
bands run out of things to say, but if this ten-minute raving was their
thing to say, this is even worse. It is not psychedelia and it is not even
«modern art», but it is more dull to listen to than the third LP of George
Harrison's All Things Must Pass, and that was pretty dull. Must have
been dull even back in 1968; who the heck would want to take this for
one's ideal of a «lengthy composition» when one could choose between 'Sister
Ray' and 'In Held Twas In I' at the same time?
Still, chop off the last ten minutes and you
still come out with about thirty-five of good music, which is at least longer
than the Beach Boys' Surfin' Safari, and that was an LP as well, and still
continues to sell for a full price. Therefore, a definite thumbs up for the rest of it, coming mostly from
the heart department — believe it or not, but that Burdon guy somehow manages
to awaken the dormant working man in me. Roight, guvnah, off to the docks, 'en.
See ye round.
LOVE IS (1968)
1) River Deep, Mountain High;
2) I'm An Animal; 3) I'm Dying, Or Am I; 4) Ring Of Fire; 5) Coloured Rain; 6)
To Love Somebody; 7) As The Years Go Passing By; 8) Gemini; 9) Madman (Running
Through The Fields).
The Animals' 1969 Christmas gift to their
already well-loaded fans was this double LP — nine songs stretched to the
breaking point and still hardly pushing over sixty minutes. With a little modest
trimming, the band might have easily fit everything on two sides of vinyl. But
in 1968, double albums were coming in as the latest obligatory ingredient for
the serious artist: if you lacked the capacity to splatter your Vision over
four sides, you ran the risk of being deemed closed-minded. Big times required
big statements, said the Beatles, and came out with The Beatles.
Eric Burdon, too, was already well used to big
statements, and Love Is was one of his biggest. No original material
here at all; instead, the band runs through a selection of covers whose only
thing in common is that they have nothing, or almost nothing, in common. Having
sung so many times about the diversification of popular music, Burdon now
illustrates that diversification on himself. Beginning relatively
straightforwardly with the R'n'B genre (Ike & Tina Turner's 'River Deep,
Mountain High', Sly & The Family Stone's 'I'm An Animal', no doubt,
selected because of the fitting title), he rips through country ('Ring Of
Fire'), Brit-tinged roots-rock ('Coloured Rain'), lush balladry ('To Love Somebody'),
12-bar blues ('As The Years Go Passing By'), and, finally, psychedelic rock
(side four).
And I stand by my word: with about fifteen or
twenty minutes of this stuff trimmed, the album would have stood up better
today. Case in point: the rocking rendition of 'River Deep' ranks among Eric's
best covers, as he yields one of those stirring predator-begging-for-mercy
performances that combine the primal ferocious scream with rough tender
feeling in a uniquely Burdon way. But midway through, the song transforms into
a silly tweet-tweet chant praising the charms of Tina Turner (culminating in a
mock-psychedelic 'Tina-Tina-Tina-Tina!' that must have embarrassed the poor
woman deeply even back then). Original? Certainly. Does it add much to the
song, does it go down well today? All I can say is that I far prefer the edited
single version which, nicely enough, can be found as a bonus track on the CD
edition of Every One Of Us.
Pretty much the same applies to every other
song on here that goes over five minutes — with the possible exception of 'As
The Years Go Passing By', which is prolonged at the expense of an excellent
blues-rock guitar solo rather than silly psychedelic noises, and the slightly
less possible exception of 'Coloured Rain', where the guitarist improvises in a
Clapton-like manner, backed by a tired brass section. 'To Love Somebody' just
repeats the chorus too many times; and 'Gemini' offers a freakout break that
is stuck somewhere in between the astral plains of the Moody Blues and the upcoming
minimalistic chinks of King Crimson's 'Moonchild'.
All these flourishes will probably inspire only
the most «open-minded» of human beings, those that accept just about any flash
of creativity as long as there is a minimal chance of proclaiming the thing in
question «a flash of creativity». Yet all it really takes is to flip the
mindset switch on the back of your head into the '1960s' position, and then the
«flashes» will not be a serious bother — at the very least, they will not
prevent one from enjoying the individual stamp that Burdon is putting on all
those covers. He is loving this — or else he would not have done it —
and he still roars the blues out like crazy, and he does not spoil 'Ring Of
Fire' by giving it an operatic flavor, and, in my opinion, he sings 'To Love
Somebody' better than the Bee Gees.
And a special big thanks to new band member
Andy Summers — later of the Cops' fame — for bringing along the beautiful song
'Madman (Running Through The Fields)', taken from the vaults of his previous
outfit, Dantalion's Chariot. I would not say it is better than the original,
but this probably made a lot of people hear it for the first time. Such a cute
marriage between uptempo Brit-pop and «pastoral psychedelia» — a gorgeous way
to close the record.
Analytically, Love Is does not quite
make the grade: its «meat» is unoriginal, and its «fat» decidedly
oversaturated; the brain is not happy. But the heart clearly states that, as
long as Eric Burdon sticks to singing the stuff that he is covering
rather than fucking with this stuff, it will never have a problem with
this particular artist. Assessing the rate of singing to fucking to be approximately
7 : 3 on this album, thumbs up are
guaranteed.
BEFORE WE WERE SO RUDELY INTERRUPTED (1977)
1) Brother Bill (The Last Clean
Shirt); 2) It's All Over Now Baby Blue; 3) Fire On The Sun; 4) As The Crow
Flies; 5) Please Send Me Someone To Love; 6) Many Rivers To Cross; 7)
Just A Little Bit; 8) Riverside Country; 9) Lonely Avenue; 10) The Fool.
Burdon dismissed the band soon after Love Is
failed to make the big time, and for the next decade, there was no sign of the
Animals, as Eric gravitated in and out of various projects, first with WAR,
then on an entirely solo basis (not that the period did not have an excitement
of its own, but this will be duly covered under the «Eric Burdon» section).
Eventually, nostalgia — or, perhaps, some earthlier
feelings, such as cash pressure? — took over, and in 1977 Burdon and Price
ended up reassembling the entire original line-up from 1965. Old time fans were
rejoicing, but for the original five Animals, the studio hours must have been
really hard, because what exactly were they to record? Obviously, there was no
question about Burdon dominating the proceedings like he did on each record
since 1967 — getting back the primordial line-up meant also going back to a
more democratic kind of arrangement. On the other hand, what would be the
point, in 1977, to return to the same brand of, by now, way obsolete R'n'B that
used to be their main occupation?
These are tough questions, and, unfortunately,
the resulting album does not manage to find the right answers. Like in the old
days, they mostly revert to doing covers, and some of the covers are
respectable oldies, like Ray Charles' 'Lonely Avenue', but they also do Curtis
Mayfield and Jimmy Cliff and, most importantly, they try their best to not
make it sound like an exercise in retrospection. They do steer clear of all
new trends — disco, punk, New Wave etc. — but neither do they sound like they
are hopelessly stuck in the Sixties.
And it does not click. It goes down uneasy. The
most transparent proof would be to compare their original recording of 'Just A
Little Bit' (back then, called 'Don't Want Much' and easily available on the
two-disc Columbia set) with the 1977 reworking. The aggression is toned down,
Burdon trades his rock'n'roll growl for a moodier, «sexier» approach, Price
mostly uses the organ for occasional flourishes, and I never manage to get the
point.
Nor do they seem to recapture their blues
glories all that well, either: 'As The Crow Flies' is completely pro forma
— where, in the past, Burdon and Price would be ripping each other's throats,
competing for whoever was able to generate the higher excitement level, here
they seem to compete for whoever is able to exercise the most restraint. It is
odd to hear Burdon sing like Lou Reed, and it is even odder to hear Price trade
in his organ for a tasteful, but minimalistic electric piano backing. Alan
Price is really a phenomenal keyboard player; why do we have to hear him play
like some anonymous backer in a late Eighties' Eric Clapton stage band?
This does not mean the record is unlistenable,
or even boring. Eric does plenty of good screaming work on 'Lonely Avenue',
reaches his highest «confessional» standards on 'Many Rivers To Cross', rocks
out on 'Fire On The Sun', and does not let Bob down with 'It's All Over Now
Baby Blue' (the latter is given a particularly minimalist arrangement, with
Price not so much playing the piano as marking the time with it, so that we can
give Eric our full attention. It is worth it, actually). Plus, while evading
the trends, it never once sounds like «generic Seventies soft rock» or
something like that; play it without knowing and you will not be able to guess
the year correctly, or even the decade — «retro-bands» or, simply, bands that
laugh at trends are still recording similar-sounding albums even today, except
that not all of them are this good.
In the end, it is a moderate thumbs up and an enjoyable listen, but it did not
prove the most important point — namely, that The Original Animals had
a solid reason to reconvene, much less waste time, money, and efforts on trying
to hit the market again. Consequently, they went their own ways once again, and
stayed that way for six more years.
ARK (1983)
1) Loose Change; 2) Love Is
For All Time; 3) My
Favorite Enemy; 4) Prisoner Of The Light; 5) Being There; 6) Hard Times; 7)
The Night; 8) Trying To Get To You; 9)
Just Can't Get Enough; 10) Melt
Down; 11) Gotta Get Back To You; 12) Crystal Nights; 13*) No John No.
«Third verse, different from the first», as
Joey would say. For the Animals' last attempt at a meaningful and productive
reunion, they finally decided to shift their sound. Unfortunately, the decision
happened to be taken at a time when geometry-defying hairstyles were only the second
worst thing after the current trends in music-making, and it is not a pretty
sight witnessing one of the world's former champions in white R&B go all
synth-pop on their audiences.
Frankly speaking, it is not even clear how much
of a true «reunion» this is. In addition to all the regular band members, there
are at least four additional people, two of which — Zoot Money on keyboards and
Steve Grant on guitar — seem to have a much stronger hand in the playing and arrangement
departments than the «true» Animals. The songwriting, this time around, is
mostly original, with the exception of the old blues number 'Trying To Get To
You', but Burdon is the only Animal that gets any credits; the rest go to
corporate songwriters. In short, it is more like a solo Burdon album with nice
surprise cameos from his old pals (and no one would guess that anyway without
looking closely at the liner notes).
Furthermore, it looks like Eric had finally
gulped down the last drops of the old «creativity and experimentation» elixir.
Before We Were... could at least be understood as the result of a simple
desire to take it easy and go back, for a sec, to being the old careless
rambunctious boys of the days of yore, playing simple, but fun, entertainment
for the crowd. Ark, on the contrary, is an album filled with new songs
and melodies, looking as if it had something new to say — but, when you get
down to the bottom of it, it hardly says anything worth paying close attention
to.
It is not a bad album. It could have
been much worse. They could have gone to Diane Warren, who had just made a name
for herself in 1983. They could have tried to sound like Rod Stewart. Instead,
Burdon most definitely sounds like Burdon — his voice is still in great shape —
and the outside songwriters at least take enough care so as not to ruin the classic
Animals legacy entirely: no power ballads, no disco, no hair metal.
In fact, guitarist Steve Grant can write a mean
tune: his two numbers, 'Loose Change' and 'My Favorite Enemy', are the
liveliest, catchiest, and least troublesome tunes on the album, and both have
clearly been designed with Eric as the preferred vocalist in mind, especially
the latter, which lights up rather slowly, but eventually does go up in smoke
and propels Burdon back into all-out screaming mode as the rest of the band
rally around him and clearly enjoy all the fun.
Less convincing, in my opinion, is the overtly
MTV-oriented stuff like 'The Night', the album's lead single, molded into a
sci-fi-ish New Wave pop tune. It's not even the silly keyboards — silly
keyboards per se cannot spoil anything — it's that Burdon is simply
uncomfortable when trying to adapt to this new style, about the same way that
someone who has never worn a suit and tie would be uncomfortable when having to
don them for an official reception. You know he'd rather sing 'Boom
Boom' than shake his bum to these synthesized rhythms.
Naturally, there are missteps all the way:
'Love Is For All Time' puts the band into reggae mode, a first and,
fortunately, last for them; 'Being There' seems to be a song about the movie Being
There — great movie, piss-poor song; and, although 'Trying To Get You' is
given a much more dramatic, desperate sheen than it used to have in the Presley
era, it could certainly benefit from more blues guitar and less post-Kraftwerk keyboards.
Etc. etc.
As an attempt to put the Animals back on the
chessboard in the MTV era, Ark is a predetermined failure; at least the
Rolling Stones had played back to back for the entire preceding decade, and
were somewhat ready to face the upcoming challenge — these guys, on the
contrary, had no regular bonding for more than fifteen years, and it would
have been a marvel had they succeeded in «re-gelling» altogether, let alone in
an Eighties fashion. But as a slight memento of the era, and as a record that
features a bit of decent songwriting crossed with a bit of superior singing, it
works, and, at the very least, 'My Favorite Enemy' has never left my
best-of-all-time playlist ever since it got there, a long time ago. Therefore,
although the brain keeps trying to plant a vicious thumbs down rating here, the
heart still crosses it out with a thumbs up,
if only moderately so.
ADDENDA:
THE ANIMALS WITH SONNY BOY WILLIAMSON (1963/19...)
1) Sonny's Slow Walk; 2)
Pontiac Blues; 3) My Babe; 4) I Don't Care No More; 5) Baby Don't You Worry; 6)
Night Time Is The Right Time; 7) I'm Gonna Put You Down; 8) Fattening Frogs For
Snakes; 9) Nobody But You; 10) Bye Bye, Sonny, Bye Bye; 11) Coda; 12) Let It
Rock; 13) Gotta Find My Baby; 14) Bo Diddley; 15) Almost Grown; 16) Dimples;
17) Boom Boom; 18) C Jam Blues.
This record exists in many forms and varieties
— the negative flipside of the lack of proper copyright — but the 18-track one
is probably the most comfortable, even if also the least true, since the last seven
tracks, in fact, have nothing to do with Sonny Boy Williamson. But what all of
this stuff does have in common is that everything was recorded sometime in late
1963, live at the Club A Go-Go in Newcastle, the Animals' principal stronghold
at the time. Fairly surprisingly, the sound quality is very good — all the
instruments are well discernible, and, since the audience probably consists of
rowdy, but self-preserved coal miners instead of orgasming teenage girls,
Eric's singing is not impeded by extraneous noises to the point that he cannot
hear himself.
As for Sonny Boy Williamson II, he was an
excellent and even innovative bluesman in his own right, and his touring in the
UK, along the same lines as that of Muddy or Big Bill Broonzy, did a lot to
popularize black music and, eventually, replace it with black-sounding white
music. But it must be duly noted that, while performing, he had this nasty
habit of jamming the whole length of his harmonica way deep down his throat,
making it possible for him to punctuate the right notes with his uvula. This
gave him a unique, inimitable sound — the only drawback was that, most of the
time, he did not have the time to push it back whenever it was necessary
to sing. Therefore, if you lack access to Sonny's records, but are
nevertheless interested in his manner of performing, it is advisable to stuff a
big chunk of wood or rock in your mouth and try to sing some generic 12-bar
material in this condition. For additional authenticity, it is also recommended
to knock approximately half of your teeth out before proceeding.
If this sounds a little exaggerated and
offensive, my only excuse is that it at least makes the proposition seem
somewhat interesting. Because otherwise, there is no point whatsoever in
being interested in this kind of collaboration. Sonny Boy sounds better on the
original studio recordings anyway, and the Animals, when backing him, sound
exactly like your average backing band, with Price alone occasionally trying
out some extra organ flourishes and Burdon probably sleeping it out backstage.
Things get a little hotter on the duets, such as the lengthy rave-up of 'Nobody
But You' (same as 'Talkin' 'Bout You', actually), but only because Sonny Boy is
mostly absent from there, only coming in for a few seconds to trade some lines
with Burdon — who, in his turn, is very busy ad-libbing stuff about Sonny Boy
being the king of the blues and all.
As for the band's own set (sometimes found
separately under the title In The Beginning), it is pretty well smoking hot.
The vocal harmonies aren't worth shit (particularly on those songs that really
really need them, e. g. Chuck Berry's 'Almost Grown'), but there is plenty of
energy and good will throughout, and I am especially struck by how big Hilton
Valentine's presence is on here — he is playing lots of sharp, hard-rocking
solos in a very fluent and «mature» manner that somewhat reminds me of Keith
Richards' typical stage playing about six or seven years later on. Very raw,
dirty, with plenty of rock'n'roll feeling: the Berry numbers rock harder than
anything the studio Animals produced in their original years.
The album's primary value is historical, of
course, but it does give one a somewhat different facet of the Animals than the
ones we are used to, and no fan of early British R'n'B should stay away from
it. As a first acquaintance with Sonny Boy, it does not work at all — please do
not let it discourage you from exploring his classic Chess singles — but as a
farewell glance at the original Animals, it provides a convincing last-time
ass-kicking. Thumbs up.
SONGS OF FAITH (1956)
1) There Is A Fountain Filled
With Blood; 2) Precious Lord (part 1); 3) Precious Lord (part 2); 4) You Grow
Closer; 5) Never Grow Old; 6) The Day Is Past And Gone; 7) He Will Wash You
White As Snow; 8) While The Blood Runs Warm; 9) Yield Not To Temptation.
Upon release, Aretha Franklin's groundbreaking
debut caused a serious stir among the musical elites of the day, what with its
innovative concept of a mini-musical built around Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Starting with the ominous introduction of 'There Is A Fountain Filled With
Blood', it is vividly remembered for Aretha as Lucy Westenra's stirring aria
('You Grow Closer', as the Count grows closer), the creepy seduction monolog
of guest star Christopher Lee ('Never Grow Old', indeed), the terrifying
chorus of vampiric henchmen ('He Will Wash You White As Snow'), the triumphant
evil of 'While The Blood Runs Warm' that puts Wagner to shame, and the sudden, deus-ex-machina,
but still heartwarming happy ending of 'Yield Not To Temptation', as the forces
of Light manage to rally around the victim and drive off the Terror... you
wish!
Okay, so who could actually resist imagining
this bit of Cooper-meets-Coppola fantasy upon glancing at the track listing
for the first time? And is it really our fault if so many subjects and titles
of gospel hymns involve the good old blood-'n'-guts imagery? In any case, it
certainly is a little disappointing when you put on the record, and, instead of
this promising model, it turns out to be a bunch of crappily recorded gospel
hymns, performed by Aretha and a choir of highly professional churchgoers
and highly amateurish singers during a service held by her father, the Rev. C.
L. Franklin, in his own little parish in Detroit.
The Reverend was a very active promoter; not
only did he put his daughter in the Lord's service at the earliest age that the
Lord would admit servants, he went so far as to put her under contract with
Checker Records, to use every possible opportunity to spread the Lord's word in
as many ways as possible. (For that matter, the Reverend was one of the first
Reverends to record his own sermons and distribute them through the LP
medium; God can only wish he had more PR agents like this).
It is somewhat pitiful that he did not strive
for a better ambience — the recording is really, really poor. The piano, played
by Aretha herself, wobbles and floats, the chorus is mostly unfocused, and the
ad-libs of 'yes, yes', 'praise the Lord' and suchlike sometimes sound as if
they were overdubbed at random, or as if it never mattered to anyone in the
audience at the time that the ad-libs should punctuate specific moments in the
singing rather than just be there. On the other hand, there is probably
something to be said for authenticity; we do not have that much solid sonic
evidence for gospel conventions in the 1950s, and Songs Of Faith is at
least a decent example.
Now for the main point. The album was recorded
when Aretha Franklin was fourteen years old, and it already gives
us her voice and fiery personality as fully established. In fact, she is far
more inspired — and inspirational — on here than on any of her records from the
next ten years on Columbia. She does not go for subtlety, and she does not try
to capture any of the possible nuances of these hymns like, say, Mahalia
Jackson; at 14, she is much more intent on simply setting the house on fire,
and does she ever do it! The Reverend had the good sense of thrusting the only good
mike in the church into close proximity with his daughter's oral tract, and
Aretha's singing rules supreme over every other sound; but something tells me
she'd do almost as good if the mike were at the other end of the building. The
power buildup is amazing — you do have to keep in mind that it comes
from a 14-year-old all the time, but that is the only condition necessary to
accumulate a ton of respectable admiration.
Admiration does not necessarily mean enjoyment:
straightforward gospel is a tough genre to enjoy unless you are a Jesus freak,
and wall-rattling power alone is not sufficient to redeem its weak sides. But I
cannot deny the basic thrill of accessing this experience, nor, of course, the
tremendous historical importance; the brainy side demands that the album
receive a thumbs up based on these
considerations. For the record, Songs Of Faith can also be found under a
million other titles, such as The Gospel Soul Of Aretha Franklin, Aretha's
Gospel, You Grow Closer, Never Grow Old, and, of course, Dracula:
A Gospel Mini-Musical.
ARETHA (1961)
1) Won't Be Long; 2) Over The
Rainbow; 3) Love Is The Only Thing; 4) Sweet Lover; 5) All Night Long; 6) Who
Needs You?; 7) Right Now; 8) Are You Sure; 9) Maybe I'm A Fool; 10) It Ain't
Necessarily So; 11) (Blue) By Myself; 12) Today I Sing The Blues.
Columbia's legendary talent scout John Hammond
discovered the yet-to-be legendary Aretha in 1960. He made the right decision
to put her under contract, but whether he made the right decision in giving her
the kind of material he gave her remains debatable. That said, what kind of material
was there in 1960? He could have made her a legitimate gospel star along
the lines of Mahalia Jackson, but she did not really want to be a gospel star.
He could have made her a legitimate blues queen along the lines of Big Mama
Thornton, but Columbia was not the kind of label to have had much experience
with blues queens. He could have made her a great sweeping R'n'B shouter — the
problem is, great sweeping R'n'B did not yet exist at the time.
In the end, she just sings a little bit of this
and a little bit of that. Show tunes, ballads, Gershwin arias, a little gospel,
a little urban blues, and a couple new compositions by J. Leslie McFarland (the
guy who wrote 'Stuck On You' — the fun song that almost single-handedly ruined
Elvis' reputation as a rocker after his homecoming). In the process, she is
being backed by the Ray Bryant combo, a big band with a big style, but no
memorable face of its own.
Still, whenever the songs are at least
semi-decent on their own, Aretha's fresh, full, and finally well-recorded
19-year old voice injects them with power-a-plenty. McFarland's modest pop rocker
'Won't Be Long', opening the record on a particularly energetic note, is easily
the best of the bunch, but her take on 'It Ain't Necessarily So' is not far
behind, and I must say that this is the first time ever I have not
cringed at somebody singing 'Over The Rainbow', simply because Aretha never
knew the meaning of cheap sentimentality, and, although there is a down side to
her shrillness and tenseness — if you breathe it long enough, it may start
drilling your skull from the inner side — fairly often, it takes the corn right
out of the cornball, replacing it with ass-kicking.
There is a frequent tendency to put down
Aretha's entire Columbia period; for many, the real Franklin does not even
begin until she makes the switch to Atlantic in 1967. But, in a way, this is
akin to saying that the Beatles do not begin until Rubber Soul or Revolver;
the true fan will always find a way to work around the obvious shortcomings —
generic nature of the material, lack of interesting musical backing, etc. — and
highlight the high points. As to what concerns Aretha, I have little
memory of the individual songs, but I have plenty of memory of youthful
exuberance and excitement. At this point, Hammond could have given her a
bluegrass arrangement of 'Little Jack Horner', and she would still sing it with
the inspiration fit for an 'Amazing Grace' — so obviously thrilled is she to
find herself in a recording studio. For this matter, no less than a definite thumbs up is in order.
For the record, the album is, in general, more
easily found as The Great Aretha Franklin: The First 12 Sides, under
which title it was re-released by Columbia a decade later. The message of the
new title is quite transparent: you, the listener, cannot really understand the
great Aretha Franklin of Atlantic fame to perfection without peeling off a
dozen bucks for her first dozen of sides, recorded on our label.
Laughable? Presumptuous? Stupid? But who really knows these guys at Columbia? In
some way, they might even have been right.
THE ELECTRIFYING ARETHA FRANKLIN (1962)
1) You Made Me Love You; 2) I
Told You So; 3) Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody; 4) Nobody Like You;
5) Exactly Like You; 6) It's So Heartbreakin'; 7) Rough Lover; 8) Blue Holiday;
9) Just For You; 10) That Lucky Old Sun; 11) I Surrender, Dear; 12)
Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive.
By the time of Aretha's second album on
Columbia, it was pretty obvious that Columbia was steering her in all the
wrong directions. There are people who can work wonders with glitzy show
tunes — Ray Charles, for instance — and there are people who can't. That
Aretha, per se and by default, is an electrifying kind of person is undeniable,
but most of these songs are like rubber, completely incapable of conducting her
electricity.
Again, John McFarland comes to the rescue,
contributing several original compositions, of which 'I Told You So' is a
likeable pop shuffle and 'Rough Lover' the closest thing to a forgotten
classic, swinging with fervor and perfectly tailored for the young queen's
aggressive stride. Clearly, McFarland was «getting» Aretha better than anyone
else in the management, and, even though he was hardly above writing sappy
ballads for her as well, his eventual removal from the proceedings was just
another in an endless series of marketing mistakes on Columbia's part.
So, 'Rough Lover' rocks hard; the rest is a test
— a test to see if Aretha's determination and exuberance will prevail over the
shadow of Hoagy Carmichael and Bing Crosby. I do not find that it does, but if
you happen to love show tunes regardless of the way they are done, this can be
a nice experience. After all, as Harold Arlen tells us towards the end, we
gotta 'accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, but don't mess with Mr.
In-Between'. I do feel tempted to say that messing with Mr. In-Between is exactly
the kind of thing that's going on this record, because otherwise I just can't
bring myself to eliminate the negative, no matter how hard I try.
Thumbs down, not even because I cannot stomach Bing Crosby
(that happens to be my personal problem), but because I cannot see any
rational reason behind Aretha Franklin doing Bing Crosby. At least Pat Boone
singing heavy metal had a bizarre novelty ring to it. This one just sucks in
the good old plainly boring way.
THE TENDER, THE MOVING, THE SWINGING (1962)
1) Don't Cry, Baby; 2) Try A
Little Tenderness; 3) I Apologize; 4) Without The One You Love; 5) Look For The
Silver Lining; 6) I'm Sitting On Top Of The World; 7) Just For A Thrill; 8) God
Bless The Child; 9) I'm Wandering; 10) How Deep Is The Ocean; 11) I Don't Know
You Anymore; 12) Lover Come Back To Me.
More fuel from the Great American Songbook. If
you love Irving Berlin, Al Hoffman, Ray Henderson and their co-workers, you
will love this, because, after all, Aretha truly worked her ass off on these
numbers, and Columbia's session musicians were no sissy amateurs either. But,
as far as I can tell, this time around she is not even covering the cream of
the cream — and it had to take Otis Redding to bring out the hidden potential
of 'Try A Little Tenderness'.
Side one, for me, does not even begin until the
last song, when Aretha kicks up a cute little rumpus on 'I'm Sitting On Top Of
The World'. Side two is significantly better, with two Billie Holiday classics
('God Bless The Child' and 'Lover Come Back To Me') performed quite convincingly
and Lil Armstrong/Ray Charles' 'Just For A Thrill' that does not compare so
well to Ray's smoky version, but does not spoil it with extra syrup at least.
Still, while the album pushes dangerously close
to representing her nadir stage on Columbia, no record featuring a young,
fresh, enthusiastic (let alone tender, moving, swinging) Aretha Franklin can be
truly bad; when she unleashes the full power of her range and phrasing ('I'm
Wandering'), she can take one's breath away even by means of the Songbook — an
ability that the manneristic, overbearing «soul divas» of today have either
lost or caused to mutate in quite a sacrilegious way. Thumbs down, but only because better days were
soon to come.
LAUGHING ON THE OUTSIDE (1963)
1) Skylark; 2) For All We
Know; 3) Make Someone Happy; 4) I Wonder; 5) Solitude; 6) Laughing On The
Outside; 7) Say It Isn't So; 8) It Will Have To Do Until The Real Thing Comes
Along; 9) If Ever I Would Leave You; 10) Where Are You; 11) Mr. Ugly; 12) I
Wanna Be Around.
Actually, this may be the nadir. This
time around, there is not even a single lick of fire; each single tune is slow,
genteel, and dominated by Mantovani-style strings. Duke Ellington's 'Solitude'
could have been a minor standout, but its lonely trumpet is unable to beat the
corniness that oozes from every pore.
It is even hard to say whether the singer
herself cared as much about these songs as she did when she first crossed the
threshold of Columbia's studios. She does, indeed, begin with a mini-blast of
passion ('Skylark', where she spends the first two minutes winding herself up
and then letting it go with a vengeance), but everything that follows is
restrained and uninvolving. Oddly, this is the first album to feature an
original composition — 'I Wonder (Where Are You Tonight)'; it is, however,
completely indistinguishable from the rest.
Albums like these need to be heard today, if
only for people to understand that «generic pablum» is not a recent
invention of the last twenty years or so, but was fairly persistent throughout
the whole history of pop music; still, it is very painful to realize what a
great talent was actually being wasted on that pablum — and at the exact time
when pop music was undergoing revolutionary changes. Thumbs down.
UNFORGETTABLE: A TRIBUTE TO DINAH WASHINGTON
(1964)
1) Unforgettable; 2) Cold,
Cold Heart; 3) What A Diff'rence A Day Made; 4) Drinking Again; 5) Nobody Knows
The Way I Feel This Morning; 6) Evil Gal Blues; 7) Don't Say You're Sorry
Again; 8) This Bitter Earth; 9) If I Should Lose You; 10) Soulville; 11*) Lee
Cross.
Dinah Washington is one of those legends that
is, in my opinion, much better off as a legend than as an ongoing presence on
one's turntable: the Whitney Houston of her generation, classier than Whitney
Houston only inasmuch as her entire generation was classier than Whitney
Houston's generation. She did occasionally perform fine, diverse material,
but, at a time when Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker were redefining the very idea
of what a mainstream-oriented female performer could be up to, mostly got stuck
with «torch songs» that come a dime a dozen: trashy, easily replaceable fluff
entertainment, with a talented, charismatic personality wasted on it.
Considering that Columbia was trying to
market Aretha as the new queen of fluff entertainment, it is only natural that,
upon Dinah's demise from a sleeping pills overdose in 1963, she was offered to
record a tribute album. Normally, when the new queen of fluff pays tribute to
the old queen of fluff, you would expect to have the fluff squared.
Surprisingly, Unforgettable is not as bad as it could be — in fact, it
is far more genuinely entertaining than the preceding two albums. Reasons
are coming up.
First, good song selection. Sentimental ballads
are predictable, but only occupy about half of the space; the rest is dedicated
to R'n'B and jazz numbers that kicked up a few extra sparks already in Dinah's
days — such as her breakthrough single, 'Evil Gal Blues', or her very last
record that had some proper swing in it ('Soulville').
Second, to my liking at least, Aretha does most
of these songs better justice than Ms. Washington. When a tune demands
saccharine and sentimentality ('Unforgettable') as its focal point, there is no
big difference — both the original and the copy will seem equally classy to
some and equally corny to others. But when it comes to reflecting inner torment
('Drinking Again', 'Nobody Knows The Way I Feel This Morning') or outer
frustration ('This Bitter Earth'), Aretha does them Aretha-wise = shouting her
head off, and since she always shouts on-key, this gives her the edge over the
far more restrained, far calmer delivery of Dinah.
Oh, there is always something to be said for
modesty and restraint, of course — but Dinah Washington did not sing these
songs calmly because that style suited her own calm personality; she sang them
calmly simply because back in those days you did not shout, not even
when the material begged for shouting. Compare the timid original of 'Evil Gal
Blues' with Franklin's fiery reworking: this is the way this hot jazz
number implores to be done, and, in a way, it is comparable with all the fine
work that the early Beatles and Rolling Stones did on those shy R'n'B /
rock'n'roll / pop numbers by their predecessors.
Best of the bunch is a track that did not even
appear on the original release and, in fact, has nothing to do with Dinah
Washington: 'Lee Cross', a rough, bawdy blues-rocker with shades of gospel,
one of those songs that must have originally given the people at Atlantic the
right idea about how to deliver Aretha's goods to the people in the proper way.
This and 'Evil Gal Blues' are the obvious highlights and a must-have for any
decent compilation illustrating Franklin's early years. The rest is a matter of
taste, but my taste says there is enough power and spice here to guarantee at
least a moderate thumbs up.
RUNNIN' OUT OF FOOLS (1964)
1) Mockingbird; 2) How Glad I
Am; 3) Walk On By; 4) Every Little Bit Hurts; 5) The Shoop Shoop Song (It's In
His Kiss); 6) You'll Lose A Good Thing; 7) I Can't Wait Until I See My Baby's
Face; 8) It's Just A Matter Of Time; 9) Runnin' Out Of Fools; 10) My Guy; 11)
Two Sides Of Love; 12) One Room Paradise.
Now this is fun. See, all it took was to shift
the emphasis from old, rusty pop tunes to new, shinier pop tunes. When the
rhythms are livelier, the strings not so overwhelming, the melodies catchier,
and the singer is not struggling with the material in order to understand it,
but assimilates it in an easy-going, natural way — that is when real life
starts to flow.
There is nothing particularly unpredictable
about these song selections: Nancy Wilson, Burt Bacharach, Smokey Robinson,
Dionne Warwick, Brenda Holloway, Mary Wells, Betty Everett — Columbia made a
thorough study of the big names in the last two years of the music business and
unleashed all of them on Aretha, finally realizing that to waste her talents on
retro-pop in a clearly changing world is spiritually and financially
unhealthy. From a possible point of view, Running Out Of Fools is a
turning point in Franklin's career — the album where she first emerges as a modern
artist, regardless of the rather slight way she does it.
Slight, but not slothful: she understands and
likes this new Motown and «para-Motown» brand of semi-pop, semi-R&B, and
her interpretations of the classics are well worth judging on their own terms.
Of course, she does it the Aretha way. 'Every Little Bit Hurts' used to mix
tenderness, vulnerability and desperation — the way she sings 'Come
back to me, I'll make you see..' turns this into a command rather than a plea.
'My Guy', when done by Mary Wells, was a sexy purr that must have made the
majority of its male listeners consider competing for the guy's position; Aretha's interpretation discards the sex
kitten associations and becomes a feminist stance — her "nothing in the
world can keep me away from my guy" is not an oath of loyalty, it just
means that the poor guy has little choice, and woe to him if he does try
out any alternatives.
The choices could have been better; there is
still too much emphasis on similar-sounding ballads, especially on the second
side (the first one is at least redeemed with such colourful pop tunes as 'Mockingbird',
'Walk On By', and 'The Shoop Shoop Song'). But in general, the album is no
better and no worse than any normal Motownish album of the era by any of
Motown's great performers. Never mind that this is not at all the kind of sound
with which we associate Aretha Franklin today; there is no harm in hearing her
— for once, at least — applying her talents to the sounds of lightweight pop
entertainers of the day, in a way, making it more heavyweight. Thumbs up.
YEAH!!! IN PERSON (1965)
1) This Could Be The Start Of
Something; 2) Once In A Lifetime; 3) Misty; 4) More; 5) There Is No Greater
Love; 6) Muddy Water; 7) If I Had A Hammer; 8) Impossible; 9) Today I Love
Ev'rybody; 10) Without The One You Love; 11) Trouble In Mind; 12) Love For Sale.
Well worth locating. One thing you cannot say
about Columbia Records is that they never tried finding the right groove
for Aretha — or that Aretha herself did not latch onto each of their initiatives
with respectful enthusiasm. Thus, after the attempt to market her as a teen
idol lady did not work (or, rather, did not succeed in making her into the next
Mary Wells), out comes another direction: straightforward small-combo jazz! If
not Dinah Washington, and not Mary Wells, then why not Ella Fitzgerald?
Something, at some time, is bound to work after all.
The album is claimed to be «live», which is
both true and false. True, in that the performances were indeed recorded live —
in the studio — with no overdubs and very few different takes, the way it
befits a tight jazz band. False, in that there was no live audience present,
but, following the perverted spirit of the times, it was felt that a «live
ambience» was necessary, so the engineers added scattered bunches of applause
and audience noises, as if this were all happening in a posh restaurant: you
can hear the clinking of the silverware and lots of conversation going on —
obviously, no one has any real business in listening to Aretha belt her soul
out, except for a little polite clapping at the end of the song.
Which immediately translates to «fake», because
I have serious doubts that most people would go on chatting about their own
affairs the minute Aretha opened her mouth on any of these tunes. As I already
said, she is no jazz singer, or, at least, no great jazz singer; she knows
little about vocal modulation, nor does she have any desire to scat or
vocalize. She is a powerhouse gospel machine that found itself in the situation
of having to work in a jazz framework. But that's exactly what makes the
experience particularly interesting. Jazz music + gospel engine almost
equal rock'n'roll; if only the backing band, who are tight but play in the
standard jazz idiom, understood the special qualities of Aretha and played
accordingly, Yeah!!! would have justified its title and, who knows,
could even become a landmark jazz record. As it is, they find it hard to catch
up, but it is still exciting just to see them try.
The track list mostly consists of standards, a
few ('Without The One You Love') re-recorded from former sessions, with maybe
one or two surprises, such as the jazz arrangement of 'If I Had A Hammer'.
Overall, it is not always possible, nor is it absolutely necessary, to discern
breaks between songs, except when a fast shuffle is replaced by a slow ballad;
instead, just concentrate on the energy and conviction that flows from young
Aretha, and think about how less kick-ass all of it might have sounded
in the hands of other singers. This is a record that begs you to headbang to
it, and closes its eyes on all the subtle nuances of the genre. Well, why not? Thumbs up.
SOUL SISTER (1966)
1) Until You Were Gone; 2) You
Made Me Love You; 3) Follow Your Heart; 4) Ol' Man River; 5) Sweet Bitter Love;
6) A Mother's Love; 7) Swanee; 8) (No, No) I'm Losing You; 9) Take A Look; 10)
Can't You Just See Me; 11) Cry Like A Baby.
Not to be confused with the same-titled compilation of some of Aretha's
biggest non-hits from the Columbia years, which, out of the two Soul Sisters,
is the more widely available. This Soul Sister is a fully
original release, one that finally sets Aretha on the right track — except that
Columbia lacked the manpower and the creativity to put the track on the same
level with the train.
Most of the numbers, once again, return us to
the Great American Songbook, but the sound is not as thoroughly retro, and the
arrangements not as thoroughly traditional / nostalgic. Furthermore, slow sappy
ballads occupy less than half of the album; someone finally realized that if
Aretha's general style is most perfectly suited to belting it out, she should
stick to belting it out on the «belters» instead of belting it out on the
«crooners». Songs like the midly rocking 'Can't You Just See Me' already give
us an early glimpse of the classic Atlantic Aretha, except that the backing
band obviously cannot compete with the classic Atlantic backing. Unquestionably
the biggest surprise, however, is '(No, No) I'm Losing You', a little-known
tune written by little-known songwriter Joy Byers which, however, could
proudly stand its own on par with all those other songs about losing you (e. g.
the Temptations or John Lennon). It is the first time Aretha tries to invoke a
mood of sincere desperation, and it works — why the song never became a hit can
only be explained by a ridiculous marketing policy.
Most of the other stuff is perfectly well
listenable; the more upbeat, the more listenable, vividly demonstrated by the
bouncy reworkings of 'Swanee' and 'Ol' Man River', and even the glitzy lounge
entertainment of 'You Made Me Love You' is fun. Overlook silly excesses like the
pathos of 'A Mother's Love' (pretty much every Aretha record, including the
best ones, has dissatisfying moments like that), and Soul Sister truly
qualifies as an album that needed very little to push the singer over the edge.
Very little. Just a better backing band, a better set of backup vocalists, a
better arranger, a better producer, a better sequencing, a better level of
songwriting, and better choices for the lead singles. Other than that, Soul
Sister rules.
TAKE IT LIKE YOU GIVE IT (1967)
1) Why Was I Born; 2) I May
Never Get To Heaven; 3) Tighten Up Your Tie, Button Up Your Jacket; 4) Her
Little Heart Went To Loveland; 5) Lee Cross; 6) Take It Like You Give It; 7)
Only The One You Love; 8) Deeper; 9) Remember Me; 10) Land Of Dreams; 11) A
Little Bit Of Soul.
Aretha's last album for Columbia is a
terminally dark horse that cannot even be found in some of her discographies,
and even the info on its year of release is contradictory — some say '66, some
say early '67. Considering that it only runs for a bare twenty-five minutes,
and that at least some of the tracks date from much earlier sessions — e. g.,
'Lee Cross', recorded in 1964 (which is why we find it as a bonus track on Unforgettable),
but not released officially until three years later — it is not difficult to
understand the slightness with which it had been treated.
A pity, because it is easily one of the best
LPs Aretha ever cut (or, rather, had herself cut) for her
original label. There are as many as five upbeat, uptempo numbers that give
Aretha ample room to unleash her temper, of which the already discussed 'Lee
Cross' is only one highlight; the other one is 'Tighten Up Your Tie', where she
tells her man to beat it like only she can, and the nicely moralizing title
track where she tells her man to balance his gives and takes more convincingly
than any non-musical spokesperson for women's lib.
Both 'Lee Cross' and 'Take It', by the way, are
credited to Ted White, her manager and first husband, and he also contributes
the successful slow-burner 'Land Of Dreams', a lush ballad that somehow
transcends the standard clichés with its unusual piano parts and moody
backup vocals. If not a classic, it is still a far more interesting and
sincerely moving track than, uh, 'Her Little Heart Went To Loveland' — the
inclusion of which shows that, even at their most intelligent, the people on
Columbia were still unable to properly distinguish material that
emphasized all of Aretha's talent from material that did nothing except
extinguish that talent.
It is a little ironic that the last track on
the album and, thus, the last track from Aretha to be issued on Columbia, bears
the title 'A Little Bit Of Soul' — she spent half of the Sixties on that label
implicitly begging for exactly that, and the «Columbians» spent the
same time by understanding her way too literally, giving her a tiny bit of soul
every now and then to whet our appetites, and not a crumb more. Perhaps 'Much
Too Little Bit Of Soul' would be a more understandable title. Regardless of the
irony, though, Take It Like You Give It, recently released on CD
together with Soul Sister, is well worth keeping an eye on, and is a
perfect «pre-shadower» of what would very soon put Ms. Franklin on and over the
top; so a moderate thumbs up.
I NEVER LOVED A MAN THE WAY I LOVE YOU (1967)
1) Respect; 2) Drown In My
Own Tears; 3) I Never
Loved A Man (The Way I Love You); 4) Soul Serenade; 5) Don't Let Me Lose
This Dream; 6) Baby, Baby, Baby; 7) Dr. Feelgood (Love Is A
Serious Business); 8) Good Times; 9) Do Right Woman, Do Right Man; 10)
Save Me; 11) A Change Is Gonna Come.
One does not need to go much further than the
three funky guitar notes that open 'Respect', against a background of big
brawny brass, to understand that things have changed. The first two things that
the new deal with Atlantic gave Aretha was fine musicianship and strong
material; reacting to the third, long-present, ingredient — her power — they
formed an explosive, and the reaction was immediate. At times, one hears faint
echoes of a critical backlash against I Never Loved A Man, which has
its uses — it goads people into giving more attuned listens to the rest of the
lady's catalog — but there is simply no way the album can be budged from its
pedestal without the side effect of toppling Aretha altogether, and do we want
to do that?
The original hit, the one that clearly
indicated how well Aretha and Atlantic can do business together, was 'I Never
Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)'. The Muscle Shoals supply the rhythm; Aretha
herself supplies the piano; and little-known songwriter Ronnie Shannon supplies
the song, written specially for Aretha. This is simple, but deep soul, the
likes of which she could never access on Columbia, and, predictably, the
public was captured by the awesome contrast of the fiery, ecstatic screaming on
the verses and the hot, breathy, animalesque hush of the chorus.
About 'Respect', Otis Redding, while performing
the song in concert during the last year of his life, would always mention the
«little girl who took it away from me», although in quite a friendly manner.
He was right, too: singing it from the feminine perspective, Aretha turned it
into the women's-rights anthem for her epoch, not to mention the fact
that, for Otis, it was simply one more memorable, but hardly outstanding, hit
in a long series of classics, whereas for Aretha it was really the song that
made her, and even today, when you listen to it, it is easy to understand how
she must have known this would be the song that would make her — and how
everyone assisted her so well in that knowledge, starting from her sisters
with their brilliant vocal echoes and ending with King Curtis' sax break. Oh,
and the newly added bridge, and the vaguely obscene "sock it to me sock it
to me sock it to me" — is this the first time the phrase appears in a pop
song? If not the first, it is easily the best.
There is the usual complaint to be applied:
Aretha does not stand up much for diversity, and all of the material, no matter
how different in melody or mood, gets the standard Franklin treatment. On the
other hand, this is a sport of its own: isn't it exciting to take songs as
diverse as 'Drown In My Own Tears', Ray Charles' celebration of desperation,
and 'Good Times', Sam Cooke's glorification of party life, and try to find a
common invariant? Aretha's, of course, reads «power». When she sings the
former, she is not really desperate — she uses fake images of desperation to
exercise mind control over her deceitful lover; and when she sings the latter,
she does not invite you to "get in the groove and let the good
times roll", she commands you. Lady says to get in the groove —
what are you, deaf or something?
Understandably, though, material like 'Drown In
My Own Tears' works better as a curio than as a soul classic; but when the
songs actually do deal with the issue of power, they are immortal. 'Respect'
and 'I Never Loved A Man' are clear highlights, but so is Aretha's self-penned
'Dr. Feelgood', where she finds the love she needs to be OK with her (poor,
poor Dr. Feelgood, whoever he is), and Cooke's 'A Change Is Gonna Come' — no
questions asked about that one.
The album contains no obvious filler; some cuts
are stronger, some weaker, but the album was designed as a solid blast, and
Aretha jumps in it with the same fervor she demonstrated on her first Columbia
record, except that, this time, the fervor is not wasted or dissipated on
syrupy strings and corny oldies. Even the composition of the record — wisely
kicking off with the soul aggression of 'Respect' and closing things with the
epic conclusion of 'Change' — deserves an unequivocal thumbs up from the brain department, and as for
the heart, well, if Aretha Franklin is OK with you as a source of inspiration,
there is no way the heart could feel disappointed with this particular record.
ARETHA ARRIVES (1967)
1) Satisfaction; 2) You Are
My Sunshine; 3) Never Let Me Go; 4) 96 Tears; 5) Prove It; 6) Night Life; 7)
That's Life; 8) I Wonder; 9) Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around); 10) Going
Down Slow; 11) Baby, I
Love You.
Just because this record happened to yield only
one major hit ('Baby, I Love You'), instead of the usual two or three or four,
it is occasionally dismissed or slighted as a rushed follow-up to the
brilliancy of I Never Loved A Man. But if we start thinking of Aretha
Franklin as a «singles artist» — quite a possible way of life — we can skip
all of her albums altogether, since even the best ones are very strictly
divided into the attention-grabbing part and everything else. And, sometimes,
it makes good good sense to come back to the everything else.
There is also the strange album title factor: Aretha
Arrives? The Present Perfect tense would have made far better sense,
because, with several hit singles and a hit album and a perfectly established
style and image, this is sort of a retarded announcement. Now if they had
thought of this title for the previous record, that would have
been a ballsy decision. But then, there is really no reason to think of the
people at Atlantic Records as some sort of artistic superheroes compared to the
marketing department of Columbia. People are always silly.
This is a terrific record. 'Baby, I Love You'
is Ronnie Shannon's second great contribution to the catalog — a swaggering,
self-assured, and hyper-catchy piece of R'n'B on which Aretha's playful
interaction with her vocalizing sisters totally matches the intensity and fun
of 'Respect'. How could this not be a hit? More surprisingly, how could
Aretha's equally powerful delivery of the garage rock classic '96 Tears' not be
released as a single? And, even more surprisingly, how did the world miss the
excellent songwriting abilities of sister Carolyn Franklin, who contributes the
album's second best tune: 'Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)', a strong,
muscular feminist anthem in which the greatest hook is actually delivered by
the backup singers ('nobody, nobody!...') — well, we all have to make a living
somehow, even if it involves hanging on to the coattails of Big Sister.
Aretha's takes on 'Satisfaction' and 'You Are
My Sunshine' do not owe so much to Jagger/Richards and The Pine Ridge Boys as
they do to Otis Redding and Ray Charles, whose nearly unrecognizable
«deconstructions» she appropriates, and, once again, she beats or near-beats
Otis, managing to extract his slightly clownish manner and replace it with
pure fire and brimstone, but fails to unsaddle Ray because of her inability to
enact vulnerability — still, it is quite thrilling to watch her try, and fun to
hear the kickass R'n'B punch of 'Sunshine' emerge after the lengthy
non-rhythmic intro that gives no clue to whatever is going to happen.
For those who always search beyond pop hooks
(and meticulously log their results so as not to appear empty-handed at the
Last Judgement), the album's greatest achievement will most likely be 'Going
Down Slow', which used to be a blues number, but now is a profound slab of
gospel. I am not a fan; Aretha is not great at the tragic confession genre, and
I cannot imagine her actually asking someone to forgive her for her sins, nor
can I imagine her asking for a doctor. But it is still the usual powerhouse of
a performance, that's for sure.
Altogether, with the exception of a couple
semi-lame blunders like a Sinatra number, the record goes down very well. This
is formula; it is now obvious that Aretha has found her groove and is going to
stick to it at least until the changing times demand otherwise. But from an
artist like Aretha, we do not expect anything but a formula, and as long as
the formula makes the world go round, so be it. A totally heartfelt, if not a
thoroughly brainy, thumbs up.
LADY SOUL (1968)
1) Chain Of Fools; 2) Money
Won't Change You; 3) People Get Ready; 4) Niki Hoeky; 5) (You Make Me Feel Like) A
Natural Woman; 6) Since You've Been Gone; 7) Good To Me As I Am To You; 8) Come Back Baby; 9) Groovin'; 10) Ain't No
Way.
Nobody remembers 'Niki Hoeky'. For a reason.
Written by Jim Ford, better known as the author of 'Harry Hippie', it is a very
silly tune that, in its original conception, only serves to introduce the most
exciting linguistic excesses of Southern speech to Northern — and, in a longer
run, worldwide — audiences. When simply sung by Aretha Franklin, it is
marginally listenable, like everything else by A. F. But throw in some
ultra-loud, monster bass playing from Tom Cobgill, ballsy brass playing, and
the overwhelming strength of The Sweet Impressions on backing vocals, and a
minor corny throwaway becomes two and a half minutes of powerful, intoxicating
jamming that is impossible to stop. I want the full version, goddammit; with
this kind of drive, they must have ploughed on for another ten minutes at
least.
This is the major reason why all these albums
from that particular period are so highly valued — the golden touch of
Atlantic's session players. The actual songs are not all that good. Lady
Soul is often quoted as Franklin's finest hour, but throughout that finest
hour, I only find one piece of brilliant, original melodicity: Carole King's
(of course — who else's?) '(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman'. And, odd
as it may seem, it is also a song that, perhaps, works better in King's own
hands; with its decidedly non-feminist, maybe even anti-feminist message
("if I make you happy, I don't need to do more"), it is pretty hard
to reconcile it with Aretha's usual aggressive style. She certainly tries, and
does a great job anyway — not easy to botch a fantastic tune, one of the most
impressive, cathartic build-ups in pop history, with a fantastic singer, even
if they are both fantastic in such incompatible ways. But, in my opinion,
'Natural Woman' only showed its true face three years later, when recorded by
Carole herself.
The true face of Lady Soul is the other
big hit, 'Chain Of Fools' — Don Covay's R'n'B stomper is far more primitive
from a melodic standpoint, but at least this is a song that is forever bound to
be associated with Franklin and Franklin only. And the Muscle Shoals: a
very important ingredient here is the swampy guitar playing, which, together
with the 'chain chain chain' backing vocals, adds a creepy voodooistic tinge to
the song — we are told that, in light of the five years of torture that the
protagonist gets from her man, "one of these mornings the chain is gonna
break", but we can only guess how. I smell bonfires and fresh
rooster and goat blood, personally.
Like all great R'n'B, Lady Soul does not
stuff your brain cells with magic combinations of complex chords, but provides
dazzling, fiery, and diverse entertainment. Aretha throws herself at a little
bit of everything. There is more Ray Charles, this time the rowdy Ray Charles
turf where she can almost beat the genius ('Come Back Baby'); there is more
getting hip to the sounds of the times (a cover of the Young Rascals' 'Groovin');
there is the daring to challenge the unchallengeable — James Brown, with a
smoking version of 'Money Won't Change You'; the beginning of Aretha's lengthy
love affair with Curtis Mayfield ('People Get Ready', which she rips out of the
silk cocoon of The Impressions and adapts to her own rough 'n' rowdy gospel
style); and even a heartily welcome guest appearance by Eric Clapton, who makes
the slow-passing four minutes of 'Good To Me As I Am To You' twice as exciting.
For the grand finale, sister Carolyn comes up
with the epic winner 'Ain't No Way', again, not exactly a pillar of
songwriting but a song that allows Aretha to show softness and vulnerability
without self-humiliation — trust a sister to truly understand the nature of
your soul, rather than an outside songwriter, no matter how brilliant.
Supposedly, that is also Carolyn and Erma wailing out there in the background,
in a manner rather uncharacteristic of standard R'n'B vocalizing, almost close
to bel canto at certain moments.
The immense reputation of Lady Soul, to
a large extent, rests on the success of the hit singles, but there is no
question that, at this point, Aretha and her following were still in full
control of the formula and able to keep it fresh by constantly adding new minor
ingredients. So it gets the same type of a thumbs up
as the less revered, but equally satisfactory Aretha Arrives. And, for
the record, try to find an issue that has the unedited version of 'Chain Of
Fools', with an extra minute of introductory vocalizing over rhythmless swamp
guitar. Makes the voodoo brew quite a bit denser and juicier.
ARETHA NOW (1968)
1) Think; 2) I Say A Little
Prayer; 3) See Saw; 4) Night Time Is The Right Time; 5) You Send Me; 6) You're
A Sweet Sweet Man; 7) I Take What I Want; 8) Hello Sunshine; 9) A Change; 10) I
Can't See Myself Leaving You.
Working at the rate of two first-rate LPs per
year might not seem that difficult when you do not have to write (most of) the
songs you record — but, on the other hand, for a «cover-based» R'n'B artist to
have released four excellent records in two years is a feat you just can't
beat, and I do not even mean today, when even major R'n'B stars lazily
condescend to record one album every two or three years and most of it is bland
crap anyway; I mean back in the 1960s, when even the grittiest stars of
Atlantic Records still gave their all to the singles market.
So if, as usual, there are still two or three
tracks on Aretha Now that don't do much except pad out the length, this
should not detract from the overall consistency. Same band, same songwriters,
same formula, and, fourth time in a row, it still works, as long as the pool of
Ray Charles and Sam Cooke songs is still open to reinterpretation. The Cooke
tribute here is 'You Send Me', a rare case of Aretha doing fine on one of Sam's
more sentimental numbers — because this particular one does not require any
vulnerability on her part; and the Charles tribute is 'Night Time', on which
she celebrates the joys of lovemaking from the feminine side just as vigorously
as Ray used to do it from the male one. (Strange they never tried a duet,
missing the chance of recording the sexiest performance of all time).
The album is most vividly remembered, however,
through 'Think', a rare case of a self-penned song that is also a classic;
Aretha attempts to one-up Otis by writing her own version of 'Respect', and she
very nearly succeeds, putting another big-time feminist hit under her belt, and
one that rocks the shoes off right from the very first beats, too. (Twelve
years later, she was smart enough to refresh the song for the general public in
The Blues Brothers). I may be wrong here, too, but I think it might be
the first pop song ever to feature, if not the word "freedom" itself,
but an anthemic exclamation of "Freedom!" in the chorus, and even
today it is still one of the most powerful "Freedoms!" ever — even
if, in its context, it refers to family freedom rather than social freedom (not
that we haven't been told that all society starts with family).
The other big hit was Aretha's reinterpretation
of Burt Bacharach — Dionne Warwick's 'I Say A Little Prayer', a song whose pomp
may be overbearing for some and whose tenacious presence in pop culture may be
off-putting for others, but an icon is an icon, and this is the second-most iconic
recreation of it, and it's right here on this album. For the record, Aretha's
version completely dissolves the candy gloss of Warwick's original (tender
strings, silky percussion, «cutesy» vocals etc.), so, in my eyes, it is
definitely superior.
And, of course, the hits are still interspersed
with minor, but heavily rocking R'n'B cuts each of which is delightful in its
own minuscule way — Don Covay's 'See Saw', Isaac Hayes' 'I Take What I Want',
and Clyde Otis' 'Change' are all worthy renditions. No man ever did 'I Take
What I Want' better than Allan Clarke of the Hollies, but no woman ever did 'I
Take What I Want', period — that is, not before Aretha, who, as it seems, was
constantly on the look out for strong self-assertive male songs from the past
decade(s) and turning them upside down. Good for her, and another major thumbs up; when you know for sure that it's
formula, but it doesn't feel one bit like formula, that's real talent for you,
and sometimes, even genius.
ARETHA IN PARIS (1968)
1) Satisfaction; 2) Don't Let
Me Lose This Dream; 3) Soul Serenade; 4) Night Life; 5) Baby, I Love You; 6)
Groovin'; 7) (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman; 8) Come Back Baby; 9)
Dr. Feelgood; 10) Since You've Been Gone; 11) I Never Loved A Man (The Way I
Love You); 12) Chain Of Fools; 13) Respect.
Franklin ended her second big year at Atlantic
with this live album, unfortunately, completely overshadowed two years later
with Fillmore West. Producer Jerry Wexler hated its guts, and probably
did not sleep well at night until his «mistake» was finally corrected at the
Fillmore — by whisking off Aretha's regular live backing band and replacing it
with King Curtis'. Consequently, In Paris mostly got bad publicity
from the very start, and mostly continues doing so.
True enough, the musicians that accompanied
Aretha on tour were hardly a match for the much more seasoned pros at Atlantic
Studios. The term «well-oiled» does not work too well in application to this
outfit; no single musician can hold his own against Aretha's power, and you can
hear that perfectly exemplified during the very, very lame sax break in
'Respect' which is there only because the structure of the tune requires it,
not because it ever struck the sax player that this might be a strong
counterpoint to the vocals. And, considering that for the most part they stick
to the original arrangements and running lengths — with the exception of
several faster tunes which they rush through at a ridiculously accelerated rate
— this makes most of the tunes sound like notably or slightly inferior copies
of their studio correlates.
Nevertheless, Aretha herself is in excellent
form, ready as hell to show them Parisian sybarites what that sweaty R'n'B
sound is all about. It's all about the singing, first and foremost; if you do
not make out much distinction between the complex, fluid bass playing of Jerry
Jemmott and the less advanced, «merely competent» playing of Rodderick Hicks,
you might not even notice the big difference until you start seriously focusing
on it, or ascribe it to the extra demands of playing in a live environment. But
the lady herself is wound up to the max, and shifts effortlessly between tough
R'n'B, slow moody blues, and sweet sweet ballads.
Most of the big hits are here — 'Baby, I Love
You', 'Chain Of Fools', 'Natural Woman', 'Respect' etc. — along with minor, but
decent tracks, making this both a good overview of her first and best years at
Atlantic and an important — in fact, the only important — historical document
of a «pre-Seventies» Aretha, still fresh and somewhat innocent and not yet
spoiled by any excesses that normally accompany fame and fortune. Obviously not
essential, but nothing to avoid, either.
SOUL '69 (1969)
1) Ramblin'; 2) Today I Sing
The Blues; 3) River's Invitation; 4) Pitiful; 5) Crazy He Calls Me; 6) Bring It
On Home To Me; 7) Tracks Of My Tears; 8) If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody;
9) Gentle On My Mind; 10) So Long; 11) I'll Never Be Free; 12) Elusive
Butterfly.
What a great piece of bait for professional pessimists
and optimists alike. The former will say: «She had to exchange the bland
confines of Columbia for the juicy pleasures of Atlantic and still end up with this?»
The latter will retort: «Wow, if only she had this kind of dedicated support
and personal maturity on Columbia! Finally, a dream come true!» And, in between
them, they will ensure the presence of an electromagnetic field that will only
fall apart once the whole world has switched from Aretha Franklin to
Beyoncé, by which time nothing will matter any more.
Soul '69 is not entirely retro; approximately a third of the tunes brings us
back into the hands of The Great American Songbook, but the rest of the covers
are more modern, ranging from early Sixties' Sam Cooke and Smokey Robinson to
very freshly written stuff (John Hartford's 'Gentle On My Mind', Bob Lind's
'Elusive Butterfly' etc.). What unites them all is the style: Aretha's regular
studio backing band is joined — and, more often than not, drowned out — by a
swarm of big band players, going for an intentionally old-style sound, but one
that is still in good accordance with modern production values.
I daresay that most people who, in 1967, were
overjoyed to see Aretha switch from the lightweight lounge entertainment style
of Columbia to the rougher style of Atlantic, must have been shocked to see her
come back to jazz-pop — after four terrific hit-filled albums of R'n'B? Hardly
a surprise that the album was her first studio LP for Atlantic not to make it
into the Top 10, although this also has something to do with the intentional
lack of a hit single. And, of course, it must have burdened many a skeptical
mind with the uncomfortable thought — maybe she does not like her
1967-68 sound, if it not only did not make her forget the fluff of the Columbia
years, but, in fact, prompted her to return to it?
Certainly, that would be exaggerating things.
No one can truly hate a sound that puts you on top of things, even if it
happens to be provided by pop culture Antichrists like Diane Warren. But, for
one thing, sticking to the same formula for ages and ages is a tiresome
business, and, for another, digging R&B is hardly incompatible with digging
lounge jazz. We have no reason to doubt the sincerity of the effort that went
into Soul '69 any more than we could doubt the honest verve behind Lady
Soul. What we can doubt is the artistic merit of that effort.
First, the orchestral arrangements truly
nullify the effect of the regular Atlantic players. Most of the time one cannot
even hear the bass, and when it does come through, it's just... some bass. Second,
a few of the tracks are downright misguided, such as the glitz-style
reinvention of 'Bring It On Home To Me' which completely loses the «humble
devotion» aspect of Cooke's original. Third, she tries to compete with the
sentimental aspect of Billie Holiday — why?.. Fourth, quite a few of these
songs were never all that good to begin with.
Summing it all up, I must agree with the general
consensus that Soul '69 is the least significant record from Aretha's
«golden years» at Atlantic. As a risky experiment — cross Muscle Shoals with
Las Vegas and see which one comes out on top — it was, perhaps, worth carrying
out. The gamble failed, though, and all we have to do is optimistically thank
the artist for not attempting to repeat it. Not bad, overall, but decidedly
useless. Thumbs down.
THIS GIRL'S IN LOVE WITH YOU (1970)
1) Son Of A Preacher Man; 2)
Share Your Love With Me; 3) Dark End Of The Street; 4) Let It Be; 5) Eleanor Rigby; 6) This
Girl's In Love With You; 7) It Ain't Fair; 8) The Weight; 9) Call Me; 10) Sit Down And
Cry.
The first of Aretha's 1970s albums — and the
one that, from a certain point of view, ushered in the Seventies as such. You
know what I'm talking about. The watery pianos. The silky cymbals. The romantic
strings. The gospel back vocals. The total subjugation of «melody» and «hook»
to «atmosphere» and «elegance». The gradual crash of the classic school of
R'n'B under the joint pressure of Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway (or, rather,
the shadowy forces of evil that stood behind their heavily burdened backs). The
age in which mainstream entertainment music, after a short, wobbly period of assimilating
the best influences from a host of creative artists, once again detached itself
from good taste etc. etc.
All this and more is best illustrated by 'Call
Me', a song that Aretha wrote herself, allegedly after overhearing a young
couple in the park parting company with the words "call me, I love
you" (or was that "I love you, call me"?). As
heartbreaking/heartwarming as the story may sound, the song is sappy, the
melody is lazy and unmemorable, and to call the lyrics clichéd would be
a serious understatement: one can always object that it is the simplest,
crudest words of love that are the most honest and effective, but, in this
case, shouldn't we take the Ramones' 'I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend' over this
pompous piece any time of day?
In fact, the crudeness of 'Call Me' may be
enough to give one a new appreciation for the talents of Burt Bacharach — the
title track, far more pompous in its use of orchestration, girl choruses, and
just about everything, is far more involving and features enough tonal changes
to carry one's attention throughout. But, of course, the balladeering
highlight is 'Let It Be', a song that would have been a crime for Franklin not
to record (in fact, she was sent a demo already in 1969, and her version of
the tune appeared on the market before the Beatles) — after all, she was
pretty much sent on this planet to put her stamp on every brilliant gospel-pop
idea to be patented by anyone. Turns out that 'Let It Be' does work in grand
style when you get the proper artist to do it, and King Curtis' passionate sax
solo holds its own against Harrison's guitar versions fairly well.
All the more puzzling is the question of what
in the world made Aretha go and nearly botch the impression by immediately
following 'Let It Be' with her infamously misguided reinvention of 'Eleanor
Rigby'. Granted, the song gets a nice frantic R'n'B groove to it, but there is
nothing except the lyrics to link it to the original, so why establish this
link in the first place? To let audiences worldwide realize how she
understands absolutely nothing about the song? Why was this a single? To
compete with Ray Charles (whose version also sucks, but at least has something
in common with the spirit of the original)? Why does she sing "I'm
Eleanor Rigby, I pick up the rice in a church where a wedding has been"?
She is, quite clearly, not Eleanor Rigby, never has been, never will be
(hopefully). On the other hand, she does engage in a piece of glorious idiocy,
and glorious idiocy tends to attract more attention than ordinary genius;
negative publicity makes for great publicity, and who wouldn't want to hear
Aretha Franklin's openly awful take on a Beatles masterpiece, be it in 1970 or
today?
The rest of the hit covers work much better.
Dusty Springfield, apparently, loved Aretha's take on her own 'Son Of A
Preacher Man' so much that she would rearrange all her live performances to fit
that style, and while I certainly do not agree (nothing compares with the
perfection of the original), Aretha's version is worthy in its own way. Far
less sexy, though: with Dusty, it is always clear what exactly she was
being taught by the preacher's son, but with Aretha's spiritually enhanced
take, I am not that sure — the basics of Trinitarian theology, perhaps?
Jerry Wexler later regretted cutting the Band's
'The Weight' with Aretha, saying that the song was unsuitable for and incomprehensible
to her black audiences — but come now, Mr. Wexler, I seriously doubt that
white audiences have a seriously better understanding of what Robbie Robertson
was trying to convey with the song (actually, there is fairly little evidence
of Robbie understanding his creation himself), and as for the black and white
ties, how about The Staple Singers perfectly complementing The Band on The
Last Waltz's famous performance? This is just silly. Maybe Aretha does not
«get» the song (nor do I), but she sets herself on fire all the same; in my
eyes, this is a total success, and the only real complaint is that the song all
but wastes the talents of Duane Allman, accompanying the band on guitar but,
for the most part, buried in the mix. Surely a short solo couldn't have hurt?
Overall, the record, with its mix of styles
comfortably old and dangerously new, bravely explorative and ridiculously
skewed, is fairly intriguing in its lack of balance, and for its very unpredictability
and occasional craziness, gets a thumbs up.
I agree with those who see it as the beginning of Aretha's decline, but, for
the moment, it was merely a side effect of the beginning of decline of the
public taste, and there were still several years of exciting struggle to go
through.
SPIRIT IN THE DARK (1970)
1) Don't Play That Song (You
Lied); 2) The Thrill Is Gone; 3) Pullin'; 4) You And Me; 5) Honest I Do; 6)
Spirit In The Dark; 7) When The Battle Is Over; 8) One Way Ticket; 9) Try
Matty's; 10) That's All I Want From You; 11) Oh No Not My Baby; 12) Why I Sing
The Blues.
Aretha's second LP from 1970 has eventually
emerged as a major critical favorite, despite containing only one hit. What
a hit, though. When it was first released by Ben E. King, 'Don't Play That Song
(You Lied)' was just a modest attempt at keeping up his chart presence — its
lack of pretense to anything greater exemplified by the fact that it borrowed
the rhythm track off his biggest hit, 'Stand By Me', but left behind that
song's loyal intensity. In Aretha's hands (quite literally, by the way: she
plays her own piano lines, and plays them in quite a confident and memorable
way), it acquires a poppier, toe-tappier bounce that, melodically, still
hearkens to the careless old days of 1962-63, and so gives us a good idea of what
Ms. Franklin's early career might have been had she been fortunate to sign up
with Ahmet Ertegün from the very beginning, instead of wasting six
fruitless years on a completely alien label.
Normally, though, a «classic» Aretha LP was
supposed to contain at least two or three big chart hits with monster hooks,
and Spirit In The Dark clearly did not set out for those goals. Instead,
here was a conscious attempt to get closer in touch with the lady's blues and
gospel roots, as well as give her more room to stretch out as a songwriter. The
songs have been, as usual, recorded at several different sessions with several
different bands, but there is almost as high an amount of cohesion here as on Soul
'69 — and the final results are much stronger, since the songs are way more
in touch with Aretha's own spirit, be it in the dark or in the light.
She is responsible for writing four out of
twelve tunes — a personal record, or a family record if you add a fifth one
contributed by sister Carolyn. Instead of Burt Bacharach, she covers Jessie
Hill, B. B. King (twice!), and, least predictable choice ever — Jimmy
Reed; you'd think that Jimmy's one-two-note-based, toothless-rambling
vocalizations would be unadaptable for the Atlantic treatment, but apparently, nothing
is unadaptable. The Rolling Stones may have shown more imagination in regard
to the song while applying their own instrumental flourishes back in 1964, but
in the vocal department, Mick Jagger is hardly the king to Aretha's queen.
In a more risky battle, Franklin takes on B. B.
King and wins hands down on 'The Thrill Is Gone', giving the song a far grimmer
reading, if only because straight-faced darkness is a mood that King always has
to simulate, but to Aretha it comes quite freely when necessary. For some
reason, Aretha and B. B. failed to team up, live or in the studio, to produce
what would surely have been the definitive version — her singing, him playing —
but perhaps, in the future, someone will find a way to overdub King's soloing
on this here rendition? Actually, no less a talent than Duane Allman himself is
listed in the credits as playing guitar on this number; but his presence is
felt far sharper on 'When The Battle Is Over', as he duly gets into «battle
mood» for this gospel number and adds crispness and «jaggedness» to this already
sparkling performance.
Aretha's own creations are surprisingly
diverse: orchestrated balladry ('You And Me'), gospel R'n'B that tries to
compete with Wilson Pickett (title track), Ray Charlesian soul ('One Way Ticket'),
and even a fun throwaway mid-tempo boogie number advertising the comforts of a
local restaurant ('Try Matty's'). None of these goes far enough to convince us
of the lady's composing genius, but she never needed one — it's quite
sufficient that they establish competent grooves over which she can spread her
sincere emotions.
The bottomline is that nothing here can be
counted as an individual masterpiece, but there are no slip-ups or catastrophes
— it's solid rootsy-bluesy grit all the way through, and, consequently, one of
the few Franklin albums (heck, perhaps the only Franklin album) that can
be considered a coherent forty-minute piece of honest art rather than a chance
bag. It is not quite clear to me how, after such clear signs of slipping into
the worst vices of the Seventies on This Girl, she managed to reemerge
in such a rejuvenated, cheese-free manner, but miracles sometimes happen even
in the world of mainstream pop. A spiritually endowed thumbs up, of course.
LIVE AT FILLMORE WEST (1971)
CD I: 1) Respect; 2) Love The
One You're With; 3) Bridge Over Troubled Water; 4) Eleanor Rigby; 5) Make It
With You; 6) Don't Play That Song (You Lied); 7) Dr. Feelgood; 8) Spirit In The
Dark; 9) Spirit In The Dark (reprise); 10) Reach Out And Touch (Somebody's
Hand); CD II: 1) Respect; 2) Call Me; 3) Mixed-Up Girl; 4) Love The One You're
With; 5) Bridge Over Troubled Water; 6) Share Your Love With Me; 7) Eleanor
Rigby; 8) Make It With You; 9) You're All I Need To Get By; 10) Don't Play That
Song (You Lied); 11) Dr. Feelgood; 12) Spirit In The Dark; 13) Spirit In The
Dark (reprise).
Aretha's big, bulky, flashy show at the
Fillmore West has become a love-hate affair amid critics and fans alike.
Defenders and propagators never tire of repeating how terrific it was of Jerry
Wexler to convince Aretha to drop her usual backing band (the one we heard on
Aretha In Paris) for these shows and rely on King Curtis and the
Kingpins instead — not to mention the addition of Billy Preston and the Memphis
Horns, and Ray Charles himself for the encore! Skepticists, however, object
with a smirk that the entire show was a humiliating sellout to white audiences,
what with at least half of the setlist dedicated to Aretha's reinterpretations
— sometimes forced and clumsy — of the Big White Hits of the day, and remark
that to pass it for Aretha's greatest live album would be betraying the essence
of soul.
On a factual basis, the skeptics are probably
right. Wexler was constantly steering Aretha into that direction, and
commercial considerations must have played a serious part in this. Then again,
there is always the «bridging the racial gap» justification, and no one can
ever state with certainty whether it was greed or gallantry lying at the bottom
of it all. And once we get down to it, the real question, of course, is not
whether Aretha had any real business covering these songs, but whether or not
she managed to make a good job out of it.
Not quite, I'd say. Of the four «white hits»
covered during the show, 'Eleanor Rigby' remains as perfectly misinterpreted as
it ever was, and (Bland) Bread's 'Make It With You' is no less awful in
Aretha's version as it was in the original. I have mixed feelings over the
famous cover of 'Bridge Over Troubled Water'; again, it is probably a
reinterpretation that works much better if you have never heard the original —
Franklinization of the song leads to a complete loss of the tender, caring
atmosphere provided by Garfunkel, and when the lady belts out "Like a
bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down", I'd suggest to steer clear:
no one wants to be buried under three hundred pounds... oh, never mind.
In the end, what remains is Stephen Stills'
'Love The One You're With', a song that lends itself very well to the Aretha
treatment, not to mention the great interplay between the horns and Preston's
jumpy organ. That is one great cover — friendly, rocking, and sincere-sounding
— and it honestly makes one wonder just how much of the lady's own judgement
went into those selections and what the hell prevented all these people from
making all the right choices; it's not like there was any sort of limit to the
material. Anything from 'Whole Lotta Love' to 'Long As I Can See The Light'
would easily do, but no, they had to pick a Bread hit? Ridiculous.
No complaints can be voiced about the rest of
the material. One of the most frantic 'Respects' in existence to open the show;
'Don't Play That Song' turned into a dazzling screamfest; eight minutes of a
slow, steamy 'Dr. Feelgood' that challenge Tina Turner herself on the sexiness issue;
and, best of all, a huge, sprawling, never-ending, but never-boring
twenty-minute jam to conclude 'Spirit In The Dark', first with Ray Charles
trading voiceovers with our heroine, then just letting the tape roll as the
Kingpins and the Memphis Horns battle it out with each other. On formal grounds,
this may be condemned as overkill, but these are some of the finest, if
not the finest, R'n'B players of their era, and not for one second do I
get the feeling that they are merely carrying on on autopilot because somebody
forgot to tell them when to stop — they're going on strictly as long as the
spirit is there (or until Aretha does tell them to "break it up!").
Regardless of the flaws, Live At Fillmore
West is essential Aretha, a fact commemorated by several different releases
of the album: mine is the 2-CD edition where the second disc adds alternate
versions from other shows, plus some additional material like 'Call Me', but
there is also a limited 4-CD edition that adds the King Curtis part of the show
and may actually be a better buy if you're generous enough (note, however, that
Curtis was not above lame white artist covers either — his 'Whiter Shade Of
Pale' will not make the world forget Procol Harum any time soon). My thumbs up relate to any of these editions.
YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK (1972)
1) Oh Me Oh My; 2) Day Dreaming; 3) Rock
Steady; 4) Young, Gifted And Black; 5) All The King's Horses; 6) A Brand New
Me; 7) April Fools; 8) I've Been Loving You Too Long; 9) First Snow In Kokomo;
10) The Long And Winding Road; 11) Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time); 12)
Border Song (Holy Moses).
Seriously amazing. In a certain sense, this is
Franklin's Abbey Road: one last colossal punch of an effort with a 100%
payoff, before the inevitable disintegration. Of course, like the Beatles' solo
careers, Franklin would still keep on shining, sometimes brighter, sometimes
dimmer, but explode in such a dazzle of fireworks — never again. If you stop
at this point and go no further, the Almighty will surely not count this
against you (especially since it is my firm belief the Almighty himself would
rather shake his booty to 'Rock Steady' all day long than remain bored stiff
with fifteen minutes of 'Amazing Grace').
I have no idea why, but absolutely everything
one could ever love and respect about A. F. is right here in this forty-minute
package. For one thing, there is no filler. Each song has its purpose and no
two sound exactly alike. The arrangements are fabulous. The rate of cover tunes
to original compositions is respectable, and the original compositions steadily
outshine the covers. The production only occasionally gets bogged in
soft-rockish values of the period. The balance between diversity and stylistic
coherence is ideal. In short — perfection.
Let's see — where do we start with the songs?
Okay, 'Rock Steady'. Aretha gets a little lost here among all the other sounds,
but this is so damn right. In a terrific funk groove like this, she has to be a
bit player, important, but not overwhelming, and that is exactly what she is.
No other Franklin song rocks like this, as the bass, the chicken-scratch
guitars, the sleazy brass bridge, and the voodooistic background vocals take
you right in the middle of the jungle. This is not typical for Aretha, but I
certainly wish it were, since she is perfectly capable of tackling hardcore
funk head-on along with the best of 'em. She wrote it herself, too.
She also wrote 'Day Dreaming', a soft ballad
more in the vein of Roberta Flack than her own, but one whose melody and
atmosphere, with its cloudy electric pianos and flute swirls, perfectly match
the title. She also wrote 'All The King's Horses', whose main hook — merging
Humpty-Dumpty with a tragic tale of lost love — is as ingenious as it is
genius. And even if 'First Snow In Kokomo' is not so much a song as it is a
hummable piece of artistic memoirs set to gospel piano and weeping guitar, it
is still a beautiful experience worthy of most jazz greats.
Once again, she intentionally misinterprets
Otis Redding by turning 'I've Been Loving You Too Long' upside down: Otis wrote
it as a near-suicidal tune, in a Tristan-like manner, presenting love as a destructive,
lethal drug habit — Aretha discards any allusions to self-destruction and
states her point very clearly: since she's been loving him too long to stop
now, it is he who has no choice but to stay... or suffer the odds,
whatever they might be. And who can tell whose interpretation is the more
artistic one? Probably Otis', since the high tragedy and the elegant subtlety
of the original are lost on Aretha; but that does not mean her take on this is
not deserving, either.
The title track, a complete reworking of Nina
Simone's original hit, puts us in celebratory mood and in a far more
intelligent way, of course, than straightforward sloganing of the "Say it
loud" type. More joyful celebration, but without a serious social
background this time, is to be found on 'Oh Me Oh My' and the cover of the
Delfonics' 'Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time?)' — to which the only possible
answer is one hundred percent positive, of course.
As for 'Border Song', there was probably no way
Franklin could not have covered it; in fact, I have a creeping suspicion
that Elton and Bernie intentionally designed the tune in a way that would
entice every single black soul artist to cover it (thus ensuring their
financial future in case the boots and glasses failed to do their job). But you
gotta give it to her: she fights through Taupin's meaningless lyrics with the
same reckless abandon that she fought through Robertson's equally meaningless
lyrics on 'The Weight', and somehow makes them meaningful in the (or, perhaps,
through the) process — and, besides, the song works fine as a
wrapping-up coda to the whole album. I wouldn't have refused a fifteen-minute
jam-style reprise of 'Rock Steady' in its place, of course, but that's just me.
For more and more fans over the years, this is
Aretha Franklin at her best, and I tend to agree. Only 'Rock Steady' would have
made my personal Top 5; but where else will you find a Franklin LP that is (a)
so consistent, (b) so variegated, (c) so well-crafted and intelligently
arranged, (d) heavy on hits and hooks? Thumbs up
on all these counts and more.
AMAZING GRACE (1972)
CD I: 1) Organ Introduction;
2) Opening Remarks; 3) On Our Way; 4) Aretha's Introduction; 5) Wholy Holy; 6)
You'll Never Walk Alone; 7) What A Friend We Have In Jesus; 8) Precious
Memories; 9) How I Got Over; 10) Precious Lord, Take My Hand / You've Got A
Friend; 11) Climbing Higher Mountains; 12) Amazing Grace; 13) My Sweet Lord
(instrumental); 14) Give Yourself To Jesus; CD II: 1) Organ Introduction; 2) On
Our Way; 3) Aretha's Introduction; 4) What A Friend We Have In Jesus; 5) Wholy
Holy; 6) Climbing Higher Mountains; 7) God Will Take Care Of You; 8) Old
Landmark; 9) Mary, Don't You Weep; 10) Never Grow Old; 11) Remarks by Reverend
C. L. Franklin; 12) Precious Memories; 13) My Sweet Lord (instrumental).
Amazing Grace is, as you might know, the best-selling gospel album of all time. There
is little else that needs to be said about it, because, once you take it from
here, it all depends on how you feel about gospel. Predictably, most responses
fall into one of three categories:
«The Lord giveth and the lord taketh away, and
with this album, the Lord giveth thus a-plenty, I wouldn't mind spend the rest
of my sinner's life having him take away. As a matter of fact, I am divorcing
my heathen wife (var.: husband) right now because she (he) dared suggest that
the Rev. James Cleveland is in need of a good dentist.»
«Gospel music? Baloney. My interests are rooted
in the propagation of scientific atheism (var.: I'm a documentally proven
Viking descendant in the n-th generation), so excuse me if I don't have time to
discuss that howling crap, I have a lecture on the evil ways of the Old
Testament to deliver in thirty minutes (var.: a couple of Christian churches
to burn before the day is out)».
«Well, uh, I'm not that much of a believer, er,
uhm, as a matter of fact, I only go to church to admire the stained glass
(var.: the bodily proportions of young Catholic girls), but, er, Aretha Franklin,
she, like, has a mighty fine voice, and plus, she is sort of passionate about
this, don't you see? And, like, we have to respect sincerity and passion in
art, plus, it's, like, tradition, so in the interests of tolerance and world
peace, I, uh, give this a B+. Hey, that's what Robert Christgau gave it, and he
says there's passion there, too!».
A few facts. This live album was recorded on
two successive nights (January 13-14, 1972) as a church session, with the Rev.
James Cleveland («King of Gospel») presiding, the Rev. C. L. Franklin stepping
up to the mike once or twice to drive home the point about how Aretha never
ever really left the Church, and the resulting double album going radioactive
platinum. Today, with the new CD release containing the near-complete material
from both nights, it is a quadruple album, with more gospel on it
than even the most fervent Christian (or Voodoo) practitioner could chew off in
one bite. But a good bargain for one's money.
If still another opinion is really called for,
I'd say there is actually not that much difference between Amazing Grace
and those early sessions when she had the added benefit of super-young age to
add to the jaw-dropping effect. Except, of course, that the sound quality is
much better, and that the proceedings are expectedly grander now that this is
no longer «the little Aretha», but «the Living Queen of Soul». As for the Grace
— well, if there were dedicated followers of Aretha from childhood that night
at the church, I don't think they would have dared say that the Grace was particularly
high upon her during those particular hours. This is just your usual, regular,
awesome Ms. Aretha Franklin — but specifically pandering to Mr. and Mrs.
Churchgoer. Me, I'm more of a Mr. Stayhomer, and thus, not really qualified to
position my thumbs in this matter.
HEY NOW HEY (THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SKY) (1973)
1) Hey Now Hey (The Other Side
Of The Sky); 2) Somewhere; 3) So Swell When You're Well; 4) Angel; 5) Sister
From Texas; 6) Mister Spain;
7) That's The Way I Feel About Cha; 8) Moody's Mood; 9) Just Right Tonight;
10*) Master Of Eyes.
This record initiated Aretha's critical and
commercial decline — but for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps inspired by recent
examples of artistic liberation such as Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, Franklin
dared to put forward a record that took more chances than usual, aspiring to
something larger than just another hit package — and was duly castigated.
Duly, in the sense that she could never hope to ascend the heights of Stevie's
musical genius (she is, after all, primarily a singer and interpreter), nor did
she choose the infallible path of putting forward such a Mother of all Socially
Conscious Albums as was Gaye's What's Going On (whose purely musical aspects,
in my opinion, frankly, leave much to be desired in the wake of its
reputation).
Instead, Hey Now Hey, co-produced by
Aretha herself with the already legendary Quincy Jones, simply opts for a more
experimental, more serious approach. The album is quite intentionally
non-hit-oriented; the closest thing to a potential hit is Carolyn Franklin's
pleasant, conservative ballad 'Angel', and, true enough, as a single it sold
better than the LP itself. But the rest of it has Aretha doing all sorts of
unpredictable things — like engaging in multi-part suites with alternating
soft and hard bits (title track); singing consoling odes to miserable junkies
('Mr. Spain'); putting on Ella Fitzgerald's shoes as a scat singer ('Moody's
Mood'); and simply writing — a lot: more than half of the songs here are
either credited to Aretha all by herself or co-written with Quincy. Quite a
precedent, neh?
As I said, the gamble did not pay off; critics
were mostly underwhelmed, and fans bewildered. But I dare say Hey Now Hey
belongs to those not-of-their-time stacks of albums that simply wait to be
rediscovered, taking as much time as they need to; in the future, it may yet be
seen as a major highlight for the lady. Perversely, it is exactly the two most
frequently lauded tracks that, I think, are the album's corniest: 'Angel' shows
that Carolyn Franklin was much better at writing pop songs than ballads, and
should have been better left to Roberta Flack; and the lush orchestrated cover
of 'Somewhere' cannot hope to beat the original (and Bernstein or no
Bernstein, the original is still little more than a sappy Broadway number).
The rest mostly rules, though. The title song
throws you off the track in a great way, wobbling between the Friscoish
psychedelic bridges and the Funkadelic-style verses; if Aretha truly wrote
this, it is the most complex and rewarding thing she ever did. 'Sister From
Texas' is oddly dark and mysterious, and, for my money, spreads God's message
more effectively than all of Amazing Grace put together. 'Mister Spain',
on the outside, employs much the same arrangement techniques as 'Angel', but
touches upon rougher and darker subjects and is completely devoid of whiffs of
cheese so prominent on 'Angel'. 'So Swell When You're Well' pulsates with fun,
in the good old steady blues-rock way, and so does 'Moody's Mood', in the jazz
way.
Some of the tracks are overlong, and there is
little feel of consistency; if anything, it reeks of a job well conceived, but
sort of executed mid-way through, which may explain the critical resistance:
intellectuals like their concept albums smoothly oiled and well polished.
Clearly, the lady was trying to bite off a bit more than could be chewed;
clearly, with more than a decade of show-biz behind her back and six years of superstardom
assured with a winning formula, it would be hopeless to try and, all of a
sudden, apply for the position of «The Brains of Black Music». But anything of
the sort is still miles better than simply giving in to mainstream trends of
the time and eroding your reputation with the general flow...
...which, unfortunately, is exactly what
happened; perhaps, had the album been even a little more successful and
critical reply more positive, the rest of Franklin's career in the Seventies (at
least in the Seventies; no hope for the Eighties, ever) would not have
dragged so miserably. Thumbs up, then,
for a flawed, but extremely interesting and, in parts, highly inspiring record
that is so absolutely unique in her catalog.
LET ME IN YOUR LIFE (1974)
1) Let Me In Your Life; 2)
Every Natural Thing; 3) Ain't Nothing Like The Real Thing; 4) I'm In Love; 5) Until You Come Back To Me;
6) The Masquerade Is Over; 7) With Pen In Hand; 8) Oh Baby; 9) Eight Days On
The Road; 10) If You Don't Think; 11) A Song For You.
A flat-out bore. So the experimental approach
of the last record did not really pay off with the audiences. Big deal — you'd
think she could simply go back to the unassuming, but fiery R'n'B of the Young,
Gifted & Black caliber. Why, then, do we get this inane collection of
generic Seventies sappy-pappy instead? Where is the music?
As the grooving bassline, the chuckling organ,
and the chicken-scratchy guitars introduce the title track, one is immediately
misled into the impression that this is going to be another high-spirited romp.
Then, one minute into the song, all of it is gone, replaced by a soft,
sleepy beat, equally soporific strings, and wedding march brass puffing — and
from then on, the song never really awakens back to life, despite switching
from bridge to verse melody several times.
The only other songs that rock out a wee bit
are Eddie Hinton's 'Every Natural Thing' and Jerry Ragovoy's 'Eight Days On The
Road' — neither one an enticing pot of honey by Aretha's usual standards, but,
verily and truly, the only songs on here that save me from feeling
comatose. Just about everything else is good for you only if you are a really
big fan of the American Soft Ballad, 1970s style, where clichéd atmosphere
always prevails over melody-writing and the Diva aspect always dominates over
real emotional content.
Not that there aren't any — previously —
good songs on the album; but material as diverse as 'Ain't Nothing Like The
Real Thing' (formerly a big, deserving hit for Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell)
and 'I'm In Love' (formerly a big, deserving hit for Wilson Pickett) is run
through the same grinder, chopped up and mixed with the same pompous strings
and wobbly keyboards, and there is nothing unpredictable about Aretha's
interpretation, either. And on the other side of the business, the big hit, a
cover of Stevie Wonder's then-unreleased 'Until You Come Back To Me', is a
sweet, catchy little pop number, but not really suitable for Aretha's general
style, plus, it's sort of shallow — Stevie wrote it in 1967, for Christ's sake,
while still in his early and fully conventional years; for the Queen of Soul
to make a big hit out of it as late as 1974 would be akin to the Beatles going
out with a bang in 1969 by putting out 'Besame Mucho' as their last single.
Aretha's own compositions have dwindled back to
two, and they are written in the exact same vein as everything else on here, i.
e. completely forgettable. And then, for the final number, we get a cover of
Leon Russell's 'A Song For You', which, by that point, everyone, from the
Carpenters to Cher, had already covered. It is almost like a symbolic sign of
submission, surpassed only by the cheap-glam look of the sleeve photo, fit,
perhaps, for a Donna Summer album, but quite degrading for the likes of the
Queen. The album might have — very temporarily — put Aretha back on the charts,
and reinstated Atlantic's faith in her, but this is truly the turning
point, beyond which the «Franklin phenomenon» finally mutates into the
«Franklin legacy». Thumbs down.
WITH EVERYTHING I FEEL IN ME (1974)
1) Without Love; 2) Don't Go
Breaking My Heart; 3) When You Get Right Down To It; 4) You'll Never Get To
Heaven; 5) With Everything I Feel In Me; 6) I Love Every Little Thing About
You; 7) Sing It Again, Say It Again; 8) All Of These Things; 9) You Move Me.
The most remarkable thing about this album is,
arguably, its sleeve picture, on which Aretha, first time ever, resorts to a
bit of sexploitation — quite a long distance from the prudish cover on Amazing
Grace. It did not help; the record was a commercial disaster, and initiated
a series of flops that only subsided when Luther Vandross took care of the
lady, but that would not be coming up until almost a decade later. Worse, it
is the first in a series of Aretha albums that, as of now, still have to see a
legitimate CD release (my version is a fan-made LP rip with all the required
hissing and crackling in place — sweet memories of days gone by).
Understandably, the record is indeed mediocre.
But it does not follow exactly the silky-boredom formula of Let Me In Your
Life; the artist, the band, and the producers make a serious effort to
restore the balance between upbeat and fluffy, and, even though by that time
the classic aura of hot late Sixties R'n'B had all but blown away, with strings
leading an assault on guitars, glossy, pasteurized production sucking the
breath of life out of the rough edges of yesterday, and smooth disco rhythms
pummeling out the unpredictable improv aspect of funk, some of these
tunes still rock out nicely to shades and memories of ye olde Atlantic R'n'B.
The best song is almost unquestionably sister
Carolyn's 'Say It Again', a cool funky sermon with an imaginative wah-wah /
brass / organ arrangement, in which Aretha becomes a bit player on the verge of
getting forever engulfed in the forest, but who cares if the musicians are so
obviously on fire? 'Don't Go Breaking My Heart' (nothing to do with the Elton
John hit, which had not even been written yet) is faster and closer to the
nascent disco style in terms of beat and strings use, but is still harmless
danceable fun. And the self-penned title track should be allowed to grow on
you; it is one of the hottest numbers she ever wrote, or, at least, the backing
band has done everything in its power to make it so by adding strange subtle
touches (like, for instance, using what sounds like an orchestra of slide
guitars — sic! — instead of the actual strings).
Against this background, perfunctory ballads such
as 'You Move Me' cannot do too much harm; and, as an added bonus, those behind
the wheels suddenly remember that they are actually recording one of the most
phenomenal voices in popular music, and let the lady blossom on cool codas to such
otherwise simply okayish songs as 'When You Get Right Down To It' (the echo
effort on her belting at the last minute works really great with the bass
strings) and 'You'll Never Get To Heaven' (wonderful acappella finish as the
instruments fade away).
The somewhat successful single was the opening
ballad 'Without Love': a moderately memorable pop ballad whose organ
introduction happens to be more emotional, however, than Franklin's own singing
— hardly the best choice, I'd say; if the idea behind the album was to toughen
up her flabbified sound, 'Without Love' is one of the least convincing tunes
behind that concept (even the Stevie Wonder cover, in my opinion, one of the
weakest things on here overall, sounds tougher than 'Without Love'). Regardless,
the entire record is well worth getting to know, and, at the very least, it is
hardly any worse than contemporary (female) R'n'B from 1974. If anything,
Aretha was deteriorating together with the times, not against
them. Thumbs up.
YOU (1975)
1) Mr. DJ (5 For The DJ); 2)
It Only Happens (When I Look At You); 3) I'm Not Strong Enough To Love You Again;
4) Walk Softly; 5) You Make My Life; 6) Without You; 7) The Sha-La Bandit; 8)
You; 9) You Got All The Aces; 10) As Long As You Are There.
Aretha hit the first of her several commercial
nadirs here, although it is not easy to understand why: surely much of this
stuff is at least on par with those huge Barry Manilow hits of the decade in
terms of attention-grabbing, and most of it is far less comatose. But considering
the popular success of the ballad-choked Let Me In Your Life and the
relative failure of her next two LPs, it is likely that «comatose» is just what
the public wanted from the Queen of Soul.
Instead, she gave them her liveliest, most
recklessly party-oriented get-it-up single in years — 'Mr. DJ', wobbling on a
classy, irresistible funky groove — and was thanked by seeing it stall
somewhere in the middle of the Top 100. It is certainly no 'Rock Steady';
totally devoid of the seductive dark aspect of the latter, it is, like the
lyrics honestly state, a simple paean to all the disc jockeys out there who
gotta "shake their funky soul", but it's brilliantly executed dance
fun that should have been vastly popular, but wasn't — perhaps because the
smoother, glossier disco attitudes were already crawling in.
A few other tracks are likeable pop-R'n'B
hybrids ('It Only Happens', 'You Make My Life'), but the major other highlight
is 'Without You', another slice of superb Atlantic funk with a bumble-bee bass
line to die for. Together with 'Mr. DJ', these two tracks are enough to
constitute a strong argument for getting the album back in print, no matter how
much a handful of the usual tepid ballads would call for the opposite.
Aretha's brief flirt with reggae on 'You Got
All The Aces' is, however, not at all successful; dressing reggae rhythms with
gentle background vocals, R'n'B brass, and an overall sweet pop attitude will
almost inevitably produce a pointless, lifeless hybrid — in fact, most attempts
to adapt the Jamaican spirit of reggae to generic mainstream entertainment
values of the 1970s are about as lame as an attempt by, say, Neil Diamond to
sing the blues.
Overall, You's weakest side is that the
ratio is again somewhat skewed in favour of lighter material; count but two
«hardcore» R'n'B numbers, four fluffy dance-pop numbers (including the unlucky
reggae bit), and four rosy-cloudy ballads, none of which rises above generic.
Where are all those gospel roots? Did she get so sick of them after the Amazing
Grace experience, or was there somehow a general industry consensus that,
with disco on the rise, God must have embarked on a three-year picnic? Unclear.
What is clear is that You fits in beautifully into the
fluff-head, hedonistic atmosphere of «The Me Decade», but does not engage in
the filthiest of its excesses, and at least the excellent musicianship,
moderately acceptable songwriting level, and Aretha's usual professionalism
make it still worth an occasional listen.
SPARKLE (1976)
1) Sparkle; 2) Something He
Can Feel; 3) Hooked On Your Love; 4) Look Into Your Heart; 5) I Get High; 6)
Jump; 7) Loving You Baby; 8) Rock With Me.
Technically, this is not really the soundtrack
to the movie Sparkle, even though all of the songs were indeed performed
in the movie. They were, however, performed by different actors rather than
Aretha — but as the movie took off among black audiences, and so did the songs
that were, after all, mostly penned by Curtis Mayfield himself, it was decided
(don't ask me by whom) that a wiser commercial decision would be to let the
Queen of Soul sing all the material, instead of all the inferior human
material. The original vocals were therefore wiped out, and Aretha's singing
pasted on top of the instrumental tracks — the dehumanizing potential of
technology at work.
Nevertheless, the move was smart, temporarily
restoring Aretha's commercially shattered career and giving her a last bright
moment with Atlantic. In reality, the success of Sparkle must have
mostly had to do with the success of the movie — frankly speaking, the songs
are not that good, and there is no reason for them to be: Mayfield was
recording so much at the time that it was only natural for him to keep his best
stuff to himself and relegate all the mediocre dregs to outside mendicants.
The overall sound is generic, but pleasant: dense orchestration, multiple
layers of brass, keyboards, guitars, harps, and whatever other instruments were
lying around. Yet behind all the layers, there doesn't seem to be a great deal
of essence or memorability.
Ms. Franklin does attempt to lay into these
songs as if she'd played all the roles in the movie, but it does little good:
as gritty as Sparkle the movie was (dealing with the rise and fall of an
all-girl band loosely based on the Supremes), most of the grit takes place off
stage, and within the soundtrack is reflected only in 'I Get High', a dark,
chaotic aria on the effects of drug usage, which really reads more like a
moody instrumental composition, with someone rashly deciding to slap on a bunch
of deranged vocals as a last-minute thought.
The rest is generally just soft-rock, or,
rather, soft-R'n'B sentimental fluff, with 'Something He Can Feel' as the biggest
hit — deservedly, since the song builds up all the way to the strongest chorus
on the album, except that it is perhaps more suitable for a tighter, poppier
delivery than Aretha's usual and totally unavoidable free-form vocal flow.
'Rock With Me' is also pretty cheerful, upbeat, and catchy, and 'Hooked On
Your Love' gets quite a few unexpected chord changes in the chorus for a
run-of-the-mill ballad.
The bottomline really depends on whether one
trusts the sales record. To me, even such a relative commercial failure as You
seems livelier, energetic, and less calculated. But there is nothing tremendously
wrong with Sparkle, either — in fact, it stands up to repeated
listening, if only for the high amount of creativity that went into the
arrangements. Calculated, yes, but they took the time to work it out, so thumbs up out of basic respect at least.
SWEET PASSION (1977)
1) Break It To Me Gently; 2)
When I Think About You; 3) What I Did For Love; 4) No One Could Ever Love You
More; 5) A Tender Touch; 6) Touch
Me Up; 7) Sunshine Will Never Be The Same; 8) Meadows Of Springtime; 9)
Mumbles/I've Got The Music In Me; 10) Sweet Passion.
This and the next two albums put Aretha back in
a commercial slump, leading to her finally breaking her ties with Atlantic to
seek better fortune with Arista. It is true that, somewhere around the
mid-Seventies, Atlantic lost that «golden touch» that used to allow it to be
innovative and commercially successful at the same time. But, in retrospect,
it was not so much the fault of the label's bosses as it was due to the dumbing
down of public taste. The label made a relatively late switch to disco, for
instance, and when it did, it did not success in realigning its old guard in
the new formation. What worked for Chic did not work for Aretha, and vice
versa.
Sweet Passion is typical of these struggles — it is forgettable, but hardly awful.
Its lone minor hit, 'Break It To Me Gently', launches an elegant attempt to
combine orchestrated balladry with grumpier funk rhythms, but the
hybridization may leave you cold because the individual parts are cold
themselves, cold and formulaic, as if the idea never got all that far beyond
just being laid out on paper, and then executed completely without enthusiasm.
The same goes for most other tracks: interesting melodic ideas pop out from
time to time, but never translate into genius.
Still, three tracks at least are salvageable
and well worth getting to know. 'Touch Me Up' is Aretha's first true venture
into disco territory, elaborated by Motown veteran Lamont Dozier, and it is a cheesy,
colorful multi-layered romp (not unlike Al Green's similarly tinged 'I Feel
Good') whose fun quotient suffices to overcome any formulaic banalities. But
the album's true surprises await at the end. First, 'Mumbles / I've Got The
Music In Me' is a retro-jazz number that features the best scat singing in
Aretha's entire career (how deeply ironic that such a quirky little gem is to
be found at the start of the lady's disco period, rather than well back in time
when she used to do whole LPs of mediocre jazz material).
And then there is the anthemic seven-minute
title track, completely self-penned and structured as a semi-free-form piece of
R'n'B that moves from soft to hard and from tight chorus to loose improv
without warning. It may not be a great, wond'rous composition, but it is, at
the least, an interesting attempt at something unconventionally soulful, all
the more surprising to turn up on a record whose primary goal is commercial
success and whose primary failure is the impossibility to reach commercial
success. 'Sweet Passion' never cares about any of these things, becoming, arguably,
the last track in quite a long while where Aretha is actually trying to
say something. This should at least be a good argument for saving it up for all
the career retrospectives. The album as a whole cannot help but deserve a thumbs down — but it is not without its merits.
And it is downright wrong to claim that Aretha and disco are two incompatible
things, either. Too bad she never could bring herself to becoming the lead
singer in Chic or something.
ALMIGHTY FIRE (1978)
1) Almighty Fire (Woman Of The
Future); 2) Lady, Lady; 3) More Than Just A Joy; 4) Keep On Loving You; 5) I
Needed You Baby; 6) Close To You; 7) No Matter Who You Love; 8) This You Can
Believe; 9) I'm Your Speed.
For Almighty Fire, Aretha once again
turned to Curtis Mayfield for guidance. And once again, things got off to a
good start — the title track here is a classic, burning-up funk groove on which
Curtis and Aretha succeed in pointing the clavinet, horns, and strings in the
rightfully «disturbing» direction, and once they do, Ms. Franklin belts the
lyrics out as if she were on fire herself: there is some absolutely
head-spinning vocalizing here, even if the melody per se leaves something to
be desired.
Unfortunately, Mayfield never gave the rest of
the songs the same attention, and the next seven songs never ever amount above
pleasant background muzak. Danceable and professional as always, they do not
offer anything special. Like with Sweet Passion, there have been
complaints that the whole thing was too heavily disco-fied, but such opinions
are misguided: 'Keep On Loving You' and 'I Needed You Baby' are the only fast
dance numbers on the record, and even those two are not straightforward disco
in the rhythmic sense. Not that they're special or anything, but at least they
kick one inch more ass than everything else.
As if to give final proof that, for the most
part, Mayfield's waning talents were all but wasted on the LP, Aretha finishes
the dusky proceedings with her own piano solo ballad, 'I'm Your Speed', which
feels more heartfelt and meaningful than all of those seven preceding tunes put
together. Everything gets its proper taste in context, of course: on a record
like Young, Gifted And Black such a song would come across as a cute
throwaway or minor highlight to be enjoyed after everything else, but in the
environment of Almighty Fire listening to it is like witnessing your
loved one come back to senses after a period of heavy sedation.
Which is why 'I'm Your Speed', with all its
surprising soulfulness, would not do good on a best-of compilation or
retrospective, for which, in the proper way, only the title track could be
salvageable. A big thumbs down — mostly
to Mayfield, who had all but betrayed the Queen's faith in him, so much so that
the two would never work together again.
LA DIVA (1979)
1) Ladies Only; 2) It's Gonna
Get A Bit Better Now; 3) What If I Should Ever Need You; 4) Honey I Need Your
Love; 5) I Was Made For You; 6) Only Star; 7) Reasons Why; 8) You Brought Me
Back To Life; 9) Half A Love; 10) The Feeling.
Totally worthless crap — one of those few
fortunate spots where critical sense, bad taste instincts, and public opinion
all come together in a rare moment of unity. The sleeve photo was probably sufficient
in itself to repulse most of the old fans and bore stiff all the potential new
ones: the Lady reclining on a red sofa in a Donna Summeresque position, sexy
slit dress, cowboy boots, cheesy coiffure, and album title spelled out in
bright shiny stars all present. A closer look at the Lady's face, however,
reveals that the Lady has absolutely no idea what exactly she is doing on that
sofa; the idea of marketing Aretha Franklin off as a sexy disco chick is
comparable in its idiocy to a heavy metal image for Pat Boone.
To be perfectly fair, again, there is not all that
much disco stuff on the album, but what there is is truly disgusting, including
arguably the worst song ever recorded by the Queen, 'Only Star', which
truly has to be heard to be disbelieved — or, better, to remind ourselves why
disco (a genre that has, since its downfall, been partially rehabilitated
because its few successes have lingered in memory where its many gross-out
horrors have faded away) truly deserved all the public hate; with atrocious,
bimbo-style delivered, lines like "I'm gonna be the only star tonight at
the disco", Ms. Franklin has introduced her own small contribution to the
shift in standards, and thank her very much for that. The one thing I totally
cannot understand is that 'Only Star' is credited, of all people, to Aretha
Franklin: she wrote this garbage herself? Why?..
The lead single, 'Ladies Only', was also
self-penned — and almost as awful. It thinks it's clever — it's a trick song,
see: one minute it's a slow-moving syrupy ballad, then whoosh, off go the
veils, and there goes the brandest new disco tune from that piece of real hot
stuff, the sexy Aretha «Burst-Yer-Pants» Franklin. It might have been funny,
had it not all been so sad.
La Diva was produced by somewhat legendary hitmaster Van McCoy, who died of a
heart attack a few months before the album was even released (that should
probably give you an extra hint on the quality); out of all the disco songs on
it, his 'The Feeling' is probably the best one (some cool Saturday Night
Feveresque orchestration, at least), which is not saying much. The best
song overall is probably Lalome Washburn's 'It's Gonna Get A Bit Better',
whose muscular funky arrangement kicks tons of shit from all the inane disco
on here, not to mention Aretha being overall far better used to this style —
any normal record executive, upon listening even once to the final
product, would have immediately thrown out half and make the lady record more
songs like this Washburn number, but hey, we all knew that disco would last
forever back then, didn't we?
Thumbs down without question, and chalk that album up as
one of the top 10 reasons why disco had to die — it all but destroyed
Franklin's artistic reputation without even compensating her on the material
level (La Diva was one of the poorest selling albums in her career), and
finally severed her ties with the Atlantic motherlode as well. Not that
anybody really cared by then: Atlantic's golden days were over, and, with R'n'B
standards moving steadily into the «faceless automaton» department, with hits
that might as well be performed by machines rather than people, there was
hardly any chance that the label would strike that gold one more time.
ARETHA (1980)
1) Come To Me; 2) Can't Turn You Loose; 3) United Together; 4) Take
Me With You; 5) Whatever It Is; 6) What A Fool Believes; 7) Together Again; 8)
Love Me Forever; 9) School Days.
Aretha's debut with Arista Records is
definitely an improvement over the self-parody of La Diva, but not by much. The fact that it restored her, albeit
temporarily, on the charts, probably had more to do with promotion on the part
of the Blues Brothers, who'd arranged for her fun cameo in the movie as the
hot-tempered boss lady singing 'Think', and thus endeared her to an entire new
generation of Saturday Night Live
alumni. Don't think they were all that happy, though, upon rushing to the
stores to scoop up her new album.
Aretha — at the time, the title could hardly have
been confused with that of the long out of print 1961 album, although, today, a
retitling to Aretha Reloaded might
be welcome — is certainly a more reasonable proposition for the Queen than her
last bunch of Atlantic albums. The giggly disco crap is gone, the arrangements
do not rely so much on strings-based pop clichés of the 1970s, and the
general atmosphere is slightly more relaxed, so that one does not fall under
the impression that the lady is permanently trying to prove something. Even
the photo on the album cover gives us arguably the most realistic Aretha
expression we've seen since 1970.
Which means this could have been a fairly good
record, if only the songs didn't suck. Unfortunately, the music is pretty much
all rotten. The idea to modernize Otis Redding's classic 'Can't Turn You Loose'
through robotic funk riffs and electronic drums may be questionable, but the
main groove is still preserved, and this means that every single other
groove-based dance number on here pales miserably next to this frail shadow of
Otis' greatness. The only other track that is honestly fun is Aretha's own
'School Days', a charming deception — starts out as if it were going to be a
soft, nostalgic, miserably boring ballad-o-mush, then, in good old fashion,
transforms into a fast, exciting, modern jazz performance.
If only Aretha bothered to let her hair down on
tracks other than 'School Days' and the Redding number... but throughout the
rest of the record she plays it safe, more often hiding behind the big, but
meaningless boom of drums and keyboards than not. The big anthemic ballad
'United Together', a typically bland Diva-style number that made it all the
way to a whopping No. 56 on the charts (for all its Bigness and Pomp!), tries
way too hard to communicate with the Lord's angels to convince me that it was
indeed graced by an angelic presence. Sill, it is at least noticeable; the rest
of the songs just roll by like ordinary clouds, instantly forgotten. For the
record, the cover of the Doobie Brothers' 'What A Fool Believes' almost
improves on the original, with a more complex arrangement and a vocal delivery
that conveys deeper understanding of the lyrics (the subject matter of
strenuous male-female relationship is, after all, right up Aretha's alley) —
but melodically, this piece of primitive crap totally stunk with Kenny
Loggins, totally stunk worse with the Doobies, and was objectively proven to
have been skunk-raped upon birth with Aretha.
Thumbs down are in the order of things, although without a
whole lot of cringing in addition; the tunes are really not so much puke-worthy
as bland and expendable. At the same time, 'School Days' just might be Aretha's
best overall creation of the entire decade — which, of course, does not bear
good tidings for the rest of the decade.
LOVE ALL THE HURT AWAY (1981)
1) Love All The Hurt Away; 2)
Hold On! I'm Comin'; 3) Living In The Streets; 4) There's A Star For Everyone;
5) You Can't Always Get What You Want; 6) It's My Turn; 7) Truth And Honesty;
8) Search On; 9) Whole Lot Of Me; 10) Kind Of Man.
The only good thing that can, overall,
characterize these early Eighties Aretha albums is that the Arista people did
try not only to modernize her, but to «maturate» her as well. That photo on the
front sleeve, for instance — she hadn't looked that stylish or genuine since at
least 1970. And the music is always deeper, denser, and darker than on her last
Atlantic albums, dropping the giggly disco crap in favour of bombastic adult
contemporary... crap.
Half of this album is devoted to instantly
forgettable «diva ballads», which, by then, she could probably sing under deep
narcosis without any difference, and the other half is primitive electro-pop
that would disgust Michael Jackson, let alone Prince. The title track is a duet
with George Benson, a first for Aretha — never before did anyone dare to market
her singles on a double bill, and, fortunately, this one sold so miserably that
she never went on the «Duet Circuit for Pop Dinosaurs» that made many a good
artist into a marketing curio. But the fact that it is a duet at least makes it a standout number.
Well, actually, another standout number is the
dance version of 'You Can't Always Get What You Want', a good candidate for the
«Top 100 Butchered Classics» of all time list, but also a shocking distraction
from the interminable boredom of it all. How I wish to have been able to get
inside the mind of the person who came up with the idea of re-recording the
song on a foundation of slap bass and cheap synths... then maybe I don't. At
least the similar rearrangement of Sam & Dave's 'Hold On! I'm Comin' has
this classy brass melody arrangement, putting it closer to the likable
rearrangement of 'Can't Turn You Loose' than the Stones' killer job.
None of the other songs are even worth talking
about. If you do not have a specific alergy to all that dance crap and
deep-soul-by-the-pound as they used to make them in the Eighties, it's all listenable,
but nobody gave a damn when writing these songs and Aretha probably didn't give
a damn when she sang them, although, her being a professional and all, I
couldn't say that she is slacking: the vocals are as powerful as ever,
throughout. But great singing from Franklin is a given, so I just give it a thumbs down
for all the evil people who had the nerve to spit on it. (For the record,
evil people included several members of Toto — throw on a couple hundred
thousand years on the frying-pan, please. Just for justice sake: they probably
won't even notice, what with the already accumulated several billion centuries
for mass spiritual genocide; I'd rather listen to Love All The Hurt Away over and over again than having to repair my
ears from 'Rosanna' just one more time).
JUMP TO IT (1982)
1) Jump To It; 2) Love Me
Right; 3) If She Don't Want Your Lovin'; 4) This Is For Real; 5) (It's Just)
Your Love; 6) I Wanna Make It Up To You; 7) It's Your Thing; 8) Just My
Daydream.
Dragged out of the commercial slump once again
— this time, by contemporary hero Luther Vandross. The late Luther, as we
mostly remember him, was the king of the suave, the chic, the polish, the
gloss, leading his voluntary listeners straight into the spasms of orgasm and
his involuntary ones straight into the spasms of forceful expulsion of the
contents of one's stomach through the mouth, to avoid nasty words. Nevertheless,
even the most professional and experienced haters of Mr. Vangloss will probably
acknowledge that the man was a
talented craftsman, a sort of anti-Prince, always playing it cool and safe
where Mr. Nelson would take every chance — and getting immaculately good at
playing safe.
The idea, I believe, was to bring Aretha fully
up-to-date with the modern world — to restore her to the status of Diva, both
of dance music and of power balladry, which La Diva actually flunked and Arista's early albums didn't exactly
succeed in, either. So, if anything, Jump
To It sounds even more Eighties than the two records before it. Sterile and
calculated to the very last note, and totally focused on mind-numbing
repetition of its hooks: when you have "jump, jump, jump to it!"
blasted in your ear four times in a row before any of the instruments start to
come in, you know it's gonna make the
Top 40 at least.
Trying to come up with theoretical ideas on Jump To It is a bit like coming up with
a seductive description on an Ikea piece of furniture. It's smooth, it's
functional, it's gonna do its thang for a few years, but it's unlikely to
figure in your memories and memoirs. Oh, and it's probably going to have at least
one really ugly, really annoying aspect that is going to bug you for all of its presence
in your house. On Jump To It, it may
be the power ballads, starting with the Archangel™-approved m-m-melisma (also
known as the 'wo-wu-wa-we-wi' mode of singing) of 'This Is For Real' and ending
with almost seven minutes of 'I Wanna
Make It Up To You', Aretha's self-penned apology for all the bad things she
gone done to her man over the past two decades — even as it starts to finally
fade away, Vandross pushes the volume levels back up to make her apologize one
more time; quite embarrassing, really.
The generic dance stuff is more tolerable, but
not because of any decent amount of songwriting (there isn't any) and not
because of Aretha's enthusiasm in getting in the groove (I do not feel she is
at her vocal best here; this whole artificial re-imaging of her image is really
stifling). The good news is the slap bass playing from the ultra-talented
Marcus Miller, which really gets the fingers moving — even when he is
restricted to disco patterns ('Love Me Right'), he can still play around with
them, giving his bass more freedom and expressivity than everything else on
this album combined, including Franklin's singing. Unfortunately, for some
reason, the minimalistic, bass-only karaoke version of Jump To It is still unavailable in stores, so you'll have to do
your own digital editing if you want to appreciate the album's artistry without
the cheese.
'Jump To It' is the only song from the record
that is regularly met on compilations, but a correct compilation that wants to
reflect the spirit of Aretha Franklin rather than the peak levels of her
revenue should replace it with Smokey Robinson's 'Just My Daydream' — stuck at
the very end, it is the perfect retro remedy against the lifeless robo-funk and
corporate balladeering of the previous seven numbers, the one number on which
we get to hear Aretha's real voice, as the narcosis wears off a little earlier
than anticipated. A pleasant piece of filler on any of her classic LPs, a
soul-soothing highlight on this one — coming too late and too briefly to save
it from the unavoidable thumbs down.
GET IT RIGHT (1983)
1) Get It Right; 2) Pretender;
3) Every Girl (Wants My Guy); 4) When You Love Me Like That; 5) I Wish It Would
Rain; 6) Better Friends Than Lovers; 7) I Got Your Love; 8) Giving In.
Believe it or not, this second
Franklin-Vandross collaboration is a wee bit better than the first — and, of
course, in strict accordance with Murphy's law, it sold far less, making this
the duo's last collaboration. Too bad
— they were just starting to get accustomed to each other.
Not that there is a huge difference or
anything, but Get It Right gets one
thing right: it cuts down, quite seriously, on overblown power ballads, concentrating
almost completely on the dance pop aspect; even the more sentimental tracks are
mostly set to bouncy rhythms, giving Marcus Miller plenty of chances to
practice his slap playing. Certainly, this is not the kind of style at all that
would ever truly fit Franklin's breeding, but... anything but this Eighties style of boom-boom balladry. Even the
bubbly Casio sound.
The title track, when released as a single, was
obviously targeted at the same people who gobbled up 'Jump To It'. However,
'Get It Right' cuts down a little bit on the flashy (fleshy) sexiness of its
predecessor, its hooks are less explicit, and setting up a counting-out rhyme
as the main chorus melody may be considered a dumb move even by people who are
not usually bothered by that kind of thing. Anyway, it takes time to appreciate
it, and even then it's hardly a timeless dance classic that will not make one
regret that time. So it sort of flopped.
The one recording that may eventually survive
as an interesting timepiece is the reworking of The Temptations' 'I Wish It
Would Rain'. This is where Aretha steps into her element, and one can only
regret that she did not try out the song ten years earlier; Miller gives it his
best, but the robo-drums and synthesized strings neutralize his effort. Yet,
what would sound as a passable Eighties curio on an Aretha retrospective
becomes an obvious, outstanding highlight here, in the midst of all the routine
dance-pop.
More bad news include Aretha's first, very
tentative, and, as a result, very pitiful-sounding attempt at rapping (the
coda to 'Pretender'); and plenty of repetitive, mind-numbing choruses that drag
each song out to about twice its expected length, which is why, like Jump To It, this album also has but
eight tracks. Did people really make use of that? were American discos hopping
and bopping to the extended grooves of Get
It Right back in 1983? I seriously doubt it. And, to make matters worse,
the album cover flashes the cheesiest photo for the lady since La Diva tried picturing her as a disco
whore. So this is still a thumbs down,
despite the best efforts of the bass player and the semi-successful
Temptations cover.
WHO'S ZOOMIN' WHO? (1985)
1) Freeway Of Love; 2) Another Night; 3) Sweet
Bitter Love; 4) Who's
Zooming Who?; 5) Sisters
Are Doin' It For Themselves; 6) Until You Say You Love Me; 7) Ain't Nobody
Ever Loved You; 8) Push; 9) Integrity.
From the hands of Luther Vandross, Aretha was
transferred to Narada Michael Walden, yet another glossy production guru,
fresh from making the newest star out of Whitney Houston. The only thing these
two had in common was living during the same crappy musical age, which means no
way of getting rid of the electronic drums and generic synths. As for the rest,
where Vandross tried to treat Aretha all «lady-like», smooth and slick and
solemn even when jumping to it or getting it right, Walden makes her simply let
her hair down and get in the groove. Who the hell would want to buy «cold dance
music» in 1985? Word of the day is «hot», baby.
Given Aretha's usual luck with steamy dance
hits, Who's Zoomin' Who? could have
easily been another disaster on par with La
Diva. Surprisingly, it's not that
bad — actually, all the predictable corniness aside, it might be the most fun
album of her Arista days. The power ballads ('Sweet Bitter Love', 'Until You
Say You Love Me') are incorrigible, but the dance grooves, even without Marcus
Miller's slap bass over them, are louder, rougher, more brutal and
down-to-earth than the sterilized production on the Vandross LPs. In particular,
the big hit 'Freeway Of Love' is surprisingly catchy, and, in another age,
could have been a true rocking classic for the dame — in this age, the synth bass still ends up ruining it.
On the other hand, there are even traces of
diversity: we have big bombastic arena-rock ('Another Night'), big bombastic
hard rock riffage ('Push'), a strange leftover from the disco days (Aretha's
own 'Integrity' with classic Seventies' strings that probably sounded quite
nostalgic back in those days already), and ridiculously dumb pop (title track)
with a chorus that will stick all the same. Not a single one of these songs
manages to make the very best out of the miscalculated machinery of 1980s
production, but, in between themselves, they succeed in drawing attention —
solving the biggest problem one usually experiences with mainstream commercial
records.
Over it all, like a local Mount Everest of
sorts, hovers 'Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves' — a song that, strictly
speaking, does not belong here at all, a «donation» from Eurythmics for the mere
reason that Aretha happened to be invited to duet with Annie Lennox on the
song. (Ironically, in the context of the band's own Be Here Tonight, released the same year, the number was just one of
its moderately decent attractions rather than the absolute pinnacle). With its
dark riff (allegedly copped from Talking Heads' 'Great Curve', but who cares),
lonesome cool guitar solo, and the Annie-Aretha duet blowing it all to high
heaven, here is one great example of how mainstream music from 1985 still can sound overwhelming, even today.
And although nothing can be easier than poking
fun at the simplistic feminist charge of the song (laugh of the day: midway
through explaining how proud they are to be «coming out of the kitchen», the
ladies are seized with sudden fear at being mistaken for a couple of modern day
Lysistratas, and rush out to assure us that «a man still loves a woman, and a woman still loves a man» — no shit!), there is still no denying the basic
brawny power of the anthem, or the fact that it actually feels nice to hear
Aretha back in her cherished element, one that Vandross tried so hard to erase
but, ultimately, and fortunately, failed.
Obviously, I cannot give the album a thumbs up
— for the non-historian and non-diehard, it must be as skippable as the rest of
Aretha's Eighties catalog — but the way I see it, out of all the misguided
attempts to steer the Queen in all sorts of alien directions, Who's Zoomin' Who? is probably the
most successful, and deserves to be heard at least once — if only out of
curiosity — in its entirety, not just the big hit singles.
ARETHA (1986)
1) Jimmy Lee; 2) I Knew You
Were Waiting; 3) Do You Still Remember; 4) Jumpin' Jack Flash; 5) Rock-A-Lott; 6) An Angel
Cries; 7) He'll Come Along; 8) If You Need My Love Tonight; 9) Look To The
Rainbow.
A second chance for Narada Michael Walden, but
nowhere near as well exploited as the first. Unquestionably the fruitfull-est
thing about this album is its sleeve painting, and only because it happened to
be Andy Warhol's final work (and I am not even one of Andy's major fans). The
rest ranges from the usual cringe-worthy to the usual hilariously ridiculous.
Three songs on the whole deserve to be heard.
The unknown sleeper is 'He'll Come Along', a very friendly and, thank God,
easy-on-the-electronics pop gospel number that Aretha wrote herself —
reflecting her renewed interest in direct conversation with the Lord after all
these years, and a direct precursor to next year's One Lord, One Faith; notable if only for the fact that it was her
first decent song written since 'School Days' at least.
Of the four singles, 'Jimmy Lee', as much as it
is spoiled by the big drum sound, still works as a conscious, and successful,
throwback to the good old days, although its pop rhythms, girlie harmonies,
and even its title (reminiscent of Martha & The Vandellas' 'Jimmy Mack')
indicate a Motown connection rather than an Atlantic one; Aretha even borrows
a few vocal moves that are generally more characteristic of Diana Ross!
Certainly an awkward impersonation for those who are familiar with both ladies'
styles — but certainly nowhere near as awkward as the Queen's take on 'Jumpin'
Jack Flash'!
Fortunately, Keith Richards produced the track
himself, and provided guitar accompaniment along with Ronnie Wood, ensuring
the kind of quality that N. M. Walden could never dream of: the guitars clash
over Franklin's howl-in-the-pouring-rain in true Stonesy manner. The problem
is, it's just not the kind of song that is likely to find a suitable
interpretation from Aretha — the Queen was never meant to be that hard. She tries approaching it from
some sort of Moses-on-Sinai angle, all awe, thunder, and lightning, but in the
process, loses the sarcasm and irony of the thing, not to mention the
«playfulness». It is still a spirited, well-meaning, sweaty performance, but
she'd probably have a finer day covering 'Shine A Light' or something.
But at least these songs qualify as exciting
curios, rather unpredictable if seen from the perspective of all the badly
dated musical mutants that haunt the rest of the LP. The lead single, 'I Knew
You Were Waiting', is a duet with George Michael, which sounds just like George
Michael; if you enjoy the George Michael vibe, you will love its blunt catchy
Eighties pathos, but I beg to pass. As for the fourth single, its very title —
'Rock-a-Lott' — may be enough to make sensitive souls shiver in despair, but it
gets far worse: the werewolf growls of «Rock, rock, rock» that punctuate the
chorus beats may be the single most embarrassing moment in Aretha history,
rivaled only by "I'm gonna be the biggest star at the disco".
The rest of the songs just continue to betray
the cheesy fun dance vibe of Who's
Zoomin' Who — most are power ballads that never go beyond generic,
although, frankly speaking, if energizing the album meant bringing in more
numbers that sound like 'Rock-a-Lott', I'd rather opt for Phil Collins
collaborations instead. Still, Aretha's third album to be titled Aretha is at least curious — with
moderately tasteful numbers like 'Jimmy Lee' going hand in hand with plastic
garbage, it is yet another of those records that really make you wonder on the
issues of «good taste» and its limits. Thumbs down, then, but with a pinch of amazement.
ONE LORD, ONE FAITH, ONE BAPTISM (1987)
1) Walk In The Light; 2)
Prayer Invocation By Rev. Cecil Franklin; 3) Introduction Of Aretha And The
Franklin Sisters By Rev. Jesse Jackson; 4) Jesus Hears Every Prayer; 5) Surely
God Is Able; 6) The Lord's Prayer; 7) Introduction Of Aretha And Mavis Staples
By Rev. Jesse Jackson; 8) Oh Happy Day; 9) We Need Power; 10) Speech By Rev.
Jesse Jackson; 11) Ave Maria; 12) Introduction To Higher Ground By Rev. Jaspar
Williams; 13) Higher Ground; 14) Prayer Invocation By Rev. Donald Parsons; 15)
I've Been In The Storm Too Long; 16) Packing Up, Getting Ready To Go; 17*) Be
Grateful; 18*) Beams Of Heaven (Some Day); 19*) Father I Stretch My Hands To
Thee; 20*) Packing Up, Getting Ready To Go (alt. version).
Back to church again. In all fairness, the
sincerity of Aretha's religious fervor cannot be doubted. So many people turn
to church as a last resort when all else has failed — Aretha's church records,
on the other hand, tend to come out when all is well, as a respectful thank you
rather than a desperate help me please. Amazing
Grace captured the world at the ultimate peak of her Atlantic powers; and One Lord came out no sooner than her
tattered commercial status had been succesfully restored with the hit singles
from the 1985-86 period.
Unfortunately, in terms of quality One Lord relates to those hit singles
in direct proportion to the relation between Amazing Grace and the Atlantic hit singles — in simpler terms, the
1985-86 material was mostly formulaic pop dreck, and One Lord, correspondingly, is formulaic gospel dreck. Where Amazing Grace may be liable to draw a
few vacillating souls to the congregation, One
Lord is the perfect tool to drive them out of it, once and for all.
For one thing: to hell with Rev. Donald
Parsons. To hell with Rev. Jesse Jackson. To hell with Rev. Cecil Franklin.
When we put on an Aretha album, no matter which genre it is in, we want to hear
Aretha; do we really want our living room to transform into the Christian
Broadcasting Network for about forty minutes? (Yes, this is approximately the
amount of time devoted to bare bones preaching — an entirety of two LP sides, with only two more
featuring Aretha). The way I see it, gospel music can only qualify as «fundamental art» if it is able to appeal even to
non-believers, those free of slavish adherence to superficial trappings of the
Christian faith but nevertheless capable of being moved by the spirituality of
Mahalia Jackson. How, then, does a ten-minute speech by Jesse Jackson appeal at
all to non-believers?
For another thing, the duets do not work well. On
Amazing Grace, Aretha faced no
competition, being completely free to express herself with both passion and
restraint depending on the situation. Here, she is constantly teamed up with
iron-throated professionals, and way too often the proceedings simply
degenerate into a shouting match — nowhere worse than on 'I've Been In The
Storm Too Long', a duet with Joe Ligan which begins decently enough, but
eventually morphs into an ugly shouting match. Is Jesus supposed to be that hard of hearing, or did he ever say
that your chances of admission to the Kingdom of Heaven depend on your
amplitude? Certainly, this is the way it's always being done in traditional
Afro-American churches, but, again, it brings us into the realm of generic
worshipping, rather than individual artistic expression. And you do not really
need the Queen of Soul hanging around if your goal is to join in unison with
the flock rather than enjoy the soul of the queen.
Finally, she is simply getting old; the fire
still burns hot enough, but the fuel has deteriorated, and one possible reason
for diluting the album with so many speeches and duets may simply be the fact
that the Queen is no longer able to carry on a ninety-minute-long session on
the strength of her cords alone. 'Jesus Hears Every Prayer' and 'Surely God Is
Able' go off fine enough, but she stutters a few times on 'Ave Maria', and
chanting her way through The Lord's Prayer seems like a sly manoeuvre to lure
the listener away from more demanding stuff. In the end, it is the fast-paced
harmony numbers like 'We Need Power' and 'Packing Up' that are supposed to wow
the listener, not the solo performances, and, frankly speaking, there is quie
a bit of solid competition on the gospel market to challenge these harmony
numbers.
In short, One
Lord cannot ever hope to become one small bit the «classic pillar of the
genre» that Amazing Grace purports
to be, and cannot be recommended to anyone except Aretha's, or ritualistic
gospel's, staunchest fans. And, for the record, Rev. Cecil Franklin (Aretha's
brother) does not hold a candle to Rev. C. L. Franklin, either — the latter's
calm, informative, and slightly humorous speech on Amazing Grace is far more ear-pleasing than Cecil's predictably
boring prayer invocation. Thumbs down.
THROUGH THE STORM (1989)
1) Gimme Your Love; 2)
Mercy; 3) He's The Boy; 4) It
Isn't, It Wasn't, It Ain't Never Gonna Be; 5) Through The Storm; 6) Think
(1989); 7) Come To Me; 8) If Ever A Love There Was.
This is pretty darn bad, and occasionally gets
presented as Aretha's lowest point of the decade, but for the most part, Through The Storm sucks through theory,
less through actual realization. At the least, it is nowhere near as
mind-numbingly boring as the Vandross-era records. Yet, granted, once you
become acquainted with the complete list of people involved in the making of
this album — a list that includes Alanis Morissette's sidekick Glen Ballard; a
late-period washed-up Elton John; Aretha's own disciple, Whitney Houston,
famous for copying the Queen's mannerisms much more successfully than her
soul; Diane Warren, the wicked witch of corporate songwriting; and (drumroll!)
KENNY G!! — once you see all these credits, it is easily understood how one
might hate Through The Storm before
even putting it on.
Three things are worth noting, though. First,
there is one good composition on the album, and it is a Franklin original in
the Franklin style, indicating that the lady still got soul, no matter how many
layers of corporate garbage she was buried in. 'He's The Boy' is just a simple,
unassuming, cutesy jazz-pop number with normal
drums, normal pianos, normal electric guitars, and no attempts
at any unnatural hipness — almost like a dramatic highlight.
Second, the electronic funk duet with James
Brown that opens the record is contrived and forced — few people are less
compatible in the world of R'n'B than Aretha and James, and she has rarely
sounded sillier than every time she goes "Hit me!" and "Give it
to me right here!"; what may be good for Tina Turner is ruinous for
Franklin. ("You don't mess with the Queen of Soul", she warns the man
sternly, as if forgetting that they screened out the crown and the sceptre
before letting her into the studio). But even despite the thoroughly fake
atmosphere of 'Gimme Your Love', it is still interesting to see two giants
working together, just for the sake of the experiment. Like conducting a
reaction that results in large amounts of hydrogen sulfide — drastic results,
curious process.
Third, it is hard to accuse the producers of at
least not trying out different approaches. Through
The Storm sucks in quite an eyebrow-raising number of ways. Bad electro-funk,
bad dance-pop, bad power balladry, even bad rearrangements of former successes
— 'Think' mostly just recalls how terrific the original was, and 'Come To Me'
is just a similar-sounding re-recording of the 1980 ballad — and lots of duets,
which never really click but always sound different. Some do not work because
Aretha is either too scared or just plain incapable of letting her hair down
('It Isn't, It Wasn't' sounds like she and Houston are almost terrified of each
other rather than excited about working together), some just because the songs
are that poorly written (the title track wastes both her and Elton's time),
some because it's all about loungey adult contemporary atmosphere ('If Ever A
Love There Was' — the Four Tops on vocals and Kenny G on sax, what a brilliant
cocktail).
But they are all different! If ever you wanted to make a solid case for the vicious
side effects of diversity, Through The
Storm is your ace card. If you didn't, it's worth taking a peek just to see
what strange paths life can follow sometimes. Thumbs down, with a whiff of
amusement.
WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU SWEAT (1991)
1) Everyday People; 2) Ever
Changing Times; 3) What You See Is What You Sweat; 4) Mary Goes Round; 5) I
Dreamed A Dream; 6) Someone Else's Eyes; 7) Doctor's Orders; 8) You Can't Take
Me For Granted; 9) What Did You Give.
All right, this is nowhere near «pretty darn
bad» — this is downright terrible, easily Aretha's biggest artistic flop since
La Diva, if not bigger than that.
Apparently, at some point an entire army of producers, corporate songwriters,
and their idiot assistants, tired of half-hearted attempts at modernization,
conspired, there and then, to return Aretha to perfect glory by making her,
once again, the reigning queen of hot, fashionable R'n'B.
Any single intelligent person in the lady's
entourage could have, of course, remembered that Aretha never reigned over hot
R'n'B; she reigned over soulful
R'n'B, and dressing her up in a pimp hat, teaming her with fashionable rappers,
and teaching her to open songs with a hearty "Yo gang!" ranks up
there with Pavarotti dueting with Clapton on 'Holy Mother' for sheer ridiculousness.
It's even worse that completely innocent songs like Sly Stone's old classic
'Everyday People' had to be destroyed in the process.
The album is equally divided between dance
numbers and ballads, with a few guests, as usual, lending a cold shoulder —
old pal Luther Vandross and Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers — but
mostly this is Franklin's show throughout, and a consistently disappointing
one. The dance numbers are rote and generic ('Mary Goes Round' is probably the
mildest offender, due to some pretty sax playing and a catchy chorus), and so
are the ballads, where the memorability is all but limited to the rhyme between
«locket» and «pocket» on Aretha's own 'You Can't Take Me For Granted';
everything else is just power stuff without any true power.
It is hard to imagine even the lady's biggest
fans getting a kick out of this crap; perhaps Babyface admirers would consider
it a better deal, but why the heck would a Babyface fan want to include a
fifty-year old has-been, completely «out of it», in his/her sphere of
interests? And, of course, they didn't: after Through The Storm's #55 on the charts, What You Sweat stopped dead at #153. The fact that none of the
twelve producers involved in the making of the record succeeded in predicting
this and preventing disaster is quite telling. Thumbs down, obviously; things have
rarely been any gloomier for Ms. Franklin than at that particular point in her
(non-)career.
A ROSE IS STILL A ROSE (1998)
1) A Rose Is Still A Rose; 2)
Never Leave You Again; 3) In Case You Forgot; 4) Here We Go Again; 5) Every
Little Bit Hurts; 6) In The Morning; 7) I'll Dip; 8) How Many Times; 9) Watch
My Back; 10) Love Pang; 11) The Woman.
Give the Queen some credit: it took her but
seven years of layoff to firmly re-upgrade the music from «thoroughly awful» to
«competently dead boring». No more inadequate, contrived attempts to rock out
on the level of the young ones: A Rose
is a demonstrative return to a slow, stately, soulful sound that, decades ago,
provided her with some of her greatest hits. Miriads of people are found on the
credits list, all charged with the task of making Aretha Franklin sound once
again like Aretha Franklin, rather than Whitney Houston's jealous old aunt.
Now if only they'd written some good songs for
the lady, we could honestly call it a comeback. They didn't. And there is
nothing surprising about that: the record strictly adheres to the format of «Contemporary
R&B» (whose main difference from «classic R&B» is in that it is ruled
by people who figured out that record buyers will still buy R&B records even if you cut down on such superfluous
budget articles as «complex / intelligent songwriting» and «skilful playing»).
All of the grooves are constructed so that they fit Aretha's vocal style, but
none of them really help the singer out — everything is stiff, plastic, and
utterly hookless.
For the lead single, Lauryn Hill of the Fugees
(still months away from her solo breakthrough with Miseducation) was recruited, and she did a modestly better job on
the track than everyone else — it has a bit more lyrical bite, the chorus
lingers a bit more in your head, and the quiet wah-wah guitars and
orchestration are arguably the finest arrangement touches on the album. Only enjoyable if you have a high
tolerance level for the varnished gloss of modernized R&B, and ready to
accept a song on which Aretha's vocals are almost buried, at times, under the
backing ones.
The only other track of minor note is 'The
Woman', Aretha's only songwriting contribution, on which she succumbs both to
self-referencing (the lyrics keep sending us back to 'I Never Loved A Man') and
retroish jazz vocalizing — the latter almost
a pleasant surprise that almost
justifies the 7:41 running length of the song, but then you start remembering
that this hardly adds anything of note to the legacy that extends all the way
from 1965's Yeah! to 1973's Hey Now Hey, except for being able to
say «Hey, this girl's 56 years old and she still has it!»
It should, of course, be understood that none
of this is strictly Aretha's fault. After all, the world of R&B is
generally very conservative: the performer isn't supposed to fight the times in
order to maintain his/her individuality, the performer is expected to move on
with the times. All of these albums are as good or bad as the times were, and
in that respect, Aretha Franklin isn't that much different from, say, Aaliyah. (And
by 1998, the vocal capacities of the «old queen» and the «new princess» were
quite comparable, except for the unmatchable advantage of Aretha's experience —
no matter how pointless a song may be, she still slides and glides across its
smoothly unremarkable surface with admirable professionalism). And considering
that nothing on here qualifies as a stupid personal embarrassment, the
inevitable thumbs
down are not so much for the lady as for the deterioration of
mainstream values as such (used copies of the record go for as high as $0.01 on
Amazon, despite its being out of print - a good indication of what it's really
worth). But Aretha — she really tried her best on this one.
SO DAMN HAPPY (2003)
1) The Only Thing Missin'; 2)
Wonderful; 3) Holdin' On; 4) No Matter What; 5) Everybody Is Somebody's Fool;
6) So Damn Happy; 7) You Are My Joy; 8) Falling Out Of Love; 9) Ain't No Way;
10) Good News.
Damn happy, indeed. With seven years separating
Aretha's absolute career nadir from a return to simple-boring-forgettable, and
only five years more — from an album with occasional hints of genuine
pleasure-giving, at this rate, one might hope for a «total fuckin' comeback»
some time around, let's say, 2050. Too bad few of us will live long enough to
enjoy it.
Some of the critics, who had been waiting since
at least the punk revolution for an opportunity to praise Ms. Franklin for something other than just the voice,
were so touched by the retro elements on this record that they dubbed it «a
return to roots» and were almost set to start comparing it with her 1970's
recordings for Atlantic, except what still remained of their conscience didn't
really let them do it. Because, despite the superficial similarity, So Damn Happy is still essentially a
fully modern R&B record, the only difference being that it does not
seriously toy with hip-hop and/or electronic elements, thus avoiding the
unintentional ugliness of What You Sweat.
The low points are two tracks co-written and
co-performed by Mary J. Blige — they sound just like any typical number by Mary
J. Blige, with Aretha's parts reduced to whiny cackling fading in and out of
the steel-iron carcass of Blige's repetitive vocalization arrangements. It
isn't tough street music, and Aretha is not forced into picturing something
that is so totally not herself, but it is still Mary J. Blige music with
novelty-value has-been guest participation; who needs this?
Another sad matter is that this conscious
attempt to make the music a little retro tempts one into going back and relistening
to the old records — this is where you notice how seriously her voice has
really changed over the years, so much so that even really bland past efforts
like Let Me In Your Life, whose
cheaply exquisite furs-and-champagne style So
Damn Happy brings to mind, sound like Callas in comparison. It is
interesting that, as time went by, Aretha's cords seem to have been losing
their lower rather than upper range —
most of the time, she sings here in some exuberant semi-falsetto, which may
eventually get on one's nerves, and that earthy, breathy tone of hers that used
to convey so much depth and «grit», is nowhere to be found. Age is nothing to
joke about, of course, and all of us could see that coming — but,
unfortunately, this means that the good fairy is no longer sporting her magic
wand, one that could help her out in the direst of situations, even on La Diva.
Aretha's two self-penned compositions are in
the listenable-but-forgettable category (the title track tries to convey ten
thousand pounds of joy, but lacks any distinct melody or interesting build-ups;
its only hook is a loud, annoying "Hey boy!" that's good enough to
cut down a pickpocket, but hardly for anything else), and so are, for the most
part, contributions by outside songwriters of which there is about a billion
and a half. In the oldies department, Burt Bacharach gets plundered for
'Falling Out Of Love', lots of sugar, sweet harp playing, and a thoroughly
unimaginative reading — but at least it's four and a half minutes of genuine
feeling, and as much as I hate to admit that a Burt Bacharach song can be a
highlight on an Aretha Franklin record, this is exactly that kind of situation.
Overall, So
Damn Happy is nothing to get real damn happy about, but it is easily the
lady's first album in a long, long time that tries to remember what Aretha
Franklin was all about in the first place. IF they only hadn't brought in so
many outside songwriters... IF they'd kept Mary J. Blige ten miles away... IF
the rhythm section had more swing to it... IF the Queen took better care of her
pipes... IF all of these conditions could avoid being classified under the Irrealis label... As it is, So Damn Happy is still the closest that
Aretha could ever approached a proverbial comeback, but that is still no reason
to own the album unless you really love her like your long-lost, aberrant
mother... and perhaps all of us should?
[PS: As a sidenote, one could seriously
question the rationale behind releasing an album called So Damn Happy in the midst of the Iraq War — but let us be gentle
and not hold this against the completely apolitical Queen of Soul. She did sing
at Obama's inauguration as penitence, after all, even if her hat that day
produced much more of an impact than her voice.]
THIS CHRISTMAS (2008)
1) Angels We Have Heard On
High; 2) This Christmas; 3) My Grown Up Christmas List; 4) The Lord Will Make A
Way; 5) Silent Night; 6) Ave Maria; 7) Christmas Ain't Christmas (Without The
One You Love); 8) Angels; 9) One Night With The King; 10) Hark! The Herald Angels
Sing; 11) 'Twas The Night Before Christmas.
For a moment out there, it might have seemed
like the Queen was holding serious plans to clean up her act. Upon the release
of So Damn Happy, she severed her
ties with Arista — giving the album title a whole new meaning — a thing she
should have done a long, long time ago; twenty three years on that rotten label
gave her barely enough good songs to fill up one side of an LP. She then opened
up her own label and announced a new title, A Woman Falling Out Of Love, for which some sessions were held but
nothing eventually materialized.
And then we get this: a Christmas album (!) with the lady not only showing us her
full girth (!!), first time ever, but also wearing the tackiest red dress ever
made (!!!) and, furthermore, making it Borders-exclusive (!!!!; since then,
re-released on DMI records and made available for Santa Claus fans all over
the world, not just those who do their Christmas shopping at Borders). After
three decades of piss-poor records, there is no way whatsoever that a
Borders-exclusive Christmas album from the Great-grandmother of soul could
make us happy. It sold something like thirty thousand copies, and earned her
some of her worst reviews to date, especially from obligation-free fans who
have earned their inalienable right to despise red dresses, Borders, and
Christmas albums through a properly regulated diet of multicultural /
intellectual values.
It is hard to believe any of them took a proper
listen to the album, though, because if anyone
did, surely at least one voice in the crowd could have stated the obvious: this
is the best-sounding Aretha Franklin album since at least 1975-76. Not in
regard to singing, no. But the arrangements, after so many years of
technological fluff, are very pleasant. Aretha herself plays a lot of piano
(the most, I think, she'd ever played since the Atlantic heyday); the rhythm
section adheres to the old values of classic R'n'B and occasionally even
manages to kick some funky ass ('The Lord Will Make A Way'); lots of nostalgic
Hamoond organ and real strings arrangements; and not one single half-hearted,
corny attempt at sounding «modern». The idea is to make a Christmas album, and
make it in a way that the real Aretha
Franklin would have made it — say, around 1970. The presence of Mary J. Blige
is not required.
If you judge any Aretha Franklin record by one
and the same parameter — the shape her voice is in — then, of course, even What You See Is What You Sweat (a.k.a. What You Hear Is What You Puke) is a
far superior record. The lady is getting old; the lady is relying ever and ever
more on that raspy «dying-dog» falsetto that should not be concentrated upon,
for fear of provoking condescending or embarrassed emotions. Some of the higher
notes are blown, and certainly such a demanding benchmark as 'Ave Maria' should
have been left off. Furthermore, the duet with her son on 'This Christmas'
suffers from overt cuteness and could have done without the
struggling-to-be-funny bit of «telephone monologue».
But let us face it — it makes no sense to
expect a 66-year old belt it out with the power, range, and precision of a
30-year old. At this point, the only reason to keep on listening to new
Franklin records, other than irrational stubborness, is a faint hope to hear
traces of deep soul attitude, and This
Christmas offers more of these traces than all of her Arista records put
together — because this is her first record in a long, long time where she is
not trying to prove anything, but is simply being herself. And the music,
correspondingly, is being itself.
As much as I am skeptical of Christmas
albums (see the Aimee Mann Christmas album review for more details on that),
this one, being taken in its chronological context, is much more than just a
Christmas album for Aretha. It is unlikely to be followed by anything as good
any time soon — but even if it is her very last album of «original» material,
it forms a nice redeeming conclusion to thirty years of shame and horror. As a
bonus, you get one of the most original, if not necessarily the most
artistically successful, personal readings of 'Twas The Night Before Christmas'
ever put on record. Thumbs up — modestly, but firmly.
A WOMAN FALLING OUT OF LOVE (2011)
1) How Long I've Been Waiting;
2) Sweet Sixteen; 3) This You Should Know; 4) U Can't See Me; 5) A Summer
Place; 6) The Way We Were; 7) New Day; 8) Put It Back Together Again; 9)
Faithful; 10) His Eyes Are On The Sparrow; 11) When 2 Become One; 12) My
Country 'Tis Of Thee.
Almost ended up missing this one. Apparently,
Aretha's first album of «original» material in eight years only got an
exclusive release through Walmart — this should give us a few hints at the average
audience of Aretha Franklin these days — and, although it did get some press
coverage, this time around there was not even the faintest trace about any
«comeback» hullabaloo. In fact, I do believe that Aretha's choice of hat for
President Obama's inauguration made far more of a social wave than this album.
Even if it does include her performance of ʽMy Countryʼ as a bonus
gift for those who missed turning on the TV set on January 20, 2009, preferring
a leisurely, relaxed stroll down the Walmart aisles two years later.
Not that the lack of interest was in any way
unfair, since — mildly speaking — this is not a very good album. There are, in
fact, only two merits to it. One, Aretha's voice got a little better: naturally,
it is still an old lady's voice and will always remain that way, but either she
does not try so hard to reach the highest notes or merely manages to cut down a
bit on the breathiness — in any case, the age issue does not stay on my mind as
constantly here as it does when listening to her Christmas records. Two, she is
very much «acting her age» — there is no «music for the body» here whatsoever,
just ballads, gospel tunes, and a few light-jazz / blues-de-luxe cuts for good
measure: a fine decision, actually, since it relieves us of the impolite
temptation to poke nasty fun at the lady. An icon is an icon, after all.
And yet, this time I am also quite sure that I
would rather want to hear the lady go completely retro, pushing out a slew of
inferior copies of past successes, than listen to this bland, thoroughly
faceless collection of so-called «songs», all of them written and produced
according to the legislation of «modern R&B» — which means sitting through
oceans of synthesized wishy-washiness as Aretha weaves predictable tapestries
of melismas over them. Of all these tunes (most of them contributed by outside
corporate songwriters), only three stand out at once, and none of them for a
particularly good reason:
— ʽSweet Sixteenʼ, announced as a
tribute to B. B. King, is soaked in a strongly traditionalist sauce, and may be
Aretha's most retro-sounding track she's done in years; however, the choice is
fairly strange, since this is very much a male
song in lyrics and spirit, and there are no attempts here to remedy the
ridiculousness of the situation (although whoever is playing that guitar adds
at least a few minutes of fresh musical breath to the overall turgid
experience);
— ʽFaithfulʼ, a gospel duet with
Karen Clark-Sheard, is a six-minute monster that becomes completely unbearable
as it reaches the two-minute mark; sheer aural torture for seasoned masochists
by the four-minute mark; and a good cause for a «I-have-lived-through-this»
medal if you survive all six. If this stuff is, in any way, typical for modern
gospel, I will stick with my Mahalia Jackson (or, actually, with my Amazing Grace, for that matter) until
the end of time — instead of visions of angels, what I see is two unfortunate women forced to dance barefoot on a bed of
red-hot rocks, and I am no sadist to enjoy that;
— ʽHis Eye Is On The Sparrowʼ is not
Aretha at all: it is a promotional spot for her son Eddie, who has turned into
an accomplished, professional, sincere gospel singer with a strong set of
pipes, and he ain't afraid to use them, drawing out those notes as best he can
to challenge Morten Harket. That said, I have no idea who could actually be
interested in listening to him other than out of sheer curiosity — there is no
subtlety in his delivery, just a mechanical pump-iron drive. Maybe he believes
that the longer your notes are, the higher your chances of God hearing them.
Provided God operates at the speed of sound, of course.
The rest is divided into one hi-tech lounge
jazz number (ʽU Can't See Meʼ), one clap-your-hands light-mode
R&B dance number (ʽNew Dayʼ, the closest the album comes to «body
music», but still not quite), and ballads, ballads, ballads, all of them freely
interchangeable within the confines of the waste basket. If you ask me, the
album should have never hit even the counters of Walmart, let alone anybody's
personal collection. If it makes Ms. Franklin happy, let it be — it is not easy
to settle into hopeless retirement after half a century in the music business.
In fact, let her release as many more of these as it takes to sweeten the
latter part of her life. But what's up with the title? A Woman Falling Out Of Love with whom? Her family? Her fans? President Obama? The world at large? If
anything, the title should have been Falling
Out Of Fashion — as is also suggested by the awful hairstyle and cheeky
red dress — and she should have known better: competing with Beyonce and
Rihanna is a hard time even for the former Queen of Soul, when you are pushing
seventy. Even without intentionally trying to sound sexy and young. Nothing
personal here, but an inevitable thumbs down.
SINGS THE GREAT DIVA CLASSICS (2014)
1) At Last; 2) Rolling In The
Deep; 3) Midnight Train To Georgia; 4) I Will Survive; 5) People; 6) No One; 7)
I'm Every Woman / Respect; 8) Teach Me Tonight; 9) You Keep Me Hangin' On; 10)
Nothing Compares 2 U.
The less said about this abomination, the more
honor we pay to what used to be the
greatest soul singer in the world. Quoth Clive Davis, executive producer of the
album: «She's on fire and vocally in absolutely peak form. What a thrill to
see this peerless artist still showing the way, still sending shivers up your
spine...» In defense of Mr. Davis' questionable marketing strategy, I will
admit that, every now and then, listening to this album did send shivers up my spine, but probably not quite the kind of
shivers that Mr. Davis would surmise; and the peerless artist did occasionally show me the way — to
the bathroom. I am almost not exaggerating here, mind you.
What is so utmostly horrible about albums like
these is not merely discovering that a formerly great artist has lost all
greatness. Yes, Ms. Franklin is well over 70, and her voice has become a shadow
of what it once used to be, and she probably
should retire, but if she really really wants to still linger in the studio, if
it helps her get along in life to do these sessions every once in a while, then
okay, and besides, that Christmas album wasn't that bad, on the whole. As long as we all, and the lady herself in
the first place, come to terms with the fact that there will not be another Spirit In The Dark anytime soon, who
are we not to let her have her fun?
No, what is really
atrocious is the utmost fakeness of it all. Starting from the sickeningly made
up (and probably Photoshopped, too) old dollface on the album sleeve (is she
trying to compete with Nicki Minaj or what?), going on to the album title that
once again brings up the horrifyingly perverted word «diva», and ending with
this whole idea — to remind humanity of her Supreme Rule as the Supreme Ruler
of All Things Soul, the incomparable Ms. Aretha Franklin will offer, for
everyone to see and kowtow, a brief run through old school and contemporary soul classics in order to show that ʽNothing
Compares 2 Herʼ. Move along, Beyoncé, Adele, and Alicia Keys —
Mama's in the kitchen now, and she's gonna show y'all how to cook those ribs.
Pull the wool from Clive Davis' eyes, though,
and it is pretty clear that the production on all these songs ranges from
unimaginatively retro to tastelessly modern (technobeats on ʽYou Keep Me
Hangin' Onʼ? Ooh, now we're
talking!), that the musicianship is non-existent, that the song choices are
either all too predictable or completely baffling, and that Aretha walks
through this entire session in a totally somnambulant state. Her voice, at this
point, is incapable of rendering proper emotionality; still capable of
technically smooth modulation, yes, but all
the songs are delivered in the same mode — «generally poetic», let's call it —
and the delivery is so robotic that the question «why?», appearing in our minds
in bloody huge red letters as the lady takes the first note, will most probably
turn into such an irritating headache by the middle of the album that,
hopefully, you will not have the strength to endure the lady butchering her own
ʽRespectʼ, let alone becoming Prince's involuntary comical sidekick
on ʽNothing Compares 2 Uʼ.
The cream of the crop is ʽRolling In The
Deepʼ, the lyrics of which she delivers with all the neophyte fervor of
someone so proud to have learned them phonetically — and later on down the
line, the backing singers intersperse them with the chorus of ʽAin't No
Mountain High Enoughʼ, even if the two songs are virtually antonymous in
meaning (perhaps that was the
original plan, but if so, they never went far enough to convince us that it was
a good plan in the first place). I am
sure that Adele herself would be happy to know that The Queen Mother of Soul
herself sends her that much of a blessing, but why should we, the befuddled listeners, be involved in their royalty games?
And you know something is wrong when
there is an Alicia Keys tune in the setlist, and even wronger when the best
thing about it are the backing vocals (the "o-wo-wo-oh-oh" bits on
ʽNo Oneʼ are done expertly — well, they were the best thing on the
original, too — and provide a bit of relief from listening to Aretha's
caterwauling).
It could take well over a fortnight to think of
all the exciting ways of poking mean fun at this album, but let me just
pretend to be sure that Aretha Franklin herself was only a tool here. The lady
is old, weak-willed, maybe a little weak-minded, the lady can be excused for
wanting to relive her stardom, Sunset
Boulevard complex and all. The real
criminal here, the one who bears full responsibility for making laughing stock
out of a formerly great artist, is Mr. Clive Davis — I have no interest in how
many great artists he had signed to Columbia in the 1960s; whatever he is doing
these days generally counts as severe
crimes against music as an art form, whether it be producing Santana's Supernatural or signing fishy deals at
RCA. This whole venture is his idea, a big stinking musical lie that should be
wiped from memory or, at least, condemned to the sewer parts of it. Thumbs down
with a vengeance — sorry, Ms. Franklin.
ADDENDA:
RARE AND UNRELEASED RECORDINGS (1967-1974/2007)
CD I: 1) I Never Loved A Man
(The Way I Love You) (demo); 2) Dr. Feelgood (demo); 3) Sweet Bitter
Love; 4) It Was You; 5) The Letter; 6) So Soon; 7) Mr. Big; 8)
Talk To Me, Talk To Me; 9) The Fool On The Hill; 10) Pledging My Love/The
Clock; 11) You're Taking Up Another Man's Place; 12) You Keep Me
Hangin' On; 13) I'm Trying To Overcome; 14) My Way; 15) My Cup Runneth Over; 16)
You're All I Need To Get By (take 1); 17) You're All I Need To Get By (take
2); 18) Lean On Me; CD II: 1) Rock Steady; 2) I Need A Strong Man
(The To-To Song); 3) Heavenly Father; 4) Sweetest Smile And The Funkiest
Style; 5) This Is; 6) Tree Of Life; 7) Do You Know; 8) Can You
Love Again; 9) I Want To Be With You; 10) Suzanne; 11) That's The Way
I Feel About Cha; 12) Ain't But The One; 13) The Happy Blues; 14)
At Last; 15) Love Letters; 16) I'm In Love; 17) Are You Leaving
Me (demo).
There is no serious need to hunt for «lost
gems» from all over Aretha’s career — certainly not now, when Rhino has done
such a decent job of summarizing, if not exhausting, the vaults of the Queen’s
peak period (the full title is Rare And Unreleased Recordings From The
Golden Reign Of The Queen Of Soul, and who could contest that?). Although
this double CD is consistently listenable, there are (almost) no lost
masterpieces or anything; in the accompanying notes, Jerry Wexler ardently
defends the tracks, but, after all, it was he himself who prevented them from
riding the original trains, and he must have had his reason.
Nevertheless, it goes without saying that Rare
And Unreleased Recordings belongs much more securely in your collection
than all of Aretha’s post-1974 records put together in one large pile.
Returning to those sweet sounds — songs written by people understanding the
essence of music, arrangements played and produced by people in love with the
sonic capacities of musical instruments, the Queen herself at the peak of her
pipes — is such a breath of fresh air after going through the lady’s dance-pop
and hip-hop years that the relative lack of hooks on the outtakes and the
rawness of the sound on the demos can easily be overlooked.
For starters, the early demo versions of ‘I
Never Loved A Man’ and ‘Dr. Feelgood’ — stripped to just Aretha and her piano —
are almost superior to the final polished product, because the lady does not
hold back at all, belting it out at such decibels that it seems like a mortal
combat between her and the piano (guess who loses). It is during moments like
these that one understands how much the packaging of Aretha as a «Gift To You
From Atlantic Records» (let alone Columbia or Arista who could not even produce
a fine piece of wrapping paper) actually contained and constrained her —
either out of modesty, so as to leave plenty of space for the players, or out
of some irrational fear on the part of the producers, too afraid to uphold,
nurture, and encourage that streak of wildness she had in her younger days.
Then, of course, they ended up doing it for so long that she lost it
completely, beyond hope of repair, sometime in the mid-Seventies.
Of the songs one usually knows from other
artists, ‘Fool On The Hill’ fares about as well as the average Beatles song
covered in an R’n’B manner — quite badly, in other words — but it is not as
emotionally queer as ‘Eleanor Rigby’, anyway, and should have certainly been
used instead of it for This Girl’s In Love With You; ‘You Keep Me
Hangin’ On’ is as essential for fans of Duane Allman as their recording of
‘The Weight’, even though his slide backing is mixed somewhere in the seventh
channel and is rather sensed on a psychic level than directly; ‘My Way’, if you
can stomach the song’s overplayed sentimentality at all, is at least tried out
with more honesty and personality than Presley’s rendition; and the big big
surprise is Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’, sparingly and colourfully adorned with
simple electric piano chords and sung with so much passion that it is possible
to be convinced that she actually understands what the song is about.
Not coincidentally, ‘Suzanne’ is an outtake
from the sessions for Hey Now Hey — Aretha’s most daring and
experimental album, whose bombing pretty much ruined her self-credibility as an
artist, with disastrous results for anybody who’d want to review her ensuing
career (anyone you know, by any chance?) — and there is plenty more on the
second CD here from the same sessions, including a second-nearing-first-rate
funk-rocker (‘Sweetest Smile’) and at least one near-fabulous ballad (‘Tree
Of Life’) that is probably the closest thing to an unjustly forgotten epic
piece on the whole album (or maybe not).
It is a very good gesture on the part of Rhino
that they knew where to draw the line, and did not dare explore the vaults of
Atlantic for «rare masterpieces» from the Queen’s disco days — the onset of
deep autumn is heard well enough on the last few tracks (from the Let Me In
Your Life sessions), and it is quite permissible to stop at the hot gospel
duet with Ray Charles (‘Ain’t But The One’). This way, no matter how much these
outtakes deserved being outtakes, every single one of them has more than just
historical value; and in the relative absence of new Aretha albums in the 21st
century, it’s nice to know that at least the vaults can still please her fans. Thumbs up.
THE GREATEST (1961-1965; 1989)
1) Anna (Go To Him); 2) You're
The Reason; 3) Soldier Of Love; 4) I Hang My Head And Cry; 5) You Don't Care;
6) Dream Girl; 7) Call Me Lonesome; 8) After You; 9) Where Have You Been; 10) A
Shot Of Rhythm And Blues; 11) Don't You Know It; 12) You Better Move On; 13)
All I Need Is You; 14) Detroit City; 15) Keep Her Guessing; 16) Go Home Girl;
17) In The Middle Of It All; 18) Whole Lot Of Trouble; 19) Without A Song; 20)
I Wonder Where You Are Tonight; 21) Black Night.
There is little need to explain why this
compilation, bypassing the actual chronological order in which Arthur Alexander
recorded all these singles, starts with 'Anna (Go To Him)': nowadays, this is
pretty much the only song in existence that may make the average listener aware
of the man's former presence on Earth in the first place — due to the Beatles
covering it for Please Please Me.
The slightly more informed part of the population will also recognize 'Soldier
Of Love' and 'A Shot Of Rhythm And Blues' — the Fab Four used to play them live
quite a bit in the early days, with recorded versions surfacing on BBC Sessions — and 'You Better Move
On', recorded by the Rolling Stones for one of their early EPs.
In the dark forests of pretentious mystery,
closed and barred to regular mortal men, dwell occasional supernatural beings
that swear by Arthur Alexander's name and consider him to be a soul great on
the level of Ray Charles and Otis Redding, unjustly overlooked by the PR
industry. I do not know that I would go that far. But Arthur certainly was a
sincere, dedicated, talented artist who lived, worked and died all in the line
of duty, and there is no question that he deserves a page all his own in the
big book of XXth century music soldiers.
To begin with, he actually wrote both 'Anna' and 'You Better Move On', and the former's rolling
piano hook, stuck somewhere in between melancholic and hipster-cool, is one of
the finest pop hooks to come out of the American industry in the early 1960s.
(Them Liverpudlians had good taste, after all — and their guitar-based
recreation of that hook took good care to carry over the same atmosphere). 'You
Better Move On', in comparison, does not exactly beg for the question «where
did that come from?» — its debt to
generic country is obvious — but it still creates a stately-romantic formula
of its own, and its hit record prompted Alexander to record a couple other
«sequels», none of them anywhere near as successful.
Whether he was a fabulously great singer — that
is debatable. Technically efficient, melodically sweet, but not saccharine, a
fine, but not outstanding or completely unmistakeable tenor, in which
department he could compete with Ben E. King and the like. It is probably the
lack of «that particular extra something» that stalled his commercial success:
the songs had to be extra catchy to compensate for the non-uniqueness, and few of
them were. It takes a little time and effort to understand, though, that his
personal life was a rather troubled one, and to discern the subtle smell of
real-world paranoia and insecurity that runs through his shakey deliveries.
Once you understand that, great or not great, Arthur was «the real thing», it gets
easier.
For the most part, Alexander seems to have been
taking his cues from the «country-soul» style pioneered by Ray Charles
(although it must be noted that 'You Better Move On' came out almost a year
before Modern Sounds In Country And
Western Music — although it must be noted that Charles started
experimenting with mixing country and soul way before Modern Sounds —
although enough already). Some of the songs on this compilation are straightahead
country, played and sung by non-country musicians; some offer a good mix, like
'Detroit City', which starts out all Motown-esque, then quickly takes a country
turn. Most importantly, all of them sound really, really fine, adding a certain
«earthiness» to the soul elements and removing the redneck whiff from the
country ones.
Arthur could also rock out a little bit, but,
apparently, was not a big fan of these wild teenager sounds: 'A Shot Of Rhythm
And Blues' was not appropriated by Johnny Kidd and the Beatles for nothing,
it's a fun, catchy party-rocker in its own right, yet there is nothing else
here that would even remotely approach it in terms of energy. There are a few
delicious pop-rockers, though: 'Whole Lot Of Trouble', with its ska-derived punch,
barroom boogie piano, and wicked strings flourishes at the end of each chorus,
is a total classic — and it actually remained in the vaults until the release
of this compilation in the late Eighties!
The
Greatest compiles most of
Arthur's singles, released on the Dot Records label in the first half of the
Sixties, before he switched to Sound Stage 7; missing is his debut single,
'Sally Sue Brown', for Judd Records, as well as the bulk of his first, and only
LP, on Dot, recorded as a hasty follow-up to the commercial success of 'You
Better Move On', predictably given the same title and consisting, so they say,
mostly of throwaways. None of these were as successful as 'You Better Move
On', and most of the tracks from 1963-65 didn't chart at all, but still, the
whole compilation is consistently listenable if the idea of «country soul»
appeals to you in the first place. Obviously, a thumbs up from the hidden country
depths of the soul.
THE MONUMENT YEARS (1965-1972; 2001)
1) (Baby) For You; 2) The
Other Woman (In My Life); 3) Stay By Me; 4) Me And Mine; 5) Show Me The Road;
6) Turn Around (And Try Me); 7) Baby This, Baby That; 8) Baby I Love You; 9) In
My Sorrow; 10) I Want To Marry You; 11) In My Baby's Eyes; 12) Love's Where
Life Begins; 13) Miles & Miles From Nowhere; 14) You Don't Love Me (You
Don't Care); 15) I Need You Baby; 16) We're Gonna Hate Ourselves (In The
Morning); 17) Spanish Harlem; 18) Concrete Jungle; 19) Taking Care Of A Woman;
20) Set Me Free; 21) Bye Bye Love; 22) Another Place, Another Time; 23) Cry
Like A Baby; 24) Glory Road; 25) Call Me Honey; 26) The Migrant; 27) Lover
Please; 28) In The Middle Of It All.
Arthur Alexander did not manage even one single
hit since at least 1964, and switching labels did not help out any — it's a wonder
that Sound Stage 7 and, later, Monument even bothered keeping him throughout
the rest of the decade (granted, they did not bother a lot: he was never even offered one chance to record a full album
during all that time). Lack of promotion and overall mismanagement were a key
factor, but, it must be said, most of these twenty-eight tracks (about half represent
actual 45s released in between 1965 and 1972, the other half is taken from the
vaults) are certainly devoid of hit potential.
One reason is that, having found the kind of
sound that pleased him most — the modestly orchestrated, moderately
sentimental country-soul of 'You Better Move On' and its heirs — Alexander,
regardless of the circumstances, refused to budge one inch away from it.
Perhaps he simply felt that this was
his niche in which he was, if not king, then at least an established master of
the art, and that further experimenting would be the death of him (he may have
been right, too). But he took it way too far by paying virtually no attention
to anything. All across The Monument
Years, musical genres and directions came and went in bunches, yet you
certainly couldn't tell by this compilation — in the early Seventies, Alexander
sounded exactly the same way as he did in the early Sixties. In a time period
dominated by the likes of the Beatles, how could that ever be a recipé
for critical success and commercial recognition?
Today, though, when grand-scale experimentation
has pretty much expired in favour of little niches with musical ant-workers
doing their little schtick over and over again, it is perhaps high time we all
grabbed this compilation and evaluated it on its own terms. Because most of
this is lovely, enjoyable pop music, with pretty, if not tremendously catchy,
hooks and Arthur's personal seal of quality all over them. Very few tracks
approach such peaks as 'Anna' and 'You Better Move On', but the arrangements
are tight, the singing is always on the level, and the soul is always on the
line. It doesn't really seem for a moment as if the man were trying real hard
to come up with a crowd-pleaser — he just enjoys singing and, occasionally,
writing this kind of material, and, in the long term, it does him a great
service.
The discerning eye will quickly discover that
he is doing 'Spanish Harlem', but you'd be wrong to focus on his
interpretations of classic hits — they add little, if anything, to the
originals. Much more juicy are his own songs, such as 'We're Gonna Hate
Ourselves (In The Morning)', a catchy, toe-tapping pop tune on a rather risky
subject (adultery, on the matter of which, so it seems, Arthur was quite an
expert). 'Turn Around (And Try Me)' is totally infectious with its inventive
vocal harmonies and mad trombone blasts; 'I Want To Marry You' strolls on for
five minutes in a rarely witnessed humorous mood; 'You Don't Love Me' is a
beautiful example of how to combine anger and pleading in a desperate love
song; and there's quite a few more little observations like these in my
backpack that, combined, make sitting through these twenty-eight selections a
sincere pleasure rather than just a reviewer's chore.
Perhaps the best way to immediately ascertain
that Arthur Alexander was more than a coincidental one-hit wonder, and to get
yourself to sympathize with his plight, is to move straight over to the last
track. The re-recorded version of 'In The Middle Of It All' borrows its major
transition from verse to chorus from 'He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother', and the
rest of the song is no world wonder of songwriting, but Alexander's vocals,
almost from the first notes, stimulate that sensory receptor that is
responsible for our «epic-tragic» mode — beautiful, gracious bit of acting.
Considering how fine an impression it all gives
— the Ace label people have done a great job not just finding this long-lost
material, but remastering it in near-perfect sound quality — I definitely
recommend this for any serious soul music collection, and it still makes both good party music and a useful soundtrack for one's lonely
evening. Thumbs
up.
RAINBOW ROAD: THE
WARNER BROS. RECORDINGS (1972-1973; 2001)
1) Rainbow Road; 2) Down The
Backroads; 3) I'm Comin' Home; 4) In The Middle Of It All; 5) Call Me Honey; 6)
Lover Please; 7) You Got Me Knockin'; 8) It Hurts To Want It So Bad; 9) Love's
Where Life Begins; 10) Come Along With Me; 11) Burning Love; 12) Go Home Girl;
13) They'll Do It Everytime; 14) Mr. John; 15) Thank God He Came.
This disc collects most of the stuff that
Arthur recorded during his brief stint with Warner Bros. in the early 1970s —
although, what with all the commercial non-success he'd had in the previous six
or seven years, it is amazing they even let him into a studio: Muscle Shoals,
no less. The results were a couple of singles and a self-titled LP, all of
which except for one song is reproduced here. It all sold about as much as
usual — i. e. from very little to none — and Alexander soon found himself on
the streets again.
Way too bad, because the Muscle Shoals stint
gave the man the best backing he ever had, while at the same time the quality
of his songs continuously remained the same: another bunch of modest, likeable
country-soul that does not aspire to much except sounding friendly, touching,
and very human. Not a single misfire all around; perhaps trying to promote
'Burning Love' as a single was a rash decision — no one messes with the King
even in his Vegas-y state of mind — but no one can accuse Arthur of botching
this hot pop-rocker, either (after all, 'A Shot Of Rhythm And Blues' had
already secured his potential as a rock'n'roller).
The third
re-recording of 'In The Middle Of It All' is a bit limper, less stately than
the original version, and there is also an updated version of 'Go Home Girl'
that is equally unnecessary, but, apparently, Arthur was struggling for
material. Still, the album is worth locating for two tracks at least: 'Rainbow
Road' is a humbly beautiful prayer that could have been a blue-eyed soul hit
for Van Morrison (it was eventually picked up by Percy Sledge instead), and
'Mr. John' simply revels in darkness and paranoia, accentuated by wah-wah
guitars and chain gang backing vocals.
These two stand out a bit over everything else,
but not by much: regardless of personal fortunes, at all times in his career
Arthur Alexander was nothing less than the
perfect working man, never demanding genius from the songs he sang, but always
demanding melody and emotional force. Even the little country-gospel number at
the end is moving in its own gentle way, despite the fact that technically, you
could hardly find a less qualified singer for gospel than Mr. Alexander. Then
again, if we do not consider the ability to break glass and cover everyone
within a half-mile radius in one's spit the necessary prerequisites of singing
good gospel, I suspect that's subjective.
Arthur's last, faintest smudge of success came
two years later on Buddah Records, for whom he recorded a minor hit version of
'Every Day I Have To Cry Some', but even that did not help his career to
recover, and eventually he just switched to bus driving — all for the better,
perhaps, because even with all that perfectionism, who knows what degrees of
lameness could he have been driven to in the disco and synth-pop eras? This
way, I can simply award him another respectful thumbs up, and then we can move
right on to the very last chapter of his career, and life.
LONELY JUST LIKE
ME (1993)
1) If It's Really Got To Be
This Way; 2) Go Home Girl; 3) Sally Sue Brown; 4) All The Time; 5) Lonely Just
Like Me; 6) Every Day I Have To Cry; 7) In The Middle Of It All; 8) Genie In
The Jug; 9) Mr. John; 10) Johnny Heartbreak; 11) There Is A Road; 12) I
Believe In Miracles.
It is not quite clear what exactly drew Alexander
out of bus-driving retirement: some people mention a «renewed interest in his
legacy», but surely such an interest could only have very limited distribution
anyway. Perhaps it took him fifteen years to understand that, by now, it was
perfectly all right for people to record music the way they would like to
record it without an obligation to
seek mass commercial appeal. Or, more probably, it just took him fifteen years
to find a record label that would want him in the first place.
The label was Nonesuch (not yet under the roof
of Warner Bros.), and the album — one of the most delightful small-scale
comebacks of the 1990s. Apparently, Alexander took the bus-driving business
quite seriously: only half of the album is comprised of new material, written
God knows when, with the other half (as befits most of the blues, jazz, and
R&B comebacks from the «real old days») consisting of re-recordings of old
hit material — and it is, of course, debatable whether we really need a fourth
version of 'In The Middle Of It All'. But in the end, it doesn't matter at all.
What matters is how classy it all sounds.
First, it is almost impossible to date these
recordings to 1993. The drums have a slightly «processed» feel to them, and
the electronic piano sound and synthesized strings constitute another mildly
unpleasant giveaway, but, other than that, the record seems to have been made
exactly the way Arthur would have it. The man drove his bus through the
Eighties without noticing a single thing going around, and thank God for that —
Lonely Just Like Me sounds like good
old school R'n'B / country-soul. Melodies, guitars, catchy choruses, human
feeling, the works.
Actually, some of the new material is terrific.
'If It's Really Got To Be This Way' is gorgeously written and sung, with some
nice slide playing attenuating the pain and grace in Arthur's voice, a lost
classic totally on the level of 'Anna' and 'You Better Move On'. 'Genie In The
Jug' bounces, delights, and saddens all at the same time; the
"doo-doodley-doo"s of 'All The Time' are unusually deeply felt for a
doo-doodley-doo; 'There Is A Road' is built upon an overwhelming vocal crescendo
— one that could have been performed in a much more technical manner by the
likes of a Neil Diamond, but benefits far more from Arthur's trembling
sincereness; and 'I Believe In Miracles' is a tender, lovingly naïve
conclusion.
Moreover, I don't feel one bit of a difference
between Arthur's early singing and his vocal powers on here — perhaps the voice
got just a trifle deeper with age, but you'd really have to use serious acoustic
equipment to prove your point. The important thing is that his simple magic has
not gone anywhere: Lonely Just Like Me
fully justifies its title — few people could ever sing about broken hearts
with the kind of simplicity and adequacy that Alexander introduced back in the
early 1960s, and, strange as it is, it still
holds true in 1993.
I mean, people like Al Green came along and
took the whole thing to an entirely new level of depth — making songs that
mixed joy with pain directly, playing psychological torment with
quasi-Shakesperian standards — but there is something to be said for holy
simplicity as well, and especially
for being able to move a heart without overplaying it. Most of these twelve
cuts focus on that ability, making Lonely
the only Arthur Alexander LP that is truly, to some extent, conceptual in its
nature.
It is nothing short of a mini-miracle, either,
that Alexander had just enough time to put out this sole LP before, a few
months later, succumbing to a fatal heart attack that finally put him out of
his loneliness. Without it, I would still be tempted to classify him as a
two-hit wonder; with it, his career got a suitably humble and elegant finale
that confirmed it as, well, an actual career.
And it seems that the record label people understood that as well: fourteen years
later, the album was re-released on CD as Lonely
Just Like Me: The Final Chapter, adding several guitar-only and accapella
demos recorded for the album and, more importantly, a small live promotional
performance played before a well-receptive audience. They do not add much
artistic or historical importance, but they do a good job of bringing out the
vulnerable human side of Arthur to an even bigger extent.
A very natural thumbs up here, and a big thank you
to the man for having stayed exactly the same through all these years, and also
to producer Ben Vaughn who gave him a chance to show that to us before it was
too late. Trust me, this is not a trifle here; this is soul food as essential
as any of the man's greatest hits compilations, even if it may take a while to
understand that.
AND THEN ALONG COMES... THE ASSOCIATION (1966)
1) Enter The Young; 2) Your
Own Love; 3) Don't Blame It On Me; 4) Blistered; 5) I'll Be Your Man; 6) Along Comes Mary; 7) Cherish; 8) Standing
Still; 9) Message Of Our Love; 10) Round Again; 11) Remember; 12) Changes.
Just because someone generated the questionable
idea of dressing The Association up in matching Beatlesque suits and thrusting
electric instruments in their hands does not mean that, at any time during
their existence, The Association would turn into something seriously different
from a modern-day / Sixties-style barbershop quartet (actually, sextet).
Arriving way too late on the rapidly shifting and fading sweet-folk-pop scene,
they somehow managed to endure on a commercial high all through 1967 and early
1968 — then inevitably faded away together with their barber shop. Unlike the
Beach Boys or the Zombies, their
output has not survived the popularity time test, for understandable reasons.
Nevertheless, like all good barbers, they, too, have certain advantages; at the
very least, in the golden canon of the Sixties they deserve their own thick
footnote, rather than just a brief comma-circled niche in a long list of
complete good-for-nothings.
The Association's first album was released in
mid-1966, produced by such a semi-legendary figure as Curt Boettcher, one of
America's top sonic wizards in the «lush baroque pop» department (he used to
work in close tandem with Gary Usher, one of the Beach Boys' original
collaborators, and was also responsible for the sound behind such nice,
unjustly underrated late-Sixties art-rock projects as The Millennium and
Sagittarius). Considering that the band's two leaders, Terry Kirkman and Jules
Alexander, tended either to write their own material or to rely on non-trivial
songs written by outside composers, and had at least a few shreds of individual
musical vision, there was, from the very outset, a strong chance of The
Association forever changing the face of Californian pop music... or was
there?
Certainly 'Along Comes Mary', the band's third
single (the first, by the way, was 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You', a version
nowhere near as innovative as Led Zeppelin's, but fully holding its own ground
in terms of soulfulness), is a damn fine tune. Most people dug it for the
lyrics, one of the earliest examples of non-Dylan-derived complete incomprehensibility
(so much so that it was, and still is, a common assumption that 'Mary' stands
for 'Juana'), except for Leonard Bernstein, who actually raved about the tune's
melodic structure — I wouldn't know about the technical stuff, of course, but the
song is pretty complex, and has a
little bit of everything: a propelling dance rhythm, a nicely dated fuzz guitar
riff, vocals that go from angry pop to hazy psychedelic and back again, and
even an unforeseen instrumental flute break, at a time when flute
popularization by the likes of the Moody Blues or Jethro Tull was still quite
low. Catchy, too.
This was almost immediately followed by the
band's first No. 1, Kirkman's 'Cherish' — a song that actually conveys The
Association's essence better than 'Mary' by ditching anything even remotely
close to a «rock» sensibility and just playing along as a lush folk-pop ballad.
Way too ornate and saccharine for my personal tastes, but impeccable as a fine
piece of craftsmanship all the same, due to production values that could rival
George Martin himself.
The remainder of the LP sort of grew around
these two songs, perhaps a little faster than necessary, but then, in pure
terms of quality, the band never really managed to beat this level anyway. If
you are new to the band, but not to Sixties' West Coast sound altogether, you
will have a great field day sorting out the influences: lots of Beach Boys and
other vocal harmony groups, lots of Byrds and other folksy jangle bands, a
little bit Lovin' Spoonful, a pinch of early Jefferson Airplane, etc. etc. For
the most part, The Association plays it «soft» — 'Along Comes Mary' and Billy
Ed Wheeler's harmonica-driven pop-rocker 'Blistered' is as heavy as it gets,
which wouldn't even cover the mass of Hendrix's left toe — but it is the «soft»
that emanates from merging teen dance music with intelligent folk influences,
not Barbara Streisand-style «soft», meaning that the actual schmaltz quota is
relatively low.
What is much worse is that neither Kirkman nor
Alexander qualified as great songwriters — as nice and professional as the
songs sound, they do not leave a lasting impression. 'Along Comes Mary', the
one song that does, was actually written by one-song-composer Tandyn Almer, and
the rest... uh. 'Enter The Young' opens the album on a funny anthemic note and
with a good modicum of fuzzy punch, but it's no 'My Generation'; 'Your Own
Love' sounds like something they could have stolen from under Roger McGuinn's
pillow without paying attention to "P.S.: NOT TO BE USED BEFORE
COMPLETION"; and even the album's dreamiest, psychedelic-est number, 'Remember',
is based on just one melodic line repeated over and over again — a modestly
haunting line, but one that should rather serve as a taste of better lines to
come than be self-containing.
That said, Along
Comes... The Association is still a fine record — like most of the records
that were released in 1966 and made a
point out of exploring new grounds and sounds. I do not see how it could be
possible to fall in sincere love with its substance, but at least the form, this odd mix of San
Francisco-style song-crafting with Pet
Sounds-era Beach Boys production values, is definitely unique for its time.
If you don't feel like listening to it, at least frame it — it's that good. Thumbs up,
with respect. (And no, if you were wondering, not all albums made in 1966 automatically get their thumbs up. Wait
until we hit all that vinyl wasted on garage LPs).
RENAISSANCE (1967)
1) I'm The One; 2) Memories Of
You; 3) All Is Mine; 4) Pandora's Golden Heebie Jeebies; 5) Angeline; 6) Songs
In The Wind; 7) You May Think; 8) Looking Glass; 9) Come To Me; 10) No Fair At
All; 11) You Hear Me Call Your Name.
A small drop-off in quality here, since, in a
haze of rashly taken decisions, the band has lost two advantages: the exquisite
perfectionist production of Curt Boettcher and the presence of even a single
truly outstanding single of 'Mary's quality. New producer Jerry Yester,
soon-to-work with Tim Buckley, does a decent job at preserving the band's face
value, but it is way above him to bring out the hidden magic in their songs
that Boettcher occasionally perceived.
The choice of lead single was quite surprising:
the most «notable» aspect of 'Pandora's Golden Heebie Jeebies' is probably its
mock-psychedelic title, as well as the use of Japanese koto — unfortunately,
the latter could hardly be on the same level as Harrison's sitar on 'Norwegian
Wood': Alexander simply plucks a few notes, occasionally, for atmospheric
reasons, instead of contributing anything even remotely resembling a memorable
riff. If they thought this gimmick could be enough to make it chart... well, it
did chart, but got no higher than No. 35. Lesson learned — for their next
attempt at a hit single, they'd actually write a real melody rather than simply
riding the psychedelic wagon without a ticket.
Other things that do not work include going for
a tender/stern Scott Walker-ish approach on the ballad 'Angeline' and
attempting to do something Byrds-style, shards of guitar jangle and vocal
harmonies included, in shakey waltz tempo ('All Is Mine'). Neither is really
bad, but the level of competition is simply way too high.
Still, some of the faster pop-rock numbers are
quite delightful: 'You Hear Me Call Your Name' is just as derivative of the
Birds as 'All Is Mine', of course, but since the Byrds were just as wimpy at
the art of rock'n'roll themselves as the Association, the song does not
immediately click as lame plagiarism, and, with time, reveals a really nice,
inspiring build-up from start to finish, ending almost as an anthem. The
harmonies are near-perfect on 'Come To Me' (think Hollies this time), and
nothing beats the simple, but intriguing bassline of 'You May Think',
especially when the whole band starts harmonizing to it — in falsetto!
Thus, if you orgasm easily at the very mention
of «sunshine pop», Renaissance is
one of those records that may, given
time, reveal itself to you as an unjustly overlooked masterpiece of the genre
(a great starting point for building up your own identity on Amazon or
RateYourMusic). I can, however, only reiterate the rather common opinion that
the album is Association-by-the-numbers, which is never disgusting — I do not
regret one minute of the five or six times I sat through it, waiting for
lightning to strike — but, given the fact that even top-notch Association rarely
displays any genius, is certainly enough to make this No. One-Hundred-and-smth.
on your purchase list for the great year of 1967.
INSIGHT OUT (1967)
1) Wasn't It A Bit Like Now;
2) On A Quiet Night; 3) We Love Us; 4) When Love Comes To Me; 5) Windy; 6) Reputation;
7) Never My Love; 8)
Happiness; 9) Sometime; 10) Wantin' Ain't Gettin'; 11) Requiem For The Masses.
By the time the band advanced to a major label
contract with Warner Bros. and got around to raising their stakes for 1967,
Jules Alexander was out — temporarily, at least, «to study meditation in
India», as some sources claim, and was there ever a trendier moment to study
meditation in India than in 1967? The bad news is, this left the band with but
one semi-accomplished songwriter. The good news is — the band has always been
at its best performing material from fully accomplished outside songwriters. So
the loss was quite relative. Plus, they got assigned to the Mamas & Papas'
producer, a fairly good match, one must agree.
Not that Terry Kirkman does not try to rise to
the challenge. In a way, he even succeeds: 'Wasn't It A Bit Like Now' opens the
record on an ambitious note, jamming a somewhat chaotic, rough-edged music-hall
ditty inside a deceptive blues-rock framework. You can turn it on, admire the
gall of the band for switching to fuzz-drenched heavy riffage, move the
needle/cursor to the last seconds, and leave in the same confidence — without
ever knowing that the bulk of the song is hanging on a drunken electric piano
melody, visions of homemade top hats floating around. In a way, it's a very
specific kind of fun.
On the other end of the deep blue sea,
Kirkman's 'Requiem For The Masses' may be a bit more than he is able
to chew: it does start off with a
little bit of requiem music, eventually turning into a «martial folk» memorial tune
to the fallen. An anti-war song from someone as nicely «mainstream» as The
Association must have been perceived as a brave gesture — one could even suggest
that it might have served a key role in the band's getting invited to Monterey
Pop, had Insight Out not been
released two months after the
festival. But for all of the tune's complexity and ambition, it is not very
inspiring: the band can pull off the basic structure, but it cannot imbue it
with convincing human rights' idealism, certainly not in the context of the
previous ten numbers, all considerably wimpy in comparison.
It is the wimpy numbers, however, that have
grown and matured quite notably in their wimpiness. P. F. Sloan's 'On A Quiet
Night' features gorgeous vocal harmonies, well backed by harpsichord, chimes, and woodwinds, rather than spoilt by
strings; the second biggest hit 'Never My Love' is even sappier, but even more
tastefully arranged — the vocals enter a subdued, barely audible dialog with
brief electric organ runs, all in an atmosphere of humble intimacy rather than
overacting pathos. And these are just the slow-paced ballads!
The album's most recognizable number is, of
course, 'Windy', donated to the band by little known folk songwriter Ruth
Friedmann. Like 99% of Association-related music, it is pure fluff, but of the
highest quality — an ultra-catchy kiddie tune the likes of which they just
don't do any more, certainly not with this kind of hard-hitting bassline. Tim
Hardin's 'Reputation' is the album's «rock» number, although only the drums
seem to be doing any «rocking», but it's still a fun version. And what's a
1967 album without at least a little bit of psychedelia? 'Wantin' Ain't Gettin'
offers us some sitar, some sarod, choppy guitar rhythms straight outta the Revolver textbook, and droning
harmonies a-plenty.
Insight
Out may have firmly and
finally dispensed with any idea of The Association becoming an «independent»
band — both formally, as they complete the sale of their future to the
corporate monster, and figuratively, as they lose the incentive to become
self-reliant — but for a short time, they would still be out there among the
best jumpers on bandwagons; and jumping on bandwagons rarely gets any more
involving and amusing as it is on the band's third album. Thumbs up.
BIRTHDAY (1968)
1) Come On In; 2) Rose Petals,
Incense And A Kitten; 3) Like Always; 4) Everything That Touches You; 5) Toymaker;
6) Barefoot Gentleman; 7) Time For Livin'; 8) Hear In Here; 9) The Time It Is
Today; 10) The Bus Song; 11) Birthday Morning.
In retrospect, Birthday is hailed today by a small
cult following as The Association's starkest attempt at putting forth
something serious, a record that would impress on the musical level, bite on
the lyrical one, and, overall, increase the public's confidence in the band at
a time when, for once, the fluffy people had to share the chart spotlights with
the fair people. Inspired, perhaps, by sharing the Monterey Pop Festival stage
with such giants of the mind as Country Joe & The Fish and Hugh Masekela
(not to mention various forgettable rag-tag entertainment like Jimi Hendrix or
the Who), the six-man-band toughened up their act, brushed up on the
songwriting, came up with lyrics that honestly tried, in simple ways, to
answer some questions on life and death — and expected the record-buying
public to like it.
The public did like it, by inertia, but nowhere
near as much as it liked Insight Out,
halting it at #23 compared to its predecessor's #8. Can't really blame them — I
do not like it as much as I like Insight
Out, either. The band's biggest problem was that they tried to get more
pensive and complex, indeed, but without any accompanying stylistic changes.
If Insight Out was mostly lightweight,
easy-roaming pap, Birthday is pap
that asks to be paid attention to. That's fine by me, but where's the payoff?
Attention is not something you should simply give away without expecting an
adequate reward, and Birthday's
reward, I am afraid, is inadequate.
The band does try hard. Saccharine level is
soaring only on the ballad 'Rose Petals, Incense And A Kitten', and even that
song, with its loud jazz-poppy bassline and somewhat strange lyrics (and in
1968, where there are strange lyrics, one always begins to suspect trippiness,
even if the song is firmly rooted in Streisand territory) could work bizarro
magic on a generation that was, after all, open-minded enough to accept even
Astrud Gilberto as a sample of «cool». The only other straightforward love
song is — technically, at least — a first-rate lush-pop creation ('Everything
That Touches You', the album's top ten hit), even though its lushness sort of
masks the lack of a firmly clinging hook.
The rest ranges from meaty-beaty, friendly
power-pop ('Come On In') to Manfred-Mann-ish quirky, rhythmically tricky pop
(Larry Ramos' 'Like Always' that never seems to know whether it wants to waltz
or shuffle along; 'Hear In Here') to magical-mystical Femme Fatale anthems
('Toymaker') to odd attempts to cram a mini-suite into three minutes à
la Brian Wilson ('The Bus Song') — all of this topped with the calculated
audience seduction 'Time For Livin', a song that drips jovial, starry-eyed
optimism from each single note as it strolls along.
Somehow, someway, you expect it all to morph
together into the band's big, self-assured answer to Sgt. Pepper, but it never does. Never mind that by 1968, the art of
answering to Sgt. Pepper could be considered
obsolete and, as conventional wisdom goes, audiences were expecting «tougher»
stuff. The first six months of 1968 on the Billboard charts were dominated by Magical Mystery Tour, Simon &
Garfunkel's soundtrack to The Graduate
and Paul Mauriat — quite a decent setting in which Birthday could easily fit in.
None of the songs — not a single one — can
qualify as a masterpiece, and an approach like this begs for at least one masterpiece
around which the lesser, supportive material could freely cluster and
«atmospherize». Insight Out did not
set the stakes that high, and worked almost ideally well on its own level: moderately
complex, unassuming pop for the rocking man to put on before bedtime. Birthday begs for acceptance on the
part of a more raffinated social sphere, and is rightly rejected that
acceptance; if one is happy enough with one's Beatles, Kinks, Beach Boys, and
Pretty Things, this album will not add much to the perspective.
Of course, there is always the possibility of
clearing one's brain of all these considerations and just liking the album for
its individual songs, not for its failed «statement». All of the songs are at
least pleasant — and 'Time For Livin' deserves a steady place on any sunshine
pop retrospective — and God forbid you from denying a thumbs up to a record just because
it did not quite live up to elevated expectations. Whatever be the case, it is
undeniably one of The Association's strongest offerings. Who knows, one might
even build up a successful case on the basis of the band holding its very own
against an onslaught of new trends, fighting off psycho-rockers and housewives with the exact same
verve.
THE ASSOCIATION (1969)
1) Look At Me, Look At You; 2)
Yes, I Will; 3) Love Affair; 4) The Nest; 5) What Were The Words; 6) Are You
Ready; 7) Dubuque Blues;
8) Under Branches; 9) I Am Up For Europe; 10) Broccoli; 11) Goodbye Forever;
12) Boy On The Mountain.
As much as Birthday
can be over... appreciated by the
connaisseur, not quite up to the mini-art rock masterpiece status it is
assigned, so is the band's fifth, oddly eponymous, album somewhat overlooked in
the annals. With the return of one-time lead talent Jules Alexander back to the
fold, the band makes a fresh, concentrated attempt at refreshing and updating
its pop sound, incorporating new influences and at the same time tempering any
inadequate ambitions it could have nurtured on earlier records.
Eleven out of twelve songs are self-penned here
(the twelfth is provided by producer John Boylan), with almost all of the band
members turning in contributions, although Alexander gets the lion's share
(five credits / co-credits), with Kirkman closing in second with three. Biggest
news is that the band must have been in close touch with the evolution of the
Byrds' sound: lots of banjos and pedal steel guitars are brought in to inject
an element of «country-rock» (or, rather, «country-pop») — although the melodic
structures generally still follow the old sunshine pop formula, and this offers
The Association a nice chance at a synthesis all their own.
Travel no further than 'Look At Me, Look At
You'. The opening oink-oinking of the banjo at first tricks you into visions of
cowboys chasing turkeys, but pretty soon it is transformed into a sensitive,
wonderously arranged nostalgic ode — how come Bernstein never got around to praising
the intricate harmonies on this song?
vocal-wise, it smashes 'Along Comes Mary' to tiny bits; the low / high exchange
of "look at me — I'll look at you" alone is worth gold. Up it goes
into The Association's very own Top 5, little doubt about that.
Actually, «nostalgia» — lyrics and
sentiments-wise, not in the melody department — is the ticket for quite a few
numbers on here, and it's one of those few sentiments that the band has really
got a terrific knack for. Jim Yester's chivalrous folk ballad 'What Were The
Words' and Alexander's baroque-pop ode 'Dubuque Blues' are quite different
melodically, and rely on different atmosphere-setting instruments (steel
guitar for the first, piano for the second), but both weave the same tender
mood, feeding it with memorable vocal lines and tasteful arrangements.
Twice and twice only does the band try to go
for something bigger: first, on the grand-sounding 'The Nest', envisioned as an
anthem based on thickly overdubbed vocal harmonies, and then on the album closer
'Boy On The Mountain', envisioned as a four-minute mini-suite (buildups, crescendos,
choral harmonies, weirdly processed guitar solos, pathos, the works).
Predictably, just like on Birthday,
it doesn't quite work like it's supposed to, because way more meat would be needed
on the instrumentation to make it work. The harmonies, however, are still tops
on both tunes — way better designed, I'd say, than their predecessors on Birthday.
In between, as usual, they throw on some
lighter material — Russ Giguere's cute joke song 'Broccoli' (inspired by the
Beach Boys' 'Vegetables', perhaps?), Larry Ramos' quirky dance number 'Are You
Ready?', Boylan's upbeat pop throwaway 'Yes I Will' (nothing to do with the
much better known Hollies song), etc., all nice tunes that do not linger long
but always leave a good aftertaste. In fact, The Association flashes even less sap than 'Birthday': compared
with 'Rose Petals, Incense And A Kitten', Alexander's 'Love Affair', this
album's sugariest number, comes across as a tender-hearted, sincere hippie
ballad with psychedelic overtones rather than a formulaic orgasmatron for
depressed housewives.
Alas, the album only continued The
Association's downward commercial slide — ironically so, since this soft, inoffensive
style is still done with way, way more taste than a whole legion of Seventies'
soft-rock albums that would very soon start cesspooling the charts. Apparently,
in 1969, when «soft rock» could still be done well, the world was not yet ready
for it. What it really needed, so it looks like, was the real high standard of
The Bay City Rollers. Well, we all have to pay our dues sooner or later, and
hopefully, my thumbs
up can contribute, in their own tiniest of ways, to The Association
being assigned the better fate of the two at the Last Judgement. (Unless God is
gay, of course.)
THE ASSOCIATION LIVE (1970)
1) Dream Girl; 2) One Too Many
Mornings; 3) Along Comes Mary; 4) I'll Be Your Man; 5) Goodbye Columbus; 6)
Let's Get Together; 7) Wasn't It A Bit Like Now; 8) Never My Love; 9) Goodbye
Forever; 10) Just About The Same; 11) Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You; 12) Seven Man
Band; 13) The Time It Is Today; 14) Dubuque Blues; 15) Blistered; 16) What Were
The Words; 17) Remember; 18) Are You Ready; 19) Cherish; 20) Requiem For The
Masses; 21) Windy; 22) Enter The Young.
Behind all the gloss, fuss, and bliss of The
Association's studio recordings, one almost forgets that, throughout their
existence, they toured quite extensively — so much, in fact, that in a very
short while they would mutate into a traveling oldies act. In 1970, however,
they were still a creative force, and this live album captures the band at a
stage when it still had something to
offer to the world, not that the world was all that willing to take it.
Recorded at the University of Utah, no less,
and featuring the revamped seven-man line up (as reflected in the sly title
upgrading of their non-LP hit 'Six Man Band'), the album has mostly been
panned: first, by those who castigated The Association for not matching the
perfection of their studio output, and then by those who castigated The
Association for overdubbing some parts in the studio so as to satisfy the first
group. In reality, of course, it is simply that they came out a bit too late
with this double LP — in 1970, this sort of music was even less cool than the
Beach Boys, and the harder you could throw the dirt, the more self-confidence
it would get you.
Truth is, The
Association Live is terrific. It is true that few of the songs live up one
hundred percent to their studio equivalents. But the band members did know how
to play their instruments and not
reduce the songs to their basic, raw components, including thoughtful
reproduction of all the important flourishes and modulations (something that,
for instance, The Monkees never really learned to do well). As for the vocal
harmonies, even keeping in mind that some of them may have been doctored in the
studio (is that the real reason why
the word Live is in quotation marks
on the sleeve?), the seven-man band is in complete control — simply check out
the intro to 'Just About The Same' for proof.
Another key thing is that, had the live album
been released in the year of Monterey, when the world was much more curious
about The Association, it could never have boasted this sort of richness. With
five studio albums and a bunch of non-LP singles behind their belt, the band
can allow itself to forget about the weak and concentrate almost exclusively on
the strong — the track selection is impressive as hell. We get to hear a whole
six songs off the debut — confirming its Boetcher-masterminded greatness; no songs at all from Renaissance — confirming that the band
themselves considered it rushed and dated; four from Insight Out — all hail rejuvenation; only one from Birthday — strange, but, perhaps,
understandable, since they might have felt it was a more coherent «art-pop» LP where
the songs belonged all together; and four from the self-titled record, which
they were, after all, supposed to promote (all good ones, although I personally
miss the inclusion of 'Look At Me, Look At You').
Among other things, those who do not want to
bother with Best Of packages get to
hear the band's first two singles — brave and efficient covers of Dylan's 'One
Too Many Mornings' and Anne Bredon's 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You' (of course, by
1970 the song was practically owned by Led Zeppelin, but this here way is what
it used to be before the
metallization), as well as the already mentioned 'Seven Man Band' and the title
track from the Goodbye Columbus
soundtrack (which, technically, could count as an additional Association LP
from 1969, but it had like only four new songs on it, and only 'Goodbye
Columbus' itself was any good, which is why I did not review it separately).
There is also a version of 'Let's Get Together', a song that seems to have almost
been written with a band like The Association in mind — a wonder it never
appeared on any of their earlier records.
One thing that is entirely a matter of taste is
the band's stage banter: little bits of obviously pre-rehearsed theatricality
that even I may find ranging from the hilarious to the obnoxious, sometimes
both at the same time. There is definitely a level of sophistication here that
far surpasses the poor Monkees or, God help us, Mike Love — the little rant on
attitude comparison between old and new times before 'Wasn't It A Bit Like Now'
is probably the smartest bit of all — but on the whole, humorous stage banter
is a thing that pop bands rarely do well, unless they secretly get Lenny Bruce
or Woody Allen to script it for them. On the other hand, it's a better way to
fill in the pauses between songs than just tuning up (and they had to fill it in, or else they wouldn't
have enough space for a double album, and in 1970, a live album had to be
double, because how else in 1973 could a live album be triple?).
Summing up, I just cannot imagine how a live
album from The Association could be any better than this. Let's see: leave out
the banter... polish a few tiny mistakes on the harmonies... tighten up the
musicianship... you're ending up with their studio recordings. Obviously, a
series of live albums from this band would be useless, but to experience them
once, at the very top of their game, with humor, confidence, and professionalism,
is perfectly all right by me. Thumbs up.
STOP YOUR MOTOR (1971)
1) Bring Yourself Home; 2)
Funny Kind Of Song; 3) That's Racin'; 4) P. F. Sloan; 5) Silver Morning; 6)
It's Gotta Be Real; 7) The First Sound; 8) Along The Way; 9) Travellers Guide; 10)
Seven Virgins.
Growing extra facial hair and finally changing
from suits and ties into somewhat more loose and leisurely Californian outfits
was a telling sign — the band was ready and willing to update their sunshine
pop values of the 1960s to the bland MOR values of the 1970s; they weren't
above competing on the same market with Bread, James Taylor, and the
Carpenters, contrary to strange opinions that «the Association sounded
completely out of step in the 1970s» — for Led Zep fans, perhaps, but it's not
like the Association targeted their Sixties' music at garage rock lovers
either. Listen to 'Along The Way' and have the nerve to state that it is not a
perfectly generic early Seventies ballad — Stop Your Motor belongs in 1971 as sure as America belongs in it.
If there's a problem here, it's in the strange
manner in which the album's material is divided into a rougher hewn
country-rock part and a tenderly crafted ballad part. The latter is, for the
most part, proverbially gorgeous and is about as good as anything the band ever
produced. The former is, for the most part, either boring or atrocious garbage,
replete with clichés and silly hillbilly accents that make the songs
dumb without making them hilarious. One of these, 'That's Racin', probably the
most ridiculous song the world has ever known from Terry Kirkman, they even
tried to release as a single — thankfully, the public didn't get the joke, and
it flopped just as assuredly as the good singles from this record (or else
Warner Bros. could have extended their contracts on the condition that they
release even more of that hicky stuff).
Jimmy Webb's 'P. F. Sloan', a friendly-catchy
pop rocker about the ups and downs of being a corporate songwriter (or any songwriter, for that matter), is
just about the only upbeat tune on the album that goes someplace good, but
even this generally harmless ditty suffers from an obvious flaw — the endlessly
repeated chorus ("Don't sing this song — it belongs to P. F. Sloan!")
can be deemed way too cutesy, if not corny. (Although I have no idea why this
single, too, did not chart: the na-na-na-na's get ingrained in the brain so
firmly after one or two listens that the only reason I can think of is
forgetting to put it on the radio in the first place).
But on the positive side, 'Bring Yourself Home'
is a swooping, fanfare-attractive type of ballad that succeeds marvelously;
then there is 'Silver Morning', an almost «progressive» five-minute suite with
several movements that is, at worst, a meticulous and complex piece of work,
and, at best, a little bit of wandering genius (the fact that Kirkman is
credited for writing both this number and
the near-cretinous 'That's Racin' almost boggles the mind); and 'It's Gotta Be
Real' and 'Along The Way' are just decent, solid ballads.
These highlights show that the band was not on
such a desperate downward slide as it might have seemed. If anything, they were
simply deteriorating at the same rate as mainstream pop music — or, perhaps,
much to their credit, they were trying to resist the deterioration of the
mainstream while at the same time trying to remain in the mainstream, an
absolutely impossible task. They make the necessary concessions — grow beards,
reject much of the instrumental experimentation from the freshly deceased
«psychedelic era» (no sitars or kotos in sight), put more emphasize on syrupy
strings, but still try to remain on the intelligent side of the street.
Which, perhaps, explains why they were
eventually pushed into the gutter — this kind of soft rock was a bit too
demanding for those who like their rock butter-soft. As time goes by, though, I
hope that more and more people will want to experience the gorgeous harmonies
of 'Bring Your-self Home' without any silly genrist prejudices — and as flawed
and disconcerted as this record is, it honestly fulfills its historic function
as The Association's swan song (had they
known it themselves at the time, they might have refrained from ending the
record on the mock-rock disaster of 'Seven Virgins'). Thumbs up, with lotsa reservations.
WATERBEDS IN TRINIDAD! (1972)
1) Silent Song Thru The Land;
2) Darling Be Home Soon; 3) Midnight Wind; 4) Come The Fall; 5) Kicking The
Gong Around; 6) Rainbows Bent; 7) Snow Queen; 8) Indian Wells Woman; 9) Please
Don't Go; 10) Little Road And A Stone To Roll.
I have no idea what the title is supposed to
mean, nor its possible connection with the snow-covered photo on the front
cover. Probably just an absurdist gimmick to give the buying public at least one pretext for owning the record — some
people may find it cool to nail something like that to the wall. In any case,
the band's first, and only, release for Columbia sufficed to show that the
problem was not with the recording
label, but with the band itself. The soil was no longer fertile, the
creativity dissipated, and the band hopelessly lost among generic acts of the
day.
The decision to release a stripped down
acoustic rendition of John Sebastian's 'Darling Be Home Soon' as a single is
quite telling — and pitiful. There is nothing they can do to improve on the
original: Sebastian's sugary-folksy vibe works well only when he does it, being such a charming,
lovable chap and all, and they don't even begin trying to reinvent the song
(and how could it be reinvented
anyway?). And yet it is still a songwriting highlight on this album of limp,
languid, lethargic soft-rock, next to which America and Bread hit songs take on
the status of masterpieces.
In a way, The Association used to have crunch — not the hard-rocking kind of
crunch, of course, but they could streamline their harmonies and heavy use of
diverse and loud instrumentation to raise the plank of sunshine pop really
high. Now, as they try to get more and more in touch with the mainstream pop
values of the early 1970s, they have lost that crunch completely. Patches of
spiritual inspiration still blink here and there ('Silent Song Thru The Land'
and 'Come The Fall' have their moments of glory), but overall, they just lock
the lazily strummed acoustic guitars and sleepily delivered vocal harmonies in
a mind-numbing murmur, song after song — and, unlike David Crosby, they do not
intentionally try to deliver this as trance-inducing sonics, but seem to sort
of think that this is the way one is
supposed to do good pop music these days. But it isn't!
The album's attempts to provide a little
diversity are just as half-hearted: 'Kicking The Gong Around' totally wastes
its cool opening bass line (could have been a gritty hard rocker, but becomes a
silly jazz-pop number instead), and the ska thing on 'Please Don't Go' is as
ridiculous as you'd probably expect a take on ska to sound in the hands of a
band like The Association — no surprises there. Splat after splat after splat.
For better or worse, it is fairer simply to
forget about the album. Really, The Association were the real Association as long as they were associated (har har) with
Warner Bros. Columbia only had them for one record anyway: later in 1972, their
bass player Brian Cole overdosed on heroin (yes, nice guys do drugs, too), and
this initiated a wave of lineup changes that the band did not survive. Other
than a few scattered singles, they had no more original albums. Later on, after
a million lineup changes, they re-recorded some old tracks for Vintage (CBS, 1983), and then, one
decade later, for The Association '95: A
Little Bit More (Track Records, 1995) — both releases were heavily panned
by those three people who heard them, and, honestly, I do not think it will
make any sense to waste any time on their detailed discussion.
The funniest thing of all is that The
Association still exists — in fact,
it's not even as if there ever was a period in which it would be officially
disbanded. And it is not even an entirely different band from what used to be,
with Russ Giguere, Larry Ramos, and Jim Yester still in the band. And I suppose
it should be OK by all of us as long as they do not try to record once again: a
respectable oldies act that (a rare thing among active oldies acts) actually
understands that their time has really passed, and that there is absolutely no
reason to try and reignite your creativity if you know for sure there is no creative spark left.
HELLO STRANGER (1963)
1) Hello Stranger; 2) Puppy
Love; 3) On Bended Knees; 4) My Heart Went Do Dat Da; 5) My Mama Told Me; 6)
Gonna Love You Till The End Of Time; 7) Would You Love Me; 8) Longest Night Of
The Year; 9) Does Anyone Want A Lover; 10) We're Too Young To Marry; 11) Love
Is A Castle; 12) Think A Little Sugar.
In the early 1960s, mainstream R&B was
going through much the same crisis as mainstream rock'n'roll, caught up in the
drive to make teen-oriented music sweeter and softer — and so, if you ever
wondered, like me, how could Atlantic Records switch its focus from the
harsher, cooler, more ass-kicking sound of Ruth Brown to the tender, fragile,
bubblegummier sound of Carla Thomas and Barbara Lewis, well, do not forget that
it was essentially the same relation as between Gene Vincent and Ricky Nelson.
Despite being marketed as an R&B artist, there was really very little
R&B about Barbara Lewis and quite a bit of pop. But, now that we are long
out of that time loop and no longer feel any pressure to choose one over the
other, who cares?..
Even though Barbara's debut album is quite a
rarity nowadays (it did get an official CD release, but has probably been out
of print for years now), there is one
outstanding thing about it: it was completely self-written — yes, that's right,
not just the hit singles, but every
single track here is credited exclusively to Barbara Lewis and nobody else. How
she got Atlantic to trust her on that is not entirely clear, but it most
probably had to do with the big commercial success of ʽHello
Strangerʼ — a song with a strange, subtle charm, emanating from John
Young's organ riffs, backing vocals from the Dells, and Barbara's own croon,
half-sexy, half-sad, and, lyrically and attitude-wise, probably more aligned
with Sinatra than with Ray Charles. The song does not even have an explicit
vocal hook (unless "shoo-bop, shoo-bop, my baby" counts), essentially
becoming a hit based on atmosphere more than melody.
The funniest thing is that both of the other
two single A-sides included on this record, ʽMy Heart Went Do Dat Daʼ
and ʽPuppy Loveʼ, are far catchier — the former is a lushly
orchestrated twist number that tries to express the same kind of first-time
excitement that is found on ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ, the latter a
piece of hard-to-resist bubblegum that shows Barbara is as good at describing
situations of emotional disappointment as she is with sudden teenage crushes.
Cool, cuddly numbers with decent musicianship, yes, but neither of them
captured the national heart as strongly as ʽHello Strangerʼ — perhaps
because the nation felt some sort of intangible intrigue in Lewis' performance,
as opposed to complete clarity and one-dimensionality of the other two.
On the whole, her songwriting is surprisingly
diverse: the songs include straightforward doo-wop numbers (ʽOn Bended
Kneesʼ), Brill Building-style teen-pop (ʽMy Mama Told Meʼ), a
bit of very light R&B (ʽGonna Love You Till The End Of Timeʼ is
pretty much a cuddlier re-write of ʽMoney (That's What I Want)ʼ —
well, nobody claimed Barbara Lewis was a completely original songwriter), some jazz-pop (ʽWould You Love
Meʼ), and slow orchestrated balladry (ʽLove Is A Castleʼ).
«Great» is not a word I'd associate with any of this, though, for some strange
reason, the otherwise bland pop ditty ʽWe're Too Young To Marryʼ is
distinguished by a highly melodic, inventive, and energetic string passage that
is resolved with an amusingly Beethoven-esque flourish. But it's all pretty,
listenable, tasteful, and the diversity helps you form the impression that you
are actually listening to some sort of artistic statement, rather than a simple
bunch of filler quickly produced as packing material for the hit single. As far
as I'm concerned, that's sufficient grounds to give the record a thumbs up
— it is not every day, admit it, that you run across a pop album from 1963
where all the songs have been written by the artist (even if, admittedly, some
of these songs did not involve that
much songwriting); in fact, as far as labels such as Atlantic and Motown are
concerned, I am not sure that (barring professional songwriters who also had
their own bands, like Smokey Robinson) there was even a real precedent.
SNAP YOUR FINGERS (1964)
1) Snap Your Fingers; 2)
Please, Please, Please; 3) Frisco Blues; 4) I'll Bring It Back Home To You; 5)
Just A Matter Of Time; 6) Twist And Shout; 7) I Don't Want To Cry; 8) Turn On
Your Love Light; 9) Stand By Me; 10) If You Need Me; 11) What'd I Say; 12)
Baby, Workout; 13) Shame, Shame, Shame.
So much for «original songwriting». With a
short string of self-penned singles (ʽStraighten Up Your Heartʼ,
ʽPuppy Loveʼ) that charted quite modestly, unable to repeat the
success of ʽHello Strangerʼ, Atlantic Records probably decided that
it was, after all, a mistake to be so permissive towards the lady — and, in
stark contrast, made sure that her second LP did not contain even a single
original. Instead, they came up with the plain-as-day, dumb-as-death concept of
«Barbara Lewis Sings The Great Soul Tunes». This means that Barbara Lewis has
to demonstrate to the world that she knows how to put a special twist on James
Brown, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Solomon Burke, the Isley Brothers, Bobby Bland,
and make it all the way to Jimmy Reed.
Needless to say, that is a really tough
challenge for a nice, quiet, collected lady like Barbara who would much rather
write her tender little ballads and pop ditties. She bravely braces herself for
the ungrateful task and does what she can — yet even if the results are perfectly
listenable, there is hardly any reason for us to get too excited about these
takes on ʽTwist And Shoutʼ and ʽWhat'd I Sayʼ, with their
energy level well suited to the ambience of a contemporary teen-oriented TV
show, but never reaching the requirements of a truly sweaty, gritty R&B
workout. In other words, ʽTwist And Shoutʼ here is far more about
twisting than shouting, and the infamous moaning sex bits on ʽWhat'd I
Sayʼ would probably satisfy the most conservative parents, so far removed
they are from, you know... the real
thing.
I have absolutely no idea how Atlantic, a label
that was generally known for its good marketing sense, could have thrown away
money on such a hopeless project — making the star of ʽHello
Strangerʼ cover Jimmy Reed's ʽShame, Shame, Shameʼ was pretty
much the equivalent of some genius marketologist telling Simon & Garfunkel,
"hey boys, that ʽSound Of Silenceʼ thing was so cool, now how
about you covering some of those British Invasion hits for us, like ʽYou
Really Got Meʼ and ʽMy Generationʼ?" The only way for
Barbara Lewis to succeed was with original material suited to her quietly
reserved personality; instead, she is challenged with the impossible task of
having to stand up to the belting of James Brown and to the gospel-pop vibes of
Sam Cooke. She is a good girl, and she had a good backing band, but this has
got to go down in history as one of the most ridiculous gaffes in Atlantic's
history in the Sixties. Thumbs down.
BABY I'M YOURS (1965)
1) Baby, I'm Yours; 2) My Heart
Went Do Da Dat; 3) Come Home; 4) Think A Little Sugar; 5) If You Love Her; 6)
Stop That Girl; 7) Puppy Love; 8) Hello Stranger; 9) Someday We're Gonna Love
Again; 10) Snap Your Fingers; 11) How Can I Say Goodbye; 12) Straighten Up Your
Heart.
Today, this looks like a textbook rip-off if
there ever was one: six new songs, chaotically mixed with six older songs that
had already been released both as singles and
as part of the Hello Stranger and Snap Your Fingers LPs. But back in
1965, this probably looked like a reasonable marketing solution, well
acceptable for both the artist and the customer. As Barbara's career had pretty
much stalled by 1963, and then got jump-started again with the smash success of
ʽBaby I'm Yoursʼ in early 1965, the managers of Atlantic probably
decided to «reboot» her, reasonably thinking that nobody would remember those
early songs in the first place, and that most of the people who might want to buy the LP based on the
power of the single had never bought the first two LPs — or, if they did, had
already forgotten about them.
What's a retro-reviewer got to do, though?
There's only six new songs here to take care of, none of them written by the
artist herself, and probably only two deserving special attention. The title
track is, of course, an Atlantic classic, another lush ballad written by Van
McCoy especially for Barbara and distinguishable for its non-standard hook,
where the first three lines, smoothly and tenderly spiralling upwards, are then
suddenly (but gently) brought down to earth with a deeper "in other
words..." counterpoint. Like ʽHello Strangerʼ, it is more of a
traditional pop ballad than a real R&B groove, and Barbara is probably
sounding even «whiter» here than on ʽHello Strangerʼ, but that
should not detract from the intrinsic qualities of the song. Unfortunately,
none of the other ballads here match that hook — ʽIf You Love Herʼ
and ʽHow Can I Say Goodbyeʼ are pleasant Roy Orbison imitations that
would need a real Roy Orbison to make them come to life: Barbara's vocal parts
are too fragile and quiet to make the transition from soothing background to
rousing foreground.
A second, more minor, classic is ʽSomeday
We're Gonna Love Againʼ, from the pen of Sharon McMahan — the song was
originally released as a B-side on one of Barbara's singles from 1964 and had
already been covered by the Searchers as well, but in this case, I'll
definitely take Barbara's version over the Searchers: Atlantic rewards her with
a tougher, tighter rhythm section, good support from background vocalists and
brass players, and the tension is seemingly higher here than on the Searchers'
relatively frail version. Basically, with Lewis it's an uplifting anthem (she
sings "someday we're gonna love again" like she really means it), with the Searchers it's a bit of an uncertain
mush.
That's about it, though: even Jackie
DeShannon's ʽStop That Girlʼ sounds like generic movie fodder from
circa 1964-65, though by no means unpleasant. Overall, there's just nothing to
discuss, as the entire album could be represented in terms of a single single,
with ʽBaby I'm Yoursʼ as the A-side and ʽSomeday We're Gonna
Love Againʼ as the B-side. But no representative collection of mid-Sixties
pop music could do without either.
IT'S MAGIC (1966)
1) It's Magic; 2) The Shadow
Of Your Smile; 3) Let It Be Me; 4) Quiet Nights; 5) Since I Fell For You; 6)
Don't Forget About Me; 7) I Only Miss Him When I Think Of Him; 8) Yesterday; 9)
He's So Bad; 10) A Taste Of Honey; 11) Sorrow; 12) Who Can I Turn To.
You gotta love those old style liner notes —
"Each cut weaves a different spell, and one is made heady with the potion
that is the liquid voice of Barbara Lewis — here curving around a note,
wavering just a hairbreadth, there full and round one moment, trailing off the
next, now breathy, now misty, now pleading, now desiring, now sad, now
exciting, but all musical", writes New York-based disc jockey Enoch
Gregory, alias "The Dixie Drifter", in his desperate bid to help
Atlantic sell a few more copies of Barbara Lewis' fourth (third?) LP. But even
that kind of sweet-talking did not help — fact is, in mid-1966 pop and R&B
audiences were not nearly as entranced about curving around notes and
misty-pleading-desiring vocals, certainly not if they were so totally
old-fashioned in style as Barbara's singing is on this album.
For It's
Magic, the label commands Barbara Lewis to morph into Doris Day — starting
with the title track — and then turn everything
into Doris Day, whether it be Antonio Carlos Jobim, Carole King, or the Beatles
in the beginning. She's not too bad as Doris Day, but compared to these
sugar-sweet arrangements and performances, even Doris Day comes across as
Madonna — so completely purged they are of any humor, irony, sexiness, and,
well, everything that we usually appreciate in classic R&B. It's like Atlantic
were going totally anti-Atlantic here, marketing a singer for the tastes of a
respectable white middle class family circa 1952 instead of... well, it's not
as if respectable white middle class families had completely vanished off the
surface of the Earth by 1966, but they sure as hell weren't likely to go
hunting for Barbara Lewis, either.
It is not clear to understand the logic of this
LP, especially considering that it came right off the heels of Barbara's last
truly big hit, ʽMake Me Your Babyʼ, a grand Phil Spector-like lush
soul number with towering strings, angelic vocal harmonies, and a vocal
performance that at least showed genuine yearning and passion, even if the song
itself, written by Helen Miller and Roger Atkins, was little more than a
third-rate Shirelles / Ronettes pastiche. But compared to what we got here on
the LP... well, enough with the comparisons. If you want a schmaltz version of
ʽYesterdayʼ, Matt Monro is probably the way to go (at least he was
there first). As far as my earbuds are concerned, there's absolutely nothing on
these songs bar raw timbre and technique, so I'll just have to stack my thumbs down
against Encoh Gregory's verdict, and let time choose the winner. Oh, wait, I do
believe it already has.
WORKIN' ON A GROOVY THING (1968)
1) I'll Keep Believin'; 2)
Workin' On A Groovy Thing; 3) Make Me Your Baby; 4) Girls Need Loving Care; 5)
I Remember The Feeling; 6) Baby What Do You Want Me To Do; 7) Make Me Belong To
You; 8) Love Makes The World Go Round; 9) I'll Make Him Love Me; 10) Only All
The Time; 11) Sho-Nuff (It's Got To Be Your Love); 12) Thankful For What I Got.
Well, one thing is for sure: Barbara's last LP
for Atlantic sounds like a mix of industrial avantgarde and grindcore metal...
next to It's Magic, that is. At the
very least, they had the sense to tone down some
of the sugary sweetness and give her a wee bit more of an R'n'B groove and a
merry pop swing. They even allowed her to include one of her own songs at the
end of the album (ʽThankfulʼ) — a nice gesture, considering that
she'd been precluded from that since 1963; given that her own songwriting
talents have always been comparable to those of the songwriters she had to
cover, this discrimination was really uncomfortable.
That said, the record is still anything but
great. Essentially, it is assembled from various singles stretching all the way
back to 1965; the earliest inclusion is Helen Miller's ʽMake Me Your
Babyʼ (already discussed in the previous review), and the next one, from
1966, is Billy Vera's ʽMake Me Belong To Youʼ, originally recorded by
Helen Shapiro — as usual, Barbara's fragile and delicate voice puts the
emphasis on vulnerability and pleading, where Shapiro's version was more of a
power strike. ʽBaby What Do You Want Me To Doʼ is not the Jimmy Reed
song, but a lush folk-pop tune written by Grant Higgins and featuring nothing
but atmosphere (Barbara's voice, strings, and a quiet brass section should be
enough for perfection, right?). Probably the catchiest number is the upbeat,
jokey ʽOnly All The Timeʼ, with an unusually carnivalesque
arrangement for Barbara, including ukulele, honky tonk piano, and trombone; and
probably the best number is ʽSho-Nuffʼ, because it finally adds some
real «bottom» to the music, with a strong bassline and an authentic R'n'B feel
(unfortunately, one that also calls for a more powerful singer).
Anyway, the good news is that we are not
emulating Doris Day any more; the bad news is that all of this is still quite
formulaic, and the songs are almost never memorable. It remains unclear if we
should thank Atlantic for loyally protecting Barbara throughout all that
decade, or if we should accuse them of underplaying her talents, saddling her
with inferior material, and not letting her develop as an original songwriter —
regardless, the fact is that they finally let her go after this record, which,
honestly, sounded about as «modern» even by the contemporary standards of
mainstream R&B in 1968 as would a blues record by, say, Alberta Hunter. Surprisingly,
though, the story does not end then and there, as there was one last chapter to
it.
THE MANY GROOVES OF BARBARA LEWIS (1970)
1) Baby, That's A No-No; 2)
Windmills Of Your Mind; 3) Slip Away; 4) How Can I Tell; 5) Break Away; 6) Oh,
Be My Love; 7) Just The Way You Are Today; 8) Anyway; 9) But You Know I Love
You; 10) You Made Me A Woman; 11) The Stars; 12) Do I Deserve It Baby.
Before fading out completely, Barbara Lewis got
one last chance at parading her muse with this record, released on the
Enterprise label — a subsidiary of Stax, founded largely to accommodate the
early production of Isaac Hayes, even though Barbara was never much of a Hayes
protege (at least, I am not aware of any of his songs that she'd covered). Once
again, for some reason, the emphasis is on the «groove» side of Lewis, an
artist whose smooth balladry had always been as far removed from «grooving» as
possible — but if you understand «groovy» in the sense of "life, I love
you, all is groovy", then you just might have something there.
The record continues well in the vein of its
predecessor: pure ballads aside, there's quite a few rhythmic tracks with some
energy and «bottom» to them, enough to compete at least formally with classic
Motown material, if never in terms of catchiness or originality — not
surprisingly, since, once again, most of the writers here are professional pop
(and sometimes blues) experts, in touch with formulas but largely out of touch
with the spirit. Once again, despite the label change, Lewis gets no chance at
advancing her own songwriting techniques — and, who knows, perhaps she simply
did not care by this time.
A few of the songs seem to want to feature a
refreshed, revitalized Barbara Lewis singing in a deeper, more powerful voice —
ʽBaby, That's A No-Noʼ opens the album on precisely this note, and
Morris Dollison's ʽBreak Awayʼ (alas, nothing to do with the classic
Beach Boys song of the same name) is a relative highlight in the same vein,
although the former song has Barbara standing her ground against The Guy,
while ʽBreak Awayʼ has her standing her ground against herself,
because she can't break away from The Guy. Funky, soulful, lightly tragic, well
framed by ghostly backing vocals, this is, I guess, every bit as good as any
contemporary Diana Ross song, but there's a problem — Barbara Lewis as a
strong-tempered character just does not come across as perfectly convincing;
you can still tell that suave, sentimental numbers like ʽOh Be My
Loveʼ and ʽAnywayʼ represent her natural turf. Therefore, on one
hand, it is a relief to see a record that has more funky guitar,
well-syncopated bass, and toe-tappy rhythms than all of Barbara's previous
career put together — on the other hand, it is sad to see how unfit she is, in
general, for feeling at home with this music.
It works fairly well as a finale to a mediocre,
but inoffensive and mildly charming career: after this record, nothing
whatsoever would be heard from Barbara in the music world, apart from an
occasional nostalgic emergence (as of the 2010s, she can still be seen
performing). Nevertheless, despite the mediocrity, there is still a certain
small market for albums like these — clean, tasteful, thoroughly derivative,
but full of tiny individual nuances that will not go unnoticed by serious fans
of «soft R'n'B» — and while most of the world will probably only remember
Barbara Lewis for ʽHello Strangerʼ and ʽBaby I'm Yoursʼ, a
tiny smidgen of the world still might want to remember her for her many
grooves, and there'd be nothing wrong with that.
ARE YOU A BOY OR ARE YOU A GIRL (1965)
1) Are You A Boy Or Are You A
Girl; 2) Mr. Tambourine Man; 3) House Of The Rising Sun; 4) Marie Elena; 5) Bo
Diddley; 6) Memphis, Tennessee; 7) What The New Breed Say; 8) Take It Or Leave
It; 9) I'll Keep On Seeing You; 10) Linguica; 11) Susy Q; 12) I've Got A Woman;
13*) Moulty; 14*) Hey
Little Bird; 15*) You've
Got To Understand.
The Barbarians are only remembered these days
because of two songs on the Nuggets
boxset — and the vivid, idiosyncratic image that goes along with them:
long-haired, sandal-wearing ruffians with a drummer (Victor Moulton) who
happened to have a hook for his right hand. (You can see the hook all right on
their only well-filmed appearance at the T.A.M.I. show, but not the sandals —
for some reason, the camera just would not focus on the feet, as if
sandal-wearing were even a worse public offense than Elvis' girating hips).
I would not exactly say that this select memory
of the band is unjustified. The two songs are fine and memorable indeed.
'Moulty', their tongue-in-cheek ode to the drummer's calamity (on which only
the drummer himself actually played — ironically, backed by none other than The
Hawks, later to be The Band), I used to detest as a cheap gimmick, but at least
it showed a certain level of creativity, and the unpredictable transition from the
soft, «cooing» atmosphere of the verses into the bass-heavy screamfest of the
chorus is, today, in all the rock'n'roll textbooks anyway. And 'Are You A Boy
Or Are You A Girl', the only time the band ever got close to a national hit, is
lucky enough to strike a public nerve while being poppy and catchy as hell.
Other than that, the band's only LP, wisely
named after the hit title track, has next to nothing of interest. Producer Doug
Morris was the only semi-competent songwriter in sight, contributing to both of
the above mentioned tracks as well as 'What The New Breed Say', another
sign-o'-the-times pop-rocker built on unoriginal guitar lines and modestly
catchy vocals. Most of the rest are simply cover versions of tunes from all
over the place, ranging from competent, but unnecessary (a surf-rock
rearrangement of 'Susie Q') to barely competent and annoying ('Mr. Tambourine
Man', which they steal from the Birds without even matching its quality, let
alone improving on it or adding a single new twist) to downright awful ('House
Of The Rising Sun' — Mr. Lead Singer, if you have just shown a complete
inability to be Roger McGuinn, what is it exactly that makes you think you can
be Eric Burdon?). Nobody in the band simply had the right chops to do these
things properly, or the right head to do them uniquely.
Clearly, the Barbarians were strictly a singles
band: the only thing one will ever need from them are the A-sides of their 45s:
'Moulty', 'Are You...', 'What The New Breed Say', and possibly their first and
best one — 'Hey Little Bird', with a ferocious proto-hard rock riff, monumental
fuzz bass and a great swaggery vocal tone (sort of like a more street-wise,
slum-evil twin brother of Mick Jagger's). Unluckily, neither 'Breed' nor 'Bird'
are to be found on Nuggets, even
though, in my opinion, both belong there more firmly than 'Moulty'. But it's
also true that neither of them tells any horrifying thrills about one-armed
drummers.
Not that the Barbarians could not have become an LP-oriented band: after all,
we know plenty of examples of Sixties' artists whose first albums were
derivative suckfests. But some guys have all the luck and some don't even get
the scraps. Like so many others, the Barbarians did not manage to fit in, got
lost in between bad publicity and personal conflict, and disbanded around 1967.
Several of the members later founded another band, Black Pearl, which got the
chance to release a couple bad psychedelic rock albums in 1969-70 before
vanishing into thin air — I've heard a few of the tracks and, perhaps, after all, the Barbarians
really could not have made the
transition into the LP era. But thanks for leaving us with an unforgettable
image.
SURFIN' SAFARI (1962)
1) Surfin' Safari; 2) County
Fair; 3) Ten Little Indians; 4) Chug-A-Lug; 5) Little Girl (You're My Miss
America); 6) 409; 7) Surfin'; 8) Heads You Win – Tails I Lose; 9) Summertime
Blues; 10) Cuckoo Clock; 11) Moon Dawg; 12) The Shift.
Listening back on 'Surfin', the Beach Boys'
first single and a song that, in a way, opened up a new page in the history of
American popular music (without knowing it at the time, of course), one could
probably build up a solid case for a complete lack of progress in mainstream
pop in fifty years time — the period it takes to span the distance from
'Surfin' to thoroughly «modern» «pleasures» like Miley Cyrus' 'Party In The
USA'.
Yet there is
a difference. From the very start, the Beach Boys — the three Wilson brothers,
their cousin Mike Love, and their friend Al Jardine — were truly committed to
music. With their simple blue-collar origins, it was all very much homebrewed
at first, but the boys practiced hard and, most importantly, amalgamated tons
of influences. It is true that their first two singles and the accompanying LP
could not yet let anyone see the true greatness to come, but perhaps, buoyed by
the freshness of the idea to write a vocal song about surfing, they were simply
pushed into the studio too soon: compare the Beatles, whose serious studio
career only truly took off after a grueling five year schedule of playing and
honing their act.
Even so, the simplistic-hedonistic vibe of
'Surfin' still sounds cute and seductive today, if only for its utter innocence
and, I'll say it again, freshness —
basically, it was one of the first situations in which a bunch of normal,
clean, non-threatening kids, raised on proper suburban values, would pick up
their electric guitars and take their inspiration from the «right» people in
the business, namely, rock'n'rollers, surfers, and folksters.
19-year old Brian Wilson contributed a whoppin'
nine originals here, with lyrics contributed either by cousin Mike Love or pal
Gary Usher. His growth as composer and arranger is evident already during the
transition from first to second single: 'Surfin', behind the lively
ba-ba-dippity's (courtesy of Mike, not Brian), is almost non-existent on the
musical plane, whereas 'Surfin' Safari' already has a steadier beat, a guitar
solo, and Mike Love, although still suffering from too much nasal whining, hits
a few more notes here and there. Fairly big progress, actually, achieved in
less than half a year, at a time when the very idea of «progress» in a pop
musical career was not yet formulated explicitly.
But overall, there is not much diversity: at
this point, Brian's originals are mostly fast-paced surf pop variations on
pre-existing rockabilly / surf-rock compositions. The arrangements are fleshed
out only inasmuch as they can distinguish «songs» from «early demos»
(guitar-bass-drums and very thin, insecure vocal harmonies; kudos for playing
all the instruments on their own, but this is actually a case where outside
professional help couldn't hurt). And, although his services in the future
would occasionally be of more significant use, Gary Usher is essentially a crap
lyricist — after all, you needn't go further than Chuck Berry to learn that it is possible to write smart, funny, and
provocative lyrics about cars, girls, and other simple pleasures of life, yet,
apparently, Usher was not a fast learner, what with his idea of a provocative
chorus amounting to "Chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug, give me some root beer".
ROOT BEER? Cute little darlings, are we?
Some of the more interesting failures, the
likes of which one can only encounter on this debut, involve: (a) 'Summertime
Blues' — the only time the Beach Boys dared to put a bona fide rock'n'roll
classic on a studio album before the even bigger failure of 'Rock'n'Roll Music'
in 1976; I guess they just weren't made for this style; (b) 'Ten Little
Indians', an «original» experiment in kiddie-folk that the record label
embarrassingly selected as the follow-up single to 'Surfin'; (c) 'County Fair',
«enlivened» by pseudo-carnival atmosphere overdubs that only further emphasize
its silly amateur entertainment status.
Yet, when all is said and done, 'Surfin'
Safari' is arguably their best straightforward surfing anthem (as opposed to
«best song that has the word 'surf' in the title», an honor that goes to the
much later 'Surf's Up' which, frankly speaking, had nothing to do with surfing
whatsoever); and '409' firmly establishes their «car song» format, even if the
lively chorus of "giddy up giddy up four-oh-nine" sounds dangerously
close to "idiot idiot four-o-nine" (intentionally, perhaps?). A minor
sensation upon release, almost immediately forgotten in the wake of a wave of
much grander successes, these days Surfin'
Safari is simply an exciting case study in «a day in the life» of
fresh-faced, innocent teenage America before the filthy British Invasion came
and perverted the land of the free and the brave beyond repair. Thumbs down,
of course (I could not win the argument that this is objectively better than
Miley Cyrus had I really wanted to), but with reservations concerning its
instructive, period-piece-ish, value.
SURFIN' USA (1963)
1) Surfin' USA; 2) Farmer's
Daughter; 3) Misirlou; 4) Stoked; 5) Lonely Sea; 6) Shut Down; 7) Noble
Surfer; 8) Honky Tonk; 9) Lana; 10) Surf Jam; 11) Let's Go Trippin'; 12)
Finders Keepers.
Professional growth a-plenty. From the toddler
infancy of 'Surfin', through the humble teenagehood of 'Surfin' Safari', the
Beach Boys grow into adulthood with 'Surfin' USA', a true anthem to surfing as
the ultimate embodiment of F-U-N — even if they just happened to take the
melody from Chuck Berry's 'Sweet Sixteen', a fact that was so utterly obvious
that loving dad / ruthless tyrant manager Murry Wilson was so afraid of, he
immediately ceded complete copyright to an eager-to-complain Chuck Berry, even
though the lyrics most certainly weren't his.
Nor was the arrangement, which seriously
«surfed up» Chuck's original rock'n'roll mood, and, most importantly,
introduced the Beach Boys to the technique of double tracking. Now that there
were eight Beach Boys singing harmony
to the world, instead of four, all of a sudden, this no longer sounded like
silly homebrewed product: Brian Wilson still had plenty to learn in the studio,
but here you finally had material produced according to modern standards, songs
that still sound respectably enough when placed on compilations of highlights
from different periods.
'Surfin' USA' was a well-deserved monster hit
for the Boys, the first one in a series of nuggets that would last all the way
unto 1966; and it wasn't merely the vocal overdubbing technique that it
introduced — it is also performed much more steadily and self-assuredly than
anything on Surfin' Safari, showing
that the kids were fairly well dedicated to improving as musicians. Brian plays
a little electric organ, Carl plays a livelier and more fluent solo than ever
before, and Dennis can actually both
keep the rhythm and throw in precise
fills — nothing extraordinary, but for a guy who was frequently accused of
being kept in the band for his good looks (and wild reputation) rather than his
musicianship, he acquits himself fine already on this first track of their
second album. The grooves are fine.
The bad news is, of course, that Surfin' USA (the album) was rushed —
let alone the fact that, like all the US pop albums of the early Sixties, it
only contains twelve songs that do not altogether amount to even twenty-five
minutes' worth of music, more than half
of them are transparent filler. The Beach Boys trained themselves as
respectable musicians, to be sure, but with Dick Dale, Duane Eddy, and the
Ventures around, who would, honestly, want to hear a bunch of surf
instrumentals played by a bunch of teenage sweeties? Clearly, it is not the
Beach Boys' version of 'Misirlou' that is going to go down in history, even if
they pull off the basic structure; and even if I have nothing displeasing to
say about 'Surf Jam' or 'Honky Tonk', the best
thing there is to say is — if these recordings played their part in helping the
Beach Boys gain a necessary level of self-confidence as bona fide musicians, so
be it, and let us move on.
As the dust settles, 'Surfin' USA' finds itself
in the company of, at best, four additional treasurable songs. 'Farmer's
Daughter' introduces us to the flourishing of Brian Wilson's falsetto vocals
(an event that must have produced so great an impression on the 14-year old
Lindsey Buckingham, he had to cover the song for Fleetwood Mac's Live album seventeen years later), and
also to one of the most hilariously unintentional double entendres in lyrical
history — "Glad to help you plow
your fields, farmer's daughter". So that's what they call it now.
'Shut Down' is a little bit of a vehicular
improvement on '409' ("tach it up, tach it up, buddy gonna shut you
down" is certainly a step up from "giddy up giddy up
four-o-nine"), but the real major progress is the entrance of ballads:
fast ones ('Farmer's Daughter', 'Lana') and, most notably, the slow «downer»
'Lonely Sea', also sung by Brian. The harmonies here are still a bit crude, not
hitting the heights they would be hitting in just a few months, but the spirit
is already there, that particular one which pushes the band's output outside
the realm of teenage muzak and doo-wop clichés into higher places (if
you want to believe it, of course).
All of which makes Surfin' USA a historical marvel — so many steps up
(double-tracking, full fledged production, improved musicianship, strengthened
songwriting, introduction of balladry, etc.) and so little material to prop the
steps. Even as a two-for-one CD offer, with Surfin' Safari getting top billing, there is still not enough
classic material to fill up twenty minutes of music. Fortunately, this is the
very last time the band allowed itself such a high filler quota — at least,
until so much later, when the band's very existence came to define the idea of
filler.
SURFER GIRL (1963)
1) Surfer Girl; 2) Catch A
Wave; 3) The Surfer Moon; 4) South Bay Surfer; 5) The Rocking Surfer; 6) Little
Deuce Coupe; 7) In My Room;
8) Hawaii; 9) Surfers Rule; 10) Our Car Club; 11) Your Summer Dream; 12) Boogie
Woodie.
There may be a slight overload of surf-related
song titles here, but the problem ceases to be a problem with the first notes
of 'Surfer Girl' — a song whose shallow, insignificant lyrics (unless you
happen to be one of the lucky few who really did encounter the love of your life on a surfing trip) contrast so
much with the beauty of the melody and vocal arrangements, it's not even
amusing. How many people have shunned and avoided the Beach Boys for their
image, one that is so easily detachable from their substance with but a little
effort and goodwill? Much more than the Beatles — and only because the Beatles,
during their early years, happened to be just a tiny bit more «mature-looking» in terms of lyrics and general image.
Huge changes here, much more so than the difference
between the titles Surfin' USA and Surfer Girl would really have one
believe. For one thing, Brian Wilson asserts his role as sole producer: he is
now unquestionably the heart and soul of this band, credited as full writer or
co-writer (in the latter case, usually responsible for everything but the
lyrics) on ten of the tracks and «arranger» on the other two. For another
thing, this is where the band starts employing professional session musicians
— at the time, mainly limited to Hal Blaine on drums, replacing Dennis' powerhouse,
but, according to Brian, erratic drumming (Maureen Love, Mike's sister, is also
credited for harp playing on 'Catch A Wave', but that could hardly be called
«professional support»); in the future, session players would replace the band
almost entirely. Good? Bad? For the purposes of Surfer Girl, somewhat irrelevant, I'd say; for the future — well,
like it or not, Pet Sounds would not
have been the way we all know it without session musicians.
Finally, Surfer
Girl shows strong signs of hope that someday, in some way the Beach Boys
would be overcoming the filler problem. Both sides of the album muster enough
awesomeness to begin with not one, but two
phenomenal songs in a row (that's already 4 out of 12, more classics than on
their previous two records put together). The title track and 'In My Room' are
a wee bit simplistic compared to the really flourishing period of Brian's
balladry writing, but the boys had fully learned how to transform their
collective vocal acoustic powers into mind-blowing angelicity — strangest
thing ever, here was a kind of sweet beauty created from the simplest
ingredients by a bunch of teen idols, and it wasn't banal or cringe-worthy.
Comparisons between 'In My Room', Brian's and
Gary Usher's first attempt to cover a little more serious lyrical ground, and
the Beatles' 'There's A Place' crop up all the time, just because both happened
to be recorded in the same year and dedicated to the same subject (a little
introverted escapism), but in terms of reaching for heights, there is really no
comparison: John's is basically a happy pop-rocker that has the overwhelmed guy
retreating to his personal corner to think over a girl's love confession,
whereas Brian's is really a prayer to solitude, with the lyrics and the slow,
lullaby-like, melody perfectly molded together.
The sequencing is such that you are supposed to
be shaken out of both of these dreamy beauties by the two far more dynamic surf
anthems — 'Catch A Wave' and 'Hawaii' respectively — which, in their own turn,
represent the pinnacle of the surf genre for these guys. Surfboard sales must
have skyrocketed with these songs occupying the airwaves, since both create a
totally paradisiac atmosphere — on 'Catch A Wave', Maureen Love imitates the
breaking of the wave in question with such a lovely harp flourish you'd think
the wave were a cuddly little friend (instead of the huge salty monster it
actually is — has any surf musician
ever tried writing of the dangers of
surfing, if only just for a change?). And, of course, Brian's falsetto on
'Hawaii' is legendary, even if the song is basically just a flat commercial to
touristic Polynesia.
The attractions of Surfer Girl do not begin and end with these four songs — there's
also 'Little Deuce Coupe', the band's most elegantly composed and least
stupid-sounding car anthem so far; 'Your Summer Dream', another of Brian's
prayer songs that is really no worse than 'In My Room', just a little more
predictable in terms of lyrics; and a couple more surf-rockers like 'Surfers
Rule' that may be a bit annoying next to the classics, but are still heads and
tails above what the boys were writing less than one year before. Clear-cut
filler is essentially restricted to a couple instrumentals ('Boogie Woodie')
and occasional bits of teenage stupidity ('South Bay Surfer' — early Beach Boys
are almost always at their worst when they try to take a direct aim at humor,
which is no surprise considering that the band's biggest humorist was also its
biggest asshole).
The silliest thing about the album, really, is
the cover — that photo must have been taken from the same session that yielded
the shot for Surfin' Safari, and, if
anything, begs for two questions: (a) how on Earth can it take someone one
whole year to unload a surfboard? and (b) what on Earth are five guys going to do with one surfboard? (The correct answer, of
course, is: Give it to Dennis, since he was the only one in the band who knew
how to surf in the first place). Bar that circumstance, a thumbs up most of the way.
LITTLE DEUCE COUPE (1963)
1) Little Deuce Coupe; 2)
Ballad Of Ole' Betsy; 3) Be True To Your School; 4) Car Crazy Cutie; 5) Cherry,
Cherry Coupe; 6) 409; 7) Shut Down; 8) Spirit Of America; 9) Our Car Club; 10)
No-Go Showboat; 11) A Young Man Is Gone; 12) Custom Machine.
Capitol Records and the Beach Boys have a long,
complex story of Money vs. Art relationship, and this is where it all begins.
Some people have jokingly called Little
Deuce Coupe the first concept album, since all of its songs are about cars
— but then you could take every second blues album ever recorded before white
people started appropriating the genre and claim that all of them were concept
albums about getting laid (or not
getting laid). Besides, one usually expects that the person behind the concept
album should be the artist, not the
record label.
Anyway, seeing as how Brian's «car songs» were
getting the band as much fame and the label as much money as his «surf songs»,
the idea to put out a «car album» was probably inevitable. Unfortunately, due
to the mad rush (I mean, what if Jan and Dean should get there first?), Brian was not given time to
write enough material, meaning that four of the songs had to be recycled from
the band's previous albums — and, of the rest, not everything could boast
proper quality control on the level of Brian's finest contributions for Surfer Girl.
With disc jockey and big car fan Roger
Christian and cousin Mike handling most of the lyrics, it is hardly surprising
that Little Deuce Coupe is one of
the silliest-sounding Beach Boys records ever — from the primitive
teenage-jingoistic 'Be True To Your School', as flat-foot as any cheerleader
anthem, to a whole series of girls/cars analogies that are sometimes unaware of
their own double entendres ("A-ridin' the clutch", eh? "She
likes to take 'em clean and gap the plugs" — that one's for you, Dennis).
This does not mean that the entire stock is
worthless: 'Cherry, Cherry Coupe' and 'No-Go Showboat' are both a great
showcase for the band's ever-solidifying harmonies; the late James Dean tribute
'A Young Man Is Gone' is its first serious try at going a cappella, and, although the lyrics are utterly lame, the
sentiment is quite genuine; and Brian's vocals on the sentimental 'Ballad Of
Ole' Betsy' are so gorgeously done that the feelings are almost believable —
except, of course, that the historical Brian Wilson, in comparison with the
lyrics, was produced ten years after
«Betsy», but that's exactly how a great artist is born: fakin' it and loving
every minute.
Since I am not more of a car fan than I am a
surf one, there is little else to say. The record came out barely one month
after Surfer Girl, still managed to
sell plenty, gave the guys their third Top 10 hit (the cheerleading nonsense,
of course, rather than the much more tasteful 'Cherry, Cherry Coupe', for
instance), and satisfied Capitol Records for long enough to be able to come up
with a proper follow-up to Surfer Girl in due time. That's all,
folks.
SHUT DOWN VOLUME 2 (1964)
1) Fun, Fun, Fun; 2) Don't Worry Baby; 3) In
The Parkin' Lot; 4) Cassius Love Vs. Sonny Wilson; 5) The Warmth Of The Sun; 6)
This Car Of Mine; 7) Why Do Fools Fall In Love; 8) Pom Pom Play Girl; 9) Keep
An Eye On Summer; 10) Shut Down, Part II; 11) Louie Louie; 12) Denny's Drums.
WARNING: As a sincerely committed, responsible
father, I feel professionally obliged to state that the song 'Fun, Fun, Fun' by
the popular American band that surreptitiously calls itself "The Beach
Boys" (a highly suspicious fact, considering how few witnesses ever
noticed members of this band near an actual beach) is one of the most morally
endangering, spiritually corruptive by-products of the pop music industry,
intentionally designed to lead the young people of America and the world into
the temptation of easy-going pleasures, debauchery, and degradation.
Doubt my words? Armed with concrete evidence, I
will prove to you that the song 'Fun, Fun, Fun' was created by the Devil in
person — promoting, in one way or another, all
of the seven deadly sins AT ONCE. Just look here. First, the protagonist is
openly stated as having pilfered her daddy's car — GREED, logically leading to illegal thieving
activity. Second, what is her first selected destination? "Cruising
through the hamburger stand" — GLUTTONY,
bright and clear as the morning sun. Then, of course, "the girls can't
stand her 'cause she walks, looks and drives like an ace now" — ENVY, ladies and gentlemen, promoted and stimulated
by the young girl's rash, irresponsible activity, poetized by this suspicious
band. And on the girl's side? Why, PRIDE, of
course: "She makes the Indy 500 look like a Roman chariot race now".
Yet the worst is still ahead. With her
thoughtless behaviour, she has provoked her formerly intelligent and rational
parents into the deadly sin of WRATH — "Your dad was
gettin' wise to you now, you shouldn't have lied now" is but an indirect
hint at the ensuing family scandal that, no doubt, included elements of heavy
verbal abuse and, who knows, perhaps even corporeal punishment. Does that,
however, stop the unrepenting teenager? Not at all! As she is slowly sinking
into the subtle, but firm sin of ACEDIA —
"You've been thinking that your fun is all through now", sing these
false prophets, implying that there is little more to life than mindless,
shameful hedonism — the final blow is delivered: "You can come along with
me 'cause we got a lot of things to do now", says a certain Mr. Michael
Edward Love (or should we call him "Mr. Michael Edward Lust?"), clearly implying that the
doomed teen is just about to be led into the deadliest sin of them all — FORNICATION.
In the light of this thoroughly irrefutable
evidence, I have no choice but to recommend blacklisting the song on all
family-oriented radio stations and adopting radical measures to prevent music
created by this so-called «pop band» from ever reaching the ears of the young
generation of today, whose still developing spirit should instead benefit from
the much better pronounced traditional Christian values of such inspired
artists as Ms. Taylor Swift, Ms. Selena Gomez,
Ms. Anna Margaret, and, of course, Ms. Rebecca Black, whose own attitude
on the questionable activity of «having fun» is far more restrained, healthy,
and reflects reasonable, caring, God-loving upbringing on the part of her
esteemed parents.
As a sidenote, I would also like to remark that,
with the above-mentioned so-called «pop song» 'Fun, Fun, Fun', the alleged
«Beach Boys» themselves have demonstrated recidivist criminal behaviour: less
than a year after having been caught red-handed while shamelessly stealing a
melody written and copyrighted by Mr. Chuck Berry, they have now gone on
record doing it once again,
considering that the opening guitar solo on 'Fun, Fun, Fun' is an almost
note-for-note reproduction of the guitar solo that opens Mr. Chuck Berry's own
'Roll Over Beethoven'. In fact, once I suffered through the misfortune of
putting on this record, I first thought that I was going to be treated to a
faithful cover of Mr. Chuck Berry's song (a fine piece of work, that, affirming
the strong, healthy values of traditional American music over the effeminate
sissy-pissy excesses of decadent European composers). One can only imagine my
profound disappointment and sense of shock fifteen seconds into the song — of
course, I still had to sing along and tap my foot right down to the very last
note, but it's the Devil made me do it, swear to God.
As a postscriptum, here is some extra info on
this album I've found, written by some Russian guy with an unpronounceable
name. I'm not responsible for his opinions, mind you — it's just that I cannot
bring myself to providing any further information on this band that is so
clearly aiming for a kind of Herostratean fame.
«...another quick cash-in with a small bunch of
classics and a large bunch of filler. Approximately half of the album is really
good, with 'Fun, Fun, Fun' illustrating the band's rapid progress in writing
catchy fast classics (although Carl's ripping off Chuck Berry in the intro is
somewhat too obvious), and 'Don't
Worry Baby' being Brian's first successful attempt at getting a genuine Phil
Spector-ish sound with just a few clever vocal overdubs and some nice echo
effects — basically, a terrific illusion of a wall of sound without any actual
«walling».
These are the two perennial classics, plus you have two gorgeous, but self-derivative
ballads in the old style ('The Warmth Of The Sun' and 'Keep An Eye On Summer',
written in the same vein as 'Your Summer Dream' etc.), and there is another beautiful cover, that of Frankie Lymon's 'Why
Do Fools Fall In Love?' (a song that now seems to have been written almost
specially for Brian and the boys' harmonies, despite coming out six years
earlier).
Other than that, Shut Down Vol. 2 seems to be the
album in the Beach Boys catalog that is just proverbially riddled with
stupidities. Stupid is the name itself, sending unsuspecting fans (particularly
unfortunate for later-day fans) in search of Vol. 1 (which did indeed come out in 1963, but was an all-star hot
rod compilation, with only 'Shut Down' and '409' from the Boys themselves).
Stupid are filler tracks like 'In The Parkin'
Lot' and 'This Car Of Mine', retrograde Mike Love-fests that would have been
alright on Surfin' USA but, by now,
were already obsolete in the light of Brian's progress (granted, Mike didn't
have anything to do with the writing of 'In The Parkin' Lot', but he did sing it, and in singing it, he owned it).
Stupid is the decision to cover 'Louie Louie' — the Beach Boys are no
Kingsmen, and their inability to carry over the caveman menace of the original
leaves them with just the simple dumbness of it all.
Most stupid is the decision to include a separately
recorded drum solo from Dennis ('Denny's Drums'), considering the young
Wilson's lack of technicality; and stupidest of 'em all is 'Cassius Love Vs.
Sonny Wilson', a specially staged piece of «verbal sparring» between Mike and
Brian — although, funny enough, in retrospect it does not seem nearly as stupid, sounding now as a
slightly ominous preview of the real «pop success vs. artistic integrity»
conflict between the two of them that would start taking place in two years'
time. At the time, though, it sounded really
brainless. (A learner of English could at least hope to teach oneself a thing
or two about archaic Californian slang, but "at least I don't sound like
my nose is on the critical list" doesn't sound quite like real-life Californian slang, or does it?).
Altogether, a shut down, uh, thumbs down,
with salvation guaranteed only for five of the songs and classic status
guaranteed only for two. Fortunately, Shut
Down also shuts down the «purely singles-oriented» period of the Beach
Boys' career — with the British Invasion and its anti-vinyl waste policy around
the corner, the Wilsons would be among the first American performers to adopt
that policy, and even set an example for others.»
ALL SUMMER LONG (1964)
1) I Get Around; 2) All
Summer Long; 3) Hushabye; 4) Little Honda; 5) We'll
Run Away; 6) Carl's Big Chance; 7) Wendy; 8) Do You
Remember?; 9) Girls On The Beach; 10) Drive-In; 11) Our Favorite Recording
Sessions; 12) Don't Back Down.
All comparisons between the Beach Boys' All Summer Long and the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, even if the two
sound very little like each other, are still fully justified. Not simply because
the two LPs were released on the market literally within days from each other,
in July 1964, but also because they represent the two finest pop bands of the
early «teenage Sixties» at the absolute peaks of their «pre-serious» days.
Both records take the «innocent» teen pop song genre — in its Brit-pop and
California-pop incarnation, respectively — as high as it could ever be taken.
From here on, there are but two directions: (a) conservation and gradual
stagnation or (b) self-upgrading to an advanced level. Fortunately for us, both
bands took option (b).
In the field of consistency, All Summer Long still loses out to Hard Day's Night, being much further
from perfection on a song-by-song basis. For one thing, the issue of explicit
filler has not been overcome. There is another piece of useless studio
chit-chat, and another equally useless guitar instrumental — made to look ever
more embarrassing by being given such «honorary» titles as 'Our Favourite
Recording Sessions' (just in case you ever had the stupidity to think that the
band's favourite recording sessions actually were the ones where they got the
recordings right, instead of sounding
like a bunch of five-year old goofballs); and 'Carl's Big Chance' (this one invites
about a million bad jokes, so I'll just leave it up to you).
For another, there is no denying that there is
a gradual drop in quality as the record moves along — much of Side B (and let
us not forget that the entire album is over in 25 minutes' time) is dominated
by Mike Love, whose lyrical skills seem to become more and more annoying with
each new album, so much so that even Brian only sees it fit to put them to
inferior re-written melodies. (It remains to be ascertained how much the local
drive-in theater owners' union surreptitiously paid Mr. Love for the line
"don't sneak your buddies in the trunk 'cause they might get caught by the
drive in" — in any case, he'd have to be pretty dumb not to try to cash in
on that).
'Do You Remember?', a song twice unnecessary
because of the melodically similar, but far superior 'Little Honda', becomes
thrice unnecessary also due to lyrics that, in an inane manner, try to glorify
the early pioneers of rock (let alone the fact that we still don't know what is "the all-time greatest song"
that Chuck Berry is supposed to have written — 'Rock'n'Roll Music'? 'Johnny B.
Goode'? 'Roll Over Beethoven'? Come on, Mike, you of all people should know
that Chuck Berry's all-time greatest song, 'My Ding-A-Ling', had not even been
conceived yet. And why are the boys upholding this with harmonies of
"diddy-wah diddy-wah"? That's, uh, actually, like a Bo Diddley song,
really).
Finally, as beautiful as 'Girls On The Beach'
is on its own, there is no denying that it is merely a variation on 'Surfer
Girl', with the exact same verse melody getting a different resolution. The
fact that Brian, who is very rarely known for plagiarizing himself, still gave
it the green light, can only mean that, once again, the potential perfection of
All Summer Long was ruined by
external circumstances — record company demands, touring, promotion, and
Brian's conflict with his father, which culminated somewhere around that time
as the growing artist finally mustered enough courage to fire the parent from
his manager position. (Too bad he was never strong enough to try the same stuff
on Mike — although in 1964, Mike was still a positive force within the band,
and by 1967, when he became its sinking stone, it was too late to chip the
stone away).
Still, even today, as you put on the record,
and all these classic numbers on the first side swish by, one by one — you
can't help being impressed. 'I Get Around', the big hit single and one of the
greatest songs of its era, is the record's visiting card, of course. The band's
first No. 1 hit on the charts (and, contrary to what we'd all think, the Beach
Boys only scored a measly three No.
1's during their good days — the
fourth one was 'Kokomo'... nice weather today, isn't it?), and the finest
vocal-harmony present to the art of cruising around that there ever was, as all
the "round round round round I get around"s interweaved with Brian's
gradually rising and falling falsetto really create a head-spinning atmosphere
— almost proto-psychedelic in its way.
But all the other highlights lag only slightly
behind, by being less concentrated on breaking new ground and more concentrated
on pure emotion. The title track is like a joyful sequel to the romantic
preview of 'Keep An Eye On Summer'. 'Little Honda', turning from cars to bikes
now, puts on lots of echo and overdubbing — maybe its basic melody is not that
far removed from '409' or 'Shut Down', but now Brian has this whole thing
quasi-symphonized, and suddenly even Mike's lead vocal sounds heroic/anthemic
instead of simply coming across as a teenage wimpy nasal whine. 'Hushabye'
features the most complex vocal harmonies on the album and is, in some ways, a
fine preview of the many vocal wonders the band would give us in the 1966-71
period.
And then there's the fabulous opening bars of
'Wendy' — let's face it, for the first ten seconds, what with the gruff,
ominous bass notes and the lonely, intriguing drum fill we do not even know what the heck we are listening to.
Is it going to be a surf instrumental? An attempt at blues-pop? A Gregorian
chant? Then the vocal harmonies kick in, but the mist never clears completely,
as the song balances between a generally fun atmosphere and grief-stricken
lyrics (and a pretty morose organ solo).
Finally, a brief plugin needs to be inserted
for 'We'll Run Away', with proverbially naïve lyrics from Gary Usher — but
leave it up to Brian to take all these Romeo-and-Juliet clichés and make
them utterly believable through an incredibly gorgeous vocal delivery. Just the
right tone, just the right modulation, just the right notes. So right, in fact,
you can almost picture Mr. Wilson finishing the recording, taking off his
headphones, leaving the studio, picking up the 15- or 16-year-old love of his
life, eloping to the airport, and spending the rest of his life in total and
utter happiness on a quiet, remote dairy farm somewhere in North Dakota. Who
cares if he eventually wound up as a disillusioned, overweight, thoroughly
unhappy nervous wreck? Actually, the song did
reflect reality at the time — Brian would marry the 17-year old Marilyn
Rutherford in December that same year, and they even managed to have a
fifteen-year long family relationship, quite a long stretch for a rock star, by
any accounts. So — fluffy idealism or gritty autobiography?
Overall, for a non-completist it would make
terrific sense to combine the strong parts of All Summer Long with the bunch of classic numbers on Shut Down Vol. 2 — my dream album for
the Beach Boys circa the first half of 1964 would look something like this:
Side A: 1) I Get Around; 2) All Summer Long; 3) Hushabye; 4) Little Honda; 5)
Don't Worry Baby; 6) Keep An Eye On Summer; Side B: 7) Fun, Fun, Fun; 8) Why
Do Fools Fall In Love; 9) The Warmth Of The Sun; 10) We'll Run Away; 11) Don't
Back Down; 12) Wendy. This sort of record would, IMHO, be capable of knocking
the ground even from under Hard Day's
Night's feet. As it is, just thank the inane people at Capitol records for
being in the secret pay of Brian Epstein. Nevertheless, even with all the
filler and haste, All Summer Long is
as vertical a thumbs
up as they come.
CONCERT (1964)
1) Fun, Fun, Fun; 2) The
Little Old Lady From Pasadena; 3) Little Deuce Coupe; 4) Long Tall Texan; 5) In
My Room; 6) Monster Mash; 7) Let's Go Trippin'; 8) Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow; 9) The
Wanderer; 10) Hawaii; 11) Graduation Day; 12) I Get Around; 13) Johnny B.
Goode; 14*) Don't Worry Baby.
Even though Capitol's exploitation policies may
be detestable per se, one should admit that the marketing guys inadvertently
pioneered quite a few creative ideas in the process. First came the
mock-concept of Little Deuce Coupe,
and now comes what must have been the first live album — not first live ever, of course, but the first one to
capture a new-look Sixties band at the start of the era of sexual liberation,
replete with screaming girls all over the place. EMI never had the heart to do
this with the Beatles: the recording technology was still too feeble to capture
the live sound properly in that kind of sonic environment, let alone the fact
that no band could withstand the screaming and retain the proper sound
tightness. Capitol had no scruples about «tarnishing» their Californian darlings'
reputation that way — and came out with a first.
One thing Concert
is definitely not is a hundred
percent authentic document of the times. Many of the vocals had been overdubbed
later, and even some of the instrumental tracks are substitutes — for instance,
'Fun, Fun, Fun' is just a sped-up version of the original. On the positive
side, this is not simply a live-in-the-studio experience with shamelessly
overdubbed audience sounds (this approach would also be pioneered by Capitol
soon enough, with the release of Party!).
Hardcore Beach Boys fans will undoubtedly be able to disentangle the truth from
the lies.
But the album can still be seen as the next
best thing — a trustworthy facsimile of the way it used to be, way back when
Brian was still performing live with the band; when the band itself came across
as a real bizarro act, half silly teen-pop, half gorgeous adolescent-art (no
two songs in a row on an album from 1964 present a starker contrast than 'In My
Room' and 'Monster Mash'); and, of course, when the audience was so happy just
to see these shining young lads with
guitars they'd be bursting out screaming at the first notes of anything — had Brian Wilson suddenly
come up with 'Vegetables' back then, little girls would probably go orgasming at
the sound of any given Beach Boy chomping on a carrot.
The setlist is historically precious in that it
does give us a good slice of the popular teen standards of the day. Not many
people today remember anything much about Jan & Dean, or Dion, or even the
Four Freshmen, let alone Bobby «Boris» Pickett, and, although these rough live
renditions do not really do full justice to either the originals or the Beach
Boys' ability to interpret them, they are still fun. At the very least, it is
curious to hear Dennis sing Dion's 'Wanderer' from behind the drumkit, to the
best of his abilities, or to witness Mike «Boris» Love engage in a little
comedy horror fun ('Graduation Day', though, most of us could probably live
without — way too corny even for the innocent early Sixties).
Best of the bunch is the Rivingtons'
'Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow', a novelty tune that does not scale the same walls of
absurdity as its much more famous derivative ('Surfin' Bird'), but is still one
of the few non-embarrassing pure gigglefests that its age produced. No idea how
much of the harmonies was overdubbed, of course, but does it really matter? It
is still one of the few songs on here that makes the whole album a must for
even the non-hardcore fan.
Another good thing is that, at this point, Mike
Love was not the undisputed conductor
on stage — it took him growing a whole beard to earn that privilege — and, for
the most part, the listener is deprived of the torture of having to assess the
man's dubious sense of humor. It only hurts during the pathetic intro to
'Graduation Day' (in which Mr. Love feels it is his duty to remember and list
all types of schools whose graduates could be the potential addressees of the
song), but you might as well skip the whole thing altogether and go straight to
'I Get Around' — a song so good that no introduction by Mr. Love could ever
spoil it (a thing he obviously understands, so he offers none).
All it takes is try and overlook the abysmal
sound quality (Al Jardine's guitar, for instance, seems to have magically
vanished from the mix — particularly noticeable on 'Little Deuce Coupe', where
Mike introduces the players with their instruments one by one), and Concert may sound like harmless fun
even today. But it goes without saying that, being released three months past All Summer Long, its picture of the Beach Boys was slightly
anachronistic even for that time. 'In My Room' and 'I Get Around' are, in fact,
the only indicators here that what we are listening to is really a major
happening on the American scene rather than well-crafted, but seriously fluffy
teen entertainment.
CHRISTMAS ALBUM (1964)
1) Little Saint Nick; 2) The
Man With All The Toys; 3) Santa's Beard; 4) Merry Christmas, Baby; 5) Christmas
Day; 6) Frosty The Snowman; 7) We Three Kings Of Orient Are; 8) Blue Christmas;
9) Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town; 10) White Christmas; 11) I'll Be Home For
Christmas; 12) Auld Lang Syne.
The Beach Boys' only fruitful attempt at a
Christmas album (there would be another try as late as 1977, rejected by the
record label) is exactly the kind of thing that a Beach Boys Christmas album
circa 1964-65 would be expected to be. You'd expect them to cover some oldies
(because what's a Christmas album without recognizable standards?), and they
do. You'd expect them to offer some originals (because what's a Beach Boys
album without a few Brian Wilson songwriting credits?), and they do. You'd
expect them to not pour too much heart and soul into it (because why the heck
should anybody, let alone one of
America's most creative bands, give two fucks about a Christmas album?), and
they don't.
No better proof for that last statement than
one of the bonus tracks included on the first CD reissue — an early version of
the album's main track and single, 'Little Saint Nick', which is nothing other
than All Summer's Long 'Drive-In'
with a different set of Christmas-related lyrics. Apparently, they eventually
thought the idea too crude and
self-plagiarizing, because the final version ended up... sounding like 'Little
Deuce Coupe'. All right, a little
different when it comes to the chorus vocals, but certainly not enough to
convince anybody this was not a mere
hash job to satisfy the record company's fifty five thousandth stupid request.
Beach Boys fans hungry for more Beach Boys material
will not want to bypass the album. Its good side is that it is totally and
completely drowning in floodwaves of
vocal harmonies, and in this respect, it may even have been a little bit of a
progression — there wouldn't be that huge an amount of proverbially gorgeous
vocalization even on Today!; only Pet Sounds would explore the power of
angelic vocalizing to a higher degree. Its drawback, however, is that, since it
is after all a Christmas album, there is way too much syrupy orchestration,
done the corniest way possible — yes, a first for the Beach Boys, but a
regrettable one.
There are also some particular questionable
decisions. For one thing, covering 'White Christmas' is a useless job even for
the Beach Boys, after Clyde McPhatter had taken the song to the highest level
it could ever be taken to. For another thing, there was no single good reason
on Earth to variegate 'Santa Claus Is Coming To Town' with a completely
non-belonging quotation from 'Entry Of The Gladiators'. (Unless, of course,
this is a veiled hint at the stupidity of Christmas, implying the thoroughly
clownish nature of Santa as a character). And they certainly could have at
least sung 'Auld Lang Syne' to the end,
with that trademark a cappella delivery of theirs, instead of having Dennis
(why Dennis?) deliver the seasonal greetings to the fans.
But other than that, hey, it's a Christmas
album; and if I had a choice between, say, the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, and
Metallica, I'd probably always take the middle ground and go along with Brian
Wilson than with either the overtly predictable or the downright weird choice.
Besides, want it or not, there is a certain level of «maturity» shown here in
the boys' brave tackling of «serious» material such as 'We Three Kings Of
Orient Are' — and, clearly, choral hymns like that were also one of the major
influences on Brian's creativity in the following years.
As an utter novelty, it would also be well
worth checking out one of the bonus tracks — a complete a cappella take on The
Lord's Prayer, done Beach Boys-style, of course. (If you belong to the rare
breed of devoted Christian teens, it will be an overwhelming beauty. If you are
a grim atheist, you can still think of it as an innocent, naïve, but still
utterly sincere beauty.) There is also a new reissue of the album called Ultimate Christmas, which joins the
album with the results of sessions for the aborted 1977 album, and a couple
songs there may be worthwhile, but... too much Christmas talk already, and I'm
writing this on a hot day in August — let's just move on.
TODAY! (1965)
1) Do You Wanna Dance?; 2) Good
To My Baby; 3) Don't Hurt My Little Sister; 4) When I Grow Up; 5) Help
Me, Ronda; 6) Dance,
Dance, Dance; 7) Please
Let Me Wonder; 8) I'm So Young; 9) Kiss Me, Baby; 10) She Knows Me Too Well;
11) In The Back Of My Mind; 12) Bull Session With "Big Daddy".
Let me put in a few kind words for Mike Love.
Whatever he did for the Beach Boys' reputation starting in the mid-Seventies
and onwards — we'll get to it eventually — is inexcusable. But as for his
infamous clashes with Brian over the band's direction in the «classic» era of
1965-67... well, it would be one thing if the Beach Boys wrote and recorded
their surf/cars/girls songs like any generic teen pop band. But by 1964, Brian
had already learned to keep such gems as 'I Get Around' coming on a regular
basis — songs that were, at the exact same time, artistically innovative and commercial. So... if you can write
music that is loved both by the critics and the public, what's your problem?
No wonder Mike got so infuriated when he saw
Brian concentrating, first and foremost, on complex, not-so-easily-accessible
ballads. He might not have been railing so much against innovation and progress
as he was upon what he perceived as an incomprehensible haughtiness, an
out-of-nowhere desire to go and lock oneself up in an ivory tower. And, to a
certain extent, I get that feeling.
By concentrating exclusively on his «pet sounds», which could, medically, be
interpreted as giving in to the call of autism, Brian, want it or not, would
lose some of the versatility and flexibility that he showed off so well in the
early years. In a way, paradoxical as it may sound, his music, with Pet Sounds and whatever ensued, became
more predictable — more complex, more
profound, more spiritual, but less diverse and adventurous.
Which is why The Beach Boys Today! has eventually become my favourite Beach Boys
record. For a very simple reason — it contains everything one should know and
understand about the Beach Boys, a perfect demonstration of all of their
capabilities and almost none of their
flaws. On Side A, it has songs tailor-made to send Mike Love into waves of
ecstatic frenzy, and yet, at the same time, impenetrable to criticism unless
one just hates pop altogether. And on Side B, you have a bunch of ballads whose
lyrical subjects may not reach the depths of thought that Tony Asher or Van
Dyke Parks would soon bring in... who knows, perhaps that's a good thing... but whose musical layers
and heavenly vocal arrangements would never truly
be surpassed; I am, in fact, arguing, that, even if Brian would be still
writing music every bit as beautiful in the following years, Today! already finds him at his
accomplished peak.
Four words: 'Please Let Me Wonder'. The most
perfect synthesis of romanticism and realism that the band had created up to
that moment — and when you think that Mike Love is actually credited for the lyrics, it also becomes an acutely
band-like thing, more so than Pet Sounds
and Smile that were more like «Brian
Wilson solo albums with invited guests supplying vocal harmonies». Not that the
lyrics are great, but they're okay, a nice rendition of a perfectly believable
situation. The poor protagonist guy is smitten, but hasn't really got the nerve
and/or courage to come out with it, so he is just content with asking to
"please let me wonder if I've been the one you love, please let me wonder
if I'm who you're dreaming of" — ah, what the hell, most of us have, at
one time or another, asked this question, no matter how macho some of us may try to seem in everyday
life. (If you haven't, you must at least be Che Guevara or something).
The music, owing quite a bit to Phil Spector's
wall-of-sound, is not stunning on its own (but then I have also never been a
big fan of the instrumentals on Pet
Sounds, either), but it acquires stunning power in conjunction with the
vocals — even before the chorus comes
in, with Brian's lead line "Now here we are together..." as the most
gorgeous verse melody the man ever wrote and sung. There's such a delicate mix
of loving tenderness (his inner voice is addressing the invisible heroine as if
she were made of china), fearful insecurity, and down-to-earth realism — not
one single note is overcooked — that I can only express pity at the fact that
so few ballad-makers took serious notice. This
is how these things ought to be done, period.
The magic of 'Please Let Me Wonder' has always
obscured the solid qualities of the other ballads for me — perhaps they should
have placed the song last rather than first — but there is no getting away from
the fact that musically, 'She Knows Me Too Well' and 'In The Back Of My Mind'
are more thoroughly developed, and
presage the psychedelic/baroque qualities of Pet Sounds. 'In The Back Of My Mind', furthermore, has been donated
to Dennis — a questionable decision, seeing as how he was always the least
technically accomplished singer of the whole bunch, but, on the other hand, his
«painful» delivery is also a quirky precursor to his later career; you can
easily trace a straight line from the experience of singing it on this album to
the aching confessions on Pacific Ocean
Blue twelve years later.
Then there is no forgetting the first side,
either. 'Do You Wanna Dance' does away with Bobby Freeman's silly bongo sound,
cranks up the speed dial, and becomes a rip-roaring anthem to the powers of
dancing, with yet another lead vocal from Denny, this time far more confident
and collected. The original creation 'Dance, Dance, Dance' that bookmarks Side
A on the other edge, has all that and
terrific vocal harmonies, rising and going in circles according to a pattern
that has its direct precursor in 'I Get Around', but may be even more tricky
this time. For 'When I Grow Up (To Be A Man)', Brian hauls out the harpsichord
— still a fairly rare instrument in late 1964/early 1965 — and trades a set of
commonplace, but always relevant teen-philosophy questions with Mike
("will I love my wife for the rest of my life?" — nice question to
ask, Brian, I'm sure Marilyn was only too happy to hear that one). Only the early, rushed, version of 'Help Me Rhonda'
sounds underdeveloped, a mistake the band would soon correct on their next LP.
Elsewhere, no trouble with anything whatsoever.
Oh yes, a brief reminder of the fact that the
LP medium is not allowed to exist without filler is still there in the form of
the last track: 'Bull Session with Big Daddy', which tries to pass for about
two minutes of civilized interviewing, but is constantly getting derailed with
complaints about stepping on one's French fries — and that one immortal quote:
"Of all of Europe the only thing that stuck out in my mind is the bread"
(I don't quite understand who exactly said that, and I don't think I want to know) — granted, American bread
does suck, but just how patriotic is it to rub that fact of life in our faces?
Anyway, two minutes of humiliation for us all here to remind that listening to perfection
may be dangerous, since it makes us forget that we are still living in the real world, where people not only write and
perform beautiful music, but also behave like silly clowns and eat cheese
sandwiches.
As a beautiful, well-balanced, and (for a bunch
of young kids in early 1965) intelligent album, Today! has few peers — in fact, even a «Beatles person» like myself
must admit this was the only time when Brian Wilson clearly was in the lead;
and I do not mean the formal richness of the sonic texture, which Brian, ever
the trustworthy disciple of Phil Spector, would always excel in, but simply the
realization — the conscious
realization — that his mission here on the planet was to create something
bigger than just «pop music». The Beatles would slowly gravitate towards this
realization over the course of 1965; Brian must have been thriving on that mindset
as early as late 1964, and maybe even earlier than that. Sensitive soul, that
Brian. Thumbs up.
SUMMER DAYS (AND SUMMER NIGHTS) (1965)
1) The Girl From New York
City; 2) Amusements Park USA; 3) Then I Kissed Her; 4) Salt Lake City; 5) Girl
Don't Tell Me; 6) Help Me, Rhonda; 7) California Girls; 8) Let Him Run Wild; 9)
You're So Good To Me; 10) Summer Means New Love; 11) I'm Bugged At My Old Man;
12) And Your Dream Comes True.
History has marked Summer Days as a
slight fall-off from Brian's unprecedented mountaineering record — an
involuntary concession to pressure on the part of both Capitol Records and
Mr. Mike Love, so that the band's loyal fan guard suffer not the painful
deprivation of the good old surf / girls / cars saccharose intake. And nothing
is going to change that history, because it seems to have been objectively
true: Summer Days was rather hastily put together by Brian to assuage
his worried pals, just as Pet Sounds were already flooding his brains.
That said, for a «marking-time album» this one
is remarkably filler-free — so much so that, in a way, it would be possible to
imagine Summer Days/Pet Sounds as a joint double LP, twice the length of
Today! but sharing the same structure: one half dynamic, upbeat, and
commercial, one half slow, introspective, and experimental, yet in such a way
that both halves are clearly the product of a single mastermind conscience. (Even
bearing in mind that the former half still showed some signs of
collective output, whereas Pet Sounds is 100% Brian).
Yes, there are a few saddening throwbacks. For
instance, the instrumental composition 'Summer Means New Love' is technically
pleasant, but essentially sounds like generic early Sixties soundtrack muzak (à
la 'Ringo's Theme' off Hard Day's Night, except the melody is
nowhere near as captivating as 'This Boy'). Worst of the lot, a serious blemish
on the album's reputation, is 'Amusement Parks USA', a carnivalesque romp
dominated by artificially cheery lyrics and vocals from Mike, festival barkers
and what-not, a tune whose closest match in style would be something like
'County Fair' off Surfin' Safari — and that was three years ago, when
the band was just starting out and its lack of expertise, professionalism, and
taste could still be excused. In mid-1965, there was no more excuse. Every time
I hear that frantic laughter in the background, I have to turn the volume down
— if anybody catches me listening to this over the Brandenburg
Concertos, my reputation is gone forever.
The expertise, however, breaks through on 'Salt
Lake City', which must have been intended as yet another silly-sounding,
life-asserting anthem to the pleasures of American life (through a Mormon
perspective, no less, although, judging by the lyrics, Mike Love might have
been totally unaware of that obvious association, being far more interested in
the sensual pleasures that the location offered). But midway through, an
entirely different sax-and-keyboards section cuts in, with complex interweaving
patterns, and becomes the focal point of the song — so good that the melody
would stick in the band's subconscious and eventually be rewritten as 'Do It
Again'.
And when the collective spirit is not that
strongly dominated by the «surf-o-rama» (meant figuratively, of course;
technically, there are no surf songs here at all, in spite of the tempting
album sleeve), we simply get pop classic after pop classic. 'Help Me, Rhonda'
is here again, in a heavily revised version that adds more melodic overdubs,
more complex vocal layers, and a more inventive build-up in the solo section.
Phil Spector and the Crystals' 'Then He Kissed Me', with the gender roles
wisely reversed, is not a huge improvement over the original, but is exactly
what one would expect of a Beach Boys' reversal of a fabulous girl group hit
song.
The magnum opus of the record has always
been recognized as 'California Girls': easy-going catchy pop lovers adore it
because, well, it would be fairly hard to find a catchier pop song in existence,
while artsy-minded types love to concentrate on the song's small «symphonic»
opening, simple in melody but, sound-wise, completely identical to the
instrumental style of Pet Sounds ('Wouldn't It Be Nice' would soon be
introduced in a very similar way). Me, I like the tempo of the song — before
that, somehow, the band would generally favor either fast pop-rockers or slow
ballads, but here we roll along on a steady midtempo that somehow gives the
song a statelier character than all those other early anthems to the
Californian lifestyle. It is really a perfect culmination, and a fitting
conclusion, to the band's career as troubadours of teen-centered West Coast values,
which they would never again return to in a fully convincing, «authentic»
manner.
On the other hand, the magnificence of 'California
Girls' sometimes obscures the fact that its immediate follow-up on the album,
'Let Him Run Wild', is also one of the greatest achievements of Brian Wilson's
career. It isn't just a ballad, it's a little bit of an über-romantic thunderstorm
that, for the first time on a Beach Boys album, almost threatens to break out
from under control and turn into emotional chaos — even if it's only an
illusion, since, at that time, Brian was still in full control of his senses
and instincts. And that nervous beginning, when Brian's high-pitched vocals
break the wall of the near-psychedelic keyboards, is every bit as good as the
famous start to 'Good Vibrations'. Don't you go forgetting this little
masterpiece.
Almost everything else on the album also ranges
from interesting to excellent. Beatlesque influences crop up on 'Girl Don't
Tell Me', one of Carl Wilson's first lead vocals over a refrain that,
admittedly, was influenced by 'Ticket To Ride' (although the lyrics treat their
female subject with far less reverence than John Lennon reserved for his
female protagonist); overall, however, the two songs are entirely different. And
'You're So Good To Me', with a non-falsetto lead from Brian, also sounds a
little Mersey-beat-ish to my ears, or, perhaps, even reminiscent of the style
of the Hollies — in any case, more British in stylistics than American.
Of note is the near-complete lack of
transparent filler, and the complete lack of goofy material ('Our
Favorite Recording Sessions' etc.), unless one wants to count 'I'm Bugged At My
Ol' Man' as a bit of goofiness. The tune, a sort of mock-comical musical swipe
that Brian took at his father (hyperbolically exaggerated enough so that a
«c'mon, Dad, it's not really about you» would always be in order), is
made to sound like a rough demo, with just Brian at the piano and the rest of
the band surrounding him like a barbershop quartet — in a way, presaging
similar rough-cut musical skeletons that he would accumulate twelve years
later for Love You. It is so completely out of place here, though, that,
for the first time ever, we get to sense Brian's own bits of mental instability:
a person more or less at peace with himself could hardly be expected to put
this kind of stuff on the same album with 'California Girls'.
To summarize, Summer Days is, in
general, a bit of a retread indeed, but, taking one big step backwards, the
band still manages to make a few intriguing short steps forward at the same
time. And it is the last we will ever see of these early, smiling, still beardless,
still having-fun-in-the-sun Beach Boys — before the towering ambitions of their
leading genius, the relentless marching on of time, the personal troubles and
turmoils, drugs, disfunctions, depressions, derision, Charles Manson, and
whatever other avatar of chaos came along, took over and wiped that smile off
the band's collective face, never to return again, unless in a very forced and
unnatural state. Thumbs up, album —
thumbs down, loss of youthful innocence.
PARTY! (1965)
1) Hully Gully; 2) I Should
Have Known Better; 3) Tell Me Why; 4) Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow; 5) Mountain Of Love; 6)
You've Got To Hide Your Love Away; 7) Devoted To You; 8) Alley Oop; 9) There's
No Other (Like My Baby); 10) I Get Around/Little Deuce Coupe; 11) The Times
They Are A-Changin'; 12) Barbara Ann.
Another odd experiment from the depths of
Capitol Records. Another album was required from the band by Christmas time, in
order to fulfill the regular three-LPs-per-year quota — but with Brian's
reluctance to speed things up with standard studio production, it was clear
that yet another bastard release would be in the works. Still, it would have to
at least match the band's tendency for unpredictability and diversity. Since
the «conceptual compilation» (Little
Deuce Coupe), the live album (Concert),
and the Christmas album slots were already occupied, some bright soul came up
with the idea of The Beach Boys' Party!:
— everyone knows, of course, that if a bunch of
musicians gives a party, what always
happens is, at some point they inevitably end up dragging out the acoustic
guitars and the maracas and the tambourines, and start goofing around covering
their own and other people's materials, and the nonplussed guests simply
continue chatting and laughing at top volume of their own voices, because who the heck would want to stop and listen, provided the booze is still
flowing freely? This is known, or should be known, as authentic party atmosphere, and this is exactly what Capitol
Records has offered its clients on this Beach Boys album.
Of course, considering that such authentic party atmosphere does not
actually exist, and even if it existed, could hardly have been captured on
record in 1965, one had to remain contended with a careful simulation. The
Beach Boys did drag out their acoustic guitars, run through a rag-taggy set of
songs, upon which the results were spliced together with «party sounds» — and
the final product ends up being completely bizarre. Since the liner notes never
stated explicitly that the «party» was a fake, many people probably wondered
back in the day — how come all these laughing idiots treat the band with such
blatant irreverence, and what on earth prompted the boys to invite them to their party in the first place?
Upon disregarding all the giggles and the clinking
glass, Party! remains a
let-your-hair-down style curio, worth an occasional listen. It is interesting
to see how much the Beach Boys were fascinated by the Beatles — covering a
whoppin' three tunes, the last one featuring Dennis on vocals (a fourth one,
'Ticket To Ride', is said to have been left in the can) — and gets one to
thinkin' wouldn't it be nice to see them actually contributing backing vocals
to any real Beatles songs. An even
bigger surprise is to hear Al Jardine passionately, if not very convincingly,
battling his way through 'The Times They Are A-Changin', needlessly «deflated»
by clownish exclamations like "RIGHT!" that sometimes punctuate the
pauses between vocal lines. Although, if rumors be believed, Al was a major folkie, back in those days
at least, and fell under the Dylan charm easier than the rest of the guys.
(Probably also had something to do with his vocal limitations — it is much
harder to fall under the Dylan charm if you yourself are used to singing like
an angel).
Everything else is more predictable: goofy
novelty numbers for Mike's tummy ('Alley Oop'; another take on
'Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow'), pompous Phil Spector chorales for Brian's dummy ('There's
No Other Like My Baby'), and tepid, but catchy pop oldies for your Mommy ('Mountain
Of Love', 'Devoted To You'). The only bit of self-written material is a parodic
medley take on 'I Get Around' and 'Little Deuce Coupe', the latter bit recast
as a moron's interpretation of an Elvis Presley bossanova recording. And the
biggest technical surprise is that the closing number, 'Barbara Ann', with Dean
Torrence of Jan & Dean guest starring on lead vocals, unexpectedly became
one of the band's biggest hits — particularly in the UK, where, ironically, its
commercial success became the lube that helped Pet Sounds effortlessly slide up the charts next year, despite the
two having virtually nothing in common.
Maybe some day Capitol will come to its senses
and release a Beach Boys Party Pooper!
or something like that, with the moronic noises removed and extra acoustic
tracks from the vaults thrown in — because, as an early representative of the
«unplugged» genre, it is a nice enough, sometimes genuinely touching record. At
this point, its importance is mostly historical: it shows clearly that the
Beach Boys were not developing in a vacuum, and that, in 1965 at least, some of them were quite hip to the
times, even if each such demonstration is consistently set back with a
performance of a silly kiddie piece of fluff.
But 'Barbara Ann', which indeed sounds like one
of the happiest, catchiest, lightest numbers ever recorded (no wonder even
Keith Moon was a major fan), does serve as the
perfect watermark to separate the pre-pubescent (figuratively speaking) Beach Boys from a musical ensemble that has
made the transition to another plane of existence. You'll definitely know it
when you put all their material into one continuous playlist — and then
experience 'Wouldn't It Be Nice' a few seconds after the final applause and
laughter of 'Barbara Ann' have died down.
PET SOUNDS (1966)
1) Wouldn't It Be Nice; 2)
You Still Believe In Me; 3) That's Not Me; 4) Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My
Shoulder); 5) I'm Waiting For The Day; 6) Let's Go Away For Awhile; 7) Sloop John B; 8) God Only Knows; 9) I Know
There's An Answer; 10) Here Today; 11) I Just Wasn't Made For These Times; 12)
Pet Sounds; 13) Caroline No.
Could it actually happen so that someone lands
on this review without having
previously heard, if not Pet Sounds
itself, then at least of Pet Sounds and its influence? In the
unlikely event of a yes, here are three basic facts and one popular opinion you
need to know: (1) Pet Sounds is the
only album in the Beach Boys catalog that can be objectively described as a
Brian Wilson solo album with guest vocal harmonies provided by the Beach Boys;
(2) Pet Sounds is the album that singlehandedly
initiated the destruction of The Beach Boys as America's juiciest commercial
proposition; (3) Pet Sounds is the
album that forever cemented the reputation of The Beach Boys as America's
finest pop-art institution. And that opinion? Simply that Pet Sounds is the greatest album ever recorded, bar none.
Trying to expand on this condensed information
in an original way, offering fresh insights and unique analysis, is probably
futile. The mass impact of Pet Sounds
in 1966 was incomparable to that of the Beatles, and could seem to be
dissipating in the ensuing years, what with the band's overall reputation going
to tatters. But ever since the great and magnificent Pet Sounds revival around the early 1990s, in large part due to its
huge influence on all sorts of alternative and underground musical genres
that were infiltrating the mainstream, so much has been written on the subject
from all points of view that... well, prepare to be bored.
Clearly, Pet
Sounds is a watermark — the single highest point that Brian's creativity
managed to reach, an ambitious project that had the luck of having each of its
ambitions fulfilled, a complex work of art on which the principal artist
managed to be in total control and get everything to work exactly, or, at least,
nearly-exactly, as he'd envisioned it. Sort of a Citizen Kane for pop music, a fabulous surprise success after which
the original artist would inevitably run out of luck, because there's only so
much luck you are entitled to in your lifetime.
Just as clearly, the endless comparisons
between Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper (or Revolver, or whatever other Beatles album there is) are pointless,
because the principal players differed in quantity and purposes. Brian was
mostly alone (not counting fellow lyricist Tony Asher), busy writing a concise,
conceptual, monolithic «teenage symphony to God» (he invented the term in relation
to Smile, but, personally, I think
it works much better when applied to Pet
Sounds). The Beatles consisted of at least two (at the time — almost three) distinct and multi-tasking
creative personalities whose spirituality, primary influences, and manner of
work had nothing in common with Brian and his approach. Rumor, partially spread
by Van Dyke Parks, has it that hearing Sgt.
Pepper was one of the reasons behind Brian's creative collapse in mid-1967
— I find it extremely hard to
believe, because there is just no way Brian would ever have wanted to record an album similar to Sgt. Pepper in the first place.
Less clear to spell out are the actual reasons
for which this music remains so timeless. As I return to these songs, which I
had not properly listened to for several years, with a fresher ear, and happily
understand that every single one of them has been firmly remaining in my head
for all this time, I become more and more convinced — what is truly and
uniquely fabulous about Pet Sounds
is not the reckless experimentation, not the tons of backing musicians, not the
use of empty Coca-Cola cans for percussion, not the exquisite baroque
flourishes, not the complex engineering techniques, not even the over-the-top
arrangements of backing vocals. All of these things have their functions and
are always in their proper place, but Pet
Sounds could still be Pet Sounds
without them, just wouldn't present so many happy excuses for critics to shoot
off their mouths.
What really makes Pet Sounds so special, in my view, are the main vocal melodies.
There are, indeed, some of the most fabulous singing parts ever recorded in pop
music out here. Rhythmic, symmetric, elegantly organized, catchy — and dripping with raw, unfaked emotion —
and displaying a brand new advanced
level of intelligence and complexity. In 1965, there was still no talking about
this kind of depth. In 1967, there would already be no talking about this kind
of discipline
After all these years, 'Don't Talk (Put Your
Head On My Shoulder)' still remains one of my favorites — an amazing feat,
considering that slow, lethargically paced, dreamy ballads are almost never my
thing. And in a different setting, a different performer could very easily miss
the life in these vocals. But it is the vocal modulation that carries the main
content — most of all, the subtle transition from verse to chorus, the former
delivered with romantic solemnity ('I can hear so much in your sighs / And I
can see so much in your eyes...') which culminates in high-pitched near-ecstasy
('...there are words we both could say...'), the latter then briskly
undercutting the pathos and wiping off all traces of sappiness: 'don't
talk...', he sings with a no-bull attitude that almost borders on irony, 'put
your head on my shoulder...' with an added bit of very natural caressing, no
overplaying involved — the vocals only move up again on the finishing '...let
me hear your heart beat', as the chosen method of communication starts to work
its charm. Miss any one of these components and you miss out on a great new way
to tell an old story.
Little wonder that Brian sings lead on seven
out of eleven vocal numbers — leaving Mike Love with a fairly pitiful presence
on the album, which was probably a much stronger reason for Mike shunning Pet Sounds in subsequent decades than
any purely ideological disagreements. (He does a damn fine job on 'That's Not
Me' and 'Here Today', though — but apparently the former was too personal, and
the latter too complex, to be properly reproduced on the stage. And, by the
way, concerning the story of how Mike was pressing Brian into changing some of
the more obscure lyrics — I find that the new, «simplistic» lyrics to 'I Know
There's An Answer' actually sound far less contrived and unduly pretentious
than the original 'Hang On To Your Ego', one of the silliest refrains of the
year). Brian could have easily done the lead vocals on 'God Only Knows' as
well, but preferred to donate the song to Carl, a move that pretty much
singlehandedly shaped his image as that of a smooth, irresistable romantic
loner. But overall, this is Brian's
album, and it was only fair that he, and no one else, should vocalize his own
emotions, all of which he did admirably.
At the same time, in 1966 Brian was still
keeping a fairly rational head on his shoulders. Understanding that an album
filled from head to toe with slow-moving confessional tear-jerkers would hardly
go down easy with audiences previously used to 'Help Me, Rhonda's and 'Fun Fun
Fun's, he commences both of the album's sides with a deceptively upbeat start.
The hushed mandolin sound that opens 'Wouldn't It Be Nice' rips into a
danceable tempo in a manner somewhat similar to that of 'California Girls', and
although the song descends into choral chanting a couple times along the way,
in general it is still very much compatible with the girls-and-sunshine image
of the Beach Boys of old. Same with 'Sloop John B', a folk-reworked-as-pop tune
originally brought in by Al Jardine and recorded as early as mid-1965.
Unsurprisingly, these were the two songs that remained in the live setlists for
the longest time (along with 'God Only Knows' as a special showcase for Carl
while Mike Love would listen to his beard grow).
Where I'm getting at is this: the crucial,
perhaps, difference between the ultimately successful Pet Sounds and the ultimately not-as-convincing Smile was that Pet Sounds shows the steady hand of an unusual, but generally sane artist, whereas Smile, by all accounts, would be the
documented history of the artist's gradual — in fact, rather fast — descent
into madness: a thing that easily happens to the best of us when we attempt to
bite off far more than our jaw-stretching capacity allows us physically. Among
other things, it is a lot of fun to look at Brian's photos from 1966, like the
ones included in the original artwork of the album or the endless CD reissues:
note how deeply involved, how self-assured, and how Europeanishly-cool he
always looks with that haircut and those dark frames. (Actually, it all makes
him look like Roy Orbison, but that does not contradict the generalization).
Already in 1967, that coolness starts to dissipate, frequently replaced by
vacant or frightened stares into open space. Creepy — but somewhat expectable.
So is this «the best» Beach Boys album? Or «the
best» album of all time? Or, at least, a one-of-a-kind achievement that gave
America its own Great God of Pop Music, to show all these British ruffians
where they truly belonged? I don't think one can answer this question directly
without getting politicized and ostracized. It already gave and continues to
give plenty of happy fodder for all the «Beatles vs. Beach Boys», «UK vs. US»
etc. discussions that are never conclusive because it is never clear what
exactly is the object, or what exactly are the criteria for the discussions.
It's a great way for normal people to turn into obsessive trolls overnight.
I would just say this: On its own terms, Pet Sounds is perfection. All of the
songs make sense, all of the songs have grappling power, all of the songs fit
together and give a high resolution mirror image of the sensitive, dynamic mind
of their creator, in which optimism and melancholia dwell on adjacent floors
and frequently visit each other for a friendly drink. In the historical
context, Pet Sounds is one of the major achievements of 1966, hardly a
slouch year for great music. And in the context of California boy Brian
Wilson's artistic growth — it captures that perfect moment when the teen soul
suddenly finds itself capable of thinking like an adult, all the while
retaining its teen character.
But in order to get the most sensual pleasure
out of listening to the album, one does have to have a high tolerance level for
similar-sounding, occasionally «mushy» music in which strings, chimes, and
organs are always more important than electric guitars, and steady kick-snare
drum patterns and head-bob-inducing basslines are sidestepped in favor of, uh,
far more gentle sounds. And I can understand people who would irately claim
that an album like that simply isn't
qualified for the title of «best ever», and that they'd sooner give the title
to a Mötörhead record (at one point in time, I actually shared
something close to that position).
In other words, the formula of Pet Sounds is a formula: after the first side is over, the second side sounds
fairly predictable — we already know most of the places to which Brian Wilson
has been, even if there is no problem whatsoever about freely and happily
revisiting them once again on the next six tracks. But I must say that I openly
envy those whose idea of total, limitless beauty happens to coincide with
Brian Wilson's: for these people, Pet
Sounds will be the soundtrack to their life, an endless source of support
and inspiration. (Just for the record, for myself
such a soundtrack, ever since childhood, has been George Harrison's All Things Must Pass — another soul
outbreak from a tormented loner tempered by impeccable production values, but
one that has always hit closer to home in my particular case). And, want it or
not, even if my own wavelength never quite
coincided with Brian's on this album — shouldn't a song like 'I Just Wasn't
Made For These Times' be the collective frickin' anthem for all of us, the few pathetic souls in
this world who have actually heard Pet Sounds? Aw, thumbs up.
SMILEY SMILE (1967)
1) Heroes And Villains; 2)
Vegetables; 3) Fall Breaks And Back To Winter; 4) She's Goin' Bald; 5) Little
Pad; 6) Good Vibrations; 7) With Me Tonight; 8) Wind Chimes; 9) Gettin' Hungry;
10) Wonderful; 11) Whistle In.
The story that surrounds the release of Smiley Smile is one of the weirdest
stories to have ever taken place in the music record industry. The basics are
well known, and have been accounted for over and over in countless sources (so
I will not bother retelling The Most Excellent And Lamentable Tragedy Of
Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks And How The Both Have Been Perfidiously
Betray'd By One Michael Love, An Eater Of Broken Meats If There Ev'r Hath Been
One), but that does not help them make any sense.
Put it this way. When your original idea was to
produce a groundbreaking, inspirational, more- free-than-a-bird piece of
musical art, and, in response to this, you have been tied hands and feet by
your friends, relatives, and record company; when you have just made a brave
attempt at opening your mind to all sorts of sounds, images, influences, and
substances, and your own musical colleagues have openly stated that they are
in no shape to stomach it; when, under tremendous pressure from what looks like
the entire world around you, you are finally forced to step on your ambitions
and shelve your dreams — what is the natural
thing for you to do?
Nothing could be simpler. You take a bunch of
the craziest songs from your project;
you re-record them as raw, demo-quality versions, ten miles away from the
general quality of production you are usually known for; and, as a subtle
mockery, you bookmark them with two brilliantly produced, multi-layered,
visionary mini-suites that provide a brief glimpse into what that project could have sounded like. Then you submit
this to your record company. And the record company, naturally, releases the results. Why? I have no answer other than
the basic intuition suggests — because people who work in the record industry
are fucking idiots, that's why.
Perversely, over the years Smiley Smile has achieved a cult status among a sub-section of the
indie crowd, although that could hardly have been predicted by any of the
eggheads at Capitol Records. People who tend to get a huge kick from any kind
of music that is raw, mad, and daring, often point to Smiley Smile as somewhat of a milestone, noting its uniqueness not
just in the catalog of the Beach Boys (who, until 1967, were the last group
one could ever suspect of producing something that insane), but among any records released throughout that era.
What they forget, or conveniently omit, is
that this insane «masterpiece» was produced almost by accident, and that, when
it was released on the market, not a single Beach Boy, least of all Brian
Wilson, could probably provide a coherent — or an incoherent — explanation of
what the hell it was doing on that market in the first place. (Charts
comparison: Pet Sounds – #8, Smiley Smile – #41, most likely
because the promoting DJs were smart enough to push 'Heroes And Villains' and
'Good Vibrations' on to the top of their playlists).
It goes without saying that 'Good Vibrations',
which had already been released as a single in October of 1966, while the
aspirations for Smile were still
running high, is a timeless classic, the «Ode to Joy» for its generation; and
that 'Heroes And Villains', slightly less known because of its non-anthemic
quality, is hardly any worse, going from one of the band's most upbeat,
catchiest pop grooves (so sorely missed on Pet
Sounds!) to a veritable whirlpool of vocal harmonies that completely
redefine our notions of vocal harmonies. In a pop context, that is. The coolest
thing about both these songs, though,
is that no matter how anthemic, upbeat, or band-oriented they may be, there is
still a misunderstood, romantic, tormented loner deep within each of them.
But the rest? Oh, that rest. Now that most of
us have a better understanding of what the original Smile project should have sounded like — first, through individual
songs scattered on latter era records, then through bootlegs, then through
Brian's thorough solo re-recording in 2004, now from an upcoming official
archive release, coming out forty-five years too late — I am not going to pretend that the scraps,
thrown together on Smiley Smile,
were in any way intended to be a «daring» reinvention of the original project.
Scraps they were, and scraps they are still.
As in, 'Fall Breaks And Back To Winter' is a
meaningless, repetitive, rocking-chair-style, meatless spine of a melody that
used to be the psychotic 'Mrs. O'Leary's Cow'. 'Wind Chimes' is but a hushed shadow
of a grand, stately, completely self-sufficient composition. 'Wonderful' has
one of Carl Wilson's loveliest vocal parts ever, but next to no music backing
it at all: appreciation is encouraged, enjoyment is futile.
To make matters even more complicated, at least
one brand new number had been included — 'Gettin' Hungry', a barely-comical
novelty composition, hanging upon a primitive Farfisa organ (or some other
organ) line and choral vocals, somewhat akin in spirit to Brian's «adult child
period» output in the mid-1970s. It certainly fits in well with all the other
raw deals on the album, but there is still no explanation as to why the band
decided to release it as a single —
and, furthermore, one formally credited to Brian
and Mike rather than the Beach Boys. That Mike Love, he ain't as simple as
he'd like us to think.
If the album accidentally invents lo-fi, as
some defenders have claimed, there is no more reason to love it for the fact
than it is to sanctify Little Deuce
Coupe for accidentally inventing the concept album. Of all these lo-fi
recordings, the only one that does not
sound like a hastily concocted demo is 'Vegetables' (former 'Vega-Tables'), an
experimental ode to carrots and beets that's sort of sweet, if rather slight. (The
original percussion part, in the form of a chomped-on celery, or carrot, was
provided by guest star Paul McCartney, but I am not sure if they retained the
original track on this re-recording).
To say that Smiley Smile singlehandedly destroyed the Beach Boys' reputation
would be an overstatement. Even Smile
itself, had it been originally released the way it was meant to be released, might not have stood critical and commercial
competition in the face of straightforwardly psychedelic and/or heavy rock.
Nevertheless, riding on the heels of Pet
Sounds and the 'Good Vibrations' single, expectations were really strong,
and Smiley Smile was predictably
understood as a mockery of these expectations. Basically, Brian went all-in
with that project — including his personal sanity — and lost it all. The
vehicle crashed down from overload; the next several years would be spent selling
the debris for spare parts.
Thumbs down, of course,
for an album that never had any proper reason to exist, and has done way more
harm than good — although, from a purely historical standpoint, it is somewhat of a fascinating listen
(and, of course, the two big singles are priceless, although they can always be
obtained separately on any semi-respectable collection), especially for S&M
devotees.
WILD HONEY (1967)
1) Wild Honey; 2) Aren't You
Glad; 3) I Was Made To Love Her; 4) Country Air; 5) A Thing Or Two; 6) Darlin'; 7) I'd Love Just
Once To See You; 8) Here Comes The Night; 9) Let The Wind Blow; 10) How She
Boogalooed It; 11) Mama Says.
Wild
Honey inaugurates what was
probably the most bizarre and, from a historical point of view at least, the
most fascinating period in Beach Boys history. Over an impressive seven years,
from 1967 to 1973, the band was engulfed in a near-constant state of chaos,
scandals, drugs, rushing from one half-baked idea to another, lack of
leadership, lack of purpose, clashes of ambitions and interests — the only
thing that might explain their staying together is brotherly ties, or, more
likely, the insecurity of each individual member as to whether a solo career
in music would be realizable. (In the end, Dennis and Carl only went solo after the band solidified its commercial
positions in 1976).
The seven studio albums they put out over that
period illustrate that lack of coherence perfectly. In stark contrast to every
Beach Boys record up to Pet Sounds,
they do not even provide the impression of well-rounded collections of songs
«from A to Z». None of them beat the rag-tagginess of Smiley Smile, but it is one thing to forgive one hastily concocted,
rushed-out contractual obligation consisting of briskly re-recorded demo
versions, and quite another one to sit through album after album after album,
completely devoid of any sense of purpose or quality control.
Fortunately for all of us, Smiley Smile had used up most of the hyper-experimental ideas that
Brian came up with for the SMiLe
project, and all of the subsequent records would be generally more melodic and
better produced. In fact, Wild Honey
does sound, from time to time, like
an honest-to-goodness attempt at returning to the standard practice of
recording pop music LPs. Not bizarre avantgarde experimentation; not «teenage
symphonies to God»; not intentional attempts at beating the Beatles — just a
stab at another good old regular pop music record, the way Mike Love had always
preferred it the best. It is somewhat symbolic that the album's biggest hit,
'Darlin', was partly written as early as 1963 (the verse melody is taken from
an early tune called 'Thinkin' 'Bout You Baby', donated by Brian to Sharon
Marie in 1964; the chorus, however, is brand new): Wild Honey was calling us back to basics, in feeble hopes that a Sgt. Pepper and Are You Experienced-fed public could heed the call. Naturally, it
didn't.
But it didn't not simply because, by late 1967, there was no more demand for shiny,
optimistic surf-pop. No; it didn't because, after the SMiLe fiasco, Brian's workmanship was irrepairably damaged. He did
not lose any of his genius — what he did
lose was the ability to «flesh out» that genius, the will to take his brilliant
ideas and polish them up to the same degree of perfection that characterized
his work from 1964 to 1966. Imagine a fabulous painter, with each of his new
works causing a shockwave of sensation, who suddenly abandons the canvas and
starts dealing exclusively in half-finished sketches on paper — how would his fans react to that?
Of the eleven songs on Wild Honey, nine, in good old fashion, are credited to «Brian
Wilson / Mike Love». But, as Robert Christgau, in his original review,
correctly (surprise surprise) stated, «each of the 11 tunes ends before you
wish it would». Indeed, most of the fade-outs arrive just as you start feeling
that the song has finally picked up some steam — almost as if some deranged inner
voice was telling Brian, Mike, and the others, «okay guys, time to wind it up,
you know a pop song is not supposed to last more than 2:20», forgetting that
the year was 1967, not 1963, and that even the conservative American standard
had already been revolutionized.
The craziest thing about it, however, is that
the songs themselves do not sound
very nineteen-sixty-three themselves. I mean, 'Darlin' might have been all that
old, but its re-recording, with a very much «post-Beatles» rhythmic base, a
steady brass accompaniment that shows serious influence on the part of
mid-1960s Atlantic/Motown sound, and a raw, creaky, shaky (and, because of
that, quite beautiful) vocal delivery from Carl, was quite modern for 1967,
nothing specifically «retro» about it except for the melodic moves, which are,
indeed, quite typical of early Phil Spector.
Then there is all the sexuality. Pre-Pet Sounds, Brian's songs were
innocence exemplified (so much so that even certain salacious hints inside the
lyrics could easily pass unnoticed), and on Pet Sounds itself, not much difference was made between boy-girl
and man-God relations (in all fairness, it is Pet Sounds that the Christian fundamentalists should have been
a-goin' after in 1966, not Beatles records because of John's silly throwaway
remark). Wild Honey, first time ever in Beach Boys history, explicitly
puts the body next to spirit.
Obviously, Mike Love can spend the rest of his
life explaining how the title of the album was due to the «health food craze»
going on around town at the time, but there's no way anyone in his right mind
could interpret a line like "My love's coming down since I got a taste of
wild honey" as an expression of the protagonist's sincere gratitude to his
partner because of her dedication to wholesome eating practices. It's a classy
white-boy R'n'B number, for sure, but Carl's ecstatic vocal delivery
transparently spells out orgiastic,
as do the siren-imitating theremin blasts. Clearly, from the moment that the
first copy of Carl Wilson screaming out "gonna take my life eating up her
wild honey!" descended on the open market, his fate was sealed. On that
fateful day, the man had no choice left but to start growing himself... a
beard.
And that is just the beginning. We also have 'A
Thing Or Two', which starts out as a lightweight enough bop-de-pop music hall
number... then, with a series of "do it right baby"-s and suggestive
moans and wails, lets all of us know that the days of not talking, putting your
hands on my shoulder and listening to my heart beat are long gone — today it
takes something more, uh, active than
that to get life a-goin'. And, uh, 'I'd Love Just Once To See You'? It takes an
endless one minute and fifty seconds for us to get to the real end of that statement, but we do get to see the boys overcome
the «shyness» and make their true point. And 'Here Comes The Night'? Can you
imagine that one next to, say,
'Surfer Girl'? The "Oooohh..." at the end of each chorus is about as
close as the band ever came to creating a porn movie soundtrack.
Much of this heavy-breathing raunchiness seems
«forced» — by now, we all know that the Beach Boys were no prudes when it came
to relations with the opposite sex (with Dennis at the progressive forefront
of the sexual revolution), but on Wild
Honey, it is almost as if they were fulfilling some sort of contractual
obligation, one that openly urged them to place «more flesh, less spirit» on
their subsequent albums. Fortunately, it is more often funny than annoying,
more frequently «silly» than «stupid», and as much as I'd like to dub this the
band's «cock pop» album, the fact is that, after all, it took me several years
of listening to it to get that idea, so it cannot be blatantly and obviously
correct.
Besides, all this sexuality merely adds extra
spice to the already bizarre, confused atmosphere of the album. We have not
yet mentioned the Stevie Wonder cover — why? no particular reason — or 'Mama
Says', a one-minute accappella ode to the art of teethbrushing that was cut out
of the original 'Vega-Tables' to close the album — why? because, mama, we're still crazy after all these years. Each
subsequent song on Wild Honey is
utterly unpredictable: it can end up «normal», like the tender balladry of
'Aren't You Glad' or 'Let The Wind Blow', or it can fall apart into free form
atmospherics, like 'A Thing Or Two' or 'Country Air'.
However, where the tunes that fell apart on Smiley Smile would just fall apart, because nobody gave a damn about how they would
hold together, the free-form approach on Wild
Honey is, on the whole, more motivated. This «sketch-style» approach to
recording seems more thought out and intentional, and, from that point of view,
far more similar to the «lo-fi» movement in indie pop/rock than the hazy daze
of Smiley Smile. The songs share the
same the craziness and artistic desperation, but the final result is more
easily enjoyable — making Wild Honey,
in fact, the real starting point of the last and most mysterious stage of the
Beach Boys' greatness. So, clearly, a thumbs up — for God only knows what.
FRIENDS (1968)
1) Meant For You; 2) Friends;
3) Wake The World; 4) Be Here In The Morning; 5) When A Man Needs A Woman; 6)
Passing By; 7) Anna Lee, The Healer; 8) Little Bird; 9) Be Still; 10) Busy
Doin' Nothin'; 11) Diamond Head; 12) Transcendental Meditation.
I have now reached that point in life at which
I am almost ready to accept Friends
as the Beach Boys' finest hour — or, to be more precise, their finest 25
minutes, since even at the dawn of the era of sprawling conceptual double LPs,
these buttheaded retrogrades still stubbornly stuck to Capitol's old idea of
«who needs to spend resources on recording a 40-minute LP when you can sell a
20-minute LP for the same money?» These days, though, it almost smells cool. «A
25-minute long record? In 1968?
CLASSY, man!»
It is not just 25 minutes long, though. It is
also quiet, meditative, boring, and beautiful: the most low-key they ever got. Even Smiley Smile had its double dose of epics, and Wild Honey had the upbeat pop singles. When it came to releasing a
single from this album, though, all
they could come up with was the title track — a... waltz? Little surprise that they immediately plopped down on the
charts from #19 ('Darlin') to #47; I am much more baffled by the fact that they
managed to get even that high.
In a way, Friends
destroyed the band's credibility among the «hip» crowds of the day with even
more success than Smiley Smile did a
year earlier. That album, at least,
could interest people due to its (often unintentional) psychedelic and
avantgarde qualities — Friends was
just a low-key collection of unassuming, unsubstantial quasi-pastoral sketches.
In a similar vein, on the other side of the ocean, at the very same time,
another band, The Kinks, would be lambasted by popular indifference to their magnum opus of a pastoral idilly, The Village Green Preservation Society.
But next to Friends, Village Green can pass off for a War And Peace of its category, a much
longer, much more thought out recording, none of the songs on which sound like
snippets, demos, and flash-in-the-pan ideas that Brian Wilson could come up
with one nice evening singing made on the spot lullabies to his newborn daughter,
then rush to the studio the very next day to turn them into commercial songs
offered for millions of fans.
Still, it was a troubled time, but a good time.
For starters, Mike Love was mostly absent from the sessions, delayed on a trip
to India to study transcendental meditation. It took a Mike Love to actually profit from the teachings of the
Maharishi — apparently, he returned so inspired and full of love that he not
only acquiesced in having a low-profile presence on the album, but also
contributed one of his most gorgeous vocal parts ever (on the opening forty
second-snippet 'Meant For You') and co-wrote one of the album's catchiest
numbers, a teensy-weensy kiddie tune called 'Anna Lee, The Healer', presumably
written, if you can only believe it, about a healer named Anna Lee. It is a
bit unfortunate that the song, with its lyrics going "She cures people
with her hands / I'm just one of her many fans" was released in the same
year as The Who's 'Mary Ann With The Shaky Hand', raising unhealthy associations.
Rest assured: freshly reformed from the Himalaya mountain side, Mike Love was not referring to any, er, «unhygienic»
practices. It's all about the spirit — and about beard extension.
It was also a time during which Brian was
progressively losing control of himself, which meant that the others either had
to disband and die, or start developing musical egos of their own. On Friends, Brian is still in the lead,
but, for the first time, brother Dennis comes out with two brief stabs at
composing — and these two numbers already establish his creative persona,
because their «aura» is more or less the same as that of his creative peak on Pacific Ocean Blue a decade later.
Taking his brother's approach to instrumentation and harmonies, he mixed it
with his own odd feeling of world-weariness and melancholia (what else could be
expected of the band's biggest womanizer and alcoholic?). The two songs are
stacked together — as in, «and now, a big round of applause for Little Dennis,
here to entertain you with two songs, and then he'll be back to playing with
his toy horses» — but, really, both are very good, although the rhythmic,
R'n'B-ish, almost proto-J. J. Cale-style (if you discard the harmonies, that
is) 'Little Bird' works on the senses much faster than the slow, prayer-like
'Be Still'. But be still and, eventually, its dark lightness and dreary
gladness will creep up on you.
Not that Brian's own sensibility had in any way
become diminished. 'Passing By' and 'Diamond Head', in particular, are fabulous
instrumentals that hold their own against the wordless musical bits of Pet Sounds, even despite the comparably
minimalistic arrangements. Actually, 'Passing By' began by having lyrics, which
were eventually dropped in favor of chanted harmonies — a decision that,
perhaps, the Beach Boys should have been taking more often. As to 'Diamond
Head' — here is a tune that should qualify for the Hawaiian National Anthem
(or, at least, one could consider adapting the lyrics of Hawai‘i Pono‘ī to this perky little melody).
'Busy Doin' Nothin' relates so well to Brian's
state at the time, it almost is the
perfect song to reflect that particular state — it also seems to reflect
Brian's interest in bossa nova, which is fine, because most of bossa nova is targeted at people who are busy doin'
nothin' most of the time. 'Wake The World' and 'Be Here In The Morning' are
tremendously underdeveloped... and sound fabulous that way, exactly as if Brian
just got up in the morning, wrote them on the spot, recorded them in the
afternoon, and started collecting royalties in the evening (you wish).
And so on — like I said, these days, I cannot
find a single flaw in these songs, with the possible exception of the silly
anthem to 'Transcendental Meditation' that closes the record (well, some sort of fuckup should have stemmed
from Mike Love, eventually), but even that one is mostly atrocious in terms of
lyrics ("transcendental meditation can emancipate the man", we are
told, "and get you feeling grand" — no shit, Mike!), and, anyway, is
over faster than you can actually bind the sounds into meaningful (or
meaningless) words.
Low-key, pastoral, homey, underdeveloped,
minimalistic, and all that, but none of it should be interpreted as a
criticism. This is what Smiley Smile
could have been if the bits and snippets on there had been composed and
arranged specially for the album, not hastily re-recorded in a throwaway
manner. Completely unfit for the grand ambitions of 1968, Friends is a record that, to me,
sounds far more relevant today,
rather than at the time when it was supposed to really make a difference. Thumbs up
ahoy.
STACK-O-TRACKS (1968)
1) Darlin'; 2) Salt Lake City;
3) Sloop John B; 4) In My Room; 5) Catch A Wave; 6) Wild Honey; 7) Little Saint
Nick; 8) Do It Again; 9) Wouldn't It Be Nice; 10) God Only Knows; 11) Surfer
Girl; 12) Little Honda; 13) Here Today; 14) You're So Good To Me; 15) Let Him
Run Wild; 16*) Help Me, Rhonda; 17*) California Girls; 18*) Our Car Club.
It's almost hard to believe that as late as
1968, with the «album» well established as a pop art form and all, Capitol
Records would still be willing to
fuck with its (formerly) favorite pets' LP releases — but there you have it.
Things looked pretty back, and the record people decided to make them better by
making them worse: reminding the world that, no matter how perturbed, stressed,
and worn out this band was on itself, this was utterly nothing next to the
ridiculous decisions that their promoters were still entitled to taking.
There is, however, an entire different side to
it. You sing the words and play with the
original instrumental backgrounds to 15 of their biggest hits, Capitol
writes on the front sleeve — at least three years before the invention of the karaoke machine, and quite a few years
more before the machine started actively drawing blood in revenge for Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. Come to think of it, it was
a problem: these pesky Beach Boys used to mix their vocals way high in the mix, so even if you did want to sing along to 'Catch A Wave' or 'Sloop John B', you
simply couldn't hear your own angel tone next to the lackluster hum of these
arrogant Californian teens. Now Capitol's engineers, working overtime, and at a
significant risk to their mental health, took on the task of wiping these annoying vocals, and you
can catch your own wave — and listen, without any obstacles, to the fabulous
virtuoso work of underrated guitar genius David Marks in the process.
A fabulous idea, but, for some reason, one that
failed to ignite a lot of interest. Apparently, people were not out there falling over each other in
line to get vocal-less versions of songs by one of the world's greatest vocal
bands. Silly of them, perhaps, but at least it saved us from other record
companies latching on to the idea (e. g. Layla
And Other Assorted Guitarless Songs: You play all the guitar parts of Eric
Clapton to 14 of the finest blues-rock songs ever recorded! Double fun
guaranteed with extra friend invited! Includes booklet with printed tabs and a
mini-model of Duane Allman's motorcycle etc.). Anyway, Stack-o-Tracks deservedly failed to
chart and, if that was at all possible, sunk the band's reputation even
further.
It is
good for one listen, though, provided you reprogram the tracks in chronological
order: since they are more or less evenly distributed from 1963 to 1967 (and
even include the backing track for 'Do It Again', the band's latest
summer-of-'68 single that had yet to see album release), it serves as a nice
reminder of how great the musical progression had been from those early days —
from the bare simplicity of 'Surfer Girl' and 'Catch A Wave', which are really
nothing special without the vocals, to the complexity, inventiveness, and
multiple layers of the Pet Sounds
tracks. 'Here Today', in particular, is a major standout here — one of the few
numbers that does acquire a separate
flair without the vocals: listen to what Carol Kaye is doing on that bass, clearly
outperforming Mr. McCartney without
going all flashy and virtuoso on our ears. Bet you never really heard that with
the vocals on, certainly not on your first listen, at least.
Perhaps it would have been a better idea if
Capitol simply decided to put out the backing tracks for Pet Sounds (which they eventually did), maybe mixing them with a
couple instrumental leftovers from Smile.
But that would have required the presence of somebody willing to market the
band as artists rather than has-been
teen audience attractors, and that would have required the presence of
somebody to convince somebody to be willing to market the band as artists, and
that... never mind. The stupidest thing of all is that, on some of the early
mixes, they actually had to wipe out the vocals, and they didn't do a very good
job on it. So you'll have a nasty feeling when singing along — like they're
eavesdropping on you from a faraway corner. Thumbs down.
20/20 (1969)
1) Do It Again; 2) I Can Hear Music; 3) Bluebirds Over The Mountain;
4) Be With Me; 5) All I Want To Do; 6) The Nearest Faraway Place; 7) Cotton Fields; 8) I Went To
Sleep; 9) Time To Get Alone; 10) Never Learn Not To Love; 11) Our Prayer; 12) Cabinessence;
13*) Break Away; 14*)
Celebrate The News; 15*) We're Together Again; 16*) Walk On By; 17*) Old Folks
At Home/Ol' Man River.
It took the Beach Boys almost ten years, almost
twenty albums (granted, some of them were actually compilations), one musical
revolution, one nervous breakdown, one full-grown beard, and Charles Manson —
all that and more, but on February 10, 1969, they finally released their first
true album recorded as a band, in
which every single member had the right to think of himself as an active
musical contributor. Ironically, it was also their first album of original
material to have been recorded mostly as a contractual obligation, to get them
out of the ridiculously outdated deal with Capitol. We all understand, of
course — any label that rewards its
trustiest artist of the decade with Stack-o-Tracks
deserves to be fed to the sharks.
Anyway, it could have been much worse.
Democracies in rock music can be a complete disaster, especially if they are
installed artificially (talking to you, John Fogerty). But by the end of 1968,
it was a case of do or die: Brian Wilson had almost completely lost
functionality, and his pals either had to prove that the man did teach them something vital over the
past few years, or to mutate into an irrelevant «oldies act», singing
'California Girls' to fat old ladies for the rest of their lives. Eventually,
they would do just that, but in 1969, they flat-out refused. For a brief five
year period, the flame kept burning.
Despite being quasi-mysteriously absent on the
front sleeve (he is hiding inside the gatefold, the gist of which is, alas, all
but lost on the CD generation, not to mention the Children of Napster), Brian's
presence is still felt quite strongly on the album — even if the only original
work he did for it consists of a brief, genuinely lethargic waltz suitably
called 'I Went To Sleep' (sounds seriously like a Friends-style leftover to me) and one «complete» song, 'Time To Get
Alone' — also a waltz, with chimes,
accordeons, strings, electric pianos, you name it; even on its own, it feels
deeper, denser, and tastier than most of the other stuff on here.
The rest of the album is a bizarre, but
phenomenally enticing melting pot. Dennis continues his strange odyssey with
'Be With Me', further developing and deepening the 'Little Bird' vibe — these
tired, world-weary, ominous-brass-filled bluesy grooves that skedaddle along like
a pack of ugly hobos, only to burst into huge magic flames midway through; but
this time, he also justifies his status of the band's professional hooligan
with 'All I Want To Do', a number that rocks meaner and harder than anything
the band ever did before (or after, for that matter) and culminates in a bunch
of sex noises. (How he got Mike Love to sing it is beyond me — considering how
grizzled up the man actually sounds here, must have been a tough night out).
Creepiest of the bunch is 'Never Learn Not To
Love', formerly called 'Cease To Exist'. Co-written by Dennis with his one-time
accidental acquaintance and protégé Charles Milles Manson, it is
easily the least interesting of his three tunes on here — just a bunch of
flowery harmonies with very little personal involvement — but what is actually
creepy is how it begins with twenty-five seconds of ominous-sounding grumbling
industrial noise: a fade-in that is decidedly out of sync with the tune, yet so
neatly presages the Manson disaster, even if it would only take place in the
summer of 1969. I wonder if poor Dennis ever had it in him to relisten to the
track afterwards.
Brother Carl was still not quite up to the task
of competing with the other two; but his contribution to the album has forever
been one of my favourite late-period Beach Boys tracks — a take on Phil
Spector's 'I Can Hear Music' that, production-wise and vocal-wise, is every bit
the equal and, in some ways, surpasses the proverbial Brian Wilson
gorgeousness. Even though he was the
best singer of the bunch, Carl only very rarely put his voice to proper use,
and even 'God Only Knows', at least technically, does not begin to compare with
the things he does on this track — loud, intense, and at the same time, so
subtle and caressing. The vocals are so immaculate here that never ever in
concert would they be able to do the track perfect justice.
Then there's the delightfully hickey-hockey
part. First, Al Jardine rises as the band's major folkster-in-residence.
Naturally, in between the two grand renditions of 'Cotton Fields' released that
year, I will always go with Creedence, but as little as the Beach Boys might
ever be associated with Texarkana, this version is really no slouch either. It
would probably take a synth-pop arrangement or something to kill off the power
of 'Cotton Fields' anyway.
Second, Bruce Johnston tries to finally justify
his presence in the band by simulating Brian's instrumental genius with 'The
Nearest Faraway Place'. Instead, he ends up with something that could be
mistaken as an excerpt from an Ali McGraw-starring movie soundtrack — but
there's a certain embarrassing charm in seeing him fall so flat on his face.
Much better is the cover of Ed Hicksel's 'Bluebirds Over The Mountains', a
catchy pop single recorded at Johnston's initiative. Better, that is, until
midway through guest star Ed Carter starts contributing a flashy, «furious»,
and utterly tasteless — not to mention completely out-of-place and irrelevant
on a Beach Boys record — hard rock guitar solo, clearly proving that «stupid
guitar pyrotechnics» was invented long before the hair metal movement. Still,
in this context it's hilarious rather than disgusting.
Third, the record opens with 'Do It Again'. The
idea of Mike Love harrassing Brian in mid-1968, urging him to go surf-popping
once more, may look fairly corny on paper, and the song is, technically, the very first time that the Beach Boys have so
openly embraced nostalgia, but, amazingly, they did it so well that «corny» is
the last word to be associated with the song. The spiralling vocal melody is
sunny-cool, the da-doo-ron-rons are reprised in a novel manner (so much so
that, even twelve years later, they still inspired ABBA to come up with 'On And
On And On'), and the transition between the band's near-desperate "...been
so long!" and the ensuing shrill guitar solo is fabulously climactic. As
silly as it is, and as obvious as it is that not a single Beach Boy really
truly «did it again», the old magic is still there, for 2:26, at least.
Finally, the Beach Boys also learn how to make
a living peddling little bits and pieces of Smile on the corner — current lesson involving dragging out the a
cappella 'Our Prayer' and the naturalistic 'Cabinessence', a song that must
have inspired the entire career of Animal Collective, with its unpredictable
alternations of homey on-the-porch folk chanting (to the soft strum of an innocent
bouzouki), kaleidoscopic psycho patterns, and merry-go-round vocal chants.
Putting it at the end of the album was a smart move, because, clearly, as good
or as «unusual» everything else here might be, nothing compares with a slice of
peak-era Brian. A certified resident fan might even be motivated to forgive the
band Ed Carter and Charles Manson.
As rag-taggy as 20/20 is, the rag-tagginess is authentic, and the high points shine
with an even more peculiar glow when pressed against the low points. It may
have been their goodbye to Capitol and the sunny Sixties, but, due to so much
active participation from so many band members, it actually opened a whole
window of opportunities — most of which ended up wasted, but no one could say
they weren't there for at least a little while. Thumbs up, of course.
And do not forget to have this on its proper
twofer CD with Friends: that way, you
also get access to the magnificent bonus single 'Break Away' (co-written by
Brian with his father, no less) — which might just be the last classic hit single in the classic Beach Boys style written
by classic Beach Boy Brian Wilson. ('Add Some Music To Your Day' opens a new,
and rather ambiguous, page in that legacy, but... later).
LIVE IN LONDON (1970)
1) Darlin'; 2) Wouldn't It Be
Nice; 3) Sloop John B; 4) California Girls; 5) Do It Again; 6) Wake The World;
7) Aren't You Glad; 8) Bluebirds Over The Mountain; 9) Their Hearts Were Full Of
Spring; 10) Good Vibrations; 11) God Only Knows; 12) Barbara Ann.
This last contract-fulfilling record was
released by Capitol as a last goodbye — an almost desperate gesture,
considering that the actual recording was drawn from a performance in December
1968. But it has 'Do It Again' and 'Bluebirds Over The Mountain' on it, so that
innocent bystanders could almost safely assume it post-dates 20/20 rather than precedes it. One
thing's for certain: Mike Love's beard on the front sleeve is at least thrice
as long as on the sleeve of 20/20,
and that makes for a naïve, but wholesome chronological order.
For some reason, there seems to have still been
a lot of wild girl screaming for the Beach Boys at the time — each announcement
or song start is obligatorily accompanied by howls that make short work of the
band's harmonies. On the whole, though, things had obviously calmed down a bit
since 1964's Concert, and this
presents us with a much better opportunity to enjoy these harmonies in a live
setting, not to mention the much improved track listing, on which teen fluff
like 'Monster Mash' has given way to... well, just look at those titles. The
question is: do we want to enjoy
these harmonies in a live setting?
Well, sometimes we actually do. 'Their Hearts
Were Full Of Spring', performed a cappella ("nude", as remarked by
the all-witty Mike Love), is taken without a single glitch and almost trumps
the studio original, because all the notes are conquered with the recording «breathing»
at the same time, no polish or airbrushing. That's a mean, mean feat. But most
of the other songs are marred by minor imperfections — Dennis' messing with the
rhythm (sometimes), one or two of the band members stepping away from the mike
at the wrong moment, etc., etc.; with a band of lesser stature, this would have
never been a problem, but now that you actually get to hear what the Beach Boys sound like live, every time a
single note is flubbed away from perfection, Live In London loses a point.
I must say that I also miss Brian: somehow, it
just doesn't feel right without the
mastermind. One is especially sharply reminded of that when his high-pitched
vocals on the harmonies of 'Do It Again' are replaced with an equally
high-pitched brass arrangement — a suitable substitute, but a little sad all
the same. In here, it's Mr. Love who is running the entire show, spewing out
bad jokes and clichés — I think he says "lost my head again"
at least thrice during the tracks that made it onto the album, and «God Only
Knows» how many more times he said it during the entire show — and managing to
goof off even during 'Good Vibrations' (his idea of taking sweet revenge on
Brian is to mumble "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today..." as
the organ starts off the «solemn» part of the song).
Still, what can you do about an album with not
a single bad, hell no, not a single less-than- fabulous track about it? For the
same reason that no live album by, say, Paul McCartney could ever «suck», Live In London also makes the grade.
(Actually, 'Bluebirds Over The Mountains', with a far more restrained and
subdued guitar solo second time around, beats the studio version on that kind,
so make that two tracks worth
owning). The band would sound better oiled and geared up on its subsequent
live album, three years later, but this one, available today on a 2-fer CD with
Concert, is well worth collecting
for fans of the band. Thumbs up — in a mechanical, perfunctory manner,
perhaps, but we should at least mark that Live
In London still presents the band as a living, breathing entity, not a
fossilized oldies act.
SUNFLOWER (1970)
1) Slip On Through; 2) This
Whole World; 3) Add Some Music To Your Day; 4) Got To Know The Woman; 5) Deirdre;
6) It's About Time; 7) Tears In The Morning; 8) All I Wanna Do; 9) Forever; 10)
Our Sweet Love; 11) At My Window; 12) Cool, Cool Water.
Well, now we know who was the de-facto leader
of the Beach Boys circa late '69 / early '70 — brother Dennis! It is his song, and a typically his song, that opens the album; and altogether, he gets
four of them, a feat never to be repeated. That is almost as much as Brian
contributes to this record (in fact, exactly
as much if we exclude Brian's material left over from older sessions). In
between the two of them, the brothers dominate Sunflower, making it a somewhat less collective effort than the
overtly democratic 20/20; and that
actually helped with the critics, who (justifiedly) saw this as an attempt to
return to the naïvely romantic, but still profound art-pop of the old
days. It didn't help with the public, though. Even the singles mostly bombed.
Why didn't the population at large like Sunflower? Answering that question
could be a culturologist's wet dream. Not being one, I could still risk
suggesting that, by the end of the Sixties, the one big pop market, having
become way too large for the people to assimilate in one go, had already begun
splintering into multiple small ones — and the Beach Boys simply fell through
the cracks. Although Brian was still not well, and the rest of the band had
their multiple problems, too, 20/20
at least sounded like the band had finally remembered how to put out records (because, let's admit it, Smiley Smile was a joke; Wild Honey was way too rough-hewn; and Friends was way too minimalistic), and Sunflower solidified a «formal return
to form». All of its twelve tracks are songs
— including even those whose length does not exceed two minutes — and all of
the songs are taken good care of — including even the bad ones, of which,
fortunately, there are few. So what happened?..
Actually, what may have happened is that Sunflower avoided genre definition. It
is an odd melange of influences both old (some of it sounds very Sixties) and new (some of it sounds
very Seventies), but it does not have
any sort of central running theme that would hit a loose nerve in the common
listener around 1970. These days, such things are normal — and that is why,
with time, people learned to appreciate Sunflower
more than they used to — but in the age of the concept album, armadillo tank
and all, I can sort of understand why record-buying people would be shunning Sunflower. As a «rock» album, it was
nothing next to Led Zep, and as a «pop» album, it was far too disjointed and
subtle next to the concentrated charm of Karen Carpenter.
But, as it happens, it just contains lots of
good songs. Dennis' trademark style is all over 'Slip On Through' — which just
bursts in without knocking, a simple, bawdy, rough melody, a slightly
off-kilter rhythm, vocal harmonies that seem to come from an entirely different
song, brass backing that seems to come from still another song, a climactic chorus, and it's all over before you can
actually put a tag on it. He also submits a fairly creepy «dark rocker» ('It's
About Time'), which is about as close as the Beach Boys ever got around to
being «apocalyptic»; unfortunately, his other rock'n'roll number ('Got To Know
The Woman'), written in a cocky vein, is all but incompatible with Beach Boys
aesthetics, and sounds out of place here (I'd rather listen to Alex Harvey if I
wanted that particular kind of sound). Yet this small blunder is easily
forgiven for 'Forever', his most anthemic song so far — and, arguably,
containing his sweetest vocal delivery on any record (by the time Pacific Ocean Blue came along, his
voice was already way too alcohol-shot to successfully muster sweetness).
At the same time, there is some serious
revitalization on Brian's part. 'This Whole World' is lively, loud, and
optimistic; no one could easily imagine that the man to write it would be
spending most of his days as a lost recluse. 'All I Wanna Do' is not just
tender, but a bit otherworldly: apparently, they are experimenting with voice
effects there, because the modernistic psycho-wobbling makes it impossible to
discern who is taking the lead vocal (Mike?). The lead single 'Add Some Music
To Your Day' is, indeed, the most «commercial» song on the album, and a far cry
from the complexities of 'Good Vibrations' or even 'Break Away', but as a
nice, harmless little pop song whose only purpose is to ask you to add some
music to your day, it works. (Although, chances are that if you are listening
to it in the first place, you already have
added some music to your day. Whether it may actually make a real music hater
change his mind is something that no one probably has tested yet. Hey there,
music haters round the world, this one's for you!).
Continuing the trend of saving the
best-from-the-past for last, Sunflower
says goodbye to you with 'Cool Cool Water', another five-minute suite rescued
from the rubble of Smile and brought
to relative completion, with Mike Love adding new «comprehensible» lyrics that
actually fit the suite's «watery» mood — it does flow on smoothly, gently
rocking the listener on its waves of never-faltering harmonies, quite different
from the violent Sturm-und-Drang of some of the other tracks on Smile. Really beautiful, «becalming»
stuff.
All in all, despite a few blunders here and
there — chief among them Bruce Johnston's two originals, which sound
positively lame and out-of-style next to everything else; at least 'Deirdre'
could pass for cuddly Harry Nilsson-ian fun, but the attempt at
pain-in-my-heart blue-eyed soul ('Tears In The Morning') is a blatantly corny
fake — anyway, despite a few blunders, Sunflower
is yet another of these fabulously strong late-period albums: formerly
overlooked by the masses, today given its due by the cool minorities among the
masses. Even if, «brain-wise», it could have been done «smarter» to pass the
acceptance threshold in 1970, «heart-wise», it is one of Brian and Dennis'
finest hours. Thumbs
up.
SURF'S UP (1971)
1) Don't Go Near The Water; 2)
Long Promised Road; 3) Take A Load Off Your Feet; 4) Disney Girls (1957); 5) Student
Demonstration Time; 6) Feel Flows; 7) Lookin' At Tomorrow (A Welfare Song); 8) A
Day In The Life Of A Tree; 9) 'Til I Die; 10) Surf's Up.
This and the following two albums are
inextricably linked to the Beach Boys' new management. After the commercial
crash of Sunflower, Jack Rieley, a
former radio DJ, was hired to try and do the impossible — return the band to
«respectability». Apparently, Rieley had good musical taste and a decent
understanding of the laws of the times, so it was assumed he could steer the
band in the right-est direction. The talent was still there, but you had to
process it the right way.
Even if Rieley had been a genius of planning
and organization (of which there is little indication), he still had to fight
against really tough odds. The Beach Boys, at the time, were basically divided
in two camps – the Wilson brothers and the rest (Mike/Al/Bruce). The Wilson
brothers were the artistically gifted ones, but, as it often happens with
artistic gift, also the chaotic, erratic, and relatively weak-willed ones. The
other part of the gang could care less about serious artistic ambition, but
were fairly active, and, in a large part, responsible for the overall image of
the band. They might have yearned for respectability, but they didn't have the
faintest clue as to the actual ways of earning it. But to step aside and leave
all credit to the Wilsons? No way! The «democracy» of 20/20 had given them a taste of power, and they weren't about it to
let it go.
Thus, Surf's
Up is split fifty-fifty: the «surfers» dominate Side A, while the «artists»
emerge from the shadows on Side B (with but one exception on each side). The
«surfers» mostly retain the proportions of 20/20,
whereas in the «artists»' camp, there are some changes made. For various
unpleasant reasons, not a single song by Dennis made it onto the final cut of
the LP, although at least three had been recorded. Instead, Carl finally
emerges as a composer in his own right, with two originals sitting next to two
new Brian tunes — and, of course, the crowning masterpiece of the album, the
old Smile nugget 'Surf's Up' itself.
The discrepancy between the quality of the LP's
two sides is HARSH, and I mean it. The only song by the «surfers» that, in my
opinion, stands the test of time — and, apparently, Brian is with me on that
one — is Johnston's 'Disney Girls (1957)', which is quite unmistakably written
from the bottom of the heart (leave it to a guy like Johnston to gush out
heartfelt nostalgia for the Douglas Sirk era — then again, my teenage years fell on the late
Eighties, which was a nightmare of a cultural epoch next to the late Fifties,
so maybe I shouldn't be the one to judge. Plus, I dig a Douglas Sirk movie
every now and then, and Patti Page is a marvel to look at, as long as looking
is not supplemented by listening). Anyway, it's a very touching slice of
nostalgia, beautifully arranged in the twin cloak of falsetto harmonies and
watery wah-wah effects, and the vocal part is arguably Bruce's finest ever —
soft, but not syrupy.
The rest of the «surfers»' songs may take a
hike. Rieley's biggest mistake was to demand that the guys at least write
«socially conscious» lyrics — resulting in such ridiculous misfires as Mike
Love going all rebellious on our heads ('Student Demonstration Time', a re-write
of Leiber and Stoller's 'Riot In Cell Block 9' with new, more «relevant» lyrics
— somehow it escaped Mike that the original was, first and foremost, a comic song), Al Jardine lamenting the
fate of the underdog ('Lookin' At Tomorrow', subtitled 'A Welfare Song' for
those too lazy to extract the message from the lyrics; a generic folk ballad, almost impressive with its echo effects
and harmonies, but who are they kidding?), and both of them instructing our
five-year olds — I cannot imagine the typical audience of this song being even
one year older — on the disastrous
consequences of installing cheap plumbing ('Don't Go Near The Water'). If
Rieley was actually happy with lyrics
like "Don't go near the water / Ain't it sad / What's happened to the
water / It's going bad", I will have to take back everything I said about
good taste. My bet is he just saw that it was hopeless, and gave up. Not that
the melody is much better — sounds like a nursery rhyme as well.
Taken from this point of view, Surf's Up is a complete disaster.
Fortunately, the «artists» come to the rescue — and the biggest surprise is
Carl, who contributes two magnificent ballads, not one little bit weaker than
any selection of Brian's classics. 'Long Promised Road', with its shades of
gospel, features a perfect build-up technique, although it is one of those rare
occasions where the verse melody might actually be superior to the bridge and
the climactic chorus — just because Carl is always at his vocal best in quiet,
pensive mode rather than in all-out screaming mode. And 'Feel Flows' is even
better — the lyrics are stream-of-conscious nonsense, but this is exactly what
such a title requires: just some poorly strung together, optimistic,
idealistic, Jon-Anderson-ish bullshit that still makes you feel good if you do
not think too much of it. What matters is how the song really «feel flows»
around you, totally psychedelic without embracing any superficial psychedelic
effects — although the instrumental mid-section, contrasting distorted electric
guitar with Moody Blues-ish flute, is quite in line with the light-psycho
stylings of its time (still sounds fairly unique with that combination).
Last, but not least, comes Brian, with his
three songs again intentionally or
accidentally squished together at the end of the album. Not being the biggest
fan of 'A Day In The Life Of A Tree' (sung by Jack Rieley himself in a voice
that creepily reminds one of Brian's own cracked voice circa Love You), a song that does not seem to
be able to decide whether it wants to take itself as a kiddie joke or as a
tearful metaphor, I, however, have to say that both 'Til I Die' and 'Surf's Up'
should be in the man's, let's say, Top 15 (I'm stretching the number a bit so
as to leave room for 'I'm Bugged At My Ol' Man', of course). The former was
infamously called a «downer» by Mike Love, but the song's atmosphere, strange enough, is not at all depressing — deeply
romantic, rather, in a vein that is very similar to solo McCartney, so that,
as the band chants "I'm a cork on the ocean, Floating over the raging
sea", you almost get the feeling that it's sort of nice to feel yourself like a cork on the ocean.
Then there's 'Surf's Up', somewhat altered here
from its original version by being merged with 'Child Is Father Of The Man'. I
have always been puzzled by the title — it certainly makes its appearance in
the actual lyrics ("Surf's up aboard a tidal wave"), but only in
brief passing, immediately giving way to Van Dyke Parks' usual incoherent
and poorly strung, ungrammatical nonsense ("Come about hard and join the
young and often spring you gave"). In this context, the words almost
sound like a self-ironic deconstruction of the band's former image. But, on the
other hand, there is nothing truly ironic about 'Surf's Up' — it is a stern,
solemn, religious suite that, during any live performance of Smile, would be the perfect spot to stand up and then land on one knee or
something, never mind the lyrics which any well-read person could rival in ten
minutes (and even surpass, since Parks was clearly experiencing a violent fit
of agrammatism while putting the words together — try conducing a syntactic
analysis and you'll end up having a friendly barbecue with Mike Love).
'Surf's Up' is a cold song, though. With incomprehensible lyrics, perfect, unwavering
singing (both on Brian's original demo and the new version, where Carl takes
most of the lead vocals), and an odd, echoey production that tries to weave a
Gothic cathedral around you, it approaches «classical» standards of beauty
rather than «pop» ones, and not even «romantic classical», there is something
very 18th (if not 17th) century about it. It is as «serious» as Brian ever got in his art, and I am not sure
that an utterly serious Brian is my favorite kind of Brian. But to deny the
greatness of the composition is ridiculous, and would get the denier nowhere.
Better get over it, take the hat off, and place your knees on the prayer rug.
Thumb's up aboard a
tidal wave — one that washes away the silliness of Side A and plunges you into
the magnificence of Side B. One thing that remains unexplained, though, is why
the album sleeve, the band's first since Wild
Honey not to feature all the members, reproduces James Earle Fraser's End Of The Trail. Were they afraid they
wouldn't live long enough to release one more record? Or was it just supposed
to represent a peculiar type of good luck charm?..
CARL AND THE PASSIONS: SO TOUGH (1972)
1) You Need A Mess Of Help To
Stand Alone; 2) Here She Comes; 3) He Come Down; 4) Marcella; 5) Hold On
Dear Brother; 6) Make It Good; 7) All This Is That; 8) Cuddle Up.
Here we have a bizarre, but intriguing page in
Beach Boy history. At Jack Rieley's instigation, the band fired Bruce Johnston
(allegedly for being rude and condescending to Brian, but in reality, as part
of a wicked plan to purge itself from excessively «commercial» elements, in
order to... sell more albums). At the same time, the official lineup was
expanded by the addition of two guys from South Africa: Blondie Chaplin on
bass, guitar, and vocals, and Ricky Fataar on drums and vocals. At the same time, Brian once again moved back
in the shadows, barely contributing anything to the album. Result: the least
«Beach Boy»-sounding album so far.
Basically, So
Tough is an eclectic roots-rock experience. With Carl now sporting a full
beard whose length openly challenged Mike's, and Al getting close up there, the
whole image was now closer to The Band than ever before. So Tough has it all: barroom boogie, swampy blues rock, blue-eyed
soul, even gospel. The only thing it does not
have is even a faintest trace of the good old sunshine pop band that used to do
'California Girls'.
Even Brian, on those few contributions of his
that actually made the grade, is moving here towards an earthier,
rhythm-and-bluesier sound. 'Marcella' (an ode to Brian's masseuse, no less!) at
least features the band's trademark harmonies; musically, however, it not only
recycles a few moves from 'Wild Honey', but is also completely built around a
chugging blues-boogie line of the «pub rock» variety (Brian himself admitted
that he was taking the Stones as an inspiration, even if it is sort of tough to
picture the song stuck in the middle of, say, Exile On Main St.).
But if 'Marcella' is sort of a
blues-rock/lush-pop hybrid, then 'You Need A Mess Of Help To Stand Alone',
opening the album with a rough, bristly combination of tack piano, hard-rocking
electric guitar, and relatively «street-tough» vocals from Carl, is almost pure
pub-rock (again, with the exception of some intricately mixed harmonies in the
bridge section). In the hands of the Beach Boys, it almost produces a kitsch
effect — if not for the song's catchiness and Carl's sudden miraculous ability
to make his «gruff» manner of singing quite convincing, it could have been a
gross failure; as it is, it is more of a gross surprise.
The real weak links on the album are those
songs on which the new band members dominate. 'Here She Comes' has nothing to
do with the Beach Boys proper; it's a Chaplin/Fataar collaboration, a
semi-decent blues-soul number, very generically early Seventies, could just as
well have been written by the likes of America (although I kinda like the
swampy slide solo). The soul anthem 'Hold On Dear Brother' depends on how much
credibility we issue to Blondie Chaplin's impersonation of Van Morrison (never
mind that it is the former guy who is
black, and not the latter). Personally, I wouldn't contribute any. It's all
kinda boring.
In the meantime, the «original» Beach Boys,
under the influence of all this back-to-basics stuff, retort with contributing
their first and, fortunately, last straightahead gospel number. Formally, 'He
Come Down' is successful, but «celebratory» gospel is such a miserable art form
in general that not even Beach Boy harmonies can save the tune from looking...
«cooky». To make matters worse, Mike Love contributes some ridiculously
«eclectic» lyrics à la George
Harrison that throw in references to Krishna, Zarathustra, and the Maharishi,
violating the sanctity of the genre and probably making the Rev. Jesse Jackson
quite displeased.
Overall, this whole roots-oriented approach
ended up something like 20% failure, 30% success, 50% stupefaction. The band
itself was fully aware of how much change they were introducing, hence the
album's convoluted title — the Beach Boys turning into «Carl And The Passions»
(an actual name for Carl's earliest schoolday band) and complaining how it is
«So Tough» to make this kind of record. To add to the stupefaction, the album
was originally released as part of a 2-LP set with Pet Sounds, syndicated from Capitol, as the second LP — a
tremendously silly marketing move that, naturally, did not work. Not to
mention the side effect of this decision — everybody would be inclined to
compare the two albums on their own merits. It was like, «That's the way we
were then, this is how we are now» — make your choice?
But, in the end, So Tough is saved by the bell. Wobbling between the strange and the
ridiculous on its first five tracks, it is finally directed to God's territory
on the last three. Carl's 'All This Is That' is basically a twin brother to
'Feel Flows'; more annoying Krishna references in the lyrics aside, it is an
elegant piece of «lush pop». The major hero, however, is brother Dennis, who returns
triumphantly with two more compositions in his by-now trademark «rough beauty»
style. Of these, the sprawling, aching, expressionist 'Cuddle Up' is the magnum
opus, although it may require some time to work its subtle charm on the
listener. Daryl Dragon (of the «Captain and Tennille» fame) is responsible for
the orchestration, which, on its own, would be sappy-Hollywoodish, but, in
conjunction with Dennis' grizzly-soul delivery, which it echoes directly,
produces an astonishingly cathartic effect.
So
Tough was a commercial flop
next to the relative success of Surf's
Up, and it's easy to see why: the market was already oversaturated with
roots-rock product, and the last thing anyone needed was to see a band least associated with roots-rock go
roots-rock as well. In the end, Rieley simply pushed the Beach Boys too far:
his failure to procure any serious respect for this new direction was the
first step that eventually led to his parting ways with the band, and, to
extrapolate this even further, a major reason for the band's eventual
capitulation to the nostalgic Mike Love vibe. It is one thing to demand
«seriousness» and «keeping up with the times» — but an entirely different thing
to set up alien role models, competition with whom does not come out naturally.
Maybe they should have looked up to the Moody Blues instead?..
On the other hand, time has certainly been
kinder to So Tough than to any of
the Love-reign-era records. At the very least, this album is a serious attempt
to break the ice, and if we manage to forget
that this is the same band that gave us Pet
Sounds — as much as the stupid executives at Warners tried to prevent us
from doing that — it is all at least fairly competent by the standards of
1972. And then Dennis and Carl come along and push it firmly into thumbs up
territory.
HOLLAND (1973)
1) Sail On Sailor; 2) Steamboat;
3) California Saga: Big Sur; 4) California Saga: The Beaks Of Eagles; 5) California
Saga: California; 6) The Trader; 7) Leaving This Town; 8) Only With You; 9) Funky
Pretty; 10) Mt. Vernon And Fairway - Theme; 2) I'm The Pied Piper; 3) Better Get Back In Bed; 4) Magic Transistor
Radio; 5) I'm The Pied Piper; 6) Radio King Dom.
The title implies that the album was mostly
written and recorded in sunny Afghanistan, where the Beach Boys had to migrate
after Dennis Wilson had bedded the last virgin in the States. (That incident
is, of course, transparently described in 'Sail On Sailor' with the simplest of
metaphors: "I work the seaways / Past shipwrecked daughters of wicked
waters"). Unfortunately, history has concealed from us what exactly
happened out there, but supposedly the last King of Afghanistan's removal from
power in 1973 was somehow connected. How else would you react if, without a warning, Mike Love invaded your country?
Seriously, though, Holland is a watermark. It represents the end of the short-lived
«Beach Boy Renaissance» period; their last album under the supervision of Jack
Rieley; and the last time ever that the band would at least pretend to some
sort of artistic importance (Love You
would be more of an accidental aberration than a strong, concentrated effort to
be reborn). The album failed to go gold, but was not a commercial disaster,
either, and gained some critical support as well — implying that, perhaps,
more of the same would follow — but, with Carl and Dennis following their
genius brother on the roads to self-destruction, this was not to be.
Like every other post-Pet Sounds album, Holland
is a mixed affair. It is clearly a very careful and thoughtful record; I would
even go as far as to say that it is the band's most intelligently construed
and performed work since 1966. There is not a single sheer embarrassment here à la 'Student Demonstration
Time'; not a single half-finished snippet to leave the listeners grinding their
teeth in frustration; not a single reckless experiment for experiment's (and
insanity's) sake. It is also the only album in the band's catalog on which they
show themselves capable of handling «mature» issues with adequate maturity (e.
g. on Carl's 'The Trader', a convincing ode against the evils of colonialism
and racism).
On the down side, Holland may be a bit too «heavyweight» for the Beach Boys. It's not
even the fact that almost all of the tracks are emotional downers (yes, even
'California Saga'; we'll get to that in a moment) — what with the band's
then-current state, that would be expected. It is the overall sound of the
record, heavily dominated by various sorts of keyboards and highly dense
baroque harmonies, that gives the impression of clear-cut melodic hooks
sacrificed in favour of soulful atmosphere. And that impression does not go
away with additional listens: unfortunately, at this point it simply seems to
me that most of the songs here are not too well-written.
In-frickin'-fact, as much as I hate to admit
it, the best creation on Holland,
the way I currently see it, is the nostalgic 'California Saga', written by none
other than our good friends Al Jardine and Mike Love, the «normal working guys»
of the band. Pretty soon they would be having this band standing on its hind
paws and jumping through burning hoops, but at the moment, being stationed in
one of the artsiest places in Europe, they felt obliged to come up with
something suitable, and developed this three-part suite that, for once, sounds
like a genuine love confession, rather than a well-calculated commercial bait
(its very format would prevent it from being released as a single, and it never
was).
From the gentle opening waltz of 'Big Sur',
through the pathos-imbibed, but far from cheap-sounding, «grand» piano-backed
poetic recital of Robinson Jeffers' poem "The Beaks Of Eagles", to
'California' proper, the sunniest-sounding bit on the record that evokes
distant memories of 'California Girls', this ten-minute Love/Jardine piece
is, by all means, the highest point
they ever scaled — perfect proof for the idea that «commercial accessibility»
and «artistic impulse» can go hand in
hand, even when these are the same hands that have so often found their resting
place on Brian Wilson's throat. 'California', in particular, mixes the
brightness and bounce of surf-pop with a country-rock flavor, not forgetting to
draw on the band's entire vocal harmony experience.
On the other hand, Dennis' contributions are a
little disappointing, not the least because, for some reason, Dennis does not
take the lead vocal on them — and his manner of composing and arranging
material has always seemed to me compatible only
with his own manner of singing: it was all about the contrast between the
gruffness of the voice cutting across the lushness of the music. Here, however,
Carl takes over the microphone, and the overt sweetness of his delivery, combined
with the overt sappiness of the music, completely ruins 'Only With You' for me
— it ends up sounding like generic early 1970s soft balladry, even if it
honestly does not deserve to sound
that way. 'Steamboat', structured melodically to resemble the steady clang and
roll of the engine, is a bit more interesting, but also a bit more
sleep-inducing. In short, these are Dennis songs without the Dennis essence —
no visible signs of ache, paranoia, or disturbance of any kind that used to
constitute the marrow of his artistry (and would soon continue to do that in
his solo career).
Carl's own 'Trader', as I already said, is one
of the band's most successful attempts at a little social bite, but even as it
succeeds as a serious statement, it is not a masterpiece of songwriting — lots
of emphasis on the lyrics which roll along in a monotonous manner, and,
although some of the lines are delivered beautifully, even the beauty gets
tedious after a while if the artist does not stray from the exact same «beauty
line» every once in a while. And it does not help that, at over five minutes in
length, this second-lengthiest song on the album is immediately followed by the
first-lengthiest one — and also the weakest link: the unhappy duo's (Chaplin
and Fataar's) 'Leaving This Town', a languid, near-comatose piano ballad that,
of all things on Earth, seems to have been inspired by Elton John's 'Rocket
Man' (as well as by ELP's 'Lucky Man' when it comes to the tedious synthesizer
solo). Not only does this song have nothing to do on a Beach Boys album, it is
simply not a very good song, period. Maybe if Elton played and sung it, and
Keith Emerson took charge of that synth solo... but let us turn our thoughts to
merrier matters.
Chaplin and Fataar's second contribution, 'We
Got Love', was eventually replaced by Brian's 'Sail On, Sailor' (the former
would later resurface on the ensuing live album); a wise move, but, alas, 'Sail
On, Sailor' is not one of Brian's masterpieces, either. Its mixed
folk/R'n'B-ish flavour is not the man's proper specialty, and even if the
lyrics could be said to capture the band's, and Brian's own, turbulent state at
the time, the capture is rather perfunctory. Plus, why the hell is Blondie
Chaplin singing it and not Brian himself? Even if, by 1973, he'd already mostly
lost his old voice, a «cracked» Brian Wilson delivery of these troubled lyrics
would sound far more authentic. Much better is 'Funky Pretty', the real «lost gem» from this album — a
gloomy, moody chunk of piano-based art-pop, also with R'n'B overtones, but far
more complex and less easy to crack.
On the other hand, it is also telling that
Brian's real major «project» of 1973, included as a bonus EP together with the
original Holland, was a musical
«adult fairy tale»: 'Mount Vernon And Fairway', a sort of allegorical tale
about an unhappy prince discovering «The Pied Piper» in a magic radio. (Yes,
children, «the prince» is Brian Wilson, «The Piper» is his musical genius, and
the brothers who re-discover «The Piper» after it conceals itself from the prince
are... well, take a guess). The project is anything you want it to be —
intriguing, sad, disturbing, etc. — but it certainly ain't no precious
mini-symphony. The music is actually quite minimalistic and, by Brian's usual
measures, totally predictable. There is some fieldwork here for Freud's and
Jung's disciples, but for the average music lover? Nope.
All in all, Holland is decidedly a mixed bag, and it is better to treat it as a
whole — a respectable stab at respectability — than concentrate on its individual
aspects one by one. Still, even with all its flaws, it managed to sound
relatively modern, and keep the band's head above the water for a bit more
time. Besides, any album on which Mike Love manages to own ten minutes worth'
of artistic integrity automatically warrants a thumbs up.
IN CONCERT (1973)
1) Sail On Sailor; 2) Sloop
John B; 3) The Trader; 4) You Still Believe In Me; 5) California Girls; 6) Darlin';
7) Marcella; 8) Caroline No; 9) Leaving This Town; 10) Heroes And Villains; 11)
Funky Pretty; 12) Let The Wind Blow; 13) Help Me, Rhonda; 14) Surfer Girl; 15) Wouldn't
It Be Nice?; 16) We Got Love; 17) Don't Worry Baby; 18) Surfin' U.S.A.; 19) Good
Vibrations; 20) Fun, Fun, Fun.
I've said it once, twice, and thrice, and I'll
say it again: I do not fancy the idea of a Beach Boys live show, much less a live album.
At their best (and even at their so-so), the Beach Boys were the perfect studio band, and such things
as «spontaneity», «rock drive», «getting in the groove», etc., could only hurt them
rather than help. No matter how hard they tried, they could not get the same
kind of perfection on stage — nor could they re-cast their stuff in a
significantly different way for live audiences, different enough to be
justified. They could come close to
perfection — but that only makes the whole experience even more frustrating, because
who the heck needs close-to-perfection if you can get complete perfection
instead?
And if anything in the Beach Boys' live catalog
ever comes close to perfection, it is, without a doubt, the double In Concert album from 1973. The shows
were recorded in 1972 and 1973, at the height of the band's artistic and
«reputational» comeback. Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar, as questionable as
their songwriting contributions were to the band's catalog, added plenty of extra
power on stage: good harmony singers and
good extra musicians (especially Fataar, who really helped the band out at a
time when Dennis had lost his drumming capacities through a hand injury. Not
that Dennis felt good enough at the time to drum with as much passion as he did
in the innocent Sixties — even if there were nothing wrong with his hands).
Then there is the amazing setlist, of course.
The double LP allows to cover plenty of ground, running the gamut from the
classic surf-era hits to the mid-Sixties artistic peaks and, finally, to the
band's more recent experimental period — a whole four pieces from Holland are present (five, if we
include 'We Got Love', another Chaplin/Fataar number originally intended for
that record, but pulled off at the last moment to make room for the «hit
single» 'Sail On, Sailor'). Anyone shrugging their shoulders and saying «so
what?» should be reminded that, in a matter of months within the release of this album, The Beach Boys would drop
the bulk of «serious» material from their setlists, and just go back to being
the Beach Boys, concentrating on the old sunny day hits — sure it looked a bit
quirky, what with all the band members sporting big bushy beards, but hey, as
long as they keep paying for the tickets...
And if that
wasn't enough, how about the big fabulous surprise of the show? NO MIKE LOVE
BANTER WHATSOEVER. Repeat: MIKE. LOVE. SHUTS. THE. FUCK. UP. Not a single goddamn
"Lost my head again!" anywhere
in sight. It is almost like he existed only
to take lead vocals on the old surfin' classics, for which he continued to
remain the best choice. It is almost like paradise. No wonder this couldn't be
kept up for much longer.
However, feelings become a little more mixed
when we come to consider the subtle changes introduced in the live versions.
'Sloop John B' gets something like a million extra instruments, including
countrified electric guitar, banjo (I think? I may be wrong here), and other
stuff, cluttering the perfectly constructed musical card house of the
original. It's not exactly 'Sloppy John B' in the end, but the bits of chaos
annoy me. 'Help Me, Rhonda' gets a distorted hard-rock boogie line for its
spine, which is fairly inadequate for the song's feather-light character —
hell, why not a Tony Iommi tone if you are all for «toughening it up»? 'Funky
Pretty', as if to justify its title, gets a genuine «funky» introduction that
has nothing to do with the song itself, and the seams certainly show as they
switch into the pop piano melody without a warning. 'You Still Believe In Me',
in the place of the opening harpsichord/deep echoey vocal duo, gets an electric
keyboard /Theremin introduction — nice, but, again, a rather poor substitute
for the baroque beauty of the original. (And hearing Al Jardine do it instead
of Brian is also saddening).
This list could go on a bit, but the
illustration is sufficient: changes are few, and in most cases, they detract
from the originals rather than re-open them in a new light. Exceptions would
include 'Leaving This Town', slightly improved with an electric organ solo
instead of the silly Emerson-style Moog solo on the original (but the song is
still as un-Beach Boys as ever), and 'Marcella', one single case where the
«toughening» works, since, according to Brian, the song was originally
envisioned as sort of a Stones tribute, and the crunchier rhythm guitars and
sharper slide solo guitars on here do convey some sort of an Exile On Main St. vibe, for a moment.
The same complaints go for every instance of a
flubbed or «swallowed» vocal note — of which, granted, there are very few examples,
but each one stabs through the heart. With Concert
at least, you could ascribe these flubs to the band not being able to hear
itself behind the yelling, but here they have no excuse — other than,
admittedly, it is hard for the likes of Carl Wilson to play rhythm guitar and
hold up a perfect voice melody at the same time, and it is utterly admirable
that he is still able to do that, say, 90% of the time. But for those of us who
expect nothing less than perfection from the way a Beach Boys album is
delivered (technically, I mean — we cannot always expect ideal songwriting),
this is still a serious letdown.
In
Concert must be heard — throughout the 1970s, the Beach Boys remained a
significant live attraction (in fact, as their studio reputation plummeted,
their live one kept going up), and this album very well explains why. And yet I
do not think that it is ever going to remain highly ranked on anyone's
playlist. Thumbs
up, because the record is unimpeachable on formal grounds, is still
a major pleasure to listen to on its own, and a satisfying swan song for The
Beach Boys, soon to be disbanded, reshuffled, restructured, and renamed «The Al
And Mike Love Show».
15 BIG ONES (1976)
1) Rock And Roll Music; 2)
It's OK; 3) Had To Phone Ya; 4) Chapel Of Love; 5) Everyone's In Love With You;
6) Talk To Me; 7) That Same Song; 8) TM Song; 9) Palisades Park; 10) Susie
Cincinnati; 11) Casual Look; 12) Blueberry Hill; 13) Back Home; 14) In The
Still Of The Night; 15) Just Once In My Life.
Strange, controversial times did not
automatically end for the Beach Boys with their separation from Jack Rieley.
The story that one usually hears goes like this: after Capitol, in 1974,
released the double-LP compilation Endless
Summer, lightly packed (five
songs per one LP side — typical miserliness on the part of said record label)
with old Beach Boy hits, it suddenly took off, hitting #1 and spending lots of
time on the charts. This prompted Mike Love and Al Jardine to take control in
their hands and recast the band as an «oldies act», dumping most of the
experimental material from the past six years and concentrating on the likes of
'Surfin' USA'.
Then, out of the blue, it was decided that the
band would get a big boost by «officially» returning Brian Wilson to the
forefront. Considering that, by 1975, Brian had turned into a complete moral
and physical wreck — bed-ridden, depressed, drugged, overweight, with a beard to
rival Mike Love's hairiest days — this might have been a semi-decent idea; at
the very least, it put extra pressure on the man to return to a relatively
normal life. Unfortunately, the pressure also happened to be premature and
inadequate. Due to psychological «instability», Brian's songwriting instincts had
mutated into something utterly weird, sort of an eerie mix of old-time baroque
influences, mental ward improvisation, and Sesame
Street. Furthermore, his voice was totally shot, transformed into an old
man's hoarse rasp, never again to even remind one of its former Pet Sounds beauty. And he hadn't done
any serious production work — one that would be as technically complex as what
he did in 1966 — for almost a decade.
In fact, it was Brian's, not anybody else's,
idea that a good thing for the band would be to release an album of «golden
oldies»: which just goes to show how deranged he was at the time, because,
according to common consensus and my own opinion as well, the «oldies» part of 15 Big Ones is easily its worst
segment. The idea to open the proceedings with 'Rock And Roll Music' is one of
the worst reputational moves in Beach Boy history, period. Even in the early
surf age, the band probably could not have handled the Berry anthem properly; this typically mid-Seventies version,
with its slowed-down tempo, falsetto harmonies, Bay City Roller-style guitar
tones, jazz-pop brass backing, and, ultimately, a carnival-style rather than
rock-rave-style atmosphere, is an abomination — an insult to rock'n'roll as a
genre and the Beach Boys as a band.
The «poppier» oldies that the band chose to
perform are not nearly as offensive as the opener, but generally match it in
blandness and uselessness. Sappy-happy, trivially arranged (for the most part,
relying on a very ugly keyboard sound), nobody needs to hear the Beach Boys
sing 'Chapel Of Love', or 'A Casual Look', or 'Palisades Park', etc. Even as a
light distraction — nobody needs to be serious all the time — they end up
annoying rather than entertaining, and, if the originals were good in the first
place, spoiling them rather than improving upon their hidden potential.
On the other hand, the mediocre-to-abysmal
quality of the covers has obscured the quality of a small bunch of originals. A
malfunctional Brian Wilson is still better than a dysfunctional Brian Wilson,
and, with a whole five «big ones» co-credited to the man in person, he still
managed to sow a few more good seeds — in fact, they quite transparently
presage his style on Love You. He
returns to the «snippet» style of old: ultra-short, concise chunks of melody,
sliced out on the piano and disappearing into nothing almost as soon as they
emerge. The paranoid plea of 'Had To Phone Ya' (he delivers the line "come
on, come on, come on and answer the phone" almost as if he believed he
really had a phone in his hand); the
madman music hall of 'That Same Song'; the rough amateur stomp of 'Back Home' —
all of this gives us the same Brian Wilson that would, next year, attract far
more attention, because none of this attention would be dissipated by cheesy
covers of Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and, God help us, Joe Seneca (although I
must admit that Carl's angel-voice on 'Talk To Me' is one of Side A's modest highlights).
Overall, the poor reputation of 15 Big Ones is unquestionably deserved
— but it could have been much better,
if not for Brian's sudden and odd penchant for cover material, or Mike and Al's
pressure on him to put out a new album as soon as possible. It is very
fortunate that the standard CD edition has paired the album with Love You: that way, all of the
suspicious covers can simply be edited out, so that one simply gets a bigger Love You, expanded by a short bunch of
same-style precursors. Also, all of the band members desperately need a shave, but do I really have to tell that to anyone?
LOVE YOU (1977)
1) Let Us Go On This Way; 2) Roller
Skating Child; 3) Mona; 4) Johnny Carson; 5) Good Time; 6) Honkin' Down The
Highway; 7) Ding Dang; 8) Solar System; 9) The Night Was So Young; 10) I'll Bet
He's Nice; 11) Let's Put Our Hearts Together; 12) I Wanna Pick You Up; 13)
Airplane; 14) Love Is A Woman.
This is what 15 Big Ones would have sounded like, had all of its songs been originals: the real culmination of the «Brian Is Back!» movement, for which we
have to thank Brian's infamous therapist Eugene Landy — it was his strictest
demand that Brian's return to regular composing work be part of the therapeutic
treatment. The result was The Beach Boys
Love You — the first album since Pet
Sounds, on which all of the material was credited to Brian Wilson.
Curiously, Love
You has been splitting Beach Boy fans for more than thirty years. The
admirers point out that the album was the last artistically-oriented
«non-product» offering from the band, the last one to truly and genuinely
feature Brian in creative control, and simply the last one to consistently
offer quality material. The detesters point out that most of the songs are too
overtly childish (sometimes, downright stupid); the arrangements are a far cry
from Pet Sounds, ranging from too
primitive to too ugly; and Brian's handling of the lead vocals on most of the
tunes is unbearable — with the previous four years of drugs and booze taking a
heavy toll on his vocal cords, the former messenger of heaven has pretty much
mutated into a hoarse hobo.
Both sides have their reasons. Love You is plagued by mostly
inavoidable problems, and could have been much better. But it is also a record
that really sounds like nothing else, and, although I cannot speak for
everybody, I definitely vouch that there is
a nerve channel to guide this music inside one's subconscious — all you need
to do is unlock it. Love You is,
truly and verily, an album by a madman undergoing therapy (as opposed to, for
instance, Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean
Blue, released the same year, an album by a patient slipping into madness
and desperation). Many of the songs almost give you the impression of an ailing
genius «re-unlocking» his talent, as if slowly recuperating after a long-term
physical and mental paralysis. So it is clumsy, naïve, childish, silly —
and, at the same time, touching, inspiring, and quite optimistic.
The format of a typical Love You song is quite uniform. Dominated by Brian's piano or
organ, built upon one or two repetitive hooks, featuring simple, but often
grappling melodic hooks, and generally downplaying the band's vocal harmonies
in favour of a rougher delivery. Lyrics still concentrate on love themes, but
fairly often it is not even clear what is the object of love — 'I Wanna Pick You Up', sung by Dennis (who is, by
now, closely competing with his brother for the «Booziest Downgrade in Beach
Boy History» title), begins with the lines "I'd love pick you up / 'Cause
you're still a baby to me", and ends with the risky suggestion of
"pat, pat, pat her on the butt", hardly a preferable approach to
one's girlfriend, but that is just the way Brian's strange mind happened to
work at the time.
There is plenty of admirable weirdness on the
album. 'Johnny Carson' is an anthem of admiration for the host of The Tonight Show that any normal person
would consider to be tongue-in-cheek ("Who's the man that we admire? /
Johnny Carson's a real live wire!"), but which, in Brian's conscience,
most probably wasn't. 'Ding Dang' is a one-minute outtake from a «kiddie
session» with Roger McGuinn as official guest, sounding like a «parody on
parody» — all those early 1960s comic numbers processed through a sick mind's
perspective. 'Mona', two minutes of Dennis howling out a repetitive vocal
melody with an emphasis on repeating the first word of each line four times in
a row. Some of the songs remind of the quiet pastoralism of Friends ('The Night Was So Young'); one
or two, in an exceptional manner, come close to recapturing some of the
complexities and psychedelic nature of Smile
('Solar System'). There is even one very old outtake ('Good Time') that still
features Brian's original voice — a
jarring contrast, to be sure, but quite well agreeing with the overall
confused nature of the album.
At the very least, Love You is utterly fascinating — that's for sure. As to whether it is enjoyable, well, I do not like either Brian's singing (the most
soulful song on the album, 'Love Is A Woman', could certainly use a better
vocalist) or his playing (that organ tone which, for reasons unknown, he fell
in utter love with since 1976, is quite bland and ugly), but I find his ability
to string notes together unimpaired, and what he may have lost in the
«perfectionism» department, he had gained in straightforwardness. Where a
single Pet Sounds song probably took
weeks and months to reach the desired state, a single song on Love You sounds, at least, as if it were composed, arranged, recorded, and
mixed in about ten minutes, but with a certified supernatural being taking over
the important parts of Brian's brain and directing him in just the right direction.
In other words, there is a certain odd streak
of magic associated with Love You,
and, apparently, I share the position of R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck on this
one — he has gone on record claiming Love
You to be his favorite Beach Boy album. Me, I am just a poor guy who would
never dream of going that far, but I do refuse to let the shortcomings of the
record overshadow its unique quality. Thumbs up from the proverbial bottom of the
proverbial heart; no matter how much the brain is tempted to appeal the
decision, it's way too much of a drag to prepare the proper papers.
M.I.U. ALBUM (1978)
1) She's Got Rhythm; 2) Come
Go With Me; 3) Hey Little Tomboy; 4) Kona Coast; 5) Peggy Sue; 6) Wontcha Come
Out Tonight; 7) Sweet Sunday Kinda Love; 8) Belles Of Paris; 9) Pitter Patter;
10) My Diane; 11) Match Point Of Our Love; 12) Winds Of Change.
Although I completely understand the regular
fan disdain for M.I.U. Album, I have
never really shared it. Yet on the surface, there seems to be every reason for
hating it. With Love You failing to
repeat the commercial success of 15 Big
Ones, it was hardly surprising when Reprise Records, with which the band
was now affiliated, refused to release Brian's subsequent project in the same
vein, the much-bootlegged Adult / Child.
This sent the band into further chaos, exacerbated by Brian once again
retreating into drug asylum. Consequently, Mike and Al dragged Brian to Maharishi
International University in Iowa, force-fed him some meditation, and, in
between the three of them — Dennis and Carl are present only marginally, adding
vocals on a couple of the tracks — quickly concocted this certified «piece of
product» instead.
With Al Jardine as producer and Mike once again
writing most of the lyrics to Brian's melodies (and thus, gaining access to the
general «mood» of the songs), M.I.U.
Album is a bizarre mix of retro
light pop (which mostly dominates Side A) and contemporary light pop (Side B, with a little bit of
contamination). This safeguards the record from being derided as either an
«unabashed transformation into an oldies act» or a «cheesy attempt at trendy
commercialization» — because it is both
at the same time!
That said, at least the retro stuff, per se, is
okay. Brian's 'She's Got Rhythm' and the cover of the Del-Vikings' old hit
'Come Go With Me', in particular, open the album with a solid 1-2 punch. Brian
even somehow manages to resurrect the good old falsetto for 'She's Got Rhythm'
(that's him, right?), and, as simple
as the song really is, its melodic structure and vocal arrangements could
easily land it into the «second-tier» group out of the band's pre-Pet Sounds years. Basically, so what if
they are all fifteen years older and
bearded? When the Beatles climbed out on the roof in 1969 and played the
six-year old 'One After 909', it's not as if anybody complained.
Further in the band's favor, the arrangements
on the retro-oriented stuff are much better here than they were on 15 Big Ones, with less emphasis on
carnivalesque pump organ and glitzy brass and more on guitars, pianos, and
group harmonies. Hence, a «generic» cover like Buddy Holly's 'Peggy Sue', no
matter how superfluous, still sounds much more genuine than the butchered 'Rock
& Roll Music'. And Brian's «sole survivor» from Adult/Child, 'Hey Little Tomboy', fares much better with Brian and
Mike sharing the lead vocals and its thick instrumental arrangement than similar
songs fared on Love You, even if the
melody is more nursery-like.
On the down side, every now and then the retro
spirit gets officially unbearable — most openly so on 'Kona Coast', which goes
as far as to snatch the old vocal hook off 'Hawaii': a direct sequel to a
fifteen-year old song that was originally geared towards fifteen-year olds is,
on any rational planet of ours, considered «corny», and its «corniness» tends
to be infectuous here — the more battered old tricks Mike, Al, and Brian pull
out of the dusty hat, the more they embarrass their grown-up audiences.
But this downside does not even begin to
compare with the downside of songs like 'Belles Of Paris', 'Match Point Of Our
Love', and 'Winds Of Change'. The latter two, in particular, sound like they
had been freshly extracted from some musty Top
of the Pops show, surmising blue eyes, cowboy moustaches, modestly hairy
chests, acoustic guitars, and so much «soul» your brain could easily drown in it. This is the first
time the Beach Boys actually start paying attention to «pop fashion» in the
1970s, and I don't like it (big surprise) — I'd much rather hear a hundred new
variations on 'Surfin' USA', no matter how hopelessly out of touch with said
fashion.
In the big picture, M.I.U. Album was the final blow that destroyed the Beach Boys'
reputation, and one from which the band never recovered. Brian could still
materialize good melodies, but he was no longer responsible for shaping them
out; and, although this record still
manages to keep the nostalgic and the trendy tendencies somewhat apart,
subsequent ones would squish them together, resulting in all sorts of
horrendously tasteless mutations. Yet, on a song-by-song basis, M.I.U. Album probably has more good
songs than bad ones, and a «simply good» Beach Boys song, even from their late
period, is still worth hearing, liking, and owning. So I would recommend a
little bit of sympathy for the record.
L.A. (LIGHT ALBUM) (1979)
1) Good Timin'; 2) Lady Lynda;
3) Full Sail; 4) Angel Come Home; 5) Love Surrounds Me; 6) Sumahama; 7) Here
Comes The Night; 8) Baby Blue; 9) Goin' South; 10) Shortenin' Bread.
The follow-up to M.I.U. Album is a somewhat more collective effort — we now have
writing and arranging contributions from all five members, and, in addition,
Bruce Johnston is back from exile, taking the producer's seat and setting the
stage up for the band's final descent into Reputational Hell. But that
wouldn't truly occur until next year; in 1979, the band was still floundering,
and L.A. at least saw a couple risks
taken, a couple opportunities made use of, and a few embarrassments that were
at least surprising in all of their embarrassing boldness. It is the last Beach
Boys album I could claim to «like», if hardly respect.
More collectivism means more eclectic choices,
and a sense of creative chaos and commotion that, one could say, rivals 20/20 — just like ten years ago, the
album involves everybody vying for attention and no creative control
whatsoever, à la «anything goes». In 1969, this worked fine; in 1979, it
could hardly be the same way. With Brian's mind still in a haze and Brian's
backlog of solid material mostly exhausted; with Dennis focusing what drugs and
booze condescended to save of his talent on his solo career; with Carl's
passion for «angelic arrangements» gradually turning into an embrace of «adult
contemporary» values; and with Mike's and Al's ever-increasing penchant for corny
gimmicks — clearly, L.A. promised to
be a mess, and it was.
The main anti-hero of L.A. still turned out to be Bruce Johnston, whose main claim to
fame here is the rearrangement of 1967's 'Here Comes The Night' as a hot
eleven-minute disco number. The only time the band ever dabbled in disco, it
was a critical disaster, but still managed to snatch its approximately five
seconds of fame (given that 1979 was disco's last year of prominence) among
club-goers. All I can say is — if you manage to forget that this is the Beach Boys (or think about it as some
trendy joker's remix of a Beach Boys number, without the band themselves being
involved), it's a fair enough disco attraction for the likes of John Travolta.
Nothing more. But it does waste eleven minutes of running time...
...which, given the quality of some of the material, could have
certainly been put to better use. As far as I am concerned, this is Dennis'
last big hurray: 'Love Surrounds Me', an outtake from the sessions for his
second solo album Bamboo, which
never came to pass in his own lifetime, is a typical D.W. confessional number
(grizzled vocals + tender string and keyboard arrangements = Dennis heaven),
and 'Baby Blue' is a nearly-ambient atmospheric piece that may not be too memorable,
but is grand and lush in classic Beach Boys tradition.
Brian's contributions, both of them outtakes
from older epochs, bookmark the album: 'Good Timin' is a retro ballad, with
harmonies straight out of 'Surfer Girl', but mixed with... some might say,
maturity, others would call it mid-age soft-rock boredom (heading straight into
mid-age and finding more tolerance for soft-rock each day, I still give it a
plus); and 'Shortenin' Bread' is just a goofy, dumb old coda that would not be
out of place on Love You. His
presence is thus drastically reduced from M.I.U.
times — but, in those troubled days, would anyone notice?
Al's 'Lady Lynda', a fast-paced ballad tribute
to his wife loosely based on a Bach piece (! — guest musician Sterling Smith
plays the actual melody of 'Jesu, Joy Of Man's Desiring' on the harpsichord),
is not great, but modestly catchy and humble enough to be pleasant; Mike Love,
in the meantime, sets his sight on the Far East and delivers 'Sumahama', the
first song in the Beach Boys catalog to have been written exclusively by him
(if we count 'Big Sur' as only part of the collective 'California Saga') — and
a fairly decent Japanese-stylized trinket it is, even if everything about it, each single chord and each single lyric,
sound clichéd. Somehow, when all the clichés fall into place, I
still find myself liking it every single time. At the very least, everyone
simply has to admit that, in choosing
between 'Sumahama' and 'Kokomo'... that is, if one is ever forced to choose
between... never mind.
Curiously enough, my conscience selects Carl
Wilson as the largest failure of L.A.
His three numbers presage the soft, sweet, and utterly hookless adult
contemporary he would sink into in his own solo career, and even sharing lead
vocals with Dennis on 'Angel Come Home' does not help matters much (even if
that's just the right way Dennis could always save one of his hookless numbers from failure — by singing it like a
TB-stricken street bum with a big heart). His brief artistic rise in 1971-73
and his vocal presence on some of Brian's best numbers had always obscured the
fact that, to a large part, he simply missed the opportunity of rescuing the
band late in its career — abandoning invention and creativity and relying
entirely on the dubious power of «beautiful» synth tones and formally
«beautiful» singing.
But even so, the production on these C.W.
numbers is still miles ahead of what we would be seeing very, very soon. As it
is, L.A. is the last Beach Boys
album I would — with a fair warning — recommend to anyone. At the very least,
it is diverse. There's your adult contemporary balladry, your Saturday Night Fever, some Bach, a Mikado tribute, Dennis' bully-eyed soul,
you name it. Even if you happen to think it all sucks — a respectable opinion —
the think is well worth happening. A gullible thumbs up it is.
KEEPIN' THE SUMMER ALIVE (1980)
1) Keepin' The Summer Alive;
2) Oh Darlin'; 3) Some Of Your Love; 4) Livin' With A Heartache; 5) School Day
(Ring! Ring! Goes The Bell); 6) Goin' On; 7) Sunshine; 8) When Girls Get
Together; 9) Santa Ana Winds; 10) Endless Harmony.
This is where it ends, and salvation is no
longer even a remote option. The late 1970s saw the band wobbling between the
crass, the silly, the occasional flash of experimentation or creativity, and
the very sporadic outburst of genius. In other words, the band was down on its
luck, but still somewhat alive and struggling; it was, at the very least,
curious to watch that struggle.
With the new decade on the horizon, Mike Love
was all set to clench his teeth, tighten his grip, and achieve sanity and
stability. A noble goal, but at what cost? The much-discussed image on the
front sleeve gives us the answer. They may be «keepin' the summer alive», yes –
but a completely fake, artificial summer at that, kept on technological life
support. As corny as their comeback was announced on 15 Big Ones, it is to Keepin'
The Summer Alive that we ought to award the title of «First Ever Genuinely
Awful Beach Boys Album». And by «genuinely awful», I mean exactly what I say —
I'd rather have an album on which every second song was a variation on 'Bull
Session With Big Daddy' than this one.
However, it is not the worst produced Beach
Boys album, nor is it the least melodic. Its awfulness lies in its «aura». The
motto is simple: «Whatever we are in real life, let us be infectiously happy
and merry in the studio», a fairly strange attitude for a band in a state of
complete moral wreck, twice as strange considering that «infectiously happy and
merry» was certainly not even the prevailing
mainstream musical vibe in 1980, not even in California, and thrice as strange
considering that the market for surf pop was even smaller in 1980 than it had
been in 1976.
As a result, Keepin' The Summer Alive sounds... well, imagine yourself having to
do a stand-up comedy routine before a non-English speaking audience the next
day after one of your parents' death, and you might get the general idea. Already
the title track combines a grossly exaggerated «barroom growl» delivery from
Carl, electronically processed backing vocals that robotically chant the melody
of 'Louie Louie' (??!!), and a dead-sounding keyboard backup, supposed to bring
stuff «up to date» (visions of frizzed-hair leotard-clad girl dancers
included). It hardly gets worse from there — but it very, very rarely gets
better.
Most of the songs are catchy: that one aspect,
at least, Mike is always committed to wrangling from Brian, Carl, or whoever
else is involved in the writing. You will remember how to sing along with
"some, some, some of your love" or "don't leave me alone, living
with a heartache" (for a brief period of time, at least). But this
catchiness does not match any of its surroundings — neither the arrangements,
nor the age and mental state of the band members, nor the very times to which
they try to stick it. Where some of these melodies may have qualified for
passable pleasant filler, had they been written and transferred to vinyl circa
1962-63, they sound utterly dumb and kitschy in 1980. And this applies both to
the worst offenders (title track; the hideously tropical 'Sunshine'; the clumsy
vaudeville sentimentality of 'When Girls Get Together') and songs that were most likely quite innocent and positively
oriented upon writing, but were still engulfed and destroyed by the same vibe
(e. g. Carl's ballad 'Oh Darlin', not only muffled by pedestrian production
and arrangement values, but also by being stuck in between 'Keepin' The Summer
Alive' and 'Some Of Your Love').
Brian's own fetish for covering oldies, still
ongoing from 1976, was generally suppressed by the rest of the band, but, as a
compromise, they still include a cover of Chuck Berry's 'Schooldays', which
only goes to show that compromises were never good for this band; the result
seems just as sanitized as everything else on here.
In short, you know things are going really,
really bad when the best track on the album is a long-time reject that dates
all the way back to 1972, and was written by Bruce Johnston, of all people; now
that he is in full technical control of the band as its producer, it is only
natural that the track he never got around to donate to the band eight years
earlier (having been fired by Jack Rieley) finally makes a triumphant return.
(Subsequently, it is the only track on the album to feature backing vocals
from Dennis — who reportedly hated the sessions so much that he walked out
after just a couple of them, and I fully empathize). 'Endless Harmony' is an attempt on Johnston's part to emulate
the «deep» sonic landscapes of Brian, and, compared with the likes of 'Our
Prayer' or 'Surf's Up', it is a very cheap facsimile; but compared with the average
crap that constitutes the bulk of Summer,
it is an obvious highlight — at least it gives us a tasty bit of collective
band harmonies circa 1972, reminding the forgetful that it didn't always used
to be like this.
At this particular point, it is reasonable for
the non-historian to cut off access to everything that bears the «Beach Boys»
tag on it (except for archive releases): 1980 sealed the band's doom, even if
they still had a few decent years left as a respectable touring act (mainly due
to Carl's active presence and Brian's spirit on the stage serving as a mascot,
even if the man himself hardly contributed at all to the stage show). With the
endless harmony warped into the state of an endless thumbs down, one might as well
just assume the harmonies on 'Endless Harmony' to represent a swan song coda —
and move on to Brian's solo career instead. But the reviewer's honest duty is
to back up nasty generalizations with album-specific bawdry, so on we go.
BEACH BOYS (1985)
1) Getcha Back; 2) It's Gettin'
Late; 3) Crack At Your Love; 4) Maybe I Don't Know; 5) She Believes In Love
Again; 6) California Calling; 7) Passing Friend; 8) I'm So Lonely; 9) Where I
Belong; 10) I Do Love You; 11) It's Just A Matter Of Time; 12) Male Ego.
Although, on the whole, this next attempt at
«self-rebooting» (what with the eponymous title and all) belongs to the same
category as Keepin' The Summer Alive
(i. e. the «Facepalm» category), I have always thought of it as just a bit of a
tiny improvement over the miserable cardboard facsimile of that 1980 disaster.
Not too many people agree, though, and I get their point.
First, no Dennis. His contributions to Summer Alive were already non-existent,
but they still had him pictured on the front sleeve, and, somehow, the very fact
of his being alive and still composing always left hope that, one day, he'd be
back out there with another 'Forever', or 'Cuddle Up', or, at least, a 'Love
Surrounds Me'. With Poseidon's daughters putting a final stop to that hope on
December 28, 1983, expectations for the band's next album were a priori lower
than ever before.
Second, Culture Club. One might love Culture
Club or hate Culture Club, but one thing is for certain: «Culture-Clubbing» the
Beach Boys' style is simply one more of those «acts of senility» in which
clueless old veterans turn to the «young 'uns» for directions, and, more often
than not, come out looking utterly silly and even more clueless. Not only do
Culture Club members guest on the songs and even contribute one original number,
they also provide the band with their own producer, Steve Levine, and this
means a sterile Eighties sound that may have been good enough for Culture Club,
but is completely useless for the Beach Boys. Electronic drums, generic
plastic-sounding synthesizers, the works.
Third, more of that trashy Mike Love-dominated
nostalgia. The lead-in track, 'Getcha Back', co-written by Love with long-term
Beach Boy partner Terry Melcher, sounds spliced together from a million old
Beach Boy tricks (some of the high-pitched harmonies almost seem sampled from
the likes of 'Hushabye'), then set to a booming electronic rhythm that is
supposed to prove you how seamlessly and self-assuredly these lads have
effected the transition into the modern age. Yes, this did work once — sixteen years earlier, when they first started
tapping into the nostalgic vibe with 'Do It Again'. But let us not compare
mainstream production (and songwriting!) values of 1969 with those of 1985. It
is hard to do so and stay within diplomatic range. Besides, there is also
'California Calling', which shamelessly steals its intro from 'Surfin' USA'
without listing Chuck Berry in the credits — disgusting, ain't it?
Fourth, a rather unhappy collaboration with
Stevie Wonder on the horizon — a thing that, if ever it was bound to happen,
should rather have happened around 1976, when Stevie was at his peak, than in
1985, when he had already lost too many of his teeth and was rapidly
downgrading himself to the status of saccharine-addled middle-of-the-road housewife
entertainer, with 'I Just Called To Say I Love You' already riding the charts
for a year (sorry, Stevie). 'I Do Love You' belongs in the same dropbox: an
inoffensive, unremarkable, watery composition, immediately recognizable due to
Stevie's unmistakable piano and harmonica playing, and just as immediately
disposable because it's little more than formula.
Fifth, lots of Carl Wilson's and Bruce
Johnston's adult contemporary on here. Stuff like 'Maybe I Don't Know' and 'She
Believes In Love Again' has its vocal hooks, but the instrumental sound is
utterly rote (guitar soloing on 'Maybe I Don't Know' is even more tasteless
than on 'Bluebirds Over The Mountains'), and Johnston's pathos on the latter
number is unbearable.
So what could be the saving grace? Only a
genuine comeback from Brian — and there are some tiny signs of it. The funny
thing is, although he'd been steadily contributing scattered contributions for
all the time since Love You, it was
not until the Beach Boys had deteriorated into this pitiful «clueless old
beard» act that he started recovering as a motivated songwriter. Although the
Al Jardine-cowritten 'Crack At Your Love' is hideous (probably wrestled by
force on the part of the «sunshine party», desperate for a new Brian Wilson upbeat
love song), 'It's Just A Matter Of Time', 'Male Ego', and especially the
heartbroken 'I'm So Lonely' are all songs that may not be very good, as such,
but which reflect some genuine care —
and point the way to highlights of Brian's upcoming solo career.
These tracks are few and in between, but, in my
eyes at least, they save The Beach Boys
from the impression of being that monumental Tower of Evil (Pretending to be
Good) that Keepin' The Summer Alive
turned out to be. It is formally the last album with notable involvement on
Brian's part, and deserves at least to be mentioned as a historical footnote,
with 'I'm So Lonely' and, perhaps, 'Male Ego' saved for future consumption on
detailed anthologies. The inevitable thumbs down are, therefore, not quite as irate
as last time around — and if you think Boy George and Stevie Wonder were rather
poor choices to hang around in 1985, just wait and see what we have coming on
subsequent «albums».
STILL CRUISIN' (1989)
1) Still Cruisin'; 2) Somewhere
Near Japan; 3) Island Girl; 4) In My Car; 5) Kokomo; 6) Wipe Out; 7) Make It
Big; 8) I Get Around; 9) Wouldn't It Be Nice; 10) California Girls.
This and the next album were the only ones not to be re-released on CD during the
recent major Beach Boy reissue campaign — which is quite telling, all by
itself; even Mike Love, deep down in his soul, must be embarrassed about these records, provided he is an organic
human being and not a side effect of the evolution process. Still, there they
are — no matter how much I'd like to get in
my car and wipe out this
abomination somewhere near Japan.
That said, let us not put all the blame on the
shoulders of one person. First, this record would probably never have seen the
light of day if it wasn't for 'Kokomo', an unlucky collaboration between Mike,
Terry Melcher, and two aging hippie veterans (Scott McKenzie of 'If You're
Going To San Francisco' fame, and John Phillips of the Mamas & Papas) that
had the misfortune to go all the way to No. 1 and become the Beach Boys' first
mega-hit since 'Good Vibrations' last struck gold twenty-three years back.
The odd thing about 'Kokomo' is that, with its
relaxed sunshine-happy atmosphere, cheap Caribbean flavor, and hedonistic
implications, it really belonged somewhere in the mid-Seventies rather than in
1988-89, with dance pop and hair metal as the leading fads. But, on the other
hand, there is always a place for bikini-clad beauties in the human heart, an
association towards which 'Kokomo' is targeted first and foremost, music and
lyrics and all, and as for Mike Love pushing fifty, well, «dirty old men» were
all the rage in 1989 (Steven Tyler! well, he wasn't that old in 1989, but still a bit overreaching for his age when it
came to pussy-chasing).
Anyway, 'Kokomo' has some nice vocal lines
("that's where we wanna go" is Carl's finest bit of high-pitched
delivery on the entire record), but the general aura of the song is downright
humiliating — in the good old days, we were ready to accept that atmosphere
when it was dominated by Brian Wilson catching heavenly melodic moves right out
of the sky, but there is nothing about the melody of 'Kokomo' to remind of
Heaven, and that's not even mentioning slick Eighties production (at least it
isn't synth-driven, but the electronic drums combined with echo-laden vocals
give it a completely plastic face all the same).
Worst of all, 'Kokomo' was the final nail in
the coffin — as it started climbing up the charts, boosted by inclusion in a
thirty-third-rate Tom Cruise movie (HOT!), Mike must have become fully
convinced that this overproduced
sunshine-nostalgic crap was exactly that the public wanted to hear from the
Beach Boys, and the entire album was built around that attitude. Brian couldn't
care less: in contrast to Beach Boys,
his involvement here was minimal — he contributed but one song ('In My Car', an
upbeat pop-rocker consciously written to emulate the 'I Get Around' spirit, but
killed off by inadequate lyrics, dreadful overproduction, and, let's face it,
a none-too-overwhelming melody), and sang on a couple others.
Curiously, Carl seemed disinterested as well,
since he is completely missing from the songwriters, only contributing lead and
backup vocals on other people's tunes. Bruce Johnston was also minimally involved, writing but one tune ('Somewhere Near
Japan', another of his pedestrian romantic odes, but at least its romanticism
does not seem as utterly forced as all the other emotions on this record,
making the song a relative highlight). Al makes his sole mark with the dreadful
'Island Girl', an attempt to stake his own claim to Caribbean territory that
sounds dumber and cornier than a dozen 'Kokomos' rolled together. And as for
Dennis, well, he'd rather drown than be in any way associated with a record
like that.
Further atrocities include (1) the title track,
stupid enough to paraphrase Paul Simon ("still cruisin' after all these
years"), ask a girl, on Mike Love's behalf, to "hop on my hot
rod", er, "in", I mean, and dress it all in an arrangement on
which big booming electronic drums are just about the only discernible
instrument; (2) 'Wipe Out', a song that used to be a delightful surf classic by
the Surfaris, and is here rearranged as an embarrassing «rap-rock»
collaboration between the band and The Fat Boys (unfortunately, Brian also
bears part of the responsibility); and (3) in full accordance with the
«terrible food, and such small portions» logic, the band did not even scrape
together enough new material to fill up respectable space — so they had to
include three golden oldies at the end, under the pretext of their having been
used in recent movie soundtracks.
That last decision was actually a benchmark in
stupidity. Just in case if, having listened to the seven originals, someone
would still be left thinking whether they are «soft shit» or «real hard shit» —
here is a nice comparison base for you. Would you rather hear 'I Get Around' or
'In My Car'? 'Wouldn't It Be Nice' or 'Somewhere Near Japan'? 'California
Girls' or 'Kokomo'? And now you, the listener, do not even have to choose —
here they are in the same package. Unfortunately, time has not been kind to it
— still awful after all these years; much as I'd like to go against the grain
and promote, say, 'Make It Big' as a forgotten mini-masterpiece, I'd have to
strip myself of all credentials to do that. Thumbs down.
SUMMER IN PARADISE (1992)
1) Hot Fun In The Summertime;
2) Surfin'; 3) Summer Of Love; 4) Island Fever; 5) Still Surfin'; 6) Slow
Summer Dancin' (One Summer Night); 7) Strange Things Happen; 8) Remember (Walking
In The Sand); 9) Lahaina Aloha; 10) Under The Boardwalk; 11) Summer In Paradise;
12) Forever.
Since this album, like its predecessor, is now
out of print, and even the few surviving copies are going on Ebay for
suspiciously low cash figures, it is clear that even Mike Love, not to mention
the few other surviving Beach Boys, would prefer to forget about it like one
forgets about a particularly nasty bad dream (to each his own). But history is
history: in the digital age, it no longer forgets anything. Besides, the fifty
years of penance required for a crime like this are far from over — so take it
like a man, Mr. Love.
The most awful realization one can make about Summer In Paradise is that — yes, I
know it is very hard to believe, but
here goes: The Beach Boys (at this point, consisting of Mike, Carl, and Bruce)
were not consciously trying to make
the worst pop album ever recorded. On the contrary, they were trying to make an
album that would garner commercial success by combining healthy nostalgia,
modern production values, and a soulful punch. Had this been intended as a corny self-parody, we
would all just laugh and go home.
Granted, time has healed the wounds, and what,
in 1992, could only seem the utmost horror to all purveyors of good taste, now
comes across as a bizarre curiosity — and by now I mean «when Baywatch
is no longer the regular benchmark for trash culture». But it is still worth
one and only one listen, exclusively for educational purposes. For starters,
the album was almost entirely computer-generated (Pro Tools!), with all the
rhythm sections pre-programmed. The only Beach Boy to actually play an
instrument on these tracks was Bruce Johnston. The only Beach Boy to actually
write songs on this album was Mike
Love, and even then he mostly supplied lyrics to Terry Melcher's
«compositions». The only other Beach Boy to take an active part whatsoever was
Carl Wilson, taking lead vocals on a couple tracks, overseeing the vocal
harmony recording process, and adding pathetic «credibility» to the product as
a «Beach Boys» creation.
As for the album's general purpose, one look at
the tracklist is quite sufficient to understand what was going on.
Unfortunately, the titles alone do not let one see the true scope of disaster.
To do that, arm yourself with forgiveness and listen to the new «re-recording»
of 'Surfing', replete with crashing electronic percussion and muscular Def
Leppard-influenced RIFFAGE: a new look for surf-rock, targeted at the recent
generation of morons, which, fortunately, was far less huge than could be
expected (alas, a whoppin' 10,000 people still bought this record back in the
day, heedless of everything). If you need more, a couple blocks down the line
comes 'Still Surfing', a nostalgic
toss-off that steals vocal harmony lines from several genuine Beach Boys
classics and tries to make them serve the idea that nothing much has changed in
thirty years. No dice.
Amazing, unbelievably effective lowlights on
the album include 'Summer Of Love', on which Mike is impersonating a cocky
beach-goer with a little rap chant (the most offensive thing about it is, of
course, not the «sexism» of the lyrics, as critics frequently complain, but the
utter fakeness of the sexism — at
least a guy like Steven Tyler, with all his flaws, still knew how to invite a lady to his «love vacation» in 1992 sounding
like he really means it); the title track, which begins like a corny nostalgia
trip and then quickly, and for no apparent cause, transforms into an even
cornier eco-anthem; and the «reinvention» of 'Remember (Walkin' In The Sand)',
which genuinely should rank among the top three or so worst covers ever
attempted by anybody — the idea of doing the kind of deed they did to the word
"remember" could only come from a mind so perverted that I wouldn't
trust the person in question with a baseball, let alone a baseball bat.
As for the not-so-impressive tracks, they are
simply forgettable — boring adult contemporary crap, for the most part. The
fact that this whole thing was recorded in 1992, at least one year after the
grunge revolution, in an age when the long-burgeoning underground scene was
finally coming out to meet the masses, just shows how utterly, thoroughly
clueless the «Beach Boys» were about the musical scene of the time, judging it
exclusively by MTV standards. But that's only half of the crime — then comes
the pathetic part, because even by those
standards they could not come up with a glossy enough, convincing enough,
commercial enough piece of product. What more can be said about an album that
hypocritically ends with a cover of Dennis Wilson's 'Forever' — with the lead
vocals given to John fuckin' Stamos,
the star of Full House? If that ain't
reason enough for Dennis to stage a vengeful comeback from the grave, nothing
is, and the dead will stay in the ground until the end of time —
coincidentally, just like Summer In
Paradise. The only consolation is that at least Brian had nothing
whatsoever to do with this senseless self-humiliation. Thumbs down — all the way right
to the toes this time.
STARS AND STRIPES, VOL. 1 (1996)
1) Don't Worry Baby; 2) Little
Deuce Coupe; 3) 409; 4) Long Tall Texan; 5) I Get Around; 6) Be True To Your
School; 7) Fun, Fun, Fun; 8) Help Me Rhonda; 9) The Warmth Of The Sun; 10)
Sloop John B.; 11) I Can Hear Music; 12) Caroline, No.
All I can say is that, in «desert island» mode,
Stars And Stripes would be a more
tolerable choice than Summer In Paradise.
Which does not mean that the entirety of this album does not spell out
«M-I-S-E-R-Y» at the rate of two songs per each letter of the word. Listed as a
«Beach Boys» album; featuring all five Beach Boys – including Brian! – on vocal
harmonies; but consisting exclusively of Nashville musicians playing and
Nashville singers singing on old Beach Boy covers — the idea was rotten from
the start, and the lack of intelligent execution fails to compensate for the
rot in any imaginable way.
These are not even properly done «country»
rearrangements: at best, it is all made to sound like «1990s country-pop»,
which was at least before the Taylor Swift era, but was already no more
«authentic country» than John Mayer is «genuine blues». Everybody just seems to
be playing for cash, with no interest whatsoever in anything else — learn the
chords (and, since most of the covered songs are from the 1963-64 period, that
certainly would not take too long), practice for half an hour, churn it out,
and off you go. A pure instance of rigid professionalism that makes the idea of
«art» almost ridiculously superfluous.
Much the same applies to the singers, almost
none of which are either capable of reproducing the fun spirit of the originals
or of supplying a new cool twist to the old stuff. The only exceptions are –
big frickin' surprise – the two old-schoolers. Timothy B. Schmit, of
Eagles/Poco/solo fame, does a good job of recreating the worried mood of
'Caroline, No' (which is, by the way, the only
«serious» song on the entire album, and its being tacked onto the end, like a
lame dog bonus track, clearly demonstrates that, at this point, Executive
Producer Mike Love was still certain that the true Beach Boys expired thirty years ago upon disembarking from the
yacht on the front sleeve of Summer Days).
It adds nothing to the original, but it doesn't spoil it, which produces quite a nice psychological effect after
the preceding eleven tracks.
Second, another old-schooler and everybody's
favorite, Willie Nelson, unexpectedly pops out on 'The Warmth Of The Sun' — a
song that normally commands a very complex vocal performance and a particularly
sweet vocal tone. Of course, it could be expected that the old trickster would
try and do something like that — deconstruct a vocal classic with a
deliberately minimalistic performance. But, unfortunately, that is just the
way it works: as an experimental deconstruction. It is odd and unusual to hear Nelson's sympathetic «non-singing»
backed by angelic harmonies, but it certainly is not the right way a good Beach
Boys cover can be done. (Come to think of it, I do not even know what is the right way — the Beach Boys
defy personal interpretation, which is why we do not see too many respectable
Beach Boy covers floating around, unlike the Beatles).
And, in any case, two decent/interesting
performances out of twelve isn't exactly hot stuff — especially when, in order to get through to them, one has to
suffer the humiliation of Toby Keith singing about being true to your school;
of 'Help Me, Rhonda' rearranged as a fast-tempo shit-rock number; of grown-up
people rather than fresh kids still wallowing in the cheap silliness of 'Long
Tall Texan'; of Lorrie Morgan going through 'Don't Worry Baby' with all the
passion of a young idealistic mom giving it her all at the local school benefit
show, etc. etc.
Predictably, the planned Stars And Stripes Vol. 2 never came to pass (although some material
was actually recorded, like a not-half bad Tammy Winette take on 'In My Room'),
and the original record went out of print fairly soon — and with it, any
incentive on the part of the «Beach Boys» to record any new material,
particularly since, soon afterwards, the rift between Brian and Mike Love
became permanent, and because Carl passed away in 1998: although Mike and Bruce
still shamefully continued touring as «Beach Boys», it is one thing to please
nostalgic crowds with shaky-hand renditions of 'Surfin' USA', and quite another
one to record new material under the same name (not that, in between the two of
them, they had any).
Thumbs down without a
question (sorry, Willie), both to this album and its funny permutation that
occasionally circulates around in bootleg form — one with all the lead vocal
tracks wiped out and amusing liner notes that explain that, since this is
probably the last ever Beach Boys album to bear that name on it, one must have
the right to hear it as a Beach Boys album, focusing on authentic Beach Boy
harmonies, rather than a trashy country star tribute record with the band
guesting on its own album. Now that, in 2012, a reunion is finally expected,
the excuse may no longer be an excuse, and then the last ever reason for even
remembering that someone ever had such a fit of bad taste will dissipate
forever.
THAT'S WHY GOD MADE THE RADIO (2012)
1) Think About The Days; 2)
That's Why God Made The Radio; 3) Isn't It Time; 4) Spring Vacation; 5) The
Private Life Of Bill And Sue; 6) Shelter; 7) Daybreak Over The Ocean; 8)
Beaches In Mind; 9) Strange World; 10) From There To Back Again; 11) Pacific
Coast Highway; 12) Summer's Gone.
I do not know why this album was made. I do
know that the word «money» explicitly showed up in some of Brian's interviews,
and, although I am not sure that Brian was exactly starving in the early 2010s,
he is one of the few people in the
world who actually deserves all the money he can get, so that would be one
reasonable reason. Another reasonable reason would be the fact that the «band»
was still in need of a bona fide swan song, after all: with Mike trampling the
Beach Boys brand in the dust throughout the 1990s, the biographic curve had a
maddeningly pathetic form.
Thus, once Brian and Mike temporarily settled
their problems and got all the remaining Beach Boys they could lay their hands
on together (Al, Bruce, and somebody even dug up «oldboy» David Marks to strum
the guitar; 1962 all over again!), they wisely agreed on the following work
pattern: the album would be mostly sunny, happy, and nostalgic, just the way
Mike would like it to be, but Brian would otherwise be given complete freedom
in the writing, throwing in teenage-symphonic compositions à la ʽSurf's Upʼ if he will. Considering that
Brian's solo activity in the 2000s showed him as almost completely «cured»,
busier with his musical projects than anytime since the 1960s, this pattern
simply could not fail. Or could it?
The critical world invented a brilliantly
polite tag for the final product: «their best since 1977's Love You». Given that very few people would even remember Love You itself, much less anything
that came later, the tag sounds impressive — wow, thirty-five years past their
last artistic success and still going strong! But take the time to relisten to
all these albums: honestly, beating all of them put together in one punch is no
feat of heroism. The question should be put differently: have The Beach
Grandpappies actually managed, this time, to put out an album that would make sense to people outside the small
circle of hardcore fanatics?
As one select representative of these people,
I'd very much like to say yes, but the more I listen to it, the more I'm forced
to say no. That's Why God Made The Radio is by no means an «awful» album in
the spirit of the Brianless garbage of the 1990s, and it manages — most of the
time — to avoid being «cheesy» in the spirit of the band's late 1970s / early
1980s products. But it is an empty shell of an album, Beach Boys-ish to the
core in form only, never in spirit. In fact, I'd say that it doesn't even have any spirit, Beach Boys or
otherwise.
In comparison, I try to remember how amazed I
was at hearing Paul McCartney's Chaos
And Creation several years ago. There it was, a record by an aged,
out-of-time dinosaur that made crystal clear sense: slow, pensive, atmospheric,
still carrying traces of melodic genius but also reflecting a shift of values,
moods, attitudes so totally in line with both the modern world and the artist's
own age. Not a proverbial «masterpiece», not anything to be remembered by on an
order of first importance, just an album that quietly stated, «yes, my creator
is old and gray, and that gives him a special edge that he is willing to take
advantage of». Similar impressions can also be received from some (far from
all) of Brian's solo work — even the re-recording of SMiLE, one could say, carried some whiffs of this «wisened old man»
attitude.
That's
Why God Made The Radio has none of that. It sounds as if the only
question the band put to itself was, «can we just make one more ʽDo It
Againʼ type of album?» (As a promo move, they did re-record ʽDo It
Againʼ, but it is not included on the final LP). To be more precise, «can
we still work out those harmonies? can we avoid synthesizers and electronic
dance beats? can we still come up with credible lyrics on Californian topics?»
etc. And — yes, for dessert: "can we still make a proverbially beautiful
multi-part epic suite like we did in the old days, when Mike didn't like epic suites and we still didn't
give a damn?»
The title track, released as a taster several
months prior to the complete thing, epitomizes its essence quite faithfully.
After a few listens... maybe even after a single
listen, you can memorize the chorus and forgetfully toe-tap along with its
lazy, shuffly rhythms. But from the first to the last note, it feels utterly
fake. Or, perhaps, «fake» is not the right word — what is truly awful is that it might feel like a sincere outburst of
emotion to Brian himself. Can you imagine the Beatles, had they all remained
alive, finally reuniting... with
every single Paul song written in the spirit of ʽP.S. I Love Youʼ and
every John song written in the spirit of ʽLittle Childʼ?
At least if there had been new tricks, new
solutions, new discoveries. No dice. Every single chord, every single harmony
seems to have a direct ancestor in one Beach Boys classic or another. Sometimes
in several at once: ʽShelterʼ is the most glaring example, where the
chorus ("I'll give you shelter from the storm...") is the offspring
of ʽDon't Worry Babyʼ while the backing harmonies are mostly
variations on ʽBreak Awayʼ. I do not doubt for a second that Brian is
still capable of inventing new textures, but for this album — it's like he
didn't even try. Instead, he reprogrammed his brain computer-wise, activated
all the old melodies, shuffled them around, and gave out a credible «Beach
Boys™» record. Give musicologists, biologists, and programmers another fifty
years, and you might not even need a Brian Wilson to receive another album of
this caliber.
We cannot even blame Mike Love this time. For
the most part, he wisely stays away from the writing process, although you can
always be sure that if you encounter a particularly
cringeworthy lyric, you know who to blame. "Singing our songs is enough
reason / Harmony boys is what we believe in" from ʽSpring
Vacationʼ (the most overtly awful song on the entire album — few things in
life are more disgusting than forcefully faking happiness) is bad enough, but
"we got beaches in mind, man it's been too much time" is a close contender
(unless you start singing "we got bitches
in mind", which immediately gives the whole thing a fresh new angle). He
is also responsible for ʽDaybreak Over The Oceanʼ, which seems to be
a crude vivisection of ʽBluebirds Over The Mountainʼ with a transplant
from ʽMy Bonnieʼ or something else like that.
Most of the rest is honestly credited to Brian
and producer Joe Thomas, who had been a close associate of Brian's since the
recording of Imagination more than a
decade earlier. And from all of this «rest», critical attention, for obvious
reasons, has preferred to focus on the last three songs, which finally dispense
with all the phoney summer happiness and give us pianos, flutes, strings, kind
melancholia, and solemn vibrations. Does this make me happy? No. I don't like the idea of Brian sitting down at
the piano and telling himself, «okay, concentrate, focus, God, make me capable
of writing another ʽSurf's Upʼ here and now» — and for all of these
nine minutes, I cannot get rid of the idea. And again, all I hear is faint
echoes and shadows of past greatness.
To sum up, if this is really why God made the radio, it's totally awesome how God
made me stay away from the radio for most of my life. If this album really
replenished Brian's, or even Mike's, pockets in a time of need, I am fine with
that. If it was made just so that the official Beach Boys discography did not
end with Stars And Stripes, I am so
totally fine with that, too. But in the general context of the Beach Boys
history, this is not a good record, I'm afraid to say. In fact, it is a bad record, I'm afraid to say — a
nostalgic trip that feels forced and stuffy, as if you've just successfully
taken a time machine back to 1967, but cannot open the doors. In fact, I'm not
even sure I really agree that «this is their best since Love You»: even L.A., in
those parts of it that weren't totally wretched, sounded more natural.
The only reason I'm chickening out on giving it
a thumbs down is that such a decision would look like some sort of «gesture» —
as if I wanted to «punish» the band for committing some sort of sacrilege, or
was intentionally going «against the grain» (since most of the official reviews
were uniformly positive). After all, they are all just big (and, as of now,
senile) children, and at least by now they have learned their lesson: don't pay
too much attention to big wicked grown-ups coming at you with «modern musical
values». Better some sheer, unadulterated nostalgia, than ʽSummer Of
Loveʼ. And any nine-minute epic written and recorded by Brian Wilson will
always respect the Beach Boys' textbook definition of beauty. The album sounds great — like an immaculately
produced facsimile. It feels phoney.
But sounds, as we know, are waves that penetrate us all in the same way, and
feelings — who knows, yours might be better than mine.
P.S. And I'd like also to explicitly mention
that I do not buy the «well, what more would you expect from these guys in
2012?» argument at all. One of the
«real» Beach Boys' biggest advantages in the past was the ability to surprise
— after the failure of Smiley Smile,
they could come up with a winner like Wild
Honey, and after the glitzy cheese of 15
Big Ones they could rebound with the raw bizarredom of Love You. Like I said, I could totally see Brian taking charge and
leading the band in yet another direction. Instead, they gave us this fucking
paper house. Nosiree, we had the
rightful right to expect more, and got much less.
ADDENDA:
RARITIES (1983)
1) With A Little Help From My
Friends; 2) The Letter; 3) I Was Made To Love Her; 4) You're Welcome; 5) The
Lord's Prayer; 6) Bluebirds Over The Mountain; 7) Celebrate The News; 8) Good
Vibrations; 9) Land Ahoy; 10) In My Room; 11) Cotton Fields; 12) All I Want To
Do (live); 13) Auld Lang Syne.
Although most of this album, out of print for a
long time and never even released on CD, was scattered around as bonus tracks
on subsequent CD re-issues, and most of what was not is no big loss for anyone,
Rarities is still worth at least a
brief mention — as the first archival package in the band's career, consisting
entirely of previously unreleased material.
The fact that Capitol waited for more than ten
years to release this is telling in itself: the Beach Boys' vaults are not
quite as opulent as popular instinct would have us believe. The fact that Capitol
had to slap a bikini-clad «tropical beauty» on the front sleeve is even more
telling — back in 1983, I bet more people bought this record for the album
cover than the actual content. Besides, what could be kinkier than an intense
jack-off to the sounds of 'The Lord's Prayer'?
Anyway, both back in the day and today the only curio-reason to own
this were/are the first two tracks. Proceedings begin with a nice enough cover
of 'With A Little Help From My Friends' that is surprisingly tight and
well-rehearsed, almost on the level of the original: I have no idea if the band
really had any intentions to include it on the likes of Wild Honey, but I would not be surprised if they did. (And, who
knows, someone might even prefer Mike Love's lead vocal to Ringo's, for
reasons that do not require explaining.) Then there is a shorter, rawer,
lo-fi-er take on 'The Letter' (originally made famous by The Box Tops) —
perhaps considered too dark and disturbing for official release.
As for the rest, alternate versions of 'I Was
Made To Love Her', 'Bluebirds Over The Mountains', and 'Cotton Fields' do not
differ too much from the originals; the working version of 'Good Vibrations'
is just one of the million working versions of 'Good Vibrations' circulating
around since times immemorial, first on bootlegs, then on boxsets; the German
version of 'In My Room' will make sense if you are one of those few Germans who
does not understand one word of English; 'Land Ahoy' must date back to
something like 1961, with all the inevitable consequences (see my review of Surfin' Safari for details); and
accappella versions of 'The Lord's Prayer' and 'Auld Lang Syne' are predictably
flawless — but also predictably trite.
Still, all of the tracks are developed enough
to ensure thirty minutes of pleasant listening — for me, only spoiled by having
to experience them as a poor quality vinyl rip. Of course, it is always
possible to substitute those tracks that have been released on CD for the
remastered versions, but that sort of alienates the listener from the wonderous
tangerine mood of that album cover. The only question is: did they really have to add the ugly leering guy
with the awful hair? Just goes to show the difference between tropical life in
1963 and 1983.
ENDLESS HARMONY SOUNDTRACK (1998)
1) Soulful Old Man Sunshine (writing
session excerpt); 2) Soulful Old Man Sunshine; 3) Radio Concert Promo; 4) Medley:
Surfin' Safari / Fun, Fun, Fun / Shut Down / Little Deuce Coupe / Surfin'
U.S.A. (live 1966); 5) Surfer Girl (binaural mix); 6) Help Me, Rhonda (alternate
single version); 7) Kiss Me, Baby (stereo remix); 8) California Girls (stereo remix);
9) Good Vibrations (live 1968); 10) Heroes And Villains (demo); 11) Heroes And
Villains (live 1972); 12) God Only Knows (live 1967); 13) Radio Concert Promo;
14) Darlin' (live 1980); 15) Wonderful / Don't Worry Bill (live 1972); 16) Do
It Again (early version); 17) Break Away (demo); 18) Sail Plane Song; 19) Loop
De Loop (Flip Flop Flyin' In An Aeroplane); 20) Barbara; 21) 'Til I Die (alternate
mix); 22) Long Promised Road (live 1972); 23) All Alone; 24) Brian's Back; 25) Endless
Harmony.
It must have been quite risqué to select
ʽEndless Harmonyʼ, out of everything there was, as the Beach Boy song title to serve as the
title for a documentary on the band's history — in 1998, as Carl finally
succumbed to cancer and the rest of the band drifted apart, with only Mike and
Bruce going on as «The Beach Boys», selling out barrooms and spas either to
people too old to remember whoever was in the band anyway, or to people who
didn't give much of a damn about whether they were being entertained by «The
Beach Boys» or «The Backstreet Boys». Maybe ʽYou Need A Mess Of Help To
Stand Aloneʼ would have been a better title.
In any case, the documentary provided Capitol
with a respectable opportunity to unload some more of those archival dustbins,
and the fans genuinely got over seventy minutes of new Beach Boy material.
Granted, the word «new» can have lots of nuances, and in this particular case,
way too often «new» simply means:
— new stereo remixes of well-known songs, e. g.
ʽSurfer Girlʼ, ʽKiss Me, Babyʼ, and ʽCalifornia
Girlsʼ (a thing that should have been done on a far more thorough level,
e. g. have all the early albums remastered in two modes, the way they
eventually did with the Beatles);
— underarranged demo versions that can only
have historical interest (ʽDo It Againʼ, ʽBreak Awayʼ,
etc.); everything listenable and in fine quality, but no unexpected twists.
Well, you do get to hear Mike sing
"let's get together and surf
again", which was eventually deleted, for fear that somebody might
actually start harassing the band into fulfilling that exhortation;
— «radio concert promo» bits written for the
band by people who probably thought that such a dumb band deserved the dumbest
of writing ("Hi! This is Al Jardine, and I am a Beach Boy"; "Hi,
this is the greatest drummer on Earth, Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys").
Fortunately, that is only about a third of the
album. The other third features an assortment of live rarities that range from
the curiously fun (a five-hit medley from 1966 crammed into three and a half
minutes) to the brilliant (ʽHeroes And Villainsʼ from 1967) to the
unexpected (two highlights from the 1972 Carnegie Hall Concert: an inspired
take on ʽLong Promised Roadʼ from Carl, and a ʽWonderfulʼ
that is, for some reason, merged with a Chaplin/Fataar blues-rocker called
ʽDon't Worry Billʼ — see, back in the old days this band did include
surprising its audiences among its top priorities) to the so-so
(ʽDarlinʼ should probably have been taken from some show prior to
1980's Knebworth concert).
Finally, there are six new songs that had only
been previously available through bootlegs, although only one of them may
count up there with the classics — consequently, it is also the one that opens
the album: ʽSoulful Old Man Sunshineʼ, an outtake from the 1969
sessions, is a prime time Brian Wilson classic with all the works —
multi-layered harmonies, varied instrumentation, catchy verse/chorus, and a
lush, optimistic, anthemic atmosphere that was hardly a cherished guest on
Brian's post-breakdown compositions. Why they ended up leaving it in the can is
anybody's guess — maybe they thought it was too Motown-ish in sound (it does
bounce around the room in the same way that a light, fast-tempo Supremes number
can), although this never stopped them from covering Stevie Wonder on Wild Honey.
Five minutes are given to two different
incarnations of the same song — ʽSail Plane Song' from 1968 began as a
dark swirling piano number, then gradually mutated into 1969's 'Loop De Loop',
a carouselambra-extravaganza of brass, chimes, harmonies, and circus spirit,
before finally getting to be killed off by Jack Rieley, who thought the Beach
Boys should not waste their precious time working on such mindless fluff, and
dedicate their efforts to things far more serious in nature and scope — such as
ʽStudent Demonstration Timeʼ. Actually, though, ʽLoop De
Loopʼ in its semi-finished shape is still a nice piece of Cali-psychedelia...
but it certainly used to be creepier when it used to be ʽSail Plane
Songʼ.
There is also a previously unreleased Dennis
ballad (ʽBarbaraʼ), and at least one misguided inclusion —
ʽBrian's Backʼ, a song written in 1976 to celebrate the prodigal
brother's artificial «comeback», sewn together from a miriad nostalgic leaves
and, fortunately, shelved for the time being. Now that Brian had finally
severed his ties with the remaining «Beach Boys» for good, the song's
resurfacing on this anthology might have seemed even more comic.
It would have been better if they had let the
album run its course on the «full» version of 'Til I Die' — the only song on
here that has it in itself to compete with the original, lengthened by two
completely instrumental minutes that allow the melody to be explored in all of
its potential; if you ever wondered how all these late Sixties / early
Seventies Beach Boy classics would sound with proper build-ups and fade-outs,
well, here is your answer: this alternate mix, created by engineer Steve
Desper, makes the song twice the epic that it is. (In fact, Brian himself liked
it so much that he eventually started working around the extended version in
live performances).
The end result is, naturally, a thumbs up,
and a big overall improvement compared to Rarities:
longer, cleaner, better sequenced, and with three or four genuinely awesome
discoveries. Unfortunately, it also confirmed that, even in the CD age, as
well as an age in which interest in the Beach Boys as «forefathers of cool» was
perking up, the archives would not yield Holy Grails. However, the fact that it
was still possible to brush the dust off an occasional ʽSoulful Old Man
Sunshineʼ still left ground for suspicions that the people at Capitol were
playing out their time-honoured strategy — never let go of everything at the
same time, or you might make people way too happy for them to remember to make
you way too rich.
HAWTHORNE, CA (2001)
CD I: 1) Mike Love Introduces
"Surfin'"; 2) 3701 West 119th Street, Hawthorne, California: The
Surfin' Rehearsal; 3) Happy Birthday Four Freshmen; 4) Mike On Brian's
Harmonies; 5) Their Hearts Were Full Of Spring (live rehearsal); 6) Surfin' USA
(demo); 7) Surfin' USA (backing track); 8) Carl Wilson Radio Promo; 9) Shut
Down (live); 10) Little Deuce Coupe (demo); 11) Murry Wilson Directs A Radio
Promo; 12) Fun, Fun, Fun (backing track); 13) Brian's Message To "Rog"
(take 22); 14) Dance, Dance, Dance (stereo remix); 15) Kiss Me Baby (a cappella
mix); 16) Good To My Baby (backing track); 17) Chuck Britz On Brian In The
Studio; 18) Salt Lake City (session highlights); 19) Salt Lake City (stereo remix);
20) Wish That He Could Stay (session excerpt); 21) And Your Dream Comes True (stereo
remix); 22) Carol K Session Highlights; 23) The Little Girl I Once Knew (alternate
version); 24) Alan And Dennis Introduce "Barbara Ann"; 25) Barbara
Ann (session excerpt); 26) Barbara Ann (master take without party overdubs);
27) Mike On The Everly Brothers; 28) Devoted To You (master take without party overdubs);
29) Dennis Thanks Everybody / In The Back Of My Mind; CD II: 1) Can't Wait Too
Long (a cappella mix); 2) Dennis Introduces Carl; 3) Good Vibrations (stereo
track sections); 4) Good Vibrations (concert rehearsal); 5) Heroes And Villains
(stereo single version); 6) Vegetables Promo (instrumental section); 7)
Vegetables (stereo extended mix); 8) You're With Me Tonight; 9) Lonely Days;
10) Bruce On "Wild Honey"; 11) Let The Wind Blow (stereo remix); 12)
I Went To Sleep (a cappella mix); 13) Time To Get Alone (alternate version);
14) Alan And Brian Talk About Dennis; 15) A Time To Live In Dreams; 16) Be With
Me (backing track); 17) Dennis Introduces "Cotton Fields"; 18) Cotton
Fields (The Cotton Song) (stereo single version); 19) Alan and Carl on
"Break Away"; 20) Break Away (alternate version); 21) Add Some Music To
Your Day (a cappella mix); 22) Dennis Wilson; 23) Forever (a cappella mix); 24)
Sail On, Sailor (backing track); 25) Old Man River (vocal section); 26) Carl
Wilson; 27) The Lord's Prayer (stereo remix); 28) Carl Wilson - Coda.
Do not be fooled by the endless tracklist on
this ridiculous piece of crap – a tracklist long enough and descriptive enough
to serve as its own review – and, by all means, skip this unless your completism
and/or religious adoration knows no limits. Inspired by the success of Endless Harmony, and also, perhaps, by
that of the Beatles' Anthology, Capitol
ushered out this 2-CD «anthology» of «previously unreleased material», in the
finest tradition of screwing with the Beach Boys' studio output, stretching
all the way back to 1962.
Beyond the pretty packaging and the nice
«historic» run of the recordings, generally arranged in chronological order
from 1960 to 1972 (and thus, acknowledging that the Beach Boys as a historically
relevant entity virtually ended with «Brian's comeback»), most of the tracks
here fall in five different categories, listed in the order of (slowly)
decreasing stupidity:
(a) bits of retro-banter à la Beatles' Anthology
I (usually consisting of one Beach Boy praising the spiritual gift of
another Beach Boy, or, failing that, of the Everly Brothers): could be
tolerable if these introductions actually led into anything worthwhile, but the
compilers should have rather taken the hint from the Beatles' Anthology II, on which, not
coincidentally, all the bits of banter had magically disappeared;
(b) instrumental «backing tracks» for original
studio recordings, i. e. more Stack-o-Tracks
fun for those who hadn't already had enough; including such really odd choices
as Dennis' ʽBe With Meʼ and even ʽSurfin' USAʼ (what's to
admire on that one? the stop-and-starts?);
(c) vocal «a cappella mixes» for other original
studio recordings, probably for aspiring boy bands to have something to
practice their craft to;
(d) even more of those «stereo remixes» that
made our day on Endless Harmony,
instead of doing it like a man and just remastering all the albums in stereo;
(e) work-in-progress versions. This is probably
the most interesting of the five groups, but it is also fairly small and pretty
much entirely oriented at historiographers and musicologists, e. g. the 1960 home
recording of ʽSurfin' Safariʼ, with just one weak acoustic guitar
track accompanying the already well-structured vocal harmonies; Brian (Brian?)
teaching the horns to come one after the other on ʽSalt Lake Cityʼ; and
the band having silly fun during the recording of ʽVegetablesʼ. The
funniest moment is on ʽWith Me Tonightʼ, where, after the
introductory harmonies, one of the Boys says, "hey, I've got an idea,
let's sing this with a smile" —
probably a much-needed invocation during the sessions for Wild Honey. But that's just one tiny bit, and you'd have to strain
your attention so as not to miss it.
In the end, what remains is a couple of
highlights from Party! stripped from
their phony-raucous ambience (including ʽBarbara-Annʼ); a one-minute
snippet of an abandoned melancholic ballad called ʽLonely Daysʼ; and
a two-minute piano and organ demo of Dennis' ʽA Time To Live In
Dreamsʼ from 1968, an era in which his individual songwriting style had
only just begun to terraform: pretty, but not as deep and moving as his
genuinely accomplished compositions. Slim pickings to say the least, and
certainly not at all worthy of any sort of hype.
Perhaps Capitol would have made a more
understandable and respectable move, had it simply promoted The Beach Boys as
«Unquestionably The American Band Of All Time», and, under that pretext,
emptied its vaults completely, systematically, and thoroughly, e. g. by having
a 4-CD boxset of The Wild Honey Sessions
next to the already released Pet Sounds
Sessions. That way, it would have been perfectly clear who the intended
recipients of this stuff might be – professional Beach-Boy-o-logists, who are
numerous enough in the world to justify the commercial side of it – and
everything would have made perfect sense. As it is, nothing here makes much
sense at all; Beach Boys or no Beach Boys, this is a pathetic thumbs down
of a release.
GOOD TIMIN': LIVE AT KNEBWORTH 1980 (2002)
1) Intro; 2) California Girls;
3) Sloop John B; 4) Darlin'; 5) School Days; 6) God Only Knows; 7) Be True To
Your School; 8) Do It Again; 9) Little Deuce Coupe; 10) Cotton Fields/Heroes And
Villains; 11) Happy Birthday Brian; 12) Keepin' The Summer Alive; 13) Lady
Lynda; 14) Surfer Girl; 15) Help Me, Rhonda; 16) Rock And Roll Music; 17) I Get
Around; 18) Surfin' USA; 19) You're So Beautiful; 20) Good Vibrations; 21)
Barbara Ann; 22) Fun, Fun, Fun.
Twenty years after the fact, it was decided to
finally let the Beach Boys' 1980 performance from Knebworth reach the hearts
and minds of fans through official financial channels, and it was released
both on CD and DVD, for the world to
enjoy the middle-aged band in all of its heavily bearded glory. By all means,
though, this is a historical performance, with all the original six members of
the band for the last time standing together on a British stage. (They would do
some more US shows, though, in between this one and Dennis' drowning three
years later).
Of all the officially released Beach Boy live
albums this one is predictably and expectedly the worst; but even at their
worst, the Beach Boys never failed reminding the world what a spectacular
backlog they possessed, and what sort of a superhuman craft they had developed
to deliver it live — even at a time when, deep down inside, even Mike Love must
have already understood that the world was regarding them as little more than a
cute nostalgic plaything. Not that you'd tell it from the audience's reactions
— the cheering is quite heartfelt and spontaneous, to the extent that
everybody seems quite content to join in a happy birthday wish for Brian. But
chalk it up to the magic of the songs, whose power had outlived the personal
charm and sex appeal of the band. (Well, I'm pretty sure there were still some people falling for Mike's Hawaiian
shirts even as late as 1980, but they probably do not read my reviews, so I'm
quite safe insulting them).
By 1980, the band's setlist mainly consisted of
evergreens from 1963-67, with a few «highlights» from their most recent albums
thrown in, to try and lure the listeners into raising sales. Considering,
however, just how «terrific» recent efforts like ʽKeepin' The Summer
Aliveʼ and even the much less annoying ʽLady Lyndaʼ sound when
they are wedged in between ʽHeroes And Villainsʼ and ʽSurfer
Girlʼ, I do not think they had all that much of a chance here (at least
they do not get booed after three minutes of retro-moronic duh-duh-duh-ing on
ʽSummerʼ, which is the best they could possibly expect).
But the evergreens are delivered well enough:
even Dennis, with all his troubles and wreckings, seems to be in hot search of
energy, and smashes and crashes all over the place just as he used to in the
good old days, with a limited sense of rhythm, perhaps, but a sincere desire to
pump as much energy into brother Brian's melodies as possible. Brother Brian
himself mostly serves as a mascot here, sitting well-hidden behind a keyboard
that he hardly really plays, and each time he takes a lead vocal part is
considered so special that Mike feels it his chivalrous obligation to draw our
attention — "Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Wilson!" Throw in the happy
birthday chant, and a special thank-you-thank-you-Brian delivered once or twice
for the «man who wrote all this beautiful music», and the feeling of a
mummified deity installed in the temple is complete.
That said, there is no evidence to suggest that
Brian himself did not feel positive emotions from what was going on — playing
live, for him, was supposed to be part of the healing process, even if he was
being used in the process. And the actual leads that he takes on ʽSloop
John Bʼ and the bridge section of ʽSurfer Girlʼ are sung at his
broken-voice-best; I think he actually flubs fewer notes during this show than
Al Jardine, who has developed a strange penchant for straying away from the
melody (most notable on ʽHeroes And Villainsʼ) — not quite in the
Mick Jagger manner, of course, but still rather unpleasant for a band where
tightness is always the key.
Curious odds-and-ends would involve a
drastically and solemnly slowed down take on the «symphonic» introduction to
ʽCalifornia Girlsʼ; the unearthing of ʽBe True To Your
Schoolʼ sung with the good old teen verve — very strange-sounding, coming from a bunch of guys who should, by
then, be teachers rather than students; a barroom-oriented rearrangement of
ʽDo It Againʼ that does not work very well with the accent shifted
from vocal harmonies to hard-rock overtones; ʽHeroes And Villainsʼ
squashed into a medley with ʽCotton Fieldsʼ, even if the only thing
that joins them together is that ephemeral «Americana» feeling; and a Dennis
solo spotlight with ʽYou Are So Beautifulʼ, a song he originally
co-wrote with Billy Preston and then performed frequently until his death —
easily one of the most spontaneous and heartfelt bits of the show.
Other than that, Good Timin' is strictly for the collector — although it does its
best to fill in a certain gap in Beach Boy history, since the «Brian is back»
period was, until 2002, the only period left unrepresented by an official live
recording. And, from a certain point of view, it is now the best of all the «Brian is back» period albums, by
definition: the only reason why the Beach Boys were able to carry on and
preserve a shred of respect at that time were their live performances. A bit
rusty over here, a bit wobbly out there, but still saving the day. Thumbs up.
THE SMILE SESSIONS (2011)
CD I: 1) Our Prayer; 2) Gee;
3) Heroes And Villains; 4) Do You Like Worms (Roll Plymouth Rock); 5) I'm In
Great Shape; 6) Barnyard; 7) My Only Sunshine; 8) Cabin Essence; 9) Wonderful;
10) Look (Song For Children); 11) Child Is Father Of The Man; 12) Surf's Up;
13) I Wanna Be Around / Workshop; 14) Vega-Tables; 15) Holidays; 16) Wind
Chimes; 17) The Elements: Fire (Mrs. O'Leary's Cow); 18) Love To Say Dada; 19)
Good Vibrations; 20) You're Welcome; 21) Heroes And Villains (stereo mix); 22)
Heroes And Villains Sections (stereo mix); 23) Vega-Tables Demo; 24) He Gives
Speeches; 25) Smile Backing Vocals Montage; 26) Surf's Up (1967 solo version);
27) Psycodelic Sounds: Brian Falls Into A Piano; 28) Capitol SMiLE Promo;
CD II: 1) Our Prayer
"Dialog"; 2) Heroes And Villains: Part 1; 3) Heroes And Villains:
Part 2; 4) Heroes And Villains: Children Were Raised; 5) Heroes And Villains:
Prelude To Fade; 6) My Only Sunshine; 7) Cabin Essence; 8) Surf's Up: 1st
Movement; 9) Surf's Up: Piano Demo; 10) Vega-Tables: Fade; 11) The Elements:
Fire Session; 12) Cool, Cool Water (version 2); 13) Good Vibrations Session
Highlights; 14) Psycodelic Sounds: Brian Falls Into A Microphone.
Sooner or later, this was bound to happen.
After several years of «teasingly» slapping re-recorded and re-arranged shards
and slices on incoherent LPs, somewhere in between Carl Wilson's soft rock
ballads and Mike Love's pseudo-experimental oddities; after several decades of
heavy reckless bootlegging, filling a Beach Boy fan's life with sense and
emptying a Capitol executive's pocket of moolah; after Brian Wilson's brave
and critically respected 2004 attempt to resurrect and materialize the
original concept in its entirety, unfortunately, marred by the hoarseness and
senility of his vocals, as well as the lack of original Beach Boy harmonies
for pleasant authenticity; in brief, after more than forty years of this
strange fantom life lived by the original SMiLe,
here we are — finally presented, under an official seal of approval and in
shiny optimistic packaging, with what we should have been presented with in
1967. Back when it actually mattered,
that is.
We are supposed to understand, however, that
the nineteen tracks on the first CD of this archival release are not the «real» SMiLe. The «real» SMiLe,
throughout 1966 and early 1967, was well organised within Brian's head, but not
within any particular set of tapes. Brian's 2004 version is actually closer to
«reality», although it should also be obvious that, over thirty seven years,
that «reality» could not help but become slightly altered. Still, do we really
care all that much? At the bottom of
it, both the 2004 version and this «reconstruction» are fine additions to our
catalog, and neither of the two could be explicitly called «disjointed»,
«messy», or «lacking artistic vision». For all I know, these forty-eight
minutes of music are SMiLe — that planned conceptual follow-up
to Pet Sounds, that «teenage
symphony to God» that Brian had announced before falling victim to his own
unbridled ambitiousness and inability to adapt it to the actual surroundings. Smiley Smile, in comparison, was not SMiLe
— not even close. This one, regardless of any deficiencies that Beach Boy
historians and Brian Wilson's spiritual twins may detect, could just as well be
SMiLe. Why the hell not?
From a «basic acquaintance» point of view, even
if you have never heard any bootlegs and are a strictly «official release» kind
of person, there will not be any major new-song surprises here if you already
know Smiley Smile, the Beach Boys'
entire catalog of 1967-1971, the anthological archive releases, and, of course,
Brian's 2004 reconstruction. What matters is the coherence of it all: from the
very fact that yes, a reconstruction from the original tapes is possible, to the joy of discovering
the original, fully inspired recordings, and multiplied by the lovingly
executed remastering — each single vocal part here, in particular, sounds
clearer, cleaner, closer to home than could ever be achieved in the old days.
(One way to relive your Sixties experience anew).
So — always the
tempting question — could the album, as it is now presented, be the supposed
equivalent of Sgt. Pepper? Clearly,
it would have been less accessible. There is simply too much going on here: with most of the songs consisting of
several parts, plus additional instrumental links tying them together, the
kaleidoscopic ambitiousness would have been too much for most people — at times,
it seems as if Brian were competing not so much with Lennon/McCartney as he was
with Frank Zappa (Absolutely Free is
comparable in terms of the sheer number of unpredictable leaps and twists,
even if it leans far closer towards the avantgarde side of things and, thus,
could not hope for commercial success at all). Sgt. Pepper cleverly knew where to stop; SMiLe knows no limits, which is why it will always be adored much
more by eccentric «poetic souls» and relentless musical omnivores than «normal
people».
On the other hand, SMiLe does correct what I have always thought of as the biggest
mistake of Pet Sounds — it is much
more dynamic, with the melancholic, introspective mood, slow tempos, and gentle
musical flow replaced by head-spinning psychedelia, turbulence, and jarring
stops-and-starts a-plenty. It is not «rock» at all (the electric guitar barely
registers at all as an instrument among all the carnivalesque trappings), but
it is energetic for much of its duration, and, sometimes, even becomes aggressive
(ʽMrs. O'Leary's Cowʼ, Brian's musical equivalent of a raging fire
destroying everything in its path). Ever yawned at the languidness of Pet Sounds? Once or twice, at least? SMiLe gives you no time for yawning:
open your mouth and something attention-drawing will happen before you close
it.
But it is no coincidence that ʽGood
Vibrationsʼ became the only SMiLe
song to enter each and every household — it is the Beach Boys' equivalent of
ʽAll You Need Is Loveʼ: behind all of its fabulous complexity lies a
very simple, very basic, and very easily understandable message. Musically, it
belongs fully to Brian's «mature» period, but spirit-wise, it is like a perfect
link between the early fun-in-the-sun days and the later transition into the
realm of strangeness and charm. Beyond ʽGood Vibrationsʼ lies the
strange and charming, too strange and charming, perhaps, for the average
musical listener to swallow. Personally, I think that the people at large would
not be ready for SMiLe in 1967,
just as they are not all that ready for it now.
Which should not prevent critics, fans, and musical
omnivores, of course, from holding their ground — SMiLe is, indeed, one of the finest achievements of pop music in
the XXth century, and now we have the near-perfect package to prove it without
having to do all that extra work for ourselves. In the long run, it is a more
rewarding listening experience than Sgt.
Pepper: the payoff is smaller at first, with all the different links and
overdubs and stops and starts and reprises and modulations and special effects
dazzling and confusing the listener, but larger on subsequent listens, when all
the flourishes start sinking in and you start to realize how well they all
belong together. It does not have its own ʽDay In The Lifeʼ — a sort
of ultimate, mind-blowing, cathartic peak with a cleverly engineered mix of
comic and tragic overtones that forces you to realize how small you are in
relation to the universe — although the magnificent ʽSurf's Upʼ comes
close, its solemnly mannered baroque flow, ungrammatical lyrics (I still think
that Van Dyke Parks was one of the weakest links in the chain), and intentional
coldness still stir up a very different kind of emotions. But apart from that,
it still reflects a grand vision, dressed up in some of the most inventive
clothes ever designed by a pop musician.
Regarding the package, I have only heard the
«standard» 2-CD version, which includes about twenty extra tracks from the
sessions, all of which are well worth
listening to — SMiLe was such a fascinating
project that even the demos and interrupted studio takes are exciting on their
own, as you watch these songs unfurl before your eyes. Even the eight
minute-long «montage» of accapella backing vocals for the project is
jaw-dropping — these are, after all, some of the most unusual and non-trivial
harmonies the band had ever designed, and some of them do get lost in the
background when you are listening to the completed takes. Heck, even the «silly
bits» — such as the little staged comic-absurdist scene in which ʽBrian
Falls Into A Pianoʼ are charmingly hilarious this time. Why couldn't they
think of something like that in the times of ʽBull Session With Big
Daddyʼ?...
There is, however, an enlarged 5-CD boxset
version as well, with a whole disc given over to the story of the development
of ʽHeroes And Villainsʼ and another one given over to ʽGood
Vibrationsʼ. For me, this is technical overkill, but I am fairly sure all
of that is worth listening to at least once — if only to understand how much time,
work, energy, and spirit had been invested in these creations. If you can
afford the big boxset, by all means, do so: even a self-proclaimed hater of SMiLe could be objectively convinced, I
believe, that this is one of the few albums that does merit a whole boxset of
such length all to itself. Thumbs up to all of the versions out there — and
especially to the amazing fact that, now that the enigma has finally disclosed
itself as fully as possible, it has not become the tiniest bit less enigmatic
than it was before.
PLEASE PLEASE ME (1963)
1) I Saw Her Standing There;
2) Misery; 3) Anna (Go To Him); 4) Chains; 5) Boys; 6) Ask Me Why; 7) Please
Please Me; 8) Love Me Do; 9) P.S. I Love You; 10) Baby It's You; 11) Do You
Want To Know A Secret; 12) A Taste Of Honey; 13) There's A Place; 14) Twist And
Shout.
We deserve a little bit of a preface here. This
is, after all, the third time that I am writing about the same Beatles albums —
the first one was from a generally fanboyish perspective, poorly worded and
quite uninformative, and the second one was written in a text-generating frenzy
that probably went over the top. Third time, hopefully, be the charm, or else
it just was not meant to be.
It is amusing to look back on the old days —
not even the early reviewing days, but the good old Iron Curtain days when
music was scarce to come by, and each album received approximately the same
span of attention that is today reserved to a large shelf crammed with CDs —
and realize how the Beatles could be «everything and more» to somebody who had
so little context to place them into. Many people knew the Beatles, but not
their sources and influences — not Motown, not a lot of early rock'n'roll
(Elvis, perhaps, but Buddy Holly? Carl Perkins?), certainly not skiffle or the
late 1950s / early 1960s British pop music scene. Of their contemporaries, with
whom they constantly traded ideas back and forth, also only select figures were
known to the average Soviet listener — and, I dare say, many of the average non-Soviet
listeners as well. No surprise, then, that many of the musically knowledgeable
people like to think of — or, at least, talk
of — the Beatles as phantom-like figureheads, a band whose achievements are
vastly overrated just because they happened to market stuff better than the people who actually invented it.
It would seem, then, that as we pick up more
and more «context», the Beatles are more and more probable to turn into «just
another band», a good one, maybe a great one, but hardly the ultimate benchmark
for every musical adventure of the 1960s. Who would dare judge Frank Zappa by
applying the same criteria as one's mind sets out for the Beatles? Or The
Grateful Dead? Or Carlos Santana? Surely the idea is laughable.
And yet... every time I have the occasion to
put on a Beatles record (which I do not actually need to put on — after all
these years, each single note on each single Beatles record is inextricably
ingrained in my head), I cannot help
wondering how different it sounds. If
the primary goal of music, after all, is to incite vibration in our emotional
nerves, then different artists, throughout the history of music, have displayed
various levels of skill in inciting this vibration — and the difference of the
Beatles is that, in almost everything they did, no matter how «derivative»,
«imitative», or «tentative» it was, they seemed to work as if not making these nerves ring out at top
volume was not even an option. Where others would string together
«nice-sounding» or «catchy» chords, the Beatles consistently — and I stress,
consistently — strung together chord sequences that went somewhere goddamn deeper
than they were supposed to. (The infamous discovery of «Aeolian cadences» by
William Mann in Lennon's early ditty ʽNot A Second Timeʼ may sound
funny, but there is a grain of seriousness beyond each such bit of fun:
whatever there was, it must have hit The Times' resident musicologist real hard — unless, of course, he was
bribed by Parlophone executives or Brian Epstein in person).
Let us take Please Please Me as our first test case. There can hardly be any
disagreements here — it is literally the «weakest» Beatles album, if only
because it was recorded in such a rush: 9 hours and 45 minutes of studio time
altogether, from a young band with very little studio experience. Already
guided by George Martin as the wise studio guru, for sure, but, by February
1963, the band and their producer had not yet even gotten to know each other all
that well. The band's original compositions were still few and far between:
John Lennon still struggling as a songwriter, Paul McCartney feeling a little
bit more self-confident, but stuck hands and feet in a simplistic teenage
mindset, George Harrison not even beginning to look up to his «elders», and then
there's always Ringo — or, rather, there was beginning to always be Ringo, having quite freshly replaced Pete
Best and not yet «proven» as an integral part of the band.
In short, there is no need to prove to anyone
that Please Please Me represents the
tender infancy of the Beatles. For most bands, such «tender infancy» is, at
best, giggly-cute, at worst, confusing and ugly, but in both cases, normally,
there is no good reason to listen to this music for a second time other than
research purposes. But Please Please Me
still stands up — despite all the flaws, the silliness, the rampant
naïveness, and ʽAsk Me Whyʼ, which may be the worst Beatles
original ever composed (and is definitely
the worst original Beatles song composed by John Lennon).
It all begins with ʽLove Me Doʼ.
"Love, love me do / You know I love you". When the Ramones wrote
lyrics like that twelve years later, they were taken as smart, ironic,
streetwise minimalism. When the Beatles wrote them, they were dead serious, or,
rather, they did not give a damn — the words never mattered anyway, except for
the stipulated convention that it had to be something about «love». As an
«artistic statement», ʽLove Me Doʼ has even fewer credentials than a
Sesame Street composition (the latter ones have educational value at least).
Big question, then: why does it stick so sorely in the head, much more so than
the average Dave Clark Five or Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas song?
Melodically, it has very little going for it other than the main harmonica
part, and the repetitive vocal melody that partially replicates it.
But there is this little matter of the
Beatle-specific hook: the resolution of that melody during the extended
"so plea-ee-ee-eeese..." bit — I'd bet my head on it that a
hypothetical Billy J. Kramer would have been able to come up with everything in
this melody but that particular
resolution, which so admirably breaks up the monotonousness of the main part of
the verse. Simply put, we start out «simple, stupid», then add a tense
«longing» effect with the "please", then bring it all to a natural
conclusion with an accappella moment of half-comic «spookiness». It might seem
stupid, but there is a touch of suspense, maybe even some primitive mystique,
in the song — which makes it stand out among dozens of technically similar
compositions of 1962, and explains its rapid chart success (No. 17 on the UK
charts at the time), achieved, by the way, without any serious marketing /
promotional campaign.
There is no such element of mystique in the
follow-up single, ʽPlease Please Meʼ, which, instead, concentrates on
overwhelming joy, conveying it with as much effect as a standard four-piece
band in 1963 could be capable of. Lennon's harmonica is triumphant rather than
menacing this time, the joint vocal harmonies sound as if George Martin was
pushing them in a «Beethoven for teens» direction, and, again, the
Beatle-specific hook: the "come on come on..." crescendo that nobody else
could think of delivering at the time. The Dave Clark Five would later
shamelessly steal that technique for ʽAny Way You Want Itʼ — but even
if they had enough talent to more or less convincingly replicate the mood, they
still did not come up with the better song.
It is interesting that, for all of the band's
Hamburg- and Cavern Club-acquired reputation as rough and tough onstage
performers of genuine rock'n'roll, Please
Please Me features only one genuine self-penned «rocker». I have always
thought that, perhaps, had the Beatles started their recording career one or
two years later, when mainstream fears towards «aggressive music» had already
slightly diminished, they may not have had to endure the reputation of
«softies» compared to the Stones' «tough guys» image; but then, on the other
hand, had they started out later, they would not be so much in the lead — plus,
there is no use in all these ifs and buts.
In any case — what a rocker. Paul's "one,
two, three, FOUR!" countdown that opens the song was specially glued on to
the final master tape from another take — a genius decision, giving the album
an energetic blast-off start, again, sounding like nothing before it. The idea
behind the LP was to give the audiences a slight approximation of a Beatles
live show; clearly, this was incompatible with George Martin's perennial quest
for sonic perfection, but the few «live» elements that they did incorporate
still gave the record a huge advantage. To me, the main hero of ʽI Saw Her
Standing Thereʼ, however, is the other
George: it is his lead work, both in between the verse lines and on the solo,
that gives the song its genuine tough edge. The vocals, harmonies, lyrics are
all «teen fluff», but George's echo-laden licks, some of which seem to be
imitating 1950s guitar gods such as Scottie Moore, are the true grit of the
song. The transition into the instrumental section is one of the ass-kickiest
moments in Beatle history.
Of the other originals, I have always thought
of ʽMiseryʼ as tremendously underrated — not only does it have a
fabulously catchy melody, but there is something deeply disturbing as well
about how the bitter-tragic lyrics of the song clash with its overall merry
mood: how is it possible to sing lines like "without her I will be in
misery" when the singer is clearly having a hard time preventing himself
from toppling over in spasms of laughter? (The truly disturbing realization about it is that the song might easily
have reflected John's genuine feelings about his affairs). The rest is fluff,
ranging from passable (ʽP.S. I Love Youʼ — Paul in his songwriting
infancy stage) to quite awkward (the already mentioned ʽAsk Me Whyʼ:
the most fake song John ever wrote,
trying to convey an atmosphere of care and tenderness of which he quite obviously
knew nothing at the time — the whole song is a mess of poorly strung together
clichés that are really grating).
ʽThere's A Placeʼ is frequently
found in comparisons with the Beach Boys' ʽIn My Roomʼ due to both of
them exploring the topic of «loneliness» in the lyrics, but if we dig from
there, there is no question that the Brian Wilson song is the better of the two
— its slow, melancholic musical backing fully matches the word, whereas the
Lennon song is upbeat and optimistic (but not devoid of subtlety: its harmonica
blasts are notably sterner and sadder than the ones on ʽPlease Please
Meʼ). Still, the vocal modulations are beyond reproach.
Of the six covers, Arthur Alexander's ʽAnnaʼ
is a fantastic achievement — on the instrumental plane, the band extracts and
amplifies its main melodic hook in the form of a finely shaped, mysteriously
resonating guitar riff; and in the vocal department, John finds a good way to
let go of the self-restraining «mannerisms» of traditional black R'n'B and
actually convey a believable tragic atmosphere in the bridge section. Goffin
and King's ʽChainsʼ is given to George, who does a fine job of
transposing his natural slight tongue-tiedness onto the song's message of love
confusion; and the Shirelles' ʽBaby It's Youʼ, like so many other
songs the Beatles did, simply converts the original's excessive «roundedness»
into sharper angles.
It is useless to speculate on whether Please Please Me already «sows the
seeds» of the grand successes to come. The Beatles certainly do not come across
as «enthusiastic revolutionaries» when you listen to Paul telling us how he'll
be coming home again to you love, or even when John is screaming his head off
throughout ʽTwist And Shoutʼ, trying to beat the Isley Brothers at
their own game (and I think he did — except, of course, the Isley Brothers
probably did not need to go home and nurse their voices with cough drops after
the recording session). But it also never really seems as if they «just» went into the studio to record
some songs, knock off an LP and be done with it. All of the little things I
have mentioned show ambition, and lots of it: a strong desire, right from the
start, to be the very best at what they are doing, otherwise there's no point
in doing it in the first place. And there is a clear understanding of the
long-playing record as the proper medium to do it — a realization that it is a
bit humiliating when your fourteen song-long collection consists of two
well-written hit singles surrounded by a sea of useless filler.
Which is why Please Please Me, after all these years, holds together quite fine
as an album, unlike 99% of pop-oriented LPs from 1963. (Too bad for the Wilson
brothers, who did not start properly understanding the LP's potential until All Summer Long). It is slight,
occasionally clumsy, lyrically trivial, not devoid of very strange decisions
(such as saddling Ringo with ʽBoysʼ, a tune that was perfectly fine
when the Shirelles did it, but predictably earned him a gay image with certain
audiences), yet it is unmistakably Beatles, and everything that is unmistakably
Beatles deserves a thumbs up without any need for meditation on the
subject. And anyone who tries to slight it too
much should just try to remember the names of at least ten other pop LPs from
1963 without calling on the Internet for help. Might be a chore even for some
of those who had already struck their teens back in the day.
WITH THE BEATLES (1963)
1) It Won't Be Long; 2) All
I've Got To Do; 3) All My Loving; 4) Don't Bother Me; 5) Little Child; 6) Till
There Was You; 7) Please Mister Postman; 8) Roll Over Beethoven; 9) Hold Me
Tight; 10) You Really Got A Hold On Me; 11) I Wanna Be Your Man; 12) Devil In
Her Heart; 13) Not A Second Time; 14) Money (That's What I Want).
By the time With The Beatles came out in late 1963, the Beatles were already
superheroes all over Europe, with the «super-» bit neatly provided by the
success of ʽShe Loves Youʼ. But at this point, they did not yet need
to «prove» anything — what they did was still seen simply as pop music, and
there was no conscious, openly perceivable drive on their part to «push
boundaries» or whatever. They were simply writing more songs the way they felt
these songs, and that is what is so exciting about those early records, one
hundred percent pure and free of any intellectual pretense: natural innocent
genius, not at all burdened with reasoning and calculation. (Well, they were
happy enough to have George Martin do the calculations for them).
Reviews of the album often (almost always, in
fact) start with expressing admiration for the front sleeve. Ooh, black and
white. Wow, standing in the shadows. Dark! Disturbing! What a far cry from the
silly smiling faces on Please Please Me.
Progressive and intelligent. Look at what Gerry and the Pacemakers, or Freddie
and The Dreamers were putting on their
album covers at the time. No comparison whatsoever.
Frankly, I am not all that sure that the album
cover (although it does look cool) is really such a tremendous achievement.
What is much more interesting is that With
The Beatles manages to sound fairly «dark» without any actual help from the blackness of the album sleeve.
Well, maybe not «dark» as such, if by «darkness» we mean Jim Morrison or Led
Zeppelin. But I have always felt that there was a very significant line
separating With The Beatles from Please Please Me, perhaps even one of the most significant lines in Beatle
history (and Beatle history knew plenty of lines). It is the line that
separates «lightweight» from «heavyweight»; and it is no coincidence that it
was only With The Beatles that the
first «serious» musical critics started suspecting there might be something of
use for them in that air.
One thing that need not confuse us are the
lyrics. At this point, neither John nor Paul (nor George, who makes his
songwriting debut on here) showed any care for the words; the epitome of «wordy
cleverness» to them was finding a line like "it won't be long 'til I
belong to you", and the rest generally just rearranges all the love song
clichés extracted from God knows where. (That's what you get for
sticking to crude rock'n'roll values and ignoring The Songbook — at least the
Tin Pan Alley people knew their English). But I do not think that, before Bob
Dylan got the guys interested in the magic powers of language, either John or
Paul invested a lot of time and work into the words, or had any high thoughts
of those words. Later on, John would make it a personal hobby to look upon the
Beatles' legacy with a critical laser-eye, and demolish the stupidity of the
lyrics in particular (Paul's, preferably, but his own were not exempt from
self-criticism either). But in 1963, none of them were teenagers any more, and
they certainly understood how silly it all sounded to the average «grown-up»
person, and they did not give a damn about it.
And neither should we. The lyrics just followed
the conventions of the times, which certainly does not apply to the music. Take
ʽIt Won't Be Longʼ, for instance. On the surface, it is just an
upbeat tune about... well, find the quote in the previous paragraph. But, for
some reason, I have never thought of that song as «happy». The main melody
rather shows a clear Shadows influence, and Shadows mostly wrote «shadowy»
music — that British variant of surf-rock with a spy movie atmosphere. Now
there is no spy movie atmosphere in ʽIt Won't Be Longʼ, but its meat
and bones are tough, and its colors disturbingly grayish.
And then there are the vocals. Any other vocalist
would probably sing the lines "Since you left me, I'm so alone, now you're
coming, you're coming on home" with all the proper «tenderness» and «sympathy»
that they require. Not John, who never in his life stooped to simulating emotions on his songs. But
instead of just being all out wooden about it, he sings it, well, probably in
the same way he'd be greeting his wife Cynthia after a hard day's night:
pretending to care, but in reality not giving much of a damn. As a result,
both ʽIt Won't Be Longʼ and the immediate followup, ʽAll I've
Got To Doʼ, have a surprisingly emotionally hollow sound — but it still
works. (A good way to understand this would be to play ʽAll I've Got To
Doʼ back-to-back with one of those Yoko-period Lennon ballads on which he
really cared, like ʽJuliaʼ).
So genuine sugary sentimentality is left in the
care of Paul, right? Not quite. It certainly rears its head on the record's
only «sappy» number, a cover of ʽTill There Was Youʼ from The Music Man, but nowhere else. Even
there, the sentimentality is tempered with class: Paul learned the tune from
Peggy Lee, who already performed it in a poppier, more rhythmic, slightly Latinized
arrangement when compared to the orchestral sludge of the original — and
still the Beatles almost completely reinvented the music, coming up with a
complex melody played on twin nylon-stringed acoustic guitars (and featuring
one of George's first brilliant solos).
But a song like ʽAll My Lovingʼ is
anything but sentimental; or, rather,
sentimentality is merely one of its side effects rather than the main
attraction. It started out as a country-western tune, actually (traces of that
history can still be found in George's Nashville-style solo), but ended up
becoming a fast pop-rocker; and any lesser band would have simply settled for
placing the emphasis on the catchy vocal melody, but what really pushes
ʽAll My Lovingʼ over the threshold is the rhythm guitar work from
John: the rapidly strummed triplets that drive the verses are technically
unnecessary, but, being there, they give the illusion that the song is played
thrice as fast as it would be otherwise, and shift the focus away from Paul's
vocalization, closer to what almost looks like a bit of subconscious paranoia.
Finally, in comes George with his first original
offering, and while ʽDon't Bother Meʼ is simply a preliminary stage
in his songwriting maturation, it is decidedly
dark, not to mention how much the title really reflects George's persona:
"please go away, leave me alone, don't bother me", I believe, should
have eventually been etched on his tombstone. A big hooray to whoever had the
idea to double-track the vocals: the trick magically transformed the
stuttering, insecure delivery on ʽChainsʼ and ʽDo You Want To
Know A Secretʼ into a thick, threatening rumble-grumble. One step further
in that direction — no more teen pussy for George! (Or, rather, he'd have to
start borrowing from the special Mick Jagger/Keith Richards brand).
Part of why With The Beatles has this «darker» aura around it lies in it being
almost totally dominated by John, which was not the case on Please Please Me: he is the main
composer and/or «spiritual presence» on more than half of the songs, whereas
Paul bears primary responsibility for only three of the tracks — and the third
one, which I still have not mentioned, is ʽHold Me Tightʼ which I
have always perceived as one of his weakest ever tunes, if only because the
vocal melody resolution (the "it's you — you, you, you-ooo-ooo" bit)
comes across as exceedingly silly.
John, on the other hand, further extends his
reputation by throwing in three excellent interpretations of Motown material,
turning the Marvelettes' cutesy-flimsy ʽPlease Mister Postmanʼ into a
rip-roaring personal tragedy, the Miracles' soulful ʽYou Really Got A Hold
On Meʼ into the same tongue-in-cheek, slightly sarcastic stab as ʽIt
Won't Be Longʼ, and delivering Barrett Strong's ʽMoneyʼ with
enough evil glee to make us all believe that that is what he wants, indeed —
not that hard to do once he has already established his lack of a proper tender
heart on the previous tracks. Real nasty guy, that Lennon, without any attempts
to hide it.
From a sheerly musical point of view, it would
take too much time to list all the new tricks that the band introduces here (besides,
it has all been written about a million times already), so I will just mention
one obvious thing — the complexity and creativity of vocal harmonies on With The Beatles completely dwarfs Please Please Me. That this is going to
be a seriously voice-oriented record is obvious from the very start: in the
place of the energetic, but not particularly surprising "one two three
four" of ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ we have the multi-flanked
assault of "it won't be long yeah – YEAH – yeah – YEAH" which, to the
best of my knowledge, comes from nowhere at all. There is no «beauty» as such
in these harmonies that get ever more trickier as the album progresses (no
comparison with the Beach Boys, who had a strictly Heaven-oriented approach), but
there is a wonderful dynamics, the major goal of which is your undivided
attention.
In effect, With
The Beatles might be said to introduce the unspoken motto of «leave no spot
unfilled». Not only is there supposed to be no filler, the idea is that there
should be no «filler within non-filler», that is, the songs are not supposed to
have any wasted moments. Gaps between verse lines? Fill them in with
counterpoint backing vocals. Instrumental passages? Make them either reproduce
the verse melody or construct an economic solo that makes perfect sense and is
easily memorable, rather than merely respects the convention that there be an
obligatory instrumental passage. And so on.
It does not always work. The curse of pop
repetitiveness strikes hard on the overlong chorus to ʽHold Me
Tightʼ, and even harder on ʽI Wanna Be Your Manʼ, a song that
John and Paul originally wrote for The Rolling Stones, and, honestly, I think
they should have left it at that: the Stones arranged and performed it as an
eerie sexual menace, with a supertight, take-no-prisoners attitude, next to
which The Beatles' comparatively «relaxed» performance and, especially, Ringo's
near-comical vocals (as opposed to Jagger's evil gloating!) lose hands down.
(It did give Ringo a more assured and natural live solo spot than
ʽBoysʼ, though). Personally, I have never been a big fan of John's
ʽLittle Childʼ, either, a somewhat sub-par R&B composition, only
lifted out of mediocrity by an over-pumped tour-de-force on harmonica, which
John must have been trying to literally «blow to bits» during the session —
even Sonny Boy Williamson II could have appreciated that.
But none of this really matters, because the
major goal of With The Beatles was
to stabilize the band's position as accomplished artists, and that goal is clearly
fulfilled. In addition, the record just might feature the best ever balance in
Beatle history between covers and originals: the covers, although ranging from
Motown to Chuck Berry to musicals, are all strong, inventively rearranged, and
sit fairly well next to the originals. (On Beatles
For Sale, the band would be falling back on covers for lack of free time to
come up with more originals rather than out of free will, and that had its
negative effect on the final results). Hence, a very special thumbs up
here: With The Beatles often gets a
little bit overlooked next to the «great big breakthrough» of A Hard Day's Night and its all-original
cast, but in the story of the Beatles' evolution it may actually have played a
much more important role.
A HARD DAY'S NIGHT (1964)
1) A Hard Day's Night; 2) I
Should Have Known Better; 3) If I Fell; 4) I'm Happy Just To Dance With You; 5)
And I Love Her; 6) Tell Me Why; 7) Can't Buy Me Love; 8) Any Time At All; 9)
I'll Cry Instead; 10) Things We Said Today; 11) When I Get Home; 12) You Can't
Do That; 13) I'll Be Back.
Time has solidified the status of A Hard's Day Night as the one «early Beatles» album you have
to get if you are only going to get one (although what sort of a silly person
would settle for only one early Beatles album?) — if only for the objective
reason that this is the only «early Beatles» album that consists entirely of
originals; the next one like that would only be Rubber Soul, where the band was already stepping into «maturity».
It is true that, in the UK at least, A Hard Day's Night sort of turned the
whole idea of a «soundtrack» on its head. In the States, which the Beatles had
only just finished conquering in early '64, with the success of ʽI Want To
Hold Your Handʼ, it was released as a «proper» soundtrack — seven songs on
Side A and a bunch of movie-related instrumental versions of Side B (including,
by the way, a very stylish, Duane Eddy-style, reworking of ʽThis Boyʼ
as ʽRingo's Themeʼ — the one that is played in the movie as Ringo
takes his solitary strolls upon «leaving» the band). But at home, the second
side was completely unrelated to the first: six more songs, all of them
originals, that had nothing to do with the movie. Yet the album was still, in
some way, a «soundtrack», provoking the layman into thinking that, from now on,
every recording with the Beatles name on it would be worth buying, even a
collection of toothpaste commercials.
As for artistic growth, I would think that the
strength of A Hard Day's Night lies
in the details. At this point, «experimentation» was not yet an integral part
of the Beatles' career: they did try out new ideas and approaches, but nobody
seemed obsessed with them. John and Paul were bursting with melodies, not
«concepts», and the only global thing that A
Hard Day's Night proves us is that they do not really need those covers any more.
For one thing, up until now, the Beatles had a
hard time coming up with original gritty rockers: other than ʽI Saw Her
Standing Thereʼ and, to a lesser extent, ʽShe Loves Youʼ (which
was rather just «loud» than truly «rocking»), they preferred to rock out on
their cover versions (ʽTwist And Shoutʼ, ʽRoll Over
Beethovenʼ, ʽMoneyʼ etc.). Now, with ʽCan't Buy Me
Loveʼ they show that they can easily create a fast, kick-ass pop-rocker
along with the best of them; and with ʽYou Can't Do Thatʼ, show that
they can rock out in a mean, nasty, mid-tempo manner, holding their own on the
same field with contemporary R'n'B-ers and blues-rockers (I have always thought
that ʽYou Can't Do Thatʼ was John intentionally pulling a Mick).
On the other side of the field, ʽAnd I
Love Herʼ establishes Paul as an independent, self-confident sweet
balladeer for his generation — placed at approximately the same strategic
juncture on the LP as ʽTill There Was Youʼ was on the previous album,
and showing that the band no longer requires the services of Meredith Willson
to feed its fans with wonderful roses and sweet, fragrant meadows. Granted,
Paul still cannot write a decent lyric to save his life, but does he need to?
There is a certain minimalistic charm, this time around, in "I give her
all my love / That's all I do / And if you saw my love / You'd love her too"
that sits perfectly at home with the equally minimalistic riff that drives the
song. And there is a bit of self-confident tease at the end of the song as that
minimalistic riff is «driven home» with four more bars. «Yes, I am so simple
and silly, but you will never forget this coda anyway».
That said, at this time John is still the
dominant presence in the band. Most songs were still written collectively, to
be sure, yet the «Paul stamp» is strongly felt only on ʽAnd I Love
Herʼ, ʽCan't Buy Me Loveʼ, and ʽThings We Said Todayʼ
— a «miserable» three out of thirteen! (This might actually explain some of the
exquisite fan worship towards the album). And by now, his songwriting had
reached that level of perfection from which it would never fall back again
(except when he was derailed by avantgarde temptations or politics).
Of course, not all of his songs here are
equally deserving. On Side B, the unfortunate ʽWhen I Get Homeʼ
frequently gets the flack for being somewhat cruder and less coherent in its
melody than the rest (although the chief culprit is usually the lyrics:
word-wise, it is like the little imbecile brother of ʽA Hard Day's
Nightʼ, and the line "I'm gonna love you till the cows come
home", for some reason, has always irritated me). ʽI'll Cry
Insteadʼ suffers notably from the lack of a guitar solo: it is quite a
respectable little pseudo-rockabilly number as such, but way too repetitive as
a result. Most importantly, they just don't look too good against the
background of everything else.
Although John is overrepresented on the album
and Paul is underrepresented, now that I think of it, the starkest contrast on
the record is between the best songs of each one of them — and that contrast,
funny enough, is just the opposite of the public's general opinion on their
artistic and personal natures, because it is John who is primarily responsible
for the brightest song on the album and Paul who is behind the creation of the
darkest one. Coincidence? Or just one of those «stereotypes suck» kind of
moments?..
The «brightest» song is, of course, ʽI
Should Have Known Betterʼ. It is utterly artificial, and yet it is
probably the most successful attempt they ever made at capturing that «first
love feeling» mood that made them into such invincible teenage deities. Three
ingredients combine to make it a into such a mind-blower: John's massive
harmonica runs, overwhelming all the other instruments for miles around;
George's minimalistic, but brilliant solo that, once again, makes the right
choice in mimicking John's already perfect vocal melody rather than trying
futilely to invent something different; and the singing, of course — all the
prolonged notes that bookmark the verses from both ends, all the
"whoah-whoahs", all the sexy "oh-oh"s and dips into falsetto
in the bridge section, so many individual snares within so short a track. And
no croony sentimentality in sight. This is yer Good Youth incarnate; people
unable to feel pure joy at the sound of this song are, at best, «stuck-up»,
and, at worst... oh, never mind.
The «darkest» song is, of course, ʽThings
We Said Todayʼ. The lyrics are actually stronger here than on ʽAnd I
Love Youʼ, but whether they really fit the doom and gloom of the tune is
questionable. There is a little bit of irony in the words, but, overall, the
theme of separation is much better indicated by the music: although the tempo
is relatively fast and the rhythm is quite toe-tap-provoking, the minor mode of
the song provokes an entirely different reaction. And as the whole thing
eventually fades away on the same melody that opened it, it becomes the first in a relatively short line of
«wholesale tragic» Beatle songs.
Actually, I would say that in general, there is
a certain drift in A Hard Day's Night
from Side A to Side B: the movie-related songs are, perhaps predictably,
lighter, brighter, and fluffier, whereas, as we get to the second side, the
mood darkens and solidifies a bit. John allows himself to be a nasty jealous
guy on ʽYou Can't Do Thatʼ, Paul goes all melancholic on ʽThings
You Said Todayʼ, and even the opening drum crack on ʽAnytime At
Allʼ would probably seem a bit out of place, had they wanted to put that
song in the movie as well. Then it all ends with ʽI'll Be Backʼ, a
song that vies with ʽThingsʼ for the title of «saddest» — only barely losing out because the vocals
do not quite manage to show that ominous tingle of "you say you will love
me...".
It's just these little things, really, that
elevate Hard Day's Night above the
general «good pop album» status. It may be all about trivial sentiments
dressed in simple musical forms, but never in simple musical clichés.
The slamming chord that opens the title track; the falsetto peaks on ʽI
Should Have Known Betterʼ; the deletion of the verse/chorus opposition on
ʽIf I Fellʼ; and so on and on and on, from the «light» of Side A to
the relative «dark» of Side B.
There is nothing genuinely «revolutionary»
about Hard Day's Night, because the
songwriting and the artistic personae of John and Paul had already become fully
formed on With The Beatles. There is
simply a sense of some sort of completeness: this is the ultimate «light-pop»
experience of its epoch, and an experience that could not even theoretically be
reproduced once pop-rock had gotten out of its infancy stage. It is, at the
same time, utterly naïve / formulaic and
hunting for genius musical decisions. Genius musical decisions would, of
course, be quite plentiful in years to come, but the «virginity» would be lost
forever. Look at all the «twee-pop» bands of today — many of them are quite
fine, but nobody in his right mind strives to close up that hymen, understanding
well enough that it is impossible. Today, naïveness and innocence in
attitude is reserved for the likes of Taylor Swift — mainstream puppets that
are almost always the laughing stock of «advanced» music listeners. The miracle
of Hard Day's Night is in that, even
today, «advanced» music listeners may easily listen to it without laughing, and
join me in my thumbs
up.
P.S. A few words about the movie are probably
in order as well. Time has been a little less kind to the movie than the
accompanying album, I think. In 1964, it was seen as an even more colossal
breakthrough: Richard Lester showed the world that a «pop artist movie» could
actually be seen as an individual work of art, not just a dumb vehicle for the
current teen idol to show off his charisma. That alone was a staggering
discovery, rendering insignificant the fact that most of the Beatles could
barely act (fortunately, Lester had the good sense not to ask them to act, so
most of the time they were just being themselves — good news for John, worse
for the rest of them), or that most of the jokes, puns, and gags, now that you
look at them with a fresh eye, aren't really all that funny. (One exception is the cut-in scene between George and
the advertising executive — some truly wicked dialog out there, as relevant for
us today as it was fifty years ago, if not more so). Nevertheless, even if the
movie is not as hot on its own as it is sometimes proclaimed to be, it is still
one of the most fascinating — and, in a way, «authentic» — documents of its
era. For best effect, watch it on a double bill with Viva Las Vegas.
BEATLES FOR SALE (1964)
1) No Reply; 2) I'm A Loser;
3) Baby's In Black; 4) Rock And Roll Music; 5) I'll Follow The Sun; 6) Mr.
Moonlight; 7) Kansas City/Hey Hey Hey Hey; 8) Eight Days A Week; 9) Words Of
Love; 10) Honey Don't; 11) Every Little Thing; 12) I Don't Want To Spoil The
Party; 13) What You're Doing; 14) Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby.
Tradition dictates that Beatles For Sale should always be docked half a point, one star, or
the + sign next to A Hard Day's Night,
its luckier elder brother from the same year. It is one of the few Beatles
albums that makes no giant steps forwards; it is objectively the only Beatles
album that makes one small step backwards
by re-introducing the six obligatory cover tunes, where the previous record had
seemed to so effectively obliterate this custom; and the four lads are standing
in a clearly «autumnal» mood on the front cover, all of them «babies in black»,
worn and torn by heavy touring, annoying socializing, and life-sucking demands
from the music industry.
It is true enough that the boys were getting
tired, particularly of having too many other people make the decisions for
them, and it does seem to be true that they simply did not have the time to
come up with enough original material to fill a complete LP. It is
unquestionably true that, on the whole, the sound of Beatles For Sale is less «happy» than that of Hard Day's Night — the album does, after all, begin with three
«downers», and John is no longer contributing teenage odes to joy à la ʽI Should Have Known
Betterʼ.
And, speaking of the covers, I still share the
opinion that ʽMr. Moonlightʼ is one of the unluckiest choices the
band ever made. The Dr. Feelgood version, which they copied with very little
imagination, had it registered as a soul ballad with an almost crooner-ish
atmosphere, quite incompatible with John's usual singing voice; and where his
frenzied screaming worked so well on ʽAnnaʼ because the song had a
tragic heart, it feels silly and wasted on the bridge sections of this particular
tune. The only clever touch was to replace the original rudimentary guitar solo
with an eerie Hammond organ passage — but no Beatles song in which the
instrumental, rather than vocal, part is the best one can really count as
successful.
However, apart from that minor misstep, Beatles For Sale is anything but a «step backwards» in the story of
the Beatles' development. Any detailed song-by-song analysis would immediately
show just how many of these itty-bitty-beatly «trifles» make a first appearance
here — whenever these guys were locked in the studio with George the Fifth at
the helm, tired or not tired, they just weren't interested in repeating the
same old formulae. «Beatle-quality» had to mean «creative», even if it meant
being «creative» on an old piece of Carl Perkins boogie.
So, just a few things off the top of my head.
Buddy Holly wrote ʽWords Of Loveʼ in 1957, and he must have been so
proud to have come up with that melody that he did not bother giving it all the
studio care it required. Play the original and the cover back to back, and the
first thing you notice is how much «juicier» the main guitar line is sounding.
Where Buddy is satisfied with just occasionally letting out that high-pitched
piercing tone, George uses it on every note, getting a warm, jangly effect —
tender and cordial, but without a trace of cheap sentimentality. With John out
there behind him, partially doubling his work on a second, barely audible
guitar, the effect is otherworldly, and even though the solo break, faithfully
following Holly's original, is no more than two different phrases played over
and over again, I would not mind a longer version.
Laying on echo effects was one of the band's
favorite tricks ever since With The
Beatles at least, but it was a cool touch when they threw them on 'Rock And
Roll Music' and 'Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby', giving the old rock'n'roll
chestnuts an «arena» feel instead of the «chamber» feel of the originals. In
fact, the feel of 'Rock And Roll Music' has completely shifted: Chuck did this
song just like he did all the rest — with a friendly smile, inviting all the
young ladies and gentlemen out there to try out this brand new hot dance called
rock and roll. This rendition demands
that you scream your head off, instead of dancing your legs off: because of the
echo effects, John's brawny delivery, and Paul's somber bass, it is far more
aggressive than Chuck ever intended it to be. Ditto with Carl Perkins, when
they start laying the echo on Harrison's vocals (but they couldn't do anything
of the kind with ʽHoney Don'tʼ, so they just... gave it to Ringo. Who
did a hilarious job with it, anyway).
Now, about the originals. First, we are all
taught that it is here, and nowhere else, that John started to fall under the
Dylan spell, and take a healthier attitude towards the lyrics — hence,
ʽI'm A Loserʼ, a feeble first attempt to climb out of the mire of
clichés. The famous "Although I laugh and I act like a clown /
Beneath this mask I am fearing a frown" would hardly count as «significant
lyrics» today, but for the Beatles in 1964, it was a milestone. It is debatable
if we can take ʽI'm A Loserʼas the beginning of John's
«no-bullshit-allowed» phase, where everything had to be either strictly
tongue-in-cheek or strictly heart-on-the-sleeve, but, in any case, there is
increased «character complexity» here, and that be good.
Second, McCartney is quickly learning how to
put «genius» and «corn» in the same package, coming up with his first
genuinely great «softie». Curiously, ʽI'll Follow The Sunʼ is usually
said to have been written around 1960, which might explain the man's dragging
it out of the storeroom for lack of time to write something new; but maybe it
is a good thing that it was given four years of fermentation. Now it sounds a
bit Searchers-style, what with the folksy melody and the harmonic layering and
all, but more homely and sincere, due to the production and the clever
alternation between group singing and Paul's solo lines. Just a year and a half
separating this from the thematically similar ʽP.S. I Love Youʼ, but
that song screamed NAÏVE all over the place, and this one spells WISENED —
big reason why Paul still performs ʽI'll Follow The Sunʼ in concert,
on occasion, but never the other one (not that anyone would mind, I suppose).
Third, shortly after discovering feedback on the
single ʽI Feel Fineʼ, they discover the fade-in — on ʽEight Days
A Weekʼ. Much of the band's experimentation was done «randomly», «just for
fun», etc., but one big difference of the Beatles' approach to experimentation
is that they rarely kept their
experimental results if they weren't sure that they had come out somewhat
meaningful and were appropriate for the song in question. So, before we go «A
fade-in on ʽEight Days A Weekʼ? Big deal! Who the heck cares?», let
us listen to the fade-in and, perhaps, understand that it works here as the
equivalent of a crescendo, which the
band had no special means of producing at that time (they'd need an orchestra
at least). ʽEight Days A Weekʼ is another one of those ode-to-joy
songs, cruder and simpler than ʽI Should Have Known Betterʼ, and
never one of my favorites in that genre (for one thing, too repetitive — a solo
break couldn't have hurt, and the "hold me, love me, hold me, love
me" refrain also seems too roughly hewn), but the fade-in suits it perfectly
— it is the first ten seconds of the song, from the first faraway notes to the
breakout of "ooh I need your love babe..." that do it for me.
Fourth, the Beatles discover the value of...
silence. While the more famous songs of Side B have always been ʽEight
Days A Weekʼ and ʽEvery Little Thingʼ, I have always held a soft
spot for ʽWhat You're Doingʼ, because of the important role with
which they entrusted Ringo — hold the melody for the first few bars on his
little old drummer's own, before introducing the looped electric riff (very
similar in texture, by the way, to the one that would soon make the Byrds
famous with ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ). Then, once the song is done, they
repeat the same trick once again before fading out — as if saying, «hey, it was
quite cool in the beginning, surely you want us to do it one more time? heavier
on the bass this time, right?»... and it works.
So, in the end, it's just the little things
that make Beatles For Sale as
essential a Beatles album in your catalog as everything that surrounds it. It
takes its cue from the second half of Hard
Day's Night, not the first one, and overcomes it in terms of diversity,
jangliness, and, in a way, «darkness». Artistically, it is still dominated by
John, which is a good thing, because Paul as a «dominator» would only be
acceptable once the band entered its wild-experimental-frenzy phase; but
overall, it is still very much a group effort, and, ultimately, another
success, if not necessarily another «triumph». Predictable thumbs up
here.
HELP! (1965)
1) Help!; 2) The Night Before;
3) You've Got To Hide Your Love Away; 4) I Need You; 5) Another Girl; 6) You're
Going To Lose That Girl; 7) Ticket To Ride; 8) Act Naturally; 9) It's Only
Love; 10) You Like Me Too Much; 11) Tell Me What You See; 12) I've Just Seen A
Face; 13) Yesterday; 14) Dizzy Miss Lizzie.
Sometimes I can't help!... but think that it is
this album, rather than Beatles For Sale, where the Beatles
went for a bit of a sag. In fact, the band spent most of the first half of 1965
sort of procrastinating, giving others plenty of time to catch up — the Stones
were coming into their rights as masterful songwriters and creators of a new
rock'n'roll sound; the Beach Boys finally learned how to make real musical
albums rather than filler; the Byrds were pressing from behind the lines; Bob
Dylan had gone electric, etc. etc. With a whole exciting new world waking up, Help!, as fine a Beatles album as it is
per se, sounded like it needed a little... help?
You could sense a bit of trouble brewing even
by simply watching the movie. Where Lester's first experience with the boys
bordered on the «biographical» and, in places, read like a smart jab on the
crisis of the older generation next to the young ones, Help! was, clearly, just a comical excuse for some Beatle-acted
gags and lots of Beatle-mimed songs. It was still miles ahead of the average
contemporary Elvis movie, but only because the gags were funnier and the songs
were pretty much incomparable. Oddly, when you look at it in retrospect, Hard Day's Night, to me, seems to shrink
a little bit in stature, where Help!
seems to grow — not because Help! is
actually «deeper» than it looks, rather because Hard Day's Night is somewhat shallower. But, clearly, it is always
the former that will be the critical darling, never the latter.
Of course, on an individual song level, Help! contains at least as many
tactical breakthroughs as Beatles For
Sale, if not more. The presence alone of the title track, ʽTicket To
Rideʼ, and That Song Most Frequently Covered By Crap Artists, places it
well beyond the reaches of dirty jealous criticism. But it is probably no
coincidence that it also contains the first song in the Beatles catalog whose
author himself went on record to state his acute despisal for it: ʽIt's
Only Loveʼ, written mostly by John, was later lambasted to bits by his
own persona. Why ʽIt's Only Loveʼ? Why not ʽAsk Me Whyʼ or
ʽWhen I Get Homeʼ — songs that were comparably inane from a lyrical
standpoint, and much less elaborate
from a musical one? (Want it or not, the main guitar line that drives
ʽIt's Only Loveʼ is terrific, and its liaison with the final falsetto
flourish is even more so). I think it's all because of the context — writing a
song like that in 1963 would be more fitting in with the still slowly changing
times than in 1965, when creative juices were flowing on all sides and lines
like "it's only love and that is all, why should I feel the way I do"
just didn't cut it any more. (And yes, the lyrics are atrocious, even if one could argue that "I get high when I
see you go by, butterfly" may be
interpreted in a psychedelic manner).
Anyway, what it all boils down to is that Help! is really a curious melange of
startling discoveries, obsolete attitudes, lightheadedness that borders on
annoyance, and hidden depth that borders on catharsis. The album is structured
in the exact same way as Hard Day's
Night (one side has the movie soundtrack and the other one doesn't), but
this time, there is no feeling that the movie songs are somehow «lighter» and
the non-movie ones are «darker». If anything, it would rather be the other way round — simply compare the
initial Side A mood set by ʽHelp!ʼ and the initial Side B mood set by
ʽAct Naturallyʼ (Ringo to the rescue!).
The movie soundtrack may produce a rougher,
rockier, and a pinch more somber impression because the movie was rougher — an action-packed comical thriller, with the
Beatles chased around the world by a cartoonish cult aiming to chop off Ringo's
finger (which, of course, symbolizes the Beatles' creative genius, and the cult
is a personification of EMI/Capitol record bosses... okay, pushing too far
ahead here). But it also genuinely reflects the growth of John's aggravation:
of the three songs on Side A that are definitively his (ʽYou're Going To
Lose That Girlʼ seems like a fifty-fifty job), one is playfully
melancholic (ʽTicket To Rideʼ) and two are downright tragic, with
John playing the sad little broken-down chap on ʽYou've Got To Hide Your
Love Awayʼ and a snarling hunted beast on the title track.
ʽHelp!ʼ (the song) is, in fact, so
perfectly arrow-shaped, it always gave me the impression of being played on one
single breath throughout — the verses flash by like a speed rocket, with just a
few brief moments in between chorus and verse to give the senses a quick rest.
Played slow (the way Deep Purple would attempt it a few years later), it would
be an emotional folk ballad; played at this sort of breakneck speed (well, «breakneck»
for the times), it was proto-punkier, in a way, than quite a few garage
classics of the time, if only because it was born out of a genuine feeling of
desperation and crisis, rather than out of a generic penchant for «teenage
rebellion». But never forget about the professionalism — as in, «with what else can we decorate this tune so that
it will stick out more?» — there are some head-spinning harmony arrangements on
the verses that intensify the arrow-like feeling of the song, with a non-stop
vocal bombardment throughout.
ʽYou've Got To Hide Your Love Awayʼ
has always been attributed to the Dylan influence — slow acoustic shuffle,
«draggy», tired vocals that almost seem to imitate Bob himself, a clumsy,
not-yet-quite-successful attempt to make the words matter — but the vocal
melody is rather too poppy for Bob, and so is the pastoral flute solo at the
end, although it adds a great touch. And ʽTicket To Rideʼ is
sometimes hailed as one of the first «proto-metal» tunes, but I wouldn't go
that far — just acknowledge that the level of «roughness» is severely increased
from the likes of ʽYou Can't Do Thatʼ, mostly by devising a very
complex, innovative drum-bashing part for Ringo and bringing the bass a bit
higher in the mix than usual.
Next to these songs, Paul's competing material
is tremendously slight — not that ʽThe Night Beforeʼ and
ʽAnother Girlʼ aren't great, energy-filled, instantly memorable
pop-rock, but they do not advance us much further: ʽAnother Girlʼ, in
particular, sounds like an attempt to capitalize on the formula of ʽCan't
Buy Me Loveʼ, but the Beatles never fared all that well when they tried to
write a song that sounded exactly like, or seriously in the vein of, a previous
song, and there's a reason why ʽCan't Buy Me Loveʼ is on all the
best-of packages and ʽAnother Girlʼ isn't. (Again, hardly a
coincidence that the song illustrates the «cheapest» bit in the movie — the
band engaged in generic teenage fun with girls in the Bahamas). For some
reason, I have always valued George's ʽI Need Youʼ over its neighbour
on the record — his second attempt at songwriting that made the grade in the
other ones' eyes has a certain minimalistic sternness and solemnity to it that
makes it cross over from the slight and flimsy into the strange realm of the
chivalrous. (Well, it was chivalrous,
of course — a proper serenade to Patti Boyd, whom George would marry in less
than a year's time. Good idea that there is no guitar solo; who knows what
would have happened, had Eric Clapton turned up at the studio on that day?).
Most of the «high-quality filler», however, is
concentrated on the second side — this
is the batch of songs that looks like it has been relatively quickly thrown
together to fulfill the obligations. For one thing, the two covers that
bookmark it are either painfully slight (ʽAct Naturallyʼ,
tongue-in-cheekily given to Ringo as an inside joke on his celebrated acting
abilities; its cutesy country-pop mode would later be reworked in a much more
interesting and original manner for ʽWhat Goes Onʼ) or questionably
minimalistic (Larry Williams' ʽDizzy Miss Lizzieʼ is saved by John's
trademark rock'n'roll roar, but the song is built on one single melodic phrase,
and even if George's guitar tone is fatter, shriller, and hard-rockier than
Larry's original incarnation, it is a bit too
repetitive for a band that always thrived on build-ups, dynamics, and
unpredictable twists).
For another thing, there are only two genuinely
great creations on all of Side B, and
both happen to be Paul's. ʽI've Just Seen A Faceʼ may actually be the
greatest of the two (yes, we are all entitled to a bit of controversy) — Paul's
first venture into the realms of bluegrass, but infused with the usual pop
spirit; had anyone up to that point, in the UK at least, even tried playing the
acoustic guitar in rapid-fire banjo mode? Spiritually, a trifle, perhaps
("falling yes I'm falling, and she keeps calling me back again" is as
serious as the song gets), but musically, this is a rather unique entry in the
Beatles catalog, which would never again see such an enthusiastic triple
acoustic guitar-fest. As for ʽYesterdayʼ... well, who needs to hear
another opinion on ʽYesterdayʼ? Surely the sixteen hundred popular
artists who have covered it since cannot be wrong, even if fifteen hundred of
them probably suck as artists.
All that remains is to voice the speculative
conclusion: If there ever was a moment in Beatles history where they could have been thrown off the «train of
relevance», it was in the first half of 1965. Plenty of early 1960s bands never
survived the transition into the psychedelic and the art-rock era, and,
theoretically, even the Beatles could have forever remained stuck in «teen-pop»
mode — as Help!, with its somewhat
unsettling conservatism, is enough to show. Again, this disappointment is quite
relative and, in a way, fantom-like, because back in 1965, any new Beatles product was greeted with tremendous hoopla,
regardless of whether it did or did not push boundaries; and today, with all
the boundaries pushed to death a long time ago and «innovation» no longer being
a defining trait of one's creativity, we can simply enjoy Help! as another collection of fabulous pop songs, no better and
no worse than the ones that surround it.
But then, it is also fun to look at it as a
tricky, deceitful bit of «calm before the storm»: the more innocent and
unassuming an air these Help! tunes
put upon themselves, the more of a shock one must have gotten by the end of the
year, with Rubber Soul announcing
that the Beatles were finally agreeing not only to participate in the ongoing
musical revolution, but even to take upon themselves the role of one of the
leaders. And, finally, no theoretical criticisms could ever conceal the fact
that, innovative or not, formally Help!
is just as filler-free and enjoyable all the way through (yes, even ʽDizzy
Miss Lizzieʼ) as any other Beatles album — you didn't think I would dare
deprive it of its upcoming thumbs up, did you?
RUBBER SOUL (1965)
1) Drive My Car; 2) Norwegian
Wood; 3) You Won't See Me; 4) Nowhere Man; 5) Think For Yourself; 6) The Word;
7) Michelle; 8) What Goes On; 9) Girl; 10) I'm Looking Through You; 11) In My
Life; 12) Wait; 13) If I Needed Someone; 14) Run For Your Life.
As everybody knows, this is where the switch is
flipped, without any possibility of going back. With The Beatles saw the band adopt an unbreakable «no-filler»
policy (even the filler must, in one way or other, be treasurable); Rubber Soul sees it transform into a
«no-routine» policy. Starting here, it is no longer sufficient for everything
to be «good» — it has to be «expansive», with a permanent, non-stop coverage of
new territory. I wonder just how exactly conscious
that decision must have been — and am fairly certain that it was conscious, that an explicit goal was
set, and, furthermore, that whatever aided its fulfillment the most was healthy
(sometimes unhealthy) competition between John, Paul, and, to a lesser degree,
George (but even George had decidedly joined the game by the end of 1965).
By the fall of 1965, the band was relatively
free of heavy touring commitments, and everyone had more time to poke around
and take a good look at whatever was a-happenin'. There are tons of
acknowledged outside influences on Rubber
Soul: from Dylan and the Byrds to Otis Redding, but, as usual, the Beatles
never allow these influences to overshadow their own inspiration and
craftsmanship. A lesser band would have resulted in a bandwagon-jumping
mishmash; Rubber Soul, following the
guidelines laid out by the era's most innovative acts, turns the trick right on
them and, through sheer magic, somehow becomes the leader.
The most important quality in a leader is that
the leader should be impossible to pigeonhole, and Rubber Soul is properly uncategorizable. Try to play all the seven
tracks on Side A in your head at the same time (yes, it is possible if you listen to them long enough), and they will be
seven different worlds, peacefully coinhabiting the same vinyl environment.
This is the highest level of diversity on a Beatles side so far, and, as far
as I'm concerned, even the White Album
would have a difficult time beating
it on these terms. But even the White
Album, for all of its unpredictability, did not make such bold strides in
all these different styles as Rubber
Soul does. Think about it some more, and you will begin to understand why
musicians, critics, and fans alike were flabbergasted — including Brian
Wilson, who was reportedly spurred on to the success of Pet Sounds by listening to the album. Not that anything on Pet Sounds has any similarity to
anything on Rubber Soul — it's
simply that, for quite a few people, Rubber
Soul unavoidably acted as a catalyst. «Go on out there, we dare you to be
as creative as we are». (It also ruined many a lesser band's career — with this
new type of benchmark established, the old policy of developing a set formula
and sticking to it for the rest of one's life was done for. Not everyone
survived the transition — Gerry Marsden and Dave Clark will tell you the rest
of it).
Out of sheer controversy, my consciously
selected favourite on Side A, for quite some time, was Paul's ʽYou Won't
See Meʼ — just because so much praise was already heaved on everything
else, and this was a nifty «dark sheep» to ride. But, in all honesty, even this
relatively «conservative» pop tune still has an entirely different sound, mood,
and feel to it than anything done previously. It reflects a real situation in
Paul's life (a temporary estrangement from Jane Asher, to be remedied later
before they'd eventually break up for good), and almost everything about it —
the mature, if still a bit simplistic, lyrics; the vocal intonations; the
darker production overtones — qualifies for a «singer-songwriter» style,
rather than just another exciting, but formulaic pop hit. In addition, it
features what I consider to be one of the Beatles' greatest vocal arrangements
(it is already a joy just to listen to them gain in complexity and intensity
throughout the song), and probably the most successful ever attempt at
creating a special mood with just one single note: for the last verse of the
song, trusty roadie Mal Evans is holding down the A note on a Hammond organ,
creating this barely noticeable low hum that somehow gives the song an extra
depth level. (Before the Internet came along, I'd wondered about that hum for
years, actually).
But this is really just to reaffirm my faith in
how amazingly consistent the whole construction is. Indeed, Rubber Soul finally sees the emergence
of Paul McCartney as not only as a great melody writer, but as an artist no
longer afraid of taking risks, and, indeed, reveling in risk-taking. ʽYou
Won't See Meʼ is, after all, fairly conservative next to ʽDrive My
Carʼ and ʽMichelleʼ. The former is Paul's first non-love song,
as is obvious not only from the lyrics (that are more about humorous character
assassination than about anything else), but also from the melody — gritty,
R'n'B-ish, and quite bass-heavy (George claimed to have laid down both the
basic bass part and the accompanying bass-doubling rhythm guitar, but I doubt
it: why the heck would Paul not want
to play the crucial bass part on one of his own songs?). And the latter? Chet
Atkins + stereotypical Parisian atmosphere (in live performances, Paul likes
to augment the sound with an accordeon, which I find way too obvious) + sweetest bass solo ever put to tape. As corny as
your average French pop song, but still genius.
Compared to this, John's breakthroughs on Rubber Soul are not as huge, but that's
because he'd already covered much of that distance before. ʽNorwegian
Woodʼ builds upon the foundation of ʽYou've Got To Hide Your Love Awayʼ,
but this time adding a distinct, instantly hard-hitting melody to the bare
accompaniment, not to mention the lyrics and their vocal delivery being far
more true to the John character — this
time around, the bitch actually gets it. (Whoever said the Rolling Stones were
more «dangerous» than the Beatles? Mick Jagger only warned the girl about the dangers of playing with fire; John Lennon
is not afraid to light the fire in person). Of course, the song is mostly
famous for George's sitar part, which was, at that time, added somewhat spontaneously,
on a momentary whim, but ended up predicting his future career.
[Side note: I actually agree with Alan Pollack
that the sitar in ʽNorwegian Woodʼ is rather «clunky sounding», and
that the song could have been just as strong without it, as existing early
takes demonstrate. In fact, both the Yardbirds' ʽHeart Full Of Soulʼ
and the Kinks' ʽSee My Friendsʼ, although the songs only imitate the
sitar rather than use it — the Yardbirds actually did record a sitar version,
but abandoned it because it did not resonate with enough power for a single
release — both these songs are far more adept at setting an «Indian» mood.
Which does not deny the actual pioneer move, since ʽNorwegian Woodʼ was the first original pop song to use a
sitar; nor does it mean that there is anything «wrong» with the move — George's
«clunky», minimalistic playing quite matches the basic melody and feeling.]
ʽNowhere Manʼ must have appeared out
of nowhere indeed: nobody saw it coming, and the sight of the Beatles
performing the song live during their last international tours in 1966 is
extremely confusing, because, if there ever was one song in their pre-Revolver catalog not to be addressed to seas of screaming girls, it is this one.
Okay, so I stand corrected: this is a
real milestone for John, his first pronounced attempt at carrying himself away
into a parallel world; and he would forever retain this penchant for parallel
worlds, regardless of all the disillusionments and the confessionals and the
politics and Yoko and whatever else — there is a straight line from
ʽNowhere Manʼ not only to ʽLucy In The Sky With Diamondsʼ,
but to ʽDream No. 9ʼ as well, and maybe even right down to
ʽ(Just Like) Starting Overʼ, in a way. The coolest thing about John's
parallel worlds, of course, is that he wastes no time on building them — they
just descend upon him all by themselves, while he is doing nothing:
"Nowhere man, don't worry, take your time, don't hurry, leave it all till
somebody else lends you a hand" — get it? That's the way to go about it.
Greatest single moment about the song: the high ringing E at 1:03 that
concludes George's guitar solo like a sudden burst of inspiration / revelation.
It didn't necessarily need to be
there, but that's what makes a Beatles classic a Beatles classic.
Speaking of George, his Side A contribution, ʽThink
For Yourselfʼ, is a major leap forward as well — also his first non-love
song, more like a simple socio-philosophical rumination on the perils of
brainwashing (but, mind you, still not tainted by Indian motives, which would
only begin rearing their head on Revolver).
No bridge, no solo, three verses of straightahead preaching, a grumbly, fuzzy
bassline carrying the main melody — decidedly a claim to something special. But
I think that what really makes the
song are the effortless tempo transitions from verse to chorus: the verses,
frankly speaking, are a little bit boring, and we all know it is the easiest
thing in the world for George to write a boring, mid-tempo, preachy song, so
each time the tune transforms into an aggressive faster-paced pop-rocker, it's
cheer time. The result is probably not a true masterpiece on the level of
George's later songs, but the whole thing is still quite intriguing — in fact,
it is well nigh impossible to even understand the exact genre of the song,
which takes a little bit of melodic stuffing from almost everywhere.
Finally, there is no forgetting ʽThe
Wordʼ as the first ever «anthemic» song to be recorded by the guys — a
direct predecessor to ʽAll You Need Is Loveʼ, stating the same
message in cruder terms, but, actually, with more of that crude-rocking energy
(and it has the best Ringo fills on the entire album, too). It's not the most
inventive track on the album (twelve-bar blues form, mostly?), per se, but it
is the first time in the Beatles catalog where they deliver an explicit message
to the world, and the bluntness of the melody is appropriate, because that's
what most anthems are. And again, it never prevents them from scattering little
tricks all over the place — such as George Martin's harmonium solo, giving the
whole thing a bit of a religious feel (for lack of a church organ, that is), or
my favourite bit, when the repetitive "Say the wooooord..." chorus is
pushed up to ecstatic falsetto levels on 1:39. That's right: if you're gonna be
repetitive about it, at least don't be monotonously
repetitive. Give the people a little bit of hysteria.
The second side of the album is a tiny bit of a
letdown in comparison, but not even the Beatles could handle fourteen
individual breakthroughs in a row. Of course, there are no bad songs, but
certain facts speak for themselves. I have never cared all that much for
ʽWaitʼ, a sort of slightly updated take on ʽWhen I Get
Homeʼ but with way, way too little happening to the song once the first
solid verse/chorus pair is over; it was hardly a surprise to discover that it was,
in fact, an outtake from the Help!
sessions, carried over at the last moment to plug a gap (so, «filler» from an
objective perspective). John himself would harbor and occasionally express
hatred for ʽRun For Your Lifeʼ — well, he probably was ashamed of the misogynistic lyrics, I just think
that, while the song itself is sorta okay as an aggressive pop-rocker, they did
miss a spectacular chance to close a spectacular album with a spectacular song
(a mistake that would never ever be repeated again — beginning with Revolver, the Beatles always took good
care of their codas).
There is also ʽWhat Goes Onʼ, an
excellent piece of country-pop that is a sheer improvement over ʽAct
Naturallyʼ (and Ringo sings it just as well as he did on the latter), but,
again, it feels kinda slight; and so does Paul's ʽI'm Looking Through
Youʼ, which is set a little in the vein of ʽTell Me What You
Seeʼ, but has a distinctly more aggressive edge, having also been written
about his turbulent relations with Jane Asher. Good songs, all of them, yet
with hardly any pizzazz next to the first side monsters. George's ʽIf I
Needed Someoneʼ also has an excellent melody, but this is the only time on
Rubber Soul where the influences
show up a bit too much — the whole
thing ends up sounding like a respectful homage to Roger McGuinn, belittling
the album's pretense at flagmanship. (Not that there's anything wrong with a
little self-belittling!)
In the end, Side B is semi-rescued by John —
ʽGirlʼ and, particularly, ʽIn My Lifeʼ are the two giants
that push it closer to Side A's standards, and, if it were up to me, I would
certainly have set ʽIn My Lifeʼ as the album closer; it is
exceptionally strange that the idea did not come up originally, unless, of
course, it did come up and everyone thought of it as too «obvious», so they
decided to humbly end the record on one of the lesser tunes instead. (Another
possibility is that they just wanted to cut things off on a rock'n'roll punch —
like they used to on all of their previous albums, with the exception of A Hard Day's Night. Too bad, since, at
this point, the Beatles were no longer a genuine «proverbial» rock'n'roll
band).
Still, as it goes, Side B is a «failure» only
as far as it fails to comply with the «no-routine!» motto: its only flaw is
that there are a few songs on it that either aspire to something grander than
they really are, or even a few songs that do not aspire to anything at all, and
that goes against the current policy. For the standards of 1964,
ʽWaitʼ would have been as good as anything, but it just feels small
and defenseless sitting next to the downright orgasmic ʽIn My Lifeʼ.
But who cares, really? Things were going great in late 1965, and everybody knew
that this was not going to be the last we hear from the Beatles.
Let's just conclude this by stating one further
dislike and one further like. I have never cared much for the album sleeve. It
was quite telling at the time — not just an «artsy» perspective, but a
distinctly psychedelic one — but it sort of makes the Beatles look like four
scrawny Indians in the jungle, and that is definitely not the mood on any of Rubber
Soul's music. What I have always
cared about, conversely, is the marvelous stereo split that George Martin
conducted for this album — over the years, it has been a regular delight to
listen to all the tracks in one channel and then in the other one. With the mix
separation, it's like you are getting a couple Stack-o-Tracks-like bonus records with your original purchase.
Considering, among other things, that Rubber
Soul marks the beginning of Paul's most creative period as a bass player,
it is not just recommendable, but actually obligatory that everyone listen at least once to the bass / drums
channel on its own — it gives an entirely different perspective on the album,
and an extra reason to admire Paul as a technically limited, but wildly
imaginative musician. And, as that last drop / straw / whatever, it takes away
the wish to reward it with a rating — giving a «thumbs up» to Rubber Soul or to any subsequent
Beatles album is as ridiculous as giving it to a da Vinci painting. It's the
Beatles in their prime, for Chrissake. Why waste good red ink?
REVOLVER (1966)
1) Taxman; 2) Eleanor Rigby;
3) I'm Only Sleeping; 4) Love You To; 5) Here, There And Everywhere; 6) Yellow
Submarine; 7) She Said She Said; 8) Good Day Sunshine; 9) And Your Bird Can
Sing; 10) For No One; 11) Dr. Robert; 12) I Want To Tell You; 13) Got To Get
You Into My Life; 14) Tomorrow Never Knows.
In 1966, the Beatles were cool. Of course, in certain ways, they were cool ever since the
world learned enough of them to treat them as such, and in still other ways,
they remain cool even today. But I am not just talking about the usual «cool»
here; I'm talking about «cool cool», that
particular kind of it that sows respect even in the hardened hearts of young
cynical intellectuals. For the Beatles, 1966 was that very brief period where
they were, like, one of the coolest things ever — so much so that, despite
their pop orientation, they could be competing with the likes of Ornette
Coleman. After Rubber Soul, nobody could
properly predict where they would go next, and, although in retrospect their
creative development seems quite logical and consistent, back in those days
each new record was seen as a revelation.
They even looked
cool — still wearing the suits, but exchanging the cutesy ties for rougher looking
sweaters, adopting «continental intellectual» sunglasses, letting their hair
down to barely acceptable length, but still quite a long distance away from
the Frisco hippie look (and still untainted by the Maharishi aura). Still very
much in the public eye, too, keeping touring activities on a limited, but active
scale: the band's last concert, in Candlestick Park, San Francisco, would be
held twenty four days after the release of Revolver
(without featuring even a single one of the new tracks). This was the year of
John's «more popular than Jesus» scandal — adding as much to the «coolness»
image as could be sucked up by the world's growing share of cultural rebels.
The Beatles, though, were no rebels. They were just cool. Nothing else.
Consequently, Revolver may not be the Beatles' «best ever» album (what is?), or
their most «revolutionary» album (one could write a thesis on that issue and
still be left standing in the middle of the road), but the way it seems to me,
it is their «coolest» album — in mid-'66, all of the conditions for that were
met, no difficulties encountered. The reason why so many «hip» people prefer it
to Sgt. Pepper are crystal clear — Sgt. Pepper is saturated with
idealistic ambition, a genuine desire (at least, on McCartney's part) to make a
«grand» statement from a «rock guru» standpoint, which can easily piss off some
people, especially if they feel that
the actual music is not quite up to the task (and that feeling is not that
difficult to feel for an album that has ʽWhen I'm 64ʼ on it). On Revolver, however, the idea of a
«conceptual» approach had not yet burgeoned — the songs are perfectly free to
flow, without having to work for any common noble purpose. And yet, at the same
time, Revolver washes away the last
traces of «simplistic teen pop» that could still be evident on bits of Rubber Soul (ʽWaitʼ,
ʽRun For Your Lifeʼ, etc.).
It is also a «transitional» album, in the best
sense of the word that there is: Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison are now fully
established as individual creative forces with separate, coherent creative
ideologies (George gets a grand total of three songs to celebrate that, his
largest share ratio per one vinyl disc on a Beatles album ever), and yet the
group spirit is still completely intact — as evidenced not only by the jointly
written ʽYellow Submarineʼ, which works primarily as a charming
buddy anthem, sealed off by having Ringo sing on it, but simply by the fact
that everything is perfectly coherent, with no visible attempts to pull the
blanket in opposite directions, and plenty of emotionally involved and fruitful
collaboration, too, on each other's songs.
And, above all else, perhaps, it's a LOUD
album! Revolver is often proclaimed
as the record on which the Beatles
finally embrace the psychedelic vibe without reservations — but, truth be told,
there is relatively little «hardcore psychedelia» out there, apart from Klaus
Voormann's sleeve painting and ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ. On the other
hand, there is a lot of loud, thick, bulging electric guitar-driven rock music,
usually provided by John (ʽShe Said She Saidʼ, ʽAnd Your Bird Can
Singʼ, ʽDoctor Robertʼ), but also by George (ʽTaxmanʼ,
ʽI Want To Tell Youʼ), whereas Paul, assisted by the «rock saboteur»
George Martin, is channelling the loudness into the realm of art songs
(ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ) or brass band stylistics (ʽGot To Get You Into
My Lifeʼ) — adding heap big lot of aural diversity without disrupting the
overall flow.
And finally — it is the first Beatles album
where not even a single song can be said to «owe a heavier-than-it-should-be
debt» to anybody else in particular. I have scrutinized every piece in my mind
several times, and not a single one qualifies as «okay, here they are being a
bit too much somebody else (Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Bob Dylan, Burt
Bacharach, the Byrds, etc.) and not quite enough themselves». Like everybody
else, I have my favorite tracks here and ones that I could, more or less, live
without (ʽDoctor Robertʼ, even after all these years, strikes me as a
rather minor novelty number, notable for its drug-related lyrics rather than
much of anything else; melodically, it seems like a miscalculated attempt on
John's part to upstage Paul with ʽPaperback Writerʼ), but all of
them exclusively represent the vision of the Beatles and no one else.
A possible
exception is ʽLove You Toʼ — the band's (more precisely, George's,
since the only other band member to be involved here is Ringo on tambourine)
first serious attempt to incorporate real Indian motives in its music, rather
than just plunk out a simple (but effective) folk melody on the sitar in
ʽNorwegian Woodʼ. It is still a point of debate whether he is
responsible for all the sitar playing on the track himself or there are
uncredited Indian musicians supporting him at least on the soloing parts — most
musicologists are inclined to believe the latter, claiming that it would have hardly
been possible for George to master the necessary skills in less than one year
of training, not to mention that, for some reason, those «magic skills» would
somehow never re-appear on subsequent tracks (and by the time they got around
to recording ʽThe Inner Lightʼ in 1968, the Indian session musicians
were already given proper credit, even as George was taking extra lessons from
Ravi Shankar himself).
But this should not detract from the fact that
ʽLove You Toʼ is not only the first full-fledged merger of Indian
and Western motives in pop music, as opposed to tiny flourishes in the past,
but also one of the best such mergers — unlike future, expectedly more
meditative, ventures, this one actually rocks, and combines the «spirit of the
drone» with the memorability of a pop hook in a way that somehow seems
completely inoffensive for both cultural approaches. Nine times out of ten, the
whole «East meets West» thing in pop, be it Western-produced or
Eastern-produced, is either dead boring or hideously laughable. With ʽLove
You Toʼ, I used to be a little bored, for sure, but now I am convinced
that its basic melody is no worse than the average melody of a George Harrison
song, and that the sitar carries it in a natural and unforced manner. Indian
music aficionados will cringe at its lack of «authenticity», of course, but for
those who actually look forward to getting into Indian music from a completely
Western background, ʽLove You Toʼ and the likes of it would be a
respectable initial compromise. At least it was good enough for Shankar.
Besides, ʽLove You Toʼ is as true to
George's ego as anything else he'd written. On Revolver, ʽTaxmanʼ introduces us to his mundane side —
never a proper hermit, George liked his money just as everyone else does — and
on ʽI Want To Tell Youʼ, he plays that kid in The Who's ʽI Can't
Explainʼ who finally grew up and learned to articulate more properly: now
at least he realizes that it's no big deal to be confused, because "I
could wait forever, I've got time". Funny buddy thing: both of the songs
owe a huge part of their effect to Paul — first contributing the exquisite
angry guitar solo on ʽTaxmanʼ (raga-style! mind the irony!), then
enhancing the somber mood of ʽI Want To Tell Youʼ with the
finger-tapping piano bits.
Speaking of Paul, Revolver marks that particular point in the race where he fully
catches up with John, the both of them speeding ahead neck-to-neck (another
good point to hold up the reputation of the album). Five out of fourteen songs
constitute his private domain (as opposed to the average four or even less on
preceding albums), and even though all of them are expectedly «wimpy» and
sentimental next to John's «grittier» material, at least two out of five
transcend generic sentimentalism by delving deep into human tragedy — ʽEleanor
Rigbyʼ is often seen as the ultimate heart-breaking anthem to loneliness,
but ʽFor No Oneʼ, written and arranged on a slightly less epic / anthemic
scale, is actually its more reclusive, but not any less beautiful cousin.
(Quite closely matched in spirit by Paul's solo classic ʽAnother
Dayʼ four years later — although ʽAnother Dayʼ was quite
«upbeat» in comparison, not as much of a straightahead downer; not to mention
lacking the exquisite extra flourish of Alan Civil's French horn solo).
Come to think of it, the emotional depth of
these two — Paul's suddenly emerging ability to invent two fictitious, but
realistic characters and then get so deeply under their skins — pretty much
transcends the depth of anything even John had written up to that point. I
cannot even exclude the thought that this is the starting point from which we
have to unwind the story of the Beatles' breakup (which, in my opinion, has
always been the story of John Winston Lennon being pissed off at one James Paul
McCartney stealing his, John Winston
Lennon's, band from under John Winston Lennon's nose — and not being able to do
anything about it, because all the stealing happened through fair competition.
But that's putting it too roughly, of course). In any case, Revolver sees Paul firmly and finally
taming his «sappy» instincts and taking them in the only right direction that
can turn one's genius sentimentalism into lyrical tragism.
On the other hand, you could argue that
sometimes genius sentimentalism can place a truly great song on a top spot without adding huge psychological depth,
and that such feats are arguably harder to achieve. That is what's being done
on ʽHere, There And Everywhereʼ, though, a «sappy», «sugary» song if
there ever was one, but you would have to be a hardcore balloon-shooting Puritan
to remain unmoved by it. Suffice it to say that I have always felt that the
line about "running my hands through her hair", regardless of the
quality of the lyric itself, actually sounds
like the vocal equivalent of «running one's hands through her hair»: this is
truly one of the most magical double-tracked vocal recordings ever made (and
this is also why the song never
produced the same effect in concert, whenever Paul would sing it live later on
— heck, there actually was a real
reason why the Beatles quit live performing, and it goes much deeper than «how
the heck are we supposed to play our backward-recorded guitars onstage!»).
So what about John? At this point, he does not
yet fully realize that Paul is tugging on the rug, and Revolver is the last Beatles album to feature him in a completely
coherent, workmanlike state, rather than thrown off balance by a miriad extra
things. We learn that he is quite preoccupied with the LSD issue — but, funny
enough, on both of the tracks that deal with it directly his is the view of a
curious outsider: it's either "She said I know what it's like to be
dead" or "My friend works for the national health, Dr. Robert".
ʽShe Said She Saidʼ went on to become a classic drug culture anthem,
but even though its lead guitar line is a little reminiscent of the San Francisco
/ Grateful Dead jamming style, it is still firmly rooted in the Beatles' usual
brand of pop rock; and apart from the thinly veiled lyrics, there is nothing
particularly psychedelic about ʽDr. Robertʼ, either. Still, both
songs were quite daring for their time, what with The Beatles having the
disadvantage of falling under far more closer public scrutiny than, say, The
13th Floor Elevators. «More popular than Jesus» + «Take a drink from his
special cup, Dr. Robert» = did I hear somebody calling for trouble? On the
other hand, ʽShe Said She Saidʼ could only be interpreted as a vow of
abstinence ("I know that I'm ready to leave"), so it's not all that bad.
In reality, there are only two genuine bits of
psychedelia on the entire record. The one that people rarely talk about is ʽI'm Only Sleepingʼ, which, formally, is just a
semi-autobiographical sketch of a lazy guy who sees no reason to get out of bed,
and has nothing to do with drugs — on a lyrical basis: the general aura of the
song is, of course, extremely trippy, and it would still remain trippy even without the backward guitar solo. Then
again, dreaming, or even «waiting for a sleepy feeling» can sometimes be quite
a psychedelic experience without any drugs — and there was nobody who could
transmit that yawny, sleepy, fuzzy-conscience atmosphere like John could. I
used to picture him actually installing a bed in the Abbey Road Studios and
recording directly from under the sheets, and it looked very realistic in my
mind. (A similar, but slightly different experience would be captured on that
same imaginary bed two years later with ʽI'm So Tiredʼ). Listen to
how all the instruments are made to
sound as if the person playing them had not had any sleep for at least 48 hours
— even Ringo's drums seem to be «dragging their feet». And, to boot, a great
muffled yawn at 2:01, during Paul's quiet bass break before the second bridge.
The one that people always talk about is ʽTibetan Book Of The Dead In C
Majorʼ, a.k.a. ʽIf You Have No Idea On How To Name Your Song, Ask
Ringoʼ. Now this one, of course, would be impossible to dismiss as
«non-psychedelic»: there is hardly a more flamboyant way of giving yourself
away than "turn off your mind, relax and float downstream". Serious
adepts like to point out that the tune is a mere trifle compared to «hardcore»
London psychedelia of the time, such as Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd. Yet even on
an objective basis, there is really far more complexity and audacity involved
in the meticulous construction of ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ from its
multiple tape loops than in any of Floyd's astral jamming. And on a subjective
basis, well... don't you just love that unnerving Ringo beat?
Seriously, what I love most about
ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ is how well it ties in with the album cover.
(That link alone would suffice to earn the overall non-psychedelic Revolver its overall very-much-psychedelic
reputation). The song places you, the listener, in a capsule, sends you «floating
downstream», and has all sorts of impressions flash by in ragged, broken,
mysterious tape segments. There has to be an active sender, of course,
responsible for the capsule-making and the button-pushing — and there he is,
four of them, to be precise, on the album cover, with everyone and everything
wedged in between the four Mount-Rushmorian faces. Somebody feeling a bit too
God-like, perhaps? Well, the Beatles had been humble enough for too long for
their own good; by late 1966, they thought they were entitled to a little more
than usual. Besides, feeling God-like is an obligatory ingredient of «coolness»
— at least, it used to be like that
in the mid-Sixties, when idealistic hopes for the breeding of a new,
super-progressive kind of conscience were at their peak, and «coolness» was not
yet thought of as incompatible with «mass popularity».
Then again, as great as ʽTomorrow Never
Knowsʼ is in its album-closing role, there are some days on which I think
that ʽYellow Submarineʼ might have worked even more effectively — as a simpler, friendlier, homelier gesture to
say goodbye with. One for the kids — in fact, it is ironic that it took the
Beatles most «adult» album up-to-date to contain the first song targeted
primarily at their pre-teen audiences. (Unless you, too, believe that the
whole thing is a metaphor for an acid trip, and that John and Paul were taking
it out on their simpleton drummer by constantly supplying him with drug
innuendos: ʽYellow Submarineʼ, ʽWith A Little Help From My
Friendsʼ... throw in the line about "what goes on in your mind",
and the picture's complete). For some reason, it never satisfied me in its
silly position as track No. 6 on Side 1 — couldn't they have at least switched
it places with ʽShe Said She Saidʼ? It's a side-closer if there ever
was one! Or, at least, a side-opener, for which function it had to wait until
the movie soundtrack.
As far as I am concerned, though, that little
mix-up with the sequencing is just about the only flaw I can see about the
whole record. Almost fifty years later, it continues to sound just as fresh and
relevant as it was back in its time, without losing a single drop of its
«coolness», despite not even having an overall conceptual backbone (or,
perhaps, because of that?), and yet,
still being somewhat larger than the sum of its individual parts. Just like Rubber Soul, it pushes its nose in a
dozen different stylistic, emotional, and thematic directions — only this time,
nobody does the pushing but the Beatles themselves. If Rubber Soul is the album on which they successfully attempt to
turn into the greatest band in the world, then Revolver is the album on which they know of their superpowers as the greatest band in the world, and
not afraid to use them. Ambitiousness? Vanity? Pretense? A double helping for
me, please, with some meaning of within on top.
SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (1967)
1) Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club Band; 2) With A Little Help From My Friends; 3) Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds;
4) Getting Better; 5) Fixing A Hole; 6) She's Leaving Home; 7) Being For The
Benefit Of Mr. Kite!; 8) Within You Without You; 9) When I'm Sixty-Four; 10) Lovely
Rita; 11) Good Morning Good Morning; 12) Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
(reprise); 13) A Day In The Life.
There are currently two major, equally
controversial, schools of thought on Sgt.
Pepper, and I do not think I need to explicitly remind anyone of what they
are. Both are entitled to prolonged existence, both can be respectable from
one angle and laughable from the opposite one. And, unlike certain other
situations, the Beatles bear direct responsibility for this one. In early
1967, they voluntarily and conciously undertook an attempt to make an album
that would be the best album ever made — or, at least, would take the world
places it has never ever seen before, opening a new age in popular music. Did
they succeed? Did they fail? Begin trench warfare!
Part of the Sgt. Pepper problem is that, to a large extent, the whole thing was
the brainchild of Paul rather than John. With the touring period over and all
the band members suddenly finding themselves with lots of extra free time on
their hands, they used it not only to grow additional facial hair (adding the
«wisened look», so obligatory for generation spokesmen), but also to evolve on
individual levels, with the drive towards collective work gradually beginning
to dissipate. As it turned out, Paul remained the most active defender of the teamwork
approach — that is, as long as the others were ready to accept him as the
unofficial coach. When it turned out they weren't, things got nasty.
Fortunately, in 1967, they still were.
Fortunately and
unfortunately, because Paul's increased role in the creation of Sgt. Pepper meant that the first side
effect of the Beatles' new-found grandiosity and universalism would also be a
balance shift towards the «whimsier» side. The «band within a band» concept
that Paul introduced is okay as such, but the «meta-band» in question is a
retro-oriented military outfit, and many of the songs they sing are infested
with influences of «granny music», as John would say. Many people complained
that the record just didn't rock hard
enough — with one or two exceptions, the loud electric guitar music of Revolver is nowhere in sight. (Of
course, many of the same people also praise the completely non-rocking Pet Sounds as one of the greatest
albums ever made, but that's what expectations are for: nobody expects kick-ass
electric guitar rock from Brian Wilson.) Furthermore, the album sees George
getting ever deeper in his love affair with Indian music, and John entering his
most «nonsensical» period — two more grounds for discomfort.
Thus, whoever believes that good pop music
should always keep both of its feet placed firmly on the ground will always
have a nice ideological justification to dismiss Sgt. Pepper as the enfant
terrible of the epoch — an unlucky bastard of combining too much acid, too
much childish love for newly-developed studio technologies, and way too much
adoration for corny pre-war music standards. And yet I think that the script
authors for Yellow Submarine got it
best of all: Once upon a time or maybe
twice, there was an unearthly paradise called Pepperland...
Clearly, like many other people, I may be
biased here, since it was Sgt. Pepper
and Magical Mystery Tour that
originally acquainted me with the Beatles as such, and, in fact, served as my
point of entry into the wide world of rock and pop. But certain childhood
memories and impressions wither and fade with age, whereas others remain
incurable. What I clearly remember — in fact, I am able to relive that feeling
each time I replay those records, even if only in my head — is the awesome,
incomparable sense of magic and intrigue. Now that I think of it, even
though the Beatles are in no way a «kid-oriented» band in general, the rightest
age to get yourself exposed to these records is when you are ten to twelve
years old — about the same age that works best for stuff like Alice In Wonderland. If, somehow, you
only get to hear it later, when puberty and grueling social pressure have
already cured you of childhood innocence and idealism, the effect simply cannot
be the same. But if you have let the magic permeate you at that tender age,
you'd have to be way too corrupted by
the outside world to ever let it dissipate and vanish.
It has been frequently stated that Sgt. Pepper is a «concept album» only
from a formal point of view. You have the lush album sleeve, the Beatles in
uniforms, the title song that introduces «the concert», and the reprise of the
title song at the end. Nothing else ties in with the concept, and any of the
other songs could have appeared on any other album, so that the whole «first conceptual
album ever» appraisal is just a fraudulent myth — records like Pet Sounds or Zappa's Freak Out! were ten times more
«conceptual». True and false. Take the «concept» thing way too literally and there
will, quite naturally, be nothing to tie together the «setlist» of the Lonely
Hearts Club Band. But why the heck should
you take it too literally? Should one also insist that ʽLucy In The Sky
With Diamondsʼ is a song written about a girl called Lucy which John's son
Julian had a crush on in nursery school? Or about LSD, for that matter?
Of course, Sgt.
Pepper is a concept album, and if not the first, then at least definitely
one of the best concept albums ever made. But it is not a concept album about a
military band. It is a concept album about a parallel universe, a «Pepperland»
of its own, in which things sometimes resemble earthly reality but, in the
end, are always different. Essentially, it is an escapist album — not the first one, because Pet Sounds was also quite escapist; but Pet Sounds was an «introvert escapist» album, seeking salvation
from life's problems deep inside one's own mind, whereas Sgt. Pepper is much more «extravert», at least formally: at the
bottom of it, it's all in the mind,
as George's character from Yellow
Submarine would say, but, want it or not, Sgt. Pepper creates a vivid, dynamic world, in which girls are
leaving their parents, meter maids may be invited to tea, Mr. Kite flies
through the ring, people run around at five o'clock, and, yes, tangerine trees
and marmalade skies a-plenty. Brian Wilson may have not been born for these
times, but he didn't really have a strong penchant for tangerine trees, either.
So, how does Paul's «granny-oriented» whimsy
tie into this? What's a song like ʽWhen I'm Sixty-Fourʼ, which Paul
allegedly wrote when he was sixteen,
got to do with parallel universes and escapism? LOTS, as it turns out. For one
thing, its placement on record, right after the last echoes of George's
cosmic-level sitar on ʽWithin You And Without Youʼ have faded away,
forms one of the most awesome contrasts in history —forming the perfect
light-hearted retro-oriented remedy for those who sat somewhat uncomfortably
through five whole minutes of Harrison's deadly serious Indian introspection.
For another thing, what is ʽWhen
I'm Sixty-Fourʼ if not an extra bit of idealistic escapism? Its happy,
undisturbed, end-of-a-Dickens-novel-style lyrical dreamery, lovingly
wrapped up in the bass clarinet arrangement, always seemed to me to be
emanating from the exact same character who was also busy with «fixing a hole
where the rain gets in». And its references to the Isle of Wight never had
anything to do with the real Isle of
Wight in my mind — this is not a Ray Davies type of song, tied hand and foot to
British Empire realities. It is a dreamer's dream, maybe even dreamier than
the sitar meditation it cuts across. Had they recorded it in 1959, without the
clarinets and the slightly sped-up tapes and whatever else, it would not
produce this impression, of course — but they didn't, so the discussion is
irrelevant.
The bottomline is that all of the songs here, whether they really want it or not, serve
this entrancing purpose; written, recorded, and produced in different times
under different circumstances, they could easily lack the magic aura, but on Sgt. Pepper, they are all graced.
ʽFixing A Holeʼ could be just a simple pop song based on routine
mundane observations. But with its harpsichord intro, with its «ticking-clock»
percussion, with its mystical-flavoured rise-to-falsetto ("where it will
go..." — as if indicating the actual direction), with its funny
alternations between the introspective-meditative verses and the
near-hysterical bridge, with its echoey fuzzy guitar solo, with its overall
Zen-like contrast between the protagonist and the «silly people» — it's a
fuckin' epic. Come to think of it, with this song and ʽFool On The
Hillʼ, 1967 was the peak year of
McCartney driving a wedge between The Artist and Boring Outsiders, an elitist
trick that he, even with all his «accessibility» and «popularity», could easily
pull off even better than John. (And I have always preferred Paul's melancholic-loner
side to Paul the anthem-writer).
If ʽFixing A Holeʼ is an escapist
fantasy that borders on the psychedelic and ʽLovely Ritaʼ is another
fantasy bordering on the comical, then, supposedly, ʽGetting Betterʼ,
with its realistic (or maybe not very
realistic) tale of exchanging violence for self-improvement, and ʽShe's
Leaving Homeʼ, loosely based on a real story, should violate the
«no-feet-on-the-ground» rule of Sgt. Pepper.
But do they? ʽShe's Leaving Homeʼ does not see the band play any
actual instruments, relying exclusively on a large string section in the good
old European Lieder tradition. The
result is — no «grit», just a sad, poignant fairy-tale in which Paul accounts
for the facts and John delivers the «Greek chorus» moral ("fun is the one
thing that money can't buy"). I never bought it as «realism»: ʽFor No
Oneʼ and even ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ, with their sterner,
«mini-chamber» mood, as opposed to the blossoming «maxi-chamber» sounds of
ʽShe's Leaving Homeʼ, belonged to this earthly world much more
visibly than the Sgt. Pepper ballad.
Turning to John, the funny thing is that, years
from then, he would be skeptical about the whole Pepper enterprise, and, on bad days, condemn it as a silly,
insubstantial divertissement, blaming the whole thing on Paul. Yet in 1967,
even despite being «trumped» by his pal in the leadership game, he was more
than ready to take part in it, contributing songs that did not clash with Paul's,
but instead agreed with them in general atmosphere and attitude. ʽLucy In
The Sky With Diamondsʼ may not necessarily be a «drug» song — it is just
a part of human nature to be attracted to the potentially scandalous side of
things — but it is a Fantasy, big F and all, one of the most surrealistic
pieces in the band's career. Just one remark is enough: what the hell is the instrument that is playing the opening melodic
lines? A Hammond organ with a special stop, it is sometimes said, that produced
a celeste-like sound. Any proof of that? Did anyone ever try to recreate it? It
genuinely sounds like nothing else I have ever heard before or after, and,
clearly, "tangerine trees and marmalade skies" are quite the perfect words
to go along with it.
If the words for ʽBeing For The Benefit Of
Mr. Kite!ʼ were really borrowed by John from a circus poster, we would
still be hard pressed to find the music emanating from any «earthly» circus.
Its instrumental sections, both the «waltz» in the middle and the musical
carousel of the outro, would rather be a perfect soundtrack to our being
strapped in a chair and fed images of a slowly rotating night sky picture
during a meteor shower. It is almost mind-boggling when you realize that the
sound effects on that final outro were essentially assembled at random from a scissor-chopped
tape (and I cannot help thinking that George Martin was really pulling our leg
here when he narrated the process — this kind of work attitude is fairly
incompatible with his usual style). Whatever be, ʽMr. Kiteʼ far
transcends the «carnivalesque atmosphere» John wanted for it, taking us out of
the circus pavillion into open space very quickly.
More than one opinion I heard draws a very
thick line between ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ and everything else on the
record: in fact, most of the self-proclaimed Sgt. Pepper haters generally admit that «if not for that one
song...» etc., while many of the Sgt.
Pepper admirers go as far as to proclaim ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ the
best song ever written, a musical/spiritual revelation etc. I do not think,
however, that ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ would have ever had nearly the same
impact, had it been released separately, say, on a 45" like
ʽStrawberry Fieldsʼ. It is a climactic moment, not only in the
context of the album, but in the context of the Beatles' career as a whole, yet
it belongs on Sgt. Pepper, where it
fulfills its function just like everything else does.
The one big difference of ʽA Day In The
Lifeʼ is that it is essentially a tragic
song, performed in a «high register». The rest of the album has its share of
sadness and melancholy, but it is either light and meditative (ʽFixing A
Holeʼ), or contrastive (ʽShe's Leaving Homeʼ — tragic for one
party, bright and optimistic for the other). ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ structurally
comes on as an «encore» from the Lonely Hearts Club Band — but it is almost as
if an entirely different band appears on the stage here, or, rather, this is the spot where the band
justifies the «Lonely Hearts Club» moniker. It's not as if, on a formal,
objective basis ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ made far more musical and lyrical
«sense» than the other songs. It doesn't. It just makes a sudden dash at the
foundations of your soul; a dash that you can hardly expect after thirty four
minutes of music that guided you through the multicolored fields and forests of
«Pepperland» — and now, suddenly, out of nowhere, you are led to the shrine.
And the shrine is a downer.
Everyone knows and quotes the famous "I'd
love to turn you on" line as if it were, at least, merely a hooliganry
(«let's throw this one and get some extra press coverage»), and at most, a
sincere exhortation («let's get them to comply»). What I have always been
hearing in that line is the deepest sorrow
— it's like, «I'd love to turn you on, but it's completely hopeless». And the
orchestral crescendo, to me, does not represent the process of «turning you
on»; it is an energy outburst that serves to release all the hidden emotional
tension in the verses. What is that tension, why it is there, what it all
means, is another question. Why give an album as phantasmagorically radiant as Sgt. Pepper such a
conscience-shattering conclusion?
One possible answer is that the bulk of Sgt. Pepper is utopian in nature. The
ten main songs conspire to show you what could
have been in a perfect world — not «perfect perfect», as in completely free of
problems and issues, which would be very boring, but «perfectly interesting»,
as in full of surprises, revelations, inspirations, artistry, and absurd happenings.
Then the illusionism is over, and ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ, alternating
between John's mini-sketches of life's stupidity and senselessness and Paul's
mini-sketch of life's routine, sweeps the whole circus show away. In other
words, Sgt. Pepper builds itself up,
slowly and expertly, only to self-implode in its last track. The final grand
piano chord, all of its fifty seconds or so, solemnly accompanies the wind blowing
away the debris.
Unsurprisingly, when I was just a kid, I hated ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ — loved
it for its melodicity, catchiness, and depth, of course, but subconsciously
hated it because, for a whole five minutes, it was telling me that the fun is
over, and that Hollywood forgot to supply a happy ending. In a way, I still
hate it, as much as that childhood feeling is still with me, feeling as sorry
for Lucy In The Sky, Lovely Rita, and Mr. Kite as one may feel about one's
favorite characters killed off at the end of a Shakesperian tragedy. But what
is it, really, if not the firmest proof of the ultimate greatness of Sgt. Pepper? Without this particular
direction of the flow, the album on the whole could be no different, in
attitude and atmosphere, from, say, a Moody Blues record. With it, it is simply one of the greatest «musical oratorios» ever
made. To hell with the pretentious naysayers.
MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR (1967)
1) Magical Mystery Tour; 2)
The Fool On The Hill; 3) Flying; 4) Blue Jay Way; 5) Your Mother Should Know;
6) I Am The Walrus; 7) Hello Goodbye; 8) Strawberry Fields Forever; 9) Penny
Lane; 10) Baby You're A Rich Man; 11) All You Need Is Love.
This is a «fake» LP, originally assembled for
US release by combining the British EP, containing six songs from the movie Magical Mystery Tour, with a bunch of
non-LP A- and B-sides from 1967, including even the famous ʽStrawberry
Fieldsʼ / ʽPenny Laneʼ single that chronologically preceded Sgt. Pepper. In other words, a
blatant mish-mash with a vaguely conceptual first side and a totally incoherent
second side. A non-album as such — but still one of the best albums of 1967. In
fact, quite a few people even happen to prefer it to Sgt. Pepper, for reasons that include «anti-hype», but are not
confined to it. But let us not jump to conclusions.
The movie, as we all know, was just one more in
a series of Paul's «let's try anything» ideas that his brain was spitting out
from 1967 to 1969 in a frenzy that most of his bandmates generally found irritating.
Why they decided to go along with his suggestion to hire one bus, one filming
crew, several sets of dorky costumes, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and hop
around the country in search of filming inspiration, is anybody's guess.
(Maybe some of them were too stoned to resist). The results could be
predictable: some parts of the movie turned out interesting and challenging,
some did not, nobody could agree on which ones were and which ones weren't — by
the Beatles' usual standards, this was startling enough to be branded as the
band's first unequivocal failure. Imagine the critical relief — waiting four
years for a chance to say the Beatles suck at something, with comparatively little risk of a rotten tomato in the
back.
In retrospect, Magical Mystery Tour (the movie) absorbed a little more credit.
Most people these days agree that the «music video» segments match the songs
fairly well, despite the band's rather lacklustre dance moves on ʽYour
Mother Should Knowʼ and rather cheesy-looking smoke overcloaking George
on ʽBlue Jay Wayʼ. John manages to remain cool for most of his
onscreen time (which isn't all that much), Ringo is always Ringo, the Bonzo Dog
Band «live» clip is mostly worth it for the stripper touch (great incentive to
get your twelve-year old to watch the movie), and some of the «proto-Monty
Python» gags/sketches, like the car race scene, are... provocative? Suggestive?
Pre-post-modernistic? Whatever. Bottomline is, the movie does not make much sense,
but few things in 1967 made much sense, and in that respect, it is a fairly
diagnostic document of its time — and you get to see the Beatles in it. Back in
1967, it was just a Christmas special with the Beatles in it; nowadays, how
much Beatles video footage from 1967 do we have?
As for the music, Magical Mystery Tour was as much of a straightforward sequel to Sgt. Pepper as it was a departure from
the formula. Sequel — because it is another trip to a fantasy world, even more
crazy and surreal in some ways than Pepper's.
Departure — because this time, there is frankly no concept whatsoever, other
than the title track, whose purpose it is to announce, with bombast and
fanfares this time, that what you are about to hear and feel is... different. As if anybody had any doubts
about that. Just look at the album sleeve.
The thinly-conceptual framework once again
belongs to Paul, who also dominates Magical
Mystery Tour in sheer statistical terms (three out of six songs are his,
and I have no idea who wrote the main theme for ʽFlyingʼ —
intuitively, seems more Lennon-like to me, and it is John behind the dominating
Mellotron, but no final word here). But the funny thing is, it is Paul's
material that is the «sanest» on the soundtrack. The title track may announce a
journey into the depths of the surreal, but it is just a statement — it could
just as well announce a trip to the Taj Mahal. ʽThe Fool On The Hillʼ
is existentialist-sentimental Brit-pop balladry. And ʽYour Mother Should
Knowʼ is Paul's most retro-oriented music-hall send-up so far. Clouds?
Wizards? LSD? Absurdism? Not for Paul, really, who provokes the whole band
into conjuring mushroom imagery and then quietly backs out while there's still
time.
Which does not imply these aren't great songs —
on the contrary! All right, so the title track probably does not qualify as
«great», because its aim is modest; but within the scopes of that aim, it is as
perfect a PR statement for the trip as there ever could be. The greatest bus
commercial in the history of mankind for sure. As for the other two, both of
which start out with solo Paul at the piano, and then evolve into something
bigger, these may be even more poignant than anything «solo Paul» wrote for Sgt. Pepper.
It makes little sense to add my two cents on
ʽFool On The Hillʼ, the finest Taoist anthem in Western pop music
history, but I would like to specifically stand up for ʽYour Mother Should
Knowʼ, which I frequently see condemned as «soft pap», «presaging the
worst fluff of McCartney's solo career», etc. Anyone who perceives it that way
should play it back to back with the Fred Astaire-dedicated ʽYou Gave Me
The Answerʼ on Venus And Mars —
and see what it is that separates major genius from minor. Because the latter is
also melodic, memorable, and modestly charming, but in a «fluffy», «shallow»
way, resulting in a sugary-sentimental mood (which is one of the major moods of The Songbook, though, so it's not as
if the goal weren't reached).
Yet ʽMotherʼ is not just a «tribute»
to any particular one of Paul's pre-war idols. Its A minor intro and
thoroughly sad intonations throughout are really a lament — light tragic
intonations here, just like on ʽFool On The Hillʼ, only even less
noticeable because the minimalistic words do not reflect any tragedy by
themselves. But "though she was born a long long time ago..." —
doesn't that sound sad? One of Sir
Paul's greatest talents, as we know, is making us all feel for the lonely and
the rejected, from ʽFor No Oneʼ and ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ through
ʽJunkʼ and then all the way to ʽLonely Old Peopleʼ (also
on Venus And Mars), and, although
this one is much less obvious, it actually fits well in the same category.
It's a «happy-sad» funeral march to days long gone by, and I do not care in the
least if Paul's original intention was merely to toss off a trifle — trifles do
not trigger tear-shedding mechanisms.
That said, ʽMotherʼ is not the least
bit «psychedelic», either. The honours are delegated to the rougher Beatles —
Mr. George «Please Don't Be Long» Harrison and Mr. John «GOO GOO GOO JOOB»
Lennon. The former comes up with an unusually lightweight number: nothing to do
with religion, philosophy, or the meaning of life in general, just an
impressionistic account of getting lost in L. A. fog. Of course, nobody forces
you to take the lines "There's a fog upon L.A. / And my friends have lost
their way" literally — it is much more fun to take them figuratively, as
an unveiled indictment of the hippie drug culture (which George genuinely
disliked). But even if we pay no attention to the accounted details of the
genesis of the song (presumably written while waiting for Derek Taylor to
locate Blue Jay Way), it is still hardly possible to see the music as anything
but a sonic impression of thick, dense fog that paralyzes normal activity. Drone,
phasing, backward tapes, cold Hammond organ, uncredited cello — the whole song
is one big, aggressive manipulation of the senses, the best example of this
approach during George's very brief «experimental»
period of late 1967 / early 1968 (others include ʽOnly A Northern
Songʼ and a few bits of the Wonderwall
Music soundtrack, all recorded during more or less the same period).
As for ʽI Am The Walrusʼ... well, the
song probably deserves writing a whole novel about it some day (and not just because it was the song that
originally introduced me to the band in all seriousness). For John, it was
first and foremost a lyrical breakthrough: after "elementary penguin singing
Hare Krishna" and "crabalocker fishwife pornographic priestess",
there were no more limits. But there is so much more. If ʽLucy In The
Skyʼ was the man's tribute to «idealistic psychedelia», a kaleidoscopic
paradise of surreal beauty, ʽI Am The Walrusʼ shifts to aggressive psychedelia, if not donwright
militaristic. It is, to some degree, sarcastic and cynical, but mostly it just
kicks ass, right from the gloomy intro and especially from the moment when
Ringo butts in at 0:14. This is when you know
that you are going to be ripped to pieces.
Meaning, really, that the true breakthrough may
not be «textual», but «personal»: the words mean nothing in particular, but
when taken all together, they form a string of brutal, ugly, gross imagery ("pigs
in the sky", "let your knickers down", "yellow matter
custard dripping from a dead dog's eye", "semolina pilchard climbing
up the Eiffel Tower", etc.), all of it delivered in John's most sneering,
sharpest tone, as if he'd just finally come out with an official,
government-sealed permission to spit as much venom as he is capable of. And
the music? The string arrangements on the song alone inspired Roy Wood and Jeff
Lynne to form Electric Light Orchestra — pop music, up to that point, had never
seen cellos and violins swoop up and down like hungry vultures or hack away at
the listener like razors and knives. And the climactic moments? Whoever said
that the chorus of "GOO GOO GOO JOOB" was meaningless? It's all in
the modulation — the way I've always felt it, in «walrus-speech» this means
"FUCK YOU VERY MUCH", and I've always preferred the exquisite way it
is expressed in walrus-speech over the way it is normally done in Standard
Literary English.
In the movie, ʽI Am The Walrusʼ comes
in the middle of things, whereas the forced ballroom dancing scene of
ʽYour Mother Should Knowʼ rounds them up; and in the movie, this is
logical, but the eventual sequencing of the American release, which shifted the
running order, is more delicious these days — the soft sentimental sadness of
the simple piano on ʽMotherʼ giving way to the ominous electric piano
of ʽWalrusʼ is a fine transition, and the whole «magical mystery
tour» now ends with a chaotic, unresolved fade-out that leaves no questions
answered, rather than a strange suggestion that a trip to the world of the
surreal should end on a «retro note». On the other hand, it also ensures that
there really is no specific framework to this whole enterprise. Paul does
Paul's thing, John does John's thing, and George's friends are lost in L.A.
fog.
Then there is the second side, gathering most
of the odds and ends from the rich harvest of 1967. ʽStrawberry Fields
Foreverʼ and ʽPenny Laneʼ need no introduction: arguably the
greatest «double A-side» in history, if only because there is no other example
in the chronology of the Beatles' 45"s where one side would contain a
«seminal» John classic and the other one an equally «seminal» Paul classic.
(One could argue for ʽPaperback Writerʼ / ʽRainʼ or
ʽHey Judeʼ / ʽRevolutionʼ, but in each of these cases it is
Paul's song that wins over in terms of popularity — no matter if it's «right»
or «wrong»). It's also a particularly great example in that the two songs are
expectedly and admirably different in terms of personalities — John's
psychedelic experimental introspection vs. Paul's illusionist ultra-melodic
whimsy — but both songs are also somehow coherent thematically, taking their
cues from both writers' childhood memories. It's as if they were both given a
«homework task» for their late 1966 break, and each performed it in his own
style. And who won? From the historical significance point of view, obviously,
John, what with the bizarre multi-part structure and all. From the point of
view of «catchiness» — Paul, hands down. But why should we really care? Both
songs still blow our minds today the same way they did in early 1967.
ʽHello Goodbyeʼ works as a fine intro
to Side B — Paul at his carnivalesque best, impossible to resist even for
grouchy old people who never kids — and ʽBaby You're A Rich Manʼ is a
bit of «filler» mostly worth it for the lyrics: when you stop to think about
it, it works best as an earthy drop of antidote to the pathos of
ʽAll You Need Is Loveʼ, and it might have been more fun if the silly
American people actually put it where it belongs: after ʽAll You Need Is Loveʼ, not before, deflating the idealism in properly cynical fashion. Which
is not to say that ʽAll You Need Is Loveʼ is not a great song, or
that there is something wrong or harmful about its idealism. (The verses of the
song actually run deeper than simplistic propaganda — "there's nothing you
can do that can't be done" is slyly reminiscent of the much more
straightforward "there's nothing that can't be done by you", but
bears quite the opposite meaning; so Brian Epstein's comment that «the song
cannot be misinterpreted; it is a clear message saying that love is everything»
may really need a little bit of refinement).
In the end,
if you give Magical Mystery Tour in
its LP incarnation to an unsuspecting friend and ask him, «Is this a concept
album or what?», he might well respond that it is — starting off with an
invitation to explore the unknown, taking the listener to distant hills with
fools, clouds spewing forth L. A. fog, eggmen and walruses, nostalgia mixed
with fantasy, and finally culminating in the most bombastic anthem to L-O-V-E
ever written. He might even remark that it is a concept album that is better
grounded in reality than Sgt. Pepper,
yet also more optimistic in its conclusions, with a happy grand finale as
opposed to the mind-shattering explosion of ʽDay In The Lifeʼ. Then
again, he may be more astute than that and guess the truth — that there is no
concept here whatsoever — but I can only judge for myself, and I myself have
always regarded the album as coherent, even if the Beatles themselves never
intended such a coherence (and how could they, if the songs had been recorded
all through the year?).
The album may
be dominated by its colorful sleeve imagery — resplendent «yellow, orange and
green», shooting stars, and the band in grotesque animal costumes (and we still have no true idea of who really
was the walrus, no matter what John says) — and that, in turn, sometimes leads
to the impression that they are now engaging in «psychedelia for kids», where Pepper was «psychedelia for adults».
An impression that is not entirely untrue: from Paul's «fluffy» bits to John's
ever increasingly demonstrated love for Lewis Carroll, there may be even more
of those individual bits here that would make the album delightful for the
little ones (and I never denied that it was the eye-and-ear-candy of MMT that led me to the Beatles as
well). But, as it happens with every Beatles record, we have layers here — all
sorts of. Musical, lyrical, ideological, personal, whatever. It's just another
mini-world where leaping from tree to tree may be a goal in itself. And it is
all the more admirable considering the hard, turbulent times when most of it
was recorded — following up on Brian Epstein's death and all. With the father
gone, you'd expect the kids to start growing up. Instead, they are making one
of their kiddiest albums ever. Fascinating, right?
THE BEATLES (1968)
1) Back In The U.S.S.R.; 2)
Dear Prudence; 3) Glass Onion; 4) Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da; 5) Wild Honey Pie;
6) The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill; 7) While My Guitar Gently Weeps; 8) Happiness
Is A Warm Gun; 9) Martha My Dear; 10) I'm So Tired; 11) Blackbird; 12) Piggies;
13) Rocky Raccoon; 14) Don't Pass Me By; 15) Why Don't We Do It In The Road?;
16) I Will; 17) Julia; 18) Birthday; 19) Yer Blues; 20) Mother Nature's Son;
21) Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey; 22) Sexy Sadie;
23) Helter Skelter; 24) Long, Long, Long; 25) Revolution 1; 26) Honey Pie; 27)
Savoy Truffle; 28) Cry Baby Cry; 29) Revolution 9; 30) Good Night.
By and large, the Beatles had no big reason to
exist after Sgt. Pepper. Regardless
of how much new ground it broke or didn't break in the world of actual music,
it definitely broke a huge, huge lot of ground in the public conscience —
definitely more so than any
subsequent Beatles release. In 1967, the band pushed its creativity so far that
the obvious question, «what next?», could seem unanswerable. I mean, really, where is one supposed to go after
ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ?..
That the
Beatles only had two years of toil and turmoil left after Sgt. Pepper is hardly surprising; the real miracle is that they had these two years, and that their
legacy, these days, continues to be loved and respected as much as everything
else (and even more, by some people at least) — despite the fact that the
band's days as major innovators were
already over. For one thing, having explored the experimental possibilities of
the studio as thoroughly as they could, they couldn't help but simply fall back
on their main strength — melodicity, and melodicity alone doesn't earn you many
points on the pedantic scales of knowledgeable, but tonedeaf critics. For
another thing, the musical scene in 1968 was far more diverse and competitive
than it was two years earlier. It is one thing to compete with the Byrds and
the Beach Boys — but compete with Hendrix? Cream? Procol Harum? The Nice? The
Grateful Dead? Frank Zappa? Dozens of classy, innovative, inspired acts,
frequently including far more technically accomplished musicians? A hard task
for sure, but an inevitable one: having set their plank that high in 1966, the
Beatles had no right to lose face in 1968. In terms of pure creativity, it must
have been an intensely tough period.
But The White Album offers a brilliant
solution to the problem. What can you do if you have hit your ceiling and «up»
is no longer an alternative? Simple as heck: instead of going high, you can allow yourself to go wide. You do not have to prove that you
are the best in the world: instead, it is much more fun to show that you are the world. Everyone who ever
complained that the 2 LPs of The White
Album were overkill, and that the whole thing might have benefited from
throwing out some filler, completely missed the point. If there are songs on
here that you don't like, feel free to edit them out of your playlist — just
like it is hardly a sin to skip over a few hundred uninspiring pages of War And Peace when you set out to
re-read it — but do not deny them their rightful place as an integral part of
the whole composition.
Legend has it
that there was no original idea to turn The
Beatles into a humorous, insightful, Beatle-approved genre anthology. The
band members just had a lot of free time on their hands while staying in India
with the Maharishi, and they happened to make much better use of it than simply
wasting it on transcendental meditation (this is why, after all, John is John,
Paul is Paul, and Mike Love is, and will always be, Mike Love). They never were
enemies of genre-hopping in the first place, and they were always open to
influences, so what's up with a little «parroting»? But as the actual sessions
started, and the final result started getting fleshed out, the project took on
a life of its own. The Beatles
turned into a small autonomous universe, no less.
As I try to
recollect some of the oldest, possibly silliest, but also most intriguing
impressions of the record, one thing that keeps surfacing is the contrast of
the utter whiteness of the album sleeve with the sheer number of songs printed in small type on the back cover. That long,
long stretch for Side B in particular — the whole «MarthaMyDearI'mSoTiredBlackbirdPiggiesRocky RaccoonDon't
Pass Me ByWhy Don't We Do It In The RoadIWillJulia» thing had something freaky
to it. You knew it wasn't a de-jure concept album, but somehow even the way all
these titles were condensed in one small area of the cover suggested some sort
of happy family unity. Then you threw on the album, and there were all these
little links like ʽWild Honey Pieʼ, and seamless transitions from
one song to another, and ultra-short pauses between songs that did not have
actual transitions, and the songs were all so different, yet somehow seemed to
belong together.
Relistening to The Beatles now only reaffirms that old feeling. The sequencing of
the songs, and the manner in which they flow into one another, is almost as
important an ingredient as the songs themselves. The Beatles is, indeed, a smorgasbord of musical styles, but, more
importantly, it is a smorgasboard of moods,
and the different ways in which those moods replace one another over the
album's ninety minutes work magic on one's psychics.
Right off the bat, we have the reckless, joyful
(but also notably tongue-in-cheek) rock'n'roll party mood of ʽBack In The
USSRʼ contrasted back-to-back with — «pacified with», I'd say — the soft,
natural, acoustic tenderness of ʽDear Prudenceʼ. The tense, nervous
flow and the dark psychedelic string coda of ʽGlass Onionʼ replaced,
in a flash, by the upbeat bounce of the merry ska piano of ʽOb-La-Di
Ob-La-Daʼ. The unexpected transformation of the mysterious, but clearly
ironic ʽBungalow Billʼ into the dead-serious cosmic despair of
ʽWhile My Guitar Gently Weepsʼ. Once we get over to the second side,
the songs get generally shorter and are so densely packed that, with just a
little bit more effort, the whole thing would have turned into a never-ending
medley, something that the band would actually realize on their last album.
ʽI Willʼ and ʽJuliaʼ, the album's most openly romantic
numbers, complete the side in a competing manner — no better comparison in the
Beatles catalog of the difference in John and Paul's approach to saying «I love
you».
The second half of the album raises the bar on
harshness, with ʽHelter Skelterʼ serving as the rallying point for
Side C and ʽRevolution 9ʼ looming far and wide over everything else
on Side D. This is probably the reason why I never felt the same warmth for the
second LP when I was a kid: after the colorful Brothers-Grimm panorama of the
first seventeen tracks, the songs got longer, the moods got sourer, and the
lone lightweight, humorous protest of the vaudeville of ʽHoney Pieʼ,
a tiny island of sunshine lost in a sea of relative darkness, was never enough
to counteract the huge sonic nightmares built up by Paul (I remember literally being afraid of the diabolical
buzz coda of ʽHelter Skelterʼ) or by John (and Yoko, since
ʽRevolution 9ʼ should clearly be credited to the two of them,
breaking up the happy Beatles home). The chaos brought on by ʽRevolution
9ʼ is so brutal that the necessary and inevitable «pacification» — the
Ringo-sung romantic lullaby of ʽGood Nightʼ — does not feel like a
happy ending. More like a slightly relieving calm before the upcoming storm,
wherever it may come from. (For that reason, the evil of ʽHelter Skelterʼ
also needs quick remedying with a soft, caressing George number — and,
likewise, ʽLong Long Longʼ calms down the nerves, but does not
completely relax them).
Thus, The
Beatles may be imagined as a sort of musical Odyssey, a gradual descent
from the light into darkness — starting off innocently and colorfully, with all
sorts of gags and tricks and fluffiness, and ending with raucous, aggressive,
sometimes apocalyptic sounds. The transition is gradual (there are «previews»
and «fallbacks» on both LPs), but quite notable, and even though it may simply
be my personal impression, or just a coincidence, for me it is at least a
direct answer to the question «wouldn't it be better if The Beatles had been a single album?» Sure it would. For those who
just want to see the Beatles as reliable «hitmakers».
The album is frequently checked as the first
true «non-collective» Beatles project, on which not only were most songs
written completely individually (despite preserving the traditional «Lennon /
McCartney» crediting), but sometimes even recorded individually, with Paul
working in one studio, John in the other, and Ringo leaving the band because,
with Paul surreptitiously re-recording his drum parts and all, he reasonably
felt himself superfluous. (It would be cool to assert that he only returned
under the condition that the rest would finally include one of his compositions
on the album, but, apparently, ʽDon't Pass Me Byʼ was recorded
several months before the row took place). Does this bear any direct reflection
on the album as such? I don't think so. The individual members' individual
styles had already been well defined by 1965-66, and the only thing that could
have mattered was a potential loss of «quality control», where egos would
triumph over common sense.
ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ is clearly the
best example: McCartney was originally dead set against its inclusion, and I
am not exactly sure what made him change his mind. It represents the biggest
and most obvious influence of Yoko Ono on the band, but calling it a «totally
non-Beatles kind of thing» is difficult, because it raises the natural question
of what exactly are the defining aspects of a «Beatles kind of thing». If the
answer is «melody and harmony», then yes, ʽRevolution 9ʼ is an alien
inclusion; if it is «breaking boundaries and searching for new forms of
expression», then it definitely is not. I have never had any love for
ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ, and often used to sacrilegiously skip it, going
straight from "can you take me back" to ʽGood Nightʼ. But I
cannot deny that the «song», with all of its much-too-obvious adoration of musique concrète, has a purpose —
a sonic description of utter social chaos — which is essentially fulfilled; at
any rate, it is a much more complex, well thought out, and properly executed
sound collage than the trivial «experimental hooliganry» that clogs up John and
Yoko's early solo albums. Nor can I
deny that ʽGood Nightʼ right after
ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ has a soothing, calming effect, whereas on its own
it may seem too overtly sentimental, or even boring.
But ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ is far from
the only artistic «advance» that John demonstrates on the album. With the
flower power / psychedelia cloud no longer hanging over the band, this gives
everyone a good chance to delve into the personal vaults, and John comes out
with ʽSexy Sadieʼ (a thinly veiled attack on the Maharishi and one of
the deadliest character assassination songs in pop history), ʽI'm So
Tiredʼ (the coolest ever song written about... being tired?), and
particularly ʽJuliaʼ — a truly transcendental ballad, betraying his
«mother complex» (the song is «formally» addressed to his mother, but in
reality blends her in one with Yoko) and standing several feet above every pure
«love song» he'd written up to that point. Probably because that was the first
time he had really fallen in love, a fact that professional Yoko haters have to
bear in mind: without Yoko, there might never have been a ʽJuliaʼ.
That said, it
is once again Paul who is in general charge of the process. At this point, John
is clearly tired of the competition: his role is essentially reduced to
simply writing a bunch of great songs and donating them to the band's
collective fund. Paul, on the other hand, is the one responsible for the
«Beatles sound» and the general structure of the album (which is also why he
has always been the staunchest defender of its 2-LP volume). The amount of
«silly fluff» that he contributes dangerously grows at an exponential rate —
most of the «parody» numbers on the album are his, be it the vocal harmonies of
the Beach Boys on ʽBack In The U.S.S.R.ʼ, country-pop on ʽRocky
Raccoonʼ, old-school vaudeville on ʽHoney Pieʼ, or bubblegummy
ska on ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ. But all these numbers fit in very well
inside the slots of the band's musical voyage: Paul is not just «playing the
fool» throughout because his inner fool (on the hill) got the best of him, but
because a completely serious take on
these genres would place the Beatles at a disadvantage — surely they could
never hope to compete with the best masters of ska, or country, or proto-heavy
metal, etc., on a «serious» level. Their saving grace could only be a superior
sense of melody and harmony — and humor. Both are present.
Speaking of
humor, there is humor a-plenty, and
it's working. The lyrics to ʽU.S.S.R.ʼ are slyly parodic of Chuck
Berry's ʽBack In The USAʼ (substituting Russia for North Korea would
have been even more poignant, but the theme is not as popular), and probably
contain the first significant pun on the toponymic ambivalence of «Georgia» in
the history of mankind. The «life is wonderful» atmosphere of ʽOb-La-Di
Ob-La-Daʼ is exaggerated to the point of total absurdity — apparently,
the names of «Desmond» and «Molly» were switched accidentally in the last verse
as compared to the one before last, but they kept it that way because "Desmond
stays at home and does his pretty face" sounded more fun. ʽRocky
Raccoonʼ sends the whole «country-western» thing up like nothing else,
with the honky piano breaks a particularly brilliant idea. And I may be wrong
here, but isn't ʽBirthdayʼ a smart-as-heck ridiculization of «party
atmosphere»? In a way, it presages the Ramones with their «lobotomized»
perspective on life's rituals and conventions: big, energetic, straightforward,
and making a sharp point by being utterly pointless.
On the other
hand, there is no way a serious analysis could simply brush away Paul as the
«fun guy» of the album, leaving all of its «soul» to John's isolated
contributions. ʽMartha My Dearʼ may be named after the man's
sheepdog, but the naming will fool no one: unless there is something we do not
know (and do not want to know) about
Paul's relations with his animals, the song moves from optimistic
love-and-tenderness ("Martha my dear...") to highly concerned sorrow
("hold your head up...") to an almost threatening attitude
("take a good look around you...") and then back again, in reverse
order, in a perfectly realistic manner. ʽBlackbirdʼ and ʽMother
Nature's Sonʼ conceal great depth behind their humble folksy acoustic
surfaces — the former being the sharpest, most intelligent anthem to personal
freedom ever written by the man, the latter celebrating the simple joys of
life so convincingly that even a stone cold dedicated city dweller, unless he
is completely tonedeaf, will get a moment's urge to move to the country. (Have
the Maharishi to thank for that — the song required some Indian inspiration).
Furthermore,
although the «battle» between ʽI Willʼ and ʽJuliaʼ is
clearly unwinnable by the former (which never even begins to seek for the same
epic heights), on its own ʽI Willʼ is still an absolute triumph
along the lines of ʽHere, There And Everywhereʼ: sweet, sugary
sentimentality fleshed out in the shape of heavenly beauty. Actually, the main
influence here seems to be Buddy Holly, as the atmosphere is clearly
reminiscent of ʽWords Of Loveʼ (even the guitar tones are
comparable), but Paul pushes it up one more notch with a perfect vocal (which
required 67 takes to get properly) and a particularly brilliant melodic
resolution in the end. Then it's three more gentle bongo taps, and the mike is
thrown over to John.
Additionally,
there are four good-to-great George songs on here: ʽPiggiesʼ is an
odd harpsichord-driven bit of social critique, ʽLong Long Longʼ is
very atmospheric (but so subtle that it is barely even possible to hear what's
going on behind the bass lines), ʽSavoy Truffleʼ is disciplined R'n'B
that reads like a parody on moralizing, but, naturally, you'll have to have
them all pulled out after ʽWhile My Guitar Gently Weepsʼ, which is
simply one of the greatest songs ever written, period. Everybody who prefers the original, stripped-down acoustic
demo version now available on Anthology
3 should be banned from procreation — the demo version is fine, but what is
the sense in writing a song about a guitar that weeps at the turning world that
doesn't have a weeping guitar? Kudos
to George for recognizing the best candidate for the job, as well: everybody
knows that Eric Clapton is responsible for the solo, but few ever mention that
it was really the very first time in Eric's career that he played his
instrument that way. Before
ʽWhile My Guitarʼ, Eric was all about rock'n'roll flash, angry
blueswailing, or Cream-style psycho-jamming. After ʽGuitarʼ, there were Derek & The Dominos,
ʽLaylaʼ, etc. — get the drift? We do not simply have Clapton to thank
for adding a cosmic dimension to a George Harrison song — we have Harrison to
thank for bringing out the best in Clapton.
Finally, let
us not forget about poor Ringo. ʽDon't Pass Me Byʼ was an old ditty
that he'd worked on since 1964, and chances are it would have never seen the
light of day on a Beatles album if it weren't the White Album. As it is, the smorgasbord is large enough to
accommodate everybody, even the friendly, but compositionally-challenged
drummer boy. And it's a fun, catchy tune that gets a tongue-in-cheek wall-of-sound
arrangement, pianos and violins and all, which it probably would have never
gotten in 1964. (Also, without this boost of confidence there may never have
been an ʽOctopus' Gardenʼ).
One popular
assessment of The Beatles is that,
for the Beatles, it signalled a «return-to-roots»: the band's contribution to
the emergent roots-rock movement that stepped away from the excesses of
psychedelia and made a point of reintegrating back in the world of «earthly»
values. For one thing, it marks a return of guitar-oriented rock tunes —
ʽBack In The U.S.S.R.ʼ announces this shift fairly loudly. For
another, the «absurdist» segments of the album either place most of their absurd
in the lyrics (ʽHappiness Is A Warm Gunʼ), or veer away towards more
«intellectualized» musical directions (ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ).
This is all
true, and is also well reflected in the evolution of superficial features
(plain white cover instead of the rainbow colors of 1967, «homely» photos of
the band members, etc.), but no one should be misled into thinking that The Beatles was, in any way, a «step
back» in the direction of Revolver
(which did place much of its trust into loud electric rock) or Rubber Soul (which did have an
intentionally «rootsy» sound most of the time). There certainly was an
understanding that the big masquerade of 1967 had been pushed a bit too far,
but the difference is that in 1966, the Beatles were a leading force in popular
music; in 1968, the Beatles were «elder statesmen», carrying the weight of the
world on their shoulders. The greatest single wonder of The Beatles is that somehow, in some way, despite all the odds,
evading all the glaring traps and pitfalls, these 2 LPs managed to convince the
public at large — your humble servant included — that the weight has been
lifted.
I mean, what
other album, single or double, recorded in 1968 (and the year was fairly rife
with great albums), could produce an equally imposing impression? With all the
breakthroughs and the discoveries and the technical achievements and
philosophic backgrounds, there was only one niche open — that of the «wise
encyclopaedist» — and the Beatles were only too happy to occupy it.
Accidentally, or intentionally, coming up with the finest encyclopaedic album
in history. (Don't even let me hear of Todd Rundgren in this context).
If you are
waiting for critical remarks, I have none. Barring the disputable case of
ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ, The White
Album, through its devilishly clever structuring and «ideology», is
unassailable. You think the melody of ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ is silly
and pedestrian? It's supposed to be
that way — it is a friendly laugh at the excessive optimism that dominates some
people's lives. You think ʽYer Bluesʼ is generic and draggy? It's supposed to drag — it's a musical
projection of pissed-off misery (or, rather, self-miseration). You think
ʽDon't Pass Me Byʼ should never have seen the light of day? Have pity
on poor Ringo — the song is not half-bad, and there is no reason why he should
be excluded from this special feast of life. And so on.
The Beatles deserves its title and its minimalistic
cover — both imply that it is only the music that matters, not the PR-friendly
environment. On the other hand, I sometimes wish the front sleeve were more
colorful, because that would arguably be a better reflection of the new gallery
of wonderful characters that have been introduced here to us. From Dear
Prudence to Sexy Sadie, from Rocky Raccoon to Mother Nature's Son, from
Bungalow Bill to Martha, from piggies living piggy lives to me and my monkey, The Beatles are really not less
«rainbow-y» than the pictures painted in 1967. They are simply less cloudy and
live in closer proximity to us mortals — but at the same time, The Beatles never really ceases to be
a wonderous fairy tale, intriguing, exciting, yet also with a fairly ambiguous
and unsettling ending. How great it is that they had it in them to complete
this project before personal problems finally took over.
YELLOW SUBMARINE (1969)
1) Yellow Submarine; 2) Only A
Northern Song; 3) All Together Now; 4) Hey Bulldog; 5) It's All Too Much; 6)
All You Need Is Love; 7) Pepperland; 8) Sea Of Time; 9) Sea Of Holes; 10) Sea
Of Monsters; 11) March Of The Meanies; 12) Pepperland Laid Waste; 13) Yellow
Submarine In Pepperland.
There is no pressing need to decry and deplore Yellow Submarine as a «failure», since
the album was never truly geared for any sort of success, and everyone knew it
at the time: it never even managed to hit the top of the charts in either the
UK or the US. Perhaps, had it been marketed along the lines of Magical Mystery Tour — for instance,
packed with contemporary singles like ʽLady Madonnaʼ and ʽHey
Judeʼ on Side B — it might have seen a warmer reception. But, on the other
hand, unlike Magical Mystery Tour,
this particular project was somewhat anachronistic from the very beginning, so
even that might not have helped.
The thing is, Yellow Submarine (the movie), together with its soundtrack,
genuinely belongs in 1967, with all of its humorous surrealism and
young-and-innocent flower power vibe. Most of the basic work on the movie was done in late 1967, and the Beatles
themselves filmed their brief cameo at the end of the cartoon in January 1968, before the Indian trip that can truly be
seen as the last important watermark separating the band's «mid-period»
(psychedelia, rabid innovation, friendly cohesion) from its «late period»
(back-to-basics, Elder Statesmen, dissent and dissolution). Much had changed
in the world, and for the band, by
July 1968, when the movie was premiered; and even much more had changed by
January 17, 1969, when the soundtrack was finally released (apparently, the
delay had a lot to do with George Martin recording the symphonic score for the
second side).
Thus, it is almost ironic that the soundtrack
to one of the friendliest «buddy» cartoons in the history of animation,
celebrating peace and love and bright colors and substances, came out at the
same time that the band, on the brink of total collapse, was trying to patch up
its recent fallout with George Harrison, only briefly delaying the inevitable.
And hence, one more reason for a subconscious lack of respect for Yellow Submarine: when placed in the
chronological context of late 1968 / early 1969, it feels fake, or, rather, just uncomfortably anachronistic — the first
«new» Beatles release that reeks of nostalgia, rather than points to the
future, or, at least, gives the exhaustive lowdown on the current situation.
The other reason for «despisal» is, of course,
the fact that even the first side of the album, with only four out of six «new»
songs on it, is mainly comprised from outtakes. Only John's ʽHey
Bulldogʼ, recorded during the same session as ʽLady Madonnaʼ,
was donated to the movie right away, and, naturally, it is the best of the lot.
Incidentally, the contrast between the energetic, but harmless-friendly boogie
piano melody of ʽLady Madonnaʼ and the melodically simpler, but definitely
more «evil», «barking» piano riff of ʽHey Bulldogʼ, recorded almost
back-to-back, is another glaring textbook example of the John/Paul dichothomy.
Watch how John can be friendly, funny, mentoresque, and downright nasty at the
same time: "if you're lonely, you can talk to me" is sung with such
primal ferocity that I'd rather not
be lonely, given the actual choice. On the other hand, the final bit of dialog
— "I said woof" etc. — is one of the most lovingly silliest moments
in the Beatles' entire career. The song is a worthy companion to ʽI Am The
Walrusʼ in sheer terms of «what the heck is going on?», even though it
lacks the latter's intentional «epic» vibe. A ʽWalrusʼ for the kids?
The other three songs were all written or even
recorded in 1967: George's two contributions are both outtakes from the Sgt. Pepper era (but they do make Yellow Submarine the only original
Beatles album on which George is the main contributor), and Paul's ʽAll
Together Nowʼ was conceived in the Magical
Mystery Tour period. The Paul song clearly did not make the grade because
of its explicit kiddie orientation (it is even based on a basic counting-out
rhyme structure), and George's songs are both somewhat questionable. ʽOnly
A Northern Songʼ shows no serious attempt at creating a vocal melody,
playing out rather like an absent-minded psychedelic jam — it is rather obvious
that, in the wake of ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ and ʽMr. Kiteʼ,
the decision not to let it compete with these songs in 1967 was correct.
ʽIt's All Too Muchʼ is far, far
better, one of George's most underrated love anthems, in my opinion — not to
mention the kick-off, a wall-crumbling fifteen-second Hendrix tribute if there
ever was one (and, although much of the song is dominated by keyboards and
trumpets, the guitar throughout is 1967-distorted-psychedelia at its
wickedest). The song is somewhat marred by the extra-long coda, though, which
is actually funny, considering how the also-anthemic, also-uplifting, also-coda-focused
ʽHey Judeʼ would be even longer — but, of course, the choral singing
on ʽHey Judeʼ is supposed to entice and draw in the listener, making
him one with the band, whereas the coda to ʽIt's All Too Muchʼ is
primarily instrumental, and is probably best appreciated during a chemical
holiday in Pepperland.
Of course, two great songs and two passable
outtakes do not make up for a credible album, and, in order to pad out the
results, George Martin was commissionned a full instrumental score for the
second side. Which is usually the biggest complaint: that Side B has nothing to
do with the Beatles in the first place, making the record a rip-off. This is
not entirely true, of course. At
least one of the pieces (ʽYellow Submarine In Pepperlandʼ) is built
on the theme of a Beatles song (guess which), and besides, whatever happened to
the «fifth Beatle» tag? Personally, I've always loved the ʽMarch Of The
Meaniesʼ theme, and still consider it fairly «Beatlesque» in spirit (with
just a pinch of Wagner thrown in for good measure).
Naturally, the instrumental orchestral themes
work better within the context of the movie for which they were commissionned —
except that in the movie, you almost never get to hear them in their entirety,
logically developed from beginning to end. In any case, my firm position has
always been that the original Yellow
Submarine made and continues to make much better sense than the 1999 Yellow Submarine Soundtrack, a total
commercial rip-off which threw out the orchestral score and replaced it with
songs that were already available on regular LPs. (One could easily make
oneself that kind of mix without having to buy the album). On the other hand,
something like a double LP mix with all the songs and all the instrumentals properly sequenced could also have been
useful.
Which brings us to the obvious conclusion:
unlike A Hard Day's Night and Help! (in their UK versions), Yellow Submarine is the Beatles' first
and only true «soundtrack album», and
it makes little sense to rate, judge, criticize, or enjoy it beyond the context
of the animated movie which it represents. Which would have been bad news if
the movie were «Beatleproof» — but, fortunately, «nothing is Beatleproof», and
no one is Beatleproof, including the animator George Dunning (whom laymen only
know for his work on this particular cartoon), and the bunch of script writers
who managed to fill a silly, simplistic fairy-tale storyline with enough subtle
wit, humor, and intelligent puns to last a lifetime.
The situation is simple: it makes no sense to
get the Yellow Submarine LP before
watching the movie, it makes no sense to not
watch the movie if you care about the Beatles in the first place, and it makes
no sense to crap on Yellow Submarine
after watching the movie, unless the
Blue Meanies actually got to you in the process. With the musical and cultural
world galloping at full speed in the late Sixties, it almost feels like a
last-moment soulful gift, a final memento of the era in which the Beatles were
the chief symbol of the whole «make love not war» ideology. So it does have its
place in the catalog — sort of like a paragraph break before the final act of
the tragedy. Judge it on its own terms.
LET IT BE (1969-1970)
1) Two Of Us; 2) Dig A Pony;
3) Across The Universe; 4) I Me Mine; 5) Dig It; 6) Let It Be; 7) Maggie Mae;
8) I've Got A Feeling; 9) One After 909; 10) The Long And Winding Road; 11) For
You Blue; 12) Get Back.
I am going to go for a little change of
protocol here. Technically, Let It Be
was the last original Beatles album, since it was released on May 8, 1970,
exactly one month after the infamous McCartney press release about his leaving
the band. It was also the last album on which three out of four Beatles (no
Lennon) recorded a new version of an older song (George's ʽI Me
Mineʼ, with the final sessions dated to January 1970), and most of the
mixing was done in March/April 1970 by Phil Spector. Naturally, most
discographies and review sets place it at the end of the line. Besides, it's
called Let It Be. The title track is
called ʽLet It Beʼ. How could there be a more perfect title and a
more perfect title track for the Beatles' swan song?
But, ironically, the first rehearsal of
ʽLet It Beʼ took place on January 3, 1969, at a time when tension was
already running high, but there was no thought yet of an actual break-up — and
the song was never intended as a musical testament, as it is quite easy to see
from the lyrics. On the contrary, it is a pacifying piece, maybe even a
subconscious plea for everybody to just take it easy. Which no one did,
unfortunately, because by early 1969, Paul's «take it easy» was unequivocally
understood by everyone as «take it easy and just do as I say», whether he
really meant it or not.
The «finished» album may have come out in 1970,
but in 99% of all possible ways and manners, it belongs in early 1969; and
props must be given to Spector for preserving much of the attitude of early 1969. Upon release, Let It Be was heavily criticized for sounding ragged and
unfinished, but that is exactly what the Beatles' musical grip was at the time — ragged and unfinished.
If you ever saw the movie, you might even get the feeling that the Beatles themselves were quite ragged, although
much of this has to do with the cold London climate and the necessity of
getting up early in the morning to participate in the filming.
I have no reason to doubt that Paul's complex
plan to revitalize the band was undertaken with the best of all possible
intentions. Unfortunately, it just proved what many might have felt all along:
namely, that being a genius composer does not automatically make you eligible
for «smart politician». Probably the most correct strategy at the time, if one
really wanted to preserve the band as
a single entity, was to take a break — let everybody's nerves cool down after
the already heated White Album
sessions, invent alternate outlets for everybody's individuality, maybe even
settle on part-time solo, part-time collective careers. Instead, less than two
months after The Beatles was
finally launched, Paul was pressing the band back in the studio, and how.
The idea of getting «back to the roots»,
playing much of the material «live in the studio», like they did in 1963,
without giving in to studio trickery where each band member would sit in his
own cubicle, turned out to be disastrous. For one thing, it'd been a long,
long, long time since they ever did anything like that — two or three years at
least. Listening to the early takes of Let
It Be material, or watching the Twickenham footage in the movie, shows just
how painfully rusty, and, at times, quite sloppy the results came to sound. For
another, it actually involved spending more time in the presence of each other,
and an increased necessity of compromising
— something that was much more easily done in 1963 than in 1969.
And finally, it was just plain wrong. It is one thing to abandon an
idea that did not work, and retrace one's steps back to the previous level
when things were going all right. But the concept of «getting back to the
roots» from a level that you have
perfectly mastered is nothing short of ridiculous. (Four years later, a
similar change of mind would forever destroy the «hipness» of Eric Clapton).
Simply put, Paul's plan was completely doomed from the start, and it also laid
to rest whatever hopes there might have been of the Beatles eventually sorting
out their mutual problems. In a way, Paul did
kill the Beatles with the «Get Back» project — injecting a lethal dose of camaraderie
instead of a careful, step-by-step treatment.
Still, the Beatles could be fairly great even
at their collective worst, and for demonstrating that, we have to say a big
thank you to Phil Spector. These days, mostly due to active counter-propaganda
on Paul's part, his role in the album is usually remembered as that of «the guy
who put those corny strings on ʽThe Long And Winding Roadʼ, but I am
completely on John's side of the debate: strings or no strings, Spector took
the chaotic, confusing, incoherent mass of tapes from the January 1969 sessions
and made the best of them. And, furthermore, he did not merely select the
«cream of the crop» — he somehow managed to convey the dishevelled, tense
spirit of the sessions, while at the same time avoiding showing us all of their
blandness. In other words, Let It Be
manages to be a glorious mess, as compared to the depressing mess that we can
now officially observe in the outtakes included on Anthology 3.
Paul's original idea was to record the final
version live, and Spector actually respected that intent: although only four
songs were included from the «Rooftop Concert» — the culmination of the whole
enterprise — there is certainly a live feel to the entire album, conveyed by
the inclusion of snippets of dialog, pseudo-announcements ("I Dig A Pygmy,
by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf Aids! Phase One, in which Doris gets her
oats!"), and little odd bits like the band launching into an accappella
comic rendition of ʽDanny Boyʼ at the end of one of the rooftop
numbers. Throw in such snippets as ʽMaggie Maeʼ and a little slice
from the large ʽDig Itʼ jam that introduces ʽLet It Beʼ,
and the informal, messy feeling is complete.
It does not necessarily help, because the ʽDig Itʼ jam is pointless, ʽMaggie
Maeʼ is just a moment of occasional silliness, and the jokes and adlibs
are only funny for the first time. But it provides some authenticity. There is
no way that Let It Be could ever
demand to be included into a Beatles
«Top 3» or something like that, anyway — so, if this is going to be a
relatively minor release, one might as well throw on something special that
would indirectly hint at why it is a
minor release. Sure, the best explanation would probably have to be the heated
McCartney / Harrison studio exchange, captured in the movie, but that's
carrying it a bit too far. We're
happy enough with Lennon's self-ironic "thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we
passed the audition" at the end of the album. Would there ever have been
a reason for asking that question on any previous record?
Still, there are at least three fully
accomplished, well-produced, «completed» Beatles classics on the record — one
of John's (ʽAcross The Universeʼ) and two of Paul's (the title track
and ʽThe Long And Winding Roadʼ), which is already more great stuff
than there is on... er, Yellow Submarine.
John's song is intentionally «transcendental», and probably the quintessential
«transcendental» Beatles song altogether — again, not without irony,
considering how this stately, gracefully flowing, humbly meditative anthem was
written and recorded at the height of the Beatles' personal quibbles and
quabbles. Discussing the religious ecstasy of ʽLet It Beʼ is hardly
necessary, although I must mention that this particular version is my personal
favorite, compared to the single release and the movie take — because of
Harrison's decision to make the solo a little more dynamic and «screechy» by
going all the way up before elegantly coming down again.
As for ʽRoadʼ, well... frankly
speaking, the song is not one of my favorite McCartney ballads anyway, so it is
hard for me to say whether it works better or worse with Spector's strings or
without them. It's got plenty of romantic pathos in its original incarnation
anyway, so if it is the «corniness» that annoys the listener, it's right there
from the beginning. If, however, it is the amazement at yet another impeccable
piano/vocal combination from Macca's heart that you're after, the strings
arrangement hides neither part of it from you.
Of the «rooftop» numbers, ʽGet Backʼ
is the only one that approaches the same level of accomplishment, and for good
reason: the band must have spent plenty of time working on the song in the
studio, to get locked in such a tight, ideally directed groove, with Billy
Preston on electric piano as the star of the show. Arguably McCartney's
greatest contribution to the restrictive world of the boogie — that stomping,
cavalry-charging rhythm seems so simple when you come to think of it, but
somehow, nobody ever did it just like that before. Had all of their new songs
come out sounding thus easy-going and inspired, the message of "get back
to where you once belonged" might not have been wasted on the band.
The bad news is, instead of going on another
creative rampage, a lot of studio time was wasted on remembering, rehearsing,
and re-recording old standards — from ʽBlue Suede Shoesʼ to
ʽBesame Muchoʼ — none of which had any reason to appear on the final
album, and none of which, fortunately, did. The only exception was made for
the Beatles' own ʽOne After 909ʼ, a song they'd originally tried to
record at least in 1963, and now replayed it «rootsy-style» on the rooftop.
It's funny, and they had lots of fun playing it, and it features an original
Billy Preston piano part with a cool «electronic» ring to it... but for some
reason, I've always enjoyed the original version more: the slower, more
relaxed, laid back original matched the sarcastic lyrics better than the
rooftop version, which tries to kick more ass in a rowdier way. Besides, John
and Paul's voices do not mix up all that well on the live performance.
On the other hand ʽI've Got A
Feelingʼ is, to me, the forgotten gem on the album. It makes for a classy,
fresh, inspiring start of Side Two; it's got one of the band's best ever
«looping» riffs; it's really two songs alternating with each other and then locked
onto one another; it has George Harrison playing the nastiest licks of his
career at 1:25 into the song (and it's hilarious how he never managed to get them quite right in the Twickenham Studios
part of the footage — and then got it so perfectly once the band was finally on
the roof) — and even the lyrics make sense, because it is... well, it's
probably the world's finest ode to human ability to feel. In that respect, it's funny how, in this battle, it is Paul
who is the herky-jerky one, whereas John is all but playing the Dalai-lama on
the "Everybody had a hard year..." part. Down with stereotypes!
Sure, the album feels incomplete. Some of the
songs are objectively underworked — George's ʽI Me Mineʼ, fantastic
as it is, lasted all of 1:34, and Spector had to replay the same section twice
to bring it to a more logical completion (with brass overdubs on the second
verse so it wouldn't feel too obvious). John's ʽDig A Ponyʼ gives the
feeling of leaving too many melodic lines unresolved, as if he wasn't given
enough time to complete all the sections. ʽFor You Blueʼ feels a
little naked, too, although I love the song dearly because of its odd
combination of sounds — John playing lap steel and Paul getting it on with an
electric piano that seems to have been dragged out into tropical sunlight and
left out to dry for twelve hours straight (I almost physically feel dehydrated
myself each time after the performance).
But let us also remember that, much to the
Beatles honor, they realized it full well themselves: this is why the final
album was indefinitely shelved, as the band regrouped itself for the final effort
of Abbey Road, and this is why it
was only released after it became clear to everybody that a brand new studio
album from the Beatles was not forthcoming.
Let It Be is a self-acknowledged
failure, with a few moments of utter brilliance and some moments that are not quite up there (but, goes without saying,
still better than 99% of the... well, you know). It should not be passed off as
«just another Beatles album» — it is in equal parts a Beatles album and a
historical document, and should be taken as such.
Which brings me to my last point: the recent
re-invention of Let It Be as Let It Be... Naked is little more than
a postmortem curio (I'm not saying «cash bait», because the process of messing
around with the tapes again may have meant much more to Paul than simply an
extra source of revenue). By discarding the Spector «innovations», taking out
the «live» bits and snippets, and reshuffling the tracks, the Naked version tries to pass it off for
«another Beatles album» — but it doesn't work that way. That Beatles album never
existed in the first place. And I have no interest whatsoever in hearing
ʽTwo Of Usʼ without the "I dig a pygmy...!" introduction,
or ʽOne After 909ʼ without the ʽDanny Boyʼ bit.
Particularly the latter. Watch the Let It Be movie and you'll have to agree with the obvious: throughout
that cold and miserable January of 1969, the happiest moment in the Beatles'
collective life happened during those forty minutes of playing on the roof —
fueled by the genuine excitement of it all and the impending danger of getting
their heads smashed in by the police. The more of those minutes we have
included on our copy of Let It Be,
the better it makes us feel — realizing that the whole venture was not a complete waste, after all. At the very
last moment of his crazy plan, Paul finally had it going right. Too bad that
forty minutes of playing live in the cold never got around to compensate for
twenty days of misery that preceded it. Not even Billy Preston helped in the
long run.
I can only hope that future re-editions of the
Beatles' catalog will never succumb to the mistake of replacing the original Let It Be with the Naked version — although, perhaps, both have a reason to exist. To
me, the Beatles are interesting not only as masters of the pop hook, but also
as live human beings with a juicier feel for the universe than my own, and I
sense their presence as such much better on the original album than on the
sterilized «remake». Not that it's a matter of life and death or anything —
screwing around with a Beatles album is nowhere near as dangerous as screwing
around with the multiplication table — but on that little grading scale of
life's tiny nitpicks it at least feels more important to me than the Greedo
controversy. Am I wrong in thinking that Paul McCartney is more precious for
humanity than George Lucas? You tell me.
ABBEY ROAD (1969)
1) Come Together; 2)
Something; 3) Maxwell's Silver Hammer; 4) Oh! Darling; 5) Octopus' Garden; 6) I
Want You (She's So Heavy); 7) Here Comes The Sun; 8) Because; 9) You Never Give
Me Your Money; 10) Sun King; 11) Mean Mr. Mustard; 12) Polythene Pam; 13) She
Came In Through The Bathroom Window; 14) Golden Slumbers; 15) Carry That
Weight; 16) The End; 17) Her Majesty.
To say that Abbey Road sounds like no other album ever recorded is to say
nothing. What is really important is that Abbey
Road sounds like no other Beatles
album ever recorded. Within the confines of the large world that is the
Beatles, Abbey Road is a sub-world
in itself; a musical mystery that was supposed to put a full stop to the
Beatles career — then subtly replaced it with an ellipsis. It's an
open-invitation album: «Terribly sorry, guys, for having to leave you so soon, but,
in compensation, we'll just give you this cool idea you could perhaps expand
upon some time in the future... and this one... and one more... and another
bunch... and this... and this...»
It so happened that I came into first contact
with Abbey Road at a somewhat later
date, after I'd already heard and properly assimilated the rest of the Beatles'
regular catalog. I remember that first feeling — what I heard that day struck
me as the product of an entirely different band. It was the Beatles for sure,
and at the same time, it was a different Beatles. I wasn't even sure I «loved»
those Beatles to the same extent I «loved» the normal Beatles. It didn't feel like
a musical piece that was supposed to be «loved». It had a mythological aura
around it. It was part-time scary, part-time disorienting, part-time
religiously beautiful. You couldn't make friends with that record like you
could make friends with The White Album.
You couldn't understand how in the world did they manage something like that.
Years later, I still cannot put it into context. There is not a single thing
about Abbey Road that would scream
out 1969.
I understand now that it certainly had to take
the traumatic effects of January 1969 to bring out this side of the band. The
individual Beatles generally acknowledge that they went into the Abbey Road
studios one last time in the summer of 1969 feeling,
or even knowing, without saying it,
that this was going to be their «swan song», and this could not help but add
extra solemnity and seriousness — that last chance had to be taken. But
there's more to that. Compare the band's material on Abbey Road with the songs on their first — and generally best — solo
albums, released within a year or so. These are great albums, but they are
understandable: John's bleeding confessions, Paul's homespun absurdism and/or
romance, George's straightforward search for the meaning of life (and, er,
Ringo's «songs to keep Grandma happy»). Abbey
Road, compared to these, opens the «doors of perception» to something
entirely different, and I am not sure how to call it.
Let us take off from the obvious. First of all,
Abbey Road is grim. The only song here that can be called relatively sunny and
optimistic is ʽHere Comes The Sunʼ, and even that one works like a
momentary consolation rather than an all-out idealistic anthem. Even Paul is
bleak: his trademark studio silliness evolves into black humor on
ʽMaxwell's Silver Hammerʼ (which some even find repulsive), and his
sentimentalism into unhealthy hysteria on ʽOh! Darlingʼ. George's ʽSomethingʼ,
the album's one and only hardcore love ballad, alternates between devotion and
paranoid fear. And John's songs... the beast was having a field day within him
that summer.
Second, Abbey
Road is distant. Most Beatles
albums had their intimate or uniting moments, sucking in the individual guest
or the collective host. Paul sweetly cooing along with an acoustic guitar. John
letting you in on how he's so tired, he hasn't slept a wink. Friendly, inviting
vaudeville. Singalong choruses for family audiences. We all live in a yellow
submarine, naaaah naaaah na-na-na-n-na and so on. There is nothing of the sort
on Abbey Road. These songs are not made
for «us»; they seem to be talking to somebody else out there, and you have no
idea who. With a different band, this approach could infuriate; with the
Beatles, it intrigues. There's an odd channel here that leads somewhere — I am still trying to figure
it out.
This «distance» is perhaps best illustrated by
one of my absolute favorite moments on the album — one that, for some reason,
nobody ever talks about: the last minute of ʽYou Never Give Me Your
Moneyʼ, that section where the repetitive "one two three four five
six seven, all good children go to heaven" mantra kicks in. Before that section, the song is a mix
of short, excellent musical ideas and understandable lyrical content; but once
it begins, the combination of majestic arpeggiated riff, heavy wailing leads,
and Paul's fearsome bass, gradually, softly giving way to a field of wind
chimes and cicadas is simply something else. It seems simple when disentangled
and put on paper, but the real effect is undescribable. It's psychedelic, I
guess, but it isn't your average psychedelia. There's some sort of loneliness
here, a weird feeling of being stranded somewhere in a whirl of alien
happenings — nothing particularly threatening, more like a combination of
«thoroughly uncongenial» with a sense of deep intelligence. Like you're encountering
new life forms that you really know nothing about, but still get a feeling they
must be smarter than yourself.
Still, the words «dark» and «distant» do not
suffice to properly describe the atmosphere of Abbey Road. If you just asked me to name the first «dark» and
«distant» band that comes to mind, I'd probably go along with The Cure instead,
and Abbey Road is nothing like The
Cure. Thus, here is a third defining feature — well, you probably saw it coming
— Abbey Road is cathartic. Its songs are either big and sprawling, or tense to the
point of snapping, or calm and serene to the utmost, and it all comes together
in a total emotional spectrum. The only one missing is hatred, but that is to
be expected. Who'd expect to see hatred on the Beatles' last album?
Each of these songs — including even most of
the little pieces in the large medley — deserves several pages of text, but
overkill never helped anybody, so, instead, I will just jot down some random
observations on stuff, beginning from the beginning and then proceeding in no particular
order. Here goes...
The opening seconds. Chuck Berry could sue John
for all he wanted to: ʽCome Togetherʼ may be loosely built around the
chords of ʽYou Can't Catch Meʼ and even retweet the line about «old
flattop», but otherwise, it's one of those cases where a borrowing of a bit of
«form» adds a completely new «spirit». John's «shooing» (allegedly he is
supposed to say «shoot!», but I never get to hear anything except the first
consonant), Paul's jumping bass pattern, and Ringo's soft, but stern «crescendo
rolls» on the drums — weird combination, right? Every single Beatles album up to
then would start out with a bang — a crashing power chord, a loud guitar riff,
a snappy, energetic vocal lead, or some other musical sledgehammer. Abbey Road is the only one that starts
out with an atmosphere of deep mystery instead. A sign of «maturity»?
ʽI Want Youʼ — too heavy, too scary,
too bizarre to gain mass popularity, but is there another moment in the Beatles
catalog where John's voice would match so closely the wobbling modulation of
John's guitar? Some of these "I want you, I want you so bad" actually
remind of his Yoko-fueled solo experiments (Two Virgins, Life With The
Lions etc.), but, since this is a Beatles album, the irrational primal
energy here is properly harnessed and integrated into a «normal» musical
structure — which only adds memorability and further emotional impact. And even
if, on the surface, the song is about going love-crazy (the Japanese curse
strikes again!), it is also John's only truly ambiguous composition on the
subject: the «horrific» "she's so heavy" part paints a picture of
strolling through a barren wintery wasteland, knee-deep in the snow, with Abbey
Road Studios' brand new synthesizers adding heavy white-noise wind support. I'm
not exactly sure Yoko would harbor the same feelings for this song as she did
for ʽOh My Loveʼ.
Probably the greatest mood transition between a
Side A / Side B contrast on a Beatles album ever — especially today, when you
no longer have to turn the record over manually. Just as the wind howling that
winds around the doom-laden chords of ʽShe's So Heavyʼ reaches its
peak, the tape is unexpectedly cut off — and replaced by the lightest,
prettiest, folksiest acoustic pattern on the album. For me, this is the single
greatest «musical relief» in LP history, as George comes along and literally
tears the listener out of the dark wings of depression, Galadriel-fashion. As I
already said, ʽHere Comes The Sunʼ is not a lot of relief: it is short, quiet, humble, and already
ʽBecauseʼ returns us to slightly more troubled waters, but sometimes
«a gleam of hope» on an album works more intensely, with a more profound and
lasting effect, than a whole side of it.
People like to condemn ʽMaxwell's Silver
Hammerʼ as just another silly piece of fluffy Paul crap. It is music-hall-ish enough, yes, and the
lyrics are silly (and rather clumsy), but it fits the album's tenseness — hey,
silly or not, Paul just wrote a song about a juvenile serial killer! — and it
introduces the Moog synth into the Beatles' array of instruments just at the
right moment. Old-time vaudeville performed on hyper-modern electronic gadgets?
Count me in. It also adds up to the overall mystery feel of the album.
John sometimes used to say that ʽOh!
Darlingʼ was a song on which Paul should have traded the lead vocal rights
over to him — he may have been right,
having honed the art of «passionate screaming» ever since the recording of
ʽAnnaʼ way back in 1963, but Paul's lungs in 1969 were no slouch,
either. The song may own a serious debt to classic R'n'B and Louisiana swamp
pop, but the bridge section — Paul screaming it out like a psycho over George's
razor-sharp electric chords — strictly follows the «Abbey Road spirit». Dangerous, brooding, distant. It is hardly a
coincidence that both John's and
Paul's love statements on Side A dump sentimentality, replacing it with madness
and aggression.
That sort of leaves George to do the honors,
but ʽSomethingʼ isn't really a «love song» per se, no matter what
Frank S. might have to say about it (well, he used to introduce it as a
«Lennon-McCartney» song, too). George himself never admitted personally that
it was about Pattie, and something tells me that his personal feelings for his
wife in 1969 weren't really that deep
to serve as chief inspiration. It's really a religious hymn, close in form and
spirit to All Things Must Pass. And
it isn't just sentimentally sweet: it swings from deep admiration
("something in the way she moves...") to nervous jealousy
("don't want to leave her now...") to almost aggressive insecurity
(bridge section) — with what is probably George's best ever guitar solo going
through all three of these states, one by one.
«Okay», says you, «but what about Ringo? Surely
Ringo at least will be the one cheerful
spirit in this morose bunch! He's singing about octopi — how can a song about
octopi be dark and depressing?» Well, to each his own, but there must be a
good reason why ʽOctopus's Gardenʼ is often considered the drummer's
finest addition to the Beatles catalog — and to me, that reason has always
been the subtly sad emotional state it generates. The band helped Ringo shape
the simple little kiddie tune into a sonic masterpiece — the harmonies,
Lennon's jangly rhythm in the back, the «synth bubbles», everything combines to
really make it sound like a trip through an imaginary underwater paradise — but
the lyrics clearly state that "I'd
like to be...", and Ringo, perhaps subconsciously, sings it in such a
longing manner that it is perfectly clear: the song is about something
positively unreachable. (Okay, so we all know that none of us has a chance to
see a real Octopus's Garden any more than the stage set of ʽLucy In The
Skyʼ, but that's the difference: ʽLucyʼ and other songs like it
were psychedelic, implying that all
these wonder-locations were perfectly reachable inside your mind — maybe with
a little help from your «friends» — but ʽGardenʼ is a «fantasy»
song, utterly non-psychedelic in spirit).
And where does that sadness reach its climax?
In George's brief leads during the final chorus refrain. At 2:34-2:36 you get
an outburst of anger, at 2:39-2:41 — an anguished wail. I have always thought
of these brief moments as the perfect way to blend the «lightness» of
ʽOctopus's Gardenʼ into the immediately following «heaviness» of
ʽI Want Youʼ (and, for that matter, the whole Side A has an amazing
continuity and coherence to it, despite not being organized as a medley, but
that would take too much space and time to explain).
And — about the medley. The opinion one usually
gets on the medley is: «The Beatles had a lot of leftover fragments from past
sessions, none of which worked well in and out of itself, so they threw them
all together to prop up each other and came out with a masterpiece». This is
probably correct, but it still requires understanding how the heck can a bunch
of assorted odds and ends make up a masterpiece.
I think the medley should be thought of in
terms of a «last gift». If the band subconsciously knew they were going out
with this thing, it would have been natural for them to try and give it all
they got — in particular, to somehow implement, at least briefly, every good
idea they had stacked in the vaults (one reason, by the way, why ransacking the
Abbey Road archives over the years has resulted in so few previously unreleased
songs of any worth). It might have been possible to work all those little
segments into three-minute long songs and sacrifice a few of the weaker ones —
but it wouldn't have given the people so
much. It also looks like a last-minute frantic competition between John
and Paul: in the main body of the medley, three bits are John's, followed by
three of Paul's, followed by ʽThe Endʼ which is generally Paul's but
could be viewed as a collective thing, since most of it is occupied by jamming.
And it is true that many of the links are not
particularly special «per se». ʽMean Mr. Mustardʼ sounds fairly pedestrian.
ʽShe Came In Through The Bathroom Windowʼ has a vocal melody that is
almost primitive by Paul's usual standards of the time. ʽCarry That
Weightʼ is just a mildly catchy anthemic refrain — it had to be fattened
up by a reprise of ʽYou Never Give Me Your Moneyʼ to save face. But
linked all together, they work so well through contrast more than anything else. The peaceful, religious serenity
of ʽSun Kingʼ shattered to bits with the onset of John's
«Brit-character assassination» (first the brother, then the sister Pam). The
way John's sarcastic «oh, look out!» at the end of ʽPamʼ segues
straight into ʽBathroom Windowʼ. How McCartney's quiet lullaby,
addressed to a little baby, magically transforms into «boy, you're gonna carry
that weight...», presumably addressed to an already grown-up baby.
And, of course, how ʽThe Endʼ winds
it all up by giving all the band members a chance to have their say — with the
only three-part guitar jam and the only drum solo in official Beatles history —
and bringing it down with just the sort of lyrical testament that the fans
would expect from the Beatles. Of course, "and in the end the love you
take is equal to the love you make" is a slightly naïve way to
formulate the human equivalent of the energy conservation law. But the Beatles'
notes always speak far more effectively than their words — and the guitar
phrase that brings down the curtain is a gorgeous finale... except that the
Beatles wouldn't be the Beatles if they didn't succumb to the tendency to
deflate the pathos a little bit — thence came ʽHer Majestyʼ, the
first «hidden track» in LP history (the «song» was originally intended to be
part of the medley, then excluded and tacked on to the end almost by mistake — but not really by mistake). Some humorless
people actually resent its presence — well, it's a hidden track, guys, just
pretend it's not there. (CD editions actually list it now, which, I think, is
not right.)
Yes, it is true that, by the time the band went
into the studio that summer, they already had the first steps of their solo
careers projected in their heads. It is also true that they spent less time collaborating
on each other's material (Paul himself admitted that Abbey Road suffered from having too few Lennon/McCartney vocal
harmonies). But there is also no denying that Abbey Road is a
collective album nevertheless. John
Lennon/Plastic Ono Band did not have, and could not hope to have, a song
like ʽCome Togetherʼ on it. All
Things Must Pass, great as it was, did not have a ʽSomethingʼ
(ʽI'd Have You Anytimeʼ comes close, mood-wise, but is a bit more
impassioned and a little less majestic). And even within Paul, something died
that allowed him to make stuff like ʽYou Never Give Me Your Moneyʼ –
so complex, diverse, and emotionally non-trivial.
Could there have been another Abbey Road in
these guys, had they not parted on such abysmal terms? I cannot exclude that.
If you simply take the best solo Lennon, McCartney and Harrison from 1970-71
and slap them together, you won't be getting a Beatles album; but when they got
together, the Beatles always brought out the... well, not necessarily the banal
«best» in each other, more like a desire to be «unusual», to transcend their
own personalities and be somebody else
for a bit. John could be the walrus, or, at least, get walrus gumboot; Paul
could sing about serial killers; George could at least pretend to dedicate his
songs to women; even Ringo could wander around in octopus's gardens instead of
singing the ʽNo No Songʼ. Therefore, there is no knowing how a
Beatles album from, say, 1973 or 1979 would have sounded like. No knowing at
all.
But on the other hand, there is no way more perfect than Abbey Road to bring a band's career to
completion. The record does not have everything
— it has a little less sunshine, humor, and lightly colored vibes than you
usually expect from the Beatles. All of these things are replaced with extra
weight, wisdom, «maturity». But everything other than that, it's got plenty.
And once it's all done, ʽThe Endʼ locks and bolts the door, then
throws away the key in the direction of ʽHer Majestyʼ. Do we really
need more from the Beatles? Just our natural greed calling out. One thing is
for sure: Abbey Road would have lost
some of its tremendous impact, had its importance and influence been diluted by
further releases. And for all those genuinely hungry for more — well, there's
always the solo records. No dark, distant, cathartic magic in them, though.
ADDENDA:
PAST MASTERS, VOL. 1 (1962-1965; 1988)
1) Love Me Do; 2) From Me To
You; 3) Thank You Girl; 4) She Loves You; 5) I'll Get You; 6) I Want To Hold
Your Hand; 7) This Boy; 8) Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand; 9) Sie Liebt Dich; 10) Long
Tall Sally; 11) I Call Your Name; 12) Slow Down; 13) Matchbox; 14) I Feel Fine;
15) She's A Woman; 16) Bad Boy; 17) Yes It Is; 18) I'm Down.
In the CD age, one way to treat the Beatles'
extensive singles catalog could have been to scatter it as bonus tracks tacked
on to contemporary LP releases. On a certain level, that would have worked
well, because the singles frequently shared the same spirit as the LPs.
Clearly, ʽWe Can Work It Outʼ is very much a Rubber Soul-type song, ʽPaperback Writerʼ embraces Revolver, and ʽHey Judeʼ is
every bit as 1968-ish as The White Album.
Since the Beatles had, from the very beginning,
enacted a very strict «no-filler» policy, they never shared the «save the best
stuff for the singles, use the worst stuff to pad out the LPs» ideology that
plagued the record industry all the way up to the «concept album» revolution.
Instead, the singles were tasty trailers — insightful previews of things to
come that were every bit as good as the things to come themselves, only
shorter. ʽStrawberry Fields Foreverʼ left your head spinning, but it
also left you craving for more, and somehow, you knew more was coming.
On the other hand, bonus tracks are all right,
but a proper chronological sequencing of all the officially released non-LP
material may be even more right. The
release of Past Masters way back in
1988 was probably the first time in history when a major band's «odds and ends»
were treated with equal respect to the band itself and its fans: for
comparison, no such comfortable collection has so far been made available for
The Rolling Stones. And it gives you one more chance to witness, this time in
a brief, condensed, but equally «legitimate» version, the band's amazing development
from teen pop fakirs to seasoned magicians. These songs are every bit as good
as LP material, and in quite a few cases, better; fossilizing them as «bonus»
additions would be a psychological disservice to the listener.
Vol.
1 is, expectedly, slightly
less revered than Vol. 2, since it
only manages to cover the band's early period — right up to Help!, stopping short at the breakpoint
after which the Beatles would begin to regard themselves as superheroes and,
consequently, act like ones. But that should not imply that the songs are in
any way inferior to LP material from 1963-65. ʽFrom Me To Youʼ,
ʽShe Loves Youʼ, ʽI Want To Hold Your Handʼ and, a bit
apart chronologically and stylistically, ʽI Feel Fineʼ rank among the
greatest A-sides ever released in the era when rock'n'roll was young, innocent,
stylish, and British. Do I need to write about them? Probably not.
Ah, but what about ʽI Feel Fineʼ and
its allegedly pioneering use of feedback on record? Pete Townshend used to
scoff at that, claiming that The Who had already become good friends with manually
controlled feedback by then — unfortunately, The Who never got around to
recording their first feedback-containing singles until 1965, so, as far as I
know, Liverpool still holds the trophy here. What is more important from a
non-historical standpoint is that the single feedback note gives the song an
odd shade of «rough mystery». Let's face it, it is somewhat monotonous, what
with that cool, but repetitive riff dominating the entire song, and there's
nothing like a sharp twaaaaang of
feedback to set up an intriguing start.
But enough about the big ones. Most of the rest
of the tracks are B-sides and EP material that was previously available on the
old Rarities LP, which the regular
average fan never bought — depriving himself of a wealth of beautiful
material. Well, not all of it is
equally beautiful. The German versions of ʽShe Loves Youʼ and
ʽI Want To Hold Your Handʼ are sheer novelties that do not even let
you properly ridicule the boys' accents due to harmony singing and echo. That
the Beatles, too, had to undergo the humiliating ritual of recording in a
poorly mastered foreign language «to capture an overseas market», like so many
of their peers, says a lot about the record industry, but does not add much to
one's respect for the band.
The EP Long
Tall Sally from mid-1964 is hardly a major conquest in Beatles history
either, but it does feature some of their most inventive cover versions. The
title track is such a stone cold Little Richard classic that I cannot bring
myself to asserting that the Beatles did it better: it is a milestone in the
«McCartney Screams» saga (supposedly, it was John who goaded Paul into giving
it his all, convincing him that he could yell it out along with the best of
'em), but still, Paul McCartney is no Richard Penniman when it comes to revving
up the larynx.
But all three covers (Little Richard's ʽLong
Tall Sallyʼ, Carl Perkins' ʽMatchboxʼ, and Larry Williams'
ʽSlow Downʼ) share the same advantage: they take basic rock'n'roll numbers
that used to be pure entertainment, albeit with a naughty subtext, and add an
odd pinch of desperation, at times descending into sheer madness. When Larry
Williams sang ʽSlow Downʼ, it was fun. When Lennon took the lead, it
turned into an open-text anthem of acute sexual hunger. ʽLong Tall Sallyʼ
is screamed out by Paul at the top of his screaming range — yes, it is shakier
and shallower than Little Richard's version, but way more hysterical. Coupled
with George's equally hysterical guitar leads, it turns the band's take on the
song into their wildest bit of «outside» rock'n'roll ever. Even ʽMatchboxʼ, given over to Ringo whose «range»
is non-existent in principle, gets a slightly apocalyptic gloss with its echo
effects over everything and double-tracked vocals. Funny, only the sole
original on the EP, John's ʽI Call Your Nameʼ, remains completely
hysteria-free — it is set in John's «chivalrous» mode (compare ʽAll I've
Gotta Doʼ or ʽAnytime At Allʼ), even if the lyrics are about
separation and longing, and is of a completely Hard Day's Night caliber.
Then there are the B-sides. Personal favs here
would include ʽI'll Get Youʼ, one of their best early «kiddie love
songs» (I've always loved the way its vocal melody unfurls without a single
glitch from the opening "oh yeahs" to the chorus), and, naturally,
ʽThis Boyʼ, arguably the greatest B-side from the band's early period
— if only for its mid-section, where the intensity of John's vocal performance
would not be truly matched again until... well, for quite some time.
I have to admit that ʽYes It Isʼ has
always been too slow moving for me to enjoy it fully — even though I also admit that the song, solemnly
dirge-like as it is, would not really work at any other tempo, and that in
terms of depth of sentiment, it beats ʽBaby's In Blackʼ all to hell.
It's also intriguing: is it just about trying to pull oneself together after a
breakup, or is she dead? Is it a song
about a dead loved one? Could it
be?...
I also have to admit that ʽI'm Downʼ
has always seemed way too much of a self-penned Little Richard imitation/tribute
for me to enjoy it fully — even if, technically, it is one of those classic
McCartney rock'n'roll numbers. In reality, though, it is a hybrid. Behind all
the rock'n'roll screaming and Harrison's stinging leads lies a classic pop
chorus, seeking its strength in vocal harmonies. I mean, the song is bluesy
and all, but the chorus really belongs in the ʽPlease Please Meʼ
ballpark, doesn't it? Not even sure if Paul ever wrote one wholesome «non-pop»
rocker in his life. Not that it's a big problem or anything. But in between
ʽI'm Downʼ and John's cover of Larry Williams' ʽBad Boyʼ —
two of their loudest tracks from early 1965 — I always found myself veering
towards the latter if there was any frustration to be vented.
Actually, it is kind of a funny thing: with the
Stones on their heels, the Beatles never laid a claim to the title of «bad boys
of rock'n'roll», yet there still is a very small handful of titles in their
catalog where John's mean, aggressive side comes out with a vengeance — you know that at moments like these, he'd be
beating poor little Mick to a pulp in his corner. I sometimes think that when
he was recording ʽBad Boyʼ, he simply let that nasty 15-year old
Liverpudlian hooligan reinhabit his body once again — that, despite the lack
of personal authorship and the essentially comic lyrics, he felt some sort of
intimate bond here, almost to the point of making a pledge to turn this
humorous number into something much more dark and troublesome. Maybe it is not
a complete success (it is very hard
to intensify and terror-ify songs that were originally conceived as comic
parodies), but the very fact that, for instance, the cover version omits kooky
backing vocals ("he's a... bad boy") that accompany each line of the
original, supports my point.
Anyway, altogether I would say that the ratio
of good-to-great titles on Vol. 1 is
more or less consistent with the band's normal LP ratios from 1963-64; omit
the German versions and the interesting, but rather useless alternate single
version of ʽLove Me Doʼ (with session drummer Andy White replacing
Ringo on a rather pointless whim from George Martin), and you just got yourself
another high-level early Beatles album. Congratulations.
PAST MASTERS, VOL. 2 (1965-1970; 1988)
1) Day Tripper; 2) We Can Work
It Out; 3) Paperback Writer; 4) Rain; 5) Lady Madonna; 6) The Inner Light; 7)
Hey Jude; 8) Revolution; 9) Get Back; 10) Don't Let Me Down; 11) The Ballad Of
John And Yoko; 12) Old Brown Shoe; 13) Across The Universe; 14) Let It Be; 15)
You Know My Name (Look Up The Number).
The second volume of the singles oversees the
band enter adulthood, and, consequently, will be of more interest to those who
like to see these guys chasing the meaning of life instead of you-know-what. Of
course, I respect the opinions of people who assert that you-know-what and the
meaning of life are the exact same thing, and that the Beatles did the world a
major disfavour when they stopped thinking of happiness as the art of «just to
dance with you» and began thinking of it as a «warm gun». I get their point,
but I'm not one of them — and, therefore, Vol.
2 by definition is going to show up more frequently on my playlists than Vol. 1.
One tiny element of displeasure is that Vol. 2, for sheer technical reasons,
lacks the smooth continuity of Vol. 1.
Since all of the band's A- and B-sides from 1967 already constitute the second
side of the Magical Mystery Tour LP,
they are not included in this collection; thus, we have a straight jump from
ʽRainʼ to ʽLady Madonnaʼ, as if the band went on hiatus at
the height of the Flower Power era, and neither ʽStrawberry Fields
Foreverʼ nor ʽAll You Need Is Loveʼ ever existed. In a more
perfect world, a well-rounded Beatles CD catalog could perhaps consist of Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour proper
(the movie soundtrack) on one disc, and the accompanying singles properly
distributed among the two volumes of Past
Masters. But, obviously, that is not going to happen — and, anyway, with
the little plastic discs on their way out, it's all up to you to program your
sequencing the way you like it.
For a bit of fun, let us talk about the weaker
or less famous stuff on this release, and then we'll see if I have anything revolutionary
to say about the likes of ʽHey Judeʼ or ʽGet Backʼ. So here
we go — random observations on an incidental compilation.
ʽThe Ballad Of John And Yokoʼ.
Apparently, the only thing that puts the «Beatles» tag on this song is that
Paul happened to be hanging around in the studio when John got the urge to
record it (and a well-trained ear with seasoned knowledge of Paul's solo career
will probably recognize his own, rather straightforward, drumming style).
Otherwise, not only do the never-ending lyrics violate the Beatles' autonomy,
but they seem to be far ahead of the melody as well. I've always enjoyed it
for a laugh, but it is odd that Paul vetoed
ʽCold Turkeyʼ (which, with a little doctoring, could have been turned
into a proper Beatles song), but okayed this rather pedestrian travelogue. John
must have caught him in a good mood.
ʽLet It Beʼ. I do not like George's
solo on the single version. The Leslie speaker effects are fine, but the effect
is subdued and humble, compared to the far more dynamic and passionate solo on
the album track. Some people might say that this repetitive stateliness is
exactly what the song needs, but I always saw ʽLet It Beʼ as a song
that goes up and comes down — not a stern church hymn or anything: Paul
McCartney ain't no Handel. But in the end, it's good to have both versions so
that we can happily waste away hours of our lives arguing about these things.
ʽThe Inner Lightʼ. Probably the
weakest of all of George's «Indian» songs (but, in true eclectic fashion, the
lyrics actually paraphrase the Tao Te
Ching) — but in terms of effect, not structure: structurally, it is often
described as particularly complex, unusual, and the closest in tone and arrangement
to true Indian music. Which might just be exactly why it never struck me as all
that amazing: a personal achievement for George, perhaps, but if I want something fairly close to Indian
music, I'll probably just go straight ahead for some real Indian music. The
«galloping» sarod rhythms are funny (by the way, there is no sitar on this song
— just sarod and Indian wind instruments), but not convincing enough for me to
see George himself — he's kinda lost in the consequences of the novel idea to
set basic Chinese philosophy to an Indian melody.
ʽAcross The Universeʼ. Uh... nice
birdies. No limits to the happiness of The World Wildlife Fund, for whose
purposes the song was originally recorded. Teenage girls singing backup instead
of Phil Spector strings. Your choice or mine? Funny enough, every time I replay
the song in my head, I only remember Lennon and his guitar anyway — meaning,
honestly, that I don't care.
ʽYou Know My Name (Look Up The
Number)ʼ. A frickin' LOST
MASTERPIECE. Probably the only more or less «genuine», if utterly
tongue-in-cheek, «jazz» number the Beatles ever recorded, an almost vicious
send-up of its lounge variety, and with a brief and dashing sax solo at the end
contributed by no other than the Rolling Stones' own Brian Jones. The only time
in Beatles history that a sheer musical joke dared to make it to a B-side —
and, although one time is quite enough, wouldn't we feel a little poorer
without at least one?
ʽOld Brown Shoeʼ. This one is
surprisingly rough rock'n'roll for George's «late Beatles» period, when his
Carl Perkins fandom phase was already long overcome: he would never again play
in such fast tempos for a long long time. In fact, this «aggressive love song»
style is usually John's, not George's. It was not included on Abbey Road, and for good reason — it is
too brutal to uphold George's ʽSomething / Here Comes The Sunʼ image
on that album. But I dare say that, this once at least, the band could have given
him the honor of having the song as an A-side, since it is in every way
superior to ʽThe Ballad Of John And Yokoʼ.
And then come the «biggies» that require no
extra publicity. ʽRainʼ, originally hidden on the B-side of
ʽPaperback Writerʼ, these days finally gets its deserved dues as one
of the greatest classics of the psychedelic era. And while, spirit-wise, it is
a John show all the way — «birth of the cool», Lennon-style — its finest asset
is still the rhythm section; the more I listen to it, the more I am inclined to
think that Paul and Ringo were trying to work a bit in the style of The Who,
where Paul would play faster, more complex runs (fitting in plenty of bass
expressivity, considering the song's slow motion), and Ringo would be working
in energetic «drum leads» that keep threatening to take the listener's
attention away from the guitars. But since Paul is no Entwistle, and Ringo is
no Keith Moon, the end result is still different.
Lastly, the rocker in me is always a little sad
that ʽRevolutionʼ always gets such a reserved welcome compared to
its A-side, because on the sheer musical side of things, the rock sound that
the band gets on that thing is, again, something utterly without precedent. The
whole track just sizzles with
electricity — every time I listen to it, I get the feeling of standing near a
high voltage power trnasmission line. There's been lots of people known to
professionally handle distortion, but this particular way goes beyond Hendrix.
I'm pretty sure George must have played his part with rubber gloves on his
hands, for safety reasons.
And the best song of the lot? I am going to
play the game of «being special» here — and, instead of the predictable
ʽHey Judeʼ, nominate ʽDon't Let Me Downʼ. It is curious
that, where in the next few years John's «Yokosongs» would mostly be of a
purely romantic nature (ʽOh My Loveʼ and suchlike), in 1969 he must
have really been scared of his own feelings — ʽI Want Youʼ is where
he almost goes over the top with that fear, but ʽDon't Let Me Downʼ
is a little more restrained. The verses are like a sledgehammer, driving that
feeling of eternal, unbreakable love into the ground — the final «she done me
good» borders on animalism — and then comes the fear that this love might be
breakable, after all. It's one of the greatest
«this-moment-is-so-good-please-God-don't-let-it-end» songs in pop history, and
the energy that John lets out with this performance is unprecedented. When
they played it on the roof, they didn't require plugging in.
Overall, Vol.
2 covers lots more ground than Vol.
1 — from the still relatively early days of ʽDay Tripperʼ, which
announced the beginning of the «maturation» process, through the «psycho» and
«elder statesmen» years, you have here the folksy Beatles, the psycho-cool
Beatles, the back-to-roots Beatles, the let's-get-personal-Beatles, and the
don't-give-a-damn-Beatles. What you do not
get at any of these stages is let-the-standards-fall-Beatles — even the «worst»
songs I mentioned are still memorable and engaging. Everything is a must hear,
even ʽThe Ballad Of John And Yokoʼ. Admit it, it's more fun to learn
about their daily activities when John sings it to you than when you read about
it in some sloppy biography.
AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL (1964-1965; 1977)
1) Twist And Shout; 2) She's A
Woman; 3) Dizzy Miss Lizzie; 4) Ticket To Ride; 5) Can't Buy Me Love; 6) Things
We Said Today; 7) Roll Over Beethoven; 8) Boys; 9) A Hard Day's Night; 10) Help!;
11) All My Loving; 12) She Loves You; 13) Long Tall Sally.
For some reason, this album still has not seen a properly authorized
CD release; maybe they are just waiting to lay George Martin peacefully in his
grave before that happens, considering how reluctant he was to put it on the
market back in 1977 — when the release was triggered by the concurrent
propagation of the horrible Live At The
Star-Club, Hamburg tapes from 1962. Because there was no way Capitol could
stop these recordings from going public, they quickly needed their own reply,
and ended up holding George at the allegorical gunpoint. Various factual sources
will let you know how much of a challenge it was to handle and process the old
tapes; the whole thing was anything but
a love affair, and so, the only officially released Beatles' live album still
remains sort of a bastard, despisable child.
Ironically, though, as the years go by, its
importance increases, if only because there are so many young fans now who do not know the proper answer to the
question: «So why exactly did they stop touring?» One good listen to Hollywood Bowl will provide that
answer. Although the tracks are taken from two different periods, more or less
equally divided between August 23, 1964, and August 29-30, 1965, little had
changed in the interim: the banshee wailing flying over the amphitheater never
loses a single decibel of intensity. You,
the listener of At The Hollywood Bowl in its LP form, have the
magnificent benefit of actually hearing
the band. The girls in the audience did not have that benefit — not that they
had any need of it. And the band itself did
have need of it, but couldn't have gotten it unless somebody built a soundproof
glass wall around them. Like the blue bubble around Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club Band in Yellow Submarine.
That said, the Beatles did play well under the circumstances. Occasional flubbed notes in
Harrison's solos or a few tripped beats here and there could happen at any
Beatles show, screamfest or no screamfest, and John's major stage curse — that
of constantly forgetting the lyrics and having to mumble, improvise, or fall
back on older verses — was, I am fairly sure, aggravated by his nonchalant
personality rather than teenage howling getting him off the right track. They
were never «great» stage performers, but they did what they could do: rev up
the energy level of their studio recordings and play them faster, crazier, more
aggressively, the way any good rock show should assert its advantages over the
«calculated perfection» of the studio.
The problem was not that they «couldn't play»;
the problem was that they couldn't improve.
In the studio, every new batch of recording sessions brought on new discoveries
and challenges. Live, there was no way they could profit from these
discoveries. It is quite telling that, although the performances from 1964 and
1965 are shuffled, there is hardly any way to distinguish earlier and later
stuff — even if, in August 1965, less than two months separated the Beatles
from the breakthroughs of Rubber Soul.
(Well, clearly, other than the numbers performed — in 1964, they couldn't have
been singing ʽHelp!ʼ or ʽTicket To Rideʼ, but I'm not
talking about that).
The oddest moments, I think, are the ones where
either John or Paul strike up some clumsy, «humorous» stage banter — banter
that, under normal circumstances, could either be ignored or produce a laughing
reaction, but under Beatlemania rule, triggered something much simpler: «A
Beatle is talking — time to scream louder!» They genuinely seem lost on that sea, talking and joking to
no one in particular, and playing well enough to not lose confidence in
themselves, but who really cared? A few headshakes, a few falsetto whoo-whoos,
and that's all they need to send the audience to heaven. Led Zeppelin sure hope
they could get away that easily.
Today, there is no pressing need to hunt down Hollywood Bowl as long as you already
have a general idea of what a Beatles live show used to be like — for which
purposes, the Anthology CDs and
videos would be perfectly sufficient. Maybe someday the tapes will get the
benefit of proper remastering, and the setlists will be expanded to make this
document more coherent and comprehensive (at the very least, there is something
disrespectful about the almost random shuffling of the running order). But
clearly, none of these performances will ever replace the studio originals in
your heart — although I do admit that, Ringo yells his head off quite
effectively on ʽBoysʼ, going at it far more ferociously than when
locked in the comfort of Abbey Road Studios. On the other hand, the decision to
strip ʽThings We Said Todayʼ of a part of its subtlety, and introduce
the bridge with a rock'n'rollish "yeh!" on Paul's part, was a
mistake. They should have rather included more Carl Perkins in the program.
Of course, the only official live Beatles album
(bar The BBC Sessions, which isn't
really «properly» live before a real audience) cannot and will not get a
thumbs down. What might get a thumbs
down is the band's uncompromising decision to quit touring, once and for all.
Had they endured just one more year (and even then, when you look at their
touring schedule for 1966, you will see that they already spent an absolute
minimum of time on the road many months prior
to abandoning the practice altogether), the screaming would have died down on
its own, and then, finally...
remember that the best touring years for the Stones and the Who, two of the
Beatles' finest competitors, only began around 1968-69; before that, live
bootlegs and scraps of official recordings show that they had relatively
limited advantages over the Beatles on the stage. But, as they tell us, history
knows no ifs, so let us just bear with the fact that Paul Is Dead, after all.
LIVE AT THE BBC (1962-1965; 1994)
CD I: 1) Beatle Greetings; 2) From Us To You; 3) Riding On A Bus; 4) I
Got A Woman; 5) Too Much Monkey Business; 6) Keep Your Hands Off My Baby; 7)
I'll Be On My Way; 8) Young Blood; 9) A Shot Of Rhythm And Blues; 10) Sure To
Fall (In Love With You); 11) Some Other Guy; 12) Thank You Girl; 13) Sha La La
La La; 14) Baby It's You; 15) That's All Right (Mama); 16) Carol; 17) Soldier
Of Love; 18) A Little Rhyme; 19) Clarabella; 20) I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And
Cry; 21) Crying Waiting Hoping; 22) Dear Wack; 23) You Really Got A Hold On Me;
24) To Know Her Is To Love Her; 25) A Taste Of Honey; 26) Long Tall Sally; 27) I
Saw Her Standing There; 28) The Honeymoon Song; 29) Johnny B. Goode; 30)
Memphis Tennessee; 31) Lucille; 32) Can't Buy Me Love; 33) From Fluff To You;
34) Till There Was You.
CD II: 1) Crinsk Dee Night; 2) A Hard Day's Night; 3) Have A Banana; 4)
I Wanna Be Your Man; 5) Just A Rumour; 6) Roll Over Beethoven; 7) All My
Loving; 8) Things We Said Today; 9) She's A Woman; 10) Sweet Little Sixteen;
11) 1822; 12) Lonesome Tears In My Eyes; 13) Nothin' Shakin'; 14) The Hippy
Hippy Shake; 15) Glad All Over; 16) I Just Don't Understand; 17) Top So How
Come (No One Loves Me); 18) I Feel Fine; 19) I'm A Loser; 20) Everybody's
Trying To Be My Baby; 21) Rock And Roll Music; 22) Ticket To Ride; 23) Dizzy
Miss Lizzie; 24) Kansas City/Hey Hey Hey Hey; 25) Set Fire To That Lot; 26)
Matchbox; 27) I Forgot To Remember To Forget; 28) Love These Goon Shows; 29) I
Got To Find My Baby; 30) Ooh! My Soul; 31) Ooh! My Arms; 32) Don't Ever Change;
33) Slow Down; 34) Honey Don't; 35) Love Me Do.
Although the BBC has really gone on a limb to
empty its vaults in the past couple of decades — by now, there must already be hundreds of official releases of
sessions recorded by different artists — it is interesting that not a single
one of these archival albums ever went «legendary». Some of the packages are,
on the whole, rather disappointing (Cream, the Who, etc.), others are
consistently listenable and highly enjoyable (Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, etc.), but
not a single one ever managed to add something very, very important to what we
already knew of the artist in question. (Of the several dozen that I have heard, at least — cannot pretend
to completeness of info, or else I'd have to be «swamped in the beeb»).
Of course, one shouldn't really expect too much
of archive releases; but the whole «recorded live in the studio» experience is
not a completely trivial thing, either — basically, it's a live album recorded
with good quality and without external noise, something that can, at least theoretically, be more
than worth our while. Somehow, it is never more than that. As it turns out, a
real live album needs external noise
— for most bands (unless we're talking of those that have stage fright), an
active audience, be it a club, theater, or arena crowd, unlocks some other
dimension in the mind, so that they can «lose themselves» in the playing. The
BBC studios, on the other hand, never unlocked anything — sometimes, quite the
opposite happened instead. Maybe some sort of claustrophobia, maybe
subconscious pressure to exercise restrain and calmness in your playing since
nobody is really watching (some of these performances actually were played before small audiences, but
that usually wasn't enough), maybe a feeling that this is not really a live
show, but rather a simulation of one — anyway, once they are inside the BBC
studio, musicians tend to stick close to the notes and chords, and just provide
a half hour of simple fun for those fans who don't have enough money to buy the
records (but, perhaps, have enough money to buy blank tapes).
The Beatles, who were among the first of the
Beeb's clients to get a deluxe 2-CD official treatment of their BBC history —
extracted from over 9 CDs worth of material, as can be found on the bootlegged Complete BBC Sessions — are no
exception to this general rule. On one hand, it is nice to get over two hours of vintage live Beatles material
where you can actually hear the guitars and vocals, not just Ringo's drums
trying to rise over the girlie din. On the other hand, where would the real
live Beatles be without the girlie
din? There's something about the whole atmosphere of this thing that makes
them feel naked — no access to either the perfection screen of George Martin or
the mighty scream curtain of the fans.
Formally, Live
At The BBC is a treasurehouse. It does wisely by focusing on the early
shows from 1963, because this way, we now have access to clean recordings of
lots and lots of covers that the band performed in their early days —
everything from American rock'n'roll (ʽCarolʼ, ʽJohnny B.
Goodeʼ, ʽI Got A Womanʼ, ʽToo Much Monkey Businessʼ)
to American R&B (even more of that sympathetic Arthur Alexander fellow!) to
songs the band must have learned from the repertoire of Billy Fury
(ʽNothin' Shakinʼ) to one or two really
crappy «Europop» numbers (ʽThe Honeymoon Songʼ, next to which ʽA
Taste Of Honeyʼ and ʽTill There Was Youʼ have the
anti-establishment potential of a Patti Smith). And, just so you do remember
that these are the Beatles you are
listening to, a nice, thick selection of originals that also cluster around
1963 and early 1964, but extend a little bit into 1965 as well (ʽTicket To
Rideʼ, etc.).
The actual playing, I must say, is almost
uniformly bad, and I do mean B-A-D
bad. Ringo seems either asleep or dozing half of the time, George is simplifying
or flubbing his lines, and Paul is captured in his early-bass stage, when he
still had relatively little interest in improving the reputation of that
instrument. It is especially painful when it comes to straightforward
rock'n'roll numbers: the band is positively sagging on ʽCarolʼ
(which the Stones covered in a far sharper and focused manner), ʽI Got A
Womanʼ is a total failure next to the Elvis version, etc. Again, it does
not really prove that the Beatles completely sucked at playing live — there are
plenty of first-rate takes on both originals and covers in the Anthology series, but, somehow, the BBC
studios never got them properly attuned. They just don't seem to be trying too
hard.
In fact, once the original pleasure of «more
Beatles! more Beatles!» had faded away for me, I found that my fondest memories
of the album are all related to the silly, but charming bits of banter. John
is the undisputed King of Banter here, opening the album with the unbeatable
"I'm John, and I play guitar... sometimes, I play the fool", poking
fun at silly schoolboy fan poetry with an exaggerated accent (ʽA Little
Rhymeʼ), noisily promoting his book (ʽFrom Fluff To Youʼ), guessing
the name of the band's latest movie in Portuguese (ʽCrinsk Dee
Nightʼ... right), and recording what was probably the first little swipe
at bandmate Paul while reading a fan letter (ʽDear Wack!ʼ), even if
it is just a short interjection, but such delicious tonality! Next to that
outpouring, Paul, George, and Ringo all come through as sissies, but everybody
is given a few brief moments to shine anyway, and somehow, when the band is talking, they often come across livelier
and merrier than when they are playing.
Still, even without the banter, the record is
still worth owning for at least the following tracks: (a) ʽSoldier Of
Loveʼ — John had the perfect voice to offer interpretations of Arthur
Alexander's ballads, and this one is a worthy companion to ʽAnnaʼ;
(b) ʽSome Other Guyʼ — a rocking highlight from the Cavern days,
available here in good sound quality; (c) ʽThe Hippy Hippy Shakeʼ,
done a little slower and lumpier than either Chan Romero's original or the
Swinging Blue Jeans' hit version from 1963, but saved by Paul's ʽLong Tall
Sallyʼ-style hysterical vocals and the overall heaviness of the rhythm
section; (d) the dark slow waltz of ʽI Just Don't Understandʼ — just
because anything sung by John Lennon is always better than anything sung by
Ann-Margret; (e) Little Richard's ʽOoh! My Soulʼ — if you actually
loved Paul doing ʽLong Tall Sallyʼ, you'll love this, because there's
really very little difference.
Only one previously unissued original surfaces
here: ʽI'll Be On My Wayʼ, a song very much in Buddy Holly's style
that the Beatles originally donated to Billy J. Kramer, then rearranged it in a
slightly less Crickets-derived manner and tried playing with themselves. It
doesn't take a lot of intellect to understand why it never ended up on a
proper Beatles album, but it's nice to have it all the same — every once in a
while, you need to reassure yourself that the Beatles were human, after all,
and did actually learn and improve by trial and error rather than have God
establish a beeline from heaven right around the time Ringo joined the band.
In short, this is far from the «great lost live
Beatles album» — something that may yet surface on the market one day if
somebody really puts his mind to the idea. But it is a modestly good package
all the same: at the very least, kudos to the BBC for focusing on the
little-known stuff rather than on a dozen versions of ʽFrom Me To
Youʼ or ʽI Feel Fineʼ, and for including just the right amount
of banter with merry announcer Brian Matthews — just enough to make the whole
thing homely, and compensate for the bits of clumsiness and occasional discomfort
in the playing. The only real disappointment is that I never get the feeling
that the Beatles really enjoyed playing
at the Beeb — even at the Hollywood Bowl, you could sense more inspiration
fighting its way through the deafening screaming than in these studios. At the
Beeb, there was really nothing to fight against. Maybe that's why the
enthusiasm is so low.
ANTHOLOGY 1 (1962-1965; 1994)
CD I:
1) Free As A Bird; 2) Speech by John Lennon; 3)
That'll Be The Day; 4) In Spite Of All The Danger; 5) Speech by Paul McCartney;
6) Hallelujah I Love Her So; 7) You'll Be Mine; 8) Cayenne; 9) Speech by Paul
McCartney; 10) My Bonnie; 11) Ain't She Sweet; 12) Cry For A Shadow; 13)
Speech by John Lennon; 14) Speech by Brian Epstein; 15) Searchin'; 16) Three
Cool Cats; 17) The Sheik Of Araby; 18) Like Dreamers Do; 19) Hello Little Girl;
20) Speech by Brian Epstein; 21) Besame Mucho; 22) Love Me Do; 23) How Do You
Do It; 24) Please Please Me; 25) One After 909 (Sequence); 26) One After 909;
27) Lend Me Your Comb; 28) I'll Get You; 29) Speech by John Lennon; 30) I Saw
Her Standing There; 31) From Me To You; 32) Money (That's What I Want); 33) You
Really Got A Hold On Me; 34) Roll Over Beethoven.
CD II: 1) She Loves You; 2) Till There Was You; 3) Twist And Shout; 4) This
Boy; 5) I Want To Hold Your Hand; 6) Speech by Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise;
7) Moonlight Bay; 8) Can't Buy Me Love; 9) All My Loving; 10) You Can't Do
That; 11) And I Love Her; 12) A Hard Day's Night; 13) I Wanna Be Your Man; 14)
Long Tall Sally; 15) Boys; 16) Shout; 17) I'll Be Back (Take 2); 18) I'll Be
Back (Take 3); 19) You Know What To Do; 20) No Reply (Demo); 21) Mr Moonlight;
22) Leave My Kitten Alone; 23) No Reply; 24) Eight Days A Week (Sequence); 25)
Eight Days A Week; 26) Kansas City/Hey Hey Hey Hey.
There is no better way to understand the real
meaning of «quality control» than to give a good listen to any of the three Anthology volumes. When the Beatles saw
the light, and knew that it was good, they let it out. When they were not sure,
they left it in the can. It is really as simple as that. Despite the sometimes
inadequately warm reception that the Anthologies
got upon release — for the most part, from Beatle-hungry fans with an
anti-bootleg disposition — I insist that there is not even a single track on any of these six CDs
that would in any way be «better» than its original counterpart. The demos are
demos, the work-in-progress mixes are in progress, the abandoned arrangements
were abandoned for a good reason, and the outtakes remained outtakes for an
even better one. Take together even the most polished of these versions, and
they will still suck next to what we have always known.
On the other hand, the sheer historical value of the Anthologies is certainly priceless —
with one important drawback: as a «history package», this set is drastically
incomplete, and will never truly satisfy the dedicated Beatles scholar.
Clearly, the Beatles scholar will want to hear all of the preserved takes, so as to assess each song over the
natural course of its development; and the Beatles scholar might, in fact, be
offended at the idea of creating new tracks by splicing together parts of
different takes — this is like tampering with history, man. It's one thing when
you are making your original ʽStrawberry Fields Foreverʼ out of two
entirely different visions for the song; it's quite another thing when somebody
is twiddling and reshuffling your stuff thirty years after the fact — be it
even under your own supervision.
Still, we have to admit that «history lite» is
a necessity as well; the difference between Anthologies and a complete package of everything that remained on
the cutting floor is like the difference between a school textbook of history
and a multi-volume edition for high-level scholars, each of which has its
audience. And from that point of view, the amount, selection, and sequencing of
the material processed for the collection seem to be just about right. We get
to see the Beatles as initially lousy students of American rock'n'roll, as constantly
improving energetic live performers, as generators of all sorts of musical
ideas, good and bad, as
perfectionists and innovators, and, above all, as human beings made of flesh,
blood, testosterone, good humor, and bile — a fact that is occasionally
forgotten behind the immaculate appearance of their official recordings.
Anthology
1 is often called the weakest
of the three volumes, for an objective and easy-to-understand reason: it
covers their early «formative» years, halting right at the end of 1964, and a
large chunk dates back to the pre-Please
Please Me era, where the tracks frequently involve horrendous sound
quality and, sometimes, a shot of embarrassment. To me, however, it has always
been and still remains the most interesting and intriguing of the three sets —
not only does it feature the largest amount of songs (most of them
non-originals, but still...) not featured on regular Beatles albums, but it is
here that we actually witness the
biggest transformation of all: the amazing maturation of a sincere, vivacious,
but still somewhat clueless and clumsy pop-rock band, into the greatest pop
outfit of its generation.
It is not even entirely clear how far do we
have to extend that «maturation period». All of the pre-1962 era material is either
grossly amateurish (early Quarrymen records) or atrocious (the 1960 recordings
at Paul's house in Liverpool; even when the sound quality is relatively acceptable,
as on the instrumental Shadows knock-off ʽCayenneʼ, there is nothing
here to suggest that these guys would go on to something bigger than art
school, or working in a local garage). The Hamburg recordings from 1961 are
already a major step forward: while backing Tony Sheridan, «The Silver Beetles»
finally became professionals, and John and George's ʽCry For A
Shadowʼ is a fine, driving, catchy instrumental that is every bit as good
as the Shadows' best hits, and maybe even better — because the entire band is
getting into it with less restraint and a more «primal» attitude than Hank
Marvin ever allowed his boys.
Then there are selections from the January 1962
Decca tapes — all covers, with the exception of two early Lennon/McCartney
originals (ʽHello Little Girlʼ, later turned into a minor hit by The
Fourmost, and ʽLike Dreamers Doʼ, later covered by The Applejacks). If
you need my opinion, I might have turned these guys down, too, based on this
stuff, were I a Decca decision taker back in 1962. The covers almost slavishly
follow the originals — and the Beatles, even at their best, would never
out-humor such masters of the «fun rock» genre as the Coasters; let alone the
fact that handing the lead vocal part on a Coasters cover (ʽThree Cool
Catsʼ) to George Harrison, at that time the «clumsiest» singer of them
all, could never be a good idea. And that early Lennon / McCartney stuff...
don't get me started. Saccharine teen-pop, imitating radio fluff of the day —
next to ʽHello Little Girlʼ, even ʽP.S. I Love Youʼ sounds
like Brahms.
Basically, the wonder of it all is that the
Beatles only turned into
professional, original songwriters upon signing the EMI contract — which
brings George Martin into the picture, and solidifies his «fifth Beatle»
status to a previously unsuspected degree. As ʽPlease Please Meʼ and
even the early incarnation of ʽOne After 909ʼ emerge from the sad
shadows of ʽHello Little Girlʼ, we get an altogether unexpected leap
in quality, and then — there is no turning back.
Yet there are fascinating and intriguing slips
and trial-and-error bits all over the place. On the second disc, for instance,
there is a barely listenable take on ʽAnd I Love Herʼ with Paul
«bleating» over the top of his range and the main guitar hook of the song still
nowhere in sight; an early demo for ʽI'll Be Backʼ as a slow waltz,
crumbling to pieces by the time the band gets to the bridge; a thoroughly lame early Harrison
composition (ʽYou Know What To Doʼ) that was originally intended to
be the 14th track on A Hard Day's Night,
but was allegedly — and justly — ridiculed by the rest of the band and
turned George off songwriting for almost a year; and an early take on
ʽEight Days A Weekʼ that starts off as a Beach Boys vocal harmony
tribute — a rather insecure and out-of-place "oooooooohhh..." that
works far less effectively than the eventual fade-in of the guitar melody upon
which they would settle later.
In the end, the only studio material that could
probably make it onto «real» (non-historical) anthologies, is a finished 1963 take
on ʽOne After 909ʼ — the original also sounds like another tribute
to the Shadows, but I have always loved its detached, cool, ironic hide better
than the more bluntly aggressive rooftop delivery from 1969 — and ʽLeave
My Kitten Aloneʼ, a rather vicious Lennon-dominated cover tune that
probably should have made it onto Beatles
For Sale instead of ʽMr. Moonlightʼ. But maybe they thought it
sounded too hateful or something (John would later summon much the same mood
for ʽRun For Your Lifeʼ).
But there is also some prime-time live stuff
here: carefully selected performances from mid-size venues, mostly, where the
Beatles could still hear themselves above all the din and, most importantly,
were dedicated to giving the fans all they had to give. The crown jewel
consists of five tracks from a Sweden performance on October 24, 1963: here you
will find the tightest, most focused and compact ʽI Saw Her Standing
Thereʼ that you are ever going to find, a ʽRoll Over Beethovenʼ
on which George manages not to mess up any of the trademark Berry-licks, and a
ʽYou Really Got A Hold On Meʼ on which John, as was usual for him,
mixes up the lyrics and still gets away with it — showing all of us how little
the words really mean on all these tunes.
Of all the three volumes, Anthology 1 is the one that is most fully equipped with monologuish
bits from the accompanying movie (all of them on Disc 1, for some reason), but
this is not a big bother since all the bits are very short; and Disc 2 also
captures the full version of a brief comedy sketch with Eric Morecambe and
Ernie Wise, culminating in a joke performance of ʽMoonlight Bayʼ —
the jokes are mostly awful, and the performance is below-the-belt clownish, but
the Beatles really did a lot of that
on TV in the early days, and, once again, we do need to be reminded from time
to time that these guys were only human.
Of that, Anthology
1 keeps reminding us every step of the way indeed. But can that be a cause
for unhappiness? Not if you get over 20-30 minutes of excellent live
performing, over 20-30 minutes of previously unknown / unexperienced cover
tunes and Lennon / McCartney / Harrison originals, not if you really want to
know how, sometimes, a fabulous melody does not arrive to the songwriter right
on the spot, but is steadily built up along the way, sometimes, with great
hardship and toil — you try and deduce for yourself the ratio of inspiration to
perspiration. And here is one final hint for you: the difference between the
common songwriter and the really great one is that common songwriters — and
approximately ninety-five percent of the world's songwriters are «common», I'd
say — never succeed in rising above the level of Anthology 1. The truly great
songwriter, however, will at least try to make it over to Please Please Me.
PS. No review of Anthology 1 can, of course, get along without a mention of
ʽFree As A Birdʼ — the first «new» Beatles song in twenty-five years,
consisting of a Lennon piano demo, a McCartney bridge section, a Harrison
guitar solo, and a Jeff Lynne production. (Ringo is in there somewhere, too,
but the drum sound is 100% Lynne anyway). Who knows, maybe the Beatles would end up sounding like that in 1995,
had things turned out differently, although something tells me John probably
wouldn't be too happy of Lynne imposing his sonic attitude on the band
(somehow, George, who had already fallen under the Lynne charm during the
recording of Cloud 9 in 1987, ended
up convincing Paul that this was the right thing to do). In any case, it's a
good song that still carries a bit of John's spirit from the late 1970s — and
the video row that accompanied it in the movie was fairly epic as well.
ANTHOLOGY 2 (1965-1967; 1995)
CD I:
1) 1) Real Love;
2) Yes It Is; 3) I'm Down; 4) You've Got To Hide Your Love Away; 5) If You've
Got Trouble; 6) That Means A Lot; 7) Yesterday; 8) It's Only Love; 9) I Feel
Fine; 10) Ticket To Ride; 11) Yesterday; 12) Help!; 13) Everybody's Trying To
Be My Baby; 14) Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown); 15) I'm Looking Through
You; 16) 12-Bar Original; 17) Tomorrow Never Knows; 18) Got To Get You Into My
Life; 19) And Your Bird Can Sing; 20) Taxman; 21) Eleanor Rigby (strings only);
22) I'm Only Sleeping (Rehearsal); 23) I'm Only Sleeping (Take 1); 24) Rock And
Roll Music; 25) She's A Woman.
CD II: 1) Strawberry Fields Forever (demo); 2) Strawberry Fields
Forever (take 1); 3) Strawberry Fields Forever (take 7 and edit piece); 4)
Penny Lane; 5) A Day In The Life; 6) Good Morning Good Morning; 7) Only A
Northern Song; 8) Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite-1; 9) Being For The Benefit
Of Mr Kite-2; 10) Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds; 11) Within You Without You
(instrumental); 12) Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (reprise); 13)
You Know My Name (Look Up The Number); 14) I Am The Walrus; 15) The Fool On The
Hill (demo); 16) Your Mother Should Know; 17) The Fool On The Hill (take 4);
18) Hello Goodbye; 19) Lady Madonna; 20) Across The Universe.
I am not much of a bootleg guy, but it did so
happen, accidentally, that I heard John's early demo for ʽReal Loveʼ
(not for ʽFree As A Birdʼ, though) way before the remaining Beatles
started working on it, and I distinctly remember thinking — «that melody is
quite gorgeous, really, I wonder how it would sound on a Beatles record». Well,
as it turns out, it does not sound way better than the barebones original on a
Beatles record — mainly because the Beatles record is really a Jeff Lynne /
John Lennon record with accidental Beatles participation (George throws in one
of his tasty slide solos).
But because there is no McCartney bridge;
because John's vocals and, most importantly, John's words come through more clearly than on ʽFree As A Birdʼ;
finally, because the song was not quite as heavily advertised as «New Beatles
material in twenty-five years!» — because of all these things, ʽReal
Loveʼ comes through as just a caring tribute to John's memory, and, unlike
ʽFree As A Birdʼ, it never
fails to bring a sentimental tear to my eye while playing. And, in fact, as a
final post-scriptum to the Beatles' legacy, it works better than ʽFree As
A Birdʼ — where they turned ʽFree As A Birdʼ into a sort of
metaphorical meditation on the band's fate and legacy itself, ʽReal
Loveʼ, on the contrary, is not self-centered, but is instead a message to
the world, the simple, but effective kind, the Beatles kind — "no need to
be afraid, it's just real love" hits with the same intonations as
"don't carry the world upon your shoulders", despite coming from John
rather than Paul. Well, after all, the love for Love was one thing that united
both.
It's all too bad that ʽReal Loveʼ has
to introduce what I still view as the weakest, «sagging-est» of the three Anthology packages. Spanning the
«magical metamorphosis» years of 1965-67, these 2 CDs neither give the listener
an impressive number of previously unheard titles (no matter whether good or
bad), nor reward him with enough fleshed-out alternate takes to start thinking
about «an alternate White Album» or
something. Instead, in order to fill out space, we have to sit through some really superfluous tracks, such as the Stack-o-Tracks-influenced strings-only arrangement
of ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ or, even worse, the voiceless arrangement of
ʽWithin You Without Youʼ (why? why? all of these sitars and sarods
were quite perfectly audible with
George's voice, thank you very much).
These are just the extremes; more often are the
situations where you just end up with «non-final mixes», genuinely painful to
listen to «for pleasure». It gets particularly unbearable on Disc 2, where, for
instance, we are offered to sit through an ʽI Am The Walrusʼ without
the strings and the noise overdubs — had Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne heard that mix, there would have been no
Electric Light Orchestra for sure. Or a ʽLucy In The Sky With
Diamondsʼ without the keyboards. Or an ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ
without the orchestral crescendos. Uh... yeah, there was a time — a short time — when these songs really were that naked. Are we supposed to
understand that the general public should think of these early takes and demos
as «alternate approaches»? They just sound like naked demos, nothing more.
They're still great, but who would be interested in tasting a chocolate cake
without the chocolate? Only the baker, perhaps.
Altogether, we get three songs that we never knew before from the Beatles (not
counting ʽReal Loveʼ), and one of them isn't even a song:
"12-Bar Original", recorded in late 1965, is the Beatles trying to be
Booker T & The MGs for a few minutes (the unedited take on bootleg records
actually goes over six of them) — long enough for us to understand why the
Beatles so quickly decided to leave the 12-bar blues business to the Rolling
Stones. (Not that there weren't a lot
of 12-bar blues bands back then who were quite happy with this kind of
technical and imaginative levels, but that's why the Beatles are number one and
most of those bands are forgotten). ʽIf You've Got Troubleʼ is a
Lennon/McCartney composition that they gave to Ringo, but were so horrified
with the results that they quickly retired the silly number and replaced it
with ʽAct Naturallyʼ. Only ʽThat Means A Lotʼ, later
donated to P. J. Proby, has a fine, Beatles-worthy middle eight, but otherwise,
as Ian McDonald rightly pointed out, is (possibly a subconscious) melodic
re-write of ʽTicket To Rideʼ — and whoever heard of the Beatles
humiliating themselves with remaking earlier material?
The live performances on the first disc continue
Anthology 1's trend of convincing
the listener that the Beatles were, in fact, a very good live band when they
could hear themselves — tracks 9-12, recorded at the relatively small ABC
Theatre in Blackpool, are excellent, including a historical moment: the
introduction of ʽYesterdayʼ to the general public. (In the movie, the
look upon Paul's face as John presents him with a large bouquet of flowers
during the applause is absolutely priceless, as is George's sneery introductory
remark of "...and so, for Paul McCartney of Liverpool, opportunity
knocks!"). But, of course, the perfunctory performances of ʽRock And
Roll Musicʼ and ʽShe's A Womanʼ from the June 30, 1966 Tokyo
concert, coming straight off the Revolver
sessions, clearly show how far ahead the band was in its studio flight — and
why they decided to cancel further live appearances.
But ahead or not, Anthology 2 does a good job of showing just how many bad ideas the
Beatles could go through before settling on the good ones. Notice how awful the
sitar sounds during the bridge sections of ʽNorwegian Woodʼ? Good
lads, they took it out. Doesn't the sharp «rocking» guitar sound out of place
in the chorus of the otherwise mild-folksy ʽI'm Looking Through Youʼ?
You'll find it gone for good in the final version. Doesn't this take on
ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ, with its straightforward, de-funkified
drumming, seem like lazy stoner rock? By the time of the final takes and
overdubs, it would turn into a psychedelic ocean. Don't the woodwind / brass
solos on ʽPenny Laneʼ sound chaotic and extraneous compared to the
rest of the piece? How marvelous it was for them to finally settle on that
little sad/triumphant note mix of the piccolo trumpet. Isn't that acoustic
guitar rhythm on take 4 of ʽFool On The Hillʼ unable to convey the
required atmosphere of sadness that Paul's original piano melody provides so
well? And so on, and on, and on...
One might get a kick, perhaps, from the full
(extended) version of ʽYou Know My Nameʼ (I am not sure; six minutes
of silliness seem a bit too long), but everything else on the second disc only
has this «positive through negative» effect — I definitely urge every aspiring songwriter to study the evolution of
these songs, because, really, there is nothing wrong with perfectionism, no matter
how much the simplistic perception of «indie culture» tries to convince the
aspiring songwriter otherwise. As a historical piece, Anthology 2 is priceless (except that it will only whet any credible
historian's appetite for more), but do not make the mistake of trying to
«enjoy» it. If the Beatles never released their original songs this way, they obviously never wanted you to «enjoy» them this way. Well, at
least, not until three of them got old, mellow, and generously forgiving of
their own mistakes and blueprints.
PS. One track I do like a lot is the «Giggle Version» of ʽAnd Your Bird Can
Singʼ, if only because it is a mean mean feat to see the band able to
carry the tune so well when they are literally falling over their feet with
laughter from the very beginning. Be careful, it's infectious.
ANTHOLOGY 3 (1968-1969; 1995)
CD I:
1) A Beginning; 2) Happiness Is A Warm Gun; 3) Helter
Skelter; 4) Mean Mr Mustard; 5) Polythene Pam; 6) Glass Onion; 7) Junk; 8)
Piggies; 9) Honey Pie; 10) Don't Pass Me By; 11) Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da; 12) Good Night;
13) Cry Baby Cry; 14) Blackbird; 15) Sexy Sadie; 16) While My Guitar Gently
Weeps; 17) Hey Jude; 18) Not Guilty; 19) Mother Nature's Son; 20) Glass Onion;
21) Rocky Raccoon; 22) What's The New Mary-Jane; 23) Step Inside Love/Los
Paranoias; 24) I'm So Tired; 25) I Will; 26) Why Don't We Do It In The Road;
27) Julia.
CD
II: 1) I've Got A Feeling; 2) She Came In Through The Bathroom Window; 3) Dig A
Pony; 4) Two Of Us; 5) For You Blue; 6) Teddy Boy; 7) Rip It Up/Shake Rattle
And Roll/Blue Suede Shoes; 8) The Long And Winding Road; 9) Oh Darling; 10) All
Things Must Pass; 11) Mailman Bring Me No More Blues; 12) Get Back; 13) Old
Brown Shoe; 14) Octopus's Garden; 15) Maxwell's Silver Hammer; 16) Something;
17) Come Together; 18) Come And Get It; 19) Ain't She Sweet (Rehearsal); 20)
Because; 21) Let It Be; 22) I Me Mine; 23) The End.
The journey ends here, much the same way as it
started. No matter if we are dealing with the tense, but cooperative sessions
for the White Album, or with the
angry madhouse at Twickenham in early 1969, or with the final solemn ritual of
completing the circle with Abbey Road,
what we have here are nearly always bad — relatively
bad, of course — work-in-progress versions of what would, in the end, become
timeless masterpieces, regardless of the emotional states of their creators at
the time. Be it 1963 or 1969, the Beatles always chose the best take for the
official record; no exceptions that I could be aware of.
However, one of the major bonuses of Anthology 3 is that it offers much more
«new» stuff to the casual listener than the second volume — apparently, the
1968-69 sessions resulted in a larger number of canned outtakes than sessions
for the previous years. Quite possibly, this had to do with the band members
now working much more on their individual own than before — and consequently
running far stronger risks of having their contributions vetoed by other
members because of not being «Beatlesworthy» enough.
So it is up to us to decide now whether John's
ʽWhat's The New Mary Janeʼ, George's ʽNot Guiltyʼ, or
Paul's ʽStep Inside Love / Los Paranoiasʼ were rightly excluded from
the official canon or cruelly wronged by being shelved for almost thirty long
years. I would say that, all things considered, the wait time should have been
shorter, but also that I mostly agree with the vetoes.
ʽNot Guiltyʼ is often highlighted as
a first-rate Harrison song that was abandoned much too easily, and should not
have waited until 1979, when George finally decided to rework and release it on
his eponymous album. But the vocal melody of the song is so seriously
underwritten that «first-rate», as far as I can tell, is out of the question —
it is hardly a coincidence that, when it came to emptying George's stunning
backlog on All Things Must Pass, ʽNot
Guiltyʼ was not seen fit for inclusion even without the vetoing block of
his former colleagues. It's got a fine riff, some terrific guitar pyrotechnics
in the largely instrumental coda, and primetime Harrison lyrics, but it definitely
lacks that certain «something» — be it the transcendence of ʽWhile My
Guitarʼ, the catchy humor of ʽPigsʼ, the subtle minimalism of
ʽLong Long Longʼ, or even the outright whackiness of ʽSavoy
Truffleʼ. Good song, but if they gave all 5 to me and told me to exclude
one, I'd have made the same choice as John and Paul. Did Ringo have a vote at
all?..
Another «lost classic» is John's ʽWhat's
The New Mary Janeʼ,
one of his «nutty» numbers that indulges in the pleasure of going from simple
absurdist piano-led music hall ditty (almost like a parody on something Paul
could have done) to an alien world of spooky sound collages, like a blueprint
for much of Amon Düül II's work on Tanz Der Lemminge three years later (or maybe not, but somehow
that association did spring into my mind). When the final version of The Beatles was being assembled, the
track was pulled in favor of ʽRevolution #9ʼ — a much longer piece
that did not have any musical basis
at all. Should ʽMary Janeʼ had taken its place? Years earlier, I
would definitely have said yes; now I am not at all sure — no matter how
absurdist and silly some of John's stuff might sound, ʽMary Janeʼ
lacks «killer guts» where even ʽCry Baby Cryʼ has some. It's more of
a musical joke fit for something like the second LP of John's own Sometime In New York City, where he was
fooling around with the «Elephant Memory Band». A darn fine musical joke,
though, and it's good to know that it has not been lost.
1968 and, most prominently, 1969 introduced
plenty of tunes that later surfaced on the Beatles' solo albums — here, in
particular, we have an attempt to record ʽTeddy Boyʼ (later included
on McCartney) and George's ʽAll
Things Must Passʼ (later included on, naturally, All Things Must Pass). The former was and remains kinda fluffy, if
cute — and no, that's not «Paul in a
nutshell», if you want to know — and the latter's potential remained
half-hidden until Phil Spector came and laid a wall of ten million instruments
on it. But the 1969 sessions also yielded lots of uninspired waste — there is
no better way to understand the futility of the band's attempt at «getting back
to its roots» than to listen to their perfunctory run through a medley of old
rock'n'roll hits, performed with none of the enthusiasm or motivation that they
had in the early Cavern days. And ʽMailman, Bring Me No More Blues?ʼ
Really, that could have been done by anyone.
The only small piece of true joy on Disc 2 is Paul's original demo of
ʽCome And Get Itʼ — a nice song, generously donated to Badfinger...
who actually improved on it, since Badfinger were one of the very few bands to
carry on the «original spirit» of the Beatles, whatever it was.
Elsewhere, it's the same old story. Vocal
harmonies for ʽBecauseʼ without the instrumental track. Nice, but
they were fairly well discernible with
the instruments already. A raw take on ʽOctopus' Gardenʼ with George
still fumbling and fussing around with the guitar solo, quite far from perfection.
ʽThe Long And Winding Roadʼ with Paul trying out a spoken rather than sung version of the bridge — what is this, Elvis time? An ʽOh!
Darlingʼ tried out in an all-out comic
mode — here, the bridge is crooned in a hilarious falsetto rather than screamed
out at the top of one's lungs. Wind your way back to The White Album and everything stays mostly the same...
...probably
with the exception of the original acoustic demo for ʽWhile My Guitar
Gently Weepsʼ, which sounds like an entirely different song from what it
eventually became — a meditative confessional, rather than a grand lament for
the fate of mankind. Although its evolution was a blessing, it is still very
pleasing to have the starting point as well: the major highlight of Anthology
3, with ʽMary Janeʼ, ʽNot Guiltyʼ, and ʽCome And
Get Itʼ all coming in for the second spot in a tier that lags significantly
behind.
It goes without saying that the historical value of all this stuff, as
usual, is priceless. It is useful to
know, after all, that the original line in ʽPiggiesʼ went
"...clutching forks and knives to
cut their pork chops" rather than the final "eat their
bacon" — "bacon" fits the verbal flow better than "pork
chops", even if it may make less sense (people do tend to eat pork chops
rather than bacon for dinner, I guess). Or that the original version of ʽHappiness
Is A Warm Gunʼ contained a direct lyrical reference to Yoko — who, as it
seems, provided some inspiration for the song, a fact all Yoko-haters should
keep in mind. Or a million or so similar observations that each of us can make
by thoroughly studying these documents. One thing surely cannot be denied — studying the development of Beatles
songs can actually be far more enjoyable than enjoying the final takes of
thousands of other bands. Think of the Anthology project from that angle, and it might take its proper
respectable place in the band's regular discography some day.
INTRODUCING THE BEAU BRUMMELS (1965)
1) Laugh Laugh; 2) Still In
Love With You Baby; 3) Just A Little; 4) Just Wait And See; 5) Oh! Lonesome Me;
6) Ain't That Loving You Baby; 7) Stick Like Glue; 8) They'll Make You Cry; 9)
That's If You Want Me To; 10) I Want More Loving; 11) I Would Be Happy; 12) Not
Too Long Ago; 13*) Good Time Music; 14*) Gentle Wanderin' Ways; 15*) Fine With
Me.
It has been said that the Beau Brummels chose
their name deliberately — so that their records could be placed right next to
the Beatles in record stores. The band members themselves denied it quite
vehemently, of course, but then again, who on earth would publicly admit to
such trickery? The situation is even less in the band's favor when you realize
that nobody in 1965 sounded as close to classic British Merseybeat on the other
side of the Atlantic than those five guys from San Francisco. They had their
own peculiarities, for sure, but where the Byrds only borrowed superficial
traits of British Invasion bands, these guys went much further in idolizing
their heroes from the overseas. Only The Sir Douglas Quintet could probably
compare, and they have always seemed more of a novelty act to me.
The Beau Brummels made their first — and, as it
turned out, biggest — mark on musical history with ʽLaugh, Laughʼ, a
song that was actually one of their less obvious Beatles rip-offs, because none
of the Fab Four ever played harmonica in such a mournful way, or sang in such a
melancholic, plaintive, trembling manner, which would soon become one of the
trademarks of the folksy San Franciscan sound. It wasn't aggressive garage
rock, and it wasn't mainstream pop, it was a special kind of folk-pop sound
where the «folk» and the «pop» elements were mixed in equal proportions. The
gentleness and vulnerability of the tune, in fact, suggests that The Searchers
were a much bigger influence here than the Beatles.
Like most of the other songs on this record, ʽLaugh,
Laughʼ was penned by the band's lead guitarist Ron Elliott, and that was
yet another defining trait in the Brummels' portrait: they had their own
resident songwriter, who could hammer out well-crafted hooks all by himself,
and their very first long-playing album only had two covers — an incredible
feat for an American band circa early 1965. If there is a problem here, it is
rooted in the band's wimpiness: Introducing
The Beau Brummels does not feature any good old rock'n'roll, which is a
bit regrettable for a band wih two electric guitars and a swinging rhythm
section.
However, that isn't really the way one should
be trying to get into this album. This one is for the sensitive, delicate souls
— or at least for the sensitive, delicate corner of one's soul, provided there
is one that can be found — souls that do not want to be delved way too deep,
but wouldn't mind a bit of emotional complexity dressed up in formal
simplicity. Basically, if you really like songs like ʽAsk Me Whyʼ or ʽP.S.
I Love Youʼ, but are ashamed to admit it because everything about them is
exceedingly childish, from the chord sequences to the arrangements to the
lyrics — The Beau Brummels are here to offer you a slightly more advanced
version of the sentimental ballad, just as frail and genteel, but with a bigger
emphasis on craft and, well, «intelligence».
By «craft» I do not mean technicality, since
the band's hold on their instruments was rather limited; but they had a really
good knack for getting the most out of these limits — listen to ʽJust A
Littleʼ, for instance, and see how well the mix of rhythm guitar,
minimalistic acoustic lead fills, and vocal harmonies, create a believable
atmosphere of «noble melancholia» with only a few chords and «trivial»
overdubs. (The song became their biggest commercial hit, by the way, yet it did
not acquire such a monumental status as ʽLaugh, Laughʼ — perhaps
because of the lack of harmonica, or because, in retrospect, it looks like a
very conscious attempt to capitalize on the success of its predecessor).
Other mini-delicacies in the melancholic vein
include ʽThey'll Make You Cryʼ, where the harmonica does make a
triumphant return, and participates in a pretty-sad duet with a three-note
acoustic guitar solo (to great effect!); the more traditionally arranged
ʽI Would Be Happyʼ, sounding like a subconscious tribute to Roy
Orbison; and ʽNot Too Long Agoʼ, sounding like a conscious tribute to
the Searchers and ʽNeedles And Pinsʼ in particular.
The rest of the album is more upbeat, but, like
I said, the upbeat side of the Brummels is less convincing than their
cry-in-my-pillow side. They do show their country heart fine enough on a respectable
cover of Don Gibson's ʽOh Lonesome Meʼ which they somehow manage to
play even faster than the original, but the other cover (ʽAin't That
Loving You Babyʼ) is totally forgettable, and fast-paced originals like
ʽJust Wait And Seeʼ, fun as it always is to listen to a fast-paced
pop rock song from 1964-65, sort of make them sacrifice their identity — not sure
why exactly one should be enjoying this
if the Hollies have better vocals, the Animals kick more ass, the Yardbirds
have a far more gifted guitar player, and anyway, Carl Perkins did all that
earlier. Still, most of this is at least semi-original material, so at least
they tried.
Overall, there are occasional signs of a «rush
job» on Introducing, as you'd expect
from any pop LP (particularly American) of the era, but considering that the
Beau Brummels never really vied for a VIP lounge among the rock crowds of the
day, in a relative way, this is a tremendously successful debut. Do not miss
the current CD edition, which throws on some nice demos and B-sides, among them
a cover of John Sebastian's ʽGood Time Musicʼ (generic R'n'B melody +
one of John's patented «love music!» set of lyrics = forgettable, but
hilarious) and ʽGentle Wanderin' Waysʼ, which simply happens to be
one of the best Beau Brummels songs ever: apparently, the addition of a little
menace-laden fuzz guitar can work wonders on an inspired day. Thumbs up
for one of the most underrated US records from 1965.
THE BEAU BRUMMELS, VOL. 2 (1965)
1) You Tell Me Why; 2) I Want
You; 3) Doesn't Matter; 4) That's Alright; 5) Sometime At Night; 6) Can It Be;
7) Sad Little Girl; 8) Woman; 9) Don't Talk To Strangers; 10) I've Never Known;
11) When It Comes To Your Love; 12) In Good Time.
Ouch, bad mistake. Instead of trying to
capitalize on their personal strengths — the mournful vibe of ʽLaugh
Laughʼ, for instance — The Beau Brummels, completely seduced by and
envious of the success of the Byrds, decided to adjust their sound to the
standards set by McGuinn and Co. The results were not so much «bad» as they
were disastrous. Perhaps in simple terms of «hooks», Ron Elliott could stand
some competition with Gene Clark (although even here the bands were at a
serious disadvantage — the Byrds had at least three accomplished songwriters,
the Brummels only had one). But in terms of everything else — instrumentation,
technicality, arrangements, unexpected sources of inspiration, etc. — the band
did not stand a chance; and if there ever was a moment in their career when the
term «poor man's Byrds» could be appropriate, it was right here.
The two lead singles, ʽYou Tell Me
Whyʼ and ʽDon't Talk To Strangersʼ, are two lovely little
folk-pop creations that both succeeded in hitting the charts, but both —
particularly the latter, with its jangly melody and the lead singer's
(subconscious?) imitation of Roger McGuinn's phrasing — are only enjoyable to a
full extent if your experience has not been previously tampered with Mr. Tambourine Man (and Turn! Turn! Turn!, although the latter,
to be fair, was only released after the Brummels' second album). The vocal
harmonies are lovely, but the guitar sound is so thin and wimpy that the songs
just don't seem capable of being hammered into your brain with the proper
energy (unlike the Byrds, where every final pluck of McGuinn's and Crosby's
guitars was always delivered with perfect self-assurance — at least that's
what my intuitive feelings are whispering at the moment).
Tracks that are less obviously «byrdsey» turn
out to be more impressive at the end of the day. The real major highlight is
probably ʽSad Little Girlʼ, a melancholic mid-tempo ballad with a
highly repetitive structure whose main point of attraction is a subtly arranged
crescendo: considering the band's relatively low instrumental skills and relatively
poor instrumental inventory, they do a great job adding layer after layer of
guitars, percussion, harmonicas, and vocal harmonies, and eventually transform
the song into a mini-anthem.
Another unexpected highlight, for me, is
ʽWomanʼ, a fast R'n'B number that they first recorded in a fully
vocalized arrangement (the «lyrical» version can be found as a bonus track on
the CD edition), but then decided instead to include in an instrumental
version, with acoustic and electric guitars taking turns to mimic the vocal melody.
The results are cute, funny, and somewhat atypical for the era (not a lot of
people were interested in working out acoustic leads for electric rockers) —
atypical for the Brummels themselves, in fact, but that might be all for the
better, considering that «typical Brummels» for this album means «let's do it
like the Byrds do, as best we can».
There are no real in-yer-face embarrassments on
the album — most of these folk-poppers and «soft-garage-rockers» have their
moments, but they hardly deserve individual descriptions. It does not help,
either, that the subject matters of the songs remain slight and formulaic —
it's all in the traditional love-my-girl ballpark, with the exception of
ʽDon't Talk To Strangersʼ, which tries to deliver a message ("follow
your own beaten path, wander where you can't be grabbed"), but not very
convincingly or effectively.
All in all, it's a nice little album, but the
train was running speedy in late '65, and Vol.
2 failed to catch it, forever grounding the Brummels in the losers' lounge:
while their story was far from over, and the stock of creative energy would
still be enough to carry them through the psychedelic years, this sophomore
semi-success (certainly not a «sophomore slump» — the album deserves a
friendly thumbs
up in any case) forever buried any hopes of the band joining the big
league, which may not seem like a big deal in our indie-soaked days, but
certainly was a big deal back in the
old days, and explains the oblivion into which the Brummels had sunk before
being dragged out by the ears by the likes of Richie Unterberger, along with
their many pals and competitors.
BEAU BRUMMELS '66 (1966)
1) You've Got To Hide Your
Love Away; 2) Mr. Tambourine Man; 3) Louie Louie; 4) Homeward Bound; 5) These
Boots Are Made For Walkin'; 6) Yesterday; 7) Monday Monday; 8) Bang Bang; 9)
Hang On Sloopy; 10) Play With Fire; 11) Woman; 12) Mrs. Brown, You've Got A
Lovely Daughter.
In a blazingly inane move of complete
incompetence, Warner Bros., under whose wing the Brummels found themselves
with their old record label, Autumn, in early 1966, demanded that the band stop
producing original material and release an entire album of covers instead.
Apparently, the thinking process behind it went like this: «This band is not producing
any big hits — maybe they suck at writing songs — but they have a lovely style
of playing — maybe they can fare better covering other people's material —
after all, some of our biggest hits are covers». That the issue was
essentially out of the band's hands is made evident by the fact that they were recording original material — some
of it resurfaced later on archival compilations — but had to put it down in
order to make way for...
...you know, one curious thing that I realize
from time to time is that, even though ʽYesterdayʼ is supposed to be the most frequently
covered pop song of all time, I don't seem to have any covers of it in my
not-too-small collection, except for maybe the Ray Charles version. Of course,
this does not say so much about the song as it does about the average type of
artist covering it. But this already does not bode well for the Beau Brummels.
You're risking quite a lot if you decide to cover ʽYesterdayʼ —
simply because the very act may land you in a category to which you wouldn't
really want to belong.
Anyway, if there is one thing that Beau Brummels '66 proves to us, it is
that they had a pretty good reason to stay away from covers on their first two
LPs: as a cover band, the Beau Brummels are a completely, utterly incompetent
bunch. Half of these songs are incompetently chosen, and the other half
incompetently performed — to the point of sounding like clumsy high school parodies
on the artists. It could have been better if the band tried faithfully sticking
to the original arrangements; in keeping with the times, they decided to
«brummelize» them, and the results are almost uniformly disastrous.
Chief culprit here is Sal Valentino, who
thought it would benefit the recordings if he kept straying away from the
melody, changing notes in mid-air, adding extra vocalization, and throwing in
all sorts of annoying mannerisms. What's up with all the "eveyyy-wheey
people stayyyy" and "yes,
and I hear them say" stuff on ʽYou've Got To Hide Your Love
Awayʼ? With the "why don't you
play a song for me" and the "I'd
like to go far, far from the twisted reach..." on ʽMr. Tambourine
Manʼ? Why is Simon's ʽHomeward Boundʼ, a song that should really
be performed at barely-audible level to reveal its full potential, sung with
the flamboyance of a Tom Jones? Why do they think that the last verse of the
Stones' ʽPlay With Fireʼ should
rise from the quiet menace of "now you've got some diamonds..." to the
ugly barking threat of "...or start living with your mother?" There
was a good reason why Mick Jagger never did that, even though the thought might
have visited him — there is no good reason to dump the subtlety here.
But the band's musical decisions are not that
far advanced, either. Extending the Beatles' songs with extra repeated verses
and additional solos — including a solo on ʽYesterdayʼ — seems cheap
(for that matter, completely instrumental versions of these songs might have
been a better move). The decision to do ʽLouie Louieʼ, a lonesome
garage rocker among a sea of folk-pop, is extremely strange — the Brummels were
never a rock'n'roll band, unless, of course, they actually wanted to prove this by covering the song. They fare a little
better with their moody R'n'B arrangement of Nancy Sinatra's ʽBootsʼ
— the combo of melancholic jangly guitar, fuzz bass, oddly placed chimes, and
sneering kill-it-kid vocal delivery adds some serious spice, but it's also
quite telling that the only song in
this batch that somehow stands competition with the original is a cover of
Nancy Sinatra.
«Embarrassing» choices, other than the Beatles
songs and ʽLouie Louieʼ, include ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ
(which can only remind us of the time when the Byrds came into existence and
blew the Brummels off the stage), and ʽMonday Mondayʼ — actually, a
decent arrangement, but the choice, all by itself, places the Brummels on the
«oldies» shelf, since The Mamas & Papas themselves pretty much owed their
existence to the BBs, and now here they are basically acknowledging that
somebody already outdid them at their own game.
All in all, this is one of the most inane cover
albums of the decade — worth a curious peek, perhaps, as a reminder that even
a bunch of absolutely great tunes may be easily spoiled with wrong attitudes
and poor translation from one artist's language to another's. And although the
Brummels would recoil from this artistic disaster, and get their act together
the following year, the damage was done: it struck one further blow at their
reputation, tougher and meaner than all the previous ones. Completely justified
at the time, alas. Thumbs down.
TRIANGLE (1967)
1) Are You Happy; 2) Only
Dreaming Now; 3) The Painter Of Women; 4) The Keeper Of Time; 5) It Won't Get
Better; 6) Nine Pound Hammer; 7) Magic Hollow; 8) And I've Seen Her; 9)
Triangle; 10) The Wolf Of Velvet Fortune; 11) Old Kentucky Home.
The title obviously refers to the band's being
reduced to a trio — upon the departure of guitarist Don Irving and drummer John
Petersen, following the embarrassment of '66.
(And if that ain't enough, take an extra look at the album cover). Of course,
one could always try to uncover additional meanings — for instance, attempt to
define Triangle as a trendy
concoction, consisting of one-third American country-/folk-rock, one-third
British Kinks-style pop, and one-third world-wide psychedelia. That could
probably work.
Anyway, the very fact that, having just
recorded the most superfluous album in their history and gone through critical
disinterest, fanbase decay, and loss of several members, The Beau Brummels
found it in them to regroup, start anew, and present themselves as artists with
interesting stuff to say in 1967, deserves merit. Triangle did not sell at all well, for understandable reasons: the
Brummels were effectively kicked off the train by the end of 1965, and it would
have taken a miracle to catch up with it in the whirlwind atmosphere of 1967.
Besides, most people preferred their psychedelia with a harder edge at the
time, and Triangle is totally music
for sissies. However, some reviews were positive, and since then, the record
earned itself a stable place on all sorts of «great albums from the past that
you have never heard about» lists.
The most notable song is ʽMagic
Hollowʼ — the band correctly realized that it was the most accomplished
creation on the album and put it out as a single, unfortunately, forgetting
that «most accomplished creations» do not always qualify for single releases:
the sleepy, hypnotic attitude of the song is quite far removed from the dynamic
punch that the record buyer usually expects when he puts down the cash for
about three minutes worth of A-side music. But the fact that it flopped
commercially does not diminish the accomplishment — mainly in terms of
arrangement, which weaves a dense and unique sonic web of harpsichords (played
by Brian Wilson's SMiLe partner, Van
Dyke Parks), guitars, accordeons, chimes, and strings. It is, indeed, one of
the finest representatives of the baroque pop era — and, as far as my own
perception can tell, it does paint a musical picture of a «magic hollow»
without the aid of any particularly «trippy» effects or studio trickery, other
than a bit of toying around with the delay effect on the vocals at the end.
However, the same perception also suggests to
me that, in general, Triangle is not
much of a «lost masterpiece». Unlike so many true masterpieces of the psychedelic era, its songs do not have a
lot of staying power. The band seems hung up in mid-air, somewhere in between their
folk roots and «art-rock»... but that is not the real problem — many wonderful
things were generated over time in such a hung-up state — the real problem is
that the songs, with but a few exceptions, never seem to know how to build up
to full stature.
Take something like ʽOnly Dreaming
Nowʼ, for instance. There is an attractive cello riff that drives it, but
it does not mesh at all well with the accordion melody — the song seems torn
between its baroque fundament and some sort of gay Parisian attitude: an
unusual marriage, perhaps, but not a particularly meaningful one. Much worse,
however, is the fact that its ominous introduction never develops into anything
«stronger» — the climax of the song involves nothing other than Valentino
rising high to bleat out the chorus. Likewise, ʽThe Painter Of Womenʼ
is basically just an acoustic guitar / brass-led mantra; its chorus is a little
louder than its verses, but that's about it.
The album's magnum
opus is the five-minute long ʽWolf Of Velvet Fortuneʼ, an attempt
to write a mystical-magical mini-epic, influenced by mid-Eastern music,
Tolkienish fantasy, and just a pinch of acid. Again, the premise is nice enough — the little creepy echoey guitar
flourishes, the ominous notes in the singing — but the eventual resolution (the
chorus of "Delight! Delight!"...) is not quite enough a pay-off for
the monotonousness of the verses. It's a good song, but it never crosses
borders — there is a good reason why everybody knows and loves Led Zep's
ʽBattle Of Evermoreʼ, but not this Beau Brummels tale of happenings
in a parallel world (and I was never even a big fan of ʽBattle Of
Evermoreʼ in the first place).
Then there are some things that are just
strange. For instance, what was the point of ending the album with a Randy
Newman song? Just so as to please the album's producer Lenny Waronker, a good
pal of Randy's? ʽOld Kentucky Homeʼ is indeed a hilarious send-up of
redneck attitudes, but it doesn't exactly have a lot to do with psychedelia —
and even though it's one of the best tunes on the album (since it belongs to
Randy), its positioning right after "delight, delight, the wolf of velvet
fortune is upon his merry flight" is befuddling.
So, to be honest, Triangle is a mixed bag, really. The Beau Brummels were a decent
folk-rock band, and the only kind of hooks Ron Elliott knew how to manufacture
were folk-rock hooks. When pressed with the necessity of living up to the
times, they accidentally fell upon a unique kind of sound — that one thing I am
quite ready to admit: Triangle
sounds lovely and intriguing — but the substance did not have enough time to
catch up with the form. So no, I do not think Triangle really could belong in the same category with Pet Sounds, Forever Changes, or even The Left Banke's killer singles.
But on the other hand, it could have been much
worse. Most bands of The Beau Brummels' caliber were simply blown away for
good by the psychedelic revolution, or, at best, tried to squeeze out miserably
laughable simulations of «the real stuff». (Bands like The Hollies were
actually the opposite of the Brummels — they continued to write better songs,
but nothing that they did in 1967 was as individually inventive as ʽMagic
Hollowʼ in terms of pure sound). From that point of view, Triangle is an artistic miracle that,
regardless of any criticism, absolutely belongs in the collection of every art-pop
lover, let alone the abstract «musical annals». You may fall under its spell or
resist it if you wish, but there seems to be no reason to disagree with a thumbs up,
particularly if all things are taken in the context of the Brummels' own
career, rather than in the context of 1967 as the year of Sgt. Pepper, Are You
Experienced, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, or Days Of Future Passed.
BRADLEY'S BARN (1968)
1) Turn Around; 2) An Added
Attraction (Come And See Me); 3) Deep Water; 4) Long Walking Down To Misery; 5)
Little Bird; 6) Cherokee Girl; 7) I'm A Sleeper; 8) Loneliest Man In Town; 9)
Love Can Fall A Long Way Down; 10) Jessica; 11) Bless You California.
Somewhere out there is a model that
convincingly predicts a Beau Brummels album recorded in 1968 would be more
effective and natural than a Beau Brummels album recorded in 1967. Maybe this
idea has biased me from the start, but I do really feel that Bradley's Barn — titled after the
Wilson County studio where the remaining Brummels, Valentino and Elliott,
teamed up with some Nashville pros — seriously improves on Triangle. It may have nothing on the uniqueness of the sound of
ʽMagic Hollowʼ, but it sounds like a record that these guys really
had a lot of fun making, putting off most of the pressure of the preceding
years.
Obviously, by 1968 the subtle «roots-rock
revolution» was in an active phase, and, as The Byrds, The Band, and Bob Dylan
were cleansing their organisms from psychedelic «excesses», the Brummels and
their original folk-pop vibe suddenly got one more chance. The result is a
record that may be even more underrated than Triangle — eleven lovely exercises in country-rock, with Elliott
taking care of the music and Valentino of the words (usually): not generic country-rock, mind you (a.k.a.
«Singing Cowboy rewrites with hippie lyrics»), but interesting attempts at merging
the spirit of country-rock with the band's experience in baroque pop
flourishes.
Unfortunately, neither the album itself nor any
of the singles released on its basis charted at all. ʽLift Meʼ, an
experimental, but catchy patchwork that housed too many different beasts (rockabilly
rhythmics, psychedelic woo-hoos, folk vocal melody, Britpop bridge, etc.), was
the first failure that was not even included on the LP (you can find it as a
bonus track on today's CD versions). ʽLong Walking Down To Miseryʼ
was much more straightforward, with a very strong, if also quite delicate and
lyrical, delivery from Valentino, but its hooks (including an oddly fussy set
of blues-rock acoustic flourishes during each chorus, disrupting the steady,
lazy country flow of the melody) were probably too subtle for anyone to notice
at the time.
Finally, there was ʽCherokee Girlʼ —
a 3:30 «epic» tale of the troubled allegoric relations between the «Cherokee
Girl» in question and her friend The Coyote (an influence on Joni Mitchell's
subsequent ʽCoyoteʼ, perhaps? lyrically, at least, there may be some
unpaid debt here), with an intelligent, subtly grand strings arrangement; but,
again, probably a bit less focused and more «wimpy» than necessary for
significant chart success in 1968.
Neither these nor any of the other songs hit as
hard as ʽLaugh, Laughʼ, and in 1968, competition was so tough that
you either had to land your hardest punch in one go, or refrain from hitting at
all; and the delicate, intelligent charm of Bradley's Barn only emerges with a little bit of time. The biggest
surprise is Valentino — at this point, he is a masterful crooner, not busy
butchering great songs with crudely experimental vocalizing techniques, as he
did on '66, or trying out various «unusual»
styles of singing to match the magic-expecting wishes of the public in 1967,
but simply delivering the message with plenty of power, a good sense of pitch,
and elegant phrasing and modulation; honestly, Bradley's Barn could simply be one of the best «sung» records of
the year. (Especially since the Hollies only released an album of Dylan covers
that year — Allan Clarke would usually be Valentino's biggest direct
competitor).
But many of these songs are quite interestingly written, in addition. ʽTurn
Aroundʼ, for instance, through its «dark folk chords» adds a bit of
menace, a faint devilish grin even, perhaps, to what could otherwise be just an
innocent love story. ʽDeep Waterʼ is a country-rocker that really
does rock, despite always staying in acoustic territory. ʽI'm A
Sleeperʼ is an incidental response to the Beatles' ʽI'm Only
Sleepingʼ as presented from the perspective of a talented hillbilly with a
strange penchant for cello overdubs. Okay, really, none of these songs are all
that great — what really matters is
that they all sound nice, easy-going, natural, and with an underlying streak of
good humor and irony.
Overall, Bradley's
Barn is a very nice artefact for us to dig up after all these years —
traditionalist as it is, the Brummels were still able to make it ring out with
its own voice: rootsy, yes, but keeping its feet just a few inches above the
ground, with echoey traces of fantasyland psychedelia still contained in its
keyboards and strings arrangements. That the band (duo) finally disintegrated
soon after the album flopped on the charts, even worse than Triangle, was probably inevitable, and,
anyway, I am not sure that they would have been able to replicate Barn's subtle charms even one more time
without going completely limp and lifeless on us. But speculation is one thing,
and facts are another: Bradley's Barn
is what we have, and it remains a solid «B-level» album from a rare era whose
«solid B-level» offerings are well worth seeking out. Thumbs up.
THE BEAU BRUMMELS (1975)
1) You Tell Me Why; 2) First
In Line; 3) Wolf; 4) Down To The Bottom; 5) Tennessee Walker; 6) Singing
Cowboy; 7) Goldrush; 8) The Lonely Side; 9) Gate Of Hearts; 10) Today By Day.
If there is a real reason why the Beau Brummels
decided to make a comeback in 1974, I am almost afraid to spell it out. They
should have taken their clue from the original Byrds, who had already performed
the trick one year earlier and, much to their surprise, discovered that most
people couldn't care less about whether Crosby and McGuinn were generating
their vibes together or separately. If the mighty Byrds couldn't do it, how
could the not-so-mighty Beau Brummels stand a ghost of a chance?
They couldn't, but, for some reason, they still
thought they could — had they reformed just for the fun of being together once
again, they probably wouldn't have scattered in different directions as soon as
the reunion album predictably flopped. Predictably, because in 1975, the
Brummels' folk-/country-pop sound was either concentrated in the hands of
«seriously charismatic» singer-songwriters, or mixed with a generic rock bottom
to generate hits à la America.
Elliott and Valentino refused to go either way — and gave us an album that
basically picked up exactly from where Bradley's
Barn left off. No matter how experienced the experience, you could never reliably
tell that these songs were recorded in 1975.
The songs do not only sound timeless — they
sound quite lovely. The entire atmosphere of Bradley's Barn, its mix of country-pop arrangements and folk
melodicity, is carefully preserved, and Valentino has not lost one ounce of the
confidence he so admirably gained in 1968. The overall mood is a little
heavier, and there is a higher percentage of dark, depressed numbers
(ʽDown To The Bottomʼ, ʽWolfʼ, ʽGoldrushʼ, etc.),
but that's one thing to be expected from the post-hippie era, and a little
extra darkness never hurt anyone anyway — and, besides, the Brummels were well
adapted to darkness ever since the lamenting intonations of ʽLaugh,
Laughʼ.
The main problem, however, remains the same —
most of these songs are eminently forgettable. Seven years of
better-things-to-do had not produced any miracles: Elliott's songwriting skills
are still mediocre, the band's playing has not improved, and the whole
experience never for a single moment pushes anywhere beyond «nice». Perhaps
they felt it too — or else why would they feel the need to re-record ʽYou
Tell Me Whyʼ, a ten-year old single? (It's a fine re-recording, by the
way, preserving all the hooks of the original and piling some new guitar
flourishes on top — but it only makes the rest pale further by comparison).
ʽDown To The Bottomʼ was released as
the lead single — a good choice, since the song's grimness, pessimism, and
accompanying high-pitched, shrill electric guitar solos (courtesy of guest star
Ronnie Montrose) do make it a standout of sorts. But this isn't Pink Floyd,
and few people would want to be lectured on the misery issue by a band as
lightweight as the Beau Brummels. Nor would anyone feel the urge to sit up and
listen as the feeble, delicate chords of ʽWolfʼ ring out in
soft-rock mode, no matter how much they try to transform the "...crying
wolf!" chorus into a catchpoint.
Every other song only seems to reinforce my
point — the Beau Brummels' principal flaw is that you never know when their subtlety slides into weakness. Yes, these songs have
potential, but the energy level is comparable to that of an activist two weeks
into a hunger strike: even the frickin' drums sound like someone was much too
afraid of breaking a drumstick. I mean, Joni Mitchell playing solo acoustic —
at her best, that is — could produce more damn energy than this whole
supposedly «rock» band.
For all of its niceties, I give the record a
shaky thumbs up,
but intentionally hunting for it is a waste of time unless your hobby is to
build up a complete collection of 1970s country rock — an occupation that I'd
find about as exciting as collecting matchboxes or bumper stickers, but hey,
that's just an opinion.
ADDENDA:
THE BEAU BRUMMELS LIVE! (1974; 2000)
1) Nine Pound Hammer; 2) You
Tell Me Why; 3) Turn Around / Singing Cowboy; 4) Gate Of Hearts; 5) Lonely
People; 6) Music Speaks Louder; 7) Lisa; 8) Tennessee Walker; 9) Don't Talk To
Strangers; 10) Laugh, Laugh; 11) Lonesome Town; 12) Free; 13) Man And Woman
Kind; 14) Restless Soul; 15) Her Dream Alley; 16) City Girl; 17) Paper Plane;
18) Just A Little; 19) Love Can Fall.
For a band as «historically insignificant» as
the Beau Brummels, they do seem to have a rather disproportionate amount of
archival releases honoring their legacy — including a monumental 3-CD
collection of demos, outtakes and rarities (San Fran Sessions) that is not easily available, and, anyway, the
perspective of sitting through 60 samples of «second-rate» material by one of
America's classic «second-rate» band may not look all that appealing even to an
obsessive completist: a gross excess
of the allocated quota if there ever was one.
In its place, it is more useful and pleasant to
mention this, much shorter, archival
release of a live show that the reunited Brummels played in February '74 in
some little-known pub near Sacramento. For some reason, the show happened to
be professionally recorded — with no less than excellent sound quality — only
to surface officially twenty-five years later, licensed by the small Dig Music
label based in Sacramento.
There are two reasons to be happy about it.
First, this is the only Beau Brummels live album in existence, and what is a
rock band without a live album, even a bad one? Second, the time of the show
caught the Brummels in a highly creative mode — Ron Elliott was writing like
crazy for the 1975 reunion album, and most of that writing went through a live
testing period; 13 out of 19 songs are newly-penned, and, what is most
interesting, only three of them actually ended up on The Beau Brummels, so there is a swarm of previously unavailable
material here, and not in «raw demo» form, either: these are fully fleshed out
compositions that the reformed band was not afraid to offer for their limited,
but rowdy audience.
As a live unit, the reformed Brummels sounded
predictably professional and predictably not all that exciting compared to the
studio recordings. The vocal harmonies are not too good, particularly when it
comes to stretching out on the high notes — the "babe, babe, babe"
chorus on ʽDon't Talk To Strangersʼ goes painfully on the ears, and
Sal's «macho bleating» (I'm all out of words, goddammit) on ʽMan And Woman
Kindʼ is another seriously stressful moment. But in general, when they are
not trying too hard, the outcome matches the quality of the original recordings
just fine — ʽNine Pound Hammerʼ and ʽTurn Aroundʼ are the
major highlights, and the melancholic harmonica of ʽLaugh, Laughʼ has
not lost a drop of the original melancholia.
But generally, the album is really worth it for
several of the new songs that did not make it onto the 1975 record (they might,
perhaps, have made it onto subsequent recordings, had the reformed band
persevered for a couple extra seasons). ʽMusic Speaks Louderʼ is a
lively, friendly pub romp very much in the spirit of the Lovin' Spoonful, and
it's funny how its wah-wah-driven guitar parts unexpectedly contrast with the
overall soft folksy melody. Bassist Declan Mulligan's ʽLisaʼ is a
moderately heavy rocker with idiot lyrics, but a nice muscular drive that would
be so sorely lacking on The Beau
Brummels. So is Elliott's ʽRestless Soulʼ; and ʽFreeʼ
is one of the band's prettiest anthemic ballads (although, once again, it
loses momentum whenever Valentino starts stretching out — alas, Frank Sinatra
this guy is not).
Overall, it is very good that the show does not
go too heavy on the «classics» and leaves such a huge space for new material,
even if this prevents it from becoming a well-rounded, conclusive «live
retrospective». Altogether, there is more energy, passion, and interest here
than the band demonstrated in the studio — maybe because by the time they did
get around to the studio, disillusionment had already started seeping in. As
it is, Beau Brummels Live! may not
deserve its exclamation point, but it may at least be a better example of the
reformed band at its brief inspirational peak, so one more final thumbs up
is not out of the question.
BILLY FURY
THE SOUND OF FURY (1960)
1) That's Love; 2) My Advice;
3) Phone Call; 4) You Don't Know; 5) Turn My Back On You; 6) Don't Say It's
Over; 7) Since You've Been Gone; 8) It's You I Need; 9) Alright, Goodbye; 10)
Don't Leave Me This Way.
Billy Fury. Was this guy just a cheap plastic
imitation of American rock'n'roll, temporarily acting as a local substitute on
UK soil before «the real thing», like the Beatles and the Stones, came along?
Or was he the real thing all along? It's a tough question, not unlike the one
that is often asked about the Monkees on the other side of the ocean.
Furthermore, is there a single solitary reason, real thing or not, to listen to
his recordings today?
I think the key factor here is that — unlike quite a few of the supposedly more
«authentic» British Invasion acts that came in the guy's wake — Ronald
Wycherley, a.k.a. Billy Fury, wrote all of his material himself. Yes, he
idolized American pop music and rockabilly, and had no idea whatsoever about
going out there and making something different; but he crafted his own melodies
and constructed his own lyrics, and when you are doing this in the genre of
light entertainment, you either fall flat on your face or you come up with
something interesting. Given Billy's tremendous popularity from 1960 to 1963, he must have come up with something
interesting, you'd think. And when you take a listen to The Sound Of Fury, his first and best record, just a quick couple
of listens might convince you that he really did.
Yes, he likes all of them whitebread rockers,
and alternately writes and sings in the style of Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins,
Gene Vincent, the Burnette brothers, and/or Elvis — all of whom he had to be at once for the hungry British crowds. But
the simplest thing to do would be to simply appropriate their melodies and add
new lyrics, and I do not recognize direct rip-offs. Each time a song starts off
exactly like some other classic, it quickly shifts into its own territory —
like ʽIt's You I Needʼ, for instance, starts off just like
ʽThat's Alright (Mama)ʼ, then gets its own brief poppy chorus. A
trifle, of course, and one might seriously argue that all these cosmetic
changes were mainly designed as safe guarantee against lawsuits while all the
royalties could be kept for the artist. But I hope there was more to it than
just financial reasons — that Billy Fury really liked writing songs in the manner of his idols.
Of course, The
Sound Of Fury is quite a misleading title, and anyone looking for the album
in hopes of uncovering a long-lost classic of kick-ass early rock'n'roll must
immediately lower the pulsating expectations. Even something like ʽShakin'
All Overʼ, also recorded in the UK that same year by Johnny Kidd & The
Pirates, blows Fury's «fury» out of the water — not to mention most of the major American rock stars of
the 1950s. The «wildest» track on here is ʽTurn My Back On Youʼ, an
echoey, suggestive, bass-heavy rockabilly romp in the vein of Gene Vincent and
Johnny Burnette, but altogether about four years late to seem in any way
«dangerous» to anybody but the most killingly conservative grandparents (not
that there weren't still quite a lot of them in 1960, of course). Everything
else is even more tame, with a poppy or a country underlining to it. Heck,
even such a little-known wussy band as The Silver Beetles, who once refused to
become a backing band for Billy because he wanted them to fire their bass
player (Stuart Sutcliffe at the time, not Paul McCartney, so I sort of
understand), was «heavier» than Fury's ensemble. So take the album title with a
grain of salt.
On the other hand, Billy did have himself a
nice playing outfit — including a young and ambitious guitarist called Joe
Brown (yes, the Joe Brown who went on
to many different things, including befriending George Harrison, becoming the
father of Sam Brown, and writing some good music in between), helping him out
with original riffs (he doesn't solo all that much), and Reg Guest on piano,
playing much in the style of such American greats as Amos Milburn and Johnny
Johnson (meaning that he mostly favors the boogie pattern).
If anything, The Sound Of Fury does sound like a perfectly professional endeavor
— it just seems a little bit out of date for 1960, what with all the echo and
reverb and bass slapping and a near-total lack of drums (at least loud ones;
extra bit of trivia — Andy White, later to play on the Beatles' recording of
ʽLove Me Doʼ, is the drummer here). You'd almost think the radio
didn't work and it took these guys four years for a steamship to deliver The Sun Sessions to their doorstep.
(The story also goes that, while doing the bass slapping, they had to have two
bassists — one to pick the notes and one to actually do the slapping. Hey, but
it works!).
But they made their own Sun Sessions, and they do
sound somewhat like the real thing. As a singer, Billy never had a unique
voice, but it was capable of many things: he can have it all glottalic and
hiccupy and rockabillish on ʽTurn My Backʼ, or he can have it slyly
sweet with a hillbilly whiff à la
Buddy Holly on ʽThat's Loveʼ, or he can do tender sentimental
pleading on ʽAlright, Goodbyeʼ (although the from-the-bottom-of-my-heart
crooning style on ʽYou Don't Knowʼ is one time where he seems to
severely overcook it: his frail lungs simply cannot handle the ambition). So,
looking back on this stuff from more than a half-century distance, I wouldn't
call this «empty posing». The guy really dug whatever he was doing here. Thumbs up.
That said, the best track on the current CD
issue is to be found not on the album itself, but on one of the accompanying
bonusy B-sides: ʽDon't Jumpʼ is a terrific pop-rock exercise in the
style of post-army Elvis (think something like ʽLittle Sisterʼ), but
with heavy emphasis on Duane Eddy-ish twangy guitar and an independently
invented «heartbreaking» story of a teenage suicide set to Billy's own lyrics.
Just a juicy, seductive example of one of those «light somber moods», set to a
steady pop rhythms, that were produced so frequently in the early Sixties and
then vanished almost completely, replaced by genuinely depressing heavy
somberness.
BILLY FURY (1960)
1) Maybe Tomorrow; 2) Gonna
Type A Letter; 3) Margo; 4) Don't Knock Upon My Door; 5) Time Has Come; 6)
Collette; 7) Baby How I Cried; 8) Angel Face; 9) Last Kiss; 10) Wondrous Place.
Billy's second LP seems to have been mainly a
«recent singles scoop-up», which is why, unlike most of his early 1960s
records, it never got a CD release, and I had to do a little reconstruction
from a variety of sources (including some extremely poor quality recordings).
It is relatively important, though,
since it contains both the A- and B-sides to his first two singles from 1959,
the stuff that made him a star in the first place.
Interestingly, both of the A-sides are sweet
ballads, with the rocking material relegated to the B-sides: apparently,
British marketeers were not willing to take chances and counted on Billy's potential
lady fans to be a more stable source of income than the masculine, rowdy
rock'n'roll riff-raff rabble. The ballads are syrupy enough, but not hopeless:
ʽMaybe Tomorrowʼ is an attempt to write something in the Everleys'
style, with a vocal part that finds a good balance between pathos and humility
(it also helps that no strings are involved), and the somewhat denser
ʽMargoʼ, replete with echoey female backups and woodwind flourishes,
is more in the Roy Orbison vein (it also features the wonderful lyrical line
"Oh please be mine / Most of the
time" — I'm sure the author never noticed the ambiguity, but I wonder
what the BBC radio services must have thought of it). Anyway, could have been
worse.
Of the rockers, ʽDon't Knock Upon My Doorʼ
is the more important one — one of Billy's fastest and raunchiest tunes, a
straightforward Elvis homage in the spirit of ʽHard Headed Womanʼ,
but a little less «dangerous»-sounding due to all the have-a-good-time
cheerleader harmonies (you'll be getting those sexy visions of early 1960's
girls in tights in a jiffy) and the lack of any sharp lead guitar work (even
the solo is handed over to the bass edge of the piano). Still, it's as fun as
any second-tier rockabilly number, and so is ʽGonna Type A Letterʼ, although
the latter is, unfortunately, marred by a rather inept brass backing (whatever
these wind blowers were doing in the studio on that day, they surely weren't
prepared for a rock'n'roll number).
Most of the other tracks are ballads, ballads,
ballads, ranging from the easily tolerable (the bluesy waltz ʽBaby How I
Criedʼ) to the questionable (ʽColletteʼ, way too hard trying to become the Everleys here, even
double-tracking the vocals so as to sound like Phil and Don at the same time) to the awful (an overtly-sickeningly
sweet attitude on ʽAngel Faceʼ, sadly, presaging many of the
disappointments to come). But the album does get a modestly-excellent
conclusion with ʽWondrous Placeʼ, a moody Latin/Western hybrid with
a melancholic flair that Billy pulls off real well, even if, once again, it is
just one of several of Elvis' incarnations that he is modelling here.
Overall, the album does sound significantly
different from The Sound Of Fury —
more echo, more atmosphere, less rockabilly, more balladry — which is curious,
considering that most of this stuff was recorded at approximately the same
time. Recommending it is beyond my
abilities (not to mention that this would require setting up an Ebay search),
but putting it down due to cheesiness is not something I'd like to do, either:
most of the ballads are well within the adequacy limits, and some even have
original hooks. It is pathetic,
though, just how few rockers they let him place on the LP, despite his obvious
attraction to the bawdy side of the business.
HALFWAY TO PARADISE (1961)
1) Halfway To Paradise; 2)
Don't Worry; 3) You're Having The Last Dance With Me; 4) Push Push; 5) Fury's
Tune; 6) Talkin' In My Sleep; 7) Stick Around; 8) A Thousand Stars; 9) Cross My
Heart; 10) Comin' Up In The World; 11) He Will Break Your Heart; 12) Would You
Stand By Me.
This marks the end of Fury's transition from
«wannabe-rocker» into the «lite entertainment» category: the cover of Goffin
& King's ʽHalfway To Paradiseʼ, originally recorded by Tony Orlando,
sent him to the top of the charts, lost him a squadron of devoted hardcore fans
but gained an army of newly evolved softcore ones. But was he really to blame?
The British Elvis, after all, had to follow in the footsteps of the American
one, and now that the real Elvis,
back from the army, was softening up his act, the UK shadow had to follow suit
— no serious alternatives. «Guitar bands are on their way out», after all.
Even worse, Billy is no longer willing to (or
allowed to) write his own songs — apart from a little semi-nostalgic, semi-comic
number (ʽFury's Tuneʼ), a folk-poppy ditty where he amuses himself by
quoting as many titles of his own past hits as possible. Everything else is
just stuff by contemporary US and UK professional songwriters, writing for the
lite-pop scene: I mostly do not recognize the titles, other than ʽYou're
Having The Last Dance With Meʼ, which, for some reason, invents new
lyrics for the recent Ben E. King classic ʽSave The Last Dance For
Meʼ.
Still, if you have nothing against early 1960s
«soft-rock» per se, Halfway To Paradise
is as nice and elegant a ride back into the epoch as anything. There is only
one syrupy, orchestrated ballad, floating along at a slow waltz tempo (ʽA
Thousand Starsʼ); most of the rest is upbeat, catchy pop with occasional
echoes of blues and R'n'B, and if only the arrangements were relying a little
less on keyboards, strings, and girlie harmonies, than on a well-recorded
guitar sound, the whole thing could have been a cool, tasteful example of
pre-Beatles pop.
For starters, ʽHalfway To Paradiseʼ,
want it or not, is a Carole King classic (perfect melody resolution and all),
and Billy, with his Elvis-like style, does a grittier, less manneristic job
with it than Tony Orlando. Then there's some piano-led country-pop stuff like
ʽDon't Worryʼ and ʽTalkin' In My Sleepʼ (imagine Elvis
guest singing lead on a Jerry Lee Lewis album from his «country» period, but
do remember to dim the lights a little — this is Billy, after all, not Elvis or Jerry), some bossa nova
influences (ʽHe Will Break Your Heartʼ), some further cuddlifying of
the sentimental approach of Buddy Holly (ʽStick Aroundʼ)... nothing
jaw-dropping, that is, but still a respectably diverse bag of styles, created
with a modicum of intelligence, arranged with a big nod to catchiness, and, for
the most part, delivered without any signs of overt «sweetening» or theatrical
exaggeration.
Of course, all of it is way too smooth — the
addition of even a single track that would have a faint hint at going a little
deeper (such as ʽWondrous Placeʼ) would have helped a lot, but no
dice. Still, this is just the kind of album that would get one of those
«slanted» thumbs
up — mildly pleasant, «average» with a
positive-rather-than-negative shade, etc. Historically, it helped make Billy a
national star while at the same time forever burying his hopes of artistic
growth — but the same could, indeed, be said about Elvis' early 1960s records,
and we do still enjoy them from time to time. Seems like there is more to life
than artistic growth, after all.
BILLY (1963)
1) We
Were Meant For Each Other; 2) How Many Nights, How Many Days; 3) Willow Weep
For Me; 4) Bumble Bee; 5) She Cried; 6) Let Me Know; 7) The Chapel On The Hill;
8) Like I've Never Been Gone; 9) A Million Miles From Nowhere; 10) I'll Show
You; 11) Our Day Will Come; 12) All My Hopes; 13) One Step From Heaven; 14) One
Kiss; 15) Hard Times; 16) (Here Am I) Broken Hearted.
Unsurprisingly for 1963, Billy's best-selling
LP was his artistic nadir — and with the Beatles on the near horizon, ironically,
it would also be his last proper LP.
Nothing here is self-written; most of the songwriters involved in the project
are hack-like professionals, long since forgotten; and the emphasis is rapidly
shifting from light, cutesy pop-rock to saccharine balladry.
The voice is still there, and, actually,
Billy's range and art of imitation are the only things that seem to have been
improving with time. For instance, Ray Charles' ʽHard Timesʼ will
never make anyone forget the original, but it is not a bad cover: sung with the proper feeling, without superfluous
over-emoting, and it's hardly probable that the record industry people forced this cover on Billy — why not
just another hack tune from a local craftsmanship instead? Even at this point
he might have been allowed the liberty to make a small bunch of «artistic
choices», and this one's not bad, and neither is the LaVern Baker nursery-R'n'B
of ʽBumble Beeʼ (with Billy's British audiences, most likely,
wondering their heads off about the title, because instead of the expected
"you hurt me like a bee, an evil bee, an evil bumble bee", Billy
prefers to sing "oo-wee, my life is misery, get out of here and don't come
back to me". Was «bumble bee» a slang term for something offensive at the
time in Britain? Who knows?).
But the rest of the songs leave rather faint
traces, to put it mildly — even a bare glance at song titles like ʽThe
Chapel On The Hillʼ is quite enough to get a preliminary idea of the
content and the style: strings,
strings, more strings, superstrings (okay, not really), and epic romantic
vocalizing over passable, ten-for-a-dime melodies, of which old Tin Pan Alley
standards like ʽWillow Weep For Meʼ are actually the «highlights».
The upbeat, but still heavily orchestrated, ʽHow Many Nightsʼ and
especially ʽLet Me Knowʼ are the only tracks on here that could even
barely suggest that four years earlier, this here gentleman was the unofficial
head of Britain's rockabilly scene — on ʽLet Me Knowʼ, the familiar
Elvis «snap» reaches out from under the softcore arrangement — but barely suggest is the key phrase here.
Overall, this is just for those who can't get
enough out of their Paul Anka records; but, perhaps, Beatles fans also deserve
a listen — it would be interesting to try and imagine the Fab Four's reaction
to this act of «musical betrayal» (and appreciate their own force of resistance: as we all remember, even George Martin
almost fell into the trap of «taming» and «teenifying» their act by trying to
saddle them with silly soft crap like ʽHow Do You Do Itʼ at the
beginning). An utterly ignoble thumbs down.
WE WANT BILLY! (1963)
1) Sweet Little Sixteen; 2)
Baby Come On; 3) That's All Right; 4) Wedding Bells; 5) Sticks And Stones; 6)
Unchain My Heart; 7) I'm Moving On; 8) Just Because; 9) Halfway To Paradise;
10) I'd Never Find Another You; 11) Once Upon A Dream; 12) Last Night Was Made
For Love; 13) Like I've Never Been Gone; 14) When Will You Say I Love You.
Well, this
is a semi-interesting project at least — in that it allows Mr. Fury one last
chance to showcase whatever little of the «fury» was still left. It may not
sound exactly like a real live album from real early 1960s, but it is, in a
way: recorded live at Decca Studio No. 3, in front of a small (but still
annoyingly loud) audience — hence, We
Want Billy! may be counted as the first live album by a UK pop-rock act of
any importance. (As distinguished from «the first important live album by a UK pop-rock act», which may or may not be
Five Live Yardbirds a year later —
produced in worse quality, but in an actual club environment).
Backed by the semi-professional Tornadoes,
whose skills at playing guitar and organ leads seem a little better developed
than the skills of the rhythm sections, Billy cuts here through a long chains
of rockabilly and R&B standards — then, two-thirds into the album, switches
gears and gives us a long medley of his «sweeter» hits. The screaming girls are
nowhere near as overwhelming as if this were Shea Stadium or Madison Square
Garden, but it is not quite clear which situation is better: an evenly spread
screaming background of tens of thousands, or singular howls and yelps of
dozens that come and go. (The funniest of all is ʽWedding Bellsʼ,
where all the major screaming fits are triggered by the chorus of
"wedding bells are ringing in my ears..." — supposedly, were
polygamy to be allowed, Billy could have walked right out of that studio
prouder than a Turkish sultan).
Anyway, the rock'n'roll part is passable and
sometimes even a little inventive: for instance, ʽThat's All Right
(Mama)ʼ starts out as slow country, spiced up with organ flourishes, then
gradually accelerates, turning only about halfway into the classic Elvis
version: a somewhat banal way for us today, perhaps, to show the roots and
sources of the rockabilly craze, but not quite so trivial back in 1963.
ʽJust Becauseʼ develops, with a key change, out of a short «clap your
hands» R&B baby-jam (curious, but unnecessary — Billy can do a passable
Elvis, but he's no single-handed match for the Isley Brothers). The two Ray
Charles tributes (ʽSticks And Stonesʼ and ʽUnchain My
Heartʼ) are, as usual, emotionally charged and further prove that Mr. Fury
was a big fan and promoter of Ray's,
but, alas, you'd have to have an ego (and a throat) the size of an Eric Burdon
or a Joe Cocker to do Ray any sort of true justice.
The balladeering part, unfortunately, is quite
skippable: the only reason to listen to these songs in the first place is a
willingness to take them in as «pop confections» — the strings, the harmonies,
the meticulously rehearsed notes and modulations. In this «live» context, though,
even a really good song like ʽHalfway To Paradiseʼ becomes limp and
unconvincing (and the idea of recreating the five-note string motif with
pseudo-martial drumming does not work), not to mention all the lesser ones,
whose titles all speak for themselves.
Still, in the overall context of Billy's post-Sound Of Fury career, We Want Billy! is a relatively high
point, and it can easily be understood how these tepid (especially to the
modern ear), but sincerely delivered performances were, indeed, «the next best
thing» for UK teenagers who could only dream of meeting their real idols in
person. Even regardless of the disappointing ballad medley (disappointing for me, of course, not for the orgiastic
girls in the audience), the whole impression is that of a modest — okay,
condescending — thumbs
up. It also helps that the only CD release of the record that I
know of pairs it with Billy, which
makes for a very seductive contrast.
CLASSICS AND COLLECTIBLES (1960-1965; 2008)
CD I: 1) Halfway To Paradise; 2) Cross My Heart; 3)
I'd Never Find Another You; 4) A King For Tonight; 5) You're Having The Last
Dance With Me; 6) Turn My Back On You; 7) Maybe Tomorrow; 8) Wondrous Place; 9)
Like I've Never Been Gone; 10) Baby Come On; 11) Do You Really Love Me Too; 12)
I'm Lost Without You; 13) Letter Full Of Tears; 14) Turn Your Lamp Down Low; 15)
In Thoughts Of You; 16) What Am I Living For?; 17) Somebody Else's Girl; 18)
Jealousy; 19) Push Push; 20) Last Night Was Made For Love; 21) Nothin' Shakin'
(But The Leaves On The Trees); 22) A Thousand Stars; 23) It's Only Make Believe;
24) Hard Times (No One Knows Better Than I); 25) Once Upon A Dream; 26) This
Diamond Ring; 27) I Will; 28) A Million Miles From Nowhere; 29) Run To My
Lovin' Arms; 30) You're Swell; 31) Forget Him;
CD II: 1) Break Up; 2)
Nothin' Shakin' (But The Leaves On The Trees); 3) The Hippy Hippy Shake; 4)
Glad All Over; 5) I Can Feel It; 6) You Got Me Dizzy; 7) Saved; 8) You Better
Believe It Baby; 9) She's So Far Out She's In; 10) Straight To Your Arms; 11)
Away From You; 12) Am I Blue; 13) That's Enough; 14) Kansas City; 15) From The
Bottom Of My Heart; 16) I'll Be So Glad (When Your Heart Is Mine); 17) Lovesick
Blues; 18) Keep Away; 19) What Did I Do; 20) Cheat With Love; 21) I Can't Help
Loving You; 22) Candy Kisses; 23) I'm Hurting All Over; 24) Nobody's Child; 25)
Wedding Bells; 26) Stick Around; 27) Time Has Come; 28) Let's Paint The Town;
29) Begin The Beguine; 30) I'll Never Fall In Love Again; 31) I Will Always Be
With You.
Billy's discography after 1963 quickly becomes
a poorly-studied mess. He did have at least one movie soundtrack in 1965 (I've Got A Horse, with some new
material), but other than that, most, if not all, of his releases for Decca,
and then, later, for Parlophone (from 1967 to 1970) were singles — none of them
hits, and few of them even gaining the honor of reappearing on later compilations.
For obvious reasons: with Beatlemania hitting the decks, by the end of 1963
nobody needed Billy Fury, shorn of his «rock'n'roll» reputation, any more, and
he just withered away like the «poor man's UK Elvis» he was (and his withering
was correspondingly more pitiful — at least Elvis still sold records a-plenty
all the way up to 1977).
Anyway, as a brief post-scriptum, here is one
of the most readily available comprehensive compilations — more than 60 songs
in all — that goes way beyond Billy's LP material and includes lots (but far
from all) of the single A- and B-sides from 1960 to 1966, that is, his Decca
years. In between The Sound Of Fury,
which is seriously underrepresented here, and this huge collection, honestly,
nobody needs any more of Billy in one's life (well, throw in We Want Billy!, perhaps, just for all
the girlie fun). And it is also not very surprising that the Collectibles part, emphasizing B-sides
and rarities, is generally more enjoyable than the Classics part, mostly dedicated to sentimental and syrupy pop.
«Enjoyable», of course, does not mean
«outstanding» or «original» — in fact, the best songs are usually covers of
contemporary rock'n'roll and R&B hits, with some surprising choices (LaVern
Baker's ʽSavedʼ, for instance, or Hank Williams' ʽLovesick
Bluesʼ with some credible yodeling, or ʽYou Got Me Dizzyʼ from
the repertoire of Jimmy Reed, the world's greatest toothless homeless bluesman
getting the blues-de-luxe treatment with pompous brass and all) and some
predictable ones (ʽKansas Cityʼ, ʽNothin' Shakin'ʼ,
ʽThe Hippy Hippy Shakeʼ, which every British rock'n'roller knew by
heart). Interestingly, Billy almost completely refrained from covering the big
pop hits of the British Invasion era, the only exception here represented by
the Dave Clark 5's ʽGlad All Overʼ — he might have been quite bitter
at all those whippersnappers outshining him in droves. But what can you do:
with the Beatles and the Stones at the front of the movement, professional
singers were pushed back by singer-songwriters, and since Billy no longer
writes his own material here, or, when he does, strictly adheres to the recipés
of corporate crooners, sulking ain't gonna help matters none.
Still, there is no denying that Billy was a
fairly decent chameleon. Elvis was his main, but not only role model. He could
have his way with smooth vocal jazz (ʽBegin The Beguineʼ), could
inject the required subtle slyness into a Jerry Lee Lewis song (ʽBreak
Upʼ), could stir up the soul on an R&B classic (ʽWhat Am I Living
For?ʼ). He just never really took it to the very top — and this is where
he fails, because in the long run, nobody needs one guy scoring a bunch of B's
when one can have instead several different guys, each one scoring one A.
Anyway, as long as this whole compilation
stretches out, there are no unjustly forgotten classics here, but fans of
strong, reliable British vocal cords set to family-entertainment-level arrangements
will find a lot to heartily nostalgize to. And oh yes, the first disc actually
ends with Billy's last recorded track — ʽForget Himʼ, recorded in the
early 1980s (yes, synthesizers and electronic drums are included) and released
already after his death in January 1983, at the awfully young age of 42. For
the record, the song shows that Billy's music remained loyal to cheesy
atmosphere until the very end, but also that his vocal power stayed with him
for all that time (although the singing does seem a little thinner, probably
due to health problems).
16 YR. OLD SOUL (1963)
1) Greazee (Pts. 1 & 2);
2) Lost And A'Lookin'; 3) I Can't Stop Loving You; 4) Born To Lose; 5) Ain't
That Love; 6) Bring It On Home; 7) God Bless The Child; 8) Pretty Little Girl;
9) In The Spring; 10) Good News.
Most people in the world — certainly, almost all of the people outside the U.S.,
myself included — have only heard of Billy Preston due to his involvement in
the last period of the Beatles' activity in 1969, including participation in
the Rooftop Concert, and, perhaps, due to his later friendship with George
Harrison, stretching all the way from the Bangla Desh Concert period and right
down to the posthumous «Concert For George» thirty years later. Not everyone
knows, though, that Billy was not just a random figure picked out for no good
reason: he'd known the Beatles from their Hamburg days, where, in 1962, they
crossed paths with Little Richard and his touring band. But most importantly,
even though messing 'round with the Beatles certainly gave Preston's career and
notoriety a shot in the arm, he was already a noted presence on the R&B
scene.
In fact, he was noted as early as 1957, when
the young prodigy did a ʽBlueberry Hillʼ duet with Nat
ʽKingʼ Cole on TV (check it out here — in case of
difficulty, the young prodigy can always be recognized by the large funny gap
in his front teeth: that, and the fluent organ-playing technique, have
forever remained two of his permanent trademarks). Then came supporting gigs
with everyone who mattered, from Mahalia Jackson to Little Richard to Sam Cooke,
and eventually, in 1963, came the solo debut on the small Derby label — an LP
of fully instrumental tunes, focusing exclusively on Billy's organ and piano
playing. (Technical note: 16 Yr. Old
Soul is frequently ignored in the discographies, due either to the limited
nature of the original release, or chronological confusion — it was
re-released in the UK in 1969 under the title Greazee Soul — but this is definitely where it all begins).
Now, actually, from a technical point of view
the record was somewhat groundbreaking: instrumental albums with a keyboard
fetish were nothing new for the jazz world in the early 1960s, but in the —
still quite young and fresh — world of R&B, recording a whole set of
vocal-less numbers was practically unheard of, and the very fact that little
Billy got such a proposition would suggest that there was something really
special in his keyboard playing. Or, perhaps, that he was just too shy to sing
in the studio, and would rather have his trusty organ do all the singing. Otherwise,
one would rather expect somebody of Ray Charles' caliber to be the first in
line.
In any case, 16 Yr. Old Soul is not exactly a masterpiece, but it is also much,
much better than one would think, just by looking at the song titles and
learning the basic facts. The thing with Billy was not that he was a
top-of-his-class «virtuoso», or that he'd mastered everything there was to
piano and organ playing, but that he had his own way of making the keys sing.
Listen closely to his inspired take on ʽGod Bless The Childʼ, for
instance, and you will notice that he has Billy Holiday's original in his head
all the way, trying to capture the nuances, the shadows, the echoes, varying
the tones, the pitches, the force, everything — basically, doing the sort of
thing that every instrumental jazz performer would do, of course, but with as
much invention and feeling as the best of 'em, if not necessarily with the same
technicality.
The one major highlight is the instrumental
ʽGreazeeʼ, four minutes of moody blues-waltzing spent exploring the
world of threatening riffs and flashy solos, showing Billy's easily recognizable
«whirlwind» playing style already fully established: at his most revved-up, he
does it all, from creaky Morse code passages to tricky bends and glissandos...
well, maybe not that tricky, but they
do rock in an openly aggressive manner — in the world of the electric organ,
ʽGreazeeʼ is quite the equivalent of Link Wray in the world of the
electric guitar, and it lets you know, from the very start, that the young
Billy would be mingling more and more with the rock crowds.
Some of the tracks are too dependent on Billy's
jazz piano mentors, whoever they might have been (ʽLost And
A'Lookinʼ), but whenever the band hits a fast / tight groove, he always
ends up shedding superfluous academicity and just plugs along — ʽAin't
That Loveʼ and ʽGood Newsʼ, in particular, are great showcase
for Billy's «abandon». And second best are those tunes where the point is to
capture the spirit of the former vocal part in the keys — like the already
mentioned ʽGod Bless The Childʼ or Sam Cooke's ʽBring It On Home
To Meʼ. Plus, I have no idea what ʽIn The Springʼ, credited to
Lowell Johnson, was originally supposed to be, but here it's a lovely, uplifting,
optimistic piano anthem to start a day with.
Despite all the originality, 16 Yr. Old Soul did not make much of a
splash, being targeted towards the pop rather than jazz market — and the pop
market was relatively indifferent to instrumental albums, unless we're talking
real hot white teen dance music like The Ventures. But it is still an absolute
must for those who appreciate Billy's talents, because it already shows an
accomplished master of his trade: Billy would never go on to learn to be a
first-rate songwriter or unpredictable innovator — all he had for himself was
sincerity, passion, technique, and a great ability to channel other people's
feelings through his own soul, and in one way or another, it's all here already.
Not a jaw-dropping masterpiece, just a highly pleasant musical show that fully
deserves its honorary thumbs up.
THE MOST EXCITING ORGAN EVER (1965)
1) If I Had A Hammer; 2)
Lowdown; 3) Slippin' And Slidin'; 4) Drown In My Own Tears; 5) I Am Coming
Through; 6) The Octopus; 7) Don't Let The Sun Catch You Crying; 8) Soul
Meetin'; 9) Let Me Know; 10) Billy's Bag; 11) The Masquerade Is Over; 12)
Steady Gettin' It.
It is quite likely that each of us has an
individual opinion on what exactly is the most exciting organ ever and to whom
in particular it happens to belong... but hang on there, this is a Billy Preston
review and we are actually supposed to talk about his contributions to the
world of keyboard-based music, or are we not. The album, with one of the most
provocative titles ever, was released a few days prior to Billy's 19th birthday
on the VJ Records label (notorious for being the first overseas label to gain
rights to Beatles' recordings, before EMI got around to their senses), and is
often considered his first «proper» album, even though it really is the second.
And there is relatively little substantial
difference between Billy at 16 and Billy at 19, except that now, almost half of
the tunes are original instrumental compositions for the organ (ʽI Am
Coming Throughʼ gets to have its title chanted in group harmony form, but
that's about as far as it goes with vocal presence). None of them are
particularly memorable or interesting per se — the themes are fairly basic —
but even the most rhythmically and tonally generic, like the basic blues
shuffle of ʽLowdownʼ, are all quite pleasant for those who like
Preston's style in general.
Of course, his «conversing organ» style is best
appreciated where he is emulating classic melodies: my favorite bit is the
attempt to emulate Little Richard's singing intonations on ʽSlippin' And
Slidin'ʼ — not a lot of rock'n'roll excitement here, but the
comic-seductive vibe is carried over very well, by heavily taxing the organ
keys instead of the vocal cords. ʽIf I Had A Hammerʼ is somewhat less
recognizable, but even more inventive in exploring the organ's capability to
beat the human voice as primary message-carrier.
Overall, though, the whole thing is
surprisingly less exciting than 16 Yr. Old Soul. Maybe it is because of
the backing band, which seems sort of slack and disinterested, acting like a
mere dummy (at least on 16 Yr. Old Soul
there were actual guitar solos, competing with the organ). Maybe it is because
the choice of covers is a bit off (I mean, who the heck is interested in Don
Covay's ʽSoul Meetingʼ?), and the originals aren't quite up to par.
Or maybe it is because, in the end, the whole thing sort of comes across as
just a blunt publicity campaign for the Hammond.
On the other hand, there is no need to be
condescending. Billy's level may be incomparable with that of, say, Jimmy Smith
(it is always tough to compare the levels of «pop» and «jazz» musicians, even
though so few people actually listen to the latter), but this is his vision,
and there was nobody else around with a vision like that in 1965. The Hammond,
with its thick sound and extra electronic capacities, could do lots of tricks
for the rock and pop world that an ordinary piano could never reproduce, and
Billy, both here and elsewhere, is quite keen on discovering as many of these
as possible — pitch, tone, strength, modulation, whatever. What the hell, in a
way, this could be the most exciting
organ ever. I mean, I like Rick Wakeman and all, but maybe whatever he brought
into this world should be described by some other word than «exciting». A thumbs up
here, for reasons that go beyond «historical», even if not too far beyond.
EARLY HITS OF '65 (1965)
1) You've Lost That Lovin'
Feelin'; 2) Eight Days A Week; 3) Downtown; 4) Goldfinger; 5) My Girl; 6) Go Now;
7) Ferry Across The Mersey; 8) Shotgun; 9) Stop! In The Name Of Love; 10) King
Of The Road; 11) The Birds And The Bees; 12) Can't You Hear My Heartbeat.
Not much to say here: as far as I can tell,
most or all of these songs were recorded during the same session that yielded Exciting Organ, so this is a same-style
companion album that is often called a «compilation» — a strange definition,
considering that only a few of these titles seem to have been released as
singles. In any case, it was an
original Vee-Jay LP, re-released on CD thirty years later, and it functions as
part of Billy's legacy, so here you are.
The «hits», of course, are not Billy's, but
other people's — he runs a relatively short gamut here, mostly contemporary
Motown material (ʽMy Girlʼ; Junior Walker's ʽShotgunʼ,
etc.), interspersed with a few oddities, such as a Beatles cover and the latest
Bond song. Since Billy's own compositions are rather slack as far as thematic
hooks are concerned, this is not a big problem, and in terms of capturing the
«spirits» of the originals, he consistently does a very good job — that organ
captures everything, be it the warm romance of Smokey Robinson, the classy
seductiveness of Diana Ross, or the desperate praying of Denny Laine.
Even ʽEight Days A Weekʼ works a fine
charm — in subtle ways, finer than the original, since Billy, being careful to
preserve each vocal note, embellishes them with quirky little flourishes on the
sides, coming out with something more complex and less predictable than Lennon
/ McCartney's original creation (which was great, but lacked development —
once you had your verse, chorus, and middle-eight, the rest of the song was
exactly the same; for Billy, a bare transposition to organ would have been too
boring).
The biggest problem is with the choice of
material — about half of these songs weren't too great in the first place (I
mean, ʽThe Birds And The Bees?ʼ, really?), and I don't quite manage
to see the «fun» in producing all these arrangements. Maybe an entire record's
worth of Beatles covers (they did have enough popular hits by late 1964 to
stuff a 12-song LP, didn't they?) could have been a better idea: in any case,
ʽEight Days A Weekʼ sitting next to ʽGoldfingerʼ does give
a fairly accurate snapshot of the era, which wasn't exactly overpopulated with pop-rock masterpieces,
but doesn't function so well by way of general enjoyment. (Unless you really dig Hammond organ encoding of
Dame Shirley Bassey's acoustics).
WILDEST ORGAN IN TOWN (1966)
1) Midnight Hour; 2) Uptight
(Everything's Alright); 3) A Hard Day's Night; 4) Ain't Got No Time To Play; 5)
Love Makes Me Do Foolish Things; 6) The Duck; 7) Advice; 8) (I Can't Get No)
Satisfaction; 9) I Got You (I Feel Good); 10) It's Got To Happen; 11) Free
Funk; 12) The In Crowd.
The ever more swinging years find Billy Preston
still too shy and afraid to try something that deviates from the established
formula. He does continue to acknowledge the arrival of new trends, styles, and
fashions — covering contemporary pop hits by the dozen — but he does not dare
to sing, still limits his own songwriting to just a small handful of half-assed
instrumentals, and, most importantly, still shows little interest in playing
with a daring, competitive backing band.
In fact, most of the backing players were not
even listed in the credits here — with the exception of Sly Stone, not yet a
man of «The Family», but already a player on the scene, who is also credited
for arranging most of the tracks and co-writing two of Billy's three numbers.
Curious trivia bit: ʽAdviceʼ is probably the first recorded song on
which you get to hear Sly's trademark "I wanna take you higher" bit,
even if the excitement and enthusiasm on this track is on kindergarten level
compared with later Family Stone developments. For some reason, the two artists
find it funny to interweave the riff of ʽLouie Louieʼ into the melody
— in a certain sense, ʽLouie Louieʼ does take you higher, but I wonder if my sense is the same as
theirs.
Anyway, the only real difference is that, the
farther they go, the less these organ rearrangements closely resemble and mimic
the originals — ʽSatisfactionʼ, for instance, is practically
unrecognizable until the brass section starts playing the main riff, at which
point you understand that Billy was
actually translating Jagger's vocals to an organ setting all along. But he
really transforms it into a loose, festive R&B number (somewhat similar to
Otis Redding's take), completely changing the spirit of the Stones to
something more celebratory and less spiteful. (Which is not necessarily a good
thing, but a fairly common one with R&B adaptations of British Invasion
tunes, so we might just as well make our peace with the procedure).
Many of the covers are R&B standards in the
first place, though, and cannot be transformed too deeply — ʽIn The
Midnight Hourʼ, ʽI Feel Goodʼ — so, in the end, it is still more
intriguing and curious to look at Billy handle the other stuff. If ʽSatisfactionʼ rolls along like a merry
dance groove, then ʽA Hard Day's Nightʼ, on the other hand, gets
slowed down and played in almost dirge-like fashion, which is only logical, if
you ask me: this is the kind of
rhythm that would be more appropriate for someone who has just had «a hard
day's night», «working like a dog». Yes, it's sort of sad that the song loses
energy, spirit, catchiness, memorability, and every other reason to exist in
the process — but nice, logical, reasonable try anyway.
On a final note, beware of ʽFree
Funkʼ: despite the title, this is really a slow soul ballad, «freely»
quoting from ʽGeorgia On My Mindʼ and something else that I do not
recognize. Not that the word «funk» had a straight, unambiguous musical meaning
in early 1966, of course, but even back then, it would probably be associated
with something carnal and sexy rather than a slow moving, spiritually-oriented
soul groove. Maybe the record people accidentally switched the title with
ʽIt's Got To Happenʼ — since both are original non-hit compositions,
who would be giving a damn anyway?
Overall, if you only want to have one album of Billy Preston
instrumentals, this might just as well be it, or just about any other one would
do (I would still lean towards 16 Yr.
Old Soul — back then, at least, this formula was still fresh and far away
from being run into the ground). A year later, Billy would follow it with Club Meeting, another similar
«experiment» that hardly merits its own review (the two LPs have been reissued
on a single CD in recent years), except for a brief mention that it does have a
few vocal parts, the first real Billy Preston singing on a Billy Preston album.
He also does ʽSunnyʼ and ʽSummertimeʼ. (I bet you're
already as thrilled as I am).
It is a little sad, actually, that in the end,
Billy had to spend most of the century's greatest musical decade in such a
state of skepticism over his own abilities — the years to come would prove that
he had much more to offer the world than credible, mildly imaginative organ
reworkings of other people's ideas. Who knows, maybe if he had spent those «magic
years» honing his individuality and creativity in more aspects than one, he
could have grown into a major star of the business. Then again, idle
speculation on the subject is none of our
business, either. Simple fact is — early Billy Preston is best enjoyed in a
minimal dosage. One LP only, or, better still, a self-made compilation.
Preferably without ʽGoldfingerʼ on it.
THAT'S THE WAY GOD PLANNED IT (1969)
1) Do What You Want; 2) I Want
To Thank You; 3) Everything's All Right; 4) She Belongs To Me; 5) It Doesn't
Matter; 6) Morning Star; 7) Hey Brother; 8) What About You; 9) Let Us All Get
Together; 10) This Is It; 11) Keep It To Yourself; 12) That's The Way God
Planned It; 13*) Through All Times; 14*) As I Get Older; 15*) That's The Way
God Planned It (alt. version); 16*) Something's Got To Change.
The royal gift to Billy for joining the Beatles
on «The Rooftop», and for generally keeping their spirits up a bit throughout
early 1969, was a contract with Apple, and probably an unwritten pledge on George
Harrison's part to finally promote him as a «real artist» instead of merely
«the wildest organ in town». For that matter, That's The Way God Planned It might be considered the first
«genuine» Preston album — one on which he finally composes and sings most of
his own material the way he wants to, much like Where I'm Coming From would be the «comeout» album for Stevie
Wonder one year later (although the analogy is far from perfect, since Stevie
had already been singing a long time by then, and his emergence as a serious
artist was far more gradual than Billy's — and that's not even beginning to
compare the overall qualities).
Anyway, this is one of Billy's best albums
indeed, but it still isn't particularly great or anything, recommendable mostly
for the enthusiasm and out of curiosity. The major problem, of course, is that
Billy just wasn't a particularly good songwriter or a particularly
awe-inspiring singer. His vocals, now that they are put up front, are those of
an honest, hard-working soul / R'n'B guy, but they do not exactly dethrone Otis
Redding, and only capture a tiny percentage of the shades of a Marvin Gaye. And
his writing is very much
hit-and-miss: as fluent as he always remains on the organ, there is hardly a
single melodic line on the entire record that forms a memorable picture — and
the vocal hooks come sort of unnaturally: already on the first track, the
call-and-response trick of "do what you want to!" — "I will love
you anyway!" sounds like its two parts actually belong in different songs,
and were spliced together in a sincere, but unsuccessful fit of experimentation.
In short, do not look to Billy for compositional genius. Not everyone got an epiphany from being
close to the Beatles for a short period of time.
Even then, That's
The Way God Planned It is a lot of fun. Not just because Preston was obviously
very glad to be making this record, and, if anything, his sense of joy is
fairly infectious, but also because he got to record it with a star-studded
cast — George Harrison, Eric Clapton, even Keith Richards (on bass!) and Ginger
Baker make guest appearances throughout. Since the primary emphasis always
honestly stays on Billy and his keys, it doesn't matter all that much that they
all left traces (I am sure nobody will be able to track down a «definitive
Keith Richards streak» in the basslines), but it may be felt indirectly in the
overall atmosphere: for instance, I am fairly sure it is George adding the subtle
weeping licks to ʽThis Is Itʼ, contributing to making it one of the
most morose-sounding proto-disco numbers ever recorded.
The big breakthrough, and the only track worth
hearing again and again, is, of course, the lengthy title track. Nowadays, most
people (like me) are probably only familiar with the live version that Billy
got to perform on George's Concert For
Bangladesh — that was a good performance indeed, but it failed, or did not
even try to, reproduce the multi-layered grandeur of the original. Here, it is
not even the main part of it that matters (although it certainly is Billy's
finest attempt at conquering the gospel genre), but the long coda where Billy
battles it out with Clapton — the two trade rapid-fire guitar and organ punches
between each other that are far more breathtaking than the chorus mantra.
Herein I move to have the track renamed ʽThat's The Way «God» Planned
Itʼ, considering that it features some of the best licks that «God» laid
down that year, getting in fine shape before the glorious experiences of 1970.
Out of the rest, I could, with a little effort,
single out: ʽThis Is Itʼ for the Harrison-related moodiness already
mentioned; ʽEverything's All Rightʼ with its little comic debt to
ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ (the happy-boppy mood always works well for
«silly Billy»); and ʽIt Doesn't Matterʼ, which sets a fairly gritty
groove (and if that's still Ginger behind the drums, no wonder the massive drum
sound plays a strong hand in it). This is, however, negatively compensated by
several covers that mostly fall flat — Dylan's ʽShe Belongs To Meʼ,
where the jerky, aggressive attitude makes no sense; and an exaggeratedly
sentimental delivery of W. C. Handy's ʽMorning Starʼ that shares all
the irritating clichés of early 1970s «mainstream family entertainment»
of American roots-a-pop. Also, ʽHey Brotherʼ is really ʽHey
Joeʼ without the Hendrix — I suppose the «tribute» must have been
intentional, but it doesn't work anyway.
Still, on the whole, this is a thumbs up,
and not only because of the title track, but also because of Preston's general
charisma. Some people are more than just the sum of mediocre songwriting,
merely competent singing, and professional mastery of an instrument — see the
Grateful Dead for further reference — and with Billy, you will just have to add a mix of simplicity,
sincerity, and sympathy. You might not remember these songs on an individual
level, but unless you are completely immune to the basic charms of
gospel-flavoured R&B (and I could understand that), That's The Way God Planned It will still aromatize the air around
you with some old-fashioned joyful niceness that is not in the least «fake» or
«synthetic». And, to quote Mr. Billy himself, from one of his joyfully nice,
forgettable songs, "for this, I want to thank you".
ENCOURAGING WORDS (1970)
1) Right Now; 2) Little Girl;
3) Use What You Got; 4) My Sweet Lord; 5) Let The Music Play; 6) The Same Thing
Again; 7) I've Got A Feeling; 8) Sing One For The Lord; 9) When You Are Mine;
10) I Don't Want To Pretend; 11) Encouraging Words; 12) All Things Must Pass;
13) You've Been Acting Strange; 14*) As Long As I Got My Baby; 15*) All That
I've Got I'm Gonna Give It To You.
Billy's second and last album for Apple is
frequently singled out as the highest point of his solo career — for which
there certainly has to be some objective basis. Much of the team that would
very soon be working on George Harrison's All
Things Must Pass is already assembled here, including George himself, who
not only oversaw the production, but also contributed material: in fact, both
ʽMy Sweet Lordʼ and ʽAll Things Must Passʼ itself were
first shown the world through Billy
Preston's interpretation, before George could think of them as tested enough to
make the grade on his own solo record.
I do not think we should drift too far away
towards that opposite shore, though: Encouraging
Words is a very good album that has been as unjustly forgotten as
everything else masterminded by «that funny black keyboard guy in the Rooftop
Concert», but fanboyishly overrating it (like Bruce Eder did in his AMG review)
is no solution, either. In particular, ʽMy Sweet Lordʼ is not better than George's own version,
and not just because it lacks the not-yet-invented slide motif, but also
because Billy's religious fervor, no doubt sincere but rather ordinary for a
professional soul/gospel performer («clichéd» if you will), is no match
for the comparatively quiet, restrained, and «earned», if you will, rather than
«in-yer-blood» spirituality of Harrison. Here, it is just a high quality gospel
number, nothing more.
Overall, as usual, the performances are not
memorable in an individualistic manner, and get by on the strength of the
grooves, the collective spirit, tastefulness of the arrangements, and Billy's
personal charisma — the latter is particularly important, because all too
often, he assumes a mentor tone (title track; ʽUse What You Gotʼ),
which could be annoying, but he is also incapable of plunging into a
holier-than-thou attitude: "stop getting jealous of the other
fellows" is a line delivered with perfect credibility, so that you somehow
get to know Billy is just «one of the guys» who mentors you because he cares,
not out of some inflated narcissistic reason.
And, as «one of the guys», Preston simply does
whatever it is his select genre requires him to do. Be sentimental? You got
your ʽLittle Girlʼ, with an exaggerated tearful delivery. Rave and
rant over unrequited love? You got your ʽWhen You Are Mineʼ, with a
funky backbone and a psychotic vocal. Praise the Lord? You got your ʽSing
One For The Lordʼ — slow tempos, gospel choir, the works. Be
transcendental? Here is a cover of George's ʽAll Things Must Passʼ —
very different from the final version, with heavy orchestration instead of the
guitar-brass arrangement that we are all used to. Be socially conscious? The
title track will teach you to "stay in school and don't you be no
dropout" — a pretty reasonable call for the first post-Woodstock year,
even if, for some, it might make Billy look too much like a square (an image he
would soon be growing out of, what with that large head of Afro hair and
touring with the Stones at their wildest and all).
The only truly
unpredictable choice here is the brave stab at ʽI've Got A Feelingʼ:
you'd think that if there had to be one song exported by Billy from the Let It Be sessions, it would rather be
ʽLet It Beʼ itself, or a torch ballad like ʽThe Long And Winding
Roadʼ — okay, if it necessarily had to be something from the Rooftop
Concert, it could have been a soul-burner like ʽDon't Let Me Downʼ,
but ʽI've Got A Feelingʼ? That
one is almost psychedelic, and it was quite an achievement for Billy to sense
its true funky soul and turn it into a playful groove (although the conversion
of Lennon's counter-melody into an alternate megaphone-processed nasal overdub
does not work at all). Still, of course, it lacks the snappy bite of the
original — and the strangest thing about it is that Billy's keyboard work on
the Beatles' recording is actually more impressive than on his own
interpretation, where, as the «master of his domain», he could be expected to
turn in a much more flashy performance.
There is
no flash whatsoever on Encouraging Words,
though — not even a Billy/Eric duel like the one on the coda to ʽThat's
The Way God Planned Itʼ — and that's the way Billy planned it, to be just a friendly soul/R&B party with
a bunch of friends. And what friends — Derek & The Dominos in their
entirety, plus Harrison, plus Ringo, plus Jim Price and Bobby Keyes on
horns, plus the Edwin Hawkins Singers on
backing vocals. There is really no thinking of this record in terms of «hooks»
and «pre-meditated melodies» — much of it must have been created right then and
there on the spot, and almost everything sounds terrific as long as it's on;
then, as the individual moments quickly fade from memory, the overall warmth
still remains for quite a bit of time. Not a great record, perhaps, but an
encouraging one indeed — thumbs up.
I WROTE A SIMPLE SONG (1971)
1) Should've Known Better; 2)
I Wrote A Simple Song; 3) John Henry; 4) Without A Song; 5) The Looner Tune; 6)
The Bus; 7) Outa-Space; 8) You Done Got Older; 9) Swing Down Chariot; 10) God
Is Great; 11) My Country 'Tis Of Thee.
Sporting a slightly tougher image here: still
as deeply religious and idealistic as ever, yes, but is that a slightly
threatening «street punk look» that I feel is directed at me from the sleeve
photo? Nah... can't be, really. Then again, the funk hits pretty hard on this
record — clearly, Billy feels a strong need to emphasize that he is cool with
the rock crowds of the day, and that it is really the last thing on his mind to
get pigeonholed as a «ladies' man» or a «spokesman for God», or both. He still
doth speak for God on occasion (ʽGod Is Greatʼ, yeah, right), but
note the complete absence of sappy ballads — in fact, the title track is, in
itself, an angered rant against sappy
ballads: "They took my simple song / They changed the words and the melody
/ Made it all sound wrong / Now it sounds like a symphony", he complains.
Who knows, this might even have been a direct jab at Phil Spector and his
strings on ʽThe Long And Winding Roadʼ, or something.
In any case, the approach does work: there are
no particularly stunning highlights on this album (no George Harrison covers,
no mega-epic production triumphs like on ʽThat's The Way God Planned
Itʼ, etc.), but no particular sentimental lowlights either, with the
possible exception of the very last track — for some reason, at the last moment
we are presented with a weepy anthemic outburst of patriotism (ʽMy Country
'Tis Of Theeʼ) that misses the mark. Basically, unless you are Jimi
Hendrix or the Sex Pistols, you should probably avoid putting your mark on
century-old anthems: singing them directly is a corny move, and trying to find
your own unique, refreshing interpretation is a risky one — particularly for
Billy, who ain't no performing genius, and, despite all his personal charisma,
cannot hope to get by on sincerity and passion alone for too long; and adding
strings and a gospel choir does not make life any easier.
But disregard the country and vouch for space
instead — the instrumental ʽOuta-Spaceʼ was initially released as
the B-side to the title track, then gradually overtook it in popularity and
became one of Billy's most classic numbers: a rather daring experiment in
funky, wah-wah-treated, clavinet composing, with Billy hanging on a wobbly,
scratchy groove and the rest of the band jamming rings around his simple, but
infectious phrasing. The effect is somewhat close to the one achieved in
ʽSuperstitionʼ — although the latter employed a more difficult chord
sequence, and was overall «tighter» in the composition sense, this one not only
comes earlier, but has much more of a «nasty party» atmosphere.
That said, even if the punchy, prickly clavinet
does make ʽOuta-Spaceʼ into the most memorable event on the album,
the overall strength of the grooves is not any less on such workouts as
ʽThe Busʼ and ʽShould've Known Betterʼ (nope, not a Beatles
cover here at all: most of the material is quite rigorously self-penned). The
pop spirit comes out on the upbeat, jumpy ʽLooner Tuneʼ (which, for
some reason, quotes from ʽEntry Of The Gladiatorsʼ on the chorus,
adding some psychedelic gloss to the circus atmosphere), and most of the gospel
is either disguised as mid-tempo funk once again (ʽGod Is Greatʼ) or
gets a nice rootsy sheen (ʽSwing Down Chariotʼ).
The album marks the end of Billy's «star luck»
period — all the fabulous guests, courtesy of the Beatles connection, that
contributed heavily to the star power of That's
The Way and Encouraging Words,
have finally packed and gone home. However, Harrison still stays behind for a
few guitar and dobro flourishes, and Quincy Jones is responsible for the
strings and horns arrangements (which might be the reason why the strings
never sound annoying); notorious Motown session player David T. Walker is
responsible for most of the guitar work, but most of the time, assuredly sticks
in the background (overall, there is very little genuine «soloing» going on
here — emphasis is always on collective groove playing).
In short — this is just another good Billy
Preston album, designed to heat up the party and cheer up the heart, not to
blow the mind or anything (even if ʽOuta-Spaceʼ seems to set its
sights a little bit higher), which corresponds to a modest, easy-going,
quickly-passing thumbs
up in my book.
MUSIC IS MY LIFE (1972)
1) We're Gonna Make It; 2) One
Time Or Another; 3) Blackbird; 4) I Wonder; 5) Will It Go Round In Circles; 6)
Ain't That Nothing; 7) God Loves You; 8) Make The Devil Mad; 9) Nigger Charlie;
10) Heart Full Of Sorrow; 11) Music Is My Life; 12*) Slaughter.
Heavier on the Afro hairstyle, but somewhat
lighter on sharp funk, Music Is My Life
is neither a very interesting title for an album, nor a very good album as
such. It does, however, establish the basic formula of a «typical post-gospel
Billy Preston hit single»: a cheery, colorful, brass-aided R&B dance
number, impressive in form, lightweight in spirit. That is ʽWill It Go
Round In Circlesʼ, heavily derivative of the early, nonchalant, happy
days of Sly & The Family Stone, well-rounded and catchy, but not at all
meaningful, as illustrated by the lyrics already: "I've got a story, ain't
got no moral / Let the bad guy win every once in a while / Will it go round in
circles? / Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky?". Nice lines, good
spinning groove, but the fact that it became one of only two of Billy's songs
to hit No. 1 (and that the second one would be appropriately called
ʽNothing From Nothingʼ) is rather telling.
It is
the best song on the album, though — and the second best one is a little
slower, a little more New Orleanian in style, and called... ʽAin't That
Nothingʼ (go figure): almost as if some subconscious pressure was driving
Billy to acknowledge that he has grown up to become a master of amicable,
innocent, sometimes even charming «R&B-fluff» whose faint magic is hanging
on little other than his amicable, innocent, charming personality. Well, that
and a few memorable-through-quirkiness brass flourishes every now and then.
In comparison to this «fluff», attempts at
getting somewhat more serious every now and then are not necessarily rotten,
but generally fail to impress. The full-bodied funky arrangement of ʽBlackbirdʼ
is creative, with a well-arranged mish-mash of guitars, organs, and
harpsichords, but it also illustrates the «less is more» principle — the song
hit far harder when it was just Paul and his quiet acoustic guitar, whereas
here all the focus has been dissipated, with the noblest of aims, perhaps, but
the feeblest of results. The funk-gospel numbers (ʽGod Loves Youʼ,
ʽMake The Devil Madʼ) are tepid, hard-to-scale grooves. The ballads
(ʽI Wonderʼ) are sort of second-rate Al Green without a great
vocalist to propel them upwards.
And then there is ʽNigger Charlieʼ, a
song apparently written in «honor» of the then-current blaxploitation movie The Legend Of Nigger Charlie (two stars
from Ebert, in case you're interested) — six minutes of an «ominous» funk
jam, with generic «black pride» lyrics alternating with some very boring piano
/ guitar interplay. I mean, either you are really into hot funk, and then you
got to make that wah-wah guitar loud, screechy, drunk-off-its-head, or you are into moralizing, and then
you do not make a song like this run over six minutes. This is neither a good
groove nor a successful message — what were
you thinking, Billie?
Bottomline: other than the two friendly
danceable numbers, the only other thing worth of minor interest on this album
is the title track — not so much a proper «song» as a pseudo-improvised
«musical credo». Just Billy at the piano (sometimes jumping over to the organ),
playing snippets of various melodies in various genres and humming to himself about
how music is... well, a gas and all that. Again, nothing phenomenal, but
charismatic to boot (and the whole enterprise probably inspired him to plan
his next album, which, as an album,
would be far more interesting than this here collection of a few mild successes
and many languid misfires).
If you do
insist on getting acquainted with Music
Is My Life because music is your life, be sure to get the re-issue that
adds the single-only ʽSlaughterʼ from 1972 as a bonus track — that one is a genuine «hard-funker»,
with a mad, outta-this-world bassline, a proto-industrial synth grind pattern
terrorizing the listener, and an aggressive, tear-down-the-wall organ
«slaughtering» from Billy. God only knows why he never managed to get that angry while recording the LP.
Friendliness is all right and all that, but a rock'n'roll artist has just got to go angry-crazy every once in a
while, even if he happens to be the famous Billy Preston, «The Positive Vibe
That Delayed The Beatles' Split». Hence, a thumbs down for the album as a whole — but if
Billy wants me to say that I really like him, no problem. I really like him.
Swell guy.
EVERYBODY LIKES SOME KIND OF MUSIC (1973)
1) Everybody Likes Some Kind
Of Music; 2) You Are So Unique; 3) How Long Has The Train Been Gone; 4) My Soul
Is A Witness; 5) Sunday Morning; 6) You've Got Me For Company; 7) Listen To The
Wind; 8) Everybody Likes Some Kind Of Music (reprise); 9) Space Race; 10) Do
You Love Me; 11) I'm So Tired; 12) It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding; 13)
Minuet For Me.
Billy Preston unofficially recommends: if you
do not know how to write a good song, write a good concept, and you will have
yourself a perfect excuse for each individual instance, because didn't your
mother ever explain to you that the sum is always greater than the parts?
And the concept is good out here, because it is quite simple, unambiguous, and
universally relevant. "Everybody likes some kind of music" is, after
all, a nearly-true statement (especially if we include Justin Bieber and Taylor
Swift into the «some kind of music» category), and every nearly-true statement
like that can easily do with a concept album built around it. In this
particular case, Billy exerts himself in producing a set of songs — all but one
written or co-written by himself in person — that represent, one way or
another, all the musical genres he had come in touch with over the previous two
decades. Not all genres as such — you
won't see any Indian ragas or heavy metal on here — but as much as one Billy
Preston can handle in half an hour.
The challenge, as such, would be interesting in
the hands of any professional artist — even if the ambitions are not supported
by actual genius, the diversity of approaches, from the very outset, will
stimulate curiosity. Technically, the idea is carried out well: there is never
any feeling here that Billy is doing «something he shouldn't ought to», not
even when he is pulling a Chopin on ʽMinuet For Meʼ, daring to close
the record with a little traditionalist classical composition. But in
substantial terms, of course, all of these songs are rather weak on their own.
Besides the «bold» advance into classical territory,
tackled genres include: (a) light lounge jazz (ʽHow Long Has The Train
Been Goneʼ, perhaps with a slight subtle reference to Duke Ellington); (b)
gospel — Billy's mother milk (the fast-paced ʽMy Soul Is A Witnessʼ);
(c) country-western — the somewhat deceptive ʽSunday Morningʼ, which
starts out totally in ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ mode, but then quickly
moves from ska to banjo-adorned cowboy territory; (d) lush pop balladry
(ʽYou've Got Me For Companyʼ — as if we didn't realize that already);
(e) gritty electronic funk — ʽSpace Raceʼ, a direct, but not as
particularly interesting, sequel to ʽOuta Spaceʼ; (f) blues-de-luxe —
ʽDo You Love Meʼ, which would eventually serve as the lazy basis for
The Rolling Stones' ʽMelodyʼ on Black
And Blue; (g) Bob Dylan — with an ominously orchestrated and slightly
funkified take on ʽIt's Alright Maʼ which is... alright, I guess.
With the addition of a few «regular» R&B
pieces like ʽListen To The Windʼ, this does broaden Billy's usual
scope a lot — he'd never ventured into pure jazz or country territory before,
let alone classical — and, combined with his ever-present charisma, makes for a
fun listen. That said, what the album lacks in the process is one or two
standout tracks: all of these exercises are predictably formulaic and, for the
most part, exploit progressions that are so standard and so over-abused that it
makes no sense whatsoever to discuss the numbers on their own.
As an experiment, the album «makes the grade»,
but is quite forgettable once the grade has been made — proving, unfortunately,
that not only is Billy Preston no John Lennon/Paul McCartney combined, but he
ain't even no Todd Rundgren (much as I consider Todd Rundgren seriously
overrated by the hipster crowd as an exemplary pop master). That said, Everybody Likes Some Kind Of Music got
as much soul as any given Billy Preston album, and if you are not into Billy
Preston for the soul, I have no idea what else is there that you might be into
Billy Preston for. Oh, and the overall production and playing are at the usual
high / tasteful level for the early 1970s, but if we are talking 1973, that is
to be expected, on the whole.
LIVE EUROPEAN TOUR (1974)
1) Day Tripper; 2) The Bus; 3)
Let It Be; 4) Will It Go Round In Circles; 5) Let's Go Get Stoned; 6) Space
Race; 7) Amazing Grace; 8) That's The Way God Planned It; 9) Outa Space; 10*)
Day Tripper; 11*) The Bus; 12*) Let It Be; 13*) Let's Go Get Stoned; 14*)
Billy's Bag; 15*) Will It Go Round In Circles; 16*) Outa Space; 17*) Higher;
18*) Get Back.
Maybe this is it. Yep, if you are
wholeheartedly determined to own a Billy Preston album because he has such a
cute gap in his front teeth — but are stubbornly determined to own only one Billy Preston album because he only
got one gap in his teeth, or for any
other such reason — this live performance from the time when the man was at the
peak of his powers (no matter how high one believes that peak to have been)
might be a better choice than even the best studio records.
These recordings were made on the brief European
tour where Billy supported the Rolling Stones — the same tour that did not
yield the official release of the famous Brussels
Affair show, but did yield a live album for Billy, and we do have the
Stones to thank for that. First, because it is a real mean feat to be the
opening act for the Stones, particularly around 1973: with all the people
gathered to see a real hot rock'n'roll show, you have no choice but to work
double hard on the atmosphere — leave behind most of the sentimentality and
concentrate on the fire.
Second, because I have always felt that what
was missing the most on Billy's albums was the presence of a reliable guitar
sidekick — somebody who could, on a steady basis, provide much-needed sparring
partnership, push the guy towards reaching new extremes, crunch-ify the proceedings
and add diversity. Somebody like Clapton, whose presence on the original
ʽThat's The Way God Planned Itʼ made it so unforgettable.
Well — turns out that for most of the duration
of Billy's set, none other than Mick Taylor himself, warming up for the main
gig, would come out and play along. It goes without saying that, consequently,
the album is an absolute must-have for all those who hold a special place in
their hearts for Mick's guitar tones and fluent bluesy phrasing. In fact, one
could argue that it is on Billy's songs where Taylor really gets to play his
heart out: with the Stones, the guy was «contractually» held back both in the
studio and (to a lesser extent) on the stage, but with Billy, there was no such
obligation — so that every time Mick launches into a solo on here, all the
attention is immediately diverted to his playing... and Billy is such a nice
guy that he doesn't mind too much: in fact, he does not fail to remember to
thank «his friend Mick Taylor» at the end of the show.
The latest CD edition of the experience
actually contains two versions of the
album: one from the US and one from the UK market, which differ quite
significantly — about half of the tracks actually represent alternate
versions, plus the UK album has ʽBilly's Bagʼ and ʽGet
Backʼ on it, whereas the US version replaces them with a closer-to-home
instrumental take on ʽAmazing Graceʼ. So, despite all the
similarities, there is really very little duplication going on here, and we
should be quite happy with eighty minutes of live Billy/Mick material instead
of forty.
Billy winds himself up fairly quickly — after a
brief two-minute warm-up with ʽDay Tripperʼ (yes, the Beatles crop up
quite often on this record, but, given the particularities of Billy's biography,
we could not expect otherwise), we get a ten-minute monster jam based around
ʽThe Busʼ, which is as blisteringly raw and kick-ass as the album
gets in general. With Preston hopping around from organ to Moog and back again,
and Taylor having the permission to throw his hard blues chops in the spotlight
anytime he feels like it, the ten minutes pass by in a flash — and at the jam's
peak, with the two players «weaving» their lead lines around each other, they
easily build up as much rock'n'roll excitement as the Stones themselves.
In a few tiny areas, the energy level might
seem to sag a little — for instance, Billy's «comical» impersonation of Ray
Charles on ʽLet's Go Get Stonedʼ is rather misguided, and
ʽAmazing Graceʼ does not truly find its voice until Taylor joins in
at the end — but for most of the time, the heat is totally on: if ʽThe
Busʼ were to still leave any doubts, the monster run through ʽOuta
Spaceʼ will dissipate the last of them. The final part of that jam
features a particularly tense duel between Billy, getting a vile, poisonous
tone out of the Moog, and Taylor, spurred on to new heights of slide-playing
power (UK version only — the keyboard mix on the US version is not good enough,
although Taylor's kick-ass licks are just as good).
Overall, this is an essential listen for all
those who tend to think of Preston as somewhat of a lite-entertainment «sissy»,
all gospel anthems and sentimental ballads and fluffy pop songs about nothing
from nothing (speaking of fluffy pop songs, even ʽWill It Go Round In
Circlesʼ sounds tough and threatening in this here context). Were it so,
the Stones would hardly have entertained the idea to pick on him as a support
act (not to mention playing keyboards on their own part of the set) — and
while, on his own, he would probably never be in a position to steal the show,
the subtle alliance with Mick Taylor almost
threatens to do just that. At the very least, I'd bet there was never any
clamoring of «we want the Stones!» during Billy's star time. Thumbs up.
THE KIDS & ME (1974)
1) Tell Me You Need My Loving;
2) Nothing From Nothing; 3) Struttin'; 4) Sister Sugar; 5) Sad Sad Song; 6) You
Are So Beautiful; 7) Sometimes I Love You; 8) St. Elmo; 9) John The Baptist;
10) Little Black Boys And Girls; 11) Creature Feature.
A perfect title, actually — if there is one
soul performer who might be said to have it special for the kids, it is
unquestionably Billy: never going heavy on 16+ themes, always loaded with sunny
charisma, yet very rarely lapsing into overt tastelessness. Formally, this is
not a «kiddie» album, but it is very
lightweight in attitude and atmosphere, almost intentionally targeted at those
who like it easy-going, unburdened with too much pretense or complexity, but
still retaining some basic rock'n'roll grittiness, for the sake of the
reputation.
Billy's main inspiration in those days seems to
have been Stevie Wonder — it is no coincidence that both of them used to be the opening acts for the Stones, Stevie in
1972, Billy in 1973, and there is nothing surprising that Stevie's own
sunny-optimistic style, borrowing all the brightest sides from ye olde R&B,
jazz, and pop traditions, must have inspired Preston to try going in the same
direction. Thus, The Kids & Me
is like a lite, much simplified version of Talking
Book (Innervisions was
chronologically closer, but had much more socially-conscious tenseness to it —
not that Billy is never socially conscious, but that side of his is downplayed
on The Kids & Me), with more
emphasis on dance beats, but the same idea of merging the «catchy pop-hit» with the «building up an R&B groove»
approach, and dressing it all up in modernized production values with a buzzing
synthesizer on top.
The inspiration proved worthwhile — the album
gave Billy his second and last #1, ʽNothing From Nothingʼ, a song
that is even fluffier and sillier than ʽWill It Go Round In Circlesʼ,
but even more catchy, sort of a fast-tempo vaudeville number with layers of
piano, banjo, and brass combining, respectively, the atmospheres of music
hall, country-western, and New Orleanian party muzak. The song may be easily
despised, but it is hardly worth wasting your despisal generator on such an
innocent, cuddly trifle. Besides, it was the first musical number ever to be
performed on Saturday Night Live, so
it's already made history, want it or not.
Almost everything else here is just as short,
sweet, (more often than not) catchy, and up to the point. The only exception is
the slow anthemic love ballad ʽYou Are So Beautifulʼ, which Billy
happened to co-write with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys — and which Beach
Boys fans will consequently recognize from Dennis' own live performances (e. g.
on Live At Knebworth). Of course,
the fully worked out, elaborately arranged version here is the one that shows
the song's true potential — a little cheesy, but passionately and honestly
sung, with an odd, (no doubt) Stevie-influenced, synth tone smearing weird
electronic honey on top.
Around this ballad, strategically placed in the
middle, all the little ditties hop around, shifting their places in the blink
of an eye — funky instrumentals (ʽStruttin'ʼ), proto-disco with a
head-spinning strings-to-brass marriage (ʽSister Sugarʼ), almost-completely-disco
with metronomic beats (ʽSometimes I Love Youʼ) and Bible-for-juniors
adaptations (ʽJohn The Baptistʼ, possibly the most upbeat song ever
dedicated to the poor martyr — and sort of a blueprint for nearly the entire career
of The Average White Band), and, at the end of the day, a «mock-spooky»
B-movie-parody (ʽCreature Featureʼ, where Billy fools around with a
talkbox, correctly using it as a tool for producing goofiness, rather than
going the Peter Frampton route and trying to employ its potential with
«serious» purposes).
On the whole, The Kids & Me is a surprisingly «adequate» record, one on which
there is never any feeling that Billy — a «limited» artist, for sure — may be
overstepping his limits, stretching out in directions that he really cannot
handle. For a «deeper» Billy Preston — deep enough, that is, to talk to God and
humanity in general, but not deep enough to say a lot of interesting and original
things to either — Encouraging Words
or its predecessor still remain the basic standard, but the «fluffy» Billy
Preston never got any more charming than on this record, where the fun almost
literally drips through his fingers. Thumbs up.
IT'S MY PLEASURE (1975)
1) Fancy Lady; 2) Found The
Love; 3) That's Life; 4) Do It While You Can; 5) It's My Pleasure; 6) Song Of
Joy; 7) I Can't Stand It; 8) All Of My Life.
The balance is a little upset here: compared to
The Kids & Me, Billy's follow-up
only has eight compositions on it, and you can guess why that is — either out
of a general lack of ideas, or because the dance attitude of the age prevailed
so heavily, many of the songs are cruelly stretched out, usually way past the
point at which they have anything to say to anything but your limbs.
No, actually, scrape that from the record: ʽI
Can't Stand Itʼ, one of the album's longest numbers, is not about dancing
at all — it is a slow, moody, pensive instrumental that could have been
brilliant if not for the fact that all of its brilliance is immediately
unveiled in the first twenty-five seconds; from then on, it is all either an
infinite number of repetitions or a few sidetracking, distracting solo
passages. That is Billy Preston in a nutshell for you: one good idea makes the
man so happy that he smears it all over the plate until it ends up looking...
well, kinda thin for an idea.
There is also a more pronounced emphasis on
synthesizers throughout, although Billy strictly adheres to the Stevie Wonder
formula, preferring a guitar-like sound to his electronics rather than using
them to emulate strings and organs, like many (if not most) of his
contemporaries. This makes the album somewhat dated, but not in an ugly way —
the instruments sound live enough and sufficiently emotional, much like Billy
himself, whose optimism and energy was still pulsating — perhaps boosted
somewhat by the success of ʽNothing From Nothingʼ.
Other than ʽI Can't Stand Itʼ (which
should have been compressed to three minutes), the main highlights here are:
ʽFancy Ladyʼ, a bouncy-catchy duet with Syreeta Wright (marking the
beginning of a long-term partnership: apparently, a fancy for synthesizers was
not everything that Billy inherited
from Stevie Wonder — his ex-wife and partner, too, had made the grade);
ʽThat's Lifeʼ, the album's disco-est number that is simply infectiously
enthusiastic; and the almost surprisingly moving solo piano ballad ʽSong
Of Joyʼ, elevated from fodder level to something higher by the unexpected
bass twist at the end of chorus — just as you become assured that this is just
one of those «thank-you-for-all-the-happiness» songs, the melody swerves and
enters darker territory, with a big question mark that might make you want to
revisit it some other day.
Still, there are serious disappointments, such
as the drastically overlong ʽDo It While You Canʼ, a rather pointless
soft-funk jam that is not particularly salvaged by Stevie Wonder's harmonica
parts, as the song never really decides what sort of mood it is aiming for. The
rest of the tracks, too, are somewhat non-descript, and given how few of them
there are overall, It's My Pleasure
shows the curve going down again — not a bad record by all means, what with the
creative synth sound and the esteemed guest stars (and I haven't even mentioned
a certain «Hari Georgeson» adding guitar ornaments to ʽFound A
Loveʼ), but where The Kids & Me
had Billy in full adequate control of his element, this here is yet another
pretext to showcase his limitations. And so I'd like to give it a thumbs down,
but «officially» I won't do that — there is so much worse to come.
BILLY PRESTON (1976)
1) Do What You Want; 2) Girl;
3) Bells; 4) I've Got The Spirit; 5) Ecstasy; 6) Bad Case Of Ego; 7) Take Time
To Figure It Out; 8) Let The Music Play; 9) Simplify Your Life; 10) Let's Make
Love; 11) When You Are Mine.
A self-titled album that comes in the middle of
an artist's career is usually taken to signify a «reboot» of sorts — «please
allow me to re-introduce myself», «now I'm twice the man I used to be», that
sort of thing. And indeed, Billy is photographed on the cover in an
introductory pose — in a new and, frankly speaking, rather disturbing light.
With the huge Afro hair cut away to make room for the brand new top hat, the
setup suggests Vegas glitz, and the chronological context suggests disco-rama.
In this context, even the familiar tooth gap begins to look corny, rather than
reassuring, as it always used to be.
Next, a brief glance at the track listing shows
that at least three of the tracks are re-recordings — one number from That's The Way God Planned It (ʽDo
What You Wantʼ), two more from Encouraging
Words (ʽLet The Music Playʼ and ʽWhen You Are Mineʼ).
More cause for worrying: since it would clearly be hard to improve on these
songs' melodic genius, it is more likely that they were singled out for experimental
treatment — restructure and polish the grooves to fit the spirit of
contemporary dance pop. And what do you know — that is exactly what they were singled out for, as becomes evident from the
very first seconds.
Essentially, Billy Preston is a lite-disco album, reducing most of Billy's
traditional sides (social message-oriented soul, party/booty-oriented R&B,
heaven-bound gospel, and a little bit of sentimental balladry) to one single
invariant. There are a couple exceptions, but for the most part, this is all
just one non-stop crystal ball wave of entertainment. It doesn't sound awful at
all — behind all the disco «smoothing» of the old funk grooves, Billy's backing
band is still playing live and having fun, and it even sounds like Billy
himself is having fun, even with the top hat on. But, as could be expected,
there is next to nothing to distinguish it from its multiple brethren.
Guest stars are mostly wasted — supposedly,
Merry Clayton (of ʽGimmie Shelterʼ fame) is somewhere here adding
hardly noticeable background vocals, and if you pay close attention, you will
witness Jeff Beck playing a really mean, revved-up fusion solo at the end of
ʽBad Case Of Egoʼ, almost completely buried under the horns and
vocals. Horns, by the way, are provided by Tower Of Power, which usually means
quality, but it's not as if anybody took real good care of the arrangements
here — everything is fluent enough, but completely passable.
There is but one instrumental this time around,
and it's probably the best of the lot — the slow orchestrated «blues-waltz» of
ʽEcstasyʼ, with tense, wailing synth and guitar solos, goes rather
brusquely against the prevailing disco grain. Unfortunately, it has no
autonomous, overriding theme to it, but it is still a serious piece of work,
the only one here that I wouldn't mind «anthologizing» if Billy's post-1975
career is ever considered to qualify for selection. (Most people would probably
slobber over ʽBad Case Of Egoʼ just because it has Jeff on it, but at
least on ʽEcstasyʼ you can actually hear the guitar, even if it is only played by Steve Beckmeier).
That said, I will not denigrate the album even
further with a thumbs down, not this time, either, because any record that has
a cheery, lively feel like that, generated by one of the cheeriest guys in the
business, is OK by me. Going disco may have killed off any serious aspirations
that Billy's mid-1970s career could contain (what with all the Stevie Wonder
collaborations, etc.), but it did not exactly kill off his spirit — just singed
off some of his hair.
A WHOLE NEW THING (1977)
1) Whole New Thing; 2) Disco
Dancin'; 3) Complicated Sayings; 4) Attitudes; 5) I'm Really Gonna Miss You; 6)
Wide Stride; 7) You Got Me Buzzin'; 8) Sweet Marie; 9) Happy; 10) Touch Me
Love; 11) You Don't Have To Go.
When Sly Stone, Billy's good friend and
old-time mentor, titled his debut album A
Whole New Thing back in 1967, this was sort of understandable — it might
not have been the most innovative album of the year, given all the fierce
competition, but at least it was a
new thing, whole or partial. When, ten years later, Billy himself named his
far-from-first album A Whole New Thing,
it only served to exacerbate the differences between a rough, but active genius
like Sly and a pleasant, but mediocre chap like Billy. Most likely, the title
simply refers to the disco wave — even though this was already Billy's second
album in that stylistics, and the disco movement itself was far from a «whole
new thing» in mid-1977 (although, granted, the album was released about half a year prior to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack).
Anyway, this is an even less impressive /
memorable affair than Billy Preston,
even though it is almost equally likeable while it's on, and for the same
reason: no slick, stiffening overproduction. Even the cheesiest entry,
conveniently named ʽDisco Dancin'ʼ, features perfectly normal organ
backing, perfectly lively string countermelodies, and a perfectly hearty Latin
percussion break — so the tune could only be «condemned» from a purely ethical
point of view (as in, "it is morally pernicious to sing songs about the
joys of disco dancin'... try to be properly spiritual and choose ʽBlitzkrieg
Bopʼ instead"). And songs that are not at all «lyrically defiant» —
title track; ʽYou Got Me Buzzin'ʼ, etc. — are unimpeachable
whatsoever. Which is not to say that there is anything particularly insightful
to be remarked about them.
There are two instrumentals, of which the
briefer ʽAttitudesʼ features some nice two-piano sparring between
Billy and another keyboard player, while the lengthier ʽWide Strideʼ
indulges in lite fusion with some free-flowing synth improv. There are a couple
of obligatory ballads, too, of which ʽI'm Really Gonna Miss Youʼ is
the more soulful, but less engaging one, and ʽSweet Marieʼ is the
lushier-sexier one, and probably, by a tiny margin, the best song on the album.
The credit list, this time around, features
next to no celebrities, unless one counts Marc Bolan's soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend
Gloria Jones on backing vocals, and... uh... percussionist Ollie Brown who
appears on the Stones' Love You Live
album as Charlie's aide-de-camp. Not surprisingly, not a single instrumental
part ever stands out bar Billy's own — not that anything needs to stand out, because almost everything on here was designed
as entertaining dance fodder, with no serious ambitions whatsoever. (Actually,
at the time Billy was saving his serious ambitions for a separate line of
pure-gospel albums — the first one, Behold,
would come out only a year later. However, the fact that this line is
frequently omitted from published discographies is quite telling; supposedly,
if you want late 1970s Billy, you will do better with Billy the disco dancer
than Billy the Lord's man).
LATE AT NIGHT (1979)
1) Give It Up, Hot; 2) Late At
Night; 3) All I Wanted Was You; 4) You; 5) I Come To Rest In You; 6) It Will
Come In Time; 7) Lovely Lady; 8) With You I'm Born Again; 9) Sock-It Rocket.
Mediocrity notwithstanding, it has to be recognized that Billy never
really made a truly «bad» disco album, despite becoming so deeply stuck in the
genre and still sticking to it even at the height of the «disco sucks»
backlash. In fact, his last disco-era album, and also his first for Motown
after the expiration of his A&M contract, might be his finest — despite the
utterly godawful album sleeve (which would still be overwhelmed in
godawfulness by the next album, but we do have to remember that the visual
standards of mainstream cool do not always
correlate with musical quality... well, they tend to, but they don't always do it... well, they usually do, but there are exceptions...
well, yeah, it's like about 95% to 5% exceptions, but still... well all right,
probably more like 99.1% to 0.9%... well, we do have to be open-minded about
it, don't we?).
Two ballads, one instrumental groove, and six
disco-dance vocal numbers. The only song that made any sort of impact here is
ʽWith You I'm Born Againʼ, the sentimental oh-so-adult contemporary
duet with Syreeta written for the forgotten comedy Fast Break. The song quickly overshadowed the movie, became a big
international hit, and allegedly raised the birth rate in several countries by
a few percent — the last statement is a guess, but even professional haters of
the sappy ballad style will have to admit that Syreeta's honey-purr, carefully
wrapped in harps and violins, does have the properties of a sexual stimulant (not
so sure about Billy's contribution — friendly charisma is one thing, but as a
«ladies' man», he is no Al Green or Marvin Gaye, whereas Syreeta really has one
of the sexiest voices of her generation). The melody, alas, is almost unbearably
mushy, but this was the age of Xanadu, after all.
The album in general sounds nothing like the
hit, though — it's packed with bubbling disco grooves that are not in the least
offensive, as Billy's large backing band still plays it out like a real band
rather than a set of sonic robots producing basic rhythms for aerobic purposes.
Funky guitar and keyboard leads, brisk Latin percussion, hot live sax breaks,
vocal hooks — nothing outstanding, as usual, but everything perfectly
listenable. Actually, ʽGive It Up, Hotʼ that opens te album is almost
close to being outstanding — the chorus, dominated by Gloria Jones and her
backing girls, raises the playfulness bar much higher than the first forty-five
seconds could suggest; at least, the girls push the limits a little further
than Billy usually does by himself.
Of the other songs, the funniest ones are those
where Billy still indulges in his «kids-and-I» spirit, adding ska-influenced
choruses or breaks over the disco skeletons — particularly ʽIt Will Come
In Timeʼ, which is not really any less deserving than ʽNothing From
Nothingʼ. On the other hand, the instrumental ʽSock-It Rocketʼ
is disappointing: it sounds no different from all the vocal numbers where the
biggest attraction is the vocal hook, but... no vocal hook, and Billy's
synthesizer improvs are getting less and less imaginative with age.
Overall, this is one of those albums that can
actually make one lament over the
passing of the «classic» disco age — at least you can occasionally get yourself
a human-driven rhythm section, and such ideas as «guitar / bass interplay» or
«no pre-programmed keyboards» are still in the air. Basically, you can overcome the limitations of the
disco beat if you still preserve the notion of good taste — but you just can't
beat a MIDI protocol. Mild, but certain thumbs up.
BILLY PRESTON & SYREETA (1981)
1) Someone Special; 2)
Searchin'; 3) Just For You; 4) It's So Easy; 5) A Long And Lasting Love; 6)
Love; 7) One More Try; 8) Hey You; 9) A New Way To Say I Love You; 10) What We
Did For Love.
It's almost tedious in its predictability — the
Eighties are upon us, and with the first year of the new decade, comes the
first genuinely awful album in Billy Preston's discography. And what a sad bit
of un-luck, too, that it had to be a duet album with Syreeta Wright, whose
sweet voice is the only redeemable feature of the record — and even then, only
barely.
Apparently, Motown wished to exploit the
success of ʽWith You I'm Born Againʼ to the utmost limit, and steered
the two artists towards pooling their talents for a whole session, evenly split
between contemporary teenage dance-pop and contemporary adult balladry. In
1979, that could have worked — the dance-pop, at least, given how ʽIt Will
Come In Timeʼ still managed to be fun in Billy's usual «one for the kids»
way. But now, with «electro-funk» sweeping the waves, synthesizer markets
overstocked with brand new production waiting to be exploited, and Prince and
Michael Jackson setting new creative standards for dance music that ruined
everybody not fully up to the same levels of creativity, «the average
mainstream» was going down the drain so fast, it could almost make you wanna
cry for the passing of the disco era.
Like I said, this album is atrocious — first
and foremost, it is not really a Billy Preston record: his playing here, if it
can be called playing at all, is completely lost behind the walls of
synthesized strings (if it's balladry) or the programmed drum beats and
electronic bass (if it's the shake-yer-booty vibe), and his singing... well,
Billy has never been that much of a singer, and when he is doing it
face-to-face with Syreeta who, most definitely, is a singer, he hardly ever rises above totally generic vocal
clichés.
Second, it would be one thing if it were only
the syrupy power ballads that are atrocious (ʽA New Way To Say I Love
Youʼ — nope, no dice, really; ʽLoveʼ — who do you think you are
to get away with that title? John
Lennon?; ʽA Long And Lasting Loveʼ — between you, me, and sweet
Yamaha; ʽWhat We Did For Loveʼ — is it just me, or do I see some sort
of tendency here?). Unfortunately, the dance grooves, while nowhere near as
embarrassing, are just plain boring — there is nothing behind these grooves to
demand attention, and nothing in these
grooves to suggest somebody here was looking for something other than a quick
cash-in.
Actually, I stand corrected: every once in a
while, the grooves do tend to become embarrassing, when the artists start
exploring their «Hot, Sexy» sides (such as the bridge section of
ʽSearchin'ʼ, or the clumsy, halfway-there Prince-isms of ʽJust
For Youʼ). Now that dance-oriented artists were explicitly pushed towards
«roughing it up» rather than keeping it smooth the way they used to, you either
had to reinvent yourself or die trying. Billy and Syreeta died trying, and
sometimes the smell gets a little bit too heavy.
Too bad, because, as I mentioned early, Syreeta
Wright is a lovely singer, and her
vocal talent should not have been wasted on this total tripe — maybe a duet
album with Michael Jackson could have been a better proposition. Thumbs down,
unless your honorable taste is really
perverse and you delicately feed on generic early Eighties' dance-pop like...
(insert your favourite insulting line
here: «green flies on horse poop» is a good candidate). The good news is, I
think this record was never officially released on CD, and here's hoping it
never will be.
THE WAY I AM (1982)
1) Hope; 2) Good Life Boogie;
3) Keep On Truckin'; 4) A Change Is Gonna Come; 5) Lay Your Feelings On Me; 6)
I Won't Mistreat Your Love; 7) Baby I'm Yours; 8) Until Then; 9) The Way I Am.
Whew, that was close. Try to ignore Billy's
subtle hint on the album sleeve photo (about having just bought a poultry farm
in Texas or something like that), and The
Way I Am will successfully correct and purify the aura that Motown blew in
around their unfortunate duet batch with Syreeta. At the very least, this album
is not downright awful. It is
predictably generic, and boring, and uninspired, but it rarely aspires to
something else.
Basically, the mascot of this here album is the
cover of Sam Cooke's ʽA Change Is Gonna Comeʼ — a seriously belated
tribute to one of Billy's major influences, done with competence, sincerity,
and absolutely nothing else that would warrant its existence. The song is a
great anthem for the ages, Billy Preston is a nice fifth Beatle, the keyboard
inventory consists of a snowy organ instead of a Yamaha synthesizer — it's
pretty hard to complain. It's probably the best cover of ʽA Change Is
Gonna Comeʼ that was done in 1982, but I couldn't be sure, considering
that 90% of black artists and 45% of white artists probably did it at least
once in their lifetime.
Elsewhere, what we have is: an electronic disco
instrumental (ʽGood Life Boogieʼ) with a technophile synth solo, a
couple dance rockers with either a pop (ʽHopeʼ) or a funk (ʽKeep
On Truckin'ʼ) undercurrent, some heavily orchestrated tender-hearted disco
numbers à la ʽMore Like A
Womanʼ (ʽBaby I'm Yoursʼ), an oddly out-of-place slide-driven
country blues ballad (ʽUntil Thenʼ), and a pompous, pathetic,
tear-gushing, string-flowing
«Life-Will-Never-Be-The-Same-Once-I-Finally-Lay-This-Shit-Down» power ballad
(title track), which is probably unsalvageable, like most of the songs that
have the artist explicitly sobbing into the microphone, spoiling both the
expensive equipment and whatever emotional effect he could have triggered
otherwise.
There is nothing whatsoever here worth hearing
— it is not quite a successful
retreat to Billy's late-1970s disco era standards, when there was that certain
light, fluffy charm emanating from his kiddie melodies and his band trying to
turn them into genuinely hot grooves. Overproduction, bombastic strings
arrangements, obvious disinterest on the part of the backing players — it's all
there, not to mention the album's being out-of-print for years. But in all
honesty, it could have been much
worse — if anything, the album and song title do give an indication that Billy is trying to revert to whatever it is he
is used to do, and wants to do,
instead of having to tag along with the kids, strutting his stuff to those hip
electrofunk waves. From that point of view, we could even convince ourselves to
forget, if not forgive, the cowboy hat and the open chest.
PRESSIN' ON (1982)
1) Pressin' On; 2) I'd Like To
Go Back Home Again; 3) Loving You Is So Easy; 4) Turn It Out; 5) I'm Never
Gonna Say Goodbye; 6) Thanks But No Thanks; 7) Don't Try To Fight It; 8) I Love
You So; 9) I Come To Rest In You.
Recorded unusually quickly after its predecessor,
particularly given Billy's serious problems with alcohol, not to mention
general re-adaptation into the hostile climate of early Eighties' mainstream
entertainment — quite predictably, this is a carbon copy of The Way I Am: listenable if serious
need be, but ultimately forgettable under any imaginable circumstances.
The two new ballads are predictably rotten on
the level of the Syreeta-duet album (a third ballad, ʽI Come To Rest In
Youʼ, for some strange reason has been copied from Late At Night — not even a re-recording, which is why it is the
best of the three, what with the pleasant harpsichord and all, but we already
know what it sounds like). The dance numbers, however, continue to cut back on
electronics, restore Billy some access to his piano, and slap on some genuinely
funky bass and guitar lines — only the drumming is still marred by
epoch-defining electronic effects.
The «highlight» is arguably ʽI'd Like To
Go Back Home Againʼ, with its typically Stevie Wonder-ish rhythmics and
harmonica (I am not sure if Stevie himself is actually involved, but that may
well be the case) — a homely, catchy shuffle, even if it does sound totally
like «post-genius era» Stevie, short on ideas, long on their repetition. On a
sheer gut level, I am more pleased by ʽTurn It Outʼ, with a fine
instrumental balance (heavy on the cowbell, too!) — with some real drumming and
a slightly more loosened vibe, it could be up there with Billy's best dance
numbers of the preceding decade — and by ʽThanks But No Thanksʼ, a
passable example of «silly Billy» in the ʽNothing From Nothingʼ vein.
Of course, when it came to selecting a song for
a single release, none of the good
choices made the grade — the only single from the album was ʽI'm Never
Gonna Say Goodbyeʼ, a song whose quality is already made apparent by the
title. For some reason, Motown kept stupidly promoting Billy as a
balladeer-troubadour, neglecting the obvious — to stand out in the balladry
line, you need to at least have the vocal skills of a Ray Charles, whereas in
the dance-pop entertainment line, Billy had his own little lawn of charm, which
even the sterile Eighties' production could not quite pave in asphalt.
So forget about the single, but if you ever get
a chance to rescue an old vinyl copy from a used bin for fifteen cents...
well, provided you also have shelf space to spare... then again, no, not really
— keeping records with front sleeves like that is bad for one's karma. It might
be enough to simply remember this: Billy Preston did not lose much of his
reputation in 1982 — partly because there was not that much to lose in the
first place, and partly because he was not willing to completely give himself
up without a fight. The only reason to like Billy Preston has always been
because, well, he's a generally likable guy, and in 1982, he was still likable
against all odds.
ON THE AIR (1984)
1) And Dance; 2) Kick-It; 3)
Come To Me Little Darlin'; 4) Beatle Tribute; 5) If You Let Me Love You; 6) You
Can't Hide From Love; 7) Oh Jamaica; 8) Here, There And Everywhere.
Speak o' the goddamn wolf. You might think, perhaps, that if an artist
who has stood on the threshold of compromising his humble identity for years
now has finally been dropped by his major label (Motown) and picked up by a
small independent label (Megatone Records) — you'd think that, perhaps, this could be a good chance to
focus on that goddamn identity, maybe even release that one particularly
special record which, decades later, unearthed, cleaned up, and re-mastered,
could be called the «lost gem» of his career, the «pleasant surprise» for fans
and bypassers alike. You could think that, and you'd be damn wrong, because...
...On
The Air is not just the worst ever Billy Preston album in existence — it is
one of the worst albums I've ever heard, period,
and I've heard some pretty bad ones from the mid-Eighties. The only excuse I
can think of is that Billy went really, really heavy on the substances
(according to some sources, this was somewhere around the peak of his cocaine
addiction), and had no genuine control whatsoever over the compositions and
arrangements, most of which fall in the range of utterly routine dance pop,
heavy on primitive electronics and with occasional echoes of pop metal
(whenever the synths are joined in with electric guitar — not that often, and
never to any mutual benefit). The new style is best illustrated on the album
opener ʽAnd Danceʼ, which is as far removed from anything Prestonian
in nature as a Bach suite, only in the opposite direction.
On the other hand, presumably it is Billy and
Billy alone who has to be held responsible for ʽBeatle Tributeʼ — I
do not like abusing the word «moronic» these days, since its vibe should be
reserved for really special cases, but I do feel this here is just the
occasion. Not only does the «song» have no melody whatsoever to speak of (and
whoever writes Beatle tributes without any melody?), but the lyrics, for the
most part consisting of crudely intertwined titles of Beatle songs, are
priceless: "John, Paul, George and Ringo too / They wrote some beautiful
music for me and you". I especially like that «...and Ringo too» bit — such
a friendly gesture, and generous, too; betcha thought the original line should
have gone «...and Billy too», fifth
Beatle and all, but the nice guy must have reconsidered at the last minute.
Anyway, it must be so refreshing from time to time to put oneself into the
shoes of a second-grader. And kudos to the passionate, high-pitched guitar lick
after each of the Beatles' names — so INFLAMING!
Next to that, Billy's simply-boring cover of
ʽHere, There And Everywhereʼ does not even look that bad — simply boring: unless you change a real Beatles song to
unrecognizable levels, it cannot suck that seriously if you just play the main
melody on synthesizers. But the rest of the original «compositions», be it the
rotten electrofunk instrumental ʽKick-Itʼ (where there are more drum
machine overdubs than actual musical phrases), or the dance-ballad ʽIf You
Let Me Love Youʼ, or the electronic reggae «experiment» ʽOh
Jamaicaʼ, are all parts of the same pseudo-musical disgrace, and
represent the absolute nadir of Billy's career. Essentially, a mediocre artist
is at an advantage — his stuff will almost always be judged by the same
consistently mediocre standard — but when a mediocre artist stoops to being
bad, he is really, really bad.
But do not try to search these tunes out — they
are not even «hilariously» bad, just «mind-numbingly» bad. Do not even go
looking for ʽBeatles Tributeʼ, or, God forbid, «The Beatles + Billy
Preston» may become unintentionally associated with this crap rather than the
Rooftop Concert or, at least, The Concert for Bangla Desh or some other
classic moment like that. It is preferable to simply erase this memory with a
collective thumbs
down, and forget about this unhappy moment in the unhappiest decade
for this man who generally preferred to be happy and spread that happiness
around. You just can't always get what you want — apparently, not on Megatone
Records anyway. How nice it is that this album was never released on CD, and
hopefully, it will forever stay that way.
YOU AND I (1997)
1) Hold Me; 2) Right Now; 3)
Lonely No More; 4) Supernatural Thang; 5) You And I; 6) I'm In Love With You;
7) Getting It On; 8) Dream Lover; 9) Sweet Senseous Sensations; 10) You Are So
Beautiful.
On
The Air effectively cancelled
Billy Preston's solo artistic career, and none too soon: another couple of
records of comparable quality with even a bare minimum of promotion, and his
good guy reputation would be squandered without hope. Actually, he did record more, and there is such a
thing as a «1986 Billy Preston album»: the rather threateningly titled You Can't Keep A Good Man Down,
released by D&K Records only in the Netherlands and in Spain and utterly
unavailable since then — unless you are an Ebay hunter and God loves you so
much that you want to spend seventy bucks on a 1986 Billy Preston album.
The remaining two decades of Billy's life were
mostly spent on cleaning up, session work, and only very occasional venturing
into solo recording — for the most part, he kept to himself in a private
manner, with his arguably biggest «public flash» being on the memorial Concert
For George four years prior to his own death (ironically, his last glimpse of
major fame ended up just as tightly connected to the Beatles as his first
ones). His discography also becomes confused at this point, with various
sources yielding controversial information. He did most certainly attempt a
«comeback» in 1995, releasing Billy's
Back on NuGroove records: since this already happened in the CD age, the
record should be easier to locate, but I have not been able to, and the fact
that it opens with a remake of ʽNothin' From Nothin'ʼ does not
exactly thrill me into active searching.
He may also have recorded one or more gospel
albums, but the only secular project of his that is relatively easily available
is You And I, recorded in 1997 under
odd conditions — in Italy, working together with brothers Lino and Pino
Nicolosi of the Italo disco / synth-pop / soft-rock band Novecento. The union
sounds kinda scary, but also curious on paper — in theory, this could be
something as utterly awful as On The Air
and more, but could just as well present some curious surprises. Besides, if it
really is the last complete (secular)
LP that Billy ever released, it would make at least some reverential sense to
get hold of it. So what is it?
Well, apparently, there is nothing particularly
Italian about it, and, likewise, there is nothing particularly awful or astounding about it. It is just a
perfectly middle-of-the-road, not-too-irritating, smoothly even collection of
R&B and ballads, ideologically very much belonging in the 1970s but
production-wise, an unmistakable product of the 1990s. Which is good, actually
— it means clear and sharp production for music recorded by a real band rather
than a bunch of samplers. But it also means adding an adult contemporary edge,
and it is a little sad to watch the «kiddie spirit» of Billy dissolving away in
pools of «heavenly synthesizers». At their best, Billy's grooves were
lightweight, upbeat, and giddy; these ones sound deadly serious and «mature»,
which may theoretically be alright for a 50-year old, but really, some people
need to stay forever young because there is simply no sense at all in their
growing old. (And, for that matter, has Billy produced even one thing worthy of
long-term memory storage after he turned 30?).
Some of the R&B grooves are decent enough
to make for acceptable background listening: ʽHold Meʼ, ʽRight
Nowʽ, ʽLonely No Moreʼ, and ʽGetting It Onʼ are
impeccable from a technical point of view — strong, well-oiled rhythm section
with adequately jumpy bass, tasteful jazzy guitar licks, synthesizers creating
a moody background but not getting too much in the way, catchy repetitive
choruses, even an occasional attempt or two at entrancing (such as the
acappella break in ʽGetting It Onʼ). ʽSupernatural Thangʼ
adds a mariachi band vibe for a little extra diversity, and ʽI'm In Love
With Youʼ heads towards neo-disco territory. It's all competent, but I am a bit puzzled about why it was
necessary to engage an Italian band (unless, of course, no one else was willing
to play with an old washed-up has-been, which might just be the reason) — worse, I am a bit puzzled
about why it was necessary to engage Billy Preston, because neither his
keyboard playing nor his rather non-descript singing are really at the center
of this music.
The ballads (title track, a duet with Dora
Nicolosi, brother Lino's wife; and the last three tracks that include a remake
of ʽYou Are So Beautifulʼ, also as a duet with the same lady singer)
fall into the category of «totally generic», although the lady does have a nice
tone and all (and a remarkably good English pronunciation, with almost no
traces of Italian accent, a relative rarity in the Mediterranean world) —
rendering the last twelve minutes of the album pointless from just about any potential point of view. But yes,
what's a Billy Preston record without a few heartbreakers? It's good enough
they left the Lord out of it this time.
Moody, unnecessarily serious, redundant,
ultimately dull — all of this could qualify for a cruel «thumbs down», but if
taken in the general context of Billy's ups and downs, You And I is still a creative rebound, and it does seem as if he
had a bit of fun making it: nothing left to prove, not the slightest chance of
commercial success — just a relaxing session with some trendy European friends,
themselves probably head-over-heels about working with a «living legend». As a
final memento from the man that helped bring us ʽGet Backʼ,
ʽDon't Let Me Downʼ, and ʽLet It Beʼ, it is at least an
acceptable choice, even if I feel he could have done much better even at that point.
THE COLLECTORS' GUIDE TO RARE BRITISH BIRDS (1964-1967; 1999)
1) You're On My Mind; 2) You
Don't Love Me; 3) Leaving Here; 4) Next In Line; 5) No Good Without You Baby;
6) How Can It Be?; 7) You're On My Mind [original demo]; 8) You Don't Love Me
[original demo]; 9) Say Those Magic Words; 10) Daddy Daddy; 11) Run Run Run;
12) Good Times; 13) Say Those Magic Words [alternate version]; 14) Daddy Daddy
[alternate version]; 15) La Poupée Qui Fait Non; 16) Run Run Run
[alternate version]; 17) Daddy Daddy [backing track]; 18) Granny Rides Again.
When the Deram label put out this lovingly
assembled package in 1999 (charmingly ungrammatically subtitled «contents all their singles, the first
demos, unreleased recordings, alternate versions & backing tracks»), they
also found it necessary to add «Featuring Ronnie Wood's first recordings» on
the album sleeve — because, they must have reasoned, who on Earth could have
fallen for it except for Stones fans?
But in a way, such advertising could have been
an easy turn-off just as it could be a turn-on. Not all Stones fans are Ronnie
Wood fans — the veterans tend to write him off as a vastly inferior figure to
both Brian Jones and Mick Taylor (not entirely without reason), and even those
who are totally unfamiliar with Stones history know for sure that Ronnie Wood
(a) does not write songs (not for the Stones, at least), (b) cannot sing to
save his life, and (c) with each passing year, spends more and more time
jumping around the stage rather than playing his guitar, that is, when he is
not in rehab or courting Ms. Katya Ivanova.
Yet it used to be different. In 1964, when The
Birds formed in the Yiewsley borough of West London, determined to bring even
more muscle to the British Invasion and reap themselves some well-deserved fame
/ dough / pussy, Ronnie Wood was a handsome, intelligent, and motivated 17-year
old prodigy who knew well enough how to play guitar, how to write competent
songs, and how to be clever enough so as not to open his mouth and let a more
competent singer (Tony Munroe) do the job for him. Whether he was the de-facto
leader of the band remains uncertain, but whatever original material they did
record was written almost exclusively by himself, so at the very least he was
the band's Pete Townshend — and, considering the band's Mod-influenced
(although they never pledged explicit allegiance to the Mod culture) looks and
sounds, the analogy seems even more appropriate.
One thing that evaded The Birds was pure luck.
They stayed together for more than two years — from late 1964 to early 1967,
the juiciest years of 'em all — but over that period, only got the chance to
release a tiny handful of singles (four in all), due to poor management, lack
of promotion and a rather unfortunate run-in with the American Byrds. Most
people are naturally lazy to check whether «Byrds» is really a misprint for
«Birds», so, naturally, anybody wandering into a local store in late 1965 and
asking for the Birds would be handled a freshly imported copy of ʽMr.
Tambourine Manʼ. Take a lesson from that, kids — next band you form, be
sure to name it «The Three-Legged Gonzo Plum Tree Musketeers» or something.
Anyway, those four singles, two A-sides of
which eventually made it onto Nuggets,
are completely on the level. The Birds were okay with covering other people,
such as Bo Diddley (ʽYou Don't Love Meʼ), but their very first song,
ʽYou're On My Mindʼ, was an interesting and even mildly innovative
Wood original, a fierce garage-blues-rocker with several time signature and
tempo changes, a wild vocal from Tony, and some ear-piercing soloing from
Ronnie. The seasoned listener will obviously discern a strong Clapton-era
Yardbirds influence, but where the Birds lacked in technique, they more than
made up in raw energy and crunch.
The second single was a cover of the Motown hit
ʽLeaving Hereʼ, very popular in London at the time (The High Numbers,
soon to be The Who, did it too, and the Birds were often on the same bill with
them) — and, although not an original, it took the Birds as high as they ever
got. Brutal, heavy riffage here, interspersed with shrill, hysterical solos —
instrumentally, the Stones and the Animals had kiddie-level power compared
with this, as the Birds went with more explicit bravery in the «caveman sound»
direction, even if at the expense of subtlety and understatement. Then, in a
gesture that was also quite typical at the time, the B-side, ʽNext In
Lineʼ, was a Wood original written in the same style and key as
ʽLeaving Hereʼ, an imitation rather than a direct rip-off, but almost
as good (unfortunately, with a harmonica solo instead of a guitar-based one).
Later singles, the ones that did make it onto Nuggets, actually went a little easier
on the blues-rock and added a pop sensibility. Written by outside songwriters,
ʽNo Good Without You Babyʼ still compensates for its catchiness with
guitar crunch and an ear-splitting crescendo at the end, but ʽSay Those
Magic Wordsʼ, recorded in 1966, is already pure «power-pop», with a
Doppler-effect-treated lead guitar part (psychedelia on the rise) and, overall,
«happier» vocals from Tony — which only reflects the general evolution path of
so many «wild» R&B outfits of the time, without any negative assessment:
all of these are fine songs in their own different rights. The «sleeper»
surprise might be Wood's B-side to ʽNo Goodʼ — the four-minute long
ʽDaddy Daddyʼ, with even more experimentation with song structure and
tempo changes, falling from upbeat pop to slow-crawling dirge and ending with a
feedback-drenched noise section: hilarious and spooky at the same time, a
perfect reflection of the contradictory spirit of the time.
Problem is, four singles ain't enough to make
for a proper LP, let alone a CD-length one, so the archivists at Deram did a
remarkable job, indeed, of gathering together everything that could be gathered
to occupy more space. Alas, only one track is of significant interest —
Ronnie's ʽGranny Rides Againʼ, recorded in the band's twilight days
of 1967, a rather stereotypical marching-band-style Brit-pop nugget à la
Kinks / Small Faces with an uplifting brass arrangement. The rest ranges from
the competent, but unnecessary (a cover of The Who's ʽRun, Run, Runʼ
which The Who naturally did better on their own) to the silly and unnecessary
(ʽGood Timesʼ, a boring attempt at sentimental folk-pop for which
they had no proper qualifications) to the just unnecessary (most of the demo
versions that do not even have any historical importance — so they started out
with a faster recording of
ʽYou're On My Mindʼ than what they ended up with... so who cares?).
But we will not hold it against them — after all,
it was hardly the band's fault that they never got a chance to prove themselves
properly, and even if filler is filler, nobody is forced to sit through
anything these days. The officially released handful of material is solid
mid-Sixties garage / pop-rock stuff — about twenty-five minutes' worth of it —
and yes, «Ronnie Wood's first recordings» are quite on the regular Ronnie Wood
level: the guy was hardly ever «amazing» in the jaw-dropping sense of the
word, but he was always sensible, sensitive, and fun. With the added weight of
the liner notes, the colorful photos and packaging, I do acknowledge that this
here Guide is indeed a nice
collectors' item — thumbs up without any questions.
R&B FROM THE MARQUEE (1962)
1) Gotta Move; 2) Rain Is Such
A Lonesome Sound; 3) I Got My Brand On You; 4) Spooky But Nice; 5) Keep Your
Hands Off; 6) I Wanna Put A Tiger In Your Tank; 7) I Got My Mojo Working; 8)
Finkle's Cafe; 9) Hoochie Coochie Man; 10) Down Town; 11) How Long How Long
Blues; 12) I Thought I Heard That Train Whistle Blow.
First things first: the absolute main reason
why «Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated» get a mention on this site is
historical. Mr. Korner may not have ever been a great visionary or even a particularly
gifted musician, yet it so happened that he became, more or less, the Godfather
of British R&B — and, consequently, R&B
From The Marquee, recorded in June 1962, may be considered the first
proper R&B album to appear in UK territory. And even if it wasn't — diligent
research, which I do not have time to conduct, always shows that there was
always a bunch of no-names before the first big name — it was certainly
influential, opening the floodgates for the Stones, the Yardbirds, the Animals,
and all of their younger brethren.
«Blues Incorporated» wasn't even a proper band
— indeed, it was more like a flexible «corporation» of the blues, with people
attracted to and repulsed from its only permanent member, guitar player Alexis
Korner, in free-flow mode. (A similar model, albeit with a larger amount of
discipline, would later be adopted by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers). Occasional
members of the conglomeration in its early, «classic» days included just about
every future member of the classic Stones line-up, as well as Jack Bruce,
Ginger Baker, Paul Jones, Rod Stewart, Jimmy Page... — Alexis had a fairly good
eye for talent, in recompense for a lack of a good deal of his own.
Unfortunately, at the time when the ensemble
finally got a chance to put its sound on record (the title, by the way, is
somewhat misleading — the sound did indeed stem «from the Marquee», where B.I.
functioned on a regular basis, but the actual recordings were produced in one
of London's Decca studios), most of the future big stars were unavailable. The
only «grand name» given credit here is sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith, one of
Britain's finest horn blowers of all time, who would later go on to play with
the Graham Bond Organization, the Bluesbreakers, and Colosseum; bass, drums,
and keyboards are credited to relatively little known individuals (Teddy
Wadmore, Graham Burbidge, and Keith Scott, respectively; some of them at least
were also parallel members of Chris Barber's Jazz Band).
Korner's major partner at the time was singer
and harmonica player Cyril Davies, another important figure in the British
R&B movement, but by mid-1962, the two were already drifting apart, and
this would be the first and last B.I. record featuring Cyril's vocal talent
(not particularly impressive anyway) — alternating, on a few tracks, with the
throatier, croakier delivery of Long John Baldry (Davies would later go on to
form the «Cyril Davies All-Stars» and then die two years later from either
endocarditis or leukemia).
The setlist, as can easily be seen from the
song titles, largely consists of Chicago blues numbers, mainly Muddy Waters,
spiced up with a little Jimmy Witherspoon and Leroy Carr; about half of the
songs, though, are «originals», i. e. variations on the same Chicago styles and
patterns, credited to Korner, Davies, or (in one case) Long John Baldry. The
band had a «purist» attitude at the time, focusing exclusively on slow 12-bar
blues or mid-tempo jump blues, no Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley allowed (one may
amusedly remember how Mick Jagger, in the earliest days of the Stones, was
appalled and abhorred at the prospect of the Stones being called a «rock'n'roll
band»), an attitude that soon passed, but not before driving a wedge between
the more conservative Davies and the more easily adapatable Korner — and not
before they released their first album for all the world to marvel at their
interpretations of ʽI Got My Mojo Workingʼ and ʽHoochie Coochie
Manʼ.
Frankly speaking, there is very little to
marvel at. The lack of proper amplification (Korner confines himself to
acoustic guitar) may be a minus, but not as big a minus as the very fact that
this whole thing is, at best, merely «competent» — everybody does his best to
imitate the respective player in Muddy's band, but that is just what it is: a
faithful imitation, bound to pale against the original when the players
intentionally withdraw from offering anything of their own. Even Dick Heckstall-Smith,
who would go on to much higher heights, is perfectly content here with the status
of a bit player — his sax leads on ʽSpooky But Niceʼ, ʽDown
Townʼ, and other instrumentals are fun, but do not stand any serious
competition against America's «monster tradition».
If anything, it is quite instructive to take
one listen to this stuff, if only to see how much of a jump forward the British
R&B movement went through in two years' time, and gain an additional appreciation
for something like the Rolling Stones' debut — everything is always better
understood, and sometimes stronger liked, in its context. Nevertheless, no
thumbs down here, and not only for the obvious historical reason, but also
because, even with all of its blandness, R&B
From The Marquee never feels «fake»: all of these people were clearly
united by a genuine love for this sort of music, a basic understanding of how
it works, and an honest desire to share this love with the listeners. In a way,
it is not their fault that the impact of this album had been reduced to naught
within a couple of years — every giant leap is naturally preceded by a small
step, and this might just have been the small step without which there would be
no giant leap. Without Blues Incorporated, there might truly have been no
Rolling Stones — and that, to me, is already reason enough for a perfectly
«rational», if not altogether «emotional», thumbs up.
AT THE CAVERN (1964)
1) Overdrive; 2) Whoa Babe; 3)
Every Day I Have The Blues; 4) Hoochie Coochie Man; 5) Herbie's Tune; 6) Little
Bitty Gal Blues; 7) OK You Win; 8) Kansas City.
With Beatlemania already in full swing and the
British rhythm & blues scene already beginning to be populated by newcoming
young ruffians, this record already has less historical significance than R&B At The Marquee — yet it is also
an honestly much better album. First, unlike the «Marquee» sessions, this one
was actually recorded live (February 23, 1964, at The Cavern in Liverpool,
already made famous by the Beatles' residence): expectedly, it catches Korner's
band in a more adventurous and riskier state of mind, where their purpose is
not only to «introduce» their influences, but to actually do something with those influences as well.
Second, with several years of experience behind
their backs, Blues Incorporated were almost beginning to develop some sort of
personal identity — very important in an era of swiftly increasing
competition, even though it was still never enough to make Korner into a
superstar (not that he ever entertained any such ambitions). Clearly, they were
listening not only to «mass appeal» records from the Chicago blues scene, but
to various strands and strains of jazz as well, and introducing «bizarre»
elements into their own musical approach.
This particular line-up, other than Korner
himself, included mostly new players: Dave Castle replacing Dick
Heckstall-Smith on sax; Malcom Saul on organ; Vernon Bown on bass; Mike Scott
on drums; and Herbie Goins on vocals, although Alexis himself takes the lead on
several of the tracks (allegedly, he abhorred his own singing voice and only
sang out of necessity — which is understandable, since he has a raspy croak
that, at best, comes across as «funny»; still, in terms of mood, it agrees well
with many of the arrangements, and it is still light years more «accessible»
than, say, any random Jimmy Reed vocal).
Of all these people, Dave Castle is the
loudest, and his sax frequently tends to outshout the vocalist (ʽEveryday
I Have The Bluesʼ is a particularly illustrative example: no sooner does
Alexis introduce Herbie Goins to the Cavern audiences as «someone who can
sing» than the frenetic blurting from Dave's pipe completely prevents us — and I am not even talking about the
actual audience at the club — from assessing that statement). Some find this a
problem, but not me: the noisy ambience generated by Dave's ruckus is
intermittently irritating... and curious
— certainly B. B. King would never have dreamed of performing the song that way.
The lengthy instrumental ʽHerbie's
Tuneʼ, ironically named after the band's only non-performing member, is
quite solid — a carefully constructed workout in 12/4, with Castle and Saul
taking time to improvise and Mike Scott turning in the obligatory drum solo,
probably making this the earliest «jazz-style rock instrumental» in the history
of British rhythm & blues, and a pretty good one: everything gels, even if
the main theme, with its rather monotonous rise-and-fall pattern, is hardly on
par with Charles Mingus.
Alexis throws in a few of his own compositions,
introducing ʽWhoa Babeʼ as a «John Lee Hooker type blues» (not that
John Lee Hooker would care for such saxophone exuberance on his records, but
otherwise, a fairly good definition) and giving the other one the ambitious
title of ʽOverdriveʼ — although, frankly, the only performer to
remain in overdrive throughout the album is Dave Castle, so much so that they
should have honestly credited this one to «Dave Castle's Blues Incorporated».
He even manages to dominate ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ, no matter how much
Alexis tries to revert attention to himself by playing a «stinging» slide
guitar solo.
Sometimes it hurts, sometimes it amuses, but in
the end, it is what gives At The Cavern
its distinct flavor: Britain had its fair share of competent sax blowers, yet,
for the most part, they were either bit players of relatively little
significance (e. g. Mike Vickers of Manfred Mann) or played in a strictly pop
configuration (Mike Smith of the Dave Clark 5). Heckstall-Smith was among the
few exceptions, but he had not yet latched on to his chance to shine — so Dave
Castle takes the lead here and blows 'em all away, for bad or for good. Yes,
and Herbie Goins does have a nice blueswailing tone, after all (check out
ʽOK You Winʼ for proof).
Thumbs up, of course,
and there is also an expanded reissue of the album that includes an additional
six tracks recorded live for the BBC that same year — including ʽTurn On
Your Lovelightʼ and ʽPlease, Please, Pleaseʼ, showing how much
Korner was really getting into soul-based R&B at that time, way beyond his
passion for the Chicago blues scene.
RED HOT FROM ALEX (1964)
1) Woke Up This Morning; 2)
Skipping; 3) Herbie's Tune; 4) Stormy Monday; 5) It's Happening; 6) Roberta; 7)
Jones; 8) Cabbage Greens; 9) Chicken Shack; 10) Haitian Fight Song.
This studio album was recorded a month later
than the Cavern show, but seems to have been officially released earlier than
the Cavern album — no big matter, since neither of the two was a prominent
commercial or critical success. It is a good listen in its own right, but it
has neither the energy nor the exuberant risk-taking of At The Cavern, consistent with the then-current practice of putting
on a politely gallant face in the studio and leaving all the «stop-pulling»
business for the live shows. This is the environment in which Alexis calls for
tightness and discipline.
Unfortunately, a tightly disciplined Blues
Incorporated, at best, comes across as a second-rate backing band for Louis
Jordan — check ʽSkippingʼ, a professionally played jump-blues where
Ron Edgeworth's organ, Alexis' own guitar, and three sax players form five
near-ideal pieces of the puzzle, yet that «something special» still ends up
missing, maybe because not one of the players is ready to let the instincts
take over, too afraid that something will fall out of place. It is this
rational fear, I think, that prevented Alexis Korner from becoming Keith
Richards, even if some of the licks he plays here are quite reminiscent of
Keith's «anglicized Chuck Berry» style.
Likewise, the short version of ʽHerbie's
Tuneʼ captured here is fairly academic and stiff compared to what they did
to it on stage — where the saxophone screeched and whined like a demented pig
under the knife, whereas here the pig just lazily grunts and snorts in its
trough. Of course, the mix is better, the different instrumental parts are well
defined, and Ron Edgeworth's organ adds an extra layer of depth that was all
but unheard at The Cavern, but they are not even trying to capture the same excitement.
Thematically, Korner, in addition to the old
infatuation with 12-bar blues (ʽStormy Mondayʼ, with a stinging
guitar solo, fairly decent for the pre-Clapton era) and jazz (ʽIt's
Happeningʼ), seems to have also become a big fan of Booker T. & The
MGs, ripping off ʽGreen Onionsʼ on his poorly masked ʽCabbage
Greensʼ — he gets everything right except for the «evil» vibe that made
ʽGreen Onionsʼ so devilish where ʽCabbage Greensʼ is so
utterly inoffensive. ʽHaitian Fight Songʼ is a bit better, but still
way too tame to match the promise of its title. At best, it sounds like a
behind-the-stage preparation for an actual fight.
Still, even if Red Hot From Alex should rather read Stone Cold From Alex, there may well be people to whom this
«perfectionist» take on rhythm & blues will be dearer than garage rock. The
album does have the distinction of being the first well-produced,
clear-sounding record to come out of Alexis Korner's camp, and now it sounds
like Manfred Mann without the irritating nursery pop ditties — serious, but
totally accessible mix of blues, jazz, and dance music whose only fault was in
that nobody really needed this kind of music from Britain at the time. Even if
he wanted to (which he didn't), Alexis Korner could never become part of the
«British Invasion» — this whole thing was strictly for internal consumption,
and even then, only as long as the US import market still remained relatively
underdeveloped. Only in long-term retrospect is it possible to see that the guy
was honestly trying to reinterpret his influences, not just copycat them — and
that he just didn't quite have the talent to make these reinterpretations
transparent for everybody. A modest thumbs up here, but teetering dangerously on the
edge of «blank indifference».
ALEXIS KORNER'S BLUES INCORPORATED (1965)
1) Blue Mink; 2) Rainy
Tuesday; 3) Yogi; 4) Sappho; 5) Navy Blue; 6) Royal Dooji; 7) Preachin' The
Blues; 8) The Captain's Tiger; 9) A Little Bit Groovy; 10) Anything For Now;
11) Chris Trundle's Habit; 12) Trundlin'.
Introducing a new angle here — for the first
time ever, Blues Incorporated operate on a completely instrumental basis, with
Herbie Goins quitting in order to front a new hot Mod band, The Nightimers. Not
only that, but the focus is very clearly shifted in favor of a jazz approach:
around a third of the numbers are completely in the jazz idiom, and the rest at
least tend to stray away from the 12-bar blues form, in favor of jumpier time
signatures and extra sax work.
Naturally, with so much «authentic» jazz work
to digest and assimilate, it is futile to expect that people nowadays would
have any incentive to dig Alexis' noble attempt to lead British R&B in a
different direction. Compared to jazz stuff that was en vogue or, more politely, «on the cutting edge» in 1965, this bunch
of tunes is more or less on a «Mother Goose level» — Korner is taking more cues
from Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman than Miles Davis or Coltrane. This is understandable,
since he had no lofty goal of progressing from «intelligent entertainer» to «intellectual
innovator». But this sort of music entertained relatively few people in 1965 —
not to mention today — and its traces
dissipated just as quickly as those of any other given B.I. album.
Which may be just a tad unfair, because Alexis
and the band (Heckstall-Smith still manning the sax, along with Phil Seamen on
drums, Mike Scott on string bass, and Johnny Parker on piano) are trying to achieve something. At
least the opening number, ʽBlue Minkʼ, is unusual in its combination
of a Chicago blues guitar style on Alexis' part with two fussy, dissonant sax
parts blown in the background, kind of a Muddy-meets-Dolphy type of thing. Does
it make sense? Is it inspirational? Mind-opening? Who knows? All I can say is
— at least they make a creative effort, even if the resulting synthesis is not
pleasing for either straightforward blues or jazz lovers.
The arrangement of Robert Johnson's
ʽPreaching The Bluesʼ is likewise non-trivial, with a slightly
discordant sax and tribal congas accompanying Korner's slide playing (which
remains relatively faithful to Johnson's parts). The dissonance takes some
time to get used to, but one could say that it only strengthens the hellish
atmosphere of the track (remember, ʽUp Jumped The Devilʼ was the
original subtitle). Again, an interesting, if not flabbergastingly exciting,
take on an old classic, quite novel for its time.
The remaining tracks feature steadier tempos
and less fussy arrangements, and also occasionally lapse into rewriting
(ʽRoyal Doojiʼ is basically just ʽHerbie's Tuneʼ under a
different name), but ʽSapphoʼ and ʽTrundlin'ʼ have charming
dance potential, and Parker's ʽA Little Bit Groovyʼ features
impressively dexterous piano playing for an allegedly «B-level» record. In
brief, everything is totally listenable and undeniably professional, and if
there are only one or two attempts at expanding existing boundaries, well...
frankly speaking, quite a few highly applauded jazz albums do not really
feature any such attempts, so let us
not frown at poor Alexis Korner just because he dared to encroach upon such an
alien turf. In a way, for some people, this might be the least predictable and
most promising record in his entire career.
SKY HIGH (1966)
1) Long Black Train; 2) Rock
Me; 3) I'm So Glad; 4) Wednesday Night Prayer; 5) Honesty; 6) Yellow Dog Blues;
7) Let The Good Times Roll; 8) Ooo-Wee Baby; 9) River's Invitation; 10) Money
Honey; 11) Big Road Blues; 12) Louise; 13) Floating; 14) Anchor 5 Miles; 15)
Daph's Dance.
The last album to be credited to «Blues Inc.»
(after this Korner just kept going on in his own name) was released in April
1966 — already at a time when everything that Alexis ever did, someone at that
point was doing it better. The Graham Bond Organization stole away his jazz
thunder, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers sneaked away his blues temper, Fresh Cream was just around the corner,
Jimi was coming up around the bend, and that's just in the UK alone. Furthermore,
all of Korner's finest brass players had migrated to a better climate, and his
new vocalist, Duffy Power, was just a competent, hoarse, blues-rock vocalist
(previously noted for one of the first — and worst — covers of the Beatles'
ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ, hardly saved even by an expert rhythm
part from Graham Bond's organ).
This means that, for the most part, the band is
back here to generic, unexciting 12-bar blues stuff and sparkless blues-rock
that sounds hopelessly antiquated for its time. In retrospect, it probably
gives an overall finer impression than it did in early swinging London days,
but who would you rather want to listen to — Alexis Korner on guitar and Duffy
Power on harmonica, or, say, Muddy Waters and Little Walter on the same
instruments? (For the record, Duffy's harmonica is all over the place, and he
blows it in just as perfunctory a manner as he sings — Mick Jagger was a
titanic-level impressionist in comparison even in his earliest days).
If there is anything here of mild interest, it
is a couple of jazzier numbers that sound like leftovers from the self-titled Blues Incorporated: Mingus'
ʽWednesday Night Prayer Meetingʼ at least tries to be exuberant, and
ʽHonestyʼ tries to be multi-part, experiment with time signatures, improvise,
and, overall, behave in a «look-at-me-I'm-so-Miles-Davis» kind of manner.
Again, there is no reason why one shouldn't be listening to the real thing instead, but this material
feels more natural for the band — like it or not, successful blues playing
requires having a bit of the devil in the soul, and these guys just don't seem
to be able to make contact.
A small, odd surprise is further provided by
three short acoustic guitar instrumentals that close off the record: just
Alexis and his six-string, playing three original folk-blues compositions. Not
one of them displays any stunning technique or emotional breakthrough — it just
sounds like a quick set of last-moment sketches that the man put together
before cutting the record. But it is an interesting gesture all the same, and
a rather cute way to say goodbye, even if Korner probably did not know at the
time that he would soon be forever retiring the name of «Blues Incorporated».
Actually, Korner's solo career from 1967 and up
to his death from lung cancer in 1984 was long and varied, and would have its
ups, downs, and (most frequently) middle-o'-the-roads — but no matter how much
fashionable revisionism we might want to cook up, it is hardly likely that he
will remain in pop music history as anything more than a devoted Kulturträger of the early 1960s: a
semi-legendary figure, worthy of respect, recognition, and memory for what he
did as a promoter, but not as a musician, composer, or performer. Not that
there's anything wrong with that — just don't bother hunting for these records,
hardly worth even the time of the hunt, let alone the money (or the bandwidth).
PSYCHEDELIC LOLLIPOP (1966)
1) (We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet;
2) Love Seems Doomed; 3) Tobacco Road; 4) Queen Of My Nights; 5) I'll Go Crazy;
6) Gotta Get Away; 7) Sometimes I Think About; 8) One By One; 9) Worried Life
Blues; 10) She's Coming Home.
One possible reason why the Blues Magoos' debut
album made even less of an impression on the buying public than it could have
is that the title is grossly misleading. A «psychedelic lollipop» would rather
be something like a 1967 record from the Hollies or the Monkees — catchy pop
strewn with trippy sound effects. These
guys, however, were quite far removed even from «fake» psychedelia. What the
Blues Magoos really loved was the blues (sorta evident), wimpy Byrds-style
folk-rock, and garage vibes. This makes for a fairly diverse listen — yet there
is nothing even remotely «psychedelic» about this album.
It was also kind of evident that the Blues
Magoos wouldn't have a chance to go all that far. By the time Psychedelic Lollipop came out, they had
already hung out around the Bronx and Greenwich Village for at least two years,
without much success, and you can see why — there are no traces of
«individuality» here, neither in the playing nor in the singing, neither in the
attitude nor in composition. Like
gazillions of their contemporaries, the Blues Magoos sincerely loved their influences,
but lacked the talent, or the chutzpah, to build up on them.
The band's greatest moment of glory is here, of
course, as the lead-in track. ʽWe Ain't Got Nothin' Yetʼ is based
upon a riff that was nicked from Ricky Nelson's cover of
ʽSummertimeʼ: famous session bassist Joe Osborn originally came up
with it as early as 1962, but, frankly speaking, the idea of pairing it with
the ʽSummertimeʼ vocals was fairly odd, and the Blues Magoos, singing
in unison with its triumphant martiality, make much better use of the idea.
(Naturally, such a great riff couldn't help but be re-pilfered later as well,
most notably by Ritchie Blackmore on ʽBlack Nightʼ, but it plays a
very different role out there). Not only that, of course, but the whole song is
one of those perfect «youth-army-on-the-march» anthems of the mid-1960s that,
spiritual-wise, puts it on the level of ʽMy Generationʼ — and the sharp
guitar breaks, rising to ear-piercing heights after each verse, complete the
tension.
However, already the second original, a
bass-and-organ-dominated dark folk ballad (ʽLove Seems Doomedʼ),
feels formulaic and clichéd, subscribing to a high school level (a.k.a.
totally fumbled) understanding of a «broken heart» and how to translate the
idea into music. And ʽSometimes I Think Aboutʼ, although also
credited to the band, in reality owes its lyrics and basic structure to a
traditional folk song, and its guitar / organ arrangement to ʽHouse Of The
Rising Sunʼ, of which it could be said to be a poor man's version. (The
Blues Magoos did adore the Animals above most other British Invasion bands, so
it seems: there is a cover of ʽWorried Life Bluesʼ here that tries to
ape the Animals' older version as closely as possible).
One more song deservedly made it from here to
the Nuggets anthology — the band's
take on ʽTobacco Roadʼ. It is similar in structure and mood to the
Nashville Teens' 1964 version, but its main charm is, of course, in its being
extended by two of the fastest, noisiest, most pissed-off jam sections of the
year, with Peppy Theilhelm and Mike Esposito giving their axes a full-scale
thrashing that presages the Velvet Underground's ʽEuropean Sonʼ by
a good year or so. (It may be so that they were trying to match some of the
Yardbirds' stuff, but couldn't due to neither of them being Jeff Beck, so they
invented minimalist avantgarde noise music instead. Okay, so they didn't
exactly invent it, but they did
contribute their two cents).
The other covers consist of more lacklustre
folk ballads; a tolerable, but unexciting escapist R&B track (ʽGotta
Get Awayʼ, not the same as the Stones' title of the same way, but just as
much of a throwaway as the Stones' song); and a totally unconvincing cover of
James Brown's ʽI'll Go Crazyʼ (even Roger Daltrey sounded more
authentic, or, at least, more hooliganish on the Who's early Brown covers). In
other words, two great tunes, surrounded by quick-grown patches of filler — not
a good start for a band that had at least two years all to itself to come up with
a more involving sound or a fuller batch of original material.
Nevertheless, considering that there are no
genuine embarrassments here (upon second thought, even the James Brown cover is
listenable provided you are not familiar with the original), any album that
has ʽWe Ain't Got Nothin' Yetʼ and ʽTobacco Roadʼ on it,
deserves at least a modest thumbs up. And besides, unlike so many of their
quickie-mart garage contemporaries, the Blues Magoos weren't done yet — for
them, the battle had only just begun.
ELECTRIC COMIC BOOK (1967)
1) Pipe Dream; 2) There's A
Chance We Can Make It; 3) Life Is Just A Cher O'Bowlies; 4) Gloria; 5)
Intermission; 6) Albert Common Is Dead; 7) Summer Is The Man; 8) Baby, I Want
You; 9) Let's Get Together; 10) Take My Love; 11) Rush Hour; 12) That's All
Folks.
As bold and presumptuous as a title like
ʽThere's A Chance We Can Make Itʼ might sound, the Blues Magoos'
second album, taken in the context of its time, clearly shows that there is
really no chance whatsoever of their making it. The band does find itself ready
to conform to the usual requirements: compared to the six covers on Psychedelic Lollipop, this follow-up
only has two, with every member of the band, even the drummer, joining the
resident songwriters' guild — and its title and structure give it even more of
a «mock-conceptual» flavor. Unfortunately, not only is this not a Sgt. Pepper, it isn't even quite on the
level of second-rate 1967-style psychedelic apings by the likes of the Pretty
Things or the Hollies.
The problems remain the same — lack of
songwriting talent — and they are best illustrated on the opening number:
ʽPipe Dreamʼ is fast, energetic, and psychedelic-tinged, but not a
single instrumental or vocal line is shaped into a decent hook. Ralph Scala's
organ and Mike Esposito's «raga-blues» guitar, played Frisco-style, rub nicely
against each other, but the same could be said about a million other songs from
the same year. The song has neither the catchiness nor the tension build-up of
ʽWe Ain't Got Nothin' Yetʼ, and it is actually surprising that they
managed to get as high as No. 60 on the charts with it — what with all the
insane competition going around.
The other three songs that the band released as
singles are even less impressive: ʽSummer Is The Manʼ is tender
folk-pop in the vein of the Searchers, but without that band's competence and
perfectionism to compensate for the sappiness; ʽLife Is Just A Cher
O'Bowliesʼ is a weird retro throwaway in the style of, say, Del Shannon —
it probably has the catchiest vocal melody on the album, but it is not quite
clear what particular business does a ballsy garage rock band cover by
switching to such a «namby-pamby» style; and ʽThere's A Chanceʼ tries
to melt your brain with continuous feedback and droning vocals, but since there
is no hook attached, it is not clear what need there is of this song — surely,
if we just want the feedback and the
trippy atmosphere, we'd all rather listen to Jimi than to these guys.
Overall, the only original number here that
shows potential is the very last song — ʽRush Hourʼ could have been a
top-notch heavy rocker (in fact, its distorted guitar / organ duet niftily
presages the classic Deep Purple pairing of Lord and Blackmore) if only the
song had better... better everything:
better production, better mix separation, better playing, better singing,
better internal development, better coda... other than that, great job,
really.
But there is no better proof than the band's
totally successful, impressive cover of Them's ʽGloriaʼ to the
statement that the lack of songwriting talent was their main problem — it is a
very worthy successor to ʽTobacco Roadʼ as a psycho freakout, and one
where the insane jamming section actually stays more in touch with the main
sung part (on ʽTobacco Roadʼ, the basic melody and the crazy free-form
section were, after all, sewn together rather crudely). This is arguably the
first extended, six-minute long, interpretation of ʽGloriaʼ found on
record (earlier Gants, Shadows Of Knight, and other covers ran for less than
three minutes, respecting the original), and might just as well be one of the
best.
Additionally, it is humorous to discover that a
song called ʽLet's Get Togetherʼ, which, given the circumstances,
you'd probably expect to be a Jefferson Airplane-type peace-and-love hippie anthem,
is really a cover of a Jimmy Reed booze-blues number — together with a drunk,
teetering-tottering imitation of Jimmy's «toothless» delivery. Nothing special,
that is, but just the kind of material towards which the Blues Magoos clearly
feel a more natural affection than towards all sorts of flower power stuff.
The «conceptual» nature of the record shows in
the brief links — the ʽIntermissionʼ and the eleven second-long
Looney Tunes finale (ʽThat's All Folksʼ); together with the album
title, they provide a «pulpy» spirit, amusing and self-ironic at the same time.
But even here, the band only dips one small finger in the water — by the end of
the year, The Who Sell Out would
show everybody how far one can go in that direction without fear of drowning
the good stuff in kitsch and parody. All in all, Electric Comic Book, listenable and modestly enjoyable as it is,
still feels like a failed exam — reinforcing the feeling that ʽNothing
Yetʼ was just an accidental fluke.
BASIC BLUES MAGOOS (1968)
1) Sybil Green (Of The
In-Between); 2) All The Better To See You With; 3) I Can Hear The Grass Grow;
4) Yellow Rose; 5) I Wanna Be There; 6) I Can Move A Mountain; 7) President's
Council On Psychedelic Fitness; 8) Scarecrow's Love Affair; 9) There She Goes;
10) Accidental Meditation; 11*) You're Getting Old; 12*) Subliminal Sonic
Laxative; 13*) Chicken Wire Lady; 14*) Let Your Love Ride; 15*) Who Do You Love.
The band's third and final attempt to make
themselves noticed in a world of gruesomely heavy competition. Some creative
growth is evident: all of the songs but one are originals, and the one cover is
that of a contemporary psycho-pop single — The Move's ʽI Can Hear The
Grass Growʼ, very suitable for the Magoos' current interests and much more
«relevant» than, say, another Jimmy Reed or Ray Charles tribute. However, this
is where the growth starts and ends: in all other respects, this is just
another Blues Magoos record, well on the level of Electric Comic Book, but still lacking anything even remotely close
to the «bomb» of ʽNothin' Yetʼ.
The opening number, ʽSybil Greenʼ, is
this album's ʽPipe Dreamʼ: a song that seems to have plenty of
potential, but ultimately remains a failure — the descending organ riff, its
main claim to individuality, is not given enough prominence to register itself
deep in the emotional core, not against the wimpy vocals, the disappointing
lack of hook in the chorus, or the simplistic power-pop rhythm guitar backing.
It has all the ingredients of The Move, for sure, but none of that band's
talent to make these ingredients matter.
It is all the more evident when you look at
them actually covering The Move: on
one hand, they honestly work to bring out to light some of the facets of
ʽI Can Hear The Grass Growʼ that were underdeveloped in the original
(such as the colorful guitar riff introducing the verses, somewhat smudged in
Roy Wood's version, but quite resplendent here, despite worse production), but
on the other hand, they completely undermine the song's psychedelic capacity by
choosing a more aggressive, lower-pitched and barkier approach in the chorus: their "I can hear the grass grow, I
can hear the grass grow, I see rainbows in the evening" is delivered
almost like a call-to-arms, which is definitely not what this peaceful and, essentially, introspective song really
needs.
Elsewhere, the Blues Magoos now come across as
a slightly lighter version of Blue Cheer: on songs like ʽAll The Better To
See You Withʼ and ʽThere She Goesʼ they mask the paucity of
ideas with a thick, brutal sound that still lacks interesting chord sequences.
ʽThere She Goesʼ has a curious solo section (some proto-electronic
bleeps in the nascent style of United States of America, battling over turf
with freakout electric guitar), but that's about it. Maybe if they at least had
hired an expressive singer... at this point, the lack of a good vocalist in the
band really becomes a problem — their
vocal melodies seem to be more thoughtfully constructed than instrumental ones,
but neither Scala nor Tielhelm know how to do them justice.
ʽI Can Move A Mountainʼ aspires to
become a touching epic, rooted as much in dark folk as it is in jangle-pop, but
loses out just as well because (a) the production is tedious, with everything,
from vocals to organ to rhythm section, glued together in tapeworm fashion; (b)
the vocals, apart from the first bars of its «romantic» opening, are nasal and «wooden» at the same time; (c) the
mid-section, with its twenty seconds of loud musical chaos instead of a normal
solo, is pointless, because the «crashdown» comes from nowhere, is completely
unexpected and out of place (unlike, just to quote the first analogy that
crept up in my head, a similar «crashdown» in the middle of Bruce Springsteen's
ʽAdam Raised A Cainʼ, where it concludes a ripping solo and has a
well identifiable purpose of its own).
And that is not to mention minor ridiculous
excesses — ʽScarecrow's Love Affairʼ, for instance, which is not only
a bad attempt to cross psychedelic trippings with a barroom rock vibe, but also
ends in at least one whole minute of recordings of engine noises, a minute we
should all have saved for something better to do. Or the generic psycho-folk
conclusion of ʽAccidental Meditationʼ, which is neither really a
meditation nor certainly accidental. (And I'm not saying anything about the one-minute «link» of ʽSubliminal Sonic
Laxativeʼ, attached as a bonus track — except that it is hardly even worth
checking out to learn what it is that is so embarrassing about it).
I suppose that, on some level, the album
certainly justifies its «#435 for 1968» rank currently awarded to it by the
reviewers at RateYourMusic — considering the greatness of the year, #435 isn't too bad — but the rank more or less
correctly reflects the order in which I
would recommend adding Basic Blues
Magoos to anybody's collection, as well. Style-wise, I have no problems
with the record — the band has proved capable of adapting to changing fashions,
shifting to heavier grooves, modernized technologies, and a larger amalgam of
different styles. But the playing, the singing, and the songwriting
departments are still understaffed, and now that there isn't really a single song here that I'd like to keep
in memory, I have no choice but admit that the Blues Magoos' boat had sunk
back then, even before the original band split up and became replaced with a
«Peppy Castro Post-Blues Magoos Experience». Thumbs down.
NEVER GOIN' BACK TO GEORGIA (1969)
1) Heartbreak Hotel; 2) Heart
Attack; 3) The Hunter; 4) Feelin' Time; 5) Gettin' Off; 6) Never Goin' Back To
Georgia; 7) Brokedown Piece Of Man; 8) Nobody Knows You When You're Down And
Out; 9) Georgia Breakdown.
Oh yeah, as if these Bronx fellas had ever been to Georgia. This and the following
album usually get a very bad rap
compared to the earlier stuff — for the simple, objective, and respectable reason
that this is a «phony» version of the Blues Magoos. The real Blues Magoos, fed up with lack of success, split in late '68:
the only original member of the band to have renewed the contract with ABC
Records is Peppy Castro, a.k.a. Emil Thielhelm, and the rest are all new —
including keyboardist and songwriter Eric Kaz, who would later earn a living by
getting his songs covered by the likes of Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt. The
others are even darker horses.
The «revamped» Blues Magoos, sniffin' the
whiffin' of the times, were no longer a psychedelic or a garage rock band —
they were «rootsy» artists now, dabbling in blues-rock, jazz-rock, and
folk-rock with such a serious face on that the album is stuffed with five-,
six-, and seven-minute-long explorations of this suddenly discovered «earthy»
component of their spirits. The shift — if it is at all possible to speak in
terms of «shifts», considering that what we have here is an entirely different
band — anyway, «the shift» is quite expectable, given the times, but the
ability of Peppy Castro to make his new band rival The Byrds or The Band?..
Still, this is an interesting album. It does
feature an unusual gimmick — in the keyboards department, huge emphasis is
placed on chimes (xylophones?) as a lead instrument, which gives the record a
nifty «cool jazz» flavor; and many of its pieces are either purely instrumental
or feature lengthy instrumental sections, which is quite alright considering
that the band still lacks a good singer — Thielhelm's voice is weak and stiff, completely
beyond competition in an era of Van Morrisons, Joe Cockers, and Rod Stewarts
(and these are only the white guys). On ʽGettin' Offʼ, they go as far
as trying to play some dissonant jazz piano solo passages à la Thelonious, and you know what? I couldn't really state
with certainty that they're «bad» solo passages.
The album really falls flat on its face on the
«tough» numbers — ʽThe Hunterʼ, due to the weak singing and the
unimaginative, harmonica-based arrangement, is virtually nothing compared to,
for instance, the Free version from that very same year. ʽHeartbreak
Hotelʼ is a brave choice, but a suicidal one: the chosen arrangement, with
its waltz tempos and xylophone solos, could be quirky and fun if the base song
were different, but as it is, they drain the tune from all of its original
darkness, and end up looking like clowns. Many a critic must have shot the
needle off his stereo system in disgust before that first track was over.
Which is too bad, since the instrumental tunes
on Side B are fairly moody — particularly the title track, with its
quasi-Santana Latin beat; ʽGeorgia Breakdownʼ, added later on as a
counterpoint, is slower and breezier, with lots of woodwinds spilled over the
rhythm section, and it brings the record to a smooth, quiet end. Again, both
are certainly more worthwhile than a flat, pedestrian rendition of ʽNobody
Knows Youʼ — at this time, the new-look Blues Magoos are actually better
as a «voiceless» lite jazz combo than as a rock band, and this is the biggest
surprise of the album, one that prevents me from rating it with a thumbs down.
Who knows, maybe this kind of sound might even have had a bigger future, had
these guys themselves managed to properly understand what it was they were
really on to here.
GULF COAST BOUND (1970)
1) Gulf Coast Bound; 2) Slow
Down Sundown; 3) Can't Get Enough Of You; 4) Magoos Blues; 5) Tonight The Skies
About To Cry; 6) Sea Breeze Express.
The new-look Blues Magoos' second and last
album, recorded in the wake of more lineup changes and heavily relying on the
use of session musicians, almost manages to hit the mark — hard as it may be to
believe this, it is more coherent, focused, and overall adequate than Never Goin' Back To Georgia. It was
commercially doomed, since it did not have a proper hit single to it, and, come
to think of it, with a vocalist as «gifted» as Peppy (at this point, he already
sounds like Eric Burdon's twin brother, however, unfortunately mutilated at
birth), a hit single would be impossible in theory and practice.
They do try with the title track, which is a
bouncy-friendly jazz-pop concoction in the vein of the post-Al Kooper Blood,
Sweat & Tears, but could really
use a more attractive vocalist to, well, attract the necessary positive
attention on the part of the buying public. And then Peppy does even worse on
the aggressive R&B workout ʽSlow Down Sundownʼ — this is where
the vocals get genuinely awful, as the singer almost revels in his drawn out, torturously out-of-key vowels, probably
believing that soul and sincerity will easily compensate for this. If Keith
Richards can get away with this, why not Peppy Castro? Unfortunately, most of
us, upon hearing the two, will probably figure out several easy «why nots» soon
enough.
Surprisingly, though, the worse the vocals, the
better the instruments. The band must have been inspired by the presence of sax
player Pee Wee Ellis, who had previously worked with James Brown for five years
and added an unexpected element of «authenticity» — it is not so much that his
sax parts are great (although they sometimes might be) as it is that they
subconsciously spur the band into trying something... well, something that used
to be outside their reach, and now they are on the verge of nailing it, and
sometimes they nail it pretty close.
What I mean is this: normally, the idea of a
twelve-minute funky jam from a third-grade band like the Blues Magoos would
seem preposterous. It is possible that ʽCan't Get Enough Of Youʼ was
inspired by CCR's cover of ʽI Heard It Through The Grapevineʼ — it
moves at a similar tempo, includes more or less the same amount of cowbell,
and, without a warning, switches to jam mode midway through. But where CCR made
the whole thing work by conceiving it as a spirited dialog between Fogerty's
pre-rehearsed theatrical guitar phrasing and Cosmo's pissed-off drum bash retorts,
the Blues Magoos pretty much just let the tapes roll without any preconceptions
or, as it seems, any prior rehearsals. Amazingly, it still works — it isn't
anywhere near as memorable as the CCR epic, but the band catches a good fire,
and the sax, guitar, and vibraphone solos are quite lively and well on the
level, even if they can't help but lack the inventiveness and technical dexterity
of serious competition from master jazzmen.
But the band's ballsiness goes beyond that — no
sooner than the one lengthy instrumental jam is over, another one begins, and
this time, there is no singing at all: ʽMagoos Bluesʼ is a long
jazz-rock monster that echoes Bitches
Brew in spirit (if not quite in form, since the band's rhythm section
remains poorly equipped when it comes to tricky time signatures) but brings it
closer to the average rock listener by retaining a bit of ye olde blues-rock
aggression (mostly through the grimness of the bassline).
Lastly, ʽTonight The Skies About To
Cryʼ (original orthography preserved) is a «monumental» soul ballad that
would have worked well had they invited Van Morrison to guest star; and
ʽSea Breeze Expressʼ is the album's most adventurous number, with
elements of atonality and free-form improv gradually scrambling together to
take the more concise shape of yet another short blues-rock jam.
Altogether, bad singing and a pervasive lack of
personality do haunt the record, and there is no way I could argue about a
«lost masterpiece» or anything. But neither does it deserve to be completely
forgotten, and, most importantly, there is nothing here to support a naturally
biased judgement of the «yet another grrrrreat garage band turned to shit by
deciding to go artsy-fartsy» variety. Fact is, the Blues Magoos, other than
one or two accidentally impressive singles, were never that great a garage band
in the first place; and their turning to «artsy-fartsy», at the very least, followed
a slightly unusual path compared to many of their peers — and produced
generally listenable and occasionally exciting results.
It is not a tragedy that, following the
predictable flop of Gulf Coast Bound,
the band came apart once again — it is not very likely that Eric Kaz would have
firmly steered them onwards to further greatness. But it seems to me that the
album may still be considered a rather respectable B-level entry in the
jazz-rock log — at the very least, it has far more integrity than anything
Blood, Sweat & Tears or Chicago have ever done past their few initial prime
years. Consequently — a modest thumbs up here, provided we can disregard Peppy's
narcissistic feelings.
PSYCHEDELIC RESURRECTION (2014)
1) Psychedelic Resurrection;
2) There's A Chance We Can Make It; 3) We Ain't Got Nothin' Yet; 4) D'Stinko Me
Tummy's On The Blinko; 5) There She Goes; 6) I'm Still Playing; 7) Pipe Dream;
8) Gotta Get Away; 9) I Just Got Off From Work; 10) Rush Hour; 11)
Psyche-Delight; 12) Tobacco Road.
Apparently, history has judged that The Blues
Magoos were a force to be reckoned
with back in the old days — otherwise, even the band members themselves
probably wouldn't come up with the idea of a reunion. But reunite they did, if
only on a partial basis, with Ralph Scala, Peppy Castro, and drummer Geoff
Daking formerly justifying the resurrection of the band's name, and two new
members (Mike Ciliberto on guitar and Peter Stuart Kohman on bass) completing
the picture as the band began a regular touring program... and in 2014,
actually emerged with a new album, most arrogantly called Psychedelic Resurrection — because, as everybody (at least in the
Bronx area) knows, real psychedelia
died in 1968 with the passing of the original Blues Magoos, and could only be
resurrected if the original Blues Magoos got together.
And you know what? They might be right about
that — well, hyperboles aside, and also keeping in mind that the band was never
really that big a symbol for psychedelia in the first place, Psychedelic Resurrection is
surprisingly effective. Yes, it is true that 7 out of 12 songs are re-recordings
of their classic hits and personal favorites — but, first of all, we would have
already forgotten how most of them sounded like anyway, and, second, they are
so cleverly interspersed with the new compositions that the record never for
once gives the impression of a pitiful collection of remakes. Somehow, despite
occasional embarrassing moments, Psychedelic
Resurrection turns out to be one of those very, very rare cases when the
word «resurrection» is actually justified.
I am not sure how they managed to do it, but
this new material is real fun — apart from having very little to do with
psychedelia, it's a solid collection of pop-rock songs with true hooks and
plenty of kickass energy. You can certainly detect some age-related wear and
tear, most notably on Scala's vocals (that sound almost pitiably feeble and
whiny on the new recording of ʽWe Ain't Got Nothin' Yetʼ), but the
new (and probably much younger) guitarist compensates for that by playing with
verve and inspiration, all the while adhering to the sonic stylistics of the
Blues Magoos' original era rather than «modern» guitar playing... well, maybe
not in the opening bars of the title track, though, where he sets off a bunch
of fireworks that would feel more suitable on a Van Halen album.
But do not worry, that's just a bit of initial
excess, quickly forgiven by the overall weirdness of the track — technically,
it is supposed to be an arena-rock anthem celebrating the band's comeback, yet
the slow pace, the doom-laden keyboards, and the strangely soulful, almost
mournful vocals give the impression of a pack of zombies rising from the grave,
so, on one hand, it's cool to hear them intone "we're back again... like
an old friend!", but on the other hand, there's that strange green tinge
on the faces and the definite smell of freshly overturned earth that puts the
"join us now!.." admonition in a somewhat different light. I wonder
if that was intentional, or if it just came out that way? In either case, it
adds a drop of much-needed genuine weirdness to the whole thing, immediately
elevating it over the expected status of a «just another boring comeback»
record.
The rest of the new material is equally
striking in its diversity. There's ʽD'Stinko Me Tummy's On The
Blinkoʼ, a verse-bridge-chorus anthem to various types of indigestion
(hardly a very psychedelic subject, although, admittedly, you never really
know when problems with your food tract may lead to potentially psychedelic
reactions) — lyrically crude, but the chorus has an almost vile degree of catchiness.
ʽI'm Still Playingʼ borrows a big chunk of the riff to ʽAll Day
And All Of The Nightʼ, but spices it up with fine lead guitar overdubs and
a nice ecstatic build-up to the chorus (again, on the subject of the band's
tenacity). ʽI Just Got Off From Workʼ is a perfectly unpretentious
chunk of power-pop that never strays off too far away from expressing delight
at what its title is all about. And ʽPsyche-Delightʼ, despite a whiff
of corniness, is cast as one of those «proto-disco» numbers (like
ʽFunʼ from Sly & The Family Stone's Life album), combining even more reminiscences about the good old
Sixties with a hard rock tone from the mid-Seventies and a bit of discoish
hedonism from about the same time — I don't know if I'm committing a crime
against good taste by recommending it, but apart from the rather ugly vocals on
the bridge section, it's gut-level fun, if not necessarily a «psyche-delight»
as they advertise it.
As for the old stuff, particularly the extended
workouts like ʽTobacco Roadʼ and ʽRush Hourʼ that were very
much dependent on garage-psychedelic jamming, all I can say is — these boys
still got it. They do it a little differently and without a fresh feel of
amazement at the new possibilities, but the rocking bits, particularly on
ʽTobacco Roadʼ, still rock
harder than most of the new rock bands do — perhaps because they feel so
unburdened with decades of intellectual pressure on the unfortunate rocker. In
other words, there's lots of brawn here, and only a tiny modicum of brain, and
that happens to be admirable. I mean, come to think of it, how many of your
favourite artists would be brave enough to release a song about the simple
pains of indigestion as late as 2014 — and considering, too, that indigestion
as a problem has never really gone away in all that time? The overall slogan of
the album is neatly summarized in the pseudo-reprise of the title track at the
end of ʽRush Hourʼ: "Psychedelic resurrection / Gives me such a
big erection". Really, this album is not about much more than that, and besides, if psychedelic
resurrection can still give Ralph Scala a big erection in 2014 (he must be
around 70, no?), there's just nothing to do except give the record an admiring thumbs up.
If only every «Veterans' Ball» were
like this, we might want to change that slogan to «don't trust anybody under 30», eventually.
LIVE AT THE CAFE AU GO GO (1966)
1) Goin' Down Louisiana; 2)
You Go, I'll Go With You; 3) Catch The Wind; 4) I Want To Be Your Driver; 5) Alberta;
6) The Way My Baby Walks; 7) Violets Of Dawn; 8) Back Door Man; 9) Jelly Jelly
Blues; 10) Spoonful; 11) Who Do You Love.
Along with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the
Blues Project were one of the first American acts that consisted of young
middle-to-low class white guys playing the black man's devil music, wondering
how the hell it could ever have happened that they had let British young middle-to-low class white guys take this sort of
initiative a couple of years earlier. They were less successful than Paul
Butterfield about landing a record contract, only managing to have their first
album out in early '66. On the other hand, unlike Butterfield's, their debut was a live one, recorded in
November '65 at the Cafe Au Go Go in the Village — introducing the band at its
rawest and wildest, and drawing inevitable analogies with the Yardbirds, who
were also introduced to the world in full through a red-hot live session back
in '64.
The original Blues Project line-up included
Danny Kalb on lead guitar and vocals; Steve Katz on rhythm guitar; Andy Kulberg
on bass; Roy Blumenfeld on drums; and latecomer Al Kooper on organ (Kooper
originally played guitar, but ever since he first tried out the organ on the
sessions for Dylan's ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ, the instrument was
promoted to his personal good luck charm — not that he had any particular knack for that particular
instrument). Last, but not least, was vocalist Tommy Flanders, whose cultural
and social background put him somewhat apart from the rest of the guys (well,
the names speak for themselves) and may have been responsible for the tension
that eventually drove them apart even before the album was released.
The record is not fully representative of the
Blues Project onstage — like most of the other bands that tried out the live
album schtick at the time, due to format demands, they had to cut down on the
jamming and improvisation and concentrate on relatively short, compact
song-based numbers. Nor did they yet have much audacity in trying out their own
material: other than Andy Kulberg's instrumental ʽThe Way My Baby
Walksʼ, all of the tunes are covers. And for the most part, the Blues
Project predictably covers... the blues: Chicago stuff from Muddy and Howlin'
Wolf, with a bit of Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry thrown in for the extra energetics,
and a Bobby Bland tune for a little extra bit of soulfulness.
On the other hand, seeing as how this is the
Village, after all, it is only natural that the band's territory also extends
in the direction of folk — with a somewhat surprisingly modernistic slant, as,
instead of doing ʽIf I Had A Hammerʼ or at least ʽTurn Turn
Turnʼ, they prefer to popularize imported fellow Donovan (ʽCatch The
Windʼ) and the Village's own Eric Andersen (ʽViolets Of Dawnʼ),
as well as redo the traditional folk-blues tune ʽAlbertaʼ
("...let your hair hang low..." and all that) in sentimental folk
ballad mode (with a whiff of lounge jazz, perhaps). This certainly gives them
their own twist, since even Paul Butterfield, not to mention the Yardbirds,
preferred to stay away from the sissy vibes of folk balladry — but the Blues
Project, from the very beginning, showed that it was not going to insist on
taking its name too literally.
All fine and dandy, but how good are these guys, really? Well — they
certainly have enough energy to rock the Café (although, judging by the
rather limp applause, the house wasn't exactly jam-packed on those evenings),
and they are smart enough to introduce their own tempo, time, and tonality
changes into the songs, so as to limit the comparison angle between the covers
and the originals. The singing, more or less equally divided between Kalb and
Flanders (Al also gets to sing on the Chuck Berry cover), is competent, and the
playing is engaging as long as it is possible to think of it in terms of
«honor duels» between Al, trying to prove to Danny that his is the rocking-est
organ in town, and Danny, trying to prove to Al that his is the flashiest and
speediest style of playing on the other side of Eric Clapton.
The latter, in fact, is not that far removed from
the truth: Kalb's parts are expressive, fun, and technically stunning for late
'65, showing a clear interest in the jazz school of playing as well as the
expectable Chicago blues lessons. The weak side is the thin, limp guitar tone,
unfortunately, quite characteristic of all the pre-Hendrix era (and quite a few
of the post-Hendrix era) American R&B-ers — of course, you had to be fairly
careful with your feedback and distortion when playing in the folk-oriented
Village, but in retrospect, there may simply be too little «power» here to
properly capture the interest of the modern listener. Downplay that aspect,
though, and Kalb's parts on such blues snarls as ʽJelly Jelly Bluesʼ
and ʽSpoonfulʼ will indeed be second only to Mike Bloomfield
(inasmuch as aggression-channeling young American six-stringers from 1965-66
are concerned).
And yet, this rarely feels like an album where
everybody is doing whatever is the most suitable thing for them. The Rolling
Stones (not always, but often) and, say, The Doors (remember their ʽBack Door Manʼ?) were
able to capture and preserve the creepy-devilish atmosphere of these Muddy
Waters and Howlin' Wolf tunes. These
nice, bright kids from New York are not able to do that — they can host a
friendly rock'n'roll party, and they can let off some steam, but there is no
sense of allegoric «danger» coming from their renditions. In fact, the
jazz-folk recreation of ʽAlbertaʼ, in terms of soul and feeling,
easily trumps almost everything else that they do here — pointing out the
general route which Al Kooper would soon start to take.
So, if it weren't for the notoriously exciting
bits of Kalb / Kooper interplay, and an overall good chance of assessing young
Danny's talents from several different angles, Live At The Cafe Au Go Go would not be much more than a valuable
historical document. In fact, even with Danny, it isn't much more than one — mainly a teaser, and certainly no match for Five Live Yardbirds, the album whose
model it loosely follows. Fortunately, the Blues Project still had some time
left to ripen and come into its own, before the whole mutual-tension and
lack-of-perspective thing would start tearing it apart.
PROJECTIONS (1966)
1) I Can't Keep From Crying;
2) Steve's Song; 3) You Can't Catch Me; 4) Two Trains Running; 5) Wake Me,
Shake Me; 6) Cheryl's Going Home; 7) Flute Thing; 8) Caress Me Baby; 9) Fly
Away.
The band's first «proper» album, recorded
without Flanders (everybody except for the rhythm section has his share of lead
vocals), is the first proper LP-size imprint that Al Kooper made upon the
world, and for that fact alone, is worth owning, admiring, and cherishing.
However, like all Blues Project albums, it is inconsistent, and only
occasionally starts scaling visionary heights — with Al as the band's resident
visionary, and Katz and Kalb as a pair of disloyal henchmen, who, instead of
supporting their clearly more gifted buddy, try in vain to steal the spotlight
on every occasion. It is not that either of them is a poor musician: it is
simply that, without Kooper, they seem unable to transcend the paradigm in
which they had started out.
Take the cover of Muddy Waters' ʽTwo
Trains Runningʼ, for instance. Even in late 1966, 11-minute tracks with
long jam sections were still a relative novelty, and it took some guts to dedicate
so much precious LP space to even one of them. But for the most part, it looks
like the band itself is not quite sure about what to do with all that amount of
time — mostly, they just waste it on a very slow tempo and a bunch of guitar
and harmonica solos that sound a little... obsolete, perhaps, for an age where
the Yardbirds and Cream were already setting new standards (and Jimi was just
coming around the corner). They were probably thinking that, by expanding the
composition, they could ensure some proper build-ups, climaxes, and finales for
Muddy's «apocalyptic pinnacle» of a song. But they do not.
Amusingly, it is actually the midsection of the
much shorter ʽWake Me, Shake Meʼ that stands sonically close to the other well-known 11-minute monster from
1966 — the Stones' ʽGoin' Homeʼ, with freely ad-libbed vocals over a
repetitive R&B groove. But although the song itself is among the most fun
and rousing romps in Blues Project history, the groove section limps — too
clean, too restrained, too laid-back to compete with the bite-and-snarl of
classic Stones.
No surprise, then, that the most famous piece
of the Blues Project's legacy, captured on the album, is neither a lengthy
improvised blues-rock jam, nor a stark-ravin' rock'n'roll number: rather, it is
Kooper's instrumental ʽFlute Thingʼ, a slightly dreamy number that
rolls folk, jazz, and psychedelia all into one, with Andy Kulberg's simple,
but elegant and memorable flute part standing out as probably the first
«serious» example of the flute as a lead instrument in a «pop-rock» context, a
couple years before Ian Anderson made the situation casual. This is what the Blues Project should
have done more often — an open-door synthesis of beauty and innovation. It
isn't much of a «blues project», of course, but then again, ʽFlute
Thingʼ does convey a blue feeling all the same, and whoever said that by
«blues» we only mean the Chicago 12-bar stuff anyway?
This does not mean that the band is somehow
pathologically unable to «rip it up». When Al is given the ideological lead, he
knows how to make it work — his arrangement of the old blues tune ʽI Can't
Keep From Cryingʼ as a hard-rocking stomper, with screechy distorted organ
solos and accordingly screechy guitar counterparts from Danny, is first-rate,
as it scales epic / anthemic heights, rather than attempting to delve into the
devilish depths à la Muddy / Howlin' Wolf or to rapturously kick ass
like the Stones. There isn't much credibility to the lyrics this way — the
whole performance should rather be associated with punching fists through walls
than with shedding an occasional tear over lost love, so something like
"I can't keep from cursing"
would have been a better idea for a title change — but this is not essential.
What is essential is how the organ
and the guitar meld together in ecstasy.
Other than those two obvious highlights, Projections is rather evenly divided
between blues-rock escapades (including a fun, but superfluous cover of Chuck
Berry's ʽYou Can't Catch Meʼ — again, the Stones did that one in a
sparser arranged, but tighter and sharper fashion a couple years earlier), and
friendly rootsy compositions like Kooper's ʽFly Awayʼ (fast
country-pop with a lightly psychedelic flavor) or a cover of Bob Lind's
ʽCheryl's Going Homeʼ which sounds like... uhm, sounds a bit like the
Monkees, I guess. Yes, I'm sure the Monkees would have loved to have that one
on their debut album. Steve Katz also steps into the spotlight with
ʽSteve's Songʼ, an interesting attempt at fusing a baroque-style
menuet with gallant singer-songwriter folk-pop à la Donovan, although
its consciously experimental and glaringly derivative nature still make it feel
a bit artificial.
In conclusion, I think that anyone who would
bother to seriously sit down with this record back in 1966 and listen to it
several times in a row could have prognosticated the obvious — namely, that the
conflicting forces within The Blues Project would not allow the band to last
for long; that the only way it could
have carried on would be by turning into Al Kooper's backing band (with Danny
Kalb playing loyal second fiddle, as he does on ʽI Can't Keep From
Cryingʼ), which was impossible; and that, most likely, The Blues Project
would have remained in history as an important, but brief page in the personal
biography of Mr. Al. Nevertheless, Projections,
even with all of its imminent flaws, does remain as Al's finest moment with the
band, and fully deserves its thumbs up — ʽFlute Thingʼ alone is a
steady guarantee, and individual flaws, after all, only accentuate the rich
diversity of approach: other than modern classical and Eastern stuff, there is
hardly a musical genre that does not get a nod on the record.
LIVE AT TOWN HALL (1967)
1) Flute Thing; 2) I Can't
Keep From Cryin'; 3) Mean Old Southern; 4) No Time Like The Right Time; 5) Love
Will Endure; 6) Where There's Smoke, There's Fire; 7) Wake Me, Shake Me.
A fake live album — the last thing that was
needed to complete the fall from grace, just as Al Kooper finally decided that
the others were tying him down and streamed out into space, in search of the next band that he could quit in less
than a couple of years. Actually, it is not totally fake, but only about half
of the tracks (admittedly, the longest half) are live, and, according to
Kooper's own words, only one of them was truly recorded at Town Hall (NYC's, I
presume). The rest are just masked with overdubbed applause, and it is not
difficult to spot the masking.
The live tracks are all rather faithful,
sometimes extended, versions of songs from Projections
— most notably, ʽFlute Thingʼ in all its glory and then some, with
extra seances of psychedelic painting, noise bits and dreamy static passages
incorporated in the improvised section. Andy Kulberg actually plays an electric flute here, which allows for
some extra sonic hooliganry every now and then. Even so, the result never
strays in either form or spirit away from the original. Neither does ʽWake
Me, Shake Meʼ, whose frenetic R&B crescendos were already a part of
the studio design, or ʽI Can't Keep From Cryinʼ, which sounds almost
like a note-for-note, punch-for-punch recreation.
At least Live
At The Cafe Au Go Go was smart enough not to let itself be preceded by a
studio album — that way, the public could not see that the band's stage presence
did not seriously boost its chutzpah; one could turn it the other way, of
course, and insist that The Blues Project simply kicked as much ass in the
studio as they did on stage, but that wasn't really the way it worked in 1966 —
it just means that The Blues Project did not kick much ass, even despite
Danny's sharp leads and Steve's ability to pump up the fuzz if the situation
called for it.
Nevertheless, there is no reason to complain
about the general level of the performances — the band does rock as hard as it
is capable of, and the audience must have gotten what it came for, enough to
spill over some «fake applause» for the studio additions. Of these, the most
recommendable is Kooper's garage-art-pop single ʽNo Time Like The Right
Timeʼ (which even made it onto the Nuggets
collection, and for a good reason) — with a rather silly, but attention-grabbing
tonality change that transforms the romantic ecstasy of the verse into
straightforward teenage lust of the chorus. ʽMean Old Southernʼ is a
Butterfield Blues Band-style bass-'n'-harmonica-driven blues dance with what is
probably Danny Kalb's best moment on the album — a fast, flashy, maddeningly
precise country-blues solo. The other two tracks are rather syrupy folk-pop
ballads that are rather quickly forgotten, I warrant.
In short, the album has all the signs of a
contractual obligation — live tracks mixed in with what must have probably been
studio outtakes from the previous sessions — and should be judged as such,
rather than a gruesome artistic failure. Strangely, though, it did not close
the book on The Blues Project, but merely turned over the most well-read pages
of its history.
PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE (1968)
1) If You Gotta Make A Fool Of
Somebody; 2) Calypso; 3) Frank'n'Curt Incensed; 4) Turtledove; 5) Mojo Hannah;
6) Niartaes Hornpipe; 7) Endless Sleep; 8) She Raised Her Hand; 9) Dakota
Recollection; 10*) Gentle Dreams.
Bravely ironic title: not even the Beatles,
assembled at Abbey Road Studios for what they all felt was to be their last collective
recording session, dared to slap an ill-omened title like that on the final
product. Of course, The Blues Project had a very good reason: by 1968, with
Kooper, Katz, and Kalb out of the picture, the original lineup was reduced to
Kulberg and Blumenfeld. Addition of such new members as Donald Kretmar on sax,
John Gregory on guitar, and Richard Greene on violin, meant that the tables had
turned completely — yet, on the other hand, the music that this entirely new
configuration came up with seems strangely compatible, to a large degree, with
The Blues Project of old.
Except that there is nothing seriously bluesy
about this music now. The two main directions actively pursued are now
country/bluegrass (fueled by the violin of newcomer Greene) and serene folk
balladry, with or without a pinch of psychedelia. As the roots-rock revolution
was in full swing, so did the revamped Blues Project, too, decide that
embracing the good old soil and its vegetative contents was the correct thing
to do. As a team of musicians, they had all the proper skills and resources to
do it — as composers and artists, they had predictable problems.
The major highlight of the album is probably
its opening track, a cover of Rudy Clarke's ʽIf You Gotta Make A Fool Of
Somebodyʼ. It is not shorn of inventiveness — opening with a little bit of
flamenco before settling into an R&B-with-fiddle groove, later to be
complemented with chaotic flute solos and finally building up towards an
explosive climax. The problem is that, as a «groove», the track does not have
enough power or sharpness, and as a «song», it does not have a memorable
musical theme to go along with. And the multiple segments of which it is
composed do not quite agree with each other. Why the bold Spanish introduction,
if it gives way to a feeble violin lead line? Why the flute soup, if this is
fiddle territory? Why the noisy climax and crash-boom-bang at the end if the
song was never all that tense to begin with?
Which is all pretty illustrative of the album
in general: a bunch of dudes with a bunch of incoherent ideas at a crossroads.
A lot of stuff is tried out — almost none of it works. Worst of the lot is
ʽDakota Recollectionʼ, a twelve-minute attempt to recapture the
success of ʽFlute Thingʼ that immediately degenerates into a jazzy
jam with competent, but boring flute, violin, fuzz guitar, and drum solos, the
likes of which were generated in droves by dozens of artists at the time. Difference
from ʽFlute Thingʼ? Lack of a properly resonant main theme, of
course: the theme as such is almost indistinguishable from the solos that
follow, and everything is played with such a limp attitude that it's a wonder
everybody managed to keep awake for all of the twelve minutes it took to draw
the track to a complete stop. Then again, if the title makes any sense, what
else could one expect from one's
recollections of the merry states of Dakota?
Not all of the album is just fiddle-and-flute
games. ʽFrank'n'Curt Incensedʼ, ʽMojo Hannahʼ, and
ʽEndless Sleepʼ do try to rock out, fuzzy distorted guitars, screechy
vocals (mostly courtesy of John Gregory) and all; but there are no cool riffs,
and the energy level remains chained to the average pub-rock level expected
from your local bar band. In this context, I rather prefer their softest,
gentlest numbers, like ʽCalypsoʼ or ʽTurtledoveʼ, where
Kulberg's pastoral flute exercises at least find full justification (the
ridiculous backward-vocals bit at the end of ʽCalypsoʼ, however, does
not, falling victim to the psychedelic atavisms of the time).
True to the title, Planned Obsolescence was the only album recorded by this lineup;
out of its ashes, a year later, rose and briefly flourished the short-lived
band of Seatrain, more focused and goal-oriented during its peak periods but,
in general, also suffering from poor songwriting skills. That said, serious
fans and scholars of late-Sixties roots-rock should not ignore the album — lack
or presence of «genius» is, after all, a subjective concept, and in objective
terms, there are enough unusual tricks and combinations displayed here to
attract the attention of somebody who, for instance, is deeply curious about
the different ways in which it is possible to combine pastoral flute, honky
tonk fiddle, and psycho-fuzz guitar on one album. (Even if each and every one
of these ways is ultimately boring and pointless — but this is no scholarly
talk).
LAZARUS (1971)
1) It's Alright; 2) Personal
Mercy; 3) Black Night; 4) Vision Of Flowers; 5) Yellow Cab; 6) Lazarus; 7)
Brown Eyed Handsome Man; 8) Reachings; 9) Midnight Rain; 10) So Far So Near.
After Planned
Obsolescence, we thought it was over, but apparently, something about the
«Blues Project» moniker had a mesmerizing effect to it — and so, three years
later, an out-of-work Danny Kalb resuscitated it once again. Reunited with
Blumenfeld — so that, as in the case of Fleetwood Mac, the drummer turned out to be the sole link between all of the band's
incarnations — and also scooping up Don Kretmar from the previous lineup (now
on saxophone and bass), Kalb plunges
back into battle.
Given that, of all the original members, Danny
was usually considered to be the most «bluesy» in thought, the new record, so
it seemed, could finally feel adequate to the name of the band — and in a way,
it does, even if the band still feels an obligation to include at least one
softie folk ballad (ʽVision Of Flowersʼ), and also dips its toes in
the newly-nascent funk style. Unfortunately, where earlier they had to compete
with the likes of Cream and Hendrix, now their heavy blues thing has to pander
to the same market as Led Zeppelin, and we can all guess the consequences.
The highlight of the album — that one number
which, as may be guessed, Danny really gave his everything — is the nine-minute
brontosauric title track: a lumbering dark blues rumination on the fate of
Lazarus, with Muddy, Wolf, and a little bit of Wheels Of Fire-era Cream as the easy-to-surmise chief sources of
inspiration. What can I say? The groove is definitely heavier and growlier than
anything previously generated by The Blues Project. But — once again, too
little, too late: feelings wrought and tempered by ʽDazed And Confusedʼ
may simply not find enough power here to get wound-up again. Danny even tries
to break out of the formula by making the second solo less melodic and more
«metallic», but he does not seem to have the proper experience or foresight to
make it really rumble.
With this major battle fought and ultimately
lost, the rest of the songs are just local skirmishes, some of them more
successful than others, some utterly embarrassing. For instance, the idea to
slow down Chuck Berry's ʽBrown Eyed Handsome Manʼ and turn it into a
stuttery pub rocker, honky tonk piano and drunken sax included, was equal to
downright killing the song. (One might just as well play the Stones' ʽRip
This Jointʼ to the tempo of an ʽI've Been Loving Youʼ and see what
happens). Recording Bobby Bland's ʽBlack Nightʼ as a dark blues
number made more sense, since the original version never really had the
«blackness» promised in the title, but in reality the song also fails, due to
predictable lead guitar and awful vocals (vocals on the album, by the way, seem
to be mostly handled by Danny himself, and this alone makes it clear why he was
so rarely awarded with lead spots on «proper» Blues Project albums).
In the end, once all the noses have finished
twitching and all the mouths have ended cringing, what we are left with is
ʽIt's Alrightʼ, a fun three-minute piece of sax-led boogie; the cute
rhythm section dialog on the funky opening to ʽPersonal Mercyʼ to
which the song never really lives up; and a surprisingly effective combination
of guitar riff and groovy bassline on the final song, ʽSo Far So
Nearʼ, unfortunately, almost killed off by vocals so wobbly and shaky
you'd think the singer was doing a tightrope balance trick at the same time.
Clearly, this tiny pile of goodies is not enough to recommend the album — a thumbs down
judgement is inevitable, albeit without any particular hatred, disgust, or
condescension: everything is arranged professionally enough, there is some
diversity, some sincerity, some fun. There just ain't too much sense of
purpose, other than getting some sort of heroic pleasure from reviving the old
moniker.
BLUES PROJECT (1972)
1) Back Door Man; 2) Danville
Dame; 3) Railroad Boy; 4) Rainbow; 5) Easy Lady; 6) Plain And Fancy; 7) Little
Rain; 8) Crazy Girl; 9) I'm Ready.
Little of what applied to Lazarus would not equally well apply to Blues Project, the reunited band's foolishly arrogant attempt at
«re-booting» with a self-titled album. The major change is that the original
vocalist Tommy Flanders is back for this particular show — not a big deal at
all, since we now know that Danny Kalb's vocal powers do not lag far behind
Tommy's. In fact, Flanders makes an immediate false start — this version of
ʽBack Door Manʼ is one of the worst I have ever heard, in terms of
lead singing: most of the time, Tommy alternates between «sloppy drunk» and
«whiny schoolboy». No self-respecting lady would ever let this guy through her back door, if you know what I mean.
The sad thing is that Kretmar and Kalb have now
managed to keep up a heavy groove, at least on the level of, say, soon-to-come
Bad Company — the guitar / bass dialog on ʽI'm Readyʼ is grim and
snappy enough to attract some interest. Then in come these ridiculous schoolboy
vocals, once again, and the groove goes to hell: the Blues Project were
incapable of properly covering Muddy and Wolf in the early days, and there is
no reason why they should have gained that capacity in their twilight years.
And then, when they do a regular, less criminal-minded, ultra-slow 12-bar blues
(Jimmy Reed's ʽLittle Rainʼ), with «nice» vocals and «clean» sound,
you start thinking that, perhaps, Jimi Hendrix did sacrifice himself for nought after all. Entertaining people at
a late-night diner with this kind of stuff is boring enough, but actually book
studio time for that? Waste the world's vinyl resources? Forget it.
There is one good original song on this album:
Danny Kalb's ʽCrazy Girlʼ, a darkly romantic «jazz-folk» concoction
that has much in its favour — a quirky «trilly» rhythm pattern for starters,
catchy psycho-jazz guitar leads, and a slightly paranoid atmosphere that
matches the title so well. Had they focused on exploring this jazzy route with
its melodic twist further, instead of stubbornly sticking to limited formulae
of the past that they could never properly sink their teeth in to begin with,
there might be a real reason for this
reunion.
On the other hand, original material
contributed by Flanders is hardly much stronger than their blues cover material
— he is now favouring anthemic soul balladry, to which his voice is indeed
suited much better than to Chicago blues, but ʽPlain And Fancyʼ is
rather plain than fancy, and ʽRainbowʼ, despite adding some lively
sunny funk notes to the picture, does not have enough energy to turn its
optimism into something infectious. So it makes no sense, either, to try and
overrate the band's songwriting abilities.
The final verdict is pretty much the same as
for Lazarus — a few real awful
performances, a few minor highlights, but most of the time, simply
run-of-the-mill early-1970s blues rock with no «hall-of-fame» ambitions
whatsoever; unless you are a certified enthusiast of the style, just join me in
my thumbs down
and let us get a move on.
REUNION IN CENTRAL PARK (1973)
1) Louisiana Blues; 2) Steve's
Song; 3) I Can't Keep From Cryin'; 4) You Can't Catch Me; 5) Fly Away; 6)
Caress Me Baby; 7) Catch The Wind; 8) Wake Me, Shake Me; 9) Two Trains Running.
Believe it or not, but the original Blues
Project did come back together in
1973 — if even the Byrds could have a reunion, why not the noble act that tried
to carry on the relay? (It wasn't their fault, after all, that time was
speeding up way too fast for them). Everybody except for Tommy Flanders is
here, yet somehow, the inspiration just wasn't there to try for some creativity
— instead, The Original Blues Project, as they call themselves on the sleeve,
embarked on a brief American tour, culminating in a free show in New York's
Central Park, almost a whole decade before Simon & Garfunkel popularized
the idea on a wider scale.
Actually, according to Al's own memories, the
LP continues the band's tradition of strange «semi-fakes»: only the audience
reaction comes from Central Park, while most, if not all, of the performances
come from earlier shows (in Washington), where the atmosphere, Al says, was
more «spontaneous». Not that it would probably matter much — I'd bet anything
that The Blues Project at their worst differed little from The Blues Project
at their best: mediocre bands do have that slight benefit of consistency, you
know.
The setlist is largely predictable: Projections done in almost all of their
entirety, plus a couple additional live favorites from the early days — no
attempts whatsoever at sinking their teeth into anything written in the
post-Kooper epoch. The surprising glaring omission is ʽFlute Thingʼ,
which made me double-check if Kulberg was present at the show at all, yet
apparently, he was, and they did
perform the song, but, for some reason, left it off the final album, even if,
the album being a double one, there was most certainly enough space remaining
for it. Maybe Andy forgot to oil the flute or something, or perhaps they
consciously decided that it would be a cool gesture to leave their best-known
and most-respected composition off the reunion album — you know, so it wouldn't
go multi-platinum and turn them into commercial sluts.
Seriously, though, this is a decent
performance, delivered with such confidence as if it were 1966 all over again —
the band plunges into old-school dance-blues of Muddy's, rockabilly of Chuck's,
and starry-eyed folk idealism of Donovan's with such vehemence you'd think the
world still lived and breathed these tunes in 1973. However, once we get past this
element of energetic surprise there is little else to say — except that the
slow blues numbers (ʽCaress Me Babyʼ and particularly the
excruciatingly tedious journey through the twelve minutes of ʽTwo Trains
Runningʼ) are predictably uninteresting, and that, with their exclusion,
the album could have been a far more elegant and economic single LP.
Since Kooper had already established himself as
a solo artist by that point, it was obvious that the reunion would not last
long — this was, in fact, the last time that The Blues Project blipped on the
radar, although, rumor has it, in recent years Katz and Blumenfeld have brought
the name back from the grave once again, touring as «The Blues Project» with a
bunch of sidemen (hopefully, we will be spared any new studio recordings). As
a last goodbye, Reunion In Central Park
plays its part with sufficient conviction — more credibly, at least, than the
Kalb-dominated bland platters from 1971-72. But if you want a good live album
by The Blues Project... then again, I am not even sure why you should want a
live album by The Blues Project in the first place. Just get Al Kooper's Soul Of A Man instead.
BOB DYLAN (1962)
1) You're No Good; 2) Talkin'
New York; 3) In My Time Of Dyin'; 4) Man Of Constant Sorrow; 5) Fixin' To Die;
6) Pretty Peggy-O; 7) Highway 51; 8) Gospel Plow; 9) Baby, Let Me Follow You
Down; 10) House Of The Risin' Sun; 11) Freight Train Blues; 12) Song To Woody;
13) See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.
There was never, ever a time, really, when Bob
Dylan would be a «folk singer». Folk music has always provided him with base
fuel, for sure, but such is Bob Dylan that one cannot even be one hundred
percent certain that he likes what
usually passes for folk music, much less «admires» or «respects» it. The Freewheelin', his first complete
album of (formally) original compositions, had very quickly eclipsed his
self-titled debut — but in a way, that debut is not any less original than Freewheelin', and remains an essential
listen for even the casual listener.
For the most part, «folk music» around
Greenwich Village in the early 1960s had a reverential nature. Rural tradition
had to be respected, cherished, almost «sanctified» for its depth and purity,
as opposed to commercial music. Robert Allen Zimmerman, a quiet, but troubled,
and also slightly mischievous, Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota, would have
none of that. By the time he was spotted and signed to Columbia Records by John
Hammond — the same John Hammond that, almost thirty years earlier, «made»
Billie Holiday — Bob was already a pretty nifty guitar picker and harp blower,
but his technical singing abilities left a lot to be desired. The answer? Quit
singing? Nope — redefine singing.
Bob's guitar, harmonica, and vocals do
immediately form a holy, interdependent trio, but it is naturally the voice
that takes the gold. From a «natural» point of view, it is utterly
unlistenable, except for when the singer is in «talking blues» mode, where it
is just a blurry murmur, consciously or subconsciously devoid of any
particular shade of color; whenever the artist actually shifts his natural
pitch, the results — by the standards of 1962 — are aurally hideous. And as if
simply showing his style wasn't enough, Bob blows the top off the cauldron on
ʽFreight Train Bluesʼ, where the vowel in the word "blues",
prolonged for a staggering thirteen seconds, produces an effect not unlike the
«nails-on-chalkboard» or «fork-on-plate» variety.
If they pressed him into a corner and demanded
nothing but the truth, Bob could probably say something about the
«far-from-perfect» singing abilities and styles of many of his blues and folk
predecessors, both black and white, and how it actually makes things more
realistic and closer to the listener and such. But that would not be the entire
story. Take a listen to Jesse Fuller's original recording of ʽYou're No
Goodʼ, the song that Bob chose for his opening number — old man Fuller's
set of pipes is nowhere near «angelic», but it does not go against the grain:
in his hands, the song is just a gruff traditional folk-dance number. With
Dylan, the guitar melody is insanely sped up and «fussified», the vocals are
filtered through a nasal twang effect, the pitch sometimes rises to absurdly
high levels that he cannot properly hold, and the «gulping» trick that he
occasionally plays out certainly does not make him sound like a regular guy —
more like someone suffering from a light case of cerebral palsy.
In all actuality, this is not just «folk»: this
is some sort of early form of «folk-punk», and from that point of view, Bob Dylan is the natural predecessor
(and potential inspiration) to such early and little-known «odd-folk» bands
like The Holy Modal Rounders or The Fugs, who would, I think, be quite likely
to rate Bob's then-inauspicious debut over the glorious Freewheelin'. The fact that such an album, not only thoroughly
uncommercial in general but also extremely radical for the tastes of Bob's folk
audience, could get an official
release by a major record label in 1962 is nothing short of miraculous, and has
everything to do with John Hammond's status and influence — there is little
doubt that Bob would have made it anyway, but who knows when, how, and what
would the actual revenue have been...
So, anyway, what you get with Bob's exuberant,
hyper-energetic renditions of traditional funereal standards like ʽIn My
Time Of Dyin'ʼ and ʽFixin' To Dieʼ is neither reverential carbon
copies (or would that be «cardboard copies»?) of exhortations done by scary
bluesmen, nor reverential scholarly interpretations, smoothly and politely
dressed up for mid-level intellectual consumption. What you get is uniquely
«uglified» interpretations of all that material, perhaps repelling at first,
but then subtly drawing you in through all the sheer ugliness — think Elephant
Man, if you wish, and the analogy is even stronger when you realize that behind
this ugliness, as is the case with Elephant Man, there is sensitivity and
intellect (if not necessarily kindness — Bob Dylan has been ascribed quite a
few virtues over the years, but «kindness» and «niceness» were rarely spotted
on the list).
The fact that almost the entire album is
devoted to covers is, in a way, inevitable. Dylan himself acknowledged that he
was «hesitant» to show all of himself from the get-go (even though he had
already accumulated quite a backlog of original compositions by 1962) — and
besides, all of these «original» compositions, in one way or other, were still
derivative of earlier folk and blues songs, so it is instructive to look at
those roots in an explicit fashion. Bob's mix of tragedy and comedy is astute —
with the ratio of songs about death and suffering vs. songs about fornicating
and playing the fool approximately equalling 3:1, Bob Dylan ends up grim, but humorous, perfectly matching Bob's
facial expression on the front cover: simultaneously a little sad and a little
smiling, looking at us with... with... actually, I have no idea what the hell
that guy is thinking when he is looking at us that way. At 21 years, he was
already inscrutable.
Two of the covers should be of specific note.
ʽBaby Let Me Follow You Downʼ, played in an arrangement «borrowed»
from fellow folkster Eric von Schmidt ("I met him in the green pastures
of... Harvard University!" Dylan jokes in the intro, poking even more fun
at folkie clichés), is so simple, straightforward, and almost stupidly
catchy that Bob would later, every once in while, revive it for his electric
show. It also provided The Animals with their debut single (retitled ʽBaby
Let Me Take You Homeʼ). The other one is Bob's take on ʽHouse Of The
Rising Sunʼ, which he boldly sings without
changing the "many a poor girl" to "many a poor boy" —
something that The Animals actually did, completely turning around the song's
message: their version ends up abstract and symbolic, Bob's is quite concise
and literal, but the fact that this is Bob
singing, and not, say, Joan Baez, adds a familiar pinch of Bob-irony. (It was
claimed by Eric Burdon that the band never heard Dylan's version before
recording theirs, which is strange, since it is a bit too much of a coincidence
that the Animals recorded a whole two songs in 1964, both of which were
included on the earlier Bob Dylan:
methinks somebody's withholding the whole truth here).
As for the originals, there are only two, both
of them important ones: ʽTalkin' New Yorkʼ is a fictionalized,
humorized tale of Bob's first acquaintance with NYC, so it both introduces the
artist as the artist and initiates
Bob's lengthy string of «talking blues» numbers that would provide comic relief
throughout his early acoustic period. ("Man there said, come back some
other day, you sound like a hillbilly, we want folk singers here" — if
that's autobiographical, no wonder Bob has been taking his revenge out on folk
singers ever since). And ʽSong To Woodyʼ, which borrows the melody
from one of Guthrie's own songs, gives the impression of being this album's one
small drop of sincerity, as Bob both acknowledges his debt to the great
folkster and states that he is not
going to go the same route: "The very last thing that I'd want to do / Is
to say I'd been hittin' some hard travelin' too". I'm not sure how many
people back then scrutinized those particular lyrics, but those that did could
have predicted that this guy was certainly not
going to go the Dave van Ronk / Eric von Schmidt route.
Keeping all that in mind, Bob Dylan is not just a skippable foreword. On the contrary, it is
essential listening for anybody with even a passing interest in the man,
although, true enough, more from an informational point of view: all of these
performances are innovative, curious, and thought-provoking, but they will
probably not provide you with any important epiphanies or anything like that.
Still, Bob's career in the 1960s is one of the most important plays in XXth
century theater, and when you go watch an important play, you don't want to
miss the setup, don't you? You certainly don't. Hence, thumbs up all the way.
THE FREEWHEELIN' (1963)
1) Blowin' In The Wind; 2)
Girl From The North Country; 3) Masters Of War; 4) Down The Highway; 5) Bob Dylan's
Blues; 6) A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall; 7) Don't Think Twice, It's All Right; 8)
Bob Dylan's Dream; 9) Oxford Town; 10) Talking World War III Blues; 11)
Corrina, Corrina; 12) Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance; 13) I Shall Be Free.
Common knowledge has it that The Freewheelin', released in May 1963,
singlehandedly transformed pop music into a serious occupation. The album was
loyally recorded in a folk paradigm (with one exception, all the songs strictly
respect the Holy Trinity of Bob's voice, Bob's acoustic guitar, and Bob's
harmonica), but inspired legions of rockers all the same, including the
Beatles, who immediately turned Dylan into an object of worship and began
writing songs like ʽI'm A Loserʼ, expanding their active stock of
English words and idiomatics.
Common knowledge does not lie — not in this
particular case, at least, since the enormous influence of The Freewheelin' on so many things that
came after it is well-documented in numerous sources. However, common knowledge
may also do the album a disservice. Once it came out, it was mainly the words that caught everybody's
attention. The melodies were well played, but they were familiar — just about
all of these songs were based on traditional patterns, which Dylan simply
expropriated for his own needs: typical behavior for old-school blues and folk
troubadours, perhaps, but not something that was expected of the emerging
modern-day singer-songwriter. The vocals were... well, you know: «atypical», to
say the least. The words — this was stuff that mattered. And it did not even
matter so much what exactly these words
were, but the very fact that, somehow, they seemed sharp, deep, and acutely
relevant for 1963 made The Freewheelin'
into this cult classic, and then, into one of the most respectable LPs ever
released.
But you probably know all that. The real
question is — how does the album hold up after all these years? Hundreds,
thousands perhaps, of colorful rock poets have emerged since then, some of them
shamefully derivative, some, on the other hand, proudly standing up to Bob's
verbal talents. The historical importance, once so evident and overwhelming,
has receded inside textbooks and critical best-of-ever lists. The melodies
have been bested, the phrasing has found its rivals, and, for what it's worth,
one can always find these songs performed by more skillful vocalists in
improved arrangements — starting with Peter, Paul and Mary's ʽBlowin' In
The Windʼ and ending with Elvis' ʽDon't Think Twice, It's All
Rightʼ...
...and this is where we have to make a serious
comment. In general, the world of those who know something about Dylan in the
first place is divided in two sections: the «Dylan For Dylan» section prefers
Bob's own original versions, whereas the «Dylan For Others» section prefers
listening to Bob's oeuvres done by those artists who embellish them with
intricate arrangements and, most importantly, «clean vocals». Dylan or Joan
Baez? Dylan or The Byrds? Dylan or Manfred Mann? Dylan or The Hollies? Dylan or
The Band? Dylan or Hendrix? Dylan or Rod Stewart? Dylan or Joe Cocker?... and
the list goes on. And considering that Dylan's «composing genius» is
questionable, to say the least (more on that later), and also considering that
we do not really listen to pop music
for the words, no matter how fascinating their combinations might be, this
adoption of his songs by other artists basically means that the «Dylan For
Others» party can get along very well by drop-kicking Dylan altogether.
The stark-raving «Dylan For Dylan» section has
some problems, too: much too often, its members regard Dylan covers as
watered-down, dumbed-down for mass consumption, «prettied up» and losing their
essence as a result. This is true in that, once a Dylan song becomes a Dylan
cover, it usually ceases to be a Dylan song — I have never heard a single Dylan
cover (at least, not by a major artist) that would honestly try to preserve the
exact spirit of the original. But instead of complaining, it is much more
healthy and pleasing to admire how much additional
potential there is in all these songs — and how smoothly they yield to
musical reinterpretation, be it the epic hard rock thunderstorm of Hendrix's
ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ or the smooth reggae wobble of Clapton's
ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ.
In other words, I not only refuse to join
either party, but I would strongly admonish everyone else to merge the ranks as
well, regardless of whether this means learning to enjoy and respect the
simple, accessible pleasures of Dylan covers, or — something that is usually
more difficult for people — learning to understand and soak in the uniqueness
of Dylan originals. In which tasks we should all take our lessons from the
musicians themselves. The Byrds loved ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ so much
that they covered it, and Dylan loved their version in return (although his
famous comment of "wow, you can dance to it!" may, of course, be interpreted ironically — but then, back in 1965 everything that came out of Dylan's
mouth had to have an ironic twist).
But let us get back to business. ʽBlowin'
In The Windʼ and ʽA Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fallʼ, the two major
anthems of Freewheelin', are
somewhat similar in structure — based on the old folk «listing» principle, the
former keeps asking one meaningless question after the other, while the latter
keeps piling up one loose impression and reminiscence after the other. There is
a striking contrast here — the amount of briefly skimmed themes and topics is
staggering, yet the manner in which they are skimmed (feeble acoustic picking
and mumbled vocals) is almost humiliatingly unassuming: Dylan's lack of a
strong singing voice is turned to his utter advantage, as he sings about these
issues the same way an old hobo could be begging for a drop of whiskey.
On the other hand, he does sing, and the serious singing tone, devoid of hiccups, gulps, and
other ways of overstating his purpose, that he had previously only shown on
ʽSong To Woodyʼ, is well represented on both of the anthems. And in
all honesty, the more I listen to them, the more I am becoming convinced that
it is a marvelous singing tone for these kinds of songs. At this stage in his
career, Bob prefers to leave his «eccentric» vocal tricks for his lightweight
material — the heavyweight stuff, on the other hand, is given over to his
world-weary, prophetic persona, which is at the same time skeptical and
idealistic: "the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind" sounds
hopeful and reassuring for one moment, then bitter and disillusioned for the
next one. That is one damn fine
nuance that Peter, Paul and Mary were not able to transfer to their interpretation
— nor, for that matter, was anybody else.
ʽDon't Think Twice, It's All Rightʼ is
an early example of Dylan's misogynistic persona — and, since he still had
rather small means of overcoming his shyness, probably the least irritating and
the most motivated for those who can be bothered by such things. The message is
offensive ("you just kinda wasted my precious time" is, come to think
of it, a far meaner thing to say than to just call her a fuckin' bitch), but it
is delivered in such soothing packaging — the hyper-tender style of acoustic
plucking, the soft murmuring that culminates in a most nonchalant, blurry recital
of the last chorus line, the overall almost lullaby-style atmosphere of it all
— Dylan's evil magic at work: you end up emotionally sympathizing with the
protagonist despite understanding precisely well that he's really a doggone
bastard.
His theatrical nature does show up a little bit
— especially in the way that he so carefully articulates the final
"-d" in the incorrect verbal form ("...the light I never know-eD"). Sure, he just wants to
emphasize the formal rhyme with "road", but the trick has the effect
of aligning the guy with the low-class language fuddlers: «uneducated, but
experienced through trouble and toil, and endowed with natural wisdom». How do
you condemn a guy like that? You don't — you have no choice left but to
empathize.
The other two well-known highlights of the
«grim» part of the album have not become household staples, for understandable
reasons — ʽGirl From The North Countryʼ would soon be overshadowed
by Simon & Garfunkel's ʽParsley, Sage...ʼ, since it is really a
courteous, troubadourish song that lended itself better to Paul and Art's
formally beautiful, elegiac arrangement; and ʽMasters Of Warʼ was
just too brutal and straightforward
in its onslaught (Dylan himself occasionally expressed surprise at his being
able to explicitly wish for somebody's death in a song — not that he would ever
change the lyrics in concert, I think).
Which should not detract from their virtues:
ʽGirl From The North Countryʼ has all the tenderness of ʽDon't
Think Twiceʼ without the sarcasm and woman-bashing — not that Bob's
intonations convey the slightest superficial trace of sadness or longing for the
girl, it is the song of somebody who has long since accepted and made peace
with his lonesome fate. And ʽMasters Of Warʼ, although it openly
steals Jean Ritchie's arrangement of the traditional ʽNottamun Townʼ
(eventually costing Bob $5,000 in cash), does that for a good reason — its
dirge-like repetitive structure is perfect for a solemn curse, no matter how
crudely leftist that curse may be (not that the actual lyrics necessarily have
to have a leftist interpretation — a war is always a war, and the song does
good by not naming specific names, preserving its relevancy).
A curious fact, rarely commented upon by
reviewers, is that The Freewheelin'
gradually lightens up as its unusually bulky fifty minutes roll by: starting
off with the solemn and the serious, after ʽBob Dylan's Dreamʼ it
takes a sharp turn into the lightweight and comical — the last five numbers
are a downright playful sequence, and the idea to put them all together was
right there from the start, even before censorship forced Bob to drop some of
the politically loaded songs (like ʽTalkin' John Birch Bluesʼ) and
replace them with something less «actual». Of course, ʽOxford Townʼ
is really about racism, and ʽTalking World War III Bluesʼ is quite
apocalyptic in its basic dream message, but the former is still shaped as a
humorous folk song, and the latter is a talking blues, where humor is an
essential component. And the whole sequence ends with ʽI Shall Be
Freeʼ, which already contains no social undercurrent whatsoever (well, almost: that verse about President
Kennedy and what we need to make the country grow has always seemed to me as
one of the smartest observations on 1960s society in general).
This gradual transition from the solemn to the
sacrilegious is really the main thing that makes The Freewheelin' matter as an album — otherwise, it would simply be
an early acoustic hit collection. Not being too diverse in its melodies and
certainly not being diverse in its arrangements (it is almost too easy to
overlook the fact that ʽCorrine, Corrinaʼ was recorded with a full
backing band, what with its overall quiet sound agreeing so smoothly with the
rest of the album), The Freewheelin'
has more emotional diversity in its overall 50-minute palette than Woody
Guthrie (no offense meant) had in his entire career. Dylan the prophet, Dylan
the accuser, Dylan the hardened loner, Dylan the visionary, Dylan the bluesman
— and, at the same time, Dylan the social satirist, Dylan the snappy joker,
Dylan the musical-slapstick clown. Too bad Dylan the surf-rocker and Dylan the
smooth teen idol missed the boat, but there is a physical limit, I guess, on
different types of personalities one can handle at the same time.
The album cover deserves a special mention, too
— the photographer did a marvelous job of capturing Bob in a downright awkward
pose, where he looks like an authentically autistic dude, used to spend most of
his life in dark corners, whom his girlfriend just finally happened to drag out
in the street to take a brief walk, clinging on to him so tightly not so much
out of general passion, but more out of fear that he'd run away at the first
occasion (which he eventually did a year later, breaking up with the
unfortunate Suze Rotolo out of general immaturity of character). On subsequent
covers, he would usually stare at you with either contempt, condescension, or,
at best, curiosity (at the general stupidity and backwardness of the human race,
no doubt) — on The Freewheelin', he
is much too shy to look you in the eye at all.
This shyness permeates the entire LP, as Bob
never engages his listeners in bloody fights (even the vicious punch of ʽMasters
Of Warʼ is directed somewhere in the open air, unless you are in a
position to take it personally). There is, consequently, a thick demarcation
line that separates The Freewheelin'
from everything that came after it — the «certified genius» and «generation
spokesman» tags that were slapped on to Bob in the wake of the enormous
success of the album had an irreversible effect on his persona, and so Freewheelin' remains the only fully
original Dylan album to not bear the
traces of this pressure. In a way, this is the only «pure» Dylan album out
there, written and recorded by a shy, but talented little kid from Hibbing,
Minnesota. Later on, the shy little kid was crowned king — and has behaved like
a king ever since then. Young king, old king, active king, lazy king, acting
king, king in (temporary) exile, whatever: he would always be up there and you
would always be down here, in some way. On The
Freewheelin', he is not a king yet — he's out in the street with a girl on
his arm. When would there be another time he'd allow himself to be photoed with
a girl on his arm? Thumbs up for Suze Rotolo and her charming, if
doomed, little smile.
THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN' (1964)
1) The Times They Are
A-Changin'; 2) Ballad Of Hollis Brown; 3) With God On Our Side; 4) One Too Many
Mornings; 5) North Country Blues; 6) Only A Pawn In Their Game; 7) Boots Of
Spanish Leather; 8) When The Ship Comes In; 9) The Lonesome Death Of Hattie
Carroll; 10) Restless Farewell.
One thing that most people have always felt
about Dylan to the near-point of certainty is his egocentric nature.
Behaviorally haughty, instinctively condescending, and in addition to all that,
totally closed to outsiders — where «outsiders» would begin with the closest
friends and relatives and end with everybody else. This is more or less common
knowledge, but I have to bring it up because ever so often, caught up in one or
another side of Dylan's artistic personality, we forget that we can never be sure of when exactly we are
dealing with the «true» Dylan.
It is probably
safe to say that «Dylan the folk protest singer», much like «Dylan the newborn
Christian» fifteen years later, was essentially a mask that he agreed to wear
for a certain period of time, as long as it was helping him with his artistic
career. «Mask» does not quite nearly equal «fake», mind you: there is no reason
not to believe that, on some level, Bob did sympathize for people like Hollis
Brown or Hattie Carroll — and there is every
reason to believe the spite and contempt that the man had both for the
powers-that-be, as brutally as he is lashing against them on ʽWith God On
Our Sideʼ, and for the «mothers and fathers», as gleefully as he is
condemning them to the trashbin of history on ʽThe Times They Are
A-Changin'ʼ. But sympathizing is one thing, and pledging one's faith is
another — The Times They Are A-Changin'
is not an album made by a loyal soldier of the Pete Seeger regiment, even if
the uninitiated did not understand it all that well back in early 1964.
The decision to release an «all-out» protest
song album was quite conscious, and symbolically illustrated by the sleeve
photo — quite far removed from the clumsy shyness of The Freewheelin', Bob is now trying to put on the look of somebody
who has just emerged out of a sweatshop, or, at least, spent his entire childhood collecting Woody Guthrie
photos and memorabilia. Again, though, the somber look on his face as he so
explicitly looks down upon the evil
exploiters (including everyone who sells and buys his own records) is not
particularly «fake» — this is, after all, a great opportunity to indulge in his
favorite passion: putting people down, whether it be for his own sake or for
the greater good of the planet in general.
The only problem is that, having consciously
narrowed down this scope and played out in favor of this particular image, Bob
— almost predictably so — did not manage to come up with a suitably great
bunch of songs. Many of them were, in fact, created already at the time of or
even way before The Freewheelin',
and some are downright simple rewrites: ʽBoots Of Spanish Leatherʼ,
as it is very easy to notice, is essentially the same song as ʽGirl From
The North Countryʼ. Likewise, it is hardly a coincidence that the overall
number of tunes here is smaller than on Freewheelin',
while the average length of a single
composition has increased by almost a whole minute — something quite typical
for a situation of «creative blockage».
Three songs still stand out as major/minor
classics. The title track sits here in the same place that was earlier occupied
by ʽBlowin' In The Windʼ: its face is more stately, its voice is
louder, and its message is far more blunt and unambiguous — blushy shyness
being replaced by Biblical thunder as the prophet makes the transition from the
liberal-minded salon into the open space of the town market square. It must
have taken some gall to write and record a song like that, but someone had to
do it, particularly if that someone had to live up to the «generation
spokesman» tag (which Bob openly claims to have hated, but ʽThe Times They
Are A-Changin'ʼ could only have been written with that specific tag in
mind, whether he had already been assigned it or not). The song has neither
the depth nor the subtlety of his greatest creations — but it has certainly
gone «beyond your command». The guitar may be raggedy and a little out of tune,
the lyrics may borrow one too many clichés from the Prophets, and the
message may seem less and less pleasant to baby boomers as they become
grandfathers, but what can we do about it? It's a fucking symbol now, one of
those near-ideal generational anthems.
Within the context of the album, though, I
think that it is ʽWhen The Ship Comes Inʼ that makes the greater
impact — the only song to break up the dirgey bleakness and monotonousness and
to shower the curses on the heads of Bob's enemies in a faster, more playful
(and, therefore, a little more sadistic) mode: inspired by Jenny's pirate tune
in The Threepenny Opera and an
accident where Bob was refused hotel admission for not being clean enough, it
is the most gleefully danceable of Bob's protest songs, and probably the one
that his Jewish ancestors would be the most proud of, not just because it
namedrops Goliath and the Pharaoh among those who will be crushed when the ship
comes in, but also because, of all those early songs, it is the only one that
gives the listener a clear vision of that happy end we're all hoping for. And
it's catchy, too, but what wouldn't
be catchy if it were inspired by Threepenny
Opera?
The rest of the social / political songs on the
album rarely reach these highs, not just because they are lyrically much more
tied in with specific cases and particular situations, but also because they
simply happen to be too drawn out and dreary. ʽWith God On Our Sideʼ
gives you nine verses of irony when one could easily do with just three or four
— the melody is boring, the energy level is low, and the lyrics are extremely
questionable in the light of Bob's usual standards (I have always thought that
the verse about the Germans was particularly poorly thought out — do the lines
"though they murdered six millions... the Germans now, too, have God on their
side" imply that the correct alternative would have been to wipe the
Germans off the face of the Earth, once and for all? Probably not, but that is one of the easiest interpretations).
ʽThe Lonesome Death Of Hattie
Carrollʼ has more direct involvement on Bob's part, and would have
probably made a great impact had it been performed on the day of the William
Zantzinger trial (August 28, 1963), but, at the risk of understating its
importance for the history of anti-racist struggle in the US, I would dare say
that the song is quite boring on the whole, and that its slow, stuttering,
droning verses have nothing even close to the fist-clenching effect that a song
like ʽHurricaneʼ would produce more than a decade later — even if, as
a person, Hattie Carroll might be deserving more of our empathy than Ruben
Carter (if anything, merely for the fact that Hattie Carroll is dead and Ruben
Carter is not). The lyrical description of the woman's murder and of the rigged
trial, and the acid condemnation of those who «philosophize disgrace and
criticize all fears» is brilliant — the execution seems way too poorly thought
out (although, of course, there are quite a few Dylanologists that would be
happy to fight that idea).
In any case, the best song on The Times They Are A-Changin' happens
to be one of the few that completely lack any sociopolitical undercurrent — it
is also the shortest and, at first, least noticeable of these tunes, still
completely in the vein of the «humble mumble» of Freewheelin'. ʽOne Too Many Morningsʼ (Steve Jobs'
favorite song, no less!) has only three verses, a barely audible fingerpicking
melody that rolls out far more smoothly from under Bob's fingers than the
scrapy, wobbly strum of ʽThe Times They Are A-Changin'ʼ, and a beautiful
melancholic aura — I like to think of it as a sequel to ʽDon't Think
Twiceʼ, in which our hero contemplates the choices he has made and feels a
little guilty and repentant about it, all the while being extra careful to not
let us understand this directly. But even if not, it is still the most personal
and deeply human tune on the whole album — even more so than the closing
ʽRestless Farewellʼ, where Bob once again dons the travelin' minstrel
cap and sings a well-meant, but formulaic dinner ballad for the king and his
court.
On the whole, The Times They Are A-Changin' is a misstep — the only time in Bob's
entire career, perhaps, when he went ahead and delivered an album that somebody
expected him to deliver: an artistic
mistake he would never repeat again. But considering that he was still young,
fresh, full of creative juices, energy, and invigorated with his success in
«the right circles», it is also no wonder that the record is listenable, contains
no major embarrassments (if one discounts the superfluous song lengths and a
few lamentable lyrical slip-ups), and still has a bunch of classic songs that
rank all the way up there with his best. For these reasons, I would rather
resist the temptation of giving it a thumbs down — even the worst Dylan record
of the 1960s is still an essential listen for everybody who has a basic
interest in the man. Besides, as a social stimulus — a musical protest
statement — it certainly worked back in 1964, and might as well continue working
for a long time, as long as the English language doesn't change too much.
ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN (1964)
1) All I Really Want To Do; 2)
Black Crow Blues; 3) Spanish Harlem Incident; 4) Chimes Of Freedom; 5) I Shall
Be Free No. 10; 6) To Ramona; 7) Motorpsycho Nightmare; 8) My Back Pages; 9) I
Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met); 10) Ballad In Plain D; 11)
It Ain't Me Babe.
Whoever suggested that title for Bob's fourth
album was smart enough to understand that the album was different — naturally — but certainly not smart enough to
understand just how different it was.
Another Side Of..., linguistically,
suggests something like: «You thought he could only do that — guess what, he can also do this, bet you didn't know that, did you?» But on the other hand, it
is tough to think of how a more proper title might have sounded. The Real Bob Dylan? But nobody really
knows what a «real» Bob Dylan would be. The
Selfish Side Of Bob Dylan? Closer to the truth, perhaps, but a little too
repelling for the potential buyer and a little too insulting for the artist. Bob Dylan Arrives? Too promotional. Bob Dylan Doesn't Really Give A...? Too
avantgarde. Whatever, we will just have to live with that original title,
issued in poor understanding, but good faith.
Most sources call the record «transitional»,
which is objectively true in that the instrumentation and arrangements still
mostly follow the old acoustic guitar-and-harmonica model (with the important
exception of the electric piano, soon-to-be one of Bob's favorite instruments,
on ʽBlack Crow Bluesʼ), but the lyrics have almost completely shifted
away from socio-political issues into the realms of the deeply personal, the
deeply sarcastic, or the deeply absurd. However, from a general «ideological»
point of view, Dylan's transformation is already quite complete; and this
completion does not even have that much to do with abandoning the image of the
«protest singer» — the process goes deeper than that.
To illustrate, let us begin from an unexpected
point of reference: a superficial comparison of The Freewheelin's ʽI Shall Be Freeʼ with this album's
«sequel», called ʽI Shall Be Free No. 10ʼ (why ʽNo. 10ʼ?
because ʽNo. 2ʼ would be too boring, that's why). In 1963, this
little comic number, a slapstick-ish talkin' blues with a few scattered moments
of brilliance here and there, was delivered in a low, shy, murmured tone —
presumably, by a humble guy lurking in some dark corner of the stage, not yet
daring to come out and spill it all in-yer-face. In 1964, the harmonica blasts
get more shrill and piercing, and the guy is no longer afraid to raise his
voice — sometimes almost to a shout, giving the tune an arrogant-defying feel
that his talking blues used to lack previously. Nor are the lyrics always
inoffensive to his surrounders — at least once he sneaks in a snappy verse
about them ("I got a friend who spends his life / Stabbing my picture with
a bowie knife... I've got a million friends!"); and one should definitely
pay attention to the last verse — "Now you're probably wondering by now /
Just what this song is all about... / It's nothing / It's something I learned
over in England!" — which, on its own, might be interpreted as a good-bye
to his past that is at least as strong as the entire message of next year's
ʽIt's All Over Now Baby Blueʼ. And, mind you, we are still only
talking about one of the most «throwaway-ish» pieces on the entire record. And
it goes on for fifty minutes (the record, that is, not the song, although I'm
pretty sure that Bob could have easily thrown on a couple dozen extra verses).
This is, perhaps, the most important breakthrough
achieved in Another Side: the
discovery of Bob's new voice, the one that would dominate his «golden age» over
the next two years, the «arrogant bastard» voice that, no doubt, owed its
existence to Bob's stabilized stardom — after all, a true king should behave as
a true king, with none of that shying away in the dark corner. And, above all,
a true king should be perfectly free to do whatever he wants to do, not
whatever the people expect him to do
— at least, such could have been Bob's reasoning when, instead of opening the
album with an inspiring, visionary anthem like he had already done twice in a
row, he preferred to open it with ʽAll I Really Want To Doʼ instead
of, say, ʽChimes Of Freedomʼ.
An interesting, and probably true,
interpretation of ʽAll I Really Want To Doʼ, previously suggested by
some people, is that the song was really a vehicle for lambasting feminist
clichés — something Bob must have swallowed his fair share of in his
Village period. It is a fun, catchy song, an object convenient enough to have
had both The Byrds and Sonny &
Cher to use it as a weapon for chart domination, but one mustn't lose track of
the condescending contempt, lurking
behind the superficially innocent arrangement — the funnier it gets, as Bob
intentionally bursts into «spontaneous» laughter towards the end of the song,
the harder it snaps at the heels of all those girls who must have, many a time,
actually accused Bob of wanting to «simplify them, classify them, deny, defy,
or crucify them». Then again, to be fair, some of them may have deserved this rough treatment — let us refrain from
demonizing the artist alone.
In any case, ʽAll I Really Want To
Doʼ is definitely more personal than it seems to be upon first sight, and
it introduces a series of even more personal songs — be it in the form of
surrealist love letters to surrealist female characters (ʽSpanish Harlem Incidentʼ,
ʽTo Ramonaʼ), or in the form of nasty-but-honest confessions
(ʽIt Ain't Me Babeʼ), or in the form of unpleasant reminiscences of a
general (ʽMy Back Pagesʼ) or way-more-particular-than-we-really-need
character (ʽBallad In Plain Dʼ). A pretty impressive bunch,
especially considering that, of all the songs on the previous two albums,
probably only ʽDon't Think Twice, It's Alrightʼ and ʽOne Too
Many Morningsʼ could match them in the intimacy department. This, too, is
yet another side of the another side —the artist is raising his voice, but he
is also less afraid to dig into his own
feelings, his own past and present,
than he was just a year before. As inspiring and grandiose as those ʽHard
Rainʼ pictures must have been, in a sense, ʽMy Back Pagesʼ is
even more «Dylanish» in nature.
Not that being «Dylanish» is always a good
thing. The existence of ʽBallad In Plain Dʼ mars this idyll in a most
harmful manner — the song is a misguided creation both on the lyrical side, reminiscing of Bob's rather shameful
handling of his relationship with Suze Rotolo and her sister from a decidedly
biased (to say the least) point of view, and
on the musical side, as the languid, barely existing melody drags on for eight
bleeding minutes at a snail's pace, so that the listener may fully savour and
digest each little jab, sting, and kick addressed at «the parasite sister» whom
the protagonist was allegedly able to «nail in the ruins of her pettiness»
(allegedly, by getting booted out of her house for improper behaviour). As a
document of human relations, ʽBallad In Plain Dʼ is a fine
educational piece; as a work of art, it is... let's just say, «undeserving».
It is a little funny, though, that the song, in
which Dylan presents himself and his former passion as innocent romantic
victims of misguided social practices, is immediately followed by ʽIt
Ain't Me Babeʼ, where the protagonist switches from self-victimizing to
self-humiliating, almost as if to atone a little bit for the aggressiveness of
the eight-minute rant. But the song is also a mirror companion to ʽAll I
Really Want To Doʼ — just like in that one, Bob is once again proclaiming
his distance from all sorts of «masculine stereotypes». See, lady, he ain't
gonna beat or cheat or mistreat you, or disgrace you or displace you, but as a
consequence of that, he also ain't
the one who will die for you and more — so «go melt back into the night, babe»:
a fairly convoluted way to tell somebody to fuck off, but works exactly the
same way. Alas, it is also an extremely catchy song, the catchiness being
provided mainly by the sneering, mocking refrain — the "no, no, no, it
ain't me, babe" bit lashes out with cruel sarcasm and sarcastic cruelty in
the nastiest way yet witnessed on any Dylan song. No wonder it had to be The
Turtles to become the first artists to cover the song: for the Byrds, it must
have seemed a little too prickly to fit in with their image.
Just about every song on Another Side merits detailed discussion, but I would rather compress
things a little bit by simply saying that the album is also quite musically
diverse for something recorded with such limited means. There is the
quasi-baroque gallantry of ʽSpanish Harlem Incidentʼ, with Dylan in
a courteous, serenadish mood; the Mexican waltzing of ʽTo Ramonaʼ,
with Dylan in the grip of Latin romanticism (something that would not be
properly revisited again until the age of Desire,
I think); the primitive, but effective «blues-punk» piano punching of
ʽBlack Crow Bluesʼ; the instantaneously memorable pop structure of
ʽI Don't Believe Youʼ — a trifle in the grand scheme of things, but
every bit as delightful to the ear as anything off A Hard Day's Night; and, of course, the two grand anthems —
ʽMy Back Pagesʼ and ʽChimes Of Freedomʼ, with Bob's newly
found «loud-and-proud» singing voice turning them into the stateliest epics of
1964... and, perhaps, the entire decade as well.
Had ʽChimes Of Freedomʼ been written
a good forty years earlier and gotten a solid translation into Russian, it
would have, no doubt, been readily adopted by some of the more
progressively-oriented Bolsheviks — of all Dylan songs, this one has the most
revolutionary spirit, and, in fact, somewhat sticks out in the context of all
the smaller-scale, personally-oriented tunes on Another Side. Very very soon, this «grand vision» would be turned
on its head and adapted to reflect surrealist and near-psychotic values, as on
ʽGates Of Edenʼ (which, in nature, is like ʽChimes Of
Freedomʼ on a heavy acid trip). But for the moment, this one here still
seems to be tailored to the likes of Bob's friends in the protest movement —
and delivered with all the seriousness and inspiration that could be mustered,
even if immediately following it up with ʽI Shall Be Free No. 10ʼ
might have been an intentional sequencing move.
Lyrical influence from Rimbaud, Blake, Shakespeare,
etc. etc. has all been detected and described by a million authors and hardly
needs any of my comments — as usual, though, the magic of the song goes far
beyond the lyrics: it is rousing, yes, but at the same time also «lulling»,
with a regular rise-and-fall vocal drive throughout each verse, and a perfect
«calm» resolution after the high-pitched lines that usually nail one or another
social injustice. Despite the violent nature of the lyrics, the only thunder
and lightning in the entire performance are in the man's voice — but it has by
now gained so much in confidence that, at times, it does begin to seem that the
guy is busy flinging out sonic lightning balls, a first example of the practice
that would reach its peak on Highway 61
Revisited. And he does that without recurring to screaming, fist-clenching,
or shirt-tearing — a tricky art mastered only by a select few.
To recapitulate, Another Side Of Bob Dylan really shows all of his sides — the romantic and sentimental, the nasty and
offensive, the humorous and playful, the visionary and anthemic, the pretentious
and the humble, the serious and the clownish (the latter as represented by
ʽMotorpsycho Nightmareʼ, the one song that has not been mentioned
because, hilarious lyrics aside, it should really be viewed as an early demo
version of the vastly superior spectacle of ʽBob Dylan's 115th Dreamʼ
on the next album). And somehow, depending on the angle you choose, it's all
there in the man's facial expression on the album cover: not yet fully
embracing the hip attitudes and attires of the «young intellectual elites» of
the Sixties, but already far removed from the «working class hero» image of The Times — half-dreamy, half-grounded,
staring somewhere right above your face, but not entirely into the sky.
A «transitional photo», perhaps, taken for an
album that he himself knew would be
«transitional» — not all of his friends and admirers might have guessed that,
but ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ was already written at the time, and the
only thing, really, that separates Another
Side from Bringing It All Back Home
is that, with the former, there still remained a slight technical chance of
going back. «Another Side» — as in, «indulge a little bit in that beatnik
stuff, show off your creativity, then go back to singing about coal miners and
racial discrimination». Well — as it turned out, that side ended up being quite
sticky. Thumbs
up without a question: the album would have been a flawless
masterpiece, had he decided at the last moment to replace the hatred of ʽBallad
In Plain Dʼ with, say, the tenderness of ʽMama You've Been On My
Mindʼ, but even geniuses are only human in the end, and have their
reserved right to occasional lapses of judgement.
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME (1965)
1) Subterranean Homesick
Blues; 2) She Belongs To Me; 3) Maggie's Farm; 4) Love Minus Zero/No Limit; 5)
Outlaw Blues; 6) On The Road Again; 7) Bob Dylan's 115th Dream; 8) Mr.
Tambourine Man; 9) Gates Of Eden; 10) It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding); 11)
It's All Over Now, Baby Blue.
So what else can really be said here, now that
we have entered the kind of territory that has already been swept clean with a
toothbrush by armies of Dylanologists and
amateur fans alike? As Dylan's music intrudes on the sacred, and vastly
popular, grounds of rock'n'roll, and Dylan's lyrics plunge into the deep pool
of surrealism, symbolism, expressionism, post-modernism, and goofy nonsense,
who in the whole wide world could
resist the temptation of offering an opinion, an interpretation, a critical
analysis, a philosophical speculation? The overall amount of writing done on
this period in Dylan's history, especially if you throw in all the Ph.D.
theses, is probably larger than any other amount on any given topic in popular
music. «Maggie comes fleet foot face full of black soot talking that the heat
put plants in the bed but...» — come on, it's pretty hard not to want to
express any sort of opinion on that
one.
Let us begin by asking some questions. Who is
the girl in the red dress on the album sleeve? That one's easy: all sources
have her down as Sally Grossman, the wife of Dylan's manager Albert Grossman.
Okay, trickier question: what is the wife of Dylan's manager doing on a Dylan
album sleeve? The answer «because Dylan was probably porking her at the time»
doesn't quite cut it, since, by all accounts, Albert Grossman simply wasn't the
kind of man with whose wife you'd want to mess around, no matter how
free-thinking and liberated you considered yourself to be. The answer «because
she just happened to hang out there while Bob was photosessioned for the album
sleeve» is a little better, but still doesn't really cut it. It would be much
better, I think, if we started looking for the answer from a straightforward
perspective — most of the things that
Bob was doing at the time were being done with the intention of pissing some
people off, and thus, the same intention can be deduced for this photo as well.
A ragged, somber, beetle-browed Dylan is
sitting, half-buried in vinyl records, in what looks like a fairly well-off
upper middle class house — with a glamorous lady in a red dress puffing away on
the couch. The obvious issue is — what is this freedom-fighter, protest-brewer,
Greenwich Village tenant, etc., doing in a place like this? Has he come here to
surrender his attitude, begging mercy from the proud and rich, or is he playing
a sort of trickster part, preaching his gospel to the bourgeoisie in order to
make them see the light?.. The album cover intrigues — it is obviously «hip» in
a very much early 1960s kind of way, pandering to fans of Godard and Antonioni,
among other things, but what would be the actual meaning of it?.. and would
there be an actual meaning, or are we just being nose-pulled by unpredictable
tricks of the subconscious?
Now, here is another question. The first side
of the LP is fully electric, recorded with a quickly assembled backing band,
Bruce Langhorne presiding on lead guitar. The second side is almost completely
acoustic, with little other than Langhorne's soft electric countermelody on
ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ to take the focus away from Bob's traditional
ingredients. Would it matter if the sides were reversed? After all, that would be respectful to the chronology —
Bob wrote ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ as early as February 1964, and
ʽGates Of Edenʼ followed fairly quickly, way before he even got
around to seriously thinking about going electric.
Imagine yourself buying a brand new Dylan album
in early 1965, coming home, putting it on the turntable and hearing ʽMr.
Tambourine Manʼ. The effect is breathtaking — it is easily among the most
beautiful acoustic tunes in Bob's repertoire. But then compare it with the
effect of coming home, putting Dylan's new album on the turntable and hearing
ʽSubterranean Homesick Bluesʼ. No actual comparison, right? even if,
by all accounts, ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ is the better song of the two,
musically, lyrically, attitud-ally, whatever.
ʽSubterranean Homesick Bluesʼ doesn't
even have much of a melody — just a basic rhythm track, painted over with
Langhorne's bluesy electric licks. Later on, Dylan himself admitted that the
song was heavily influenced by Chuck Berry's ʽToo Much Monkey
Businessʼ, mostly by way of Chuck's invention of the «machine-gun word
attack» where a storyline would develop quickly and impressionistically, in
rapid bursts of short phrases. Of course, Chuck's storyline was ultimately
understandable, realistic, and relevant for the teen spirit — Bob wouldn't be
Bob if he didn't try to capsize this approach. In his world, you have a happy
marriage between Chuck Berry and Allen Ginsberg, and it is a little strange, in
fact, that in the famous accompanying video you do see Ginsberg chatting with
someone else, but not Chuck. Personally, I think Chuck should have been
invited, too. But maybe Bob was too shy to try.
In any case, ʽSubterranean Homesick
Bluesʼ is simply one of the greatest punk
songs ever written — the whole Side A of this album is fairly punkish, but the
opening blast may have been an even
bigger fuck-you statement for 1965 than ʽMy Generationʼ and
ʽSatisfactionʼ put together, despite not saying anything «in the
open». Bob's «rap» delivery, of course, has nothing to do with «rap» as we have
generally come to know it — it is quite consistent with his overall singing
style, just a little faster than usual, but it has a special dynamics to it
that generic «rap» parts usually do not have: note how each verse is divided in
two parts, the first one delivered on the wave of a single breath, overwhelming
the listener, then the second part ("look out kid...") starts out
slow, then turns into a second wave of even huger intensity. The lyrics don't
make much literal sense — naturally — but it's no good to haughtily pretend
that we do not understand what the song is about, or to whom it might be addressed.
"The man in the coonskin cap wants eleven dollar bills, you only got
ten" — Johnny Rotten never had it that good. Oh yes, there was a time when
I remembered all the words to the song and could sing along on time — I do
consider that as some sort of personal feat, but, more importantly, there was
something there to make me do it. Never happened with Lou Reed or Joni
Mitchell, for some strange reason.
ʽMaggie's Farmʼ, to some extent,
doubles the punch of ʽSubterranean Homesick Bluesʼ (remember how
many times you used to confuse the acoustic / electric openings of the two?),
but puts things in a more personal frame — sung in the first person and initiating
a series of vicious put-downs that could have gotten Bob into lotsa personal
trouble... had anybody understood properly who it was that was getting the
face-in-the-mud treatment. Since ʽMaggie's Farmʼ may be interpreted
as a pun on «McGee's Farm» where Bob performed his protest songs, Dylan
studiosos usually understand the song as a big fig to the folk movement. But it
could actually be a big fig to just about anyone — "I try my best to be
just like I am, but everybody wants you to be just like them", and why
should the "everybody" be confined to the Pete Seegers and the Joan
Baezes?
On a sidenote, as «generic» as the blues-rock
of ʽMaggie's Farmʼ actually gets, witness Bob's sharpness as each
line of the "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more..." type
gets its own intonation — decisively affirmative first time around; higher-pitched,
more scandalous, more defensive and hysterical on its second round; a little
calmer, but also a little tired worn at the end of the verse, as if the
previously given explanation has cost the narrator too much effort. It's just a
trifle, perhaps, but it is these subtle dynamic minutiae that need to be felt,
in order to understand what separates a great Dylan song from a not-so-great
Dylan song.
Not-so-great Dylan songs on Side A on the album
do make an appearance — one doesn't often hear great praise for either
ʽOutlaw Bluesʼ or ʽOn The Road Againʼ, and it's easy to see
why: not only do they fail to match the righteous fury of ʽSubterranean
Homesick Bluesʼ and ʽMaggie's Farmʼ, but they simply seem a
little undercooked, and would soon be obliterated by better songs in the same
vein, like ʽFrom A Buick 6ʼ or ʽMost Likely You Go Your
Wayʼ. They do have a sort of minimalistic roughness which would be
completely absent from the next two records (where the issue of overcooking stuff would replace that of undercooking), but both are clearly
second-rate, tentative efforts that can easily be excused — they are short and
funny, after all — yet their presence does bring the cumulative value of the
album down a little bit: if anything, they are here to remind us that on Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan's new
«electric image» was still sinking in, but he wasn't quite there yet.
None of that applies to the near-mystical
celebration of the mysterious bohemian lady who was concocted from Joan Baez,
Nico, and probably a pack of other women in Dylan's life (ʽShe Belongs To
Meʼ), nor to the courteous beauty of ʽLove Minus Zero/No Limitʼ,
achieved not so much with the lyrics as with its three descending chords (that
bear an eerie resemblance to ʽDo You Want To Know A Secretʼ — Beatles
influence at work?), nor to ʽBob Dylan's 115th Dreamʼ where the
lyrics are, indeed, the biggest attraction, considering that the words flow
together to tell «the greatest story ever told» in a Dylan song. Or maybe it's
the opening fit of hysterical laughter, prompted by Dylan's backing band
missing its cue, that is actually the biggest attraction? Once the stage is set
with those ten seconds of rolling over, you are already drawn deep into the
experience before the song has actually started.
However, even these songs generally pale in
comparison to the acoustic side of the album: ironic, indeed, that Bob was
reaching his absolute peak in the «acoustic folk» department just as he was all
set to make the transition to «electric rock». The four songs on Side B are
four different musical worlds, a brief, but unforgettable journey through four
types of mindsets that take you from the early morning through the day into the
night and back to the light again — I have no idea just how conscious that particular
sequencing might have been, but I could imagine these four songs in no other
order.
First, ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ is, of
course, the rising-sun kind of song, not just because "in the jingle
jangle morning I'll come following you", but because the whole attitude is
that of a piper at the gates of dawn, no more, no less. The lyrics are dazzling
with imagery, Bruce Langhorne's subtle electric countervoice in one channel
adds extra sweetness, and only ʽLove Minus Zeroʼ on the first side
challenges this song's monopoly on a «benevolent mood».
Then ʽGates Of Edenʼ comes along like
a prophetic follow-up to ʽChimes Of Freedomʼ — only where the latter
made some attempt at making some sense, this one already doesn't. It
is much more stern, with a lot more iron in Bob's voice, and it should offend
Christians, because Dylan's «Gates of Eden» do not offer salvation: instead,
they seem to offer indifference to
everything that is either mentioned in the lyrics or left outside them. They're
pretty Buddhist, in fact, his Gates of Eden — describing a state of nirvana
rather than eternal bliss.
Then, with ʽIt's Alright Ma (I'm Only
Bleeding)ʼ, darkness moves on — this is a 100% nighttime song — no wonder
"darkness" is the first word spoken. In some ways, the tune invokes
the image of creepy old-time bluesmen like Blind Willie Johnson, and Bob even
tries to introduce various complex flourishes into his playing: this is one of
the few of his acoustic songs where an instrumental version (okay, not a
seven-minute long one) would not be uninteresting to hear. Moreover, the song
is quite religious in nature — most people remember it for the "even the
president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked" bit,
which is Dylan once again challenging the verbal skills of Old Testament
prophets, but there is much more to it. I mean, Dylan actually complaining about
how "it's easy to see... that nothing much is really sacred"? This is
a little personal, nighttime vision of one man's personal apocalypse, and if
you keep thinking about it too long, it might eventually grow pretty creepy, so
be warned.
Then, once the gruelling seven and a half
minutes of the song are finally over, we are brought back to life from the
nightmare with the bright guitar and harmonica of ʽIt's All Over Now, Baby
Blueʼ — despite the categoricity of the title and, once again, the
put-down nature of the lyrics, in this particular context it actually sounds
like an optimistic awakening after the horror of ʽIt's Alright Maʼ.
Like ʽMaggie's Farmʼ, the song is usually understood as Bob's
personal goodbye to the folk scene — or, perhaps, as his personal goodbye to
some girl (Baez?) — or, better still, couldn't we just understand it as a
goodbye song in general? Riding off into the sunset, or, to be more precise,
into the sunrise? A goodbye song as the last song on an album does make sense,
doesn't it?
The thumbs up that this record gets should not, of
course, obscure its overall place on the Dylan curve: a major move forward from
the already greatly advanced Another
Side, but still a little faltering and teetering in an environment that had
not yet become fully «natural» for Bob. Most importantly, the electric side is
essentially powered by his voice alone — excited and energized by these new
developments, drawing its strength from the clear understanding that he is
allowing himself to go against the grain and be strong enough to get away with
it. Langhorne's skills at the electric are considerable, but he is still no match
for Mike Bloomfield, nor is there any Al Kooper here to add organ depth to the
sound. On the other hand, this does
make Bringing It All Back Home into
a record that brings Dylan closest of all to whatever could be called «punk
aesthetics» — and for that reason, it might draw its own fanbase that an album
like Highway 61, not to mention Blonde On Blonde, could possibly shoo
away for being way too full of different superfluous ingredients. To each his
own, I guess.
HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED (1965)
1) Like A Rolling Stone; 2)
Tombstone Blues; 3) It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry; 4) From A
Buick 6; 5) Ballad Of A Thin Man; 6) Queen Jane Approximately; 7) Highway 61
Revisited; 8) Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues; 9) Desolation Row.
By this time in Dylan's career, it is already
best for everybody to refrain from asking questions (if only out of fear of
losing one's sanity), but I still find it hard to resist from at least this
short one — why «revisited»? The song
itself, duly mentioning a «highway 61» in each verse, makes no mention of
revisiting anything; and although the title does, perhaps, allude to Bob's
cover of the ʽHighway 51ʼ blues on his self-titled debut album, well,
that was 51, not 61, so he is not exactly revisiting that old place. The word «revisited» is really out of place on this
album, considering how bent it is on breaking new ground rather than revisiting
old one — but maybe that's what we think,
after all, and in reality Bob was using this faint hint to let us know how little has changed ever since he entered
the recording business?..
On the other hand, who could really tell what
this guy wants and what he does not want to let us know when he keeps staring
at us like that from the album cover.
And it is not even the stare that produces the best impression: it is the
kingly pose that he adopts on that chair, as Bobby Neuwirth, the loyal
courtier, stands right behind the throne, ready to whop any potential
dissenters over the head with that camera at the slightest notice. (And now we
know that this impression wasn't that
far from the truth, what with the Dylan/Neuwirth couple practicing intellectual
assassination on the weak, meek, and humble with brutal social-darwinist
fervor throughout that entire period — be it Joan Baez or Donovan, no one was
safe from their verbal wrath).
It worked both ways: on one hand, Dylan's
definitive breakup with the folksie movement earned him plenty of scorn, flack,
and derision — but on the other hand, most of it only went further to fuel the
well-lit fire, and pushed him to new creative heights, most of them mean, lean,
and vicious in nature. Highway 61
Revisited, heralded by ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ and the non-LP
single ʽPositively 4th Streetʼ, showed the world what it really meant to be pissed off when
you're Bob Dylan: next to these two songs — as well as about half of the other
ones on the LP — ʽMaggie's Farmʼ is Sesame Street-level material.
Fortunately for us, Dylan's vitriolics can
always be pushed aside from the listener, or, even better, empathized with — in
need, one can always side with the protagonist, and then you can giddily rail
at all the mistreated disillusioned young girls of ʽRolling Stoneʼ
and all the dazed and confused Mr. Joneses of ʽThin Manʼ, borrowing
the appropriate machine gun from the Zimmerman Industries, Hibbing, Minnesota.
And just as fortunately, the unbeatable, incomparable sneer of Highway 61 Revisited is only one of its major attractions — had it
been its only attraction, the album probably would never come to be regarded as
one of the finest products of Western civilization in the 1960s by so many
people (myself included, to make things clear right away).
The other attraction, of course, is the overall
sound of the album, which is where
the gist of Bob's genius truly lies. The assembled musicians were neither
renowned professionals (although many of them did have plenty of session experience
behind them, like Paul Griffin on piano or Bobby Gregg on drums) nor immediate
unmistakable geniuses (even though Mike Bloomfield did, on occasion, earn the
«guitar genius» tag) — nor did Bob
spend any serious amount of time training and disciplining them. Instead, what
usually happened during the sessions was that everybody just hammered away, in
various styles, moods, and combinations, and every once in a while Dylan would
signal — keep it right there. Every
single time, that is, when his bloodhound instinct picked up a hint that there
was finally something happening out
there. It is this instinct, and this instinct only, that explains why Bob, when he was in a proper hunting
spirit, was able to get so much out of almost any musician, no matter how well-trained,
experienced, or innately talented. And he was never in a more proper hunting
spirit than during these summer sessions of 1965.
Even if we take a relative «lowlight» from the
album — say, ʽFrom A Buick 6ʼ, a fast blues piece that is probably
the least well-known track on here — it still got that sound. The guitar does
not seem to be playing anything other than a standard ʽMilk Cow Bluesʼ-type
pattern, but it does play it with an arrogant brutality and decisiveness that,
for some reason, many a blues-rocker at the time was unable to achieve — and
when you overlay it with Al Kooper's flashy, incessant organ swirls, the result
is a thick, heavy sonic tempest. Most likely, the song title, which has nothing
whatsoever to do with its lyrics (a beat-era-update of the traditional
"praise for me woman" type of blues ode), could have been inspired by
this drive — it is the sonic
equivalent of landscape flashing past the windows of a speeding vehicle.
And that is just the lowlight, of course. In
general, Dylan continues with the «proto-punk» aesthetics here: once the band
or a particular band member happens to fall upon a crude, simple, but working
chord sequence, Bob locks it in place and makes him / them stick with it for
three, four, six minutes — as long as it takes him to empty his lyrical
inspiration pot. So is the deal with ʽTombstone Bluesʼ, for instance,
which gallops at a crazy pace on the power of about three guitar notes and
about as many organ ones — hello, Motörhead? (I could actually see Lemmy
doing ʽTombstone Bluesʼ in a flash — as a matter of fact, ʽAce
Of Spadesʼ does sound surprisingly similar) — and has Bob unfurling his
acid dreams one by one until it all comes together in this hilariously sound
conclusion: "I wish I could write you a melody so plain / That could hold
you dear lady from going insane / That could ease you and cool you and cease
the pain / Of your useless and pointless knowledge". Off-top piece of
advice: always try to pay the most attention to the last verse of Dylan's
songs, it is that one that usually — but, of course, not always — holds the key
to the whole story.
Or take the case of ʽIt Takes A Lot To
Laughʼ. Is it the slow, almost lethargic tempo that makes the song? Is it
the harmonica soloing? Is it the completely generic, thoroughly uncreative
blues shuffle melody? Is it the lyrics? Well, I don't know about you, but the first thing I remember and cherish about the song is
that ridiculously loud, «primitive», archaic-feel barrelhouse piano part from
Paul Griffin. Most likely, had he been recording this stuff with a different
artist, he would have played it differently: less flash, more technique, less
power, more notes. Under Dylan, he is guided to «deconstruct» that part,
dropping the complexity and emphasizing only the «key» moments, and goddammit
if it doesn't work, even if, after all these years, I am still not able to
verbally express how exactly it makes the song so unique. Leave it to me
deathbed.
Or take ʽQueen Jane Approximatelyʼ,
which I remember as the very last song on Highway
61 that I learned to love, but now I probably love it more than anything
else on the album — perhaps because it is the only genuinely friendly and
compassionate song on here, created in a rare fit of sympathy, I believe, for
those few people whom Bob did not overtly dismiss as phonies upon first sight
and who have been merged together in this single collective «Queen Jane» image.
The lyrics are great, the invitation to "come see me, Queen Jane" is
delivered in a great tone that is fifty percent irony and fifty percent
empathy, but none of that would work if it weren't for that four-note
descending bass line and Bloomfield's conclusive arpeggiated chord before the
final lines of the chorus — marking the transition from the critical
"you're in one hell of a mess, girl" stage to the consoling
"but hey, no prob, I got the cure!" one. Like everywhere else, the
non-stop crushing waves of the lyrical onslaught may initially prevent one from
seeing this — but ʽQueen Jane Approximatelyʼ could have worked almost as well in completely
instrumental mode.
And, of course, there is always ʽBallad Of
A Thin Manʼ to prove my point better than anything else. That somber
four-note piano bit — it was not invented by Dylan, it was taken directly from
Ray Charles' ʽI Believe To My Soulʼ, but it's almost as if Bob
listened to the song and said, "hey, that's a great four-note piano bit! How come there's so much more piano playing on here — doesn't it
only detract attention away from that great sequence? Why don't we just zoom in
on that?" So they did — and somehow it acquired this additional meaning,
one of a musical sword of doom hanging over the head of poor Mr. Jones, walking
around and minding his business while the naked people, the geeks and the
freaks, arming themselves with creepy horror movie organ parts and this
relentless «piano bell toll», make fun of him. It must have took some balls to
record something like that — of everyone I know, only Procol Harum tried that
trick with similar success two years later on ʽA Christmas Camelʼ
(funny enough, this here song does have the word ʽcamelʼ in its
lyrics, too), although it was already nowhere near as effective.
Considering how much of a «garage» spirit there
is here on Highway 61, it is not
surprising that the chosen guitar player was Mike Bloomfield, probably the
«dirtiest» blues guitar player on the American scene at the time, the one who
might have had the best balance between blues-rock guitar technique and the overall «nastiness» of effect:
his frantic leads on ʽTombstone Bluesʼ here must have inspired
everyone from Lou Reed to Marc Bolan. What actually is surprising is that most of the time, this garage spirit is being
enforced through decidedly unorthodox means for a garage album — usually, the
electric guitar is actually subdued by the keyboards, providing a thick
supportive sonic mat for their pounding and swirling. This kind of wall of
sound, technically speaking, was not at all typical for the far more
minimalistic garage-rock bands of the day — and yet, at the same time, Highway 61 Revisited sounds much more
raw, crude, visceral, in-yer-face, slam-dunk than almost any randomly picked
garage single from 1965.
I guess, like George Harrison said, «it's all
in the mind» — perhaps you could make garage rock with an unplugged mandolin if
you really put your spirit to it. And Dylan, by getting additional musical help
from his friends and gaining the right to direct and channel that help, was
more than qualified in terms of spirit. If anything, though, Highway 61 Revisited transcends «garage
rock» — «hangar rock» would be more like it, adding vast, sprawling musical
space to the raw power, leanness and meanness of the message. The title track
alone is like a bunch of warheads blasting into a thousand directions, each one
guided by its personal Al Kooper whistle.
All the more interesting, then, how the album
quietly settles down towards the end, gradually cooling its rockets instead of
trying to pick up even more steam. First, ʽJust Like Tom Thumb's
Bluesʼ, though still thick on sonic stuffing, gives us a sort of
«post-acid» Dylan, in a somewhat stupefied and a little «transcendental» state
— the only number on here that has quite an explicitly druggy atmosphere,
particularly when it comes to Bob's vocal delivery: his "I cannot move, my
fingers are all in a knot / I don't have the strength to get up and take
another shot / And my best friend, my doctor, won't even say what it is I've
got" sounds so totally authentic, I have this constant urge to get up and
take his temperature every time I hear it. Where the first seven songs, with
the partial exception of ʽTrainʼ, all show us a «Dylan on speed»,
this one is definitely «coming down», and it ain't too pretty, but it sure as
hell is quite mesmerizing.
Then, of course, there is always
ʽDesolation Rowʼ. Now my opinion on that song hasn't changed through
the years: I still tend to think of it as a «preview», an early,
not-100%-successful attempt at tapping into the visionary-transcendental style
of Blonde On Blonde. Its lyrics drop
just a tad too many name references to not come across as «show-off» stuff; its
arrangement, despite the brilliant folky acoustic flourishes from Charlie
McCoy, is a little too minimalistic to warrant 11 minutes of repetitiveness;
and its overall atmosphere does not gel full well with the word ʽDesolationʼ
in the title — plenty of surrealist stuff is happening out there, but very
little of it has anything to do with «desolation». But an epic, towering album
did need an epic, towering conclusion, and ʽDesolation Rowʼ suits
that function perfectly — here is Dylan as Unbiased Neutral Observer rather
than the «character-assassin» on the bulk of the album, just to prevent any
potential outcry of «so, all that guy is able to do nowadays is sneer and jeer
and criticize and complain» from the verbose critics. All that I really hold
against this song is that it has always worked much better for me in its
specific «Highway 61-closer»
function, rather than on its own merits, Charlie McCoy be blessed and all.
And as much as I seem to be gushing here, no, I
go with the minority that does not regard Highway
61 Revisited as the highest peak of the curve. For me, above all, Dylan is
the world's greatest master of subtlety and understatement, for both of which Highway 61, in its raging garage
fervor, has only limited space. Likewise, I certainly do not consider Dylan a
«rock'n'roll artist», and this also helps to get detached from the majority
that might simply prefer Highway 61
to Blonde On Blonde because the
first one «kicks ass all the way through» where the second one can be «kinda
boring, at least in some spots» — this may be true, but I genuinely do not need
«my Dylan» to kick ass in order to achieve unparalleled greatness.
Nevertheless, there is no question whatsoever
in my mind that an album like Highway 61
could only have been done by this one person at this particular time; that it
captures and personifies the incomparable «Zeitgeist»
of 1965 more intelligently and with more complexity than any other album; that
all of its moods and sentiments are as vital and relevant today as they were
half a century ago; and that quibbling over pizza toppings is a great way to
take some pressure off one's brain, but hardly deserves even a single permanent
byte of Internet space. Consequently, let's just top this one off with an enthusiastic thumbs up-de luxe — and move on up.
P.S. Curiously enough, already after signing
off, I found out that I forgot to say even a single thing about the album's top
song. But on second thought, let's keep it this way — it is sort of tempting to
ensure the uniqueness of this here review through a thing it fails to mention, rather than the
opposite. Besides, what else new can there be said about that opening snare
shot that hasn't already been said by that eloquent preacher of post-industrial
existentialism, Mr. Spruce Bringsteen? "He showed us that just because the
music was innately physical, did not mean it was anti-intellect" — well,
leave it to Mr. Bringsteen to once again dangerously toy with the balance in
favor of extra «physicality» as his own time would arrive a decade from then
on, but at least there is no questioning his judgement on this one.
BLONDE ON BLONDE (1966)
1) Rainy Day Women # 12 &
35; 2) Pledging My Time; 3) Visions Of Johanna; 4) One Of Us Must Know (Sooner
Or Later); 5) I Want You; 6) Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues
Again; 7) Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat; 8) Just Like A Woman; 9) Most Likely You
Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine); 10) Temporary Like Achilles; 11) Absolutely
Sweet Marie; 12) 4th Time Around; 13) Obviously 5 Believers; 14) Sad-Eyed Lady
Of The Lowlands.
Usually, whenever I get the urge to fantasize
about yet another version of a shortlist of the «Greatest Albums Ever
Recorded», I tend to exclude albums from solitary singer-songwriters or
«dictatorial bands» dominated by one towering figure (like Jethro Tull). As
phenomenal as any one particular mind may be, two phenomenal minds, properly coordinated with each other, are
unquestionably even better. Pet Sounds
is a fantastic album, yet it is fundamentally the product of not simply one
mind's (Brian Wilson's), but one vision's, one purpose's, one creative
vector's: almost any random song off it already has the seeds of every other
song's inside it. Not so with a truly great record from, say, a peak period of
the Beatles or the Stones, where thoughts and aspirations ran in different
directions, and the way they interlocked opened up a virtually limitless number
of combinations. Perhaps this could come at a certain expense of coherence, or
perhaps some of the ideas could get a wee bit dissipated or out of focus, but I
never see this as a real problem — a great idea that makes its point in two
minutes rather than forty is still a great idea.
However, every rule knows its exceptions. «I
get your point about Pet Sounds, but
it speaks to me on such a fundamental level that I really don't care if all of
its songs are essentially about the same thing. What really matters is that
they are about THE THING, and nothing is greater in the whole world than THE
THING». That is certainly a respectable position — and that, more or less, is
the way I feel, and have always felt, about Blonde On Blonde. Except I could argue, perhaps, that, unlike Pet Sounds, it is not all about the same thing, but for the sake of simplicity, and
equality of argument, let us assume and agree that it is. For the moment.
One thing that Dylan shared with the Beatles
around late 1965 / early 1966 was this uncanny, rationally inexplainable
ability to progress in the face of all odds. The more they all became burdened
with «public duties» — never-ending touring, ridiculous press conferences,
excessive socializing, not to mention groupies, sycophants, girls, drugs, and
whatever else might be coming that way — the more their creative juices seemed
to overflow and pour out in a completely different direction. Revolver had Paul's finest odes to
loneliness and John's strongest hymns to the transcendental; Blonde On Blonde almost completely
dispensed with the aggressive rock'n'roll spirit and dived into the
introspective and the ephemeral. It would have been one thing if Revolver were recorded after the band's decision to quit
touring and retreat into their private worlds, or if Blonde On Blonde were created after
the infamous motorcycle incident that temporarily cut off Dylan from the
outside spheres. But history stubbornly insists on the reverse, «unnatural» order
of these incidents, and this should, if anything, enhance our respect for — and
our enjoyment of — both these sonic wonders of 1966.
Formally, the crucial difference between Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde was due to Bob's
decision to move to Nashville for the main sessions. He had made several
attempts to record with his new touring band, The Hawks, in Columbia's New York
studios, but nothing seemed to work the way he wanted — and it is relatively
possible to follow Bob's train of thought on that one if one listens to a
selection of outtakes from those sessions that have since been made available
on the various Bootleg Sessions
(ʽI Wanna Be Your Loverʼ, ʽShe's Your Lover Nowʼ, etc.):
most are listenable, but sound like somewhat uneasy transition pieces from the
blazing rock of Highway 61 to the
moody sounds of Blonde. In the heat
of the moment, the Hawks and Robert Zimmerman just wouldn't gel in the studio —
it would take the motorcycle incident, a relaxed period of Woodstock
seclusion, and a name change to The Band to make them understand each other so
much better.
Meanwhile, the move to Nashville in February
'66 turned out to be a genius move. Dylan took only two musicians from his
then-current retinue — Al Kooper on organ (a very wise choice, since the organ
parts are essential ingredients in many of these songs) and Robbie Robertson on
guitar (maybe not so wise a choice, since Robbie, with his still very
«rock-oriented» style of playing, does not seem to always understand what is
going on. "It's not hard rock", Bob would later say about
ʽVisions Of Johannaʼ, "the only thing in it that's hard is Robbie",
and I am not sure that the statement was not actually meant as a slight
critique. On the other hand, some of the songs here do require small amounts of
hard rock guitar, so the decision to bring the lead Hawk along was not entirely
pointless, either).
The rest of the band was all picked up at
Nashville, including the already well-known guitarist Charlie McCoy and the
soon-to-be well-known artist Joe South on bass. None of them were bona fide
«rock'n'roll» players, so, in a way, one could argue that Dylan's personal
«roots revolution» had already begun well prior to John Wesley Harding, or, at the very least, that the seeds for
those roots had already been planted in early 1966. But that would be a moot
argument anyway, because Blonde On
Blonde goes beyond these petty discrepancies — its world transcends the
limits of «rock music», «roots music», whatever. Somehow, during those
sessions, something, some sort of sound was captured, the
likeness of which I have never, ever heard on any other record. Out of a
complex bunch of ingredients arose a once-in-a-lifetime combination that, for a
brief moment, opened the doors to a completely befuddling dimension. The
motorcycle crash slammed those doors back shut — but, in all honesty, I highly
doubt that they would be kept open by themselves even without the crash: the
moment was simply too good to last.
So what's up with that «thin, wild mercury
sound», the way Bob himself described what was happenning here a decade later?
In individual terms, the closest equivalent to a «thin mercury sound» that my
ears tell me about here is probably Kooper's subtle organ lining for the basic
melody of ʽVisions Of Johannaʼ — very thin indeed, and trickling down
from your speakers like mercury, though, hopefully, with less lethal
consequences. Not coincidentally, this is also the album's stand-out tune par excellence, a thoroughly «nighttime»
song compared to the louder, brighter, generally more «active» or, sometimes,
more «ceremonial» performances elsewhere, but still, in most of its
ingredients, very typical of the general approach of Blonde On Blonde. The lyrics themselves subtly hint at nocturnal
impressions — "ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're
trying to be so quiet?", "lights flicker from the opposite
loft", etc. — and the whole song ultimately becomes a musical seance, and
leave it to Al to come up with the perfect ghostly whistle of an organ tone to
complete the picture (whereas Robbie's sharp, piercing licks, as I already
said, rather detract from the atmosphere than add to it — fortunately, not a
lot).
There was nothing, and I mean absolutely
nothing, that even hinted at this kind of material earlier on in 1965. There is
no anger here, no irony, no condescension, no pissed-off feelings, and it even
looks like there ain't that much in
terms of «shock value»: ʽVisions Of Johannaʼ is not set to stun, its
only way of working is to gradually crawl under the skin, which partially
explains its running time of seven and a half minutes. I have no intention of
saying that this is «Dylan at his most sincere» or «as close to the real Dylan
as it gets», because by early 1966, what with drugs, touring, pressure, and,
above all, Bob's complete slide into the realm of self-mythologization, he
himself may not have been entirely secure of what was real and what was, well,
a «vision». But there is a very special kind of magic running through the air
every time the chorus comes to a resolution.
"These visions... pause... of Johanna... pause..."
...note the ultra-short punch of the first i
in "visions" and the first a in "Johanna", they are like two rhythmic hammer blows, sharply contrasting
with the generally drawn out stressed syllables in the verses — that obligatory
conscience modulator, without which our senses might have simply been lulled to
sleep. This type of careful, meaningful enunciation is something decidedly new:
there just wasn't time, space, or opportunity for it on Highway 61. Nor were there any similar tricks, in fact, on any of
Dylan's early acoustic albums. He'd learned to turn the weakness of his voice
into a powerful communicative tool already prior to entering the recording
studio — but I think that it wasn't really until these Nashville sessions that
the knife became truly jagged.
In fact, it is the Blonde On Blonde voice, I think, that usually falls victim to all
sorts of «Dylan parodies», be it Adrian Belew on Zappa's Sheik Yerbouti or Weird Al Yankovic on his own ʽBobʼ
(with an accompanying video that parodied Dylan's original clip for
ʽSubterranean Homesick Bluesʼ — which Bob certainly did not rap out
with that kind of voice). On many, if
not most, of the tracks, Bob sings here in a significantly lower register than
he'd used to before; and since so many of the songs are taken at relatively
slow tempos, this gives him the opportunity to draw out, twist, mutilate, and
make otherwise suffer as many syllables as he wishes to — including that odd
manner of adding a rising tone to everything that's stressed: "but you-OO
said you knew-OO me and I too-OOk your wo-OOrd..." ...in fact, he even
manages to push it over to the fast tracks, like ʽI Want Youʼ —
"the gui-II-lty underta-AA-ker si-II-ghs...". Why the heck does he do
it? What's to be gained, other than mockery and parody?
Perhaps — simple explanation — it all has to do
with the side effect of mind-expanding substances. Perhaps — slightly more
complicated, but I actually like this more — it's all about screening himself and his output from
outsiders: by putting on this half-theatrical, half-mental guise Dylan
instinctively protects the songs from being adopted, adapted, misconstrued, and
desecrated by outsiders. Indeed, how many notorious
covers of songs off Blonde On Blonde
do we know of? Other than ʽJust Like A Womanʼ, which the ubiquitous
Manfred Mann immediately latched on to (but even the Byrds, who only attempted
to do it around 1970, dropped it from the official releases of Untitled and Byrdmaniax) — almost nothing. Not that people didn't try to do it —
they did, and usually failed, not «getting» the original spirit of the song and
not succeeding in imbuing it with a different one, either. Of all Dylan
collections, Blonde On Blonde is
arguably the least pliant when it comes to the art of plundering — and there
are good reasons for that: its strength is not in the «melodies» per se, but in
the fortuitous combination of its sonic structures. The «mercury sound», the
«Nashville orchestra» bent to carrying out the will of the Minnesota genius,
the ridiculous — and ridiculously unforgettable — singing manner, and the
endearingly nonchalant spontaneity of it all. How does one improve on such a cocktail?
At this point, it would probably make sense to
talk in more details about the individual songs, which places the reviewer in
an awful condition: brief blurbs would be redundant and uninformative —
thorough analyses would turn the review into a monograph, and for that we
already have Clinton Heylin and a host of less prolific Dylanologists.
Consequently, instead of going one way or the other, I will try the «random
observation» route. If you have not yet had your required listen to Blonde On Blonde, stop reading this
stuff already; if you have, and wish to compare impressions, you might want to
think about the following:
— how is it possible, on the part of so many
people, to rail against ʽRainy Day Women # 12 & 35ʼ? It is the perfectly expectable Dylanesque
shocker: after the mindblowing explosions of ʽSubterranean Homesick
Bluesʼ and ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ, to open up your next album
with a superficially dumb, deranged, plodding carnival freakout. But if it sounds stupid, that does not necessarily
mean that it is stupid — if anything,
it might be the best ironic pun on the double meaning of the verb ʽto
stoneʼ ever offered by anybody, and Bob's totally triumphant intonation on
the verse-closing "everybody must get stoned!", as he turns the
tables on his imaginary oppressors, reveals that he is perfectly aware of his
own greatness in the matter;
— don't the rhythmically counterbalanced guitar
and organ flourishes, framing Bob's vocals on the verses of ʽStuck Inside
Of Mobileʼ, remind you of relentless, unchanging, unyielding cogs inside a
machine, enhancing the «stuck inside» feeling? No conventional depression or
desperation here, despite the lyrics' obvious debt to old-timey plaintive
blues poems — but, somehow, the song still manages to pass for Blonde On Blonde's pinnacle of
depression;
— what's up with all this odd passion for
long-winded adverbs? ʽAbsolutely
Sweet Marieʼ, ʽObviously 5
Believersʼ, "anybody can be just like me, obviously... but not too many can be like you, fortunately..." It's one thing to be head over heels in love
with words, and another, much less comprehensible one, to be obsessed with
complex derived adverbials. Maybe it was just a kind of intellectual mockery,
especially considering how these adverbs usually seem to be employed in the
«wrong» context. On the other hand, the longer any particular word is, the more
fun you can have with it while mouthing its syllables — let us not forget that,
at this point in time, phonetics was just as important to Bob's act as
semantics;
— if there is a single «anti-sexiest» manner of
pronouncing the words "I want you" than Dylan doing so on ʽI
Want Youʼ, I have yet to hear it. Much has been said about how sweet and
sentimental the song is, but if so, it is being all that only by having all
the sweetness and sentimentalism «purged» from its chorus, much like Robert
Bresson preferred to purge all signs of «acting» from his actors before casting
them in his movies;
— there is only one occasion on the whole album
where I am truly grateful to Robbie Robertson for his presence: the maniacal
garage-style solo during the instrumental break on ʽLeopard-Skin Pill-Box
Hatʼ. Sure, the song, recorded while still in New York rather than
Nashville, is formally a bit of filler, but it does feature one of the funniest
sets of lyrics Bob ever wrote ("you might think he loves you for your
money, but I know what he really
loves you for — it's your brand new leopard skin pillbox hat!" remains one
of my favorite cliché inversions in the world), and Robbie's break has
him rising to the screechiest of heights, crazier and punkier than he'd ever
get anywhere else, be it backing Bob, fronting The Band, or even flash-duelling
with Clapton on The Last Waltz. This
is just to note that these Dylan albums do not generally have filler per se: there are simply more and less
ambitious tracks, that's all;
— regarding ʽJust Like A Womanʼ, my
favorite part has always been the final instrumental verse, which I regard as
the album's most beautiful moment: not coincidentally, perhaps, it is the only
instrumental verse that does not count either as a «fade-out» (since it does
not fade out) or as a «break» (since it terminates the song) — that way, it
draws additional attention, and for a good reason, since the guitar / organ /
harmonica trio is simply out of this world. Regardless of what the song's
lyrics are supposed to mean, and whether they are «misogynistic» or merely
«risqué», it is the music that truly counts here, not the words, and the
music is a tender, dreamy serenade with just a tiny, but an important, bit of
sarcastic sorrow (look for the meaningful harmonica note change at precisely
4:08, among other things) beneath the surface;
— ʽSad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlandsʼ is
basically an Eastern, Persian/Arabic/Jewish-type tapestry of verse, crossed
with a streak of beatnik influence and set to the «mercury sound»: beyond its
obviously innovative surface there actually lies a grand archaic tradition,
which is the exact reason it works so well, or else it would have been simply
perceived as a spout of boring nonsense. Consequently, I think this is the only
song on the whole album where his new singing style fits in perfectly — because
this is not really even beginning to approach «singing», it is grand-style
rhythmic poetry declamation set to a rich accompanying soundtrack, and the only
things that are missing include a turban, a long beard, and a flying carpet,
though it wouldn't take a whole lot of imagination to put them all together,
because the music already supplies the required magic fuel. My only complaint
at this point: the song could have used an extra three or four verses, since
11:20 is kind of a pitiful length for an entire LP side, don't you think?
It's always been a little funny to me, to talk
to people who don't «get» Blonde On
Blonde (much as it has probably been equally funny for lots of people to
talk to myself, not «getting» Miles Davis or, say, Radiohead, so this should
not be taken as a snobby remark), an album that has always connected to my
psychic radar like no other — yet, somehow, there still remain lots of those
who wouldn't even agree with the thumbs up, much less with such pompous, but
sincere appellations as «greatest Bob Dylan album ever» or «one of the greatest
albums ever recorded», etc. On the other hand, the very fact that, unlike,
say, any given Tim Buckley or Scott Walker album, Blonde On Blonde has never been awarded a «cult status», but has
continued to enjoy an unbroken world-wide reputation ever since its release,
should also speak volumes to at least those of the unconverted who do not
suffer from acute bouts of conspirology and can be persuaded to think about the
impact of this album outside of the «Great Dylan Hoax» theory.
At the very least, here is my own sincere
testimony: at one time, these songs — heard around the age of 13-14, still in
Soviet times, thoroughly disconnected from any potentially accompanying
reviews, praise, hype, etc., and not even fully understood as far as the actual
words were concerned — somehow managed, nevertheless, to rock some of the
foundations of my personal world. And in a way, that old feeling still remains.
This is one of those very few albums that occasionally reminds me — listening
to music, after all, is not such a silly way to spend one's time as one's
logical reasoning might suggest.
THE BASEMENT TAPES (1967; 1975)
1) Odds And Ends; 2) Orange
Juice Blues (Blues For Breakfast); 3) Million Dollar Bash; 4) Yazoo Street
Scandal; 5) Going To Acapulco; 6) Katie's Been Gone; 7) Lo And Behold; 8)
Bessie Smith; 9) Clothes Line Saga; 10) Apple Suckling Tree; 11) Please, Mrs.
Henry; 12) Tears Of Rage; 13) Too Much Of Nothing; 14) Yea! Heavy And A Bottle
Of Bread; 15) Ain't No More Cane; 16) Crash On The Levee (Down On The Flood);
17) Ruben Remus; 18) Tiny Montgomery; 19) You Ain't Goin' Nowhere; 20) Don't Ya
Tell Henry; 21) Nothing Was Delivered; 22) Open The Door, Homer; 23) Long
Distance Operator; 24) This Wheel's On Fire.
Technically speaking, this album belongs in the
«Addenda» section, together with all the Bootleg
Series volumes. As every Dylan fan with a spoonful of experience already
knows, this rag-taggy collection of songs was never intended to see the light
of day — not even after much of it was bootlegged as Great White Wonder in July 1969, initiating the worldwide bootleg
craze, not even after many of its songs were officially covered by other
artists, not even after Dylan and The Band went through a new extensive
collaborative period in 1974. In the end, it saw the light of day as late as
mid-1975, after the tremendous critical success of Blood On The Tracks — some suppose that this had something to do
with Bob regaining confidence in himself, but since this is Bob, we will
probably never know the truth anyway.
Nevertheless, these reviews are intended to provide some sort of
chronological coherence, and from that point of view, The Basement Tapes is a vitally important transition piece for Bob
— not a «great Bob Dylan album» by any means, but a notable evolutionary step
that might, perhaps, somewhat soften the blow of sudden metamorphosis from the
unique psycho-dreamy whackiness of Blonde
On Blonde to the stern musical ascetism of John Wesley Harding. Anybody who is willing to learn his Dylan in
chronological order should, I believe, put The
Basement Tapes in its right place — which is right here, smack dab in the
middle of the Summer of Love. Just as the hippies converged in Monterey to open
up a new era of peace, love, and soiled underwear, Dylan and The Hawks holed up
in the basement — at Woodstock, as
ironic as that may sound — and showed 'em all how much they cared.
That infamous motorcycle accident on July 29,
1966... the funny thing is that, apparently, there are no reliable documentary
confirmations that the accident even took place, or, at least, that it was
really as serious as Dylan described it himself, with broken neck vertebrae and
all. If the whole thing was not staged, then, at the very least, Bob clearly
used it as a respectable pretext to trump the wheel of fortune and put it in
reverse before it burned him up. So very much like Bob — right at the very
moment where, in a matter of months, they could have finally crowned him king,
to go in hiding, abandoning any possible claims.
The music he made with The Hawks,
soon-to-be-the-band in that Big Pink basement over in Woodstock, was, for the
most part, «non-music», or, rather, «anti-music», a perfect antidote to his
1965-66 period of creative overdrive. It is not clear to me how it would be
possible to think of The Basement Tapes
as a «lost and found masterpiece», as is it is often claimed to be, outside of
the overall context. The sessions actually started out in full-on «recreation
mode», as Bob, in order to kill time, began drawing upon his vast knowledge of
«Americana», and playing the game of «teach The Hawks to be The Band in three
months», which he actually did — Robbie Robertson and his pals entered that
basement in their garage shoes and came out of it wearing pioneer boots. There
was no genuine intention to be creative. It just so happened that creativity
sometimes comes to you, whether you want it or not.
The
Basement Tapes were, indeed,
much more important for The Band than for Dylan: they helped lay down the
basics for the sound which, when carried over to a proper studio and given an
«okay, now let's be serious here,
folks» flavor, generated Music From Big
Pink and everything that followed. What that sound was, exactly, is hard to define in one sentence. «The real folk rock» is as close as it gets —
meaning music with a folk tradition basis, but played on rock instruments,
without any unnecessary polish, but with lyrics and moods updated to fit the
times. As odd as it seems, very few people had done that prior to the summer of
'67 — hence all the alleged «roots-rock revolution», much of which ultimately
came from «The Basement».
The funny thing is, Dylan himself did not care
all that much. He helped The Band find their voice, but it is interesting that
the two best known songs on the album (ʽTears Of Rageʼ and ʽThis
Wheel's On Fireʼ), featuring Dylan-written lyrics and Band-written music
(Richard Manuel is responsible for the former, and Rick Danko for the latter),
are the most serious-sounding pieces on here, whereas most of the «solo» Dylan
material is just plain comic stuff — ʽOdds And Endsʼ, ʽMillion
Dollar Bashʼ, ʽLo And Beholdʼ... the guy was really not doing much
out there, except for just plain goofing off, and this is not even ʽRainy
Day Womenʼ-style goofing off, with a bit of a bite: nope, this is as
straightforwardly «dumb» as Dylan ever allowed himself to get. At least
ʽYou Ain't Goin' Nowhereʼ got itself that lazy, hammocky, nonchalant
vibe that The Byrds caught on and exploited so well on Sweetheart Of The Rodeo — but hey, I'd like to hear them try and
cover ʽYea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Breadʼ, with all that Roger McGuinn
sagacity.
Is there any salt-of-the-earth-type «depth»
behind all this fun? Not unless we count the overall raggedness of the session
as a means to invoke ye spirits of olde — including Bob's personal transition
from the energetic and meticulously staged singing styles of 1965-66 to a deeper,
lower, croakier, and somewhat less distinctive manner of delivering his lyrics,
which could be just as much a result of a conscious image-shifting decision as
it could be the result of physical injury. (One must, however, also remember
that these songs were never intended for commercial release, and this is why
Dylan is less mindful of steering his soundwaves than he would soon be on John Wesley Harding — whose genius is
all about that particular steering). In other words, The Basement Tapes make sense as an overall cultural phenomenon,
but certainly not as a collection of bigger-than-life songs, like most of the
LPs that Bob put out prior to 1967.
Even the lyrics often sound like they were
created on the spot... well, come to think of it, most of Dylan's lyrics took
very little time to write, but in the end, they usually fit in very well with
the mood of the song, and ended up making their point — not so with songs like
ʽMillion Dollar Bashʼ and ʽLo And Beholdʼ, which, quite
honestly, sound as if Bob was simply improvising to a freshly discovered
groove: "What's the matter Molly dear / What's the matter with your mound?
/ What's it to you, Moby Dick? / This is chicken town!" and so on. It
don't really matter much — if this counts as an easy-going, laid-back set,
created in order to have fun and kill time. Of course, it helps that most of
the songs are catchy, usually by means of their anthemic choruses, but even the
choruses usually give the impression of yer friendly madhouse come to visit.
Curiously, or maybe not so curiously, it is the
small handful of Band songs included on the album that tries to be more serious
and thoughtful — as if all these little comic trifles from the mind of The
Master somehow ended up inspiring Robbie and friends to come up with
ʽKatie's Been Goneʼ and ʽBessie Smithʼ, as well as the
utmost verbal nonsense of ʽYazoo Street Scandalʼ and ʽRuben
Remusʼ that still has a «spiritual tinge» to it — the former is ominous
and aggressive, the latter tragic and desperate. It should be noted that a few
of the Band songs included here are actually «fake Basement Tapes», recorded somewhere in between 1967 and 1975,
which explains an overall higher degree of polish and sound quality:
Robertson's explanations on the issue are confusing, suggesting either that
they simply did not have access to some of the original recordings and so had
to re-record them, or that they would automatically brand any of their
post-1967 homemade recordings as a «basement tape» and throw it in the pile.
But on the whole, there is no doubt that the Band material included here is
stylistically close to what was going on in there, in those summer months — the
birth of The Band, with Dylan as trusted godfather.
Because of the extra-crudeness of the demo
recordings, this is the only album in Bob's career, I think, where all of the
famous songs would be improved upon by future performers — most notably The
Band themselves, of course, who took ʽTears Of Rageʼ and ʽThis
Wheel's On Fireʼ with them for their debut album, but also by The Byrds and
others. However, their appearance here, among all the lighthearted fun stuff,
is still very important: these are the first Dylan songs in the genre of
«Biblical dirge» — one that he never tried to seriously approach before the
motorcycle accident, but which sounds so appropriate after. John Wesley Harding
would soon put it on the map in all its gloomy splendor, but these are the
first serious inklings — ʽTears Of Rageʼ wails and moans in
desperation, while ʽWheel's On Fireʼ wails and moans with reproach
and anger: "this wheel shall explode!" is Prophet Ezekiel speaking to
you, not Woody Guthrie or Allen Ginsberg, and the speech sounds fairly
convincing, if a bit shaky.
Altogether, I believe, it is high time the
original Basement Tapes were
reconfigured — the 1975 double album release could benefit both from some
trimming (for instance, later Band tracks should probably be removed for
integrity's sake) and from some expansion — the «seriousness» quota, in
particular, could be improved by including ʽI Shall Be Releasedʼ,
still usually only available on compilations, even though it is arguably the most important Dylan song of the
year 1967, and one that symbolizes the transition from a «young, spirited
Dylan» to an «older, wiser Dylan» better than anything else, not to mention
simply being one of the most beatiful songs about death ever written by mortal
man. (Although, once again, Richard Manuel trumped the original Dylan-sung
version on Music From Big Pink).
But even if such a reconfiguring never takes
place, the album, inevitably flawed as it is, is still fascinating as a
chronicle of the times — and works particularly well in contrast with the chronicle
of the Monterey Pop Festival on the opposite coast. The only trick is that it
has to be experienced as one barely-cohesive whole: if you go inside,
expecting individual sonic masterpieces (which was sort of my original
expectation, and the reason why I was so sorely disappointed at one time),
«nothing will be delivered». Perhaps, if you are a newcomer both to Dylan and
The Band, it might even make sense to postpone the acquaintance until after you have become a convert to the
magic of both Blonde On Blonde and John Wesley Harding, not to mention Music From Big Pink. That way, it could
be much easier to get those thumbs up.
JOHN WESLEY HARDING (1968)
1) John Wesley Harding; 2) As
I Went Out One Morning; 3) I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine; 4) All Along The
Watchtower; 5) Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest; 6) Drifter's Escape; 7)
Dear Landlord; 8) I Am A Lonesome Hobo; 9) I Pity The Poor Immigrant; 10)
Wicked Messenger; 11) Down Along The Cove; 12) I'll Be Your Baby Tonight.
Most of the ink, both analog and digital, spilt
over John Wesley Harding since its
appearance in late 1967 / early 1968, has been spilt with benevolence and
admiration, with the few dissenters deservedly going to Hell. However, to my
deep surprise, I have never yet encountered a review or general discussion of
this record that would really hit me
where it feels sharpest. Maybe that makes me a particularly special kind of
«Dylan nutcase» — wouldn't that be flattering, actually? — and if so, feel free
to ignore the strong sentiments below. But they are strong, and have been that way for about two decades, and this
is nothing to laugh about.
The story itself is known fairly well: Dylan
recuperates, goes back to business, returns to Nashville, enlists the minimal
aid of Blonde On Blonde vets Charlie
McCoy (now on bass) and Kenny Buttrey on drums, plus steel guitarist Pete
Drake on two tracks, cuts a forty-minute, twelve-song LP in less than twelve
hours (to the huge surprise of his backers), makes a Christmas release that
stumps, then delights critics and fans alike: Dylan going back to his «roots»!
and this time, with a noticeable «country» rather than «folk» flavor! and in
the middle of the psychedelic craze and all! Then, next year, we have The Band,
The Byrds, and even The Beatles following suit, and the «roots-rock revolution»
is underway: yet another lever in the popular conscience pulled hard by the
mysterious Mr. Zimmerman.
But, of course, as arrogant and self-centered
as Mr. Zimmerman has always been, he was hardly likely to think of himself as
the harbinger of yet another revolution when he entered that Nashville studio
once more. What is much more likely
is that, in his usual manner, he simply wanted to derail the public — there
they are, all waiting for yet another rock'n'roll explosion à la Highway or the next whacky soul trip à la Blonde On Blonde,
so, naturally, the right thing to
give them is something that couldn't be farther removed from these
expectations: who are all these
people, daring to hope that The Artist will condescend to their predictable
tastes? The day The Artist allows himself to be pigeonholed is the day he dies,
and now that God himself has changed his mind and postponed that, all the more
reason to become twice as confounding.
That must have been the planned intention, and it
does not interest me all that much. What is far more bewildering is the side
effect that John Wesley Harding has
on some people — like myself, who believes that the record, by far, transcends
the formulaic limitations of «country-rock» and, together with Blonde On Blonde, taps into something
much deeper, much less understandable and expressable. It is not just an album
about going back to one's roots, nor is it a limited-issue album about some
sort of nostalgia for the Old West, as some have proposed. But what is it, exactly — I am still not sure of
it myself.
You put on the record, and it starts out with
some unassuming, though lively, acoustic strumming and an equally unassuming
"John Wesley Harding was a friend to the poor...". Now that looks
pretty much like just a normal kind of folk stylization — Bob's take on the
«friendly outlaw ballad» genre. Let alone the fact that the real John Wesley
Hardin was more of a psychopathic killer than a «friend to the poor»: none of
that matters, since most outlaw
ballads idealize their protagonists (what do we know about the real Robin
Hood?), so Bob is just following tradition — besides, if pressed real hard
against it, he could always reasonably retort that his John Wesley has an -ng
rather than an -n in his family name,
so "no charges against him could they prove".
But that is not the point — the point is that
ʽJohn Wesley Hardingʼ, the song, is like one of those dazzling
optical illusions, something that shifts from one opposite to the other before
your very eyes without any noticeable conscious effort on the viewer's part. At
one point in time, it is like a sincere, honest stylization. Then, with one
carefully planted vocal twist or intentionally crude lyric, it seems to drift
into parody and irony. Here it sounds like a respectable imitation; there it
sounds like a sarcastic deconstruction. One bar of solo harmonica feels heroic
— the next one rather gives a sense of the comical. You can sing along with a
deadly serious expression, or you can do the same thing with a permanent grin
on your face — it works both ways. At the end of the song, you might feel that
the message has been delivered from the first to the last letter — or you might
feel that there was no message in the first place.
Ridiculous as it might sound, I have even shed
an occasional tear to this song — one of the most befuddling, incomprehensible
tears in my life. Was it because the tune was so catchy, so well-rounded, so
ideal in the simplicity and finiteness of its form? Was it because I had no
idea of what I just heard, but felt strongly that I must have heard something, just couldn't put my finger
on it? (and neither, perhaps, could the artist himself, even if pressed under
torture to give out the truth?). Was it, in any way, related to the context of the times — this
minimalistic, ascetic exercise in self-limitation, displayed in an age of
sprawl and excess — or could it work the same way regardless of one's knowledge
about said context? What are the extents and limits of this incomprehensible
mystique? Nope, I cannot answer any of that.
And that is all just about the first song,
probably the least assuming / pretentious number on the entire first side of
the LP. The following ones are not as tightly locked for comprehension, or,
rather, you are simply allowed to make a few more steps down the corridor
before you arrive at the same locked doors. This makes them into more usual
candidates for discussion, debate, and hot-headed interpretations — but no
final word has been pronounced on any of them either.
With ʽAs I Went Out One Morningʼ, the
minimalistic approach begins to shows its potential for real — there is almost
nothing to block the little zoops
that Charlie McCoys plays on his bass, make the tune one of the few Dylan songs
that are «owned» by the instrument. As usual, there has been plenty of debate
over what exactly Tom Paine has got to do with stopping fair damsels running
around in chains, but, frankly speaking, I have always regarded those lines
("as I went out one morning to breathe the air around Tom
Payne's...") on the same level as "depart from me this moment, I told
her with my voice", etc. —
semi-improvised phrasing that helps organise and rhyme the lines, at the cost
of some benevolently allowed linguistic and cultural crudeness which has always
been an explicitly stated part of Dylan.
Anyway, once again, it is not really important what the man is singing — only how. Charlie's bass zoops, Bob's worried
acoustic strum and the gravel in his voice, all of that has mystery and danger
a-plenty, but you don't know where the danger is actually coming from. At the
end of the song, you are somehow left in the middle of a Hitchcock movie — is
it the «lovely girl» who is the bearer of the danger? is it Tom Paine? is it
nobody in particular, and the whole thing is just a misunderstanding? or is it
all about a general issue of fate? Whatever the answer be, here we have
ourselves a pretty eerie slice of quiet darkness, and everyone can hang one's
own name on it — it could be an allegory of the Vietnam War, for all I know. Or
a prediction of 9/11. Do it yourself.
Joan Baez did not cover that one — too weird! — but she did do a good job
on ʽI Dreamed I Saw St. Augustineʼ, a fairly accessible number in
comparison. Bob didn't have to do much composing here — the melody and even the
initial lyrics are rigorously based upon ʽI Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last
Nightʼ, and one could not even argue that he had much improved upon the
original's pedestrian, but still well-chosen phrasing. However, Bob throws in
one of those seductive Biblical components — the righteous loner against
overwhelming odds — and gives the song an air of quiet, barely visible, but
total killer desperation. Formally, it sounds nowhere near as bleak and
misanthropic as... well, as about fifty percent of everything he'd done since Street Legal, but subtlety is always
king, and ʽSt. Augustineʼ works on a much deeper level: above
everything else, it does not whine,
nor does it make a big point out of openly condemning anyone or anything, it is
just unbelievably, devastatingly S-A-D in all of its elements.
The obvious question that occurs to everyone
vaguely familiar with Christian history is — who are the mysterious «them»
"that put him out to death", when it is well known that not only did
St. Augustine die from natural causes in his own bed, but also that one cannot
even take that figuratively (since the guy still remains one of the Holy
Fathers of the Church). The simple answer is that, just as in the case of John
Wesley Hardin(g) and the travesties of his career, Dylan did not care — he just
needed a trisyllabic name for a Holy Father, and «Augustine» worked quite well.
The complex answer is that this is a «symbolic» St. Augustine, chosen out of
many to represent the «righteous loner» image (which he did have in life), and,
well, we all know that, as a rule of thumb, «righteous loners» don't last long
and... well, you know. It is, however, curious, that for the first time in his
life Dylan has the guts to align himself with the ignorant «them» rather than
the rebellious «him» — and ask a little confessional pardon for it. Or maybe
it's just another of the many clever ways for the dude to show off, I am not
sure. But I am sure that every goddamn time I hear "...I put
my fingers against the glass, and bowed my head and cried..." I am all but
ready to do the exact same thing. The song just totally got me in its grip — like no Beatles song ever did or could
hope to do.
Hendrix was the first among many to see the
thunderstorming hard rock potential of ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ —
and thank God he did, or it might have been picked up by Three Dog Night or
Grand Funk Railroad instead. His is a grand and visionary interpretation, but
do not let its loudness and technical dazzle overshadow the understated
simplicity and sparseness of Bob's original. Dave van Ronk, Bob's old friend
and mentor, used to openly criticize the song for its nonsense lyrics — which,
as it happens, are nonsense if you
string all of them together and try to look for cohesion, but work very well as
a disjointed collection of phrasal sketches: lots of individual great lines
("businessmen they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth"), or at least
appropriately placed platitudes ("there are many here among us who feel
that life is but a joke").
But of course van Ronk missed the main point —
ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ is the best known and the most covered
song off this album because it provides a unified emotional reaction to the
largest amount of people: few will dare to deny its creepy pre-apocalyptic
feel, in which it is second only to ʽGimme Shelterʼ (actually,
ʽGimme Shelterʼ is the
Apocalypse happening before one's very eyes, so they are in complementary
distribution on the subject), and its emotional power runs highest in between the verses, as those shrill
harmonica sirens pierce your ears to McCoy's doom-and-gloom basslines.
Bob himself had commented on how ʽAll
Along The Watchtowerʼ challenges time conveniences, having the «events»
unfurl in reverse order, with the setting of the scene verse coming after the
dialog — a brilliant move, actually, as it always seemed to correlate with an
imaginary movie in my mind: camera focus on the «thief/joker» duo, then slowly,
gradually zoom out onto the surroundings — "all the women came and
went..." "...two riders were approaching..." This is, in fact,
the normal way of life for Dylan: talking from a «petty» perspective that
logically flows into a «grand» scheme of things. So, on second thought, there
may be some cohesion here after all.
That one-two-three-four punch which I just
described, to me, is the single awesomest streak of four-in-a-row album openers
on any Dylan album, period — which is why, in comparison, the rest of John Wesley Harding, in relative comparison, has always seemed a
little underwhelming to me. Underwhelming not because the other songs are «bad»
or «uninspired», but because not all of them manage to uphold the same style of
eerie mysticism. Worse, they do drift
a little bit too close to concrete particularities — ʽI Am A Lonesome
Hoboʼ and ʽI Pity The Poor Immigrantʼ are just the kind of
material that earned Harding its
«oh, it's the one where he sings about Old West colonization» status, even if,
yes, the lyrics of ʽImmigrantʼ are probably one of his deadliest and
sharpest bites of all time: a bite that, among other people, would certainly
hurt the inhabitants of Bobby Zimmerman's own dear beloved town of Hibbing.
This is, however, merely to note that these
songs are less mind-stimulating than others — on the other hand, ʽI Am A
Lonesome Hoboʼ is great in how its whole melody and vocal delivery convey
the «warning» idea of "hold your judgment for yourself lest you wind up on
this road" before the words are even spoken; and ʽI Pity The Poor
Immigrantʼ is amazing in how the lyrics are so devastating, yet the singer
does deliver them with visible pity in his voice — the same singer who, but
less than three years ago, mostly used that same voice to reduce the objects of
his critique to dust, salt, and vinegar.
On the other hand, ʽBallad Of Frankie Lee
And Judas Priestʼ, occupying twice as much space as the average track on
the album, sort of outpulls the blanket in the other direction — its melody
carries no mystery, serving only as a backdrop for Bob's convoluted
pseudo-allegory. To me, that song has always played the role of a «red herring»
on the album, which I would be perfectly ready to forgive if it weren't for all
the people who actually admit to liking
the song, as in, really liking from
the heart — about which I'm not sure: a put-on, I think, is always a put-on. If
anything, Bob's own conclusion ("Don't go mistaking Paradise for that
home across the road!") should serve as an easily decipherable warning to
all.
The situation is more difficult with the last
two songs on the album, where Bob's little band is joined by steel guitarist
Pete Drake and the merry foursome get carried away into straightahead country
territory, first in a danceable mode (ʽDown Along The Coveʼ) and then
in nighttime ballad mode (ʽI'll Be Your Baby Tonightʼ). Both songs
are lyrically straightforward — way
too straightforward, one might say, faced with "Down along the cove, I
spied my little bundle of joy / She said Lord have mercy honey, I'm so glad
you're my boy!" right after the head-bursting conundrum of ʽWicked
Messengerʼ — and both, in their own way, act as a «preview» of the upcoming
Nashville Skyline, although, of
course, nobody knew that back in early 1968. Naturally, such an odd conclusion
was intentional — the question is, does it work?
Well, I think nobody will ever want to put
ʽDown Along The Coveʼ on one's list of Dylan favorites, but as a
«gesture» of sorts, it does no harm sitting there next to the great stuff on John Wesley Harding. On the other hand,
ʽI'll Be Your Baby Tonightʼ, I think, is simply a perfect conclusion
to the album — closing it off on a thoroughly serene, nonchalant,
not-give-a-damn note after all the troubles and premonitions. It captures a bit
of that lazy, arrogant, and utterly charming Hank Williams atmosphere with just
the barest of Hank Williams trappings, and none of that distinct Southern
accent, either, which may act as a turn-off for all them elitist Yankees. It's
insanely catchy, it's probably got the most melodic and perfectly controlled
harmonica breaks on the whole record, and it just washes your worries away with
two and a half minutes of gentle soul medicine — when was the last time, or
when, for that matter, would there be a next time where Bobby would get us all
so relaxed with such a finale?..
It is not advisable to choose John Wesley Harding for your first
acquaintance with Dylan, no matter how much I, or anybody else, choose to gush
over this stuff. Its minimalist trappings can turn one off, I think, even
quicker than his completely bare-bones early acoustic albums — where the
instrumentation was ascetic, but the ambitions were grand. John Wesley Harding, in comparison, is a true musical «Hermit's
Hollow»: if I learned, one day, that the songs were recorded in a cave in the
middle of a wild forest, rather than a cozy Nashville studio, with all the band
members wearing loincloths and drinking nothing but clear water from the
nearest brook, I wouldn't be the least surprised. On its initial run, I think,
the album works best as a deliberate contrast with the 1965-66 stuff, and
should probably be listened to in the evening, on headphones, for the ultimate
effect. But eventually, it gets its own life, and I am fairly sure that with
certain psychological types of people, it can lock on so tightly that a «best
Dylan album ever» option will not be out of the question. In any case, it is in my personal «top 5» for Bob,
meaning one of the highest thumbs up an album might get. Too bad he never
made anything even remotely close to it in style — but then again, a wonder is
a wonder, and one thing that makes it a wonder is that you cannot deliberately
repeat it, and if you try, you either end up with a different kind of wonder —
if you are that good — or you simply
fail.
NASHVILLE SKYLINE (1969)
1) Girl From The North
Country; 2) Nashville Skyline Rag; 3) To Be Alone With You; 4) I Threw It All
Away; 5) Peggy Day; 6) Lay Lady Lay; 7) One More Night; 8) Tell Me That It
Isn't True; 9) Country Pie; 10) Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You.
If there ever was any intention behind John Wesley Harding to act as a potent
«fan repellent» — and I am almost sure there must have been — it did not work.
For a brief moment out there, the people may have been shocked and surprised —
what, no rock'n'roll on a Dylan record? and what exactly do all these 19th
century outlaws have to do with pushing boundaries and stuff?.. — but give them
a few months, no, weeks, and they
were back to swooning and praising and deciphering the writing on the wall and
covering all those songs like there was no tomorrow. That Jimi Hendrix swiftly
took over ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ is no accident — far more
amazing is the fact that he also tried to appropriate ʽDrifter's
Escapeʼ, which, technically, was one of the «filler» tracks on JWH. Whatever tricky plan there was, it
backfired.
Initiate phase two, then. By early 1969, Bob was back in Nashville, and the
general idea must have been that he was all set to give out John Wesley Harding, Vol. 2. What he
did instead was put together a much
larger band, something like a crowd of about ten people, coming and going — and
record an album that, for all it's worth, became probably the least expectable,
least «Dylanesque» listening experience to that point.
«Trouble» begins already with the album cover.
This is only the second of Bob's album sleeves where we see him clutching a
guitar — the first one, not coincidentally, was the self-titled debut from
seven years ago. But this time, there is quite deliberately no subtle mystery
on the photo: what we see is pretty much a regular country bumpkin, and what is
he doing, really? Tipping his hat to us and smiling?
Ever saw Bob Dylan smiling at us
before? What is this guy saying — that he actually cares about his audience? Bummer, man. A Bob Dylan who cares about
his audience is arguably even worse than Ted Nugent going Democrat. The signs
are not good.
Trouble increases as we inspect the album's
running length: ten songs, clocking in at less than a measly thirty minutes?
What is this, Surfin' Safari? from a
guy who used to have trouble restricting himself to less than fifty, earning
curses from cassette tape owners all around the globe? And the very first song
— a remake of ʽGirl From The
North Countryʼ? Duetting with Johnny Cash? And then, as you actually put
it on — what's up with that new voice of his? What's that supposed to mean —
campaigning for grandpa's and grandma's attention?
Back in 1969, when people asked him about it,
Bob used to joke that «this is my
normal voice, you know», or mystically attribute it to his abandoning smoking.
Both statements were gross put-ons (that some people surprisingly fell for) —
of course, this new clean croon of his is anything but his normal voice, and every time that he is not paying strict
attention, he tends to slip back into the old, well-familiar «sandpaper» style.
He had actually explored that sort of singing back in early 1960, while still
staying in Minneapolis, before understanding that his natural, «grating»
intonations would suit his image of a grizzled folkster much more perfectly.
Now it's back — for the purposes of perfecting that warm, friendly, sentimental
country mode.
Nashville
Skyline is not a great album,
because it deliberately limits itself to a formula that precludes greatness.
There is no doubt that, with some serious effort put into it, a country album may be inspiring and meaningful, but the
idea itself was the opposite — to produce something that, while not being a
complete throwaway, would be purposefully devoid of too much meaning and
inspiration. Bob Dylan did not want us to think of Nashville Skyline as «great», and we hardly have any choice but to
respect that wish and «debase» our reactions appropriately. On the other hand,
neither does it mean that we have to concentrate on the throwaway aspect and
ridicule the album, as some people continue to do.
One hotly debated topic is whether Bob's
unexpected friendliness, sentimentality, and personal charm that he sweats out
on the album at an ever-accelerating speed, were «true» or «false» at the time
— a topic where it is all too easy to forget that one never really knows, anytime, when Bob is being sincere with
us and when he is putting on one of those interchangeable masks. The songs are
mostly love songs, with surprisingly accessible and understandable lyrics, that
usually express the desire to get next to his loved one (ʽLay Lady
Layʼ, ʽTo Be Alone With Youʼ, ʽTonight I'll Be Staying Here
With Youʼ), or, occasionally, worry over the possibility of a breakup
(ʽTell Me That It Isn't Trueʼ), or lament over an actual breakup —
with, get this, the protagonist blaming
himself over what has happened (ʽI Threw It All Awayʼ). Bob Dylan
accepting the blame for a breakup? Sure must have come a long, long way from
the days of ʽBallad In Plain Dʼ... nah, couldn't be, really. Either
they have some really good secret
genetic engineering facilities out there in Nashville, or somebody's a really good actor.
Anyway, historical context aside, Nashville Skyline is what it is — a
fun, cozy, likeable little country album, with moderately decent, unoriginal
songwriting; a trifle lazy, loose, relaxed, but well thought out playing style;
and, on the whole, still a unique atmosphere, because the country lifestyle was
anywhere but in Dylan's blood and
bones, and even those who hate this particular metamorphosis should be curious
enough to see his individualistic take on it. Even the «croon» is still an
official Dylan croon — it will drift towards whatever direction the current
Dylan will want it to drift, rather than whatever the official Nashville
textbook has to prescribe on the subject. Would a professional Nashvillian dare
to switch from the cool-collected "she said she would always
stay-aa-ee-eeey..." to the absurdly soaring, ridiculously-out-of-range
pitch on the ensuing "but I was cruel, I treated her like a fool..."?
He wouldn't, and neither, in fact, did any of the non-Nashvillians, from Cher
to Yo La Tengo, who would go on to cover the song. So we shouldn't worry that
much: behind all the covers, this is still very much a Dylan album.
Which, by the way, is exactly why the first
song on here, although I used to like it in the past, has eventually dropped
off the favorite list. The idea of a Bob Dylan / Johnny Cash collaboration
sounds fantastic in theory, but it couldn't be well realized on practice — in
fact, we now know that, having crossed their paths in Nashville, the two
recorded a whole bunch of songs (extraneous covers, Cash originals, and Dylan
originals alike), but nothing was deemed suitable for official release. At the
very last moment, they settled on ʽGirl From The North Countryʼ, and
although both Bob's new take on it, in his «crooner» voice, and Johnny's
earth-bowel-rumble delivery both have their individual appeal, these are two
entirely different visions — and they mesh together about as well if you tried
to overdub, say, Bob's original take on ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ
on top of the Hendrix tape, and see what happens.
It might have been a fun idea to do a «split»
album, where, on Side A, Bob would sing Johnny's songs, and on Side B, Johnny
would sing Bob's — coherence and comparison on one circle of vinyl. It is still
mildly tolerable when they trade verses — but as soon as it's duet time,
cognitive dissonance sets in, and I personally honestly want to strangle both, or, at least, whichever one gets
selected through the coin flip. (Generally speaking, most of Bob's duets, be they with Johnny Cash, Phil Ochs, or even
Joan Baez, are aurally confusing because he has this obnoxious manner of always
taking the ground from under the feet of the «normal» singer at his side).
On the other hand, ʽNashville Skyline
Ragʼ, which marks a first (the first completely instrumental number on a
Dylan album), is extremely welcome — a fun rollicking tune that gives the major
players in Bob's Nashville band a chance to shine, very well planned and
executed (Bob Wilson's piano rolls are especially endearing). And all those
little bits that seem «fillerish» have their rightful purpose: ʽCountry
Pieʼ has some sharp, almost Robbie Robertson-like lead guitar playing, and
is really a snippet that shows quite a bit of that absurdist Basement Tapes spirit ("shake me
up that old peach tree, Little Jack Horner's got nothin' on me"); the
comically tinged ʽPeggy Dayʼ is so catchy that, in two years' time,
it would be stolen by Ray Davies and re-written as ʽHolidayʼ for Muswell Hillbillies; and ʽOne More
Nightʼ seems like a subtle, but intentional tribute to Hank Williams (at
one point in 1967, there was actually talk of a possibility that Bob would record
a whole album of tunes set to lyrics left over from Hank — fortunately, the
idea backfired, but Hank had always been a big inspiration to Bob anyway, and
writing an original number in Hank's style seemed like the best way to pay the
proper respects).
Then, of course, there are the best known songs
— ʽI Threw It All Awayʼ, ʽLay Lady Layʼ, ʽTonight I'll
Be Staying Here With Youʼ — that do not try to go all the way, but still
lodge themselves in various sensitive areas of the soul. Musically, ʽLay
Lady Layʼ is the most lushly velvety of them all, courtesy of the organ /
pedal steel combination, and is probably as close as Bob ever came to writing
and recording a «sexy» song — of course, real
lovers are always expected to be making out to the mystical sounds of
ʽVisions Of Johannaʼ (preferably, in a cemetery, too), but for the
average Joe, ʽLay Lady Layʼ may, in fact, wobble the same nerves as
Al Green. However, on the whole I prefer ʽTonightʼ — as the album's
most fully arranged song, and a counterpoint of sorts to John Wesley Harding's ʽI'll Be Your Baby Tonightʼ: that
one was lazy and nonchalant, placing the burden of action on the lady
("bring that bottle over here..."), but here, believe it or not, it
is the gentleman who is willing and ready to make the effort — first, by
throwing his ticket out the window, next, by throwing his suitcase out there,
too.
Nashville
Skyline is not John Wesley Harding. It does not crawl
under the skin — to an extent, it is so shamelessly «normal» that one begins
looking for hidden meanings almost instinctively, as if they are absolutely,
inavoidably supposed to be there. But
they aren't. If this weren't a Dylan album, if it were recorded in 1969 by some
no-name from Nashville, it probably wouldn't have caused much of a stir — and
it would be a pity, because, even though accepting all of the superficial
trappings of contemporary country music, this is not a «generic» country album:
first and foremost, it is a certain stage in the evolution of a
singer-songwriter, be it an initial, middle, or final stage. And we are
certainly under no obligation of believing
that seemingly friendly smile on the album sleeve (by this time, we should be
aware enough of Dylan so as not to put our sincere trust in anything he does),
but that should not preclude us from allowing ourselves to be charmed by it, all the same. Thumbs up,
by all means.
SELF PORTRAIT (1970)
1) All The Tired Horses; 2)
Alberta #4; 3) I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know; 4) Days Of '49; 5) Early
Mornin' Rain; 6) In Search Of Little Sadie; 7) Let It Be Me; 8) Little Sadie;
9) Woogie Boogie; 10) Belle Isle; 11) Living The Blues; 12) Like A Rolling
Stone; 13) Copper Kettle; 14) Gotta Travel On; 15) Blue Moon; 16) The Boxer;
17) Quinn The Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn); 18) Take Me As I Am; 19) Take A
Message To Mary; 20) It Hurts Me Too; 21) Minstrel Boy; 22) She Belongs To Me;
23) Wigwam; 24) Alberta #2.
«All the tired horses in the sun, how'm I s'posed to get any writing done?» God bless you, Bob Dylan, for always finding a way to make good use of those uncomfortable phonetic mergers in the English language. He was joking, of course, but this time around, people were not amused. They would tolerate an electric Dylan, a psychedelic Dylan, a locked-up recuperating Dylan, a mystical rootsy Dylan, even Dylan the country gentleman — but their patience exploded when they got the evilest of 'em all: a singing, but not songwriting Dylan.
Years later, Bob himself would cautiously
«disown» the record, saying that this was simply his most successful attempt at
fan alienation — surely, if ʽJohn Wesley Hardingʼ could not stop
people from regarding him as the Messiah, and if even ʽCountry Pieʼ
was not enough, then at least ʽBlue Moonʼ and a Gordon Lightfoot
tribute would do the trick. But this is not highly likely: Dylan was so well
used to each of his unpredictable moves perceived as yet another display of his
eccentric brilliance that he must
have expected a warm reception for Self
Portrait as well; otherwise, if he really
got what he wanted with all that backlash, why all the fuss to remedy the situation
as quickly as possible by releasing the self-penned New Morning just a few months later, without letting all that
disgust and disillusionment «sink in» more properly?
I was fortunate enough to sit through my first Self Portrait experience with the Iron
Curtain still largely in place — open enough to let me hear the music, but
filtering out its Western reputation, so I had absolutely no idea of how much
the critical world, spearheaded by Greil Marcus, had set the people against it;
and even though I was probably about thirteen years old at the time, I could
detect nothing «fake» about it, even though, naturally, there seemed to be
plenty of humor and light-heartedness, which was A-OK by me — and, actually,
provided a bit of a relief after the «brain-heavy» stuff of the golden years.
And now, I'm happy to say, after all those years of putting Self Portrait in its proper
perspective, very little has changed. It is not a great Dylan album, but it...
wait, who am I actually kidding? It is
a fairly great Dylan album, albeit in an entirely different way from the
«classics».
Of course, Self
Portrait is a mess: most good
Dylan albums are. Recorded over a longer period than usual, and, on the whole
of it, probably involving more session musicians than the entire number of all
session musicians collected from all of Dylan's previous sessions, it features
only a tiny handful of original songs (some of them formal «throwaways», like
the one-line repetition of ʽAll The Tired Horsesʼ or the two instrumental
numbers — first ever instrumentals to appear on a Dylan record), mixed with
four tracks culled from the man's 1969 live appearance on the Isle of Wight and
tons and tons of «Americana» covers: some folk, some blues, some country, some
adult pop, some light jazz, and some Simon & Garfunkel. Bob's own Pin Ups, three years before Bowie came
out with his idea of this kind of
tribute album (and was also panned, though, as far as I remember, not nearly as
badly).
Everything works: despite the 24-track sprawl,
there is not a single misstep. Bob's vocal variety on the album is arguably
larger than anywhere else: some of the songs are delivered in his new-fangled
«croon», others give us back a more traditional Dylan, and, in a hilarious
move, both are overdubbed on Bob's
cover of ʽThe Boxerʼ — the «croon», I presume, homaging Art and the
«rasp» correlated with Paul, in what becomes a touching tribute and a clever
parody at the exact same time (well, depending on how well you know the
original). His phrasing is under perfect control — listen to all the subtle
out-of-tempo moves made on ʽDays Of '49ʼ that seem like mistakes at first, but are eventually revealed as Bob's
usual means of livelying up the effect. The arrangements may occasionally be
thrown off balance with some excessive orchestration (e. g. the
mock-Tchaikovsky grandeur on ʽBelle Isleʼ), but more often than not,
they are tasteful and inventive. And the choice of covers?..
Just a few examples will suffice. ʽTake A
Message To Maryʼ was never among my favorites from the Everly Brothers —
too much pathos, too much inadequacy between the lyrics (which, after all, tell
a rather gruesome tale of manslaughter and imprisonment) and the delivery
(which is more of a moonlight serenade than a jail song). Dylan uses his croon,
not his rasp, for the song, but even his croon is twenty times «earthier» and
more believable than Phil and Don's cooing — and he also has the bright idea to
spice the song up with a gritty electric blues-rock line: no doubt, every
connoisseur of the original must have been a little bit shocked back in 1970,
hearing that electric guitar grumble its way in after the predictable «sissy
acoustic» intro at 0:15 into the song. Are the final results «great»? Well, as
far as I am concerned, what the man did here was take a well-written, but
inadequately performed, folk-pop tune and correct its errors — I find no flaws
in this performance. But yes, it's no ʽBallad Of A Thin Manʼ, if that is what Greil Marcus wants to hear
from me. It doesn't bother me, either.
Lightfoot's ʽEarly Mornin' Rainʼ, on
the other hand, is deconstructed almost à
la Leon Redbone (speaking of which, Bob later became a Redbone fan himself)
— all the overt emotion and aching pathos taken out of the original and
replaced with a quiet, untroubled acceptance of one's fate, making the title
character more intriguing and thought-provoking: the song, in my opinion, works
better in this interpretation than when one is openly wearing one's heart on
one's sleeve.
The old folk standard ʽCopper
Kettleʼ, which Bob used to sing with Joan Baez in his younger days at the
Village, is remade here with a lush arrangement — strings, keyboards, backup
vocals, the works — yet somehow, in the end, feels more intimate and ascetic
than in Joan's version. Maybe it has something to do with the backups: Bob has
the girls doing this little series of quick one-note "aah"s and
"ooh"s, crystal clear to the point of sounding like water droplets
plunging into little mountain pools — enhancing the «naturalistic» aura of the
song. Throwaway? Exercise in alienation? Not with all this obvious care for
detail, it isn't.
The Isle of Wight tracks were most likely the
catalysts: «disinterested» versions of ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ and
ʽShe Belongs To Meʼ, with even The Band, standing at Bob's side,
unable to rectify the situation, must have pissed the fans off more than anything.
And it is true: it takes a monster effort to take this whiny, powerless, poor
sound quality version of ʽStoneʼ seriously after either the studio
original or any inspired performance from the «Judas» era of 1966. It is probable that Bob only sang some of
his 1965-66 classics with reluctance at the event, being more interested in
his «rootsy» avatar at the time — but even so, the performance is notable for
curiosity reasons (for instance, all the crazy phrasing decisions). And, in
stark contrast, the band's performance of ʽQuinn The Eskimoʼ, sound
quality issues aside, is ripping —
this is where Bob totally launches into action, and Robbie lends him a good
hand, too, with arguably the fiercest guitar solo he'd had a chance to play in
1969.
Fortunately, time has been kind to Self Portrait. As the «contextual» mist
slowly dissipated, as, later on, Bob would start releasing albums that were
occasionally blatantly worse than Self Portrait (Knocked Out Loaded, anyone?), as people's feelings towards new
Dylan albums gradually became less sharp and demanding, the tide seems to have
finally turned — these days, you can find more and more people digging into the
past and taking the album for what it is: a sincere, diverse, light-heartedly
charming experience at worst, and at best, a little infusion of classic Dylan
magic into a set of simple songs. (For what it's worth, ʽLet It Be
Meʼ and ʽBlue Moonʼ, the way they are captured here, are among
my favorite versions of these songs — I'll give Billie Holiday the edge on
ʽBlue Moonʼ for fear of being crucified for tastelessness, but that
fiddle solo in the middle is totally awesome anyway).
I am not even appalled by the album's length —
on the contrary, expanding the selection to 24 tracks, in a special way, makes Self Portrait reminiscent of The White Album as an unpredictable
journey through styles, forms, and moods, where no two tracks standing next to
each other are truly alike. «Great» or not, they still show a unique brain
shooting off miriads of impulses per second, a mind that shows not the least
signs of staleness or tiredness. This is the work of a person who, still at
the peak of his abilities, intentionally chose to limit these abilities to
«atypical» and, admittedly, «inferior» material — but I'd always take a Dylan
at the peak of his powers, fussing around with ʽBlue Moonʼ and old
Skeeter Davis tunes, over 90% of other artists at the peak of their powers, trying to come out with
something bloody original and world-shaking.
In short, this is clearly a thumbs up,
and I insist that it belongs in the catalog of everybody with more than just a
passing interest in the Bobster. These days, you actually have an alternative: Another Self Portrait, released as the
10th installation in «The Bootleg Series», offers us an alternate series of
outtakes, demos, and early mixes from the 1969-70 sessions, often removing the
orchestral and brass overdubs from the finished versions (think Let It Be Naked? but, of course, the
analogy would not be complete because the original overdubs were all made under
Bob's own supervision and reflect his original ideas). For that matter, did the
critics pan it this time? Hate it? Spit on it? Nope — they gave the release glowing reviews and even dragged out old
Greil Marcus' bones to offer a semi-apology for the original «What Is This
Shit?...» review. Well, from a certain perspective, come to think of it, shit
is good — helps plants grow and
everything. Anyway, another thumbs up here for fair justice, sweet revenge, and
the wonders of time, but more on that later, in the addenda section.
NEW MORNING (1970)
1) If Not For You; 2) Day Of
The Locusts; 3) Time Passes Slowly; 4) Went To See The Gypsy; 5) Winterlude; 6)
If Dogs Run Free; 7) New Morning; 8) Sign On The Window; 9) One More Weekend;
10) The Man In Me; 11) Three Angels; 12) Father Of Night.
The fact that New Morning came out just four months after Self Portrait is frequently brought up as an argument that the
album was an «appeasement» for critics and fans alike — that Bob's huge ego
simply could not stand the rotten-tomato treatment of his latest record, and so
New Morning was rushed out, first
and foremost, in order to wipe out the bad memories. As could be expected,
Dylan himself denied this; and, likewise, there are strong counterarguments —
for instance, the bulk of the album was recorded over the first five days of
June 1970, whereas Self-Portrait
itself was only released commercially on June 8.
But then again, it sure does seem that way. Is it a coincidence,
after all, that 1970 was the only year,
past-1965, in which Bob would release two albums rather than one? Is it a
coincidence that Self-Portrait was
all covers and this one was all originals? Is it a coincidence that there are
almost no signs of the «clean» crooning style of Nashville Skyline / Self-Portrait,
as Bob is getting back to the tried and true? I don't think so. I think that
there was an explicit goal here — to
get that damn Rolling Stone to renege on its aggression, and wrench that
precious «we've got Dylan back!» tag out of it. Although I'm not sure Bob
himself would confess to that in the presence of God Almighty, provided he
does hold a ticket to Heaven after all.
For all I know, New Morning does not give us back «our» Dylan, since he was there
all the way on Self-Portrait. But it
does open him up from yet another, previously unknown side — that of a quiet,
relatively unassuming, relatively undemanding family man, quite content to
enjoy the little things and not force any diatribes, proclamations,
predictions, sermons, or hallucinatory visions on the world at large. Well,
maybe just a few, every once in a while. For old times' sake.
The fact is that, throughout the late Sixties
and early Seventies, Dylan really was
a family man. Like a good, traditional Jewish father, he already had four kids,
and with the birth of Jakob in 1969, he found himself pleased to take a detour
in the world of diapers (either that, or he knew how important it was for the
frontman of The Wallflowers to be hugged and pampered on a 24-hour basis). Serenity
was unstable from the beginning, and did not last for long, but a strong ray of
it is evident all over New Morning — making it, as the title
also suggests, the sunniest and homeliest of all Dylan records, so that it is
probably best played on the porch of your country house, on a hot summer day
when you have nothing else to do. Heck, I am writing this review right now — in
my 7th floor apartment, on a cold autumn day when I have tons of stuff to do,
and I can still put myself in that mood just by pushing play. That's how strong the mood is.
Stuck between Bob's own rendition of ʽIf
Not For Youʼ and George Harrison's vision of it on All Things Must Pass, I will take George — who found the song a
place in his awesome religious experience and turned it into a thing of, like,
transcendental beauty. Dylan's original, in comparison, is humble and homely,
no wall of sound, no soaring slide passages, and even a tempo that seems a
little too rushed, giving no time for the sentiments to complete the blow to
one's head. But even so, there is a feeling that this might be the first
thoroughly «sincere», unveiled, intentionally simplistic-sounding (both
lyrically and musically) love song he'd ever put on record — not the cloudy,
hip-o, intellectualistic tapestries on Blonde
On Blonde, some of which may or may not be about love, but who can really
tell; not the «look-at-me-I-sing-love-songs-like-a-country-pro» crooner stuff
on Nashville Skyline; no, just an
old-fashioned catchy love song, with the heart on the sleeve represented by the
subtle vibraphone touch. Surely it wasn't by chance that, of all the new Dylan
songs Harrison had heard while jamming with him in May 1970, it was ʽIf
Not For Youʼ and no other that he latched on so quickly — only on very,
very rare occasions does Bob come up with a great love song.
There is a lot of piano on the album: Bob
himself places the ivory keys at the center of six of the songs, and, where
extra sophistication is required, Al Kooper contributes his services — particularly
impressive on ʽIf Dogs Run Freeʼ, a rare, if not only, Dylan
incursion into the world of late night cool jazz, reciting beat poetry over
Al's sprinkly arpeggios, Maeretha Stewart's scat vocals in the background, and
an overall atmosphere that would seem more appropriate for 1955 than for 1970,
but then, why refuse when you can indulge your «inner family man» by going
retro and satisfy your «try anything
once» life principle at the same time? The good news is, it all works out —
once you realize that the key word is ʽfreeʼ, it all falls in place
(or out of place, which is pretty
much the same thing here).
The other Kooper-led song is ʽThe Man In
Meʼ, which Al liked so much as to appropriate it for his own catalog
(1972's Possible Projection Of The Future),
but this is where it becomes obvious that Al Kooper is no George Harrison —
his version dispensed with the piano and replaced it with solemn-sounding
organ, needlessly serious-ifying the mood. It also cut out the
"la-la-la"s which are totally
essential to the song, giving it a little bit of healthy idiot flair to
compensate for the metaphysical heaviness of the refrain ("takes a woman
like you to get through to the man in me" — could an apology for one's
male-chauvinistic excesses in the past be worded in a better way?). I think it
was the "la-la-la"s and little else that prompted the Cohens to
include the song in the Big Lebowski
soundtrack — although, come to think of it, New Morning in its entirety is the most Lebowski-compatible album Dylan had ever recorded in his life.
Dividing the songs into «high-» and «lowlights»
on New Morning is impossible due to
the very conception of the album. On John
Wesley Harding, there was a very clear demarcating line between songs like
ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ (epic!) and ʽDown Along The
Coveʼ (whee, groovy!). As for New
Morning, well, on one hand, it is true that some of the tunes explore grander
themes than others. ʽThree Angelsʼ, with its gospel organ and
allegoric story about the world failing to notice the angels with their horns,
is one; ʽSign On The Windowʼ, exploring loneliness and escape from it
in the possible joys of domestic bliss (sort of an «Eleanor Rigby Got Married»
from a Dylan perspective), is another; ʽFather Of Nightʼ, concluding
the album in brief snippet fashion, is a reworking of a Jewish prayer.
But on the other hand, none of these songs
could have ever been properly reworked into blazing Jimi Hendrix anthems — they
simply represent occasional dips into pensiveness and solemnity on a generally
light-hearted, «simple man» type of daily schedule. Here we celebrate the
arrival of yet another 24-hour cycle with the title track, sung deliciously
out-of-tune (the only thing lacking is Keith Richards on background vocals),
but with all the soul it takes. There we do a bit of barroom blues, pulled by
the hair out of «generic» mode like only Dylan can — by re-defining the concept
of «nagging» with the repetitive song title. Here we send up Princeton
University, who had the nerve to present Dylan with an honorary degree when he
least needed it (ʽDay Of The Locustsʼ, somehow still managing to
piano-celebrate the innocence of nature in between all the sneering — and if it
were up to me, I would probably rename some part of the Princeton campus to
«The Black Hills Of Dakota», if only to take revenge on the songwriter). There
we just rollick along to an unassuming, but utterly non-Nashvillian all the
same, country waltz (ʽWinterludeʼ), and so on. All soft, all cozy,
lazy, tender, and sarcastic at once.
New
Morning essentially concludes
the third phase in Dylan's career — the «country years», some might call it,
although «the campfire years» or «the log cabin years» seem much more to my
liking. Subsequently, his musical ascetism would reach its peak and culminate
in abandoning music altogether for a couple of years, except for a few
unproductive sessions and a rare gig for George's Bangla Desh concert — which
he shared, surprisingly enough, with yet another recluse: Clapton, too,
basically just locked himself up in 1971-72. Dylan's existence, fortunately,
was less drug-dependent, but somehow I think that these pauses were not
entirely coincidental: both Bob and Eric represented the «Sixties' survivor»
stereotype — «The Guy Who Could Have Been The Next Jimi Hendrix / Jim Morrison
/ Brian Jones», etc. — and, probably, both of them needed to take some time
off, if only to shake off the ghosts of the past and clean themselves up,
spiritually even more than physically, for what the future had in store.
That said, I must note that, had New Morning turned out to be Dylan's
swan song for any reason, it would have enjoyed an even stronger reputation
than it does today — I mean, a record that starts out with one of the man's
sincerest, tenderest, simplest, catchiest love songs, and ends with an equally
light, but moving take on a Jewish prayer? That certainly qualifies as some
sort of Let It Be, if you ask me.
And just imagine everyone salivating at the idea of the man being taken away
from us just as he finally got to
admit that "this must be the day that all of my dreams come true..."
— can you not feel the Faustian grandeur already? Not even John Lennon and Double Fantasy would have anything on
this. Anyway, thumbs
up all the same — for all we know, Bob Dylan's talents may extend to
the ability of terminating and resuscitating his own life at will, so he is
entitled to at least nine proper swan songs, or something like that.
PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID (1973)
1) Main Title Theme (Billy);
2) Cantina Theme (Workin' For The Law); 3) Billy 1; 4) Bunkhouse Theme; 5)
River Theme; 6) Turkey Chase; 7) Knockin' On Heaven's Door; 8) Final Theme; 9)
Billy 4; 10) Billy 7.
Intermission. Other than a brief three-day
recording session in March 1971, which yielded ʽWatching The River
Flowʼ and the «canonical» version of ʽWhen I Paint My
Masterpieceʼ, there was little musical activity on Bob's part for almost
four years. Somewhere in this gap, lost and generally overlooked — well, as
far as one can «overlook» anything associated with a giant of Bob's stature —
was this soundtrack, which the man generated for the Sam Peckinpah movie of the
same name, in which he also played a brief, but curious, supporting part.
Although few critics would probably list Pat Garrett as a Peckinpah masterpiece
(nothing beats The Wild Bunch,
right?), it still has to be one of the most dead-on collaborations between a major
movie figure and a major musical figure in history. Peckinpah was pretty wasted
by the time it came to realizing his next project; Dylan was in comparatively
better shape, but still a long way from inner peace and comfort, insecure about
his musical future and facing family trouble on the horizon. Peckinpah was
making a movie about «the end of the Old West» as we know it, and Dylan had
lightly scratched that issue, too, on John
Wesley Harding, although the album wasn't about that topic in general.
Peckinpah put Dylan in the movie, gave him the name «Alias», and pretty much
nailed his essence by providing him with the most bizarre scene in the film
(the one where «Alias» is forced to move behind the bar counter and read all
the labels on cans of beans and tomatoes — am I the only one to see the hilarious
parallels between this
and this?). In return,
Dylan gave Peckinpah some of the most broody, somber, unsettling, and,
occasionally, cathartic music he'd ever written.
The obvious bane of the soundtrack album is
that it is not only way too short, but also way too repetitive and «padded out»
to count as a properly offered record of new original music. No less than four
of the tracks are set to the same melody (the three different
ʽBillysʼ and the instrumental ʽTitle Themeʼ), and, in
between them, cover about a half of the album's running length. Of the remaining
half, only ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ counts as a fully
self-contained song, melody, lyrics, significance, and everything; the others
are instrumentals, varying in purpose and quality. Essentially, the album is a movie soundtrack, never aspiring to
anything more, and it wasn't even as if Bob had any incentive to write a lot of
music for the movie — the first impression is that of a quick toss-off, with
neither the acting part nor the writing part helping to make the man feel happy
or satisfied.
That said, even a proverbial «toss-off» like
that from Dylan still in his prime (or, more accurately speaking, on the
threshold of his «Silver Age») may contain its fair share of gold nuggets. For
one thing, the backing band assembled for the sessions was a mega-nugget on its
own: Roger McGuinn and old pal Bruce Langhorne on guitars, Booker T. Jones on
bass, Jim Keltner on drums, fiddler-extraordinaire Byron Berline, and
brass/woodwinds-pro Gary Foster — Dylan's usual knack for getting varied, but
amazingly well compatible teams working again. The combination is so perfectly
set that even the six-minute repetitive acoustic jam of ʽTitle Themeʼ
is ultimately quite addictive — they just repeat the same instrumental
folk-blues verse over and over and over, but with enough nuances to keep it
interesting (and when you are tired of savoring the acoustic guitars, turn your
attention to Booker T.'s bass parts: the man is actually being quite funky in
places).
ʽCantina Themeʼ, ʽBunkhouse
Themeʼ, and ʽRiver Themeʼ all seem to be centered on the general
atmosphere of the dreamy, relaxed laziness in a hot New Mexican framework —
their slow tempos and somewhat rambling guitar arrangements also diminish the
album's initial impact, but with time, the laziness acquires its properly
mystical character, a sort of «desert Taoism» that only the best directors of
Westerns could capture — and only the best soundtrack composers. The ninety
seconds of ʽRiver Themeʼ are especially captivating. Monotonous, yes,
but so is the river.
The real «meat» of the soundtrack, I think,
begins with ʽTurkey Chaseʼ and covers the next two songs as well.
ʽTurkey Chaseʼ may have begun life as a realistic accompaniment to an
actual turkey chase (fast tempo, aggressive style of playing, and the banjo
does a good job of impersonating an actual turkey), but the frantic fiddle
part from Byron Berline makes it more like a life-and-death chase (well, I
guess it was, from the turkey's point
of view), being, simply put, one of the
most stunning country fiddle melodies I've ever heard in my life — seeing as
how we are normally accustomed to «friendly» or «funny» fiddle melodies in the
genre, this one, by contrast, is a deeply tragic impersonation of a restless
hunted soul, forced on the run for eternity. Possibly the greatest musical ode
to a turkey ever written — never mind that the word «turkey» by itself produces
a funny effect, just have a listen for yourself.
Still, Berline's three minutes of glory on the
album are easily outperformed by Gary Foster on ʽFinal Themeʼ — here
featuring what is probably my favorite recorder part in all popular music.
ʽFinal Themeʼ builds on the base chord sequence of ʽKnockin' On
Heaven's Doorʼ — for the first thirty seconds, it seems as if this is
simply going to be an instrumental version, but from the moment Gary's
recorder part comes in, it fully compels the listener's attention, and not just
the listener's: drummer Jim Keltner, for instance, seems totally hooked on the
playing, following Foster's melody in all of its rises and falls, and so do the
gospel-styled backing vocals. Little surprise about that: it uses a bare
minimum of tone changes to cover the entire palette of human emotions — every
several bars, the mood goes from sadness / depression / tragedy to joy / relaxation
/ redemption, before, finally, the instrument gets stuck in a small coda loop
of ultimate pacification and coming to terms with the world. Further words
just fail me.
In the middle of this great battle between the
master fiddler, who gets the silver, and the master woodwinder, who gets the
gold, sits ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ, the first and unquestionably
the best of Dylan's intrusions into the field of gospel music. Later recast by
Clapton as a reggae number, with Bob picking up on the rearrangement and
generally performing it that way in concert, it is still at its most
impressive here, backed with all the proper, somber "ooh-oohs",
funereal organs, and a slow, steady beat, rather than the reggae pulse that
cannot help but transform the song into a dance number — which it probably
shouldn't be. (Actually, I think one reason why Bob eventually switched to the
reggae version was that he might have found the original too heavy and serious for his cliché-free image). But it
should also be noted that, for all of its subsequent fame, the song works particularly
well in the context of the original movie — this is when you really get to feel
this somberness and heaviness as almost physical
heaviness, pressing down on the protagonist: the "mama, put my guns in the
ground / I can't shoot them anymore" bit is central to the general idea of
Pat Garrett, and the song is not so
much a generic anti-war / anti-violence song as a personal complaint against
the wearisome side effects that complete freedom from everything, including law
and morale, brings on to people.
So, as you can see, there is not one single
reason on Earth to sidestep Pat Garrett
& Billy The Kid while exploring the different faces of Bob Dylan. It
may be debated to what extent the instrumental numbers are really «Dylan»
(although, formally, he is credited as the only songwriter), but we should
remember that «Dylan music» was never limited to «Dylan songwriting» and «Dylan
singing» — time and time over again, it was also about getting all the right
people in the right place at the right time, getting them in the right mood to
produce great music, and knowing when to start, when to stop, and what to
select for the final take. And from that point of view, this soundtrack is as
quintessentially «Dylan» as everything else — and its thumbs up here means «even if this
is to be your last Dylan acquisition, there is no reason why it should be the
least».
DYLAN (1973)
1) Lily Of The West; 2) Can't
Help Falling In Love; 3) Sarah Jane; 4) The Ballad Of Ira Hayes; 5) Mr.
Bojangles; 6) Mary Ann; 7) Big Yellow Taxi; 8) A Fool Such As I; 9) Spanish Is
The Loving Tongue.
The infamous «Columbia Revenge Album» —
impossible not to mention, even though, for a long time, it held the status of
being officially «deleted» from the label's catalog (at the time of writing of
this review, it has been announced that the album is finally getting CD
release). The backstory is well known: in 1973, upon the expiration of his
contract, Dylan left Columbia to sign up with David Geffen's Asylum Records —
leaving his former label free to capitalize on the old threat of flooding the
market with «from-the-vault» Dylan releases (which the people at Columbia had
already voiced as early as 1967, when there was a failed attempt to sign up
with Warner Bros.).
Curiously, though, the choice of action at
Columbia was entrusted to idiots — who, instead of mining the gold vein of
Bob's early recordings (the ones that, later on, became the Bootleg Series), decided that the
record-buying world would rather be thrilled with something relatively recent.
To that end, Columbia's «sleuths» fell upon the abandoned cache of outtakes,
recorded by Bob in the early stages of the sessions for New Morning (June 1970). At that time, the army of negative reviews
for Self Portrait had not yet
appeared on the horizon, and Bob with his band were still heavily mixing covers
of ancient and recent material with original compositions — apparently, the
basic idea was to release something like Self
Portrait Vol. II, but the hostile reception of the first volume eventually
led Bob to scraping all that and releasing nothing but original compositions
for New Morning.
Apparently, the people responsible for the
assembly process of Dylan were not
aware of any of those controversies — the only thing that mattered was that
those were still steaming-hot outtakes from relatively recent sessions, and
that would make them relevant competition for whatever new stuff Bob was going
to put out on Asylum. Thus, wasting no time at all, Columbia put out this small
bag of «surprises», consisting of seven outtakes from the New Morning sessions and, so as to bring the running time to a
respectable length, two more earlier outtakes from the Self Portrait sessions. Critics-wise, the project was doomed from
the start — and commercially, it did not fare all that bad, but, naturally, it
did not manage to outsell Asylum's Planet
Waves.
How do the songs fare in retrospect? Well,
nothing that Bob tried out at the time can really count as «proverbially bad»,
and if we accept his temporary role as eccentric interpreter of other people's
ideas in the first place, it makes little sense to praise Self Portrait while sternly castigating Dylan. However, there are still major differences between a piece
of «finished product», which Self
Portrait was, and raw, incomplete outtakes as captured here. For one thing,
the songs are less imaginatively arranged — they do boast the presence of Al
Kooper on keyboards, but other than that, it is usually just Bob and his
acoustic/harmonica team, whereas much of the subtle magic of Self Portrait was due to various
overdubs (electric guitars, brass, strings, etc.).
For another thing, some of these tracks feature
the ugliest female backup vocals you
will ever hear on a Dylan album. On Self
Portrait, they usually provided light, simple, folksy prettiness. Here,
many of the backing parts sound like a swarm of drunk landladies, trying to
sing way below their normal range and having a hard time hitting the right
notes, especially on the traditional numbers (ʽMary Annʼ, ʽSarah
Janeʼ, etc.). This lends an air of dull, unintentional stupidity to the
songs — something that Dylan could never have been accused before.
Another flaw is that by June 1970 Bob had
altogether abandoned his «croon» — which came so very much in handy when
covering pop ballads like ʽLet It Be Meʼ. Now, when he decides to
have a go at Elvis' ʽCan't Help Falling In Loveʼ, he delivers it in
his usual rasp, and the final result sounds like a bona fide parody, and a
rather pitiful one, worth, perhaps, a chuckle and a dollar bill toss in a
low-level comedy club, but little else. The take on Joni Mitchell's ʽBig
Yellow Taxiʼ is less irritating, as the song is humorous and playful
rather than deeply sentimental, but it is also disappointingly faithful to the
original — «reinterpreting» Joni Mitchell would be one thing, but imitating Joni Mitchell is just kind of
dumb.
Still, some of this stuff works. ʽThe
Ballad Of Ira Hayesʼ, from Peter LaFarge's repertoire, is an unexpected
and welcome echo of Bob's protest song period — even though he recites the
verses rather than sings them, the ultimate effect is not any less resonant
than on any of the songs from The Times
They Are A-Changin'. Jerry Walker's ʽMr. Bojanglesʼ, likewise,
turns into a melancholic character study, and Al adds beautiful organ parts
that, for a while, almost succeed in bringing back the wintery atmosphere of
ʽOne Of Us Must Knowʼ. And ʽLily Of The Westʼ, if only the
annoying female backup vocals were taken out, with its sparse, but haunting
old-timey sound, could have cozily fitted in on the original John Wesley Harding.
Of the two Self
Portrait outtakes, ʽSpanish Is The Loving Tongueʼ is the better
known and the more widely discussed — a throwaway on its own, but it might have
been a welcome addition to the album as a whole, adding a little
tongue-in-cheek Latin flavour to the rich choice of scents already present. At
the very least, here we have the nice croon and
the pretty harmonies. But it is also seriously out of place on this record —
best solution would be to simply mix it in with some of the other Self Portrait tracks.
On the whole, this one is clearly for
biographers and fanatics. Since most of the songs come from one specific
session, it does have a reason to exist as a separate album, rather than be
split into a bunch of bonus tracks — but the album reflects a rough, unlucky,
transitional session that is not likely to cause you much listening pleasure,
or influence your understanding of the Dylan phenomenon in a positive way. For
all of this, as well as for the formal reason of having been released without
Bob's consent, Dylan should be a
fairly clear-cut thumbs down case, but in the end, turnoffs like ʽCan't
Help Falling In Loveʼ and the ridiculous caterwauling on ʽMary
Annʼ are still outbalanced by turnons like the haunting harmonica parts of
ʽLilyʼ or the honest world-weariness of ʽIra Hayesʼ — and,
besides, the true era of musical stagnation for Bob was still years ahead, so I
find «condemning» a record like this to be an unnecessary harshness. Now the
weird guys at Columbia Records and their misguided choices — that is a different matter.
PLANET WAVES (1974)
1) On A Night Like This; 2)
Going Going Gone; 3) Tough Mama; 4) Hazel; 5) Something There Is About You; 6)
Forever Young; 7) Forever Young (v. 2); 8) Dirge; 9) You Angel You; 10) Never
Say Goodbye; 11) Wedding Song.
Blood
On The Tracks may be more
«polished», generally accomplished and certainly better known, but Dylan's
fourth phase — that of the «introverted / tortured / self-centered songwriter»
— properly begins here, on this somewhat half-hearted collaboration with The
Band. A three-year break from «proper» songwriting, or at least recording, can
sometimes be detrimental, and, in fact, I have always tended to look at Planet Waves as the first official
album in Dylan's career to be seriously plagued with meandering filler. But
«temporary loss / slackening of songwriter skills» was not the only reason for
this impression.
As Bob's family life was beginning to
disintegrate in his most serious personal crisis to date, there was no way he
could avoid letting his feelings on the matter spill out — in fact, this was
probably the first time in his life when he found himself hurting so bad, it
couldn't help but lend an air of deep tragedy to everything he was doing. There
is a bunch of cheerful, happy songs
on Planet Waves — in fact, it starts
out with quite a merry romp — but they mostly sound forced, sometimes almost
hyperbolically so: the only reason I can see for the existence of the second,
«upbeat» and rather corny version of ʽForever Youngʼ sequenced right after the first, slow and
melancholy one, is to show how very, very, very
hard it is for the man to stay optimistic.
ʽGoing Going Goneʼ,
ʽDirgeʼ, ʽHazelʼ, and ʽWedding Songʼ all convey a
sense of desperation, the likes of which Dylan fans had never yet experienced
from the man. Before the crash, he was fierce, cocky, locked up tight, and most
of the genuine feelings that seeped in through the walls were aggressive. After
the crash, he'd softened up, got subtler and wiser, but everything generated in
1967-70 was still primarily an act of mystification — we never saw an inch of
«the real Dylan» on either John Wesley
Harding or Self Portrait (never
mind the misleading title), or if we did, there was no surefire telling where
exactly he would pop up.
Planet
Waves, from that angle, is the
first «mature» Dylan album, although «maturity» is by no means associated with
higher quality — it simply means that the man gets more... well, more grounded
in concrete personal situations, I'd say. The biggest shift is in the lyrics
department, as the sophisticated wordplay starts making more literal sense. The
love songs are good old-fashioned
love songs, none of that "ceremonies of the horsemen" «bullshit», and
the lost, or, rather, in-the-process-of-getting-lost love songs are all soaked
with fear, anxiety, depression, even occasional guilt and remorse (though
mostly implied, particularly on ʽDirgeʼ, where the exaggerated hatred
thrown at the female antagonist reveals hatred of oneself — he'd be much more
careful about whitewashing his own spirit on Blood On The Tracks). And with ʽForever Youngʼ, he is really concerned about writing a song
that could be sung as a meaningful lullaby to a three-year old — without having
to worry about the three-year old asking unanswerable questions about Captain
Arab and those one-eyed midgets.
All of this means that there is a transition
taking place, and that the transition is rough. Neither, I am afraid, was his
choice of The Band to back him up during the recording sessions here as good as
all the previous choices. Robertson and Co. do not seem to have properly sensed
that change in Bob, or, if they did, they weren't able to fully latch on to it.
They could certainly sound somber and tragic if they'd worked themselves up for
it, but it almost seems like they thought they were just going in for another
round of Basement Tapes, and
realized that they weren't when it was already much too late. The music tends
to be a little relaxed, a little sloppy, generally sparse and spontaneous (none
of the production intricacies of The Band's first two or three albums found
their way on here — not that Bob would be interested, of course), more
appropriate for a quiet campfire evening ("on a night like this!")
without too much on your mind than for a soul-baring session. Just a big
mistake on Dylan's part here — his first big one, I'd say.
That said, more than half of the songs still
pass the grade. ʽForever Youngʼ is the only «golden classic», but it
is, indeed, the first straightforwardly anthemic song that Bob wrote in about a
decade, cleverly worded so as to appeal to his kids as well as a general
audience — and as simple as the melody is, there is a touch of easily cracked
genius here: the "forever young, forever young" chorus is sung with
such a tragic inclination that the emptiness
of the wish becomes felt. This is basically a prayer to reach the unreachable,
and we have the whole bunch here — love, affection, sadness, desperation,
acceptance of fate. Small wonder the chorus did not make it to the second,
upbeat version: it has no place there whatsoever, as the vibe is completely
different (and utterly anticlimactic; whoever would prefer the second part to
the first would fit my personal understanding of a proverbially «heartless»
person).
My second favorite song would probably have to
be ʽGoing Going Goneʼ — the one that must have played out like a shock to the listeners after the
expectable little opening folk dance of ʽOn A Night Like Thisʼ.
Luckily, Robbie got the vibe right on this one, adding some quietly dry, stingy
electric lead lines — nasty pain impulses reflecting the protagonist's state of
mind — and the lyrics do not mince words much: "I've just reached a place
/ Where the willow don't bend / There's not much more to be said / It's the top
of the end". And on one hand, it is
funny that the proverbial «top of the end» has been stretched out to about
forty years now, with the total amount of everything that has been said (and written, and sung) far exceeding what had been
done in the previous decade — and yet on the other hand, he is also absolutely
correct: Planet Waves is the first,
and far from the last, album in Bob's career on which he is not searching for
anything new, he just says it all the way it is. ʽGoing Going Goneʼ
is not the first time that he had sounded depressed, but it is the first time
he sounds depressed about himself,
rather than Hattie Carroll, St. Augustine, or the chronologically frozen
inhabitants of Desolation Row.
ʽDirgeʼ and ʽWedding Songʼ
raise the bar on tension even further — the music is stripped down to its basics
(on ʽDirgeʼ it is just Bob on minimal piano and Robbie accompanying
him on acoustic, on ʽWedding Songʼ Dylan goes completely solo) and
the singer's voice is raised to a scandalous howl. Melodically, they are not
too interesting, and the howling prevents subtlety, but it all essentially
depends on whether you are willing to empathize or if you think that the songs
exude too much self-pitying, and that their monotonousness makes them either
too boring or just simply too unbearable. Difficult decision; I am not a big
fan of either, but it seems like this kind of stuff was something Bob needed to do at the time (ʽWedding
Songʼ was written and recorded at the very last moment, like a final
attempt to get that particular stone off his back).
I cannot say anything positive about songs like
ʽNever Say Goodbyeʼ or ʽTough Mamaʼ except that all my
years of Dylan-listening experience come together to suggest that Bob's heart
just wasn't in them. He may have felt that getting back to a little rock'n'roll
with his old friends at his side would do him good, but this is limp,
half-assed rock'n'roll, a far cry from the spirited performances of 1965-66.
ʽOn A Night Like Thisʼ, where they turn down the volume and place
their faith in Garth Hudson's accordeon, works much better than all those other
numbers put together — perhaps because it is not so far removed from the soft
country-rock sound that was fresher in Bob's memory than his «garage» days.
Like a fussier, merrier take on ʽI'll Be Your Baby Tonightʼ where the
singer is at last ready for some active
participation; Bob's "...and let it burn, burn, burn, burn on a night like
this" is my second favorite bit of phrasing on the record after the
ʽForever Youngʼ chorus.
All in all, this just doesn't properly fit the
criteria for a «thumbs up» type of album. Like The Times They Are A-Changin', this is essential listening for
everyone interested in Bob's thorny evolution path, but it only has two or
three essential songs on it, as such: to the ones already listed one could,
perhaps, add the New Morning-style
soul ballad ʽHazelʼ, and that's just about it. (No wonder that most
of these songs would not be revisited by Bob in subsequent concert performances
— only ʽForever Youngʼ and, to a lesser extent, ʽHazelʼ
seem to have survived his personal reassessment). What I see here is a
temporarily derailed man, unable to properly pull it together, and a bunch of
old friends who do not really understand how they can help. But even if it is a
relative «disaster», its very disastrous nature makes it all the more
intriguing for the non-casual Dylan fan, not to mention the Dylan historian.
BEFORE THE FLOOD (1974)
1) Most Likely You Go Your Way
(And I'll Go Mine); 2) Lay Lady Lay; 3) Rainy Day Women #12 & 35; 4) Knockin'
On Heaven's Door; 5) It Ain't Me, Babe; 6) Ballad Of A Thin Man; 7) Up On
Cripple Creek; 8) I Shall Be Released; 9) Endless Highway; 10) The Night They
Drove Old Dixie Down; 11) Stage Fright; 12) Don't Think Twice, It's All Right;
13) Just Like A Woman; 14) It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding); 15) The Shape
I'm In; 16) When You Awake; 17) The Weight; 18) All Along The Watchtower; 19)
Highway 61 Revisited; 20) Like A Rolling Stone; 21) Blowin' In The Wind.
Nowadays, with the Bootleg Series out on a steady roll, we have easy access to the
«Bob Dylan live experience» at all sorts of stages — early acoustic shows,
mature acoustic shows, classic era electric shows, and even Bob's major
post-crash live appearance with The Band at the Isle of Wight in 1969,
previously known only through brief glimpses on Self Portrait, is now available officially for all those who are
too honest, or too lazy, or both, to indulge in bootleg study. We have it all,
for historical knowledge and personal enjoyment alike.
Back in the day, though, in 1974 there was not
yet a single Dylan live album available, and Asylum Records decided to seize
the occasion. Now that Bob was back in the saddle again, and embarking on his
first major American tour in eight years, and with The Band at his side once
more, what was to prevent him from finally giving the fans what they wanted —
not to mention, what was almost demanded
by the Golden Era of the Double Live Album?
The tour only lasted around two months, and
although plenty of recordings were made, most of the record is comprised of
takes from the very last two shows, played on February 13 and 14 at the Los
Angeles Forum in Inglewood, California — possibly these shows were thought to
reflect the band at their most «well-flexed». The setlist is mixed, so that
this is, in fact, «Bob Dylan & The Band» rather than «Bob Dylan, backed by
The Band»: the first part is Dylan classics played by everybody, then there's a
Band part without Dylan, then there's an acoustic solo Dylan part, then another
chunk of Band stuff, and finally, back to big-band Dylan arrangements: a
circular ABCBA structure, probably symbolic of something we'll never know for sure.
Time has not been very kind to the album. When
it first came out, critical praise was nearly universal, but in a couple of
years, everybody seemed to forget that it ever existed, and later on, with live
shows from 1964, 1966, 1975, etc. coming out as official releases, we began to
understand the prophetic meaning of the title: Before The Flood was lucky enough to have been released,
well-bought, well-reviewed, and orderly appraised... before the flood of archive performances came in and duly washed it
away. Not completely, but, well, put it back in its proper context.
Do not be too afraid — every live Dylan album
before the man completely lost his voice is worthy in at least some respects, and, for that matter, after he'd completely lost his voice he
stopped releasing new live albums completely. But there are two major problems
with Dylan & The Band as far as these shows, and recordings, are concerned.
The first one is about Dylan — the second one, as you may have guessed, is
about The Band.
The problem with Dylan is that he is just too
goddang loud on this tour. It is
almost as if some hypnotizer fed him two words — «ARENA RAWWK!» — or as if he'd
been to a Led Zep show and it temporarily blinded him or something. Even while
playing his acoustic on the solo spot in the middle of the show, he flails it
like a madman — and then there is the singing: not a murmur, not a grumble, not
a whine, not a croon, but a warrior-style scream through and through. And if it
works fairly well on numbers like ʽMost Likely You Go Your Wayʼ,
anthemic and inflammatory from the get-go, songs like ʽLay Lady Layʼ
and ʽIt Ain't Me Babeʼ shift dangerously close to self-parody in the
process. You try to invite your lady
to lay across your big brass bed in that kind of voice, and she'll probably be
off calling 911 in a second.
In less than two years, when the Rolling
Thunder Revue came along, Dylan would learn to cope with that problem —
adjusting his singing to the appropriate musical backing and once again diversifying
the moods and attitudes of the individual performances. But on Before The Flood, all of the thirteen numbers performed are reduced to the same
common denominator: power, power, and still more power, subtlety and stealth be
damned. Perhaps that was an experiment: the man had to see if he still had it
in him to win over a huge crowd. Perhaps he just thought it a good way of
re-establishing his grip on 'em, or perhaps it was sort of a «sweet revenge»
thing after the mixed reactions to his risky concerts of 1965-66. Whatever be
the answer, Before The Flood is very
much of a «stadium rock» thing, and Dylan is not quite Dylan, I'd say, when he
is donning that sort of attitude.
Then there is Robbie and the gang. When they do
their own songs, they do them reasonably
well, the way they are supposed to — although they never venture beyond the
ordinary setlist, and most of these numbers can be found in equally good or
better versions on the classic Rock Of
Ages album. But when they back up Dylan, they become his trusty Hawks, and
fully indulge his «arena fetish» by providing a loud, crunchy, yet somewhat
rustic rock'n'roll foundation. Garth Hudson gets a chance to try his trendy
synthesizers on extra material, but really it is the Robbie show all along, as
he plays Phenomenal Guitar God on almost every song, making his guitar scream
as loud as Dylan's set of pipes. It works — at first — then quickly becomes
predictable and tiresome. By the time they get to ʽAll Along The
Watchtowerʼ, you just know they
are going to go the Hendrix route, and they are not going to succeed. Why keep
on listening?..
Play it all off a different angle, though, and
it might strike you — well, why not? This is
a live reflection of an arena tour, it is
supposed to replace subtlety with crunch, and all of these songs deserve a little
crunch every once in a while: heck, even ʽJust Like A Womanʼ is
interesting to get to know in a hysterical version, now that you have already
known it for so long in its original pensive mode. And it is also not as
overloaded with extra bit players as the 1975-76 recordings, not to mention the
Vegasy production of the infamous Budokan album — what's better, anyway, a mean
and lean rock'n'roll backing or a choir of stiff gospel back vocalists? And is
it possible to deny the sheer raw energy, the intensity of the show? One thing
is for sure, there is not a minute here that could be described as «lax» or
«limp».
In the end, leave it up to yourself, and
history, to decide. Dylan himself had no fond memories of the tour, and seemed
to acknowledge that he'd overstepped the limits where «power» and «energy»
were concerned. But there is no need to agree with that opinion as long as you
do not insist that this is exactly the way these songs always need to be done.
At the very least, this is yet another curious
page in Dylan history — and, for one thing, it is a very different «Dylan and
The Band» from the «Dylan and The Band» that had just done Planet Waves not more than a few months ago. (For that matter, they
did play some Planet Waves stuff at
the beginning of the tour, but then ended up dropping most of it in favor of
the golden oldies — this new personal shit was a little too hard for Bob to
convert to arena-rock mode, and it probably didn't manage to get the crowds
a-goin' in exactly the sort of way he'd like them to go). Still, you will
probably be doing yourself a favor if you do not procure this as your
introduction to the Live Dylan Experience — for which cause, Live 1966 or Live 1975 will be a much more beneficial choice.
BLOOD ON THE TRACKS (1975)
1) Tangled Up In Blue; 2)
Simple Twist Of Fate; 3) You're A Big Girl Now; 4) Idiot Wind; 5) You're Gonna
Make Me Lonesome When You Go; 6) Meet Me In The Morning; 7) Lily, Rosemary And
The Jack Of Hearts; 8) If You See Her, Say Hello; 9) Shelter From The Storm;
10) Buckets Of Rain.
I must say, I have never been much fond of the
title of this album — seems altogether more suitable for a Slayer than a Bob
Dylan LP. Not only is ʽbloodʼ a fairly strong word for Bob, but the
title also works towards a very straightforward understanding of the record,
namely, that the tracks are indeed figuratively soaked in his blood, that is,
convey his genuine spiritual pain like nothing has ever conveyed it before. The
mask is dropped, the barriers removed, the cabbalistic verbal fog cleared, here
is Robert Zimmerman, and here is a pint of his own blood that he offers you to
drink up like some modern day Jesus. Real strong hemoglobin and all.
That Dylan's family problems and divorce case
have provided inspiration for these songs seems quite obvious; much less obvious, when you really start
thinking about it, is this idea of a Dylan freely opening his heart and mind to
the general public, allowing to connect on a much more intimate level than
before. The greatest advantage of Blood
On The Tracks is not so much its «sincerity», about which we can really
only guess, as its «accessibility». Planet
Waves had already introduced a serious change to Dylan's lyrical style,
and here it is carried even further — even if not all the lyrics begin to make
sense, all of them at least give a feeling
of making sense. The air is still clouded with thick metaphors and allegories,
but they heartily invite interpretations: "beauty walks a razor's edge,
someday I'll make it mine" does make one ponder its possible meaning much
more effectively than "six white horses that you did promise were finally
delivered down to the penitentiary", if you know what I mean.
Subsequently, there has always been, and will
always be, two camps of Dylan fans: the Blonde
On Blonde camp and the Blood On The
Tracks camp (there is also a separate Highway
61 Revisited camp, but that is a different talk altogether — it is mostly
populated by people who like an angrier, dirtier, kick-ass-er, rock'n'rollish
Bob Dylan). The «BOB» camp appreciates Dylan for the enigma, the unexplainable
magic; the «BOT» camp worships him for the revelation, the suffering humanism.
The camps are not forever fixed in place — normally, the case is that every
once in a while, somebody «achieves a higher degree of illumination» and
defects from the BOT camp to the BOB camp, but I have also seen opposite cases,
where haughty young people would snub BOT for its relative simplicity and
triviality, then gradually, over the years, succumb to its charms and renounce
their trendy elitism of old.
Amusingly, though, it's not as if there weren't
anything in common between those two records. Listen closely to ʽIdiot
Windʼ and you will see that it amply borrows from ʽOne Of Us Must
Know (Sooner Or Later)ʼ — not just the same organ tone, but even some of
the same melodic moves: "I couldn't believe, after all these
years..." is pretty much the same line as "I didn't realize, just
what I could hear...". It is only when you see these little occasional
shake-hands between songs that you understand — this whole «feud» is completely
pointless, and rests entirely on flimsy subjective impressions, liable to
change with every next blow of the wind.
Overall, Blood
On The Tracks happens to have a more «serious» tone, showing none of the
sense of humor that could either attract or repel in the case of songs like
ʽRainy Day Womenʼ or ʽLeopard-Skin Pill-Box Hatʼ; and it
also happens to be a little more «stripped» in terms of arrangements, with no
traces of brass and, more importantly, very little electric guitar presence
(ʽMeet Me In The Morningʼ is the only song here with a loud electric
lead part). These factors create the impression of intimacy / personality /
altogether confessional atmosphere, which charms the pants off the souls of so
many people, but how close that impression is to the «truth», we will never
know. All we know is that, for the first time since Blonde On Blonde, Bob has given us a collection of songs that
punch hard and reach deep — a similar «soul transfusion» from one vessel to
another (John Wesley Harding I judge
on a different level — more like a meaning-of-life-style type of global mystery
that is much bigger than the singer and the listener taken together).
It's a good thing, too, that he let go of The
Band for those sessions, as they had turned out to be more of an encumbrance
than a blessing on Planet Waves.
Although the final credits list quite a lot of different people taking part in
the recordings, they are all split in two different bands — one backing him up
in New York, another providing local services in Minneapolis, where he re-recorded
several of the tracks — and the only thing that technically separates Blood On The Tracks from the ascetic
sounds of John Wesley Harding is a
near-constant keyboard presence (some of those provided by Paul Griffin, who'd
previously played with Bob on parts of the Blonde
On Blonde sessions, for that matter).
Bob's own acoustic guitar playing is at the
heart of every single song on here, and it looks as if he'd been taking lessons
— just take a look at ʽBuckets Of Rainʼ, for instance, which could
have easily worked as an instrumental (some of the chords sound like they came
right off the Pat Garrett
soundtrack, which, for that matter, was no slouch in playing terms either). The
album is really only marginally louder and denser than his early acoustic
stuff, but it still produces a much «fuller» feeling, both because the guitar
is treated more like a musical instrument than a «partner for comfort», and
also because of the production — credited to Bob himself, by the way, which was
a first for the man, and now we know how Bob wants his own records to sound:
soft, deep, and with just a small touch of echo on the vocals so that it
doesn't sound too homely and cozy.
He's not exactly calling out to us from the lower depths, but he's distanced
himself a bit so we no longer have to smell each other's socks or anything.
As for the songs themselves — these are not
really «songs» as usual. These are magic incantations: mantras, whose
repetitiveness is brought upfront and shoved in your face, take it or leave it.
Notice how most of the song titles form sentences or at least complex phrases,
and then inavoidably conclude or constitute each chorus, so that you have them
memorized upon first listen: ʽTangled Up In Blueʼ, ʽSimple Twist
Of Fateʼ, ʽYou're A Big Girl Nowʼ and so on. This can be no mere
coincidence — it can only reflect a maniacal desire to hammer these statements
inside our heads, and it could be seriously irritating if only these mantras,
taken all together, did not form such an awesome kaleidoscope of their author's
state of mind.
Side A: ʽTangled Up In Blueʼ opens
the show with fuss / irritation / confusion, as the title would suggest.
ʽSimple Twist Of Fateʼ is melancholic introspection — something that
happens once the nerves calm down and one takes some time to reflect on all the
damage done. ʽYou're A Big Girl Nowʼ is all sorrow and tears, held
back as much as possible but still showing. ʽIdiot Windʼ brings on
scorn, rage and curses (good thing for Bob he put in that last "we are
idiots, babe" chorus, including himself in the guilty party, or else this
might have become his most misogynistic song ever). ʽYou're Gonna Make Me Lonesomeʼ brings on more
sorrow, but now it is subtly hidden under a veil of bouncy retro-folk, just
like them old jigsters did it in pre-war times.
Side B: ʽMeet Me In The Morningʼ
throws in some acid intonations with a nod to the 12-bar blues form. ʽIf
You See Her, Say Helloʼ is like an older, creakier, wrinklier brother to
ʽGirl From The North Countryʼ: the girl has now moved to Tangier, but
she can still look him up if she's got the time. ʽShelter From The
Stormʼ, however, concludes the album on an almost unexpectedly optimistic
note — consolation, redemption, basic human care, no need to commit suicide
after all. ʽBuckets Of Rainʼ acts like an epilogue that pretty much
summarises everything about the album: "Life is sad / Life is a bust / All
ya can do / Is do what you must / You do what you must do and you do it well /
I do it for you honey baby can't you tell?". Yes we can.
I have omitted ʽLily, Rosemary And The
Jack Of Heartsʼ from the list, as you can see, because even after years
and years and years of listening, I still cannot quite understand what this
song is doing on an album like this, other than functioning as «that one song
that shouldn't fit in because no Bob
Dylan album can be that predictable».
Its complicated, twisted story should have rather been saved for a Traveling
Wilburys album or something like that — nor is it even melodically interesting
or just plain funny (like a ʽBob Dylan's 115th Dreamʼ). But some
people like it, and some even think it belongs — if only in its role of a thick
question mark. Of course, it also has to be the longest song on the album, goes
without saying.
As usual, the album thrives on Bob's little
perks and twists — mantras are mantras, sure enough, but he never forgets to
vary his intonation from chorus to chorus, so that no two tangled up in blues
or simple twists of fate sound exactly the same way: within each of the
specified moods there are further teensy-weensy mini-moods, and indeed, it all
easily makes up for one of Bob's most realistic-looking performances. (Then
again, reality as such is rarely that exciting). In addition, ʽIdiot
Windʼ is really the last time ever
we would see such a fulminating, life-threatening Bob without a trace of
elderly whine or lyrical banality — feel free to enjoy every second of its
eight minutes, and particularly the haughty-snotty irony of the final
protracted vowel in "sweet lady", which I personally enjoy in a
masochistic way: it is Bob's equivalent of a condescending grin to his
audience, and I, for one, humbly acknowledge his right to it. Besides, "we
are idiots, babe, it's a wonder we can even feed ourselves" is a suitable
conclusion to those eight minutes, and one that only gets stronger and stronger
with each passing year.
As a sidenote, I would also like to commend
Tony Brown, the little-known bass player on the New York sessions, for
perfectly guessing the vibe of the album and providing a wonderfully restrained,
but meaningful, counterpoint for the man — particularly on ʽSimple Twist
Of Fateʼ, whose pensive atmosphere is largely due to his laconic plucking,
and on ʽShelter From The Stormʼ, whose repetitiveness might get a
little wearisome if there weren't any extra meat added to Bob's strumming (the
bass actually plays a more complicated melody, and it is almost joyfully
danceable in places, again, well in touch with the redemptive mood of the
song).
Winding down on this: if somebody wanted me to
formally narrow my choice of «best Dylan album» to one, Blood On The Tracks would have to be left out for several reasons —
the simplest of which would be that he was 34 years old at the time, and we
should never trust anybody over 30, or, more accurately speaking, the «gold»
layer of Dylan's talent was already depleted in the mid-Sixties. Blood On The Tracks is not particularly
«unique» — it is well within the paradigm of introspective folk-based
singer-songwriters, and there may be Neil Young or Joni Mitchell albums lying
around that would be ready to give it battle in terms of depth, melodicity, and
consistency. In fact, the follow-up to Blood
On The Tracks would, surprisingly enough, superate it as far as sheer
boldness and experimentalism are concerned.
But on the other hand, the album is unique — it is Bob Dylan's «great
humanistic record», relating to his mid-Sixties stuff much the same way as Dark Side Of The Moon relates to
Barrett-era Pink Floyd: more accessible, more compatible with «the flow», less
mysterious and enigmatic, and if these aren't virtues by themselves, they sure
as heck ain't flaws, either. Always nice to see a man explore so many different
corners of the human soul in one well-focused sweep (and then blow it all away
without giving a damn on ʽLily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Heartsʼ) —
and too bad he never even came close to repeating this feat again: bleakness,
depression, paranoia, and, occasionally, Jesus would soon enough get the better
of him, and we would never again see the same ideal balance, where for every
sob of ʽYou're A Big Girl Nowʼ there would be a snarl of ʽIdiot
Windʼ, and for every confused and insecure ʽTangled Up In Blueʼ
there would be an optimistic and consolatory ʽShelter From The
Stormʼ. Thumbs
up, of course — not forgetting the album sleeve, where our hero gets
himself a Byron/Chopin-sort of early 19th century romantic profile (or should
we say Mendelssohn for accuracy?). Suits the songs just fine, I'd say.
DESIRE (1976)
1) Hurricane; 2) Isis; 3)
Mozambique; 4) One More Cup Of Coffee; 5) Oh Sister; 6) Joey; 7) Romance In
Durango; 8) Black Diamond Bay; 9) Sara.
If Blood
On The Tracks were Dylan's «silver-age» Freewheelin', then Desire
would be his silver-age Blonde On
Blonde. Recorded right before the first leg of the famous «Rolling Thunder
Revue» tour and officially released in the short interim between it and the
less warmly received second leg of the tour, Desire was seriously messy, a little crazy, vastly adventurous, experimental,
and, most importantly, inspired. If, ever since, it has been sentenced to the
tortuous fate of forever living in the shadows of its much more lauded elder
brother, this is still no excuse for ignoring the younger brother. He may be a
tad clownish, but he's an intelligent clown all the same.
In fact, Desire
is that particular album where ʽLily, Rosemary And The Jack Of
Heartsʼ could have been transplanted to perfect effect, let alone the fact
that, even without it, Desire still
runs over 50 minutes. It is very much «story-based», partly through the
influence of the playwright Jacques Levy, whom Dylan had unexpectedly recruited
to collaborate with him on the lyrics (!), but partly, I guess, because Bob was
so invigorated by the success of Blood
On The Tracks that he was all warmed up for adding a little extra dynamics
to his output. Wait, a little? This whole album is like a spacetime-warping
travelogue — taking the listener from Rubin Carter's jail cell to the pyramids
of ʽIsisʼ, from the «sunny skies of Mozambique» to the valley bellow
somewhere in the Promised Land, no doubt, from the gangster wars of NYC to the
questionable asylum of Durango, Mexico, and even to some mysterious volcanic
island about to be submerged in lava. And best of all, it's not just the words that take you to all those places
— Desire is arguably the most
musically diverse Dylan album of all time.
To be honest, besides Levy, two more people —
both of them ladies, for a change — should receive a heavy dose of the credit.
One is the then-young country diva Emmylou Harris, who was only something like
half a year into a promising career at the time (Pieces Of The Sky, her first major album, had only come out in
February '75), but whose formally «background» vocals here really form part of
several soaring duets with Bob: be it ʽOh Sisterʼ or ʽOne More
Cup Of Coffeeʼ or anything else, the two of them are a much stronger pair
than Bob could ever be with Joan Baez (Harris' voice is a little more nasal and
raspy compared to Joan's glass-shattering vibrato, so it fits in more naturally
with Dylan's preferred way of singing).
Even more important, I think — in fact, it's
perfectly well made clear ten seconds into the album — is one of those «genius
spontaneity» decisions of Dylan's to enlist a girl who was carrying a violin
case as he drove by in his limousine. It's a bizarre story, really: she could
have had a shotgun instead of an instrument there as far as we know, but she
didn't, and, instead, produced what is probably the finest, sharpest, most
emotionally impressive fiddle playing on a Dylan album ever. Nobody knows
anything about Scarlet Rivera except that she played on Desire, but she did have a modest solo career afterwards, and some
of the tracks from her late 1970s albums (Warner Bros. quickly grabbed her for
a couple of LPs, then kicked her back out on the street since they weren't
selling) that we can now get easy access to do show the same inventiveness, sharpness,
and feel for music. How did the guy
spot all that from the window of his limousine?..
Anyway, it is mostly the violin that transforms
ʽHurricaneʼ from a spur-of-the-moment political song into a musical
masterpiece. You may not give a damn about Rubin Carter and you may not even
know two words of the English language, but as long as you know just one —
ʽhurricaneʼ — you will be able to spot a subtle, ominous gathering of
the clouds in the introduction, and Scarlet's lead violin parts, interspersed
with Bob's verses, will be like lightning to the dark, grumbling clobber of
the rain played by Bob's guitar and the rhythm section. If you do know the story, well, this is the
angriest that Bob ever got since The
Times They Are A-Changin', and arguably even angrier: the song kicks,
punches, snarls, bites, roars, and definitely calls to action here, not just to
shedding tears for lonesome Hattie Caroll. Was Rubin Carter guilty? Was he
innocent? Other than the actual people concerned, who really gives a damn these days? Change the names, change the
places, change the motives, it has lost none of its basic, brutal force — like
some of those politically charged Lennon songs, it's got magic enough to make
one's fists clench themselves without effort, as naïve and uninformed as
some of the actual statements may be. And the way Bob and Scarlet play and sing
off each other, trying to outperform the opposite party, still takes my breath
away each time.
Of course, the usual consensus is that
ʽHurricaneʼ rules and ʽJoeyʼ sucks, because Rubin Carter
was an unjustly accused black sportsman and Joey Gallo was a justly murdered
white gangster. (Also because the former runs for eight minutes at a brisk
tempo, and the latter crawls on for eleven at a snail's pace, but that's just
nitpicking). I do not know the backstory — it is not clear if Bob really had
any reason to think of ʽJoeyʼ as a «noble gangster» or if this was
just another one of his provocative moves. In any case, ʽJoeyʼ is
certainly no ʽHurricaneʼ because the violin is not as prominent (its
role here is to be more relaxed), but it isn't a bad song — it is a moving
tribute to a «street hero», with a sensitively delivered dirge-chorus where
Bob, Emmylou, and Scarlet come together in a beautiful three-part harmony (two
parts human, one part nylon). It probably did not deserve the honor to be as
long as ʽSad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlandsʼ, but apart from that, I
couldn't care less about the «real life» person it related to. Remember, he'd
done that once before — singing about John Wesley Hardin as if he were some
sort of Robin Hood of the West — and if we let him off that time, there is no
reason to incriminate him here. It is an abstract tribute song to an abstract
criminal with a heart of gold. It could have been ʽAdolphʼ instead of
ʽJoeyʼ, that would have made the experience even more hardcore but it
wouldn't have made Dylan a Nazist any more than ʽJoeyʼ makes him a
gangster lover, or might turn us, the
listeners, into gangster lovers. It's just a pretty piece of music, albeit a
little repetitive.
Fortunately, no such big debate about the
non-political masterpieces on here. Nary a weak piece on the block, so it is
really tough to choose, but ʽOne More Cup Of Coffeeʼ has long been a
personal favorite — Dylan bravely chooses quite an unusual genre to tackle
here, a sort of mid-Eastern ballad that requires him to actually sing, modulating his voice in a
melismatic manner, and gets away with it (although somehow I've always thought
that it must have felt very much like taking a quick plunge in ice-cold water
for him), while Emmylou on the chorus and Scarlet on the accompanying violin
melody once again provide the perfect counterparts. It is one of the saddest songs
in his vast repertoire — and in an epic
manner at that: "one more cup of coffee 'fore I go to the valley
below" sounds pretty much like the last word from a death row prisoner,
awaiting to be beheaded in the morning. Prophetic in a way, too, whether there
be any connection to his impending divorce — or to the impending creative
decline.
But Desire
is also the last ever Dylan album, or, at least, the last in a long, long time,
on which he may sound forceful —
energetic, wilful, even occasionally imposing and terrifying, though nobody
could say exactly why or how. This is especially so on ʽIsisʼ, which,
musically, could be described as Bob's impression of a tired caravan, slowly
working its way through the desert — and lyrically does contain elements of a
travelog, references to pyramids, and a little proto-Indiana Jones feel to it, everything delivered in such a loud,
sparkling, indignant tone as if he were reproaching us, the poor listeners, for
all of his personal unluck with ʽIsisʼ and the stupid guy who duped
him into a tomb-raiding affair. On ʽBlack Diamond Bayʼ, singing from
a third person perspective, he is being more detached, but still gives a
theatrically engaging reading of the story — a story whose tempo and
arrangement are fairly similar to ʽHurricaneʼ, but it really looks
like the meditative, melancholic, philosophical brother of
ʽHurricaneʼ. Lyrically, you can think of it as an allegory on the
meaninglessness of life; musically, you can think of it... well, much in the
same way, come to think of it.
ʽOh Sisterʼ and ʽSaraʼ are
the most personal songs on here — the latter, in fact, is amazingly
straightforward for Dylan, who'd never before dared to get that open on record, certainly not enough to publicly confess about
having specifically written one of his songs for a particular person (not that
the phonetic proximity between Sara
Lownds and ʽSad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlandsʼ had ever escaped the
attention of keen-eyed Dylanologists, but still, being forced out of the closet
is always different from taking the initiative). Both are deeply moving tunes,
but ʽOh Sisterʼ is certainly more «timeless», and has the added
bonus of Emmylou and Scarlet playing
the collective part of Bob's mysterious «sister» (no, the song is not about
incest, or, at least, you'd never be able to prove that in court).
On a personal level, I have to confess that I
am still more of a personal fan of Desire
than of Blood On The Tracks. Maybe
it is simply a case of being mysteriously attracted to the underdog (not that
the album has not received its solid share of critical praise over the years),
but more likely it is simply a case of being mysterious — there is so much on Desire that is intriguing and enigmatic: the whole album is like a
wagonload of boxes that may or may not be empty, but you only have your own
imagination and power of interpretation to reach that decision. And, of course,
it also has the added bonus of being Dylan's last creative high peak — leaving
aside the issue of the late-period «Time
Out Of Mind Renaissance», which happened on an altogether different scale
in an altogether different world anyway, Desire
really was the last moment where you saw that bird reeling in the sky with
enough boldness, freedom, lust for life and adventure to blow your own mind.
That was at the end of 1975. The following year would see an unsuccessful tour,
the beginning of transition to a new musical age, the final disintegration of
the family unit, a personal mid-life crisis, insecurity, depression, pessimism,
all sorts of stuff that would take such a serious toll on the Zimmerman brain,
he'd never fully recover from it again. Therefore, just join me in my thumbs up
here — enjoy it while it lasted — and here comes «the valley below».
HARD RAIN (1976)
1) Maggie's Farm; 2) One Too
Many Mornings; 3) Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again; 4) Oh
Sister; 5) Lay Lady Lay; 6) Shelter From The Storm; 7) You're A Big Girl Now;
8) I Threw It All Away; 9) Idiot Wind.
Conventional legend has it that The Rolling
Thunder Revue, Dylan's last major outburst of extrovert energy that left him
all spent and exhausted and ready for a shot of Jesus, began with a mighty
bang and ended with a pitiful whimper — and that the Hard Rain album, released as a memento of the tour, inexplicably
culled its material from the later,
second leg rather than the far more inspired, energetic, and unpredictable
first part of the tour. Back then, unless you were an active bootlegger or
actually went to several shows yourself, it was hard to tell, but these days,
with a careful selection of performances from the first round of shows finally
released as Live 1975, even a young
Justin Bieber fan can throw in an unbiased opinion.
My take on the situation would probably be as
follows. Bob's whole venture — going out on a spontaneous cross-country
«magical mystery tour», more like a crazyass traveling circus than a
disciplined team of performers, enlisting everyone who'd agree to tag along and
not giving a damn about what tomorrow might bring — was, on the whole, a fine
jolt, aimed at getting himself out of his depression; and, perhaps, somehow he
hoped it might miraculously help him settle his family issues, too. But, like
so many other spontaneous initiatives, generated on the spur of the moment,
there is only a certain time that they will preserve the initial freshness
before turning into petty routine — and it is quite likely that, by the time
these May 1976 shows in Texas and Colorado rolled along, Rolling Thunder was
showing signs of petty routine.
Upon first sight, both Live 1975 and Hard Rain
are loud, bombastic, rip-roaring affairs, with Bob making full use of the
little army assembled behind his back, and throwing in his own two cents in the
form of ultra-loud, ultra-aggressive bellowing, sometimes outroaring even his
already far-from-timid delivery level on Before
The Flood. Still, looks like two different kinds of roar to me — the first
one triggered by the sheer novelty of it all, and the second one by frustration
and desperation at the sight of it all squandered and falling apart. Live 1975, behind its decibel-rattling
facade, had subtlety and variety of approach; Hard Rain throws subtlety out of the window and just blasts, on and
on and on. Compare the only song that overlaps between the two releases —
ʽOh Sisterʼ, initially performed with Bob on acoustic guitar,
carefully modulating his vocal tone, and then, on Hard Rain, switching to the same bloody electric and with the vocal
performance «streamlined» to fit more in line with the bark-heavy attitude of
everything else.
Not that this isn't, in its own way,
fascinating to behold, or impressive on an emotional level. But in the end, the
problem remains the same as on Before
The Flood: not all of these songs deserve to be treated this-a-way.
Certainly not ʽLay Lady Layʼ, once again taken up in a loud
arrangement (though at a much slower tempo this time) with a brand new set of
lyrics — and a fairly clumsy one, because how is it that one first asks the lady to lay on one's big
brass bed, and then to forget this
dance and come upstairs? Unless they happen to be dancing on beds, this is just
another indication of the man's rather confused state of mind at the time.
The three highlights of the album, I'd say, are
the three songs from Blood On The Tracks
— ʽYou're A Big Girl Nowʼ is the only performance here to break the
mold, with acoustic guitar and piano and Scarlet Rivera's violin embellishments
nicely fitting the slowed-down tempo; ʽShelter From The Stormʼ works
tremendously well with an arena-rock electric arrangement — it already had
plenty of anthemic potential in its original version, so the reinvention was
perfectly asked for; and the best is saved for last — I am not at all sure that
the band used to close any of their shows with ʽIdiot Windʼ, but it
is clear that in the context of this album, it occupies the same space that is
usually reserved for ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ, which, in a way, it is now, updated for the 1970s. On
ʽIdiot Windʼ, after fluctuating to and from for a while, it all comes
together for a picture-perfect thunderstormy finale, which was well worth the
wait.
Together with Desire, Hard Rain puts
the cap on what could conveniently be called «Dylan's Silver Age» — a strange,
unexpected era in which the man once again became the focus of collective
attention and the source of unpredictable happenings. It is not all that much
to my liking: for kick-ass energy, Live
1966 and even Before The Flood
are preferable, for a more comprehensive overview of what the real Rolling Thunder Review was all
about, Live 1975 is far better
suitable, and for sheer bizarreness, I'd even take the Budokan album over this
straightforward rock'n'roll show. But, like all of Dylan's live albums, it
still does not sound exactly like
anything else (for that matter, it is interesting to notice that, aisde from
his joint deal with The Grateful Dead, Bob has not sanctified even a single
live release ever since he embarked upon «The Never Ending Tour» in 1989 —
possibly because he wouldn't have any more strength to drastically vary the
moods and approaches of the shows), so I'm still happy to recommend it with a thumbs up
— just remember, though, that it makes more sense when juxtaposed next to Live 1975.
Incidentally, Bowie fans should probably also
care about picking it up — but if any of them expects Dylan to be as kind as
to let Mick Ronson seriously interfere with his glam guitar chops anywhere in
the show, they'd better think again. (On Real
Live, Bob would be far more tolerant towards Mick Taylor's lead playing,
but I guess that the basic Rolling Thunder deal was always the same: «nobody gets to show off except the boss,
or we're all going down»).
STREET LEGAL (1978)
1) Changing Of The Guards; 2)
New Pony; 3) No Time To Think; 4) Baby Stop Crying; 5) Is Your Love In Vain; 6)
Señor (Tales Of Yankee Power); 7) True Love Tends To Forget; 8) We
Better Talk This Over; 9) Where Are You Tonight (Journey Through Dark Heat).
And so, goodbye extravagance and exotica —
welcome to the Christian era!!
Yes, you heard me right. While it wasn't until
later on tour that Dylan had his «epiphany», and it wasn't until Slow Train Coming that J. Christ, Esq.,
had formally paid three years rent in advance, the honour falls to Street Legal as Dylan's first album to
be soaked from top to bottom in religious feeling. Steve Douglas' saxophone,
Alan Pasqua's omnipresent organ, background vocals from Jo Ann Harris, Helena
Springs, and Carolyn Dennis (the latter of which would eventually go on to
become Bob's second wife) — they all give Street
Legal a decidedly gospel feel. The lyrics... well, we all know that Bob had
played around with Bible imagery since the early days, but not even John Wesley Harding, where he first
tried on the mask of an Old Testament prophet several times, had such a serious
tone when it came to references of Eden and Armageddon. Never mind that,
topically speaking, most of the songs are centered on love and relationships —
even on ʽIs Your Love In Vainʼ, Bob still manages to play the part of
a prophet, way too busy with his sacred mission to waste time on trivialities.
I used to get very easily bored with Street Legal, and part of it had to do
with its «whiny» feel. Too much complaining and self-pitying in that
increasingly nasal and elderly tone of his, pitted against too repetitive and
simplistic melodies. The fire seems to have gone out, the energy spent; in its
place is a crude, unconvincingly constructed, wall of sound and a bunch of
gospel dames (and if you remember, last time Dylan used a bunch of gospel dames
was on those unhappy outtakes from New
Morning that formed Columbia's lame Dylan
album). It sounded like a temporary stop-gap, crisis-period album in
between the creative peak of Blood On
The Tracks / Desire and the
eventual born-again rejuvenation, questionable as it was, of Slow Train. In fact, what does it mean,
«sounded like»? It was a crisis
album, period.
But the more we have to deal with our own
crises (and as of now, I am only two years younger myself than Bob was when he
wrote those songs), the more chances, I guess, there are of Street Legal beginning to grow on you.
Its slow / mid-tempo grooves may have been somewhat influenced by Springsteen,
whom Dylan holds in high esteem, especially in the way the keyboards and saxes
continuously beef up the rootsy mix, but even if Bob was ever secretly envious
of the success of Born To Run, he
could never even begin to try and emulate that bombastic pathos — instead, he
turns that wall-of-sound thing inside out, using it as a background for a very
bleak, very disillusioned, very cynical view of the world. (From that angle, a
comparison with Darkness On The Edge Of
Town might have worked better, but that record was released just twelve
days before Street Legal came out,
so it would have no chance at being based in reality).
Eventually, Street Legal does work — in small bursts, perhaps, but the quality
of a Dylan record depends proportionally on how many times the man succeeds in
pricking the listener, and I count a sufficient number of pricks to admit that
I originally underappreciated it. The first prick, actually, arrives
immediately. Street Legal is easily
summarized by its first ten seconds — the organ as primary lead instrument; a
muscular, soldier-of-the-Lord tempo; three lady angels on backing vocals; and a
"sixteen years..." greeting that makes it clear — this is a tired
man's summarization of whatever he has achieved in the past, and that
summarization ain't going to be too pleasant. Don't believe me? Subtract 16
from 1978 and you get the year of Bob
Dylan.
Much as I dislike being drawn in into the
analysis of Bob's lyrics, they deserve attention here: "Gentlemen he said
/ I don't need your organization / I've shined your shoes / I've moved your
mountains / And marked your cards / But Eden is burning / Either brace yourself
for elimination / Or else your hearts must have the courage / For the changing
of the guards". In a way, this is similar to the message of Slow Train, despite being stated in
much more obscure terms, but the message here is personal as well as universal
— the «changing of the guards» is an announcement that, from now on, things
are going to be different, and they were: Street
Legal, in a way, marks the final and most decisive period of wall-making
that Dylan had entered. Except that this time, he wasn't pissed off at the
establishment, or at stupid people outside of his immediate circle — he was
clearly pissed off at everything and everybody. Divorce had a lot do with it,
of course, but there are certain mid-age hormonal processes involved, too, not
to mention a basic falling out with the times, the moment for which was quite
ripe in the age of disco, punk, and early New Wave, to whose values Bob had no
wish to subscribe in the slightest.
The «darkness on the edge of town» hits
heaviest on ʽSeñorʼ, all apocalyptic piano chords and Bob's
voice dropping down from nervous fuss to somber «ready-to-go-down»
decisiveness. No wonder he was all ready-set-go to join the Lord's armies if
"this place don't make sense to me no more" and if he "can smell
the tail of the dragon". In 1978, it was the bleakest thing he'd written
up to that point — past troubles either carried some revolutionary optimism
along with them, or were at least just personal (wife troubles), but this here
is the first time Bob states that we are all
in deep doo-doo, and does so with shivery competence. And who is the mysterious
«señor»? Well, you know, "it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but...".
He did not release that creepy piece as a
single: the single, as a matter of fact, was rather deceptive, because
ʽBaby Stop Cryingʼ is the simplest, prettiest, folksiest tune on
here, with Bob consoling a lady by telling her that "you know, I know,
the sun will always shine". Yeah right. Is there any truth in that,
señor? People who heard the song and then went on and bought the album
must have been pretty mad — including Greil Marcus and Robert Christgau, who
were all too happy to latch on back to their Self Portrait "what-is-this-shit?" mode. As usual, this
shit was an expectation-breaker, no more, no less. Just as ʽBaby Stop
Cryingʼ and its almost saccharine (for Bob's standards) tenderness
evaporate, the next song is ʽIs Your Love In Vainʼ, whose rampant,
raging sexism is so blatant, it is hard even to take it at face value (but the
critics did anyway), especially when it is arranged pompously enough to match
any national anthem. (Come to think of it, any nation that chooses the lines
"are you willing to risk it all / or is your love in vain?" for the
refrain to its national anthem would be alright with me).
That said, Street
Legal does drag in spots. One song that I have not been able to warm up to
at all is ʽNo Time To Thinkʼ, whose main hook consists of, literally,
a list — apparently, of all the
things in which the protagonist has lost faith and which now float around in a
meaningless, monotonous wordy mess, be it «China doll, alcohol» or «equality,
liberty» or «socialism, hypnotism». Yes, but eight minutes of this
"I'm-so-bored-with-all-that" sermon actually gives one plenty of time to think — for instance,
to think about how plenty of contemporary punk bands would deliver pretty much
the same mesage at three times the speed and did not have to sound like a disgruntled old geezer backed by a
half-drunk, half-incompetent New Orleanian marching band (well, that is my
not-too-good impression of what Bob made his band sound like on that song). And
it has to be like Dylan to take the
album's least emotionally charged and silliest-sounding tune and stretch it to
absurdist length (third time around — he pulled the same trick earlier with
ʽJoeyʼ, and then still earlier with ʽLily, Rosemary And The Jack
Of Heartsʼ, although both were better, ʽJoeyʼ because it at
least had strange sentimentality, and ʽLilyʼ had a hot tempo).
Still, ʽChanging Of The Guardsʼ,
ʽNew Ponyʼ ("her name was Lucifer" — hello there, padre!),
ʽSeñorʼ, ʽLove In Vainʼ, these are all minor
classics, and the album finds a nice way out with ʽWhere Are You
Tonightʼ, which not only has a clever and tense build-up throughout the
long verse and all the way up to the explosive chorus, but actually offers some
hope — here is Mr. Zimmerman explaining to us that not all is lost as long as
there is still a chance to get close to "a woman I long to touch".
(The «woman» would soon turn out to be the son of God, but shh, don't tell).
Take it all together, and Street Legal
still won't be no masterpiece — I'd rank it about the same as Planet Waves, maybe a little more
consistent but with no ʽForever Youngʼ to prop up its reputation. But
it won't be a failure, either. If anything, it took an extra set of guts for
Dylan to embrace this bombastic style at a time when nothing was as much out of
favor with the critics as «bombast», and he didn't do it just to piss people off, either. Most of these arrangements carry a
«happy funeral» mood, which must have been just the state of mind that Bob was
in, anyway. And maybe I do not exactly «love» these songs now any more than I
did ten years back, but I can sort of feel a connection with the spirit that
wrote them. Just remember not to
listen to Street Legal when you are
feeling good about life — this is one album that should definitely bear one of
those «parental advisories» — «Sulky / Grumpy People, 35+» or something like
that.
AT BUDOKAN (1979)
1) Mr. Tambourine Man; 2)
Shelter From The Storm; 3) Love Minus Zero/No Limit; 4) Ballad Of A Thin Man;
5) Don't Think Twice, It's All Right; 6) Maggie's Farm; 7) One More Cup Of
Coffee; 8) Like A Rolling Stone; 9) I Shall Be Released; 10) Is Your Love In
Vain?; 11) Going, Going, Gone; 12) Blowin' In The Wind; 13) Just Like A Woman;
14) Oh Sister; 15) Simple Twist Of Fate; 16) All Along The Watchtower; 17) I
Want You; 18) All I Really Want To Do; 19) Knockin' On Heaven's Door; 20) It's
Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding); 21) Forever Young; 22) The Times They Are
A-Changin'.
Certainly not the best live album in Dylan's
career, but just as certainly the most unusual — and, together with Before The Flood and Hard Rain, At Budokan completes a trinity that might be reasonably called «the
most sensible live trilogy to be released over just five consecutive years of
touring». Not a single one of these albums sounds close to its predecessor, but
it is At Budokan that confounds all
possible expectations. A one-of-a-kind experiment here, so viciously trashed by
the majority of the musical press that you just know it's gotta be good...
...but all in due time. Fact is, this is where Bob
took his Street Legal band on the road
— together with the violins, the mandolins, the saxophones, and the gospel
lady choir. In fact, the actual performances here were recorded on February 28
and March 1, preceding the bulk of studio sessions for Street Legal rather than following them, and this means that Bob's
«big band style» rearrangements of his classic hits were invented and rehearsed
before the same style was applied to
newer material, not after.
Essentially, the tour was an experiment, carried
out in order to answer a simple question: what would happen if Bob Dylan were
to pass himself for a «normal», «accessible» artist? Practise some singing in tone. Calculate, compose, rehearse,
play in pre-planned mode. Eschew minimalism for large, complex, bombastic
arrangements with diverse, polyphonic instrumentation. Exchange rock'n'roll
spontaneity for lush pop professionalism. In other words — go on a Dylan tour
and make a Dylan album that would seem to go against everything that a Dylan
tour / album is «supposed» to stand for. How does that sound?
Critics like Christgau fell for this lock,
stock and barrel: some people were so stupid as to state that Dylan had gone
the «Vegas route», comparing him to Neil Diamond or late-period Elvis. Given
that this here was the age of «rock revitalization» by the punk movement,
albums like Budokan must have
sounded particularly cringeworthy — and to make matters worse, Cheap Trick had
only just released their own Budokan
experience, so, even if on an everyday basis you'd never imagine the
possibility of comparing Bob Dylan with Cheap Trick, in this particular case
such comparisons were inevitable. A power-pop guitar band making some of the
loudest and fiercest rock'n'roll ruckus in recent years — and a washed-up,
prematurely senile has-been tarnishing his legacy with «gratuitous sax and
senseless violins», to borrow a Sparks album title for an adequate description.
However, just as it happened with Self Portrait and not a few other Dylan
albums that clashed with people's expectations, the reputation of the Budokan
shows has seriously improved in recent decades. Looking back, and assessing it
all in the proper context, it is perfectly clear that Dylan was not «pandering»
or «selling out» to anybody or anything — it is just that there is a time for
everything, and every once in a while the man felt a need to shed the
«rock'n'roll rebel» image and settle for a more relaxed, easy-going attitude.
Yes, the downside of Budokan is
that, unlike almost anything else in the Dylan catalog, it lacks his trademark
spontaneity. The music runs on a captured, bottled and canned spirit here,
rather than inspiration generated on-the-spot as the band hits the stage. But
there is also an upside to that downside — at the very least, it is curious, and I would say fun, and maybe even exciting, to hear a pre-planned, carefully rehearsed, so openly
«music-oriented» Dylan show. If what they mean by «Vegas» is «enhancing the
melodic component in both the musical instruments and the singing», I'm game.
And it isn't just the enhancement of the melody
— what we have here is a near-total reinvention of the classic numbers, to an
extent that Dylan, famous for his reinventions, would never ever replicate. The arrangements are so recklessly experimental
that, most likely, nobody will like all
of them, but an unbiased listen, free from the local superstitions of 1979,
will most likely result in liking at least some
of them, depending on the listener. Some of the rearrangements preserve the
general message and emotional atmosphere of the originals; just as many of them
do not, opening up dimensions that you'd never suspect to have previously
existed in these numbers — and even if some of these dimensions sound silly,
well, silly or not, they're all there, and the inventiveness and hard work that
Bob put into them seriously belies the image of a broken down, depressed,
mid-age-crisis-bound artist that had just been created by Street Legal. In other words, the frustrating Dylan enigma strikes
again.
For those in doubt, I will list and laud some
of my favorites. First and foremost, a big thank you to Steve Douglas (who, by
the way, used to be one of the session players on Pet Sounds) whenever he
picks up the flute, particularly on ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ and
ʽLove Minus Zero/No Limitʼ, both of which, big band style or small
band style, had never sounded lovelier — the arrangement of ʽMr.
Tambourine Manʼ, in particular, turns it from a beautiful early morning
serenade into an equally beautiful early morning symphony, a great, uplifting
introduction to the whole album. And the transposition of the three descending
chords of ʽLove Minus Zeroʼ to flute was an equally inspired choice
(additional kudos to David Mansfield for the great violin solo, which sounds
particularly life-asserting in tandem with the flute).
Many darts have been launched at ʽMaggie's
Farmʼ for its evolution from an almost «proto-punk» statement into a
mastodon of R&B bombast — what has been lost on the critics is that the
rearranged melody, now sewn into a steady sequence of symmetrically ascending
/ descending lines, simultaneously played on sax, violin, and guitar, still bears an air of defiance and determination, and
just as, back in 1965, one used to interpret the song as Dylan's refusal to
conform to the expectations of the «folkies», so here it could be interpreted
as his refusal to conform to the expectations of the «rockies». As in,
"it's my Neil Diamond interpretation
and I'm ready to sock it to anyone!" And for those who used to complain
that the «fire and brimstone» had gone out of Dylan, well, they probably did
not have the patience to sit all the way through to the new avatar of
ʽIt's Alright Maʼ — done big-band hard-rock style, with as much fire
and brimstone as could be seen necessary in Bob's voice. Yes, the song used to
work perfectly as a dark, creepy soliloquoy, and it works all right as a brash, pre-apocalyptic dark gospel
anthem, too.
Other rearrangements that I am quite fond of
include: the «generic country-pop», but still lovable, take on ʽI Shall Be
Releasedʼ, with tasteful slide guitars and a completely redone chorus
hook; ʽBlowin' In The Windʼ, redone as a piano pop ballad; ʽOh
Sisterʼ, shorn of its melancholic tenderness and now performed almost
«cold turkey-style», with not just the singer, but the entire band behaving as
if they were suffering from virtual (spiritual!) constipation; and ʽAll I
Really Want To Doʼ, redone as a cheery, bouncy, martial Brit-pop song,
closer to Sonny & Cher's version than anything else but with even more
rhythm and energy.
Speaking of Sonny & Cher, several other
songs, too, are done closer to cover versions than originals — ʽAll Along
The Watchtowerʼ traditionally incorporates scorching heavy rock guitar
solos, in honor of Jimi, and ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ is done
reggae-style à la Clapton version
(not a particularly wise decision, but understandable). But applying the same
reggae groove to ʽDon't Think Twiceʼ was, of course, unprecedented,
and so was the reinvention of ʽI Want Youʼ as a slow, rhythmless,
quasi-accappella number; I am still undecided about either of those.
Still, particular preferences and dislikes
aside, on the whole I insist that the tour, commemorated with this Budokan album, was a triumphant
success, and really the last time that a live Dylan experience «mattered» as an
artistic experience, not just an
excuse to go have a good time or go see that Zimmerman guy before he takes
Highway 61. For those who dislike the «tunelessness» of Dylan as a singer or a
guitar player, the album could even be a good introduction — in a way, it's a
classic case of «Dylan for the anti-Dylanites», and one would have to be quite
tonedeaf, I think, to continue to deny the man's gift for melody or mood after
sitting through it. For those who condemn At
Budokan for «betraying» some thing or other, dispensing with artistic
integrity, etc. — just get a life. And for those who simply think that the
whole experience is kinda boring and lifeless, even despite all the hard work
that went into the rearrangements and rehearsals, well, I'd only say that,
after sixteen years of seeing and hearing too
much life and excitement from the artist, it is quite a lively and exciting
experience to hear him sound so boring and lifeless. Give me the boredom of At Budokan over the liveliness of, say,
1984's Real Live any time of day —
the album was a firm thumbs up when I first reviewed it about ten years
before this, and my admiration of it has only grown since then.
SLOW TRAIN COMING (1979)
1) Gotta Serve Somebody; 2)
Precious Angel; 3) I Believe In You; 4) Slow Train; 5) Gonna Change My Way Of
Thinking; 6) Do Right To Me Baby (Do Unto Others); 7) When You Gonna Wake Up;
8) Man Gave Names To All The Animals; 9) When He Returns.
Truly and verily the match between Bob Dylan
and Mark Knopfler must have been made in Heaven, even though Mark did find it
somewhat embarrassing when he discovered that he had been recruited to play on
a bona fide Christian rock album. So
was Jerry Wexler, for that matter, who produced the album, all the while having
to fight back Dylan's incessant proselytizing. According to Bob's own
confession, he had seen the light after Jesus himself visited the old sinner in
his sleep — and judging by objective evidence at least, Bob's conversion must
have been quite sincere, since it involved schooling, training, and missionary
activity. The fact that he dropped all of his secular material from the concert
setlists is, in comparison, not such good evidence, since this could be
ascribed primarily to the man's general fondness for controversy and
prankishness; but on the whole, his entire life during those three strange
years seems to have indeed been dominated by J. C. and his teachings.
As a rule, the term «Christian rock» does not
stimulate too many positive emotions among people with «good taste», so to
speak — which is really due not so much to the fact that a practising Christian
may not have good taste (he certainly
may) as to the fact that the term has largely been privatized by scores of
dull, talentless artists who seem to think that any music is all right as long as it explicitly glorifies Jesus,
the Church, and the Christian life. From which, of course, it does not
logically follow that any music that
glorifies Jesus is automatically bad — nor is the very fact of singing praise
for the Christian lifestyle by itself worth condemnation, because, well, on the
whole this is just another way of singing about the battle between good and
evil, right?
Which means that I cannot side with John
Lennon's famous fury when he heard ʽGotta Serve Somebodyʼ and it
pissed him off so much that he could not resist the temptation of writing an
unofficial response (the furious and melodically awful ʽServe Yourselfʼ;
fortunately, he had the good commercial sense not to polish it for inclusion on Double Fantasy). If you take the song on its own value, out of the
general Jesus context, its only message is a simple one — whatever you do, and
no matter how complicated life seems to be, there will always be a
black-and-white perspective to it as well, and your very existence in this
world will force you to choose one side over the other. Put it that way, and
it's not too different from the naïve philosophies of John and Yoko
themselves, the way they were practised and propagated in the era of «Bagism».
Indeed, of all the three albums of Bob's
«Christian» period, Slow Train Coming
is the least driven by ritual and formula — only about half of the songs deal
directly with Jesus and the «born again» thing — and, more importantly, much of
it is about the music, not about the words. With Wexler in the producer's seat,
the album has a strong Muscle Shoals atmosphere about it, replacing the «big
band» sound of Street Legal with a
tougher, more stripped and economic, but still dense 1970s R&B atmosphere,
which Knopfler then personalizes with his shrill-and-somber Glasgow blues
guitar tone. The atmosphere, however, is anything but celebratory: Dylan does not glorify or praise so much as
condemn, and that's some mighty fine condemning, I must say.
Christian rock or not, ʽSlow Trainʼ
is one of Bob's greatest songs of the 1970s, if not ever — an inspiring combination of critical lyrics, sincerely
angered vocal delivery, viciously lashing licks from Knopfler, and perfectly
placed backing vocals: each of the "...there's a slow... slow train
coming... up around the bend" choruses really does create the illusion of
an approaching train (okay, so it passes you by and fades away in the distance
with each chorus, so that after a while it gets a little repetitive, but the
arrangement compensates for that by gradually adding extra layers of brass and
keyboards). Bob's way with words is quite impressive as well — the
fire-and-brimstone thing never gets old if you populate it with new imagery,
such as backwards girls from Alabama, «masters of the bluff and masters of the
proposition» (the last time we heard of «masters» was on ʽMasters Of
Warʼ, and this might be the first time since then that the old preacher
from Hibbing comes out with so much direct thrashing). Plus, as of 2013, the
thrashing seems to be ever and ever more relevant than it was in 1979
("they talk about a life of brotherly love, show me someone who knows how
to live it") — although my favorite quote still comes from ʽWhen You
Gonna Wake Upʼ ("they tell you ʽtime is moneyʼ as if your
life was worth its weight in gold"). This sort of preaching is quite all
right with me, you know.
On the whole, he may have broken up with his
fanbase, but Slow Train Coming is a
typical — and typically good — Dylan album all the way. Long, verbose songs,
with repetitive, but hooky choruses: whatever one might say, the transition
from slow shuffly tempo verse to sped-up boogie chorus on ʽWhen You Gonna
Wake Upʼ gets me every time (a good word must be put in for Dire Straits
drummer Pick Withers), and the brass groove of ʽGonna Change My Way Of
Thinkingʼ (which, come to think of it, borrows a part from ʽSunshine
Of Your Loveʼ) is powerful and makes good use of its stop-and-start
structure. Oh, and there is even some lightweight humor in the picture —
ʽMan Gave Names To All The Animalsʼ is really one for the kiddos
(you'd hardly expect a reasonable grown-up to feel happy about filling in that
last line, which also gets you a-thinkin': what, suppose Adam did not notice the snake and give it its
name, maybe things would have turned out quite different?..).
In any case, there may be no doubt about it: Slow Train Coming did rejuvenate Dylan
and pull him out, if only temporarily, of the personal crisis so
masochistically displayed on Street
Legal. The solution may seem too crude, too simple, too undeserving of
someone who used to take pride in out-of-the-ordinary sophistication, but it
seems that, at the time, a crude, simple solution was exactly the kind of
solution that the doctor ordered — and as long as it did not interfere with Dylan's
strengths and values as a musician, there was no problem.
Well, come to think of it, there may have been signs of a problem: songs like
ʽWhen He Returnsʼ really show Bob drifting towards formulaic
spiritual mush, and on the whole, Slow
Train succeeds much better when he is condemning violators of brotherly
love than when he is trying to spread brotherly love as such. Want it or not,
Dylan's most personal and beloved God is the God of Vengeance, not the God of
Compassion, and this is why ʽGotta Serve Somebodyʼ and ʽSlow
Trainʼ have a strong chance of being remembered when stuff like
ʽPrecious Angelʼ and ʽI Believe In Youʼ is long forgotten.
Fortunately, it is these songs that
set the overall tone for the entire album — along with Knopfler, still at the
peak of his «inner punk flame» period — and guarantee it an assured thumbs up.
Fun fact: Nick Cave himself has gone on record proclaiming Slow Train to be his favorite Dylan album (of all time, no less!),
and even if it is hard to believe the sincerity of this statement, I can
certainly understand his motivation. At the very least, this may have earned
the album a bunch of extra listeners — pretty strong publicity.
SAVED (1980)
1) A Satisfied Mind; 2) Saved;
3) Covenant Woman; 4) What Can I Do For You?; 5) Solid Rock; 6) Pressing On; 7)
In The Garden; 8) Saving Grace; 9) Are You Ready.
In the thrilling, hook-filled,
popcorn-blockbuster-size Saga of Bob Dylan, Saved holds a special place. As an autonomous album of the gospel
persuasion, I would not dare recommend it even to a diehard Christian
(although, it is true, quite a few diehard Christians have used it as a pretext
to show how even the greatest of the «youth rebels» eventually come to terms
with God, suitably omitting the last
thirty years of Mr. Zimmerman's career). As a separate chapter in the life of
Bob Dylan, the self-experimenter, it has its fascinating points.
At some moment in time, Dylan must have
understood, or perhaps some of his newly found religious friends made him
understand, that Slow Train Coming
did not solve his problem — that it was a Christian album in name, but a Dylan
album at heart. If the true Christian ideal be about «losing yourself in
Christ», then Slow Train certainly
showed none of that. ʽI Believe In Youʼ, yes, but that wasn't enough
— too much of it still sounded like the same old angry Dylan, blasting off
firecrackers in Old Testament rather than New Testament mode: too much
bitterness and fury, not enough love, too much of an opposition between
ʽmeʼ and ʽthemʼ, not enough unity between ʽmeʼ
and ʽHimʼ. Basically, what the man really needed was to make an album
that would be as non-Dylan as possible: only then would the initiation be
complete.
From that point of view, Saved is a tremendous success. Bob retains Wexler and Barry Beckett
as co-producers, but dismisses Knopfler (who probably would have even less
interest playing on a full-scale gospel record than on Slow Train) and allows none of his backing players to show any
signs of ardent individuality. No less than four ladies on backing vocals now
form a strong gospel choir, present and active on most of the songs — and each
and every song is about Jesus, usually from a personal (ʽme and Himʼ)
rather than universal (ʽHim and the worldʼ) perspective, although
ʽIn The Gardenʼ does stress the issue of a general lack of faith, be
it then or now.
Consequently and inevitably, Saved is the «worst» Dylan album up to
that point — because it simply does not strive to be a «Dylan album», quite
intentionally so. One could wonder what it is that actually makes it so much
worse than, say, Self Portrait,
another quintessential «demolition of image» record — but, all reservations
made, Self Portrait was very much a
Dylan album, if only because it made so many unpredictable twists and took so
many risky chances. Saved, however,
is built entirely upon the premise that one does not fool around with Him; one merely acknowledges one's own
insignificance in His presence. "You have given everything to me / What
can I do for You?... You have laid down your life for me / What can I do for
You?"
«...well, how about it, Bob — I have laid down
My life for you, and the natural thing for you to do in return is to record a
generally boring, if sincere-sounding, album of generic gospel tunes, put it on
the market and leave the rest to me; I can guarantee you that it will hit No. 3
on the UK charts, although I am not so sure about American sales — these
suckers may worship me more ardently than UK people, but they are simply not
used to buying Christian albums from Minnesotan Jews, you know, so I cannot
guarantee anything higher than No. 24. Yet do not worry: between the two of us,
our mutual brand will always be failproof. At least we have better taste than
Jerry Falwell...»
Petty blasphemy aside, Dylan obviously did not
do this album for the money, but, like most «Christian rock», it shares the same
problems — too much formulaic preaching, too little artistic value. Of the
«gospel rockers», there is not a single song that has even a single merit over
the predictable «well, they got a tight, professional band carrying the
groove». Of the «gospel soulsters», I can only name the inspiring harmonica
breaks in ʽWhat Can I Do For You?ʼ (first time in ages Bob blows his
instrument with such tremendous verve, as if Jesus' very resurrection depended
on the wave amplitude), and ʽIn The Gardenʼ actually has real tension
and a suspenseful buildup, with some inventive bass work from Tim Drummond.
These moments are rare, but important: they show that some creativity was involved and that, even when Dylan is
consciously striving to make the blandest album ever recorded, he still tends
to slip into experimental mode every now and then. Talent is hard to bury.
On the other hand, one must admit that he
almost ends up blowing his cover with a song like ʽCovenant Womanʼ —
if you are a responsible Christian, you will surely blush at the ambiguousness
of such lyrics as "Covenant woman / Intimate little girl / Who knows those
most secret things of me / That are hidden from the world". Is that what he means by the earlier line
"way up yonder, great will be your reward"? I don't know — I'm a big
Dylan admirer, and even I don't care much about knowing the most secret things
of him that are hidden from the world, much less a «covenant woman», who seems
to be forming a suspicious threesome here, dividing her attention between the
protagonist and the Lord. Altogether, a very confusing song — one on which Bob
tried a different lyrical approach, and ended up with a whirlygig of sincerity,
silliness, and parody, probably without meaning it.
But on the whole, there is no intrigue to Saved. Its objective was to erase
personality, and for the most part, it succeeds. As a historical curio — a
de-characterized album from one of the strongest characters in art history — it
deserves to be heard once, but, unlike the beginning and the end of Bob's
«Christian trilogy», it has never held any replay value for me. Rumor has it
that Bob was seriously bent on proselytizing at the time (even trying to
convert Jerry Wexler), but Slow Train
Coming, with its anti-sinner agenda and Knopfler guitar, went way farther
in converting me than this bland, boringly prescribed prostration before Jesus.
I have no interest in doubting Bob's sincerity, or denying the «point» of Saved — I just do not see why this
point had to be carried in music stores and bear a price tag. It may well be
that Christianity helped pull Bob out of his crisis, restore him to sanity,
save him from drugs / alcohol / suicide, etc., and that Saved was his honest «thank you». But even if it really was like
that, truly, it's all between those two guys — one here on Earth, the other one
there in singularity. I don't wanna be a part of it. Are you ready for the saving grace? Then press on to the solid rock. What
can I do for you, Mr. Zimmerman? Only
show my sincerity in giving Saved a thumbs down
— first one in Dylan history. If it is not a failure, it is an insult. If it is
not an insult, it is a failure.
SHOT OF LOVE (1981)
1) Shot Of Love; 2) Heart Of
Mine; 3) Property Of Jesus; 4) Lenny Bruce; 5) Watered-Down Love; 6) The
Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar; 7) Dead Man, Dead Man; 8) In The
Summertime; 9) Trouble; 10) Every Grain Of Sand.
Now this is more like it. Having gotten Saved out of his system, Bob must have
felt redeemed enough to revert, partially at least, to his old fulminating
self. Shot Of Love still has
occasional gospel overtones, but for the most part, it does what the old man
does best — bring down the haughty, send up the arrogant, snatch the ground
from under the feet of the self-assured. Paradise may be beautiful, but it is
not up to Bob Dylan to convey that kind of beauty; he is much better off
pouring molten gold and lead down the poor sinners' throats.
Fed up with Dylan's in-yer-face Christianity,
«progressive» musical press pretty much shredded the album — which, I think,
had much more to do with it being yet another religious follow-up to Saved than to any sort of fair
assessment. In fact, if you removed one or two of the most lyrically obvious
numbers, the album wouldn't even present itself as a specifically «Christian»
statement: religious, yes, moralizing, for sure, but none of that stopped the
same progressive art critics from endorsing the folk revival scene twenty years
back, which was as religious and moralizing as they come, by the very nature of
its object. No, it just had to be the same gut level «oh no, not another piece of that
what-can-I-do-for-you crap» reaction, I think.
Because, even though Shot Of Love is nowhere near a «great» album and lacks even the concentrated,
focused attack strength of Slow Train
Coming, it is at least a properly «Dylanish» album, written and recorded
in a way that is consistent with the idea of Dylan as an artist rather than
Dylan as a gospel preacher. Religious imagery is now interwoven in the songs
rather than continuing to serve as a primary focus — modern day intellectuals
will go on feeling uncomfortable about all the references to "a perfect
finished plan", of course, but that does not make ʽEvery Grain Of
Sandʼ any less of an artistic
rather than religious accomplishment.
A distinctive feature of Shot Of Love is its overall rugged-ragged feel: little-known
producer Chuck Plotkin, who had formerly worked as recording engineer for Springsteen,
replaces master sound man Jerry Wexler at the wheel, and does not much
interfere with Bob's demand of spontaneity and, sometimes, even a little
musical chaos. On Slow Train Coming,
the prophet of doom was sober, bitter, well-stocked up for battle; on Shot Of Love, the prophet sounds drunk,
desperate, and rambling: what, a whole two
albums into the prophet's Christian crusade, and the world only seems to have
gotten even worse? No wonder somebody
is so frustrated that he needs to cure his frustration with a "shot of
love". Looking back at Bob's entire catalog, Shot Of Love stands out quite particularly — as a quintessential
«panicky» album, with a stronger concentration of nervous hysteria than just
about anywhere else.
At the same time, the atmosphere of «religious
panic» does not detract Bob from further experiments with form and substance:
compared to the rest of the Christian trilogy, Shot Of Love is its most diverse representative. Genre-wise,
there's some gospel, some pop, some blues-rock, some reggae, some folk
balladry, and ʽTroubleʼ, with its jagged lead guitar and minimalist
percussion, actually suggests that maybe Bob had been listening to some Tom
Waits lately (Heartattack And Vine
had just come out, and if you replace Bob with Tom on ʽTroubleʼ, you
get a song that fits on that particular record like a glove). Not everything
works the way it should, but the important correction has been made — Bob has
regained his interest in music, in addition to continuing, but already slightly
diminishing, interest in Christ.
For most fans and critics, the main, if not
only, highlight on the entire album was its last track, ʽEvery Grain Of
Sandʼ, which certainly rides a train of high ambitions — longer, slower,
statelier than the rest, a personal, anthemic poem with a haunting arrangement
that almost seems to echo ʽSad-Eyed Ladyʼ in its stately cadences.
The echo is but a faint one, though: the basic melody is but a variation on the
50s progression, the lyrics are marred by some clichéd application of
Biblical imagery where the man once used to be much more imaginative with it,
and, worst of all, the major point — that of finding consolation in the Lord's
«perfect plan» — does not come across with the sincerity of, say, a George
Harrison (to whom I am quite often more than willing to forgive all the
clichés since they are delivered with so much genuine devotion — and,
fairly frequently, melodic bliss). Nevertheless, this song alone, in its
execution, is still more atmospheric, personal, and affecting than the entirety
of Saved, if a bit too overwrought
and undercooked (simultaneously, no less!) as a prayer-anthem.
The real kicker on the record, however, is the
title track. Produced by Robert "Bumps" Blackwell instead of Plotkin,
it has a distinctly different aura from the rest — a shadowy, echoey, ghostly
song, where Dylan rails against nasty garage guitar barrages and gospel back
vocals with the ladies in «fury» rather than «angel» mode. Fleeting visions of
ʽGimmie Shelterʼ come to mind, and even though ʽShot Of
Loveʼ does not come close to the former's grandeur, there is no denying
the atmospheric and thematic connection — here, too, we have a deeply troubled
protagonist looking for salvation among a sea of troubles. There are some really vicious lyrics here, bordering on
Morrison-esque darkness ("Why would I want to take your life? / You've
only murdered my father, raped his wife / Tattooed my babies with a poison pen
/ Mocked my God, humiliated my friends"), which emphasizes the repetitive
counter-plea of "I need a shot of love" even stronger — and the shot
itself is never really delivered until ʽEvery Grain Of Sandʼ wraps
the proceedings up nine tracks later.
In between, we have some lesser, but still
acceptable, tracks, such as the funny, slightly funky ʽHeart Of Mineʼ
(a rather ruffled version, selected by Bob only because it had both Ringo Starr
and Ron Wood guesting on it, but I kinda like it); the weird, out-of-nowhere
eulogy for Lenny Bruce, done in a minimalist arrangement but with the same
sentimental affection as was earlier displayed for Joey Gallo; a bit of catchy
apocalyptic reggae in ʽDead Man, Dead Manʼ; and ʽThe Groom Is
Still Waiting At The Altarʼ, formerly a non-album B-side but eventually
included by Bob as a regular constituent in the CD age — screechy 12-bar
blues-rock that he hadn't done since God knows when... the only thing lacking
is a mighty Robbie Robertson solo, but the song still works, maybe because the
very fact of rhyming the song title with "the rock of Gibraltar" is
one of those Dylan-only hooks that can make his silliest and/or most generic
tracks memorable.
It is quite ironic, really, that Shot Of Love could be dismissed for its
ongoing Christian preachiness when it was already clear that Dylan was done
with, or would very soon be done with, formulaic Christianity. Much more
important than being the last in his «born again trilogy», Shot Of Love would also turn out to be his last properly produced
album in a long, long time, and the last album to consistently feature Dylan in a non-comatose state, where
«mumbling» and «whining» would not be the only
two switches on the vocal control board. It is an uneven album, it is not
locked on greatness, but it lives, breathes, rambles, stutters, falls down,
picks itself up again, and throws itself at ya. «Garage gospel» is more like it
— from the cloudy chaos of the title track to the drunk Waitsian strut of
ʽTroubleʼ, there is really nothing else like this in the entire Dylan
catalog, so, despite occasional flaws, an unquestionable thumbs up here.
INFIDELS (1983)
1) Jokerman; 2) Sweetheart
Like You; 3) Neighborhood Bully; 4) License To Kill; 5) Man Of Peace; 6) Union
Sundown; 7) I And I; 8) Don't Fall Apart On Me Tonight.
And now, welcome to the Eighties — says the
opening percussion roll by Sly Dunbar, resonating with an electronic echo that
announces Dylan's first encounter with the wonderful world of hi-tech. It is
actually a little ironic that, while gradually recovering from the Jesus haze
and trying to reconnect with the modern world, Dylan ended up hiring Mark
Knopfler as his producer: the one
guy, out of all that crowd of new arrivals, that did not give a damn about all
that «New Wave» crapola, sticking to the tried and true. And it remains unclear
to me just how much Knopfler is actually responsible for the production, since
he had to leave his post midway through in order to go on tour — then, when he
came back, it turned out that Dylan himself had wrapped up production in his
absence, too impatient about waiting.
In any case, Infidels is far from the most transparent case of bad production
marring a Dylan record (that «honor» would probably have to go to Empire Burlesque), but it does not have
a particularly vibrant vibe, either. As we know, except for those rare cases
in his life where Dylan would come up with a genuinely wonderful melody, the
musical success of his albums would always depend on that vibrancy — in the
1960s and 1970s alike, the man had an acute sense of smell and always knew when
and how the ball was rolling, but by 1983, he was either showing signs of
getting too old for that stuff, or perhaps his brainwaves were seriously
affected by too much zealous Christianity. Whatever be the cause, Infidels simply does not have a good
sound; it is an album that might have been infinitely better, had all the songs
been recorded at a different time, in different conditions.
First and foremost, the rhythm section of «Sly
and Robbie» is a joke. Nothing against Jamaica, but there isn't even a trace of
reggae on this album anyway, and the electronic coloring of the drums and
non-descript character of the bass just gives the record a plastic backbone,
nothing more. Over this rhythm, Bob invites not one, but two famous and fairly incompatible guitarists to back him up:
Knopfler himself, and Mick Taylor, who would also back Bob on the subsequent
tour. But neither of the two shows much interest — Knopfler's licks and leads show
but half of the passion that he had earlier infused in his playing on Slow Train, and Mick Taylor seems so
thrilled about simply sharing the honor of playing with Bob that, throughout the
record, he plays nothing but the simplest and boringest of old stockpiled
Stonesy and Chicago blues riffs, usually of a rather predictable and monotonous
nature. Complete the picture with Dire Straits' keyboardist Alan Clark and his
penchant for adult contemporary soundscapes, and in terms of liveliness of the music, Infidels is trumped by any previous
Dylan record, Saved included.
Which is especially pitiful since, by all
accounts, Bob was actually on a songwriting roll. «Lost gems» like ʽFoot
Of Prideʼ and ʽBlind Willie McTellʼ, later to be fished out for
the Bootleg Series, all hail from
this period, and, with just a few unfortunate exceptions, most of the songs here are potential masterpieces as well
— strong lyrics, well-designed chorus hooks, intelligence and inspiration all
present. But the rote, stagnant musical backing simply does not allow the hooks
to properly blossom — and in addition, there is way too much echo on Bob's
voice to preserve the «singer vs. listener intimacy» that was so important on
his masterpieces.
ʽJokermanʼ, which opens the album,
could very well apply for the ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ of the 1980s —
same reference to a mysterious character, same barrages of sometimes
nonsensical, sometimes epiphanic imagery, same impression of some visionary
musical announcement that opens some sort of door to some sort of previously
unseen destination, except that the celebratory spirit of ʽJokermanʼ
is bitter and ironic, where ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ used to simmer with
dreamy idealism. (Well, then again, it is fairly hard to write a song that is
so much inspired by browsing through the Old Testament and have it dreamily
idealistic). Could, yes, but the
lyrics are easily the best thing about it — hearing them gently float atop a
sanitized, chlorine-smelling seascape is one hell of a disappointment. Besides,
couldn't he have found anything even slightly
more impressive as the song's main hookline than "oh-oh, whoa-whoa,
Jokerman!"? So many words for the verses — and such odd neglect for the
chorus.
And so much for the best song on the album,
even though ʽI And Iʼ comes spiritually close: the most Dire
Straits-sounding track of the lot (Knopfler must have sensed the connection and
saved his best world-weary licks for the proceedings), it is also curious in
how Bob suddenly embraces the tenets of Judaism ("took a stranger to teach
me, to look into justice's beautiful face / and to see an eye for an eye and a
tooth for a tooth") — and makes it sound convincing, now finding his
answer in the Father where it used to be the Son just a short while back. Then
again, Bob himself is as much of a walking contradiction as the Holy Trinity,
and after Infidels, nobody would probably
be surprised to find the Book of Mormon, the Bhagavadgita, or the works of L.
Ron Hubbard among his sources of inspiration. And if it helped him to make
good records — heck, I say, here's to switching churches every six months.
Unfortunately, there is also this small matter of production... and playing...
and singing...
...and
exercising better quality control over the songwriting. One thing that pissed
off many a critic at the time, and I somewhat concur, is that several songs
here were too overtly and bluntly politicized. A prime example is
ʽNeighborhood Bullyʼ, musically riding all the way on a primitive
blues-rock riff that only serves to provide a rhythmic base to Bob's
allegorical endorsement of the State of Israel in its military conflict. Now
even in his early days as a protest singer, the man was too smart to allow
himself to be boxed in one corner: he may have rallied against war and
injustice, but he never aligned himself with the Communist party or anything
like that — and here we have a song that was all but adopted by the Zionist
camp as their personal anthem, which is pushing things a bit too far. Nothing
against anybody's right to share or even promote a pro-Israeli / anti-Palestine
agenda (or vice versa), but not in the form of art, please. This is crude, misguided, and has far less reason to
exist than ʽJoeyʼ or even ʽI Believe In Youʼ; it might have
been simpler for the man to simply shout "I'm with you guys" from the
stage during his subsequent short tour of Israel.
Another, less blatant, but fairly similar
example is ʽUnion Sundownʼ, another
political statement about the decline of U.S. industry and constantly growing
dependance on foreign production. Well, first of all, the same subject had
already been successfully (and with much more humor) tackled on John
Entwistle's ʽMade In Japanʼ exactly one decade earlier, and that is just off the top of my head.
Second, once again, the message is pinned to a deconstructed Chicago riff (Mick
plays something that closely resembles a shortened version of the melody of
ʽRollin' And Tumblin'ʼ), the echo effects are unbearable, and nobody
is even given a proper chance to solo. Who needs to listen to clichés
about how "democracy don't rule the world" set to minimalistic,
repetitive, deeply familiar melody? Okay, millions of Bad Religion fans around
the world do that on a daily basis, but there used to be a fundamental
qualitative difference between Bad Religion and Bob Dylan... not any more?
Likewise, ʽMan Of Peaceʼ is basically
a re-write of ʽFrom A Buick 6ʼ for the next decade, but where there
used to be organ-and-guitar fury a-plenty, we now have a mechanical backing and
a vapid acoustic solo where it seems that the guitarist (be it Mark or Mick, I
honestly don't know) was still figuring out the notes, quite surprised to find
out that he has just performed on the master take. The electric solos
(definitely Mick) are much better, but they do not do much to remedy the
impression — and Bob's re-adoption of «the yell» for the sakes of denouncing
Satan is unfortunate when compared to the much subtler ways of delivery of
said message on Slow Train.
All of which goes to say that Infidels generally rides on the
strength of its softer rather than rockier numbers — ʽJokermanʼ,
ʽI And Iʼ, possibly ʽSweetheart Like Youʼ which also sounds
so eerily like a Knopfler composition, I think it might have worked better with
Mark taking lead vocal and Dylan reduced to harmonica blowing for a change.
The country-tinged ʽDon't Fall Apart On Me Tonightʼ seems to want to
close the album on a John Wesley Harding
/ Nashville Skyline note, but the electronic drums murder the slide
guitars, and the vocals create no atmosphere whatsoever. It all sounds like
he's trying to do something which he already did several times before, and
failing to be even as good as it used to, let alone being better.
So is this all reason enough for a thumbs down?
I'd probably stop just a few degrees short of it. As «bad» as the record is, in
terms of overall context, it was a creative step forward for Bob —
surreptitiously and without warning, he broke out of his religious seclusion
and showed that he still had something to say, even if he did not quite manage
to figure out how to say it properly, and sometimes said it too bluntly and
crudely. ʽJokermanʼ alone, as the opening track, screams
"REVIVAL!" so loudly that it becomes one of his most important songs
of the decade, and no man shall see the face of ʽI And Iʼ and live to
claim that Infidels has no redeeming
qualities. Of course, today we know that Infidels
marked the start of a lengthy decline rather than revival — all of the problems
evident here would come to fruition on Bob's subsequent series of releases. But
the one really big difference between Infidels
and all that followed is that on Infidels,
Bob generally does not whine: he
barks, growls, yells, does whatever he can to come across as his usual
«strong», lively, provocative character. The music may be lifeless, yes, due to some unfortunate decisions, but
the man behind the music is definitely alive, even if it now takes the Old
rather than New Testament to provide the necessary life support.
REAL LIVE (1984)
1) Highway 61 Revisited; 2)
Maggie's Farm; 3) I And I; 4) License To Kill; 5) It Ain't Me Babe; 6) Tangled
Up In Blue; 7) Masters Of War; 8) Ballad Of A Thin Man; 9) Girl From The North
Country; 10) Tombstone Blues.
Although Dylan's touring activity did not slow
down from his usual 1970s rate — in fact, with the beginning of the «Never
Ending Tour» in 1988 it only kept accelerating — the same cannot be said about
the verve with which he would continue to release live albums. In fact, Real Live is, in a sense, his last
«proper» live offer: Dylan & The
Dead should rather count as a misguided memento of a star-crossed event, Unplugged was all but forced upon the
man by MTV, and all other subsequent live releases would be culled from the
archives for the «Bootleg Series».
As one of the many who actually had a chance to
catch one of Bob's live acts (Albuquerque 2007, if my memory serves me right),
I kind of understand this decision. Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, Dylan
kept experimenting with the live format, switching from acoustic to electric,
there and back again, sometimes leaning towards a harsher rock'n'roll sound (Before The Flood), sometimes trying out
a «symphonic roots» approach (Rolling Thunder), even taking risks with a glitzy
big band sound (Budokan) or, of
course, adding gospel elements to his Christian-era touring. However, once his
«hardcore Christian» days were over, the live Dylan sound became, on the whole,
more streamlined and typical. The backing bands (including the one I saw) are
never anything less than professional, but most of the time they tend to
gravitate towards well-established, predictable forms, with limited
opportunities for spontaneity. Thus, Real
Live may sound seriously differently from everything that came before it, but it does not radically
differ from anything that came after
it (granted, I am nowhere near an expert on the extensive field of Dylan
bootleg studies, but those few dots that I know of are connected in a rather straight line).
Of course, sonic streamlining has never
prevented Dylan from continuing to experiment with his songs, whose original incarnations he has always regarded as
experimental material rather than sacred cows — all fans know that going to a
Dylan show, be it 1984 or 2014, always presumes taking part in the
«guess-what's-playing» game. But the downside has been the progressive deterioration
of his voice, already well evident on Real
Live, as it converts much of its former color into a high-pitched whine,
and, more importantly, as Bob seems to be losing much of his control over it.
It is almost as if his voice problems took him by surprise, and he never really
learned to cope with them (unlike, say, Tom Waits, who gave us all a lesson in
capitalizing on his guttural issues). Many people have learned to disregard the
issue and keep insisting that Dylan continues to be a «vocal master» both in
his «whiny» period and even later, when his frequencies took one more
somersault and landed in «deep pharyngeal croak» territory — I cannot share
this opinion and pretend that I have any
love at all for Dylan's live vocal performance after his turning 40-45. (Studio
records are a different matter, since he seems to be paying more attention to
his limits and capacities there, and attunes his new songs respectively).
So that is what Real Live is: a tolerable, mediocre, middle-of-the-road live
rock'n'roll album, with old hits and newer compositions alike all reduced to a
single common invariant and «graced» by a singer who seems a little lost and
confused — he'd like to roar like a lion, perhaps, but all he can is yelp like
a jackal. His backing band would like to help, perhaps, but they gel fairly
mechanically, and although Mick Taylor is given plenty of opportunities to
shine on lead guitar, he does so without letting his hair down, and comes
across as competent, but boring (he really needs a Keith Richard around for
both to profit from the contrastive effect — on his own, he's just another
careful, politely groomed, not-too-inspiring blues-rock guitarist). You really
get to know that there is a big problem, though, when the guest star on one of
the tracks (ʽTombstone Bluesʼ) turns out to be Carlos Santana, and
when his leads on that track turn out to be stylistically indistinguishable
from Taylor's on all the others.
As usual, Bob has a little acoustic set in the
middle, with ʽIt Ain't Me Babeʼ to have the entire audience subtly
glorify their male chauvinism (I wonder if the girls, too, are always singing
along to "it ain't me you're looking for, babe"?), and a newly
revised version of ʽTangled Up In Blueʼ with alternate lyrics, a
serious collectible for fans, but not something I'd like to pay attention to
because the vocal delivery sucks anyway. Of the new songs, ʽI And Iʼ,
as befits its Rastafari title, is slightly reggaeified as compared to the
studio version, but the results are crude, and the song is simply stripped of
its moody atmosphere; and why they preferred to perform / include ʽLicense
To Killʼ instead of ʽJokermanʼ is beyond me.
In the end, the only «interesting» bit of the
album is in how ʽMasters Of Warʼ became radically reinterpreted as an
«ominous-apocalyptic» rock song, now closer in spirit to (and even partially
borrowing the riff of) ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ than
ʽNottamun Townʼ which it originally copied — and maybe Taylor was
reminded of his past glories playing on ʽGimme Shelterʼ under those
conditions, so there is a little extra heat and freedom of expression in the
several solos he takes on that particular song (not to mention length). But one
song is not enough to revert the trend, and the verdict should be a grim one: Real Live marks the breaking point at
which Dylan's live legacy generally becomes expendable. It ain't bad, but it ain't something you should
be looking for, babe. A thumbs down here, in loving memory of all
those other live albums.
EMPIRE BURLESQUE (1985)
1) Tight Connection To My
Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love?); 2) Seeing The Real You At Last; 3) I'll
Remember You; 4) Clean Cut Kid; 5) Never Gonna Be The Same Again; 6) Trust
Yourself; 7) Emotionally Yours; 8) When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky;
9) Something's Burning, Baby; 10) Dark Eyes.
So Infidels
had some good songs and a troubled, inadequate sound — but if you really want to learn the meaning of the
word «misproduced», look it up in an imaginary encyclopaedia and chances are, a
45-year old Bob Dylan with a puzzled look on his face will materialize in your
imagination and say, «See this jacket that looks like I've just dragged it
through a tub of lime paint? Actually, it fits me about as well as the
production style on my twenty-first studio album matches the songs I have
written for it. You don't happen to be a recording engineer, by any chance?
I've been sitting in this bottle for ages...» ...oh, never mind.
One hypothetical version of «the truth» is as
follows: Dylan never, not for once, truly «lost» his songwriting skills
throughout the Eighties. The melodies on Empire
Burlesque may not count among his most imaginative, but when we get down to
it, they aren't all that inferior to anything he'd done in the previous decade,
or even decades. The lyrics do range from cringeworthy (particularly when he
is in one of his «mass-moralizing» moods) to insightful, but consistently show
Bob's usual dedication to his craft. And he even makes some effort to sing
here, rather than just whine and mumble — age issues getting worse and worse
with every new year, so that his high «wheezing» notes are now more painful
than ever, but many of the songs still show strong will and power, which used
to be his saving grace even under certain off-key circumstances.
All of this means that at the heart of Empire Burlesque lies a really strong,
emotionally attractive and intellectually useful collection of songs. It also
boasts a fairly diverse and promising cast-of-thousands: unfortunately, «Sly
and Robbie» from Infidels are
retained on many of the songs, but several members of Tom Petty's Heartbreakers
are there to rectify the deal, including the band's fabulous guitarist Mike
Campbell, and even Ronnie Wood drops by to add his guitar parts to the basic
rock'n'roll of ʽClean Cut Kidʼ. With all these ingredients, it could have been a really good record,
with a healthy roots-rock / folk-rock sound that we hadn't really heard from
Bob since the days of Rolling Thunder.
And now the bad news. Although the credits say
«produced by Bob Dylan», there wasn't really any particular production job that
Mr. Zimmerman could carry out here — being either paranoidally afraid of,
or, more likely, completely disinterested in technological progress. Instead, he
just surreptitiously handed those duties over to his recording engineer, Arthur
Baker, a guy who was mostly famous those days for producing «special dance
remixes» for rock'n'roll artists, as well as collaborating with New Order on
such songs as ʽThieves Like Usʼ. The results were not just «unfortunate»
— they were a real friggin' catastrophe.
It isn't just the all-pervasive electronic
drums or the plastic, lifeless bass sound this time: it is virtually
everything. Sterile keyboards, inspired guitar solos that get drowned in the
mix, echo-drenched vocals that put the singer in an even deeper well than he
occupied on Infidels — everything
follows the great call of «modernization at all costs», resulting in an overall
sound that has nothing to do with Dylan and who or what he really is. If you
are willing to look past this production style, by all means, do so, and you
may eventually find yourself rewarded. But if you are not one of those who need
their daily dose of a Dylan epiphany, then why, you might ask yourself, should
you ever want to listen to an «electropop Dylan» or an «adult contemporary
Dylan», when there is plenty of quality
Dylan lying around?
Arguably the worst nightmare of this record is
ʽWhen The Night Comes Falling From The Skyʼ, a song that began its
life as an uplifting polyphonic rocker with a Born In The USA kind of sound (the original version has since then
been made available on Bootleg Series)
and ended it as a heavily sanitized, depressing electronic dance track. Where
«depressing» applies both to the change of mood from «angry / castigating /
condescending» to «panicky / whiny / pathetic», and to the effect that the implosive electronic percussion casts on
your nerves. It is particularly ironic that the final take was almost certainly
influenced by ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ — the same «ominous» type of
introduction, borrowing a part of those original chords — but if you are going to step in the same river
twice, you might at least want to check for any recent dumps. This here is Bob
Dylan, miscast as Kim Wilde; all that's missing is some of those hot dance
moves to get the blood boiling. (Actually, he is trying to rock it just a little bit in the accompanying video,
but I seriously doubt any of the kids were properly impressed. What's he got on
Madonna?).
According to Ron Wood's memories, the man just
didn't give a damn to whatever was happening around him — he wrote it the way
he wanted, strummed his guitar and blew his harp the way he wanted, sang it the
way he wanted, then left everything else, from overdubbing to mixing, to Fate.
Maybe his idea was that Fate would, somehow, intervene and go on spreading her
usual blessing, but this just wasn't going to be 1966 all over again, and much
of what was going around was just plain crappy, to say the least. ʽTight
Connection To My Heartʼ is one of his best contributions to the decade, a
potentially gorgeous love anthem that could
have been a masterpiece — but oh, those drums, oh, that robotic bass, oh, that
awful echo! As if this wasn't enough, the credits list Mick Taylor as lead
guitar player on that one, but where the hell is his better half? Who cut off
something like half of the frequencies of his sound? Is that supposed to be
«modern»?
It really becomes all the more painful when you
start struggling to look past the «ragged glitz» and see these songs in their
primary, imaginary incarnations. ʽEmotionally Yoursʼ is a beautiful
ballad that should rank among Dylan's tenderest achievements (probably inspired
by his romance with the backup singer, soon-to-be wife Carolyn Dennis) — and it
certainly deserves a much more tasteful arrangement than the adult-contemporary
keyboard soup it got here. ʽClean-Cut Kidʼ, with Wood on lead guitar,
could have been a decent-sounding Stones-style rocker with a poignant, if a bit
too banal, message on the evil influence of The System — instead, looks like
The System's most evil influence has
been on the recording and mixing process of the song itself. ʽSomething's
Burning, Babyʼ has a simplistic folk melody that could be taken in any
direction — so why did the direction have to be this blend of simplistic New
Age with equally simplistic New Wave, as if the listener is being shoved face
down into a set of Casios and rhythmically dragged across all the switches and
transistors?..
Small wonder that the only song that truly
stood out back then and truly stands out up to this day is the coda of
ʽDark Eyesʼ — credit must be given where it is due, as it was Arthur
Baker's idea to finish the album on a minimalistic note: just Bob, his
acoustic, and harmonica, like in the good old (oh so old) days. Dylan caught up
on the idea, and came up with a song here that would not at all feel out of
place on any of his early acoustic albums; you could very well swap it places
with ʽRestless Farewellʼ, for instance, on the condition of getting a
time machine to a 23-year old Dylan to sing it in a younger voice. He even
falls back upon some of his old beatnik-style poetry here, but the overall
subject, one of «total focus on beauty», remains clear and poignant. Too bad he
was not able to focus on much of anything else, though.
When it comes to any sort of judgement, I am at
a total loss here — it is one of those rare pesky situations where solid,
appreciable substance violently clashes against abysmal form, and in honor of
its relative rarity, I would like to have a special honorary thumbs down
for what might just be the worst production on a Dylan album ever (unless we live long enough to see
Lady Gaga's Meat Dress produce him an electro-pop extravaganza), but to reserve
a separate thumbs
up for some of his most inspired and tightest songwriting of the
entire decade. There! And now that it's done, I, too, want a lime paint jacket
and a puzzled look on my face.
KNOCKED OUT LOADED (1986)
1) You Wanna Ramble; 2) They
Killed Him; 3) Driftin' Too Far From Shore; 4) Precious Memories; 5) Maybe
Someday; 6) Brownsville Girl; 7) Got My Mind Made Up; 8) Under Your Spell.
It would take more time to type up the names of
all the musicians responsible for this record than to listen to all of its
thirty-five minutes — two ominous signs for Dylan, whose best records have
always tended to be recorded over brief periods, with minimal staff, and run
for far longer than the usual 40-45 minutes; the «country-western» period of
1968-70 being a notable and perfectly intentional exception. But Knocked Out Loaded is not even a proper
album, in a way. It consists of outtakes from previous sessions, throwaway
pieces hastily and fuzzily knocked out (loaded) with members of Tom Petty's
band during rehearsal breaks on the True
Confessions tour, and a random selection of covers by various people,
without any organizing principles or quality control. Whatever in the world
made Bob want to put this stuff out as his next LP is beyond me. Out-of-control
drug and alcohol consumption on the tour seems to be out of the question, but
so far, this sounds like the optimal explanation anyway.
Without Sly and Robbie at the wheel, the record
sounds less electronic and «plastic» than Empire
Burlesque, but its heavy reliance on synthesizers, echoes, and monotonous
paid-by-the-book gospel background vocals, somehow ensures that everything is
even more tired and boring than it used to be. The rock'n'roll numbers have no
drive, the ballads have no feeling, and the melodic hooks are not even an
active topic. You'd think that a Dylan/Petty collaboration, of all things,
could have gone down real well (especially in the light of the Traveling
Wilburys' revival just a couple years later), but ʽGot My Mind Made Upʼ
turns out to be just a semi-improvised blues-rock jam without any redeeming
qualities, other than maybe some nifty, but noisy acoustic slide playing, and
even that is dissolved in the grayish production.
At least once the whole story borders on the
ridiculous: Dylan covering Kris Kristofferson's freshly written ʽThey
Killed Himʼ, a young-adult retelling of the uneasy common fates of Mahatma
Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Jesus Christ Superstar. The song is
trite from each and every point of view, melody and lyrics included; at least
in the days of Self Portrait, Bob
used to come up with interesting rearranging and artistic twists to justify
inclusion of such material, but this
is downright crazy — why take a bad song and cover it if you do absolutely nothing
to compensate for the corny atmosphere? Then again, it was barely a year since
Bob took part in the ʽWe Are The Worldʼ embarrassment (although that
one at least made some sense in that some of the money went to charity;
ʽThey Killed Himʼ will only begin making sense when Bob decides to
throw in an extra verse on Kenny, but I don't know how well he gets along with South Park these days).
The one song that, in stark contrast with the
rest of this «album», has usually gotten rave reviews was ʽBrownsville
Girlʼ (formerly ʽNew Danville Girlʼ, as the tune dates back to
the Empire Burlesque sessions). Its
format is certainly unusual — not only does it return us to Dylan's «epic»
length that we haven't really seen since the days of ʽJoeyʼ, but it
also features alternating, «clashing» sets of lyrics that revolve around
several sets of memories, one of which involves a movie starring Gregory Peck;
ironically tinged «taunts» from Dylan's backup singers from time to time; and
some sax solos that add some sort of muscular Springsteen grandeur to the
proceedings. In a different age, this could have worked. Unfortunately, the sound of the song is just as colorless
and mucky as everything else on here — big stupid drums, meaningless guitar and
keyboard rhythms, echo and reverb all over the place, and a bombastic chorus
whose bombast is only slightly louder
than the bombast of everything else, so do not really hope for a grappling
build-up effect. It is certainly an intriguing tune when compared to everything
else around it, but truly that is not saying much.
Thumbs down, of course,
although calling this «the worst Dylan album ever» or at least a worthy
candidate and shooting fat fish in a tiny barrel would be acts of comparable
importance — like I said, this isn't even a proper «album», more like an
uninteresting drunk escapade of which Bob himself might not be retaining any
particular memories. Had he ever stated that the songs were released by
Columbia without his approval (again!), I think nobody would have a hard time
believing him. Like that silly album from 1973, it is best to forget Knocked Out Loaded, as an object that
adds nothing credibly positive or starkly negative to the man's legacy. Even
the album sleeve is probably the silliest picture in Dylanology.
DOWN IN THE GROOVE (1988)
1) Let's Stick Together; 2)
When Did You Leave Heaven; 3) Sally Sue Brown; 4) Death Is Not The End; 5) Had
A Dream About You, Baby; 6) Ugliest Girl In The World; 7) Silvio; 8) Ninety
Miles An Hour (Down A Dead End Street); 9) Shenandoah; 10) Rank Strangers To Me.
A slightly delayed twin brother to Knocked Out Loaded in almost
everything, beginning with the somewhat ironically self-deprecating title, not
to mention the approximately same short running time, the surprisingly low ratio
of originals to covers, and the rag-taggy origins: the album was scrapped
together from at least six different sessions, and chronologically, the songs
reach all the way back to the Infidels
period. Small wonder, then, that it was received with even more hostility than
its predecessor — and this time, there isn't even a single pretentious
eleven-minute epic to feed as a juicy soup bone to the critical hounds.
On general terms, the record is certainly
expendable: with such similar birth conditions, there is just no way one could
condemn Knocked Out Loaded while at
the same time patting its follow-up on the back. On a more particular note, Down In The Groove has always seemed
ever so slightly more listenable to me, mainly because the production has
improved a bit, and those rather pedestrian rockers that sounded all muddled
and flaccid two years back now get a little extra bark by way of a sharper
electric guitar sound and cleaner vocal mixing. Let's admit it, when the guitar
and harmonica kick in at the start of ʽLet's Stick Togetherʼ, this
does induce a bit of a jolt, doesn't it? Definitely a more intense and
immediate sound here than on ʽYou Wanna Rambleʼ.
Furthermore, although ʽWhen Did You Leave
Heavenʼ does greet you with a «plastic heaven» synthesizer onslaught, this
is rather an exception: for the most part, Down
In The Groove avoids soft adult-contemporary and concentrates on
rock'n'roll — much of it simple, unassuming, and sometimes even humorous
rock'n'roll, as if Bob was intentionally trying here to produce a solo match
for his Traveling Wilburys image (or, rather, the reverse is more likely: early
Wilburys material was being written and recorded at the same time as the first
copies of Down In The Groove were
finding their accursed way to the store shelves). In a different age, this
wouldn't be such a bad choice, but for 1988, it was still a disaster.
As these rockers fly past you, one by one,
there is nothing to distinguish them from one another — you get no idea of how
«dear» they are to Bob himself, who sings them in the exact same monotonous
tone, you sense nothing but bored professionalism from the backing bands, and
at times, you start to suspect self-parody: I mean, what is something like
ʽThe Ugliest Girl In The Worldʼ but self-parody? Play it back to back
with ʽFrom A Buick 6ʼ and remind yourself of the difference — both
songs poke fun at the singer's imaginary and slightly caricaturesque lover, but
the former was all turbulence and garage rage, whereas this one is just a flat
out dumb joke; too bad that the talents of Robert Hunter, the loyal / royal
lyricist of the Grateful Dead, had to be wasted on this unfunny tripe.
Like its predecessor, Down In The Groove is usually let off the hook for just one song:
ʽDeath Is Not The Endʼ, for which Bob is inexplainably joined by Full
Force on backing vocals, is a quiet, suggestively «optimistic» outtake from the
Infidels sessions, presented as a
minimalistic gospel ballad, quietly mumbled and humbly arranged, in a very
sharp contrast to the louder-than-good-taste-recommends-it sound of the rest of
the album. It is repetitive and very sparse on musical ideas, but you can't go
wrong with the nostalgic harmonica part, or the mesmerizing vocals, still
connected through an invisible feeding tube to Bob's cauldron of Christian
inspiration — Nick Cave, a big fan of Bob's Christianity, would later cover the
song for his own spiritual purposes, and Nick's usually got a good taste in
covers, so take his word for it.
Everything else is, at worst, ridiculous
(ʽUgliest Girlʼ) or very boring (ʽWhen Did You Leave
Heavenʼ), and, at best, mildly-pleasantly-listenable, like the acoustic
rocker ʽSilvioʼ, punctuated for the pleasure of your attention by an
extra ukulele part, but still coming across as a flimsy trifle for some reason.
Maybe it would have sounded better on a Traveling Wilburys album. Even the
attempt to cap off the record with something more subtle and sentimental,
namely, the cover of Albert Burmley's gospel tune ʽRank Strangers To
Meʼ, is only halfway credible: lazy guitar strum + echo-laden voice + dull
backup singing = why should we bother? Thumbs down in the groove; much as I like
disagreeing with mainstream criticism on Bob's low points, defending this album
would be a disreputable affair. Funny enough, it does confirm the usual trend —
the more time Bob Dylan spends on making a record, the worse it usually comes
out. It's a good thing he never tried auditioning for Pink Floyd.
DYLAN & THE DEAD (1989)
1) Slow Train; 2) I Want You;
3) Gotta Serve Somebody; 4) Queen Jane Approximately; 5) Joey; 6) All Along The
Watchtower; 7) Knockin' On Heaven's Door.
This album got such utterly vicious reviews
when it came out that it seems to have forever turned Bob off further live
albums — with the exception of Unplugged,
where he was not really in control of the situation, all subsequent stage
experience would have to be experienced in front of the stage, or in the form
of bootlegs that devoted fans would cherish anyway and critics would not take
note of, unless they were professional dylanologists using those for research.
I cannot say that this decision makes me
particularly sad, since listening and re-listening to Bob croak out his past
glories with the voice of someone who's spent forty years too much in the
desert is indeed an occupation for the truly faithful (who can afford the time
and resources for a bootleg hunt). However, to stay on the objective side,
Bob's voice still had some ring to it in 1989, and the negative reaction to the
album was overplayed — no doubt, fueled way too much by the disappointing
effects of his concurrent studio albums. With at least two, or maybe four, or
maybe seven if you hated the Christian stuff, or maybe even eight if you also
despised Street Legal, consecutive
reputational flops, who would want to be positively attuned towards a live
album, even if that live album was announced as a collaboration with one of the
few bands everybody could expect to be a great match for Bob — the Grateful
Dead?
Actually, critics and fans alike could consider
themselves duped: where Before The Flood
was truly «Dylan and The Band», the setlist being proportionally divided
between the two, Dylan & The Dead
is really just Dylan being backed by the Dead. The Dead, of course, did play
their own set on that joint 1987 tour, and played it well enough for 1987 (the
year of their «comeback» with In The
Dark), but there were no plans to release a joint album, and a couple years
later somebody must have thought it a great idea to put out Dylan's part on
its own — surely being backed by the
Dead must be like promoting the Dylan songs to the next plane of existence?
But whoever had that idea, be it Bob himself or
some one-dimensional financial manager at Columbia, never realized one thing:
the Dead are not «Booker T & The MGs» — they are well worth it when they
play their own material, but they are
not at all guaranteed to instantaneously add a hundred points to the power of
any random song they are given to play. On their own albums, they often
struggle with covers, unless the covers in question are traditional folk or
country songs, and on Dylan & The
Dead, they have a hard enough time just keeping up with Bob's basic needs,
let alone add any serious creativity or wild energy. Jerry Garcia does add some
nice, fluent and expressive solos to ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ, and
the band harmonizes well on key on the finale of ʽKnockin' On Heaven's
Doorʼ (which they thankfully do in a non-reggae arrangement), and the
rhythm section never really falls apart or anything, but that's about it.
Bob himself is still trying to sing from time
to time, and it would be wrong to flat-out accuse him of being uninspired or
somnambulant, particularly in
retrospect when he's been sounding like that (only hoarser) through more than
twenty years of the Never Ending Tour and doing fine. It is interesting that
he is not giving up on the Christian stuff: with such a short running length, two songs from Slow Train Coming might seem like overkill, but they are the two
best ones, and they are taken quite seriously, even if the repetitive codas to
both seem hopelessly overextended. It is noteworthy that he insists on having
ʽJoeyʼ in the set, as if provoking the critics (who had always seen
the song as the main flaw on Desire's
multi-tissue body).
It is
distressing that the once powerful, sneering, condescending aura of ʽQueen
Jane Approximatelyʼ has now turned into an old man's feeble whine, but it
is also almost perversely funny — here is this guy who just spent twenty years
waiting for Queen Jane to show up and finally see him, to the point of almost begging her now, but no dice. Looks
like the Queen still hasn't gotten sick of all this repetition, after all. And
who is more «tired of yourself and all of your creations» now, in the end —
Queen Jane or Robert Zimmerman? I cannot help but wonder if Bob himself felt
the presence of this unintentional self-irony in his performance.
That said, it would not be correct of me to
counteract critical opinion with a thumbs up, because there is certainly no way
Dylan & The Dead would be
anywhere close to the level of Bob's classic live output — or, for that
matter, any Bob Dylan live
performance, including the one I've been to personally, dating from before the
period when his voice first turned whiny, then wheezy, and then crackly like a
bunch of dry firewood. It is particularly unbearable to hear him pull his usual
vocal stunts with that voice — for instance, singing directly against the
melody on the chorus of ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ; it takes
superior intellectual effort to understand that he is «experimenting» as
usual, rather than simply forgetting that somebody is playing in a certain key
behind his back, and why should we
waste our intellectual efforts on Dylan
& The Dead? It's just a late period live album, good enough for one
listen. If you have never been to a Dylan show and are considering whether or
not to go, give it a try — this is the closest official sound to a 21st century
Dylan show you can get, although his current backing bands are certainly better
suited to his needs than the Dead were in 1987 (but the voice now takes even
more getting used to).
OH MERCY (1989)
1) Political World; 2) Where Teardrops
Fall; 3) Everything Is Broken; 4) Ring Them Bells; 5) Man In The Long Black
Coat; 6) Most Of The Time; 7) What Good Am I; 8) Disease Of Conceit; 9) What
Was It You Wanted; 10) Shooting Star.
This album shared pretty much the same fate as
the Rolling Stones' Steel Wheels,
released the same year — when they came out, both seemed like such a breath of
fresh air after several disappointments in a row that the critical world went
a-droolin'. Later on, as time went by, the Eighties started fading out of
sight, and albums such as Voodoo Lounge
and Time Out Of Mind began (quite
justifiedly) eclipsing their predecessors in terms of depth, melodicity,
production, and general adequacy, the 1989 «comebacks» gradually came to be
regarded as little more than tepid half-steps on the way to a genuine recovery.
For Dylan especially, the shadow of Time,
universally hailed as his undisputed «late period masterpiece», has plunged Oh Mercy into nearly complete
obscurity: at the very least, few people remember any individual songs as
«classics».
But I feel kinda sorry about all this. First of
all, Oh Mercy definitely was a comeback album, much more so than Steel Wheels — the latter was more of a
«formal» comeback, announcing that the Stones have patched up their differences
and got together after a two-year break, but it did not exactly show us a band
that was getting back on the right track, since they'd never really left it. Oh Mercy, on the other hand, did give
us back our Dylan — after six years of confusion, total uncertainty of where he
actually belonged in this new world, occasional gross embarrassments the likes
of which he'd never fallen prey to before (such as the disco production of
ʽWhen The Night...ʼ), this was the first album where he at least seemed to be back in control,
knowing what exactly he was doing and why he was doing it.
Clearly, this could not have happened without
falling upon the proper producer — Daniel Lanois, who is responsible for the
resuscitation of Bob's late-period career as much as Tom Wilson was responsible
for Bob's early sound. It was Lanois who truly introduced Dylan to the good possibilities of the new
technological era, showing that the new production standards were not limited
to a simple reliance on electronic drums and atmospheric synthesizer backdrops.
Instead, you could take real musicians and mix their parts in such a way that
would emphasize, colorize, and maybe even «mystify» them, without any
dehumanization involved. All of a sudden, the music behind the words began to
matter once again, and this, in turn, revitalized the words: after the
«anything-goes» approach of Knocked Out
Loaded and Down In The Groove,
we are suddenly back to a world where words, chords, and moods form a
meaningful unity. It's not an artistic paradise, but it is a meaningful unity.
Not a particularly uplifting or optimistic
unity, mind you: Oh Mercy opens
another period of utter bleakness for Bob, not nearly as deeply personalized as
it was on Street Legal, but nowhere
near as formulaically Christianized as on Slow
Train Coming, either. Renewed interest in making music here corresponds to
a renewed feel of disgust for just about everything in sight, be it politics,
social relations, personal relations, or even himself. Small wonder that the
lead (and only) single from the album was ʽEverything Is Brokenʼ, a
song whose lyrics probably did not take more than five minutes to write, as
they mostly just list everything that is broken, but whose mood is quite
typical of the album — and also reflects Lanois' deep understanding of what
sort of sound goes best with these words, as he punctuates each bar with a
«breaking» guitar chord. And it is not a deadly depressed song, either: it's
got an angry, punkish overtone to it, not coincidentally opening with a rhythm
pattern taken directly from ʽBrand New Cadillacʼ.
Grim acoustic riffs, steel guitar stings, and
electric howls in the background actually welcome us from the very beginning —
this ain't the Traveling Wilburys, folks: this is a ʽPolitical
Worldʼ, where paranoid musical sounds are the norm and "you can
travel anywhere and hang yourself there / You always got more than enough
rope". Together with ʽEverything Is Brokenʼ, these two songs,
clumsily and falsely separated by the less interesting country waltz
ʽWhere Teardrops Fallʼ, set the basic tone and deliver the basic
message of the whole record. Grim, morose, skeptical, but not up to suicidal
heights or anything.
Most of the songs that follow are, however,
slower, moodier, and folksier/bluesier in nature, marking the transition to a
much more retro-oriented sound and reflecting an increased interest in pre-war
music. A song like ʽMan In The Long Black Coatʼ, for instance, with
the lyrics properly adjusted to reflect the correct time period, could have
come from many an old folk singer, except that Lanois also adjusts it for
atmosphere (such as adding some cricket effects to go hand in hand with
"crickets are chirpin', the water is high", etc.), and puts a tinge
of dark mystery all over the place — if the lyrics themselves do not get you
a-wonderin' who the "man in the long black coat" that whisked away
the protagonist really is, the deep rumbling bass and the «crickets» just
might. (Not that there's a lot of wondering to be involved, but still, this is
a relatively new twist in Dylan's relations with the Devil, curious enough to
have the song covered by an act as unlikely as the reunited Emerson, Lake &
Palmer several years later).
It is true, I suppose, that the actual
songwriting here is not phenomenal or anything. It'd been a long, long time
since Dylan was able to come up with brand new melodic ideas, and his failing
voice, now down to just a few miserable shades of color, can no longer grip the
listener with odd tone changes — while he still watches his phrasing quite
carefully (unlike his live shows), all the phrasing mostly consists of hoarse
croaking. But Oh Mercy goes for
atmosphere, not hooks. Yes, sometimes it feels like Bob is getting a bit out of
focus, but not on stuff like ʽWhat Was It You Wantedʼ, bitter,
direct, and featuring some really mean-blown harmonica, or ʽWhat Good Am
Iʼ, one of the most self-critical songs he ever wrote.
When the time comes to prune and filter your
collection, and weed out all the music that «does not really matter» and leave
in music that does, even an album like Empire
Burlesque, which has a lot of individual benefits going for it, might have
to go eventually — because its individual parts are greater than its cohesive
significance, misguided as the whole thing was. Oh Mercy, with its imaginative «deep dark forest»-style production
and deeply personal nature, is the opposite: separately, most of the songs are
lacking, but together, they form a realistic and credible picture of Bob the
artist at the time. You may not want to keep coming back to it any time soon,
but that would be no serious reason to deprive it of a thumbs up.
UNDER THE RED SKY (1990)
1) Wiggle Wiggle; 2) Under The
Red Sky; 3) Unbelievable; 4) Born In Time; 5) T.V. Talkin' Song; 6) 10,000 Men;
7) 2 x 2; 8) God Knows; 9) Handy Dandy; 10) Cat's In The Well.
I think that most of the critics misunderstood
this album when it came out. Most of the reviews were starkly negative — after
the oh-so-obvious and oh-so-welcome comeback of Oh Mercy, here was a cold shower that threateningly hinted: Oh Mercy was just an accident, and now
we are back to the washed-up state of its predecessors. Rote, stale, toothless,
simplistic rock'n'roll. And the lyrics? "Wiggle wiggle wiggle like a gypsy
queen, wiggle wiggle wiggle all dressed in green". "One by one, they
followed the sun; two by two, to their lovers they flew". "Handy
dandy, just like sugar and candy". "Cat's in the well, the wolf is
looking down". This is Dylan? Sounds more like Dr. Seuss on a bad day.
The only exception from the crowd was Robert
Christgau, who fabulously gave the record an A- and populated his brief review
with phrases like: "aiming frankly for the evocative, the fabulistic,
the biblical, Dylan exploits narrative metaphor as an adaptive mechanism that
allows him to inhabit a ʽmatureʼ pessimism he knows isn't the meaning
of life" — as much as we sometimes hate The Dean for a variety of
aesthetic reasons, this is clearly just a provocative hoot: The Dean thinks he
can claim as good a right to be bullshitting his audience as Bob Dylan has a
right to be bullshitting his. Hence,
the only real difference is that most critics thought Bob had produced an
unintentionally bad record, whereas Christgau probably thought it was quite
intentional.
What they missed was
the dedication of the record — «to Gabby Gabby Goo», later revealed to be
Bobby's little daughter, Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan. The dedication
explains it all: Under The Red Sky
is nothing but Robert Zimmerman's idea of a «children's record», designed and
executed through the vision frame of Bob Dylan. What would a four-year old kid
do with Blonde On Blonde or Blood On The Tracks? A four-year old
kid would much rather wiggle wiggle wiggle, or learn to count to ten, or hear
about the cat and the wolf. And if most of the lyrics are absurdist and do not
make any literal sense, the same can be said about quite a large percentage of
children's literature as well.
Consequently, Under The Red Sky should not be put in
the same league with Knocked Out Loaded.
It is clearly Dylan's most «Traveling Wilburies-style» album, sharing the
general lightweight atmosphere of that band, but then it goes further than
that, stripping the melodies and the lyrical structures to their bare bones,
and not even beginning to pretend to any depth, seriousness, or nuanced
atmosphere. Unlike Knocked Out Loaded,
Under The Red Sky knows exactly what
it is doing, with one exception: as a «writer for kids», Dylan is not
particularly well experienced, and the «fun» component of the album seems
underdone.
That this is a
specially concocted «Dylan lite» variety is most evident on ʽHandy
Dandyʼ, I think, which opens with a bombastic organ riff, very similar to
the one of ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ — but the lyrics are sheer
nonsense, their delivery is rather expressionless, and the backing band has no
particular idea of what sort of feelings it should be trying to convey. Most of
the other «rock» songs are based on well-known rock'n'roll patterns
(ʽUnbelievableʼ opens like ʽHoney Don'tʼ; ʽCat's In
The Wellʼ is really ʽLucilleʼ; ʽ10,000 Menʼ is
ʽGood Morning Little Schoolgirlʼ, etc.) that Dylan explores with
gusto, probably drawing his inspiration from those early high school days when
playing in a rock'n'roll band was still the only life for him — in other words,
he is not simply writing for children, he is sort of reliving his own
childhood. I guess you're allowed to do that as you turn 50, no?
The backing band
assembled for the purpose is quite impressive — with guest appearances from Al
Kooper (I assume it is him responsible for the organ on ʽHandy
Dandyʼ, for obvious reasons) to Elton John to Slash to Jimmie and even
Stevie Ray Vaughan (on ʽGod Knowsʼ). George Harrison makes a notable
appearance on the title track (I can only assume the pretty slide solos there
come from George's hand), Dave Crosby sings backing vocals, Bruce Hornsby
contributes piano runs, and producer Don Was adds his own guitar skills. And
all of this talent thrown together for a thirty-minute long kiddie album? Truly
and verily, nobody but Dylan can pull off a stunt like that and get away with
just a few negative reviews.
If we preserve that
angle of view, Under The Red Sky has
no highlights or lowlights. ʽGod Knowsʼ is actually a bit more
serious than everything else, both lyrically and musically (due largely to
Stevie Ray's participation), but it is lurking at the rear and does not add
much coloring to the rest of the album. A deliberate throwaway, it would have
fared much better had it been properly advertised — but Dylan hates proper
advertisement, and it is a hatred I can empathize with. As an experiment, you
can leave it in storage for your own little «Gabby Gabby Goos» and see for
yourself whether Robert's paternal instincts were functioning correctly. Or, if
you are ever in the mood to play the fool, you can «wiggle like a big fat
snake» yourself, provided you have nothing better to do.
One last word about
the album cover — I think the «Dylan in the desert» image, which, if you do not
look at it hard enough, seems very much like a «Dylan in the dumps» image,
generated more harm for the overall critical impression than the songs
themselves. You listen to ʽWiggle Wiggleʼ, you look back at the
cover, you listen to the title track, your glance returns to the cover again,
and you do get the impression of a
completely washed-up intellectual tramp, with nothing but sheer pity or utter
disgust to evoke from the consumer. The photo and the songs just do not go
together, no matter how much you twist the angle. Then again, come to think of
it, Desire was probably the last
time when Bob actually gave a proper hoot about the shapes, colors, and facial
expressions on the album sleeve. I do wonder, though, if «Gabby Gabby Goo»
actually enjoyed all the ashen grey on that photo.
GOOD AS I BEEN TO YOU (1992)
1) Frankie & Albert; 2)
Jim Jones; 3) Black Jack Davey; 4) Canadee-I-O; 5) Sitting On Top Of The World;
6) Little Maggie; 7) Hard Times; 8) Step It Up And Go; 9) Tomorrow Night; 10)
Arthur McBride; 11) You're Gonna Quit Me; 12) Diamond Joe; 13) Froggie Went
A-Courtin'.
«Going back to one's roots» is a trick that's
tried and true, but, to be perfectly honest, Dylan never really strayed too far
away from his roots in the first place — that solid foundation of folk, blues,
and country styles had always remained at the core of every «original» song the
man went on to write. From that point of view, the stylistic and emotional
distance between the much reviled Under
The Red Sky and the much lauded Good
As I Been To You is not really that
far. But yes indeed, on a formal basis, here we have Dylan going back to his
roots in a way he'd never gone back before — thirty years on, revisiting the
exact same territory he'd started out upon, with his self-titled debut of old
blues and folk covers.
It does make sense to play those two albums
back-to-back and see the difference. In 1962, Bob Dylan was an inexperienced
Jewish kid from Minnesota, arrogantly challenging himself to rival old
weathered black bluesmen. The only way he could rise to that challenge was by
radically reinventing the songs, recasting them in his own new image, with a
little extra irony and an already strong beatnik flavor. Time goes by, and now,
in the early 1990s, he goes back to that same well, digging in the archives and
selecting even more tracks from the past for publication as part of The Bootleg Series — but by now, he is
fairly weathered and battered himself, and a little washed up and low on ideas,
and the solution presents itself: why not try it again, but this time in a
perfectly «authentic» manner? Given that he really really loves those old
melodies and all? Wouldn't thirty years be a sufficient learning period?
Totally stripped down and reduced once again to
pure acoustic guitar and harmonica, dumping everything that could be dumped,
Bob handpicks himself thirteen oldies from the depths of the folk and blues
tradition — a few of which will be easily recognized even by amateurs
(ʽSittin' On Top Of The Worldʼ, for instance, or the old jazz ballad
ʽTomorrow Nightʼ, done by Lonnie Johnson, LaVern Baker, Elvis, and
probably a dozen other artists), but many of the rest are relatively obscure
sea shanties or jug band dance numbers where the listener would have to do some
serious digging to uncover the prototypes. This is quite easy in the Internet
era, of course, but in 1992, access to golden oldies was still limited, so for
many a Bob Dylan fan, Good As I Been To
You must have contained plenty of revelations.
There is no serious point in discussing
individual highlights or lowlights here. Any review of an album like this begs
for an answer to just one question — does it or doesn't it? Most critics have
agreed that it does, and I sort of agree as well. «Sort of», because nowadays
we can all scrutinize these acoustic monuments of popular genius the way they
were recorded by various artists in pre-war times — cleaned up, remastered,
still a bit crackly, but preserving some of that old spirit for us all. Whether
we really need them so faithfully redone by Bob Dylan is a complex question.
Naturally, it all sounds great. It's been a long time since Bob rode the old
six-string with so much verve and passion — his technicality hasn't improved
all that much since 1962, but it wasn't too bad to begin with, and most of the
time he is being well in tune and throwing around inspired lead lines every now
and then. His voice, having played such a mean trick with him around the time
of Under The Red Sky, is now
perfectly suited to these shanties and nursery rhymes — grandpa music, played
round the fire for the grandchildren to frolick around to. And there is enough
stylistic and emotional diversity, from the unvarnished dark balladry of ʽFrankie
& Albertʼ to the medieval kiddie folktale stuff of ʽFroggie Went
A-Courtin'ʼ.
Whether it would have significant replay value,
though, is a different matter. Like Bob's born-again stuff, this is something
that had to be done, and it could be
argued that without this album or its sequel, we would not have seen and
enjoyed the true late period revival of Bob Dylan. It is also well worth
studying for all those who only have a vague idea of where all those wonderful
Bob Dylan songs are coming from — he even went all the way to include several
prototypes of his own classics, e. g. ʽBlack Jack Daveyʼ is the true
father of ʽBoots Of Spanish Leatherʼ, and ʽJim Jonesʼ would
eventually become ʽDesolation Rowʼ. But the record is really more of
a well-meaning lesson in folk musical history, now given by a seasoned pro,
than an original musical creation in its own right.
No question about it — on the general curve, Good As I Been To You was a great
improvement over the previous album, and in terms of its minimalistic production
and intimacy, probably the best-sounding Dylan record since at least his
Christian period. Yet I do not see myself coming back to it very often: its
impact is really at its highest if it is taken in the strict context of Dylan's
entire career. In that context, it gets an assured thumbs up; out of that context, it
is merely a curiosity. But on a positive note, if you memorize all the verses
to ʽFroggie Went A-Courtin'ʼ, that's at least one hell of a useful
mental exercise.
WORLD GONE WRONG (1993)
1) World Gone Wrong; 2) Love
Henry; 3) Ragged & Dirty; 4) Blood In My Eyes; 5) Broke Down Engine; 6)
Delia; 7) Stack A Lee; 8) Two Soldiers; 9) Jack-A-Roe; 10) Lone Pilgrim.
Dylan has never been an enemy to sequels, and
many of his finest records come in «pairs» or «trios», be they acoustic folk,
electric rock'n'roll, or Jesusfests — and since Good As I Been To You got such good reviews, a quick follow-up
along the same lines would appear quite natural. But it wouldn't be true Dylan,
either, if the follow-up were observing exactly the same angle. One more page had to be turned, so, for World Gone Wrong, Dylan chose a «long
black cloak» to wrap it in. Where the first record was essentially the
soundtrack to an old, ragged traveling minstrel show, with women and children
all equally welcome to sing along to ʽFroggie Went A-Courtin'ʼ, World Gone Wrong takes a more serious,
and usually, quite deadly view of the world.
Bob himself, clean-shaven now and well-trimmed,
is posing on the front cover in the guise of an undertaker — sharing a quiet
moment with a cup of coffee and a candle right after the services have been
held. Sure enough, the title track, if taken literally, only documents a nasty
breakup between the man and his gal, but there are so many other nasty things
happening later on that nobody will want to take it literally: «world gone
wrong» does refer to the whole world, not just the protagonist's own personal
world.
Once again, all the songs are traditional
oldies, some fairly well known (like Blind Willie McTell's ʽBroke Down
Engineʼ), some excavated by Bob from fairly obscure sources, but given a
thorough explanation in the liner notes, which he wrote himself, almost as if
he really really wanted us to digest and enjoy these songs on their own exclusive
terms, rather than in the form of «yet another Bob Dylan album». Of course,
that would be impossible, and people still ended up writing about how Bob
really managed to breathe new life into them old tunes, and you can't blame
them: even if he truly wanted to perform ʽWorld Gone Wrongʼ and
ʽBlood In My Eyesʼ the same way they were done by the Mississippi
Sheiks sixty years earlier, he couldn't have done it. But then the Mississippi
Sheiks, after all, were playing for popular entertainment, hiding the songs'
grieving heart behind a wall of lively, upbeat fiddles and guitars. Bob Dylan,
at best, is playing for popular education
rather than popular entertainment — and he has no obligation, to his record
label or to his audience, to whitewash any of the feelings.
Consequently, World Gone Wrong is one of Dylan's bleakest albums, full to the
brim with murder ballads and depressed blues, and, in its own way, paving the
road to Time Out Of Mind, whose
artistic success was, beyond any doubt, at least partly the result of
inspiration drawn from recording these covers. With one or two exceptions,
there is hardly even any harmonica on here: harmonica is known to liven up the
atmosphere, and Dylan does not need that for his current purpose. Instead, he
invests it all in his guitar playing, choosing the saddest chord sequences in
his repertoire to match the lyrics and vocal intonations. And if there might
have been occasional questions as to whether his voice was really suitable to
sing stuff like ʽTomorrow Nightʼ, no such problem is evident here.
With the themes and moods so consistent,
highlights vs. lowlights are impossible to discuss, so we shall bypass any
song-by-song comments and get out the general judgement: World Gone Wrong is a more important album than Good As I Been To You, since it is more
conceptual, and the concept is
carried out in the spirit of Bob Dylan, not in the spirit of those old folk
guys, God bless 'em, who had preserved those songs for us, on tape and shellac,
back when the spirit of Bob Dylan was not just non-existent, but pretty much
unthinkable. It is tempting to compare it with Nick Cave's Murder Ballads, which came out three years later and were quite
obviously inspired by this album (two of the songs, ʽStagger Leeʼ and
ʽHenry Leeʼ, are the same as ʽStack A Leeʼ and ʽLove
Henryʼ) — but Cave, when it comes to such matters, usually goes all the
way, building up a heavy-hitting atmosphere of doom and gloom; Bob wouldn't
have been able to do it if just for the reason of not having Nick's vocal
capacities, and his delivery is far more understated, and takes more time to
sink in if you are in the mood for acute depression.
The record ends on a spiritual note —
ʽLone Pilgrimʼ, an anthem pulled out of The Sacred Harp, calms us
down after all the tales of grief and woe, once again reminding, in a
traditional way now, that «death is not the end», because all the good pilgrims
simply go home when they die. Whether this could be any consolation to a
non-religious person is unclear, but Dylan has constructed this whole album
from an obviously religious point of view (and, for that matter, he had never officially rebuked his Christianity),
and if he wants this emotional flourish — the world may have gone wrong, but not Heaven — he's got every right to
have it, and still get his thumbs up rating.
MTV UNPLUGGED (1995)
1) Tombstone Blues; 2)
Shooting Star; 3) All Along The Watchtower; 4) The Times They Are A-Changin';
5) John Brown; 6) Rainy Day Women #12 & 35; 7) Desolation Row; 8) Dignity;
9) Knockin' On Heaven's Door; 10) Like A Rolling Stone; 11) With God On Your
Side.
When MTV approached Dylan with their
still-relatively-fresh «unplugged» franchise, the man eagerly accepted the
invitation, hoping to use it as a pretext for playing some of the material from
his last two acoustic albums. However, it soon became obvious that this was not
at all what the MTV people had in mind, since MTV people were setting the whole
thing up for MTV audiences, and what sort of MTV audience would want to sit
through an entire show of acoustic murder ballads and ʽFroggie Went
A-Courtin'ʼ? Eventually, Bob just had to give in and agree to play «the
usual» — the only oddities on the setlist are ʽJohn Brownʼ, an old
protest song from 1962 that Bob never got around to officially release, and ʽDignityʼ,
an outtake from the Oh Mercy
sessions (another Oh Mercy song,
ʽShooting Starʼ, is also on the setlist, indicating that Bob still
regarded Oh Mercy as his last
«proper» studio album up to date).
Given this situation, one could suggest that,
perhaps, Bob would end up sounding disinterested and distant as a result, but
most such predictions usually underestimate Mr. Zimmerman. After all, good or
bad, all the performances would go on tape, and he was not at all interested in
letting his reputation go to waste in the eyes of young MTV viewers.
Consequently, the performance has him totally involved — as best he can, with
that ever-deteriorating voice of his and with a backing band that has no
immediately recognizable names, but is probably threatened into working as hard
as possible. Indeed, as they launch into ʽTombstone Bluesʼ, with
Brendan O'Brien playing the Hammond in Al Kooper mode, and Bucky Baxter
violating channel rules by adding electric slide guitar licks in the background
(because what would ʽTombstone Bluesʼ be without at least a little
electricity?), what we hear is a strong echo of the «real thing» — the old
hipster Dylan from 1965 — as compared to say, the relatively lacklustre,
bite-less version from Real Live a
decade ago, where the slowed-down tempo and the time signature change simply
ate it all up.
From there on, it is all at least pleasant, and at most, inspiring — ʽDesolation
Rowʼ, reimagined as a country-tinged ballad from the era of Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, being
one of the major highlights of the show; ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ
shedding its poorly fitted reggae coat and returning to its stately gospel
roots; and some nice steel guitar solos adding new spice to ʽThe Times
They Are A-Changin'ʼ. ʽJohn Brownʼ will be enjoyable to everyone
who liked the 1992-93 albums, and ʽDignityʼ is a rather pedestrian
blues-rocker, but played with enough martial energy to keep it up for about six
minutes.
Most importantly, the Unplugged album is the last record where Bob's voice, old and frail
as it already is, is nevertheless free of the «gargling croak» that would
already be in full swing two years later. This means that he can still boast
some sort of technical and emotional range in his performances, and even hit
some high notes every once in a while. On many of his contemporary live shows,
he did not really care about this either way; but for those young MTV viewers,
he does, and delivers credible — in fact, occasionally haunting — versions of
ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ and ʽWith God On Your Sideʼ (the
latter song requires a particularly versatile mode of singing, and the man
actually hits all the right notes! Just filter out all the nasality and it's almost
as good as in the old days).
Keeping this in mind, please forgive the
inexperienced audience for not recognizing ʽDesolation Rowʼ until Bob
actually says "desolation
row", and then they all start clapping like crazy. If these were more or
less the same people that sat in during the Nirvana and Alice In Chains shows,
this delayed reaction is understandable — but some people might have gone home
that evening with a little revolution taking place in their minds, because the
show was really damn good. The video version is well worth owning as well: not
only does it feature the complete show (with an additional ʽLove Minus
Zero/No Limitʼ, otherwise only available on limited European editions of
the CD), but Bob also cuts a pretty cool figure, sporting 1966-style dark
shades and an overall «mystery look» that he'd cobbled together around the
late 1980s and still carefully preserves up to this day (no more silly
"thank yous" to the audience, for instance). All in all, a profitable
thumbs up,
even though, for obvious reasons, Unplugged
will hardly have a chance to go down in history as one of his biggest live
triumphs (unlike, say, Clapton's).
TIME OUT OF MIND (1997)
1) Love Sick; 2) Dirt Road
Blues; 3) Standing In The Doorway; 4) Million Miles; 5) Trying To Get To
Heaven; 6) 'Til I Fell In Love With You; 7) Not Dark Yet; 8) Cold Irons Bound;
9) Make You Feel My Love; 10) Can't Wait; 11) Highlands.
The first thing you will probably notice about
the album is that its last track goes on for 16 and a half minutes — longer
than ʽSad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlandsʼ! — and, more than that, it is
also called ʽHighlandsʼ, which is no more reminiscent of Robert Burns
than echoing the aforementioned title. Then there is another thing worth
noting — that the running length of the album is 72 minutes, which may, of
course, simply be a usual tribute to the growing capacities of the CD era, but,
for that matter, this was also the exact running length of Blonde On Blonde. Coincidence? Most likely so, but who's to tell
there wasn't something going on a subconscious level?
It is irrelevant whether critical opinion
«overrated» or «underrated» Time Out Of
Mind when it came out, hailing the record as that particular miraculous
offering from the old man that everybody was secretly hoping for, but nobody
dared to predict in the open. What matters is that most people felt a strong tug, felt that the record was speaking
to them in deep, mysterious ways that had, for a long time, seemed completely
blocked off and forgotten. In a way, it is
the Dylan of Blonde On Blonde
speaking here. The real Dylan, some
might say — the one who got frozen in time after the motorcycle accident and
was replaced by the Dylan of The
Basement Tapes and the Dylan of Blood
On The Tracks, a first-class replacement but not exactly the same thing.
Now, thirty years later, the Dylan of 1966 has been let out of the fridge — and
no, the refrigeration process did not stop him from growing older, but it did
freeze the evolution of talent and the personal history. No Rolling Thunder, no
born-again Christianism, no Eighties' crisis.
What we have is a man who fell asleep thirty
years ago, and is now waking up — in a cold, distant world that still feels
like a dream (courtesy of Daniel Lanois' production devices). That is
ʽLove Sickʼ, which, if anything, creates the atmosphere of a barren,
collapsed environment, devoid of sentient life-forms: "I'm walking
through the streets that are dead", backed with a drip-drip-dripping organ
pattern (either Bob's own beating heart or the ominous tick of the last clock
left alive on the planet) against which distant keyboards and slide guitars
play a small army of haunting ghosts. Formally, the song is about a lost or
unreachable love, but you'd never guess it without the lyrics — my first
reaction would be «last survivor of a nuclear holocaust».
Although ʽLove Sickʼ does set the
tone, and is probably the one song most responsible for the album's reputation
as «Dylan's depressive masterpiece», Time
Out Of Mind in general is not really about depression. There are some
formally optimistic numbers here as well (particularly romantic ballads like
ʽMake You Feel My Loveʼ), and the famous refrain of one of the
album's key songs ("it's not dark yet, but it's getting there"), when
you stop to think about it, is not really delivered with the kind of ominous
gloom you'd expect to accompany such a phrase, but rather with an attitude of
«wise amusement». The Dylan of Blonde On
Blonde, frozen in time and now resuscitated to right all the wrongs,
refuses to get too angry, too sad, or too smitten by any sort of emotions. He
has learned to be able to acknowledge all the problems without getting too
fussy, too whiny, or too opinionated about it.
Which is, ultimately, the reason for all the
hoopla — with Time Out Of Mind
crackling out of your speakers, you might feel, first time in years, that once
again, Dylan has an edge over you. For a long time, his albums posed no
questions, or if they did, the first one was «why exactly did I just waste time
on this when I could rather have given another spin to Highway 61?» But now, all of a sudden, there is this blast of deep
alien wisdom, unfathomable and perplexing. A put-on, perhaps? A front? These
are questions that one can only answer for oneself. My answer is simple — the
purpose of Dylan's entire life was to blur the difference between back and
front, between put-ons and sincere confessions. But the vibe I get from this
album is just exactly the kind of vibe I would
expect from a smart, seen-it-all 57-year old dude with artistic talent and a
keen sense of taste. Except that its particular effect is impossible to
describe in words.
Of course, Lanois has to take a lot of credit for the album; he is the
reason why all of the follow-ups never quite received the same amount of
acclaim. Although his production stamp is easily recognizable on any album, he
knows how to be versatile, and makes lots of small, but important shifts from
the approach used on Oh Mercy in
order to accommodate Bob's current needs and, most particularly, Bob's vocal
shift — over the eight years that separate their two collaborations, that voice
has lost the last traces of color, and is now reduced to a hoarse, sandpapered
state that needs special treatment. Lanois provides that treatment with gusto,
matching most of the instruments to the voice — yes, they too, particularly
the harmonicas and the organs, sound like they've been sandpapered a-plenty.
Most importantly, though, is the ghostly aspect of the album. It does not
really have any particularly memorable multi-note riffs or complex lead lines;
it's more as if it was all constructed from a perfectly engineered set of
musical moans, wails, creaks, squeaks, squawks, blimps, and blurts. Listen to
ʽCan't Waitʼ, for instance, which basically sounds like a series of
squeaky doors opening and closing, as if their hinges got plenty of time to
rust up while Bob was still waiting. Or ʽMillion Milesʼ, where Jim
Dickinson's pump organ is walking a shaky, repetitive, never-ending walk
against the other instruments, echoing Bob's refrain of "I try to get
closer, but I'm still a million miles from you" — sure you are, if the
world is running away from under your feet in the guise of half a dozen
minimalist guitar and keyboard parts, scattered around the speakers.
Many, if not most, of the songs «scrap
themselves together» — beginning as a disjointed series of sonic happenings,
eventually falling together in a surprisingly tightly coordinated groove. The
groove is sometimes completely democratic, but the best songs are probably the
ones where there is a dominating force — such as the deep, hopping bassline of
ʽCold Irons Boundʼ, appearing on the horizon at 0:14 into the song
and completely determining its grim, gruff face. Dylan won the Grammy for Best
Vocal Performance here, but, frankly speaking, his vocals are on the level
through the entire album — the award should have gone to Lanois for Best Cold
Storm Front Arrangement, with the bass, snappy guitars, and snowy organ tugging
away at the listener like a bunch of really
pissed-off North winds.
The Blonde
On Blonde connection, upon which I sort of hung up this review, does not
entirely rest on imaginary symmetries — for instance, if you listen to
ʽStanding In The Doorwayʼ closely enough, you are bound to hear
echoes of ʽJust Like A Womanʼ in the guitar lines; and the organ
parts on ʽTrying To Get To Heavenʼ (among others) are almost
certainly played with Al Kooper's work on ʽOne Of Us Must Knowʼ
(among others) well fixed in the mind of the current organ player. This, too,
is taken care of by Lanois, who does his best to reward us with nostalgic memories
of the «thin wild mercury sound» from time to time — not always, so as not to
turn the whole deal into unabashed nostalgia, but frequently enough to keep our
minds well set on the past.
ʽHighlandsʼ, of course, is really no
ʽLowlandsʼ, nor does it even try to, apart from the superficial
analogies. It's really more of a somber Dire Straits-style bluesy number (you
could very easily visualize it as sung and played by Knopfler), and when taken
on its own, it has no reason whatsoever to drag on for sixteen minutes. In
fact, you won't really lose track of the integrity of Time Out Of Mind if you turn it off at any time — be it three, six, or ten minutes into the song; lyrics
excluded, that is, since the whole piece is supposed to be Bob's artistic
testament — "my heart's in the highlands" may echo Scottish
sentiments, but the «highlands» that Bob is really talking about actually
happen to be much higher than the peak of Ben Nevis. So it's a very important
song, even if you are not swayed over with its monotonous, almost robotic
groove — but at this point, Bob has no interest in swaying, converting, or
mesmerizing you. He is being completely adequate to himself, and even the odd
story about his encounter with a restaurant waitress that he throws in the
middle comes across as perfectly natural, nothing to be amazed or irritated at.
The man is really quite at peace with himself, despite all the seeming tension
and worry.
Without going into boring discussions on
whether the album really stands up to Bob's highest standards, is as good as or
better than his «classic» stuff, etc., etc., let's just say that this is the perfect album for a 57-year old
veteran with a lengthy career behind his back. When Dylan just started out, in
the early 1960s, he was already fascinated by those strange blues tunes about
death, redemption, and the Heavenly way — which he understood and interpreted
from his perspective of a smart, reclusive, rebellious youngster. Thirty-five
years later, that reclusiveness and rebelliousness have been burned down,
charred and transformed into clouds of black smoke, but the smoke is completely
organic and natural.
Dylan himself has denied that the album was, in
any way, connected to his near-death experience later that year, as he was
struggling with histoplasmosis (the album's release was delayed until
September, by which time Bob had recuperated) — which makes this an eerie
coincidence, since Time Out Of Mind
really does sound a lot like a
typical album for somebody whose intention it is to make final peace with the
world, and prepare himself for a better place somewhere out there. Regardless
of the circumstances, though, it does belong in the small collection of all
terminally ill people — what with that soothing mix of doom, gloom,
tranquility, and self-assuredness. No matter how many spooky ghosts Mr. Lanois
has amassed for the occasion, Dylan's weather-proof singing brushes them all
aside — he ain't afraid of no squeaky doors opening up into the void, and sets
a terrific example for us all here, especially as we hit our later years (I'm
just hoping that, thirty years from now, Adele will cover ʽLove Sickʼ
or ʽTrying To Get To Heavenʼ with the same emotional precision she
demonstrated when covering ʽMake You Feel My Loveʼ, the only song on
here equally suitable for young and old mindset alike). And — thumbs up,
of course.
LOVE AND THEFT (2001)
1) Tweedle Dee & Tweedle
Dum; 2) Mississippi; 3) Summer Days; 4) Bye & Bye; 5) Lonesome Day Blues;
6) Floater; 7) High Water; 8) Moonlight; 9) Honest With Me; 10) Po' Boy; 11)
Cry A While; 12) Sugar Baby.
He survived into the 21st century after all,
but when you compare Love And Theft
with Time Out Of Mind, it still
feels as if he died, lingered out there for seven days and seven nights, and
then came back as a different person. In all honesty, trying to repeat Time Out Of Mind would be like trying
to rewrite one's own testament — not an auspicious thing to do. So what do you
do if you have your testament laid out in perfect form, and somehow you're
still not dead yet? You just take on a different personality, and pretend it's
a separate kind of you.
It is a little humorous that, although the
levels of critical praise for Love And
Theft matched, or even exceeded, the praise for its predecessor, if you
rewind the tape a little, the nearest closest album in spirit would probably be
Under The Red Sky — the one that got
the critics all riled up and declaring that the man was gone for good. But
honestly, play them back to back and the basic concept is the same: get
yourself a rootsy backing band, let it all hang out a bit, relax and have some
old-fashioned fun with archaic musical structures. The one glaring difference
is the lyrics, which were clearly downplayed and almost intentionally
simplified on Red Sky, but are fully
back to Dylan's highest standards of sophistication here — which, once again,
only goes to show that for most critics, Dylan's art is only as good as Dylan's
words are. To tell you the truth, though, I like Love And Theft just fine, yet I could not bring myself to pay deep
attention to any of the lyrics. As I browse through the sheet, it is evident
that the man is really trying — many of the phrasings and unpredictable twists
hearken back to 1965-66 — but, honestly, by 2001 most of us must have hit that oversaturation point
where even the most brilliant new Dylan lyrics are already perceived as...
well, it's good to know his brain is still locating new combinations of
metaphors and conundrums at top speed, but it's not as if it were still capable
of surprising us.
Anyway, the big deal is that, where Time Out Of Mind, with its
ghostly-swampy Lanois palette, was dark, unsettling, and psychologically
uncomfortable, Love And Theft is
light, playful, and almost completely given over to pre-rock'n'roll stylistics.
The Bob Dylan band is having itself a «woodchopper's ball», to which we are all
cordially invited — overseen and produced by none other than Jack Frost, giving
you a sharp stare from the album cover and looking quite a bit frosty indeed
(the album does really go along quite fine with a thin streak of fresh snow
falling outside the window, particularly the romantic jazzy bits like
ʽFloaterʼ and ʽMoonlightʼ), although, when the time comes,
he can shake off all that ice with a tight, fast beat in an instant.
It is interesting that Bob chose not to retreat
once more into the world of dark acoustic folk songs, but instead settled
somewhere else — emerging as a retro popular entertainer, stuck somewhere in
between Louis Jordan, Lonnie Johnson, Hoagy Carmichael, and Hank Williams. But
then, when you start thinking about it, that was a kind of image he hadn't
really tried on yet (although he did get somewhat close with the Traveling
Wilburys and Red Sky stuff), and he
obviously was not going to get any more pigeonholed in the 21st century than he
was in the 20th. So here you go — some good old-fashioned jump blues, some
Django Reinhardt-ish jazz balladry, a bit of swing, a touch of the electric
12-bar Chicago stuff, and one for the road: ʽMississippiʼ is the most
«proverbially Dylan» song on here, but it was originally recorded during the Time sessions, later donated to Sheryl
Crow, and finally reappropriated for Love
And Theft — where it occupies the position of track no. 2, luring the
listener into thinking there will be more songs like that on the album. But
there won't.
So, how successful is the experiment? I'd say
it works all right, but probably does not deserve the grand acclaim it got — to
a large extent, from people who had simply forgotten about how good «rootsy» music can sound when one
actually gives a damn. Funny as it seems, Bob's backing band here sounds
tougher, tighter, more involving and more involved than gazillions of other
bands from 2001, young and old — and yet they are only the backing band: never once
is any of the players properly allowed to leave the shadows and outshine the
frontman. Everything is kept down to the bare, well-familiar necessities: clock
in, set the groove, kick in the groove, repeat at top energy level until the
leader runs out of lyrics. The only question is, how much of your time are you, the listener, willing to give to
these guys.
And Bob plays a mean game with you here,
pushing his band into delivering one cheap, simple, healthy trill after
another. ʽTweedle Dee & Tweedle Dumʼ, opening the album, is not
really that more sophisticated than, say, ʽWiggle Wiggleʼ, but the
guitar parts, screwed together from a few jazz, blues, and rockabilly chords,
are much more fun and far better capable of winding up the spirit. Likewise,
the song title also hints at the same level of childishness as ʽWiggle
Wiggleʼ, but the words, this time, are fired from Bob's machine gun of
surrealism and sarcasm, and in the end, «Tweedle Dee» and «Tweedle Dum», as
abstract characters, will tend to look more like Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
than their John Byrom, Lewis Carroll, or LaVern Baker predecessors. Yes, the
song goes on for nearly five minutes. No, you are not getting anything in its
last four minutes that you have not already gotten in the first. Yes, it's not
as if this never happened before with Bob Dylan. No, you are not allowed to suggest any changes or
throw in constructive criticism, because he is Bob Dylan and you are...?
There may be yet another reason why Love And Theft is so far removed from Time Out Of Mind. Over those four
years, Dylan's voice has undergone yet another
shift — now the croaking, gurgling, and wobbling in his throat can no longer be
tamed, subdued, or mixed out, and this is really not the kind of voice that
could inspire its owner for another round of ʽIdiot Windʼ. Even
ʽLove Sickʼ, when sang with the Love
And Theft voice, would have lost a large part of its mystery. So the best
bet, indeed, would be to match the «decrepit» vocal strings to certain
«decrepit» musical genres, in order to prove that they are not «decrepit» at
all — check ʽHigh Waterʼ, subtitled ʽFor Charley Pattonʼ,
on which Bob certainly does not sound much like the real Charley Patton, but does sound like a desperate-desolate old
hobo, lamenting the end of the world as we know it ("high water
everywhere!"), much like the real Patton did in the 1930s. On the other
hand, correction: the voice is not particularly desperate per se, but the
colors that Bob has irrevocably lost in his singing, he is still able to elicit
from the players — the atmosphere of trouble and confusion is brilliantly
conveyed with the fussy banjo and acoustic guitar parts.
As far as I can tell, there are no highs or
lows on Love And Theft whatsoever —
be they retro-rockers or retro-ballads, all of these songs, no exceptions,
satisfy their modest goals more or less equally. And I stress «modest»: not
even ʽSugar Babyʼ, the nearly seven-minute long solemn outro, for
which Bob is saving most of his (intentionally) clichéd grand maxims
("love is pleasing, love is teasing, love's not an evil thing"),
could be said to truly aspire to something grandiose, it merely winds down the
album with some pleasant atmospherics.
But I propose that we all try to find this an
adorable solution. This is a perfect formula for a 60-year old who has said all
the important things he had to say, and now he's only got three options — die
from histoplasmosis (failed), retire into painting and memoir writing (done that,
but still got free time to fill), or continue to make «middle-of-the-road»
music that would be adequate to his age, pleasant to the ear (as far as
possible, with that voice), tasteful, and, most importantly, full of that
routine old-age wisdom that, fortunately enough, still prevents us from
treating our elders in a Ballad of
Narayama manner. Love And Theft
satisfies all those conditions — and sets in motion an easily-repeated formula
that Bob, with only minor variations, would employ for all of his ensuing
output in the new millennium, even at the risk of getting too predictable and
pigeonholeable. But then, here is a man who has certainly earned the right to
predictability, after forty long years of rough seas and cerebral turmoil. Thumbs up.
MODERN TIMES (2006)
1) Thunder On The Mountain; 2)
Spirit On The Water; 3) Rollin' And Tumblin'; 4) When The Deal Goes Down; 5)
Someday Baby; 6) Workingman's Blues #2; 7) Beyond The Horizon; 8) Nettie Moore;
9) The Levee's Gonna Break; 10) Ain't Talkin'.
Nothing more or less than Love And Theft, Vol. 2, and by now, we should have already gotten
the idea of what the title meant (for Dylan, that is): he loves those old blues
tunes so much that he is only too happy to steal them, and not feel guilty
about it. Then again, if Muddy Waters in the 1950s put his name on a song that
he clearly did not write, why couldn't Bob Dylan do the same fifty years later?
From that point of view, this album's
title is a condescending joke — you sort of expect to turn the CD over and find
the first part of the title on the back cover: This Is What I Think Of Your..., yes, and maybe the finger as well.
Because these days, you're not expected to infringe on copyright. In the old
days of folk tradition — now that's a different story. These days, «all
copyrights reserved for that nameless old guy in the backwoods and his
progeny».
Anyway, there we have it: ten more songs in Ye
Olde Style, same topics, same cracked voice, same «Jack Frost» production
style. The backing band has evolved (only Tony Garnier on bass remains over
from the Love And Theft sessions),
but the sonic essentials remain completely the same. In fact, much as I hate to
admit it, the album as a whole is not even deserving of an individual review.
On the whole, the songs roll along a little smoother this time, with fewer
«rocking» moments and respectively more «soft blues-rock», but it takes a long
time to figure out the subtle differences, and even if there are any, they seem
accidental. It's not as if Bob finally lost his potential to rock out — he just
happened to be in the mood for quieter guitars and drums.
And it's not as if I'm complaining, because the
sound remains efficient. The upbeat, «soft-rocking» grooves now take on a J.
J. Cale not-give-a-damn aura about them: ʽThunder On The Mountainʼ
and ʽThe Levee's Gonna Breakʼ both make reference to natural
disasters, but the attitude of the protagonist is like, «I'm 66 years old
already, what do I care about the whole world going down in flames?», and the
rest of the band sounds correspondingly hip and nonchalant, churning the groove
out like a biorobot, only occasionally deviating for a muffled guitar solo.
Naturally, once you hear "if it keeps on rainin', levee's gonna
break", you will be remembering Led Zeppelin (rather than Memphis Minnie,
unless you're a seasoned blues snob), and the apocalyptic hysterics of Page and
Plant will look tremendously fussy and vain next to this cool-calm-collected
view on the turbulent side of life.
Clearly, it is the «coolness» of it all, this
effortless transition to a state in which basic emotion is completely
suppressed, that attracted critics and fans alike to this «bronze age
renaissance» in Dylan's career. On the more officially sentimental, jazzier
numbers Bob seems to get accordingly more sentimental and tender (ʽSpirit
On The Waterʼ), but exactly how «sincere» is that sentimentality? It
might be just another tip of the hat to the trappings of a goneby era.
ʽWorkingman's Blues #2ʼ, a stately piece of soul-blues, formally
written from the point of view of a member of the «proletariat», whatever that
word might mean today, is a piece of sad romance that a Bruce Springsteen could
easily fill up with genuine affection — in Bob's current rendition it sounds a
little hollow and formalistic. But that is the point — to deliver all these messages the way they are delivered,
in a detached, introvert manner. It helps to play these songs interspersed with
stuff from Highway 61 Revisited:
where Bob once used to sound like he was hurling bolts of lightning at his
listeners, now he sounds as if he is directing all the singing right inside his
own guts.
The last song on the album, ʽAin't
Talkin'ʼ, seems to be a throwback to the vibe of Time Out Of Mind. It is long, dark, pessimistic, it has a naggingly
depressing violin part crawling all over it, and its (and the whole album's)
last words are, suitably, "the world's end". But even so, compare it
with, let's say, ʽShot Of Loveʼ (a suitable comparison, actually,
given the wealth of Biblical imagery in ʽAin't Talkin'ʼ), and see the
difference — where we once saw the man near-literally pulling out his hair and
rolling in the ashes, here is a man completely resigned to his fate. Not at all
happy about it, but accepting it as something inevitable. He ain't talkin',
just walkin'. If Nick Cave were to sing this song, we'd already be scraping a
major percentage of his internal organs off our clothes and faces. Bob and his
band just put out the bare facts. No acting, no exaggerating, no self-whipping
into frenzy, no trying to change the world through the music, no trying to do anything, in fact. A perfect album for a
certified Taoist.
However, although there is no reason to deprive
Modern Times of its thumbs up
rating, I must say that it sounds
overreaching, and that, in particular, I do find the running lengths of most of
these songs inadequate — even understanding that Bob Dylan is Bob Dylan, takes
orders from no one, and has every right to try my patience in asserting his
rights to do whatever he wants. Love And
Theft had 12 songs rather than 10, and still ran about five minutes shorter
than Modern Times, and that was a
good balance; here, unless you really, really, really crave for extra and extra modernist lyrical variations on
ancient blues themes (for instance, think that namedropping Alicia Keyes in the
context of ʽThunder On The Mountainʼ really works), almost each of
these songs could be at least one or two verses shorter without any harm to the
business, particularly since there is no development whatsoever happening on
any of the songs.
Unless, of course, we are supposed to
understand this philosophically — for Bob Dylan, such a silly thing as «time»
no longer exists. The end of the world presupposes no need for time, so you
cannot even physically complain of having «wasted time» on the extra verses of
these songs, because you wouldn't be making much sense. Which, of course, puts
the album title in an even more ironic light. Modern times? There are no modern times. They say that
Rolling Stone, a magazine that has long since lost touch with true reality, put this record up at No.
204 on its 500 Greatest Albums of All
Time list. Silly people, not realizing how absurd it must feel for Modern Times to be on that list, when
it so clearly belongs on The Divided By
Zero Greatest Albums of No Time list instead.
TOGETHER THROUGH LIFE (2009)
1) Beyond Here Lies Nothin';
2) Life Is Hard; 3) My Wife's Home Town; 4) If You Ever Go To Houston; 5)
Forgetful Heart; 6) Jolene; 7) This Dream Of You; 8) Shake Shake Mama; 9) I
Feel A Change Comin' On; 10) It's All Good.
None of us should have anything against Los
Lobos — they're a great band and all — but I am still not altogether sure
whether it was such a good idea to use David Hidalgo as a key player on Dylan's
third album of the new millennium, and relegate him to accordion at that. Together Through Life continues in the
same general direction as its predecessors, but there is one major difference:
this time around, it flat out refuses to rock. There's lots of blues, a little
folk, some jugband dance stuff, but no rock. Polite old-timey muzak for dem old
folks.
Naturally, the very fact itself that «Dylan
refuses to rock» shouldn't be mentioned as an accusation. First, Dylan is
Dylan, and he only rocks when he wants to. Second, Dylan is not a young boy no
more, and an old boy can certainly be excused for wanting to sit on his porch
and play a little rusty accordion instead of playing the Rolling Stones game.
Third, the word «rock» itself sounds so passé
circa 2009, no?
The problem is, this not-so-unexpected dropoff
in energy cannot but focus our attention on the obvious: way too often, these
new projects of Dylan's end up sounding like unimaginative tributes to the
past, rather than an inventive singer-songwriter's upgrading of the past. As
long as he kept a certain sharpness to the sound, this was forgivable —
ʽTweedle Dee & Tweedle Dumʼ was so snappy and sneery that it
remained a fun listen from first to last second. But now, with this transition
to a more laid-back, relaxed, even «friendly» sound, Together Through Life runs a much higher risk of boring the average
listener — and annoying the listener who is able to pick out all of its stolen
parts.
Because this time around, the stealing issue
really gets irritating. At least ʽRollin' And Tumblin'ʼ and ʽThe
Levee's Gonna Breakʼ started out like covers, then veered off into a
different lyrical world under the banner of «this belongs to no one man /or
woman/, we all add and subtract what we like as the inexhaustible human spirit
flows». But a song like ʽBeyond Here Lies Nothinʼ — well, all it does
is simply appropriate the melody of Otis Rush's ʽAll Your Love (I Miss
Loving)ʼ (a song that many of us know through the famous Clapton / Mayall
cover on the Bluesbreakers' 1966 album), without a single hint that there might
be an actual source. For what it's worth, though, the Otis Rush song was one of
the most desperate soul-blues explosions of its time — the Dylan song is quite
routine in comparison.
ʽIf You Ever Go To Houstonʼ is a
transparent «deconstruction» of ʽThe Midnight Specialʼ, extracting
one of its lines, attaching it to a pervasive two-note accordion riff and
dragging the results through a lazy six minute rant, inspired by the lovely
state of Texas. It's nice, in a way, yet I cannot get rid of the feeling that I
am really listening here to the protagonist of ʽJust Like Tom Thumb's
Bluesʼ, forty years older, flabbier, smellier, and, worst of all, not made
particularly wiser by all the passing years. Just a little less attractive to
the ladies, that's all.
Cutting it short, I am not in awe of this vibe.
The lack of «darkness» does not bother me, because if Dylan does not feel the
need to convey darkness, this probably means he is relatively happy, and a
relatively happy Dylan can be a wonderful thing (remember New Morning?). In fact, the happiest song on the album, ʽI
Feel A Change Comin' Onʼ, is easily my favorite on the album: it is one of
the few that does not sound like a straightforward rip-off and has a personal,
inspired ring to it. But what does
bother me is that the music is so somnambulant — as if that goddamn accordion
got everybody off the track. ʽMy Wife's Home Townʼ sounds like Muddy
Waters on tranquilizers, for Christ's sake!
As Bob himself slyly remarks on the last track,
"whatever's going down, it's all good". If you relax, put a smile on
your face, and put your signature under that philosophy, Together Through Life with Bob Dylan at your side is simply going
to be one more healthy, fun-filled joyride through the pleasures of old-timey
music in a post-post-modern world. (A sparingly short ride, too, since the
songs are cut down to reasonable length and the entire record runs for the good
old 45 minutes). You might even be wooed over and swept off your feet by some
of them charming old-fashioned ballads like ʽLife Is Hardʼ (not too hard, by the sound of it) or
ʽThis Dream Of Youʼ. For some other people I know, Together Through Life was an unpleasant
jolt, even leading them to re-evaluate their feelings towards the other two
albums — on a sort of «looks like there ain't that much depth to this style, after all» platform.
I wouldn't go that far, of course, but I do
agree that, third time around, the same formula does not work that well, and it
isn't even the fault of the accordion — the accordion is just a side effect, as
is the ever-increasing gurgle ratio of the voice. The real problem might be
that, at this advanced age, Dylan has largely lost his gift for «genius
spontaneity», and needs to spend more time working on his songs, and his sound,
than he used to.
CHRISTMAS IN THE HEART (2009)
1) Here Comes Santa Claus; 2)
Do You Hear What I Hear?; 3) Winter Wonderland; 4) Hark The Herald Angels Sing;
5) I'll Be Home For Christmas; 6) Little Drummer Boy; 7) The Chirstmas Blues;
8) O' Come All Ye Faithful; 9) Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas; 10) Must
Be Santa; 11) Silver Bells; 12) The First Noel; 13) Christmas Island; 14) The
Christmas Song; 15) O' Little Town Of Bethlehem.
In all honesty, I do not think that this album
deserves more than one short paragraph of strictly musical commentary. Yes,
this is a collection of fifteen Christmas carols, hymns, ballads, and kiddie
ditties, recorded with Bob's regular band (still including Dave Hidalgo from
the previous sessions, but minus Mike Campbell on guitar) and a small choir.
Yes, the arrangements are kept quite close to the traditional form, but, for
purposes of extra intimacy and better taste, do not include any orchestration.
No, there are no Dylan originals, nor are there any serious attempts at reinventing
the «classics»: even the singing, or what's left of it in the current state of
Dylan's voice, is done as close to the prescribed vocal melody as possible.
Logically speaking, the target audience for
this kind of album should not even exist. People who do celebrate Christmas,
and listen to traditional Christmas songs while celebrating it, are not too
likely to fall for a million year-old hoarse, cracked, gurgling voice
delivering Christmas imagery into their living room (think old Santa Claus in
one of his hard years: coat torn, gifts squandered, breath stinking of
moonshine). People who could care less for Christmas, let alone Christmas music,
will not be particularly pleased with Dylan forcing it upon them, either — at
best, they could try and read some irony
into the idea, but the fact is, there is
no irony. Or if there is, you certainly cannot detect it based on the music as
such.
Most reviewers, upon trying to answer the
obvious question («why?»), concentrated on one of two answers: (a) «whaddaya
know, he really likes Christmas music, and why shouldn't he?» and (b) «this is
fuckin' Bob Dylan, he's always done exactly what he wants to do and there is no
reason why he should be different now». Actually, I think most of them combined the two answers — Christmas In The Heart shows that
old-timey Christmas music is Bob's not-so-guilty pleasure, and he is pleased as
heck to use this as an opportunity to prove to the world that he can be just as
unpredictable at 70 as he was at 25.
These answers, however, do not quite explain
why the man chose Christmas carols, and not, say, a bunch of punk rock or
Hebrew folk song covers instead. So a third factor must be considered — namely,
the traditionalist / conservative aura that these songs embody. In doing them,
Bob even goes as far as to sing the original Latin lyrics of ʽO Come All Ye Faithfulʼ (hearing him
struggle through the complex morphology of Latin verbal and nominal forms might
alone be worth the price of the record, for that matter). Without any
straightforward statements this time, Bob has surreptitiously recorded his most
openly Christian album since the 1979-81 trilogy — a fairly naughty gesture,
I'd say, in the face of his largely «progressive» audience (not that I'm saying
that every Dylan fan is an atheist or agnostic by definition, but I'm sure that
«hardcore Christians» never constituted the bulk of his fanbase even in the
«Christian period»).
He himself would probably never admit the
«naughtiness» of it, especially since, in a way, it all ties in together: since
the early 1990s, his chief sources of inspiration and creativity were the folk,
country, and blues traditions of the American and the Anglo-Saxon world, and
this is just one more corner of the same world. But instead of pouring new
(lyrical) wine into old (musical) skins, this time around, he goes all-out
archaic, against a young 21st century world that usually craves for innovation
and futurism. From that point of view, and in the overall context of Dylan's
existence, this is more than a Christmas album — it's one more friendly
fuck-you to the world at large, and it probably couldn't have come at a better
time, too, than the Big Year of Lady Gaga, to stand for just about everything,
good or bad, that Lady Gaga is not.
TEMPEST (2012)
1) Duquesne Whistle; 2) Soon
After Midnight; 3) Narrow Way; 4) Long And Wasted Years; 5) Pay In Blood; 6)
Scarlet Town; 7) Early Roman Kings; 8) Tin Angel; 9) Tempest; 10) Roll On John.
So, what does it take to put Dylan back in
«grand» mode these days? Song lengths expanded — check. Deep folk roots
revisited — check. Focus on lyrical intertextuality — check. Stern, Old
Testament-worthy singing tones — check. What couldn't have hurt, perhaps, would
be a little more emphasis on musical backing and production values, but since
Bob himself is once again listed as producer (he even dropped the «Jack Frost»
nickname for the occasion), it is perhaps better to be minimalistic. And he
wouldn't want to, or be able to, pull a Daniel Lanois all by himself anyway.
After the relative disappointment of Together Through Life, Tempest is clearly a return to...
return to spirit, rather than form. If at all possible, Bob's voice
seems to have taken another round of beating over those three years — and so
has his chord-assembling, what with just about every song on the album riding
the same mini-groove from top to bottom, and most of the mini-grooves
«borrowed» from other people's songs at that. So anybody who claims that «Dylan
is back in top form!» should probably rent a time machine and go back a few
decades just to remind oneself what «top form» actually means. But the thing
that got critics and fans alike heap up another heap of praise here is not
«form» — it is attitude. The one thing that really has not changed one bit
about Dylan in fifty years is that he is still a great manipulator. He may
forget about it every once in a while, but on Tempest, he does not forget.
In fact, the first signs of manipulation are right
there at the very beginning — ʽDuquesne Whistleʼ opens deceptively
low-key-ish, like something your local jugband outfit would practice on your
porch. Then, several bars later, the band suddenly kicks in with full force:
the main melody does not undergo too much of a change, but the listener gets a
jolt — «okay, thank God, the man is still rocking and I'd already started
worrying that he'd given up on it...». Now you already feel a little
predisposed towards the song, and the entire album with it. Even if there is
really nothing about the melody of ʽDuquesne Whistleʼ that you
haven't already heard a million times.
Next thing you discover is that the darkness is
back. You kind of expected that when you saw the word Tempest, but you'd never believe this guy in advance, right? None
of the songs are really «tempestuous», but then, musically, Dylan has always
been more of a harbinger of tempest (ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ,
etc.) than a master of tempest, and from that angle, Tempest, in spots, is even scarier than Time Out Of Mind — the latter was, after all, extremely personal
and intimate, whereas Tempest pours
it out rather than keeps it within.
Two dirge-like epics stand out in particular.
ʽScarlet Townʼ flows on like a funeral procession, with a mournful
lead violin part (vaguely reminiscent of Rivera's parts on Desire — and is it a pure coincidence that her name was «Scarlet»?)
and the guitar, piano and banjo assembled in a drony three-part rhythm that is
best associated with barren earth and scattered ashes. Lyrics-wise, there are
numerous references to sickness, death, the end, and so forth, but,
surprisingly enough, the words on the whole do not paint any properly
«apocalyptic» picture; in fact, the protagonist clearly likes it in «Scarlet Town», whatever that be a metaphor for (life
here on Earth, most probably). We might suspect a thin streak of masochism
here, but then, all of us who like ourselves some of that heavy-shit depressing
music are already masochists, in more than one way.
For sheer unusualness, however, and the honor
of hitting the heaviest upon first listen, I will probably single out ʽTin
Angelʼ. Now that you think about it, it was a perfectly organic choice for
Dylan to take a centuries-old murder ballad (ʽMatty Grovesʼ, which
most people probably know through the unforgettable Fairport Convention version
with Sandy Denny on vocals; topical similarity to ʽBlack Jack Daveyʼ
detected, too, but is less self-evident) and turn it upside down — in the place
of «husband kills lover and wife», we now have a more complex scheme of «lover
kills husband, wife kills lover and herself» — it is even a little surprising
how he got around to doing it so late in his career. (Maybe he holds the
opinion that all murder ballads should not be written at an earlier age than
seventy).
Anyway, there is exactly one melodic hook to the song — that deep, haunting «zooop» on Tony
Garnier's bass part that you get to hear approximately forty times over the
song's nine minutes, and one which you probably already heard far more times
incorporated into one too many bass solo parts on classic and not so classic
jazz records; but yes, minimalistic genius strikes again, as that little bit of
bass twiddle becomes a key part in creating a working atmosphere of dread and doom.
The tale takes nine minutes to unwind, but that bass part, it sort of lets you
know from the very beginning that the Fates have already woven the stuff to
completion, and everybody is going to be dead when we get to the end. You don't
even have to know anything about ʽMatty Grovesʼ, or about the murder
ballad tradition in general, to get that sense. And don't forget to throw in
the grim banjo part as the bass's only lonely counterpart — the equivalent of a
funeral church bell. My only problem is: what the hell is an «electric wire»
doing in the context of this song? And «lowered himself down on a golden
chain»? Were they making love in some sort of James Bond setting, or am I too
dumb to even begin asking those sorts of questions?...
Strangely enough, the title track, in
comparison to those two, does not sound «dark» at all — even if, or maybe because, it is an almost literal
retelling of the story of the Titanic, cast in the form of a 14-minute long
Irish ballad, accordion and fiddle at the ready. The primary asset of the tune
is its surprise value. Fourteen minutes? Irish ballad? Fiddle? Titanic? Oh God, he couldn't have caught
on to James Cameron now, could he? No, no, hope it's at least Roy Ward Baker
(for that matter, Roy Ward Baker had just died in 2010; another
coincidence?)... and so on. Outside of that, I am not sure what to feel or
think — the song feels like a laborious stylistic exercise more than anything
else, and even lyrically, its complete straightforwardness and evasion of any
unexpected twists or metaphors is in sharp contrast with the rest of the
album. Where ʽTin Angelʼ was a stylistic transformation, a typically
Dylanesque twist on a traditional form, ʽTempestʼ almost seems bent
on explicitly purging out the Dylanesque. It is curious, but it is hardly
likely to end up on anybody's top list of Bob favorites.
Individually, the rest of the songs range from
almost intentionally annoying (ʽNarrow Wayʼ — seven minutes of a
grumbly four-note blues riff on endless repeat is too much for me; ʽEarly
Roman Kingsʼ — another post-modernist massacre of an old groove, the honor
going to Muddy Waters' ʽMannish Boyʼ this time) to endearingly
sentimental (ʽSoon After Midnightʼ; ʽLong And Wasted Yearsʼ
— the kind of late-evening balladry that he'd introduced on Love & Theft), and in between you
have at least one oddball musical hybrid, ʽPay In Bloodʼ, a menacing,
but ultimately toothless roots-rocker whose melody actually changes — for a change! — from verse to
bridge and then once again from bridge to chorus, yes, with actual chord
changes that first put the song into «threatening» mode one minute (0:27) and
then into «soothing» mode (0:48) not a minute too soon. In between those two
extremes, the song sort of sounds like a rip-off of the Stones' ʽHand Of
Fateʼ, though, and, (not) knowing Bob, I cannot guarantee that this is
simple coincidence, either. The guy's memory is a bottomless well, there is
no telling what is going to be fished out next — and he's exacerbated it by
fighting Dylanologists all his life.
There is no simple logical explanation, either,
of why he deemed it wise to end the album with a metaphor-drenched, but easily
guessable tribute to John Lennon (ʽRoll On Johnʼ). I'd like to think that, perhaps, he thought
the time had finally come to invoke his spirit — perhaps even to «sacrifice» to
his spirit, yielding the album's coda to the memory of a dead hero — you know,
in the good old «times are so shitty, we need a John Lennon here to set them
right» kind of way... but I guess the truth is really that he probably just
"heard the news today oh boy" on some John-related topic and suddenly
realized he'd all but forgotten to write a John Lennon song in the past thirty
years. Truth be told, ʽRoll On Johnʼ is far more flattering to John's
memory than John's ʽServe Yourselfʼ was flattering to Bob back in
1979 — and there's not even a single denigrating reference to Yoko on the list!
On the whole, Tempest unquestionably deserves a thumbs up, but buyer beware:
sixty-eight minutes of this stuff will be properly appreciated only by somebody
who can at least partially put it in its proper context. If you know little of
Bob Dylan, less of Muddy Waters, and nothing at all about Irish folk or murder
ballads, this will be nothing more than a horrendously raspy old man gurgling
out verbose stuff over simplistic, monotonous melodies — quite a relevant
warning for 2012, a year when there are music-listening teenagers around who
were born in the year of Dylan's
third (fourth?) creative revival. And Tempest
I wouldn't list as a fifth creative revival — it is more of a staying-afloat
record, showing that the old guy still has some interesting things to say in
some interesting way, which, really, is far more than we could feel ourselves
justified to demand. For that matter, ʽRoll On Johnʼ could just as
well be ʽRoll On Bobʼ. Heck, maybe it was ʽRoll On Bobʼ and he just felt a modesty attack at
the last minute. Doesn't matter. Just keep on manipulating us, Mr. Zimmerman.
SHADOWS IN THE NIGHT (2015)
1) I'm A Fool To Want You; 2)
The Night We Called It A Day; 3) Stay With Me; 4) Autumn Leaves; 5) Why Try To
Change Me Now; 6) Some Enchanted Evening; 7) Full Moon And Empty Arms; 8) Where
Are You?; 9) What'll I Do; 10) That Lucky Old Sun.
It's really been a long time — these days, the
Bobster is nowhere near such an intense presence in people's minds as he was in
1970, when the appearance of Self-Portrait
was a weird shock not just for Greil Marcus, but also for millions of followers
of the Verbose Curly One. In 2015, many of these original followers are already
dead, and those who are not rarely make their voices heard, not to mention that
they have been patiently taught, through more than five decades, that you do
not bother His Bobness with anything as trivially pitiable as «expectations» —
each new album may be freely judged on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, but the man
just will not be chained by your
demands and predictions, so do not even try.
Since we are all well used to it, and since we
also all know that you do not ignore a new Bob Dylan album like you can allow
yourself to ignore, say, a new Kings Of Leon album, it is not particularly
surprising that Shadows In The Night
shot high up in the charts (even all the way to No. 1 in the UK), nor is it
particularly surprising that the response to it has been rather limp. A record
like this in 1970 would have made people scream — a few renegades would be
loving it, most of the others would be hating it even more viciously than Self-Portrait. Today, most of us will
probably find ourselves... mildly curious about it. Which is not the fault of
us, or the fault of Bob Dylan, or the fault of the music industry, but is
simply due to the changing ways of the world.
Objective facts, in brief: The record consists
of 10 songs, whose overall running length barely exceeds half an hour. All the
songs are covers from the Songbook, all had been, at one time or another,
performed by Frank Sinatra, most had been encountered on a string of his «melancholic
period» albums from the late Fifties and early Sixties. Everything has been
recorded with a 12-piece band in the «midnight country» stylistics (echoey
guitars, nocturnal pedal steel reverberations, quietly subdued, almost
unnoticeable horns), and, most interesting of all, everything has been sung — almost crooned — by Bob in the cleanest, smoothest voice we've heard from
him in ages; in fact, not once ever since he'd clearly developed his trademark
«old» rasp-and-gurgle.
This last point is important, since it clearly
parallels Dylan's vocal reinvention of 1969 with Nashville Skyline (the alleged «non-smoking» voice that had
nothing to do with smoking and everything with confounding expectations). This
time, he is not that capable — some
of that rasp and gurgle has definitely set up for good — but capable enough to
make it clear that the near-evil death rattle of his last few albums was just
another of his impersonating acts. He never was a Sinatra at 20, let alone at
75, but he understands well enough that you cannot sing ʽFull Moon And
Empty Armsʼ with the same voice with which you sing ʽDuquesne
Whistleʼ, unless you want your album to be a parody, and Bob Dylan ain't
no cheap «parodist».
One thing I do not wish to discuss at all is
how well Dylan «understands» these songs, or whether he is able to offer his
own «artistic interpretations», capturing their lyricism, emotionality, conveying
the right feeling of loneliness and despair, etc. etc. Above and beyond
everything else, this is just a gesture of freedom — never mind his age, never
mind the current century number, never mind that fifty years ago, a young Dylan
probably wouldn't want to be caught dead trying to cover a Sinatra song, never
mind that even the «gloomy» aspect of these tunes still sounds excessively
mannered and polite next to the much more genuine-looking gloom of the
preceding Tempest. This is a
gesture, and all I have to say is that, accompanying this gesture, Bob does
manage to get a good sound from his band (with Donnie Heron's pedal steel
guitar as the lead instrument throughout), and that I was kinda happy to hear
him sing like that — after all, not everybody can boast the honor of adding yet
another vocal style of one's own to
an already large bank, at the ripe age of 75.
At the same time, I also can't help thinking
that this «gesture of freedom» comes with its own irony — back in the 1980s and
early 1990s, when Dylan was severely out of the state of commercial grace,
people were too busy digging the new musical sounds of those decades to pay
much attention to an old fogey, regardless of whether his albums were really
bad (like Down In The Groove) or
really good (like Good As I Been To You).
Now, in 2015, Dylan releases a short throwaway album of Sinatra covers — and
not only does it not pass unnoticed, but it actually sells, charts, and gets
positive reviews, when most of those people should really be busy doing other
things. If you ask me, this is neither a good nor a bad sign — it just shows
that these days, there are no expectations,
not just from Dylan but from anyone, and in these conditions, an album of Dylan
covering Sinatra is just as potentially welcome as an album of B. B. King
covering Friedrich Nietzsche, and both of them are as potentially welcome as
anything released by anybody in the last five years or so. Everything is so
goddamn relative these days, with the sole exception of "that lucky old
sun — got nothin' to do but roll 'round heaven all day", which is sort of
a slightly consolatory conclusion here, some stable point of reference to get
us by.
As a stand-alone record, Shadows In The Night is too short, too slight, and too monotonous
to deserve any recommendation. But as another quirky pit stop on this man's
race to nowhere in particular, it should definitely earn its thumbs up
— if only because it got me thinking again on all these odd issues of quality,
relevance, artist-vs.-public, and the general and special theory of relativity
as filtered through the incomprehensible mind of the Einstein of popular music.
FALLEN ANGELS (2016)
1) Young At Heart; 2) Maybe
You'll Be There; 3) Polka Dots And Moonbeams; 4) All The Way; 5) Skylark; 6)
Nevertheless; 7) All Or Nothing At All; 8) On A Little Street In Singapore; 9)
It Had To Be You; 10) Melancholy Mood; 11) That Old Black Magic; 12) Come Rain
Or Come Shine.
Bob is well known for doing the same thing
twice or thrice if he got a good kick out of it first time around: so, just as Good As I've Been To You was quickly
followed up by World Gone Wrong
(because there's nothing like a satisfactory refill of the good stuff), one
album of Sinatra covers was quickly followed by another — and no, from what I
can tell, it's not as if all the material was recorded during the same
session. There is even a slight stylistic difference: Fallen Angels features a smaller band, with no brass support
whatsoever, so that the «wee small hours» atmosphere is generated to
near-perfection.
That said, I am not even going to try to comment on any of the actual
songs — it is totally and utterly irrelevant whether Bob «does justice» to the
old versions, and I cannot take seriously any review of Fallen Angels that tries to make meaningful comparisons between
Sinatra and Dylan. It seems as clear as daylight that the main, if not only,
goal of Fallen Angels is to
strengthen and solidify the statement of Shadows
In The Night — namely, that you can never pigeonhole Robert Zimmerman,
because Robert Zimmerman refuses to wear the yellow star of the pigeon. You
gambled on the man putting out another Tempest
in 2015? You lost, sucker. You gambled that, okay, he had this weird diversion,
but next year he'd put out another Tempest? You lost again. See, the man's
been collecting from you for over fifty years now, and so far, he's shown no
signs of stopping.
Of course, it's a pretty wise gamble: with time
mercilessly rolling by, as each new record's chances of becoming his last
increase significantly, these quiet, introspective, melancholy-filled tributes
to Sinatra all work like ideal swansongs. But it's also obvious (well, not obvious, really: nothing is ever truly
obvious with Dylan) that he is not
going to stop, and that his next move could be anything — from yet a third album of Sinatra covers (and why
not? he had three Christian albums
out, didn't he?) to a bunch of acid house rearrangements of Dolly Parton.
That's what we love him for, and that's what he is going to keep on doing. As
for Fallen Angels, well... I did
listen to it twice, and I'll probably never listen to it again. Don't try to
make the mistake of taking it too seriously — although if you somehow happen to
love the results, there's nothing criminal about that, either (I do love Self-Portrait, after all; but then Self-Portrait was far more diverse, inventive, and unpredictable
than these albums, where all the songs follow the same formula — take Sinatra's
orchestrated songbook and adapt it for small lite-jazz combo). Just remember
that, behind all the seriousness and «depth» of these renditions, he is still
putting you on, and you'll never know
the truth, because, as Keith Moon once eloquently put it, «you couldn't afford
me!»
TRIPLICATE (2017)
1) I Guess I'll Have to Change
My Plans; 2) September Of My Years; 3) I Could Have Told You; 4) Once Upon A
Time; 5) Stormy Weather; 6) This Nearly Was Mine; 7) That Old Feeling; 8) It
Gets Lonely Early; 9) My One And Only Love; 10) Trade Winds; 11) Braggin'; 12) As
Time Goes By; 13) Imagination; 14) How Deep Is The Ocean; 15) P.S. I Love You;
16) The Best Is Yet To Come; 17) But Beautiful; 18) Here's That Rainy Day; 19) Where
Is The One; 20) There's A Flaw In My Flue; 21) Day In, Day Out; 22) I Couldn't
Sleep A Wink Last Night; 23) Sentimental Journey; 24) Somewhere Along The Way;
25) When The World Was Young; 26) These Foolish Things; 27) You Go To My Head;
28) Stardust; 29) It's Funny To Everyone But Me; 30) Why Was I Born.
Because he can.
In fact, I am not altogether sure why he decided to stop at three CDs,
containing ten songs each. It could just as well have been five CDs with twenty
songs each — clearly, the main shocking idea of this package is how much is
being offered, and is there anyone out there who doubts that the old man could
have filled five, ten, twenty, fifty discs with this kind of material, and in
a matter of several months at that? He's got plenty of money to afford studio
time, he's got a dedicated and professional band that would probably back him
through the entirety of Dolly Parton's catalog, had he opted for that one, he's
clearly enjoying it all so far, and I don't think he cares all that much about
whether he is going to make or lose money on this. In fact, he can use his
entire Nobel Prize to cover the deficit, if it becomes really necessary.
I did not waste time describing the individual
peculiarities of the songs in the case of Fallen
Angels, and the «triplication» of the number of recorded tunes does not
make such a description any more necessary — as you can probably predict, the
playing, the production, the general vibe remains precisely the same. He does
seem to be running out of Sinatra-related tunes, but even so, I do believe that
the absolute majority of these thirty had been recorded by Frank one way or
another, even if we probably prefer to associate ʽAs Time Goes Byʼ
with Casablanca and ʽStormy
Weatherʼ with Billie Holiday. There seems to be no special mini-concept
that would govern the distribution of songs across the three CDs, except that
each tends to begin with something a little bit more uptempo, upbeat, and
cheerful (all three opening songs feature lively brass riffs, for instance),
before quickly descending into the world of slow tempos, midnight brooding, and
sentimental nostalgizing. And — goes without saying — sitting through the
entire package in one go is hardly possible unless you use it for background
purposes only. (It's not that long:
since the songs are not dragged out — even if, in some cases, Bob claims to
have reinstated original openings to the songs that were lost in most of the
classic interpretations — the whole thing barely runs over an hour and a half
and could, if necessary, fit on two discs easily).
The only comment worth making here is, perhaps,
the realization that Bob is genuinely awed by this material. If anything, he
may have recorded so much of this stuff in the effort to have us convinced —
if not by the quality of it, then at least by sheer quantity — that he is acknowledging the sheer power of Tin Pan
Alley, and that he has devised a way, for himself, to make these songs reveal
their «Dylanesque» properties, ones that neither us nor him would probably
suspect half a century ago. The trick is to sing them in a way that suggests
neither cheerfulness (for the cheerful songs) nor sadness (for the sad ones):
the trick is to create a combination of instruments and voice that makes them
sound psychologically deep and emotionally realistic. Pretty much everything
here is reduced to one single denominator — much like with Billie Holiday, who
also used to bring everything down to earth with one and the same manner of
delivery, except hers was a delicate, fragile, humble, deeply personal and
moving delivery that made you want to give her a hug of friendly consolation in
between each of the tracks; old man Zimmerman here is not asking for your
empathy, he sounds more like he's giving you thirty similar pieces of life
advice from the depths of his seventy years of experience. Even a relative trifle
like ʽSentimental Journeyʼ is sung by him as if he were impairing
some kind of deep-meaning parable to you, something that could have hardly been
contained in the original song.
So, if there's any moral to this at all, kids,
it is that previously unknown depth of feeling may be found anywhere — which, allegedly, paves the
way to future albums, in which an 80-year old Dylan discovers the Taoist wisdom
of songs from Teletubbies (Over The Hills And Far Away), a 90-year old Dylan cracks the neurocognitive
code of Coca-Cola jingles (Things Go
Better), and a 100-year old Dylan explores the nirvana-related properties
of the IBM 5150 PC speaker (Beep Beep
Doo Doo). And if you think this is a bad joke, well, I'm not altogether
sure that this is a joke at all.
Unless the title of the last song here (ʽWhy Was I Bornʼ) is meant as
an implicit reminder of his own mortality and a brief musical testament (and I
do not think it is), there is still no telling what the man might have in store
for us in the coming years. Oh, and I actually enjoyed the record, though,
honestly, I have a faint hope that he's finally through with this project and
that he is not going to pull an Ella Fitzgerald on us.
ADDENDA:
BIOGRAPH (1985)
CD I: 1) Lay Lady Lay; 2) Baby
Let Me Follow You Down; 3) If Not For You; 4) I'll Be Your Baby Tonight; 5)
I'll Keep It With Mine*; 6) The Times They Are A-Changin'; 7) Blowin' In The
Wind; 8) Masters Of War; 9) Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll; 10) Percy's
Song*; 11) Mixed-Up Confusion*; 12) Tombstone Blues; 13) Groom's Still Waiting
At The Altar; 14) Most Likely You Go Your Way And I'll Go Mine; 15) Like A
Rolling Stone; 16) Lay Down Your Weary Tune*; 17) Subterranean Homesick Blues;
18) I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)*.
CD II: 1) Visions Of Johanna*;
2) Every Grain Of Sand; 3) Quinn The Eskimo*; 4) Mr. Tambourine Man; 5) Dear
Landlord; 6) It Ain't Me Babe; 7) You Angel You; 8) Million Dollar Bash; 9) To
Ramona; 10) You're A Big Girl Now*; 11) Abandoned Love*; 12) Tangled Up In Blue;
13) It's All Over Now, Baby Blue; 14) Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?*;
15) Positively 4th Street*; 16) Isis*; 17) Jet Pilot*.
CD III: 1) Caribeean Wind*; 2)
Up To Me*; 3) Baby, I'm In The Mood For You*; 4) I Wanna Be Your Lover*; 5) I
Want You; 6) Heart Of Mine*; 7) On A Night Like This; 8) Just Like A Woman; 9)
Romance In Durango*; 10) Señor (Tales Of Yankee Power); 11) Gotta Serve
Somebody; 12) I Believe In You; 13) Time Passes Slowly; 14) I Shall Be
Released*; 15) Knockin' On Heaven's Door; 16) All Along The Watchtower; 17)
Solid Rock; 18) Forever Young*.
Our long journey through The Amazing World of
Dylan's Vaults begins here, as early as 1985, when the people at Columbia,
possibly suspecting that Bobby has finally outlived his greatness, decided to
summarize it like no other greatness had been summarized before — with a
sprawling, pompously packaged, multi-disc package: five vinyl LPs, and then, a
year later, three CDs in the then still brand-new and expensive format.
Apparently, this was one of the first, if not the first, «boxset», starting off a trend that will never die until
there is still at least a small army of diehard fans in the world to make the
expenses pay off.
Usually, I begin every review of this kind by
saying how much I dislike the idea of the «boxset both for the casual and the
serious fan», and Biograph is no
exception. It is certainly capable of giving you a very good idea of who is Bob
Dylan, why he matters, and how much of an exciting artistic journey he has had
in twenty years. Yet certainly, casual fans and neophytes have no reason to
listen to most of the rarities included here — especially if the rarities are
included at the expense of such seminal tracks as ʽA Hard Rain's A-Gonna
Fallʼ, ʽIt's Alright Maʼ, ʽDesolation Rowʼ,
ʽHurricaneʼ, among but a few. And the serious fans — why in the world
would they want to pay for three CDs' worth of music when they really only get one, at the very best?
Perhaps it would have made better sense if the
album(s) were at least properly sequenced, to present a logical musical history
(as it would later be done on The
Bootleg Series). But the sequencing is deliberately messy. Statistically,
it does look like the first CD is a bit more on the early acoustic side, the
second one concentrates a bit more on the mid- and late Sixties, and the third
one has a bit more material from the 1970s and 1980s, but that is, at best,
still just a limp tendency. Placing the studio version of ʽI Want
Youʼ next to a live rendition of ʽHeart Of Mineʼ hardly seems
like the right thing to do — perhaps it reflects somebody's personal philosophy
of Dylan's music, but whose? And why?..
Probably for historical reasons, and also
because no better alternative has been presented so far, Biograph has never gone out of print. But its main value today
still remains in the approximately ninety minutes of music that are either
unavailable elsewhere, or remain scattered on various compilations. The real
bad news is that it ties together most
of the pre-Bootleg Series rarities,
but not all of them: the most glaring
omission arguably being ʽWhen I Paint My Masterpieceʼ, the single
version of which was originally released in 1971 and still remains openly
available only on various greatest hits compilations. Meaning that Biograph won't even be able to solve
the basic demands of the quintessential completist.
Still, none of this is arguably Dylan's fault
(I am not sure of how much the man himself was involved in the project — most
of the time, Columbia made all these decisions without him), and there is no
question that most of these ninety minutes of single A-sides, outtakes, demos,
alternate versions, and live performances are outstanding. Just a few
highlights here to tickle the fancy:
— no Dylan portrait circa 1965 may be complete
without access to ʽCan You Please Crawl Out Your Window?ʼ and especially ʽPositively 4th
Streetʼ, which so belongs on Highway 61 Revisited that it's not
even funny: unquestionably the angriest, most vitriolic song ever written by
the man, just a lengthy, monotonous, unstoppable, exhilarating spew of venom
set to an unforgettable folk-rock organ riff that most resembles a triumphant,
self-confident whistle — as the artist takes a step back and surveys with
pleasure the hacked and mutilated limbs of his enemies' bodies. (Bob would, of
course, later deny that ʽPositively 4th Streetʼ was about the folk
purists who thought themselves betrayed by his going electric — but, as rare as
it is for Dylan, the lyrics speak for themselves in a most straightforward manner:
"you say I let you down...", "you say you lost your
faith...", "I used to be among the crowd you're in with...",
etc.).;
— ʽMixed-Up Confusionʼ is the man's
first ever single, and it's... well, not electric, but it is recorded with a complete rhythm section and at breakneck speed.
Think any of the songs on Bob Dylan
with added drums, bass, and piano and sped up to a decent rockabilly tempo.
Fascinating? Perhaps not that much. Fun? Definitely. Remember, Bobby Zimmerman
started out as a rock-and-roller in his early teens, and maybe his early folk
career wouldn't have been nearly as exciting if it didn't have some of that
«rock'n'roll rebel» essence left over in it;
— at least two electric-era outtakes, ʽI'll
Keep It With Mineʼ and ʽI Wanna Be Your Loverʼ, are also classic
1965 songs in their own rights; the latter was probably shelved because of
extreme variational dependency on the Beatles' ʽI Wanna Be Your Manʼ,
although, of course, the Beatles' repetitive chorus is only taken here as a
jump-off point (most likely, it just got stuck in Bob's mind one day and he
decided to play ball). The musical arrangement, carried here by the Hawks, is a
little less inventive than the usual standard of Highway 61, but I guess that, with a little more work, the song
might have carved out its own strong identity;
— from the latter days, ʽAbandoned
Loveʼ is a lively violin-carried tune from the Desire sessions that was hacked off to make way for
ʽJoeyʼ (!) — a sacrilegious decision in the eyes of some of the fans,
I guess, although I do admit that the song is a little too close melodically to
ʽBlack Diamond Bayʼ to satisfy the diversity requirements that Bob
set for himself on that album. And then there is one of those famed outtakes
from the 1981 sessions, ʽCaribbean Windʼ, a six-minute epic that
never made it onto Shot Of Love for
unclear reasons; an inspired, anthemic performance, even if not particularly
heavy on hooks (its most «memorable» element is the imitation of the wind in
question through a series of inhaling and exhaling noises, which is either
funny or irritating, but hardly an inspirational find).
Lesser finds involve some decent live
recordings, alternate versions of which from the same tours would eventually be
released in a better context through the Bootleg
Series (ʽVisions Of Johannaʼ and ʽI Don't Believe Youʼ
from the 1966 tour; ʽIsisʼ and ʽRomance In Durangoʼ from
the 1975 tour); an alternate version of ʽShelter From The Stormʼ with
completely different and, I'd say, better lyrics (ʽUp To Meʼ); an
early, repetitive, almost trance-inducing folk epic from 1963 (ʽPercy's
Songʼ); and some other stuff that would take too much time and space to
discuss. In any case, what has been listed is already enough to call this first
batch of «Dylan rarities» an essential listen — and with our current digital
possibilities, it is easy to extract and re-sequence it in your favorite order,
although I sure wish Columbia would do it on an official level someday.
As a final trivia, the liner notes here were
written by Cameron Crowe, who knows his Dylan fairly well — the essay is a fun
and informative read, for the neophyte at least — but as for the song info, it
could certainly have used more actual information (such as, for instance, the
names of the players) and a little less rambling. Much to Crowe's honor, he
lets Dylan himself do most of the rambling (almost every track is accompanied
by some of Bob's thoughts on the subject), but one must always remember that
Dylan's words usually only reflect Dylan's current state-of-mind, and it is
quite likely that his stories on these songs circa 2014 would be completely different
(even where facts, not opinions, are concerned) from the same stories circa
1985. After all, the man has never had any stabilized center of gravity, so
what can you expect?
THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 1: RARE & UNRELEASED (1961-1963; 1991)
1) Hard Times In New York
Town; 2) He Was A Friend Of Mine; 3) Man On The Street; 4) No More Auction
Block; 5) House Carpenter; 6) Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues; 7)
Let Me Die In My Footsteps; 8) Rambling, Gambling Willie; 9) Talkin' Hava
Negeilah Blues; 10) Quit Your Low Down Ways; 11) Worried Blues; 12) Kingsport
Town; 13) Walkin' Down The Line; 14) Walls Of Red Wing; 15) Paths Of Victory;
16) Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues; 17) Who Killed Davey Moore?; 18) Only A
Hobo; 19) Moonshiner; 20) When The Ship Comes In; 21) The Times They Are
A-Changin'; 22) Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie.
With three CDs worth of material, recovered
from the vaults in surprisingly pristine condition, The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3 should arguably count as the best, quality- and quantity-wise, archival
release of all time, setting a standard that no artist, to the best of my
knowledge, has managed to beat so far, and is not too likely to beat in the
visible future, especially since these days, artists tend to leave nothing in
the vaults, piling all their goodies and crap on «deluxe» editions of their
albums (and perhaps they're right — who the heck will want to bother with their
leftovers twenty years from now?).
In the light of this, it makes sense to split
the expected single review of this 3-CD compilation into three shorter reviews,
one for each of the three volumes, particularly since all of them make good use
of CD space, clocking in at just under 80 minutes each = the size of a
respectable double LP. And if not double, perhaps, then at least each of these
CDs potentially holds a single LP of a quality that would make it a worthwhile
contender for anything that Dylan had officially released in his first prime,
second prime, and post-prime periods, respectively.
Vol.
1 represents the early years —
Dylan's acoustic period, from his first assured recordings made in 1961 and
right down to the sessions held for his last and most «formalistic»
folk/protest-era album (technically, this also comprises the first three songs
off Vol. 2, but they did have to
make adjustments for the CD format). Most of the tracks are studio outtakes and
demos, with a few live performances of songs that did not make it onto the studio
LPs (for political reasons, mostly) thrown in for good measure. Some were quite
well known previously, since Dylan never shyed away from displaying all of his
work publicly — ʽWalls Of Red Wingʼ, for instance, was given away to
Joan Baez, and there is also a brief taste here of the 1962-64 Witmark demos
that he recorded for other artists to cover — but most were probably only known
to avid bootleggers, whereas the «simple» record-buying public was in for a
pleasant shock. As acceptable as Oh
Mercy was for 1989, what could it really have on gems like ʽLet Me Die
In My Footstepsʼ or ʽQuit Your Low Down Waysʼ?
On a song-by-song basis, Vol. 1 might not stand competition with The Freewheelin', but you could easily split it into an
«old-fashioned» half that would be every bit the equal of Bob Dylan and an «anthemic / satirical» half that might, perhaps,
even be stronger than The Times They Are
A-Changin'. ʽHard Times In New York Townʼ thematically covers the
same ground as ʽTalkin' New Yorkʼ, and, although its musical form is
even more derivative than the latter's, has the same teen-folksy cockiness —
the man's first impression of the big city, conveyed from the provintial point
of view: "...it's hard times from the country, livin' down in New York
town". ʽHe Was A Friend Of Mineʼ already shows how this rather
manipulative and sometimes downright cruel little guy could stir up the most
humane emotions with just his guitar and vocal — the song is even more touching
in its humbleness and loneliness than the so much better known Byrds cover. And
from there on, the highlights just keep coming, too numerous to discuss 'em
all.
It is impressive how just about every facet of
classic acoustic Bob Dylan that we know and love finds some sort of equivalent
here, and how they all work so well despite more or less following the same
formulae. Bob's humorous/satirical side is represented by ʽTalkin' Bear
Mountain Picnic Massacre Bluesʼ, a true story of an excursion boat gone
horrendously wrong, and ʽTalkin' John Birch Paranoid Bluesʼ, a funny
account of Bob's hunting for commies whose gag may be a little overdone, but
is still well worth a chuckle. Then there is Bob the protector of the
underprivileged — ʽOnly A Hoboʼ and ʽMan On The Streetʼ are
poignant little tales of no-name Joes whose quiet tragism matches the best
stuff on Bob Dylan. And, of course,
Bob the flag-carrier for the oppressed against the system — ʽWho Killed
Davey Moore?ʼ — and Bob the anthemic optimist (ʽPaths Of
Victoryʼ), and Bob the rover (ʽKingsport Townʼ, ʽWorried
Bluesʼ), and Bob the visionary — ʽLet Me Die In My Footstepsʼ is
as powerful an anti-war, pro-freedom tune as anything he wrote back then. There
is even a bit of Bob the joker (ʽTalkin' Hava Negeilah Bluesʼ —
"here's a foreign song I learned in U-tah!..."), and a long, long,
long bit of Bob the graphomaniac (ʽLast Thoughts On Woody Guthrieʼ —
a poem recited live that has very little to do with Woody Guthrie but very
much to do with us wondering how long that guy can keep it up).
Now, if you look at most of these songs long
enough, you can probably figure out why most of them, for one reason or
another, were left off the original official records. ʽTalkin' John Birch
Paranoid Bluesʼ was said to have been left off for legal reasons (Columbia
lawyers were afraid of libel suits from the John Birch Society), but, truth be
told, it is less sparklingly funny than ʽTalkin' World War III
Bluesʼ that ended up taking its place. ʽLet Me Die In My
Footstepsʼ is proud and grand, but still not nearly as monumental as
ʽHard Rainʼ, which also ended up replacing it — and so on. Since most
of these songs have their counterparts, they will not provide you with significant
additional insight into Dylan, although you will learn lots of interesting new
trivia (such as what was the John
Birch Society and who really kived Davey Moore and where the hell really is Bear Mountain). But they will give you lots and lots of extra
emotional punch if you are at all into early acoustic Dylan. Furthermore, of
the three volumes this is the one to contain the largest number of previously
unheard songs as opposed to alternate
versions — thus, its artistic worth clearly outruns its historical value, and
earns it a very natural thumbs up.
THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 2: RARE & UNRELEASED (1963-1975; 1991)
1) Seven Curses; 2) Eternal
Circle; 3) Suze (The Cough Song); 4) Mama, You Been On My Mind; 5) Farewell,
Angelina; 6) Subterranean Homesick Blues; 7) If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Or Else
You Got To Stay All Night); 8) Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence; 9) Like A
Rolling Stone; 10) It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry; 11) I'll
Keep It With Mine; 12) She's Your Lover Now; 13) I Shall Be Released; 14)
Santa-Fe; 15) If Not For You; 16) Wallflower; 17) Nobody 'Cept You; 18) Tangled
Up In Blue; 19) Call Letter Blues; 20) Idiot Wind.
The first thing to notice about Vol. 2 if you treat it as a slightly
autonomous entity is the stretching of time: where the first volume barely
covered Dylan's first three years, the second volume extends all the way from
the still acoustic 1963 to the electric period to the «country revival» and
further on to the Blood On The Tracks
era. Additionally, a much larger number of tracks is represented by alternate
takes and demos of songs we already know. This can actually mean only one thing
— namely, that Dylan's vaulted backlog is not nearly as huge as we consider it to be; most of the stuff he put
down in the studio did end up on official albums (or, alternately, was so bad
that it was destroyed on the spot or deemed completely unsuitable for release).
One logical explanation is that by 1964, he was in total control both of his
own creative urges and of his studio production, so that ideas rarely ended up
wasted, nor was there any post-production censorship, either (as there was
with ʽTalkin' John Birch Paranoid Bluesʼ, for instance). But that's
just one possible explanation — with
a guy like Bob, you're always better off looking for at least two.
Anyway, even the early takes and demos on Vol. 2 give plenty of food for thought.
Some are curios, providing insight into roots of legends — like the acoustic
demo of ʽSubterranean Homesick Bluesʼ and that snippet of an early
take on ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ, with Bob banging out the skeleton of
the song on electric piano, still somewhat absent-mindedly and in a waltz tempo
at that — clearly, the night was still young. Some show an alternate vision of
the song that, according to Bob, did not work out, and he's almost always
right: ʽIt Takes A Lot To Laughʼ, when set to the melody of
ʽSmokestack Lightningʼ at twice the regular speed, «rocks»
technically, but has no true angry snap to it: once they recast the tune in its
«lazy», sittin'-around-doin'-nothing incarnation, that's when it really got its nasty sneer.
There is a crowd of people out there, I know, ready
to defend the acoustic version of ʽIdiot Windʼ as every bit the equal
of the fully arranged final take — but the song is a «screamer» by definition;
when you tell your counterpart that "you're an idiot, babe, it's a wonder
that you still know how to breathe", you do not usually do it «subtly», in
the tone of a soft, friendly reproach. Again, it is interesting to know how
the song started out, but I am glad
that Bob did not stop there and expanded it to cataclysmic (at least, for Blood On The Tracks) proportions. On
the other hand, one alternate version that does pretend to outdo the original
is ʽIf Not For Youʼ, done here in an arrangement much closer to
George Harrison's on All Things Must
Pass: slower, more melodic, less hurried and fussy, more «caring». What
probably happened is Bob thought, now that George did it so well on his own,
there is no need doing the song the same way — and so he intentionally «fucked
it up» for New Morning (where the
sped-up, fussy version still worked well in the overall context of the album's
«hangover» attitude).
Some of the other songs included here were
ultimately reworked into slightly or significantly different entities.
ʽCall Letter Bluesʼ, with just a slight lyrical shift, would become
ʽMeet Me In The Morningʼ. Much more interesting was the fate of the
lengthy epic ʽShe's Your Lover Nowʼ, dating back to the early 1966
bout of Blonde On Blonde sessions
(pre-Nashville) with the Hawks — after several takes, it was ultimately
dropped, but some of its chords and vocal moves eventually became ʽOne Of
Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)ʼ. Its convoluted love triangle is
intriguing, but I think I can see how Dylan could see that he could not quite see where it was all going, and
besides, it was just a tad too fast for the deliberating, take-your-time spirit
of Blonde On Blonde, so, once again,
I do not quite share the widespread opinion of the song being a «lost classic»
— in any case, he couldn't fit both
songs on the same album, and the wintery epiphany of ʽOne Of Usʼ was
much more profoundly and elaborately worked out anyway.
True «lost classics», in my personal
recognition, are limited here to five tracks. Still from the early acoustic
days, ʽSeven Cursesʼ is a haunting, somewhat creepy attempt at a
pseudo-authentic «dark folk ballad» that would have fit like a glove one of
Bob's later acoustic albums such as World
Gone Wrong (but in 1963, it was probably deemed a bit too out of place on a
«protest» album like The Times).
ʽMama, You Been On My Mindʼ, which Bob used to do live in a rather
awkward duet with Joan Baez and which is also one of my favorite Rod Stewart
songs, is great to finally have in a clean-sounding, solo acoustic studio
version — it is, after all, one of Bob's finest psychological digs, and should
rank right up there with ʽDon't Think Twiceʼ and such. And ʽFarewell
Angelinaʼ — okay, now there's a
song that definitely should have made it onto Another Side Of Bob Dylan, at the obvious expense of ʽBallad
In Plain Dʼ. Maybe Bob thought that it sounded too much like a traditional
folk ballad (it does) and therefore did not fit in the overall concept of the
album (where Bob was already playing the hip beatnik, even without the help of
electric instruments). But it is such a beautiful «traditional folk ballad»
that we'd hardly give a damn about the concept, right? Not to mention a great
excuse for leaving poor Suze Rotolo and her protective sister out of the mess.
From the electric days, I'd single out the
«test-stage» electric recording of ʽIf You Gotta Go, Go Nowʼ, a
«comic» number formerly relegated to live acoustic performance and also one of
those trademark Dylan hits for Manfred Mann — it is simply an excellent example
of Bob's sarcastic skills, and, in a way, summarizes the still relatively new
issue with groupies and rock stars to a tee (I don't actually see Dylan that
much as a typical protagonist for the song's lyrics; now Keith Richards, that'd
be a whole different story...). And much later on, ʽNobody 'Cept
Youʼ, from the Planet Waves
sessions, could have certainly livened up the spirit of that album a wee bit
(what with ʽDirgeʼ and ʽWedding Songʼ and other tunes
reflecting Dylan's failing human relationships at the time) — then again, maybe
that is exactly why it was left off.
Regardless, though, of how many lost classics,
found non-classics, or «songs that should have been there a long time ago»
there are on Vol. 2, its structure
naturally makes it one heck of a journey — acoustic folk, electric blues-rock,
rambling roots-rock from the «Basement» era, and, finally, the somber
singer-songwriting mood of the mid-1970s: Dylan's exclusive Odyssey given to
you through a batch of hitherto unknown «subpar» material that still allows to
witness all his transformations and evolutions as clearly as anything released
in its own time. Thus, even though of all three volumes, this one has the
smallest amount of «new songs», a thumbs up for it is still unavoidable, if only
because it covers not one, but several
of Dylan's «peak periods». Silver peaks, golden peaks, platinum peaks — they're
all reflected here in shadow-mode.
THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 3: RARE & UNRELEASED (1975-1989; 1991)
1) If You See Her Say Hello;
2) Golden Loom; 3) Catfish; 4) Seven Days; 5) Ye Shall Be Changed; 6) Every
Grain Of Sand; 7) You Changed My Life; 8) Need A Woman; 9) Angelina; 10)
Someone's Got A Hold Of My Heart; 11) Tell Me; 12) Lord Protect My Child; 13)
Foot Of Pride; 14) Blind Willie McTell; 15) When The Night Comes Falling From
The Sky; 16) Series Of Dreams.
I think it helps to be religious in order to
fully appreciate Vol. 3. In just a
few moments, after a couple of outtakes from the Desire sessions have rolled by, history plunges us right in the
center of Dylan's existential crisis and, consequently, the two stages of his
religious experience — first, the Christian exuberance of 1979-80, and then,
the Judaeic prophet avatar of 1981-83. If you still had any doubts as to
whether these feelings were just a professional put-on after listening to Bob's
official output from those years, Vol. 3
will do a good job of dissipating these. Apparently, some of the songs recorded
in that period turned out to be so deeply personal that Bob simply did not dare
release them — either fearing they would be misunderstood and undervalued, or
because, as he confessed about ʽBlind Willie McTellʼ, he simply
couldn't get them to sound just right.
To me, the «key» song and the true dark horse
of the album, however, is not ʽWillieʼ, but ʽSeven Daysʼ,
the one true missing link between the gypsy violin days of Desire and the dark depressed brooding of Street Legal. Bob did try it out in the studio and eventually
donated the song to Ron Wood, but, thankfully, he left behind a few live
performances from the last leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue, and the one
included here completely blows away Ronnie's version, as well as Joe Cocker's
and whoever else's. In Bob's original interpretation, ʽSeven Daysʼ is
essentially a howl — an explosion of
despair, the likes of which we'd never heard, as of yet, from the man up to
that point. The way he extends that vocal note on the first line of each verse
— "seven day-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-es!..." — is an outburst that, for Bob,
probably worked the same way that Janov's primal scream worked for Lennon
(ironically, this is the one part that was never replicated on any of the cover
versions: Ronnie obviously lacked the vocal capacities for this, and Cocker
either took off from Ronnie's version or rightly thought that his take on this trick would result in a
completely different emotional impression).
Besides, ʽSeven Daysʼ is simply a
perfect song for the Rolling Thunder band, all these musicians piling up the
loosely structured layers, sometimes bordering on chaos, but with the ominous,
storm-gathering flute and violin lines always cutting through to convey the
emotional panic. And whatever Dylan really meant by those lyrics, they do sound
panicky: "...seven more days, all I gotta do is survive" sounds
almost like he really believes it, or, rather, that he is not really sure
whether he can survive for seven more
days. The mysterious "beautiful comrade from the North" that, he
hopes, will be able to come and relieve him, may, of course, be identified with
ʽGirl From The North Countryʼ, but, more likely, this is just a
vague, figurative allusion to the idea of «salvation» from a dreary existence,
which may be hoped for but is never guaranteed. Anyway, the tension of the
performance simply burns through the speakers; nowhere else on this album, and,
in fact, very little else anywhere,
can you find Bob Dylan sounding so psychotic.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the antidote
to the psychosis may seem a little disappointing — the very next song is
ʽYe Shall Be Changedʼ, signalling the beginning of Bob's Christian
period and proselytizing in general. The problem was stunningly laid out; the
cure, in comparison, looks simplistic and clichéd, particularly since
the most Christian songs on here (ʽYe Shall Be Changedʼ and
ʽYou Changed My Lifeʼ) are all Saved-style
rather than Slow Train-style stuff —
upbeat, «boppy» anthems that hint at the achievement of happiness and content
but seem more like a clumsily self-inflicted form of therapy («I will sing songs of finding happiness in
the Lord! I have to! There is no other way!»), like homeopathy or
something.
Fortunately, these happy anthems only form a
minor slice of Vol. 3 (and, if the
whole collection is to be taken as a brief history of Bob Dylan, you couldn't
do without a couple of these for the sake of completeness, anyway). At the same
time, he was also recording stuff like ʽAngelinaʼ, a lovely, tender
ballad that also makes heavy use of Biblical imagery, but exclusively for the
sake of lyrical mysticism — we never get to know who «Angelina» is any more
than we knew about «Johanna» or «Queen Jane», but we do get to know that, even
as he was still praising Jesus on the more explicit cuts of Shot Of Love, he was also doing this stuff at the same time: slow,
piano-based, dreamy, subtly building up to a grandiose climax whose meaning
still escapes you until the very end. Perhaps he thought that the song was way
too obscure and esoteric for his Christian friends, and this is why we have
ʽEvery Grain Of Sandʼ on Shot
Of Love and not ʽAngelinaʼ, but in these days of borderless
playlists, that technical compromise may be overlooked, right?
And then we finally get around to songs that
were recorded in the days of Infidels,
but then shelved to make way for ʽNeighborhoud Bullyʼ, ʽLicense
To Killʼ, and all those other clearly inferior numbers. ʽFoot Of
Prideʼ is one of the natural highlights here — like an even more advanced
lyrical take on ʽSlow Trainʼ, Dylan machine-gunning subtly poisoned
darts at sinners and hypocrites to an arrangement whose bassline almost borders
on disco (and wouldn't it be fun to actually have a Dylan disco song condemning
sinners to Hell?). Word-wise, it is really one of his most challenging oeuvres
("He looked straight into the sun and said revenge is mine / But he
drinks, and drinks can be fixed" is one hell of a great passage, isn't
it?), and it was a great choice for Lou Reed to pick up at the 30th anniversary
concert (although, like most other guests at the celebration, he never bothered
to memorize the lyrics and spent most of his time at the mike squinting like
crazy at the rapidly moving teletext, tee hee hee).
As for ʽBlind Willie McTellʼ, the one
thing that always «amused» me about the song was that it had nothing whatsoever
to do with the real Blind Willie
McTell, and if there actually was a
Blind Willie to whom the Biblical flavor of the song could be connected, it was
rather Blind Willie Johnson, the creepy howler of doom, death, and retribution
— except «Willie Johnson» would never fit into the rhythmic-rhyming scheme of
the song. It is not a great composition (the melody is completely unoriginal,
dating back to the days of ʽSt. James Infirmaryʼ and probably way beyond
that), and its acoustic-and-piano arrangement is formally unexceptional, but there
is no denying the visionary grandness: there is an attempt here of a panoramic
perspective that digs deep into American history and beyond, and ties it with
the modern world, and I do agree with Bob that, perhaps, he did not manage to
find quite the musical setting that
the words demanded, although I cannot decide if the song would have benefitted
from a denser arrangement, with more overdubs, or, on the contrary, from a
completely stripped-down arrangement, with just an acoustic guitar. Come to
think of it, it is also a song that might have benefitted from Bob's voice
circa Tempest — all hoarse and
rattled — so, as of 2014, it might not be too late to think of a re-recording
(he does perform it in
concert, but the jazzy reinvention is not too suitable, either, I think,
since it strips the song of much of its eeriness).
These are only the highlights; the rest of the
songs on Vol. 3 may not necessarily
deserve extensive comments, but none of the tracks are annoying or useless,
and the alternate takes of ʽSomeone's Got A Hold On My Heartʼ and
particularly the dancebeat-free ʽWhen The Nightʼ will be especially
comforting for all those who thought the biggest problem with Empire Burlesque was its ridiculously
«modern» production. Finally, ʽSeries Of Dreamsʼ, an outtake from Oh Mercy, is not a masterpiece, but
works very well as a conclusion to the whole package — an introspective,
slightly optimistic (against all the apocalyptic preaching) jangly rocker that
at the same time serves as a wrap-up summary of the road travelled, and an
intriguing prelude to those heights that still remain to be conquered.
Considering that, in six years' time, the man would bring us Time Out Of Mind, and then go on to
produce a whole queue of albums that, might I say it, are quite useful for the needs of the 21st
century, the message — "I'd already gone the distance / Just thinking of
a series of dreams" — seems almost too modest for Mr. Zimmerman, but at
least he'll probably accept this additional thumbs up for this particular
«series of dreams».
THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 4: THE «ROYAL ALBERT HALL» CONCERT (1966; 1998)
1) She Belongs To Me; 2)
Fourth Time Around; 3) Visions Of Johanna; 4) It's All Over Now, Baby Blue; 5)
Desolation Row; 6) Just Like A Woman; 7) Mr. Tambourine Man; 8) Tell Me,
Momma; 9) I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met); 10) Baby, Let
Me Follow You Down; 11) Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues; 12) Leopard-Skin Pill-Box
Hat; 13) One Too Many Mornings; 14) Ballad Of A Thin Man; 15) Like A Rolling
Stone.
It was only a matter of time before The Bootleg Series would turn into a
chain of new releases — considering that Bob Dylan was one of the most heavily bootlegged artists of all time, and
quite justly so. Perhaps the wait was intentional: in 1997, Time Out Of Mind proved to everyone
that the old man still had plenty of incense left to burn, and it became safe
to put out archival documents without expecting the average review to carry on
in a «yes, believe it or not, there was
a time when there was a reason to listen to Bob Dylan...» manner. Or perhaps it
wasn't. Whatever be the case, over a stretch of seven years The Bootleg Series managed to enrich us
with three fantastic live albums in a row — each one featuring a Bob Dylan that
was completely different from the other two, albeit not exactly in
chronological order.
The first choice was perfectly natural, almost predictable:
the «Royal Albert Hall» Concert bootleg (quotation marks signify that the
album was originally misattributed to a more famous location, even though the
actual show was played at the Manchester Free Trade Hall) had been in heavy
circulation since the early 1970s, and was traditionally held in awe by fans
due to its containing the infamous «Judas!» episode. Fortunately, the official
release went all the way to boot the boot out of competition — not only by
including the complete show, together with the first acoustic half (the boot
only contained the electric set), but also by cleaning up and remastering the
original tapes, so that the final product is pretty much impeccable. (There are
a couple spots on the acoustic part where Bob's voice suddenty turns distant
and cavernous midway through the song, but that may have been due to some
microphone problems or slight equipment malfunction, and it does not do much
harm anyway).
Technically speaking, and also from the point
of view of the continuously evolving setlist, there may have been better shows that were played by Bob on his British
tour of mid-'66. But, of course, it is not really for performing quality that The «Royal Albert Hall» Concert has
gained most of its fame — it is more for serving as a priceless historical
document illustrating the endless conflict between «The Artist» and «The
People». Should The Artist, offering his Art to The People, pander to The
People instead of following his individual muse? Should The People expect to
be given what they want from The Artist (especially if they're paying for it),
or should The People respect the integrity and/or evolution of The Artist? Does
The Artist have a right to force his
actions on The People? Do The People have a right to force The Artist to amend
his ways, even if they believe they are acting in Art's best interests? So many
questions in that field, and they are all raised on Live 1966, even if not one of them is conclusively answered.
You probably know the backstory already, and what
you don't know can easily be deduced from listening to the album itself. First
part of the show — «traditional»: Dylan and his acoustic guitar alone on stage,
lights dimmed, dreamy, mumbly voice, the audience holding their breath. Still
weird, though, since the man has decided not to sing any of his old «protest»
tunes, but is instead treating everyone to stripped-down acoustic versions of
songs from his new, bizarre, modernist, «treasonable» electric albums. Only
ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ dates back to 1964, and even that one refers to
an imaginary, hallucinatory universe, rather than a world populated by Hollis
Browns and Hattie Carrolls. The audience applauds politely, but nobody really
knows what they feel —mesmerized? enchanted? confused? disappointed?
Second part of the show — «treason» starts in
earnest: the Hawks appear onstage, set up their instruments, and Dylan leads
them in an ear-piercingly loud electric set that includes not only recent
songs, but also — treason! treason! — those old acoustic songs from the folk
troubadour era, now reinvented as bombastic rockers. "This is called
ʽI Don't Believe Youʼ. It used to be like that, and now it goes like
this". 'Nuff said. The battle line is drawn.
Of course, like 99% of the stuff that
eventually passes into legend, Dylan's clash with the «traditionalists» was
always overstated. The acoustic set goes on without a hitch, and the first two
songs of the electric set also feature no ruckus. «Trouble» kicks in after
ʽI Don't Believe Youʼ, when hecklers first start peppering the stage
with insults, and then join together in a clap-hands demonstration whose
purpose is rather to show disrespect than to boo the man offstage completely.
But listen closely to the album and it becomes clear that there is only one
part of the audience, a representative, clearly audible group, maybe about a
quarter or so of the hall, that is getting busy with heckling — and that Dylan
actually gets more approving applause at the end of each «electric» performance
than he gets «disruptive» applause from the hecklers. So picturing this as some
sort of epochal «One Man Against The Whole Wide World» battle would be
overdoing it: clearly, were it really
like that, Bob would never have set foot on British soil, or removed it once
and for all after the very first show.
Nevertheless, he does have to battle the hecklers, and the way he eventually wins
over the majority of them, to me, is far more priceless than the famous
«Judas!» — «I don't believe you... you're a liar!» exchange. At one point, as
the counter-applause really threatens to spread to an alarming level, the man
begins mumbling some slurred, incomprehensible story into the microphone:
eventually, the hecklers calm down, as curiosity to hear what is actually being
told gets the better of them, and just as the rhythm of the clapping hands
breaks down and dissipates, Bob finishes the «story» with a «...mumble mumble
grumble grumble... if you only just wouldn't clap so hard». At that point, even
some of the hecklers probably couldn't help breaking into a general laugh, and
the atmosphere becomes significantly lighter from then on. Just one of those
little things, I guess, but sometimes they illustrate the greatness of great
minds with much more clarity than «big things», don't they?
That said, Live
1966 does tend to get its fair share of «tepid» assessments these days,
usually accompanied with the formula: «historically great, no doubt, but rather
so-so as an actual musical performance». Well, it is probably true that the
atmosphere was a bit too tense for both Dylan and the Hawks to concentrate
exclusively on the music. The electric part, in particular, sets out to
overwhelm rather than intrigue the listener — the emphasis is on being loud, on
getting every decibel possible out of every instrument, with the six players on
stage doing everything they can to sound like a big band, if not like a
symphonic orchestra, but only with reference to volume, bombast, and power, not
to «tightness», which may be found missing. And on the acoustic part, Bob
largely neglects the guitar, concentrating most of his expressiveness in the
art of singing and playing harmonica (ʽDesolation Rowʼ suffers the
most, as it may be hard to endure all of its 11 minutes without the ornate
baroque guitar flourishes of the original).
But then this is, after all, a performance in the «garage» spirit of the times:
substance, energy, and revolutionary ideals first, technical quality second. So
the band teeters on the brink of chaos every now and then, but they never
descend into chaos (and, actually, it would be fun even if they did), and the maniacal
strength of the proceedings is still with us — as ʽTell Me, Mommaʼ (a
song that was frequently performed, but never made it onto any of the studio
albums) opens the electric set, the band plays the first bars quietly and
tentatively, looking for the groove, then drummer Mickey Jones gives the
signal, and off they go into complete electric madness. Robbie Robertson, in
particular, gets into the spirit brilliantly, and his sharp, gruff guitar
leads, usually attested in brief splatches as they emerge from under the
general rumble, are a worthy counterpart to Dylan's moaning, howling, and
wailing (three preferred modes during the electric set).
I must say that, throughout both sets, Dylan
does sound «trippy». Whether he was really on grass or acid, was just tired, or
was just acting, is unclear, but if this manner of singing is typical of his
1966 tour (and, judging, by the real
Royal Albert Hall performance of ʽVisions Of Johannaʼ on Biograph, it might have), it is
seriously different from both the snappy, sneery performance style of Highway 61 and the more contemplative, peaceful manner on Blonde On Blonde. This here style is more «breathy», more «nasal»,
and, in moments of frenzy, more high-pitched than he usually goes. Later on,
when the 1970s came along, he would resort more to shouting out the words, but
here, he drags and drawls them out as if in an intoxicated haze. No mistakes,
no slip-ups, but a sound that seems completely locked in on itself rather than
targeted at the audience — an additional factor, perhaps, in enraging the
hecklers, who must have gotten the feeling that the man is doing it all
strictly for himself, and couldn't care less about whoever else was out there
in the hall (a correct feeling, most
likely). Unfortunately, in my case at least, it does not exactly make me want
to listen to the album over and over again — even the great, fabulous
conclusion of ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ ("play fucking loud!")
has the feeling of an imposing distant volcano, erupting over the heads of the
unfortunate nearby villagers rather than over your own: I get the feeling of
admiring the scene from afar rather than being directly involved. But that's
also the same thing that makes it such a fascinating historical document.
On the other hand, it must also be stated that
the stripped-down acoustic versions, especially ʽVisions Of Johannaʼ,
raise the «intimacy» bar rather than lowering it — the mystical nighttime aura
of ʽVisionsʼ is enhanced through this minimalism, even if I do miss
Al Kooper's ghostly organ (but not Robertson's squeaky guitar runs, for that
matter). And in general, I'd say that acoustic reinventions of Bob's
«beatnik-psychedelic» classics are more interesting, per se, than the electric
reworkings of Bob's acoustic material, because most of the electric songs,
mood-wise, sound the same in this setting, whereas the acoustic songs still
preserve their individual faces. Plus, you get to hear Bob's harmonica better,
and he behaves like a mean, evil beast with the instrument, particularly on
the opening ʽShe Belongs To Meʼ and on the closing ʽMr.
Tambourine Manʼ — some of the shrillest, wickedest blasts you'll ever
hear.
All in all, this is probably not the «greatest
live album of all time» from anything but a purely historical point of view,
and this may not even necessarily be the greatest live Bob Dylan album of all
time (at least the next two volumes in the series give it quite a bit of
competition), but, regardless of that, you have much left to accomplish in
your life if you have not yet heard a good sample of Bob Dylan live circa 1966,
and no better sample exists than this. As for historical importance, my only
quibble is that people who praise Live
1966 to high heaven for that importance should stop dissing Live At Budokan — which, for my money,
quite matched Live 1966 in the
overall «braveness» of approach, even though the Fan War of 1965-66 was
ultimately won and the Critical War of 1978-79 was ultimately lost. Of course,
nobody could call Dylan's reinvention of his back catalog in «mock-Vegas
format» a «key moment in rock history». Yet I think that, to most people, Live 1966 is important not for holding
a particular vital place in history — but for simply showing how one man can
hold his obstinate ground against many and emerge victorious, sort of like a
rock music equivalent of 12 Angry Men,
and so, let us not forget that this was far from the only such battle in
Dylan's lifestory, even if it's naturally the first one to be featured on the thumbs up
list for such achievements.
THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 5: THE ROLLING THUNDER REVIEW (1975; 2002)
1) Tonight I'll Be Staying
Here With You; 2) It Ain't Me Babe; 3) A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall; 4) The
Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll; 5) Romance In Durango; 6) Isis; 7) Mr. Tambourine
Man; 8) Simple Twist Of Fate; 9) Blowin' In The Wind; 10) Mama You Been On My
Mind; 11) I Shall Be Released; 12) It's All Over Now Baby Blue; 13) Love Minus
Zero/No Limit; 14) Tangled Up In Blue; 15) The Water Is Wide; 16) It Takes A
Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry; 17) Oh Sister; 18) Hurricane; 19) One
More Cup Of Coffee (Valley Below); 20) Sara; 21) Just Like A Woman; 22)
Knockin' On Heaven's Door.
With the predictably warm reception organised
for Live 1966, it was only natural
that the subsequent evolution of The
Bootleg Series would focus on live Dylan some more. But what would be the
right period? On stage, the man evolved and recreated himself in different
images even more radically than in the studio, so it must have been a tough
choice to make — yet the compilers of the series managed to make exactly the
right one. An uplifted, hyper-energetic, crowd-defying Dylan in the 1960s could
only be matched by an uplifted, hyper-energetic, crowd-defying Dylan in the
1970s, and no moment in time could be more right than the first leg of The
Rolling Thunder Revue, played out in the last two months of 1975.
We already had us Hard Rain from the second
leg of the tour — recorded and released in 1976, after Desire had already come out — and it was a live album that was
nowhere near as bad as its original reputation goes, but for quite a long time,
there was nothing to compare it to (unless you were there in the first place or
collected bootlegs). Live 1975 set
out to remedy that omission, putting together a coherent, but mixed set of 22
numbers from five different shows, played at various locations in New England
and in Montreal.
Some people complained about the album being a
mix rather than a single complete show, and it is true that multiple fadeouts
are a turn-off for those who want to feel themselves as part of the audience —
yet it is also true that the tour, due to its spontaneous and chaotic nature,
was uneven, and the compilers obviously did not want us to sit through
particularly sloppy stuff, choosing instead the best of the best. So yeah,
there is a touch of «fakeness» to the album in its historical function, but
then let us not forget that many «regular» live albums are sewn together just
like that in the first place, and that most of the «regular» Dylan lovers have
no need to hear inferior versions of Dylan classics when they can easily have
superior versions.
Anyway, what's so special about Live 1975 and why have so many people
hastened to declare it the greatest live Dylan album on Earth? (And I count
myself among these people every now and then — although, since no two live
Dylan albums sound the same way, making a choice here is only a good way to
kill some time). In a way, The Rolling Thunder Revue was an attempt to fight
time and fate itself. In an era that was beginning to be more and more
dominated by corporate ventures, pre-planned, well-calculated commercial tours,
meticulously worked out market strategies, etc., Bob suddenly felt tremendous
nostalgia for the era of Woodstock and Festival Express — nostalgia all the
more fueled by the fact that he himself had pretty much missed out on in its
heyday — and decided to single-handedly «bring it all back home». Of course, in
order to turn back time you had to be a Bob Dylan, and even then, you could
reopen that door for only a few minutes, but, luckily, somebody had time to
thrust a few mikes in the opening, and preserve that little time trip for
posterity. At least in audio form. (Video footage was shot for Dylan's 4-hour
experimental movie Renaldo And Clara,
panned by the critics for its clumsy avantgarde pretense and shelved for
posterity, although a few bits have been mercifully released for viewers on a
bonus DVD that came together with the first pressings of Live 1975).
The original atmosphere of the Revue is mostly
felt in this music when you realize how many people there are onstage —
approximately a dozen musicians playing together with Bob, including not only
understandable superstar choices like Roger McGuinn and Joan Baez (who, like in
the old times, duets with Bob on four of the songs), but also completely
out-of-the-blue characters like Mick Ronson: if you thought the former «Spider
from Mars» would be the least likely choice for a Bob Dylan sideman, think
again — there are no musicians who
couldn't step into the shoes of a Bob Dylan sideman, period, because Bob Dylan
is... well, adaptable. With a crowd
like that, chaos is inevitable, and there is some, but not too much: Dylan's
songs are so flexible, and so easily stretch in any direction, that messing
them up is dang near impossible as long as Dylan himself is inspired and
interested.
And he is clearly inspired. The choice of
ʽTonight I'll Be Staying Here With Youʼ, formerly a pleasant, but
minor country ditty on Nashville Skyline,
as the album opener is perfect — not only do its lyrics perform a welcoming
function in a most original manner, but the song itself is reinvented as a
loud, bombastic roots-rock anthem that promises a brand new start in life. The
opening line — "throw my ticket in the wind!" — just cuts through
the air like a samurai sword, prompting a cheerful response from the audience.
Of course, Bob has completely rewritten the lyrics (more for fun than anything
else — why the heck should "throw my suitcase out there too" become
"throw my mattress out there
too"?), restructured the melody, and turned the song from a settle-down
decision into a ceremonial pledge of honor, but isn't that just what we mean by
saying «the song lives on»? Let's
hear it one more time for musical evolution.
Bob shouts a lot throughout the album, much
like he did on his Before The Flood
tour, but he does not do it all the time, so that the music is not reduced to a
monotonous arena-rock buzz. The most questionable decision was probably to
reinvent ʽHard Rainʼ as a martial rock stomper which is now more
melodically similar to ʽHighway 61 Revisitedʼ than to its
troubadourish origins — but it is still fun to hear it trod along that way. On
the other hand, ʽIt Ain't Me Babeʼ works great in its sped up
version, making Bob sound cooler than ever in his anti-heroic poise; and the
resurrected ʽLonesome Death Of Hattie Carrollʼ now laments the
lonesome death in near-symphonic format without losing the mournful spirit of
the song.
Most importantly, Live 1975 is probably the one live Dylan album on which his «human»
side opens up to us better than anywhere else. Not only was he totally inspired
by what he was doing, but he also happened to be going through some turbulent
rough shit at the time (specifically with his marriage on the brink of
collapsing), and while he is on that stage, it never feels like he is «playing
a character», as he usually does. It may have been the one tour on which he was
wearing a real physical mask (white
clownish paint, probably to match the spirit of Children Of Paradise, a movie to which Renaldo And Clara paid heavy tribute), but, paradoxically, the
singing seems to come straight from the heart this time around — and you can
most clearly notice it on the acoustic sub-set. Listen to this ʽMr.
Tambourine Manʼ: he sounds nervous, agitated, eager to let it all out
without any stage mannerisms or specially conjured poetic trances. Listen to
this ʽSimple Twist Of Fateʼ: it does not hold a candle to the studio
original, but that is because in the studio original Bob played the part of a
sympathetic wise onlooker, an experienced Buddhist master contemplating the
young folks, whereas here he jumps right in the fray as if he were part of the
story — losing subtlety, but gaining in urgence.
This intense combination — Dylan in his most
disturbed and exuberant state, caught in a rare moment of opening up; and this
huge band, fueled by the man's energy and buzzing around like a swarm of
roots-rock-hungry bees with their slide guitars, dobros, mandolins, and violins
— ensures that the album never gets boring, not for a second. Echoes of the
past pursue the performer in the guise of an occasional listener shouting «play
a protest song!» («here's one for you», Bob replies as the band goes into
ʽOh Sisterʼ), but then what else would you expect from an old fan who
has just witnessed his idol crooning out ʽMama You Been On My Mindʼ
with Joan Baez like it were 1964 all over again? And, actually, Bob does protest songs, old as well as new: ʽHurricaneʼ,
performed very close to the studio recording because the tune was brand new at
the time, is presented together with a plea to the audience for help — "if
you got any political pull at all, maybe you can help us get this man out of
jail". So, in a way, we do go
ten years back in the past here: never ever again would Bob sound so
rejuvenated.
It does get darker towards the end, where there
is a streak of four numbers in a row from Desire
that culminate in a particularly sinister, bass-heavy rendition of ʽOne
More Cup Of Coffeeʼ and a creepily personal rendition of ʽSaraʼ,
a song that, as it turns out, Bob was not afraid to perform in front of a live
audience. But the darkness is still chased away at the end, as all the band
gathers round the campfire to sing a spirit-lifting rendition of ʽKnockin'
On Heaven's Doorʼ (one verse is gracefully given over to McGuinn, whose
angelic vocal tone suits the song so well) — and then ends the show with a
little happy country jig as Bob announces, traveling-circus-style, that
"we'll be in the area for a few days, maybe we'll see you tomorrow
night!" Yes, tension and trouble aside, it was quite a merry-go-round.
It was also the last time that Bob would get so
friendly: for the tour, he got together with many old friends, only to part
ways with them completely once depression and disillusionment got the better of
him by early 1976, and never again would a live Bob Dylan show have this sort
of camaraderie attitude (certainly this was the last tour on which the Dylan/Baez
connection was still seen to work — on the 1984 tour, Joan was only used as an
opening act, and quit midway through in protest). In short, this was a unique
event from just so many sides — technical, emotional, historical, cultural —
and Live 1975 captures and bottles
its essence to perfection. «Legendary» baggage aside, it deserves to be soaked
in every bit as much as Live 1966,
and as I am giving it out the obligatory thumbs up, I seem to understand that I have
actually listened to it quite a few times more
than to Live 1966. It might be, of
course, that I am at heart just a bigger fan of Mick Ronson than of Robbie
Robertson, but who knows?
THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 6: CONCERT AT PHILHARMONIC HALL (1964; 2004)
1) The Times They Are
A-Changin'; 2) Spanish Harlem Incident; 3) Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues;
4) To Ramona; 5) Who Killed Davey Moore?; 6) Gates Of Eden; 7) If You Gotta Go,
Go Now (Or Else You Got To Stay All Night); 8) It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only
Bleeding); 9) I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met); 10) Mr.
Tambourine Man; 11) A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall; 12) Talkin' World War III
Blues; 13) Don't Think Twice, It's Alright; 14) The Lonesome Death Of Hattie
Carroll; 15) Mama, You Been On My Mind; 16) Silver Dagger; 17) With God On Our
Side; 18) It Ain't Me Babe; 19) All I Really Want To Do.
Or maybe this,
too, could be «Dylan's best live album», despite not featuring a backing band
at all and not having anything to do with «rock and roll» as such — just Bob,
Bob's acoustic guitar, Bob's diatonic harmonica, and Bob's Joan Baez on four of
the tracks. Actually, if you do have
the physical copy of the album already, this review will be completely
unnecessary, because the astute liner notes by Sean Wilentz (who did really
attend the show in question) provide all the information and all the extra food
for thought you'd need, and I have nothing of use to add to the man's
insightful retro-analysis of everything that was going on that night. But
provided you do not have access to those
liner notes, here be a lowly substitute of recycled information and plagiarized
conclusions for y'all.
The show was played on October 31, 1964, at New
York's Philharmonic Hall, in preparation for Halloween ("I'm wearing my
Bob Dylan mask!"). Another Side Of
Bob Dylan had come out less than three months prior to that, and in two
months' time he would be trying out the electric schtick; ʽMr. Tambourine
Manʼ had not yet been officially released, but had already been extensively
played out, and was clearly familiar to the audience. Basically, when the
«Bootleg Series Team» decided that the next live album to be released would
have to be for the acoustic period, the choice was between «classic acoustic
phase» (Bob as Pete Seeger-approved hero of the protest movement) and
«transitional acoustic phase» — and they settled on the tapes from the
Philharmonic as a particularly well-played and well-preserved memento of the
latter. What can I say? Awesome choice, probably (probably, because I don't
have that much to compare it with).
Playing Live
1964 back to back with Live 1966
(especially its acoustic first half) will give you a good idea of just how much
the man — and the times — had changed in less than two years. The Dylan of 1966
was a Dylan living in a cloud (and I don't even literally mean a cloud of dope,
though that was relevant, too), separated from the audience by an invisible
plexiglas layer. By contrast, the Dylan of 1964 is a lively, cheerful,
charismatic fellow, already well aware of the great power that he can exercise
over people and occasionally testing its limits — for instance, there is a
moment there when he just absent-mindedly strums the chords to ʽI Don't
Believe Youʼ for a couple of minutes before «admitting» that he does not
remember the first verse, and having people in the front row explicitly remind him
that yes, Bob, truly and verily we have faithfully memorized all the songs from
your latest and greatest. (I do not buy it that he actually did forget the "I can't
understand..." bit, although he does stumble once on a verse in the middle
of ʽIt's Alright Maʼ, and then again, there's a hilarious stumble in
the middle of ʽMama You Been On My Mindʼ where they have to trade
some extra vocalising in between Bob and Joan).
He is also clearly a fellow that is way too tired of his «protest» image, as
evidenced by the encore, where somebody jokingly requests ʽMary Had A
Little Lambʼ and the man responds with "Did I write that?... Is that
a protest song?" To that end,
there are only three songs off The Times,
his most symbolically «protest» album, and once he gives the impression of
being about to launch into ʽBallad Of Hollis Brownʼ, but then
switches gears and it becomes ʽHard Rainʼ. Even the early Freewheelin' material is downtrodden —
no ʽBlowin' In The Windʼ in the setlist, no ʽMasters Of
Warʼ, and as for ʽDon't Think Twiceʼ, it is executed in
near-parodic mode ("well it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, BAAAAAAAAABE!") that sends the
audience laughing rather than empathizing. Clearly, the time had come for
something different, even if you had to slaughter some of your own sacred cows,
or, at least, rudely de-sacralize them.
On the other end of the pole, we have previews
of things to come — introductions of the as of yet brand new ʽGates Of
Edenʼ and ʽIt's Alright, Maʼ ("it's a very funny
song!" — yeah, right), which could have been known at best to a tiny
handful of people in the audience; it is not clear how many people could get
the words right, but it must be said that Bob plays both songs at slightly
slower tempos than we are used to nowadays, and enunciates everything very clearly. For that matter, he also
enunciates very clearly the comical sexual innuendos on ʽIf You Gotta Go,
Go Nowʼ, sending the people up in roars of laughter after each verse —
even a stren-faced folkie likes a good adulterous brawl every now and then.
The Joan Baez section is probably the weakest
link of the show: she was a good foil for him in the «classic protest» days,
but by late 1964 the vibe had died down, and their dueting on ʽWith God On
Our Sideʼ feels a little «workmanlike» and not particularly inspiring.
ʽMama You Been On My Mindʼ, envisioned here as a mental dialog
between the two separated protagonists, works much better (when they do not
forget the lyrics, that is), and Joan graciously gets a solo spot with the
traditional song ʽSilver Daggerʼ (she is really very beautiful when
she comes in small doses like this), but in the context of this show it is
clearly seen that the Dylan/Baez partnership is over and out. "It ain't me
you're looking for, babe". Was it intentional that he had her participate in
this as the show's final duet? I think it was.
Anyway, even despite the fact that there is
relatively little space to rearrange and reinvent your songs when you are only
armed with the barest of equipment, Bob gives us plenty of quirks and tricks to
make this experience every bit as valuable as the canonical studio recordings.
(Might I add that aficionados of Bob's guitar playing might have something to
treasure about this as well — for instance, the basic melody to ʽIt's
Alright, Maʼ seems to be played in a more complex manner than ended up on
the studio album, almost giving an illusion of two guitars played at the same
time). Most importantly, even if he does admit to "wearing his Bob Dylan
mask", he is still young and fresh here, and his self-constructed «wall»
that would firmly separate him from the audience in the future only has the
first few bricks laid in. In fact, dare I say it, you can actually hear the
sound of the first brick plunged in position when the sixth song of the show is
introduced as "a sacrilegious lullaby in D Minor", and then it
becomes ʽGates Of Edenʼ, and many of the people sitting there in the
hall probably sit around in a «what was that?..»
sort of mood.
But historical importance aside, this is just a
very good performance. Impeccable sound quality, good playing, and fabulous
singing — on no other live album of his can you really feel this magnetic pull
on the audience, this desire to work 'em for all they're worth. Soon enough,
Bob would only be playing for himself. But before he started doing that, he had
to build himself up plenty of credit, so as to make the people want him to be playing for himself. If
you are a Dylan neophyte, or an accidental walk-in who has no idea why people
are still flocking to his shows to hear an old codger mumble out seemingly
toneless, incomprehensible blabber — rewind all the way to here and see the
reverberations of 1964 still influencing the atmosphere of 2014, in a bizarre,
but real chain of causes and consequences. Thumbs up.
THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 7: NO DIRECTION HOME (1959-1966; 2005)
1) When I Got Troubles (home
recording); 2) Rambler, Gambler; 3) This Land Is Your Land (live); 4) Dink's
Song (home recording); 5) I Was Young When I Left Home (home recording); 6)
Sally Gal; 7) Don't Think Twice, It's All Right (demo); 8) Man Of Constant
Sorrow; 9) Blowin' In The Wind (live); 10) Masters Of War (live); 11) A Hard
Rain's A-Gonna Fall (live); 12) When The Ship Comes In (live); 13) Mr.
Tambourine Man (alt. take); 14) Chimes Of Freedom (live); 15) It's All Over
Now, Baby Blue (alt. take); 16) She Belongs To Me (alt. take); 17) Maggie's
Farm (live); 18) It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (alt. take);
19) Tombstone Blues (alt. take); 20) Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (alt. take);
21) Desolation Row (alt. take); 22) Highway 61 Revisited (alt. take); 23)
Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (alt. take); 24) Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The
Memphis Blues Again (alt. take); 25) Visions Of Johanna (alt. take); 26) Ballad
Of A Thin Man (live); 27) Like A Rolling Stone (live).
Nothing lasts forever, and even «The Golden Age
of The Bootleg Series» had to pass sooner or later. The first 3-volume set
could rival at least a good half of Bob's officially released LPs, and the next
three packages, in between them, offered a phenomenal retrospective of live
performances, each one covering a completely distinct and autonomous Face of
Bob Dylan. Alas, Vol. 7, nice as it
is to have it on its own merits, shows that... well, we are not exactly
scraping the bottom of the barrel,
seeing as how there is seemingly no end to The Bootleg Series in sight, but we
have definitely lifted off all the real juicy, creamy layers. The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-6 were for
everybody; here begins the hardcore stuff for the truly inquisitive fan.
Actually, this album did not even begin its
proper life as part of The Bootleg Series. It just so happened that Bob's old
admirer Martin Scorsese finally got around to shooting a documentary on the
man's rise to fame and his early, glorious years, with special focus on the
«acoustic to electric» transition. The documentary had to have a soundtrack,
but since it was deemed too boring to simply reuse the already available
recordings from the movie, it was decided that the soundtrack would be a «pseudo-soundtrack»,
offering alternate cuts to much, if not most, of the music that was actually
used in the movie or previously
released on audio. And if so — hey, why not count the soundtrack as one more
part of The Bootleg Series? Happy
coincidence.
No Direction
Home is the first Dylan album
to be very similar, in principle, to the Beatles' Anthology: a few outtakes of songs that we have not previously
heard from the man at all, interspersed with a boatload of alternate takes and
live versions of stuff we do know
pretty well. And, just like the Anthologies,
it shares the same problem — there are good reasons why none of these alternate takes made the final cut. Live
performances aside, there is a huge deal of «work in progress» here, and for
myself at least, these takes hold only historical interest. They might be seriously
different from the final version — but in most cases, «being different» means
«does not really work all that well».
One myth that the availability of these
outtakes does ruin, or, at least,
shatter a little bit, is the myth of «total spontaneity», according to which
the usual process was as follows: Bob just threw some lyrics together, got some
guys together, gave them the key to play in, and then they'd record everything
in one, at max two or three takes. Very rarely, it was like that indeed, but in
reality most of the tunes did go through a gestation period, and the second
disc here, covering the early electric years (1965-66), proves that all too
well. We already knew about ʽIt Takes A Lot To Laughʼ and how it
started out fast and raunchy and then only started making real sense when they
slowed it down (there is yet another
fast version here, and it works no better than the one on Vol. 2). But we may not have known that there was a take on
ʽDesolation Rowʼ with Al Kooper on electric rather than Charlie McCoy
on acoustic guitar — it sure sounds different, with Al's raga-like,
proto-Velvet Underground improvisation a far cry from Charlie's quasi-baroque
flourishes, but fact is, Charlie knew what the song needs here much better than
Al did, and thank you very much, Bob, for understanding that.
Or take the two early outtakes from the New York
sessions for Blonde On Blonde,
recorded without the aid of the Nashville session people. ʽLeopard-Skin
Pill-Box Hatʼ is slower and lazier than the finalized Nashville take, and
has more of that uncomfortable «white boys play the blues» aura to it than the
almost punkish punch of the final version. But the worst offender is
ʽVisions Of Johannaʼ, which is seriously the only song on this album
that I cannot listen to without cringing — the only excuse I can find for The
Hawks' complete lack of understanding of how to play that song is that Bob, at
this point, does not seem to understand it himself, screaming out the lyrics in
«battle cry mode» as if this were ʽTombstone Bluesʼ. Horrible. And
fascinating — that he did work it
out, and eventually turned the disaster into an atmospheric masterpiece.
Even in the acoustic era, some outtakes sucked:
the version of ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ, included here, for some reason
features Ramblin' Jack Elliott on rather out-of-tune background vocals, adding
a semi-drunk echo to Bob's main part. Worth one listen out of general
amusement, I guess, but believe me, these harmonies sure ain't Byrds quality.
(For that matter, the liner notes state that this might have been the version
that was actually sent to the Byrds — if it was the «duet» that prompted them
to try out group harmonies on the chorus, then, okay, this take has much more
historical significance than I'd generally award it).
Curious, but inferior alternate takes aside,
there is still about 70 minutes of excellent live performances here. Real
early stuff like an honest-to-goodness, but somewhat bumblin' cover of
ʽThis Land Is Your Landʼ, is not all that great, but then we get to
hear some peak-level acoustic-era numbers from 1963, which already show him
experimenting with the tempos and modulations, and a very spirited rip through ʽChimes Of Freedomʼ from the
1964 Newport Festival (so spirited, in fact, that some might probably suggest
he was quite high at the time). Of course, the cake is taken by that one bit
from the 1965 Newport Festival — that
very performance of ʽMaggie's Farmʼ, cleaned up and remastered here
in pristine sound (now we can hear
what was actually played!), that started off the entire «heroic Dylan goes
electric in the face of overwhelming odds» legend. Legend aside, it is one hell of a punk rock performance
indeed, where Mike Bloomfield and his crazy electric guitar hystrionics rule
the day more than Bob Dylan himself — naturally, the one crown jewel of this
collection that should be present on any Dylan anthology.
Boosted by a few biographical oddities, like
the low quality home recordings from 1959-1961 (ʽI Was Young When I Left
Homeʼ is kind of a fun song to hear from a 20-year old, don't you think?),
No Direction Home: The Soundtrack
will boost your understanding of Bob Dylan and give you a few pointers about
the nature and functioning of his genius. But unless you have worn out your
copies of the «regular» albums no less than three times, I doubt that you will
have strong «affection» for the seventh issue in The Bootleg Series. And to
uphold that doubt, and also to stress the significant drop in quality, no
thumbs up for you this time. As great as these songs are, we cannot give away
thumbs up to any album that has any version of ʽDesolation
Rowʼ or ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ on it, can we? That'd be debasing
the currency in too cruel a fashion.
THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 8: TELL TALE SIGNS (1989-2006; 2008)
1) Mississippi (alt. version
#1); 2) Most Of The Time (alt. version); 3) Dignity (piano demo); 4) Someday
Baby (alt. version); 5) Red River Shore; 6) Tell Ol' Bill; 7) Born In Time; 8)
Can't Wait (alt. version); 9) Everything Is Broken (alt. version); 10) Dreamin'
Of You; 11) Huck's Tune; 12) Marchin' To The City; 13) High Water (For Charlie
Patton) (live); 14) Missisippi (alt. version #2); 15) 32-20 Blues; 16) Series
Of Dreams; 17) God Knows; 18) Can't Escape From You; 19) Dignity; 20) Ring Them
Bells (live); 21) Cocaine Blues (live); 22) Ain't Talkin' (alt. version); 23) The
Girl On The Greenbriar Shore (live); 24) Lonesome Day Blues (live); 25) Miss
The Mississippi; 26) The Lonesome River; 27) 'Cross The Green Mountain.
The next installment in The Bootleg Series
returns us to the original format. Since the release of the original triple
package, more than 15 years had elapsed, and in the interim Bob had managed to
recapture the hearts of fans and critics alike one more time — clearly, the
entire fruitful period in between the «pre-comeback» of Oh Mercy and the super-success of Time Out Of Mind, Love &
Theft, and Modern Times needed
some extra coverage, to bring collectors, completists, and cultists up-to-date
with the latest developments. Sure the third disc of the original series had
some duds on it, but that was the Eighties, you know — surely Bob's blistering
comeback had to lead to its own precious leftovers in dust bins?
Well, to tell the truth, this one's been a
little over-hyped. First, although two discs for 18 years of music making does
not feel too disproportionate
compared to three discs for the previous 28 years of music making — one should
not forget that back in the 1960s, each year counted for five in comparison.
Look at this track listing and you will see that approximately half of these
songs are alternate versions of officially released counterparts (demos,
rejected takes, live versions, the usual stuff), whereas much of the other half
gathers leftovers that had been
officially released — on various movie soundtracks (North Country, Gods And
Generals, etc.). Altogether, you only get something like five or six
completely new songs. This is still a treat, but one that gets diluted in a sea
of all too familiar voices and melodies.
Second, Tell
Tale Signs presents very little, if anything, in the way of actual big-time
«surprises». Most of those years Dylan spent reconnecting with his heritage —
the dark side of Americana, in so many different, but nearly always similar,
ways — and these outtakes mostly just offer more of the same. Blues, folk,
country-oriented tunes with predictable melodies and the usual hoarse singing:
no wonder the liner notes are mostly busy discussing the wonders of the lyrics
rather than anything else. This is not a jarring criticism, though — merely a
warning that if you already have the original official LPs, Tell Tale Signs will not be opening
your eyes in a manner of which the old Bootleg Series was sometimes capable.
That said, this is still Dylan's Bronze Age
here, and the album is consistently listenable throughout, and there are even
highlights a-plenty. Particularly treasurable are the Time Out Of Mind outtakes: ʽDreamin' Of Youʼ is an
atmospheric guitar lover's paradise, with several haunting, weepy lines flowing
in and out of each other, perfectly complementing the main lyrical message
("I'm dreamin' of you / That's all I do / And it's driving me
insane"); ʽRed River Shoreʼ is a nostalgic ballad with a Texmex
flavor (the accordeon strikes again) that was, perhaps, deemed too
happy-sounding for the album; and the two early versions of
ʽMississippiʼ (one almost purely acoustic, one with a full backing
band) are arguably better than the final take on Love & Theft, which seems a little overproduced in comparison.
Of the soundtrack tunes, ʽTell Ol'
Billʼ is pretty good, even if the melody is basically just a rewrite of
the verse melody for ʽMan Gave Names To All The Animalsʼ (well, we
wouldn't expect Bob to overtax himself for a goddamn soundtrack) — nice «dark
boogie» atmosphere smelling of unexplored alleys and unseen dangers. But the
real highlight is ʽ'Cross The Green Mountainʼ, a song commemorated to
the Civil War (only too appropriate for a movie about the Civil War) that
somehow manages to get a unique sound going, courtesy of Tony Garnier playing a
minimalistic «doom-style» bassline and Larry Campbell contrasting it with a
romantic violin part, while Bob is telling us a not-too-sophisticated moral
tale on the evils of war. This is probably the greatest song on the album, so,
not coincidentally, it is also set at the very end — and it gives a deeper
impression than any song from Love &
Theft (both were recorded in 2002).
Honorable mention should also go to the live
cuts — so far, Bob has not released a single complete live album from the
Never Ending Tour, so this is the easiest way to check out his band on a good
night (other than actually buying a ticket to the next show, of course). On
Disc 1, there is a really gritty, nasty rendition of ʽHigh Waterʼ,
with Bob's guitarists raising hell and, overall, turning the formerly moody-creepy
song into a kick-ass blues-rocker (not necessarily a «good» thing per se, but a
good example of how Bob can still radically reinvent his new songs even at this
late date). ʽLonesome Day Bluesʼ on the second disc is closer to the
studio version and also featured in surprisingly lo-fi quality, but the
acoustic rendition of the old ʽCocaine Bluesʼ from 1997 is hard to
beat, with Bob's «whining» voice perfectly fit for the whiny occasion.
Finally, there are just some extra nice touches
here and there — the versions of ʽBorn In Timeʼ and ʽGod
Knowsʼ, for instance, will be a drop (two drops) of pleasure to those who
hated the keyboard-heavy production of these songs on Under A Red Sky (as it turns out, they sounded so much better under
the original supervision of Lanois during the Oh Mercy sessions). A couple extra acoustic oldies, recorded in the
1992-93 «back-to-rootsiest-roots» period, would have made a good addition to
the original Good As I Been To You
and World Gone Wrong. And
ʽDignityʼ has a more interesting and flashy arrangement than on the
live Unplugged version. In short, some of these alternate versions can
outshine the originals — the final list depends on the listener, but I guess
you could say that is the privileged advantage of an album of outtakes from
your not-so-revolutionary period.
Overall, this is a fine supporting companion to
Dylan's latest creative renaissance, as long as you do not set your
expectations unjustifiedly high or join the salivating crowds of worshippers,
ready to overpraise each scrap as soon as it is found and laid out on the
table. One thing that it proves is that it always makes sense to pry into the
man's vaults, no matter from which epoch they date. But the quality of the
vault in question is tightly correlated with the quality of its epoch — thus,
if your favorite Dylan album is Love
& Theft, for some reason, then run, don't walk, to get this stuff.
Otherwise, just walk. A walking man's thumbs up here.
THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 9: THE WITMARK DEMOS (1962-1964; 2010)
CD I: 1) Man
On The Street (fragment); 2) Hard Times In New York Town; 3) Poor Boy Blues; 4)
Ballad For A Friend; 5) Rambling, Gambling Willie; 6) Talking Bear Mountain
Picnic Massacre Blues; 7) Standing On The Highway; 8) Man On The Street; 9)
Blowin' In The Wind; 10) Long Ago, Far Away; 11) A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall;
12) Tomorrow Is A Long Time; 13) The Death Of Emmett Till; 14) Let Me Die In My
Footsteps; 15) Ballad Of Hollis Brown; 16) Quit Your Low Down Ways; 17) Baby,
I'm In The Mood For You; 18) Bound To Lose, Bound To Win; 19) All Over You; 20)
I'd Hate To Be You On That Dreadful Day; 21) Long Time Gone; 22) Talkin' John
Birch Paranoid Blues; 23) Masters Of War; 24) Oxford Town; 25) Farewell;
CD
II: 1) Don't Think Twice, It's All Right; 2) Walkin' Down The Line; 3) I Shall
Be Free; 4) Bob Dylan's Blues; 5) Bob Dylan's Dream; 6) Boots Of Spanish
Leather; 7) Girl From The North Country; 8) Seven Curses; 9) Hero Blues; 10) Whatcha
Gonna Do?; 11) Gypsy Lou; 12) Ain't Gonna Grieve; 13) John Brown; 14) Only A
Hobo; 15) When The Ship Comes In; 16) The Times They Are A-Changin'; 17) Paths Of
Victory; 18) Guess I'm Doing Fine; 19) Baby Let Me Follow You Down; 20) Mama,
You Been On My Mind; 21) Mr. Tambourine Man; 22) I'll Keep It With Mine.
So I suppose it was only a matter of time,
after all, before the complete set of the Witmark demos (only a brief «teaser»
glimpse of which was offered on the original Bootleg Series) made it onto the
public market. But almost inevitably, here is where we pass completely into the realm of special
interest; the potential audience of this package is probably even smaller than
the one for No Direction Home, which
at least had the advantage of covering both the acoustic and the early electric
periods and thus, featured considerably more diversity.
These recordings are not rejected outtakes and were
originally meant to be heard by other people, but not by any people — they were recorded by Bob for two publishing companies
(Leeds, and later the more prestigious Witmark that bought out Bob's contract)
that would offer Bob's raw demos for other artists to cover. So, on one hand,
there is some incentive here to get the basic point of the song through to the
listener — on the other hand, there is no pretending that these aren't essentially
«scratch» versions, ranging from half-finished drafts to completed recordings
that still lack the care and meticulousness of finished studio productions.
More than half of the songs that the Bobster
recorded in those «childhood days» we already know well enough from the
official studio albums, and the cream of the crop for the unknown ones was
already made available on The Bootleg
Series Vol. 1. ʽDon't Think Twice, It's Alrightʼ is the only
version here that can fully compete with the official original — most of the
others will have you cringe a bit in terms of occasional flubbed lines, bum
notes, or wrong intonations. For some reason, his latest sessions for Witmark
were mostly piano-based, yet I doubt that anybody will get more kicks out of
piano-driven versions of ʽMama You Been On My Mindʼ or ʽMr.
Tambourine Manʼ, since Bob's piano skills were quite rudimentary.
As for previously unavailable or rare /
bootlegged material, don't hold your breath: most of it consists of short,
highly derivative snippets that may only disappoint when set next to classic
material. Their main flaw is almost always the same — Bob is trying to sound
like somebody else rather than himself. ʽStanding On The Highwayʼ,
for instance, is an attempt at re-writing Robert Johnson's
ʽCrossroadsʼ that fails because Bob is not Robert Johnson. A whole
bunch sounds like Bob attempting to be Woody Guthrie (ʽGypsy Louʼ,
ʽGuess I'm Doing Fineʼ, etc.). And it also features what might
arguably be the man's worst ever
attempt at a protest song: ʽThe Death Of Emmett Tillʼ. Which is
really just ʽThe House Of The Rising Sunʼ with a new set of extremely
crude lyrics that couldn't even be called «manipulative» because they're so
ham-fisted. It did not take him too long to come up with better, sharper angles
for Hollis Brown and Hattie Carroll, but poor Emmett Till, as tragic and
disgusting as his story is, never really got his due here.
That said, there is hardly any sense in
severely criticizing this album. For historiographers and «deep fans», this
collection, grafted together in chronological order, is priceless anyway,
because the lack of selectiveness shows, first and foremost, the learning process — the album lets us in,
stage by stage, on the complicated job of becoming a successful singer-songwriter.
In the process, we gradually see Dylan «coming into his own» — moving away from
imitations and tributes and closer to finding his own voice. The big
breakthrough, of course, comes with ʽBlowin' In The Windʼ and
ʽHard Rainʼ — the great leap in quality that, amazingly enough, was
yet nowhere near in sight when John Hammond signed Bob to Columbia — but it's
not as if everything after that is a winner: inspiration still comes and goes,
and it is only by the time of the second CD that Bob begins putting down
masterpieces on a steady basis.
If seen from that point of view, The Witmark Demos is quite a unique
archival release, because not even Anthology
1 included such a big share of early rejected or donated material, and it
is quite bold of Bob to give the world easy access to his early jottings on
such a large scale — although, at this point, it probably wouldn't have hurt
his reputation if the next Bootleg Series were an entire album of Presley
covers with his high school band. But the uniqueness comes with a price: I
could only recommend this collection
to people seriously obsessed with the question of «what is Bob Dylan's genius
and where did it come from?». Additionally, young aspiring songwriters in need
of some sort of «textbook» might certainly have an interest here. Not that
Dylan himself had any «textbook» when learning to become a songwriter, but...
well, let's just admit that «the waters around us have grown», and way too many aspiring songwriters seem
to think that all it takes in this business is to write your own ʽDeath Of
Emmett Tillʼ, without even bothering to upgrade it to the level of
ʽBallad Of Hollis Brownʼ. So it doesn't hurt, every now and then, to
refresh one's memory of what it is that separates «craft» from «awesomeness».
THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 10: ANOTHER SELF PORTRAIT (1969-1970; 2012)
CD I: 1) Went To See The Gypsy;
2) Little Sadie; 3) Pretty Saro; 4) Alberta #3; 5) Spanish Is The Loving
Tongue; 6) Annie's Going To Sing Her Song; 7) Time Passes Slowly #1; 8) Only A
Hobo; 9) Minstrel Boy; 10) I Threw It All Away; 11) Railroad Bill; 12) Thirsty
Boots; 13) This Evening So Soon; 14) These Hands; 15) In Search Of Little
Sadie; 16) House Carpenter; 17) All The Tired Horses;
CD
II: 1) If Not For You; 2) Wallflower; 3) Wigwam; 4) Days Of '49; 5) Working On
A Guru; 6) Country Pie; 7) I'll Be Your Baby Tonight; 8) Highway 61 Revisited;
9) Copper Kettle; 10) Bring Me A Little Water; 11) Sign On The Window; 12)
Tattle O'Day; 13) If Dogs Run Free; 14) New Morning; 15) Went To See The Gypsy;
16) Belle Isle; 17) Time Passes Slowly #2; 18) When I Paint My Masterpiece.
The farther you go, the harder it gets to push
out new incarnations of «The Bootleg Series» that would not merely be of
historical interest, but actually worthy of Bob's general reputation and
enjoyable to the average ear without having to be preceded by a three-hour
lecture on how Bob Dylan changed the world in so many ways. The Witmark Demos was already something
like the equivalent of Vol. 25 of Leo Tolstoy's Collected Oeuvres, located so
far down the bookshelf that only professional philologists ever get there. But
with Vol. 10, the Bootleg Series
Team and their grumpy old endorser from Hibbing, Minnesota, have found an
unpredictable and exciting twist that clearly shows — «Dylan still got it» even
when it comes to digging around in forty-year old trash that most people would
have probably recycled a long time ago.
This, in fact, is nothing less than «Dylan's
revenge»: a double CD of demos, outtakes, and alternate cuts from his least
critically respected era — the year of Self
Portrait (which everybody hated) and New
Morning (which everybody could
have hated were it not for it being the follow-up to Self Portrait). Was the team crazy or something? Not in the least.
Even as the original terminator-style reviews of Self Portrait pretty much secured the album's encyclopaedic status
of «Dylan's lowest creative point», over the years, more and more people came
to realize that the record was really «not all that bad» — meaning, of course,
that it was pretty good, as long as you did not hold it up to the standards of
a Highway 61 Revisited. All one had
to do was wait — and Dylan waited just long enough. The timing could hardly be
better: with his string of derivative, non-revolutionary, but still modestly
brilliant artistic successes in the 1990s and 2000s he got fans and critics
alike to recognize and respect that «Dylan cannot always be great, but he can
be consistently good». And here comes a memo of the distant past — just admit
it, guys, I've always been at least
consistently good, even when you said I stunk. Just let it go. Drop a load.
You've always liked Self Portrait,
I'm sure, you were just too embarrassed to admit it.
To drive the final nail in the coffin of Self Portrait's musical-Frankenstein
legend, none other than Greil Marcus, the author of the original famous «what
is this shit?» review, is called in to repent and atone for his sins by writing
a new set of liner notes. Honestly, I have not even opened them — I am just
amused by the power that Bob Dylan has over people. Of course, he may have also
reiterated what other reviewers have said: many of them, so as to save face,
published glowing reviews along the lines of «Dylan was on such a creative roll
in 1970, really, it is a pity and a shame that his outtakes were actually so
much better than the official record. Yeah, truly and verily, the only thing
that is better than ʽCopper Kettleʼ and ʽBelle Isleʼ
without the orchestral overdubs is ʽDays Of '49ʼ without the rhythm
section!»
This is all rubbish, of course. Self Portrait was cool (including Bob's romantic takes on
ʽBlue Moonʼ and ʽLet It Be Meʼ, rather than excluding
them), and Another Self Portrait
simply adds to that coolness. If there is one thing that it adds to our
understanding of Dylan circa 1970, it is that the man was not merely driven by the desire to release
something «humble» and «epochally irrelevant» to get the Messiah-seekers off
his front porch — he really was
exploring various musical avenues and corners, even if that exploration so
often focused on material written and recorded by other people. It was all just
a part of the general plan to «get back to the roots» (which he shared with the
Beatles, the Byrds, and quite a few other people around the same time) and it
worked far more often than it did not.
Of those songs that have previously been
available only in real bootleg form,
most would have fit in well on Self
Portrait, although I do not feel like spending much spacetime discussing
them — mostly a mix of blues, folk, and country oldies and a few originals,
ranging from the stylishly romantic (ʽPretty Saroʼ) to the epic
western (ʽRailroad Billʼ) to the working man's song (ʽThese
Handsʼ) to even a satirical send-up of Jimmy Reed's classic style
(ʽWorking On A Guruʼ); only the cover of Eric Andersen's ʽThirsty
Bootsʼ, a stately song of consolation and repose, makes a humble swipe at
«classic» status, but somehow remains incomplete. Still, it is kinda fun to
imagine all of them, along with a few early versions that would later be
reworked for New Morning, making it
on to the regular Self Portrait and
turning it into a triple album. What
would Greil Marcus have said in 1970?
The most interesting stuff, actually, is not
the «naked» versions of songs that did make it to Self Portrait (I personally do not mind the strings and backing
harmonies on ʽCopper Kettleʼ at
all), but those early versions of New
Morning songs that are often completely dissimilar to their official
equivalents. ʽIf Dogs Run Freeʼ, in particular, is an actual song here rather than just a recital,
with a gospel chorus to boot; ʽNew Morningʼ itself is aggrandized
with a horn section, giving it a flashy «Stax» feel; ʽTime Passes
Slowlyʼ opens up in full-blast rocking mode, and ʽIf Not For
Youʼ features a retro-romantic, if not too well polished, violin part from
some wannabe Jascha Heifetz — I can see why Dylan ended up hating the idea, but
it was funny while it lasted. Collectively, these songs are very different in aim and scope from the
final «homebrewed», relatively minimalist product, and, as good as New Morning ended up anyway, it would
have been interesting to see it as this far more ambitiously conceived project;
the album would have no obvious equivalent in the rest of Bob's catalog.
Two of the songs also feature additional
numbers from Bob's 1969 Isle of Wight gig with The Band, but if you're lucky,
you might end up with the 3-CD deluxe edition whose bonus disc contains the
show captured in full. Since it was Bob's first official gig after a three-year
break (and would also be the last, an appearance at Harrison's Bangla Desh
concert excepted, for another four or five), everything is as crude as it
seemed on the official Self Portrait,
but not without its own period charms — this is where Bob would sing (for about
half of the show) in his «angelic» voice, putting a special spin on oldies like
ʽIt Ain't Me Babeʼ and ʽTo Ramonaʼ, butchering ʽI Pity
The Poor Immigrantʼ in the process, and, together with The Band, turning
his old rockers into rambling, half-drunk traveling minstrel show ballads. Not
a great show, but a fun experiment — and another live Dylan album that sounds
nothing like any other live Dylan albums. Plus, that Robbie Robertson guitar
solo on ʽQuinn The Eskimoʼ, cleaned up and remastered, has never
sounded more fiery and inspirational.
Happy to say that I have no qualms whatsoever
about giving this one a thumbs up — I, for one, have liked (and sometimes
even loved) Self Portrait since the
day I first heard it, and it is only natural to extend that liking to Another Self Portrait, since it sort of
lets you in much deeper on Dylan's general state of mind at the time.
KRLA KING OF THE WHEELS (1965)
1) Never To Be Forgotten; 2)
Another Sad And Lonely Night; 3) She's My Girl; 4) Take My Word; 5) Fool Of
Love; 6) Let Her Dance; 7) King Of The Wheels; 8) The Lonely Dragster; 9)
Little Annie Lou; 10) The Phantom Dragster; 11) Saturday Night; 12) KRLA Top
Eliminator.
Unless you were there and paid attention,
chances are that the only association
that the words «Bobby Fuller» could kick up from the depths of your conscience
should be "...I fought the law, and the LAW WON!", delivered in a
very British rather than American accent by Joe Strummer circa 1979. The song was a hit for Bobby Fuller, but it
wasn't even written by Bobby (credits go to Sonny Curtis of the Crickets), and
it may convey a very, very wrong idea of Bobby Fuller — namely, that the man
was some sort of long-forgotten proto-punk, anti-establishment hero, some kind
of a Marlon-Brando-meets-James-Dean-tags-Gene-Vincent phenomenon to which it
was only natural that Britain's greatest working-class-hero-band of the punk
movement pay tribute, or something like that. At least, it did convey that idea
to me, originally.
But nothing could be further from the truth. In
reality, Bobby Fuller was a nice, clean, well-meaning all-American lad from El
Paso, Texas, who, like so many others, caught the rock'n'roll bug from Elvis in
his early teens and then developed a passion for electric guitar-based
pop-rock. Without any «working class hero» ambitions whatsoever, he merely
wished to be the next Buddy Holly — and then, when The Beach Boys and then The
Beatles appeared on the scene, he also wished to be a Beach Boy and then a
Beatle, too. Is that too much for a simple Texan guy to ask God for — just to
be a Beach Boy and a Beatle at the same time?
Bobby's first recordings were made
independently as early as 1961, when he was only 19 years old. He recorded with
a revolving-door cast of personages, commonly dubbed as «The Bobby Fuller Four»
(even though there may have been periods with larger or smaller numbers), the
only other constant presence among which was his brother Randy Fuller on bass,
and eventually gained a little notoriety after teaming up with Bob Keane's
Del-Fi (later Mustang) Records. His first LP was, however, only released in
late 1965, after some of the singles began getting serious airplay and slowly
ascending up the charts.
Although some of these songs actually date from
earlier sessions (circa 1964), and some of the originals had been written even
earlier, it is quite clear already from the title that KRLA King Of The Wheels was, for the standards of late 1965, a
«nostalgic-conservative» record. Bobby hardly ever shies away from promoting his influences
on his sleeve, and the themes of the album are strictly limited to the classic surf-era
recipé — Girls and Cars, not necessarily in that order of preference.
And not the Girls of ʽGirlʼ fame or the Cars of ʽDrive My
Carʼ fame, either (to be accurate, Rubber
Soul had not yet been released, but it would probably have made no
difference if it were): the emotional / verbal content of the songs is all
about those stereotypical «teen sensations». The Beach Boys were no longer
writing songs about their little 409 or Little Deuce Coupe by the end of 1965,
but Bobby Fuller was, and he was not ashamed.
Whatever. If
you are a fan of innocent early-to-mid Sixties pop, there is no way that you
will not appreciate at least the first two songs on here — ʽNever To Be
Forgottenʼ is an Orbison-worthy little gem (although Bobby's vocals are
nowhere near as special), showing how well acquainted the man was with Phil
Spector's wall-of-sound technique, and ʽAnother Sad And Lonely Nightʼ
seems far more influenced by the Merseybeat scene: more Billy J. Kramer than
the Beatles, in that the sound is not very sharp and the hooks are not as
piercing, but still friendly and catchy enough for the "another sad and
lonely night, another sad and lonely day" hookline to get stuck in your
head for no apparent reason.
The band's
biggest success from this era was with ʽLet Her Danceʼ, a reworked
version of Bobby's earlier ʽKeep On Dancingʼ (a 1961 Buddy
Holly-style composition) that Keane obviously suggested redoing in the style of
the Beach Boys' «grand dance» numbers, most notably their recently released
upgrade of ʽDo You Want To Danceʼ. Echo on the guitars, echo on the
vocals, a bottle-tapping gimmick, heavy use of back vocals — reportedly, Bobby
hated the final version, yet it is ultimately more gripping than the original,
if only for the non-trivial vocal arrangements (the repetitive "let her
dance, let her dance, let her dance, dance, dance..." echoey response that
seems to bounce off the instruments in all directions). Almost shamelessly
«second-hand», but melodically distinct enough to act as a loving little
brother to ʽDo You Want To Danceʼ rather than just a useless rip-off.
Other cute
imitations include ʽShe's My Girlʼ (with a ʽHelp Me
Rhondaʼ-like key change from verse to chorus), ʽTake My Wordʼ
(with handclaps coming straight from the Beatles' ʽI'll Get Youʼ),
and ʽFool Of Loveʼ (also sounds as if the Beatles wrote this circa
1959 and donated it to anyone hungry enough to eat it up). The second side of
the LP, however, is almost completely dedicated to the «Cars» side of the business,
and since «Cars» are generally inferior to «Girls» as a major source of melodic
creativity, this is where Bobby falls way too often on direct borrowing
(stealing) — ʽKing Of The Wheelsʼ is really little more than a
slightly sped up version of ʽLittle Deuce Coupeʼ, and ʽThe
Phantom Dragsterʼ is merely an attempt to apply the Bo Diddley beat to the
same thematical subject, but can this really work? I mean, «car songs» are
supposed to bring on musical associations with car racing, and if I ever had to
car-race to a Bo Diddley beat, I'd probably be throwing up most of the way.
A few of the
songs on that side are instrumentals in the classic vein of The Ventures
(ʽThe Lonely Dragsterʼ, ʽKRLA Top Eliminatorʼ), which gives
you the chance to assess Bobby's skills as a guitar player — not bad at all
compared with his surf-rock competitors, fluent and expressive, but not enough
to push him over into the «greatness» range: the same bluesy chops had already
been brought over to a new level by the likes of Clapton, anyway.
Still, on the
strength of the simple-and-innocent pop hooks on Side A, the album as a whole
qualifies for a mild thumbs up, I think — though not high enough to
recommend anybody to search for the entire contents of this LP rather than head
straight for a best-of compilation: the fact is that Bobby Fuller simply did
not live long enough to show us whether he had a real album brewing inside his head or not.
I FOUGHT THE LAW (1966)
1) Let Her Dance; 2) Julie; 3)
A New Shade Of Blue; 4) Only When I Dream; 5) You Kiss Me; 6) Little Annie Lou;
7) I Fought The Law; 8) Another Sad And Lonely Night; 9) Saturday Night; 10)
Take My Word; 11) Fool Of Love; 12) Never To Be Forgotten.
ʽI Fought The Lawʼ is quite a cool
song, although it is a bit odd that the original version by the Crickets, with
Sonny Curtis on lead vocals, never managed to have even one dozenth of the impact
of the Bobby Fuller Four version, despite Bobby being quite reverential to the
original: talk about the power of accidence! Or maybe there simply was
something in the song that made it sound so much before its time in 1960, and
so well in line with the garage spirit of 1966. Not that it formally sounds
«garage-like»: the guitar sound is clean and jangly, reflecting the influence
of the Crickets filtered through Merseybeat standards. The message — this is, after all, the unrepentant confession of a
young derelict we're talking about — that's what mattered.
Honestly, I am not even sure if Bobby selected
it for the message: this is pretty much the only song in his catalog that could
be properly called «rebellious». Most likely, he just liked the vibe of the
original and chose to cover it as one of those quirky, catchy, but little-known
non-hits from the past that needed additional popularization. Who knew, back in
1966, that eventually The Clash would roll along a decade later to make it an
integral, well-fitting part of their usual pedigree? Who could, in fact, have
predicted that it would rise into the US Top Ten...? One of those amazing
little mysteries of life that makes exploring musical history so worthwhile.
The record label decided to quickly capitalize
on the success of the single by placing it on the band's second LP — the irony,
of course, being that the band had almost no new material, and thus, about half
of the record simply repeated the songs from the KRLA LP (I assume that the executives logically reasoned that,
since nobody bought that LP in the first place, there'd be no harm in trying to
introduce the population to those songs for a second time). Only four new songs
have been recorded, of which ʽJulieʼ is another upbeat, friendly
Buddy Holly imitation, while the others are rhythmic ballads more in the style
of Roy Orbison — not awful or anything, but nothing to write home about.
Funny enough, the songs from KRLA that do get repeated are restricted to love-themed pop rockers and
ballads — not a single car song is included, which, on the whole, makes I Fought The Law the ultimate Bobby
Fuller LP: ʽAnother Sad And Lonely Nightʼ, ʽLet Her Danceʼ,
and ʽI Fought The Lawʼ are
all here, and those ridiculous variations on the theme of ʽLittle Deuce
Coupeʼ are not. On the other hand, the selection does make ʽI Fought
The Lawʼ stick out like a sore thumb — nothing even begins to come close
to this song in terms of attitude, energy, «spiritual fire», if you will.
Since it would only take six months after the
success of ʽI Fought The Lawʼ for Bobby Fuller to have been found asphyxiated
in his mother's car (permanently cementing the legend, so to speak), we have no
idea of what direction he would have chosen; something tells me that, most
likely, he'd probably just fade away like so many others, but who needs
guesswork? Other songs recorded around that time have been since then made
available on various compilations, and none of the ones I have heard seem to
yield any more clues.
Additionally, Bobby's legend has so
uncomfortably outgrown his real importance that, among the faithful collectors,
almost every shred of his recording legacy from the early days has been
lovingly assembled and packaged on various archival releases (Bobby Fuller Tapes, El Paso Rock, etc.), with fans often
claiming that his earliest work is rawer, grittier, and more «sincere» than his
Mustang days. Perhaps so, but, judging by what little I have heard, there is no
need to hope for a miracle: it's not as if Bobby Fuller was a genius songwriter
or virtuoso guitar player in 1960. On the whole, his claim to fame can be
measured out in two or three real good singles, a dozen or so reasonably clever
facsimiles, and the most mysterious death of 1966. But then, it was all such a
good time that even a minor footnote like this has its own bit of value. You
just need to disentangle legend, hearsay, and false impression from facts —
sometimes not easy at all, given the existence of scenes like this, where the Bobby
Fuller Four were forced to lip-synch to a non-Bobby Fuller song next to Nancy
Sinatra in a performance worthy of Austin Powers. Oh yes, no need to deny that
the 1960s had their fair share of embarrassingly weird ways of earning a buck.
GREEN ONIONS (1962)
1) Green Onions; 2) Rinky-Dink;
3) I Got A Woman; 4) Mo' Onions; 5) Twist And Shout; 6) Behave Yourself; 7)
Stranger On The Shore; 8) Lonely Avenue; 9) One Who Really Loves You; 10) You
Can't Sit Down; 11) A Woman, A Lover, A Friend; 12) Comin' Home Baby.
Back in those early days, fully instrumental
albums were the norm for jazz performers — the much younger world of R&B
was still predominantly oriented at the «popular» market, so most of Atlantic's
classic hits in that style were driven by vocalists: a somewhat unfair deal, since
many of the employed musicians were first-rate pros and deserved a good piece
of the action themselves. No better way to prove this than by donating our full
attention to Booker T. & The M.G.'s, the Stax house band behind Wilson
Pickett, Otis Redding, and other Memphis greats that was seriously responsible for the appeal of their hits — except that
the popular ear in all these cases always tends to be attracted to the singer
first.
Like so many good things in the world, Green Onions came about by accident:
the band was loosely jamming in the studio, warming up for an upcoming session,
when they were overheard by Jim Stewart, president of Stax, who surreptitiously
recorded the results (ʽBehave Yourselfʼ) and proposed to put it out
as a single. For the B-side, the band wrote and recorded another instrumental
— upon hearing which, it was decided that the B-side should become the A-side,
and on that day, a piece of history was made.
Most serious instrumentalists of the day could
probably have laughed ʽGreen Onionsʼ off as a simplistic, repetitive,
primitive groove, seductive only for aspiring teenage guitar players (indeed,
most of the young British R'n'B-ers would cut their teeth learning how to play
ʽGreen Onionsʼ, and you can still hear The Who, for instance, digging
into it on some of their earliest bootlegs). Yes, but what a groove, though! If ʽLouie Louieʼ was the defining
«simplistically rebellious» groove of its era, then ʽGreen Onionsʼ
pretty much invented the «scary blues-rock groove» paradigm. The youngsters
didn't just like it because it was simple — they loved it because it sounded so
«dangerous» and so «cool» at the same time.
Booker T. himself, the 17-year old organ wiz
Booker T. Jones, that is, is unquestionably the star of the show, a complete
master of tone, timing, and «un-flashiness»: his lines seem fairly simple, but
there is a deep understanding of each played note behind them, whether he is
punching out the main rhythmic groove in perfect tandem with bassist Lewie
Steinberg or engaging in economic, razor-sharp solos that make their point as
coolly, leisurely, and deadly as Yul Brynner in one of his Westerns. However,
he has a perfect partner in guitarist Steve Cropper, who shares the same
aesthetics — «do not play too many notes, but make each one count», so that on
ʽGreen Onionsʼ, each chord he picks produces the effect of a
well-placed bullet. Complemented by the always reliable and metronomically
steady Al Jackson, Jr., on drums, in less than three minutes of playing time
Booker T. & The M.G.'s suddenly emerge as America's most badass bunch o'
sons o' bitches — especially for 1962, a year not particularly well known for
«badass» qualities, a year when instrumental recordings on the pop scene were
more associated with The Ventures (a great group, by no means, but «harmless
fun»-oriented next to these guys).
Knowing a little about the general context of
the times, we could easily predict that the sudden (if totally deserved)
commercial success of ʽGreen Onionsʼ, the single, would inevitably
lead to the appearance of Green Onions,
the LP, and that none of the tracks on that LP would come close to the
greatness of the single because they were not even supposed to — the LP was
just a matter of making more money, and would necessarily be rushed, and,
indeed, most of it consists not of original instrumentals, but of instrumental
covers of contemporary hits by Ray Charles, the Isley Brothers, Motown people,
etc. Apparently, the band just did not have enough time to come up with
melodies of their own — or, more likely, saw no need to come up with any
additional melodies, viewing, like most other people, the LP format as
filler-oriented by nature.
That said, the contemporary hits were good, and
the band to play them was good, and it does make aesthetic sense to hear Booker
T. use his Hammond M3 to substitute the vocal melodies of Uncle Ray or Mary
Wells — particularly if you dislike generic R&B lyrics, but also if you
just like a good hand and mind controlling a nicely tuned keyboard instrument.
While a few of the choices are admittedly silly (ʽRinky-Dinkʼ, going
neither for eeriness nor for excitement, more or less matches the seriousness
of its title), already on the third track, ʽI Got A Womanʼ, they show
that they can capture and put new sparkle on just about any classic — Booker T.
surrounds the original vocal notes with quirky additional flourishes to
compensate for the lack of human voice, Cropper adds a fussy, ecstatic guitar
solo, and the rhythm section totally puts to shame the players on Ray's
original version.
Stylistically, the album is quite diverse: they
cover a highly representative territory, from fast Ray Charles to slow, soulful
Ray Charles (ʽLonely Avenueʼ) to lively, life-asserting dance numbers
(ʽTwist And Shoutʼ) to lush Motown balladry (ʽOne Who Really
Loves Youʼ) to «easy listening» mood-setters (ʽStranger On The Shoreʼ).
None of these covers rise up to the challenge of the dark mystery of
ʽGreen Onionsʼ (not even their own «sequel», entitled ʽMo'
Onionsʼ and sounding like a less creepy variation on its elder brother),
but the album still has a very noble ending with their rendition of the Dave
Bailey Quintet's ʽComin' Home Babyʼ — again, totally made by the harmony
between Steinberg's bass and Booker T.'s organ that seems to drag us down into
some eerie sonic vortex at the end of each verse.
For those of us who can still appreciate «the
oldies» by detaching ourselves from our contemporary values, Green Onions, even as an LP, will be
enjoyable throughout — if only because people simply do not play that way any
more, and with the passing of that style, simple, direct, and deep, something
was irretrievably lost, no matter how many other things were gained. For those
who cannot, the record will sound boring and dated, but even then, at least the
basic primal punch of ʽGreen Onionsʼ, the song, would be hard to
deny. In any case, the album (and I do
stress — the album, not just the single) gets a reliable thumbs up from me, and a secret wish
that the band might have played on all the originals... then again, that would
hardly be fair to the singers, wouldn't it? Uncle Ray and Aunt Aretha were
probably these guys' only genuine competition that they wouldn't have blown off
the stage with their presence.
SOUL DRESSING (1965)
1) Soul Dressing; 2)
Tic-Tac-Toe; 3) Big Train; 4) Jellybread; 5) Aw' Mercy; 6) Outrage; 7) Night
Owl Walk; 8) Chinese Checkers; 9) Home Grown; 10) Mercy Mercy; 11) Plum Nellie;
12) Can't Be Still.
Unlike Green Onions, this one does not seriously pretend to be a genuine, much less «conceptual» LP — like so many others, it largely consists of a string of singles recorded by the band from 1963 to 1965, in the process of which they eventually lost original bass player Lewie Steinberg and replaced him with Donald ʽDuckʼ Dunn, thus completing the «classic» Stax lineup, responsible for so much of that mid-to-late 1960s Atlantic greatness. On the other hand, also unlike Green Onions, Soul Dressing largely consists of original compositions — with the exception of Don Covay's ʽMercy Mercyʼ, all the songs are now credited to the band members.
The question of originality does not exactly
disappear, since many of the compositions sound like variations on all too
familiar themes (ʽBig Trainʼ = Howlin' Wolf's ʽLittle
Babyʼ, to name but one), including some of their own
(ʽJellybreadʼ, for instance, recycles the main organ groove of
ʽGreen Onionsʼ once too many), but in any case, this is not a very
relevant issue for the boys, whose goal was never to push forward musical
boundaries in blinding flashes of
inspiration, but to make professional, reliable, cool-sounding mini-soundtracks
to stimulate the body without insulting the mind. To that end, Soul Dressing is just the right kind of
dressing, as would be many of its follow-ups.
And it's not as if there weren't lots of cute
minor touches that keep reminding us — these guys had, on the average, one
notch more of class than most competition. There's the tricky, confusing
percussion groove on ʽTic-Tac-Toeʼ, for instance, stuck somewhere in
between regular rock'n'roll and syncopated funk — and they also experiment with
fade-outs, bringing the tune back for an extra thirty seconds out of nowhere
even as you think it was over all too quickly. There's ʽChinese
Checkersʼ, whose main organ/guitar riff builds on the already mentioned
ʽMercy Mercyʼ, but competes for attention with Hugh Masekela-style
horns, and plays on the title by having somebody cue Booker T. for his electric
piano solo with a juicy "your move!"
And then there's ʽPlum Nellieʼ, where
they finally succeed in coming up with something just as gritty and threatening
as ʽGreen Onionsʼ, even if this time they have to abandon
«minimalism» and add a brash brass part to the recording, as well as have Steve
Cropper intersperse his concise riffage with more complex soloing techniques
(trills, ʽMisirlouʼ-style surf guitar passages, etc. — no feedback,
though: for all their experimentation, these guys were «clean» as a whistle). A
track as sharp and crisp as that could not be forgotten, and, in fact, the
Small Faces later covered it, probably out of reluctance to be good lads and
play the usual ʽGreen Onionsʼ like everybody else. Now those guys threw in quite a bit of juicy
feedback, though — throwing out the horns and probably wrecking a complete drum
kit in the process. Not sure if Booker T. would have appreciated that. Too
much ruckus and chaos.
Although some of the tracks could probably be
labelled as «filler» if we were in the mood for labelling, the M.G.'s in their
prime were always a delight to hear, and even if the basic grooves are often
similar, neither Booker T. nor Steve Cropper ever play the same solo twice;
also, proceedings are kept at a certain level of diversity, alternating
between strict blues, poppier blues, gospellier blues (by the way, on a random
note — Ray Manzarek's organ solo on ʽLight My Fireʼ owes quite a bit
to ʽSoul Dressingʼ, doesn't it?), and midnight jazz (ʽNight Owl
Walkʼ, which is all soft and hushed and premonition-filled, but just as
you succeed in getting lulled, they pull you out with a stop-and-start
punchline — the classic sense-baiter). All the goals here being fairly humble,
and all of them being met with the usual touch of class, I see no reason not to
give Soul Dressing a proper thumbs up
rating. At the very least, you simply won't
be getting this kind of guitar and organ solos on the absolute majority of
vocal R&B records of that time — reason enough to be interested in the
M.G.'s on their own terms.
AND NOW! (1966)
1) My Sweet Potato; 2)
Jericho; 3) No Matter What Shape; 4) One Mint Julep; 5) In The Midnight Hour;
6) Summertime; 7) Working In The Coal Mine; 8) Don't Mess Up A Good Thing; 9)
Think; 10) Taboo; 11) Soul Jam; 12) Sentimental Journey.
The band's first complete LP with
ʽDuckʼ Dunn handling bass duties, but in other respects, sort of a
step backwards, since once again, most of the tunes are covers, with but two
exceptions: ʽMy Sweet Potatoʼ, a showcase for Booker T.'s mastery of
the electric piano, and ʽSoul Jamʼ, featuring some cool guitar/organ
interplay taken at a reasonably fast tempo. Actually, ʽPotatoʼ is a
pretty damn fine tune that somehow combines the «sentimental strut» of
Atlantic's piano-based tunes (the opening bass melody is quite reminiscent of
ʽUnder The Boardwalkʼ) with the grittier sounds of the British
Invasion (some of the chords openly mimic ʽSatisfactionʼ), and should
not be overlooked because of its inadequately silly title.
Covers or no covers, though, at this point in
time, whenever the band gathered together in the studio they were «unstoppably
listenable», so that everything here is at least as nice, tasteful, and
professional as always. Every once in a while, though, there are some startling
surprises — I count at least three. First, as if to poke self-conscious fun at
their own self-plagiarizing, they take the old Clovers classic ʽOne Mint
Julepʼ and turn it into ʽGreen Onionsʼ, with yet another small
touch of ʽSatisfactionʼ serving as the mint leaf. Second, the old
"walls came tumbling down" bit of ʽJerichoʼ is perfectly rendered
on guitar and organ, whereupon the tune becomes an even more passionate «soul
jam» than ʽSoul Jamʼ itself.
Third and most importantly, there is a really
haunting, practically unique cover of ʽSummertimeʼ here, with Booker
T.'s organ scaling psychedelic heights of tone, milking the tune's deep mystical
potential for all its worth, while Cropper adds brief, ghostly, wailing
electric licks. Of all the non-jazz, non-vocal-centered versions of this
composition this one just might be the best, or at least one of the top
candidates — not to mention that it is probably one of the best places to
understand the totality of Booker T.'s symbiosis with his preferred instrument
(at about 0:48 he almost flies away into the realm of ultra-sound with the
melody).
That said, the problem remains that a lot of
the tunes they cover are melodically insufficient without vocals: ʽIn The
Midnight Hourʼ, for instance, was still fresh in everyone's memory as a
major hit for Wilson Pickett, and without Pickett, they are unable to make it
similarly exciting. Neither do they have the superb ability of an expert jazz
band to take an old standard and use it as a launchpad for exploring uncharted
territory — the short, concise tunes rarely stray off base, and honestly, I
have little interest in hearing ʽSentimental Journeyʼ diligently
played by-the-book, no matter how overall-good the Cropper/Jones sound may be.
Still, the presence of ʽJerichoʼ,
ʽMy Sweet Potatoʼ, and ʽSummertimeʼ is the necessary
catalyst to guarantee the record a modest thumbs up — these songs clearly indicate that the
band is not «coasting», but simply suffers from preset limitations of their
format, while at the same time retaining creativity and inspiration. Which is
hardly surprising, seeing how Stax and Atlantic in general were so nicely
adapting to the musical changes of the mid-Sixties, and entering their second
(third?) wave of artistic greatness, for which the skeletal team of Booker T.
& The M.G.'s was so heavily responsible when it came to supporting vocal
artists.
IN THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT (1966)
1) Jingle Bells; 2) Santa
Claus Is Coming To Town; 3) Winter Wonderland; 4) White Christmas; 5) The
Christmas Song; 6) Silver Bells; 7) Merry Christmas Baby; 8) Blue Christmas; 9)
Sweet Little Jesus; 10) Silent Night; 11) We Three Kings; 12) We Wish You A Merry
Christmas.
Okey-dokey. This is an album by Booker T. &
The M.G.'s, called In The Christmas
Spirit and containing twelve songs whose titles you could probably guess
even without looking at the track list. It was issued in time for the Christmas
season of 1966 on the Stax label. What else needs to be said? I'm at a loss for
words.
Actually, if you are on the lookout for a
purely instrumental Christmas album, so that you could have thirty-four minutes
of background accompaniment while you're doing your Christmas thang (not that
thirty-four minutes is such a long time, particularly if your table is well set
up), this would be a decent enough choice, I guess. At least we can tell that
Booker T. Jones respects his traditional holidays, and is able to transmit feelings
of joy, reverence, and even a bit of spiritual mysticism through his organ
playing, such as would be required from an understanding musician during the
Christmas season.
On second thought, we could also remark that
once the main theme of ʽJingle Bellsʼ gives way to the improvisatory
section, the song becomes a rather irreverent piece of Chuck Berry-stylized
rock'n'roll, with Cropper taking over Booker T. for a while and ruminating on
the possibilities of merging ʽJingle Bellsʼ with ʽMemphis Tennesseeʼ.
That's a good thing — a bit of experimental Christmas humour has never hurt
anybody — but it is somewhat regrettable that they did not apply the same
approach to everything else here. Pretty soon, it becomes obvious that
Cropper's guitar will consistently be relegated to an auxiliary function: Santa
Claus does not approve of too much rocking and rolling while being confined to
sleigh duty, but he does enjoy some solemn church organ, or at least an
electric simulation. One exception is a Chicago blues-style arrangement of
ʽMerry Christmas Babyʼ, where Steve gets to be B. B. King for a
little while, and which does not sound at
all Christmasy, but then what's wrong with adding some classic electric
blues to your Christmas experience?
That said, when it is Booker T.'s turn to have
a track completely focused on a solo organ performance, this is as close as
the album comes to emanating a bit of magic: ʽWe Three Kingsʼ, played
completely straight and stern, at a low, ghostly volume, becomes almost as
haunting as ʽSummertimeʼ from their previous album. Booker T. may
not have been a fantastic organ virtuoso, and his playing on the band's more
dynamic-aggressive numbers may seem unnecessarily restrained and too overtly
disciplined to generate top-level excitement, but he was a fine master of
subtle atmosphere, and it is a pity that the band's R&B format prevented
them from letting him explore that side of his personality more often. Here,
though, ʽWe Three Kingsʼ, together with the preceding ʽSweet
Little Jesus Boyʼ and ʽSilent Nightʼ, is like a concluding part
of a special atmospheric trilogy that, once you have had your fill of the
turkey or the pumpkin pie, initiates you into the mystery spirit of the
occasion. It's not amazingly amazing — reinventing these all-too familiar melodies
in some radically new way is a feat of which The M.G.'s would hardly be capable
— but it is touching and tasteful. Meaning that the record is not a complete waste of time, as much as the
rational mind would suggest that it couldn't be anything but.
HIP HUG-HER (1967)
1) Hip Hug-Her; 2) Soul
Sanction; 3) Get Ready; 4) More; 5) Double Or Nothing; 6) Carnaby St.; 7) Slim
Jenkins' Joint; 8) Pigmy; 9) Groovin'; 10) Booker's Notion; 11) Sunny.
Okay, we all know how much the British Invasion
affected the state of mind of young American people in the mid-Sixties and all,
but this is almost ridiculous — the finest combo in the history of classic
R&B, a quintessentially American genre, naming one of their tracks
ʽCarnaby St.ʼ? Writing an anthem to hip huggers, such a
quintessentially British (mod) thing? Putting out an album cover that screams "Eurofashion!" to
everyone who dares lay an eye on it? Where be The Moral Police, claiming that
only white people are supposed to be influenced by black people, shamelessly
stealing their culture away from them? What's up with this reverse
debauchery?..
Of course, now we remember that the influences
went back and forth in a million different directions, and (hopefully)
understand that there was no logical, ethical, or aesthetic reason why they
shouldn't have. In particular, the UK loved Booker T. & the MG's, and
Booker T. & the MG's loved the UK — in no particular order. Not madly loved, mind you — not enough to
have any songs by UK artists covered on this album, actually: The Temptations,
The Young Rascals, and Bobby Hebb are all as American as you can get. But
feeling sympathetic enough to borrow a whiff of «Euro-coolness» for their first
album of the post-Revolver, circa-Sgt. Pepper era.
ʽHip Hug-Herʼ (the song) restored
them to major commercial success for the first time since ʽGreen
Onionsʼ — and the song didn't even at all sound like ʽGreen
Onionsʼ: it was, indeed, the quintessential instrumental anthem of the young
smarmy «hip-hugger», opening with a coolly non-chalant «whistling» organ theme
and then transitioning into an expressive solo from Steve that managed to be
nasty and arrogant without being overtly aggressive. Swinging, not giving a
damn, full of life, self-consciously defying, oh, you can easily see how so
many people back in 1967 could easily identify with these sentiments. Even the
Doors later borrowed that swaggering rhythm track for their own
ʽChangelingʼ.
Unfortunately, nothing else on the album comes
close to matching that feeling. Even the brash title of ʽCarnaby St.ʼ
does not help mask the fact that it is in sore need of some vocal accompaniment
— its simple organ theme does not manage to be interesting on its own, and
Cropper's arpeggiated guitar lines show that he must have been interested in
folk-rock playing techniques (quite Byrdsy, really, rather than British), but
do not show him making any positive contribution to these techniques. They seem
more confident on old-school Ray Charlesian numbers like ʽBooker's Notionʼ
(some mighty powerful piano playing there), or on the organ blues of ʽSoul
Sanctionʼ, but neither of these compositions ranks among their finest
anyway.
There are at least two excellent cover
versions, though. Smokey Robinson's ʽGet Readyʼ has Booker T.
wringing out a rather unique tone out of his organ (or is that an electric
piano? it really sounds like something in between the two), so that the main
theme acquires a mystical, otherworldly flavor. And ʽSunnyʼ takes
the hook from Bobby Hebb's then-recent hit and cooks it up several different
ways — guitar-based slow tempo first, organ-based faster tempo next, with multiple
variations, tonal angles, and several different mini-moods that realize the
tragic potential of the tune perhaps even better than the original; quite
possibly, this early instrumental «promotion» may have helped in popularising
the song (at least for all those artists who'd be covering it in never-ending
waves in decades to come).
In the end, it all makes up for an assured thumbs up
— no bad tunes and a small handful of outstanding ones — but it does not make
up for a big artistic statement. Not that Booker T. and his band had one in
mind — with their services in constant demand, they were perfectly happy to be
the perfect sidemen in R&B's golden hour, without any significant
ambitions. ʽHip Hug-Herʼ is, after all, also really just a «trifle» —
although I can't help wondering how many more of such stylistically perfect
«trifles» these guys could have churned out if their goal-setting mechanisms
got attuned to this kind of thing.
BACK TO BACK (1967)
1) Green Onions; 2) Red Beans
And Rice; 3) Tic-Tac-Toe; 4) Hip Hug-Her; 5) Philly Dog; 6) Grab This Thing; 7)
Last Night; 8) Gimme Some Lovin'; 9) Booker Loo; 10) Outrage.
The Stax-Volt Revue circa 1967 was a pretty hot
affair, largely due to some of its megastars such as Otis Redding — popular
enough for the label to graciously allow even the instrumental backing bands to
leave behind some musical documentation. Technically, Back To Back is a split album between Booker T. & The M.G.'s
and The Mar-Keys. However, The Mar-Keys are featured only on three numbers out
of ten, and they are actually piled above the other band — being represented by
the horn section of Andrew Love, Wayne Jackson, and Joe Arnold who just play on
top of the Booker T. rhythm section, so essentially it's all Booker T., really.
As a document, it's okay: the bands play their
biggest hits, a few obscure tracks, and a bit of contemporary material (such
as ʽGimme Some Lovin'ʼ by the Spencer Davis Group). As something to
enjoy, it is certainly disappointing, particularly for the standards of 1967,
by which time pop bands who knew how
to stretch it out on stage were already beginning to be expected to stretch it
out all right. Granted, the world was only just warming up to the sounds of
Cream and Jimi Hendrix in March 1967, but there is not even the tiniest hint
here that a muscular R&B outfit could do something else on stage than just
faithfully reproduce its studio sound.
They do extend ʽGreen Onionsʼ for
about one minute, that is for sure, but merely to add a small, playful, quiet
pre-coda movement — nice, but nothing special. Everything else is similar, but
slightly inferior to the studio versions, as the band does not have the benefit
of choosing the perfect take or canceling out unnecessary noise (although, to
be fair, the sound quality is quite high, and the audiences at the Olympia
Theater are politely listening to the players without ripping stuff up — ain't
no hurly-burly Rolling Stones messing up the local morals here). The tempos are
sped up just a very tiny bit, so that it is really hard to say if they did it
to raise the excitement level or simply to cramp more tunes into the half-hour
slot allocated to them. Possibly the latter, since the entire performance is
also completely banter-free, bar a short introduction.
The three numbers where the M.G.'s and the
Mar-Keys play together are arguably the most exciting part of the show,
because the M.G.'s thrive on a «stern» attitude where the brass-crazy Mar-Keys
are a little more wild and eccentric, and it is fun to watch the two different
attitudes collide and collate for about ten minutes. Other than that, the
release is completely inessential, although it would probably make much more
sense as a brief instrumental interlude in a large multi-volume retrospective
of the Stax-Volt Revue (and, as far as I understand, something of the sort is
actually available, except all the individual performances have been cut short
on the collective Stax-Volt CD releases).
DOIN' OUR THING (1968)
1) I Can Dig It; 2) Expressway
(To Your Heart); 3) Doin' Our Thing; 4) You Don't Love Me; 5) Never My Love; 6)
The Exodus Song; 7) The Beat Goes On; 8) Ode To Billie Joe; 9) Blue On Green;
10) You Keep Me Hanging On; 11) Let's Go Get Stoned.
Okay, try as I might, it is really hard to get excited about
anything on here. For the first time, a Booker T. album does not accompany a
hit single — or a non-hit single — actually, there were no singles whatsoever
from this album, almost as if in recognition of the increased role of the LP in
popular life and culture. Unfortunately, the recognition does not translate to
the music-making: like before, the record consists of short instrumentals,
either made on the spot by the M.G.'s or interpreting other people's
achievements.
The covered material is kinda lame for 1968,
ranging from The Soul Survivors (a very pedantic organ recreation of the
melodic structure of ʽExpressway To Your Heartʼ) to Sonny & Cher
(a very pedantic organ recreation of the melodic structure of ʽThe Beat
Goes Onʼ). The major highlight is probably the tight, snappy, mean and
lean cover of ʽYou Don't Love Meʼ, a blues-rock tune whose overall
catchiness and conciseness was much appreciated at the time — of course, in a
matter of a couple of years all other versions would be rendered obsolete with
the Allman Brothers appropriating the tune, and Cropper's guitar solo here
looking like a student work next to the flashing duels of Duane Allman and
Dickey Betts.
Of the originals, one would expect the opening
track to be the most precious one, but in all actuality, ʽI Can Dig
Itʼ just sounds like a merry warm-up for better things to come — the tempo
is rousing, the organ and guitar solos are friendly, but hardly worth
memorizing on their own. Too bad that the better things never really come: all
over the place, it seems like the band is going through the motions, or perhaps
just stupidly sticks to the old guns in defiance of all the wonderful musical
progress going on in 1968.
In the end, the only positive effect the album
had on me was to remind me that ʽLet's Go Get Stonedʼ, when you take
Ray Charles and/or Joe Cocker out of it, is simply ʽNobody Loves You When
You're Down And Outʼ — not such a big surprise, but you do keep forgetting
how easy it is for a song to completely change face with just a «motivation
shift». Other than that, this is just Booker T. & the M.G.'s «doin' their
thing» and not giving a damn about anything else. As usual, it all sounds cool,
but already sort of «retro-cool» by the standards of 1968.
SOUL LIMBO (1968)
1) Be Young, Be Foolish, Be
Happy; 2) La La Means I Love You; 3) Hang 'Em High; 4) Willow Weep For Me; 5)
Over Easy; 6) Soul Limbo; 7) Eleanor Rigby; 8) Heads Or Tails; 9) (Sweet, Sweet
Baby) Since You've Been Gone; 10) Born Under A Bad Sign; 11) Foxy Lady.
I have no idea if this was in any way connected
with the separation of the Stax label from Atlantic Records, but Soul Limbo is the first record in ages on which Booker T. & The
M.G.'s show at least a few signs of wanting to «keep up with the times», as
they cover such «daring» material as ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ (already two
years old at the time, but certainly more «relevant» than any song called
ʽLa La Means I Love Youʼ) and Jimi's ʽFoxy Ladyʼ
(supposedly, that's one out there on the front cover, as the four M.G.'s
calculate various competitive scenarios while staring at her assets). Although Soul Limbo is still uneven and its
existence not completely justified, there is some life here, and some justification for the continuing
presence of Booker T. Jones in a world where the electric organ as a musical
instrument would soon rather be associated with white progressive rock artists
than black soulsters and R&B'ers.
First and foremost, I really like this
ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ cover — at the very least, it makes much more sense
than Aretha's version, which left little of the original and replaced it with
something rather incomprehensible. Here, the strings are replaced with a steady
beat, and the vocal part is being played on an organ heavily loaded with a
tremolo effect, so that it sounds suitably psychedelic and weepy at the same
time, adding a pinch of deep dark mystery to what used to be a devastatingly
sad, but ultimately «light» arrangement. Throw in some variations on the basic
theme, a few technically challenging flourishes, and you get an adventurous and
challenging homage to a great composition that re-channels, rather than loses,
the spirit of the original.
It does not work nearly as well with ʽFoxy
Ladyʼ, and on the whole, surprising as it may seem, Booker T. does a
better job with the Beatles than with Jimi — most likely because the Beatles
are not a band oriented at any single instrument, and while hearing Booker T.'s
organ play the role of Paul McCartney's pipes is amusing, listening to him
imitating Hendrix's guitar is rather a disappointment; even more of a
disappointment is hearing Steve Cropper actually play a guitar on that track — with all due respect to Cropper, he
ain't Jimi, nor does he have any non-Jimi musical vision that would be
comparable in scope. Still, it is curious to see them try, and it may be instructive
to see how close in texture their result is to the preceding ʽBorn Under A
Bad Signʼ — just so we all remember how deeply himself Jimi was rooted in
the blues.
There are a few other highlights here as well,
equally unpredictable — for instance, the spaghetti-western theme from the
Clint Eastwood movie ʽHang 'Em Highʼ where Booker T. does an admirable
job transferring the theme's pseudo-Morricone-like «heroic» orchestral hook
onto the organ, so much so that I think I like the band's version more; or
Aretha's ʽSince You've Been Goneʼ, where the organ almost jumps out
of its case to recreate or replace all the nuances and overtones of the human
(or, more correctly, the superhuman — we're talking Aretha here) voice. On the
other hand, the band's originals suffer in comparison: the title track is a
light-headed Caribbean romp with too much percussion and too little depth, and
ʽOver Easyʼ is an overlong jazzy jam where our main hero fussily
fumbles on the piano without much focus.
Ultimately I would probably select ʽHang
'Em Highʼ, ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ and possibly ʽSince You've Been
Goneʼ as honorable mentions, well fit for inclusion on any representative
anthology, and disregard the rest of the tracks — admitting, at the same time,
that with Soul Limbo, our Silent
Heroes of the Golden Age of R&B make a brave, if not wholly successful,
attempt to prolong that Golden Age by intelligently adapting to changing
fashions.
UP TIGHT (1969)
1) Johnny, I Love You; 2)
Cleveland Now; 3) Children Don't Get Weary; 4) Tank's Lament; 5) Blues In The
Gutter; 6) We've Got Johnny Wells; 7) Down At Ralph's Joint; 8) Deadwood Dick;
9) Run Tank Run; 10) Time Is Tight.
Jules Dassin was a great director, but Up Tight! is one of his movies that I
have not yet seen; since it was essentially a remake of an earlier John Ford
movie, transposed on Afro-American territory, it usually does not figure among
his greatest successes — but one of the important things about it is that he
hired Booker T. & The M.G.'s to provide the soundtrack, and that, in turn,
led to the band doing something a little bit different from the usual schtick.
Even if the soundtrack to Up Tight
is not their best album (and what is?), at least it is a major departure from
the established formula, and it helped the boys make the transition into the
«artistically responsible» late 1960s and early 1970s much more efficiently
than the half-hearted forays into «modern rock» on Soul Limbo the year before.
The ten tracks on the soundtrack are, on the
average, a little bit longer than before, and much less oriented at simply
providing a groovy soundtrack for your dancing day. The difference is felt
immediately, as the opening track ʽJohnny, I Love Youʼ is a piano-led
blues ballad with vocals: Booker T.
himself performs the duties, and does it quite nicely — a pat on the back from
Smokey Robinson would not be out of order, and you even get to wonder why the
hell they never tried that earlier. The iron fist of Stax? Humility and
shyness? The idea that, as a vocal band, they would be just «one of many», but
as an instrumental band, they had their own niche to keep? Fun questions to
mull over, even if, apart from the vocals, the song is nothing special.
Another vocal track that is very hard to
associate with Booker T., is Frank Williams' gospel anthem ʽChildren
Don't Get Wearyʼ, brilliantly done by 30-year old Judy Clay (I suppose
getting Mahalia Jackson would have ruined the budget). Of note is the keyboard
arrangement — the organ does not enter until midway through the song, then
quickly rises to ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ heights, eventually
stopping just short of completely overwhelming Clay's vocals right before the
fade-out. A strange thing about the track is its decidedly «lo-fi» feel
compared to the rest; quite possibly, the band and the production team were
aiming for a «retro», quasi-pre-war feel, which is probably not the wisest
decision — the Judy Clay/Booker T. duet is so excellently put together that it
deserved the grandest and highest in production value.
Other than that track, everything here is
self-composed — and more often than not inspired. Plenty of interesting piano
work all over the place, with even «minor» pieces like ʽTank's Lamentʼ
and ʽRun Tank Runʼ («Tank» is the name of the protagonist in the
movie, not a prophetic vision of Tarkus)
featuring cute simplistic piano riffs and haunting organ solos. And the second
part of the set is like a brief exploration of musical genres — lounge blues
(ʽBlues In The Gutterʼ), hard rock (ʽWe've Got Johnny
Wellsʼ, which takes the riff of ʽYou Really Got Meʼ as its base
and builds up a set of organ variations from there), blues-based pop (the lively
ʽDown At Ralph's Jointʼ), country/carnival waltz (ʽDeadwood
Dickʼ), and, finally, the band's own — groove-based R&B: ʽTime Is
Tightʼ, borrowing the merry theme from Otis Redding's ʽI Can't Turn
You Looseʼ, became one of the band's biggest commercial successes since
the days of ʽGreen Onionsʼ and ʽHip Hug-Herʼ (note: the
album version is seriously extended, compared with the single, mainly because
of moody organ intro and outro sections).
All in all, it's not as if there were any
particularly breathtaking or cathartic moments on the record, but it is
unquestionably a serious attempt at «doing» something rather than just putting
out one more album because that's what professional album-outputters put out.
Cool-sounding, diverse, and mildly «progressive», it gets a thumbs up
from me with no reservations whatsoever. Well, maybe just one: I'd like to hear
a little more Steve Cropper — not because I'm a white supremacist or anything,
but because it almost feels as if he
was not being offered a fair chance here. Then again, if it really was Booker T. who wrote all these
compositions, I guess it is only natural that he had this sort of advantage.
Then again, we'll probably never know for sure.
THE BOOKER T. SET (1969)
1) Love Child; 2) The Horse;
3) Sing A Simple Song; 4) Lady Madonna; 5) This Guy's In Love With You; 6) Mrs.
Robinson; 7) Michelle; 8) Light My Fire; 9) You're All I Need To Get By; 10)
I've Never Found A Girl; 11) It's Your Thing.
Back to basics again — as if the creative
shot-up of Up Tight was just a
fluke, here we have the band reverting once more to the tried and true, with
another mish-mash of covers, some of which were already fairly dust-covered by
1969 (ʽMichelleʼ? That's, like, so passé!), but most actually
reflect a more representative-diagnostic approach to the charts than ever. We
have American artists, British artists, funk, soul, R&B, Motown, folk-pop,
even a little bit of musical darkness as they tackle The Doors — here is a band
that seems to have finally got hip with the times, even if a spirited take on
ʽDazed And Confusedʼ wouldn't have hurt to complete the picture.
Few, if any, of these covers raise much
excitement, though, and the blame lies primarily with Booker: for some reason —
my best guess is that he just didn't really want to do this schtick any more,
and was simply obeying the wheel of fate — anyway, for one reason or another
his organ playing is really «limp». He never loses the thread, but that's about
all he does: the cover of ʽLight My Fireʼ only goes on for four minutes
(much shorter than the original LP version), but it seems like an eternity,
because the organ just drags and drags and drags, repeating the same
verse-chorus melody of the song several times in a row with only minor
variations, in a very mechanistic manner and at a very low volume level. One
wonders why they have not actually retitled the song ʽFuneral Pyreʼ.
Pretty much the same impressions accompany
everything else. Yes, the main melodies of ʽMrs. Robinsonʼ,
ʽMichelleʼ, and ʽLady Madonnaʼ are catchy, emotional,
nerve-hitting nuggets that make you experience sorrow, tenderness, and
amusement even in these incarnations — never let it be said that Booker T. does
not instinctively feel which chords are the most important in capturing a
song's heart and soul. But everything is played so low-key, so «lethargically»,
that you have no idea what's going on, really. Is it just a sign that they
don't really care? Is it an intellectual statement — «these songs are flashy,
but we can make them meditative»? Is it just a technical failure? Or are the
songs just so good that it is
literally impossible for an instrumental R&B band to offer an engaging
instrumental take on them, no matter how hard they try?
The best track is ʽThe Horseʼ, a
cover of the solitary instrumental hit by Cliff Nobles & Co. in which the
heraldic horns that originally made the song into what it was are substituted
for the organ. With a much tighter rhythm section, a galloping tempo, and even
a rare bass solo from Duck Dunn, it is one of the few tracks on the album that
does not come across as soporific. But when they try to break into funk (Sly
Stone's ʽSing A Simple Songʼ), the results are even less promising
than with the white guy songs: Booker T. & The M.G.'s are not a funk band, they are a calm,
calculating, oh-so-mid-tempo blues-rock / R&B team, and they never let
excitement get too much to their heads. At best, they can milk the funk
approach for a little musical humor (ʽIt's Your Thingʼ), but that's
about it.
In the end, The Booker T. Set gets by simply because of its strong selection of
source material: with all these classic songs and all these professional and
deep-feeling musicians, and being recorded in an era when actual playing chops
still mattered, the record could not be downright «bad» even if they
sleepwalked through it (which they more or less did). It's just that the performances
instinctively remind me of the not-yet-born Average White Band, and it is a
rather uncanny comparison when you have the Above-Average Black & White
Band on the other end of the scale. And oh yes, once again Steve Cropper is
dreadfully underused throughout. I mean, couldn't they have at least given him
a solo spot on ʽLight My Fireʼ? Surely he could have shown Robby Krieger
a trick or two of his own.
McLEMORE AVENUE (1970)
1) Golden Slumbers / Carry
That Weight / The End / Here Comes The Sun / Come Together; 2) Something; 3)
Because / You Never Give Me Your Money; 4) Sun King / Mean Mr. Mustard /
Polythene Pam / She Came In Through The Bathroom Window / I Want You (She's So
Heavy).
There are good records and bad records,
exciting records and boring records, «straight» records and «freakout» records,
and then there's McLemore Avenue — a
record whose only purpose is to stress the greatness of a different record. In a «where-did-that-idea-come-from?» fit of bizarre brain impulse attack, Booker
T. puts together what must have been the first authentic case of musical
cosplay in pop/rock history, and I do mean the visuals as well, because one
look at the album cover shows that this is one album that couldn't have
appeared on store shelves prior to 1970 (or, at least, very very late 1969).
It is cozy for me to know that, of all Beatles
albums, it was Abbey Road that
struck Booker T. as such an otherworldly experience that he fell into a «must
cover Abbey Road!» sort of trance,
because it is totally in line with my own perception of Abbey Road. However, it is also obvious that the man could hardly
hold any false hopes of improving
upon the tunes by covering them, or even of uncovering any hidden potential of
the songs that was not already revealed (immediately or gradually) on the
original LP. The only rational
purpose of putting out a record like this would be to get people to say to each
other: «Say, that Abbey Road must be
really special, eh? I mean, did you ever hear
of any American band covering any Brit band record in its entirety? Should be
real good if people worship it that
much!» Plus, there may be irrational purposes at work, but we're not gonna talk
about those.
Recreation of the songs was not achieved in a
«carbon copy» manner. First, as if to over-stress the importance of Abbey Road's «medley principle», almost
all of the tunes here are arranged in medleys, with ʽI Want Youʼ
stuck as a long spasmodic tail to the end of ʽShe Came In Through...ʼ
and ʽHere Comes The Sunʼ glued with ʽCome Togetherʼ either
because they both have the verb «come» in the title or because, for some reason,
Booker thought that such a sequencing would be «natural» (I am not at all
sure). Second, not all of the songs are covered — actually, Booker shortchanges
not only Ringo (with the lack of ʽOctopus' Gardenʼ, which is
understandable, if not very forgivable), but also Paul, omitting both
ʽMaxwell's Silver Hammerʼ (which he may have thought too juvenile)
and ʽOh Darlingʼ (which is really hard to explain, considering that
ʽOh Darlingʼ was easily the
most R&B-ish song on the album, heavily influenced by the Louisiana sound —
then again, maybe it was that very closeness that prompted Booker to reject
it).
Nor are the remaining songs done all that close
to the originals, either. Plenty of variations are introduced, what with
ʽHere Comes The Sunʼ largely redone as a jazz number and with the
instrumental break in ʽSomethingʼ replaced with a surprisingly
aggressive blues-rock jam section as Cropper breaks out the deck of nasty
swamp-blues slide licks. And, of course, as Booker T. loyally continues the tradition
of imitating vocal melodies with his organ, you will note that some stuff works
better than other — for instance, the opening religiously-solemn lead part on
ʽGolden Slumbersʼ is fabulous, but as they make the transition into
ʽCarry That Weightʼ, the same subdued tone fails to clearly mark the
contrast between the «lullaby» and the «work chorus» parts of the medley. But
then, is there any use in such dissection, when McLemore Avenue was never meant to be treated as a number of
distinct parts in the first place?
It is quite probable that, provided you have
not heard of this album before, you will
be tempted into hearing it at least once, at least out of sheer curiosity — and
that one listen it certainly deserves, because, after all, there is no way
that the leading instrumental R&B outfit of its time would be covering the
leading rock band of its time without the results being at least somewhat
entertaining. The problem is, it is impossible to judge McLemore Avenue on its own merits or by its own standards — and as
much as I can respect all the solos that Booker T. and Steve Cropper are
playing here, every time they're on, I'm like «God, it's so cool the Beatles
didn't use this chord sequence in
1969!» Even on ʽI Want Youʼ, where you'd think there'd be a good
chance of Cropper blowing John Lennon's lead guitar out of the water... well,
no, he doesn't. Why? Not his song.
Not his idea. Not that kind of guy. It's just a Booker T.
thing, you know. A hunch, and everybody had to follow up on it.
I'd like to give this one a thumbs up, just
because of the awesome craziness of the idea, but I cannot. It's a curio — certainly
more memorable because of the idea itself rather than its actual execution. It
certainly isn't executed any worse than any other Booker T. album: it's just
that this time around, they set themselves an unbeatable standard, and, uh,
they didn't beat it. Then again, I'd guess we'd rather have them select Abbey Road and be left beaten by it
than have them select, say, The Archies,
and beat it.
MELTING POT (1971)
1) Melting Pot; 2) Back Home;
3) Chicken Pox; 4) Fuquawi; 5) Kinda Easy Like; 6) Hi Ride; 7) L.A. Jazz Song;
8) Sunny Monday.
For those who doubted if Booker T. & The
M.G.'s could make a credible and efficient transition to the sound of the
Seventies — here is your answer. The issue is not whether Melting Pot is or is not the band's «best album», as is often
claimed. The issue is that, with those new funky sounds on the rise, the
Seventies gave us the last wave of great Afro-American instrumental music, before
electronics and sampling swooped it all away, and as it often happens in
between waves, not everybody riding one could easily hop on to the next one. The
M.G.'s could — even if one could say, in light of the consequences, that the
leap ultimately broke their back.
Following McLemore
Avenue, the band grew dissatisfied with the conservatism of Stax and
relocated to New York City in order to record their next album — where, as
Booker T. was convinced, things were really happening at the time. Keeping in
mind that Soul Dressing was really a
collection of scattered singles, and that Up
Tight was really a movie soundtrack, Melting
Pot may claim the distinction of being the really first M.G.'s album to be conceived as an album, with all
original compositions — not to mention that two of the compositions go over
eight minutes, which was perfectly alright for an autonomous, self-sufficient
funk outfit, but certainly out of the ordinary for a band that used to make a
living by covering hit singles of the day.
The difference is immediately felt in the title
track, opening with a bona fide funk groove — syncopated bass, scratch guitar,
the works — and yet, at the heart of the track we still find the same old
melodicity, characteristic of Booker T., as he and Cropper lay on several
melodic solos. Steve's part is quite traditionally bluesy, Booker T.'s is
traditionally jazzy, but the funky groove provokes them into action, so the
playing is a little more «red hot» than usual. The usual «grimness» of the
music that originally made them their name is still fully retained, though —
this is a dark, brooding take on funk, a stimulus for «brain-dancing» rather
than «body-dancing».
The second large track, ʽKinda Easy
Likeʼ, is a little more gimmicky and a little less sensible. First, it
starts off totally in ʽGreen Onionsʼ mode — not a good sign for a
band whose purpose here is to clearly put some miles between this and their
past. Second, several minutes into the track they add some semi-scat,
semi-doo-wop vocalizing from «The Pepper Singers», a move whose purpose I fail
to comprehend. Imagine a ʽGreen Onionsʼ with some girls going
"doo-dah-doo-dah-day!" all over the place. Kinda spoils the fun by
trying to add up to it, doesn't it?
Fortunately, the short tracks more than
compensate for one strange misgiving. The one that is probably going to stick
forever is ʽFuquawiʼ, because the organ riff is of the ʽIron
Manʼ variety — you'll be whistling it for days, cursing yourself for being
so easily impressionable, but in reality just falling for a standard trick that
your wired brain plays on you. The good news is that on top of that «nursery»
riff, the band honestly builds up a good groove, and Cropper plays some mean,
stinging guitar. It's the coolest, sweatiest strut they ever took since the
days of ʽHip Hug-Herʼ, a mean mother-huggin' sound that manages to
make them sound more «nasty» (in line with the general tendency) without using
any specifically «nasty» effects.
In terms of funkiness, do not miss out on
ʽChicken Poxʼ, with a monster bass riff from Dunn and an amusing
guitar-organ dialog, and on ʽL. A. Jazz Songʼ, where the Pepper
Singers' vocals sound much more natural, as the tune itself sort of follows the
formula of the typical blacksploitation movie soundtrack — seriously rhythmic,
moderately fast, extremely tense, and perhaps ever so slightly «apocalyptic»,
all of which is only natural if we want associations with strenuous life
conditions of the underprivileged population on the streets of American big
cities. The doubled guitar-organ riff of the tune is particularly effective in
its «hit-and-run» delivery.
But the album still ends on a lighter note — I
think that the title of ʽSunny Mondayʼ was deliberately chosen to
contrast with the well-known ʽStormy Mondayʼ; it is probably the
first song in the band's catalog to open with an acoustic guitar part (and the
chord sequences, by the way, show a clear influence on the part of the recently
covered ʽHere Comes The Sunʼ), and one of the very few to feature
some romantic orchestration towards the end. Ultimately, everything's well,
they tell us, even if this transition to a harsher, funkier sound may
originally give the impression that life has become more gloomy, gritty,
whatever. Hmm, guess the same could be said about Sticky Fingers, if you remember the opening and the closing tracks on that album. A scary thing, that
associative power of the brain's.
Ironically, this album, so very different from
the «classic» M.G.'s sound, was to become their last one before the original
split, after which the band was never the same again — their own Abbey Road, in a hilarious twist of
fate in which their «proper» Abbey Road
(McLemore Avenue) was really their
confused Let It Be, and this here
was when they regrouped, cleared their heads, and pointed the way to the
future. On the grand scale of things, Melting
Pot ain't no masterpiece (not in the era of Bitches Brew it ain't), but by the self-imposed «humble» standards
of these guys, it blows them right through the roof, and deserves a thumbs up
like no other.
THE M.G.'s (1973)
1) Sugar Cane; 2) Neck Bone;
3) Spare Change; 4) Leaving The Past; 5) Left Overs (Bucaramanga); 6) Black
Side; 7) One Of A Kind (Love Affair); 8) Frustration.
Yes, technically this album belongs in its own
section or at least in the «special addenda» corner, but we will make a
logistic exception and treat it as a regular part of the discography just for
the sake of continuity. Not long after the release of Melting Pot, the two main creative guys in the band — Booker T.
himself and Steve Cropper — ever more unhappy about being tied up by the new
rules at Stax, decided to break the chain and move on to an uncertain, but
seemingly more exciting (as it looked to them at the time) future.
The rhythm section, however, as is often the
case with rhythm sections around the world, felt that the name of «M.G.'s» was
everything they had left in this world, and ultimately they decided to stick to
it. After a few tentative detours, Dunn and Jackson teamed up with Stax session
guitarist Bobby Manuel and newly-emerged organ sensation Carson Whitsett — and
now that once again there were four of them, they thought it sensible to just
lop off the «Booker T.» part and bill themselves as «The M.G.'s» for their next
record.
Now obviously, one's first basic instinct would
be to dismiss the album without giving it a chance: after all, as reliable as
the band's rhythm section had always been, most
of the time we were really coming back to their tunes in order to hear some
classic guitar/organ interplay. And indeed, when you listen to The M.G.'s right after Melting Pot, the initial feeling is
almost guaranteed to be underwhelming. The funky backbone is all but gone, not
a single song is as catchy as ʽFuquawiʼ, and the whole album seems to
be very low-key, almost begging you to accept it as unremarkable background
music while you're busy doing your typical 1973-style chores.
However, it is also immediately noticeable that
the new band is trying — not merely
coasting on the strength of their reputation. Most of the compositions are
self-written (with just a couple taken from rather obscure sources), the
arrangements and moods are relatively diverse, and there are some relatively
long and complex tunes that show a mildly «progressive» spirit. This alone
should guarantee a few extra listens, and eventually you might come to realize
that the record is not all bad — its biggest disadvantage, perhaps, is that it
is really so quiet. Unlike Booker T.
and Cropper, the new guitarist and organist sometimes give the odd impression
of competing in who of the two can «out-hush» the other one. Yet they are doing
it in good taste.
Perhaps the single finest example of this
competition comes on the seven-minute long ʽLeaving The Pastʼ,
largely an acoustic number with several sections that smoothly flow from simple
folk to more «baroque» textures, then eventually make the transition into jazzy
and then bluesy territory. Everything is done so quietly that your attention
may easily drift away, and yet it is probably the single most complex composition up that was up to that point
credited to the name of The M.G.'s. And it is quite likeable — the first half
being elegantly romantic and the second more self-consciously «cool», as
Manuel's acoustic guitar really roots all of these parts in the «past» (no
clear signs of anybody «leaving» it, though). Nobody is going to remember it
all that much, no, but accidentally falling upon it somewhere in your
collection can trigger some good emotions every once in a while.
Most of the other tracks, while technically
«louder», are just as inobtrusive. Typically, they will feature a soft,
tasteful, friendly organ melody from Whitsett (ʽSugar Caneʼ,
ʽOne Of A Kindʼ), set to a funky rhythm pattern that is so frail and
delicate, hearing this kind of take on funk would be like watching Audrey
Hepburn in a boxing ring — well, maybe not as gimmicky, but a pretty solid
analogy all the same. Very rarely the
music packs a bit more muscle, when Al Jackson agrees to pummel rather than
caress his skins and Whitsett includes some bombastic honky-tonk piano playing
(ʽSpare Changeʼ), or when Duck Dunn decides to play a «threatening»
bass line (ʽLeft Oversʼ), but even a track called
ʽFrustrationʼ, where you could theoretically expect them to
auto-destruct their equipment in the studio or something, is really just one
more low-key piece of clean, soft, smooth fusion with perhaps a tiny pinch of
psychedelia, provided by the trebley guitar tone and a mind-manipulative
overdub strategy.
But give this stuff time, and The M.G.'s might just turn out to be
one of those barely noticeable, non-flashy, self-reserved albums that show how
good music can be made without pulling
rock'n'roll faces — all the more amusing that it was released at the height of
the glam era, when Keith Emerson and Mick Ronson ruled the day and hiding in
the shadow to play your instrument was a surefire commercial suicide. And, of
course, The M.G.'s was a commercial suicide — none of its
singles charted, much less the album itself. It still got some good reviews,
though, and continues to be warmly treated even today, but you do have to warm up to it. An outstanding
non-triumph of being utterly non-outstanding, it deserves all the thumbs up
it can get without getting your hands out of your trouser pockets.
UNION EXTENDED (1976)
1) Overton Park Sunrise; 2)
Steve's Stroll; 3) Duck Walk; 4) Cotton Carnival; 5) Midnight On McLemore; 6)
Union Extended; 7) Avalon; 8) Around Orange Mound; 9) National Jackson; 10)
Beale Street Revival; 11) Saucy Pt. 2; 12) Booker's Theme.
Only nine days after Booker T. and the M.G.'s
finally came together and agreed to give their romance one more chance, Al
Jackson Jr. was murdered in his own home. Plans for a new album were
temporarily scratched, but relationships between Booker T. and the remaining
members of the band were somewhat remedied, and, as tribute to the dear
departed, Stax put out this record of previously unreleased archive material —
with a title that was thrice
misleading: not only did Union Extended
contain no new recordings, but it wasn't even prophetic, since the extended
union only lasted for less than two years, and
the union had nothing to do with Stax.
Nevertheless, this here is a fine enough
gathering of leftovers. It has never been issued on CD and is rather hard to
come by in physical form these days, and the exact dates for the recordings are
unknown, but judging by the overall stylistics and instrumentation, I'd
probably put them around 1968-70. All the tracks are original instrumental
compositions by the M.G.'s and are no better and no worse than their regular
stuff — and commenting on them individually, for that reason, is tremendously
hard, but here goes a feeble attempt.
ʽOverton Park Sunriseʼ is a fairly
good title, since Jones and Cropper's playing on the track sounds «fresh»,
particularly Jones' «water-droplet» organ tone that sometimes throws on the
hook from ʽSunnyʼ and Cropper's sunshine-poppy guitar riff — a dang
good song to start off your day with if you're in need of a quick, painless
shot of optimism. ʽCotton Carnivalʼ begins by sounding like
ʽBorn Under A Bad Signʼ transposed to a major tonality, then, all of
a sudden, shifts half of its riff to a quotation from ʽSunshine Of Your
Loveʼ in the coda section — funny, and easy to miss, but it's there all
right. ʽMidnight On McLemoreʼ may have been written and/or recorded
around midnight in the studio, of course, but its musical skeleton is essentially
a variation on ʽSummertimeʼ — then again, ʽSummertimeʼ has
always had a nocturnal aura around it. Anyway, some nice, quietly haunting
organ and guitar themes again.
The most haunting track, though, is arguably
placed at the very end, where ʽBooker's Themeʼ, opening with the
sound of sea waves and a romantic piano motif, quickly gets a string arrangement
and becomes the perfect soundtrack for one of those ride-across-the-country,
freedom-wind hippie movies of the late Sixties. Since the band almost never
used the orchestra on its original tracks, this could have been a later
overdub, but it works — in fact, it works in perfect contrast with the opening
number: ʽOverton Park Sunriseʼ opened the day for us, and
ʽBooker's Themeʼ is the ideal sundown-at-the-beach track, closing the
day. Whoever assembled this stuff at Stax sure had a knack for conceptuality.
Anyway, a solid thumbs up here: it is certainly
telling that an album of outtakes released in 1976 would be more satisfactory
than the band's contemporary output — if anything, playing Union Extended in its little time machine pod back-to-back with the
modernized Universal Language gives
an ample demonstration of how much the ideology had changed in about six or
seven years' time. Not for the better, of course — you knew I'd say that,
didn't you?
UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE (1977)
1) Sticky Stuff; 2) Grab Bag;
3) Space Nuts; 4) Love Wheels; 5) Moto Cross; 6) Last Tango In Memphis; 7)
M.G.'s Salsa; 8) Tie Stick; 9) Reincarnation.
As is known all too well, the death of your
drummer is a bad, bad omen. Led Zeppelin understood that and wisely disbanded;
the Who did not, and spent four years wallowing in mysery and degradation.
Booker T. & the M.G.'s, however, preceded both of them, and they probably
believed that, since they were not in the big leagues anyway, they could try it
out safely. So, in the place of brutally murdered Al Jackson Jr., they hired
Willie Hall, who formerly played with The Bar-Kays and Isaac Hayes, and
ploughed ahead.
There were other big changes, too. First, a new
label: Asylum Records, the first brainchild of David Geffen, notorious for
offering a brief «asylum» from Columbia to Bob Dylan in 1974-75 and now
providing the same for this bunch of Stax survivors. Second and more important,
a new style: with Afro-American entertainment music now shifting almost
completely to funk and disco, it was only natural that the M.G.'s, too, would
have their own funk/disco album. After all, they showed the world that they
could easily make the switch and tame those wild funky rhythms back in 1971, on
Melting Pot — what could stop them
from traveling further down that track?
Alas, Universal
Language falls in the same trap as so many other albums by Sixties acts who
tried to embrace the shifting production values, playing styles, and
atmospheric ideologies of the Seventies. Word of the day is «smooth» — tightly
disciplined and strictly repetitive guitars, «cosmic» electronic keyboards
painting pictures of seductive, but somewhat soulless technological future, and
formulaic dance grooves that are not allowed to experiment with rhythm because,
you know, who wants to be unexpectedly thrown off rhythm on the dance pad? The
best performers of the day could compensate for this tight harness with
wildness, sleaziness, or pop hooks, but Booker T. & The M.G.'s were never
wild, always tended to avoid coming across as sleazy, and as for pop hooks —
well, that could happen, but it was never a priority.
So, somewhat predictably, Universal Language ends up sounding professional, but dull and quite
pointless — as a serious musical offering, it hardly adds anything to these
guys' legend, and as entertainment, it is nowhere near as «hot» as, say, Chic,
or many more of the new competitors. ʽSticky Stuffʼ opens the album
with a nice cool groove, but it soon becomes obvious that the guys are not very much into it, or if they are, the
point is not to let us know: everything is tight, but nothing ever gets out of
hand. Total lack of passion, just professionalism — and the same verdict
applies to each of the remaining eight tracks.
The record has its fair share of decent
keyboard work from Booker, especially later on: there is a graceful, pensive,
nostalgic organ solo on ʽLast Tango In Memphisʼ, an uplifting uptempo
solo in ʽM.G.'s Salsaʼ, and a cocky, whistle-away-your-blues part on
the closing ʽReincarnationʼ, which is probably the braggiest tune
about reincarnation ever recorded. But even with these, it takes a long (and
unnecessary) time to suck them in, because everything is so restrained and
«under wraps» of the thoroughly unremarkable production.
All in all, just another passable experience.
Actually, as far as real «disco» is concerned, there ain't too much of it here
— not a single instance of a «proper» disco bassline detected — but that is
hardly a consolation, because I'd rather take «hot» disco over «cool» funk and
fusion like this. It is true that Booker T. & the M.G.'s had always thrived
on restraint and cool-calm-collected discipline, but with Universal Language, this just translates into Dull-o-rama-a-plenty,
and it is hardly a wonder that neither ʽSticky Stuffʼ as the lead
single nor the album as a whole were noticed by anybody. Upon which, the M.G.'s
did the wisest thing they could do — and split once again, with Cropper, Dunn,
and White eventually offering their services to The Blues Brothers. And I'd
probably take the kitsch of the Blues Brothers over the mind-numbing
seriousness of this Universal Language
any time of day. What sort of title is that for an album like this, anyway?
Since when has limp, pedestrian funk like this represented «universal
language»? ʽHotel Californiaʼ — now that's «universal language» for you in 1977. Thumbs down.
THAT'S THE WAY IT SHOULD BE (1994)
1) Slip Slidin'; 2) Mo'
Greens; 3) Gotta Serve Somebody; 4) Let's Wait Awhile; 5) That's The Way It
Should Be; 6) Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me); 7) Camel Ride; 8)
Have A Heart; 9) Cruisin'; 10) I Can't Stand The Rain; 11) Sarasota Sunset; 12)
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.
Hey, they're back. Oh, technically speaking,
Booker T. & the M.G.'s never went away for too long: throughout the
Eighties and early Nineties, they occasionally reuinted in various configurations
for various purposes — they did, however, sit the whole Eighties out without
attempting to record any new albums, which was probably as wise a decision as
they could possibly take. And it was not until 1992, when Bob Dylan asked them
to back him for his «thirty years in the biz» anniversary, that the thought of
making new music came back into their minds — by which time the retro-vibe had
already set in, and they were free to return to their «classic» sound if they
so desired, without having to go through the electronic filter.
Enlisting Steve Jordan on drums, the band
relies on the trusty old formula: instrumental renditions of a few classic
tunes, a few (relatively) contemporary hits, and a bunch of originals thrown
in. You can see that the running lengths are slightly extended, as they take
advantage of the new CD format to stretch out — hardly necessary, in my
opinion, but not tragic or anything; and you do notice the new drummer, because
Jordan has a ponderous, hard-hitting style, quite far removed from the original
funky lightness of Al Jackson's kit, but, again, not tragic.
And I do like the record — I think they did a
good job answering that question for us, «what would Booker T. sound like if he
had all the benefits of modern production?» This
is your answer: they work here exactly the same way as they used to, but from
the opening notes of ʽSlip Slidin'ʼ you can discern the «cleanness»
of the sound that could not have been achieved thirty years back. Not that it
really matters, of course — the M.G.'s always had the best of best sounds even
way back when. What is much more important is their selection of the material,
and it's fun.
The oldest tracks here are from the early
1970s: a suitably tender, organ-dominated cover of the Temptations' ʽJust
My Imaginationʼ, and a harsher, heavier, bluesier, more guitar-oriented
cover of Ann Peebles' ʽI Can't Stand The Rainʼ. Then they do Dylan's
ʽGotta Serve Somebodyʼ which they'd already performed at the
anniversary show (Booker takes the lead, but Cropper also throws in a stinging
blues solo); Bonnie Raitt's ʽHave A Heartʼ (why? why? what's so
goddamn good about that song?); and probably the least predictable choice —
finishing the album off with U2's ʽI Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking
Forʼ. Maybe that was their way of telling us "I'll be back", but
if so, they still haven't capitalized on that promise as of 2015.
Oh, wait, no, the least predictable inclusion
is a cover of Janet Jackson's ʽLet's Wait Awhileʼ. Yes, right, if you
cannot release a record during the crappiest musical decade of the century, you
should at least cover one of its crappiest hits. And even the way it is done by
these guys, you can still understand that you're dealing with a corny adult
contemporary ballad — but it is interesting, actually, to play this one back to
back with ʽJust My Imaginationʼ and try to understand just what it is
that so profoundly separates the former from the latter. Is it the use of the
more «obvious» chord sequences in the JJ song? Their nagging repetitiveness? It
certainly isn't just a matter of arrangements, which in this particular case
are quite similar.
Of the new tunes, ʽMo' Greensʼ is...
well, you guessed. But it's actually got a different groove from the original —
a little slower, grizzlier, more ominous, and with a weeping solo from Cropper
that tries to inject a little soul-and-sentiment into a franchise that used to
concentrate on just biting and snapping. ʽCamel Rideʼ is funny,
funky, and more than a little reminiscent in its basic theme of Zappa's
ʽWillie The Pimpʼ (I keep expecting Captain Beefheart to step in at
any minute); ʽCruisin'ʼ is based on the ʽMemphis Tennesseeʼ
groove and is the most dansable number on the album; and ʽSarasota
Sunsetʼ is a nice mid-tempo jam that could indeed go down well along with
a well-earned sunset, though not much more.
Anyway, I have read a few disappointed
reactions to the album and I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why — I
mean, who would ever want to expect any ambitions
from a 30-year old instrumental R&B band that only, like, released one or
two album's worth of ambitious material in its entire career? The organ tones
are conservative and classy, Cropper's guitar solos only gain in depth and
experience with the passage of time, and even though I have no idea why I
should be enduring a Janet Jackson ballad from these guys, I'll take it as a
man, in honor of all the good things they did for humanity (and it's not as if
they haven't covered quite a few shitty tunes even way back when). Thumbs up,
and thank God, actually, that this,
rather than the unnatural-sounding Universal
Language, is the (currently) last item in the band's discography. Yep,
that's the way it should be, yes indeed sir.
EVERY LITTLE BIT HURTS (1964)
1) I've Been Good To You; 2)
Sad Song; 3) Every Little Bit Hurts; 4) Too Proud To Cry; 5) Who's Loving You;
6) Land Of A Thousand Boys; 7) Suddenly; 8) Embraceable You; 9) Unchained
Melody; 10) A Favor For A Girl (With A Love Sick Heart); 11) (You Can) Depend
On Me; 12) Can I.
As much as this «torch ballad» style is
generally not my cup of musical tea at all, I cannot deny that ʽEvery
Little Bit Hurtsʼ is a great song, and that even with all these other
versions around, nobody has done it more justice than its original performance.
This Motown recording from 1964 was actually her second recorded version — the
original was produced two years earlier for Del-Fi Records — but apparently the
people at Motown, having just signed their first West Coast artist, knew what
they were doing, and made Brenda re-do the tune with higher production values
and, naturally, with a stronger promotion agenda.
Her own gift is in understanding that the song
works primarily as an «aria», and depends crucially on mood interchange — the
way it bounces back and forth from tragic weeping to determined screaming,
breaking down, picking up, breaking down again, with unbelievably authentic
dynamic tension: the bridge section, with its punchy, almost threatening
"come back to me, darling you'll see..." beginning and then smoothly,
fluently morphing into pleading — "I can give you all the things that you
wanted before" still starting out determined and proud, but descending
into submission and pleading tenderness by the time it's over. No wonder that
Steve Winwood and a host of other performers were so enthralled: this is one
hell of a vocal delivery, a three-minute spectacle of emotional bliss the likes
of which are pretty dang hard to find in the rest of Motown's catalog —
certainly not off the top of my head.
The downside of this, however, becomes obvious
as we listen to the rest of Brenda's debut LP for the label — and realize that,
in a more-than-stupid attempt to capitalize on the brilliance of the title
track, Motown made her record eleven more
songs that all sound the same. Okay, ten: ʽA Favor For A Girl (With A
Love Sick Heart)ʼ is taken at a sprightlier tempo and groomed to sound a
little more sly, sexy, and seductive, much in line with the leading brand of
Smokey Robinson and The Miracles' style (although, ironically, although Smokey
did contribute some songs for this album, ʽA Favor For A Girlʼ is
credited to producer Clarence Paul instead).
Everything else, though, shares the same tempo,
the same tragic-love mood, and even more or less the same basic chord
progression as ʽEvery Little Bit Hurtsʼ. Everything! Ten completely
interchangeable songs that all try to be ʽEvery Little Bit Hurtsʼ —
and all fail, because none of these writers, intentionally striving to write
something exactly like Ed Cobb's masterpiece, arrive at matching the original's
perfect flow. The only good thing about them all is that Ms. Holloway honestly
tries her best to make them come alive — and she did have one of Motown's best
female voices: deeper and more «mature» than the average chirp of their teenage
starlets (not that Brenda wasn't in her teens herself, but she sounded far more
grown-up than anybody), capable of all sorts of modulation, combining «clean»
tenderness with «raspy» excitement or irony within the same verse or chorus
like a perfect natural.
The songs, alas, have about as much interesting
going on about them here as does your average Celine Dion record — the only
difference being that the generic Motown sound is always preferable to the
generic Celine Dion Columbia sound — but that is not really Brenda's fault: in
1964, she was nobody's top priority, and Motown's resident songwriters simply
fed her with scraps and leftovers (besides, just how many great LPs did Motown artists record anyway in
1964, when the LP was a strictly hardcore-fan-oriented artefact?).
Basically, it all boils down to this: if you
really happen to madly fall in love with the voice and the personality behind
the voice, do track this album down (as far as I know, it was never issued on
CD by itself, but all the songs have been included on the 2-CD Motown Anthology). If you value the
song much more than the voice, though, and especially if you think the Spencer
Davis Group with Stevie Winwood is better or something like that, you will be
perfectly fine just owning the track on any reasonable sampler of Motown's
greatness. As the future would show, there would be much more (well, not much,
but maybe a little more — as much as the powers-that-be would mercifully
allocate) to Brenda Holloway than ʽEvery Little Bit Hurtsʼ, but if
you were to judge the artist on the strength of this one album, «fluke» and
«one-hit wonder» would be the most appropriate associations.
HURTIN' AND CRYIN' (1967?)
1) When I'm Gone; 2) Just Look
What You've Done; 3) You've Made Me So Very Happy; 4) I Don't Want Nobody's
Gonna Make Me Cry; 5) Till Johnny Comes; 6) Hurt A Little Everyday; 7) Starting
The Hurt All Over; 8) You Can Cry On My Shoulder; 9) A World Without You; 10)
I'll Be Alright; 11) Everybody Knows; 12) Make Him Come To You.
Frankly speaking, Brenda Holloway's discography
becomes a nightmare immediately after her first album. She was found to be less
cooperative at Motown than her chief female competitors, beginning with Mary
Wells and ending with the Supremes, and largely spent the next three or four
years in their shadow, occasionally releasing singles, sometimes even minor hit
ones, but as far as I can understand, not a single «original» LP by Brenda
Holloway ever appeared on the label. You will occasionally find two additional
entries in the discographies, but both are deceptive: Hurtin' And Cryin' was (or, rather, «may have been», as I have
learned not to trust anything in this business) an LP that was recorded,
assembled, and then indefinitely shelved by the label, and The Artistry Of Brenda Holloway, released in 1968, was actually a
UK-only compilation that included a bit of everything, from old singles to some
newer, then-unreleased material.
Turning first to Hurtin' And Cryin', we find that the album was supposedly released
— eventually — as part of the sprawling, well put together Motown Anthology, a 2-CD collection
from 2005 that seems to claim to contain everything that Brenda recorded for
the label. That does not quite solve the enigma, though, because sources vary
tremendously on when the album was
originally scheduled for release. I have found conflicting reports that said
«rejected in 1964» (too early, it seems), «rejected in 1968» (too late, I'd
say) and «rejected in 1967», which sounds just about right, but then the track
list also includes ʽYou've Made Me So Very Happyʼ, a single which, to
the best of my knowledge, did not come out until 1968. Clearly, a little
confusion is in order here. This is what happens to underdogs, you know.
Anyway, regardless of technicalities, had it
been given proper birth, Hurtin' And
Cryin' would have been a large improvement over Brenda's debut. This time,
the tracks are grouped around not just one
hit single, but three hit singles —
and none of them sound like each other, or like one more bunch of inferior
rewrites of ʽEvery Little Bit Hurtsʼ! ʽWhen I'm Goneʼ, a
song that Motown reassigned to Brenda from Mary Wells just as the latter made
her exit from the label, shows that the lady can do sexy irony and sarcasm just
as fine as she does loss and tragedy; besides, Brenda's version is far more
loud, bombastic, and all-over-the-place than Mary's original, belying her
«subtly sensitive» image and showing how thunderstormy she can be when put to
the task. Then there's ʽJust Look What You've Doneʼ, where the rhythm
and brass section put the melody into gallop mode — a far cry from the snail
paces of 1964 — and although Holloway certainly pales in this respect compared
to either Diana Ross' squeaky sexiness or Martha Reeves' street brawniness, she
does not let the song down.
As to ʽYou've Made Me So Very Happyʼ,
this song was actually written by Brenda herself, in collaboration with her
sister Patrice and songwriter Frank Wilson — then, at the last moment, Berry
Gordy Jr. himself, understanding they had a hit on their hands, «changed a few
notes» as they say and became co-author of the tune. Later on, it made them all
a ton of dough when the song became a major hit for Blood, Sweat & Tears —
but I actually like the original better, or, at least, I do not think that
BS&T, aside from smothering it in horns, managed to uncover some sort of
hidden meaning that was not already revealed in Brenda's own performance. And
who do you really think makes the
tune more justice, David Clayton-Thomas or one of Motown's most legendary (if
underrated) vocalists? It's actually quite joyful to hear Brenda take her mind
off negative emotions for a while and sing a happy song for a change, and she does it with style; gotta love her
«cloudy vibrato» in the chorus.
The other nine songs are mostly filler, sure
enough, but since she was actually trying to expand in several subdirections of
R&B, it is nowhere near as monotonous as on the 1964 album. There are a few
more slow tempo «hurting songs» (ʽHurt A Little Everydayʼ,
ʽEverybody Knowsʼ), but there's also a pretty effective «consolation
song» (ʽYou Can Cry On My Shoulderʼ, with a heart-tugging couple of
Roy Orbison-worthy chord changes in the chorus) and a few more of these rousing
gallops, sometimes titled quite deceptively — ʽStarting The Hurt All Over
Againʼ is far more playful and aggressive than I'd dare to derive from
that name. At the very least, the way these tracks are sequenced never conveys
the impression that we are only watching a mediocre artist and a bunch of
obliging record executives fill up empty vinyl space.
On the whole, I'd like to give the record a
thumbs up, but I am not even sure if it really ever existed the way it is
presented here — and you'll never find it anyway except as an integral part of Motown Anthology. But it is
logistically useful to keep it as a separate building block in Brenda's
discography, if only to stress that there was
life after ʽEvery Little Bit Hurtsʼ, and not even just life, but
actual evolution and development. At the very least, let this review be my little contribution towards the «International
Movement To Declare Brenda Holloway Not A One-Hit Wonder, But A Two-Hit Wonder»
and the «International Movement To Demote Blood, Sweat & Tears And Promote
Brenda Holloway In The Name Of Justice, Equality, And Awesome Critical
Ratings».
THE ARTISTRY OF BRENDA HOLLOWAY (1968)
1) Together 'Til The End Of
Time; 2) Every Little Bit Hurts; 3) Where Were You; 4) I've Got To Find It; 5)
Unchained Melody; 6) Hurt A Little Every Day; 7) I'll Be Available; 8) You've
Made Me So Very Happy; 9) I've Been Good To You; 10) Too Proud To Cry; 11) I'll
Always Love You; 12) Operator; 13) When I'm Gone; 14) You Can Cry On My
Shoulder; 15) Just Look What You've Done; 16) Starting The Hurt All Over Again;
17*) Mr Lifeguard (Come And Rescue Me); 18*) My Smile Is Just A Frown Turned
Upside Down; 19*) After All That You've Done; 20*) The Love Line; 21*) Can't We
Be Strangers Again; 22*) Just Another Lonely Night; 23*) Where There's A Will
There's A Way; 24*) It's Love I Need.
As I said, Brenda Holloway's discography is so
messy and confused that you will find quite a few sources repeating that The Artistry Of Brenda Holloway was her
second and last «regular» LP on the Motown label. That is, however, only true
to a certain degree. First, it seems to have had a very limited release —
restricted to the UK, for some reason (apparently, somebody calculated that
Brenda Holloway was more popular among the British; might that have anything to
do with young Stevie Winwood covering ʽEvery Little Bit Hurtsʼ?).
Second, in reality it was a compilation — singles, B-sides, album tracks, some
stuff from the shelved Hurtin' And
Cryin', and just three or four songs from the vaults. Not much to write
home about.
Now, forty-five years later, the album
unexpectedly gets remembered and re-released by Ace Records — with a whoppin'
eight bonus tracks, also culled from the vaults and unavailable elsewhere, not
even on the comprehensive 2-CD Motown
Anthology from 2005. Any reason to be interested? Yes. For serious lovers of Motown, these extra tracks, combined
with whatever news might be culled from the original album, will be a bit of a
blessing. Why the label never cared about releasing or promoting this music in
the Sixties is a big question mark — many of these songs are just as good as
any brand of lush pop that they were peddling back then. Just one more of these
silly «personal conflict issues», I guess, as history tells us.
Anyway, here are some highlights. First, the
original album. In addition to the good stuff that was already mentioned in the
previous two reviews, we have ʽWhere Were Youʼ, an upbeat, Supremes-style
single with ecstatic strings, triumphant brass, handclaps, angelic backing
vocals, and a party atmosphere that contrasts nicely with the usual lost-love lyrics.
Even more fun are the two extra Smokey Robinson tracks — ʽOperatorʼ,
where Brenda once again beats Mary Wells in terms of depth and subtlety; and
ʽI'll Be Availableʼ, which is just super-catchy-friendly — you know,
one of those tunes that should have been covered by the Beatles on the BBC
sessions. "When the U.S. mail is no longer mailable, I'll be
available" gets me every time.
Two more dang fine Smokey compositions are
among the bonuses — ʽMy Smile Is Just A Frown Turned Upside Downʼ,
known as a hit for Carolyn Crawford, is also done much more expressively by
Brenda, in fact, Smokey's «weeping» ballads are the perfect vehicle for Ms.
«Hurtin'-and-Cryin'» to ride altogether; and ʽAfter All That You've
Doneʼ, once again more upbeat and playful, castigates the lady's
unfaithful friend in a bittersweet manner — finger-poppin', funky bassline, sly
vocal hooks ("you had a girl over here, a girl over there"), the
works. She also does a good job with Billy Eckstine's ʽLove Lineʼ,
and fires all her cannons on ʽIt's Love I Needʼ, although, to be
frank, «hystrionic» vocal delivery is not her strongest area — she could
compete with Mary Wells in expressiveness, or she could offer an «aristocratic»
alternative to the rowdiness of Martha Reeves and the seductive squeakiness of
Diana Ross, but when it comes to wailing and howling and bellowing, she was no
Aretha.
Anyway, while once again this is an odd, ragged
release that should probably best be left without any «rating» as such, it is
definitely a good thing that the vaults are being cleaned up this way — it does
baffle the mind, though, just how many perfectly commercial and perfectly artistically attractive
little nuggets Motown had Brenda record for them in the Sixties, only to let
them gather shelf dust for decades. My only complaint is that there's way too
much overlap with Motown Anthology —
most people will probably go for just one or the other. Then again, these days
it is becoming obsolete to think even in terms of «compilations», much less
cohesive LPs, and the way they treated Brenda, she'd be like the perfect number
one candidate to promote futuristic services like Spotify. Just hunt down the
songs anyway.
ADDENDA:
THE EARLY YEARS (1962-1964/2009)
1) Constant Love; 2) Suddenly;
3) The Game Of Love; 4) Hey Fool; 5) I Never Knew You Looked So Good Until I
Quit You; 6) I Want A Boyfriend (Girlfriend); 7) I'll Give My Life; 8) I Ain't
Gonna Take You Back; 9) Gonna Make You Mine; 10) Unless I Have You; 11) Candy;
12) Echo; 13) I Get A Feeling; 14) It's You; 15) He's Gone; 16) The Nursery;
17) Will You Be My Love; 18) I Told You Baby; 19) I'll Find Myself A Guy; 20)
Do The Del Viking, Pt. 1; 21) You're My Only Love; 22) Every Little Bit Hurts
(demo).
Few people know that Brenda Holloway actually
had a recording career prior to her Motown engagement — and probably even fewer
give a damn about that. Big frickin'
mistake, as it turns out, now that we have this wonderful, carefully assembled
collection of the various tracks that she recorded either as a solo artist, or
as part of a duo or a vocal band from 1962 to early 1964. This compilation, as
inauspicious as it is on the surface, is actually a fun-filled, representative
slice of, let's say so, «Afro-American bubble-gum pop» in the pre-British
Invasion era, and is not to be missed by any nostalgic fan of those young and
innocent days.
First of all, it is interesting that very
little here, if anything at all, actually sounds like ʽEvery Little Bit
Hurtsʼ (for some strange reason, her original recording of it from 1962 is
omitted here in favor of a new demo version from 1964, for Motown already —
with strings instead of keyboards). Instead of being slow, regal, and tragic,
she comes across as upbeat, energetic, loud, sometimes even abrasive — and
occasionally screeching her head off with even more recklessness than Aretha
in those same years. Of course, this is all basically «teen pop» without much
pretense at depth of any sort, but it does raise the issue of pigeonholing:
here, she is all over the place, and then, in one year's time, she'd become a
prisoner of her biggest hit. Was that voluntary, or the result of Motown's
forceful image-making? Just three or four of these songs, had they been
included on her first LP, would have made it far less formulaic and far more
exciting.
For instance, here is her first single,
ʽHey Foolʼ, credited to Jesse James and released on the small Donna
label — a gritty blues-rocker with a scorching electric guitar solo played by
God knows who, but with a fierce, piercing tone that reminds one of Freddie
King (and, subsequently, early Yardbirds-era Clapton). The rhythm section is a
bit wobbly, but guitar and vocals are impeccable. And the B-side is
ʽEchoʼ, co-credited to Brenda and her sister Patrice — a slow,
waltzing ballad this time, but with an imaginative gimmick as Brenda and
Patrice bounce their "there's an echo... echo... echo..." off each
other in a unique combination (they have slightly different ranges whose
interference produces an almost psychedelic effect). Both these songs are better than just about anything on her Motown
debut, bar the big hit single, of course.
Several of the songs are exciting and hilarious
duets with male singers: on ʽI Never Knew You Looked So Good Until I Quit
Youʼ and ʽGonna Make You Mineʼ, she is downright nasty and
raunchy, roughing up her vocal cords while Jess Harris is playing the part of
the dumb, but weirdly seductive, baritone — and on ʽI Want A
Boyfriendʼ, recorded with Robert Jackson, they put a sharp echo effect on
her already hysterical "I want a, I want a, I want a boyfriend!"
intro that is guaranteed to glue your attention: there was not a single song in
her Motown catalog where she would sound that
fiery and insistent. And in each and every one of these vocal battles, she
always makes it clear who's on top and who's really in the background.
One has to be careful, though, because not
every one of these tracks has Brenda as lead vocalist: for instance, the one
single included here under the name of ʽThe Four J'sʼ (appropriately
recorded for the 4J label) features two other ladies, while Holloway is
dismissed to the position of background singer; and the joke number ʽDo
The Del Viking, Pt. 1ʼ was released under the name of Patricia Holloway,
so I suppose that once again, Brenda is just singing backup here. But that's
not a big problem, because, like I said, the collection works as a «wholistic»
package — sort of «the early life and times of Brenda Holloway», a little bit
of a working Odyssey as she goes through label after label, team after team,
style after style, carefully building up an original pedigree that would
eventually assure her a place in the big leagues (and not a very respectable
place at that — this compilation definitely shows that she deserved a lot
better).
Discussing the other songs would not be very
helpful, because composition and arrangements are predictably not the strongest
elements here: most of the chord sequences, lyrics, and sentiments are totally
in line with the formulae of the day. And this is the mistake which most people
who have reviewed this package seem to have made — for some reason, they tended
to focus on the songs, when in reality you have to focus on the delivery of the songs, on the character behind the songs, and on the difference between this character and
Brenda's subsequent Motown image. Just put on ʽI Never Knew You Looked So
Goodʼ and then go listen to some
of her Motown dirges, and it's like two different singers, and it's, like, a
transition that took place in between when she was fifteen years of age and seventeen
years of age. Reason enough to be at least slightly amazed, not to mention
seriously amused, and to issue a surefire thumbs up and a strong recommendation, provided
the package is still circulating somewhere out there.
THE MOTOWN ANTHOLOGY (1963-1968/2005)
CD II: 1) Think It Over
(Before You Break My Heart); 2) I'll Always Love You; 3) Operator; 4) I'll Be
Available; 5) Together 'Til The End Of Time; 6) Where Were You; 7) I've Got To
Find It; 8) How Many Times Did You Mean It; 9) You've Changed Me; 10) All I Do
Is Think About You; 11) Who Could Ever Doubt My Love; 12) Come Into My Palace;
13) He's My Kind Of Fellow; 14) You Need Me; 15) Love Woke Me Up This Morning;
16) I Prayed For A Boy; 17) Don't Judge Me; 18) I'll Always Meet You Half Way;
19) You Are Very Much A Part Of Me; 20) I'm On The Right Track; 21) How Can You
Call It Love When The Feeling's Gone; 22) I See A Rainbow; 23) Play It Cool, Stay
In School; 24) Summertime.
In the end, there's probably got to be a
special mention of this package, even if it's cropped up several times already
— because, as of now, the first CD of this edition is where you get your most
natural, most properly remastered, and, for that matter, your only official
access to Brenda's first two LPs: the filler-stuffed Every Little Bit Hurts and the prematurely shelved Hurtin' And Cryin'. This is just the
first disc, though. The second one, once you get past the first bunch of tracks
that duplicate some of the songs on The
Artistry Of Brenda Holloway, is stoked with even more oldies that were written, arranged, recorded, and mixed by
Motown — then, once again, left unreleased, with the invisible hand of Ms.
Holloway's mortal enemy always blocking their public availability at the last
moment. Imagine that — dozens and dozens of well-polished, completely
marketable songs left to rot. What a waste, eh? And, most likely, all because
of some silly intrigues and under-the-carpet competition.
Anyway, it is
true that there are no genuinely outstanding nuggets here: most of these
previously unavailable tunes are relatively standard Motown fare (not that
«relatively standard Motown fare» songs have never been hits — from a commercial
standpoint, quite a few of these could be winners circa 1965-67).
Interestingly, most of them are also upbeat, overturning Holloway's «hurtin'
and cryin'» image: for instance, ʽCome Into My Palaceʼ, a duet with
sister Patrice, sounds like a merry Shirelles serenade from the beginning of
the decade, and the Ed Cobb-written ʽYou Are Very Much A Part Of Meʼ,
set to the ʽYou Can't Hurry Loveʼ rhythm, is an upwinding, ecstatic
celebration of joy that shows all those little bits can heal pretty quickly,
depending on what it is that you go into the studio with.
And on ʽI'm On The Right Trackʼ and
ʽI See A Rainbowʼ, the drummer pounds so hard and the back vocalists
sing so tightly — you'd think the lady could have won over the audience with
sheer collective energy alone, like The Four Tops won over the audiences not
necessarily with melody, but with their sheer capacity to transmit that
«jubilation vibe». As in, you have no idea why
they're being that joyous about
something, but they sure as hell are infectious. Admittedly, though, as I
already said, Brenda's voice is not that well suited to transmit joy as it is
to transmit sorrow — Diana Ross had her beat for a reason.
The last two tracks are worth noting for
special reasons. ʽPlay It Cool, Stay In Schoolʼ is a propaganda
ditty that Brenda recorded for a socially oriented purpose — each time I hear a
song like this, I tell myself that I wouldn't mind paying to learn, out of sheer sociological interest, whether any
single person in America ever changed his/her mind about dropping out based on
any such musical «stimulation»? It's hilarious how they try to mold all these
clichés like "when you learn more, you're bound to earn more"
into catchy hooks — yes, some poor kid will definitely
fall for that, humming these lines each day on the way to school. But then
again, is there any psychological difference between a message-carrying
pop-radio-jingle and a straightforward commercial advertising? Maybe it worked after all.
Then, at the very end, there is a rather
beautiful live version of ʽSummertimeʼ, recorded somewhere in a club
setting and, for the first and last time, giving us a glimpse of what could
have been if Brenda had settled for a career in vocal jazz instead. She's no
Billie or Ella, of course, and her ʽSummertimeʼ may be a bit too slowed down, but she sings strongly,
fluently, and passionately, and could probably have assured herself a good
position in the «B league» of jazz divas. But that, of course, could never have
happened under contract with Motown, and by the time the contract was
terminated, it was already too late. All in all, the more you listen to these
songs, the more you tend to start thinking not about these songs, and not even
about Brenda Holloway in particular, but about the good old «slings and
arrows».
Anyway, get The Motown Anthology. All of us music lovers owe the unfortunate
lady at least this one — ensure that her legacy lives on way beyond that of
Taylor Swift, if possible.
BRIAN WILSON (1988)
1) Love And Mercy; 2) Walkin'
The Line; 3) Melt Away; 4) Baby Let Your Hair Grow Long; 5) Little Children; 6)
One For The Boys; 7) There's So Many; 8) Night Time; 9) Let It Shine; 10) Meet
Me In My Dreams Tonight; 11) Rio Grande.
It is no big secret that if one wants to go on
savoring the real taste of the real Beach Boys past their eponymous
1985 album (which wasn't all that hot, but at least involved Brian Wilson in some ways), one has to forget about the
«Beach Boys» moniker altogether and simply go along with Brian Wilson's solo
career. It is somehow a rather
little-known fact, though, that the beginning of that solo career — the
eponymous Brian Wilson from 1988 —
is the last new album ever recorded by a Beach Boy that could lay a
semi-successful claim to «masterpiece» status.
Of course, all sorts of technical circumstances
prevented it from being one. For one thing, even in his psychically weakest
condition (or, perhaps, especially in
his psychically weakest condition) Brian tends to be aware of the current state
of mainstream production, and always feels comfortable about embracing
contemporary trends, even those that seriously clash with his own vision. Being
an Eighties album, Brian Wilson is
therefore full of electronic drums and dinky MIDI effects (there are at least
four people here credited with «synthesizer programming», and that's never a
good thing — imagine how much conflicting code there must have been?), which is
positively embarrassing for one of the biggest «humanists» in popular music.
It also goes without saying — and this is the
first and last time I'm gonna say it, since it applies equally to every album
in Brian's solo career — that all these songs would have benefited from a
better singer. Brian's prematurely aged and croaky voice (which, admittedly,
first came as a shock to us as early as on 1977's Love You) has an undeniable charm of its own, but yes, there used
to be a time when the mellow timbre of his cords was a perfect fit for his
musical palette, and now there is this unavoidable discrepancy between voice
and music. You can get used to it, of course, but still, every once in a while
I like to imagine his old self forming a musical duo with some younger, more
«angelic» singer... then again, he might have gone along with some innocent
melismatic horror like Mariah Carey, so maybe not.
Additional, little-felt problems, included
Brian's being manipulated — primarily by his cunning therapist Eugene Landy and
his wife Alexandra Morgan, who may or may not have contributed to Brian's
getting well over the decade, but one thing they sure did was infiltrate
themselves in all his doings, including getting songwriter credits for about
half of these songs (which, according to certain sources, usually consisted of
Morgan changing one of Brian's lyrical lines to something different). Of
course, it's not as if you were going to listen to this and your first reaction
would be like, «Oh, this album would be so
much better if it weren't so obvious that it was completely derailed by a
sleazy psychotherapist masquerading as an amateur musician!» But still, there
is a general sense of a lack of total freedom for Brian here — at that point,
he was still convalescing, and much too susceptible to all sorts of
interference.
And yet, despite all this, Brian Wilson is a wonderful collection of art-pop songs, the
closest thing to a proper development of the man's artistic vision that we saw
ever since Smile was aborted and
chunks of its bleeding flesh scattered all across five or six different LPs. At
least one chunk, by the way, made it all across the decades and ended up here,
in the mid-section of the ʽRio Grandeʼ suite which includes a brief
excerpt from the ʽFireʼ part of Smile
— and altogether, ʽRio Grandeʼ is commonly acknowledged as a
deliberate imitation of the complex approach of Smile. On the whole, though, Brian
Wilson is decidedly more conventional and poppy, with a lot of
dance-oriented material mixed in with introspective romanticism à la Pet Sounds, so you could say it's got a backwards nod to a little
bit of everything — the infectious dance hook of 1965, the lush baroque
romanticism of 1966, the insane surrealist whimsy of 1967 — and had all these
ideas had a chance to be born, nurtured, and realized at least fifteen years
earlier, we'd have us yet another classic. But, like David B. once wisely
remarked, "time may bitch-slap me, but I can't fuck with time". Or
something to that end, anyway.
The best known song here, though it failed to
become a commercial hit, is ʽLove And Mercyʼ, and it was actually the
first time that Brian sat down and wrote a straightforward public sermon —
which, I guess, is alright when you've lived long enough and earned yourself
the right to a bit of idealistic preaching, no matter how naïve or
«trivialized» the idea(l) might be. The descending chord pattern on which the
song is based is simple, solemn, and moving, the only problem being that it
deserves far more than those electronic keyboards and processed choral vocals:
in fact, early piano demos of the song, as well as later live performances
convey the message far more effectively. In any case, ʽLove And
Mercyʼ is kind of like Brian Wilson's equivalent of ʽLet It Beʼ,
written much later than needed but better late than never.
It must be noted, though, that ʽLove And
Mercyʼ is not sung from a pleading,
or despairing point of view — on the
contrary, the song and the album in general are sunny, optimistic, and
spiritually strong. If The Beach Boys
Love You sounded like a record made by a deeply confused, if not totally
deranged, person, Brian Wilson gives
us a fairly self-assured Brian. God only knows (pardon the pun) what was going
on behind the scenes, but the final result only betrays a slight quiver in his
aged voice from time to time; other than that, he's perfectly all right to sing
straightforward upbeat love songs, such as ʽWalkin' The Lineʼ (whose
chorus of "gimme gimme gimme gimme lovin' tonight" sounds like he
might just gonna make it without
resorting to medication) and ʽMeet Me In My Dreams Tonightʼ, the most
martial song ever written about dreaming (it is also somewhat funny that when
he raises his pitch so high on the verses, he ends up sounding like Ozzy
Osbourne — not that Ozzy couldn't hold his own on a love song, of course).
But even if you have something against too many
upbeat songs, including cutesy-cuddly-catchy stuff like ʽLittle
Childrenʼ (which you shouldn't — exercises in nursery rhyming have always
been an integral part of Wilsonism), the bulk of Brian Wilson still consists of lush, deeply felt love ballads:
ʽMelt Awayʼ, ʽBaby Let Your Hair Grow Longʼ, ʽThere's
So Manyʼ, ʽLet It Shineʼ, all this stuff basically picks up
where we were temporarily left off with the second side of Today! twenty-three years earlier. Apart from production issues, I
couldn't really say that these songs are unworthy of Brian's highest standards
in the serenade genre. And even the production issues fade away when you
realize that his harmony-arranging instincts are as strong as ever — just
listen to all the choral overdubs on ʽThere's So Manyʼ (there is also
an accappella track called ʽOne For The Boysʼ, perhaps ironically so
— because it has Brian and several backers ably reproduce the Beach Boys'
choral harmonies without actually employing any of the other Beach Boys; so
it's more like «that's it boys, I don't really need you anymore»).
The biggest success on the album, though, is
the closing suite — ʽRio Grandeʼ shows that after all these years and
troubles, Brian still knows how to write an experimental suite based on the Smile approach and make it sound fresh,
involving, and funny. Of course, it helps that several Smile motives were actively exploited in the making of the track
(see the reference to ʽFireʼ mentioned above, as well as all the
country-western touches that recall ʽHeroes And Villainsʼ), but on
the whole, it is a new composition
that consists of fairly distinct parts, yet has a thematic unity. A few of
these parts actually began life as separate entities (ʽNight Bloomin'
Jasmineʼ, for instance, can be found as an autonomous demo version on the
deluxe edition of the album), then found their place inside this little epic
about some guy who has to cross the Rio Grande to find his true love or
something — okay, maybe I'm a little exaggerating about «thematic unity» (it is
not at all clear how the nocturnal, slightly creepy ʽNight Bloomin'
Jasmineʼ fits in with the idea of rolling, rolling, rolling on, but I'm
sure one can always find an answer if one tries), but then the same question
can always come up with the Abbey Road
medley, yet somehow most of us instinctively feel that it works, so...
whatever.
Anyway, this sure is one of those records where
you just have to dig your way past
the uncomfortable surface (bad lyrics, cheesy production, failing voice) to
locate that heart of gold, because there is not a single bad song here as such
— ultimately, everything is melodic, memorable, and deeply heartfelt. It is
quite logical that the album's legacy would be honored with a deluxe edition,
too: in 2000, it was expanded with about thirty minutes of extra tracks,
including another upbeat pop rocker, the slyly self-referential B-side ʽHe
Couldn't Get His Poor Old Body To Moveʼ that Brian co-wrote with Fleetwood
Mac's Lindsey Buckingham, one of his biggest fans (too bad the collaboration
took place around the Tango In The Night
era, when the synth-pop boom was messing up Lindsey's mind, too). There's also
a new collaboration with old pal Gary Usher on ʽLet's Go To Heaven In My
Carʼ (silly) and lots of demos that often sound better than the final
versions, for obvious decade-related reasons. Not that the expanded version is
worth wasting your life strength on to seek out — but it's always nice to see
the greatness of a particular record honored by thirty minutes of surrounding
extras. Almost as nice as acknowledge it with an enthusiastic thumbs up
and be able to recommend it to everyone over a Mike Love solo album.
I JUST WASN'T MADE FOR THESE TIMES (1995)
1) Meant For You; 2) This
Whole World; 3) Caroline, No; 4) Let The Wind Blow; 5) Love And Mercy; 6) Do It
Again; 7) The Warmth Of The Sun; 8) Wonderful; 9) Still I Dream Of It; 10) Melt
Away; 11) 'Til I Die.
This is certainly not an essential release, but
it has a bit of historical importance. The last really rough period in Brian's wobbly life occurred on the brink of
the Eighties and the Nineties, as his risky relationship with Eugene Landy was
finally cracked, with a little help from brother Carl and other members of the
family, and he finally found himself in a position where he was no longer
manipulated or abused by anybody — probably for the first time in his life, or
maybe for the second, if we count the brief period in between breaking up with
his father and succumbing to insanity, during which he made Pet Sounds. Almost as if to celebrate
that newly-found freedom, he teamed up with Don Was for a biodocumentary and a
soundtrack album to the documentary, and I guess the only better song title for
this than ʽI Just Wasn't Made For These Timesʼ would have been
ʽHang On To Your Egoʼ, but nobody would get it except for the bootlegging
crowd at the time, so they went ahead with the obvious.
Anyway, since (I guess) they probably could not
use the original material without the consent of Capitol, they simply went
ahead and re-recorded all the songs. Surprisingly, the re-recordings are not at
all crappy! I guess all these guys were just so happy to work with the
legendary Mr. Wilson that they honestly gave it their best, and since Brian,
for the first time in ages, supervised all the production himself, the
recordings sound warm and natural, and the extra touches are all reasonable —
like, for instance, David McMurray's extended flute solo on ʽCaroline,
Noʼ: there were lots of flutes on the original, but they were sort of
«implied», buried in the mix, whereas here the instrument is finally given a
chance to surge, and it does that quite nicely.
The songs, as you can imagine, are usually the
personal-intimate ones, mostly from the Pet
Sounds and Smile shelves,
although the old boy does let himself be carried away on a sunny wave with
ʽDo It Againʼ, and reaches as far back into his catalog as ʽThe
Warmth Of The Sunʼ (although, frankly speaking, the harmonies on that song
make it an early, but straightforward, precursor to the «teen symphony» era of
the Beach Boys). The really good news,
though, is that there are new versions of ʽLove And Mercyʼ and
ʽMelt Awayʼ here, completely free of the stiff excesses of Eighties'
production, and they are wonderfuller than wonderful — with normal drumming,
acoustic guitars, pianos, unimpeded vocals, whatever. It might have been a good
idea to just re-record the entire Brian
Wilson instead, but that, I guess, would have been incompatible with the
general idea of the movie.
Vocal-wise, Brian is in significantly better
form here than he was in 1988. If you want yourself a good contrast, listen to
the ninth track — an unearthed demo from 1976 (the Love You era), with just Brian at his piano, somewhat spontaneously
singing about whatever was going on at the time: "Time for supper now /
Day's been hard and I'm so tired, I feel like eating now..." It's actually
an embryo of what could have been a pretty good song (a nine-year-late answer
to "woke up, fell out of bed" that Brian couldn't come up with back
in 1967), and you can feel all the lo-fi pain of a confused and meaningless
existence flowing out of the speakers, but after three and a half minutes of
the man's 1976 sandpaper vocals you will be physiologically glad to be back
(forward) in 1995. Maybe the voice has aged, yes, and forever shifted its timbre
to something less angelic, but at least this is no longer the voice of a
«half-person». And yes, maybe good health and self-confidence are bad for
artistic purposes, but we've already had so much bad health and lack of
confidence from Brian over the years that it is actually heartwarming to see
him back in shape.
It is, however, respectable that he ends the
album with ʽ'Til I Dieʼ — no matter how happy and uplifting the
majority of the selections are, he still finishes things by reminding us, and
himself, of simple mortality, with one of the best songs ever written about
death (I'm not joking — I'm pretty sure the song works as a great pice of
therapy for anyone who happens to be afraid of dying). Starting off with love
(ʽThis Whole Worldʼ) and ending with quiet acceptance of the inevitable
is the way to go, and Don Was, along with his little playing team (including
guitarist Waddy Wachtel and James Hutchinson on bass), did a fine job of
guiding Brian through his own backstory. Again — nothing essential, but a good
short summary of the man's greatness, and at the same time a nice opening of
the next, perhaps not the greatest, but quite possibly the happiest stage in
his life.
ORANGE CRATE ART (1995)
1) Orange Crate Art; 2) Sail
Away; 3) My Hobo Heart; 4) Wings Of A Dove; 5) Palm Tree And Moon; 6) Summer In
Monterey; 7) San Francisco; 8) Hold Back Time; 9) My Jeanine; 10) Movies Is
Magic; 11) This Town Goes Down At Sunset; 12) Lullaby.
Apparently, this album seems to have gone down
in history as a catastrophic failure — critics and fans alike, at least in
retrospect, never seem to have any kind words for it, and the only reason I can
see is that formally, the record is a bit of a hoax: credited to «Brian Wilson
and Van Dyke Parks», it actually consists almost exclusively of compositions by
the latter. According to legend, a short while after the pair of old friends
found themselves in the studio, Brian said: "Wait a minute, what am I doing here?" and Parks said
"you're here because I can't stand the sound of my own voice" and
Brian said "oh, okay then", and the tapes were rolling. To Parks'
credit, he always insists that he did
try to get Brian to collaborate more creatively, but he wouldn't — partly out
of humility, partly because he was still recuperating from Landy's «therapy».
Well, color me crazy, but I not only like this
record, but also think that it was conceived and executed strictly in the
genuine Beach Boys spirit — maybe Van Dyke Parks is not a great composer, and
maybe his lyrical skills leave something to be desired even from a slightly
more sophisticated perspective than Mike Love's, but Van Dyke Parks did bring something to the table in 1967
when he worked with Brian on Smile,
and, judging by these songs, he took even more off that table, because the
themes, the vibes, the melodic moves, the harmonies that we hear on Orange Crate Art, all these things are
a clear throwback to the happy innocent days of baroque pop teen symphonies
and that warm California sun.
Actually, Parks' concept goes even beyond that
— thematically, the songs picture an even younger, pre-war era California,
idealistically unspoiled by surfers, hippies, drug dealers, racial riots, oil
spills, and whatever else you might think of. The music is totally relaxed,
happy, dreamy, full of orange crates, palm trees, dove wings, and Monterey
summers. It may not be great music,
but it is totally adequate to its purpose. According to St. Thomas Erlewine of
the All-Music Guide, "instead of making his melodies catchy, Parks makes
sure they are complex, which means they are rarely memorable" — but the
good sir must have confused Van Dyke Parks with Brian himself, because I could
see where such an accusation could be (misguidedly) directed against the author
of Smile, but certainly not at the
author of the perfectly accessible, never too complex, and frequently quite
catchy vaudeville and pop rock numbers on Orange
Crate Art.
On the contrary, if there is one serious flaw
to this show, it is its lightweightness. The whole thing almost literally
floats on air — song after song of giddy romantic innocence, too cute, perhaps,
for its own good. When the entire album pulsates with just one emotion, this
can easily result in oversaturation, and the music can come across as a bit
cartoonish (which, perhaps, suited Brian just fine at the time — it is no coincidence
that the man would later do a whole album of Disney covers himself — but may
feel alienating for those of us who have always appreciated the emotional
depth in the best songs he wrote for the Beach Boys).
There are some excellent musical ideas here,
though. ʽWings Of A Doveʼ, for instance, is on the whole a bouncy pop
rocker, but with a delicious «swooping» hook to resolve the chorus — very
simple, Mr. Erlewine, and quite memorable, as we are getting carried away into
the sky by an out-of-nowhere keyboard arpeggio. ʽPalm Tree And Moonʼ
seems to have both South American and Far Eastern elements in its colorful
arrangement — perhaps it is this kind
of «complexity» that perplexed the critics, but the melody is perfectly catchy
and unpredictable (and I guess California could
be described as standing in between the Far East and South America, anyway).
And the mix between country-western, cabaret vaudeville, and Smile-style harmonies on ʽSan Franciscoʼ
is probably the single weirdest (but still totally accessible) bit on the album
to which you might find yourself inclined to return in the most unlikely moment
of your life.
I guess there are some duds as well — for
instance, the cheesily sentimental, accordeon-driven ʽMy Jeanineʼ (an
attempt to crack the French pop market?) is way too silly, and ʽMovies Is
Magicʼ lays on the orchestra too thick, threatening to become late Andrew
Lloyd Webber at any time. It is also not clear if they really should have
devoted six minutes to Gershwin's ʽLullabyʼ which you should probably
rather hear somewhere else — even if we accept that conceptually, this little
dreamy fantasy of George's does fit in well with Van Dyke Parks' vision. But
really, there is no sense in nitpicking: Orange
Crate Art is most likely either a record that you will like (or even love)
as a whole, or dismiss altogether as corny fluff.
I would go with a thumbs up, though. Even if it is not
Brian Wilson's music (but then again, who can really tell now, with no eyewitnesses around, how much he did or did
not contribute to these arrangements?), it is the single closest thing to Brian
Wilson's music that one could imagine, and it certainly has the Brian Wilson
spirit in it a-plenty.
IMAGINATION (1998)
1) Your Imagination; 2) She
Says She Needs Me; 3) South American; 4) Where Has Love Been; 5) Keep An Eye On
Summer; 6) Dream Angel; 7) Cry; 8) Lay Down Burden; 9) Let Him Run Wild; 10)
Sunshine; 11) Happy Days.
It looks like there is yet another manipulation story going on here, this time involving
producer Joe Thomas, who teamed up with Brian under an obligation to
«modernize» his sound — only to have Brian later come back at him with a
lawsuit, seeking damage compensation and creative freedom. I know what you're
about to ask: «Geez, with so many schmucks and leeches sucking up to the man
over the years, couldn't he finally have learned a thing or two about making
friends? Or could it be so that the blame actually lies — at least partly — on
Brian himself, rather than on those who may have actually helped him get along all this time?..»
To answer these, though, you'd at least have to
be a criminal inspector, or a judge, or a psychoanalysis freak. One thing is
certain: Imagination, Brian's first
truly new musical project in a decade, would have unquestionably sounded
different with a different producer. We are not even talking here of
«modernistic» production, the way Simon Climie produced Clapton's Pilgrim around the same time — Joe
Thomas cut his producer's teeth in the late Eighties, and that is what much of Imagination
sounds like, with dated synthesizer tones that are largely drawn from that
period's adult contemporary data bank. He may be a Beach Boys fan, but he does
not show much understanding of what it takes to make a Beach Boys album.
That said, harsh criticism of Imagination, which seems to be the
default mode in review circles, is exaggerated. In reality, there are some very
nice, and quite obviously inspired, Wilson compositions here: the mere fact
that many of them are credited to Wilson and Thomas should not be taken as an
obligatory turn-off before you give them a proper chance. The record is
noticeably short, and I guess that in some way, Brian was still suffering from
writer's block, because no other reason exists for our having to listen to
re-recordings of ʽKeep An Eye On Summerʼ and ʽLet Him Run
Wildʼ: both songs fit in with the album's general mood, but so do at least
several dozen other Beach Boys tunes, and it never helps when you juxtapose
classics from your peak period with non-classics from your struggling old age
period, even if you sing them in a struggling old age voice and bring them
down to mediocre level with poor production values.
Maybe they thought of remaking ʽLet Him
Run Wildʼ by way of association, since the chorus of the title track goes
"you know it's just your imagination running wild". The comparison
would certainly not be in favor of ʽYour Imaginationʼ, which has a
rather cloying verse melody and a much more simplistic and repetitive hook in
the chorus — but it is still a good song, innocent and charming in a typically
Brian sort of way, and with some space left for angelic harmonies (that's the second time in his life that he made the
idea of «running wild» reflect heavenly beauty rather than the roar of a Harley
Davidson). Not even the dinky keyboards can take its quality away, though one
can only wonder how much better it would have sounded with, say, an authentic
harpsichord. Or a grand piano.
Other highlights include ʽShe Says She
Needs Meʼ, a re-write of the old Beach Boys outtake ʽSandy She Needs
Meʼ from 1965 for which Thomas at least had the good sense to include an
easily noticeable clarinet part, giving it a bit more of a «classical» feel
than anything else on here; ʽLay Down Burdenʼ, which begins as a
Spanish guitar-embellished adult contemporary bore, but redeems itself when it
comes to the pacifying chorus (mellow out a bit and the summon to "lay
down burden" might just make you do that); and ʽHappy Daysʼ,
which also hearkens back to the old days (part of it being based on the
«goofy-scary» outtake ʽMy Solutionʼ from 1970) and does a terrific
job of contrasting the «doom» verses with the happy boppy chorus of "happy
days are here again" (provided they really are, but whatever).
Other songs are more questionable — like, I am
not sure what to think or feel about ʽCryʼ, a pop ballad with weepy
Claptonesque blues guitar all over it (generic on the whole, but not without
brief moments of unusually pointed emotionality), and I am even less sure if I
like Brian's musical advertisements for tropical resorts (the Jimmy Buffett
collaboration ʽSouth Americanʼ, which goes as far as to feature the
line "I'm hungry and I'm doing lunch with Cameron Diaz"; the
all-too-happy cod reggae piece ʽSunshineʼ), but I am not altogether
put off by them, either, because they still show the man in a creative phase,
no matter how skewed or twisted.
In the end, a thumbs up here. Yes, plenty of
technical handicaps and strange decisions, but really, bottomline is: either
Brian Wilson creates or he coasts, and whenever he creates, nothing can stop him from
channelling some of the pop fairy's most heartwarming vibes, even if the
ability to attract them inescapably wanes over time and can be further harmed
by (figuratively) tonedeaf collaborators. But at least he does not rap here, or
perform duets with Missy Elliott or Jon Bon Jovi, or engage the Backstreet Boys
to do the harmonies for him, so it could have been much, much worse. As it is, Imagination largely shows that some is
still left, and that at least Brian's veteran fans have themselves a nice new
musical companion to get old to.
LIVE AT THE ROXY THEATRE (2000)
1) Little Girl Intro; 2) The
Little Girl I Once Knew; 3) This Whole World; 4) Don't Worry Baby; 5) Kiss Me
Baby; 6) Do It Again; 7) California Girls; 8) I Get Around; 9) Back Home; 10)
In My Room; 11) Surfer Girl; 12) The First Time; 13) This Isn't Love; 14) Add
Some Music To Your Day; 15) Please Let Me Wonder; 16) Band Intro; 17) Brian
Wilson; 18) 'Til I Die; 19) Darlin'; 20) Let's Go Away For Awhile; 21) Pet
Sounds; 22) God Only Knows; 23) Lay Down Burden; 24) Be My Baby; 25) Good
Vibrations; 26) Caroline No; 27) All Summer Long; 28) Love & Mercy; 29)
Sloop John B; 30) Barbara Ann; 31) Interview With Brian.
This record has quite a bit of historical
importance — as is well known, Brian had largely abhorred live performing
since 1965, and even after he reluctantly agreed to return to the stage in his
«full beard» period in the mid-Seventies, that stage presence had largely been
limited to absent-mindedly picking at a keyboard and singing occasional
harmonies. A confident return to the stage was, therefore, an essential move in
the quest to overcome his reclusiveness — and it actually worked: after the Imagination tour got off on the right
foot, Brian apparently found his stage fright largely gone, at least, as long
as the majority of the shows took place in relatively small venues with
friendly and adoring audiences to establish some intimacy with.
It may have even gone too well: the most uncomfortable thing about Live At The Roxy is that Brian seems to feel himself a little too loose, taking on the role of
nonchalant entertainer without a care in the world. As you listen to him making
jokes (usually silly ones — that cigarette lighter bit is kind of
kindergartenish, don't you think so?), winding up the audience like a jaded
stadium rock hero ("you want some vibes? you want some good vibes? YOU WANT SOME GOOD
VIBRATIONS?.."), or putting some forcefully concocted roar into the words
"rock" and "rock and roll" ("we'll do some pretty
songs... and then maybe later on we can ROCK OUT or something!"), you can
sort of see that this role is relatively new for him, and that — even worse! —
he may be basing some of this new frontman image on memories of how Mike Love
used to do it. That may be a little embarrassing at times. But certainly
forgivable.
Besides, we are not here for the stage banter
anyway: we are here to witness three good pieces of news. First, the man
continues to be in good voice, nowhere near as angelic as it used to be or as
brother Carl's (whose shoes in ʽPlease Let Me Wonderʼ and ʽGod
Only Knowsʼ Brian has to step into) used to be, but perfectly in tune (sometimes
in downtune, but still in tune) and
perfectly in spirit. Second, the backing band is thoroughly respectful of the
classic Beach Boys sound and, definitely unlike the backing band on Imagination, makes sure that the
original playing styles, instrumentation, and harmonies are reproduced as fine
as possible. (In order to showcase just how much the band can get in the old
spirit, Brian has them run through both of the instrumentals from Pet Sounds — thus presaging the next
live album).
Third, the playlist is almost too perfect: a
well-balanced mix of radio hits, personal favorites, art-pop masterpieces, and
rarities/oddities to fit the tastes of just about everybody. Well, clearly,
everybody will also be miffed at some glaring omissions (like, gimme some
ʽSurf's Upʼ or some ʽHeroes And Villainsʼ instead of
ʽBack Homeʼ from 15 Big Ones!),
but with a backlog the size of Brian's, he'd have to spend the whole night at
the Roxy to satisfy all of us 100%, and he's not that strong yet. On the other hand, you have a
couple surprises, such as a leftover from 1983 which, as Brian claims, he
unexpectedly "found in his briefcase" (ʽThe First Timeʼ — a
nice piano ballad, though slightly contaminated with that Eighties' adult
contemporary vibe), and ʽThis Isn't Loveʼ, a somewhat ABBA-esque/Disney-esque
collaboration with old lyrical pal Tony Asher that would later be featured in The Flintstones In Viva Rock Vegas — a
crap movie, and, let's be honest, the tune is pretty saccharine and campy
itself, but still, it bears the Wilson seal, doesn't it?
Concerning the classics, I wouldn't know where
to begin with recommendations: like I said, most of them are performed very faithfully to the originals
(including ʽGood Vibrationsʼ, which omits the audience interaction
and clap-your-hands sections that the Beach Boys used to have in their
performances, and returns the intimate prayer feel of the theremin-powered "gotta
keep these lovin' good vibrations a-happenin' with her..." section) or to
the way the originals used to be performed (ʽDo It Againʼ has a
«rockier» feel here than it used to have on 20/20, but that's how it always went live). ʽCalifornia
Girlsʼ, with its extended coda, may be the relative highlight — you can
just feel how delighted Brian is to be ruling all over those life-asserting
harmonies, feeling young again and all that. Against such a rich background,
the new songs obviously cannot compete — so the only tune played from Imagination is ʽLay Down
Burdenʼ, now dedicated to the memory of the recently deceased Carl Wilson
and "all those here who had a loss in their family". Of course, it is
a much gentler and subtler rendition than the overproduced original.
Funniest moment of the show is probably when
Brian's band, and then Brian himself,
launch into a brief snippet of the Barenaked Ladies' ʽBrian Wilsonʼ —
a moment of either subtle irony or forgivable vanity, depending on your own
subjective judgement. It is true that
Brian holds a high opinion of himself, to which he is most certainly entitled —
reminding the people here that he wrote ʽSurfer Girlʼ while riding in
his car, "without a piano!", or that ʽGod Only Knowsʼ was
the first song with the word "God" in its title. It's all within the
range of politeness, though, and besides, he still has the mind of a small
child in many respects, so whenever he «brags» like that, it comes across as
sweet rather than annoying. God bless the old guy — and kudos for pulling off
such a long and diverse setlist without a glitch. You probably will not be
returning to it all that often, but as a one-time solid chunk of good
vibrations, it is highly recommendable, so a solitary thumbs up is the way to go about it.
PET SOUNDS LIVE (2002)
1) Show Intro; 2) Wouldn't It
Be Nice; 3) You Still Believe In Me; 4) That's Not Me; 5) Don't Talk (Put Your
Head On My Shoulder); 6) I'm Waiting For The Day; 7) Let's Go Away For Awhile;
8) Sloop John B; 9) God Only Knows; 10) I Know There's An Answer; 11) Here
Today; 12) I Just Wasn't Made For These Times; 13) Pet Sounds; 14) Caroline No.
Every single review of this album inevitably
asks the question «why?». Five of
these tunes had only just recently been heard on the Live At The Roxy album. There was no question in the minds of
anyone who cared that Brian's backing band was awesome and inspired enough to
reproduce the musical magic of Pet
Sounds on stage. The shows were warmly received, the people were thrilled.
But Pet Sounds Live in their
entirety, as a special separate CD? Is this an acute case of «hanging on to
your ego» or what?
It is true that the band is excellent, yes. The
album was played and recorded over three different nights at the Royal Festival
Hall in London, with probably the best particular versions picked from the
three shows, and the musicians do a fabulous job — I think that even a diehard Pet Sounds fanaticist who has every
single frequency memorised to a tee will not find much to complain about or to
cringe at. As for Brian, who now has the task of regularly stepping in not just
for brother Carl, who at least had a somewhat similar vocal timbre, but also
for cousin Mike, he does everything as best he can — changing the tonality
where it has to be changed, but never getting off-key and never once sounding
uninspired (well, after all, why should he? it's not as if anyone was forcing him to go through his own
masterpiece).
The emphasis, however, is on reproducing the
sacred original as closely as possible: the band has so meticulously dissected
and thoroughly studied all the parts that I wouldn't be surprised to learn they
also featured those empty Coke bottles for percussion right on stage. This can
occasionally be instructive — for instance, some parts that were intentionally
lowered deep in the mix, when played live, come out much louder (the trilling
guitar parts on ʽDon't Talkʼ, for instance), so that the adoring fan
of the album might pick on some nuances that he/she may have missed earlier.
But if you are not that awed over
Brian's original mastery of texture, you will be, like me, rather disappointed
that not a single song gets any extra «twists» where we could see it open up to
any new dimensions or perspectives. Only on the instrumentals, where the band
is showcased per se, without the lead singer stealing away attention, do they
occasionally stretch out beyond the original limitations — like on the
extended percussion jam on ʽPet Soundsʼ — but then it was exactly
those instrumentals that we already had the pleasure of enjoying on Roxy just two years ago.
Additionally, there is something vaguely embarrassing
about Brian's stage behaviour this time: we can hardly blame him for preserving
that «innocent child» mentality, but it is somewhat different when the entire
audience gets mistaken for little kids as well. Here are some typical introductions
from the horse's mouth: "Track number TWO!" (ʽYou Still Believe
In Meʼ — what is this, a foreign language audio course? fortunately, he
drops this schtick very quickly, but still...); "You can close your eyes
if you want to for this song!" (ʽDon't Talkʼ — thank you, Mr.
Wilson, we can decide for ourselves); "Here's an instrumental with no
voices, okay?" (ʽLet's Go Away For Awhileʼ — sure we know what an instrumental is, and did
somebody warn you of potential audience disturbances at the perspective of
hearing a song with «no voices»?); "This next song, my friend Paul
McCartney told me it was his favorite song" (gee, this guy is friends with Paul McCartney himself? like, no shit!); "this next one sounds like a Bob Dylan lyrics'
tune, I think you'll like it" (ʽI Know There's An Answerʼ —
actually, no, it doesn't); "now we have another instrumental... NO VOICES
JUST INSTRUMENTS!!!" (uhh... okaaaay...), and so on.
Honestly, that
is annoying. I would advise anyone who does develop an odd taste for this
performance to just cut those intros out in their digital versions (there is
also a particularly ridiculous section where the old guy decides to have a
shouting match with the audience, as if he were Bruce Dickinson or someone like
that). Or, better still, just leave the record for what it is — a historical
curio that may have had some personal importance for Brian at a particular
juncture in his life. Or get the video (you can currently watch it on YouTube
for free) — the band is quite hot to watch in many senses of the word,
including sexist ones (ah, that Taylor Mills!). But if you miss out on this one
altogether, that will hardly be a tragedy.
GETTIN' IN OVER MY HEAD (2004)
1) How Could We Still Be
Dancin'; 2) Soul Searchin'; 3) You've Touched Me; 4) Gettin' In Over My Head;
5) City Blues; 6) Desert Drive; 7) A Friend Like You; 8) Make A Wish; 9)
Rainbow Eyes; 10) Saturday Morning In The City; 11) Fairy Tale; 12) Don't Let
Her Know She's An Angel; 13) The Waltz.
Cured as he was, it is notable that Brian did
not actually engage in that much new songwriting ever since getting rid of the
evil Dr. Landy: the majority of his new albums either revisited old territory,
or were filled with covers and tributes, or, like this one, were a rather
choppy-chompy mess. Here, at least four or five of the songs were re-recorded
from Sweet Insanity, an abandoned
project from 1991 — and quite a few others were pulled from various older
projects as well. And for the really new songs, Brian gets himself extra
security with the presence of three giants as guest stars: Elton John, Eric
Clapton, and Paul McCartney.
Knowing Brian, though, «messy» is not
necessarily a bad word when it comes to assessing the albums of a man who had
once made it his business to arrange genius in messy ways, and wrenching
beauty out of chaos. The songs written for Sweet
Insanity were more or less on the same level as those written for his
self-titled debut; the presence of such eminent guest stars on a Brian Wilson
record could hardly hurt, and, most likely, many fans had waited an eternity to
hear Brian and Paul on the same record (technically, they already did, but
Paul's carrot chomping is not nearly as distinctive and recognizable as his
singing). There's even the ghost of brother Carl making a cameo here on
ʽSoul Searchin'ʼ, an old outtake from which brother Brian erased all
the vocals but Carl's, then added his own touch. Possibilities ahoy!
Critics and fans alike destroyed the album,
though — almost literally knocked it to the ground, in a rather vicious way at
that — and I am somewhat at a loss as to why, because I kinda like it. Now it
is certainly true that it is not at all ambitious: clearly, the idea was to
make a simple pop album, without aspiring to scale Smile-type heights. It is also possible that true fans, who were
already well acquainted with Sweet
Insanity through bootlegs, were disappointed about not getting their
money's worth (not that they paid that earlier money to anybody except
bootleggers). And it is also true that the lyrics to most of the songs are kinda
crappy, but then Brian's never been a great lyricist on his own anyway.
But on the whole as well as in parts, Gettin' In Over My Head still offers
enough cute, harmless fun — enough to empathize for the old guy and brighten
your day, particularly if you're an
old guy too (this is very important: ever since his «revival», Brian has stayed
completely out of touch with the young generation, while at the same time
staying young at heart — this is a paradox that can either irritate or amuse,
depending on your initial attitude). The songs are reasonably well
(self-)produced, relatively catchy, completely amicable, and each one contains
a small drop of the Brian Wilson essence — maybe that ain't enough to love it, but I sure do not see that many
reasons to hate it, either.
Of the three superstar collaborations,
ʽHow Could We Still Be Dancin'ʼ is probably the best one. You really
can't go wrong with Elton banging the keys like crazy on this sort of «pub pop»
(his vocals, unfortunately, are rather dusty), the harmonies are top-notch, and
the optimistic vibe of this typical «old geezer anthem» feels totally sincere.
(Also, kudos to the line about "how could we still make music after
MTV?", which is delightfully ambiguous). ʽCity Bluesʼ, with Clapton,
has an almost surprisingly harsh blues-rock lead guitar part all over it, and
although the Clapton / Wilson link is far from the most natural thing on earth,
it is not the least credible, either: Brian's sad, melancholic side ("the
strange loud people made a mess of the world", he complains) is quite
compatible with Eric's trademark blues licks.
Weakest of the three, unfortunately, is the
Wilson/McCartney collaboration. ʽA Friend Like Youʼ is just a bit too
obvious a title for such a collaboration, and things get even more confusing
when you realize that the title is the only
line in the song that Paul is allowed to sing solo — when his is clearly the
stronger of the two voices at the time (in fact, Brian now sounds like Ozzy's
younger brother at certain times, which is all the more eerie considering how
much Ozzy is a fan of sentimental piano ballads, too). Even so, denying the
song's catchiness or sincerity would be an insult to both of the elder
statesmen.
Occasionally, the retro vibe does get corny —
ʽDesert Driveʼ is a flat-out re-write of ʽ409ʼ that does
not even try to mask this fact, and we do not usually take lightly to
self-plagiarism, even if it invites us to take it symbolically and realize that
Mr. Wilson still feels a very tight connection to the old days of
pre-Beatlemania. It is also hard for somebody like me who is almost alergic to
make-merry musicals to harbor positive reactions on cheerful dreck like
ʽSaturday Morning In The Cityʼ (sorry). But, if anything, this all
contributes to the rather colorful diversity of the record: having its relative
ups and downs is probably a better fate than staying permanently jammed in
consistent mediocrity. Even if Brian is not pushing for greatness, he is at least
continuing to experiment with format, and that's unequivocally a good thing.
Ultimately, a thumbs up here: missteps and dumb
lyrics ("she had a body you'd kill for / you hoped that she'd take the
pill for" would be moronically sexist if it weren't already so completely
ungrammatical) aside, it's too much of a fun-fun-fun carousel ride to be
dismissed with an intellectual or musicological blast of arguments. You'll
probably have to wait to hit at least forty to make an objective assessment — a
twenty-year old hipster who reveres Brian Wilson for Pet Sounds and/or The Beach
Boys Love You will hardly be impressed at this stop.
BRIAN WILSON PRESENTS SMILE (2004)
1) Our Prayer/Gee; 2) Heroes And
Villains; 3) Roll Plymouth Rock; 4) Barnyard; 5) Old Master Painter/You Are My
Sunshine; 6) Cabin Essence; 7) Wonderful; 8) Song For Children; 9) Child Is The
Father Of The Man; 10) Surf's Up; 11) I'm In Great Shape / I Wanna Be Around /
Workshop; 12) Vega-Tables; 13) On A Holiday; 14) Wind Chimes; 15) Mrs. O'Leary's
Cow; 16) In Blue Hawaii; 17) Good Vibrations.
Only the most battle-hardened Brian Wilson fan
would state these days that this album has not completely outlived its purpose.
In 2004, when Brian rattled the musical world by restoring the classic Smile
project, this was not just an important personal step (a rather brave one, for
someone as mentally unstable as Brian to return to the project that had
already once cost him much of his sanity), but it also gave the world its first
«officially sanctioned» access to Smile in all of its glorious
(in)coherence, rather than having people hunting for bootlegs or making clumsy
playlists out of everything that got scattered on four years' worth of
different LPs.
However, with the eventual release of The
Smile Sessions half a decade later, the basic point of this version was
gone — no offense, but who would really want to keep on listening to a 60-year
old Brian Wilson faithfully reproducing the classic old recordings when you can
now listen to the original young Beach Boys? More importantly, who would you
want to have chewing on your carrots and celeries — some anonymous
whippersnapper, or Sir Paul McCartney? (Not to offend percussionist Nelson
Bragg, who sounds perfectly fine on the re-recordings, but he just isn't quite
as convincing, melodic, or idiosyncratic with his munch).
Seriously now, the re-recording sounds
wonderful, and Brian's backing band gets into the spirit of Smile as
perfectly as they got into the spirit of Pet Sounds. But this is
a very loyal recreation, and although there are minor differences from Smile
Sessions, they are mostly of a structural nature — a couple brief links
here and there are placed in different locations, and a couple tracks are
brought to completion: ʽIn Blue Hawaiiʼ, in particular, which used to
be the instrumental ʽLove To Say Dadaʼ, now features a brand new set
of lyrics, commissioned from Van Dyke Parks, and sounds more like a real song
than just a mood-setting «watery» instrumental. From that point of view, you
could perhaps argue that this version of Smile is more «complete» than
the old one, but the argument would be just a wee bit dorky.
Of course, the clinching argument is not the
«sacrality» of the old recordings, but simply the fact that those songs were
written with the original Beach Boys in mind — Carl, Mike, Al, and particularly
the young Brian; the old one, even downtuning stuff to accommodate it to his
current singing voice, still runs into problems (see ʽSurf's Upʼ,
where he relegates the highest parts to his backup singers). It's all smooth,
and you wouldn't notice any major flaws if you weren't well aware of the
original versions — but why settle for the less-than-perfect if you actually
have access to perfection itself?
I may be missing some nuances here, but on the
whole, these nuances should rather be explored by obsessive fans who live and
breathe Smile and would rather spend valuable time dissecting all of its
links and pondering over their musicological and philosophical interpretation
than on something of more use to themselves or society. It may be amusing
and/or instructive to give the new version a spin or two — if only to see for
yourself just how well Brian has managed to coach his new band and infect them
with his original inspiration — but that's about it. On the other hand, he
himself may still regard this as an important step in his life: after all, this
is the only official completed Smile that there is, so perhaps
there's this checkmark somewhere in his brain («must complete Smile!
must complete Smile!») that was finally checked, and now the man is
ready to look St. Peter straight in the eye, because once you've completed the
entire journey from ʽHeroes And Villainsʼ to ʽGood
Vibrationsʼ without missing a single stop, you got yourself an assured
reservation in God's own little pops orchestra.
WHAT I REALLY WANT FOR CHRISTMAS (2005)
1) The
Man With All The Toys; 2) What I Really Want For Christmas; 3) God Rest Ye
Merry Gentlemen; 4) O Holy Night; 5) We Wish You A Merry Christmas; 6) Hark The
Herald Angels Sing; 7) It Came Upon A Midnight Clear; 8) Christmasey; 9) The
First Noel; 10) Little Saint Nick; 11) Deck The Halls; 12) Auld Lang Syne; 13)
On Christmas Day; 14) Joy To The World; 15) Silent Night.
This one will be done with in brief. As you
remember, the Beach Boys had already fulfilled their national obligation with a
Christmas album as early as 1964. However, now that Brian has officially
reached the natural age of a Santa Claus, he might have felt the need to
balance that early teenage offering with a well-aged, well-tempered reading of
the classics — in fact, a couple of the songs here are reprised from Christmas
Album, most noticeably the Wilson/Love co-written ʽLittle Saint
Nickʼ and ʽThe Man With All The Toysʼ. And yes, one more
ʽAuld Lang Syneʼ for the world to cherish and enjoy.
And what you get, in light of Brian's previous
career, is probably what you'd expect. Sincerity a-plenty, wonderful harmonies
from the Wondermints, pretty and tasteful arrangements played on a wide variety
of instruments — and that dear old crackly voice. Newly written songs include
the title track, with lyrics provided by Bernie Taupin (and if you're wondering
what it is that Brian really wants for Christmas, well, he couldn't get it even
if he were President), and ʽChristmaseyʼ, co-written with Jimmy Webb
— melodically, both are indeed «Christmasey», nothing particularly special or
irritating.
If you really love Beach Boy-style harmonies
for what they're worth, though, they do a really really fine job on the choral
numbers, such as ʽJoy To The Worldʼ and ʽSilent Nightʼ.
This is, of course, perfectly rehearsed professionalism rather than sparkly
youthful enthusiasm, but frankly, I am not sure which of the two I would prefer
in 2005. And another thing is that back in 1964, it was never clear if the
Beach Boys sang these Christmas carols because they really admired them, or
because Capitol, or Papa Murry, told them to — here it is perfectly obvious
that Brian is enjoying the process, and why shouldn't he? Come to think of it,
of all veteran rockers it is Brian Wilson, with his wonderfully childlike mind,
who is the most natural candidate for an old-fashioned Christmas release. Not
that I'd truly recommend this album — I don't usually recommend Christmas
albums unless they have ʽThe Night Santa Went Crazyʼ on them — but at
least this one is not a total waste of time. Lovely harmonies.
THAT LUCKY OLD SUN (2008)
1) That
Lucky Old Sun; 2) Morning Beat; 3) Room With A View; 4) Good Kind Of Love; 5)
Forever My Surfer Girl; 6) Venice Beach; 7) Live Let Live; 8) Mexican Girl; 9)
Cinco De Mayo; 10) California Role; 11) Between Pictures; 12) Oxygen To The
Brain; 13) Been Too Long; 14) Midnight's Another Day; 15) Lucky Old Sun
(reprise); 16) Going Home; 17) Southern California.
This one, I believe, is quite charming in the
usual cuddly way, but only if you lower your expectations of it — something
that most of the critics have not done, perhaps because they were so excited
about the perspective of Brian and Van Dyke Parks working together once again
on yet another conceptual album about
the joys (and the occasional side effects) of that lazy old California life.
Odd, because Orange Crate Art
already showed the world that the Wilson/Parks team is capable of pleasant
pastiches that will never stand proper competition with the likes of Smile: and still, with every new Brian
Wilson record that has an orange in the title or on the album sleeve, people
hope and hope and hope for the return of the son of ʽGood
Vibrationsʼ. Then again, the critical turnaround is so rapid these days,
it is quite likely that most of the people that were disappointed by Lucky Old Sun never even heard Orange Crate Art.
This one may be just a tad more deceptive
because it has a conceptual structure — one large suite that basically
describes one day in the life of a veteran, but still impressionable
Californian, from morning to midnight, with an intro, an outro, and a set of
brief musical links where Brian recites,
rather than sings, some of Parks' poetry. So, «suite» would automatically
trigger the Smile connection, but
the ambitions here are very humble — this is not a teenage symphony to God,
this is just an old man's homage to his native place, and it is not always
obligatory to invoke deep spirituality under these conditions, even if the
homage is idealized and about as «natural» as the eye-burning oranges on the
front sleeve.
The songs here are generally very simple,
highly derivative (of course) of Brian's past successes, but catchy and
likeable all the same. (Many were co-written with Brian's band member Scott Bennett;
I have no idea how much the latter was responsible for the words or melodies,
but everything bears an easily recognizable Wilson stamp anyway). Production
has occasionally been compared to the Beach Boys' work in the mid-1970s (15 Big Ones and whatever followed), but
I do not believe that was intentional — most
of the times when Brian goes retro (and he almost always goes retro), he ends
up sounding like that just because it is easier these days to mimick that
sound, with its loud drums and thick guitars, than something like ʽI Get
Aroundʼ. And the biggest problem with 15
Big Ones was not the production
anyway, but rather Brian's general lack of involvement and interest — which is
certainly not something you could suspect here,
unless we eventually find out that his record company had him under strict
contractual obligation to come out with a concept album about the state of
California every ten years.
But yes, the songs are nothing special, very
simple and casual for the «high» Brian standard. Most of the stuff here either
observes the rules of early Sixties' rock'n'roll (ʽMorning Beatʼ and
its ilk) or lightweight vaudeville (ʽGood Kind Of Loveʼ and its kin).
The piano ballads are typically illustrated by ʽForever My Surfer
Girlʼ, which borrows its title from you-know-what, but its hook from
ʽDon't Worry Babyʼ for some reason, and simply does not exist outside
of its nostalgic context — but inside this context, it's totally OK, just to
verify that the old naïve romantic hasn't changed a bit in more than forty
years. Actually, though, there are not too many ballads here: on the whole, the
album is lively, filled with slow boogies and dance-oriented numbers, at least
one of which is Latin (ʽMexican Girlʼ, which is so stereotypical in
both its musical and lyrical approaches that it probably would be unbearable
if done by anybody else, but Brian is actually working on an album of
stereotypes here, so let us forgive him the mariachi trumpets and the «bonita
muchacha»'s — the man is happy to live in his dollhouse).
There is, however, at least one song here that
— perhaps unintentionally — gives out a flash of greatness. ʽMidnight's
Another Dayʼ begins inauspiciously enough, a quiet piano ballad whose
hard-pumped chords are more Elton John than Brian, but eventually it is the
only one of these tunes that transcends the «oh look at that, isn't it nice how
much diversity we have in this state of California?» angle and delves into
Brian's more personal and intimate emotions, because "all these people,
they make me feel so alone": the crescendo on that line is this record's
most defining moment, and it makes your heart ache for the old guy who, at the
end of the day, realises how most of his
world has really passed away, and how what remains is confused and messed up,
but then tries to reassure himself by softly purring in his own ears that
"midnight's another day". The song may not be on the level of
ʽ'Til I Dieʼ, but it's in the same territory, and if anything, it
comes across as more personal because most of the vocals are not multi-tracked.
The two final tracks, particularly the
brawny-braggardly ʽGoing Homeʼ (somewhat of a cross between the
melodic side of ʽDo It Againʼ and the mood side of ʽBack
Homeʼ), will probably seem anti-climactic after that, but somehow it feels
right to me that the «deepest» song
on the album should not conclude it, but rather be followed with some light
silliness. We do not want to be left with the feeling that Brian is still beset
by his old demons — it's important to know that the scars still hurt, and that
deep down inside he still traps those fears without which most of the Beach
Boys' masterpieces would never come to life, but a tragic conclusion for That Lucky Old Sun would have us
worried, and we don't want another Dr. Landy in Brian's life. As it is, the
record's status as a package of catchy, shallow entertainment with an
unexpected (and slightly creepy) heart of gold is totally satisfactory, and
calls for a routine thumbs up.
REIMAGINES GERSHWIN (2010)
1) Rhapsody In Blue (intro);
2) The Like In I Love You; 3) Summertime; 4) I Loves You Porgy; 5) I Got Plenty
O' Nuttin'; 6) It Ain't Necessarily So; 7) 'S Wonderful; 8) They Can't Take
That Away From Me; 9) Love Is Here To Stay; 10) I've Got A Crush On You; 11) I
Got Rhythm; 12) Someone To Watch Over Me; 13) Nothing But Love; 14) Rhapsody In
Blue (reprise).
It would be okay, I guess, except for the
title. Why shouldn't Brian Wilson, an
icon of American pop music from another age, find the time to pay tribute to
George Gershwin, an icon of American pop music from before another age?
However, «paying tribute» is not quite the same thing as «reimagining» — the
latter implies that you will somehow be able to look at the music in a completely different light. For my
money, Janis Joplin singing ʽSummertimeʼ is a textbook case of
genuine «reimagining»; whether Brian would at all be capable of a comparable
feat remains an open question, even upon multiple listens to this platter.
Naturally, this album here sounds nothing like
Bing Crosby, or Ella Fitzgerald — as you can easily predict, the arrangements
are one hundred percent Beach Boys/Brian Wilson: instrumentation, harmonies,
rhythms, you couldn't mistake this for not
the author of Pet Sounds in a
million years. This is the way Brian works, and this is his paradigm into which
he will gently force everything that comes his way, Gershwin or Cannibal
Corpse. From this point of view, this is certainly a «reimagining» — sometimes
a «mutation», even, as is the case with the introductory and outgoing bits of
ʽRhapsody In Blueʼ over which Brian plasters a thick wall of Smile-style harmonies. But in all other
respects, this is just an album of Gershwin covers, no more, no less.
Really, there are two reasons to justify an
album like this. First, Gershwin songs are vocal pieces, so it makes sense to
crave for a new rendering once a fresh new vocalist with a special twist comes
along. I guess it is pretty obvious that a 68-year old Brian Wilson does not
fall into this category: it is nice to see that his singing has not at all
deteriorated in more than a decade, but he still has too much of a hard time
trying to hit and hold all the notes so as to divert his brain to other tasks —
such as special ways of vocal modulation or inflection that would depend on particularities
of the lyrics. Nice, but expendable.
Second, one could try to somehow load the
original songs with additional layers of depth — truly «reimagine» the songs so
that, for instance, ʽI've Got A Crush On Youʼ would not properly
sound like he's really got a crush on
you, but made it ironic, or melancholic, or stalker-ish, or something. These
interpretations, however, are all pretty straightforward and, I must admit,
fairly bland. ʽSummertimeʼ has a few nice things going for it (like
the grim cello line and the little orchestral climax at the end, hinting at the
song's implied darkness), but on the whole, never rises above «nice», a
pleasantly loungey delivery. ʽIt Ain't Necessarily Soʼ sounds like a
school professor explaining to the kids the meaning of metaphor, rather than a
cynical drug dealer taking pot shots at religious faith, which is what it used
to be. So, okay, you could perhaps object that «disney-fying» the songs (almost
literally so, because the album was released on the Walt Disney label, in
exchange for the courtesy of Brian covering Disney songs on his next record) is
a sort of «reimagining», but would that be an objection in favor of the record?
Ultimately, there are no two big reasons to
subject yourself to this, but there may be two small ones. First, it is cute to
hear how Beach Boy rhythms and melodies, sometimes directly reminiscent of
classics, make their way into Gershwin songs — for instance, once ʽThey
Can't Take That Away From Meʼ blasts out of the speakers, most of us will
probably want to hum "little deuce coupe, you don't know what I got"
before the real lyrics even start; ʽSomeone To Watch Over Meʼ sounds
like a Pet Sounds outtake that could
have, with a few twists, become ʽI Just Wasn't Made For These Timesʼ;
ʽI Got Rhythmʼ ends with harmonies directly transposed from
ʽFarmer's Daughterʼ, etc. Again, I wouldn't call this «reimagining»
(no more than a thick Russian accent out of the mouth of a native Russian
speaker of English would be «reimagining English»), but it's charming and
certainly unique.
Second, also on a technical note, there are two
«new» songs here (the second and the next-to-last tracks, symmetrically),
permission to use and finalize which were granted to Brian and his pal Scott
Bennett by the Gershwin Estate — reason enough, I guess, for hardcore George
fans to sit up and take notice, even if the original melodies were obviously
«wilsonized», and, frankly speaking, the songs are not all that special. Well,
I guess ʽThe Like In I Love Youʼ, as you can already see from the
title, offers another small collection of Ira Gershwin's trademark word games,
so at least there's some linguistic interest. Other than that, I can't think of
any more exciting associations — clearly, it is at least more rewarding to
listen to Brian sing Gershwin than to listen to him singing ʽCan You Feel
The Love Tonightʼ (a coming-up experience), but maybe it would have been a
better idea to have him record all these songs around, say, 1969, when he was
mad, uncool, and unclean, and the results may not have been so predictable.
IN THE KEY OF DISNEY (2011)
1) You've Got A Friend; 2) The
Bare Necessities; 3) Baby Mine; 4) Kiss The Girl; 5) Colors Of The Wind; 6) Can
You Feel The Love Tonight; 7) We Belong Together; 8) I Just Can't Wait To Be
King; 9) Stay Awake; 10) Heigh-Ho/Whistle While You Work/Yo Ho (A Pirate's Life
For Me); 11) When You Wish Upon A Star.
According to the Disney people, In The Key Of Disney was «the album
that marries the vision of two men who shaped the image of modern California».
That may be so, but it still does not
exactly explain who on Earth came up with the romantic idea of having Brian
Wilson record a bunch of Disney movie songs, and why on Earth had the decision
been approved by Walt Disney Records. Were they that out of touch with reality? Did they think it could have any
chance to become a strong seller? Or could it be true that somebody on top
there was really enchanted by what it would be like to have Brian sing
ʽCan You Feel The Love Tonightʼ — and damn the torpedoes and all? So
many silly questions, so few answers.
Anyway, one thing and one thing only is for
sure: in terms of musical arrangements, all
these songs are better than their movie counterparts (well, maybe except the
two Randy Newman ditties from Toy Story 1
and 3, because, well, Randy is
Randy). Either Brian took the job seriously, or by now he and his band are just
doing this automatically, but most of the songs are dutifully Wilsonized to
the same extent that Gershwin was — with harmonies, chimes, baroque
atmospheres, indeed, it has to be stated that there is far more Wilson vision
here than Disney vision. And yes, some of these songs were quite decent in the
first place, but it is Brian that performs here the tedious, but rewarding
task of «de-cloying» them.
The selection, as you can see, leans heavily
towards the «Disney Renaissance» era, probably because it is these songs that 21st century listeners
would seem to relate to rather than the old stuff, but then one shouldn't also
forget that Brian himself grew to some of those cartoons, and it may be assumed
that at least ʽBaby Mineʼ from Dumbo
and ʽWhen You Wish Upon A Starʼ meant something to the man long
before he became a star in his own right (in fact, ʽWhen You Wishʼ,
according to Brian's own confession, had influenced ʽSurfer Girlʼ to
some degree). And out of ʽBaby Mineʼ, at least, he managed to make a
minor Wilson classic — now it is a lush, but totally non-sappy Beach Boyish
waltz with perfect harmonies. If they ever remake Dumbo, I do hope this version will make it to the soundtrack,
especially since there will probably be nothing else worth remembering about
such a remake anyway.
Another really
pleasant surprise for me was the cover of ʽColors Of The Windʼ from Pocahontas, which probably has the
single finest vocal delivery from Brian and puts the awfully and predictably
overwrought vegasey version by Vanessa Williams to sleep — and the quiet organ,
electric guitar, and flute arrangement is as much an epitome of good taste as
the usual Disney arrangements are the epitome of cheese-a-rama. Brian's
magical talents are not quite sufficient to salvage every wreck: ʽCan You
Feel The Love Tonightʼ, unfortunately, retains its pompous power ballad
core, and ʽWhen You Wishʼ... well, people don't like tampering with
that song any more than they like tampering with ʽYesterdayʼ, and
that makes the cover fairly useless.
But the major weakness of the album, and the
one which makes it hard to recommend it to anybody except as a curio, is that
there is really no point in having Brian sing all these songs. One or two could have been nice, but they are all
character impersonations, and Brian was never much good at character
impersonation. When he can really get into it just because he knows, deep in
his heart, what that song's mood is all about (ʽBaby Mineʼ is
definitely up his alley, and I guess the naïve environmentalism of
ʽColors Of The Windʼ was also something he could heartily relate to),
it works; but ʽI Just Can't Wait To Be Kingʼ? ʽKiss That
Girlʼ? ʽHeigh-Ho, To Work We Goʼ? These are comical numbers that
call for «getting into character», and it is predictable that Brian can't do it
and won't do it, so why bother? And even if he might empathize with the message
in ʽThe Bare Necessitiesʼ (not to mention that he does look a little
Baloo-like these days), the bare necessity of that song is to deliver the
message with comic precision and timing.
So, despite my sincere amazement at the
intelligent and tasteful transformation of some of the songs, the idea on the
whole does not work: there is just not enough of Disney's musical legacy for
one Brian Wilson to absolve it all. It is not quite as absurd, pointless, or
sacrilegious (the latter depending on whether you'd think Wilson desecrates
Disney, or Disney desecrates Wilson) as it may seem, but it ain't no
thirty-minute miracle, either. What could
be a miracle would be a Disney (or, preferably, Pixar) cartoon about Brian
Wilson, with a Brian Wilson soundtrack — given that Brian, particularly at this
point, somewhat resembles a cartoon character himself. Come to think of it, a
cartoon about The Beach Boys could very well qualify as «family entertainment»,
especially if they remember to focus on drugs, wild sex, Charlie Manson, and
Mike Love's wife-beating escapades all the way through.
NO PIER PRESSURE (2015)
1) This Beautiful Day; 2)
Runaway Dancer; 3) Whatever Happened; 4) On The Island; 5) Half Moon Bay; 6)
Our Special Love; 7) The Right Time; 8) Guess You Had To Be There; 9) Don't
Worry; 10) Tell Me Why; 11) Sail Away; 12) Somewhere Quiet; 13) I'm Feeling
Sad; 14) One Kind Of Love; 15) Saturday Night; 16) The Last Song.
I am sorry to say this, but here it comes: for
the first time in his solo career, and, in fact, for the first time in his
overall career — discounting those Beach Boys albums for which he was really
not responsible — Brian Wilson has come out with a blatantly bad record. Not just «so-so», not
«mediocre» — no, this here is something much worse: a dishonest album, which pretends to be a Brian Wilson piece of art
in name, but has about as much real Brian Wilson in it as a surimi crab stick
has real crab in it. Fake throughout, starting with the silly pun of the title:
No Peer Pressure would imply that
the album is 100% Brian, which it is not, and No Pier Pressure would imply... crap, I don't even know what it
would imply. It's just a stupid pun.
Objective reason #1 for the miserability of
this failure: Brian falls back on collaboration with Joe Thomas, the guy
responsible for the bad production of Imagination,
and, for some reason, also co-writes most of the songs with the guy.
Additionally, joining the club of «old geezers embracing new faces», he brings
in a swarm of musical guests — which wouldn't be much of a problem if it were
the right kind of guests, like, say,
Andrew Bird or the girl from Beach House, but Kacey Musgraves? Zooey Deschanel?
Are you kidding me? Nate Ruess? I have no idea who that guy is, but I do know
that he sounds like a boring version of Robin Gibb, and for that reason
ʽSaturday Nightʼ sounds like bad late period Bee Gees. Rumor has it
that Brian also wanted Lana del Rey, but that she backed out of the project at
the last minute — not that her presence would have made this pile of shit any
less artificial than it already is, but yeah, I'd like to have her here, just to drive in the last nail of proving my
point.
There is not a single good song here, nowhere in sight. ʽThis Beautiful
Dayʼ is a pretty enough piano-and-harmonies introduction, tastily adorned
with cello and trombone, and it lures you in with a fake promise of the usual,
if a little too predictable and derivative, baroque bliss. But that is it — everything that follows broadly
falls into two categories: (a) crappy mush and (b) mushy crap (to make this
judgement more precise, let us assume that mushy crap has steady danceable
rhythm and crappy mush is more of the ballad variety).
Theoretically, I have nothing against Brian
Wilson going techno — I have outlived that prejudice a long time ago, and if
you genuinely believe your melody needs a good house beat, well, so be it. But
ʽRunaway Dancerʼ is just a stupid sounding song — the singing guy has
a stupid voice, the lyrics are stupid, the melody is stupid, and what exactly
here is Brian Wilson, anyway? This is
the kind of stuff you can get on any cheap contemporary dance music radio
station. Is it merely to prove a point, that Grandpa can crank it up as good as
the young 'uns? If so, it does not prove that point — please, Grandpa, could
you return to your usual self, which is something the young 'uns actually cannot imitate, no matter how they try?
Or maybe not, because after that dreadful
experiment, Grandpa does try to fall back on the old formula, and the results
are comparably pathetic. ʽWhatever Happenedʼ is a good title —
because whatever happened to Brian's ability to pen a decent melody? We are not
asking for another Pet Sounds — I
mean, another Lucky Old Sun would
have been quite enough. But this is just mush after mush after mush. Pretty
harmonies on autopilot; safe, basic, bland instrumentation; not a single
challenging or unpredictable vocal move anywhere. When exactly did lush baroque
pop degenerate into smooth background muzak? Lounge instrumentals like
ʽHalf Moon Bayʼ, instantly forgettable country pop like ʽGuess
You Had To Be Thereʼ, and, worst of all, would-be-Beach Boy pastiches like
ʽSail Awayʼ, which surreptitiously quotes ʽSloop John Bʼ
and nicks some of its instrumentation and vibe, too, but hardly offers a tenth
part of its catchiness.
The presence of Al Jardine (and even David
Marks) on a few of the tracks adds to the illusion of another Beach Boys
reincarnation (indeed, at one time Brian thought this would be a new Beach Boys project), but other than Al's well
recognizable voice, songs like ʽThe Right Timeʼ are just more of the
same elevator muzak. However, the biggest disappointment is probably ʽThe
Last Songʼ — what could at least be an epic, heartbreaking conclusion ends
up being a limp, struggling ballad that is one hundred percent atmosphere,
sappy, sentimental, and completely free of spiritual depth. Once again, I have
no problems about Brian being a big baby: I do
have problems when his music sounds like it comes from a little baby, without any signs of the astute psychologism that it
once had (not that it doesn't happen to a lot of people as they age — Ray
Davies, for instance, seems to have suffered from the same problem).
Overall, for an artist of lesser stature a
record like this would have been just boring, but for Brian this is downright
awful. One can only hope that his songwriting instincts have been temporarily
derailed and buried under the layers of misguided production and ridiculous
ambitions of «hipness», and that he still has time to dig himself out and at least return to Lucky Old Sun levels of quality. Then again, it is perfectly
possible that Joe Thomas isn't quite as responsible as we'd like him to be, and
that it is simply old age catching up — after all, not everybody can expect to
preserve compositional genius for more than five decades. Whatever be, I am
actually glad to see that the album has largely garnered negative (or
«cautiously positive», so as to not seem offensive to the Elder Statesman)
reviews, and I do hope that Brian reads at least some of them. Really, I mean,
it is not that hard to understand
that something went terribly wrong here. And if you want to help out, I suggest
you begin bombarding Brian's mailbox with ideas of what sort of collaborators
could actually help rather than hurt his legacy — let us insure, after all,
that his next project does not involve Zooey Deschanel at least, because he
might eventually end up with Katy Perry, and that would just totally blow
Grandpa's integrity to pieces. Thumbs down.
THE COMPLETE CHESS STUDIO RECORDINGS (1960-1967; 1992)
CD I: 1) First Time I Met The Blues;
2) Slop Around; 3) I Got My Eyes On You; 4) Broken Hearted Blues; 5) Let Me
Love You Baby; 6) I Got A Strange Feeling; 7) Gully Hully; 8) Ten Years Ago; 9)
Watch Yourself; 10) Stone Crazy; 11) Skippin'; 12) I Found True Love; 13) Hard
But It's Fair; 14) Baby (Baby, Baby, Baby); 15) When My Left Eye Jumps; 16)
That's It; 17) The Treasure Untold; 18) American Bandstand; 19) No Lie; 20) $100 Bill; 21) My Love Is Real;
22) Buddy's Boogie.
CD II: 1) Worried Mind (aka
Stick Around); 2) Untitled Instrumental; 3) Moanin'; 4) I Dig Your Wig; 5) My
Time After Awhile; 6) Night Flight; 7) Crazy Love (Crazy Music); 8) Every Girl
I See; 9) Too Many Ways; 10) Leave My Girl Alone; 11) Got To Use Your Head; 12)
Keep It To Myself (aka Keep It To Yourself); 13) My Mother; 14) She Suits Me To
A Tee; 15) Mother-In-Law Blues; 16) Buddy's Groove; 17) Going To School; 18) I
Cry And Sing The Blues; 19) Goin' Home; 20) I Suffer With The Blues; 21) Lip
Lap Louie; 22) My Time After Awhile (alternate vocals and mix); 23) Too Many
Ways (alternate take); 24) Keep It To Myself (alternate take); 25) I Didn't
Know My Mother Had A Son Like Me.
Like most of his colleagues at Chess, Buddy Guy
had his output measured in singles, not LPs; unlike some of his luckier
colleagues, though, he was not even allowed the privilege of putting together
an LP from some of these singles until his very last year on Chess (where,
according to most accounts, he was treated as sort of an underdog) — which made
his early discography seriously confusing until MCA finally got around to
putting it all together on this double disc package, as part of their general
program to systematize and preserve their legacy. Even so, compared to so many
other Complete Chess Studio Recordings
series, two CDs seem fairly pitiful — indeed, the label saw little sense in
maintaining Buddy Guy as an independent artist, preferring to use him for
session work rather than individual stardom.
And indeed, discrimination accusations aside,
those early «formative» years do not really give us the Buddy Guy that most of us are accustomed to — the consummate
showman and guitar wizard with his own unmistakable, and highly eccentric,
dialect of the blues language. His very first singles were actually released in
1958 for the smaller Cobra Records (and are pretty hard to locate, as you'd
have to go for an obstinately chronologically representative collection), where
he worked close to Otis Rush and seems to have been highly influenced by that
style — deep-echo, ominous soul-blues with vocal wailings and screechy guitar.
A year later, he switched to Chess, where he continued to explore that Otis
Rush vibe, but also put out «blues de-luxe» tracks in the glitzy style of B. B.
King, dabbled in danceable R&B (in fact, danceable anything — one of the tracks here is not called ʽGully
Hullyʼ for nothing), and basically was willing to try out any idea as long
as it had some probability of selling.
The problem is, the one thing the world is most
grateful to Buddy for is his guitar playing, and these early Chess singles do
not paint a very good picture of it. First, although Buddy's playing was a big
influence on everybody from British bluesmen to Hendrix even in the first half
of the Sixties, his «classic» style of playing did not truly emerge until after
he himself was «re-influenced» by the blues-rock explosion of the second half of the Sixties. And second,
according to most accounts, Buddy was at his most influential when playing live
— not an option here, with just one track (ʽStone Crazyʼ) giving him
enough space to stretch out with some serious soloing, and most of the others
molding him more as a singer and entertainer than a blues player. And he is a good singer, wailing and crooning
along with the best of 'em, yet hardly doing anything here that would put him
over the level of the aforementioned Otis Rush — or B. B. King and Bobby Bland,
for that matter.
The collection does feature some of the songs
that formed the foundation of the Buddy Guy legend. There's ʽLet Me Love
You Babyʼ, his firmest affirmation of aggressive masculinity that would
later be covered by Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart, among others, as an early anthem
of blues-based hard rock. And there's his blues-rock transformation of
ʽMary Had A Little Lambʼ from 1967 (here entitled ʽGoing To
Schoolʼ — copyright reasons?), which many people know from the Stevie Ray
Vaughan version — although, to be fair, the importance of the recording is more
in its general idea that «anything you want can be converted to kick-ass
scorching blues» than anything else, because it is not outstanding in any other
respect. And those early singles, ʽFirst Time I Met The Bluesʼ and
ʽI Got My Eyes On Youʼ, they would also become regular live staples —
and both introduce those signature «quivering» guitar licks that sound as if he
were pulling on those strings like they were bowstrings, loosing an arrow at
the listener (I think Keith Richards and/or Brian Jones did a good job copying
these licks on the Stones' early records).
So yeah, there's plenty of fun and importance
here, but, unfortunately, the completeness of the package also means that there
will be a lot of crap — I mean, most of these upbeat R&B numbers that he
did in the early Sixties, with female backing voices and cheery brass sections
etc., are completely skippable (ʽBaby Baby Babyʼ, etc.): for better
guitar work, you do not have to travel a long way from there, and for better
entertainment value, you'd rather want to cross over to Smokey Robinson or
Wilson Pickett. Even as the Sixties were advancing, he was still saddled with
novelty material like ʽLip Lap Louieʼ and ʽI Dig Your Wigʼ
— compensating for this with occasional stabs at serious jazz (a cover of Art
Blakey's ʽMoanin'ʼ is here, too) which show respectable technique,
yet it was never highly likely that Buddy Guy would ever be respected as a jazz
guitarist. Additionally, four tracks here actually feature guitarist Lacy
Gibson instead of Buddy, and on one of them (ʽMy Love Is Realʼ) Lacy
even takes lead vocals, leaving it unclear what Buddy's contribution to the
track was in the first place.
Some of his better material from those years
eventually made it to his first and last LP for Chess, Left My Blues In San Francisco (which we will tackle separately),
but on the whole, these 47 tracks could easily be reduced to about 10-12, if
you want to properly understand what all the hoopla about Buddy was in the
pre-Hendrix era. To the ones already mentioned add something like the
scorching confessionalism of ʽMy Time After Awhileʼ... the weeping
licks on ʽI Cry And Sing The Bluesʼ... the fast, fluent, fun playing
on ʽBuddy's Boogieʼ... and yeah, that's about it for this one. Still,
I guess the same criticisms apply to B. B. King as well, who spent the first
two decades of his career stifled by the confines of his studio, his image, his
technology, and his time, before really exploding in the mid-Sixties, so let us
not hold his buddy Buddy to impossibly higher standards and still acknowledge these
«beginning-of-the-legend» years with a modest thumbs up (especially since there
is, at the very least, nothing openly bad
here: even the novelty numbers and the hip-shaking dance fluff are really very
innocent.)
LEFT MY BLUES IN SAN FRANCISCO (1967)
1) Keep It To Myself; 2) Crazy
Love; 3) I Suffer With The Blues; 4) When My Left Eye Jumps; 5) Buddy's Groove;
6) Goin' Home; 7) She Suits Me To A Tee; 8) Leave My Girl Alone; 9) Too Many
Ways; 10) Mother-In-Law; 11) Every Girl I See.
The only «original» LP that Buddy managed to
get out of his stay at Chess is still not very «original»: despite being
released in 1967, at a time when even the most old-fashioned bluesmen were
beginning to pay heed to the album-oriented mentality, it consists of eleven
tracks recorded throughout the decade — although, fair enough, most of them
were not previously released as singles, so most people probably did not hear
any of this stuff prior to 1967. Today, all of these tunes are included in the Complete Chess package, so it makes no
sense to hunt for the LP separately, but it might deserve a brief separate
mention anyway.
For the Hendrix-owned standards of 1967, this
stuff obviously does not seem very impressive; but Buddy holds his own ground
fairly well against such competitors as B. B. King or Albert King, except that
he seems constantly torn between his ambitions as a guitar player and a red-hot
R&B entertainer — on the opening ʽKeep It To Myselfʼ, he wails
and screams his way through the tune like a wannabe James Brown, and his
backing band, laying it hard on the brass, wouldn't mind outperforming the
Famous Flames, either (you wish). Predictably, this leads to the songs being
stuck somewhere in between the two extremes, and satisfying neither the serious
R&B lover nor the casual fan of expressive guitar playing — at least, not
satisfying nearly as much as they
could, had Buddy had a more focused understanding of what it is he is trying to
be.
On the other hand, it helps that the selection
is fairly diverse. We have regular 12-bar blues with stinging, albeit poorly
mixed, guitar (ʽI Suffer With The Bluesʼ; the bass lines, left
uncredited, are mixed really high, though, and are stunningly inventive,
whoever it was that invented them); slow brass-drenched blues-de-luxe with
wailing guitar (ʽWhen My Left Eye Jumpsʼ); a variation on the Chuck
Willis/Elvis ʽI Feel So Badʼ groove with a playful jazzy solo
(ʽCrazy Loveʼ); an early stab at proto-funk (ʽBuddy's
Grooveʼ) with nice brass/guitar interplay and a lightly aggressive/ominous
touch (once again, mainly due to the cool bassline); even a straightahead pop
song that could have easily been handed over to some Motown girl group, despite
being credited to the prolific Willie Dixon.
So it's all smooth and fine — just not very individualistic
and not tremendously exciting. Not that his earliest efforts on the Vanguard
label fully convey the uniqueness of his talent, either, but even so, you can immediately feel the difference as you
jump from this LP to the follow-up, and we either have to ascribe this to
stupid pressure from Chess, forcing the man into the three-minute single
format, or to the man's conscious decision to recast, upgrade, and modernize
his image in the wake of the guitar rock revolution of 1966-67. Probably both,
though.
A MAN AND THE BLUES (1968)
1) A Man And The Blues; 2) I
Can't Quit The Blues; 3) Money (That's What I Want); 4) One Room Country Shack;
5) Mary Had A Little Lamb; 6) Just Playing With My Axe; 7) Sweet Little Angel;
8) Worry, Worry; 9) Jam On A Monday.
What a difference a label change made — Buddy
didn't even have to move away from Chicago, because the New York-based Vanguard
Records gave him studio time at Universal Studios in his own Chicago
stronghold, where he was still able to play with some of the Chess veterans,
including, most prominently, pianist Otis Spann, who makes A Man And The Blues as much his own as
Buddy's. Some people have claimed not to notice any big difference, but that is
not true: the major difference is that, for the first time in more than ten
years, Buddy got to make an album —
no longer confined to the limitations of the single form — and this has not
only allowed him to properly unfurl his talents, but also stimulated him to
expand them.
If you think, though, that A Man And The Blues is going to be some ballsy, flashy, I-can-beat-that-Hendrix-sucker
affair, think again — with a few minor exceptions, this is a very quiet,
low-key recording, concentrating on slow blues guitar/piano interplay rather
than cocky blues-rock riffage. One of the minor exceptions is ʽJust
Playing With My Axeʼ, which borrows the basic riff of
ʽSatisfactionʼ (or, more accurately, the basic guitar/brass riff of
ʽSatisfactionʼ as done by Otis Redding) and uses it as a base for
some rather chaotic, but clean-sounding jazzy improvisation on Buddy's part —
not as if that axe were chopping a whole lot of wood.
Large numbers of generic slow 12-bar blues can
be a heavy burden, of course, but the saving grace of the record is Otis — from
the opening title track, where Spann and Guy duel with each other for about six
minutes, and right down to ʽWorry Worryʼ, where... Spann and Guy also duel with each other for about six
minutes, the record is loaded with this exciting piano/guitar dialog, where the
possibilities for expression are near endless, and the two men captivate our
senses like two genius actors in a never-ending Shakespeare dialog, alternating
between lengthy expositions of individual arguments and quick, flashy
call-and-response duels (check out especially those brief interchanges in the
coda to ʽA Man And The Bluesʼ).
The best of these tracks is probably the
soulful cover of Mercy Dee Walton's ʽOne Room Country Shackʼ, a song
whose nearest relative in the blues idiom is the well-known ʽBall And
Chainʼ (popularised by Janis, but actually brought to the public by Big
Mama Thornton) — Otis plays it out like Ray Charles, moody and ominous, while
Buddy does his best Bobby Bland impersonation and adds minimalistic jazzy
leads (incidentaly, Wayne Bennett, Bobby Bland's guitar player, is also present
on the album, but only as rhythm guitarist). It's not exceptional, but in
between the two, they succeed in generating a haunting atmosphere of loneliness
and depression, and the only problem is that more conventional numbers, such as
B. B. King's ʽSweet Little Angelʼ and ʽWorry, Worryʼ, feel
a little bland after it.
The «rockier» numbers are also done «gently»:
ʽMoney (That's What I Want)ʼ is played with clean guitar and fluent,
accurate piano (no Jerry Lee Lewis-style piano bashing allowed), and the
re-recording of ʽMary Had A Little Lambʼ gives much of the melody to
the brass section, while Buddy's soloing style is, once again, soft, smooth,
and silky, to the extent that I probably couldn't tell it apart from B. B. King
at this moment (well, no, actually, the two men's playing techniques are always
different, but the guitar tone here
is 100% Lucille). But that is no big deal — the big deal is that, for the first
time in his life, Buddy here gets to play what he wants, how he wants, and
(quite importantly) for as long as he wants (a couple of the songs have
fade-outs that may have concealed even longer jamming bits, but how we will
ever know?). And since it's all done with style and taste, let us just forget
about the «identity-finding» issue (I mean, if you want to lay down a claim
that Buddy never truly found his own identity until the 1990s, that's fine with
me) and give this a well deserved thumbs up, and don't forget — this is as much
thumbs up to Otis as it is to Buddy, if not more.
THIS IS BUDDY GUY! (1968)
1) I Got My Eyes On You; 2)
The Things I Used To Do; 3) Fever; 4) Knock On Wood; 5) I Had A Dream Last
Night; 6) 24 Hours Of The Day; 7) You Were Wrong; 8) I'm Not The Best.
Oh yes indeed, now this is Buddy Guy, with an exclamation mark, make no mistake about
it. The man's first ever live album was recorded at the New Orleans House in
Berkeley, California, and, true to the location, combines New Orleanian
extravagance with the Californian sense of wildness and freedom. Vulnerable
metaphors aside, this is simply a kick-ass performance that, for the very first
time, gives us retro-listeners a taste of «Buddy unleashed» that was
unthinkable on his Chess singles, and still very much subdued on his earliest
studio recordings for Vanguard.
There is a problem, though. At the time, Buddy
was clearly still on a major James Brown kick, and thought himself as much an
R&B artist as a bluesman — which means that the selections are more or less
equally divided between scorching blues / blues-rock performances and sweaty
R&B rave-ups. And while the rave-ups are dutifully red-hot, and even
Buddy's unknown brass section does a good job interacting with his ecstatic
vocals, you just can't help the feeling that all of this is not playing to the man's greatest
strengths. The best thing about them, really, is that they help to break up the
monotonousness — one 12-bar blues tune after another can get tiresome even if
the guitar work is always awesome — but while I heartily welcome the inclusion
of ʽFeverʼ, which Buddy delivers with an almost comedic flair,
ʽKnock On Woodʼ is mainly an excuse for pestering the audience about
whether they feel all right, and the album-closing ʽI'm Not The Bestʼ
is basically six minutes of "Good God!" screeching over a repetitive
brass riff. Basically, there's too much of this wannabe-James-Brown posturing
here to make me take this seriously.
The blues stuff, though — that is a different matter. From the opening licks of ʽI Got
My Eyes On Youʼ, you understand that a new, daring, challenging presence
on the blues scene has been made available: less wild and otherworldly than
Hendrix, perhaps, and not as endowed with the gift of subtlety as B. B. King,
but more fiery and eccentric than just about any other black guitarist alive
at the time. It is not when he tries to imitate James Brown or Little Richard
with his singing and showmanship that he is at his greatest — it is when he
puts a little bit of James Brown or Little Richard into his guitar playing,
giving the instrument a unique jerky, sputtering voice that ignites all sorts
of passions when the man is really «on».
And here, he is totally on for all the duration
of ʽI Got My Eyes On Youʼ, a militant mid-tempo boogie with gunfire
soloing; for all of the slow-moving ʽI Had A Dream Last Nightʼ, whose
scraggly, chaotic, stuttery guitar licks, sometimes building up to fabulous
series of trills, are such a far cry from the carefully nuanced, economic,
silky-soft sound of B. B. King; and for all of ʽYou Were Wrongʼ, with
a slightly cleaner guitar tone that does not, however, in any way diminish the
rawness and roughness of delivery. This
is the kind of sound that may, indeed, have characterized his live playing for
quite some time already — the kind of sound that inspired people like Clapton
and Page, with whom we tend to associate it more than with Buddy, just because,
well, Buddy Guy didn't get the chance to become a household name before the
1990s. But he was there all right, and This
Is Buddy Guy! proves it.
And even if I'd only like to treasure one half
of the album (honestly, I don't care at all if I never get to hear Buddy spit
out "good God!" on the likes of ʽI'm Not The Bestʼ again in
my life), that half is reason enough to award a thumbs up to the album in general.
Of course, not every Buddy Guy live album is deserving a thumbs up by
definition (in fact, some disgruntled fans state that no Buddy Guy live album so far has managed to truly capture the
exuberance of his performance in all its glory), but here's to first-coming and
introducing a new distinctive voice that could hold its own against all the big
ones in the business — no mean feat for 1968 and its new, Hendrix-dependent
standards of quality.
BUDDY AND THE JUNIORS (1970)
1) Talkin' 'Bout Women Obviously;
2) A Motif Is Just A Riff (Riffin'); 3) Buddy's Blues; 4) (I'm Your) Hoochie
Coochie Man; 5) Five Long Years; 6) Rock Me Mama; 7) Ain't No Need.
This probably is not at all the sort of record
one would normally associate with Buddy Guy, Hot Lover of Electric Blues Guitar
— a minimalistic, all-acoustic session with Buddy on guitar, Junior Wells on
harmonica and, sure enough, one more Junior (Mance) on piano joining the two
better known legends on the third track and sticking with them to the end. The
whole thing pretty much came about by accident (producer Michael Cuscuna
«tricked» Vanguard Records into holding the session so that they could also
back up a regular Buddy Guy album which he also produced), and you know how
professional music critics love such accidents — the record gets nothing but
rave reviews, even if few of the rave reviewers probably get the urge to listen
to it again once they get all the admiration off their chests.
In all honesty, there is nothing particularly
special about the session. As an «unplugged» player, Buddy is okay, but neither
his technique nor his inventiveness on the instrument would put him on the
level of those Delta veterans for whom the acoustic guitar was the instrument — much like Hendrix
becomes «just okay» when you hear him play acoustic. When they get down to
soloing or jamming, it is mostly Junior Wells' harmonica that occupies the
spotlight, and even if the guy had superb technique and expressivity on the
level of Little Walter or Sonny Boy Williamson, it could be a chore to sit
through for 40 minutes; and he is actually slightly below these fellas when it
comes to «blowpower» or musical phrasing, although sometimes he makes cool
counterpoints to Buddy's vocal lines (the "black night... black night"
section on ʽFive Long Yearsʼ, for instance, when the harmonica «fades
in» and «whooshes» past you like a spirit in the night).
Mostly, the record is about attitude; the first
track is a ten-minute 12-bar improvisation where the chuckling, the whispering,
the occasionally quivering vocalizing, the minimalistic syncopation are much
more important than the nearly non-existent melody or the totally irrelevant
lyrics. On the second track, Buddy does indeed play the same acoustic riff over
and over again, with Wells either picking it up on harmonica or veering off on
a tangent — and despite the simplicity, they do manage to create the atmosphere
of some important shamanistic ritual, as if nagging and nagging and nagging
away at that riff were sure to eventually restore balance to the universe. It
helps that the riff itself is mysteriously bass-heavy, and Buddy's occasional
grunts give the illusion that playing it is about as difficult as lifting heavy
weights, but no pain, no gain — it's not that easy to restore balance to the
universe, you know.
The atmosphere actually dissipates a little bit
when the piano player joins in and the trio begins playing more predictable
classics like ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ and ʽFive Long Yearsʼ.
Some critics praise Junior Mance's piano playing here to high heaven — I don't
know, I think he's just keeping his end up fairly well, but comparisons with
Otis Spann are unjustified, since this guy has neither the fluency nor the
coolness and confidence of Otis (for actual comparison, refer to A Man And The Blues, where Otis made
the record shine in all those places where Buddy was not able to — this piano playing, in comparison, does
little for me except providing some extra rhythmic support and clogging up one
recording track). Worst of all is when they decide to close the session with a
boogie piece (ʽAin't No Needʼ), and Mance plays like two or three
different notes throughout, with Wells as your only hope for some nitty-gritty
stuff, and it's not even as if he were doing his best, either.
Ultimately, this is a disappointment — I admire
Buddy, and Junior Wells can be a delightfully bad blues guy when he really gets
into that spirit, but here they seem to be holding a «who of us can get more
low-key?» competition, which starts out as subtly atmospheric but then rapidly
progresses into boringly non-atmospheric. Unless you believe that any acoustic session between two blues
heroes automatically deserves a thumbs up, I see no big reason to bother here,
although, as a historical document, Buddy
And The Juniors probably has its place in the annals of Superstar Meetings.
Decent acoustic blues, if nothing else.
HOLD THAT PLANE! (1972)
1) Watermelon Man; 2) Hold
That Plane; 3) I'm Ready; 4) My Time After Awhile; 5) You Don't Love Me; 6)
Come See About Me; 7) Hello San Francisco.
Honestly, Buddy's last album for Vanguard is no
great shakes; in fact, although it seems to have been recorded as early as
1970, they only put it out two years later, probably as part of a
shelf-cleaning process — and it happened to be Buddy's last album for almost a
decade, and Buddy's last American-released album for almost two.
And you can sort of see why, because Hold That Plane!, while not being
objectively bad, is a mess. It shows a lot of diversity — not every blues
artist would think of covering Herbie Hancock and Muddy Waters on the same
album — but not a lot of spirit or invention. Probably the silliest thing about
it is that Buddy splits himself in two: Buddy Guy the guitar player is
restricted here mainly to long instrumental jams like ʽCome See About
Meʼ (no, no relation whatsoever to the Supremes' song — this here is just
generic 12-bar blues), and Buddy Guy the singer/showman is featured on songs
with very brief guitar solo passages or no such passages whatsoever. This almost
inevitably results in the instrumental jams becoming boring, and in the vocal
numbers becoming superfluous halfway before they are over.
Worse than that, it seems that at this point
Buddy does not have his own muse — for instance, I cannot believe that it is
mere coincidence that he chose to record ʽWatermelon Manʼ and
ʽYou Don't Love Meʼ just a year or so after the world saw these tunes
successfully assimilated by Albert King; and his stab at ʽI'm Readyʼ,
one of the most deliciously rude, brawny, cocky blues numbers ever owned by
Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters, shows one thing only — that, like it or not, he
is not ready. There is no threat in
his delivery, nor can there be: personality-wise, Buddy has always been closer
to James Brown than to Muddy or John Lee Hooker, and his music has never been
«evil» or «scary» in the least.
So what's the good news, if any? Well, I am sympathetic to this version of
ʽWatermelon Manʼ: strong piano groove, good sax, and Buddy's «broken»
style of soloing is at least so individually different from Albert King's that
he gives the song much more jerky spazz. ʽCome See About Meʼ is sharp
and crispy for about three minutes, after which it just starts repeating
itself. And ʽHello San Franciscoʼ could work well as a rousing show
opener... in San Francisco. And, uh, that's about it for this record; no
offense to Buddy, but if this was his typical level of operation at Vanguard
circa 1970, you can sort of easily see why he lost that contract, and had so
much difficulty finding another. (For that matter, one probably needn't lay
all the blame on Buddy — his backing band here seems fairly mediocre as well;
just compare this level of playing with B. B. King, who around the same time
had probably assembled the best backing band of his career, on those Bill
Szymczyk-produced albums). Unless you're a real blues fanatic, no need to
bother with this uninspired, thumbs down-worthy stuff.
STONE CRAZY! (1979)
1) I Smell A Rat; 2) Are You
Losing Your Mind?; 3) You've Been Gone Too Long; 4) She's Out There Somewhere;
5) Outskirts Of Town; 6) When I Left Home.
For most of the rest of the decade, Buddy found
himself without a recording contract, suffering the same fate as quite a few
old Chicago bluesmen, out of vogue and fighting, or refusing to fight, for
survival. One reason may have been a stubborn refusal to adapt, like B. B. King
did, but more important, I think, was the fact that unlike B. B. King, Buddy never truly achieved major stardom either
in the 1950s or in the 1960s, and thus had no «starting capital» to begin with:
not even the good word from Hendrix could make much of an impact.
Eventually, by 1979, as it sometimes happens, Buddy
emerged on the far-from-home front — some people have to move to Japan to do
this, but Stone Crazy!, as far as I
can tell, was recorded in Toulouse,
of all places (pretty big city, but who'd know there was a market for American
electric blues specifically in the far south end of France?), released on the
small Isabel label, and only two years later picked up by the Alligator label
in the States (which is why in most conventional discographies you'll find this
record marked 1981, when it's really 1979), obviously, to very little fanfare
and even less effect.
And you can see why, because Stone Crazy! does indeed show a man who
is totally refusing to adapt, living in his own world of musical values and
happy to ignore all the developments on all the musical fronts around him. Ten
more years and the world would start admiring him for that, but in 1979-81 the
progressive drive was still strong, and this retro-Chicago-stuff just didn't
cut it. Too bad, because on a purely personal level, the album does show some
progress — about half of the tracks feature Buddy Guy in such an overdriven
mood as he'd never let us take part in previously. Perhaps there was something
in the Toulouse air that made him feel as if he were fighting the Saracens, or
maybe it was just the lack of any pressure, but on ʽI Smell A Ratʼ
(no relation to the Big Mama Thornton classic) and ʽYou've Been Gone Too
Longʼ Buddy Guy is unleashed — good news for all lovers of electric blues
guitar thunderstorms.
In fact, unless my gut feeling plays a trick on
me, we'd probably have to pick ʽI Smell A Ratʼ as the first bona fide
representative of the by-now-all-too-familiar Buddy Guy playing style — «blues
against the rules», where conventional, party-approved blues solo licks may be
offset at any time with a bit of dissonance, harmony break-up, discordant
repetition of an appreciated chord instead of required moving up or down the
scale, etc. etc., any time that the soul commands it from the player. Sometimes
it's ugly, but even when it's ugly, you kind of feel that it's just because
the guitarist got so caught up in his feelings, he forgot all about his
textbook. Of course, Buddy is not alone in this respect, but far from every
respectable bluesman can allow himself to introduce that element of punkish
hooliganry into the playing — Eric Clapton, for instance, while mastering quite
a few of Buddy's old licks, never dared to follow him into that territory.
The downside of all this, unfortunately, is
that Stone Crazy! is really only
interesting when it comes to guitar solos — the song structures are as
generically 12-bar as they come, and the only thing that varies are tempos and
basic patterns (ʽShe's Out There Somewhereʼ is ʽDust My
Broomʼ, ʽAre You Losing Your Mind?ʼ is B. B. King, and only
ʽYou've Been Gone Too Longʼ constructs its vamp on the basis of
Funkadelic's ʽHit It And Quit Itʼ, because, after all, Buddy does
know his way around the basics of R&B, soul, and funk — it's just that the
people of Toulouse expect him to play the blues, because it makes for a good
rhyme).
Anyway, highlights: ʽI Smell A Ratʼ
(plaintive, soulful, crazy aggressive guitar kicks in right away and almost
never lets go); ʽYou've Been Gone Too Longʼ (instrumental,
funkadelicious, kick-ass energy, the works); ʽWhen I Left Homeʼ (only
partially — he makes a big case here out of the alternation of loud and quiet
bits, but there's way too little of that
scorching soloing when it comes to «loud», and it comes in way too late, and
all the rest of the time is Buddy Guy doing his best Bobby Bland
impersonation). The rest... ain't bad, really, just nothing to write about. But
as a whole, the album does have enough importance and entertainment value to
deserve a thumbs
up: ʽI Smell A Ratʼ was probably the best blues song to
come out of 1979, even if the world couldn't care less at the time.
BREAKING OUT (1980)
1) Have You Ever Been
Lonesome; 2) You Can Make It If You Try; 3) Break Out All Over You; 4) She
Winked Her Eye; 5) I Didn't Know My Mother Had A Son Like Me; 6) Boogie Family
Style; 7) You Called Me In My Dream; 8) Me & My Guitar.
Apparently, this period in Buddy Guy's career
is so ridiculously understudied and underappreciated that not even the
Internet, our most trustworthy and loyal counselor in all things (especially
when it comes to the latest pop crap single that sold 100,000 copies in three
digital minutes), can be relied upon for cohesive information. The (current)
Wikipedia page for this album states, for instance, that it was issued in 1988,
and it probably was (still other sources say 1996 and/or 2008), but it was actually
a late reissue — the original date seems to be 1980 or 1981 at best. The
All-Music Guide review of the album, other than listing some of the credits,
gets away with one or two vague phrases that could be equally well applied to
99% of Buddy's output ("raw but applied talent and showmanship" —
what the hell does "raw but applied" even mean?), and gives no clue
as to whether the reviewer has even heard the songs. Who do you turn to for
comfort?
Well, at least the good old Only Solitaire is
here to tell you that Breaking Out
sounds nothing like anything that Buddy had put out prior to that — and only
partially like anything that he would put out after that. The oddity of the
record is that, while remaining firmly grounded in standard blues territory,
this time it's all about the tone. Yes, this is where Buddy falls upon a new,
rich, not totally unique or innovative, but seriously idiosyncratic electric
guitar tone — thick, trebly, distorted, echoey, crackling but melodic — and
proceeds to explore it on every single
song on the album. You might suspect it makes things monotonous and boring,
but it does not: since there is enough formal diversity (slow 12-bar, fast
12-bar, boogie, ballad, R&B), all it does is make every single song kick
major ass.
ʽHave You Ever Been Lonesomeʼ,
presented here as an «original» number, is really just ʽFive Long
Yearsʼ (var.: ʽHave You Ever Loved A Womanʼ) with new lyrics,
but you could argue that the presence of this tone is really the thing that
makes it original, particularly when the man shuts up and just plays his guitar
— fast, passionate, thunderstormy, irreverent, and with the guitar assuming the
language of a raging bull. I would still insist that when Clapton did the same
thing on his From The Cradle fifteen
years later (and seriously influenced by Buddy), he would be able to come up
with more inventive phrasing... but he never had this kind of tone, and
whatever be the case, Buddy got there first.
When he experiments with the same tone on
softer numbers, such as ʽYou Can Make It If You Tryʼ, the results are
tasteful but not quite as exciting — Breaking
Out is really all about «breaking out» on such rip-roaring tracks as the
funky ʽI Didn't Know My Mother Had A Son Like Meʼ, or the
breathlessly fast ʽBoogie Family Styleʼ, or the totally instrumental
showcase ʽMe & My Guitarʼ that closes the album with five minutes
of fretboard assassination that seems to be delivered in one uninterrupted
blast, as if the player's brain were operating on a single powerful charge/impulse
that took that long to discharge: normally, these blues jams tend to run out of
steam pretty fast, but this here is just one uninterrupted gulp, like watching
somebody pick up a wine barrel and drain it off in one go. Listening to this in
headphones could indeed make one dizzy and delirious, especially considering
the potential psychedelic effects of that treated tone, so be careful about
this.
Little can be said about the virtues of
individual songs, melodies, or supporting instrumentation — and little needs to
be said, since it is all about that tone and the power to use it. Buddy would
go on using it in the future, but, strangely enough, never again would he make
an album of such stubborn consistency: Breaking
Out is indeed a stylistic oddity in his catalog, and a very welcome one,
I'd say. Definitely a thumbs up if you're in the mood for some serious
whiplashing.
D.J. PLAY MY BLUES (1982)
1) Girl You're Nice And Clean;
2) Dedication To The Late T-Bone Walker; 3) Good News; 4) Blues At My Baby's
House; 5) She Suits Me To A T; 6) D.J. Play My Blues; 7) Just Teasin'; 8) All
Your Love; 9) The Garbage Man Blues; 10) Mellow Down.
The last of these semi-obscure Buddy Guy albums
before he once again went into hiatus is usually listed as having been
recorded in Chicago in December 1981 and released on the JSP label in 1982; the
10-track edition is a 1987 CD reissue that originally went under the title of Complete DJ Play My Blues Sessions.
Featuring Mike Morrison on bass, Ray Allison on drums, and second guitarist
Doug Williams, this is once again a stark, uncompromising affair that
completely refuses to recognize or respect the progressive advancement of the
musical world — in fact, if anything, it's a «regressive» album on Buddy's own
terms, since it pretty much abandons the cool-tone-based personality of Breaking Out and returns to a far more
standard, conservative electric blues paradigm.
The title track is a good indication of what's
at stake — searching for a good pretext to enter one of his blue moods, Buddy
finds a suitable one in the fact that blues went out of fashion, so the song,
instead of pleading for baby to come home, as it normally should, pleads for
Mr. D.J. to play some T-Bone Walker (instead of all that New Wave crap, one has
to assume). Of course, the D.J. has no answer to that, so there's nothing left
to do but to play some T-Bone Walker on one's own (ʽDedicationʼ,
which is indeed played very much in classic T-Bone Walker style, even if Buddy
never attaches as much importance to each individual note as the late T-Bone
did — the speed curse hits the man even in slow mode).
A somewhat shadier side of said conservatism is
the sheer amount of «mutated» songs by classic artists that Buddy includes here
in only very slightly modified versions — most likely, so that he can get his
own songwriting credits (on an album that wouldn't sell anyway, but I guess
that when you're so down on your luck, every penny counts). For instance, Otis
Rush' ʽAll Your Love (I Miss Loving)ʼ becomes simply ʽAll Your
Loveʼ; Little Walter's ʽMellow Down Easyʼ becomes simply
ʽMellow Downʼ; ʽShe Suits Me To A Tʼ is an Elmore James
number with new lyrics; and ʽGood Newsʼ is a strange hybrid of
ʽMemphis Tennesseeʼ (melody), ʽGood Rockin' Tonightʼ
(lyrics) and an ad-libbed mish-mash of old rock'n'roll clichés.
People interested in musical family ties should
check out ʽThe Garbage Man Bluesʼ, a duet between Buddy and his
brother Phil Guy, who takes lead vocals and adds his own guitar leads — as a
singer, his talents are quite comparable to Buddy's, but as a guitarist, this
is just nepotism in action. Overall, there's nothing here to make the record
stand out from the average pool of professional electric blues-rock, and while
I fully concur with Buddy's pleading on the whole, he does not exactly build as
much of a strong case for himself
here as he provides a good pretext for brushing the dust off all those T-Bone,
Elmore, Otis, and Little Walter records to which D.J. Play My Blues is nothing but a humble, uninventive tribute.
DAMN RIGHT, I'VE GOT THE BLUES (1991)
1) Damn Right, I've Got The
Blues; 2) Where Is The Next One Coming From; 3) Five Long Years; 4) Mustang
Sally; 5) There Is Something On Your Mind; 6) Early In The Morning; 7) Too
Broke To Spend The Night; 8) Black Night; 9) Let Me Love You Baby; 10)
Rememberin' Stevie; 11*) Doin' What I Like Best; 12*) Trouble Don't Last.
A quarter century later, it is a little hard to
understand what all the hoopla was about, but back in 1991, Buddy Guy's
«comeback» album (or «breakthrough» album, to be more accurate, since he didn't
exactly have a ton of hit records to be eclipsed) caused quite a bit of
excitement. The entire music industry was rolling backwards a bit, after the
oversaturated futurism and technocracy of the previous decade, and in a way,
Buddy here became one of the symbols, or maybe even the symbol for the revival of raw electric blues. After all, most
of the pioneers were dead, and those that were still alive didn't give much of
a damn, or were way too prone to selling out whenever their record labels
dropped a hint (B. B. King, for instance, had quite a few smelly duds throughout
the Eighties). And here was a guy of stark integrity, who'd rather record on a
minor label with no promotion, or not record at all, than go for pop choruses
and electronic drums.
That said, Damn
Right, I've Got The Blues still had to come out in England, on the small
Silvertone Records label, where Buddy got signed up after having luckily
partnered up with Eric Clapton for the latter's 24 Nights engagement at the Albert Hall (and some of Eric's backup
team, including backing vocalists Tessa Niles and Katie Kissoon, are also
playing here). The album was produced by John Porter, who was before then
mostly known for working with The Smiths — which really meant that nobody would
be truly getting in Buddy's way. And, just so that the sales could be boosted a
bit and proper respect be paid, the man procures guest appearances not only
from Eric himself, but from Jeff Beck and Mark Knopfler as well.
The result was... well, not exactly a smash
hit, but the record did sell far more assuredly than any of Buddy's previous
work, and attracted quite a bit of critical attention, going as far as to win
the Grammy for best blues album. Finally, after all those years, the blues paid
off, and the best thing about it was no need to compromise — well, maybe only a
little bit, if «overproduction»
counts as «compromise». Other than the backup girls and the guest stars, the
sound is considerably beefed up by The Memphis Horns, and then there are two
additional keyboardists and two more guitar players. But that is really not
that different from the early records: Buddy always favored a big band sound,
and he was always a «better with horns» kind of person. It's not his fault he
was put on such a tight budget in the early Eighties.
Of course, the music here is not significantly
better or worse than anything he recorded in the lean-hungry years. The songs
are mostly old blues standards, occasionally interrupted by some contemporary
writing (John Hiatt's ʽWhere Is The Next One Coming Fromʼ) or an old
R&B cover or two (the inescapable ʽMustang Sallyʼ). The playing
has plenty of energy and feeling, but not a lot of creativity — clearly, this
here is not a man searching for new sounds, but a man unloading his precious
baggage, accumulated over the years, all in one place. Too many songs sound the
same, and the arrangements never focus on outlining potential hooks: in just a
few years, Clapton — who was quite likely motivated himself to do a
straightahead blues album by Buddy's success — would really show the world how
this thing can be done right with From
The Cradle, where the inidividual touches on the songs and their sequencing
made for an involving, surprise-filled journey. Damn Right, I've Got The Blues is not that kind of record.
And yet, it is a damn right good record all the
same. It's as if this man here were given this one chance to do it right and
succeed, and he totally throws himself in on that, throttling his guitar on
every song and throwing a desperate vocal fit on the title track: "I can't
win, cause I don't have a thing to lose" — just change that can't to a can and that's what it all is about. He is still being the hooligan
of the blues, changing his tone from «clean» to «dirty» at will, embracing
dissonance and off-rhythm playing when the heart calls for this, sending
catcalls and wolf whistles from his six-string whenever his brain begins
smouldering from too much excitement and complex, finger-flashing strings of
notes become hard to concentrate upon. And he can be sentimental, throwing in a
lengthy vocal-free serenade called ʽRememberin' Stevieʼ — of course,
the best way to remember Stevie is not through sheer sadness and melancholy,
but through a mix of sadness with ferociously ass-kicking blueswailing of the
ʽHave You Ever Loved A Womanʼ variety. (In fact, come to think of it,
ʽRememberin' Stevieʼ is
ʽHave You Ever Loved A Womanʼ with all the vocals safely stored over
in the closet).
Although this is not the best album of Buddy's
«comeback» period — more like a taste of even more exciting things to come —
its sheer historic importance, in addition to general enjoyability, demands a thumbs up.
I must say that I am somewhat dismayed by the guest star talents largely being
wasted (unless you listen very hard,
you won't even suspect that Knopfler, Clapton, and Beck are in the same
building), but then it would certainly be impolite to subconsciously wish for
them stealing the mat from under the guy's feet: they are quite expressly here
to add to the market value, not to steal the black man's blues for the white
man's gain one more time. Other than that, I couldn't complain of any
unpredictable disappointments.
FEELS LIKE RAIN (1993)
1) She's A Superstar; 2) I Go
Crazy; 3) Feels Like Rain; 4) She's Nineteen Years Old; 5) Some Kind Of
Wonderful; 6) Sufferin' Mind; 7) Change In The Weather; 8) I Could Cry; 9) Mary
Ann; 10) Trouble Man; 11) Country Man.
The success of Damn Right, I've Got The Blues gave birth to a prolific pattern to
which Buddy has more or less conformed ever since, releasing a steady stream of
records with one or two year intervals that are pretty much interchangeable,
some being slightly more and some slightly less interesting, of course —
essentially, though, lovers of Buddy will want to savor them all, while those
who are largely indifferent to modern electric blues might just pay a little
attention to those few tracks on which Buddy's guitar playing occasionally
transcends the genre's limitations.
Feels
Like Rain, unfortunately, has
no such tracks. Like its predecessor, it is a mish-mash of some really old
blues tunes, some comparably old R&B hits, and a few contemporary, but
still retro-oriented compositions — all of them impeccably played and produced,
and featuring some guest stars to boost up sales; this time, though, Buddy goes
with some lesser profiles, the most notable of the lot probably being Bonnie
Raitt and Paul Rodgers, and with John Mayall and Travis Tritt in tow. Accusations
of «pandering to mainstream tastes», which sometimes accompany descriptions of
this record, are a little misguided: with or without all these people, Feels Like Rain would still feel
exactly like Buddy Guy — if he choked the arrangements up with solemn
synthesizer parts, or started studying Madchester beats, that'd be a whole
other story, but these guys are just
following the boss' directions, 'sall.
What is actually much worse than abstract
«pandering to the mainstream» is the inclusion of all those covers. What
business does Buddy really have in
trying to not just cover Muddy Waters' ʽShe's Nineteen Years Oldʼ,
but to actually imitate Muddy, both
in his vocals and his guitar playing? It's one thing to adapt the song to his
own style, but have we all lost access to the old records or something? Is the intended
target audience of the cover supposed to consist of people who'd never ever want to listen to a song from 1958
because it's, like, all mono and shit? It's not very likely that those same
people would be interested in investing their money in a record by an old
geezer who was 22 himself in 1958. Likewise, it is not very uplifting when he
tries to appeal to the James Brown fanbase (ʽI Go Crazyʼ) or, God
help us, the Grand Funk Railroad fanbase (ʽSome Kind Of Wonderfulʼ —
which most people certainly associate with GFR rather than Soul Brothers Six)
instead.
My own favorite tracks here are the two
blues-rock rave-ups that bookmark the album and are credited to Buddy himself —
ʽShe's A Superstarʼ and ʽCountry Manʼ (not that he had much
to compose on either one, except for some new lyrical lines). Totally generic
in basic form, they are simply used by Buddy as launchpads for some major
master soloing, with heavy wah-wah support and a speedy, guitar-throttling
approach where his note sequences cover each other like rippling waves, rather
than jagged, broken, dissonant patterns that he favors more often. The words of
ʽCountry Manʼ, which he delivers like a passionate defense speech in
court ("I'm a country man, baby, you know I ain't ashamed / That's why I'm
crazy 'bout my guitar, that's why I surely will keep on playing"), ring a
little strange, seeing as how Buddy was always professionally associated with
«urban» Chicago blues — but then again, he did spend all of his childhood in
Lettsworth, Louisiana, and if he means that it is precisely this rustic
pedigree that gives him the strength and the stubborness to push on in his «conservatively
innovative» manner, more power to the man, I say. He certainly plays the hell
out of his guitar on that track as if each new verse he delivers on the subject
provides him with extra strength to do it.
If you are in the mood to relax a little, the
title track, written by John Hiatt and sung and played by Buddy in a duet with
Bonnie Raitt, will do a reasonably good job as well. Nothing particularly
special on the hook / riff / arrangement front, but Bonnie's slide playing is
always welcome, and her raspy vocal support in the background feels... well,
suffice it to say that there's a pleasantly optimistic vibe to all of this, and
that Buddy's singing is almost unusually sensitive and vulnerable, compared to
his usual standards.
That said, three songs to salvage out of eleven
is not a particularly awesome quota; and the rest, ranging from the puzzling (dueting
with Paul Rodgers on ʽSome Kind Of Wonderfulʼ? How gauche!) to the
unremarkable (dueting with John Mayall on ʽI Could Cryʼ? How...
nostalgic...), are nothing to write home about. Of course, that did not stop
the man from scooping up yet another
Grammy here for «best contemporary blues album» — for almost total lack of
competition, I suppose — but honestly, it does not seem as if the guy was
trying too hard here. Fortunately, he would begin pinching himself way hard for the next release, just in
the nick of time to escape being pegged down as a particularly smelly dinosaur.
SLIPPIN' IN (1994)
1) I Smell Trouble; 2) Please
Don't Drive Me Away; 3) 7-11; 4) Shame, Shame, Shame; 5) Love Her With A
Feeling; 6) Little Dab-A-Doo; 7) Someone Else Is Steppin' In; 8) Trouble Blues;
9) Man Of Many Words; 10) Don't Tell Me About The Blues; 11) Cities Need Help.
This is as straightahead as it ever gets: nothing but pure electric
blues, eleven heads in a row, and not a single guest star in sight — an
impeccable experiment in the «can I do it alone?» genre. Of course, this also
makes it twice as hard to say anything uniquely meaningful about this album, unless
it is in the comparative genre... and it's not that difficult to slip into the
comparative genre here, considering how few originals there are. The choice of
covers is actually not all that trivial: for instance, there are two songs by Charles Brown, both of
which were covered in 1963 by Sam Cooke on his Night Beat album. Coincidence, or the result of some fortuitous
nighttime listen? There's Freddie King's ʽLove Her With The Feelingʼ
redone in the style of ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ, because Buddy loves
ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ, but he can't play ʽHoochie Coochie
Manʼ on all his albums, so a
little strategic thought is in order here. There's Denise LaSalle, there's
Fenton Robinson... all sorts of interesting blues people that rarely appear on
the first pages of blues encyclopaedias. But, of course, it's still just the
blues.
Points worth mentioning, in addition to Buddy's
reliable vocals and guitar escapades, are: (a) a sweet appearance by legendary
Johnnie Johnson, Chuck Berry's pianist of choice, contributing a feather-light
(in the good sense of the word) solo on ʽ7-11ʼ; (b) a suitably comic
arrangement of ʽSomeone Else Is Steppin' Inʼ, with ridiculous «party
noises» in the background and a drunken choir joining in for the final line of
the chorus — but thanks, Mr. Guy, for reminding me where the Stones stole their
ʽBlack Limousineʼ from; (c) ʽTrouble Bluesʼ features a lo-fi production style, with plenty of
hissing and crackling to artificially age the song — see Mr. Guy flirt around
with indie aesthetics!; (d) ʽCities Need Helpʼ, one of the two
originals, is Buddy adopting a socially responsible posture — kind of like
Bobby Bland on his moody, smoky early 1970s records. He still cannot resist
from the temptation to turn it into a guitar pyrotechnics feast midway through,
though, and I concur. Are we going to become more socially conscious if Buddy
Guy tells us that our cities need help? No. But if he goes on beating the crap
out of that guitar, who knows what changes that might eventually bring about in
our social consciousness.
In terms of beating the crap out, I would
probably single out ʽPlease Don't Drive Me Awayʼ, where the man
brushes the dust off the wah-wah pedal for a speedy,
destroy-everything-in-its-path type of solo, sometimes bordering on the
psychedelic; and ʽSomeone Elseʼ, for such an essentially comic
number, also boasts a fairly mean tone, with each note threatening to snap you
in half. Beyond that, it's Buddy Guy and his predictably ecstatic blues guitar
— lots of improvising, not a lot of artistic invention that could be
correlated with words. Which means it is time to award this album its
well-deserved, if unexceptional, thumbs up and move on.
LIVE: THE REAL DEAL (1996)
1) I've Got My Eyes On You; 2)
Sweet Black Angel; 3) Talk To Me Baby; 4) My Time After Awhile; 5) I've Got
News For You; 6) Damn Right I've Got The Blues; 7) First Time I Met The Blues;
8) Ain't That Lovin' You; 9) Let Me Love You Baby.
Buddy's first live album of the «comeback» era
— recorded at Buddy Guy's Legends in Chicago with, would you believe it, the
Saturday Night Live band itself backing the man. That is no mock irony, though,
since the SNL band at the time included George Edward Smith, a first-rate guitarist
with an impressive pedigree; additionally, Buddy is joined by Johnnie Johnson,
who had already stuck with him on the latest studio album. On the whole, the
backing band is top notch, the audience is responding wildly, and good vibes
are flying all around the place.
The most interesting part here is probably the
setlist which, with the exception of the man's comeback anthem (ʽDamn
Right I've Got The Bluesʼ), consists completely and entirely of old
classics; not a single new tune from the last two records anywhere in sight. He
even does ʽFirst Time I Met The Bluesʼ, his first single from way
back — which shows that he is not particularly impressed by his own new
material, or, more accurately, that he probably recognizes how it's mostly just
variations on the old themes, and when we're in concert, why not just stick to
the old themes in person? Instead of trying to create the illusion of coming up
with something new, it works better for him when he is just pouring his heart
into the old.
That said, this is a pretty awesome guitar battle between Buddy and Smith that they
get going on ʽDamn Right I've Got The Bluesʼ, as the backing horns
goad them into brutal action against each other — almost putting the original
to shame. ʽLet Me Love You Babyʼ is also reprised in the Damn Right version, with horns and
stuff and those guitar wails occasionally getting out of harmony with the
rhythm section for reasons of an ecstatic character. Much of the album,
however, is given over to the slow and subtle — such as a 13-minute version of
ʽI've Got News For Youʼ, with a lengthy Johnnie Johnson solo and
other members of the band taking their turns as well (I'm assuming it's G. E.
Smith responsible for the short, but classy slide guitar solo, since Buddy does
not play the slide much — to which Buddy then answers with one of his sexiest
vibratos). I do not know why he feels such a pressing need to steal ʽSweet
Black Angelʼ from under B. B. King's nose — that's one of King's greatest
trademarks, and even though Buddy does a very good job mimicking the man's
silky-sweet Lucille tone, Buddy is Buddy, and B. B. is B. B.
Other than the purist attitude, I'd say the
biggest advantage of The Real Deal
is the party attitude: thankfully, Buddy does not go for a lot of audience
interaction, but every once in a while, the people out there make sure to let
us know they love him, and he makes sure to let us know that he loves them, and
it's all cool. There's definitely more fun in the air than at an Eric Clapton
concert, even if that does not necessarily mean that there's more going on than at an Eric Clapton
concert, if you know what I mean.
HEAVY LOVE (1998)
1) Heavy Love; 2) Midnight
Train; 3) I Got A Problem; 4) I Need You Tonight; 5) Saturday Night Fish Fry;
6) Had A Bad Night; 7) Are You Lonely For Me Baby; 8) I Just Want To Make Love
To You; 9) Did Somebody Make A Fool Out Of You; 10) When The Time Is Right; 11)
Let Me Show You.
In the never-ending series of the clinkers and
clunkers triggered by more and more demand for Buddy Guy records, Heavy Love is more of a clunker. Not
because it was produced by David Z. or because it featured a duet with rising
star Jonny Lang (rising at the time, perhaps, but never truly arisen) — just
because it's kinda lazy, and on none of these songs do I get the feeling that
Mr. Guy is giving us the best he can.
Some of the covers are downright odd. Would you
think it a good idea for Buddy Guy to cover Louis Jordan? I wouldn't, but he
does anyway, throwing on a five-and-a-half minute long rendition of
ʽSaturday Night Fish Fryʼ (without even a single guitar solo!) that
has none of the jivin' excitement of the original. Maybe might have worked on a
tribute album to Louis, but as an independent artistic interpretation, that's
one stinky fish fry. ZZ Top's ʽI Need You Tonightʼ? The whole point
of that generic blues ballad was to do it Eliminator-style.
Throw away the ZZ Toppishness, and it reverts back to a generic blues ballad.
ʽI Just Want To Make Love To Youʼ, remade as a modern funk number,
becomes totally lifeless. ʽAre You Lonely For Me, Baby?ʼ makes a
valiant effort to keep Buddy astride that Classic Soul branch, but he never
ever held a position of honor on that branch, and this performance does not
change much about it.
Neither these nor the rest of the tracks offer
us any particularly stellar guitar parts, either. The title track, the
ʽMidnight Trainʼ duet with Lang, and ʽHad A Bad Nightʼ are
macho blues rockers that could kick ass if kicking ass were on anybody's
scheduled list, but apparently it wasn't, so they don't: Buddy's playing is
consistently restrained here. He does manage to throw in a head-spinning
vibrato or one of his trademark "going somewhere completely different, but
don't worry, I'll be back in time to save this from falling apart" lead
phrases from time to time, but you really have to wait for it — on the whole,
he seems fairly disinterested. He is
still mildly interested in writing new lyrics for old tunes and re-crediting
them to himself, though: ʽLet Me Show Youʼ, from head to toe, is
really Jimmy Reed's ʽHonest I Doʼ (although, to be fair, this song
probably contains the album's most interesting bit of guitar, with Buddy
playing slightly out of tune with the rest of the instruments and sometimes
«de-tuning» his licks in mid-air).
Basically, this isn't embarrassing enough to
earn a proper thumbs down, but that is simply because Buddy has a certain
strictly observed quality standard that safeguards him almost 100% from total
cringeworthy failure (well, used to
have, at least, before he went completely out of his mind and started messin'
with Kid Rock). As it is, I would not recommend this one to anybody but the
starkest fans, mad-crazy about every lick the man ever played.
SWEET TEA (2001)
1) Done Got Old; 2) Baby
Please Don't Leave Me; 3) Look What All You Got; 4) Stay All Night; 5) Tramp;
6) She Got The Devil In Her; 7) I Gotta Try You Girl; 8) Who's Been Fooling
You; 9) It's A Jungle Out There.
I have no idea what the title is supposed to
symbolize (was "sweet tea" the finest taste to be tasted by a young
Buddy during his early Louisiana days?), but the album is indeed Buddy's finest
in a long, long while. It continues the strange pattern of alternating a
rougher-edged, more aggressive and inventive record with a softer, calmer, more
commercial one — but there's something extra special here that was not seen
either in Damn Right or in Slippin' In, the two real good 'uns.
Perhaps it's his new band, now including Davey Faragher of Cracker on bass and
Jimbo Mathus of Squirrel Nut Zippers on second guitar, that gives Sweet Tea its edge — at the very least,
I can definitely vouch for Faragher as far as the bass goes, because this is
the first time we have such a deep, echoey, rumbling bass sound on a Buddy Guy
album, and I love it.
More generally, though, Sweet Tea sounds like it's out there to say something, not just to
show the world that Buddy Guy is still playing the blues. The first track is a
consciously laid trap — an acoustic moanin' blues, courtesy of the
then-recently deceased Junior Kimbrough, on which Buddy laments that he
"done got old" and that he can't look, walk, or love "like I
used to do", in the general fashion of an old Negro spiritual. Of course,
that's a ruse — already the second track, the lengthy, slow, threatening
ʽBaby Please Don't Leave Meʼ shows that getting old sure don't
prevent Mr. Guy from playing God of Thunder if he sets his heart to it. That
great psychedelic distorted tone is back, and coupled with Faragher's
doom-laden bass sound, it gets the old mojo workin' — the entire seven minutes
seem like a voodooistic ritual performed by the man to ensure that his baby
don't leave him. And who could, after such a performance?
A few tracks down the line, he tries to repeat
the exact same ritual with the even longer, but less effective ʽI Gotta
Try You Girlʼ — same bass, same tempo, same style of vocal incantation,
but a little less fury and a little more plodding with the solos; also, in this
modern age endless repetition of the lines "I gotta try you girl, we gotta
make love baby, no matter what you say girl" could get you arrested in
some parts of the country, but I guess this could probably never stop a real
man like Mr. Guy. Still, for about five or six minutes the ceremony can be just
as breathtaking as its shorter and angrier predecessor.
I am not going to launch into a detailed explanation
of the other tunes, of course — suffice it to say that there are many more
covers of the late Junior Kimbrough here, as well as some other blues pals of
Buddy's (CeDell Davis, Lowell Fulson, etc.), and only one «original»
(ʽIt's A Jungle Out Thereʼ, yet another bit of socially-conscious
preaching on Buddy's part that sounds like an imagination-less sequel to
ʽCities Need Helpʼ). The important thing are not the individual
tunes, but the overall sound of the album — that bass, that echo, that renewed
ferociousness on those sharply tuned guitars, well, it's not exactly a
revolution, but it is the hugest and brutal-est update of the Buddy Guy sound
ever since the underrated Breaking Out
experiment in 1980. And, funniest of all, it is a huge f*ck-you to all those
new generations of blues players. Who would be the very first blues musician to
come out with a solid update of the blues idiom in the 21st century? A 65-year
old native of Lettsworth, Louisiana, that's who. Now let us see you top this, Mr. John Mayer. Thumbs up.
BLUES SINGER (2003)
1) Hard Time Killing Floor; 2)
Crawlin' Kingsnake; 3) Lucy Mae Blues; 4) Can't See Baby; 5) I Love The Life I
Live; 6) Louise McGhee; 7) Moanin' And Groanin'; 8) Black Cat Blues; 9) Bad
Life Blues; 10) Sally Mae; 11) Anna Lee; 12) Lonesome Home Blues.
Okay, so apparently «Sweet Tea» is the name of
the recording studio in Oxford, Mississippi, where Buddy made that album — and
also its follow-up two years later: an «other-side-of-me» companion piece, all
quiet and acoustic as opposed to Sweet
Tea's ferociously electric thunderstorms. On paper, this sounds like a
promising idea that could work: in fact, it does seem like a much better
proposition to replace the older sequence of «one kick-ass hard-rocking album,
one boring commercial album» with a more basic «one electric, one acoustic»
approach. Reality, however, turns out to be disappointing.
The thing is, Buddy Guy is not a great acoustic
guitar player — much like his late buddy Hendrix, his «native» sphere is the
electric guitar, where he experiments with tones, effects, feedback, and
dissonance. Switching to acoustic, he just plays it: plays the blues, that is,
like any averagely competent blues guitarist does (okay, make it «more than
average», but still, there's literally hundreds of guys who have the same kind
of acoustic technique and versatility as Buddy). Granted, the album is named Blues Singer, not Blues Player; but that hardly resolves the problem, since as a
singer, Mr. Guy is also competent and convincing, yet not exceptional.
And even that
is not the worst problem here. No, the worst is that for this record, Buddy
chooses a varied selection of old classics typically associated with specific
idols of the past — Skip James (ʽHard Time Killing Floorʼ), John Lee
Hooker (ʽCrawling King Snakeʼ), Frankie Lee Sims (ʽLucy Mae Bluesʼ),
Muddy Waters (ʽI Love The Life I Liveʼ), Son House (ʽLouise
McGheeʼ), Lightnin' Hopkins (ʽBlack Cat Bluesʼ), and a few
other, somewhat lesser names; and instead of offering the «Buddy Guy
perspective» on all these guys, he pretty much tries to emulate every one of them. Excuse me, but this is just stupid — as
if he were some kind of Shang Tsung-like sorcerer, having devoured all of their
souls and exploiting them one at a time. He'd committed such errors before,
plenty of times, but never, as of yet, had any of his records sounded like One
Huge Error, stretched across fifty minutes' worth of wasted time.
It almost goes without saying that outside of context — that is, if you are
not familiar with any of the originals — Blues
Singer sounds quite nice. It's not as if Buddy showed no understanding of
these tunes, or wasn't able to get a good grip on the melodies. It's even got a
few enticing bonuses, like both B. B.
King and Clapton offering guest solos on ʽCrawling King Snakeʼ (and
it's not every day that you get to hear B. B. play acoustic guitar, either,
though you can probably understand why upon witnessing his performance here).
But why on Earth should one settle for an imitation
of the real thing rather than the real thing itself? Unless your ears are
completely insensitive for old mono production, crackles and pops, or unless
you have made a vow never to listen to music that is more than 10 years old (in
which case, as of 2016, this album is already obsolete as well), Skip James
still does a better ʽHard Time Killing Floorʼ, because Skip James
singing like Skip James... well, I dunno, sounds a little more authentic, for
some reason, than Buddy Guy singing like Skip James.
The only reason why I do not think the album
deserves a «thumbs down» in the end is that, on the whole, it shows good vibes
and good will. Propagating the old classics is always worthwhile, and properly
crediting the songs to their creators (or, at least, their classic
interpreters) is a sign of honesty. Besides, an album that is competently
performed, well produced, and consists of mostly good songs should not be
called «bad» just because it is so utterly superfluous; and, after all, Buddy
is one of the last surviving «original carriers» of the tradition, so at least
it makes much more sense than if somebody like John Mayer came out with a
record like this. However, it is also a sign that «being an original carrier»
never guarantees top quality; and that being an old black bluesman from
Louisiana does not automatically place you on the same level of spirituality
and sensitivity as any other old black (dead) bluesman from Louisiana.
BRING 'EM IN (2005)
1) Now You're Gone; 2) Ninety
Nine And One Half; 3) What Kind Of Woman Is This; 4) Somebody's Sleeping In My
Bed; 5) I Put A Spell On You; 6) On A Saturday Night; 7) Ain't No Sunshine; 8)
I've Got Dreams To Remember; 9) Lay Lady Lay; 10) Cheaper To Keep Her/Blues In
The Night; 11) Cut You Loose; 12) The Price You Gotta Pay; 13) Do Your Thing.
Despite the revealing title, not all of these songs, as could have been
thought (and easily been done), feature outside guest stars; in fact, more than
half of the album is just Buddy and his regular band, whatever it was at the
time. However, guest-studded sessions, no matter how much time is actually
being spent with the guests, tend not to work too well for Buddy: there's too
much emphasis on having collective fun and not enough emphasis on giving the
listener a real good musical reason to buy the album. And in that respect, Bring 'Em In is no exception — once
again, here is a «merely okay» record that never shows that one extra spark to
bring it over the top, like Sweet Tea
or even Slippin' In.
The collaborations themselves at least merit
some discussion. ʽI Put A Spell On Youʼ is set to a Latin,
Santana-esque rhythm, and sure enough, Carlos is here in person, forming quite
an incendiary duet with Mr. Guy; perhaps they could have chosen some less
obvious material to cover, but they do bring out the best (or, perhaps, simply
the most buoyant and arrogant) in each other, and there are a couple moments
here when their thunder-and-lightning soloing styles cross paths and you seem
caught up in a one-of-a-kind Chicago-Mexican blizzard. Next to this, a duet
with John Mayer could seem a total disaster; fortunately, they avoid it,
instead making Mayer add some relatively inoffensive and quiet lead lines to
Buddy's cover of Otis Redding's ʽI've Got Dreams To Rememberʼ (which
is like any other Buddy cover of any classic soul number: technically competent,
but completely expendable in the long run).
Elsewhere, Robert Randolph adds a pleasant
pedal steel part to ʽLay Lady Layʼ, but that song tends to always
sound cheesy and sleazy in anybody's hands but its author's, and this version
is no exception — Buddy's duet with Anthony Hamilton just ends up being generic
soul fodder. Finally, there's a weakly advertised Keith Richards on Keb' Mo's
ʽThe Price You Gotta Payʼ, but he neither sings nor plays lead
guitar. Actually, both of these may be good things, but there ain't a
Keith-worthy riff here, either, so ultimately, I guess, the point of having him
here was merely for the most advanced of Stones fanatics to buy the record (I
suppose that there are more people out there, anyway, vowing to own every
recording Keef has ever played on, than there are people out there ready to go
out and regularly buy up every new Buddy Guy release).
Of the other tracks, with a little effort, I'd
single out Curtis Mayfield's ʽNow You're Goneʼ, which Buddy tries to
sing like a true falsetto crooner (not too bad) and crowns with some cool
wah-wah work; his own ʽWhat Kind Of Woman Is Thisʼ, a rare case of a
riff-based Buddy original that's sharp and swaggerish at the same time; and the
lengthy epic ʽCut You Looseʼ, musically based on the old
ʽCatfish Blues / Rollin' Stoneʼ groove and gradually putting itself
in guitar overdrive — along the lines of Hendrix's ʽVoodoo Chileʼ,
which must have been Buddy's main inspiration for this stuff. None of these
songs have the unique aura of a ʽBaby Please Don't Leave Meʼ, though:
they are simply more powerful and decisive than everything else.
For the record, the reason why John Mayer is
here is probably because the album was produced by Steve Jordan, who was at the
time a member of the John Mayer Trio (and who earlier drummed for Keith
Richards' X-Pensive Winos, so here's anouther connection); the backing band includes
Danny Kortchmar on guitar and Bernie Worrell on keyboards, all well-known
professional musicians, but without too much rapport between each other, if you know what I mean. All in all, a
classic case of "let's make working conditions so cozy and polished for
our superstar that he suffocates in them", sort of.
SKIN DEEP (2008)
1) Best Damn Fool; 2) Too Many
Tears; 3) Lyin' Like A Dog; 4) Show Me The Money; 5) Every Time I Sing The
Blues; 6) Out In The Woods; 7) Hammer And A Nail; 8) That's My Home; 9) Skin
Deep; 10) Who's Gonna Fill Those Shoes; 11) Smell The Funk; 12) I Found Happiness.
Okay, this time, believe it or not, the guests
make a good difference. There's
Clapton on one of the tracks, singing and playing a little, but much more
important is the presence of the Derek Trucks / Susan Tedeschi pair — not just
because of the extra playing and singing, but because of a virtual «quality
boost» that Derek's presence in the studio usually gives to his peers and even
his elders. With a guy like that, you either have to give it your all, or step
back — and since Derek's work aesthetics rejects «flash» and «showmanship»
completely, your response has to be adequate. No monkeying around — just get to
the point.
Maybe this is why the album opener, ʻBest
Damn Foolʼ, despite not even featuring Derek, and despite being
essentially based upon the age-old ʻBorn Under A Bad Signʼ groove,
once again sounds sharper and livelier than anything on Buddy's last two
records — not quite up to the level of Sweet
Tea, because everything except Buddy's guitar is fairly routine, but up to
Buddy's own personal highest standards, as he delivers barrages of shrill,
simple, glass-cutting licks that have a whiff of «garage» attitude to them
(and, in some ways, remind me of John Fogerty's classic soloing style — the way
he could get the best out of the blues idiom with minimal means on stuff like
ʻPenthouse Paperʼ or ʻNinety-Nine And A Halfʼ). Basically,
the song just kicks ass.
Most of the material here is «original» (as
usual, in Buddy's case this normally means setting old blues tunes to new
lyrics), sometimes co-written with Tedeschi's producer Tom Hambridge (and
occasionally just written by Hambridge on his own), but the topics remain the
same — either bitchin' about the ten billionth woman in his imaginary life, or
reminiscing about his real, but long gone life in the swamps of Louisiana
(ʻOut In The Woodsʼ, ʻThat's My Homeʼ). At least once he
hits upon a sensitive theme — ʻWho's Gonna Fill Those Shoesʼ
namechecks a boatload of deceased bluesmen and leaves the question unanswered.
Of course, it is hardly a coincidence that the song was contributed by Susan
Tedeschi's associate, and that the young and promising Mr. Trucks was hovering
somewhere in the neighborhood, but still there are no direct hints here that
Mr. Trucks is in any way worthy of filling the shoes of Son House and Muddy
Waters, so we might as well suppose that Buddy answers this to himself in the
negative (Buddy himself, belonging to the same old breed, does not count, of
course — and he was a whoppin' 72
years old when this platter was recorded, for that matter; but then again, for
a 72-year old he really swings that axe on the track, acknowledging his guitar
as an equal partner in the righteous indignation over the fact that the shoes
are not gonna be filled by just anyone).
Stuff like ʻToo Many Tearsʼ, on which
the old man duets with Tedeschi, is the kind of unexciting contemporary
smooth-blues-rock fodder that usually goes in one ear and out the other — and,
honestly, Susan Tedeschi is a very nice lady and a respectable promoter of the
blues, but she is very, very ordinary
and unexciting (sort of like a sandpapered Bonnie Raitt). Her husband, however,
is a different matter, and his trademark slide wailings make a great
counterpoint for Buddy's style — too bad that they don't really get to properly
«spar» on any of these songs; in fact, every time Derek is in, Buddy slyly
(coyly?) steps back as a player and concentrates on the singing.
It doesn't nearly manage to save the title
track, though, which is just too
preachy and weepy: yes, most of us know that "underneath we're all the
same", and okay, some of us should probably be reminded of that from time
to time, but just a little more complexity couldn't hurt, and besides, Buddy
Guy is not a friggin' soul singer —
he does not quite have the voice or the phrasing right for this. But
fortunately, ʻSkin Deepʼ is just one such track here, probably
designed to boost sales a little bit as middle-class sentimentalists battle
racism by shedding tears over how we should "treat everybody just the way
you want them to treat you" (Confucius™). The other songs do not exactly
supercede ʻSkin Deepʼ in terms of non-banality, but they tend to kick
ass, and you usually tend to forget about how banal something is when it kicks
your ass on a relentless basis.
Anyway, more highlights: ʻOut In The Woodsʼ
has a great swampy solo, with Buddy impersonating a hungry alligator from his
childhood nightmares; ʻLyin' Like A Dogʼ is seven and a half minutes
of slow angry ʻFive Long Yearsʼ-style blues, perfectly played and
produced (not sure what else to say); ʻShow Me The Moneyʼ and
ʻHammer And Nailʼ display Buddy's sense of humour, and ʻSmell
The Funkʼ displays his, um, well... pretty strong vibe there for a 72-year
old, maybe even a little too strong. Sure
puts some of these youngsters to shame — ah, who's gonna fill those shoes?
Do not get me wrong: Skin Deep is fairly generic and conventional, there's not a single
thread of exploration here as there seemed to be on Sweet Tea. But it is a good
kind of generic, brought on by people who just want to make a little difference
by throwing in a little bit of sheer spirit. This, at least according to my
cherished gut feeling, is not just a
record made out of the need to make another record — and for that, given that
the key player is Buddy and the supporting force is Derek, it automatically
deserves a thumbs
up. Just sort of ignore the title track. There are much more
efficient ways in which you can fight racism, believe me.
LIVING PROOF (2010)
1) 74 Years Young; 2) Thank Me
Someday; 3) On The Road; 4) Stay Around A Little Longer; 5) Key Don't Fit; 6)
Living Proof; 7) Where The Blues Begins; 8) Too Soon; 9) Everybody's Got To Go;
10) Let The Door Knob Hit Ya; 11) Guess What; 12) Skanky.
You can pretty much see from these titles —
ʻ74 Years Youngʼ, ʻStay Around A Little Longerʼ,
ʻEverybody's Got To Goʼ — that there is essentially one thing hanging
heavy on Buddy Guy's mind these days, and it don't have much to do with his
little red rooster, either (although a couple of the tunes here still raise
that subject on an obligatory basis). Indeed, he has reached that crucial point
where every new album, no matter how generic or predictable, is welcome as long
as it serves as «living proof»: the man is still alive in body and in spirit.
No other reasons are necessary: it is now a game of survival, of seeing just
how long and how bright that old spirit, dating all the way back to what is
like the Stone Age from a 2010 perspective, can still burn.
And yes, nothing particularly interesting can
be said about these songs except for a general confirmation — the man still
got it. ʻ74 Years Youngʼ brings home the message once it's time for
the guitar solo: as he takes a break from listing his achievements and memories
("drank wine with kings and the Rolling Stones", etc.), the man
unleashes such a violent barrage of rapid-fire blues licks, punching the shit
out of that poor guitar, that you almost get the urge to scream "enough
already! we get the message, Mr. Guy, have pity on your 74-year young
hands!"
But that "74 years young, gonna keep on
having fun" bit is still braggadoccio, because later on we get either
sentimental about it (ʻStay Around A Little Longerʼ is a duet with B.
B. King where the two of them basically ask this of one another, confessing mutual
admiration) or religious about it (ʻEverybody's Gotta Goʼ dips into
gospel, as Buddy comes to personal terms with the Lord); the man understands
everything about the power of hyperbole, and easily swaps songs that deny the
possibility of a near end with songs that accept and make their peace with that
possibility. And all three of these numbers are convincing and touching, each
in its own way, even if their manipulative devices are in plain view — yet how
could one not be moved at the sight
of a friendly, emotional duet between two age-old patriarchs of the blues?
Next to that, the duet with Santana
(ʻWhere The Blues Beginsʼ) can only sound like you'd imagine a duet
with Santana should sound — pompous, pathetic, predictable, still theoretically
cool like any duet between two guitar giants should be, but way too gloomy and
serious. Apparently, whenever Santana crosses your threshold, you think you
have to engage him in something Spiritual with a capital S, or else he'll
think you unworthy or something; but Spiritual with a capital S can only be
Successful with a capital S when it's Subtle with a capital S, and Buddy Guy
has never been the master of subtle (unlike B. B. King, by the way, who could
squeeze your soul out with his microtones). So they just blast away, and the
pomp soon becomes overbearing.
The rest of the tracks are fun, but, as usual,
rather non-descript, and too often fall upon the exact same groove
(ʻSkankyʼ is essentially an instrumental re-run of the title track,
and both just milk the ʻPride And Joyʼ groove until it runs completely
dry). So, overall, you have to get in a somewhat respectful or reverential
mood to be able to say that Living Proof
is better than average — although, to be fair, Buddy himself tries to avoid
getting too serious about his age. He
sure as hell ain't fearing no reaper — good for him.
LIVE AT LEGENDS (2012)
1) Intro; 2) Best Damn Fool;
3) Mannish Boy; 4) I Just Want To Make Love To You / Chicken Heads; 5) Skin
Deep; 6) Damn Right I Got The Blues; 7) Boom Boom / Strange Brew; 8) Voodoo
Chile / Sunshine Of Your Love / Keep On Truckin'; 9) Polka Dot Love; 10) Coming
For You; 11) Country Boy.
A fairly typical live show from Buddy in his
seventies, actually recorded in the same year as Living Proof and burning with the same aching desire to prove that
the man still got it — like ʻ74 Years Youngʼ on the studio record,
this one opens with a kill-'em-all version of ʻBest Damn Foolʼ that
is supposed to whomp your ass once and for all, so that even if he gets
mellower or sloppier later on, the initial impression lasts long enough to keep
you going all the way. You've heard it all before, but it never hurts to get
another set of those insane trills from the man.
The setlist is heavy on classic hits and
oldies, some of which were picked from the classic rock repertoire to please
the listeners — in one hilarious medley, Buddy gives his condensed readings of
ʻVoodoo Chileʼ and ʻSunshine Of Your Loveʼ, and in another
one, he juxtaposes John Lee Hooker's ʻBoom Boomʼ with Cream's
ʻStrange Brewʼ as an illustration of what happened to the blues once
it made the Transatlantic crossing (although, to be honest, his guitar on
ʻStrange Brewʼ sounds far more like solo Clapton than Cream-era
Clapton — for one thing, where's the woman tone? Bad illustration). In another
creative fit, he merges Muddy Waters' ʻI Just Want To Make Love To
Youʼ with the Bobby Rush tune ʻChicken Headsʼ, funkifying the
former and bluesifying the latter in the process. "I'm gonna fuck up all
these songs tonight", he admits with disarming honesty, much to the
audience's delight.
It's too bad the one song he didn't dare
"fuck up" was ʻSkin Deepʼ, the pathetic equality anthem
from the 2008 album — the only redeeming thing about which used to be Derek
Trucks' weeping slide, but Derek ain't here, so there's nothing redeeming about
it any more, and it just doesn't fit among all the rip-roaring blues-rock, not
even as a «breather». Unless you do care about Buddy Guy as a soul singer, feel
free to just skip it and enjoy the flamethrower rendition of ʻDamn
Rightʼ instead.
Note that the last three songs here are
attached studio recordings: ʻPolka Dot Loveʼ is a rather boring piece
of slow blues, and ʻCountry Boyʼ is an even slower cover of the Muddy
Waters song with another annoying attempt by Buddy to closely mimick his
predecessor's vocals, but at least ʻComing For Youʼ has some cool
wah-wah funk guitar (the song itself is an attempt to write something in the
style of Sam & Dave's ʻHold On I'm Comingʼ). Honestly, though, it
would have been nicer to get more live material instead — it's not as if the
man were now limiting himself to playing short 40-minute sets, right? He's just
76 years young, after all.
RHYTHM & BLUES (2013)
CD I: 1) Best In Town; 2)
Justifyin'; 3) I Go By Feel; 4) Messin' With The Kid; 5) What's Up With That
Woman; 6) One Day Away; 7) Well I Done Got Over It; 8) What You Gonna Do About
Me; 9) The Devil's Daughter; 10) Whiskey Ghost; 11) Rhythm Inner Groove.
CD II: 1) Meet Me In Chicago;
2) Too Damn Bad; 3) Evil Twin; 4) I Could Die Happy; 5) Never Gonna Change; 6)
All That Makes Me Happy Is The Blues; 7) My Mama Loved Me; 8) Blues Don't Care;
9) I Came Up Hard; 10) Poison Ivy.
Look, we all love Buddy Guy. He is one of the
coolest blues players around — the
coolest blues player still left alive from his generation, probably, and the
world will never be the same when he's gone. But that doesn't mean that we just
have to keep spending our time on
every new album of his, and certainly not on a double album, unless that double album has anything specifically interesting
to say. And the fact that this album is called Rhythm & Blues, and the first disc is supposed to be «rhythm»
and the second is supposed to be «blues» is not a specifically interesting fact
on its own. Not to mention that it's a fickle distinction anyway.
The worst news here is that the record, once
again, is just too damn slick. On Living
Proof, Guy at least sounded excited and eager to, well, prove that he can
still outplay any new sucker in town. Here, that excitement seems largely
dissipated, and the songs, most of them not-too-original originals co-written
by Buddy with a pack of songwriting partners (Tom Hambridge, Richard Fleming,
and others), are melodically boring and played by-the-book. You know
something's not quite right when the
record greets you with the opening riff and it's... uh... Miley Cyrus'
ʻParty In The USAʼ. Well, okay, that one's probably a funny
coincidence, but fact is, everything here is remade, sterile, safe, and dull.
It certainly does not help matters much that
the new bunch of guest stars, in place of Derek Trucks or Santana, now includes
bland singer-songwriters like Beth Hart, handsome sentimentalists like Keith
Urban, and evil scourges of humanity like Kid Rock, let alone three grizzled
members of Aerosmith who really have
no business on a Buddy Guy album. The only pleasant collaboration here is with
rising blues star Gary Clark Jr., but his abilities seem wasted on an upbeat
track like ʻBlues Don't Careʼ where he just gets a brief rip-it-up
solo of speedy trills, choking on themselves (if you know nothing about him,
he's usually much better on his own albums). I think these guests are quite
indicative, really — and, with disgusting predictability, Kid Rock joins Buddy
on nothing else than ʻMessin' With The Kidʼ. Dear Mr. American Bad
Ass, could you please not pollute the
production of your elders with your presence any more?
Not that the elimination of bad guest
appearances would have saved the album anyway. Buddy plays okay throughout, but
we know that he is capable of more than «okay», even at this old age, and the
only reason why he is not rising to the occasion is that he is not trying to —
the emphasis here is on crafting a slick, commercial piece of product. Every
once in a while, there's a flash of raw greatness (ʻWhat's Up With That
Womanʼ, on which he is backed by the Muscle Shoal Horns, is probably a
good example), but for an album that runs well over eighty minutes, these flashes
come all too rarely.
I understand that a thumbs down rating here may seem
unnecessarily harsh, but see, at this time in history there is simply no need
for Mr. Guy to come out with albums like this — I don't think he needs the
money that bad, and if he wants to
transmit his expertise to a younger generation of players, he can just do it in
his basement and leave us out of it.
(Not to mention that the only thing that needs to be transmitted to somebody
like Kid Rock is a free one-way ticket to Saint Helena island). Basically,
there's nothing good on this record
that you haven't already heard a couple dozen times (usually better), and the bad stuff on this record is not
something you ever need to hear, unless you really have the hots for a sexy
hunk like Keith Urban.
BORN TO PLAY GUITAR (2015)
1) Born To Play Guitar; 2)
Wear You Out; 3) Back Up Mama; 4) Too Late; 5) Whiskey, Beer & Wine; 6)
Kiss Me Quick; 7) Crying Out Of One Eye; 8) (Baby) You Got What It Takes; 9)
Turn Me Wild; 10) Crazy World; 11) Smarter Than I Was; 12) Thick Like
Mississippi Mud; 13) Flesh & Bone; 14) Come Back Muddy.
I suppose that's Buddy playing his guitar with
his teeth on the sleeve photo out there, but for what it's worth, one might
also get the impression that he just keeled over his instrument and fell asleep
in the middle of the session or concert. Perhaps it works both ways; in any
case, I wouldn't call the photo particularly appropriate or inspiring, and the
same judgement applies, more or less, to the entire album.
Here's how it starts: "I was bo-o-o-orn in
Louisiana..." (how many times does he have to remind us?), followed by a
standard introductory blues lick. The rest of the track explains how the very
fact of his being born in Louisiana made it imminent and inavoidable that he
would, in fact, be born to play guitar, along with some nice, quiet samples of
said guitar playing. "A polka dot guitar will be resting (rusting?) on my
grave". Sounds pretty convincing. The only problem is, how many of us
still remain to be convinced? At least ʻLiving Proofʼ kicked ass,
volume-wise; ʻBorn To Play Guitarʼ just says it, rather than screams
it. And this applies to the album in general: there are very few, if any,
outstanding guitar parts (one interesting exception are the wah-wah parts in
ʻCrazy Worldʼ and ʻTurn Me Wildʼ, but they're kind of
buried right in the middle of a long series of by-the-book 12 bar playing).
Later on down the line, you get ʻWear You
Outʼ, a fun collaboration with Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top — and indeed, the
song does sound a little ZZ Top-ish; the partnership is quite natural, too,
considering how Buddy likes to rough it up every once in a while (more natural,
in fact, than the Santana duet on Living
Proof). The other guest appearances are not as successful — Kim Wilson
plays Sonny Boy Williamson-style harmonica on ʻToo Lateʼ and
ʻKiss Me Quickʼ (Sonny Boy played it better anyway); Joss Stone
shares lead vocals on ʻYou Got What It Takesʼ (could have invited,
oh, I dunno, Sheryl Crow with the same results); and Van Morrison is drafted to
sing ʻFlesh & Boneʼ, a soul number dedicated to the memory of B.
B. King — inevitably touching, yes, but still way too perfunctory. Neither Van,
nor Buddy's guitar, nor the gospel backups manage to rise to any ecstatic
heights here... although, who knows, in a hundred years from now people might
look back on this fusion of great vocal and instrumental talent in their waning
years and melt away in admiration.
Overall, there are no real highlights here, although at least there are no serious
lowlights, either: best of all, there's no sign of Keith Urban or Kid Rock, and
this is why this album gets no thumbs
down from me. The guest stars are respectable, the songs try to be a tiny bit original, and Buddy Guy has never stopped
being good, and I will personally defend his right to come out with a new album
every two years: if ʻBorn To Play Guitarʼ and ʻCome Back
Muddyʼ will be followed by ʻGuitar Playing Is My Businessʼ and
ʻI Said Come Back, Muddy!ʼ
in 2017, to me this will only signify that Buddy is still alive and well, and
it will be nice to know that in an age when heroes are dropping around like
flies. So you might even buy this thing to let the man know we still love him.
You don't really have to listen to it. Just admire the karma.
ADDENDA:
SOUTHSIDE REUNION (w. Memphis Slim) (1972)
1) When Buddy Comes To Town;
2) How Long Blues; 3) Good Time Charlie; 4) You Call Me At Last; 5) You're The
One; 6) No; 7) Help Me Some; 8) Rolling And Tumbling; 9*) Jamming At The Castle;
10*) You're The One (alt. version).
Strictly speaking, this is more of a Memphis
Slim record than a Buddy Guy one: he is listed first of the two, he sings most
of the vocals, and he apparently dominates the track selection. But that does
not formally prevent one from including it in Buddy Guy's discography, and
besides, it's a nice record, so let us use Buddy's involvement in it as a
pretext to give it a friendly mention that it totally deserves.
The session in question was recorded by Slim
and Buddy when they happened to cross paths in Europe, when Buddy was touring
with the Stones, and is marked as having taken place on September 17-18, 1970.
Subsequent information, as it always happens, in controversial: apparently, the
album was released by Warner Bros. in
1972, but since then, there's been at least several official and unofficial
re-releases, on different labels and with different track listings. My version
is a 2004 CD reissue on the French specialized Maison de Blues label, with
eight «main» and two «bonus» tracks, whatever that might mean in the present
case. Yours might be different, and in time, we may hold an international
symposium to sort it out and draw scientific conclusions.
In the meantime, what matters is that this is
(predictably) not a very original or deeply inspired blues jam session, but
(unpredictably) with a pretty high fun quotient. With Junior Wells joining the
dynamic duo on harmonica, and a strong brass section in tow, much of the accent
is placed on energetic boogie numbers, like the opening ʻWhen Buddy Comes
To Townʼ, and there are few pianists in this world better suited to
boogieing the hell out of their instrument than Memphis Slim, one of the few to
not only perfectly feel the spirit of the pre-war jump blues of Pete Johnson
and Amos Milburn, but to expand on it with more complex, but no less fun
playing. On all these numbers, it is Slim, not Buddy, who is the real hero —
but Buddy is also doing his best, playing "thin" jump blues guitar in
the style of Chuck Berry or even T-Bone Walker rather than doing his Hendrix
imitations.
Most of the songs here are credited to
"Peter Chatman" — the name of Memphis Slim's (John Len Chatman's)
father, to whom Slim respectfully credited all of his own compositions; but,
also quite predictably, there is really not much here in terms of composition,
since you can find all of these melodies on, say, a best-of compilation by
T-Bone Walker or quite a few other old rhythm-and-bluesmen. Only ʻRolling
And Tumblingʼ continues to be credited to Muddy Waters, even if that is actually the one song that has
changed the most, being converted to a slow 12-bar blues and losing its
distinctive melody — a rare case where old lyrics were transposed to a new
arrangement rather than vice versa.
I cannot insist that Memphis Slim and Buddy Guy
are a perfect pair for each other, but I do know that two great players on a generic blues recording is always a better
bet than one, and if you throw in Junior's harmonica, you get stuff like
ʻJamming At The Castleʼ, three minutes of fast, intense blues-boogie
that is well worth the price of the entire album. And it does include some of
the best examples of Buddy's "traditional-restrained", but still
mighty energetic guitar playing that would rarely, if ever, be heard in his
late Seventies' / early Eighties' period, let alone the post-Damn Right revival — so a gentle thumbs up
is perfectly justified.
LIVE AT THE CHECKERBOARD LOUNGE (1979/1988)
1) Buddy's Blues (part 1); 2)
I've Got A Right To Love My Woman; 3) Tell Me What's Inside Of You; 4) Done Got
Over You; 5) The Things I Used To Do; 6) You Don't Know How I Feel; 7) The
Dollar Done Fell; 8) Buddy's Blues (part 2); 9) Don't Answer The Door; 10) Tell
Me What's Inside Of You (version 2).
For somebody as prolific over the past twenty
years as Buddy Guy, the amount of archival releases in his catalog is surprisingly
small; apparently, he really spent most of his time in the sixties, seventies,
and eighties outside of the studio, and rarely had the opportunity or desire to
bother with professional recording equipment during his live shows at the
time. Add to this the overall confusion with his pre-Damn Right discography — for this particular archival release, for
instance, although all sources agree that it comes from a show at the
Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago in 1979 (because that's essentially what the
album cover tells you), different sources indicate different years of
provenance, from 1979 itself to 1988 to 1995. I've also encountered no less
than three different track
sequencings, and I think my own copy has a fourth...
...anyway, let the specialists bother about
trivia like these; my job is simply
to tell people whether the music is any good. Overall, this seems to be typical
fare for Buddy in that time period: he is not being too loud or cocky, he is
not yet even close to building up his image of a «survivor» or a «blues
saviour», he plays lots of «semi-originals» (i. e. generic 12-bar blues tunes
with new lyrics made on the spot), and he sounds like a fun guy to hang around
with, as he always does. Also, the sound quality, while not perfect, at least indicates
a professional recording, although the engineer still deserves a good whipping
for tampering too much with the controls; sometimes the rhythm section
miraculously disappears, only to re-emerge a few seconds later as the control
guy realises he must have overdone it with the volume level on Buddy's mike.
Minor points of interest include: (a) the main
melody of Cream's ʻStrange Brewʼ remade into ʻTell Me What's
Inside Of Youʼ (the man didn't even bother to change the phrase
"inside of you"), which, for some reason, is featured here in two
versions, indicating that there was probably more than one show taped after
all; (b) Buddy's social conscience flashing in the form of ʻThe Dollar
Done Fellʼ, a lengthy funky jam full of complaints against inflation and
gasoline prices — essentially, though, it's just Buddy doing his clownish
James Brown thing all over again; (c) the «original» ʻDon't Answer The
Doorʼ dropping all pretense and transforming back into ʻSweet Little
Angelʼ, replete with loving how she spreads her little wings and all.
It is well possible that I missed a few
particularly awesome guitar licks every now and then, but on the whole, this is
just predictably solid all the way through — very straightforward blues soloing,
all the note chains as familiar as your ten fingers. Very little stage banter,
too, so maybe this is a better choice for those who love their Buddy as
unpretentious and «un-patriarchal» as possible. Otherwise, don't bother.
BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD (1966)
1) Go And Say Goodbye; 2) Sit
Down I Think I Love You; 3) Leave; 4) Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing; 5) Hot
Dusty Roads; 6) Everybody's Wrong; 7) Flying On The Ground Is Wrong; 8) Burned;
9) Do I Have To Come Right Out And Say It; 10) Baby Don't Scold Me; 11) Out Of
My Mind; 12) Pay The Price; 13*) For What It's Worth.
Listening to Buffalo Springfield's debut in the
context of everything that surrounded it in those bubbling fall days of 1966,
one thing that might strike you is how decidedly non-psychedelic, perhaps even anti-psychedelic
it is. It is possible that some people back then might have thought of Buffalo
Springfield as «yet another second-rate Byrds imitator», but the Byrds
themselves were strongly bitten by the psychedelic vibe that year, writing
songs about spacemen and playing trippy Coltrane-influenced guitar solos —
leaving their second-rate imitators to lay the strongest claim for «best
roots-rock album» of the year, even if the term «roots-rock» did not exist back
then («rock» being still way too young to feel the need for any «roots»).
Of course, it's not as if Stephen Stills, Neil
Young, or Richie Furay had any ideological issues with psychedelia, and, um,
«for what it's worth», Neil occasionally includes a bit of droning, and every
once in a while, they fuss around with special effects on their guitar sounds,
from simple fuzz to trickier tricks (Leslie speakers?); since the word
«psychedelic» can be adapted to a very wide variety of meanings, you could try
and make a good case for this record as well. But that would most likely be an
exercise in sophism: Buffalo Springfield
is, first and foremost, just an unassuming collection of well-written songs
from a couple of young kids enthralled at the perspective of merging together
simple pop melodies, age-old folk tradition, and relevant-contemporary verbal
meaning. The Beatles, The Byrds, and Bob Dylan circa 1965 being their mentors
in this exciting business.
A certain amount of record executive pressure
is felt here — namely in the circumstance that most of Neil Young's songs are
being sung by Richie Furay; the powers that be imperatively decided that Furay
was incompetent as a songwriter (and it's not as if they were totally wrong on that one), but also
that Young was way too weird as a singer (come to think of it, they were sort
of right about that, too, except that «weird is good» in the artistic
paradigm), and this is why you don't get to hear Neil's own take on
ʽFlying On The Ground Is Wrongʼ until you get around to some of his
solo live shows. But that ain't much of a problem — Furay is a lovely singer
indeed, and since electric folk rock in 1966 was still largely associated with
the earthy sweetness of Roger McGuinn and the other Byrds, it is understandable
how Neil's high-pitched «womanly whine» would be deemed un-commercial.
The good news is that Stills and Young already
come up to the table as competent songwriters. While there is a certain level
of simplicity and innocence to these songs that would gradually be ushered out
by professionalism, Buffalo Springfield
does not feel like a generic Byrds
rip-off. Some of the songs, especially Stills', do come across as sort of
formulaic pop — but it is still an inventive formula. ʽGo And Say
Goodbyeʼ plays out like a country dance tune, with three differently
toned guitar parts that all try to sound like interlocking banjos — however,
the verse and chorus vocal melodies are sheer Beatles (in fact, the verse
melody is reminiscent of Harrison's ʽYou Like Me Too Muchʼ, and the first verse talks about
"the night before" — subconscious on the rampage!), and even if that
may not sound like much, the song immediately establishes a solid special case
for the Buffalo Springfield — where the Byrds usually tended to have a fully
integrated sound, these guys
actually sound like they're competing against each other from the very
beginning. A folk rock band with «feuding» members? Now we're talking!
Of the two songwriters, Young immediately comes
across as the «deeper» one, an impression that would, of course, be maintained forever
on — and an impression largely conditioned by the fact that the man was
probably depressed and psychologically wounded already as an embryo in his
mother's womb, which is why he is able to contribute a whole set of credible
downers (ʽNowadays Clancy...ʼ, ʽFlying On The Ground Is Wrongʼ,
ʽBurnedʼ, ʽOut Of My Mindʼ — even the titles speak for
themselves) at the tender age of 21. Even his solitary love song on the album,
ʽDo I Have To Come Right Out And Say Itʼ, is an under-the-bed
serenade from somebody who's way too insecure and afraid to tell anyone that he
wants to hold her hand. Unfortunately, no Neil Young-sung version of the song
seems to exist, which is a pity, because Furay sounds the refrain so tenderly
and sweetly that it must have won the band quite a bit of female fans! (But
they'd all be Furay's, of course. Damn that Neil and his
"indecision").
Stills provides the perfect extravert
counterpart to Young's introverted character — passionate and permutable as
hell: one minute he asks you to ʽSit Down I Think I Love Youʼ, then
the very next moment you already have to ʽLeaveʼ because all it took
for the I-love-you obsession to turn into I-hate-you rage was one small record
groove. He also pays a little more attention to song structure and hooks, where
Neil seems more concerned with overtones and atmospherics, and the two of them
strike a great balance so that the record neither threatens to drown in watery
melancholia nor to float away on the fluffy pop hook breeze.
But the real value almost always lies in the
potential of this band as a guitar outfit — not a lot of pop bands around that
time had two lead guitarists in the group with two distinct styles: ʽSit
Down I Think I Love Youʼ, if anything, is priceless already for its
doubled guitar break, first with Neil playing a grungy
ʽSatisfactionʼ-esque fuzz solo, then Stills cutting in with a soft,
fluent, playful country guitar part representing the other side of the
protagonist's split personality. They also have a sense of intertextual humor —
right in the middle of the rocking ʽBaby Don't Scold Meʼ, for just
one bar, the riff from the Beatles' ʽDay Tripperʼ makes a guest
appearance out of the blue, in addition to the song featuring some
raga-influenced guitar playing (which, I guess, makes it the most proverbially
«psychedelic» number here, although that's not saying much). Why? Because we
can, that's why.
Actually, checking the dates, I see that most
of the songs here were recorded already after the boys must have had heard Revolver — but they were almost
certainly written when the band's freshest Beatles impressions were still from Help! and Rubber Soul, and it is amusing, in that respect, that Stills'
ʽPay The Priceʼ, with its fast tempo and mildly threatening lyrics,
closes the album in much the same fashion that ʽRun For Your Lifeʼ
closed Rubber Soul. Which is to say,
a somewhat underwhelming and totally non-conceptual coda, but at least we don't
see Stills promoting womanslaughter (maybe he'd love to, but Atlantic Records
wouldn't let him anyway). And which is also to say that Buffalo Springfield, as a whole, was not quite «on the cutting
edge» when it came out in December 1966 — for that matter, were Buffalo
Springfield ever «on the cutting
edge»? — but who cares, when you've got these two interesting and so
significantly different personalities pooling their talents,
Lennon-Mc-Cartney-wise, on the same record?
Trivia time: in typical American fashion, the
record was mutilated just three months later, as a new re-release took the
band's newly successful single ʽFor What It's Worthʼ and inserted it
as the lead-off track at the expense of ʽBaby Don't Scold Meʼ — as if
there weren't enough free space on the frickin' LP to allow for 13 tracks
instead of 12. Of course, ʽFor What It's Worthʼ is not just an
insanely catchy song, but it also represents a certain «maturity stage» for
Stills (he'd already tried the «serious approach» with ʽEverybody's
Wrongʼ on the original LP, but it wasn't very memorable and sort of got
lost in between all of his love songs and all of Neil's mopey mini-epics), and
in a way, it feels a little out of place on the record (imagine the Beatles replacing
ʽDrive My Carʼ with ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ, or starting Sgt. Pepper off with
ʽRevolutionʼ), making the decision completely commercially motivated.
That said, there's really no conceptual side to the structuring of the record
anyway — and those mysterious ping...
ping notes in the intro, followed by the
most delicately phrased and intoned "there's something happening
here..." in the history of world-changing pop music, still arguably remain
Buffalo Springfield's greatest contribution to humanity, as boring and trivial
as that judgement might seem to fans of Poco. Oh, and big thumbs up, of course.
BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD AGAIN (1967)
1) Mr. Soul; 2) A Child's
Claim To Fame; 3) Everydays; 4) Expecting To Fly; 5) Bluebird; 6) Hung Upside
Down; 7) Sad Memory; 8) Good Time Boy; 9) Rock & Roll Woman; 10) Broken
Arrow.
Even though the title of this second album
would seem to imply that this record is a logical heir to the first one, it
really isn't. Three young lads cut their songwriting teeth in 1966 (although at
least one of them — Furay — was denied dental help), helping each other out
where necessary. By 1967, the three young lads in question were ready to
understand how utterly different they were from each other, but professional
and historical ties still bound them together, and so, instead of three solo
albums, Fate got them to get together again and make a single one. So they kind
of jumped from their Rubber Soul
period into their Abbey Road stage
in one blink — quite a dazzling case of acceleration, if you ask me.
The actual sessions for Again were stretched out across the entire first half of 1967, and
did not always include all the band members assembled together: Young was
frequently absent because he did not care all that much, bass player Bruce Palmer
cared a lot but was also frequently absent because of his drug bust, and
session players came and went at random whenever some of the regulars dropped
out of the picture. In other words, the whole thing was rather messy, but then
«messy» was sort of good in 1967, when great ideas sprang out of chaos and
«work schedules» were considered detrimental to groundbreaking art anyway.
The one member of the band here who sounds as
if he wouldn't mind working on a schedule is Furay, who finally gets a chance
to contribute three of his own songs — and they are proto-Poco: nice, sweet,
inoffensive country-pop/rock — melodic, derivative, sentimental, perfectly
listenable but not all that exciting. ʽA Child's Claim To Fameʼ has
some sweet dobro lines added by James Burton, but could have been written and
recorded by just about any mediocre Nashville team. ʽSad Memoryʼ is
an acoustic folk ballad, somewhere in between the Everleys and James Taylor,
which Young tries to make more distinctive by playing some electric lines in
the background, muffled and disguised to sound like a soft jazzy sax solo —
too quiet to draw attention, though. ʽGood Time Boyʼ is the most
upbeat number of the three, and drummer Dewey Martin gets to sing on it, either
because they didn't want him to feel left out, or because they thought he had a
sufficiently rowdy voice to make it rougher. However, his attempts to generate
a «good time» atmosphere and bring it closer to James Brown's R&B
stylistics (with chaotic-ecstatic "sock it to me now!"s and "lay
it on me now!"s) are laughable, to put it mildly, and the whole thing, at
best, can qualify as a humorous / parodic number. (Another Beatles analogy here
— they use up their drummer much like the Fab Four used up theirs. Drummers are
funny, you know).
Stills gets the largest share of songs here,
and they already establish his classic solo/CSN style: not too hard, not too
soft folk- and country-rock with a creative/psychedelic twist. Arguably the
oddest track of the four is ʽEverydaysʼ, where he combines a
nightclub lounge-jazz atmosphere with harsh feedback hum that accompanies all
the verses — assuming that the feedback is provided by Neil, this marks the
first Young experiment with guitar noise captured on record, and it is sort of
ironic that it had to happen on a Stills-penned jazz number! The most ambitious
number out of all four, though, is probably ʽBluebirdʼ, which really
puts that «rock» in «folk-rock», with battling acoustic and electric guitars,
falsetto harmonies in the bridge alternating with brashly-boldly delivered verse
vocals, an instrumental section where psychedelic drone meets folk dance and
even a little bit of drum'n'bass, and an unexpectedly soft coda where the
distorted electric guitar is kicked out of the house by a banjo — you can read
all sorts of symbolism into it, but we here will just accept this as an
unpredictable randomized adventure.
The biggest artistic breakthrough,
nevertheless, belongs to Young, whose three tunes here have all acquired
classic status, and raised the Buffalo Springfield benchmark high enough to be
able to compete with 1967's first-graders. ʽMr. Soulʼ rocks harder
than anything else on the album, and not so much because its main riff
represents but a minor variation on ʽSatisfactionʼ, but because this
is where we get to know the classic Neil Young style of guitar playing — the
piercing distorted guitar tones, the jagged, slightly dissonant solos, the
relentless ear-pummeling that forces the listener to take notice. It's a short
song, with no sign yet of the earth-shattering guitar jams that Neil would soon
be associated with, but it's a fairly truthful sign of things to come. And
also, somehow I get the feeling that the song may have been at least a subconscious influence on ʽJumpin'
Jack Flashʼ: couldn't we hear echoes of "I was raised by the praise
of a fan who said I upset her", played to the riff of
ʽSatisfactionʼ, in "I was raised by a toothless bearded
hag", played to the near-equal riff of ʽJumpin' Jack Flashʼ?
Just curious.
Neil's other two contributions are not rockers
at all, but rather grand romantic epics, on a surprisingly grand scale that
was probably imposed on him by the overall romantic ambitiousness of the times,
since his early solo records have almost nothing resembling ʽExpecting To
Flyʼ and ʽBroken Arrowʼ (well, maybe the self-titled debut
does, a little bit). You could, in fact, treat them as two separated movements
of a single conceptual piece — «The Arrow That Expected To Fly But Couldn't
Because It Was Broken» or something. The first movement is what they sometimes
like to call a «Euroart song», one that the Moody Blues and the Zombies would
probably appreciate; the second is multi-part in itself, playing out like a
mini-spectacle (with a goofy self-quotation-mode reprisal of ʽMr.
Soulʼ leading into "the lights turned on and the curtain fell
down" introduction) with half-metaphorical, half-nonsensical lyrics that seem to be dealing with disillusionment,
disenchantment, and depression. But really, I'm just writing this because 99%
of Neil's songs deal with disillusionment, disenchantment, and depression, and
remembering this always comes in handy when trying to decipher the cryptic
verbal imagery of his early years.
I think that these songs still hold up after
all these years, despite their youthful maximalism and rather naïve
grandiosity — the vocal melodies are lovely and
challenging, what with all those unpredictable time signature changes inside
the verses of ʽBroken Arrowʼ; and those who have a problem with the
sharpness and shrillness of Young's whiny voice on his stripped down solo albums
will probably wonder why he would so rarely, if ever, resort to smoothing them
out with the psychedelic echo effects on ʽExpecting To Flyʼ that
retain all the tenderness of his voice while at the same time masking the
«grating» overtones. On the other hand, neither of these songs is «typical»
Neil Young — they're «Summer-of-Love Neil Young», recorded in that really
strange year when you could extract a common musical invariant from John
Lennon, Mick Jagger, Neil Young, and Ted Nugent, so it might be argued that
these are just early experiments with different voices, and that the music is
not endowed with true Young spirit, whatever that be.
On an amusing note, you could argue that the
logical sequel to Buffalo Springfield
Again is Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of
The Moon — picking up exactly where the former left off. But apart from the
odd link between the coda of ʽBroken Arrowʼ and the beginning of
ʽSpeak To Meʼ, there would be little to further that analogy: Again has no concept, no big
masterplan, and is really just an exercise in survival of three differently
attuned songwriters in the newly discovered limitless waters of the post-Sgt. Pepper era. An inconsistent mix of
pretty secure mediocrity with flawed, insecure greatness, it deserves its thumbs up
a-plenty, but you can already see here who's aiming for the buffalo and who's
pining for Springfield.
LAST TIME AROUND (1968)
1) On The Way Home; 2) It's So
Hard To Wait; 3) Pretty Girl Why; 4) Four Days Gone; 5) Carefree Country Day;
6) Special Days; 7) The Hour Of Not Quite Rain; 8) Questions; 9) I Am A Child;
10) Merry-Go-Round; 11) Uno Mundo; 12) Kind Woman.
Of the three Buffalo Springfield records, this
one always gets the cold shoulder — for objective reasons: like Cream's Goodbye a year later, it was released
due to contractual obligations already a few months after the band had split,
it consisted of various odds-and-ends recorded over a year-long period, and it
did not even have a single track where all of the band members would be playing
together. Clearly, this is an album that cannot be as strong as its
predecessors — and this is the decision towards which most listeners are biased
even before putting it on.
But if Last
Time Around does not and cannot work as a «coherent» group album (and
neither did Again, for that matter),
it does not mean, either, that all these songs were not written and recorded
at a time when all the songwriters
involved (even Richie Furay!) were maturing or even reaching their creative
peaks. In just one more year, Stills would be a respectable and visionary
member of Crosby, Stills & Nash; Young would be issuing the first of his
numerous solo classics; and even those first Poco albums weren't all that bad,
when you lower your expectations.
With maybe one or two questionable exceptions,
all the songs here are at least good — hooky, meaningful, nicely produced — and
at least a few are classics for the ages. And even if the principal
songwriters are pulling on the blanket in different directions, it's not as if
these directions are completely incompatible: had it been so, there'd be no way
that Stills and Young would still regularly get together later, as parts of
CSN&Y or of the Stills-Young band. Heck, even the sole contribution by the
latecoming new member, Jim Messina, who briefly replaced Bruce Palmer on bass,
is nonchalantly nice — not to mention that it would very soon be rewritten by
Ray Davies as ʽHolidayʼ, although they both probably caught the tune
from some pre-war vaudeville.
Anyway, speaking of individualities, Young is
really underrepresented here, with just two solo songs to his name — of which
ʽOn The Way Homeʼ is a fairly soft, innocent folk-pop ditty sung by
Furay and dominated by falsetto group harmonies that sound more Beach Boys than
Neil Young; and ʽI Am A Childʼ is an early Neil classic that would
soon become a stage favorite, a very simple little ditty that probably earns
our love by how well the chorus matches its basic catchiness and simplicity —
a song written, indeed, from a child's point of view, but, in the grand
tradition of «baffling the grown-up», ending up asking some unanswerable
question or other (in this case, "what is the color when black is
burned?", and no, the song was recorded two months prior to Martin Luther
King's assassination, if you're looking for some political metaphor here). I
mean, ol' Neil can be a very boring
gentleman on acoustic guitar and harmonica when he plays those things for too
long, but these two and a half minutes — so sweet, so charming, worth all of Harvest for me if you need a
hyperbolical comment.
Of the five Stills numbers, I would want to
single out ʽFour Days Goneʼ, which already gives you the perfectly
accomplished Steve Stills of Crosby, Stills & Nash — a country waltz with
nervous tension a-plenty and that fabulous desperation strain in Steve's voice
that gets through to you even if he's singing so quietly, never having to
strain his vocal chords; and ʽSpecial Daysʼ, with a great guitar tone
that shows how much the man has matured as a psychedelic rock'n'roll player
from the early days of romantic folk-rock. ʽUno Mundoʼ, bringing in a
Latin beat and a rather hammy lyrical attempt to marry all the world's
continents to each other, seems like a misfire to me, but an amusing one — as
an anthem, it may not be nearly as immoral as ʽLove The One You're Withʼ,
but the "uno mundo, uno mundo..." harmonies should probably have been
left to somebody more authentic, like Santana.
Probably the weirdest number here, however, is
ʽThe Hour Of Not Quite Rainʼ, an art-pop song with baroque
orchestration written by Furay around a poem by Micki Callen as the result of a
radio contest on a Los Angeles station («send us your words and Buffalo
Springfield will write a song to them because that is absolutely what they're
here for, folks»). Amazingly, it sounds real good, with an atmosphere of some
deep autumnal mystery generated by the cello-and-brass-heavy orchestration and
by Furay's slow, high-pitched, slightly somnambulant, if not altogether
drugged-out, vocals. Despite being written «on order» and not featuring the
input of any band member other than Furay, it somehow ends up in the same class
as ʽExpecting To Flyʼ — melancholic light classical psychedelia with
a bit of a shivery edge to it.
In short, I would recommend not to regard the
record as an auxiliary odds-and-ends package, nor to see it as a
less-than-perfect swan song — in reality, «Buffalo Springfield» were almost
always more of a mixture of interests than a band united by a single purpose,
and should be seen as the first chronological chapter of a long saga, or
perhaps an important prologue to the continuing story of Stills, Young, and
their buddies from the Byrds and the Hollies (now these were actually real bands, whose stories were vastly different
from CSN&Y and did not end with Crosby's and Nash's departures). And in
that context, Last Time Around is
really more of a See You Soon, Folks
thing — not the sound of something crashing and dying, but the sound of
something better beginning. And, of course, it gets a thumbs up.
THE PAUL BUTTERFIELD BLUES BAND (1965)
1) Born In Chicago; 2) Shake
Your Money Maker; 3) Blues With A Feeling; 4) Thank You Mr. Poobah; 5) I Got My
Mojo Working; 6) Mellow Down Easy; 7) Screamin'; 8) Our Love Is Drifting; 9)
Mystery Train; 10) Last Night; 11) Look Over Yonders Wall.
Eric Clapton had said in interviews that when
Cream crossed over to America and began looking around, they basically just
thought all those new bands were shit
— with the exception of the Butterfield Blues Band, which, he admitted, was the
only real competition that the haughty Brits had over there. Whether he was
exaggerating or not, and what this was really supposed to mean, is up to you to
determine, but the curious fact is, when you come to think about it, there
weren't really that many «blues-rock» type bands in the States circa 1964-66.
Folk rock, yes, with the Byrds serving as godfathers of the genre; psychedelic
jamming, yes; garage-pop, yes, plenty of it, but the blues were largely left
over for the British invaders to take. Strange, isn't it, when you come to
think about it? As if all these white kids were afraid that The King Gang
(Albert, Freddie, and B. B.) would start smashing their windows at night and
putting holes in their tires if they tried stepping on their local turf.
Thus, in a way Paul Butterfield (and, coming a
wee bit later, The Blues Project, who were their principal and not very
successful competition) was filling an empty niche in his own native country —
of course, few people were more qualified to do it than Butterfield, who was so
much born in Chicago that the first song on his first album was appropriately
named ʽBorn In Chicagoʼ, the second song covered Elmore James, the
third song covered Little Walter, and by the time the fourth song came along,
you were pretty much all set. And having been born in Chicago, and having spent
his younger years soaking in the blues atmosphere of the city, and having a
good ear for music, there was no way that Paul Butterfield could not have matured into a solid blues
singer who could also blow some real mean harp, perhaps a little less
creatively than his mentor Little Walter, but not any less passionately.
However, the real reason people still continue
to listen to these early Butterfield Blues Band records certainly is not Paul,
likeable as he is — it is young prodigy Mike Bloomfield, whom most people first
hear on Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited
and only few people bother to check up further, despite the fact that he may,
indeed, have been the... let me phrase this carefully... single best white
blues guitar player in mid-Sixties' America? yes, something like that. At the
very least, Clapton did consider him his chief over-the-ocean competitor for a
brief while.
The thing about Bloomfield, of course, was that
he was really a young punk who somehow got stuck in the blues — a genre that,
unlike so many other white kids, he was totally refusing to treat
boringly-reverentially. He would play fast, loose, flashy, ecstatic. He could
be the Jerry Lee Lewis of the guitar one moment, the Coltrane of the guitar the
next moment, and swing in and out of the generic 12-bar mode at will. He
clearly loved all these big Chicago dudes a lot, but he was not at all set to
imitate them — well, maybe Buddy Guy could have taught him something special,
but then there might also have been things Bloomfield could teach him back. In
any case, the guy's crazy leads are the
goddamn reason to own and enjoy this record, period.
Because outside of that, the album would mostly
hold up as a historically important one — if not the first bona fide American blues-rock album, then certainly one
of those that first comes to mind when you think about American blues-rock as a
whole. Butterfield is a nice professional guy, but not much more than solid —
he does not have that much of a distinctive personality, and he can't even pull
off a perfect, Muddy-approved "got my brbrbrbrbrbrbr working" on
ʽMojoʼ, which means that drummer Sam Lay gets to sing it instead (!).
I certainly couldn't elevate Butterfield as a singer over, say, Mick Jagger
(who may have been not as technical on the harmonica, but made a far better job
of making your hair stand on end as a singer in those early bluesy days, for
good or bad). And consequently, there's not much reason to prefer him over Elmore, Walter, and Muddy, or
even think that he brought something extra to the table (he's not a
particularly good songwriter, either, and he would never be able to acquire the
same «lonesome schizophrenic genius» tag as his future British correlate, Peter
Green).
With Bloomfield afoot and aloof, though, even
the most straightforward Elmore James covers here, like ʽShake Your
Moneymakerʼ and ʽLook Over Yonders Wallʼ, acquire an arrogant
boyish fervor that makes them, I dunno, somewhat more rock'n'rollish in nature
than the originals — not «dangerously» rock'n'rollish, like the Stones
presented their blues, but «ecstatically» rock'n'rollish, just ripping through
the stratosphere like there was no tomorrow. Likewise, he is capable of making
the slow blues numbers interesting and exciting, sometimes even playing those
scorching melodic lines simultaneously with the vocals, without caring whether
they take your attention away from the singing or not (they usually do, for
instance, on the «original» composition ʽOur Love Is Driftingʼ, which
is really just one more 12-bar blues, but with more stinging on it than around
a bear-attacked beehive). The two instrumentals, ʽThank You Mr.
Poobahʼ and ʽScreamin'ʼ, have Bloomfield and Butterfield
competing, but as shamanistic as Paul sometimes gets on his instrument, he just
can't match Bloomfield when he strikes real hard.
We should probably drop in a kind word for the
rest of the band as well — Elvin Bishop on second guitar (usually rhythm, but
I guess he takes a few leads here and there), Mark Naftalin on organ, Jerome
Arnold on bass, and Sam Lay on drums (the latter two were drawn over from
Howlin' Wolf's own backing band) — but the best word that can be dropped in, I
guess, is that they all manage to put enough swing in the music so that it
don't sound too stiff and reverential. Lay, in particular, creates far more
fuss with his drumset than your average Joe, and is also seriously responsible
for the above-average energy quotient of the album; but the role of the drummer
on a by-the-book blues-rock album is not too enviable by definition.
In any case, as far as «whiteboy blues» stuff
from the Sixties goes, there are few records out there to beat out the charm of
The Butterbloomfield Blues Band (as it should have been called) — Eric Clapton With The Bluesbreakers
might be the only competition in terms of scorching fierceness (and certainly not those early
pre-ʽAlbatrossʼ Fleetwood Mac albums with Peter Green that strange people
tend to rave about). Even if the band would really find its own voice with the
next album, this one is still very respec... no, wait, I meant to say «quite
kick-ass, really», because, well, if your blues-rock doesn't kick at least some ass, you must be doing something
wrong — like confusing it with a 17th century court dance, for instance. Thumbs up.
EAST-WEST (1966)
1) Walkin' Blues; 2) Get Out
Of My Life, Woman; 3) I Got A Mind To Give Up Living; 4) All These Blues; 5)
Work Song; 6) Mary, Mary; 7) Two Trains Running; 8) Never Say No; 9) East West.
Butterfield's second album is often regarded as
the band's high point — not just because it would be Bloomfield's last as a
band member, but because, due to his instigation, this is as close as the BBB come
to breaking the generic blues-rock mold. Just like Cream, already mentioned in
the previous review, started out with the aspiration of doing a «pure blues»
thing (at least, Clapton had that intention — maybe Bruce wanted them to do a
«pure jazz» thing), but almost immediately got caught up in the winds of time
and drifted towards heavy rock and psychedelia, so it was almost inevitable,
with the BBB's pool of talent, that they wouldn't be settling cozily in their
status of «Muddy/Elmore cover band». At least, not in 1966 they wouldn't.
There is
still plenty of pure blues here, of course, but even here they are
experimenting, no longer content with merely covering the songs the way they
were, but trying to reinvent them in a different idiom. The results aren't
particularly awesome — more like «curious», like when they do Robert Johnson's
ʽWalkin' Bluesʼ as some sort of blues tango, or when they take
Muddy's formerly slow, threatening ʽTwo Trains Runningʼ and
transform it into a boogie: unfortunately, they did not have the idea to
conduct a sparring guitar match between Bloomfield and Bishop, which would have
fit right in with the song title. In the end, my favorite «pure blues» song on
here emerges as ʽI Got A Mind To Give Up Livingʼ, Butterfield's first
attempt at generating a deep soul atmosphere, with Bloomfield playing straight
from the heart, making the guitar choke with tears of rage rather than just go
all fussy and crazy. Sharp, poignant, convincingly tragic, this is America's
answer to The Animals and in this case, it might even be better, since
Butterfield, unlike Burdon, never comes across as a theatrical poseur (sorry
Eric — you are more interesting and
gifted as a singer, but not as a haunted human being).
A brief mention must be made of such an oddity
here as ʽMary, Maryʼ, which most of us usually know from the Monkees'
second album — indeed, Mike Nesmith originally gave the song away to Butterfield
before making use of it for his own band. It would be curious to know what the
demo looked like, because the Butterfields present it as a swampy blues jam,
all ragged and torn, whereas the Monkees naturally made it into a tight, jaunty
pop number; the respective cherry-on-top is a shrieking, frenetic Bloomfield
solo in Butterfield's version, and Davy Jones' smooth vocal harmonies in the
Monkees' version. Neither of the two is greatness incarnate, but I like both,
and I'm not altogether sure if I'd even want to make a preference.
Still, that's just the potatoes: the meat of
the album, as any critic will tell you, are the two extended, jazz-influenced
instrumental jams. Wait a minute, influenced?
ʽWork Songʼ is jazz — a
stretched cover of Nat Adderley's most famous composition — and
ʽEast-Westʼ, following in the footsteps of the Byrds' ʽEight Miles
Highʼ, is rock's attempt to incorporate free-form soloing and modal jazz
elements into its very soul. Mike Bloomfield may have made his reputation as a
flaming guitar punk in Bob Dylan's 1965 entourage, but he had an intellectual
drive as well, and ʽEast-Westʼ is as intellectual as you ever get
with these guys. And considering how repetitive, drone-heavy, free-flying, and
energetic ʽEast-Westʼ is, it is arguably the most closest predecessor
to the Velvet Underground and their jamming feats a year later.
What is even more interesting, though, is that
ʽEast-Westʼ actually has a cool, well thought out structure — over
its thirteen minutes, it gradually moves from swampy blues into a decidedly
Eastern raga section, then into something more close to country-western, and
ultimately culminates in a set of pop-rock riffs, starting with a variation on
ʽMemphis Tennesseeʼ. This means that they took the name seriously,
and consciously tried to integrate Eastern and Western traditions, to the best
of their abilities, within the same composition. I have no intention of
overrating ʽEast-Westʼ like so many American critics desperately
hunting for proof that American bands were just as rigorously pushing
boundaries in 1966 as their British counterparts, but this is a major milestone, and for what it's worth, as a lengthy jam,
it makes a stronger point than Cream's jams, since its scope is wider and its
ambitions are higher from the start.
Unfortunately, the happiness did not last long
— apparently, this new direction and its conflict with the old one created too
much tension in the band and finally split apart the Butterfield / Bloomfield
partnership for good. In fact, it probably couldn't have been any other way —
one more record like this and Bloomfield would be taking Butterfield's band
away from him, despite not knowing how to sing or play harmonica. In a world
that was less and less interested in retro Chicago blues, I guess, the only way
you could still play retro Chicago
blues would be to alienate yourself from fellow players who were only too happy
to mix Chicago blues with Indian ragas. As it turned out, though, Bloomfield
wouldn't be able to get too far on his own — all his attempts to create bands
for himself (such as Electric Flag) failed, proving that he was far better off
as a masterful sideman than a clumsy leader. Fortunately, East-West still proudly stands as a small, but exciting testament
to one of the finest talent pools in America and simply one of the best
non-standard blues-rock albums of its era, so a thumbs up is inevitable.
THE RESURRECTION OF PIGBOY CRABSHAW (1967)
1) One More Heartache; 2)
Driftin' And Driftin'; 3) Pity The Fool; 4) Born Under A Bad Sign; 5) Run Out
Of Time; 6) Double Trouble; 7) Drivin' Wheel; 8) Droppin' Out; 9) Tollin' Bells.
If I ever had a nickname like «Pigboy
Crabshaw», I'd probably have to join the Church in repentance, but Elvin
Bishop seemed okay with it, and his pals in the band liked it so much that with
the departure of Bloomfield they put it in their album title to commemorate the
beginning of Bishop's brief rule as the Butterfield Blues Band's only guitar
player. Brief and, may I add, somewhat inessential. Elvin was neither the
band's frontman nor its stuntman — he just played that guitar and never seemed
to think all that much about leaving his mark on the world.
It would be cool as hell for me to say
something important like «There was so much more to the original Butterfield
Blues Band than Mike Bloomfield», and follow it up by saying «and this is
effectively shown on the band's third album, where they effortlessly
demonstrate how they can get by without Mike's talents», and then justify this
further by pointing out that «Bloomfield was, after all, 50% talent and 50%
showman flash — without him, Butterfield, Bishop, and Co. are finally able to
concentrate directly on the music and sacrifice their egos for the benefit of
the music». But hey, what can I do? All said and done, I'm a fan of egos. And
the most successful sacrificers of egos are, in a way, the biggest egotists of
them all — like J. J. Cale, for instance.
The
Resurrection Of Pigboy Crabshaw
is just a regular electric blues album now, abandoning all the genre-crossing,
tradition-marrying pretense of East-West.
To «compensate» for Bloomfield's departure, Paul brings in a whole new brass
section — a good one, to be sure, including none other than the
soon-to-be-legendary David Sanborn on alto sax; but the big band approach to
their source material is neither new nor revelatory. Furthermore, the album
title seems to suggest that previously, Bishop's talents were at the least
undervalued and underused, and that now is his chance to shine; but the guitar
parts are very subdued throughout the
album, and when it is over, it will most likely be remembered as a sonic field
dominated by Butterfield's harmonica and the brass section, never the guitar.
And maybe it's logically cool, but most of the arrangements leave me cold,
bored, and almost amazed that they would dare offer something like this in the
middle of 1967 — what with Cream and Hendrix setting completely new standards.
The record consists almost entirely of covers,
with just two short Butterfield originals for an excuse: ʽRun Out Of
Timeʼ, co-written with sax player Gene Dinwiddie, is a playful fast
R&B groove ruled by nimble brass flourishes, but it fades out way before it
could evolve into anything mind-blowing; and ʽDroppin' Outʼ,
co-written with songwriter Tucker Zimmerman, is... a playful fast R&B
groove ruled by nimble brass flourishes? Okay, it's soulful enough, but
Butterfield is still unconvincing and unexceptional as a vocalist.
The covers are hardly any more exciting —
particularly the unterminable, mindnumbingly slow ʽDriftin' And
Driftin'ʼ, whose tortoise tempo and thick brass layers attempt to build up
an atmosphere of solemnity, but don't do much in that respect other than the
fact of their existence. Butterfield and Bishop do deliver a couple of
harmonica and guitar solos where it seems like they are really trying, but by
the time they get around to them, the song has already long since outlived its
usefulness. ʽDouble Troubleʼ is unworthy of both the shorter, far
more focused and ten times as bleeding Otis Rush original and a later Dire Straits-style reinvention by Eric Clapton;
ʽBorn Under A Bad Signʼ is totally expendable in between the Albert
King original and the grizzly Cream cover; and the list may be continued.
Bottomline is that this record, while not
stereotypically «bad», is just very, very boring. You have to have a really
subtle appreciation for Butterfield, one that goes deep beyond the surface and
maybe even adds an imaginary touch or two, or a very rigid, academic type of
respect for electric blues to truly enjoy The
Resurrection as something above background music; and I have neither, so I
just have to rate it as a thumbs down. Especially in the overall context of 1967, when, you know, it was
almost shameful to release a record
of such profound mediocrity.
IN MY OWN DREAM (1968)
1) Last Hope's Gone; 2) Mine
To Love; 3) Get Yourself Together; 4) Just To Be With You; 5) Mornin' Blues; 6)
Drunk Again; 7) In My Own Dream.
By the time this album came out, nobody really
cared any more, and only the most astute listeners and critics may have noticed
how desperately The Butterfield Blues Band was trying to rebrand itself.
Running on covers, it seems to have been agreed, was pretty much equivalent to
suicide; but neither Butterfield nor Bishop had a lot of songwriting talent,
and so it is up to new bass player Bugsy Maugh to fill in the glaring gap and
steer the Butterfields away from interpretation and improvisation and into the
treacherous waters of creativity.
The big problem with this is that Bugsy was
apparently a major fan of contemporary R&B, and his songs basically sound
like sincere, but never outstanding imitations of Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding,
and whoever else was riding the Atlantic wave of success at the time. Jazzy
rhythms, poppy choruses, lots of brass and vocal exuberance (and, what's more,
the vocals were to be provided by Bugsy himself — Paul either did not want to
mess around with other band members' songs, or found them unsuitable to his own
style). And yes, the problem is not that this does not at all sound like classic
BBB (who'd really care?), but that the songs only barely stand competition.
ʽGet Yourself Togetherʼ, for instance, takes the old and well-worn
ʽCan I Get A Witness?ʼ groove, but adds nothing particularly new to
it — probably the most «novel» aspect is the way their brass section crosses
paths with Butterfield's harmonica, but then I'd rather just see the whole
thing turn into a fast, punchy, harmonica-driven instrumental (much like the
Stones had originally done with this groove, turning it into the awesome — for
1964, at least — ʽNow I've Got A Witnessʼ). Actually, Bugsy is not a
bad singer: he does quite alright on ʽMornin' Bluesʼ, a snappy chunk
of whitebread soul, showing good range, fluent modulation, and respectable restraint.
And still, I cannot get rid of the feeling that something is just not there. Probably because they take all these
familiar structures, refuse to populate them with extra hooks, yet do not have
enough balls to make them sizzle and kick proper ass in performance.
There are altogether two songs on the album
that rise above the likes of «nice» and «okay» and «wish I'd had an extra
ninety years to my life». The opening number, ʽLast Hope's Goneʼ, is
a moody, subtle piece of blues made special by a very unusual bass «zoop» at
its core and a chaotic mish-mash of brass and woodwinds at the edges; it is
hardly a coincidence that the rising star of David Sanborn is credited here as
one of the co-authors. And Bishop's only contribution to the record,
ʽDrunk Againʼ, is a hilariously realistic example of how to make an authentically «drunken blues», with a
large part of it taken over by a loosely coherent rant of the «protagonist
walks into a bar...» variety. Not much to do with pure music (although
Butterfield does a pretty good job on the harmonica in the background), but
hits home all the same.
Butterfield's only solo composition here — the
title track — is featured at the end and was probably supposed to be the
climactic finish, what with all those gospel harmony overtones, but it is
stunningly weak: musically, just sort of a ghostly shuffle, limping along like
a three-legged dog, and vocally, with nothing but the pure power of one man's
soul to guide it to its conclusion (and it doesn't even have a conclusion — it just indecisively fades away after almost
six minutes of trying to understand what it is supposed to do).
So yes, I respect that the fact that they at
least tried to change, and even
develop some sort of hybrid musical genre, wobbling between blues, jazz, and
R&B, rather than just throwing in a few more mediocre Albert King covers.
But there's really nothing here that couldn't be done better by either Traffic,
or Grateful Dead, or Blood, Sweat & Tears in their prime — and there's nothing
but sheer curiosity, I think, that might make you want to check it out. Oh
well, at least it's all over in just 36 minutes — very respectful of them,
since it wouldn't have been too difficult to shove twenty more minutes of
comparable mediocrity into the pot, and then I'd really have to hate 'em.
KEEP ON MOVING (1969)
1) Love March; 2) No Amount Of
Loving; 3) Morning Sunrise; 4) Losing Hand; 5) Walking By Myself; 6) Except
You; 7) Love Disease; 8) Where Did My Baby Go; 9) All In A Day; 10) So Far, So
Good; 11) Buddy's Advice; 12) Keep On Moving.
God, how boring. By 1969, both Elvin Bishop and
Mark Naftalin had left the band, feeling that the ship had sunk low enough —
but, of course, «The Butterfield Blues Band» may function under that title as
long as it has at least one Butterfield in it. Keep On Moving features at least ten different players in addition
to Paul, and I am not even completely sure who of them was «officially» a band
member and who was not at the time. Most importantly, the quality of the music
hardly stimulates me to find out.
Basically, at this point they are acting as a
weak, dis-focused substitute for Blood, Sweat & Tears. Lots of brass, lots
of swinging' and funky rhythms, lots of swagger and agitation, but practically
nothing by way of memorable tunes. Somehow, they have gradually entered a
«loungy» phase of existence, where vibe and atmosphere are created by the
players' tones and personalities rather than compositional findings — and other
than a few more nice bits of Paul's harmonica, there is nothing particularly
fascinating about these particular tones and personalities. For me at least,
the «three listen test» was failed here 100%: glancing back at the song titles,
I have not the faintest memory of how any of them originally went, other than a
general vague remembrance of how much noise the brass section made and how Paul
Butterfield worked so very hard to pass for a natural «soul screamer» and it
still didn't help.
Now, with the help of the «play» button, just a
few quick remarks: ʽLove Marchʼ is undescribably dippy and silly —
and its organ-led gospel bridge, culminating in a "I know... THERE'S GOTTA
BE A CHANGE!", is the biggest embarrassment in Butterfield history up to
that date, just about everything about it being a poorly executed
cliché. ʽWalking By Myselfʼ is the only song that even
remotely tries to rock, and new guitarist Buzz Feiten adds a decent lead part,
but he's definitely no new Mike Bloomfield. His only songwriting contribution,
ʽBuddy's Adviceʼ, probably has the best brass riffs on the album, but
they fall on a totally empty stomach anyway.
For objectivity's sake, I should probably state
that the album is very well produced (by Jerry Ragovoy, the author of
ʽTime Is On My Sideʼ and ʽPiece Of My Heartʼ), that the
brass, keyboard, and guitar players are tightly coordinated, that at least some
thought is included in most of the arrangements, and that Robert Christgau gave
the album an A, saying about Butterfield that "he just gets better and
better". Well, this ain't the first and ain't gonna be the last time that
we don't exactly see eye-to-eye with Mr. Dean, and just so that this fact can
be properly reflected, I'm going all out here and awarding the album a decisive
thumbs down.
Okay, honestly, this decision has nothing to do with Christgau — I just
thought that you should be aware of alternate opinions, no matter how puzzling
or irrational they are.
LIVE (1970)
1) Everything Going To Be
Alright; 2) Love Disease; 3) The Boxer; 4) No Amount Of Loving; 5) Driftin' And
Driftin'; 6) Intro To Musicians; 7) Number Nine; 8) I Want To Be With You; 9)
Born Under A Bad Sign; 10) Get Together Again; 11) So Far, So Good.
The very idea of the Butterfield Blues Band
releasing their first live album without
Mike Bloomfield — or Elvin Bishop, for that matter, if we want to be
chivalrous about it as well — seems so revolting to me that, you know, these
guys would have to work real hard to
compensate for the affront. And they did not work that hard. Live seems
like a realistic picture of Paul Butterfield and his bluesy/jazzy friends at
the time: a band that plays it tight, intelligent, and safe to the point of
boring. The fact that the record came out the same year as Live At Leeds and Get Yer
Ya-Ya's Out!, not to mention all the fresh blood like Led Zeppelin or
Jethro Tull shaking down the walls, does not exactly speak much in its favor,
either.
The main problem, however, is not that the
Butterfield Blues Band does not sound «tough» when it gets out on stage —
kicking ass and rockin' the roof are not, after all, obligatory requirements
for a good show, not even in 1970. The main problem is that they give the
impression of trying to sound «tough»,
without truly rising to the task. Case in point: ʽNumber Nineʼ, a
lengthy, speedy funk-rock jam, with the brass section in full flight and Paul
playing Aeolus, Lord of Winds, on the harmonica. You can literally feel the
buckets of sweat coming off the players, but to no avail: Sly & The Family
Stone or James Brown would have blown them off the stage in a minute. There is
a certain level of tightness and coordination, but it does not feel natural,
and eventually the brass section just begins going to hell, with the players
falling out of sync with each other and almost hinting at free-form jazz — but
then, neither is this too free-form
to genuinely compete with, say, Eric Dolphy. It's all neither here nor there: a
whoppin' big mess that becomes a real chore when you realize you have to endure
ten minutes of it.
Naturally, most of the songs are taken from the
band's latest albums: ʽEast-Westʼ is not an option, and there is not
even a single fast, short, catchy blues-rocker from their past — mostly these
excursions into jazz-pop and funk territory, with a little gospel on the side
(the awful singalong number ʽGet Together Againʼ, which, for some
reason, strives to establish a black church atmosphere in an L.A. club).
ʽThe Boxerʼ, by the way, is not a Simon & Garfunkel cover (that
would have been at least novel), but rather a new funky composition by Rod
Hicks that provides the drummer with a soloing opportunity (the drummer is the boxer, see?), and the brass
section with a chance to replicate the meticulous punctuality of The Family
Stone (which they fail). The other tunes aren't even worth discussing.
What is
worth discussing is the split that the public had with the critics — most of
these latter day Butterfield albums, and this live one in particular, have
always received a serious share of academic admiration, yet sales were
drastically slow, and if East-West
still finds support among the connoisseurs these days, everything after 1966-67
seems to have completely fallen out, no matter how much the critics try to
revive it (see Bruce Eder's truly glowing account of the Live album at the All-Music Guide, for instance). The reason, I
guess, is that The Butterfield Blues Band play their program formally right. There are no serious
lapses of taste here (other than in the ʽIntro To Musiciansʼ bit,
which Paul delivers as if he were stoned, or dead drunk — maybe he was),
there's energy, there's some originality, there's not a lot of pretense and
quite a lot of humbleness. But there is never
a sign that this is a band that's ready to «go all the way», you know.
Ultimately, they just sound like any average blues-rock band with enough
determination to go on practicing, no matter how much time it takes. And the
decision to expand into jazz-rock and funk — genres that absolutely require
that one «goes all the way» if one wants to make a difference — was probably
the single silliest decision of Butterfield's entire career. As a jazz
musician, he's too sterile; as a funk player, too stiff. He was born in
Chicago, and that is where he should have stayed.
SOMETIMES I JUST FEEL LIKE SMILIN' (1971)
1) Play On; 2) 1000 Ways; 3)
Pretty Woman; 4) Little Piece Of Dying; 5) Song For Lee; 6) Trainman; 7) Night
Child; 8) Drowned In My Own Tears; 9) Blind Leading The Blind.
Although by 1971 just about everybody
completely lost interest, I actually think that The Butterfield Blues Band's
last LP is a slight improvement, in terms of energy and focus at least, over Keep On Moving. Of course, it was much
too late. The «roots» market was wide open at the time, but it was occupied by
a variety of fresh new faces, and Butterfield neither had the intimate
sentimentality of Californian folkers like James Taylor, nor the purported
depth and wisdom of The Band; and even if he made a serious effort to gain any
of these, it would probably make no difference — he was already kicked off that
train.
So this Smilin'
record has no historical significance other than representing a last farewell,
pronounced with a certain amount of musical dignity. There's a little less jazz
here, a little more blues, and a lot more gospel-soul, with «Brother Gene
Dinwiddie» (as he was now known) possibly responsible for pushing Mr.
Butterfield further in that territory. Occasionally, they have ignition, like
on the opening track ʽPlay Onʼ, where bass, guitar, and brass succeed
in locking themselves in a tight groove, and it is in fact possible to get
caught up in the excitement — when the brass section emerges in grand mode at
the end of the track and gets diffused across the lead and backing vocals, the
band almost manages to cross that
invisible border between musical performance and spiritual celebration. Not
quite, but almost.
(Amusing note: for some reason, many Web
sources list the song as «co-written» by Butterfield with Kerry Livgren and
John Elefante of Kansas! Of course, it's just a mix-up because of the latter
two having a song with the same title on the Vinyl Confessions album from 1982, but apparently the mistake has
virally spread over to dozens of sites — nobody even bothered to check that
John Elefante was 13 years old at the time and had nothing to do with Kansas.
And I'd be sad to find out that Butterfield ever co-wrote anything with Mr.
Livgren, although, of course, that wouldn't be totally out of the question).
A couple other funky pieces here are worth
hearing at least once, too: ʽ1000 Waysʼ builds up a slower, moodier,
but still perfectly danceable groove, and shows that Paul's harmonica skills
could be well adapted to funk from their blues origins; ʽLittle Piece Of
Dyingʼ is a bit flabbier, but continues in essentially the same style, and
if only the groove had some development to it instead of simply serving as a
background for Paul's apprentice attempt at spiritual exorcism, it could
perhaps hold our interest a little longer.
The rest is fairly non-descript as usual:
needless covers of Albert King's ʽPretty Womanʼ (as devoid of eerie
voodoo magic as their earlier toothless take on ʽBorn Under A Bad
Signʼ) and ʽDrowned In My Own Tearsʼ (Paul has never been a
certified member of the «I have covered Ray Charles and lived» club),
jazz-rockish instrumentals that hurry past you like particles of office
plankton on their way to work (ʽSong For Leeʼ, ʽNight
Childʼ — beware, this song, too, in the world of virtual irreality often
features a credit by «Oscar Peterson», even though Oscar Peterson wouldn't
issue his ʽNight Childʼ
until 1979), and competent, but lackluster gospel singalongs like
ʽTrainmanʼ (which begins with a really
silly invocation to NYC: "New York, New York... the bi-i-i-i-i-g
APPLE!..") and ʽBlind Leading The Blindʼ, which at least ends
the album on an upbeat note, rather than dissolving it in a yawny puddle of
slow wailing.
The best thing I can say about all this stuff
is that Rod Hicks is a really good, interesting, underrated bass player — even
on the boring songs, I find my attention consistently privatised by his nimble,
adventurous lines. If only the rest of the band followed his lead and took
similar flight at least half of the time, things would have been different at
least in terms of energy and musical freedom. As it is, he did his best to save
the band's swan song from being an embarrassment, but he was not enough of a
magician to turn all his bandmates into inspired virtuosos — leaving them with
little choice other than to split for good, once the record had sold its
predictable fifty copies; and that was the quiet, humble, barely noticed demise
of The Butterfield Blues Band.
ADDENDA:
THE ORIGINAL LOST ELEKTRA SESSIONS (1964/1995)
1) Good Morning Little Schoolgirl;
2) Just To Be With You; 3) Help Me; 4) Hate To See You Go; 5) Poor Boy; 6) Nut
Popper #1; 7) Everything's Gonna Be Alright; 8) Lovin' Cup; 9) Rock Me; 10) It
Hurts Me Too; 11) Our Love Is Driftin'; 12) Take Me Back Baby; 13) Mellow Down
Easy; 14) Ain't No Need To Go No Further; 15) Love Her With A Feeling; 16)
Piney Brown Blues; 17) Spoonful; 18) That's All Right; 19) Goin' Down Slow.
Although the posthumous legend of The
Butterfield Blues Band mainly lingered on in circles of «aficionados» and
«connaisseurs», it was strong enough to trigger a large series of archival releases
in the mid-Nineties — and for understandable reasons: most of these releases,
like Strawberry Jam or East-West Live, were culled from live
shows recorded while Bloomfield was still in the band, so as to satisfy the
demand for Mike-era live material and have something to commemorate the band's
finest incarnation on stage, rather than its latter day version with the brass
players replacing the original guitarists. Unfortunately, all of these releases
are bootleg quality: for some reason, the original band did not care much about
being recorded professionally while in live flight, and most of this stuff is
barely listenable, let alone reviewable.
In the end, the only archival release by the
original band that is worth owning and talking about is the very first one —
their failed first attempt at recording an LP, which they made as early as December
1964, immediately after signing up with Elektra. Not all of the 19 songs
included here date from those very sessions, but most of them do, and since the
band was already fully formed and included Bloomfield, and the recordings were made in a professional studio, this here is
an indispensable acquirement for The True Fan.
The problem is, I can sort of see why the
people at Elektra were not impressed. From a certain angle, these covers of
classic blues and R&B numbers are not significantly different from the
contents of The Paul Butterfield Blues
Band — indeed, a few would later be re-recorded for that very album. The
subtle difference is that in late 1964, this really was «The Paul Butterfield Blues Band», with Paul's vocals and
harmonica always taking center stage and always being much higher in the mix
than everything else. Basically, ladies and gentlemen, we come here to listen
to the amazing Mr. Paul Butterfield do impersonations of Muddy Waters, Howlin'
Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Elmore James, and particularly Little Walter —
and there are a few sidemen playing, uh, on the sides, but they're quite
dispensable.
There are only a few spots where Bloomfield is
allowed to shine, and they're cool and important: instrumental rave-ups like
ʽNut Popper #1ʼ and R&B dance numbers like ʽLovin' Cupʼ
are probably the earliest known examples of the classic Bloomfield style, and
even a small handful is enough to say that for that brief moment in late 1964 /
early 1965, Mike Bloomfield may have been the coolest axe player in the West,
and the only real competition to Mr. Slowhand of the Yardbirds' fame as the
finest (white, at least) blues-rock guitarist known to mankind. But it is a
really, really small handful — and it
betrays jealousy, since on ʽMellow Down Easyʼ, for instance,
Butterfield does not even allow him a proper solo: all the lead parts are
played in the background and convenietnly muffled by the much louder harmonica
parts. (On the 1965 re-recording, that would change, and Mike would get to slip
in something purely his own).
To serious admirers of Paul's harmonica-blowing
talents, this should not be a disappointment; on the contrary, I'd say that not
a single «proper» BBB album features as much harmonica playing as these early
tapes — where Paul is simply all over the place. But honestly, unless you
really, really take your time thinking about how to use your harp in various
creative / expressive ways, depending on the structures, tonalities, moods of
the individual songs, a blues-rock «Listen To Me Blowing» type album is
ultimately bound to sound boring, and I can suggest that the people at Elektra
thought so, too. As competent as these covers are, Butterfield here is the
all-pervasive imitator, and only Bloomfield is the occasional innovator —
because at least several Chicago blueswailers played better harmonica than Paul
(let alone singing), but no Chicago lead guitar players ever played a guitar
solo the way Bloomfield does it here on that ʽNut Popperʼ thing.
For some reason, many accounts of the album try
to increase its status by claiming that it was «one of the first blues-rock
albums», which is supposed to boil up our admiration and at the same time to
forgive the record its rawness, unevenness, and harmonica-heaviness. But the
true expression should be «one of the first white American blues-rock albums»
— British invaders like The Yardbirds and The Animals, let alone lesser heroes
like Alexis Korner, had already been doing this thing for at least a couple of
years; and in basic terms of instrumentation, there's really no reason why one
couldn't apply the term «blues-rock» to the Chicago sound — I mean, Howlin'
Wolf's recordings from the late Fifties / early Sixties certainly «rock» just
as hard, if not harder, than these ones. A thinner drum sound, perhaps, but
that's about it.
Still, there are enough historical and other
reasons to at least be happy that the tapes were not completely lost, and that
it is possible to trace Butterfield's story way back into late 1964. And, heck,
when they really speed up the tempo and Paul is blowing away and the rhythm
section is rolling and grooving, like on ʽPiney Brown Bluesʼ, for
instance, it takes a mighty (anti-)intellectual leap to not get caught up in
the excitement — at least a little bit.
MR. TAMBOURINE MAN (1965)
1) Mr. Tambourine Man; 2) I'll
Feel A Whole Lot Better; 3) Spanish Harlem Incident; 4) You Won't Have To Cry;
5) Here Without You; 6) The Bells Of Rhymney; 7) All I Really Want To Do; 8) I
Knew I'd Want You; 9) It's No Use; 10) Don't Doubt Yourself, Babe; 11) Chimes
Of Freedom; 12) We'll Meet Again.
The historical importance of this record can
only be denied by the same people who also deny the Holocaust, the Moon
landing, and the Spaghetti Monster — but I suppose that it is also every reviewer's
and historian's responsibility to point out that the Byrds did not
singlehandedly invent «folk rock» (even if the term was allegedly invented by
American journalists upon listening to the Byrds). Folk music had already been
successfully packaged together with pop/rock beats, band-style and all,
throughout 1964 and even earlier, particularly in the UK (The Four Pennies and
The Searchers are only the most easily memorable examples), and then you could
actually trace it all the way back to the States with the Everly Brothers. And
it is interesting that that kind of
folk rock is really only represented by one single song on the Byrds' debut
(ʽBells Of Rhymneyʼ).
What was really
important here was the inclusion of no less than four Dylan covers — all of
them reinvented as pop band numbers, bass, drums, electric guitars, and all.
Before June 1965, people covered plenty of Dylan, but hardly ever moving away
from the same stripped acoustic format, largely due to either lack of
imagination, or lack of bravery required to bridge the silly artificial gap
between «folksters» and «popsters» (or «rockers», whatever). The Byrds, from
the very outset, idolized the Beatles and wanted to appeal to pop audiences
rather than Greenwich Village intellectuals — yet they also wanted to grab some
of that intellectualism, admittedly believing that pop audiences wouldn't
really mind listening a little bit about trips on magic swirling ships and
cliffs of wildcat charms, in between wanting to hold your hand and needing your
love eight days a week, you know.
In the end, the Byrds did not invent
«folk-rock» any more than Bob Dylan could be said to invent «folk music» —
what they invented was «Dylan-rock», a genre that was not only influenced by
Bob Dylan, but also happened to influence Bob Dylan, who went on to adopt it
soon enough and then quickly began pushing its boundaries into much harder
rockin' territory (largely because Roger McGuinn was such a sweet, tender guy,
and Bob Dylan was such a nasty asshole; isn't it odd how we love them both in
the end?). The three main ingredients of the original brand of Dylan-rock,
then, are: (a) the pop/rock band format providing a steady pop/rock beat with
electric amplification; (b) the melodic component, largely carried over from
the folk music tradition but also incorporating pop elements; (c) lyrics that
are supposed to be listened to and perhaps even thought about, even when we
still have boy/girl relationships at the core of everything.
In addition to that general formula which could
be exported to other bands, The Byrds had their individual assets as well —
three talented songwriters (although the debut album is still almost completely
dominated by one, Gene Clark), a lovely lead singer, a system of group harmony
singing that was quite novel at the time, and a unique 12-string electric
guitar playing style that came to be known as «The Jangle» (or «The
Jingle-Jangle» if you like complex sound-symbolic strings of sounds) and was a
major sonic advance over previous similar styles, such as the Searchers (whose
12-string riffs sound seriously wussy compared to McGuinn's, both from a technological
standpoint and in terms of playing technique).
This strictly organized, immediately recognizable
Byrds sound can have its drawbacks — the band has never managed to appeal to me
all that much on a basic gut level, because the sound can get pretty monotonous, the songs rarely have much to applaud in
terms of dynamics and development, and when you find out that for the fifth,
sixth, and tenth time in a row you cannot describe those group harmonies with
any other word than «lovely», a nasty subconscious strand of depression sets
in. Another big problem is that the Byrds never had a proper sense of humor,
which I think is essential for a truly great band. But then, most bands and
artists have their natural limits, and it is only because the Byrds tend to get
really overrated in certain critical
circles that I find myself sometimes obliged to explain why I cannot bring
myself to regard them in the same major league as the Beatles.
In my opinion, the Byrds were generally a
better «singles band» than an «album band», despite the fact that Mr. Tambourine Man, even if it was named after their breakthrough single,
was certainly not recorded according to the «one-two hit singles and a lot of
filler» principle. It's just that the single does tower high above the other eleven songs here — the band's interpretation
of Dylan's greatest merger of acoustic folk with psychedelic visions is one of
the awesomest events from mid-1965, even if they only preserve one complete
verse of the original due to the inevitable three-minute restriction on pop
single length. There are these defining moments from that year — the fuzz blast
of ʽSatisfactionʼ, the snare drum kick of ʽLike A Rolling
Stoneʼ, the stunning cry for aid of ʽHelp!ʼ — and the opening
riff of ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ is certainly one of them.
For me, there is no dilemma when it comes to
the old, tired, and stupid question of "whose version do you prefer,
Dylan's or the Byrds'?" — it is so much more exciting to simply look at
the song from different angles than to put a dollar value on any of its
avatars. The Byrds, it could be argued, have «tamed» and «dressed up» Dylan's
roughly hewn masterpiece, converted it into a state of organized and
disciplined beauty, carried it over from the Dionysian into the Apollonian
field of existence. The musical arrangement, in fact, owes more to Phil Spector
and the Beach Boys than to any folk musicians — and the vocal harmonies are
more Smokey Robinson than even Peter, Paul, and Mary, if another folk analogy
is required. But to say that this somehow «cheapens» the rough, direct,
intimate, human, etc. atmosphere of the original would be just as ridiculously
judgemental as stating the opposite ("oh, it sounds so much more melodic
now, and Jim McGuinn has such a lovelier voice than Dylan's nasty rasp").
I just prefer to sit back and watch the sheer awesomeness of the power of
intelligent conversion — the same way I can enjoy a really great Russian
translation of a classic English novel, or vice versa.
As I said, my problem is with the rest of the
album — that the Byrds offer a great, distinctive style, but stumble upon the
problem of providing distinctiveness for its individual constituents (a.k.a.
«songs»). At first, it seems like they have a great solution for the problem —
namely, the songwriting skills of Gene Clark, and the decision to include
ʽI'll Feel A Whole Lot Betterʼ as the immediate follow-up to
ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ was totally brilliant: there we have just stunned the world with the most imaginative and
innovative reinvention of a great Dylan song yet, and here we have our own young aspiring songwriter who can write a
«fuck off, unfaithful bitch» type song as if he himself were Bob Dylan, John
Lennon, and a bunch of Everly Brothers all in one. Okay, he is a bit clumsy on
the verses ("The reason why / Oh I can say / I have to let you go / And
right away" isn't exactly a Joycian type of handling the English syntax),
but he also says "I'll probably
feel a whole lot better when you're gone" rather than just "I'll
feel...", which, when you come to think of it, is actually a huge advance
on the lyrical front. And that guitar solo — they're just playing one riff over
and over, instead of copping Chuck Berry licks, but it weaves in so nicely with
the rhythm, so fluently and melodically, it's like wow, you never really heard
any of that on Searchers records. Two songs into the album, and you already
begin to think that Bob is God, and Gene Clark is his Prophet, and we're
entering a new era when the infidels from the British Invasion will finally be
pushed out, and purity of faith restored.
The problem is that the band's bag of tricks
seems exhausted with those first two songs: everything else ranges from «very
pleasant» to «almost great», but essentially follows the established stylistic
patterns. The insane success of ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ meant that from
now on, the Byrds would be expected to cover more Dylan — but already the
second single, ʽAll I Really Want To Doʼ, is less convincing and
maybe even somewhat of a misstep, because they took a straightforward joke number and turned it into a catchy,
but humorless jangle-pop number, and no matter how Apollonian it is made,
ʽAll I Really Want To Doʼ really cannot survive without a strong
sense of humor to go along with it. ʽChimes Of Freedomʼ, in
comparison, is quite fantastic, but tailored so strictly in agreement with the
recipe of ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ that the dreaded word «formula» cannot
be avoided.
Clark, too, writes in accordance with a
formula, but at least he has different subvariants of it: ʽYou Won't Have
To Cryʼ is a tender song of consolation, ʽHere Without Youʼ is a
sad song of loneliness, ʽI Knew I'd Want Youʼ is a chivalrous
serenade, and ʽIt's No Useʼ is the fastest and hardest rocking tune
on the entire album, with an almost garage-like lead part and such a harsh,
decisive resolution of the vocal melody that the message is perfectly carried
over — "it's no use saying you're gonna stay if you don't want our love to
live", period. (So much for chivalrous serenades and tender songs of
consolation). They are all catchy, pretty, and have enough lyrical quirks to be
regarded as «progressive stuff» for mid-'65, but in the end, they seem to
somewhat dissipate the enthusiasm generated by ʽI'll Feel A Whole Lot
Betterʼ than multiply it. With the possible exception of ʽIt's No
Useʼ — I've always liked that one's sharp energy shot in comparison with
the rather limp overall flow of the record. (Should have invited Dave Davies
over to play the guitar solo, though).
The choice of non-Dylan covers is cool:
ʽBells Of Rhymneyʼ honestly confirms the band's link with Greenwich
Village (although, shame on me, I've always found its three-and-a-half minute
length somewhat overlong — they are left with nothing new to say after the
first verse is over); Jackie DeShannon's ʽDon't Doubt Yourself, Babeʼ
confirms the band's link with... the Searchers? (but how amusing it is,
actually, to find out that the coda of the song has been lifted from the
Stones' version of ʽIt's All Over Nowʼ!); and the decision to end the
record with the age-old ʽWe'll Meet Againʼ is symbolic on so many levels
— not only is this one of the first rock band arrangements of a non-folk
pre-war song, and a suitable goodbye song to add a bit of conceptuality to the
LP, but it's also a not-so-thinly-veiled signal to their British friends (and
competitors) across the ocean. An encoded ironic hello to Lennon and McCartney?
Who knows, really. But here's a fun coincidence: Vera Lynn was the first UK
performer to top the American charts, and the Byrds were the first American
band to top the British charts (not the first American artist in general, I
believe, but still...). The 12-string guitar strikes back.
All said, the criticisms in this review should
not be taken too harshly: yes, the Byrds had a formula, but it was a fabulous
formula, and for what it's worth, musically
Mr. Tambourine Man is heads and
tails above, for instance, that whole indie college rock scene of the Eighties
(yes, R.E.M. included, you Eighties nuts!) which was so heavily influenced by
McGuinn and his pals. In 1965, there were two brands of pure organized beauty
in America — the heavenly brand of the Beach Boys and the earthly brand of the
Byrds — and even if organized beauty can seem boring when taken in mass
quantities, a Byrds song a day still keeps the cynic away. So if you thought
the final verdict was going to be anything other than a major thumbs up,
you're as mistaken as anybody who has ever taken the phrase I HATE PINK FLOYD
much too literally.
TURN! TURN! TURN! (1965)
1) Turn! Turn! Turn! (To
Everything There Is A Season); 2) It Won't Be Wrong; 3) Set You Free This Time;
4) Lay Down Your Weary Tune; 5) He Was A Friend Of Mine; 6) The World Turns All
Around Her; 7) Satisfied Mind; 8) If You're Gone; 9) The Times They Are
A-Changin'; 10) Wait And See; 11) Oh! Susannah.
The Byrds' second album is a classic example of
«the sophomore slump» — rushing somewhat prematurely back into the comforts of
the recording studio to capitalize upon the success of Mr. Tambourine Man, they had not the time, strength, or will to
think about «where do we go from here?», and ended up with what is essentially
a weaker twin brother of the debut. More Dylan; more covers; older songs from
the bottom of the barrel; no creative advances whatsoever — if this band were
of a slightly lesser caliber, the album would have been a resounding suckjob.
Fortunately, even a subpar Byrds album circa 1965 was still a Byrds album.
If there is one single defining difference, it
is that this record is far more
objectively «folk-rock» than its predecessor. There are only two Dylan covers
this time (another one, ʽIt's All Over Now Baby Blueʼ, was also
recorded, but ultimately rejected), and all the included covers are, one way or
another, «traditional» (in fact, I almost forgot initially that ʽLay Down
Your Weary Tuneʼ was also a Dylan song — considering how it was directly
influenced by some Scottish ballad). This is not necessarily a good thing — it
means that, for a while at least, The Byrds were only too happy to fit in the
image created for them by the musical press, and conform to stereotypes where
their major idol, Mr. Zimmerman, would be only too happy to break them. Then
again, it is easy to forget that even Mr. Zimmerman had to play his cards with
care in the early years, and that his
post-breakthrough album (The Times They
Are A-Changin') was even more stereotypical than Turn! Turn! Turn!; so who could blame these lads? It takes some financial and public image stability to
grow some clout.
Anyway, the real problem is not that this is
«too much folk rock», but that there are no obvious standouts — the album flows
smoothly and steadily, consistently pretty and engaging to a degree, but hardly
cathartic or mind-blowing. The title track is the only one that has endured as
a radio classic, due to its high ambitiousness — a folk-rock anthem for peace with
connections to Pete Seeger and Ecclesiastes is, after all, no laughing matter, and
it became the band's second and last #1 hit on the charts, not to mention King
Solomon's greatest moment of glory. But I have never liked it as much as
ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ — the Byrds instinctively understood the
seduction powers of the latter, and used their harmonic gift to bring them out
in full, whereas ʽTurn! Turn! Turn!ʼ is a sermon that lacks intimacy,
and though the verse melody ("a time to be born, a time to die...")
is harmonious and formally beautiful, it does not connect on that deepest of
deepest possible levels. It's also overlong. Four minutes? Why wasn't
ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ four minutes? They could have included a whole
other verse!
It is, however, observable that Gene Clark is
maturing as a songwriter. Not deviating from the folk rock formula, he
contributes three tunes that all go a step or two beyond the still relatively
simplistic pop numbers on Mr. Tambourine
Man. ʽThe World Turns All Around Herʼ is melodically and
lyrically more complex than ʽI'll Feel A Whole Lot Betterʼ, to which
it could be considered a logical and ironic sequel (as the protagonist finds
that, curious as it is, he is not
feeling a whole lot better when she's gone). ʽSet You Free This Timeʼ
seems simple and repetitive, but oh that vocal part — out of nowhere, you have
this bittersweet, quivering-but-struggling vocal that has to be sustained
through the long winding verse melody, and makes the song seem like the first
truly serious «breakup song» of the young rock band era. My favorite is
ʽIf You're Goneʼ, with another stunning vocal and... how the hell do
they have that weird hum going on while Gene is singing? Sounds like vocal
harmonies recorded from the bottom of a well or something. Do they have deep
wells in Columbia Studios? In any case, I'm pretty damn sure that these effects
on backing vocals had never been used previously, not by any major artist, at
least.
(Two more Clark songs did not make it onto the
LP, but are available as bonus tracks on the regular CD edition — ʽShe
Don't Care About Timeʼ is another romantic classic, but ʽThe Day Walk
(Never Before)ʼ seems largely to get by on the strength of copping the
ʽSatisfactionʼ riff, and is noticeably inferior to the rest of Gene's
songs, which is probably why it was left off; no need to suspect envy or
sabotage on this particular occasion).
McGuinn still languishes far behind in
comparison as a songwriter (his two originals here are fairly lackluster), but
not as a visionary — the decision, for instance, to reinvent ʽHe Was A
Friend Of Mineʼ as an obituary to JFK, though clearly naïve in
retrospect, is one of those «why folk music still matters today» moves that
kept the whole thing alive and vibrant at the time. And ʽOh!
Susannahʼ, this time around, closes the album on a joke note, even if
McGuinn couldn't really sing in joke mode to save his life, so there's a
bizarre desperation to his vocals on the verses, you just want to lend him a
helping hand or something.
In a way, it may be so that Turn! Turn! Turn! captures the essence
of the early Byrds tighter than Mr.
Tambourine Man — by purging away some of the more obvious Beatles
influences, and focusing more sternly on the American side of business. But
then, of course, you can always make the argument that by purging those
influences they tipped the balance a bit too far in the «folk» direction of
«folk rock», and this made the songs less memorable and the whole experience
less fun. (I know I could certainly
have been made more happy with something like ʽIt's No Useʼ on this
record). And ultimately, it's one of those mood swing things, I guess. The
record clearly deserves a thumbs up and a solid place in the canon, but in
the context of the times... well, just remember the distance between Help! and Rubber Soul, or between Bringing
It All Back Home and Highway 61
Revisited, and against that top level background, the Byrds weren't really
doing all that great in late '65. Fortunately, they had the intuition to
understand it.
FIFTH DIMENSION (1966)
1) 5D (Fifth Dimension); 2)
Wild Mountain Thyme; 3) Mr. Spaceman; 4) I See You; 5) What's Happening; 6) I
Come And Stand At Every Door; 7) Eight Miles High; 8) Hey Joe; 9) Captain Soul;
10) John Riley; 11) 2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song).
For some reason, the general critical consensus
seems to have had a bone with the Byrds' third album from the very beginning,
and even today it is usually described as an «uneven», «transitional» record
that lacks both the freshness and inspiration of their first two efforts and
the art-pop perfection of Younger Than
Yesterday. I have never seen it that way myself — not only am I still
enjoying the absolute majority of the tunes here, but in a way, Fifth Dimension is the Byrds album for me: that one collection of musical ideas where
they really showed the world that they could not only invent a successful
musical formula, but they could also transcend it, and participate in the
«great progressive race» of the mid-Sixties along with the best of 'em. This is
their Revolver, if you wish, and it
actually came out before Revolver, so there.
The high quality of the music is all the more
astounding considering that it was recorded in the wake of the band's first
(but far from the last) great cataclysm — the departure of Gene Clark due,
among other things, to his fear of flying (as a mocking parting gift, this is
reflected in the band's decision to finish the record with ʽThe Lear Jet
Songʼ). His only contribution, ironically, is yet another song about the
strangeness of flying (ʽEight Miles Highʼ), with McGuinn and Crosby
both taking additional credits, even if no one really knows how justified that
was (well, I guess at least McGuinn deserves plenty of credit for the famous
guitar solo). This explains the continuing high ratio of cover material — but
the covers are mostly good, and beyond that, Clark's departure did stimulate
McGuinn and Crosby to develop their own songwriting talents.
Most importantly, though, Fifth Dimension simultaneously takes The Byrds in more directions
(dimensions?) than any other of their albums. Word of the day is diversity, as
if they themselves looked back in horror at the clonish nature of Turn! Turn! Turn! and said, «if we go
on this way, we'll never catch up with them Beatles», and now they are firing
all the cannons at once. There's still some of the old trusty jingle-jangle
folk-rock vibe, of course (title track; ʽI Come And Stand At Every
Doorʼ), but there's also lushly orchestrated art-pop (ʽWild Mountain
Thymeʼ), psychedelic rock with jazz and Indian influences (ʽEight
Miles Highʼ, ʽI See Youʼ), speedy, catchy, quirky country-pop
(ʽMr. Spacemanʼ), Booker T.-influenced R&B with jagged edges
(ʽCaptain Soulʼ), and even a pre-Hendrix version of ʽHey
Joeʼ so that they could always say that they were first, and pout their
lips to the max.
You could join the chorus of disappointed
grunts and point out individual problems with these songs — the sound is too
thin, the grooves are too repetitive, Crosby overacts like an idiot while
singing ʽHey Joeʼ — but instead of picking at minutiae, I recommend
simply embracing this universe as a whole, and getting the most of it. See Jim
McGuinn invent the motif of the «space cowboy» with ʽMr. Spacemanʼ, a
song that sounds as if it should have been a hit for Buck Owens, but is
actually a ten-years-early theme for Close
Encounters Of The Third Kind! Watch him set a poem by Nâzım
Hikmet to a morbidly slow-waltzing theme and reimagine the lyrics as coming
from the ghost mouth of a 7-year old victim of Hiroshima! Revel in the
wind-gusty string swoops of ʽWild Mountain Thymeʼ as they smash into
the guitar jingle-jangle that bravely withstands each new assault! And look,
David Crosby can actually write a song that has a steady, fast rhythm and a
catchy vocal melody to go along with the famous «lost in time and space, and
loving it» Crosby vibe. Even Yes would admire it to the point of covering the
song on their first album — something they'd probably never dream of doing over
the likes of ʽAlmost Cut My Hairʼ.
It is probably the towering awesomeness of
ʽEight Miles Highʼ — eight-mile towering, right? — that forms this
impression that the entire album is centered around one song, and everything
else is just filler in comparison. (Much the same way people like to dismiss Sgt. Pepper as an album that really
only has one great song on it — you know which one). Naturally, ʽEight
Miles Highʼ is a classic and a milestone: with its Indian raga and
Coltrane influences, it invents The Velvet Underground before there was a
proper Velvet Underground, and the combined effect of hard-rocking rhythm
guitars, droning leads, and stratospheric lyrics unequivocally makes this one
of the defining tracks of 1966, along with ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ (a
song that seems to pursue much the same goals, albeit in a totally different
manner). However, it is just because the song's innovative gamble is thrust
straight in your face here — the tasks that are accomplished on the other songs
are more subtle and humble, and may take a little time to appreciate.
I even hold a high opinion on ʽCaptain
Soulʼ, a jammy blues-rock instrumental that should not normally be
associated with the likes of The Byrds — but I've always admired the energy
level on it, as two lead guitars and one wailing harmonica compete for attention
like a trio of brawny, unrestrained kids. Were this a real Booker T. & The M.G.'s jam, they would only let one instrument
solo at a time, and the solo would be all restrained and dignified and
potentially quite boring. These guys, on the other hand, make it feel like a
garage happening — all the more exciting coming from a bunch of «softies»... in
a way, you can almost feel the seeds of the classic Crosby, Stills, Nash &
Young live electric jams planted on this track, or at least understand why Stills
and Young even bothered letting ol' Cros' in on their little games.
Of course, Crosby can be a weak link at times — the band's version of ʽHey
Joeʼ is dramatically overwrought and rushed, never even hoping to be as
doom-laden and imposing as the Hendrix cover; and ʽWhat's
Happening?!?!ʼ already goes over the top with psychedelic «Indian»
guitars, a process that would reach rather an ugly culmination on next year's
ʽMind Gardensʼ. But even so, ʽWhat's Happening?!?!ʼ is
hardly worse than, say, any random Love track from 1966-67, and at this point,
Crosby is still conservatively writing structured songs rather than
impressionist fantasies which would eventually become his primary, if not only, style of writing. Moreover, he had
not yet grown his walrus moustache yet, so there's really no need to worry.
Maybe a few of the idealistic / psychedelic
touches here have dated rather poorly
— particularly the lyrics of the title track, with its clichéd
references to "my two dimensional boundaries" and "scientific delirium
madness" — but only a few, and they are no more than cute bookmarks of a
time when child-like earnestness in popular music could be a source for
inspiration rather than immediate derision. In their own way, The Byrds were
doing here the same thing that The Beach Boys were doing with Pet Sounds (I mean, if I already
mentioned Revolver, it was only a
matter of time before a reference to Pet
Sounds would show up, right?), although their vision was more expansionist
and «macrocosmic» at the time — even boy-girl relations are seen here as
requiring the mediation of an extra dimension. After all, what kind of square
loser would want to have sex in 1966 without the added benefit of certain
chemical substances?..
Even the bonus tracks on the CD release are
excellent — an early version of the dreamy pop rocker ʽWhy?ʼ, an
electric pop reimagining of the traditional ʽI Know My Riderʼ with a
riff that sounds suspiciously similar to the Beatles' ʽDr. Robertʼ,
and Crosby's talking psychedelic blues ʽPsychodrama Cityʼ with another
bunch of those messy, chaotic, avant-jazz solos. But why is that final track
dubbed as an «instrumental» version of ʽJohn Rileyʼ? It sounds
nothing like ʽJohn Rileyʼ. Just a fast groove with even more jazzy
guitar playing. (Could have been a nice move, though, if it were spliced with
the actual ʽJohn Rileyʼ, speeding and jazzifying it up after three
original minutes of electrofolk prettiness).
As far as I'm concerned, Fifth Dimension is the ultimate Byrds experience — not a «perfect»
album (the Byrds don't have a perfect album), but one that gives you everything
they could do well, shows you how much of a vision they had, and never ever
creates the impression of this band as a one-trick pony. Diehard fans of the
jingle-jangle, who think the band lost its strength as long as it stayed away
from the jingle-jangle, will indeed prefer 1965 or 1967 to 1966; but those who
really think that The Byrds are worthy of their own legend, and that in their
prime they were able to rival the
scope of The Beatles, at least in «mini-mode», will just have to agree that Fifth Dimension is really where it's
at, and accept the significance of this particular thumbs up.
YOUNGER THAN YESTERDAY (1967)
1) So You Want To Be A
Rock'n'Roll Star; 2) Have You Seen Her Face; 3) C.T.A.-102; 4) Renaissance
Fair; 5) Time Between; 6) Everybody's Been Burned; 7) Thoughts And Words; 8)
Mind Gardens; 9) My Back Pages; 10) The Girl With No Name; 11) Why.
Although this album (actually recorded at the
end of 1966 — still in the «Revolver
era» rather than the much-mutated «Sgt.
Pepper era») is very frequently listed as the pinnacle of the Byrds'
career, I have always belonged to the small minority that regards it as a tiny
step down from the heights of Fifth
Dimension — at least in terms of innovation and diversity, if not overall
song quality. Where Fifth Dimension,
with all its minor faults, broke The Byrds out of the eggshell of their early
formula and opened them to the many ways of the world, on Younger Than Yesterday you can sort of see the beginnings (only the beginnings) of
their retreading back to a slightly different, but still monolithic eggshell.
At the very same time, you also see signs of serious tension between band
members that ultimately led to the band's enclosing itself in a rigid niche,
and then simply disintegrating because nobody cared any more.
If these sound like undeservedly harsh words
for an introduction to a great album, let me stress that the idea is not so
much to defame Younger Than Yesterday
as it is to restore justice for Fifth
Dimension. My only concrete
problem (as opposed to the abstract construction of an idealistic «progress
curve») with this record is one song and one song only, and yes, you guessed
right: David Crosby strikes again! Last time around, it was the clumsy
arrangement and the exaggerated vocal antics on ʽHey Joeʼ — this
time, it is ʽMind Gardensʼ, unquestionably the worst track ever that
classic-era Byrds put on tape. In fact, it was one of those ʽRevolution
#9ʼ-type moments, where everybody except the contributing artist hated the
track, but did not have enough willpower to veto its inclusion.
Crosby himself later argued that the hatred was
simply due to backwardness — that his bandmates were appalled about including
something that did not have either rhyme or rhythm — but, of course, this is
just a bunch of crapola; in fact, Crosby himself would later come up with
plenty of far, far better compositions that had neither rhyme nor rhythm, but
compensated for this with beautiful atmospherics. ʽMind Gardensʼ, however,
sounds like something where the overriding itch was to compose, record, and
release a track without rhyme or rhythm, period.
(Actually, the underlying guitar melody does have plenty of rhythm, to be
precise — it's just not a very interesting guitar melody, and David largely
referred to the vocals, of course). The lyrics, which sound like they were largely
influenced by Oscar Wilde's Selfish Giant
(yet still find a clichéd opportunity to throw in a reference to
"the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune", just for kicks), are
almost intentionally primitive in their psychedelic-moralistic imagery; the
singing is annoyingly shamanistic and shows that Cros never properly finished
his crash course in tribal incantations; and worst of all, very soon you find
yourself surrounded by a swarm of discordant backward guitar solos that make
the whole experience physically
painful (there is an alternate version among the bonus tracks of the CD reissue
that seriously tones down this hideous buzz, but still does not completely
resolve the problem). Basically, the only kind words I have to say about this
monstrosity is that it makes the following ʽMy Back Pagesʼ sound
twice as angelic by contrast.
All the more curious is the fact that, outside
of ʽMind Gardensʼ, the remainder of Crosby's contributions for this
record are fairly nice — ʽEverybody's Been Burnedʼ is a beautiful
three-minute long introspection on the matter of broken relationships, with two
somber minor key guitar parts weaving around each other and a perfectly
melancholic vocal serenade from David himself. (The song is said to have been
written as early as 1962, but I guess its «torch song» genre characteristics
and the lack of a proper chorus could not help but delay its release); and
ʽRenaissance Fairʼ, inspired by an actual trip to the original South
Californian Renaissance Fair, is one of Crosby's catchiest compositions — based
on a real riff, for once, if not a particularly inventive one; its starry-eyed
refrain of "I think that maybe I'm dreaming..." should count as one
of the most trend-defining, uh, starry-eyed magical moments of 1967, especially
in its retro-futuristic perception of Elizabethan decor as suitable garb for
the new psychedelic era.
At the same time with Crosby reaching his songwriting
peak (even if it does result in a few excesses), we also have Chris Hillman
emerging as a distinct songwriter in his own right — and pulling the band in a
completely different direction: the country-rock style. ʽTime
Betweenʼ and ʽThe Girl With No Nameʼ, with their steel guitars,
banjo-imitating guitars, and perky tempos, are two prime examples of the Byrds'
early venturing into hillbilly territory, and, honestly, sound like fairly
generic country to me (I do actually prefer the Beatles doing ʽWhat Goes
Onʼ — they have Ringo singing on it, and it's kinda funny). However,
Hillman is able to do better than
that: ʽHave You Seen Her Faceʼ is a fine slice of jangly pop (the
intro alone sounds like a blueprint to a good half of Big Star's career), and
the sleeping masterpiece here is ʽThoughts And Wordsʼ, which somehow
manages to combine both the country-rock and the art-pop idioms, throwing in a
moody psychedelic hum effect — it's like the Byrds' ʽThings We Said
Todayʼ multiplied by the trippy production values of Revolver. On this song, the backward guitars actually work. See how
they kick in as the second chorus starts up its "I knew what you wanted to
do"... yep, you wanted to drive me nuts by jamming jagged shards of
backward guitars in my ears. You don't spoil lovely melancholic music with
brute ugliness unless you have a good reason, and Hillman at least pretends to
have one — it's all about a lovely beginning and a rather brutal ending.
And we have not yet mentioned the
McGuinn/Hillman lead-off ʽSo You Want To Be A Rock'n'Roll Starʼ, one
of the first and bitterest sarcastic takes on rock stardom by rock stars
themselves; or the sci-fi noises on ʽC.T.A.-102ʼ, a more than
respectable successor to ʽThe Lear Jet Songʼ; or the new re-recording
of Crosby's ʽWhyʼ, released earlier as a single and now sounding very
much like Martha & The Vandellas' ʽHeatwaveʼ because we can; or
ʽMy Back Pagesʼ, which tends to get my vote as the band's second best
Dylan cover (and this time, they actually have enough space to cover four out
of six original verses) — McGuinn's vocals are not always capable of capturing,
let alone expanding upon, the magic of the original, particularly when they
cover humorous or battle-oriented songs, but «Dylan the transcendental
visionary» always comes off fine, and rarely, if ever, finer than on these
"crimson flames tied through my years"...
And it all happens within an almost
embarrassing twenty-nine minutes — in
29 minutes here, these guys say more than most modern bands say in 10 years.
Amazing how fast things were really moving back in 1967, isn't it? (The bonus
tracks aren't particularly phenomenal this time, but they do include ʽLady
Friendʼ, the last substantial Crosby-penned single they released, and a
couple more early excursions into country-rock with Hillman). Although,
supposedly, this still has something to do with the conservative peculiarities
of the American LP market, which rarely thought its customers worth more than
30 minutes of music per vinyl chunk. (Unless your artist was Dylan, who just
couldn't shut up — ironically, though also predictably, Bob would begin
releasing his own under-30-minute albums exactly at a time when this
restriction was finally and completely lifted).
So where, if you might ask, are those
«retreading» signs that I mentioned earlier? Well, essentially you see two
main trends sometimes peacefully co-existing, sometimes battling here — Crosby's
psychedelic vision and Hillman's «earthy» style, with McGuinn clearly more
seduced about the latter than the former. Crosby would eventually lose, and for
good reason — all these songs are really much more about solo Crosby than the
Byrds as a band, far more so, in fact, than even John Lennon's latter-day
Beatles material (more like as if Lennon were to offer songs like ʽMotherʼ
or ʽGodʼ for Beatles albums). Hillman would win — and complete the
Byrds' transformation into The Country Turf Preservation Society, which would
still be a fairly pleasant society, to be sure, but quite far from the
all-powerful eclectic deities of American rock that they were for a very brief
period in 1966.
On a song-by-song basis, Younger Than Yesterday is as strong as anything else they did in
their peak period — however, it does not have either a ʽMr. Tambourine
Manʼ or an ʽEight Miles Highʼ to symbolize a particular major
breakthrough (ʽSo You Want To Be...ʼ comes somewhat close, with its
send-up of the pop star image and Hugh Masekela on the trumpet, but does not
exactly have the majesty of those two other singles), because there are no major breakthroughs here. Which,
on a personal level, should not prevent anybody from simply enjoying the
excellent music. Alternately, it may just be an intense hatred for ʽMind
Gardensʼ that spoils and distorts my perception: honestly, I'd rather have
Crosby re-recording ʽHey Joeʼ in a duet with Iggy Pop rather than
having to listen to this atrocity, which I count among the same «1967 excesses»
as the Animals' Winds Of Change,
even one more time. Regardless, thumbs up are still guaranteed all the way — on
the already overloaded shelf of classic records from that wonder year, Younger Than Yesterday will always have
a secure place of honor.
THE NOTORIOUS BYRD BROTHERS (1968)
1) Artificial Energy; 2) Goin'
Back; 3) Natural Harmony; 4) Draft Morning; 5) Wasn't Born To Follow; 6) Get To
You; 7) Change Is Now; 8) Old John Robertson; 9) Tribal Gathering; 10)
Dolphin's Smile; 11) Space Odyssey.
Although technically marked 1968, since it was
released on January 15, the Byrds' fifth album still fully belongs in 1967 — on
the whole, it is still far more «psychedelic», «baroque-poppy», and
«experimental» than anything from the new back-to-roots era of Sweetheart Of The Rodeo and beyond. It
is also messy to the extreme, since the complete and irredeemable
disintegration of the original Byrds took place right through the sessions —
during which Crosby walked out, Michael Clarke walked in, Gene Clark came back,
Michael Clarke walked out again, and Gene Clark walked out again, too. Not to
mention dozens of sessions musicians walking in and out on a pay-per-hour
basis. Or on just a good word.
Despite, or maybe thanks to all the turbulence,
The Notorious Byrd Brothers has
always fascinated the critical mind, and eventually turned into a «cult
favorite» — people who think it too obvious to list Mr. Tambourine Man or Younger
Than Yesterday as their favorite Byrds album often turn to this as an honorably elitist competitor.
I am in no rush to join that chorus, though. It is true that this is really the
last Byrds album where the band members are still trying to push their
imagination to the limits, the last one where three different talents (McGuinn,
Crosby, and Hillman) compete with each other and feed on each other at the same
time, the last one that explicitly rejects formula in favor of freedom. But it
is not true that freedom is always
preferable to formula — and The
Notorious Byrd Brothers, in my opinion, could certainly benefit from a
little more martial discipline than is on display.
It is somewhat telling that when it came to
singles, the only track that was deemed qualifiable was a cover, and not even a
Dylan cover, but their take on Goffin and King's ʽGoin' Backʼ, previously
known mostly in Dusty Springfield's arrangement. It is a classic number, to be
sure, but other than replacing the «adult pop» version with keyboards and
strings with a janglier and more percussion-heavy pop-rock arrangement, the
band does not truly unlock anything here that Dusty had not already unlocked —
the nostalgic pull towards the past coupled with gentle optimism for the
future, as reflected in the elegant key changes of the melody. Even if we call
this the «definitive version» of the song (to me, though, that would rather be
Carole King's own take on her creation on the Writer album), it is still a cover, and not a magically transformed
one.
The band actually does much more with their
second Goffin/King cover, ʽWasn't Born To Followʼ, which they saw as
a fast-paced country-rock number (unlike Carole herself, who recorded it in a
slow, gospel-tinged version in 1969, while still a member of «The City») — and
it still did not prevent them from throwing in a few backward solos and put a
heavy phasing effect on the instrumental passage, because, you know, playing
straightforward country is kinda dull (an idea that had all but evaporated by the
following year). However, even that song never truly goes beyond «cute» —
maybe it's all because of the vocals, so cuddly and fragile and monotonous.
The rest of the album is all left to original
material, but next to the songs on Younger
Than Yesterday, these never seem to truly compete in terms of sharp,
interesting ideas. Crosby, in particular, is beginning to value social
importance over musical integrity. His ʽDraft Morningʼ, an
anti-Vietnam rumination on the fate of a nameless soldier, has no discernible
musical theme, and although the vocals were completed by McGuinn and Hillman
already after he'd been fired, the vocal melody is more enjoyable due to the
pure beauty of their silky tones than to the actual lines they're singing — not
to mention the totally pro forma,
unconvincing and disruptive «war sound effects» in the instrumental part; as
far as anti-war songs like these go, give me The Doors' ʽUnknown
Soldierʼ over this one any day. ʽTribal Gatheringʼ, inspired by
yet another hippie caucasus, is too short and simplistic to justify the «aura
of deep mystery» intention of the author, sounding more like hippie lounge
muzak than something to actively attune your brain to. And although I
distinctly remember that ʽDolphin's Smileʼ sounded fresh and sparkly,
a nice tune to wake up to on a bright summer morning when you want to start
your life anew, the whole thing was just too hazy and hookless to ever find a
proper place in my memory.
Ironically, Crosby's best song at the time was
not only considered too risky to put on the album, but, in fact, seriously
contributed to his decision to leave the band — and donate the song to
Jefferson Airplane. As sung by Grace Slick, the version of ʽTriadʼ is
still the definitive one, but the one that The Byrds did, eventually released
on CD as a bonus track, holds up fairly well, too. And it isn't merely its
controversial subject matter — "going on as three" is a fairly
uncomfortable notion even for 2015, although it is probably the next logical
stage after gay rights — that makes it stand out, no; it has an excellent verse
structure, with a double resolution of the vocal melody that, well, doubles the
intrigue. There's a certain je ne sais
quoi in that "...I don't really see why can't we go on as three"
conclusion that almost makes you... you know... see the point and all. It's
fairly disturbing and provocative on all fronts — no wonder that the nice
country lads McGuinn and Hillman felt way too uncomfortable about something
like that.
But what did they offer instead? Well, Hillman does write one of the album's
best songs, ʽNatural Harmonyʼ, which goes against his country-rock
reputation by actually sounding more like something Crosby would write —
jazzy, trippy, and featuring heavy use of the Moog synth, still very much a
rarity in late 1967; however, his collaboration with McGuinn on ʽChange Is
Nowʼ I can appreciate only a formal level. It does this novel trick of putting
together folk, drone, psychedelia, and even a fast country-western part, but
none of the parts are interesting on their own, and putting them together just
feels like an empty experiment.
McGuinn does shine on his own on the opener,
ʽArtificial Energyʼ, largely due to the powerful, anthemic brass
section (famed session musician Richard Hyde on trombone); but his ʽSpace
Odysseyʼ, concluding the album, is definitely an acquired taste. If the
idea of a slow four-minute folk ballad from the highlands, overdubbed with all
sorts of «deep space effects», instantaneously appeals to your cosmic cowboy
psychology, you'll find it a masterpiece. Personally, I find it boring and
tedious, a fairly dubious tribute to a fairly dubious piece of literature —
and, for that matter, I also hold the opinion that of all Kubrick's movies, A Space Odyssey is also the one that has
dated far more seriously than any other, let alone Arthur Clarke's prose.
All in all, maybe this entire album is very
much an acquired taste, and one that I have lost all hope of acquiring. Nothing
here is truly bad, with the exception of the last track, but the highs are
lower than any previous highs, and other than the Goffin/King covers, there
really isn't anything here that would unquestionably make it into my personal
«best-of» collection. I still give the record a thumbs up out of respect — with the
band in a state of near-collapse, it is amazing that they even had their minds
set on experimentation and progress so much of the time — but let it also go on
the official record that I continue not
to share the hype, and generally like my Byrds when they are more polished and
focused than when they are in a state of disarray.
SWEETHEART OF THE RODEO (1968)
1) You Ain't Going Nowhere; 2)
I Am A Pilgrim; 3) The Christian Life; 4) You Don't Miss Your Water; 5) You're
Still On My Mind; 6) Pretty Boy Floyd; 7) Hickory Wind; 8) One Hundred Years
From Now; 9) Blue Canadian Rockies; 10) Life In Prison; 11) Nothing Was
Delivered.
The sweetheart in question turned out to be
male: Mr. Ingram Cecil Connor The Third of Winter Haven, Florida, better known
as Gram Parsons, the father of country-rock and a respectable member of Club
27 (26, to be more precise). Although he was originally recruited by The Byrds
as a keyboard player (to play jazz piano, no less!), he soon moved to guitar,
then to songwriting, then to musical ideology, and, according to some sources,
ended up nearly wrestling control over the band from McGuinn; when that failed,
he quit in protest over the band's touring engagements in apartheid-rule South
Africa — though some suspected it was largely just a pretext. You never know
for sure with these things, anyway.
We all know the drill: McGuinn wanted the next
Byrds album to be a sprawling overview of all the genres of American pop music,
from the early days and well into the future, but abandoned the project — due
partly to the lack of a proper budget and support from the rest of the band,
and partly due to Parsons' insistence to turn specifically to country. Spilling tears over Roger's unrealized
project is useless, since we do not even know whether he was properly qualified
for this; but neither would I agree to succumb to waves of critical respect for
this album. Released in August 1968, it marked a sharp commercial decline in
the band's fortune. Rock audiences of the time were not prepared for any
radical «country twists», and although The Byrds weren't really doing anything
that their major idol, Mr. Zimmerman, hadn't already done with John Wesley Harding and those parts of
the Basement Tapes that were already circulating among devotees, their wholesale
conversion to the Nashville spirit was not greeted with too much pleasure by
record buyers, even if critical reviews seemed to be relatively benevolent.
The historical status of Sweetheart Of The Rodeo — the first LP release by a major
established «pop/rock» artist to consistently,
rather than sporadically, embrace the country idiom, and without any traces of
irony at that — is indisputable, as is its social importance: a sincere attempt
to bridge the gap between the rural and the urban, the conservative and the
progressive, the hillbilly and the hippie. The Byrds may have gotten their fair
share of flack for this gesture, from both the hillbilly and the hippie side, but this is the predictable fate of all
fence-sitters, sacrificing themselves while gambling on humanity's future.
What matters far more is how well the record holds up after all these years —
and this is where I continue to have my doubts.
Curiously, it does continue to have its fanbase among the rockers, usually along
the lines of "well, I'm not much of a country fan, but I have nothing
against country if it's done right,
and this is one such case". Well, the thing is, I'm not sure how this here
version of ʽLife In Prisonʼ is done more right than Merle Haggard's; or how this particular performance
of ʽYou're Still On My Mindʼ carries more energy and excitement than
George Jones' rendition of it. The Byrds pick a solid set of tunes — as far as
country goes, these songs mostly have interesting vocal hooks, though the base
melodies are predictably generic waltzes and shuffles. McGuinn, Hillman, and
Parsons sing the tunes with enough conviction, guest guitarist Clarence White
does the Nashville shtick with gusto, it's all fine and dandy, but...
ultimately, it's just a cover album of country tunes.
Sure there are a few originals, mostly courtesy
of Parsons, but I have never understood and still do not understand the
adoration for ʽHickory Windʼ, a song whose compositional virtues
amount to precisely zero (it is just a regular country waltz), lyrical virtues
consist of clichés ("hickory wind keeps callin' me home" is
not exactly a breakthrough in country lyricism), and musical arrangement is
not fundamentally different from similar arrangements for hundreds of country
songs (fiddles, slide guitars, honky tonk piano, you know the drill). The only
thing standing for it is Parsons' presence, I guess — if you are enchanted by
the man's lonesome-hero charisma — but it's not as if he had a totally unique
singing voice or presence, either. For my money, his other original, ʽOne Hundred Years From Nowʼ, beats
ʽHickory Windʼ on all counts — less obvious vocal melody (the verse
melody actually pinches a bit from ʽGod Only Knowsʼ, don't you
think?), psycho-folk harmonic singing from McGuinn and Hillman, and overall, a
clever mixture of folk, country, pop, and psychedelic elements.
Ironically, the Byrds are still at their best when they rely on the tried and true — covering
Dylan, that is. ʽYou Ain't Going Nowhereʼ, a perfect opener for the
album, does the usual wonder of converting Bob's natural ugly beauty into
smooth-glamorous pop perfection, with there being enough free space in the
world to allow for both visions. Here, we have the most heartfelt and sensitive
McGuinn vocal performance on the album, and a vivacious, elegantly woven steel
guitar lead melody as his lovin' partner throughout the song, and those
"ooh-wee, ride my high, tomorrow's the day my bride's gonna come"
harmonies are a downright epitome of tenderness itself. Basically, they took a
Dylan song that began life as an absurdist ode to nihilism and turned it into
an optimistic love anthem, while still retaining some of that absurdism. And
then, in a sudden fit of symmetry, they close out the album with a bitter
reversal of these feelings — having started out with "get your mind on
wintertime, you ain't going nowhere", they end the record on "the
sooner you come up with it, the sooner you can leave" (ʽNothing Was
Deliveredʼ) and a sort of disillusioned atmosphere (which, incidentally,
is also how I feel about this
record).
The problem is, they know how to reinvent
Dylan, but they never had a good idea about how to reinvent Woody Guthrie,
Merle Haggard, or Cindy Walker — they just cover
them, retaining the original spirits of these songs. The whole point of Sweetheart Of The Rodeo is to shock the audiences along the lines
of "see, we're rockers, but we're doing country, how unusual is that?": this attitude was even
incorporated into the promotional campaign, as you can see from the original
radio promotion bit, hidden at the end of the last bonus track on the CD
reissue — as bits and pieces of songs flow out of the speaker, a girl and a guy
argue with each other: "It is
the Byrds! — That's not the Byrds... — Okay, listen to this one! See, it is the Byrds! They're playing Dylan! —
It can't be the Byrds! Play another one... — It's the Byrds all right! — Nah,
that ain't the Byrds..." I regret to say that sometimes it seems to me
this radio bit carries more fun with it than the majority of the record itself.
Anyway, these are mostly decent tunes (though
lyrically, ʽThe Christian Lifeʼ is atrocious, and McGuinn must have
lost plenty of credibility with his friends for that one), and only people with
a very strong anti-Nashville bias could hate
Sweetheart Of The Rodeo. But shuffle
these tunes around a bunch of top (or even middle) quality country albums, and
if there's some way in which they will notably stand out, let me know. As far
as I'm concerned, Sweetheart is an
ideological gesture first, and a
collection of musical pieces second —
which doesn't do much for a record in the long run. Interesting and curious,
yes, not without its few moments of Dylanesque glory, yes, but essentially the
band just shot itself in the foot with this one, and ended up hobbling for the
next three years of its existence.
DR. BYRDS & MR. HYDE (1969)
1) This Wheel's On Fire; 2)
Old Blue; 3) Your Gentle Way Of Loving Me; 4) Child Of The Universe; 5)
Nashville West; 6) Drug Store Truck Drivin' Man; 7) King Apathy III; 8) Candy;
9) Bad Night At The Whiskey; 10) Medley: My Back Pages / B. J. Blues / Baby
What You Want Me To Do.
Finally, we move on to the very last chapter of
the transformational history of The Byrds. With Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons
departing to form The Flying Burrito Brothers, the only surviving member is
Roger McGuinn, and his new team includes Gene Parsons (no relation to Gram) on
drums, John Yorke on bass, and Clarence White on guitar (Clarence had
previously sat in with the band on some of the 1968 sessions, and had already
joined the band as a replacement for Gram Parsons in the brief interim when
Hillman still remained an active member). But even though the new musicians are
all quite decent, it took some time before the whole thing clicked, and Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde shows a
certain lack of direction.
Actually, my biggest problem with this record
is that there are way too many McGuinn originals, and most of them — nay, all of them — are deeply problematic.
ʽChild Of The Universeʼ? Lots of lyrical pretentiousness, a touch of
grand pathos provided by the booming percussion fills and Spanish guitar lead
fills, but the melodic drone is just too monotonous and the transitions between
verse and chorus too un-dynamic to make you go wow — and let's face it, if a
song called ʽChild Of The Universeʼ does not make you go wow, too bad
for the song, not the universe.
ʽKing Apathy IIIʼ is an even stranger
and clumsier experiment that sews together a fast blues-rock verse with a slow
country-western bridge — the song has a very clear lyrical message, in which McGuinn
renounces the "middle class suburban children" who "blindly
follow recent pipers" and states that "I'm leavin' for the country,
to try and rest my head", and it's his choice and all, but illustrating it
with a poorly joined-at-the-hip mix of generic bluesy psychedelia with generic
country waltz is at best boring symbolism, and at worst an embarrassment in
both genres (let alone all the condescending remarks about "liberal
reactionaries" who are busy "slowing down their B. B. King" —
not quite on the level of Lennon's "fuckin' peasants" yet, but slowly
getting there, although at least Lennon could sound real passionate about the
issue).
Hilariously, McGuinn manages to offend both the progressive liberals and the hillbilly conservatives on the
album: ʽKing Apathy IIIʼ is the immediate follow-up to ʽDrug
Store Truck Drivin' Manʼ, a remainder of the McGuinn/Parsons collaboration
that rhymed the song title with "the head of the Ku Klux Klan", was
inspired by a clash with the obnoxious Nashville DJ Ralph Emery, and must have
probably been a sweet, sweet joy to perform during the band's tour of the Bible
Belt (just joking — actually, they preferred California, but whether they dared
perform ʽKing Apathy IIIʼ there, I have no idea; then again, most of
the hippies would probably be way too stoned to notice the words). Not that
it's a particularly good song, either, but at least it sort of evens the odds
for representatives of both parties. See, Roger McGuinn doesn't really like
anyone, so what's the big surprise about the album selling more poorly than
ever before?
In the light of these and other, not much
better, failures at decent songwriting, the best thing about Dr. Byrds are its covers — starting
with the hard rock of ʽThis Wheel's On Fireʼ, for which Clarence
recorded a heavily distorted, brutally angry guitar part that suits the song's
lightly apocalyptic mood very well (the CD reissue adds an alternate take with
a much lighter guitar arrangement if you insist that hard rock and Byrds
should never mix, but I don't think we need be so strictly prejudiced).
Contextually, that track is pretty deceptive — the sequencing contrast between
its angry roar and the following sentimental country tweeting of ʽOld
Blueʼ may be the single sharpest contrast in Byrds history — but I suppose
it made some sense, to try and demolish the perception that from now on, the
Byrds are a «country band», period. However, most of the other covers are country, with songs like ʽYour
Gentle Way Of Loving Meʼ and the speedy instrumental ʽNashville
Westʼ totally belonging on Sweetheart
and, in fact, being better than most of the stuff on Sweetheart (ʽNashville Westʼ has some pretty pleasing
guitar interplay).
Still, by the time they get to the odd closing
medley that puts Bob Dylan and Jimmy Reed on the same stage (how do ʽMy Back Pagesʼ, a song
that the real Byrds already had recorded, belong together with ʽBaby What
Do You Want Me To Doʼ? Nohow is the answer), by the time they do this, the
overall impression of Dr. Byrds is
that of a total mess. There are enough talented people here to guarantee that
it works in bits and pieces, but they don't know where to go. They know where
they don't want to go, all right —
they don't want to engage in drugged-out hippie psychedelia, and they don't
want to fit in with the Nashville crowds, but they are unable to work out a
true new musical genre that would take the best from both worlds, filter out
the excesses, and still manage to sound intelligent and emotionally exciting.
And although they'd have some time to sort it out later on, this is a problem
that would haunt the McGuinn/White era of The Byrds for their entire three-year
period of trying to fit in in a thoroughly changed musical world post-Woodstock
and post-Abbey Road.
BALLAD OF EASY RIDER (1969)
1) Ballad Of Easy Rider; 2)
Fido; 3) Oil In My Lamp; 4) Tulsa County; 5) Jack Tarr The Sailor; 6) Jesus Is
Just Alright; 7) It's All Over Now, Baby Blue; 8) There Must Be Someone; 9)
Gunga Din; 10) Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos); 11) Armstrong, Aldrin And
Collins.
Almost everybody will tell you that Ballad Of Easy Rider was a huge advance
over Dr. Byrds, even if,
paradoxically, it is far less ambitious and creative. For starters, the
heavy-rocking component has pretty much been chucked out the window — a few
distorted guitar solos crop up every now and then, but nothing even remotely
approaching the thunder of ʻWheel's On Fireʼ; here, the Byrds settle
for a far calmer, softer roots-rock sound, somewhat of an amalgamation of the
early folk-based sound and the Sweetheart
country-soaked approach.
Second and more important, there is only one
song here written by Roger McGuinn; everything else is either contributed by
other members of the band or comes completely from outside. This is not meant
to sound as an insult to his general songwriting skills, but the material
written for Dr. Byrds, although
experimental, was clearly weak, and getting rid of that whole «space cowboy»
baggage was probably necessary to avoid further embarrassment. Actually, there is one track here that is more space-cowboyish
than ever — ʻArmstrong, Aldrin And Collinsʼ merges NASA voiceovers
with a little acoustic ditty about the latest American heroes, written by
country guy Zeke Manners; but it is just a short amusing epilogue that does not
aspire or amount to much.
At the heart
of the record are tracks like the title one or ʻGunga Dinʼ —
haste-less, regal, slightly transcendental in their unnerving acoustic bliss,
well comparable to the Byrds' classic legacy and, for that matter, completely
absent on Dr. Byrds. Dylan, who
originally began work on the title track as the theme of Easy Rider, pretty much stopped after writing "the river
flows, it flows to the sea" and telling the contractors to pass it on to
McGuinn — and sure enough, McGuinn put it to a melody that would probably evoke
visions of a river flowing to the sea without a single word. The idea to
orchestrate the song belonged to producer Terry Melcher, who seeked to emulate
the effect of Nilsson's ʻEverybody's Talkingʼ, and they do emulate that effect, except that
ʻBallad Of Easy Riderʼ has no tragic overtones and is essentially a
static, beautiful soundscape — perfect as the movie theme (it is, after all,
about /the impossibility of/ finding paradise on Earth), perfect as a Byrds
song, one of McGuinn's tenderest and sincerest vocal performances.
Interestingly, new drummer Gene Parsons almost
has Roger beat, or at least, matched, by contributing ʻGunga Dinʼ, a
song about personal tribulations and discriminations set to an equally
becalming arpeggiated melody — no orchestration this time, and the
multi-tracked vocals are not as moving as Roger's solo parts, but chorus
harmonies are cute (it's quite endearing how in the final "I know that
it's a sin... Gunga Din" the title is delivered almost with a «sigh» of
some sorts, in the «life is tough, but we'll get over it» kind of sense). His
is clearly the best contribution of all the new band members — John Yorke's
ʻFidoʼ is amusing, but first, it is another song about a dog (as if ʻOld Blueʼ was not
enough; and they would return yet again with ʻBuglerʼ), which is
discriminating towards cat lovers, and second, its melody is pretty much a
complete rip-off of Manfred Mann's cover of Dylan's ʻQuinn The
Eskimoʼ, differing only by the inclusion of a rather gratuitous drum solo.
Probably they should have just gone ahead and covered the song instead. With
some certified Inuit drumming for an interlude.
The covers are largely selected from the
traditional folk/blues/country pool, although Bob gets his share — finally,
they come out with an official release of ʻIt's All Over Now Baby
Blueʼ, recorded at an ultra-slow tempo with triple repetition of
"it's all over now", which may not be such a good idea (does the
message really need rubbing in?). There's an alternately funny and disturbing
reinvention of ʻJesus Is Just Alrightʼ as a semi-progressive rocker
with «alarmed» vocal harmonies, sounding as if the band were performing an
exorcism or a general ward-off-evil ritual with the song; an empathetic cover
of Woody Guthrie's ʻDeporteeʼ, which would have made a good inclusion
on Sweetheart at the expense of,
say, ʻChristian Lifeʼ; and some gorgeous vocal harmonies on the old
anthem ʻOil In My Lampʼ. None of these songs are masterpieces of the
human spirit, but they're nice, listenable, and reliable, and the new Byrds do
them full justice.
In all, the goodness of Ballad lies precisely in its new-found humility — it's short,
quiet, friendly, and almost completely free of ambitions and presumptions. It's
as if the Byrds are no longer interested at all in the big race, but just want
to share with us their love for the weather-worn American spirit, and not even
in a «defying» way, as it was with Sweetheart,
without locking themselves into one single narrow formula to which some of us
furthermore might be alergic. If Dr.
Byrds showed the world that the band could no longer be «relevant» even if
it tried, Easy Rider shows that they
no longer care about being relevant —
and, in the process, are rewarded by the good fairy with a record that, almost
haf a century later, sounds timeless, rather than time-bound. Naturally, this
deserves a thumbs
up.
UNTITLED (1970)
1) Lover Of The Bayou; 2)
Positively 4th Street; 3) Nashville West; 4) So You Want To Be A Rock'n'Roll
Star; 5) Mr. Tambourine Man; 6) Mr. Spaceman; 7) Eight Miles High; 8) Chestnut
Mare; 9) Truck Stop Girl; 10) All The Things; 11) Yesterday's Train; 12) Hungry
Planet; 13) Just A Season; 14) Take A Whiff On Me; 15) You All Look Alike; 16)
Well Come Back Home.
This was the most ambitious project of the
«McGuinn Experience» — a double album, half live, half studio, presenting a
seemingly solidified line-up (now including the far older and more experienced
Skip Battin on bass as a replacement for John Yorke) that would bravely take
The Byrds into the Seventies as successful survivors, alongside The Stones, The
Who, The Kinks... well, no dice, really.
Even though the album was very warmly received
by critics, even though its sales were strong, and even though it still enjoys
a rather stable general reputation, I would call it a serious step down from
the level of Ballad Of Easy Rider,
and the true beginning of the end. It is not particularly embarrassing — it is
confused, feeble, and it does not seriously stand the gruesome levels of
competition that were around circa 1970. (The confusion even extends to the
album title — which came about by accident, as Columbia pressed copies before
they had time to think of a proper name, using a first-draft album cover that
still had (Untitled) indicated on it
in the spot where the real album title should have been).
For starters, people like to praise the live
half, but I do not really get it. The first side, mixing a few classics with
recent material, sounds way too sloppy and rough for my ears — in particular, I
find Clarence White's style of weaving in his lead guitar phrasing downright
irritating: ʻMr. Tambourine Manʼ is almost completely destroyed by
that stupid lead guitar playing some sort of jiggly country dance around
McGuinn's vocals on the verse melody, and that's not even mentioning that the
vocal harmonies on the chorus sound like a cat choir next to the gorgeousness
of the original. Neither are the guitars well in sync on ʻMr.
Spacemanʼ or on ʻPositively 4th Streetʼ, and since the Byrds are
not truly a «rock and roll» band, it is hard to bring up the argument that they
are compensating for the sloppiness with kick-ass energy and overdrive (not
because they should not do that, but
because they do not do that). Only
ʻNashville Westʼ stands competition with the studio version, but it
is not clear why they must go ahead and try to make everything else sound like
ʻNashville Westʼ — except for the darker and harsher ʻLover Of
The Bayouʼ, where they go for a voodooistic swamp-rock attitude (a little
hilarious how Roger makes his voice sound so deep and hoarse), not something
they'd ever tried before and therefore feeling a little artificial, though
definitely not bad.
The key point here is whether or not you will
like their 16-minute improvisation around ʻEight Miles Highʼ. There's
some nifty musicianship displayed, for sure, particularly a cool rhythmic bass
solo from Battin, but overall I would say that these guys are no Cream and no
Grateful Dead when it comes to, let's say, «visionary jamming». The guitarists
seem to stick to more or less the same direction, never trying to take things
into a different key and permanently falling back on the same phrasing, so
unless you manage to reach the desired state of trance very quickly, after a brief while it just gets ultra-boring. And
although I have heard praise for the interplay between White and McGuinn, most
of the time I don't even hear the
interplay — McGuinn's guitar is quietly buried well below White's, who gets
most of the spotlight. And he's good, but he ain't no Clapton. And with the
total amount of bands who were doing 16-minute jams in 1970, one would think
that the Byrds, of all these people, would have done well to constitute an
exception, no?
In short, the live part, to me, is a serious
disappointment (although this does not mean that the Byrds could not put up a
good show — the Fillmore tapes from 1969 show the band in a much more
self-assured shape). Unfortunately, the new studio material is not
significantly better. Much of it (including also ʻLover Of The Bayouʼ
on the live half) comes from the abandoned Gene
Trip, a country-rock musical reimagining the story of Peer Gynt (!),
co-written by McGuinn with the lyricist Jacques Levy (who would later work with
Dylan on Desire); this means that
Roger makes a grand return here as songwriter, which is not a very good omen —
and indeed, the songs are rarely among his best.
ʻChestnut Mareʼ has a pretty chorus
melody, but suffers from rather boring spoken verses and also from being
overlong — basically just five minutes of story-telling, occasionally
interrupted by a couple of lovely vocal lines. ʻAll The Thingsʼ
sounds pretty until you realize that it is really McGuinn's attempt to write
his own ʻMy Back Pagesʼ — note the contrast between the main bulk of
the verse and the conclusive refrain with vocal harmonies — and in contrast
with that song, ʻAll The Thingsʼ is just pretty, not visionary.
ʻJust A Seasonʼ is probably the catchiest and most intimately
endearing piece of the lot, but it has to grow on you a bit. None of the other
songs, except for the cute novelty bit of Leadbelly's ʻTake A Whiff On
Meʼ, done with humor and passion (and it's always nice to hear a direct
reference to cocaine, which, funny enough, must have probably sounded more
controversial in 1970 than it was at the time when Leadbelly sang it), anyway,
none of the other songs ever made much of an impression on me. Just fluffy,
inoffensive, forgettable country-rock.
It should be noted that ʻHungry
Planetʼ and ʻYou All Look Alikeʼ mark the first appearance of
the great rock'n'roll swindler, Kim Fowley, on a Byrds album — although for the
moment, they are not particularly embarrassing, and Skip Battin, who was the
one to bring Fowley along, probably was responsible for the music anyway. The
lyrics to ʻHungry Planetʼ are banal, but not stupid — it is far more
problematic that the song tries to kick up some sort of syncopated funky
groove, but the music just limps along (a few tasty acoustic licks on the solo,
but nothing to hold your interest for more than three seconds in a row). Much
worse: what's up with the drunk quasi-yodelling during the extended coda to
ʻWell Come Back Homeʼ? Now that's
just plain stupid. If they wanted a ʻHey Judeʼ vibe, they should have
brought in Paul McCartney instead.
Consequently, I seem to belong to the minority
that does not think much at all of this record, be it live or studio. Of
course, formally, it is the band's
bulkiest project — so bulky, in fact, that in the program of remastering and
reissuing the original albums Untitled
became the only one to get a 2-CD release, «renamed» to (Untitled)/(Unreleased). Predictably, the second disc is not better
than the first one — some alternate takes, some unmemorable outtakes, a studio
version of ʻLover Of The Bayouʼ that hardly bests the live variant,
and more live performances that are just as sloppy as the old ones: okay at
best, inferior at worst (ʻThis Wheel's On Fireʼ meanders aimlessly
without recapturing the heavy apocalyptic vibe of the Dr. Byrds version). On the whole, both the original and the new
version fall in the «not too good, not too bad» category, and clearly demonstrate
that The Byrds had turned into thoroughly second-rate players.
BYRDMANIAX (1971)
1) Glory, Glory; 2) Pale Blue;
3) I Trust; 4) Tunnel Of Love; 5) Citizen Kane; 6) I Wanna Grow Up To Be A
Politician; 7) Absolute Happiness; 8) Green Apple Quick Step; 9) My Destiny;
10) Kathleen's Song; 11) Jamaica Say You Will.
Approximate critical consensus says thus: The
Roger McGuinn Experience fell flat on its face with Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde, miraculously recovered with Ballad Of Easy Rider, miraculously
climaxed with Untitled, then just as
immediately fell flat on its face again
with Byrdmaniax, in a series of
rise-and-tumbles that are all too strange to understand considering that (a)
the band, at this point, never went through major
lineup changes, (b) pursued more or less the same stylistic course, and (c)
hardly aspired to getting back in the major league by adapting to the times (e.
g. shifting over to hard rock or glam).
I cannot really subscribe to this point of
view. Yes, some of the 1969-72 records may certainly be a little worse or a
little better than others, depending on how many unfunny novelty numbers are
included or on whether McGuinn wants to inject some symbolism in his song
structures or not. But on the whole, this period is even — no major marvels or disasters, and I find myself shrugging
my shoulders both at the loving appraisal of Untitled and at the
exaggerated disgust for Byrdmaniax,
the ill-fated follow-up.
Supposedly, the Achilles' heel of Byrdmaniax is an increased degree of
Kim Fowley's involvement in the life of the Byrds — this time, the man has a
whoppin' three co-credits with Skip
Battin, and two of them sound as far away from what we expect of the Byrds as
anything: ʻTunnel Of Loveʼ is a useless five-minute recreation of
Fats Domino's ʻBlueberry Hillʼ groove accompanying a rather macabre,
Alice Cooper-worthy, lyrical fantasy; and ʻCitizen Kaneʼ is two minutes
of vaudeville nostalgizing about pre-war Hollywood values (actually, despite
being so very un-Byrdsey, it's actually somewhat funny, and quite harmless
with its 2:37 running time). ʻAbsolute Happinessʼ takes a more
serious tone, but hardly registers as an actual song — it is so quiet and so
lacking in melodic presence that you can never properly remember what is so
absolute about it.
However, Fowley's presence alone is hardly
sufficient to make the album a complete disaster. For one thing, it's got a
really strong opener — the energetic cover of the ʻGlory, Gloryʼ
spiritual, with what might be one of McGuinn's strongest ever vocal performances for the band; those high notes on "I
wanna thank you Jesus" and on the hallelujahs, combined with Roger's
timbre, sting all the right emotional centers, and although the arrangement has
been criticized for the fast-moving piano part, I think it totally belongs in
the song. For another thing, ʻPale Blueʼ and ʻKathleen's
Songʼ, even if they are not masterpieces, are at least as good as any
ballad on Untitled, and I also do
not think that Melcher's orchestration spoils either of them as long as it does
not drown out the acoustic guitar, harmonica, and vocals (and it does not).
There's also ʻI Trustʼ, Roger's
experiment in crossing R&B/gospel aesthetics with country-rock arrangements
that is neither too inspiring nor too disappointing, but again, his singing on
the track is to be heavily commended; decent covers of Helen Carter's ʻMy
Destinyʼ (not that worse than anything on Sweetheart) and Jackson Browne's ʻJamaica Say You Willʼ;
and Roger's own take on the vaudeville genre, ʻI Wanna Grow Up To Be A
Politicianʼ, which is even more trivial than the Fowley song but is also
even shorter. Finally, ʻGreen Apple Quick Stepʼ is basically
ʻNashville West Vol. 2ʼ, arguably done in a more down-to-earth,
rustic style than its predecessor, but there's nothing wrong with that.
Also, now that the album has been properly
reissued on CD, you can also take the liberty of replacing any of its worst
numbers with a nice cover of ʻJust Like A Womanʼ that was recorded
during the sessions but not used for some reason. Okay, that would be a cheap
cop-out, but the general assessment stands: Byrdmaniax is a problematic record that suffers from some erroneous
decisions (including, most definitely, the decision to place a set of the band
members' death masks on the front cover! what were they thinking?), but it is by no means an artistic embarrassment
compared to its immediate predecessors. Same mix of nice, boring, and throwaway
pieces as usual — most likely, it is primarily its total lack of ambitiousness
that earned it its negative points in 1971, when not being ambitious counted as
being worse than nothing.
FARTHER ALONG (1971)
1) Tiffany Queen; 2) Get Down
Your Line; 3) Farther Along; 4) B. B. Class Road; 5) Bugler; 6) America's Great
National Pastime; 7) Antique Sandy; 8) Precious Kate; 9) So Fine; 10) Lazy
Waters; 11) Bristol Steam Convention Blues.
The last album by «The Roger McGuinn
Experience» tends to be the band's most despised (contending for this position
with Byrdmaniax). It signified the
band's complete fall-off from the charts, the shame being exacerbated and
perpetuated by the idiotic choice of releasing ʻAmerica's Great National
Pastimeʼ as the lead (and only) single — a slightly funny, but also sort
of obnoxious vaudeville number from the Battin/Fowley team, not to mention
that its somewhat unjustly derogatory lyrics may have detracted listeners as
well (I mean, the song satirizes a certain segment
of American population, but why American? "One of America's great national
pastimes is cutting the grass / Grabbing some ass / Living too fast" —
could be said about quite a few other countries as well, if it needed to be said in the first place).
Anyway, the truth is, Farther Along is certainly not worse than anything else produced by
the White-era Byrds, and although it lacks serious ambition, I actually prefer
this laid-back, simple atmosphere to the unsuccessful attempt at epicness that
was Untitled. There, the band overreached,
going on a sprawl without having the proper means, vision, or talent pool to
back it up. Here, the band is just having itself a good time. There is no
«flash» whatsoever, and none of these songs probably had what it takes to catch
the public eye in 1972 (although that still does not mean that prioritizing ʻNational
Pastimeʼ was a wise choice by any means); but in retrospect, Farther Along just feels like a bunch
of nice musicians... well, engaging in one of America's great national
pastimes, I guess.
Ironically, of all the late-era Byrds catalog this album probably comes closest to
fulfilling McGuinn's original dream for Sweetheart
— the «musical encyclopaedia of Americana» — featuring excursions in straight
country, blues-rock, folk, vaudeville, Fifties' rock, and R&B, all of it
taken in the most straightforward manner. And as they so openly steal, beg, or
borrow, it happens to mostly work. ʻTiffany Queenʼ is introduced with
the classic ʻSatisfactionʼ / ʻMr. Soulʼ / ʻJumpin'
Jack Flashʼ riff (all roads lead to Rome), but then almost immediately
becomes Chuck Berry's ʻLet It Rockʼ, done McGuinn-style, and on some
level it is hilarious to hear McGuinn do the Chuck Berry schtick (more
hilarious, anyway, than listening to Gene Parsons sounding all rough-and-rocky
on the pub boogie number ʻB. B. Class Roadʼ). The Johnny Otis cover
ʻSo Fineʼ technically destroys
the Fiestas' original from 1959 — as good as that one was, here the boys do a
much stronger job smoothing out and sharpening the vocal harmonies (even with
these new-look Byrds, nobody beats them at harmonies). And Larry Murray's
ʻBuglerʼ, yet another dog-oriented song, is done very close to the
original, but improves on it in many small, subtle details (though, of course,
country lovers might want to prefer the «rougher», «rawer» original — fact is,
I think Roger McGuinn loves dogs as much as Larry Murray does, if not more, so
it is not a set fact here that the original songwriter necessarily must sing this with more feeling).
There's not a lot of original material here at
all (another reason, supposedly, for the album feeling like such a letdown in
1972), but of the two McGuinn originals, ʻAntique Sandyʼ is very nice: basically just one folksy
melodic line over and over, but a warm, tender, and catchy one, quite tolerable
for two minutes and sounding particularly beautiful when taken over from the
singer by a cozily sustained piano. (ʻTiffany Queenʼ is the other
original, although I'm not sure exactly how original it is in the first place;
a joint lawsuit from Chuck and Keith would not be out of order). Most
importantly, there's very little about the record that I could call openly bad — ʻB. B. Class Roadʼ does
sound a little phoney (not even the beards could make the Byrds get that
rough-and-tough feel), and ʻNational Pastimeʼ is good for not more
than one listen, but everything else ranges from pleasant to... very pleasant.
Cutting a long story short, Farther Along is slight, but fun,
which, at that time, worked better for the Byrds than serious, but boring. It
was probably inevitable that the White/Battin/Parsons line-up would crackle and
dissipate after they became a commercial non-entity with no particular place to
go (actually, the real reason was the perspective of a possible reunion for the
original Byrds), but I'm pretty sure that there is still some demand for
unambitious, unpretentious, run-of-the-mill nice quality music from the early
Seventies, and this record is a good candidate, so a friendly, not too excited thumbs up
here.
BYRDS (1973)
1) Full Circle; 2) Sweet Mary;
3) Changing Heart; 4) For Free; 5) Born To Rock & Roll; 6) Things Will Be
Better; 7) Cowgirl In The Sand; 8) Long Live The King; 9) Borrowing Time; 10)
Laughing; 11) (See The Sky) About To Rain.
If I am not too mistaken, this was the first
ever «reunion / comeback experience» in the history of rock music, at least as
far as major league players are concerned. The event happened largely by
accident — by late 1972, it so chanced that all five original Byrds found
themselves at the crossroads, with their solo careers (including McGuinn's
disaster with Farther Along) either
commercially flopping or reaching a certain turning point (for instance,
Crosby, Stills & Nash were on a lengthy hiatus). Had they been the Beatles,
their egos would probably stay too huge and mutually repellent to succumb to
attraction. But they weren't the Beatles, and five years after mutual disagreements
tore them apart, the wounds healed well enough to initiate reunion talks. Throw
in a nice financial proposition from Asylum's David Geffen, and the cat was in
the bag.
One thing that was not in the bag, though, was nostalgia. The reunited band did have
the exact same lineup as the Great Original Byrds of Mr. Tambourine Man — McGuinn, Crosby, Hillman, Clark, and Clarke —
but they immediately came to an agreement that they would do anything but consciously try to recreate the
«harmonies-and-jangle» atmosphere of their early albums, partly because trying
to cohesively work as a single unit was the thing that ended up driving them
apart in the first place, and partly because they were, after all, still too
young and too full of ideas to bow down to pure nostalgia. Consequently, the
reunion album, as everybody seems to agree, is not really a true «Byrds» album
— it is a bunch of solo tracks, collected from four out of five members: more
precisely, McGuinn contributes 2 songs, Crosby contributes 3 (one of them a
Joni Mitchell cover), Hillman and Clark also 2 each, and then there are two
Neil Young covers, suggested by Clark and defended by Crosby (saying that the
band was now covering Neil Young instead of Dylan because Neil was for the
Seventies what Bob was for the Sixties).
It is actually quite curious how the original
Byrds were pigeonholed — reviews at the time were scathing, with people
complaining about the disunity and the lack of jingle-jangle much the same way
that in 1969, somebody could easily
complain about the lack of "yeah yeah yeah"s on Abbey Road. True, the record on the whole sounds more like a James
Taylor album with group harmonies, but even James Taylor in his prime had some
good songs, and if there is no unity, at least there is diversity. Let's face
it, when you have three songs on your record that totally sound like solo David
Crosby, it's still better than when your record consists entirely of songs by solo David Crosby. On the other hand, the
downside is also that in a situation like this, band members may be tempted to
offer their weakest material for the collective pot, consciously or
subconsciously saving up the best stuff for true solo albums.
The bottomline is that Byrds sounds quite nice. Only Crosby's ʻLaughingʼ, one of
those lengthy stoned rants of his set to a completely unmemorable melody,
sticks out unpleasantly with its 5:40 running length (and, adding insult to
injury, it was already released earlier on his first solo album, so there's
hardly any other reason than pure laziness behind its inclusion). Everything
else ranges from cute to sympathetic — even the Neil Young covers, with
ʻCowgirl In The Sandʼ remade as a bouncy, almost cheerful country-pop
number and ʻSee The Sky About To Rainʼ featuring a soulful Clark
lead vocal and even, in the form of a small bonus for the fans, some genuine
12-string jangle in the coda section.
Clark's two originals, ʻFull Circleʼ
(also brought from his solo career) and ʻChanging Heartʼ, arguably
have the best vocal melodies on the album — nothing too breathtaking, but the
«alarmed» intonations on the chorus of the latter agree very well with the
song's message (warning about the fickleness of fame and all that), and
although the semantics of the line "funny how the circle is a wheel"
is a bit tautological, its delivery is inspiring, and so well punctuated by the
added mandolin lead line. As for Hillman, he contributes the album's poppiest
tune, ʻThings Will Be Betterʼ, with colorful power pop riffs and
lively choruses that would not be out of place on a contemporary Big Star or
Badfinger album.
This leaves McGuinn, and, surprisingly, he is
probably the second weakest link on the album after Crosby — throwing in his
filler bit ʻBorn To Rock & Rollʼ (which has very little to do
with actual rock'n'roll, not to mention stealing the verse melody from Dylan's
ʻI Shall Be Releasedʼ) and the Jacques Levy collaboration ʻSweet
Maryʼ, where I guess Levy wrote the lyrics and Roger borrowed the melody
from some traditional sea shanty. Not that it doesn't sound nice — it's always
nice to hear McGuinn sing traditional ballads, and the mandolin touch is again
a gallant addition — but it does seem like, out of all the contributors,
McGuinn contributed the smallest efforts to this reunion. It's basically like,
"okay, guys, I've held up the Byrds name for four goddamn years on my
own, now I'm just going to sit back and relax while you do your job". But I guess he may have thought he earned
it, after all. Besides, less work — fewer reasons for arguing over artistic
decisions with his former pals.
In retrospect, I think that the record does
deserve a mild thumbs
up, because of all the little pretty things and the essential lack
of ugly bad things. Formally, it is
sort of a belated Abbey Road for
these guys — a «let's-come-together-and-be-friendly-for-the-last-time» type of
album, except, of course, that there is not even a small attempt at the
grandness of vision that characterizes Abbey
Road; in the end, The Byrds never truly had
a «grand vision», and they weren't about to try and develop one at the end of
the road. It is not likely that anybody would want to revisit Byrds on a regular basis — however, it
is still very comforting and satisfying to have it, witnessing the band coming
«full circle» indeed. From Mr.
Tambourine Man all the way to Byrds
— such a long, strange, bizarre trip, beginning in one place and ending up in
several completely different ones. Very instructive, at the very least.
ADDENDA:
IN THE BEGINNING (1964/1988)
1) Tomorrow Is A Long Ways
Away; 2) Boston; 3) The Only Girl I Adore; 4) You Won't Have To Cry; 5) I Knew
I'd Want You; 6) The Airport Song; 7) The Reason Why; 8) Mr. Tambourine Man; 9)
Please Let Me Love You; 10) You Movin'; 11) It Won't Be Wrong; 12) You Showed
Me; 13) She Has A Way; 14) For Me Again; 15) It's No Use; 16) Here Without You;
17) Tomorrow Is A Long Ways Away (acoustic).
«The Great Lost Byrds Album». Well, maybe not that great, and not that lost, either, considering that the majority of these tracks
(albeit in slightly alternate takes) were originally released in 1969 as Preflyte, an album that actually sold
better than the contemporary Dr. Byrds
& Mr Hyde, what with the public ready to show McGuinn what they thought of his Clark-less,
Crosby-less, Hillman-less «Byrds». Still, in its expanded form, released on CD
as In The Beginning in the late
Eighties, this is a pretty nice
little record, well worth owning to logically round out the catalog. In fact,
nothing seriously prevents us from counting it as the first, «quintessentially
early» Byrds album, their equivalent of a Please
Please Me or a Bob Dylan, which
simply happened to be left on the shelf at the time.
Consisting of early recordings that the band
made as The Beefeaters, The Jet Set, and, eventually, The Byrds, In The Beginning's first and biggest
surprise is in how many of these early tunes (most of them, in fact) are
originals: the Byrds may have been one of the few bands in history that started
out cutting nothing but their own songs, only to end up doing Dylan and Pete
Seeger because somebody thought they were not worthy. But, actually, they were
— these originals are fun, harmless, pleasant, often catchy, and occasionally
innovative folk-pop.
From that very beginning, Gene Clark was the
primary songwriter: seven songs are credited solely to him, whereas most of
McGuinn's songs are co-credited (to McGuinn/Clark or McGuinn/ Crosby). His
strong debt to The Beatles and particularly The Searchers is clear, but he does
his best to come up with original melodies, and sometimes makes bold decisions:
ʻBostonʼ is the most striking of these, combining moody folk
harmonies with the bass line of ʻMemphis Tennesseeʼ — pretty much an
epitome of what «folk-rock» should be all about — but it's hardly the best song
of the lot, just an example of what strange direction the mind of this
promising young fellow could choose in the age of ʻHouse Of The Rising
Sunʼ.
On the whole, the Byrds were working very
strictly in the «pop» idiom, despite their fascination with Greenwich Village:
all the songs are short, all the songs follow the verse/chorus/bridge
structure, all the songs strive to have hooks, and the lyrical and emotional
sides do not show much depth, let alone «vision». Little love songs, ranging
from the way-too-cute (ʻThe Only Girl I Adoreʼ — hey, David Crosby
co-wrote it! Hey, how come he never sings it live? It's so much better than
ʻAlmost Cut My Hairʼ!) to the gallant serenade (ʻTomorrow Is A Long
Ways Awayʼ, whose medievalistic romanticism borders on the laughable, but
the harmonies are too gorgeous and elegant to laugh away). There's an early
version of ʻMr. Tambourine Manʼ, all right, but no 12-string jangle
yet — no chance for this particular version to change the face of the musical
business. But the seeds are all there.
Some of the tunes would later end up on the
band's first two albums or the accompanying B-sides, but really, with the
exception of one or two really trite songs (ʻThe Only Girl I Adoreʼ
even has the gall to end up with a «seductive» Beatlesque ʻoh-ohʼ
flourish — ridiculous!), most of them could be tightened up to the status of
semi-classics. ʻThe Airport Songʼ is actually giving us an almost
mature David Crosby (at least, his starry-eyed singing style is already in
place); ʻThe Reason Whyʼ and ʻFor Me Againʼ are as
introspective as Clark would ever get, and so on. Perhaps the thing that we
subconsciously miss the most on these songs is the Wrecking Crew — apparently,
the band members are playing all their instruments here, and so the recordings
lack the necessary polish. On the other hand, at least this shows that they could play their instruments as early as
1964 — not to mention write their own songs, which was not a typical ability
for beginning pop bands circa 1964. And at most, this is a record that one can
actually keep for enjoyment, rather than pure historical interest, so "it
won't be wrong" to issue it a proper thumbs up and state that it is a definite must-own
for any half-serious Byrds lover.
LIVE AT THE FILLMORE (1969/2000)
1) Nashville West; 2) You're
Still On My Mind; 3) Pretty Boy Floyd; 4) Drug Store Truck Drivin' Man; 5)
Medley: Turn! Turn! Turn! / Mr. Tambourine Man / Eight Miles High; 6) Close Up
The Honky Tonks; 7) Buckaroo; 8) The Christian Life; 9) Time Between; 10) King
Apathy III; 11) Bad Night At The Whiskey; 12) This Wheel's On Fire; 13) Sing Me
Back Home; 14) So You Want To Be A Rock'n'Roll Star; 15) He Was A Friend Of
Mine; 16) Chimes Of Freedom.
In the case of The Byrds, the vault-emptying
ritual has largely focused on the Clarence White era, particularly when it
comes to live albums — the original Byrds were never appreciated much for their
live playing, not to mention that they fell apart just prior to the era of the
first quality recordings of live shows. However, the decision to open the
vaults with this particular recording, taped at two shows from the Fillmore
West on February 7-8, 1969, is still questionable. The new Byrds were just
getting their stuff together: Dr. Byrds
& Mr. Hyde had only been released one week before, and not only does
this mean that you are going to have to sit through quite a few mediocre songs
from that album, but it also means that everything else is happening in «test»
stage.
For instance, ʻEight Miles Highʼ,
although already a couple minutes longer than the original, has not yet been
expanded to the mammoth psychedelic heights of the Untitled era — instead, it is included here as part of a frickin' medley, into which they have compressed
three of their biggest hits. The trick is a well-known cop-out: "we have
no interest in playing these songs any more, but out of a sense of loyalty,
we're giving you a taste" — and, honestly, they'd do better to leave out
ʻTurn! Turn! Turn!ʼ and ʻMr. Tambourine Manʼ of this
altogether, because the harmonies on those songs just flat out suck.
Admittedly, the instrumental passages on ʻEight Miles Highʼ are
handled much better, with White already an accomplished sparring partner for
McGuinn.
Overall, the setlist predictably concentrates
on material from Dr. Byrds and from Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, with the
addition of a few extra country covers (Red Simpson's ʻClose Up The Honky
Tonksʼ, Merle Haggard's ʻSing Me Back Homeʼ, Buck Owens'
ʻBuckarooʼ) and everything else basically just played «for the old
fans». This is in stark contrast with the live material they'd soon record for Untitled, which included only one pure
country number and observed a better balance between new and «classic» songs,
so you have to be mentally prepared for the fact that these Fillmore Byrds are
shining knights of the Country Rock Order through and through.
Arguably the one thing that is most typical and
representative of the album is Clarence White's manner of playing country
melodies — with a device called the Stringbender that he invented with Gene
Parsons, enabling him to play a regular electric Telecaster similarly to a
pedal steel guitar. This does bring a whole new twist to the idea of «country
rock», and gives all these instrumentals like ʻNashville Westʼ and
ʻBuckarooʼ a unique face — otherwise, we'd probably just ask "so
why do we have to listen to the Byrds doing this stuff, when it would make so
much more sense to just bring in the regular Nashville guard?" However, I
would also insist that true pedal steel gives a much prettier sound than a
regular electric guitar made to sound like a pedal steel; there's just
something about this imitation that throws me off (actually, a lot of situations where instrument A
is forced to sound closer to instrument B throw me off, but maybe it's just
me).
Still, it is a fact that White's guitar playing
is pretty much the only argument why you'd ever feel tempted to give this
another spin — in no other respect do these performances even come close to
matching the originals in clarity or emotional impact. Whenever he takes a
seriously focused solo, even on so-so material like ʻBad Night At The
Whiskeyʼ, the playing is clearly inspired (unfortunately, he does that on
less than half of the tracks), and even if that country style of his may seem a
bit monotonous, it also provides unity for all content — old classics, new
originals, and cover material. Just forget about The Byrds as one of America's
(formerly) greatest vocal harmony bands, and you'll be fine for a while.
LIVE AT THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL (1971/2008)
1) Lover Of The Bayou; 2) You
Ain't Going Nowhere; 3) Truck Stop Girl; 4) My Back Pages; 5) Baby, What You
Want Me To Do; 6) Jamaica Say You Will; 7) Black Mountain Rag/Soldier's Joy; 8)
Mr. Tambourine Man; 9) Pretty Boy Floyd; 10) Take A Whiff; 11) Chestnut Mare;
12) Jesus Is Just Alright; 13) Eight Miles High; 14) So You Want To Be A
Rock'n'Roll Star; 15) Mr. Spaceman; 16) I Trust; 17) Nashville West; 18) Roll
Over Beethoven; 19) Amazing Grace.
Okay, this is no live masterpiece, either, but
third time around, they finally got it close
to right. This archival release, coming out of the vaults more than 35 years
after the original recording was made, has some obvious advantages over both Untitled and Fillmore, to emerge as arguably the single best live document of
the Clarence White era — if you still needed convincing that they were a fun
live band, and the Albert Hall show still does not convince you, there's
probably no hope left for the future.
First, it is much longer than both of these,
which is a good thing because it allows them to concentrate on pretty much
every side of their legacy — folk, country, psychedelia, rock, «Americana» in
general, whatever. It is well-structured, with a «breather» all-acoustic
section in the middle and a couple proper encores. It does not rely too heavily
on new material, with only a couple (good) songs from Byrdmaniax and only three (decent) songs from Untitled. And, most importantly, it reflects a three-year gestation
period, meaning that the band had gained quite a bit of muscle since the
somewhat insecure beginnings of the Fillmore days.
In particular, this 18-minute version of
ʻEight Miles Highʼ (more accurately, ʻImprovisational Variations
Around The Theme Of ʻEight Miles Highʼʼ, since the song itself
is played for about two minutes only) is much tighter and, I would say, comprehensible than the jam captured on Untitled. If the early McGuinn/White
interplay seemed to lack self-assurance and was more like "okay,
everybody's doing it, let's try this too and see where it gets us", by
1971, having done it many times over, they sound like they already know the
main directions and use the jam as a polygon for testing and expanding the
individual players' skills — in particular, the bit where the guitarists go
take a smoke and the Battin/Parsons rhythm section stays behind and experiments
with key and tempo changes is really quite exciting, as Battin seems to go
through every basic rhythm pattern in existence (jazz, blues, boogie, pop, you
name it).
The originals still suffer from being too
ragged and «earthy» compared to the ethereal studio versions, and McGuinn does
not even begin to strive for the same fluidity, precision of phrasing, and tonal
beauty that he seemed to so effortlessly achieve in the studio. But this is at
least partially compensated for by the increased tightness and energy of the
rhythm section and the ever more fluent guitar interplay, and besides,
individual weaknesses and elements of sloppiness are not so painful when you
look at the whole thing as one complex — there's so much collective goodness
here that an occasional vocal flub in ʻMy Back Pagesʼ is negligible.
And the decision to revert ʻMr. Tambourine Manʼ to its acoustic
roots, playing it close to the way Dylan did in 1964, actually works well in
concert, where the heavenly effect of the studio 12-string jangle multiplied by
immaculate harmonies would have been irreproduceable anyway.
In this context, I do not find the strength to
protest even again the inclusion of ʻRoll Over Beethovenʼ — a song
that was clearly not made with The
Byrds in mind, but is still forgivable given the mighty eclectic nature of the
show. I mean, they stick it in between a hot-pants rendition of ʻNashville
Westʼ and a devoted accappella walk through ʻAmazing Graceʼ, so
it's goddamn symbolic — «we're gonna finish off this show for you as
hillbillies, rockers, and soulmen». With
a little more sense of humor, a little more polish, and a little more energy in
the right places they could have turned the show into an unforgettable
celebration of both the Byrds' individual legacy and American popular music in general. And, well, it doesn't get
quite that high, but they were on the
right track.
Who knows, maybe a couple more years of
obsessive touring and they'd finally nail it down to perfection... then again,
they still wouldn't be able to compete with The Band, who had the advantage of
cutting their teeth on classic Dylan tours, fighting off Judasmongers and
stuff. But in any case, these 77 minutes are
impressive, except you really have to take it all in without a break and
disregard the individual scars, seams, and pimples. Thumbs up without any future
regrets, I hope.
Part 3. The Pop Art Era
(1967-1970)
UP, UP AND AWAY (1967)
1) Up, Up And Away; 2) Another
Day, Another Heartache; 3) Which Way To Nowhere; 4) California My Way; 5) Misty
Roses; 6) Go Where You Wanna Go; 7) Never Gonna Be The Same; 8) Pattern People;
9) Rosecrans Blvd.; 10) Learn How To Fly; 11) Poor Side Of Town.
Although The 5th Dimension never had a proper
artistic agenda of their own, they weren't exactly an «artificially marketed»
group like The Monkees, either: the five members found each other in the early
Sixties and had been operating as a Motown-style vocal group some time before
they were spotted by Motown man Marc Gordon and self-made man Johnny Rivers.
They were not songwriters, and they were not musicians — just three guys and
two girls who found it inspirational to pool their vocals together in the old
barbershop tradition, but also perfectly ready to adapt to modern times and
fashions.
Having secured a managerial contract with
Gordon and a recording contract with Rivers' small-scale Soul City label, the
group's true stroke of luck was getting a very young and still largely unknown
— ʽMacArthur Parkʼ was more than a year away — Jimmy Webb to oversee
the recording sessions for their first album, including complete control of
the arrangements and about half of the songs written by himself. The result,
though ridiculed by many in the past and still ignored by many in the present,
was unique: a psychedelic sunshine pop album from a group deeply rooted in
soul, gospel, and R&B — basically, Afro-American music strained through a
Mamas & Papas filter and re-converted back to Afro-American music.
In 1967, people with good taste scoffed at this
stuff, and for a good reason: this «psychedelia-lite», totally timid and
inoffensive and acceptable for parents and grandparents and housewives and
hillbillies all over the country (they quickly became one of Ed Sullivan's
famous bands, which is way more than you could say about the Stones or the
Doors), sounded complacent, conformist, and corny even compared to the Mamas
& Papas, let alone all the «sharper» outfits out there, from Hendrix to the
Jefferson Airplane — nor did The 5th Dimension offer the loud and rowdy punch
of genuine Motown. In fact, you could have hardly committed a worse crime in
1967 than borrow the superficial trademarks of newly emerging music and water them
down to the level of «respectable family entertainment». Nevertheless, once
again, time heals all wounds, and now that the revolutionary scent of the late
Sixties has passed into the domain of ancient history, we can give the band a
fair assessment based on certain, let's say, more «permanent» values of
music-making.
As a matter of fact, Up, Up And Away, the band's debut, is a pretty good record. With a
well-polished and perfectly coordinated bunch of male and female singers; a
professional and tasteful backing of studio musicians, including many members
of The Wrecking Crew such as Hal Blaine and Larry Knechtel; a talented young
songwriter providing the bulk of the material; and a decent choice in covers
for the rest of the record — really, the only thing that one could accuse The
5th Dimension of is an overdose of happiness and an aversion to risk-taking,
and wouldn't these accusations sound sort of silly in the 21st century? Oh, and
a few of these songs suck, too, but only a few of them — and it's not as if
«filler-proof» were a defining feature of all the genuinely psychedelic
masterpieces of the epoch, either (mumble mumble mumble Grateful Dead mumble
mumble mumble...).
The band's first choice of a single wasn't
particularly auspicious: a note-for-note perfect cover of the Mamas &
Papas' ʽGo Where You Wanna Goʼ — a great song for sure, and one
perfectly adapted for the purposes of The 5th Dimension, but somehow, the
combined vocal powers of Florence LaRue and Marilyn McCoo were not enough to
beat the combination of Michelle Phillips and Mama Cass for sheer power, and
the only good that came out of this is that they actually did make a hit record
out of the song, even as it attached the stigma of «Afro-American clones of the
Mamas & Papas» to the band (not entirely unjustified). However, the second
single corrected this obvious wrong, featuring an original P. F. Sloan
composition, ʽAnother Day, Another Heartacheʼ — an equally perfect
sunshine pop anthem with a cool male/female breakdown of the vocals and a
wonderfully polyphonic coda ride (Al Casey's sitar-ish «eastern sounds» are
quite gratuituously placed, though).
Finally, Jimmy Webb himself steps in with the
title track, providing The 5th Dimension with their first and one of their best
known programmatic anthems. Reducing the escapist and psychedelic ideals of
the day to the so-innocent-I-could-just-puke allegory of riding "up, up
and away in my beautiful balloon", it creates an atmosphere of almost
Sesame Street-like cuddliness with all its strings, flutes, trumpets, and
falsettos (heck, it was so cuddly that Bing Crosby himself would agree to cover
it on his 1968 Thoroughly Modern
album)... but whenever you're in the mood for some lukewarm cuddliness with a
steady beat, few songs really beat this one for efficiency; I only wish fewer
commercials would use it for their crass purposes, though I do admit it does
sound like a ready-made commercial jingle from the start. Like that ʽI'd
Like To Teach The World To Singʼ thing for Coca-Cola, you know.
Of the other four Webb songs here,
ʽPattern Peopleʼ is a nice mash-up between a folk-rocker (verses) and
doo-wop (chorus) with another complex, multi-layered vocal harmony arrangement
that rivals The Mamas & Papas as well as The Beach Boys; ʽRosecrans
Blvd.ʼ is basically a prequel to ʽMcArthur Parkʼ, with a similar
multi-part structure and a similar sentimental message based on a toponym —
only three times as short and not nearly as pompous; and ʽWhich Way To
Nowhereʼ and ʽNever Gonna Be The Sameʼ are somewhat mediocre
ballads, respectively male-led and female-led, that are mainly recommendable
for the excellent musicianship, but aren't particularly memorable otherwise. On
the other hand, they also cover two songs by the somewhat underrated Willie
Hutch — ʽCalifornia My Wayʼ is clearly inspired and influenced by
ʽCalifornia Dreamingʼ (the line "California here I come"
even has the exact same modulation on "California" as it has in the
M&P song), but is really an autonomous composition in its own right,
combining melancholia and sunshine where the M&P song was all about
melancholia; and ʽLearn How To Flyʼ (more songs about flying! more songs
about flying!) is simply infectious, catchy, fast-paced pop that is quite
impossible to condemn.
As they end the album with a respectful nod to
the man who gave them their contract, Johnny Rivers — this time, they go smart
and release a near-accappella version of ʽPoor Side Of Townʼ that
allows them to show their strongest side without sounding like superfluous
clones of the artists they are covering — I have to admit that, as lollypop-ish
and bubblegum-ish all these songs sound to a pair of ears weaned on so much
stronger stuff, almost all of these songs have a lot to offer: great singing,
strong musicianship, catchy hooks, and, yes, a jet of corny happiness that is
perfectly acceptable if it goes along with all of these things. So what if they
got themselves named after a Byrds album without any solid proof that they were
capable of going beyond the second dimension, let alone the fifth one? As long
as we do not make the mistake of ranking them as equals with the major
psychedelic artists of the time (just as we probably wouldn't want to equate
The Monkees with The Beatles, unless only as a defiant hooligan act in the face
of the critical establishment), Up, Up
And Away deserves its thumbs up as securely as any well-meaning,
well-written, well-produced cash-in on current musical trends that compensates
for lack of originality or individual artistic message with honest skill and
craft. Oh, there was plenty of such imitative acts in 1967 that genuinely
sucked — but The 5th Dimension sure weren't one of them, not by a long shot.
THE MAGIC GARDEN (1967)
1) Prologue; 2) The Magic
Garden; 3) Summer's Daughter; 4) Dreams/Pax/Nepenthe; 5) Carpet Man; 6) Ticket
To Ride; 7) Requiem: 820 Latham; 8) The Girl's Song; 9) The Worst That Could
Happen; 10) Orange Air; 11) Paper Cup; 12) Epilogue.
Hey, it's a mini-rock opera! Or, uhm, more like
a «mini-sunshine pop musical». The 5th Dimension, as it turns out, were
anything but unambitious — or, uhm, were made to seem anything but unambitious,
since the one person whose ambitions really soar here is Jimmy Webb, writing
all but one (guess which) song on the album and arranging them as a conceptual
suite, where the first half is about a boy and a girl falling in love and the
second half is about the boy and the girl falling out of love (so much for the
overall «optimistic» image of the band — although, to be fair, even some of the
formally saddest songs on here still happen to have a happy glow to them). Just
so you do not ever forget this, the record is framed with the exact same motif
in the ʽPrologueʼ and ʽEpilogueʼ, but if you attune
yourself properly to the storyline, then the first lush vocalise of "have you tried love?" will seem
enticing and seductive, and the second
— formally exactly the same — will seem bitter and disillusioned. The magic of
Jimmy Webb, ladies and gentlemen!
Musically, as is typical for Webb, the album is
still a mish-mash of lushly orchestrated and richly harmonized ballads with
bouncy-friendly, hook-filled pop songs. The ballads all sound like next door
neighbors of ʽMacArthur Parkʼ, though shorter in stature and simpler
in character — and not particularly memorable, except for the overall
impression from the rich orchestral / vocal coating, be it more in the
traditional standard way (ʽSummer's Daughterʼ) or in the
baroque-meets-Indian way (ʽDreams / Pax / Nepentheʼ, with the
obligatory, and slightly ridiculous, mix of harpsichords and sitars). ʽThe
Worst That Could Happenʼ is the most notorious of these tunes, due to the
smash hit version produced a little later by Johnny Maestro & The Brooklyn
Bridge, but it is simply way too schmaltzy and pompous to be taken seriously
(and I still cannot decide if the unexpected launch into Mendelssohn at the
point where she's leaving him and marrying another is a smart musical decision
or just a cheap corny move — possibly both); much better and more genuinely
soulful is ʽRequiem: 820 Lathamʼ, with an appropriately requiem-like
piano and organ arrangement and a passionate vocal performance from Billy Davis
Jr. that is every bit as respectable as any major soul anthem of the era.
But it is probably the bouncy pop stuff that
will remain in your head once the album is over — some delicious nuggets to be
found here, particularly the singles ʽCarpet Manʼ and ʽPaper
Cupʼ: the former is a fast, toe-tappy folk-pop number with a complex and
dazzling male / female harmony arrangement (and quite an astute set of lyrics
— sort of like a complete anti-thesis to the Stones' ʽUnder My
Thumbʼ), and the latter is a slightly more plodding, McCartney-esque music
hall number that offers to resolve the storyline with one of the most radiantly
cheerful pledges of self-isolation and misanthropy ever: "and my life is
looking up / from inside my paper cup" is sung with such a life-asserting
Sesame Street intonation that you just got to know it's such a major relief that the damn bitch dumped the guy.
(Not before he took his complete fill, mind you: rewind all the way back to
the title track and read these lyrics carefully — "There is a garden /
Something like the shadow of a butterfly... and darling, it belongs to
me"... you do understand what is
meant by «the magic garden», right? No? Then listen to this: "...the magic
garden / Waits with all the gates wide open / And darlin', I'll be standin'
just inside". Still not getting it? Okay, how about this: "It's so
soft and warm / Behind those hedges / No hard edges". Now you'd probably
have to be Tipper Gore to still not get it. Oh that Jimmy Webb, what a
prankster.)
Oh, speaking of McCartney: everybody seems to
hate the band's cover of ʽTicket To Rideʼ (apparently, a leftover
from the Up, Up And Away sessions,
but included here because it seemed to fit in with the album's theme) — I
think, however, that it is as good as, say, Otis Redding's cover of ʽA
Hard Day's Nightʼ or any such reinvention of a Beatles song as an upbeat
R&B groove number. Sure, the exuberant brass, the ecstatic vocals on the
bridge section, the revved-up harmonies, the whoo-whoo-whoos — little of this
agrees with the melancholic nature of the lyrics, but then again, the Beatles'
original wasn't exactly the epitome of doom and gloom, either, so I don't know
what the deal is about, really. It's a tight, fun, rockin' cover — I'd at least
take it over the slowed-down and genuinely gloomy (though also decent in its
own way) version by The Carpenters. And besides, with all due respect to Jimmy
Webb, it does feel nice to have his monopoly broken at least once by a
superior brand of songwriting.
On the whole, despite the expectable proportion
of cheese, The Magic Garden is interesting
and creative even at its worst, and sonically enchanting at its best: if
anything, the harmonies here are even tighter, denser, more head-spinning in
effect than on the first album, and at least technically superior to The Mamas
& Papas (who have plenty of songs like ʽCarpet Manʼ in their
catalog, but have never been able to reach that
level of vocal complexity and polish, I think). This means another thumbs up
— with all due reservations — and also the end of the band's first and probably
best stage, considering that from now on, Webb's role in their future would be
seriously diminished due to his getting busy with his own career.
STONED SOUL PICNIC (1968)
1) Sweet Blindness; 2) It'll
Never Be The Same Again; 3) The Sailboat Song; 4) It's A Great Life; 5) Stoned
Soul Picnic; 6) California Soul; 7) Lovin' Stew; 8) Broken Wing Bird; 9) Good
News; 10) Bobbie's Blues; 11) The Eleventh Song (What A Groovy Day!).
The worst thing that could happen to the 5th
Dimension was Jimmy Webb beginning to pay more attention to his own career —
or, for the time being, to the career of Richard Harris, whom he'd enriched
with ʽMacArthur Parkʼ in early 1968, as well as all the other songs
and production work on his first album, at the expense of his former pets. The
only Webb composition on the band's third album is roughly tacked on at the end
under the title of ʽThe Eleventh Songʼ (because, you know, nice
sunshine pop albums are supposed to contain even numbers of songs, but we did need a Jimmy Webb seal of approval,
if only at the very last moment), and it is an obvious quickie throwaway —
"what a groovy day it turned out to be, doo-doo-doo" is its only
line, and coming off a generally disappointing record, it has a strong whiff of
self-parody, which is pretty bad for a band that often already comes across as
parodic in its very nature.
The 5th Dimension are completely in the hands
of Bones Howe now, the by-default sunshine pop producer of the era, already
noted for his work with The Association and now working his tepid magic on
these guys — but he is nowhere near as adventurous as Webb, so out go the
sitars, for instance, and all that pseudo-Eastern crap, and in goes even more
brass and strings than there used to be. Theoretically, this is no big deal:
it's not like Webb was particularly innovative or subtle in his use of sitar,
and it's not as if Howe's idiom for the band results in completely different
textures and atmospheres. What is worse, however, is the sore lack of good
songwriting: with Webb largely out of the picture, Howe and the other industry
people are forced to fall back on even more cuddly and safe brands of corporate
songwriting.
Worst of the bunch is a guy called Jeffrey
Comanor, contributing pompous Neil Diamond-ish crap (ʽIt'll Never Be The
Same Againʼ) and hookless folksy mush that tries to mask melodic paucity
with lush flute-and-chime panoramas (ʽThe Sailboat Songʼ); he is
equally bad at upbeat pop-rock (ʽLovin' Stewʼ, which has nothing to
its name except for the strong tempo) and dream balladry (ʽBobbie's
Bluesʼ — pretty male-female vocal harmony arrangement, but hardly ever
elevated above the level of background muzak). Bob Alcivar's and Denny
McReynolds' contributions (ʽBroken Wing Birdʼ and ʽIt's A Great
Lifeʼ) are equally boring.
The saving grace of the album are two songs by
the still relatively little-known Laura Nyro — ʽSweet Blindnessʼ and
the title track, both of which had already managed to come out on Laura's own Eli And The Thirteenth Confession by
the time The 5th Dimension got around to releasing their interpretations. These
should probably be found worthy even by major fans of Laura: ʽSweet
Blindnessʼ capitalizes even deeper on the contrasts between the slow and
fast parts of the song than Laura's original, and the vocal duo of Florence and
Marilyn add extra (and quite welcome) muscle to the joyful Motown-ish punch of
the original, bringing it closer in style to something like Martha & The
Vandellas. Likewise, they add extra funkiness to ʽStoned Soul Picnicʼ
while managing to preserve its fussy spirit, a mix of psychedelia and gospel
that makes the song equally interesting to fans of the Lord and lovers of the
Grass. The ridiculous thing about it is that somehow, Laura Nyro material here
goes interspersed with Jeff Comanor material — imagine some honest-to-good
interpreter covering a mix of Beatles and Monkees songs (and I like the
Monkees, but that would be irrelevant in this case).
The third and last single from the record was
ʽCalifornia Soulʼ by Ashford & Simpson, a song that is definitely
better than any of the Comanor stuff, but I still do not like it too much: it's
another tune that is clearly
influenced by ʽCalifornia Dreamingʼ way too seriously, and didn't we
already have ʽCalifornia My Way?ʼ Here, it's like half of the vocal
lines were lifted directly off the Mamas & Papas masterpiece — rather
pitiful.
All in all, a major disappointment, although I
still won't turn the album down explicitly because of the excellent Nyro covers
and the fact that the vocal performances and arrangements are still complex and
at least «beautiful» on a perfunctory level. Nevertheless, you're much better
off just picking out the individual highlights here, due to the total lack of
consistency.
THE AGE OF AQUARIUS (1969)
1) Aquarius / Let The Sunshine
In; 2) Blowing Away; 3) Skinny Man; 4) Wedding Bell Blues; 5) Don'tcha Hear Me
Callin' To Ya; 6) The Hideaway; 7) Workin' On A Groovy Thing; 8) Let It Be Me;
9) Sunshine Of Your Love; 10) The Winds Of Heaven; 11) Those Were The Days; 12)
Let The Sunshine In (reprise).
If there was at least one good influence that Hair made on the musical world (outside
of its social impact — making parents finally shed a tear for their hippie kids
and all), it came in the form of a serious improvement of The 5th Dimension's
fourth album over their third one. Not that anybody really gives a damn in
2017, but, on the other hand, the band's cover of ʽAquarius / Let The Sunshine
Inʼ is pretty much the only
thing that the average customer these days might remember about the band in
general, so at least there's that. Obviously, Hair and The 5th Dimension were made for each other, and here, the
band commits to the experience one hundred percent, with soaring vocal
harmonies and brass fanfares blaring Ennio Morricone out of the sky, while
Billy Davis Jr. pulls his finest son-of-a-preacher-man impression on the ad-libbed
part of ʽLet The Sunshine Inʼ — with an energy level easily matching
that of Otis Redding (in fact, it would not be impossible to mistake him for
Otis on this one).
If it were just the single, though, we'd have
to count it as a fluke; surprisingly, the entire album is significantly more
consistent than Stoned Soul Picnic,
which probably had to do with the band and Bones Howe retaining the best of
their songwriters and firing the worst ones (yes, we're sort of looking at you,
Jeff Comanor). The best remains the best: there are two more Laura Nyro songs
here, brilliantly sung by the band's female vocalists — ʽBlowing
Awayʼ is upbeat soul-pop at its catchiest, funnest, and most powerful,
while ʽWedding Bell Bluesʼ mixes that upbeatness and melodic optimism
with a streak of sadness and yearning (it is, after all, about a girl losing
hope of ever getting married), and Marilyn McCoo's vocals on both songs do full
justice to Laura's originals (Marilyn is clearly more powerful and disciplined
than Nyro, but that does not mean these are just technical, soulless renditions
— she clearly understands Laura's messages, and is as perfect and loyal an
interpreter as Laura could ever get).
Predictably, they are less successful when
tackling genres they don't really know what to do with: while Cream's
ʽSunshine Of Your Loveʼ cannot lose all of its sexy menace as long as the main riff stays relatively
intact, it is obvious that the only thing this band and this production team
can do with it is water it down — which they do, with happy harmonies, more of
those brass fanfares, and a silly conga-driven break in the place of Clapton's
solo. It made even less sense to put it near a bombastic, Vegas-style
arrangement of ʽLet It Be Meʼ (I wonder if Billy Davis Jr. had to
wear a rhinestone suit in the studio to properly get into character?), though,
perhaps, not as little sense as ending the album with a cover of a cover of a
cover — it was not enough that Mary Hopkin got herself a hit with ʽThose
Were The Daysʼ after Gene Raskin had converted it from an old Russian
gypsy-themed romance, no, the song also had to get a 5th Dimension seal on it
(then again, it's personal here, since I hate stereotypical Russian romances
and drinking songs with the same passion that is usually reserved for
intellectual Yankees hating stereotypical country music).
Still, misfires aside, there's a surprisingly
large number of cool tunes here even beyond the title track and the Nyro
covers. Michael and Ginger Kollander's ʽSkinny Manʼ is a chunk of
charming bubblegum pop with intricate call-and-answer vocals between the boys
and the girls in the band. Rudy Stevenson's ʽDont'cha Hear Me Callin' To
Yaʼ has a tense, resolute Latin groove (stylistically similar to
Santana's ʽEvil Waysʼ, even though that song had not yet been
released at the time). The only (but obligatory) Jimmy Webb cover, ʽThe
Hideawayʼ, is a Randy Newmanesque Tin Pan Alley-ish family pop number that
avoids Jimmy's sentimental excesses, even if its vocal hooks leave something to
be desired. And as much as I am supposed to despise Neil Sedaka, I cannot deny
that ʽWorkin' On A Groovy Thingʼ is a really well-written pop song,
even despite sharing the subliminal message of rejecting intercourse before
marriage ("let's not rush it, we'll take it slow" — yeah right, how
about singing this with special guest Grace Slick on parallel lead vocals for
extra sincerity?).
Subsequently, even if there are no signs
whatsoever here that the band was somehow aware of changing musical fashions
circa 1969 (and maybe that's a good thing — imagine Bones Howe trying to pull a
Jimi Hendrix or a Led Zeppelin on us!), at least The Age Of Aquarius could not help but get pulled into the overall
mega-healthy vortex of whatever was going on, when even thoroughly commercial
songwriters, about as rebellious in nature as the local tax inspector, sometimes
produced musically challenging and tasteful material. Oh well, just a very good
year on the whole, and for The 5th Dimension in particular — thumbs up,
with the usual minimal reservations here and there.
PORTRAIT (1970)
1) Puppet Man; 2) One Less
Bell To Answer; 3) Feelin' Alright?; 4) This Is Your Life; 5) A Love Like Ours;
6) Save The Country; 7) The Declaration / A Change Is Gonna Come / People Gotta
Be Free; 8) Dimension 5ive.
Not a lot of departures here from the formula
of Aquarius, but the ones that do get noticed are not particularly
auspicious. But first, the good news: ʽPuppet Manʼ is not only the
best opening song on a 5th Dimension album, period — it also beats the shit out
of both Neil Sedaka's original and Tom Jones' Vegas-ized version. With a
sharp-stinging electric guitar lead, the band's usual stunning multi-part
harmonies, and particularly the girls' fiery, well-empowered lead vocals, the
song definitely rocks here — which is kind of amusing, considering how the
lyrics are all about personal submission. (Then again, there's nothing more
powerful in the world than voluntary total and absolute submission, I guess —
just look at ʽVenus In Fursʼ).
Alas, the song also gives you false hopes — that,
perhaps, the rest of the album might, too, conform to this «electric soul»
idiom, not too far removed from classic Funkadelic in terms of juiciness and
intensity. Nope! Released as a single, ʽPuppet Manʼ only made it all
the way up to No. 24; and when the band resorted to its usual weapon of choice
and followed it up with a typically excellent Laura Nyro cover, ʽSave The
Countryʼ, it fared even worse and stalled at No. 27, despite all the
upbeat gospelishness, all the enticing organ swirls and brass fanfares, all the
enthusiasm poured into the "we could build the dream with love"
chorus. Oh, you can never tell with the American public: first they raise you
up with ʽWedding Bell Bluesʼ, then they bring you down — harshly —
when you give them something equally catchy and tasty.
So what's a poor fifth dimension to do in a
situation like this? Fall back on sappy, shapeless sentimentality and release
ʽOne Less Bell To Answerʼ, a slow Bacharach/David tear jerker of the
«ultimate housewife» variety — technically, sung to absolute perfection by
Marilyn McCoo, but substantially, containing absolutely nothing but atmosphere,
an empty vessel for whoever is more or less able to imbue it with dramatic
content (of the soap variety, mostly). Naturally, it was that song that had to become the biggest commercial success from
the album, and pretty much set the basic development trends for the band in the
next few years. (I admit to having never been a big fan of Burt Bacharach — the
Johann Strauss Junior of the Great American Songbook, from a certain point of
view — but he did write quite a few
better songs than this piece of thoroughly unmemorable mush).
In between these commercially low /
artistically high and commercially high / artistically low points, Portrait wobbles and vacillates,
largely depending on source material. The obligatory Jimmy Webb song this time
around is ʽThis Is Your Lifeʼ, unfortunately, also slow, mushy and
way too pompous to be taken seriously. The cover of Traffic's ʽFeelin'
Alrightʼ is decent, and Billy Davis Jr. gives a good Otis Redding-ish soul
take on the original vocal part, but is nowhere near close to the «interestingly
personal» Joe Cocker version. Then there's a guy called Bob Alcivar, apparently
responsible for the orchestration and also saddling the band with two of his
own compositions — the lush pop ballad ʽA Love Like Oursʼ (so-so) and
the lite jazz / lite classical mash-up ʽDimension 5iveʼ, somewhat
ambitious but still way too corny for my tastes (I guess the idea was to
produce something like the band's own take on the Pet Sounds instrumentals, but the results are much cuddlier and
kiddish).
Worst of the lot, though, and deserving to be
registered as a legendary embarrassment in the history of hippie muzak, is the
idea to set to music nothing less than The Declaration Of Independence itself
— in a three-part medley with Sam Cooke's ʽA Change Is Gonna Comeʼ
and The Young Rascals' ʽPeople Gotta Be Freeʼ. While the Cooke cover,
like the Traffic cover, is decent (but adds nothing to the glorious original),
the vocal performance of ʽThe Declarationʼ simply has to be heard to
be disbelieved: they really do rip through a large part of the Preamble,
alternating between male and female leads and trying their best to squeeze the
dense prose of the text into soul music phrasing. The most horrible thing about
it is that — who knows? — there might well be people out there inspired by this brand of starch-heavy,
gluten-rich musical corn. But, I mean, yeah, who else but a band of
superficially-minded, commercially-oriented, family-friendly pseudo-hippies to
remind society of certain self-evident truths?..
All in all, here be a mixed bag if there ever
was one — swinging all the way from the coolness of ʽPuppet Manʼ to
the catastrophe of ʽThe Declarationʼ, from the upbeat, catchy
inspiration of ʽSave The Countryʼ to the instantly forgettable mush
of ʽOne Less Bell To Answerʼ, and so on; a classic case of up and
down thumbs outcanceling each other, but this is precisely what compilations
and self-made playlists are there for these days.
LOVE'S LINES, ANGLES AND RHYMES (1971)
1) Time And Love; 2) Love's
Lines, Angles And Rhymes; 3) What Does It Take; 4) Guess Who; 5) Viva Tirado;
6) Light Sings; 7) The Rainmaker; 8) He's A Runner; 9) The Singer; 10) Every
Night.
Umm... nice stripes, I guess. While the more
progressively-minded part of the African-American community at the time was seriously
getting funky (and this involved even major commercial stars like Aretha
Franklin), The 5th Dimension, still ruled by the rose-perfumed fist of Bones
Howe, continued to live in their own vision of 1967. The most important
difference is probably the lack — first time ever! — of even a single Jimmy
Webb song: not a very good sign, but if we agree that they swapped Webb for
Paul McCartney, it might be OK. Actually, the cover of ʽEvery Nightʼ
is one of the album's highlights: the band must have chosen the song because
they felt McCartney's falsetto wooh-wooh harmonies on the track were right up
their main alley, and they were quite right about it.
Other than that, it is almost too easy to
predict which songs will be good and which ones will be bad just by
scrutinizing the tracklist. Check: two more Laura Nyro songs, the wonderfully
upbeat and catchy ʽTime And Loveʼ and the golden oldie ʽHe's A
Runnerʼ that had already been covered by Mama Cass and Blood, Sweat &
Tears. Check: Harry Nilsson's ʽThe Rainmakerʼ, for some reason, with
Billy Davis' lead vocal reciting
rather than singing the lyrics much of the time, but the girls' harmonies on
the flute-supported chorus more than make up for it. Check: who are all these
other guys writing songs for them? They probably all suck.
Indeed, almost everything else seems to be
forgettable. Maybe with the exception of the title track, an effort to
capitalize on the slow ballad success of ʽOne Less Bell To Answerʼ:
once again sung by Marilyn McCoo, it is another of those torch songs, but I
actually prefer it to the mush of Bacharach/David — there's more fire in this
one, with a chorus rising to near-scream levels on brass fanfare waves and a
dark and firm bassline supporting the verses. Originally written by Dorothea
Joyce and recorded by Diana Ross, the song is even better suited for Marilyn's
fuller, more powerful vocals, so it passes the quality test.
The rest is just generic soft-soul, inoffensive
ear candy with weak hooks and mediocre levels of emotional power. ʽViva
Tiradoʼ, with its annoying mixed-language chorus of "viva joy and
viva peace", sounds like a serious misuse of Latin rhythms; the other four
songs, including the minor hit single ʽLight Singsʼ, sound like they
belong in the soundtrack of some generic hippie movie from the early 1970s.
There's nothing tastelessly wrong with enjoying that sound (as long as the
backing musicianship remains professional, which you can always expect of Bones
Howe and the 5th Dimension), but nothing too exciting to relate to your
grandchildren, either. The striped pants and suits certainly look far more
exciting than the overall musical content.
INDIVIDUALLY & COLLECTIVELY (1972)
1) Leave A Little Room; 2)
(Last Night) I Didn't Get To Sleep At All; 3) All Kinds Of People; 4) Sky &
Sea; 5) Tomorrow Belongs To The Children; 6) If I Could Reach You; 7) Half
Moon; 8) Band Of Gold; 9) Border Song; 10) Black Patch.
Honestly speaking, you can skip most of the individual
and the collective songs on here and head straight for the last number —
because, as you have already guessed, it is a Laura Nyro song; not one of her
best, though, or, at least, not one of those to which they do proper justice.
An upbeat, horn-filled anthem giving each of the band members a solo spotlight,
it erases the happy-sad personality that they had, up until then, managed to
preserve so well, and becomes just another decent, but unexceptional sunshine
pop statement.
Even so, it is the best track on this highly
generic, thoroughly uninspired platter that finds The 5th Dimension largely
unhooked from their energy sources — most of the songwriting seems to come from
second- and third-rate people, with Jimmy Webb totally busy elsewhere. One major
new songwriter whom they try to include on their roster is Elton John: the
cover of ʽBorder Songʼ is halfway decent, but for all their
gospel-soul authenticity, they are incapable of preserving the song's aura of
loneliness and depression: Billy Davis Jr. is really such a happy, happy person
by nature that he could probably inject warmth and cuddliness into Joy
Division, so this is just a wrong choice here.
Both of the singles culled from the album,
according to the formula established with ʽOne Less Bellʼ, are
ballads sung by Marilyn McCoo — Tony Macaulay's ʽI Didn't Get To Sleep At
Allʼ and Randall McNeil's ʽIf I Could Reach Youʼ, both of them
making bets on the strength and expressivity of Marilyn's voice (no questions
there) and little else, standard lush pop Broadway fodder without any special
hooks. Both made it on the charts, but climbed highest on the adult contemporary
/ easy listening registers, for obvious reasons, and I'd think that only a
major fan of schlock aesthetics could easily memorize them.
Other than that, you have a surprisingly decent
exercise in funk (ʽHalf Moonʼ, previously made famous by Janis
Joplin) — excellent musicianship (watch out particularly for a mighty mighty
bassline from session veteran Joe Osborne), but not such a great vocal
performance; another of their generic pa-da-bam vocalize pieces (ʽSky
& Seaʼ, from some obscure musical), good for lengthy elevator rides;
and a few other non-descript soul pieces that seem to have been recorded
completely in autopilot mode. When you put it all together, the result is
devastating: there's not really even a single song that I could visualize
making it to my ideal 5th Dimension compilation. Then again, there is
absolutely nothing surprising in this: all they did was loyally follow the
trends in American mainstream pop tastes, and as those tastes continued
disentangling themselves from the pop-rock and psychedelic influences of the
mid-to-late Sixties, so did these guys' music continue to evolve from
fun-and-cuddly to bland-and-mushy. Thumbs down.
LIVING TOGETHER, GROWING TOGETHER (1973)
1) Open Your Window; 2) Ashes
To Ashes; 3) Changed; 4) The Riverwitch; 5) Living Together Growing Together;
6) Day By Day; 7) There's Nothing Like Music; 8) What Do I Need To Be Me; 9)
There Never Was A Day; 10) Let Me Be Lonely; 11) Woyaya.
Although the band's commercial luck began to
seriously wane with Individually &
Collectively, it was not until 1973 that the fifth dimension truly began
caving in on them — the LP did not make it into the Top 100, and this time, not
even the singles were of much help. The biggest of 'em all was the title track
— immediately recognizable as a Burt Bacharach tune since it uses the exact
same introduction as ʽClose To Youʼ, and sharing all the usual easy
listening attributes of any generic Bacharach tune: sweet, slightly bouncy ear
candy with about as much depth to it as the movie it was written for (the
allegedly awful reinvention of Lost
Horizon as one of those corny 1970s musicals). And even that one only got
to No. 32.
By now you know that you can usually predict
the average quality of a 5th Dimension album just by looking at the list of
songwriters, and this time around, the list is particularly discouraging.
Bacharach & David, represented by two songs (the second one is ʽLet Me
Be Lonelyʼ, a solo spot for Florence that's nice if you... umm, like
sentimental waltzes with lotsa strings and brass), are actually one of the top
names on the list — the only other top name is Harry Nilsson, whose ʽOpen
Your Windowʼ, deliciously and seductively crooned (cooed?) by Marilyn
McCoo, is a nice enough opener, but very short and misleading.
Elsewhere, brace yourselves for the return of
Jeff Comanor, with derivatively Sam Cookish gospel numbers like ʽThe
Riverwitchʼ (Billy Davis Jr. gives a fairly impressive Cooke / Redding
impression, as usual, but the melody has not a single original twist) and
equally derivatively Wilson Pickettish R&B rave-ups like ʽThere's
Nothin' Like Musicʼ — well, not too bad, to be honest, but not
particularly necessary if you can get the real thing. And then there's lush
ballads, ballads, ballads a-plenty, all of them largely interchangeable, even
if, technically, McCoo's vocals are unimpeachable as usual. Of course, the
«easy listening» genre is not really my cup of tea, and maybe I simply cannot
see the little things that make these particular performances stand out against
the rest, but as far as I'm concerned, this is all just plastic soul-imbued pop
crapola, diligently, but indifferently executed by the performers. At least
all those Laura Nyro songs offered a good chance to get into some character,
but now they've run out of these, too.
Out of good ideas, The 5th Dimension make a
nice, but meaningless, gesture of fraternizing with their black brothers across
the Atlantic — covering Osibisa's ʽWoyayaʼ from the latter's 1971
album of the same name. As you can guess, it is a loyal, professional, and
probably well-meaning cover, but it is hard to expect that the professional,
glossy, restrained approach of a bubblegum Californian band can make this mix
of pop music and tribal chanting uncover hidden depths that it lacked in the
original. Nice try, but next time, try moving to Ghana or something. Definitely
a thumbs
down — no Jimmy Webb, no Laura Nyro, no dice.
SOUL & INSPIRATION (1974)
1) Soul & Inspiration; 2)
Harlem; 3) The Best Of My Love; 4) My Song; 5) Hard Core Poetry; 6) No Love In
The Room; 7) House For Sale; 8) Somebody Warm Like Me; 9) Salty Tears; 10) I
Don't Know How To Look For Love.
This album starts off just fine, with two of
the band's finest performances from the meager mid-1970s — a solid, fiery
rendition of The Righteous Brothers' ʽSoul & Inspirationʼ, with
Billy and Marilyn trading lead vocal duties and bassist Joe Osborn providing
the song with a tough, gritty skeleton underneath all the orchestral layers;
and immediately afterwards, a cover of Bill Withers' ʽHarlemʼ that
smartly capitalizes upon all the funky promise of the original — perhaps the
band inevitably loses some of the song's irony and subtlety in the process, but
with their harmonies, wild strings and wah-wah guitars all over the place, they
make the song kick significantly more ass than it did while chained to Bill's
vision.
Alas, that's about it: once the highlights are
done with, the usual curse of the 5th Dimension — dependence on mediocre
songwriting — kicks in, and the rest of the album consists of largely
interchangeable ballads and R&B workouts that waste the vocal talents of
the band and the instrumental professionalism of the Wrecking Crew behind
them. You're covering the Eagles? Fine, but couldn't you at least have picked
some of their better songs, like ʽWitchy Womanʼ or something, rather
than the generic MOR ballad ʽBest Of My Loveʼ? And of all those other
tunes, the only one that still sticks in my head a bit is ʽNo Love In The
Roomʼ, a dark dance number with a good vocal build-up, though still very
run-of-the-mill in terms of arrangement (ominous strings, proto-disco bass, all
the works).
In fact, the record is so heavy on softness and
sentimentality that the only proper R&B number here, besides
ʽHarlemʼ, is ʽMy Songʼ, a composition by Rich Cason written
at the crossroads of Funkadelic/Parliament and Stevie Wonder, but without the
mad energy of the former and the melodic genius of the latter. At least they
try to get a groove going here, and Billy is sincerely trying to fire it up; on
such easy listening numbers as ʽHard Core Poetryʼ (courtesy of the
Lambert & Potter songwriting duo), ʽHouse For Saleʼ (courtesy of
Larry Brown, a Motown hack),
ʽSomebody Warm Like Meʼ (courtesy of Tony Macaulay who'd given
them ʽ(Last Night) I Didn't Get To Sleep At Allʼ in 1972), there's
nothing happening at all, although, of course, all of these songs can be used
as relaxing background muzak. But even considering how many people in the world
treat all music as no more than
relaxing background muzak, and how much this record follows the standard
soft-pop formula of the mid-1970s, the fact is that Soul & Inspiration tanked just as miserably as its predecessor,
missing its huge core audience by a mile. Again, not recommended for anybody
except huge fans of Billy's and Marilyn's vocal talents — which, as usual, are
formally on open display, but still do not prevent me from an overall thumbs down.
EARTHBOUND (1975)
1) Earthbound Prologue / Be
Here Now; 2) Don't Stop For Nothing; 3) I've Got A Feeling; 4) Magic In My
Life; 5) Walk Your Feet In The Sunshine; 6) When Did I Lose Your Love; 7) Lean
On Me Always; 8) Speaking With My Heart; 9) Moonlight Mile; 10) Earthbound
Epilogue.
See, sometimes it really helps to be patient.
After a set of four nearly identical, nearly identically lackluster records
dominated by subpar material, during which period the commercial relevance of
The 5th Dimension steadily dropped down to near-zero level, one last attempt —
caused, perhaps, by events beyond their control rather than a conscious change
of image — nevertheless, one last attempt was made to return the band to their
bubble-psycho-lite roots. It was made at the wrong time and in the wrong way,
but it was made, so that succeeding
generations of listeners like myself could at least partially redeem them for
their sins.
Big changes here indeed: a new record label
(ABC) — Bones Howe getting tired of his protegés and leaving them to
concentrate on Tom Waits — and, most importantly, Jimmy Webb returning, not
only to take his place as producer but also as dominant songwriter: as if in
compensation for all the years he'd been missing, he now writes a whoppin' half of the album for them, just like in
the good old days! And the rest of the songs? Still covers from outside
songwriters, but no more of those mediocre hacks and Bacharach adepts: we have
such highly unusual choices as the Beatles' ʽI've Got A Feelingʼ, the
Stones' ʽMoonlight Mileʼ, and even such a classy underrated selection
as George Harrison's ʽBe Here Nowʼ from the Living In The Material World album. Plus, as an additional oddity,
they cover both the A-side and the B-side of the last single released by the
obscure American prog rock band Gypsy: weird choice, sure, but I guess that
Webb just thought, "well, we have to do something contemporary, but none
of that sentimental crap they'd been regurgitating on those past albums... oh,
I guess this will do nicely".
In addition, they have a completely new backing
band: no more relying on the professionalism and good taste of the Wrecking
Crew, but worth it, perhaps, for a brand new sound, significantly dependent on
synthesizers (played well, with a «cosmic / acid» vibe rather than adult
contemporary overtones) and talented individuals such as guitar wiz Fred
Tackett, most commonly associated with Little Feat, and jazz master Larry
Coryell, hired to play acoustic guitar: his presence is immediately felt on the
dazzling speedy runs he plays on ʽBe Here Nowʼ — the song itself
rolls along at its original slow tempo, but Larry's fussy, funny fretwork gives
it an original lively angle that shows this new incarnation of The 5th
Dimension has finally remembered what it actually means to introduce a fifth dimension to the four of the original
work.
Do not get me wrong: Earthbound is not some sort of unjustly forgotten masterpiece. It
is a Jimmy Webb conceptual album, and Jimmy Webb is not a genius. But it is a
genuinely interesting record that
dares to take chances — such chances as this band had not taken for at least
five years. The cover of ʽI've Got A Feelingʼ is excellent, because
the Beatles' number was a ready-made energetic R&B workout, and Billy Davis
Jr. does it full justice here, even if the ladies' talents are strangely
underused (the perfect thing to do would be to have them sing the "everybody had a hard year" part,
contrasting with Billy delivering the main verses). ʽMoonlight Mileʼ,
unfortunately, loses all of its Stonesy magic in transition — it is so deeply
rooted in its «redemption from the sins of a rock'n'roll lifestyle» context
that few people other than the Stones themselves could ever appropriate it
adequately — but the band's soulful rearrangement is amusing and pleasant, and
the girls' dreamy harmonies slide along like perfect butter for Billy to cut
with his own vocal knife, if you'll pardon the metaphor.
The Gypsy tracks seem to be fairly rare (I have
not heard the originals), but ʽDon't Stop For Nothingʼ is one of the
steamiest, funkiest grooves this band ever did, with a gritty bass / guitar
lockdown and all the back vocalists in a high-charged bayou-voodoo mood;
ʽMagic In My Lifeʼ is a comparatively inoffensive R&B ballad that
one could easily imagine as one of those Diana Ross / Michael Jackson duets,
but at least it's got a fun quotient in it. As for the Webb tracks, four of
them form a near-continuous suite and are, perhaps not so surprisingly, the
sappiest of the lot: ʽWhen Did I Lose Your Loveʼ and ʽSpeaking
With My Heartʼ are just as expendable as anything on their previous four
albums, but ʽWalk Your Feet In The Sunshineʼ, even if it shamelessly
steals its riff from The Who's ʽSubstituteʼ and its piccolo trumpet
fanfares from the likes of ʽPenny Laneʼ, is an enticing slice of
classic sunshine pop (okay, I just looked back at the title and realized I'm
being grossly redundant, but what the heck), and ʽLean On Me Alwaysʼ
is saved by Billy Davis, who injects as much passionate gospel soul into this
stereotypically generic number as he is inherently capable of.
All of this (not always, but usually)
successful diversity is framed by a pseudo-progressive wrapping in the form of
the title track — a lite-classical piece, Moody Blues-style, but with a lot of
attention predictably given over to the band's harmonies; as pompous and
ceremonial as the composition is, it is really atypical of the rest of the album,
which might be just as well, because I'd rather have this band engage in funky
grooves, gospel soul, and sunshine pop than try their hand at progressive rock
(and as late as 1975 at that!). But it does call to my attention the strange
fact that on the whole, the album goes very
easy on female vocals — the majority of the leads are by Billy Davis, and the
male-female harmony schtick is severely underplayed, which is fairly weird,
since Webb had never shown any signs of male chauvinism up to then. Strange as it
is, Marilyn only gets one single lead part on ʽWhen Did I Lose Your
Loveʼ, which wasn't even made into a single, breaking with the
questionable, but well-established tradition. Well — perhaps they just wanted
to try something completely different.
For all of the album's inevitable flaws (we
know all about how this band and its producer could never be perfect, anyway),
I give it an enthusiastic thumbs up — it is not every day, after all, that
you can witness a formerly decent band rise from the ashes after so many years
of bland mediocrity, and at a time when nobody could even begin to expect
something of the kind. As a matter of fact, nobody did begin to expect anything of the kind, and after four
commercially oriented records that flopped, it would have been foolish of them
to expect a non-commercial (or, at least, not-so-commercial) record not to
flop. Whatever the circumstances, this was the straw that broke the camel's
fifth-dimensional back — Billy and Marilyn quit the band soon after its release
to continue their career as a musical duo (for a short while) and as a family
couple (for quite a long while: as of 2017, they are still together, probably
setting a record for the longest-lived family couple in the world of pop music
or something, God bless 'em). At this moment, the logical thing for the rest of
the band would have been to pack it in; due to circumstances beyond logical
control, though, this is where the strangest chapter in the history of this
band actually begins.
AFFINITY (1970)
1) I Am And So Are You; 2)
Night Flight; 3) I Wonder If I Care As Much; 4) Mr. Joy; 5) Three Sisters; 6)
Coconut Grove; 7) All Along The Watchtower; 8*) Eli's Coming; 9*) United States
Of Mind.
Here is a classic
textbook case of a band that could be, but wasn't, for no particularly fatal
reason. Things just didn't work out. But at its very best, during that brief
moment when it almost was, the band
had a perfectly good chance to grow into at least something like Renaissance or
Curved Air, and there is some sense in how carefully its small cult following
has amassed all the relics, starting from the only LP officially released
during the band's existence and ending with all the outtakes, demos, and
archival mementos both from before and from afterwards.
At the time when their
self-titled album was released, Affinity were a five-person band from Brighton,
most of them idealistic college students intent on making «serious» rock music.
Their chief selling points: (a) intelligent humility, making them rely as
prominently on cover versions of classic tunes as their own material — in an
age when «serious» acts were supposed to camouflage their influences rather
than openly state them; (b) a heavy, «grinding» style of organ playing by
keyboardist Lynton Naiff, whose sound is much more responsible for the band's
hard rock style than Mike Jopp's guitar; (c) the iron lungs of vocalist Linda
Hoyle, versatile enough to evoke the fury of Grace Slick on one track and then
the tenderness of Joni Mitchell on another.
The result is an
excellent album, and even in those demanding days of 1970, most critics had
some kind words to say about it. Its only flaw is that it synthesizes too much
without carving out a totally individualistic style — working fine in the 21st
century, perhaps, where so many critical darlings are almost afraid to develop
a-thing-all-their-own for fear of being dismissed as too narrow-minded, but
not in 1970, when every great band was expected to spearhead its own genre.
Which makes all the more
sense for us to re-experience the taste of Affinity
now that the 21st century is tenth-part over. If heavy, sweaty, and artsy rock
music is your cup of tea, tracks like 'I Am And So Are You' and 'Three
Sisters', driven by massive organ riffs and overlaid with thick brass
arrangements more reminiscent of the jarring distorted grunts of Colosseum than
the much more poppy approach of Blood, Sweat & Tears, are sure to make your
day. If you like your art rock in a more quiet, nocturnal mode, then 'Night
Flight' and 'Mr. Joy' (particularly the latter, with Linda Hoyle practicing all
over the scale) are an equally good choice.
The band's knack for
invention is most evident on their near-unrecognizable rearrangement of the
Everly Brothers' 'I Wonder If I Care As Much' — with harpsichords, cellos,
chimes, harps, strange scraping percussion, choral vocal arrangements, and a
big wailing Mellotron melody running through the fields (provided that really is a Mellotron); it's as if the song's
purpose were to outdo Pet Sounds,
clearly an impossible task since they are unable to match the beauty of the
harmonies, but in terms of complexity of arrangements, the final result almost
puts Brian to shame.
The band's self-evident
Achilles' heel is rambling: most of Side B is dedicated to a long, long, long
take on 'All Along The Watchtower', delivered by Linda with epic Biblical
force, but mostly turned into a showcase for Naiff's organ doodling: he takes
no fewer than three lengthy solos,
without allowing Jopp even a single guitar
break (and it's not as if he were not up to the task — his art-bluesy solo on
'Three Sisters' is quite fluent). The weird thing is, I like his doodling: each
of the three solos is slightly different in texture and consists of carefully
executed lines that must have been thought out and pre-rehearsed — building up
to a great noisy climax at the end. (The style is mostly reminiscent of Jon
Lord circa 1970, but Lord would actually improvise a lot more, playing whatever
quotation from whatever classical piece would be roaming in his head at the
moment — too much expertise can be
just as bad as too little of it, in some contexts).
The bottomline is —
there isn't really a single bad track on the record. But, epoch-wise, it may
have come out just a little too late, at a time when «art rock» in its early
stage, that is, blues, folk, and rock'n'roll tunes dressed up in exotic
instruments and spiced with quotations from classical and jazz idioms, was
giving way to the «prog» way of life, where these idioms themselves took on as
much meaning as «rock». These guys could certainly compete with Donovan or
Quicksilver Messenger Service, but not with King Crimson or Yes. It is only
these days that, finally, they can be judged on their own. Affinity may not be one of those «forgotten masterpieces» on the
level of Odessey And Oracle, but
it's the perfect album to bitch about
when all of those first-tier range forgotten masterpieces start sounding like
old clichés to you. Come to think of it, who'd be able to prove that Lynton Naiff's keyboard
playing isn't every bit as
accomplished as Rod Argent's?
Thumbs up from the bottom of me heart; and do not bypass the bonus tracks on the
CD release either — there is a stomping cover of Laura Nyro's 'Eli's Coming'
out there that almost annihilates the original.
AFFINITY 1971-72 (1971-72; 2003)
1) Moira's Hand; 2) Grey
Skies; 3) Cream On Your Face; 4) Sunshower; 5) All Along The Watchtower / It's
About That Time; 6) Rio; 7) Poor Man's Son; 8*) Sarah's Wardrobe; 9*) Highgate.
When Linda Hoyle and
Lynton Naiff simultaneously declared that they were parting ways with Affinity,
in order to enjoy a more peaceful existence in Obscurity, hardly anyone
familiar with the band's output could doubt its future as a Non-Entity. The good sides of the band, upon which a
bright shining future could have been constructed, were the vocals and the
keyboard passages, and now they were no more. (Incidentally, Linda Hoyle pretty
much disappeared from the musical scene after putting out one mediocre solo album,
and Naiff disappeared altogether — so much for yielding to antisocial
behaviour!).
Nevertheless, it turns
out that the remaining members did decide to plow along, rebooting the whole
thing from scratch. The place of Naiff was occupied by Dave Watts — yes, Dave
Watts, who may have been head boy at the school and captain of his team (that's
what Ray Davies tells us), but, for some reason, eventually switched to playing
second-rate keyboards. Hoyle's spot was given to Vivienne McAuliffe, formerly
of Principal Edwards Magic Theatre, a bizarre music-and-theater artistic
commune specializing in crossing Shakespeare with the Grateful Dead. And then
they tried to go on as if nothing happened.
The results are almost
surprisingly decent. Although there is nothing particularly interesting going
on in terms of technique or complexity, the band spent some time improving their
compositional skills, and came up with quite a few win-quality art-pop songs —
which McAuliffe gives a classy interpretation; her vocals do not have the
ticklish «beastly» quality of Hoyle, belonging more to the «British female folk
singer» breed, somewhere in between Annie Haslam and Sandy Denny, but she has
more range, and is quite capable of adding real fire to all the right places.
So both 'Moira's Hand'
and 'Cream On Your Face' are exciting «hard-folk»-rockers with catchy choruses
and classy, if not really unique, sound; 'Rio' has an impressive build-up from
subdued jangly folk-pop to its pompous art-rock refrain — watch how McAuliffe goes
from twittery-fluffy chirping to all-out boisterous screaming; and 'Sunshower'
and 'Poor Man's Son' (the latter contributed by friend Mike D'Abo, whose own
recording of the song never extols the loveliness of the vocal melody as much
as McAuliffe's performance) are both pretty ballads well worth revisiting from
time to time.
Predictably, the band
stutters when going for extended takes — without the required instrumental
power on their hands, the «epic» 'Grey Skies' sounds underdeveloped in its
vocal parts and excessive in the instrumental ones; and the re-recording of
'All Along The Watchtower' is a blunderous mistake — this is the kind of tune
on which the subtler approach of McAuliffe could never compete with Linda
Hoyle's blasts, and the solo parts are just a joke next to Naiff's cleverly
mapped organ journeys; the original's eleven minutes seemed to go by much
faster than the eight minutes of the new version.
We can only hope that
this track was just a bit of studio rehearsal, not intended for inclusion on
the band's second album — hope, but never know, since that album never came to
pass: before the new-look band had the proper time to get a record deal, «good
friend» Mike D'Abo simply whisked away the remaining original members to back
him up as a solo performer, leaving McAuliffe jobless and with no future hope
of competing with Sonja Kristina or Maddy Prior.
The only reason that we
are now aware that this second incarnation of Affinity left something behind in
the first place is the nostalgic kindness of Angel Air Records, who, upon
re-releasing the 1970 album in 2002, followed it up by making available to the
public just about every little scrap of material related to the band the very
next year. Of these archival deposits, only Affinity 1971-72 deserves a special review (note that the album
also includes a couple bonus instrumentals that seem to have been recorded at
a much later date); the rest date back to earlier times, with self-evident
titles like Live Instrumentals 1969,
Origins 1965-67, and even Origins: The Baskervilles 1965 (some
live playing there, with easily imaginable sound quality). These are of minor,
if any, historic importance, but the seven tracks on Affinity 1971-72 really play out like an album, and a pretty
coherent one at that — thumbs up, and yes, big pity about both girls
fading out of sight and sound so early in their careers.
BACK UP TRAIN (1967)
1) Back Up Train; 2) Hot Wire;
3) Stop And Check Myself; 4) Let Me Help You; 5) I'm Reachin' Out; 6) Don't
Hurt Me No More; 7) Don't Leave Me; 8) I'll Be Good To You; 9) Guilty; 10) That's
All It Takes (Lady); 11) Get Yourself Together; 12) What's It All About; 13) A
Lover's Hideaway.
You would have to be quite exceptional at your
homework to even know this record exists. It is credited to Al Greene, with an extra «e» at the end that
would be soon removed so as not to lead the buyers into orthographic confusion.
It came out almost three years before Al's «proper» debut with Hi Records and
Willie Mitchell. In all honesty, it bears only a remote resemblance to what
came to be known as the «classic Al Green» style. At least these days, it is
finally available on CD — with due respect to the Reverend's status and proper
care for his purse.
But, unlike some
«formative» debuts that we could name with a blush, Back Up Train is certainly not a record to be ashamed of. In fact,
in terms of sheer consistency and simple «enjoyability», I would argue that
it is more solid than the «proper debut» itself (Green Is Blues). It is
simply different — much more suitable
to the tastes of those who dig straightforward, catchy, danceable, classic R&B,
than of those who are in need of soft, silky, sexy sounds to make out to, and
who, not unjustly, consider Al Green their guiding light in that department.
Being utterly unoriginal, Back Up Train may be best described as the sum of its influences: a
little jerky hoppin'-and-boppin' from James Brown, a touch of soul from Otis
Redding, plenty of clean-cut, white-suited, well-tailored spirituality from The
Impressions, and Marvin Gaye, perhaps? I am sure he is hiding somewhere in
here as well (for instance, it is his
legacy that may be responsible for the actual «hooks» in these songs, rather
than mere «grooves»). I wish I could claim that all these influences fall
together into something completely idiosyncratic and one-of-a-kind, but I
cannot. The only independent aspect here is Green(e)'s singing voice, already
capable of seducing the audience — even if, at the moment, he is still sparing
those trademark killer high notes of his for just a few spine-tingling choruses;
in particular, do not miss his glorious croon of 'I've been cheated...' ('Don't
Hurt Me No More'), an early, but quite impressive example of his ability to
mix smooth sexiness with spiritual desperation.
Still, as far as pure craftsmanship goes, the album
is beyond criticism. The songwriting, mainly courtesy of Curtis Rodgers and
Palmer James, Al's old musical buddies and co-founders of the independent Hot
Line Music label on which the album was released, is honest and moderately
creative. The musicianship is either first-rate or, at worst, second-rate,
which is still pretty damn good for 1967. The arrangements are tasteful and make
the best use of mid-Sixties technology — particularly impressive is 'I'll Be
Good To You', which, over its limited two minutes, manages to throw in choppy 'Taxman'-style
rhythm guitar, a complex proto-funk rhythm section, a brash brass opening,
echoey vocal harmonies, and an almost psychedelic strings section, with some
weird violin/cello interplay (or was that a Mellotron instead of a violin?)
that makes me suspect that someone in the studio must have been quite a big fan
of 'Strawberry Fields Forever' — and, by the way, we would fairly soon
explicitly witness Al's interest in the Beatles.
For the record, Green(e) himself is only
credited for one song, 'Stop And Check Myself', which is, as one might expect,
a little more personal and a little less lyrically trivial than the rest of the
stuff, but not a particular highlight from a purely musical side. I must
confess that I personally prefer Palmer James' 'Let Me Help You' and 'Don't
Leave Me', if only for the cool hooks concealed in the backing vocals, for
which Mr. James must have had quite a hidden fetish, if he was writing the best
lines for Green's backing singers rather than for the man himself. Odd.
Predictably, cold rational analysis would
demand to trash this record as a predictable product of its time, but in the
end, it is so nice and friendly that a thumbs up
is impossible to deny, especially if we remember that it is not particularly
easy to find great R&B with a solid hook-base, or talented R&B artists
who could look for inspiration towards The Beatles as easily as they could
towards James Brown or Ray Charles.
GREEN IS BLUES (1969)
1) One Woman; 2) Talk To Me;
3) My Girl; 4) The Letter; 5) I Stand Accused; 6) Gotta Find A New World; 7) What Am I Gonna Do With Myself; 8) Tomorrow's
Dream; 9) Get Back Baby; 10) Get Back; 11) Summertime; *12) I Want To Hold Your
Hand.
The "proper" start of Al's career: a
new producer (Willie Mitchell), a new label (Hi Records), a new backing band
(the Hi Rhythm Section), and... well, no, on this album the new determination
to finally find his own unique style is nowhere yet to be seen. Green Is
Blues, for some reason, drops the "Rhythm" stem before the
"Blues" one, but one listen is enough to understand that in 1969, Al
was still trying to market himself (or, rather, Al's producer was trying to
market Al) as a cool swingin' cat, whippin' his audiences into a groove that
didn't include smoothness, suaveness, and silkiness into its list of
ingredients.
For one thing, Green is still singing with a
certain degree of harshness in his voice; the lush velvet of his phonation was
still waiting for a chance to unravel. (We only get a very little glimpse here
on the rather so-so composition 'What Am I Gonna Do With Myself'). For another,
there are very few straightforward ballads on the album — in fact, maybe just
the opener, 'One Woman', which cleverly grows from quiet/tender to all-out
operatic, and a cover of 'My Girl', and that's that. All of the other songs
will at least have you tap your foot — including Green's lone original, 'Get
Back Baby', where he tries to ride James Brown's funky train by relying on
chicken-scratch guitars and very Brown-like grunting. Unconvincingly.
The entire album smells of foot-in-the-water,
as would probably any album that covers both 'Summertime' and
'Get Back', not to mention the already mentioned 'My Girl'. The take on 'Get
Back' is at least curious, along the lines of Otis Redding's take on 'A Hard
Day's Night' — it's always fun to see the black groove masters adapt the
Beatles to their own sense of rhythm and musical vision — but whether we really
need one more version of 'Summertime' is certainly up to discussion. Green's
vocals are perhaps most impressive on his version of the Box Tops' 'The
Letter', since he actually sings all the way through rather than grunt or recite,
and essays almost every trick in his vocal repertoire.
A major highlight that few people usually
mention is Doc Oliver and Carl Smith's 'Gotta Find A New World' — actually, one
of Al's most passionate socially-tinged songs, a little 'Gimme Shelter'-ish in
mood, with its tense bass line, female backup harmonies and Green driving
himself into frenzied desperation. A song almost criminally underarranged,
though: with a little more work it could have become a timeless epic rather
than just a forgotten track on one of Green's lesser records.
A decent start overall, but for some reason,
whenever I call upon my heart and brain for judgement, both happen to be out
for lunch, no matter what time of day it is. Meaning that the judgement has to
be suspended, and the music lover should proceed at his own risk. There is a CD
edition with lots of bonus tracks, I hear, but the only one on mine is an early
single version of 'I Want To Hold Your Hand', which is... well, it's not
difficult to imagine what an Al Green version of 'I Want To Hold Your Hand'
could sound like.
AL GREEN GETS NEXT TO YOU (1971)
1) I Can't Get Next To You; 2)
Are You Lonely For Me Baby; 3) God is Standing By; 4) Tired Of Being Alone; 5)
I'm A Ram; 6) Driving Wheel; 7) Light My Fire; 8) You Say It; 9) Right Now,
Right Now; 10) All Because; 11*) Ride, Sally, Ride; 12*) True Love; 13*) I'll
Be Standing By.
Third time gets it right. Please own this Green
album: there is nothing else like it in his catalog. Al's first really focused,
really consistent effort still catches him in his transitional phase, when he
hasn't yet decided whether it is more promising to keep on putting out harder,
grittier grooves, or to completely reinterpret himself as The Ladies' Man. So
he tries some of both, but with a serious bias towards the "grittier"
side nevertheless — and if you've ever gotten tired of the exquisite, but
tiring soft sound of his post-1971 records, Gets Next To You gives you
an Al Green who can do it all: rock along with the best of 'em and croon like
even the best ones of them can't.
The only thing he can't do is get next
to you, as he shamefully confesses in the title track... but then you look at
the album title and you know he's only pretending. Slowing down the original
Temptations version, removing the funk and replacing it with a slow, longing,
burning R'n'B melody, Al gives the song a whole new life, and the Memphis Horns
a terrific playground for practicing their brassy geometry. Instead of playful
and aggressive, the song is now dark and disturbing, and while Al's one-man
potential is not enough to replace from four to six different individual
Temptations, he has the advantage of personalizing the song and building up a persona:
the same confused, chaotic, but mild and lovable persona he'd be regularly
invocating from now on. Watch out for the two or so bars of grizzly
psychedelic-Funkadelic-like guitar in the solo, too.
But 'I Can't Get Next To You' isn't the only
half-cool, half-relaxed, sweaty, rhythmic workout on the album. 'I'm A Ram' is
like a tightly wound coil of great brass, organ, and guitar riffs, over which
Al asserts his superiority to the average Joe; Roosevelt Sykes' (yes!) 'Driving
Wheel' is indeed given the musical shape of a rollin' wheel (more great
riffage); and on 'You Say It', 'Right Now, Right Now', and 'All Because' they
finally figure out how to make Al sound funky without emulating James Brown. It
turns out that all you have to do is just... stop emulating James Brown!!!
(Even though he still can't help giving out a few grunts and hiccups on 'All
Because', but on that particular song they fit the ominous organ chords to a
tee).
The album's biggest hit and best-known song
was, however, one of the "softies" — 'Tired Of Being Alone'. For a
good reason: this is the tune that has for the first time given us the new,
silky-smooth Al Green, and the world certainly didn't forget it. But in the
general context of the album, there's little that makes this tender little gem
more worthy than the poppy, jumpy 'Are You Lonely For Me Baby', or the gospel
number 'God Is Standing By'.
So we will forget the album's only clumsy
misfire — a lumbering reconstruction of 'Light My Fire', in the vein of the
failed experiments on Green Is Blues — and join the brain and the heart
in a glorious thumbs up tandem. Perhaps
this isn't the most sonically perfect album Al ever cut, but it's certainly one
of his most consistent, and one that goes down the easiest with me.
LET'S STAY TOGETHER (1972)
1) Let's Stay Together; 2)
La-La For You; 3) So You're Leaving; 4) What Is This Feeling; 5) Old Time
Lovin'; 6) I've Never Found A Girl; 7) How Can You Mend A Broken
Heart; 8) Judy; 9) It Ain't No Fun To Me; 10*) Eli's Game; 11) *Listen.
Early 1972 marks the arrival of the new,
freshly-glossed Al Green. After half a decade of kicking around, he finally and
ultimately falls into his new groove he'd be exploring for another half a
decade, before making the transition into gospel. This is the period that has
all the hits. It may or may not be one's favourite period in the man's career,
but it's certainly his period, a time when everything came out all right
and when no one else could make it came out the same way.
It is hardly a coincidence, either, that Let's
Stay Together is Al's first album where the originals outnumber the covers
— seven to two. Al didn't have much of a knack for conjuring tight funky
grooves out of his own mind, but soft silky ones seemed to come to him
naturally. The class of Al's act cannot be really esteemed without realizing
that he really wrote songs with melodies, not just riding high on
the strength of his newly-found unique voice and his tremendously gifted
backing band. These melodies may not come through too quickly, and not all of
the songs are of equal quality, but they, and nothing else, are the reason for
owning all of these classic Al albums except of just one, for collection's
sake.
The biggest hit — in fact, Green's biggest hit
so far — was the title track, which is maybe just one tiny step away from a
gross cliché of the idea of conjugal happiness, but it's exactly that
one tiny step that makes me recommend it for all the happy couples in this
world without the slightest bit of embarrassment. Some sappy strings in the
background could spoil the picture if they were given free rein, but they never
ever threaten to overshadow the song's main attraction: Green's voice, which
had by then redefined the meaning of the word "soft" when applied to
somebody's vocal cords. It's not just "soft", it's seducing to the
breaking point, far beyond the realms of common decency, I'd say. It has to be
rated PG-13 at least, and X in extreme cases.
The new approach works so well that the
grittier, funkier spirit of Gets Next To You is all but forgotten.
Sterner rhythms only kick in on two tracks: the boppy album closer 'It Ain't No
Fun To Me' and the paranoid 'So You're Leaving', which comes in two tracks
after 'Let's Stay Together' and has the effect of a cold shower after the
pleasant happy delicacy of the former: Green gives his best impersonation of a
nervous, tired man on the edge of his seat (or sofa), tearing himself apart
because he's being abandoned but never really able to decide what to do about
it. (The man was always much too gallant to behave in a 'good riddance, bitch'
manner).
Everything else is milk and honey, one hundred
percent organic and fresh from the local farmer's market. Even the choice of
covers is telling: the Bee Gees' recent lush ballad 'How Can You Mend A Broken
Heart', one of their sugariest creations, which, in Al's treatment, manages to
sound more natural and convincing.
Frankly speaking, there's a bit too much
sugar, and the balance would be somewhat corrected on Al's subsequent
releases. The transition is too sudden and too total, and a few of the songs
look like they're just there to mark this totality rather than to be minor masterpieces
per se. But even the lesser songs still warrant further listening, and this
means a sincere thumbs up from every
piece of the organism, be it emotional or intellectual.
I'M STILL IN LOVE WITH YOU (1972)
1) I'm Still In Love With You;
2) I'm Glad You're Mine; 3) Love
And Happiness; 4) What A Wonderful Thing Love Is; 5) Simply Beautiful; 6)
Oh, Pretty Woman; 7) For
The Good Times; 8) Look What You Done For Me; 9) One Of These Good Old Days.
I always knew there was one particularly magic
moment on this record — the idea had been lingering in my head since the very
first listen, but, for a long time, it seemed impossible to lay my finger on
it, as if the whole album were shrouded in a stealth cloak. But then finally I
knew the secret, even if it didn't become any less magical because of this.
It comes at 0:37 into 'I'm Glad You're Mine'.
[If you own the album, go listen to it before you read on any further and see
if you agree]. It's when the tender strings "swoop" arrives in
response to Al's call. He makes the call three times, see — 'baby, I'm
so glad you're here... baby, I've got something to say my dear... baby,
I'm so glad you're mine...' — at exactly the third 'baby', no sooner, no
later, the strings come in as if finally replying, finally giving in to Green's
seductive, yearning cooing. See, not even the instruments can resist
this, much less his female audience!
On I'm Still In Love With You, Green's
transformation into the Ladies' Man is complete. Even the album cover, with the
man sporting a blinding white suit, slyly and contentedly, with a hint at
decadence, perhaps, grinning at you from a blinding white wicker chair, exudes
temptation (of course, some of the more cynical heads might probably think of
it as advertising a dentist's office instead). And the songs are ALL about
love, passion, devotion, and, to a small extent, suffering (from love, passion,
and devotion). Simply put, Al now knows what kind of thing is best for him, and
dedicates himself completely to doing that one thing.
Accusing the record of monotonousness would be
like condemning a lion for carnivorous behaviour. It may be wise to savour its
genius slowly, one or two songs at a time, to get a better taste for all of its
delicious little flourishes and vignettes — another well-propagated use for it
is to employ it as the soundtrack to one's making out, if you're into that kind
of thing (i. e. a generous threesome with Al Green). The approaches are
numerous. But to treat this in an 'applied' matter without recognizing it as a
major work of art would be criminal.
I'm Still In Love With You has arguably the finest combination of
singing, melody, rhythm section work, organ, strings, and backup vocals on a
soul record ever. It is a very well fleshed out record, with multiple
sonic layers, a great level of understanding between all the players and the
singer, and a respectable balance between groove and melody. A perfect example
is 'Love And Happiness'; the strings flourish on 'I'm Glad You're Mine' may be
the most magical moment on the record, but 'Love And Happiness' is simply my
favourite song in the Green catalog, and actually, the moment when the mysterious
organ line presents the main section after the quiet introduction is only
iotas below the 'baby'-substituting strings.
And it goes deeper than one might expect from a
song called 'Love And Happiness'. It's a nervous, disturbing song, with the
organ and the brass section working towards establishing a slightly paranoid
mood — so that Al's "warning" at the beginning of the song
('something that can make you do wrong, make you do right...') comes back to
you with a vengeance, and so that you realize that the 'power of love' may,
indeed, be a double-edged weapon. And all this time the rhythm section hacks
away with a rhythmic power normally intended to make you dance — but here, the
heavy, precise drumming and the pounding bass only remind you further of the
danger of the whole thing. And then it just goes on and on for three minutes
after there's no more verses, because that's exactly how much time Al needs to
implant his inner confusion and turmoil inside his listeners — those that
actually listen, of course.
But that's about the grimmest thing on this
unabashedly happy album. Shaking off the cobwebs, Al then proceeds straight
into the honey-pouring 'What A Wonderful Thing Love Is', and his cover of
Orbison's 'Pretty Woman' transforms a magnificent pop song into a magnificent
celebration of an idolized love object.
My only complaint is that I don't seem to
possess the exact amount of soul to connect with Green on the same level as I
am able to connect with, say, John Lennon. My mind finds too many mannerisms
and not enough straightforward directness in this stuff; all of these sonic
layers are gorgeous, but just how many of them do you need to penetrate in
order to get straight to the heart? And is that steel-melting, iceberg-thawing
voice of his really the voice of his heart, or just a well calculated
gimmick to give ladies their dose of physical pleasure? These questions will
never cease to torment me, but in the meantime that does not prevent I'm
Still In Love With You from becoming the most consistent, the most
well-produced, the most symbolic album in Al Green's entire career, or from
receiving an easy thumbs up from both the
intellectual department (for some of the cleverest arrangements in soul
history) and the emotional one (for successful idolization of love as the
supreme emotion).
CALL ME (1973)
1) Call Me (Come Back Home);
2) Have You Been Making Out OK?; 3) Stand Up; 4) I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry;
5) Your Love Is Like The Morning Sun; 6) Here I Am (Come And Take Me); 7) Funny
How Time Slips Away; 8) You Ought To Be With Me; 9) Jesus Is Waiting.
Robert Christgau gives Call Me an A+
rating, and so do many other critics, whether influenced by "The
Dean" or not. I have not been able to understood what exactly is it that
separates Call Me from the rest and so unequivocally turns it into the
pinnacle of Green's career. But there is hardly any need to turn that into a
pretext for not sleeping nights. It is obvious, anyway, that an Al Green fan
without a copy of Call Me is like a Michael Jackson fan without a copy
of Off The Wall, regardless of whether this or Thriller is his
highest point — in other words, a ridiculous and bizarre entity that defies
scientific explanation.
Innovation-wise, Call Me makes one bold
step forward by taking two well-known country standards — Hank Williams' 'I'm
So Lonesome I Could Cry' and Willie Nelson's 'Funny How Time Slips Away' — and
transforming them into classic Seventies' country-soul with Al Green's seal of
approval. Having already shown that he could effortlessly (or with but a little
effort) Greenify radical R'n'B, whitebread ballads, and even Brit-pop, he now
takes his cue from Ray Charles and delves into country. 'I'm So Lonesome' is a
particular stunner, a song whose mood and lyrics suit Al's general self-pitying
style so well it must have been the obvious choice; he injects a little bit of
different emotion into each syllable, and if you thought, like me, that Hank's
original was intentionally somewhat detached, containing its grief to just the
lyrics, you wouldn't be able to think that about Green's version.
Another reason for the high critical opinion
might be that, in fact, the whole album conveys a general atmosphere of sadness
and moodiness, with the dial set to 'tragic' or 'lamentable' far more often
than on I'm Still In Love With You — and don't we usually regard tragedy
as the high genre, a priori set to exploring the innermost depths of one's
soul? The very opening is telling — sad, sad, sad swoops from the strings and
even the horns; those same horns that, in an Al Green tune, usually announce
joy, but here morosely pronounce separation. And the echoey female backup
vocals — 'call me', 'call me', 'call me', like a Eurydice might have been
calling out to Orpheus from under the ground, if classical metaphors are
allowed. A masterpiece of a song, but certainly not the proper tune to
make out to, at least if you're even a little bit superstitious.
Only a couple songs sound more upbeat and R'n'B-ish,
like 'Stand Up' or 'Here I Am', but in my mind they actually sound more timid
than Green's first full-blown entry in the gospel genre, the almost six-minute
sermon of 'Jesus Is Waiting'. Sermon, not song — there is a basic vocal theme
here, but it does not matter one iota next to the amazing web of vocal overdubs
that Green uses to draw you closer to his religious conscience. As goes with
all of great gospel, though, you don't have to be a zealous Christian to
appreciate it — for all I know, you could be a militant atheist. I'm an
agnostic, but even I can't resist his 'thank you... thank you... thank you', or
'help me... help me... help me...', or especially 'you been good to me... you
been good to me...'. Like all best sermons, this works well on the
subconscious level, and it makes me feel good and inspired without making me
yearn to be baptized.
It does go without saying that this is a
highest quality Al Green record with enough soul to warm the heart and enough
inventiveness to soothe the brain, so a thumbs up
is guaranteed from both directions. As for the issue of "all-time
best", I don't think Al himself ever gave a damn about it, and I don't do,
either.
LIVIN' FOR YOU (1973)
1) Livin' For You; 2) Home
Again; 3) Free At Last; 4) Let's Get Married; 5) So Good To Be Here; 6) Sweet
Sixteen; 7) Unchained Melody; 8) My God Is Real; 9) Beware.
I cannot think of anything substantial to say
about this album. It is another transitional piece, apparently, before Green
started venturing into more "danceable" territory with his next
album, and as such, reflects the usual high standard of Green's records, but
with next to no serious surprises and no minor breakthroughs into unexplored
territory.
For some reason, the songs here just don't
grapple as much as the best songs on his two previous records; maybe he was
again temporarily running out of ideas, or maybe his musical partners were too
busy trying out the latest in trendy chemicals, or maybe it's just that the
recording sessions fell on an unlucky day. Case in point: the eight-minute jam
of 'Beware' looks like it's there just to occupy all the empty space — with
'Jesus Is Waiting', at least Al had some sort of point to break through, but here
he is just coasting; with class, but still coasting.
He also seems to be recycling ideas; for
instance, the "rocking" section of 'Home Again' would have been far
more effective in surprising the listener, who'd already settled into the soft
groove of it, if it hadn't been lifted right off 'All Because'. Minor quibble,
to be sure, but enforcing the general unhappy feeling that Livin' For You
is, in fact, the first in a long string of albums where the man finally has
nothing new left to say and is forced to repeat himself.
The big hit was 'Let's Get Married', and,
regardless of what I say, deservedly so: it's first-class Al Green, tenderness
and paranoia and tremendous R'n'B drive all in one. And realism, of course — no
clichéd lovey-dovey nonsense or dumb sexual bravado for Mr. Green, he
always looks like he's torn between the holiness of his feelings and the
utmost horror of them — exactly because they're so holy, he's so scared
of them; true love, after all, is a very, very scary thing, much more so than
simple adultery. If 'Love And Happiness' didn't manage to get the message
through, then 'Let's Get Married' certainly will; throughout all of it, you can
never really guess if the protagonist offers the girl to get married because he
happily means it or because he just wants to get over all of this as soon as
possible.
However, the only track that truly points to
the future is, odd enough, the album's most lightweight number — 'Sweet
Sixteen', a straightahead dance number that could have been disco if it had
been just a tad faster. It does take some lyrical and musical clues from 'Sweet
Little Sixteen', but overall it's an unrecognizable re-working, with
near-robotic funky guitars, "geometrically arranged" string
embellishments, strict drum patterns, and just tiny touches of looseness here
and there to retain the connection to Green's classic style. One might call it
a cheapening of the general approach, but I'd rather save this remark for the
next album, where this "innovation" becomes a commodity; within the
context of Livin' For You, it's weirdly refreshing.
In the long run, it's still a thumbs up, of course, but I dare say the album
will very rarely show up on the Top-3 for any fans of the Reverend, unless it
chances to be the first Al Green record ever heard by them. Incidentally, it
also happens to feature the cheesiest album cover from that period: Al Green as
a cartoonish towering giant! I'd rather see the man in a pimp hat than that.
AL GREEN EXPLORES YOUR MIND (1974)
1) Sha-La-La (Make Me Happy);
2) Take Me To The River;
3) God Blessed Our Love; 4) The City; 5) One Night Stand; 6) I'm Hooked On You;
7) Stay With Me Forever; 8) Hangin' On; 9) School Days.
Explores Your Mind? More like Explores Your Body! Keeping
up with the times, Al and producer Willie Mitchell steer the ship in a more
shallow direction, ending up with the first Al Green album in a long time that
might be more suitable for club audiences than late night make-outs. The tempos
are driven up, the strings swoop in precise funky grooves, Al introduces more
catchy vocal choruses, and much of this borders on proto-disco.
Is it bad? Who knows? After all, it is quite
slippery to try and accuse Al Green of "selling out"; his creed, from
the very start to the very end, has always been Spirituality, Sentimentality,
and Commerciality (or, if one wants to use a less derogatory term,
Accessibility). So, Al Green Explores Your Mind may abuse the latter
part, but it does so without sacrificing either Spirituality or
Sentimentality — and, if anything, he is now even closer to merging the two, e.
g. on 'God Blessed Our Love', the slowest and most gospel-oriented song on the
album. Nothing can be more exciting than bringing together God and the
lady you love, right?
But, of course, it can be relatively unsettling
to learn that the big hit, this time around, bears the title of 'Sha-La-La'.
It's not the Manfred Mann level of (anti-)intelligence, of course, yet there is
decidedly less subtlety to this little album-opening hymn than to 'Call Me' or
even 'Let's Get Married', and you can feel that decidedly less work went into
it, as well. So history was right to decide that the true song number
one on the album is Al's original version of 'Take Me To The River', not fully
appreciated by either black or white audiences until its popularization by
Talking Heads several years later.
With the Heads, it was put by David Byrne through
his well-oiled paranoia machine, but also lost the lyrical relevance — David
Byrne isn't well-known for being (and could have never even tried on the guise
of) a tortured lover, whereas for Al it's the primary occupation, and his use
of a Christian metaphor — 'take me to the river, wash me down' — to reflect the
yearning for getting rid of a love he doesn't feel right about is right on
target. Once again, here's this idea of a supernatural fear outbalancing
temptation, and it is perhaps no accident that 'God Blessed Our Love' is the
very next track: in order to overcome this fear, Al has to make sure that this
is not a demonic temptation, but rather a holy feeling validated by his
superior. It's only natural, though, that 'Take Me To The River' is the masterpiece,
and 'God Blessed Our Love' the trifling footnote.
None of the other songs have an intrigue as
deep-cutting as 'Take Me To The River', but both the ballads and the dance
grooves are uniformly tasteful, and one has to seriously, seriously commend
the strings and horns arrangements: for instance, the first fifteen seconds of
'One Night Stand', with the two waves of these sounds meeting each other, are
quite a glorious fifteen seconds, and the clever use of the harp on 'Hangin'
On' is a refreshing novelty. So let it be well understood that, even though the
emphasis is on Entertainment, this is still first-class Entertainment and
still one of the best soul/R'n'B albums of the year. And even though it begins
with the feather-light 'Sha-La-La', it still ends with the pensive,
introspective finale of 'School Days' — Al sweetly and gracefully reminiscing
about his early days of romance. Or maybe reminiscing about your early
days of romance? After all, it's Al Green Explores Your Mind, not
His Mind. But a big thumbs up from
the heart regardless of the answer, and a slightly lesser one from the mind,
which still cannot completely shake off the not so pleasant feeling of being "explored"
with the likes of 'Sha-La-La'.
AL GREEN IS LOVE (1975)
1) L-O-V-E (Love); 2) Rhymes;
3) The Love Sermon; 4) There Is Love; 5) Could I Be The One; 6) Love Ritual; 7)
I Didn't Know; 8) Oh Me, Oh My (Dreams In My Arms); 9) I Gotta Be More (Take Me
Higher); 10) I Wish You Were Here.
This isn't a bad album, but its message is
forcefully overstated — just look at all the song titles. Besides, it's not
like Al is letting us in on something we haven't been previously aware of. In
reality, this may simply be a sign that the king (of Love) is faltering, and
that this nothing more than a desperate gimmick to reassert his failing
position. When the Rolling Stones, on their 1969 tour, billed themselves 'The
Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band In The World' whenever they went, audiences weren't
really too sure of this prior to the show, meaning that the gesture was
arrogant, but masterfully provocative. When Al Green, in 1975, claims that he
"is Love", though, he is reminding this to people who were already
quite positively certain of the fact since 1972 at the latest, and when exactly
is it that you have to remind people of the obvious? That's right — when the
obvious is either no longer obvious or, on the contrary, is so obvious it has
become boring and forgettable. So, not a good sign.
There is exactly one song on Al Green
Is Love that constitutes forward movement: the near-instrumental 'Love
Ritual' —a musical representation of said ritual through the art of funky
jamming. It is pretty decent as far as proto-disco jamming goes, but,
evidently, it cannot be anything but an oddity in Green's catalog, because who
the hell wants to listen to Al Green not singing? Its presence on the
album is only justified within a larger context, since Al clearly designed the
record as a semi-conceptual one, defining and describing the power of love in
multiple ways, including even one way that does not involve his trademark
vocals, except for a few woo-woos and hoola-hoolas.
The rest is basically just Explores Your
Mind Vol. 2: respectable dance grooves graced with catchy vocal hooks,
interchangeable but, as usual, all ranging from pretty to gorgeous. 'L-O-V-E'
and 'Oh Me, Oh My' are probably the high points of the 'tighter' sector,
especially the former, which is one of Al's most straightforward anthems,
completely devoid of subtlety or ambivalence — but, of course, one cannot and
should not always be ambivalent; there's always a time and place for letting
yourself go, and few people can do it more gracefully than Al.
However, the further we progress, the more he
seems to be slipping. The slower ballads aren't that captivating any more,
maybe because he cannot think of any new ways to seduce us, and who wants to
always be seduced in the very same way? that'd be missing the very point of
seduction. The hugest misstep is on 'I Didn't Know', whose eight-minute length
would indicate a soft R'n'B jam showered with inventive vocalization, like
'Jesus Is Waiting' or 'Beware', but instead it's just one more slow ballad with
a relatively generic performance, and it functions as okay background music to
make out to, but the greatness of Al was that, even if his previous output
could always be technically defined as 'background music to make out to', it
always went beyond that — 'I Didn't Know', on the other hand, belongs in
a decent-quality softcore flick, never to be judged as containing some sort of
value that trumps this level.
On shorter songs, hooks take more time to sink
in — I still haven't been able to buy into the magic of 'Could I Be The One' or
'The Love Sermon', and only a super-effort on 'I Wish You Were Here', where Al
really pulls all the stops with his falsetto, effectively grants a memorable
and moving ending to the record and thus, a general favorable impression, with
the best dance number opening it and the best ballad closing it.
It's interesting that the record scarcely ever
bears the imprint of Al's great tragedy of the preceding year, when his
then-current lover Mary Woodson scalded him with boiling grits and then
committed suicide — an incident which, as it is often claimed, moved him one
big step closer to fully converting to religious activities. Nor would I try to
insinuate that his third-degree burns resulted in this slight drop of musical
quality, a drop that was probably inevitable — you can't go on making great
music forever, not if you lock oneself in one particular style. It does,
however, seem reasonable to think that, the more messed up he became in
personal life, the more idyllic he would be shaping his musical landscapes,
which were his Wonderland refuge from the troubles of everyday existence. But
there's only so far you can go with idyllic settings, and on Al Green Is
Love, there is simply too much honey and not enough meat to balance the
diet. Thumbs up anyway — there are no
serious accusations I could have against the record — but if there ever was
such a thing as a "beginning of the end" for Green, this was it. Or
maybe it was the boiling grits.
FULL OF FIRE (1976)
1) Glory, Glory; 2) That's The
Way It Is; 3) Always; 4) There's No Way; 5) I'd Fly Away; 6) Full Of Fire; 7)
Together Again; 8) Soon As I Get Home; 9) Let It Shine.
Al made a whoppin' two albums in 1976 —
both of them easy-going and eminently listenable, but completely surprise-less.
Full Of Fire may be a bit more consistent than Have A Good Time,
or it may be vice versa, however, that is not saying much.
Do not get me wrong, though: Al's last really
big artistic transformation happened four years before, and since then his
main emphasis had steadily focused on creating new melodies rather than new
ways of expression. Full Of Fire is more or less evenly divided between
proto-disco dance numbers and slow ballads, and the dance numbers in particular
never disappoint — regardless of whether they celebrate the celestial ('Glory
Glory') or the carnal (title track), they're the usual mix of catchiness, fun,
and tasteful arrangements.
The ballads are slightly weaker this time
around, though, especially 'Together Again', which creeps along at a dehydrated
snail's pace and is weirdly lazy even in the vocal department; maybe somebody loves
the idea of stretching vocals, strings and saxes to the point of
thinning out to a microscopic level, finding it mesmerizing, but if formerly
the idea of an Al Green ballad was to assist your sleeping with a lovely lady,
the idea of 'Together Again' just seems to be in assisting you to sleep
— period. Arguably hooking people on ballads is a more subtle matter than
hooking them on rockers, since Al is clearly losing the balance here on these
two fronts.
Nevertheless, when the ballads run at a
slightly more upbeat tempo, the results are more optimistic. In particular,
'Soon As I Get Home' is one of Al's simplest, but also tenderest and warmest
creations — there's nothing here emotionally but a starry-eyed wish to be
reunited with one's beloved, of course, but as long as it's expressed with so
much passion, and as long as the strings continue to play the part of the
beloved to Al's part of the lover, who would want Al Green to drop this simple
approach in favour of a more complicated "existentialist" one?
All in all, once we get around to the bragging
title track, I'm all but ready to believe that, no matter how many times he's
going to do this all over again, he's still "full of fire", and will
remain that way until the end of time. Therefore, here's another highly
recommended Al Green album; thumbs up
from the heart, which is still in love with the man, and from the brain, which
is trying to calculate the exact number that it is possible to come up with a
winner using the same formula — using the Al Green catalog as essential empiric
data.
HAVE A GOOD TIME (1976)
1) Keep Me Crying; 2) Smile A
Little Bit More; 3) I Tried To Tell Myself; 4) Something; 5) The Truth Marches
On; 6) Have A Good Time; 7) Nothing Takes The Place Of You; 8) Happy; 9) Hold
On Forever.
Or maybe it's Have A Good Time, after
all, that is slightly more consistent than Full Of Fire — it's so easy
to sway from one to another when one stops playing and the other begins. At
least there is one major plus: no pure-atmosphere seven-minute track for the
ultra-dedicated fan. The closest to a seven-minute track is a couple
four-minute tracks, one of which ('Something') is really quite a moving ballad,
with some exquisitely novel use of a sitar (if that really is a sitar) that
someone is trying to play like a moody Nashville guitar. [The connection with
George Harrison, despite the sitar use, does not extend beyond the name of the
song]. The other chunk of slow romance, 'Nothing Takes The Place Of You', is
nothing special — but it is not a seven-minute chunk, and so you are not
forced to concentrate on how positively it demonstrates the depth of Al Green's
decline.
Elsewhere, he is accelerating the drive towards
disco, but there are no distinct disco basslines and the melody in all these
dance send-ups almost comes first and foremost before the groove. The only
track that misses competition with Chic and the Bee Gees by an inch is the
opener 'Keep Me Cryin', yet it is so awash in complex strings patterns that it
is hard to accuse it of extra cheesiness. If there is a flaw, it's that
Al is working way, way too hard to wrap the listener in a friendly, loving
vibe: with tunes like 'Have A Good Time', 'Happy', and 'Smile A Little Bit
More' — all on the same album! — he doesn't so much wrap you as he drowns you,
and if he were just a wee bit less talented and charismatic, this would be the
equivalent of overdosing on Prozac. All of the ambiguity and all of the subtle
darkness that used to elevate his art to the level of A-R-T seem to have been
burned away by just one pan of boiled grits, and I sincerely miss them...
...but only when I take a look back at his
major efforts from the start of the decade, that is. As frustrating as it is to
admit, there is not a single really weak tune on the record — well, 'The
Truth Marches On' starts out suspiciously, as if we were about to witness some
forced "gritty blues-rock", but then it turns out the blues-rock
aspect of the song is secondary to its atmosphere and inspired religious
message. And no matter how shallow and superficial I could find the exhortation
to 'have a good time', the note captured by Al comes across as so sincere and
charming in its naïveness that spiritual depth and profound meaning can go
fuck themselves for a good half hour — and I don't care.
THE BELLE ALBUM (1977)
1) Belle; 2) Loving You; 3)
Feels Like Summer; 4) Georgia Boy; 5) I Feel Good; 6) All 'N' All; 7) Chariots
Of Fire; 8) Dream.
In 1977, Al was but two years away from a
full-fledged immersion into radical gospel; it's all the more amazing that the
same year saw such a major oddity in his catalog as The Belle Album. He
may have realized himself that the last three records, consistent as they were,
were also pretty much interchangeable, and opted for a change of direction.
Long-time pal and producer Willie Mitchell was cordially given the sack; new
musicians were brought in the studio; Al wrote pretty much all of the material
himself, and he even played his own guitar on most of the tracks. The results
could have been terrible; instead, they are brilliant.
What's so fascinating about The Belle Album
is that it goes in two opposite directions at the same time. No other Al Green
record makes so well-pronounced a distinction between Dance and Dream; no two
Al Green songs are more different from each other than 'I Feel Good', symbolizing
the Dance and 'Dream', symbolizing itself. And yet the two extremes are one in
that both serve the same purpose — celebrating the beauty of Her and the
goodness of Him in one package, the two inseparable from each other.
For the Dance, Al finally makes the crossing
into disco (blessed are the polyester wearers, so the Lord says). But if all
disco were like this, we could still be hailing disco as the best musical breakthrough
since the days of Handel. 'I Feel Good' — an original, nothing to do with the
James Brown hit — boogies along to a clever web of acoustic rhythm, funky
clavinet patterns, brass bursts, and even a little modernistic electronic
percussion; it is disco, technically, but it feels like maniacal funk all the
way, even despite lacking fiery funky guitar solos. 'Georgia Boy', also built
around a disco bassline, is, however, its direct opposite: it's hushed and
stripped down, with just a little acoustic backing track and some handclaps
(and some delicate chiming in the background) strapped on top. The result is
fairly weird, as if we were witnessing an old folk-blues performer adjusting to
the modern times, but it's quite unique in a way.
Those who are more interested in the
"serious" aspects of soul music, though, will certainly want to pay
more attention to the Dream side of the story. That one is best illustrated by
'Belle' and 'Dream'. The former is a gorgeous ballad; the story is old — once
again, Green is assuring his girl that he has little choice but to share her
with the Lord, because 'I know you're all of these things, girl, but He's such
a brighter joy' (yes, I know that's exactly the way I'd always talk to my
wife were I a truly devoted believer) — but the way of delivery is new, with
Green's acoustic and the shrill, but pleasant synthesizer gelling together in a
manner that seriously raises the angelic feel of it all.
Yes, even though synthesized strings mostly
replace real ones on this album, it never feels wrong because they're pushed a
bit into the background to provide subtle atmosphere, while the loud part is
mostly Al's acoustic rhythm. This is even more pronounced on 'Dream'; the
latter formally belongs to the pile of Green's seven-minute mood-setters, but
it's better than most — it is really set in the manner of a "musical
lullaby", slowly rocking back and forth, rising and falling, soaring and
swooping; if you play it loud, it'll be a never-ending series of mini-climactic
moments, but you're probably supposed to play it soft, so that it gets a chance
to really lull you — I've always felt that "music that puts you to
sleep" is not necessarily a bad thing, and 'Dream' will put you to
sleep in one of the best ways possible, just as 'I Feel Good' will put you up
on your feet even if you were among the original jury that yielded the guilty
as charged verdict against disco.
Set so near the end of his career, so
unconspicuously nested among a string of "merely good" records, and
so near to the usually (but not in this case) precarious influence of the disco
spirits, The Belle Album rarely gets the same attention or respect as
the early 1970s records that defined Green's career, but to me it is obvious
that this is little more than the result of unfortunate circumstances, and my
own respect and love for the record prompt me to give it as solid a thumbs up as I'd give Call Me or I'm
Still In Love With You, and here's hoping the album will eventually return
to print and gain as much critical and fan appraisal as the older records.
TRUTH 'N' TIME (1978)
1) Blow Me Down; 2) Lo And
Behold; 3) Wait Here; 4) To Sir With Love; 5) Truth N' Time; 6) King Of All; 7)
I Say A Little Prayer; 8) Happy Days.
The point of this record, however, is
not clear. No sooner had Al rejuvenated and reinvented himself with The
Belle Album than he'd completed his conversion, and Truth 'N' Time
turned out to be his last record of secular music for quite a long time. But it
isn't even a properly done farewell to
his classic image: coming off the success of Belle, it's a veritable
cold shower, if not a straightforward fuck-you to this image. It's almost as
if, at this point, he didn't care so much that he'd intentionally produced a
total toss-off.
Truth 'N' Time completely adheres to the classic Woody Allen
formula, introduced a year earlier — 'such terrible food, and such small
portions'. With eight songs and not a single 'epic' among them, it runs for
less than thirty minutes, and the amount of throwaway cuts rises over fifty
percent. He didn't even write most of them, with gospel guru Bernard Staton
contributing three cuts and two others being covers of Burt Bacharach that are
usually associated with Lulu ('To Sir With Love') and Aretha Franklin ('I Say A
Little Prayer').
Of course, Al's professionalism and work ethics
prohibit him from releasing something utterly worthless, and the classic Green
sound is still in vogue, with the ballads retaining the atmosphere and the
dance numbers still kicking it up. But only moderately so. The title track and
'Happy Days' will only be bootylicious when not compared to the real maniacal
punch of 'I Feel Good', which was like almost a meticulous study on all the
possible reasons for shaking it up; and as for the ballads, the only thing that
managed to register properly on my meter was the chorus to 'Blow Me Down', very
idealistic and invigorating with its nice use of backing vocals. On the
downside, the cover of 'I Say A Little Prayer' may be the closest Green has
ever come to 'awful' — clumsy, rushed, and feeling completely superfluous; it's
no use trying to do it if you're unwilling and unable to compete with Aretha,
and Al is neither able nor willing.
In short, I don't understand this record at
all. Under different circumstances, I'd call this a typical effect of a
"contractual obligation", but Al wasn't getting out of any contract —
he was still associated with Hi Records, and he'd continue to be associated
with them for much of his gospel period. So, rather, Truth N' Time is just
a semi-misguided album from a person who'd finally lost interest in secular
pleasures, yet still could not force himself to make the complete conversion to
the Lord's music; it took another couple of years and another stage accident in
1979 to finally convince Green that taking this career risk was the right thing
for his soul. I am fairly sure that he himself, looking back, would give Truth
N' Time a thumbs down as decisive as
I am forced to award it, even if 'Blow Me Down' and the title track are
salvageable in the long run.
And, as much as pure gospel music annoys me to
no end — unless it is Mahalia Jackson taken in very small dosages — I guess
that an inspired gospel album is still preferable over an uninspired secular
pop one, regardless of whether it narrows your vision of things or widens it.
Except I have about as much interest in reviewing gospel music as I have in
writing about flamenco, so that you are free to explore Green's output in the
1980s on your own, without my judgements to refer to.
TOKYO... LIVE! (1981)
1) L-O-V-E (Love); 2) Tired Of
Being Alone; 3) Let's Stay Together; 4) How Can You Mend A Broken Heart; 5)
All'N'All; 6) Belle; 7) Sha-La-La (Make Me Happy); 8) Let's Get Married; 9) God
Blessed Our Love; 10) You Ought To Be With Me; 11) For The Good Times; 12)
Dream; 13) I Feel Good; 14) Love And Happiness.
This live album came out somewhat belatedly,
but early enough to be considered a 'proper' rather than 'archival' release; Al
himself is heard mentioning, during his stage banter, that they are recording
the show for a live album. And here is the live album itself: most certainly, a
God-sent gift for the fans who'd already given up hoping for any more secular
material from the man.
The Al Green live show generally boasted a high
reputation, but I am not so sure that their magic is properly captured here.
It's a long, two-LP set, honestly hitting on huge radio hits as well as some
rarities, well-recorded and quite "authentic", but Green's power to
seduce and enchant, as far as I'm concerned, manifests itself much stronger and
much quicker on studio records. For one thing, it's not just the voice
that matters: an essential part of Green's success are the musical flourishes
and inventive arranging details, and most, if not all, of them, get seriously
flattened out in the context of this live performance.
Worse, the emphasis is way too heavy on getting
the people up on their feet — some of the golden oldies are rearranged as fiery
disco workouts, which is just w-r-o-n-g. It's one thing to wind up the happy
Japs with a genuine recent disco smash like 'I Feel Good', but an entirely different
one to follow it up with a dance reworking of 'Love And Happiness', a song that's
unimaginable without its unhurried mid-tempo. Likewise, the hurried delivery
and extended jamming turn 'Let's Get Married' into something totally
unconnected with the original message of the song. It's not necessarily bad,
but it's certainly not "Al Green-specific".
On the other hand, the rare occasions where Al
does stick to his guns don't add anything new to what we already know:
'L-O-V-E', 'How Can You Mend A Broken Heart' (seriously shortened), 'Belle' and
others go off smoothly and predictably. Accompanied with visuals, they might work
better, but as it is, I don't see Green pouring any extra passion into them
compared to the perfection already achieved in the studio (unless added bits
of annoying stage banter count). So from that point of view, maybe it is
more fun, in a way, to hear 'Love And Happiness' rearranged as a disco jam, or
to get a better chance to enter a dance trance during the extra five minutes of
'I Feel Good' that Al and the band spend hitting it.
Something tells me that, perhaps, a live album
from some earlier tour might have worked better; but since I have no proof,
I'll have to take it for granted that this is the average Al Green live
show, and that there's no way to properly capture it on record without me
giving it a moderate thumbs down,
according to my general views on the value of live albums. On the other hand,
this is, so far, the only official Al Green live album in existence, and,
therefore, is a must-buy for fans who crave knowledge as much as they crave
enjoyment.
DON'T LOOK BACK (1993)
1) Best Love; 2) Love Is A
Beautiful Thing; 3) Waiting On You; 4) What Does It Take; 5) Keep On Pushing
Love; 6) You Are My Everything; 7) One Love; 8) People In The World; 9) Give It
Everything; 10) Your Love; 11) Fountain Of Love; 12) Don't Look Back; 13) Love
In Motion.
[Technical
note: this review was written after
the reviews for I Can't Stop and
subsequent «comeback» albums, so it omits certain factual information
concerning Al's retirement from secular music and eventual return to the scene
— that information is presented below in the I Can't Stop review. Some time later, I'll get around to
normalizing the logical sequence.]
It only goes to show how much Al Green has
derailed his critical audience with his abandoning the «secular» style — nobody
takes good care of the man's official discographies any more. In the info
section of Wikipedia, for instance, Don't
Look Back (1993) is listed as the man's last «gospel album», whereas Your Heart's In Good Hands (1995) is
listed as his first «later secular album». Accordingly, Your Heart's In Good Hands is an album that has been discussed and
reviewed in quite a few sources, while Don't
Look Back, at most, gets a brief mention and a title list, without any
substantial discussion whatsoever.
What is bizarre about this situation is that
even a brief glance at the track listings shows that Don't Look Back and Your
Heart's In Good Hands are, in fact, almost
the exact same album, except that Don't
Look Back, which was from the very start released in CD format, runs
longer, and Your Heart's In Good Hands
has just one track that was not present on Don't
Look Back — the title track, released as a single. However, since that
title track was written by Diane Warren, this gives me a legitimate excuse to
forget about the existence of that album in the first place. Consequently, Al's
«proper» comeback, one that somehow remained unnoticed by the critical society,
is the 13-track Don't Look Back from
1993 — his first record in a decade and a half to consist throughout of
«secular soul» material. Most likely, the confusion is due to the fact that the
album was only released in Europe — and, as everybody knows, nothing released
exclusively in Europe really counts in the US-centric universe.
The album owes much of its flavor to Al's collaboration
with David Steele, former bass player in The Beat and Fine Young Cannibals —
about a half of the songs are co-credited to Green and Steele, while the others
are covers of contemporary (ʽLove Is A Beautiful Thingʼ) or old
(title track, originally a big hit for The Temptations) R&B material.
People have occasionally complained about the production of the album, but I
do not see any serious difficulties: the producer here was Arthur Baker, a
seasoned pro who'd previously worked with Afrika Bambaataa and New Order, and
the worst accusation I could haul out against him is that too many drum parts
are programmed rather than live — but far from all, and even those that are do
not flaunt their electronic gloss in any sort of ugly, arrogant manner. On the
whole, I could not say that Baker's production is that much worse than Willie Mitchell's production on Al's
subsequent releases: it's just that everybody went so crazy over the very idea
of a Green/Mitchell reunion that they failed to notice that their chemistry no
longer guaranteed immediate success.
Anyway, Don't
Look Back sets the general tone for Al's two next albums — a collection of
steady, honest soul grooves, most of which are tastefully enjoyable but feel
sorta flat. Years of self-humiliating, individuality-effacing work for the Lord
had paid off: the subtlety, vulnerability, sinfulness, inner torture, and
occasional strive for redemption, all that dense psychological soup that made
Green's soul classics so outstanding on a cruelly competitive market, no longer
exist. Instead, song after song is simply dedicated to praising Love on a
general level, which makes me happy for Al — clearly, such an album could only
have come from somebody who had succeeded in finding internal peace — but
rather quickly bored with the album in general. This is what happens, I guess,
when you have finally exorcised your demon and are left alone with the angel.
Beauty, elegance, predictability, and boredom.
Which is a pity, because individually, some of
the grooves are quite solid. ʽLove Is A Beautiful Thingʼ, for
instance, has a tasty stereo mix of several overdubbed funky guitars capped
with a catchy chorus ("soul to soul, fire to fire...") — the only
problem being is that I know not what else to say about it. ʽWaiting On
Youʼ might have even better guitar work — two more funky guitars engaged
in a productive dialog (pentalog,
actually, if you throw in organ, piano, and brass overdubs: the mix is dense,
but the production is so good that each instrument speaks with its own distinct
voice). Then ʽWhat Does It Takeʼ takes over with...
...okay, I have little choice but to repeat the
same unnecessary descriptions. Truth is, most
songs here sound exactly the same. Funky guitars, brass, keyboards, backup
vocals, repetitive codas, the works. For a 1993 album, everything sounds
absolutely great and delicious — in an era when the word «R&B» was already
heavily associated with the idea of technically challenging vocal gymnastics
over robotic pseudo-musical backgrounds, Don't
Look Back redeems the genre with an old school vengeance. And from a
strict, pedantic musical standpoint, I would even think that Don't Look Back is superior to the next
two Mitchell-produced albums — I find the arrangements a bit more creative.
But the overall problem is the same: most, if not all, of the songs are
interchangeable, and their overall mood does not do perfect justice to the
capabilities of Al's voice, which has not at all been ravaged by time, but is
simply not offered the right material to shine in all its glory. On the other
hand — if you are simply looking for a lot of love, Al's got a lot of love
saved up from his fifteen years of ministering, and it's all spilled here. I
mean, when 7 out of 13 songs have the word «love» in the title, that's gotta be a lot of love, right?..
I CAN'T STOP (2003)
1) I Can't Stop; 2) Play To
Win; 3) Rainin' In My Heart; 4) I've Been Waitin' On You; 5) You; 6) Not
Tonight; 7) Million To One; 8) My Problem Is You; 9) I'd Still Choose You; 10)
I've Been Thinkin' 'Bout You; 11) I'd Write A Letter; 12) Too Many.
From 1980's The Lord Will Find A Way and
up to 1987's Soul Survivor, the Reverend was unwaverend: with a handful
of minor "ambiguous" exceptions, everything that he wrote, covered,
and recorded served the sole purpose of proving, over and over again, that He
could always count on the Reverend in case of need. Some time in the late
Eighties, though, either the Reverend felt that he'd propped up his faith with
plenty of supporting beams already, or perhaps He eventually let the Reverend
know that if the Reverend were to continue in the exact same way, his paeans
would eventually start being regurgitated back on Earth in the form of a severe
pandemic of diabetes, proportional to the amount of Heart and Soul contained
therein.
Anyway, during the late Eighties and Nineties
Al Green released several uneven albums, somewhat confusedly hopping between
pure gospel, gospel-tinged secular numbers, and secular-tinged gospel numbers.
Some of these albums are supposedly worth a short visit, but it wasn't until
the turn of the millennium that it became possible to speak of a true
"secular comeback" — after all, the Apocalypse happily passed us by,
and so one could allow oneself a little relaxation.
Since relaxing is always more fun in the
company of old friends, Green chose to team up once more with his old producer
pal, Willie Mitchell, and within the confines of his original Eldorado: Hi
Studios, where many of the old session players were still abiding. Not only
that, but the intention was clearly to try and replicate the old sound — screw
all modern technology advances and return to the original warm vibes of
Seventies' R'n'B; who cares if it sounds "retro" and "outdated"
as long as it's Green's signature sound, the thing that he obviously does best?
Indeed, I Can't Stop sounds marvelous.
No matter how much I listen to it, I still can't find a single thing that would
unmistakably tie it to 2003 from a technical point of view; it seems to pick up
exactly from where we were left twenty-five years back with Truth 'N Time.
One could imagine that, over twenty-five years, Green could have at least aged
in the throat, but the Lord has amply repaid him by protecting his vocal charm
— he hasn't lost a single step off his range, still doing both his grunts and
his high-pitched squeals the same way he produced them in his youth. And when
you hear them strewn over funky guitars, rhythmic brass figures, swirling organs,
and swinging live percussion, you know for sure that the old joy is back.
There's only one thing that's wrong with this
idyllic picture: this album completely, totally, and inescapably sucks.
Beneath the shiny facade, there is no sign whatsoever of the old amazing spirituality,
or of the composing genius that Al Green used to be. Each and every one of the
twelve songs on this album are utterly lifeless, as if they were contributed by
outside hacks — all the more horrible it is to realize that all of them are
credited to Green and Mitchell. Obviously, I have no "objective
proof"; I can only speak for myself, stating that, where Green's classic
material from 1971 to 1977 made me cry, laugh, and feel like a sentient human
being, I Can't Stop has not connected me with Al Green neither on the
in-, nor on the outside.
I cannot put my finger on it; it's one of those
most-hard-to-explain cases where everything should work but somehow
nothing does. It's certainly not the "sterileness" of the production
— perfect studio gloss has always been a sine qua non of Green's life.
It's not a matter of "detached singing": I cannot accuse Green of not
caring for this material, as he fully empties his bag of vocal modulations and
tricks onto the listener. It's not even a matter of "lack of hooks": technically,
there are some 'attention-demanding' brass riffs and catchy choruses, meaning
that the songs were written, not improvised on the spot. So what is it?
Unfortunately, it seems to be a severe case of
gospelitis. After two decades of squeezing himself into the rigid hymn format,
of bravely (but, in the long run, needlessly) sacrificing his individuality
for the Greater Glory, Green is no longer able — or, to put it in more
optimistic terms, for the moment unable — to bring back that most important
component: emotional intelligence. These are all simplistic, superficial
love numbers, some in dance format, some in ballad shape, but none of them
displaying even a tenth part of the subtlety and depth of old. They're all
interchangeable and flat; the only feel they give out is that of gladness
and satisfaction, but you can't even tell where the gladness and satisfaction
are coming from, much less discern a single trace of something more complex
behind them.
There are some tiny drops of potential, like on
the sly, foxy-sounding 'I've Been Thinkin' 'Bout You', or on the anthemic title
track, but even these numbers sound like their primary purpose was to
reintroduce the old sound — at all costs — rather than say something important.
It all prompts me to end this review with some spiteful remark (such as
"see what years of singing gospel music does to good people"), but
it's scientifically incorrect to make broad generalizations even on such a
tempting subject as dedicated Christians, so, instead, I'll just give this a
straight ahead thumbs down from the
heart, reiterating, however, that the brain was at least pleased to see the man
able to recreate the basics of his classic sound with such meticulousness —
even if to no avail.
EVERYTHING'S OK (2005)
1) Everything's OK; 2) You Are
So Beautiful; 3) Build Me Up; 4) Perfect To Me; 5) Nobody But You; 6) Real
Love; 7) I Can Make Music; 8) Be My Baby; 9) Magic Road; 10) I Wanna Hold You;
11) Another Day; 12) All The Time.
Yes, everything's OK indeed. This is I Can't
Stop Vol. 2 — same lush arrangements that tell you the last two decades
never happened, same beautiful vocals, same dedication to original songwriting.
How can I put down this album? It has everything that made Al Green a legend,
in full shiny spades. A triumphant return to form.
Alas, for myself, I can only state that, just
like its predecessor, it passed me by completely. It's one of these very, very
bizarre situations where I honestly do not understand what is happening — I
want to admire it as a successful comeback, and it seems to be fully
equipped to qualify as such, but something essential is missing, and, once
again, I can't put my finger on it.
In fact, when I manage to specially concentrate
on some of the tracks, they are capable of giving the illusion of life. For
instance, isn't 'You Are So Beautiful', well, beautiful? The strings, the falsetto,
the soaring choruses? Or doesn't the title track make you wanna get up and
dance like it's supposed to? And isn't the warm, optimistic feeling on most of
these songs a sincere feeling, so much in line with The Reverend's real nature?
And isn't it spreading all over you, the listener?
Well... technically, yes. But the songs just
don't have any staying power. The presence of form makes them seductive while
they're playing — the lack of spirit makes them trifling when they're gone. And
although I understand the host of critics who all but fell over themselves in
praising Green's musical resurrection, I do not understand myself, because I
cannot bring myself to following suit. It is funny that, statistically, about
half of the opinions I've encountered rate this as superior to I Can't Stop,
and the other half thinks vice versa — restoring the equilibrium.
I do heartily recommend Everything's OK
to Green's serious fans, but I cannot even write about it, sorry. Thumbs down from all the sensitive organs of my
mucho puzzled organism; I'd rate even Truth 'N Time higher than this —
at least 'Blow Me Down', in my mind, is well worth all the twelve songs on here
put together.
LAY IT DOWN (2008)
1) Lay It Down; 2) Just For Me;
3) You've Got The Love I Need; 4) No One Like You; 5) What More Do You Want
From Me; 6) Take Your Time; 7) Too Much; 8) Stay With Me (By The Sea); 9) All I
Need; 10) I'm Wild About You; 11) Standing In The Rain.
As if we needed one more proof that life is
stranger than fiction. Two times in a row, Al Green had unsuccessfully
attempted to recreate the Ol' Green magic by immersing himself in the painstakingly
recreated setting of the legendary Seventies. It did not work. What was the
reason? No one knows for sure. Then, for causes unknown, Green switched
producers: instead of old pal Willie Mitchell, Lay It Down was produced
by Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson,
from the hip-hop outfit of The Roots. And presto, third time's the
charm: suddenly, everything works!
I can only explain this by admitting that
people change, and that, at this particular point, there are people for whom it
is easier to step into Willie Mitchell's old shoes than for Willie Mitchell himself.
The essential difference between Lay It Down and Green's previous two
records is that Lay It Down sounds far less cluttered. At his best,
Green worked in a subtle way — nothing, to me, exemplifies the beauty of his
approach better than the gallant dialog between the man and the strings on 'I'm
So Glad You're Mine', and these subtleties were thoroughly missed on both I
Can't Stop and Everything's OK. Now they're back — maybe not in a
real big way, but they're definitely back, and the magic is back with them.
If the former two records both opened with an
energetic, punchy rocker (that, nevertheless, somehow missed the punch), Lay
It Down opens with the soft, relaxed title track, meaning that the company
set their aims real high — on attempting to recreate the el-paradiso-atmosphere
of I'm Still In Love With You rather than the much more dance-oriented
collections of the mid-Seventies. And even if 'Lay It Down', featuring R'n'B
guest star Anthony Hamilton on additional vocals on the chorus, is no
masterpiece, it is still a perfect conductor for Green's warmth and kindness.
Revolving around a (finally!) good vocal hook in the chorus, it manages
to reinstate my faith in Green's soul therapy, and who could ask for more?
But there is more. Additional magic can
be found, for instance, on 'Take Your Time', where Green cedes a large part of
the vocals to another guest singer, Corinne Bailey Rae, and their duet, aided
but definitely not overshadowed by the usual silk screen of lounge
instrumentation, is touchingly sincere. In fact, just about every ballad on
here is good. The upbeat numbers are more hit-and-miss, perhaps running a bit
too close on the heels of the generic product of yesteryear, but even so they
manage to close the record perfectly — 'Standing In The Rain' is a great singalong
number in the pure R'n'B tradition, with nary a sign of disco and sung in such
an encouraging manner that somehow it leaves you certain that this isn't the
last time you are heartily enjoying a slice of Al Green wizardry.
It may be so that all the «new blood» was
brought in primarily with the aim of assuring chart success, an argument
reasonably upheld by the fact that the album got an assured chart success, rising
to #9 on the Billboard where Everything's OK had previously stalled at
#50. And we all know that Green is not the kind of ivory-tower artist that is
most alergic to popularity: he is a preacher, after all, and regardless of
whether you're preaching about heavenly or quite earthly love, you are a
proverbially lousy preacher if you're not interested in attracting a large
crowd. But if one's successful search for success even today, when even
Google has trouble juxtaposing the words «good taste» and «Billboard», can, as
it turns out, be compatible with a record as elegant, delicate, and well-crafted
as Lay It Down — maybe there's still hope for our fellow earthlings. Thumbs up on the part of the grateful heart.
SUPER SESSION (1968)
1) Albert's Shuffle; 2) Stop;
3) Man's Temptation; 4) His Holy Modal Majesty; 5) Really; 6) It Takes A Lot To
Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry; 7) Season Of The Witch; 8) You Don't Love Me;
9) Harvey's Tune.
Known generally as the only album credited to
«Bloomfield / Kooper / Stills», but the title is tremendously misleading. The
whole thing was supposed to be «Bloomfield / Kooper», a collaborative project
to capitalize on the strengths of America's hottest keyboard player, freshly
booted out of his own band (Blood, Sweat & Tears), and America's craziest
guitarist, freshly booted out of his
own band (Electric Flag). Had they managed to properly convert their
accumulated hate and frustration into musical output, Super Session might have made them buddies for life and, who knows,
America's superhero response to the freshly demised Cream, perhaps?
Unfortunately, this was not to be. Bloomfield,
suffering from insomnia and whatever else it is that so many crazy musicians
seem to suffer from, split on the second day of the planned session (so much
for the supergroup), and Kooper had to bring in a quick replacement to finish
the project (we should all sympathize with people who hate to leave things
unfinished, and what a paradise life will be). That turned out to be Stephen Stills,
a somewhat less incendiary guitarist than Mike, but every bit as technically
accomplished — know that if you want to make Stephen Stills rock out, all you
have to say is «rock out, Steve!» and that'll do it. (Unless your name is David
Crosby, in which case it won't work).
Anyway, the finished, but not perfected product
sounds exactly the way it is supposed to sound: ass-kicking and inspired on
Side A, just ass-kicking on Side B. The fact that there are very few songs as such should not be surprising:
the idea was to get together and jam, making an essentially free-form record.
The one song that Al and Mike did have time to cut together, a cover of Curtis
Mayfield's 'Man's Temptation', is an excellent rendition, with great vocals and
passionate playing from Al. But in order to enjoy it all, tolerance for
typical Sixties' jamming is obligatory.
Although, frankly speaking, it is not clear to
me how anyone who likes electric guitar at
all could possibly dislike Mike Bloomfield's playing. Obviously, he is no
Hendrix or Beck, and his playing was never meant to push boundaries, but he
was one of the few players of his age who systematically played 12-bar blues
with the spirit of a punk-rocker — irreverentially, loudly, dirtily, making
the poor guitar scream like a tortured pig instead of sticking to the safe
side. And when he did that on that happy day in May 1968, he clearly infected
Kooper as well. 'Albert's Shuffle', 'Stop', and 'Really' are fabulous jams,
generic on the surface, spiritually shredding on the inside; the gargantuan
'His Holy Modal Majesty' is more questionable, since this is where the two
wade out in more adventurous, jazzy territory, and it is not quite clear if
this is really a masterful rock answer to the likes of Coltrane and Miles Davis
or a sorta lame attempt to mimic their far more accomplished and original achievements
(although, personally, I will take Bloomfield's guitar and Kooper's organ over
Coltrane's sax any time of day, but these are just my personal sonic
preferences).
The Stills side is more discussable; with the
inspiration and chemistry sort of dissipated into thin air with Bloomfield's
defection, it seems like Kooper decided to compensate with fancy reinventions
of the popular repertoire. So they take Dylan's 'It Takes A Lot To Laugh'
(which Kooper must have remembered from the days of his and Bloomfield's work
on it during the sessions for Highway 61
Revisited) and record it in its original fast version; take Donovan's
'Season Of The Witch' and develop it into a creepy-funky eleven-minute brew;
take the old blues standard 'You Don't Love Me' and mutate it into a phased-out
bad psychedelic trip; take Harvey Brooks' jazz number 'Harvey's Tune' and... do
nothing with it except fade it out by the second minute, the shortest track on
the album. (Brooks himself played bass on the album).
At the very least, it's all interesting — and
Stills does chug it out nicely on 'Season Of The Witch', in a ragged, chopped
style that would soon become the trademark of his live sparring with Young
during CSNY live performances ('Down By The River' etc.). Some like to claim
that the second side is a huge letdown, and that Bloomfield's departure killed
off a burgeoning masterpiece whose importance a nice guy like Stills could
never really «get». But most of these people must be dead hero worshippers —
the late great Bloomfield was great,
but not that great; plus, three or
four more jams in the same style would eventually become obnoxious (as the
dynamic duo's ensuing live album would clearly demonstrate), so the Stills
change of pace was welcome.
Overall, this can be safely counted as the
album that finally, after years of session work and one bursting band
experiment after another, established Kooper as a solo artist, capable of fully
driving his message home regardless of whoever else shared the yoke. And as
much as it clearly belongs in its own time, those still-happy spring days of
1968, Super Session is still super
after all these years. Thumbs up.
THE LIVE
ADVENTURES OF MIKE BLOOMFIELD & AL KOOPER (1968)
CD I: 1) Opening Speech; 2) The
59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy); 3) I Wonder Who; 4) Her Holy Modal
Highness; 5) The Weight; 6) Mary Ann; 7) Together 'Til The End Of Time; 8)
That's All Right; 9) Green Onions; CD II: 1) Opening Speech; 2) Sonny Boy
Williamson; 3) No More Lonely Nights; 4) Dear Mr. Fantasy; 5) Don't Throw Your
Love On Me Too Strong; 6) Finale-Refugee.
Al must have really been fascinated by Mike, considering how quickly he forgave
him for nearly ruining the «Super Session» — just a few months later the two
were back again, and this time decided to push the spontaneous inspiration
thing even further by recording their next project live, in front of the
demanding, but respectful audience of the Fillmore West. They booked three
nights and everything went fine for the first two. Then Bloomfield's insomnia
struck again, and he fled the field on night three, once again leaving Kooper in dire need of a quick replacement (Butterfield
Blues Band veteran Elvin Bishop and a young Latin unknown going by the
cool-sounding name of Carlos Santana filled the spot).
Needless to say, that was the last time
Bloomfield and Kooper worked together (at least, on anything significant): too
bad, since the resulting double album is such a fascinatingly attractive-repulsive
document of its era that there is no doubt in my mind the two could have had a
promising future. The concert, indeed, is a spontaneous mess, almost certainly
underrehearsed, crudely recorded, plagued with missed cues, flubbed vocal
lines, and a setlist that all but seems made up on the spot by drawing lots
from the audiences. But what a delight it is.
If there was any idea behind this, it was a big one: to bring together all the
loose strands of Americana and run them through the efficient processing
centers of Kooper's and Bloomfield's spirit to show how two guys with two big
hearts can move the world. They cover blues, jazz, soul, folk, R'n'B,
rockabilly, and recent-format roots-rock — all that is missing is a little bit
of country, bluegrass, and gospel, and since we do not have the complete
setlists here, it is not excluded that something from those categories could
have been played, too.
With this ambitious diversity, no one is
probably going to like everything on
here, but the trick is to distance oneself from the source material. Simon
& Garfunkel's '59th Street Bridge Song', for instance, is played about
three times slower than the original ("slow down, you move too fast"
taken at face value) and is made about thirty times as grand and solemn,
stripped completely of the light nerdy humor touch for which we all loved it in
the first place. From this comparative point of view, the song is crudely
butchered by a couple of dumb hacks. But in reality, what they did was simply
borrow the lyrics to set them to something completely different, and quite
inspiring in its own way, especially when Al hits those keys upon the final
resolution of the chorus ("feelin' GROOVY!...") and plunges the world
into soulful sonic mayhem, or when Mike takes advantage of the moment to
deliver a solo of epic proportions.
Traffic's 'Dear Mr. Fantasy' sticks much closer
to the original, but only until the free-form part, in which Bloomfield again
explores mystical jazzy territory à
la 'Her Holy Modal Highness' — and then, out of nowhere, the two start
trading organ and guitar lines that mimic the hymn coda to 'Hey Jude'. There is
nothing that 'Hey Jude' could have in common with 'Dear Mr. Fantasy'; the
connection is completely ad hoc and
uninterpretable, but hey, this is what artistic freedom is all about, and
besides, 'Hey Jude' was so damn fresh back then — barely a month out, so, in
all likelihood, this is the first documental case of somebody quoting the song
before the cliché got old and stale. It makes no sense, but it's a fun
decision all the same.
Throughout the two discs Mike and Al really
play off each other in a competitive spirit, although normally they take solo
turns rather than drown each other out. «Song-y» highlights include a
marvelous, soulful rendition of 'Together 'Til The End Of Time' (with Kooper
managing an almost tearful vocal performance, something he very rarely
succeeds at in a live setting); «jammy» highlights consist of a kick-ass blast
through Booker T. & The MG's 'Green Onions' and Elvin Bishop's guest spot —
a painfully slow twelve-minute grind through a Sonny Boy Williamson number ('No
More Lonely Nights') in which both Al and Elvin take proper advantage of the
tortoise speed, nurturing each lick and punch as if a note weren't worth
playing without proper sustain... heck, they almost manage to convince me, and I'm quite a speed-lover. (In
comparison, the Santana guest spot, a silly rendition of Jack Bruce's 12-bar
eulogy 'Sonny Boy Williamson', is completely wasted — Kooper moonwalks through
the tune, and Santana hardly plays anything that could be suspected of genius).
That said, this is one of those stupid records
that detail-obsessed professionals will be tempted to dismiss and
wholesale-swallowing live-for-the-moment free-spirit aficionados will kill for.
Two music-loving guys jamming on the basis of whatever gets in their heads —
only in 1968 or so could a record like that cause anyone to pay attention. But
once you get the pure professionalism, the passion for playing, the desire to
experiment, and the overall quality of the source material on one side of the
scale, I think that it by far overweighs that other side which includes all the
technical deficiencies (and there are many, including brutal ones — why the
heck do they have to fade out 'I Wonder Who' just as Bloomfield starts picking
up steam? Did somebody throw up on the tapes in homage of the free spirit of
the proceedings?). Unfortunately, it is the kind of genius at work here that
you cannot lock up in a bottle and give a DNA analysis, like you could do with,
say, something like a 'A Day In The Life'. Feel free to disagree with my thumbs up.
PS. Post-production trivia bits: (a) the album
sleeve (for many people, its finest moment) was painted by Norman Rockwell; (b)
Paul Simon himself volunteered to overdub some vocal harmonies on 'The 59th
Street Bridge Song', allegedly fascinated with the results — talk about totally
stoned, the lots of 'em; (c) apparently Bloomfield ended up in a hospital again, and you gotta appreciate the
quality of playing from a guy who hadn't slept for several nights in a row —
me, I can hardly find the proper keys on the keyboard without a good night's
sleep.
I STAND ALONE (1968)
1) Overture; 2) I Stand Alone;
3) Camille; 4) One; 5) Coloured Rain; 6) Soft Landing On The Moon; 7) I Can Love
A Woman; 8) Blue Moon Of Kentucky; 9) Toe Hold; 10) Right Now For You; 11) Hey,
Western Union Man; 12) Song And Dance For The Unborn, Frightened Child.
To finally decide to stand alone was fairly
sensible for Kooper, already a veteran of one failed outfit (The Blues
Project), one band that kicked him out to ensure a brighter, Prozak-ier future
for us all (BS&T), and one duet for which he just had to team up with a psycho insomniac. All that could prevent him
from boldly slapping his own name on the front sleeve was lack of self-confidence,
and by the end of 1968, he certainly lacked that no more.
Poorly promoted and scantily reviewed, I Stand Alone did not make Al a solo
star in his own right, and set off a chain of albums that are now mostly regarded
as cult favorites but still have not received, and probably will never receive
the same retro-reverence as, say, the Zombies' Odessey And Oracle — a record that Kooper once singlehandedly saved
from oblivion, so that most people who actually do know him, know him as «that guy who played the organ on 'Like A
Rolling Stone' and promoted the Zombies in the US». Bruce Eder even had to
write a glowing review in which he drew comparisons with Sgt. Pepper, implying that I
Stand Alone was actually the better album. It didn't help, I think. A few
people just bought the record expecting another Sgt. Pepper, and came away disappointed.
Basically, this is just like The Live Adventures Of Mike Bloomfield
& Al Kooper if you take away all the extended psycho jamming and
replace it with a bunch of rag-tag studio effects. The general idea is the
same: Eclecticism as a goal in itself, a musical celebration of life's various
sides on the part of an innocent, but creative bystander. A humble bystander,
too — humble enough to realize, for instance, that his own brain is by no means
capable of quickly and effectively covering all the bases, so there is no
problem about mixing his originals with lots of covers (something you could
easily be publicly castigated for in 1968 if you were aspiring to Art with a
capital A, and which may actually explain some of the disinterest in the
record).
Both the covers and the originals are
consistently swell, though. It is true that the covers add little to the impact
already done by the original: there are no really drastic reinventions, with
Harry Nilsson's 'One' and Traffic's 'Coloured Rain' receiving more or less the
same respectful treatment. 'Blue Moon Of Kentucky' throws on a bit too much
reverb, overwhelming the fine backing racket that Al gets from a host of
Nashville session players (did I mention that the whole thing was recorded in
Nashville? possibly the least likely album to be recorded in Nashville that
year, yet it still happened — Kooper must have stolen Roger McGuinn's passport
or something to dupe these guys), but still a fine brief piece of rockabilly
done the Elvis way, not the Bill Monroe one. We also have spirits of Sam &
Dave ('Toe Hold') and the Philly soul crowd ('Hey, Western Union Man') guesting
around, with equally solid results.
But true fans of the Koop will most likely
treasure the record for a few jazz-rock and art-pop numbers that Al must have
salvaged from the wrecks of the first lineup of BS&T. The title track is
technically a love ballad, but in reality a pained, yet bold declaration of
self-assertion: the "love" he is talking about is universal, of
course. It's sweeping, stumbling, pretentious, badly sung (Al is no Van
Morrison to do these things), but still wins over because of some goofy
unlockable combination of freshness and sincerity. Or maybe it's the brass
arrangements that help.
'I Can Love A Woman' will easily provoke a
whirl of sardonic comments these days (like «Right-o!» or «Who could ever
tell?» at the most innocent end of it), but the song has a fabulous soulful
buildup from Al, the master of soulful buildups, and really plays out like a
mini-classical spectacle of romantic self-discovery. The Blossoms, an early
1960's backing band, provide the perfect counterpart for Al's own vocals here, and
the song stands loud and proud next to Kooper's soul-baring classics on Child Is Father To The Man.
And then there is the album closing chamber
piece with the record's longest and most pretentiously titled number, which
shows that Kooper could write a cool baroque melody for the strings every bit
as flawlessly as Paul McCartney (hmm, perhaps that Sgt. Pepper comparison wasn't that
way off, anyway). An art-pop masterpiece mixing melancholy and optimism in a
50/50 proportion — should be on every anthology of classical-influenced pop
from the late 1960s.
So, any flaws? One — alas, a big one: frankly
put, the album needs to be re-recorded, or, at least, remixed in a normal manner from the original tapes.
In order to ensure Conceptual Coherence, Al thought it necessary to provide all the songs with large bunches of
meaningless sound effects. Sirens, explosions, laughter, shrieks of horror,
crowd noises, animal noises — by 1968, everybody already knew that you could
insert some dog barking into any song of your choice without being evicted
from the Songwriters' Guild, so the novel effect was no longer in action, and
still the man plowed on. Sometimes these nasties creep up at the wrongest
moment (e. g. the horrified shrieking on 'Unborn Child'), and sometimes they
just fuck the song up, like the wobbly warped vocals on the otherwise pretty
guitar ballad 'Right Now For You'.
In his review, Bruce Eder put forward the idea
that the whole sound effect thing was effectively one large gag, a sort of parody on the abuse of
sonic collages — he may have had some firsthand information on this, but it
certainly does not come across that way from the music; this is not a Zappa album, and parody and humor do not tie
in all that much with Kooper's image of a romantic idealist. They just come
across as a bad distraction, an inevitable, perhaps, curse of the time, but
something that you have to forgive
the record for before giving it the deserved thumbs up. In all other respects, I Stand Alone still stands alone as a
unique singer-songwriter-art-pop-philosopher effort — I can think of no other
album from 1968-69 with this particular kind of eclectic, yet highly individual
sound.
YOU NEVER KNOW
WHO YOUR FRIENDS ARE (1969)
1) Magic In My Socks; 2)
Lucille; 3) Too Busy Thinking About My Baby; 4) First Time Around; 5) Loretta;
6) Blues, Pt. 4; 7) You Never Know Who Your Friends Are; 8) Great American
Marriage/Nothing; 9) Don't Know Why I Love You; 10) Mourning Glory Story; 11)
Anna Lee; 12) I'm Never Gonna Let You Down.
Al Kooper may not be a «genius», either John
Lennon-style or Paul McCartney-style — which is, really, just about the only
explanation of why these late Sixties' records are not generally remembered as
musical pinnacles of their time. But when three great doubly-defined qualities
come together — ambitiousness/bravery, sincerity/honesty, balance/taste — you
do not necessarily require a superpower to craft simple and stunning hooks. It
only remains to the listener to take his time, and eventually it'll all hang
out.
There is no «development», as such, from I Stand Alone to You Never Know, because, after the titanic sprawl of Kooper's
interests in 1968, there was really very little new territory for the man to
penetrate, considering that neither trip-hop nor metalcore had yet been
invented. Thus, all that was left to do was to try it again — which he did,
with one major improvement: most of the sonic collage stuff was sent packing,
to the delight of all those future generations who love the 1960's achievements
but hate their excesses. Another difference is that there is more original
material, but, given Kooper's interpretive talents, that may not necessarily be
a plus.
The sessions were produced with the aid of «The
Al Kooper Big Band» — a veritable swarm of musicians very few of which I am
familiar with, because most seem to come from jazz rather than blues or rock
backgrounds, be they guitarists, pianists, or brass players. Not that You Never Know is, in any big way, a
jazz album. There is a huge R'n'B presence, lots of blues, some music hall,
Motownish lush pop, and one or two songs recreate the style of the original
Blood, Sweat & Tears, perhaps, but that's about it. That said, if you want
to record a great pop album — better still, a great eclectic album — get some
well-oiled jazz dudes to do it.
An almost frustrating feeling of evenness all
but prevents me from talking about the tunes; each and every one defines
worthiness. One possible choice for top of the pops would be 'Too Busy Thinking
About My Baby', which just might be the
most «authentic» Motown number recorded by a non-Motown artist (not inside a
Motown studio). If Kooper cannot properly hit the high notes required of Eddie
Kendricks, he still does a good, passionate job, and in all other respects he
builds up on the song's potential, throwing on a brass, strings, and back
vocals arrangement that is at once very
Motown-ish and artsy — an arrogant,
but subtle synthesis of tribute and reconstruction, and a great euphoric feel
to the whole thing.
The album starts out on such a rowdy note,
actually ('Magic In My Socks' will rock those socks off you with its
fast-moving brass riffs) that it is possible not to notice the wonders of the
slow, moody numbers at once: the cover of Harry Nilsson's 'Mourning Glory
Story' has a complex «angelic» harmony arrangement, and 'Nothing', opening
with an interesting neo-classical introduction, then turns into psychedelic
Sinatra, riding from cello cloud to harp cloud to piano cloud in a frenzied fit
of never-stopping imagination. Decidedly not my favourite style of music, but
when it's done with that much enthusiasm, even the sappiest notes regain some
freshness.
At this point in his career, with just a little
bit of restraint on meaningless weird side effects and unjustified song length,
Kooper could do no wrong. Even 'Blues, Pt. 4', essentially just an instrumental
blues jam, has five minutes of soulful organ and piano solos that soothe rather
than bore. And if it really is so hard to pick out outstanding tracks, well, so
much the better — think of this as one even-quality forty-three minute symphony
with tons of ideas that trump quite a few forty-minute-symphony-structured
progressive rock albums. Thumbs up.
EASY DOES IT (1970)
1) Brand New Day; 2) I Got A
Woman; 3) Country Road; 4) I Bought You The Shoes; 5) Easy Does It; 6) Buckskin
Boy; 7) Love Theme From "The Landlord"; 8) Sad, Sad Sunshine; 9) Let
The Duchess No; 10) She Gets Me Where I Live; 11) A Rose And A Baby Ruth; 12)
Baby Please Don't Go; 13) God Sheds His Grace On Thee.
Don't know much about easy, but third time clearly does it. Not one to
hold back, still bursting with ideas, still probably dissatisfied about not
being able to let it all out in one huge bundle to amaze everyone's eyes and
ears, Al finally went for the gold: same approach as usual, but this time, on a
double album, never ever to be outdone in the future, even by himself.
The surprise effect may have been gone, because
by then everybody pretty much knew what to expect from the whizz kid, yet it is
still amazing to realize just what an immense overload of ideas this guy had
accumulated over the mid-Sixties to finally start depositing over this
relatively brief period of hypercreativity. Once again, each and every song
bursts with them — they may not all be tremendously memorable, but he did come
up with all of them. How did he manage to do that? Some people have trouble
coming up with one fresh idea over a
consecutive run of five or more LPs; Al Kooper is the direct opposite.
In random order, let me just list some of the
crazy stuff he does on here. Ray Charles once produced a revolution when he
took a generic spiritual and reworked it into 'I Got A Woman', creating soul
music in the process. Now Al, in an almost absurdist twist, pushes it one step
further, taking Ray's creation, slowing it down, and reworking it into an
orchestrated lounge jazz standard, piano and sax solos and a sort of Oscar
Peterson Trio mood thing established. It reads like a deconstruction, with
Kooper's tenderness almost impossible to believe, but it's one of the most bizarre
and totally unpredictable deconstructions ever — and it all sounds very smooth
and natural, unlike the man's previous rough experiment with '59th Street
Bridge Song'.
Another transformation awaits the old blues
chestnut 'Baby Please Don't Go', which bands like the Amboy Dukes, and later
still, Budgie and AC/DC, were speeding up and transforming into a balls-out
hard rocker. The Koop, on the contrary, turns it into free-form jazz, a set of
piano, bass, and something else («ondioline»?) improvs occasionally interrupted
by slightly black-facened vocalization (whose whininess actually fits in well
with the slightly psychedelic, slighty relaxed, slightly paranoidal mood). Ah
yes, it clocks in at 13:20, and obviously invites one to thoughts of padding
out one side of the double LP — truth is, it deserves every second of that
running time, and I would like to see someone deny this and at the same time
sing hosanna to all those Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus
albums.
Of the originals, 'Sad, Sad Sunshine' is the
classic highlight. Said to be written or, at least, conceived while coming off
an acid trip, this may be the most harmonious, proverbially gorgeous conjoining
of fully worked out sitar and orchestral parts in pop music that I have heard
so far — must have been one hell of a trip if, upon the end of the journey,
East and West managed to share such a truly historical meeting. And then
there's 'Brand New Day', Kooper's most eagerly optimistic anthem so far.
Recorded for the soundtrack to Hal Ashby's directorial debut, The Landlord, it has clearly outlived
the movie and works far better as the kick-start opener to Easy Does It.
What else is there? Rootsy, friendly, catchy
soft-rock ('Country Road'), more of the old Blood, Sweat & Tears-style
jazz-rock with bold Morricone-like brass parts ('She Gets Me Where I Live'),
blues-rocky concern for the abused native ('Buckskin Boy'), music-hall
arrangement meets Nashville melody ('I Bought You The Shoes'), and an almost
parodic attempt at big bulgy blues-de-luxe with the title track, performed so
crudely you could easily mistake it for a lame attempt at self-promoting on the
part of your local barroom ensemble. Don't worry, they're professionals,
they're just faking it for a reason.
With all these treasures to reap, you'd think Easy Does It would be perennially
hailed as yet another in an endless stream of masterpieces from 1970. Instead,
it has sunk into almost complete oblivion, rarely appearing on CD (usually as a
limited-edition import) and completely ignored on most critical lists (even
among amateurs: on RateYourMusic, the album has not, as of yet, garnered a
single review). Reader, take my word on it and do not believe this tombly
silence. Even if you do not happen to be a big fan of Mr. Al's voice (I can
understand) or tendency to slip into improvised rambling (I can understand),
railing against Mr. Al's skills as composer and arranger would defy the purpose
of music itself — and Easy Does It
is Al Kooper's biggest, grandest, splurgiest declaration of love for music, one
hundred percent honest and almost nearly as exciting. Thumbs up, of course; get this thing
back in print now, you sluggards.
NEW YORK CITY
(YOU'RE A WOMAN) (1971)
1) New York City (You're A
Woman); 2) John The Baptist (Holy John); 3) Can You Hear It Now; 4) The Ballad
Of The Hard Rock Kid; 5) Going Quietly Mad; 6) Medley: Oo Wee Baby I Love You /
Love Is A Man's Best Friend; 7) Back On My Feet; 8) Come Down In Time; 9)
Dearest Darling; 10) Nightmare #5; 11) The Warning (Someone's On The Cross
Again).
Back to single LP format: many artists, after
the kind of effort that it would take to produce a complex monster like Easy Does It, would be left somewhat
exhausted (think Goat's Head Soup
right on the heels of Exile On Main St.),
but not Kooper, who, having finally hit his stride, was seemingly determined to
set a new world record of continuous creativity.
Again, there is no single conceptual thread to
this collection, and it's good, because it allows each single song to shine on
its own: again, no filler within miles. Again, Al is working with lots of
musicians, including an immense bunch of guests during a Los Angeles session,
which yielded most of the tracks on here, and a smaller combo while guesting
himself in England. One of his new influences is Elton John (yes, the true
well-established professional will never be afraid to borrow from the young,
and it doesn't always look as ugly as
a Mick Jagger/Lenny Kravitz collaboration): not only does Al cover the freshly
issued 'Come Down In Time' (one of the generally overlooked album tracks from Tumbleweed Connection), he even gets
Caleb Quaye to play guitar on a couple of tracks – but not on 'Come Down In Time' itself, which was recorded in L.A.
Always the perfect guy to confound expectations, Mr. Kooper.
With albums like these, it is sometimes easier
to switch to a song-by-song manner than try to summarize impressions that
simply cannot be summarized. Immensely beautiful, the title track: countless
battalions of songwriters have tried to convince the people at large that their personal relationship with New
York merits popularization — Al is one of the few who convinces me, not just because lines like
"New York City, you're a woman / Cold hearted bitch ought to be your name
/ You ain't never loved nobody / Still I'm drawn to you like a moth to a
flame" are a phenomenally successful way of collating clichéd
images into a fresh sequence, but musically, too, it's a grand aural
celebration, with progressively soaring organs and Mellotrons and a coda that
is stuck somewhere in between «anthem» and «prayer» (yes, it does remind of
Elton John circa Madman Across The Water
quite a bit — hey, that's a good
thing).
'John The Baptist', on the other hand, sounds
like The Band: not my fault if, in addition to the rootsy melody, Al whines his
way through the lyrics like Rick Danko, but it's one of the best Band songs The
Band never wrote. 'Can You Hear It Now' is a grand art-pop ballad, more Mellotrons
and echoey soulful guitars and a gospel buildup at the end. Then it's boogie
time with 'The Ballad Of The Hard Rock Kid', parodic in name but a guitar
lover's paradise in nature (excellent slide parts played over a bluesy riff
borrowed from Slim Harpo's 'Shake Your Hips', I believe). 'Going Quietly Mad'
places us in psychedelic piano territory that is sometimes said to emulate the
Beatles but mood-wise is really more reminiscent of that other Cooper with a C (think 'Ballad Of Dwight Fry'). The 'Oo Wee
Baby' medley is Philly soul incarnate, a steady beat, a fat layer of instruments,
and hooks entrusted to female backing vocals...
...which, altogether, may finally answer the
question of why these Kooper classics are not as universally acclaimed as they
should be: throughout the album, Al is clearly capable of emulating all those other people, but it is not so easy to
see «the proper Al» in the songs. The complex answer is that Al Kooper is all of these things; he is being
completely sincere and passionate regardless of whether it is Elton John, Robbie
Robertson, Jackie Wilson, Bob Dylan, or Phil Spector whose creative manner he
is appropriating at the time. But a detailed review of the album will inevitably be choked with comparisons —
and not simply because all of those guys are the more better known ones, so it
is them who will figure in Al Kooper
reviews and not vice versa, but because that's the way it really goes with Al.
Simply put, the man got his own soul and his
own talent, but not his own style; it's an almost terminal case of
«chameleonism», next to which David Bowie is behaviourally indistinguishable
from Lemmy Kilmister. Which clearly translates into the problem of finding
one's own steady fan base. Average fans tend to associate with distinct
personalities, and this ain't no distinct personality; and musical critics
like to pigeonhole, and New York City
cannot be pigeonholed even if one kills off all the pigeons.
If there is
some sort of unifying aspect to all these songs, it is BIGness. Lots of
musicians, lots of layers, grand ambitions, everything is driven as high up as
possible. 'Nightmare # 5' strolls along cloaked in a stern organ melody and
prophetic lyrics, and the title of 'Someone's On The Cross Again' speaks for
itself. (Both songs are carried off splendidly, though.) But even in this aspect
Al loses out, for instance, to George Harrison, whose All Things Must Pass (also quite possibly, one of the influences
here) had established the unbeatable Standard Of Sounding Real Big a year
earlier; next to Harrison's grizzly-size Al is just an ordinary black bear.
None of which should discourage any honest
music lover from checking out this excellent LP; newcomers will find it a more
accessible and easy-going introduction to Al's early 1970s greatness than the excess-improvisation-loaded
Easy Does It. On the other hand, it
is hard to imagine «newcomers» looking for «accessible» stuff to be interested
in Al Kooper in the first place, so disregard this and just go for the
chronology. Thumbs
up, of course.
A POSSIBLE
PROJECTION OF THE FUTURE/CHILDHOOD'S END (1972)
1) A Possible Projection Of The
Future; 2) The Man In Me; 3) Fly On; 4) Please Tell Me Why; 5) The Monkey Time;
6) Let Your Love Shine; 7) Swept For You Baby; 8) Bended Knees; 9) Love Trap;
10) Childhood's End.
Years later, Kooper himself acknowledged that
this album came out as a «colder» experience than usual, ascribing it to heavy
use of synthesizers. He may be partially right about it, too: there is quite a
bit of freezing machine sound here, although, for the most part, Kooper is able
to master the electronic beasts just as effectively as Pete Townshend and
Stevie Wonder were doing at the time. The real problem, however, runs deeper
than that.
Synthesizers or no synthesizers, there is
simply a lot of gloom on this record. It started life as a conceptual thing,
dedicated to issues of time and aging — hence Al's creepy «projection» on the
front cover (fortunately, as of 2010, he looks much better than the plastic zombie on the sleeve) — then lost
track of the concept, but preserved its rather pessimistic spirit. 'A Possible
Projection Of The Future' winds the record up on Al's most depressed note since
'I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know', but if Blood, Sweat & Tears
managed to uphold a solid balance between pain and joy, this record is far more
pain than joy. The above-mentioned synthesizers quickly set up a
half-winterish, half-nightmarish setting, over which Al superimposes sad piano
chords and almost tragically plaintive vocals: "You never know who your
friends are / 'Til they don't come around no more".
Add to this a hearty "No one gives a fuck when I'm singing" and you're
done – the cultured public was still reeling from John Lennon's use of the F-word
on 'Working Class Hero'. On the other hand, given the generally low sales for
most of Al's albums, no one really
gave a fuck when he was singing, so that this should rather be judged as a sign
of heavily getting into character than a smartly calculated public gesture. And
it is nowhere near as memorable, per se, as the thunderous threatening
piano/strings/synths coda to the song.
The rest of the tunes follow the usual pattern
of mixing unpredictable covers with unpredictable originals, and it is generally
the covers that alleviate the heavy mood: almost saccharine-sweetly done
versions of Dylan's 'The Man In Me' and Smokey Robinson's 'Swept For You Baby',
with Al trying out his falsetto range on both; since they are not altogether
different from the sources, they cannot rank with his finest, but Al's ability
to combine sweetness with taste does not betray him on either of the tracks.
Jimmy Cliff's 'Please Tell Me Why' fits in better with the gloomy parts of the
album — and fattens up the original with several layers of those chilly synths
and strings that provide it with a useful extra dimension or two.
Meanwhile, the originals, one after another,
keep dealing with the side effects of broken love affairs: after the anthemic,
but seemingly not too self-certain 'Let Your Love Shine' (which, strange
enough, borrows its main hook from 'Brainwashed' by the Kinks), 'Bended Knees'
has the protagonist prostrate in a weeping prayer, and 'Love Trap' has him
going unquietly mad, with what sounds like backward recorded sitars symbolizing
his wrecked state of mind during the tumultous race-to-the-end. Each single
moment is utterly believable — Kooper's ability to translate soul torture into
sound is still his main attraction.
A
Possible Projection is
certainly not the proper place to start exploring Al: it is better to arrive at
it chronologically, with the darkness and depression offering a sharp contrast
to the brightness and joviality of what used to be. It is, no doubt, tempting
to try to attach it to the «hippie disillusionment» of the time, but, truth
is, that sort of crisis had already struck musicians at large two years
earlier, and it is safer to assume that Al was going through some personal
rough times — and even safer to assume that he wasn't. But it's certainly more exciting to assume that this is a
troubled album made in troubled times by a troubled spirit, and its title track
at least is perfect listening for anyone in dire need of a good wallop of
self-pity. Thumbs
up as usual.
NAKED SONGS (1973)
1) (Be Yourself) Be Real; 2) As
The Years Go Passing By; 3) Jolie; 4) Blind Baby; 5) Been And Gone; 6) Sam
Stone; 7) Peacock Lady; 8) Touch The Hem Of His Garment; 9) Where Were You When
I Needed You; 10) Unrequited.
Apparently this was released to fulfill Al's
contractual obligation — a mish-mashed quickie to allow for some breathing
space and take a three-year break from recording. However, always a gentleman
to the core, Al took the obligation seriously: Naked Songs may not be altogether more «naked» than anything else
he's done (and, fairly speaking, the title would fit in much better with his next album, if you compare the front
sleeves), but it's another good Al Kooper album, not striving for much of
anything except satisfying his usual goals and values. And whoever holds no
love for Mr. Kooperschmidt's usual goals and values has no reason to be present
at this part of the review sequence anyway.
'(Be Yourself) Be Real' has a clichéd
hippie title and a slightly moralizing attitude (are we supposed to cast out
everyone who wants to be fake? Well, on second thought...), but it is one of
his best three-minute outpourings of soul, two amazing piano and choir
crescendos that crash down in a hoarse, near-suffocated "be rea... eaaa...
eal" which let you know for a fact
that, unless you solemnly pledge to be as real as real this very instant, the
guy is going to expire right here and now, thrashing in agony on your
blood-stained carpet.
Then, no sooner than the pledge has been given,
he launches into the fiercest, broken-heartedest interpretation of Albert
King's 'As The Years Go Passing By' that anyone has ever given (and cover
versions abound, by the way, of which Jeff Healey's is the more recommendable
one, Gary Moore's is the one to avoid for those who prefer subtlety over
pathos, and Eric Burdon and the Animals' is the goofiest one). On here, Al
enters his 'More Than You'll Ever Know' mode: Shakesperian doom without
disgusting mannerisms, every word weighted out carefully before being
pronounced, and, in a rare fit of passion, he plays both of the scorching
guitar solos himself, assassinating the instrument (occasionally, people
mistake this for a Mike Bloomfield performance; Mike would have probably gone
for more complexity, but I doubt he could have played with more feeling).
These two performances, I believe, are the best
ones, but there is always space for more highlights: the big band arrangement
of the rainbow-coloured optimistic soul ballad 'Jolie', the hilarious country
sendup of 'Blind Baby' (lovers of Paul McCartney's similarly upbeat country
shuffles from the early 1970s will want to hear this at all costs), the wall-of-sound
arrangement of John Prine's anti-drug classic 'Sam Stone', and the exotic
lushness of 'Peacock Lady', which is like a mind-altering jungle of guitars,
strings, tablas, and reeds (or reed-like synths). You can always count on good
old Al for diversity.
A couple of relatively unfocused and
underarranged, if still classy, piano tunes give the impression of having been
laid out too quickly to pad the sessions; and 'Touch The Hem Of His Garment',
unfortunately, is very hard to appreciate next to the Sam Cooke original,
because there are almost no melody twists to distract from the vocals, and
while I do not hold the orthodox opinion that it is theoretically impossible
for anybody, let alone a blue-eyed soul singer with limited range like Al, to
outperform Sam, this is one of Sam's
best ever vocal performances — in fact, this may just be the single greatest
straightforward gospel number ever written and performed by a solo artist —
and Al Kooper can move big hills, but not major mountains.
Other than that, if only all «contractual»
albums were ever like this, the world would have a much higher opinion of the
legal system as a whole and record industry lawyers in particular. More thumbs up
for Al.
ACT LIKE
NOTHING'S WRONG (1976)
1) Is We On The Downbeat?; 2)
This Diamond Ring; 3) She Don't Ever Lose Her Groove; 4) I Forgot To Be Your
Lover; 5) Missing You; 6) Out Of Left Field; 7) (Please Not) One More Time; 8)
In My Own Sweet Way; 9) Turn My Head Towards Home; 10) A Visit To The Rainbow
Bar & Grill; 11) Hollywood Vampire.
Three years off and Al returns again — not in
the best of all possible lights, even if, for some reason, Act Like Nothing's Wrong is among his
personal favorites. Essentially, what this is is a record conceived and
executed as an almost formulaic Seventies' R'n'B album. All it takes is a
little bit of detachment and you can see Al Green singing all the songs with
Willie Mitchell standing behind the steering wheel.
Words of the day include smooth, silky, and sexy: even the lack of clothes on the
front sleeve agrees fairly well with the overall spirit (three cheers,
however, for the decision to cover up... no, not what you thought; I meant the hairy chest, of course, that
particularly annoying trademark of the mainstream school of coke-and-sunshine
pop of the decade). Typical elements of the sound involve well-disciplined,
mechanistic brass riffs; funky Stevie Wonder-style clavinet melodies; pulsating
rhythm sections whose business it is to keep you on your feet until you drop
('She Don't Ever Lose Her Groove' is quite a telling title); keyboards, strings,
background choirs, etc. etc.
In short, superficially this is Kooper's most
«commercial» album to date; but if there is one person on the planet who is
physiologically incapable of «selling out», Al, at the very least, clearly
passes the primaries — all of these songs place more emphasis on sincerity, melodic
build-up, complexity of arrangements, and subtlety of expression than on brute
head-hammering hooks, and even if these songs got any airplay at all back in
the day, they would be immediately forgotten by the populace at large next to
concurrent Bee Gees material. Play 'She Don't Ever Lose Her Groove' next to
'Night Fever' and you'll see what I mean.
The jerky glissando that opens 'Missing You' is
just like the one that opens 'Dancing Queen' (coincidence?), but no amount of
proto-disco glitz that Al managed to pile up can distract from realizing that
it is, in fact, a very sad and heartfelt song, and that his falsetto climax in
the chorus is a painful falsetto
rather than the usual sugar sweet falsetto in the disco tradition.
William Bell's 'I Forgot To Be Your Lover' is also given a glossy coating,
which passes by almost unobserved, next to Al's so very human delivery. Maybe
that is what the audiences did not like — the human element in all of these performances. Technically, Kooper
isn't much of a vocalist, but over the years, he'd learned very well to put
that to his advantage (he wasn't a student of Dylan's for nothing, after all);
the only trouble is that the more experienced he became about it, the less mainstream
audiences would be willing to take it. Barry Manilow forever!
Still, no matter how heartfelt, there is a
disturbing atmosphere of «sameness» about these songs that only dissipates with
the final number — out of the blue, without warning, the bag is tied up with
'Hollywood Vampire', a loud art-rock epic that almost looks like a sardonic
spit in the face of all the attitudes pandered to on the previous tracks. No straightforward Bee Gees fan could tolerate this: a subtly-creepy send-up of an evil
vamp that ditches sweetness for bitterness and ominousness, not to mention
culminating in the most ferocious guitar solo on the entire record. Even if the
ratio of musical ideas to song length is not ideal, it is still the only track
on Act Like Nothing's Wrong that
rattles my imagination even after the album is over, and ensures it a thumbs up
where, otherwise, I might have been too lazy to make these thumbs defy the law
of gravity.
CHAMPIONSHIP
WRESTLING (1982)
1) I Wish You Would; 2) Two
Sides (To Every Situation); 3) Wrestle With This; 4) Lost Control; 5) I'd
Rather Be An Old Man's Sweetheart (Than A Young Man's Fool); 6) The Heart Is A
Lonely Hunter; 7) Bandstand; 8) Finders Keepers; 9) Snowblind.
After another lay-off period, much longer than
usual this time (but, fortunately, depriving us from the experience of learning
what «The Al Kooper Disco Album» would have sounded like), Kooper teamed up
with Jeff «Skunk» Baxter, of the original Steely Dan fame... to release
possibly the strangest, and unluckiest, album of his career.
The creativity is still there, by all means,
but way too many things about the album are simply not what they should be.
Starting from the wrap-up concept: the silly title, the puns on the back cover
(such as splitting the LP's two sides into «First Fall» and «Second Fall»), the
ridiculous photo on the front sleeve, the «ring noises» that open the
proceedings — almost as if someone had just watched Raging Bull a couple times too much. The idea of letting Bill
Szymczyk (the guy who started out real well, producing classic B. B. King and
James Gang albums, and ended up as the prime minister at the Eagles' court)
take care of the proceedings was also disturbing: previously, Al had produced
all of his efforts on his own, and did a damn fine job at that. Why let the Eagles
guy in on an already well-working formula?
But the most confusing thing here is that Championship Wrestling does not sound
like an «album» at all. Instead, it feels like a mix of four and a half single
records of widely varying quality that someone put together for no reason at
all. Part of this is because Al mostly takes a break from singing, contributing
vocals only to two of the songs and letting in three different vocalists to battle
for the rest — but the vocalists bring their own atmospheres, and, for the most
part, they turn out to be completely incompatible.
Al's personal «single» is the best of the lot:
a crisp-fried version of 'I Wish You Would' that continues the fine tradition
of reinterpretations of old classics (The Yardbirds this time), with blazing
leads from Baxter — and a moody original shuffle ('The Heart Is A Lonely
Hunter'), with an eerie midnight spirit, that should have made it onto the
previous album (that spirit ties in real well with that of 'Hollywood
Vampire'). But beyond that...
...the two numbers with Mickey Thomas on vocals
sound like a slightly improved take on Foreigner: pompous arena-rock with too
high a concentration of gall and pathos over melodicity. The two instrumentals
are second-hand jazz-fusion, rather hollow exercises in technique and fluidity
— why should anyone waste one's time on them
instead of going for the real thing (Jeff Beck, Holdsworth-era Soft Machine
etc.), I have no idea. The almost-retro R'n'B number 'Finders Keepers', with
Ricky Washington on vocals, is a bit more memorable, but Kooper has already
done everything he could with the clavinet anyway.
Strangest of all are the two songs with
independent singer-songwriter Valerie Carter on vocals: 'Two Sides' brings on
memories of Dusty Springfield (which is a really odd feeling coming on the
heels of the hell-raising 'I Wish You Would'), and 'I'd Rather Be An Old Man's
Sweetheart' is an Atlantic-style R'n'B machine that brings on equally solid
memories of Aretha Franklin in her heyday (stylistically, not vocally, of
course). Both tunes are pleasant pop, but somehow neither of them feels like
it's got anything to do with Al Kooper.
You gotta give it to Al, though: even for what
could easily be called his worst ever album he managed to pull some surprises
out of his sleeve, and compared to the real garbage that so many of his
contemporaries were putting out in 1982 (It's
Hard, eh?), Wrestling is one
Empire State Building of a masterpiece. Had it not been so confused and
misguided in its execution (and the problem was exacerbated quite seriously
with Baxter taking off and leaving in the middle of the sessions), it might
have... well, it might have been just another great Al Kooper album. Instead,
it's a not-great, but BIZARRE Al Kooper album! Go for it — that is, if you can
find it anywhere.
REKOOPERATION (1994)
1) Downtime; 2) After The
Lights Go Down Low; 3) When The Spell Is Broken; 4) How 'My Ever Gonna Get Over
You; 5) Sneakin Round The Barnyard; 6) Soul Twist-ed; 7) Lookin For Clues; 8) Honky
Tonk; 9) Clean Up Woman; 10) Don't Be Cruel; 11) Alvino Johnson's Shuffle; 12) Johnny
B. Goode; 13) I Wanna Little Girl.
Kooper lay low through most of the Eighties —
which only further confirms his sensibility; had most of the prominent artists
of his generation followed his example, their present day reputations would
only have been the better for it (just imagine — no Press To Play, no Dirty Work,
no August, no Never Let Me Down, not even Camouflage...
then again, an artist with a thoroughly unblemished reputation can be a real
dangerous type, come to think of it).
Surviving this, his next notable musical move
happened at the perfect time — in 1992, when, for a while, decent musical taste
returned to «mainstream periphery» as the smoke screen dissipated and people
began to realize just how ridiculous synth-pop and hair metal guitars have
gotten. With Jimmy Vivino, originally the main guitar player and arranger for
the Conan O'Brien Show, he formed «The Rekooperators», a professional
no-nonsense, if not exactly innovative, team, and put them on the road, playing
a smorgasboard of eclectic material in the proper Al Kooper way.
The band's only studio album was released two
years later — and yes, after twelve years of silence one might have expected anything, but, most probably, Rekooperation is not at all what one
would really expect. What it is is a
collection of twelve instrumental and only one vocal numbers, mixing inventive
original compositions with covers of classic standards, mutated beyond recognition.
The very fact that, once again, Al is taking other people's ideas and submits
them to genetic engineering, is not at all new — but the setting within which
he is doing it certainly is, and the near-total absence of vocals, coupled
with the complexity of the arrangements, gives the whole thing a killer hip
atmosphere. On Kooper's vocal albums, one could accuse the man of being bloated
and pretentious — a hollow accusation, since all of the bloatedness was always
compensated by professionalism, and all of the pretentiousness, by sincerity,
but an accusation nevertheless. Rekooperation
is not pompous, anthemic, or overtly cathartic. It is simply thrilling. And it
kicks ass.
The assemblage of covers raises Al's
eclecticism to unprecedented heights here. There's Elvis, with a 'Don't Be
Cruel' that has been converted to a sort of lazy, non-chalant, New Orleanian
Dr. John-style shuffle. There's Chuck, with 'Johnny B. Goode' slowed down, a
little bit discoified (but definitely not
the way Elton John killed it on Victim
Of Love), and transformed into a comic stomp, what with the organ playing
all of Chuck's vocal parts (not that it wasn't a comic stomp to begin with,
but, if at all possible, Al makes it even less serious than it used to be).
There's Betty Wright, whose 'Clean Up Woman'
fully preserves the sunny brightness of the upbeat original. On 'After The
Lights Go Down Low', Kooper mimicks Al Hibbler's original vocal part so
perfectly that it made me reevaluate the soulfulness of the song. A bit less
interesting is the cover of Bill Doggett's 'Honky Tonk', if only because it
sticks way too close to the already perfect original; and the only serious
misstep is 'Soul Twist-ed' — Kooper is doing fine when he uses his keys to
mimick voices, but when he tries to substitute them for King Curtis' sax, the
outcome is sort of evident. You'll love this only if you haven't heard the
original 'Soul Twist'.
Stepping out of the old school
rock'n'roll/R'n'B template, there are two more surprises — a deep-cutting
tribute to Richard Thompson ('When The Spell Is Broken'), with Al's organ at
its most soulful, and an utterly grossly ridiculous and equally loveable
reworking of Robert Palmer's 'Looking For Clues', with the original xylophone
solo replaced by a bumblebee-style organ passage that features the speediest,
most perfectly flowing playing from the guy we have heard up to that point —
clearly, the twelve years were not passed away from the keyboard.
Throw on a couple of adequate (but not so
interesting) original compositions, sum things up with a vocal rendition of the
old lounge standard 'I Wanna Little Girl' (well, the man was not yet 50 when he
recorded that, we shall not count that against him), and there you have it — a
record that clearly demonstrates how awesome it is to still have Mr. Kooper
with us in this post-revolutionary musical period. Were he a major commercial
star at this juncture, all of these people that he is covering, with the
possible exception of Elvis and Chuck, should be paying royalties to him instead of vice versa; a classier
way of introducing so much past talent to newer listeners can hardly be
imagined. (Not that a lot of listeners would bother locating the originals, of
course, but these days, with Youtube and stuff around, it is much easier; if
you have heard the album, but are unfamiliar with some of the ground it
covers, here's your chance). Thumbs up, heartily.
SOUL OF A MAN (1995)
1) Somethin' Goin' On; 2) I
Can't Keep From Cryin' Sometimes; 3) I Stand Alone/I Can Love A Woman/New York
City; 4) Flute Thing; 5) Don't Tell Me (Repo Man); 6) Two Trains Runnin'; 7)
Heartbeat; 8) Sleepwalk; 9) Just One Smile; 10) I Can't Quit Her; 11) I Want A
Little Girl; 12) My Days Are Numbered; 13) I Love You More Than You'll Ever
Know; 14) Spoken Intro; 15) Made In The Shade; 16) Downtime; 17) Violets Of
Dawn; 18) Albert's Shuffle; 19) Closing Medley (You Can't Always Get What You
Want/Season Of The Witch).
Is this a stupendous live album, or what? Imagine
a double live CD led by, say, Eric Clapton, with three songs performed by the
original Yardbirds, four by the original Cream, and an extra three by the
original Derek & The Dominos (minus the dead guys, of course), plus a bunch
of solo stuff plus a bunch of whatever else came along — old stuff, new stuff,
you name it. Clearly, despite all of his allegedly easy-going nature, Clapton
could not pull it off in one go, nor would he ever want to. Leave that kind of bewildering stuff to crazy
schemers like Al Kooper.
For a series of three gigs, recorded in New
York in February 1994, Al got together the original members (well, not all of
them, but most) of both of his old
bands —The Blues Project and Blood, Sweat & Tears, as well as his new band, the Rekooperators, led by
Jimmy Vivino. In addition, he got Johnnie Johnson (the Johnnie Johnson, of Chuck Berry fame) to play some piano, and
John Sebastian (the John Sebastian,
of the Lovin' Spoonful fame) to blow some harmonica — in fact, something tells
me he could have gotten anybody,
including President Clinton on tambourine, they just ran out of space listing
all the guests on the album cover.
With such an eclectic presence spearheaded by
one of the most eclectic artists the world has ever seen, one should be
prepared for everything. Now, obviously, Al did not get the old bands back
together to make them play post-rock: the old chestnuts are respectfully
revisited en masse, from the Blues Project's 'Flute Thing' and 'I Can't Keep
From Crying' to BS&T's 'My Days Are Numbered' and 'I Can't Quit Her'.
Apart from that, however, instead of concentrating on his solo career (mostly
reduced to a brief three-song medley in the early part of the set and just two
numbers from Rekooperation), Al
concentrates on...
...oh boy, this is always my favourite part with
this guy. Let's see now: there's Randy Newman ('Just One Smile'). The Rolling
Stones (well, somehow, Al is justified in choosing 'You Can't Always Get What
You Want', considering that he played on the original; and this is the only
live rendition of this classic song I've ever heard that emphasizes the initial choral part instead of just dropping it, as
the Stones always do). Friggin' Lynyrd Skynyrd — 'Made In The Shade', not even
one of their better-known tunes, but turned into a New Orleanian hedonistic
delight with Johnnie Johnson's help. And, even less expected — Adrian Belew,
with 'Heartbeat' ("I cannot even begin to tell you how difficult it is to
play this song", Al complains before launching into it, "cause Adrian
Belew is nuts!"). The band does
a great job on the song, though.
Not everything is picture-perfect. The Blues
Project, for instance, was a really early venture for Kooper, who did not
really begin to bloom until 1968, and while the band was quite decent when
covering contemporary psych-pop (e. g. Eric Andersen's 'Violets Of Dawn', one
of the highlights here as well), their «blues» thing was rather generic, and
little has changed since then — eleven minutes for Muddy Waters' 'Two Trains
Runnin' is overkill. And on 'Albert's Shuffle', Jimmy Vivino does not
particularly well match the shoes of the late great Mike Bloomfield (who,
himself, must have had a great time watching the shows from Heaven through
direct satellite transmission). Also, one strange post-production defect
concerns Steve Katz, the guitar hero behind both Blues Project and BS&T,
who, for reasons beyond rational comprehension, did not give permission to
release his playing, so his parts had to be re-recorded in the studio by
Vivino.
But none of this is truly significant next to
the general feel of the record: once again, and once again from an entirely
different angle, you get a potpourri of Americana (I sometimes forget Adrian
Belew is American, too) played with just the right mix of professionalism,
sincerity, and accessibility. And Al is in perfect form as a singer, too — for
instance, his rendition of 'I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know' almost matches the original in tension
and passion, and this is a major feat; the original vocal performance was so
perfectly modulated that each single live version by BS&T I've ever heard
was always a letdown. Here, allowing himself some minor leeway during the coda,
Kooper delivers the goods exactly the way I feel they should always be
delivered if 'I Love You More' is destined to remain what it has always been
(namely, one of the most soul-shattering, tear-jerking songs ever written). His
grumbly sense of humor works well, too ("I hate playing this
song...", he says about 'I Can't Quit You', "...except with these
guys").
Soul
Of A Man is a goddamn perfect
title. It is not a «career summary» — it omits way too much from Al's career,
and adds way too much from his non-career for that — it is merely a reaffirmation
of Al's original purpose in music, and shows him fully capable of pulling off
everything he did thirty years earlier, and more. Look up «artistic integrity»
in your local encyclopaedia — if you don't find a picture of Al Kooper next to
it, I'll be very much surprised.
BLACK COFFEE (2005)
1) My Hands Are Tied; 2) Am I
Wrong; 3) How 'My Ever Gonna Get Over You; 4) Going, Going, Gone; 5) Keep It To
Yourself; 6) Get Ready; 7) Imaginary Lover; 8) Green Onions (live); 9) Another
Man's Prize; 10) Childish Love; 11) Got My Ion Hue; 12) Just For A Thrill; 13)
Comin' Back In A Cadillac (live); 15) (I Want You To) Tell Me The Truth.
In Al's own words, this album had been «thirty
years in the making», and it certainly sounds like it, because no album (at
least, no rock album — we aren't talking Wagner operas here) that had been
thirty years in the making could ever aspire to turn out to be a jaw-dropping
masterpiece in the end (what with spontaneity being a major component of it and
all). Instead, it is simply the first «true Al Kooper» album of new material in
30 years, if, out of purism, we disregard the bizarre Baxter collaboration and
the all-instrumental Rekooperation — and it is simply every bit as good
as any other true Al Kooper album. No better, no worse.
Still, it is a somewhat special feeling
to be listening to a brand new Al Kooper album in the 21st century and realize
that the man has not really withered one little bit. Call it the old grumble
grumble, but only grizzled Sixties veterans manage to preserve the proper
amounts of energy and creativity so as not to sound completely out of vogue in
their, er, sixties. Of course, almost nobody noticed Black Coffee when
it came out — and why should they, when they so rarely noticed the young
Al Kooper? — but those few who did, all gave rave reviews (Al himself was astonished
at one such review in the Mojo magazine, no less), and I can't blame
them. They had no choice, if you ask me.
Seventy minutes worth of material here, with
hardly a second idly wasted. Even the two live jams included from a gig with his
new band, «The Funky Faculty» (apparently, consisting entirely of his fellow
music professors at the Berkelee College in the Boston!) are terrific: Booker
T. & the MG's 'Green Onions', fully respecting the cool grimness of the
original (Al begins with a rather slavish imitation of the old organ solo),
adds blazing rock solos and fades out just as the repetitiveness factor
threatens to kick in. 'Comin' Back In A Cadillac' is a semi-original that
begins with a brass riff borrowed from 'Bony Moronie', immediately becomes a
part facetious, part bitter-ironic autobiographic rant ("Right now I don't
have a dime / Most folks say the life I live is a crime"), and then
unpredictably turns into a «soul clapping» session with the audience. How Al
Kooper-ish.
As for the studio recordings — «black coffee»
is indeed the perfect way to describe their general style: somewhat on the dark
side, with plenty of bitterness, and yet, at the same time, an overall
pleasing, satisfactory, mind-clearing effect. The music is not quite as diverse
as usual, generally well set within the classic R'n'B pattern, with occasional
excourses into Dylan-ish singer-songwriting and the lounge style, but all of
the songs are exceedingly well-written, starting from the anthemic brass riff
that opens 'My Hands Are Tied' and all the way down.
Al's voice, which was never one of nature's
treasures to begin with, has become even lower, cracklier, and whinier than it
used to be; but the genius of Al is that he always knew what kind of stuff this
voice was best fit for, and Black Coffee
is the final proof, because the songs
are lower, cracklier, and whinier, while never losing the necessary
soulfulness. 'Going, Going, Gone' is an old man's rant at the inevitably
changing times (with a funny stab at hip-hop culture as opposed to «deep soul
music» which I cannot help enjoying), but it is nowhere near as flat and
close-mindedly bitter as, for instance, Steve Stills' 'Seen Enough'. Songs
like 'Keep It To Yourself' and 'Another Man's Prize' seem to be borrowing the
vibe from Mark Knopfler — gloomy, introspective, nocturnal broodings, but also
catchier and more interestingly arranged than the average Knopfler song (Dire
Straits always sucked at spicing up their sound beyond just one awesome
guitar).
As usual, there are some interesting covers —
'Get Ready', 'Just For A Thrill' — that almost seem to be there for comparison
with how well Al can write his own songs in a similar style: 'Am I Wrong' is a
cross between swamp blues and boogie that stands loud and proud against Smokey
Robinson's fast-paced register, and 'How 'My Ever Gonna Get Over You' matches
Lil' Armstrong's mood and depth bit for bit, with Al's raspy vocal performance
treasurable over the song's musical content (generic, but tastefully arranged
lounge stuff).
Overall, Black
Coffee is very much an old man's album, and that's a compliment: always
true to himself, Kooper recognizes his age and is not ashamed to make
nostalgia, retro-reflection, and slow-burning, bitter-esque emotion into the
central themes. Which never completely suppresses the desire to rock out,
either, as the 'Green Onions' cover successfully demonstrates. Charismatic
then, charismatic now, he is aging just like a good wine should, settling so
comfortably into the «elder statesman» role that the hat-tipping reflex
becomes unconditional, and so is, of course, the thumbs up motion.
WHITE CHOCOLATE (2008)
1) Love Time; 2) You Never Know
Till You Get There; 3) Calling You; 4) I Love You More Than Words Can Say; 5)
It Takes A Lot To Laugh (It Takes A Train To Cry); 6) I Cried So Hard; 7)
Staxability; 8) You Make Me Feel So Good (All Over); 9) Susan; 10) Hold On; 11)
Cast The First Stone; 12) No 1 2 Call Me Baby; 13) Candy Man; 14) I (Who Have
Nothing); 15) (I Don't Know When But) I Know That I'll Be There Soon.
This aptly titled companion piece to Black Coffee is a little disappointing.
Apparently, Al was on a limited budget, but that does not really explain why he
needed to fall back on hollow synthesizers and obsolete-sounding drum machines
on so many of these tracks — what is this, making up for lack of Eighties
output? Stuff like 'You Make Me Feel So Good' sounds simply awful, especially coming out of the
hands of such an experienced soundmeister — and the rest of the tracks often
come out pretty flat as well.
Out of reach of the major studios and, perhaps,
compensating with homebrewed digital technologies, Al is in real strong need
of a master producer here, yet, if I understand it correctly, White Chocolate was his first album not
to get any official distribution at all:
physical CD copies could only be acquired from his own site. Well, that's still no reason to infect your atmosphere
with sounds that never really belonged in it.
Musically, this is another batch of first-rate
«white soul / R'n'B» compositions and interpretations that suffer from subpar
production and, sometimes, so-so musicianship (Al is still playing with The
Funky Faculty, and The Funky Faculty is still playing like a faculty rather
than a well-grounded rock band), but certainly not from a lack of melodicity
or, God forbid, sincerity. There is, in fact, so much R'n'B on here that by now we know: Al Kooper has lived all
his life suffering from not having been born in Sam Cooke's, Otis Redding's, or
Marvin Gaye's shoes, and even though he has a clear advantage on all three of
them now (as in, they are all violently dead and he is peacefully alive), I
miss those early days, when the man was radiating all sorts of styles and genres.
Now it is as if he just felt the need to resuscitate the old Atlantic Records
spirit.
A song name like 'Staxability' says it all,
even if the tune itself is a load of fun, and no one really has to concentrate
on Al namedropping all of the Stax-Volt heroes (although it does not hurt to
refresh one's memory, either — quick, name all of the M.G.s! and most of them,
incidentally, are guesting on the actual song) instead of the funky brass
riffs. It's an homage, but a good one, but still an homage, and the whole album
is this unabashed trip down memory lane. Al covers Eddie Floyd ('I Love You
More Than Words Can Say'), Ben E. King ('I Who Have Nothing'), and, in a moment
of personal luck, gets to co-write a couple songs with Gerry Goffin himself.
It's a bit of an overkill, really, even for Al's standards.
Interestingly, White Chocolate came out sunnier and shinier than Black Coffee: half of the songs are
either loud, pompous, life-asserting anthems, pleasantly offset only by Al's
ever-whinifying, but still highly resonant, old voice ('I Love You More...',
'You Make Me Feel So Good', 'Susan', 'No 1 2 Call Me Baby'; some of these I can
easily imagine on post-Al Blood,
Sweat & Tears albums — after all, how much emotional difference is there
between 'You Make Me Feel So Good' and 'You've Made Me So Very Happy'?), or
equally loud and anthemic tunes with just a slight touch of melancholy, but no
tragedy ('Love Time'; the fast moving 'You Never Know 'Til You Get There',
arguably the album's most introspective and personal number that begins with a
subtle lyrical nod to Dylan's '115th Dream' and could have been really great if its main melodic hook weren't
played on some cheap-sounding electronic keyboard — to my ears, it would need a
couple of real cellos to truly come alive).
In a way, that's good, because the world has
seen way too much whinying from old rock'n'roll
farts already; and I have no idea if Kooper is so much internally at
peace with himself as would seem from listening to the album (so much so that
he wraps it up with the happiest, cheeriest «carnival gospel» performance
about death ever put on record) — but even if he isn't, White Chocolate gives no sign of that. It may be somewhat
monotonous, and it certainly is a disgrace to the classic «Al Kooper sound», but I do believe him when he
writes how much fun he had making it, and, after all, at the ripe age of 64 he
should feel absolutely free to lock
himself in that one particular groove that, throughout his whole life, he has
loved the best. Thumbs
up.
ADDENDA:
RARE AND WELL DONE (1964-2001; 2005)
CD I: 1) I Can't Quit Her; 2)
Somethin' Goin' On (demo); 3) Autumn Song; 4) I Can't Stand The Rain; 5) Baby
Please Don't Go (live); 6) I Let Love Slip Through My Fingers; 7) The
Earthquake Of Your Love; 8) Bulgarya; 9) Nuthin' I Wouldn't Do (For A Woman
Like You); 10) New York's My Home (Razz-A-Ma-Tazz); 11) Making Plans For Nigel;
12) I Believe To My Soul; 13) Went To See The Gypsy; 14) Rachmaninoff's
Birthday; 15) Hey Jude (rehearsal tape); 16) Living In My Own Religion; 17)
The Big Chase; 18) They Just Don't Make 'Em Like That Anymore; 19) A Drive
Through The Old Neighborhood.
CD II: 1) I Can't Keep From
Cryin' Sometimes (live); 2) I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know; 3) This
Diamond Ring; 4) Albert's Shuffle; 5) Bury My Body; 6) Season Of The Witch; 7)
New York City (You're A Woman); 8) I Can't Quit Her (live); 9) I Stand Alone;
10) Flute Thing; 11) You Never Know Who Your Friends Are; 12) I Got A Woman;
13) Brand New Day; 14) Love Theme From The Landlord.
Frankly speaking, I do not understand what in
the world made Al decide to go ahead with this double CD package — most likely,
he just wanted to make a fine present to his beloved self with this «totally
killer package» (in his own words). It is one of those ridiculous «half
greatest hits, half rarities» things that make fans and novices alike overpay
and overcringe; all the more ridiculous coming from Al Kooper, the man whose
last significant batch of «novices» was probably acquired the week that Child Is Father To The Man reached its
chart peak at No. 47.
In addition, the second («well done») CD is odd
as hell even for old fans' sakes: for instance, Al has insisted on cramming the
entire seven minutes of 'Albert's
Shuffle' and eleven minutes of 'Season Of The Witch' from Supersession on it — yeah, these are fine jams all right, certainly
well done and all, but coming at the expense of so much other great stuff (the resulting
«retrospective» pretty much stops dead in its tracks around 1971), the choice
reeks too much of unpredictability for unpredictability's sake. For the
Beatles to have a «Millennium Collection» that drops three or four textbook
hits in favor of 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)', would be refreshingly cool; for
Al Kooper, whose popularity does not even begin to approach Ringo Starr's solo
career, it is unpleasantly haughty (but I still love the guy).
Now on to the real meat: the nineteen rarities
on CD 1. There is one big catch here. On one hand, Al Kooper does not generally
write or perform crappy filler, and most of this vault stuff could make fine,
worthy additions to any of his classic albums. However, much of it is in the
form of «fully-arranged demos», meaning synthesizers and programmed drums in
the place of real competent musicians, and vocals that seem processed through
a test tube. As soulful, sincere, and memorable as 'I Can't Stand The Rain'
and 'Living In My Own Religion' can be, I just cannot recommend them to
anybody but the most hardcore fan — not until Mr. Kooper decides to re-record
them with a normal band. Sorry, Mr. Al.
A few of the choices are, admittedly, just
plain bad, and the worst one is chosen as the opening track — a 2001 remake of
'I Can't Quit Her' as a slow, draggy adult contemporary ballad, throwing out
everything that was so great about the song's melody in the first place. There
is also a bit of cheesy «senti-pop» ('The Earthquake Of Your Love' is like a
collaboration between Neil Young, Billy Joel, and disco-era Bee Gees), a
stupidly pathetic arena-rock theme with Titanic Guitar Solos™ ('Bulgarya') and
an instrumental number that sounds like generic Eighties prog rock ('The Big
Chase') — yuck.
On the positive side, the long stretch from
track 11 to track 15 is almost worth the price of the entire package on its
own. First, in a fantastically
unpredictable manner, there is a cover of XTC's (!) 'Making Plans For Nigel'
from Drums & Wires (!!),
rearranged as a carnivalesque extravaganza with hopping violins and, the way it
seems, accordeon-imitating keyboards (!!!). It is bizarre on its own and even
more bizarre compared with the original, but, if possible, even catchier. Then
there's a terrific take on Ray Charles' 'I Believe To My Soul' (from 1970, with
Mick Taylor on guitar and Al at his deadliest) and a raving hard-rock/power-pop,
whichever way you like it, reinvention of Dylan's formerly quiet and
introspective 'Went To See The Gypsy'.
Then the next track is, again, spoiled by
crappy arrangement, but it is fairly hard to forget a song whose chorus goes
"Oh I just can't believe you left me on Rachmaninoff's birthday"
(which, as a matter of fact, also happens to be April Fools' Day). And finally,
the universally acknowledged highlight of the program is a 1969 big band
instrumental arrangement of 'Hey Jude' — no, not the coda, but the song itself, in a fun, stompy, stormy manner
that Benny Goodman himself might have envied.
In the end, such positives outweigh the
negatives, making the collection a must-have for all those who have admitted Al
into the circle of their personal greats, and justifying its thumbs up;
and yet, at the same time, coupled with the general deterioration of the Al
Kooper Sound on his 21st century albums, it makes me wonder a little bit
whether the man hasn't really gone deaf in one ear or something. Then again, I
guess when you hit sixty, it is
natural of you to cut your own legacy more slack than you used to — or, in a
more philosophical manner, it is easier to perceive the little specks of beauty
in what you previously saw as monolithic turds.
BEDSITTER IMAGES (1967)
1) Bedsitter Images; 2) Swiss
Cottage Manoeuvres; 3) The Carmichaels; 4) Scandinavian Girl; 5) Pretty Gold
Hair; 6) Denise At 16; 7) Samuel, Oh How You've Changed!; 8) Cleave To Me; 9) A
Long Way Down From Stephanie; 10) Ivich; 11) Beleeka Doodle Day.
Alastair Ian Stewart narrowly missed the chance
to become the leading voice in fantasy folk; his first single, released for
Decca in 1966, was called 'The Elf' and is frequently quoted as one of the
first, if not the very first, Tolkien-inspired song to get a commercial
release. The song is fairly cute, but either Stewart was afraid of losing the
field to Marc Bolan in the long run, or he simply perceived the silliness of
it all, or perhaps he got ridiculed by either Dylan or Simon, the former of
whom he revered and the latter was good friends with.
Whatever the reason, in 1967 he rebooted his
career, signed up with CBS, and put up his own modest claim, one that is at
once completely transparent and yet, rather hard to put an untrembling finger
on. Much of Bedsitter Images sounds like it belongs on Nuggets II
— pop-style Brit-folk with a slight mystical-magical tinge — but we are most
certainly not in the realm of the three minute single, even though only
a few tunes violate that rule technically. Dissecting Bedsitter Images
into the sum of its influences is useful, and defining it as an album that
could only appear in 1967 is insightful, yet it has its own voice, too, and,
although Stewart was still way far from being recognized as a solitary force in
pop music, this is also an album that could only have been recorded by the
likes of Al Stewart.
Since Stewart came from the folk scene, echoes
of Dylan were unavoidable, but they are mostly felt in the decision to push
ahead with a few long songs (most notably, the grand seven minutes of 'Beleeka
Doodle Day'), and in the lyrical influence, although it should be noted that
Stewart never followed Dylan in his beat escapades and weirdass linguistic
experiments; clearly, it is the early acoustic Dylan, not yet free from the
clutches of romanticism, that serves as Al's beacon.
Paul Simon, with whom Al had even shared
living space a little while back, is also a large presence, and almost
directly responsible, I think, for the youthful enchanted prance of the title
track, which is like a slightly more serious and responsible brother to 'The
59th Street Bridge Song' (although the steady, monotonous fall of the verse
lyrics is more Dylan than Simon). On the other hand, both Simon and Stewart owe
a common debt to the folkie scene in general — the age-honoured traditional
melody elements, the gallantry/chivalry touch for the love songs, the general
intelligence and culture stamp on the singing voice etc.
But occasionally, Stewart also goes beyond that
in trying to merge those medieval influences with the relevant Brit-poppiness
of the day, and so it should be no surprise that right after 'Swiss Cottage
Manoeuvres', which is both lyrically and melodically reminiscent of Dylan's
'4th Time Around', we segue into 'The Carmichaels', thematically much more of a
Ray Davies song (and, coincidentally, with its subject matter of a bored
cheating housewife, also presages 'Mrs. Robinson'). Here, he shows that he can
be mean and sardonic, too, behind that innocent stare.
But not for long, of course. Overall, Bedsitter
Images is hopelessly lost in romance, whether it be old-fashioned,
theatrical romance ("Maid, truly I see now, it must be a long way down,
and with love's burnt shore must all dalliance hither crumble and wither"
— Sir Thomas Malory, eat your heart out!), or some typically Sixties' attempt
at finding radically new ways of searching for the same old meaning of life
('Scandinavian Girl'). And, like a true folkie pro, he does not neglect the duty
of showcasing his guitar playing skills, with two non-outstanding, but quite
pretty instrumentals ('Denise At 16', 'Ivich').
Now comes the odd part. Most people, including
Stewart himself, have always thought that CBS pretty much ruined the record by
drowning out Al's introspective sound with Alexander Faris' orchestral arrangements.
I disagree. Obviously, they were merely trying to follow the latest trend, the
one stating that pop artists performing in romantic genres go down well with
symphonic treatment (see the Moody Blues' Days Of Future Past for
further examples), but most of the arrangements are in very good taste, and
never really distract from the essence of the songs. It is not just a bunch of
syrupy strings tacked on as an afterthought — strings, pianos, horns, flutes,
chimes, harps, Al really got the works here, and no two arrangements really
sound the same.
For instance, 'Samuel, Oh How You've Changed!'
is not very original as far as such melodies go, and it is up to the cute harp
plucking to push it up in the beauty department. The military fanfares add a
whole new dimension to 'Swedish Cottage Manoeuvres'. And the piano arpeggios,
rising higher and higher all through the duration of the chorus of 'Bedsitter
Images', are just about the best aspect of that song as a whole — a magnificent
melodic touch which turns the song from a competent exercise in Simon-izing
into something of near-epic proportions. Plus, it is all handled quite
intelligently; the album's magnum opus, 'Beleeka Doodle Day', does not
get any orchestral backing, just acoustic guitars and a morose organ laying
down a wintery pattern in the background, because strings would not have added
anything significant to this kind of sound.
The album is truly flawless. It simply does not
aspire to all that much — like most of Al's records, its ambitions are limited,
and it prefers to capitalize on breakthroughs made by other people rather than
try its own. It is also way «fluffier» than his subsequent efforts, but there
is nothing wrong with having too many stars in your eyes if you generate them
yourself instead of buying them wholesale like mass-produced contact lenses.
Intelligent lyrics, beautiful voice, competent guitar playing, inventive
arrangements — a classic example of «Snubbed First Effort», to be dusted off
and reappraised once Father Time readjusts the necessary balance.
LOVE CHRONICLES (1969)
1) In Brooklyn; 2) Old Compton
Street Blues; 3) The Ballad Of Mary Foster; 4) Life And Life Only; 5) You
Should Have Listened To Al; 6) Love Chronicles.
No more orchestration — all the young folkies
are made happy, now that the corporate wall of Mantovani strings no longer
separates them from the Bare Truth. But the real good news is that, despite
writing songs with strictly traditional, «rootsy» structures, Stewart always
understood the power of exciting arrangements. After all, a bunch of long,
repetitive songs with predictable vocal melodies and simple rhythmic backing
satisfies no one but the staunchest fanatic. And from the very start, Stewart
had an uncanny talent for attracting the best of the best to help him out.
On Love Chronicles, Al is assisted by no
less than Ashley Hutchins, Simon Nicol, and Richard Thompson of Fairport
Convention (all sporting various pseudonyms, most likely to avoid breach of
contract), and, on the lengthy title track, by Jimmy Page himself, freshly free
from Yardbirds duties but not yet having embarked on the Zep crusade. The
formula works most of the time: Stewart starts off with a lengthy piece of
narrative, sets it to an unpretentious, time-honoured chord progression, and
then lets his pals roam all over it, adding plenty of (probably improvised)
guitar flourishes in between his vocal lines, but never ever going off into
solo territory.
From a formalistic point of view, all of this
is a terrific potential recipé for boredom. But the combination of Stewart's
intellectual charisma and the fresh talents of some of Britain's finest players
generally overrides the boredom factor, at least on Side A of the album where
the only song that significantly outlasts its usefulness is 'The Ballad Of Mary
Foster', an eight-minute lament on the sad fate of a British housewife. For
some strange reason, it is exactly this behemoth of a tune that Al had deemed
unsuitable for any additional electric flourishes, and there are only two ways
one can come to terms with that — either Al's very voice acts like an
orgasmatron (not in my case, but I can understand how it could), or you can try
to bring yourself to feel fairly deeply about Mary Foster, hard as it is to
have deep feelings about such «stock characters». The song does have a certain
novelty value in that it is divided into two «acts», giving us first an outside
glimpse of the Fosters' family life, and then taking us inside as Stewart
begins to impersonate the protagonist herself. But the novelty value wears off
after a while.
Of course, 'The Ballad Of Mary Foster' is
nothing compared to the famous excesses of 'Love Chronicles' themselves —
eighteen minutes of musical-lyrical dialogue between Stewart and Page, as the
former provides a detailed, if not necessarily sincere, account of the story of
his love life from kindergarten to adulthood, and the latter attempts to
project its various stages onto an improvised set of in-between lines
mini-solos. The song's main claim to fame is not even the length (after
'Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands', nothing of the sort could be surprising to the
general public); it is the first documented use of the F-word in a pop
composition, and something tells me that, perhaps, the very idea of recording
an eighteen-minute long song was intended by Al to be a ruse so that he could
sneak the F-word in surreptitiously somewhere close to the end, in the hope
that none of the record executives would have enough patience to hear it.
A great, promising idea, but, alas, it did not
work; the executives did hear the word, and, consequently, the album's
release was delayed by a year at least, as Al battled it out with the censors.
And, of course, kudos to him for not having given in, especially since this is
one rare case where the F-word really makes sense, in the context of the phrase
"...it grew to be less like fucking and more like making love". But,
even though it all makes for a great historical anecdote and a pivotal
precedent, it hardly saves the song from a «mere curio» status. As much as we
all respect Jimmy Page, he, too, eventually runs out of ideas, and somewhere
around the ninth or tenth minute it all goes away except for the never-ending
monolog. To be fair, it is a good monolog, very much of its time and owing much
more to the hip European prose, poetry, and movie scene of the Sixties than to
folk balladeering, but tolerable — but certainly not for repeated listenings.
So I would say that it is the shorter songs on
Side A that make up the real meat of this record. 'In Brooklyn', a funny
remembrance of one of Al's love encounters on the other side of the Atlantic,
pretty much says in four minutes the exact same things that 'Love Chronicles'
said in eighteen, and Thompson's and Nicol's electric guitar «weaving» is every
bit as inspiring as Page's. 'Old Compton Street Blues' and 'Life And Life Only'
share a slow stately beauty, particularly the latter in its cruel dissection of
bourgeois family life, symbolized by a deep, desperate electric wail that
renders it far superior to 'Mary Foster'. And, although slight by comparison,
'You Should Have Listened To Al' is one of the best tributes to the classic
Byrds sound on this planet — especially opportune to come at the moment when
the Byrds all but ceased to produce that classic sound.
The biggest difference, however, is not the
length of the songs, or even the switch from orchestration to electric guitar
backing; it is the generally more «down-to-earth» attitude, as Stewart moves
ever further away from the mannered medievalisms of Bedsitter Images and
closer — some would say, dangerously closer — to the equally popular
territory of socially-oriented Brit-pop subjects. Half of these songs, true to
the album's title, tell us about Al's love life (which was, if we are to
believe all this tripe, almost comparable to Gene Simmons'), and the
other half is about broken dreams and wasted lives of the middle class (or the
lower class, for that matter, as in the prostitute tale of 'Compton Street
Blues').
The stinging question is: can he do it better
than, for example, Ray Davies? The obvious answer is: there is no need to
compare the two if the purpose is to award first prize, because, roughly
speaking, Ray sets average lyrics to colossal melodies, whereas Al clearly
places more emphasis on the words — which, however, does not mean that Ray's
lyrics and Al's melodies/arrangements do not matter, because they do; it's all
a matter of accents, and both are quite meritorious in their own ways.
Despite the obvious shortcomings of the album —
at least, from today's point of view — its gains over Bedsitter Images
are as significant as its losses, which guarantees a thumbs up; but I will not argue with the commonly held opinion
that, what some could see as eighteen minutes of spiritual revelation back in
1969, has mutated into eighteen minutes of wasted time forty years later
(actually, much earlier than that), and that Al still had a certain way to go
to learn the true meaning of the word «timeless».
ZERO SHE FLIES (1970)
1) My Enemies Have Sweet
Voices; 2) A Small Fruit Song; 3) Gethsemane, Again; 4) Burbling; 5) Electric
Los Angeles Sunset; 6) Manuscript; 7) Black Hill; 8) Anna; 9) Room Of Roots;
10) Zero She Flies.
Not as much star presence this time around; the
biggest names are arguably Louis Cennamo on bass (of Renaissance, Illusion, and
Armageddon fame, if the word «fame» is applicable to these fairy tale bands at
all), and Gerry Conway on drums (Fotheringay, Cat Stevens, Steeleye Span... get
the picture?). But this is not a big problem, since Stewart has temporarily
settled upon a formula that does not necessarily require such presence.
Cutting down on the excesses of Love Chronicles,
he seems, for now, content to stick to two recipés: (a) instrumental or
near-instrumental folk ditties with huge emphasis on his own acoustic playing;
(b) short- or medium-sized folk-pop songs with decent, but never overwhelming,
levels of catchiness and intelligence. In other words, nothing new, but the
overall feeling of balance and self-assuredness is higher on Zero than
both on Bedsitter Images, with its lack of a perfect sense of direction
and contamination by outsider ideas (not that I ever complained), and on Chronicles,
with its overloaded aura of pretense.
First, the instrumentals are excellent. If you
are a fan of Led Zeppelin's 'Black Mountain Side' and similar things, Zero
She Flies will be a solid source of pleasure, a tight package of beauty for
all lovers of tricky acoustic soundscapes. I am not entirely sure of who is
playing what — most of these compositions have at least two guitars weaving it
out — but, obviously, it does not really matter as long as the melody takes you
to the appropriate enchanted forest.
Second, the songs, no longer subjugated to Al's
sudden fondness for Jean-Jacques Rousseau-style sexual confession, are no
slouches either. He returns to the «anything goes» ideology of Bedsitter
Images: we have meaningless, but cool-sounding neo-hip punboxes with lyrics
by outsiders ('My Enemies Have Sweet Voices'), not too cheap and not too
expensive swipes at organized religion ('Gethsemane, Again'), socially
conscious anthems ('Electric Los Angeles Sunset', which must have served as an
inspiration to the Stones' 'Heartbreaker' three years later), bizarre romance
in which compliments are hard to distinguish from insults (title track), and
solemn reminiscences of days long gone by in which the heroes of both World War
II and World War I are named explicitly ('Manuscript'). The latter
track, in particular, must have struck such a strong chord in Al's heart that
he's been playing the local history buff ever since. But this is where it
started.
None of this is too complex, and none of it
sacrifices catchiness in the chorus for the sake of putting on an elitist air.
'My Enemies Have Sweet Voices' does feature some pretty elaborate puns (as
distasteful as the practice is considered these days, wordplay like "I was
jumping to conclusions, and one of them jumped back" is
impressive and — who knows? — perhaps not even devoid of a certain sense), but
its main attraction lies in the jagged staccato playing and its dialog with the
woozly-bamboozly harmonica. 'Los Angeles Sunset' is a little silly and lazy
(surely the distinguished scholar could have come up with a better chorus line
than 'Hmmm, mmmm, hmmm, Electric Los Angeles sunset...'?), but it sounds
unnaturally rough and stern in the context of the album. And the title track is
a darn good merger of roots-rock with psychedelia, inspiring without being
overbearing.
All of this means another thumbs up, no matter how obvious it may be that
here is an artist who has not yet firmly settled into his saddle of choice. The
brain department politely reminds that all of the things you hear on this
record had already been done better by other individuals of the late Sixties'
generation; but why should we take it out on poor Al Stewart, whose only fault
lies in getting there a tad later than the rest of the crew? "My enemies
have sweet voices", he sings about this nuisance, "their tones are
soft and kind — when I hear, my heart rejoices, I do not seem to mind".
Neither do I, while hearing Zero She Flies.
ORANGE (1972)
1) You Don't Even Know Me; 2)
Amsterdam; 3) Songs Out Of Clay; 4) The News From Spain; 5) I Don't Believe
You; 6) Once An Orange, Always An Orange; 7) I'm Falling; 8) Night Of The 4th
Of May.
Every generalization you can make for Orange
holds equally well for Zero She Flies, so let us keep this short. Key
changes in personnel include a traveling Rick Wakeman — the maestro plays his
perfect piano throughout, usually to good effect, as on 'The News From Spain',
whose last few minutes he transforms into progressive grandiosity — and a
here-to-stay Tim Renwick, whose solid, if not exactly individualistic, guitar
style would go on to become a humble trademark of the Al Stewart style.
As usual, all of the songs are at least good,
and some are downright great (the album is sometimes written off as
«transitional», more proof that transitions are generally cooler than settled
formulae). With all of the musical styles spelt out so clearly and all of the
lyrical motives so thinly veiled, it is tempting to label them as tightly
connected pairs of a coherent array. Thus, 'You Don't Even Know Me' = «cheerful
bouncy Brit-pop» + «memories of a turmoiled love affair»; 'Amsterdam' = «light
rootsy boogie à la Flying Burrito Bros.» + «memories of (guess what)
Amsterdam»; 'Songs Out Of Clay' = «stern folk ballad» + «lots of metaphors
about searching for the meaning of life»; 'I'm Falling' = «intelligent
multi-layered folk-rock anthem à la Nick Drake» + «desperate yearning
for romance from someone who clearly misses it quite a bit», etc.
Throw in an obligatory instrumental that
wobbles somewhere in between jig and menuet ('Once An Orange...') and a
convincing, if not wholly necessary, Dylan cover ('I Don't Believe You', whose
lyrics fit in perfectly with the rest of the album, showing just how much of
an influence Bob really was), and the picture of yet another successful, but
not breathtaking, record is complete. With the sprawling 'News From Spain' and
'Night Of The 4th Of May', both of them continuing Stewart's series of
semi-confessional, semi-show-off-like songs, he may have hoped for a stronger
effect, but neither had hit potential, nor can they really qualify as stunning
art-rock creations of the era — in order to become anything like that, Stewart
would have to learn to let go of his intelligent humility and add more flash,
much more than letting Wakeman roam freely over the keyboards in the coda to
'News From Spain' (as wondrous as that roaming is — one of the most inspiring
instrumental moments in Al's entire catalog).
Not that the lack of flash has any importance;
by 1972, it was fairly clear that Al would be forever content with playing it
low-key, his audience mainly confined to that particular sector of college-goers
who like their art «clever» and «humble», but get easily bored with lonely
acoustic guitars or ten-minute saxophone solos — a pretty small sector indeed,
but for those kinds of people, Orange should be as close to perfection
as it can possibly get. Like everything else, it has aged pretty well, and
somehow Al has this talent of befriending the listener over and over again with
each new record; thumbs up, no doubts
about it.
PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE (1973)
1) Old Admirals; 2) Warren
Harding; 3) Soho (Needless To Say); 4) The Last Day Of June 1934; 5) Post World
War Two Blues; 6) Roads To Moscow; 7) Terminal Eyes; 8) Nostradamus.
He certainly had it coming, even if no
particular Nostradamus could precisely predict when it would actually happen: a
massive concept album about History. The canvas had some flaws, in the form of
several acutely ahistorical songs hanging around ('Soho' and 'Terminal Eyes'),
which is why the copout is to pretend it's all about weaving the different ages
of humanity together with its state of today and its distant prospects, but
this is where it does not work. Clearly, Al just wanted to intelligently
justify the co-existence of his old habit of writing introspective songs for loners
with the new habit of setting history textbooks to music, and the album title
is a transparent deception that might formally clear him in court, but fail to
make him invulnerable. Fortunately for him, no one really gives a damn.
Now when Al writes about history, he never
hides behind allusions or allegories — you may be sure that if he sings about
an old admiral lamenting his uselessness in the years of the Great War, or
about a Russian soldier interned in a Siberian camp upon being freed from
German captivity, or about President Harding's last and fatal journey to
Alaska, that is exactly what he is singing about. For many admirers of
Stewart's talent, this may seem boring, because Stewart is too esoteric and
obscure a performer to function as proper edutainment, and most people will
usually be quite familiar with at least the protagonists and general settings
of his little historical landscapes, if not necessarily with all the details.
(Although if there is at least one person in the world who, upon hearing this
record, will want to learn more about General Guderian, Lord Mountbatten, Ernst
Röhm, or about how to pinpoint Smolensk or the Suez Canal on the map, Al
may well consider his mission to humanity accomplished).
Nevertheless, as simple and unflinching as
these lyrics are, they are decent; not much use as poetry, but working well in
conjunction with the music, not to mention quite well informed (well, there is
nothing, really, in 'Roads To Moscow' that cannot be found in a standard
beginner-level textbook on World War II in Russia, but just how many so-called
«artists» bother to check their facts with even beginner-level textbooks
anyway?).
Surprisingly, it is the lengthy epic numbers
that take the cake. 'Old Admirals' gets the properly stately, solemn backing
you'd expect from a song about an old war hero — great use of the synthesizer
on the closing bars of each chorus, and masterful slow buildup of keyboard,
guitar, and orchestration layers. 'Roads To Moscow' has no Russian influences
whatever in its music, and this is good: the man would have certainly
failed had he tried to go for balalaikas and accordeons and folk choruses —
instead, when he sings "I'll never know, I'll never know why I was taken
from the line and all the others / To board a special train and journey deep
into the heart of holy Russia", I cannot help but picture a starry-eyed Al
Stewart in person, for some reason finding himself in the position of
defending the outskirts of Moscow first and then later conveyed into the realm
of the GULAG. Not the effect he hoped for himself, I suppose, but Fortune works
in mysterious ways.
Most of the seriousness and solemnity was,
however, saved for the last track, as 'Nostradamus' takes you on a ten-minute
journey through Stewart's interpretations of the prophecies (this is the one
time when he clearly fiddles with the sources, but then it is hard to resist
fiddling with a guy like Michel if you are into him in the first place) set
mostly to acoustic strumming heavily laden with echo and other effects (the
instrumental section does not even bother to add much of anything else except
for a phasing gimmick). Obviously, ten minutes is overkill, but the melody is
catchy, and the general idea rather effective — at the very least, it is
nowhere near as tedious as Al's sexual autobiography on 'Love Chronicles'.
Among the shorter songs, only 'Soho (Needless
To Say)' has emerged as a minor classic (enough, at least, to go on to be
played live for quite a long time), but I am a bigger fan of the hilarious
folk-rocker 'Post World War Two Blues', which not only manages to set an
infamous dialogue between Churchill and Mountbatten to a catchy, toe-tappy
traditional melody, but is also — arguably? — the first song in history to
properly ask the question "Which way did the Sixties go?",
guaranteeing Al the title of The Honorable Mother Of All Retro-Mopers (including
yours truly). And let us not forget 'Terminal Eyes', one of Al's most
convincing and elegant creations in the «psychedelic Brit-pop» style of Nuggets
II.
For the record, the LP, like its predecessor Orange,
was produced by notable art-rock producer John Anthony (of Van der Graaf
Generator, Genesis, and Queen fame); some fans and critics hold the opinion
that Stewart never truly hit his stride until he finally teamed up with Alan
Parsons, but I beg to differ — Anthony's grand, imposing style of production
may be less calculated than that of the mathematical genius behind Dark Side
Of The Moon, but all the arrangements are done in great taste, and not for
a single second does the record reveal the piss-stained side of the Seventies
to the listener. A mildly intelligent, moderately heartfelt thumbs up (i. e. not the kind of album that begs
you to jump for joy, but then Al is hardly the jumping kind, more like the
squatting one).
MODERN TIMES (1975)
1) Carol; 2) Sirens Of Titan;
3) What's Going On?; 4) Not The One; 5) Next Time; 6) Apple Cider
Re-Constitution; 7) The Dark And The Rolling Sea; 8) Modern Times.
Al Stewart could never take the place of Roger
Waters. He lacks the prerequisite acid of evil, and he is too courteous to want
to wash the listener with gallons of musically-processed bile. But every now
and then, the need arises to consume some «Pink Floyd Lite» — music that would
carry similar messages of fear, sadness, melancholia, betrayal, madness, etc., but
without the overdriven intensity and spookiness of the classic Floyd sound.
And since, deep down inside, Stewart's artistic and intellectual essence is not
at all different from Waters', what a better way to get that «Pink Floyd Lite»
sound than combining Al's usual schtick with Pink Floyd's lead engineer?
The coming of Alan Parsons on board means that
things are going to get a bit denser and darker, and somewhat alarmingly in
touch with what may loosely be termed as «the second wave of Seventies' prog»
— such bands as the Alan Parsons Project itself, for which the formal trappings
and complexities frequently overshadowed the inadequate shallowness (or pompous
absurdity) of content. But since at the heart of it all we still find Stewart's
relatively simple, honest, clever, and essentially friendly folk rock, there
is no need to worry. Modern Times may have survived without Parsons'
production — in fact, I wouldn't say that Modern Times desperately need
Parsons' production — but the man definitely adds an extra dimension to Al's
sound that doesn't spoil anything; on the contrary, it sort of justifies the
release of yet another album, even if the songs never tell us anything about
Stewart that we didn't already know.
In fact, I do not have a good explanation for
the fact that the album shot up to No. 30 on the Billboard charts — up more
than a hundred positions from the previous LP. We can hardly blame it on
the Alan Parsons association: as solid as he made a name for himself with the
engineering of Dark Side, people don't usually scoop up new albums
because of their producers. Obviously, all the songs are good, and there are no
pushing-it experiments like 'Roads To Moscow' or 'Nostradamus' that can kill
off a good idea midway through, but, the way I see it, this is just another collection
of Stewart's usual caliber: repetitive folk-rockers and «folk-poppers» each of
which contains a touching hook or two but each of which is also overlong and
only saved by the fact that, like Dylan, he can come up with plenty of
interesting lyrics to keep it up.
Nicest of the bunch are the fast ones — 'Carol'
and 'Apple Cider Re-Constitution' — not just because they have the toe-tappin'
factor in their favor, but also because they are the best suited ones to Tim
Renwick's fast, fluent and emotional playing style, even though the atmospheres
are completely different: moody and bitter on 'Carol', with Al sharpening his
teeth on yet another female victim, sunny and romantic on 'Apple Cider', where
the odd psychedelic lyrics do not suggest much in terms of finding a way out of
this place ("You know London can make your brain stall") but the
music is definitely escapist to the n-th degree.
The magnum opus, however, is the
lumbering title track, on which Parsons unleashes all of his potential to
create a kind of musical crescendo that echoes the best successes of Yes in the
prog-rock genre, adding layer upon layer of guitars, keyboards, brass, and
orchestration to elevate this initially humble tune about sharing a glass with
an old friend to epic heights. Al himself hardly exists on the song's last two
minutes at all, but he is definitely out there for the first six, and so the
song reads like a dialog between Stewart, lazily melancholizing about the world
that we have lost, and Parsons, who translates his melancholy into grand
musical vision much the same way he would «translate» Edgar Allan Poe on his
own album one year later.
Curiously, Modern Times lives up to its
name in that none of the songs deal with historical subjects: perhaps Stewart
thought that, for the time being, he'd exorcised his inner history demon and
that it was time to deal with more actual matters. But he still deals with them
in the same old fashioned ways, appealing primarily to old fashioned
audiences, which is why the commercial success of the album is so puzzling in
such a totally mid-Seventies manner. Is Modern Times really a giant step
forward, as we sometimes read in musical guides? I don't believe so; the
musical guides have simply been misled by too much chart statistics analysis.
Is it yet another first-rate Al Stewart album? Unequivocally so; thumbs up.
YEAR OF THE CAT (1976)
1) Lord Grenville; 2) On The
Border; 3) Midas Shadow; 4) Sand In Your Shoes; 5) If It Doesn't Come
Naturally, Leave It; 6) Flying Sorcery; 7) Broadway Hotel; 8) One Stage
Before; 9) Year Of The Cat.
By popular consensus, Year Of The Cat is
not just the best Al Stewart album ever; it is, inasmuch as we know, the only
Al Stewart album, period. The man may have baked LPs like pancakes, both
before and after, but no matter — popular conscience has logged 1976 as the Al
Stewart year, and popular conscience is a bitch when it comes to dissenting
opinions. The rest of the time, popular conscience tells us, was spent in the
basement.
There is one nagging problem with this: frankly
speaking, Year Of The Cat may be a masterpiece and all that, but it is
not really an Al Stewart album. It is Al Stewart providing his services of
resident singer-songwriter to Alan Parsons, the true musical wizard behind this
sound. Hardly a coincidence that Year Of The Cat was released about two
months later than Parsons' own debut (Tales Of Mystery And Imagination):
by now, Alan had his own approach to art-rock fully fleshed out, and he was
perfectly happy to impose it upon a good friend as well.
Not that there's any need to complain, mind
you. Stewart's own musical palette was staying firmly the same: these here
songs, even including the big fat hit single of the title track, are no better
and no worse than his usual quality. So it was only natural for Parsons to try
and see what he could do to make the material, based on the exact same folk
rock chord progressions, sound not just up-to-date, but diverse and involving
as well. The recipe is simple: cook it all up in the thick, echoey, mystically-pretentious
overproduction of mid-Seventies art-rock.
As 'Lord Grenville' opens the proceedings, no
holds are barred: big drums, rippling acoustic guitars, grim keyboards, and
Spanish-tinged electric lead lines welcome you on the first bars, and the
strings are not lagging far behind. And if you think that this sea of sound, in
which Stewart himself is merely a Robinson Crusoe latching onto a piece of
timber, is perfectly suitable for the opening number, be forewarned that it is
going to be raging on every song on the album. («Raging», of course, is
not the right word when you are dealing with a tin-can Alan Parsons production:
everything is raging only inasmuch as it is permitted to range by the Man In
Control).
Those who hate the likes of Alan Parsons,
thinking that the man represents everything that was rotten about «serious pop
music» in the Seventies, should steer clear. But I, for one, cannot deny
neither his imagination and creativity nor his ear for melody, and, when all is
said and done, 'Lord Grenville' is a great cohesive work of art — if anything,
listen to how marvelously the strings at the end of the song imitate the
crashing of waves on the shore! Without his flourishes, the tune would be just
another nice Al Stewart song; together, they molded it into a progressive epic
that sounds extremely dated and completely fresh at the same time.
It is not hard to understand the immense
popularity of the title track, either. Stewart happened to write a set of
mysterious lyrics about a mysterious woman, with Humphrey Bogart references and
a whole lot of appeal to all those looking for the meaning of life in
extravagant romance. Parsons got the idea, and gave the song a perfectly
radio-ready arrangement that had it all: head-bobbing rhythmics, acoustic
guitar, electric guitar and lounge sax solos, and a combination of melancholia
and elevated inspiration that grabbed everyone wanting to be grabbed. Is it
really Stewart's «masterpiece»? I would never have thought that on my own. But
that it was the perfect song to capture the minds of its generation on a summer
day in 1976 — no question about that.
The rest of the album, sandwiched in between
these two highlights, is generally of the same quality, and occasionally
suffers from monotonousness. I was quite happy to discover 'Sand In Your Shoes'
and 'If It Doesn't Come Naturally' as two sunnier-than-the-rest Dylanesque
inclusions, particularly the former with its wintery Blonde On Blonde
overtones and one of the most memorable chorus lines on the record — "and
it's goodbye to my lady on the island...". But the other songs, be they
the second big hit single 'On The Border', or 'Broadway Hotel' with its gypsy
violin, or 'Midas Shadow' with its somnambulant electric piano, get sort of glued
together in a never-ending celebration of the wedding between the
modernistically morose and the canonically beautiful.
Do not make the mistake of equating Al Stewart
with Year Of The Cat, even if it may still be the only record of his
within easy reach of the bargain bins. To understand the man better, one would
need to experience him outside the state of symbiosis with Parsons. But it is
also true that that symbiosis never worked better than on the best songs on Year
Of The Cat, and that the longer the title track will be followed by its
army of sympathizers, the more hopes there are humanity will last a little
longer. Could you love 'Year Of The Cat' and still be able to detonate a
nuclear missile? Weird question, but, for some reason, it just popped into my
head out of nowhere. Yes, and a big thumbs up
both for the intelligent craftsmanship and for the good songs.
TIME PASSAGES (1978)
1) Time Passages; 2) Valentina
Way; 3) Life In Dark Water; 4) A Man For All Seasons; 5) Almost Lucy; 6) Palace
Of Versailles; 7) Timeless Skies; 8) Song On The Radio; 9) End Of The Day.
Before I start, here is a short message from a
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Also Bought: Year Of The Cat — Al Stewart; Past, Present And Future
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— Al Stewart; 24 Carrots — Al Stewart; and whatever other Al Stewart is
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Friendly Card — The Alan Parsons Project; and then, all down the line. Only
one customer had the nerve to buy Breakfast In America — Supertramp, but
we wiped out his bank account as a restricting measure, so hopefully he'll
never try that one again.»
Now, back to the review. I would be lying
through my teeth if I said that Al Stewart was all but strangled on this album.
He is, after all, writing songs, lyrics included, and singing them. He is
returning to his world of allegories, with, at the very least, Thomas More and
heroes of the French Revolution roaming through the tracks to refresh your
memories of history classes. But it is also true that, by this point, Parsons,
now an established rock star in his own rights, probably viewed all of the
records that he was still producing as his own private domain; consequently, he
produces everything as if Al Stewart were not Al Stewart at all, but rather
Eric Woolfson, his singing and playing partner in The Project. As a result, Time
Passages is, basically, an Alan Parsons record with special guest
star Al Stewart invited to tell us about Thomas More.
At least two of the songs, 'Life In Dark Water'
and 'Palace Of Versailles', with their grim, depressing synthesizer depths /
heights, sound as if they come straight from Pyramid. If you hate generic
«soft-prog» of the mid-Seventies, that one style that was dumbed down even
further in the next decade, becoming «adult contemporary», better program them
right out at the very beginning. Personally, I think that 'Dark Water', with
its spooky tale of submarine life, is atmospherically successful, whereas
'Versailles' is too languid and boring to match its exciting lyrical subject,
but these opinions could be turned round any day, for all I know.
The other tunes are a bit sunnier and cheerier,
and the more the sun shines in on the music, the more we see of Al and the less
of Alan. 'Valentina Way' is a solid, and surprisingly fast, pop-rocker with
great melodic work from Renwick; 'Timeless Skies' is the only chance we get to
enjoy the old folkie acoustic style; and both the title track and 'Song On The
Radio' are two conscious attempts to pick off from where 'Year Of The Cat' left
us yearning for more — big brawny anthems with strings, synths, and saxes
battling it out on your radio. Perfect cruising material for 1978, and still
going strong.
But don't take this «more of Al, less for Alan»
for a retracting of my earlier words: major or mior key, all of this is
uniformly overproduced, overglossed, and polished to near-ugly perfection. The
best solution is try and not pay any attention to the production at all, but
concentrate on the basic melody. I am not a Parsons-hater (in fact, I have lots
of respect for The Project in its classic form), yet the best thing about Time
Passages is still Stewart's persona whenever it emerges, plus Tim Renwick's
guitar playing whenever it is he that gets the chance to solo and not any of
the keyboard or sax players. Most of the songs are still reasonably well
written; unfortunately, Parsons seems to have spoiled Stewart into thinking
that arrangement and production matter at least as much as the melody,
if not more, and, furthermore, resulted in turning him into a heavy Parsons
addict. Just one listen to his next record is sufficient to see how disastrous
that addiction turned out eventually. Thumbs up
through clenched teeth — and seriously not recommended for anyone with
a significant alergy to typical 1970s production values.
24 CARROTS (1980)
1) Running Man; 2) Midnight
Rocks; 3) Constantinople; 4) Merlin's Time; 5) Mondo Sinistro; 6) Murmansk
Run/Ellis Island; 7) Rocks In The Ocean; 8) Paint By Numbers; 9) Optical
Illusion.
How hard is it to produce an Alan Parsons album
if you are only Al Stewart, and the real Alan Parsons is no longer there to
assist you in sacrificing to that dangerous deity known as The Lord MOR?
Answer: very, very hard. And in the Eighties — pretty much impossible even if
you are Alan Parsons himself, rather than Al Stewart.
24 Carrots is not nearly as depressing as some of Al's later variations on the
life support system, but, in terms of living/breathing instruments, it is
almost non-existent. Not only Parsons, but Tim Renwick as well has vanished —
in fact, pretty much the entire backing band is newly assembled, headed by
professional, but way too technically-minded fusion guitarist Peter White, who
also assists Al with much of the songwriting. The electronic currents have not yet
gained the upper hand, but all of the riffs and even most of the solos have a
decidedly programmatic aura around them; new producer Chris Desmond turns out
to be twice the mathematician Alan Parsons used to be, but without the latter's
understanding of the concept of beauty — as Pythagorean as it was with Parsons,
at least he trusted the Muse to guide him. The guidance patterns of Chris
Desmond are unknown to me, and I'd rather not guess.
Much of the material is catchy, as usual, but
this is the first Stewart record which actively brings on the question — why do
we have to listen to it? Who needs an impoverished, third-rate copy of Year
Of The Cat? The only new ingredient is a brand of faster-paced, slightly
crunchier, harder-rocking near-dance numbers that are, at best, indistinguishable
from generic mid-to-late Seventies radio fodder ('Paint By Numbers', although
I admit the guilt of really digging the ecstatic guitar solos — so predictable,
but so brilliantly constructed!), and, at worst, designed as corny jokes but
not immediately guessable as such ('Mondo Sinistro' — unless you have a very,
very wide-reaching sense of humor that allows you to openly enjoy Benny Hill
with the same passion as Monty Python, you will probably deem this the worst
Stewart song written up to that point).
Apart from this questionable innovation, what
is there to tell? A few of the songs are relatively unmarred by the antiseptic
production and bring on vague recollections of Stewart's pre-Parsons years: e.
g. the mandolin-heavy waltz of 'Rocks In The Ocean' and the medievalistic
'Merlin's Time' (although the latter is awfully derivative of 'Jerusalem', I
must say). The lead single 'Midnight Rocks' comes with the obligatory sax
solo, but is no 'Year Of The Cat' for sure. 'Constantinople' is the obligatory
history listen to remind you of the fateful events of the year 1453 through
politically incorrect lines like "I see the hosts of Mohammed coming"
and a permanently wailing, never erring guitar riff that periodically disintegrates
into a flurry of permanently wailing, never erring guitar solo notes.
If you are younger than Christ and your blood
is still boiling, do not come near the record — its vibes will most likely be
atrocious, as befits the vibes on any essentially stillborn album. If, on the
other hand, you have somewhat calmed down, you might understand my thumbs up: 'Mondo Sinistro' is the only true crime
against good taste on here, and there is plenty of melodicity, intelligence,
and — not the least important — humility to keep a middle-aged person
satisfied.
LIVE: INDIAN SUMMER (1981)
1) Here In Angola; 2) Indian
Summer; 3) Pandora; 4) Delia's Gone; 5) Princess Olivia; 6) Running Man; 7)
Time Passages; 8) Merlin's Time; 9) If It Doesn't Come Naturally, Leave It; 10)
Roads To Moscow; 11) Nostradamus/World Goes To Riyadh; 12) Soho (Needless To
Say); 13) On The Border; 14) Valentina Way; 15) Clarence Frogman Henry; 16)
Year Of The Cat.
The record is structured the same way as
Genesis' Three Sides Live, raising the hens-and-eggs issue of whether
there were too few new studio tracks, calling for live filler material, or
whether it was the shows that were too short, calling out for some studio
padding. Regardless, it all works fine. Consummate professionalism.
Al's live show, at this point, tended to
faithfully concentrate on songs that his MOR-raised audience knew and loved:
reaching moderately into the days gone by, but firmly stopping at the border
of Past, Present & Future, beyond which there be dragons of his disavowed
childhood experience. With the exception of a new tune, wittily poking fun at
the newly-increased prestige of the Arab countries ('World Goes To Riyadh'; no
idea how it got stuck together in a medley with 'Nostradamus', though), and a
brief spoken anecdote about an ill-fated meeting of the double of Clarence
"Frogman" Henry with the double of Audrey Hepburn (sic!), the songs
are performed as faithfully as possible. If it weren't for the addition of
female background vocals on 'Time Passages' (hardly an exciting touch), I
could have easily mistaken this for the studio original with overdubbed
applause; and much the same goes for every other number.
Ergo, it is nice to know all of these tricky
Alan Parsons arrangements can be reproduced on stage, and to ascertain that
Stewart's fine, bright voice steadily holds up all the right notes upon first
take, and to hear the receptive audience taking in and applauding all the
history-as-art lecturing of 'Roads To Moscow', but other than that, the live
show primarily functions as a best-of package. Which is not a bad deal,
actually, given that you also get five new studio tracks that, as far as I'm
concerned, beat the crap (or, more politely, the carotene) out of 24 Carrots.
The big difference is that most of them are
unexpectedly light and happy, purging out the murky melancholia of the previous
albums; normally, there is nothing wrong with murky melancholia, of course, but
the more we got of it, the more it got the Parsons treatment, with all of the
feelings simulated with minor chords played on routine synths, and there was no
way to lift this depressing smog of generic arrangements except by making
the music a little happier.
'Here In Angola' is one of the most upbeat
songs in the man's repertoire (and the only song in existence to rhyme
'Angola' with not just 'Cola', but also 'Francis Ford Coppola') — simpler than
a prokaryote, but also much catchier (ever tried to catch a prokaryote?), and,
as the lyrics would suggest, perhaps taking a jab at Dylan and his «born again»
debacle? 'Indian Summer' and 'Delia's Gone' are also simple, but poignant,
tales that are melancholic, but not murky — and 'Delia's Gone' tries to
go for a little Jethro Tullian style, with a flash of Celtic influence bursting
through the soft-rock arrangement, later propped up with a flute melody saying
hello to Ian. 'Princess Olivia' adds non-irritating cuteness to simplicity;
although I have no idea who 'Olivia' is (his wife? daughter? a historical
character? no one in particular?), there's another fun rhyme in there ("I
love Princess Olivia/Can't speak, I slip into trivia") and even the silly
synthesizer reproduction of 'Ode to Joy' at the beginning cannot spoil the
positive impression. The only weak point is 'Pandora', which does bring over
some of the shades of gray from 24 Carrots, reminding us that the man is
still firmly in the clutches of corporate production values. But it's not a bad
song, either.
If you need any additional reasons to own this
album, get it just for the front cover photo — the wide lapels on the suit are
corny, but it's the last chance one has to spot a young-looking, long-haired Al
Stewart, still looking like Eric Idle's concealed twin and loving it.
One reason we old fogeys and retro-fans might dislike the Eighties is, perhaps,
purely age-related, as they stole the facial freshness of most, if not all, our
idols. Then again, it has been all but scientifically proven that just one listen
to a mid-Eighties Phil Collins record takes away six months of life; how many
months, then, must producing such a record take away? Thumbs up, before it's not too late.
RUSSIANS & AMERICANS (1984)
1) Lori, Don't Go Right Now; 2)
Rumours Of War; 3) The Gypsy & The Rose; 4) Accident On 3rd Street; 5)
Strange Girl; 6) Russians & Americans; 7) Cafe Society; 8) One, Two, Three;
9) The Candidate.
Like all singer-songwriters with a modicum of
intelligence to their overall style, Stewart could hardly hope to steer his
moderate commercial success straight into the Eighties. With Year Of The Cat
and Time Passages, he'd found a way to clothe his music in the trappings
of «prog-lite» for the masses; but now that times had changed once again, and
unless you went straight pop, you had no more chance of making it. Maybe
old friend Parsons, who was still going strong commercially, could have lent a
hand, but fate did not let it happen.
As it is, Russians & Americans fell through
the cracks. In retrospect, I find it unjust; there are some good songs here,
and, frankly speaking, the taste lapses in production are not at all horrendous
compared to the next record. Expectedly, the album is heavy on generic Eighties
keyboard sound — a cheap-sounding synth riff greets you from the very first
second — but only 'Rumours Of War' is completely synth-based, with acoustic
guitar melodies still forming the backbone of most of the songs. And, in stark
contrast to 24 Carrots, where at least half of the album gave the
impression of having been written and recorded to prove Al's being hip with the
times, Russians & Americans gives us only one such example —
the skewed Cars-style New Wave pop-rocker 'Strange Girl', which could have
become a minor radio hit were it ever released as a single. For some reason, it
never was, even though its only understandable pragmatic use would have been
the jukebox: dumb, but catchy — the best type of bait for Eighties' teenagers.
Only one other song intentionally tries to
recapture the essence of the Stewart/Parsons collaborative years: 'Cafe
Society', all baroque piano flourishes and wild guitar solos and even wilder
sax blowing from Phil Kenzie. Among fans, it produced the opposite effect:
where the sax solo on 'Year Of The Cat' has always been counted as the song's
major asset, Kenzie's screeching, stark raving mad blowing into the instrument
on this track never pleased anyone. Well... it's different. I like the
song; it is the album's gloomiest, most desperate, and most lyrically obscure,
and the sax solos might be grating to everyone expecting another smoothly
flowing piece from Kenzie, but it suits the overall mood of the song perfectly.
The title of the album may scare some people
into thinking it is, overall, a concept piece on the Cold War, but in reality
only the title track, a somewhat naïve plea to the opposite sides to sort
out their difficulties, has something to say on the subject; even 'Rumours Of
War' should be taken figuratively rather than literally (the song is about
relationships rather than hydrogen bombs). If there is a concept, it is
the overall darkness of the record — everything is extremely bitter, sour,
minor, and morose. Not a surprise for the likes of Al, of course, but he may
have overdid his usual grim schtick on here, another reason for fans to scorn
it.
In essence, though, it has much more in common
with the man's good old folk-rock style than 24 Carrots. 'Lori Don't Go
Right Now' and 'The Gypsy & The Rose' are pretty, modestly memorable, upbeat
compositions. The title of 'Accident On 3rd Street' recalls Springsteen, but
the song is really closer to all those dozens of forgettable, but harmless and
quite listenable rambling Dylan «sociologues» from the mid-Seventies and
onwards (besides, how can one resist being slyly baited with lines like
"He reminded me of one of those Vikings with the long-handled swords / The
kind of guy even Joan Baez would not feel non-violent towards"?).
If the album is approached without prejudice,
it has a good chance of taking its humble place next to Orange and Zero
She Flies and all those other Stewart albums that just have him quietly doing
his thing, without too much overproduction and too many grand ideas that
sometimes hit the mark and sometimes miss it. Therefore, thumbs up.
LAST DAYS OF THE CENTURY (1988)
1) Last Days Of The Century; 2)
Real And Unreal; 3) King Of Portugal; 4) Red Toupée; 5) Where Are They
Now; 6) Bad Reputation; 7) Josephine Baker; 8) License To Steal; 9) Fields Of
France; 10) Antarctica; 11) Ghostly Horses Of The Plain; 12*) Helen And
Cassandra.
Way too clinical. It is not at all difficult to forgive Russians &
Americans — sterile Eighties production was not only kept at bay on that
record, but was also a somewhat new, exciting way to get things wrapped up. By
1988, however, it was mostly clear that, were good taste in music to prevail
for the intelligent artists at least, the electronic drums and synthesizers and
pop-metal guitar solos had to go. But apparently it was not clear to Stewart's
new producer, Joe Chiccarelli, who, despite his near-sterling record of work
with Frank Zappa and Oingo Boingo, here saddles Al with the worst kind of sound
he'd ever received up to that point. (On the other hand, it is also the same
Joe Chiccarelli that produced the abysmal Y Kant Tori Read album for
Tori Amos that same year, making that guy's evil streak far more transparently
pronounced).
The songs are mostly okay; no great
revelations, but the usual folk-pop, modest-hook formula continues to work. The
bizarre post-psychedelic chorus of 'Real And Unreal' is rather ugly and poorly
sewn on to the otherwise fine lounge jazz essence of the song, and 'King Of
Portugal' is a lame attempt at capturing the essence of the late Eighties
dance-pop hit, but otherwise, where the songwriting is concerned, we are still
in business.
The sound of it all, however, is
downright awful. It's all echo and robotic tick-tock synths and big booming
drums — so much so that, whenever I hear a bit of Spanish guitar come in, I
cannot help but cringe, because what once used to be one of Al's trademarks —
he was a big fan of the flamenco style from the earliest days — is now reduced
to the kind of overproduced Latino muzak that haunts us in elevators and cheap
eating places. Next to this kind of coating, Alan Parsons is unquestionably the
Mozart of production.
It is funny, though, that Stewart, three years
later, had been chained to the exact same sound as Bob Dylan was, three years
earlier, with Empire Burlesque; in fact, 'License To Steal' half-borrows
its title from Bob's 'License To Kill' and half-borrows its melody and sound
from Bob's 'Clean-Cut Kid', and all of these tunes could have rocked had they
been recorded ten years earlier or ten years later. As it stands, they are
sorely in need of reinvention.
The second half of the album does seem to be a
little more polite to good melodies and a bit less intent on all the New Age
stuff. Once you're past all the synthesizer excesses of the first half and the
horrendously cheesy backing vocals on 'Red Toupée' (contributed by Tori
Amos, no less! of Y Kant Tori Read fame, no less!), you may relax with the aid
of Al's cute, sentimental, and somewhat touching ode to Josephine Baker (or,
in a broader sense, to all the sensual delights of days gone by that we are
unable to taste in person, at least not until the Holodeck becomes a reality),
the pretty Tullian flute interludes on 'Fields Of France', and the happiest,
catchiest anthem to the world's coldest, bitterest continent ever written.
Overall, though, it is very sad that the man
was unable to resist the temptations of the «let's turn music to gross shit»
decade, but at least he only released one single album in his entire career
that sounded in such a horrendous manner. This does not save the album itself
from an indignant thumbs down, but it
does wipe out all grounds for comparison with Rod Stewart, much as the
names would want to lead one into such a temptation.
RHYMES IN ROOMS (1992)
1) Flying Sorcery; 2) Soho
(Needless To Say); 3) Time Passages; 4) Josephine Baker; 5) On The Border; 6)
Nostradamus; 7) Fields Of France; 8) Clifton In The Rain / Small Fruit Song; 9)
Broadway Hotel; 10) Leave It; 11) Year Of The Cat.
Nice, humble little album, strictly for the
fans but real quality stuff for the fans. In the midst of a local industry
crisis that left Al without a recording label, he and Peter White undertook a
short inexpensive tour with just the two of them onstage, both playing acoustic
guitars (with White occasionally switching to accordeon or piano). Come to
think of it, it is actually strange how long it took Stewart to come up with an
«unplugged» album — many fans must have been secretly hoping for one since
1967 at least, yet the man steadily refused to budge, on the contrary, pumping
more and more layers of production onto his simple melodies until it all
exploded with the stinkfest of Last Days Of The Century.
Not that Stewart is really to blame — without
all the extra arrangements, reduced to bare-bones acoustic strum, the songs
lose quite a bit of pizzazz; if Stewart's entire career sounded like Rhymes
In Rooms, he'd be even more of a cult taste than he is today. But after the
suffocation of Last Days, just about the only way to remedy it was to
roll back all the way and give the depressed fans just the opposite of
«overproduced», so the record really came in at the right time.
With the surprise exception of the 'Clifton In
The Rain / Small Fruit Song' medley, hearkening back to the old days of
obscurity, the tracklist is predictable: hits and classics ranging from Past,
Present & Future to Time Passages. But it is interesting to
learn whether all these Parsons-era classics still have anything to say with
the Parsonage taken away from them — and yes, 'Time Passages' works well
without the underwater keyboards, and 'Year Of The Cat' does not wither away
and die without the saxophone solo, partly because of Peter White's highly
technical, but pleasant solos (somehow complex solos played on an acoustic
guitar tend to come across as soulful even when the same solos, played on an
electric, would seem ugly — go figure), partly because, yes, they were
expertly written and heartfelt tunes from the very beginning; it only took
Parsons to make the average layman notice that.
Needless to say — no, not Soho, but just that
the two tunes off Last Days sound much better than the originals,
particularly 'Fields Of France' (although I miss the flute solos, they did make
the song way too reminiscent of late-period Jethro Tull). Overall, the acoustic
duo worked so well that Stewart even went on to replicate the experience
several times (most recently, with Dave Nachmanoff) — not really necessary, in
my opinion, but certainly money-saving. Thumbs up
as a one-time experience, but it is quite friendly on Al's part that he did not
go on to abuse the acoustic-only principle.
FAMOUS LAST WORDS (1993)
1) Feel Like; 2) Angel Of
Mercy; 3) Don't Forget Me; 4) Peter On The White Sea; 5) Genie On A Table Top;
6) Trespasser; 7) Trains; 8) Necromancer; 9) Charlotte Corday; 10) Hipposong;
11) Night Rolls In.
Wonderful return to form. Fueled, perhaps, by
all the joy that was synthesized on the acoustic duo tour, Stewart finds the
strength to ditch most of the production excesses — and delivers a lively,
strong, charismatic record, more consistent than anything he's done in years.
Almost everything is strictly acoustic-based, with rhythm sections, electric
guitar solos and keyboard backdrops swearing complete loyalty to wood, nylon,
and human voice. This may add an unwanted whiff of monotonousness to the
proceedings, but surely monotonousness is at least preferable to the dozen
varieties of excremental sonic effects on Last Days.
Although the album is formally dedicated to the
memory of the recently deceased keyboardist Peter Wood (Stewart's co-author on
'Year Of The Cat'), it contains two of the most joyous, life-asserting songs Al
ever wrote, totally irresistible in their optimistic swirl: 'Feel Like' and
'Genie On A Table Top'. Coming up with hosts of lyrical metaphors to describe
his elated spirits — replacing each other in a whirlwind so rapid it is almost
impossible to separate the time-tested clichés from brilliant
on-the-spot inventions — he infects the backing band with his cheerfulness, and
each single musician, from the percussionist to organ and guitar guys taking
solo spots, do their best to match him in this celebration of life. After all
the chilly, morose panoramas of Last Days, it is the perfect antidote —
even though there is no telling as to whatever it really was that made Al feel
so wond'rous. The death of Peter Wood?..
These two I-feel-good anthems are the obvious
highlights, but Al's sense of melody and taste seems to have picked up on quite
a few other occasions as well. 'Angel Of Mercy' is eloquently vicious, staking
it all on Al's duet with the ominous violin part (reminiscent somewhat of
Dylan's mid-Seventies conversations with Scarlett Rivera's instrument). The
inescapable history lesson of 'Charlotte Corday' is a collaboration with Tori
Amos that most Tori Amos detractors will like — because she is not singing,
merely playing piano, and because the lyrics are his rather than hers. The
chorus of 'Trespasser' — "you see him in your dreams, but I seem to see
him all the time" — is technically unforgettable, although the song may
have used a bit less generic Spanish guitar (what can you do, Al loves the
stuff).
Even the two-minute kiddie throwaway of
'Hippopotamus Song', which may turn off deadly serious listeners whose sense
of humor had been gradually wiped off with a series of Rush concerts, is funny
fun in its capriciousness; besides, who else but Al Stewart would flaunt the
etymologically correct plural form of the word 'hippopotamus' — and then make
it rhyme?
Against all this surge of the spirit, the
record's few flaws seem even fewer. The gracious, nostalgic folk-rocker
'Trains' has no real reason to drag on for eight minutes; four would have been
quite enough — it is certainly no 'Roads To Moscow'. And a couple of the tracks
still carry vestiges of crappy Eighties' production — 'Don't Forget Me' still
gets pigeonholed as glossy, suffocating adult contemporary, and 'Necromancer'
abuses echo effects and electronic percussion in order to remind us that true
evil does exist. Yet the tone of the album is still set by 'Feel Like', and a
small amount of inertia-based blunders cannot misdirect it. Thumbs up for a record that may brighten up many a
day if one so desires, or, perhaps, already has.
BETWEEN THE WARS (1995)
1) Night Train To Munich; 2)
The Age Of Rhythm; 3) Sampan; 4) Lindy Comes To Town; 5) Three Mules; 6) A League
Of Notions; 7) Life Between The Wars; 8) Betty Boop’s Birthday; 9) Marion The
Chatelaine; 10) Joe The Georgian; 11) Always The Cause; 12) Laughing Into 1939;
13) The Black Danube.
Another minor gem, alas, too limited in
ambition and too humble in execution to become anything higher than a cult
classic (and, so far, it has not become even that). This time, in collaboration
with guitarist Laurence Juber, and, apparently, feeling more free than a bird,
Al fully gives in to his historical passion — dedicating an entire album to
songs dealing with one and one only historical period, arguably his favourite
one: remember “...I was born too late to see Josephine Baker dancing in a
Paris cabaret"? Well, at least he was born not too late to be enthralled
by the 1920s and the 1930s, enough to offer such a cute little recreation of
those happy/awful times.
The recreation is not actually musical: apart
from the first two fast-paced songs, Al does not offer a regular «retro»
exercise, which might have been judged as too posh and fanciful, and heard as
too fake and devoid of credibility (think Christina Aguilera). Most of the
songs are written the way he usually writes them — not terribly inventive
folk-pop melodies — but the spirit is clearly invigorated by the subject, which
he explores from all sides, with humor, tragedy, melancholy, and excitement
permeating all the motives.
The track names mostly speak for themselves —
unless you come from a long line of village idiots, you will be able to
understand at least fifty or more percent of Al’s sources from the titles,
although there may be one or two you will have trouble with even if you’re a
history buff yourself, since Mr. Stewart touches upon political, social, and
cultural issues of the two decades, sticking references to just about
everything that existed back in the day, from Dorothy Parker to Hedy Lamarr to
Zinoviev and Kamenev.
To waste space on description of the individual
songs would be downplaying the point. All are sparsely produced, completely acoustic
with an occasional accordeon, piano, or quiet orchestral arrangement thrown in.
Each delivers a hummable chorus; some, in addition to that, offer the delight
of a flapper’s dance (‘The Age Of Rhythm’, ‘When Lindy Comes To Town’), while
others prefer to delve the mines of doom and gloom (‘Laughing Into 1939’).
Lyrically, some are hilarious (all the spy references in ‘Night Train To
Munich’), some knowledgeably sarcastic (‘League Of Notions’), a few downright
silly (‘Joe The Georgian’, about how Stalin’s victims are impatiently waiting
for him to join them in Hell). And some represent implicit edutainment — ‘Betty
Boop’s Birthday’ may make one want to check out those old cartoons.
But the point is, of course, to weave a
specific projection of the epoch out of these bits and pieces, and, from that
point of view, the album is a success. Pedantically minded ones may complain
about Stewart’s vision being too shallow and unprofessional, but he is no
historian, after all, and Between The Wars is not a PhD thesis, merely a
loving tribute from a talented, intelligent aficionado. If it does not charm
you at least a little, you’re either hopelessly hung up, or a disgruntled
victim of Are You Smarter Than A Third Grader. And what better excuse is
needed to rewatch that old Carol Reed classic? Thumbs
up, of course.
DOWN IN THE CELLAR (2000)
1) Waiting For Margaux; 2)
Tasting History; 3) Down In The Cellars; 4) Turning It Into Water; 5) Soho; 6)
The Night That The Band Got The Wine; 7) Millie Brown; 8) Stained Moon; 9)
Franklin's Table; 10) House Of Clocks; 11) Sergio; 12) Toutes Les Etoiles; 13)
The Shiraz Shuffle.
It is hard to imagine anybody other than al
Stewart, in the whole wide world, recording an entire album of songs about wine
— and, more or less, getting away with it. That Al is a seasoned connaisseur,
is no sin of his. That he is capable of writing a nice, friendly tune about
taking a sip, there is hardly any doubt. But surely a whole concept album
drawing on his love for wine would be overkill? Boring at best, kitschy novelty
at worst?
Well... it is not the best Al Stewart
album ever, that one is for sure. Some songs work well and some not quite so.
He did overestimate the power of inspiration evaporating from that cellar; and,
what's worse, there is a quaint, uncomfortable aroma of snobbery. There is no
reason to doubt the man's noble and innocent intentions (heck, he just loves
all sorts of wine, what's wrong with that? Not everyone is supposed to
inherit the tastes of John Lee Hooker) — but somehow I, for one, feel it easier
to fall under Al's enchantment when he is reminding me of Josephine Baker and
Charles Lindbergh rather than extolling the virtues of Margaux and Shiraz.
So, as a sprawling, many-faced ode to wine, Down
In The Cellar is ambiguous, not only because a rock LP praising wine is
suspicious per se, but also because the songs themselves are not all that
reminiscent of alcohol-related environment, if you know what I mean. A note
from a listener I once fell upon read something like, "I hate wine, but I
liked this record" — meaning that Al essentially failed in his task. If
this were a good record about wine, it would have been hated by all strong
wine-haters — or it would have converted the weak ones. Instead, this is just a
good record. Forget about the wine.
Since there are no production excesses
(everything is kept in strict accordance with Al's no-extra-ornaments folk-rock
formula: acoustic essence, minimalistic rhythm section, occasional electric
guitar, occasional pianos, occasional chamber strings arrangement), and since
there are no excuses for genre-hopping and experimentation such as provided by
the topical matters of Between The Wars, the melodies do not require
description; as usual, they are, uh, melodic — simple, moving, and memorable.
Humble, too: only 'The Night That The Band Got The Wine', with its lengthy epic
title, six-minute running length, and increased levels of loudness, pretends to
epic status, but is actually underpinned by its pretense; I'd rather look for the
meaning of life in the rococo strings of 'Franklin's Table' (apparently, Ben
was a big fan of the spirits, too), the dense medieval drone of 'Soho', and the
echo-laden lonesome howling-wolf electric solos of 'Stained Moon'. Beautiful
tunes, these.
Unfortunately, Down In The Cellar
suffered doubly because of lack of promotion (the Miramar label that was
supposed to take care of the album in the States went bankrupt before it
managed to release it), and because of being tagged as some sort of «special
interest» item. Not to worry: it is a perfectly normal, regular Al Stewart
album reflecting his normal, regular skills at writing, singing, and playing.
And who really gives a damn about the wine? Thumbs
up.
A BEACH FULL OF SHELLS (2005)
1) The Immelman Turn; 2) Mr.
Lear; 3) Royal Courtship; 4) Rain Barrel; 5) Somewhere In England; 6) Katherine
Of Oregon; 7) Mona Lisa Talking; 8) Class Of '58; 9) Out In The Snow; 10) My
Egyptian Couch; 11) Gina In The Kings Road; 12) Beacon Street; 13) Anniversary.
Down
In The Cellar gave us an Al
Stewart that was cozily settling in. And for an artist that did not really make
too many wild, unexpected, dangerously experimental moves even at his youthful
peak, «settling in» means providing precious little food for us reviewers.
Pleasant, but never overwhelming melodies, intelligent, but never
unpredictable lyrical subjects and flourishes, good sense of taste so steady
it's almost boring — what is there to say?
In Al's case, this means thirteen more
folk-rock tunes that grow, although slowly, upon each ensuing listen, and more
of his little stories, sometimes fantasies, sometimes nostalgia pieces. And, as
usual, although the acoustic-based arrangements are generally similar, there is
enough mood diversity to sit through the entire thing if not in an enthralled,
then at least in a cutely satisfied manner. Every once in a while, Al's «modest
perfection» may really get to you in all of its perfect modesty, and all of
that accumulated NICENESS may make you want to throw up in disgust and reach
out for your collection of hardcore classics — but in 2005, everyone who puts
on a new Al Stewart album is either supposed to know what to expect, or is
completely crazy and throws up on a regular basis all the same.
For the record, this particular issue of «Where
In The World Is [W]Al[do] Stewart?» covers such topics as limerick father Edward
Lear; David Lean's Brief Encounter;
American barnstorm fliers of the 1920s; one of the wives of Henry VIII subtly
transplanted into a personal fantasy; and far more obscure subjects that I am
unable to decipher at all (what the hell is 'Rain Barrel' about, and who the
hell is Mr. Williams? Perhaps Al should consider having his albums come
packaged in newspaper clippings, à la Thick As A Brick?).
Also for the record, rumors state that the
entire thing was originally thought to be centered around a thirteen-minute
version of 'Class Of '58', with Al's inevitable nostalgic impulse targeted at
gray-haired rock'n'roll grandaddies of his generation. The full version, it is
said, has seen single release, but it is hard to see why this fun, but
insignificant retro-rockabilly stomp should have been any longer than four,
which it is here.
And for the final record, my personal favourite
song is easily definable here as 'Mona Lisa Talking' — not because Al pretends
to have found a simple, but most probably wrong decipherment of the most famous
smile in history, but because he has actually found a gorgeous musical/vocal
hook to go along with the decipherment: the "go home, pretty baby..."
is one of those subtle heart-tugs that I so like to collect in relatively
obscure locations and strongly recommend to all the other heart-tug
connoisseurs out there.
Oh, and thumbs up, of course. These particular shells on
the beach are hardly worth a million, but all are fairly solid, and it's not
that easy these days to fall upon a solitary beach with thirteen solid shells.
This one's definitely not for the
tourists. Odd coincidence of the day: Why does the Middle Eastern-ish strings
riff that introduces 'Rain Barrel' sound so
much like the opening riff of ABBA's disco hit 'Voulez-Vous'? Either the two must have a common source, or Al Stewart
has a really sick subconscious.
SPARKS OF ANCIENT LIGHT (2008)
1) Lord Salisbury; 2) (A Child's
View Of) The Eisenhower Years; 3) The Ear Of The Night; 4) Hanno The Navigator;
5) Shah Of Shahs; 6) Angry Bird; 7) The Loneliest Place On The Map; 8)
Sleepwalking; 9) Football Hero; 10) Elvis At The Wheel; 11) Silver Kettle; 12)
Like William McKinley.
And another modestly perfect album; they just keep
comin'. At such a pace, with such a steady mindset, Stewart could probably go
on like that for another twenty years or so. A major asset is his unyielding
vocal power: realize that on Sparks,
a 63-year old Al sounds exactly like
the 22-year old Al sounded on Bedsitter
Images, and I mean it — not a single note betrays the aging (come to think
of it, he looks pretty great for his
age, too, except for the hair).
Of course, he did not exactly start out with
the most powerful or wide-ranged voice of them all, but that is the common
benefit — break out your superhuman voice in your twenties and you will be
eating dust by the time you hit fifty; stay cool, calm, and collected when
you're young and your singing life will be lengthy and healthy. The miracle of
Al Stewart, then, is that the story of his voice is basically the same as the
story of his songwriting. Here we sit listening to early period albums like Love Chronicles, classic years' albums
like Year Of The Cat, and recent
offerings like this record — and, for the life of me, I cannot figure out
which ones are the «highlights» and which ones the «lowlights».
Focus on Sparks
Of Ancient Light. Topics covered include: the Islamic revolution in Iran
('Shah Of Shahs'), the golden days of British imperialism ('Lord Salisbury'),
America in the Fifties ('The Eisenhower Years'), ancient Phoenician naval
expeditions to Africa ('Hanno The Navigator'), glories and pitfalls of
professional sports ('Football Hero'), and a bizarre story about Elvis seeing
the face of Stalin in the clouds on an Arizona trip in 1964 ('Elvis At The
Wheel'). Plus a healthy dose of not-so-lyrically-specific tunes, of course, to
ensure that the album will be likable by more than just history buffs.
Musically, Al's stern conservatism keeps up its
rule: all the arrangements, by Al and long-term colleague Laurence Juber,
follow the standard formulae. But, as usual, it is impossible to accuse the man
of direct self-copying: as much as the melodies sound familiar, there are no
obvious rewrites to be found. The expected hooks expectedly keep coming:
catchy singalong choruses to 'Lord Salisbury' ("look away, look away, look
away for our survival..."), 'Hanno' (with the charming line "when my
sailing days are done, I'll see Poseidon's daughter"), 'Sleepwalking', and
more. The expected acoustic instrumental is confined to the first half of 'Ear
Of The Night', with Al giving us another of his simple, unassuming, but lovable
folk interludes. The rock'n'roll, which Stewart never abandons, is represented
by 'Angry Bird' and, to a lesser extent, by 'Eisenhower Years' — neither of the
two «kicks ass», but Stewart is still one of the few veterans who can make a
song «rock» while exercising restraint and cutting out dirty distorted guitar
tones.
In short, it is exactly what is to be expected
these days in the guise of the next Al Stewart album, and solid proof that the
powers of melodic folk-rock, although drained, are still far from being
completely spent. As I write this, Sparks
is Stewart's last original studio album to-date, but there is truly not a
shadow of doubt in my mind that he still has something like a dozen more
records of the same quality in him, and that the longer he lasts, the more of
an awesome example he can set for generations to come — doing for British
folk-rock more or less the same that, say, a J. J. Cale does for American
blues-rock. And he knows it well himself, the cunning old fox, or else he
wouldn't end the album with the following refrain: "I'll sit on my porch
like William McKinley / And I'll let the world come to me / And if it's too
busy I really won't mind / And there's no place I want to be". Well, we
can only hope that the world will continue to leave Al alone — not too difficult
— since it would benefit no one see him end
like William McKinley. Thumbs up, even despite the ill-omened nature of
that one simile.
UNCORKED (2009)
1) Last Days Of The Century /
Constantinople; 2) Coldest Winter; 3) Warren Harding; 4) News From Spain; 5) Bedsitter Images; 6)
Midas Shadow; 7) Running Man; 8) Palace Of Versailles; 9) Auctioning Dave
(story); 10) Princess Olivia; 11) Life In Dark Water; 12) Carol; 13) Old
Admirals.
Stewart's penchant
for guitar-sparring as a major artistic incentive continues with a new twist:
at the end of the first decade of the century, after Peter White and Lawrence
Juber, his new partner is Dave Nachmanoff, a somewhat obscure, but critically
respected folk musician / singer / songwriter with a PhD in philosophy and,
most likely, numerous other fine qualities that remain hidden from the general
public.
The newly-formed duo's first joint appearance
on record is with Uncorked (another
transparent allusion to Al's wine cellars which, judging by all sorts of merry
jokes the two engage in on this album, have been strongly tampered with) — an
all-acoustic live album that repeats the experience of Rhymes In Rooms, but to even better effect.
First and foremost, because, as fine as Peter
White was on guitar, Nachmanoff is an even stronger player. If you are afraid
of or usually bored with «unplugged»-type concerts, Uncorked may change your attitude — Dave can shift from languid
and subtle to loud and brutal in the wink of an eye, and his technique seems
sometimes to be specifically geared towards proving that there really are no things you can do with an electric
guitar that cannot be reproduced, or at least efficiently substituted on an
acoustic. for instance, as they launch into 'News From Spain', Al remarks that
"Dave has the unenviable task of trying to cover Rick Wakeman's piano
solos on the guitar", but actually, Dave rises to the challenge, and even
if it is not really possible to completely reinstate the turbulent sea storm
atmosphere that Stewart, Wakeman, and others created on the original, they
still come very, very close — with nothing but one acoustic rhythm guitar and
one acoustic lead. And it's not merely «impressive» — it's overwhelming if you
play it loud enough.
Second, the set list is anything but trivial;
since the album is obviously geared towards a small group of hardcore fans —
most of the outside world already has trouble remembering who wrote 'Year Of
The Cat', let alone anything else — the track selection firmly excludes all of Al's «biggies», with the arguable
exception of (a much shortened version of) 'Old Admirals', and is almost
completely unpredictable; and yet, most of the songs are so pretty that no
neophyte, accidentally discovering Stewart through this concert, would ever
want to think of the man as a «one-hit wonder» or «singles artist».
Personal favorites include 'Bedsitter Images',
bringing us all the way back into 1967, with Nachmanoff perfectly nailing that
admirable piano / strings ascending melody; 'Life In Dark Water', stripped down
and consequently restored to the status of a melancholic Al Stewart ballad from
that of an ice cold Alan Parsons prog-pop epic; the already mentioned 'News
From Spain' (Al doing a number from Orange?
Unbelievable!); and the happiness of 'Princess Olivia', with its 'Ode To Joy'
quote at the beginning unforgotten.
But really, it's all good; even the two songs
from Last Days Of The Century,
which, come to think of it, really needed this sort of re-recording to redeem
them from the production excesses of Al's worst period. And, despite the
obligatory humbleness of it all, Uncorked
may, all the same, be the most dynamic live album in Al's career, if only
because it is so transparently clear that these two guys are simply going for
the fun of it, not out of some troublesome «rock star obligation» to the fans
and managers, or out of financial reasons. Add to this that the clarity and
youthfulness of Al's voice in 'Bedsitter Images' makes it sound like it could
have well been recorded in 1967, and Uncorked completes its transformation
from a cute late-period curio from a folk rock veteran into a near-must-have
recording not just for grizzled Al Stewart fans, but for everyone who
appreciates clever songwriting, pretty singing, and masterful guitar playing as
such. Thus — yet another thumbs up for the running man. The only bad news
is that there is no accompanying DVD release.
ADDENDA:
SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME (1996)
1) Where Are They Now; 2)
Fields Of France; 3) Soho (Needless To Say); 4) In Red Square; 5) A Sense Of
Déjà Vu; 6) How Does It Happen; 7) Coolest Winter In Memory; 8)
Candy Came Back; 9) Jackdaw; 10) The Bear Farmers Of Birnam; 11) In The Dark;
12) Blow Your Mansion Down; 13) Willie The King; 14) Merry Monks; 15) Ghostly
Horses Of The Plain; 16) Mixed Blessing.
This collection of outtakes and rarities was
only available for a limited period through a fan club distribution in the
mid-1990s, and, for the most part, has been made obsolete since then by the recent
CD re-releases of Al's catalog, through dismemberment and dispersal of most
tracks as bonuses for the corresponding chronological periods.
Nevertheless, it still exists — in the form of
a used item on Ebay, a low-quality download on the local torrent site, or a
discography memento graced with a slightly corny photo. And it has its use as a
one-time sixty-minute listen, too, being fully on the level. Not every artist
can boast an outtake collection that is almost as entertaining as an original,
semi-coherent LP; Al, in terms of quality if not recognition, joins the league
of Dylan and Nick Drake.
The time period covered spans pretty much all
of Stewart's pre-1996 career, the earliest track being 'Jackdaw' from the late
Sixties, the latest — several tracks from the Between The Wars sessions;
and most are just as melodic and moving as the typically best stuff from the
guy, sometimes even more. 'Jackdaw' gives us the early innocent Stewart with
pastoral flutes and starry eyes, spoiled somewhat by cooky backing vocals; but
already the tracks dating back to the Parsons years are magnificently serious
folk-rock, particularly 'A Sense Of Déjà Vu', worthy of the
stateliness of a George Harrison classic, and 'Willie The King', a bleak,
depressing cross between a barroom blues and a prog-rock epic.
Later numbers are a 'Mixed Blessing' indeed —
some, like this particular song, are hopelessly overwhelmed by crap-Eighties
production, but generally they match the standards of the corresponding LPs:
'In Red Square', for instance, would have made a decent addition to Russians
& Americans, but was, perhaps, excised for way too many references to
Russian history targeted at audiences who might not have too pleasant a time
refreshing their memories on Khrushchev. The New Wave trimmings of 'Candy Came
Back' will please fans of 24 Carrots; the synth-pop leanings of 'How
Does It Happen' will probably please no one, though — lines like "An
original thought can be such a rush, why do they feed you on a diet of man-made
mush?" do not sound all that convincing when they are set to
man-made mush. Then the mood will be set right with the light humor of 'The
Bear Farmers Of Birnam' ("...oftentimes the girls reject you — a bear
won't treat you so; you're satisfied to know, when he chews you up, he still
respects you"), the cheery medievalism of 'Merry Monks', and what may be
the grandest and gorgeous-est entry of 'em all, 'In The Dark', from
not-exactly-sure-when with a beautiful piano melody played by
not-exactly-sure-whom.
All in all, a great collection — thumbs up, and way too bad if some of the best
tracks happen to get lost in the process of dismemberment — but the tormenting
question is: who the hell thought it was a good idea to start things off with
two tracks from Last Days Of The Century? Fanclub releases seem to have
their own unexplicated bits of weirdness.
ALICE COOPER
1) Titanic Overture; 2) 10
Minutes Before The Worm; 3) Sing Low Sweet Cheerio; 4) Today Mueller; 5)
Living; 6) Fields Of Regret; 7) No Longer Umpire; 8) Levity Ball; 9) B.B. On
Mars; 10) Reflected; 11) Apple Bush; 12) Earwigs To Eternity; 13) Changing
Arranging.
Vincent «Alice Cooper» Furnier on vocals and
harmonica, Glen Buxton on lead guitar, Michael Bruce on rhythm, Dennis Dunaway
on bass guitar, Neal Smith on drums. A bunch of Detroit kids raised and reared
on the rock'n'roll craze, mixed and mingled with the Detroit proto-punk scene
and the likes of the Stooges and the MC5. Sharp, talented, and obviously poised
for success as rock'n'roll's baddest boys.
What fun, then, to realize just how far
derailed they were with their first two albums. Since their original record
contract was with Frank Zappa, who signed them to his Straight Records label,
it is usually assumed that Zappa was, in fact, responsible for the overall
sound of Pretties For You. I do not think so; many, if not most, of
these "songs" had already been a part of the band's act by the time
they met Frank, and the general desire to twist simple, basic rock'n'roll into
the weirdest psychedelic shapes possible was quite common among even the most
caveman-like bands in the late 1960s (remember Ted Nugent's hallucinogenic
past?).
That said, Zappa's style is a major influence
on the record, especially on all of its one-minute-long interludes; if, by
"psychedelia", we want to mean something like the hippie-style West
Coast approach, there is very little trace of that on the record — Alice
Cooper, band and artist alike, have always treated hippies with more fiery
hatred than the Establishment itself. Some of the guitar solos may remind the
listener of Quicksilver Messenger Service-style drone-jamming, but I doubt that
the decision could have been conscious: these sounds were all over the air in
1969, and Alice Cooper were all but forced to reproduce some of them, like it
or not. Yet the main idea of the music is certainly not to flush out and
evacuate your mind from prejudices — rather, it is to flush out and evacuate
your neighbours from the premises.
This superficially ugly, unpredictable,
devoid-of-meaning geometry-rock clearly falls under the jurisdiction of Captain
Beefheart. The big difference is that Alice Cooper are in no position to play
it the way Beefheart's Magic Band were able to. Alice Cooper, from the
beginning, were a garage band, and they play geometry-rock like a garage band:
loud, brutal, technically limited and artistically impoverished. If Trout
Mask Replica, from its first note to its last one, is constructed like
complex alien music, Pretties For You is basically a bunch of
straightforward rockers, and the idea of "weirdness" here is
essentially interpreted as cruelly forcing each to break down in the middle —
or several times in a row — and imposing some out-of-the-blue ugly new signature
or chord change upon the track. For no reason, just like that.
Given, however, the band's obvious songwriting
talent, Pretties For You inspires very mixed emotions. On one hand,
there may be an impression of it as an unnecessarily, stupidly deconstructed
and spoiled hard rock album that might have been much better. Proof? There is
some stunning material on it: the epic 'Fields Of Regret', the melancholic pop
gem 'Levity Ball' (a bit Pink Floydish in its "astral" sonic
arrangement), the cheerful 'Reflected' (later, with all the weirdness edited
out, to become the well-known 'Elected' on Billion Dollar Babies), and
even less coherent tunes like 'Sing Low Sweet Cherio' have their moments.
On the other hand, let us face it: we do not
hear natural born garage rock bands trying their hand at complex avantgarde art
each and every day of our life. The very fact of such an experience is pretty
darn novel and intriguing: what we have here is an attempt to combine the
uncombinable. (It tempts me very much to whine about how this kind of crazy
daringness was only possible in that crazy epoch known as the late Sixties, but
this is, of course, not true; what is probably true is that only in the
late Sixties could a band come out with a jaw-dropping flop like Pretties
For You and still have a long, successful commercial career ahead of them).
Maybe the record is awful, but it's hard to deny that it is somewhat... brilliantly
awful.
I would still give it a thumbs down, of course, since there is little
practical use for geometry-rock when it is done well, and none at all when it
is done poorly. Yet in doing so, I am also forced to register a serious
complaint from the brain department, which insists that the record should at
least be heard, if not necessarily liked — for educational purposes, if
nothing else.
EASY ACTION (1970)
1) Mr. And Misdemeanor; 2) Shoe
Salesman; 3) Still No Air; 4) Below Your Means; 5) Return Of The Spiders; 6)
Laughing At Me; 7) Refrigerator Heaven; 8) Beautiful Flyaway; 9) Lay Down And
Die, Goodbye.
A transitional record. You can already witness
traces of the classic Alice Cooper sound here, but it is still trying to break
through the wall — a wall that, in all fairness, need not ever have existed if
the band had been originally brought into the studio by someone other than the
original Mother of Invention. Still, history knows no subjunctive, and I dare
say further Coop records wouldn't have been half as interesting if not for the
Zappa influence.
Actually, Zappa was no longer involved at all
during the sessions for Easy Action, an album produced by Neil Young's
producer David Briggs who, it has been said by Neal Smith, hated the band and
their sound, but still gave it a much more polished, and also heavier, sheen
than Zappa did not give Pretties For You. Technically, this is already
"hard rock", although still bordering on noise and avantgarde most of
the time. The only number that "rocks" in the conventional sense of
the word is 'Return Of The Spiders' — the Spiders was one of the band's
original names, so it's quite natural that a song thus entitled should plunge
us into straightforward garage fervor — but it has no memorable melody to speak
of, just kick-ass guitar 'n' drums.
Conventional "songs" include 'Mr. And
Misdemeanor', a mid-tempo vaudeville number with distorted guitars replacing
barroom pianos; 'Shoe Salesman', a slight nod to Brit-pop and its "little
man" values, a particularly bizarre direction for the Coops that they
never pursued again; and the Michael Bruce-sung piano ballad 'Beautiful
Flyaway', a charming McCartney-style ditty that contains the album's most
memorable moments.
In between we meet various uninteresting
semi-musical links, as well as lengthier freakouts: 'Below Your Means' is a
depressing guitar-and-organ blues jam, while 'Lay Down And Die, Goodbye' is
essentially a long cluster of atonality that serves no serious purpose after we
have already learned what atonality is with a little help on behalf of
everybody from Stockhausen to Zappa. (And it is certainly far less evocative in
terms of pure psychedelia than Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd).
It is always ego-pleasing to state, with
authority, that you know better than popular opinion, but there really, really
is no point in defending Alice Cooper's first two albums other than out of pure
historical interest — for instance, some of the aimless jamming and noisemaking
would, only a year later, be magically transformed into the visionary
instrumental style on Killer, and to witness this change is like
observing accelerated cell mutation under a microscope, but whether it can also
give one aesthetic pleasure is surely a question of much debate. 'Mr. And
Misdemeanor' and 'Beautiful Flyaway' are two solid numbers that would have not
been out of place on any of their classic records, and it is sad that the
latter did not even make it onto the Life And Crimes Of Alice Cooper
retrospective; the rest may be heard once and then forever held in peace, so
here is another assured thumbs down for all
parties concerned.
LOVE IT TO DEATH (1971)
1) Caught In A Dream; 2) I'm Eighteen; 3) Long Way
To Go; 4) Black Juju;
5) Is It My Body; 6)
Hallowed Be My Name; 7) Second Coming; 8) Ballad Of Dwight Fry; 9)
Sun Arise.
By 1971, Zappa's Straight Records came under
the control of Warner Bros. — in a mighty ironic twist of fate — and so did
Alice Cooper, who unexpectedly found themselves under contract with a major
label and under the supervision of a new producer, Bob Ezrin. They also
relocated back to their hometown of Detroit, saying goodbye to the detestable
West Coast and once again breathing in the air of slums, garages, and dirty
rock'n'roll.
Clearly, recording back in their natural
habitat must have raised the stakes on the band's future, but it is highly
unlikely that anyone might have expected the results to be so phenomenal. All
of a sudden, the band not only knows precisely where to go and where to stop,
but also delivers a bunch of songs that are gritty, threatening, relevant, and
catchy. At this point, the "theater" aspect of their show was still
relatively subdued, limited mainly to a little bit of spiderish makeup around
Furnier's eyes and, perhaps, a little bit of snakes and ropes here and there. More
important was the rock'n'roll aspect, the brutal proto-punk onslaught that, in
1971, promised to make the Rolling Stones and the Who sound like old farts.
Five of the album's tracks are just like that:
tough, compact riff-rockers, with a typical running length of three to two and
a half minutes, each one a lyrical fuck-you to middle class values, each one
geared so well towards the rebellious teenage mind that there is hardly a
future point in time when they will become obsolete. The best known is the
immortal single 'I'm Eighteen' (I'm eagerly awaiting the moment Alice will
have to rename it to 'I'm Eighty'), a song so blatantly commercial ("Hey
Bob, do you think they'll buy into that 'lines form on my hands and face'
stuff?") that the mind almost revolts against it, but so tremendously
seducing at the same time that the heart buys it. Let us face it: 'I'm eighteen
and I like it!' is, after all, a much more realistic slogan than 'Hope I die
before I get old', even despite the odd-evening circumstance that, today, Alice
looks just as ridiculous singing his slogan onstage as Roger Daltrey
and Pete Townshend singing theirs.
'I'm Eighteen', however, is merely the most
anthemic and presumptuous of the five rockers, not necessarily the best; the
band are equally adept at capturing a wannabe-glam effect with 'Caught In A
Dream', at sounding sexy and provoking with 'Is It My Body', at playing angry
prophets with 'Hallowed Be My Name', and at playing the angry lonely young man
routine with 'Long Way To Go' (my personal favourite, a totally smoking garage
classic that let you vent your frustration like nothing else back in 1971). No
other Alice Cooper album packs together a five-way punch like that, although Killer
comes close.
The 'theater' aspect, however, is far from
absent from the proceedings: it dominates two of the album's epics that also
served as then-current visual centerpieces of the live show. Of these, one has
endured: 'Ballad Of Dwight Fry', Cooper's morbid impersonation of an
asylum-locked mental patient such as could have been played by Dwight Frye (the
title is a bit misleading — Dwight Frye himself was a perfectly sane person,
merely being known for playing a long line of deranged characters like Renfield
in Dracula). As is the usual case with Cooper, the effects are a bit
overwrought, but not by much, and one could argue that the 'Dwight Fry'
character is, in fact, far more effectively fleshed out than, for instance,
'Steven' (1975-1994).
The other lengthy showpiece is far more
questionable — in most treatises written around the album, 'Black Juju' is
quoted as its low point, the one track that prevents Love It To Death
from acquiring 'masterpiece' status. Curiously, it is credited not to Furnier
(you'd think he would be responsible for all of the band's theatrics),
but bassist Dennis Dunaway. Its main problem is the length and the extremely
evident — way too evident — debt to the Doors' epics, particularly 'When The
Music's Over'. But at least the Doors had Morrison's poetic gift and a better
knack for dressing his spoken ramblings in a variegated array of musical
effects; 'Black Juju', apart from its main imposing guitar-and-organ melodic
line, has none of that, and if it simply petered out after the first three or
four minutes, it would not be as problematic as it is with its lengthy
mid-section, supposing to creep you out but, instead, probably just making you
go to sleep. The 'rest... rest... rest... rest... WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE
UP!' segment is so trite and predictable that 'Black Juju' does spoil the
overall effect — just as you thought the Coops had magically attained the
status of the perfect rock'n'roll band, they slap this proof for the contrary
right in your face. That's a bit humiliating.
Yet, once we come to terms with the fact that
nobody's perfect, least of all Alice Cooper, Love It To Death proudly
remains standing as one of the best examples of early Seventies' rock, and not
to give it a total thumbs up is out of
the question. As the solemn chorus of Rolf Harris' 'Sun Arise' slowly fades
away into silence, we all know that the sun has, indeed, arisen over one of America's
finest acts of the decade.
KILLER (1971)
1) Under My Wheels; 2) Be My
Lover; 3) Halo Of Flies;
4) Desperado; 5) You Drive Me Nervous; 6) Yeah, Yeah, Yeah; 7) Dead Babies; 8) Killer.
One can classify this as proto-punk, as
hard-art-rock, as Goth theater, as power pop with a dark edge — Killer
is one of those records that give the illusion of being easy to pigeonhole, but
whatever you pigeonhole it into, it will always be more diverse, experimental,
and unpredictable than the basic rules of the genre demand it to be.
Essentially, Killer consolidates all the
strengths of Love It To Death (its mean, scary sound and strong
songwriting), dispatches with its weaknesses (an occasional tendency to ramble
without a point), and throws in lots of additional touches, such as multi-part
song structures and diverse instrumentation. My only regret is that, due to
the two lengthy "suites", there are only eight songs; surely, given the
perfect shape the band was in, they could have made room for two or even four
more mini-gems. (I hold the same opinion on the Stones' Let It Bleed,
for that matter).
Classic rock radio, with its tightass
conservatism that makes even the Catholic church pale in comparison, has only
managed to memorize 'Under My Wheels'. Certainly the song is a classic, a big
ball of rollickin' fun with the band magically pumping up tension throughout
(some of glam rock's greatest use of the horn section, for instance) — fun
which you get so caught up in that you do not even realize you're singing about
roadkill, and I don't mean squirrels or opossums. So it's a metaphor — big
deal.
But Killer is much, much more than just
the 'album that yielded that big hit single'. Its main emphasis is not on pure
rock'n'roll: even 'Under My Wheels', with the addition of these horns, starts
to resemble David Bowie, so the honour of the most canonically "rock"
number should go to 'You Drive Me Nervous', a two-minute explosion of teenage
anger whose creaky riffage and wild wild screaming guarantee it a solid place
in the Punk Hall of Fame. The rest is much more subdued: 'Be My Lover' and
'Yeah, Yeah, Yeah' are catchy guitar-driven pop songs with fun self-referential
lyrics ('She asked me why the singer's name was Alice/I said listen, baby, you
really wouldn't understand') and pretty melodies.
'Desperado' has been called a tribute to Jim
Morrison, but if so, a very veiled one, because on the surface, it's rather a
tribute to a Western hero, building up on a little Spanish guitar and a bit of
spaghetti atmosphere. But it could be about anyone: 'I'm a killer, I'm a clown,
I'm a priest that's gone to town' — words that many people would be happy to
sing about themselves. With the exception, of course, that no one could sing
it better than Cooper, his dark, deathly voice the perfect vehicle for both the
subdued ominous verses and the paranoid chorus.
Opinions are divided about the longer pieces —
'Halo Of Flies' and 'Killer'. For the former, the band has gone on record
saying that they wanted to record something à la King Crimson
(!), to prove their skill in creating longer, more complex pieces.
"Longer" all right, but in terms of musical complexity, of course,
'Halo Of Flies' would never make Robert Fripp suffer from sleep deprivation. Or
would it? Each particular musical part that the band's guitarists create is
pretty rudimentary by itself, but there's quite a few of them, and each works
well on a gut level. Most of the time, non-virtuoso musicians trying to dabble
in artsiness "drive me nervous", but 'Halo' manages to create an
eerie, unsettling atmosphere and slowly build it up to a galloping, shattering,
ecstatic climax — should be played very very loud, by the way — so much so that
even the awful, absurd and unfunny lyrics that swing between James-Bondish and
gibberish ('And while a Middle Asian lady she really came as no surprise, but I
still did destroy her and I will smash halo of flies' — at least, make it grammatical!)
are forgotten.
As for 'Killer', which works in a tandem with
the preceding 'Dead Babies', these two should arguably be best experienced in
the context of the live setting: 'Dead Babies' with the accompanying smashing
and chopping of baby dolls onstage, and 'Killer', of course, culminating in the
infamous hanging scene, when Alice, cursing and kicking, was led to the gallows
to the accompaniment of the solemn funebral organ music. But even without the
imagery, 'Dead Babies' is the perfect marriage of Cooper's gut-level
shock theater and meaningful social statement; unlike the pure brainless
gorefest of 'I Love The Dead' two years later (ooh, necrophagia, yummy!), 'Dead
Babies' is, after all, a lament on the so frequently tragic effects of parental
neglect.
And then, of course, the title track: 'I came
into this life, looked all around, I saw just what I liked and took what I
found'. Musically, it is again a concoction of several effective riffs and
tempos, not one pattern hanging around for too long and all of them together
symbolizing the killer's final journey from arrest to gallows; lyrically, it
gives the perfect impression of that typical guy we're all afraid of — you
know, the one whom the world forgot to endow with any sort of moral code upon
graduation; whether it was the world's fault or his own does not seriously
matter here. It all leads to one of the scariest endings in musical history —
you just have to remember that the organ music accompanies him to the noose,
the dull noise that follows is the opening of the trapdoor, and the evil,
ear-bursting noise that follows is... well, you know. Creepy.
Killer is a relatively easy record to dismiss: its lyrics are generally either
obvious or absurdly bad, its music simple and unassuming, its shock value very
much in-yer-face and almost completely devoid of any subtlety. Next to Lou Reed
or Bowie or even the Stones at their best, it's "dumb". But many
things in life that many of us deeply love without any feeling of guilt are
"dumb", from Casablanca to 'Oliver Twist' to Michelangelo's
David (don't tell me the latter is a sculptor's feast of intelligence). Killer
belongs in that company, a straightforward masterpiece of angst and brutality
and, at the same time, a big, big load of FUN. Even the brain, amazed at the
effectiveness of this approach, opts for a thumbs up,
and the heart enthusiastically proclaims this to be the undisputed peak of the
original Alice Cooper band.
SCHOOL'S OUT (1972)
1) School's Out; 2) Luney
Tune; 3) Gutter Cat Vs The Jets; 4) Street Fight; 5) Blue Turk; 6) My Stars; 7)
Public Animal #9; 8) Alma Mater; 9) Grande Finale.
Some puritan rock'n'rollers part company with
Alice straight after Killer — «because of all that Broadway shit». Quite
rightly so; School's Out drops a strict demarcating line on the band, beyond
which Mr. Furnier started pushing the rest of the guys in an openly theatrical,
vaudevillian direction that not only placed more emphasis on the stage show
than on the music, but actually sucked much of the grit from the music itself, replacing
hard rock riffage with Broadway style, and then, still later, Vegas style
flourishes.
Not that Furnier's bandmates objected all that
much, not at first, at least. On School's Out, all of their four names
still feature regularly on the list of songwriting credits ('Alma Mater' is
even exclusively credited to drummer Neal Smith), and none of them are above
adding these names to tracks that are so overtly derivative of West Side Story
that they even had to list Bernstein and Sondheim as co-authors to avoid any
copyright hassle.
Perhaps, though, at this point the band
regarded School's Out as merely a one-time experiment: a glitzy
"rock musical", loosely based around their own schoolday experiences,
combining all sorts of influences and styles, but not necessarily determining,
once and for all, their future progress. After all, Alice Cooper, as a band,
were no AC/DC and had no desire to stick to one narrow formula, and if
anything, Killer was solid proof, because it was anything but
stylistically monotonous three-chord rock. Sure it didn't have any Bernstein
bits, but was there anything that legally prevented it from having Bernstein
bits? Hardly so. They just hadn't thought about it in 1971.
Rock theater starts already on the title track,
one that has since been acknowledged as a hard rock classic and has become as
firmly embedded in the world of classic rock programming as 'I'm Eighteen' and
'Under My Wheels'. And yes, its monstrous chugga-chug, chugga-chug,
chugga-chug-chug riff embodies the hard rock spirit of the early Seventies on
the same level of subconscious as, say, 'Smoke On The Water'. And Alice's
delivery — 'well we got no choice, all the girls and boys' — is as punk as they
come, sowing the seeds for Johnny Rotten's entire career.
But do not let it fool you: this is show
business above all, perfectly illustrated by Alice introducing the song on
stage in his top hat and tailcoat, and, on record, by the 'no more pencils, no
more books' children's choir, as well as ridiculously over-the-top lyrics like
'school's been blown to pieces'. You'd need to boast a particularly disturbing
level of intelligence to take this stuff seriously — as in, 'Alice is
sending us school victims a message here' — and it's hardly coincidental that
the song's greatest accompanying visual row was provided not by the Alice
Cooper Band themselves, but a few years later on The Muppet Show (a must-see for all
concerned).
And from this perspective, the uncomfortable
discoherence between the opening heavy rock of the title track and the
generally more lightweight, big-band-jazzy sound of the rest of the album is
not nearly as uncomfortable as it might seem. Besides, there is still plenty of
musical diversity; the songs do not easily fall together into any one single
style. Not everything works, and some of it may stink, but the band avoids
falling into any predictable traps, and overall, School's Out is perfectly
enjoyable if you set your expectations accordingly.
To test yourself, go straight to the two
lengthy centerpieces — 'Blue Turk' and 'My Stars'; if you happen to appreciate
both, then you are free to roam the future career of Alice Cooper (the band and
the solo artist) at will. 'Blue Turk' is corny, but delicious music-hall,
driven by a simplistic, but impressionistic bass riff and ripped in the middle
by a lengthy and surprisingly professional jazz jam session, while Furnier is
titillating our senses with lyrics that shift between sexual and, uh,
necronomical (he'd be far more straightforward about it very soon, with 'I Love
The Dead'). 'My Stars', co-written by Furnier with producer Bob Ezrin, is more
complex and demanding, leading us into a progressive direction with its
unusual piano ostinatos, guitar heroics and undecipherable lyrics (a
schoolboy's absurd fantasies of world domination? Whatever).
If these two are too much for your tastes,
there's hardly any hope that you will enjoy the much more straightforward
Broadway numbers, like 'Gutter Cat Vs. The Jets' or the instrumental 'Grand
Finale', but perhaps you will still be able to dig the slightly rockier
numbers, like the creepy 'Luney Tune' (for a long time, Alice muttering 'I'm
swimming in blood, like a rat on a sewer floor' was my most disturbing memory
of his early output), or the more relaxed barroom-rock stomp of 'Public Animal
#9' (yes, I think the title is quite clever).
In any case, School's Out — the album —
is, by all means, much more than merely eight tracks of fillerish show-music
stuck onto one genuine rock'n'roll classic. The truth, as it usually happens,
is much more complicated than that. I'd say the truth is that, within most
Cooper show numbers, you'll always be able to find a solid grain of serious
meaning wrapped in a commercially viable shell of glitz, corniness and spiced
with irony and sarcasm. School's Out firmly establishes the man as a
buffoon (not that Love It To Death and Killer lacked buffonade,
but it was generally wrapped in a less transparent veil), but buffoons are, and
have always been, a necessary and vital part of society. And, if you ask me,
there is just as much depth and cleverness to the self-conscious buffonade of
Alice Cooper as there is to the grim seriousness of the Clash or to the overtly
intellectual posing of the Talking Heads. At this particular moment, I'm
perfectly happy to give a thumbs up to
the buffoon and his buffonade.
BILLION DOLLAR BABIES (1973)
1) Hello
Hooray; 2) Raped And
Freezin'; 3) Elected; 4) Billion Dollar Babies; 5) Unfinished Sweet; 6) No More Mr. Nice Guy; 7)
Generation Landslide; 8) Sick
Things; 9) Mary Ann; 10) I Love The Dead.
Taken cut-for-cut, Billion Dollar Babies
probably does not have the same number of truly high points as Killer;
and it is certainly not a return to the "rocky" sound of 1971
after the Broadway excesses of School's Out, as some suggest — it is
pure glitz and show-biz all the way. But this is not a record to be remembered
through its individual songs; its sum is much bigger than its parts, big enough
to make the entire album one of the most unforgettable symbols of its time.
The accompanying show, partially captured on
the Good To See You, Alice Cooper video, was the band's biggest,
flashiest, and goriest, culminating in the introduction of the guillotine, and,
as usual, the studio record reflects it relatively faithfully; those wondering
about what all these odd noises are during 'Unfinished Sweet', or about why we
need the repetitive chorus of 'I Love The Dead' sung four times in a row should
check out the stage versions for their answers. Again, on the level of
individual songs these "soundtrack" elements may not work, but Billion
Dollar Babies is not about individual songs: it is a loosely strung
concept album about the vices of the society we live in — some of them open
and obvious, but most latent or concealed.
This makes Babies the
quintessential "glam rock" album — if we want to understand
"glam" as rock music's equivalent to the decadence of the late XIXth
/ early XXth century. Sceptical, cynical, disillusioned as to any past ideals,
diving into hedonistic excess and hating it at the same time, terrifyingly
suicidal and loving it: 'I love the dead before they're cold/Their blueing
flesh for me to hold' — any questions?
Mockery and sarcasm do not get more mocking and
sarcastic than with the album's opening — if you have ever heard Judy Collins'
original version of 'Hello Hooray' (credited to little-known Canadian writer
Rolf Kempf), you will know what I mean. The song, sounding like a sweet, romantic,
slightly hippiesque hymn to the beauty of life, in the hands of the Coop becomes
a flashy, tongue-in-cheek intro to the evils of life; his passionate
wails of 'I feel so strong!' do not come from an innocent lover of life, they
come from Mr. Mephisto in person. Fun stuff.
From then on, the songs may not be memorable
throughout, but they are always interesting — we get tales of female-induced
sexual molestation ('Raped And Freezin'), wannabe politicians with inflated
egos ('Elected'), obsessed fetishists (title track), spoiled candy lovers with
rotten teeth ('Unfinished Sweet'), outcasts who hate society as much as society
hates them ('No More Mr. Nice Guy'), and, of course, Alice's pet themes —
herpetophilia ('Sick Things') and the mother of 'em all, necrophilia ('I Love
The Dead'). Not a single one of these themes is made to look truly scary,
except for little kids, perhaps, but this is not Hitchcock or Carpenter, this
is a variety show that just happens to be ever so slightly on the gory side of
life. And what a show!
Musically, the high point, after all these
years, is still 'No More Mr. Nice Guy', the major single from the album and a
nagging rock radio classic along the same lines as 'I'm Eighteen', 'Under My
Wheels', and 'School's Out'. The opening riff is basically copped from the
Who's 'Substitute', but other than that, it is quite an independent Brit-pop
number streamlined for catchiness and singalong, if a bit clumsy in the lyrics
department; still, it is fun to see the classic optimistic, anthemic sound of
Brit-pop "borrowed" for such a wicked anti-social statement.
The rest of the tracks may not be equally as
solid, but all are loaded with little gimmicks to make them special. They get
Donovan — Donovan the hippie symbol! — to trade vocals with Alice on the title
track, singing lines like 'rotten little monster, baby I adore you' and
sacrificing his angelic reputation in the process (not that his reputation
mattered much around 1973). They get a little James Bond-style music in the
dentist's office as enormous drills penetrate Alice's cavities on 'Unfinished
Sweet'. Out of nowhere, a little 'Martha My Dear'-like music hall number
emerges and gives us a fairly believable Alice McCartney ('Mary Ann') — that
is, until we learn that Mary-Ann might really have been a man, and that
Alice's interest in her/him has not waned upon the latter's sad demise, if you
know what I mean.
Fans' opinions are frequently divided as to the
final track. 'I Love The Dead' raises the stakes on Alice Cooper's kitschy
ugliness: the band's previous accounts of death and delirium were at least
disguised as "social statements" (e. g. 'Dead Babies' was really
about parental neglect, 'Killer' was about a lost soul etc.), but in 'I Love
The Dead' there is nothing except pure, untampered shock value, making it
possible to argue that this is the point of no return where Alice Cooper is
forever transformed from the threatening rocker of Killer into the Mr.
Showbiz of Welcome To My Nightmare. Perhaps; to my eyes and ears,
though, this is way too fine a distinction, and, besides, impressions can vary.
After all, is there really any impenetrable
distance between 'Dead Babies' and 'I Love The Dead'? Sure the former was about
the amorality of the parents, but it was just as much about chopping baby dolls
onstage. And sure the latter is about feeding on dead flesh, but it is just as
much about the amorality of the band's audience — who pay real money to watch
and listen about this. You could, in fact, argue, that as the song sweeps into
its grand, anthemic chorus, 'the dead' to whom Alice refers are not the corpses
he claims to be attracted to, but the very people in the concert hall for whose
eyes and ears the show is intended. Who is, in fact, more dead — the guy about
to have his head chopped off on the guillotine or the people intently watching
the process from a safe distance, licking their lips in anticipation? And who
loves the dead more — Alice, "sacrificing" himself for the public
each night or the public itself? He's got you there, fans and lovers.
For dessert, treat yourself to the smartest
lyrics on the album — off the unjustly forgotten 'Generation Landslide': 'And
I laugh to myself at the men and the ladies / Who never conceived of us billion
dollar babies'. I am pretty sure it is songs like this that Bob Dylan referred
to when, in one of his interviews, he called Cooper "an underrated
songwriter". Thumbs up, of course,
even if the album has lost some of its freshness — but none of its major points
— today.
PS. The double-CD "deluxe edition" is
highly recommendable: it adds a near-complete live show from the accompanying
tour, recorded in high quality and played with enough variation on the studio
album to make it worth your while, although an even better choice would be to
get acquainted with the video equivalent of Good To See You. In
addition, you get the cool Elvis-like rockabilly B-side 'Slick Black
Limousine' and a couple studio demos — and liner notes that trace comparisons
between the glam excesses of the Alice Cooper Band circa '73 and the jazzbaby
excesses of Joan Crawford circa the Depression, among other things.
MUSCLE OF LOVE (1973)
1) Big Apple Dreamin'; 2)
Never Been Sold Before; 3) Hard Hearted Alice; 4) Crazy Little Child; 5)
Working Up A Sweat; 6) Muscle Of Love; 7) Man With The Golden Gun; 8) Teenage
Lament '74; 9) Woman Machine.
The original Alice Cooper Band's last album is
a strange, twisted creation, hard to categorize, explain, or understand. Conventional
knowledge states that the main reason of the split between Furnier and his
trusty bandmates was artistic: "Alice" was pushing the band further
and further into theater / vaudeville territory, beyond the already
broad-beyond-belief borders of the Billion Dollar Babies show, while
Buxton, Bruce, Dunaway, and Smith, on the contrary, were tired of the theatrics
and wanted to retreat to the more music-oriented sound and show of the Love
It To Death era. But before they parted company, they made Muscle Of
Love — an album that is, most definitely, neither here nor there.
On one hand, there is very little overt
theatricality in this record: in fact, it is much easier to see a direct
transition from Babies, with its shocking excesses, to Cooper's first
solo album, with its shocking excesses. Muscle Of Love has no
shocking excesses, unless one considers the presence of Liza Minnelli as back
vocalist a shocking excess in itself. But on the other hand, it is just as hard
to call Muscle a "rock" record: it has its share of rock
riffs, for certain, yet try to compare the album's heaviest, crunchiest number
— the title track — with 'Long Way To Go' or 'You Drive Me Nervous' and then
tell me which of them rocks the harder.
The inescapable impression is that Muscle Of
Love represents a compromise — further confirmed by the removal of
Furnier's pal, Bob Ezrin, as producer — that has satisfied no one and, in fact,
made things worse than they were. So, Furnier removes the snake theme and the
necrophilia theme and the giant toothbrushes and chopped dolls, but the band
still goes for vaudeville-like and glam-style arrangements (and, moreover,
notice that Alice is listed as co-writer on every track, first time
ever). No ballsy rock and no breathtaking show? Not easy to understand why the
album was a relative flop compared to its predecessor.
Even the lead-off single, 'Teenage Lament
'74', roughly broke the string of radio-ready classic hits: imagine the eternal
teenager, who was once given the anthem of his life with 'I'm Eighteen' and
then shown the right way to treat his bitch ('Under My Wheels'), his teachers
('School's Out') and society as a whole ('No More Mr. Nice Guy'), now getting a
vicious lashing himself: 'What a drag it is, these gold lame jeans, is this the
coolest way to get through your teens? Well, I cut my hair weird, I read that
it was in — I looked like a rooster that was drowned and raised again.' And the
worst blow — Alice is laughing at him with Liza Minnelli in tow!
But history seems to have been kind to Muscle
Of Love. Shrugged off upon release as a clear sign of the band running out
of steam, it has since seen a slow, but steady return of esteem. It is a
sleeper and a grower: for the first time in Alice Cooper history, here is a
record that tries to reach its core audience not through delightful cheap
thrills, but by gradually sinking in. I would go as far, perhaps, as to name it
the most intelligently designed record by the original band: nowhere
near a masterpiece, but an album that makes plenty of smart musical and lyrical
points all the same. The thinking man's Alice Cooper!
The pompous opener 'Big Apple Dreamin', the
complex ballad 'Hard Hearted Alice' and the Vegasy flash of 'Teenage Lament
'74' form three pieces of a scattered puzzle where the band kind of takes a
step back and takes a sideways look at itself: ambitions, expectations,
illusions, disappointments. Neither of the three cuts through the senses, but
all are at least interesting to follow, and the riffs on 'Big Apple' are
actually terrific, although poorly produced. Lyrically, they go way beyond
their previous style, and no sane human being, upon intently listening to this
material, could accuse the Cooper band of a lack of substance.
In between, we do get much lighter material —
cock-rock swagger on 'Working Up A Sweat' and the title track, music hall
melodrama on 'Crazy Little Child', B-movie soundtrack on 'The Man With The
Golden Gun' (Alice claims that the song was written specially for the James
Bond movie, but the producers chickened out at the last minute), and weird,
robotic, sci-fi rock on 'Woman Machine'. But nothing is wrong with these songs,
either: they simply give us a show of smaller proportions than usual, and, if
anything, Cooper's sneer and sarcasm only becomes stronger when he pushes the
"external effects" and the titillating elements further in the
background. For all I know, he would not again return to this level of irony
until his early Eighties' "New Wavy" period.
Time has taught me to enjoy the Coop both when
he is being gross and when he is being smart, so much so that I cannot imagine
people honestly hating Alice in either of these states. Therefore, if
the idea of an ugly guy confessing to having had sexual relations with the
deceased as his own head gets mock-chopped off onstage does not appeal to you,
try Muscle Of Love. Hear the ugly guy confess 'Hard hearted Alice is
what we wanna be / Hard hearted Alice is what you wanna see' and, perhaps, gain
extra insight inside the ugly guy. Thumbs up —
brain-wise, mostly, but liking an Alice Cooper album for its intellectual value
is no mean feat by itself.
WELCOME TO MY NIGHTMARE (1975)
1) Welcome To My Nightmare;
2) Devil's Food; 3) The
Black Widow; 4) Some Folks; 5) Only Women Bleed; 6) Department Of Youth; 7) Cold Ethyl; 8) Years Ago;
9) Steven; 10) The
Awakening; 11) Escape.
In 1975, it was not yet obvious that Alice
Cooper as a band had already sung their swan song. The idea was to put the
thing on hiatus, and let everyone do what they wish to do — a wise decision,
perhaps, seeing as how the compromise of Muscle never really satisfied
anyone. Unfortunately, Alice Furnier just happened to love his newly-found
freedom so much that he ditched the band altogether, sending them on their own
merry way for good — but not forgetting to take the name for himself.
From here onwards, Alice Cooper is a solo artist, not a band.
The change is visible, but not nearly as
drastic as some people insist. For his next album, Alice procured the services
of twin glam-guitar-gods, Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter (already well known for
their work with Lou Reed and other things; they'd also contributed bits and
pieces to the Alice Cooper Band's work as well), and also reteamed with Bob
Ezrin, always happy to help out his former pal with another theatrical piece of
production. Obviously, Welcome To My Nightmare, on which the Coop had
complete creative freedom, was to be his flashiest, most grotesque and
image-heavy production yet, a rock-theater extravaganza of an unprecedented
stature. Far from the goriest, by the way: the accompanying stage show did not
even feature any of the trademark executions, being instead heavy on decorations,
dancers, giant spiders, cyclops, smoke, and corny gimmicks a-plenty. (All of
this can be easily discovered on the video of the live tour — not to be
confused with the somewhat less impressive TV special version of the musical).
But what about the music? Alas, the Vegas
nature of the ridiculous show has all but wiped out the songs themselves from
the public conscience, which is a pity, because, despite all the heavy nods to
show-business, and despite Alice's drink problems that were piling up ever
higher, there is no way one could accuse the man of dropping quality control
standards. Of course, Welcome To My Nightmare should not be approached
with the wrong expectations. Back in 1975, people would cautiously ask from
around the corner: 'Well... does he still ROCK?' And, upon understanding that
he most certainly did not, disappointed, they would leave him to his drink
problems. Somehow, someway, public amnesia reached a stage at which nobody
remembered that, actually, the last time Alice Cooper was "rocking"
was somewhere around 1971, after which the band had almost completely switched
to "shocking".
In fact, if we initiate a direct comparison of
the amount of heavy riffage, Welcome To My Nightmare "rocks"
more than Billion Dollar Babies. 'Black Widow' is heavier than anything
on that 1973 classic, and 'Devil's Food', 'Cold Ethyl', 'Department Of Youth',
and 'Escape' are all upbeat, rhythmic, guitar-driven tunes that honestly pump
out the required amount of adrenaline. It is not a rock'n'roll album per se,
but neither were its predecessors. It is only the shock of seeing Alice Cooper
prefer the company of Broadway dancers dressed in stupid spider costumes to the
company of Baxter, Bruce, and Dunaway that is responsible for unwarranted
claims of "Vincent Furnier betraying the ideals of garage rock and
becoming a slick Vegas entertainer".
The spider costumes are stupid, for sure, but
the music is not. Welcome To My Nightmare is a concept album about...
nightmares. It introduces the character of 'Steven', a mentally unstable boy
(or, alternately, an Anthony Perkins-type character), possibly locked in a
sanitarium (for the live show, Alice would incorporate 'The Ballad Of Dwight
Frye' into the proceedings), constantly tormented by voices and visions. The
first side of the album gives us the visions, the second introduces
"Steven" in person; intersections provide different subjects, poorly
or not at all connected to the main "plotline", the way it usually
is on concept albums.
Actually, we begin our journey with a series of
B-movie clichés. The title track is all about Alice reveling in his
impersonation of the lord of darkness — yes, rather a silly thing to do for a
grown up person, but what if the person has simply forgotten to grow up? There
is such a great, overwhelming delight in the man's intonations as he tries to
spook you with lines like 'welcome to my breakdown, I hope I didn't scare you,
that's just the way we are when we come down' that it is impossible not to
participate. The song is so perfectly composed to, building up from quiet
creepy acoustic guitar to all-out funky jamming, and the laser torch of the
Vegasy brass section that cuts its way through guitar and keyboard concrete midway
through the tune is the ideal icing. Creepy, but harmless, titillating, but
sanitized, Horror-for-Housewives, it is delicious.
B-movie flavor hits with even more force on the
'Devil's Food/Black Widow' segment, where the obvious highlight is Vincent
Price's lengthy monolog on the glory of Arachnida: 'this friendly little devil
is the heptathelidae... unfortunately, harmless...', and where Alice almost
matches his cartoon evil style by demanding that we all 'pledge allegiance to
The Black Widow'. How can one resist this demand? I do not see how it is
possible. Count me in, even though I hate spiders.
Still, if Nightmare were all just
a lengthy sequence of gut-level pleasure flashes, we could successfully build
up a case against it. But every now and then, Alice adds small vials of
substance that have acted as superb preservatives over the years. 'Department
Of Youth' continues the mean treatment of his teenage audience, initiated with
'Teenage Lament '74' and now reaching a new scale of grandiosity; watch out for
the biggest, deadliest blow on the fade-out as a curious Alice asks his young
friends where their power source comes from. 'Only Women Bleed' initiates the
decidedly strange trend of sugary ballads as Cooper's main candidates for hit
singles — and, although I personally do not at all find this newly-found
sentimentality for the weaker sex convincing, it is still an interesting new
page in the man's career.
Finally, there is the sprawling Steven Suite on
the second side, which also threatens, every now and then, to free itself from
the straightjacket clutches of "B-class" material and reach a higher
level of conscience. Unless you strongly believe that it is illegal to draw
inspiration from pictures of deranged lunatics, it is a masterpiece of the
genre — a little overdramatic in places, for sure, but not nearly enough to be
officially relocated to the Five-and-Dime area. Plus, there are some beautiful
piano passages somewhere out there.
So what is Welcome To My Nightmare?
I cannot come up with an easy definition. Its seriousness and irony,
intelligence and stupidity, gritty rock and flashy schmaltz cling to each other
so tightly that it is forever bound to be the subject of endless debates — and
this is good, because debates ensure longevity, which it certainly deserves. I
do not even understand which particular part of myself plays a decisive role in
giving it a thumbs up, because neither
the brain nor the heart have ever found the courage to confess, and yet here it
is — a fairly certain thumbs up if there ever was one. A truly mistifying
record, though perhaps not quite in the same way that Alice intended it to be.
ALICE COOPER GOES TO HELL (1976)
1) Go To Hell; 2) You Gotta
Dance; 3) I'm The Coolest; 4) Didn't We Meet; 5) I Never Cry; 6) Give The Kid A Break; 7)
Guilty; 8) Wake Me Gently; 9) Wish You Were Here; 10)
I'm Always Chasing Rainbows; 11) Going Home.
As the 1970s slowly begin to usher in the age
of punk and disco and retire the age of glam and shock rock, we find Alice
flubbering and fidgeting. «Master of the Macabre», sure — but from 1976 and all
the way to his questionable «comeback» a decade later, the man has not really
released even one properly macabre record. Instead, he spent all that
decade fighting: with himself, over his alcohol addiction and other personal
problems, and with the musical scene, trying to reinvent and redefine himself
in all sorts of new styles and genres, from Broadway to disco, from art-rock to
New Wave.
This is the reason why critics, and plenty of
fans, think of this period as the «lost years». What good is a man whose output
is saddled by drink, and who cannot even decide properly what it is exactly
that he wants to do? And what good is a man who used to make mind-blowing killer
rock, only to have later flushed it down the toilet and replaced it with show
tunes and cheesy humor? Awful times, awful songs, awful sell-out.
The title of Alice Cooper Goes To Hell
suggests that it may be some sort of conceptual sequel to Welcome To My
Nightmare. It is conceptual, for sure, but hardly a sequel. This time,
Alice depicts an imaginary voyage to the depths of Hades — probably also a
dream, as indicated in the final track, but not on the part of «Steven», rather
on the part of Alice himself. 'For criminal acts and violence on the stage...
for all of the decent citizens you've enraged — You — Can Go — To — HELL!' And
so he does. The rest is up to Dante.
A concept album about Alice Cooper traveling
through the nine circles, with realistic musical illustrations — hot, hot
sounds! — could have been just the thing that fans were waiting for. Astonishingly,
there is nothing even remotely resembling such a concept. Instead, what you get
is, essentially, a rock-tinged comic Broadway musical, with a very simple
subject: Alice Cooper goes to Hell (depicted, more or less precisely and
authentically, as a disco nightclub), meets up with the Devil, pleads for mercy
and salvation, confesses his sins, and only manages to avoid eternal torment
by... waking up.
No giant snakes or lizards, no sword-wielding
demons, no pitch or tar or boiling blood, no Bosch level horrors, and even the
Devil himself is just a big old bad boss who, so it seems, can be reasonable
enough unless you flip out too early, which is the protagonist's biggest
mistake. Plenty of irony and humor, but no titillation whatsoever: you do not really
need to call yourself Alice Cooper to stage this kind of show. You couldn't
exactly be Frank Sinatra to do it, either, but there is nothing whatsoever to
scare off the little kids. I bet even Elvis would appreciate.
Musically, the last traces of rock'n'roll have
been washed away by the onslaught of orchestrated balladry, retro-vaudeville,
and disco. We still get a couple crunchy riffs on the title track and 'Wish You
Were Here', and Alice tries to mold 'I'm Guilty' in the old garage style, but
neither of the three are very convincing as «rock»-style material — they just
provide some instrumental diversity and catchy themes, fist-clenching not
included.
Topping it all is the album's hit single, 'I
Never Cry' — another housewife-level ballad, second in a row. This turns
a potential one-time blunder into an alarming tendency: Alice Cooper competing
with Barry Manilow? This either got to be the grandest put-on known to mortal
man, or the grandest sell-out this side of Rod Stewart.
In short, it does not take a genius to
understand why Alice Cooper Goes To Hell is usually pinpointed as the
start of the slide by the regular audience (purists, of course, point already
to Nightmare or even Muscle Of Love). But there is also a small
heretical group of semi-outsiders who confess to loving this record — and this
is exactly the group to which your humble reviewer belongs. According to him,
this just happens to be one of Alice's best efforts.
Yes, the concept is not particularly smart, but
it is FUN. Who but Alice could have thought of arranging the climactic dialog
between himself and the Devil in the form of a 1950s doo-wop number ('Give The
Kid A Break'), replete with second-rate Woody Allen-like dialog ('can't you
give me a break? — Sure thing kid, when hell freezes over')? Who but Alice,
when facing the need to pander to contemporary disco audiences, would have
incorporated the obligatory disco number into his concept in a way that equals
disco dancers with sinners confined to eternal torment ('You Gotta Dance')?
Finally, who but Alice could have crossed the distance from sharp social irony
to hilarious self-parody in two easy steps? Watch for yourself. Step 1: 'For
gambling and drinking alcohol constantly... For choosing to be a living
obscenity — you can go to Hell!' Step 2: 'You'd poison a blind man and steal
his cane... You'd even force feed a diabetic a candy cane — you can go to
Hell!'
And while the songs may not rock, they are
good. 'Go To Hell' is massive and memorable. 'Wish You Were Here' is a complex
mini-suite where Wagner and Hunter are eager to show what they have learned
about the intricacies of funk. 'I'm The Coolest' is cute minimalistic
vaudeville. The ballads suffer from overpompous arrangements, but show an
ever-increasing skill; in particular, 'I Never Cry' owes as much to the school
of Paul McCartney and Badfinger as 'Only Women Bleed' owes to the school of
James Taylor and Carly Simon — feel the difference. It's also much more
personal — in fact, probably the first openly confessional tune that Cooper
ever wrote about his problems (which is why nobody noticed at the time) — and,
hopefully, will stand the test of time better than its hit ballad competition
in the face of 'Only Women Bleed' and 'You And Me', also good songs, but rather
obviously «fake» in comparison.
Goes To Hell does have some structural similarities with Nightmare, in that
both albums start off at a high level of tongue-in-cheekiness, and then, by the
time the second side comes along, gradually turn into something more
disturbing, sincere, and deep. Here, under the superficial «mush» of all the
balladeering — 'I Never Cry', 'Wake Me Gently', 'Going Home' — Alice is
exposing his sensitive and vulnerable side, not a pretty sight for the fans. I
respect the effort in its entirety, and love parts of it. «Broadway» or not,
it's an interesting, often exciting, diverse and thought-provoking effort that
deserves a thumbs up from all points of
view.
LACE AND WHISKEY (1977)
1) It's Hot Tonight; 2) Lace And Whiskey; 3) Road
Rats; 4) Damned If You Do; 5) You And Me; 6) King Of
The Silver Screen; 7) Ubangi Stomp; 8) (No More) Love At Your Convenience; 9) I
Never Wrote Those Songs; 10) My God.
Lace And Whiskey initiates an entirely new period in Alice
Cooper history, one that has been much maligned and misunderstood by the public
at large. From 1977 to 1984, Alice «Monster» Cooper did not exist, except for
the stage, and even there its presence was seriously limited. In its place, the
world saw Alice «Human» Cooper, a simple, but smart, human being, tired of the
old shock-rock image and looking for new ways to channel his creativity.
The world never succeeded in loving him that
way. Experimentation was taken to represent loss of direction and paranoid
confusion; innovation was seen as selling out; and sincerity and vulnerability
was seen as weakness and silliness. Alice himself looks back upon that period with
caution and mistrust, occasionally reviving a number or two, but generally
preferring not to remind the fans about its existence. However, he has his own
special reason: these years also marked the peak of his alcohol-related
problems, and all the records he made back then are inescapably tied in with
his personal nightmares.
But this is exactly what makes this period so
fascinating — in my humble opinion, far more fascinating than his clever, but
boring commercial «comeback» in the mid-Eighties. Lesser artists may stink when
they struggle; artists of Furnier's caliber will shine. Lace And Whiskey
has been frequently called the nadir of Alice Cooper's career, in deep
stagnation until the final big rebound with 1986's Constrictor. I can
only hope that, in time, more people will learn to recognize Constrictor
for what it is — a fun, but cheesy, shallow, dated, overtly calculated shell of
a record — and come back to Lace And Whiskey as a serious, memorable,
and exciting venture.
As usual, there is a concept behind the album,
this time a very different one. Alice reinvents himself as some sort of
gangster movie / comic strip personage from the Roaring Twenties («detective
Maurice Escargot», he used to introduce himself during shows), telling tales of
glam, vice, and Hollywood, and, predictably, deviating into other directions
like every good concept album is supposed to deviate. The music, however, is
only occasionally «retro»; on the contrary, the LP is crammed with heavy riff
tunes, pompous Seventies balladry, a little disco, and some art-rock to
complete the picture. (Another reason why critics hated the stuff: in the newly
nascent age of punk, you were not supposed to do any of that, and Alice fell
right in with the other «dinosaurs» like the Stones and the Who).
If anything, though, already the opening trio
of hard rockers should be enough to redeem the album. 'It's Hot Tonight',
propelled by a classic Dick Wagner riff, is Alice's only bit of Satanic fun on
the record, his most perfect musical recreation of hellish fever before 1994's Last
Temptation. The title track, mixing hard rock with vaudeville, exposes the
Coop's own alcohol problems, even if on the surface he is playing an old-time
character ('gimme lace and whiskey, mama's home remedy, double indemnity...'
— see?); it takes a few listens to get through to the real pain encoded in the
chorus, but once you do, those desperate backing vocals will never sound the
same.
Alcohol problems, however, never hindered
Cooper, Ezrin, and Wagner from rewarding us with the musical masterpiece that
is 'Road Rats', Alice's little ode to those faithful roadies without whom there
would have been no pythons, chopped dolls, electric chairs, or guillotines: 'we
work this band cause they make it rock, but we're the guys that make it roll'.
I have no idea why the song is never hailed as a Coop classic; certainly its
riffs are simple, but they are every bit as impressive and inspiring as
something like 'No More Mr. Nice Guy'. Maybe a different set of lyrics would
have worked better — not everyone wants to hear about «low-life scum». Whatever
be the case, 'Road Rats' is wedged, quite firmly, in my personal A. C. top 10.
The record certainly gets more lightweight from
there, bouncing from style to style in a drunk stupor, but how fascinating it
all is! '(No More) Love At Your Convenience' is the one truly weak spot, an
attempt at a soft dance-pop hit that sounds like a misguided take on a
third-rate ABBA reject (and even then, it is sort of catchy). 'Damned If You
Do' and the much-reviled cover of the old rockabilly ditty 'Ubangi Stomp' are
simple, unpretentious, danceable fun; 'King Of The Silver Screen' is a mighty
epic character assassination, with Alice blasting off his irony guns at the
little man voicing his fantasies; 'I Never Wrote Those Songs' is a deeply
personal, confessional ballad, still waiting for appreciation; and 'My God' is
one of the weirdest album closers in Alice's career... a glam gospel
number?
And out of all these crazy, mighty interesting
genre experiments, the public at large has only managed to remember Alice's
third-in-a-row soft ballad hit single, 'You And Me', arguably the most cheaply
sentimental of his creations (not coincidentally, it was 'You And Me' that
Frank Sinatra decided to cover rather than the more personal 'I Never Cry' or
the more biting 'Only Women Bleed'). Granted, the duet version with Miss Piggy
was awesome in the Muppets context, but who can refrain from smiling
upon hearing Alice Cooper, the God of Shock Rock, sing 'that's enough for a
working man — what I am is what I am' as if that were correct?
Meet Lace And Whiskey, mama's home
remedy, a fabulous blunder of a record, a fun journey through uncertainty,
self-irony, pain, genre-hopping, and a bunch of excellent melodies. We all
reach a certain point in our lives when we can cope with a little disco and a
little sentimentality, and if that's what it takes to get songs like 'Road
Rats', 'It's Hot Tonight', and 'I Never Wrote These Songs' in return, thumbs up without second thought. Oh, and he had chickens
dancing with Tommy guns during live performances of the title track — how
cool is that?
THE ALICE COOPER SHOW (1977)
1) Under My Wheels; 2) I'm
Eighteen; 3) Only Women Bleed; 4) Sick Things; 5) Is It My Body; 6) I Never
Cry; 7) Billion Dollar Babies; 8) Devil's Food/The Black Widow; 9) You And Me;
10) I Love The Dead/Go To Hell/Wish You Were Here; 11) School's Out.
A live album from Alice Cooper makes about as
much sense as you guess it makes: without the accompanying «events», the music
is still worthwhile — and it must be stated that, no matter how flashy the
visual entertainment, Alice always cared highly about the musical component of
the show — but what exactly can it add to the studio experience? Very little.
This does not mean that all the performed
numbers were uniformly inferior quality carbon copies of the studio recordings.
The original Alice Cooper band could extend some of them into gritty improvised
jams, true to the requirements of the epoch, and so did Furnier's new band,
dominated by the Wagner/Hunter duo. For instance, history has preserved for us
a gorgeous moment of musical masturbation in the guise of a lengthy, spirited
«guitar battle» between Wagner and Hunter, as they attack each other — first,
figuratively and then, literally! — before eventually launching into 'Black
Widow' (this can be seen on the video of the Welcome To My Nightmare
tour): Seventies' glammy excess at its most guilty-pleasuring.
Unfortunately, no such flourishes have been
successfully stored on The Alice Cooper Show, a live album released
without Alice's consent or knowledge, at a time when his personal and critical
problems were heavily multiplying, and overseen by a bunch of people who,
apparently, were only capable of appreciating the man from the Cashcow side.
Certainly the Lace And Whiskey tour show
must have been more coherent than this unruly mess, which starts off as your homebrewed
version of Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits Live and then crams «lesser»
numbers into heavily edited medleys. Apart from 'No More Nice Guy' (which was
probably not performed at all in 1977), all the hit singles are here —
including all three ballads, which you encounter when you least expect them (I
am particularly knocked out by the idea of hearing the Sinatra-esque sentimentalism
of 'You And Me' in between 'The Black Widow' and 'I Love The Dead' — what a
creative find!). Little portions of non-hit material are unwillingly allowed
to seep through every now and then, but you do not get neither the meat of the Lace
And Whiskey component of the show, nor the important «Steven»-related
segments. What for? The respectable American citizen only wants to hear
'School's Out'. Making matters worse, everything is run through very quickly
(limited budget, double LPs not allowed) — and then there is the utterly
ridiculous medley that does not have 'Wish You Were Here', as promised
(only a short instrumental coda) and abbreviates 'Go To Hell' to the point of
non-existence.
Ultimately, what saves the album from deserved
oblivion is the surprisingly high level of performance. For one thing,
problems or no problems, Alice is in great vocal shape: he sings up a storm on
the hard-rocking numbers and displays plenty of theatrical brilliance on the
showier tunes; his performance on 'I Love The Dead', for instance, is sharper
and creepier than on the live version from the 1973 tour (as heard on the bonus
disc for Billion Dollar Babies). And as for the backing band — Wagner
and Hunter are the kind of seasoned pros who will stupefy audiences from their
wheelchairs, let alone mishandled live albums. Even here, they get their own
moment of personal glory during the solo parts on 'I'm Eighteen'.
Alice himself has always hated this album,
eventually squeezing it out of the public conscience by releasing a personally
approved live recording twenty years later; for a long time, it has been out of
print and has few chances of making it back there — especially now that we have
official access to live stuff from 1973. Still, its reputation of representing
Alice at his worst is just as exaggerated as the negative feelings for Lace
And Whiskey itself. It just wasn't a good year for the man, but he could
still put up a mean show. For all of its indirect flaws — lack of
authorization, commercialism at the wheel, awful construction, hideous flow — I
am tempted, brain-wise, to issue it a thumbs down, but every time I listen to
it, I still dig every second of it, and, since the heart takes precedence, it
is still a thumbs up. And a hint to those
few good, thinking people that may someday own the rights to the Cooper catalog
—remastering, restructuring, and expanding the record would only honor the
man's legacy.
FROM THE INSIDE (1978)
1) From The Inside; 2) Wish I
Was Born In Beverly Hills; 3) The Quiet Room; 4) Nurse Rozetta; 5) Millie And
Billie; 6) Serious; 7) How
You Gonna See Me Now; 8) For Veronica's Sake; 9) Jackknife Johnny; 10)
Inmates (We're All Crazy).
The album cover is pretty clever. We still see
Alice «The Monster», painted eyes and mouth and all — but, instead of scaring
us by way of the usual grotesquerie, he scares us by letting us know that the
monster is, no doubt about it, on the verge of collapsing. Pale white face,
eyes wide opened with no emotion other than uncontrolled panic, mouth
half-open in bewilderment, this is a very vulnerable, pitiable Alice Cooper
staring at his own mortality.
As the Lace And Whiskey tour drew to a
close, Alice made his first conscious attempt at kicking the alcohol addiction
by checking himself into a New York mental hospital, no less. Unfortunately, it
did not work (not for long, at least), but, on the good side, it gave him
plenty of shocking impressions — truly shocking impressions — to base
his next album around it; a concept record, for the first time in Alice history
based on something in the real world, even if the subject (insanity) would certainly
fit in well with the Coop image; in fact, Alice had already tackled the issue
seven years earlier, with 'The Ballad Of Dwight Frye'. Now he'd had some
first-hand experience at it, and why let such great material go to waste?
The new approach apparently deserved a new
musical setting, and From The Inside sees huge changes in the entourage.
First, Alice teamed up with Bernie Taupin, Elton John's royal lyricist (who, as
chance would have it, had just temporarily broken up with Elton), to give the
lyrics a more serious, poetic twist. Second, along with Bernie, he enlisted
part of Elton's own backing band, including Dee Murray on bass and Davey
Johnstone on guitar. Dick Wagner still stays on to add an occasional sparkling
solo or two, but Steve Hunter is gone, dissolving the duo. The legendary Jim
Keltner plays drums, Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick guest stars on guitar, and
Marcy Levy, the backing singer from Eric Clapton's band, duets with Alice on
one number. Now how is that for a quintessential hodge-podge?
As for the songs, they actually do form a real
concept — everything is either describing the general conditions in or
impressions of the asylum, or tells little stories of people «hosted» within
its walls. Credit usually goes to Cooper, Taupin, and Wagner, occasionally to
new producer David Foster (who, for some reason, replaces Bob Ezrin, much as I
think Ezrin would have been the perfect producer for this thing — but perhaps
he was too busy working on The Wall at the same time), and, frankly, I
am not even sure of how much actual musical content — beyond the general
«spirit» of the thing — is owed here to Alice in person.
Because if there is something that From The
Inside could be compared to, it is definitely not previous Alice Cooper
albums, but rather previous Elton John albums — good Elton John albums,
that is. The glammy rockers sound like Elton John, MOR-oriented guitars and
keyboards and all. The male-female duet between Alice and Marcy brings on
memories of Elton and Kiki Dee. The strings arrangements remind one of Paul
Buckmaster. And the ballads? Don't even let's start with the ballads. When I
think of the ballads, I inevitably come to one of two conclusions: either the
whole thing is a hoot and Elton John is the uncredited writer of these
melodies, or the whole thing is a different hoot and Bernie Taupin really wrote
all the music, while Elton was just sitting there flashing his glasses at the
audience.
'How You Gonna See Me Now' is a magnificent
ballad, but it is an Elton John ballad; Alice even sings like Elton, borrowing
all of his typical moves. Listen to 'just to let you know...', to 'yes I'm
worried honey...', to 'you know I've let you down in oh so many ways' — this
belongs in the same category as 'Someone Saved My Life Tonight' or 'Don't Let
The Sun Go Down On Me'. Not that I mind. Alice or Elton, it is a song that expresses
one's horror and shame at the perspective of going back to one's family «after
the ordeal», and it is Alice's second shrillest personal confession after 'I
Never Cry', only to be surpassed by 'Pass The Gun Around' five years later.
The rest of the album is a delightful —
sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes creepy — mix of tongue-in-cheek and
deathly seriousness, sometimes within the same song. The rockers have their
share of humor, most prominent in 'Nurse Rozetta': we cannot expect an Alice
Cooper album with no dirtiness in sight, so here, with salacious metaphors, he
describes a patient's sexual fantasizing (well, let us face it, not exactly a forced
subject for a hospital). The epic ballads are more painful, like 'The Quiet
Room' ('I just can't get this wrist to bleed!') and the 'Millie And Billie'
duet, which starts off like a really generic Broadway number but then moves
into uncomfortable territory, as, to the ominous sounds of the string
orchestra and a drill, the 'criminally insane' Billie is carried away (for
lobotomizing?).
Best of all is the skilful conclusion:
'Inmates' is an expertly constructed anthem, alternating Wagnerian orchestral
swoops, stately Eltonian mid-tempo balladry, the traditional Coop school of
vaudeville, and a 'Hey Jude'-style conclusion where everyone joins in a cheery
chorus of 'we're all crazy, we're all crazy' as the strings dance around them,
creating a mock-epic mood where you have no idea whether you are supposed to
laugh, cry, or fall into a trance. A perfectly questionable ending for an
album that gives no answers and passes no judgements. It is not exactly «realism»
— Alice's fantasy worlds are too demanding to let him ground himself completely
— but it is very close, and, frankly, it might have simply been boring were it
all purely realistic.
Not all the songs seem to be on the level —
some, as expected, are too heavily focused on the conceptual side to be
memorable (e. g. 'Jackknife Johnny') — but the record is in the «grower»
category, and, in my case, it grew enough to deserve a thumbs up both from the heart, moved by Furnier's
troubles, and the brain, delighted by all the inventiveness and creativity with
which these troubles have been converted into art.
FLUSH THE FASHION (1980)
1) Talk Talk; 2) Clones (We're
All); 3) Pain; 4) Leather Boots; 5) Aspirin Damage; 6) Nuclear Infected; 7)
Grim Facts; 8) Model Citizen; 9) Dance Yourself To Death; 10) Headlines.
This time, the cover proudly flashes the
inscription «ALICE COOPER '80», which makes it a little dubious that Alice is
truly going to «flush the fashion». On the contrary, he embraces the fashion —
not to the point of sacrificing his old self, but to the point of sacrificing
his old sound. This is the sharpest, least expected shift in his solo history
so far.
At each step in Alice's career, there was a
small disgruntled group of old fans who would jump ship; Flush The Fashion
must have caused a particularly large disturbance. Openly and shamelessly, the
album borrows the musical trappings of the likes of The Cars: old guitar-driven
pop rock structures dressed in trendy modern electronic clothes — industrial synthesizers,
ping pong percussion, even processed vocals (sometimes). Why should Alice
Cooper, father of all things shock, innovator extraordinaire, now reinvent
himself as a New Waver, imitating those who grew up on his own records, among
other things?
It is sometimes easy to forget here that, musically
speaking, Alice Cooper — neither the band nor the solo artist — never
«invented» anything; their chief know-how was their image, not the music,
which, despite generally being high quality, always looked up to somebody else.
If the guy could look up to the Stones, or the Who, or Bowie, or Elton John,
why can't he look up to The Cars?
Particularly since Flush The Fashion,
looking at it from a particular point of view, is better than most Cars albums
(and I like The Cars quite a bit). Surprisingly, there are no more ballads —
breaking up with the well-established tradition, Alice chose the weird sci-fi
rock of 'Clones' to forward his new image — and the ten pop-rock songs put such
a heavy emphasis on irony and humor that it is all but impossible to get
seriously offended or bored by the material, even if you find it uneven.
Among the good news is Alice's simultaneous decision
to refresh and renew his rock'n'roll roots. The record opens with a gritty
electronic reworking of The Music Machine's garage classic 'Talk Talk' (this
was way before Nuggets, in the form of a bulky boxset, became an
obligatory requirement for the refined music fan), includes a brief, but fun
rockabilly snippet ('Leather Boots') and, despite all the keyboard-heavy
production style, includes a fair share of seriously ass-kicking riffs
('Nuclear Infected', 'Grim Facts', etc.). 'Talk Talk' is, in fact, fairly
symbolic of the album as a whole: Cooper drags out a retro obscurity, implying
that rock'n'roll ain't and never was noise pollution, gives it a contemporary
arrangement, implying that it makes no sense not to change, and comes
out with a winner, implying that best results are always gotten when the old
and the new go hand in hand, rather than taking pot shots at each other.
As for the humor, it is well on the level — no
slapstick in sight, satire a-plenty: 'Clones (We're All)' is a nasty swipe at
mass mentality; 'Aspirin Damage' exposes the addiction problem with the aid of
an unforgettable — especially if you are a third-grader — chorus ('Sometimes I
find myself shaking from the medication taken!'); 'Pain' is Alice in his native
element, an anthem sung from Pain's point of view ('It's a compliment to me to
feel you screaming through the night', he concludes in classic «Steven»-like
fashion); and 'Model Citizen' continues the artist's crusade against the
self-important bourgeois. For those who like their humor/grit ratio at around 1
: 4, there is 'Grim Facts', where Alice «slices through the vices» both with
his angriest vocal performance on the record and Davey Johnstone's fittingly
«grim» guitat melody — and you can certainly see the seeds of born-again
Christianity sown with the Coop's creepy tales of teenage moral decay.
It may be a little sad to realize that Furnier
has, once again, completely disappeared behind the Alice Cooper mask; his true
(or, at least, «true-looking») personality, having broken through thick crust
on Goes To Hell and culminated with From The Inside, has now gone
into hiding again — no doubt, due to the temporary alcohol-free relief after
the sanitarium experience. But then, expecting to have regular glimpses of
Alice Cooper's true face is about as justified as expecting the same from one
of Shakespeare's clowns: their function is simply different, and Flush The
Fashion is as typical of the typical Alice Cooper function as the typical
Alice Cooper function typically gets, and this should be deemed good enough.
Flush The Fashion is almost criminally short (less than half an
hour), and has a couple oddities-among-oddities whose effect, either expected
or actual, is not well understood (e. g., the obscure purpose of the mix of
mid-1970s Stones-style riffage and Dylan-style vocalization on 'Dance Yourself
To Death'). But overall, this is a brilliant reinvention that allows Alice to
stay in touch with the times while being true to his vision — and it opens wide
the doors to one of his most interesting, if, unfortunately, most neglected
musical periods that would last for three more years and three more albums. Thumbs up by all means.
SPECIAL FORCES (1981)
1) Who Do You Think We Are;
2) Seven & Seven Is; 3) Prettiest Cop On The Block; 4) Don't Talk Old To
Me; 5) Generation Landslide; 6) Skeletons In The Closet; 7) You Want It, You
Got It; 8) You Look Good In Rags; 9) You're A Movie; 10)
Vicious Rumours.
When looked at in its proper context, there is
only one thing that might be wrong with Flush The Fashion — it digests
the sounds of the new age with care and intelligence, but perhaps a bit too
obnoxiously. It's like: "I'm Alice Cooper and now I sound like all these
new guys with funny hairstyles! Let me join the club, I'm worthy!"
Well, Alice did get a haircut around the time Special
Forces came out, but, more importantly, he toned down the sci-fi keyboards
a bit, retaining the New Wave elements that modernized his image but no longer
putting them at the forefront of his melodies. And so, his new album is every
bit as fun, catchy, and clever as the old one — and it sounds less dated today.
For the critics, it was another clear sign of
how confused, out-of-touch and generally lost Alice Cooper became in the
post-glam world. A «techno» reworking of Love's 'Seven & Seven Is'? A
pseudo-live re-recording of 'Generation Landslide' that adds nothing (good) to
the original? The idiot stutter on 'You Want It, You Got It'? Straightahead
mockery of his old scary image in 'Skeletons In The Closet'? Who needs all
this in the wake of the Clash and U2?
For those who like their Alice Cooper
confused and out-of-touch, though, most, if not all, of this record will be
super-enjoyable. First, it contains at least two of his best written pop-rock
melodies in 'Who Do You Think We Are?' (the question has two answers, the
complex 'Special forces in an armored car!' and the more simple 'We don't
care!') and 'You Look Good In Rags' — ter-riff-ic guitar line, hilarious
anti-socialite lyrics and an outrageous coda. Maybe alcohol was
affecting his creative vein — but, for all I know, in a positive way.
'You Want It, You Got It' is a crude, clownish,
but doggone funny poke at superstardom's excesses; 'You're A Movie' returns us
to the issue previously tackled with 'King Of The Silver Screen', but in a
campier, grinnier way; 'Prettiest Cop On The Block' is worth it for the title
alone; and 'Skeletons In The Closet', with its harpsichord theme that
transforms «creepy» into «kiddie-spooky», is just a masterful send-up of all
the «values» of Welcome To My Nightmare that I can only imagine how it
could offend all those who used to take Alice Cooper way too seriously.
Not everything works, and the idea of reworking
'Generation Landslide' remains unclear — was Alice simply trying to say that
everything the original band denounced in society back in 1973 was still actual
in the society of 1981, or did he simply need to fill up some empty space on
the LP? — but, overall, this is an inspired, well-crafted, and thoroughly funny
piece of work. Yes, it is also the first piece of work for which Cooper has to
take all of the credit: with Wagner, Hunter, Ezrin, and even the Elton John
backing band gone, I have little idea of who the players on here are, apart
from the names, and presume that most of the songwriting and arranging ideas
came from the Coop himself.
In a certain way, although no one realized it
at the time, Special Forces must have been a precious drop of humor in
a musical world that was taking itself way too seriously, what with all the new
musical development and the renewal of the doomed struggle to heal the world's
problems with the power of music. And, just as it was during the original
band's peak years, here is Alice again, with satire and heavy grinning to show
how fruitless this struggle can be. Maybe he overdoes the «musical slapstick»
bit a little, ensuring that Special Forces will never, ever be worshipped
on the level of Killer or Billion Dollar Babies, but it still proudly
deserves its thumbs up.
ZIPPER CATCHES
SKIN (1982)
1) Zorro's Ascent; 2) Make
That Money (Scrooge's Song); 3) I Am The Future; 4) No Baloney Homosapiens; 5)
Adaptable; 6) I Like Girls; 7) Remarkably Insincere; 8) Tag, You're It; 9) I
Better Be Good; 10) I'm Alive.
By this time, the alcohol problem was seriously
catching up with Alice once again — to the point that he subsequently stated he
had no memories whatsoever of recording this and the next record. Too bad: they
happened to be, respectively, his weirdest/funniest and his most
honest/personal albums to date — yet neither of them had a tour behind it, and
no material has, even later on, been incorporated into an Alice live show.
For Zipper Catches Skin, Dick Wagner
returns full-time, playing on many of the songs and even co-writing a couple.
This means that the New Wave overtones are somewhat hushed down (good news for
all the old-fashioned fans who hated the Cars-like synthesizers), but does not
make the record rock any harder than its immediate predecessors. Oh, there is a
decent rock sound throughout, sure, but the most important goal here is to
raise the stakes in the humor department, and serious humor does not go hand in
hand with too much headbanging.
Predictability has never been one of Alice's
major sins, but Zipper, in all of its weird splendor, nearly returns us
to those crazy days of the late 1960s when the original Alice Cooper band was
trying so hard to apply their garage muscles to the construction of Zappa's
bizarre panopticum. Of course, the songs are songs, not disconnected
atonal snippets, and their non-trivial messages do make certain sense — but
other than that, this is sheer madness that certainly goes way beyond spectacle,
vaudeville, and parody. Who else but a seriously deranged person could have
written a song called 'I'm Alive (That Was The Day My Dead Pet Returned To Save
My Life)' whose lyrics actually justify the title?
No one will ever be able to explain, least of
all the amnesia-suffering Alice himself, why he thought it commercially and
artistically viable to write a song about the death of Zorro, or how he
happened to come across lyrics like 'Yeah, I'm a Sony, you're Panasonic, I'm
heavy metal, you're philharmonic', or why most of Side 2 rushes past the listener
as if each individual song had a very serious individual bladder problem. Some
things have slightly better motivation: 'No Baloney Homosapiens', for instance,
pokes slow, ponderous fun at the human race in general, which is rather
typical of Alice, while 'Tag, You're It', first time in years, brings back the
«scary» Alice, albeit in grossly overdone form — the song may drop a reference
to Halloween, but it is a comic performance, not a thrilling one.
None of the songs are too memorable; the goal
is, at the most simplest, to amuse, and, at the most complex, to stupefy, certainly
not to make you hum such catchy lines as 'If I ain't cool, my daddy gonna send
me to military school, if I ain't nice, my girlie gonna freeze me with cold
shoulder ice'. This is probably why, despite Dick Wagner, there is not a single
distinctive riff, and why Alice never actually sings anything, rapping out all
the lyrics like Groucho Marx's lost twin. But this is also why, in spite of
these shortcomings, the record works. All the schizophrenically shifting
ideas, all the misguided creativity, like a firehose gone out of control — none
of this is truly meaningful or instructive, but it sure gets your attention
like nothing else. And better not concentrate on the fact that it was alcoholism
that drove the man to such dubiously delirious artistic heights, because you
just might want to try this at home, without being a professional.
To sum it up — both the brain and the heart
department had firmly settled upon a thumbs up
from the very first time they heard this record; but up to this day, they are
still having a hard time explaining what the hell made them persist in this
decision.
DADA (1983)
1) DaDa; 2) Enough's Enough;
3) Former Lee Warmer; 4) No Man's Land; 5) Dyslexia; 6) Scarlet And Sheba; 7) I
Love America; 8) Fresh Blood; 9) Pass The Gun Around.
By a miraculous stroke of luck, Bob Ezrin,
after a period of recuperation from all the stress caused by The Wall,
returned one last time to produce what is, today, very commonly recognized as
the «lost gem» in Alice's catalog. Of course, all of his early Eighties'
records are criminally underrated. But the entire stretch from Flush The
Fashion to Zipper Catches Skin, no matter how exciting from a
general point of view, was certainly not very Cooperish: the theater vibe
suppressed, the sci-fi New Wave elements replacing all the hard rock, and the
entire balance tipped way too seriously towards the humor and irony end of
things.
Dada is, of course, the name of an art movement, somewhat hinted at by the
use of a modified Salvador Dali painting as the cover — even though Dali
himself was never part of that movement. It is hard to tell whether DaDa
the album was in any way stimulated by the Dada trend, though, because,
if anything, it quenches most of the surrealistic trends that ran
through Cooper's previous albums — even with all of its references to vampires,
it is still quite brutally realistic. More likely, the primary use of the title
referred to baby talk, and the art connotations, if any, came as an afterthought.
With DaDa, Alice manufactured the
impossible: retaining all the best qualities of his later work — incessant
experimentation, modernistic production, etc. — he once again gave the fans a
quintessentially Alice Cooper album, but darker, deeper, creepier than Welcome
To My Nightmare ever hoped to be. The biggest difference is that DaDa
is not exactly show business. Created and recorded by an essentially dying
man — Furnier's alcohol problem was at its absolute peak — it was not
accompanied by any subsequent touring, and, in fact, the songs would not easily
lend themselves to any reasonable stage treatment. The general atmosphere of
the record, some would say, is closely reminiscent of Berlin-era Lou
Reed and The Wall-era Pink Floyd: hardly surprising, considering
Ezrin's involvement in both of these projects. In fact, it would seem that
Bob's goal was to create a little mini-Wall for Alice himself. The
continuity is most glaringly observed in the «looping» structure of the album,
beginning with the recording of a baby saying 'Dada!...' and ending with the
same — but it also deals with pretty much the same subjects throughout: alienation,
parents-children conflict, addiction, psychosis, and guilt.
And, just like Waters was trying to build on
his own emotional experiences and traumas, so does Alice transform this into
his most personal album. How do we know this, when nothing is made particularly
explicit? Well, obviously Alice's father did not sell him out on the streets
for cash upon the death of his mother ('Enough's Enough'). In fact, Alice's
father was an ordained Elder and anything of the sort would have become the
Sacrilege of the Century. But the song, a slow-moving hard-rocker with «light
prog» overtones, is so bleak in its lyrics and its arrangement that, no matter
how shocking the subject is, it goes way beyond ordinary shock-rock: there is
no overriding desire here to gross out the audience, there is a mad drive to
take it out on someone's Dad — someway, somehow.
After the father comes the brother: 'Former Lee
Warmer' returns us to the well-explored territory of 'Dwight Fry' and 'Steven',
now re-invaded with re-kindled passion and increased experience. Then comes the
misogyny, weirdly joined with schizophrenia, in 'No Man's Land'. 'Dyslexia' offers
one little drop of pure humor ("Is dis love, or is dys-lexia?"),
before we are thrust into the hellish Middle Eastern paradise of S&M with
'Scarlet And Sheba', subjected to a poisonously vicious lashing of the stereotypical
redneck in 'I Love America', and, finally, immersed into the romantic, but
boring and depressing life of a vampire stalking its prey on 'Fresh Blood'.
Had all these songs been recorded five or six
years earlier, they would have born a Stamp of the Silly; in the context of DaDa,
even the ode to vampires takes on a personal aspect; its tired mid-temp funk
groove may not be exciting per se, but it fits in very well with the concept of
a vampire who keeps on doing his bloodsucking routine out of pure necessity
rather than out of some sort of evil excitement and a sense of romantic destiny
calling. Same thing with 'Scarlet And Sheba': the exotic sexual pleasures are
presented neither as exciting/titillating, nor as dangerous/perfidious — the
nagging chorus "I just want your body, Sheba, I don't want your
brain" sounds like the protagonist does not really care all that much for
the body either. Just the same old routine. Same old story. Same old whips and
chains. Overfed, overspoiled, disgusted with everything in sight.
No wonder, then, that the album ends on an
appropriately suicidal note and arguably the most personal song the Coop ever
gave us. 'Pass The Gun Around' is one of his cleverest titles (as much as
cultural history has discredited the concept of puns, one has to admit that, in
this context, the line "give everyone a shot" is just brilliant), and
Ezrin cloaks the song in a gorgeously desperate anthemic veil, while the
trusty Dick Wagner contributes what I find to be his best guitar solo on an
Alice Cooper record — taking a few easily noticeable hints from David Gilmour,
but adjusting the catharsis mood to his own early-Seventies over-the-top glam
style, with breathtaking results. In the end, 'Pass The Gun Around' is a song
of epic proportions, tragically overlooked by the music world because it
happened to be produced by the wrong artist at the wrong time — or, perhaps,
because its subject matter was just too uncomfortable to be hailed publicly.
If it is at all true that great artists tend to
produce their greatest art when totally strung out at the end of their rope,
there is no greater proof of that than DaDa. The only thing that can,
and will, prevent people from hailing it as one of the decade's finest
achievements is bias of the «how can an Alice Cooper album not by the
original band be anything but a shallow candy wrapper?» kind. Yet even Alice
Cooper is human, and, as such, theoretically capable of communicating with his
audience through some individual mutation of an art form. If it took him a
decade of hard drinking to get to this point, there definitely is something to
be said for hard drinking; at least we can state that not all of that «Stoli
Vodka» had been consumed in vain.
Hopefully, when the dust settles and the finest
and brightest of our children's children's children begin exploring the Alice
Cooper backlog without using 'Poison' or even 'School's Out' as the starting
point, DaDa will occupy its rightful place of honour. Until that day, I
can only give it a major joint thumbs up
as a record that does a great job of wiring up the brain and rocking the heart
at the same time. Furthermore, it can be a terrific, utterly non-banal way of
getting into Alice Cooper in the first place. Start with DaDa — and you
will never want to end up with Trash.
CONSTRICTOR (1986)
1) Teenage Frankenstein; 2)
Give It Up; 3) Thrill My Gorilla; 4) Life And Death Of The Party; 5) Simple Disobedience;
6) The World Needs Guts; 7) Trick Bag; 8) Crawlin'; 9) The Great American
Success Story; 10) He's Back (The Man Behind The Mask).
Freedom of choice or predetermination? In 1983,
Alice had but two options: go down by losing all the vital organs, or make one
last desperate attempt to break his dependency. He chose the latter, and must
be commended for it. But, having cleaned up his act and taken a two-year break
from the music industry altogether, the only smart logical choice for the next
step was to re-establish his sunk career. And when 1986, the absolute worst
year for music in XXth century, is on the threshold, how do you re-establish
your sunk career? That's right: by putting out the inarguably most rotten
record of your entire career.
It is not difficult to understand the driving
force behind this. The Coop did not just want to go back to making records
again; he was in acute need of something that would reinstate his confidence
in himself and his power over the crowds — not to mention acute need of
replenishing his bank account. He also probably experienced some nostalgia for
the horror shows of old, which he hadn't produced for about a decade now. In
short, the man needed to be back!
But the man was also smart enough to understand
that, if he wanted to capture a new audience of Eighties' teens, he had to meet
their contemporary expectations. Since synth-pop was obviously not a good
choice, the only other one was hair metal. Accordingly, Alice hired a hair
metal guitarist by the name of Kane Roberts, who satisfied pretty much every
single cliché of the genre: big, brutal, utterly stupid riffs and
meaningless finger-flashing solos, played by a hairy dude with a Rambo
complexion whose every stage move suggested having missed a successful career
in porn flicks in favour of a misguided stunt at music-making. The rest of the
band were mostly complete unmentionables. And Dick Wagner must have been
begging on the streets.
The corny, mock-creepy arrangements would have
probably ruined the album even if Alice made the mistake of populating it with
well-written songs. Fortunately, he did not; with his superpower IQ, he
calculated that dumb times called for dumb tunes, and every single one of these
ten songs must have been conceived and hummed during a quick bathroom break.
Lyrically, there are three subjects: (a) «rebellion» ('Simple Disobedience'; 'Give
It Up') — generic verses about teenage unrest, which, in this context, are
about as smart as the album gets; (b) «shagging» — Alice had long since become
only very modestly and occasionally interested in picturing the basic elements
of this process on record, but, since he now had to compete with Mötley
Crüe, there was hardly any choice ('Crawlin'; 'Trick Bag'); (c) «gore» —
now that the horror show was back, it needed fresh songs, and, since most
Eighties' teens had a hard time understanding the concepts of «irony» and
«metaphor», the images had to be slapped in their faces on a far more direct
level ('Teenage Frankenstein'; 'The World Needs Guts' — the titles speak for
themselves).
Cooper's expertise still shows through in that
most of the tunes are mildly catchy: you take one or two listens, you look back
at the song names, and you will get a devilish urge to hum them and make
yourself look silly. (I still think it was a particularly dirty trick on
Alice's part to make people sing along to the lines 'Where were you when the
monkey hit the fan? Thrill my gorilla!'). The teens were impressed — to the
point of putting Alice back on the charts (the record hit No. 59, his highest
since Flush The Fashion). The new show was also successful, with Alice
setting new records for the amount of blood'n'guts splattered around, getting
into good old confrontations with local authorities, and, overall, having a
mighty good time with it all. And he probably needed this — who knows,
maybe if he did not succeed in this corny comeback, his confidence would have
been shattered forever and we would have been deprived of his later artistic
successes (not to mention that he could have easily gone back to drinking).
But to understand is one thing, and to forgive
and enjoy is another. When your comeback single, presumptiously titled 'He's
Back (The Man Behind The Mask)', is not even a bona fide rocker, but a goofy
pop song propelled by the cheapest synthesizer patterns in existence, not to
mention a legitimate part of the soundtrack to Friday The 13th Part VI:
Jason Lives (!), you know for sure this is not a record that is
going to go down in history as a classic. What you do know for sure is that it
is just one more piece of evidence of how deep down the drain mainstream taste
had gone in ten years. In 1973, the world wanted Alice Cooper to give it Billion
Dollar Babies; in 1986, the world was fairly happy to have Constrictor.
Play them back to back. Taste the difference. Times have sure changed, haven't
they? Please join me in my thumbs down.
RAISE YOUR FIST
AND YELL (1987)
1) Freedom; 2) Lock Me Up;
3) Give The Radio Back; 4) Step On You; 5) Not That Kind Of Love; 6) Prince Of
Darkness; 7) Time To Kill; 8) Chop, Chop, Chop; 9) Gail; 10) Roses On White
Lace.
It took a clearly rejuvenated Alice less than a
year after the silliness of Constrictor to follow it up with an album
even more silly. Raise Your Fist And Yell follows in the exact same
vein, but ups the antes in every respect. The album cover (this time, Alice
merges his made-up face with a fist rather than a snake) is campier. The
lyrics are more primitive. The tunes emphasize the gore aspect far more
strongly. And 'Chop, Chop, Chop' might just be the single most ridiculous song
title on an Alice album to appear in ages.
Too bad, because the lead single at least shows
promise. One need not, after all, think that all hair metal is meritless
by definition. Its basic aesthetics and sound requirements have aged badly, but
when they happened to be placed across a good melody and a decent message,
sometimes the big electronic drums and the guitar pyrotechnics could help
carry it all off with extra power. This is what Alice demonstrates on
'Freedom', which seems to have been written in an inspired mood — it takes off
where 'Simple Disobedience' left off on the last album, a well-calculated
rebellion anthem pandering to teenage tastes of the decade, but so was
'School's Out', and, while 'Freedom' is no 'School's Out', Alice's battle cry
of "You better leave us, man, 'cuz you sure can't take us!" certainly
rings the bell.
"We're a make-up metal degeneration",
he also states, "we're not as stupid as you want to make us".
'Make-up metal degeneration' is, in fact, a great summary of most of this
album; unfortunately, it does look like Alice is quite consciously trying to
make his audiences look as stupid as possible, interested in preciously little
beyond slasher movies, reckless partying, and non-standard sexual practices.
The presence of irony in all these songs cannot be doubted, but it's an irony
that has to be reconstructed, based on what we know about Alice, rather than
heard or felt directly.
The cheese-o-meter needle keeps oscillating as
we progress through this mess, throwing the listener off his balance whenever
he seems to have found some sort of hold. For instance, 'Time To Kill', as the
signature song of a homicidal maniac, is not entirely awful — its brutal chorus
works a certain brutal charm on you, and, on a particularly pissed-off evening,
Alice's well-focused "I feel the fire in my eyes, I only got time to
kill!" will help you vent your frustration as perfectly as any
«intelligent» MC5 or Clash anthem. (Heck, many of us go through moments when
we'd rather like to be Freddy Krueger than Martin Luther King, Jr.). But when
the next song is the aforementioned 'Chop Chop Chop', well, "...I only
got time to kill" indeed.
As catchy as some of the choruses are
("give the radio back, to the maniac!"; "if you don't like it,
you can lock me up, woah-oh-oh-oh!"; and it can take up to one week of
recuperation to get rid of the cretinous line "chop chop chop, engine of
destruction!" ringing in your head), the music behind them is uniformly
atrocious — Kane Roberts is pathologically unable to write a memorable riff,
or to play a solo passage that goes beyond mindless superficial copying of
Eddie Van Halen's patterns. 'Freedom' is good, and 'Time To Kill' might be
salvaged through transplantation on a different album, but everything else has
been designed with 'stink' in mind, and so, predictably, it stinks. Thumbs down.
TRASH (1989)
1) Poison; 2) Spark In The Dark; 3) House Of Fire; 4) Why
Trust You; 5) Only My
Heart Talkin'; 6) Bed
Of Nails; 7) This
Maniac's In Love With You; 8) Trash; 9) Hell Is Living
Without You; 10) I'm Your
Gun.
Trash is a puzzle. At least, it is fun to think of it as a puzzle. First, it
was Alice's startlingly unexpected commercial breakthrough, his biggest
critical and especially commercial success since God knows when. Second, it
eventually became one of Alice's most despised albums — at least, on the part
of both the old guard of The Monster's long-term fans, and the newer
generation of picky eaters, free from the virus of the Eighties. Third and
final, it is not really as painfully flat and obvious a record as it may seem
— it deserves some serious thinking.
That the primary idea behind Trash was
to endear Alice to a whole new brand of young admirers and to solidify his
commercial base is beyond doubt. Why else would he want to enlist corporate
songwriter Desmond Child to help out with the writing and recording of most of
the songs? Why else all the guest star appearances by Jon Bon Jovi and members
of Van Halen and Aerosmith? Why else replace the perversely charismatic, but
over-brutal figure of Kane Roberts with slicker, more self-controlled, but even
more faceless guitarists? Why else have Diane Warren in person co-write one of
the songs (thankfully, not one of the ballads)?
And yet, I do not think it is entirely correct
to dub Trash a direct «sell out». Rather, it is a curious «experiment in
selling out» — a little game that the Coop played on society for his own
personal amusement. When people «sell out», this normally surmises a conscious
(or, sometimes, subconscious) rejection of one's own artistic ambitions as you
plainly enslave whatever talent you have — singing, playing, writing — to the
industry people, who gain the right to fuck with it in any way they like, depending
on the current fashion. Most frequently, however, people are at least
marginally ashamed of selling out, trying to somehow mask the cheapness of
their product by including something «personal» or «complex» or trying to save
at least a couple of their old trademarks, so they can cling to some straw in
case they get pummelled in interviews.
Trash, however, is different in at least two ways. First, Alice never made a single
other album that sounds like it — Hey Stoopid did carry on with the
glam-metal image, but, in effect, already began the «artistic healing» period
for the man. Second, it is so overtly cheap, so blatantly commercial
from top to bottom, so completely un-Alice-like, that, once you look at
it sideways, it becomes all but impossible to regard it as anything other than
a vile joke played upon the old fans, or, come to think of it, upon the new
ones as well — the mindless idiots who are bound to be zombified into sending
the man's least relevant record high up the charts. After all, isn't the album
title a dead giveaway? Couldn't the sole reason behind this record consist in
Alice, and others, being able to say «Look at them kids today, digging all that
trash!»
So what do we have here, anyway? Ten metallic
tracks (eight pop rockers, two power ballads) that have switched their allegiance
from W.A.S.P. to Bon Jovi. The guitar riffs and solos are still heavy, but have
been thoroughly cleaned up, sanitized, and made catchier. The horror imagery and
slasher movie references have been expurgated — but the dirty sex remains,
multiplied ten-fold. Basically, Trash is an album about non-stop
fucking, which was just about the hottest topic in mainstream America in 1989,
Tipper Gore notwithstanding; predictably, it takes a couple romantic breaks on
the ballads that appeal to higher sentiments, but, since we all know that a
real man is supposed to use higher sentiments as simply a required pretext for
anal sex and golden showers, the romantic breaks never take too long. Sure, we
know that it's 'only my heart talkin', but what it really says is 'I'll lay you
down and when all else fails, I'll drive you like a hammer on a bed of nails'.
Now that's some talking!
Are the songs any good? Well, it is certainly
not the worst that Eighties' glam-metal had to offer. In terms of songwriting,
actually, I would think of it as an improvement over the previous pair of
records. There are some interesting riffing ideas — simplistic, but effective,
as on 'Spark In The Dark', or slightly more complex, as on 'This Maniac's In
Love With You'. The choruses are nearly always catchy, and some are fun to sing
along with, unlike that 'chop chop chop' abomination. Really, if you manage to
quench the theoretical fire of indignation — «Alice Cooper, the creative
artist, recording something like this?» — Trash is an okay piece
of Eighties' party muzak.
I have no idea, though, why the album's biggest
hit (and, up to this day, still Cooper's best recognized tune, a
situation unlikely to change until the cursed Eighties generation, myself
included, has died out) was 'Poison'. 'Poison' is simply too slow and lumbering
to offer much in the way of headbanging, yet too aggressive to qualify as a
power ballad. These two extremes are much better represented by, respectively,
the title track, whose dirty riffs and raspy vocals are «trash», and
'Only My Heart Talkin', on which Alice and Steve Tyler merrily compete over who
gets to sing in a more «ugly beautiful» manner. But 'Trash' wasn't even a
single, and 'Only My Heart Talkin' failed to become a significant hit. Go
figure.
'Spark In The Dark', with its near-perfect pop
structure, and 'Trash', which transcends ugliness, are, to me, the only true
standouts on the record. Most of the other songs do their job well, adding to
the general success of the experiment. But the only reason for the overall
album to exist that I can think of is that Alice's experience as a veteran
shock-rocker may matter, and that, from a certain point of view, a forty-year
old guy can sing a bunch of songs about animal pleasures in a more
convincing manner than twenty-five-year old whippersnappers. In other words,
there is something about Trash that is viler, meaner, and dirtier than
about any Mötley Crüe or Twisted Sister record. But is it a good
thing? I have no idea. One thing is for certain: if you like catchy pop-metal
tunes about sex sung by a decent family man pretending to be a dirty old
pervert, Trash is your number one record to satisfy that passion. Out
of respect for this market niche, I refrain from rating it.
HEY STOOPID (1991)
1) Hey Stoopid; 2) Love's A Loaded Gun; 3)
Snakebite; 4) Burning Our Bed; 5) Dangerous Tonight; 6) Might As Well Be On
Mars; 7) Feed My
Frankenstein; 8) Hurricane Years; 9) Little By Little; 10) Die For You; 11)
Dirty Dreams; 12) Wind-Up Toy.
From a rigidly formalistic point of view, Hey
Stoopid is an utterly faithful sequel to Trash: one more batch of
big fat glam-metal tunes that sacrifice the Cooperishness of Cooper for the
sakes of modern commercial values. From the economic point of view, Hey
Stoopid was a financially unsatisfactory venture — not only did it fail to
repeat the success of Trash, but it plummeted down so fast that people
might have missed its appearance altogether, were it not for the lucky move of
featuring one of the songs in Wayne's World. From my personal point of
view, Hey Stoopid simply kicks ass in a way that none of the three
preceding albums could ever hope to.
Let me put it this way: Trash, for the
most part, could have been recorded by any ballsy artist of its era, and nobody
would have winked. It was Alice's conscious experiment in getting himself
anally penetrated with corporate songwriting, from which he inarguably gained
financial and arguably — sexual satisfaction. Hey Stoopid, on the other
hand, shows the man still embracing the trappings of the genre, but it is an
undeniably Alice album, one on which he has finally initiated the process of
restoring his artistic integrity. And I do not even mean such superficial
messages as the haunting wail of "Steven!.." at the album's end,
bringing on a feeling of nostalgia for 1975. I mean that an Alice Cooper album
is supposed to sting, and this one stings.
Let us begin with the worst. We still have a
share of moronic cock-rockers and pompous power ballads. 'Snakebite' is not a
very useful song, not much of an improvement over 'House Of Fire', except a
little faster. 'Burning Our Bed' and 'Die For You', following tradition, dress
cheap sentimentality in hymn form and fail, quite miserably so (me never
having been a major worshipper of 'Only Women Bleed', I cannot help but wonder
just how much «weightier» the average commercially-oriented pop ballad of
the 1970s used to be).
But overall, the standards have improved. For
instance, 'Dirty Dreams' could have easily been the equal of 'Snakebite'.
Instead, it is given this crunchy, catchy, hilarious riff that is more T. Rex
or Cheap Trick than Mötley Crüe, and only the obligatory (but
somewhat fun) finger-flashing guitar solo truly gives it away. And 'Might As
Well Be On Mars' (which is not really about Mars, but about the inability to
get together — apparently, even non-stop fucking eventually has to stop) could
have easily been the equal of 'Die For You', but it is given an artsy, «spacy»
arrangement that befits the title and a lengthy coda where guitars engage in a
fierce battle with strings until both run out of steam and get swallowed up by
'Feed My Frankenstein'. Hardly a timeless classic, because the powerhouse
chorus still sucks, but the classy touches certainly justify Dick Wagner's
one-time involvement with the creation of this particular tune.
Wagner, however, only guests on one track. The
rest are dominated by more trendy guitar heroes — no expense has been spared, as
Alice enlists Vinnie Moore, Slash, Joe Satriani and Steve Vai, sometimes
several of them on the exact same song. (For pointless trivia lovers, Ozzie
Osbourne also helps out with backing vocals on the title track, and Nikki Sixx
of Mötley Crüe fame plays bass on 'Feed My Frankenstein'). Of course,
this is overkill, and even those who claim to be fans will probably enjoy these
guys more on their own records. Still, it is undeniable that all of them have
better technique than Kane Roberts, and more inventiveness than whoever it was
responsible for the guitar work on Trash. And if you are determined to
make a glam metal album, why should you want anything less than the best? This
is a very demanding genre — nothing but the best really works.
I sincerely believe that three of these songs
at least deserve as much recognition as anything Alice ever did, before or
after (with the fourth one — the title track, a spitting warning for the fans
not to waste themselves away — closing in not too far behind). First, 'Love's A
Loaded Gun'. This one should be in everybody's handbook on how to write a
non-cringe-inducing power ballad, except it is not properly a ballad, because
it is a threat song, not a love song. Tense, memorable, paranoid, acid sharp
in terms of both riffs and solos, it follows the outlines of Trash, but
with much more wit and bite, and it has the second most exciting use of the
"Pull the trigger!" exclamation in rock history (the first one, of
course, is attested for AC/DC). Plus, it gives you something to think about
when you consider Alice's ironic tribute to Robert Johnson: where the latter
used the image of 'her suitcase in her hand' as a starting point for unraveling
his own misery, Alice uses it as the starting point for revenge — no time for
sissying around for this guy.
Second — yes, you guessed — 'Feed My
Frankenstein'. Vai and Satriani battle it out in the solo section, but that is
actually the least interesting section for those who already know a little
about either of them. The most interesting thing is how, torn between
the necessity of writing about dirty sex and horror shows, Alice manages to
come up with a song that deals with both at the same time, using healthy,
decent cannibalism as a metaphor for sick, indecent you-know-what, and
combining it with great riffs and (finally!) his old sense of humour for good
measure. "Feed my Frankenstein, meet my libido!" is certainly silly,
but it makes you laugh, and yet, at the same time, this is nowhere near the
comfy safety of sex-oriented material on Trash — I can hardly imagine
the respectable bourgeois headbanging to "I'm a hungry man but I don't
want pizza..."
Third and most important — do not miss on that
one! — is 'Wind-Up Toy'. Refreshing! Alice returns here to what he does best:
impersonating the mentally deficient. (Leave it to guys with a seriously
higher-than-average IQ to be the most efficient spokesmen for the retarded
ones). Apparently, what we have here is the reappearance of Steven, shut up in
an asylum and shut out from the outside world; but to hell with
"Steven" — this thing need have no name. One big mistake that people
commit with this song is calling it «spooky», or expecting it to be so: the
actual music is not one bit spooky, nor is Alice's performance; this is not
'Black Juju', this is a realistic song that tries to pick at the deepest inner
feelings of the Down's syndrome guy, and it really does not hit its full stride
until the coda, when Alice's piercing wail ('I'm just a wind-up toy, a wind-up,
wind-up, wind-up toy!') cuts through the wall of sound. That is the
scariest moment — «scariest», not «spookiest» — much more so than the Steven
King-ish voiceovers at the end, and it is one of those rare instances where the
Coop succeeds in getting across real pain, suffering, and desperation
rather than their exciting, but cartoonish projections.
All of this translates as «mixed bag, but with
a well-discernible positive trend for the whole factory», and, consequently,
as a hearty thumbs up — with only three
or four songs out of twelve ranking below expectations. To this I should
probably add that Hey Stoopid was released just a few months before the
grunge explosion, which possibly explains its inability to find the same
market as Trash, but something tells me that, had the hair metal rule
managed to last for another decade, Cooper's next record in the same genre
might have completely overcome the genre's weaknesses. Fortunately, with the
hair metal empire collapsing around him, for his next offering he already
didn't have to.
THE LAST
TEMPTATION (1994)
1) Sideshow; 2) Nothing's Free; 3) Lost In America; 4) Bad
Place Alone; 5) You're My Temptation; 6) Stolen Prayer; 7) Unholy War; 8)
Lullaby; 9) It's Me; 10) Cleansed
By Fire.
To paraphrase the Kinks, "God save Kurt
Cobain and all the different varieties". The Last Temptation,
completing Alice Cooper's comeback, is not a grunge album — but it is an album
saved by grunge, whose triumphant march in the early 1990s prompted Alice to
finally drop the hair metal trappings and realize that the hard rockers of the
late Sixties/early Seventies did it just about right — so why mess with
perfection?
We are given the message almost immediately: as
the short, intriguing acoustic introduction fades away, out sweeps a bunch of
chords reminiscent of the Who's 'Substitute' — and, for that matter, Alice's
own 'No More Mr. Nice Guy' — played on a normal, fat, crunchy electric guitar
the way Pete Townshend himself might have played it around 1971. The song then explodes
into a gritty power pop number, rousing, inspiring, and with a further touch of
brass waiting around the corner to remind us of who wrote 'Under My Wheels'.
Yes, here is a sound that Alice hasn't touched for two decades — welcome back.
But, at the same time, be wary. Since Alice has
officially given up on sounding cool and commercial (the album peaked at #68,
more than twenty points below Hey Stoopid), nothing prevents him from
finally sounding like an old man; and, in Alice's case, «sounding like an old
man» means shifting, or at least extending, his ire from criticizing stupid old
people who make the rules to attackig stupid young people who break them. The
Last Temptation is a conceptual piece with a transparent Christian message
— mess around with your morals and there'll be hell to pay, in this particular
case, quite literally so. (Not that I disagree, mind you, and I am no
believer).
There is some vague storyline followed here.
The protagonist, apparently, is a grown-up Steven from Welcome To My
Nightmare, although the name is never spoken on the album — we learn this
from Neil Gaiman's comic book that accompanies it. The guy is bored with conforming
to society's standards and seeks escape from the antagonist, a traveling
showman who is really Satan in disguise, who is really Alice Cooper in disguise
(or is that the other way around?). They hit it off for a bit, but then the guy
comes to his senses, renounces Evil before it is too late and lives happily
ever after selling door-to-door insurance and watching talk shows (or maybe
not, but if you have been branded by Satan, you do not really have a lot of
choices left).
Were the album recorded by the Rev. Billy
Graham, I would probably not have recommended it. But the genius of Alice
Cooper is such that he can even make a genre as hollow as Christian rock sound
exciting. The Last Temptation's cornerstones are the songs where Satan's
presence is at its strongest — two of them, 'Nothing's Free' and 'You're My
Temptation', rank up there with the most vivid of Alice's past material, and
credit goes not only to Alice himself, but also to the guys who matched his
demonic inventions bit-by-bit, particularly guitarist Stef Burns who, on 'Temptation',
gives the absolutely most exact impression of hellish flames that I have ever
had the honor of hearing. Amazing, what a little wah-wah and a little reverb
can do to the senses.
The most «messageous» of all the songs on here,
however, is 'Nothing's Free' — quite an interesting tune to compare with
1987's 'Freedom'. In his hair metal days, the Coop titillated his younger fans
by inviting them to "raise your fist and yell"; now he reminds them
that, come to think of it, "nothing's free from the rules and laws of
morality", and that, if you really want to be free in the absolute
sense of the word ("free, free, free, I wanna be free!" go the
backing vocals all around the place), the payback is simple: "When the
trumpets sound and his light is all around... we'll be going way
downtown". But it is not the words that matter; the message is useless
without the music, as the song, a steady mid-tempo hard rocker, slowly
accumulates more and more power and, finally, becomes a nightmarish Death Dance
with Burns' guitar leading you through the nine circles right into the final
pit. A lesson to all the Christian rockers out there: your words don't really
mean jack shit — take your cue from Bach, Stevie Wonder and... Alice Cooper!
The Last Temptation has no weak ground; the Coop has covered all
exits. Obviously, there should still be space for a lighter, catchier rocker to
be promoted as the lead single; thus, we get 'Lost In America', a lyrically
hilarious and riffaliciously engaging song loaded with Alice's usual
maliciousness: a frustrated teen anthem that viciously ridicules frustrated
teens ("I can't go to school 'cause I ain't got a gun, I ain't got a gun
'cause I ain't got a job, I ain't got a job 'cause I can't go to school — so
I'm looking for a girl with a gun and a job and a house"... pause...
"with cable"). If you think 'Nothing's Free' and 'You're My
Temptation' are both a little too carnivalesque, take 'Unholy War', a dark,
twisted rocker with no theater involved — just a disturbing tale of one guy's
lifelong struggle with his own inner corruption, or the equally nasty 'Bad
Place Alone'.
If you think no Alice Cooper album is complete
without the obligatory sentimental ballad, there's 'It's Me', hardly one of his
best, but recorded with pretty acoustic guitars, mandolins, and no Steve Tyler
on backing vocals — which is already a huge improvement on the likes of 'Only
My Heart Talking'. And, finally, even the «plot-advancing» songs such as
'Lullaby' and 'Cleansed By Fire' all have plenty of musical thought injected —
the latter alone has, like, three or four different vocal melodies.
As we can see, it took Alice ten years to
overcome his drinking problem, and it took him a further ten years to make all
good people remember what was so fascinating about him in the first place. His
conversion to Christianity certainly must have come as a shock to many people,
but that is exactly the point — Alice is a professional shocker, and shocking
his audience with Christian morality is far more effective than shocking them
with the same old images of blood and gore. Besides, this sudden embracing of
Jesus is probably responsible for his abandoning the pursuit of commercial
success: ever since Temptation, his records have sold quite poorly, yet
each one made far more sense than the empty commercial splash of Trash.
Thank the Lord for that — and for this record in particular, which gets an
equal thumbs up from the heart
(kick-ass!) and the brain (perfect construction, perfect sound quality, perfect
sequencing, you name it).
A FISTFUL OF
ALICE (1997)
1) School's Out; 2) Under My Wheels;
3) I'm Eighteen; 4) Desperado; 5) Lost In America; 6) Teenage Lament '74; 7) I
Never Cry; 8) Poison; 9) No More Mr. Nice Guy; 10) Welcome To My Nightmare; 11)
Only Women Bleed; 12) Feed My Frankenstein; 13) Elected; 14) Is Anyone Home?
The idea behind Cooper's second live album was
to remedy the flaws of the first one. Since The Alice Cooper Live Show
had been released in 1977 without the artist's consent and, according to his
opinion, did not offer a proper audio representation of what the show was really
about, it was only a matter of time before a real, officially endorsed,
live album would see the lights of day — strange that it took a sobered-up,
activity-bursting Cooper a whole decade to get around to it, but it is pretty
fortunate that it did, because otherwise we would have ended up with a bunch of
Kane Roberts machine gun solos on some of Alice's worst songs.
The irony is, of course, that A Fistful Of
Alice, fine-sounding as it is, does not capture the «true» Alice Cooper
show any more than the 1977 album did. Specially recorded at the Cabo Wabo club
in San Lucas, Mexico, and fattened up by guest appearances from Slash, Rob
Zombie, and even Sammy Hagar (fortunately, on guitar only!), it reads as a Greatest
Hits Live. Only 'Desperado' had not been previously released as a single —
and, vice versa, pretty much all of the hit singles Alice ever had in
his career are represented, including even a livened up version of 'Teenage Lament
'74' and (only on the expanded Japanese version) 'Clones', songs that were not at
all part of the regular show at the time. On the other hand, the album that he was
promoting at the time — The Last Temptation — is only represented by
'Lost In America', the «hit song», ripping out any hopes of conceptuality or
coherence ('Nothing's Free' and 'Cleansed By Fire' were regular parts of the
setlist).
So the purpose of the album is somewhat
obscure; loyal fans would likely have preferred a more authentic document, and
casual fans, by 1997, would hardly be interested in anything other than regular
«greatest hits» packages, not bothering to see them re-recorded in a live
setting. Nevertheless, on its very own, A Fistful Of Alice is still
fun. What is there to dislike about the Coop's hit singles, with the possible
exception of 'Poison'? Nothing. The man is in top vocal form, the backing band
is in good taste (Fistful marks the first appearance of soon-to-be
Alice's regular sidekick Ryan Roxie on guitar), the sound quality is crisp, the
volume levels awesome.
Here is just a bunch of off-the-cuff remarks on
minor special details that may or may not entice you into hearing this: (a)
'Teenage Lament '74', losing Lisa Minelli, gets a crunchy power-pop coating
that almost wipes out its vaudeville spirit; (b) 'Welcome To My Nightmare' has
a brief 'Steven' introduction, and keyboard player Paul Taylor manages to
simulate the powerful brass section so that the results are almost credible;
(c) Rob Zombie's growling on 'Feed My Frankenstein' adds nothing to the song,
but Slash definitely spices up the sound on 'Lost In America'; (d) 'Elected'
serves as a pretty good Grand Finale to the whole show.
As a tempting bonus, the fans get one new
studio track, the acoustic-and-slide-led pop rocker 'Is Anyone Home', similar
in tone and message to 'Wind-Up Toy', nowhere near as desperate, but much more
instantly likeable in terms of arrangement, because the guitars follow the
sonic patterns of The Last Temptation rather than Hey Stoopid.
Should it be tempting enough to make A Fistful Of Alice into an
obligatory part of the fan's collection, or will the album forever remain in
the status of an obsolete curio? Depends on how much you are into black
leather. But thumbs up regardless of the
answer.
BRUTAL PLANET (2000)
1) Brutal Planet; 2) Wicked Young Man; 3)
Sanctuary; 4) Blow Me A Kiss; 5) Eat Some More; 6) Pick Up The Bones; 7)
Pessi-Mystic; 8) Gimme;
9) It's The Little Things;
10) Take It Like A Woman;
11) Cold Machines.
For the first time since the weirdness attacks
of Zipper Catches Skin and Dada, Alice puts out a decidedly
non-commercial album, one that not only ignores current marketing trends, but
goes as far as not yielding even a potential hit single, not to mention
being released on a tiny indie label (Spitfire) with little or no marketing
potential whatsoever. No one can call Brutal Planet a commercial flop:
with its subject matters, its sound, and its intentional lack of promotion, it
was never supposed to be «huge». This is hardcore Cooper for hardcore fans.
How would an artist like Alice Cooper prefer to
greet the new millennium? Quite likely, by casting a wicked glance at the
then-and-now and, in his own individual style, telling us the obvious: want it
or not, this world pretty much sucked in the past two millennia, goes on
sucking today like there was no tomorrow, and is more or less doomed to go soon
if things continue the way we continue doing them. Come to think of it,
quite a predictable thing to be preached by an old, grizzled, spiteful,
born-again Christian. It all hangs on the manner of preaching.
Brutal Planet is Cooper's heaviest album to date, and possibly ever, and «heavy» here
refers both to the music, cast in the questionable, but potentially killer
genre of Industrial Metal, and the subject matter, since Alice has apparently
decided to address all seven deadly sins and more. Let's see: I clearly
perceive wrath ('Wicked Young Man'), greed ('Gimme'), gluttony ('Eat Some
More'), uh... well, the rest does not work out so well, but at least you get
the basic idea.
Mind you: this is not an intellectual
celebration. The lyrics are rarely ambiguous, and the riffs are rarely complex.
In a way, this is a retread even from the level of The Last Temptation.
But we can buy this regardless of the fact that the number of employed chords
is not overwhelming, because Brutal Planet was clearly designed with
this idea in mind — someone, thinks Alice, needs to brutally bash the concept
of a «brutal planet» into the heads of the current generation. To hell with
obscurity and complexity; let us have a simplistic metal ball before we get all
blown to the same hell, and who knows, perhaps this simplicity might get at
least a few of us to stop and consider not being blown to hell after
all.
The incessantly ironish guitar tones should not
really be hard to bear. Behind them lie standard Alice Cooper pop hooks, much
like the ones on Trash, except they have been better fleshed out and
their metal encasing is sharp, crisp, and hot, much unlike the
commercial gloss of the days of yore. (There have been complaints that, in
reality, Alice is simply jumping the freshest bandwagon of nu-metal, but
frankly, I do not hear any Korn or Limp Bizkit in these songs, way too truly
evil to be compared to these youngsters). The riffs frequently come in pairs —
a low, scary one that carries the rhythm, and a higher, whiny one that
highlights the pop melody, as you can immediately hear on the title track. The
solos usually come in short, garage-style outbursts: professional, but humble
blasts of ass-kicking courtesy of Ryan Roxie, I believe. And the singing...
well, that is one area where we should never bother; Alice Cooper is, by all
means, guaranteed for life.
As simple as it all sounds, much of it is
genius simplicity, plus there are unpredictable touches all the way through.
The title track, on which Alice trashes humanity as a whole (admitting,
however, that it is really the Biblical serpent who is behind all the shit),
introduces, out of nowhere, a dreamy female chorus of rose-colored
glasses-wearing angels, which is then contrasted with Cooper's devilish
shouting. 'Wicked Young Man', possibly the most hateful send-up of hatred ever
put on record ("I read Mein Kampf daily just to keep my hatred fed"
transcends simple kitsch and dives head first into Monty Python territory, but
that's cool), borrows an alert siren as its second riff. 'It's The Little
Things', fastest song on here but also serving as a bit of comic relief, falls
back on the legacy by namedropping some of Alice's previous hit titles, etc.
There is also the predictable, although this
time decidedly non-hit, ballad ('Take It Like A Woman') that is essentially
'Only Women Bleed Part Two'; but it is the only time when the metallic punching
fades away, only to come back once more and predict the rise of 'Cold Machines'
(yes, what's up with us forgetting about that? thank you for reminding
us, Alice!). As monotonous as it all feels together, each hook is different,
and although the basic anger behind this is simply Anger, it is exciting to be
able to feel Anger at so many different things: the original sinners, the skinheads,
the consumerists, the genocide instigators, the social-darwinists, and all
those other inhabitants of the brutal planet — and it is fairly certain that,
in one song at least, you, the reader, will be able to spot yourself, because
the Coop spares no one.
Lumping and leaden, impressive and memorable,
funny and scary, it is an album that cemented Cooper's status as that of the
old guy who made it artistically intact into the new millennium, along with
just a bare handful of his colleagues from the old days such as Lou Reed or
David Bowie. Heartily recommended for metal fans in general and Alice fans in
particular, the heart gives it a thumbs up,
and the brain is still trying to figure out how it is possible to squeeze that
much sense out of a handful of primitive metal riffs.
DRAGONTOWN (2001)
1) Triggerman; 2) Deeper; 3)
Dragontown; 4) Sex Death And Money; 5) Fantasy Man; 6) Somewhere In The Jungle;
7) Disgraceland; 8) Sister Sarah; 9) Every Woman Has A Name; 10) Just Wanna Be
God; 11) It's Much Too Late; 12) I Am The Sentinel.
For the direct sequel to Brutal Planet,
Alice reteams with old friend Bob Ezrin; the impact is hard to measure, since,
out of all his Ezrin-produced records, this one sounds the least like Ezrin.
Possibly because Cooper was still in his «doom metal» phase, and the mystical
Ezrin touch is not as transparent behind the dark waves of deep distorted
guitars as it usually is behind the pianos, strings, special effects, and
echoes.
Still, at least several songs are immediately
distinguished by the new presence — such as the title track, whose Middle
Eastern keyboard patterns on the verses immediately bring to mind similar
arrangements on DaDa. And this ties in well with Alice's decision to
vary the stylistics a bit: Dragontown is not simply one titanic metal
onslaught following another, but rather a more diversified journey through the
pleasures and horrors of our times, liable to be set to grinding gnashing metal
just as easy as it can be set to light balladry or even rockabilly.
Strangely, the record does not start off on an
epic note: 'Brutal Planet' announced its goals from the first minute, but Dragontown
takes things more slowly, conducting the listener to its own brand of hell in
several steps. First, there is the introduction of 'Triggerman', a fast,
churning rocker that introduces your own personal Virgil who's going to be
your guide for the rest of the album: "I'm pure non-entity, don't even
watch for me, I watch you when you sleep". Who is that? Subconscience?
Some sort of inner voice? Nah, probably just Satan once more.
Then the real metal starts, plunged in a
felt-more-than-heard swamp of Ezrin's Gothic effects — 'Deeper' is the descent:
"The elevator broke, it went right through the floor...". Corny,
B-movie level, but catchy and exciting as always, and, more importantly,
evocative; here is a man who understands what these deep guitar tones are there
for. And, finally, the gates burst open on Track Three — the magnificent
'Dragontown', unfurling slowly and almost unwillingly through a maze of
swirling keyboards and basses into the gritty singalong chorus. If 'Brutal
Planet' was all a big ball of disgust and hate, 'Dragontown' is more personal
and frightening, as if the Coop were stretching out his gnarled set of claws
to you right out of the speakers: "Come on, I've got something to show you
— come on, you're really gonna love this!"
I have caught myself plenty of times on the
realization that, at some point, despite all the obviousness and simplicity,
the Coop's cartoonish vibe transcends these flaws, making even prepared listeners
of the «been-there, heard-that, no surprises» caliber experience an unfaked
internal shiver. Dragontown has plenty of moments like this. On the
previous album, the evil of genocide was vividly described within 'Pick Up The
Bones', inspired by events in Bosnia; here, the subject continues with
'Somewhere In The Jungle', reminding Western audiences of even bloodier events
in Rwanda (granted, most people won't even pay attention to the lyrics, and
those that will may not know what the thing is specifically about; it does not
help matters much that the reference to the Serengeti is somewhat misguided —
that's, uh, in Tanzania, Alice, on the other side of Lake Victoria.
Might as well say the Kalahari). Nevertheless, it's quite scary as well.
On the lighter side, the humor is back, and
most of the heaviest songs are imbued with sarcasm so as not to sustain the
same homicidal level of depression throughout. 'Sex, Death And Money' introduces
the deadliest, zombiest guitar tone you will ever hear on a Cooper album, but
the song's message ("sex, death, and money, sonny, that is why we all are
gonna fry") is delivered with irony: for all of Cooper's unexpected
Christian morality, he sure knows a mean way how to hand out a moral message and
have a good laugh at professional moralists at the same time and not end
up sounding like a cheap hypocrite.
There are also some killer send-ups on the
record. 'Fantasy Man' returns us to the lambasting of the redneck stereotype:
"I don't do dishes, and I'm suspicious of any grown-up man that does; I'm
homophobic, don't do aerobics, just lay around and catch a buzz" — he
hasn't nailed that stereotype that well since 'I Love America' in 1983.
'Disgraceland', alternating punk-pop with rockabilly, is a, ahem, «tribute» to
The King, whom we apparently meet doing time in Dragontown, replete with a
not-half-bad Elvis impersonation. And the hilarious industrial rap of 'Just
Wanna Be God' goes as far as to send up the principal anti-hero himself — now
we know that all of mankind's troubles are really, in fact, the sole
consequence of some solitary individual's inferiority complexes: "I only
wanna build my statue tall, that's all — why can't I be God? I only wanna be
God!" Thanks a lot, pal.
To complete the picture, we have the obligatory
woman-is-the-nigger-of-the-world sensitive ballad ('Every Woman Has A Name',
hardly better or worse than all of Alice's similar creations, but give the guy
extra points for consistency) and a lighter pop-rocker about a guy who
seemingly led a righteous life but is now wondering how the hell he ended up
right in it ('It's Much Too Late', which, according to rumors, is dedicated to
Lennon and, indeed, sounds a bit like John, but it is a little difficult to
imagine John as the protagonist of a song whose lyrics go "When I was a
teen, all the sex that I missed was an abstinence blessing to me", don't
you think?).
We are more or less accustomed to Cooper's
albums arriving in pairs — Welcome To My Nightmare in a two-fer with Goes
To Hell, Trash with Hey Stoopid, etc. — but most of these
pairs had a clear superior and inferior member. With Brutal Planet and Dragontown,
no such decision can be taken. The former has the upper hand when it comes to
pouring out bare emotion — it pummels you right across the floor; the latter, while
slightly more restrained and calculated, is, on the other side, more
interesting in that the sheer number of ideas is much larger. Naturally, it is
as easy a thumbs up as its predecessor,
continuing to build up Alice's reputation for the new millennium (and setting
up an impressive record of two consecutively fine albums in two years for a
rock icon in his fifties).
THE EYES OF ALICE
COOPER (2003)
1) What Do You Want From Me;
2) Between High School And Old School; 3) Man Of The Year; 4) Novocaine; 5) Bye
Bye Baby; 6) Be With You Awhile; 7) Detroit City; 8) Spirits Rebellious; 9)
This House Is Haunted; 10) Love Should Never Feel Like This; 11) The Song That
Didn't Rhyme; 12) I'm So Angry; 13) Backyard Brawl.
Jumping on bandwagons is a skill, one that few
can master as smoothly as Cooper. Clearly, the decision to dive into the
oilfield of heavy metal must have been influenced by the success of numetal
bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit; but it was carried out in full accordance with
the Alice spirit, which makes Brutal Planet and Dragontown
perfectly enjoyable on their own.
By the early 2000s, the new trend for the
«alternative mainstream» emerged as the neo-garage rock of the Strokes, the
Vines, and the Hives, and, according to the strict laws of determinism, there
was simply no chance that Alice could have missed the opportunity, particularly
since what the Strokes and the rest were reviving was, in part, Alice's own
ancient style — the proto-punk vibe of the Detroit scene. The MC5, the Stooges,
and Alice Cooper of Love It To Death fame. Let's admit it: if you spot a
pack of spoiled, hedonistic young whippersnappers stealing your music, it is
only natural for you to get pissed off and decide to resteal it from them. Is
stealing from thieves stealing at all? The Eyes Of Alice Cooper may not
rise up to the level of Love It To Death — no surprise, since that would
require a bottle of rejuvenation pills and a time machine — but at least it
competes fairly well with the Strokes and the Vines, and it still shows who is really
the boss in all of this, lack of sales notwithstanding.
There is no trying to mask the «retro» attitude
on this one. The title itself, focusing us on Alice's «eyes», makes us notice
that he is not wearing much makeup except for the spiderish shades around those
eyes, just like he did in 1971. The back cover shows him together with his new
band, first time in decades — ever since the demise of the original Alice
Cooper band, no sidemen ever got the unimaginable honour of entouraging The Monster
on any album sleeves. And, speaking of the band, well, the band may lack the
crudeness and imagination of Alice's former pals, but they still do a mighty
impressive job. Of particular notice is Ryan Roxie, arguably the only guitarist
in Cooper's history to wilfully go through several distinct styles — he is just
as convincing as a punkish rock'n'roller as he was in the guise of an
industrial metallist.
Then there are the songs, on which Alice, once
again, rises to the occasion. Thirteen tracks, each one pretty damn good in its
own way. Monotonousness is out of the question: the rock numbers are evenly
split between «poppy» and «hard», and, from time to time, interspersed with
ballads (one sentimental, one comical) and even a solitary «horror» number ('This
House Is Haunted', written and recorded in the «spook that kid» style, rather
unusual for Alice). Melodies? You bet. Humour? Lots. If there is one thing to
complain about, it is the occasional scent of excessive «overproduction»: the
guitars, at times, are too noisy, perhaps the biggest difference between
Eyes and the true classic Detroit sound, which, after all, was born and
extinguished not only in pre-Strokes times, but even in pre-Ramones' ones.
It would be nicer, I think, if more of the
songs here were along the lines of 'Detroit City', or, rather, its first
thirty seconds, with the cool old chugga-chugga hard rock style, after which
the wall of sound still kicks in (it is, however, notable that Wayne Kramer of
the MC5 fame himself adds some guest-guitar to the recording). But then, of
course, the entire album would be skewed towards the «nostalgia» line —
'Detroit City' alone, with its 'Me and Iggy were giggin' with Ziggy and kickin'
with the MC5...' has drawn its fair share of smirks.
So let us enjoy life as it is, and just give in
to the hooks of the female-bashing 'What Do You Want From Me', the
bourgeois-bashing 'Man Of The Year', the amour-bashing 'Love Should Never Feel
Like This', and especially the self-bashing 'Between High School And Old
School', which is where Alice finds himself stuck in between — a perfect
projection of the «confused teen anthem» style onto the idea of «too old to
rock'n'roll, too young to die». Behind the big, fat sound on all these songs we
still find the same indomitable spirit, plus a catchy hook or even two per
song. And, just as the genre requires, much of this is about anger, anger,
anger. No wonder the last two songs are 'I'm So Angry', where he takes it out
on his cheating girlfriend, and 'Backyard Brawl', where he takes it out on
anyone stupid enough to get in the way. 'Backyard Brawl', in particular,
stomps and thrashes about with such passionate violence that, unless you have
seen one of Alice's peaceful, relaxed golf videos recently, you will be
fooled.
However, I have to confess that my own
favourite song on the album is the most peaceful one — the sweet love
ballad 'Be With You Awhile', which sounds 100% like a solo John Lennon ballad,
right down to all the vocal modulations, and, (not) coincidentally, the most
beautifully arranged Cooper ballad so far — a mix of deep underwater-ish
electric piano, high above-the-sky-ish Mellotrons, and juicy, colourfully
distorted electric guitars that, unlike the rockers, arises completely out of
nowhere and is thoroughly unpredictable. And, unlike Alice's former hits
in the balladeering genre, this one is completely untouched by the chisel of
commercialism. As hard as it is, especially in recent times, to combine
simple, old-school sentimentality with a sugar-free, pathos-free environment,
'Be With You Awhile' is a total success. (Although, of course, the anti-sentimentalists
of our modern age will hardly pay much attention to it; they will prefer
to concentrate on the hilarious send-up of 'The Song That Didn't Rhyme', a cool
joke tune about the worst song ever written — 'a three minute waste of your
time, no redeeming value of any kind').
The Eyes Of Alice Cooper cannot be among the greatest records of Alice
Cooper: any album from an old Alice Cooper that toys with the departed spirit
of the young Alice Cooper is doomed to be forever sitting in the second or
third row, at best. But the goal has been achieved, and the have not been
disappointed; the brain marvels at the efficacy of evading all the reefs and pitfalls,
and the heart rejoices at the delightful mix of the rough and tender — thumbs up from both sides.
DIRTY DIAMONDS (2005)
1) Woman Of Mass Distraction;
2) You Make Me Wanna; 3) Perfect; 4) Dirty Diamonds; 5) Pretty
Ballerina; 6) Sunset Babies; 7) Zombie Dance; 8) The Saga Of Jesse Jane; 9)
Six Hours; 10) Steal That Car; 11) Run Down The Devil; 12) Your Own Worst
Enemy; 13*) Stand.
The album cover is almost the same as before —
the important half of Alice's face staring at us from behind some ornamental
camouflage — but the music is seriously different. Dirty Diamonds is
Alice's first album in God knows when that follows no specific agenda
whatsoever, and deals with no particular concept other than «life as seen from
the viewpoint of a cartoonish half-Satanic, half-criminal character», which is,
by now, more than thirty years old. Now that all the points have been stated,
all the comebacks effectuated, and all the trends perpetrated, there is little
left to do other than simply write songs and record them. Or play golf. But I
guess even a maniac golfer can go crazy from doing nothing other than play
golf.
This is a good record, but it is not as focused
or energetic as the four that came before it, so we can probably send the curve
sloping down once again. Big bulging concepts do not work for everyone, but
they usually do for the Coop: his 1994-2002 «Trilogy of Hell» burned the same
fuel of commitment to the idea as the rejuvenated ode to backyard brawls that
was The Eyes Of... Two years later, Alice ran out of big ideas, and what
we get is a rag-tag collection of small ones that frequently work, but also
have the tendency to misfire from time to time.
Frankly speaking, the rock'n'roll numbers here
are about as interesting as the recent attempts by the Rolling Stones —
nostalgic riff-recyclers that will never appeal to the jaded fan, and, in all
probability, will only make him mourn the fact that new generations of
listeners, whose ability to turn the clock back usually gets lost together with
their milk teeth, will take this for the real thing; but Alice
Cooper may not be judged by 'Woman Of Mass Distraction' any more than the
Rolling Stones' place in history can be decided based on 'Rough Justice'. It is
a moderately fun song, but the chords are almost as recognizable as any
standard 12-bar progression, and as for the sleaze — well, we sort of thought
Alice would have outgrown that since his hair metal period; why return to it
now? To appeal to the sacrilegious Eighties nostalgia guard?
The same criticism applies to 'Perfect' and
maybe a couple other numbers that history, hopefully, will discard as
unfortunate errors born out of boredom and temporary lack of focus. Then there
are a few more similar numbers, helped out by nagging, nifty vocal hooks (the
'woo-hoo-hoo' on 'You Make Me Wanna') or by a combination of said hooks with
on-the-level crunchy character asassinations ('Sunset Babies' — any song that
trashes spoiled glammy trash is OK by me; where do I sign for turning the line
'Sunset babies all got rabies' into an international slogan?), but even these
are sort of «melodically grim». And I do not support the idea of taking the
Ramones' solo on 'Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue' and turning it into the backbone
for the title track (granted, that solo was probably a lift itself, but that is
beyond the point).
So the album is probably at its best every time
it steps away from the generic rock'n'roll idiom; two obvious standouts are a
beautifully felt and executed cover of the Left Banke's 'Pretty Ballerina'
(the Coop continuing the honourable mission of opening up the vaults of golden
oldies to new listeners — although it is a little sad that most people
commenting on the album do not even seem to realize the song's origins) and
'The Saga Of Jesse Jane', a tongue-in-cheek Johnny Cash send-up about a
transvestite cowboy ending up in jail for defending his rights a bit too much
on the violent side (and Brokeback Mountain had not even hit movie theaters
at the time). Melody-wise, the latter at least hangs on a beautiful,
melancholic guitar line that I do not recall ever having heard before — and
this combination of ridiculously pointless lyrics with guitar gorgeousness
gives it a nice post-modern flavour that the rest of the album lacks.
That said, I reiterate that Dirty Diamonds
only sucks when taken in context — namely, in the context of Cooper's
blistering renaissance with his four previous albums, and in the context of having
almost nothing to add to the history of rock'n'roll as we know it. On their
own, clear and unsoiled by extra knowledge, each number kicks its own midget
ass, with the exception of the silly bonus track 'Stand' recorded in tandem
with the rapper Xzibit (not just because it has a rap section, which can be
tolerated, but because it is one of those ugly examples of the «let me teach
the younger generation the important morals of life through their own voice
because they are too dumb to figure them out on their own» approach that is
always pretentious and fake, and I am surprised how a guy like Alice with his
IQ level keeps falling in that pit so often). So, from the bottom of my heart,
I still give it a moderate thumbs up; yet
there is every reason to be afraid that the final comeback is over, and perhaps
Alice should spend more time with that golf club, after all. Or, at least, try
to write a concept album about golf.
ALONG CAME A
SPIDER (2008)
1) Prologue: I Know Where You
Live; 2) Vengeance Is Mine; 3) Wake The Dead; 4) Catch Me If You Can; 5) (In
Touch With) Your Feminine Side; 6) Wrapped In Silk; 7) Killed By Love; 8) I'm
Hungry; 9) The One That Got Away; 10) Salvation; 11) I Am The Spider
(Epilogue).
After the brief relaxation of Dirty Diamonds,
Alice returns to concept mode — but I am not entirely sure if this particular
concept is really such a great step forward for the father of shock rock. That
the Coop is a huge fan of generic slasher movies, we all know very well: all
through the Eighties, he had constantly expressed this love with both his
albums and his occasional songwriting and even acting contributions to such
movies. But with The Last Temptation and whatever followed, it seemed
like this preoccupation was somewhat behind him, and that he would now forever
be focusing his attention on worthier matters.
Apparently not. Apparently we have been wrong
all these years. Along Came A Spider brings back the fetish in full
force: the entire album is a mini-rock-opera about a serial killer who — imagine
that — is busy collecting eight human legs in order to construct his personal
spider, leaving the rest of the bodies behind wrapped in silk cocoons. His
only mistake is falling in love with his last victim — justice, after all, must
triumph. (He even repents in the end — a good Christian like Alice must
always leave his heros at least a theoretical chance of "Salvation").
The bad news, therefore, is that the overall
style of the record, out of all of Cooper's past output, is most closely
reminiscent of the campiness of Constrictor. The good news is that Alice
is not toying with commercialism this time around, and is neither intentionally
dumbing down his lyrics to appeal to the scum of the earth, nor calling upon
the most clichéd musical arrangements in existence to «fit the times».
He has once again changed his working partners, to be sure, replacing long-term
partner Ryan Roxie with guitarists Danny Saber and Greg Hampton, but they fit
Ryan's shoes pretty well, so the transition will not be painful for anyone. And
these guys help him write decent songs, too — a collective Kane Roberts they
are not.
The overall sound is more or less what we would
expect based on past observations: heavy and crunchy, but not industrial-brutal
crunchy à la Brutal Planet — surprisingly, this may be the
closest Alice has ever come to capturing the classic grunge sound: metallic
sound tones applied to punkish guitar riffs. He has not asked us if we really want
to hear the classic grunge sound all over again, but it does agree with the concept:
setting it to the old hair metal style would be just as ridiculous as setting
it to the garage riffs of The Eyes.
None of the songs will probably become
classics, considering that their primary way of working is as part of the
concept. Alice has not even taken them along for the supporting tour (!), with
the exception of 'Vengeance Is Mine', either because, deep down inside, he had
a feeling they really sucked, or because he did not think performing them
individually would make much sense. (The latter consideration, mind you, never
stopped him from staging the freshly released Welcome To My Nightmare in
its glorious entirety back in 1975). My feelings exactly: individually, the
songs are no great shakes, but together, they work. For B-movie fans, that is.
There is plenty of exciting Cooper-worthy moments,
however, scattered around. The opening funk-metal riff of 'I Know Where You
Live'. The hooting harmonica on 'Wake The Dead' (where Alice is joined by Ozzy
on the vocals, but you wouldn't get it without the liner notes). One more
outburst of believable Lennonesque sentimentality on the chorus of 'Killed By
Love'. The unexpected piano opening of 'Salvation'. These are just a few
occurrences that make the record musically interesting. If only they were
matched by solid riffs and choruses throughout — but they are not. The riffs
are «healthy» — they growl, roar, and threaten in all seriousness — but not
really «solid». The emphasis is clearly on the storyline, not on the music; too
bad, because some time in the past Alice made us believe that he was
capable of keeping one eye on the concept and the other one always fixed on the
hooks.
And, coming back to where we started, what sort
of concept is this, really? Yes, I realize perfectly well that, in our modern
world, one can express a far more unique and profound artistic interpretation
of one's surroundings through a concept album about a serial killer who wraps
his victims in silk webs than one about the abstract vices and shortcomings of
the planet in general. But, for all of Alice Cooper's genius, he is no Umberto
Eco, and Along Came A Spider is no Name Of The Rose. Heck, it is
even no M or Silence Of The Lambs. It is what it is: a suitably
adequate tribute to second-rate horror movies. Perhaps, in the long run, we
should be glad that Alice got it out of his system; he must have been waiting a
long, long time to do that. Now that he did do it, it is time to get
back to bigger and better things. And yet — still a thumbs
up, because as a soundtrack to a second-rate horror movie, it works
as best as it can. Plus, even though I do not watch a lot of second-rate (or
even first-rate, for that matter) horror movies, it is sort of uncool to say
they stink, and frequently garners the humiliating response of «go back to your
Julia Roberts, you cog», so if you wanna propagate Along Came A Spider
as the greatest piece of work to grace the Noughties, I am not going to be so
stupid as to argue.
WELCOME 2 MY
NIGHTMARE (2011)
1) I Am Made Of You; 2) Caffeine;
3) The Nightmare Returns; 4) A Runaway Train; 5) Last Man On Earth; 6) The
Congregation; 7) I'll Bite Your Face Off; 8) Disco Bloodbath Boogie Fever;
9) Ghouls Gone Wild; 10) Something To Remember Me By; 11) When Hell
Comes Home; 12) What Baby Wants; 13) I Gotta Get Outta Here; 14)
The Underture.
Sequels that try to catch up with the original
thirty-five years later cannot work effectively — there must be some
mathematical law out there to prove that, but I’ll take it on pure intuitive
trust for the moment. Let us refresh our memories: in 1975, Alice was all but
injecting one last breath into the dying lungs of «glam» rock, hybridizing it
with vaudeville and Vegas, much to the disgust of some fans, but much to the
delight of others. Under all of its glitz and camp, Welcome To My Nightmare had a purpose — it offered fresh, sizzling
sensations with strategically placed drops of intelligence (so that for each
ʽCold Ethylʼ and ʽBlack Widowʼ you got yourself a
ʽDepartment Of Youthʼ or an ʽOnly Women Bleedʼ).
Compared against that landmark, the
predictably, but uncomfortably titled sequel Welcome 2 My Nightmare (for one thing, you can’t even express the
difference in spoken words, only graphically) is an inevitable flop. It has
only one advantage: SCOPE. What began as a light nostalgic collaboration
between Alice and Bob Ezrin somehow managed to evolve into a sprawling,
mega-ambitious project involving a whole army of people. Even if all of these
songs sucked from beginning to end, it would still be worth at least one
listen just to see all these guys assembled in one place. The three original
Cooperites (Michael Bruce, Dennis Dunaway, and Neal Smith) collaborating on
three of the numbers. Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, the Coop’s guitar god saviours
of the late 1970s, on a couple others. Desmond Child, the malicious hero of Trash, co-writing the lead-in track.
Good old pal Rob Zombie adding backing vocals on another one. And that is just
the beginning of the list. It must have taken lots of energy to simply get all these
people to participate — let alone shuffle their contributions into some sort of
coherent mix.
But is
there a coherent mix? The question might be moot, since, at his most inspired,
the Coop was always about eclecticism and unpredictability. The presence of a
«heavy guitar rock» sound is, by and large, the only glue that holds most of
this material together (and even then there are exceptions — ʽLast Man On
Earthʼ is an attempt to work within the Kurt Weill / Tom Waits idiom),
but the original Alice Cooper band members certainly do not play the same way
as Hunter and Wagner, let alone «modern» guitar players. From the industrial
metal echoes of Brutal Planet to
the neo-punk crunch of The Eyes Of Alice
Cooper to the glam metal days of Trash
to the MTV-friendly bowtie-guitars of ʽWhat Baby Wantsʼ, we have
everything.
Concept? Well, was there really a concept behind the original Nightmare, other than just offering a general framework within
which the man could worship his fetishes and poke fun at society’s vices?
From that point of view, the sequel works just as well. There are songs about
ghouls, devil women, and disco dancing in hell, yet there are also songs about
mechanical world evils, child abuse, life in the fast lane etc.: quite a
workable mix if you know how to work it.
But the album still does not work as an album;
it never becomes bigger than the sum of its parts, which is further exacerbated
by the fact that, since there are so many different parts, quite a few of them
sum together in the negative. The standard culprit, for instance, is ‘What Baby
Wants’, a collaboration with a weird by-product of today’s pop culture called
Ke$ha (supposedly, on the next sequel we will be seeing Justin Bieber take on
the role of Steven). Some folks naturally suggested «big bucks» and «getting
hip with the youngsters», but they are missing the point here: the former may
work for Elton John and the latter for Mick Jagger, but the Coop is a seasoned
joker, and bringing in the latest shit-hip-pop-sensation is this season’s idea
of a joke. If only the song itself had more to it than its insanely annoyingly
catchy two-bit chorus, it might even have been a successful joke. But it
doesn’t, so it wasn’t.
Other misfires include: (a) heavy use of
auto-tune on ‘I Am Made Of You’, employed as a purely artistic device, of
course (God save us from living to see the day when Alice starts needing auto-tune!), but still as utterly ugly
as every other bit of auto-tune on the planet — and the song itself is one of
Desmond Child’s least convincing contributions to Cooper’s legacy; (b) the lack
of either humor or interesting
musical ideas in ‘Disco Bloodbath Boogie Fever’, a song that tries to go for
the same sort of vibe as the dance-oriented tracks on Goes To Hell, but add a little techno flavor to the soup — the
effect is confusing, and the message seems misguided (a guy as smart as Alice
should not, I think, try to write songs that attempt to make fun of Boney M and the modern dance scene at the same
time); (c) the big obligatory ballad, ʽSomething To Remember Me Byʼ:
even if it was announced as an old song, originally written by Alice and Dick
Wagner in the late 1970s, it does not have the «grit» of ‘Only Women Bleed’,
nor the pretty hooks of ‘I Never Cry’, nor even the simplistic sentimentality
of ‘You And Me’ — and, furthermore, it is almost arranged as a power ballad;
cutting down on some of that guitar pomp might help.
On the winning side, there is still ‘When Hell
Comes Home’, a song that returns us to the already well-exploited topic of
dysfunctional families, but with the aid of one of the meanest, darkest riffs
in Cooper history; and the galloping rock’n’roll of ‘A Runaway Train’ (which is
the only track here that does indeed bear a strong resemblance to the «Alice Cooper
Band» era). (The third track written and recorded with the old pals is ‘I’ll
Bite Your Face Off’; a far less interesting proposition, built on generic
blues-rock chord sequences and sounding like, er, well, pretty much like The
Rolling Stones on A Bigger Bang,
which should be telling). ʽLast Man On Earth’ is a fairly funny Tom Waits
imitation, and ‘The Congregation’ does indeed sound a little Beatlesque, as
Alice himself claimed, but mostly due to his singing the melody in a
Lennon-like style.
So, on the whole, there is a lot to learn about
Welcome 2 My Nightmare and quite a
few things to enjoy about it, but as an album
it is still an embarrassment, unfortunately, making it Alice’s second
embarrassment in a row, and this time, I cannot even overcome myself and
explicitly give it a thumbs up — creating the illusion that it, in any way,
might rival Welcome 1. (And if you
are not a fan of that one, don’t even
fantasize about getting this one).
What should have been done, under the
circumstances, was to dispatch the idea of a «sequel» altogether, and simply
profit from the presence of so many old-time pals by having them write better
songs. Come to think of it, neither Bruce, nor Dunnaway, nor even Desmond
Child had anything to do with the original Nightmare
— why saddle them with unnecessary responsibility for the «sequel»?
(Fortunately, in theory only: their songs are the least 1975-ish on the
album).
In other words, Alice keeps balancing on the
fringes: after a decade-long genuine «comeback», he goes back to being happy
about playing the fool for playing the fool’s sake, regardless of how many
repulsive lapses of taste this attitude is bringing along. Too bad, because
even at this well-advanced age, I believe, he still may have one or two Brutal Planets inside him, and if that
is right, why waste that age with ridiculous «sequels»? Just to remind us one
more time how all values are relative, and how one man’s «lapse of taste» is
another one’s «challenge to taste»?
PS. ʽThe Undertureʼ, masterminded by
Ezrin, is a decent enough potpourri arrangement, but if its chief message is in
persuading us to accept the blood brotherhood of Welcome 1 and Welcome 2,
it is wasted on me at least. And I genuinely hope that «Steven» has finally
made his last appearance on this record. Imagine McCartney sticking with
Sergeant Pepper for the next thirty years of his career — as an evil running
gag of sorts.
ADDENDA:
THE LIFE AND
CRIMES OF ALICE COOPER (1999)
CD I: 1) Don't Blow Your Mind;
2) Hitch Hike; 3) Why Don't You Love Me; 4) Lay Down And Die, Goodbye; 5)
Nobody Likes Me; 6) Levity Ball (studio version); 7) Reflected; 8) Mr And
Misdemeanour; 9) Refrigerator Heaven; 10) Caught In A Dream (single version);
11) I'm Eighteen; 12) Is It My Body; 13) Ballad Of Dwight Fry; 14) Under My
Wheels; 15) Be My Lover; 16) Desperado; 17) Dead Babies; 18) Killer; 19) Call
It Evil; 20) Gutter Cat Vs. The
Jets; 21) School's Out; CD II: 1) Hello Hooray; 2) Elected (single version); 3)
Billion Dollar Babies; 4) No More Mr Nice Guy; 5) I Love The Dead; 6) Slick
Black Limousine; 7) Respect For The Sleepers; 8) Muscle Of Love; 9) Teenage
Lament '74; 10) Working Up A Sweat; 11) Man With The Golden Gun; 12) I'm Flash;
13) Space Pirates; 14) Welcome To My Nightmare (single version); 15) Only Women
Bleed (single version); 16) Cold Ethyl; 17) Department Of Youth; 18) Escape;
19) I Never Cry; 20) Go To Hell; CD III: 1) It's Hot Tonight; 2) You And Me
(single version); 3) I Miss You; 4) No More Time For Tears; 5) Because; 6) From
The Inside (single version); 7) How You Gonna See Me Now; 8) Serious; 9) No
Tricks; 10) Road Rats; 11) Clones (We're All); 12) Pain; 13) Who Do You Think
We Are (single version); 14) Look At You Over There Ripping The Sawdust From My
Teddy Bear; 15) For Britain Only; 16) I Am The Future (single version); 17)
Tag, You're It; 18) Former Lee Warmer; 19) I Love America; 20) Identity
Crisises; 21) See Me In The Mirror; 22) Hard Rock Summer; CD IV: 1) He's Back
(demo version); 2) He's Back (The Man Behind The Mask); 3) Teenage
Frankenstein; 4) Freedom; 5) Prince Of Darkness; 6) Under My Wheels; 7) I Got A
Line On You; 8) Poison; 9) Trash; 10) Only My Heart Talking; 11) Hey Stoopid
(single version); 12) Feed My Frankenstein; 13) Fire; 14) Lost In America; 15)
It's Me; 16) Hands Of Death; 17) Is Anyone Home; 18) Stolen Prayer.
Release of monstruous, multi-CD box sets for artists whose creative
careers still go on is an ethically questionable business. How can you call
something The Life Of... when the life in question is far from over?
Since the day this boxset came into existence and up to the time when this review
has been written, Alice has released no less than five additional studio
albums, and a sixth one is reportedly in the works. So, who will really need The
Life Of... ten years from now, apart from curio collectors? No doubt, it
will be superseded at some point by an even fatter, an even more gruesome, and,
perhaps, even more senseless collection.
So let us take this review as simply an excuse for a few scattered
general and particular remarks. First, Vincent Furnier, even discounting the
last decade, has indeed had a long, unpredictable, thrilling, and wobbling
career. Perhaps it does take the space of four CDs to prove that, and the
selections are well-planned, placing slightly more emphasis on the Alice Cooper
Band period than his solo career — reasonably so — but still careful enough to
track down fine selections from each and every one of his records, even the
ones that were decidedly uncommercial. (I do take offense at the slighting of
Special Forces, Zipper Catches Skin, and Dada, though).
Second, unlike Bob Dylan, Vincent Furnier does not have a ton of
concealed goody-goodies for future generations to uncover and delight in. Rarities
and previously unreleased material that are included contain a few tasty bits,
but no forgotten masterpieces. I count three songs exactly — no more — that
really interest me as elegant pieces of art rather than curios/novelties. The
B-side 'No Tricks', from 1978, written and recorded in the confessional manner
of From The Inside, very much belongs on that album, and should count as one
of the four or five most intensely personal songs Alice ever dared to deliver
publicly.
The 1982 single 'For Britain Only' was, true to
its name, only released in the UK, and is a fine sharp stab at either Britain
or those who visit Britain, I have forgotten which, but I do remember it is as
hilarious as everything Alice did in those weird days of New Wave. (Two other
little-known tracks from that period, movie soundtrack contributions 'Identity
Crisis' and 'See Me In The Mirror', are only semi-decent, but at least show
that he was still writing bizarre material as late as 1984, so his conversion
to hair metal in 1986 must have been quite immediate).
And the 1991 cover of Jimi Hendrix's 'Fire',
while obviously inferior to the original in terms of music (those were the
hair metal years, remember?), yields a deli-salaciously sleazy vocal performance
— it fits in perfectly with Alice's dirty sexual escapades like 'I'm Your Gun'
or 'Snakebite', but the latter were written by corporate sleazebags, and the
former by you-know-who. 'Jimi's rolling over', the Coop sneers during the
coda, and he most certainly was, but I am pretty sure that, had the Coop
included more cover versions like these instead of third-rate outside material
from his delivery guys, Jimi wouldn't have minded rolling over a little
bit to uphold Alice's artistic reputation. For all of its campiness, this way
of doing 'Fire' is one of the few things that can, to an extent, redeem our
nostalgia for the days of The Big Frizz.
Outside that field, the goody-goodies are
mostly here to remind us that, apart from the Life side of Mr. Alice, he
also had his Crime side — and by that, we do not mean his anti-social
stage personality, but rather true crimes, subject to capital
punishment, such as:
—
the agreement
to participate in the farce of the Sgt. Pepper movie (a memento of which
is left in the form of his strange cover of 'Because');
—
the silly
early days when The Alice Cooper Band were supposed to be The Spiders, but in
reality tried to be lame clones of the questionable facets of The Rolling
Stones by covering the likes of Marvin Gaye's 'Hitch Hike';
—
the irritable
and malodorous love for B- and C-movie clichés, which led the man to
contribute corny Seventies' bubblegum rock to corny soundtracks for cornier,
completely forgotten flicks like Flash Fearless Versus The Zorg Women
('Space Pirates' is pure delirious idiocy);
—
the
unforgivable decision to include two alternate mixes of 'He's Back (The
Man Behind The Mask)' — both of which are superior to the final version, but
still not enough to make it into anything non-stinky;
—
the idea
to transform the monster original version of 'Road Rats' from Lace And
Whiskey into a whiny, wheezy, synth-heavy, smelly little gnome of a tune,
donate it to a movie with Meat Loaf in the title role, and then have the nerve
to include it on this boxset instead of the original.
That said, such was his life, and such were his
crimes, that the two are hard to separate from each other. At the very least,
here is a man that has definitely paid for his crimes many times over in his
lifetime — you could say that to every person who has ever wished him to hang
for unleashing the likes of Constrictor on humanity, he was happy to
donate a personal hanging. Or beheading. Or zapping. In the meantime, The
Life And Crimes Of Alice Cooper play out like a sensible, reasonable,
properly constructed re-enactment of all these things, even though there is
very little reason for anyone to waste money on this.
THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND (1969)
1) Don't Want You No More; 2)
It's Not My Cross To Bear; 3) Black Hearted Woman; 4) Trouble No More; 5) Every
Hungry Woman; 6) Dreams;
7) Whipping Post.
«Southern rock» is often described as having
started out with this album — brother Gregg Allman on keyboards and vocals,
brother Duane Allman on fabulous virtuoso guitar, brother Dickey Betts on
fabulous, but non-virtuoso second guitar, brother Berry Oakley on bass, brother
Jai Johanny Johanson on drums, and brother Butch Trucks also on drums, the two of them so well coordinated that most
people would never guess about their coexistence.
But «Southern rock» is also a term that does
serious injustice to the band. Whoever coined it back in the day was stupid
enough not to foresee the consequences — that the word «Southern» would rather
be associated with Dixie and, perhaps, the plantator's whip, rather than
something remotely intelligent and humanistic in nature. The Allman Brothers
did come up with a seriously new type of music, but nothing about their
synthesis makes it so goddamn inherently «Southern», except for the
indisputable fact that most of the band members came from the South (with the
sole exception of Oakley, born and raised in Chicago).
On first sight and sound, The Allman Brothers Band is merely another blues-rock album from a
fresh team of American musicians, following in the steps of Paul Butterfield,
Canned Heat, and the like; the fact that most of the material is original,
generally written by Gregg Allman, is hardly all that significant, since both
his melodies and lyrics rarely rise above slightly individualistic variations
on common blues patterns. This may explain why the world was a bit slow to
catch on to this new development — the record sold poorly, and it took the
band's blistering (but also gruelling) tour schedule to patch it up.
On second
sight and sound, The Allman Brothers
Band tears Paul Butterfield and Canned Heat to shreds, scattering them
along the road as pretty historical curios. These guys' purpose was not simply
to pay tribute to their adored Delta and Chicago heroes, or to show off their
naïve adoration for dangerous-sounding, voodoo-laden music of the past.
As the instrumental introduction, 'Don't Want You No More', explodes out of
your speakers without warning, it becomes obvious that the Allmans had been
attentively listening to Cream and Hendrix at least as much as, and probably
maybe more than, Elmore James and Otis Rush. Further down along the line, it
becomes transparent that they were quite deeply interested in various forms of
jazz from all over the last two decades. And, once you reach 'Dreams', it is
crystal clear that they were all ears when it came to the psychedelic sounds
emanating from San Francisco.
Another aspect of it, lost over time, is that
in 1969, for an American rock band that did not specifically target itself for
cult «proto-punkish» or «proto-metallic» audiences, the album was jarringly,
abysmally loud and heavy. The big drum sound, the two overdriven guitars
battling with each other at top volume, amplifying techniques that really owed
far more to the fat, overwhelming sound of Hendrix than the thin, lonesome
wailing of the Byrds or Buffalo Springfield — if this was blues-rock, no one in
America really played blues-rock in such a defiant manner back in 1969. (With,
perhaps, the lone exception of Grand Funk Railroad, who released their first
record a couple months prior to the Allmans — not that GFR, even at their best,
possessed one fifth of the dexterity and intelligence of the brothers). Today,
of course, it's the norm rather than the exception, and way too many «Southern
rock» bands have turned that loudness into dumb, empty, and sometimes offensive
pomp; but even today, it does not take much to clearly draw the line between
The Allman Brothers Band and, say, Black Oak Arkansas.
At the heart of The Allman Brothers Band is brother Gregg, twenty-two years old at
the time but blessed with the ability to come across — convincingly — as a
fifty-two years old, belting out heartbroken tunes about waves upon waves of
soulless bitches who continuously let him down in the good old blues tradition.
However, it takes the collective vision of the band to turn his relatively
simple melodies into compositions of epic proportion: sometimes by turning them
into spectacular riff-fests ('Black Hearted Woman', with more memorable guitar
lines to it than a single generic blues-rock LP will ever hold), sometimes by
imbuing them with jampower ('Dreams', which does perfect justice to the title
as it is extended to seven minutes' length through a long, unpredictable,
impressionistic guitar solo that could put Jerry Garcia to shame), sometimes
simply through a series of build-ups and calm-downs and more build-ups that
convey all the pain in the world ('Whippin' Post', probably the most well-known
tune from the album, and understandably so — the joint agony of Gregg singing
"Sometimes I feel like I've been tied to the whipping post, good Lord I
feel like I'm dying" and the band imitating his feelings is one of the
most unforgettable moments in blues-rock history indeed).
The album takes itself dead serious. There are
no lightweight boogie pieces, no humoristic aspect at all; song after song,
Gregg rips apart all of the shirts in his wardrobe and scoops out all of the ashes
in his fireplace. This is the blues completely shucked off of its
«ladies-and-gentlemen entertainment» husk, elevated to bombastic, tragical
levels of Wagnerian opera — these guys were no purists, they came there to make
«high art» out of the legacy of Robert Johnson. Some may find this a priori
annoying; if prog-rockers were so cruelly castigated by the establishment for
violating the spirit of rock'n'roll, I see no reason why the Allmans couldn't
be «tied to the whipping post» for pretentiously tampering with the spirit of
the blues. But in the end, it's all bullshit: just as Emerson, Lake &
Palmer were doing their thang on one end of the spectrum, the Allmans did their
hyperbolic show on the other one, and both excelled at it.
In a certain way, the band's debut has never
been bested — subsequent albums would be more complex, diverse, and
experimental from a «purely» musical point of view, but The Allman Brothers Band, all seven songs of it, each one a small
masterpiece in its own rights, provides a complete, convincing, and accessible
explanation of why God really put these six people in the same place, an
explanation that has no need whatsoever to be repeated or rephrased. Oh, and
haven't I mentioned yet that this record kicks major ass? Thumbs up.
IDLEWILD SOUTH (1970)
1) Revival; 2) Don't Keep Me Wonderin';
3) Midnight Rider; 4) In
Memory Of Elizabeth Reed; 5) Hoochie Coochie Man; 6) Please Call Home; 7)
Leave My Blues At Home.
Idlewild
South, the Allman Brothers'
second and last Duane-era studio album, is anything but the proverbial
«sophomore slump» — and yet, at the same time, it is hard to quench the feeling
that, for some reason, the band was consciously trying to slightly calm down
the raging spirits that dominated their first LP. Often hailed as the masterpiece, not just of the first
stage of their career, but of all stages, it most probably gets that luck
because it happened to put the Allmans on the commercial map — with 'Revival'
and, a little later and mostly through other people's covers, 'Midnight Rider'
— as well as hosting the band's most famous instrumental number. But on the
overall scale, it is not quite as consistent.
In subtle contrast with the loud, bombastic,
and daring debut, Idlewild South is
really much more reminiscent of the generic image of «Southern rock». In
particular, the country influence is felt quite acutely, e. g. on Gregg's
rather formulaic ballad 'Please Call Home', which contains as much
tormented-soul as that guy is capable of dispersing over four minutes — but
that fact alone does not make it all too different from miriads of
similar-sounding tunes that the deep South has produced since then, and not
even brother Duane's tender accompaniment can salvage it.
The optimistic interpretation is that the
Allmans are simply trying to broaden their scope: after all, loud, jarring
blues-rock did occupy something like 80% of their last record, and with a
little extra country and a little extra gospel influence, they now have a
better chance to compete for that «all-Americana» slot recently invented by The
Band. It is no fluke that Dickey Betts' 'Revival' had been chosen as the album
opener. 'Don't Want You No More', with its immediate crash-boom-bang, was
announcing the arrival of a new type of power. 'Revival' cuts down on the power
aspect, letting us know that it is really tradition
that these guys cherish more than brute force. Well... I'm all for tempering
brute force with tradition, but do they have to rub it in so blatantly?
In short, it is not very uplifting to see a
great band swap the experimental psychedelia of 'Dreams' for predictable rootsy
country/gospel sounds, no matter how close those sounds are to their hearts.
With an overall running length of 30 minutes, even one so-so song turns out to
be fairly detrimental to the added effect, and here there are at least two or
three so-so songs. Fortunately, the «so-so» does not apply to 'Midnight Rider',
immortalized through its simplistic, but unforgettable acoustic riff and a
little bit of Southern mysticism in the lyrics — beautiful tune, even if it
never catches as much fire as its thematic follow-up three years later,
'Ramblin' Man' (which I have always thought of as Dickey Betts' «response» to
Gregg Allman's «call»).
And, of course, there is plenty of the same
stuff here that made The Allman Brothers
Band so great. The pompous reinvention of 'Hoochie Coochie Man', with
bassist Berry Oakley taking lead and all sorts of riff-a-licious embellishments
thrown in. The roaring finale of 'Leave My Blues At Home', with Betts and Duane
trading rapid-fire licks and the two drummers finally letting us know why the
heck there are two drummers in the
band. The sweaty swampy harmonica playing from common guest Thom Doucette on
'Don't Keep Me Wondering'. They all count.
But the unquestionable magnum opus — one that would go on to become magnissimum in concert — is Dickey Betts' unpredictable ode to an
unknown woman's grave, one that has forever immortalized the simple name of
Elizabeth Reed, whoever she was. Instrumental compositions modelled after the
jazz pattern (theme, collective / individual improvisation, back to theme) were
no longer news on rock albums by 1970, yet few of them, if any, had managed to
capture the listeners' spirits so intently as 'In Memory...', perhaps because
previous similar efforts usually came off more as technical experiments than
musical compositions with a spiritual purpose.
'In Memory...', on the other hand, is wonderful
exactly because its spiritual purpose is so firmly, but also humbly, engraved
on its sleeve. It starts out almost like a Santana number: moody, a tad
ominous, ever so slightly sad, then leads us through a series of signature
changes reflecting various states of the human soul, with imaginative soloing
from the two competing guitarists, a little less imaginative soloing from
Gregg's organ, and a mercifully brief, up-to-the-point of solo interplay from the
drummers. It is hardly «dazzling», but it is exactly its lack of dazzle that
makes it so respectable: after all, if you name your song in memory of a
deceased person, it does not make sense to use it as a pretext for firing on
all your guns — somehow, you have to channel your talents into respectful
servitude for the roaming spirits, and 'In Memory...' succeeds admirably at
that. In fact, this relatively sparse studio version may be more likable than
its drawn-out live counterparts, where the «show-off» element would inevitably
come through.
So, despite the fact that lamentable «Southern
rock» clichés show through much more explicitly this time around, Idlewild South is still an indisputable
classic, with the strengths not just outweighing the weaknesses, but almost
obliterating them. And, in order to appreciate it, one does not even need to
subscribe to the conventional «Dead Hero Legend»: Duane Allman, whether you
worship the guy or consider him overrated, is only one of the many significant
attractions on this record, whose status would be well deserved even if he
hadn't played one note on it. Still fresh after all those years — thumbs up,
of course.
AT FILLMORE EAST (1971)
1) Statesboro Blues; 2) Done
Somebody Wrong; 3) Stormy Monday; 4) You Don't Love Me; 5) Hot 'Lanta; 6) In
Memory Of Elizabeth Reed; 7) Whipping Post.
Although this might easily be one of the five,
six, or ten greatest live albums ever, it is fairly hard to review it without
sounding like a dick. People who tear it down for the boringness of its
long-winded jams have a point — courtesy of Captain Obvious. People who praise
it, however, may just as well come across as art-brain-washed retards who'd
slobber over any piece of improvisation
as long as it crossed the ten-minute mark. Essentially, At Fillmore East is one of those perfect excuses for an argument
that keep life boiling — so let's argue.
There are several editions commemorating the
Allman Brothers' legendary performances at Bill Graham's Fillmore East on March
12-13, 1971; the 1992 version, The
Fillmore Concerts, in particular, is longer and more informative (and, of
course, even more excruciating for jam-haters), but since much of its
additional material comes from Eat A
Peach anyway, in this review I am sticking to the original double-LP. A
double LP, that is, that barely manages to pack seven numbers in its
eighty-minute running time. Whoo!
First, let us mark that The Allmans never came
across as stage perfectionists. In the studio, mistakes were banned, and
creativity was always controlled with the highest amount of polish; on stage,
the atmosphere was loosened, and if you want really tight, blameless versions
of 'Elizabeth Reed' or 'Whipping Post', my advice is to stick firmly to the
studio originals. (This is in stark contrast to Lynyrd Skynyrd, for example,
who always exercised at least as much as discipline on stage as they did in the
studio — not that it makes any sense to hang out the «good» and «bad» labels on
this).
This puts the band straight into the «spiritual
improvisers» camp: the emphasis is on picking up small strands of vibes right
here and now, out of thin air, rather than on reproducing the pre-existing
vibes synthesized during studio hours. Stage jamming was, of course, nothing
new by the time 1971 rolled along: every respectable live band that pretended
to go beyond mere cheap entertainment had to engage in it. And at first, it is
easy to take the extended duelling of Duane and Dickey for just another in a
long, long series of similar examples, brushing it away with a «oh no, not
another infinitesimal jam band» attitude. I mean — holy crap! — 'Whippin' Post'
drags on for over twenty minutes! ('Mountain Jam' could easily spill over forty).
Overkill.
But, in fact, these jams are quite different.
Now, the band's style is obviously influenced by such jamming traditions as,
let us name them arbitrarily, the «Airplane way» and the «Cream way» (both of
which, in turn, owe a lot to free-form jazz, but let us not get carried too far
away). The former emphasizes psychedelia — the player is actually possessed by
a pink elephant while plucking the strings — where the latter emphasizes
technique, complexity, and elite-ness — the player is on a mission to bring
intellectual respect to the guitar-bass-drums combo. Then there is also a
third tradition, the «Who way» of doing it, which essentially says: «You can do
whatever you want and for however long you want to do it as long as it kicks
ass». It's a pretty rare tradition, actually, but it does exist.
As I sit here, listening to Dickey Betts wail
away on 'Whippin' Post', it somehow looks like the Allmans, back in those good
old days, did not quite fit in with any of the three traditions. There are
occasional elements of psychedelia, when the pink elephants break away from the
pen (as in the coda to 'You Don't Love Me', or the «chaotic» mid-section of
'Post'). There is obvious attention to technique, emanating mostly from Duane,
but seriously infecting the other band members as well. And much, if not most,
of it rocks quite aggressively. But none of this spells oh so clearly: «We're
here to (a) open, blow, and forever change your minds; (b) show you how badass
the vector geometry of our fingers is; (c) rock your pathetic asses to high
heaven».
If anything, for me, it spells: «Say, why do
all these good old songs really need to be three minutes long? Isn't it a
shame? Why worship this stupid confinement to a particular time length? Let us
just allow them to roll on for as long as might seem reasonable». There is
really no mission here, no deep meaning underlying this need to jam. It's just
a — why not? We can do it, so why not? If we couldn't do it — if there weren't
so many of us, if we weren't all highly committed, well trained musicians —
that'd be another thing. But as it now stands, what's wrong with it?
Indeed, I used to get bored a lot with the
twenty-two minutes of 'Whippin' Post' — before I ended up understanding that I wanted to get bored with it, just
because it was so long. But it is not as if this were some sort of ambient
landscape: each minute of its instrumental sections is seriously different.
First, you have Duane's scorching solo, all unpredictable jumps from behind
corners. Second, you have Betts, more disciplined and rhythmic in his approach.
Then you have the odd chaos section, with each of the guitarists taking turns
to pull the band over to his side for some avantgarde trick or other. Then you
have the second chaos section, where
they even pull out a bit from 'Frère Jacques' (why not? anything goes).
It's an exciting, intriguing musical journey — yes, it could have been shorter,
but what are you, catching a train or something? (And, by the way, in
headphones it makes for some great
train voyage accompaniment).
It goes without saying that the same logic
applies to the extended version of 'In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed', and to the
twenty-minute take on 'You Don't Love Me', which grows out of its initial
rip-roaring blues-rocker mode (featuring the most memorable organ riff of Gregg
Allman's career) into an unwarranted celebration of all sorts of bluesy
modalities. It never really feels as if these guys were playing these
twenty-minute jams because they were expected to play twenty-minute jams —
they just felt like it.
For what it's worth, far from every song
develops into such a mammoth: 'Statesboro Blues' is gorgeous blues-rock at its
most economical, Elmore James' 'Done Somebody Wrong' jumps around for less
than five minutes, the instrumental 'Hot 'Lanta' explores its main melancholic
theme reasonably briefly, and only 'Stormy Monday' takes longer than it should,
mainly because it is taken, in a traditional manner, in an ultra-slow tempo.
For these numbers, the band did not
feel any desire to expand them, and it is easy to see why: all except 'Lanta'
are traditional, and fairly generic, compositions that do not provide much
incentive for the flight of the mind — unlike, say, the multi-part original
structure of 'Elizabeth Reed', or the 11/4 tempo of 'Whippin' Post'.
Also, I would not go as far as the exclusive beatification
of Duane Allman, sponsored by motorcycle manufacturers, but this is
probably the best spot, along with his work on Layla, on which one could lay the temple foundation. Sharp, crisp,
fluent leads with a proper combination of technique (Duane was a big Coltrane
fan) and emotion (did I say that Duane was a big Coltrane fan?) and just a
small, reasonable addition of «show-off-ey» flash to make his thang more blood-boiling
than Clapton's contemporary efforts — plus, serving as a magnificent catalyst
for his pals who, ever since 1971, had always struggled with finding the same
kind of ignition (Wipe The Windows
from 1976 shows this fairly well). If these leads are «boring», then so is
improvisation as a whole, jazz and classical forms of music included — indeed,
dare I say that if you do not «get» the improvised parts of Fillmore East, some of the least
strained and self-conscious musical waves ever captured on tape, stick instead
to your...
...All right, we got carried away. Thumbs up,
particularly from the heart department, because the brain department usually
endorses elegant formulae, and At
Fillmore East, despite usually, and justifiedly, classified into the
«roots-rock» stock, captures a glorious moment in musical history when
roots-rock was about to shed its formula and advance to boundless, completely
unencumbered free-flight mode. Cut short, unfortunately, with Duane's crash on
October 29 same year.
EAT A PEACH (1972)
1) Ain't Wastin' Time No More;
2) Les Brers In A Minor; 3) Melissa; 4) Mountain Jam; 5) One Way Out; 6) Trouble No
More; 7) Stand Back; 8) Blue Sky; 9) Little Martha.
Duane's sudden passing pretty much ended the
Allmans' hopes of conquering the world. He may not have been God, but he had a
far broader vision than any of the remaining band members: neither brother Gregg
nor chief competitor Betts saw any dire necessity in breaking out of the «Southern»
mold, and although both were capable of continuing to make good music, no
longer would it try to be transcendental. Perhaps God was afraid of Duane, after all, requisiting him for his own barroom
band with Jimi on first guitar.
In the meantime, though, the «Allman Brothers
Band» (I am sure they had their reasons for continuing to use that name) still
had enough material left to shape out a proper swan song for their original
incarnation. This included, for one thing, plenty of live leftovers from the
Fillmore concerts; for another, some session work done in September 1971 with
Duane still alive at the Criteria Studios in Miami. Padding it out with a few
tracks recorded post-Duane (but which could still bear his serious influence),
the Allmans came out with another absolute winner in all respects — starting
with the appetizing album sleeve and the title, stemming from Duane's famously friendly-cynical
remark of «There ain't no revolution, it's evolution, but every time I'm in
Georgia I eat a peach for peace».
The Fillmore outtakes can be problematic, for
sure. Few people have any problems with 'One Way Out', a fast blues-rocker in
the vein of 'You Don't Love Me', or with the grinding version of 'Trouble No
More' that fully stands up against its studio counterpart, but it may be a
different story with 'Mountain Jam', an improvisatory piece so long that it
took a whoppin' two LP sides to fit
it in (originally — the second and the fourth, but the CD version naturally
reinstated the correct playing sequence).
Essentially, everything I said in the earlier
review about the Allmans' improvisational principles holds out for 'Mountain
Jam' as well. In order to appreciate it better, it may be a good idea to listen
to Donovan's hit single 'There Is A Mountain' first — one of those will-o-wispy
rose-coloured flute-based hippie fantasies the mid-Sixties were so easy to
deride for, but the Allmans latch on to it and expand its childishly optimistic
spark into a full-fledged joyful celebration: thirty-three minutes of pure
musical happiness. Obviously, some of the lead work gets recycled, and the
obligatory drum solo is obligatorily tedious (although the Allmans at least
have two drummers going on at the same time, which makes things slightly more
interesting), but this is not simply aimless jamming for the sake of killing
time — this is the brothers' way of explaining about peace and love, it simply
takes time to say everything they want to say about it.
However, it is hardly incidental that Eat A Peach opens with the Duane-less
material: as much as it is a tribute to their fallen friend, it also indicates
clearly that the band has no intention of stopping. Betts' 'Les Brers In A Minor',
in particular, is a complex, intelligent instrumental that, unfortunately,
could not be matched by anything similar for the rest of the decade: its
combination of a three-minute chaotic intro, a basic organ/guitar theme that
stands out as one of the band's catchiest melodies, and a jam section that
borrows far more from Santana than Southern rock, is still as fresh today as
ever.
Brother Gregg's compositions, the slide rocker 'Ain't
Wastin' Time No More' (which may sound like a hastily taken vow in the light
of brother Duane's misfortune, but was actually written before the accident),
and the country-folk ballad 'Melissa', are more in line with the formulaic
Southern stuff that was to dominate the band's sound after 1972, but both are
nevertheless first-rate, and Betts' ethereal guitar work on 'Melissa' defines
beauty.
The studio numbers with Duane are cunningly placed on side three — side four on
today's CD version — so that nobody could have the temptation to skip the
Duane-less tracks; only once you have come to terms with the idea that The
Allman Brothers can have a musical
future despite the illusory nature of the plural marker, you are permitted, as
a bonus, to taste the last taste of Duane's playing on such elegant numbers as
'Blue Sky', a rare example of an actual guitar duet between Duane and Dickey
(they usually avoided crossing their different styles at the same time), and
Duane's tiny acoustic flourish, 'Little Martha', a humbly fitting end to the
album.
There are times when I am close to believing
that this, indeed, is the moment where it all
comes together for the Allmans (especially since I have learned to fall under
the charm of 'Mountain Jam') — Eat A
Peach is as much an honorary tribute to Duane's memory as it is a promise
of a great artistic future, and for an album written under such a dark shadow,
it is almost like a pillar of optimism: with visions of heavenly bliss and calm
all over 'Melissa', 'Blue Sky', and 'Mountain Jam', ironically, it could almost
be inferred that the brothers, starting out in the utmost anguish and despair
with their self-titled album, have finally found the peace and love they were
only hinting at earlier. In reality, they found death — turmoil — confusion
— more death, with bassist Berry Oakley eerily suffering the same accident as
Duane one year later — more turmoil and pain — but little, if any, of that is
showing on Eat A Peach, as if this
concentration on inner peace and self-contention was their aggressive reply to
life. So it's not just enjoyable, it's also intriguing; and how often is
«Southern rock», good or bad, found to be intriguing? Rare enough to keep the
listener's thumbs
up all the way through.
BROTHERS AND SISTERS (1973)
1) Wasted Words; 2) Ramblin' Man; 3) Come And
Go Blues; 4) Jelly Jelly; 5) Southbound; 6) Jessica; 7) Pony Boy.
With the departure of Berry Oakley, whose bass
playing is rarely mentioned in greatest-ever lists but who was nevertheless
quite innovative, and a good foil for Duane, it became rather obvious that the
powers-on-high were quite seriously bent on having «The Allmans» tone down their
ambitions, put a stop to their experiments, and become a regular Southern rock
band. Brothers And Sisters saw them
coming to terms with their destiny. But still — what a band!
Of the two remaining founding fathers (if, true
to tradition, we omit the drummers), Dickey Betts was left as the major
motivating force; Gregg's contributions here involve writing two out of seven
songs, contributing vocals to two more, and mostly staying in the background
with his playing, as the role of primary keyboardist is ceded to newcomer
Chuck Leavell. And since Betts had been the «traditionalist» all along,
suitably complementing Duane's forward drive, an album dominated by his
presence can have no hope of harboring even a minor musical revolution.
Instead, the emphasis is on melody writing — and playing.
The key track is 'Ramblin' Man': if its
quintessentially Southern sound bugs your sophisticated urban ears, or if its
constant presence on classic rock radio has forever annihilated its potential
(one reason why no rational person should ever listen to classic rock radio), Brothers And Sisters as a whole will
hardly feel attractive. On the surface, it is a very, very generic song — exemplified
by its lyrics, which intentionally milk one bad cliché after another; I particularly
«like» the lines about "on my way to New Orleans this morning, leaving out
of Nashville, Tennessee". But there is some sort of magical ambiguity
concealed in its chorus, a hard-to-tell invisible hook, a subtle touch of
sorrow in the "When it comes to leaving..." line that raises it high
and above so many other generic Southern rock anthems.
And then, of course, it can be seriously argued
that the vocal part of the song as such is merely a prelude to the purely
instrumental second part — not a «coda», since it is almost as long as the
vocal section itself, but a brief symphonic bit, with guest guitarist Les Dudek
supporting Betts as he dumps the vocals and goes on celebrating the reckless
joys of livin' on the road by serenading them with shrill, jubilant, overdriven
phrasing, none of which is too complex, but each segment simply bursting with
emotion.
On 'Southbound', a fairly generic blues-rocker
given to Gregg for the singing, Dickey adopts an even shriller,
crisply-stinging tone, and transforms it from a forgettable piece of filler
into a virtual textbook on the art of making classic rock'n'roll into a feast
for the senses. His mid-part and coda solos on the song have all the
construction perfection — and thus, all the memorability — of an A-level John
Fogerty solo, but throw on a bit more complexity. None of the live recordings
of the tune that I've heard have managed to recapture or successfully reinvent
the smoothness of the original; I'm guessing that the man must have worked out
quite a sweat by the time he got that take just
right, but all the more respect for not allowing himself to be satisfied with
anything less than pure perfection. Honorary second prize goes to Leavell,
whose piano part manages to rock nearly as hard — clearly, his presence was
still enough to spur Dickey on to giving it his best, preserving the
«competition» angle that had been so important for the Duane years.
If the guitar solos on 'Southbound' easily make
my personal Top 50 or so for guitar solos, then 'Jessica' can easily qualify
for the Top 10 most unabashedly joyful songs ever produced by mortal man.
Written by Dickey for his newly-born daughter in the key of A major, of which
key Christian Schubart once said that it is most suitable for
"declarations of innocent love, youthful cheerfulness and trust in
God" — 'Jessica' exemplifies all three purposes, with major emphasis on
«innocent» (all cynics are required to log off now!): there is a certain unbeatable purity of feeling about this
simple, honest celebration of the miracle of birth.
As «cool» as it is to profess one's love for
the demanding, complex instrumental compositions of Thelonius Monk or Miles
Davis, and, in comparison, dismiss tunes like 'Jessica' for pandering to
simplistic tastes, I would never want to subscribe to that ideology. To me,
'Jessica' simply embodies every good quality that a meaningful pop music
instrumental could want: from professionalism and technicality to meaning and
emotion, not one second wasted on anything I do not «get» or «like». In terms
of complexity, 'Elizabeth Reed' may be the more enduring Betts classic, but its
mid-section is way too detached from the main theme — the song does begin like
a stern memorial service, but then quickly disconnects into awesome, yet unrelated
jamming. In comparison, all of 'Jessica' — the main theme, the little
repetitive bridge bit, Leavell's piano and Betts' guitar solos — is placed
along the same highway of delight, diverse enough in sonic texture so as to
never become boring, but never ever straining from its primary purpose.
Fabulous thing.
With these three classics, the rest of the
album could have been Osmonds' covers and it would still command a fine rating.
But there is still nothing to be ashamed of. Gregg's 'Wasted Words' is a
gritty, slide-dominated rocker that easily ranks alongside any of his Idlewild South originals; 'Come And Go
Blues' is a fine showcase for Leavell's flourish technique; 'Jelly Jelly' is a
bit overdrawn, but still culminates in a series of ear-splitting licks from
Dickey; and the acoustic country shuffle 'Pony Boy' is just a cute little
throwaway to end the album on a lighter, less breathtaking note after the
fireworks of 'Jessica'.
So Brothers
And Sisters does not make a point of straddling away from the conventions
of «roots rock», «Southern rock», «redneck rock», or whatever else one might be
predisposed to call it. But if only most
Southern rock had the same inspiration and talent with which the Allmans, in
1973, were able to assault these conventions, the world would have been one
step closer to the kind of paradise that is so vividly depicted on the sleeve
photos. It's pretty doggone sad that even for the Allmans, this paradise did
not manage to last long. Thumbs up — and yes, I am quite ready to go on
record with the opinion that this is the
Southern rock album if you are only going to get one Southern rock album. Beats
Skynyrd to pulp, and what other contenders are there?
WIN, LOSE OR DRAW (1975)
1) Can't Lose What You Never
Had; 2) Just Another Love Song; 3) Nevertheless; 4) Win, Lose Or Draw; 5)
Louisiana Lou And Three Card Monty John; 6) High Falls; 7) Sweet Mama.
With the Allmans now becoming a modest-power
hit machine, each new death of a band member only energizing and focusing the
remaining ones even further, nobody could have predicted in 1973 that Brothers And Sisters would be the last
undisputable jewel in the crown. But maybe I am exaggerating here. Maybe it
was, after all, predictable, that both Gregg and Dickey would end up quarrelling
with each other. That they would start releasing solo albums, and thus,
becoming less interested in pooling their «brother» talents. That two years of
bickering, booze, drugs, and Cher (whose tumultuous affair with Gregg still
remains one of the most absurd blips on the celebrity radar) would eat their
credibility from inside out.
But it is also possible that none of these
factors are truly responsible for the depressing effect that Win, Lose Or Draw can produce on
people. Perhaps it's just that, after Brothers
And Sisters, there was nowhere to go but down. No matter how weak the
follow-up is, it cannot be said that the band did not try. On the contrary, I
think Win, Lose Or Draw tries way too hard to simply give the people
what they want — another formulaic Allman Brothers Band™ record. Forgetting, in
the meantime, that none of the Allman Brothers' records, up to now, have ever
been made in strict accordance with formula.
The kicker is that almost every song on Brothers has its near-exact counterpart
on Win. The rock and soul sound of
'Wasted Words' is reprised on 'Can't Lose What You Never Had'; the reckless
country romance of 'Ramblin' Man' becomes 'Just Another Love Song' (albeit at a
slower, more balladeering tempo); 'Come And Go Blues' = 'Nevertheless' (languid
blues-rock). The instrumental world of 'Jessica' gets an overweight brother in
'High Falls', and the restrained exit music of 'Pony Boy' becomes the 12-bar
finale of 'Sweet Mama'.
«Companion albums» like these are not
necessarily a bad thing — think of such classic pairs as Aerosmith's Toys In The Attic vs. Rocks, or Queen's pair of Marx Bros.
tributes. But the band's creative members have to be on a roll to make it work,
and neither Gregg nor Betts were, so it seems, in the same spirits. Actually,
Gregg fares a little better; I am not a major lover of his dreamy
country-blues stuff, but the title track is as good a sample of it as any, and both
'Nevertheless' and 'Can't Lose What You Never Had' — the latter a drastic,
unrecognizable reinvention of an old Muddy Waters tune — are honest-to-goodness
midtempo rockers whose mission is to wallow in pain, and that they do. 'Can't
Lose' is, in all likelihood, the album's highlight, with its clever spiralling
duet-riffs from Betts and Leavell and some frantic bits of soloing from Dickey,
especially after the false ending where it seems like the man has been
unjustifiedly cut off just as he was really really beginning to get into it.
But then he never really does. 'Just Another
Love Song' is no 'Ramblin' Man', after all — just another piece of
indistinguishable hillbilly entertainment, of which you can find billions of at
least equal examples throughout the decade. And 'Louisiana Lou' is roots-rock
by the numbers, clichéd, boring, enlightened briefly by one of Leavell's
patented sprinkly piano solos, nothing else of interest. Betts' own guitar
playing is unexplainably hushed, over-restrained, hidden behind the drums and
pianos, and stripped of the crisp, piercing tones that did so much in the
adrenaline-raising department on Brothers.
The biggest disappointment, highly symbolic of
the band's breakdown, is 'High Falls'. Beginning with a two-minute atmospheric
series of rhythmless cascades — reminiscent of 'Les Brers In A Minor' — it
eventually becomes one of the band's jazziest compositions, yet its inevitable
inferiority to 'Dreams' and 'Elizabeth Reed', whose successor it vainly tries
to pass itself for, is blazing so
ardently that it is hard to «love» the thing in the same way that we reserve
for the Brothers' trailblazing instrumentals. The main theme is cutesy-pretty,
and both Leavell and Betts deliver technically decent solos, but there is no
big point to these solos.
Clocking in at fourteen and a half minutes,
'High Falls' is the longest instrumental they ever included on a studio record
— and something tells me that it only needed to be fourteen minutes long
because they must have been at a loss coming up with actual songs for the
record. A sharp contrast with 'Jessica', whose shorter solo passages managed to
convey far more emotion. For me at least, 'High Falls' only works as pleasant
background music, never even for a single moment rising sufficiently high above
the ground to take you with it. One can always argue, of course, that, where 'Jessica'
was supposed to represent the state of ecstatic, overflowing happiness, 'High
Falls' is supposed to be more contemplative, a calmer, but no less contented,
observation on the beauty and harmony of nature. Possibly so, but if I want
calm and contemplation, I go for my ambient Eno albums. The Allman Brothers
Band, on the other hand, came into this world kicking serious ass, and there is
little need for us to see them so «relaxed». There is nothing in 'High Falls'
that makes it superior to, say, an old Quicksilver Messenger Service jam.
Overall, Win,
Lose Or Draw lands somewhere near the «Draw» mark: it is not a bad
roots-rock album, but it is a
disgrace to the name of the Allmans, the first, but far from the last, clear
sign that the loss of Duane and Oakley did, after all, seriously undercut the
band's fortunes. A thumbs down rating would indicate that the album is
essentially worthless, which is not so — I believe that 'High Falls', despite
its shortcomings, is still well worth getting to know — but a thumbs up is
equally out of the question, since I do not want to convey the false impression
that it is in any way comparable with the band's golden/silver periods.
WIPE THE WINDOWS, CHECK THE OIL, DOLLAR GAS (1976)
1) Introduction by Bill
Graham; 2) Wasted Words; 3) Southbound; 4) Ramblin' Man; 5) In Memory Of
Elizabeth Reed; 6) Ain't Wastin' Time No More; 7) Come & Go Blues; 8)
Can't Lose What You Never Had; 9) Don't Want You No More; 10) It's Not My Cross
To Bear; 11) Jessica.
The band finally collapsed in 1976, mainly due
to Gregg's tribulations. Final straws included marriage with Cher and
testifying against the band's road manager and chief drug supplier Scooter
Herring; most of the band decided they would have nothing to do with a silly
playboy and a stool pigeon to boot,
and quit to form Sea Level, whereas Betts went on his solo way. The worst thing
was that they'd lost Chuck Leavell, once and for all; the band would never
again be able to boast that kind of powerful piano sound (and, as a keyboardist,
Gregg himself was never more than just adequate — he likes playing the Hammond,
for sure, but his technique and passion for it has always been the weak link
in the band's collective chemistry).
This double-LP live memento fulfills the
function of the obligatory rip-off on the part of the music industry: unable
to acquire further studio product, they decided to go with this rag-bag of recordings
culled from different venues over a three-year period, clumsily sewn together
as if to reenact a real live show, but with the tracks constantly fading in
and out, there is no such effect. Yet, as a memento of the band's immediate
post-Duane years, it works, and is well worth listening to from time to time.
Unfortunately, with Betts dominating the stage
now, the Allmans live have quickly transformed from the unpredictable jam
monster they used to be into a mere A-level Southern rock band, content with
faithfully reproducing their studio hits (and misses) for packs of new fans who
were happy to simply hear the hits. And it is easy to see why, by simply
comparing this album's lone jam number, 'Elizabeth Reed', with the older
version on Fillmore East: without
Duane and his imaginative stage explorations, there was no point. The man's
place on that track is now occupied by keyboardists — Leavell and Gregg — and
even Leavell seems to be playing his generic jazzy bits without supplying them
with meaning, let alone Allman who is not able of handling it at all. They
should have cut down the length here, instead of expanding it, and just allowed
Dickey his usual solo, which, of course, does not fail.
Everything else is just faithfully reproduced
standards from the band's three post-Duane albums; the only «oldie» on the
setlist is 'Don't Want You No More / It's Not My Cross To Bear' from the debut,
suffering from the lack of Duane, but still making their point. 'Southbound'
sounds murdered to my ears because of Betts' nonchalance (his playing here
relates to the original the same way a two-dollar penknife relates to a
Fairbairn-Sykes); somehow he only really comes to life in the end, perhaps
goaded by the unyielding perfection of Leavell's solo part. But he does much
better on 'Ramblin' Man' and 'Jessica', and as for 'Can't Lose What You Never
Had', I've always suspected that they used an alternate studio take — all of
the sound is so brilliantly polished that either it is all a fake, or, somehow,
somewhere, they did happen to be recorded on fire even during one of the
shakiest periods in their touring history.
In all, it is a good, carefully assembled
portrait of «The Allman Brothers, Mark II» that needs to be perceived as
nothing more and nothing less; no one ever seriously claimed that it would
aspire to the cosmic heights of Fillmore.
Apart from the butchered 'Southbound', the boring keyboard solos on 'Elizabeth
Reed', and the completely baffling album title (did the band even play any Chuck Berry songs in the first
place? What was that all about?), it's all decent. Thumbs up.
ENLIGHTENED ROGUES (1979)
1) Crazy Love; 2) Can't Take
It With You; 3) Pegasus; 4) Need Your Love So Bad; 5) Blind Love; 6) Try It One
More Time; 7) Just Ain't Easy; 8) Sail Away.
Leavell and Lamarr kept their promise, never
returning to Gregg's side. The cynics will certainly want to point out that the
two were just too pleased with their own free lives as bandleaders of Sea Level
to consider a reunion that would once again relegate them to the status of
sideplayers. On the other hand, Dickey Betts' latest solo album from 1978
stalled at #151 on the charts, quite a drop from #30 for its 1977 predecessor —
there was your strong incentive to bury the hatchet and rearm oneself with the
magic moniker of The Allman Brothers.
Recruiting David Goldflies on bass, Gregg and
Dickey managed to make peace with the dynamic drumming duo, and also decided to
return to the dual guitar lineup instead of continuing to rely on the piano.
However, the addition of Dan Toler on second axe by no means makes the
situation comparable to the golden days of Dickey/Duane. Most likely, Toler is responsible for some of the solo
passages on Enlightened Rogues, but
his style is so similar to Betts' that only a serious expert could tell the
difference, particularly since the emphasis is never placed on interplay between
the two guitarists (but neither was it the same way in the Dickey/Duane period,
when the two guitarists used to prefer competition over collaboration, over
nobody's objections).
Much more important, perhaps, is the return of
legendary Tom Dowd as producer: having recorded most of their stuff from Idlewild South to Eat A Peach, the man did not participate in the band's fortunes
since Duane's death, but now he has been re-recruited to provide a much desired
shot in the arm. It could fail, but it worked: Rogues is the Allmans' finest collective effort since Brothers & Sisters, and they really
haven't been as good after it, at least, not until the unexpected rejuvenation
with Derek Trucks.
Not that there's anything different. The
formula stays the same: unimaginative bluesy Southern rockers, mixed with even
less imaginative Southern country ballads and one traditionally long Allman
Brothers Instrumental™. But the rockers really do rock, providing all the
sharpness, aggression, and spirit that you expect from rockers; the ballads are
suitably ambitious, designed to soar rather than drag; and the instrumental may
not be genius, but is certainly blameless. Considering how sharply they went
down from this record to the very next one, released but a year later, it is
hardly a coincidence that the only difference in lineup between there and here
was the presence of Dowd at the mixing controls.
'Pegasus', the instrumental, is sort of like a
gentleman's compromise between 'Jessica' and 'High Falls'. In terms of
atmosphere, it emulates the latter's romantic, dreamy, slightly otherworldly
qualities, but moves along at a faster pace and never drags: its seven and a
half minutes are timed perfectly, unlike the overkill fourteen minutes of
'Falls'. The main theme is a folksy little beauty, very much reflecting Betts'
vision, even if it may be a bit difficult to make it convey images of flying
horses (the Allmans, after all, had their feet planted way too firmly on the
ground, especially after Duane's demise); and there are a few curious twists,
like the «looped», vortex-like guitar phrasing in the coda, that hint at the
band's ongoing search for new combinations of sounds (very modest, but nobody
probably expected even that).
Meanwhile, 'Crazy Love' and 'Can't Take It With
You' rock like crazy — the former may smell a bit of barroom atmosphere, but
the latter is a gritty, bristling number that wouldn't have been out of place
on a Fillmore East concert; Betts lashes out with the same sort of fluent,
emotive solos that make such a gas out of 'Ramblin' Man', but switches the
controls from «happy» to «pissed off», and my only complaint is that the song
fades out over his accumulating steam — that final solo part should have been
streamlined into jam mode. Another song with terrific guitar work is Gregg's
ballad 'Just Ain't Easy', which could have been just another pleasant, lazy
Gregg ballad, but for which Betts has found enough time to elevate it to
near-epic status.
Occasional complaints have been voiced over the
addition of female backup voices on 'Crazy Love' (Bonnie Bramlett) and 'Sail
Away' (Mimi Hart), but they are used very moderately — unless one shares the
misogynistic view that female voices on Southern rock albums automatically turn
them into, uh, «Southern Rock Albums», there is nothing to worry about. Enlightened Rogues is no more or less specifically
«Southern» than Brothers & Sisters
— it respects a particular paradigm of music-making without glorifying it.
These rogues, after all, are enlightened: they know that Southern-accented
singing and Southern-style playing alone won't be enough to restore Southern
reputation. It also helps to make a good record, and on Enlightened Rogues, there's nary a bad song to be found, even if
nothing rises to particularly spectacular heights. Thumbs up.
REACH FOR THE SKY (1980)
1) Hell And High Water; 2) Mystery Woman; 3) From
The Madness Of The West; 4) I Got A Right To Be Wrong; 5) Angeline; 6) Famous Last
Words; 7) Keep On Keepin' On; 8) So Long.
In 1980, The Allman Brothers said goodbye to
Capricorn and signed on with Arista — same year that the label also got Aretha
Franklin. Unfortunately, in both cases, the record company, whose biggest
achievement would soon consist of making a star out of Whitney Houston, wasn't
quite sure about what to do with these
has-beens. Saddled with a pair of unimaginative hackjob producers and somehow
outliving the emotional reunion spark that made Enlightened Rogues such a nice treat for long-term fans, the band
sort of put itself on autopilot.
Reach
For The Sky is not awful, but
it is even more of a generic Southern rock album than Win, Lose Or Draw; it certainly does not take the golden legend of
the Allman Brothers to come up with that kind of result. One by one, Betts is
constructing simple, catchy, danceable boogie tunes that have their little fun
quotient: 'Angeline' actually managed to become a minor hit single, nearly
making it into the Top 50, and most of the other rockers have their singalong
charms, too, except they all spell «local barroom».
But it is quite telling that his major misfire
is the obligatory instrumental: 'From The Madness Of The West' is officially
the first of these that makes no point whatsoever. From 'Elizabeth Reed' to
'Pegasus', all of these numbers had an evocative, dreamy quality, sometimes
weaker, sometimes stronger, but always purposeful. These particular six and a
half minutes, however, sound like a very lame attempt at crossing blues-rock
with fusion, a genre that they could have, perhaps, stomached were Duane still
alive, but Dickey's and Gregg's abilities alone do not suffice. So they
incorporate boring, amateurish synthesizer solos (yes!), a main theme
completely devoid of atmosphere, and a longer than usual drum solo to cover up
their asses (if there is a pair of guys in this band to never let anyone down,
it's the drummer boys). What were all those Betts fantasy worlds doing at the
moment? Eclipsed by the new record contract?
Of Gregg's two contributions, only 'So Long'
works on the level of his past successes in Southern melancholia; his lazy
ballads may or may not be your favourite piece of the Allmans' legacy, but at
least they have forever remained its most stable part. Something tells me that
this is the sole song on here that could have received Duane's stamp of
approval; unfortunately (but predictably) it is merely the album closer, and
impatient people might not live long enough to enjoy it.
If you are an avid collector of stereotypical
blues-boogie records that neither say anything new nor anything awful, of which
there have been thousands upon thousands of releases in the 1970s alone, Reach For The Sky belongs in your
collection. If you happen to be Cher, Chuck Leavell, or Derek Trucks, it also
belongs in your collection through former or future professional obligation.
Otherwise, feel free to skip, although I refrain from giving it an explicit
thumbs down.
BROTHERS OF THE ROAD (1981)
1) Brothers Of The Road; 2)
Leavin’; 3) Straight From The Heart; 4) The Heat Is On; 5) Maybe We Can Go Back
To Yesterday; 6) The Judgement; 7) Two Rights; 8) Never Knew How Much (I Needed
You); 9) Things You Used To Do; 10) I Beg Of You.
If there is one nomination in which Brothers
Of The Road would fail to acquire the title of «Worst Of... Ever», it
requires sharp brains indeed to come up with it. If there is one
disaster that reluctantly agreed to pass this record by, I have no idea what it
is. Hiring Barry and Robin Gibb to do the vocals, perhaps?
The blame lies hard and heavy on everyone, but
mostly on producer John Ryan, who seems to have been so firmly set on putting
his entrusted band back onto the surface of MOR-waves that he had no problems
about making a deal with the devil and magically converting the Allman
Brothers into the Doobie Brothers. Most of these songs are tailor-made
for your local Southern rock radio station with no hopes whatsoever of making
it on a larger scale. Tired, generic, sometimes non-existent riffs, bland
lyrics, no inspiration or innovation whatsoever.
What is particularly wrong? Everything.
Jaimoe had been fired, destroying the final magic charm of the band — the
drummer duo: his replacement, Frankie Toler, has no reason whatsoever to exist
since he just faithfully copies Trucks’ patterns. The album cover features seven
long-haired dudes in happy shirts, smirking in the middle of a field on a hill
as if to say «Betcha not even the Eagles could be as down to earth as us here!»
The obligatory instrumental is at last gone without a trace: the Doobie
Brothers did not build their gorgeous reputation upon no weirdass wanking, so
why should these guys? (Not that I seriously mind — ‘From The Madness Of The West’
clearly showed their chief instrumental writer at the end of his rope).
And then it takes exactly three seconds of ‘Two
Rights’ to understand what all these unpleasant surface omens translate to on
record. All of the instruments that come in during these three seconds join in
a prime slice of musical spam, heralded by the ugly canned synthesizer. Johnny
Cobb helped Betts co-write the song, along with the minor hit ‘Straight From
The Heart’, which takes the worst elements of Southern rock and disco and
brilliantly synthesizes them.
Big, big, really big fans of Dickey Betts will
still want this album for several examples of his fine soloing — one thing
nature had not yet taken from him — particularly on the ballad-rocker ‘Maybe
We Can Go Back To Yesterday'’which really kicks ass during the last minutes,
almost as if the first ones, on which Gregg was singing silly lyrics in a
dramatically overblown and inadequate manner, never existed. Unfortunately, I
cannot say the same for really big fans of Gregg: of his two contributions,
‘Leavin’ sounds like a so-so imitation of the Lynyrd Skynyrd swagger (yes, the
day has come indeed when the Allmans are taking lessons from the Skynyrds), and
‘Never Knew How Much’ is way too fluffy even for his usually schmaltzy
country-ballad tone. “Never knew how much a man needed a woman, never knew how
much a boy needed a girl” — sure lyrics don’t matter much in pop music, but
try to sing along and you’ll know that «not much» and «not at all» are not
quite the same thing.
Conclusion: if Reach For The Sky was
simply sort of dull, then Brothers Of The Road is simply sort of awful.
We should all be thankful that it tanked, or else we could be stuck with this
Allman-Doobie Overdrive for the rest of the decade. As it was, the «reunion»,
by now sunk to levels lower than self-parody, finally came apart, and all the
bit players took a fortunate break right up to the end of the decade. Thumbs down with a vengeance.
SEVEN TURNS (1990)
1) Good Clean Fun; 2) Let Me
Ride; 3) Low Down Dirty Mean; 4) Shine It On; 5) Loaded Dice; 6) Seven Turns; 7) Gambler's
Roll; 8) True Gravity; 9) It Ain't Over Yet.
Since Gregg's and Dickey's solo careers in the
1980s still stubbornly refused to take off (no big surprise there), with
ultra-rare exceptions, such as Gregg's surprise 1987 hit 'I'm No Angel', only
proving the rule, it was only a question of time before they'd consider coming
together again; the real question was — would they take off from the dust in
which Brothers Of The Road had left
them, or would they forget about the album's existence at all and try to start
it all anew?
Fortune helped them out, in the shape of guitarist
Warren Haynes, who'd crossed paths with Dickey Betts earlier in the decade and
played a bit in his solo band, along with keyboardist Johnny Neel. With the
second reunion coming up, Dickey invited both to fatten up the sound of the new
Allmans, along with new bass player Allen Woody. Both Haynes and Woody, in
addition to being thorough masters of their instruments, also turned out to be
stark «old schoolers»: well open to occasionally trying out new things, but
putting the restoration and preservation of the classic Allman Brothers
spirit above all else.
With the silly Arista contract having expired a
long time ago, the rejuvenated band (yes, and they got both of the original
drummers back together again) signed with Epic and returned to Tom Dowd for production
duties. The issue of songwriting was dealt with in an original way: although
all the songwriters are clearly listed, it does not matter much who wrote which
song — Betts', Neel's and Haynes' names are scattered throughout almost
randomly (Gregg Allman is only co-credited for the lead-in track, but at least
he takes on most of the vocals), and the vibe is generally more important here
than the actual melodies: Seven Turns
is a very good album, but not a single track really threatens the safety of
'Ramblin' Man' or 'Whippin' Post'.
Still, it's hard to deny a little chill when
'Good Clean Fun' opens the album with the kind of thick, meaty, aggressive
sound the band hadn't really put out since the early Duane years — and the
track's nod to 'Don't Want You No More' (the instrumental that put them and
their self-titled album on the map back in 1969) is transparent, right down to
somewhat similar chord progressions. The only Allman-Betts collaboration on the
album, with Neel listed as third writer, it makes clear from the very first
seconds that Brothers Of The Road
have, indeed, been downgraded to roadkill; and, first time since 1971, Dickey
finally gets a proper sparring partner who promises to restore the band's
two-guitar reputation and, more often than not, keeps that promise.
Naturally, with time taking a heavy toll, some
of the Turns are blander than
others. Dickey, in particular, cannot help throwing in annoying Southern
clichés; the two tracks that he sings, 'Let Me Ride' and the title track,
have a bit too much ordinary Dixie happiness in them to merit a seal of
approval from Duane's heavenly office. But 'True Gravity' marks an excellent
revival of the band's instrumental tradition, a challenging, risky journey from
headbanging blues-rock to free-form dream territory that we remember these
guys for, with Haynes literally taking us back to the idealistic days of 1970
for a few minutes; 'Gambler's Roll' is seven minutes of slow, aching, bleeding,
threatening blueswailing with both guitarists and Gregg at their absolute best;
and the rest of the songs simply rock out with a vengeance, so that when we get
to the final explosion of 'It Ain't Over Yet', we certainly know — the song may literally be about a
guy unwilling to break up his romance for good, but what matters is still the
metaphor.
Because Seven
Turns certainly showed that it ain't over yet, marking one of the most
triumphant comebacks of an «oldies act» in history, as well as proving, once
and for all, that it is possible to
merge talents from different generations — Haynes is thirteen years younger
than Gregg and seventeen years younger than Dickey — and still come out with a
perfect chemical reaction. Seven thumbs up for each of the seven turns (minus two
stinkers from Betts).
SHADES OF TWO WORLDS (1991)
1) End Of The Line; 2) Bad
Rain; 3) Nobody Knows; 4) Desert Blues; 5) Get On With Your Life; 6)
Midnight Man; 7) Kind Of
Bird; 8) Come On In My
Kitchen.
Compared to the regular 1990s standard for
aging rockers, the time gap between Seven
Turns and its follow-up was practically non-existent, and this could only
mean one thing: the revamped Allmans were in tremendously high spirits and knew
how to use 'em. Shades Of Two Worlds
is, unquestionably, a rather rushed sequel: only eight songs, one of them a
cover and one an extended jam the likes of which they'd usually reserve for
the stage. But it does preserve the momentum, and shows that, even on
autopilot, the new-look Allmans remained unbeatable.
In fact, in some respects Shades even improves on its predecessor. Most of the material is
still written by Betts, either solo or in tandem with Haynes, but this time, he
wisely avoids the softer, country-rock/pop side of the business and opts
instead for all-out crunch. So, either they're doing slow, tormented, wailing
blues, or rocking the roof off the building — none of that sentimental
"seven turns on the highway, seven rivers to cross..." sappiness.
Most of the album crackles in bright red colours, like the burning sunset on
the album sleeve, all the way down to the closing Robert Johnson cover, which
lands the ship softly in acoustic blues mood.
The decision to turn 'Nobody Knows' from a
rhythmically tricky folk-blues rocker into a monster jam is questionable, but
respectable; the whole experience sounds like a nostalgic nod to the old days
of Duane and Dickey battling it out in semi-free-form mid-tempo mode on
'Whipping Post', and here, the Betts/Haynes duo really only loses to the way it
used to be in terms of freshness — but the spirit and the technical mastery
remain the same. Still, perhaps they should have saved it all for the upcoming
live album, where this length would seem more natural.
On the other hand, the obligatory instrumental
is an unassailable blast — 'Kind Of Bird' must be a reference to Charlie
Parker, and there is a lot of jazz here indeed, as they substitute the idea of
dreamy / psychedelic wordless music for one that involves less planning and
calculating, more absolute freedom of expression. It could fail, as it so
often does on jazz records, but, due to the band's determination and
experience, it works. The opening part is all fast, furious, bop-influenced
headbanging, the middle part defies genre classification, and the third part is
free-form chaos à la 'Brers In A Minor' — most of the ingredients, in
some form or other, they'd already shown us on earlier records, but this
particular synthesis is brand new for the Allmans.
The individual songs are all written in strict
accordance with formula; in the hands of a band of lesser caliber than the
Allmans, much of this material, including all of Betts' rockers, could have
sounded ugly, perhaps even moronically flatulent (imagine "I'm your
midnight man, guranteed to love you like nobody can" in the hands of
Foreigner!), but it is not the melodies, it is the tightness and the
intelligent force of this big sound, and the clever interplay between Betts and
Haynes, that carries most of them through. Gregg's 'Get On With Your Life',
for instance, would be nothing if not for Haynes' lengthy Clapton-esque solo,
slowly, predictably, and still admirably winding its way up, up, up, until it's
joined by Betts' companion guitar and the two crash down in ecstasy. Another
first is the guitarists' acoustic duel on 'Come On In My Kitchen' — the number
finishes the record off on the same note as 'Pony Boy' put the final stop to Brothers And Sisters, but this time, we
have a fun dialog going on, instead of Betts' mono spectacle.
For some reason, Shades Of Two Worlds, unlike Seven
Turns, went out of print fairly quickly and is now hard to find in legal
form (except for ultra-expensive import versions); this is hardly a major
tragedy, but certainly a minor travesty that needs to be remedied. Thumbs up,
in the vain hope that this might eventually help people treasure this part of
the Allmans' legacy with all the respect it deserves.
AN EVENING WITH
THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND: FIRST SET (1992)
1) End Of The Line; 2) Blue Sky; 3) Get On With
Your Life; 4) Southbound; 5) Midnight Blues; 6) Melissa; 7) Nobody Knows; 8)
Dreams; 9) Revival.
With the kind of high standard that the revived
Allmans set themselves on their first two studio LPs, there was hardly any
question that they'd be kicking the same sort of ass onstage. Even so, the
band's first live album in sixteen years (the 1979-81 lineup wisely avoided
official live releases) manages not just to meet expectations, but to trump
them — decisively.
Many people — way too many people — state their
opinions along the lines of «this is some damn fine playing out there, though,
of course, not quite on the level of
the Fillmore shows». I would beg to differ — or even suggest that they might be
deluding themselves, perhaps out of some subconscious fear of Duane Allman's
ghost: An Evening With The Allman
Brothers Band is completely on
the level of the Fillmore concerts. Four of the original band members are
present in the shapeliest of shapes, and number five is Warren Haynes, one of
the most expressive Southern-style guitar players who ever lived.
The only area in which this band cannot beat
the original lineup is freshness — compared to the Fillmore Concerts, these are
expert swimmers showcasing their skills on a public beach rather than intrepid
risk-takers diving from cliffs into unknown waters. But, on one hand, this is
sort of understood, and on the other, both angles have their strengths and
weaknesses. In terms of sheer musical pleasure, the Betts/Haynes version of
this band has completely restored its former magnificence. Short songs, long
songs, genre fiddlings, experiments, they do it all.
The setlist mixes new numbers, mostly from Shades, in with the old warhorses in
such a way that nobody will really feel the difference: 'Get On With Your Life'
is slow burning blues that is well on par with the old classics like 'Stormy
Monday', and fifteen minutes of colorful guitar wanking on 'Nobody Knows' are
simply variations on whatever it was that they used to do about 'Whippin'
Post'. Best news is, the setlist has enough variety to save this from becoming
a monotonous celebration of cool crisp guitar sound: slow blues, fast boogie,
country-rock, acoustic balladry, psychedelia (they dust off 'Dreams', which
Gregg introduces as the only song he had in his pockets when the band was
formed), and gospel ('Revival').
I may have a minor beef with the band for its
reinvention of 'Southbound' as a slower, funkier, more danceable rocker — for
the first three minutes, it deprives the song of its usual kicks. But once the
instrumental part starts, it's all forgiven as Haynes and Betts battle it out
till your speakers start tearing apart at the seams. If anything, Dickey only
got better through the years: abandoning the occasionally whiny, wimpy tone he
used to have on stage, he goes for the same thick, brawny wail as Warren, yet
the two's styles are still distinct enough, and the symphonic effect they
achieve on the track — as well as several other crescendos, most notably on
'Get On With Your Life' — has to be heard to be believed.
Another major highlight is 'Blue Sky', turned
into a veritable propaganda campaign for slide guitar. As much as I love the
studio version, Haynes merely uses it as a foundation to transform the song
into something twice as anthemic and celestial as it used to be; in his hands,
the guitar becomes, at one point, a kid angel, at another, an exuberant little
piggie, and sometimes both at the same time. Once Betts enters the picture, he
plays with such precision and feeling
he'd previously demonstrated only in his studio work, never on stage. Overdubs?
I don't think so — rather just years and years of experience, plus being goaded
into action by the first serious chunk of competition he'd seen in twenty
years.
These remarks alone, I hope, will be enough to
free the reader of the vain idea that he already knows all these songs, but
there's more: the gorgeous acoustic trills at the end of 'Melissa'; Haynes'
«slide nightmare» contribution to the mid-part of 'Dreams'; the way they work
out hard rock bits into 'Revival', etc. By no means are these guys coasting;
the Allmans, in 1992, were a full-time working band that made good use of their
past glories, but never relied upon them as sacred cows — making First Set an absolute must-have; in
fact, it should probably go on the list before
that period's studio albums. Thumbs up from all directions.
WHERE IT ALL BEGINS (1994)
1) All Night Train; 2) Salin'
'Cross The Devil's Sea; 3) Back Where It All Begins; 4) Soulshine; 5) No One To
Run With; 6) Change My Way Of Living; 7) Mean Woman Blues; 8) Everybody's Got A
Mountain To Climb; 9) What's Done Is Done; 10) Temptation Is A Gun.
Third time around and the revitaminized
formula, smart as it is, is starting to wear a little thin. From a formal point
of view, this is still completely impeccable. The rockers roar, the ballads weep,
the players put up a hundred percent. But then there is also the matter of that
little checkmark in the «Innovative» box on the Allman Brothers Band's info
tab. If a band like the Allmans ceases to experiment and develop, it inevitably
becomes a generic Southern rock band, and there is only so much blessed earth
on the planet to make room for another Black Oak Arkansas.
Not that they don't do anything new, but the forward steps are infuriatingly tiny and,
moreover, rather hit-and-miss. For instance, the band's first attempt at
writing a song based on the Bo Diddley beat ('No One To Run With') is
misguided — they don't have a knack for good-time dance music like that, not to
mention that six minutes of dum-de-dum-dum, dum-dum is a physiologically
damaging experience. Much better is their subtle toying with modern guitar
sounds on Betts' 'Mean Woman Blues', as they transform a standard blues-rocker
into something that would not be out of place on a latter day Jeff Beck record
— the result is a tough, aggressive howler that rocks harder and heavier than
almost anything else ever recorded by the band. Alas, it's just one track,
although I admit that a whole handful of these would have shifted the band's
profile way too drastically; besides, it's not like the modern blues-rock
scene were in a real big need of yet another «metallizing» act — there's plenty
of diversity as is.
The rest is fairly good on its own terms, but
too many songs rehash too many recent feelings. The slow burn of 'Temptation Is
A Gun' is a shadow of 'Gambler's Roll'; 'Back Where It All Begins', with its
long happy jam section, is another of Betts' optimistic country-rock anthems
that can never hope to replace 'Jessica'; and most of the four-to-five minute
songs are just another bunch of well-played, nicely-felt blues-rockers that are
perfectly enjoyable but generally undescribable.
Only 'Soulshine', written by Haynes and later
exported by him into the repertoire of his own band (Gov't Mule), has more or
less endured as a standard. It is a bit too power-balladeerish for my tastes,
a bit too overtly pathetic for its own good, and a bit too clichéd
lyrically for those who have already assembled a big enough collection of «When
I Was Just A Little Boy, My Daddy Sat Me On His Knee»-type songs. What is not clichéd is Haynes'
guitar-playing, which makes the song a spiritual tour-de-force so much more
efficiently than all the other ingredients — the tune starts cooking right from
the intro and never really lets go.
No particular individual is to be blamed for
the little whiff of stagnation that emanates from the record — the worst songs
on here do not have any individual stamp of poor quality, and the best ones
show that all of the songwriters were trying quite hard. But perhaps it is not
all that lamentable, after all, that the next ABB studio album only arrived in
the wake of the final sacking of Betts: with this sort of tendency, new studio
ventures desperately called for fresh blood. Where It All Begins is still strong enough to merit a solid thumbs up;
I gotta agree, however, that its title is tremendously deceptive from all
points of view. Fortunately, renaming it to Where It All Ends is equally out of the question, no matter how
happy it could have made Dickey.
PS. For the record, if you happen to be
wondering about the mushroom on the album sleeve — it is the Allman's first attempt
(not counting the peach image from 1972) at hand-painting their album covers,
with the assistance of Greek designer/painter Ioannis, based on a
mushroom-shaped tattoo for the band that was designed as early as 1970. And
yes, «mushroom consumption» (figuratively speaking) used to be a regular thing
with the band members, but there is nothing particularly trippy or
surrealistic about Where It All Begins,
so don't be getting any false ideas.
AN EVENING WITH
THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND: SECOND SET (1995)
1) Sailin' 'Cross The Devil's
Sea; 2) You Don't Love Me; 3) Soulshine; 4) Back Where It All Begins; 5) In
Memory Of Elizabeth Reed; 6) The Same Thing; 7) No One To Run With; 8) Jessica.
The slightly misleading title — the tracks here
were mostly recorded in 1994, during the promotion of Where It All Begins — takes nothing from the fact that 2nd Set is at least every bit as good
as 1st Set, and, in some ways, even
more adventurous, finely compensating for the slight drop in quality on the
studio LP that it was supposed to accompany.
It is
a bit too thick on tunes from that LP, but fact is, when the Brothers play
live, it does not so much matter what particular song they are playing as what
sort of mood they are in when they're playing it. A brief comparison of
'Sailin' 'Cross The Devil's Sea', for instance, shows that the live counterpart
kicks the studio version's ass all over the place — the guitars are louder,
angrier, the tones sharper, everything is set to stun the audiences. The
particular performance may have been handpicked (the tracks alternate between
two different dates, signifying a diligent selection process, most likely
supervised by the mighty Tom Dowd), but even if the Allmans only played with
that much power for two nights out of two hundred, this is still enough to
place them among the finest live acts of the 1990s.
Relative surprises, this time around, include:
— a supertight, fully satisfying rendition of
the old Fillmore chestnut 'You Don't Love Me', with Haynes doing his own,
rather than Duane's, thang (for good reason), and without the lengthy improvisational
part; the joint guitar/organ riff still hits as hard as it used to;
— a real hot version of an old Willie Dixon
blues ('The Same Thing'), which even stalwart haters of generic blues-rock
might appreciate for all the amazing guitar pyrotechnics that goes on — as
flashy as the show-offiest act in glam metal, but at the same time completely
down-to-earth; the Betts-Haynes duel at the end is honestly trance-inducing;
— a strange, and, I would say, not fully
working version of 'Jessica' that, after the main theme, introduces an
out-of-place «dark» passage into this formally one-hundred-percent celebratory
piece. Maybe they just wanted to show us that, in order for the sun to shine,
it has to wiggle its way out of all the dark clouds, but personally, I do not
think there is any place for somber overtones in the tune at all. There is also
really no need to extend it to sixteen minutes: too much repetition of the
motives. Still, for the most part, a cool rendition (and, in retrospect,
considering that it is the last track on the Allmans' last solid album with
Betts, a gallant way to say goodbye);
— the major highlight: a fully rendition of
'Elizabeth Reed' from a club date back in 1992. Could have been a disaster, but
both guys are as dexterous with the acoustic as they are with power conductors,
and the emotional impact is almost the same as with the electric version
(except it's different, yep: in a few places, the song acquires an almost
inadvertently Latin flavor).
All in all, 2nd Set is a fitting, respectable conclusion to this next stage of
the Allmans' long strange trip — one of the finest stages, mind you,
considering that it had not been marred by one single total failure. Major
kudos for which fact should, of course, go to Warren Haynes, whose inborn genius
may not reach the heights of Duane or even Dickey — but who, at least,
compensates well for it by not riding motorcycles or abusing substances. There
is, after all, something to be said for steady professional reliability as
well. Thumbs up.
PEAKIN' AT THE BEACON (2000)
1) Don't Want You No More; 2)
It's Not My Cross To Bear; 3) Ain't Wastin' Time No More; 4) Every Hungry Woman;
5) Please Call Home; 6) Stand Back; 7) Black Hearted Woman; 8) Leave My Blues
At Home; 9) Seven Turns; 10) High Falls.
Obviously, the new-look Allmans' winning streak
could not last forever — this band, after all, was tailor-made for «slings and
arrows» from the very beginning. No sooner had they released the blistering 2nd Set that even won them a Grammy for
'Jessica' (twenty-three years after
the original recording!) than Warren Haynes and Allen Woody left the band in
order to be engaged full-time in their new band, Gov't Mule. Guitarist Jack
Pearson and bass player Oteil Burbridge came in as their replacements, but only
Burbridge survived; Pearson made his exit in 1999 (so that nobody except for
staunch concert-goers even has any idea of what he sounded like), to be
replaced by young prodigy Derek Trucks, Butch's nephew and, coincidentally, one
of the finest slide guitar players to emerge in the past twenty years.
Just as this new lineup was about to stabilize,
however, the band shocked everyone by firing Dickey — by fax, no less. To this very day, no one is truly sure about what
happened. Maybe he did have a renewed problem with «substances», as the other
band members sometimes insinuate, or maybe he just happened to make a dirty
joke about Cher at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Fact is, that Peakin' At The
Beacon, the Allmans' last contribution to the world of art in the 20th
century, is their very last album to feature founding father Richard Betts.
Everything else is speculation, no matter what the culprits and the victims
pronounce themselves.
The release of the album has, however,
frequently puzzled fans and critics alike. For one thing, it was released
already after the firing of Betts —
and, considering that the alleged major reason behind it was the extremely poor
playing shape in which he had been in for some time, such a move could only be
seen as sort of a half-hearted justification for the fans: «Wanna know why we
fired the guy? Just listen to this!»
For another thing, the sound quality is pretty poor — certainly better than
audience bootleg quality, but nowhere near the perfect mix and sharpness of the
1st and 2nd sets. Not to wonder — the band, once again, parted ways with Tom
Dowd (for reasons of his health, probably, since two years later he died of
emphysema), but why produce a record yourself if you know for sure this is
going to sabotage your high standards?
Peakin'
At The Beacon is, therefore,
for near-objective reasons, one of the least essential live ABB records to hunt
for. It has some historical importance as the one and only album on which
ancient guitar legend Dickey Betts and rising guitar hero Derek Trucks have
played together. Unfortunately, this historical importance can hardly be
converted into pure-hearted enjoyment, because (a) Betts is clearly not at the
top of his game here: at worst, he does indeed play in a wretchedly awful manner
(the solo on 'Ain't Wastin' Time No More' feels like it is coming from a man
who hasn't picked up his guitar in twenty years or so and is re-learning the
scales as they go), and at best, he is doing merely okay, without any of the
jaw-dropping ecstatic moments scattered throughout the previous two albums; (b)
Trucks, on the other hand, more often than not sticks in the background,
feeling, perhaps, a little shy about outplaying the Grand Old Master, and when
he actually takes a solo, it is always muffled by poor engineering. At best,
there are only tiny hints here at the greatness to come.
Not even the cleverly composed setlist saves
things: most of the tracks avoid repetition from the previous two sets, as they
concentrate almost exclusively on numbers from the first three studio albums,
throwing in a limp 'Seven Turns' (Dickey's farewell tune!) and choosing 'High
Falls', this time around, as the obligatory instrumental showcase, with lengthy
drum and bass solos (actually, Burbridge's bit of bass improvising — he even
bursts into a little scat accompaniment at one point — is the album's only
exciting surprise). Still, the performances never rise above barely competent,
and who needs «barely competent» from the Brothers?
In short, the album title is grossly
misleading: nobody's doing any «peakin'». Dickin'
At The Beacon would be a much better title (but I guess it would have hurt
Betts' feelings even further). There was hardly any need to disgrace the
reputation of their annual Beacon Theater shows which the band became famous
for ever since its 1989 reunion and which have lasted all the way down to 2009,
after which they were expelled to make way for the Cirque du Soleil (!). By all
means, one to skip unless you are a trusty historiographer — the Allmans have
so many live records out that you can certainly allow yourself the choice. Thumbs down.
HITTIN' THE NOTE (2003)
1) Firing Line; 2) High Cost
Of Low Living; 3) Desdemona; 4) Woman Across The River; 5) Old Before My Time;
6) Who To Believe; 7) Maydelle; 8) Rockin' Horse; 9) Heart Of Stone; 10)
Instrumental Illness; 11) Old Friend.
Fortunately for all, the Allmans' latest streak
of bad luck took less time and less toll on the band than earlier ones. By
2001, Warren Haynes had learnt to doubletrack, and so regained the status of a
full-fledged Allman Brother. The balance was now restored; with the band once
again featuring a monster twin-guitar attack as its main point of interest,
they had a good chance of taking the Allman Brothers' legacy into the 21st
century — and, sure enough, they didn't miss it.
Comparisons between the Haynes/Trucks and
Duane/Dickey pairings are as inevitable as they are pointless, because all four
guitarists have fairly individual styles. Trucks may occasionally «quote» from
Duane, and Haynes may sometimes try to replicate some of Betts' Southern
geometry, but neither of the two players could in any way be regarded as
«reincarnations» — exalted cries of «Duane lives on through Dereck's playing!»
should rather be treated as expressions of justified respect for Dereck's
contributions than even semi-literal truths. But, obviously, this is a major advantage
rather than flaw: the fact that these guys, with their own styles of playing,
still make the final result seem like a natural, easy-going progression from
the classic ABB sound, serve to confirm the band's exceptional status — ahead
of the pack in 1969, still way ahead
of the same pack in 2003, no mean feat considering how huge the pack has become
since then. (The only other example of a similar late-period revitalization I
can think of at the moment is Deep Purple, a band that, likewise, gained a new,
fresh future from a smart lineup change).
The first and, for now, latest
Haynes/Trucks-lineup studio LP, aptly titled Hittin' The Note, got no less than slobbering rave reviews from
pretty much every critic alive — and
there is no reason for any of us amateur evaluators to play it differently for
the sake of being different. I do not know if it is really «better» than Seven Turns and the like, or how tall
it stands in comparison to the Brothers' classic original output, but as far as
energetic, heartfelt, and intelligent roots-rock can actually go in 2003, it
certainly goes there — and then, just
a little bit beyond, so that nobody could open his big mouth and say «Well,
it's awful good, although, naturally, quite formulaic, so if you like good old
Southern rock, grab this some time before your paycheck runs out».
Of course, you needn't expect any jaw-drop
marvels of songwriting. Their oddball (but wonderfully sweet) inclusion of
'Heart Of Stone' states this explicitly: «Mick and Keith — there's two great
songwriters for you. We suck in
comparison. But we can still blow 'em off the air any time of day». The
material is standard fare — some fiery blues-rock to crispen up your day, some
soulful balladry to soothe the spirit, some on-the-spot experimentation to
keep the brain busy and the finger nerves well-trained. But that's how it would
be on paper. With the talents pooled together for these sessions, and the
clearly seen determination to pull it through no matter what, they could record
an album of Barry Manilow covers, and still come up with a winner.
Actually, I must say that it's a big relief to see Trucks and Haynes
constantly play off each other. Dereck is truly a magnificent, unique musician,
but the fact that he always sticks to his sliding style makes it all a bit
monotonous. Usually, as befits a traditional blues-rocker, he takes his time to
get to the searing/soaring parts, and even if each individual solo culminates
in near-psychedelic ecstasy, at least the early parts eventually start coming
off as too predictable. The same can be said about Haynes, whose «normal» sound
we have already studied to bits on his 1990s records for both the Allmans and
Gov't Mule; he has not added much to it since then.
So it is the matching of the two styles that is Hittin' The Note's biggest attraction. On most of the tunes, true
lightning strikes not when the two players are taking turns, but when they join
together in a smorgasbord of sounds such as you never heard before on any
Allmans' record. With Haynes' six-string all but choking on the amount of sonic
venom it regurgitates, and Trucks' slide thing buzzing and stinging all over the
surrounding space, it's a hell of a charge on the senses. It doesn't arrive too often, but watch out for it — for
instance, during the final minutes of 'Woman Across The River', a song that
would justify the existence of this seventy-plus-minute-long record on its own.
Fortunately for us, there isn't really a single
bad track anywhere in sight.
To be completely fair, one should also mention
the damn fine form Gregg Allman is in — it is his presence, after all, that continues to provide the band with
legitimacy after all these years, and justifies their not having, as of yet, changed the name to «The Trucks Family
Band». Not only does he receive a grand five
co-writing credits on here (an absolute record since the 1969 debut!), but his
singing also had not been so bravely upfront in almost as many years. And now,
finally, his age matches his pathos: 'Old Before My Time' is a heartbreaking
confession of a man looking down — in horror! — at all the different ways in
which his life has been wasted, so aching and sincere that it could depress the
living hell out of anyone... had that
been its purpose — in reality, 'Old Before My Time' is a sad, but optimistic
tune for somebody who has finally come to terms with himself. No two opinions
about it, Mr. Allman: you may well have been «old before your time» back in
1970 or even 1979, but now you are exactly as old as your time requires of you.
Thus, with the two guitarists crackling a
seemingly endless storehouse of fireworks and the singer adding his stately
touch to ballads and rockers alike, Hittin'
The Note truly never feels overlong for one bit. The twelve-minute jam
'Instrumental Illness' may be just a bit overdone, but the same things I used
to say about the jam length in the Dickey/Duane period apply here as well —
they go when they feel like going, and they stop when they feel they have
really got nothing left to say. And even if the individual songs may feel
underwritten, most at least have a line, a chord change, an odd gimmick or two
to hold attention. Such as the ridiculously kiddie-like riff that opens and
drives 'Maydelle', the album's heaviest number — I may be alone in thinking how
much it reminds me of 'The Itsy Bitsy Spider', but regardless of whether it
only reflects my own craziness or if I really cracked a consciously
idiosyncratic code here, it's FUN.
Other instances of FUN include the ballad
'Desdemona' (nothing to do with The Moor of Venice, unfortunately; I suppose
they just thought of it as a cool name to use, being all out of 'Melissas' and
'Jessicas') suddenly transforming into slide-driven free-form jazz for the
mid-section; the dark, smoking blues-rock of 'Who To Believe' totally owned by
Gregg as if it were only yesterday that Cher finally blocked body access, and
it hurts goddamn bad; and the Stones' 'Heart Of Stone' burdened down with
years of experience and graced with weeping solos unthinkable on any Stones record,
even of the Mick Taylor period. Each new listen brings out some minor delight,
and it almost makes you feel sad for poor old Dickey Betts — ten to one he
never dreamed his old band could undergo another rejuvenation at his expense.
But he did have this occasional nasty penchant for dragging them into generic
Southern rock — and Hittin' The Note
is certainly drenched in Southern, yet there is nothing generic about a record
that kicks ass, surprises, provokes, and drains your emotions at the same time.
Thumbs up,
of course.
ONE WAY OUT (2004)
1) Statesboro Blues; 2) Don't Keep Me Wondering;
3) Midnight Rider; 4) Rockin'
Horse; 5) Desdemona; 6) Trouble No More; 7) Wasted Words; 8) Good Morning
Little Schoolgirl; 9) Instrumental Illness; 10) Ain't Wastin' Time No More;
11) Come & Go Blues; 12) Woman Across The River;
13) Old Before My Time; 14) Every Hungry Woman; 15) High Cost Of Low Living;
16) Worried Down With The Blues; 17) Dreams; 18) Whippin' Post.
With the kind of quality standard already
established on Hittin' The Note, it
certainly makes little sense to doubt that the same standards would be upheld
for the Brothers' next wave of live shows as well. So the nearly simultaneous
release, in 2004, of a high-quality live DVD (At The Beacon) and a double CD commemorating the band's live status
at the same time, suffers from a certain lack of surprise (at least the two Evenings sets arrived after a
fifteen-year break in live album production, and the latest live album before
that (Wipe The Windows) really
wasn't all that hot anyway).
One other significant flaw of One Way Out is that it relies way too
heavily on recent material, with six out of eleven tracks from Hittin' The Note (including all the
long ones) reproducing way more than half of that album. Of course, these are
excellent tunes per se, but too little time has passed between their creation
and reproduction for the band to think of any interesting new twists — for the
most part, they just faithfully recreate the arrangements, structures, and
moods of the originals, the only minor differences concerning bits of solo
improvisation.
It is far more interesting to hear how the
latest lineup handles the classics — and whether, for instance, Derek Trucks
really lives up to the «Duane reincarnation» moniker. It is certainly not a
coincidence that the first number to be played (or, at least, sequenced on the
CD) is 'Statesboro Blues' and the last one an extended version of 'Whippin'
Post' — the exact same way we experienced it on Fillmore East: more than a transparent hint at the fact that the
band feels confident enough to declare that they are just as good now as they used to be then.
«Just as good», however, does not equal
«exactly the same». No matter what, both Trucks and Haynes belong to a
different, more modern, school of guitar players than Duane. A very rough
phrasing would be to say that they emphasize complexity and precision over gut
feeling — rough, because no sane person would ever accuse Duane of lacking
amazing technicality, or Warren and Dereck of playing without their hearts in
it. (Insanity, or, at least, extreme narrow-mindedness will be assumed for all
the odd people who refer to Derek's total immobility and lack of stage mimics
as showing a lack of emotion). But, on the other hand, it is hard not to sniff
a whiff of «predictability», an over-polished approach to these here shows —
with the original Allmans, you never really knew where exactly a particular
performance would eventually take you, whereas the Haynes/Trucks duo steers the
ship like a pair of expert, grizzled boatsmen, disciplined enough to know when
it is safe to stick to the bottle and when the situation requires complete
sobriety.
This is, probably, what people mean when they call
One Way Out «just one step below»
the original concerts — this is the step. On the other hand, there are also
those who prefer immaculate, well-calculated professionalism, not to mention a
perfect sound quality, unimaginable on Duane-era recordings, and we have to
think of them, too. No matter how predetermined and safely packaged we see
this guitar communication language between Haynes and Trucks, it is still an
awesome challenge to both enjoy and study it. And then there are all the little
interesting changes they do to the classics. 'Whippin' Post', for instance,
gets its second chaotic part (the 'Frère Jacques' bit) cut off — a
respectable decision, allowing them to go for less self-repetition. 'Midnight
Rider' gets a much harder-rocking treatment than it used to. 'Wasted Words', in
its final section, is transformed into one of the most furious twin-guitar
battles on the album, etc. etc.
In between 2004 and 2007, the Allmans would
practice a special «Instant Live» gimmick, where they would make rough
soundboard quality recordings of all of their shows and then select the best
ones and trade them for fans off their website, increasing their «official»
discography sky-high. Nobody except for diehards and studiosos really needs to
bother with all these «authorized bootlegs», but One Way Out, as one easily available sample of the Allmans'
greatness in the 21st century, is recommendable for everyone.
ADDENDA:
LIVE AT LUDLOW GARAGE (1970/1991)
1) Dreams; 2) Statesboro
Blues; 3) Trouble No More; 4) Dimples; 5) Every Hungry Woman; 6) I'm Gonna Move
To The Outskirts Of Town; 7) Hoochie Coochie Man; 8) Mountain Jam.
As befits every legendary live outfit, the
Allmans had hoarded tons of archive recordings from the good old days. Their
vaults seem to be fairly thin when it comes to unreleased studio material (no
big wonder there, since most of the material was thoroughly tried and tested
live before being committed to vinyl, so that usually the Allmans went into the
studio with a fairly good idea of what they were going to do); live shows are a
whole different matter, and as of 2010, there are at least eight or ten
officially endorsed retrospective live albums covering dates from 1970 all the
way to 1973 — not counting, of course, the millions of bootlegs.
Not all of these releases are of comparable
sound quality, and, of course, writing individual reviews for each one only
makes sense if you are a paid biographer of the band or, at least, Mark
Prindle, who can use each review as one more opportunity to inform you of one
more turbulent event in his oversaturated life. Me being neither of the two, I
will limit myself to just a few of these archival treasures — not necessarily
the best ones, since I haven't heard
everything, but you will just have to let the inductive method decide about the
rest.
Live
At Ludlow Garage, played and
recorded at a small local club in Cincinnati sometime in April 1970, about one
year before the legendary Fillmore set, is the earliest of these releases — it
came out in 1991, just as the Allmans were making their big comeback with
Haynes, and it was certainly a good time to remind the world what it actually
used to be, that particular thing that they eventually came back for.
Most listeners agree that the sound is fairly
raw and unpolished here (well, they do play in a garage, after all, har har) compared to the Fillmore gigs, and
that, taken together with the imperfections of the equipment, this makes it
understandably inferior. Inferior, perhaps, in the sense that Fillmore East should certainly be one's
first buy regarding the original
lineup. But there is no reason why Ludlow
Garage could not be a close second. For one thing, it is fun — and, from
time to time, inspiring — to experience the Allmans in this sort of raw form,
when the long jams and multi-section performances had not yet been rehearsed to
utter smoothness, and the Bros. would occasionally compensate for their rough
edges with extra loudness, shrillness, and aggression. For another thing, as
imperfect as the sound quality is (and it is really fairly good), it brings the
dead guys — Duane and bassist Berry Oakley — way up in the mix most of the
time, giving all us dead guy fans an extra
reason to own this.
In terms of rarities, this is worth hearing if
only for a grizzled, rabid version of John Lee Hooker's 'Dimples', with
Hooker's minimalistic riffs transformed into scorching heavy blues the way the
old master could never anticipate. The slow nine-minute blues version of
'Outskirts Of Town' had, by the time Fillmore rolled along, ceded its position
on the playlist to 'Stormy Monday Blues', but is in no way inferior — and
culminates in a mad sea of absolutely flaming licks from Betts practicing his
soon-to-be-'Southbound' piercing tone. There is also a rarely heard live
stomping version of the Oakley-sung 'Hoochie Coochie Man'; and 'Statesboro
Blues' gets an extra four-minute coda as Duane teases the audience with volume
level tricks.
Above all, there is a goddamn forty-four minute
long take on 'Mountain Jam' — longer than the Eat A Peach standard version by about eleven minutes, much of them
courtesy of Mr. Oakley who takes quite a bit of time to play his solo part,
much heavier and fuzzier than on the Peach
version. Myself, having eventually become a convert to the religion of
'Mountain Jam' based on its Fillmore incarnation, I have no problem whatsoever
with these forty-four minutes either, but all those who still do — well,
beware, this thing occupies the whole of Disc 2.
Anyway, these are the fuckin' Allman Bros. in
their prime, in terrific shape, all set and burning to go, and after a few
listens, you may even grow to love
this sound quality — on no other record do the Bros. sound this much like a
pack of dangerous outlaws playing for their lives. Thumbs up.
LIVE AT THE ATLANTA INTERNATIONAL POP FESTIVAL (1970/2003)
CD I: 1) Introduction; 2)
Statesboro Blues; 3) Trouble No More; 4) Don't Keep Me Wondering; 5) Dreams; 6)
Every Hungry Woman; 7) Hoochie Coochie Man; 8) In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed; 9)
Whipping Post; 10) Mountain Jam (part 1); 11) Rain Delay; 12) Mountain Jam
(part 2); CD II: 1) Introduction; 2) Don't Keep Me Wondering; 3) Statesboro
Blues; 4) In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed; 5) Stormy Monday; 6) Whipping Post; 7)
Mountain Jam.
Hungry for more of the true, genuine,
authentic, original, unforged Allman Brothers? Look no further than this 2-CD
monster, recorded July 3rd and 5th (actually, 6th, since the show closed around
dawn) at the second Atlanta International Pop Festival, held, as the name
clearly suggests, nowhere other than Byron, Georgia (quite a bit removed from
Atlanta, but you gotta admit, «The Byron Festival» might have brought in an
entirely different brand of people, especially since David Byron of Uriah Heep
fame had only released his first album a month before that and was of no
particular fame to get confused with Lord Byron).
Anyway, Byron,
Georgia is right in the middle of Peach County, making it the perfectly atmospheric place for the Allmans to perform. For
some reason, the previous year's Atlanta Pop Festival was marred with a
confusion, as the Bros. were booked for the venue by a fake booker (!) and,
upon arrival, were denied the right to play (!!). To compensate, perhaps, for
the embarrassment, for the second (and, as it turned out, last) Festival they
were allowed to both open and close
it. Which they did, and both of the
shows are reproduced on this set.
Honestly
speaking, despite the hugeness of this thing, it is not nearly as good as
either Fillmore East or «the Allmans
doing their proto-punkish thing» on Ludlow
Garage. The sound quality is quite all right, and the playing is tight,
complex, and as honest as you could expect, but the little things that turn the
band's excellent shows into explosive ones are not quite there.
Either the festival grounds did not quite agree with them, or the festival atmosphere — not every outfit can be
always happy playing these huge outdoor venues — but neither Duane nor Dickey
seem to be interested in burning up their guitars.
Everything that
is out-of-the-ordinary with this album (and that does not necessarily surmise
«awesome») revolves around 'Mountain Jam'. During the first show, the band was
interrupted by upcoming rainclouds, and had to return to the stage after a
while, making the performance kind of smothered and shortened. For the second
show, however, they managed to get by uninterrupted, with a classic 28-minute
length and accompanied by Johnny Winter on second slide guitar — although only
a seasoned listener could tell that there is a third guitar out there, and only
a genius could guess who it belongs to.
Otherwise, it
makes perfect sense that, with the vaults opened, the band's first choice was Ludlow: this performance is strictly for the fans who can already recreate
every note of Fillmore in their
minds, or for those who do serious research on the history of pop music
festivals (for some reason, the Allmans remain so far the only band that has
released its set from the festival, despite a boatload of classic artists also
contributing — did they have a monopoly on the use of recording equipment or
what? Actually, I believe some bootleg-quality videos of Hendrix's performance
also seem to be floating around). On the other hand, the original Allmans in
their prime probably never ever really played a bad show — so if it somehow
happens that this can be your introduction to the band, don't flinch.
THE AMBOY DUKES (1967)
1) Baby Please Don't Go; 2) I
Feel Free; 3) Young Love; 4) Psalms Of Aftermath; 5) Colors; 6) Let's Go Get
Stoned; 7) Down On Phillips Escalator; 8) The Lovely Lady; 9) Night Time; 10)
It's Not True; 11) Gimme Love.
It would seem simple and logical to suggest
that when Detroit-based Amboy Dukes released their self-titled album,
completely and sincerely dedicated to issues of Sex and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll,
lead guitarist Ted Nugent would take care of the Sex, rhythm guitarist Steve
Farmer would take care of Drugs, and both would share equal responsibilities on
the Rock'n'Roll thing. But, of course, matters are never quite that simple:
Ted is regularly co-credited on most of the band's drug songs — a paradox that
he has since preferred to resolve by simply claiming that he had no idea they
were about drugs (some would reply that this either makes him a liar, or a
coward, or a moron, but we will just settle on Ted the Naughty Mystifier).
Plus, even if these days, The Amboy Dukes are
mostly remembered as the odd druggie band the Nuge used to play in before
testosterone and Artemis got the better of him, the connection is weak — The Amboy
Dukes were really a band, and their importance goes way beyond (okay, somewhat
beyond) having merely served as a launching pad for the solo career of
America's most famous hunter since Hawkeye.
In general, the Detroit scene is known as the
birthplace of «proto-punk», famous for bands such as the MC5, the Stooges, and
Alice Cooper, who preferred to shock the establishment with loudness,
vulgarity, and evil rather than flower power and mushroom essence. The Amboy
Dukes had plenty of loudness and vulgarity within their systems, but they had a
much more tolerant attitude towards psychedelia as well, so one could think of
them as sort of a cross between Alice Cooper and, say, Arthur Lee's Love —
although their most serious source of inspiration was British rather
than American psychedelia: it is no coincidence that one of the cover versions
they did was Cream's 'I Feel Free', performed in a highly competent manner, but
so slavishly adhering to the original that there is no reason at all for it to
linger today. (The other British cover that they do is, as a fairly odd choice,
Pete Townshend's 'It's Not True', which they do not slavishly adhere to
since they drop the tune's signature riff — but that doesn't make it
treasurable, either).
The band's psychedelic inclinations are fairly
naïve and dated on such tracks as 'Psalms Of Aftermath' (everything about
which is clichéd, starting from the title and pretentious lyrics and
ending with the obligatory sitar and choral vocals) and 'Down On Phillips
Escalator' (don't miss the anagram!). But as soon as they go into hard rock
mode, the situation gets better — they come up with some nicely brutal riffs
('Colors'), and Nugent consistently shows that he's done his Hendrix homework
fairly well.
The single, which did not chart, but ranked
high enough with critical taste to make it onto Nuggets, was Big Joe
Williams' 'Baby Please Don't Go', whose fast-rocking arrangement was borrowed
by the band from Them, but, quite probably, later served as the more direct
source of inspiration for Budgie, AC/DC, and God knows who else. Anyway, no
other song by the band so perfectly merges their psychedelic and their sexual
side together — the lead vocalist, John Drake, may be no great shakes, but Bill
White's unnerving bass groove is impossible to resist in its enticing
primitivism, and Mr. Ted unleashes a juicy psychedelic extravaganza in the
middle (even throwing in a direct quotation from Hendrix's 'Third Stone From
The Sun' and getting away with it) that rocks your mind as much as it blows it,
even if every single lick out there must have been copied from somebody else's
record. Even so, he's a master splicer.
In short, I would easily give this record a
hearty thumbs up, if not for the fact that Nugent and Farmer's songwriting is
so sour. Apart from two or three cool hard rock riffs, there is very little on
here that is memorable. This is no big fault for the band — they were clearly
trying to find their own voice, throwing in everything that could be thrown in
(I have not mentioned the Rolling Stones yet, but John Drake must surely have
been a major admirer of Mick Jagger, essentially dedicating 'Night Time' and
the cover of 'Let's Go Get Stoned' to his name), but it does little, if
anything, to convince the listener that any other track on here besides
the epochal reworking of 'Baby Please Don't Go' deserves salvation.
That said, it would not exactly be right to
give it a thumbs down, either, because the bizarre mix of cock rock with dope
rock that The Amboy Dukes had worked out from the very start is weirdly special
in its own way — almost each individual song may be weak per se, but the idea
itself has never been realized so completely by anyone I know (even the Rolling
Stones preferred to separate these two sides: as psychedelic as Satanic
Majesties is, the Stones had seriously slowed down their regular sex drive
rate on it). And, as you can see from the massive amount of covers, this was,
after all, just the beginning.
JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE MIND (1968)
1) Mississippi Murderer; 2)
Surrender To Your Kings; 3) Flight
Of The Byrd; 4) Scottish Tea; 5) Dr. Slingshot; 6) Journey To The Center Of The
Mind; 7) Ivory Castles; 8) Why Is A Carrot More Orange Than An Orange; 9)
Missionary Mary; 10) Death Is Life; 11) Saint Phillip's Friend; 12) I'll
Prove I'm Right; 13) Conclusion.
Not sure about hitting the very «center», but
with their second album, the Dukes have certainly reached a stable periphery.
All of this is entirely self-written and much more confident than the first
time around. It's also interesting in its very pronounced division. Nugent more
or less owns Side A, based on individual, fat-riffed psycho-rockers, and Farmer
dominates Side B, propped by a continuous psycho-pop suite, much wimpier, but
somewhat subtler than Side A. Who's the winner? As much as it pains me to
pronounce this, the Nuge is the winner.
Of course, the title track which opens the
suite is the album's best number, and proudly deserves its place on the Nuggets boxset — but it is also the
only one co-written by Farmer and
Nugent on Side B. Psychedelia is rarely done at breakneck speed, for understandable
reasons (try running a 60-metre dash on pot!), but that might just be one of
the reasons why the Nuge still keeps pretending that 'Journey To The Center Of
The Mind' is not a drug song, just an
ass-kicking call for general open-mindedness and what-not. Anyway, it rocks,
it's catchy as hell, it's got a blistering solo from Ted, and it shamelessly
steals the fabulous riff from The Del-Vetts' 'Last Time Around' for one brief
section — what's not to like?
The directions in which Farmer pushes the band
on the other parts of the suite are a different matter. They borrow
extensively from baroque-pop and folk-rock, and neither of these is done in a
particularly exciting manner. Sure, the band learns the guitar jangle, and the
harpsichord tingle, and the snowy Hammond organ badongle, but the sounds still do not come together in anything
particularly impressive or original. Nugent does his best to paint the generic
bolero rhythms of 'Ivory Castles' with meaty, vibrato-dependent solos, but he
does little to save the Witgenstein-worthy title 'Why Is A Carrot More Orange
Than An Orange', and even less to pull up the loud disaster of 'Missionary
Mary' (that kind of title would
suggest something grossly indecent, but, much to everybody's disappointment —
no titillation whatsoever).
Thus, my and your money should be on Ted's
compositional work on Side A: 'Surrender To Your Kings', another speedy anthem
with a paranoid undercurrent; 'Flight Of The Byrd', another hard rock monster
with a heavy Hendrix debt; and 'Scottish Tea', for which Ted honestly reworks a
traditional Celtic anthem, replacing the bagpipes with psychedelic guitar —
possibly the first straightforward crossing of the Highlands with San
Francisco. No masterpiece, but amusing.
John Drake, as lead vocalist, once again makes
no strong impression, much as he tries on the opening track: 'Mississippi
Murderer', standing somewhat alone in its own corner, is a gruff roots-rocker,
dedicated to the familiar subject of womanslaughter, and, in trying to find the
proper spirit, Drake impersonates a thoroughly gin-soaked, smoke-choked local
barroom goer, some might say successfully, but I'd rather have Tom Waits over
this, since Tom has what it takes to creep me out and this guy, unfortunately,
doesn't. In the end, 'Murderer' just sounds like a joke song, and a very
deceitful way to start out the album.
Overall, this is «progress», in a way, because
the Nuge has made way for his talents, adding a decent composing flair to his
already well-honed guitar skills — and, on the other hand, it is the only Amboy
Dukes album on which Uncle Ted's big dick consistently stays out of the
conversation, an amazing exception in the man's career and reason enough to
not only own the album, but even to award it an explicit thumbs up without bringing on seedy
connotations. But be ready for a sea of filler in compensation.
MIGRATION (1969)
1) Migration; 2) Prodigal Man;
3) For His Namesake; 4) I'm Not A Juvenile Delinquent; 5) Good Natured Emma; 6)
Inside The Outside; 7) Shades Of Green And Grey; 8) Curb Your Elephant; 9)
Loaded For Bear.
So, what sort of reaction would you expect from
Ted Nugent if you told him his name were really an anagram for GUN DETENT? Here
we have God providing the man with an almost direct hint, and he still ends the
Amboy Dukes' third album with a song called 'Loaded For Bear'. What's that? Oh,
right, it's not that bear. Damn the
English language and its silly homonyms. Besides, Uncle Ted's big machine is
usually loaded for boar, not bear. Or, sometimes, for beaver.
Anyway, Migration
is basically the last attempt on the part of the original Amboy Dukes to behave
like a more or less straightfaced psychedelic American band. However, they are
already nurturing a more sarcastic attitude — the one that eventually landed
them on Frank Zappa's record label — as evidenced by the tongue-in-cheek cover
of the old doo-wop tune 'I'm Not A Juvenile Delinquent'. It's too silly to be
hilarious, but it does show a desire to evolve, be it only in the cartoonish
direction.
In other news, the band had just fired John
Drake, replacing him with Rusty Day, an equally forgettable non-presence — his
lungs are slightly more powerful than Drake's, but that's just about it.
Songwriting duties are still shared equally between Nugent and Farmer, with
keyboards player Andy Solomon throwing in a piece of his own ('Curb Your
Elephant', an uninteresting piece of whitebread R'n'B with occasional
«free-form» bits of instrumental chaos thrown in, not unlike some eccentric
composition by Giles, Giles, & Fripp on the other side of the Atlantic, but
without the humor or the memorable melody).
Alas, even though the Dukes may be sounding here better than ever before —
the Nuge just keeps getting huger and nuger with each new record, and Dave
Palmer's drumming borders on the epic at times — they still do not have the
faintest idea of what it is that constitutes a true hook, unless they come upon
one through sheer coincidence. This is why the title track, a sprawling
instrumental that opens the album, is arguably the best that Migration has to offer — it is a
colorful melange of various freely quoted psychedelic motives (inspired
primarily by 'Beck's Bolero', so it would seem), which requires instrumental
versatility rather than compositional skill, and all of the players rise up to
the task, Ted first of all, alternating sweetly flowing psychedelic lines with
rapid explosive bursts of fireworks, excited as if being under the spell effect
of rhinoceros semen (the taste of which he would sometimes compare to marijuana
in interviews).
'Prodigal Man' is also little more than yer
basic, utterly generic hard rock when it comes to main melody, but there is
enough ferocious drumming and guitar heroics on here to feed a small regiment
of musicians; the final solo from Ted is among the most melodic and coherent
pieces he ever cobbled together. Very
few guitarists would play that fast, that clean, and that melodic in 1969, come
to think of it: certainly, if pressured to do so, both Clapton and Hendrix could
have shown Uncle Ted a thing or two in that style, but the bottomline is, they
just didn't care to play in that
style. (Pete Townshend did, but he was always way above disciplining himself as
strictly as Nugent does on this, or many other, tracks). The live versions of
'Prodigal Man' used to run for fifteen minutes, too (a twenty-minute mammoth
performance later surfaced on the band's live album), and, apparently, the
original LP version of the song was much longer than the cut version that is
available on all CD editions — vinyl collectors ahoy.
As long as the song in
question is not all about the Nuge sending fireflies into space, though, it
just floats by without much ado, like the routine psychedelic sonic cloud it is
(if it's a Farmer song) or like the yawn-inducing hard rock cliché it is
(if it's a Nugent song, e. g. 'Good Natured Emma'). The sound is always
tasteful, but it's no fun just beating around the bush all the time, waiting
for Ted to strike up a solo (oh well, at least he never disappoints); and,
apparently, the music industry people shared this feeling, too — the songs got
little, if any, airplay, and after the brief hopes that 'Journey To The Center
Of The Mind' instilled in the band, Migration
was a dreadful flop, failing to chart at all and essentially destroying the
basic conception of the Amboy Dukes as a Farmer-Nugent project. And I agree
with the people — thumbs down; after all, we can always hear the
Nuge flash and sparkle some other time, particularly when there are some fine written
songs to go along with the sparkle.
MARRIAGE ON THE ROCKS/ROCK BOTTOM (1970)
1) Marriage; 2) Breast-Fed
Gator; 3) Get Yer Guns; 4) Non-Conformist Wildebeest Man; 5) Today's Lesson; 6)
Children Of The Woods; 7) Brain Games Of Yesteryear; 8) The Inexhaustible
Quest For The Cosmic Cabbage.
All right — now that
Steve Farmer is officially out of the band and complete control passes on to
Nugent, you'd think The Amboy Dukes must have kicked aside all the silly psycho
shit and moved on to a sort of permanently fixed 'Cat Scratch Fever'-like type
of groove, right?
Dead wrong. Not only
has Farmer's departure not affected
Uncle Ted's testosterone level one little bit, it seems to have initially
worked the wrong way — for one brief moment at least, Nugent assumed that it
was now up to him to fill in the
«artsy slots», left vacant with Farmer's departure. The result is, hands down,
the weirdest album to ever bear
association with the name of Ted Nugent. Were he ever to unexpectedly perform
'Marriage' or 'Children Of The Woods' at one of his shows, at least half of his
fans' heads would explode. Fortunately, there is no danger of that. «He was
young, he was foolish, he was angry, he was vain», Mick would describe this.
I do not like any of these songs. The Nuge still
has problems coming up with memorable riffs, and much of the time he is not
even trying. What he is doing,
though, is being all over the place. No single song on here ends where it
begins, and most go through several transformations at least — constant tempo
and key changes, constant juggling around with instruments and guitar tones,
constant mood-shifting that borders on psychic disturbance.
If there is any primary
influence here, it is Frank Zappa, closely followed by the «street mob variety
art rock» of Blue Cheer, Vanilla Fudge, Iron Butterfly, and various other heavy
psychedelic bands (I have met comparisons with Jethro Tull, but that's out of
the question; it is unlikely that the Dukes had even heard Jethro Tull by then,
much less could have been carried away by them). The major Zappa fan in the
band was keyboard player Andy Solomon: his only contribution, the crazy
disjointed ten-minute suite 'The Inexhaustible Quest For The Cosmic Cabbage' is
fully Zappaesque in name and spirit, except it's also boring as hell: the
free-form jazz / Brit-pop / avantgarde noise / pseudo-barbershop quartet
harmony bits do not mesh together with nearly as much professionalism or
conceptuality as they do on Frank's Absolutely
Free, and it is not really until Uncle Ted properly picks up the guitar and starts whuppin' its ass at the
tail end of the show that the track belatedly justifies its existence. Still,
it's a fascinating misfire in its own way.
Ted's own brave stab at
a multi-part epic ('Marriage') is much
better — it is listenable as a normal and mildly interesting piece of music
with progressive overtones, although its main flaw also follows the main flaw
of so many aspiring progressive musicians: it is basically just a set of moderately
complex rhythmic grooves, none of which have any real significance, over which
Nugent gets a chance to showcase his melodic soloing. That Ted has a gift, and
that he is not merely «wanking» all over the studio, but trying to invoke
beauty one minute and fury the next one, is crystal clear. That 'Marriage' is
a breathtaking prog epic, capable of taking its rightful place next to 'Watcher
Of The Skies' or 'Gates Of Delirium', is not quite so evident.
The shorter
hard-rockers are more in line with the Dukes' previous body of work — meaty,
brawny, worth tapping a toe or two or kicking a butt or three. But no review
of an album like this can bypass a track as crazy as 'Non-Conformist Wildebeest
Man' — which could only be described as «Nashville meets Orange County hardcore»:
ninety seconds of a lively country shuffle played at over-breakneck speed, nothing in 1970 could even remotely
sound like that. Alas, on the ninety first second it mutates into the mid-tempo
art-metal of 'Today's Lesson', a much less interesting track, even if it takes
itself much more seriously.
Had the new-look Amboy
Dukes continued that way, who knows, this could have perhaps evolved into a
whole new genre. On the other hand, Nugent clearly shows that he is in no
position to pen really complex material: he gets by on the strength of his
fire-breathing playing, but any embellishments that the band tries to load on
top of his riffs mainly fall flat. Whatever you could say, some people are born
into this world to bring it 'Thick As A Brick' — and some are born to simply
give it some 'Wang Dang Sweet Poontang'.
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST (1971)
1) Survival Of The Fittest; 2)
Rattle My Snake; 3) Mr. Jones' Hanging Party; 4) Papa's Will; 5) Slidin' On; 6)
Prodigal Man.
Some pressings of Marriage On The Rocks already added a
«Featuring Ted Nugent» note in small print right on the sleeve. With the band's
next album, all doubts were lifted. The band is now officially «Ted Nugent And
The Amboy Dukes», with TED NUGENT in thick blood-red letters and THE
AMBOY DUKES in a poorly
discernible, malicious yellow. If that ain't enough, there is TED NUGENT
himself, staring right at you from the sleeve photo, dressed up in Native American
garb and ready to shoot himself some fleshy dinner.
Still, at least there
is some small connection with the
earlier Amboy Dukes, because keyboardist Andy Solomon is still part of Ted's
band — a very important, in fact, ingredient of the overall sound — and he even
co-writes the title track. All of the other band members have been replaced:
now we have K. J. Knight on drums and Rob Ruzga on bass — not that it seriously
matters, since neither of the two had enough stamina to last too long around
Uncle Ted. Survival Of The Fittest
indeed — and say what you will about Mr. Nugent and his social-darwinist stance
on life, but one thing nobody can deny is that the guy does belong in the
«fittest» category.
The entire album was
recorded live over two nights of playing at a Detroit theater in the summer of
1970 — home grounds boosting self-confidence — yet consists almost entirely of
new material, with the sole exception of 'Prodigal Man', and even that one, by
the time of the recording, had evolved into a typically early Seventies
twenty-minute long jam with extended soloing from all the members. This makes Survival an obligatory must for Nuge
fans — whether it is an equal must for general hard rock audiences is a tougher
question.
As close as he is
getting there, the Nuge still had not
shaken the artsy cobwebs out properly; his wildman image is gradually starting
to get the better of him, but a little bit of shyness and, more importantly, a
little bit of pretense to something bigger than blunt ass-kicking still
remains. The title track begins with an intentional false start — the band
launches straight into the main riff of 'Journey To The Center Of The Mind' —
then transforms into another 'Marriage'-like suite with alternating blues-rock
and R'n'B sections; the grooves are smooth, but the little pizzazz that can
push a thing like that into overdrive is, unfortunately, missing.
Other than the okayish
hard rocker 'Rattle My Snake' ("rattle my snake! feel free to," a
young Uncle Ted invites his audience at the end of the track, officially
initiating his long history of salacious live routines) and a semi-psychedelic
workout called 'Mr. Jones' Hanging Party', the magnum opus of Side 1 is unquestionably 'Papa's Will'. A slowly
lumbering grumbly monster, it never truly kicks off until the last minutes,
when it's all about Mr. Ted and his wildman behaviour, culminating in a series
of feral screams that are almost the equal of Pink Floyd's 'Careful With That
Axe, Eugene' — and, in a way, even sound more natural.
The good news is that Survival Of The Fittest drops most of the clumsy and pointless elements
that Marriage On The Rocks tried to
associate with the Amboy Dukes. No straightahead psychedelia or ambitious
messing around with Bartok pieces — this is rock'n'roll that tries to be more
than three-chord entertainment, but still remains pure rock'n'roll. And yet,
the Nuge still had a short way to go: except for the rip-roaring finale of
'Prodigal Man' (for which you have to wade through fifteen minutes of mediocre
drum, bass, and organ soloing), not one song on here truly cuts loose with the
appropriate degree of Madness from the Motor City Madman; I doubt that 'Rattle
My Snake' or 'Slidin' On' might ever rank high on anyone's top 100 list of
Harder Than A Rock Classics. The flaming bits are truly flaming, but, overall,
this is a boring thumbs down — a transitional stage that no one needs to
spend too much time on.
I mean, this was 1970,
for God's sake — with the Who, the Stones, Led Zep, the Allman Brothers, and
Derek & The Dominos all at the
peak of their powers that year, someone still needs Ted Nugent? Just give the
smartass his due — by steering clear of drugs, in five years' time, he'd
outlast all these peaks — and THEN there would be something to finally talk
about.
CALL OF THE WILD (1973)
1) Call Of The Wild; 2) Sweet
Revenge; 3) Pony Express; 4) Ain't It The Truth; 5) Renegade; 6) Rot Gut; 7)
Below The Belt; 8) Cannon Balls.
Well! Is this already a completely solo Ted
Nugent album in all but name? With Andy Solomon out of the band, the Nuge is
now officially the only link to any sort of the Amboy Dukes' past — now there
is no one but himself to even remember who the heck was a «Steve Farmer» and
whether he was a real farmer or just pretended to be one. Actually, with the
second wildlife-dedicated album title in a row, Ted drives the last nail into
the coffin of the agricultural revolution. From now on and all the way down to
eternity, a-hunting we will go.
And yet, the label «Ted
Nugent & The Amboy Dukes» still makes some sense. For one thing, Uncle
Ted's limitless libido is still kept under control: the occupation of «looking
for meat», as applied to Call Of The
Wild, is mostly to be understood in the literal, not figurative, way, with
most of the album's rockers celebrating the simple pleasures of enjoying nature
and freedom, rather than the self-imposed chains of the sex drive. For
another, Ted still requires a full-fledged «band-like» sound — Solomon's
replacement, Gabriel Magno, contributes thick keyboard layers that are
regularly battling with Ted's guitar runs. (On vocals, by the way, we sometimes
find Ted himself, sometimes a certain Andy Jezowski whom I really know nothing
about).
But, most importantly,
about half of Side B is still turned over to an atmospheric, quasi-psychedelic
instrumental suite ('Below The Belt') — granted, its slow, moody unveiling,
with Ted gradually laying on echos, distortion, wobble, phasing, feedback,
etc., is probably just supposed to illustrate a thrilling journey through the
jungle, which every brave hunter is expected to undertake in order to feel
himself one with the things of nature before killing and eating them. (More
nutritious that way, not to mention spiritual.) However, 'Below The Belt's
direct musical influence is unquestionably Pink Floyd's 'Careful With That
Axe, Eugene' — same type of relentlessly creeping crescendo, culminating in
blood-curdling screams. For the classic Ted Nugent style, this is much too artsy-fartsy, and fully
justifies still dragging along the «Amboy Dukes» tag.
The real good news is
that Call Of The Wild rocks. Right until 'Below The Belt'
softens up and colorizes the atmosphere, it is just one energetic rocker after
another — truly wild, conveniently fast, and each containing either a decent
riff, or a decent chorus, or both,
and all of them featuring Mr. Ted in
overdrive mode, soloing away like there was no tomorrow, no holds barred at
all. The man is just completely unchained — one listen to the solo on 'Sweet
Revenge' at 1:56 into the song is enough to witness a happy soul in fully free
flight. This is one of those seminal spots where any disgust one might harbor
towards Ted Nugent, the sickening human being, must be left behind that door
and replaced with admiration for such inspired musicianship.
Obviously, if you are
asserting yourself as a major hard-rocking machine as late as 1973, some of
your music will be ripped off, and Uncle Ted's listening stand, by that time,
must have included quite a bit of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple — 'Pony
Express', as much ass as it kicks, is very much a slightly slowed down,
bluesier take on 'Highway Star' (check the beginning of each verse, in
particular). But then, one thing Uncle Ted never ever pretended to was
trend-setting — other than masterminding an unfortunate association between
cock rock and the National Rifle Association — and his is far from the only
brand of derivative hard-rock that is still enjoyable from top to bottom. Who
needs historical innovation with the kind of awesome guitar thunderstorm interlude
Uncle Ted showers on our heads at 2:16 into 'Call Of The Wild'? That's just,
like, totally MURDEROUS guitar playing out there! Beats even
Mötörhead for sheer headbanging purposes, if you ask me.
To put it short, I can
understand how all those «transitional era» Amboy Dukes albums had so little
impact — but why an album like Call Of
The Wild should so slumpily fall through the cracks of benevolent public
attention and reluctant critical recognition, I have no idea. With a bunch of
steamin'-hot rockers like the title track and 'Sweet Revenge', and a fun
seven-minute atmospheric romp through the realm of sound like 'Below The
Belt', it is the first Nugent-associated record I had the pleasure of enjoying
all the way through — and, possibly, my thumbs up might stimulate someone else into
sharing that pleasure. This may not yet be the completely print-ready
cartoonish version of Uncle Ted with the cat scratch fever, but this is where
Nugent truly arrives on the scene as a force in a class of his own. And no Jack
London-related jokes, please.
TOOTH, FANG & CLAW (1974)
1) Lady Luck; 2) Living In The
Woods; 3) Hibernation; 4) Free Flight; 5) Maybelline; 6) The Great White
Buffalo; 7) Sasha; 8) No Holds Barred.
The Amboy Dukes finally
reach the end of their transmutational career with this record — upon
completing it, Nugent officially disbanded the group and embarked on a
three-month deer-killing spree, a bloody intermission that formally separates
«Ted Nugent & The Amboy Dukes» from «Ted Nugent, Solo Madman». But since Tooth, Fang & Claw is very much
just Call Of The Wild Vol. 2, there
is a substantial difference, too.
This is the last time
Uncle Ted flirts with an itty-bitty bit of artsiness, coming in the form of two
consequent instrumentals: 'Hibernation' and 'Free Flight'. The former is just
as long as 'Below The Belt' on the previous album, but much faster and much
more relying on speed runs from Ted's fingers, happily bursting out in
seemingly endless waves. The latter also runs fast, but is more riff-based,
centered around an equally happy, memorable melody. But as loud and energetic
as these guitarfests are, they are not at all «heavy», and the sweaty sexual
aggression that Ted would start cultivating so hard in just a year is nowhere
in sight.
It is much more evident
on vocal numbers, such as the opening 'Lady Luck' and the closing 'No Holds
Barred'; the former, in particular, is classic Nugent — not one, but several
crunchy and evocative riffs, lyrics that leave no doubts about the directions
of Uncle Ted's mind, and a heavy as heck, macho as muck atmosphere that, in
1974, Ted was still learning to borrow from his predecessors (Steppenwolf,
etc.), but of which he would soon become the ultimate priest. Great tune! As
recommendable for sissies as 'Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme' is for
bodybuilders.
'Lady Luck' and the
instrumental rampage are the chief reasons why I believe this record to be
almost as satisfactory as Call Of The
Wild, but there are other points of interest, including:
— 'The Great White
Buffalo', a Nugent classic and one of the very few Amboy Dukes-era survivors
that made it into his regular set — an environmentalist
tune, mind you, blaming the stupid white man for the fate of the buffalo. (Come
to think of it, I can understand Uncle Ted's rage at the stupid white man —
exterminating all the buffalo before
Uncle Ted got there! Now all Uncle Ted's got left are these puny little deer
things). The important thing about the song is not its lyrics, though, but
rather the quirky little riff, built around several loop-like flourishes that
Ted bravely reproduces in each bar of the verse melody;
— 'Maybellene': Chuck's
prime chestnut is updated here for the 1970s, with everything bigger, louder,
faster, and dumber than it used to be, but that's to be expected. The funniest
part of it is Ted imploring the drum guy to "Hit me... hit me... hit
me!" in the very end, like a junkie screaming for a shot, then, once the
desired hit finally comes — a relieved "Ah, thank you!". That funny
old Mr. Nugent, eh?;
— 'Sasha': a rather
mediocre acoustic-folk ballad, but it's a NUGE-APPROVED acoustic-folk ballad,
his first one, actually — and it's about his newborn daughter, so cut the
caveman some slack for a little sentimental tenderness, something like the
first time ever. After all, even loincloth-clad primordial hunters could have
a weakness for babies.
Strange as it is, I
would not say that, at any point during the album, Ted feels like he is tired
of his current direction, or feeling under pressure from some atavistic
obligation to inject a shot of «art» into whatever it is that he is doing. Tooth, Fang & Claw is not a great hard rock album, but it's fairly
solid, so Nugent's final decision to concentrate on one and one thing only in the future really comes off as
a surprise. Believe it or not, there used to be a time when Uncle Ted kept
trying different things from time to time — if anything, none of these records
sound as cartoonish as whatever followed. Of course, Ted's cartoons are one of
a kind, too, but still, there is something about his Amboy Dukes past that
brews up a little nostalgia. Thumbs up to commemorate this yearning — oh, and
for all the swell guitar runs, too, of course.
PSYCHEDELIC UNDERGROUND (1969)
1) Ein Wunderhübsches
Mädchen Träumt Von Sandosa; 2) Kaskados Minnelied; 3) Mama
Düül Und Ihre Sauerkrautband Spielt Auf; 4) Im Garten Sandosa; 5)
Der Garten Sandosa Im Morgentau; 6) Bitterlings Verwandlung.
So here I was all set
to start writing about Amon Düül II, one of the fundamental marvels
of classic Krautrock, when it somehow struck me that it is, after all,
somewhat unprofessional, not to mention illogical, not to say a few words about
what the «II» stands for. And this, in turn, begs for the question — why do so
many people know a lot of things about Amon Düül II, but prefer to
generally keep quiet about their predecessors?
The best answer, of
course, implies taking a listen to this record (one is quite enough for the layman;
any more and you will start träum-ing
von Sandosa yourself, and we don't
want any of that). The original Amon Düül was not so much a musical
band as a bohemian artistic conglomeration of a dozen or so free-spirited
German youths, who drifted together some time in 1967 in Munich, and, instead
of plotting a beer hall putsch, decided instead to take it out peacefully —
besides, with that much pot around
you, it'd be pretty hard to organize even a rally, let alone a political coup.
So they just called themselves Amon Düül instead: «Amon» for the
Egyptian sun god, of course, but with «Düül» there are problems —
some claimed this to be the Turkish equivalent for 'moon', which would be nice
and symmetric except there's no such word in the Turkish language. The closest
thing I have been able to locate would be Proto-Turkic *düül 'dream', which is still fairly appropriate. Anyway,
sure beats «Grateful Dead».
The group engaged in
all sorts of activities — political, social, artistic, hallucinogenic — and one
of these activities happened to be music, which some people at the time still believed to be able to save the
world. Of course, «music» was understood in a strictly ritualistic sense of the
word: having little value in and out of itself, serving instead as a promoter
of collective ecstasy. This meant that it did not matter much if you knew how to play — it only mattered if,
by playing, you could lure the spirit inside you, and then be able to pass it
on to the rest.
Hence this jam session,
recorded somewhere in late 1968, with eight musicians participating, and — get
this — six of them credited only for various kinds of percussion
(with Ulrich Leopold trying, as best as he can, to lay down the bass lines,
and Rainer Bauer contributing stoned-out-of-his-mind rhythm guitar). Peter
Leopold is the primary drummer, and Wolfgang Krischke — who passed away one
year later, having managed to freeze to death while under the influence — also
contributes occasional piano rolls (or, should we say, piano bangs).
The session was later
doctored in the studio, mostly through the insertion of various sonic collages
that raise the album's «unpredictability» quotient — as in, sometimes the
unending tribal beat simply vanishes from under your feet and is replaced by a
few minimalistic piano notes, then fades in again as if nothing happened. But
in general, there is nothing here to take away the total freedom of expression,
so that we can all witness how boring it can be when the universe is ruled by
an absolute absence of rules.
Well, maybe not
absolute. Psychedelic Underground is
not just a bunch of random noises, as could easily be expected from early,
hyper-experimental Krautrock. Rather, it is a bunch of tribal dances, with the
entire first side given over to a particularly expressive 17-minute one. Most
of the time, the rhythm section does hold down a pseudo-African beat, and the
rest of the band beat their congos and maracas and shake their shakers and
tambourines and dance around the campfire, yelling in tongues and worshipping
The Great Zombie or something. For a couple minutes, it's amusing, and then you
start forgetting about the whole thing even while it's playing.
The second side of the
album is, technically, more diverse: instead of one single groove, there are
five, although one is very similar to 'Mädchen' ('Im Garten Sandosa') and
another one is not really a «groove», but rather a long psycho-folk
incantation, heavily peppered with abysmal falsetto wailings (' Der Garten
Sandosa Im Morgentau'). The best thing that could be said about this stuff is
that it does have atmosphere — the tribal chanting actually sounds «tribalistic», and the mantras
actually sound as if the people behind them believed
they were channelling supernatural currents that-a-way. Perhaps the optimal
manner of enjoying this stuff would not even imply consumption of substances —
just put on a loincloth, light a campfire, put some sacrificial meat on the
spit, get out your tomtom, and join in all the fun. Just the kind of thing to
seduce a respectable Munich bürger, especially at the height of the
Oktoberfest.
I would not want to stamp
a negative rating on this thing — obviously, it fares quite poorly when
compared to the contemporary psychedelic jamming of Can, or even Amon
Düül's own, much more disciplined, offspring («II»), but, like I
said, «psychedelic jamming» is not a good way to describe the album. It is not
offering «music» — it delivers a tribal ritual, and delivers it pretty damn
well as far as tribal rituals in the heart of Germany could ever go.
COLLAPSING / SINGVÖGEL RÜCKWÄRTS & CO. (1969)
1) Booster (Kolkraben); 2) Bass,
Gestrichen (Pot Plantage, Kollaps); 3) Tusch, FF; 4) Singvögel
Rückwärts (Singvögel Vorwärts); 5) Lua-Lua-He (Chor Der
Wiesenpieper); 6) Shattering & Fading (Flattermänner); 7) Nachrichten Aus
Cannabistan; 8) Big Sound (Die Show Der Blaumeisen); 9) Krawall (Repressiver
Montag); 10) Blech & Aufbau (Bau, Steine & Erden); 11) Natur (Auf Dem
Lande).
This almost immediate
follow-up to Psychedelic Underground
was, frankly speaking, not a very good move. For the most part, it consists of
leftovers from the same jam session — think carefully: leftovers from a psychedelic
jam session. That's sort of like replacing fresh cocaine with fresh vomit
from a cocaine inhaler, isn't it?
The only big formal
difference is that most of the tracks are short. This makes the album more diverse;
but how possibly diverse can an album get if all you hear is a set of
ritualistic percussion grooves? How many different ways are there to bang a drum — okay, a lot of drums — unless you are
Max Roach and you approach the drumbanging task the way a mathematician
approaches a Millennium Prize Problem, which is clearly not the kind of situation that the members of Amon Düül
were in when they released this sequel under the slogan of «anything goes».
Psychedelic Underground at least made a statement and provided you
with a good soundtrack if you wanted to engage in a zeitgeist-ish religious
ritual. These brief bits, however, fall under the Woody Allen principle of
"really awful food, and in such small portions": as boring as these
percussion fests are, they do not even give you plenty of time to settle into
the groove. The whole venture loses its purpose, becoming a very silly album
released with no particular purpose. It is fairly amazing they were able to
release it at all. Not to bother — thumbs down here with not a shred of remorse.
The best thing about it are the song titles, including such wasted wonders as
'News From Cannabistan' and 'Songbird Forwards (Songbird Backwards)'. But then
again, it still sells for $25 at Amazon, so perhaps it is me, after all, who is
missing something here — like an ability to appreciate strong young German
hands on a set of bongos.
PARADIESWÄRTS DÜÜL (1970)
1) Love Is Peace; 2) Snow Your
Thirst And Sun Your Open Mouth; 3) Paramechanische Welt; 4) Eternal Flow; 5)
Paramechanical World.
An almost unpredictable
surprise: Amon Düül's first, and only, attempt at establishing
themselves as a real band — perhaps, spurred on by feelings of jealousy towards
their musically more ambitious brethren in Amon Düül II (a couple of
which still ended up guesting at the sessions, because the entire collected
musical talent of Amon Düül proper would not even reach the level of
the Monkees, let alone real Krautrock competition). Predictably, it did not
work, but at least it's (a) GROWTH, (b) not as awful as it could easily have
been. I mean, in 1970, an underground band of poorly trained «musicians» could
release an entire album of running up and down any basic scale, and it would
still sell — a little — as the ultimate mind-expanding experience. Fortunately,
Paradieswärts is slightly
better than that.
Slightly. The entire
first side is occupied by one 17-minute track, consisting of two parts: first,
a folk-bluesy electric part, pinned to a trivial looped riff, then a raga-style
acoustic part, pinned to even more trivial acoustic strumming, with some
electronic noises forming a bridge between the two. There is some overdubbing
(bass, extra guitarwork, including what tries to pass for baroque acoustic
flourishes, etc.), but overall, you can only think positively of this track if
the atmosphere happens to be to your liking — enough to make you enter a
peaceful realm of sleep.
On the second side,
'Snow Your Thirst...' is another Grateful Dead-ish experience, but expanded
with a lengthy and, surprisingly, not too atrocious electric wah-wah solo;
'Paramechanische Welt' is another raga that sounds quite similar to the second
part of 'Love Is Peace'. Furthermore, CD editions also include two shorter
tracks that were released as a single slightly before the LP, of which 'Eternal
Flow' could be moody and melancholic if it weren't so goddamn minimalistic —
and with Amon Düül, the feeling never passes that their minimalism is
due not so much to their intentional love for minimalism as it is to their
formal inability to practice maximalism.
In short, it is all
quiet, atmospheric, «pastoral», as some would claim, and utterly irrelevant in
the face of so many much better albums out there. But apparently, Amon
Düül themselves believed this music could get you to paradise (see
the album title), and, since it is hard to scientifically falsify that belief,
you might as well join in, to avoid frustration. Still a thumbs down, though, from a
voluntarily frustrated non-believer.
DISASTER (1972)
1) Drum Things
(Erschlagzeugtes); 2) Asynchron (Verjault Und Zugeredet); 3) Yea Yea Yea
(Zerbeatelt); 4) Broken (Ofensivitäten); 5) Somnium (Trauma); 6) Frequency
(Entzwei); 7) Autonomes (Entdrei); 8) Chaoticolour (Entsext); 9) Expressionidiom
(Kapuntterbunt); 10) Altitude (Quäär Feld Aus); 11) Impropulsion
(Noch'n Lied).
If they intentionally
gave this album that kind of name to avert disaster — for instance, to
have all of us blush and say, «oh come on, don't be so hard on yourselves, it's
not that bad, really!»... — well, it is that bad. No need to
underplay the badness. After the cute, if ultimately unsuccessful, attempt at
actual music-making on the previous album, Amon Düül are back to
basics: once again scraping out the barrel of the big 1969 jam session.
And now, God help us, they have scraped out enough to fill out a double
album of material.
What separates the real
Disaster from a forgivable curiosity like Psychedelic Underground
is that these, really truly, are dregs. Most of the tracks are, as
usual, centered around drums, except that this time, there is little of
anything other than drums (about one or two chords worth in guitar
strum and some occasional howling notwithstanding), and it all sounds like a
bunch of soundchecks — warming up for the real thing. Everything is taken at
the same tempo, most of the patterns are exactly the same, and the
individuality of each of the tracks basically just depends on how many drummers
there are and on which particular single string the guitar or the bass player
would pluck or strum in the event of a common cosmic current picking him up and
carrying him along with the drummer(s).
Essentially, this is Metal
Machine Music, but without the pizzazz — Lou Reed, at least, produced his
«anti-masterpiece» as a well-targeted fuck-you-all, whereas Disaster
doesn't even have the proper sonic punch to offend anybody exactly as the
doctor prescribed. Psychedelic Underground was the sacrificial ritual;
this is rehearsal material for the sacrificial ritual. You interested in
listening to the witch doctor getting it on inside his hut, half an
hour before they drag the sacrificial victims in the center of the village
square? If yes, Disaster awaits you, all the sixty seven minutes of
thumping and pumping. Thumbs down.
EXPERIMENTE (1983)
1) Special Track Experience
No. 1; 2) Special Track Experience No. 2; 3) Special Track Experience No. 3;
4) Special Track Experience No. 4; 5)
Special Track Experience No. 5; 6) Special Track Experience No. 6; 7) Special
Track Experience No. 7; 8) Special Track Experience No. 8; 9) Special Track
Experience No. 9; 10) Special Track Experience No. 10; 11) Special Track
Experience No. 11; 12) Special Track Experience No. 12; 13) Special Track Experience
No. 13; 14) Special Track Experience No. 14; 15) Special Track Experience No.
15; 16) Special Track Experience No. 16; 17) Special Track Experience No.
17; 18) Special Track Experience No. 18; 19) Special Track Experience No.
19; 20) Special Track Experience No. 20; 21) Special Track Experience No. 21;
22) Special Track Experience No. 22; 23) Special Track Experience No. 23;
24) Special Track Experience No. 24.
Some sources list this
album, released more than a decade after the musical career of Amon
Düül had been wisely laid to rest, as a bootleg; others include it in officially sanctioned discographies,
and, having not the temporal resources to investigate the controversy, I can
only say that I do not care, on any grand scale, but that it would, perhaps, make
sense to say a few words about it anyway, to scare off the irrationally brave
people.
Basically, these are
the «dregs off the dregs» from the proverbial jam session: sixty-five more minutes of lashing, crashing,
bashing, and thrashing. The only difference from Disaster is that most of these «special experiences», for which
nobody even bothered inventing specific titles this time around, are relatively
short, from one to three minutes in length. Some may find it a consolation; I
find it a travesty, since slicing these percussive blasts into thin strips
pretty much loses the only remaining
saving grace of the original Amon Düül — their ability to genetically
engineer your brain if the drumming and strumming are left alone for a
prolonged period of time. These here little pieces are blatantly stripped of
that power, each one cutting off abruptly, without even being provided a chance
to fade away, at what looks like completely random intervals. Even on those few
(two or three) occasions where I, involuntarily, would find myself slipping
into the groove, this was only to be followed by the very unpleasant feeling of having the groove suddenly jerked from under
you, and that can be almost as bad as a case of coitus interruptus.
There does, however,
occur a big, big laugh here if you make it all the way to Special Experience
No. 20 — which basically sounds like someone trying, over the course of one
minute, to master the chords for 'Louie Louie' but... failing. Pretty much tells you everything you should know about
the musical level of Amon Düül. Actually, a few scattered tracks here
and there offer a bit of folksy jangle, as a relief from the usual choppy
rhythm chords, but it's not as if throwing in a simple flourish here and there
had any actual meaning in this context.
I'd like to give the
album a thumbs down, but I can't — not before the effect of listening to it is
properly tested in a psychiatric ward; after all, similia similibus curentur, if you pardon my Latin. We can only
hope that, with Experimente, the
well had truly run dry. If anyone ever happens to fall upon more leftovers from this accursed
session (or, God forbid, come across recordings of other similar rituals), I will just have to pretend that the
unfortunate indie label that will dare release them is run by Nazi pedophiles,
and the Reviewer's Code says I can't deal with such types.
PHALLUS DEI (1969)
1) Kanaan; 2) Dem Guten,
Schonen, Wahren; 3) Luzifers Ghilom; 4) Henriette Krotenschwanz; 5) Phallus Dei.
While the original Amon
Düül busied themselves with one-way communication with anonymous
spirits, mostly via unharnessed drum banging and unrehearsed screaming, a
rebellious subset of the commune decided that, perhaps, the spirits would be
more responsive if spoken to with real music — weird music, for sure, but one that would at least be more firmly
grounded in the human musical experience, collectively gained over the past
millennium.
One thing in common
between early Amon Düül II and their brethren is that the new group,
too, started out as an improvisational outfit, burying themselves in heavy
jamming and putting on record those particular cuts that seemed to capture the
largest concentration of inspiration. Not that, in 1969, this was any big news
for the jazz idiom, but for the «rock» one the approach was still novel — even
the Grateful Dead preferred not to mix their live and studio images too
heavily. Phallus Dei, on the other
hand, was essentially a studio recreation of the band's live set, slightly
doctored with special effects and overdubs during the final stage.
In 1969, this set of
jams must have sounded as wild as the album title, which hardly requires
translation. Today, both the title and the music seem far more tame — in fact,
the music is downright accessible.
The band consciously avoids overtly tricky time signatures, key changes every
five seconds, or flashy, scale-jumping soloing; it simply keeps on playing, and
the only truly bizarre trademark are the vocals — alternately sung by
guitarist Chris Karrer or, uh, tambourinist Renate Knaup, the only girl in the
band. Bizarre, because the former had an occasional penchant for the Mickey
Mouse thing, and the latter keeps veering towards opera vibrato; together, they
sure make a pretty pair.
Although it is the
second side of the record that is completely dedicated to a twenty-minute
suite, it is actually the first one that sounds the craziest — dark psychedelic
cosmic rock, of that particular variety on which the instruments do not seem
to be working towards a collective purpose, but play the part of randomly
functioning objects speeding past your observation point in outer space. Two or
more guitars drone, buzz, or jangle with enough hard-rock power to keep the
listener from being bored by too much wimpiness (a typical failure for the
Grateful Dead) and with enough spaced-out sound effects to remind the listener
that this is certified psychedelia, not Steppenwolf or anything. The most
obvious parallel would be Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd ('Interstellar Overdrive'
etc.), except that the guitarists exude far more sanity and technicality.
As for 'Phallus Dei'
itself, it is more like a completely free-form jam, without even an introductory
theme, and much more steeped in standard rock'n'roll — the groove that emerges
out of the first three minutes of psycho noises shows the «garage» side of this
band, as the rhythm section and both guitarists rev up the tempo and start
competing in the art of ass-kicking. The groove that the band launches into
after a clumsy, wobbly pause must have been subconsciously borrowed from the
Amboy Dukes' 'Journey To The Center Of The Mind' — one of the most perfect
fusions of hard rock and psychedelia. The final results are meaty enough, but probably twenty minutes is a bit too long
for a flight that, no matter how free, has been launched from such a familiar
runway.
Essentially, Phallus Dei is like a grand rehearsal
for the real show: all the elements firmly in place, but without that little
special spark to really drive the performance home. The style that would ensure
the uniqueness of the band has been found — dark, but not depressing, space
rock with a slight touch of the carnival spirit and a healthy dose of Bavarian
buffoonery. But it would take the next album to prove that this uniqueness had
a really good reason to be unique. Thumbs up, but oh so modestly — if you are
completely new to this band and would rather prefer to be swept off your feet
than mildly amused, go straight to Yeti,
and don't forget to pass go and collect your $200.
YETI (1970)
1) Soap Shop Rock; 2) She Came
Through The Chimney; 3) Archangels Thunderbird; 4) The Return Of Ruebezahl; 5)
Eye-Shaking King; 6) Pale Gallery; 7) Yeti; 8) Yeti Talks To Yogi; 9) Sandoz In
The Rain.
The big difference between
Phallus Dei and Yeti is that the former still sounds more «stoned» than
«experimental». On the band's second album, the tables are turned. The band
that recklessly and delightfully jammed on Phallus
Dei was, by all means, a musical band, but one that could have easily faded
away in history like so many virtual unknowns from the same era. The band that
meticulously and purposefully laid down the foundation for Yeti, though — these guys
are already one of the primary driving forces of Krautrock; there is no way
they could disappear in smoke without the world sitting up and taking notice.
Not that I'd like to
conjure up images of a precise plan, conveying, bit by bit, some well thought-out
musical ideology: even at their tightest and most ambitious, Amon
Düül II were nothing like, say, the musical philosophers of
Kraftwerk. The album, after all, is named after the Abominable Snowman —
whereas the front cover, for no reason I can think of, depicts The Grim Reaper
instead (with the band's sound man posing as the gentleman in question). That
just about gives the right idea of the degree of the album's conceptual or
ideological coherence. Song titles and lyrics need not be paid much attention
here — except for a few brief seconds of wondering at all the delirious word
combinations, well steeped in the avantgarde tradition.
If there is an actual
idea behind all the rampage of Yeti,
it may be that of a certain denseness of sound, a kind of an aura that I would
call «Jungle Psychedelia». When you start thinking where this strange, strange
music is growing from, one immediate influence is the American psychedelic
scene — the sprawling jams of San Franciscan bands — but that sound, no matter how boring or how interesting, was decidedly
thinner and less picturesque than the exotic, dangerous landscapes painted by
Chris Karrer and his merry German pals.
When 'Soap Shop Rock'
introduces the album with a blues-rock riff not unlike Canned Heat or
Steppenwolf, the first few bars almost give a misguided impression — has this
band gone in a «rootsy» direction? 30 or 40 seconds into the song, though, you
begin to understand that, although they are
using traditional blues / rock'n'roll approaches to playing, this is merely a
foundation for something completely different. The guitar players throw on
everything they can think of, from jazz to classical guitar to psychodrome to
Indian ragas. The violin player idolizes John Cale, laying it on like a country
fiddler who has just learned to play him some Schoenberg. The male singer sings
with bleating Eastern overtones, the female singer sings like Isolde on speed.
And on top of that, if you get too
bored, they pile some memorable melodic hooks. Occasionally. And much of the
time, it all goes on at once, with
your ears constantly occupied in a mad rush from one spot to another, unable to
settle on any one thing permanently, like in one of those Robert Altman movies.
That's Amon
Düül II at their finest, in a nutshell. Sometimes there are softer,
gentler interludes ('She Came Through The Chimney', with a bizarre electronic
solo that squeaks at such a high pitch you'd think she must have had some real trouble coming through that
chimney), which are quickly replaced by more of that jungle bombast. If the
13-minute 'Soap Shop Rock' seems like overkill to you, try 'Archangels
Thunderbird' — all the magic of the band compressed into three and a half
minutes of brutal riffage, «non-standard» singing, and thick-as-thieves series
of overdubs. Although stopping at
'Thunderbird' would be a crime, too: neither Renate Knaup's vocals, nor Chris
Karrer's violin feature on it all that much. And the guitar solos on
'Eye-Shaking King' are louder and wilder.
The music becomes far
less focused on the second LP of the package, which does honestly warn the listener
that all of the music there is improvised. The title track, clocking in at 18
minutes, has its moments, and essentially follows the same vibes as the first
LP, but due to a lack of pre-rehearsed structure, can seem like a fall back
to the stage of Phallus Dei —
somewhat of a letdown after the concentrated jungle assault of 'Soap Shop Rock'
and its peers. Which is not denying the mood, and the background effect, and
the unique combination of sound ingredients, etc. And even the second LP does
have some structural planning: after the generally grim, «spooky» atmosphere
of 'Yeti' and 'Yeti Talks To Yogi', 'Sandoz In The Rain' closes the album on a
gentler note, with folksy chord sequences, acoustic guitars, and flutes, to
soften down and placate the disturbed senses. Take a load off. Your trip to the
musical jungle of Amon Düül II ends standing on a sunlit open patch,
rather than in the densest, darkest, eeriest part of the forest.
This disproportionate
importance of the two LPs means that, at this stage, the band was still in a
state of transition — the peak of their powers would not be reached until the
next record — but this sort of transition is worth ten instances of «reaching
maturity» for lesser bands. And, want it or not, never again (with the possible
exception of Wolf City) would the
band come across as possessing such monstruous rocking power — Yeti may not be as fantastically
inventive as subsequent albums, but it compensates by kicking all of their
asses to high heaven; how could it not get a major thumbs up due to that fact alone?
TANZ DER LEMMINGE (1971)
1) Syntelman's March Of The
Roaring Seventies; 2) Restless Skylight Transistor Child; 3) The Marilyn Monroe
Memorial Church; 4) Chewinggum Telegram; 5) Stumbling Over Melted Moonlight;
6) Toxicological Whispering.
Not even the murky
jungleland of Yeti can prepare the
listener for the «shoot down all barriers» marathon that is The Dance Of The Lemmings, Amon
Düül II's crowning masterpiece that earned them the right to resign
in dignity (although I do not blame them for preferring to fizzle out in disgrace
— there are still plenty of goodies in the subsequent catalog). If there was an
album in 1971 on which the universe of music was stretched out to a higher
extreme, I have yet to hear it; and, as we all know, 1971 was no slouch when it
came to stretching out.
Technically, each of
the first three sides of this double LP contains one lengthy suite, whereas
side four consists of three shorter tracks; in reality, this information is
irrelevant — the «suites» themselves are created from snippets that have little
to do with each other. The best choice one could make, I think, is to simply
accept the album as one sprawling seventy-minute long sonic fantasy, an Alice In Wonderland filtered through the
drug-fueled, but playful conscience of German «non-academic avantgardism». As
all such things go, it may work
better if the listener's conscience is drug-fueled, too, but you're on your
own with that one (this site is
strictly adhering to the «just say no» policy, no matter how hard it may get).
Actually, Tanz Der Lemminge becomes most delightful only in comparison. As
'Syntelman's March' starts us off on our psychedelic voyage, one can easily see
the links to the acid rock scenes in the US and the UK — the backbone sounds
like acoustic folk crossed with Eastern music and going crazy in the process.
But the more it goes on, the more and more different other ingredients are
thrown in, in radical contrast to Friscan psycho jams, usually very poor on
fantasy. Anyone accustomed to dismissing psychedelic music as «hippie crap»,
a.k.a. interminable wanking based on single-string drones or limited bluesy
improvising techniques, will have to waive that opinion after sitting through
the first ten minutes of 'Syntelman'. Spooky cosmic Mellotrons, gypsy violins,
tablas, flamenco guitar, Beatlesque electric pop riffs, barrelhouse piano, and
I have not listed even half of what's on there, I think — and it's just the
first side.
The second side
('Restless Skylight'), if at all possible, is even more inventive, complementing the diversity with sitars and
hard-rocking parts (the riff that bursts through your speakers at 7:08 is every
rocker's dream — lower the tone a little and Tony Iommi would have paid good money
to appropriate it for Master Of Reality).
And then, on side three, 'The Marilyn Monroe Memorial Church' goes for a
complete change of scene, dropping melody and rhythm in favor of mood and
atmosphere: eighteen minutes of creepy soundtrackish «muzak», during which the
intrepid jungle traveler of Yeti has
finally given up his machete and, from an active breaker of new ground, has
turned into a frightened passive observer, as the amicable, but deadly
dangerous friends of the forest hurry past him about their daily (or, rather,
nightly) tasks.
Come to think of it,
'Memorial Church', despite being largely improvised and having no firm
structure to speak of, may be one of Amon Düül II's greatest
contributions to humanity. Its dark mystique is not fully unprecedented — one
could say that it draws its inspiration, among other things, from the
mid-section of Led Zep's 'Dazed And Confused', or from the Doors' 'Horse Latitudes'
— but it is the first time ever that someone dared to explore the limits of
that mystique to such a full extent. It is essentially eighteen minutes of
«dicking around», and yet it doesn't feel boring, or, at least, doesn't have to feel boring. Just think of
yourself as Snow White groping around in the dark forest, and eighteen minutes
will pass in a jiffy.
Strange enough, the
band would never again try anything as totally far out as this record. Having
blown to bits all notions of limits and borders, Karrer, Weinzierl and Co. seem
to have decided that operating within
certain conventions is, after all, a more challenging task for the artist than
demolishing any such conventions — a notion that I generally endorse, but not
necessarily in this case. Tanz Der
Lemminge is a triumph of near-total freedom, but it is the kind of
near-total freedom that I love the best: one that does not forget about sheer
entertainment value, diversity, and melodicity (pardon my French). It sounds
like nothing else, yet still goes fairly easy on the «normal» ear. Not only
does it have absolutely nothing to do with the weirdness of, say, Captain Beefheart's
Trout Mask Replica (weirdness that I
am not afraid to call «anti-musical»), but when you get down to dissecting all
of its little bits, you find out that each one of them is fairly normal and even simple in its own rights. No crazy time signatures, no
earth-shaking dissonance, not even any ultra-ugly sound effects or feedback
abuse. It is only the recklessly
kaleidoscopic approach that makes Tanz
what it is — namely, one of the most mind-blowing experiences of the late stage
of the psychedelic era. Thumbs up a-plenty; in fact, I'd like to borrow
yours as well.
CARNIVAL IN BABYLON (1972)
1) C.I.D. In Uruk; 2) All The
Years Round; 3) Shimmering Sand; 4) Kronwinkl; 5) Tables Are Turned; 6) Hawknose
Harlequin.
Miles ahead of the
usual speed of progressive rock, Amon Düül II reached their most
audacious peak in 1971 — two years ahead of Tull's Passion Play and three years ahead of Tales From Topographic Oceans and The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway — and, by 1972, the band was all but
ready to «sell out». Those few admirers who held their breath, expecting the
follow-up to Tanz to blow their
minds to even higher heavens, must have lived out a depressingly anticlimactic
experience. The follow-up was a single LP; rather uniform in style and manner
of execution; low on psychedelic jamming, but high on folksy singing; and,
worst of all, rather flaccid and limp compared to the monster hard rock grooves
of Yeti and (occasionally) Tanz.
Now the very idea of an
elitist, far-out-there group making their sound more accessible to general
audiences has nothing sacrilegious about it per se. Unfortunately, I have to
side with those who consider this first attempt on Amon Düül's part
more of a failure than a success. No parts of the record are «awful» — in fact,
I would be hard pressed to imagine how exactly, at that point in time, it would
be at all possible for those guys to churn out straightforward musical trash —
but, basically, the results are neither too stunning, nor too memorable.
What this is is
«mood-oriented» music, shorn of the excessive sound layers of Tanz; the rhythmic grooves once again
get longer, returning us to the style of Yeti,
but they are also less based on crunchy guitar riffs and more on generic,
acoustic-based blues and folk patterns. In short, now they sound more like 1968-69 era Jefferson Airplane than ever
before — the major distinction being the German voices of Weinzierl, Karrer,
and Renate Knaup, who seem to be trying really hard to almost sound serious, which may be one of this
album's worst flaws, because it is frankly impossible to get a «serious»
reaction to Renate's vaudeville overtones or the male singers' strongly
pronounced German accents.
In the process, they
manage to come up with their «poppiest», most «song-like» number to date:
'Tables Are Turned', driven forward by a homely-psychedelic riff fed through a
Leslie cabinet or some similar shit, is very pretty (I still prefer they'd
invited a Sandy Denny to sing it instead), and, after many years, still leaves
the most lasting impression, alongside 'All The Years Round' (another cozy and
elegant summertime folk ballad, and another
song that would have benefited immensely from the presence of one of the
folk-rock greats, even though Renate does give it all she can). But the other
numbers are merely okay, and, coming
off the majestic turbulence of the previous two albums, feels like a cold
water bucket to me.
As subjective as these
impressions are, I have yet to hear anyone prefer Carnival In Babylon to the band's next album — Wolf City does such an amazingly better job at combining the bedlam
spirit of classic Amon Düül with «accessibility» that it just about
totally annihilates the very purpose of Carnival's
existence. Still, as a transitional effort, it does deserve minor attention.
WOLF CITY (1972)
1) Surrounded By The Stars;
2) Green Bubble Raincoated Man; 3) Jail-House-Frog; 4) Wolf
City; 5) Wie Der Wind Am Ende Einer Strasse; 6) Deutsch Nepal; 7) Sleepwalker's
Timeless Bridge.
Call me crazy, but my
guess it's a lion or, at least, a leopard out there on the front sleeve rather
than an actual wolf. It also looks vaguely Assyro-Babylonian to me (don't even
ask why), which might tie in with the band's vague interest in all things
Ancient Near Eastern, already evident in their last title. But, if anything, Wolf City, to me, sounds distinctly more pagan-empire-atmospheric
than Carnival In Babylon — and why?
Because that old crunch is back.
Yes, second time
around, Amon Düül II gets it right. Carnival In Babylon may have made some people (me!) ask the
question — would the band be at all able to make the transition from sprawling
freakouts to a tighter, more disciplined and restricted unit while still
remaining on the «cutting edge», or, at least, still writing good music? It
took Wolf City to prove that Amon
Düül II were definitely not
fading away, not for the moment, at least. Short (a single, 35-minute long,
LP), concise, diverse, and complex, it is their finest offering in an
«accessible» vein.
I do think it is poorly
sequenced, though. By all means, the title track should have been opening the album, setting the mood —
cold, stern, unnerving, with one of the band's finest vocal parts, where, for
once, the German accent comes off splendidly;
not that I am specifically suggesting Nazi associations or anything, because
the music itself would make a perfect
soundtrack to any movie about any evil empire, be it ruled by Palpatine or
Ashurbanipal. From the bizarre opening noises — sounds like a plugged-in
electric guitar bouncing off the walls of a deep well — to Renate's paranoid
multi-tracked backing vocals, sounding like a flock of scared female slaves
scurrying through the streets, it's a minor atmospheric masterpiece. It takes
but three minutes to make its point and chain you to the record — so be a good
boy/girl and reprogram it to the album-initial position where it rightfully
belongs.
Funny enough, that same
attitude, two tracks later, is deconstructed and made fun of on 'Deutsch
Nepal', where the «Nazi vocals», dubbed over the grim organ melody, are
constantly interrupted with the sounds of coughing and sputtering. (Actually,
that's a good thing: the melody is so
iron-fisted and potentially scary that the band must have felt it necessary to
de-puff the proceedings a bit — otherwise, their international audiences might
have started paying attention to their Bavarian roots on a more grave level).
Apart from the title
track, 'Deutsch Nepal', and the kick-ass guitar intro to 'Jailhouse Frog', however,
Wolf City still has plenty of soft,
folksy vibes to it. The album's lengthiest track, 'Surrounded By The Stars', is
almost entirely acoustic-based, but this time around, it has plenty of
dynamics, incorporating American, Celtic, Spanish, and Middle Eastern motives
as it moves along, and beefing them up with heavy electric chords where
necessary. This is truly «Yeti lite», as opposed to Carnival.
Many sources speak of Wolf City as Amon Düül II's
transition from «psychedelia» to «progressive rock». This makes sense,
although Wolf City is certainly not
«prog» in the ELP / Yes / King Crimson understanding of the term — the
backbones of the compositions are far too simple and inexquisite. It is the
wide variety, the unpredictability, and the sheer force of these backbones that
counts, not their inimitable ways of stringing together incompatible notes and
bizarre chords; not to mention the near-complete lack of influence from
«academic» styles of music.
Thus, the guitar riff
that opens 'Jail-House-Frog' makes it clear that, just the day before, the
guitar player had been spinning his Hendrix albums. And when the first chords
of the «underwaterish» electric piano complement the acoustic strum of
'Sleepwalker's Timeless Bridge', I seem to discern the melancholic, but
amicable mood of George Harrison's 'Isn't It A Pity' — coincidence, perhaps,
but just how totally accidental? No, indeed, Wolf City is almost honoured to feed upon the legacy of late 1960s
art-pop/rock and build it up from there, colorfully and masterfully. And in
doing so, it becomes, in itself, one of the most impressive art-rock LPs of the
decade. Thumbs
up, with certified approval from the Lord-Mayor of Nineveh himself.
LIVE IN LONDON (1973)
1) Archangels Thunderbird; 2)
Eye-Shaking King; 3) Soap Shop Rock; 4) Improvisation; 5) Syntelman's March Of
The Roaring Seventies; 6) Restless Skylight - Transistor Child; 7) Race From
Here To Your Ears; 8*) Bavarian Soap Shop Rock; 9*) Improvisation On Gulp A
Sonata.
To be more precise —
recorded at the Greyhound Club in Croydon (South London), December 16, 1972.
The first consideration triggered by this date is that they either do not play,
or do not put on record even one single track from either Carnival In Babylon or Wolf City: the entire setlist only pays
homage to Yeti and Tanz. This is strange, because, in the
studio, Amon Düül II would never again return to that kind of sound —
perhaps they really intended this record to be a swan-song summary of their
craziest, «jungliest» stage.
That said, on that
fateful night in Croydon they did crank down the dial on craziness, if only a
little bit. All the selections are relatively short, with the Tanz tracks bearing the main brunt of
simplification. One of the recent CD releases «corrects» that benevolent
gesture by adding a bonus live-in-the-studio re-recording of 'Soap Shop Rock',
held in a Bavarian studio a few weeks later — a good old seventeen-minute-long
jam — but it actually sounds out of place here, and not the least because, most
of the time, the band's playing is mixed in over a bunch of distracting chaotic
electronic noise (possibly simulating the complex movement of a million
wheels and cogs inside the Artist's Brain?). These days at least, the effect is
just as annoying as seeing old TV show videos of great artists marred by the
addition of «colorful» «psychedelic» effects (any «classic rock» lover will
know what I'm talking about here).
The main album,
however, is killer, and even if none of the renditions overwhelm the studio originals,
Live In London still deserves our
full attention, to complete and certify the band's reputation as consummate
professionals. It is one thing to build yourself your personal jungle in the
studio, and quite another thing to retain that sonic density and keep all the
psychedelic fumes without the benefit of overdubbing or taking another take.
But this is what they do, from the opening crushing riff of 'Archangels
Thunderbird' and right down to the closing... er, crushing riff of 'Race From
Here To Your Ears'.
The actual musical
differences between the studio originals and the live interpretations are minimal,
and too subtle either to notice or to merit discussion. Apart from completing
your informational picture on the band and giving the major fan a little more
variety in his listening choices, Live
In London is not one of the all-time live greats, because the tunes really
do not kick more ass than they did in
the studio. But there is no reason anyway why the record should not get a thumbs up:
any chance to revisit the jammy greatness of classic A.D.II, especially from a
band that only had three years of potential left within it (though, admittedly,
no one could guess that in 1973), has to be taken without second thought.
UTOPIA (1973)
1) What You Gonna Do?; 2) The
Wolfman Jack Show; 3) Alice; 4) Las Vegas; 5) Deutsch Nepal; 6) Utopia No. 1;
7) Nasi Goreng; 8) Jazz Kiste.
Strictly speaking, this
is not an Amon Düül album at all. After a temporary quarrel / split
within the band, bassist Lothar Meid and producer Olaf Kübler went into
the studio on their own, grabbing some session musicians along the way, to
record some of their personal ideas; this «side project» was ambitiously
entitled Utopia (funny enough, the very same year that, in a very different
place, Todd Rundgren concocted his own Utopia). However, as the recording went
by, the band managed to patch up its differences, and most of the original
members (Karrer, Weinzierl, etc.) ended up contributing their services to the
album as well, as «guests». Consequently, the record has always been associated
with Amon Düül II — and, eventually, in the CD age re-released as
credited simply to Amon Düül II, so this is where it fits in the
discography.
Overall, Utopia leans even closer to the
«accessible» side of the music world than Wolf
City; but this does not make it an anomaly in the catalog, because the
band's subsequent albums would go on and on «normalizing» the tunes. It is more
disciplined and less unpredictable, yes, but the material is still inspired, turning
it all into art-rock of the highest degree. In fact, it may well be the most
diverse of all their records — each of the eight tracks is an attempt to work
with a different palette. Naturally, some attempts are more successful than
others, but I cannot find a single «really bad» or «really boring» track here.
See for yourself:
No. 1: upbeat catchy
folk-rock with San Franciscan overtones, but denser, thicker arrangements and
much more aggressive guitar soloing. No.
2: Dark, quasi-Satanic blues-rock with medieval vocal harmonies, like a
black mass for headbangers. No. 3:
For the first time ever on a Krautrock album — tender piano-and-flute balladry!
Not very memorable per se, but per its uniqueness, definitely so. No. 4: Shuffling danceable acoustic
guitar, jazzy brass riffs, folksy flute, bluesy electric guitar soloing — 'Las
Vegas' has certainly never experienced that
kind of cross-genre entertainment. No. 5:
A re-recording of 'Deutsch Nepal' with weaker, less satisfying vocals — the only
blunder on here, although the gothic music is impressive all the same, so no
potential complaining on the part of those unaware of Wolf City.
The last three numbers
are purely instrumental. No. 6:
Closest in spirit to old-school Amon Düül, a four-minute psychedelic
jam (phasing, looping, echoing, Mellotron clouds, swirling, mind-blowing
guitar runs, the works). No. 7: Solemn,
stately, organ-driven wordless gospel anthem, building up towards a mighty
crescendo — if it weren't so blatantly optimistic in mood, it could have been a
masterpiece. No. 8: Someone's been
listening quite heavily to Bitches Brew,
so it seems. Snuck this thing on any Miles Davis album from his «fusion» period
and most people will probably not notice the difference.
Hopefully, this brief
description will suffice to stimulate interest. There is no such internal coherence
here as there used to be, and I wouldn't say that the sum of it all could be
greater than its parts — the «Sci-Fi Babylonian» aura of Wolf City has mostly dissipated — but, basically, around 1973 Amon
Düül II were on such a roll that they could simply do no wrong, not
even when left unguided by conceptual ideas. Utopia may not blow your mind, but it is one fabulous way to keep
it entertained. Thumbs
up.
VIVE LA TRANCE (1973)
1) A Morning Excuse; 2) Fly
United; 3) Jalousie; 4) Im Krater Blühn Wieder Die Bäume; 5) Mozambique;
6) Apocalyptic Bore; 7) Dr. Jeckyll; 8) Trap; 9) Pig Man; 10) Mañana;
11) Ladies Mimikry.
Although, after the
brief disturbance of the «Utopia» project, the original band managed to regroup
and put their troubles behind them, Vive
La Trance continues the «normalization» trend that Utopia started. In fact, it more or less finalizes the band's
transformation from a «far-out kosmik rock» act into a «glammy weird-pop» one.
No wonder the ratings on prog-related sites usually start plummetting down
around this time.
I would say, however,
that the major problem about the record is not with individual tunes, but with
the album as a whole. Having shortened, «normalized», and diversified their
compositions, the band pretty much lost face — without the mystical jungleland
atmosphere of the early phase, and without the «Gothic-Babylonian» vibe of the
middle phase, the very purpose of their existence is now unclear. Vive La Trance is actually bursting
with ideas, but only a few of them are given a fully convincing, well-finalized
expression.
The only tune here that
should truly deserve «classic» status is 'Mozambique', supposedly dedicated to
the memory of «Che Guevara avenger» Monika Ertl. After going through a
lightweight «doo-wop» opening section, and then a brief folk-rock vocal part,
at about 2:35 into the song they hit upon a fast, dense, powerful groove that
builds up fat and muscle for a mind-blowing five minutes, during which it
rivals, fair and square, everything in the hard-rocking vein they'd ever put on
record before — maybe even beats it, because they'd never, as of yet, taken it
up at such a fast tempo. This is prime-time Düül blasting for
eternity.
The rest is never bad —
but always confusing. Why is the ominous syncopated groove of 'A Morning
Excuse' so oddly thin, supported only by an occasional annoying croaking noise
rather than the band's trademark Inquisitional organ and spooky harmonies? Why
does 'Fly United' bring to mind 'Fly Jefferson Airplane' – and not just because
of the title? Why does the six-minute 'Apocalyptic Bore' try so hard to
justify the second word of its title, but not the first one — and why does the
vocalist attempt to sing like Bob Dylan? Why is there a catchy, but pointless
garage rocker about Dr. Jeckyll? Why is there another pointless garage rocker ('Pig Man') that is taken in a
slightly more comic manner, so it sounds like The Lovin' Spoonful instead of
The Who? Why does 'Ladies Mimikry' make me suspect that they'd liked the first
two Roxy Music albums?..
On an even odder note,
how come Renate's vocal spotlight 'Jalousie' sound like early Kate Bush five
years before anyone could ever get
the chance to learn about Kate Bush?..
Of course, let the fact
that I am asking all these questions not
lead you into mistakenly assuming that Vive
La Trance is a poor record, undeserving of your attention. Most of these
songs are fine enough — more often than not, saved by intelligent melodic
twists, professional arrangements, and plenty of energy. It's just that the
band does not seem to have enough confidence in itself to try and go for their
own White Album: as diverse as the
record is, most of the arrangements are still made in the «Amon Düül
II spirit». Basically, if you really want to do stuff like 'Pig Man', just
don't put it on the same LP with 'Mozambique', guys — your sense of humor
and/or integrity isn't that strong.
Other than that, a fine
piece of entertainment. So 'Fly United' is 100% derivative; that does not mean
it cannot be evocative and transcendent, with all these pianos and violins and
desperately aggressive electric guitar solos. Also, check out the colorful
power pop guitars on 'Trap', so smooth and pretty. If you are a modern-day fan
of revivalists like Black Mountain, remember – even that sort of rock
revivalism was really born more than thirty years ago. Thumbs up for all the noble
revivalists out there.
HIJACK (1974)
1) I Can't Wait (pt. 1 + pt.
2) / Mirror; 2) Traveller; 3) You're Not Alone; 4) Explode Like A Star; 5) Da
Guadeloop; 6) Lonely Woman; 7) Liquid Whisper; 8) Archy The Robot.
This 1974 record is
sometimes pointed out as the first truly «bad» Amon Düül II album,
but simply scolding it does not really let one understand how the very same
band that just came out with a string of nearly-infallible records would
suddenly allow itself such a huge drop in quality. What happened here was an
increase in the drift from «dense and chaotic» to «thin and well-ordered». Some
of these compositions are, in fact, memorable upon first listen, a genuine
rarity in Amon Düül history so far — and a clear sign of decline for
those who hold the opinion that, in order to enjoy a piece of art, you have to work for it.
To tell the truth,
there are a few misfires on Hijack; the most blatant being 'You're
Not Alone', a «minimalistic folk» anthem that, for a whole seven minutes, is
hanging on two acoustic power chords
(plus vocals and strings, trumpets, and keyboards in a lumpy atmospheric mass
in the back of the studio). It's a clear-cut gamble that I do not buy, and
neither should anyone, I believe, who would, like me, think that the overall
effect is somewhat Loureedian, and, consequently, decide that there is no
reason to forcefully «admire» this stuff when it can be done similarly, but
differently, without this Nazi-style torture-by-repetition.
Hardcore fans must have
also scoffed at 'Da Guadeloop', the band's first (and, actually, most successful)
flirtation with «proto-disco funk» — but, really, it works modestly well in its
own context, and its descending strings riff, though not tremendously
original in structure, has psychedelic overtones that usually distinguish the
«art» variety of disco from its purely body-oriented versions. So maybe the
track would feel more at home on an Isley Brothers record — but the question
is, what home are we talking about?
Because at this point,
Amon Düül II seem to be simply moving from one turf to another
without any coherent plan in their head. In trying to switch from one image to
another, they lost the road, and Hijack
reflects the sophisticated tracks of their blunderings. The opening multi-part
suite begins with a bizarre pop/rock hybrid that sounds like Eric Burdon
guest-singing on an ELO record: creaky, nasty, angry vocals against a
background of pop cellos and happy keyboards; then grows into some sort of
sci-fi sexual fantasy; finally, becomes a catchy glam rocker with uplifting
brass, gimmicky guitar solo effects and other savory indulgences. If there is a
«plan» anywhere here, it must have been created five minutes before the actual
recording.
Elsewhere, there is
some dark brooding pop-rock with a «visionary» vocal delivery from Renate
('Traveller'); exhilarating space-pop that could have fit in on Nuggets ('Explode Like A Star'); a
«lounge» rearrangement of Ornette Coleman's 'Lonely Woman', replete with
vocals; and some lightweight tongue-in-cheek comedy with circus overtones to
close the album ('Archy The Robot'). In short, anything goes, as long as it
doesn't sound too much like everything else.
Frankly speaking, in
1974 Amon Düül II were still incapable of releasing a «bad» record.
Their melodic senses were at an all-time high (since they only really started
writing «normal» melodies circa 1972), and the outside musical world was not
yet corrupted enough to taint their spirit (unless they'd intentionally choose
the Osmonds as their major musical inspiration). This is a diverse,
entertaining, catchy, well-played and arranged buncha solid 1970s tunes — don't
expect a once-in-a-lifetime experience, just sit back and enjoy. And yes, there
actually is some deeply perverse
pleasure in being «commercially» (but still tastefully and exquisitely)
entertained by one of the world's formerly weirdest and wildest bands. Thumbs up.
MADE IN GERMANY (1975)
1) Overture; 2) Wir Wollen; 3)
Wilhelm Wilhelm; 4) SM II Peng; 5) Elevators Meet Whispering; 6) Metropolis; 7)
Ludwig; 8) The King's Chocolate Waltz; 9) Blue Grotto; 10) Mr. Kraut's Jinx;
11) Wide Angle; 12) Three-Eyed Overdrive; 13) Emigrant Song; 14) Loosey Girls;
15) Top Of The Mud; 16) Dreams; 17) Gala Gnome; 18) 5.5.55; 19) La Krautoma;
20) Excessive Spray.
A particularly fine
example of an album that was «born under a bad sign». With the peak of interest
in «Krautrock» having already passed (except for Kraftwerk and their role in
the establishment of electronic pop), with Amon Düül II themselves
already recognized as a bunch of has-beens, never ever to beat the impact of Yeti and Lemmings, with the world starting to turn its attention from
progressive rock to early New Wave and early disco, our Bavarian comrades
could, perhaps, have recorded the best ever album in 1975 and nobody would have
taken notice. Which they did not — but they came pretty damn close.
Made In Germany is, as the title suggests, about Germany; it
might, in fact, be the smartest, most adventurous internationally-oriented
record made about Germany, and I have no idea why the German government never
recognized that openly. Although it is a sprawling set of thematically
connected songs, spread over two LPs, and starting off with an 'Overture', it
is not really a «rock opera» — there is no story told here, in fact, the
«vignettes» are not even unfurling in chronological order. But so much the
better: «rock operas» tend to sacrifice melody for the sake of pushing forward
the story (even Tommy could
occasionally be accused of that), whereas here, nothing whatsoever is
sacrificed for the «concept».
This is the last time
that all the original members of the band truly put their heads and hands together
in a collective inspired effort, and it is clear that the task they set out for
themselves — basically, telling the political, social, and cultural story of
Germany's last hundred years — invigorated everyone. The songs are not at all
melodically complex: this is «art pop» rather than «prog rock», all of it
straightforward enough to be instantaneously catchy, but always tasteful enough
so as not to fall victim to the pop clichés of the time. Come to think
of it, Made In Germany is pretty
timeless — an expert ear would probably be able to date it to the first half of
the 1970s, but it certainly would not be able to easily explain why.
Most importantly, there
is no dreaded Teutonic seriousness here at
all: all the details are laid down in a highly tongue-in-cheek manner, yet
with sufficient respect at the same time. A wah-wah hard-rocking riff opens the
album's first real song, along with a terrifying "Wilhelm, Wilhelm, the
nation needs you!", but, lest you fear that this is going to turn into a crazy
neo-imperialist rant, it soon becomes obvious that we do not even understand
quite well which Wilhelm the band are
singing about — Wilhelm I, the creator of the Empire, or Wilhelm II, its
destroyer? The song rocks out loud and proud, but the lyrics are really just a
set of disconnected historical images floating before our ears.
Eight minutes of
running time are predictably dedicated to Ludwig of Bavaria (given the band's
background, their accent on all things Bavarian is understood), running from a
comic fast-tempo vaudevillian introduction ('Ludwig') to a bit of deranged
psychedelia in the psychotic king's name ('The King's Chocolate Waltz') to a
lovely romantic ballad, with Renate viewing the poor fellow with tender
compassion ('Blue Grotto'). There's also a bit of Fritz Lang (the upbeat,
superbly catchy, and properly futuristic 'Metropolis'); and, of course, the
issue of the Führer could not remain completely untouched — it is raised
in a brief «link» towards the end of the album, where snippets of Adolf's
speeches are presented in the form of an «interview» with an annoying radio DJ
("Adolf, baby, you're what they call a veteran in the entertainment biz..."),
presaging Weird "Al" Yankovic by a darn good couple of decades. The
«sketch» is sort of silly and not jaw-droppingly funny, but not too offensive,
either — after all, a brief laugh at the expense of the führer never hurt
anyone, or so I hear.
But first and foremost,
Made In Germany is simply a damn
fine art-pop album. The brief musical links scattered all over the place are
not particularly important, but almost all of the songs are creative,
intelligent, and memorable. 'Loosey Girls' may be one of the best David Bowie
epics that Bowie never wrote — pompous, gorgeously orchestrated, overlaying a
whole web of guitar and brass riffs and solos, powerful and melancholic.
Renate's 'Wide-Angle' is lush, up-tempo pop with echoes of Motown (maybe it's
just me, but I do hear echoes of Diana Ross and 'Baby Love' throughout).
'Emigrant Song' is a successful stab at country-pop, with cool bass hooks at
that. 'Dreams' is one of the finest incorporations of generic tango structures
into a pop song, and arguably contains the album's catchiest riff and vocal
hook (no wonder it was chosen to open the abbreviated one-LP version of the
record).
Echoes of the «old
Düül» are only encountered twice. First, there is 'Mr. Kraut's Jinx',
an eight minute long epic that slowly creeps along, growing like a snowball,
expanding from a gloomy Gothic mood number into a complex rock jam and, finally,
a carnivalesque anthemic part. And the album ends with 'La Krautoma', which is,
of course, 'La Paloma' done Krautrock-style, with lotsa distortion, fuzz, and
echo, and then, for a few minutes, mutating into a wild jungle jam, just the
way they used to do it five years back — just to show everyone who is
interested that yes, they still can
do it, with just as much power and crunch as it used to be. It's just that, you
know, times are different. People want more pop, less noise.
But frankly, I couldn't
agree more, if only all sorts of pop were done like this. Yes, perhaps the record's slightly «comic» mood, the band
members' German accents, the ambiguous Hitler punch, the overall length, and
the choice of recent German history as the main part of the concept dethrone Made In Germany as a candidate for the
best record of 1975, but that is only as far as the «brain» part is concerned.
The heart is simply too busy digging all the cool melodies — heck, all the awesome melodies — to bother with that
crap. Thumbs up
without a second thought. Along with Yeti
and Tanz, this is the one to grace
your collection: in fact, grab it before
Yeti if you are more of a pop addict
than a psycho-jungle admirer.
[P.S.: Do not make the mistake of scooping up the
original US release — abbreviated to the length of one miserable LP, and, along
with all the links (which could at least be pardoned), throwing away such
masterpieces as 'Wilhelm Wilhelm', 'Blue Grotto', and 'Wide-Angle'. Granted, it
had a cooler album sleeve — Renate posing as Marlene Dietrich — but that
particular photo does come along with the complete edition as well.]
PYRAGONY X (1976)
1) Flower Of The Orient; 2) Merlin;
3) Crystal Hexagram; 4) Lost In Space; 5) Sally The Seducer; 6) Telly Vision;
7) The Only Thing; 8) Capuccino.
Alas, some good things are not meant to last.
No sooner had the band seemed to stabilize its possible future direction
than destabilization hit once more, and carried away Renate, along with several
other band members. A significant part of the «core», including Karrer,
Weinzierl, and Leopold, remained, but they had to recruit newcomers — Klaus
Ebert on bass and Stefan Zauner on keyboards — and with the newcomers came
further changes, such as the band's reputation could not stand. And it
crumbled.
I used to hate this record; these days, it
sounds sort of okay, a slight, harmless pop-rock album with nothing
particularly atrocious about it. Unless
the very idea that a band like Amon Düül II could debase itself to
playing barroom-style boogies and country-rock already rubs one in the wrong
way, Pyragony X is listenable. If
you are stranded on a desert island with one CD and thirty eight minutes worth
of battery load in your player, that is.
Much to the band's honour, there is no attempt
here to openly suck up to any of the then-popular genres: no stabs at «Eurodisco»,
and no signs whatsoever that anyone in the band could even hear of the punk or New Wave idiom. Everything is recorded strictly
according to «old school rock» values (for Amon Düül II, that's a good thing). The music is modestly
diverse: a little Eastern mystique on 'Flower Of The Orient', a little piano
vaudeville mixed with astral effects on 'Lost In Space', some blues-boogie on
'Merlin', etc. In short, they continue delving the catchy song mine, only this
time, there is no high-brow or tongue-in-cheek concept to wrap it all in.
But where Made
In Germany was alternately inventive, unpredictable, hilarious, tender, or
moody, Pyragony X is consistently
mediocre. The Eastern bits on 'Flower Of The Orient' do not begin to compete
with the likes of 'Kashmir', and Weinzierl's assured, but not too thought-out
ecstatic «Southern rock» soloing on 'Merlin' and 'The Only Thing' is no match
for a Dickey Betts. And that's just the playing;
the melodies are equally uninspiring.
One exception is the instrumental 'Crystal
Hexagram' — its slow, time-taking buildup to the two electric guitar climaxes
also owes a lot to the Allmans, but it is a tasteful and emotional guitar
showcase on its own, and even if it adds nothing to the formal annals of
guitar-based music, its several well-placed and well-paced lines are still the
highlight of this dull record. On the other end of the pole are short and
pointless «stunts», such as 'Sally The Seducer' (rather a pathetic title for a
band who used to come up with 'Restless Skylight Transistor Child') and 'Telly
Vision' — a very flat rant against commercialism, oddly appearing on the band's
most «commercial» album so far (and whoever came up with the horrid line
"Ronald McDonald say, 'Big Mac to you!'" needs to be dragged out into
the street and force-fed twenty pounds of burgers).
But most of the pole's actual length is devoid
of any kind of charge, a gray mass of musical neutrons that heralds the end of
Amon Düül II as a musical force to be reckoned with. Maybe it is not
exactly «pure agony», as the title humbly implies, but it is definitely some kind of agony. 'Crystal Hexagram'
would look nice as the coda to a comprehensive career overview from 1969 to
1976; the rest just screams for a non-violent, but firm thumbs down. Too bad.
ALMOST ALIVE (1977)
1) One Blue Morning; 2) Good
Bye My Love; 3) Ain't Today Tomorrow's Yesterday; 4) Hallelujah; 5) Feeling Uneasy;
6) Live In Jericho.
I am not quite sure what kind of hole would be
ready to accommodate this pigeon.
Technically, it is even less of a «sellout» than Pyragony X. The compositions are longer, the melodies less trivial,
meek attempts at sounding «rootsy» mostly purged. But even if we manage to call
this stuff «art-rock», what consolation would that give? My ears only hear a
band that has completely lost its original vision, and is now blindly
struggling to find a new one, with no success whatsoever. Almost Alive? Frankenstein-style, you mean?
The marginally new direction that the band,
here represented by the exact same lineup as in 1976, sets out to explore is funk,
which, at least on one track ('Hallelujah'), veers dangerously close to disco.
It is as if someone in the group had become a major fan of George Clinton — or the Average White Band, because,
although there is a big difference between the two, it's not like it matters
for Amon Düül II, a band that could do many things, but hot
syncopated grooves were never among them. This takes care of about half the
album: 'One Blue Morning', seven minutes of boring riffage that neither rocks
nor makes you want to dance; 'Good Bye My Love', which sounds like a cross
between the Bee Gees and Boston-style arena rock; and 'Hallelujah' — danceable,
but why should anyone, way back in 1977, prefer to dance to Amon Düül
II when you could have Donna Summer and Boney M all to yourself?
The two soft-prog mini-epics are nothing
special as well. This is simply not
this band's emploi, never has been. Renate is not here to trigger the band's
psycho-folk inspiration channels, and the dark Gothic blasts are equally a
thing of the past. What we get is just more substandard riffage, autopilot-mode
Moog solos, and, in the case of 'Tomorrow's Yesterday', an attempt to mount an
Anthemic Progressive Coda, with grand piano, swooping strings, and choral
vocals, which could be resonant if
only the actual song to match it were of any value. As it is, it's an anthem to
nothing, hopelessly lost in the din.
Thus, the only track of passable interest to
hardcore fans of the band would be 'Live In Jericho', on which, for the last
twelve minutes, the band decides to try and go back into «improv» mode, the way
they used to cut it seven years back. Even then, they all but kill off the
initiative by beginning the track
with a drum solo (remember that classic Düül valued democracy way too
much to ever allow their drummer a moment of self-indulgence), and only
somewhere around the six-minute mark start barely recapturing bits of former
glories. Even then, there is too much
generic guitar and keyboard wanking to finish the recapturing properly.
In short, consider me stumped, because I have
no idea why on Earth a band as original and inventive as Amon Düül
II would one day decide that they'd rather be a combination of Funkadelic,
Boston, and ELP instead. Almost
Ridiculous would be a far more precise title for this record — «almost»,
because most of the tracks are pulled off with just enough competence so as not
to sound like parodies. But in such cases, «awful» records at least may leave
an imprint in the mind: Almost Alive,
tottering on the lowest rungs of «simple mediocrity», is not guaranteed to
produce even that effect. BORING! Thumbs down. (And let's not even talk about
the album cover — their silliest one to-date).
ONLY HUMAN (1978)
1) Another Morning; 2) Don't
Turn To Stone; 3) Kirk Morgan; 4) Spaniards And Spacemen; 5) Kismet; 6)
Pharao; 7) Ruby Lane.
It is as if, with these album titles, Amon
Düül II were (sub)consciously giving away the real motivations
behind the questionable (to put it mildly) music. Almost Alive was bad enough, but Only Human? As in: «YES — we're only human, so there should be nothing surprising about the fact
that we are taking our cues from the Bee Gees now. Please buy this record so we
can afford our Weisswurst and Bretzel.»
Actually, I am not even sure about the «we»:
the only remaining founding father on this album is Chris Karrer. Granted, the
Amon Düül sound evolved gradually: as huge a difference as there is
between Yeti and Only Human, there have been enough
intermediate links in the chain so as not to view this record as some sort of
wicked shock therapy. But the fact remains that Only Human is the band's blandest, least interesting album ever.
Technically, this is another attempt to cross
the «commercial» styles of the time — soft-rock, arena rock, funky dance-pop —
with an «artistic» spirit, ever more laughable in the face of punk and New Wave
squeezing these old genres out of the picture even when they were done well, let alone tackled by a German band
coming from an entirely unsuitable background. But at least the hooks could be
strong, and the playing could sparkle — in theory.
I think that one good, attentive listen to
'Another Morning', the album-opener, is quite enough to form a reliable
impression of the record. The same funky rhythms that the 1970s gave us in droves,
without any individuality; a Europop piano riff that crops up every now and
then as the only «hook» to hang upon, but, in itself, being nothing but a very
poor man's ABBA (!); vocals whose only advantage is the ability to sing on-key,
otherwise, completely devoid of personality; and a thoroughly generic melodic
backup of wishy-washy synthesizers and bleak funk guitar.
Objectively, I cannot say that the band makes
no effort whatsoever at diversifying their approach. They do try out some
Spanish guitar on 'Spaniards & Spacemen', a mildly curious, but generally
failed attempt at marrying flamenco with electronica; some vaguely mid-Eastern
chord sequences on 'Kismet' — a mildly curious, but generally failed attempt at
marrying Arabic music with disco; they almost manage to turn into Supertramp on
'Pharao'; and there is a brief drum solo on 'Ruby Lane'. (Just to make everyone
sure that I actually did listen to
the album in its entirety).
But most of these tricks leave little or no
impression, because a good composition needs to do more than just «be
different» — there should be some sense of purpose, some sort of trigger to
elicit a gut response. From that point of view, 'Kismet' is no 'Kashmir' — at
best, it sounds like a silly, uninspired parody. At worst, I cannot even
remember how it goes (I do remember there is a very, very ugly synth tone used
on the «Eastern» bits).
With no sense of purpose, no commercial or
critical viability, a dangerously close to zero level of creative songwriting,
and a pitiable title, Only Human is,
doubtless, the lowest point in Amon Düül II's career — the only
consolation is that, from a strict point of view, it is not even a proper Amon Düül
II album at all, rather «Chris Karrer and His So-Called Friends». Abysmal and
unlistenable? Not really. Just simply utterly forgettable. Thumbs down.
VORTEX (1981)
1) Vortex; 2) Holy West; 3)
Die 7 Fetten Jahre; 4) Wings Of The Wind; 5) Mona; 6) We Are Machine; 7) Das
Gestern Ist Das Heute Von Morgen; 8) Vibes In The Air.
This could have worked. A last-minute desperate
attempt to get their act together — and a reunion of sorts, with Renate back
in the band, along with organist Falk Rogner; original members John Weinzierl
and Lothar Meid also make guest appearances. This way, some conditions are met
to try and give the old rusty engine another kick, and see if the good old Amon
Düül II still have it in them to survive the Eighties.
It is undisputable that the album is a major
change in direction after the last three records. The band has dropped all
attempts to suck up to disco (none too soon, given the date), and the sound
gets denser and darker, in strict accordance with the classic «jungle» philosophy
of the band. At the same time, they rely rather heavily on up-to-date
synthesizers and electronic drums — an inevitable evil at the time, perhaps,
but one that heavily affects the response to Vortex today. Too stiff. Too mechanical. Too Eighties!
Ah, but the main problem isn't even the decade.
The main problem is — will the atmosphere
be back? If, stylistically, this is supposed to be an Eighties' update of Wolf City and Vive La Trance, will these new songs be as evocative and
penetrating as their elder brethren? My simple answer — no, they won't. For one
thing, the playing throughout is fairly crappy. Jörg Evers, who is
handling most of the guitar work, is, at best, just a passable player, and Rogner's
synthesizers do not begin to compare with the moody organ work on early Amon
Düül II records. For another thing, most of the compositions on Vortex are «songs», not «jams», and, as
«songs», they mostly suck. Where are the cool electric riffs? The catchy choruses?
Your inner Amazon.com should tell you that, if
you like the album opener (the instrumental title track), you will probably
like the rest as well. It shows that the band has finally opened its eyes to
New Wave and its electronic brethren; 'Vortex' sounds not unlike stuff from Peter Gabriel III, with the same
potentially eerie contrast between crashing electronic drums and
«The-Inquisition-is-after-you» synthesizers. But neither the drums nor the
synths form particularly interesting or unpredictable patterns. The sound is
dense and murky without being genuinely scary or depressing — and that is a
pretty bad scenario.
Already the first vocal number, 'Holy West', is
really a very simple pop-rocker, hanging upon a very simple and very senseless
melody; just because Renate's voice is separated from the melody with an echo
effect, and just because someone has bothered to add some chimes and extra
guitar overdubs, the song is not going to fare much better. At least it is
nowhere near as embarrassing, though, as the band's misguided stab at anthemic
arena-rock à la Queen ('Wings
Of The Wind'), wasting a perfectly healthy slab of bombast for nothing. And
nowhere near as disappointing as the grim electro-rocker 'We Are Machine',
which formally justifies its title — and does nothing else. Who needs it when
we have Kraftwerk?
In the end, paradoxically, it is not until they
get to the lightest, softest, and most optimistic of the tracks — 'Vibes In The
Air' — that I am able to feel at least a small bit of involvement. Essentially
a «power ballad», this one, but a well-arranged one, with acoustic and slide
guitars, harps, the works. A suitably fine conclusion, but coming in way too
late to save the album from ultimate failure. Yes, it is an attempt to gain back
some credit, but a half-hearted one; a far cry from a certified «comeback», as
some have dubbed Vortex just because
Renate and Rogner's return has prompted them into self-deception. No wonder,
then, that the follow-up to Vortex
never came, and that Amon Düül II was finally put on hold soon
afterwards.
NADA MOONSHINE # (1995)
1) Castaneda Da Dream; 2) Nada
Moonshine Union; 3) Speed Inside My Shoes; 4) Sirens In Germanistan; 5) Lilac
Lillies; 6) Kiss Ma Eee; 7) Carpetride In Velvet Night; 8) Black Pearl Of
Wisdom; 9) Ça Va; 10) Guadalquivir.
The next reunion of Amon Düül II took
place fourteen years after Vortex —
and not a moment too soon, allowing the band to skip falling under cheesy
Eighties' influences. The line-up here includes Karrer, Leopold, Meid, and
Renate, that is, most of the founding fathers and mothers, with the unfortunate
exclusion of Weinzierl (who had spent most of the previous decade with his own UK-based version of «Amon
Düül»), replaced by new guitarist Felice Occhionero (Italian? In a Bavarian band? Confound this age of globalization!) Nobody either
expected the reunion or, in fact, noticed it, apart from a few prog veterans.
The band had not given the world anything truly worth its while since Made In Germany; what would be the sense
of reuniting?
The answer is — to prove to themselves, at least, that they still
had it in them to release an album that would be unpredictable, interesting,
and inspiring. This is, after all, the only reason for a reunion that is not
overtly cash-targeted (never a chief concern for these guys). And how do they
fare? Well, I think that they hit it right on the «unpredictable» and
«interesting» notches — as for «inspiring», you'd probably have to jump through
a couple hoops to reach that mark.
In terms of atmosphere, the band certainly
tries to recapture the mystical jungle-like spirit of old. However, this is not
achieved by bluesy jamming or thick instrumental density. Instead of that, they
go for the mixing panel. The whole thing is echoey and wobbly, the synthesizers
employ the latest in cool and uncool tones, the guitars are «treated», and
there are lots of «special effects» overdubs: Nada Moonshine # is a hundred percent «studio creation».
This may sound like bad news. Sure, Amon
Düül II had abandoned most of their jamming power as early as 1972,
but, since then, the only thing that kept them alive for three more years was
the ability to concentrate on melodic art-rock instead. Nada Moonshine #, in contrast, consists mostly of rather large
(five to eight or nine minutes) atmospheric pieces that are neither sweaty jams
nor catchy pop songs. Worse, they do not really understand properly how to borrow stuff from the young ones without causing
grounds for embarrassment (the techno beats that accompany the second half of
'Lilac Lillies' are one of the stupidest moments on an otherwise non-stupid
record by a major artist I have ever heard). Still worse, the name «Castaneda» appears in the title of the first
track — the way I see it, this is more or less the equivalent of admitting that
the words of the songs not only do
not matter, but absolutely have to be
ignored. (The band was never all that hot in the lyrics department, but some of
their nonsense at least used to be used to comic effect).
But none of this really matters, because the
reunited band has resolved the major problem of Vortex — they finally learned to make these dense, brooding,
mystical, (sometimes) Eastern-tinged landscapes sound meaningful and involving,
by simply pushing the boundaries. Essentially, they just try out All Sorts Of
Things to see what can happen — boldly and crudely. Sometimes it's a
catastrophe ('Lilac Lillies'; the repetitive, silly-sounding "LOUIE LOUIE
KISS MA EEE" mantra voiced by Renate on the appropriately titled 'Kiss Ma
Eee'). More often, it's a decent hook.
The way the «ethereal» chorus of the title
track eventually surges out of the surrounding pseudo-hip-hop chaos, or out of
the blazing guitar solo. The grimly acid sax riff of 'Speed Inside My Shoes'.
The «ominous» side effects of the «child chorus» on 'Sirens In Germanistan'.
The unexpected operatic coda to 'Kiss Ma Eee', verging on sheer beauty if not
for the ever-weakening powers of Renate's voice (which never had the proper
operatic stamina in the first place). And a personal favorite of mine — the
terrific idea to speed up 'Ça Va', which begins as something of an «old
wise man ballad», all moody soothing vocals strewn over an adult contemporary
type of arrangement — then, midway through, picks up tempo and becomes one of
the fastest and most ferocious rockers these guys ever tackled.
As much as Nada
Moonshine # is plagued with «wrong moves», for me, it is unquestionably the
band's finest moment in twenty years — a comeback one would never expect after
all the pathetic blunders of the Klaus Ebert period. It is actually a little
bit worriesome how «crazy» it sounds: I feel the same nervous reaction as I do
when listening to late-period Gong reunions (a 70-year old Gilli Smyth impersonating
sexy psychedelic witches, etc.). But this may really have something to do with
the overall deterioration of Renate's vocals — she always had a strange tone,
and now that strange tone borders on «decrepit». One can get used to it
eventually, though; and then it's a respectable thumbs up all the way.
LIVE IN TOKYO (1996)
1) Nada Moonshine Union; 2)
Black Pearls Of Wisdom; 3) Dry Your Ears; 4) Castaneda Dream (In Another World);
5) Deutsch Nepal; 6) Kiss Ma Eee; 7) Speed Inside My Shoes; 8) Lilac Lillies;
9) Wolf City; 10) La Paloma; 11) Flowers Of The Orient; 12) Surrounded By The
Stars; 13) Archangel Thunderbird; 14) Jam Hai.
The main point of this release, as I attempt to
reconstruct it, was to assert that Nada
Moonshine # was, God forbid, by no means merely a pretext to get together,
go on tour, and play some oldies. Believe it or not, the briefly resuscitated
Amon Düül II actually insisted on the album's relevance — and, climbing up on the stage, concentrated almost
exclusively on new material. Evil conspirators might drop poisonous hints
that, perchance, the band had simply forgotten
how to play the old stuff (and their not being able to get Weinzierl back in
the fold guaranteed that the proper old sound was hardly recuperable). But it
is more polite to presume innocence and believe that the band's worst fear was
to come out before their audiences as an «oldies act».
With 6 out of 14 songs faithfully recreating
the latest studio album, Live In Tokyo
seems to go for overkill. However, despite occasionally unfocused bits and
spoiled vocal notes, many of these songs work better in a live setting. The
most obvious improvement is 'Lilac Lillies', done here without the annoying
techno beats — still not a very good song, but, at least, shed of its unnatural
and ridiculous packaging. Others simply replace the excessive use of echos and
electronics by a more «natural» approach, and that's a big plus.
Most of the old material is from Wolf City — three big numbers that are
performed quite close to the original versions, and honestly reproduce their
«Babylonian Gothic» atmosphere (particularly 'Deutsch Nepal'); guitarist Felice
Occhionero is at least capable to reproduce the «regular» guitar parts of old,
so that the band can play its old «song-like» successes. Eventually, they even
go into 'Archangels Thunderbird', done a bit too noisily for my taste (the old
live version from Live In London,
with its violin parts, is much more impressive), but still decent.
There isn't really much more to say about the
record, except to stress that the assessment of Mr. Stephen Thomas Erlewine at
the All-Music Guide («...the group is no longer experimenting — they are simply
recreating their sound, and that slavishness prevents the music from being anything
other than a nostalgia trip») is completely off the mark, given the setlist.
Most likely, Mr. Erlewine just threw on one track whose title he happened to
remember ('Deutsch Nepal'), compared it with the studio version, and then
hastened away to review Celine Dion's Let's
Talk About Love before dinnertime.
Fact of the matter, subtle changes are
introduced almost everywhere: if
there is one thing the band is determined to prove here, it's that anyone
wanting to talk about «nostalgia trips» should be dragged out into the street
and shot. It's an entirely different
matter if Amon Düül's attempt to reform in a progressive way was a
success or a failure. It seems that they themselves were hardly satisfied — the
band's official site omits both Nada
Moonshine # and Live In Tokyo
from its discography section. But credit must be given for trying, and trying
in a way that was not simply copying current trends, but actually «upgraded»
the old sound with a mixed bag of various tricks, some modernistic, some retro.
Live In Tokyo is, therefore, quite a
respectable companion to its studio counterpart, and demands the same modest thumbs up
reaction.
BEE AS SUCH (2009)
1) Mambo La Libertad; 2) Du
Kommst Ins Heim; 3) Still Standing; 4) Psychedelic Suite.
As it turns out, the Amon Düül II
story is not quite over with the
passing of the millennium threshold. On the heels of various new compilations
and CD re-masters, the original band made one more effort to reconvene — this
time, featuring four of the founding fathers and mothers (Renate, Karrer, Meid,
and Weinzierl). Sessions were held in April 2009, but the results, so far, have
not been issued in CD form: the «album» was made officially available only on
the band's site, and, as far as I can tell, Bee As Such does not even have its own album art.
It is, however, accompanied by a short and
slightly ungrammatical press release, reading as follows: «... a highly
sensitive performance, of finding back to the roots – not in the past, but essentially
– seeking the new sounds and contents at the same time. No ‘kraut’, no ’70s’,
but the music of the new millenium. This sound painting is one more of our
unique works, containing the spirit of our time.» Meaning that, just as it was
with Nada Moonshine #, the band is
still more worried about being perceived as an «irrelevant oldies act» than
about... uh, making good music?
Besides which, they are simply lying. Even on a
fully formal and objective basis, how is it that there are «no '70s'» here,
when 'Still Standing' essentially merges 'Hawknose Harlequin' from Carnival In Babylon and 'The Wolfman
Jack Show' from Utopia? And on a
non-formal basis, the very fact that Bee
As Such is, essentially, a set of lengthy studio jams, will automatically
remind one of the days of Phallus Dei
and Yeti. If anything, Nada Moonshine # was far more reflective of the «spirit of
our time» than this recording (although even that is not saying much). If the
press release genuinely reflects the
way they feel, this is fairly pathetic — an open acknowledgement of the fact
that they have no idea what the «spirit of our time» really is (not that I
seriously blame them, but it's one thing not to know the truth and another
thing to assert a lie). If, however, this is just a dumb «marketing ploy»,
it's even more pathetic. How many incoming customers has it managed to offend?
Still, let us forget about silly words. It
certainly must be praised that,
almost forty years since the band was last involved in brave, unpredictable
jamming, they came together to give this approach one more try. It is at least
brave — and it endorses the idea that 1969-72 were, in fact, the years of Amon Düül II;
that dark experimental jamming has been and will always be at the heart of their
legacy. Compare the idea with that of a Genesis reunion to record another Foxtrot, or an Aerosmith attempt to
blacklist their outside songwriters and record another Rocks — things that never came to pass, even though they were
expected so hard.
But, once again turning to the negative side, Bee As Such is not at all impressive.
Frankly speaking, most of its fifty minutes sound like kitchen rehearsals, fit
for inclusion as bonus tracks on special editions of «proper» albums rather
than having any serious autonomous value. They are authentic «jams», almost
completely improvised (or, at least, seemingly so) around simple themes and
usually appearing out of nowhere and disappearing in the same direction after a
while (do not be alarmed by the 26 minute running time of 'Psychedelic Suite':
it is really three separate jam parts that do not have any coherent links in
between themselves). But the jamming has nowhere near the power, the
concentration, and the density of, say, a 'Yeti Talks To Yogi'.
It may have to do with the fact that there is
no keyboardist in the band: only Weinzierl is credited for «synthesizers», but
most of the time he just plays guitar, with Karrer accompanying on violin. But
even those guitar parts are perfunctory — rhythm chords, mostly, with the
instrument never really leaving the ground. The band members still remember how
to keep a groove together, but they seem to have forgotten how to develop that groove, or how to make
their individual personalities impressive within the groove.
And, finally, as much as I respect Renate
Knaup-Krotenschwanz for her immeasurable services to Amon Düül II
in the past, I have to admit that on this
record she is simply the biggest pain in the ass. I could have stomached the
music more easily, were it not infested with her tuneless croaking. Whatever
thin nuages of atmosphere the players might have been able to conjure with
their jamming, they are immediately blown apart by Renate's thoroughly
anti-atmospheric vocalizations. It's okay by me if she simply cannot sing any more, but whatever made them
think that the inability to sing should be compensated with unlimited freedom
of quacking and croaking?
In brief, I tip my imaginary hat to the band's
decision to succumb to nostalgia (and Bee
As Such, no matter what the press release tells us, is first and foremost a
hardcore exercise in nostalgia), but if the album never makes it to CD format,
this will not be a reason to shed serious tears. I could be mistaken, but I
think the album clearly shows it's high time to pack it in — or, at least, high
time to stop deluding themselves into thinking that they can still reflect «the
spirit of our times» by producing watered-down imitations of their glory days.
Granted, they may still have another Nada
Moonshine # in them, but only if they stop being so serious about it. As it
is, the sheer inadequacy of this product requires a thumbs down.
HAWK MEETS PENGUIN (1982)
1) One Moment's Anger Is Two
Pints Of Blood; 2) Meditative Music From The Third O Before The Producers Part
1; 3) Meditative Music From The Third O Before The Producers Part 2.
Upon resigning from the «regular» Amon
Düül II, guitarist John Weinzierl, as one of the founding fathers of
the band, decided that he had as big a claim to the name of «Amon
Düül» as anyone else — and, in the early Eighties, realized that
claim by reteaming with another of his former bandmates, bassist Dave Anderson.
Adding former Van der Graaf Generator drummer Guy Evans and
former-don't-know-who Julie Waring on vocals, the foursome set themselves a
brave task — re-establish the good name of Amon Düül (II) after it
had been so seriously tarnished in the late 1970s, with the band losing
direction, relevance, and, ultimately, all meaning.
The «new» Amon Düül relocated to
Britain (after all, only one of the members was German), and released its first
album under the same old moniker of Amon Düül II. At the time, it was
not as confusing as it might seem, considering that the «old» Amon
Düül II had just released its last album in fifteen years (Vortex); but these days, the usual
convention is to call this incarnation of the band «Amon Düül (UK)»,
for reasons too obvious to discuss. The main question, though, is — does the
actual music sound «Amon Düül-ish» enough to justify the name
preservation / usurpation / whatever?
Yes and no. Hawk Meets Penguin, despite a title that would rather suit the
likes of The Residents, is steeped in traditional prog-rock values, and,
therefore, is a record as commercially moribund by the standards of 1982 as
they come. There are only two compositions altogether (one of them splintered
in a small introduction part and the main body to suit LP requirements),
designed and structured as slowly developing mood pieces — so one might say
that Weinzierl and friends were trying to recapture the spirit of Tanz Der Lemminge, as the only album
from the classic Amon Düül II that was just as completely
mood-oriented.
But neither of the two suites actually
recaptures the spirit except in name only. The first one, 'One Moment's Anger
Is Two Pints Of Blood', instead sounds like fairly «normal», atmospheric, British
prog-rock à la «easily
accessible» side of the Canterbury scene — think mid-period Caravan or, even
more precisely, Camel. The dominating bits are stern, gallant, slightly
medievalistic keyboard melodies, and Julie Waring's wordless chanting. There
is a lengthy build-up, but around the six minute mark, the main melodies emerge
as fully formed, and they are fairly impressive, if not at all «challenging»
for the hardcore prog fan. The combination of slightly sci-fi synth tones and,
in stark contrast, Julie's folksy vocalizing works very well — count me in on
an assessment of the whole thing as «humbly beautiful», even if not for one
second truly «Amon Düül-ish».
The second part is an entirely different
matter: it is a twenty-three minute long chaotic piece, much of it running
along in the mode of free-form, rhythmless improvisation, until, finally, two
thirds into the «tune», they manage to slide into some sort of half-jazz,
half-Latin groove. Frankly, it all sounds very
boring to my ears; and it is not clear who exactly they were trying to seduce
with this heavily derivative, poorly staged cacophony of random mantras,
shouting, whooshing synth noises, and screwy percussion as late as 1982. Even
the final groove is limp and utterly purposeless. If anything, it does not
even remind so much of Amon Düül II as it does of the original Amon
Düül I — with technically superior and more inventive musicianship,
perhaps, but without any of the shock value that this A-R-T could claim in
1969. Only hardcore «genrists», I am sure, will prefer the second part to the
first here — those people who value the worst of Eric Dolphy over the best of
Duke Ellington, just because the former is E.D. and the latter is D.E.
So you probably already guessed that Hawk Meets Penguin is no «lost
masterpiece» out of the depths of the Amon Düül family; but the first
side, at least, is an entertaining (and, if you agree to subscribe to the charm
of Julie Waring, perhaps even tear-jerking) link between that family and
melodic prog-rock of the British variety. A link that will hardly downgrade
anybody's musical collection, that is; and one that is not that difficult to
procure, considering that, since 2005, most of the Amon Düül (UK)
catalog seems to be back in print.
MEETINGS WITH MENMACHINES (1985)
1) Pioneer; 2) The Old One; 3)
Marcus Lead; 4) The Song; 5) Things Aren't Always What They Seem; 6) Burundi
Drummer's Nightmare.
When you first see the full title of this
record — Meetings With Menmachines,
Unremarkable Heroes Of The Past — the probable association is «Kraftwerk
meets Uriah Heep» or something like that. In other words, a fine enough title
for something that tries to fuse electronic Krautrock with fantasy-prog, and
the very length of the title also brings to mind Tyrannosaurus Rex. Besides,
it is a sequel to the highly avantgardist Hawk
Meets Penguin, from essentially the same lineup, so bizarre music fans in
1985 should have been intrigued.
But instead, what we get here is a relatively
straightforward, almost predictably constructed, and perfectly «accessible» collection
of traditional art-pop tunes. The entire approach of Penguin's Side B has been jettisoned, and the style of Side A has
undergone sharp budget cuts to placate listeners with short attention spans. No
need to work on your intellectual skills here — most of the melodies rest on
fairly traditional chord sequences... in fact, they are almost instantaneously
catchy, which is why prog fans tend to brand Meetings as the same kind of pathetic sellout that was the «big»
Amon Düül II in the late 1970s.
However, there is a big difference between an
album like Only Human and this one.
Where Amon Düül II were clearly looking for a way to «blend in», to
find new styles of expression that would make them hip to record buyers, the
UK-based incarnation is simplifying its sound in ways that have nothing
whatsoever to do with current tastes. There is a New Wave-like strain in this
collection, mainly due to the heavy use of keyboards, but the whole thing is
neither synth-pop nor hair metal nor adult contemporary nor any other «hot
stuff», typical of 1985. The album sounds timeless — it could just as well be
recorded today by some cool indie
act.
And, like every inspired album released by a truly cool indie act (as opposed to
boring poseurs), I happen to enjoy it thoroughly. Although Julie Waring is not
a strong singer, and her voice has an immanently odd link to kindergarten, this
somehow puts it in line with the melodies — which are, in and out of
themselves, sometimes so simple you'd never even guess this band inherited any
of Amon Düül's family genes. 'Things Aren't Always What They Seem',
for instance, is an acoustic folk ballad that you'd rather expect to hear from
the likes of Peter, Paul, & Mary, with appropriately communist lyrics and
Pete Seeger marching on Washington, instead of a kiddie-mystical attitude,
courtesy of Julie's vocal stylings. But isn't it charming? We all like to
associate female art rock singing with Sandy Denny or Joni Mitchell; why not
try out a Shirley Temple approach instead, from time to time? That's, like, so post-modern.
The more fully-arranged numbers run the gamut
from alluring mid-tempo blues-pop ('Pioneer') to psychedelic mid-tempo
hard-rock ('The Old One') to gracious, elegant folk-art-whatever ('Marcus
Leid', the closest number in spirit to the «beautiful» part of 'One Moment's
Anger'), to fast-paced power-pop in the vein of Blondie ('The Song') and,
finally, straightforward rock'n'roll with a tongue-in-cheek «evil» edge
('Burundi Drummer's Nightmare', with Weinzierl playing the role of an Alice
Cooper-ish evil clown next to Waring's «damsel in distress» — not so much
humorous as it is bizarre, but bizarre enough to pardon the failed attempt at
humor).
All of these songs are at least catchy — some, in addition to that, are quite gorgeous,
and even if 'Nightmare' is overdrawn (too monotonous for us to waste nine
minutes of our life on the exact same nightmare pattern; wake up!), for most of
its duration, it rocks hard enough to keep us headbangers satisfied. The
«progressive» stamp is consciously commemorated by beginning every single
track with a brief, usually unrelated keyboard instrumental — almost in a joke
fashion, as in... «okay, here is our next tribute to Journey because we know
how much you expect us to finally get serious... nah, let's just boogie in the
sandbox some more». I like that attitude.
I like it even more once I remind myself that
the album was released in friggin' 1985,
at a time when Asia ruled supreme on the commercial sector of the so-called
«progressive» market, and that helps skyrocket its already well-established reputation.
Of all the «lightweight» albums associated with «Amon Düül» that
way or another, Menmachines is easily
the least offensive to good taste and the most adorable for those of us who
can learn to be undemanding. Unless you happen to be a prog Nazi, rocking your
kids to sleep by humming dramatic arias from Brain Salad Surgery, Make an effort to look it up somewhere — it's
well worth your while. Thumbs up.
FOOL MOON (1989)
1) Who Who; 2) The Tribe; 3) Tik
Tok; 4) Hauptmotor; 5) Hymn For The Hardcore.
Four years later, long after the sympathetic,
but unfortunate Menmachines has been
completely wiped out from the memories of those few who happened to have it
rubbed in, «Amon Düül» are back — as usual, uncalled for, unexpected,
and unwelcome. But most likely, they knew it, and this time, there are no
rational calls for accessibility or fitting in with the times. Instead, in
order to find new inspiration, they recruit the assistance of former Hawkwind
partner, the crazy sci-fi poet Robert Calvert — and try to come up with a
record that would combine the classic «Teutonic coldness» of Amon
Düül II with the surrealistic/cosmic aura of classic Hawkwind. Two records, in fact, both released the
same year; but I have been unable to determine which one came first and which
one came next — the UK incarnation of Amon Düül is not exactly an
Elvis Presley-level act, to have every aspect of their discography easily
available to the public through reliable, uncontroversial sources. So let us
begin with Fool Moon because I like
its title more.
Of course, combining the spirits of Amon
Düül II and Hawkwind is the kind of goal that would be surmised from such a pooling of talent. And, to a certain
extent, that is the kind of general
sound that Fool Moon gives the
listener. The feel of its psychedelic jams does somewhat remind of Yeti, even if the sound is much thinner
and the recordings feel far more pre-planned. And Calvert's trademark sci-fi
recitals do recall the spirit of Hawkwind, at least as far as the «ridiculous»
aspect of Hawkwind is concerned (because Calvert's presence on the band's
albums, with a few spontaneous exceptions, generally contributed to the effect
of teenage-style silliness rather than overwhelming admiration).
Unfortunately, one thing Fool Moon is rather poor on are ideas
— particular ideas, ones that form
the backbones of individual tracks and, when the stars are right, turn them
into masterpieces. There are but five tracks altogether, and, of the 43 minutes
that they occupy, at least 10-12 are given away to the proverbial nothing, a.k.a. noise. The industrial
percussion clanging on 'Who Who' and the endlessly annoying clock ticking on
'Tik Tok' (Dark Side Of The Moon
made its point far more briefly — and far better) are bad enough, but worst of
all is 'Hauptmotor', which begins with six and a half minutes of «hot summer
day sounds»: birds chirping, flies buzzing, and somebody quite busy sawing up
logs in the backyard. Not only is it utterly pointless (why not go out and buy
a Nature Sounds CD instead?), but, I
must add, having to listen to this in the dead of winter, with -20 Celsius
outside the window, is not my perfect idea of assimilating an important
artistic statement.
However, even once these 12 minutes fly out the
door, the listener is still stuck with a surprising paucity of tricks. 'Who
Who' only exists to show how fun it is to play with spooky echoey vocals over
industrial-bluesy cling-clanging (now we raise the volume — now we lower it!).
'The Tribe' is probably the best of the lot, a sharp, aggressive guitar jam
with convincing blast-offs from Weinzierl, but even that track does not get too
far along, and it certainly represents nothing that we already haven't heard
before. 'Tik Tok', once the instruments finally take over the clocks, becomes
a decent blues jam with one excellent riff and lots of complementary wanking.
The musical part of 'Hauptmotor' is just one
musical line repeated over and over again, over which Calvert half-sings,
half-recites something in German. And 'Hymn For The Hardcore' (I suppose that
is a fairly tongue-in-cheek title) is four minutes of... sitar noodling (and
rather primitive at that — like some talentless fan's tribute to 'Within You
Without You'; again, I fail to understand why I need to be listening to this
when I could choose Ravi Shankar instead, or Alice Coltrane at least).
In short, Fool
Moon is one of those quintessential records that solemnly try to make a
point by being utterly pointless. The riff of 'Tik Tok' and the solo on 'The
Tribe' should be amputated and saved for future generations who might want to
put them to better use in a context that makes more sense. Everything else is,
at best, a curiosity, especially for its time: one thing I will admit is that
not many acts sounded like that in
1989. (Quite a few acts sounded like that fifteen years earlier, though, which
might explain their not wanting to sound like that in 1989).
DIE LÖSUNG (1989)
1) Big Wheel; 2) Urban Indian;
3) Adrenalin Rush; 4) Visions Of Fire; 5) Drawn To The Flame Pt. 1; 6) They
Call It Home; 7) Die Lösung; 8) Drawn To The Flame Pt. 2.
Unlike Fool
Moon, this second album, recorded more or less at the same time, does not
even try to make a point. Unless the
point is made by Bob Calvert, but I cannot, and will not, decipher it: for
about two-thirds of the record, he «sings» in such an utterly ugly «nasal
hoarse» tone that it would be impossible to take any of the words seriously —
provided you could make any of them out in the first place. Quite ugly, really.
As for the music, this time it is not even all
that experimental. It's all mid-tempo or moderately fast «rock», with chemical-sounding,
utterly boring, guitar and clinical-sounding, utterly dated, synthesizers (the
latter, courtesy of a couple members of The Ozric Tentacles, a band which is
much better appreciated on its own, if there ever arise a need to appreciate
them) — and the mood never ever changes, at least, not until the last two
tracks which are sung by the eternal child Julie Waring: unfortunately, she
comes in way too late to dissipate the depressing grey clouds, which are the
only ingredient of the entire atmosphere of Die Lösung.
Sitting through forty minutes of this muck is
an experience only comparable in quality to sitting through some proverbially
dull lecture on a subject in which you do not have the most remote interest
(and I have had my share of these — in fact, Calvert's babbling brings up quite
a few unpleasant memories). I have no idea who on earth could develop an
honest liking to this sort of record — too sterile to stir up adrenaline, and
yet, too simplistic to tingle the nerves of progressively-oriented fans. Then,
adding insult to injury, the CD reissue doubles
the longest, and most excruciatingly boring, number on the album ('Drawn To The
Flame') by adding a second part of it that, for seven more minutes, sounds
almost exactly like the first.
Apparently, it is now known that Weinzierl did
not approve of the release of either Fool
Moon or Die Lösung,
claiming that they were unfinished recordings that were only put out because of
Calvert's death (from a heart attack in August 1988), to commemorate the
sessions. But I fail to imagine how these sessions could be «completed» — was
Weinzierl planning to add raging guitar overdubs? The London Symphony Choir?
Surprise guest appearance of Bono and Kermit the Frog duetting on a reggae
version of 'Archangel Thunderbird'? Whatever. Thumbs down would be guaranteed
even under all of these conditions.
In any case, this dead-end collaboration
effectively put a stop to Weinzierl's ongoing usurpation of the name of «Amon
Düül». For most of the 1990s, he was in relative hiding, and emerged
only in the early 2000s to reunite with the original band for a series of gigs
and nostalgic happenings, leading to the recording of Bee As Such. He still wields that axe impressively, but, overall,
his attempt to carry the flag of Amon Düül throughout the 1980s must
be acknowledged as a strategic failure, despite a few tactical victories. Just
stick to the first two albums.
JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT (1969)
1) Jacob And Sons; 2) Joseph's
Coat; 3) Joseph's Dream; 4) Poor, Poor Joseph; 5) One More Angel In Heaven; 6) Potiphar;
7) Close Every Door; 8) Go, Go, Go Joseph; 9) Poor, Poor Pharoah; 10) Song Of The
King (Seven Fat Cows); 11) Pharaoh's Dream Explained; 12) Stone The Crows; 13)
The Brothers Come To Egypt / Grovel, Grovel; 14) Who's The Thief?; 15) Joseph
All The Time; 16) Jacob In Egypt; 17) Any Dream Will Do.
Not too many people are aware of the fact that Jesus Christ Superstar was not the
first time that A. L. Webber and Tim Rice desecrated the Bible under the
intoxicating influence of the hippie age. And some of those who are aware of the duo's take on the life
of Joseph might mistakenly place it after
JC — simply for the reason that it
was not until the worldwide success of JC
made them household names that they returned to Joseph in all of its «splendor», getting it to run in prestigious
Broadway and London theaters and engaging the services of Donny Osmond to ensure
a dramatic surge in teenage girl interest in the Book of Genesis.
But the original
recording of Joseph And The Amazing
Technicolor Dreamcoat was actually released on Decca at least a year prior
to JC. It did not manage to catch a
lot of public attention, and is quite hard to come by these days as well.
Completists should take note that the recording is usually credited to «The
Joseph Consortium», which includes a selection of little-known players and
singers in which The Colet Court Choir plays a central part: the whole work was
originally commissionned by the Colet Court preparatory school, and was first
performed on March 1, 1968 as a 15-minute «pop cantata», later expanded to a
30-minute «oratorio». This second version already managed to catch the public
eye — and the result was a contract with Decca and this here album, quite hard
to come by these days, but available, for instance, as an MP3 download from
Amazon and other commercial sites.
If you are a major fan of JC and expect to find something in the same vein, prepare to be
disappointed. Joseph is not only shorter,
simpler, and far more modest in scope and ambition: it is a work produced on an
entirely different scale and in an entirely different musical paradigm. It's
not just that, at this particular point in his life, Lloyd Webber was still
mighty wary of this new potent force called «rock», placing much more of his
trust into the variety hall format; it is also that Joseph is essentially just a bit of lightweight entertainment. Put
a Bible story in a «pop musical» format? Say, what a golly gee novel idea.
That said, the actual music is not at all
«retro». Rather, it is reminiscent of the light family-oriented psycho-pop of
the times, such as practiced by The Association on one side of the ocean and
Manfred Mann on the other. Heavy on strings, chimes, sunshine vocal harmonies, but
with a light touch of electric organ, a pinch of fuzzy electric guitar, and
some wobbly production effects for the sake of «hipness». Normally, this style
is pitiful, although Webber seems to feel quite at home with it, churning out
melody after melody in a dazzling sequence of eighteen tracks in thirty-one
minutes — although some themes are reprised several times (most notably, the
catchiest vocal moment on the album, ʽPoor, Poor Josephʼ, later recreated
as ʽPoor, Poor Pharaohʼ), there is an impressive number of diverse
chord sequences on the album all the same. Unfortunately, few of them are
memorable or emotionally overwhelming.
There are several lead singers on the album,
most notably David Daltrey of the contemporary psychedelic band Tales Of
Justine (!; no relation to Roger as far as I can tell), but the whole thing is
presented as an «oratorio» rather than a true «opera», and the vocal retelling
of the story of Joseph, narrated Tim Rice-style, is nothing to write about.
Most ear-catching of the lot is probably Tim's own take on the Pharaoh:
ʽSong Of The Kingʼ is carried out as a parody on Elvis — but it is
not particularly funny because there is no clear reason why exactly the Pharaoh should be singing in an Elvis manner (they
pulled off a similar stunt in a much more convincing manner with ʽKing
Herod's Songʼ, which parodied no one in particular but conveyed the
hedonistic spirit of the character to a tee with its 1920's spirit). Like
everything else, it's just there because there's no harm in trying anything
once.
The attentive listener will probably spot a few
melodic bits that ended up migrating into JC
territory: for instance, the shrill electric guitar solo in ʽOne More
Angel In Heavenʼ would later develop into «Pilate's theme», and the vocal
melody of ʽWho's The Thiefʼ would be re-appropriated for ʽTrial
Before Pilateʼ. But most of these melodies are too kid-friendly to ever
suit the dark and tense mood of JC —
and the entire experience is so completely tongue-in-cheek that one can never
understand if the primary purpose of the two merry young Brits was to
revolutionize the world of music by synthesizing traditional musical,
psychedelia, and the Old Testament, or to simply take a hooliganish stab at the
Scripture while no one was looking.
In any case, Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in its original
incarnation is still a fun listen; much more dated and strictly tied to its
time than JC, but still a curious,
one-of-a-kind experiment that has plenty of potential to survive as intelligent
«family entertainment» — a musical fairy-tale for the young and old. At the
very least, it is certainly far from the worst effort ever undertaken to set
the Bible to music — plus, the idea of Joseph as humanity's first psychedelic
symbol is quite awesome in itself, only marginally less so than the idea of
Jesus as humanity's first impersonation of the hippie ideal. Thumbs up.
JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR (1970)
1) Overture; 2) Heaven On
Their Minds; 3) What's The Buzz/Strange Thing Mystifying; 4) Everything's
Alright; 5) This Jesus Must Die; 6) Hosanna; 7) Simon Zealotes/Poor Jerusalem;
8) Pilate's Dream; 9) The Temple; 10) Everything's Alright (reprise);
11) I Don't Know How To Love Him; 12) Damned For All Time/Blood Money; 13) The
Last Supper; 14) Gethsemane (I Only Want To Say); 15) The Arrest; 16) Peter's
Denial; 17) Pilate And Christ; 18) King Herod's Song; 19) Judas's Death; 20)
Trial Before Pilate (including The 39 Lashes); 21) Superstar; 22) Crucifixion;
23) John Nineteen Forty-One.
It makes good healthy sense to take a brief
listen to Joseph before diving deep
into Jesus Christ Superstar — if
only for the sake of getting amazed at one of the most gigantic creative leaps
of pop music's most exciting decade. Of course, the very idea of writing a
musical / rock opera on the life of JC would preclude the authors from taking
it too lightly: neither Andrew Lloyd,
nor Tim Rice were dedicated Christians, but neither of them could have the
audacity to take on an overtly humorous or satiric attitude towards the matter.
Still, intention is one thing, and execution is an entirely different one; and
where Joseph, execution-wise, was
for the most part funny, fluffy vaudeville, JCS is, unquestionably, one of the grandest high-tragical works of
our age.
In general, critical respect and continuous fan
support for JCS is due to the fact
that, out of all of Sir Andrew's works, it is the most «rock-oriented» one. The
music as such does not relate nearly as much to the psychedelic / hard-rock /
blues-rock movements of its era as it does to contemporary R&B, and the
bulk of the melodies still have the typical Broadway show as their forefather;
but the arrangements have been cleverly designed to get in tune with the rock
crowds, and it is no coincidence that, for the original studio sessions, Webber
and Rice got Joe Cocker's Grease Band to record most of the parts (including
electric guitarists Neil Hubbard and Henry McCulloch), not to mention, of
course, offering the main vocal lead to Deep Purple's Ian Gillan. The result is
funny — a totally non-rock'n'roll album that totally sounds like one.
But the real overwhelming success of JCS, of course, has nothing to do with
electric guitars and Gillan's proto-metal screaming. It has everything to do
with two people setting themselves one of the hardest tasks in music history —
writing a rock musical about the last days of Jesus' presence on Earth — and
pulling it off. If nothing that Webber ever did later can even come close to
the effect of JCS, it is not because
the effort drained him of all talent; it is simply because he would never again
encumber himself with a task involving so much responsibility. If you are
embarking on a project like JCS, you
have to (a) make sure that your work produces a cathartic effect on almost
everyone, regardless of their religious feelings; (b) make sure that your work
sounds contemporary enough to not be laughed off as pretentious mimicry, yet
also timeless enough to not let its effect wear off on the very next
generation; (c) make sure that your work does not offend the religious, yet at
the same time stay true to your own inner feelings about the matter, which may
not at all be religious. If even one of these conditions goes unsatisfied — the
result is a surefire failure which might cost you your entire future career.
It is utterly amazing, then, and still amazing
to me after all these years, how perfectly all these conditions are met —
consequently, resulting in one of the most perfect works of musical art of the
entire century. Yes, individual moments, performances, interpretations may be
deficient; and, in fact, this Original London Cast version, with Gillan at the
helm, has never been my personal favorite. To my ears, it sounds a little
rushed, almost like an «early rehearsal» attempt. The tunes are frequently
taken at way too fast tempos; the singers do not seem to always have had enough
times to properly «get into character»; the players do not seem to have
practiced their guitar licks and brass kicks to perfection. In my opinion, the opera
needed a certain gestation period, which is why the 1973 movie version boasts
more subtlety and significant «character growth», so to speak. But I also
understand those who prefer the rawer, less polished spirit of the 1970
version, which they might find more blood-boilingly-aggressive, thanks in part
to Gillan's delivery.
Extolling the individual musical virtues of
particular tunes would be pointless: if you have already heard the record, you
can probably do a better job for yourself than I can, and if you haven't, just
stop everything that you are doing right now and go get it — there is no excuse for not being acquainted with JCS unless you have something going on
against music in general. I might simply mention that I myself knew the whole
thing almost by heart upon the third or fourth listen, and that not even a
single track on it — not even the briefer links — is devoid of a stunning instrumental
or vocal hook, sometimes several of them. But it isn't «just» a collection of
musical hooks: each theme and passage is perfectly adjusted to its lyrical and
spiritual content. Dynamic, aggressive, neurotic-paranoid passages accompany
the parts of Judas; coldly ominous, scary brass pomp represents Roman power;
lightweight folksiness or silly-sounding R&B dance rhythms are associated
with the Apostles (one minor point for which the church people could be left
genuinely displeased with JCS is
Andrew and Tim's presentation of Jesus' disciples as a bunch of fame-seeking
idiots); beautiful balladry is reserved for the likes of Mary Magdalene, etc. —
Wagner himself could have been proud of these guys' use of leitmotifs.
I have occasionally heard people complaining
about the crudeness or silliness of Tim Rice's libretto — complaints I have
never understood, since, in general, the lyrics merely represent minor
variations on the original text of the New Testament. A major exception is
Judas, who gets to be the show's chief original hero, right from the opening
salvos of ʽHeaven On Their Mindsʼ, in which he lays down his
justification for the upcoming betrayal, and down to the album's big hit single
ʽSuperstarʼ, in which he, already as a ghost, reasons that "If
you'd come today, you would have reached a whole nation / Israel in 4 B.C. had
no mass communication" (okay, these particular lyrics do sound a bit
stupid — but we have to remember that, in the age of Flower Power Guru
Explosion, they did sound far more relevant than today).
On the other hand, it is fairly admirable how
Rice and Webber manage to keep things in hand — not a single moment on the
album lets us know for sure that they are genuinely presenting Jesus as The Saviour,
The Son of God: throughout the opera, Jesus does not produce a single miracle,
even when the lepers in ʽThe Templeʼ beg him to, and the music stops
directly at ʽJohn 19:41ʼ ("Now in the place where He was crucified
there was a garden. In the garden was a new tomb in which no man had ever yet
been laid"),
omitting any hints at the Resurrection. Yet, at the same time, not a single
moment directly asserts the opposite, either — giving every devoted
Christian a fair chance at admitting the opera into their canon of religious
works. Some might see this as an intentionally commercial, even cynical attempt
at recruiting fans on both sides of the fence, or as a sign of cowardice (two
self-professed atheists afraid for the potential consequences of their actions),
but that's looking at things from a hatred point of view; I would rather just
admire the skill with which they managed to guide their ship through the reef
of fanaticism.
A bit of «crudeness» may be found, perhaps, in
the constant references to the «superstarsdom» of Jesus — culminating in
ʽKing Herod's Songʼ, for which Webber recycled the melody of his earlier
vaudeville composition ʽTry It And Seeʼ (made into a hit by Rita Pavone);
here, the original Biblical mention of Herod imploring Jesus to try out a
miracle is basically turned into an allegory for a sleazy entrepreneur
imploring his artsy-fartsy client to be a good lad and sell out like they all
do. But, come to think of it, this particular projection has even more
relevance today than it had in 1970, and ends up adding depth to the show
rather than cheapening it.
A few more words are in order regarding this
particular version of the opera. As I said, I find it flawed, and not least of
all due to the relative ineptness of some of the performers. The major culprit
is Murray Head as Judas: his lungs are nowhere near as steel-caged as Gillan's,
which puts him in a bad position (the role requires him to be way more of a
passionate screecher), and his phrasing is frequently muffled and, well, just
less expressive than the melody easily allows it to be. Victor Brox as Caiaphas
is fairly mediocre as well, coming off more as a mediocre Pharisee meddler than
as the iron-willed symbol of conservative evil that the authors must have had
in mind. Even Barry Dennen as Pilate does not hit the same heights here as he will
do three years later. The only cast member I find beyond reproach is Yvonne
Elliman as Mary Magdalene — the true «miracle» of the sessions, since Webber
and Rice almost literally picked the lady off the street, where she was doing
serious drugs and living off slim barroom pickings; who knows, maybe that was
the major reason for which she slipped into the role so quickly and so
comfortably (and the decision to release ʽI Don't Know How To Love
Himʼ as the album's second single was one of the wisest marketing choices
they could have made at the time).
As for Ian Gillan in the title role... he sings
it well enough, and there is no question about ever calling his interpretation
«wooden» or any of those other well-known nasty names. But the performance
still occasionally suffers from too much speed (the timing of ʽPoor
Jerusalemʼ, for instance, is abysmal compared to the movie version — it's
almost like, «hey guys, I'd like my prophecies to be more heart-wrenching and
convincing as much as all of you, but I've still got ten more rallies scheduled
in all of the city's quarters, so we'll have to get it over real quick»), and,
perhaps, from a bit too much «Deep Purplism»? Basically, just ask yourself the
question if you're all right with the same guy who just finished singing
ʽChild In Timeʼ to go on with this Jesus role. If you are all right with the idea, Gillan is
your personal Jesus for all time. If you're not, you'll just have to wait for
Ted Neeley.
Also, there is this small matter of the
original version being too short —
omitting certain non-crucial, but still important character-building numbers,
such as ʽThen We Are Decidedʼ (Caiaphas and Annas talking about
Jesus' fate prior to the general priest meeting in ʽThis Jesus Must
Dieʼ) and the Peter/Mary duet on ʽCould We Start Again Pleaseʼ,
and criminally shortening ʽThe Trial Before Pilateʼ, giving Barry
Dennen even fewer chances to prove himself firsthand. These may come off as
minor quibbles, but they are not: the original cast version, once we get
acquainted with the future of the opera, does not come across as
«well-rounded».
Still, it is
the original cast version — the one that announced JCS as a cultural phenomenon, the one that already ensured Sir
Andrew's future knighthood (I will always prefer to think that the man was
knighted for JCS and not for Phantom Of The Opera, even if the Queen
herself proves me wrong), the one that sold the most copies and produced the
most hits, and the one that best fit the Zeitgeist,
since, by the time 1973 came along, hard drugs and assholes had already
resulted in an entirely different spirit. Hence, even if this is not my
favourite version (and even after all has been said and done, it may still
easily be a matter of personal preference), it is clearly the most important
from a historical perspective, and merits its thumbs up all the way.
JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR (SOUNDTRACK) (1973)
1) Overture; 2) Heaven On
Their Minds; 3) What's The Buzz; 4) Strange Thing Mystifying; 5) Then We Are
Decided; 6) Everything's Alright; 7) This Jesus Must Die; 8) Hosanna; 9) Simon
Zealotes; 10) Poor Jerusalem; 11) Pilate's Dream; 12) The Temple; 13) I Don't
Know How To Love Him; 14) Damned For All Time/Blood Money; 15) The Last Supper;
16) Gethsemane (I Only Want To Say); 17) The Arrest; 18) Peter's Denial; 19)
Pilate And Christ; 20) King Herod's Song; 21) Could We Start Again; 22) Judas's
Death; 23) Trial Before Pilate (including The 39 Lashes); 24) Superstar; 25)
Crucifixion; 26) John Nineteen Forty-One.
By the time Norman Jewison got around to
filming JCS for the big screen, it
had already evolved from its early beginnings as a Decca «concept album» into a
lavish musical, staged in London, on Broadway, and beginning to be exported to
other locations as well. With several years of fleshing out the structure,
arrangements, and performances, it is no wonder that the 1973 version sounds
like a more «complete» experience than the 1970 original, even if this should
not be forcing fans of Ian Gillan, Murray Head, and Joe Cocker's Grease Band to
immediately switch their loyalties.
My own loyalties, though, have firmly stayed on
the side of the movie soundtrack all through the years. Which is a bit comical,
since I was never a huge fan of the movie itself. Like so many other rock-based
movies of the 1970s (remember Ken Russell?), it leaned a bit too heavily on the
kitsch side, and ended up dated and ridiculous in quite a few aspects. I do not
actually mind some of the anachronisms — arming the Romans with Uzis and
setting the Jewish priests up on scaffolds added a fun element, and the scene
of Judas running away from rolling tanks kind of sticks in your memory, like it
or not — but the «glam» elements of contemporary culture, scattered all over
the place, are as out of place today as they used to be then. It is true that
Rice's lyrics are replete with
references to contemporary pop culture (referring to Jesus as «top of the poll»
or asking «did you know your death would be a record breaker?» is certainly not the way a more clerically-minded
person would address the same issues) — but I still believe that is exactly where it all should have
stopped, because now, instead of watching what could easily have been one of
the finest JC-movies of all time, we are forced to watch a movie about Afros,
R&B dancing, hippie clothes and hairstyles and lots of other stuff that, in
the end, narrow the range and scope of JCS
instead of attempting to broaden it.
Which is all the more pitiful considering just
how perfect the assembled cast is. Of the original UK cast, only Yvonne Elliman
as Mary and Barry Dennen as Pilate reprise their parts — for very good reason,
and, in fact, this particular stab of Dennen's at the Pilate role easily trumps
his first take: now he is a very smug, self-confident, even a little bit
tricksterish Pilate that finally falls victim to a shattering nervous
breakdown. Bob Bingham's deep bass makes a Caiaphas to die for; Josh Mostel may
be overacting the buffoonery King Herod part a little bit when compared to Mike
d'Abo's more restrained performance, but I would say that, out of all the
parts, this is one part that does not suffer too much from overacting.
Then there is the magnificent Carl Anderson as
Judas; predictably, there was a bit of fuss about a black member of the cast
playing the greatest antagonist in history — but even if we are stupid enough
to accept the «racist» argument in the first place, let us remind ourselves
that the Judas of JCS was never
intended to be portrayed as «evil» or, in any way, a «malicious» person. And
Carl succeeds in showing his inner torment far better than Murray Head — by
playing out the role with noticeably more passion, aggression, and versatility.
Finally, the completely unknown Ted Neeley —
together with Carl, both were understudies in the original Broadway version,
and got the movie part through sheer luck — will always be the ideal Jesus for
me. His voice is more thin and frail than Gillan's, which suits the character
quite well, yet he is still able to raise it to a shrill scream when necessary
(on ʽGethsemaneʼ, for instance), and he conveys the «sad little man»
aspect of Jesus with great skill and subtlety. Nor do his arias sound rushed any
more — ʽPoor Jerusalemʼ is now taken at just the right tempo that
gives Ted plenty of time to hit each syllable as hard as is required for a
prophetic passage.
It is interesting that the performances in the
movie differ quite sharply from bits and pieces of the original Broadway stage
version that I have heard, even though the cast, apart from the two major
players, remains very much the same — apparently, the motto for the movie must
have been «less theater, more realism», so that, even despite all the fads and
trappings, the movie, and the movie soundtrack frequently produces a
skin-crawling effect. The singing is in no way dominated by the kind of crap I
personally hate about Broadway musicals: each performer makes his/her best to
make every line come alive. When Pilate and Christ engage in their rapid-fire
verbal duel in the intense ʽTrialʼ passage, they are talking, like two emotion-bound human
beings — and, at the same time, singing on key. No matter how many times I
listen to these performances, I still can't help feeling amazed at how
startingly effective they pull off almost every line.
And yes, this time around the show looks
definitely completed. The extra Annas/Caiaphas dialog on ʽThen We Are
Decidedʼ, early on in the show, is a delicious dark taster of grim things
to come. The fanfaric ʽHosannaʼ is extended with one extra verse
("sing out for yourselves, for you are blessed") which is actually
very important — it is the only place throughout the whole opera where Jesus,
for once, sounds happy, surrounded by his admirers. The Mary/Peter duet on
ʽCould We Start Againʼ adds an original and interesting lyrical twist
from Rice and is a great emotional «tender breather» in between all the rough
post-Gethsemane stuff. The extra verse and bridge in ʽTrial Before
Pilateʼ gives us more time — and suspense! — to prepare for the tension of
ʽThe 39 Lashesʼ. At the same time, a few unnecessary bits have been
trimmed — such as the ultra-long repetitive coda to ʽEverything's
Alrightʼ — so that, in the end, the running length is just about the same
as on the original, but the final album makes much better use of all that time.
In short, while I am always happy to have the
Gillan/Head version around, it is the Neeley/Anderson version, I hope, that
will stand the test of time as the ultimate JCS version. Granted, I should add here that I know almost nothing
of the subsequent castings, which have been numerous and possibly successful; but, to be perfectly honest, I don't think I
even want to know, because I
honestly have no idea how anyone, anywhere, anyhow could ever improve on this
interpretation. (I once caught a glimpse of some bits of the 2000 filmed
version, with Glenn Carter as Jesus — just a glimpse, since I had to shut it
off very quickly, fearing for the safety of my stomach: the pomp, pathos,
overacting, and oversinging seemed to personify everything that I could ever abhor about these kinds of staging.
Unsurprisingly, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber proclaimed this his personal favourite
of all interpretations).
And yes, the movie deserves to be seen — we should probably just learn to disregard
its dated aspects and concentrate on the performances, because visually, the
actors fully match the emotions that we feel from their singing. And it
actually does work as a movie about
Jesus Christ — much better so, at least, than Mel Gibson's sadistic
Christploitation flick; not to mention that Jewison faithfully preserves the
ambiguity of the opera, and we never get to know «the truth». (We do see,
symbolically, an empty cross at the end — yet we are never told how exactly it
got empty, and, to be precise, Jesus was resurrected from the tomb, not from
the cross). On the other hand, the «movie soundtrack» certainly needs no
visuals to be appreciated as a great, thoroughly inspired and magnificently
arranged and recorded piece of work. Thumbs up a-plenty.
EVITA (1976)
1) A Cinema In Bueno Aires, 26
July 1952; 2) Requiem For Evita / Oh What A Circus; 3) On This Night Of A
Thousand Stars / Eva And Magaldi / Eva Beware Of The City; 4) Buenos Aires; 5)
Goodnight And Thank You; 6) The Lady's Got Potential; 7) Charity Concert / I'd
Be Surprisingly Good For You; 8) Another Suitcase In Another Hall; 9) Dangerous
Jade; 10) A New Argentina; 11) On The Balcony Of The Casa Rosada / Don't Cry For
Me Argentina; 12) High Flying, Adored; 13) Rainbow High; 14) Rainbow Tour; 15)
The Actress Hasn't Learned The Lines (You'd Like To Hear); 16) And The Money
Kept Rolling (In And Out); 17) Santa Evita; 18) Waltz For Eva And Che; 19) She
Is A Diamond; 20) Dice Are Rolling / Eva's Sonnet; 21) Eva's Final Broadcast;
22) Montage; 23) Lament.
If not for Jesus
Christ Superstar and its (a) superhuman musical impact and (b) nominal
allegiance to the «rock» paradigm, I would hardly have a single pretext, or
even personal stimulus, to include Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber in this section. As
incredible as it may seem, JCS was
an artistic accident — an achievement achieved simply because Webber, a
talented, but misguided composer, for once in his life decided to «try it out
this way». The result happened to transcend all known musical borders. But it
was never Sir Andrew's conscious intention
to transcend all known musical borders. He just needed a particular musical
framework that could fit the subject, and he found it. Who knows: perhaps, in
the wake of JCS' success, had he
begun looking for subjects of comparable grandiosity — oh, I dunno, such as
setting The Brothers Karamazov to
music — he might have produced comparable results.
Instead, as Wikipedia niftily puts it, «the
planned follow up to Jesus Christ
Superstar was a musical comedy based on the Jeeves and Wooster novels by
P. G. Wodehouse». That is Sir Andrew
Lloyd Webber to you, in a nutshell. Oh, there is nothing wrong in alternating
grand tragedies with lightweight comedies, as such (Will Shakespeare could
vouch for that); still, this was rather symbolic, and vaguely hinted at the
idea that Webber would never again conceive a project on such a grand scale as JCS — and he didn't. (Enter all good
Christians pointing out that you can never get a scale grander than the one
upon which you mount the figure of Christ; exit all good Christians after we
politely point out the fact that Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber himself was, and
remains, at a significant distance from a «good Christian», and, probably,
views Jesus himself as simply one of his action figures, on the same shelf as
Old Deuteronomy and The Phantom.)
The «grandest» and «grittiest» that Webber ever
got after JCS was in 1976. After the
predictable flop of Jeeves (due in
part to the fact that Andrew and his new librettist, Alan Ayckbourn, tried to
cram as much of the novels as possible into the musical; Tim Rice had the
wisdom to pull out of the project before it was too late), Webber and Rice
reteamed once again, choosing, this time, a female deity figure for their next
project — Eva Perón, who, by then, was a figure only slightly less
legendary than Jesus himself, and, on the faraway shores of Argentina, was
definitely «bigger than the Beatles», to paraphrase John Lennon.
As a musical, Evita is pretty damn good, if you have an ear for musicals; and it
still managed to preserve some of the toughness of old, with much of the music
built on a bluesy or R'n'B-ish foundation. That said, this time around, the
music is almost worthless without the story and the singing; as in all
traditional musicals, the tunes are there as backdrops for the singers and
their personalities — no wonder that the original concept album opens without
an overture, since there are only a tiny handful of themes from which a solid
overture could be drawn (instead, there is a sort of «underture», a
ʽMontageʼ, crudely assembled from reprises of several parts of the
show — quite annoying, considering that most of the themes have already been reprised several times).
The atmosphere is occasionally Broadwayish,
but, on the whole, remains credible. The high quotient of Latin motives,
flamencos, and ardent sentimentality, may displease, but, given the subject,
hardly seems out of place — no more so than elements of Catholic church music
(along with a children's choir on ʽSanta Evitaʼ), without which a
musical about Argentina and its modern day neo-Madonna would be unthinkable.
Many of the ballads are still cast in the typically 1970s soft-rock / folk-pop
idiom (ʽHigh Flying, Adoredʼ, etc.), which is at least better than
casting them in a Julie Andrews or Barbra Streisand manner.
As for the singers, well, Evita is really a one-actor show: although Paul Jones (the original
lead singer in Manfred Mann) is quite functional in lending his pipes to the
impersonation of Juan Perón, and Colm Wilkinson has enough sneer to
convey the sarcasm and criticism of the narrator and one-man-Greek-chorus Che,
the whole story basically belongs to Evita — with Julie Covington nailing the
part as perfectly as the composition allows. (Clearly, there is no comparison with the Madonna version —
which arguably remains much better known simply because it is the Madonna
version, but signora Ciccone, who admittedly had to take extra vocal lessons to
sing the part, despite, perhaps, being somewhat close to the real Eva
Perón in spirit — she handles the role rather well from a strictly
visual viewpoint — could never accumulate proportionally acceptable strength
in her vocal cords).
Covington's
arias are really the only good reasons to listen to the whole thing at all —
and I do not mean just ʽDon't Cry For Me, Argentinaʼ, which actually
works much better in the overall setting of the album than when ripped out of
the show and overplayed and overcovered to death in the framework of our modern
pop culture. ʽAnother Suitcase In Another Handʼ, ʽHigh Flying,
Adoredʼ, and even the cooing ʽI'd Be Surprisingly Good For Youʼ,
in which the dame is wooing over her future president husband, all have a touch
of frail beauty — which is then topsy-turved into brawn and aggression on
ʽBuenos Airesʼ and ʽRainbow Highʼ. All in all, Covington
succeeds in making a fascinating musical character out of Eva — if not a very
pleasant one: I do not know of the original reaction to the musical in
Argentina, but Alan Parker's movie, twenty years later, caused quite an uproar,
much as JCS succeeded in disturbing
the minds of one too many mindless Christian fanatics before it.
Composition-wise,
Evita and its author could certainly
be accused of laziness: recurring themes and leitmotifs crop up all of the
time, and when you get it all together and start packing it in, there are maybe
like five or six fully completed, fleshed out, memorable compositions on the
album. But the record moves on with turbulence and dynamics, and there are
quite a few unexpected surprises — for instance, the instrumental mid-section
of ʽBuenos Airesʼ, delving into funk and even disco for a couple
minutes; the boogie-blues of ʽDangerous Jadeʼ, associated, for some
reason, with Perón's military officials; and the mournful minimalistic
conclusion (ʽLamentʼ), backed with nothing but an acoustic guitar
part. At the very least, Webber and Rice consistently keep it from becoming too
boring.
Strictly
«rock»-oriented listeners, not to mention all partisans of the
«anti-commercial» movement, will find little of value in Evita — in fact, they will probably not even start looking for it.
But it is definitely not yer ordinary Broadway show, and still shows Sir Andrew
at the top of his game — even after a self-initiated change of rules. Just do
not spoil your experience with the Madonna version: by all means, seek out the
original. (There may be other good ones as well: last time I looked, there was
something like twenty-five commercially
available recordings of Evita in
English alone — yet the original recording fully appeases the small Evita-loving part of my character, so
you are on your own for any follow-ups). A modest thumbs up — mainly for Julie
Covington's performance, without which this would be «just another musical»,
with an unclear audience (regular musical-goers would prefer something softer
and more family-oriented, whereas rock opera lovers would always just remember
this as a cruel downfall after JCS).
TELL ME ON A SUNDAY (1980)
1) Take That Look Off Your
Face; 2) Let Me Finish; 3) It's Not The End Of The World (If I Lose Him); 4) Letter
Home To England; 5) Sheldon Bloom; 6) Capped Teeth And Caesar Salad; 7) You
Made Me Think You Were In Love; 8) It's Not The End Of The World (If He's
Younger); 9) Second Letter Home; 10) Come Back With The Same Look In Your Eyes;
11) Let's Talk About You; 12) Take That Look Off Your Face (reprise); 13) Tell
Me On A Sunday; 14) It's Not The End Of The World (If He's Married); 15) I'm Very
You, You're Very Me; 16) Nothing Like You've Ever Known; 17) Let Me Finish
(reprise).
In between the giant successes of Evita and Cats lies this little platter, quite delicious in its own humble
way. I omit a review of Variations,
a rock/classical hybrid that Andrew concocted in collaboration with his
brother Julian (a classically trained cellist) — I have no skills that would allow
me to properly «review» Paganini, much less a set of 23 variations that A. L.
W. composed for Caprice No. 24 In A Minor — but the odd trick is that,
eventually, the Baron found a way to integrate both projects: the musical Song And Dance would be splicing
together Tell Me On A Sunday, a
relatively short song cycle performed in its entirety by one female vocalist,
and Variations, choreographed for a
ballet performance.
I do not care much for the Song And Dance idea: merging these two completely different
ventures within one concept was merely a pretentious gesture, whose real
purpose must have been not to «lose sight» of all of Webber's latest creations.
It did not actually last too long, and eventually Tell Me On A Sunday re-emerged on its own, expanded with several
extra songs to boost the overall length of the performance (the original album
goes only slightly over 40 minutes). However, to this day it still remains one
of the lesser known Webber musicals, eclipsed by one too many biggies.
Which is a pity, because there is an element of
subtle intrigue and freshness about this project that sets it apart. For one
thing, it is all targeted towards one singer: the original album is usually listed
as part of the discography of the UK artist Marti Webb (selected by Webber
based on her previous experience as Evita in the matinee performance), although
most people have probably never even heard of any other Marti Webb albums (they
do exist). For another thing, it is all on a relatively small scale: the whole
story, with lyrics written by Don Black after Webber and Rice had a falling
out, explores the confused personal relationships of one young girl that take
her from New York to Los Angeles and back again. The subject is not
particularly overwhelming and, when you come to think of it, everything is oh
so very Seventies, but neither is it stupid or overtly clichéd, and,
with a subject like that, there is no risk of the attitude ever becoming overbearing.
Apart from a few brief plot-related links, the
whole record does not really have the feel of a musical — more like a
typically 1970s soft-rock / folk-pop album, and only Marti Webb's
musical-oriented vocals betray the final stage goals of the concept. They are
appropriately sweet, though, and never over-the-top (as it always happens to
Webber productions as they age — starting out with technically imperfect
vocalists who compensate for imperfection by actually sounding like human
beings, then eventually falling into the hands of «poor man opera singers» who
squeeze all the humanistic content out of them by overacting like crazy). Webb
lives up to the role — the character here is not as complex as Evita, but not
as fairy-tale-ish, either, and her anger, irony, sentimentality, and sadness
are all believable.
And then there is some good music, too.
ʽTake That Look Off Your Faceʼ, the lead-in number where the heroine
reacts to the first news of her boyfriend cheating on her, went all the way to
No. 3 on the UK charts when released as a single — at the height of the
disco/New Wave era, despite its defiantly tradionalist melodic structure and
arrangement. Actually, it bridges the gap between folk-pop and ABBA-style
Europop (without the corny synthesizers), and gives the world a fine,
appetizing transition from the light ("take that look off your face, I can
see through your smile...") to the dark (the "couldn't wait to bring
all of that bad news to my door" employs delightfully threatening chords
to show us a bit of the «unsettling» side of the protagonist).
Other memorable compositions range from sappy,
but modestly and stylishly touching balladry (title track) to quirky
combinations of old school vaudeville with a hillbilly shuffle attitude (ʽCapped
Teeth And Caesar Saladʼ) to featherlight upbeat pop ditties (ʽI'm
Very You, You're Very Meʼ) and only very
occasionally, a bit of a harder punch to accentuate the bad mood spells of the
protagonist (ʽLet Me Finishʼ). As usual, almost each motive gets
reprised at least two or three times, which may seem overkill given the album's
short running length, but all of the compositions are fairly brisky themselves
— this is all «small-scale» indeed, with none of Evita's sweeping orchestral runs or church chorals. So there is
really plenty of time to fit in everything fittable.
If you can stand a little sentimentality, I'd
at least certainly recommend Tell Me On
A Sunday over... well, my personal diagnosis is that I am incurably
allergic to The Sound Of Music and everything
of its ilk, so, naturally, a light musical with a sentimental female
protagonist, for me, is automatically stripped of any presumption of innocence
there may be. Yet, in a way, this whole thing sounds more like a Carpenters
album than a genuine Julie Andrews oratorio, and a fairly well-written
Carpenters album with an intelligent (if not all that intellectual) concept. A
nice, healthy way for the composer to close out the decade — and that entire
part of his career which need not, and, quite often, should not be described
with the word «cloying».
Thumbs up — for this original version: I have not heard the more recent expanded revision of Tell Me On A Sunday, but, through the powers of induction, can guess that it probably does not beat the Marti Webb show. Oh, by the way, Rod Argent, of the Zombies and Argent fame, is here on all the keyboards (he also played on the Variations album before that), and Jon Hiseman, of the jazz-rock pioneer band Colosseum fame, is on drums — one good reason for the rock music fan to seek this out (not that there is a lot of keyboard wizardry or thunderous drumming going on, but still, you never know how to please your subconscious).
CATS (1981)
1) Overture; 2) Prologue:
Jellicle Songs For Jellicle Cats; 3) The Naming Of Cats; 4) The
Invitation To The Jellicle Ball; 5) The Old Gumbie Cat; 6) The Rum Tum Tugger;
7) Grizabella: The Glamour Cat; 8) Bustopher Jones; 9) Mungojerrie And
Rumpelteazer; 10) Old Deuteronomy; 11) The Jelllicle Ball; 12) Grizabella; 13) The
Moments Of Happiness; 14) Gus: The Theatre Cat; 15) Growltiger's Last Stand;
16) Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat; 17) Macavity; 18) Mr. Mistoffelees; 19)
Memory; 20) The Journey To The Heaviside Layer; 21) The Ad-Dressing Of
Cats.
This review is for the Original London Cast of Cats,
which, predictably, is a little less Broadwayish than the Original Broadway Cast, although the two are only separated by one
year, and the difference is not particularly striking. As usual, there are
dozens of subsequent versions as well, including a relatively tolerable movie (musically tolerable — the idea of
enjoying people jump around in stupid cat make-up has, for some reason, never
appealed to me at all), but reviewing all of them would be quite a chore, considering
that I have no deep love for the original.
It is a bit ironic, of course, that Sir Andrew
would go completely song-and-dance on a piece of work drawn from the art of T.
S. Eliot. But then, the original Old
Possum's Book Of Practical Cats could hardly be called a «peak of
intellectualism» all by itself. And if we take Cats in the only reasonable way it could be taken — as a «show for
the entire family, with emphasis on the kids» — then it has to be agreed that
Webber did manage to find a perfectly appropriate musical vibe to fit the funny
feline adventures as narrated by Old Possum.
Cats are lightweight, kitschy, and occasionally
corny; and ʽMemoryʼ has been overplayed to such a terrible death
that, like the Beatles' ʽYesterdayʼ, it is one of those songs today
that one may find almost impossible to enjoy on a gut level. Still (okay, here
goes), ʽMemoryʼ is a great song, even despite being covered by Barry
Manilow and Celine Dion, and there is quite a bit of excellent music to be
found on the rest of the album as well.
The big colorful advantage of Old Possum's Book is that it introduces
such an enormous variety of characters, exploring all sides of cat psychology;
and, respecting that, Webber took the right decision to represent each of these
characters with a different musical style — which makes Cats into his most eclectic oeuvre of all time. Let us see. There
is some old time flapper jazz (ʽThe Old Gumbie Catʼ); some playful
R&B (ʽThe Rum Tum Tuggerʼ); a bit of mock-Wagnerian opera
(ʽGrizabellaʼ); some folk-pop (ʽBustopher Jonesʼ); nods
to «classic» Rogers & Hammerstein
and the like (ʽOld Deuteronomyʼ); kiddie sing-alongs from Sesame Street
(ʽSkimbleshanksʼ); spy movie muzak (ʽMacavityʼ); big,
brawny glam-pop (ʽMr. Mistoffeleesʼ); and even a lengthy multi-part
suite (ʽGrowltiger's Last Standʼ) that could, for almost ten minutes,
evoke a progressive rock feeling in whoever would be willing to properly assess
its complexity.
The bad news is that the atmosphere of it all
way too often seems either «cutesy» or downright «silly». The two and a half
minute long ʽOvertureʼ, mostly built on pianos and synthesized horns
and strings, is inspiring and occasionally even tense, but as the
ʽPrologueʼ leads you on into the world of merrily dancing predators
singing "jellicle songs for jellicle cats", you might begin to wonder
whether you have just been politely asked to surrender a significant part of
your brain, and if yes, then what are your actual gains from surrendering it.
Clearly, nobody should be afraid of a little
silliness from a grown-up person, but when that silliness takes on the form of
a major stage musical, that may be a little over the top. Fortunately, as on
most of Webber's «original casts», the singers never tend to overdramatize (the
only part that I could never really stand was Paul Nicholas as ʽThe Rum
Tum Tuggerʼ, but that may be not so much his fault as an inborn element of
incoherence between the music and the vocal part).
Unfortunately, the whimsy nature of the show
makes it hard to be genuinely moved by its darker or more complex moments:
basically, everything connected with the character of Grizabella (who was not a
character in Eliot's book, but existed as a sketch, eventually removed by the
author due to the «excessive sadness» of her persona), and the choral hymn
conclusion of ʽThe Ad-Dressing Of Catsʼ. Along with diversity, they
add confusion, and the sequencing requires getting used to. It is hardly a
surprise that ʽMemoryʼ, sung by the Grizabella character (Elaine Page
in this original version), took on a life of its own — not just because it is
the best song on the album (it may or may not be), but also because it feels
quite out of tune with it, and works well when disconnected from the amusing
cat melange.
But overall, Cats is fun. It should be taken for what it is: a lightweight stage
musical to give the people a good time. It is a high-class musical, set, after
all, to much higher quality lyrics than Tim Rice could ever provide, and
written in a broad, ambitious manner — even if the actual music, once you have
eliminated all the endless reprisals and analyzed all the remaining themes and
motives, may perhaps be judged as a triumph of form over substance (Webber's
«debts» to classical and other composers, e. g. to Puccini for
ʽMemoryʼ, are well on record, nor did he ever deny those debts
altogether himself). So why should anyone be cringing?
Only for one reason — because Cats completes and stabilizes Webber's
transition into the world of second-hand fluff. JCS granted the man immortality, Evita could still be perceived as a serious musical work tackling
sharp subjects, and even Tell Me On A
Sunday, behind its exaggerated simplicity and minimalism, was hiding loads
of social bitterness. Cats, on the
other hand, at the same time pull out all musical stops and have no «big meaning» whatsoever. They were, and still are, a
commercial triumph, but they pretty much crashed Webber's reputation in
«serious» circles, or, at least, initiated that crash, completed five years
later with Phantom Of The Opera. In
a different context, they could be just a light comedic divertissement for the man (as Jeeves
was in the mid-1970s): as it happened, he somewhat got stuck in «light» mode
for the rest of his life. Thumbs up anyway — but do not even think of coming
close to this kind of music if JCS
and Evita are your ideal projection
of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and you'd like it to stay that way.
STARLIGHT EXPRESS (1984)
1) Overture; 2) Rolling Stock;
3) Call Me Rusty; 4) A Lotta Locomotion; 5) Pumping Iron; 6) Freight; 7) AC/DC;
8) He Whistled At Me; 9) The Race; 10) There's Me; 11) Poppa's Blues; 12) Belle
The Sleeping Car; 13) Starlight Express; 14) The Rap; 15) U.N.C.O.U.P.L.E.D.;
16) Rolling Stock (reprise); 17) CB; 18) Right Place, Right Time; 19) I Am The Starlight;
20) He Whistled At Me (reprise); 21) Race: The Final; 22) No Come Back; 23) One
Rock & Roll Too Many; 24) Only He; 25) Only You; 26) Light At The End Of
The Tunnel.
I have never read a single book of the Rev W.
Awdry's Railway Series, so I do not
have the faintest idea if Rev Ll. Webber's musical interpretation of these
oeuvres matches the vision of their literary creator. I am pretty sure,
though, that the Railway Series did
not as thoroughly explore all of the clichés of popular literary genres
as Starlight Express does it with
popular music — and, therefore, deduce that, for Lloyd Webber, the cutesy
stories about anthropomorphic trains were mostly just an excuse to write
something lite — for the «young
adult» or whatever that species is called — and indulge in a bunch of
simplistic pleasures.
Simplistic, but genuinely fun. Like Tell Me On A Sunday, Starlight Express sort of got lost in
between the hugeness of Cats and Phantom Of The Opera, but it is exactly
because of its relative lack of ambition that I can easily see how the talking
trains could be more sympathetic than the talking cats or the talking ghosts.
However, there are two things one has to accept before proceeding: (1) the
storyline, the train characters, and their life problems sound very silly, so if you cannot stand
silly, get outta here; (2) the music is as derivative as it comes — derived
from all over the place, but with barely a finger lifted to write a strikingly
original melody. (Oh, and the actors are all supposed to be roller-skating
throughout the show, but, fortunately, the original cast recording has no
whirring on it, so I suppose the singers were skate-free in the studio.)
This strange bout of «laziness» resulted in the
album having no big hit single, no ʽMemoryʼ to flood the airwaves, but
that is hardly a reason to complain: despite the overwhelming diversity of
styles, Starlight Express is sternly
coherent, and does not really need a big cathartic statement. It's just one for
the kids, really, and it works well from that point of view. The real downside is that, having
temporarily re-oriented himself on the pop/rock idiom, Sir Andrew also got
entangled in 1980s production — replete with generic synthesizers, big
bashing drums, programmed rhythm tracks, the works. It does not occur on all of
the tracks, but about 70% are contaminated, and you have to bear with this,
too, or hunt for newer versions of the musical (which I would not recommend:
given the fact that Lloyd Webber's sense of taste seems to have been worsening
exponentially with each new decade, I can only hope that his heirs will return
him the honors that he seems to be unable to bestow upon himself in person).
Anyway, lower your expectations, grab the
popcorn, and Starlight Express is
really a delightful little ride. As I said, the story is nothing to write home
about: there is, naturally, a love element, an array of various «train
personalities» in a mish-mash technically (but not musically) similar to the
character array of Cats, and a shaky
subject line concerning a train race, which Andrew regards as a good pretext
to stuff disco elements into the pot — because, naturally, what other sort of
music would better correspond to a train race? (Thrash metal, perhaps, but
something tells me Sir Andrew was not a big fan of Show No Mercy at the time... yet).
The songs are harmless fun, though,
particularly when they emulate older genres. ʽRolling Stockʼ sounds
like bulgy disco-era ELO (à la ʽDon't Let Me Downʼ), with an
extra touch of classic glam. ʽA Lotta Locomotionʼ is girl-pop with a
Caribbean flavor (and a bit of pre-pubescent Michael Jacksonism?).
ʽPumping Ironʼ is pedestrian, but startlingly arrogant boogie;
ʽPoppa's Bluesʼ wisely imitates pub-style, drunken blues-rock rather
than «reverential» blues-rock; the vaudeville of ʽBelle The Sleeping
Carʼ goes down easy due to P. P. Arnold's powerhouse vocal performance
(best on the whole album, I'd say); and by the time we get to the closing
fast-tempo gospel finale of ʽLight At The End Of The Tunnelʼ, many
more of these short genre-honoring nuggets will make their appearance, way too
many to waste time on their descriptions.
Every now and then, of course, the composer
delves into the «now», usually with abysmal results because such words as
«underground» or «non-commercial» are not in Andrew Lloyd Webber's lingo: his
idea of keeping up with the times is best exemplified on ʽThe Rapʼ,
which is more or less what it says it is and wastes five minutes of my time on
having to listen to a bunch of trains arguing between each other in a «rap»
fashion. There are also a few numbers like ʽAC/DCʼ that tend to drift
way too far into the synth-pop realm, and seeing Lloyd Webber work in a Depeche
Mode state of mind is not the happiest of choices. On the other hand, ʽThe
Raceʼ, which takes all the individual train themes and sets them to disco
beats, is seductively cheesy in much the same way as the disco «experiments» on
Saturday Night Fever — there is
something deeply embarrassing about the experience, but it carries about a
sense of silly happy giddiness that hooks you in regardless of, or maybe due to
the silliness.
Derivative, but at times insanely catchy;
silly, but unpretentious; lightweight, but cute; inconsistent, but diverse
enough to justify the inconsistencies — Starlight
Express is Webber-fluff at its absolute best, and all the lovers of solid,
patented fluff should join me here in my thumbs up. But if you have kids, just give them
the record: do not expose them to the sight of one too many pairs of roller
skates at the same time.
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1987)
1) Prologue; 2) Overture; 3)
Think Of Me; 4) Angel Of Music; 5) Little Lotte / The Mirror / Angel Of Music;
6) The Phantom Of The Opera; 7) The Music Of The Night; 8) I Remember /
Stranger Than You Dreamt It; 9) Magical Lasso; 10) Notes / Prima Donna; 11)
Poor Fool He Makes Me Laugh; 12) Why Have You Brought Me Here; 13) All I Ask Of
You; 14) All I Ask Of You (reprise); 15) Entr'acte; 16) Masquerade / Why So
Silent; 17) Notes... / Twisted Every Way...; 18) Wishing You Were Somehow Here
Again; 19) Wandering Child... / Bravo, Monsieur; 20) The Point Of No Return;
21) Down Once More... / Track Down This Murderer.
Somewhere in the syrupy depths of ʽMusic
Of The Nightʼ, there is something sung about how «silently the senses
abandon their defenses», which is probably the cleverest line in the entire
musical — this is exactly the effect that Sir Andrew was going for here, and I
must say, it works. Perhaps my defenses are not as solid as those of the modern
day Spartans who eat Henry Cow for breakfast, but why deal in extremes all the
time?..
The
Phantom Of The Opera was
totally huge in its time and still remains one of the epitomes of hugeness.
This alone would be sure to generate a big ball of hatred, but there's worse:
it is also the epitome of kitsch, a sprawling, «tasteless» simplification of
classical music values. In a way, it is the direct predecessor to these sorts
of things — from Titanic to Harry Potter — that produce extremely
mixed reactions in people: on one hand, they are not overtly «bad»
(professional, carefully crafted, stimulating, exciting, etc.), on the other
hand... oh, well. They also divide people like few other things can — provoking
either fanatical adoration, or deep hatred; the latter can very easily spread
from the «piece of art» onto the people who adore it, so be careful.
First, let us let out some demons. The story
behind Phantom, no matter how
already textbook-ish before Lloyd Webber decided to tackle it, is silly and
fluffy. Gaston Leroux, who wrote the original novel, was no Edgar Poe and not
even a Bram Stoker (actually, it only takes a quick browse through the titles
of his numerous novels to realize that). It is, in fact, the silliest and
fluffiest subject picked up by Sir Andrew up to that point — at least neither Cats nor Starlight Express pretended to adult-oriented seriousness, but Phantom does, and this is reflected in
the arrangements, requiring a fully formed symphonic orchestra (which
eventually had to be somewhat cut down from the original design for touring
purposes).
Nor is the production free from the usual
shortcomings of post-JC Lloyd
Webber: big, clumsy hooks, simplistically adapted from the composer's musical
experience, repeating themselves over and over again until one becomes unsure
of the exact reason they stick in one's head — is it because they're so good,
or just because you have heard them so many times already? Again, the man was
accused of stealing from Puccini (ʽMusic Of The Nightʼ), and, more
famously, from Pink Floyd: Roger Waters explicitly stated that Sir Andrew had
expropriated one of the sub-melodies of ʽEchoesʼ for the main
«Introducing The Phantom» theme of the musical. But why didn't he sue?
"Life's too short to sue Andrew fuckin' Lloyd Webber", he is supposed
to have said, while writing up the subpoenas for his own former band mates. Yet
I have a sneaky suspicion that he might have really been afraid of Andrew fuckin' Lloyd Webber choosing a line
of defence in which he would scoop up a half-dozen earlier musical scores which
would all involve the same melody — it is, after all, a rather trivial
chromatic run that anyone can incidentally or deliberately run across. You
don't really have to be Andrew
fuckin' Lloyd Webber to write the spooky «da-da-da-da-DAAA, do-do-do-do-DOO»
bit in Phantom Of The Opera and make
it one of the most instantly recognizable phrases of the century. Or, wait a
moment — maybe you do.
If, on Starlight
Express, the composer's point was to make a head-spinning mish-mash of all
the possible «pop» styles, his task on Phantom
was more complex — to make a similar mish-mash out of the different varieties
of both «academic» and «pop-oriented» classical music. Hence, there is a little
bit of everything here. Church organ with baroque flourishes; Viennese court
music; light-headed, free-perching Mozartian opera themes; Neapolitan
heart-on-the-sleeve pathos; and, of course, plenty of attempts at reincarnating
the spirits of Gilbert & Sullivan. No Alban Berg influences, though, for
reasons that are easy to understand.
Predictably, the result is a classical music
lover's nightmare, but a paradise for supporters of healthy, wholesale «family
entertainment». The «scary» elements of the story are reduced to a sparse
minimum (so there's a chandelier crashing down and a guy with a partially
disfigured face, big deal for an epoch in which Nightmare On Elm Street was already a couple years old), with the
romantic parts occupying like 60% of the story and the «comical» parts taking
care of most of the rest. Phantom Of The
Opera is, indeed, the last step in the gradual transformation of Lloyd Webber
from an ambitious musical rebel that used to have his own point of view on
meaningful issues — into a calculated commercial hack thriving on the
superficial.
But as long as we accept that, Phantom Of The Opera is,
unquestionably, the master of its own domain. I mean, we can all live with a
simple fairy tale, and this one has its own unique appeal. Even the singers
sound like they come straight out of a fairy tale, particularly Sarah
Brightman, with her voice of such otherworldly transparent clarity, it seems
like they polished it with glass-dust for several years before letting her out to
sing. (She does not have too much appeal beyond that clarity, but she is well
chosen anyway, for a role that demands the character to be a living china doll
and little else.) So is Michael Crawford in the title role, playing it so
naturally as if he'd come straight off from playing heartbroken Disney villains
for decades.
The thing is, there are some «cheap thrills»
out there that do not work, and there are some that do. Lloyd Webber may have
lost his credibility as a «serious» artist (although he himself would probably
deny the existence of the huge gap that lies between JCS and Phantom), but I
would be lying through my teeth if I denied the effectiveness of these hooks —
the scary ones, the comic ones, the romantic ones. The Phantom-introducing
theme may be trivial, or it may be stolen, but it still triggers a little
heart-jump every time it appears out of nowhere. The title track, «decorated»
with a steady electronic beat to give it extra hit-single power, has an
unforgettable Gothic glow (which made it into a favorite for various aspiring
poppy-Goth-and/or-art-metal bands). ʽMusic Of The Nightʼ and
ʽPoint Of No Returnʼ are beauty-and-the-beast romance done as fine as
the genre is capable of doing. The vaudevillian interludes during which the
theater staff is reciting the Phantom's letters are genuinely funny (including
the words of the letters themselves). And the idea of contrasting the
«mannered», «wooden» way in which Carlotta begins to sing ʽThink Of
Meʼ with Christine Sarah Brightman's fragility-itself performance is, as
much as I hate to admit it, a touch of musical genius.
The unavoidable consequence of all this is, as
we get to the finale and a devastated Phantom Of The Michael Crawford belting
out "it's over now, the music of the night", the evil Sir Andrew will
have succeeded where his character has not: make many a listener, including
even some jaded ones, swoon under his spell, and maybe even shed a tear or two
for the poor Phantom. On a purely intellectual basis, the musical deserves, at best,
a condescending attitude, at worst, total despisal. But on a gut level, I have
even known a couple of genuine classical music aficionados who confessed to
having enjoyed Phantom, even as they
were well aware of its utter fluffiness. And even from a purely reason-based
standpoint, there is probably no better way to integrate the old school of
opera, the newer school of operetta, and the modern school of Broadway musical
together than the way it has been done by Webber. As for all the corn syrup...
well, frankly speaking, there are quite a few remarks here that could be
addressed at «serious» Italian opera itself.
Phantom
Of The Opera is a landmark
that certainly needs to be heard, preferably in the original London cast
version (the show shared the usual A.Ll.W. curse of cheapening up with time,
and, by all means, nobody really needs to see the Joel Schumacher movie). I
doubt that it could ever function as a proper introduction into the «wonderful
world of classical music» for «the people», no more so than Harry Potter could ever function as a useful
tool for «introducing the young reader to the habit of reading books» (practice
showing that it only served as a useful tool for introducing them to the habit
of reading Harry Potter-type books). But it may
serve as one of those bridges on which certain types of people, usually keeping
far away from each other, may be ready to meet and discuss things together.
Except the «cheap funny fluff» of one listener will be the «amazing,
breathtaking musical journey» of another.
My compromise will look as follows: I give Phantom Of The Opera an unflinching thumbs up
— and with this, make it my last review of an Andrew Lloyd Webber production. From
the bits and pieces I have heard or read about, his subsequent immersion into
the world of «show tunes», which I normally stay away from simply through lack
of interest, was complete, yet none of his subsequent productions replicated
even a tiny part of the brouhaha caused by Phantom.
There may be occasional patches of populist greatness left in there, but it
just makes no sense reviewing that kind of music instead of, say, Westside Story. On the other hand, the
musical journey that began with Joseph
and Jesus reaches quite a natural
ending here — a thrilling journey, in itself, one that perhaps deserves being
turned into its own musical (on the malicious effects of commercial success,
entitled Phantom Of The Superstar).
And who would be the composer and the
librettist? That one's easy — Roger Waters, of course!
END OF THE WORLD (1968)
1) End Of The World; 2) Don't
Try To Catch A River; 3) Mister Thomas; 4) Rain & Tears; 5) The Grass Is No
Green; 6) Valley Of Sadness; 7) You Always Stand In My Way; 8) The Shepherd And
The Moon; 9) Day Of The Fool.
What do you get when you take an experimental
composer, specializing in atmospheric electronics, and a cheesy East-Europop
crooner, and stick the two of them together? Feed this question to an advanced
AI system, and it will probably answer: «Something that sounds awesomely crazy
and unbearably sentimental at the same time». And, more or less, that is
exactly what Aphrodite's Child were about. Except that the chronology is
reversed: Vangelis would go on to become one of the most revered electronic
wizards of his generation, and Demis Roussos to become the epitome of feta
cheese already after the band had
broken up.
When the band had just formed, though, it was all different. They were young, ambitious,
and, of all things, they were all a bunch of Greek journeymen stranded in Paris
in May 1968 — someone should give Martin Scorsese an idea for a script. And, of
course, since most of them were musicians anyway, having already served time
in various Greek bands, what a better time and place to try out a bit of mad
genre synthesis than Paris in the spring?
Now here is the curious catch. Apparently,
Demis Roussos, at heart, was a balladeer from the very beginning, and he was
never all that interested in pushing forward musical boundaries as long as he
could score one with the ladies. But the healthy climate of a shifting musical
era, and the fortunate advantage of having the ambitious and daring Vangelis
Papathanassiou at his side, made sure that his croonery was not backed with
generic syrupy strings or whatever the croonery «norm» was in the old pre-disco
days, but rather with a refreshingly romantic, and sometimes even downright
«gritty», art-rock sound.
Put it all together — the will to experiment
and innovate, the sentimentalism, the spirit of the times, the Mediterranean
flavor, the talent, the youth, the energy, and Aphrodite's Child (quite an apt
name for the band, as a matter of fact) emerge as a fairly unique curio in an
age that had its fair share of unique curios. Most of these songs are
befuddling, so much so that I cannot decide if I should laugh or cry. But as
long as you do not make a definitive choice, End Of The World remains a fascinating puzzle.
The band's original direction was indicated by
the debut single, ʽRain And Tearsʼ, musically based on Pachelbel's
Canon — following in the vein of Procol Harum, but in a wimpier manner, since
the band did not have a guitarist at that time (their regular player, Anargyros
Kolouris, was on military duty in Greece, so Demis Roussos, in addition to
playing bass, also has to supply all of the guitarwork). Vangelis' arrangement,
with authentic harpsichord and baroque strings, is quite masterful, so it all
depends on whether you are able to swallow Roussos' plaintive, operatic
intonations without getting sick to the stomach. It's hard, but it may be worth
the while.
Personally, I find it easier to succumb to the
artsy charms of Aphrodite's Child when they switch from purely romantic mood to
a little apocalypse — primarily on the title track, which begins deceptively,
as just another organ-and-piano-led ballad, but then, with a mighty
"HEYYYEAH!" from Demis, enters a Romantic (with a capital R) world of
solemn drum-and-keyboard fury. It sounds a bit silly when you stop and think
about it, but don't make the mistake of stopping.
Actually, the band's repertoire is quite
diverse. They fiddle about with fast-paced R'n'B (ʽDon't Try To Catch A
Riverʼ — with its spirited tempos, the song seems like an answer to
ʽRiver Deep, Mountain Highʼ; at any rate, the Spector production must
have been the chief inspiration); Kinks-flavored character-assassinating
Brit-pop (ʽMister Thomasʼ); totally drugged out, dragged out,
mantra-style psychedelia (ʽThe Grass Is No Greenʼ); gritty, soulful
blues-rock (ʽYou Always Stand In My Wayʼ, probably the angriest,
rock'n'rolliest performance Roussos ever gave in his life — and one track on
which his ever-present whiny notes actually work to perfection, giving the
whole song a frenzied, paranoid atmosphere); avantgarde sonic landscapes
(ʽDay Of The Foolʼ, sung from the point of view of a madman and
eventually «degenerating» into bits and pieces of his fragmented conscience);
and, of course, something that they brought over with them from faraway lands —
ʽThe Shepherd Of The Moonʼ is the only song here to properly incorporate
the Near Eastern vibe, both in the sung harmonies and the accompanying melody.
These tunes may sound comical, and, if you are
well acquainted with the context, somewhat of a naïve, crude attempt to
«fit in» with every bit of popular/trendy Western music they could lay their
hands on. But the truth is, they all work
to some extent. Perhaps the band rarely succeeds in making it seem like they
were born and reared to perform this kind of stuff, but they certainly understand
all the small details that make this stuff great — the vocal hooks and the
arrangement details are formally impeccable, so that on a purely technical
level, ʽThe Grass Is No Greenʼ has no problem holding its own against
the flood of «authentic» drone-flavored psychedelia of the times, and that Tina
Turner might not have refused a duet with Demis on ʽCatch A Riverʼ,
had she even been aware of this band's existence.
In short, it is best to view End Of The World as a heartfelt
tribute, coming from a bunch of enthusiastic, adoring, and not untalented
fans, to the whole wide world of «popular musical art», than as an individual
«meaningful statement». But I'd rather take a chameleonic tribute like that,
masterminded by a guy like Vangelis, over an «individualistic» statement by
somebody with no musical gift at all — so, clearly, a thumbs up here.
IT'S FIVE O'CLOCK (1969)
1) It's Five O'Clock; 2) Wake
Up; 3) Take Your Time; 4) Annabella; 5) Let Me Love, Let Me Live; 6) Funky Mary;
7) Good Times So Fine; 8) Marie Jolie; 9) Such A Funny Night.
With End
Of The World turning into a modest commercial success, the band wasted
little time to follow it up with a sequel rehashing the same formula. The good
news is, the formula was so wild and utterly «permissive» in the first place, It's Five O'Clock somehow manages to
come out just as strong as, and maybe even more strong, than its predecessor.
And even though the band is noticeably straying even farther away from their
East European roots, the resulting sound seems more credible and less prone to
ridiculing than whatever preceded it.
The title track, another impressive hit single
on the continent, is a loyal successor to ʽRain And Tearsʼ and
ʽEnd Of The Worldʼ: for this one, Vangelis attaches Roussos' pop
vocals to a baroque organ melody, then throws in a bunch of extra keyboards
(including an early Moog synth part, I'd guess) to build up tension — another
good example of how it is always possible to turn schmaltz into epic, psycho-hip
romanticism when you choose your sounds carefully. It does not work quite as
well on the record's two other ballads, ʽAnnabellaʼ and ʽMarie
Jolieʼ, on both of which Demis' weeping vocals win over the
instrumentation, so that both songs really only work well if you are prepared
to weep along with the weeper (not an option for me). But even there, Vangelis'
credentials as a «soundscaper» are growing impressively, with guitars,
Mellotrons, nature sound effects, and other tiny bits combining into evocative
pictures.
Elsewhere, the band tries its hand at various
forms of folk-rock and country-rock: clearly, Vangelis and friends did not
lose sight of the «roots-rock revolution» of 1968-69, and so ʽWake
Upʼ and ʽTake Your Timeʼ take their cues from The Lovin'
Spoonful and The Mamas & Papas rather than Italian pop or psychedelia.
There is no pretense here, and both tunes, want it or not, are insanely catchy:
had they been placed on albums by the abovementioned artists, they would have
been praised as good-to-great tunes without raising any controversy. (For
experiment's sake, you might want to play them to an unsuspecting friend and
ask for a clean-slate opinion).
The R'n'B-pop hybrid of ʽGood Times So
Fineʼ (whose bridge section almost sounds like a Monkees tune, with
Roussos' vocals raised in a Micky Dolenz-kind-of nasal whine) and the friendly,
carnivalesque acoustic guitar figures of ʽSuch A Funny Nightʼ are
cutesy as well. But the album's most ambitious, risky, and future-predicting
cuts are probably ʽLet Me Love, Let Me Liveʼ and ʽFunky
Maryʼ: the former embraces noisy psychedelia in its instrumental passages,
while the latter is a noisy, jarring psychedelic jam all by itself, with an
almost «tribal» set of percussion overdubs, beneath which Vangelis is running
from free-jazz chimes to barroom tack piano and back again. It is wild, weird,
unasked for, and fairly challenging for a regular art-pop band aiming at
commercial success, even back in 1969.
If there is any real «progression» here, it
just means correctly following the times: End
Of The World went heavy on psychedelic techniques that were en vogue in
1967 (sitars, drones, etc.), whereas It's
Five O'Clock seems less dependent on momentary trends, and takes a small
step forward in helping Vangelis find his personal vision. But none of that
matters as much as simply admitting that there is a bunch of excellent art-pop
songs written here, and that they do not at all sound nearly as dated today as
the total oblivion, in which this album has sunk, would have you believe. In
fact, with retro-oriented art-pop being one of the leading styles of
«intellectual music» today, they are probably less dated now than they were two decades ago. So, with a little
help from my thumbs
up, just go look for it if it isn't in your collection already.
666 (1972)
1) The System; 2) Babylon; 3)
Loud, Loud, Loud; 4) The Four Horsemen; 5) The Lamb; 6) The Seventh Seal; 7)
Aegean Sea; 8) Seven Bowls; 9) The Wakening Beast; 10) Lament; 11) The Marching
Beast; 12) The Battle Of The Locusts; 13) Do It; 14) Tribulation; 15) The Beast;
16) Ofis; 17) Seven Trumpets; 18) Altamont; 19) The Wedding Of The Lamb; 20)
The Capture Of The Beast; 21) ∞; 22) Hic And Nunc; 23) All The Seats Were
Occupied; 24) Break.
Of all the albums recorded by Aphrodite's Child
before it grew up and underwent ternary fission, 666 is clearly the most dated — but also the most tempting, because
only a disillusioned Satanist, way past his prime, would nonchalantly bypass a
record that has the number of the Beast staring at the world so defiantly from
its album sleeve. Of course, skepticism is not merely allowed, it is very
welcome: «What can these guys tell us
about the Apocalypse? Sure they're Greeks and all, but it's not as if they wrote The Book of Revelation!» But
take away the superficial trappings, the way too overtly insistent references
to the text of the New Testament, and the result is an ambitious, extremely curious
project that succeeds at least as often as it fails. Considering that what we
have here is a double album, that makes up for at least forty minutes of good
music.
Conceptualism was the way to go in 1970, when
Vangelis decided that the band had to grow up of its «three minute art-pop
song» phase and join the army of progressive musical thinkers. I am not quite
sure of how Demis Roussos, with his crooner aspirations, reacted to the idea,
but, at the very least, he honestly participated in the project, doing his bass
duties and singing where required (many of the individual tracks are
completely instrumental). In addition, work on the album saw the return of
Silver Koulouris, fresh from the army and ready to do guitar battles now.
The flow of 666 is fairly straightforward: it takes relatively few liberties
with The Revelation, for the most part just offering vivid musical images that
accompany its happy tales of seven seals, lambs, beasts, trumpets, horsemen,
and whores of Babylon. (One curious exception is a track named
ʽAltamontʼ — apparently, Vangelis took the «apocalyptization» of the
1969 Altamont tragedy by the rock press seriously, interpreting
ʽAltamontʼ as a modern projection of the «mountain» in The Book:
"This is the sight we had one day on The
High Mountain"... etc.). Whether it works or does not work as a
soundtrack to the book probably depends on everyone's pre-set ideas of how such
a soundtrack should sound in the first place. Creepy? Scary? Overwhelming?
Disturbing? Loud/bombastic or quiet/subtle? Could we trust Miles Davis with
playing the seventh trumpet, etc., etc.? Another possibility is to simply
forget about the Biblical connection and form your own idea of what the heck it
is all supposed to mean.
Regardless of the choice, most people will
probably agree that 666 is quite
heavily «padded». Apparently, Vangelis insisted on a double album, because nothing
less than a double album would have been appropriate for the subject. (Besides,
double albums were all the rage by 1970). However, he did not have enough
original musical ideas to fill up four sides — hence, comes the sprawling,
20-minute-long suite ʽAll The Seats Were Occupiedʼ, featuring a bit
of loose jamming and then working as an «underture», rehashing and revolving
all of the themes, sometimes more than once. Already upon the second listen, it
becomes eminently skippable, except for the last minute of wild avant-jazz
noise that follows the haughty enunciation of the title.
Another highly controversial bit, then and now,
has been ʽ∞ʼ (ʽInfinityʼ). The basic premise is
crudely funny — a sexual pun on the line "I am to come", which we are
supposed to interpret in both of its meanings at the same time. The realization of the pun is a five-minute
piece of percussion havoc, against whose background the guest-starring Greek
actress Irene Papas is donated the line "I was, I am to come!" and
instructed to pronounce it in a million different ways, as long as each of the
ways is reminiscent of an orgasmic experience. That Vangelis actually won the
long, hard battle against studio executives, who tried to keep this porno-scented
stuff off the album, is a pleasant page in the history of the war for artistic
and personal freedom. It would have been far nicer, though, if, upon finally
gaining the studio executives' consent, he had immediately deleted the tapes.
That way, freedom of art would be vindicated, and so would our ears, because
having to listen to this crap for five
minutes in a row is simply ridiculous. One
would have been more than enough (it is rumored that the full take lasted for thirty-nine minutes).
That said, once all the padding and
questionable sonic experimentation have been removed as dated filler, the
musical parts of 666 are just as
strong as anything Aphrodite's Child had ever done, and in some ways, stronger.
Genre diversity, in particular, continues to be held in high esteem. We have
bombastic «arena-folk» (ʽBabylonʼ), moody art-pop dreamscapes crossed
with hard-rocking guitar frenzy (ʽFour Horsemenʼ), dark Floydian panoramas
(ʽAegean Seaʼ), jazz-fusion-style jamming (ʽDo Itʼ), honky
piano-led blues-rock (ʽThe Beastʼ), and, of course, plenty of Eastern
motives, sometimes with sitars (ʽThe Seventh Sealʼ), but more often
with a closer-to-home Greek underbelly, I think (ʽThe Lambʼ,
ʽThe Wedding Of The Lambʼ). And, for the most part, it all works. The
hooks and moods are there.
ʽThe Four Horsemenʼ were loosed on
the poor horrified little world as the lead single, and, although the piece
itself hardly had any hit potential on its own, the decision is understandable
— the track is a clear standout, with the catchiest, most sing-along style
chorus on the album ("The leading horse is white..."), and then,
several minutes into the song, followed with a brilliantly constructed wah-wah
solo from Koulouris, which has not just the finest guitar playing on the album,
but simply happens to be one of the greatest guitar solos ever played — and I
am not joking: no one would ever
suspect Koulouris of being an unsurpassed technical virtuoso, but somehow he
managed to properly pick up all the «epic» chords and come out with a flying
monster that could easily stand its ground next to Dave Gilmour in terms of
emotional impact.
Other personal favorites include ʽAegean
Seaʼ, which not only has some more of that fantastic guitar work, but also
introduces electronic textures that predict solo Vangelis, to a large extent;
ʽThe Lambʼ, with its odd mix of baritone guitars, winds, and electronics
— a fast-paced Greek dance beset with mystical vibes; and the final piano-led
number ʽBreakʼ, the closest thing we have here to a «normal» Demis
Roussos ballad, which is probably why it was the only number from 666 to remain in his solo stage repertoire.
(Not that he kept the echo effects on the voice, the organ flourishes, and
Kouloris' last wah-wah guitar solo, I believe — all the things that elevate the
song above the state of a generic ballad).
Overall, it is clear that 666 never had a chance: not only did the world market care rather
little about fearless prog-rockers that did not have permanent residence in the
UK, but Vangelis and his temporarily obedient friends also made plenty of false
moves, both during the planning of the album and upon completion of the
recording. In the end, 666 only came
out as late as 1972, by which time Aphrodite's Child were effectively over as a
band, and it never received the proper promotion, partly because there was no
one left to promote, partly because the promoters must have still felt uneasy
about promoting an album with such a title. But in retrospect, despite all the
flaws, 666 deserves proper
recognition — let alone the high quality of the melodic content, it is a bit
more than simply «derivative second-generation prog». In fact, it is not only
«first generation prog», but its synthesis of Western and Mediterranean stuff
is, in a way, completely unique for the whole movement: if the guitar solo on
ʽFour Horsemenʼ, no matter how overwhelming it is, essentially just
follows the Hendrix/Clapton standards of guitar playing, tracks like ʽThe
Lambʼ and ʽLamentʼ are in a class of their own — you won't hear
anything like that from a Robert Fripp or an Ian Anderson, because on this
sort of turf, they were at a heavy disadvantage next to Vangelis, a native
Greek who had enough time and opportunity to assimilate the Western tradition
as well. This is the only time, really, when «Greek progressive rock» came out
loud and proud on the international market, and it is fully deserving of
everyone's ears — and an impressive final twist to Aphrodite's Child's
prematurely deceased career... out of the ruins of which came Vangelis, «The
Electronic Guru», and Demis Roussos, «The Singing Kaftan» (feel the
difference). Thumbs
up — here's hoping for an eventual proper revival.
ARGENT (1969)
1) Like Honey; 2) Liar; 3) Be
Free; 4) Schoolgirl; 5) Dance In The Smoke; 6) Lonely Hard Road; 7) The
Feeling's Inside; 8) Freefall; 9) Stepping Stone; 10) Bring You Joy.
As far as I know, the Zombies disbanded in 1968
not because the band members hated each other's guts or anything, but
generally out of desperation: for the average band in the 1960s, three years
without a major hit single meant artistic bankruptcy, even if it still managed
to maintain a cult following. The Almighty rewarded them with an ironic twist
of fate, turning ʽTime Of The Seasonʼ into a big international hit
one year after the band's demise. By
that time, however, lead singer Colin Blunstone had already entered insurance
business, and somehow the band members must have thought it uncool to make a
hasty regrouping.
However, the success of ʽTime Of The Seasonʼ must have been enough for lead organist and one of the chief songwriters, Rod Argent, to believe that there was still a place in this world for him. Furthermore, by 1969 the record-buying world was slowly beginning to develop a better understanding of that strange kind of music that the Zombies kept pushing ahead of their time: classically influenced, complex, «pretentious» art-pop. Giving it one more try seemed natural. And while it may seem somewhat arrogant to slap your personal family name on the visit card of your four-piece band — give our regards to Santana — «Argent» was certainly a much more appropriate appellation for a late 1960s / early 1970s progressively-oriented art-pop team than «Zombies» ever was. (Which begs the question: did the actual Zombies ever sit back and think just how many non-bought records their name cost them in the long run?).
Although all the other official band members
are new (Russ Ballard on vocals and guitar; Jim Rodford on bass; Bob Henrit on
drums), original Zombies member and songwriter Chris White semi-officially
remained on board as one of the band's major creative personalities — making
the «Argent» brand a completely legitimate follow-up to «Zombies»: there can
hardly be any doubt that, had the actual Zombies managed to keep their act
together through the years, they would have turned into Argent even without any
lineup changes. Proof? The self-titled Argent
still sounds more like the Zombies than the «classic» Argent of ʽHold Your
Head Upʼ — and it is this transitional, fence-straddling nature exactly
that makes it my favorite Argent album.
It is probably just a coincidence that Argent opens out on pretty much the
same simple arpeggio as the Beatles' ʽI Want You (She's So Heavy)ʼ,
not a subtle arrogant hint that the band is ready to pick it up where the
Beatles have just left it off. On the other hand, late-period Beatles are an undeniable
influence: Argent is «art-pop» that
is not afraid to experiment with structures, arrangements, and
genre-melanging, but still strives to be old-school commercial, with modest
composition length, catchy choruses, and generally transparent moods — most of
the tracks are unabashed love songs (with occasionally cringeworthy or clumsy lyrics:
am I out of my mind or is the opening line "Like honey, you're
sweeter" thoroughly
ungrammatical? And what is "when night falls on rare wine" even
supposed to mean?).
But never mind the lyrics: the Argent/White
team, with just two years past their Odessey
And Oracle peak, is still going very
strong, and newcomer Russ Ballard is quite competent in the songwriting
department as well: it was his own ʽLiarʼ, after all, that was turned
into Argent's first hit... unfortunately, not before Three Dog Night covered it
one year later, in an arrangement that was very close to the original, merely
replacing Ballard's soft, McCartney-like, vocal for a rowdy barroom rasp (I am
going to take it easy on 1970's record-buyers and believe that it had everything
to do with better promotion, something Rod Argent never cared too much about).
Only one number points to the long road ahead,
on which Argent would only embark with the subsequent album: a six minute long
mystical circle dance, appropriately titled ʽDance In The Smokeʼ. The
length finally gives Rod plenty of space to practice his half-Bach, half-Ray
Charles organ chops, with lots of inspired, elegant passages that succeed far
more successfully than the song in general — if, that is, the ambition behind the song was to come up with their
own personal ʽHey Judeʼ, because the overall atmosphere is just a
bit too stern and reserved to match the supposed euphoric joy of "every
branch we'll tie somebody's worry to it, we will burn it and dance in the
smoke". Still a great sonic landscape, though.
Overall, Argent
is extremely romantic: on subsequent albums, hard rock and darker-tinged pagan
mysticism would seriously concur with heart-baring lyricism, but this debut,
with the exception of ʽDanceʼ, almost reads like a focused assault on
some particular young girl's heart. Songs like ʽThe Feeling's Insideʼ
and ʽBring You Joyʼ are almost too
beautiful for their own good, the former written on a serious Bach organ kick,
the latter more modernly R'n'B-ish / blue-eyed soulish, but both sung from the
mental perspective of a medieval troubadour, no less. And why not? The vocal
progression during the verse flow of ʽFeeling's Insideʼ easily ranks
on the same level with the best Zombies material.
The «rockers» of the album are also quite
clever in that they are almost exclusively keyboard-based (think of ʽLady
Madonnaʼ as one of the chief inspirations), so there's speed, power, and
energy, but no attempts to compete with hard-rockers that would be doomed from
the start. ʽBe Freeʼ essentially flies by on the strength of its
vocal arrangement, and Ballard's ʽLonely Hard Roadʼ is one song on
here I could possibly see evolving into a long jam — the rhythm section is
particularly tight, I wouldn't mind Argent practicing his razor-sharp organ
solos some more while the groove is still on.
For some reason, my personal favorite on the
album, for a long time, was Ballard's ʽSchoolgirlʼ — a clear attempt
on his part to write a particularly simple, but effective pop tune in the
classic early ʽShe's Not Thereʼ-era Zombies style. It's not quite up
to those standards, but close, with an unforgettable falsetto resolution of the
chorus melody, and Rod is playing these keys with classic restraint, exactly
the way he used to around 1964. Other than that, there is not that much happening
in the song, but it is a touching retro gesture the likes of which,
unfortunately, would not be seen on subsequent Argent releases.
The record is not problem-free, of course. The
songs usually blast off their full potential on the first minute, so
repetitiveness is an issue. Ballard's singing is generally tasteful, but
sometimes over the top, especially when he succumbs to the temptation of
hitting notes outside of his normal range (the coda flourish on
ʽFreefallʼ is simply awful) or tries going into full-scale operatic
mode (ʽBring You Joyʼ could definitely use a different vocalist). The
permanently keyboard-driven arrangements can get wearisome after a while
(although if you are a Zombies fan already, that shouldn't be a serious drag).
But, in addition to there being no genuinely
«bad» songs on here (I'd say even the worst ones are still memorable), Argent is also a very important record
— it is one of the very few examples of a «typically 1960s» artist managing to
re-orient himself at a «typically 1970s» musical paradigm without sounding
forced or fake. Very few, if any, «pop» people from the former decade could
reinvent themselves as «prog» people for the latter; the usual tendency was
either for 1960s «pop» people to go on being «pop» and gradually falling out
of grace, or for 1970s «prog» people to emerge out of some obscure 1960s
shadow. Of course, neither the Zombies nor Argent counted as «1960s giants»
(not back then, at least) or «1970s idols», but both bands had moderately respectable
careers, and Rod bears primary responsibility for both. Thus, good songs +
certain historical uniqueness = thumbs up guaranteed for life.
RING OF HANDS (1971)
1) Celebration; 2) Sweet Mary;
3) Cast Your Spell Uranus; 4) Lothlorien; 5) Chained; 6) Rejoice; 7) Pleasure;
8) Sleep Won't Help Me; 9) Where Are We Going Wrong.
Evolution happens. Where Argent could, more or less, be seen as the last true Zombies album
in spirit, Ring Of Hands represents
the crucial bend after which you no longer see the train (might still hear the
echo). As the new band gains momentum and ensures its own stability, two new musical
directions are emerging. Russ Ballard is now officially the «rocker» of the
band, leaning towards a louder, sweatier, more aggressive sound — an early
brand of «arena-rock». Rod Argent, on the other hand, is taking his cue from
contemporary progressive rock, exploring the world of complex structures and
lengthy keyboard solos. Counterbalancing all of these tendencies is Chris
White, retained as resident songwriter and contributing as many good old pop
hooks as can withstand the pressure of Ballard's Big Buffalo Riffs and
Argent's Extended Toccatas and Fugues.
Does it work? How could it not work, when so
much talent and freshness is involved? At the risk of occasional bits of
corniness and silliness (yes, ʽCast Your Spell Uranusʼ is an unlucky
title, and naming your songs after Tolkien toponyms never helps in the long run), the album as a whole is excellent,
with nary a single genuine misstep. Neither Ballard's hard rock nor Argent's
progressive experiments sound forced or boring, and almost every single song
shows just how much fun it must have been for Rod to do this — he attacks the
keyboard with the verve of a teenager attacking a brand new video game. There
is no condemning Ring Of Hands, even
if you don't like it: these guys are clearly excited, and an excited Rod Argent
is beyond condemnation.
The troops are still marching behind hippie-idealistic
banners: ʽCelebrationʼ opens the proceedings on an exultate-jubilate folk-rock note that
might just as well open a Crosby, Stills, & Nash record. But in reality,
the song is not at all typical of the rest of the album: round-the-campfire
idealism only serves as a formulaic bait, upon which the artists launch into
either more personal or more heavily «intellectualized» ventures. It does
stress the album's relative diversity, though: folk-rock anthems, heavy
rockers, blues stylizations, romantic ballads, keyboard pop-sonatas — the band
casts its net quite far and wide, even despite its main songwriters already
patenting their own established songwriter styles.
Ballard is, of course, the weaker link here. He
is not only incapable of matching Argent's talent and experience as player and
composer, but also shows less taste, which would eventually doom the band. Most
unpleasantly, he tends to overscream and kick up too much pathos where a slightly
more tongue-in-cheek attitude wouldn't hurt (was there no one in the studio to
let him know just how ambiguous the word URANUS
may sound when it is made into a chorus hook?). Which, somehow, still does not
prevent ʽUranusʼ from kicking some ass, mostly due to Argent's piano
and organ parts that genuinely rock harder and sharper than Ballard's vocals.
Russ fares somewhat better on the more
guitar-driven ʽChainedʼ, with a well-constructed solo and interesting
work on the harmonies; but his best contribution is probably ʽWhere Are We
Going Wrongʼ, which manages to end the album on a frenzied / paranoid
note, in a disturbing manner that contrasts impressively with the rose-colored
start of ʽCelebrationʼ. With psychedelic choral harmonies, an
R'n'B-ish drive, fluent guitar and piano solos (Rod brings out his fastest
jazziest licks for the latter), it's one of those «intelligent rockers» that requires
a little sinking in to take full effect, but don't miss it.
Of the Argent/White collaborations,
ʽLothlorienʼ is the most easily notable, if only due to the
eight-minute length. Although the title may look provocative, the whole thing
is really not so much a Tolkienist fantasy as it is a pretext for launching
into some keyboard-dominated jamming: for the first time ever, Mr. Argent feels
himself fully free to engage in anything he likes, switching several
instruments along the way and gliding from Bach into Art Tatum without effort.
For the record, Tolkien's Lothlorien is the last
place I would be associating with this kind of music, but it's nice to know J.
R. R. can be so different for different people.
One should not miss ʽRejoiceʼ,
either, a McCartney-inspired ballad with a sprinkling of gorgeous falsetto
vocal hooks framed with even more Bach quotations (organ sound this time);
ʽSleep Won't Help Meʼ, where Rod could almost seem to be inspired by
Ray Manzarek's solo on ʽRiders On The Stormʼ, playing highly similar
patterns on the same electric piano — except that Ring Of Hands actually preceded L. A. Woman by several months, rendering the theory impossible (and
the opposite idea highly unlikely, unless Manzarek was secretly listening to
little-known British albums under his pillow); and even the blues-boogie
shuffle ʽSweet Maryʼ, potentially generic, boring, and taking one
too many cues from ʽThe Night Time Is The Right Timeʼ, is lifted off
the ground by an exquisitely tasty Ballard solo. (They never did this kind of
material no more, which is a pity — some old-school blues-rock instead of
Ballard's lumpy-leaden-metal on subsequent albums could actually help to
enliven them).
In the end, Ring Of Hands is probably the best «proper» Argent album — only the
debut hits me emotionally in a manner truly comparable with the best of the
Zombies, but Ring Of Hands explicitly
tells us that this band is not the Zombies,
and, well, we'd have to understand that: they didn't change the name for
nothing, after all. And as far as a non-Zombies Rod Argent-led band is
concerned, Ring Of Hands is tops,
with a fair balance between simplicity and complexity, a coherent attitude and
plenty of diverse ways to realize it. And, historically, it is a good example
of a great band doing its finest work before
becoming destroyed by commercial success — Ring
Of Hands didn't sell, and in this particular case of this particular band,
we can only thank God for that. So, thumbs up.
ALL TOGETHER NOW (1972)
1) Hold Your Head Up; 2) Keep
On Rollin'; 3) Tragedy; 4) I Am The Dance Of Ages; 5) Be My Lover, Be My
Friend; 6) He's A Dynamo; 7) Pure Love.
After two years of commercial unluck, Argent
finally hit Gold (no pun intended) with ʽHold Your Head Upʼ — one of only
two songs, I think (the other one is the far flatter anthem ʽGod Gave
Rock'n'Roll To Youʼ), that have been carefully shrink-wrapped for classic
rock radio. Don't think too much of it: the success was a fluke, and it had
everything to do with the rather crude, but effective hook power of the chorus
— apparently, there is a way to
repeat the line "hold your head up, whoah, hold your head up, whoah"
several times in a row so cleverly that it grabs your entire attention. It may
have something to do with the faint falsetto echoing overdub of "up!"
in the background as well, or with the stern guitar/organ interplay, but I
think it's just the basic sloganeering that does the job.
Of course, the song in total is more than that
— it's got an optimistic verse melody as well, a fine stomping bassline, and a
long, reliably tasteful organ solo from Rod (the latter, however, was mostly
edited out of the single version, I believe). But hit power never comes from
organ solos, and, as a result, the success of ʽHold Your Head Upʼ
inevitably pushed the band even further into the world of arena-oriented
bombast, which could hardly have been Rod's original intention.
For now, though, the band's third album only
marginally departs from the style established on Ring Of Hands: a balanced mix of «hard-art-rock», supported with
Ballard's meaty riffs, and «light-progressive» paintings, dominated by Argent's
keyboard playing. Only one track, ʽKeep On Rollinʼ, departs from the
general rule — a side excourse into the world of piano boogie, sort of like a
nice, heartfelt tribute to the likes of Amos Milbourne and Fats Domino. Its
only drawback is that a song like this demands total recklessness, whereas Rod
would hardly ever «stoop» to bashing away the piano keys à la Jerry Lee Lewis, and this is why people will still be
listening to ʽGreat Balls Of Fireʼ by the time ʽKeep On
Rollinʼ descends to the bottom of the archives.
Ballard contributes two of the heavy rockers,
one of which is done in «pub» style (ʽHe's A Dynamoʼ), and the other
one takes a stab at acid funk (ʽTragedyʼ). The former is rather
dispensable, but ʽTragedyʼ, I think, manages to hit something,
especially when it comes to the «flying vocals» of the chorus — the only thing
it lacks is a properly roaring acid guitar solo; Rod's trademark organ does
not kick the proper amount of ass required for such a groove. The third «heavy»
number, however, is contributed by the Argent/White team, and it may be the
best of the lot: ʽBe My Lover, Be My Friendʼ quickly sets up a
genuine «monster groove» — its soul-based vocal melodies are not particularly
seductive, but the joint guitar/drum attack spells out seriousness of
intentions, and there is a brilliant five-note guitar flourish after each
chorus that adds a light psychedelic touch as well.
Meanwhile, the tradition of
ʽLothlorienʼ is preserved and strengthened by allotting most of the
second side for ʽPure Loveʼ, a track that consists of (a) Rod
«noodling» on the organ for five minutes, paraphrasing as many quotations from
Bach and Elizabethan music as can be done within five minutes; (b) two minutes
of disoriented band jamming in «rootsy-tootsy» mode; (c) seven minutes of a
long, slow, «sleazy» blues-rock composition, graced by powerhouse drumming and
blazing guitar solos. Rather boring, if you need my honest opinion, and that
applies to the first part of the suite as well — Rod Argent is a fine keyboard
player, but his solos work much better within the contexts of particular songs
rather than on their own. Somebody like Keith Emerson can at least entertain
the listener with sheer virtuosity, but in most cases, a classically-based solo
piano / organ tune should probably be played a classical pianist / organist.
Thus, altogether, the album is no big deal. Just
for the sakes of ʽHold Your Head Upʼ and no big gaffes other than the
final suite, I'd give it a weak thumbs up — but it has to be understood that the
Zombies link has been sawn through, with no traces of the elegant baroque-pop
of old in sight; and the new directions are, at most, okay when they are backed
up with solid hooks (be it vocal, as on ʽHold Your Head Upʼ, or
instrumental, as on ʽBe My Loverʼ), and, at worst, quite pointless
(the whole ʽPure Loveʼ suite). From here begins the swift decline of
the briefly mighty Argent — a band that bravely sacrificed its steady position
on a small island of a well-established style by diving head first into the
ocean of limitless musical possibilities. And sinking right down to the
bottom, more or less.
IN DEEP (1973)
1) God Gave Rock And Roll To
You; 2) It's Only Money (part 1); 3) It's Only Money (part 2); 4) Losing Hold;
5) Be Glad; 6) Christmas For The Free; 7) Candles On The River; 8) Rosie.
Strange album cover, if you ask me. Of course,
it's Hipgnosis and all, but I know what is my
first reaction: «Oh, hello, Mr. Argent. Going... down?» And indeed, the figure on the front sleeve is captured in a
fairly uncomfortable position — matching the music, which, by now, is also
beginning to feel somewhat strained. Or, perhaps, not so much «strained» as
«misplaced» — just as the band was finally getting a grip on the progressive
stylistics, the stylistics itself was slowly getting on the nerves of the
musical community. In Deep never
went as deep as the notorious prog-rockers were going in 1973, and thus, was
doubly doomed: too lightweight, primitive, and even «regressive» for defenders
of the faith, yet too pompous, long-winded, and unfocused for the modest,
undemanding pop consumers.
It charted, at least. But at what cost? Since
their previous hit record was ʽHold Your Head Upʼ, it was assumed
that the follow-up should also be anthemic — and ʽGod Gave Rock And Roll
To Youʼ becomes the most blatantly Bick-flicking power vehicle in the
band's career. Admittedly, it is nowhere near as cheesy as the KISS cover two
decades later, because it wasn't really conceived or executed in the «glam»
idiom. It's got plenty of tasteful organ work, an elegant bass line, a pretty
baroque chime-filled interlude, and bits of genuinely beautiful harmony
arrangements. Still, most people will not fall for all these flourishes —
they'll go straight ahead to the Monster Riff and the tribal incantation of
"GOD GAVE ROCK'N'ROLL TO YOU, PUT IT IN THE SOUL OF EVERYONE!" At
this point, I'd rather save my tears (and lighter fuel) for a different purpose
— I always thought it was Chuck Berry who gave me rock'n'roll, and I do not
exactly recollect seeing a holy aureole around it when it was given. Honestly,
I rarely take this crap from Freddie Mercury — why should I take it from Russ
Ballard?
There is far more grit and actual rock'n'roll
in the two-part blues-rock suite ʽIt's Only Moneyʼ, occupying the
bulk of Side A and giving the impression that Ballard is now dominating all the
songwriting. The first part in particular is quite heavy, riff-based, slightly
funky, pierced with flashy bullying guitar and organ solos, whereas the second
is a little more laid back, veering towards rowdy, but well-meaning pub-rock.
But there is a standard problem — Argent is not
a hard rock band, and its «brutal» mode simply cannot stand competition even
with the likes of contemporary Budgie, let alone the mega-popular heavy metal
monsters.
The bad news is that the Argent/White team is
also starting to lose steam. Of the two contributed ballads, ʽLosing
Holdʼ is a rather sterile power thing that tries to get by on the strength
of a «massive» coda, in which a tiny recorder painfully tries to outsing a
simplistic, but loud wall-of-sound — nice, but a better mix couldn't hurt.
ʽChristmas For The Freeʼ is relatively more listenable and
beautifully sung, yet it is such a blatant take on the «McCartney piano ballad»
style that it is almost impossible not to throw it on the same shelf with
ʽLet It Beʼ and ʽMaybe I'm Amazedʼ — which it conveniently
misses, landing instead on the same shelf with second-rate Elton John
compositions. (But the vocals are
gorgeous, I guarantee).
Then there are the two complex epics — ʽBe
Gladʼ and ʽCandles On The Riverʼ. They are probably the main
reason to care about the album at all, although ʽCandlesʼ also
suffers from excessive heaviness and too much pathos in the vocals; I place
most of my personal trust in the piano-dominated ʽBe Gladʼ, with its
merry martial rhythms, classical/boogie piano interludes where Argent keeps
switching from Mozart to Fats Domino as naturally as if the two were graduates
of the same music college. This is a genuinely inspiring piece, fully deserving
an eight-minute running time. But there is no explaining why nothing else on
the album really sounds like it — probably the misguided result of trying to
get a more «commercial» gloss.
Unlike most listeners, I think that the barroom
rock of Ballard's ʽRosieʼ forms a suitably «deflating» conclusion to
the album — if one takes it that way, as a light, relaxating slide from the
stuffiness of ʽCandlesʼ, rather than one more of the band's
questionable «sure we can rock'n'roll with the simple people» statements. But
it certainly does not remedy the general feeling: flashes of brilliance aside, In Deep generally feels lost in space
(or, rather, in deep waters). I would still award it an ever weakening thumbs up,
since there is only one significant lapse of taste, and the actual songs range
from incidental greatness (ʽBe Gladʼ) to listenable above-mediocrity
(most of the rest). But the curve is clearly past its peak, and descending at
an alarming rate.
NEXUS (1974)
1) The Coming Of Kohoutek; 2)
Once Around The Sun; 3) Infinite Wanderer; 4) Love; 5) Music From The Spheres;
6) Thunder And Lightning; 7) Keeper Of The Flame; 8) Man For All Reasons; 9) Gonna
Meet My Maker.
The last Argent/Ballard studio collaboration is
generally quite underrated, I think. It yielded no hit singles whatsoever, sank
on the charts, directly preceded the loss of a key member and only rose as high
as two stars on the All-Music Guide — most probably, rated according to its
historical trajectory rather than actual song quality. It ain't no masterpiece,
for sure, but it's hardly worse than In
Deep — in some respects, it might even be better.
Band members are usually known to quit because
of ego conflicts, yet it would be hard to suspect an ego conflict on Nexus: the balance here is tilted
significantly towards Argent on Side A, then leans to the other side with the
flip of the turntable. Lovers of Argent's brand of pompous hard rock will be
placated with two heavy numbers, but Russ also shows his sentimental side on
the minimastically titled ʽLoveʼ, and a new-found passion for
Scottish martial music on ʽMan For All Reasonsʼ. In the meantime, Mr.
«Hot Rod» Argent gets ever more and more progressive, with two long, complex,
baroque-soaked suites (one of them fully instrumental) and yet another
self-elevating anthem — after ʽI Am The Dance Of Agesʼ, comes
ʽKeeper Of The Flameʼ.
All the usual caveats, reprimands, and honors
alike apply to Nexus as well.
ʽThe Coming Of Kohoutekʼ will be seen as a triumph of creativity and
emotion by some, as a pretentious derivative bore by others. I think it
deserves credit at least for the wide variety of tricks it pulls together.
There are overwhelmingly pompous, «imperial» synthesizer parts, light
atmospheric guitar jams à la
mid-period Floyd, Bach-derived organ interludes, Chopin-esque piano rolls, and
a couple aggressive synth / organ / guitar climaxes that The Comet of Kohoutek
might have enjoyed, had it actual ears to hear. On the other hand, everything
is a little too limp and restrained to properly reflect such a kick-ass-tral
force. Enjoying is one thing, getting overwhelmed is another.
Therefore, I would say that the real highlight
of the album is ʽMusic From The Spheresʼ, a composition that does
not try to invoke the feeling of Absolute Might, but instead plays out like an
extended fairy dance — a jazz/classical hybrid driven by Rod's high-pitched
melody, always staying on the right end of the keyboard until the effect
becomes almost hypnotic: the three-minute long coda brings a new meaning to the
word «repetitive», but if you play it long enough in the dark, you might
eventually start seeing little musical fireflies hopping under your nose. In
the good tradition of ʽLothlorienʼ and particularly ʽBe
Gladʼ, the song once again gives us Rod Argent as an
illusionist-mesmerizer, his best emploi in his prog years.
Ballard, in the meantime, is dreaming of giving
his muscular rockers a religious flavor — ʽThunder And Lightningʼ
would hardly be out of place on a Manowar album, what with its GENUINE THUNDER INTRODUCTION, echoey
electric current-imitating synths and guitars, and, of course, Mr. Ballard
himself, screeching and bellowing like the great Thor himself. It would be
utterly awful if the chorus weren't catchy, and the arrangement weren't so
creative. As it is, «hilarious» is more like it. On the other hand,
ʽGonna Meet My Makerʼ is slower, more stately, based on a simple and
memorable blues riff of a ʽBorn Under A Bad Signʼ-threatening
quality, but never seems to decide whether it really wants to be a commanding
Old Testament-oriented blues-rocker, or an operatic performance — Ballard's
vocals clearly veer towards the latter, and this, again, gives the whole thing
a sort of pre-Meatloaf sheen that I find irritating.
Nevertheless, even the worst stuff is still
interesting, in one way or another, and Nexus
certainly does not feel like the end of the road — the band is literally
bursting with ideas, good, bad, or otherwise. It's just that the audience for
these ideas is steadily dwindling: in 1974, the commercial appeal of Nexus was close to zero (way before the punk revolution), and
Ballard was no longer content to «waste his talents» by pandering to Rod's
artistic ambitions. In fact, listening to ʽThunder And Lightningʼ,
you can almost sense the man's potential dissatisfaction with how the band
treated the song — instead of concentrating on its heaviness and «thunderous»
attack, Argent keeps pushing wimpy synths, spoiling its hit potential. (Never
mind the emerging subtlety — in the mid-1970s, subtlety did not translate well
into fame and revenue).
I could be imagining things here, but facts are
facts: Ballard quit soon after the recording of Nexus, making it the last «genuine» album by Argent as a band —
the next few efforts would be completely dominated by Rod. Despite its
ambiguity and occasional cheesiness, it still gets a thumbs up. Besides, it's always fun
to encounter obscure records titled after Latin metaphorical terms. And they
did it first! Gene Harris only
released his own Nexus in 1975!
ENCORE (1974)
1) The Coming Of Kohoutek; 2) It's
Only Money (part 1); 3) It's Only Money (part 2); 4) God Gave Rock And Roll To
You; 5) Thunder And Lightning; 6) Music From The Spheres; 7) I Don't Believe In
Miracles; 8) I Am The Dance Of Ages; 9) Keep On Rollin'; 10) Hold Your Head Up;
11) Time Of The Season.
This seems to have mostly been a «stopgap»
record — a live album released to keep the record company happy while the band
was regrouping after the loss of Ballard. But since Argent was, after all, a
«prog»-type outfit, and the live album was appropriately double, the whole
thing was very much in the spirit of the time. Perhaps, were Argent on the same
scale of notoriety as Yes and ELP, they would have been allowed a triple
format?
The setlist here concentrates almost
exclusively on three of the band's latest albums, completely ignoring Argent and Ring Of Hands — and generally concentrating on the longest,
loudest, and most pompous of the band's compositions, downplaying their
«poppier» side. In this context, the weak, unconvincing call of «let's get it
on and boogie!» that rings out
towards the end of the set, with ʽKeep On Rollinʼ, is a relative
disappointment, even though Ballard throws on a frantic Chuck Berry-style
guitar solo that the original studio version never knew. It's one of these tributary
gestures that way too many «artsy» bands of the 1970s engaged in, just to show
the world that they never hung up their rock'n'roll shoes, and it was almost
never credible, regardless of whether it came from good bands like ELO or
horrible ones like Uriah Heep.
On the other hand, credible or not, five
minutes of basic rock'n'roll can still work as a braincharmer after three full
sides of heavy and/or symphonic art-rock showpieces. And it may not sound nice,
but Rod is simply not a very interesting live player. In the studio, it is his
compositions, sense of taste, and overall creativity that has always attracted
me over Ballard's; but live, it is the Russ show all the way as long as Russ is
on that way. ʽThe Coming Of Kohoutekʼ remains faithful to the
original and nothing more; but ʽMusic From The Spheresʼ, for
instance, is hopelessly spoiled by the band's inability to recreate the «cosmic
kaleidoscope» of sounds in the coda — Ballard sets a thick, effects-laden
guitar tone that smears the whole feeling, and Rod's keyboards are lost in the
background.
ʽI Am The Dance Of Agesʼ and
ʽHold Your Head Upʼ are both extended with lengthy solo parts, played
consecutively on Rod's array of Mellotrons, Hammonds, and Moogs. Neither of
these parts is particularly inspiring: perhaps they should have left the extra
space for ʽBe Gladʼ or a couple more heavy guitar rockers like
ʽBe My Loverʼ. Thus, it's up to Ballard to keep the energy flowing on
ʽIt's Only Moneyʼ and ʽThunder And Lightningʼ. For the
record, he also performs a non-Argent song: ʽI Don't Believe In
Miraclesʼ, a soft-rock hit he wrote for Colin Blunstone's Ennismore album from 1972. It isn't
very good. Too much pathos set to weak hooks.
You'd think that, perhaps, in order to heat up
the public interest, Argent would agree to performing a good deal of old
Zombies material — at least the real old hits like ʽShe's Not Thereʼ,
stuff that certainly wasn't considered «dead and gone» by the mid-Seventies.
But the only Zombies song here is ʽTime Of The Seasonʼ, recast in a
hard-rocking mood, with a lengthy screeching guitar intro and a very rough
coating, compared to the smooth studio original. They do it as the final encore
— implying that, perhaps, quite a few people came to the show in hopes of
hearing it — but that's the only nod to any kind of past that precedes 1972.
Which is too bad, because it means that Encore, Argent's only official live
document, does not provide a comprehensive picture of the band — they were more than creators of lengthy
second-hand instrumental suites and sprawling heavy rock anthems; their pop
sensibility, one of their strongest sides, remains almost completely unseen. Encore deserves to be heard — the songs
are good, the performances aren't rote — and so it gets a thumbs up, but there's no rush. This
is not one of the decade's great live
art-rock albums, like Yessongs or
Jethro Tull's Burstin' Out. It is
merely admirable for showing how a band that is clearly more comfortable in the
studio can still honestly get away with giving a good time to a live audience.
CIRCUS (1975)
1) Circus; 2) Highwire; 3)
Clown; 4) Trapeze; 5) Shine On Sunshine; 6) The Ring; 7) The Jester.
So Ballard is out, replaced by not one, but two
guitarists — John Grimaldi and John Verity, and thus begins the final, very
brief, stage of Argent, almost completely ignored by history. Only one of the
band's last two albums has so far been released on CD, and even so, finding it
is quite a treat. Unjustly: Circus
is really as fine a record as Rod could produce under the circumstances.
Working almost alone, with a little help from bassist Jim Rodford (who wrote
ʽTrapezeʼ), having to sing much of the material himself, but still
refusing to move in overtly commercial directions — and still displaying plenty
of inspiration.
As you can see from the song titles, Circus is sort of a concept album, but
in a very loose sense. The lyrics use various circus metaphors to convey all
sorts of points ("I'm on a highwire, baby, moving far above the ground...
I'm on a wheel of fire, spilling my breath into the ground..."), and the
music, as far as I can tell, features no circus-related themes whatsoever. If
you are nervous about the prospect of hearing a bunch of «creative variations»
on ʽEntry Of The Gladiatorsʼ, be relieved — these songs have no comic
overtones, most of this stuff is grimly serious, but not tremendously
convoluted progressive rock.
With Ballard's testosterone-drenched rock
anthems out of the picture, something had to take their place, and the band
finds new inspiration in the world of «art-funk» and even «jazz fusion». Both
of the long epic pieces, ʽHighwireʼ and ʽTrapezeʼ,
particularly the latter (ʽHighwireʼ is still more of a «symph-prog»
composition overall), feature lots of syncopated bass, fusion piano, and even
shredding-type guitar solos from the new guitarists — all sorts of stuff that
one can see, for instance, on contemporary Soft Machine albums.
Both compositions suffer from clumsy, cluttered
structuring and lack of individual identity: there are instrumental passages
that resemble each other more than they should, and if the band actually
decided to stick them together as one eighteen minute-long composition, I'm
sure nobody would really mind. But it would be a fun eighteen minute-long
composition. The vocal melodies are original and sometimes even catchy, Rod
plays everything in sight — electric pianos, organs, Mellotrons, synthesizers —
and some of these guitar solos are damn, damn good. And the circus metaphors
add a little bit of purpose: you don't get to perceive the tracks as «just»
lengthy fusion jams. The instrumental battles sort of symbolize the ongoing
battle of life the same way as the «highwire» and «trapeze» metaphors. Ah well.
Of the shorter songs, ʽClownʼ is a
serious highlight — a solemn ballad that returns us to Argent's baroque pop
sensibilities; although its main leading arpeggiated piano line is rather
generic, the whole combination (majestic piano, gorgeous vocal part, «heavenly»
harmonies, psycho-fusion-esque synth solo, etc.) works very well. And yes, the
clown is sad. If there is any sort of
a humorous relief on the entire record, it only comes at the end — ʽThe
Jesterʼ is a bouncy, light, but «progressified» music-hall number whose
merry piano-banging is only slightly offset by the accompanying «astral» synth
parts and a brief, sharp blues-rock solo.
All said, the simple music lover inside myself
still regards the only «non-circus» track on the record, the lovely-lovely
ballad ʽShine On Sunshineʼ, as its highest point — one of the
greatest McCartney piano ballads that McCartney never wrote. Peaceful, humble,
memorable, and the falsetto harmonies are killer.
The fact that even Rod himself must have regarded it as one of his finest
creations has now been directly confirmed by the re-recording with Colin
Blunstone on vocals on the latest «Zombies reunion» album — a recording vastly inferior to the original, stripped
almost completely of its warm, cuddly charm. By all means, seek out the old version
with Rod himself on vocals: the
masterpiece.
Summing up, Circus shows that the band did get up on its feet after the loss of
Ballard. The fact that it did not last too long on those feet has everything to
do with technical matters — lack of promotion, decrease of demand for that kind
of music, an intentionally anti-commercial stand — and almost nothing to do with the quality of the music. Except that, as
each and every Argent album, Circus
is not tremendously original, and, as usual, you can get all of its separate
elements (Yes-like symph-prog, Soft Machine-like fusion, McCartney-like
balladry, etc.) in various better known, better promoted, and, let's admit it,
usually better executed packages. But in some respects, it is still a unique
synthesis, fully deserving of a thumbs up.
COUNTERPOINTS (1975)
1) On My Feet Again; 2) I
Can't Remember, But Yes; 3) Time; 4) Waiting For The Yellow One; 5) It's Fallen
Off; 6) Be Strong; 7) Rock & Roll Show; 8) Butterfly; 9) Road Back Home.
The band moved to RCA for their next album, but
the new deal never helped: not only was Counterpoints
to become their epitaph, but, so far, it is the only Argent album that has
consistently avoided a CD re-issue. So bear with me — I had to listen to it as
a mediocre vinyl rip, plagued with skips and crackles, and whether that
circumstance has in any way colored my judgement, you won't ever know until you
hear it for yourself... but, on the other hand, I cannot honestly recommend the
record, especially considering that it requires hunting for, so here we are,
locked in a vicious circle over an album that doesn't deserve getting locked
upon.
Generally, Counterpoints
expands upon the «fusion» inklings of Circus,
with a lot of the focus taken away from Rod's keyboard-directed landscapes and
placed upon the band's rhythmic drive and frenzied jazz guitar soloing. Why
they thought this could ever become the right road to follow is beyond me:
Argent's primary source of inspiration had always been classical motives, not
hard bop, and by the mid-Seventies, fusion was so well established that they
could never even begin to hope to make a dent in the market. Who wants to see
Argent turn into Weather Report? Probably the same people who'd expect Horowitz
to start playing ʽBlue Monkʼ.
The album starts out with a weak promise:
ʽOn My Feet Againʼ is an optimistic pop rocker with a pretty
McCartney-like sentimental prelude. It is not sharp or powerful enough, on its
own, to convince us that the band is
on its feet again, but it does introduce the possibility. And then, starting
with the second track and almost all the way to the end, we learn that «back on
their feet» means «competing with Jeff Beck and Alan Holdsworth, because that is what all the creative people in
the business should be betting their dollars on». Well, technically, the songs
are passable, but I cannot say that they add anything interesting to the set of technical and mood tricks
already implemented by masters of the genre. Grimaldi's and Verity's speedy
guitar runs sometimes reach actual ignition, but there's a good reason for most
people not associating the jazz-rock
fusiom movement with the «Grimaldi/Verity duet» — they are copycats, not true
creators. Fun fact: on some of the tracks, due to drummer Bob Henrit's
unexpected illness, Phil Collins himself is sitting in: no wonder a few of the
tracks have a «Brand X» feel to them. (My strongest guess is the instrumental ʽIt's
Fallen Offʼ, which you could indeed sneak on a Brand X album without
anyone taking serious notice). But it isn't a big consolation.
And thus, after twenty five minutes of
passable, mildly listenable, generally unmemorable fiddling about (including at
least one «mini-epic», called ʽTimeʼ because there were too few songs
called ʽTimeʼ written by 1975, and at least one limp, unconvincing
«anti-rocker» called ʽRock & Roll Showʼ), we get to ʽRoad
Back Homeʼ, a soulful ballad on which Rod's own honey voice does
everything in its power to seduce you into thinking that nothing has really
changed — that Argent are still a band that values traditional melodicity and
sweet vocal modulation over jazzy-schmazzy finger-flashing and tricky
percussion figures.
But the seduction is not working. Even
ʽRoad Back Homeʼ itself is still built on a bass foundation that we'd
rather be hearing from Jaco Pastorius, and besides, one ballad don't remedy no
jazz-fusion show. Counterpoints is
true enough to its title — it's an album that makes no points, only
counterpoints; the only album in Argent's catalog that has very little reason
to exist. If it had even one masterpiece of a ballad, of the same caliber as
ʽShine On Sunshineʼ, things might have been different. But it hasn't.
(Actually, there is one more ballad:
ʽWaiting For The Yellow Oneʼ continues Rod's heliophilia subject,
with intricate vocal overdubs but little in the way of hooks).
Predictably, the album did not sell at all,
which led to the band's dissipation — according to some sources, Rod simply
dumped the rest of the guys, tired of it all (some of the members, like bassist
Jim Rodford and drummer Bob Henrit, went on to work with late-period Kinks).
Too bad: I do not regard Counterpoints
as a «loss-of-steam» for the band, rather as just an unhappy, thumbs down-worthy,
move in a completely inappropriate direction. But sometimes, once you start moving
the wrong way, you just end up stuck there. It's a brain thing. Difficult to
understand.
MOVING HOME (1978)
1) Home; 2) Silence; 3) I'm In
The Mood; 4) Summer; 5) No. 1; 6) Tenderness; 7) Pastorius Mentioned; 8) Well,
Well, Well!; 9) Smiling; 10) Recollection.
This is NOT
an «Argent» album; it is a «Rod Argent» album, his first official solo project,
after which he retreated into session work shadows for a whole decade.
Technically speaking, this should certainly not have gone under the «Argent»
session; but factually, it is not all that far removed from Circus and Counterpoints, and there is always room for a little cheating — in
a way, Moving Home is not so much a
new beginning for Rod as an album that, on the contrary, closes the book that
was started in 1969. Hardly on one of its more interesting pages, but still, given
the circumstances, it could have been much worse.
The legacy of Argent (the band) is all over
this album: lush balladry, portentous attitudes, and jazz-fusion textures are
on every track, sometimes even all of them at the same time. But there is no
drive to make a really big statement. Even when things get «pompous», it is a
homely sort of pomp, never backed with mighty crescendos or lots of physical
force applied to the instruments. You'd think that on an album where Rod Argent
is responsible for the keys, Phil Collins for the drums, and Gary Moore for the
guitars, testosterone would be running high on a permanent basis — wrong! Even
Moore mostly sticks to acoustic playing.
Naturally, if you are all set on making a
«homely» album, conveying a peacefully tranquilizing message, you will
probably be more successful with the «ballad» rather than the «rocker» form of
things. So the only track here that could be called a minor classic, and
deserves inclusion on any collective Zombies/Argent anthology, is
ʽHomeʼ itself, with a nice, soulful vocal part and almost gospel
harmonies in the background. Synthesizers are used as a substitute for strings
and church organ at the same time, and produce a fine effect — unlike so many
other songs here, where, unfortunately, the selected keyboard tones mostly
range from boring to stupid.
For instance, ʽSilenceʼ is a
potentially decent upbeat art-pop song, hopelessly spoilt by a moronic
«bubbling» synth bass line and several layers of electronic keyboards where
pianos and older-fashioned Mellotrons could have worked much more effectively.
The same keyboards also spoil large parts of the fusion-esque instrumentals
(ʽNo. 1ʼ, ʽRecollectionʼ), and occasionally poison the fun
in other places. All of which is strange, because, up to this point, Rod seems
to have exercised good taste and restraint in his complex mix of acoustic,
electric, and digital instruments. Here, every now and then he seems to be
losing his head, going crazy over some new electronic toy or other. This
prevents me from taking Moving Home
too seriously.
Another bad piece of news is that most of the
«energetic» compositions never really come together. The «modern jazz» number
ʽI'm In The Moodʼ wastes some pretty nimble Phil Collins percussion
over a piece that tries to present Rod as some sort of jazz pro, but come on
now, who are you kidding. And I was subtly hoping that ʽWell, Well,
Wellʼ could turn out to be a John Lennon cover, but it is a completely
original piece of piano-driven funk aiming for a «badass» attitude (the lyrics
seem to be a harsh attack on musical criticism) that fails completely — Rod
could never sing or play «badass-wise» even if his life depended on it. I
mean, I have no idea: in real life, it is theoretically possible that he can
punch his fist through a brick wall without feeling pain, but there was hardly
a time when he could believably vent his frustration on record.
So, once all the nits have been picked and
squeezed out, this leaves us with ʽHomeʼ, ʽSummerʼ (not a
very memorable, but a very cute-sounding piano ballad with «aethereal» vocals),
and ʽTendernessʼ — decent, medium-fast moving Brit-pop reminiscent
of classic ELO. And while, on the negative end, the inclusion of the ridiculous ʽSmilingʼ is a
serious incentive for a negative rating (calypso should be left to calypso
artists, period), on the whole, this is one of those classic
«on-the-borderline» thumbs up cases when there is very little to love,
very little to hate, but the final feeling hovers around «well, that was kinda
cute» rather than «Jesus Christ, life is way
too short to waste it in such a pointless manner».
As it happens, Moving Home is that final part of the slide when the journey still
goes on, but the speed is decelerating and the feet are already dragging on
the ground. Worth owning by Rod fans, but it is quite understandable that the
guy went on a lengthy hiatus in its wake — because, want it or not, everything that could be said had
already been said, so why say it again?
ADDENDA:
THE BBC SESSIONS (1970-1973; 1997)
1) Rejoice; 2) Where Are We
Going Wrong?; 3) Cast Your Spell Uranus; 4) Tragedy; 5) Keep On Rolling; 6) Hold
Your Head Up; 7) Liar; 8) Rejoice; 9) Keep On Rolling; 10) Tragedy; 11)
It's Only Money (part 1); 12) It's Only Money (part 2); 13) God Gave
Rock'n' Roll To You.
Coincidentally, I am writing about this CD
exactly one day after reviewing The BBC
Sessions by the Beatles — and what I said about that easily applies to this:
the «BBC live album» is a genre in itself, an interesting curiosity that is
neither here nor there, most often falling in the cracks between a properly
engineered studio creation and a «genuine» live album, equally lacking the
supposed perfection of the former and the supposed raw excitement of the
latter.
Granted, in the case of Argent the difference
between a proper live album, like Encore,
and a «BBC album» is not as well pronounced as in the case of the Beatles or
the Who: with Rod favoring the «progressive» formula, the basic idea was to
simply play live with the same level of technicality, detail, and finesse, as
in the studio. But even so, Encore
showed some room for rearrangements, improvisation, and kick-ass rock'n'roll. We
had Russ Ballard throw in a raunchy, distorted boogie-woogie guitar solo on
ʽKeep On Rollinʼ, for instance — no signs of which appear on either
of the two versions of this song recorded for the BBC.
And they did not vary the approach in between
the sessions, either: the two versions of ʽTragedyʼ, the band's most
dedicated attempt to do something in the «Epic Funk» style, are pretty much interchangeable,
which begs for the obvious question — and certain alternate semi-official
releases from the archives show that Argent did
do other songs live at the BBC (at least ʽBe My Lover, Be My Friendʼ,
ʽSweet Maryʼ, as well as Nexus-era
material appear on these releases), so, apparently, someone at the BBC must
have been a big fan of Ballard's funk
and Rod's honky-tonk.
The most interesting selection here is a
performance of ʽLiarʼ, probably the only selection from Argent that ended up on a live record.
It is a bit louder here, with a bigger drum sound and a brawnier vocal and
instrumental part from Russ, including a little screaming and a little wah-wah
guitar solo. Possibly influenced by the 1970 Three Dog Night cover — which took
the song's hooks, dropped the song's humble subtlety and made it accessible and
acceptable by a more general audience at the expense of you-know-what. So it's
interesting to see Argent give a nod to their competitors, but a little
humiliating as well.
On the positive side, I was never a big fan of
Argent's production style on the studio albums — constantly laden with echos,
sometimes poorly mixed, etc., and some of these BBC arrangements do sound
clearer and sharper than their studio counterparts: the opening funk rhythms on
ʽTragedyʼ, for instance, hit much harder here than on All Together Now, where they seem
rather muffled. Serious fans of the band will definitely want to hear the
songs this way and decide for
themselves, which particular approach to the sound suits the refined Argent fan
better.
But on the whole, the package will be neither
fully satisfactory for completists (who would probably rather see a larger,
maybe a 2-CD, release with all the missing songs included), nor necessary for
non-completists. An un-enthusiastic thumbs up here.
THE CRAZY WORLD OF ARTHUR BROWN (1968)
1) Prelude/Nightmare; 2) Fanfare/Fire
Poem; 3) Fire; 4) Come And Buy; 5) Time/Confusion; 6) I Put A Spell On You; 7) Spontaneous
Apple Creation; 8) Rest Cure; 9) I've Got Money; 10) Child Of My Kingdom.
Arthur Brown was a fairly crazy freak, even for
the high standards of 1967, when he was arguably Syd Barrett's biggest
competition in the «so deliciously outrageous» department. For one thing, he
had a really dangerous fire fetish, next to which Jimi's guitar-burning antics
were elementary childplay — the culmination of the live show involved Arthur
performing in a burning helmet (which resulted in more than one nasty hairburn,
on several occasions). For another, his stage costumes and makeup pre-dated
the «glam explosion» by a good three or four years — in 1967, all that gear was
so unusual that it could still genuinely scare people, tightly binding Brown to
the «underground» scene. By the time that outlandish stage shows became truly
popular, Arthur was already out of vogue — but one could argue that, perhaps,
without Arthur Brown, there would have been no David Bowie or Alice Cooper,
either.
Third and most important, although Brown was
never really an accomplished music-writer, he did have the knack of attracting
those kinds of people. And if the first and only officially released LP of his
most famous project, «The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown», can still be enjoyed
today, it is only due to near-perfect chemistry between Arthur and his chief
musical mate, keyboard player Vincent Crane — who was even nuttier than Brown
himself, but also happened to be an excellent musician and composer. If, seduced by the excesses, temptations, and virtues
of The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, you
start digging into the rest of Arthur's chaotic catalog and end up wondering
why so little in it stands up to the same standards, remember the rule: Arthur
Brown's albums are generally only as good as the people who contribute to them besides Arthur. He's got the personality
and charisma all right, but writing songs comes hard to the guy.
This classic record from 1968, though, sounds
anything but forced, derivative, or
uninspired. Produced by no less than Pete Townshend himself (he is listed as
«associate producer» next to Kit Lambert, the Who's manager, as chief producer,
but the two always worked together anyway), it collects the cream of the cream
of Brown's stage repertoire, honed and perfected throughout 1967, and still
remains not just one of the first examples of full-fledged «rock theater», but
also one of the best — if only because, behind all of its superficial
silliness, there really hides a world of actual madness. Delve deep enough into
it, and you just might release the Nameless Terror.
Brown's basic idea was to combine the world of
classic American R'n'B, with its connections to spiritual ecstasy, with
fashionable psychedelic and overall modern-art trends of the day — he was as
well versed in European cinema and theater as he was in James Brown, and he
seemed quite preoccupied about unlocking the commonalities between the two.
There is even an actual James Brown cover here (ʽI've Got Moneyʼ),
and it's fairly good: Brown was one of the few R'n'B singers of his day who
was not afraid to just completely let go when it came to singing / vocalizing,
and his set of pipes was strong enough to compete with the master on his own
terms.
Of course, of all the classic R'n'B figures one
would imagine Brown's favorite to be Screamin' Jay Hawkins — the original
«horror show icon» of the genre — and, expectedly so, ʽI Put A Spell On
Youʼ is covered here in all of its glory; coincidentally, the same year
that Creedence Clearwater Revival put out their
version. But Fogerty, as excellent as his vocal performance was, seemed more
intent on exploring the potential of the song's musical groove, with an
extended guitar solo part swallowing the bulk of the song; here, the music,
dominated, as always, by Crane's organ, takes a backseat to Brown's
«bigger-than-life» performance. Maybe to some people his impersonation of a
mentally disbalanced voodoo priest here will seem overblown, caricaturesque,
and utterly phony, but I think there's a pinch of comic self-irony here
somewhere, and that's enough to make it work for me. (Plus, Crane's bluesy
organ work, reminiscent of Alan Price's style on the early Animals records, is
in great taste as well).
However, these are really just excourses on an
album of mostly original compositions — dealing with nightmares, obsessions,
hallucinations, lust, madness, and, above all, fire, fire, FIRE! The entire
first side is about fire, for that matter (the heat only goes down a little by
the time we hit ʽI Put A Spell On Youʼ), and if the flame-soaked
lyrics aren't enough, then the sizzling vocals of Mr. Brown and the unusually
dry, crackling organ tone of Mr. Crane will do the job. The one undying
classic, still occasionally recycled on classic rock radio, is ʽFireʼ
itself, of course, which rocked London and the world to its core with the
opening announcement that has since become quite a staple of pop culture —
"I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE, AND I BRING YOU... FIRE!" — but the fact
is that it's also a fabulously catchy pop song, which, in 1968, sounded like
nothing else, because nobody else infused the Hammond organ with that
particular sort of crazy voodoo.
Above everything else, The Crazy World is diverse: its influences do not stop at basic pop
and R'n'B, but involve classical motives (ʽPreludeʼ), improvisational
jazz (ʽChild Of My Kingdomʼ), and free-form avantgarde stuff
(ʽSpontaneous Apple Creationʼ, quite spontaneous indeed). Most of the
songs do serve the same set of purposes / motives that I already listed, but
they all try to serve it in different ways. The album's true culmination is
really not ʽFireʼ itself, I'd say, but rather ʽCome And
Buyʼ, a complex, imaginative, sweaty, sexy suite that has it all: a
simple, but mesmerizing two-note bass hook «doubled» by Arthur's vocals, artsy
strings arrangements, an epic brass-led crescendo, and a vivid impersonation
of the protagonist's descent into Hell — yes, all of it years before Alice Cooper
straddled the subject, and on a level where the «madness» of the experience
weighs heavier on the listener's soul than the «theater» aspect of it.
If someone complains that the album goes a bit
«over the top», the someone in question is absolutely correct — that is the very point of it. Really, few
albums since have so arrogantly and outrageously gone over the top. But when
going over the top is combined with great melodies, technical competence, a
singer who can belt it out along with the best of 'em without stooping to trivial
pomp, and a bunch of influences that
wide — in this case, going over the top is more than recommended: it is begged for. The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown is a glorious, precious relic from
a time when an album with the word «crazy» in the title could really mean it,
rather than offer an entertaining facsimile of the real thing. (Do not try
this at home, though, and I don't just mean putting on a burning helmet). Maybe
it's really good that people don't do this kind of stuff any more — good for the
people, bad for art, that is, since real art is, after all, mostly just a nice
way to profit from your own craziness. But hey, better this than the Manson
Family, right? Thumbs
up, no further questions asked.
GALACTIC ZOO DOSSIER (1971)
1) Internal Messenger; 2)
Space Plucks; 3) Galactic Zoo; 4) Metal Monster; 5) Simple Man; 6) Night Of The
Pigs; 7) Sunrise; 8) Trouble; 9) Brains; 10) Medley: Galactic Zoo / Space
Plucks / Galactic Zoo; 11) Creep; 12) Creation; 13) Gypsy Escape; 14) No Time.
As Vincent Crane broke up with Brown to pursue
his own preferred trail of madness that would lead him to Atomic Rooster, a
variety of mental institutions and, finally, an overdose of painkillers,
Arthur was left without an anchor, and, for a while, floated here and there
without much success or purpose. The next anchor ultimately arrived in the
guise of one Andy Dalby, a wandering guitarist with impressive chops and
(presumably) some songwriting abilities. In between the two, Brown and Dalby
formed Kingdom Come, later to be known as «Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come», to
distinguish it from still another
Kingdom Come — which is why their records will be covered here in the Arthur
Brown section and not under K. In any case, Kingdom Come was even more of a
Brown-controlled vision than Crazy World, where artistic duties were
distributed more or less equally between Brown and Crane.
By the time the band, consisting of Brown,
Dalby, and a «revolving door»-type variety of rhythm sections, keyboardists,
and what-not, had taken its first shape, prog and glam were the hottest new
thangs around, and Brown was perfectly willing to cash in on the fad, not the
least because, after all, he was the godfather of both, to some extent. But
where some people went for «prog», concentrating on the complexity of the
music and somewhat downplaying the stage image, and others went for «glam»,
dazzling audiences with super-eccentric rock theater tricks, Brown decided to
go for both at the same time. His would be a «rock theater extraordinaire for
the advanced music lover» — something that is already reflected a bit in the
first album title of Kingdom Come: Galactic
Zoo Dossier is a title way too posh even for Yes or Genesis, and way too
tongue-twisted even for David Bowie.
Conceptually, there is one big problem with
Kingdom Come: for this project, Brown attempted to take himself and his
fantasies more seriously than he used to in 1968, when he was just a delicious
madman in a burning helmet, using fire as a simple allegory for you-know-what.
The three albums of Kingdom Come, on the other hand, have been said to
constitute a conceptual triptich of sorts, where Brown is supposed to deal with
Humanity, Mortality, Animality, Spirituality, Morality, and Paranormality.
Problem is — when you have a guy who, just three years ago, declared himself to
be the god of hellfire, it is highly unlikely that people will want to take any
of his subsequent messages with the same degree of seriousness as he might
claim to have invested in them. Certainly not if he continues to deliver them
in the same overwrought, over-the-top, bombastic manner with schizophrenic
overtones. In short, there is a good reason why people chose to have Roger
Waters and David Gilmour as their mentors, and mostly ignore Arthur Brown.
Galactic
Zoo Dossier, therefore, was
doomed from the start — «serious» music listeners passed it by due to too much
eccentricity and whimsy, while the less patient listeners, naturally, found
nothing that could qualify as an instantaneously memorable hit. The one track
here that comes pretty close to the demands of 1970's rock radio is
ʽSunriseʼ — a slow, stately, epic that democratically alternates
between Brown's prophetic hair-in-the-wind wailings and a series of melodic
guitar solos that eventually shoot up to glam-rock heaven. But even
ʽSunriseʼ has little to remember it by other than Brown's singing
(which everyone is already familiar with) and Dalby's soloing (which is
climactic / cathartic / etc., but in a rather textbook-ish blues-rock manner).
Everything else is just weird, sometimes for the
sake of weirdness, sometimes for the more noble sake of breaking boundaries,
but rarely staying in place long enough to «rock» the senses or «purify» the
soul. Riffs, jams, solos are constantly interrupted by insane (or inane)
dialogs, screaming, electronic effects, phasing, speeding up, moving from
channel to channel, disappearing in one place and reappearing in another — like
on a particularly crazy Mothers of Invention record, but with less inherent
humor, more forced psychedelia.
Your overall reaction to the album will
probably coincide with the reaction to the first track, which encompasses
everything about it — good and bad. Starting off with a minute of stoned
dialogs about the Lord and immortality, ʽInternal Messengerʼ sets up
what looks like a terrific groove — a big lumbering riffwave crashing on a
bedrock of tortured, choking organ chords — only to go on and waste it on one
of Brown's pompous «sermons», after which the song turns into a relatively
wimpy blues-rock jam, heavy on guitars and organ, but never advancing beyond
what many, many other people were capable at the time (remember Steamhammer?
well, even if you don't, the second half of this song here still sounds like them).
And this problem keeps recurring. Instead of
going truly symphonic, like Yes, or radically avantgarde, like King Crimson,
these guys play a sort of «ambitiously mad R'n'B» where the themes aren't
fleshed out well enough to be emotional stunners and the solos / jams aren't
kick-ass or «kick-soul» enough to place the band on the level with first-rate
competitors. Case in point: the final «sprawler», ʽGypsy Escapeʼ, a
seven-minute musical journey through dirty organ pumping, angry blues-rock
licks, signature changes, and mood variation... and what? Nothing. There was no
anchor, and the gypsy escapes faster than it takes me to remember him (her?).
The album does leave a bizarre aftertaste.
Brown's presence, no matter how obnoxious the man can be at times; the desire
to try out almost anything that they can lay their hand on in the studio,
nostalgically reminiscent of the atmosphere of the early days of the Jimi
Hendrix Experience; and the boundless ambition oozing out of every hole — these
things command respect. But when it comes to the «meat» department, it turns
out that looney madman Vince Crane was a real «meatman», whereas seemingly
sane guitarist Andy Dalby is, on the contrary, just a butcher. As Brown admits
himself, "I've had a little intellectual placement in a very near corner
of my mind" (ʽSimple Manʼ) — well, Galactic Zoo Dossier is right in the middle of that intellectual
placement, but transplanting it into intellectual placements for other people
turned out to be downright impossible, and I think I know why.
On the other hand, if you don't think too much
about it, but try and let yourself get carried away by the moment — who knows,
there might be a nice, thick apocalyptic aura just waiting out there to engulf
you. Few people made mad progressive
albums in the early 1970s. Bizarre, twisted, yes; idealistic, ambitious, yes;
mathematically calculated to reflect Apollonian beauty, for sure. Galactic Zoo Dossier, on the other
hand, could have been made by Syd Barrett, had he not been consumed by substances
so soon, and gone on to develop and improve as a musical artist, instead of
just retreating into the dementia. So, all things considered, this is still a
unique experience in its own way, and I grudgingly advance it a thumbs up
while waiting for the exploding helmet to arrive in the mail.
KINGDOM COME (1972)
1) The Teacher; 2) A
Scientific Experiment; 3) The Whirlpool; 4) The Hymn; 5) Water; 6) Love Is (The
Spirit That Will Never Die); 7) City Melody; 8) Traffic Light Stop.
Galactic
Zoo Dossier might have been a
mess, but it had promise. This follow-up is quite disappointing, since it
sort of fails to deliver on that promise. Shedding some of the theatrical grandness
of its predecessor, it compensates with extra noises, extra nonsense, and a spoonful
of bathroom humor masquerading as Artistic Metaphor. I don't know about Tales From Topographic Oceans, but Kingdom Come could just as easily be
dubbed one of the reasons punk had to happen — not because rock music had
become too complex and intellectualized, but because it had lost its focus.
Even Arthur Brown circa 1968 actually used it to say something. God damn me if
I have the least idea of what it is he is trying to say here.
The first nine and a half minutes of the album
are given over to a messy prog/R'n'B hybrid suite which delights in changing
its melody every next minute, uses the metaphor of The Teacher to emphasize the
fact that Arthur is still trying to
open our minds... and heavily invests in lyrical references to the discharging
of liquid and semi-liquid substances, including (warning!) an entire section on the adventures of Arthur's
sphincter, set to fart noises, so make sure there aren't any minors in your
presence when you are playing this, or the next generation will forever remember
Arthur as «that guy who farts on his records», even though he only did it once
(I hope).
The next
to last section of the album, on
the other hand, represents some sort of mystical journey through uncharted
waters, with Mr. Brown pretending to be the captain and others informing him,
over and over again, that he is not.
The non-musical parts of it try to be funny and fail, then try to be wise and
fail just as well. Basically, there is just too much here: the pot is so
thoroughly overloaded with ingredients that the final result is inedible.
ʽCity Melodyʼ, in particular, is a great example of why «complete
musical freedom» should never be praised as the highest of values: three
minutes of tight, but not very inspired jamming simply do not form any sensible
unity with the other three minutes of sound collages (various city noises). But
do listen to this stuff if you have an innate allergy to musique concrète — it might help you gain more love for
ʽRevolution #9ʼ, whose apocalyptic streak of sonic terror can be nerve-wrecking,
unlike the utterly boring sonic collages of Brown and Co.
Which is all too bad, because all the wordy
garbage, failed humor, tired collaging, and excessive overdubbing tends to
overshadow the fact that, for this album, the band actually took the time to
write a small handful of very good songs. ʽThe Hymnʼ and ʽLove
Is (The Spirit)ʼ are the most radiant joy-senders to come out of the
Brown camp, for instance — in fact, their radiance is very much at odds with
the far more somber, negatively charged attitude exhibited by Zoo Dossier. Where ʽSunriseʼ
was a Brown aria of anger and despair, framed by accordingly virulent guitar solos,
ʽThe Hymnʼ is a Brown aria of unprecedented optimism, framed by
accordingly euphoric guitar passages featuring what might probably count as
Andy Dalby's best work ever. And ʽLove Is (The Spirit)ʼ is a fine
example of an early proto-power-ballad done right
— no power chords or high-pitched operatic pathos.
Best of the lot is saved for the end, though,
if you live long enough to get to it: ʽTraffic Light Songʼ is a
mean-and-lean funk jam that manages to stay in place for almost all of its three-minute duration, with just a few seconds,
perhaps, of being interrupted by an occasional extraneous piano riff or
something. It is a «conceptual» tune, too, of course, because the album begins
with «the teacher» conducting a «scientific experiment» by «trying to stimulate
the brain of this traffic light» (yes, that should give you a pretty decent
idea about whatever it is you might be going to subject yourself to). But that's
precisely the point: all things «conceptual» about this record have dated so
badly that, for all I know, they might already have seem dated back in 1972
(and they probably were: Frank Zappa was doing this sort of chaotic shit with Absolutely Free as early as 1967, and
Brown is no match for Frank when it comes to pushing chaotic shit on the
listener). Its melodic side, on the other hand, can still be salvaged from the
rubble — except that most people probably will not bother, and I cannot blame
them. If it takes sitting through the peripeteia of Arthur Brown's sphincter in
order to get through to ʽThe Hymnʼ, one might even be excused for
stubbornly sticking to Freddie Mercury.
"Let's face it — a sense of humor is a
good thing", a reviewer on Amazon said in order to justify the extra
silliness of the record. But it depends very much on who we are talking about.
Arthur Brown is never truly a «serious» or a «humorous» guy; in all of his
avatars, he is primarily «whacky», and his «whackiness», almost at every point
in his career, interfered with the rest of the message — the only time he truly
succeeded in matching it to the rest of the mood and the music was on Crazy
World's epochal album. Kingdom Come
does have a sense of humor, but crazy guys going funny is not always as
humorous as it could seem — genuine humor comes from rational thinking, and
there are very few rational things about this record. Still, if your doctor
tells you that you are in the process of going ga-ga over the way the real
world is treating you, on this record you might just find the perfect soulmate
for your condition.
JOURNEY (1973)
1) Time Captives; 2) Triangles;
3) Gypsy; 4) Superficial Roadblocks; 5) Conception; 6) Beginning Of
"Spirit Of Joy"; 7) Spirit Of Joy; 8) Come Alive.
Kingdom Come's last album was its oddest one,
and for that, is a particular favorite among the select few who have chosen to
receive their daily dose of truth and light from the likes of Arthur Brown. And
I do have to say that, out of all of Arthur's output, Journey is perhaps that one record indeed that might work better out of context than within it. I can imagine people who are not too familiar with Mr.
Brown enjoy it more than those who already know him well.
To begin with, Journey is often named as the first album ever to rely exclusively
on drum machines in the percussion department. If this is true, it was one of
those «accidents», like the several independent inventions of hard rock
through defective amps that are well documented in history — here, the
«accident» was somewhat more trivial in that Kingdom Come, at a certain point,
were simply left without a regular drummer, and instead of bothering with
session musicians, Arthur and keyboard player Victor Peraino decided to handle
all the percussion duties themselves with the aid of the «Bentley Rhythm Ace»,
an early invention from what would go on to become the Roland Corporation.
On the other hand, all the «pssht-pssht»
percussion noises here do match the album's atmosphere, which is very different both from the crazy
megalomaniac R&B of Zoo Dossier
and the comic overtones of Kingdom Come.
For some reason, guitarist Andy Dalby retreats into the background and lets
Peraino completely dominate the proceedings with the newest wonders of technology:
although old-time organs and Mellotrons still occasionally break through the
walls, most of the sounds are produced electronically.
In a way, that makes Journey almost stupendously ahead of its time — an ice cold,
shivery celebration of the robo-digital ideology in pop music that not even
Kraftwerk were fully capable of at the time, let alone all the New Wave and
synth-pop artists of the times to come. With one exception: it does not really
look like there was any conscious effort here to break genre boundaries.
Melodically and «ideologically», Journey
does not constitute any significant departure from the old style of Kingdom
Come. It just so happened that the melodies and ideologies had to be delivered
through drum machines and synthesizers rather than actual drums and guitars. It
could have easily happened otherwise. Is it a good or a bad thing that it
didn't?
Hard for me to decide. Journey seems to take itself quite seriously, and, as I already
said, it is easier to agree with that seriousness for people who have it as
their first Arthur Brown experience rather than those who have followed him
from the burning helmet days. There is a «global» theme present here — the
artist is breaking away from the problem chains of mankind and zooming into
open space, a subject for which electronic sounds are, of course, most
appropriate, what with their connection to elementary particles of matter and
all. But despite the appropriate sounds and the overall coldness, darkness, and
«distant» nature of the music, its ability to carry you, the listener, away with it is somewhat questionable (of
course, by «you» I mean «me», but who else could I put in the listener's seat?
my cat is not much of a pop music fan).
In a small part this is because, having
inadvertently fallen upon a New Sound, Arthur was so heavily seduced by it
that he abused it on more than one occasion. ʽTime Captivesʼ, for
instance, begins with almost an entire minute of nothing but rhythmic electronic percussion counting out time — yes,
it ties in with the song's message, but maybe if so much of our time wasn't
wasted by listening to an electronic metronome, we could be somewhat less
captivated by time? Four of seven songs go over seven minutes without
presenting enough melodic content for three — in honest hope of setting your
mind under the hypnotic power of the instruments, yet there is nowhere near the
care here that, for instance, Pink Floyd would invest into their lengthy
atmospheric numbers, meticulously, almost pedantically, alternating build-ups
and come-downs. It is true that Journey
sounds more calculated than its predecessors, with fewer of those spontaneous, sometimes
irritating wannabe-Zappa cuts-off and musical non-sequiturs, but it is still
an Arthur Brown album, and that means it might be jumping off the pier any time
now.
I would also like to add that, contrary to
certain reviewers who dared to praise
the use of the drum machine here, I personally find it quite dated. In 1973,
these sounds were, first and foremost, weird and otherworldly; today, they are
silly and wimpy compared to what the subsequent evolution of electronic
percussion has led us to. Likewise, some large chunks on ʽTime
Captivesʼ, ʽGypsyʼ, etc., seem more intent on telling us «look
at the real cool tone this box of
knobs and cords can produce!» than on creating a cosmic mood based on
suggestions that the cosmos itself is whispering into the musician's ear. If
you know what I'm talking about, that is.
But none of this is to say that Journey is worthless — aside from being
a genuinely unique album for 1973, a totally out-of-bounds progressive
experience for a year already rife with prog watermarks, it does have its share
of memorable and inspiring moments. In its second part, ʽGypsyʼ
gains in fury and becomes an unstoppable cosmic rocker (the second song titled
ʽGypsyʼ to use the title as a metaphor for space travel — after the
Moody Blues). The wild screams, issuing out of the bass-heavy musical jungle of
ʽConceptionʼ, still have an ability to shock. And ʽSpirit Of
Joyʼ, despite only being three minutes of length, is an excellent attempt
at fitting a happy R&B anthem within this tale of frightening cosmic
darkness. Perhaps it should have been chosen as the album conclusion, instead
of the overlong blues-rocker ʽCome Aliveʼ (where Dalby finally gets
to come out with some blazing guitar work, but not for too long).
Altogether, Journey, like every other Kingdom Come album, is not a record that
I would «trust» — and by «trust» I ultimately mean «enjoy», since it is fairly
hard to honestly enjoy an album that one does not trust — but it has enough of
puzzles in its sleeve, even coming off its already puzzling two predecessors,
to still warrant a thumbs up. On my own cosmic journeys, I prefer to
be taken by guys like Hawkwind and their B-movie visions of such things; but if
a little bit of musical metaphysics conducted by a drum machine is right up
your alley, give it a try by all means. After all, it's never been
scientifically proven that Arthur Brown is not
the ultimate source of knowledge on the universe.
DANCE (1975)
1) We've Got To Get Out Of
This Place; 2) Helen With The Sun; 3) Take A Chance; 4) Crazy; 5) Hearts And
Winds; 6) Dance; 7) Out Of Time; 8) Quietly With Tact; 9) Soul Garden; 10) I
Know The Lord Will Find A Way; 11) Is There Nothing Beyond God.
«Kingdom Come» came to an untimely end with Journey, but, considering that Brown
still retained Andy Dalby for his next — and this time, first officially solo
— project, one could claim that they simply underwent a name change, since the
remainder of Kingdom Come's lineup was always a revolving door anyway. That is,
one could claim that only before
listening to the album. If you don't hear the substantial difference, try again.
Not that the difference is so substantial as to
justify occasional haughty dismissals of Dance.
One anonymous web reviewer went as far as to blame it for showing «disco
tendencies», despite the fact that there is not the slightest hint of disco on
the album — most likely, falling victim of a simple psychological association:
if the year is 1975 and your album is called Dance, it must be some sort of a disco sellout, regardless of what
your ears tell you. Others do not venture that far out, but the overall
consensus seems to be that Dance
finds Arthur Brown in decline, betraying his psychedelic and avantgarde roots
for a smooth, accessible, ordinary pop sound.
However, let us not forget the general picture.
At heart, Arthur Brown was primarily a big, sincere fan of R'n'B in its
various incarnations, the grander, louder, and more theatrical, the better. The
three albums of Kingdom Come, in the overall frame of his work, look more like
a part-time experiment, fueled by the mood of the times — a conscious attempt
to go over the top by adding layers of extra complexity to the same old R'n'B
sound. Now that progressive rock was on its way out, though, Brown's
experiment, too, came to an end: and in a way, Dance is not so much a sellout as a process of «calming down» and
returning to things that are less arrogant and defying, although by no means
following the particular fads of 1975.
It opens with a loud cover of ʽWe've Got
To Get Out Of This Placeʼ — yes, including a wobbly synthesizer pattern
characteristic of the Era of Funk, but otherwise, quite loyal to the 1965 original
in melody and attitude: sufficient proof that Brown could care less about the
present if he still didn't have an open path to his past (and, in a funny move
of self-irony, the other golden oldie cover on the record is the Stones'
ʽOut Of Timeʼ, where Brown's "you're out of touch, my baby, my
poor old-fashioned baby" could just as well relate to himself as to his
imaginary antagonist). Both songs are quite well done, if not particularly spectacular
in any respect, and the presence of «old-fashioned» female backup harmonies and
saxophone solos should not be in the least annoying for those who don't have a
prejudice against «old-fashioned» R'n'B in general.
The original compositions, meanwhile, are
diverse and, even though much less befuddling and easier to swallow than on
Kingdom Come albums, also make more sense — at the very least, they give the
listener enough time to flesh out an emotional reaction. There is still at
least one lengthy, prog-influenced, epic: ʽHelen With The Sunʼ is
hardly worse than the average anthemic ballad from Kingdom Come or Journey,
with a powerhouse vocal from Arthur and tasteful arrangements of
electronically treated guitars from Dalby. There is a little bit of
facetious/salacious music hall (ʽCrazyʼ) that is so tongue-in-cheek
it would be ridiculous to get offended. There are moody, lyrical R'n'B numbers
(like the title track) that sound very closely to certain bits of Kingdom Come
properly extended and played to their full length. And there is a funny
ten-minute «gospel suite» to end the album, running the gamut from kitschy ska
(ʽSoul Gardenʼ) to quite sincere-sounding gospel-funk (ʽI Know
The Lord Will Find A Wayʼ) to a rather mysterious, unpredictable reggae
conclusion where, after having just sung all the required praise for the
Supreme Being, Arthur repeats the mantraic question "is there nothing
beyond God?" for two and a half minutes — obviously not hoping for an
answer, but not afraid to ask the question, either.
My personal favorite on this record has always
been ʽQuietly With Tactʼ, a song that plays out exactly as suggested
— in waltz tempo, with a certain cheese-free elegance, and features some of
Dalby's finest examples of guitar playing: Dalby is actually credited for
writing the entire song, and, indeed, Arthur's vocal part, fine as it is,
sounds here more like a taster introduction to Andy's solo parts, spiralling
around the listener in a grand display of «controlled emotion». Nobody ever
seems to list the song as a highlight, which is a travesty: its solos would
easily make my Top 100, had I ever bothered to compile one.
All in all, Dance is certainly not recommendable for those who, in «The Crazy
World Of Arthur Brown», value the «crazy» part above all else. But it is
definitely an album that belongs to the world of Arthur Brown as safely as
anything, and its combination of styles, moods, theatricality, and spirit is
anything but generic for 1975. And I,
for one, feel good about getting to hear a bit of the human side of Arthur Brown here — we have all gotten to know him
fairly well as the God of Hellfire and the Time Captive, but it turns out that
he can fairly well hold his own in the much more grounded genre of
«dance-art-pop». Thumbs up, of course.
CHISHOLM IN MY BOSOM (1977)
1) Need To Know; 2) Monkey
Walk; 3) Let A Little Sunshine (In Your Life); 4) I Put A Spell On You; 5)
She's On My Mind; 6) The Lord Is My Saviour; 7) Chisholm In My Bosom.
With musical standards exploded and reassembled
from the dust in between 1975 and 1977, Arthur Brown had pretty little hope of
maintaining even a small pinch of notoriety. Even Kingdom Come, with all of
their progressive trappings, were so far out as to be considered «underground»
in the early 1970s. Now, with the New Wave revolution in full flight, Arthur's
1% of recognizability would be reduced to about 0.01% — particularly since he
continued to behave as if his own musical evolution were on a completely
self-sustainable path, not necessarily ignorant of whatever comes around, but
never for one moment giving reason to suspect that it could be influenced by
some particularly current «fad».
So, in 1977, when everything around was
changing and adapting, Brown instead made the most «normal» album in his entire
catalog. Despite still working with Dalby, and despite old madman friend
Vincent Crane returning to guest star on one track, Chisholm In My Bosom continues the line of Dance — upgrading the challenge a little bit by returning to epic
length compositions and cutting down on cover versions, but overall, simply
coming across as standard-fare «intellectual entertainment» without any serious
attempts to break new ground.
In fact, the opening couple of numbers could
easily throw the demanding listener into the arms of a hissy fit. ʽNeed To
Knowʼ, with its gentle double-tracked slide guitars, sounds like formulaic
country-rock, unexpectedly soft, mild, and mannered the same way Lou Reed
surprised his fans with Coney Island
Baby several years earlier. Not everybody will want to acknowledge that the
slide arrangements are quite exquisite and emotional (Andy Dalby's talents on
the podium again?), but it's also true that this isn't at all the kind of music that we would readily associate with
Brown. The faster-paced R'n'B dance number ʽMonkey Walkʼ is a little
more familiar, giving us Brown's sexy, rambunctious side, and the band plays
very well, including the brass arrangements and the back vocals, but where
ʽNeed To Knowʼ could be seen as too blatantly sentimental, ʽMonkey
Walkʼ might just be a bit too generic and silly.
The rest of Side A wanders between Brown's
newly-shaped passion for gospel (ʽThe Lord Is My Saviourʼ), epic
optimistic R'n'B (ʽLet A Little Sunshineʼ), and dark funk
(ʽShe's On My Mindʼ — the only track here to contain a shred of the
old madness, maybe due to the participation of old friend Crane). There is also
a re-recording of ʽI Put A Spell On Youʼ for those who'd forgotten
he already did it a decade earlier — slower, less freak-out-ish, more keyboard-dependent,
and quite unnecessary in the long run.
Then there is the second side of the album,
given over in its entirety to the title track — which, rather than trying to
play out like a multi-part progressive suite, sounds like a cross between a Bob
Dylan epic, a Van Morrison epic, and a Jim Morrison epic: a long, wordy ramble
spread across several relatively simple melodies with relatively simple
acoustic / keyboard-heavy (Mellotron included) arrangements. Much of it sounds
(but not necessarily is) improvised, and quite personal — sort of a lengthy,
multi-layered confession that must have meant a lot to the guy in 1977, but is
hardly the kind of item we should be expected to enjoy thirty years on. Or
maybe I just don't get it, but anyone can be excused for not trying very hard
to «get» a twenty-minute acoustic / Mellotron epic from Arthur Brown written in
1977, provided it is not really out there to get you itself. It's certainly no
ʽSad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlandsʼ, anyway — neither the instruments nor
Brown's vocalizations are enough to strike out the necessary amount of magic to
carry it on for such a long time period.
Overall, the record is quite far from a crying
disaster, as it has been characterized by the very few people who still managed
to hear it (or not to hear it), but it neither has the unique weirdness of
Kingdom Come nor the occasionally brilliant hook of Dance (not a single highlight of the ʽQuietly With Tactʼ
variety). Hence, coming from the likes of Arthur Brown, it is not easily made
clear why the hell it even exists. Each and every one of these tracks, in its
respective genre, could have been better coming from someone else.
FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT (1979)
1) Storm Clouds; 2) Nothing We
Can Do; 3) No; 4) Bright Gateway; 5) Timeship; 6) Come And Join The Fun; 7)
Stormwind; 8) Storm; 9) This Is It; 10) Tightrope; 11) Balance; 12) Faster
Than The Speed Of Light.
Two years after the paths of Crane and Brown
had briefly crossed during the sessions for Chisholm, the two gentlemen fell into each other's arms again,
this time for a fully-fledged collaboration — apparently, at the urge of Klaus
Schulze, with whom Arthur made some recordings and toured a bit in the late
1970s. For a long time, the resulting album was very hard to find — the
pressings were limited, Schulze's German-based label was small, and by the time
somebody even started thinking about transferring the results to CD, the
mastertapes had been lost. Apparently, the recent re-release managed to locate
the original tape, so look for it — I am reviewing a semi- crappy vinyl rip
here, and laziness prevents me from locating a better version. That, and the
fact that the music just isn't good enough to make me crave for a better version.
Not that it's an undeserving album or anything.
The design is as follows: a loosely conceptual album or even a «pseudo-rock
opera», centered around one of Brown's favorite topics — surrealistic travel,
be it in the sci-fi, medievalistic fantasy, or psychedelic register — played
completely (or almost completely, I'm not altogether sure) without guitar
participation, although Crane's numerous keyboards are still augmented by a
normal rhythm section (no drum machines), brass players, and a small symphonic
orchestra. In a way, this is sort of a brave return to the aesthetics of
Kingdom Come (after two fairly «normal» albums in a row), but there is also a
big difference — other than the lack of guitar, it seems that the «story»
elements here were at least as important, if not more important, for Brown,
than the accompanying music.
And so, Faster
Than The Speed Of Light is sort of a cross between Kingdom Come's fantasy
worlds and the «normality» of Brown's 1975-77 period. The brief interludes here
function the same way they would function in a Broadway musical, and the actual
songs weave together classical influences, shades of R'n'B, and some «operatic
pop» for good measure. Since the orchestration never takes center stage, most
of the music is relatively low-key, so prepare yourself for a bit of quiet,
inobtrusive, «off-Broadway» music theater. If you prepare yourself well enough,
it might even sweep you off your feet and take you along on its journey —
although, frankly speaking, I would define those chances as close to one in a
hundred.
The actual tunes are, indeed, theatrical rather than musical. Actually, when they
get closer to «real music», the effect can be repulsive: ʽNothing We Can
Doʼ, for instance, fuses its funky keyboard riffs with silly-sounding
disco choruses, and the point of ʽThis Is Itʼ is to play kiddie marching
muzak on trendy synthesizers (all the while pretending to share Arthur Brown's
revelatory powers with the listeners — not easy to be convincing when the music
itself is in the camp of ʽItsy Bitsy Spiderʼ). But such tracks as
ʽTimeshipʼ, announcing the start of the journey, ʽStormʼ,
which tries to brew the appropriate atmosphere from a set of jerky keyboard
parts and «stormy» strings, and the title track, with its anthemic
brass-dominated coda, are at least curious, if not tremendously effective.
Overall, the album just doesn't seem to have
enough energy to satisfy the expected requirements. The lack of guitar harms
the proceedings: many of these songs are, by nature, fast and dynamic, and
Crane, as good as he is at writing memorable keyboard riffs and overlaying all
the parts for maximum effect, cannot provide all the tension by himself —
especially disappointing in the light of limp, pro-forma orchestration produced
by people who probably thought that they were simply paid for a technical job.
The «concept» is nothing special for those who are already familiar with
Kingdom Come — in fact, most of those who are already familiar with Kingdom
Come will probably think of Faster Than
The Speed Of Light as a «lite consumption version» of Galactic Zoo Dossier. The writing as such, though, is quite decent:
Brown and Crane still remember how to tackle a variety of styles and sometimes
shuffle them over the duration of one track.
From an optimistic standpoint, Faster ultimately deserves a thumbs up
— it's a serious piece of art that still conveys Brown's usual work aesthetics:
do your own thing against all odds, but never make it look like straightforward
nostalgia. However, I couldn't honestly recommend it to anybody but the most
dedicated fan of Arthur Brown — and by «most dedicated», I mean neither the
«heard ʽFireʼ on the radio a month ago and loved it» type nor the
«Kingdom Come were the greatest, man, nothing ever comes close» type, both of
which are the easiest types of «Arthur Brown fans» imaginable to my
imagination. No, you'd really, really have to care a lot about Arthur Brown as
a spiritually endowed human being to like this.
SPEAK NO TECH (1981)
1) King Of England; 2)
Conversations; 3) Strange Romance; 4) Not Fade Away; 5) The Morning Was Cold;
6) Speak No Tech; 7) Names Are Names; 8) Love Lady; 9) Big Guns Don't Lie; 10)
Take A Picture; 11*) You Don't Know; 12*) Old Friends My Colleague; 13*) Lost
My Soul In London; 14*) Joined Forever; 15*) Mandala; 16*) Desert Floor.
Very little information is available on this
and the next album: minimally distributed upon original release, out of print for
years, we are nearing the bottom end of Brown's «scale of recognizability» out
here. The original date does seem to be 1981,
and the only other thing I think I know is that the producer was Craig
Leon, for whom this must have been quite a curious stop in between working
with the Ramones and Blondie on their self-titled debuts and then working with
the likes of Joshua Bell since his late-1990s «conversion» to the world of
classical.
And there was quite a lot to produce: Speak No Tech, contrary to its
self-ironic title, is completely electronic — and we know that when Arthur
Brown goes all the way in any direction, the man may overdo it, but he
certainly does not underdo anything.
So here, there is a transparent attempt to show us all... or, at least, just
to check up on the idea that electronic music does rule the day. Not in the
Kraftwerk sense («robotic-flavored minimalism for elite audiences»), not in the
early period Depeche Mode sense («trivial, but catchy dance music for the
masses») — simply as an answer to the question: «What will music sound like
once live instruments and analog equipment are gone for good?»
Silly-sounding question, for sure, but not that silly when answered by somebody
like Arthur Brown — a guy who, no matter how obnoxious or pretentious he might
get at times, has always meant business. Speak
No Tech is not an example of «electronica» as such; rather, it is an experimental
art-rock album made with exclusively electronic means. With dramatically
recited theatrical pieces, lyrical ballads, «rockers», and only a few numbers
that bear a strong «New Wave» stamp, it manages to be surprisingly diverse and
inventive for a record that seems to have been born out of a simple «oh, I got
me a brand new Yamaha, I wonder what I can do with it now?» type of idea.
As with all of Brown's albums where
«experiment» takes precedence over «artistic expression», Speak No Tech is a little baffling, and is more likely to pique
one's curiosity than the soul. The best example is probably Arthur's daring
deconstruction of Buddy Holly's ʽNot Fade Awayʼ — what used to be a
prime example of Diddley-beat-based dance-pop has been transformed in a sea of
electronic waves, lapping against the aural shore with perfect clock
regularity. It's quite a puzzling piece of work, particularly so if you are
familiar with the original — or, at least, the Stones cover. But who knows,
maybe that is exactly the way that
the little green aliens who made their camp in the back of Arthur's mind dance
to Buddy Holly in their parallel universe.
Odd enough, some of the numbers are quite
catchy: the New Wave synth riff in ʽConversationsʼ, for instance,
might owe its existence to a period of heavy listening to Gary Numan, but is
quite self-contained nevertheless. The repetitive mantra «speak no tech, speak
no tech» in the title track is annoying and hypnotic at the same time; so is
the melancholic dirge melody of ʽNames Are Namesʼ and the amusing «romantic
techno» of ʽLove Ladyʼ. In fact, most of the songs here have something at least to draw our attention
— and the something can well be anything,
including, for instance, an artificially prolonged scream at the end of
ʽBig Guns Don't Lieʼ.
If only there had been some clearer sense of
purpose to the album — its least comfortable aspect is that it seems to be so
totally committed to electronics just for commitment's sake. Usually, electronica
artists are «sonic painters», plunging us into sci-fi environments, or
«atmospheric prophets», using the coldness and detachedness of their
instruments to express cool subtle irony on the dehumanization of humanity, or
something like that. Speak No Tech,
however, is neither complex and multi-layered enough to create such an
environment, nor does it present any good reason as to why synthesizers are the only musical means on it. Okay, so if this
is the music of tomorrow, then why does the first song divert us with a
monolog on the fate of the ʽKing Of Englandʼ? What's up with the
modernist poetry recital on ʽThe Morning Was Coldʼ? Neither these nor
most of the other tracks seem to actively require an electronic coating.
Consequently, Speak No Tech still gets a thumbs up for curiosity's sake — it is certainly a
different album from most, and a
«different» album from Arthur Brown that stands out in his own catalog is
different indeed. But do not despair if you are not able to lay your hands on
it: it is anything but a «lost
masterpiece» — an attractive period curio, for sure, but reflecting much too
blurry a vision to fall in love with it, I'd say.
For the record: the (semi-official?) CD release
of the album adds a bunch of bonus tracks that seems to be randomly assembled
from various points in Arthur's career — including a very early,
hiss-crackle-stuffed white R'n'B number, ʽYou Don't Knowʼ, that he
recorded in 1965 with his first band, The Diamonds. Funny coincidence, I guess,
but the heavily distorted electric organ that drives the song, from a sheer
sonic perspective, fits in brilliantly with the electronics of Speak No Tech — and beats most of it to
hell.
REQUIEM (1982)
1) Chant / Shades; 2) Animal
People; 3) Spirits Take Flight; 4) Gabriel; 5) Requiem; 6) Machanicla Masseur;
7) Busha-Busha; 8) The Fire Ant And The Cockroaches.
Second time around, though, he got it right. I
remember falling in love with this record years ago, and it still sounds just
as awesome as the first day I heard it. Arthur Brown's Requiem, a concept album about the nuclear end of the world,
released at exactly the right moment — the height of Cold War tension in the
early 1980s — might, indeed, be his masterpiece, arguably bested only by Crazy World, and is definitely near the
top positions on the list of «most underrated albums ever», considering that the total number of people who even know
about its existence, let alone actually listened to it from start to finish, must
still be somewhere in the two-digit range.
What makes Requiem
so awesome? One and one thing only — a sense of purpose. For the first time in his life, perhaps, Brown seems at least as interested in conveying an
atmospheric message as he is in cavorting around for crazy experimentation's
sake. And this immediately translates into a quantum leap from Speak No Tech — an album whose main
purpose was to answer the question of whether it is possible to record an
art-rock experience with the sole aid of synthesizers. It was. But the results
weren't tremendously exciting. So now here is an upgrade of that task: is it
possible to record an art-rock experience with the sole aid of synthesizers, and see to it that it becomes
tremendously exciting?
Yes, it is. Requiem is not as densely packed with synth overdubs as Speak No Tech — it prefers to thrive on packages of simple, «brutal» synth riffs and aggressive electronic percussion rather than colorful, but digitally incompetent sonic paintings. It has more of a stern, industrial, claustrophobic flavor to it as well — fully appropriate for an album about the consequences of a nuclear Holocaust. I am not sure as to which of the two records pumps out the larger number of raw «hooks», but the ones on Requiem definitely pack more punch and make more sense than the ones on Speak No Tech.
Odd enough, it is not a «scary» album, as could
be thought of any piece of art that aims to deal with the issue of humanity
destroying itself. «Arthur Brown» has always rhymed with «eccentric clown», and
Requiem is no exception: most of its
numbers are garish and overwrought, if not downright comic (ʽMachanicla
Masseurʼ). But it is not the alleged «terror» of Requiem that makes it so treasurable — on the contrary, it is its
satire, glitz, buffoonery, and, at times, traces of deep humanity. It is, in
some ways, much more difficult to write a funny and exciting album on the end
of the world than a scary and depressing one.
Robotic synth-rockers, such as ʽAnimal
Peopleʼ and ʽMasseurʼ, discard with the «coldness» of Kraftwerk
and tackle their subjects with intelligence and
irony. ʽBusha-Bushaʼ, subtitled ʽThe Last Man On Earthʼ, is
a great thematic vehicle for one of Arthur's trademark «nervous breakdown»
simulations, with ideally matching paranoid synth chords to boot. On the other
side, ʽSpirits Take Flightʼ is populated with light, playful loops
and solos, generating a cute psychedelic breeze that would be completely out of
place on a «serious» end-of-the-world record, but here feels quite at home.
Because Arthur Brown's post-apocalyptic world,
believe it or not, is quite a fun place to be. It is populated with merry
ghosts and friendly robots, and even the cockroaches and the fire ants, at the
end of the day, are cool enough to join in an uplifting pop chorus. Even
Brown's solemn prayer of salvation (the title track) somehow emits optimism
rather than despair (well, the main mantra does go "the missile is dead,
the missile is dead", after all).
Some might find the idea disturbing — who let a
reckless clown like that deal with such a touchy subject? — but it's not as if
Brown's purpose here was to convince people that it is OK to detonate the
bomb just because life will be more fun in the aftermath. It's more like:
«let's try and create the everyday living atmosphere of the post-nuclear
world» — where the remaining old and the emerging new forms of life are
competing for survival. To that end, it's a unique perspective: with most
people bent on painting the horrors
of it all, Brown is going for «fantasy realism» — the horrors are really only
there in the moments of death and destruction, and then it's business, er, life
as usual again. In between all the AIs and the cockroaches and the fire ants
and Archangel Gabriel, that is.
Obviously, all the endless synthesizers can
technically get annoying at a certain point, but, unlike Speak No Tech, Requiem
does not sound dated for one moment — quite the opposite, it presages and
previews a lot of later developments in the electronic business, exactly because, despite having been recorded in
the first years of the Electronic Age, it does not care one bit for following
old or new trends: this is just crazy Arthur Brown, given an exciting artistic
idea and a bunch of digital mechanisms to carry it out, and he does not have to
memorize the latest Ultravox album to carry it out.
Emotionally intriguing, intellectually
stimulating, Requiem continues to
get its well-deserved thumbs up, and I strongly urge everyone to check
it out — at the very least, «boredom» is a reaction that cannot be associated
with this record objectively. One
might question whether it really achieves its set goals, or whether those
goals deserve being achieved in the first place, but definitely not whether the
artist himself had a lot of fun or was driven by inspiration while trying to
achieve them. Personally, I just think Requiem
is cool — certainly one of the least predictable and typical requiems ever
made.
BROWN, BLACK & BLUE (1991)
1) Fever; 2) Monkey Walk; 3)
Unchain My Heart; 4) Got My Mojo Working; 5) Smokestack Lightnin'; 6) Hound
Dog; 7) Help Me; 8) The Right Time; 9) Stand By Me; 10) The Lord Is My Friend.
After the release of Requiem, Arthur Brown disappeared from the public eye —
figuratively speaking, of course, since, for the most part of his career, he
was about the size of an elementary particle relative to the public eye — for
about a whole decade. Maybe he was unable to find even the tiniest,
God-forsaken record label to take care of him, or perhaps he thought he'd said
it all with Requiem and finally
earned the right to retire (and I'd certainly understand that).
However, in the late 1980s, bitten by the
nostalgia bug, perhaps, he started making occasional TV appearances and hanging
out with Jimmy Carl Black, the original drummer, vocalist, and Zappa's
part-time creative partner in The Mothers of Invention. One thing led to
another, and one of these «anothers» ended up as a joint recording by the two —
a limited-issue album of ten R&B compositions, mostly golden oldies, but
also featuring a re-recording of ʽMonkey Walkʼ from Chisholm In My Bosom, just to break up
the predictability.
Unfortunately, at best the record is little
more than just a souvenir of two old pals having a friendly get-together. The
arrangements are tasteful, especially in the context of the late Eighties /
early Nineties — real live playing, guitars, old-fashioned keyboards, brass
section, harmonicas, the works — but never interesting, and Jimmy's input could
just as well be replicated by any seasoned pro on the drums: he may be
explicitly mentioned as an equal partner and have his name as part of the pun
in the album title, but he is never really in the spotlight. And Brown —
certainly Brown is not qualified to pull this off alone, particularly after his
ten-year layoff.
He does seem to understand that merely covering the classics makes
little sense, but the only «improvement» on his mind is changing the songs'
lyrics seemingly at random, and, occasionally, supplementing the regular vocal
melodies with long tangential rants of either a humorous (ʽGot My Mojo
Workingʼ) or metaphysical-intellectual (ʽThe Lord Is My Friendʼ)
nature. Sort of a pitiful decision — I, for one, do not generally need being
told about how all the great religious figures of the past are really one by a
guy who has just wasted thirty minutes of my time.
All I can say is that Brown's vocal skills are
still there, and that ten years have done little to quell his theatrical
manners or arrogance. So if you think that his classic cover of ʽI Put A
Spell On Youʼ is one of the greatest wonders of the universe, you will
want to have these ten tracks as respectable shadows of the past. But I've
always thought that song was just an excellent example of the Brown/Crane
collaboration. Unfortunately, Crane was not involved in the making of this album for the valid excuse of
being dead, and nobody of the same caliber replaced him — none of the musicians
here seem to give much of a damn about «expressivity».
Strictly for hardcore fans, historians, or big
admirers of classic R&B and electric blues who just love these songs so
much, they have to try to appreciate
them in as many incarnations as possible. Of course, these are all good songs,
and they are all done justice, but writing about them in more detail would only
make sense if Brown, Black & Blue
had been a conscious attempt to steal them away from Ray, Muddy, Elvis, and
Howlin' Wolf. It wasn't; in fact, it couldn't. From that point of view, it's
all strictly thumbs
down, and no amount of inventive ad-libbing is going to affect that
judgement. Like I said, only for completists or those with nothing else to do.
ORDER FROM CHAOS: LIVE 1993 (1993)
1) When You Open The Door; 2)
When You Open The Door Pt. 2; 3) King Of England; 4) Juices Of Love; 5) Nightmare;
6) Fire Poem; 7) Fire; 8) Come And Buy; 9) Pick It Up; 10) Mandela; 11) Time
Captives; 12) I Put A Spell On You.
Mr. Brown hit fifty in 1991, not a particularly
bad year for music — and I have no idea if his decision to reactivate his motor
was due to the fact that he sensed fashions changing and maybe even a renewed
demand for his kind of music in the
air, or if he just woke up one morning with a nagging sense of having wasted a
decade of his life on «Nothing Much». Whatever be, the early 1990s saw the man
returning, if not to creating new music, then at least to reliving the old one
— obviously, he was not much of a stadium seller, but all the small elitist
clubs could have him, particularly if he came with a guarantee of craziness.
This live album, released on the small
Voiceprint label, captures Arthur during one of these shows, at the Marquee
Club in London, June 25, 1993 — apparently, one day after his fifty-second
anniversary, since birthday announcements are made several times and ʽHappy
Birthdayʼ rips out of the blue at one point during an instrumental jam
section. Judging by the atmosphere, it was a pretty fun birthday, considering
that he hadn't played live in England for something like a decade and a half —
and certainly more fun than one year later, when he passed out on stage in the
middle of a brain haemorrhage, which led to a six-month hospital stay and
brought the whole «live revival» thing to an abrupt stop. A temporary one, of
course: «The God Of Hellfire» would never let himself be brought down by such a
trivial thing as a cerebrovascular accident.
Brown's touring band consists mainly of
unknowns here: the playing is fine enough (Jeff Danford does a particularly
respectable job of filling in for the late Vincent Crane on all the classic
numbers), but the chief emphasis is on the show (either the whole thing or
parts of it were supposedly filmed as well, and available on Youtube for all
those who like seeing aging glam-art-rock stars doing crazy stuff on stage) and
Arthur's persona — predictably enough. The setlist, as can be easily seen, is
heavily tilted towards Crazy World,
since, by 1993, if anybody vaguely remembered anything about Arthur Brown, it
all had to be tied to the 1969 album, and the God of Hellfire obliged — coming
up with solid recreations of ʽNightmareʼ, ʽFireʼ,
ʽCome And Buyʼ, and, of course, ʽI Put A Spell On Youʼ.
But he does go further than that, and in a much
less predictable fashion. Kingdom Come is paid tribute with ʽTime
Captivesʼ (actually a medley here, with ʽSpirit Of Joyʼ thrown
in the middle as well), and Arthur's early 1980s synthesizer experiments are
honored with bits from ʽThe Fire Antʼ (incorporated inside
ʽMandelaʼ), while ʽKing Of Englandʼ gets a more
guitar-oriented rearrangement than it had on Speak No Tech (not necessarily becoming more interesting in the
process). And then there is some new material, including the opening two-part
suite ʽWhen You Open The Doorʼ, also written and performed much in
the style of Kingdom Come. Was it a shelved outtake or something?
Overall, the impression is positive. The worst possible impression from such
things is that of a desperate old wreck, cashing in on fossilized bits and
pieces of former success, out of time, out of mind, and very transparently out
of money. But here, even without the video, it is clear that the man is nimble,
agile, and still feeling quite cozy in his «Supernatural Shoes»: neither the
voice nor the spirit have aged a bit (actually, Arthur has got quite an
advantage here: like Ian Anderson, he was intentionally downplaying his
youthfulness in his prime, looking and sounding about twenty years older than
he actually was, and this paid off handsomely in the long run — he never had
the Mick Jagger problem weighing on his shoulders).
The new numbers on their own may not give
enough of an incentive to rush out and grab the album: ʽWhen You Open The
Doorʼ is strictly for major fans of Kingdom Come; ʽJuices Of
Loveʼ is an artsified R'n'B number that is neither too stupendous nor too
memorable; and ʽPick It Upʼ is a somewhat formulaic blues-rock
shuffle that is a bit too heavy on synthesizers for my taste. But they fit in
well with the golden oldies, and the resulting mix is quite a faithful and
sympathetic portrait of Arthur Brown at fifty-two. Too bad that Requiem is underrepresented, of course,
but honoring the short memories and limited knowledge of Marquee Club audiences
was an understandable priority, I guess, so thumbs up all the same.
TANTRIC LOVER (2000)
1) Paradise; 2) Tantric Lover;
3) The Bridge; 4) Circle Dance; 5) Swimfish; 6) Voice Of Love From A Magic Hat;
7) Gabriel; 8) Love Is The Spirit; 9) Heartaches From The Music Theatre Piece
ʽAirʼ; 10) All The Bells; 11) Healing Sound; 12) Welcome.
If you have nothing better to do these days,
hunt down Mr. Arthur Brown in one of his asylums and ask him the question: «Mr.
Brown! How come Tantric Lover, your
first recording of original music in the 21st century, is credited to
ʽThe Crazy World Of Arthur Brownʼ, even though that band was
officially proclaimed dead thirty years ago, and you are the only remaining member?»
Wait for the answer, and if it is anything like «why, man, many an Arthur Brown
has roamed through this world, but there has been only one Crazy World of
Arthur Brown so far, and maybe some people will be careless enough to mistake
my new album for the old one — and I do
need the money, I'm all out of fuel for my helmet», feel free to add +100 to
Mr. Brown's artistic karma. However, if it is anything like «well, see here,
man, we just had all these groovy cats to jam with, and I thought, it's like
the spirit of the old Crazy World was coming back, and I know we're all crazy
but some are crazier than most...», please do the reverse.
Because, clearly, Tantric Lover does not sound anything like the old «Crazy World».
And not only does it not try to sound like Crazy World, on the contrary, it
does everything in its power to present Arthur in an entirely new light. For
one thing, it is completely acoustic, with elements of world music represented
by the extensive use of the kora (a West African harp) and the didgeridoo, an
Australian woodwind (and Arthur has a separate band member for each, although
«Phil Brown» does not sound much like a good name for an Australian aborigine,
if you ask me). For another thing... it is not all that crazy, to tell the
truth.
What it is is simply a good album of inventive art-pop compositions in a range of styles
and moods. Some R&B, some reggae, some folk, some blues-rock, a little of
this, a little of that, all of it sort of connected with thin psychedelic vibes
and a general peace-and-love sentiment. Very
well recorded at that — praise the 21st century for something, at least — and the quiet acoustic arrangements allow
Brown's voice to come through bright and expressive; actually, I think this is
the first time ever that he gives it to us from so many different angles.
Crooning, pleading, whispering, muttering, screaming, talking, goofing off,
it's all here. You might hate the songs and the spirit, but the man couldn't
care less — he must have had so much fun doing this.
Since this is still «rock theater», or, rather
«unplugged theater» this time, Tantric
Lover gets by on the strength of its humor and eccentricity, not on any
kind of cathartic vibes — and its quiet, low-key nature will never allow us to
recognize it as a lost masterpiece on the same level with Requiem. But, on the other hand, it also lacks those of Brown's
trademarks that are the most prone to becoming annoying — the reckless,
«anything-goes» experimentation, the permanent tone and signature shifts of
Kingdom Come, even the general «look at me, have you ever seen anyone crazier?»
attitude. And the kora / didgeridoo duets may be a novelty trick, but in our modern
potpourri of ethnic traditions, it can hardly look as surprising as, say, the
drum machines on Kingdom Come's third album, or even Arthur's decision to take
a red-hot synthesizer bath on Speak No
Tech.
No, this is just a «nice little album» here.
And the songs are surprisingly well written and performed.
ʽParadiseʼ steals the opening riff from the Beatles' ʽI'll Be
Backʼ and puts it back where it came from — into a Latin setting, that is
— and works out a half-menacing, half-magical mood punctuated by occasional flourishes
from the kora. ʽCircle Danceʼ is a catchy art-pop / blues-rock
hybrid, irresistible when it comes to toe-tapping, tasteful when it comes to
little bits of out-of-nowhere electric guitar soloing (yes, we can!), and goofy when Arthur begins to
yodel (yodeling is bad, but Arthur is good). ʽSwimfishʼ is set to a
Celtic waltz; ʽGabrielʼ (no relation to the ʽGabrielʼ of Requiem) is slightly funky, spits out
broken bits of slide guitar, and has Arthur doing his best Horned King
impression (or was that Horny King?).
He even delivers a convincing musical aria on ʽHeartachesʼ — with a
fairly complex vocal part to be sung by a 60-year old.
This is definitely not ʽThe Crazy World Of
Arthur Brownʼ — more like ʽThe Cozy World Of Arthur Brownʼ if
you ask me. But first, he is wrong who would assert that Arthur Brown has no
right to have himself a cozy world at
this time in his life. And second, the more I listen to it, the more unsure I
am about which one of the two worlds I like more. Of course, in 1969, Crazy World was on the cutting edge,
whereas Tantric Lover did not make
as much as the tiniest ripple when it appeared, and remains steadily confined
to Arthur's microscopic hardcore fan base. But, just like Requiem, it is an album that could
have a greater appeal — it is ten times as authentic, memorable, and pleasant
as the majority of indie favorites from the same year. Yes, the title and the
album cover are a bit stupid — they could make you suspect that an old dirty
has-been is lurking inside — but do not let it get you off the track: Tantric Lover deserves its thumbs up
full well, and I'd personally nominate at least ʽCircle Danceʼ for
the average 2000s playlist (particularly if this would mean kicking out one
more Bright Eyes tune from said playlist).
VAMPIRE SUITE (2003)
1) Introduction; 2) Vampire
Club; 3) SAS; 4) Africa; 5) Maybe My Soul; 6) In This Love; 7) Confession; 8)
Vampire Love; 9) Completion; 10) Divers; 11) Re-Vamp Your Soul; 12) Isness Is
My Business; 13) Stay.
Arthur's fascination with vampires comes as a
surprise, and perhaps a disappointing one. He'd never expressed tremendous
interest in the subject before — or have I missed something? — yet there he is
now, once again crediting «The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown», this time, for a
complex, relatively plotless story of the fates, characters, and habits of
vampires in the modern world: the story itself comes as a fifty-minute
«audiobook» reading on the bonus CD (which I, honestly, had no will or patience
to sit through), while the first and main CD acts as a «rock musical» loosely
based on the story.
But I mean, vampires?
Isn't a concept album about vampires
a bit too kitschy even for the likes
of Mr. Brown? Shouldn't it be relegated to the likes of Alice Cooper? (And,
speaking of Alice, the Vegasy glitz of the opening number, ʽVampire
Clubʼ, quickly brings on memories of ʽWelcome To My Nightmareʼ).
Moving away from all those concept albums about space travel and humanity's
post-apocalyptic fate into the realm of bloodsucking, garlic strings, and
silver bullets?
I must admit it is a little anticlimactic, what with the vampire subject beaten so
firmly into the ground and all. But at this point in his career — come to think
of it, at any point in his career —
Arthur couldn't really care less about the particular referential topic of his
creativity. His meager sales and near-negative recognizability (how many people
in the world would know or remember that he was still alive in 2003, let alone
making records?) would not increase or decrease depending on whether he was
writing and singing about vampires or about superstring theory. And if the guy
likes vampires, well, why not garner a bit of inspiration from vampires if it
helps make some decent music?
The project is no longer acoustic — a serious
musical needs more than an acoustic guitar and some aboriginal Australian
woodwinds, after all — but neither is it «rock'n'rollish»: pianos, electronics,
and a heavy brass section matter much more on this album than distorted
electric guitars. It does, indeed, in many respects recall different stages of
Alice Cooper's career (be it from the Welcome
To My Nightmare period, the DaDa
period, or some of his recent records), but the bluesy and R'n'B-ish shades are
all unmistakably Brownian.
Curiously, the best stuff here are the soulful numbers — songs that make me
forget all about the context and just freely enjoy the music. ʽMaybe My
Soulʼ, for instance, is one of the most uplifting R&B anthems in the
man's career — with a glorious buildup from verse to chorus, excellent
«old-school» brass parts, and a totally triumphant vocal delivery for a
sixty-year old eccentric white male with a complicated medical history. And
then, immediately after the exuberant optimism of ʽMaybe My Soulʼ,
on comes the cold shower of the desperate soul-blues ʽIn This Loveʼ, an
equally impressive stunner. Vampires? Maybe if you tune in to the lyrics very closely, but all I hear is
exuberance in number one and desperation in number two.
The «kitschy» numbers do not work quite as
well, but ʽVampire Clubʼ is still a nice and catchy Vegasy romp;
ʽVampire Loveʼ is supposed to tele-transport you to 1997, the age of
"those synthesizers and drum machines", Arthur gleefully ironizes in
the introduction to the song (but why 1997, I wonder? the track does sound
somewhat 1997-ish, but wouldn't 1987 be a better bet for such a «nostalgic»
trip?) — and it is a cool mix of rhythmic catchiness and absurd theatricality,
not to mention Arthur's old penchant for combining the uncombinable, such as
modernistic synthesizer loops and very old-school organ solos. And the retro-funk
of ʽAfricaʼ is quite hard to get out of your head once it gets around
to the "Africa, the cradle of civilization" chorus (even if
"Afr-EEH-ca", with the accent on the second syllable, gets a bit
annoying after a while).
The only true misstep comes at the end: Arthur
has a long and dubious tradition of recycling his old (or not so old) material,
and ʽStayʼ here is a remake of ʽGabrielʼ from the last
album, with the precise acoustic rhythms replaced by mushy keyboard atmospherics,
the steady drums replaced with machines and «tribal percussion» scattered all
over the place, and the grinning, sarcastic vocals of the original forgotten
in favor of a sterner, less humorous delivery. Not a very good ending for an
album that does have its fair share of strong moments.
The whole thing never sounds as «unusual» as Tantric Lover, and does not look nearly
as convincing — a half-labour of love at best, compared to its predecessor.
But the well-balanced mix of humor and seriousness, the stylistic diversity, the
never-ending freshness of the vocals, the refusal to bow to modern terms and
conditions, all of this means one thing: The Crazy World of Arthur Brown is
still alive and well, and you do not need to be a loyal follower of this guy
for thirty-five years in order to enjoy it. Yes, a thumbs up by all means — I am glad, though, that the record never
had a werewolf sequel (although, come to think of it, the idea of Arthur Brown
howling at the moon should be quite natural).
THE VOICE OF LOVE (2007)
1) Love Is The Spirit; 2)
Gypsies; 3) Kites; 4) I Believe In You; 5) That's How Strong My Love Is; 6) The
Voice Of Love; 7) All The Bells; 8) Shining Bright; 9) Birds Of A Feather; 10)
Devil's Grip; 11) Safe Now &... .
First thing to be noticed about Brown's latest
studio venture is that it is now credited not to the crazy, but to «The Amazing
World Of Arthur Brown». Sure enough, modesty and humility were never an
integral part of this guy's artistic image, but there is still an even bigger
contradiction here, because The Voice Of
Love is, in fact, arguably the most modest and humble album ever released
by the God of H.F.
On here, Arthur returns back to the acoustic
environment of Tantric Lover: he is
accompanied by much-talented, little-known multi-instrumentalist Nick Pynn,
proclaimed by Brown to «play every string instrument on the planet» or
something to that effect — however, the choice of instrumentation is generally
quite simple: about 70% guitars, and the rest divided between violins,
mandolins, harps, whatever... nothing too exotic as far as my ear can tell.
Furthermore, about a half of the songs are recycled from the past — be it very
recent past, such as ʽAll The Bellsʼ and ʽVoice Of Loveʼ
from Tantric Lover, much older past,
such as yet another rearrangement of ʽLove Is The Spiritʼ, or
pre-deluvial past, such as ʽDevil's Gripʼ, which was the very first
single put out by Crazy World in 1967. In addition, there is a cover of Hal
Hackady's ʽKitesʼ, a song first turned into a hit by Simon Dupree and
the Big Sound (the original Shulman brothers band before the emergence of the
most awesome Gentle Giant) also around 1967. Sweet, sentimental, a bit tangoish
compared to the original, and — nostalgic, of course.
Yes, the whole album is drowned in nostalgia
this time. Most of the tracks, formally, are ballads: Arthur pouring his soul
out to tasteful arrangements of romantic-natured songs, all firmly rooted in
mid-1960s and early-1970s R&B (yet another cover is the old Otis Redding
chestnut ʽThat's How Strong My Love Isʼ, which Arthur approaches here
like a master archaeologist would approach a freshly unearthed relics — almost
literally dusting off and professionally polishing each syllable, with such
great love and respect for the object that the care shown in his singing ends up more lovable than the cover
itself). True enough, there is very little «craziness» here, at least not until
ʽDevil's Gripʼ comes along at the end of the album and shakes us up a
little bit with some of the old maniacal frenzy (yet there is only so much
maniacal frenzy one can conjure with just a couple acoustic guitar tracks and
some screeching violin passages. Say what you will, electricity does matter when it comes to these
matters). But still, it would have been more honest to call themselves «The
Shadow World Of Arthur Brown» at this juncture.
Of the new stuff, meticulously mixed with the
oldies and thoughtfully levelled with them in style, ʽGypsiesʼ is
probably the standout track — make sure you neither confound it with
ʽGypsy Escapeʼ off Galactic
Zoo Dossier or with ʽGypsyʼ off Journey; yes, Arthur doth love the word — if only because it
deviates from the general «love is the spirit» standard and digs into a darker,
Mid-Easternish, violin-dominated pattern, before picking up speed, fury, and
frenzy and leading us to a climactic conclusion (by the way, Arthur's
screampower has not decreased in awesomeness one small bit — at this time in
his life, he can probably do better than Ian Gillan, which just goes to show
that you never really know your luck until you hit sixty).
Generally, though, there are no standouts. For
you and your grandmother, this is a wonderful pretext to simply lower some
barriers and bask in the excellence of Brown's intonations, modulations and
manifestations. This is still theater, replete with exaggerations and
mannerisms, but a very stripped down, life-like, and meaningful sort of theater
— and maybe quite a turn-off for the adventurous fans of Kingdom Come and the Requiem era, or even those who got a
minor kick from the absurdist minor extravagance of Vampire Suite. Personally, I tend to favor Arthur Brown, the evil clown, not the
paternalist-sentimental one — but at this time in his life, he might actually
be doing better as the latter rather than the former. A pleased, if not too
excited thumbs
up — and [obligatory old fart
addendum] needless to say, Voice Of
Love still shows more genuine soul than any given starry-eyed indie market
record from 2007.
ZIM ZAM ZIM (2014)
1) Zim Zam Zim; 2) Want To
Love; 3) Jungle Fever; 4) The Unknown; 5) Assun; 6) Muscle Of Love; 7) Junkyard
King; 8) Light Your Light; 9) Touched By All; 10) The Formless Depths.
One thing at least we know: as of the 2010s,
Arthur Brown remains remembered and admired enough to successfully conduct a
crowdfunding pledge campaign in order to raise the money for his next album. A
very nice thing to know — especially considering that the album itself, despite
having been recorded and issued as promised, has probably received 1,000,000th
share of attention compared to any recent release by any of the day's moronic
«superstars». Yes, Arthur Brown has been relegated to the top back shelves of
the musical world, but as long as he has a small bunch of people offering
support, this will not prevent him from putting out good art.
Once again credited to The Crazy (rather than
The Amazing) World of Arthur Brown, Zim
Zam Zim continues Arthur's surprisingly consistent streak of records that
nobody ever listens to. In fact, it might even be his most consistent set of tunes in the 21st century — no mean feat for
a 72-year old guy. The fact that he's been so crazy and isolated all these
years actually helps, because the songs, once again, are timeless, paying no
heed whatsoever to any modern developments (he does mention his iPod in one
song, but then even Steve Jobs invented the iPod so that he could put himself
some Bob Dylan and some Bach on it), and all for the better.
The title of the album already suggests a
phantasmagoric circus experience (the normal way of life for Arthur Brown, that
is), as does the eerie album cover, as does the opening track with its grumbly
brass fanfares, deep harmonies, and booming message by the maniacal herald
himself. Apparently, Zim Zam Zim is
a state of being that preceded even The Big Bang, to which we are being invited
or, at the very least, of which we are going to be informed. Big news for most
people, table talk for Mr. Brown.
However, if you think that the album is going
to be wildly psychedelic and ultra-other-worldly-dimensional, that is not the
case. All the songs are a little whacky as far as Arthur's singing is
concerned, and many of the tracks feature unconventional arrangements, but the
chief point here, I think, was on integrating a wide variety of different
styles — to put it philosophically, explore the amazing diversity of forms
postdating the solitary state of Zim Zam
Zim. "In my heart all forms of life are joined", quoth Mr. Brown,
and that includes such forms of musical life as ska, rumba, blues, folk, rock,
jazz, and noise. Above all of that, his voice still rings out loud and clear,
and it can be sentimental, aggressive, or just plain crazy whenever he wants —
and he sure as hell don't sound like a 72-year old. Must be all these mystical
mushrooms.
Melodically, most of the tunes are fairly
traditional, but it helps makes them more memorable, and then there are all the
different angles. ʽWant To Loveʼ has a basic ska bounce to it, bu the
percussion sounds like the Nibelung anvils, and the brass, strings, and
accordeon cobwebs in the background are quite a wond'rous combination.
ʽJungle Feverʼ is a minimalistic boogie-blues piece that echoes back
to John Lee Hooker, but the guitar is processed in a way that makes it sound
closer to a Jew's harp, and the accompanying wildlife sounds truly give the
impression of a crazy old man lost in the jungle, strumming his instrument and
going more and more ga-ga with each passing moment. ʽThe Unknownʼ
sounds like a long-lost outtake from Tom Waits' Rain Dogs (Brown even gets a credible rasp-and-gurgle going for the
chorus, although he probably has to live for 72 more years to catch up with Mr.
Tom), but far more densely arranged (background vocals, whistles, very busy and
melodic piano line, etc.).
If you are on the lookout for a good strong
punch, ʽMuscle Of Loveʼ offers an opportunity — nothing to do with
the Alice Cooper song or album of the same name, in particulars, but just as
dark, sarcastic, and glammy as Alice at his most theatrical. The chorus
("don't wear no hat, don't wear no gloves, all you wear is your muscle of
love") should probably have a sexual interpretation (Brown's Tantric
practices are never obsolete), but it is the song's nagging brass riff that
offers the most sexual imagery of it all — and the track's complex,
sense-thrashing, somewhat jungle-like percussion arrangement heats things up
even further.
There are occasional moments of heartwarming
beauty (ʽLight Your Lightʼ), occasional moments of surprising musical
complexity, hearkening back to the old Journey days (ʽTouched By
Allʼ), and a chaotic, percussion-wild conclusion (ʽThe Formless Depthsʼ)
that might, perhaps, have been more formally impressive with a larger budget,
but even so, it is curious to learn how one may paint the be-all-end-all state
of the universe with nothing but tribal percussion, a little electronic
grunting, and some primeval yodeling. I probably wouldn't have imagined it like
that myself, but I do tip my hat to the effort — and to the album in general,
which really gets the easiest thumbs up I remember giving to Brown since Requiem. Highly recommended if you can
find it, and reason enough, I guess, to keep sending in those pledges as long
as the old «muscle of love» still retains a modicum of potential energy.
ADDENDA:
STRANGELANDS (1969; 1988)
1) The Country; 2) The City;
3) The Cosmos; 4) The Cosmos (cont.); 5) Endless Sleep.
There are quite a few «from-the-vaults»
releases from different stages of Arthur Brown's long and diverse career,
judging by the discographies. Most of these, however, are quite hard to get,
some have only semi-official or bootleg status, and, most importantly, it is not
exactly clear if any of them are worth hunting down for anything other than
historical purposes.
I have managed to locate one of them — Strangelands, recorded in late 1969 and
originally supposed to be the second official LP by The Crazy World of Arthur
Brown, although this world was crazy in a different way already: Vince Crane
was out of the band, and the songwriting was dominated by Brown and his
drummer pal Drachen Theaker, even more advanced in the ways of progressive
avantgarde than Arthur. Different, but not any less crazy: how could an album recorded at the Jabberwocky Studios
in the merry land of Puddletown be anything less than competely and utterly
bonkers?
It seems hard to deny the decisive influence
that Trout Mask Replica must have
had on this record, next to which The
Crazy World Of Arthur Brown sounds like a bunch of innocent teen-pop
singles. No more verses, choruses, hooks, or anything targeted at instantaneous
memorability and seduction. Instead, we have several lengthy, multi-part
suites, performed in semi-improvisatory style over a mesh of blues-rock and
jazz-rock patterns that occasionally descend into free-form chaos. Whee!
How is this different from early Kingdom Come?
Well, much of the musical philosophy is the same (and a few of the melodies and
vocal passages actually made their way over to Galactic Zoo Dossier, eventually). But compared to this, even
Kingdom Come was more «commercial» — the sound was tighter and tougher, the
riffs were better fleshed out, and there were sometimes even perfectly «normal»
tracks like ʽSunriseʼ. Strangelands
has no masterplan, other than some vague, constantly fluctuating ideas on how
to fuck your brains in the most effective way. Or, put it differently, in the
most boring way?
The reason why this second album never even
found a proper distributor is that it never had any real meaning. Trout Mask Replica, at the very least,
was a diligently planned, carefully crafted experiment in creating a new face
for music. It took lots of inspiration from progressive jazz masters and
transplanted it into a pop / blues-rock setting with the utmost care. This here
stuff, however, has fairly little to add to what was already quite normal ever
since Frank Zappa's Absolutely Free
came out in 1967, except for Brown's «now I'm Dr. Evil, and now I'm the little
goat in your backyard, and now I'm actually being serious but you won't be able
to tell anyway» routine that gets annoying in about five minutes.
Decidedly, this is one of the most «far out»
recordings of 1969, but individually, every single ingredient here will be
done better by either Pink Floyd, Can, Captain Beefheart, or Amon
Düül II, and collectively
they do not amount to a singular vision — the whole thing is very much transitional,
before the whole plan became realized in a slightly more accessible and
coherent way on Galactic Zoo Dossier.
Recommended only for completists and serious historiographers of weird brain
cell movements; thumbs
down otherwise. PS: Apparently, there is something called Jam, credited to Kingdom Come this time,
another archival release that is also mostly bent on improvisational ravings
and stuff. There is an infinitesimally small chance that it will ever manage to
cross your path unless you make it your destiny, but beware all the same.
MUSIC FROM BIG PINK (1968)
1) Tears Of Rage; 2) To
Kingdom Come; 3) In A Station; 4) Caledonia Mission; 5) The Weight; 6) We Can
Talk; 7) Long Black Veil; 8) Chest Fever; 9) Lonesome Suzie; 10) This Wheel's
On Fire; 11) I Shall Be Released.
As the elder prophets of the whole wide world
of «roots rock», it is only fair, I
guess, that The Band was, if not born, then at least definitively baptized in
The Basement — with Dylan as parent, priest, and godfather all at once. Before
1967, «The Hawks» were basically just a faceless (and, apparently, not very
good) rock'n'roll outfit. But much of Bob's spirit rubbed off on them while
they served as his backing band in 1966 and especially while recording together
in Woodstock a year later, during Bob's recuperation period.
From that point of view, The Band — even their
name is really just a truncated version of «Bob Dylan and the Band» — are
essentially a «daughter branch» of Mr. Zimmerman's enterprise. Ponderous
lyrics whose «meaning» should be extracted from keywords and intonations rather
than wholesale analysis, guruistic attitudes, blues/folk/country chord
sequences, hybridization of traditional «Americana» with modernistic
approaches — all these things they have in common, even if Robbie Robertson and
his pals may not have directly acquired all of them from Bob and Bob only.
Still, behind all that they managed to stake a claim all their own already on
their first (and, in my humble opinion, their best) album — even despite the
fact that it opens with a Dylan cover, and closes with two more Dylan covers.
The obvious factological difference is that The
Band is, after all, a band, and places heavy emphasis on musical arrangements
and «technicality» — not «virtuosity», which none of its members ever had or
ever even strived to achieve, but the utmost care is given to the issues of
putting every instrument in its rightful place, and getting exactly as much
from that instrument as is required for each song. Not to mention that almost
every member is an accomplished singer, and, although they were never big on
harmonies, the collective range of Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, and Levon Helm
should be angelic balm on the wounds of those who failed the task of stomaching
the resonations of their teacher.
But that's just technical, after all. Where The
Band really went their own way was heaviness,
and if you are dead set against it from the start, do not even think of
listening to their records. The Band took themselves and their attitude
seriously — very seriously — from the
very start, they implicitly claimed to have shouldered The Rock of Ages, and if
you deny them that right, chances are that you will never get along. Unlike
Dylan, The Band never ever had a true sense of humor, never showed a single
glimpse of a tongue-in-cheek attitude. This is a dangerous way of conducting
things — it leaves you no space to retreat when pressed against the wall, and
total failure is very easy: all it takes is a lack of talent, or just no sense
of direction.
The good news is that, as it turned out, The
Band had more than enough talent to burn, and the two years spent with Bob made
the direction as precise and easy to follow as possible. On their first album,
there is no filler — more than that, there are no real highlights and
lowlights, no matter how much one could single out ʽThe Weightʼ on
the strength of its ubiquitous "take a load off, Fanny" chorus. In
fact, today I am more and more inclined to take all the eleven songs on Big Pink as separate movements of a
lengthy, coherent, conceptual, single-minded, single-mooded suite — and also
one, may I add, that sounds just as fresh and relevant today as it did in 1968.
Maybe even more relevant (depending
on whether humanity has indeed gotten dumber over the years or if that's just a
statistical illusion).
The suite is, of course, heavily dependent on a
sort of «Bible Spirit» that these guys nurture, although nobody is inviting us
to interpret the album as a straightforward celebration of Christian or even
Judaistic values (not any more than ʽThe Night They Drove Old Dixie
Downʼ a year later would be intended to stimulate us to whip out the
Confederation flag). Mostly slow, stately, emotional tunes, with Garth
Hudson's classically-influenced organ and Richard Manuel's
blues-and-jazz-influenced piano dominating over Robbie Robertson's
rock'n'rollish guitar licks, with «pleading» and «weeping» as the dominant
vocal intonations and catharsis as the generally intended effect. And how does
it work?
Well, if it does not work over the first thirty
seconds — first, with Robertson's «throaty» guitar, run through a «black box»
for plaintive effect, and then with Manuel's tragic ring of "we carried
you in our arms on Independence Day...", then it just doesn't work,
period. But for me, it does. Richard may be overdoing it — he is almost
overstepping his regular physical boundaries — but there is no sense of a
theatrical or, God forbid, «commercial» exaggeration in his singing. On
ʽTears Of Rageʼ and on every other song, The Band are self-appointed
prophets fresh from the pages of the Old Testament, a pack of Jeremiahs weeping
into their beards over [insert your own favorite of humanity's cardinal sins],
and they do mean it and they do believe it, and, in the end, I catch myself
believing them, too.
It helps a lot that, at this stage, The Band
was still very much a collective force and did not particularly suffer from
the domination of one single person — Robbie Robertson does claim credit for
the record's biggest hit and three other songs, but he does not sing much, allows
others to come up with their own ideas as well, and, in the end, Music From Big Pink is this stately-solemn
keyboard-fuelled dirge to the goodness of humanity, rather than the jerkier,
rockier guitar-centered music that The Band switched on to after Robertson
became their unofficial director / dictator and chief songwriter. This gives Pink an even more respectable — and,
the way I have always felt it, much less forgettable — face than whatever
followed.
The three Dylan covers (well, two are actually co-credited
to Bob and members of The Band) are the obvious highlights — particularly
ʽI Shall Be Releasedʼ, sung by Manuel entirely in a mega-vulnerable,
breaking-point falsetto that has managed to take my breath away every time I
heard it. It is also extremely well-placed at the very end of the record, a
drop of spiritual optimism / redemption after all the self-tormenting and
obscure confessions, and Manuel's interpretation of the lyrics — he delivers
them like an opera hero on the brink of expiring from consumption — is one of
the best, I think, in Dylan history, right up there with the Byrds' ʽMr.
Tambourine Manʼ and other cases of people taking the implicit beauty in
Bob's work and making it explicit.
But even without Dylan, Big Pink would still be just as big. ʽThe Weightʼ is
nonsense when taken literally, but apparently, neither Aretha Franklin nor the
rest of the armies of soul performers who took it up were intent on taking it
literally — all they heard was a swing between the suffering vibe (verse,
relayed from one member to the other) and the redemption vibe (chorus, shared
by all the members), and they took it as authentic, and so should everyone
because it is: this is no fake
preaching shit à la mode, this
is The Band's signature song for spiritual relief, and I do feel that relief
when singing along — although mostly, it probably has to do with those lilting,
powerful piano chords that build a
little stairway up to each chorus.
But there are plenty of other «elegant prayers»
on the record — ʽIn A Stationʼ melancholically slides along,
meditating about life, love, and the essential uselessness of both;
ʽCaledonia Missionʼ epitomizes the sadness of the universe
("hear me if you're near me, can I just rearrange it?" is one of the
most sadly intoned lines I've ever heard in a pop song); ʽLong Black
Veilʼ, yanked out of the popular traditional repertoire because its words
and mood fit in with the purposes of Big
Pink to a tee, is quickly echoed by The Band's own ʽLonesome
Suzieʼ. Only ʽChest Feverʼ, with its grinding harshness, stands
somewhat apart and does not have a lot of sense — many people must have
subconsciously felt that the whole song was like a long outro to Garth Hudson's
passionate, Bach-derived solo in the intro, and The Band would later play up to
that feeling by allowing Garth to really stretch out on that intro in concert,
turning it into a full-fledged instrumental showcase of baroque solemnity and
sternness.
Still, I do not want to concentrate much on
individual songs: the more I try to, the tougher Big Pink sticks together as one inseparable entity. A pretentious
entity, yes, and maybe even an insult to those who think that traditionally
oriented music should not be spoiled with the arsenal of beat poetry (but why
not?), or that it should not be «sanctified» and «sacralized» by an overtly
intellectualized approach (but what's the harm?). Like any influential album, Music From Big Pink is indirectly
responsible for much evil in this world, including, among other things, the
artistic meltdown of Eric Clapton, but that is also an indication of its
greatness — it ought to have taken a really strong record to make a tough guy
like Eric start seriously thinking about a change in his musical direction. In
a way, Music From Big Pink really
was that first record which started to turn «rock» into an institution — it certainly
was one of the first rock records that sounded like it was made by old, wisened, experienced people, rather
than fresh, hot, sizzling body-and -soul grub for the young ones. And just look
at how much facial hair was shared between all the band members, too — most
rockers still preferred a clean shave in 1968.
All this might make it kinda hard to get a real
hard kick out of Big Pink when you
are still mostly driven by instincts, gut reactions, and usually prefer to
increase your collection with hardcore and power pop rather than somebody
sounding like a mix of Woody Guthrie, Alan Ginsberg, Moses, and Aharon. Once
you get older, though, or go through some decelerating experience (losing a
leg, for instance, or a loved one), Music
From Big Pink — and I guarantee this with a 90% certainty — is one of
those relatively few truly beautiful
pieces of music that will offer a good dose of spiritual healing. Thumbs up
for one of the best albums of 1968.
PS. The CD reissue is essential for all the
remastering jobs and informative liner notes, but not necessarily for the bonus
tracks — most are just alternate takes with minor variations or versions of
songs that should rather be heard on Bob Dylan & The Band's Basement Tapes. Although, of course, a
song like ʽKatie's Been Goneʼ completely belongs, in form and spirit,
on Big Pink proper, no question
about it.
THE BAND (1969)
1) Across The Great Divide; 2)
Rag Mama Rag; 3) The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down; 4) When You Awake; 5) Up
On Cripple Creek; 6) Whispering Pines; 7) Jemima Surrender; 8) Rockin' Chair;
9) Look Out Cleveland; 10) Jawbone; 11) The Unfaithful Servant; 12) King
Harvest (Has Surely Come).
It does make some sense to argue about what's
better — Music From Big Pink or The Band — because these two records,
in between themselves constituting the backbone of «The Hawks»' legacy, are
significantly different from each other. At least, different enough to have had
Robert Christgau at the time openly admit his dislike for the former and
unexpected deep passion for the latter: he went as far as to claim that The Band could actually trump Abbey Road as the best album of 1969.
Well, as far as I am concerned, The Dean could go fly a kite with that opinion, but as for the rest of it,
his position may be understood.
The
Band marks the beginning of
Robbie Robertson's steady rule as The Band's creative director and major
mastermind — much like Paul McCartney with the Beatles since 1967, he seems to
have occupied this position just by being the most focused and «goal-oriented» of
'em all (causing much grief among the «slackers», who would later accuse him
of despotism, vanity, greed, and other deadly sins a-plenty; not that there was
nothing to it, but, as we all know, one man's industriousness may easily be
another man's authoritarianism). Of the twelve songs on their second album,
eight are credited to Robbie exclusively and four are allegedly co-written.
Furthermore, The Band is generally
faster, livelier, «rockier», and much more guitar-based than Big Pink — arguably the only song here
to carry over the dirge-like, solemn spirit of its predecessor is the ballad
ʽWhispering Pinesʼ, not surprisingly, co-credited to Richard Manuel.
And, of course, the main difference is that
this time around, the album does not hover in circles around the idea of
«Americana» — it simply dives in, head, feet, and tail. You do not even need to
go further than the song titles, with all the references to Old Dixie, Cripple
Creek, Cleveland, rags, pines, and rocking chairs. Throw in Manuel's and
particularly Levon Helm's «authentic» rootsy manner of singing, chord sequences
and instrumentation that derive ever more transparently from jugband,
bluegrass, dancehall, and vaudeville, and all that remains to seal the deal is
the brown color of the album sleeve and the grim, weather-worn, but somewhat
satisfied faces of the five band members on the photo. Just got paid for
working on the railroad?
I think that I will forever remain convinced
that The Band made a wrong turn here — that with Music From Big Pink and its subtle, but perfect synthesis of
tradition, innovation, Dylan, and non-Dylan they were onto something fabulously
universalist and mind-opening, but that The
Band blocked further progress on that path and steered them towards a less
risky, humbler, but not quite as universally appealing route (of course, it was
more appealing to Christgau, but the guy has always been a notorious
isolationist in the first place, so no surprise here). If ever stuck in between
ʽCaledonia Missionʼ and ʽUp On Cripple Creekʼ, I will
choose the former: the vibe of ʽCripple Creekʼ is much easier to
understand, assimilate, and explain away than the whiny mystique of
ʽMissionʼ. These here songs sort of landlock and pigeonhole themselves,
and with them, The Band's entire subsequent career.
But as it always happens with talented
ensembles establishing a fleshed-out formula, first time is always forgivable,
since it is usually the best time; and The Band themselves must have thought of
it as a fresh, focused «reboot», or else they wouldn't have called it The Band. There is no denying neither
the sincerity and dedication of approach, nor the melodicity and catchiness,
nor the inventiveness and great care that went into the arrangements. In fact,
Side A of the album is probably the most tightly packed Band sequence of radio
hits and concert favorites; and Side B is arguably the most promising Band
sequence for the time when one finally gets sick of radio hits and concert
favorites, and starts yearning for something underrated, forgotten, and
secretly fabulous. Maybe ʽJemima Surrenderʼ is a bit too lumpy and
straightforward in its pub-rock brutality, but at the end of the day, I have no
specific concerns to voice about the rest.
The sheer power of these songs is perhaps most
evident in the simple fact that I very rarely, if ever, hear any civil rights
activists' protests about ʽThe Night They Drove Old Dixie Downʼ. You
get lots of flack if you happen to be Margaret Mitchell, D. W. Griffith, or a
member of Lynyrd Skynyrd singing ʽSweet Home Alabamaʼ, but somehow the
textbook image of Levon Helm drumming his heart out to "well he was just
eighteen, proud and brave / but a Yankee laid him in his grave" is admired
and imitated — even by the likes of Joan Baez, who never minded singing about
the life of Virgil Caine... despite the fact that the song does not present convincing evidence that
Virgil Caine was not, by all means,
an active nigger-hater.
Of course, Robertson is very careful here with
the lyrical imagery — carefully sidetracking all the uncomfortable issues — but
this is still a tragic song about the downfall of Southern pride, want it or
not, and yet its popularity quickly went nationwide; Yankees all over the place
were na-na-nah-ing along with the chorus fairly soon, regardless of their
convictions. It took all the authenticity, melodicity, and, actually, humility
of the piece (it crawls along at a snail's pace, and even though the chorus is
based on group harmonies, its overall volume levels hardly rise over those of
the verse), I think, to turn the song into such a universal charmer; but even
so, I have never been able to empathize with the title character.
I feel much more at home with ʽUp On
Cripple Creekʼ, the other of the two big Helm-sung hits on Side A — sort
of an optimistic, earthy, downhome retort to the heavy-handed suffering of
ʽThe Weightʼ, with which they roll at more or less the same pace. Of
course, it would be nowhere near as memorable if not for Garth Hudson's
inventive, wah-wah driven Clavinet part, made to sound like a traditional Jew's
harp, especially during the brief triumphant soloing buzz at the end of each
verse. It adds the necessary bit of hot spice to what would be an otherwise
rather bland blues-rock arrangement. But then there's also the funny
repetitiveness of the chorus (the triple hit of "she sends me", "she
mends me", and "she defends me" is enough in itself to make the
experience unforgettable), and there is something about Helm's singing here
that makes the whole song, like, the
quintessential embodiment of America's «road spirit», maybe only rivaled in
that department by the Allmans' ʽRamblin' Manʼ (although the lyrics
of ʽRamblin' Manʼ fall back on clichés of the genre much more
frequently).
Maybe, in the end, the real hero of this album is not Robbie, but still Garth Hudson —
always on the watchout that the arrangements of the songs elevate them from
«genericity». Not only would there be no ʽCripple Creekʼ without the
Clavinet, but there would be no ʽAcross The Great Divideʼ without
the slide trombone parts, lending a friendly, supportive, muscular shoulder to
Manuel's «wimpy hero» vocal delivery, and there would be no ʽWhen You
Awakeʼ without the snowy organ and accordion to reinforce the plaintive
singing. Then there's also Rick Danko's folk dance fiddle parts on ʽRag
Mama Ragʼ (a song that borrows its title and sort of «suggestive» lyrics
— "shag mama shag, now what's come over you", really? — from old
dance blues tunes, but little else), Richard Manuel blowing a mournful, soulful
sax on ʽThe Unfaithful Servantʼ... indeed, Robertson might be
providing the bodies here, but it mainly falls to the other guys to bring in
the clothes, and, in a way, most of them were perfectly entitled to eventually
go to war with Robbie over the credits — most of these, in spirit and form, are «Band» numbers.
The one song here that has always looked like a
particularly rewarding dark horse is stuck at the very end. Already on
ʽJawboneʼ, the band experiments with 6/4 signatures, but the result
is a bit clumsy, if not uninteresting. However, it is a completely different
story with the contrast between the verse and chorus in ʽKing
Harvestʼ — a truly bizarre effect there, what with the verse being pinned
to a fairly standard, if a bit funkified, blues-rock pattern, and the chorus verging
on «dark folk», delivered in a stern, uncompromising manner; the whole song is
like a dialog between the poor, struggling, emotional farmer, voiced by Manuel,
and the cold, impassionate forces of nature that count away the seasonal
regularities ("scarecrow and a yellow moon... pretty soon a carnival on
the edge of town... smell of the leaves from the magnolia trees in the
meadow..."). The whole song is like the fighting of a predeterminedly
unwinnable battle — with Manuel holding on until he can hold on no longer, and
then a piercing, hysterical little solo from Robbie takes over to wail the last
wail (and, for that matter, have the last word on the album itself: notable,
since there are very few Robertson solos of note on the album altogether).
The whole thing eventually ties into a very
coherent panorama. Way too heavily intellectualized, of course, to be «truly
authentic» — it would be interesting to know what all those pre-war folk and
blues survivors who had the chance to hear it thought of the execution — but
that is the very point of it: Robbie
and pals are not trying here to put themselves in the shoes of their heroes,
they are trying to bridge the gap between these heroes and contemporary art,
much like Bob used to do on his earliest albums (or on John Wesley Harding, for that matter). Those who think the whole
idea is just a lot of bull will do better to stick with Creedence Clearwater
Revival, who did the same thing, but without a single whiff of pretense. But
those who think that there is no reason why modernism and traditionalism shouldn't ever try to sleep in the same
bed, feel free to join with me in another major thumbs up. (Even though I reiterate
that I'd never be willing to raise those thumbs to the level of Abbey Road — a record that appeals to
the senses on so many more levels — or even to the level of Music From Big Pink — because the best
album by The Band cannot not have any
Dylan covers on it — so up yours, Mr. Dean, for being way too clever for poor
little me!)
STAGE FRIGHT (1970)
1) Strawberry Wine; 2)
Sleeping; 3) Time To Kill; 4) Just Another Whistle Stop; 5) All La Glory; 6)
The Shape I'm In; 7) The W. S. Walcott Medicine Show; 8) Daniel And The Sacred
Harp; 9) Stage Fright; 10) The Rumor.
There is a lot of good songs on The Band's
third album, and it is respectable that, even though everyone probably expected
them to make a carbon copy of the self-titled LP, they went ahead and did
something different. The bad news is, Stage
Fright is no longer a record targeted at making you kowtow to it. It is a good album, but not a grand one. And when the ambitions of The
Band no longer amount to «grandiosity», things may start getting plain dull.
Who needs goddamn roots-rock if «it's only roots'n'roll», after all?
The usual judgement is that Stage Fright recedes from the mode of
«Americana Bible» and delves into more personal matters — that most of these
songs reflect Robertson's troubled state of mind in the wake of the band's
critical and commercial success, and also in the wake of the Sixties-to-Seventies
transition, what with the burnout of hippie idealism and all. Since one man's
«sincerity / honesty» is another man's «egomania», Stage Fright splits listeners and critics, depending on how far
they are willing to go in their feelings for Mr. Robertson.
The title track is a prime example of how this
split can work even over one person. On one hand, it is undeniably catchy, energetic,
well-arranged (major kudos, as always, go to Garth Hudson for providing that
shrill, piercing, slightly paranoid organ backing), and — I guess — as sincere
as they come. And with the right singing choice: Rick Danko, much better at
delivering ecstatic, bleeding heart confessions over fast tempos than Manuel
(who works more efficiently in slow, drawn-out situations) and Helm (whose
Southern mannerisms would be out of place here).
But on the other hand, I can never get rid of
the feeling that Rick and Robbie overdo it — the lyrics, the jerky tempo, the
hysterical notes (especially those glottalized high pitch bombs on the third
line of each verse — yes, Rick, we know
the protagonist is supposed to feel bad), all of this is a little too much for
a tune that, essentially, deals with just a common phobia. I mean, singing
about fuckin' stage fright? Vietnam,
Altamont, the Hendrix/Joplin deaths, and these guys are making a Shakesperian
tragedy out of stage fright? Always
seemed inadequate to me, even if we agree to take the whole thing as a metaphor
for something bigger.
Similar feelings apply to the second classic
off the album: ʽThe Shape I'm Inʼ, a song that is, curiously enough,
also elevated to forget-me-not status
through the inspiration and hard work of Hudson, huffing and puffing behind the
organ, layering layers of impressively magical passages onto the song's
somewhat dumb-sounding simplistic martial structure. This time, it is more
about a general sense of dread and desperation ("Out of nine lives, I
spent seven / How in the world do you get to Heaven?"), and Manuel gives
it an earthier, more easily credible feel than Danko on the title track, but
there is still something that doesn't feel quite right about it. Maybe if
they'd invented another 19th century character to sing the song...
Basically, what I am trying to say is that I
don't care all that much for Robertson's attempts to turn The Band into an
outlet for venting his personal frustration: that's a much narrower vision than
the one he displayed just a year earlier, and the clear-cut reason for Stage Fright as the beginning of The
Band's slide into irrelevance and (relative) mediocrity. But this is only a
problem if we look at the curve in its entirety: sitting there all by itself, Stage Fright is still essentially impeccable,
especially because the other members of the crew are still enthusiastically
backing Robbie and coming up with good creative support.
In fact, there probably isn't one single duffer
in the basket. Even a generic country-blues opener like ʽStrawberry
Wineʼ still stands out, courtesy of Levon Helm's ridiculously «nasal»
delivery (was a clothespin involved or what?) and Hudson's cheery-drunken
accordion part. A long-time favorite of mine is ʽThe W. S. Walcott
Medicine Showʼ, one of the most sarcastic-sounding tunes on showbiz ever
written and arguably The Band's most focused victory over the music hall genre
(and "once you get it, you can't forget it" indeed — this is the
album's most seductively hummable tune). ʽTime To Killʼ was released
as an A-side, overshadowed by ʽThe Shape I'm Inʼ as its B-side, but
is hardly inferior — it just doesn't hammer its hooks into your brain with the
same muscular brutality as its lucky counterpart, but its «treated» guitar
sound gives it a delicious, almost power-poppy resonance, one of those unique
experimental tones of the early 1970s: if you ever felt that way about Big
Star's ʽSeptember Gurlsʼ, this is kind of a close feeling here.
Parts of the album are notably more Dylanesque
than anything on The Band: most
notably ʽAll La Gloryʼ, where Levon's phrasing and modulation sound
intentionally modeled after Bob — this song is best enjoyed on some lazy, hazy
afternoon when your own dreams aren't enough and you are in the mood for some half-psychedelic,
half-rootsy romanticism. Most of the verses of ʽThe Rumorʼ also sound
like they could have been written directly in «The Basement». Not surprising,
perhaps — now that they are out of their Civil War uniforms, it can't be helped
if they keep subconsciously drifting back to the man who, want it or not,
taught them their songwriting in the first place. In any case, these are all
good, credible stylizations.
Overall, Stage
Fright is not a textbook masterpiece, but it does work as an «alternative»
greatest album for those too haughty, snobby, or fed up with the double crown
of Big Pink and The Band, and whatever be, it sure ain't a lazy record — the concepts, feelings, general ideas may be less
sweeping and impressive, but the craftsmanship level here remains at an
authentic A+. The final thumbs up has a lot to do with Hudson, in
particular — the one man out there to clearly show that the best «roots rock»
still comes fully equipped with stems, leaves, and branches.
CAHOOTS (1971)
1) Life Is A Carnival; 2) When
I Paint My Masterpiece; 3) Last Of The Blacksmiths; 4) Where Do We Go From
Here; 5) 4% Pantomime; 6) Shoot Out In Chinatown; 7) The Moon Struck One; 8)
Thinkin' Out Loud; 9) Smoke Signal; 10) Volcano; 11) The River Hymn.
Cahoots is like Stage
Fright without the spark, completing the transformation of The Band from
something deeply extraordinary, which they were in 1968, into something
completely ordinary. If The Band was
an epic undertaking, masquerading as a roots-rock record, and Stage Fright was a roots-rock record, preserving some traces of «epicness», then
Cahoots is just a roots-rock record,
period. Maybe not coincidentally, it represents an almost complete takeover on
Robbie's part: only ʽLife Is A Carnivalʼ co-credits Rick and Levon
for anything, and the other two songs that have somebody else's name on them
are either a fresh Dylan cover (ʽWhen I Paint My Masterpieceʼ) or a
bit of guestwork on the part of Van Morrison, who happened to drop by (ʽ4%
Pantomimeʼ).
Curiously enough, all of the songs are good —
once all the bile has been spent, these Cahoots
tunes stay with me at least until the end of the day, and maybe more. We just
naturally expect more than «just good» from a bunch of guys that happened to
have the nerve to set themselves such impossibly high standards. In particular,
I would want more «band» involvement: it almost seems as if the idea of
bringing in New Orleanian bandmaster Allen Toussaint to lead a big brass band
on ʽLife Is A Carnivalʼ put the rest of the teamplayers out of focus,
particularly Hudson, who does not come up with even a single outstanding
keyboard pattern. For this album, it looks like he was there in the studio just
to get paid — diligently playing his organ, accordion, and sax parts on
whatever songs require them, then packing it in for the night. The rest of the
band follow suit. In addition, the vocals are horrendously produced for most of
the songs — Levon? Richard? Rick? Who cares, it's all one big mess.
But these are still good songs. Sad, intelligent, cynical, ironic, soulful, and
«hooky» enough. The mid-tempo «rockers» (quotation marks are necessary, since
by this time Robbie had completely forgotten all about what it means to «rock»,
and most of the other guys never knew it in the first place), such as
ʽShoot Out In Chinatownʼ, ʽSmoke Signalʼ, and
ʽVolcanoʼ, are lazy, lumbering sloths that formally fulfill their
purpose — get you to sing along to the merry chorus of "shoot out in China
town, they lined 'em up against the wall", the ominous chorus of
"smoke signal, hear the drums drumming", or the puffed-up, angry
chorus of "volcano, I'm about to blow!", and no, the latter is not about humping — it's about feeling
bad, which is this album's weakest point: no matter how they huff it and puff
it, it just doesn't sound like
they're about to blow.
Maybe they are at their «about-to-blow-ing-est»
on ʽ4% Pantomimeʼ, which, halfway through, turns into a wild
screaming match between their guest star, Van The Man, and all of the singing
members of The Band, who just barely manage to outshout the toughest throat in
Ireland. For the typical Van Fan, well accustomed to The Man's lack of
conventional structure and emphasis on «blue improvisation», this will be a
nice addition to the canon — for a Band fan, maybe not so much, because
improvised, out-of-control rucus is not one of their strongest sides.
I think, although I am not sure, that if Cahoots has a heart, it is buried
somewhere in the ballads — ʽLast Of The Blacksmithsʼ, with a
medicinal dose of Manuel's universal sorrow, is the only track that would feel
relatively at home on The Band;
ʽWhere Do We Go From Hereʼ is a simple, but relevant title, and Rick
sings the song so plaintively that you almot do feel sorry for the crew;
ʽThinkin' Out Loudʼ is a solid grower, an exercise in «quiet
desperation», and so on. These are all emotional songs — never get around to
working real magic, but they do try to make the best of these guys' knack for
soulfulness, even despite the so-so production and the fact that we have
already heard it all before: try as it might, ʽLast Of The
Blacksmithsʼ cannot beat the stateliness of an ʽUnfaithful Servantʼ.
In the light of this all, it is mighty mighty
ironic that Cahoots kicks off so
deceptively, with the Toussaint-led ʽLife Is A Carnivalʼ. The match
is not made in Heaven: Toussaint is
the legitimate carrier of the New Orleanian go-merry, nonchalant, Mardi Gras
attitude, whereas these guys are stern, morose, humorless Canadian hicks, and
they can only exploit the atmosphere for sarcastic purposes, which they do. In
the end, all this merry brass sort of goes to waste, even if the song is still
relatively well written and memorable. In fact, it might have been a big
mistake to include it as the album opener — it immediately casts off a whiff of
confusion, and you know all about these critical ratings: nothing influences
them as much as the first song on the record.
That The Band themselves never thought highly
of Cahoots is well reflected on Rock Of Ages: a double live album
recorded in late 1971, a time when they should have been heavily promoting the
new album, includes nothing from it except for ʽLife Is A Carnivalʼ (ʽWhen
I Paint My Masterpieceʼ only got added on later as a bonus track). And I will say that Cahoots works better as a whole than as a sum of its individual
parts — implying that any individual songs in any live show would inevitably
pale next to their earlier competition — but I will also say that, if you need
to save up shelf space, this is where you can allow yourself to stop. The Band,
by definition, could never release a truly «bad» album (fortunately, they
disintegrated before the Eighties hit hard upon all the veterans), but whatever
they had to say, they said it all on their first three records. The rest is
just variations for the loyal adepts. Still, if only for reasons of generous
inertia, a thumbs
up here is not out of the question.
ROCK OF AGES (1972)
1) Introduction; 2) Don't Do
It; 3) King Harvest (Has Surely Come); 4) Caledonia Mission; 5) Get Up Jake; 6)
The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show; 7) Stage Fright; 8) The Night They Drove Old
Dixie Down; 9) Across The Great Divide; 10) This Wheel's On Fire; 11) Rag Mama
Rag; 12) The Weight; 13) The Shape I'm In; 14) Unfaithful Servant; 15) Life Is
A Carnival; 16) The Genetic Method; 17) Chest Fever; 18) (I Don't Want To) Hang
Up My Rock'n'Roll Shoes; 19*) Loving You (Is Sweeter Than Ever); 20*) I Shall Be
Released; 21*) Up On Cripple Creek; 22*) The Rumor; 23*) Rockin' Chair; 24*)
Time To Kill; 25*) Down In The Flood; 26*) When I Paint My Masterpiece; 27*)
Don't Ya Tell Henry; 28*) Like A Rolling Stone.
Not everybody in the world would have easily
dared to slap a title like Rock Of Ages
onto a live album, not even a double one. Pompous double (and triple) live
albums were all the rage in the early 1970s, of course, but The Band still
managed to stand out — releasing a concert record that could easily compete
with the average prog live album in pretentiousness, without being in the least
saddled by «prog» trappings (probably not counting Garth Hudson's solo
spotlight, but we'll get to that soon enough).
Whoever saw The Last Waltz — and we will get around to that, too, eventually —
could hardly walk away from it untouched by The Band's aura of self-importance
(be it «awestruck» or «irritated», no matter), but would probably remain
somewhat uncertain as to how much of that self-importance was immanent and how
much of it was conjured by Scorsese's direction: after all, the master is quite
famous for being able to perceive Biblical solemnity in whatever object he has
chosen to idolize this morning. One listen to Rock Of Ages will put that uncertainty to rest: no Scorsese
anywhere in sight, but the not-so-bad boys of Rustic'n'Roll are every bit as
manipulative with their majesty here as they would be at their final show. Or,
for that matter, any time, any day, as long as there were more than two of them
assembled in any one place.
Recorded on the last days of December in New
York City, at a venue (hardly coincidentally) called «Academy of Music», culminating
in a Bob Dylan cameo (which was actually left off the original album, but
faithfully waited in the archives until the remastered CD reissue), this is a
totally huge show, with about 75% of The Band's material from their first
three, «already classic» albums interspersed with a lonely ʽLife Is A
Carnivalʼ off Cahoots and a few
R&B covers here and there to provide the Impressive Link With The Past. The
Bob cameo actually took place in the early morning hours of January 1, 1972,
and on this new, expanded reissue finds its rightful place as the «climax» of
the show. I mean, what with the humble servants working their asses off for two
hours, it could be expected of The Prophet to come out at the end and provide
one final blessing. He provided four.
In addition to all the grandness, Allen
Toussaint himself, fresh from working on ʽLife Is A Carnivalʼ, had
been recruited for writing extra horn arrangements, and a five-piece brass band
is augmenting The Band here on many of (fortunately, not all) the numbers.
Contrary to expectations, this does not provide the music with an authentic New
Orleanian flavor, but it does add extra «beef» to the sound (and extra tragic
hero flavor to ʽThe Night They Drove Old Dixie Downʼ), and this here
is a show that needs as much beef as it can swallow without chewing.
The songs themselves, actually, are generally
played quite close to the way they were originally recorded, because, to quote
[an imaginary] Robbie Robertson, «why tamper with [my] perfection?» Apart
from the extra brass parts, an occasional extra electronic gimmick from Garth,
and a few flubbed notes from the vocalists here and there (very few, actually, compared to the usual leeway allowed themselves
by most rock performers — these guys were tremendously disciplined onstage,
which many people are tempted to interpret as «boring»), the music is
faithfully transposed into a live environment. If there is anything here that
overwhelms, it is simply the realization of how many goddamn great songs they
had on these three albums — not a single stinker out here, just wave upon wave of
greatness.
The bookmarks — that is where they fall short. Neither
Marvin Gaye's ʽDon't Do Itʼ which opens the main part of the show,
nor Chuck Willis' ʽHang Up My Rock'n'Roll Shoesʼ that closes it,
really stand comparison with The Band's own songs. Not because they aren't fine
old respectable R&B numbers — they are — but the idea here is to somehow
ensure this link between the old and the new, to build a bridge between the old
Hawks, still crediting the reverend masters, and the new Band, the masters of
today. It doesn't work. ʽDon't Do Itʼ does set a groove, but the band
almost seems to be afraid to truly «get into it», and as for Chuck Willis'
number, well, it does look like they may not want to, but they pretty much hung
up those rock'n'roll shoes for good, because this here ain't rock'n'roll,
really, it's bland, generic pub boogie, and no amount of Allen Toussaint's
brasswork on top is able to transform it into the «celebration» that it is
supposed to be. In a way, these two numbers predict the terrible failure to
come of Moondog Matinee — and the
questionable excesses of The Last Waltz,
of course.
What works much
better is when it goes the other way — into the depths of pretentiousness, with
Hudson showing off his «J. S. Bach Discovers The Power Of Electricity» routine
on ʽThe Genetic Methodʼ, a lengthy organ instrumental that grew out
of the original keyboard introduction to ʽChest Feverʼ. It is
gimmicky, although certainly not as «flashy» as stuff that Keith Emerson or
Rick Wakeman or even Jon Lord would be doing at the time — sort of a half «mock-baroque»,
half «tongue-in-cheek-gothic» improvisation that shows who was really the boss (Hudson was the only one
of them all with the proper academic training), and just as you start thinking
that you have just about had enough, the clock strikes twelve (maybe) and Garth
launches into ʽAuld Lang Syneʼ and the audience goes whoooh. A
touching moment, really, and much more exciting than their lame, half-hearted
attempts to «rock out». Leave ʽDon't Do Itʼ to its original master,
boys — or, at least, to the likes of The Who, because there is no way you can unlock its ass-kicking potential.
This is not the way.
The Dylan guestspot on the bonus section of the
CD is indeed a nice conclusion, but a bit superfluous if you already know Before The Flood — recorded two years later,
but setting more or less the same groove and with Bob in the same top-notch
«shouting» form. The song selection that they do is rather curious, though,
with two of the four numbers taken from The
Basement Tapes (still not released officially at the time) — Bob is clearly
being modest here, concentrating on stuff they wrote and made together, rather
than turning The Band back into his backing outfit. But then, yeah, they're
still on stage for the fans, so they can't help doing ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ
anyway. Good version, but not too necessary.
Overall, yeah, Rock Of Ages — The Band pull no punches as they prepare themselves
and their legacy for immortality. The album is more «important» as a memory of
an event, a collection of terrific songs, a self-aggrandizing eulogy, than as
something you will want to listen to over and over instead of the studio
originals. Yet it does get a thumbs up, like any live album with a great
setlist, plenty of verve, inspiration, and professionalism. The Band might not
have had a lot of ideas about how to present their material on stage in a new
light (the brass arrangements are a debatable touch), but they certainly
showed us all how much they loved their own material on that stage. And I don't
mind — they may be narcissistic about their songs, but as long as these are
great songs, it is a pleasure to witness them get so orgiastic about them. On The Last Waltz, the egos may have been
getting too out of hand — on Rock Of
Ages, they are flaunted just about right.
MOONDOG MATINEE (1973)
1) Ain't Got No Home; 2) Holy
Cow; 3) Share Your Love With Me; 4) Mystery Train; 5) Third Man Theme; 6) Promised
Land; 7) The Great Pretender; 8) I'm Ready; 9) Saved; 10) A Change Is Gonna
Come; 11*) Didn't It Rain; 12*) Crying Heart Blues; 13*) Shakin'; 14*) What Am
I Living For; 15*) Going Back To Memphis; 16*) Endless Highway.
Apparently, Robbie Robertson got tired one day
from waking up and looking out of his window to discover the rest of The Band
picketing his apartment with large signs reading «ROBBIE WE NEED MORE SONGS
FROM YOU» and «ROBBIE GRACE US WITH EVEN MORE OF YOUR EGO». In order to teach
those guys a lesson, he decided that from now on — for a short while at least,
enough to record one whole LP — The Band were no longer The Band, but would
revert back to The Hawks, the barroom/shithouse-playing backing band for
Ronnie Hawkins back in their early «Swinging Toronto» days. Alternatively, this
may have been a collective decision,
but who can tell now? It ain't 1973 any more, and they all lie in their
autobiographies anyway.
Cover / tribute albums were not exactly all the
rage in 1973, when the world was still young, but they were beginning to
coalesce as a separate form of art — the other well known example from the same
year is Bowie's Pin Ups — and with Moondog Matinee, The Band ended up
playing a serious part in that coalescence. Since, at any point in their
post-Basement existence, The Band could have leisurely changed their name to
The Academy, Moondog Matinee is no
exception: it finds our merry bunch of bearded musical intellectuals
«institutionalizing» the lightweight entertainment that they originally grew
out of. On a sheerly technical level, they succeed; on a more abstract artistic
one, they utterly fail.
At least the choice of material is exquisite.
Instead of sanctifying early garage-rock à
la Bowie (which would be silly, since The Hawks were never garage-related),
or early rockabilly, which would make them look like a British Invasion band,
or Chicago blues, which would make them into a second-rate Butterfield Blues
Band, they go for a diverse selection that does involve a bit of rockabilly,
but generally concentrates on old school soul, R&B, gospel, and New Orleans
party muzak — and very few of these songs even begin to come close to «radio
standards».
If anything, Moondog Matinee is priceless for its edutainment value. If you
squint at the credits hard enough, you might want to find out about Clarence
«Frogman» Henry and his throaty croak (which no one in The Band, shameful as it
is to say, was able to reproduce — so they just put an electronic distorted
effect on Helm's voice), or about The Platters, or about LaVern Baker — or you
just might want to shift gears and go watch The
Third Man, which is a really good movie, although perhaps just a tad
overrated in terms of significance and quality by today's gourmet hipsters,
according to whom, almost everything
with Orson Welles in it automatically turns to gold... but we were actually
talking about The Band here.
To tell the truth, this is not really a «bad»
album. The Band honestly try to «Band-ify» the originals — in fact, come 1973,
they were so much one with their general style already, they could not have
really gone back to their bare roots even if they wanted to — making this, at
the very least, into an intriguing modernization of the freshly dug-out
«non-classics». However, that is also the root of the problem: some of these
songs yield quite unwillingly to the «Band-ification», and some just plain
rebel and turn into uncomfortable small puddles of embarrassment.
I am talking first and foremost about the
«rock'n'roll» numbers — in one of his monologs on art philosophy in The Last Waltz, Robbie said something to
the effect of "been there, done that, could do that along with the best of
'em, got bored and moved on" about their early days playing rock'n'roll,
and listening to these tepid, languid takes on Chuck Berry's ʽPromised
Landʼ and Fats Domino's ʽI'm Readyʼ (which happens to be one of
my personal favorites from the early boogie era, so I take this as a personal
offense) sure confirms that stance. Actually, the prime culprit here is not
Robertson, but the rhythm section of Helm and Danko — a clear-cut case of
«overcooking it»: not content to play simple four-fours and minimalistic, but
steady boogie lines, they give both of the tracks a «swing» attitude that
completely robs them of their basic point, because if one cannot properly
headbang to these tracks in a clear, metronomic fashion, what good are they?
Completely no good. Ashes to ashes, funk to funky — if anything, Chuck Berry
should be left to the care of the Rolling Stones, and Fats... Fats can probably
take good care of himself.
They do a better job with Junior Parker's /
Elvis Presley's ʽMystery Trainʼ, which gets seriously funkified without completely losing the vibe of the
original — and also turned into a playground for Hudson, who is busy unfurling
a little electronic / proto-IDM symphony in the background while Robbie and the
boys are merrily hacking away. The weirdness of the combo alone would be sufficient
to make it passable; unfortunately, the groove goes on well past its welcome,
because even Garth runs out of creative ideas a couple of minutes into the
song.
Likewise, everything else is randomly
hit-and-miss. One upbeat tune may reach the right spot because of the proper
amount of party flavor and tongue-in-cheekiness (ʽAin't Got No Homeʼ,
even despite the lame attempt to electronically compensate for the lack of a
proper «Frogman» voice) — another one may be a shy, tentative recreation of a
much more energetic and overwhelming original (ʽSavedʼ — somebody
tell these guys to stay away from African-American parishes). One Manuel-sung
ballad may be sweet and touching (ʽShare Your Love With Meʼ), another
may attempt to squeeze his free-roaming style into a rigid waltzing doo-wop
arrangement where his attack loses focus (ʽThe Great Pretenderʼ). One
side-closer may be the completely unexpected rearrangement of the ʽThird
Man Themeʼ, now a lazy-summer-day Band-style chillout polka (no zither!),
another side-closer may be a moving, but totally expendable Sam Cooke cover (ʽA
Change Is Gonna Comeʼ is, I believe, one of those few tunes that are so
personal, you'd really have to live it out before adding it to your repertoire
— no reasons to doubt Danko's sincerity, but he is not living it out here, he
is just paying a humble tribute to Sam).
Thus, it ain't all totally without redemption,
but I would never in my life call Moondog
Matinee a «success» — certainly not if the goal here was to «update» all
the songs for the modern age, nor if the goal was somehow to prove The Band's
«authentic» status: ʽThe Weightʼ and ʽThe Night They Drove Old
Dixie Downʼ assert their authenticity and heritage far more effectively
than a million Chuck Berry and Sam Cooke covers ever could. And this is a thumbs down
— still a must-own for the serious fan, an «important trifle» in the legacy,
but, nevertheless, also an album which The Band's discography could definitely
skip over.
The CD reissue adds a whole bunch of bonus
tracks from the same sessions, most of them completely passable (particularly
a lame-o-licious acoustic guitar cover of Chuck Willis' ʽWhat Am I Living
Forʼ, with a subtle melody change that totally kills off the smooth flow
of the original) — including one and one only original track: the studio version
of ʽEndless Highwayʼ, which, to tell the truth, would later be done
with far more verve and energy on the joint Dylan/Band live album Before The Flood. No surprise here,
though — like main course, like bonus.
NORTHERN LIGHTS – SOUTHERN CROSS (1975)
1) Forbidden Fruit; 2) Hobo
Jungle; 3) Ophelia; 4) Acadian Driftwood; 5) Ring Your Bell; 6) It Makes No
Difference; 7) Jupiter Hollow; 8) Rags & Bones; 9*) Twilight; 10*)
Christmas Must Be Tonight.
The first «proper» Band album in four years —
and, as it turned out, the last to have any significant importance: Islands would be recorded a year later
mainly to fulfill contractual obligations, and all the rest comes after the
Robertson-less reunion. This time, though, Robbie pulls no punches: everything, every single chord change
and word is credited to him personally, setting the proper stage for the apex
of self-glorification that would come with The
Last Waltz. But on the other hand, this is still The Band — Levon's
drumming, Hudson's magic rituals behind the keyboards, and Manuel's and
Danko's singing count as much here as Robbie's songwriting.
On second thought, emphasize that — they count more than Robbie's songwriting. Because,
frankly speaking, by the time they reached this point, Robertson was far from
interested in the technical side of this business. Not a single song here shows
the inventiveness of a ʽKing Harvestʼ or even an ʽUp On Cripple
Creekʼ — for the most part, this is pretty standard fare roots-rock, and
you can easily get the likes of ʽForbidden Fruitʼ,
ʽOpheliaʼ, ʽIt Makes No Differenceʼ, etc., on a million
billion other roots-rock records released before and after November 1975.
So what does
make the difference is the «Band treatment» of these, rather conventional,
musical skeletons. And in 1975, that treatment was a little different. Northern Lights is nowhere near as
ambitious as Big Pink — it never
launches a full-scale assault on epic Biblical heights; instead, it channels
the group's depressive, world-weary emotional side into smaller rivulets, and
even subtly disguises all that darkness by means of playful rhythms that
regularly invite you to dance along (ʽOpheliaʼ, ʽRags &
Bonesʼ) or at least to join in with all the «group fun» on sing-along,
clap-along choruses (ʽJupiter Hollowʼ). But in reality, this is
probably the saddest, bitterest record they ever made in their entire career.
Sound-wise, there are two important changes.
First, the record reflects Hudson's new-found passion for synthesizers: there
are lots of «progressive» synth textures here, generated with enough sense and
taste so as not to sound ridiculously dated to the modern ear — and
contributing quite highly to the overall cold effect of the album. Second,
Robertson finally finds a way to compensate for his lack of singing voice —
developing a new style of soloing, with emphasis on jerky, tearing,
high-pitched, agonizing «scream-chords» (you can see a lot of it in The Last Waltz, with Robbie always
pulling funny faces at the same time) that might be a bit «show-off», but are
actually delivered with grace and harmony (ʽForbidden Fruitʼ and
ʽIt Makes No Differenceʼ are two prime examples of this new style).
It all adds a bit of pizzazz, and it all works out.
Lyrically, ʽIt Makes No Differenceʼ
is one of the simplest Band songs ever — just a regular old lost love lament —
but it is the album's definitive highlight, I think, maybe Danko's finest vocal
performance: the guy was born on this earth to lament about lost love, and,
finally, here is a tune tailor-made for him to wail on, with Robbie on
«shrieking guitar» and Garth on moody sax as the perfect counteracts. Slow,
simple, lengthy, and quite beautiful — and note the utter lack of theatrical,
overwrought «desperation», particularly in the dirgey, but very much restrained
chorus harmonies ("and the sun don't shine anymore...").
ʽAcadian Driftwoodʼ is usually
designated as the album's centerpiece, because it is the longest, the most
«epic», and the only directly «Americana-History-related» song on the record,
and also because all three singers share lead vocals in turn (think ʽThe
Weightʼ) — but in reality, its melancholy is no more and no less
impressive than on any other song here. It does urge one to self-educate,
though (I honestly knew nothing about The /Great/ Acadian Expulsion myself
before hearing the song), unlike ʽIt Makes No Differenceʼ, but then
don't we all have Al Stewart for those sort of purposes?.. Anyway, Byron
Berline plays a catchy fiddle and Garth is all over the place with accordeons
and recorders, so it all sounds great in the end.
On other sides of the compass, The Band comes
up with fabulous grooves — ʽRing Your Bellʼ toys with funk/R&B,
but not in a «rip-it-up» manner (these guys didn't even have enough ripping
power to properly play ʽHang Up My Rock'n'Roll Shoesʼ, how could they
compete with a James Brown or a Funkadelic?), rather in a «let's find a nifty
musical solution here» manner: the keyboard / brass call-and-response bits are
exactly that kind of solution. ʽOpheliaʼ is dance-oriented blues-rock
at its simplest, but somehow, again, the brass/synthesizer arrangements coupled
with Levon's snarly delivery make the whole thing really tense and snappy.
In a way, this is The Band's Abbey Road
— not in terms of similarities in style, of course, or relative importance to
the world of music as such — but in terms of working like a swan song from an
old, wisened, very much self-conscious, yet still fully competent and proactive
swan (the biggest difference probably being that the Beatles knew very well
this was going to be their last record, whereas Robbie had no thoughts of
cutting access to The Band's studio hours as of yet). Northern Lights sets out to prove nothing — everything that could be proven already was: it's just a bunch of songs gelled
together by a common feeling of loneliness and abandon and wrapped in several
layers of mature wisdom and professionalism.
I do demand that credit for all these songs be
removed from «Robbie Robertson» and given to «The Band» — had Robbie Robertson
hired himself The Eagles or Black Oak Arkansas to record the album, the results
would most likely turned out appropriately mind-numbing. But in the end, it's
all between Robbie and his former pals; my role in all this is strictly limited
to providing a respectful thumbs up. And I do like the stylish bonfire
cover, except that even there, they
had to put Robbie on top. On the other hand, as legitimate head of the outlaw
gang, he now gets the honor of being hung highest of them all.
ISLANDS (1977)
1) Right As Rain; 2) Street
Walker; 3) Let The Night Fall; 4) Ain't That A Lot Of Love; 5) Christmas Must
Be Tonight; 6) Islands; 7) The Saga Of Pepote Rouge; 8) Georgia On My Mind; 9)
Knockin' Lost John; 10) Livin' In A Dream; 11*) Twilight; 12*) Georgia On My
Mind (alt. take).
If Northern
Lights was The Band's Abbey Road,
then this is their Let It Be: a
somewhat «improper» album, consisting mainly of outtakes and a few last minute
recordings, chronologically scattered over a large period and released mainly
to satisfy formal obligations, so that they could get out of their contract
with Capitol and be free to release The
Last Waltz for Warner Bros. The analogy is not perfect — Let It Be was more cohesive, and came
out already after the band's total demise, whereas Islands was not necessarily supposed to be the end of The Band. But
in overall terms of status and quality, it is comprehensible.
Actually, it is not an overtly «bad» record —
in general, it might rank somewhere close to Cahoots — but it is strictly a minor donation to serious Band
fans: no new insights or discoveries will be made here. The only track that is
frequently extolled as a highlight is not even an original composition — rather
an acknowledgement of Richard Manuel's vocal genius, as he almost pulls off (or
just plain pulls off, depending more on your pre-assumptions than actual
feelings) a perfect Ray Charles impression on ʽGeorgia On My Mindʼ
(actually recorded in 1976 to endorse Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign).
However, this is not a «new reading» or anything, more like a successful,
heartfelt homage to a great influence, and it belongs on a Ray Charles tribute
album rather than on something more serious. Besides, Hudson's synthesizer
backing is a little annoying here — some simple piano would be more effective.
Curiously, there is very little Levon on lead
vocals — almost as a couple of leftover chewing bones, he is saddled with a
perfunctory, mechanical cover of the old blues-rock standard ʽAin't That A
Lot Of Loveʼ (much better done by Taj Mahal anyway), and the brief, upbeat
album closer ʽLivin' In A Dreamʼ. The rest is mostly handled by Rick
and Richard, and their somewhat similar high soulful deliveries result in a
pretty, but somewhat monotonous atmosphere — what Islands would really need is a couple of tough rootsy rockers,
ʽOpheliaʼ-style, as such, it is as lullingly smooth as the sea
surface on the album cover.
That smoothness works fine and well for the
first two songs — ʽRight As Rainʼ is an elegant and soothing intro
with Manuel providing his usual restrained majesty, and ʽStreet
Walkerʼ is an equally convincing retort from Danko, with moody harmonies
and cool piano/brass interplay (even so, rather heavily derivative of
ʽStage Frightʼ, I'd say). But it starts getting tiresome around the
time that the generically composed ʽLet The Night Fallʼ comes up, and
most of the rest is, at best, just pleasant background muzak — starting with
the little «fawn dance» of the instrumental title track (why do they call it
ʽIslandsʼ with such a pastoral atmosphere, I wonder?) and ending with
ʽThe Saga Of Pepote Rougeʼ, which is mostly just Robbie indulging in
his mythological fantasies and the rest half-heartedly playing along — or the
total throwaway of ʽKnockin' Lost Johnʼ, mostly «famous» for being
one of the very few Band songs on which Robbie himself takes lead vocals, and
little else.
Rather pitiful, too, is ʽChristmas Must Be
Tonightʼ, a song allegedly written by Robbie on the birth of his son —
just goes to show how much the man thinks of himself if the analogy is with
baby Jesus (and I suppose that Levon, Richard, Rick, and Garth are, without
realizing it, playing the part of the Shepherds — well, in a way, since all
the royalties go to Robbie anyway). Besides, the lyrics are donwright pathetic
for Robertson's usual standards: "How a little baby boy bring the people
so much joy?" It is not even clear what makes this so cringeworthy — the
lack of proper grammar or the weird decision to write in such a «simplistic»
Christmas fashion. But the results are
cringeworthy, in any case.
Still, a contractual obligation has to be
respected, so it is kinda fruitless to castigate the band for not delivering
yet another masterpiece — on the contrary, we should probably acknowledge this
as yet another demonstration of the greatness: even a clearly filler-choked,
uninspired record is still listenable and, in select places, mildly charming.
These are, indeed, scattered «islands», on which you can encounter — at random
— awful desolation, paradise beauty, or simply nothing in particular. In a way,
that, too, is exciting in its unpredictability.
THE LAST WALTZ (1978)
1) Theme From The Last Waltz;
2) Up On Cripple Creek; 3) The Shape I'm In; 4) It Makes No Difference; 5) Who
Do You Love; 6) Life Is A Carnival; 7) Such A Night; 8) The Weight; 9) Down
South In New Orleans; 10) This Wheel's On Fire; 11) Mystery Train; 12)
Caldonia; 13) Mannish Boy; 14) Stage Fright; 15) Rag Mama Rag; 16) All Our Past
Times; 17) Further On Up The Road; 18) Ophelia; 19) Helpless; 20) Four Strong
Winds; 21) Coyote; 22) Shadows And Light; 23) Furry Sings The Blues; 24)
Acadian Driftwood; 25) Dry Your Eyes; 26) The W. S. Walcott Medicine Show; 27)
Tura Lura Lural; 28) Caravan; 29) The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down; 30) The
Genetic Method / Chest Fever; 31) Baby, Let Me Follow You Down; 32) Hazel; 33)
I Don't Believe You; 34) Forever Young; 35) Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
(reprise); 36) I Shall Be Released; 37) Jam #1; 38) Jam #2; 39) Don't Do It;
40) Greensleeves; 41) The Well; 42) Evangeline; 43) Out Of The Blue; 44) The
Weight; 45) The Last Waltz Refrain; 46) The Last Waltz Theme; 47*) King Harvest
(Has Surely Come); 48*) Tura Lura Lural; 49*) Caravan; 50*) Such A Night; 51*)
Rag Mama Rag; 52*) Mad Waltz; 53*) The Last Waltz Refrain; 54*) The Last Waltz
Theme.
Unless you are a complete novice in this whole
«rock» business, there is probably no need to introduce The Last Waltz — one of the most well-known and successful,
image-wise, publicity projects in the history of rock'n'roll show business.
With Martin Scorsese and Robbie Robertson, two of the most ambitious
procreators in their respective spheres of business, at the helm of the
project, it quickly became much more than a «farewell concert»: more likely,
the «farewell concert to end all other farewell concerts», The Greatest
Goodbye & Thanks For All The Good Times Ever Bidden In The History Of
Mankind.
In fact, as far as the legend goes, everybody
else in The Band was pretty much taken aback at the proposition — nobody except
for Robbie really had it in mind to quit the touring circuit, and many thought
(correctly) that the man's super-ego finally got to his brain core, and there
he was, eager to kill off the hen with the golden eggs for the sake of a
bet-it-all gesture of grandiosity. The only reason they all had to go along
with the plan was that they didn't have much choice at the time: without Robbie
as chief songwriter, primary organizer, and activity center, The Band would not
be able to exist anyway (or, at least, that is what they thought back then: the
future would prove them partially — but only partially — wrong). So everybody
had to bring along their own hemp rope and their own bar of soap, and then
Scorsese filmed them all committing group suicide on November 25, 1976, at the
Winterland Ballroom.
The ultimate irony of it all, of course, is
that, for the most part, Robbie was absolutely right in his decision. Yes, it
could be that The Band still had one or two good, even borderline great, albums
left in them, but as good as Northern
Lights was, it did not add much new substance to their legacy, and the
upcoming era of punk, new wave and synth-pop would have inevitably swallowed
them up anyway, as it did with every other roots-rock band in existence. In
fact, the decision to pull the plug on The Band was almost prophetic — The Last Waltz was held the same year
that The Ramones was released. In
1976, there was still some space under the sun left for The Band; in 1977,
there already wouldn't be anything but a small dark corner.
The real depth of Robbie's cunning, however,
lies not in the very fact, but in the scope
of the concert. On the surface, an innocent, friendly idea to invite a few
guest star colleagues for The Band's last concert might seem just like that —
just an innocent, friendly idea. In reality, what Robertson and Scorsese cooked
up was nothing less than a grand eulogy for the whole vast field. The very name
— The Last Waltz — is telling
enough, but if it were allowed to drag on for a little longer, chances are we'd
see something like: The Last Waltz — The
Day That Music Died, And The Greatest Band In The World Became The Gravedigger.
Clearly, the guest selection was far from
randomized. Early rock'n'roll heroes, including The Band's own original mentor
(Ronnie Hawkins). Even earlier blues patriarchs (Muddy Waters). The world of
light jazz and New Orleans happiness, represented by Dr. John. The world of
electric blues rock, represented by Eric Clapton. Blue-eyed soul in the guise
of Van Morrison. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell — the male and female emissaries,
respectively, of the deep folk tradition. Mainstream glitzy pop, represented
by Neil Diamond (who, despite all the problems people sometimes have with his
apparition, really does belong in
this context). And, of course, Bob Dylan himself stepping out to close the
show with ʽI Shall Be Releasedʼ, a song about imminent death and
sweet redemption. And in and out and in and out of it all, The Band, The Band,
and once again The Band, acting as that one particular glue pack to hold it all
in place — «One Band to rule them all,
One Band to find them, One Band to bring them all and on that stage to bind
them, in the Land of Winter where seven 35 mm cameras have been installed».
But here is the last and ultimate moment of
irony — even once you understand the setup and how they were all framed, there
is no way, really, that you can stop watching The Last Waltz or listening to the respective LPs. Because on a
pure, simple, song-by-song basis, this was
a damn fine concert, and one that all the members of The Band enjoyed giving,
even despite being dragged into this by force; whatever their feelings towards
Robertson might that been, on that particular evening, November 25, 1976, deep
inside their hearts, they must have been pleased to be «The One Band», and took
to the task with all due responsibility. Maybe even with extra responsibility — most of the songs are played so close to the
originals that it makes the results a little less fun than on Rock Of Ages — but there is no
questioning the effectiveness of the locked-in-a-groove thing, and that is what
makes a live Band show really count.
Like Woodstock or other such «legendary»
events, The Last Waltz, in audio
form, has gone through a large number of incarnations over the years —
beginning as a 3-LP set, then issued as a 2-CD set with a few bonus tracks,
finally, as part of Rhino Records' extensive reissue program, appearing as a
huge 4-CD boxset with 24 previously unreleased tracks. I definitely suggest
going along with the latest and largest version: half of the last CD, featuring
alternate versions from rehearsal takes, might be expendable, but the rest
conveys the real scope and sequencing of the show much better than the early
truncated set. I mean, given that the idea was to make it BIG, one might as
well go along with it — even including the two instrumental jams at the end of
the show. Plus, it is always nice to get three Joni Mitchell songs instead of
one, and a fun rendition of Louis Jordan's ʽCaldoniaʼ out of the
mouth of Muddy Waters.
Discussing The
Last Waltz in terms of high- and lowlights is useless: there is so much
material here that the discussion can take forever, and none of it matters
anyway. The Band end up performing 99% of their hits, including three
blistering performances of songs from Northern
Lights (ʽOpheliaʼ, in particular, is so tight-bolted that it ends
up rocking real hard, despite having no trademarks of a hard rocker
whatsoever), and none of their misses (although, strange enough, the
ʽGenetic Method / Chest Feverʼ section is grossly abridged on all
versions of the album, with just a few little bits of the former and a brief
instrumental run through the latter — probably that usual trick where an audio
equivalent of a video release has to
have one or two songs missing or grossly abridged, and vice versa, pressing
the audiophile into joining the videophile, and vice versa).
The guest stars are all of the highest order
(well, maybe bar «The Hawk», who merely adds a bit of barking and growling to
the tight jam The Band got going on ʽWho Do You Loveʼ, and Neil
Diamond, whose ʽDry Your Eyesʼ is really a generic folk anthem and not
too diagnostic... maybe ʽKentucky Womanʼ would have been a more
telling choice) — particular kudos goes to Clapton, whose sparring match with
Robbie on ʽFurther On Up The Roadʼ prompted Eric into launching in
one of his fiercest, flashiest solo passages at the end; and to Joni Mitchell
for the gorgeous backing vocals, sung offstage to Neil Young's
ʽHelplessʼ while Neil himself, according to reports, was floating in
coke heaven (not that it impeded the performance in any way). As for the rest —
just go see it and hear it for yourself. One might love The Last Waltz, or one might despise The Last Waltz — Robbie and Martin ensured that The Last Waltz itself cares about your
feelings little more than the Tower of Pisa or the theory of evolution.
One special note must be made about «The Last
Waltz Suite» — a little special extra that The Band made specifically for the
audio variant of the experience. This is a rather strangely sequenced
concoction of mostly newly written numbers that supposedly run the gamut from
blues-rock (ʽThe Wellʼ) to country-folk (ʽEvangelineʼ, with
Emmylou Harris as guest vocalist) to pop balladry (ʽOut Of The Blueʼ)
to gospel (a re-recording of ʽThe Weightʼ with The Staple Singers
adding «authenticity») to classical-lite (ʽThe Last Waltz Themeʼ
itself, sort of a «Johann Strauss Jr. meets The Third Man Theme» thing). The
new numbers are not particularly memorable, and overall, the effort seems so
slight in comparison to the powerful live show that this «studio epilog» feels
like a misfire — even if it does offer the fan a few last minute new
compositions, and even if the resulting addition of Emmylou Harris to the
roster is a good thing in itself.
But a quibble is but a quibble, and it does not
in the least dim the general effect. The
Last Waltz is a grand experience,
and it does close the book not only
on The Band, but on the heyday of tasteful, intelligently crafted roots-rock as
well — blame it on Robbie to have collected 70% interest for the task of
assisting in the closure, but in a way, he only stated and logged the
inevitable. And that is just the philosophical underbelly of it — and then
there are the gut feelings, which simply state that The Last Waltz is a lot of fun for all those who like The Band and
the guests of The Band, and that there is no way the album could be deprived of
a thumbs up,
be it the 3-LP, the 2-CD, or the 4-CD incarnation. One Neil Diamond don't spoil
no show, anyway.
JERICHO (1993)
1) Remedy; 2) Blind Willie
McTell; 3) The Caves Of Jericho; 4) Atlantic City; 5) Too Soon Gone; 6) Country
Boy; 7) Move To Japan; 8) Amazon (River Of Dreams); 9) Stuff You Gotta Watch;
10) Same Thing; 11) Shine A Light; 12) Blues Stay Away From Me.
Ironically, even though Robbie initially
planned for The Band to simply quit touring and become a studio outfit
(possibly hoping to recreate the conditions for the Sgt. Pepper experiment), fate had it that «The Band» — without Robbie — came back together in
1983 exclusively as a touring outfit, spending an entire decade as an oldies act,
during which they had to outlive the tragic suicide of Richard Manuel, unable
to cope with his alcoholism and other problems.
Maybe if tragedy did not strike so soon, we
might have had ourselves a «Band» album from the 1980s — were such a thing able
to prevent Manuel from his rash decision, I might even agree to endure it — but
as it is, it is actually very, very good that «The Band» waited until the early
1990s, when the electronic boom had passed and live instruments came into
fashion once again, to make their first move. Because, even though Jericho adds nothing whatsoever to
their reputation, it also does not make any serious detractions.
«The Band», reconvening to further the legend
for the appropriately biblically titled Jericho,
in 1993 retained but three old war horses — Danko, Helm, and Hudson — with new
members Jim Weider and Richard Bell respectively taking the places of Robertson
(guitars) and Manuel (keyboards), and Randy Ciarlante adding extra percussion;
furthermore, there are about a dozen guest musicians emerging here and there on
saxes, fiddles, mandolins, steel guitars, you name it — a little surprising,
actually, because in the past, it was the band members themselves who would
eagerly supply all that instrumental variety. This is already suspicious, but
then there is the songwriting: of the twelve tracks, only two involve real
Band members (Helm and Danko) as co-writers, with the rest either being covers
of old / contemporary material, or special commissions from some of the guests
(the complete list of songwriters, both living and dead, amounts here to a
whoppin' 23 names altogether).
Nothing great could come out of such a huge
melting pot, and nothing did come out. Of course, the vocals, the laid-back
rootsiness, and the complexity of the instrumental layers reveal Jericho as a proper Band album — in
form and style, at the very least. But the album has no real point to make. It
is neither a proper continuation of «Encyclopaedia Americana», nor a nostalgic
look back at how they left the Encyclopaedia without completion, nor even an
attempt to create something —
anything — and prove to the world that «The Band» still has a finer grip on
reality than the average random band playing for pennies on your local street
corner. What Jericho really is is
merely a friendly get-together. Wanna play something? Yup, why not. Okay then,
let's play. Got nothing better to do anyway. Beats playing poker till dawn.
So they play — Bob Dylan's ʽBlind Willie
McTellʼ, and Bruce Springsteen's ʽAtlantic Cityʼ, and some old
stuff from Willie Dixon, and a Jules Shear song because Jules Shear happened to
be passing by, and an Artie Traum song because Artie is such a nice guy and
cares about the environment and stuff, and a bit of this and a bit of that,
and it all sounds nice on the surface, but bland, shallow, and boring once you
try to take a dive.
The slow tempos of the songs bring the average
running time of each number to about five minutes, so that Jericho drags on and on and on — above
all else, it is poorly sequenced, with the most generic, comatose song of all,
the formulaic 12-bar ʽBlues Stay Away From Meʼ occupying the final
six minutes like an extra ten pounds of excess body fat. Only twice in all do they
engage in an attempt to speed up the tempos, and only once does it sound even
remotely fun and funny, on the sarcastic ʽMove To Japanʼ, where, to
the merry sounds of Hudson's trusty accordion, Levon sings about the advantages
of relocating one's life to Tokyo since we are all so used to Japanese stuff
in our life already (a point that had already been well stated by John
Entwistle in his ʽMade In Japanʼ twenty years earlier, actually). The
song itself is little more than an average piece of fast honky tonk boogie,
though.
The whole album has this laid back,
on-the-porch atmosphere — lazy, inoffensive, and absolutely devoid of serious
interest. Even Hudson, who used to be so involved in finding non-trivial solutions
for arranging The Band's early classics, has nothing in the way of fresh ideas.
ʽAtlantic Cityʼ is a lukewarm, energy-free take on Bruce's classic,
which the romantic mandolin part is unable to compensate for in any way. Artie
Traum's ʽAmazonʼ reflects the guy's New Ageisms, with an «atmospheric»
keyboard arrangement by Garth who, alas, is no Enya when it comes to riding
that train. The old blues covers (ʽStuff You Gotta Watchʼ, ʽSame
Thingʼ) kick about as much ass as a skeleton — for comparison, check out
any live version of ʽSame Thingʼ played live around the same time by
the Allmans — but if you are not really in the mood for ass-kicking, they might
go down relatively easy with a cold beer after a hard day's work.
As a «memento», Jericho also hauls out Manuel's last archival recording with the
band — a dusty cover of the hit country single ʽCountry Boyʼ; having
been cut in 1985, it is the lone example of what an «Eighties Band» could have
sounded like, and apart from Manuel's vocals (which are always lovable and, so
it seems, were relatively unharmed by the man's predilection for Grand
Marnier), I don't think there is anything about it that strikes me as subtle or
tasteful.
Of course, it would be all too easy to
euthanize the lame dog by saying «See, there's
your Band without Robbie Robertson!» — problem is, the best Robbie Robertson
could have done in 1993, were he on talking and working terms with the rest of
them, would be to saddle the boys with a few long pompous ballads about the
heavy plight of the Native American, and, more likely than not, it would have
all sounded equally plodding and tedious, because nowhere on here is there
anything even remotely reminiscent of a spark.
I have no idea why they made this record — money, boredom, drunken bet,
whatever — but this particular Jericho is clearly past the point of the walls
tumbling down. Recommended for major fans and enthusiasts only; thumbs down
for everybody else on the planet.
HIGH ON THE HOG (1996)
1) Stand Up; 2) Back To
Memphis; 3) Where I Should Always Be; 4) Free Your Mind; 5) Forever Young; 6)
The High Price Of Love; 7) Crazy Mama; 8) I Must Love You Too Much; 9) She
Knows; 10) Ramble Jungle; 11) Young Blood*; 12*) Chain Gang.
Rule # 1: you do not call your album High On
The Hog and place an ugly swine on the cover if you care at all for your
reputation. Above everything else, High
On The Hog used to be the name of a commercially successful Black Oak
Arkansas album, which swept up the charts with the aid of the hit single
ʽJim Dandyʼ, a novelty tune that sounded cute, charming, and kick-ass
when done by LaVern Baker ages ago, but dumb and tasteless when reworked by
crude Southern rockers in the 1970s. Now these here guys in The Band must have
had a complete memory reboot to forget about it — or else, they consciously went for the same title.
Needless to say, that is not a good sign. Neither is the nasty grin on the
piggy's face.
No composing activity from the original members
is registered here whatsoever: «The Band» is co-credited on ʽThe High
Price Of Loveʼ, which is really another Jules Shear song, and Helm and
Hudson take partial credit for ʽRamble Jungleʼ, which is not really a
song at all, but rather a tribalistic jam beaten out by several very tired old
men. Additionally, Helm's lead vocals sound awful on most of these songs —
perhaps not much worse than on Jericho,
but somehow the transformation of his deep-set, snappy laryngeal bark to an
annoying high-pitched whine is far more notable here, further depriving The
Band of energy. And there are no signs of Hudson making any efforts to return
from his position of bit player to a more advanced role in the group.
Consequently, this is yet another decrepit
show: snail-paced, melodically trivial roots-rock with generic arrangements —
and are we really going to emphasize
real drums, modest use of electronics, and carefully rehearsed ʽLife Is
A Carnivalʼ-style brass parts as «charm-workers»? As in, «yeah all right,
but this could have been so much worse»...
well, no, it probably could not, because to some extent, The Band are under a
strict obligation to respect the trademark, and it is hard to imagine, for
instance, Garth Hudson head-diving into «adult contemporary». In other words,
as inoffensive background music, High On
The Hog is still effective.
But the bad news is, they are not even pretending to try. ʽStand Upʼ,
with the already mentioned brass arrangements and a stinging clavinet line
straight outta ʽUp On Cripple Creekʼ, seems to be the only song at
all that took a little bit of pre-writing and rehearsing; everything else could
easily have been slap-dashed out in the studio with a total of thirty minutes
allocated to each song. Chief culprits are a cover of J. J. Cale's ʽCrazy
Mamaʼ, done in improvised 12-bar blues mode, and a long-winded,
never-ending re-recording of Bob's ʽForever Youngʼ (a song that was
already originally recorded by Dylan with The Band in 1974) — supposedly
dedicated to the passing of Jerry Garcia in this particular case, but the years
have worn away the touching effect, and now it is just another ʽForever Youngʼ, and who needs it?
Bob actually contributes another song here, the
only fast rocker on the entire album — ʽI Must Love You Too Muchʼ; it
functions as a much-needed change of pace, but the guitars are dull pub-rock,
and the noisy keyboard and whatever-else background makes it sound overproduced
and fussy at that. Still, it is kinda fun, and definitely livelier than the
stiff slow-tempo country-blues of about half of the other numbers.
Towards the end, they plunge into older
outtakes — another post-mortem souvenir from Manuel (no less than a live
recording of a Bread ballad,
aaaahh!), and the above-mentioned ʽRamble Jungleʼ, where the players
are led by blues pioneer Champion Jack Dupree in a session that has little
other than historical interest. Again, «listenable» (only because Manuel is
such a good singer, even when he is totally soaked, and because we are all
supposed to love all the old blues guys, no matter what) is the most polite
definition that can be hung on these tunes.
To add insult to injury, British and Japanese
first pressings of the album used to replace ʽRamble Jungleʼ with a
cover of ʽYoung Bloodʼ — with most of the world unaware that the
track was originally recorded for a tribute album to the recently deceased Doc
Pomus. On that tribute album, it certainly belongs; on a new Band original, it
only brings to mind the principle of «If you have no idea what to do, do
another ʽYoung Bloodʼ», first implemented by Bad Company in 1976
(because, frankly speaking, The Coasters went as far with that novelty number
as it was possible to go already in 1957), and serves as a total downer of a
«grand finale».
Overall, of the three post-Robbie albums, High On The Hog is easily the worst —
containing even less involving song material and even more boring arrangements
than Jericho, dragging on for far
longer than the ensuing Jubilee, and
— last, but maybe not least — featuring arguably the single worst album cover
in Band history. Thumbs down guaranteed a-plenty here.
JUBILATION (1998)
1) Book Faded Brown; 2) Don't
Wait; 3) Last Train To Memphis; 4) High Cotton; 5) Kentucky Downpour; 6) Bound
By Love; 7) White Cadillac (Ode To Ronnie Hawkins); 8) If I Should Fail; 9)
Spirit Of The Dance; 10) You See Me; 11) French Girls.
Of the three «sorta-reunion» albums released by
«The Band», it is usually only Jericho
that gets a decent rap — having expressed the obligatory respect towards the
legendary minstrels of Americana who are back «at it» again, the critics and
the public quickly went on to forget about their presence, and the pig with the
evil grin on his face was no big help either. Most critical sources either
ignore these records, or give all of them a more or less equally condescending
pat on the back. And it's not as if there weren't a good reason behind such
behavior.
That said, I find myself just a wee bit more
partial towards Jubilation, the last
record in this relatively ill-fated trilogy. Perhaps it is a silly feeling,
motivated by some trifle. For instance, the fact that they swing back to
tolerable album sleeves now — instead of the ridiculously clothed Sus domesticus, we get a half-kiddie,
half-Indian-style drawing (by «famed Illinois folk artist George Colin»,
according to Net sources). Or the fact that it is so relatively short — good
old normalized roots-rock is best taken in small dosages, after all, certainly
not exceeding the classic forty(-five) minute LP boundaries.
Or maybe just the fact that it is the last one: a year and a half
later, Danko would pass away from drug-related heart failure, finally leaving
Helm and Hudson in no position to go on driving Old Dixie down. Of course,
there was no predicting this in mid-1998, while the album was being recorded,
but there is no denying, either, that age and health problems were quickly
catching up, and (gruesome but true) it was basically a question of who would
go first — both Rick and Levon sound
completely wrecked on most of the tracks. Although Rick lost in the competition
by more than a decade (mainly because of far heavier substance abuse throughout
his life), the outcome is certainly not clear if you just listen to the songs.
All the more ironic is the album title: Jubilation consistently sounds like a
fatalistic dirge rather than a celebration of anything in particular or in
general. The title comes from a line in ʽSpirit Of The Danceʼ, which,
technically, is indeed a New Orleanian, Allen Toussaint-ish dance number, heavy
on brass fanfare and twisted syncopated rhythms. But its minor-key mood, dark
basslines, and plaintive lead vocals do not even begin to approach an
atmosphere of rejoicing — either it is a complete failure to reach the achieved
goal, or that goal was never set in the first place, and the whole "dance,
dance 'til the break of day, dance all our cares away" routine was firmly
tongue-in-cheek from the very start. Honestly, no self-respecting Creole would
probably want this played at his wedding or birthday. Maybe for the funeral?..
Another omen is that Jubilation was recorded at Levon's home studio in Woodstock — thus
completing the circle begun in 1967, when The Band was officially christened
as an independent artistic unit by Godfather Bob. No idea whether shades and
echoes of Music From Big Pink were
ringing in the original members' ears when they were recording these songs, but
the fact does remain that Jubilation
has a strong «weepy» aura around it, starting from the very first song — Paul
Jost's ʽBook Faded Brownʼ, either a religious anthem tailor-made for
the local Amish population or just a «nostalcholic» look back at all the good
times that the singers had before fate drafted them into the Confederate Army.
The song is generically composed, but
tastefully arranged and mildly touching — and so is pretty much everything else
on Jubilation, which tends to avoid
experiments, production excesses, and any attempts at sounding like
«rock'n'roll» (with one tolerable exception — ʽWhite Cadillacʼ, supposedly
a tribute to the old boss Ronnie Hawkins, who, contrary to rumors and
impressions, was not dead at all, but actually outlived them all; beginning
quite deceptively, with an old rockabilly intro that you can hear on the
Burnette brothers' ʽTrain Kept A-Rollin'ʼ, it goes on to become a
mild country-rock boogie where the piano and accordeon «rock» harder than the
guitars). Quite a few of the numbers are now credited to The Band itself, and
although that does not improve the general level of songwriting, at least it
makes Jubilation into a more
«authentic» proposition than its predecessors, to some degree.
Curiously, the album is very light on
whatsoever kind of electronics: for the most part, Hudson sticks to regular old
pianos and, predominantly, the accordeon, which is also responsible for giving
Jubilation much more of an
«old-timey» feeling. All of Garth's «modernistic» passions are intentionally
saved for the last track: ʽFrench Girlsʼ is a two-minute-long
instrumental synth-based coda (still with the inclusion of saxes and
accordeons, nevertheless) that, in keeping with the overall somber mood of the
album, would rather seem to be dedicated to the likes of Saint Jeanne than to
the Folies Bergère, if you get my drift.
Perhaps if the players were in better shape, or
spent more time coordinating their act, or had a slightly better and less
«subconscious» understanding of why they were there in the first place, Jubilation might have even been
comparable in status to one of the classic Band's «minor» albums, like Cahoots or something (ʽSpirit Of
The Danceʼ does, after all, seem to have been written «in memory» of
ʽLife Is A Carnivalʼ). As it is, Jubilation
is limp, formulaic, and not at all memorable — but it still sounds decent while
it's on: professionalism and good taste are, after all, the only proper guides
through the local reefs and shallows when all else is gone.
Most importantly, it all sounds natural — it is
all exactly the way these guys were in 1998: old, sad, nostalgizing, well aware
of their imminent mortality, and maybe just driven by a subconscious desire to
leave just one more tiny particle of themselves behind while they still have
time and just enough strength to do it. That seems to be the main vibe
permeating most of these songs, and that vibe suffices for a thumbs up
— and, more importantly, for an acknowledgement: Jubilation can be accepted as a minor «post-scriptum» to the
history of The Band, where I would have a real hard time convincing myself that
Jericho and particularly High On The Hog
could be incorporated in the same history.
ADDENDA:
A MUSICAL HISTORY (2005)
CD I: 1)
Who Do You Love?; 2) You Know I Love You; 3) Further On Up The Road; 4)
Nineteen Years Old; 5) Honky Tonk; 6) Bacon
Fat; 7) Robbie's Blues; 8) Leave Me Alone; 9) Uh Uh Uh; 10) He Don't Love You
(And He'll Break Your Heart); 11) (I Want to Be) The Rainmaker; 12) The Stones
I Throw; 13) The Stones I Throw (Will Free All Men); 14) Go Go Liza Jane; 15)
Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?; 16) Tell Me, Momma; 17) Just Like Tom Thumb's
Blues; 18) Words And Numbers; 19) You Don't Come Through; 20) Beautiful Thing;
21) Caledonia Mission (sketch track); 22) Odds And Ends; 23) Ferdinand The
Imposter; 24) Ruben Remus; 25) Will The Circle Be Unbroken.
For all of The Band's gloriously legendary
status — unlike their godfather and mentor, Mr.
«I-wrote-more-songs-than-you-ever-heard-in-your-life» Zimmerman, their archived
vaults have turned out to be surprisingly low on unreleased treasures. Outside
of the regular discography, the only complete archival release in their history
was 1995's Live At Watkins Glen, an
odd monstrosity that was presumably
recorded at the Watkins Glen Festival in July 1973, although, in reality, only
two or three tracks were taken from the actual show, the rest being either
studio outtakes with cheaply overdubbed applause or live selections from
earlier shows. The album, released by Capitol without The Band's consent or
even knowledge, is now out of print, and most of its tracks are available as
bonus cuts on Moondog Matinee or Rock Of Ages — but the fact that one
had to stoop to such a silly forgery in order to make an extra buck on The
Band's reputation is quite telling of the state of affairs.
A year before that, Capitol actually put out
the first Band-related boxset — the 3-CD compilation Across The Great Divide, with the third disc replete with demos,
outtakes, and bits of pieces of The Band's history. This one is also out of
print today, replaced by a much stouter collection — 2005 saw the emergence of The Band: A Musical History, now spread
across five CDs and one DVD (the latter mostly consisting of otherwise
available bits of live appearances, e. g. the three number performed on SNL in 1976 and the material from 1970's
Festival Express), and probably containing
every single bit of non-regular-LP stuff from The Band that we might ever need
to hear. Not that the need would be overtly acute.
Formally, A
Musical History is one of those «for-beginners-and-fans-alike» collections
that will not properly satisfy either group. The fans will already have most of
these tracks on the original LPs — moreover, many of the outtakes here now also
feature as bonus additions to the new remastered CD series; beginners, on the
other hand, would do much better with a small compilation (or just buy the
first two albums anyway). Once I have filtered out standard album tracks, previously
unreleased material that has now been converted to bonus tracks, and
«tangential» stuff like the «Dylan & The Band» recordings (including, among
other things, several tracks from The Basement
Tapes and the regular single recording of ʽCan You Please Crawl Out
Your Window?ʼ), I was left with a little under 2 CDs length of material —
and most of it is rather slim pickings.
The only real bit of treasure, and even that
mostly for a historian of The Band, is the first disc, which does indeed trace
their musical history throughout the early and mid-1960s — arguably an
essential listen for everybody wanting to understand how the band became The
Band. Starting with a few sides they cut as «Ronnie Hawkins & The Hawks»,
with Hawkins as the unquestionable frontman and leader; going through the
early incarnations of «Levon & The Hawks» and «The Canadian Squires»; and
finishing with raw demos recorded in 1967-68 as they were just trying to lift
off the ground — this is a thorough and convincing picture of the
transformation of an ordinary rock'n'roll outfit into a...
...well, no, not really. To be honest, in the
context of whatever was going on in the musical world in the 1960s, most of
this first disc sucks: I cannot imagine how anybody would have sensed any seeds
of Music From Big Pink in anything
on here. The Hawkins-era numbers are pedestrian covers of electric blues and
boogie standards — «The Hawk» has always been a much better growler and
screamer than singer, and the only point of relative interest are a few
scorching garage-rock solos from Robertson... both here and on most of the «Levon & The Hawks» numbers — in the early
days, the newly-liberated band was still mostly churning out formulaic boogie-blues
like ʽLeave Me Aloneʼ, and only Robbie's stinging, screeching leads
stand out: you can easily tell what it was that got Dylan interested in The
Hawks in the first place. (Curiously, Bob's own rare instance of lead guitar
playing on an early classic album of his — ʽLeopard Skin Pillbox Hatʼ
on Blonde On Blonde — is extremely
similar in style to Robbie's early solos).
Some of the more impressive of Robertson's
early, sketchy attempts at songwriting include the catchy R&B number
ʽHe Don't Love Youʼ and the gospel-folk anthem ʽThe Stones That
I Throwʼ, but they are still deeply rooted in the clichés of these
genres. Things only start changing when we get real close to 1968: ʽYou
Don't Come Throughʼ, pitching a Manuel falsetto against a similarly
high-pitched guitar melody, shows a first brief, embryonic glimpse into the
roots of the sad beauty of Big Pink,
and Manuel's own ʽBeautiful Thingʼ is a tender demo that could grow
into something bigger, but maybe it was deemed just a bit too waltzy to
deserve elaboration. On the other hand, the early version of ʽCaledonia
Missionʼ seems to pair the already well-boiled vocal melody with an
utterly incompatible arrangement — too fast, too upbeat, too different from the
mood of Garth's merry harpsichord accompaniment. No, really, it is all almost
as if they just woke up one morning — and found out that they were geniuses, after all. Same thing
happened to the Beatles — why couldn't it happen to The Band?
Of the elsewhere unavailable stuff on the other
four CDs, there is only a small handful of recommendations I could deal out.
The live performance of Woody Guthrie's ʽI Ain't Got No Homeʼ with
Bob from the Carnegie Hall concert (January 20, 1968) is more of historical
value for Bob than The Band (marking his first live appearance after the
motorcycle crash), but is totally enjoyable even regardless of the context.
The live version of ʽSmoke Signalʼ is a rare example of a number from
Cahoots done live, and done well.
Robbie's ʽTwo Piano Songʼ, with Manuel and Hudson manning said
pianos, is a pretty piece that transcends genres — the players are trading pop
/ classical / ragtime patterns between each other, obviously feeling inspired;
too bad they never got around to finishing the composition (which could have,
among other things, made a damn stately finale for Northern Lights). And ʽHome Cookin'ʼ could have been Rick
Danko's only example of a completely self-composed song in the classic era Band
catalog — but maybe they decided, like me, that the chorus hook was a tad too
reminiscent of ʽJust Another Whistle Stopʼ to be allowed to live.
The rest is mostly technical inclusions — an
alternate run through ʽ4% Pantomimeʼ with Van Morrison, a live
rendition of Little Richard's ʽSlippin' And Slidin'ʼ, with all the
usual reservations about The Band playing visceral rock'n'roll, an early,
not-too-different take on ʽAll La Gloryʼ, etc. etc.; not a lot. In
the end, the boxset may be more precious for all the packaging, photos, liner
notes etc. — these things always have more value as intelligent shelf
decorations anyway. But I suppose that if everybody is entitled to this kind of
boxset, it would be unfair to delay this honor for the very symbol of
Americana, or else Black Oak Arkansas and R.E.O. Speedwagon might get their
dues paid first, and that would be truly embarrassing.
BARRY GIBB & THE BEE GEES SING AND PLAY 14 BARRY GIBB SONGS (1965)
1) I Was A Lover, A Leader Of
Men; 2) I Don't Think It's Funny; 3) How Love Was True; 4) To Be Or Not To Be;
5) Timber; 6) Claustrophobia; 7) Could It Be; 8) And The Children Laughing; 9)
Wine And Women; 10) Don't Say Goodbye; 11) Peace Of Mind; 12) Take Hold Of That
Star; 13) You Wouldn't Know; 14) Follow The Wind.
The «real» Bee Gees did not seriously register
on the world's musical scene until they relocated to England in 1967 — but The Bee Gees' 1st, with all of its
stunning achievements, did not appear out of nowhere, and even
technically-officially, it was The Bee
Gees' 3rd, since they already had two LPs out by that time, not heard
outside of Australia, where they grew up and missed a good chance of becoming
that nation's Easybeats. Presumably, tough-guy Australia deemed them too sissy
for its own pop market.
Anyway, «Barry Gibb & The Bee Gees»,
including Barry's underage twin brothers Maurice and Robin, had really been
releasing singles as early as 1963, and a big bunch of them was put out in 1965
as their first LP whose name basically says it all. Including, that is,
pointing out the band's two major strengths, already well worked out: (a) that
Barry Gibb knows a thing or two about catchiness; (b) these are some dang good,
unique, harmonies — kinda like the Everley Bros., but three instead of two,
which adds extra power, joyfulness, and sometimes even — dare I say it? —
«spirituality». I mean, "My heart cries, ʽTimber! Timber!ʼ"
— is that spiritual, or what?
Since there was nothing better to do in
Australia anyway, the Gibb brothers spent a lot
of time listening to the radio, and it shows. At the same time, at a very early
age, they (or at least big brother Barry) understood that writing songs, rather
than covering others, was the way to go — not only is it more profitable in the
financial department, but you can also find awesome ways to pass other people's
ideas for your own. (Not that this is a Bee-Gees-specific jab, but maybe the
Bee Gees deserve to be jabbed a bit stronger than others, given as how the LP
title puts such a strong emphasis on «Barry Gibb songs»).
So just about every song on here sounds like an
adolescent attempt to emulate somebody else without directly ripping off the
somebody else (not that somebody else would bother — takes a long way for the
subpoenas to reach the faraway land of Oz). The Everleys, with their lightly
rock'n'rolled take on the suave folk vibe, are one of the main inspirations
(ʽI Don't Think It's Funnyʼ, ʽHow Love Was Trueʼ, etc.),
but there are also nods to Motown, to the Merseybeat scene, to the
new-and-upgraded folk-rock scene of the Searchers, of the Byrds (ʽAnd The
Children Laughingʼ), and the brothers were not even above an occasional
listen to some «cruder» boogie and garage-rock (ʽTo Be Or Not To
Beʼ).
It is hard to say what exactly is so «wrong»
with this album: in a way, there are no problems here that would not be
characteristic of The Bee Gees as a whole — near-complete inability to come up
with, let alone innovative, but simply «idiosyncratic» ideas of their own: from
the beginning of time and until the very end of it, Barry and his brothers
could only really work in other people's backyards. And these here songs
aren't really much worse, on their own, than second-rate work by the Everleys:
catchy, sing-along-ish, pleasant, with impeccable harmonies. Guitar-based
instrumentation is a bit monotonous, but what wasn't back in 1963-64?
Production is a bit scruffy, but what could we expect from a cheap Australian
studio at the time? The hooks on the upbeat songs are a bit kiddie-like, but
why wouldn't they be, with the songwriter himself only having turned 17 when
the first of them was released? And he did
write a song called ʽClaustrophobiaʼ at the age of 18, didn't he? Not
every 18-year-old knows what that means. (On second thought, checking out the
lyrics makes me wonder if Barry really knew what it means. Oh well, not every
18-year-old knows that it actually exists).
In the end, it might simply be the fact that
the brothers were not quite ready yet, nor was the time quite ready for them.
Even in their prime, they would almost always be writing and performing in the
confines of a genre or style, but here they are still writing and performing in
the confines of particular bands or artists — so much so that, if you already
have the Beatles, there is no reason to cherish an inferior imitation of
Lennon/McCartney such as ʽYou Wouldn't Knowʼ, and if you already have
your Manfred Mann, ʽPeace Of Mindʼ will be just an infantile copy of
their already juvenile approach (and at least Manfred Mann, in their early days,
were accomplished musicians intentionally targeting the «innocent teen» market
with their singles — the Bee Gees could only do so much as provide the basic
instrumental backing for their compositions).
I cannot bring myself to turn the thumbs down,
since I had no problems whatsoever listening to this — quite «charming» in its
own way — celebration of «crass naïveté», but I do hereby confirm
that the album is only of serious value for major enthusiasts of either the Bee
Gees or that «wonderful early Sixties sound, when all the people were still
little children playing in the grass» and «bad» music was impossible in
principle. Technical detail: although both this record and its follow-up are
thoroughly out of print (and seem to have never been released on CD per se),
all of the songs, and much, much more, including non-LP singles, demos,
outtakes etc., are available on the
2-CD collection Brilliant From Birth
(not really, I'd say, but everybody is welcome to check it out and form one's
own opinion).
SPICKS AND SPECKS (1966)
1) Monday's Rain; 2) How Many
Birds; 3) Play Down; 4) Secondhand People; 5) I Don't Know Why I Bother With
Myself; 6) Big Chance; 7) Spicks And Specks; 8) Jingle Jangle; 9) Tint Of Blue;
10) Where Are You; 11) Born A Man; 12) Glass House.
This is where the «brilliance» starts getting
noticeably brilliant. Technically, this may have to do with the fact that the
band had much more studio time, donated to them by benevolent producer Ossie
Byrne — of course, the final recordings still sound muffled and tinny compared
to the sound the band would get in England, but it is more important that they
actually had more time to work on the moods, melodies, and harmonies. The
result is a record that has its highs and lows, but definitely sows the first
seeds of the greatness to come.
The two main singles off the album announce the
two main styles in which the pre-disco Bee Gees would excel: ʽMonday's
Rainʼ is a romantic slow-burner, with Robin Gibb's «rack-the-goat» vibrato
carrying the gist of the romance (actually, his pitch is surprisingly low on
this number), and ʽSpicks And Specksʼ is upbeat piano-pop in the old
British music hall tradition. Tasteful Australian people clearly designated
their preferences: the album itself was originally called Monday's Rain after the first single, but once the public let it
sink and went instead for ʽSpicks And Specksʼ, the record was quickly
retitled and re-released as such.
Who knows, actually, how things would have
turned out if ʽMonday's Rainʼ were to become a hit — not only could
this have delayed the Bee Gees' relocating to England, but it might have raised
Robin's early credit higher than necessary, prompting the band to turn into
professional crooners when they really had so much more to offer. Not that
ʽMonday's Rainʼ (on which Barry and Robin actually share vocal duties)
is a particularly bad ballad — the main vocal melody is quite inspirational,
even if it has to win its way over rather trite doo-woppish backing vocals and
a rather sterile backing track, and it does somewhat pave the way to ʽTo
Love Somebodyʼ. But for those who, like me, are in a rather complex
love/hate relationship with the «nightingale» aspects of the Bee Gees,
ʽMonday's Rainʼ will be the first song to fall under this
relationship.
Not so with ʽSpicks And Specksʼ,
which is fun, catchy, bouncy, and lively, despite the rather depressive
lyrical message — it is ironic that the song became the band's biggest
Australian hit just as they were embarking on the boat to England, so that one
could easily interpret lines like "All of my life I call yesterday / The
spicks and the specks of my life gone away" as a veiled goodbye to the
country that failed to accept the Gibbs as a proper homeland. (That said, the
band never failed to play the song on their subsequent Australian tours, so
they probably weren't that mad).
Here, too, one can see the seeds of ʽTurn Of The Centuryʼ — much
tastier seeds, as far as my taste is concerned, than ʽMonday's Rainʼ.
The rest of the songs is a mish-mash, but
nowhere near as derivative a mish-mash as on their first album. Now the
brothers are already trying to put a more personal spin on everything they do,
except for when they are in a plain giggly parodic mode — ʽBorn A
Manʼ, for instance, is a transparent send-up of The Animals, right down
to imitating Eric Burdon's vocal intonations, parodying the «macho» lyrical
style of British R&B ("I'm glad I am born a man" — where is
political correctness when you really need it?), and mocking the «chaotic»
build-ups of that style with some open instrumental tomfoolery and sped-up vocals.
It isn't a very tasteful parody, but it is so clearly a parody that it would be
sort of silly to take offense at it.
When the brothers are being more serious, they
invest into semi-decent Beatlesque pop-rock (ʽHow Many Birdsʼ,
ʽTint Of Blueʼ) or folk-rock that makes good use of their three-man
harmony skill (ʽPlay Downʼ, ʽWhere Are Youʼ, etc.). It is
clear that, had they had their wish, they would just as eagerly have invested
in the emerging «art-pop» or «baroque-pop», but the movement was still way too
fresh for them to get all the basics right, and they were heavily limited in
their use of instrumentation: Geoff Grant on trumpets is the only «extra»
session musician here, beyond the Gibb brothers themselves, supplying most of
the basic instruments, and two guest drummers (one of whom, Colin Petersen,
would later officially join the band and sail with them to England). So, while
most of these songs are kinda nice, they are still only half-way fleshed out,
with monotonous, unimaginative arrangements, poor sound mix, and a nagging
sense of «we're still only learning how to be hip» dragging it all down.
Nevertheless, Spicks And Specks still deserves its thumbs up, if only for containing
the band's first excellent song and no true stinkers (ʽBorn A Manʼ
could be one, but only if it is erroneously taken seriously). Also of note, by
the way, is the B-side to ʽSpicks And Specksʼ, which never made it on
the LP — ʽI Am The Worldʼ, arguably Robin's proudest moment in the
Australian stage of the band's career; he does his best to match the title
with some stunning vocal aerobics on the chorus, which deserve respect even
among those for whom they do not generate admiration.
BEE GEES' 1ST (1967)
1) Turn Of The Century; 2)
Holiday; 3) Red Chair Fade Away; 4) One Minute Woman; 5) In My Own Time; 6)
Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You; 7) Craise Finton Kirk Royal
Academy Of Arts; 8) New York Mining Disaster 1941; 9) Cucumber Castle; 10) To
Love Somebody; 11) I Close My Eyes; 12) I Can't See Nobody; 13) Please Read Me;
14) Close Another Door.
Whether the Bee Gees' 1st (technically, «3rd»,
but I understand the desire to erase one's Australian past... boy, those kangaroos
can get annoying) is or is not their
«best» album is up to each of us in particular and history in general to
decide. To me, it has always been the best simply by being the most diverse —
because not only were the Bee Gees perfectly capable of handling diversity
with gusto, but this also helped reduce the sheer percentage of sentimental
ballads: no matter how perfect a master of that art you are, too much syrup is
just so much syrup. On a cult favorite like Trafalgar, for instance, the band is a pigeonholed horde of
balladeer-troubadours. But on Bee Gees
1st, the band is a freelance pack of wagon-jumpers — and that's some first
rate wagon-jumping if we ever saw one.
The move to England did not immediately change
much in the brothers' attitudes. They are still playing the same copycat game,
indulging their love for various musical genres, trendy hairstyles, fab suits,
posh chicks, and royalties — but now they have a set of advantages, including
being geographically closer to their sources of inspiration and to state-of-the-art recording
studios (with access to the latter provided by their new manager Robert
Stigwood, the guy who also managed Cream and Clapton's post-Cream activity);
and also, last but not least, simply being grown-up — their «training years» in
Australia left behind and ready for prime time.
There is nothing in Bee Gees' 1st that suggests an «individual artistic vision» of any
kind. (In fact, there wouldn't ever be — they would sort of try forging out
that vision on Odessa, due to the popular
demand of 1969 when it was thoroughly unhip not to be a «Visionary Artist», but
it didn't really stick). But on the positive side, there is nothing on the
album that would arrogantly scream «we're only in it for the money», either.
The real situation, I believe, is more simple and even somewhat touching. So
they heard ʽPenny Laneʼ and loved it so much, they decided to make
ʽTurn Of The Centuryʼ. They threw on ʽDr. Robertʼ and dug
the rhythm, so they decided to make ʽIn My Own Timeʼ. Somebody
brought them a copy of Pet Sounds,
they were so overwhelmed that they incorporated those vocal harmonies into
ʽPlease Read Meʼ (but where are the Coke bottles?). Then they found a
Mellotron in the studio, and, giggling like little kids, used it to record the
«Gothic Cathedral» bits of ʽEvery Christian...ʼ. In short, what we
are dealing here is the pleasure of discovery, and the double pleasure of
assimilating the discovery.
If only they weren't talented — but they were,
and it all works. Fourteen short songs — nobody told the fresh young lads that,
even staying within UK borders, you are no longer obliged to record 14
three-minute long pop songs per LP in mid-1967 — fourteen short vignettes, each
of them representing a different style, and each single one making its point in
either a catchy, or a moving, or a simply curious manner, sometimes all three
at the same time. Nothing here has much intellectual «depth» to it, as can be
seen from the lyrics, most of which are sheer nonsense (ʽHolidayʼ may
be a major tear-jerker, but God only knows what it is we are supposed to be
crying about: "It's something I thinks worthwhile / If the puppet makes
you smile / If not you are throwing stones, throwing stones?" Bob would
sing this with an evil grin). But on the level of raw emotion, it all works,
from first to last note.
Bee
Gees 1st certainly does not
sound like a «happy» album. If it may be pigeonholed at all (although that's
one hell of a complex pigeon breed), it would most likely qualify as «art pop»,
and «art pop» in 1967 was not supposed to be about happiness — loneliness,
romantic tragedy, isolation/ism/, «me against the faceless crowds», «me
misunderstood and underappreciated», etc., unless you wanted to add social
critique, but that latter usually came with distorted electric guitars rather
than woodwinds and harpsichords. The seeds of those moods the brothers had
already implanted in themselves when they took up with the folk stuff years
earlier, but now the seeds have turned into saplings, and if there is something unifyingly conceptual about
the record, it is «melancholic
nostalgia». ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ was still years away. (Actually,
come to think of it, ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ is a pretty sad song,
too — I have always felt pity for the poor guy who just keeps lying on his back
throughout. But never mind).
ʽTurn Of The Centuryʼ, as I said, is
somewhat of an answer to ʽPenny Laneʼ — more lushly arranged, with a
complex baroque backing track, but more or less the same in terms of nostalgic
sentimentality, mixed with a little brass-provided parade spirit and the now-funny
complaint of "Everything's happening / At the turn of the century / I'm
gonna buy myself a time machine / Go to the turn of the century" (so
totally ironic today, when so many people would do anything to buy themselves a
time machine and go to 1967, which is exactly when everything was happening —
and who gives a damn about any round numbers anyway?). The vocal melody is not
as well-rounded as a Beatlish standard would require — in particular, the
chorus resolution seems weak and a bit anti-climactic after the build-up — but
they make up for this fairly well with the brass arrangement, which is every
bit as «optimistically pessimistic» as the finest art-pop constructions coming
from that era.
The best known songs are probably the three
singles from the album, which remained mainstays for the band's live show until
the very end. ʽNew York Mining Disaster 1941ʼ, despite flagging a
title fit for some pre-war Woody Guthrie workers' rights' ballad, was
mysteriously promoted as a «Beatles Anonymous» track (presaging the
mystification of Klaatu a decade later), even though neither the group vocals
are really reminiscent of the Beatles, nor is the composition's signature all
that reminiscent of a «Lennon/McCartney» approach — at any rate, the real
Beatles hadn't really gone for that kind of folksy sound since Rubber Soul. All of which is puzzling,
but has nothing to do with the song's quality: it is a charmingly catchy
folk-pop nugget, though probably not as effective emotionally as it should be
(the «tragic» undercurrents of the story of the poor imaginary miners are
hardly reflected in the music at all).
I used to feel uncomfy around ʽTo Love
Somebodyʼ, a song originally written for Otis Redding and one that might,
perhaps, have sounded less stiff and artificial in his rendition. But it is technically unimpeachable — if you kill
ʽTo Love Somebodyʼ, you might as well kill off the entire «soul-pop»
genre, and it is simply the realization that, for some reason, this stuff is
being sung by a bunch of young white whippersnappers from Australia instead of
a blind old black guy at the piano that could serve as a turn-off (a racist
turn-off, I should add). It's just a good old chivalrous serenade, really,
overblown, but coming from the heart and written with responsibility. (I still
prefer Eric Burdon's cover version, though — a little rasp-and-roll clears away
the affected mannerisms of Barry's delivery).
Then there's ʽHolidayʼ, one of the
least comprehensible, but saddest tracks in the band's catalog — which is just
the way it's supposed to be: I feel sad and I don't know why, so I'll just sing
some gibberish to divert myself. Robin is playing a little medieval minstrel
here, humming to himself rather than the unappreciative crowd, and the result
is an unwittingly unique mix of their old Everly Brothers style with the new
baroque and music hall tendencies, an odd cocktail that only happens when a
talented somebody hops on two wagons at the same time (and the time being 1967
only adds to the charm).
These three songs are certainly unforgettable,
but so is almost everything else. ʽEvery Christian Lion Hearted Man Will
Show Youʼ, for the uninitiated, works like a spooky creepshow, and for
those who know better — like a light-hearted parody on the psychedelic
movement. In fact, almost, like a «pre-parody»: the deep church-organish
Mellotron chords and Gregorian chanting (where they, apparently, sing «oh solo
Dominique» instead of ecce ancilla Domini
or something else with Domini it —
take that, old Catholic Church!) predates the Electric Prunes' Mass In F Minor by about a year.
ʽCraise Finton Kirk Royal Academy Of Artsʼ certifiedly adds The Kinks
to the list of the Gibbs' influences — at least, they can do an oh-so-British
bouncy piano vaudeville number with as much gusto as Ray Davies, even if they
lack Ray's lyrical insight, and it is clear that the everyday problems of the
British commoner do not worry the Gibbs nearly as much as they do the author of
ʽMr. Pleasantʼ.
Wrapping this up, we shouldn't forget that,
even despite sticking to the three-minute format, the Gibbs pay attention to
song structure — ʽI Close My Eyesʼ, for instance, changes its
signature several times before settling on a psychedelic rather than simply-pop
coda; ʽRed Chair Fade Awayʼ, likewise, gradually mutates from a
nursery rhyme into a psycho fantasy (just as its lyrics would suggest); and
ʽClose Another Doorʼ seems like an attempt to come up with their own
ʽGood Vibrationsʼ — there are at least four distinct parts here, each
with its own intricate combination of vocal and instrumental arrangements.
Overall, it is tempting to call Bee Gees 1st «just another well-meaning
offspring of Sgt. Pepper» — the
trick is that most of this stuff was recorded at the same time as Sgt. Pepper material, even if the final
album came out approximately one month later. And it does seem evident that the
main Beatles' influences here stem either from Revolver (ʽIn My Own Timeʼ truly sounds like a Revolver outtake, much more Beatlish
than ʽNew York Mining Disasterʼ) or, at best, from the
ʽStrawberry Fields Forever / Penny Laneʼ single. So there is no
denying the batch of influences, or the lack of individualistic input, but
there is no denying the sheer melodic genius — or simply the amazement at the
fact that «It All Works» in the first place.
By all means, these songs, recorded by some
very specific people in some very specific conditions, should not be touching
soul chords, but somehow, they are — I'd call this «borderline genius
craftsmanship», and that, really, is the way that the Bee Gees would be
operating from now on for most of their career. And in the generally healthy
musical climate of the late Sixties, that «borderline genius craftsmanship»
frequently gives the illusion of actually crossing that border — hence, a
«thinly overwhelmed» thumbs up.
PS. This and all the rest of the Bee Gees'
1960s catalog has recently received the de-luxe remastering treatment — 2-CD
editions (3-CD for Odessa) with both
mono and stereo versions, and the second CD comes with a bunch of bonus tracks:
the bonus disc for 1st is
particularly recommendable, with more Kinksy stuff (ʽGilbert
Greenʼ), more chamber pop (ʽHouse Of Lordsʼ), more rock'n'roll
(ʽI've Got To Learnʼ is actually a blues-riff-based song!), and more
alternate versions and demos which are all obligatory for a real fan of the Bee
Gees as a band or Sixties' art-pop as a great musical direction. And you get to
hear Barry singing lead vocals on ʽOne Minute Womanʼ instead of
Robin! Ain't that a bait?
HORIZONTAL (1968)
1) World; 2) And The Sun Will
Shine; 3) Lemons Never Forget; 4) Really And Sincerely; 5) Birdie Told Me; 6)
With The Sun In My Eyes; 7) Massachusets; 8) Harry Braff; 9) Day Time Girl; 10)
The Earnest Of Being George; 11) The Change Is Made; 12) Horizontal.
A somewhat strange title (Oval might have been more appropriate, with a reference to the
sleeve photo), and a somewhat strange album — in a way, perhaps the band's
strangest album ever. Recorded in the wake of Sgt. Pepper's arrival, and we could expect it to be at least as
diverse and multi-colored as its predecessor, considering just how heavy the
peer pressure was on everybody once the Beatles put on their grotesque
uniforms. But it isn't. The first impression is that the moods and textures are
becoming more condensed, veering towards a unified «Bee Gees sound». This is
not very good news for anti-sentimentalist crusaders. Then the second
impression is that the band is not really going for a simple pop appeal — and
that ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ must have moved them to more activity than
ʽWhen I'm Sixty Fourʼ. That's a solid compensation.
Essentially, Horizontal places a solid block on several of the paths briefly
explored in 1st — for instance, the
mock-cheery Kinksy piano music hall of ʽCraise Finton Kirkʼ, or the Revolver-style guitar pop of ʽIn
My Own Timeʼ, or the hallucinatory excesses of ʽEvery
Christian...ʼ — in favor of further road-building in the other directions.
There are still a few nods to psychedelia, and a few traces of a «rock» sound,
courtesy of guitarist Vince Melouney, but the brothers now seem more fully
aware of what it is they really like to do and what it is that they don't.
Fortunately, for now, what they like to do, what the public likes to hear from
them, and what we commonly expect from good art-pop music, irrespective of the
times, still seem to coincide.
The big hit and perennial fan favorite
ʽMassachusetsʼ could, perhaps, have been written by Scott McKenzie or
John Phillips, but it couldn't have been sung
the way Robin does it — carefully and meticulously articulating each line,
laying it out on the hay-covered melody waves like ultra-fragile glass. It is sort of namby-pamby (but this is the
Bee Gees, what are you doing reading this if you hate namby-pamby?), but it is
also tightly disciplined (the upbeat rhythm section helps out a lot), and the
string melody is locked into such a genteel baroque dance with the vowel harmonies
that the song gets an authentic «aristocratic» feel. Even when you watch the
lip-synced footage from 1967 of the band singing the song, it seems as if
Robin, and the rest of them, are doing it just for themselves — no pandering to
the audience and its tastes whatsoever. Oh, it's a long long way from here to
ʽMore Than A Womanʼ.
Above all else, ʽMassachusetsʼ is not
a very happy song, and neither is anything else on here: overall, Horizontal is fairly glum, even if
nobody quite understands why. In fact, listen closely to the lyrics of its
bookmarks and you might think it's a suicidal album — ʽWorldʼ greets
us with grand pianos, Mellotrons, and bombastic percussion only to ask the question
"How far am I able to see, or am I needed here?", and the title track
says farewell with grand pianos, Mellotrons, and no bombastic percussion in
quite a literal way: "This is the start of the end, goodbye / Hours of
facing my life have damned". Like I said — if it ain't the strong
influence of ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ, I have no idea what it is. But in
any case, existentialist despair and suicide in the Bee Gees' impersonation
circa 1967 sound seductive — the catchy choral harmonies, wobbly echos, and pompous
arrangements don't exactly plunder the depths of the soul, but they still make
this «exhibitionist world-weariness» look cool and noble.
The band also proves that it can brew sharp
tragedy out of sheer nothing just like that
— this is concerning one of my favorite Bee Gees songs, whose silly title
(ʽLemons Never Forgetʼ) fully matches the equally silly lyrics
("an apple is a fool but lemons never do forget... the lemon sings my
song, he's known it all along"), but this is really a vibe-based experiment:
Barry and Vince generate so much soul-suffering with their panicky vocal /
stormy electric guitar interplay that the lyrics take on a life of their own.
Don't you just hate those villainous
lemons? Now there's a fruit that can
push a grown man to the utmost brink of despair.
The song does pay a small debt to the tradition
of British absurdism, although only a small one: major debts are paid on one of
the two «rockier» songs of Side B — ʽThe Earnest Of Being Georgeʼ
(Oscar Wilde reference aside, could this one have any possible further
influence on the «Just George» suite from Giles, Giles, & Fripp's Cheerful Insanity?), which sounds
swell on first listen but does not leave a particularly lasting impression due
to lack of either meaning or humor.
They work it out a bit better on the second «rocker», ʽHarry Braffʼ,
a re-recorded leftover from the 1st
sessions, probably also inspired by the Kinks but with a much fuller
arrangement than the wimpy piano shuffle of ʽCraise Finton Kirkʼ.
And yet, by this time it is clear that the «art
ballad» is going to forever stay the band's major focus — «forever» meaning
«until we move to Miami, where the sun is too hot for balladeering». In this
respect, I would recommend focusing less on manneristic plaintive stuff from
Robin, like ʽReally And Sincerelyʼ, and concentrate more on such tiny
forgotten gems as the folksy ʽDay Time Girlʼ, well worthy of a Left
Banke or even an early Joni Mitchell; or Barry's prayer-like ʽWith The Sun
In My Eyesʼ, resting on a sparse bed of drawn-out organ chords and quiet
chamber strings. All of these songs are at least well written and expertly
delivered — no idea how «sincere» they are (here is a difficult philosophical
question: can somebody who once sincerely
wrote something like ʽWith The Sun In My Eyesʼ go on to write
something like ʽNight Feverʼ? I actually think that the answer is a
yes, but I'm prepared to accept defeat on this), but most of them sound
beautiful to my ears regardless of the answer.
In the end, it's all a matter of environment.
The Bee Gees simply thrived in that «dress me up as Lord Byron» atmosphere of
London in 1967-68, which stimulated their creativity like no other period in
musical or cultural history. And even if Horizontal,
on a sheer song-by-song basis, narrowly loses to 1st in terms of diversity or plain old catchiness, it has a
slightly more natural flow and cohesion, and explores the band's melancholic
side so thoroughly that already on the very next album they would have to
change direction — away from the moon and a little closer to the sun.
Meanwhile, this stuff expectedly gets its thumbs up as simply one of the finest art-pop
records of 1968 — beating the Moody Blues, I might add, if only because they
don't waste their time searching for the lost chord, wisely preferring to make
good use of already found ones.
Additionally, the 2-CD re-issue is just as
essential for the fans as the re-issue of 1st,
with a swarm of bonus tracks, including the single-only hit ʽWordsʼ
and lots of juicy B-sides that usually accentuate the Britishness of it all
(ʽSir Geoffrey Saved The Worldʼ, ʽBarker Of The U.F.O.ʼ),
but also provide extra memories of the band's toying with psychedelia
(ʽOut Of Lineʼ; the thoroughly odd ʽDeeply Deeply Meʼ,
where Robin is actually doing ragas — modulating his voice like a sitar! — I
wouldn't describe the effect as too pleasant, but it sure is odd).
IDEA (1968)
1) Let There Be Love; 2) Kitty
Can; 3) In The Summer Of His Years; 4) Indian Gin And Whisky Dry; 5) Down To
Earth; 6) Such A Shame; 7) I've Gotta Get A Message To You; 8) Idea; 9) When
The Swallows Fly; 10) I Have Decided To Join The Airforce; 11) I Started A
Joke; 12) Kilburn Towers; 13) Swan Song.
In the beginning, Idea sounds like a huge letdown. As the psychedelic haze slowly
started dissipating by mid-1968, and the musical world started splintering
into the «roots rock camp» (which the Bee Gees took a serious liking to), the
«art rock camp» (which the Bee Gees preferred to admire from afar), and the
«hard rock camp» (which the Bee Gees abhorred), the band found this a good
pretext to allow themselves to «let go» of even more of that extra ballast
they'd picked up in 1967 — and released their «wimpiest» record to-date (not
counting the early Oz stuff). Lush ballads, sissy folkie tunes, and
inoffensive country-pop — this is what Idea
is all about, and no one but the Bee Gees themselves are responsible.
Ironically, this also happened to be the album
with guitarist Vince Melouney's only songwriting credit: the soft pop-rocker
ʽSuch A Shameʼ, which must have been written under the heavy influence
of Dave Davies' ʽDeath Of A Clownʼ — not a song of any importance,
but at least it's got some bluesy harmonica runs from some anonymous harmonica
blower, which adds an extra touch to the mostly keyboards-and-strings-dominated
album. Vince was the one who pushed the band into a bluesier direction — but
what can one little-known Australian guitarist have against a whole three Gibb
brothers? Particularly once they finally decide that, God be witness, they
don't need fuzzy electric guitar on
their albums. Because it distracts them from their spirituality.
But as time goes by, Idea gains back some of the appeal that it never had. Most of these
lush ballads, manneristic as they are and occasionally suffering from the
ever-increasing prominence of Robin's lead vocals, are perfectly written and
laid out, and, most importantly, they usually offer just the right «antidotes»
to the potentially annoying sentimentality. ʽLet There Be Loveʼ
starts out swimming in cotton candy — then, once it gets to the bridge ("I
am a man, so take me for what I am..."), group harmonies come in and add a
little drama and intensity. Same thing happens with ʽWhen The Swallows
Flyʼ, where the dynamic chorus pulls the song out of mediocrity after a
rather lackluster piano verse kinda goes nowhere (but still manages to
influence a young Elton John, as I seriously suspect).
Meanwhile, Robin's two «tour-de-force»
highlights that I used to shun — ʽIn The Summer Of His Yearsʼ and
ʽI Started A Jokeʼ — are, in fact, pretty hard to criticize either
from a melodic point of view (the vocal parts are designed and carried out as
harmonic triumphs) or even from a «mood / style» point: they are subtle psychological
portraits or prayers, rather than cheap sentimental clichés. The former
was supposedly written in memory of Brian Epstein, but could well apply to any
young man, struck out by misfortune at a comparable age — Robin's take on the subject
combines just the right amount of solemn pomp, humanity, and pity.
As for ʽI Started A Jokeʼ, when you
look at the lyrics, it is actually rather gruesome — suicidal, in fact — and
this gets me to thinking that the whole album, in fact, has more brushes with
death than any other Bee Gees product: apart from these two songs, you also
have ʽI've Gotta Get A Message To Youʼ (written from the point of
view of someone condemned to the chair) and ʽSwan Songʼ which is not explicitly about death, but still
provides a sort of «last-wish» conclusion to the album, much like the conclusive
title track to Horizontal. In other
words, Idea may take another solid
step away from the diversity and the «grittiness» of its predecessors, but that
does not mean it has to steer towards the «namby-pamby»: the overall atmosphere
is still fairly dark, and the romance is still understood more in Byron /
Chopin terms than in Hollywood ones.
The upbeat, toe-tappable folk and country stuff
is mostly limited in ambition, and thus, not too durable in terms of live show
favorites or best-of compilation eligibility — but ʽKitty Canʼ is
funny and catchy; ʽIndian Gin And Whisky Dryʼ is one of the most
elegantly gallant tunes written about the perils of alcoholism; the title track
features the best (if not the only) electric guitar lick on the album,
delivered in a psychedelic tone (nice sonic match for the light bulb on the
album sleeve); and ʽI Have Decided To Join The Airforceʼ is an
amusing parody on British martial stylistics (unless the song was actually
commissioned by the UK Air Force, which I know nothing about, but it's possible
— after all, if they invested their talents into writing jingles for Coke, why
not this? And best thing of all, in the wake of The Who Sell Out, it would be impossible to tell the proper limit
between pop-sell out and pop-art anyway).
In the end, I think that the only relative
failure is ʽDown To Earthʼ — still an important song in any case, as
it briefly explores the «cosmic loneliness» theme one year before Bowie's
ʽSpace Oddityʼ made it a commodity (and four years before
ʽRocket Manʼ brought it into the average household), but it sounds a
bit too lethargic and, eventually, unresolved — and applying for epic status on
rather thin grounds. Maybe they should have extended it to seven minutes or
something, but in mid-1968, they weren't quite ready for the big game yet.
In retrospect, I sort of think that Idea was the first album where the Bee
Gees really realized themselves as the band they wanted to be — throwing most
of the peer pressure off their shoulders and going for the heart. This does
not mean that it is a better album than 1st
or Horizontal: those whose musical
tastes and conceptions are close to mine will inevitably prefer the Bee Gees with peer pressure rather than without
them, if only because there is only so much «lushness» and quasi-operatic
vocalizing and strings and romantic loneliness that one can take (although even
from that angle, Idea is like a
little kid compared to Trafalgar).
But if we judge artistic quality according to
how well the artist managed to «find himself», then Idea should be placed in the top range of the Gibb brothers'
immense catalog. The brothers themselves agree with this interpretation, by
the way — "That was when I got an idea / Came like a gun and shot in my
ear / Don't you think it's time you got up and stood alone?" And, well, in
a certain way, they do, so a big thumbs up for stand-aloners and their wimpiness.
The bonus disc on the CD reissue is not as
strong as the previous two, but it does have ʽJumboʼ (probably the
strangest, most «daring» single the brothers put out in the 1960s — naturally,
it did not climb up too high in the charts) as well as a funny tongue-in-cheek
send-up called ʽCompletely Unoriginalʼ (probably a comedy recording
to serve as the answer to some of the band's critics — and a good choice for a
banner song for everybody who denies the importance of «originality» in song,
dance, and culinary arts). On the other hand, there is also some soundtrack
muzak (ʽGena's Themeʼ), a few of those cheesy Coke jingles, and lots
of alternate mixes that do not sound too different from the original ones, so,
possibly, upgrading your CD collection in this particular instance should not
be a top priority.
ODESSA (1969)
1) Odessa (City On The Black
Sea); 2) You'll Never See My Face Again; 3) Black Diamond; 4) Marley Purt
Drive; 5) Edison; 6) Melody Fair; 7) Suddenly; 8) Whisper, Whisper; 9)
Lamplight; 10) Sound Of Love; 11) Give Your Best; 12) Seven Seas Symphony; 13)
With All Nations; 14) I Laugh In Your Face; 15) Never Say Never Again; 16)
First Of May; 17) The British Opera.
«Fourteenth
of February, eighteen ninety-nine, the British ship Veronica was lost without a
sign...» Rhyming apart, this introduction line reads more like the start of
some Jules Verne adventure novel than that of a pop record by one of The
Former British Empire's sissiest bands. But in the magic year of 1969
everything was possible — and with concept albums being all the rage,
particularly when stretched over two LPs, the Bee Gees needed their own answer
to The Beatles (Tommy still had a few months to ripen).
Granted, the «literal» concept begins and ends
with the title track, a seven-and-a-half minute suite that runs through several
sections, several moods, a bunch of sound effects, and a mystery that pulls
your leg hard enough to create the impression of the band being «really on to
something» when they really aren't — in fact, rumor has it that the original
title of the song was ʽOdessa (City On The White Sea)ʼ, and the endless references to «Baltic Sea» and
«North Atlantic» in the lyrics show that, perhaps, the band has not fully
mastered its geography even by the end of the sessions. Furthermore, there are
no Vicars in Odessa, and it is not that easy for Odessa people to move to
Finland (not in 1899, it wasn't), but never mind all that — if the Bee Gees
require artistic licence, it would be prudent to grant them artistic licence before
they take offense at our nitpicking and start singing ʽNights On
Broadwayʼ instead.
In any case, Odessa is very much a
concept album if the «concept» is not understood in a «rock opera» sort of way.
If 1st and, to a slightly lesser
extent, Horizontal were planned as
exuberant potpourris, with the Gibbs taking a sprint through the musical candy
shop and swiping off bits of everything, and Idea was an intentional balladeering «sellout» to clear their heads
from excessive psychedelia, then Odessa,
the last and most ambitious of the band's Sixties' adventures, is a huge
romantic sprawl, penetrating your subconscious with the help of bombastic
strings and multi-tracked harmonies rather than fuzzy guitar tones, distorted
vocal effects, Mellotrons, sitars, and references to lemon trees, orange skies,
and Lucies with diamonds.
Formally, it is like a test — is it possible to
make a genuinely «cool» sixty-minute experience with the aid of nothing but
fully traditional, «conservative» means? You do not even seriously need any
electricity to play the Odessa stuff
— acoustic guitars, pianos and strings dominate most of the proceedings: Vince
Melouney quit the band in frustration after having recorded a few of the songs,
understanding that his services (as the band's resident electric guitar player)
are no longer needed. (Colin Petersen, the drummer, still held on throughout).
With echoes of Idea's occasionally
excessive sweetness still fresh in the ears, this could all spell disaster.
And it did
spell disaster, but only on the real-life level: the recording of Odessa caused a major split within the
band — Robin and Barry ended up fighting both over the musical directions to
take and over the «leadership» issue: the somewhat dictatorial elder brother
was being challenged by the somewhat more adventurous (at the time) younger
brother, and there was a serious row concerning the lead single from the album.
Barry won in the end, with his ʽFirst Of Mayʼ fixed as the A-side and
Robin's ʽLamplightʼ relegated to the B-side — but at the cost of Robin
calling it quits and effectively bringing the first stage of the Bee Gees to a
close. (And yes, in the light of what would follow, many people would probably
be happy if the first stage were to be the last stage — but what difference
would it make if ʽStayin' Aliveʼ were credited to «Barry Gibb» rather
than «The Bee Gees»?)
As for the artistic level, Odessa is a total success. Yes, it is made up of lush ballads from
head to toe, with a small bunch of acoustic pop and country-rockers thrown in
for diversity's sake — but this is definitely «art» balladry, with complex,
intelligent, meticulously crafted harmonic hooks and equally complex orchestral
arrangements: easily Bill Shepherd's finest hour with the band (Paul
Buckmaster, who would go on to famously orchestrate Elton John's early albums,
may be noticed here among the credits, playing cello on the title track —
however, as far as I can tell, he is not responsible for the arrangements in
general; rather, he was probably soaking in the experience in order to begin
profiting from it just one year later). It is Bill Shepherd, by the way, who is
responsible for the only few psychedelic twists we get — the Mid-Easternish
violin «swoops» on ʽYou'll Never See My Face Againʼ, for instance,
are quite trippy.
There are no highlights and no lowlights. This
is not a «cathartic» experience: be it Barry's «knight in shining armor»
approach, or Robin's «green-clad lyre-stringin' minstrel» impersonation,
both, as usual, suffer from mannerisms and theatricality — it is as hard for me
to imagine anybody (anybody I know,
that is) driven to tears by this stuff as it is to picture anybody's eyes
watering to the sounds of a Diane Warren power ballad. But hopping from song to
song on Odessa easily affects the
same nerve centers as those responsible for, say, responding to a visit to some
old Dutch masters' gallery. The colors. The vividness. The little details. The
unpredictability of all the twists and turns within what, at first, seems to
be a rather limited-formula model. It's a case where, at first, you seem to
think of a «triumph of form over substance», then begin to realize that there is no difference between form and
substance here — form is substance,
and substance is form. (Granted, one
could say the same about the Saturday
Night Fever soundtrack, but the form-substance duality of 1977 and the
form-substance duality of 1969 are two entirely different things, aren't
they?).
Each of the songs does work on its own, but Odessa is still much more than the sum
of its parts. There are some recurrent motifs — mostly on the instrumental
compositions such as ʽSeven Seas Symphonyʼ and ʽBritish
Operaʼ — and with quality control in complete effect, each subsequent song
somehow builds up on the legacy of its predecessor, stockpiling the
«formalistic beauty» in your memory until it reaches the «grandiose» mark. Actually,
Odessa is a bit short for a double
album — barely over sixty minutes, where The
Beatles ran over ninety — but that helps it minimize or even totally
eliminate «filler»: ʽNever Say Never Againʼ on the last side echoes
ʽYou'll Never See My Face Againʼ on the first side as a full-time
respectable partner rather than an inferior re-write to pad out the remaining
space.
In the past, I used to strongly favor Barry's
material over Robin's — his «knightly» deliveries, sometimes with a bit of
irony and always with a strong debt of gratitude to the Beatles, seemed to
agree much better with my tastes than Robin's increasingly «bleating»
minstrel-boy vibrato, here demonstrated most perfectly on songs like the title
track, ʽBlack Diamondʼ, and ʽLamplightʼ (in general, Barry
has more leads here than Robin, which is not surprising given the
circumstances). But today, there is no question in my mind that ʽBlack
Diamondʼ is an absolute vocal masterpiece — there is probably no other
song in the Bee Gees catalog that would pull all the stops in the same way (stuff like ʽMr. Naturalʼ
is quite unique, too, but it leaves less space for subtle variations, whereas
on ʽBlack Diamondʼ, few lines are sung the exact same way). And if we
accuse songs written in the shape of medieval folk ballads of mannerisms, well,
the logical thing to do would be to follow up on that and extend the accusation
to the medieval folk ballads themselves — the Bee Gees are simply honoring the
time when real emotions had to be hidden behind a façade of
«regulated» ones. So I just admire the «regulations» in Robin's voice when he
is belting out his "...and I'm leaving in the morning... and I won't die,
so don't cry..." as if Henry VIII and all of his eight wives were in the
audience.
If lush orchestration, starched ruffs and
doublets aren't really your thing, Odessa
is not for you, but you might want to
try out some of its more down-to-earth segments — ʽMarley Purt
Driveʼ, for instance, an acoustic roots-rocker with a ringing lead vocal à la Hollies (who were doing very
much the same thing in the late 1960s), or the light, upbeat, catchy
country-rock ditty ʽGive Your Bestʼ, with the classical cellos and
violins laid to rest in favor of a rustic fiddle, or the shuffling
ʽSuddenlyʼ (although the latter does have some strings and
woodwinds). Still, it's only a tiny fragment of the total amount of delicacies
you get if you subscribe to the whole package — and I even like the
instrumentals: ʽSeven Seas Symphonyʼ, as far as I'm concerned, is
grander, more imposing and more memorable than any of the orchestral work on,
for instance, the Moody Blues' Days Of
Future Passed, often quoted as «the» textbook example of the neo-classical
approach on a pioneering art-rock album.
Naturally, it is all a matter of the Zeitgeist. It was the musical context of
the time that brought out the best in the Bee Gees, and stimulated them to work
in a direction that does not look dated, cheesy, or ridiculous forty years on
— Odessa may still easily be
revered, be it by only a tiny bunch of connaisseurs, long after the band's
disco stuff has been buried and the gravestone weathered down. But nobody asks
anybody to love Odessa because it is
a Bee Gees album — the Bee Gees were one of those bands that let itself easily
be blown about by the wind, and I love Odessa
because it is an album blown in by the adventurous, extravagant wind of 1969,
not because it materialized itself in the hands of three competitive,
opportunistic, narcissistic singer brothers whose tastes and priorities, not
fully evident behind the Zeitgeist of the late 1960s, would become more and
more questionable with each new year. So, in a way, it is to that Zeitgeist
that I dedicate the thumbs up rating — honorable second prize going to
Barry, Robin, and Maurice, not forgetting Bill Shepherd and whoever else
responsible.
PS. Being a double album, Odessa released the deluxe treatment over the course of the recent
reissues — an entire 3-CD boxset, with stereo and mono mixes of the album and
an extra CD of outtakes. I do not have the reissue: as far as I can tell, the
majority of the tracks on the third disc are alternate mixes and demos, which
might make it less of a necessity than the reissues of the previous three
albums. Apparently, most of the stuff recorded during the Odessa sessions did make it onto the final record, and since there
was only one single (ʽFirst Of Mayʼ), there were no extra juicy
B-sides either. So, unless you are a major fan of red backgrounds with gold
letters, you might want to hold off this time. Curiously enough, the Reprise
Records routine of reissuing Bee Gees remasters with extra tracks broke down on
Odessa — rather like the band
itself.
CUCUMBER CASTLE (1970)
1) If I Only Had My Mind On
Something Else; 2) I.O.I.O.; 3) Then You Left Me; 4) The Lord; 5) I Was The
Child; 6) I Lay Down And Die; 7) Sweetheart; 8) Bury Me Down By The River; 9)
My Thing; 10) The Chance Of Love; 11) Turning Tide; 12) Don't Forget To
Remember.
In the long run, most people probably do not
even remember that the Bee Gees split in 1969, since the «disarray» period only
lasted for one year. During that time, Robin released a solo album (Robin's Reign) that had its moments,
but still flopped, becoming a collector's item, while Barry and Maurice carried
on for a while as a duo (firing Colin the drummer for completeness of effect),
then went their own ways, too — all of that over the course of one mad year,
before the pangs of brotherly love took hold once again and the gap was
re-bridged.
Had that all happened a decade, maybe even half
a decade later, we probably wouldn't mind at all. But time passed at a
different rate in 1969-70, and the split caused the band to «lose momentum». It
is debatable if the Bee Gees were really a «major creative force» in 1967-69,
what with all the derivativeness and all that subconscious passion for schlock
— but I still tend to think that they were; at the very least, they had talent
to burn, ideas to explore, and ambitions to satisfy. With the passing of the
band's original incarnation, the talent remained, but the will to explore and
develop quickly faded away. Now that the age of «soft-rock» and «contemporary
folk-pop» and the Carpenters and the Eagles and America and Bread and legions,
legions of them were sprung from the traps, it was clear that, without an
additional effort, the Bee Gees would be swept off by that wave — and in the
wake of the split, it was all too easy.
The original slide happened here, on this
heavily disappointing album released as a «soundtrack» to a TV special that
Barry and Maurice took part in — named after one of the songs on 1st, the mini-movie featured the two
brothers rollicking around in medieval garb and engaging in various silly,
senseless activities: to some extent, this was their own equivalent of Magical Mystery Tour. It also gave the
girls a nice chance to see Barry in prime quality medieval tights (alas, no codpiece),
although, for some reason, the album sleeve designers preferred to capture them
in a state of getting ready for the tournament.
However, the fantasy setting was rather
inadequate for the music — there is no attempt here whatsoever to pull an
«Amazing Blondel» and deliver a set of pseudo-medieval compositions with lutes
and mandolins. Instead, Cucumber Castle
is just a collection of lush pop ballads, some of them with a strong roots-rock
undercurrent (gospel, soul, country), others presented in the plain old easy
listening style. Absence of Robin means fewer and thinner harmonies — when the
remaining brothers do harmonize, it
gives you a chance to better understand the importance of Maurice for the band,
but most of the vocal melodies focus on Barry burning that torch on his own,
slowly, meticulously, and not always convincingly.
Truly, this could have been a much better album
if Barry and Maurice bothered to write more songs like ʽI.O.I.O.ʼ or
even ʽThe Lordʼ. The former is a simple, but refreshingly upbeat
folk-pop ditty crossed with some calypso elements, and it has one of those
choruses that you first hate for painfully sticking to some of your memory
cells, then, eventually, learn to live with in a balanced emotional state. The
latter is an equally simple and equally upbeat country-pop anthem with a tinge
of earthly humor — the brothers proving here that it is not that difficult for
them to write quality cotton-fields material.
And that's about it: only two out of twelve
songs are not straightforward ballads. The other ten songs clearly indicate
that, from now on, the Bee Gees target their charm at bored housewives first,
and everyone else last — a very strange decision in an age that also bred
intellectual singer-songwriters (who could score it with the college chicks)
and glam-rock stars (who could score it with the other chicks), but if that's what your heart and mind desires,
well... anyway, from a purely technical point, this does not necessarily mean
that the songs will all be bad, but it is a nasty blow for the reputation all
the same.
Now that they no longer feed a grand vision,
the only thing to separate a «decent» ballad on Cucumber Castle from a «crappy» one is the presence / lack of a
particularly impressive vocal twist. I have to confess a mild passion for the
gospel-anthemic ʽBury Me Down By The Riverʼ, even though the melody
sounds like one of those you think you've heard a million times before; the
broken-hearted love ballad ʽThen You Left Meʼ, which, if anything,
may impress by the sheer number of vocal nuances and overtones with which Barry
can inflect its endlessly repeated title; and the seemingly Pet Sounds-influenced ʽI Lay Down
And Dieʼ, which probably has the most «adventurous» arrangement on the
album — unfortunately, the song's rather ceremonial, «neutral» mood does not
quite match the tragic lyrics, so that ultimately it sounds hollow compared to
what influenced it in the first place.
Everything else just kind of slips through the
fingers — and the memory cells. The acoustic folk of ʽMy Thingʼ, with
brother Maurice singing lead, is unbearably fluffy (not even Sir Solo Paul McCartney
could allow himself to sing a chorus of "bowzey wow wowzey", although
he came close several times in his career); the orchestrated country ballad
ʽSweetheartʼ would later be covered by Engelbert Humperdinck ('nuff
said); and the final three songs I cannot bring myself to remember even after a
half dozen listens.
Overall, despite the small handful of
decent-to-good songs, this is a decisive (if not hateful) thumbs down — not only in the
overall context of the band's career, where it represents a crucial turning
point, but without that context as well: the songwriting is lazy, the diversity
is minimal, the depth is non-existent, and, since this is neither a Monty
Python session nor a casting session for Ivanhoe,
the chainmails are unforgivable. Oh well, at least we do not get to see Brother
Robin sporting one — the wimpiest of 'em all, he would have looked particularly
miserable.
2 YEARS ON (1970)
1) 2 Years On; 2) Portrait Of
Louise; 3) Man For All Seasons; 4) Sincere Relation; 5) Back Home; 6) The 1st
Mistake I Made; 7) Lonely Days; 8) Alone Again; 9) Tell Me Why; 10) Lay It On
Me; 11) Every Second Every Minute; 12) I'm Weeping.
For those who did take notice — the brothers are back together, of which they
inform us already in the album title. Technically, the break-up lasted less
than two years (more like one and a half), but what's wrong with a little
rounding-up artistic license when an uplifting, bawl-along chorus of "two
years on!..." sounds so much brighter than a "one year on"? The
idea is to announce the comeback with a bang, and ʽ2 Years Onʼ is
meticulously generated with a bang in mind — quiet «little-man» verse,
mid-level «getting-it-up» bridge, then the brothers explode in a celebratory
wave. And as a final gesture of goodwill, Barry lets brother Robin carry the
lead vocal on this opening number — bygones be bygones and all.
2 Years
On is not a bad record — by
all means, a huge improvement over the tiresome mushiness of Cucumber Castle. Nevertheless, even if
Robin's return somewhat reignited the flames and re-stimulated the competitive
spirit between brothers (this time, in a healthy manner), 2 Years On does not pick
up where Odessa left off. On the
contrary, it is almost as if the brothers were intentionally intent on
forgetting about that experience — partially for personal reasons (as that one
ill-omened record that drove a wedge between them), partially for artistic
ones: Odessa put them on the «art
rock» market, way too uncomfortable for them, and even more uncomfortable now
that the standards for that market drifted off into either the Led Zep or the
ELP directions, of which the Bee Gees shared neither the philosophies nor the
musicianship.
What emerges here is a beta-version synthesis
of country-rock and lush balladeering, a.k.a. a specific brand of «soft-rock»
that... wait a minute, it's not as if that was anything new in 1970; if
anything, this is just a return to the standards of Idea, right? Well, more or less, with one subtle change, maybe:
there are almost no attempts to separate the sentimental mood from the gritty /
humorous / sarcastic vibes. The Bee Gees love their romantic troubadour guise
so much now that they stick it on throughout — the «rootsy» aspects are now so
tightly merged with the «pop» aspects that any
deviation from the formula comes across as something jarring and out of place.
On 2
Years On, there are but two such moments: ʽBack Homeʼ, a «hard
rocker» about the joys of homecoming, and ʽLay It On Meʼ, an acoustic
«blues rocker» about the troubles of being blown by the wind. On the former,
Barry is pulling off a Pete Townshend — or, rather, a Randy Bachman? — spicing
the album up with Big Electric Power Chords for a gargantuan two minutes,
seemingly with no other point in mind than to prove that these guys still
remember what an electric socket is (the song does not really qualify as true
hard rock, but it is the hardest bit you will find on here, and, for that
matter, on the next three albums as well). ʽLay It On Meʼ seems less
at odds with the rest of the album, but the image is still not convincing —
unless we keep in mind that the song represents Maurice's individual
contribution to the album (credited to him exclusively and featuring his own
lead vocals), in which case the line "I'm just a low down critter who
never did any good" begins to shine through in an entirely different
light.
That said, the ten ballads of 2 Years On, on the whole, certainly
have more integrity, credibility, and other good qualities than the ten ballads
of Cucumber Castle. With Robin, the
enigmatic lyrics and, occasionally, mysterious auras are back, and the
songwriting, overall, is up a notch. In particular, ʽLonely Daysʼ
gave the brothers their biggest US hit to date — probably due to the shrewdly
repetitive chorus, nicely attuned to cruising speeds, but it is really an
intelligently crafted song whose main charm is in its orchestral arrangements:
Bill Shepherd sure knows how to mutate the melancholic mood to jubilant and
back again, so that the music, in keeping with the lyrics, give you a sad and a
joyful vibe almost at the same time. If you think long enough about it, it is
kinda confusing, though — the «hysterical» climactic part seems to build up
around nothing in particular, so on the whole, the song is cleverly sewn
together, but somewhat senseless... then again, this judgement does apply to
the Bee Gees as such, so no big wonder here.
The best moments of 2 Years On are its anthems — big, pompous ballads distinguished by
jubilant harmonies, the smoother and glossier, the better. The title track
with its immaculately gliding crescendo; ʽMan For All Seasonsʼ, which
could be about Sir Thomas More as well as anybody else; ʽAlone
Againʼ, yet another case of the Bee Gees weirdly-successfully mastering a collective anthem about the pangs of
loneliness (the Gibb brothers are at least as good at impersonating a solitary
loner as a three-headed dragon could be); probably ʽPortrait Of
Louiseʼ, even if it does borrow a vocal line directly from the Beatles'
ʽIf I Needed Someoneʼ — these all illustrate the Bee Gees at their
early 1970's best.
«Solo Robin» and «solo Barry» are more
questionable. Robin carries the «mourning vibe» of ʽIn The Summer Of His
Yearsʼ a bit too far in the silliness direction with ʽSincere
Relationʼ, whose lyrics verge on eccentric British absurdism ("but
then he died without an explanation / he never lied, a very sincere
relation" sounds like something A. A. Milne could have written) while the
vocals descend into unbridled tragism. Meanwhile, Barry tries to subdue the
«epic» genre with ʽThe 1st Mistake I Ever Madeʼ, a lengthy
singer-songwriter-ish confession that puts pathos in the way of interesting
melody — dear Mr. Gibb the Elder, since this is not ʽSad-Eyed Lady Of The
Lowlandsʼ level we are talking about anyway, couldn't you at least have introduced a separate
bridge section into the album's lengthiest track? Four minutes of one generic
folk ballad verse repeated over and over again may work when the singer is Bob
Dylan or Lou Reed; when the singer is Barry Gibb, the pathos overruns the cup
so quickly that I have to stand with my feet all drenched for at least half of
its duration — crudely-figuratively speaking.
So it is a patchy, hit-and-miss job, for sure,
but with the musical fashions changing, splitting, and disintegrating, it would
be folly to expect consistent taste and genius from the new-look Bee Gees; on
the contrary, it all looks fairly nice next to their obvious contemporary
competitors on the «soft rock» market. There would be time (or, rather, times)
when fashions and trends would completely take over the melodic talent, but 2 Years On, those times were not yet on
the horizon, so a less secure thumbs up here than for their Sixties stuff, I
guess, but a thumbs up all the same.
TRAFALGAR (1971)
1) How Can You Mend A Broken
Heart; 2) Israel; 3) The Greatest Man In The World; 4) It's Just The Way; 5) Remembering;
6) Somebody Stop The Music; 7) Trafalgar; 8) Don't Wanna Live Inside Myself; 9)
When Do I; 10) Dearest; 11) Lion In Winter; 12) Walking Back To Waterloo.
Early info on Trafalgar was that it was planned as a double LP with twenty songs,
thus matching, if not exceeding, the monumentality of Odessa. Those plans were eventually scrapped, although enough
material was recorded indeed to spill over onto the next album (ʽWe Lost
The Roadʼ, in particular, was recorded during the Trafalgar sessions and would have fit on quite well), and, at 47
minutes, the final LP is still one of the longest Bee Gees offerings. It is
also the absolutely last one of the «timelessly great» Bee Gees records —
having gotten it out of their systems, they were creatively devastated and
«lost the road» indeed: their own private Quadrophenia,
if you wish, with all the necessary corrections for scope and style.
Of all the Bee Gees albums, this one is their
most genuinely conceptual. If Trafalgar
weren't its name, then Another Year,
Another Time — extracted from ʽWalking Back To Waterlooʼ — might
be the obvious choice. On all of their records, one way or another, these guys
tended to look with fondness at the aristocratic past, and now they have
devoted an entire album that revolves around that topic — not always
lyrically, sometimes simply in spirit. Yes, Trafalgar is slow, sentimental, drowned in orchestration and
pathos, but it has itself some real class, and it seems as if with each passing
year it only ends up aging better and better.
Curiously enough, it was not intended or
pre-planned that way: the brothers simply fell upon a lucky star configuration.
Maurice wrote the title track and the three of them wrote ʽWalking Back To
Waterlooʼ — these bookmarks, together with the album sleeve (and Barry
plays quite a dashing Lord Nelson on the back cover, but where's the eye
patch?), give the record its «Napoleonic» sheen, but its real theme, of course,
is not a particular period in history, but merely a sort of
I-just-wasn't-made-for-these-times longing — this is some rampant, raging
escapism here, only different from the Kinks in that Ray Davies liked to
picture himself more like an innocent commoner, «sitting by the riverside» and
all, whereas Barry Gibb sets his sights much higher — he is only willing to go
back into the past in the guise of an exquisite, ceremonious Lord of the Manor.
(I wish I could say «in the guise of a Byron or a Shelley», but in order to
achieve that honor, at least one of
the Gibbs would have to be lyrically competent).
Anyway, ʽHow Can You Mend A Broken
Heartʼ broke them big in the US for the entirely wrong reason — the silly
Americans took the song the same way they were taking James Taylor and the
Carpenters, that is, as a simple, sissy, sentimental ballad. Consequently, when
the band followed it up with the longer, denser, deeper ʽDon't Wanna Live
Inside Myselfʼ, they were surprised that it did not even make the Top 50,
even though, by all means, this is a much better song. Not just «better»,
actually — it is an absolute classic. That moment when Barry starts repeating
the title against his brothers' gospel harmonies and Shepherd's monumental
strings might just be the most
breathtaking single moment in Bee Gees history — for me, it opens the door to
some near-mystical epiphany... occasionally. On worse days, it is simply one
of the most successful impersonations of the «epic romantic loner» stereotype
in pop music history.
Every single track on here overflows with
pathos — but most of the time, it works, courtesy of Bill Shepherd's orchestral
wizardry. And it is Barry's show all the way, I am afraid: like a grown-up,
intelligently tasteful version of Cucumber
Castle, past the stage of sappy folk-pop balladry and scaling the walls of
«art-pop» now. Robin's minstrel leads here sometimes border on parodic:
ʽDearestʼ, a lament to a departed love interest, is overacted so
blatantly that one can't help but imagine the village's cheesy rustic foreman
laying a rose bouquet on his wife's grave, while the Lord of the Manor is busy
melancholizing somewhere high above in the castle tower. I used to hate the
song — now I am more interested in taking it in its rightful context. However,
it does not abolish the fact that Robin sometimes feels out of place on Trafalgar.
The foreman and the Lord do come together in a
ferocious duet on ʽLion In Winterʼ (another song named after a movie
on British history, certainly not a coincidence), the one place in the Bee Gees
catalog where you get to hear Robin bleat and
roar at the same time: once the initial aural shock is gone, it remains a
memorable, inspired performance on the same old topics — loneliness, abandon,
betrayal, etc. — delivered in a unique manner. (It is debatable whether the
first thirty seconds of martial percussion should be part of it, though).
Funny as it is, I have never seen the Bee Gees
accused of Zionism for ʽIsraelʼ, even if, formally, the song is one
of the most passionate anthems to the Holy Land ever created in the Western
world. But «formally» is the word — since the whole album is a fantasy, the
ʽIsraelʼ in question here is just as far removed from reality as its
Waterloo and Trafalgar, and what matters is not the word but the way Barry and
Bill lay on those mighty crescendos, making for a wonderful gospel-soul
experience. If it does worry your
conscience for some reason, just replace ʽIsraelʼ with
ʽShangri-Laʼ or something — it'd work that way, too.
Only a few of the songs are nominally
«cathartic» — maybe three or four on the whole — but I do not mind in the least
that some are less addictive and attractive than others, being too busy to dig
this «early 19th century vibe». By the time we are ʽWalking Back To
Waterlooʼ, the mood has been set, sharpened, and fine-tuned, and from the
first notes of the "where do I begin?" chorus, you get teleported —
not to any real «Waterloo», of course, just somewhere back in time where the
grass, beyond any reasonable doubt, was so much greener and... well,
unfortunately, I cannot quote any of these lyrics because they are not good
("I wish there was another time when people sang and poems rhymed" —
don't tell me this is a subtle attack on atonal music and free verse, because
it most probably isn't), but the words really do not matter one single bit. The
voices, strings, and pianos do.
It is the last time ever that the Bee Gees
would be working this magic, so please pardon them for the occasional
oversinging, overstringing, and over-presumptuous self-aggrandizing. There is
no attempt here to cover as much ground as possible, like there was on their
Sixties' records — this might, in fact, be the only album in their career where
they could have claimed to «find themselves», once and for all. With this
mission fulfilled, they could just as well «walk back to Waterloo again» and
lose themselves one more time. Thumbs up, your Lordships — may you rest in peace
and all. Thank God you have done your duty.
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN (1972)
1) Run To Me; 2) We Lost The
Road; 3) Never Been Alone; 4) Paper Mache, Cabbages & Kings; 5) I Can Bring
Love; 6) I Held A Party; 7) Please Don't Turn Out The Lights; 8) Sea Of Smiling
Faces; 9) Bad Bad Dreams; 10) You Know It's For You; 11) Alive; 12) Road To
Alaska; 13) Sweet Song Of Summer.
In an older review, I seem to have been a bit
unfair to this record — probably because, next to the concentrated, concise,
and conceptual grandeur of Trafalgar,
this one seems to lack focus so much that its throwaways, unlike Trafalgar's, lack the chance to be
«saved by the frame». In other words, where Trafalgar was «the bomb», To
Whom It May Concern is «the shards», a chaotic collection where old
outtakes, surprising new experiments, and intentionally commercial, sometimes
«dumbed-down» productions are mixed together without a clear plan. Obviously,
this generates a feeling of «faltering» and «insecurity» — even the album title
seems to suggest something like, «well, naturally, we don't insist that you listen to this, unless
you are a Bee Gees vet fan or something...».
What must have happened was that the recording
of Trafalgar, much like the
recording of Odessa two years
earlier, left the band out of breath, yet, instead of taking a recommended
break, they decided to plough on quickly, while the new wave of popularity,
caused by the success of ʽHow Can You Mend A Broken Heartʼ, was still
high. Hence, three more singles in 1972 — all of them lush ballads for sure,
although not a single one came close to replicating their biggest US success so
far. Unfortunately, this time around these songs are just that — lush
sentimental ballads with relatively simple, easily understandable content, not
particularly distinguished through any exquisite «aristocratism» or baroque
flavors. Where ʽHow Can You Mend A Broken Heartʼ not only works on
its commercial own, but also easily fits into the general puzzle of Trafalgar, a song like ʽRun To
Meʼ is simply ʽRun To Meʼ, no less, no more.
At least ʽBroken Heartʼ had an
introspective component to it, a trivial philosophy that was non-trivially
expressed through music — the lead-in number on this record is sheer candy for the crystally clear teenage heart
(and I do stress «teenage», given the line "now and then, you need someone
older" — considering that Barry was twenty-six at the time, it would be a
stretch to accuse him of grandfatherly instincts). At least it is well-written
and beautifully sung candy — just a good song, whatever — but, as a greeting,
it clearly states that a second Trafalgar
is not to be expected: the boys are running up the Sentimental Hill again.
And yet it actually helps that the band has «lost the road» one more time — this
suspended state of «where to now?» results in an unexpected return to
diversity. In fact, one distinguishing feature of To Whom It May Concern is that it is all over the place, easily
their most diverse record since 1st.
See for yourself: in addition to sentimental tear-jerkers / heart-breakers
(ʽRun To Meʼ, ʽI Can Bring Loveʼ) there is a philosophical Trafalgar outtake (ʽWe Lost The
Roadʼ); a loud, glammy pub-rocker with screechy electric guitars and big
fat basslines (ʽBad Bad Dreamsʼ); a blues boogie (ʽRoad To
Alaskaʼ); some acoustic folk- and country-rock; a hilariously absurdist
Brit-poppy «mini-musical» (ʽPaper Maché, Cabbages &
Kingsʼ); and a moody psychedelic piece dominated by a moo-moo-mooing Moog
melody (ʽSweet Song Of Summerʼ) that almost echoes the Gregorian
somberness of ʽEvery Christian...ʼ.
Not all of these ideas may work, but the
important thing is that they are all there — this makes the Bee Gees album the
equivalent of the Stones' Goats Head
Soup: nothing seriously new, not all of it ringing true, and no particular
idea of where we are going to, but give it time to grow, and once you have had
enough of all the acknowledged «classics», you may be in for a bunch of surprises.
ʽPaper Machéʼ, in particular, had always struck me as a fairly
«risqué» piece for a band that seemed to have left sheer silliness way,
way behind them in the past, yet here they are diddling away on banjoified
mandolins, making parodic fun of their own «soulfulness» in the bridge section,
and winding it up with a jolly good chant of "Jimmy had a bomb and the
bomb went bang, Jimmy was everywhere". Australian childhood memories?
ʽWe Lost The Roadʼ and ʽSweet
Song Of Summerʼ are the other two «lost gems» off the album — the former
was indeed recorded for Trafalgar,
but was excluded from the final abridged version, judged as one anthem too
many; as one of those «where have all the good times gone» sermons that the
Gibbs are always so good at, it is beyond reproach. As for ʽSweet
Songʼ, it is actually one of the most «disturbing» codas to a Bee Gees
album ever — brewing up an atmosphere of ominousness and impending doom with
its unhurried pace, torture chamber echoes, and Moog-from-hell passages, but
you never really know what sort of impending doom that is. It just impends,
that's all. For the record, Mike Vickers of Manfred Mann is credited for
mann-ing (sorry) the synthesizers on that track — apparently, getting just the
right sound for the song was a top priority for the brothers.
ʽBad Bad Dreamsʼ, the album's lonely
and risky venture into hard-rock territory, is also surprisingly decent —
mainly due to Maurice's choice of a thick, brawny, but melodic tone for his
bass, and to the brothers' new working partner Alan Kendall's aggressive style
of lead guitar playing (Kendall actually jumped on board ship as early as Trafalgar, but flashy electric guitar
was very much not a priority for Lord
Horatio «Barry» Nelson and his crewmates). Of course, with the Bee Gees and
hard rock, the question is always «will they or will they not embarrass
themselves?» rather than «will they or will they not come up with a hard rock
classic?», but a good hard rock number on any Bee Gees album, provided it's
really credible, is always welcome — at least, for an important psychological
reason.
The «sweeter» part of the deal, always aided by
Shepherd's tasteful arrangements, still strives for seriousness occasionally —
Barry's ʽAliveʼ, for instance, is genuinely grandiose, unlike the
much schlockier ʽRun To Meʼ and ʽI Can Bring Loveʼ. Robin
is best experienced here on ʽNever Been Aloneʼ and ʽSea Of
Smiling Facesʼ, but neither is a big favourite of mine — I believe his
vibrato really only works well along with a baroque flavor, whereas these here
songs are more in standard folk-pop («soft-rock») territory and end up on the
cheesy side of life. Meanwhile, Maurice tries to go for a vibe somewhere in
between James Taylor and very early Beatles circa ʽAsk Me Whyʼ on
ʽYou Know It's For Youʼ, but the song is almost surprisingly
primitive-sounding (of course, from some perspective or other, this could be
interpreted as charm).
To
Whom It May Concern marked
several important «lasts» in the band's career — most importantly, it was
their last album recorded at London's IBC Studios (from now on, most or all of
the band's recordings would be done in America) and the last one with the
participation of Bill Shepherd. Thus, if we are setting up demarcating lines,
it still makes sense to place it in the same period with Trafalgar, despite suffering from a clear «post-masterpiece»
syndrome. It does not as much initiate the band's decline as it simply resigns
itself to sweeping around the corners — with mixed, yet occasionally
fascinating results. No need to rush, but if you are interested in setting up
a block post for the Bee Gees that would leave ʽNights On Broadwayʼ
somewhere on the other side, make sure that To Whom It May Concern still stays on the right side. In the end, I reassess it as a thumbs up — conceptuality be damned
if it helps bring back somberness and silliness at the same time.
LIFE IN A TIN CAN (1973)
1) Saw A New Morning; 2) I
Don't Wanna Be The One; 3) South Dakota Morning; 4) Living In Chicago; 5) While
I Play; 6) My Life Has Been A Song; 7) Come Home Johnny Bridie; 8) Method To My
Madness.
Anti-americanists all over the world, rejoice:
here is your chance to mark down yet another band gruesomely shot down by West
Coast temptations. Oh, wait, that's just California. Well, maybe the Bee Gees did poke a bit of ironic fun at their
move to Los Angeles, comparing their new home to a tin can — but in general,
they took this change very seriously, making a solemn pledge to adapt and
conform. Then they wrote a song called ʽCome Home Johnny Bridieʼ, and
the world shuddered, sputtered, and shut them out.
It is important to realize, I think, that one
does not simply lose one's talents overnight, even with the added inconvenience
of jet lag. Play To Whom It May Concern
and Life In A Tin Can back-to-back,
several times, and the basic songwriting components will be quite similar. But
one may, and one frequently does make wrong stylistic moves — and
for the Bee Gees, their first attempt at thoroughly «americanizing» their
music was a disastrous one. It's not as if they always were so
utterly-baroquishly «European» to-the-bone (after all, they did hail from
Australia): they certainly did their blues, folk, and country homework with
diligence. But it is one thing to draw on «rootsy» influences when you make
them a part of a large bubbling whole — and a completely different one when
your ideology is, «hmm, this John Denver guy seems to be all the rage with the
chicks right now — so why don't we get together and show him that no one beats
three Gibb brothers at any game they
choose?»
Odd enough, this manner of thinking did not
even help them put together a proper album — this one clocks in at thirty-two
minutes with just eight songs (remember that Trafalgar, on the contrary, ended up spilling over the regular
cassette-side length — that should tell us a thing or two about the importance
of inspiration), all of them either soft-rock ballads for L.A. housewives or,
occasionally, country-pop shuffles for retired cowboys. The songs sorely lack
the grand and complex orchestrations of Bill Shepherd, but what is worse, they
lack the grand ambitiousness that was so important for albums like Trafalgar — I mean, if you are going to
add strings, go for total overkill, flush out the basements and flood up the
penthouse with these overdubs, or else it simply does not work. Just the way it
does not work with ʽSaw A New Morningʼ, which opens the album with
false-ringing promises of fresh hope but lacks the proper muscle to support its
optimistic smile. It isn't particularly poorly written, but it is written, and arranged, on a shallow
level, and has nothing to add to the initial «sunny» impression.
Nor does it work when they present real juicy
offerings to the great god of softness and silkiness — ʽLiving In
Chicagoʼ seems to pretend that it is melancholic and introspective, but in
reality it is simply soporific, and they drag it out to an almost six-minute
length on the dubious strength of one, not very interesting, musical idea and
one seemingly «deep» lyrical line: "if you're living in Chicago, you're
alone". Really? Is that why you guys decided on Los Angeles, or was it
actually something about the climate?
I have always liked, and continue to like,
exactly two songs on this album, which seem solid enough to be salvaged for
future consumption. One probably came about by accident: Barry's ʽWhile I
Playʼ starts out with a rather pathetic variation nod to the Beach Boys
("I cry tears of emotion to spread across the USA" = "If
everybody had an ocean across the USA"), but then quickly steps out of it
and brews some refreshing dark clouds, mostly courtesy of guest star Rick Grech
(of Family, Blind Faith, and Traffic fame) who happened to be passing by the
band's L.A. studio and beefed up the song with some moody, subtly threatening
bass and violin lines. This gives the start of Side B a much-needed change of
tone after the relentless wimpy mush of Side A — too late to save the whole
record, but a good reason to come back to it sometimes.
Then, after one more Robin tearjerker (ʽMy
Life Has Been A Songʼ, which so
needs a solid Bill Shepherd orchestral arrangement instead of Tommy Morgan's
country harmonica) and one of the band's least convincing Americana excourses
in history (ʽJohnny Bridieʼ — gunslinger tales do not come easy for
Barry), comes the potential knockout: ʽMethod To My Madnessʼ is a
worthy Bee Gees epic, with typical nonsense lyrics that can still be
breathtaking — as little sense is contained in the line "I've played the
game, still it's not worth it, like a woman in the rain", that "woman
in the rain" bit where the brothers swoop up to the skies is the second,
and last, time on the record where I find myself forced to sit up and take
notice (first time is when Grech breaks through with that spooky fiddle loop on
ʽWhile I Playʼ, of course).
After a decade or so since my last listen, Life In A Tin Can no longer sounds so
appalling or disappointing as it used to — I can now appreciate the songwriting
and singing qualities of ʽSaw A New Morningʼ and ʽI Don't Wanna
Be The Oneʼ, and better see the melodic links to their previous records.
But that does not eliminate the general feeling of «misguided-ness», and the
critics have been right about this from the start — Lost In L.A. should have been a much better title for the album.
Apparently, so it seems, the Gibbs always needed a fatherly figure to get them
in focus — be it Ossie Byrne, Robert Stigwood, Bill Shepherd, or soon-to-come
Arif Mardin — and this was the first time when they suddenly found themselves
without one (the album was completely self-produced, for that matter). Maybe
they even wanted to try hitting it on
their own — just to test their own strengths and limits, for once. It did not
work, but they did learn their lesson. An understanding thumbs down.
MR. NATURAL (1974)
1) Charade; 2) Throw A Penny;
3) Down The Road; 4) Voices; 5) Give A Hand, Take A Hand; 6) Dogs; 7) Mr.
Natural; 8) Lost In Your Love; 9) I Can't Let You Go; 10) Heavy Breathing; 11)
Had A Lot Of Love Last Night.
By mid-1973, the Bee Gees were in a total
commercial and, one could say, «ideological» rut, as if someone had
surreptitiously removed the spindle from their previously well-functioning
machine — a Midnight Special performance where a completely out-of-focus, utterly
ridiculous-looking band backs Chuck Berry on ʽReelin' and Rockinʼ
(may be found here)
might, perhaps, not be typical of their live shows at the time, but is
nevertheless perfectly symbolic. Their follow-up to Tin Can had the weirdest working title in Bee Gees history (A Kick In The Head Is Worth Eight In The
Pants), but we never got to officially
hear what it was all about, since RSO rejected it on the spot (essentially, it
was Tin Can Vol. 2, and RSO were
quite right in that nobody except for completists and historiographers should
really bother to bother). The whole situation was ridiculous — the brothers
were really trying to adapt, but the public just wasn't buying.
The subsequent story is well-known and need not
be retold once again: the «Atlantic alliance», the link-up with Arif Mardin,
the move to Miami, the embracing of funk and then disco dance-pop, the
falsettos, the leisure suits, the hairy chests... but actually, we are running a
little bit ahead here. Before all the madness, there happened to be Mr. Natural — a transitional album
which, as far as I am concerned, is preferable to all of their 1975-1979 (and
beyond, for that matter) stuff put together: one of their best records of the
decade and arguably the last «great» offering from the brothers before they
switched to a completely different aesthetics.
If there are any «seeds» of the Saturday Night Fever spirit sown here,
they are only seeds, and with a more tasteful direction, they could have
actually grown into something much more serious than "what'ch' doin' on
yer back?". Right from the get-go, Mardin suggested that the brothers try
out a livelier style — quite a sensible suggestion, considering how
somnambulant their latest album turned out — and that they did, on songs like
ʽDown The Roadʼ and ʽHeavy Breathingʼ that sound absolutely nothing like their subsequent slick disco productions.
ʽHeavy Breathingʼ, in particular, is
a fairly gritty slice of funk-pop, with acid wah-wah riffage, roaring vocals
from Barry, kickass soloing from Alan Kendall, and a masterfully engineered
paranoid atmosphere — the title has more to do with suspense movies than
sexual enticement. According to rumors, they could extend the song to a
14-minute length when they took it on their 1974 tour, and it could probably
live up to such a treatment: the concocted groove is perfect for an extended
funk jam if you got the energy and talent to carry it out. ʽDown The
Roadʼ is sunnier and poppier, but still sounds like a perfectly authentic,
and catchy, R&B number.
However, these moments of ruckus and rumpus are
exceptions rather than the rule — for the most part, the band still sticks to
balladry, and Mardin is perfectly willing to help them out with that, too, by
restoring at least some chunks of the power that they had lost when they parted
ways with Bill Shepherd. In particular, he helps Barry out with the best Elton
John / Bernie Taupin song that Elton John and Bernie Taupin never wrote —
ʽDogsʼ, a sweeping, anthemic ballad bursting with majesty and
grandiosity even if you can never tell what that majesty is all about. The
resolution leading from the bridge (one part of the song that actually sounds
more like ABBA than Elton John) to the "are you following me just like
Moses to the sea..." chorus may simply be one of the most emotionally
rewarding bits in Bee Gees history — one of those «musical doors opening the
way into ʽsomethingʼ» that truly makes a great artist.
And there are at least two other «great moments
in Bee Gees history» here. One is when ʽVoicesʼ, which begins as an
unassuming, barely noticeable acoustic Robin ballad, starts picking up rhythm one
minute into the song, and then, out of the blue, at 1:32 into the song this
shrieking wah-wah lead from Kendall crawls out of its cave, «awakened» by
Robin's vocals — upon which, there is no turning back, and the song just
strolls on forward in an imminent crescendo of strings, Mellotrons, and
near-psychedelic, «submerged» falsetto wah-wahs in the background ("sweet
voices calling wild" indeed!).
The second, slightly more conventional, moment
is Robin's tour-de-force on the title track — the vocal tapestry as woven from
the first quiet notes of the verse and to the stormy, up-and-down waves of the
chorus should rank among the most complex and
catchy in Bee Gees history, and suits Robin's vibrato so perfectly that it is
one of those rare, if not unique, cases where I wish that Barry had not taken
up the second verse and skewed the «frailty» mode of the song. In any case,
Robin has the upper hand, being the hero of the chorus as he cuts through with
that unbelievably smooth pitch-lowering on the "smile on my face and I'm
tryyy-yyy-yyying" vibrato bit — but the song is not just a technical triumph,
it is a perfect hit at combining the brothers' vulnerable sentimentality with
a strong rhythmic beat and an impressive dynamic development.
Of course, Mr.
Natural is not «perfect». Transitional as it was, the Bee Gees still could
not refrain from including some cotton-candy for their loyal «bored housewife»
audiences — ʽCharadeʼ, in particular, is as misleading an
introduction into this album as could ever have been (regardless of the actual
qualities of the songs, just imagine a Beatles album with ʽHere, There
And Everywhereʼ as the lead-in track!), and ʽHad A Lot Of Love Last
Nightʼ is as anti-climactic a conclusion to this album as could have been
after the thunder of ʽHeavy Breathingʼ (one can understand the wish
to smooth out the ending, but not that
smooth, Barry, please!). A couple other songs seem rather underwritten,
although ʽThrow A Pennyʼ at least could pass for a minor folk-pop gem
— cute catchy chorus and all.
But that is not the point. The point is that
this album, in my humble opinion, deserved all the popular acclaim it could
get — yet it happened to flop as miserably as anything, and this ensured that,
when next year ʽJive Talkin'ʼ was sent to the top of the charts, the
Bee Gees would forever say goodbye to this stylistics, believing it obsolete
and inviable. Silly, crazy people! This astute combination of the band's
art-pop legacy, rootsy inclinations, and gritty, guitar-dependent funk was the most viable approach they could develop
in mid-1970s America — and I have no doubt whatsoever that, with time, when all
the Saturday Night Fever nostalgia
has died out, the few remaining people still willing to explore their roots
will find themselves coming back to Mr.
Natural much more often than the slick and sterile dance fodder that came
in its wake.
For now, all I can do is gratefully forgive the
occasional lapses and flaws of Mr.
Natural and back-congratulate the Gibbs and Mr. Mardin on a job well done —
an album that is at the same time a farewell to the old Bee Gees of the
«ruffled shirts age» and a welcome to the new Bee Gees of the «bare chest» age.
A unique, yet perfectly working synthesis, and a great big thumbs up, of course. Next time
around, the bare chest would emerge completely victorious, and things would
never be the same.
MAIN COURSE (1975)
1) Nights On Broadway; 2) Jive
Talkin'; 3) Wind Of Change; 4) Songbird; 5) Fanny (Be Tender With My Love); 6)
All This Making Love; 7) Country Lanes; 8) Come On Over; 9) Edge Of The
Universe; 10) Baby As You Turn Away.
A naked
lady on the front sleeve of the Bee Gees' new album? What have we missed?
Where are the ruffled shirts? The mighty frigates? The pawnshop chainmails? The
Victorian picture frames? Why are they offering us a spoonful of female
flesh...?
Well, obviously, because times have changed: in
the midst of the «Me Decade», performers are expected to undress rather than
dress up. With Main Course, the Bee
Gees have crossed the line — they are still not quite there yet, but the pact has been signed and
there is no turning back now. At the instigation of Mardin, they are now recording
one R&B dance number after another, bordering on stiff disco (not quite
there yet, though), and, more alarmingly, Arif has unleashed Barry's falsetto on
the world: according to legend, it was during the sessions for ʽNight On
Broadwayʼ that he asked Barry whether he could «scream on key», and that
was one of those infamous «the night when the music died» moments in history.
As an LP, Main
Course is actually quite intriguing. There is a strong difference here
between the first side, which is mainly left to the well-calculated hot dance
grooves of ʽNights On Broadwayʼ, ʽJive Talkin'ʼ, ʽWind
Of Changeʼ, and ʽFannyʼ (the Elton John-ish ballad
ʽSongbirdʼ being the only exception), and the flip side, which is far
more traditional in structure — you got your old-time music hall stuff
(ʽAll This Making Loveʼ), your piano-based folk-pop (ʽCountry
Lanesʼ, ʽCome On Overʼ), and your guitar-based pop-rock
(ʽEdge Of The Universeʼ), with the exception being ʽBaby As You
Turn Awayʼ, a song that simply has
to close the album in groove mode (slow
groove mode, to be sure, but falsetto-laden).
In that respect, it is actually Main Course, rather than its
predecessor, that has to be counted as a properly «transitional» album — the
seeds of ʽHeavy Breathingʼ have sprouted and spread, but they have
not yet suppressed all «old school» competition. And furthermore, at this
point, it almost looks like a perfectly viable symbiosis: there are hits and
misses on both sides here. The Bee Gees are intentionally dumbing down their
image, under the pretext that everyone else is doing the same thing, but in
1975, they were still able to present it under the guise of «playfulness» — as
in, «so weren't you the one
complaining about all that slow stuff on our records?... well, here's a few
fast ones, then, just for a change».
After all, ʽJive Talkin'ʼ, the first
and best one of their disco era singles, is a good song. Its bubbly synth bass
line sounds somewhat gross and antiquated today, but the «jivin'» rhythm guitar
is still lively and fun, and so is the poppy synth line in the bridge section,
and, best of all, almost no falsetto in sight other than a few occasional
adlibs. If only they stayed on that level...
...but ʽNights On Broadwayʼ is
already an ominous sign that things are going to get much worse, with mock-serious
lyrics, glutinous synthesizer atmospherics and falsettos a-plenty. ʽFanny
(Be Tender With My Love)ʼ is an early precursor to the sleazy romanticism
of ʽMore Than A Womanʼ; and ʽWind Of Changeʼ is the
album's one straightforward disco number that openly announces a new strategy:
"Get on up, look around / Can't you feel the wind of change?" And
there I was wondering where that odd smell of polyester came from...
The second side, much more in line with the
«old» Bee Gees, is more palatable. The lyrics of ʽAll This Making
Loveʼ are well in line with the decadent spirit of 1975, but the hoppy
music-hall melody is more of a throwback to ʽPaper Mache, Cabbages &
Kingsʼ. ʽCome On Overʼ is a perfectly performed country ballad
— subtly and lavishly misogynistic, just the way all of us male chauvinist pigs
like it: "And if you think I need you / Come on over, lay your body down /
You know I will be here / So bring your love around" — even if you somehow
miss the offensiveness in the "if you think I need you" bit, you can
hardly miss it in the negligent, nonchalant, and still seductive way that the
chorus melody is resolved with "bring your love around".
The album's highest point, though — the very
last goodbye from the old Bee Gees — is ʽEdge Of The Universeʼ, which
is just a good old catchy melodic pop song that cannot be spoiled even by the
whining synth sirens, completely superfluous, inescapable, and still
insignificant in the light of the song's overall charm. Most importantly, it
has the trademark Bee Gees spirit all over it, so they sound like real,
organic, friendly, and slightly idealistic human beings. Four years ago, they
bid goodbye to their «grandiose» ambitions with ʽWalking Back To
Waterlooʼ, and now ʽEdge Of The Universeʼ puts a final stop to
their credibility as... well, let us call it «artists who have something — anything — to say that can be picked up
emotionally».
It makes no sense to blame Arif Mardin for «the
change». He came from an entirely different background, he was doing his job —
returning an «obsolete» band back to stardom — and, as it happened, he actually
showed as much respect for the Bee Gees' legacy as possible: Mr. Natural was almost completely
«old-school», and Main Course was
produced as a sensible compromise. This is not mentioning that even the
«disco-est» songs on here still show a certain «band presence» (play
ʽWind Of Changeʼ with ʽSubwayʼ off their next album
back-to-back to see how glossy and slick the latter is in comparison).
And yet — in for a penny, in for a pound. The
huge commercial success of the singles promptly ensured which of the two sides of this album was going to cast more
influence over the future, making Main
Course the start of the band's meteoric commercial rise and eventual
artistic and critical downfall. I do give it a thumbs up — the sickeningly
sugar-sweet balladry of ʽFannyʼ and ʽBaby As You Turn Awayʼ
is pretty much the only thing that really turns me off here, so I just pretend
each side ends on the fourth track — but only when thinking of it without its
historical context. But do not blame it on the Bee Gees — blame it on every
sucker who bought a copy of Main Course
without buying a copy of Mr. Natural
the previous year. Hopefully, once they all die and go to their little padded
cells in heaven or hell, someone will place Tales From Topographic Oceans on endless replay for them.
CHILDREN OF THE WORLD (1976)
1) You Should Be Dancing; 2)
You Stepped Into My Life; 3) Love So Right; 4) Lovers; 5) Can't Keep A Good Man
Down; 6) Boogie Child; 7) Love Me; 8) Subway; 9) The Way It Was; 10) Children
Of The World.
This is it — the album where the Bee Gees
quasi-officially shut the door on their past. No more half-hearted compromises
between the conflicting ideologies of «give the people what they want» and
«show the people what we are». The very idea of the exact same band recording Odessa, or even Trafalgar, and then eventually following it up with Children Of The World is so revolting
that one feels tempted to dump the Bee Gees' entire output as a result. So have
the Bee Gees always been «phonies»? Or was this sabotage of artistic credibility
a conscious sacrifice? Or did they really love these dubious achievements? Or
did they just love whatever music could return them to the top of the charts?
Are they beyond redemption, or can they still be saved? So many questions — too many, in fact, for a record of such
sordid quality.
Since Robert Stigwood's distribution deal with
Atlantic was over, with RSO shifting its allegiance to Polydor, the band no
longer had Arif Mardin at its disposal, and had to basically produce the album
on their own, with some help from engineer Karl Richardson and his friend Albhy
Galuten. The differences in style are immediately obvious — Children Of The World is far more slick
and glossy, taking at least as many cues from the newborn «Eurodisco» as from
the contemporary US R&B scene. The guitars are toned down, with chief
emphasis on electronics — regular keyboards as well as synthesized strings:
for the first time ever, the band rejects real orchestration, which used to be
such an integral part of their sound, in favor of artificial substitutes.
Of course, the most controversial of the
artificial substitutes is Barry's falsetto — which is all over the place now,
regardless of how well it fits into the overall context. Most of the time, it
does (and, to give Barry his due, he does not use it on the funky ʽBoogie
Childʼ where it would have been completely inappropriate), but overall, it
just reads as a symbolic message: «This whole thing is as true to the musical
legacy of the Bee Gees as it is true to the natural tone of Barry Gibb's voice».
With the entire album being so utterly «inorganic», it made total sense to deliver
it in a «homoerotic android» vocal style as well.
There are only two things that could have saved
Children Of The World from a total
reputational fiasco. One could be humor and self-irony, a safe haven for
«smart» artists who had to tackle disco (everybody from Blondie to Sparks) —
unfortunately, the Bee Gees always had a very limited sense of humor, and none
of it had survived into 1976. The other one could be a set of unstoppable
monster hooks — irresistible dance grooves, for instance, which totally enslave
the body despite vehement, but fruitless protestations from the mind. This is
where they fare a little better — however, occasional fanboy claims about how
the songs on Children Of The World
represent the disco movement at its finest are grossly exaggerated.
Now there is certainly no way one could deny
the killer power of ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ — although the unsung
hero here is not Barry, but brother Maurice, totally responsible for the «dark»
and «gritty» undertones with his mean and lean bassline (and do not forget to
pay close attention to his walking all over the fretboard, getting hotter and
hotter as they move into the final jam section). In fact, with that bass, those
tribal congas, the grumbly synth part, and Alan Kendall's ear-piercing wah-wah
guitar break, the song would have worked equally well as an instrumental —
except that I actually like Barry's
falsetto on here, and the way he alternates it with a more regular low-pitched
bark on the last lines of each verse. The song transcends the formalities and
clichés of its immediate environment: all you need to complete the
picture is a Travolta. The whole thing is about as «real» as some voluptuous,
fake-tittied porn star — but there is still something to be said about «grade A
sleaze» as opposed to your regular, run-of-the-mill, unimaginative sleaze. And
this is actually grade A++ sleaze.
The sad news is that nothing else on Children Of The World may even remotely
approach the punch of its lead-in single. Take the B-side ʽSubwayʼ,
for instance — simplistic sacchariney romance stuffed in a dance beat, with a
moronic chorus to boot (there is something very, very wrong in trying to
deliver the line "take me to the subway" in heavy-breathing «carnal»
mode). The only other disco song here that even tries to show a few teeth is ʽCan't Keep A Good Man Downʼ
— it has a fun brass riff interwoven with a «nasty» wah-wah guitar line, and
its vocals (on the verses) are more «aethereal» than «helium», but it is still
strictly a passable dance groove, hardly with any potential to penetrate deeper
layers of conscience.
And then there is all the «lyrical» stuff —
even the titles could not have been any more straightforward: ʽLove So
Rightʼ, ʽLoversʼ, and ʽLove Meʼ all on the same
record? What about the alleged lexical richness of the English language and
all? Additionally, ʽLoversʼ bears the brunt of having too much Robin
on it: if you think Barry's falsetto is bad enough, wait till you hear Robin's
caprine talents strained through the same filter (I honestly thought my
eardrums were going to burst). And as much as I hate to admit it, the title
track, sung partially in accappella mode, is a spiritual and technical
ancestor of all the boy bands of the 1990s — the Backstreet Boys must have been
listening to it every day on their ways to the studio.
Quite honestly, Children Of The World simply gives the impression of a bunch of
quick, cheap filler assembled around one undisputable classic of its time — an
odd observation, seeing as how the brothers would be able to crank up the
quality for their next effort. Presumably, they were still «learning» the
business, poking around in different corners, and ʽYou Should Be
Dancingʼ was their jackpot for the day — none of the other singles from
the album made it as high on the charts (and their British compatriots, in
particular, pretty much ignored them altogether). But whatever the
circumstances, most of these songs should have never seen the light of day; and
considering that ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ is perfectly well available
on the Saturday Night Fever
soundtrack anyway, I do not think that anybody except for aging cousins of Tony
Manero should bother. Hence, here comes my first «totally disgusted» thumbs down
in Bee Gees history.
HERE AT LAST... LIVE (1977)
1) I've Gotta Get A Message To
You; 2) Love So Right; 3) Edge Of The Universe; 4) Come On Over; 5) Can't Keep
A Good Man Down; 6) New York Mining Disaster 1941; 7) Run To Me / World; 8)
Holiday / I Can't See Nobody / I Started A Joke / Massachusets; 9) How Can You
Mend A Broken Heart; 10) To Love Somebody; 11) You Should Be Dancing; 12)
Boogie Child; 13) Down The Road; 14) Words; 15) Wind Of Change; 16) Nights On
Broadway; 17) Jive Talkin'; 18) Lonely Days.
The Bee Gees never got around to recording a
live album during their «golden» age — and there is nothing wrong with that,
because throughout that age, the Bee Gees were a studio-based band through and
through: even the surviving «live» footage, for the most part, consists of meticulously
choreographed, sterilized, lip-synched TV performances, and the actual live
shows, overall, would have to be rated in accordance with how close, on that
particular night, the Gibbs were able to match the perfection of their studio
productions. The shows sold out fine, to be sure, but something tells me that
the audiences were mainly there to see
the Gibbs than hear them — Barry at
least was impossibly handsome in those early days, enough to make one think
twice about one's preferred sexual orientation... 'scuse me.
By the mid-1970s, things had seriously changed.
The Bee Gees got older and a little worn out (especially Maurice, daily
increasing the sacrifice of his hair in his brothers' favour), but as they went
further and further down the dubious road of R'n'B-ization and then
disco-ization of their sound, it gave them a chance to stretch out a bit and
add some looseness and freedom to the show. An early live take on ʽHeavy
Breathingʼ could be extended to over ten minutes, showcasing the band's
improving instrumental technique (particularly Maurice's bass parts and Alan
Kendall's lead guitar playing) and giving the crowds plenty of room to practice
body language. So it is only natural that, eventually, the possibility of a
live album entered the picture — and, fortunately enough, was realized in the
pre- rather than post-Saturday Night
Fever era, when the «total sterilization» that the Bee Gees had already
achieved in the studio had not yet completely neutralized their live shows.
If anything, Here At Last... is worth taking a peek at just to see how they
manage to integrate the «old shit» with the «new shit». In terms of sheer
quantity, the «old shit» only occupies about a third of the entire running
length, but it is so skilfully scattered throughout the album that there is an
illusion of «democracy». Here they start off the show with Robin's
heartbreaking ʽMessage To Youʼ — and then immediately follow it up
with the plastic confection of ʽLove So Rightʼ off Children Of The World, as if the two
had something in common. Or, after a final sequence of their stompiest dance
hits, close the album on a melancholy / psycho note with ʽLonely
Daysʼ.
The major misstep, which turned into a practice
that they would stubbornly observe up to the very end, is in their jamming most
of the old hits into a rather pathetic «medley», which eats up huge parts of
ʽHolidayʼ, ʽI Can't See Nobodyʼ, ʽRun To Meʼ, and
other songs. This is one clear sign of where their primary allegiance now lies
— I mean, sacrifice the integrity of their baroque pop legacy in order to make
room for five extra minutes of straightforward disco dancing (in the guise of a
lengthy coda to ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ)? It would have been more sensible
to simply leave out some of these castrated snippets, but apparently they
thought that the fans should be given the chance of hearing every hit single's
chorus at least once — go figure.
One major reason why they still so left so many
oldies in the setlist, I suppose, was to provide Robin with something to do —
since he was practically excluded from singing lead on most of the disco stuff,
and never played any instruments either, his role was reduced to strengthening
the harmonies on the chorus parts and jumping around like an idiot on
everything else. (Fortunately, this is not a problem with the audio record).
But generally, they concentrate on Main
Course and Children Of The World
— and it must be said that at least ʽCan't Keep A Good Man Downʼ,
with extra focus on Kendall's aggressive lead playing, is an improvement here,
shedding some of the studio gloss and getting more in line with the livelier
vibe of Main Course.
In short, this double live LP, recorded
December 20, 1976, right in the heartland of newly conquered Bee Gees
territory — The Forum at Los Angeles — has its ups, downs, historical importances,
and dated gimmicks, but most significantly, it still has some entertainment
value: at the very least, of all the officially
released audio and video recordings of the band, it is unquestionably the best
one, still capturing a small bit of the flesh-and-blood Gibb brothers just
before they crossed over completely into Vegas territory.
SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1978)
1) Stayin' Alive; 2) How Deep
Is Your Love; 3) Night Fever; 4) More Than A Woman; 5) If I Can't Have You (Yvonne Elliman); 6) A Fifth Of Beethoven
(Walter Murphy); 7) More Than A Woman
(Tavares); 8) Manhattan Skyline (David Shire); 9) Calypso Breakdown (Ralph MacDonald); 10) Night On Disco
Mountain (David Shire); 11) Open
Sesame (Kool & The Gang); 12)
Jive Talkin'; 13) You Should Be Dancing; 14) Boogie Shoes (K.C. & The Sunshine Band); 15) Salsation (David Shire); 16) K-Jee (M.F.S.B.);
17) Disco Inferno (The Trammps).
Of all the dance-pop explosions in the history
of music, the rise and fall of «classic disco» is the one that has a certain
mystical flavor to it. I mean, already in the 1980s dance-pop reformatted itself,
incorporating elements of New Wave and electronic music, and in terms of commercial
sales became just as huge as disco and maybe huger (Michael Jackson? Madonna?),
but it had learned its lesson — it managed to live its life without becoming
«the talk of the town», not thinking all that much of itself, and avoiding the
restrictive trappings and ultimate fate of disco.
Saturday
Night Fever — the album, not the movie — is like Hitler in 1942: huge, unstoppable, with its
tentacles all over the place, grinding every musical idea ever thought of by
humanity, be it pop, rock, jazz, or classical, in its monster disco grinder...
and just a couple years away from total catastrophe: a glorious celebratory
triumph before the final crucifixion. Who knows, maybe it wasn't such a good idea to present the «ultimate disco album» in
the form of a soundtrack to a movie that is, ironically, in itself a wicked
send-up of «disco values». Sure, once the movie hit the screen, most people
probably stormed the theaters to catch an iconic glimpse of Travolta doing his
flip-flops to ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ — but eventually, some of them might have started paying attention to,
like, the plot of the movie, and
then...
...anyway, I have not even mentioned yet what
we are really talking about here. Technically, of course, this is not a Bee
Gees album: this is a soundtrack to a movie of which the Bee Gees are only a
part, with only six songs altogether performed by the band and only four of
them previously unavailable (and ʽJive Talkin'ʼ, for trivia's sake,
was not even included in the final cut of the movie, although it did feature in
a deleted scene). However, these six (five) songs are an integral part of both the movie and the soundtrack, not
counting a seventh (sixth) song written by the Bee Gees, but performed by
Yvonne Elliman, and an eighth (seventh) track that is an alternate version of a
Bee Gees track performed by Tavares. In addition, it is the Bee Gees, and not
Yvonne Elliman or Walter Murphy, that got the honor of sharing the front
sleeve spotlight with Travolta; and it is the Bee Gees that are at least
partially responsible for the name of the movie (coined from a superimposition
of Robert Stigwood's Saturday Night
with the band's own ʽNight Feverʼ) — and it is, after all, the
album that really made the Bee Gees into a household name, so not dealing with
it in an overview of the band's discography would be ridiculous.
It is true that the Bee Gees really only play
the role of those animals who are more equal than the others: in the end, this
album is not about the Bee Gees at all, it is about a «saturday night fever»
that happened to take New York City by storm and ravage it to the ground. But
then again, the Gibbs had already sacrificed the last remains of their artistic
identity on Children Of The World a
year earlier — their creative dissolution already having occurred, it does not
matter much now if they are doing it all by themselves or sharing the spotlight
with KC & The Sunshine Band. Now they are simply passive conductors of the
disco vibe, even if, sometimes, that vibe still bears occasional traces of
their own talent and professionalism.
Because no amount of hatred, even if we all
agree to pool however much we have, will ever suffice to derail the powers of
ʽStayin' Aliveʼ — the ultimate swagger anthem, perfectly tailored to
the ultimate visual swagger of Travolta strolling the dirty streets of 1970's
NYC. My favorite part of the song, actually, are the first 15 seconds, right before Barry's falsetto comes rolling
in, because it is the funky guitar riff that truly embodies that swagger, not
the vocals, and furthermore, it is a riff that probably wouldn't work anywhere
outside a disco setting. The embarrassing "ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin'
alive" chorus I could easily live without, but the riff, and even its
lively interaction with the strings, is murder. On the other hand, the lyrics
are ambiguous, and clearly indicate that the Bee Gees were conscious of the movie's principal message — namely, that the
disco lifestyle is but a crude front, tastelessly, but seductively set up in
order to mask, not to eliminate the ugly things in life — and that the life in
question is not so much about real living as it is about «stayin' alive». So
the song does have a double bottom, which is good to remember for those who
only think of it as a «guilty pleasure» at best.
The same judgement probably does not apply to
ʽNight Feverʼ, where neither the music nor the lyrics betray anything
but vapid shallowness — but there is still no resisting the magic when the
overdriven falsetto verse spills over into the "night fever, night
fever..." chorus, as the clock strikes twelve and the brothers shed their
«castrated elf» disguises and turn into disembodied friendly spirits of the
night, smoothly and suavely rocking out on a bed of grilled chicken-scratch
guitars. This may be a guilty
pleasure indeed, but I agree to bear the guilt — any sort of atmosphere that
finds a perfect representation in music is already an achievement, and this
here song is about classy hooks as well, not just atmosphere.
The two ballads are less convincing — disco
balladeering, in general, is a couple steps further down from disco dancing,
and both ʽHow Deep Is Your Loveʼ and ʽMore Than A Womanʼ
are essentially just romantic ear-candy, but the latter at least, moving at a
slightly faster tempo (and, once again, perfectly tailored to the main dance
scene in the movie), also tends to stick — maybe because of the near-impeccable
violin part. Most interestingly, this is so thoroughly «whitebread», there is
no sex whatsoever in the song — as if the Bee Gees had secretly imported some
of their medieval chivalry from the early classic period and snuck it in (this
is why the alternate Tavares version sucks in comparison: they try to ground it
with a slightly «fleshier» approach and end up taking away all potential charm
without adding anything worthwhile in return).
Still, there is some difference between the Bee Gees stuff and the rest of the
album. The Gibbs, as it were, are not doing much of anything they hadn't done
before: writing catchy songs and hardwiring them to slick, professional
arrangements. The rest of the crowd, assembled in the studio, seems to be
operating in a different manner — providing a programmed response to the
programmed query of «take musical object X and turn it into disco». And thus,
we have classical (Walter Murphy's ʽA Fifth Of Beethovenʼ,
vivisecting Ludwig van; David Shire's ʽNight On Disco Mountainʼ,
vivisecting Mussorgsky); calypso (Ralph MacDonald's ʽCalypso
Breakdownʼ); jazz-rock (Kool & The Gang's ʽOpen Sesameʼ,
with distant echoes of Bitches Brew
and the like); Latin (ʽSalsationʼ, also from David Shire); old school
R&B (KC & The Sunshine Band's ʽBoogie Shoesʼ); and generic
movie soundtrack muzak (ʽManhattan Skylineʼ) all brought on their
knees to fit the same common denominator.
It is actually quite mind-boggling to see how
much inventiveness and creativity must have gone into all of this stuff — there
are certain moments on the record when you almost become convinced that there
was a real belief in the power of
disco, namely, that, yes, this would
be the new musical framework, bound to assimilate and reinvent all the musical
legacy of mankind. As horrible as that idea is, there is a perverse evil
majesty in it, almost Nazi-style (thankfully, without the accompanying
carnage), and there is no doubting the professionalism and ardor of the people
involved. Nobody in his right mind will ever place ʽA Fifth Of
Beethovenʼ next to the real thing — but neither would I just brush it away
as a dumb, irrespectful «profanation». Maybe that is the way it was understood
by all disco haters back in 1978, but today it seems more like a bit of
post-modern hooliganry, and quite inventive at that. (And Murphy's organ solo
in the improvised mid-section is coolishly tasteful).
The album culminates in an eleven-minute mix of
the Trammps' ʽDisco Infernoʼ — maybe the length was triggered simply
by the need to fill up empty space on the double LP, but the result is
thoroughly symbolic: this is indeed a huge slice of «Disco Inferno», a
mind-numbing, trance-inducing, thoroughly hellish trip on the fuzz disco
bassline highway, wrapping it all up in a way in which the Bee Gees couldn't
(just compare the grim, gritty jam section of the track with the extended
version of ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ on Here At Last and see what makes a simple dance track different
from... a pretentious dance track,
shall we say).
In short, Saturday
Night Fever, even today, lives up to its troubled reputation — it is much
more than a soundtrack: it is a musical Godzilla that once threatened to
demolish the big city in much the same way, with the Bee Gees acting as suave
spiritual leaders and the other members of the crew carrying out rowdy soldier
tasks. That said, even with all of its ideological flaws, it overflows with
ideas — in an utterly perverse manner, it was really cutting edge stuff back in
its day, and even these days, it may still provide some perverse inspiration.
For all the guilty pleasuring, all the creativity, and all the stimulation, I
give it a thumbs
up — a thing I probably would never have done, were I not less than
two years of age and living in the USSR back when it came out, but times, ages,
and backgrounds do change, and we have to admit that.
In any case, as it turned out, the record did
far less harm than, say, Aerosmith albums of the Pump / Get A Grip variety: the disproportionate success and stature
of the soundtrack was certainly one of the factors that eventually helped bring
disco down, rather than ensure its rule once and for all. All we have left
today is a historical document, an instructive memory, a bunch of catchy and /
or silly tunes, and a chance to evaluate this stuff without the context of its
epoch — «no leisure suit required», as Phil Collins would probably say. Oh, and
if, for some reason (like being born no earlier than in the 1990s) you have not
seen the movie, do go see it — if only in memory of the late great Roger
Ebert, who deservedly put it on his Great Movies list. Don't worry, the Bee
Gees do not make any cameo
appearances.
SPIRITS HAVING FLOWN (1979)
1) Tragedy; 2) Too Much
Heaven; 3) Love You Inside Out; 4) Reaching Out; 5) Spirits (Having Flown); 6)
Search, Find; 7) Stop (Think Again); 8) Living Together; 9) I'm Satisfied; 10)
Until.
My original, rough-hewn review for this
(in)famous follow-up to the Saturday
Night Fever success might have been unnecessarily vicious — but the
general opinion has not changed much: this album is not inspiring, not all that
interesting, and definitely not fun at all. Considering how much time, thought,
and effort had been invested in its preparation (and the Bee Gees took the
responsibility of producing a follow-up to SNF very seriously), it
is, at the very least, totally inadequate to all the pooled resources. In
addition, I still think it sucks, but maybe that's just me.
According to what they say themselves, Barry
and Co. were very keen on peeling off the «disco» label — even though, by the
time they went back into the studio, the disco backlash had not yet hit all
that hard, they already felt uneasy about being associated primarily with the
disco movement. Which makes it all the more amazing that, even if formally
there are no disco songs here (a maverick bassline does make a stray incursion
on ʽLove You Inside Outʼ, but the exception only proves the rule), Spirits Having Flown still has the full
feel of a disco album, and a pretty
dull and disenchanted disco album at that. At least with Children Of The World, there was some sort of a discovery vibe
going on — the musical toilet stall that they were entering was brand new and
unused. But three years without a single cleaning? Too much, man.
The album supposedly yielded one pop classic,
the lead single ʽTragedyʼ, which is respected even by the many
detractors of disco-era Bee Gees — unfortunately, I cannot share the respect.
It may have a (relatively) catchy verse-chorus structure, but it is a sort of
catchiness that is emotionally emptier than even the catchiness of ʽNight
Feverʼ. Because with ʽNight Feverʼ, Barry was able to capture the trivial, but realistic and even somewhat
charmingly innocent spirit of the «nightclub atmosphere» — you may hate that
language, but it has a language.
ʽTragedyʼ, on the other hand, purporting to be a desperate lost-love
anthem, has no emotional vibe whatsoever. Maybe it is because of the goddamn
falsetto, relevant for the nightclub spirit, but not for any serious
aspirations. Maybe it is because the galloping, dance-oriented tempo of the
song thoroughly contradicts the very aspect of «tragedy». In any case, I simply
cannot relate to it — and I can even relate to ABBA's disco stuff on Voulez-Vous, an album that is just as
tightly screwed to the floorboards of its time but whose songs still have more
personality and spirit than ʽTragedyʼ.
The ballads — ʽToo Much Heavenʼ,
ʽReaching Outʼ, the excruciatingly slow, unbearable ʽStop (Think
Again)ʼ, the part-accappella, part-elevator jazz smooth finale of
ʽUntilʼ — are sappy artificial concoctions that are beyond
discussion. The funk-pop, «who cares if it ain't disco», stuff like ʽLove
You Inside Outʼ is melodically bland and instrumentally lethargic;
ʽSearch, Findʼ is just a tad grittier, with a weak attempt to add a
little menace and determination into the usually vulnerable falsetto, and is
probably the best song on the album if we omit the issue of ʽTragedyʼ
— but overall, that is not saying much.
Actually, maybe it is not ʽSearch,
Findʼ, but the title track, after all, since the album's finest melodic
invention — the little pastoral flute riff played by Herbie Mann — is found
right there, and the song's repetitive two-minute coda is the only piece of the
album that could even remotely be called «touching», without the suffocating
plastic synthetic vibe of everything else. Apparently, this is where the spirits have really flown, what with their
complete absence on the other tracks.
It's all predictable — you don't sell your soul
to the devil for nothing, and now that you are coming back to your senses and
start backing out of the deal, it suddenly turns out that there is really no
going back. The disco years caused irreversible brain damage for the brothers —
their songwriting and arranging skills genetically modified and twisted, they
would no longer be able to return to the level of Mr. Natural. It does not help, either, that Barry still insists on singing most of the
stuff in falsetto, or that the record is known for featuring the least amount
of Robin's contributions on any Bee Gees album (he only sings lead on
ʽLiving Togetherʼ, and even that one is a duet with Barry).
Of course, the album still sold well — riding
the coattails of SNF, anything by the Bee Gees would have sold
well in 1979, even a cover album of acoustic sea shanties; what is far more surprising
for me is that it continues to enjoy some critical reputation, in sharp
contrast to every other Bee Gees record released in the next two decades. Maybe
the sales figures still suffice to dazzle the critics, or maybe it's a matter
of subconscious nostalgia, or maybe ʽTragedyʼ is a great song and I am simply too rustic to perceive its depth
and complexity. Be it as it may, in my
world this record is a complete flop — thumbs down without further questioning.
LIVING EYES (1981)
1) Living Eyes; 2) He's A Liar;
3) Paradise; 4) Don't Fall In Love With Me; 5) Soldiers; 6) I Still Love You;
7) Wildflower; 8) Nothing Could Be Good; 9) Cryin' Every Day; 10) Be Who You
Are.
A classic case of post-(Saturday Night)fever
fatigue syndrome — the Bee Gees' first album of the new musical decade sounds
forced, tired, uninspired, and generally superfluous. The brothers had
allegedly disowned the album themselves, claiming that they were pressed into
recording by the studio at a time when they really needed to sit back and
rethink their image: with the anti-disco backlash tearing their reputation to
pieces, and the proverbial truth of «the higher the climb, the harder the fall»
landing upon them in full force, it was really
unclear where to go next after the spirits had flown and yesterday's
mass-cultural heroes became today's mass-cultural clowns.
The biggest irony of it all is that, in the
end, Living Eyes still ended up a
much better album than both the one that preceded it and the «comeback» that
would follow it six years later. Not having enough time to rethink anything and
come up with a carefully construed «nu-image», the Bee Gees simply resorted to
the one thing they usually did best — that is, writing pop songs and recording
them. Living Eyes has no direct
«affiliation»: it is not disco, it is not New Wave, it is not trendy synth-pop,
it is not retro symph-pop, it is just a bunch of typically Bee Gees songs, recorded
without much forethought or gimmickry. Not particularly good Bee Gees songs, I
might add — there is nothing here to suggest even a partial recovery from the
disco-induced «genius' block» — but not utterly without redeem, either.
The overall sound of the album is glossy and
synthetic alright (the Bee Gees would never again be able to recapture the «organic»
sound of their pre-Main Course
records), but the acoustic folk-pop harmonies that form the core of the Gibb
style are well emphasized, and the guitars are not drowned out by the
electronics (as they would be eventually), nor is the production crappy enough
to infringe on the vocal harmonies. Speaking of which, Living Eyes almost completely rejects falsetto —
ʽSoldiersʼ being the only serious exception — welcoming Barry Gibb
back to the «world of real men», provided he still remembers what it used to look
like.
So the major problem is not with the style — it is rather bland, sterile, and
unadventurous, but not ugly, crassy, or cheesy — but with the songs. Things
start out kind of okay with the title track, whose romantic chorus is
relatively pretty and even seems to recapture a tiny spark of the «courteous
nobility» of old. Slow it down a little bit, bring back Bill Shepherd, and it
would not feel out of place on To Whom
It May Concern at least. Rebirth? No, because already the second track,
ʽHe's A Liarʼ, inexplicably chosen as first single, is a pointless
pop-rocker, recorded in a style that could have worked for Foreigner, but not
for the Bee Gees — and its main hook is a contrast between a deep baritonal and
a high falsetto rendering of the song title: a silly gimmick that only confirms
that yes, the well has run dry after
all.
Only three songs out of ten have managed to
register on my brain cells with a positive charge — these are the title track;
ʽParadiseʼ, another midtempo adult contemporary ballad with a very
natural and emotional flow from verse to bridge to chorus (my favourite part is
the bridge — the "run a mile for the minute" part); and, out of the
blue, a Maurice original — there is something odd about the wimpiness of
ʽWildflowerʼ that produces an endearing effect. Everything else either
comes across as an inferior copy of one of these three songs, or represents an
inept attempt at «rocking out softly» (ʽCryin' Every Dayʼ is in the
same vein as ʽHe's A Liarʼ, and goes in the same null void
direction). Some diversity is provided by Robin taking significantly more leads
than he did last time around, but with such poor songwriting, it does not
matter much already who is singing what.
Maybe at least a part of the lackluster
atmosphere of the record could be explained by the Gibbs firing their studio
veterans at the beginning of the sessions — not only Blue Weaver, who was responsible
for the keyboards throughout the disco period, but even old buddy Alan Kendall,
who was already hanging around in their Trafalgar
days. With more than a dozen different session musicians taking their place,
there is no wonder that Living Eyes
has no «signature sound», or that the strictly-bread-and-butter arrangements do
not offer even a single curious flourish or twist to feed the hungry ear. On
the other hand — who knows if anything
could be done for the Bee Gees at the time? The harder they come...
No, the only words of consolation would have to
refer to the falsetto-dropping and the revival of the acoustic guitar — Living Eyes is boring alright, but it
sounds like a record made by living people;
people who, perhaps accidentally, did not have the time to program it into an
efficient commercial proposition and just went ahead on an almost spontaneous
basis. It is a dang shame they could not do better: this might have been their
very last chance at making a late-period mini-masterpiece, but, after all, they
did sign the contract, and the devil did honor his part of the deal — now it was up to him to ensure that the Bee
Gees would never properly rise again.
Still, it seems cruel to end the review with a
thumbs down, considering how, in retrospect, the record really looks like a
breath of moderately fresh air in between all the methane emissions. Ironically,
despite making history as the first album to have been printed in CD form (the
brothers even got an extra BBC promotion for that, although it didn't do them
any good anyway), Living Eyes has
long since been out of print, and the Gibbs, dead or alive, would not go out of
their way to help re-endorse it. But eventually, in a better, post-World War
III world, once Bee Gees albums are no longer rated by the amount of copies
sold, that mistake will be rectified.
E.S.P. (1987)
1) E.S.P.; 2) You Win Again;
3) Live Or Die (Hold Me Like A Child); 4) Giving Up The Ghost; 5) The Longest
Night; 6) This Is Your Life; 7) Angela; 8) Overnight; 9) Crazy For Your Love;
10) Backtafunk; 11) E.S.P. (vocal reprise).
It is a very good thing for the world of music
(I think) that, after the commercial failure of Living Eyes, the Bee Gees went into a six-year seclusion, at least,
as a brotherly team — although they did briefly resurface with half a
soundtrack to Stayin' Alive, an expected
unnecessary sequel to Saturday Night
Fever that nobody needs to either see or hear (ʽThe Woman In Youʼ
was the single, a bland synth-rocker with none of the sleazy glamor of the Saturday Night singles). For the most
part, they spent the mid-Eighties writing for other people — remember Diana Ross' Eaten Alive? No? Good.
It is a very bad thing for the world of music, though, that the Bee Gees
eventually decided to go back to the studio before the Eighties were out. Now
that they were under contract with Warner Bros., which had swallowed up
Atlantic Records, they found out they could re-unite with Arif Mardin, and,
apparently, they expected the magic of Mr.
Natural and Main Course to
strike out and reignite their careers. Problem is, no matter how professional
or experienced, Arif Mardin was a straightforward guy — in 1974-75, he steered
them towards commercial success by focusing on what was considered «hot» back
in the day, and why would one expect him to have acted different in 1987?
Electrofunk rhythms, programmed drums, synthesized bass, and elevator keyboards
all the way, just exactly what the good doctor has prescribed.
Whether E.S.P.
is or is not the worst Bee Gees album ever is questionable (it certainly has
some competition from some of the records that would follow) — what seems
unquestionable is that this album marks the band's transition into the last and
saddest phase of their career: twenty years of total musical irrelevance when,
not content with the simple status of an «oldies act», singing everything from ʽNew
York Mining Disasterʼ to ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ before
appreciatively glamorous Vegas crowds, the Bee Gees stubbornly went on to churn
out record after record in strict accordance with «mainstream expectations». In
other words, what they have become in 1987 is not so much a «synth-pop» act (at
least real «synth-pop» is able to generate some bodily excitement, which is not
the case here) as a strictly «adult contemporary» one.
And in the process, they have forgotten how to
write songs. I mean, completely and utterly forgotten. This does not always
happen with age: not a lot of artists could go from 14 near-perfectly written
songs (as on 1st) to 10 pieces of
totally meaningless triteness in twenty years (and I am not counting Rod
Stewart, since he wrote very few of his own songs). But it happened with the
Bee Gees — the band that used to produce vocal hooks, generate thrilling
chords, and dress them up in luxurious arrangements, now seems to think that as
long as their brotherly harmonies are still in place, everything else can be
taken care of by session players and producers, or not be taken care of at all.
Occasionally, people praise ʽYou Win
Againʼ, the album's lead single, as the only thing worthy of attention —
some even call it a late period masterpiece. It does have an upbeat, memorable
vocal melody, but the music is horrible, from the mock-industrial percussion
intro to the flabby tinkling electronic keyboards. I could easily envision the
vocal melody transplanted, safe and sound, into a healthier musical body (after
all, Lindsey Buckingham did save the beauty of ʽBig Loveʼ, recorded
that same year in a thoroughly dated synth cocoon, by later reinventing it as
one of his greatest showpieces for acoustic guitar), but fact is, it seems to
have never happened in reality — even much later live performances stick to the
original horror.
And even so, ʽYou Win Againʼ is the only vocal melody on this record that
generates decent emotions. Everything else is either generic stiff balladry
(ʽLive Or Dieʼ, ʽAngelaʼ), or, much worse, mid-tempo
dance-pop that tries to pass the brothers off as cool funksters who still know how to shake that ass like
they knew in 1979. Problem: they had very little knowledge of that in 1979, and
they have absolutely no knowledge of
it in 1987 — I mean, ʽBacktafunkʼ, really? And what is the point of
remembering all their disco hit song titles in ʽThis Is Your Lifeʼ if
it is the same song that also
features the line "more rap, less crap" (seriously!)?
Of course, plenty of people were deluded around
the same time — it would be cruel to dismiss E.S.P. simply for its adherence to drum machines and synth loops.
But even Phil Collins made better albums with the same ingredients. With all
the previous styles that they had explored, the Bee Gees were able to sense at
least the form, if not always the
substance, and even if one finds the «message» of ʽNight Feverʼ
disgusting, they found the perfect envelope to package it in. On E.S.P., behind the thick cardboard
walls of its Excruciatingly Sonorant Production, there are no hints at all that
the brothers were even mildly interested in exploring the potential of this new
sound on their own — they just took whatever they were given, and ended up with
a bunch of Exceptionally Stupid Pablum. For the record, no less than twenty
people collaborated on the final mixes of the songs — just another good example
of how much energy we waste in the modern world for obscure and dubious
purposes. Thumbs
down: now that the Eighties are viewed in the overall context of
several decades before and after them, the most prudent solution is to regard
this monstrosity as a particular aberration in Bee Gees history, and not look
back at it any more.
ONE (1989)
1) Ordinary Lives; 2) One; 3)
Bodyguard; 4) It's My Neighborhood; 5) Tears; 6) Tokyo Nights; 7) Flesh And
Blood; 8) Wish You Were Here; 9) House Of Shame; 10) Will You Ever Let Me; 11)
Wing And A Prayer.
This relatively quick (considering the previous
six-year gap) follow-up to E.S.P. is
nowhere near as awful, but, consequently, also lacks that album's shock factor
— meaning that one might end up «liking» it more, but forgetting it quicker.
With Mardin out of the picture again, the brothers went back to self-producing,
and also relocated back to London from Florida; whether these trivia are
related to the fact or not, on One
they seem to have mostly overcome the difficulties of working with new sounds,
technologies, and equipment, so that the subdued synthesizers and electronic
drums now grudgingly agree to work for the Bee Gees, not vice versa.
To be more precise, the melodies are a little
more noticeable, the vocal harmonies are reasserted as the Gibbs' chief reason
for existence, and the final mix corrects the major sonic errors of E.S.P. All of which is positive, but,
unfortunately, never eliminates the main problem: the Bee Gees are now firmly
stuck in «soft adult contemporary» mode, and there is no escape — going retro
is not a solution, as the brothers continue to stubbornly believe in their
commercial vitality, and this means trend-hopping and sucking up to mainstream
values.
Actually, maybe
if these efforts of theirs had sunk like a stone, this would have given them
food for thought. Unfortunately, they did not. One was nowhere near as commercially successful as E.S.P., but it did climb high enough,
and the title track, released as a single, hit No. 7 on the US charts — their
absolute peak there ever since the late 1970s. Maybe the public sensed traces
of the old magic in it: the opening upbeat rhythm and Barry's trademark-sexy
"I feel my heart beat.." intro are indeed reminiscent of ʽJive
Talkin'ʼ, as if somebody wrote a simple computer algorithm that would
create a robo-electronic variation on the original theme. Which kind of gives
you the lowdown already: imagine the old disco vibe revamped for the late 1980s
market of rhythmic adult contemporary muzak. And that's ʽOneʼ the
song, and One the album for you in a
nutshell.
Mood-wise, the record is sad, since the latter
part of the sessions took place in the wake of the departure of brother Andy
Gibb, victim of an unfortunate combination of genetic weakness and drug abuse.
Hence all the stuff like ʽTearsʼ and particularly ʽWish You Were
Hereʼ, sincerely dedicated to Andy's memory — it's only too bad that the
songs received such bland, pale-grayish electronic cocoons instead of something
at least superficially more tasteful:
I mean, why not hire a string quartet,
at least? Or just use a solo acoustic guitar? Something?..
The album includes only one piece of
«rock»-oriented material: Barry and old friend Alan Kendall have finally
mastered the pop-metal style and feed ʽIt's My Neighborhoodʼ with
distorted guitar riffs and a hysterically screeching Van Halen-style guitar
solo. The effect is mostly laughable, since the song's biggest hook is still
the pop chorus of "it's my neighborhood, it's where I belong", and
the «tough» guitar sound of the track is just flamboyant poseur stuff. Much the
same goes for the generic electro-funk of ʽWill You Ever Let Meʼ,
with nothing to distinguish it from ten million songs in the same style —
although both songs provide some respite from the endless stream of slow,
mood-oriented ballads (ʽBodyguardʼ, ʽTokyo Nightsʼ, etc.).
Robin and Maurice take lead vocals on a few
songs: Maurice dominates the lost love pop-rocker ʽHouse Of Shameʼ,
and Robin directs the broken hearted blues-rocker ʽFlesh And Bloodʼ,
and both end up more or less equally tedious. Barry lapses into falsetto
occasionally, but this is not nearly as big a problem as the noticeable aging
of all the voices — now that the brothers are past forty, some of the sharpness
is lost and their tones tend to gravitate towards each other: twenty years ago,
it really mattered a lot who sang what, but now it isn't that much of a deal.
Anyway, by far the only recommendation for One that I can think of is that it is,
indeed, «dark», probably the most sincerely tragic record they had ever made up
to that point. Considering that a lack of sincerity had always been the major accusation hurled at the Gibbs
from the very beginning of their career, this could be a hell of a recommendation. Unfortunately, in 1989 it was
more than just a little late — whatever genuine emotion they try to preserve on
these tapes is ultimately wasted with (at best) mediocre songwriting and
thoroughly unimaginative arrangements. I cannot imagine the album being enjoyed
by anyone but the starkest Gibb fans, always ready to look beyond the form and
right into the spirit — or, at least, what they think of as the spirit. Everybody else will probably have to just
share the thumbs
down.
HIGH CIVILIZATION (1991)
1) High Civilization; 2)
Secret Love; 3) When He's Gone; 4) Happy Ever After; 5) Party With No Name; 6)
Ghost Train; 7) Dimensions; 8) The Only Love; 9) Human Sacrifice; 10) True
Confessions; 11) Evolution.
Probably a toss-up between E.S.P. and this one for the ugliest-sounding Bee Gees album ever.
Okay, E.S.P. would likely still win,
since its production values were about as suitable for the Bee Gees as having
them sing an entire album through a Vocoder; but this monstrosity from 1991
does not lag too far behind, and it has at least one edge over E.S.P. — considering the musical
fashions of 1987, one would not really expect the band to have fared much
better, but in 1991, with hair metal and synth-pop both on their way out, some of the old vets were gradually
starting to get out of their midlife crises and reconcile their older selves
with their true selves.
Not so with the Gibbs, who, for some reason,
thought it beyond their sense of dignity to retrace their steps. What is even
worse, they thought that they still had some hopes of positioning themselves
as a dance-oriented outfit — that after the blandly somber balladry of One, it was high time to return to some
foot-stompin', body-thumpin' rhythms, provided by the latest fads and trends in
nightclub territory. Thus, most of High
Civilization — yes, with the exception of an obligatory bunch of slow
ballads — is set to chuggin' lite-techno tracks, a rhythmic shell that the Bee
Gees embrace just as recklessly as they did with disco.
Alas, if the disco encasing did not by itself
prevent them from losing their strength (melodies and harmonies), this particular style is completely
disastrous. On E.S.P., the singing
was loud enough, but utterly lost in its own echo merging with the sonic
effects of electronic percussion. On High
Civilization, the vocals sort of just splatter away in different
directions, launched in thin pressurized streaks from under the speeding wagon
wheels of the hi-tech vehicle. Once again — anyone
could have sung this crap, Barry, Maurice, Robin, Andy's ghost, the sound
engineer, the cleaning lady, Bugs Bunny, no matter. The harmonies play no role
here, and neither do the melodies — instrumentally, there are none to speak
of, and vocally, nothing makes sense.
In a different age, ʽSecret Loveʼ,
aptly selected for the band's first UK single, could have been a decent
Motown-style hit; and ʽGhost Trainʼ could have been a nice New
Wave-style mood anthem — perhaps they should have donated that one to Bryan
Ferry, he might have brought out its «sensuous potential» by attaching his
microphone to his mouth rather than some other body part. These two are songs
with traces of hope; everything else
ranks from instantaneously forgettable (title track) to abysmal
(ʽDimensionsʼ, ʽParty With No Nameʼ — in 1991, I'd honestly
rather hear that generic dance crap from the young Alanis Morissette than from
three middle-aged guys way past not only their prime, but also their ability to
get a proper grip on contemporary fashions).
For technical reasons, it is worth noting that
the sound engineer here was Femi Jiya, who had previously worked with Prince
(but it didn't help, not this time); and that the album was supposed to be conceptual — everything except for the
politically loaded title track was supposed to narrate a «secret love» dream
sequence in the head of the protagonist. The Bee Gees later disrupted the
psychedelic cohesiveness of the album by reshuffling the songs, but even if
they hadn't done that, it's not as if the thematic unity of the songs were a
good enough justification for the crap-o-matic unity of the structures and
arrangements. Thumbs
down, yucky-yuck.
SIZE ISN'T EVERYTHING (1993)
1) Paying The Price Of Love;
2) Kiss Of Life; 3) How To Fall In Love; 4) Omega Man; 5) Haunted House; 6)
Heart Like Mine; 7) Anything For You; 8) Blue Island; 9) Above And Beyond; 10)
For Whom The Bell Tolls; 11) Fallen Angel; 12) Decadence.
The Bee Gees are back — well, to be more
precise, a modest pinch of Bee Gees essence is back, which does not seem to
bother the band too much, because, as they say themselves, «size isn't
everything». There is no question of the band even as much as lifting a finger
to shake off the arbitrary shackles of mainstream production values, but at
least they do remember to make some room for the harmonies. If High Civilization could have really
been put out by anyone, your average local boy band included, Size Isn't Everything has «Gibb
property» stamped all over it. Even Barry's occasional slip-backs into falsetto,
not any less irritating by themselves, feel like home after the frustration of
the sensation of alienation on Civilization.
Unfortunately, harmonies aren't everything. One
listen to the lead-in single, ʽPaying The Price Of Loveʼ, with its
primitively programmed beats and synthesizer swamp, is more than enough to understand
that the Bee Gees still have not remembered what it actually means to «give a
damn about the way you sound» — and the same evaluation applies to every other
track on the album. Even the acoustic ballad ʽBlue Islandʼ, where it
is the guitar and not the keyboards that forms the musical backbone of the song
(and a melancholy harmonica provides the additional flourishes), feels dull,
because the melody never goes beyond simple chord strum, and all the mild
moodiness of the song is tightly locked within its vocal lines. And that,
ladies and gentlemen, is the best thing they have offered us on the album.
Occasionally, the band would offer some
explicit justifications for the sound. For instance, Robin claimed that on ʽHeart
Like Mineʼ, he was intentionally aiming at capturing some of Enya's ambience,
which explains the dreary tempos and «cloudy» processing of the electronics.
But the Bee Gees do not have Enya's natural-born feel for this texturing — they
have never been able to conquer the digital world and put it to their own
purposes; and furthermore, this ambience simply does not agree with Robin's
«wimpy» voice — it requires either becalmed operatic majesty or a dreamy
psychedelic hush (the latter, several ages ago, used to be quite within Barry's
capacities, but it's been a long, long, long time...).
Besides, for every tolerable, if somewhat
boring, mood piece like ʽHeart Like Mineʼ or ʽHaunted
Houseʼ, there is a clichéd adult contemporary ballad (ʽHow To
Fall In Loveʼ) or bland dance-pop entry (ʽAnything For Youʼ).
With the fast-paced pop rocker ʽAbove And Beyondʼ, they register one
welcome attempt to incorporate some old-style Motown spirit; and with the
album's biggest hit, ʽFor Whom The Bell Tollsʼ (alas, not the
Metallica cover, which would have really been something, wouldn't it?), they
conjure a puff of religious grandiosity. But nobody even needs three guesses to
guess why, at the end of the day, these songs still suck.
And I have not yet mentioned the band's cheeky
dabbling with techno — if ʽFallen Angelʼ is not enough to prove that
they have as much talent and authority to cover that direction as they have
with Enya, then try out the European release bonus track —
ʽDecadenceʼ, a techno remix of ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ for
the rave generation. In other words, whatever crumbs of good taste they may
have reassembled together on ʽBlue Islandʼ get scattered to the four
winds by the end of the record; and ultimately, this is just another thumbs down
for a band that made the classic mistake — having conquered the trends of the
1960s and the 1970s, decided that conquering trends would be the logical way to
go until the end of time. But fashion isn't everything, you know.
STILL WATERS (1997)
1) Alone; 2) I Surrender; 3) I
Could Not Love You More; 4) Still Waters Run Deep; 5) My Lover's Prayer; 6)
With My Eyes Closed; 7) Irresistible Force; 8) Closer Than Close; 9) I Will;
10) Obsessions; 11) Miracles Happen; 12) Smoke And Mirrors.
I know it is hard to believe after the previous
four reviews, but yes indeed, there is
one very good song on Still Waters,
very much in the style of Living Eyes
and, appropriately, the best thing the Bee Gees have ever done since that album
— the lead single ʽAloneʼ. It's been a long, long time since they
last tried that simple, open, catchy type of folk-pop with a steady beat and an
intelligently constructed and resolved vocal melody, but here it is, and even
Barry's choice of the falsetto as chief weapon for that particular session
feels appropriate. The slick production is not slick enough to smoothe out the
hooks (although, perhaps, the overall effect would have been even better
without the synthesizers weaving their way inside the acoustic guitar pattern),
and there are even some bagpipes hanging in there, fairly refreshing for the
period.
The fact that ʽAloneʼ opens the album
on such a positive note raises false hopes — are the Bee Gees finally getting
back to their roots? Alas, they are not. The evil curse of the malevolent
R&B spirit still hangs over the Gibbs' aging skulls, as it already becomes
evident on the second track (ʽI Surrenderʼ — you do indeed), and
remains so until the final minute. From here on, generic dance grooves and
echoey adult contemporary ballads take over and run in such smooth, slick,
sappy streams that an inattentive listen might easily make one confuse the Bee
Gees with the Backstreet Boys, especially considering that, unlike their rather
shabby external appearance, the voices have been preserved marvelously.
One other song that is often singled out as a
highlight is ʽIrresistible Forceʼ, which does indeed manage to escape
the dance beat curse and is realized instead as a straightahead dark-tinged
pop-rocker, say, not unlike something by Duran Duran in their classic era. With
Pino Palladino on bass, Carlos Alomar on lead guitar, Steve Jordan on drums,
and a desperately soulful Robin lead vocal, you'd think they simply couldn't
miss, but I still find the song terribly boring, with no individual hook and
no true creativity in the arrangement. At the very least, I see no sense in the
Bee Gees doing that kind of material — 1980's college rock had already explored
this «rock'n'roll rhythms with a dark personal vibe» theme so well that
ʽIrresistible Forceʼ has nothing new to say, except that it says it
with Robin's voice, and I am not sure that makes a positive difference.
Other than that, the only «positive» change is
that there are no open embarrassments on Still
Waters: be it the schlocky ballads or the nicely combed dance grooves, the
Bee Gees generally act their age and cultivate images of suave, trivially
elegant old gentlemen rather than steamy sexy lovers that live to move it.
Unfortunately, this «graceful acceptance» of old age has not resulted in any
epiphanies or career-rerouting decisions — only in sinking into further
blandness, which could not be overcome even by the accidental success of
ʽAliveʼ. The song is inspiring; the album is anything but — the usual
thumbs down,
please.
ONE NIGHT ONLY (1998)
1) Intro: You Should Be
Dancing / Alone; 2) Massachusets; 3) To Love Somebody; 4) Words; 5) Closer Than
Close; 6) Islands In The Stream; 7) Our Love; 8) Night Fever / More Than A
Woman; 9) Lonely Days; 10) New York Mining Disaster 1941; 11) I Can't See
Nobody; 12) And The Sun Will Shine; 13) Nights On Broadway; 14) How Can You
Mend A Broken Heart; 15) Heartbreaker; 16) Guilty; 17) Immortality; 18)
Tragedy; 19) I Started A Joke; 20) Grease; 21) Jive Talking; 22) How Deep Is
Your Love; 23) Stayin' Alive; 24) You Should Be Dancing; 25*) I've Gotta Get A
Message To You; 26*) One; 27*) Still Waters; 28*) Morning Of My Life; 29*) Too
Much Heaven; 30*) Run To Me.
According to some sources, One Night Only was supposed to be the Bee Gees' last show (hence
the name) — because of Barry Gibb's worsening arthritis problems (turns out he
really did love his guitar playing; ironically, in the end he still keeps on
playing it as late as the 2010s, while the other Gibb brothers are up in the
heavens). And where better to play the last ever Bee Gees show than at the MGM
Grand casino in Las Vegas? In 1998, the posh casino ambience was the only one
that was still perfectly suitable for the aging Gibbs and their suaveness.
The show was planned as a historical
retrospective of the brothers' career — hence the abundance of titles, many of
which have been severely cut and medley-fied (a corrupt practice that the band
had initiated already in the mid-1970s) in order to fit the bill.
Unfortunately, the Bee Gees treat their backlog just the way you'd expect them
to treat it: «big commercial hit» = «worth performing», «great flopped single
/ obscure, but exciting album track» = «forget it». Oh well, at least you
cannot accuse the brothers of a lack of objectivity — and, most probably, they
were giving the people assembled at MGM Grand exactly what they wanted to hear.
The only exception to the rule — actually,
«modification» rather than «exception» — is that the brothers also perform
several songs that they wrote for other artists, such as ʽIslands In The
Streamʼ (a hit for Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton), ʽDon't Throw It
All Awayʼ (written for Andy Gibb, with some of his vocalizations played
back on tape in unison with the live Gibbs), ʽHeartbreakerʼ (a hit
for Dionne Warwick), and ʽGuiltyʼ (for Barbra Streisand). As far as I
am concerned, all of these are very,
very, very bad songs, reflecting the Gibbs' final crossover into the bland
adult contemporary market, and the crown jewel is the recent hit
ʽImmortalityʼ, for which they are actually joined on stage by the
culprit — Celine Dion. «MGM Grand» indeed.
Nevertheless, when all the barbs have been
spent, and when there is no more strength left to go on with the lashing, the
Gibb brothers, even smothered in cheese, sugar, sarcasm, and irony, will be
left standing on their own two feet. Because there is neither any denying the
greatness of way too many of these other
songs, nor, most importantly, any denying the fact that most of them are
performed with professionalism, spirit, and even occasional signs of grace.
Ironically, it is the falsetto tunes that Barry seems to struggle with on a
regular basis: ʽStayin' Aliveʼ, in particular, is exactly what the
man is genuinely trying to do after squeezing out these high notes at top speed
for such a long time (where twenty years ago it all came rather naturally).
(Then again, ʽStayin' Aliveʼ did always lay the heaviest tax on
Barry's vocal cords — there must have been very few live performances where
he'd live up to the studio version).
But these are also the guys that brought you
ʽMassachusetsʼ, ʽHow Can You Mend A Broken Heartʼ,
ʽWordsʼ, ʽI Can't See Nobodyʼ, ʽNew York Mining
Disasterʼ, ʽTo Love Somebodyʼ, ʽLonely Daysʼ, ʽI
Started A Jokeʼ... yes, the list could
have been expanded with ʽLemons Never Forgetʼ, ʽYou'll Never See
My Face Againʼ, and ʽDogsʼ, but would you really play these
songs to a bunch of middle-aged suckers who may have just lost thousands of
dollars at a nearby roulette table? Forget it and just savour the lushness, the
style, the composure, the fitness of the magnificent Gibb brothers and their
unbeatable harmonies. And much as I dislike the castration of the individual
songs in order to fit them into the medley format (ʽRun To Meʼ in the
bonus track pack is particularly pitiable), the idea to make a brief unplugged
version of ʽNights On Broadwayʼ instead of re-running the old
«smooth funk» arrangement is a good one.
In short, hearing the album won't hurt as much
as owning it (encountering an album sleeve like that in one's collection might
lead to serious problems with the vice squad) — but documentally speaking, this
is the last official Bee Gees live
album, and it may be instructive to
know that, despite not having had a decent studio album in almost twenty
years, they were still willing and able to cut it on stage without a glitch
(discounting some of Barry's fermented falsetto notes). Having gained that
knowledge, you are definitely not obliged to give the record another listen. It
is, after all, designed for One Night
Only — we will respect that.
THIS IS WHERE I CAME IN (2001)
1) This Is Where I Came In; 2)
She Keeps On Coming; 3) Sacred Trust; 4) Wedding Day; 5) Man In The Middle; 6)
Deja Vu; 7) Technicolor Dreams; 8) Walking On Air; 9) Loose Talk Costs Lives;
10) Embrace; 11) The Extra Mile; 12) Voice In The Wilderness.
Is this really «just another bad album from the
Bee Gees», as the All-Music Guide review put it to us, even after considering
all the opposite arguments? Not quite, I would say. Indeed, «not quite» to the
extent that it almost makes me wonder — was the band on its way to eventual
recuperation and recovery of some of
the grace of old, stopped dead in its tracks by the death of Maurice, or was
this major leap in quality just an accidental fluke, caused by a temporary
climate improvement at the turn of the millennium? Make no mistake about it: This Is Where I Came In is, indeed, a
bad Bee Gees album, but it is still miles above the faceless, bodiless, and
soulless dreck they had been trying to feed us since at least E.S.P. — their best album since at
least Living Eyes, and, I would dare
say, maybe even since Main Course:
it does not have any highlights comparable with ʽYou Should Be
Dancingʼ or ʽLiving Eyesʼ, but it is, on the whole, more
consistent, or, at least, more consistently surprising, than those albums.
There can be no mistake here: the Bee Gees are
trying to get out of the nasty rut in which they had sunk when they were still
«in the summer of their years» and in which they grew old, bald, tasteless, and
irrelevant, only to be occasionally visited on holidays by the likes of Barbra
Streisand and Celine Dion. That they actually placed a photo of themselves in
their younger days on the front sleeve does not have to be interpreted as a
desire to put out another Bee Gees 1st,
but it is still a hint that is somehow
substantiated by the album contents — a good luck charm, if you wish. The
relative abundance of styles that they cover, modern and retro ones alike, is
also a good sign. No, there was not the slightest chance of an album like this
being good — only a complete miracle would have sufficed, considering that
these guys had only written, like, maybe two
really good songs in two decades. But we are here doing a career overview — and
a career overview is impossible without paying homage to the curve — and with This Is
Where I Came In, lo and behold, the curve begins to crawl upwards. Where
would it end up, had the Gibb twins not lost their lives, ten years apart from
each other?..
For the first minute, the Robin / Barry duet on
the title track is framed by nothing but sharp-picked acoustic guitars — then,
once the harmonies and full backing are in, there are still no signs of the
awful production muck that colored their previous five studio efforts — at worst,
it shares some alt-rock clichés, but for the Bee Gees, transition from
adult contemporary to alt-rock is like promotion of the highest order. This is
not to say that the song is great or anything, but the chorus is catchy, and
the slight «danger zone» feeling generated by the arrangement marks the first
time over a long, long, long period
that the brothers managed to reassert their nature as humans rather than «organic robots for middle-aged housewives».
And then there's more. ʽShe Keeps On
Comingʼ is a mediocre pop rocker, stuck in somewhere between late Kinks
and early Duran Duran — but it is a style that the Bee Gees had never covered
previously in their whole life; ʽVoice In The Wildernessʼ, despite
the glossy production, rolls on at an even faster speed, and serves as the
album closer — yes, instead of going out on a pompous balladeering note, these
guys go out at the fastest tempo they ever tried. Even if one hates the song
(and there is nothing really to hate about it), you can't help admiring them
for trying; and kudos for letting old friend Alan Kendall strike out with a
fiery, flashy wah-wah solo, the hardest he's been allowed to hit since...
since...?
Another piece of territory that had never been
visited before is Tin Pan Alley: Barry's ʽTechnicolor Dreamsʼ,
written and arranged in strictly vaudevillian mode, is a harmless piece of
fluff, a tribute to Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby that is a little spoiled by
oversinging, but works well as a first and last attempt to invade alien
territory; even a word like «nostalgia» does not really apply here, since this
kind of music had faded away before the Bee Gees were even born — this is just
an intentional attempt to try out something that couldn't be more removed from
their usual schtick than anything, and again, it begs for respect, if not love.
Or maybe somebody was on a Randy Newman kick at the time — a chorus like
"I'll give you Panavision pictures, 'cause you give me Technicolor
dreams" seems right up Randy's alley.
The rest of the album is nowhere near as
«outstanding», and drifts closer to the tried and true, but even there, the
production is not quite as excessive — cheap synthesizer sounds are toned down,
with more focus on acoustic guitars and hi-tech electronics, and Barry's and
Robin's vocals are always clear in the mix (nor does Barry ever resort to
full-fledged falsetto, which is a good thing, because his upper range is so
shot anyway that the remaining frequencies automatically turn falsetto into
squealing or meawing). The songs are predictably not good: generic saccharine
ballads like Robin's ʽWedding Dayʼ, or techno-style saccharine
ballads like Robin's ʽEmbraceʼ, or perfunctory synth-rockers — like
Maurice's two contributions (ʽMan In The Middleʼ and ʽWalking On
Airʼ), on which he also subjects his voice to electronic effect treatment,
maybe in an effort to give it that extra color it had always lacked, against
the background of his two more technically gifted and individualistic brothers.
It neither works nor fails... come to think of it, like most of the things Maurice brought to the band. (He did bring in
ʽTrafalgarʼ, which was one of the band's best songs, but he also
brought in the worst of the three hairstyles, evening things out).
It only remains to say, in conclusion, that you
hardly need to hear This Is Where I Came
In if you completely gave up on the Bee Gees after Living Eyes — not to mention if you completely gave up on the Bee
Gees with their transition to the disco age half a decade before that. But if
you did honestly sit through all of their adult contemporary muddle, year after
year, decade after decade, and wouldn't mind a little bit of an antidote, this
album will do. In any case, it is a relief that the Bee Gees ended their creative
existence on this note, and not with Still Waters.
In conclusion — it remains only to be said
that, no matter how much suave dreck had tainted their later years, both
Maurice's death in 2003 and Robin's in 2012 were unjustly premature, and even
if, deep down inside, my belief is that the Bee Gees did not have and could not
have another Trafalgar or even Mr. Natural within them, just waiting
to be unlocked, I still like to
imagine that, had they lived on, they could have capitalized on the minor sprouts
of musical sanity displayed in this record, and at least slightly repaired
their critical reputation, maybe spurred on by renewed hipster interest in
their art-poppy past. Who knows, though, maybe it's all for the better — that
their career was cut short with this minor enigma of an album, instead of
serving us up further disappointments further on down the line.
BLACK SABBATH (1970)
1) Black Sabbath; 2) The
Wizard; 3) Behind The Wall Of Sleep; 4) N.I.B.; 5) Evil Woman; 6) Sleeping Village;
7) Warning; 8) Wicked World.
Thirty-seven seconds. Or, otherwise, «as soon
as the second thunderstrike begins to subside». That's what I have to tell
myself every time that the tritone-infested riff to ʽBlack Sabbathʼ
kicks in, in order to avoid a quick heart jump, and even that does not always
help. Kudos to Rodger Bain, who had the idea to add a rain-and-thunder setting
to open the song — just imagine how differently it would all be if it just
began with Tony Iommi's master-riff. You have to be prepared for that riff,
build up some necessary suspense. Black Sabbath took their early cues from
B-level horror movies, after all, and those movie guys knew their suspense
strategies all right.
Simple, brutal, healthy cheap thrills — this is
what these four working-class lads from Birmingham were about. None of that
«deep» pretentious bullshit. Geezer Butler, their bass player, did tend to add
a little mysticism and self-importance to their lyrics (I think Iommi used to
refer to him as «the smart one» in the band, which is funny, since most of
their social and educational background was more or less the same), but Ozzy
Osbourne, the singer, never took the lyrics too seriously (if he did, he'd
explode), and the band's basic ambition was simple enough — to kick ass in
front of you, to entertain you, and, just for fun, to scare some shit out of
you in the process.
That said, Black
Sabbath the album as a whole can hardly be appreciated as Black Sabbath the
band's finest hour. The image of the band — dark, scary purveyors of the
nascent heavy metal genre — was fully formed, and from that point of view this
is technically their most influential record; but the truth is that on October
16, 1969, when they went into Regent Sound Studios to cut it, they simply did
not have enough songs. They played their regular live set, but, unlike, say,
The Doors, they slouched around for too long to populate it with enough
hook-filled compositions. (Speaking of The Doors, the main riff to
ʽWicked Worldʼ sounds way
too suspiciously similar to The Doors' own ʽWild Childʼ, which had
come out on The Soft Parade three
months prior to the Black Sabbath
session — coincidence? or a trick of the subconscious?).
What this translates to is a clear gap in
quality between Side A of the album, which proudly stands its ground against
any future Sabbath release, and Side B, which, frankly speaking, seems
unabashedly dedicated to filler — curious and occasionally fun filler, but
definitely not prime Sabbath stuff, and Tony would probably be the first to
acknowledge that, particularly seeing how they never played anything from that
side live once their backlog started filling up. As a four or five song EP, Black Sabbath would be the shit to end
all other shit; as it is, it's padded about as crudely as you'd expect four
rather crude Birmingham lads to pad it.
Nevertheless, that first side is quite enough
to crown Tony Iommi as the undisputed supreme ruler of the heavy metal riff
from the very beginning. The title track and ʽN.I.B.ʼ went on to become
classics of the genre, and the slightly less known ʽWizardʼ and
ʽBehind The Wall Of Sleepʼ are also prime cuts that deserve similar
recognition. Technically, these riffs are among the simplest Tony ever came up
with — and they reflect his genius far better than any of the complex, but so
often unsatisfying melodies he'd write for Sabbath in the post-Ozzy era. Just
how simple, exactly, are those three chords that constitute the main theme to
ʽBlack Sabbathʼ? Jimmy Page would have cringed at having to play
something like that. It's a grotesque, phantasmagoric, «corny» (if you wish)
sound, for sure, but goddammit, it works
on the most elementary emotional level. You want Satan? Use the tritone. It's
as simple as that. Funniest of all, Tony did not have the faintest idea of what
he was using — he just felt that this combination would give the scary effect
that was required, and he used it. I guess Satan was coming round the bend, after all.
You probably couldn't find anybody at the time
with ideas more «basic» than Iommi's, and, in a sense, all that press disdain
that followed Black Sabbath through their first years was quite justified from
a sheerly intellectual point of view. Look at the riff to ʽN.I.B.ʼ
and you will see that its first four notes almost coincide with the beginning
of ʽSunshine Of Your Loveʼ; but where the latter continues with a
completely different, almost jazzy, six-note pattern, Tony makes his six notes into an extended shadow of
the first four — something that Bruce and Clapton would have probably condemned
as too primitive a trick. But who cares, as long as it works? And if you play
it low enough, and add a steady 4/4 beat, and have Geezer play his bass in
unison through a wah-wah pedal, it makes your
song unquestionably Satanic, and what exactly was ʽSunshine Of Your
Loveʼ unquestionably? You couldn't give a straight answer, could you?
Well, Black Sabbath are a band that has no qualms about coming up with straight
answers.
Their singer is so straight, in fact, that when
you listen to the early albums, it's as if they were locking him up in an «iron
maiden» in the studio every time, then thrusting the mike under his lips. Ozzy
could hit the notes, but he had no range as such, could usually only sing in
unison with the supporting riff, and always had the same emotional expression
to his voice that basically translated to: «don't you fuck with me, or I have
no idea what I'll do if you do». It's sort of an odd mix of «mischievous»,
«stoned», and «panicky», and on paper, it doesn't at all sound like it would be
a good combination with Tony's riffs. Honestly, I still have no idea why it is. Maybe it's just the fact that Tony
and Ozzy are both one-trick ponies each of which does their one and only trick
to utmost perfection, and when they do it at once, it's like a Lennon-McCartney
effect for when you only have the opportunity to spare one track of your mind.
Anyway, on ʽBlack Sabbathʼ Ozzy is a
lone madman tempted by the «figure in black»; on ʽThe Wizardʼ, he
seems temporarily relieved because "demons worry when the wizard is
near"; on ʽBehind The Wall Of Sleepʼ, he awakens from
nightmares into sunny reality; but then on ʽN.I.B.ʼ it is suddenly
"my name is Lucifer, please take my hand", so we have to assume
multiple personality disorder. Never mind, it's all in a day's work
(literally) for Ozzy. Whatever Geezer would write for him, be it gloomy or
cheerful, you could always count on Mr. Osbourne to give it his one and only
all, and it would still sound charming when set to a prime Iommi riff. Geezer
could just as well give him a list of ingredients from a soda bottle.
At their best, though, Sabbath already had more
to offer than just heavy metal riffs and a poker face singer. Tony could play a
mean lead guitar when he put his heart into it — the solos on
ʽN.I.B.ʼ and the title track are still relatively simple, but
scorching. And Ozzy has quite an expressive harmonica part on ʽThe
Wizardʼ, even though, once Tony's main riff finally comes through, you'll
probably forget all about the mouth harp. They are also smart enough to let the
rhythm section show their strong sides: Geezer's little introductory solo to
ʽN.I.B.ʼ is not very demanding, technically, but with the addition of
the wah-wah effect, it is the first «evil-sounding» (rather than simply «dark»)
bass solo that I know of, almost literally grinning at you with its frets.
But then there are all those problems on the
second side, when the band spends too much time jamming on the interminable
ʽSleeping Village/Warningʼ rant. Critics say that one of Sabbath's
chief achievements was «chasing the blues out of metal» — well, these jams are
still fairly bluesy, aren't they? Clearly, somebody spent too much time
listening to Cream, and echoes of late Sixties blues-rock were still ringing very loud in Tony's ears when they were
recording this stuff. And, of course, Tony is no Clapton, not with these metal
fingertips plucking the strings, to seriously compete on that market — not
that the band ever wanted to in the first place. I actually like the main sung parts of
ʽWarningʼ; it is the only track on the album where Ozzy manages to
add a little chilly menace to his singing ("I was born without you, baby /
But my feelings were a little bit too strong" is delivered with a perfect
cool). But all those Claptonisms in the middle, no. Pulling in the wrong
direction.
Still, what with all the early heavy metal
perfection going on in the first half, the only way Black Sabbath could have avoided an enthusiastic thumbs up
would be if they fired Ozzy before the sessions and replaced him with David
Coverdale. And don't get me wrong — these, as well as all the other «thumbs up»
that will follow are not in respect of the album's «influence». (In fact, in a
way, I'd rather that influence never existed.) It is because, as «technically
primitive» as these songs are by modern day standards of the metal genre, their
primal power still blows away 99% of
everything ever since recorded in that genre. And all those savvy, heavily
trained modern metal composers, playing at 120mph and choking their albums
with ultra-complex riffage that all ends up sounding the same, could only wish
they were Tony Iommi circa 1970.
PS: A technical note — Black Sabbath comes in several varieties, with some editions
containing ʽEvil Womanʼ (a rather lightweight garage-metal rocker,
released as the band's first single), some containing ʽWicked Worldʼ
(its B-side) instead, and some CD versions incorporating both. Also, track
listings may differ depending on how many parts of multi-part compositions are
given their own titles (for instance, Geezer's solo before ʽN.I.B.ʼ
is sometimes called ʽBassicallyʼ and sometimes not called anything).
Some of the confusion is due to the differences in original US and UK releases,
and some seems to have appeared in the CD era — but I guess it's only fitting
for a record that was originally issued on Friday the 13th.
PARANOID (1970)
1) War Pigs; 2) Paranoid; 3)
Planet Caravan; 4) Iron Man; 5) Electric Funeral; 6) Hand Of Doom; 7) Rat
Salad; 8) Fairies Wear Boots.
Funny as it is, Black Sabbath's unquestionably
most popular album, and the one that the average listener probably associates
the most with the band, was sort of a «fillerish» affair. Although it already
took the band a whoppin' six days to
record it, it was neither as image-establishing as Black Sabbath, nor as technically groundbreaking as Master Of Reality. Its best known song
was, in fact, quickly thrown together at the last minute to occupy some empty
space — and its actual musical innovations, such as the band toying around with
acid jazz on ʽPlanet Caravanʼ, aren't usually listed as its really
strong points. And yet, it's fuckin' Paranoid,
the brilliant metal masterpiece to end all other masterpieces, and we're not
worthy. Say what you will, but there was definitely something in the air around
1970 — some sort of spirit that was hunting for you, not vice versa. Sometimes all you had to do was just sit there
and wait.
Anyway, Paranoid
is as good as Black Sabbath and even
better, because it rectifies that record's major mistake — this time, the band
rarely, if ever, allows itself to just fool around, and Iommi comes up with
enough individual compositions to stretch over both sides of vinyl. Of course,
a few of the songs could have been cut down by a couple of minutes without much
harm; I am talking specifically about the mid-section to ʽHand Of
Doomʼ and maybe about a couple more «boogie interludes», such as the one
that disrupts the eerie radioactive flow of ʽElectric Funeralʼ
without making a lot of sense...
...yes, and then there is ʽRat Saladʼ
— the obligatory tribute to Cream's ʽToadʼ and Led Zeppelin's
ʽMoby Dickʼ with their introductory/coda riffs framing a drum solo.
Now Bill Ward is a fairly good drummer for basic Sabbath purposes, but hardly a
technically endowed madman of the Baker / Bonham caliber, and most people tend
to view the track as pitiful filler. However, Iommi's riffage is good, and the
solo itself lasts for less than a minute, so (a) how could it seriously be a
bother? and (b) the short length suggests that the whole thing is more of a
good-natured parody on the
ʽToadʼ routine than a serious musical statement of the "I'm Bill
Ward, drummer extraordinaire, I can take on any sucker!" variety.
Apart from those minor and easily quenchable
quibbles, I cannot think of a single reason to dislike Paranoid, an album where exciting musical ideas — sometimes so
brutally simple that they border on «guilty pleasure» — start falling around
you like ripe apples off a well-shook tree, or, to use a better analogy, like
high-explosive bombs off a well-disciplined squadron. Because the band does
show coordination, discipline, and a collective understanding — not just
between Tony and Geezer, whose guitar/bass duo is responsible for the amazingly
orchestrated heaviness, but also between the players and the singer, who has now
learned to add extra shades to his voice: the protagonists of ʽWar
Pigsʼ and ʽParanoidʼ are really two different persons now.
ʽWar Pigsʼ is actually an important
Sabbath song in that it dispenses with the «Satanic» imagery and shows the
lads for what they really were — simple, generally well-meaning people. The
classic Sabbath myth going around is that they were a mean, lean band that
hated hippies and all that flower power crap, but they sang about the virtues
of peace and love and the evils of war and hate as convincingly as anybody — so
what if they downtuned their guitars a little bit? Ironically, the original
title of ʽWar Pigsʼ was ʽWalpurgisʼ, and the song was to be more about actual «witches at
black masses», but the record company insisted that ʽWalpurgisʼ was
too Satanic, and the band easily changed the title to ʽWar Pigsʼ.
Anyway, if you want to properly understand the
difference between an awesome «B-grade», «cartoonish» artist and an «A-grade»,
«serious» one, try listening to ʽWar Pigsʼ back to back with
Hendrix's ʽMachine Gunʼ, both of them lengthy anti-war epics recorded
at about the same time, both of them trying to use musical means to convey the
dreadfulness of the modern battlefield. Jimi's composition, with its rat-a-tat
gunfire and anguished guitar wail, penetrates such depths where Iommi's riffs
and guitar tone have little hope of reaching. But that does not mean that
ʽWar Pigsʼ is not a thrilling ride all by itself — it is simply more
about anger and disgust than actual physical and emotional pain, and, of
course, about the «hand of doom» that is best symbolized by Tony's monster riff
that links the song's «accappella» verses to the bridge. Apart from that,
ʽWar Pigsʼ is probably the best place to convince yourself that Ozzy was a capable singer — the way he is
able to sustain those high notes at the end of each line without breaking is
impressive (and even more impressively, he used to be able to replicate that
onstage).
The two big singles, the ones that elevated the
LP itself to its champion position, hardly deserve additional comment — what hasn't yet been said about
ʽParanoidʼ and ʽIron Manʼ? I'll only say that I don't think
I have ever heard a guitar tone quite
like the one that Iommi uses for the chuggin' riff of ʽParanoidʼ. A
little fuzz there, a little distortion, but there seems to be some additional
unknown part to that recipé which they never reproduced in concert,
which is why the inimitable studio version will be always superior to any
live performances (and, in any case, it is a three-minute single by definition,
so no live performance would ever allow them to stretch out or improve on the
song in any way). And if there is a riff out there that is able to better convey the impression of an iron
giant strolling through the doomed city streets than the riff of ʽIron
Manʼ, well, I'm open for suggestions.
But there are pleasures, subtle and non-subtle
alike, to be tasted here well beyond the scope of the three best known songs.
ʽFairies Wear Bootsʼ is one of the awesomest «anti-trippin' warnings»
of all time, where Tony's melody — wobbling and threatening at the same time —
could indeed be taken as an ironic lashing of the acid-happy side of «flower
power». The wah-wah rumble of ʽElectric Funeralʼ tries to convey the
atmosphere of a nuclear holocaust — honestly, it feels more like the flames of
hell, but then the two are closely related anyway. The biggest surprise is
their experiment with nocturnal jazz on ʽPlanet Caravanʼ, a hushed,
moody interlude where Ozzy's vocals are filtered through a rotating Leslie
speaker and Tony plays some simple, but tasteful jazzy improv lines over Bill
Ward's congas. Down with flower power, eh? The song is as downright
«psychedelic» as Jefferson Airplane at their trippiest — and is the only place
on the album where Black Sabbath actually go beyond «cartoonish» and almost end
up in «haunting» territory, although maybe a few more overdubs would be
necessary to complete the picture.
In short, Paranoid
is where we first meet up with the band's «working class genius» in almost
completely unbridled mode. Other than ʽRat Saladʼ (unless we treat
the number as parody), they are doing their own thang here, totally and
completely, aware, but utterly unafraid, of their limitations, and daring to
tackle pop structures, jazz improvisation, and multi-part art-rock musical
construction without any intellectual pretense or harsh musical training. For
which they were understandably grilled in the musical press — and any lesser
band in their place would have deserved that. But what lesser band could have
come up with the riffs to ʽIron Manʼ or ʽFairies Wear
Bootsʼ? Lesser bands are usually content to play it «simple and stupid»,
forgetting about the third necessary ingredient — «simple, stupid, and scorching», which is exactly what Paranoid is for most of its duration. Thumbs up,
of course, although I probably have to put in the predictable request — dear
«classic rock radio» programmers, how about playing some other songs except for ʽParanoidʼ and ʽIron
Manʼ from time to time? I'd even settle for ʽRat Saladʼ, out of
sheer propaedeutic purposes.
MASTER OF REALITY (1971)
1) Sweet Leaf; 2) After
Forever; 3) Embryo; 4) Children Of The Grave; 5) Orchid; 6) Lord Of This World;
7) Solitude; 8) Into The Void.
Black
Sabbath invented the image; Paranoid made it a part of the popular
(sub)conscious and the general «rock idiom», if such a thing could be defined
altogether. In comparison to those two records, the scope of Master Of Reality, the band's third
and, up to that point, shortest record, seems to be more limited and
concentrated — yet, as many agree, it is probably the single album in the history of music that is most responsible
for the emergence of «heavy metal» as an autonomous genre. And, even more
importantly, like quite a few of these daring progenitors, it is at the same
time an album that sounds like no other heavy metal album ever recorded. Its
ambitions are limited; its impressions, unparalleled.
This is where Tony began downtuning his guitar
«in earnest», three semi-tones down, at first, just to ease string tension and
save his chopped-up fingers some pain, and then, because it turned out to give
such an awesome effect. Even without this decision, the riffs he came up with
on Master Of Reality would have been
among the band's best; with it, they come dangerously close to overriding the
band's «cartoonish» image and dragging your mind with them into some perilous,
previously unexplored abyss — ʽInto The Voidʼ indeed. If there is
one particular subgenre of metal that this album should be associated with, it
would be «stoner metal», because this is the kind of music capable of
inflicting a brain meltdown. «Doom metal» would be a close second, though,
since no other Sabbath album conjures up such a vivid apocalyptic panorama.
Lyrically and emotionally, Master Of Reality is, of course, a conceptual album. Most of the
songs deal with sin, temptation, impending doom, catastrophes, and
possibilities of redemption and salvation — essentially, as it is well known,
Sabbath's heaviest and most musically brutal record is also their most
authentic «Christian rock» record, for which Geezer intentionally designed a
set of lyrics that would help rid the band of their «Satanic» image. Of course,
it did not help: with riffs of such impact and power that only Lucifer himself
could have imprinted in Iommi's mind, who gives a damn about the lyrics? Oh,
there's something about the Pope on the end of a rope in ʽAfter Foreverʼ,
and we're really much too busy to
explore the context of that line...
...but the fact is, the lyrics are way too dissonant with the music.
Look at this song called ʽChildren Of The Graveʼ, where the title
alone suffices to conjure an association with George Romero. Its basic message:
"They're tired of being pushed around and told just what to do / They'll
fight the world until they've won and love comes flowing through". Now
think what sort of music this message would be accompanied with in the hands
of, say, Jefferson Airplane. (You might need to relisten to Volunteers for that). Now look at the quintessentially
«necromantic» guitar/bass riff duo that accompanies it in Black Sabbath's
vision. Believing Geezer that the song glorifies young peaceful idealists is about
as easy as believing that George Romero's zombies have really come to save the
world from corruption and sin. The mercilessly galloping music, crushing
everything in its path, seems to be more fit for the Horsemen of the Apocalypse
— and the only thing that remains once the riders have trampled out everything
in sight are a few eerie, ghostly wisps in the graveyard, providing a
horror-movie coda to the song.
Or take ʽInto The Voidʼ. The verbal
message: Earth is doomed, ruined by mindless slaves of Satan and destroyed by
their mishandling of the ecology, but maybe some of us will be able to find
peace and happiness somewhere out there in space some day. The music: First
part — yes, yes, and yes, second part — where??? Is there anything in the song's iron melody that gives even the faintest
glint of «peace and happiness»? It is simply one brutal beating after the
other, an incessant queue of terror-inspiring melodic lines where the last
instrumental section could be a musical interpretation of somebody being slowly
tortured, stretched out on a rack, held over a burning flame, flogged, then
finally decapitated in a last act of mercy. "Peace and happiness in every day",
in this context, is like a faraway dream, an illusion in the inflamed mind of a
slave that has no grounding whatsoever in reality.
Speaking of ʽInto The Voidʼ, I have
to add that this song begins with my own personal favorite guitar riff of all
time in the «complex» variety (as opposed to simpler, shorter phrasing). Nicknamed
ʽDeathmaskʼ, in actuality it has always generated one and only one
image in my mind: that of a slowly awakening Great Serpent, lazily unwrapping
its coils as it prepares to embrace and crush the whole world in them. In all
the history of heavy metal that I have heard (and I've heard quite a few), no
other complex riff, be it Metallica, Amorphis, Opeth, or any other thrash or
art-metal act, has managed to conjure such a clear and vivid picture for me,
though, of course, that is a purely personal impression. (A close second would
probably be Led Zeppelin's ʽNo Quarterʼ and its horrifying Viking
ships sailing out of the mist of J. P. Jones' keyboards). So much for «peace
and happiness» indeed.
But the discrepancy does not end there.
ʽSweet Leafʼ is the only heavy rocker on the album whose lyrical
theme has nothing to do with the concept — it is, as is also well-known, the
band's sentimental (and still somewhat brave in those days) ode to the joys of
smoking pot, initiated with a looped recording of Tony's cough (apparently Ozzy
brought him a pretty strong joint one of those days). That's understandable,
but what of the music? Not being a dope smoker, I couldn't really vouch for it,
but based on all sorts of outside evidence, the crashing, thrashing riff that
drives the song is hardly typical of a pot smoker's sensation, unless we're
talking some really bad trip,
certainly not one that would cause you to sing "my life is free now, my life
is clear". For what it's worth, the riff of ʽSweet Leafʼ also
gives me a clear vision — huge ocean waves breaking on the shore in steady
rhythmic succession. Should have been a song about a thunderstorm or a tsunami
or something like that.
For some reason, ʽLord Of This Worldʼ
is the only song on the album that never made a comparable impression on me —
maybe because its riffs have seemed more «traditional», in a heavy blues-rock
manner, to me than any others on the album (I used to think of this song as the
only one here that early Led Zeppelin would be able to come up with just as
well); which is not to say that it does not kick its own major ass, just in a
slightly less mind-blowing way than everything else on here. At least it's one
of those songs where the lyrical content does fully match the music, as Ozzy
sings it from start to finish from the straight perspective of the «Master of
Reality».
In between those ultra-heavy, earth-rattling
monsters the band has inserted several rather worthless «breathers» — two
brief acoustic instrumentals and one dark folk ballad (!),
ʽSolitudeʼ, which, frankly speaking, sounds more like Country Joe
& The Fish than Black Sabbath and is not even all that interesting from a
«novelty» point of view, like ʽPlanet Caravanʼ from the last album.
But, of course, this kind of structure became quite influential in heavy metal,
too, with the idea of quiet acoustic interludes attenuating the ferocity of the
heavy distorted riffs and serving as «bookmarks» to help distinguish one heavy
metal anthem from another. If anything, the band did not really have the intention of coming across as the proverbial
one-trick pony, particularly when the songs threatened to merge together into
one gigantic devilish monolith.
But as great an album as Master Of Reality is, perhaps its greatest greatness is in the fact
that Sabbath never tried to make another one just like it — most metal bands,
had they been blessed with the fortune of falling upon such a rich sound, would
have probably milked it to death a dozen times over, running the formula into
the ground and debasing it to self-parody status. In the case of Black Sabbath,
though, there is only one Master Of
Reality, spawning a million pale imitations from everybody except its own
authors. Which easily makes it the heaviest album ever recorded in the history
of popular music, bar none — from the crashing storm surge of ʽSweet
Leafʼ to the thundering horsemen of ʽChildren Of The Graveʼ to
the dreadful serpents and iron maidens of ʽInto The Voidʼ, no other
collection has managed to match its simple, but stunning vision. So, clearly, a
big thumbs up
here for this unmatched show of brutality.
VOL. 4 (1972)
1) Wheels Of Confusion; 2)
Tomorrow's Dream; 3) Changes; 4) FX; 5) Supernaut; 6) Snowblind; 7) Cornucopia;
8) Laguna Sunrise; 9) St. Vitus Dance; 10) Under The Sun.
Much to the band's honor, back in 1971-72 they did
not entertain the idea of milking a particular formula to death. The new sound
that they discovered with Master Of
Reality could have been a gold vein that they could have easily exploited
for another dozen albums in a row. But the pressure was on to grow, develop,
and explore — even at the risk of coming up with musically inferior results.
Maybe the fans would be content with a total carbon copy of Master, but the band members themselves
would not. The heat was still on.
As it is, Vol.
4 is a curious result of the clash of two conflicting factors — Black
Sabbath's desire to chart out new territories, and Black Sabbath's personal
decline under the pressures of fame, fortune, and everything that went together
with the rags-to-riches transformation, most notably, booze and drugs. There is
no better track to illustrate that clash than ʽFXʼ, a short
non-musical interlude that walks the line between «avantgarde» and «coke-fueled
stupidity» — apparently, Tony discovered that his crucifix could make a funny
noise when accidentally hit against the guitar strings, and the band members
then took turns hitting the strings with various objects and adding echo
effects for extra giggly fun. Wheeee! (And no, there has been no positive
evidence so far for Ozzy's ding-a-ling being one of the «various objects», but
I wouldn't be surprised).
On a more serious note, Vol. 4 sees the addition of keyboards (used sparingly and all of
them played by the band members themselves, although ʽChangesʼ is
pretty much all keyboards), elements
of «soulful» soloing (such as the short intro to ʽWheels Of
Confusionʼ), and even an actual orchestra (on ʽSnowblindʼ and
most prominently on the instrumental ʽLaguna Sunriseʼ). Progress
ahoy, but it comes at the expense of some of that earth-rumbling brutality: the
«soul» component that suddenly appears out of nowhere takes the place of the
«doom» component, and, above all, if you want to love Vol. 4, you have to have a little love for Ozzy, whose presence
here is far more crucial than on Master
Of Reality — no wonder they put him up on the album cover.
Riff-wise, Tony seems to be temporarily short
on great ideas. This becomes obvious almost immediately: the main chord
sequence that drives ʽWheels Of Confusionʼ is sort of a «basic»
blues-rock pattern that carries little meaning in and out of itself (no
«crashing waves» impressionism of ʽSweet Leafʼ here).
ʽCornucopiaʼ, melody-wise, seems like a hybridization of Sabbath's
own ʽAfter Foreverʼ with Cream's ʽPoliticianʼ — not a good
sign at all. The «boogie» mid-section of ʽUnder The Sunʼ unexpectedly
rips off Deep Purple's ʽFlight Of The Ratʼ — no big crime, but sort
of a «telling» detail, I'd say.
And, finally, neither ʽTomorrow's
Dreamʼ, nor ʽSt. Vitus Danceʼ have ever managed to stick with
me, the former sounding like a failed attempt to do something different with
the «fat» psychedelic distorted guitar tone of Leslie West from Mountain, and
the latter trying to glue together a «power-poppy» part with a colorful guitar
merry-go-round and a generic metal part that, again, sounds like a re-stringing
of several chord sequences from Paranoid
and Master Of Reality. (Even so, I
think the descriptions themselves suggest that at least they're trying to go in all these different
directions).
The only song that is a total classic in all
respects is ʽSupernautʼ, which has even managed to draw praise from
Frank Zappa (one of the least likely persons you'd expect to go wild about a
band like Black Sabbath). Its riff actually feels as if it should be played on
a fiddle — there's a distinct Celtic folk dance flavor to it — but the
psychedelic effect is even more strongly enhanced by Geezer's bass «zoops» on
the verses, which go along pretty well with Ozzy's stated intention "to
reach out and touch the sky". Throw in the mad percussion romp in the
middle and the disorienting multi-layer solo guitar wobble overdubs, and the
song becomes an exuberant celebration of self-exaltation, or something like
that. As heavy as the riff is, ʽSupernautʼ is one of the happiest and
proudest anthems in the band's history...
...but it is quite telling that, once
ʽSupernautʼ finalizes Side A and you turn over the LP (well, that's how
it used to be, kids), ʽSnowblindʼ greets you with the flipside of
that exuberance — it doesn't have a particularly great riff to match
ʽSupernautʼ's, but it has its own doom-laden atmosphere. "What
you get and what you see / Things that don't come easily", Ozzy warns us
from the outset, and pretty soon we get to the midsection, which (maybe
unintentionally, but who really knows?) borrows some tragic coldness from the
Beatles' ʽShe's So Heavyʼ with fantastic results: when Ozzy begins
his "My eyes are blind but I can see..." part, it is not only the
most touching moment on the entire album, but it is the first time ever that
they have allowed to open the door to a bit of depressed sentimentalism, and it
totally works — just a couple minutes ago, you were sharing the band's
happiness, and now they work you up to share their despair. No contradiction
there, either — heavy use of cocaine has its ups and downs.
To be perfectly accurate, depressed
sentimentalism is all over ʽChangesʼ, which comes before
ʽSnowblindʼ and, in defiance of the formulaic Sabbath image, is a
soft piano ballad decorated with some Mellotron atmospherics in the background.
But even though it was inspired by a real life event (Bill Ward's breakup with
his wife), it is way too clichéd lyrically and too trivial melodically
to qualify for heart-touching genius. It's not as if Ozzy cannot sing a
romantic ballad (it might have come as a shock back in 1972, but he's done
plenty of them quite convincingly since then) — it's just that, as a first-time
experiment, the song feels about as stiff as the Rolling Stones' ʽTell
Meʼ from 1964 (maybe even stiffer, since «formulaic sentimentalism» by the
standards of 1972 would be judged far more sternly than by the standards of
1964). Some reviewer went as far as to call ʽChangesʼ «the scariest
thing about the album», but at least I like the Mellotron touch.
All in all, I'd never rate Vol. 4 as being on par with its three predecessors, but for the
most part, it still works well enough to be consistently listenable. Even when
the «meat» of the song is only so-so, it can still redeem itself in other
respects — ʽWheels Of Confusionʼ, for instance, starts out fine with
those several bars of soulful soloing, and fades out equally nobly, with a
moody electric piano rhythm as the backdrop for another grand solo (which, by
the way, reflects Tony's impressive progress a lead guitar player —
ironically, the more his riff genius deteriorated, the better his knack for
spirited blues-rock improvisation seemed to become). ʽUnder The Sunʼ
may be ripping off Deep Purple, but its coda still manages to supply a properly
bombastic, decisive conclusion to the album. A «transitional» effort, for sure
— closing the book on the first chapter of the Sabbath story and already
opening it on the second, «artsy» one — but still, at the very least, always intriguing
and interesting, and occasionally brilliant, so a thumbs up is fully guaranteed even
despite all the criticism.
SABBATH BLOODY SABBATH (1973)
1) Sabbath Bloody Sabbath; 2)
A National Acrobat; 3) Fluff; 4) Sabbra Cadabra; 5) Killing Yourself To Live;
6) Who Are You; 7) Looking For Today; 8) Spiral Architect.
This and the following album mark a new, brief,
and somewhat bizarre phase in the colorful career of Black Sabbath — the «art-rock»
phase. Vol. 4 may not have been one
of their best efforts, but it seems to have opened the band's minds towards
two things: fear of stagnation and excitement of experimentation. Originally,
«stagnation» got the upper hand: with drugs getting the better of them and
endless touring sucking out the energy, the band spent a whole month in Los
Angeles trying to come up with something new, and ended up with a bad case of
writer's block — because, let's face it, Los Angeles in 1973 was just no place
for that kind of band.
So they got back to the old UK, rented
themselves a medieval castle in Gloucestershire, and things quickly started
getting back to normal. With progressive rock pretty much at its peak in
1972-73, the basic idea here was that the band had to «mature» — explore
something more complex and adventurous than the mere conception of a «song»
being the near equivalent of a «heavy metal riff» and nothing more. This is
most evident in the lyrics — with songs like ʽA National Acrobatʼ
("I am the world that hides the universal secret of all time...") and
ʽSpiral Architectʼ ("Child of god sitting in the sun, giving
peace of mind..."), Geezer is clearly struggling to work the turf of Jon
Anderson and Peter Sinfield, often avoiding direct descriptiveness and moralization
in favor of «obscure» metaphors and non sequiturs.
Those lyrical results are mostly laughable (and
it's not as if those role models were beyond reproach themselves), but,
fortunately, it does not matter, because the collective musical genius of
Sabbath was still going strong. Sure, the idea of Black Sabbath doing art rock
might look like an elephant in a china shop, but every once in a while you get
yourself an elephant inexplicably blessed with a good sense of balance and
finesse. Most importantly, where the «quiet» moments on Sabbath albums, up to
this point, usually just served as breathers (ʽOrchidʼ,
ʽEmbryoʼ, etc., are definitely not
the kind of stuff for which people remember Master Of Reality), they are now an integral part of the
composition — and they sound nice.
The title track that breaks the record in is a
classic example — a mere forty seconds after a classic Sabbath riff has
ploughed the terrain naked, the earth is irrigated by a soft, «romantic»,
acoustic-driven bridge with a highly melodic vocal from Ozzy. «Soft» and
«harsh» interact with each other continuously, setting yet another trend for
future explorations in heavy metal, before, eventually, the song settles on
ultra-heavy mode: the dragon riff that enters around 4:05 is the toughest beast
on the entire album, with a well-ahead-of-its-time proto-thrash guitar tone, a
brief, but mercyless little musical Godzilla, in the sights of which
"dreams turn to nightmares, heaven turns to hell" indeed. This is all
so much better than ʽWheels Of Confusionʼ that it immediately strikes
the idea of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
as a creative renaissance.
That said, I have always regarded this record
as kinda «spotty» next to its follow-up, by which time the guys in the band
would figure out exactly what works and what does not work in this new
production formula. Twice over the record's course they bypass heaviness
altogether, and twice the results are unimpressive — ʽFluffʼ, rather
aptly titled, is a medievalistic instrumental ballad that mostly just spins
around the same acoustic guitar and piano arpeggios, with some delicate, but
unoriginal lead noodling in the foreground, and is way too long at four
minutes; and ʽWho Are Youʼ is essentially a stupid experiment with
«evil» Moog synth tones that sounds like a first-grader's parody on ELP's
ʽBrain Salad Surgeryʼ or something like that (but what could you expect from a song written by
Ozzy with the basic purpose of testing out his freshly purchased instrument?
It's good enough that he was actually able to come up with a quirky riff like
that, then was left with nothing to do but to loop it around the whole song).
It all works much better when they leave in the
heaviness as the song's basic foundation, then start weaving in little strands
of experimentation. ʽSabbra Cadabraʼ, for instance, begins as your
basic piece of heavy boogie, well suited for the likes of everybody from Deep
Purple to Budgie, and we suspect nothing as Ozzy sings some innocent lines
about loving that little lady, always on his mind. Then, hoopla, midway through
they shift keys and tempos, bring in pianos and synthesizers (along with Rick
Wakeman to play them, all for the price of a few bottles of beer!), mask Ozzy's
vocals with phasing to create a ghostly effect, and suddenly what was a
cock-rock-fest just a few moments ago is now a spooky extravaganza, because the
protagonist turns out to be not a regular guy, but a mischievous guest spirit
from the underworld (essentially, this is then a more subtle twist on the story
of ʽN.I.B.ʼ).
Even more impressive is ʽSpiral
Architectʼ, where metal, catchy pop, and lush orchestration come together
in a perfectly balanced synthesis — this is probably the most musically complex
piece on the album, and despite Geezer's silly-sounding lyrical
pretentiousness, everything else goes like clockwork. It is more of an
exuberant power pop anthem with a thick metallic base tone on loan than
«art-metal» as such, sometimes breaking into an inspired «musical gallop»,
sometimes letting the orchestra take over, and always returning to the song's
basic «spiral» riff for anchorage. It is also the first Sabbath song to end a
Sabbath album on a decidedly optimistic note, even if it took a pinch of naïve
mysticism to do it. But it gives the album a conceptual cohesion — we begin
with the brutal heaviness of the title track to acknowledge the world's evil,
then end with the orchestral beauty of ʽArchitectʼ to reflect the
sweet opportunities offered by escapism. That at least seems more logical than
singing about "peace and happiness in every day" to the doom-laden
monster coda of ʽInto The Voidʼ.
Throw in ʽA National Acrobatʼ
(another absolute metal classic, with Tony bouncing melodic ideas off the wall
faster than you can catch them — the stoner rock bit, the hellfire wah-wah
part, the power-pop riffage of the last instrumental section), ʽKilling
Yourself To Liveʼ (this one I've never cared for all that much, but I do
acknowledge the complexity of construction), and ʽLooking For Todayʼ,
another heavy pop anthem that pales a little in the company of ʽSpiral Architectʼ,
and you get an album not without its flaws — many of which would be rectified
soon afterwards — but still one that should be inspiring musicians all over the
world even today, so all you kids take your lesson here: this is how you «refresh» your formula once it gets stale, so as
not to lose your quintessential strengths and skills while at the same time
making a bold step forward. Plus, regardless of how one feels about the record,
it must have taken real guts to
produce it — the musical decisions taken here are some of the band's boldest
since they first arrived on the scene. Granted, boldness alone does not cut it,
but boldness + talent = thumbs up without further questions, even if some
of the actual results turn out to be subpar.
SABOTAGE (1975)
1) Hole In The Sky; 2) Don't
Start (Too Late); 3) Symptom Of The Universe; 4) Megalomania; 5) Thrill Of It
All; 6) Supertzar; 7) Am I Going Insane (Radio); 8) The Writ.
It is hardly an accident that the only song to
have endured in Sabbath's «typical» live set from this album was ʽSymptom
Of The Universeʼ. Others were tried out circa 1975-76, then quickly discarded
and forgotten; and, according to most sources, the band members have relatively
few kind words to say about the album themselves — they prefer to remember that
time as a period of personal chaos, druggy stupor, and just not a lot of fun
altogether. (Now Headless Cross — there was a time of much rejoicing and
happiness... 'nuff said).
Indeed, Sabotage
is anything but the «quintessential
Black Sabbath» album. Fans of ʽParanoidʼ, ʽIron Manʼ, and
even ʽSabbath Bloody Sabbathʼ, if they come here looking for more of
the same, will inevitably run away in disappointment — as perplexed at the
band's musical direction as we all would be in the band's taste in clothes (the
front sleeve photo has made history as one of the tackiest style demonstrations
of «the Me Decade»). Acoustic guitars are one thing, of course, and we'd had
them for quite some time already, but harpsichords? synthesizers? choir harmonies?
tape experiments? multi-part ten-minute epics? what is this, Selling Satan By The Pound?
Actually, no. Detractors of the album
(fortunately, there are not too many of them) usually complain that at this
point, the band got too heavily involved in «progressive» experimentation, lost
its head in a mix of artistic influences and illegal substances, and delivered
something that may have agreed with the spirit of the times, but was utterly
«not Sabbath», an attempt to tread on other people's turf with predictable
stupidity instead of required subtlety. My opinion is the direct opposite: I
think that Sabotage is the most
sincere and deeply personal album ever recorded by the band, and that this is
the reason why it can still be so harrowing after all these years.
As great as those early classic albums were, it
is hard to deny that the band was putting on an act, and that even with all his
looniness, Ozzy did not think of himself as Lucifer or The Iron Man in his
everyday life. Personal matters did not really begin figuring in the band's
output until Vol. 4, and even then
their preoccupation with their own minds was still only occasional. But they
still continued growing as their own psychoanalysts, step by step, and by the
time we come to Sabotage, it was really happening.
There is one central theme here, running
through most of the songs: INSANITY. Ozzy, as he will be glad to tell you
himself, is mentally unstable from birth, and while the same cannot be said of
his pals, by the mid-1970s they were certainly living mad lives (and who
wasn't?). Intentional or not, madness, fantasies, and delusions are at the
heart of Sabotage as they were an
integral part of the band's life at the time — and the fact that these themes
coincided with a «trendy» desire to experiment in the studio is used by the
band to tremendous advantage. Naturally, they lack the «education» that it
would require to produce a Dark Side Of
The Moon, but they more than make up for it with sheer natural talent,
creative instinct, and, yes, a good dose of rock'n'roll passion (that one time
where they really have Floyd in a corner).
Funny enough, the album begins on a completely
unpretentious note: ʽHole In The Skyʼ is just a heavy rocker in the
old tradition — lumpy, bluesy, driven by a good, but unexceptional couple of
riffs, and only the lyrics, written by Geezer as an ever more sophisticated
clump of metaphors and allusions, betray the band's current obsession with
their inner psyche. That, and Ozzy's delivery, of course — he sings with such
passion as if he actually gets what
those lines mean: "The synonyms of all the things that I've said / Are
just the riddles that are built in my head". Heck, maybe he does get it, he just probably couldn't
explain it in words, not even if you threatened to enroll him in a Cambridge
educational program.
It all begins at the end of the fourth minute,
when ʽHole In The Skyʼ is unexpectedly cut off in mid-riff (artsy!)
and the short acoustic interlude ʽDon't Startʼ announces the start of
the «serious» part of our program, as we slip into «experimental» mode and
never let go. ʽSymptom Of The Universeʼ begins fast and heavy, then,
midway through, dives into moody acoustic lite-jazz as Tony becomes José
Feliciano for a change. Conversely, ʽMegalomaniaʼ ends fast and heavy, but begins as a
dark psychedelic trip with ghostly musical overtones and time-warped vocals at
the start of each verse. ʽThrill Of It Allʼ is a fifty-fifty mix of
«Satanic Sabbath» with the all-together-now colorfully psychedelic atmosphere
of Yellow Submarine.
ʽSupertzarʼ (the title alone is worth a grand) puts Iommi's metal
guitar on top of Gregorian harmonies from the London Philharmonic Choir... or
was that vice versa? ʽAm I Going Insaneʼ takes Mozart's / The Nice's
ʽRondeauʼ as the foundation and turns it into a synth-pop song with a
catchy chorus, but no guitar. Finally, ʽThe Writʼ, an anti-lawyer
song of particular value to Ozzy because he wrote the lyrics himself, goes from
dark arena-rock to confessional harpsichord-driven baroque pop — and, in the
good old tradition of Abbey Road,
the album ends on a self-deflating note with the band banging away on a piano
and singing a joke tune (ʽBlow On A Jugʼ).
If you are yet to savor those crazy delights
and that paragraph seemed tempting to you, rest assured that the music actually
does match all that weirdness, and,
moreover, none of that weirdness seems particularly forced or senseless. Even
a track like ʽSupertzarʼ, probably the easiest target on here to
shoot down for «stupidity», works very well in the overall context — I suppose the band invented the title not
merely as a pun, but because the choir reminded them of «Russian church
singing», and where there's Russian church singing, there's also a sort of
«foolishness-for-Christ» association going on, and one thing ties to another
and suddenly Iommi's frantic guitar riffs, locked with those religious choral
harmonies, start making some sort of bizarre sense — perfectly put right in
front of ʽAm I Going Insaneʼ.
However, my own personal favorite here, and a
vote for most criminally underrated Sabbath song of all time (at least in that
the band has never tried resuscitating it live after the 1975-76 season), is
ʽMegalomaniaʼ. The song is yet another example of an odd
lyrical/musical mismatch — its two parts respectively deal with the
self-realized deadly plight of a satanic megalomaniac (Hitler?) and the successful search for redemption
("Now I've found my happiness / From the depths of sorrow"), but if
anything, the second part of the song is even gloomier and scarier than the
first one: at least, Tony's major riff that is driving it forward contains no
hint at «redemption» or «happiness». One totally ad hoc association that
crossed my mind, for some reason, was Jesus
Christ Superstar — there are some moments here when ʽMegalomaniaʼ
conveys the same «unredeemable darkness» feel as ʽThe Death Of
Judasʼ, with those atmospheric, ghostly, fleeting heavy chords laid over
the main melody. Thematically, though, the song probably has more in common
with Tommy... one thing is for
certain: this is as close as Black Sabbath ever came to writing their own «rock
opera», and something tells me that in 1975, they might have succeeded with it.
On the other hand, maybe it is just as well that the album was made without
such a strictly set purpose, and just came out naturally the way it did.
Fate would have it, though, that the chief
memory of Sabotage in the collective
mass conscience would have to be the main riff to ʽSymptom Of The
Universeʼ — the «first ever thrash metal riff», as it is now
retrospectively featured in encyclopaedias, even though the term certainly did
not exist in 1975 (Tony himself has humorously mixed it up in his memoirs, writing
that it has been called «the first progressive
metal riff»), and, furthermore, Pete Townshend was already playing something
very close to that same pattern as early as 1969-70 on some of the versions of
ʽYoung Man Bluesʼ. What matters, though, is that it is just a
frickin' great riff — simple, monstruous, powerful, and, while we are on the
subject, more memorable and more cool than 99% of the «real» thrash metal riffs
I have heard. And what is even cooler is how Ozzy manages to saddle it with his
own speedy vocal part — witchy lead singer ripping through space on a heavy
metal riff broom — and how they come up with the idea of crash-landing the song
in an otherworldly jazzy paradise at the end, instead of just fading the riff
away as many others would have done.
And yet I insist that the legend of
ʽSymptom Of The Universeʼ should not have overshadowed the overall
punch of Sabotage as a thematic and
unpredictable album. As a whole, it certainly is «progressive metal», and a million billion times more impressive
than, say, the entire output of a band like Queensryche, simply because it
happened to be made by a score of talented people who refused to bind
themselves by silly genrist rules. Alas, pretty soon already Black Sabbath
would turn into a prime example of a band ruining itself by sticking to genrist
rules — like most other people, they paid attention to record sales, and with
sales of Sabotage failing to match
their previous successes, it was believed that «this is not what the fans want
of us» (which was at least partially true). But this is also what makes Sabotage so pricelessly unique in the
band's catalog, and, in fact, in Seventies' music in general — thumbs up
on all counts.
TECHNICAL ECSTASY (1976)
1) Back Street Kids; 2) You
Won't Change Me; 3) It's Alright; 4) Gypsy; 5) All Moving Parts (Stand Still);
6) Rock'n'Roll Doctor; 7) She's Gone; 8) Dirty Women.
If we put it very bluntly, the crucial
difference between Sabotage and Technical Ecstasy is that the former
was an «art rock» album, whereas the latter was a «hard rock» album. Not «heavy
metal» in the typical Sabbath sense, but a much more blunt, straightforward,
lumpy, «leaden» form of heavy music, ideologically closer to AC/DC, Kiss, and
early Judas Priest than to Master Of
Reality. I mean, look at the songs — there is at least two tracks here whose primary purpose is to sing hosanna to «rock
and roll» (ʽRock'n'Roll Doctorʼ is a Kiss-worthy title if there ever
was one, and the refrain of ʽBack Street Kidsʼ — "nobody I know
is gonna take my rock'n'roll away from me" — begs for one and only one
question: is somebody whom Ozzy doesn't
know going to take his rock'n'roll away from him?).
Why in the world did the band decide to make
that switch when nobody really asked them to is anybody's guess. «Drugs» as
such does not cut it: the stylistic change was clearly rational and could not
have been fuelled by substance intake (and, for that matter, Iommi's guitar
playing skills and Ozzy's vocal technique on Technical Ecstasy are impeccable, so from a «technical ecstasy»
point of view at least, drugs really made no difference). Shifting musical
tastes seem more like it — I think that Tony paid close attention to popular
taste, and consciously wanted to shift the sound in the direction of the new
wave of heavy bands, without any artistic pretense or particularly «satanic»
connotations. Black Sabbath were going to try on the guise of a heavy
rock'n'roll band, and see how it worked.
Unfortunately, it did not work too well. The
crucial problem of Technical Ecstasy
is that Black Sabbath just do not cut it as a «rock'n'roll band». Ozzy is not a
rock'n'roll singer, and Tony is not a rock'n'roll player, and this is
immediately obvious on the very first track, which is not bad per se, but
relies on generic boogie chords to make its point rather than one of Tony's
classic riffs. Why bother coming up with a classic riff, anyway, if all you
wanna do is boogie? "I'm a rock'n'roll soldier, gonna play it until I'm
dead" — 'nuff said. It sounds especially convincing when delivered in
Ozzy's glassy, inflexible vocal tone (as much as I generally prefer Ozzy's
singing to Paul Stanley's, ʽBack Street Kidsʼ should rather be sung
by somebody like Paul).
This «keep it loud, simple, and basic» ideology
is maintained throughout the album, despite its strange title and Hipgnosis
cover showing two robots engaged in robosexual activities — you'd think it
would all be more fit for a Kraftwerk record. The only «sci-fi» or «futuristic»
element here is the occasional sound of synthesizers (provided by Gerald
Woodruffe), but it's actually less prominent than it was on the previous two
LPs, although keyboards as such are laid over most of the songs. All of this
merely adds to the overall confusion, because it sort of looks as if they
started out with one agenda, then messed up and ended up with another, by which
time it was already too late to straighten things out.
The good news is that the band was not yet
completely wasted, and even in a state of misguided confusion was able to come
up with occasional winners. Although the only song to endure in their setlist
was ʽDirty Womenʼ, a last moment attempt at a throwback to the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath epoch (with a
rather disappointing mid-song riff that sounds like a variation on the
ʽN.I.B.ʼ theme), where they really
excel here is in... the sentimental
department! Cue Bill Ward and his ʽIt's Alrightʼ, an unabashedly
romantic pop rocker on which the drummer sings lead vocals himself — and
unexpectedly demonstrates a sweet and pleasant tone. The tune has often been
compared to the Beatles, although it has a very prominent Seventies style pop
rock sound and should rather be compared to Badfinger or Eric Stewart's 10cc,
but the main thing is that, as a piano pop rocker, it's a cool, convincingly
optimistic tune, and it plays a respectable role in demolishing the «Sabbath
stereotype», even though it would be the last Sabbath song in a long, long
while to demolish the stereotype.
The true forgotten gem of this record, though,
is ʽYou Won't Change Meʼ, a song that has been cruelly overlooked by
fans and unjustly underappreciated by the band members themselves — if
anything, it should have become a
personal favorite of Ozzy's, but apparently neither Sabbath as a band nor Ozzy
as a solo artist have ever performed it live, nor has it been covered by
anybody else, for reasons I cannot fathom, since this song holds my personal
top spot for «greatest non-Sabbath-like Sabbath song». A dark, heavy ballad,
opening with a suitably Gothic guitar intro and then riding on a gloomy,
funebral organ pattern and Iommi's doom-laden power chords — and on top of it
all, what might be Ozzy's single best vocal performance of his entire career,
just because it sounds so totally like him,
Ozzy: a song about a morally dysfunctional human being who might occasionally
question his own existence and grope for a ray of light, only to conclude with
grim determination that "nobody's gonna change my world, that's something
too unreal, nobody will change the way I feel". I will even confess to
having occasionally found myself empathizing, against my will, almost to the
point of tears — then again, I guess Jesus weeps for Ozzy, too, on an everyday
basis.
The song is also notable for introducing
Iommi's new soloing style — each of Ozzy's stone-heavy concluding statements
puts Tony in a state of overdrive, where flashy, frenzied, «shredding» licks
flood the room in hysterical torrents that used to be characteristic of Jimmy
Page rather than Tony Iommi. Of course, this playing style can easily
degenerate into meaningless wanking, but on ʽYou Won't Change Meʼ,
both solos are in perfect agreement with the singer's state of mind, not to
mention the important demonstration that Iommi is, in fact, ready and able to enter
the Van Halen / Iron Maiden era with the required chops for the business.
Nevertheless, on the whole ʽYou Won't Change Meʼ is an Osbourne
classic, not an Iommi one (and, in a funny way, all those lyrics — from
"you give me life woman" to "although you won't change me
anyway" — predict the complicated story of the Ozzy / Sharon relationship
to a tee).
I wish I could garner the same level of
exuberance for the other ballad of the album (ʽShe's Goneʼ); alas,
this is where the melodrama in Ozzy takes over, and he oversings Butler's corny
lyrics to a lite-baroque pop arrangement, fully in line with all the
stereotypical «arena (pseudo)-art balladry» clichés of the decade. Maybe
they were trying to become The Moody Blues on that particular track, but they
forgot to write an interesting melody for it, beyond Tony's repetitive acoustic
arpeggios. Actually, the Moody Blues connection could also be seen in that they
have a psychedelic art rocker called ʽGypsyʼ on the album — far less
impressive than the Moodies' ʽGypsyʼ, but one of the most
experimental numbers on Technical
Ecstasy anyway; I'm not sure I love it, but I can see where it could be
lovable if you give its complex structure, various overdubs, and alleged
seriousness some time to seep in.
As you can see by now, the album is an oddly
mixed bag — on the whole, probably a failure if viewed from a «music as
never-ending progress» angle, but not without its share of underrated classics
and musical experiments. In recent years, its reputation seems to have slightly
improved as more and more people have begun evaluating it on its own terms,
rather than from the «how does it compare with the punk/New Wave spirit, or at
least with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal?» point of view. In any case, it
is not a record that is only too happy to pigeonhole itself, and I'd gladly
take it, hits and misses included, over most of what would continue to be
issued under the Black Sabbath moniker — even if it is much less true to the
«essence» and «legacy» of the Black Sabbath moniker than, say, all of those
Tony Martin albums. A «technical», if not particularly «ecstatic», thumbs up
here.
NEVER SAY DIE! (1978)
1) Never Say Die; 2) Johnny
Blade; 3) Junior's Eyes; 4) Hard Road; 5) Shock Wave; 6) Air Dance; 7) Over To
You; 8) Breakout; 9) Swinging The Chain.
This album has always had such an awful
reputation, and this awful reputation has always confirmed itself so
efficiently upon first listen, that it took me quite a while to appreciate some
of the record's redeeming qualities. Indeed, under a different set of
circumstances it could have been shaped up into something much better — it has
all the makings of a really intriguing, stylistically experimental album.
Unfortunately, few of its original ideas managed to outgrow the embryonic
stage, and for every such idea there is a swamp of boring dumbness surrounding
it.
The thing is, Never Say Die! was originally to be something completely different
— a «Black Sabbath featuring Dave Walker» album, conceived in the wake of
Ozzy's brief departure from the band (of his own free will). Dave Walker was a
veteran blues-rocker who'd probably only joined up with Sabbath for financial
reasons (Tony invited him over as an old Birmingham pal); prior to that, he'd
been a member of Savoy Brown, and then briefly a member of Fleetwood Mac, with
whom, incidentally, he released one of the band's blandest albums ever (Penguin). Naturally, the «match» with
Black Sabbath was a disaster, as were most of the songs that the band recorded
with him — once Ozzy came back, he refused to sing on any of the Walker
material, and not just because his pride was hurt or anything, but also because
the songs sucked. A good example of
just how badly they sucked is ʽSwinging The Chainʼ, a Walker-era
leftover that was eventually given to Bill Ward — a lumpy slab of blues-rock
with lots of socially conscious pretense but no subtlety or catchiness
whatsoever. It does happen to be the first song after ʽThe Wizardʼ (I
think) to feature a harmonica part, but it's a boring harmonica part, and it
does not fuse well enough with Tony's distorted, mushy rhythm parts.
Anyway, once the Walker disaster was over and
Ozzy was back in the band, they decided to recut the album in a hurry — and it feels hurried: nine tracks, most of them
overlong, yet relatively low on ideas. Even the similarly structured titles,
flashing before your eyes — ʽHard Roadʼ, ʽShock Waveʼ,
ʽAir Danceʼ — convey a feeling of being rushed and undercooked.
Worse, the primary flaw of Technical
Ecstasy, namely, the attempt to cross over to a cruder, headbangier, more
boogie-based platform, is still very much in action. As the title track kicks
in with its power chords and «ass-kicking» airs, you suddenly realize that
Black Sabbath have begun to sound like Thin Lizzy — ʽThe Boys Are Back In
Townʼ, that sort of thing. But where Lizzy had a sort of natural
street-wise attitude, with Lynott's quasi-working-class charisma doing its
thing perfectly, Sabbath never had it in them. Even though their early years
were spent close to the «slum kids» format, none of the band members had any
good idea at how to become the champion of the blue-collar guy. This weird
«social conscience» that you see in the title track and especially in the
immediate follow-up, ʽJohnny Bladeʼ, a dark tale of an outcast
underdog, feels wasted.
What is not completely
wasted are some of the band's experimental ideas. Let the record sink in a
little bit, and you will see that ʽJunior's Eyesʼ is the first time
that Tony has cobbled together a riff that depends on a wah-wah pedal and an echo effect for completion, and
it fits in well with Ozzy's almost tearful delivery of the lyrics that relate
to the passing of his father. Skip over the yawn-inducing intro riff to
ʽAir Danceʼ and see how Don Airey's keyboard work actually contributes
to the song — there are some lovely passages here, both in the «ambient jazz»
and even «jazz fusion» styles. Actually, jazz seems to have been this album's
chief inspiration after boogie rock: ʽBreakoutʼ is a bona fide jazz
instrumental with flashy saxophone solos and a big band arrangement
orchestrated by Will Malone. It is nothing to write home about, but remember at
least that bad post-Ozzy Sabbath albums do not have big band jazz arrangements
on them, meaning that even at its relative worst, the pre-1980s Sabbath was
still a band that regarded «risk taking» as a prerequisite for going into the
studio — something that was gone for good once Dio came on board two years
later.
Of course, stuff like ʽHard Roadʼ,
ʽShock Waveʼ, ʽSwinging The Chainʼ, etc., is beyond redemption
— all these songs sound like they were written in about two minutes; their
riffs are either non-existent or «unresponsive», since Tony probably did not
have enough time to work on them. At least the title track has a catchy
anthemic chorus, meaning that it worked well enough on tour during their last
concerts with Ozzy, but I'd rather have the album end than start with it, because, as it happens, Ozzy-era Sabbath
waves us its last goodbye with ʽSwinging The Chainʼ, which is
probably in the Top 5 worst Sabbath songs ever put to tape (Seventh Star excluded, because
otherwise the entire Top 5 would be occupied with songs off that one).
To top it all off, the album cover was once
again provided by Hipgnosis, and this time it is even more ridiculous than in
the case of Technical Ecstasy — all
you want to say when glancing at those air pilots, perplexed and confused, is
«...which one's Ozzy, I wonder?» The bottomline is that an album like this
simply does not call for a symbolic / enigmatic cover; one might just as well
have slapped those pilots on top of Back
In Black or The Beach Boys' Party!.
Just one more confusing detail to add to this pitiful disaster of an album —
and yet I refuse to complete this critique with a thumbs down rating, since I
believe it should at least be instructive
to take a listen to Never Say Die!
and try and figure out for yourself what, how, and why went wrong here and
whether there might have been a chance of a different outcome.
HEAVEN AND HELL (1980)
1) Neon Knights; 2) Children
Of The Sea; 3) Lady Evil; 4) Heaven And Hell; 5) Wishing Well; 6) Die Young; 7)
Walk Away; 8) Lonely Is The Word.
So, is Black Sabbath without Ozzy Osbourne
still Black Sabbath? Or is it really «Heaven & Hell», as this new
incarnation of the band, with Ronnie James Dio on vocals, would actually start
calling itself twenty-six years later? This is certainly a more difficult
question than a similar one about, say, AC/DC — who, incidentally, were another
great heavy rock band to reinvent themselves with a different singer the very
same year. But where Brian Johnson, taking over the late Bon Scott, simply
contributed to a slight change in the band's aesthetics (a little less irony, a
little more working-class crudeness), the arrival of Dio seems to have
revitalized Black Sabbath at the cost of completely shifting its ambitions in a
different direction.
The difference between Ozzy and Ronnie is, of
course, «heaven & hell» incarnated. Not only is Dio, technically, a genuine
«singer» rather than just «vocalist» (albeit with a somewhat limited vocal
range), but he was also a visionary — obsessed with escapist images of fantasy
worlds, medievalistic values, and all sorts of dark romanticism. In addition to
that, he was a really strong, charismatic personality who tended to eclipse
everybody else: it is, in fact, amazing that he managed to survive with Ritchie
Blackmore in the same band (Rainbow) for a mind-boggling four years (twice as
long as his first stint with Sabbath). The idea to invite him over to Sabbath
upon Ozzy's departure was a very weird whim: perhaps Tony and Geezer thought
that a singer is, after all, only a singer, and can be molded into whatever the
composers wish him to be molded into. As it happened, it was Dio who
transformed Sabbath according to his
masterplan, and not vice versa — and all the other band members could do was
sit back and watch.
From the opening chuggy notes of ʽNeon
Knightsʼ and right down to the epic fade-out of ʽLonely Is The
Wordʼ, it is clear that the old Black Sabbath is gone for good. Of course,
the band did go through a series of experimental transformations with Ozzy, but
somehow, Heaven & Hell is an
album that produces an immediate clear impression — finally, they have found a
comfortable «genrist» niche in which they are going to stay (and indeed, this
is where they ended up staying even after Ronnie was gone), and it's all
because of Ronnie. Now, at last, with Tony Iommi being a far friendlier and
milder chap than that Blackmore guy, Ronnie could find someone to make all his
fantasies come alive — little wonder that he'd end up remembering the Heaven & Hell sessions as some of
the most perfect moments of his life.
Musically, Heaven
& Hell walks a line somewhere in between «doom metal», «art metal», and
«power metal» — dark, heavy music that takes itself seriously and is also
oriented at «retro» ideals (medieval, Gothic, romantic, whatever). Now that I
think of it — although subsequent decades have seen zillions of albums in
those genres, as late as mid-1980, did music such as recorded here even exist? Some of it sounds like Accept
(who were only just starting), some of it sounds like Iron Maiden (who were in
the process of working out their sound), some of it sounds like Opeth (who
would not form for another decade), the point being that Heaven & Hell is sort of a milestone, though certainly not a
milestone that would be impressive for fans of «classic» Sabbath. Because this
is where, in a way, the «classic rock»-era Sabbath ceases to exist, and what we
are left with is «heavy metal»-era Black Sabbath, and I mean «heavy metal» as a
narrowly defined genre that suits certain restricted conventions. An era which
can produce its fair share of excellent songs, but has no space for
ʽPlanet Caravanʼ, or ʽChangesʼ, or ʽSupertzarʼ,
or any other such deviation.
Fortunately, even though the overall tone of
the album is so monotonous, Ronnie's arrival at least refreshed the atmosphere
and infused a new hope — and, riding on that new hope, the band came out with a
solid, consistent set of songs. One thing that you are going to notice, though,
is that Tony's riffs, which once used to be the begin-all-end-all substance of
Black Sabbath, no longer are so. It's not even that there aren't any riffs —
it's simply that they are much less prominent. Sometimes they only arrive at
the time of the chorus (ʽChildren Of The Seaʼ), and Ronnie, singing
across them, is stealing most of the attention for himself. Sometimes they only
make brief appearances in between verses (title track). Most of the times, they
are simply not too memorable, and work more as tough, brutal pedestals for
R.J.D. to get on top of them and shower the audience with his medieval metal
opera arias. Rather convenient, given R.J.D.'s short stature.
But I would not count this as a big problem. We
are here presented with a radically new ideology for the band, and for the time
being, this ideology works — many of Ronnie's vocal melodies are quite catchy,
and the man's passionate conviction for what he is doing is undeniable. Of all
the pathos-drenched, pretentious, pseudo-operatic metal singers, Ronnie James
Dio has always held my highest respect for one single, simple reason: he's
actually got the right pipes to justify all that. Apart from sheer technique
and audacious pomp, there is such a strong strain of animal viciousness in the
man that even when he is spouting forth lyrical nonsense about "circles
and rings, dragons and kings", the words are convincing and infectious.
And as for Iommi, even though his playing here might not yield a lot of
memorable melodies, it is tighter, more energetic and, in a way, more melodic
than ever before.
The title track, which would quickly become the
signature song for the Dio-led version of the band, is an obvious highlight —
doom-laden, multi-part, music and lyrics all suggestive of an inescapable fate,
and a «begin slow, end fast» principle that seems to suggest they were consciously
or subconsciously trying to repeat the formula of ʽBlack Sabbathʼ, i.
e. really start a new musical life. Okay, the words may be even clumsier than
Geezer used to make them ("the devil is never a maker, the less that you
give you're a taker"?), but only R.J.D. can bring the chorus down on the
word "hell" with such a gloriously evil pharyngealized thud, and that
prancing bass line goes so much better with Ronnie's delivery than in its
original incarnation (ʽMainline Ridersʼ by Quartz, whose former
member Geoff Nicholls brought it over with him once he was hired by Sabbath as
a bass, and then a keyboard player).
Other than that, I am quite partial to the
entire first side — the fast-and-furious opening with ʽNeon Knightsʼ;
the slow-paced ʽChildren Of The Seaʼ, a song that began life with
Ozzy still in the band but now seems thoroughly associated with Dio and his
awesome "LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT!" coda; and even ʽLady Evilʼ,
which is clearly the silliest tune of the lot but whose grinning, gleefully
corny «evilness» I simply cannot resist — Tony, too, gets caught up in the game
and comes up with all sorts of «nightmarish» wah-wah effects. The important
thing is to learn not to have to take these songs too seriously — this is all part of a highly professional
phantasmagoria; but there is some real grit to the singing and playing that
makes it believable, like the high quality writing and erudition of J. R. R.
Tolkien helps make at least some of The
Lord Of The Rings believable. I mean,
nobody is demanding you to shed tears over the tragedy of the lost
ʽChildren Of The Seaʼ, but shouldn't we at least tip our hats to the
way that tragedy is brought to its final apocalyptic conclusion?
The second side is not nearly as impressive,
since it largely rehashes the ideas of Side A (ʽDie Youngʼ =
ʽNeon Knights Vol. 2ʼ; ʽWalk Awayʼ = a poppier take on
ʽLady Evilʼ, both songs being upbeat rants about evil bitches;
ʽLonely Is The Wordʼ is yet another slow-moving epic ballad in the
same vein as ʽChildrenʼ, etc.), but then the actual melodies are
still different, and if you are okay with the overall style, you'll be okay
with the second side as well. Heaven
& Hell is not a «song-based» album, it is a «sound-based» album, and
the Iommi/Dio sound is the sound of two metal titans at work. You can
pigeonhole it, label it, jeer and sneer at it, but there is no getting around
the fact that Heaven & Hell
kicks the Devil's ass, and is right up there with Back In Black as one of the year's greatest heavy rock triumphs. Thumbs up
(there should probably be some sort of pun here on Dio's «metal horns» gesture,
but I'm sure I wouldn't be the first one, so it is perhaps more prudent to
abstain).
MOB RULES (1981)
1) Turn Up The Night; 2)
Voodoo; 3) The Sign Of The Southern Cross; 4) E5150; 5) The Mob Rules; 6)
Country Girl; 7) Slipping Away; 8) Falling Off The Edge Of The World; 9) Over
And Over.
In later years, Tony Iommi was actually a
little bit embarrassed that the second album with Dio turned out to be more or
less a carbon copy of the first one — something perfectly in the line of work
for the average heavy metal band, but still a bit of a blemish on the so-far
pioneering reputation of the great Sabbath. The funny thing is that he did not
seem to experience the same qualms about the later fate of the band — but I guess that when you are fronted by
somebody like Ronnie James Dio, expectations will always be higher than when
you are fronted by somebody like Tony Martin. In any case, in the early 1980s
the Dio/Iommi line-up, want it or not, was still on the cutting edge of «heavy
metal», if not necessarily «classic rock».
And even if there is very little progression on
Mob Rules — aside from a few novel
details that we will get around to in a moment — there is no doubt that the
band was still on a creative high. Having replaced the physically detrimented
and psychologically battered Bill Ward with new drummer Vinny Appice, the
«Heaven & Hell» lineup of the former Black Sabbath was now firmly in place,
and although Dio had already begun vying for leadership position with Tony, the
two were still enjoying the musical chemistry so much that, if anything, Mob Rules actually rocked even heavier
and more viciously than its predecessor.
Maybe this impression just has to do with the
title track, though. In spirit, ʽThe Mob Rulesʼ is probably the most
«punkish» creation to come from this (or any other) incarnation of the band — a
fast, righteously angry, brutally delivered message to the powers-that-be on
the dangers of misusing and abusing said power. Except that no punk band would
probably refer to the people as a «mob», something that Ronnie is not afraid to
do, being an elitist escapist by nature. The melody of the song is lumpy, ugly,
bursting with power chords and bass drum murders, but its spiky message fits in
well with the arrangement, and it is quite refreshing to hear Dio roar "if
you listen to fools, the mob rules!" for a change, instead of the usual
dragon narrative.
Other minor new details of certain interest
include: (a) Dio's rare use of his higher range on the medievalistic acoustic
section of ʽThe Sign Of The Southern Crossʼ — a lulling introduction
to the otherwise dark and doom-laden fantasy epic; (b) the thoroughly unexpected
use of a Celtic folk motive for the heavy riff of ʽCountry Girlʼ,
which is probably Sabbath's only direct experience of completely transposing
an old folk melody into a heavy metal setting; (c) the attempt at incorporating
a soul-blues element into the album's conclusion — admit it, every time Dio
opens his mouth to wail "sometimes I feel..." at the opening of
ʽOver And Overʼ, you just want to finish with a "...like a
motherless child" for him, don't you?
But my personal second favorite on the album, beyond
the title track, is ʽVoodooʼ, just because it provides Dio with a
perfect vehicle for unleashing some prime-time hatred on an unspecified unlucky
soul — if that "say you don't know me, you'll burn!" at the beginning
doesn't get you, how about the even more terrifying "bring me your
children, they'll burn!" at the end? I guess all those Christian
organisations did have a reason for
chasing after Dio with threats of exorcism, after all, because on
ʽVoodooʼ, he is slipping into this Satanic character like there was absolutely
no tomorrow, not for the experienced voodooist, at least. "Call me the
Devil, it's true, some can't accept but I crept inside you". It could be
hilariously embarrassing, but that subliminal roar in his voice gets me every
time. There is a real beast crouching
here.
That said, it must also be stated that once
again, the riffs in general are not too good. ʽCountry Girlʼ somewhat
qualifies, but the sole innovative aspect of its melody is the application of
the heavy guitar tone; elsewhere, even ʽThe Mob Rulesʼ employs a
rather lackluster boogie chord sequence (though, as I said, appropriate for the
occasion). The «sludge monster» riff of ʽThe Sign Of The Southern
Crossʼ seems to be on about the same level of complexity and originality
as, say, ʽElectric Funeralʼ, but is more of a lazy growl rather than
a snappy jawbite, prowling for the listener like ʽFuneralʼ did. And,
weirdest of all, we might never have dreamed we'd live to see the day where
Tony Iommi would be ripping off Keith Richards, but never say never —
ʽSlipping Awayʼ, through and through, is dependent on a riff that is
every bit the derivational function of ʽCan't You Hear Me Knockingʼ
from Sticky Fingers. Which is more
of a curiosity than a tragedy, but why?..
These men belong to different worlds, with hardly a hope of ever bridging them.
But yet again, flawed as it is and all, Mob Rules has its proper spirit, and
when Iommi, Dio, and the proper spirit are all in their right place, a thumbs up
is guaranteed by definition. When you get down to it, this half-fantasy,
half-reality world turns out to be an invigorating location — so just ʽTurn
Up The Nightʼ and forgive the record its occasional pathos and
overdramatism so you can have some easy metal fun with it.
LIVE EVIL (1982)
1) E5150; 2) Neon Knights; 3)
N.I.B.; 4) Children Of The Sea; 5) Voodoo; 6) Black Sabbath; 7) War Pigs; 8) Iron
Man; 9) The Mob Rules; 10) Heaven And Hell; 11) Sign Of The Southern
Cross/Heaven And Hell (cont.); 12) Paranoid; 13) Children Of The Grave; 14)
Fluff.
Two strange things, both marked with the tags
«Black Sabbath» and «live», happened prior to the release of Live Evil. The first was Live At Last, a compilation of old live
recordings with Ozzy from 1973, released in 1980 without the band's consent by
their former manager Patrick Meehan. The recordings were all right, actually,
but since the band originally decided not to use them, Tony was understandably
pissed off about the incident. Second, in early 1982 Ozzy, going through his
batshit-and-doveshit crazy stage, decided to release a solo live album that
consisted of nothing but Sabbath songs, and Tony was understandably pissed off
about that Brad Gillis guy trampling on his classic riffs.
So, operating in vengeful mode, Tony gave the
green light to the release of Black Sabbath's first «proper» / «officially
sanctioned» live album — one on which Ronnie James Dio would have the right to
not only sing new material, but the old classics as well. Naturally, this would
have to be a double album (what with the band's impressive backlog and all),
and naturally, it would have to prove, once and for all, who was the real master of his domain.
Unfortunately, the album polarized the audience in a way that Heaven And Hell could not — up to this
day, the debate about whether or not Ronnie should or should not have put his
mark on Ozzy-era classics is still raging like there was no tomorrow. Then
again, it is always pleasant to see just how much Black Sabbath still lives on
in the hearts of the old and the young alike.
One thing that Live Evil does show, quite obviously, is that Ronnie was no Ozzy
when it came to establishing the share of one's presence in the band. Ozzy,
when on stage, always seemed a little (or a lot) stoned, seriously enthusiastic
about the music, but also mindful of the fact that he was only one out of four
— a fact that was all too easy to be mindful of since those four guys started
off together as equals. Ronnie, on the other hand, clearly viewed the stage —
just as it was in the old Rainbow days — as a battlefield, where the winner
took it all. And subsequently, Live Evil
is all about Ronnie James Dio. The
stage banter. The singing, so loud it occasionally drowns out Tony's metal
guitar (!). The incessant ad-libbing and posturing, often performed on top of
Tony's classic riffs, so that anybody who has the misfortune of choosing this
album for an introduction to the Sabbath sound will know the band as «the one
with that Valhalla guy» rather than the world's most amazing riff machine
provider.
But you know what? I don't care, and you
shouldn't either. I find Ronnie's big ego, so amusing to behold in such a tiny
body, at worst hilarious, and at best awesomely overpowering. Yes, every once
in a while you get the urge to strangle the little guy, especially when he is
wailing right on top of the ʽBlack Sabbathʼ tritones. Yet he seems so
sincere, passionate, and ferocious in his stage attitude that anything can be
forgiven. Of course, the difference between Ronnie and Ozzy is heaven and earth
(heaven and hell?), but there is at least one additional justification for
Ronnie's almost grotesque «oversinging» on the classics — to tell the truth,
all those early Geezer lyrics are so atrocious that you either have to be Ozzy
to sing them in an appropriately stoned manner, or, if you are Ronnie, you just
have to add a twist and a flourish to
each word so that the listener be overwhelmed by the twists and flourishes
rather than be stumped by the idiocy of it all.
To that end, Ronnie delves into
ʽN.I.B.ʼ with such abandon as if he really were Lucifer, or at least that werecat creature that Michael
Jackson turns into in the ʽThrillerʼ video. The performance is so
over the top that it is frighteningly hilarious one minute, and then
hilariously frightening in the next one — he's really ripping the throats out
of those words. When we get to ʽBlack Sabbathʼ, instead of Ozzy's
paranoid madman we see a genuinely possessed spirit, somebody who's sold his
soul to the devil not one hour ago. And who but Ronnie could growl the "I
AM IRON MAN" bit without the
special metal effect on the vocals and it would still come out ironish? Just to
experience that guy sweat it out is... quite an experience, and I see no reason
whatsoever to stand firmly on any one side of the debate. Of course, those are
interpretations, and one has no more reason to listen to Ronnie sing ʽWar
Pigsʼ or ʽChildren Of The Graveʼ than to, say, Ray Charles sing
ʽYesterdayʼ or Paul McCartney sing ʽWords Of Loveʼ — but in
all these cases, a certain reason does exist, and what Dio does to these Ozzy
songs looks perfectly legit to me.
Probably the only grave misfire is
ʽParanoidʼ, a song that Black Sabbath Mark II still felt obliged to
perform before the expecting fans but also one which, with its speedy melody
and personal lyrics, simply could not yield to a Dio reinterpretation. He
simply does not know what to do with the song, whose tempo gives him no time to
properly savor any of the syllables, and delivers it in the usual devilish
growl, well fit for every other tune but not
for ʽParanoidʼ. Then again, it's just three minutes, and you really
can't call yourself Black Sabbath and not
do ʽParanoidʼ in a Black Sabbath live show, Ronnie or no Ronnie, so
we will just have to live with that.
As to what concerns the new material from Heaven And Hell and Mob Rules, it is usually done in close
accordance with the originals — ʽHeaven And Hellʼ being the big
exception, as it was restructured in order to spotlight Tony's numerous soloing
exercises. He plays lots of alternately «brutal» and «melodic» passages, none
of which defy imagination, but he's got enough craftsmanship and he never
sticks around one particular key for too long to induce boredom, so I guess
that ʽHeaven And Hellʼ, with its leisurely pace and adaptable
structure, is indeed the best choice to «feature Mr. Tony Iommi». The rest
mostly feature Mr. Ronnie James Dio, always eager to prove that it is his apocalyptic vision, and nobody
else's, that is now the dominant force in this band. Oh, for the record,
ʽN.I.B.ʼ does not feature
the introductory solo by Mr. Geezer Butler (so much for the «Geezer Butler!»
introduction from Ronnie), but ʽWar Pigsʼ does feature an unnecessary drum solo from Mr. Vinny Appice, Bill
Ward's replacement and a somewhat weak link in this show, but not so much
because of poor playing (the playing's ok) as rather because of a fairly tinny
sound to the drums, so that it is hard to take them seriously.
Speaking of which, the album itself allegedly
went through a whole series of transformations, not the least of which was the
infamous rumor that Dio was secretly tweaking the final mixes in order to bring
his voice even more to the front — a
rumor that he violently denied but which I personally have no trouble
believing, and which added to the ongoing rift between him and Iommi. Later on,
the album was released on CD in abridged form, then reinstated, then remixed
with either more or less audience interaction (I don't remember which), then
reinstated again, but I guess that,
one way or the other, I am listening to the «real thing» in the end, whatever
«real» might be. In any case, Live Evil
certainly deserves a thumbs up, despite the mucking-up of
ʽParanoidʼ, the tin drums, and the abysmal front cover which, if I am
correct, actually tries to depict the protagonists of Black Sabbath songs — I'm
sure I recognize the war pigs, but is that an Iron Man or a Neon Knight in front?
Or an amalgam of both? Whatever. Gimme a Bill Ward in tights and an Ozzy in
platform shoes over this cartoonishness any time of day.
BORN AGAIN (1983)
1) Trashed; 2) Stonehenge; 3)
Disturbing The Priest; 4) The Dark; 5) Zero The Hero; 6) Digital Bitch; 7) Born
Again; 8) Hot Line; 9) Keep It Warm.
Tony Iommi certainly knows a great singer when
he hears one, but the flipside is that Tony Iommi never really knows when the
singer in question is thoroughly incompatible with the basic idea of «Black
Sabbath». At least when they got Ronnie, they got themselves dungeons, dragons,
kings, and queens, which was not that
far removed from taking Lucifer's hand or playing the role of a repenting
megalomaniac. But when, on manager Don Arden's suggestion, after the Live Evil fiasco they invited Ian
Gillan, the result was... comical.
No, really, Born Again is, in fact, the most unintentionally funny Black
Sabbath album ever released. Tony, honest and hardworking guy as he was, came
up with the usual dark, hellish melodies, but you couldn't find a less dark,
hellish lead singer than Ian Gillan unless you went directly to the Sha Na Na
training grounds. So he used to be the frontman for that «heavy metal» band,
Deep Purple, but all those years he was just a reckless rock'n'roll singer, not
even close to a prophet of doom or something like that. And now here he was,
writing lyrics and contributing vocal melodies for Satan's household band! If
you think this sounds ludicrous on paper, just wait until you hear the album.
This mismatching is so hilarious that it pushes
the «camp» value of the album sky high. Never even mind the surrounding
paraphernalia — such as the snarling red baby on the front sleeve, or the
grotesquely massive, miscalculated Stonehenge stage sets that the band took on
tour along with dwarves and mushrooms (inspiring one of the most famous bits in
Spinal Tap) — the record is
grotesquely campy all by itself, although some context knowledge is probably
necessary to assess and savor that campiness in full.
A good example is the opening number,
ʽTrashedʼ. Formally, it is just a fast rocker commemorating a
special event in Ian's life with the band (getting drunk and trashing his car).
But there is no way you could listen to it without associating the song with
the melodically similar ʽHighway Starʼ, one of Deep Purple's biggest
hits. Similar, but different: where ʽHighway Starʼ exuberantly
celebrated the art of dominating the road, becoming one of its generation's
most arrogant rock'n'roll anthems (hooray to the power of youth, brute force,
ambition, and desire), the hero of ʽTrashedʼ is the victim of the
ʽHighway Starʼ lifestyle a decade later. Older, balder, sleazier,
whinier, far more miserable, and sort of down on his luck — the most memorable
line in the song is the twice-repeated "...but there was no
tequi-i-i-i-ila!..", as if that
was the most tragic aspect of the situation. Needless to say, it is also one
hell of an anti-climactic opener after the Dio-era blitzkriegs of ʽNeon
Knightsʼ and ʽTurn Up The Nightʼ, especially if you throw in the
argument that Gillan's voice had already begun to deteriorate by that point,
getting higher and whinier.
Ironically, Iommi seems anything but spent. It
is clear that he did listen to some Deep Purple, as an homage to Ian (in fact,
he was even gallant enough to add ʽSmoke On The Waterʼ to the setlist),
but he must have also been intently listening to the New Wave of heavy metal,
and perhaps even to some first offshoots of the emerging trash metal scene,
although there is certainly much more Judas Priest in the air here than
Metallica. As long as it's heavy and doomy, there is quite a bit of melodic
diversity in the songs — not that it always helps the particular melody, but
the man was still searching, that's for sure. Abysmal production, though: the
guitars frequently sound as if coming from the bottom of a medieval well, and
Gillan's vocals are mixed in from a different well a couple dozen yards away.
If you are going to play like Judas Priest (ʽHot Lineʼ), couldn't you
at least produce your records like
Judas Priest?
Still, the album produced at least one classic
metal tune: ʽZero The Heroʼ is an atmospheric masterpiece, and
possibly Iommi's highest point of the decade — after the spooky, screechy
introduction (with guitars that sound like a cross between whining red babies
and a beehive gone mad), comes a simplistic, terrific riff, totally on par with
anything on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
and not at all spoilable even with the song's rather dumb-sounding chorus or
the fact that Ian prefers to rap rather than sing through the verses. Tony's
extended soloing is also a highlight — in fact, the song might have worked even
better as an instrumental, but, on the other hand, the song's social message
(essentially, it's all about the power of brainwashing) agrees with the
scorched-earth onslaught of the main riff as being symbolic of the
dehumanization process, and Ian likes these songs that stir up righteous anger
emotions, so let us forgive him the lack of a strong chorus.
I wish I could tip my hat in a similar manner
to any of the other songs, but this just does not seem possible. A few are
messy beyond repair, such as ʽDisturbing The Priestʼ, with idiotic
fits of «evil» laughter; vague, scattered metal chords that never come together
in a meaningful riff; and a lot of vocal posturing without any particular
reason (allegedly, the words were written by Ian after some local priests had
complained of the band's rehearsals disturbing their peace, and it does seem
like the truth). The title track is a slow, draggy power ballad — a direct
precursor to the disaster of Seventh
Star lying ahead; boring, murkily flanged guitar sound and a lead singer
who once used to sing effortlessly with tons of soul, but now has to basically
kill himself in the studio to achieve the same effect, and still the effect is
not achieved. And songs like ʽDigital Bitchʼ are just gross
("keep away from the digital bitch, she's so rich, the digital bitch"
is the kind of a chorus where even Ozzy would have ended up with a facepalm).
A total critical disaster upon release, Born Again has been reevaluated over
the last couple of decades — with the original shock at the Gillan/Iommi
mismatch overcome, people have begun praising some of the music, recognizing at
least the fact that this is far from Iommi's worst half hour as a composer. Indeed,
the novelty value alone should earn the album some points, but other than
ʽZero The Heroʼ, the songs just do not seem to have any replay value.
The singer is not only mismatched, but his voice is shot as well, most of the
time. The production is gray and murky (and even though Bill Ward has been
restored to the drum seat, I wouldn't ever know by myself, because his skins
now have a glossy electronic coating that was all the rage back then, and ended
up reducing most of the drummers' individualities to a uniform pulp). And the
melodies, diverse as they are, seem way too lazy way too often, as if Tony were
content to adopt one or another style without taking any time to bother about
the substance.
All in all, even though I no longer hate the
album like I used to, but rather just feel amused about it, this is not enough
to shift the final thumbs down evaluation — a curious failure,
this one. Not that the band was too tight-assed to admit it: Gillan himself has
since then acknowledged that he was probably the worst singer Black Sabbath ever
had (even though he had a great time with the band); I'd say he is doing a huge favor to Tony Martin (not to
mention Glenn Hughes), but sometimes self-criticism is not merely a form of
humility, you know.
SEVENTH STAR (1986)
1) In For The Kill; 2) No
Stranger To Love; 3) Turn To Stone; 4) Sphinx (The Guardian); 5) Seventh Star;
6) Danger Zone; 7) Heart Like A Wheel; 8) Angry Heart; 9) In Memory.
We should not really take as an excuse that bit
of historical trivia which says that Seventh
Star was not supposed to be a «Black Sabbath» album, and that the decision
to present it as such was thrust upon Tony by his management, in a publicity
move that was even more dishonest than with Born Again (at least Born
Again featured three original members of Black Sabbath — Seventh Star features one) and introduced a new brand of
linguistic euphemism into the world: «Band X
featuring artist Y» = «Artist Y who used to be in band X».
We should not take it as an excuse, not because
somebody had the gall to discredit and dishonor a sacred brand, but simply
because «that which we call a turd by any other name would smell as sweet».
Wait, did I say «turd»? I meant to say Seventh
Star, an album that introduces formerly great musical guy Tony Iommi to the
pleasures of generic mid-Eighties pop metal and, along with Alice Cooper's Constrictor, has to count as one of the
year's hugest disappointments, and a good reminder to all of us how those years
used to bring out all the worst in rock dinosaurs, as the softer ones embraced
adult contemporary and the harder ones were swallowed up in hair metal.
Yes, after the eventual and inevitable
implosion of the Gillan-fronted version of Black Sabbath, whereupon, for a few
years, it was thought that the band had finally been done in for good, Tony did
really want to make a solo album, and Don Arden did persuade him that sales
would be higher if it were billed as a «Black Sabbath» release. In any case,
Black Sabbath did already go through three different incarnations, where Tony
and Geezer were the only constant links, and with the advent of Dio and Gillan
as full-time lyricists Geezer's role in the band was steadily diminishing away,
so it could be said that in 1986 Tony Iommi was
Black Sabbath, de-facto. And is Seventh
Star really so different? If
albums like Paranoid, Heaven And Hell, and Born Again are all Black Sabbath —
despite sporting such different musical ideologies — why not Seventh Star? It's a heavy metal album,
after all, little doubt about that.
A horrible one, though. Iommi's riffs, already
quite questionable for the past decade, are not getting any better, whereas the
production and commercial orientation are getting much worse. The Dio and
Gillan-era records still had some «shock value» to them: doom-laden and
snarling with Ronnie, as Mephistopheles went on the prowl, «drunk-evil» with
Ian, as Mephistopheles settled down in a pub with a black eye, whining about
how life's tough and all. These
songs, however, with a few minor exceptions, are completely user-friendly:
singalong arena-rockers and power ballads that owe as much to Journey and Bob
Seger as they do to classic Sabbath, if not more. Yes, I guess Tony wanted to
try something new for a change, but I just have to wonder how the heck a guy
whose art was formerly in such stark opposition to «user-friendliness» could
allow himself to be duped into adopting this stylistics? Not that he was the
only one, and it is also true that, with heavy metal gradually gaining
mainstream acceptance, the values were being compromised regardless of one's
intent, but still, ʽNo Stranger To Loveʼ? Gimme a break.
The other
cause for running and hiding is the backing band. The drummer, Eric Singer, was
from Lita Ford's band (later on, he would join KISS and become really famous). The bassist, Dave Spitz,
looked like a spitz, was nicknamed ʽThe Beastʼ, and went on to join
Great White. The keyboard player was Geoff Nicholls, who had originally played
on the Dio-era albums and was brought back for his ability to master the
synthesizer (so he is responsible for all the stuffy, plastic-soulful overdubs
on the record). And the singer — oh God! — was Glenn Hughes.
Now since we are on the subject, let me make
this remark: there seems to be a very important, very crucial difference
between «power metal» singers like Dio (or Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson, for
instance) and Glenn Hughes (or David Coverdale, both of which were known to
converge upon and destroy Deep Purple in the mid-1970s). From a certain point
of view, they do more or less the same things — present the closest possible
approximation to an «opera singer» in a heavy rock context; but since they are
not actually «opera singers», the
effect is corny and laughable unless they compensate by making their voice echo
the brutality of the music. Dio and Dickinson do that all right, but Glenn
Hughes just sounds like a pompous windbag, and now that the pomp is laid right
over the lifeless Eighties production, the effect is unbearable.
A few of these songs could have been okay in a
different world — ʽIn For The Killʼ, despite the unimaginative title
that Budgie had already exploited in a much better way, has a hell-raising
machine-gun hard riff; the 12-bar blues ʽHeart Like A Wheelʼ is
surprisingly effective for a band that almost never does 12-bar blues (similar
to the manneristic, over-expressive, and sometimes uunintentionally parodic
style of Gary Moore, but with Tony's dark metal preferences redeeming the
atmosphere a bit); and ʽTurn To Stoneʼ is at least fast, breaking up
the mind-numbing depression of crap metal ballads like ʽNo Stranger To
Loveʼ and the title track (oh, actually, the title track tries to be some
sort of stately mystical anthem à
la ʽKashmirʼ, but with that production and Geoff Nicholls' rather
pathetic attempt at incorporating a mid-Eastern flavor, it doesn't have much in
the way of competition).
But ultimately, there is no sense trying to
rescue and remedy any of these tracks in your imagination, unless one day
somebody actually does that in real life. So there are only two further remarks
to accompany the unfortunate thumbs down: (a) apparently, there is a 2-CD deluxe edition of this bunch of crap
(actually, the second disc is just a recording of a 1986 live show, with Ray
Gillen replacing Hughes; but still, the word «deluxe» shouldn't be caught dead
near the title of this album); (b) the oh-so-1986 video for ʽNo Stranger
To Loveʼ is notorious for featuring a slightly younger Tasha Yar from Star Trek TNG — naturally, with the
requisite big hair, so if you're a fan of Star Trek (or a fan of big hair), you
should probably check it out. Actually, they all have big hair in the video. It's a good thing Tony's was always
a bit curly by itself — he's the only guy in the band to mostly keep his own.
THE ETERNAL IDOL (1987)
1) The Shining; 2) Ancient
Warrior; 3) Hard Life To Love; 4) Glory Ride; 5) Born To Lose; 6) Nightmare; 7)
Scarlet Pimpernel; 8) Lost Forever; 9) Eternal Idol.
Goodbye Glenn Hughes, and hello good riffs —
and where have you been hiding all
this time? Hidden in an endless sea of subpar products, The Eternal Idol is that one post-Ozzy, post-Dio album which, when
placed in context, might just be the biggest surprise in Tony Iommi's entire
career. The sessions were a mess, with not one, but two bass players coming and
going (Dave Spitz recorded the original parts, quit, was replaced by Bob
Daisley, who re-recorded all the parts, then
quit); not one, but two drummers coming and going (Eric Singer recorded the
original parts, quit, was replaced by ELO's Bev Bevan, who re-recorded some of
the parts, then quit); and one
vocalist coming and another one going (Ray Gillen recorded the original parts,
quit, was replaced by Tony Martin, who re-recorded all the parts... then kinda
stuck around).
But over this mess Tony Iommi remains as the
anchor, and he seems intent on correcting the silly mistakes of Seventh Star. Gone are the crappy
sentimental power ballads, gone is the short-lived fling with «heroic romance»
filtered through power chords and synthesizers. The basic idea is to deliver an
album that would be the true successor to Heaven
And Hell — restoring some of that record's hellfire and putting real power back into Black Sabbath's
post-Ozzy brand of «power metal». Naturally, in order to have real power, what you need is reliable
powerlines — riffs that eagerly imprint themselves in your brains and trigger
fist-clenching and air guitar playing on sight. In all honesty, we had very few
of those even in the Dio era; the last time we remember Tony coming up with a
genuinely impressive collection was in 1975, with Sabotage. Well, prepare yourself for the odd wonder: The Eternal Idol is, without a single
doubt, the absolute best collection of original Iommi riffs since 1975. In
fact, might even be since 1971.
Yes, the problem is that there is little, if
anything, other than the riffs to
recommend. The production is slightly improved over Seventh Star, but most of the basic problems typical of generic
Eighties' power metal remain in place. Stiff drums, slightly synthetic guitar tones,
even more synthetic keyboards, and a bass guitar that is only there strictly
for formal purposes. On top of this, we have this new singer who seems to have
carefully studied every trick in Dio's handbook, but who is simply not a
natural like Ronnie — he knows not how to use the back of his oral cavity, only the front, and, consequently, has no
way to properly scare the shit out of the listener. At least he is not trying
to be a frickin' rock'n'roll opera star, like Hughes, so when his vocals drift
off on you in the context of a decent song, they are not an immediate turn-off.
Ah, but those riffs. If you only have patience
for one song, go along with ʽHard Life To Loveʼ, which is basically all riff — heavy, simple, threatening,
jumping at you like a hungry tiger locked in its cage, and at a respectable
tempo at that. Second champion is ʽBorn To Loseʼ, where the riff is a
bit more complex, a bit more high-pitched, maybe even a bit more poppy, but
every bit as memorable — not so much in a «threatening» way this time, but
being more of an aural tease, if you get what I mean. Give these tunes a better
singer, and they will both be better «fast power metal anthems» than ʽNeon
Knightsʼ, in a jiffy.
They don't fare too bad in the slow department,
either. ʽThe Shiningʼ, selected to open the album as well as be its
only single (didn't chart) and its only video (Gothic lighting!), meanders a
bit in the intro before a simple, brutal monster riff breaks out with all the
verve of Master Of Reality. The big
silly drums obscure it, and the production effect strips it of some of the
potential power, but this is the same
Tony Iommi that had almost made us forgot why the hell did we single him out of
the faceless crowd seventeen years back. Martin's call-to-arms ("Rise up!
To the shining!") is naïve and ineffective, but the non-vocal rumble
behind it is at least loud enough to allow you to attune your ears only to the
music — only to the riff — and that's
what makes you rise up.
Of the two «supernatural descents into the dark
and hellish», ʽNightmareʼ and the title track, it is the former that
has the better riff, well adapted to the song's title; ʽEternal Idolʼ
tries harder to be epic and religious, evoking a feel of doom that would make
it the Tony Martin era equivalent of ʽBlack Sabbathʼ itself — not
half-bad, actually, though it does lack the necessary crushing riff, and so
Martin's "sinners say your prayers tonight! your judgement day is
here!" rings a bit hollow no matter how viciously the drummer smites his
skins. Still, it's been a long time since they tried to go for this devilish
atmosphere, and it could have been much worse (and soon would be).
In conclusion, if there is one Black Sabbath simply screaming to be remade after all those
years, it is The Eternal Idol, pure
black gold at heart but marred with the predictable ravages of its time. I have
no idea whatsoever how all these riffs came about — and why this weird comeback
of Tony's chief talent only perked up for this brief moment in 1987, a year not
at all benevolent to the «comeback spirit» of old rockers. But the simple fact
remains — at least two or three songs off this album have made it to my
personal «post-Ozzy best-of B.S.» compilation, which is far more than could be
said of any of the other Martin-era
records. A flawed, but auspicious beginning, worthy of a thumbs up; too bad that the future
would turn out so treacherous.
HEADLESS CROSS (1989)
1) The Gates Of Hell /
Headless Cross; 2) Devil And Daughter; 3) When Death Calls; 4) Kill In The
Spirit World; 5) Call Of The Wild; 6) Black Moon; 7) Nightwing.
Hello Cozy Powell, goodbye good riffs. Many
fans actually view Headless Cross as
the second, and sometimes even the superior part of Tony's massive Martin-era
«comeback» — freed both from the craziness of the Gillan-led Born Again and the pop metal gloss of Seventh Star, here is this new version
of Black Sabbath doing exactly what Black Sabbath is supposed to do: writing
and performing dark, dreary, doom-laden epics about the devil, dying, killing,
going to hell, and never coming back. Tony Martin, say the fans, is the new
incarnation of Dio, and now that they have legendary Cozy Powell with them on
drums, they are ready to pummel us into the ground with Thor's hammer like
never before.
Indeed, I think I know why Headless Cross is so popular. In all of its superficial qualities,
it is the album that the more, shall
we say, «occult-oriented» fans of Sabbath had been waiting ever since Heaven And Hell. Many of these songs
were made to be sung at your local crossroads at midnight — and there is not a
single speedy headbanger here like ʽHard Life To Loveʼ. Genre-wise, Headless Cross is a mix between power
metal and doom metal, everything about it being sprawling, epic, with both
Tonys trying to be as theatrically phantasmagoric as possible. No «fun» allowed
as such: we are being deadly serious, as the first track already recalls the
legend of the Headless Cross and Satan is always
round the bend now. In fact, he's right there every time that Tony Martin sends
his pitch sky high, and that's a lot
of times.
Basically, Headless
Cross picks up right from where ʽThe Eternal Idolʼ (the song, not
the album) left off, intending to overload your senses with dark-tinged
supernatural imagery. ʽThe Gates Of Hellʼ opens like the soundtrack
to some creepy video game — synthesized moans, groans, and yawns of ghosts,
wraiths, and demons greeting you for about a minute until Cozy kicks in with
some mighty Cozy kicks, and in case you don't know it, the late Cozy Powell
didn't have a lot of swing, but he did have more bada-boom than anybody else
around. In a way, the fact that the music begins with a few bars of drums,
before the guitar comes in, is symbolic — placing the accent on «power» over
«melody» right from the start.
Actually, the title track isn't all that bad,
if you overlook the fact that they subconsciously duplicated the rhythmic
structure of ʽHeaven And Hellʼ — but at least it's got a couple of
brand new Iommi riffs, not the best, perhaps, but memorable. Martin's efforts
at getting into the character of a thunder-and-lightning heavy metal prophet of
doom are not very convincing (he's still being a second-rate Dio and there is
nothing anybody can do about it), and the main riff that drives the chorus
sounds more like AC/DC in structure and effect than Sabbath, but I guess it
might be fun to think of the song as a sort of (headless) cross between
ʽHeaven And Hellʼ and ʽHells Bellsʼ. If all the album
followed suit, it wouldn't be so tragic.
Alas, already on ʽDevil And
Daughterʼ, with flat pomp dominating the speakers and the keyboards almost
drowning out the feeble attempts at a guitar melody, Headless Cross begins its descent into total mediocrity —
melody-wise, that is, because «taste-wise», mediocre power metal can be a seriously miserable experience.
Bombastic mid-tempo or slow-tempo anthems with laughable lyrics, unmemorable
riffs, and a singer who seems to seriously believe he can spook people into
cowering and freaking out with his pathetic choruses ("WHEN DEATH
CALLS!" "IT'S THE CALL OF THE WILD!" "NIGHTWING FLIES
AGAIN!") — a complete victory of style over substance, which is certainly
not what we usually expect of Tony.
It's not that there aren't any riffs at all, but what there is gets bogged down in bad
production (Tony and Cozy are listed as co-producers) — for instance, the chorus
riff of ʽNightwingʼ could have been handled in a much more
distinctive way — and every once in a while, there does come along a song like
ʽCall Of The Wildʼ where most of the melody is reduced to just yer
basic power chords, while the chorus is dominated by Geoff Nicholls' keyboards.
The melody of ʽKill In The Spirit Worldʼ could be written by just
about any pop metal band at the time
— or, even worse, fit like a glove on something like Yes' Big Generator. ʽBlack Moonʼ, for a change, begins with a
great Iommi tone, fat and grumbly, the way we like it, but a few seconds into
the song it is already obvious that we will have to do with a generic heavy
blues-rocker, nailed to the ground with Cozy's bada-boom patterns. Queen's
Brian May makes a guest appearance on ʽWhen Death Callsʼ, but this
only counts as a bit of useless trivia — not even Frank Zappa could have saved
the song from soaking in its own pathos.
Recapitulating: take Heaven And Hell, add late Eighties glossy, bombastic production,
replace Dio's «roar» with Martin's «whine», throw in lots of cheesy keyboards,
dumb down the riffs, and what you get is Headless
Cross, an album doomed by way too much doom. You'd never think that a time
would come when somebody'd pray for Tony Iommi to start boogieing, but maybe a
bit of boogie could save this record — it is exactly this «ultra-serious» tone
adopted by everyone involved that makes it so disastrous. Thumbs down.
TYR (1990)
1) Anno Mundi; 2) The Law
Maker; 3) Jerusalem; 4) The Sabbath Stones; 5) The Battle Of Tyr; 6) Feels Good
To Me; 7) Heaven In Black.
According to Iommi, the 1989-1990 period of the
band was heavily influenced by Tony Martin in the following way: (a) for his
first batch of lyrics, he thought that Black Sabbath was all about the Devil and
stuff, so he accordingly colored the lyrics and atmosphere of Headless Cross; (b) for his second
batch of lyrics, they told him he was wrong about the first one, so he thought
that Black Sabbath was all about the Vikings and stuff. So, accordingly, he colored
the lyrics and atmosphere of Tyr.
Or, actually, TZR, because if you
read the runes of the title properly, that is what you are going to get, so I
assume this is just an abbreviation for Totally
Zany Record.
Curiously, Tyr
came out in the same year as (a little later than) Bathory's Hammerheart, often called, if not the
first, then at least the «quintessential» «Viking metal» album — which, I
guess, justifies a comparison between the two, and listening to them
back-to-back will clearly show which of the two bands had a clue about how to best combine metallic riffage and
production with Scandinavian flavor, and which one had no clues whatsoever. In
fact, I couldn't even blame Tony too hard. Here he was, just trying to rig up
some new ideas for the next album, and there is this guy bringing him stuff on
Valhalla and Odin and all that Wagnerian «paganism vs. Christianity» baggage.
A simple, hard-working guy from Birmingham could go crazy, you know.
No wonder that Tyr rarely, if ever, comes alive or makes «emotional sense».
Pompous, portentous, and overblown, it wastes Iommi's talents completely, its
main heroes, as before, being Tony Martin and Cozy Powell, and its motto being
«more power! more power!». Iommi's riffs aren't that bad (when you fish them out, leave them out to dry, and then
do the calculations, Tyr might even
come out as an improvement over Headless
Cross), but they are indecisive, and most of the time, buried deeply under
everything else — drums, keyboards, front vocals, back vocals.
There are three types of songs here. First, so
as not to bore the listener completely, there are a couple fast rockers for a
change (ʽThe Law Makerʼ, ʽHeaven In Blackʼ), which have
nothing to do with Viking metal but are reminiscent of vintage Iron Maiden — except
that Iommi has no qualifications to duplicate the skills of Maiden's guitar
duo, and Martin, as I already said, is no Bruce Dickinson when it comes to
adding snarl to operatic flavor. Even so, these are probably the best of the
bunch, if only because it's fun to hear Cozy Powell trying to drive his drumset
into the ground at twice or thrice his usual speed.
Second, there are «stately», slowly proceeding,
ceremonial chants, sometimes with a ʽKashmirʼ-type flavor —
ʽAnno Mundiʼ and ʽJerusalemʼ. These require spiritual
submission from the listener, but there is just no way I could respond to
Martin's ecstatic "can you see me? are you near me? can you hear me crying
out for life?" with a proper "I see thee, I am near thee, I hear
thee", because in reality I can only hear him crying out for a living. All
of this is stiff, clichéd, and, when you get to the bottom of it, very
repetitive and musically simplistic. Where classic Iron Maiden would have a
multi-part, compositionally challenging epic, this variant of Sabbath just
proceeds along Iommi's usual lines (riff, chorus, riff, chorus), sometimes
dropping in a predictable «soft» acoustic section. Boring.
Third, the «epics» themselves (ʽThe
Sabbath Stonesʼ, ʽThe Battle Of Tyrʼ), running longer than
everything else, and aspiring to higher status, are impossibly boring. ʽThe Sabbath Stonesʼ is their
equivalent of ʽEternal Idolʼ and ʽHeadless Crossʼ, a slab
of spooky mysticism that will spook no one, and for most of the duration of
ʽBattleʼ, you will actually be waiting for some sort of a battle to
begin, only to ask, at the end, «oh, so that was the battle? I thought it was only the village idiot running
through the streets, shouting ʽValhalla! Valhalla!ʼ until somebody
finally puts him out of his misery». To add insult to injury, they throw in a
power ballad, Seventh Star-style —
ʽFeels Good To Meʼ, which Iommi himself later apologized a little
about, saying that they were in need of a hit single. Guess how hard that one hit.
All in all, TZR is a bona fide candidate for «worst album ever to be associated
with the name of Black Sabbath», closely approaching Seventh Star in that respect. No respectful fan of Odin's court
will want to fall for this tripe — last I heard, the Valkyries were on the line
and reported that they never ride out
for anyone who tries to make his connection through Tony Martin, who can't even
spell three runes right before embarrassing himself. Thumbs down.
DEHUMANIZER (1992)
1) Computer God; 2) After All
(The Dead); 3) T.V. Crimes; 4) Letter From Earth; 5) Master Of Insanity; 6)
Time Machine; 7) Sins Of The Father; 8) Too Late; 9) I; 10) Buried Alive.
As the Nineties kicked in and heavy metal had
pretty much exhausted its basic list of subgenres, Tony Iommi completely ceased
to care about any sort of «strategy» for Black Sabbath. Having begun the decade
with Tony Martin still at the wheel, the band went through a second Dio phase,
a second Martin phase, and a second (third?) Ozzy phase in less than ten years
(and I am not even mentioning their brief live stint with Judas Priest's Rob
Halford at the mike) — clearly indicating that Iommi did not give much of a
damn, and was simply happy to jam along with whoever and whatever came along.
Not that there's any use to complain, when the
result is as good as Dehumanizer,
unquestionably the best Sabbath album in at least ten years. The return of Dio
and drummer Vinny Appice was encouraging, but even more encouraging was the
return of Geezer — and with the Heaven
And Hell lineup back in place, they could finally let go of Geoff Nicholls
and his incessantly and increasingly annoying keyboard presence. And get down
to some mean, lean, serious business.
Dehumanizer may not have the best riffs in the history of
Iommi/Dio collaborations (alas, Tony's skills were so heavily damaged during
the sessions for Headless Cross that
repercussions would follow for ever after), but it has some of the best
atmospherics. Instead of dungeons, dragons, cabbages, and kings, the album goes
for a full-throttle «apocalyptic» mode — humanity doomed and destroyed by
technology, media manipulation, and the seven deadly sins in general, that sort
of thing, vividly illustrated by the front sleeve's imaginative reinvention of
the trials of Luke Skywalker (I guess). This direction was certainly not new to
Sabbath (they'd worked that way since the earliest Ozzy days), but this is the
first time they really tried to go for a strictly conceptual approach with Dio
at the helm, and the results are... satisfactory.
Well-produced, well-arranged, full to the brim
of traditionally heavy Tony riffage and with Dio, as usual, in top vocal form, Dehumanizer just couldn't possibly
fail. It could have been a masterpiece, had Tony been struck by inspirational
lightning — instead, it sounds seriously «crafted», and it seems obvious that
Tony spent a lot of time working out the details for those riffs, which is a
better option than on Headless Cross,
but still, a little bit of extra guitar genius couldn't hurt any of these
songs, which have to rely upon Dio's vocal hooks instead.
Picking out individual high- or lowlights would
be a waste of time: most of the numbers follow the same formula, except for the
occasional speed rocker offering a welcome change of tempo (ʽT.V.
Crimesʼ, grittier and snappier than ʽNeon Knightsʼ, but not
necessarily more memorable), and the occasional unintentional drift into
psychedelia (ʽSins Of The Fatherʼ opens with a lighter guitar tone
and echoey vocals as if it were a bona fide cosmic rock jingle from 1967 — soon
enough, Tony understands that they started off from the wrong foot and corrects
the mode back to «metal», but the hilariousness cannot be erased).
More typically, this is just medium-quality
Sabbath, but in a very, very angry mood, with Ronnie and Tony competing in who
can get a «nastier» tone from his respective instrument, and this is the only
thing on the album to warrant a little fascination. You just gotta love the
cello-like instrumental beginning of ʽAfter All (The Dead)ʼ and how
it then spills over into Ronnie's "what do you say to the dead?..", slowly
and venomously roared away in his finest killer-zombie tone. Maybe Ronnie's
finest moment on the record comes with ʽIʼ, a song riding on double
irony (the lyrics seem to ridicule extreme egotism, but then you remember just
how much of an extreme egotist the late great Ronnie actually was, and it all
shines in a different light) rather than on any particular interesting riff.
But then again, maybe not — I am not seriously going to try and break that
promise not to mention any highlights, as even as the record is.
Funny enough, the closest album to Dehumanizer in spirit that I could
think of off the top of my head would probably be Alice Cooper's Brutal Planet — also heavy, also
doom-laden, also about the fall of humanity and personal degradation, so that
you could see this as some sort of dress rehearsal for the Coop's (much
poppier) descent into doom metal territory. However, Dehumanizer takes a much more serious tone (Black Sabbath could
sometimes use irony, but very rarely pure humor or satire), and probably
overestimates its own ambitions. In retrospect, it is difficult even to regard
it as a «comeback», though technically, it most certainly was one. Still, it is
impossible to disregard the vibe — and after Headless Cross and TZR, Dehumanizer sounds more like Revitalizer, if you ask me. The very
possibility of blasting ʽT.V. Crimesʼ at full volume from your
windows and terrorizing the neighbors alone should give ample grounds for a thumbs up.
And you may laugh all the way to the bank at the clichéd anti-technological
lyrics of ʽComputer Godʼ (writing about digital dreams and virtual
reality takes a heavier toll on Ronnie's brain cells than writing about witches
and demons), but hey, twenty years on down the road, they have only become more
relevant, and personally, I love even the abstract idea of Ronnie the
Witch-Hunter lending his talents to a song about the evil powers of computers.
Whatever you might think of the album, it does
have plenty of intrigue — and the last time we saw Black Sabbath mix with
intrigue, I think, had to do with Ian Gillan and the absence of tequila.
CROSS PURPOSES (1994)
1) I Witness; 2) Cross Of Thorns;
3) Psychophobia; 4) Virtual Death; 5) Immaculate Deception; 6) Dying For Love;
7) Back To Eden; 8) The Hand That Rocks The Cradle; 9) Cardinal Sin; 10) Evil
Eye.
Well, at least it's an improvement over TZR. As Dio and Appice left once again
to pursue their own destinies and Tony Martin with Geoff Nicholls are brought
back to the family, you'd think the band would automatically sink back to the
level of 1989-90. Fortunately, the experience of Dehumanizer was still fresh in the band's mind, and, very importantly,
they still had Geezer with them — as long as at least half of the original
line-up is in place, the Sabbath spirit is still there somewhere, and it takes
more than a second-rate vocalist and a generic keyboard sound to suffocate
that spirit.
Perhaps some of the songs might have been
leftovers from the Dehumanizer
sessions, or, at the very least, Iommi just happened to like that doom-growl
and tried to provide Martin with more of the same. In any case, there are some
decent riffs here — ʽImmaculate Deceptionʼ, ʽPsychophobiaʼ,
ʽBack To Edenʼ and, most importantly, the downtuned album closer
ʽEvil Eyeʼ are all quite on the level of the 1992 album. Again, the
riffs usually sound like inferior variations on early classics, and each of
these songs has a bunch of better prototypes (ʽEvil Eyeʼ, I think, is
a subconscious attempt to echo ʽSabbath Bloody Sabbathʼ), but they are competently composed riff-rockers
with their own melodies — and thank you very much, Mr. Iommi, for letting Mr.
Butler step in with that little bass interlude in the middle of ʽEvil
Eyeʼ, just to remind us one more time of how it used to be in the good old
days.
Even better than ʽEvil Eyeʼ is the
opening tune: ʽI Witnessʼ is not simply fast, it is riffaliciously
fast, and I can only imagine how much better it may have sounded with Dio still
at the wheel, adding deep growl to where Martin can only offer shallow, shrill
screaming. Special mention must be made of drummer Bobby Rondinelli, who,
coincidentally, was also originally from Rainbow, but whose lighter, less
mastodontic style of drumming actually suits Sabbath better than Cozy Powell's
thud (remember that Sabbath never thrived on really heavy drumming — Bill
Ward's parts always relied on expressiveness rather than brute force).
Alas, about half of the album still consists of
boring atmospheric mysticism à la
Headless Cross: in fact, usage of
the word "cross" for these guys should probably be banned forever,
because ʽCross Of Thornsʼ is one of the album's worst tracks, only
surpassed in that category by the sentimental ballad ʽDying For Loveʼ
(you wish), and the next in an endless series of ʽKashmirʼ /
ʽStargazerʼ tributes called ʽCardinal Sinʼ. And I still
remain undecided on the album's oddest track: ʽVirtual Deathʼ shows
that somebody in the Sabbath camp was clearly keeping an eye open on the latest
developments in the grunge camp — with its sludgy tempo, hyper-distorted guitars,
and hushed multi-tracked vocals, it sounds as if it belonged on an Alice In
Chains album rather than an Iommi-led one. Probably a bad Alice In Chains album, though, like one of those post-Staley
reunion crapfests. Curious curiosity, but neither Iommi's riff nor Martin's
vocals are able to convey a genuine impression of «virtual death» for the
protagonist.
I seem to remember that Geezer was particularly
unhappy with the final results, and quit the band once again right after the
ensuing tour freed him of any further obligations. The disillusionment is easy
to understand, but secretly I think that he just did not get along well with
the lead singer. Indeed, time has changed little about Tony Martin, whose style
is still lacking any sort of interesting personality — he tries, he really
does, but he is simply unable to come up with a special angle at which to
deliver these lyrics. Remember, some
of the songs here have real potential, they just had to be served under a
different sauce (I would certainly pay something
to see Dio try out ʽEvil Eyeʼ and ʽI Witnessʼ). If you are
a major sucker for Iommi riffs, Cross Purposes will make the grade — if
you only want A+ quality riffs, though, or if you think that Sabbath should
never be reduced to just the riffs, stay away. You've been warned by Geezer.
CROSS PURPOSES LIVE (1995)
1) Time Machine; 2) Children
Of The Grave; 3) I Witness; 4) Into The Void; 5) Black Sabbath; 6) Neon
Knights; 7) Psychophobia; 8) The Wizard; 9) Cross Of Thorns; 10) Heaven In
Black; 11) Symptom Of The Universe; 12) Headless Cross; 13) Paranoid; 14) Iron
Man; 15) Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.
A live album of a 25-year old Black Sabbath
with Tony Martin as lead vocalist was exactly
what was needed in 1995 to restore the band's reputation, I guess. At least Live Evil (a) had the novelty of being
the first officially sanctioned B.S. live record, (b) had Dio on it, adapting
the old Ozzy classics to his own style, (c) coincided with a creative revival
for the band, whether the fans were willing to admit it or not. Cross Purposes Live has none of these
advantages — in fact, it doesn't even have its own frickin' title (although
that was probably due to the fact that the concert was first and foremost
released as a video, with the audio CD as a bonus accompaniment).
Still, as long as Black Sabbath consists of
Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and whoever else, no live Sabbath album can be a
completely worthless proposition — if there ever was a night in history when
Tony played real bad, or the setlist was completely dominated by subpar
material, I'd actually be interested in hearing how that may have sounded. If
Martin's voice does not piss you off immediately, there is no reason why Cross Purposes Live should be written
off. Because of the setlist? Well, as you can see, more than half of the songs
are impeccable classics — and there is even one pleasant surprise, as the band
resurrects ʽThe Wizardʼ, a song not performed at all since their
first gigs in 1970, unjustly forgotten just because it wasn't a radio hit. And
out of the Martin-era material, only ʽCross Of Thornsʼ is a suckjob,
and should have been tossed out in favor of ʽEvil Eyeʼ or, at least,
ʽVirtual Deathʼ, if we want to be funny.
Martin's live personality is not seriously
different from his posturing in the studio, and not a lot of stage banter made
it onto the audio disc, anyway. Of course, hearing him howl on the Ozzy numbers
is a weird thing — rather than Ozzy's amusingly stoned intonations, and rather
than Dio's entertaining «corn-de-luxe» roar-from-Hell, what you get is a guy
who seems to be trying to imbue «sincerity» and «genuine passion» into these
phantasmagoric, anti-reality soundscapes. Who really wants to hear a ʽChildren Of The Graveʼ or a
ʽSymptom Of The Universeʼ that demand to be taken sternly-seriously,
let alone a ʽBlack Sabbathʼ? The poor guy is stuck in the middle
between the excessive extremes of Ozzy and Dio, and with Sabbath, there is no
middle ground by definition. Then again, the man is just doing his job the best
he can — I hope very much that nobody cheated him out of any money on that or
any other tours.
Trivia-wise, ʽTime Machineʼ begins
with a few brief samples of classic Iommi riffs (as in, "let us illustrate
this title for those who think it needs illustrating!"); ʽBlack
Sabbathʼ, as usual, has a brief «medieval» introduction;
ʽParanoidʼ is preceded by one minute of Iommi playing around with the
evil wah-wah effect; and ʽIron Manʼ is inexplicably cut down to three
minutes (perhaps due to CD length limitations). Oh, and ʽHeadless
Crossʼ sounds much better live, free from the clutches of the hideous 1989
production values. And that's about it, folks.
FORBIDDEN (1995)
1) The Illusion Of Power; 2)
Get A Grip; 3) Can't Get Enough; 4) Shaking Off The Chains; 5) I Won't Cry For
You; 6) Guilty As Hell; 7) Sick And Tired; 8) Rusty Angels; 9) Forbidden; 10)
Kiss Of Death.
On their sixty-sixth studio album, Black
Sabbath go for the gusto — they pay a humble tribute to their degenerate
friends in Aerosmith (ʽGet A Gripʼ), nostalgize for the old innocent
days of Bad Company (ʽCan't Get Enoughʼ), tip their hat to bluesman
Johnny Winter (ʽSick And Tiredʼ), and slyly reference old film noir classics
(ʽKiss Of Deathʼ). Or else they just run out of ideas for new song
titles, you choose which idea you like best.
Forbidden is often extolled by fans and anti-fans alike
as one of the absolute worst, if not the
absolute worst, record to have the misfortune of being associated with the name
of Black Sabbath. Honestly, I do not see what makes it so much worse than Seventh Star or TZR or even Headless Cross
— they all consist of the same uninspired, by-the-book musical sludge. The only
extra flaw on Forbidden is the
horrendous desecration of the Sabbath temple by allowing a goddamn rapper inside: the first track,
ʽIllusion Of Powerʼ, features a spoken-word contribution from Ice-T,
and even if it is very brief and he doesn't even «rap» as much as he just
blurts out the words, that was quite enough to do the damage.
That this was a stupid idea from the outset is
pretty obvious — some classic metal bands make a point out of meshing with
hip-hop (Anthrax, for instance), but the Sabbath spirit and the hip-hop spirit
can only annihilate each other, and it shows a remarkable lack of insight that
they still went on with the idea. Any Ice-T fans out there who made their
acquaintance with Sabbath through Forbidden?
I hope to God there were none.
But apart from that one bit of silly
pseudo-publicity, the rest of these songs are not «offensive», they are just
boring. A (mercifully) short, unassuming, unnecessary record, for some reason
produced by Ernie C, lead guitarist of Body Count (I think it was he who got
them Ice-T, since they went to high school together), and seemingly trying to
put on a «commercial» face once again, a decade after Seventh Star had showed how awful it could be if Tony Iommi
switched over to harmless pop metal. So there's rotten power balladry (ʽI
Won't Cry For Youʼ — who really
cares if Tony Martin cries or does not cry for anybody?), stale blues-rock that
rehashes old ideas in new sterile incarnations (the «heavy» parts of
ʽCan't Get Enoughʼ sound like the heavy parts of
ʽMegalomaniaʼ with all the excitement sucked out of the riff), and
colorless pop metal that tries to deliver a message but forgets to add
atmosphere (title track).
How, within less than a year, the band went
from an album that at least faintly glimmered with a sense of (cross) purpose,
to this batch of songs that try to growl but show no healthy teeth whatsoever,
is not exactly clear. We can blame Cozy Powell, whose presence had always ended
up a bane for the band and who is back in the saddle here; or Neil Murray,
whose return in Geezer's stead is equally deplorable; or the producers; or the
rapper; or Tony Martin's ridiculous oversinging on the pop choruses. But
ultimately, the blame probably rests on Iommi for allowing this underwritten,
overproduced piece of metal junk to go public — a decision which, according to
his own admission, he'd since come to regret.
Thumbs down with a
vengeance and all, yet at least one good thing came out of it: this was the
last ever product to bear the name of
«Black Sabbath» that did not relate to the original
Black Sabbath. With Forbidden, The
Great Tony Martin And Cozy Powell Experiment finally came to a close. These
days, Tony Martin is said to occasionally front his own band called — guess
what? — right, Headless Cross; and I can only imagine what sort of stuff they
play before fans who are generous enough to give them money — yet, all the
same, good luck to them in whatever it is they do, even if it means replicating
Ice-T's parts on stage. Apparently, Iommi booted Martin out rather unceremoniously
(just hung up and never called him back or something), and Martin said that
he'd never go back to Sabbath after being humiliated not once, but twice.
Formally, that was very bad behaviour
on Iommi's part, and I hope he blames himself for that — but thank God, we
never got to see the proper follow-up to Forbidden.
REUNION (1998)
1) War Pigs; 2) Behind The
Wall Of Sleep; 3) N.I.B.; 4) Fairies Wear Boots; 5) Electric Funeral; 6) Sweet
Leaf; 7) Spiral Architect; 8) Into The Void; 9) Snowblind; 10) Sabbath Bloody
Sabbath; 11) Orchid / Lord Of This World; 12) Dirty Women; 13) Black Sabbath;
14) Iron Man; 15) Children Of The Grave; 16) Paranoid; 17) Psycho Man; 18)
Selling My Soul.
It is amusing that the first ever officially
sanctioned, contemporary live release from one of the world's greatest rock
line-ups should have taken place thirty years past the formation of that
line-up — and twenty years past the last time it stuck together (not counting
brief hazy quirks like the Live Aid appearance). But it is even more amusing,
actually, that this reunion show, recorded December 4-5, 1997, in the band's
home city of Birmingham (as if we needed even more nostalgia!), is every bit as good as any good show played in
Sabbath history, young or old.
With Forbidden
marking a particularly low point in Iommi's, and Black Sabbath's, biography, it
may well have been inevitable that they made a conscious try to break away from
endless embarrassments and mediocrities and take a single big leap back into
the stratosphere. How they all patched up their differences and got back on
track once again is a long (but not particularly unique or fascinating) story,
so we will skip it and turn right to this Birmingham gig. Is it any good?
Should anybody besides hardcore Sab fans give a damn?
Well, first of all, everybody's in fine form.
Everybody put on a bit of weight, figuratively or literally speaking, over the
years, meaning that Bill Ward has lost a bit of the old-school maniacality
(this is immediately obvious on his heavier, but less fussy fills on ʽWar
Pigsʼ), but apart from that, Tony is always rock-hard reliable, and the
biggest surprise, of course, is Ozzy, who returns to the stage with his former
friends like the past twenty years had never happened — getting into the spirit
of the songs (many of which he hadn't sung live since the split, although some
of the Sabbath classics did, of course, stay in his repertoire) and even
consistently managing to stay in tune, health factors notwithstanding.
Second, the setlist alone is like a virtual
greatest hits compilation — for obvious reasons, the entire post-1978 (in fact,
the entire post-1976) Sabbath catalog is happily ignored, and we get to remind
ourselves why this band actually mattered in the first place. I do have my complaints,
since they mostly do the big hits, without any big surprises, and also since
one of their best albums, Sabotage,
is completely ignored (not even a ʽSymptom Of The Universeʼ!); at the
very least, they could have dumped ʽDirty Womenʼ, one of the least
satisfying pieces on Technical Ecstasy,
and replaced it with something more challenging and less predictable. But then
again, what are you going to perform
for your fans after a 20-year break, if not the frickin' hits?
Third, the final decision probably depends on
what you think of Ozzy as a showman. If the endless (and, ultimately, quite
gratuitous) assaults on the F-word, the incessant toying with the audience
("let me see your fucking hands!" — Ozzy, why don't you just put on
your glasses?), the strange manner of patronizing ("louder! louder! I
can't fucking hear you! LOUDER!... [pause] ... here's a song called ʽInto
The Voidʼ" — so if they all shut up out of principle, does that mean
you wouldn't be playing that song?),
and the numerous, but not totally overwhelming ad-libs on the songs are up your
alley, the album is a must-have, because the man is clearly having fun rather than faking it. If you
consider this irresponsibly clownish behaviour, going against the darkly insane
spirit of the tunes, then each and every song will host at least one, and often
more, cringeworthy moments for you. On the other hand, it might be worth
hearing just for the price of that bit of croaky laughter on ʽBlack
Sabbathʼ — "Satan's standing there, he's smiling..." — so 100%
Ozzy, could anybody else have produced a demented laugh of that kind?
Concerning the differences between these live
versions and originals, only one curious thing caught my attention: the
disappearance of Ozzy's sung part during the «brutal» mid-section of
ʽSabbath Bloody Sabbathʼ, the one where Tony comes up with one more
of his Godzilla-powered riffs. Possibly the original part was too high-pitched
for him to recreate it twenty-five years later, but then again, he did downtune
the melodies in quite a few other spots, so it is strange — and then,
apparently, they just dropped the song from their later reunion shows
altogether. One of those little reminders that time does go by, no matter how much you want it to stop.
As a small compensation for the album's
inevitable age-related flaws, though, the reunited band offers a bonus — two
new songs, sort of a water-test to see if the old Sab chemistry is still in
place when it comes to creating, not
just re-creating. On ʽPsycho
Manʼ, they seem to be trying a little too
hard: yes, we know this is a band singing dark songs on creepy subjects, but
should their first song after such a long interruption really be a straightforward portrait of a homicidal maniac?
Regardless, it follows the classic Sabbath recipé very loyally, with an
expected key/tempo change in the middle and then yet another again in the end —
I just wish Tony had come up with a better set of riffs. ʽSelling My
Soulʼ is more effective, since it is another one of those «autobiographical»
Ozzy songs — as long as the man is still crazy after all these years, you can
never get tired of sentimental depictions of his craziness, so this time, the
lack of a great riff is forgivable. If these tunes fail to come close to the
greatness of yore, they at least show that, with Ozzy and Geezer back in the
team, the Sabs can fare much better than they did in the Martin years.
With Past
Lives now easily available on the market, Reunion has automatically ceased to be the
«if-you-only-buy-one-Sabbath-live-record-buy-this-one» choice for fans,
especially because Sabbath have always been a fairly conservative band, and Reunion is a particularly conservative
live album, specially designed to re-establish the band «as it was». Still,
with all these great songs performed with such faith in their greatness, how
could this be anything but a thumbs up? Or just buy it in recognition of the
human being's inalienable right to say "fuck" at awesomely
ever-increasing rates, long predating the golden days of HBO.
13 (2013)
1) End Of The Beginning; 2)
God Is Dead?; 3) Loner; 4) Zeitgeist; 5) Age Of Reason; 6) Live Forever; 7)
Damaged Soul; 8) Dear Father; 9*) Naivete In Black; 10*) Methademic; 11*) Peace
Of Mind; 12*) Pariah.
I really don't
want to get mad about this album. It is nothing but admirable, how, after all
the incessant talks and all the innumerable get-togethers, and with Tony's
cancer, and with Ozzy's, well, ozzmosis,
they still managed to get together one more time, after more than a decade of
beating around the bush, and come up with enough songs to fill up an LP and
still have some to spare as bonus tracks for special editions. So they lost
Bill Ward at the last moment over some financial disagreements, replacing him
with session man Brad Wilk, which technically makes the experience incomplete,
but still, three out of the original four ain't that bad.
I also admire the decision to make a thoroughly
«nostalgic» album. Had they decided that it was time they «caught on»,
borrowing from nu-metal, rap-metal, Babymetal, or any of the latest trends in
heavy music, the results would probably have been catastrophic. As it is, their
decision was simple. Nothing whatsoever in heavy music beats the quality of
early classic Black Sabbath — so let's just cut the crap and make another early
classic Black Sabbath album, as if it were 1970 all over again. In fact, on a
hilarious note, the last track of the LP, ʽDear Fatherʼ, ends with
the rain and thunder sounds of ʽBlack Sabbathʼ (the song) — which
could be interpreted as if 13 were
supposed to be the prequel to Black Sabbath! It ain't 1970, it's
really 1969.
I also admire Ozzy, to an extent. Never mind
how the man let himself become a silly symbol, first of the crazy
sensationalist excesses of the «rock and roll lifestyle», then of the crass
exploitative machinery of rock journalism and MTV gluttony. In the end, he used
them as much as they used him — and
retained his integrity along with his madness. It is him, not Tony or Geezer, that comes out as the true hero of 13, singing about individual and
collective crises of the 21st century not as the protagonist of The Osbournes, but as somebody who is
even more haunted by his demons these days than at the start of his career.
Maybe he isn't, but he truly sounds like he is, and deep down inside, I do believe that he really is. In any
case, if there is one wisp, one tiny strand of mystery in any cell of 13, it is to be sought in Ozzy's
performance. When he asks, "is God alive or is God dead?", you have
to know it really matters to the guy.
All of this makes up for enough admiration not
to condemn the record, and to safely recommend it to veteran fans of the band.
Problems should start, though, if you are a youngster who'd only vaguely heard
of Black Sabbath and are merely wishing to check the record out because, well,
it's fresh and everything. Trying to
recapture the old vibe is fine for all if we remember and cherish the old vibe
— but should 13 happen to be
anybody's introduction to Black
Sabbath, this would be a major mistake with consequences that would be very
hard to clean up. Likewise, if you are expecting an album of the same quality as the «first six», don't.
You probably aren't, but you might still subconsciously hope for a miracle.
Kill off your subconscious.
Miracles do not happen, and Tony «the human
riff» Iommi is not going to grow himself
an extra brain component just because he is suddenly working with his old pals
again. Every single melody on this album sounds like a variation on something
from his past — an inferior variation — with the exception of cases where the
melody sounds like a variation on somebody else's past (for instance, the riff
to ʽLonerʼ is closely reminiscent of the stage riff that Pete
Townshend would frequently employ circa 1970-72 in the «jam section» of
ʽMy Generationʼ). Producer Rick Rubin has unjustly borne the grunt of
most of the reviewers' complaints for participating in the «loudness wars» and
overcompressing the sound on the record, but it is not the production that is
the music's worst enemy here — it is the lack of interesting ideas.
One doesn't need to go any further than the
opening DOOM-laden chords of ʽEnd Of The Beginningʼ — a brief
perusal of memory cells reveals that this is a simplified re-run of the
introductory riff from ʽYou Won't Change Meʼ, furthermore played in
alternating loud and quiet fashions so as to revive the «feel» of ʽBlack
Sabbathʼ. The tradition is loyally obeyed, but the excitement, as you can
understand, is minimal. As you go from there, into the different sections of
the same song as well as subsequent ones, direct predecessors become a little
harder to find, but the feeling rests the same: it's as if Tony is drawing upon
his own past for inspiration, and that is the primary difference — when he was
coming up with the riffs of ʽIron Manʼ or ʽInto The Voidʼ
or ʽSymptom Of The Universeʼ, he wasn't browsing for ideas in the
«Tony Iommi Handbook of Great Riffs». But now he is — and from that point of
view, is no better or no worse than any mildly talented teenager who «hates the
crappy music of today» and wants to «write swell
music just like those cool guys in Black Sabbath did thirty years ago».
Again, I do not discard, in theory, the
possibility that shifting a few old chords around might have resulted in impressive combinations, easily visualized
as more metal Godzillas or giant snakes or Satan coming 'round the bend. But in
practice, they do not. The spiralling grumble of ʽLive Foreverʼ might
possibly come close, but I may simply be enticed by its fast tempo and steady
beat rather than real musical essence. At the end of the day, not a single riff
from this record has managed to take root in my head, not even after three or
four listens — and this is a record that is all
about riffs, from start to finish. Where is the goddamn magic? "Is this
the end of the beginning — or the beginning of the end?"
The vocal melodies are, in fact, more memorable than the riffs — so damn
ironic, considering how in the past Ozzy would simply sing the riff, to save
himself the extra trouble. As I already mentioned, his performance on ʽGod
Is Dead?ʼ is outstanding, as he totally gets into the spirit of the
"if there is no God, everything is permitted?" Dostoyevsky vibe.
ʽZeitgeistʼ, a moody acoustic ballad that is an oh-so-blatant attempt
at re-summoning the vibe of ʽPlanet Caravanʼ (right down to Tony
playing a similarly stylized jazz guitar solo), has Ozzy getting into a Major
Tom-type character, ruminating about the fate of humanity from above, beyond,
and without any other representatives of said race — and enjoying every moment
of it. And there is something disarmingly simple, but convincing about his
"don't wanna live forever, but I don't wanna die" that makes me
suspect his old friend Geezer, this time around, was writing his lyrics specifically for Ozzy, or maybe even
specifically about Ozzy.
This, and nothing else, is 13's saving grace: where Tony is trying to recapture his youth, and
largely failing, Geezer as lyricist and Ozzy as singer are trying to come to
terms with their old age, and largely succeeding. In fact, as simple and
un-enigmatic as these lyrics are, I'd say they contain some of the finest
verbal imagery Geezer had ever come up with — and they're all about death,
death, death. "I don't mind dying, cause I'm already dead". Hey, it's
Ozzy singing that, you can believe him
all right. Could you believe Taylor Swift?
It's been a fascinating experience, really,
listening to 13 — not because I
enjoyed any of the songs but just because it opens up so many questions,
Sabbath-related and general musical type alike. As in, why are some riffs
better than others? When is a riff «impressive» and when is it «boring»? Is
«running out of ideas» an inevitable outcome, or may there be exceptions? How
come we may be intrigued and fascinated by certain singers who barely know how
to sing, yet remain untouched by certain «professionals»? At what point does a
laughable, clichéd piece of lyrical content become hard-hitting? What
are the flaws and benefits of aging when it comes to creating art? Why are
these songs so goddamn long, and why don't I really see that as a major problem of the album? Why is it that I am asking
all these questions here, is it that,
at such a terminal stage in their career, Black Sabbath have finally managed to
«get to me» with their middle school level philosophy of life, death, and
everything in between? And — of course — is God really dead?..
I cannot give the album a thumbs up, of course
— my fascination with Ozzy's behavior on it is not strong enough to redeem the
toothless music — but I am pretty sure that, years from now, 13 will
be regarded as a fairly adequate musical testament from the original band
(provided they do not record anything else, which is not highly likely), if one
limits oneself to viewing it as a musical testament, emphasis on the T, and accepts that it really only works
as a structural element — the completion of the circle, with fairly little
independent value. Then again, I suppose the circle had to be completed, didn't it? And in any case, it is at least a
bit more cohesive and sensible than Never
Say Die! — speaking of which, it might be cooler, and truer, if they
decided to name it Just Say Die, Already
instead of 13 — what sort of title
is that? This isn't even the
thirteenth BS album with Ozzy, they just waited until 2013 to release it. Feels
like cheating.
ADDENDA:
PAST LIVES (1970-1975; 2002)
CD I: 1) Tomorrow's Dream; 2)
Sweet Leaf; 3) Killing Yourself To Live; 4) Cornucopia; 5) Snowblind; 6)
Children Of The Grave; 7) War Pigs; 8) Wicked World; 9) Paranoid;
CD II: 1) Hand Of Doom; 2)
Hole In The Sky; 3) Symptom Of The Universe; 4) Megalomania; 5) Iron Man; 6)
Black Sabbath; 7) N.I.B.; 8) Behind The Wall Of Sleep; 9) Fairies Wear Boots.
Unlike its closest compadres in the early days
of heavy metal, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, Black Sabbath were never a
«great» live band — they pretty much gave it their all in the studio, where
they sounded every bit as heavy, raw, and «Satanic» as they could sound on
stage, and even more so (for instance, that genuinely mind-melting guitar tone
that Iommi had himself for Master Of
Reality was never properly recreated live). They were also limited by their
skills: Ozzy's vocal flexibility, unlike Plant's or Gillan's, was mainly
restricted to ad-libbing stuff like "come on you fuckin' fuckers, I wanna
see that fucking roof come fuckin' down!", and Tony's «iron fingers»,
while empowering him in his regular Sabbath schtick, prevented him from fully
exploring the capacities of his guitar.
Nevertheless, it goes without saying that such
a legendary band has to have a proper
live document to its name — and up until the 21st century, the only such
document to capture Black Sabbath in their alleged prime was Live At Last, a record released without
the band's consent in 1980. They'd recorded the tapes themselves during several
UK shows in March 1973, but eventually left them lying around, unhappy with
the results; its eventual release was really more like an act of revenge on the
part of their former manager, Patrick Meehan. Sound quality was bad, the
performances were no great shakes as such, and everybody was unhappy except for
the buying public, who still managed to send it up the charts.
Fast forward to 2002, and lo and behold, past
wounds have been healed, and now the band members have no problems with the
album as long as it's been cleaned up and remastered. Not only that, but half
of the second disc is filled up with tracks from yet a second aborted attempt at a live album, this time, recorded in
August 1975 in Asbury Park — and then, to round things out, five more tracks
are added from an early show (December 1970) in Paris, which had also been
filmed and is these days available as the earliest detailed glimpse of a very
young, very heavy, very exuberant heavy metal band in their prime.
Naturally, the recommended order of listening
would be chronological — start off in the head-spinning era of Paranoid, then leap forward to the
drug-heavy, artistically confused period of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and finally make the transition to the last
days of Black Sabbath as a seriously creative, trend-setting unit in the era of
Sabotage. There won't be too much difference (technically, the
sound on the 1970 tracks is noticeably muddier, but we can live with that): you'd
expect Ozzy to gradually deteriorate through these years, but I wouldn't bet my
money saying that these particular recordings can be used as proof of that.
There is only one song here where he comes close to completely losing it — the
fast part of ʽMegalomaniaʼ; but this is really not so much due to his
being high or anything as it is simply due to the fact that it is, on the
whole, a pretty hard song to sing for a singer as «lumpy» as Ozzy. He flounders
on the high notes of the chorus, struggles with them bravely, then mentally
says «fuck it» and finally just shifts to a much lower range. No wonder
ʽMegalomaniaʼ only lasted for, like, several weeks in their setlist,
before being jettisoned once and for all.
That said, in the historical and basic-emotional
sense the tracks from 1970 are the
best of the lot: just as Led Zeppelin's early concerts are usually preferable
to their «jet set» period from 1973 on, so it is that Sabbath, in 1970, was not
yet spoiled by stardom (not to mention drugs) and certainly not yet bored by
the necessity to reproduce the same old hits over and over again. Ozzy, in
particular, only begins to display the first signs of his irritable stage
antics, and Bill Ward is playing like a madman rather than an experienced
professional. It is only the wise Tony Iommi, keeping cool and distanced, for
whom time has been beneficial rather than detrimental, as his guitar playing
skills only improved through the Seventies (alas, the same cannot be said about
his riff-generating genius).
In the Live
At Last set, the most interesting piece is an eighteen-minute jam centered
around the old song ʽWicked Worldʼ, where, instead of mere
improvisation, Tony is weaving in parts of other compositions, for instance,
the opening riff of ʽInto The Voidʼ, or a large chunk of ʽSupernautʼ.
Apparently, after a brief period of toying with «getting musical ideas out of
thin air» in the early 1970s, he'd finally settled upon the simple truth — some
people are born to improvise, and some people are born to deliberate, and who's
to tell who's wrong and who's right? This way, at least, you get to be thrilled
by trying to guess what will come next. Or, for instance, trying to guess
whether the coda to ʽHand Of Doomʼ will include all of ʽRat Saladʼ, together with Ward's drum solo, or
just the cool riff part? (Answer: just the cool riff part. But they may have
edited out the drum solo — besides, there is
a drum solo in ʽWicked Worldʼ already).
The 1975 set is interesting in that Sabotage had not yet been released, and
thus, they are «previewing» the songs — for instance, only the speedy
proto-thrash part of ʽSymptom Of The Universeʼ is played, and
despite the obvious inconveniences for both Ozzy and Tony (the song really demands two guitars for the coda at
least, and do we actually hear backing tapes with recorded synthesizers? Talk
about the Quadrophenia effect), I am
sure glad they got to include ʽMegalomaniaʼ with its Gothic
atmosphere, so cool and refreshing next to all the basic metal monsters.
In its current status as the only official live
Sabbath release from the «prime» era, could this whole thing be better?
Perhaps. Hardcore fans, well educated in bootleg studies, tend to point out
various small flaws in the Live At Last
section and, sometimes, to heavily put down the Asbury Park recordings as well.
But I seriously doubt that the «live magic of Sabbath» could be pushed up to a
significantly higher level than this. Setlists and sound quality could be
better (in theory; not sure about how much we have in practice), but not the
overall presentation style. From that point of view, Past Lives deserves a modest thumbs up — yet I can still recommend it, like any
other Black Sabbath live album from any other period, only to very serious fans
of the band.
BLIND FAITH (1969)
1) Had To Cry Today; 2) Can't
Find My Way Home; 3) Well All Right; 4) Presence Of The Lord; 5) Sea Of Joy; 6)
Do What You Like.
In 1968, Cream was one of the greatest rock
bands on Planet Earth, and Traffic was, at the very least, one of the hottest
new teams on the UK scene, spearheading the back-to-roots movement on the other
side of the Atlantic from The Band. By mid-1969, Cream were forever gone, and,
as it seemed at the time, so was Traffic (they did pull themselves together,
eventually, but at a cost, and it does not concern us here anyway). In their
place, for just a few odd months, arose Dairy Truck Fleet, er, I mean, Blind
Faith: Eric Clapton on star guitar, Ginger Baker on crushin' percussion, Steve
Winwood on gee-whiz keys, and Ric Grech on the case of bass.
Ric Grech, for that matter, did not yet serve
the proper time in Traffic — being fresh out of Family, he would only team up
with Traffic after Blind Faith had
faded away. But that does not screw the general point: Blind Faith, at least
the way Clapton originally felt about it, had to be an experiment where the
avantgarde and psychedelic side of Cream might be tempered with the soul and
«earthiness» of Traffic's folk and jazz roots.
If it did not work, it is not because Blind
Faith were unable to make music — their only album proves that they definitely
understood their mission and had the knack to realize it — but rather because
of an unlucky crossing of complex personalities at a complex time. Clapton, in
particular, was going through an identity crisis at the time that did not let
him have normal relations with just about anybody,
let alone a renegade drummer from Cream; and the renegade drummer from Cream,
likewise, was too full of ambition and cockiness to play thoroughly second,
third, or fourth fiddle (and it is true that Ginger's presence, despite a
graciously allocated drum solo, is less acutely felt on this album than on any
preceding Cream release). And we might just as well not get started at all on
the drugs issue — particularly vital for at least two of the band members.
In short, it all just fell apart due to
«circumstances beyond cultural control», but not before they managed to record
and put out this album — retardedly controversial for its album cover (according
to the artist, the idea was that of a symbolic representation of «technology in
the hands of innocence» or something like that, but, naturally, most of us have to be dirty perverts with a
one-street way of thinking). Other than the cover, though, there is no «shock
value» whatsoever in Blind Faith:
neither Clapton nor Winwood, the two big brains behind the music, ever cared
much for epatage.
Considering that the album was «rushed», due in
part to restrictive demand from the record label (another reason why the band
did not last long), it is actually stunning to realize how much good stuff it
contains. It does not have any central theme or concept, and the band did not
have enough time to work out a proper musical philosophy of their own (which is
not necessarily a bad thing — Led Zeppelin, for instance, did not quite pull
their classic image together right from the very start, and this is exactly
what explains my soft spot for their first album). But they do give it
everything they got, especially Winwood, credited for three songs out of six,
with Clapton holding one other credit, Baker another one, and a Buddy Holly
cover completing the dish.
As we all know, Steve Winwood started out under
the «blue-eyed soul» banner, gifted as he was with a high and easily modulated
set of pipes and a knack at figuring out and expanding upon Ray Charles' organ
playing tactics, but even so, that part of his image is only one component in the sonic structure of
ʽHad To Cry Todayʼ, ʽCan't Find My Way Homeʼ, and ʽSea
Of Joyʼ. The former is, first and foremost, a riff-revering blues-rocker —
the riff in question is so sharply defined, prominent, and repetitive that it
seems as if they were trying to come up with a ʽSunshine Of Your
Loveʼ to call all their own. It is more complex and intricate than the
ʽSunshineʼ riff, though, lacking the brutality and menace that made
the Cream song a rock radio hyperclassic, and the song's switching between
gruffer and friendlier tonalities in the chorus area might also be a little
confusing and require a little «getting into» period. Other than that, the song
also exists to serve as a guitar battle between Eric and Steve (a trick that
was strangely overlooked on their original tour, where Winwood played organ on
the song, but recreated almost forty years later when the two reunited for
several joint shows).
ʽCan't Find My Way Homeʼ would go on
to become a highlight of Clapton's mid-1970s shows (with Yvonne Elliman usually
taking on the lead vocals) and was eventually covered by Swans — which means we
are definitely not dealing with a
sissie sappy ballad here: the gloomy, descending scales of the acoustic
guitars and the grim chorus of "I'm wasted and I can't find my way
home", express fairly well what some of the band members must have been
feeling at the time, and it does it completely naturally and subtly, without
any overt displays of desperation. Likewise, ʽSea Of Joyʼ may contain
the word «joy» in the title, but most of its music carries a warning / menace
rather than anything close to hippie idealism — and the way Stevie's vocals
jump up several tones from second to third line of each verse strangely reminds
me of George Harrison's manner of singing circa 1970-74: probably just a
coincidence, but Blind Faith does
share such things as world-weariness, disillusionment, and «inobtrusive
moralizing» with George's stuff, even if, to the best of my knowledge, there
was nothing going on between Steve Winwood and Pattie Boyd... or was there?
The best known song off the album is, of
course, Clapton's ʽPresence Of The Lordʼ, just because it went on to
be featured in most of his compilations, and he continues to regularly perform
it up to this very day. It is not one of his finest creations, though. The
lyrics may be sincere, but they are rather inept (and singing the exact same
lengthy verse three times in a row is a bit humiliating, though it was probably
conceived as an intentionally repetitive confessional); the music mainly serves
as obedient backup to the lyrics; and, worst of all, the fast-and-flashy
mid-section with the «thunder-solo» has always seemed somewhat alien to me —
stuck in between the slow, contemplative verses, what point does it serve? is
it the illustration of a «temper outbreak», as the protagonist falls back into
sin and lust, eventually coming back to his senses? or does it illustrate the
very «presence of the Lord», who simply decided to take a brief detour and show
his (rather Old Testamnental, I'd say) angry face to his new admirer? Or was it
just a case of, «hey, there has to be
at least one fast Eric Clapton solo on the record, I wonder where we might put
it... oh, look, there's three identical verses on this song, this deserves some
splitting anyway...»
Still, the song has a point, presents it,
defends it, and the fast solo begins and ends with Clapton's first (and quite
successful) attempt at a truly funky riff, so we might even be benevolent
enough to pardon the man for involuntarily lying through his teeth (quite clearly,
by 1969-70, at the height of his Pattie Boyd / heavy drugs problems, he was
farther from "I have finally found a way to live, in the presence of the
Lord" than any other time in history). Especially since he also found a
time, together with Steve and Ric, to take a formerly simple and happy Buddy
Holly song (ʽWell All Rightʼ) and transform it into a mix of power
pop, pagan folk dance, and psychedelic jamming — probably one of the most
bizarre twists on Buddy's legacy, ever.
Most of the hatred toward the record is usually
associated with Ginger's ʽDo What You Likeʼ, a brief snippet of a
silly moralistic ditty that serves as a platform for solo improvisation —
organ, guitar, bass, and, finally, Ginger's own battery array. The song part
comes along nicely if you disregard the lyrics (I especially like the
combination of "Do what you like / That's what I said / Everybody must be
fed" — how come it was so difficult to understand that, if one really does what one likes and nothing
else, there can be no guarantee that everybody will be fed?), and the jam
part... well, it is easy to say that most of it is there just to fill up space,
but, on the other hand, free-form soloing in the vein of one's jazz idols was an important element of
progressively-oriented bands those days, was it not? It is quite likely that
they would have tried out something like that anyway, even given plenty of
time. And, for that matter, Ginger's drum solo here is actually more
disciplined, (poly)rhythmic, and in line with the rest of the band members'
spotlights than on ʽToadʼ. In fact, I have more problems with Grech's
bass solo — he is a good player when supporting the rest of his pals, but as a
soloist, he seems to barely go through the motions.
In the end, occasional flaws and errors aside, Blind Faith is a very good record, for
a record made under such specific circumstances — even if it did not manage to
become quite the perfect synthesis of the «progressive» with the
«retro-oriented» that it was supposed to produce. Most of the songs have stood
the test of time fairly well (the warm welcome for Clapton and Winwood's
2007-2009 reunion is good proof of that), even if the same cannot be said of
the front sleeve. Whether the band had potential for a grandiose future,
provided things were to unwind in a different direction, is impossible to say
— in any case, had Blind Faith not broken up, we would not have ourselves our Layla, and Duane Allman was, by all
means, a better sparring partner for Clapton than Steve Winwood. But who
knows?..
Thumbs up, but an
additional word of warning: there is an expanded, 2-CD limited edition of Blind Faith out there that is only for completists — it adds a few
alternate versions, a generic blues cover (ʽSleeping In The Groundʼ),
and an entire disc of studio jams, all of them long, cautiously tedious, and
considerately more boring than
ʽDo What You Likeʼ: most probably, they just served as early morning
work-ups to get into shape before taking care of the real business. There is no
point whatsoever for anybody to seek this out, unless you've taken a vow to
collect every lick of Eric's committed to tape anywhere in the space/time continuum
— just go ahead with the regular version, or, better still, spend the extra
money on the recently released footage of Blind Faith's 1969 Hyde Park
performance, preserved in fine fashion and featuring, indeed, a young,
beardless, and not-yet-thoroughly-wasted Eric Clapton in his prime.
AHEAD RINGS OUT (1969)
1) It's Only Love; 2) Dear
Jill; 3) Sing Me A Song That I Know; 4) The Modern Alchemist; 5) Up And Coming;
6) Leave It With Me; 7) The Change Song; 8) Backwash; 9) Ain't Ya Comin' Home,
Babe?; 10*) Sweet Caroline; 11*) Walk On The Water; 12*) Summer Day; 13*) Same
Old Story; 14*) Slow Down; 15*) Meanie Mornay; 16*) Backwash.
What in the hell is a «Blodwyn Pig», anyway?
Surely a band that chooses to call itself thusly can hold no high hopes for the
future — offending vegans, Muslims, and people with Celtic heritage at the same
time. But none of that seemed to bother guitar player Mick Abrahams, when,
after having quarrelled with Ian Anderson over the planned career trajectory for
Jethro Tull, he quit that band in order to become undisputed master of his own domain. In the process, he
enlisted the temporary loyalty of his own flautist (and also saxophonist) Jack
Lancaster, bassist Andy Pyle (later known for a brief stint with the Kinks in
1976-78), and drummer Ron Berg. And a trendy, shades-wearing,
nonchalant-looking pig mascot to boot.
Ahead
Rings Out, the band's debut
album, came out in August 1969, at almost the exact same time as Jethro Tull's Stand Up — and although it is sometimes
fondly mentioned by rock historiographers as a neglected classic (okay, minor neglected classic), there is
clearly no comparison between the two: where Ian Anderson was using old school
blues-rock as merely a foundation for something excitingly new and dizzy, Mick
Abrahams simply stuck to doing old school blues-rock, period. Well, not merely blues-rock, okay. Jack Lancaster
provides a strong jazz flavor, there is an acoustic folk ballad or two, so it
would be more fair to speak of «roots-rock» in general, without any serious
experimental or «progressive» sides to it. However, even conservative
roots-rock can be done blisteringly well if one has the proper talent — and,
unfortunately, Mick Abrahams is no Ian Anderson when it comes to stringing
notes together.
Do not expect a Beatles cover with the opening
ʽIt's Only Loveʼ — that would have been a much more stunning move
than giving this title to a loud, fast-moving, moderately energetic boogie
blues number that never amounts to anything more than a boogie blues number.
Mick Abrahams is a competent vocalist and guitar player, but his burly
Bedfordshire voice pales next to Noddy Holder's (this sort of material does,
indeed, work best in the hands of drunken hooligans such as Slade), and his
Clapton-influenced guitar playing style offers little that Clapton himself —
or, for that matter, Martin Barre, Mick's replacement in Jethro Tull — could
not have offered.
In fact, the chief asset of Blodwyn Pig was not
even Abrahams, either as songwriter, singer, or lead guitarist, but the
woodwinder Jack Lancaster. It is his
merry double-tracked sax-solo on ʽIt's Only Loveʼ that turns the
performance into a spirited one, and it is his
sax and flute improvised pieces on most of the other tracks that give the album
a little bit of personality: at least, as far as our being able to call it «a
decent sequel to Jethro Tull's This Was»
— the jazzy instrumental ʽLeave It With Meʼ has a flute theme and a
crazyass flute solo that could, indeed, very easily be mistaken for a little
bit of early Ian Anderson creativity.
The best song on the album is probably
ʽSing Me A Song That I Knowʼ, with a well-constructed wall-of-sound
(very loud bass + double-tracked sax = decibel heaven!) that cleverly disguises
the song's true «pastoral minstrel ditty» nature, coming out clearer in the
accappella bits of the chorus. Abrahams himself was more fond of ʽDear
Jillʼ, an acoustic country blues number that sounds like a poor man's Beggar's Banquet outtake, briefly
lifted out of the mire with a sunset-mood Lancaster soprano sax solo, but quite
plain otherwise. And you know something
goes wrong when the whackiest moment in a song is a thirty-seconds spoken
intro, delivered in such a thick, exaggerated Cockney accent that you cannot
understand a single word (ʽThe Change Songʼ), even if you are sort of
supposed to dig the song's guitar-and-fiddle vibe itself.
Personally, I think that Ahead Rings Out truly «rings out» in its «thickest» bits, when all
the musicians are engaged in creating a meaty, beaty jam monster — on such
tracks as ʽThe Modern Alchemistʼ and ʽAin't Ya Comin'
Homeʼ. On the former, they eventually hit the cool jazz spot, with
Abrahams stepping away from second-rate Claptonisms and getting bolder and
riskier in a (quasi-)Django Reinhardt-like mood; and on the latter, they get
really dense and heavy, like a slightly more disciplined Blue Cheer, which goes
real fine on the ears, if not necessarily so on the memory storage cells.
So I probably will not be exaggerating much if
I state that the most memorable thing about the record is its front sleeve — an
inspiration, no doubt, for Black Sabbath's ʽWar Pigsʼ? — but also
that the album is a must-have for all serious fans of ballsy roots-rock in all
of its incarnations. Because the band did
have balls a-plenty. They did not write interesting melodies, they did not have
any great musicians, but at least they weren't treating the roots idiom in any
«reverential» fashion. Too bad they didn't manage to get too drunk at these sessions.
GETTING TO THIS (1970)
1) Drive Me; 2) Variations On
Nainos; 3) See My Way; 4) Long Bomb Blues; 5) The Squirrelling Must Go On; 6)
San Francisco Sketches; 7) Worry; 8) Toys; 9) To Rass Man; 10) Send Your Son To
Die; 11*) Summer Day; 12*) Walk On The Water.
The critical consensus (provided that the tiny
handful of consenting critics can be reliably called «consensus») seems to
consider Getting To This, the
original Blodwyn Pig's second and last album, as an artistic letdown after the
inspiring promises of Ahead Rings Out.
Even the two titles, taken together, give out a whiff of irony — ahead rings
out, and you're still only «getting
to this»? At a time when everyone else has already gotten to this, and more
than this?.. A year like 1970 wasn't exactly the best time for half-measures,
if you know what I mean.
What really did happen was sort of predictable.
Even with the jazz-influenced Jack Lancaster aboard ship, Ahead Rings Out was very much a «conventional» blues-rock record in
the well-established, but already not very cool UK tradition of John Mayall,
Peter Green, pre- (and post-) Cream Clapton and all these other well-meaning
guys who decided that channelling the spirit of American blues was a worthier
enterprise than trying to find their own. But as the 1960s closed and
«progressive» was on the verge of becoming a viable commercial proposition,
even the staunchest roots-rockers began thinking in terms of «progress or
perish». Blodwyn Pig were a good example — even if Ahead Rings Out, upon release, sold enough copies to be
commercially compared to Jethro Tull's Stand
Up, it didn't take a lot of brain to understand which of the two bands was
awaited by a more glorious future.
Maybe Mick Abrahams did stay cool enough so as
not to bite his fingernails each evening, regretting the decision to leave and
start his own band, but he was smart enough to understand that the formula of
Blodwyn Pig needed some shaking up. Consequently, there is no more generic
blues on Getting To This — it is
still bluesy in essence, of course, but syncopation is the word of day, as the
controls are seemingly placed in the hands of Lancaster, and the status of role
model is transferred almost completely to Blood, Sweat & Tears, even as
Blodwyn Pig continues to rock in a far grittier manner.
The band's major «progressive test» is the
multi-part suite ʽSan Francisco Sketchesʼ, beginning with some
assorted seagulls and going through several, mostly jazzy, sections dominated
by flutes or saxes; only one part, an anthemic piano ballad, has vocals and is,
for some reason, stuck in the middle rather than at the end, where it would
have far more naturally summarized all the sketches. Never once particularly
outstanding — the basic themes are not too captivating and the energy level
seems lower than required, maybe due to somewhat slacky work on the part of the
rhythm section — it is still a very competent, mood-wise diverse, and
entertaining performance, much as I fail to see what exactly, apart from the
seagulls, it has to do with San Francisco. (Still, better this sort of
mood-alternating jazz jamming, I guess, than a genuine attempt to write a tribute
to Quicksilver Messenger Service).
Also, the fact that they glued together several
distinct jazz-rock parts to make one cohesive whole does not prevent them from
using very similar jazz-rock parts to serve as the basis for most of the other,
shorter, songs as well — in terms of general approach, ʽSan Francisco
Sketchesʼ is not altogether different from the flute-driven funky dance
of ʽVariations On Nainosʼ, or the ominously dressed jazz dance of
ʽWorryʼ (which seems itself to have been influenced by Tull's
ʽFor A Thousand Mothersʼ), or the anti-war diatribe ʽSend Your
Son To Dieʼ, or the instrumental ʽThe Squirrelling Must Go Onʼ,
the title hinting that the tune is supposed to be a sequel to ʽCat's
Squirrelʼ, which Abrahams had earlier arranged for This Was while still a member of Jethro Tull, but ended up carrying
it over to Blodwyn Pig's live setlist.
In the end, what the record suffers from the
most is not its relative lack of diversity (there have been thousands of less
diverse albums that had more impact), but its relative lack of commitment:
Lancaster's flutes and saxes have a formally restrained, «academic» nature, and
Mick, despite his burly chap image, always ends up sounding far less wild and
«out there» than his replacement in Tull, Martin Barre. Repeated listenings
confirm that a lot of work must have gone into these songs — they constantly
try locating interesting themes and coming up with unusual arrangements (for
instance, the combinations of Mick's slide guitar parts with Jack's woodwinds
can be quite fascinating for those who pay enough attention) — but while the
formal craft is there, the vision is
lacking. The band is simply locked in a perpetual state of «getting to this».
To their honor, they must have realized that, too, and disbanded soon after
the album's release.
On a sidenote, the two bonus tracks appended to
the CD edition — strangely enough, the same tracks are also appended to the CD
edition of Ahead Rings Out as well —
are arguably the best pair of songs to come out of Blodwyn Pig in the first
place: an A-side and a B-side of a mid-1969 single, where ʽSummer
Dayʼ is a hyper-catchy rocker with what might be the coolest riff ever
thought of by Abrahams; and ʽWalk On The Waterʼ cleverly sews together
bits of folk, jazz, blues-rock, and even a boogie bridge and infests them with
a little bit of starry-eyed hippie idealism, giving the song a better sense of
purpose than almost anything on Getting
To This.
All of which means that Blodwyn Pig were essentially
a classic example of a singles band — it just had the misfortune of working in
a time zone where albums happened to be valued over individual songs, and so,
in the battle of Jethro Tull against Blodwyn Pig, it was quite clear from the
start who was predestined to be the winner. Still, let us be kind to the loser:
even without a clear sense of purpose, Mick Abrahams and his friends made music
that always tried to respect our emotions and intellect rather than offend them
— as a result, this plainly B-grade stuff will continue finding a grateful
listener for quite some time, I'm sure.
LIES (1993)
1) Lies; 2) The Night Is Gone;
3) Deep Down Recession Blues; 4) Latin Girl; 5) Gnatz; 6) Funny Money; 7)
Witness To A Crime Of Love; 8) Aby's Lean; 9) The Victim; 10) Love Won't Let
You Down; 11) Dead Man's Hill; 12) Maggie Rose; 13) I Wonder Who; 14) All Said
And Done.
I have no idea why this album was credited to
«Blodwyn Pig» in the first place. Once the original Blodwyn Pig split up
because of creative differences between Abrahams and Lancaster (actually, the
band went on for a short while without its founding father, with ex-Yes
guitarist Peter Banks replacing Abrahams, but did not even manage another LP),
Mick went on with a solo career, putting out a few records either as a part of
the «Mick Abrahams Band» or completely by himself (allegedly, the uniquely
educational record Learning The Guitar
With Mick Abrahams, released in 1975, even managed to find some moderate
popularity).
Then, after a long break during which Mick
tried out several alternate professions, he reunited with Andy Pyle, added a
couple new players, and went on to play some gigs as Blodwyn Pig once again.
Then he became so fond of the old name again that he retained it for his next LP
— even though, as far as I can tell, by that time Andy Pyle already went his
own way, and the primary credits go to Graham Walker on drums, Dave Lennox on
keyboards, Mike Summerland on bass, and Nick Payne on saxophone. None of these
guys ever had anything to do with the original Pig, but it is possible that
Mick was simply on a linguistic nostalgia roll.
Another possibility, of course, is that Mick
thought the new album was so damn good that it deserved the Pig stamp on it.
And you know what — if that were the case, he wouldn't be too far off, because Lies is indeed a damn good record. It
does not sound at all like the «classic» Pig. There is no guitar / sax or
guitar / flute dialog whatsoever — in fact, the second most notable instrument
after Mick's guitar are Lennox's keyboards, and this is not very promising,
since the tones are too smooth and synthetic. There is also little, if any,
will to experiment and innovate; but, since we already know that the classic
Pig never succeeded in wooing audiences with their innovation, this might
actually be an advantage. In fact, it is.
Essentially, Lies is just a simple blues-rock album, masterminded by a veteran
and pursuing no other purpose than relieving the veteran's hands from the recording
itch, accumulated therein for the previous decade. From this angle, it reminds
me of the Allman Brothers' early 1990s comeback with Seven Turns — especially since I would judge it almost as
respectable a comeback as the Allmans' was, adjusting for the initial
disparity, of course.
There are some healthy, strong songs here, such
as the title track (an old-school funk-pop number with catchy interaction
between main and backing vocals in the chorus); ʽDead Man's Hillʼ
(funny fast boogie with a sly, enticing slide riff for the main hook);
ʽDeep Down Recession Bluesʼ (a true slide guitar lover's paradise
here on this laid back pub rocker); and ʽLatin Girlʼ, a celebratory
«roots-pop» number with a suitably Santana-esque solo, and a fine alternative
to populating the record with unsavory ballads.
Corny trappings of mainstream rock still have
to be suffered on occasion — usually on those songs that rely too heavily on
keyboards (ʽFunny Moneyʼ would stand a better chance if its main riff
were not played on the synthesizer; ʽThe Night Is Goneʼ is too
overtly glossy, although keyboards are not the song's only flaw). Also, the
inclusion of several «generic» covers may irritate those who still look for a
little melodic originality — although Mick's choices are curiously unpredictable,
including Dr. John (ʽVictimʼ) and the long-forgotten Alexis Korner
(ʽI Wonder Whyʼ) — a weird salute from one obscure British bluesman
to another. But they are well performed and do not take up too much space:
ʽI Wonder Whyʼ does go on for nearly seven minutes, but come on, the
guy should be allowed to have at least one lengthy guitar workout per record,
and this one shows that his sheer technical skills have only increased ever
since he taught those vinyl-loving kids how to play guitar back in 1975.
Throw in a couple of pleasant instrumentals
(the multi-tracked acoustic ʽGnatzʼ is nifty, and ʽAby's
Leanʼ is a bit of fast-going, feel-good country-western), and Lies is a definite keeper — much better, at least, than whatever
could be expected from a guy who never managed to find a proper face for
himself in rock's golden era, and, now that rock is past its golden era, has
suddenly turned that flaw into an advantage. Lies does not set out to prove, confirm, or discover, it just wants
to have fun with you, and in that, it is successful — thumbs up.
The bad news is that, apparently, Mick had one
more original «Blodwyn Pig» album after that, called Pig In The Middle and released in 1996, but it seems to be
super-rare: I have not been able to locate it, and have no idea if it matched
the quality of its predecessor. Even if it does, not hearing either of these
albums is not a crime, but, considering how stiff and boring most of the
post-early 1970s blues-rock records usually turn out to be, there would be no crime
in building up some curiosity about it, either.
ADDENDA:
THE BASEMENT TAPES (1998)
1) The Modern Alchemist; 2)
Mr. Green's Blues; 3) It's Only Love; 4) See My Way; 5) Blues Of A Dunstable
Truck Driving Man; 6) Baby Girl; 7) The Leaving Song; 8) I Know; 9) It's Only
Love; 10) See My Way; 11) Blues Of A Dunstable Truck Driving Man; 12) Hound
Dog; 13) Drive Me.
Blodwyn Pig belongs to that slightly irritating
kind of bands whose official catalog of archival releases has managed to
surpass in quantity (but definitely not in quality) the number of their original
LPs. This is probably due mainly to the activities of Mick Abrahams, or perhaps
the band was blessed with a small, but energetic fan club — in any case, there
is at least half a dozen CDs on various labels out there, collecting all sorts
of outtakes, rarities, and live performance recordings, most of these in really bad quality. It would hardly make
any sense to list them all, but a couple might be worth a brief mention.
First, there is this collection, somewhat
arrogantly called The Basement Tapes
even though not only does it not even begin to approach the relative importance
of Bob Dylan & The Band's famed release — to the best of my understanding,
it wasn't even recorded in any sort of basement, unless, of course, the BBC
Studios put Blodwyn Pig on their special «basement list» reserved for
second-rate artists. Basement or no basement, though, at the very least this is
one of the cleanest-sounding archive releases for Blodwyn Pig, which is already
reassuring.
The recordings are divided into three unequal
parts. The first three tracks, with the original lineup, were made in 1969 for
the Top Gear program. The next eight tracks date from the band's brief reunion
in 1974 and thus happen to be the most historically important, since that
lineup, which happened to include former Jethro Tull drummer Clive Bunker
instead of Ron Berg, left behind no original studio recordings — these eight
tracks all come from John Peel's and Radio 1 Live In Concert BBC archives.
Finally, as an odd postscriptum, two more tracks are tackled at the end that
were recorded by Abrahams and his backing musicians as late as 1990 — prior to
the recording of Lies, but long
after the world had forgotten that «Blodwyn Pig» used to be the name of a band
and not some special Welsh recipé for pork roast.
The 1969 tracks do not deserve much special
mention, other than to say that ʽMr. Green's Bluesʼ is a slightly
revised version of ʽUp And Comingʼ, with a long spoken rant on John
Peel occupying what used to be the wordless instrumental section. The rant is
funny ("my friend John Peel is a vegetarian, he's got the greens, and
that's why he got the blues, 'cause he's got the greens, he don't eat no meat
y'all"), but not funny enough to make history: ʽThe Modern
Alchemistʼ is far more impressive, but, unfortunately, not too different
from the studio version.
The 1974 lineup is more interesting: in
addition to two rather scorching versions of ʽSee My Wayʼ, they
actually try out some new material, such as the nifty folk-blues acoustic
number ʽBlues Of A Dunstable Truck Driving Manʼ, done by Mick in the
Piedmont tradition; and the lengthy jazz/blues/folk suite ʽI Knowʼ,
conceived in the overall style of Getting
To This, but less diverse and evocative than ʽSan Francisco
Sketchesʼ. In any case, Mick's speedy 'n' greedy soloing on ʽSee My
Wayʼ is arguably the most spark-sending part of these sessions.
Finally, the new tracks are — not exactly an
embarrassment, but an incongruent oddity. They give the album a certain «then
& now» flavor, but at the expense of common sense: why exactly is Mick
covering ʽHound Dogʼ, and remaking it as a generic modern blues-rock
exercise in the process? And why does the «original» ʽDrive Meʼ sound
like somebody's semi-successful attempt to remake Aerosmith's ʽLast
Childʼ, changing a few chords, but carrying over Brad Whitford's
sleazy-echoey guitar tone?
Oh well: at the very least, The Basement Tapes has the crazy
audacity to provoke these questions, so it is probably not a complete loss.
That said, I wish I could say that the record was recommended strictly for
diehard Blodwyn Pig fans, but it is hard for me to picture a real, life-size
diehard Blodwyn Pig fan — although somebody
must have probably bought the album when it came out originally, or maybe Mick
just has a large, extended family. Anyway, it's not at all a bad listen, and
the sound quality is as good as it usually gets with BBC standards.
LIVE AT THE FILLMORE WEST 1970 (1999)
1) It's Only Love; 2) Ain't Ya
Comin' Home Babe?; 3) Dear Jill; 4) Worry; 5) San Francisco Sketches; 6) It's
Only Love; 7) Change Song; 8) Cat Squirrel; 9) See My Way; 10) Slow Down; 11)
Rock Me.
And, as a last word on Blodwyn Pig, here is a
quick account of one of those archival releases that are almost impossible to listen to because of awful sound quality.
This here is a show that the band played on the 3rd of August, 1970, shortly
before the break-up, but still in peak form: they now had two albums behind
their belt, almost two years of gig experience, and some sort of rock vision
that they tried to break through to us on Getting
To This. And they were playing at
the Fillmore West — a good chance to try and blow the Grateful Dead off the
stage with some brusk, brawny, British rock'n'roll.
The album loyally presents both of the short
sets that the band played on that day, opening for not-too-sure-whom, but the
«official bootleg» tag should count as a warning, since the sound quality is
that of a good front row audience recording — you can hear all the instruments,
but there is no question of any sort of «mixing» present, and this, as far as I
can tell, is the norm for most of
Blodwyn Pig's non-BBC live recordings, so get ready to live with this if your
soul happens to vibrate on the same amplitude with Mick Abrahams.
The biggest problem for me, unfortunately, is
not the sound quality, but the fact that this is still only Blodwyn Pig, and
that means «B-level». The band was reasonably tight, but never really
«Fillmore-proof»: the level of transformation that was implicitly required from
studio bands as they became live bands in 1970 is not reached. True, some of
the songs are expanded with additional jam sections, and there is also a
twelve-minute run through ʽCat's Squirrelʼ, which Mick took with him
from his This Was legacy. But their
attempts to plow through these sections in «Cream mode», with lengthy solo
passages from Abrahams' guitar or Lancaster's sax, end up boring — loud, proud,
and sincere, but lacking individuality.
There are also some «atmospheric mistakes» that
may embarrass the listener — for instance, inserting a Tull-esque flute lead
part in the beginning of Larry Williams' ʽSlow Downʼ is a classic
«conflict of interests», somewhat typical for early 1970s art-rockers wanting
to «embellish» the rockabilly oldies with artsy flourishes. On the other hand,
when they don't offer no embellishments
(ʽRock Meʼ), the results are simply non-descript.
On the whole, the album has mostly historical
importance — as in, this is the way (or one of the ways) a typically solid, but
unexceptional British roots-rock band would structure and conduct its show when
guesting on the West Coast; also, in the light of the overall legendary status
of Bill Graham's Fillmore enterprise, any extra small piece of the puzzle is
always welcome to complete the picture. (For instance, it may be useful to know
that Blodwyn Pig weren't booed off the stage or anything — Californian
audiences being quite friendly and receptive towards their guests, even if the
music was decidedly non-psychedelic). But only a thoroughly omnivorous person,
I suppose, could listen to this and experience genuine pleasure; in every respect other than historical, this is a thumbs down
in the context of all the truly great live shows from its era.
CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN (1968)
1) Overture; 2) I Love You
More Than You'll Ever Know; 3) Morning Glory; 4) My Days Are Numbered; 5) Without
Her; 6) Just One Smile; 7) I Can't Quit Her; 8) Meagan's Gypsy Eyes; 9)
Somethin' Goin On; 10) House In The Country; 11) The Modern Adventures Of
Plato, Diogenes And Freud; 12) So Much Love / Underture.
A slightly cumbersome name for a somewhat
encumbered band — but in early 1968, the game was worth it, considering that
nobody in the rock'n'roll department had properly done it before: namely,
integrated the «rock band» format with the «big band» format, expanding the
regular lineup to no less than eight permanent members, four of them confined
almost exclusively to the brass section (although Fred Lipsius, in addition to
alto sax, is also credited for piano). For all we know, this here is indeed the
birth of «jazz-rock», a gleefully incestuous combination in which «rock», the
child, turns on «jazz», the mother, and takes his Oedipus complex out on her.
No wonder the pagan gods got angry, and
although they could not stop the jazz-rock virus from spreading, they did
ensure that, for all their prolific career, Blood, Sweat & Tears would only
have one proper masterpiece of the
genre — this album. The formal reason is obvious: the band was essentially
conceived and formed by Al Kooper, «the master of creative thinking» in
roots-oriented American pop music, fresh out of The Blues Project — but no
sooner had they released their first record that the unlucky guy was booted out
of his own band, due to «creative disagreements»: much like Eric Clapton and
Jeff Beck on the other side of the ocean, Al must have simply been incompatible
with normal teamwork, and eventually had to go solo.
The good news is that Child Is Father To The Man, a groundbreaking and, one could say,
visionary collection of new compositions and old songs rethought in a
radically new manner, did happen. Like many similar artefacts of the time, it
is quite a pretentious affair — the name of the band, the name of the album,
the sleeve photo with all the band members holding cardboard replicas of
themselves, the presence of an overture and an «underture», the understandably
loud, sprawling sound... but its intentions are also honestly idealistic — this
is not complexity for complexity's sake, this is complexity for the sake of
building a ladder to the sky — and, most importantly, it simply got a bunch of
great songs on it.
I must
say, though, that this is one of those cases where the presence of a small
handful of major personal favorites sort of obscures the rest, and dims the
whole picture. Namely, I am talking about the three principal Kooper originals:
ʽMore Than You'll Ever Knowʼ, ʽMy Days Are Numberedʼ, and
ʽI Can't Quit Herʼ, which not only happens to be the best triad he
ever wrote — there is no doubt in my mind about that — but should also rank as
high as anything contributed to the
world by a major songwriter in 1968. The man's career in The Blues Project gave
only vague hints at the soulful depths he would eventually uncover, and how was
that made possible? In the least predictable manner — by surrounding himself
with trumpets, trombones, and saxophones that could be organized into a genuine
power machine.
Actually, ʽI Love You More Than You'll
Ever Knowʼ is the one song on here that would have been just as poignant without the brass backing — first and
foremost, it is the greatest one-man show in Al's entire career. Recording a
song that formally matches the required criteria for «soulful desperation» is
not difficult, and has been done millions of times; making it fully credible and epically breathtaking is a feat
manageable only with a fortuitous combination of talent and luck. Although,
technically, the song is molded in the well-known «blues-de-luxe» idiom, and
you can very well see its roots in the output of B. B. King and Ray Charles,
Kooper's vocal composing is all his own — the gradual build-up, rising to
near-hysterical heights on "is that any way for a man to carry
on?..", then suddenly turning from rage to sobbing tenderness on one of
the awesomest "i-love-you-baby" of all times, then bringing it all
the way up with the first "more than you'll ever know", then gently
lowering it back down with the second one. «Heart-wrenching beauty» — check,
and I would personally take that vocal part over literally anything Robert Plant has ever committed to tape, much as he liked
to dabble in the same sort of aesthetics.
That said, the individual beauty of ʽI
Love You More Than You'll Ever Knowʼ does not quite tie in with the ideology of Blood, Sweat & Tears: its
chief reliance is on Kooper's voice and the concordingly weepy lead guitar
parts from Steve Katz (who, by the way, also rises to the occasion and comes up
with lines far more impressive than anything previously tried in The Blues
Project). That the album, after the string snippets of the overture have died
down, is actually launched with this particular tune, might even be a bit of a
surprise for the uninitiated, as the brass section truly comes in only on the
bridge, and is not at all essential to the tune. But Child Is Father To The Man is actually quite big on surprises — as
befits any classic work of art.
The brass section does get essential on
ʽMy Days Are Numberedʼ, a faster, tenser, and even more desperate
sequel to ʽMore Than...ʼ — the opening brass melody gives you contemplative
melancholy resolving into decisive musical seppuku in a matter of just a few
bars, and although the fast rock-based verses and the slow baroque-styled
choruses are a little too crudely sewn together, the contrast still works
towards making the experience even more unforgettable. Finally, the «Love
Junkie Trilogy», as the whole thing could be suitably called, ends with ʽI
Can't Quit Herʼ, more piano-based and a little less gloomy than its two
suicidal companions, but still picturing the passion as a hopeless addiction,
driving the protagonist crazy and, perhaps, more than a little psychopathic.
Here, the piano is soon joined by strings and brass in a fairly democratic
ensemble, but again, everything is dominated by the vocals and the inner demons
— belying the image of «jazz-rock» as something that has to be bombastic and
anthemic, ʽI Can't Quit Herʼ is really as personal and intimate as it
gets.
And this is also why everything else on the
album, as thoroughly thought out and implemented as it could be, inevitably
pales next to the «Love Junkie Trilogy». Steve Katz, Kooper's old pal from the
Blues Project days, in stark contrast to Al, still seems to be living in those
days — his psycho-folk ballad ʽMeagan's Gypsy Eyesʼ is pretty and
courteous, but hardly endowed with much staying power. However, Kooper himself
is hardly free of the old «training days» legacy, either, contributing the
eight-minute mammoth blues jam ʽSomethin' Going Onʼ that is quite
pedestrian in the old Blues Project way: at least Katz's «post-Hendrix» guitar
tone and the thick brass backing give it more substance, but hardly enough to
compete with the new blues-rock language of Jeff Beck or the upcoming Led
Zeppelin.
The jazzified covers of Tim Buckley, Harry
Nilsson, Randy Newman, and Carole King are all perfectly listenable,
intelligently reworked, and pleasantly soulful — certainly not «filler» in any
sense of the word — and, in between the four of them, show quite exhaustively
how this new musical formula can be applied to any sort of material, though it
is interesting that the band prefers to concentrate on «singer-songwriter»
stuff rather than try, for instance, to put their touch on any of the pop hits
of the day. Kooper's intentions seem clear enough: build his art at the
intersection of the confessional style, typical of loners and recluses, and
the loud «arena» style — show how, when the deeply personal gets expressed
through the openly public, the end results may, surprisingly, turn out to
become even more deeply personal.
This is the greatest paradox of Child,
and the one reason why the band
became such a different artistic entity after Kooper's departure: the form was
retained, the substance was lost.
Anyway, the bottomline is: even if, for some
reason, you are afraid of «jazz-rock» — for instance, associate it with Chicago
ballads, or with instrumental fusion conundrums for those who value mathematics
over music, do not make the mistake of ignoring this record, which sounds
nothing like either of the two formulae. In fact, it pretty much sounds like
nothing else out there: «Al Kooper with horns, strings, and heartbreak» finds
no reasonable equivalent in my experience, and gets an assured thumbs up
for that reason alone, not to mention all the others.
BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS (1969)
1) Variations On A Theme By
Erik Satie; 2) Smiling Phases; 3) Sometimes In Winter; 4) More And More; 5) And
When I Die; 6) God Bless The Child; 7) Spinning Wheel; 8) You've Made Me So
Very Happy; 9) Blues (Part II); 10) Variations On A Theme By Erik Satie.
No band that fires Al Kooper and hires David
Clayton-Thomas deserves appraisal for its actions. With their second album, in
a brief, unpleasant flash, Blood, Sweat & Tears dispense with at least
several meters of soulful depth — making a transition from «art rock» to
«professional entertainment» and, worst of all, probably not even realizing
it. The good news was that they made the charts, something that is, indeed,
easier to do for a professional entertainer than for an art-rocker: the record
went all the way to No. 1, became quadruple platinum, yielded several hit
singles, and essentially made the band into a household name — now that they
finally had a singer who could provide them with that «Tom Jones» feel.
Despite the disappointment, the record is not
bad. First, Kooper had some time to work on these songs — a few of them do seem
to have a bit of the Kooper touch, although I do not know the exact details.
Second, the idea of BS&T as an «art» band is not yet completely abandoned:
the record is diverse, unpredictable and largely experimental — after all, no
entertaining act targeted at bored housewives would probably start the album
off with a rearrangement of an excerpt from Satie's ʽTrois
Gymnopédiesʼ. Third, they still retain a good sense of taste in
their selection of covers: whatever be, one has to admit that Traffic, Laura
Nyro, Billie Holiday and even Brenda Holloway are fairly good company on the
road.
The worst thing about Kooper's departure is
that the awesome contrast between the loud and bombastic, on one side, and the
lonesomely personal and the introspective, on the other, which really made Child the masterpiece that it was, has
vanished into thin air. The band itself understood it well enough, I guess, since
self-titling the record symbolized a sort of total reboot. Now all the songs
were not only loud and bombastic, but also sunny, cheerful, optimistic, well
suited for an audience that did not care to see a lot of «suffering» on its
playlists. Of course, the switch itself was neither «right» nor «wrong», but it
did put the record, right from the start, into a category where failure
becomes irredeemable, if you know what I mean.
As a songwriter, David Clayton-Thomas was, of
course, no match for Kooper. He contributes only one song altogether:
ʽSpinning Wheelʼ is a friendly jazz-pop piece that occasionally
pretends to be loaded with a little bit of psychedelic powder — which goes all
wet at the end, as the band unexpectedly launches into several flute-led bars
of ʽLieber Augustinʼ and the drummer makes a comment of "that
wasn't too good" as the rest of the band snickers around him. The song,
altogether, is more efficient than its coda, but not by much — the best thing
about it (and many other things around here) is probably Jim Fielder's bass
playing, combining a perfect sense of rhythm with a desire for inventive
melodicity.
Of the two covers chosen for single release,
Laura Nyro's ʽAnd When I Dieʼ seems to me by far the winner, what
with all the melodic transitions (from slow country-rock to fast
vaudeville-rock and back) and the clash of the song's unsettling title with its
lyrically and melodically optimistic message — although, frankly speaking,
Clayton-Thomas is hardly the right vocalist for this kind of material. He does
seem to be far more in his element on ʽYou've Made Me So Very Happyʼ,
a song that quickly became the new-look BS&T's calling card but, honestly
speaking, adds little to the Holloway original — which had already taken the
composition to its joyful peak, and neither the rough-hewn, pompous,
quasi-Southern growl of Clayton-Thomas nor the horn gymnastics of his band
members can push it up any higher, so it seems to me. Nor is the guy genius
enough to uncover any new depths in ʽGod Bless The Childʼ — great
song, for sure, but never because of being blessed by a Blood, Sweat &
Tears interpretation.
In all actuality, the best song on the album
(bar ʽAnd When I Dieʼ) is probably ʽMore & Moreʼ, a
cheerful, but tough funk rocker on which both Fielder on bass and Steve Katz on
his Cream/Hendrix-influenced «acid tone guitar» are allowed to shine on par
with Clayton-Thomas. At the very least, it is still a song that rocks hard in
solid 1960s mode, which is almost always a plus. Less of a plus, but still
respectable as an ongoing tradition, is the presence of a near-obligatory
psycho-folk ballad by Katz (ʽSometimes In Winterʼ) — these things are
generally pleasant to the ear, but totally lack any staying power.
Where the album really starts taking serious chances is on ʽBlues, Part
IIʼ, an 11-minute improvisational (or «seemingly» improvisational jam) with
just a little bit of vocal blueswailing at the end. Along the way, almost every
band member gets to show some jazzy tush, culminating in them all happily
diving into the riff of ʽSunshine Of Your Loveʼ, and then, for
dessert, Katz leading them into a few psychobars of ʽSpoonfulʼ — a
ritualistic tribute, no doubt, to the freshly deceased supergroup. The piece is
not «great» or anything, but the band takes care to switch its groove as soon
as it risks becoming boring, so, in the end, its role on the album seems more
positive than negative: at the very least, it symbolizes that this here band
is still searching for something, even if it may not necessarily be looking in
the right place.
With our hearts perhaps full of sorrow at such
flat-out spoiling of such a flat-out terrific beginning, we can still give Blood, Sweat & Tears a thumbs up,
if only because it is hardly possible to nosedive from the peak into the pit in
one single go. But there is little, if anything, about the record that makes it
as timeless as its predecessor, stylish and professional as it might be — unless
one actually prefers the powerful, but one-dimensional and pompous vocals of
Clayton-Thomas to the technically weaker, but (in my opinion) far more
expressive and meaningful wailing of Al. Of course, I could see where such a
preference could take place, but it is hardly the location to which these
particular reviews are addressed, anyway.
BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS 3 (1970)
1) Hi-De-Ho; 2) The Battle; 3)
Lucretia Mac Evil; 4) Lucretia's Reprise; 5) Fire And Rain; 6) Lonesome Suzie;
7) Symphony For The Devil / Sympathy For The Devil; 8) He's A Runner; 9)
Somethin' Comin' On; 10) 40,000 Headmen.
We can safely bet that way too many admirers of ʽYou've Made Me So Very Happyʼ
must have been fairly puzzled to buy an album called Blood, Sweat & Tears 3 right after having bought an album
called Blood, Sweat & Tears —
sending them out on a hard-to-explain quest for that mythical second album that
never was. With a little less safety, we can also bet that these same admirers may also have been puzzled by the fact
that the band's lack of creativity in choosing their album titles had,
unfortunately, also extended to their albums' contents. With only two original compositions out of nine, the new-look Blood, Sweat &
Tears were now clearly positioning themselves as a cover band. And who the heck
needed a cover band back in 1970?
Worse than that, they did give a concise answer
here as to why it might have been
wiser for them to stick to covers. The «artsy» past of the band catches up with
it, and fills its collective head with unnecessary ecstasy, on the thoroughly
pointless, and sometimes rather offensive, version of ʽSympathy For The
Devilʼ. For some reason, somebody thought that a little bit of free-form
jazz, with plenty of tuba and trombone polyphony, made a good companion to the
pseudo-Satanic vibe of the Stones' contemporary classic — probably picked out
of the lot not by pure chance, but due to increased public interest with it in
conjunction with the Altamont disaster — but the result is not so much
«experimental jazz-rock» as «Vegasy jazz-schlock», especially given Clayton-Thomas'
«Tom Jones with tail and horns» vocal delivery. Nothing gels, nothing makes
sense, and most of it genuinely irritates, because the band really feels quite
clueless throughout the entire performance. Maybe it could have worked better,
had they picked out a track that wasn't already «epic» in the first place —
then again, maybe it couldn't.
Therefore, when they actually cover stuff without any attempts to turn it into a
«symphony», it usually works better. Goffin & King's ʽHi-De-Hoʼ,
a smart choice for the album's first single, suits Clayton-Thomas' normal
singing style much better than any Rolling Stones song, and there is also a
nice climactic buildup to the grand «Southern gospel» finale. ʽHe's A
Runnerʼ is another Laura Nyro song that they do full justice to (not to
mention that Laura Nyro could always use a good popularization from a more
popular act), and there is a very nice piano/bass instrumental interlude that
certifies their jazz chops without turning into a pretentious mess.
Most of the other covers, too, range from
passable (ʽLonesome Suzieʼ has the lead singer doing a Richard Manuel
impression that almost works — although, who really wants to hear David
Clayton-Thomas sing like Richard Manuel when one can instead listen to Richard
Manuel not singing like David Clayton-Thomas?) to likable (Traffic's
ʽ40,000 Headmenʼ). The problem is, none of them make much sense apart
from the «and now, your favorite song by Mr. X... done with horns!» message. In fact, I'd say that
James Taylor with horns (ʽFire And Rainʼ) is a downright sordid
idea, but that's just me.
All the more puzzling it is to realize that the
two originals here are pretty strong songs in their own right. ʽThe
Battleʼ, co-written by Katz and keyboardist Dick Halligan and sung by
Katz, continues Steve's tradition of gallant baroque / medieval-influenced folk
compositions, but is tighter, catchier, more ambitious and less mushy than
usual — a nostalgic minstrel tune with a good balance between the harpsichord
and the brass section. As for Clayton-Thomas' ʽLucretia Mac Evilʼ,
yes, it is overwrought, over-exuberant, and Tom Jones-y, but it does have a
good slew of memorable brass riffs — something that ʽSpinning Wheelʼ,
for instance, did not have, and the instrumental reprise gives Jim Fielder the
best of opportunities to practice his nimble bass runs, as the rest of the
band, too, feels invigorated by the tightness of the funky groove. So why did
they have to waste solid musicianship on clumsy attempts to get into somebody else's groove, then
(ʽSympathyʼ), when they were still capable of growing their own?
Beats me.
Although the record enjoyed heavy commercial
success, on the huge impulse of its predecessor, it must have been obvious to
everybody that the overall reaction would be one of disappointment — or,
perhaps, they thought they could make it on the strength of the singles alone,
in which they were only partially right. Oh well, at least they did retain a
good taste in covers, and at least there is a working logic in that Al Kooper
would cover Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman where Clayton-Thomas would cover
Joe Cocker and Steve Winwood. No thumbs down in the end — the awful ʽSympathyʼ
is nicely counterbalanced by the excellent ʽLucretiaʼ, and most of
the rest is so utterly neutral that the band seems more poised for a shrug than
a negative judgement.
B, S & T 4 (1971)
1) Go Down Gamblin'; 2)
Cowboys And Indians; 3) John The Baptist; 4) Redemption; 5) Lisa, Listen To Me;
6) A Look To My Heart; 7) High On A Mountain; 8) Valentine's Day; 9) Take Me In
Your Arms (Rock Me A Little While); 10) For My Lady; 11) Mama Gets High; 12) A
Look To My Heart (duet).
An unexpected improvement upon the band's
disappointing third album — suddenly, the band wakes up and remembers that
writing songs can be as much fun as covering them (not to mention much more
satisfactory in the financial scheme of things). Nine out of eleven tunes are originals,
and a tenth one is contributed by Al Kooper, still the «blood» of the band
where Clayton-Thomas could have been its «sweat» (and the proper «tears» had
yet to come). Only one bona fide cover remained, because what is a Clayton-Thomas era BS&T album
without an authentic cover of an R&B standard? Original songwriting be
damned, nothing can get an audience
on its feet as effectively as good old Motown — and ʽTake Me In Your
Armsʼ is as good a choice as anything.
The point is not that Clayton-Thomas, Katz,
Halligan, and Lipsius suddenly turned into genius songwriters. The point is,
their investment in trying out new chord combinations gives the band a sense of
purpose, even if that purpose is rarely satisfied. Most amazingly, it seems to
somehow procure some much needed dignity for David's voice: be it on the
introspective country waltz of ʽCowboys And Indiansʼ, on the tough
blues-funk of ʽRedemptionʼ, or on the courteous folk balladry of
ʽFor My Ladyʼ, he sounds a little more thoughtful and a little less
flashy / corny than he did on most of 3.
A little original songwriting may go a longer way than one usually thinks?.. Or
is it just a misguided gut feeling?
The decision to start out on a hard rock note,
most likely influenced by the Zep-dominated tastes of the time, does feel
somewhat pathetic, especially considering that ʽGo Down Gamblin'ʼ
isn't really much of a classic — its generic and not particularly memorable
blues chords are not even much of a match for the brass riff of ʽLucretia
Mac Evilʼ. Competing with the «monsters of rock» did not pay off:
thoughtlessly released as a single, the song only went as high as #32, and why should it have gone any higher, with the
market already oversaturated with bulgy riff-rockers? (And most of the fans of
bulgy riff-rockers had little interest in hearing a bunch of sissy brass
instruments overclouding the guitars, anyway).
But it gets better from there: ʽCowboys
And Indiansʼ exudes some simplistic nostalgic sentimentalism — co-written
by Halligan with Terry Kirkman from The Association, it challenges David to
convince us that the protagonist does
prefer, nowadays, to «play the Indian» rather than «play the cowboy», and in
order to do that, the guy chooses the «mumble-in-your-beard» style that suits
him much better than the Tom Jones posturing. The song is written in relatively
free style, more like a distracted Van Morrison type of rambling than a
verse-chorus thing, but the brass arrangement gives it a bit of
grizzled-heroic atmosphere, and ultimately, it works.
ʽRedemptionʼ is more impressive for
its funky instrumental section, with plenty of punch contributed by the bass
and drums, than for any main melody, but, unlike ʽSympathy For The
Devilʼ, this is a groove that they worked out all by themselves, and it is
far more effective. ʽLisa, Listen To Meʼ is a pretty damn good
«roots-pop» ditty, too, highlighted by a classic fuzzy psycho-riff from Katz —
by all means, it should have been the first
single from the album, not the second one: by the time it hit the market,
ʽGo Down Gamblin'ʼ had already flopped, and the band was spinning
down commercially at an alarming rate.
The second side of the LP is unexpectedly
dominated by Katz compositions: formerly relegated to the duty of contributing
one or two lushy-mushy folk ballads per LP, he now has a whoppin' four
songwriting credits — of which only two are ballads (ʽValentine's
Dayʼ sung by Katz himself); ʽHigh On A Mountainʼ is a slow and
rather boring attempt at a hymn, and ʽMama Gets Highʼ is a piece of
old-school vaudeville, which would probably not be deemed good enough for Cabaret, let alone a respectable rock
band. All of which just goes to re-confirm the old truth about sleeping dogs —
Katz was not improving as a songwriter by expanding his range. Still, somehow,
I'd rather have these limp attempts at living than yet another bunch of
Traffic, Laura Nyro, and The Band covers. (Speaking of which, Al's ʽJohn
The Baptistʼ sounds uncannily like a Band song from circa 1969 — and,
what's even more funny, Al's own
version of the song, released the same year, is so much more overproduced and
stuffed with brass overdubs that it ends up sounding more like typical Blood,
Sweat & Tears than the BS&T version!).
Cutting a long story short, very little of this
stuff is impressive, but it holds together well, and the album as a whole is a
«moderate grower», becoming a wee bit more friendly and invigorating with each
new listen rather than the opposite. Unfortunately, 1971 was not a good year
for «moderate growers»: the public, already disappointed with what had been
offered to them the year before, could do with nothing less than a strong jolt,
and a strong jolt is one thing that BS&T4
does not manage to deliver even once — ʽLisa, Listen To Meʼ is a good
song, but much too plain to attract the required attention. Alas, the lack of
commercial success shattered the band's self-confidence, and what could have
been a new humble beginning proved instead to be the beginning of the end.
NEW BLOOD (1972)
1) Down In The Flood; 2) Touch
Me; 3) Alone; 4) Velvet; 5) I Can't Move No Mountains; 6) Over The Hill; 7) So
Long Dixie; 8) Snow Queen; 9) Maiden Voyage.
And lots
of it, too. By 1972, the band had lost not just Clayton-Thomas, who thought his
position solid enough to try and go for a solo career, but also two more of its
founding fathers — Lipsius and Halligan, whose arranging and songwriting
talents had been one of the band's assets. In their place, the remaining
veterans hired Jerry Fisher, a big fan of the jazz-rock sound who'd been
hanging around Dallas for a couple of years, playing BS&T and Chicago covers;
Lou Marini on woodwinds; and Larry Willis on piano. In addition, Georg Wadenius
was added to the lineup on extra lead guitar — maybe because the band just
couldn't stand the prospect of not
having a band member whose family name ended in "-ius" among them.
However, strangely enough, the basic essentials
of the BS&T sound remain the same even with all the «new blood» pumped in
those not-too-attractive veins. The new vocal guy sounds somewhat like a
deflated version of Clayton-Thomas — a barroom screamer who'd like to have the same amount of brawn,
but is incapable of conquering his gene machine. That is a change, but not a
very significant one. In all other matters, this is still the same old brand of
roots music with horns — a little jazz, a little blues, a little pop, and a lot
of blowing.
One change for the worse is that, with the
departure of Clayton-Thomas and Halligan, the band is once again deprived of
the songwriting initiative. Trombonist Dave Bargeron tries his hand in the
business, but his ʽOver The Hillʼ ends up being a fairly standard
pub-rock cut, very much influenced by Joe Cocker's ʽDelta Ladyʼ —
the grizzly wah-wah riff that drives the song is a nifty invention, but
everything else about the song is way below par. New band member Lou Marini
also jumps in with a slice of soulful funk (ʽAloneʼ) that only shows
signs of life during the instrumental jam section — in other respects, it's
just your Vegas show most of the way.
Elsewhere, the impoverished band has no choice
but to fall back on covers, trying out everything from Bob Dylan to Carole King
to Herbie Hancock to Teddy Randazzo. Naturally, the choice could have been much
worse, and the decision to cover ʽMaiden Voyageʼ alone signified that
the band was not yet done with its «artsy» pledge — the mid-section with scat
singing over a nimble jazz guitar solo by Wadenius could hardly qualify as
«commercial» stuff in 1972. However, it is hard to sense any genuine
inspiration in most of these covers: on the whole, the band does not seem to
understand very well why exactly they
are making these particular choices.
Thus, Dylan's ʽDown In The Floodʼ is
unexplainably set to a slowed-down variant of the bassline from Cream's
ʽCrossroadsʼ and transformed into a less-than-subtle blues-rock rucus
— not too bad per se, but what's that got to do with Dylan? Randazzo's
ʽTouch Meʼ is arranged as a bona fide Elton John piano ballad — all
fine, but we already have an Elton John, and he sings better than Jerry Fisher.
ʽSnow Queenʼ is a good song, but, from this particular rendition,
you'd never guess it had anything to do with Carole King — and so on.
I suspect that the album would have worked much
better as a fully instrumental project: almost everywhere on here, the tracks
are easier to appreciate when the band just «gets it on» — nobody is able to
deprive Jim Fielder of his great bass skills, and all the trumpet and trombone
solos and duels are completely on the level with many jazz greats of the era.
The cover of ʽMaiden Voyageʼ, which is completely instrumental, is unquestionably the highlight here
for that very reason. But every time these guys drift off in a pure
«entertainment» direction — and this happens way too often for comfort — they
run out of purposes faster than you can pull that mouthpiece away from your
lips. Nothing on here sucks bad enough to warrant a negative assessment, but
RateYourMusic currently evaluates the record as «#868 for 1972», and I'd say
that's a fairly rational place for it — be sure to check out those other 867
albums first.
NO SWEAT (1973)
1) Roller Coaster; 2) Save Our
Ship; 3) Django (An Excerpt); 4) Rosemary; 5) Song For John; 6) Almost Sorry;
7) Back Up Against The Wall; 8) Hip Pickles; 9) My Old Lady; 10) Empty Pages;
11) Mary Miles; 12) Inner Crisis.
No
Sweat? Really? Sure, the album
cover is «funny» and all, but with the heated way the band throws itself on the
glam rock barricades of the day, surely some
sweat must have been sweated out while rehearsing and recording these tunes,
not to mention performing them live before audiences who demanded that sweat from their performers. Preferably gleaming and
glistening off their bare chests, for better effect.
With Steve Katz out of the band, the number of
the original remaining members has now dwindled to two — the rhythm section of
Jim Fielder and Bobby Colomby. (Additionally, Tom Malone replaces Chuck
Winfield on trumpet, but he only lasted one year anyway, before leaving the
band to accompany Gil Evans, and I don't blame him). The musical compass is now
being provided by woodwinder Lou Marini and guitarist George Wadenius: in
particular, they take it upon themselves to once again raise the quota of
original songwriting — and to update the band's sound for those strange new
times, when «flashy» seemed to take over «substantial».
There were three alleys now for the band to
follow — with only one of them remaining the «original» alley that BS&T
themselves had a hand in constructing in the first place: instrumental
jazz-rock / «fusion», here illustrated, first and foremost, by keyboardist
Larry Willis' album-closing suite ʽInner Crisisʼ. The piece was, in
fact, just a small fragment of the guy's creative mind — best illustrated on
his solo LP from the same year, which, not coincidentally, was also called Inner Crisis and contained an
alternate, even more harsh and funky version of the same composition. Jazz
fusion is not my favorite genre, so I cannot rave and rant about the great
atmospheric wonders of the piece — but it is
fairly adventurous, starting off on a solo piano note and then moving into a
solid, riff-heavy groove (Jim Fielder offers lots of help on bass, too).
At the very least, ʽInner Crisisʼ
sounds positively respectable next to
the album's only other piece to contain some instrumental exploration:
ʽAlmost Sorryʼ starts as «pub-rock de-luxe», then quickly turns into
a portentous Vegasy piece, with hyper-loud trombone solos, hysterical synth
parts and, ultimately, a vaudeville atmosphere — not so surprisingly, the brass
/ guitar / keyboards babble on the final couple of minutes sound eerily
similar to the textures created by Alice Cooper on ʽWelcome To My Nightmareʼ
(the song) a couple years later. Was Alice enough of a BS&T fan to get that influenced? In any case, it is one
thing to combine vaudeville with parody, irony, and humorous titillation, as
Alice does — ʽAlmost Sorryʼ is just boring in comparison.
But do not get me wrong: there is nothing truly
trailblazing about No Sweat. On the
contrary, the other two directions that it explores are not just traditional in
themselves (soulful ballads and pompous rockers), but strictly follow recently
established formulas. Two of the ballads, both contributed by Wadenius —
ʽSave Our Shipʼ and ʽMy Old Ladyʼ — sound like totally bona
fide Elton John songs, relatively convincing but spoiled by weak lyrics (no
Bernie to save the day) and even weaker vocals (well, there is a reason, after all, why Elton John
is celebrating his 60th anniversary at Madison Square Garden and Jerry Fisher
is not — and it doesn't even have much to do with The Lion King or Princess Diana). In fact, the band is so well
aware of the fact that it even hires Paul Buckmaster, Elton's trusty classic sideman,
to oversee the orchestral arrangements — which happen to be the best thing
about both of these tunes: Buckmaster had this mean, lean way with cellos,
emphasizing them over violins, that automatically makes him one of the most
distinctive, if not just plain best, string arrangers on that era's pop
records.
Then there are the rockers — ʽBack Up
Against The Wallʼ does sound like a smoothed-down version of the
garage-era Alice Cooper, while Mark James' ʽRoller Coasterʼ, Randy
Newman's ʽRosemaryʼ, and Traffic's ʽEmpty Pagesʼ are
rootsier and/or funkier, but all four are equally loud, «triumphant», and
designed to give you a good time in stretching your limbs, but not necessarily
in getting an emotional high of any sorts. In other words, all of this is yer
average «okay» music, perfectly adequate as a background soundtrack — no matter
how seriously they try to make it loud enough for the foreground — but not
really working on any other levels. Maybe that is really what the title of No Sweat is trying to tell us, except I
think that the band members themselves would be honestly pissed off at such a
suggestion.
Overall, my final
suggestion is that the album does no harm, but is mainly listenable for the
sake of curiosity, especially if you are a big Elton John fan — like it or not,
not everybody is physically capable of nailing that style as expertly as they
do on ʽSave Our Shipʼ — and especially if you are a serious fusion
collector, in which case you do need to hear ʽInner Crisisʼ. (Then
again, you might just want to head straight for the lion's den and get yourself
a copy of Larry Willis' solo LP instead — certainly a better investment for the
true fusion lover).
MIRROR IMAGE (1974)
1) Tell Me That I'm Wrong; 2)
Look Up To The Sky; 3) Love Looks Good On You; 4) Hold On To Me; 5) Thinking Of
You; 6) Are You Satisfied; 7) Mirror Image; 8) She's Coming Home.
Presumably, after New Blood and No Sweat,
the next obvious LP title should have been Near
Tears, or something like that. I can sort of see the band passing on that
one, but the bare fact remains — Mirror
Image is just a gallant euphemism for Near
Tears, because (a) most of these songs do
bring the knowledgeable listener «near tears», and (b) the album is, to a large extent, a «mirror image»
of whatever this band used to be five years before.
Setting their glam-rock ambitions aside,
Fisher, Bargeron, Wadenius & Co. have now decided that neither Elton
John-style balladry nor Mick Ronson-style «flash-rock» are really where it's at
(for «it», feel free to substitute either «big bucks» or «the future of music»,
depending on the positive / negative charge of your feelings for the band).
Instead, they decide to put their trust in funk-pop
— those hot, catchy, sweeping dance grooves that were becoming all the latest
rage and had already evolved to the state of «proto-disco». With Earth, Wind
& Fire having recently begun to conquer the charts with that style, it was
only natural that «Blood, Sweat & Tears» should use the same formula (most
record buyers would be confusing the two anyway, wouldn't they?).
Consequently, Side A of the album is completely
dedicated to trying out this new approach — steady, streamlined dance-pop
interspersed with a few gentler soul numbers — while the B-side still pretends
to a slice of artsiness, being almost completely turned over to a huge,
four-movement suite (title track), with each movement written by a different
band member or subset of band members. Speaking of which, almost all of the LP is self-penned, except for
two of the most «shake-yer-booty» style songs, contributed by Patricia Cosby,
wife of Motown veteran Henry Cosby, who produced the album for the band.
Also of note is another important lineup
change: Jim Fielder, the amazingly nimble-fingered bass wonder behind all of
the band's classic numbers, finally got fed up with the constant turnover —
and, perhaps, he was feeling that this simplification of the band's playing
style left no space for his talent. Replaced by the reliable, but nowhere near
as impressive / expressive Ron McClure, Fielder left for a humble session
musician career — leaving drummer guy Bobby Colomby as the only original member of the band.
If you are a deep fan of this funky dance
music, regardless of the compositional and atmospheric value of the actual
songs, that first side, actually, isn't that
bad. The grooves are danceable and perfectly professional; Jerry Fisher
continues to be reliable as the «never oversinging» singer; and they try to
introduce bona fide brass hooks and vocal hooks to almost every song, the best
of the brass riffs arguably captured on the album's lead single ʽTell Me
That I'm Wrongʼ, and the most memorable vocal hook contained on ʽLove
Looks Good On Youʼ, where lead vocals are taken by temporary guest member
Jerry LaCroix (soon to join the mid-1970s lineup of Rare Earth).
But, of course, everything suffers from
BS&T's predictable flaw — too smooth, too cautious, too middle-of-the-road.
The hooks ain't Bee Gees level, the soul is tepid compared to Al Green, the
energy does not begin to approach Funkadelic, the subtlety is just non-existent
next to Curtis Mayfield etc. etc. Just as No
Sweat fell right into the «generic glam-rock» category, Mirror Image is equal parts «generic
dance music», with hardly any good reasons to single it out of the swarms of
records by other, less reputable, artists riding the same train in 1974.
All hopes rest on the four-part suite — how
good is that one? Well, other than a hard-funk vocal movement at the end, this
is competent jazz-fusion that suffers from the very same problem: it should
feel itself mighty uncomfortable in the company of John McLaughlin, Jeff Beck,
the Soft Machine, Weather Report, etc. Had Jim Fielder still been in the band,
he could have, perhaps, supplied parts of the suite with some super-tight
monster basslines — as it is, the band is still able to keep its shit together,
but lacks the virtuosity necessary to push it in a whole new dimension. For
instance, at one point Wadenius lets rip with an aggressive, sky-high guitar solo,
but it does not either have a distinctive voice of its own, or reach the same
levels of dazzling technicality as you'd expect from a Santana or an Alan
Holdsworth in this context.
Consequently, like everything else on here,
ʽMirror Imageʼ is as perfectly listenable as it is perfectly boring —
at this point, the band really starts
looking like a respectably dressed, but a pennyless ticketless passenger,
desperately trying to board one train after another, regardless of the actual
direction, and inavoidably thrown off upon each attempt. The only thing about
this whole process that is truly
curious is how the hell they all managed to stick together and retain the
original moniker for so long — considering that this particular «revolving
doors» approach did not even depend on one or two permanent members (like
Jethro Tull is always Jethro Tull as long as it has Ian Anderson in it, or King
Crimson only has to preserve Robert Fripp to go on being King Crimson). Blame
it all on some sort of «Blood, Sweat & Tears spirit» that Al helped
generate in 1968 — sweet, sour, or stale, it had this odd magnetic effect that
simply would not wear off, whatever
the circumstances. Mystical stuff.
NEW CITY (1975)
1) Ride Captain Ride; 2) Life;
3) No Show; 4) I Was A Witness To War; 5) One Room Country Shack; 6) Applause;
7) Yesterdays Music; 8) Naked Man; 9) Got To Get You Into My Life; 10) Takin'
It Home.
The attempt to re-model BS&T as a funky
dance-pop band having miserably failed, both critically and commercially, it
was officially decided that the group had lost its way, and needed to retrace
its steps back to the point at which they seemed more generally accepted. To
that end, Jerry Fisher amicably left the band, taking most of the Mirror Image-era extras (like Jerry
LaCroix, etc.) with him — and David Clayton-Thomas was welcomed back into the
fold.
The result is an album that is at least «on the
level» with the band's output circa 1970-71: the kind of sound they had back
there had not yet become «dated» circa 1975, and the restructuring probably
injected a few extra drops of adrenaline into the outfit — and although I have
never been a big fan of Clayton-Thomas, I have to admit that, next to the
absolute non-remarkability of Fisher, he sounds like The Supreme God Of Vocal
Expression by comparison, so that alone is a big step up from the passable, but
colorless years of Fisher rule.
To herald the «comeback», BS&T tried out a
move that, in retrospect, seems so utterly obvious that it only makes one
wonder how they managed to hold out on it for so long — then again, perhaps
they were saving it up for the rainiest day in their history, and it was getting pretty cloudy in 1975. I am
talking, of course, of the release of the Beatles' ʽGot To Get You Into My
Lifeʼ as the lead single from the album — that particular song that is
referenced, in so many textbooks, as the
song that gave life to the «jazz-pop» brand of BS&T and Chicago, much like
ʽI Am The Walrusʼ gave life to the «strings-pop» brand of the
Electric Light Orchestra.
Curiously, the band's version is actually much
more guitar-heavy than the original — it is almost as if they were returning
the Beatles a favor, with the «original brass band» paying homage to the
«original guitar band» by reinterpreting the original guitar band's brass-led
number as the original brass band's guitar-led number. That said, unlike the
Beatles, BS&T forgot to shape their guitar parts into any memorable riffs —
the result is a slippery, mushy style of production that preserves the vocal
melody but cheapens the song instrumentally. Despite that, the single still
managed to chart: a Beatles song is a Beatles song, after all, it's fairly hard
to spoil it to the ground.
But there are plenty of more adequate covers on
New City as well. ʽRide Captain
Rideʼ, the only hit by the little-known band Blues Image, originally
recorded in 1970, is here given the proper BS&T treatment, including a
lengthy cool-jazz keyboard solo, and Clayton-Thomas gives an inspired
performance — the original had a more exquisite guitar part (courtesy of Mike
Pinera, who would later play with Iron Butterfly and Alice Cooper), but,
overall, a thinner, less overtly kick-ass sound (and it also features here one
of Ron McClure's toughest basslines, good enough to rival some of Fielder's),
so count me happy.
The band also sounds revitalized on such
party-oriented stuff as Allen Toussaint's ʽLifeʼ (similar in style to
David Bowie's ʽFameʼ — coincidence? technically, yes, since Young Americans was released only a
month prior to New City, but in
general, no, since both songs reflected the same musical tendencies of the
epoch); and Randy Newman's circus number ʽNaked Manʼ, introduced with
a little bit of popular Mozart, but played out in «mock-silly» rather than
«unintentionally-corny» style. And, just for diversity's sake, Laura Nyro as
the band's resident «semi-popular intellectual singer-songwriter with musical
pretense» is now replaced by Janis Ian, whose ʽApplauseʼ is extended
by an extra three minutes of jazz-fusion and classical-fusion travels — nothing
too awesome, but at least they are
trying something out, and this is the
kind of something that their reputation was built upon in the first place.
Of the original numbers, Clayton-Thomas'
ʽYesterdays Musicʼ is a dang good soul-pop song, simple, but with a
subtle build-up and an elegant melodic wrap-up at the end of each verse. The
ballad ʽI Was A Witness To Warʼ is not as good — too much vocal
pathos, too little in the way of discernible melody — and McClure's
instrumental ʽNo Showʼ is equally mushy for the first half of its
duration, before a nicely placed twist pushes it over into upbeat rhythmic
territory, where it becomes another passable, but forgettable, fusion piece.
Still, I have nothing against awarding the
album an overall thumbs up. It is musically competent, mildly adventurous, gives
us back a singer that is above average (no matter what I might hold in general
against this particular type of singing), and, unlike its immediate
predecessors, does not try to blindly compete against prevailing fads and
trends, but rather just goes on to quietly pursue its own business. The very fact
alone that they were able to put that blundering train back upon a crude, but
functional railtrack deserves recognition.
IN CONCERT (1976)
1) Spinning Wheel; 2) I Love
You More Than You'll Ever Know; 3) Lucretia MacEvil; 4) And When I Die; 5) One
Room Country Shack; 6) And When I Die (reprise); 7) (I Can Recall) Spain; 8)
Hi-De-Ho; 9) Unit Seven; 10) Life; 11) Mean Ole World; 12) Ride Captain Ride;
13) You've Made Me So Very Happy.
Well, at least they had the good sense to wait
until Clayton-Thomas was back to release the obligatory double live album —
this way, all the hits are re-generated the way they are supposed to: even a
non-fan of the C-T style like me will gladly acknowledge that having ʽAnd
When I Dieʼ or ʽLucretia MacEvilʼ sung by the completely
colorless personality of Jerry Fisher would have deprived the experience of
the smallest modicum of sense it could ever contain.
Anyway, In
Concert, a non-US LP release (only issued in the States as late as 1991,
under the alternate title of Live And
Improvised), was culled from at least four or five different gigs that were played in the US and Canada in late
summer and early fall of 1975, and, technically, were intended to promote New City, even though only two songs
off that album were included in the tracklist (no idea how many were actually
performed); the band lineup is essentially the same as on the studio album,
except that George Wadenius, the guitar player, was halfway out, and is on some
tracks replaced here by Steve Kahn, and on others by Mike Stern, who would go
on to play with the band on the next two studio albums.
There is really not much of any substance to be
said about In Concert. Whatever
their flaws, BS&T are never anything less than professional —
money-grubbers they might be, but nobody can say they don't work hard for their
money, and the record proves it. The rhythm section is tight, the improvised
passages at least try to be inspired,
and, most importantly, the setlist nicely fluctuates between predictable, but
worthwhile, hits and unpredictable excursions into tasteful jazz-rock
territory: they give out energetic renditions of Chick Corea's
ʽSpainʼ and Cannonball Adderley's ʽUnit 7ʼ, the latter as a
tribute to the recently deceased performer. This is not my kind of music at
all, really, but as far as my ears suggest, the performances should be pleasing
enough for the general jazz fan, unless he's racist or something. Better this, at least, than covering the latest
Bee Gees hits or still trying to grovel at the feet of Earth, Wind & Fire.
Occasional turn-offs do occur, and, sad to say,
they are mostly the fault of Clayton-Thomas, who sometimes lets his hair down
too much — for instance, turns the finale of ʽLucretia MacEvilʼ into
blabbery mush (how many "talk to me, Lucy!"'s does it take to make us
get the point?), or has a little too much fun with the audience at the end of
ʽHi-De-Hoʼ (okay, so its anthemic chorus may be the perfect trigger for happy audience participation, but
that is no excuse for turning it into sheer silliness). Worst of all, however,
is that we get to hear David's take on ʽI Love You More Than You'll Ever
Knowʼ — with all the throbbing pain of the original replaced with a
Vegas-approved schmaltz delivery, oversung, overscreamed, and even the lead
guitarist somehow manages to transform the original wail into a pseudo-Page
blues-de-luxe solo without any soul.
But on the whole, the experience is adequate:
ʽLifeʼ, ʽRide Captain Rideʼ, the bulk of
ʽLucretiaʼ and ʽHi-De-Hoʼ, the ubiquitous ʽYou've Made
Me...ʼ — I do not see how these could be susceptible to serious
criticism. Besides, ʽSpinning Wheelʼ gets an improvised fanfare-ridden
passage in the middle, and ʽAnd When I Dieʼ is split in half with a
John Lee Hooker cover and a Dave Bargeron-led trombone jam — so they are being
at least mildly inventive. All in all, In
Concert might even be a good alternative to getting all the studio albums:
in between the hits, the oldies, the improvisations, and the tributes, it
captures the spirit of post-Kooper BS&T much better than any individual
studio record, possibly with the exception of the 1969 one, and, several nasty
flaws notwithstanding, deserves a thumbs up.
MORE THAN EVER (1976)
1) They; 2) I Love You More
Than Ever; 3) Katy Bell; 4) Sweet Sadie The Savior; 5) Hollywood; 6) You're The
One; 7) Heavy Blue; 8) Saved By The Grace Of Your Love.
Curious, yes, but as late as late 1976, the
band was somehow still holding up. As rhythm & blues, black and white
alike, was steering ever closer to sterilized disco standards, and men were coming
to terms with beginning to sound like machines rather than human beings, there
are practically no signs of catastrophe on More Than Ever — yes, at the expense of sounding way too
old-fashioned, Blood, Sweat & Tears make an album here whose reputation a
couple of decades or so past its
original release must have inevitably exceeded the «warmth» of the initial
reception (when the record stalled at #165, and was used as an excuse by
Columbia to drop the band from its roster — not that the label itself didn't
have a hand in this failure).
Anyway, more than anything else, More Than Ever takes its cue from the
peak years of Stevie Wonder — with plenty of funky clavinet, brass fanfares à la ʽSuperstitionʼ,
«ominous», socially acute, R&B, and excursions into gospel soul territory.
Almost half of the album is self-penned, and the other half is allocated for
relatively obscure covers, sometimes provided by guest players (e. g.
ʽSweet Sadie The Saviorʼ, credited to Patti Austin, who took part in
the sessions as backup vocalist). There is very little here that could be even
remotely called «daring» or «experimental», but the songs are written and
recorded with care, and, most importantly, with enough obvious love for the
purely musical side of the business.
Occasionally, there are tasteless missteps.
ʽHollywoodʼ, a glitzy dance-funk number that, out of everything on
here, moves the closest to disco, was probably intended as a tongue-in-cheek
self-parody — the band sending up their own image of «prisoners of Las Vegas /
Beverly Hills» — but it is not funny enough to be perceived as a purely comic
number, and so, the ecstatic chants of "Hollywood! Hollywood! I think
we're gonna be here a while!.." can easily come across as silly pandering
rather than self-irony.
The big, bulky, gospelish ballads are also a problem.
ʽI Love You More Than Everʼ, despite not being written by any of the
band members, is entitled way too
similar to ʽI Love You More Than You'll Ever Knowʼ to suggest sheer
coincidence — and invokes unfavorable comparisons, since this here song is just a sentimental, hyper-orchestrated love
ballad. The oboe part from guest star Sid Weinberg is a useful bit of peaceful
pastoralism to draw attention away from the corny string arrangements, but it
is still not enough to push the song into «artsy baroque» territory. In the
end, it's just another sappy love hymn, suffering from excessive weight.
ʽSaved By The Grace Of Your Loveʼ, closing out the album, suffers
from the same, and this time, it does not even have any oboes for partial
redemption. But at least they both give it an honest try.
A little more adequacy seems to be present in
the tougher numbers. ʽTheyʼ is a funk / fusion vehicle that seems to
grumble against organized religion, but, most importantly, has several instrumental
passages that dispense with predictability — guitars, brass, vibraphones, and
the rhythm section move around in semi-free-form mode, groping for ideas, and
generate a few minutes of thoroughly anti-commercial controlled chaos à la Zappa, which, furthermore,
fits very well the overall confused / angry mood of the song. The funky
instrumental ʽHeavy Blueʼ, in comparison, never tries to move into
previously uncharted territory, but it does establish a moderately cool
proto-disco groove — delightfully integrating all of the band's varied
instrumentation to capture the now-dated, but then-resonant stylishness of the
decade without sacrificing the musician.
The rest of the songs do not deserve much
commentary, but, as usual, none of them are awful — in fact, beyond the unlucky
corniness of ʽHollywoodʼ, there is nothing on More Than Ever that would significantly challenge good taste:
«generic decent album» would be closer to the truth than «generic failure». Why
they decided to release ʽYou're The Oneʼ, one of the better ballads
from the set, as the lead single instead of the much more hard-hitting
ʽTheyʼ is anybody's guess — probably deemed ʽTheyʼ too
adventurous for the masses, or hoped for yet another ʽYou've Made Me So
Very Happyʼ — but on the whole, of course, their stubborn clinging to the
old style was commercially doomed from the start. However, that is no reason to
dismiss the record today without
giving it a chance: it remains perfectly listenable, and deserves an
unethusiastic, but honest thumbs up.
BRAND NEW DAY (1977)
1) Somebody I Trusted; 2)
Dreaming As One; 3) Same Old Blues; 4) Lady Put Out The Light; 5) Womanizer; 6)
Blue Street; 7) Gimme That Wine; 8) Rock & Roll Queen; 9) Don't Explain.
Dropped from Columbia, the band briefly signed
on with ABC Records, getting one more limp chance to «redeem» themselves from a
commercial perspective — and predictably blowing it. Brand New Day was an arrogantly optimistic title, but it did not
help. By 1977, BS&T were out of touch with everything and everybody: on one
hand, with disco hitting really hard,
Clayton-Thomas and friends were quite obstinate about making the necessary
transition — on the other hand, their brand of slightly obsolete jazz-funk-pop
was still classified as «light entertainment» rather than «serious musical
exploration».
The results were predictable — the critics
still hated them for being too shallow and silly, and the general public had no
interest in them for being too out-of-time. Throw in the inability to accompany
the LP with a solid single (ʽBlue Streetʼ — a ballad by Randy
Edelman, a songwriter usually covered by The Carpenters, Barry Manilow, and
Olivia Newton-John, to give an indication), add a complete lack of serious
promotion, and there you have it — the album was critically vilified, and did
not even manage to break into the Top 200.
Frankly speaking, though, it is a significant drop-down even from the
level of More Than Ever. Not a
single original composition — and the cover selection, in retrospect, is very
odd. Making use of material by contemporary songwriters worked well for them at
the beginning, when they latched on to serious artists like Randy Newman or
Laura Nyro; but Randy Edelman? Daniel Moore? Guy Fletcher? Phil Driscoll? you'd
have to be one hell of a connaisseur to remember all these names, but why would you want to be that kind of a
connaisseur? All of these songs are just easy-going, instantly forgettable
tripe, be they ballads or be they «rockers», and the only thing that makes them
listenable is that the band is still capable of getting a tasteful groove
going.
They only hit disco land once, on ʽRock
& Roll Queen (A Tribute To Janis Joplin)ʼ — however, they hit it hard
enough for Janis to revolve in her grave, full turn on every next bar. Well,
stripped of its ambitions, the song is an inoffensive dance track, with Mike
Stern trying to ennoble it with screechy rock'n'roll guitar soloing, but it is
not understood why the collective talents of BS&T should be wasted on such
stuff — which could have been, with much fewer expenses and in a more adequate
manner, handled by the likes of Billy Preston. Or Boney M, for that matter.
Elsewhere, they are mining two types of ground:
«hilarious» lite-funk (ʽSomebody I Trustedʼ, ʽGimme That
Wineʼ — "I just can't get well without Muscatel" should probably
have been the title of the album; note, however, that the clumsy, overweight
funky rearrangement does not in any way diminish the genuine hilariousness of
the original Lambert/Hendricks/Ross jazz version from 1962) and Late Evening
Balladry for You-Know-What (ʽLady Put Out The Lightʼ, ʽWomanizerʼ).
Every now and then a grumpy blues tune appears to shift the mood, but even if
they respect and mostly preserve the original somber mood of J. J. Cale's
ʽSame Old Bluesʼ, they add nothing of interest to the original
(except for some unnecessary brass overdubs).
Still, it must be said that even in 1977, the
band was functioning as a tight-oiled, professional machine, constructed out of
living people — the essence of the grooves they set up may not be too
interesting, but they still work each groove to the bone, demanding top results
from every single player. This perseverance alone, a sort of «ethical music
code» that they might have broken in favor of stiff, slick disco numbness and
synthesizer swamps a million times already, does not allow me to give the
record a thumbs down. If only the songs weren't that dumb and generic, Brand New Day, in its context, could
have easily been a minor lost gem. As it is, its unavailability on CD up to
this very day is no big loss.
NUCLEAR BLUES (1980)
1) Agitato; 2) Nuclear Blues;
3) Manic Depression; 4) I'll Drown In My Own Tears; 5) Fantasy Stage; 6)
(Suite) Spanish Wine.
Losing the entire band after Brand New Day had infamously ended up
as the «Same Old Flub» was no big deal for Clayton-Thomas — after all, earlier
on in the decade the entire band had lost him,
so a quid pro quo was in the works anyway. Some sources state that he was not
going to use the BS&T tag at all, but that the band's old manager somehow
persuaded him, so David simply enlisted a bunch of his Canadian friends and
ploughed on, brave guy.
Listening to Nuclear Blues makes it fairly obvious why this «new» Blood, Sweat
& Tears was only able to get one
new album on the MCA label. The reason is that the lineup may be new, but the
music, the vibe, the sentiments stay exactly the same — by the standards of
1980, these guys might just as well have been «reinventing» the Charleston. In
retrospect, Clayton-Thomas should probably earn our admiration for the
obstinacy. In general, it did him no good: the album expectedly sank again,
and most people probably did not even go to the trouble of noticing that it did
come out. But those few people who are
ready to take note might actually find something they can not only respect out
of a general respect for bravery, but actually enjoy.
When the album is being bad or silly, it is the
kind of badness / silliness that we are quite used to from Clayton-Thomas. Not
for the first time, he picks out a solid soulful oldie (Ray Charles'
ʽDrown In My Own Tearsʼ), then slows it down and stretches it out to
breaking point, mutilating every inch with his overacting. For the hard rock
part of the show, he picks out another solid oldie, Jimi's ʽManic
Depressionʼ, and gives it a flashy brass reading that only works if you
forget all about the schizo-psycho original. From his own songwriting gut comes
the title track, a passable piece of funk-blues that does not sensibly match
the song's ominous lyrical message — and the predictable piece of cabaret
schlock, ʽFantasy Stageʼ, which could work in Las Vegas, but hardly
in my or your living room.
However, the unsung hero of this album is not
Clayton-Thomas, but rather his hitherto unknown pal, trumpetist Bruce Cassidy.
He not only contributes the opening instrumental (ʽAgitatoʼ), but is
also responsible for a large chunk of the closing 15-minute suite,
ʽSpanish Wineʼ — an inventive mix of various Latin musical forms with
elements of fusion. In between both, this makes for twenty minutes of
competent, energetic, and occasionally memorable music. Naturally, a third-, if
not fourth-generation BS&T circa 1980 could hardly be capable of pushing
boundaries or anything, but the various movements of ʽSpanish Wineʼ,
most of them intelligently sewn together with Dave Piltch's subtly thrilling
bass part, form an intriguing, if not very deep, composition, something that
the old BS&T hadn't really tried out since the early 1970s.
All in all, this almost desperate attempt to
stick even harder to their guns and go all-out retro on listeners who were just
saying goodbye to the age of disco and hello to the age of electrofunk,
synth-pop, and man-machines, was as good a «swan song» for BS&T as anything
— it goes without saying that this nostalgic meandering, sometimes impressive
and sometimes embarrassing, was much preferable to the option of trying to fit
in with the times and incorporate contemporary synthesizers, drum machines, and
pop-metal guitars. Hence, despite the many problems of Nuclear Blues, I will succumb to the temptation of giving it a thumbs up:
at the very least, ʽSpanish Wineʼ deserves one all by itself, even if
it comes in tandem with some gummy Ray Charles.
LIVE (1980/1994)
1) Intro; 2) Agitato; 3)
Nuclear Blues; 4) Manic Depression; 5) God Bless The Child; 6) Lucretia
MacEvil; 7) Hi-De-Ho; 8) And When I Die; 9) Spinning Wheel; 10) You've Made Me
So Very Happy; 11) (Suite) Spanish Wine; 12) Drown In My Own Tears; 13) Gimme
That Wine; 14) Trouble In Mind / Shake A Hand.
Although this album was recorded on October 12,
1980 (at the Street Scene in Los Angeles), it took fifteen years for it to see
the light of day — meaning that nobody really cared until Rhino Records started
out on their missionary mission to salvage, cherish, and promote historically
relevant (or irrelevant — no big deal) material that the big ones left in the
vaults for one reason or another. But it does
make sense that the last album to be officially released by BS&T had to be
a live one, considering that the band name has continued to serve as a tag for
various incarnations of the «BS&T spirit», going out on the road for over
thirty years since they last churned out some studio product.
Essentially, it happens as follows: Bobby
Colomby has the rights to the band's name, and leases it out to whoever is
willing to buy for a reasonable price, as long as there is a trumpet and
trombone attached. Some of these groupings have included Clayton-Thomas and
some have not; certain sources say that he has not sung with BS&T since
2004, but as long as he stays in good health, there is no telling what tomorrow
may bring. Altogether, BS&T should probably be in the Guinness book —
through those thirty years, approximately 120-150 different people have been
listed as formal members of the band, even if some may have lasted for just a
month or so. Then again, why not? They never hurt anyone, and they wisely
refrain from «creating» stuff under the name of Blood, Sweat & Tears, and
if you want to get rid of twenty bucks, there sure are worse ways than spending
them on an opportunity to sing along to ʽHi-De-Hoʼ.
Anyway, this
here live album still comes from an era when Clayton-Thomas provided a solid
link to the past — namely, it is from the small tour undertaken to promote Nuclear Blues, and so the album is
played here almost in its entirety (with the happy exclusion of ʽFantasy
Stageʼ). The sound quality is pretty good, the energy level is all right,
and the songs are played quite faithfully to the studio versions, so that the
excellent stuff still rocks (ʽAgitatoʼ; the ʽSpanish Wineʼ
suite), the overwrought stuff still irritates (ʽDrown In My Own
Tearsʼ is still drowning in its own bathos like there was no tomorrow),
and the so-so stuff still remains inexplicable (why ʽManic Depressionʼ?
who in the band was ever maniacally depressed?).
Unfortunately, being so preoccupied with this
promotion, the band succumbs to the «medley curse» — or maybe Clayton-Thomas
only had time to teach his Canadian friends the bare rudiments of the old
classics (but they do play quite impressively on all the sections, so there is
no question in my mind that they could have handled the proper load, had they
had the opportunity to do so). In between two sections, completely devoted to Nuclear Blues material, they stuff a
15-minute potpourri of the classic
hits, where only ʽHi-De-Hoʼ gets the royal treatment because of its
karaoke potential. And even if those classic hits were not the greatest
masterpieces of 20th century music, they still deserved a better fate.
Particularly since there was no reason to castrate them in
order to make more space for a twelve-minute jam to the theme of ʽGimme
That Wineʼ — where did that get
resuscitated from? It's essentially a joke number, not to be promoted, much
less to be used as a fanfare conclusion to the whole show. «We're a cabaret
band and we want you to leave the building with that feeling?» Is that the
message? Silly. But well representative of the band's entire career — where,
for every splash of serious artistic ambition, there had always been a compensating
splash of glitzy Vegas cheapness. There is nothing wrong with a little
silliness or a little lighthearted humor every now and then, of course, but it
all depends on the timing, the context, and on how high the joke in question is
ranked on the playlist. (And this is not even mentioning all the ultra-critics
who think that Blood, Sweat & Tears as a whole was just one big gag that
ran for way too long — something that I strongly disagree with, because even
ʽSpanish Wineʼ has some serious points of interest to it).
In any case, if you actually want a BS&T
live album, do make sure that your primary choice is the one from 1976, because
this particular Live is not even
proper BS&T — it's essentially just Nuclear
Blues plus a medley of deeply humiliated classics and a joke-style funk-pop
number run into the ground with way too much force. But if you are just an
obstinate completist, chances are you won't be too irritated with this stuff, either, particularly because the
basic condition is satisfied: David's Canadian friends are organised, tight,
collected, and energetic throughout. If much of this ends up being applied
either to the wrong material or in the wrong way to the right material, well,
that's quite a traditional part of the Blood, Sweat & Tears idiom, too.
BLOODROCK (1970)
1) Gotta Find A Way; 2) Castle
Of Thoughts; 3) Fatback; 4) Double Cross; 5) Timepiece; 6) Wicked Truth; 7)
Gimme Your Head; 8) Fantastic Piece Of Architecture; 9) Melvin Laid An Egg.
What kind of an association would you have with
the word bloodrock? Any band that
calls itself that should probably be imagined as some sort of particularly
gory, trashy younger brother of Black Sabbath. There's even a couple horror
flicks out there called Bloodstone,
but, of course, the «stone» part should be swapped for a «rock» part — the band
is American, after all. Actually, not just American, but Texan, which would
naturally spruce up further associations with Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and when you look at the album cover,
there's, like, blood on it, plenty of
it, and even a rock for good measure.
In reality, though, the boys from Bloodrock
were nowhere near that creepy. A bunch of honest rock'n'rollers from Fort
Worth, they spent three years playing as «The Naturals» (indeed) and then three
more years playing as «Crowd + 1» (because if you just call yourself «Crowd»,
people might suspect you of arrogant minimalism), before teaming up with Terry
Knight, the producer of Grand Funk Railroad, who came up with the «Bloodrock» moniker
for them. Knight, not fully satisfied by already having one big fat ass hard
rock ensemble under his belt, decided to procure himself a Southern (Texan)
counterpart to the Northern (Michigan) brand of GFR, took Bloodrock under his
wing, secured them a contract with Capitol, and produced their first LP.
Testosterone-driven, sweaty, radio-friendly
American hard rock is generally not my cup of tea at all — I can cope with the
macho attitude, and I can cope with the family-friendly attitude, but combining
them is bad for spiritual digestion. Fortunately, Bloodrock, especially on
their first albums, went beyond that. They had a fairly
testosterone-respecting lead singer, Jim Rutledge, with one of those grizzly
voices that suggests pumping iron, and a crunchy guitar player, Lee Pickens, a
big fan of thick, grumbly guitar riffs, of which he'd written a fair share for
this album (more, I think, than Steppenwolf in their entire career). But they
also had a streak of darkness and psychedelic escapism to their craft — Bloodrock is not any less inspired by
the Doors and Hendrix than it is by Steppenwolf and GFR.
I think that nothing better illustrates this
idea than the start of the album — ʽGotta Find A Wayʼ begins with a
low, heavy, «macho» rhythm pattern, but five seconds later is complemented by a
high-pitched, fuzzy, psycho-wailing «siren», and more space is given to the
battling guitar and organ solos than to the vocal sections. Then ʽCastle
Of Thoughtsʼ is the album's most directly Hendrix-inspired track, its
rhythm being almost directly lifted off ʽStone Freeʼ, but Stephen
Hill's keyboards add an extra layer of complexity, and the guitar/organ
interplay part at the end is exciting in a purely «musical» way, putting the
emphasis on melody rather than «power».
There may not be anything on Bloodrock that pushes it over the top:
although the complete combination of ingredients is somewhat unique, it is not
unique enough to turn them into prime league members overnight. But on a song
by song basis, Bloodrock is
intelligently written and effervescently well performed hard rock. The riffs on
ʽDouble Crossʼ, ʽWicked Truthʼ, and particularly
ʽMelvin Laid An Eggʼ are all perfectly respectable even for the
highest standards of 1970; the lyrics, fluctuating between absurdist,
idealistic, and morbid, are unpredictable and not always laughable
(ʽTimepieceʼ, after all, is about a prisoner's last minutes before
the gallows); and the lengthy songs have enough of dynamics to them, including
softer interludes and jammy bits. Towards the end, they even try to boldly
overstep the boundaries by offering a little Gothic art-rock suite —
ʽFantastic Piece Of Architectureʼ is a Poe-worthy tale of
disillusionment and «time-conquers-all» sentiment, ceremoniously dressed up in
solemn organs, Bach-inspired piano lines and echoey guitar tinkles, and it
works surprisingly better than one could expect from a bunch of down-to-earth
Texan rockers (although I can't help wondering how much better still it would
have sounded in the hands of an Alan Parsons).
In fact, on a song-by-song basis there are
simply no bad tracks on Bloodrock at all, which ultimately makes their
debut record their greatest one (as it happens much too often with second-rate
bands). I even like ʽFatbackʼ, despite its lack of a great riff (the
song is cleverly driven by piano chords, giving it a little whiff of modern jazz),
and ʽGimme Your Headʼ, despite the fact that its own riff deserved a
thicker sound and a more prominent position in the mix. Even so, these two
minor creations are actually the shortest
ones on the album, meaning that Bloodrock were never above stretching out a
good idea when the good idea deserved to be stretched out.
Do not expect a jaw-dropping masterpiece, but do expect an interesting combination of
ideas. Turning on the «grumbly old-timer» mode, I will say that, had these guys
come together forty years later, Bloodrock
would almost certainly be a completely one-dimensional creation; back in 1970,
though, being one-dimensional was a rather embarrassing perspective, so they
gave us this rather oddball take on Texan rock instead. Thumbs up.
BLOODROCK 2 (1970)
1) Lucky In The Morning; 2)
Cheater; 3) Sable And Pearl; 4) Fallin'; 5) Children's Heritage; 6) Dier Not A
Lover; 7) D. O. A.; 8) Fancy Space Odyssey.
Bloodrock got their biggest — in fact, their only — break with the rather unexpected
(and rather tacky) popularity of ʽD.O.A.ʼ, or, rather, the heavily
abbreviated single version of ʽD.O.A.ʼ as opposed to the eight-minute
long «epic» version on the LP. In terms of «cheap thrills», it was probably the
most Sabbath-style song they'd ever committed to tape — a story told through
the dying brain of an airplane crash victim, experiencing his last moments on
Earth, with heavy use of «intimidating» musical tricks and volume tricks that
recall ʽBlack Sabbathʼ (the song) in matters of «setting» rather than
musical substance.
Most people were probably perversely attracted
to the tune because of the gory lyrics, with each single reference to blood,
pain, and death articulated so slowly and gravely by Rutledge as if he were
reciting from the Iliad. But even if your English is not good enough to allow
you to understand what is going on, the tune is still appropriately moody,
driven by an organ riff that cleverly emulates an ambulance siren and Rick
Cobb's expert percussion work, as the drummer subtly prepares us for the chorus
explosions. It certainly doesn't have enough original ideas to fill up all of
its eight minutes — but then you can always have the short single version. And
it does feel a little eerie; at the
very least, one could always argue that its subject matter is much closer to
home (Lee Pickens claimed that it was inspired by a real accident that he had
witnessed) than the grotesque Satanic imagery of ʽBlack Sabbathʼ.
That said, ʽD.O.A.ʼ is hardly typical
of Bloodrock 2 — it's just that, in
their prime days, the band took special care that each album include at least
one lengthy mood piece, so this one merely sits here in the same spot where
they last had ʽFantastic Piece Of Architectureʼ. The rest of the
music is almost strictly in the basic rock'n'roll scheme, heavily marinated in
the «Americana spirit». In particular, John Nitzinger, another of their Fort
Worth friends who had previously contributed three songs for the Bloodrock album, was now involved
heavier than ever, and began supplying the band with expansive roots-rock
anthems, such as ʽLucky In The Morningʼ, and novelty tunes, such as
ʽFancy Space Odysseyʼ, which combines barroom boogie with seemingly
absurdist lyrics (as it happens, they actually relate to the band's early days
when they were called «Fancy Space» and played in a Fort Worth nightclub).
This bunch of new songs, while not at all bad
per se, still indicates a downward slide in the curve, mainly because the
heaviness and crunch of the first album are frequently downplayed in favor of a
slightly more rustic — dare we even say «redneckier»? — atmosphere. The guitar
tones are still low and distorted, but more in a «brawny» than an «evil» kind
of way, and, in agreement with that, Rutledge's singing keeps generating a
braggadoccio effect rather than the angry / snappy effect it had earlier on
tracks like ʽCastle Of Thoughtsʼ. The absolute low point is
ʽSable And Pearlʼ, the band's attempt at hitting it from the soulful
side, where Rutledge overscreams in the bridge section (a "TEACH ME TO
LOVE YOU!" that sounds more like a "get out of the kitchen!",
if you get my drift) to a very irritating effect — the rest, thankfully, is a
little more restrained, but still, a bit on the «flat» side of things.
Riff-wise, I feel partial to
ʽFallin'ʼ and Nitzinger's ʽChildren's Heritageʼ (the former
A-side of ʽD.O.A.ʼ), even though both tunes are essentially just
fast-paced slices of blues-rock; and ʽFancy Space Odysseyʼ is catchy,
but excessively silly — its somewhat carnivalesque riff suggests a comic tune,
yet Rutledge sings all the lyrics in his usual grave voice, without any hints
at irony, and the end result is confusing. Come to think of it, the whole album
is confusing: lots of decent ideas, none of which are taken to their logical
conclusions: the band is clearly stuck in the treacherous space between «cock
rock» and «artsiness», afraid to push too hard in the latter direction but also
a little embarrassed to root itself too deep in the former. Ultimately, Bloodrock 2 is a bit of a bore, and the
presence of ʽD.O.A.ʼ in all of its stretched-out quasi-glory does not
necessarily serve as a relief. But then again, it could have been so much worse
— I mean, rough Texan hard rock? God only knows to what sort of lower depths that could descend, so let us all say
thank you to the healthy musical climate of 1970.
BLOODROCK 3 (1971)
1) Jessica; 2) Whiskey
Vengeance; 3) Song For A Brother; 4) You Gotta Roll; 5) Breach Of Lease; 6)
Kool-Aid-Kids; 7) A Certain Kind; 8) America, America.
All right, looks like we might want to rethink
our thoughts about the self-titled debut. Unquestionably, that was Bloodrock
at their freshest, and they'd never really improve on the formula in general —
but on a rigid song-for-song basis, Bloodrock
3 might just be their most consistent application of the dang formula. The
trick is that it lays in a slight course correction: only one tune carries on
with the dumb barroom rock sound (ʽYou Gotta Rollʼ), while everything
else is retransferred back to the state of primordial darkness.
ʽJessicaʼ, in particular, is a far
more disturbing way to kick off an LP than a rise-and-shine anthem like
ʽLucky In The Morningʼ — and the rest of the record rises up to the
challenge as well, with suitably creepy riffs, scorching lyrics, and a vocal
performance from Rutledge that never forgets to add a «doom» element to all the
brawny masculinity.
Of course, something like ʽBreach Of
Leaseʼ is, first and foremost, a self-conscious attempt at repeating the
success of ʽD.O.A.ʼ (although it was never released as a single: big
mistake for the band, actually, to override it with the relatively toothless
ballad ʽA Certain Kindʼ). But it is more ambitious than
ʽD.O.A.ʼ (lyrically, the «breach of lease» refers to the relations
between man and God, no less) and has a better chorus — wordless, in fact, just
an inspirationally played descending heavy riff that could rival Iommi, issue
of guitar tone omitted. It lacks the gory sensationalism of
ʽD.O.A.ʼ, and you can't sing "I REMEMBER!" at the top of
your whiskey-aided lungs to the anthemic chorus, but it's the better song out
of the two anyway.
Other highlights include ʽWhiskey
Vengeanceʼ, a song that has both the words ʽwhiskeyʼ and ʽvengeanceʼ in its title,
which is very appropriate for a band called Bloodrock, and sounds like a
Western movie theme with just a small pinch of B-movie horror spirit thrown in;
and ʽKool-Aid-Kidsʼ, with a speedy guitar / organ dialog that is very
close in effect to classic Deep Purple — I am particularly partial to the relentlessly
pounding main guitar riff, but the whole song is delivered over six minutes in
what feels like one correctly focused breath.
As usual, Bloodrock are at their weakest when
they start going all soulful on our asses, even getting downright preachy on
ʽSong For A Brotherʼ, a number that is, fortunately, an inoffensive
blues-rock jam for about half of its duration. The only really weak number is ʽA Certain Kindʼ, although it is
useful to remember where that one came from — it is actually a cover of a ballad
from the self-titled debut of Soft Machine! One thing you can't deny is that
these Bloodrock guys were much better
educated than people usually want to give them credit for. Problem is, they
can't do much with the song other than just reduce it to a rather mediocre
hillbilly-ballad level, and Rutledge's singing loses its pizzazz every time he
rinses the «evil» out of it.
These are all but minor exceptions, though. In
general, Bloodrock 3 is all about
anger, frustration, paranoia, and the local Texan interpretation of the
apocalypse. It ain't no masterpiece, but it's got a mix of American roots-rock,
British heavy metal, and continental «artsiness» that very few people... come
to think of it, nobody could get such
a good grip on. Even if the songs may not strike you as powerful compared to
those people from whom Rutledge and co. were taking lessons, you still got to
remember — this sonic blend is quite a thing in itself, and even if I didn't
like the songs (but I do), I'd still end up with a thumbs up.
U.S.A. (1971)
1) It's A Sad World; 2) Don't
Eat The Children; 3) Promises; 4) Crazy 'Bout You Babe; 5) Hangman's Dance; 6)
American Burn; 7) Rock & Roll Candy Man; 8) Abracadaver; 9) Magic Man; 10)
Erosion.
The last and most colorful — at least, in regard
to the sleeve — album by the original Bloodrock, before Rutledge and Pickens
left the band to a cruel and miserable fate. No major changes in style, but you
can see a slight increase in the number of tracks, which indicates the
transition to a more compact, less epic scale of things. Even the longest song
here, ʽMagic Manʼ, is not a spooky Gothic phantasmagoria à la
ʽD.O.A.ʼ or ʽBreach Of Leaseʼ, but a restrained, collected
blues-rocker, the most «phantasmagoric» piece of which might be the opening
electric piano solo (similar in style to and possibly influenced by Ray
Manzarek's solo in ʽRiders On The Stormʼ, though, naturally, nowhere
near as brilliantly constructed).
The thing is, with this record Bloodrock seem
to be taking their «social duties» more seriously than ever — song after song
carries a flash of some apocalyptic vision or a scrap of some prophetic
message. With Bloodrock's lack of proper atmospheric skills, these messages
never carry the convincing force of a ʽGimmie Shelterʼ or a Dark Side Of The Moon, but at least it
helps Rutledge, Pickens, and Co. to preserve the «snappy» attitude of their
best efforts so far and deliver the goods with enough energy and feeling to
shoo away Mr. Languid Boredom.
Not that I could name any particular highlights. For some weird reason, the most memorable
bit on the album for me has always been the maniacal laughter fit at the end of
ʽAmerican Burnʼ which I have always associated with the album sleeve
(which, when fully spread, depicts a very green Mephistopheles embracing the
Capitol with one hand and performing lobotomy with the other) even without
realizing that the lyrics of the song are indeed referring to the same cover.
Which is a little embarrassing, since the song is riff-based, after all, and
should be memorable for its twin guitar/organ melodic line instead. But it
isn't.
Still, we could at least namedrop ʽDon't
Eat The Childrenʼ, a fairly upbeat and jolly tune to be matched with such
a title, especially when it comes to the fussy honky-tonk piano solo; the harsh
funk-rocker ʽRock & Roll Candy Manʼ; and the closest thing here
to an actual «epic» — ʽHangman's Danceʼ, which borrows the chords
from the coda to Yes's ʽStarship Trooperʼ but puts them to different
use, replacing the beauty-focused futuristic gaze of Yes with a grittier, more
grounded perspective on current things (not that Bloodrock ever created
anything as breathtaking as ʽStarship Trooperʼ, but at least they
tried).
But in the end, my thumbs up for this album would be
explained not by any individual songs, but rather just by the record showing
some character. It's all mild and never rocks you to the core, yet most of the
songs are infused with a mix of sadness, anger, and irony that you wouldn't
expect from a completely «generic» American hard rock album. The lack of a
single distinctive «peak» like ʽD.O.A.ʼ may actually help things —
the music here does not get by on goofy (gory) gimmickry, but rather on this
sense of sadness that subtly inhabits the melodies and even Rutledge's vocal
deliveries, which get progressively less brawny and more tragic. As it is, USA may not be a great album, or it may
not even be Bloodrock's best album, but it may be that one Bloodrock album
which has finally found itself a general purpose. Ironically, God (or Mephisto)
simply would not have that, so USA
would also be the last LP from
classic era Bloodrock as we know it.
BLOODROCK LIVE (1972)
1) Intro; 2) Castle Of
Thoughts; 3) Breach Of Lease; 4) Lucky In The Morning; 5) Kool Aid Kids; 6)
DOA; 7) You Gotta Roll; 8) Cheater; 9) Jessica; 10) Gotta Find A Way.
Quite superfluous, really. When it comes to
hard-rocking bands playing live, you generally expect them to pull all the
stops that haven't already been pulled in the studio, but this particular live
album shows there was fairly little left to pull. So little, in fact, that Jim Rutledge
even went all the way to dishonor the band by including two studio tracks,
slightly remixed and overlaid with fake applause (ʽYou Gotta Rollʼ
and ʽCheaterʼ), because, apparently, there was not enough material
for a proper double live album. Considering that the final recording still only
lasts for barely over an hour, they could have easily gone with a single long
LP instead of two short-running ones instead — but double (and triple) live
albums being all the rage circa 1972, Bloodrock preferred a different shade of
shame. Come to think of it, maybe they thought that by mid-1972, nobody would
remember how the old tunes went anyway.
The actual
live recordings cover the band's first three albums (U.S.A. is not included at all, probably because the live shows
were played before its release) and, for the most part, are underwhelming. The
mix is good enough, and the band gels together fairly well, but the songs are
played in rather strict accordance with the studio originals, small minutiae
notwithstanding, and even if the setlist is consistently strong (with the
possible exception of ʽLucky In The Morningʼ, although that song,
with its arena flavor and hymnal pretense, is clearly a natural candidate for a
live highlight), the band does virtually nothing to expand on the songs'
potential.
The only exception is an extended version of
ʽGotta Find A Wayʼ, mainly through the addition of some unimpressive
jamming and organ soloing and a very shaky, faux-energetic bit of audience
participation (which, among other things, comprises Jim Rutledge trying to scat
in between the collective clamoring — not a very harmonious activity). In the
end, that makes the song worse than it used to be, while everything else is
just about the same. And you know there's something deeply not right with a hard rock band if it simply replicates its hard
rock sound on stage.
I mean, even AC/DC tried to rip it up harder
than in the studio — not an easy task, but occasionally, they did manage.
Bloodrock, on the contrary, do not even try. Maybe it is because they thought
of themselves as an «art» band rather than just rock'n'rollers, but, well, they
thought wrong: these songs need to be crispy and crunchy — simply reproducing
all the lumpy slowness of ʽBreach Of Leaseʼ and ʽD.O.A.ʼ
the way it used to be does not work. I cannot give the album a thumbs down,
since the setlist saves it fairly well — in fact, feel free to use it as an
introduction to the basic Bloodrock sound if you wish — but, unfortunately, it
will not let you know anything (good) about Bloodrock that you did not already
know otherwise, even though it should have.
PASSAGE (1972)
1) Help Is On The Way; 2)
Scottsman; 3) Juice; 4) The Power; 5) Life Blood; 6) Days And Nights; 7) Lost
Fame; 8) Thank You Daniel Ellsberg; 9) Fantasy.
More accurately, I think the album's real title
is Bloodrock Passage, since what we
see on the cover is the image of a ship passing between what might look like
two bloody rocks. In that case, the name of the band is either Zero, which happens to coincide with the
number of positive emotions I get from listening to the album, or Led Zeppelin. In any case, this band is
definitely not Bloodrock, an early 1970s Texan rock outfit that produced such
grumbly monsters as Bloodrock, Bloodrock 2, Bloodrock 3, Bloodrock USA,
Bloodrock Live, and that great lost
masterpiece, Bloodrock Play The Entire
Engelbert Humperdinck Catalog Just To Prove That Nobody Ever Pigeonholes A Real
Texan.
What this new band is, having just lost Jim Rutledge and Lee Pickens, i.e. the only half-decent reasons one ever listens
to a Bloodrock album, is a progressive
rock band with a fixation on folk, classical, and jazz influences. The new
singer guy... well, imagine the Rolling Stones losing both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and replacing them
with, say, Woolly Wolstenholme from Barclay James Harvest, because, I mean, who
else do you turn to when you are really in such a desperate need to salvage the
Rolling Stones brand? Except you have to downscale the volume a bit: Warren Ham
is really no Woolly when it comes to talent. He is a competent singer, as well
as saxophone and flute player, but all he really knew at that point was how to
listen to others — Jethro Tull, King Crimson, ELP — and imitate them. Granted,
this was better than what followed: in the early 1980s, Ham would be touring
with Kansas, then he would go on to
join Kerry Livgren's new Christian rock band AD as lead singer, and, finally,
become a Christian rock solo performer in his own limited right.
Of course, condemning an album like Passage just because «it ain't real
Bloodrock» is silly. Passage is a
very bad record not because it dares to replace the heavy riffs, gloomy lyrics,
and scorching solos of classic Bloodrock with more formally complex progressive
rock escapades, flute solos, and synthesizer-led jams, but simply because all
of this music happens to be very, very boring. The songs, mostly co-written
with Ham and the band's old keyboard player Stephen Hill, all seem like pale,
limp shadows of their betters, without a shred of individual vision and nowhere
near close to their general energy level. In fact, I'd rather have preferred
them to be awfully distasteful and primitive, like Uriah Heep — as such, they
are not even any use as a punching bag. Just your basic bland, instantly
forgettable crap.
Just a couple of quick examples will suffice.
ʽScottsmanʼ milks the same territory as Jethro Tull's Elizabethan
marches — in fact, its main flute part echoes the "I've come down from the
upper class..." part of the freshly released ʽThick As A Brickʼ,
which could hardly be a coincidence. But there is no sharp Martin Barre guitar
accompaniment to give it teeth, nor does Ham's attempt at «heroic» singing (for
which his voice is too weak anyway) have any stun power — second-hand copying
at its most blatant. Further on down the line, ʽDays And Nightsʼ is
stretched to eight minutes in order to incorporate a lengthy jam section, a
large part of which is driven by a brass riff expressly taken from King
Crimson's ʽ21st Century Schizoid Manʼ. Take it, but don't waste it — all it does is just hang
there while the keyboard player noodles for several minutes around it with one
of about eighty billion organ solos that were recorded in 1972 and all sounded
the same (imitating either Emerson or Wakeman).
It gets worse, because Ham, Hill, and the rest
of Hoodrock insist on being diverse and matching their progressive rock
«skills» with time-honored Americana, so they also massacre funk (the one
minute long introduction to ʽLost Fameʼ, after which it becomes an
anthem to the power of the Mighty Moog), blues (ʽThank You, Daniel
Ellsbergʼ, which has to be one of the lamest fusions of B. B. King with
contemporary American politics that I've ever heard), and swamp rock (ʽThe
Powerʼ). In conjunction with the original stiffness and lumpiness of the
band's rhythm section, Ham's march-on-Christian-soldiers vocalizing and Hill's
somnambulant keyboard tinkering reduce each and every one of these genres to
the nightmarish question of «does humanity actually need to listen to music, anyway?»
It is all so mind-numbing that I wouldn't even
want to recommend the album to fans of Kansas — as much as I hate the band, at
least it had its own silly schtick sort of worked out from the very beginning; Passage is just a meandering mess with
no reason whatsoever to exist. Amazingly, the album almost managed to grope its way into the Top 100 — not so
wonderous, perhaps, given the fact that Thick
As A Brick had made it all the way to the top that very year, but at least,
not too many people were tricked into
a "hey, it's got flute on it, it's just like those groovy Jethro Tull
guys!" mindset, so that's okay, and there is no need to accompany the thumbs down
with any extra hatred. They pretty much got what they deserved, right on the
spot.
WHIRLWIND TONGUES (1974)
1) It's Gonna Be Love; 2)
Sunday Song; 3) Parallax; 4) Voices; 5) Eleanor Rigby; 6) Stilled By Whirlwind;
7) Guess What I Am; 8) Lady Of Love; 9) Jungle.
I am going against the grain here, including my
own old assessment of this album, but I do
believe now that Whirlwind Tongues
is an ever so slight improvement over Passage
where songwriting and impartial self-assessment of the band's abilities are
concerned. Not that it matters in the slightest: the Ham-led Bloodrock at their
absolute best can only present sufficient interest for historians of the
«pretentious pop music scene» in the post-Beatles, pre-punk era, and maybe for
a small group of strange people who'd probably scare me shitless if they were
to present themselves in person. But still, just for justice' sake: Whirlwind Tongues is weak, but not
awful.
The major difference is that this time around,
they are not so openly emulating
their betters — they still have a serious problem with trying to find their own
style, but something is beginning to
materialize. Perhaps a sort of folk-rock sound in the vein of contemporary
Traffic, but gentler and more sentimental (a.k.a. «sissy»). With an occasional
surprise or two, and some basic diversity. No eight-minute epics with bad Moog
solos (okay, some bad Moog solos are
inevitable, but we could live with these). Mostly boring, sometimes too cute
for their own good, but give them a break — they are really trying.
I mean, it must
have taken some brainwork to take ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ, speed it up, add
flutes, and make it rock, if only ever so softly, right? I must admit that it
is a more inventive recasting of the song than Aretha Franklin's, for instance
— I much prefer my ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ in a steady tempo, tight, focused,
and with flutes than see it turned into a rather chaotic R&B number. Not
that the world really needs either of these, but this novelty approach is not
at all repugnant. Other than the singer getting a bit too carried away (should
have kept it modestly trimmed, without any extra yeah yeah yeahs, I think),
it's actually fun.
Other than that, ʽIt's Gonna Be Loveʼ
is a solemn soft-rock anthem that suffers from the absence of authentic Crosby,
Stills & Nash harmonies (and the presence of one of those corny Moog
solos); ʽSunday Songʼ is loungey vaudeville that tries to mix sentimentality
with humor; ʽParallaxʼ is like Blind Faith's ʽDo What You
Likeʼ with a Jethro Tull-style flute part thrown in; ʽVoicesʼ
speeds along with good confidence and has the album's best riff, which would
have been even better if they knew it themselves and got it rid of the
distracting «flanging» effects; ʽStilled By Whirlwindʼ is too
preachy, too long, has too many instances of the word "propaganda"
and embarrassing falsetto harmonies, but is okay otherwise; ʽGuess What I
Amʼ is an awful piano ballad that shows Ham's lack of vocal power in all
its anti-glory as the man desperately tries to prove that he can do it all,
from tenor to falsetto; ʽLady Of Loveʼ is a simplistic serenade, not
particularly redeemed by the heavy use of saxes blended into its primitive
keyboard riff; and ʽJungleʼ is the band's attempt at doing something
darker and weirder, partially successful, as they populate the minimalistic
skeleton with «jungle noises».
Whew, at least there was some incentive to
briefly namedrop all the songs on the album. That does not mean it merits a
thumbs up, but it does mean there was enough diversity and creativity to evade
any accusations of idleness and laziness. No talent, sure, but any idiot with
talent can be creative — now creativity without
talent, that's gotta count for something! In a way, it almost makes me feel
sorry that the band finally called it a day soon afterwards — not sorry enough,
though, to hunt for one more final LP, recorded in 1975, but shelved and not
released officially until 2000 (as part of the rare 2-CD Triptych edition that combines both Ham-era albums with nine more
songs, allegedly joined under the working title Unspoken Words).
Although, let us not exaggerate. Bloodrock were
not all that outstanding in their prime, merely worth getting to know if you
are a sucker for 1970 — and whichever direction Ham could take the survivors in
the mid-Seventies would probably be a dead end, so I guess it's all for the
better that we did not get to see the Bloodrock Disco Album, not to mention the
Bloodrock Hair Metal Comeback, or be subjected to the «Bloodrock Dig Their New
Indie Label So Much They Have Decided To Release Two New Albums Each Year For
The Sake Of Their Three Fans» reality show. Having run out of blood (and out of
rock) back in 1972, at best, they could be opening shows for the likes of Styx,
and how much more embarrassment could this world stand?
WE ARE EVER SO CLEAN (1967)
1) Look At Me I'm You; 2) I'll
Be Late For Tea; 3) Remarkable Saga Of The Frozen Dog; 4) Telegram Tuesday; 5)
Love Is; 6) What's It For; 7) People Of The Royal Parks; 8) What On Earth; 9)
Mrs. Murphy's Budgerigar; 10) I Will Bring You This And That; 11) Mister
Watchmaker; 12) When The Alarm Clock Rings; 13) The Intrepid Balloonist's Handbook
Vol. 1; 14) You; 15) Track For Speedy Freaks Or Instant LP Digest.
How many times have we heard the term «Sgt. Pepper rip-off» applied to album
so-and-so, only to put it on and understand that «being influenced by Sgt. Pepper»
or even «being recorded in the era of Sgt.
Pepper» would be a more honorable definition? The truth is that real «rip-offs» of Sgt. Pepper, as a rule, have not survived — be it the Stones, the
Hollies, the Moody Blues, the Bee Gees, Procol Harum, or any other band of any
notoriety that we still remember as having produced LPs in 1967, each of them
had their own voice, with Sgt. Pepper
spurring them on to flash it rather than just serving as a role model that had
to be imitated throughout.
From that point of view, I've always been
interested in actually hearing a «genuine» Sgt.
Pepper rip-off — just for curiosity's sake: were there really any bands
who'd slobber so much at the sanctuary of the Beatles to try and mime to all of
their production techniques and melodic language elements? If there were any such albums, they must have
quickly sunk to the bottom of the ridicule pit, not least because originality
and stylistic autonomy were far more valued in 1967 than they are today. Yet
out of everything that I have heard so far, it is this quirky debut album by
the Blossom Toes that arguably comes closest to winning first prize.
Indeed, the Blossom Toes came together in early
1967, just as the Beatles were putting the final touches on Sgt. Pepper, and were immediately
assigned to Giorgio Gomelsky's appropriately titled «Marmalade Records» label.
The LP that the band recorded was announced in Melody Maker as «Giorgio Gomelsky's Lonely Hearts Club Band» — and
for once, the label was perfectly accurate: not because the album was as good as
Sgt. Pepper, but because it
basically used Sgt. Pepper (and a
bit of Revolver) as its blueprint.
The two main songwriters in the band were Brian
Godding and Jim Cregan, both of them singing and playing guitars, with some
additional writing contributions from drummer Kevin Westlake and maestro
Gomelsky himself (only bass player Brian Belshaw is left as the poor schmuck
with no songwriting royalties whatsoever). To be fair, Godding and Cregan are
not exactly gene-by-gene projections of Lennon and McCartney. Lyrically and
atmospherically, they also take a lot of clues from the Kinks — in fact, We Are Ever So Clean, with its local
imagery and whimsical ideas that are part-time redcoat marching music and
part-time Mary Poppins, is such a quintessentially British album that its lack
of popularity outside the UK is quite easy to explain (a similar story later
happened to The Cheerful Insanity Of
Giles, Giles & Fripp).
It is in their electic approach to things and
in their «anything-goes» approach to arrangements that the Sgt. Pepper idolatry really shows up. Backward tapes?
Eastern-tinged vocal harmonies? Piccolo trumpet solos? Echo, fuzz, overkill
overdubbing? The general feel of a freaky circus show? It's all here, even
including a frenetic one-minute «recapitulation», at the exact same time, of
all of the album's themes at the end. Yes, the lads are clever enough so as not
to steal anything outright (the only time I caught them redhanded was during
the call-and-response psychedelic harmonies at the fade-out of ʽWhat On
Earthʼ — that trick is lifted directly from ʽShe Said She
Saidʼ), but on the whole, there is no mistake: We Are Ever So Clean is a self-conscious, amusingly arrogant
attempt to outplay the Beatles at their own game by raising the stakes in such
departments as «extravagance», «absurdity», «eccentricity», and «vaudeville».
The good news is that the music really sounds as unpredictable, crazy,
and all over the place as that description suggests. The bad news is that the
album has no real substance: it is daring and risky, but what exactly is being gained by these risks remains unclear.
Song after song, the Blossom Toes are challenging our imagination, and I don't
know about yours, but mine rather quickly gets stumped and disconcerted. Where
the Beatles and the Kinks, even at
their worst, were sort of goal-oriented and evocative, songs like ʽI'll Be
Late For Teaʼ, even despite having the word tea in the title, are, instead, rather befuddling. "Look at me
I'm you! Look at me I'm you!" goes the pounding chorus to the lead-in
track, but it's not as if the decisiveness of that declaration were
particularly convincing: not only am I perfectly sure that I am not any of the lead singers in the
Blossom Toes, but I even have a hard time finding out what the Blossom Toes are
as such.
Which is not to say that We Are Ever So Clean is not bizarrely fascinating in much the same
way in which, say, the Animal Collective have re-defined «bizarre fascination»
in the 21st century. If anything, there is simply so much going on here that,
by probabilistic reasoning, the brain is bound
to explode in a flash of white lightning sooner or later. Maybe it is not very
likely to happen on catchy kiddie anthems like ʽRemarkable Saga Of The
Frozen Dogʼ, but it just might come to pass on the weirdly orchestrated
psychedelic love ballad ʽLove Isʼ, or on ʽPeople Of The Royal
Parksʼ, which starts off like your average Kinks or Small Faces-style
British march and then threatens to fall apart in a different manner every
thirty seconds, or on the accordeon-led mini-saga of ʽIntrepid
Balloonist's Handbookʼ, or anywhere else, in fact.
Unfortunately, neither Godding nor Cregan
happened to have the true melodic genius of a Lennon, or a McCartney, or a Ray
Davies, and ultimately, these songs may be «stunning», but they are not very
memorable, except where the songwriters are relying on music hall
clichés, usually the same ones that had already been exploited much
better by said McCartney or said Ray Davies (or would be exploited — truth be told, I will take the simplistic melodic
potential of a single ʽYour Mother Should Knowʼ over all the
intricacies of We Are Ever So Clean).
Or, if we wish to avoid mentioning the word «genius», it may simply be so that
Godding and Cregan are only focused on being eccentric and whimsical, rather
than trying to pack some deep, genuine emotion into the psychedelic box. Sgt. Pepper, after all, puts you, the
listener, on a distant fantasy planet; the Blossom Toes hit much closer to
their UK homeland, but reduce it to a rather clownish perspective. We Are Ever So Clean attempts to be a
little bit of everything, but in the end, is neither too deep, nor too funny,
nor too beautiful, nor too evocative.
A thumbs up all the same, because I heartily
recommend getting acquainted with this quaint little artefact — first, you
might see something in it that I do not, and second, the workmanship is
admirable per se, whether it contains substance or does not. Just the very
sound that they get going, all of those layers of instrumentation, it actually
feels very «modern»: dozens of 21st century retro-oriented indie-pop bands
continue to milk this baroque whimsy tit, except that these bands aren't
actually living in the middle of it, whereas the Blossom Toes are «the real
authentic thing» from one of the greatest years in the history of popular
music. At the very least, it was enough to warrant a recent CD reissue with a
heapload of bonus tracks (outtakes, B-sides, live and BBC performances etc.),
even including a live rendition of Bob Dylan's ʽI'll Be Your Baby
Tonightʼ from early 1968 or so — by which time, so it seems, the
roots-rock revolution was already catching up with the band.
IF ONLY FOR A MOMENT (1969)
1) Peace Loving Man; 2) Kiss
Of Confusion; 3) Listen To The Silence; 4) Love Bomb; 5) Billy Boo The Gunman;
6) Indian Summer; 7) Just Above My Hobby Horse's Head; 8) Wait A Minute.
Is this really
the same band that was ever so clean but two years ago? Looks like somebody decided
to get dirty after all. The drummer is different, but other than that, it's all
the same guys writing and performing the songs — yet apparently, they have
switched to heavier stuff, and I might mean that in reference to chemical
substances, too. No more whimsy, afternoon tea, and music hall; we are going
hard and heavy all the way, and if you want my opinion on what is the closest
prototype of this sound, I'd say... early Chicago. (Incidentally, Chicago did
release their debut LP in April of 1969, and If Only For A Moment dates from July of the same year.) Or any of
those loud, lumpy 1968-69 bands who took after Hendrix but couldn't get their
psychedelia to properly roll, rather
than just rock, and ended up sounding like World War I-era tanks next to Jimi's
elegant cruiser models.
Not only that, but somebody also told them they
had to get serious — everybody's doing it and all, so a proper LP striving for
artistic recognition has to get away from «frozen little dogs» and make a
statement of high social significance. The first song already, as you can tell
by the title, is a sarcastic pacifist anthem ("take this bomb, drop it on
old Hong Kong" — I'm sure they meant "Saigon", but maybe they
got sidetracked by Hoagy Carmichael), and then the «bomb» motive surfaces in a
different, but related, context on ʽLove Bombʼ (which we need to make
things right), and then they also cover a song by Richie Havens, in the name of
peace, love, and understanding. Overall, it's all starting to make sense now.
Unfortunately, this self-conscious
transformation into a heavy blues-rock outfit with psychedelic overtones never
feels honest — there is not a single song here that would convincingly prove
that the Blossom Toes keep on doing, or at least searching for, «their thing».
ʽPeace Loving Manʼ, which was the single, is moderately catchy, but
instead of an alternately horrifying and optimistically soulful anthem to the
evils of war of joys and peace, they end up creating some sort of vaudeville
number, with horrible vocals on the
verses (Brian Belshaw sings them like a terminal stage TB patient with
electrodes attached to his toes) and a chorus that still can't help but carry
traces of merry music hall. Granted, when you throw in the chaotic bridge
sections with «spooky» whispered vocals and shit, the track ultimately emerges
as an intriguing musical freak mutant, but since that could have hardly been
the original intention (Bonzo Dog Band is not
an inspiration for these people), the result is still a failure.
Here is what I really appreciate about the
album: the broken riff of ʽBilly Boo The Gunmanʼ, which, together
with the cowbell, seems like the forgotten grandaddy of Blue Öyster Cult;
the little quasi-Elizabethan guitar dance melody that crops up in the corners
of ʽIndian Summerʼ and seems like the forgotten great-great-uncle of
Jethro Tull circa Thick As A Brick;
and... that's more or less about it. There is a lot of different musical ideas
scattered around, but they never combine into anything worth a serious
discussion, and the song lengths can be exhausting — nowhere more so than on
ʽLove Bombʼ, an «epic» that takes like millions of years to build
up... to what? A happy carnivalesque chorus that goes: "What we need is a
love BOMB / We don't have any and we need SOME / Easily operated, purified love
BOMB"? It doesn't even matter that these lyrics stink to highest of
heavens (how does one go about purifying
a bomb?); it matters that the chorus
in general, music, words, singing, is a laugh rather than a prayer.
Overall, the transformation is a disaster: at
least ʽPeace Loving Manʼ and ʽLove Bombʼ are so bad they
actually give food for thought and curses, but most of the other songs fall
into that most dreadful of categories — «non-descript» — that condemns the
record to total oblivion. Even the hard-rocking guitar solos feel like
second-hand imitations of Hendrix, Clapton, and the Frisco people, without any
success in finding one's own ground. And even if the songwriting on We Are Ever So Clean was never all that
good, the album's head-spinning kaleidoscopic programme could easily and
harmlessly trick you into thinking those were great songs — here, gruesomely
stretched out song lengths and repetitive passages could not even provide a
decent soundtrack to a reefer-based experience; thumbs down all the way.
Naturally, the album neither managed to sell
nor become any sort of cult favorite — at which point the best thing that the
poor Blossom Toes could probably do was to dissolve, so they dissolved. From
then on, you could look for Jim Cregan in the ranks of Family (whom he joined
in time to record their last and arguably weakest album, It's Only A Movie), Cockney Rebel (with whom he recorded ʽMake
Me Smileʼ), and finally, Rod Stewart (whom he faithfully accompanied all
the way down to the lowest depths of his career, Camouflage included). Brian Godding, on the other hand, chose a
less flashy pop route and went on to hone his skills in various jazz and prog
rock outfits (even including Magma, that enigmatic French band, at one point).
Which, I should add, hardly excuses him from the embarrassment of having both
ʽPeace Loving Manʼ and
ʽLove Bombʼ credited all to himself.
VINCEBUS ERUPTUM (1968)
1) Summertime Blues; 2) Rock
Me, Baby; 3) Doctor Please; 4) Out Of Focus; 5) Parchment Farm; 6) Second Time
Around.
«The Jimi Hendrix Experience for Lunkheads»,
this is what this band really is, but if you ask me, this is still much better
than the poseur professionalism of Grand Funk Railroad, whose enduring popularity
should have been more justly enjoyed by Blue Cheer. Had they been a Detroit
band, their bite might have been worse than their bark, as they would have to
compete with the Stooges; as it happened, they were based in San Francisco,
where they did enjoy the cult status of the heaviest, wildest band for miles
around, but depended a bit too much on the usual «blues pedigree» that was
shared by everybody in the business, and, despite being at about the same level
of formal musical competence as the Stooges (zero), did not catch neither the
contemporary nor the «revisionist» critical eye with the same force.
But they really should have. For one thing,
there is so much that is «wrong» with this band that this realization alone
should already turn them into cultural heroes. Like, what is their very name
supposed to mean — how on Earth does one produce a «blue cheer»? Or if you are
really going to show off by giving your debut LP a Latin name, how about
getting it right? The correct Latin
translation of "to break out of chains" would be vinculis eruptum, whereas vincebus
is not even a proper wordform in the language. Or if you are covering Mose Allison's
ʽParchman Farmʼ, do you really
need to show how much you care by retitling it ʽParchment Farmʼ? It's not like any inmates in any American
prison ever spent much time scraping calfskin.
However, defying the laws of grammar,
orthography, and semantics is one thing for a musician, and defying the music is quite another. From a simple,
straightforward point of view, what this album represents is an attempt by
three well-meaning, but barely competent guys (Dickie Peterson on bass and
vocals, Leigh Stephens on guitar, Paul Whaley on drums) to provide a local Frisco
substitute for Hendrix — mainly by acquiring the same kind of musical
equipment, but definitely not by learning the same kinds of chords or
nurturing the same kind of imaginative vision. In other words, an embarrassing
fraud.
From a somewhat more complex point of view,
this is a «caveman punk» take on Hendrix that could deserve its own special
acclaim. Not just on Hendrix, of
course: Blue Cheer were fascinated by everything as long as it was loud,
screechy, and heavy — their cover of ʽSummertime Bluesʼ must have
been inspired by The Who's version (which was not yet commercially released at
the time, yet The Who had had the song in their repertoire since the early
days), and they were certainly no strangers to the Yardbirds and Cream, either.
But where they could not match any of these guys in terms of instrumental
prowess, they could match and
overcome them in terms of sheer brute force, which is really what classic Blue
Cheer is all about: PURE MUSCLE.
If the opening chords to ʽSummertime
Bluesʼ do not sound quite as mind-blowing as Jimi's ʽFoxy Ladyʼ,
from which they are borrowed, at least they are more distorted — and if the
body of the song does not produce the impression of a thunderstorm (because the
bass and drum parts are fairly wimpy when compared with the Entwistle/Moon
rhythm section), it still comes closer to conveying «dumb teenage frustration»
than the exquisite interplay between The Who could ever bring it. Which is to
say, really, that this particular version also deserves to exist and be
listened to — even if most of whatever Leigh Stephens is playing here does not
make any particular musical sense, other than "hey look, I can make those
strings go WHEEEEE! and now I can make them go BOOOOO! and now I can make y'all
believe I'm playing this thing with my teeth!" Fun thing, that rock'n'roll
stuff.
They do have a feel for it, and it can be
infectious. The songs are not so much songs as simply vehicles for wild
improvisation (Peterson is credited with writing three of them, but other than
the mediocre riff on ʽOut Of Focusʼ, I have been unable to spot much
«writing» going on) — ʽSecond Time Aroundʼ sounds like they just
left the tape rolling for three extra minutes after the song was over, and then
decided to leave that uncontrolled chaos on the record (in honor of ʽThird
Stone From The Sunʼ or any such other Hendrix noisefest). Laughable, yes,
but every once in a while it so happens that all you need to do at a certain
moment is just «go to eleven», and the result will be... impressive?
Besides, it's not like they do not know how to
play at all. Stephens' obsession with
pedals, wobbles, fuzz, and distortion does not prevent him from correctly
resolving the melody where he sees it fit to be resolved, or from borrowing
some tricks from the arsenal of free jazz artists as well: at times, it is hard
to understand if he is just being drunk / sluggish / incompetent or if he is
really trying to pull off an Ornette Coleman. Whatever be the case, his playing
turns Vincebus Eruptum into the craziest hard rock album of 1968 I have
ever heard, bar none — an affair in which he is much aided by Peterson (whose
sin... screaming is a little colorless, but loud and brawny enough to match the
guitar) and Whaley, who gives his best Keith Moon / Mitch Mitchell impression
— it still ain't good enough, but not a lot of people in Frisco were even
trying.
In a system of values that praises «wildness»
and «kick-ass potential» in rock music over everything else, Vincebus Eruptum is one of the
indisputable champions. In a subtler system that requires, at the very least,
a unique or technically gifted playing style, and at most, an individual
artistic vision, Blue Cheer will forever be stuck as one of the epitomes of bad
taste. As for myself, in situations like these I do tend to select the
«subtlety be damned» approach — the album has always been a minor favorite of
mine, and I still go for the thumbs up judgement. Want it or not, these guys
pretty much invented «brontosaur rock», where size does matter, and I both
respect it — a little bit — and enjoy it — especially when it helps flush out
unwanted guests.
PS. Oh, and, if I am not mistaken, that riff
they hit in the middle of ʽParchment Farmʼ pretty much predicts
ʽIn-A-Gadda-Da-Vidaʼ; so there you have some of the band's immediate
influence on their contemporaries.
OUTSIDEINSIDE (1968)
1) Feathers From Your Tree; 2)
Sun Cycle; 3) Just A Little Bit; 4) Gypsy Ball; 5) Come And Get It; 6)
Satisfaction; 7) The Hunter; 8) Magnolia Caboose; 9) Babylon; 10) Fortunes.
The idea of a band like Blue Cheer trying to
add a little «intellect» on their sophomore record may sound fairly scary in
theory, but the results are hardly catastrophic — most importantly, the album
does show that they were something more than just a one-shot act, if not
something much more than a one-shot
act. Given the context of the times, their decision to push the controls somewhat
farther in the direction of psychedelia and even the newly-emerging «art rock»
ideology was not surprising; what was
surprising is that, in a certain way, they almost managed to get away with it.
Under a slight risk of getting sued for slander, I'd suggest that, perhaps,
this was due to their fortunate rejection of originality — most of the musical
ideas on Outsideinside belong not to
Blue Cheer, but to somebody else, although all of them were properly subjected
to the patented Blue Cheer treatment (louder, fuzzier, clumsier).
First thing one hears is a piano. A piano? Not a mistake, no, the band has
indeed enlisted the services of Ralph Burns Kellogg, a professional musician,
to help them get accommodated in this brand new world that just keeps upping
its requirements for bands that want to stay alive and well and ahead of the
competition. Next come the overdubs — the vocals on ʽFeathers From Your
Treeʼ come from all sides, echoing the verses and framing out the choruses
like they belonged to a small band of angels. The only things that still remind
us of the beast inside is the obligatory heavy fuzz of the guitar and the
brawny screaming of the lead vocalist. The end result is indeed quite trippy,
if not particularly good: as far as soaking basic, brutal, fuzzy hard rock in
psychedelic effects is concerned, Hawkwind would later take this art to a
whole new level.
Although, formally, there are only two covers
on the album (an intentionally «Godawful-™» rendition of
ʽSatisfactionʼ and an altogether less shocking and much more
reverential ʽHunterʼ from the stockpile of Albert King), like I said,
much, if not most of the other stuff is thoroughly derivative as well. For
instance, ʽGypsy Ballʼ is what Jimi's ʽWind Cries Maryʼ
might have sounded like if the guitar were three times as distorted, the
drummer tossed aside all modesty, and the overall point were to crush, rather
than seduce, the listener. ʽBabylonʼ is a slowed down and funkified
take on ʽSweet Little Sixteenʼ, sometimes drifting off into generic
12-bar blues territory. ʽFortunesʼ is like a «heavy bubble-gum»
amalgamation of ʽFortune Tellerʼ and some Nuggets single whose title escapes me at the moment. And so on and
on and on.
Yet, at the same time, taken in context, Outsideinside comes across as an
amazingly crude pioneering effort. All those early 1970s bands trying to put a
«heavy» spin on every musical style (and subtlety and «tastefulness» and
meticulous planning be damned), be it psychedelia à la Hawkwind, pub-rock à
la Slade, or bubblegum-rock à
la Sweet — in embryonic form, it's all here on Blue Cheer's second album.
It is embarrassing, yes, because it clearly aspires to something «higher» than
a simple urge to bang your head against the wall while trying to overcome your
sex drive, and it is pretty hard to aim «higher» while still trying to bang
your head against the same wall — especially if you are not endowed with the
chops of a Jimmy Page or even the simple genius of a Tony Iommi.
But in between all the embarrassment, there is
still plenty of sheer amusement going on. Everything is unpredictable — you
never know when they are going to speed up, slow down, throw in a guitar or
organ line that absolutely and utterly «does not fit», or just boogie along
without a set purpose (ʽMagnolia Cabooseʼ, a brief, ferocious
instrumental that might actually be the most passionate track on the entire
album — even if, like everything else, it is highly derivative, this time from
Jimi's ʽDriving Southʼ, I believe). And for every single piece that
does not work, like ʽSatisfactionʼ (useless without the sneering
attitude), there is a ʽHunterʼ that does work — few people could say
"I've got you in the sight of my love gun" more convincingly than
Peterson did that in 1968. It all adds up to a thumbs up, after all. Plus, Outsideinside would turn out to be the
last album by the original lineup — Leigh Stephens would quit soon after the
official release, and the band would never be the same again, so one more
reason here for every fan of Vincebus
to pay extra attention.
NEW! IMPROVED! (1969)
1) When It All Gets Old; 2)
West Coast Child Of Sunshine; 3) I Want My Baby Back; 4) Aces 'n' Eights; 5) As
Long As I Live; 6) It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry; 7) Peace
Of Mind; 8) Fruit & Iceburgs; 9) Honey Butter Lover.
I think the title said it all even way back in
1969, when the words «new» and «improved» actually could have quite a positive
ring to them. Yes, even great bands with established formulae were capable of
occasionally «renewing» and «improving» their image. But how do you improve on
a band like Blue Cheer, on an album like Vincebus?
You just don't, unless you totally and decisively change your direction — and
how could a band like Blue Cheer
change its direction? One doesn't usually expect a Neanderthal to rapidly
accelerate his evolution in the presence of a Cromagnon. There are some laws of nature that are quite tough
to beat, you know.
Actually, this record is not so much of an improvement
as it is of a total mess. With the departure of Leigh Stephens, the band was
left without an essential ingredient, and had to reestablish its balance —
first, by hiring little-known guitar player Randy Holden, a former member of
The Other Half (an underappreciated, short-lived psycho-garage band from LA),
then, after he found out that his style was largely incompatible with the
band's image, by replacing him with Bruce Stephens (presumably, no relation to
Leigh). Consequently, the band's third LP featured both of their guitarists —
the earlier one on Side B, the later one on Side A — and essentially sounds
like two completely different mini-records.
The Bruce Stephens stuff is generally
tolerable, but a little boring. None of the songs come within ten miles of the
band's trademark crunchy bombast — it is all a rather chaotic mix of
blues-rock, psychedelia, «roots» stuff, and pub-bound braggadocio, generally
derivative and hollow. Original ideas are, for the most part, silly, like the
attempt to reinvent Dylan's ʽIt Takes A Lot To Laughʼ as a heavy,
aggressive rocker, with Dickie screaming his head off on the final verse and
the guitars threatening the listener in a glum Chicago-electric-blues sort of
way. Nice try, but either they didn't get the song's essence or they failed in
their quest to mutate it.
Even more laughable is their piano player's
contribution, ʽWhen It All Gets Oldʼ, sort of a mix of Traffic with Satanic-era Rolling Stones — a sunny,
friendly psychedelic anthem that invites you to «bring back a whole new change»
(how do you actually bring back a
change?) without offering any collateral, such as, for instance, a truly
mindblowing sound effect or melodic synthesis. Blue Cheer as the late-coming
prophets of The Great Revolution of Conscience? Yeah, right. Even the pigs
wouldn't be flying until at least eight years later.
Instead of talking about the rest of the songs
on Side A (we could, since some are better than others, but it is still hardly
worth the space), let us therefore look at Side B, which reflects an entirely
different ideology. There are only two
lengthy songs on it, plus a short useless acoustic coda, but they make all the
difference, amply featuring the talents of Randy Holden — the guy who has been
called, by some critics, one of the greatest overlooked guitarists of the
1960s, and for a very good reason, I'd say.
ʽFruit & Icebergsʼ, in
particular, is transformed by Holden into one of the finest examples of the
era's heavy blues-rock style — not as experimental and groundbreaking as
contemporary stuff by Jeff Beck or Led Zeppelin, but every bit as powerful and
awe-inspiring. The descending bass riff sets a creepy, nightmarish mood that
wouldn't be out of place on a classic Black Sabbath record (no wonder,
considering that it incorporates the same «Devil's Chord» tritone as
ʽBlack Sabbathʼ) and the lengthy solo that comes in at 2:23 and
occupies the bulk of the song is, likewise, one of the most «evil» solos of the
decade — where all of his garage predecessors were using their axes to express
righteous anger and straightforward frustration, Holden clearly uses his to summon
the forces of evil; had he come forward with the song a year earlier, it would
have made a great soundtrack for Night Of
The Living Dead. The only thing that feels altogether out of place on this
fantastic mood piece are the lyrics — "It's so nice to feel the colors /
All days when you are new / You close your eyes / And feel the foam of
silence"? Unless it's spoken from Dracula's point of view, I just refuse
to understand.
ʽPeace Of Mindʼ, which is the
slightly longer piece, is not nearly as impressive: its main part is an
arpeggiated, slowly moving dirge, waking up midway through and launching into
yet another massive Holden solo, by which time, unfortunately, it can no longer
qualify for masterpiece status. Still, the solo is equally nimble and melodic,
with a perfect flow and sense of timing — enough to make one think of an
analogy with Mick Taylor, another technically and emotionally gifted
blues-based musician who happened to find himself in the utterly wrong band,
ultimately, to the great benefit of all mankind. Although, come to think of it,
ʽPeace Of Mindʼ and ʽFruit & Icebergsʼ are basically
Randy Holden songs with Dickie Peterson guest-starring on them — this has very
little to do with any kinds of «Blue Cheer», and this is why Holden spent so
little time with the band. There were really only two choices — either «Blue
Cheer» would have to become «The Randy Holden Experience», or Randy Holden
would have to go on increasing his experience without any assistance from Blue
Cheer.
As far as any final judgement is concerned, I
would award an unquestionable thumbs up to Side B and a sceptical, if not
altogether hateful, thumbs down to Side A — merely to reinforce
the idea of «two different entities». But if a single answer is still required,
I will repeat that ʽFruit & Icebergsʼ alone is worth the full
price of the album: there is something about that solo there that I cannot
remember about any style of 1960s
guitar playing. It's like a perfect merger of the «thin»,
folk-and-country-derived electric styles of West Coast bands and the «thick»,
aggressive, show-no-mercy style of British hard rockers. And if you play it
loudly in a church, it will most certainly attract lightning, I'm sure of it.
BLUE CHEER (1969)
1) Fool; 2) You're Gonna Need
Someone; 3) Hello L.A., Bye Bye Birmingham; 4) Saturday Freedom; 5) Ain't That
The Way (Love's Supposed To Be); 6) Rock And Roll Queens; 7) Better When We
Try; 8) Natural Man; 9) Lovin' You's Easy; 10) The Same Old Story.
With Paul Whaley out of the band, replaced by
Norman Mayell, Peterson is now the sole original member — but nothing changes
much, because Whaley's drumming on New!
Improved! was already quite timid compared to Blue Cheer's original style,
and this self-titled release largely continues in the vein of Side A of Improved!: ten more pieces of
well-mannered blues-rock, with catchy pop choruses and guitars playing
conventional melodies. At this point in time, they essentially sound like
Steppenwolf, or any other such bands: the sound is «rock», but with emphasis on
«light fun» rather than oddball psychedelia or scary heaviness. No questions
about «uniqueness» or «unpredictability» — everything is played quite safe,
even homely.
The only things that save the record from total
oblivion is a limited amount of creativity and a pinch of humor. I could
pretend if I wanted to, but there is no way I could really avoid the catchy impact of a song like ʽNatural
Manʼ — a minor pop-rock gem in its own rights, with the bumbly grumbly
bass line, the «slyly smiling» riff, and the ideally constructed vocal melody.
This is as far removed from the original Blue Cheer as possible: the song
belongs in jokerland territory, and the meticulousness of its execution would
have aggravated the original band to no end. "You can't buy the love of a
natural man" is as good a vocal hook as any, and it's a good thing that
the song really doesn't try too hard to uncover the band's understanding of
what a «natural man» is actually supposed to mean, in their own world. It's just a funny song.
The first and last song are fun tunes as well,
both contributed by local friend Gary Lee Yoder, who would eventually join the
band on a full-time basis for a while — here, he just donates them
ʽFoolʼ, a ʽJumpin' Jack Flashʼ-type song with a pub rather
than arena flavor (play the two tunes back to back, and no better demonstration
suffices to show why the Stones ruled the world while Blue Cheer, particularly
in their «timid» incarnation, were a third-rate act); and the acoustic-based
ʽSame Old Storyʼ, which is likewise a variation on the classic
ʽRockin' Pneumonia And The Boogie Woogie Fluʼ, but with its own twist
— a clownish enough ending for the album, but the band are now positioning themselves as clowns, and fortunately, they can be a bit funny.
Actually, they are better when they're adapting
pinched ideas to funny matters than when they try to do it with a straight face
on — the «artsy» pop song ʽBetter When We Tryʼ, unabashedly stealing
part of its appeal from Blind Faith's freshly released ʽCan't Tell My Way
Homeʼ, has too much hippie starry-eyedness about it and too little in the
actual «beauty» department (and those baroque organ solos are fairly useless
these days when you have all those Zombies records lying around, anyway). In
another corner, ʽSaturday Freedomʼ tries to generate some fuzzy
melodic psychedelia, with a lengthy «stoned» solo, but guitarist Bruce Stephens
is neither a Randy Holden nor a Jerry Garcia, and the results are accordingly
unimpressive.
Summarizing in a nutshell, Blue Cheer's major flaw is that the album has no personality — Vincebus Eruptum and even its trippier
follow-up, flawed as they were, reflected a specifically «Blue Cheer» attitude
towards life, but now that they actually release a record called Blue Cheer, it
turns out that there's some cheer, and there's just a bit of blue, but they
don't really mix. Peterson just isn't that interesting a singer when he is not
playing the pitecanthropus erectus,
Stephenson knows how to play the guitar but does not know how to put his own
mark on it, and why listen to their cover of Delaney Bramlett and Mac Davis'
ʽHello L. A., Bye-Bye Birminghamʼ when even Nancy Sinatra sings it
with more intrigue?.. All that's really left is — become clowns and sing silly
catchy songs about cheating women and natural men. God knows why, but that is
one emploi that they are quite able
to get away with on this record.
THE ORIGINAL HUMAN BEING (1970)
1) Good Times Are So Hard To
Find; 2) Love Of A Woman; 3) Make Me Laugh; 4) Pilot; 5) Babaji (Twilight
Raga); 6) Preacher; 7) Black Sun; 8) Tears In My Bed; 9) Man On The Run; 10)
Sandwich; 11) Rest At Ease.
It seems reasonable to suggest that Gary Lee
Yoder, officially replacing Bruce Stephens as Blue Cheer's resident guitar
player, was a better proposition for this band altogether than his predecessor.
Not only did he contribute Blue Cheer's
funniest song, but somehow, his permanent presence put the band back on track,
so that their fifth album is an acceptable compromise between the chaotic
wildness of old, the established hard rock standards of the day, and a little
bit of chart-oriented pop sensibility in between (The Original Human Being even got the band back into the lower
ranges of the album charts for a brief while).
There is nothing particularly great or awesome
here, but the very attempt to stir up some creative juices is admirable. All of the members are involved in the
songwriting process now, even the drummer, with Peterson and Yoder veering
towards heavy blues, piano guy Burns Kellogg drifting towards roots-rock, and
the drummer actually contributing the weirdest number of all — ʽBabaji
(Twilight Raga)ʼ, which is, so far, the only instrumental composition I
know whose central point is a duet between sitar and Moog synthesizer: an
unlikely combination in general, let alone on a Blue Cheer album! The most
amazing thing about it is that it actually works,
a pretty, cloudy piece of simplistic, but effective lite-psychedelia.
Genrist exercises are, in fact, the talk of the
day. We have some shiny, uplifting, brass-loaded, and catchy jazz-pop
(ʽLove Of A Womanʼ); a rough, partially out-of-tune, but
sincere-sounding country waltz (ʽTears In My Bedʼ); a sleazy, snappy,
and quite exciting white-funk jam that suggests somebody in the camp must have
been wooed over by The James Gang (ʽSandwichʼ); and a sentimental,
idealistic, bombastic, gospel-influenced coda (ʽRest At Easeʼ) that —
dare I say it? — sounds suspiciously
similar to Dylan's ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ, which would only come
three years later. Okay, coincidence. The important thing is: Blue Cheer, the local cavemen of San
Francisco, are telling you to "rest at ease today" and "be
redeemed today", because "all my love is on the way" and
"my heart is open to you, slow down, we can make it". Actually, it
seems that those lyrics are mostly improvised, consisting of «soul
clichés» hastily scrapped together, but there is something haunting to that piano / organ / French horn mix. The
beast done got soul, and it ain't always cringeworthy or laughable to look at.
On the other hand, The Original Human Being also succeeds in getting back some of the
wild vibe — mainly on dark blues-rock numbers such as ʽGood Times Are Hard
To Findʼ (indeed) and ʽPreacherʼ; more generic 12-bar stuff like
ʽPilotʼ or ʽMan Of The Sunʼ also recovers some extra
grit-and-gravel that was missing on the last two records, although these are
probably the most expendable numbers of the lot. Everything is still quite
polished when compared to the original chaos (short, jam-less, structured), but
«nasty» guitar tones, «evil» vocalizing, distortion and fuzz are all present —
the songs are fun to listen to, and warrant a thumbs up. Altogether, the album is
more than the sum of its parts: diversity, and this curious struggle for
survival in an increasingly competitive context, make it a small chapter worth
reading in the musical history of 1970.
OH! PLEASANT HOPE (1971)
1) Hiway Man; 2) Believer; 3)
Money Troubles; 4) Traveling Man; 5) Oh! Pleasant Hope; 6) I'm The Light; 7)
Ecological Blues; 8) Lester The Arrester; 9) Heart Full Of Soul.
Okay, come out and confess: who was it told
Blue Cheer that they should drop whatever they were doing and start being The Band, of all people? Or, if not The
Band, then at least The Doobie Brothers. All of a sudden, just as Original Human Being showed assured
signs of the band set to return to their «caveman glory», they do a 180-degree
twist and give us acoustic guitars, on-the-porch attitudes, lyrical tales of
highway men, traveling men, money-troubled men, believers and arresters, and as
if that weren't enough, Dickie Peterson only takes lead vocals on the last
three tracks, leaving the rest to Gary Yoder. Granted, not a lot of people must
have been paying any attention to Blue Cheer in the era of ʽStairway To
Heavenʼ, but for those that were, the band's conversion to a
roots-rock-oriented strategy must have been quite a shock.
The saving grace of the album, however, is that
it never tries to take itself too seriously. Much to Blue Cheer's honor, they
do not even attempt to generate a «soulful» or «spiritual» atmosphere, as the
instrumental abilities and arranging skills of the band would be inadequate.
Instead, they make good use of their pop sensibility, loading many of the songs
with modestly catchy, sometimes even funny «roots-pop» choruses — like,
probably the only point in listening to ʽHiway Manʼ is hearing Yoder
bawl "MONEY, give me all you have!" as if he were rehearsing for a
Monty Python sketch or something. It ain't much to go on haunting you in your
dreams, but at least it saves the song from proverbial boredom, and that is
more or less the way this entire album works — through decent pop hooks.
The title track, in particular, amounts to pure
parody: its verses are set to the precise melody of ʽThe Weightʼ
("Billy Joe went lookin' round..." = "I pulled into
Nazareth..."), but the uplifting / optimistic message of the chorus,
unlike the obscure invocation to Fanny, is spelled out with the utmost
precision: "Oh, pleasant hope / Where we're gonna get our dope? ... / Oh,
pleasant hope / Grass will flow like wine" — except that even Steppenwolf
sounded like they really meant it when conversing with the enemy (ʽDon't
Step On The Grass, Samʼ), whereas ʽOh! Pleasant Hopeʼ is sung so
nonchalantly that you don't even get to feel it for them.
But if the title track simply pokes fun at
marijuana deprivation, ʽI'm The Lightʼ is downright blasphemous — not
only does it mix gospel organ with Indian sitar (did George Harrison ever have
something like that?), it actually means what it says: the protagonist tells
his girlfriend that "I'm the light, I'm the only one you'll see" and
that "It's one hand for all mankind while the other holds the flame".
For that matter, the sitar plays quite a seductive pop melody — transpose it to
electric guitar or flute, speed up the tempo a little bit, and you got yourself
a readymade Manfred Mann pop single. Not a masterpiece, of course, but second
time in a row that Blue Cheer have used the sitar in a non-conventional manner
and gotten away with it.
For nostalgia sufferers, there is a bit of a heavy rock vibe here:
ʽBelieverʼ is driven by crunchy distorted guitar (despite being one
of the poppiest songs on the album), and ʽHeart Full Of Soulʼ (a
Peterson original, nothing to do with the famous Yardbirds hit) has a dark,
scruffy bassline, chaotic leads, and growling / screaming vocals straight off Vincebus — a little peace offering for
the veteran fans if they were obedient enough to sit all the way through to the
end. But all of this is still quite tame even compared to Human Being, let alone Vincebus,
and seems to be here mainly in order to establish some sort of shaky link to the past.
Still, all things considered, I like the
record, and give it a thumbs up. The fact that it never charted is
expectable and understandable, as is the fact that, totally frustrated over
their loss of direction and obscure future perspectives, Blue Cheer finally
broke up after it had flopped. But once you get over the initial
disappointment, and once you start realizing that they weren't really trying to establish themselves as
a «serious» roots-rock act, but rather urged us all to take it with a grain of
salt, Oh! Pleasant Hope comes across
as an inoffensive, occasionally charming trifle, not entirely devoid of
interest. And after a few listens, it might even come across as a concised,
focused send-up of the whole genre — which, by early 1971, was certainly in
need of a good send-up, like all genres that eventually start falling back on
their own clichés.
THE BEAST IS... BACK (1984)
1) Nightmares; 2) Summertime
Blues; 3) Ride With Me; 4) Girl Next Door; 5) Babylon; 6) Heart Of The City; 7)
Out Of Focus; 8) Parchment Farm.
A little research shows that it is not
altogether correct to talk of a Blue Cheer breakup — more like several extended
vacation periods. Various incarnations of the band did function in 1974, 1975,
1978-79, and 1983, with Dickie as the only permanent link; none of them,
however, succeeded in landing any record contracts, which is why, for many,
this vinyl resurgence in 1984 appeared as a complete surprise — a feeling that
the band further enhanced with the appropriate title. (Which, upon subsequent
re-releases, was cheesily changed to The
Megaforce Years, after the name of the label to which they were signed at
the time).
In any case, the title alone clearly announces
vengeance — no sissy-hussy roots-rock shite for the good old fans, this is
going to be «The Beast» all the way through. The track list does not look too
promising, though: half of the songs are re-recordings of old classics from Vincebus and Outsideinside, which is usually not an auspicious sign — what good
is a comeback, after all, if you have not managed to write more than four new
songs in thirteen years?
Expectations drop down even lower, though, once
you hear the first notes of the record and see how the band tries to catch up
with the times. In 1984, if you were a veteran of the
bang-your-head-against-the-wall aesthetics and wanted to impress the kids, you
had basically two routes to choose from — thrash metal and glam metal («New
Wave metal» was more of a British thing), and guess which one those guys had
taken. Nothing against Dickie Peterson, or the original drummer Paul Whaley,
making a triumphant return in style; but the band's resident guitarist, Tony
Rainier, is a Van Halen-influenced B-grade hack, in command of a suitably nasty
tone but thoroughly relying on cocky pop-metal clichés, well-tested and
over-abused on Sunset Strip for several years already.
To be more precise and polite, we have all
heard worse than that, but still, was it really worth coming back to let us
hear a Def Leppard-style re-recording of ʽSummertime Bluesʼ? Maybe it
seemed like fun at the time to try that old stuff with new production values
and improved technique, but thicker layers of distortion/fuzz and flashy
high-pitched lead trills/arpeggios were so commonplace at the time that it is
impossible to look back on that stuff without irony — where Vincebus Eruptum, with all its flaws
and potential negative influence on the evolution of hard rock, was still an
innovative, daring breakthrough, The
Beast Is Back prompts just one inevitable question: But Who Gives A Damn
This Time?
The new songs, however, are not at all bad.
Once you get past the production clichés, three of them have solid
pop-metal chorus hooks (particularly ʽHeart Of The Cityʼ, where
Dickie manages to convey the «lethal insanity» atmosphere of being sucked into
the whirlpool of city life), and one (ʽRide With Meʼ) does a good job
at gradually building up tension until they botch it with the lack of an
adequately climactic resolution. No masterpieces, but a decent bunch of snappy
pop-metal anthems that makes one wonder whether they really needed to leave the rest of the album to useless
re-recordings. In fact, calling this «glam metal» would be quite inaccurate —
the songs are influenced by the commercial metal sound of the times, for sure,
but they have none of that unhealthy Sunset Strip hedonism (other than
ʽGirl Next Doorʼ, I guess, with beautiful lyrical lines such as
"I'm gonna wait right here just to get the right meat / ...get what I need
from the girl next door" — and the song is credited to Rainier, too).
Altogether — not a tragedy, but a relative
disappointment, although, come to think of it, any prediction-yielding model
would have probably guessed that, were these guys ever to reform, their first
album would look something like that:
re-recorded old chestnuts + glam metal production + a few nostalgic signs that
hint at the band's arrival from a distant past, rather than being a young
artistic cousin of Def Leppard. Giving it a thumbs up would be out of the
question; putting it down would be too unjust, because I really have nothing
against most of the songs, be they old or new ones. Proceed at your own risk.
BLITZKRIEG OVER NÜREMBERG (1989)
1) Babylon; 2) Girl Next Door;
3) Ride With Me; 4) Just A Little Bit; 5) Summertime Blues; 6) Out Of Focus; 7)
Doctor Please; 8) The Hunter; 9) Red House.
Blue Cheer never released a live album in their
heyday, largely because the heyday turned out to be so short — by 1969, it was
all over, and live albums, even for hard-rocking bands, were not yet seen as an
obligatory part of one's portfolio back in 1968. «Better late than never»,
thought Peterson, and, four years into Blue Cheer's «comeback» as an odd hybrid
of nostalgic late Sixties pothead rock and contemporary glam metal, decided to
set up some professional recording equipment for the band's live show at the
Rührersaal in Nüremberg, Germany (October 10, 1988). Whether the
choice of a German audience was accidental or intentional (a special affinity
for the country that gave us Accept and the Scorpions?) is not clear, but there
is an obvious connection between the players and the fans, who do not even seem
offended when told by Dickie about the planned title for the upcoming album.
Nothing like a nice little Blitzkrieg
for the Germans... oh, never mind. It does have a nice ring to it, though.
Once again, however, this particular «Blue
Cheer» is just Dickie and his revolving door: no Paul Whaley and not even a
Tony Rainier in sight. Instead, guitar duties are handled by Duck MacDonald,
known mostly for always willing to lend a helping hand to defective reunions of
old heavy rock bands with color-based names (in addition to Blue Cheer, he
would also tour with Black Sabbath and Blue Öyster Cult); the drummer, if
anybody is interested, is Dave Salce, and he does a fairly decent job
reproducing the percussive madness of Whaley, but his fills are less unpredictable
and not so much all over the place.
The setlist continues the trend already set on The Beast: as the only original member
to determine what is properly Blue Cheer and what is not properly so, Dickie
performs only songs from the first
two BC albums and The Beast (but it is interesting that,
out of the new material, he chooses Rainier's compositions rather than his own
ʽNightmaresʼ). Which is understandable if you want to limit your live
material to loud crunchy rockers, but even so, The Original Human Being is quite unjustly given the finger. There
is also a tribute cover of Hendrix's ʽRed Houseʼ, done surprisingly
close to the spirit of the original, even if MacDonald cannot restrain himself
from throwing in some histrionic hair metal vibrato cliché every now and
then.
The most memorable thing about the album,
though, is arguably the small bits of stage banter delivered by Peterson —
always sounding a little drunk, a little stoned, a little wasted, a little
toothless, a little bit too old to rock'n'roll, but ultimately quite
sympathetic: nice simple old guy with a bit of street wisdom tucked under his
belt for good measure ("we're gonna do a song called ʽSummertime
Bluesʼ... and believe me, there is
no cure, I've been looking for twenty fucking years!"). He has a pretty
hard time coping with vocal problems, particularly on fast numbers such as
ʽGirl Next Doorʼ where he clearly lacks the necessary strength to
muster the appropriate roar, but even if he did have laryngitis or something,
on most of the classic numbers the gurgling in his throat only adds to the
overall ragged punch of the material. And he certainly has no problems holding
down all the basslines on which the tightness and general well-being of the
songs depend from start to finish.
Throw in a good setlist, decent sound quality,
and MacDonald's general willingness to play Seventies-style rather than
Eighties-style on the extended instrumental sections of ʽRide With
Meʼ and ʽDoctor Pleaseʼ, and Blitzkrieg turns out to be much more enjoyable as could be expected
on the average from such a setup. Thumbs up; heavily recommended for Blue Cheer fans
and hard rock lovers in general.
HIGHLIGHTS AND LOWLIVES (1990)
1) Urban Soldiers; 2) Hunter
Of Love; 3) Girl From London; 4) Blue Steel Dues; 5) Big Trouble In Paradise;
6) Flight Of The Enola Gay; 7) Hoochie Coochie Man; 8) Down And Dirty; 9) Blues
Cadillac.
In order to better prove that they are not
«glam metal», and that they use their heaviness for darker and deeper purposes
than attenuating their sexiness, Blue Cheer hire Jack Endino to produce their
next album — the same Jack Endino that had just produced Nirvana's Bleach and engineered LPs by Mudhoney
and Soundgarden. Clearly, Dickie was still hip to whatever was happening
musically (at least, as far as heavy stuff was concerned) on the West Coast,
and it is only natural that his heart and soul would be drifting towards the
emerging grunge scene rather than the hedonistic and glossy-commercial style
of the hair metal crowds.
Unfortunately, it does not help. Endino
probably agreed to work with those guys out of a basic sense of respect — after
all, one can trace a fairly credible line from the original stoner rock of Vincebus Eruptum to the Seattle grunge
bands — but there was nothing he could do about rectifying their sound or
modernizing their attitudes. Duck MacDonald, a faithful supporter of Tony
Rainier's legacy, keeps pushing on with «muscle riffs» and «lightning solos»;
Peterson's primary points of lyrical and atmospheric interest remain in the
territory of girls, hot rods, and glorifying wasted lifestyles; and altogether,
there is no other point to this record than proving they can still push it all
the way to eleven.
Now I couldn't even say that the riffs are
«bad»: if you look at a song like ʽFlight Of The Enola Gayʼ outside
of any sort of context, its pop metal lines are somewhat catchy. It is only
when you realize that this sounds like an early rehearsal tape for Judas Priest
that the desire to hear it one more time completely evaporates. I mean, if you
are writing a heavy metal song about the bombing of Hiroshima, you want to make
your listeners' hair stand on end, right? You want them to feel the terror, the
heat, the megadeath in their very bones, right? So how are you going to achieve
that effect by relying exclusively on decade-old heavy metal clichés?
And no, «low-register guitar riff»
does not automatically result in an allegory of a nuclear explosion, you have
to work just a little bit more for that.
Conversely, much of the album does not stray
too far away from old school 12-bar territory — ʽBlue Steel Duesʼ is
nothing but your basic slow blues-rock jam, and the metallized cover of
ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ speaks for itself (granted, it is probably one
of the heaviest versions of the song I have ever heard, and Peterson plays the
protagonist with gusto, getting way more into character than on any other song
here, but still, just how many different hoochie coochie men do you really need in one lifetime?). And what does stray away sometimes borders on the
ridiculous: ʽGirl From Londonʼ is a sentimental-cum-metal attempt to
conquer the heights of impressionistic romanticism à la ʽLittle Wingʼ — Peterson and MacDonald start
off quiet and «deep», with nostalgically gallant-psychedelic imagery conveyed
by bad lyrics ("She wears a diamond beneath the moon / We bring her
flowers in the afternoon"), then gradually unwind and crank it up to high
heaven, but the guitar tones and melodic structure are so predictable it's not
even funny.
Maybe the best thing that can, and should, be
said about the album is that it avoids power ballads: ʽGirl From
Londonʼ is the only ballad as such, and it reminds far more of the early
successes of Hendrix and Led Zeppelin than the pompous anthems of the hairy
heroes of the Eighties. At the very least, Peterson is true to his past and
consistent in his approach to music-making. But this does not make Highlights And Lowlives any less
unnecessary — it just makes it a little more palatable if you do have to listen to it, for reviewing
purposes, for instance. Without even a single point of genuine interest, it's a
thumbs down
all the way: plenty of lowlives all right, but good luck trying to pick out the
highlights.
DINING WITH THE SHARKS (1991)
1) Big Noise; 2) Outrider; 3)
Sweet Child Of The Reeperbahn; 4) Gunfight; 5) Audio Whore; 6) Cut The Costs;
7) Sex Soldier; 8) When Two Spirits Touch; 9) Pull The Trigger; 10) Foxy Lady.
A rather prophetic title for an album, since,
to the best of my knowledge, this is exactly
what this particular LP, along with this particular incarnation of the band, is
busy doing at the moment. By the early 1990s, «Blue Cheer» had completed their
relocation to Germany, where their new sound unexpectedly found just a tad more
acclaim than elsewhere — a fact that Peterson acknowledged and honored by not
only hiring a German guitarist (Dieter Saller) to play on the record, but also
by writing songs with titles like ʽSweet Child Of The Reeperbahnʼ.
Which might or might not also contain an intentional nod to Guns N' Roses, but
in general, the Peterson/Saller sound rather continues the «Accept-ization» of
Blue Cheer's legacy begun on the previous album, much to the delight of all
those sons of rowdy Hamburg sailors whose fathers, thirty years back, used to
get equally aroused to the merry sounds of The Silver Beetles.
That said, even the least inspired Accept
albums are still preferable to this tremendously boring piece of sludgy-muck.
The only thing that could be briefly admired is Peterson's consistency of
character — other than the acoustic / steel guitar-driven folk-blues of
ʽWhen Two Spirits Touchʼ (still sounds dirty) there is not a single
nod here towards «sentimentality», «softness», «depth of feeling», and whatever
other silly qualities could distract The Beast from grinding its axe, strutting
its stuff, rolling its dough, and porking its chops. The problem, however, is
that The Beast got old, stupefied, and unadaptable to modern world conditions.
Everything that could go wrong, goes wrong. With Peterson, who has never shown
signs of melodic genius, being credited for most of the songwriting, the
majority of the riffs are clichéd reruns of The Hard Rock Textbook, with
echoes of Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, and those German bands all over
the place — in fact, some of that stuff has to be heard to be believed. If you
did not think, for instance, that it was humanly possible to rip off the Kinks
and ZZ Top on the exact same song, take a peek at ʽPull The Triggerʼ,
whose verse riff copies ʽI Got The Sixʼ and whose chorus riff copies
ʽ(Wish I Could Fly Like) Supermanʼ (and all the while the bass guitar
keeps on playing the old pattern from ʽSummertime Bluesʼ!). This is
just the most obvious example (to me), but I'm fairly sure most of the songs
could be analyzed the same way.
To this one should add the exact same leaden
guitar tone on each track, and the
complete inability of the new German player to raise any interest in his solos
— he just seems like a well-meaning kid with lots of reverence for Wolf
Hoffmann, but no particular talent of his own, and maybe that is why his leads
are usually mixed in so deep in the production, which makes the experience of
listening to the whole album comparable to the experience of crossing a
mile-long cesspool with a light, but constant electrical charge running through
it. The dubious «delight» of having it all capped off with a similar-sounding
cover of Jimi's ʽFoxy Ladyʼ is comparable to scooping out a piece of
Turkish Delight at the end of the crossing — bon appetit.
Finally, as if that wasn't enough, Peterson
must have been struck down with laryngitis on that particular day — his vocals
were never a huge gift of Fortune, but here he sounds like a lite version of
Motörhead's Lemmy and AC/DC's throat-problem-era Brian Johnson rolled in
one: hoarse, gurgling, and completely unadapted for the «macho» spirit of his
own compositions. Then again, given titles like ʽAudio Whoreʼ and
ʽSex Soldierʼ, I guess it all fits, on some particularly depraved
level, into the typical Reeperbahn aesthetics. But still, even something like
ʽWhat Do You Do For Money Honeyʼ seems chic and stylish compared to
this miserable sludge.
If this were at least «comically» bad, I could
have found it in me to say a few kind words — but since it is «boringly bad»,
which is really the worst kind of bad there is, the final verdict is an asserted
thumbs down
all the way; you'd have to be one of Peterson's groupies-for-life to enjoy
this, I think, or a Hamburg slum native or something. As it is, just do
yourself a favor and get an Accept record instead.
WHAT DOESN'T KILL YOU (2007)
1) Rollin' Dem Bones; 2) Piece
O' The Pie; 3) Born Under A Bad Sign; 4) Gypsy Rider; 5) Young Lions In
Paradise; 6) I Don't Know About You; 7) I'm Gonna Get You; 8) Maladjusted
Child; 9) Just A Little Bit (Redux); 10) No Relief.
Seeing as how Dickie Peterson died in 2009, a
mere two years after the release of Blue Cheer's last album, he maybe should
have thought of a different title. On the other hand, it is not likely that the
recording of What Doesn't Kill You
could in any way be responsible for the Original Beast's demise — first, most
of the sessions were held in 2005, way before Dickie developed prostate cancer,
and second, it's not as if the songs were the result of any superhuman effort
strong enough to cause cell deformation. Even if they do sound like they were rather painfully pooped out, pardon my
French and all.
Although Peterson had retained an active
network of German connections until the very end, this record was ultimately
made in the States, with Duck MacDonald resuming his guitar duties and the
German guy pulling out for good. The drumming was originally done by Joe
Hasselvander, but then Paul Whaley returned from Germany as well to resume
touring with the band, and they promptly replaced the original drum parts with
Whaley's re-recorded ones, for the sake of authenticity (and maybe royalties
as well, but I seriously doubt that the album could have sold more than a few
hundred copies, or that Peterson or Whaley could have hoped otherwise).
The final result is certainly a huge
improvement on Dining With The Sharks.
Twelve years of relief from making new music were enough to make the band
forget their one-time allegiance to the military riffage and mock-Wagnerian
solos of German pop metal, not to mention the excesses of Eighties' hair metal,
and advance to a sound that was closer in spirit to the original Blue Cheer —
namely, that of the «sludge metal» and «stoner rock» categories. The typical
Blue Cheer song is now a slow, draggy, grinding chain of distortion and fuzz,
over which the lead guitar rises in waves of wah-wah terror and «woman tone»
overdrive, but not loud enough to outscream the persistent roaring crunch of
the rhythm.
It's a good sound, in theory and practice,
capable of assigning good shape to good ideas. But since Blue Cheer have always
been short on good ideas, the general result is easy to predict — just about
everything on this hour-long CD sounds like one lengthy trip on a road of
sludge, whether we be dealing with newly «written» compositions, more remakes
of one's own oldies (ʽJust A Little Bitʼ), or a cover of Albert
King's ʽBorn Under A Bad Signʼ that reduces the original's unforgettable
riff to the exact same sludgy monotonousness. On the positive side, it no
longer matters that the final behemoth, ʽNo Reliefʼ, with its running
length of 9:30, is about twice as long as common sense should have dictated —
the listener's ordeal is to endure fifty-five minutes of this stuff, who cares
if some pieces of the pie are larger than others if they all taste the same?
Fans of Peterson's
«the-beast-got-sensitive-soul» side might want to check out the only exception
from the rule — ʽYoung Lions In Paradiseʼ is a «heavy ballad» with a
strong nostalgic component, as Dickie reminisces about those who are no longer
with us. It is so unusual in the context of this record and Peterson's career
in general that it almost becomes touching — in fact, Dickie's vocal part is touching, and far more credible and
just plain human than ʽPiece O' The Pieʼ, ʽMaladjusted
Childʼ, or any other macho / «bad boy» anthem on the album. Nothing out of
the ordinary in terms of melody, but a fitting last goodbye to his old pals
from someone who, even if he did not know that at the time, would soon be
saying hello once again.
However, one song out of ten is hardly enough
to make a big change in the weather, and the others do not seem to deserve even
one-liner descriptions. The best I can say is that Blue Cheer never once
attempted to sell out in an Aerosmith kind of way — not a single «power ballad»
on any of their comeback albums, not a single attempt at wooing the MTV crowds.
Detractors might say that Peterson and Co. were simply too stupid to even try
that, but even if that is true, a principled fool still deserves more respect
than an opportunistic wise guy. The record, naturally, gets its usual thumbs down,
but it also brings down the curtain on an overall thumbs-up career, and may the
Beast rest in peace — even if I am not at all sure that even Paradise could
cure this particular old lion's summertime blues.
ADDENDA:
LIVE & UNRELEASED '68-'74 (1968-1974; 1996)
1) Summertime Blues; 2) Out Of
Focus; 3) Doctor Please; 4) Fighting Star; 5) Adventures; 6) Make It To The
Party; 7) New Orleans; 8) Ace In The Hole; 9) Punk.
Naysayers may say their nays in their gayly
ways, but Blue Cheer are still sort of a «legend», and every «legend»
presumably deserves a set of archive releases, and any set of archive releases
is worth at least a brief mention and a sample, and I assume that Live & Unreleased '68-'74 is as
good a sample as any to try and convince the audience that nobody really needs
to hear, own, or seriously discuss Blue Cheer archive releases. But sure, they
deserve all the archive releases they can get, if somebody is willing to
invest.
This package, released quite a while ago, is
bluecheerfully messy in that it combines two absolutely different things —
three live performances of Vincebus
Eruptum material by the original
Blue Cheer, and then a set of six studio tracks that were recorded, but left in
the can by a short-lived version of the band in 1974, which included Ruben de
Fuentes on guitar and Terry Rae on drums. Apparently they just happened to find
themselves in a studio one day without a record contract, and twenty-two years
later, we were informed.
The live tracks (first two taken from the Steve
Allen TV show, third one God knows from where) are played very close to the
studio arrangements, although ʽDoctor Pleaseʼ is further extended by
two more minutes of noise, chaos, and feedback: dynamic and spirited, but
adding nothing to the studio experience, while the sound quality is totally
abysmal. Best thing about the whole deal is Steve Allen announcing, "the
Blue Cheer... run for your life!" at the end of the first track — a commentary
that says it all, whether you want to take it seriously or sarcastically.
Surprisingly, sound quality does not get any
better on the studio material from 1974, suggesting that the tapes had spent
those twenty-two years in somebody's damp basement, or maybe Dickie was using
them as wrap-ups for his personal stash. The material does, however, fill in an
important knowledge gap: as you remember, Oh! Pleasant Hope ended the band's early career on an unusual
«roots-rock» note, while The Beast Is...
Back reinvented them more than a decade later as a heavy metal outfit —
this particular pit stop shows that already by 1974 Peterson had completely
cleared his head from all that «folksy» nonsense, returning to a heavy,
pub-rock oriented sound that recalls Slade or early Rocka Rolla-era Judas Priest. From here, it would only be a matter
of adding an extra layer of distortion and glossy pop metal production to get
to the eventual sound of The Beast.
However, the songs themselves are uniformly
dull — uninventive blues-rock with just enough competence to make it
listenable, but nothing to make it stand out from all the competition. The
cover of ʽNew Orleansʼ does not work at all, because combining the
song's original party cheerfulness with an aggressive hard rock sound makes as
much sense as trying to put salt in your chocolate — and it is still more
memorable than all the other tunes put together, although, granted, the
impression may be exacerbated simply because of the dreadful bootleg-quality
murk of the sonic flow. At any rate, it is hardly the fault of Ruben de
Fuentes, who seems to honestly try to get the best out of his typically
mid-1970s hard rock guitar. But whatever be the situation, Live & Unreleased is clearly recommendable only for the
staunchest fan of the band; for everybody else, it is as good a thumbs down
as any.
FLY ME TO THE MOON (1968)
1) Fly Me To The Moon; 2)
Baby! You Oughta Think It Over; 3) I'm A Midnight Mover; 4) What Is This?; 5)
Somebody Special; 6) Take Me; 7) Moonlight In Vermont; 8) Love, The Time Is
Now; 9) I'm In Love; 10) California Dreamin'; 11) No Money In My Pocket; 12)
Lillie Mae.
Although his first solo LP did not come out
until 1968, by which time the world of popular music had changed beyond
recognition, the name «Bobby Womack» must have already been well familiar to
everyone closely following both the black and the white R&B market — on
the former, Bobby was a member of The Valentinos, a vocal group under the
protection of Sam Cooke, and, upon Sam's passing, a resident songwriter for the
likes of Wilson Pickett; on the latter, he was known as the author of ʽIt's
All Over Nowʼ, which the Rolling Stones went on to transform from a fun
variation on Chuck Berry's ʽMemphis Tennesseeʼ into something sharper
and barkier, but Bobby's original vocal performance is still well worth
checking out.
Anyway, for a variety of technical reasons
Bobby's first proper recording contract was not signed until 1968, when he put
himself under the wing of Minit Records and went to Memphis to work with Chips
Moman, the guy who would, just one year later, help record the Elvis comeback
album (From Elvis In Memphis) and
other stuff. The band assembled for the sessions was not particularly
notorious, but Womack and Moman somehow managed to rev them up, so much so that
people are sometimes surprised to find out that this was not, in fact, a
«genuine Stax production». It wasn't, but it was quality production, fully
adequate for a worthy soul/R&B album.
In fact, there is nothing here that would make
the album any less of a «knockout» than any given Wilson Pickett album — the
only difference being that Pickett had the Atlantic / Muscle Shoals «brands» on
his side, while the guy who actually wrote the songs for Pickett had to settle
with a lesser proposal. Yet when it comes, for instance, to deciding on the
better singer, it is very much a matter of taste — Pickett has slightly more
range and power, perhaps, but Bobby has a grittier rasp, and is sometimes able
to pack more human drama into a short two-and-a-half minute explosion than his
more famous predecessor.
Case in point: the title track, a 14-year old
pop song that Bobby turns from a basic sentimental love declaration into a
vocal tempest — as if all the "let me see what spring is like",
"hold my hand, baby, kiss me", and "please be true" were
not merely rhetoric questions and admonitions, but an honestly desperate
outburst of pleading. Peggy Lee (and Brenda Lee, for that matter) sang that
song with sexy security; Bobby gives it so much insecurity that one almost
forgets about the sexiness in the first place. And it works so well that he
goes on to apply the same approach to such a well-established standard as ʽMoonlight
In Vermontʼ — given an entirely new face, with sped-up tempos, muscular
brass overdubs, and a vocal delivery that eschews subtlety, nuance, nostalgia,
and melancholy and goes for burning soul ecstasy all the way.
On the other end of the spectrum, the songs
Bobby originally wrote for Pickett (ʽI'm In Loveʼ, ʽI'm A
Midnight Moverʼ) are not one inch inferior to Pickett's own versions, but
those who already know the Pickett versions will probably be more interested
in such minor gems as ʽWhat Is This?ʼ, a soul-funk hybrid that stands
with one foot firmly in the Sixties and the other one already in the next
decade, presaging its penchant for moodily orchestrated funk and disco, or
ʽLilly Maeʼ, with a concentrated bass / rhythm guitar / lead guitar /
organ / brass attack that rocks as tough as any feedback-free song could rock
in 1968. A little less successful, in my opinion, is Womack's reworking of
ʽCalifornia Dreamin'ʼ, as it often happens with R&B covers of
perfectly constructed pop hits whose magic was primarily due to vocal harmonies
— but if you manage to put the idea of comparison out of your mind, Bobby's
take is just another splash-o'-soul, fully credible and enjoyable, like
everything else on here.
The album did not sell much, yielded no huge
hits, and Bobby was still a long way from his creative peak of the early
1970s, but sticking in, out, and around of the music business for ten years
certainly helped — few R&B/soul debut albums of the decade sounded that self-assured, professional and
with the artist in full control of the vibe, and this means a certified thumbs up
even if, from a purely technical viewpoint, the «creative-innovative» component
was nothing to write home about. Nothing wrong with the «charismatic»
component, though.
MY PRESCRIPTION (1969)
1) How I Miss You Baby; 2)
More Than I Can Stand; 3) It's Gonna Rain; 4) Everyone's Gone To The Moon; 5) I
Can't Take It Like A Man; 6) I Left My Heart In San Francisco; 7) Arkansas
State Prison; 8) I'm Gonna Forget About You; 9) Don't Look Back; 10) Tried And
Convicted; 11) Thank You.
Pretty much the exact same formula here as on Fly Me To The Moon — not particularly
surprising, seeing as how it was produced by the same producer, released on
the same record label, and probably (I am not completely sure here) played by
the same backing band, while the songs, evenly divided between covers and
originals, cover the same soul/funk territory and work the same kinds of
grooves. Thus, although the lead single, ʽHow I Miss You Babyʼ, fared
decently on the R&B charts, on the whole, all three singles and the LP in
general sold significantly less than Fly
Me To The Moon — in 1969, I guess even R&B audiences expected
innovation, and Bobby was much less interested in innovating here than in
«solidifying».
But in retrospect, My Prescription holds up just as proudly as its predecessor. It is
difficult to praise these tunes to high heaven, yet, on the other hand, it is
just as hard to find any problems with them. I mean, if you just want to write
a soulful song about missing your baby and you have no other ambitions,
ʽHow I Miss You Babyʼ will show you the right way to sew together
electric guitars, organs, brass, strings, and a yearning wail — nothing
exceptional about it, just setting a humble goal and fulfilling it 100%. The
same applies to everything else.
If there is one thing about these songs that
makes them stand out, it is Bobby's own guitar parts: as a confident player
believing in the importance of his instrument, he makes sure that the guitar is
always heard loud and clear and never gets lost behind the fanfares. Considering
also that the bass parts for the songs are consistently inventive, I wouldn't
actually mind hearing ʽMore Than I Can Standʼ, ʽIt's Gonna
Rainʼ and the other songs without that many overdubs — Bobby's funky riffs
and the fretboard-roaming basslines create enough excitement between each
other.
On the arranging front, Womack continues the
practice of reinventing classics, turning ʽI Left My Heart In San
Franciscoʼ into a charmingly tight slice of fast-groovin' funk-pop with
jazzy overtones à la George
Benson (with whom Bobby spent some time working earlier that year), while his
mentor Sam Cooke's ʽI'm Gonna Forget About Youʼ is, on the contrary,
slowed down and turned into something that does not bear the slightest
resemblance to the original — the original was «decisive, but melancholic»,
whereas Bobby throws in some wound-up righteous anger, playing the ball-of-fire
to Sam's wall-of-ice. He is being more merciful to Jonathan King's starry-eyed,
sentimentally-ironic pop hit ʽEveryone's Gone To The Moonʼ, keeping
both the sentimentality and the irony, but substituting Southern soul for
Britsy folk-pop, and the substitution works without a hitch, probably even
better this time than on ʽCalifornia Dreamin'ʼ.
Ultimately, though, the album's one highlight
probably got to be ʽArkansas State Prisonʼ, an original in every
sense of the word — the way Bobby integrates bluesy slide guitar licks and
strange, deeply mixed, ominously atmospheric blasts of strings worthy of a Paul
Buckmaster into an overall R&B arrangement shows that the man was
perfectly capable of pushing forward boundaries if he really put his mind to
it. The lyrics, a daring tale of a prison break, were quite edgy for their
time, too, but it is the musical meld that still holds up in an interesting
way, not the social message. If Sam Cooke was first and foremost a wizard of
vocal melodies, then Bobby was a master of guitar/voice grooves, but both of
them saw their primary mission as entertainment, not solution of the world's
problems, although that, too, could occupy their minds from time to time.
Anyway, My Prescription on the whole
is not there to save the universe, but to give you a bit of a good time, and
for that, it earns its thumbs up without any problems.
THE WOMACK LIVE (1970)
1) Intro; 2) Oh How I Miss You
Baby; 3) California Dreamin'; 4) Something; 5) Everybody's Talkin'; 6) Laughin'
& Clownin' / To Live The Past; 7) I'm A Midnight Mover; 8) The Preacher; 9)
More Than I Can Stand.
Despite its relative brevity and despite the fact
that Bobby was not even close at the time to his career peak, The Womack Live is a hell of a great
record — one of the best live R&B recordings of its age, in fact. Played
out somewhere in Hollywood in late 1969 or so, it really sets a great standard
for how an inventive soul artist should entertain his audience if he is not
endowed with either the maniacal energy of a James Brown or the virtuoso
playing chops of a Hendrix.
First, it is very much a matter of the setlist.
Although he already had two solo albums under his belt, not to mention the
entire Valentinos career, only four songs from the studio records make it onto
the record — and at least one of these merely serves as an excuse for something
completely different. The rest consists of such contemporary classics as
ʽSomethingʼ and ʽEverybody's Talkingʼ, supposedly already
well known to the audience but seriously recast, some ecstatic improvisation
(ʽThe Preacherʼ), and even a fleeting guest appearance by Percy
Mayfield on his own ʽTo Live The Pastʼ — anything out there to make
the show more intriguing.
Second, it is very much a matter of knowing
your audience and conducting your interaction in a manner that is both
energizing and intellectually inoffensive. For all of James Brown's talent at
revving up his listeners, the usual soul-burning "d'ya feel alright? I
said D'YA FEEL ALRIGHT?" manner of interaction can quickly get tiresome,
especially in the context of a live album, so Womack finds alternate ways of
entertaining — for instance, excusing himself for wanting to «play my guitar
for five minutes» during ʽCaliforniaʼ, then turning the jam section
into a mock-contest between himself and his second guitarist, or dragging out
Percy Mayfield from nowhere, or, once again, apologizing for the onset of a
«preaching» mood, or insisting on limiting the audience participation to
«lonely women» only on ʽOh How I Miss You Babyʼ, or doing something
else; simply announcing a song and playing it always seems like a rather boring
chore to the man, but the best thing is, he never really comes across as an
annoying clown or an irritating narcissistic self-admirer.
Third, of course, the level of musical
performance is impeccable. He drops the guitar solo from ʽSomethingʼ,
because playing like Harrison is not his thang, but the arrangement comes with
organs, steel guitar, and... sitar?
I'm fairly confident there was a sitar plucked back there, or at least
something that arrogantly imitated a sitar, and meshed quite well with the
other instruments. (Of course, there was no sitar on the original, but all the
more reason to put one in the reinvention). The guitar solo on ʽCalifornia
Dreamin'ʼ combines old-school jazz with new-school funk and could well
have been much longer, except that Womack does not dare to burden the audience
too long with free-flight improvisation. And ʽI'm A Midnight Moverʼ
gets transformed into a sweaty R&B jam that incorporates everything that
flies through Bobby's mind at the moment — even a brief excerpt from
ʽShake Your Moneymakerʼ.
Thus, the only reason why The Womack Live is not a superb top-level live album is that there
is only so much you can do with that sort of set of limitations — a competent,
but not extraordinary, backing band, a soulful, hard-working, but not vocally
unique singer, and a set of pleasant, but not jaw-droppingly original songs
(well, ʽSomethingʼ is a bit
more than that, but it'd be a bit of a cheat to highly rate any artist just
because he covered ʽSomethingʼ). Usually, though, such limitations,
especially in a live setting, would probably result in utter boredom — all the
more glory to Mr. Womack for making it as exciting, enjoyable, and
unpredictable as possible. Thumbs up.
COMMUNICATION (1971)
1) Communication; 2) Come
L'Amore; 3) Fire And Rain; 4) (If You Don't Want My Love) Give It Back; 5) Monologue
/ (They Long To Be) Close To You; 6) Everything Is Beautiful; 7) That's The Way
I Feel About Cha; 8) Yield Not To Temptation.
Although his previous records were hardly the
epitome of commercial success, fate still smiled on Bobby and got him a nice
promotion in the early 1970s — for his next record contract, Womack was
rewarded with United Artists, and a possibility to record with the cream of the
crop: the regular team at Muscle Shoals. Not that his older band was worth any
serious criticism, but they were kind
of old-fashioned, and in 1970, whether you were black or white, you had to
change and adapt, or be ready to go down.
That same year, Bobby also played guitar on Sly
& The Family Stone's There's A Riot
Goin' On, learning how to behave in a hotter, crazier, funkier environment,
and the results are immediately obvious on the very first track of his new
album: ʽCommunicationʼ is a sleazy, steaming guitar groove that could
be very easily mistaken for a mating call, if the lyrics did not explicitly
refer to the idea of improving social relations through the power of
communication and mutual trust (well, on the other hand, one does not
necessarily exclude the other). Wah-wah riffage, distorted wailing leads, brass
fanfare, Bobby at his screeching best (still a few notches below James Brown,
but a decent substitute in case of need) — if this is a graduate exam in Funk
School, I'd give senior student Robert Dwayne Womack a solid A, hold the plus
for disciplinary reasons.
In general, however, Communication cannot be pigeonholed as a «funk album». Apart from
the opening track, everything else is much more traditional: smooth,
non-syncopated mid-tempo R&B grooves alternating with slow soulful ballads.
As it always happens with Bobby, tracks are regularly loaded with small
surprises, but «small surprises» are not «major stylistic revolutions»; the
general difference is really in the backing band, which always seems on the
verge of launching into something different, but in the end, stays where Bobby
wants them to stay. On ʽGive It Backʼ, for instance, they fiddle and
fuss around for about ten seconds, even starting out with the first bar of
ʽBaby Please Don't Goʼ (that might actually be Bobby himself), then
straighten out for the album's second-funkiest, but still
«lite-dance-funk»-oriented groove.
The biggest hit from the album, and the song
that genuinely restored Bobby's name on the chart of public conscience, was
ʽThat's The Way I Feel About Chaʼ, a credible, but not particularly
outstanding, love anthem whose major point of attraction might not even be the
vocal melody and the repetitive chorus, but the melodic lead parts played by
Jimmy Johnson, who does not get to have an instrumental break, but still takes
the opportunity to solo all the way alongside Bobby's singing. This adventurous
approach from the Muscle Shoals people is certainly an improvement over the
competent and devoted, but not too initiative-oriented, style of Bobby's
Memphis band.
In a particularly risky and bold approach, the
man allocates almost ten minutes of Side B to an extended version of
ʽClose To Youʼ, the first half of which is actually given to a
half-spoken, half-hummed «monologue» in which Bobby apologizes to his audience for going «commercial» — quite an apt
thing to do on a cover of a Burt Bacharach song that had just been turned into
a monster hit for The Carpenters. With this cover, Bobby sets out to illustrate
the major point of the monologue — that «music is music», and that, no matter
what sort of material you sing or play, what really matters is the amount of
soul you put into it.
To be honest, I am not sure that he is
completely right on the issue — in fact, I'd probably take the slick,
straight-jacketed Carpenters version of the song, pre-packaged and calculated
as it is, over Bobby's sincere attempt to «ruffle» it up here and make it live
and breathe. You can't really bring the stillborn back to life — you can stuff
the stillborn and make it into an imposing, eerie waxwork, but you can't make
it walk and talk, and ʽClose To Youʼ is one of those songs I'd rather
hear as stiff and mechanical, because they are more memorable that way. Still,
at the very least, Bobby's stance makes sense, and it is curious and
instructive to hear him cover the song the way he does it. Whatever be, these
nine and a half minutes are not wasted.
Without discussing the other songs (most are
covers of not particularly strong material, and it is not clear if you will
ever really need yet another individualistic
version of James Taylor's ʽFire And Rainʼ), I will simply conclude
that Communication is an uneven, but
curious and rewarding «transitional» album, worthy of its thumbs up but not quite on the same
level with the stuff that would follow. The most important thing about it is
that the shift to a major label had not, in any way, silenced or muted the
individual voice of Bobby Womack — on the contrary, just like Marvin Gaye and
Stevie Wonder at about the same time, the man's primary concern always rests on
one crucial issue: how to remain inside the machine without turning into a part
of the machine. He does not exactly resolve
that issue — Communication has its
fair share of «genericity» — but he is willing to give it a bigger try than
ever before.
UNDERSTANDING (1972)
1) I Can Understand It; 2)
Woman Got To Have It; 3) And I Love Her; 4) Got To Get You Back; 5) Simple Man;
6) Ruby Dean; 7) Thing Called Love; 8) Sweet Caroline; 9) Harry Hippie.
If a record called Communication is quickly followed up by a record called Understanding, this already suggests
that there is not going to be a hell of a lot of difference between the two.
And indeed, they have more or less the same length, more or less the same
message, more or less the same stylistic and emotional variety, more or less
the same players, and more or less the same balance between original
songwriting by Bobby, original songwriting by his partners (Joe Hicks), and
covers of contemporary material and oldies. The only objective difference is
that Understanding was a much
bigger hit — selling far more than its predecessor, as well as yielding another
Top 50 single for Bobby (ʽHarry Hippieʼ).
The LP sales were actually bolstered by the
radio popularity of the lead-in track, ʽI Can Understand Itʼ, which
never made it onto a legit single, but became a club favorite nevertheless.
Technically, it is not disco, but the combination of steady dance rhythmics,
brass, and «lush» strings makes it the perfect accompaniment for nightlife in
1972 — loud, romantic, intoxicating, and calling for peace, love, and mutual
understanding. My only complaint is that Bobby's sensuous lead lines are buried
so deep in the mix, making the brass/strings combination the focal point of the
tune and, consequently, somewhat dating its continued impact.
At the time, though, the track was extremely
«commercial», and the rest of the album shows that Bobby was not at all
interested in aligning himself with the likes of either Sly (for extra psychedelia
or «social rebelliousness») or Funkadelic (for extra experimentation and a more
aggressive sound). He got some teeth to chomp, for sure, but he does it only
once: ʽSimple Manʼ is a nasty funky groove with an appropriately
simple, but nagging bass line around which Bobby parades distorted guitar
riffs, screechy blues leads, dark electric piano rolls, brass fanfare, and even
some relatively primitive Moog synth solos. A simple man he may be, but so much
less the reason to fool around with the simple man who can growl and snarl
alongside the best of 'em.
But this is actually rare. More commonly, Bobby
is content with covering Neil Diamond (ʽSweet Carolineʼ — finally, a
cover that sticks relatively close to the original and, in some ways, transcends
it) — and the Beatles (ʽAnd I Love Herʼ, not as good because the song
predictably loses much of its uniqueness by being given a full-blown early
1970s soul arrangement), or co-writing, with either Joe Hicks or other Womacks,
soft «dance-soul» numbers, such as ʽWoman Got To Have Itʼ, the first
single for the album whose most memorable aspect is probably its jumpy bassline,
tense, boppy, and fidgety in comparison to the relatively stable groove of the
rest of the song. Meanwhile, ʽRuby Deanʼ is notable for some fine
acoustic riffage, which goes along fine with harmonica solos and Bobby's
melancholic howling.
Still, the most striking song on the album is
probably ʽHarry Hippieʼ — written by songwriter Jim Ford. The song
acquired additional poignancy two years later, when Bobby's brother, Harry
Womack, was killed by his jealous girlfriend, upon which the tune became
re-dedicated to him; but the original lyrics seem to have been referring to an
abstract-collective Harry, summarizing the artist's feelings towards the hippie
stereotype — "I'd like to help a man when he's down / But I can't help him
much when he's sleeping on the ground". You can feel Bobby really getting into the spirit here,
trying to rub up as much sympathy towards the character as possible, but put it
all in a tragic context all the same. For Bobby Womack, who was always careful
to walk the thin line between «manufactured, well-paid, stable entertainment»
and «artistic recklessness», the song must have been a particularly important
manifesto at the time. And its choice for the album's coda has its own meaning
— letting us know that Understanding
is not that easy to come by if your mental languages differ so much.
I would not rip Understanding out of its context and award it with a much more
enthusiastic thumbs
up than usual just because it incidentally happened to be more
popular than usual. But its spirit burns just as brightly as that of Communication, and together, they
represent early 1970s «dance-oriented soul» at its average finest. It isn't
«great art», but it is perfectly crafted, meaningful, and highly tasteful
entertainment.
ACROSS 110TH STREET (1972)
1) Across 110th Street; 2)
Harlem Clavinette; 3) If You Don't Want My Love; 4) Hang On In There
(instrumental); 5) Quicksand; 6) Harlem Love Theme; 7) Across 110th Street
(instrumental); 8) Do It Right; 9) Hang On In There; 10) If You Don't Want My
Love (instrumental); 11) Across 110th Street (part 2).
Nice little soundtrack here to a mostly
forgotten «blaxploitation» movie (come to think of it, are there any «blaxploitation» movies that have
not been mostly forgotten?), starring Yaphet Kotto and Anthony Quinn. The soundtrack
was mostly forgotten, too, until Tarantino acted on the urge to revive the
title track for Jackie Brown, which
is where the average pop culture fan is most likely to get his first taste of
ʽAcross 110th Streetʼ.
It is somewhat unfortunate, though, that the
song never made it to a regular LP: it is good enough to transcend soundtrack
quality, a tempestuous tale of «gotta-get-out-of-this-place» ghetto suffering
with a formulaic, but terrific arrangement and one of Bobby's most soulful
vocal deliveries ever — you won't find much of that sort of ominous, disturbing
fury even on a Stevie Wonder or a Marvin Gaye record. Sure, the brass fanfares
and howling pre-disco strings sound dated not only to their epoch, but even to
their movie genre, yet in this case, they actually work in full unison with the
escapist message of the song. And this is without even mentioning the reprise
of the theme at the end, where the vocals quickly give way to a nightmarish mix
of wailing guitars, electronic keyboard effects, and occasional ghoulish
screaming — the thickest, densest arrangement on a Womack album so far, with a
heavy psychedelic effect if played at top volume.
The rest of the album wanders between several
other vocal numbers, masterminded by Bobby, and several instrumental themes,
directed and conducted by Jay Jay Johnson «and his Orchestra»: Jay Jay,
formerly a bebop trombonist, had only recently moved to film score composing,
and his work here is quite outstanding in its own way — ʽHarlem
Clavinetteʼ is swaggerishly funky and polyphonic, with predictable wah-wah
guitar passages alternating with far less predictable flute solos; ʽHarlem
Love Themeʼ is a good example of early 1970s «fusionistic» take on the
late night jazz standard of the 1950s (provided you can stand the ultra-high
frequencies of those opening keyboards — Jay Jay must have been appealing to
the bat segment of his audience); and his instrumental reworkings of Bobby's
own compositions always bring out the best in their melodies (the brass
substitution of the vocal melody in ʽAcross 110th Streetʼ fully
preserves the tension and decisiveness in Womack's delivery).
As for Bobby, he contributes a new, slower,
more romantic reworking of ʽIf You Don't Want My Loveʼ, and a couple
extra funk numbers: ʽQuicksandʼ goes by too fast to be memorable, but
ʽDo It Rightʼ is a pretty hot rocker, set to a rhythm that will be
familiar to everybody who knows The Who's live rendition of
ʽSpoonfulʼ (though I'm sure it must have had an even earlier
precedent) and featuring some smoking guitar and Moog solos. On a curious note,
most of these numbers also feature Bobby in «totally loose» mode, repeatedly
screaming his head off like he'd never allowed himself earlier on any of his
proper LPs — talk about the liberating powers of blaxploitation filmmaking!
For technical reasons, Across 110th Street has no chance to remain as culturally
significant and thoroughly enjoyable as Curtis Mayfield's Superfly, still arguably the
definitive blaxploitation soundtrack of its era — too many instrumentals, too
many reprises, too many rewrites — but in the overall context of Womack's
artistic travelog, it is not to be overlooked, and if you are a major fan of
orchestrated funk experiments of the decade, Jay Jay Johnson's work here also
makes it a must-have. Thumbs up.
FACTS OF LIFE (1973)
1) Nobody Wants You When
You're Down And Out; 2) I'm Through Trying To Prove My Love To You; 3) If You
Can't Give Her Love Give Her Up; 4) That's Heaven To Me; 5) Holdin' On To My
Baby's Love / Nobody; 6) Facts Of Life / He'll Be There When The Sun Goes Down;
7) Can't Stop A Man In Love; 8) The Look Of Love; 9) Natural Man; 10) All Along
The Watchtower.
Back from soundtrack territory to regular LP
turf again, Bobby tosses off another fine batch of tunes — nothing particularly
spectacular, just some more of that solid, believable, classy-sounding soul
stuff that seemed to come so easily to him in the early 1970s. By now, it was
obvious that he would not be remembered as a major visionary or innovator of
Stevie Wonder's caliber, but his interest in «minor» experiments and production
twists still kept him miles ahead of many, if not most, competitors in the same
genre.
For instance, how many people would be able to
come up with the idea of redoing the old Jimmy Cox standard ʽNobody Wants
You When You're Down And Outʼ as a funk-pop number, with a nasty bassline
and proto-disco strings? Nothing whatsoever, except for the lyrics, is left
over from the original in the process, but hey, good idea — the song is about
internal turmoil and pissed-off disillusionment, and why not strengthen these
feelings with a bit of a funky tempest? Perhaps the mix is not clever enough to
let us fully appreciate Bobby's electric guitar parts (too eclipsed by the
overriding brass), but fairly strong all the same.
Another example — who would dare take
ʽ(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Womanʼ, so closely associated
with Carole King and Aretha, and turn it into ʽNatural Manʼ? Well, apparently a
little-known R&B singer called Fred Hughes got the start on Bobby five years
earlier, but, from what limited amount of his songs I have heard, Fred sported
a bit of a «womanly» image, following in the shoes of Clyde McPhatter and
Smokey Robinson, whereas Womack was totally «virile», and this kind of gender
turnaround might have been seen as risqué by some of his fans. Yet his
vocal parts are totally credible, as he'd already cut his teeth on
reinterpreting stuff like ʽClose To Youʼ — and, for that matter, they
also inspired Rod Stewart to repeat the venture on his own cover, recorded for
the Smiler sessions a year later.
(Not sure of whether this should be used as a positive argument — Smiler wasn't that hot a record, but at
least he still had Ronnie Wood by his side at the time, and the decline process
was not yet irreversible).
More questionable is Bobby's decision to put
his own stamp on ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ, where he takes the
Hendrix version for default and dares to offer his own guitar playing, heavily
wah-wahed and double-tracked, for comparison. The final results are good, but
there is a reason, after all, why Jimi is revered as a visionary guitar player
and Bobby is not — Jimi's fire comes out of ingeniously tuned firethrowers,
while Bobby's fire is satisfied with steady crackling in the hearth: the song
has no dynamics, and is in danger of becoming boring already after the first minute,
especially if it is hard for you to erase the Jimi comparison from your head.
Concerning originals, there are relatively few
here: ʽHe'll Be There When The Sun Goes Downʼ, a rhythmic,
lush-string-drenched ballad of the Al Green variety, is probably the best of
the lot, just because the string groove seems unusually complex and emotional,
and, most importantly, it falls well in line with the song's lyrical vibe. It
actually begins as a long spoken piece (title track), where Bobby, a little
tongue-tied and confused, explains that his contract does not allow him to keep
a steady relationship — so "don't get hung up on me, cause tomorrow I
might be gone on down the road". The strings help carry on this subtle mix
of romance and loneliness, even if the message itself is sorta questionable,
but then, as long as he ain't justifying date rapes or anything, the man has a
right to defend his lifestyle of one-night stands, and the music here is an
excellent soundtrack for a one-night stand if you're sick and tired of family
values or anything.
Most of the other songs, be they originals or
covers, do not submit themselves to comments that easily — I could rave on
about how wonderfully deep and tender I find ʽThat's Heaven To Meʼ,
but it's a rather faithful Sam Cooke cover, and should rather be discussed in a
Sam Cooke context. In any case, it all sounds good; my only problem with Facts Of Life is that it goes a bit too
far in the «soft» direction, with only the first and last track rocking out
with decisiveness — and all the ballads and melodic upbeat R&B numbers are
starting to fall together after a while. But it's not as if this problem did
not exist before, be it with Bobby or a million other serious, hard-working artists,
and it ain't no reason to deprive the album of another thumbs up — if only because, given
the musical climate of the time, the age of the artist, the original talent,
and the good sense of taste, it would be hard to imagine how Facts Of Life could be anything but not a «solid» album, at least. Maybe if
he'd been impressed by Barry White's early singles...
LOOKIN' FOR A LOVE AGAIN (1974)
1) Lookin' For A Love; 2) I
Don't Wanna Be Hurt By Ya Love Again; 3) Doing It My Way; 4) Let It Hang Out;
5) Point Of No Return; 6) You're Welcome, Stop On By; 7) You're Messing Up A
Good Thing; 8) Don't Let Me Down; 9) Copper Kettle; 10) There's One Thing That
Beats Failing.
It is not exactly clear why Bobby decided to
re-record his decade-old Valentinos hit, ʽLookin' For A Loveʼ, for
the lead single off his new album, not to mention using its title for the
entire LP. One might have easily taken this for a sign of stagnation — even
despite the fact that Bobby did come up with a bunch of original compositions
this time; none of them, apparently, could be regarded as commercially viable,
and indeed, while ʽLookin' For A Loveʼ still managed to hit No. 1 on
the R&B charts, its follow-up, the «soft-funk» dance number ʽYou're
Welcome, Stop On Byʼ, was a relative flop in comparison.
The essence of ʽLookin' For A Loveʼ,
which used to be indeed one of the finest mergers of R&B and doo-wop in the
early 1960s, is preserved quite caringly, but the arrangement has been upgraded
to include an intrusive synthesizer lead that makes the revision as dated to
its epoch as the original; so you have yourself a choice of preference here,
depending on whether you prefer generic Sixties production (crisp, but
poorly-recorded sound) or generic Seventies (well-recorded, but somewhat
sterile and stuffy in comparison). In any case, revisiting past successes is
always a bad omen for the artist, and it does not help that the remaining nine
songs all pale, one way or another, next to the opening vigorous punch of the
title track.
Bobby still retains enough strength to come up
with another unpredictable reinvention — this time, he is experimenting with
the old folk standard ʽCopper Kettleʼ, but even though the new arrangement,
envisaged as a lush blend of country and R&B, with a slow bass groove and
slide guitars, is properly creative, it all ends up losing the song's original
essence and turning it into just another soulful declaration of... well,
whatever can be soulfully declared. Reinvention keeps the juices flowing
alright, but everything has got to have reasonable limits: you can't do that much with yer basic campfire tune
without depriving it of its basic sense (for an example of a reasonable reinvention, check out
Dylan's version on Self Portrait).
Other than that, you've got your regular
proto-disco dance fun (ʽLet It Hang Outʼ, with some fabulously
ecstatic guitar soloing), your regular R&B ballads (ʽI Don't Wanna Be
Hurt Againʼ), your regular slow soul-burning ballads (ʽDoing It My
Wayʼ), and so on. As usual, it all sounds good, and Bobby's singing is
formally impeccable, but there is a strong impression that he is not trying all
that much, running on auto-pilot and milking that old «strong feeling» vibe
instead of looking for interesting chord sequences or startling vocal flourishes.
As a result, everything is even, smooth, and modestly classy, but the distinct
lack of individual highlights means only one thing: the man is finally caught
in a rut. Consequently, I cannot recommend this record for «fans of R&B» in
general — only for fans of Bobby in particular, since, at the very least, there
are no attempts here to change at the expense of his own identity.
I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE WORLD IS COMING TO (1975)
1) Interlude No. 1 / I Don't
Know; 2) Superstar; 3) If You Want My Love, Put Something Down On It; 4) Git
It; 5) What's Your World; 6) Check It Out; 7) Interlude No. 2; 8) Jealous Love;
9) It's All Over Now; 10) Yes, Jesus Loves Me.
Yes indeed, it is hard to tell what the world
is coming to if it no longer agrees to buy mass quantities of Bobby Womack
records. This one completely fell through the floor — the lead single
ʽCheck It Outʼ barely scraped the charts, and its follow-up, a
revised (in fact, completely reinvented, which might have added to the
problem) take on ʽIt's All Over Nowʼ, missed them completely. The LP
itself also fared poorly, and the most disappointing thing about it was that
you couldn't even accuse Bobby of feeling «out of time» — on the contrary, the
record clearly pays attention to ongoing trends, incorporating more electronics
and tighter dance beats than ever before. All in all, Bobby makes it clear that
he is ready to undergo a transition to disco. So why the decline in popularity?
How come he got outsold by the Bee Gees on this market, anyway?
Most likely, the album simply fell through the
cracks. At his best, Bobby was a master of the friendly funky groove and the
soulful vocal tear. But the more he stoops to the new demands of the time, the
less impressive the groove is, and the less space is left for the soulfulness.
A succesful disco hit needs a major hookline, and just how many major
hooklines are there on these particular songs? ʽCheck It Outʼ
features a pleasant enough four-note brass / guitar riff as its main point of
attraction, but it has neither sufficient cockiness for the boys, nor the
required sexiness for the girls. The thing is, Mr. Womack's soul is still
dwelling in the «gallant Sixties», and the thrills that he offers here for
listeners in 1975 are too obsolete to properly thrill — in fact, properly titillate — their gut feelings. In other
words, ʽCheck It Outʼ is no ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ when it
comes to really getting people up on their feet in a way they've never been
gotten up before. The old funk school is getting dusty.
Re-evaluated forty years after the fact,
though, I Don't Know What The World Is
Coming To seems to be just another decent, not-too-special Womack record.
Other than the quickened tempos, everything seems to be in place: passionate
vocals, clever guitar licks, unusual arranging ideas, tight backing band. The
title track, for instance, has a thoroughly cool twin set of guitar lead lines
trailing through all of its duration — a «clean» «woman tone», playing a
melodic part all based on sustained humming notes, and a distorted, frenzied,
psychedelic guitar explosion. Unfortunately, they are not separated into
separate channels and are kept well below Bobby's vocals in the mix: as usual,
the man is just too humble to let the guitar play a distinctive part, not even
if one of the players on the track is Glen Coins from Parliament/Funkadelic.
On Side B, the same double-tracking trick is
repeated on ʽWhat's Your Worldʼ, another classy groove where the
tension is further driven up by the mean bassline which, at about 3:14 into the
song, explodes in a murky sea of apocalyptic fuzz, then, a minute later, comes
back to its senses, then, towards the fade-out, does it again. It's the little
things like that — totally superfluous from a general point of view — that add
spice to the otherwise plain, not-too-memorable grooves and show that Bobby's
will to hunt for new sounds was hardly diminished. The problem is, you, the listener, likewise, have to
sniff that will out; sometimes only an intent, thoroughly focused listen in
headphones will bring out the complexity of the arrangements.
And there are misfires, too. The new version of
ʽIt's All Over Nowʼ, for instance, is a mess; where Bobby's previous
self-reinventions always preserved the gist of the tune, this particular one is
clearly self-referential, and could only work as an extra coda to the original
— Bobby's duet with Bill Withers centers on endless re-runs of the chorus and
chaotic vocalizing: you are offered three minutes of cheerful dance-centered
insanity without a good understanding of what all the hoopla is about. The only
thing sillier than recording this track was the attempt to release it as an
official single — for whom?
It is also a little strange to sit through a
whole album of mostly high-powered dance music, lightly interspersed with a few
ballads, only to have it end on a slow, reverential note with a gospel number:
ʽYes, Jesus Loves Meʼ seems like a hasty toss-off, almost like an
instantaneous apology to the Lord for over-indulging in «pleasures of the
flesh» on the rest of the record (musically more than lyrically), and the
gospel genre is not really tailor-made for Bobby's stylistics.
But in all honesty, that's just nitpicking. It
would be all too easy to say that the album finds Bobby in a directionless
state of confusion, and use its very title for an indirect confirmation — in
reality, I don't feel any confusion, and, for what it's worth, serious soul
artists have always complained about
the state of the world, regardless of the actual historical context (which is
why so much of their stuff sounds timeless, applicable to any epoch). It is
really quite a self-assured, solid recording in its own right — its only
serious «flaw» being in that it tries to give the people what they want, the
way they want it, but fails, because
it is still delivered the way the author
wants it. Or something like that, anyway.
SAFETY ZONE (1975)
1) Everything's Gonna Be
Alright; 2) I Wish It Would Rain; 3) Trust Me; 4) Where There's A Will There's
A Way; 5) Love Ain't Something You Can Get For Free; 6) Something You Got; 7)
Daylight; 8) I Feel A Groove Comin' On.
Ironic title, considering that this was Bobby's
first serious plunge into disco waters — the last track is a ferociously
non-stop eight-minutes-on-the-floor workout, and ʽEverything's Gonna Be
Alrightʼ and ʽWhere There's A Will...ʼ do their best to keep up
with the hotness as well. For the first time in his life, alas, it seems like
Bobby is giving in to outside pressure, with a loss of face. When it comes to
straightforward disco, he has no way of «womackizing» it.
Seriously, ʽI Feel A Groove Comin'
Onʼ, despite preceding ʽDisco Infernoʼ for about three years,
already sounds like an embarrassing parody on The Trammps (a gruesome
conclusion, considering that much of the time, The Trammps themselves sounded
like an endless self-parody). Eight minutes of a totally mind-boggling, robotic
groove, with one ska-derived brass figure repeated over and over with no extra
coloring — my only hypothesis is that this was Bobby's way of snapping back,
«oh, you want real red hot? I'll give
you real red hot, you brainless idiots!» There is an odd surprise — at 6:30 into the song, there is an
unexpectedly classy piano break that pushes the song sky high for about one
minute, and no wonder: check the liner notes and you will see that the piano
player is no less than Herbie Hancock himself (!). A beautiful reward, no
doubt, for those who have been patient enough to suffer through the rest of the
song, but is it really adequate relative to the overall cruelty?
ʽWhere There's A Will, There's A Wayʼ
is actually less embarrassing if you like that sort of jumpy mid-1970s
vaudeville (of which Billy Preston was a particular master) — at the very
least, it has an intricate, non-trivial brass-pop arrangement that Blood, Sweat
& Tears would probably kill for (just the kind of sound they needed to
fortify the dance-oriented part of their reputation). And the seven minutes of
ʽEverything...ʼ actually try to balance between darker, funkier
verses and the lighter, bouncier, more discoish chorus — an interesting,
unusual attempt to merge the two facets, but it does not seem to work well: the
«seams» are too crude and artificial for the mood transitions to become
believable. One minute you are standing in a spooky swamp of wah-wah riffage,
faraway ghostly-echoey guitar shrieks and warlike brass blasts, then the next
minute you are happily dancing your head off to a merry disco beat — sounds
intriguing on paper, perhaps, but not so much in real life.
The remaining half of the album is still
occupied by examples of the more traditional Womack sound: highlights include
ʽTrust Meʼ, written half a decade ago for Janis Joplin and revisited
here under a more modernistic coating — but even so, the plastic synthesizer
sound is not enough to wipe out traces of genuine soulfulness — and
ʽDaylightʼ, a dance ballad with an ironic flavor, sung by Bobby from
the viewpoint of a «nightlife addict» who treats «daylight» as «the only time
when I can unwind». Could be hilarious if Bobby didn't succeed in making it
sound a little tragic. As for the trademark «oddity number», this time around
it is the old Chris Kenner chestnut ʽSomething You Gotʼ, redone as a
comical reggae number: too self-consciously cute for its own good, but at least
showing that the old style of cerebral gymnastics is still very much alive.
All in all, this round of the battle is still
being won by Bobby, but when you start counting trophies and casualties, the
former only barely exceed the latter. It is clear enough that, at this point,
the man finds himself forced to engage in something that he obviously does not
like too much, and that it gets harder and harder to find an acceptable
compromise between «soul» and «commerce». The solutions that he offers on Safety Zone — such as merging the dark
and the light on the lead-in track, or subtly mocking the values of disco on
the lead-off number — betray a concealed cry for help and may be read as the
Morse code equivalent for «I'm as irritated with this crap as you are, guys and
girls», but that does not automatically redeem an album where Herbie Hancock is
invited to contribute just one minute of piano playing on a generic
eight-minute disco track. Whose idea of a pleasant surprise was that, anyway?
B. W. GOES C&W (1976)
1) Don't Make This The Last
Date For You And Me; 2) Behind Closed Doors; 3) Bouquet Of Roses; 4) Tired Of
Living In The Country; 5) Tarnished Rings; 6) Big Bayou; 7) Song Of The
Mockingbird; 8) I'd Be Ahead If I Could Quit While I'm Behind; 9) You; 10) I
Take It On Home.
The album that singlehandedly brought Bobby's
career to a standstill. At the height of the disco era, for an R&B artist
to come up with an album that consisted exclusively of covers of country songs
— well, you gotta give the man some
respect. After all those years and years of enduring compromises between the
will to experiment and commercial expectations (even saving up space on his own
records to explain the situation), Bobby suddenly comes up with this mighty
torpedo, blowing his ship to bits: he almost shoved the record down the throats
of United Artists executives, but after it predictably bombed, they had no
choice but to let him go, and, from a business point of view, that was probably
the only reasonable solution.
What is really depressing about the situation
is that the circumstances surrounding this record are far more curious and
amusing than the record itself (for instance, when first asked to come up with
a suitable title, Bobby suggested Step
Aside Charley Pride, Give Another Nigger A Try). The actual songs recorded
for the album, ten of them, all covers of old country standards by Charlie
Rich, Eddy Arnold, Jimmy Newman, etc., might appeal to really big fans of the
genre, but it's not as if Bobby were doing anything surprising with them. The
material does get a little funkified and decorated with the appropriate
synthesizers and wah-wah guitars, typical of the mid-1970s, but other than
that, I am not even sure of what to say.
Ironically, the only song that Sam Cooke ever
wrote about the country was ʽTired Of Living In The Countryʼ
("gonna get me a fine apartment, where the water runs hot and cold"),
and, of course, Bobby had to do that one as well, addicted as he was to having
at least one Sam cover per album (or, at least, per every couple of albums). It
generates a little more excitement than everything else, even ʽTarnished
Ringsʼ where Bobby drags out his own father, Friendly Womack, to sing a
family duet (in authentic country-western fashion, I guess).
It isn't as if Bobby couldn't have done anything with the songs — the man who could turn
ʽNobody Knows Youʼ into a red-hot funk workout, and ʽSomething
You've Gotʼ into ska comedy, could probably come up with some hilarious
transformations for regular country stuff as well. But it seems as if he
thought that the very gesture was enough — that, perhaps, the very fact of embarking
on this enterprise could turn him into the Ray Charles of 1976. And in thinking
that, he forgot to introduce any
spice into the arrangements: even the guitars are bland and mechanic throughout
the sessions. The singing tries to be passionate, but Bobby's singing is always
passionate: like with so many first-rate R&B / soul singers, there is absolutely
no telling when he is exactly «getting into it» and when he is just being
professional.
Even though the album only runs for less than
half an hour, it is still less than half an hour of excruciating boredom,
unless you worship the power of the waltz tempo, the slide guitar, and the
sentimental strings in all their doings. A ridiculous decision if there ever
was one (and, if I read Bobby's own memories of that correctly, drugs had some say at least in the matter). Thumbs
up for the audacity, perhaps, but the music is clearly thumbs down worthy, even if it
is a very different thumbs-down in nature from all the usual thumbs down circa
1976-77.
HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS (1976)
1) Home Is Where The Heart Is;
2) Just A Little Bit Salty; 3) Standing In The Safety Zone; 4) One More Chance
On Love; 5) How Long; 6) I Could Never Be Satisfied; 7) Something For My Head;
8) A Change Is Gonna Come; 9) We've Only Just Begun.
Although Bobby's «country-western debacle» cost
him his contract with United Artists, he did
deliver the album, so all they could do in the end was sell him out to a
different label — which they did, and Bobby found himself transferred to
Columbia. Not a particularly shabby deal, either, but now that he discovered
that they could trade him around as much as they wanted to, until he ended up
on some totally God-forsaken label, he had to come around to his senses and
work more carefully. Consequently, Home
Is Where The Heart Is drops all crazy pretense and returns us to the safe,
commercial formula of Safety Zone.
Few things, good or bad, could be stated about
this record. It has a significant disco quota to fill (title track;
ʽSomething For My Headʼ; most importantly, the mind-melting groove of
ʽStanding In The Safety Zoneʼ), but it is not gruesomely dominated by
disco, preserving plenty of space for older style funk, R&B and balladry as
well. Unfortunately, the production mostly bows down to the requirements of its
time, smoothing and streamlining the sound until all of Bobby's backing band
begins to sound like a mere background canvas for the vocal hooks (if they are
present) or the vocal atmosphere (in case of ballads that do not require
hookpower).
Bobby's guitar is the only instrument that
consistently shows signs of life, but there are so many additional players that
his signature licks, no matter how inspired, are not enough to properly tilt
the balance. It is not at all likely that you will remember ʽSafety
Zoneʼ as «that one song with some classy wailing guitar» on it — more
likely, it will simply be «that lengthy disco vamp, all pinned to just a couple
of bars of melody». On the other hand, the guitar bits (as well as a sax part
that sounds as if that instrument, too, was trying to procure itself some
individuality) at least add a pinch of replay value, so it is one of those
examples of «semi-successfully working from within the formula» that guarantees
itself at least some fans even after
quite a while.
Still, the only memorable song on the entire
first side for me is Eddie Hinton's ʽJust A Little Bit Saltyʼ, and
only because it manages a great vocal build-up from verse to chorus, with the
first line of the chorus delivered by Bobby with almost percussive precision
(for that matter, the late Eddie Hinton remains quite an underrated sessionist
and songwriter from the Muscle Shoals team). There is some injustice, I
believe, in that the song only runs for three minutes where a flabby, mushy
ballad like ʽOne More Chance On Loveʼ drags on for almost seven
(largely due to Bobby's decision to have a pseudo-improvised «scat duet» midway
through with his piano player, all of which sounds quite forced and
artificial).
The second side works better, mainly since it
is dominated by two covers of classics — finally, not a moment soon, Bobby
decides to cover his beloved mentor's magnum opus (ʽA Change Is Gonna
Comeʼ), and then immediately follows it up with ʽWe've Only Just
Begunʼ, a duet with some unknown lady who sure is no Karen Carpenter, but
carries out her duties well enough. I am not sure, however, whether we should
be happy or sad about both of these songs performed in a very straightforward
manner, without any of Bobby's usual experimental trimmings. I mean, it is
understandable if he worshipped ʽA Change Is Gonna Comeʼ like a sacred
object to the point of not wanting to change anything, and he nails its essence as understandingly and lovingly
as Sam did in his time, but what do we
get out of this? Not to mention that, with all of its sociopolitical
connotations, the song was perfect for 1964, but not necessarily so by 1976,
when racial tension in the US had already moved to a different level — at any
rate, it does feel a little weird to
have Sam's song, performed so very close to the original, sitting on the same
album with red-hot disco vamps, even when you look at it from a
forty-years-later perspective.
That said, the record has to be set straight: a
few comments that I have encountered referred to the Columbia transfer as
having a negative effect on Bobby's artistry — just put it all in context, and
it is clear that it is not the record label, but the overall musical
environment, that has to be held responsible. The transition to a smoother,
more dance-oriented, empty-headed style, leaving less and less space to create,
had already begun circa 1974, and the «mad» country-western record only
aggravated the situation: it was a reckless go-out-and-get-drunk move after a
week of pointless, depressing toil in the office, and in the end, it cost
Bobby whatever still remained of his creative freedom and inspiration. But
since the slide was gradual, Home Is
Where The Heart Is is still quite listenable, and in spots, quite lovable
(unfortunately, none of these spots were written by Bobby himself — yet another
sign that things were not going in the right direction).
PIECES (1978)
1) It's Party Time; 2) Trust
Your Heart; 3) Stop Before We Start; 4) When Love Begins Friendship Ends; 5)
Wind It Up; 6) Is This The Thanks I Get; 7) Caught Up In The Middle; 8) Never
Let Nothing Get The Best Of You.
If you like disco as a phenomenon — if the
tracks in question do not have to have something juicily outstanding about
them, rising over the conventions, in order to satisfy your taste — Pieces, which is Bobby's first
full-speed-ahead plunge into the pit, might sound just as healthy and enjoyable
to you as anything else he put out in the 1970s. Besides, not every track on
here is «regular» disco: ʽIt's Party Timeʼ, ʽWind It Upʼ,
and ʽNever Let Nothing...ʼ are the three «anchors» that are
strategically placed at the front, at the back, and in the middle to keep the
party going strong and throw the obligatory fuel into the fire whenever
necessary — yet there are quite a few moody ballads, and even a couple
old-schooler funk numbers, to offer diversity.
Nevertheless, so many crucial elements are
missing from the platter this time around that yes, I think it is quite safe to
define Pieces as that particular
turning point beyond which lies shame, obscurity, and only a slim, costly
chance at redemption. For starters, Bobby Womack the guitar player is almost
completely absent from the stage — ʽWhen Love Begins, Friendship
Endsʼ is pretty much the only song here where he is still playing
excitingly soulful lead licks. For another thing, gone completely are his creative
re-inventions of classic songs: all the material here is new, credited to
either Bobby himself, or the rest of the Womacks, or Bobby's producer, or some
of the local riff-raff that nobody remembers any more. For good reason, because
the «writing» process must have occupied Bobby and his backers least of all
circa 1978.
Without his playing, and without his
unpredictability, Bobby becomes merely one more face in the crowd — and not as
colorful or clownish as hinted at on the album sleeve, either. The ballads, such
as the Candi Staton duet on ʽStop Before We Startʼ, still show him
capable of solid soulful drama, but it is the kind of material that every more
or less respectable soul singer with a good timbre could deliver in his or her
sleep at the time; and the subject matter — resist temptation or yield to
temptation — is hardly worth praising all by itself, seeing as how it had
alreay been explored by Bobby as deep as it was possible for him.
In the end, the title of the last track,
ʽNever Let Nothing Get The Best Of Youʼ, is hilariously ironic,
seeing as how Bobby belts it out against a backdrop of cheesy disco beats,
corny Latin horns, and cooky «party noises» overdubbed in the background —
here, clearly, we have ourselves a man who let quite a few things get the best
of him, be it the record industry, the stupid musical fashions of the time, the
party lifestyle, or just that good old cocaine. Deeply embarrassing in some
spots and merely listenable in others, Pieces
is the first — and, unfortunately, far from the last — definitive thumbs down
in Bobby's career.
ROADS OF LIFE (1979)
1) The Roads Of Life; 2) How
Could You Break My Heart; 3) Honey Dripper Boogie; 4) The Roots In Me; 5) What
Are You Doin'; 6) Give It Up; 7) Mr. D.J., Don't Stop The Music; 8) I Honestly
Love You.
Bobby's label-hopping begins in earnest here:
no longer welcome at Columbia, he is switching over to Arista, for which he
only made this one album before getting the sack. And do we even need to wonder
why? Bland, hookless, run-of-the-mill disco grooves and sentimental ballads
that pick up right where Pieces left
off and downgrade the artist one or two more notches. This time around,
old-school «funky grit» is eliminated completely, so that the entire album
flows by without demanding any of your attention. Just forty minutes of
unnoticeable background muzak for healthy clubbing. You go on the floor to
stretch out your limbs during the fast ones, then back to the table for a drink
and a chat during the slow ones. You don't even remember the dude's name, not
even if ʽMr. DJʼ has taken the time to announce it.
The most dreadful thing to realize is that all of the songs, except for the last
one, are self-penned this time. The only choice for a cover is quite telling:
ʽI Honestly Love Youʼ, a 1974 hit for Olivia Newton-John, a pretty
awful song when it came out, and Bobby's attempt to inject some «genuine soul»
in it is about as successful as trying to force-feed amphetamines to someone
who's been paralyzed from head to toes. In reality, this can only mean one
thing: by 1979, lost and confused in the whirlwind of musical change and
personal troubles, Bobby had become completely separated from good taste. Oh
well; it's not as if he was the only one.
The less said about the «originals», the better.
Deep lovers of soul in all of its varieties might find something enjoyable
about ʽHow Could You Break My Heartʼ (easily done, Bobby, as long as
you keep seducing your ladies with this sort of material; the tacky «phone
conversation» alone at the beginning of the track makes it unpalatable), or
about ʽThe Roots In Meʼ, a romantic duet with singing lady Melissa
Manchester, but probably even those who are ready to forgive almost everything
will find it very hard to become
inspired by the interminably boring disco grooves that take themselves too
seriously to generate the required fun quotient — ʽMr. DJ, Don't Stop The
Musicʼ is almost like a philosophical piece in itself, even if there is
absolutely nothing going on in the song. As in, you know, somebody told us that
there has to be this four-on-the-floor thing, and some wah-wah guitar, and some
strings, and some chicks singing backup in the background, and that's, uh, the
way it goes. Hey, how come Mr. DJ stopped the music after all? What do you
mean, he never even began it? What's
wrong with the way we're doing it?
What is
wrong is that it's all deadly dull. Disco works if you really agree to stoop to
its level — make it raunchy, or at least make it catchy, and there's a guilty
pleasure for you all right. But on Roads
Of Life, just like on Pieces,
Bobby still works from an essentially «polite» point of view, incapable of
crossing the line. And he ain't the Gibb brothers, either, having always placed
his faith in the groove and the soulfulness rather than melody, so there is no
chance of any of these songs attaining the level of a ʽNight Feverʼ.
In the end, it's just another forgettable embarrassment, and a thumbs down
without any regret.
THE POET (1981)
1) So Many Sides Of You; 2)
Lay Your Lovin' On Me; 3) Secrets; 4) Just My Imagination; 5) Stand Up; 6)
Games; 7) If You Think You're Lonely Now; 8) Where Do We Go From Here.
By 1981, Bobby was stuck with Beverly Glen
Music, a record label so insignificant that it does not even have its own
Wikipedia page. Amazingly, this did not impede the man from undergoing a brief
revival of sorts: ʽIf You Think You're Lonely Nowʼ, a romantic «new
style R&B» ballad, unexpectedly became a huge hit, and helped pull the
album up the charts as well — higher, in fact, than any previous Bobby Womack album. Of course, the well-chosen title
and the cool sleeve photo (nice match between guitar and suit color, among
other things) helped a lot, but on the whole, this dazzling commercial success
requires some effort to understand.
It is definitely true that The Poet reflected a certain shake-up. With disco dead and gone,
and R&B beginning to undergo the next stage of transformation — with
synthesizers and electronic drums replacing live bands — it was only natural
that Bobby, who had already kowtowed to current trends on his previous two
albums, would not be above kowtowing to the latest change in fashion. From that
point of view, The Poet sounds more
or less like any normal R&B album circa 1981. We do have the synthesizers,
and the treated drums, and the echoey backing vocals, and every production
aspect typical of those years.
But it is also true that these songs, unlike
anything on Roads Of Life, carry
some actual meaning. To appreciate the album, it helps a lot if one listens to the acoustic demos for two of its key
tracks (ʽGamesʼ and ʽSecretsʼ), appended as bonus tracks to
one of the CD issues. They are actually so good that I cannot help wondering
how much stronger would the entire album have been if it were just Bobby and
his acoustic guitar — naturally, an album like this wouldn't be much of a chart
contender, but a legend contender, for sure. ʽGamesʼ, in particular,
comes across as a tragic plea for humanity, punctuated by mournful chords and
plaintive vocals. When you listen to it in its final incarnation, the mournful
chords are gone, replaced by completely expressionless keyboards, and the
plaintive vocals are diminished in power by the rest of the arrangement.
Still, that fact alone is enough to realize
that at least Bobby is back on an
«artistic» track. A few songs dealing with spiritual matters, most of them
still dealing with his favorite topic (dissatisfaction with his latest object
of desire), but all of them conceived as actual songs and not simply launchpads
for mindless (and toothless) grooving. Even the openly dance-oriented tracks
like ʽLay Your Lovin' On Meʼ are sung with a level of passion that
exceeds any of his disco numbers; and musically, there is a strong soft-jazz
streak to them, with pianos and saxophones sometimes rising over the
synthesizers and introducing a moody, living vibe that redeems some of these arrangements.
There may not be any particular masterpieces — or, at least, the arrangements
almost never succeed in bringing out the best in these melodies — but this
stuff is not «fodder».
Of course, the album's best known song, as it
frequently happens, is arguably one of its worst tracks — ʽIf You Think
You're Lonely Nowʼ, a midnight ballad about Bobby dumping his bitchin'
girlfriend (again), is mostly memorable for the endless repetition of its
chorus hook and little else (well, Bobby does play some nice jazzy electric
licks in the background, but, as usual, they are few and far in between and
when I say «background», I really
mean it). But if you hear it on the radio and fail to pay attention to its
never-ending monotonous coda and then learn with surprise that it was a huge
hit for Bobby Womack, do not let it fool you: there is more to The Poet than that one song. The big
question is, would you actually care
to go back in time and recover the soul of this album from under the crappy
generic arrangements?
If anything, Bobby should have done the record
with a small jazz combo — acoustic guitar, bass, piano, maybe just a little
sax, maybe no drums at all — and it would have been a beautiful, occasionally
deep-reaching experience (do look for
these acoustic demos, they are far worthier than the finished product). As it
is, The Poet is badly dated through
generic misproduction, the songs suffocated by plastic treatment. But even so,
I still give the album a thumbs up, since its intentions are clearly good
— and wherever they are not hampered too
much by extra gloss, carried out brilliantly: for instance, ʽJust My
Imaginationʼ (not a Temptations
cover!) may have been one of the most gorgeous songs recorded by the man.
THE POET II (1984)
1) Love Has Finally Come At
Last; 2) It Takes A Lot Of Strength To Say Goodbye; 3) Through The Eyes Of A
Child; 4) Surprise, Surprise; 5) Tryin' To Get Over You; 6) Tell Me Why; 7)
Who's Foolin' Who; 8) I Wish I Had Someone To Go Home To; 9) American Dream.
Playing the «sequel game» is always a risky
business, and if you are doing it in the hedonistic / technocrazy 1980s, and if
you have already shown declining immunity to musical crap-a-titis in the disco
era, winning chances are slim. It all begins, as usual, with the album cover:
same Bobby, same guitar, but the way he is dressed and the way he is wielding
it shows that the fashionable Bobby is out, and Bobby «The Ladies' Man» Womack
is in. Of course, the man was never a stranger to direct sexual attraction, but
this presentation is a tad too
obvious.
So it comes as no big surprise that the first
three songs are rather shapeless, and emotionally similar, R&B ballads on
which Bobby engages Patti LaBelle in a series of soulful duets, every one of
which, sooner or later, turns into a screaming match — which Bobby inevitably
loses, because trying to outscream Patti LaBelle is a futile enterprise for any
man. The songs are extremely bland and generic, though, just the regular
anthemic, overproduced crapola of the times, and not even Bobby's guitar licks,
moving closer and closer to regular jazz patterns, can redeem the lack of
memorable melodies or the empty keyboard sound. Besides that, Patti LaBelle's
singing style is also an acquired taste (most of the time, the lady operates in
overdrive mode, and that can wear a listener out pretty quickly).
It gets a little better from there on in the
songwriting department, but not in the production area. ʽSurprise, Surpriseʼ
is written in late period Stevie Wonder's style (soft, steady dance rhythms,
gently rocking synths, catchy chorus, etc.) and has a touch of genuine
tenderness to it (percussion is really dreadful though). ʽWho's Foolin'
Whoʼ is actually a potentially great electrofunk groove, but also spoiled
with excesses (silly backing harmonies and way
too many synth overdubs — why didn't they just leave it all to Bobby and the
bass guitar?). And probably the best
two songs are left for last: ʽI Wish I Had Someone To Go Home Toʼ
finally gives us a pinch of classic Bobby Womack desperation, featuring his
best (most credible, at least) vocals on the entire record, in addition to some
surprising tone and mood changes from verse to bridge — and ʽAmerican
Dreamʼ, hinting at the latter's unreachability, is a fairly grand social
statement to conclude such a lightweight album, but at least it's a curious
conclusion (even incorporating a bit of Martin Luther King for extra
heaviness). «Probably» the best, because, like everything else, these songs,
too, suffer from dated production ideas.
Despite a few bright spots, the album as a
whole still gets a thumbs down. It did manage to sell relatively
well, carried on by memories of The Poet,
but, nevertheless, failed to match the sales and chart success of its
predecessor, and initiated the beginning of Bobby's final (as we all thought
until recently) slide into total obscurity and oblivion. The LaBelle duets that
were released as singles never matched the success of ʽIf You Think You're
Lonely Nowʼ, either. And yet, at the same time, The Poet II is clearly way more commercially-oriented than The Poet, a much more clearly
calculated / manipulative affair that should have duped the public, but did
not, maybe because of the presence of so many fresh new stars in the early
1980s who actually had interesting new things to say — Bobby, on the other
hand, was pretty much spent with that one last gasp, no matter how much his
cheerful poise on the album cover, with so many inches of his guitar sticking
out your way, try to insinuate the opposite.
THE BRAVEST MAN IN THE UNIVERSE (2012)
1) The Bravest Man In The
Universe; 2) Please Forgive My Heart; 3) Deep River; 4) Dayglo Reflection; 5)
Whatever Happened To The Times; 6) Stupid Introlude; 7) Stupid; 8) If There
Wasn't Something There; 9) Love Is Gonna Lift You Up; 10) Nothin' Can Save Ya;
11) Jubilee (Don't Let Nobody Turn You Around).
Flip forward almost thirty years. For almost a
decade after his Beverly Glen albums, Bobby went on riding from one short-lived
record contract with a little-known label to another, releasing albums that
never charted, rarely attracted any (positive) critical attention, and went out
of print so quickly that, in the end, I sort of gave up upon trying to locate them,
especially since there is relatively little hope that the chase would be well
worth the catch. Then, after 1994's boldly titled Resurrection (which was anything but), he ceased writing songs
altogether, and, apart from a Christmas album from time to time, sank into
near-complete seclusion — not that I blame him at all, considering the dire
fate of modern R&B, a genre Bobby had worked so much for.
Then something really weird happened, one of
those accidental turns of events that generate an auspicious opportunity — none
other than Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz fame contacted Bobby with a
suggestion to work together. Apparently, the man was a fan of Womack's classic
material, yet simply being a fan is one thing, and actually going out all the
way is quite another: an Albarn / Womack collaboration, without prior notice,
would be quite an unlikely combination. It was Bobby's daughter (a closet
Gorillaz fan?) who convinced her father to accept the invitation, and this
first led to Bobby adding vocals to several Gorillaz tracks — and then, in
return, to Albarn co-writing and co-producing a brand new Bobby Womack album,
his first and, so far, only one in the 21st century.
Based on this information alone, you can easily
tell without even hearing it that The
Bravest Man In The Universe would be somewhat of a «special» record.
Critics fell all over it, not necessarily because they loved it, but probably
because they'd never heard anything quite like it. And, indeed, the record
defies simple analysis — each of its ingredients is not at all special or even
all that good in itself, but together, Albarn and Womack create a puzzling
combination that you can love or hate, but cannot ignore.
Almost in its entirety, the album is electronic
— loops, beats, cycles, lots of programming, the usual thing, not too
surprising, considering that it all stemmed from Gorillaz anyway. On top of
these electronic grooves, which are usually moody and minimalistic, Womack
records his vocal melodies — shaky and a bit gargly in an elderly manner, but
still capable of an emotional grip — to work out a series of reflections on
life, love, the past, the future, man's destiny, and even on those who use the
Lord's name in vain, ʽStupidʼ being his lyrical answer to Genesis' ʽJesus
He Knows Meʼ, in a way. The two are aided in this (un)godly mix by
Albarn's co-worker Richard Russell, and big trendy femme-fatale™ star Lana del
Rey makes a guest appearance on ʽDayglo Reflectionʼ; other than that,
the studio is empty — quite an unusual deal for Bobby.
Does it «work»? I don't know. In all honesty, I
would say that it doesn't. It is intriguing to see Albarn take the old chum in
the studio and provide him with a background of drum machines, bleeps, pings,
and synthesized sonic veils (he does play some live instruments from time to
time, too, but they are not so much upfront) — but none of this stuff seems
tailor-made to suit Bobby's style. The electronic and vocal melodies are synchronized, yet it is hard for me
to imagine Bobby drawing actual inspiration from these sounds and using it for
his own vocal delivery. Albarn says that he gave instrumental demos to Womack,
who would then write lyrics around them — I do wonder what those demos were and
whether they were not simply played on acoustic guitar, because it is hard for
me to imagine Bobby putting lyrics and vocal melodies on top of these electronic
arrangements. (It is even harder for me to imagine Bobby, with his life-long
penchant for guitar and funky groove, liking
Albarn's and Russell's production, but at least officially he did).
Nevertheless, at least these arrangements try
to be creative, unlike, say, the generic Eighties production on The Poet series — the title track, for
instance, puts a thin, moody veil of strings and some minimalistic piano
tinkles on top of the programmed percussion, giving the song an ambient feel,
that is, something previously unthinkable for a Bobby Womack song. The title is
formally cut out of the song's refrain — "the bravest man in the universe
is the one who has forgiven first" — but could easily be seen to refer to
Bobby himself, of course, as it must have taken him quite a bit of bravery to
go along with such a radical reinvention of himself.
«Classic» Bobby makes a brief appearance on the
traditional tune ʽDeep Riverʼ, where the man is featured solo with an
acoustic guitar — barely two minutes in all, just to give us a brief reminder
of what it used to be like, yet it manages to take a good shot at winning top
prize in that short time span, especially when placed next to ʽDayglo
Reflectionʼ, a self-consciously «mystical-romantic» composition where the
main hero is not Bobby, but rather the perfidiously crowned «siren of the
2010s», large-lipped lady Lana del Rey that, according to everything I've heard
and seen of her, is the perfect embodiment of phoniness in «sensual pop art».
Unfortunately, this is not the only song where
there is too much going on and not nearly enough Bobby Womack — upbeat «dance»
tunes like ʽLove Is Gonna Lift You Upʼ and ʽJubileeʼ also
sound more like Albarn and Russell's take on making an electronic facsimile of
classic R&B than songs that merit and justify Womack's presence on them.
(ʽJubileeʼ is kinda fun,
though, with its big badass bass drum pounding out the tribal beat like crazy —
the one track on the album where, instead of scratching or wracking your head,
you might just be tempted to lose it for a bit.).
But on most of the ballads, Bobby does sing as
if he cared, and his ruminations on the world, the times, and even the exorbitant
fake preachers sound exactly like they should — troubled, but tightly
controlled and technically sound confessions of a worn and torn, but still
viable old man. Actually, the age is only being betrayed by a little extra
hoarseness and maybe just a tad lessened range (which was never that big to
begin with): no decrepit relic here, even if he has to struggle a bit to strike
out the anger necessary to fuel ʽStupidʼ (that's the one about the
preachers).
I give the album a thumbs up, first and foremost, not
for «quality» as such, but for its unusualness (I was going to write «novelty
factor», but we are talking of a feat rather than a gimmick here, so that might
be a little demeaning). The very fact that something like this came out in 2012
deserves recognition — and, let's face it, it could have been worse in all
possible respects (even Lana del Rey at least has her own brand of phoniness,
where they could have invited some completely faceless chick instead, out of
millions available). The Bravest Man In
The Universe should not be judged as a collection of songs — it's more of
an experimental modern art lick on an old canvas, where some will pretend to
going gaga over the modern art, while others will simply admire the good old
art of weaving canvas. Personally, I'm just glad the old guy can still sing
with so much feeling — and a big thank you to Damon Albarn at least for
ensuring that the arrangements always stay minimalistic enough to let that
voice soar and flutter all over them.
GORILLA (1967)
1) Cool Britannia; 2) The
Equestrian Statue; 3) Jollity Farm; 4) I Left My Heart In San Francisco; 5)
Look Out, There's A Monster Coming; 6) Jazz (Delicious Hot, Disgusting Cold);
7) Death Cab For Cutie; 8) Narcissus; 9) The Intro And The Outro; 10) Mickey's
Son And Daughter; 11) Big Shot; 12) Music For The Head Ballet; 13) Piggy Bank
Love; 14) I'm Bored; 15) The Sound Of Music.
Long before there was Monty Python, there was
the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (originally Dada
band, which makes things more comprehensible — not that this particular outfit
ever hunted for comprehensibility). They began by playing absurdist jazz and
vaudeville, then got bored with it and started moving into other genres — all
sorts of genres, actually: of the fifteen tracks, crammed into 35 minutes on
their debut album, not two sound alike. And what's that thing ought to be
called? Why, Gorilla, of course.
Less predictable than Chicken, which
might have been the first and most obvious option.
There are two schools of thought on Viv
Stanshall, Neil Innes, and their merry band of sidekicks: one that treats them
as serious, responsible, important, and influential musical innovators, lodged
in the same camp as Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, and one that tends to
view them more like intelligent, well-educated, tasteful clowns, good for a
healthy laugh, but ultimately forgettable in the grand scheme of things.
Consequently, Gorilla is generally
viewed by adherents of the first point of view as a funny, but very lightweight
preview of much grander things to come, whereas the second group might see it
as the band's finest (half-)hour, adequately showing their talents without any
unsuccessful attempts to overreach their grasp.
Personally, I am stuck in the middle here: on
one hand, Gorilla is the most easy-going, immediately
enjoyable set of tunes (and/or musical jokes) that these guys put out, but on
the other hand, I do not like the idea of Stanshall, Innes & Co. as
«musical clowns», either: humor was
their chief weapon of choice at all times, but they were also accomplished and
disciplined musicians striving to innovate. But it is hard for me to deny that Gorilla finds the band completely at ease with all the goals
they are trying to achieve. No matter whether they are dabbling in old-school
vaudeville, pop, standards, calypso, rockabilly, or bubblegum, they always nail
the essence — and then turn it inside out to create, like, the best parody of
the style ever.
Yes, Gorilla
is «just» a comedy record, but dammit, what high quality comedy we have here,
to the extent that almost each single track brings on some new realization
about some peculiarity of the selected genre. For instance, ʽThe
Equestrian Statueʼ with its melancholic harpsichord is written in the sub-style
of «Britpop» commonly used for songs about loneliness and personal troubles
(think ʽTwo Sistersʼ by the Kinks, etc.), but, regarding the lyrics,
are we supposed to empathize for the protagonist — the bronzed and polished
"famous man" who "on his famous horse would ride through the
land"? Nope, it's just that playing the harpsichord that way makes you
feel gloomy and melancholic all over, so much so you'd even pity a statue.
Another fabulous highlight is ʽThe Intro
And The Outroʼ, on which the band set a boppy jazzy groove, get introduced
one by one, and then, as they run out of proper band members but not out of
musical instruments, add a host of imaginary players to the roster — including
Quasimodo on bells ("representing the flower people"), Adolf Hitler
on vibes, Charles de Gaulle on accordion, and lots of contemporary British
celebrities and politicians that are today only recognizable through historical
textbooks. In a way, it's just a silly, albeit catchy, gag, but it also makes
you ponder on the issue of sprawling «big bands» where, sometimes, the function
of a single player is reduced to simply «being there» for the sake of providing
the illusion of massiveness — play a single lead line, then disappear forever
into the background...
ʽDeath Cab For Cutieʼ, which the
Bonzos were also given to lip-sync to in Magical
Mystery Tour (the scene where everybody watches the hot stripper instead of
listening to the music, and you can't really blame 'em) and which later became
the name of a proper band in its own rights, parodies «Vegasy» Elvis, but the
lyrics tell such a macabre little story, and the arrangement is so delightfully
rudimentary (just a boogie piano line and a light brass accompaniment) that it
goes beyond parody — an absurdist-minimalist mash-up of Elvis, brutality, and
light jazz. It ain't no masterpiece, but somehow, it's cool in its
straight-faced smoothness.
The weirdest number on the album (and that makes
it truly weird, because all the songs here are weird) is ʽBig Shotʼ,
which, technically, parodies a trendy mid-1960s soundtrack to a film noir (of
the type where everybody wears sunglasses and walks the streets to the latest
hard bop grooves). If you manage to get rid of the «intentionally annoying»
voiceover that very quickly descends into schizophasia, the song, however, is a
perfectly valid modern jazz composition in its own right — dark, bluesy, and
with a frantic free-form sax solo to boot: they are setting the genre up at the
same time as they try to make their own serious mark on it.
At the very least, one thing that can be said
about Gorilla without reservations
is that it ain't boring, not for one single second. With all the diversity and
unpredictability floating around, it got more musical ideas, or spin-offs on
musical ideas, in 35 minutes than some bands manage to produce over an entire
career, and they almost always work. Even the short bits, such as the «flubbed
vocal audition» of ʽI Left My Heart In San Franciscoʼ, or the
gratuituous, but forgivable, dig at ʽThe Sound Of Musicʼ, are funny —
even when they intentionally play out of tune and as uncoordinated as possible
(ʽJazz, Delicious Hot, Disgusting Coldʼ), they still manage to be funny, and just a little bit insightful. Of all
the musical hooliganry that pervaded Great Britain circa 1967, Gorilla is that one record that is
«guaranteed to raise a smile», no matter what the circumstances, and, come to
think of it, the Bonzos were the
original Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band more than anybody else — their
short-lived alliance with the Beatles was no accident.
Thumbs up, of course —
oh, and, incidentally, this is also the album that introduced the phrase «Cool
Britannia» to the world, wasn't it? For fairness' sake, they should have
flooded Neil Innes with royalties in the late 1990s, but guess the real
Britannia isn't nearly as cool as they make it out to be. Not that the Bonzos
did not know this — they knew, and subsequently deflated expectations by
abruptly seguing the melody into a sequence of a lumberjack cutting wood,
whatever symbolic meaning that sequence might be attributed.
THE DOUGHNUT IN GRANNY'S GREENHOUSE (1968)
1) We Are Normal; 2) Postcard;
3) Beautiful Zelda; 4) Can Blue Men Sing The Whites; 5) Hello Mabel; 6) Kama
Sutra; 7) Humanoid Boogie; 8) The Trouser Press; 9) My Pink Half Of The
Drainpipe; 10) Rockaliser Baby; 11) Rhinocratic Oaths; 12) Eleven Mustachioed
Daughters.
The biggest shift from the «adolescent» stage
of Gorilla to the «(anti-)maturity»
stage of Doughnut, I think, is that
the Bonzos' second album shows a very strong Zappa influence — in particular,
lots of parallels can be drawn between it and We're Only In It For The Money, released about a half year earlier.
For instance, just like Zappa's parodic masterpiece, this one, too, begins with
a weird, «mucky» intro section, foreboding some bizarre hallucinogenic
experience before suddenly shifting gears without a warning and leaping head
first into whacky uptempo merriment and an endless pool of musical sarcasm. If
the earlier Bonzos still retained some sense of restraint, this time they are
truly «unleashed» — ideas come and go with the speed of a McDonalds attendant
on a particularly busy day, and most of the ideas play out at top volume,
energy, and craziness. Here, they are no longer a band — they're the big
bright green absurd-generation machine, to paraphrase an astute New Yorker of
the times.
In a way, this produces a detrimental effect: The Doughnut is so diffused,
distracting, and disconcerting most of the time, that once it's over, all that
remains in your head is a woozy, fuzzy feeling, as if you have just emerged out
of a forty-minute experimental slideshow where your eyes had to react to colorful
images at the speed of one image per half-second. Almost every «song» here is
spliced together from several distinct sections that often have next to no
connection with each other — you have all sorts of combinations and
deconstructions where old school foxtrots can walk hand in hand with free-form
avantgarde, piano-based music hall can rapidly metamorphose into modal jazz,
and somber Latin grooves can make a transition into a mock-solo piano recital.
In this house, nothing is impossible.
As a result, the songs on this album, unlike most of the songs on Gorilla, simply do not exist on their
own, but only function properly as part of a single package; at the very least,
in order to disentangle them, you'd have to separate the melodies from the
surrounding studio trickery, and filter out some of the noisy overdubs. In
particular, I cannot speak of highlights or lowlights — as in Zappa's case, it
makes more sense to regard the whole thing as part of a single,
(dis)integrated, (in)coherent musical show. Of course, the Bonzos do not have,
nor do they really intend or claim to have, Frank's musical vision — where
Zappa, even at his most humorous and/or offensive, still tended to pay
attention to the «boundary-pushing» factor, Innes and Stanshall concentrate
first and foremost on pushing the boundaries of humor, satire, and absurdity,
rather than those of the music. But at the same time, the very «kaleidoscopic»
nature of The Doughnut does not
allow to classify it as «just» a parody album: on the overall greatness scale,
I would certainly place this album seriously higher than, say, any given Weird
Al record.
For instance, ʽBeautiful Zeldaʼ may
be seen as just a parody on the «space-pop» thing of the times (like ʽMr.
Spacemanʼ by The Byrds, etc.), but with its moody psychedelic intro, its
old-fashioned doo-wop harmonies, and its jazzy brass section, it is clear that
the band was aiming for more than just parody — in a way, it simply builds up
on the «join pop music with sci-fi elements» trend of the mid-Sixties, perhaps
with a little more verve than the basic rules of adequacy would require, but
that's the Bonzos for you: they want to bring out the ridiculousness and the excitement and the innovation of certain ideas at the same time.
And then there's the issue of these guys being sharp. ʽCan Blue Men Sing The
Whites?ʼ, for instance, takes on the problem stated in the title (in
reverse, that is) and dresses it up in the guise of a ridiculously
over-distorted blues-rocker which has very little redeeming musical value, per
se, but even that may be intentional, because the point of the song is, well,
that blue men cannot sing the whites,
whichever way in particular you'd like to explain that statement. ʽKama
Sutraʼ parodies simplistic early Sixties teen-pop for about forty
seconds, substituting the usual boy-meets-girl lyrics with something a little
more up to the point ("we tried position thirty-one, it was terrific fun;
in position seventy-two, you was me, and I was you") — imagine Jan and
Dean circa '61 supplying their horny audiences with those kinds of words. ʽThe Trouser Pressʼ ridicules the
«new dance craze» ideas on the soul/R&B circuit, inventing its own little
dance in the process, punctuated by actual «trouser-pressing» noises and
featuring a really bold call-and-response opening section exchange ("do
you like soul music?..." — dead silence — quietly, but decisively: "no"). Further examples are
unnecessary.
Of course, like everything else the Bonzos did,
Doughnut is inextricably linked to
its epoch, and with each passing year, its humor and wit gets more difficult to
warm up to without a serious introductory course to all the main players on the
music and entertainment scene not just of 1968, but of the entire decade.
(Bonus tracks on the CD edition throw on parodic performances of ʽBlue
Suede Shoesʼ, ʽBang Bangʼ, and ʽAlley Oopʼ, among
other things). Comedy records tend to date easier than tragedy records, in
general, for being more dependent on the particular realities of their own time
and place. However, the «kaleidoscope of sound» effect that blurs the
boundaries between songs ultimately becomes the album's saving grace — even on
an alien, of the kind that gets addressed so often on the record itself
(ʽBeautiful Zeldaʼ, ʽHumanoid Boogieʼ, etc.), Doughnut will most likely produce a
dazzling effect.
What I am trying to say is that, in order to
enjoy Doughnut, you do not
necessarily have to «get» all of its parodic elements, much like you do not
really have to take a crash course in the history and customs of the Irish
people to get a jolt out of Ulysses.
With the band's professional musicianship (nothing extraordinary, but all the
grooves are honed to perfection), technological savviness (all the overdubs
are laid on with enough care and precision to rival the production team of Sgt. Pepper), and understanding of all
the basic attractions of all the musical forms that they tackle, Doughnut can, after all, work as just a
happy old celebration of music — fun
in its sincerest and most inspired variant. And, what with it being «dated»
and all, 1968 was a really great year to be having fun, wouldn't you agree? Thumbs up,
of course.
Technical notes: the band had dropped the
«Doo-Dah» from its name for this album (perhaps reflecting the transition to a
slightly more «serious» routine, although I'd rather prefer it if they'd
dropped the «Bonzo Dog» part instead). Also, in the States this was released as
Urban Spaceman, incorporating a
concurrent non-LP single — the usual practice for those times, but also, they
probably thought that the title would be too inscrutable for thickheaded
American audiences (legend has it that the title refers to a lavatory and was
acquired by the band from an anecdote by Monty Python friend Michael Palin —
which would make this the second lavatory-themed incident of the year that I
know of, right beside the story of the front sleeve of Beggar's Banquet).
TADPOLES (1969)
1) Hunting Tigers Out In
Indiah; 2) Shirt; 3) Tubas In The Moonlight; 4) Dr. Jazz; 5) The Monster Mash;
6) I'm The Urban Spaceman; 7) Ali Baba's Camel; 8) Laughing Blues; 9) By A
Waterfall; 10) Mr. Apollo; 11) Canyons Of Your Mind; 12*) Boo!; 13*)
Readymades; 14*) Look At Me I'm Wonderful; 15*) We Were Wrong; 16*) The Craig
Torso Christmas Show.
The Bonzos' third album is much closer in
spirit and form to Gorilla — a
creative retread, some might say, but only depending on whether you revere
these guys more in their «surrealist-kiddie-comic» mood or their
«surrealist-Zappa-like» mood. The heart of the matter is that most of these particular songs were culled from Do Not Adjust Your Set, the proto-Python
TV show that regularly featured the Bonzos and was originally intended for
kids, before Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and others decided they'd still target
it towards mixed audiences and see what happens. So, naturally, the
proper-accurate way to enjoy these tunes is to see them in the context of the
show (something that can be easily done these days with a little help from
Youtube), especially considering that many of the tracks feature integrated
bits of dialog (ʽShirtʼ) or implied theatrical performance
(ʽAli Baba's Camelʼ).
That said, there is nothing like Tadpoles, really, when it comes to
averaging out the number of tightly composed, insanely catchy, delightfully
funny Bonzo Dog Band songs per record. This is their one UK album, for
starters, that's got ʽUrban Spacemanʼ on it — produced by good friend
Paul McCartney, it's a piece of genius vaudeville and an amusing assault on the
concept of the fantasy superhero at the same time (the final «twist» is simple,
predictable, and unforgettable), so unbeatable that it became the band's
highest charting single ever: I have to guess that even some of the seriously-minded
people, generally well above the Bonzos' level of humor (or so they thought),
had no power to resist.
Equally sharp and up to the point are such
songs as ʽMr. Apolloʼ (jubilant folk-pop that describes the «wonders»
of body-building exactly the way somebody else would be describing the «wonders»
of turning on and tuning in) and ʽCanyons Of Your Mindʼ (yet another
Vegas-Elvis impersonation, crossed with a ridiculously «inept», out-of-tune
guitar solo and some of the grossest misuses of the echo effect in recorded
history). Then there's the «Britishness» thing, which pops out at the very
beginning (ʽHunting Tigers Out In Indiahʼ, with the band members
impersonating old-school British army officers, even if the song as a whole
sounds as it belongs more with the Soviet
than the British army) but is not too abused on the whole — most of the time,
they are too busy professing their sarcastic admiration for old-timey jazz
(Jelly Roll Morton's ʽDr. Jazzʼ gets covered), blues (ʽLaughing
Bluesʼ is «authentically» lo-fi, croaky and creeky, like something from
Louis Armstrong's ʽSt. Louis Bluesʼ days), and pop standards
(ʽTubas In The Moonlightʼ is... Bing Crosby? Whatever).
Some of the inventions are less inventive than
others, or, at least, less appropriate — I could do without the proto-Python
conversations on ʽShirtʼ, and their cover of the old comic tune
ʽMonster Mashʼ is expendable when you know that they are capable of
much better writing on their own (I'm perfectly happy with the old performance
from the Beach Boys' Concert), but
one cannot expect even a genius comedy act to act with 100% accuracy, and
besides, these nuances reflect personal tastes more than anything else. Plus,
the reissue throws on a bunch of satisfactory bonus tracks, almost any of which
can be used to replace any perceivable flaw.
Strong thumbs up here, but the warning has to be
repeated: Tadpoles is mostly about
comic ditties, and not recommended to anyone who finds himself disgusted with
the likes of ʽMaxwell's Silver Hammerʼ and suchlike. At the same
time, I cannot qualify it as a «letdown»: the Bonzos were simply pursuing
different activities and trying on different faces, like many other people at
the time — Manfred Mann, for instance, who could be seriouz jazzmen one minute
and teenybop propagandists the other. Count Tadpoles as just another high point in the Bonzos' «teenybop»
service book, then, but do not put down the idiom as such — not before you are able to write a song as
maddeningly catchy as ʽUrban Spacemanʼ, at least.
KEYNSHAM (1969)
1) You Done My Brain In; 2)
Keynsham; 3) Quiet Talks And Summer Walks; 4) Tent; 5) We Were Wrong; 6) Joke
Shop Man; 7) The Bride Stripped Bare By 'Bachelors'; 8) Look At Me, I'm
Wonderful; 9) What Do You Do?; 10) Mr. Slater's Parrot; 11) Sport (The Odd
Boy); 12) I Want To Be With You; 13) Noises For The Leg; 14) Busted.
You can use Wikipedia or a million other
sources to learn why the album was called Keynsham,
and it might even help you to form a more informative, complete, and systematic
picture of the universe, but it will probably not provide you with an extra key to enjoying, admiring, or even
«understanding» the fourth LP by The Bonzo Dog Band, so we will not dwell too
long on the trivia and instead, will skip right on to the generalization — Keynsham is their second most complex
record after Doughnut, but still a
little less complex, sort of a partial compromise between the experimentation
of Doughnut and the accessible
silliness of Tadpoles. Let it not be
said that the Bonzos made even two albums that sounded completely alike — their
menu items all share the same core, but are varied enough to fit quite a
plethora of different tastes.
One thing that is hard not to notice is how
quite a few tracks here either parody or deconstruct the «art pop» thing —
where Doughnut was more obsessed
with fooling around with blues-rock and rock'n'roll, Keynsham seems to take note of the increase in popularity of such
bands as the Bee Gees or the Moody Blues or any of their other competitors:
songs like ʽQuiet Talks And Summer Walksʼ and ʽWhat Do You
Do?ʼ combine elements of vocal crooning, pastoral flutes, swooping
strings, heavenly harmonies, etc., and end up sounding like authentic «artsy» compositions
of their age — until you start concentrating on the lyrics: ʽWhat Do You
Do?ʼ parodies the «Serious Philosophical Question Song» movement, and
ʽQuiet Talks And Summer Walksʼ depicts a couple's romantic relations
as seen through the somewhat bleek perspective of the protagonist, only to
become suddenly deflated by the sound of a dentist's drill.
At the same time, the boys are not at all past
their usual «slap-schtick»: ʽTentʼ is brassy Sha-Na-Na style pop with
a brawny caveman angle, ʽWe Were Wrongʼ is romantic Zombies-style pop
with a corny joke angle (ʽThis Will Be Our Yearʼ may have served as
the musical inspiration, provided the Bonzos actually did have access to the
not-so-popular Odessey And Oracle),
and then there's material like ʽMr. Slater's Parrotʼ that sounds as
if it were taken straight from the Benny Hill Show soundtrack. Naturally, there
is no coherence whatsoever between the «serious-sounding» stuff and the
directly comedic numbers, but that is something you either have to take or
leave: the Bonzos declared war on coherence before they were born.
In terms of sheer inventiveness, we should tip
our hats as usual: the mix of melodies, hilarious lyrics, recitatives,
mini-stories, and sound effects is as dazzling and delirious as ever — speaking
of sound effects, ʽBustedʼ probably has the single best example of a
cow's mooing sampled in the history of all cow moo samples, and ʽNoises
For The Legʼ probably has the most irritating ever example of the use of a
Theremin on record (one that was actually installed inside the leg of a
mannequin, which explains the song's title).
On the other hand, somehow you can tell that,
by intentionally avoiding all elements of «formula», the band has driven itself
into a rut — now that they know they can handle it all, and now that they have already handled it all on Doughnut, Keynsham feels a little bit... predictable. Like their TV brothers
Monty Python, who only lasted a few years before their romance with
intellectualized absurdity became boring, the Bonzos were unable to settle
their awesome initial explosion into a pleasantly useful routine.
As an incidental introduction to the band's
sound, Keynsham is as good as any
other Bonzo album — but if taken in chronological order, it does not seem to
fulfill its assigned task to stick a wise-cracking knife under the ribs of 1969
the same way that Doughnut did for
1968. The simple pop parodies are a little late, and the art pop exercises do
not work very well as «serious» Lieder
for the masses (the Bonzos could mime to the Moodies and the Bee Gees, but
their songwriting relative to these guys was more or less like the Rutles /
Beatles relationship) and do not
properly fulfill the task of desecrating these temples of romanticism, either.
They're a little bit pretty and a little bit funny, but sort of «midway» in
both categories.
The record deserves a strong thumbs up
in any case — these criticisms are relative, not absolute, and repeated listens
do bring out both the melodic hooks and the pockets of intellectual depth in
the material. But the decision to split, which the band took around the same
time the LP was issued, was utterly wise: in their current incarnation, they
found it hard to keep up with the rapidly changing times — as a 1969 album, Keynsham is simply nowhere near as impressive
as Doughnut was for a 1968 album.
Perhaps if they had a real Frank
Zappa in their ranks, things would turn out different, but neither Stanshall
nor Innes could lay claim to anything like that.
LET'S MAKE UP AND BE FRIENDLY (1972)
1) The Strain; 2) Turkeys; 3)
King Of Scurf; 4) Waiting For The Wardrobe; 5) Straight From My Heart; 6)
Rusty; 7) Rawlinson End; 8) Don't Get Me Wrong; 9) Fresh Wound; 10) Bad Blood;
11) Slush; 12*) Suspicion; 13*) Trouser Freak.
For one of those «contractual obligation»
albums that usually turn out to be predictably disappointing, the
sardonically-titled Let's Make Up And Be
Friendly actually isn't half-bad. Not only is it the longest Bonzo Dog Band
record up to date (although that is mostly the result of two intentionally
drawn-out and overlong tracks), but it is clear that quite a bit of imagination
and work was involved in its production — even despite the fact that Stanshall,
Innes, and bassist Dennis Cowan were the only regular Bonzos to oversee all of
the recording (ʽLegsʼ Larry Smith and Roger Ruskin Spear make guest
appearances on a few tracks). In spirit, Let's
Make Up is closer to a «comedy» product than an «experimental» release, but
it has its parallels with just about every single other Bonzo Dog Band release,
so, as a career wrap-up, it is fairly adequate, and, in my opinion, quite
unjustly maligned by fans.
Arguably the
major miscalculation was to open the album with ʽThe Strainʼ — a
comic blues-rock ode to constipation that many people logically consider way
too crude and unworthy of these guys' reputation. I mean, toilet humor? Come on
now! But on second thought, there is really nothing that wrong with toilet
humor if it is done well (the major mistake of 99% of toilet humor being in
that people somehow think that the subject is always funny per se, and does not need any special intellectual input), and
ʽThe Strainʼ is done well to the point of genuine hilariousness —
with Stanshall singing it in a Captain Beefheart voice and, of course,
ʽThe Strainʼ itself being a mock-analogy with a popular dance
("Hey hey human gonna do The Strain / I'm gonna grip the seat I'm gonna
pull the chain"). Throw in a kick-ass guitar solo, the most authentic
«straining noises» possible in a human being, and you really get the best song
about constipation issues the other side of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' ʽConstipation
Bluesʼ (which may have very well served as the basic inspiration for the
Bonzos' polite British answer).
Nor does the album sound particularly out of
time or out of touch — even for these contractual purposes, the Bonzos still
keep their eyes and ears open, so that the inspiration, production, and
mood-setting touches are very much reminiscent of the early 1970s or, at least,
very late 1969. ʽRustyʼ, a tragicomic spoken monologue about a
homosexual couple breaking up, is set to a slow soulful arrangement, with deep
gospel harmonies and a blazing wah-wah lead part all the way through, as though
it were influenced by Funkadelic's ʽMaggot Brainʼ. Roger's
ʽWaiting For The Wardrobeʼ begins as a somber avantgarde number, all
electronic noise and percussion, before turning into a schizophrenic electric
blues-rocker. And ʽDon't Get Me Wrongʼ is naturally reminiscent of
ʽDon't Let Me Downʼ, although the melody is a bit more Otis Redding.
On the «serious» side of things, there's
ʽTurkeysʼ, a curious instrumental that shows traces of interest in
avantgarde jazz and not-too-modern classical (of the Bartók and/or Shostakovich
variety, I'd say), and ʽRawlinson's Endʼ, mostly resting on a series
of piano improvisations, from ragtime to impressionistic to completely
free-form — although the track essentially functions as a musical introduction
to the character of Sir Henry Rawlinson, a favorite character of Viv Stanshall's
whom he would later explore in greater detail in his solo career. The
spoken-word monolog, very much in the vein of the nonsensical ʽBig
Shotʼ from Gorilla, may be
freely ignored, but the accompaniment is not without its merits.
As a matter of fact, there is not a single
track on here that I could just call «plain bad». Where they are saddling old
warhorses like Elvis-style balladry (ʽStraight From My Heartʼ) or
write very straightforward parodies on specific genres (the country-western
ʽBad Bloodʼ), the results are at least mildly fun, and ʽKing Of
Scurfʼ is one of their best stabs at old-fashioned teen-pop, though,
admittedly, this one is a bit outdated by the standards of 1972 (and it was
probably way beneath their contempt to try a stab at The Osmonds). One really
strange thing, though — why write and perform a song that intentionally sounds
like mediocre John Lennon circa 1963 (ʽFresh Woundʼ)? (There is also
an explicit Beatles reference in the song, when Neil says "come on George,
snap out of it" — apparently, a «hidden message» to a then-currently
depressed Harrison).
Finally, the two-minute coda of
ʽSlushʼ is probably the sweetest-funniest way of saying goodbye to
the fans imaginable — leave it to the Bonzos to «spoil» a sweet, innocent,
pastoral soundscape, written as if specially for a romantic movie soundtrack,
with their zany looped overdub: a ridiculous and symbolic gesture. Or you could go even farther and say that the
echoey looped laughter is the voice of Pan, The Great Satyr himself, always
happy to conjugate beauty with mischief at the most improper moment in time.
It is said that, when pressed into their
«contractual obligation», their first bitter move was to go into the studio,
set a timer for 45 minutes, and make a record out of anything and everything
they recorded in the meantime — but then the next day, they relented, repented,
and decided that they couldn't be that
cruel to their remaining loyal fans. Maybe it was all for the better, because
that way, they were able to let off steam, then sleep on it and gather some
inspiration and good sense by the morning. That way, from ʽThe
Strainʼ and all the way through to ʽSlushʼ and the farewell
message of "...dada for now!" on the back cover, Let's Make Up And Be Friendly is consistently busy tying up loose
ends and, occasionally, maybe even indicating new ways of development for the
future. Not that it really is the Bonzos' Abbey
Road or anything, but it is quite a graceful way to go out all the same,
well worth a thumbs
up and a get-it recommendation — particularly if you are not afraid
of a little bit of high-quality toilet humor.
WRESTLE POODLES ...AND WIN! (2006)
1) Rule Britannia; 2) Hunting
Tigers; 3) My Brother Makes The Noises; 4) Doorstep; 5) Little Sir Echo; 6) Ali
Baba's Camel; 7) Falling In Love Again; 8) Watermelon; 9) Look Out, There's A
Monster Coming; 10) Whispering; 11) By A Waterfall; 12) Sheik Of Araby; 13)
Hello Mabel; 14) Jollity Farm; 15) The Equestrian Statue; 16) Cool Britannia;
17) We Are Normal; 18) The Strain; 19) The Sound Of Music; 20) Exodus; 21) The
Trouser Press; 22) My Pink Half Of The Drainpipe; 23) I'm Bored; 24) Sport (The
Odd Boy); 25) Mr. Apollo; 26) Humanoid Boogie; 27) Tent; 28) Can Blue Men Sing The
Whites; 29) Look At Me, I'm Wonderful; 30) San Francisco; 31) Rhinocratic Oaths;
32) Mr. Slater's Parrot; 33) Monster Mash; 34) Urban Spaceman; 35) Canyons Of
Your Mind.
There is nothing too surprising about a Bonzo
Dog Band reunion — in fact, what is more surprising is that, since the band's
ultimate breakup, they have only had one minor attempt at getting back together
in thirty years (recording one «political» single in 1988). However, old age
nostalgia, as well as increased popular interest in all things retro,
eventually did its thing, and so, in early 2006, in order to celebrate the
band's 40th anniversary, the «proper» reunion finally took place at the London
Astoria — in the form of a sprawling celebratory show, a representative retrospective
of all things that originally made The Bonzo Dog Band the real and uncontested
champions of The Doo-Dah.
By this time, Stanshall was already deceased,
making the reunion look a little like a Lennon-less posthumous Beatles show: no
less than four different guest stars from the «alt-comedy» routine have been
invited to fill in for the dead legend, with varying (but always incomplete)
degrees of success. Original bass player Dennis Cowan was also no longer in
this world; everybody else seems to be there, and trying to enjoy the whole
thing as much as possible.
Although, apparently, there is a DVD version of
this album, and much of the show was centered around theatrical comic
performance, I am ever so slightly happy that I have not seen it — it makes
much more sense to seek out old videos of their TV show instead, rather than
watch the old geezers re-promote their legend in an age in which they so
painfully do not belong (and the same goes for Monty Python, by the way, whose
recurrent reunions compare quite pitifully to the original show). Just listening to whatever they're doing out
there, though, almost completely erases the chronological context — and since
they are doing it so well, Wrestle Poodles
could almost pass for an original,
old-school live album, minus the guest stars and the inevitable old crackle
here and there in one of the singer's voices.
Indeed, these here are one hundred minutes of
prime Bonzo stuff, delivered with all the authentic merriment, sarcasm, and
energy as could and should be expected, and strung together with little staged
vignettes and stage banter as one grand vaudevillian celebration. The setlist
mostly consists of comic classics, going heavier on Gorilla/Tadpoles-style
material than on the more experimental stuff, for obvious reasons (to please
the audience, and also because much of that original tape-splicing
experimentation would be hard, and useless, to reproduce on stage) — but since
they play all their super-melodic ditties like ʽEquestrian Statueʼ
and ʽUrban Spacemanʼ, who'd want to complain?
Of all the guest stars, Stephen Fry probably
does the best job, but that is because he is Stephen Fry, and unlike everybody
else, he does not even try to be Viv Stanshall — he just gives a typically Fry
take on a couple of tunes, most notably ʽRhinocratic Oathsʼ where the
complex surrealist monolog is delivered without a single hitch or glitch. On
the other hand, Ade Edmondson tries way
too hard to emulate Stanshall's personality on ʽThe Strainʼ, and
overcooks the toilet humor side of the song so much that... well, it stinks, frankly speaking; and Paul
Merton, according to reports, had to recite the words to ʽMonster
Mashʼ from cue cards — how un-Bonzo is that?
Not to mention that he just doesn't seem to get into the mock-ghouly spirit of
the song at all: if you are trying to perform something of that level of
silliness, you can really only allow yourself to do it if you are willing to
go all the way, otherwise it's just... silly. Or even stupid.
Still, despite these minor nitpickings, on the
whole the show seems to have been a success. The audience, probably largely
consisting of the band's 50-60-year old fans, plays along with everything that
requires audience participation (such as the "hello! – hello!"'s of
ʽMr. Slater's Parrotʼ, or the "do you like soul music? —
NO!!!!" bit on ʽTrouser Pressʼ), the musical side is faithfully
and loyally well-rehearsed, and ultimately, it is just a cool thing to have so
much of the Bonzos' comic greatness stuffed together in one such lovingly
prepared package. A thumbs up, then, although, unlike the original
albums, this one's value will probably fizzle out together with the passing of
the Bonzos' last original fan.
POUR L'AMOUR DES CHIENS (2007)
1) Pour L'Amour Des Chiens; 2)
Let's All Go To Mary's House; 3) Hawkeye The Gnu; 4) Making Faces At The Man In
The Moon; 5) Fiasco; 6) Purple Sprouting Broccoli; 7) Old Tige; 8) Wire People;
9) Salmon Proust; 10) Democracy; 11) I Predict A Riot; 12) Scarlet Ribbons;
13) Paws; 14) And We're Back; 15) Stadium Love; 16) Mornington Crescent; 17)
L'Essence D'Hooligan; 18) Early Morning Train; 19) My Friends Outside; 20) For
The Benefit Of Mankind; 21) Beautiful People; 22) Ego Warriors; 23) Cockadoodle
Tato; 24) Tiptoe Through The Tulips; 25) Sweet Memories; 26) Sudoku Forecast;
27) Now You're Asleep; 28) Jean Baudrillard.
A proper reunion of the (mostly) original Bonzo
Dog Doo-Dah Band. In 2007. No Viv Stanshall to come down from the sky, even if
only for a moment, but most of the rest somehow cuddled together. Do you really want to hear that? A relic so
inextricably associated with the Sixties. It is certainly one thing to see a
brief glimpse of them in a nostalgia-oriented show, but to actually subject
ourselves to new material from these
guys, in the iPhone and YouTube age and all? Who in his right mind would want
to do that, unless out of some twisted understanding of «pity»?
Apparently, nobody did: the album was barely
noted upon release, and you can count the online-available reactions to it on
the fingers of both hands, be it professional critical reviews or average music
fan assessments — and the reaction, mostly, was as expected: «kinda fun, but
why should this ever exist in this
age?» And from a purely logical standpoint, this is absolutely correct: it
should not. Fortunately, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band never operated on
Aristotelian logic, or else they wouldn't have any right to the title of
«Doo-Dah».
Once logic has been politely asked out the
door, Pour L'Amour Des Chiens is an
excellent album — nostalgic, futuristic, whatever, it is bursting with all
sorts of ideas, some good, some bad, some exquisitely tasteful, some
disgustingly (or delightfully) distasteful, and all of them sounding as if The
Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band never really went away. Well, they might have climbed
into a refrigerator for a while, but it's not even as if they were frozen
unconscious all that time: at the very least, they know who Gary Numan is.
For the most
part, the record relies on musical (and comical) structures and gimmicks that
do not, indeed, transgress the human experience accumulated by around 1969. For
the most part, yes — but that does
not prevent them from certain intentional anachronisms. For instance, around
the middle of the album there is a track called ʽPawsʼ, in which you
are advocated to press the pause
button on your player and go have a snack or something, since this is the way
LP records were designed in the 1960s. However, what they do not warn you about
is that back in the 1960s, few, if any, record sides could run for about 32-35
minutes — whereas Pour L'Amour Des
Chiens makes full use of the CD format, running for over 70 minutes, almost
enough for a double LP, come to think
of it, and certainly the most sprawling record in the entire life of the
Bonzos.
Fortunately, with not a single track running
over five minutes, and lots of small spoken-word, faux-commercial, and
general-goofy interludes, the album does not truly seem overlong — not to
mention that, in solid Bonzo tradition, the amount of different styles is truly
staggering. Only twice do they seriously venture outside the comfy zone of «the
Sixties and everything beyond that back in time»: ʽMy Friends
Outsideʼ is a rather sneery send-up of artsy synth-pop (the one with the
explicit Gary Numan references and a hilarious discussion on the emotional
implications of various electronic effects at the end), and the
ʽLegsʼ Larry Smith spotlight number ʽSweet Memoriesʼ,
despite being one of the album's most explicit nostalgia-oriented song, is
«perversely» arranged as a late Seventies disco dance number — indeed, it would
be too boring for these guys to set their
memories to a soundtrack from the same time as those memories, wouldn't it?
Wait, actually, I'm wrong: another all-too
obvious piece of evidence for the Bonzos knowing what time of day it is is
their cover of the Kaiser Chiefs' ʽI Predict A Riotʼ; it's just that
the Kaiser Chiefs themselves are such a blatantly retro-looking band that, in a
way, it is not quite clear who exactly is covering who. Well, so the Bonzos, if
my memory serves me right, did not actually try their hand at straightforward
garage rock back in 1967-69, but they do now, and do it in their expected
manner, taking the word «riot» a little too literally and then taking a look at
what follows (no spoilers). In any case, a good choice and yet another bit of
success.
Highlights on the whole are too numerous to
mention everything. Just a few random quick notes, then. ʽLet's All Go To
Mary's Houseʼ is a piece of crackling vaudeville that belongs equally well
in 1925 and on Gorilla. ʽPurple
Sprouting Broccoliʼ gives us a merry banjo-led country spoof;
additionally, ʽOld Tigeʼ then kicks the bucket even further by covering
an old Jim Reeves tune (one of those sentimental «me and my dog» narratives)
and winding its spoken narrative up to truly absurdist highs. ʽWire
Peopleʼ should be read "why are people..." and included in a
Sesame Street episode. On ʽDemocracyʼ, Neil Innes fumbles around with
a little reggae and offers a little bit of supposedly-serious insight in the
issue of human rights. And my personal favorite at the moment is probably
ʽEgo Warriorsʼ, which not only rocks harder than everything else, but
also probably makes the most biting — nay, the most annihilating — lyrical
point of all (which point can be
already well seen from the title, but do check it out for the rest of the
words).
The album seems to be dedicated to the memory
of the recently deceased Jean Baudrillard, who gets namechecked in a French
version of the opening ditty — appropriately so, considering the Bonzos'
post-structuralist pedigree: whatever nasty counter-arguments one might fling
at the theoretical skeleton of post-modernism, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band is
one of its happy side effects, and Pour
L'Amour Des Chiens, with its boatload of catchy, funny, inventive tunes, is
quite a happy side effect of the Bonzos. A comeback? As far as eternity is
concerned, the mighty Doo-Dah has never really gone away, so the term hardly
applies. In fact, new guests like Stephen Fry (who plays a fully appropriate
Jeeves-type role on ʽHawkeye The Gnuʼ) carry on the old spirit in
full understanding, so, apparently, as long as Great Britain, humor, intellect,
and a lack of fear of offending too many people still exist, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah
Band still has a future. Try to find the album if you can — a timeless delight,
really. Thumbs
up.
ADDENDA:
ANTHROPOLOGY: THE BEAST WITHIN (1967-69/1998)
1) Tent; 2) Busted; 3) I'm The
Urban Spaceman I; 4) Mr. Slater's Parrot; 5) Canyons Of Your Mind (intro); 6)
Canyons Of Your Mind; 7) Canyons Of Your Mind I; 8) The Equestrian Statue; 9)
Tragic Magic; 10) Quiet Talks And Summer Walks; 11) What Do You Do?; 12) Give
Booze A Chance; 13) And 3/4; 14) National Beer; 15) Canyons Of Your Mind II;
16) Joke Shop Man; 17) A Wonderful Day Like Today; 18) Mr. Hyde In Me; 19) Look
At Me, I'm Wonderful; 20) We Were Wrong; 21) Sofa Head; 22) By A Waterfall; 23)
Boiled Ham Rhumba; 24) Intro; 25) The Monster Mash; 26) Humanoid Boogie; 27)
I'm The Urban Spaceman II; 28) The Sound Of Music; 29) Little Sir Echo; 30) You
Done My Brain In.
Save yourself the trouble, I guess. There is a
rather disproportionate amount of various Bonzo Dog Band compilations on the
market, some lightly peppered with otherwise unavailable goodies and some not
at all — but there is no such thing as «a magic vault» for these guys, as this
particular collection of outtakes and rarities clearly shows. Released in 1998
and proclaiming to represent «rehearsal material» from around 1967-68, Anthropology, out of its 30 tracks, has
maybe 4 or 5 «true surprises» in stock for the casual Bonzo Dog fan (that is,
if the word «casual» is at all applicable to any Bonzo Dog fan), and not all of them nice surprises at that.
In fact, only Stanshall's ʽMr. Hyde In
Meʼ could probably pass for a valuable addition — a pretty hilarious
impersonation of a guy's «sexual transformation», unfortunately a bit spoiled
by some of those annoying high-pitched mock-doo-wop backing harmonies. The
demented waltz of ʽLittle Sir Echoʼ is also silly-funny, although its
major hook (the "hello! — hello!" echo in question) would eventually
be borrowed for ʽMr. Slater's Parrotʼ and the rest discarded. And
those who respect the Bonzos for their musical experimentation will probably
want to be exposed to ʽSofa Headʼ, a fairly wild free-style romp
through the world of jungle jazz, cosmic rock, and chime-led nursery rhymes,
well in line with any typical bit of Doughnut-era
material.
On the other hand, off-the-cuff novelty
material like ʽGive Booze A Chanceʼ (yes, a very straightforward
parody of ʽGive Peace A Chanceʼ) is simply not funny, and only exists
as a symbolic showcase for the Bonzos' already well-known «irreverence»; nor is
it easy to get won over by half-baked piano exercises such as ʽBoiled Ham
Rhumbaʼ, which honestly sounds like Neil Innes sitting down at the piano
and nonsensically improvising for a couple of minutes. (On the AMG side,
somebody supposed that this could be a parody on John Lennon — really? Does the
reviewer know something we don't
know?).
Even so, all of these «new» songs are swept
away by the ocean waves of all-too-familiar material, presented in alternative
versions — as a rule, inferior ones either in arrangement, or in sound quality,
or both. You do get to see how songs like ʽBustedʼ or ʽMr.
Slater's Parrotʼ evolved, and no number of different versions of
ʽUrban Spacemanʼ can be too huge for such a jolly tune, but on the
whole, there is little to discuss unless one has really, truly, loyally worn out
his faithful copies of the original studio albums. Which, not coincidentally,
could also be said about the Beatles' Anthologies
— which, not coincidentally, must have served as the obvious model for this CD.
Indeed — back in 1967-69, the Bonzos were like the Beatles' comic twins (no
wonder the two had a bit of a symbiotic relationship at the height of the
flower power era), so it comes as no surprise that they would choose this
particular timing, just two years since the wrapping-up of the Anthology project, to review the raw
edges of their own career. However, that is the fate of all comical twins — their sketches and leftovers inevitably
pale in comparison with their more serious brethren. Besides, these are not
even sketches, more like «rehearsal versions» indeed: too close to the final
variants to become interesting — too different from the final variants to
become «alternatively perfect». In other words, for completists only.
THE COMPLETE BBC RECORDINGS (1967-1986/2002)
1) Do The Trouser Press; 2) Canyons
Of Your Mind; 3) I'm The Urban Spaceman; 4) Hello Mabel; 5) Mr. Apollo; 6)
Tent; 7) Monster Mash; 8) Give Booze A Chance; 9) We Were Wrong; 10) Keynsham;
11) I Want To Be With You; 12) Mickey's Son And Daughter; 13) Craig Torso Show;
14) Can Blue Men Sing The Whites; 15) Look At Me I'm Wonderful; 16) Quiet Talks
And Summer Walks; 17) We're Going To Bring It On Home; 18) Sofa Head; 19) Canyons
Of Your Mind; 20) I'm The Urban Spaceman.
And another one for completists only — released
on the semi-official Strange Fruit label that, among other things, specializes
on disclosing radio archives (such as the various John Peel sessions, etc.). I
have no idea whether this is really «complete» (most probably not, since there
are too few track repetitions for a «complete» package), but it does combine
tracks from a variety of performances, mostly recorded for «Top Gear» in 1968
and 1969, and ending with a very brief snippet of ʽUrban Spacemanʼ,
performed solo by Neil Innes on vocals and acoustic guitar for «Late Night
Lineup» as late, indeed, as 1986.
Even the true completist might be disappointed,
though, because the collection offers no genuinely new material. The few songs
that had not been included on the original LPs are available these days as
bonus tracks (e. g. the mini-spoof of ʽThe Craig Torso Showʼ), and
others have been included on Anthropology
(ʽSofa Headʼ, ʽGive Booze A Chanceʼ). If I am not mistaken,
the only exception is ʽWe're Going To Bring It On Homeʼ, a quirky mix
of a flute-led art pop song and a barroom-style roots-rocker that is neither
too funny nor too touching (in the same way as quite a few songs on Keynsham) — Strange Fruit have a
monopoly on this one, having originally released it in 1990 as part of a small
Peel Sessions EP.
Everything else is just the same old stuff,
treasurable only for the fact that these are the original young Bonzos playing
their material live in the studio, showing off their accomplishment as genuine
musicians and offering a rare occasional twist on the studio version.
(Actually, I think that the first live version of ʽCanyonsʼ here
might predate the studio version, because instead of the rather incoherent
"to the ventricles of your heart / I'm in love with you again",
Stanshall sings "through the ventricles of your heart / I am pumping you
again" — what looks like the probable original lyrics, later censored by
the band themselves in order to avoid extreme ambiguity by inadvertently
introducing a new meaning of the verb "to pump" in the English
language.)
It should probably be added that Stanshall's
vocal style on ʽThe Monster Mashʼ leans here towards the «comically
crazy» rather than the «ironically croony», and that the «trouser pressing»
guitar imitation on ʽDo The Trouser Pressʼ, done without the benefit
of additional studio effects, is still inventive and funny (the freshly
demented Syd Barrett would have probably appreciated it). Other than that,
there is nothing to add — except that I am still a little disappointed to learn
once more that there are indeed no hidden wonders in the vaults for Britain's
greatest comic band of rock music's finest era. Oh well — at the very least,
it's not as if the album, loaded with all these wonderful tunes in solid
renditions and stable sound quality, were an unpleasant listen or anything.
Completists won't be disappointed.
THE BOX TOPS
THE LETTER/NEON RAINBOW (1967)
1) The Letter; 2) She Knows
How; 3) Trains & Boats & Planes; 4) Break My Mind; 5) A Whiter Shade Of
Pale; 6) Everything I Am; 7) Neon Rainbow; 8) People Make The World; 9) I'm
Your Puppet; 10) Happy Times; 11) Gonna Find Somebody; 12) I Pray For Rain.
In late 1967, The Box Tops consisted of Alex
Chilton on vocals and guitar, Danny Smythe on drums, John Evans on keyboards,
Bill Cunnigham on bass... actually, I am not even sure if anyone on that list
other than Chilton actually matters, since on most of these tracks The Box Tops
did not even play their instruments, but were replaced in the studio with
unknown professional players, courtesy of producer Dan Penn who, apparently,
had little trust in the playing skills of these white youngsters from Memphis.
The only trust, so it seems, was placed in the
vocal gift of Alex Chilton, who was only sixteen years old when he got to record
Wayne Carson Thompson's ʽThe Letterʼ during his band's first
recording session at American Sound Studio in Memphis. Now if your first
genuine exposure to Alex Chilton has been via his later, more revered band Big
Star, and if you have somehow missed out on the ubiquitousness of ʽThe
Letterʼ in its original version, you might very well be stricken by the
difference in vocal styles. For Big Star, Alex would sing clearly and cleanly,
putting the same youthful gloss on his vocal chords as he would on his guitar
sound. But here, despite being five years younger, he sings as if he were fifty
years older — there's a rasp and a
gurgle in his throat that implies «soulful world-weariness», and it certainly
does not sound like he's faking it: by all means, this is not the kind of voice
that would be naturally associated with 16 years of age. (Unless you start
smoking at age four and catch your first STD at age twelve, of course).
I do not count myself as a big fan of Chilton's
«blue-eyed soul» voice, but the very fact that a 16-year old white kid was so
readily accepted in the heart of the soul kingdom of Memphis sort of speaks for
itself. As a song, ʽThe Letterʼ is quite a moving composition, but
perhaps not as nearly deserving of its sky-high reputation as the immense
number of succeeding cover versions would have us believe — after all, it is a
very short, simple, and straightforward number that accurately conveys the link
between love and insanity, but that's about it. Mad props to Thompson and
Chilton, though, for being able to turn the line "my baby wrote me a
letter" into a haunting hook for generations to come.
Actually, I might be even more partial to the band's second single, also written by Thompson:
ʽNeon Rainbowʼ does a great job taking a verse melody reminiscent of
Simon & Garfunkel, one of those quiet, boppy, slightly childish folk-pop
ditties, and letting it effortlessly flow into a full-fledged R&B chorus,
with optimistic brass backing and Alex really belting it out. The difference is
that ʽThe Letterʼ is a dark and paranoid song, while ʽNeon
Rainbowʼ is a light, colorful, optimistic song — and people tend to
remember darkness and paranoia for longer periods of time, especially musical
critics. But on their respective scales, both tunes, I think, should occupy comparatively
respectable spots in the busy ledgers of 1967.
Of course, by late 1967 the «LP era» was not
yet properly recognized in the USA — and so, instead of giving The Box Tops
and their songwriting partners enough time to put together a proper, cohesive
record, their label made them quickly scramble together a full-fledged
follow-up, for which they did not even dare suggest a more interesting title
than the names of the two hit singles (the same tasteless strategy that also
marred The Left Banke's debut album from the same year, and God knows what
else). Since the songwriting partners weren't total hacks, and since, if you
had any talent at all, it was pretty
damn hard to put out a complete suckjob in 1967, The Letter / Neon Rainbow came out much better than it could have
been — still, it certainly ain't The
Doors or any other such 1967 debut that had a cohesive «plan» behind it,
let alone «concept».
The main contributing team for the album were
Dan Penn himself (who, other than producing, was a major songwriter and even
singer in his own rights) and his partner Spooner Oldham — in between the two,
they place no less than four originals in the hands of Chilton here, including
one catchy, fast, prickly soul-pop number (ʽHappy Timesʼ — and by
«prickly» I mean that its main hook, the vocal-call-brass-response of
"times!.. times!" makes some of your brain neurons jump in
excitement) and three slower, bleeding-heart-mode soul confessions, of which
ʽI'm Your Puppetʼ is probably the best known one, since it had
already been an earlier hit for the duo of James & Bobby Purify — and it
works better for The Box Tops, since it makes more sense for one guy to sing "I'm your
puppet" than two guys at the
same time (not to mention that Chilton slurs the words a bit as if in a druggy
haze — getting into the puppet character, no doubt).
These are good songs in good hands, mostly.
More questionable is the inclusion of ʽA Whiter Shade Of Paleʼ, a
great song with which, however, Alex cannot do anything that Gary Brooker has
not already done — other than, perhaps, popularize early British prog-rock and
J. S. Bach a little bit among the local Memphis crowds. Then there are some
truly questionable inclusions, such as the laid-back country-rock ditty
ʽBreak My Mindʼ, in a style to which Chilton's voice is not suited at
all, or Burt Bacharach's ʽTrains & Boats & Planesʼ, which has
the misfortune of finding itself way
too close to ʽThe Letterʼ to count as an equally mind-blowing song
about one's means of travel. But even the questionable inclusions aren't
cringeworthy as such, it's just that they do not exploit the band's (actually,
the lead singer's) talents to full capacity.
On the whole, the album ain't no masterpiece,
and I can even picture myself a serious Big Star fan who could be seriously
disappointed in these first steps of Alex Chilton's career — no original
material, a distinctly different vocal style, rather perfunctory musical
backing from anonymous session guys, etc. But the presence of two strong
singles, the lack of anything particularly dreadful, a generally sensible
taste in covers, and the auxiliary fact that THIS IS 1967!! altogether make it
well worth a friendly thumbs up.
CRY LIKE A BABY (1968)
1) Cry Like A Baby; 2) Deep In
Kentucky; 3) I'm The One For You; 4) Weeping Analeah; 5) Every Time; 6) Fields
Of Clover; 7) Trouble With Sam; 8) Lost; 9) Good Morning Dear; 10) 727; 11) You
Keep Me Hangin' On.
This is a rather typical example of the
«sophomore» approach: a record that is intentionally (and also rather hastily)
designed to follow up on the preceding success, formula-wise, and almost
inevitably one small or one large notch below its predecessor, depending on the
amount of talent and resources involved. Here, we have the same players (or the
same «non-players»; I am not sure how much was left to session musicians this
time around), the same focus on the lead singer, the same team of songwriters,
the same styles, the same mechanisms to prolong the band's commercial success.
So — minus the «freshness» of 1967. Any pluses?
No «special» pluses, but some good songs. The
title track, written by the Dan Penn / Spooner Oldham team in a rather tense
brainstorming session, was right on target and almost ended up returning The
Box Tops to the top of the charts, stalling at #2; today, it is often
considered a blue-eyed soul classic, and even veteran R&B artists like
Arthur Alexander would later cover it with verve and admiration. It is
undeniably catchy and has a fun electric sitar lead part, but the match between
lyrics and melody does not seem to be nearly as perfect as in the case of
ʽThe Letterʼ — its main chorus hook triggers the «happy» nerve with
its resolution, whereas the words are undeniably tragic (and the song would
sound even «happier» in Alexander's rendition; at least Chilton does
everything in his power to impersonate a broken-down human being despite the
melodic odds being so seriously against him). I do believe it would have worked
much better if the «cry like a baby» chorus were to imply tears of joy and
happiness rather than tears of loss and loneliness — but then, that might be the very reason why ʽCry
Like A Babyʼ would ultimately be a tad less popular than the perfectly
self-adequate ʽLetterʼ.
Then again, this raises the chances for the
rest of the tracks — what with the quality gap between the lead single and
everything else diminishing and all, I actually like the second track, Bill
Davidson's ʽDeep In Kentuckyʼ, more than the first one: a subtly and
eerily arranged folk-pop gem, thoughtfully stuffed with oboes, trumpets,
chimes, electric pianos, strings, ghostly hushed backing vocals — far more
complex, actually, than ʽCry Like A Babyʼ, and with all of its elements
working in coordinated tandem to convey a general feeling of gloomy rejection.
And the third one, ʽI'm The One For Youʼ, is one of those perfectly
executed «consolation tunes» ("I'll come running to you", etc.), with
a wonderful series of epic-tragic "no, no, no, no" flourishes winding
up each chorus — unfortunately, the authors of the tune failed to fully
capitalize on this «now I'm being so protective and chivalrous... and now I'm
being so paranoid and desperate» mood shift, and ultimately the "no no
no"'s do not go anywhere. Still, really good song.
Eventually, the tunes do begin to merge
together, as it often happens with blue-eyed soul records, and the moods,
chords, and bags-o'-tricks begin repeating themselves: there is even another
«aeroplane song», ʽ727ʼ, clearly written by Penn and Oldham as a
«sequel» to ʽThe Letterʼ, but this time a much fluffier and happier
one. As a rule, they are pulled out, one by one, mainly through the charisma of
Chilton's voice, but even that one only goes up to a certain limit.
So it is quite a shock when the band finishes
its pleasant, but tiring program with a surprisingly heavy-rocking ʽYou
Keep Me Hangin' Onʼ, adapted from the Vanilla Fudge version rather than
the Supremes original. Chilton goes all-out Gargantuan on the track, and I'd
say he pulls it off fairly well, but the key moment comes at the end — as the
band braces itself for the frantic noisy coda, Alex drops off a single
ad-libbed phrase, "and he walked on down the hall", which, perhaps,
was not immediately understood by the recording supervisors, but in this
context, worked like a sign of allegiance: they may be covering Vanilla Fudge
all right, but Chilton's real heart
lies with Jim Morrison, as would later be reconfirmed time and time again with
Alex whenever he'd be in one of his dark periods, and this surreptitious quote
from ʽThe Endʼ (confirmed moments later with a chaotic raga-like
guitar solo which, too, sounds suspiciously influenced by ʽThe Endʼ)
is one of these first quirky signs.
In any case, on the whole it's a good record,
perhaps deserving of a slightly less enthusiastic thumbs up than the first one, but as
you can see, at least there's enough going on here to hold detailed discussions
on several of the songs — not every «sophomore effort» by a band that does not
write its own songs has that kind of good luck. And don't you forget that Alex
Chilton was still only 17 years old! (They told me that every mention of the
Box Tops in a popular source has to have at least one reference to Alex
Chilton's age, until he gets old enough to drink).
NON-STOP (1968)
1) Choo Choo Train; 2) I'm
Movin' On; 3) Sandman; 4) She Shot A Hole In My Soul; 5) People Gonna Talk; 6)
I Met Her In Church; 7) Rock Me Baby; 8) Rollin' In My Sleep; 9) I Can Dig It;
10) Yesterday Where's My Mind; 11) If I Had Let You In.
Maybe this one was rushed out a little too
quickly after Cry Like A Baby,
because even repeated listens with an extra spoonful of attention do not do
much in the way of excitement. Two things are immediately noticeable, neither
of them auspicious — first, the Penn/Oldham partnership only contributes two
songs, and second, there are way too many horns here, as if somebody were
intentionally pulling The Box Tops away from their dabblings in the «baroque»
and the «psychedelic» and urging them to compete with the newly formed Blood,
Sweat & Tears (or the not-yet-formed Chicago, in an act of artistic
prevention).
I would not say that this latter move is
completely wrong — sometimes the results are amusing, for instance, on their
cover of Hank Snow's ʽI'm Movin' Onʼ. That one used to be a no-frills
country song (which The Rolling Stones had already managed to transform into an
ass-kickin' rhythm'n'blues killer machine in their early live shows), and here,
too, it starts out all country-like, but then midway through the horns kick in,
the bass zoops move closer to hard rock territory, the vocals disappear
altogether, and we witness a smooth, natural-sounding transformation from quiet
country to loud, anthemic, gritty R&B.
Unfortunately, surprises like these are fairly
rare throughout the album. The same horns can sound pedestrian and formulaic
just as often as they can sound useful and inspiring, and on the whole, it
seems as if once again they were using Chilton here as their main attraction —
on some of the songs, his voice is even more wild and gravelley than before, so
much so that if I did not know how smooth and clean Tom Waits sounded in his
early youth, I'd easily have mistaken Alex for a young Tom on his own ʽI
Can Dig Itʼ and particularly on the dark folk ballad ʽYesterday
Where's My Mindʼ, written by Jon Reid and Bill Soden. For this song, the
Box Tops earned numerous comparisons with the Doors that came one album too
late — musically, this one is very much rooted in traditional Britfolk, which
the Doors didn't play much, and is more in line with the Grateful Dead or the
Jefferson Airplane; also, Chilton's vocal impersonation is much more «earthy»
than Jim Morrison's not-of-this-world lizard-king promenades.
(Sidenote: for a really, really bizarre version of ʽYesterday Where's My Mindʼ,
check out the recently uncovered Paint A
Lady album by odd-folk singerine Susan Christie, shelved in 1970 and
critically savored only around 2006. She doesn't necessarily do a better job
than Chilton, but her tacked-on three-minute free-form introduction gotta rank
as one of the most bizarre performances of its epoch).
None of these songs were considered for release
as singles: instead, that honor fell to ʽChoo Choo Trainʼ, a fairly
ordinary tune of longing for one's baby. Apparently, they were once again
trying to recreate the «yearning / travel» theme of ʽThe Letterʼ,
replacing the aeroplane with a more grounded form of transportation, but for
some reason, decided to give the song a slightly «vulgarized», pub-rock atmosphere.
The trick did not work — the single charted much lower than ʽCry Like A
Babyʼ, and then it all went further downhill when they tried to remedy the
situation with ʽI Met Her In Churchʼ: not only was the title of the
song probably not the most appropriate thing to capture the hearts of the
single-buying market, but the song itself, though technically ambitious (with a
little «mini-serenade» in the place of the instrumental break), brings them
into the sphere of anthemic «gospel pop», in which sphere you usually get your
ass kicked by the likes of Mahalia Jackson unless you do something totally mad
and unpredictable. In this case, though, Chilton just does not sound as if he's
all that into it.
Throw on all sorts of stuff that is just plain
boring — for instance, these guys have no business whatsoever covering
ʽRock Me Babyʼ (nobody really has, not after Jimi), and ʽRollin'
In My Sleepʼ actually puts me to
sleep, despite being superficially pretty — and the lack of anything truly outstanding, and there remains
little mystery about why this is indeed the beginning of the end. That said, Non-Stop is not a «bad» record: it is
simply too self-conscious for its own good, trying way too hard to «do it
right» by looking at what everybody else around is doing, completely
forgetting the need to cobble together its own face. In this, it is far from
being alone, and it is still much better than a lot of the competition — the
«Neanderthal model of Alex Chilton» alone is worth a couple visits. But
probably not much more than a couple.
DIMENSIONS (1969)
1) Soul Deep; 2) I Shall Be
Released; 3) Midnight Angel; 4) Together; 5) I'll Hold Out My Hand; 6) I Must
Be The Devil; 7) Sweet Cream Ladies, Forward March; 8) The Happy Song; 9) Ain't
No Way; 10) Rock Me Baby.
The final album by The Box Tops does not have
all that much to recommend it. It is formally notable by featuring no less than
three Alex Chilton originals — none of which is particularly impressive on its
own, but collectively they show that the man is trying his hand at several
different directions at once: ʽTogetherʼ is blue-eyed soul in the
same vein as all those hits that Penn, Oldham, and Thompson were writing for
the band, ʽI Must Be The Devilʼ is dark piano blues reminiscent of
early Animals, and ʽThe Happy Songʼ is a short, fast, upbeat
country-rocker. Of these, ʽDevilʼ is the only song that gets
occasionally remembered, though, and only because its doom-laden lyrics always
bring on associations with Chilton's ill-fated life and career — but in 1969, he
probably just wrote all these "I can't bear to see my face, wrong's done I
can erase" lines because, well, that's sort of how blues stuff usually
gets written, you know.
The primary album single was ʽSoul
Deepʼ, another Thompson contribution that earned them the last bit of
chart success, but with Van Morrison's Astral
Weeks having rewritten the rules on «blue-eyed soul» a few months earlier,
you could tell that anything like ʽSoul Deepʼ already sounded a bit
behind the times in 1969 — indeed, no melodic or «semantic» progress here, just
two and a half minutes more of catchy soulful pop, and furthermore, the song is
jubilant rather than mournful, which is not a very good thing for Chilton, to
whom «sad» always seemed to come more naturally than «happy» (for that matter,
ʽThe Happy Songʼ, despite the title and the lyrics, ends up sounding
bitterly ironic the way he does it).
More interesting, if not necessarily better
written, is another single, ʽSweet Cream Ladies, Forward Marchʼ,
which has nothing to do with the recently deceased Cream, but is instead a Britpoppy
march (proper brass backing included) dedicated to lovely ladies of the night
and the useful services they provide to society. It's... uh... ironic, I
guess, but I am not sure Chilton himself understood all that well whether it
should have been sung with more sneer/irony or more empathy/compassion, and
his delivery is kinda bland — somebody like Ray Davies, perhaps, would have
been able to turn it into one more of his lovable social portraits, but here it
just sounds like a novelty number.
In addition to other minor disappointments
(such as a completely pointless cover of ʽI Shall Be Releasedʼ,
following The Band's arrangement but smoothing out all the pain-stuffed edges
that Richard Manuel brought to our attention so expressively), it is clear that
the band did not have enough material — so, to bring the record to a proper
conclusion, they recorded ʽRock Me Babyʼ once again, this time in a
nine-minute (!) version taken at two different tempos (mid- and slow) and
featuring extended guitar and piano solos that must have sounded totally
amateurish by this time in rock's instrumental journey. For a band that began
its career by having session musicians play most of the instruments, this was a
rather ironic way to end that career. (Not that it's a bad sound or anything, and I know Gary Talley has a rather high
reputation in some circles, but there is nothing in this playing that would
strike me as specifically individualistic).
On the whole, though, the worst thing about Dimensions
is that, if you play it back to back with the band's debut, you won't hear any
significant difference — and no band that sounded the same way in 1969 as it
sounded in 1967 was deemed worth to live, or at least to thrive, at the time.
So, naturally, as Jesus Christ said, «to conquer death, The Box Tops only had
to die», and so The Box Tops went ahead and did the right thing to do, upon
which Chilton could finally reboot his career, shake off the «young promising
blue-eyed soulman» tag, and put his talents to more efficient use.
TEAR OFF! (1998)
1) Flying Saucers Rock'n'Roll;
2) Wang Dang Doodle; 3) Ain't That A Lot Of Love; 4) It Tears Me Up; 5) Last
Laugh; 6) Treat Her Right; 7) Soothe Me; 8) I'm In Love; 9) The Letter; 10)
Trip To Bandstand; 11) Little Latin Lupe Lu; 12) Keep On Dancing; 13) Last
Bouquet; 14) Big Bird.
I suppose that even fewer people are aware of
this surprising Box Tops comeback than those that know about the Big Star
comeback — then again, maybe not, since I really have no idea whether «old
school power pop» still remains more popular among the knowledge-seeking
youngsters today than «old school blue-eyed soul». Anyway, this particular
comeback was actually quite a proper comeback, since it did reunite all the
original band members from 1967, right down to the rhythm section (not that the
rhythm section had much to play in 1967). The resulting album, however, was
downright odd.
I mean, you could
rightfully expect the guys to go nostalgic, but Tear Off! goes way beyond simple nostalgia — it plays out like a
consciously assembled encyclopaedia of pop music forms in the pre-Sgt. Pepper era. Putting together a
jumbo-combo of golden oldies, forgotten oldies, and some pseudo-originals,
these Elderly Box Tops begin with stereotypical rockabilly (ʽFlying
Saucers Rock'n'Rollʼ), continue with some rockin' Chicago blues
(ʽWang Dang Doodleʼ), follow that up with gritty R&B (ʽAin't
That A Lot Of Loveʼ), throw in some torch ballads (ʽIt Tears Me
Upʼ), heat it up with some hard rock (ʽTreat Her Rightʼ), mix it
with pop-soul (ʽSoothe Meʼ), spice it up with late Fifties'
novelty-comedy stylistics (ʽTrip To Bandstandʼ), bring on a bit of
twistey innocence (ʽKeep On Dancingʼ), remind us how country music
used to sound when Hank Williams was king (ʽLast Bouquetʼ), and
finally, end things with a loud, overdriven garage-rock jam (ʽBig
Birdʼ) that seems to suggest — «yes, boys and girls, and then, eventually,
the angry, crazy, distorted rock guitars took over and swallowed them all, and
they all lived happily ever after in the satiated belly of the heavy rock
guitar».
Oh, I forgot: in the middle of it all comes a
re-recording of ʽThe Letterʼ, because otherwise, I guess, the record
label wouldn't let them release the package. Come on now — what good is a Box
Tops album in 1998 if it doesn't have ʽThe Letterʼ? It's like a Sgt. Pepper with no ʽYesterdayʼ
on it!... oh, never mind. Anyway, this new version sounds almost like the
original, except that Chilton's voice, retaining its gruffness, has lost much
of its frailty and vulnerability, and that makes them sound like their own
inferior tribute band.
Anyway, on the whole this is a totally
harmless, perfectly fun, and completely useless record. Very cleanly and
wholesomely produced, which is the only thing that betrays its date of origin
(sort of like Clapton's From The Cradle),
but little more than a respectable tribute to all those heroes of long ago —
nobody is going to cherish this version of ʽWang Dang Doodleʼ over
Howlin' Wolf or this version of ʽSoothe Meʼ over Sam Cooke. This is
disappointing in that Chilton had gone a long, long way since the Box Tops last
saw each other, and with their legacy that, after all, goes a little deeper than generic rockabilly
and twist numbers, this may have been
a more meaningful album. Instead, it's just like a gathering of old friends for
old times' sake — stick around, have some drinks, play a couple songs we used
to play when we were thirteen, except we do it like professionals now.
In the end, the lengthy ʽBig Birdʼ
cover happens to be the only place where they seem like they're trying to do something — even if that
something largely amounts to kicking up a ruckus, and is not very successful
even as a ruckus (the exaggerated screaming is way too «acted»: all these
"OH BIG BIRD!" and "TAKE THE BIG BIRD HOME!" and all the
ooh-aahs seem sort of pointless). And everything else is just a nostalgic
souvenir — and it's not even the kind of nostalgic souvenir you'd most likely
expect from these former soulsters. But yeah, everything sounds kinda cool. If
you were a directionless teen in 1998 and you saw this in a used bin and had
your first acquaintance with ʽI'm In Loveʼ and ʽSoothe Meʼ
by donating fifty cents, it would at least give you a fairly good understanding
of the essence of Sam Cooke and Wilson Pickett. Wouldn't let you understand too
much about Alex Chilton, though.
BRINSLEY SCHWARZ (1970)
1) Hymn To Me; 2) Shining
Brightly; 3) Rock And Roll Women; 4) Lady Constant; 5) What Do You Suggest; 6)
Mayfly; 7) Ballad Of A Hasbeen Beauty Queen.
I like it how the band was named «Brinsley
Schwarz», even if all the songs were actually written by Nick Lowe. But, to be
fair, «Nick Lowe» sounds far less cool than «Brinsley Schwarz»; in fact, I
don't even think that anybody's first reaction to the name of the band would be
«oh, that's probably the name of one of the guys in the band», because there's
just no way in hell that any single living person could have a name like
«Brinsley Schwarz». Of course, guitarist Brinsley Schwarz had exactly that
name, which makes it all the more exciting, and in 1965, he had formed a band
called Kippington Lodge, which made the phrase «Hello, I'm Brinsley Schwarz
from Kippington Lodge» the coolest thing on Earth since any number of lines
from select Dickens novels. After the band's first singles flopped, though
(they were written in the regular Britpop style after the Kinks and the Small
Faces, and did not manage to be distinctive enough), Kippington Lodge was
abandoned in favor of something more ambitious and less overtly English — and,
after all, Schwarz is not much of an
English family name, anyway.
Most people are introduced to Brinsley Schwarz
by means of the label «pub rock», which was attached to them around 1971 and
never really meant much of anything other than playing in pubs rather than
large entertainment venues. Personally, I have always misunderstood «pub rock»
as something down-to-earth, rowdy, and bawdy — anything from ʽHonky Tonk
Womenʼ to Slade and Geordie — but even if you reject that definition and
go along with just the «small scale» aspects of pub rock, it is still hard to
view Brinsley Schwarz's debut album as anything of the kind, since it is
clearly a very ambitious, if not a very successful, project.
In a nutshell, Brinsley Schwarz tries to combine country, folk, and «progressive»
influences from both sides of the Atlantic — like a softer, smoother, subtler
version of Traffic, largely avoiding that band's blues, rock, and R&B roots
while still trying to hover in the air several feet above the label of «easy
listening». They have this laid back, clean, professional, intelligent, if not
all that exciting, sound going on, and sometimes they actually even manage to
sound like early Yes — mainly on ʽLady Constantʼ, the first of the
album's two epic pieces. At other times they manage to sound almost exactly
like Crosby, Stills & Nash, which isn't actually that surprising if you
remember that early Yes covered the Byrds' ʽI See Youʼ and that the
distance between American folk- and country-rock and early British progressive
rock actually used to be much smaller than its subsequent Tarkus-ization would
lead us to believe.
This is all interesting in theory, but in the
boiling-bubbling musical explosion of 1969-70 Brinsley Schwarz were not the
only player in this game, and as nice as this album is, the songs just do not
make that much of an impression. The band's harmony singing is pretty and
sometimes downright angelic, but hardly exclusive, and both The Byrds and
CS&N were there before. The hooks on the shorter songs are about as strong
as on the average Traffic songs —
variations on roots-rock themes with little emotional depth, since both the
playing and the singing are usually kept in check and restrained (the fastest
and most energetic song on the album, ʽMayflyʼ, is still played as if
they were afraid to wake up the neighbors or something). And, worst of all,
there is hardly any distinct personality behind the songs and the album in
general — you can tell that they're really trying, but it is much harder to
tell what they're trying or why they're trying it. The simple answer
that they just like «soft rock» is no more going to cut it than if they just
liked hard rock. I did spend some time trying to locate that one special angle,
but no dice.
Actually, I do not want to put this record way too down, but it is hard to find
kind words for pseudo-epic stuff like ʽBallad Of A Hasbeen Beauty
Queenʼ, which simply has no reason to exist in a world that already has
Van Morrison in it. After a brief and boring hard rock intro (for a change),
the thing becomes a slow country-rock shuffle that tries to be psychologically
deep and aims for a musical crescendo, but all they really have at their
disposal is an organ player and a lead guitarist who are either too afraid or
too shy to let their hair down, spending fruitless minutes trying out generic
lead lines and finally just turning up the volume for the last «climactic»
verse of the song. And the singer? Nick Lowe has a pleasant, intelligent tone
when he is humming under his nose, and an ugly way of nasal screaming when he
is going «all out», and by the time the climax has, you know, climaxed, he
still has not convinced me that he just managed to tell me something important,
deserving of ten minutes of my time.
In the end, it all boils down to a few nicely
shaped country-pop(-rock?) tunes like ʽShining Brightlyʼ and a few
moments when the sunny-day-laziness of the tune can actually seem like cynical
wisdom (ʽRock And Roll Womenʼ). But only somebody who, incidentally,
feels really tired of the insane, aggressive musical dynamics of the late
Sixties / early Seventies could probably «love» this album — and even when I
get those inclinations myself, I'd still rather take some guy who is very deliberate about getting away from all
the hullabaloo, like J. J. Cale, over this half-hearted attempt to be «humble»
and «progressive» at the same time, where the two tendencies just outcancel
themselves rather than complement each other.
Thumbs down, then, if
not necessarily accompanied with any hard feelings. Ironically, this is
probably the same decision here that was made by contemporary British critics —
some of whom felt themselves pressured by the so-called «Brinsley Schwarz
Hype», instigated by their manager Dave Robinson, a good example of why it is fruitless
to seek direct correlation between publicity and critical / public recognition,
bypassing real musical merit. Fortunately for us, this was not the end for
Brinsley Schwarz: in retrospect, their career, curve-wise, is somewhat similar
to their contemporaries Mott The Hoople, who also began with a «promising
failure» of a self-titled album around that same time, yet ultimately managed
to find themselves at a later date.
DESPITE IT ALL (1970)
1) Country Girl; 2) The Slow
One; 3) Funk Angel; 4) Piece Of Home; 5) Love Song; 6) Starship; 7) Ebury Down;
8) Old Jarrow.
Hey hey, pack up the mules and ride out west —
on their second album, Brinsley Schwarz seem to have caught the country flu
head-on, even if they also continue to be influenced by Van Morrison along the
way. The main units of adoration, though, are by now firmly on the other side
of the Atlantic: The Byrds, The Burritos, and The Band are all carefully
studied as textbook material and, if possible, strictly imitated. Thus, already
the album opener, ʽCountry Girlʼ, is a fun, sweet, innocent little
bopper, but 100% derivable from ʽYou Ain't Going Nowhereʼ, except
that, of course, lyrics like "I want to go where my country girl goes /
Back where my green-grass roots are growing" are just way too flat as an allegory when compared to "Genghis Khan, he
couldn't keep / All his men supplied with sleep", and the collective group
harmonies of Brinsley Schwarz do not even begin to compete with the lonesome
timbre of Roger McGuinn. Nice fiddle part from guest star Willy Weider, though.
Really countryesque and all.
Everything else, too, sounds and feels strictly
like a bunch of genre exercises: despite having written all but one of these
songs, Nick Lowe hardly seems to have any serious connection with the material,
so that something like ʽLove Songʼ, a very straightforward
soft-rocker, simply states that
"this here is a love song, I gotta get back to my baby's heart
again", rather than sets out to prove it in some sense-perturbing manner.
All I know is, if I were Nick Lowe's
baby, he wouldn't even get back to my front porch with this barely tepid
carcass of a song. Or take ʽStarshipʼ — theoretically, a likeable
country waltz, but not half an inch different from a million generic country
waltzes. So... uh... they can keep up the tempo, and they have a pretty slide
guitar tone. Does that rate a B+, or an A- on the regular Nashville curriculum?
I would say that the only song on this album
where they are trying at least a bit is ʽOld Jarrowʼ, the closing
seven-minute country-rock epic where the country instrumentation is continually
spiced up with sharp, high-pitched lead guitar parts. The lyrics (as you can
see from the song title) have nothing to do with country-western themes, and
the song just uses a country setting to eventually explode into a really
fierce barrage of guitar-hero soloing (although for contemporary guitar
heroics, that tone is still impossibly thin — Marc Bolan or Mick Ronson would
have eaten these guys alive). A respectable attempt that still fails to justify
its running length, let alone salvage the album as a whole.
Another thumbs down here, as the apprenticeship period
of Brinsley Schwarz enters yet another phase — the most fascinating thing about
it all being that, you know, Capitol Records were still willing to back them
for this one. Today, they would probably have shipped them straight away to
songwriting school, under the tutorship of Max Martin. No, wait, for this line
of work, Kelly Clarkson, probably.
SILVER PISTOL (1972)
1) Merry Go Round; 2) One More
Day; 3) Nightingale; 4) Silver Pistol; 5) The Last Time I Was Fooled; 6) Unknown
Number; 7) Range War; 8) Egypt; 9) Niki Hoeke Speedway; 10) Ju Ju Man; 11)
Rockin' Chair.
This is where the Brinsley Schwarz formula
undergoes the last cosmetic modifications... and turns out to be a very polite,
accurate, and somewhat tepid formula after all. The songs are shortened,
cleaned up, straightened out, and made to completely conform to the standards
of folk- and country-rock, with no «progressive» ambitions whatsoever, and nary
a hint of hard rocking, either. So this time around you will never once confuse
this band with early Yes or late Steppenwolf, much as you'd want to. However,
you might perhaps confuse it with Wildlife-era
Mott The Hoople, and probably with several dozen other bands that had this sort
of sound at the time — Byrds-Band-style roots-rock, but without the uniquely
expressive features of either of these bands, and without a whole lot of
impressive songwriting, either.
New member, bass and rhythm guitar player Ian
Gomm, steps in here as a supporting songwriter, getting credits for four songs
(Nick Lowe has six), and there are also two covers of American
singer-songwriter Jim Ford, largely unknown but, apparently, hugely favored by
Bobby Womack, who would record a shitload of songs of his for The Poet and The Poet II later on. The Jim Ford covers are actually distinctive
— they are the two songs at the end of the album that display the highest
energy level: ʽNiki Hoeke Speedwayʼ is a loose, drunk-sounding
blues-rocker, and ʽJu Ju Manʼ is an uptempo boogie piece that, in
this rendition, kicks about as much ass as the Grateful Dead when they were
playing rock'n'roll. Which is not that much, as you could guess, but for those
who like their rock'n'roll at low
chamber temperatures, very stylish and tasteful.
Unfortunately, there is very little I can find
to say about these songs, and what little I can
find will not be flattering. As much as I respect Nick Lowe's songwriting in
theory, let's face it, it is just a wee bit embarrassing when you realize that
one of the most memorable tunes on the album, so humbly titled ʽUnknown
Numberʼ, is only memorable because it is built on a joint piano/guitar
riff that completely nicks
(nick-lowes?) the melodic line from Buddy Holly's ʽWords Of Loveʼ —
and adds nothing of serious value on top of it, so I guess the only reason
Buddy's estate did not sue is that either nobody knew who Nick Lowe was, or
they knew they wouldn't get much out of these guys anyway. In any case, this is
just not a good sign.
The album's centerpiece is ʽEgyptʼ, a
long, slow, meditative ballad whose point is made perfectly clear in the first
thirty seconds or so — still it drags on for more than five minutes, with Bob
Andrews' solemn wintery organ lines and Lowe's tender vocals sustaining the
atmosphere. Some will find this deep and romantic, but it annoys me how
manneristic the whole thing is — they're handling the procedure with such
exaggeratedly exquisite finesse, you'd think they were afraid that just a
little more strain and the entire studio would crumble around them. It's so
goddamn quiet that, in fact, that at the beginning of the third minute you can
actually hear a dog barking somewhere near the studio — I have no details, but
I'm 99% sure it was just an accident that they decided to leave in, and good
thing they did, because it's probably the best bit in the song.
The new songwriter apparently still takes his
cues from Nick, because his contributions are largely just the same relaxed,
generic country-rock — pleasant, but mellow and with little in the way of
individualistically-rememberable melody. A typical example is the last track —
the instrumental ʽRockin' Chairʼ, which would fit nicely in any
average country-western soundtrack, but when I really need my share of such music, as in, for a spiritual uplift
or something, I can always have the Allman Brothers' ʽJessicaʼ
instead. That's Ian Gomm for you. And Nick Lowe? I actually like ʽMerry Go
Roundʼ a decade later when its verse melody was remade as ʽManic
Mondayʼ and its chorus melody was made completely anew.
You get the point by now — Silver Pistol sounds very nice, and it may even be the best
country-rock (soft-rock? whatever) album produced by a UK band in 1972, but in
that range, they did not have that much competition, did they? Well, some; pop
music historians will most likely be able to find far more blatantly rotten
examples. The sad truth, I believe, is that the band was still way too much
dominated by its rootsy American influences to develop their own style — and if
they did not want to take a lesson from the dirty ugly Rolling Stones, well, by
1972 you had the Kinks and Muswell
Hillbillies to show you just the
right way of merging American and British traditions. As it is, contrastive
perception forces another thumbs down.
NERVOUS ON THE ROAD (1972)
1) It's Been So Long; 2) Happy
Doing What We're Doing; 3) Surrender To The Rhythm; 4) Don't Lose Your Grip On
Love; 5) Nervous On The Road; 6) Feel A Little Funky; 7) I Like It Like That;
8) Brand New You, Brand New Me; 9) Home In My Hand; 10) Why, Why, Why, Why, Why.
Hey hey, now this is what I call pub rock! Same year — two completely different
worlds. All of a sudden, Brinsley Schwarz are no longer a homebrewed pale copy
of «The Band trying to sound like Van Morrison», but a vivacious outfit whose
songs make you want to dance, frolick, have a good time in general — with a
sentimental ballad or two in the works, but nothing that would pretend at
soulful depth and fail (and somehow, «failures of the deep» always produce a
more miserable effect than «failures of the shallow» — it's like losing $2,000
at poker compared to losing $20 at poker). The songwriting does not get
noticeably better, but it gets more adequate, and this arguably makes Nervous On The Road into the definitive
Brinsley Schwarz album.
This time, Ian Gomm writes only one song; with
the addition of two external covers, this once again leaves Nick Lowe as the
principal songwriter, contributing seven new numbers. However, it also feels
like Bob Andrews has been pushed to the foreground, and his seemingly relaxed,
but really quite disciplined and colorful playing helps drag many of the songs
from mediocrity — starting early on with Gomm's only contribution, another so-so Buddy Holly imitation
(ʽIt's Been So Longʼ) which, however, has such delicious,
light-Mozartian piano flourishes accompanying the main guitar melody as the
original Crickets could have never thought of. And then on Lowe's ʽHappy
Doing What We're Doingʼ, a quintessential «pub-rocker» if there ever was
one, Andrews' organ and piano overdubs also steal the spotlight from everyone
else — and then it becomes the regular pattern: Nervous On The Road is a record for piano lovers, not guitar fans.
That detail aside, the record is what Exile On Main St. might have sounded
like with much cleaner production, much weaker songwriting, fewer gospel/soul
ambitions, and no traces of sleaze, grease, and grit whatsoever. The
«politeness» of Brinsley Schwarz becomes especially visible on their cover of
ʽI Like It Like Thatʼ, a song that sounded more «dirty» and «raw»
when it was performed by The Dave Clark Five,
of all people — this version, with soft, playful vocals, a crystal clean guitar
solo, and a totally tame rhythm section, suggests that they probably serve nothing
but goat's milk at the place called ʽI Like It Like Thatʼ. But just
because the tempos have been sped up and the soulfulness has been replaced by
friendly low-key entertainment, this politeness does not always result in
boredom.
The faster rockers, such as the title track
(where Nick tries to emulate the Lou Reed vibe a bit) and the Ronnie Self cover
ʽHome In My Handʼ, done here as a one-chord boogie, are hardly a
match for the Stones or even the Faces, but technically, they got a great mix,
with perfect separation between guitars, keyboards, and vocals, and this is
probably just exactly how it's gotta be done if you can't make yourself sound
«really special». Things get a little more suspicious when they go for a very
low-key, subdued road-blues vibe (ʽFeel A Little Funkyʼ) with guitars
and keyboards going for a jazzier, loungier style, but Andrews is on such a
roll that I can even stand his bit of Amos Milburn impersonation. And even the
album's only reminder of the band's love for the «soulful roots-rock» of The
Band and Jackson Browne, ʽDon't Lose Your Grip On Loveʼ, might be
their best contribution in this genre — some harrowing vocal twists, a catchy
chorus, a piano line copped and well-adapted from ʽThe Weightʼ, it's
all enjoyable.
Most importantly, they do sound like they're finally ʽHappy Doing What We're
Doingʼ, if only for a brief while — even when the music remains
derivative, this lowering of ambitions helps the band achieve better
coordination and just have more fun in each other's presence. They may be Nervous On The Road all right, but in
the studio they feel quite relaxed and amicable, and the record exudes this
hard-to-describe homely charm that every soft-rock record aspires to, but not
every soft-rock record actually achieves. With all due reservations, and with
the understanding that this is still hardly an album that I might find myself
voluntarily coming back to, I still give it a moderate thumbs up — mainly because it
provides such a refreshing contrast with everything that preceded it.
PLEASE DON'T EVER CHANGE (1973)
1) Hooked On Love; 2) Why Do
We Hurt The One We Love; 3) I Worry ('Bout You Baby); 4) Don't Ever Change; 5)
Home In My Land; 6) Play That Fast Thing (One More Time); 7) I Won't Make It
Without You; 8) Down In Mexico; 9) Speedoo; 10) The Version (Hypocrite).
Apparently, this is a «stop-gap» album, thrown
out on the market to appease the fans (but how many fans?) while waiting for
the boys to write and record a proper set of new tunes — which explains its very lightweight nature, even judging by
Brinsley Schwarz's usual standards. But even so, its title is symbolic:
formally, it is simply the title of an old Goffin/King song that they are
covering here, but allegorically, it reflects the band's ever-growing ideology
of «if it ain't broke, don't fix it» — which this album is all about, from head
to toe.
Be it as it may, this time around Nick Lowe and
Co. are not even trying to imitate The Band — or, if they are, they are
inadvertently imitating The Band's Moondog
Matinee (inadvertently, because both records happened to be released at
the exact same time, October 1973). Then again, if you throw in Bowie's Pin Ups, 1973 was probably the first
year of massive nostalgia for pop music of the previous decades (and then we'd
also have to mention American Graffiti,
and then there is simply no stopping...), so no wonder that Please Don't Ever Change is filled to
the brim with Fifties- and Sixties-sounding soul, R&B, doo-wop, Latin,
rockabilly, ska, and New Orleanian music. The only difference being is that
most of these songs are not covers, but Nick Lowe (and Ian Gomm) originals, but
other than the lyrics and the arrangements, little about these «originals» is
«original» in the proper sense of the word.
Since this is Brinsley Schwarz we are talking
about, this implies that the sound will be professional and clean, the
«show-off factor» will be less than zero, the atmosphere will be light, homely,
and pleasant, and the memory of the album will probably wear off you in 24 hours
if no more music is listened to, and in much less than that if you aurally
compare this stuff to whatever, say, Genesis, The Who, or even The Faces were
doing that same year. Some of the songs are just total novelties (or, rather,
«oldities») here, with no individual reasons to exist — ʽDown In
Mexicoʼ is not a cover of the
hilarious old Coasters number, but an «original» Latin serenade pastiche, which
the band is unable to play better than your average Mexican band and, what is
worse, is also unable to render distinctly «Brinsley Schwarz-ian», whatever
that could mean; and their take on ska is either limp and devoid of energy (in
between ʽWhy Do We Hurt The One We Loveʼ and ʽWrong 'Em
Boyoʼ, I know which one I'd choose in a jiffy), or simply puzzling (what
is that instrumental cover of Leroy Sibbles doing there in the first place?).
With the blues, these guys are in more familiar
and comfortable territory, and soulful numbers like ʽI Worryʼ and
ʽI Won't Make It Without Youʼ, whose spiritual ancestors include B.
B. King, Sam Cooke, and Fats Domino, among other people, are smooth and
touching, though I would not know what else to say. Somewhat more exciting is
the live version of ʽHome In My Handʼ from the previous album, with a
nice jamming section where Brinsley and Ian heat up the hall with nasty riffs
and hysterical solos (think of the little brother of Marc Bolan on rhythm
guitar and the little brother of Alvin Lee on lead, though both clearly have a
long way to go). But on the whole, even here there is not much to say — just
tap your toes and be happy, and please don't ever change, because, you know, we
like you just the way you are. (At least they do this song better than the
Beatles did it on the BBC — but fortunately for Brinsley, the Beatles never tried
to record it in a regular studio session).
THE NEW FAVOURITES OF BRINSLEY SCHWARZ (1974)
1) (What's So Funny 'Bout)
Peace, Love And Understanding?; 2) Ever Since You're Gone; 3) The Ugly Things;
4) I Got The Real Thing; 5) The Look That's In Your Eye Tonight; 6) Now's The
Time; 7) Small Town, Big City; 8) Trying To Live My Life Without You; 9) I Like
You, I Don't Love You; 10) Down In The Dive.
For their last album, Brinsley Schwarz turned
to Dave Edmunds, already a minor celebrity in his own right, an avid lover of
early pre-Beatles rock'n'roll who would as much want to impose that love on
others as dwell in it himself — and indeed, The New Favourites should have rather been titled The New Old Favourites, since it just
might be the single most retro-oriented Brinsley Schwarz album there ever was.
It does begin with what is arguably Nick Lowe's
most famous song — the catchy pop anthem in support of idealistic ideals that
would, however, only truly catch on in the popular conscience with the Elvis Costello
cover several years later (and then be cemented even later with the version
from the Bodyguard soundtrack, but we
will try to erase that from the
record). You could argue that this song, too, is «retro» in a way — advocating
for a fallback from decadence and cynicism to the naïve, but noble (if
also somewhat mythical) sentiments of the previous decade — but musically, it
should probably be described as «power pop», punchy, muscular, employing the
three-chord punch of ʽBaba O'Rileyʼ (to weaker effect, though), and
quite modern for 1974. It's not a great song in terms of composition, but Lowe
makes an excellent, passionate vocal run towards the chorus resolution, and at
the very least, comes across as a convincing spokesman for the cause — no
wonder the song was endorsed for the Vote
For Change tour in 2004 (even if the election results that year ultimately
showed that something really was very
funny about peace, love, and understanding, but that's really beyond the
point...).
Nothing else on the album, however, even begins
to approach the anthemic fire of that song: all the other songs are quite
down-homey, humble, and formulaic in comparison. Symbolically, one of the record's
two covers is ʽNow's The Timeʼ, a very early, very simple and
naïve pop song by The Hollies — not a songwriting gem like ʽBus
Stopʼ or ʽKing Midas In Reverseʼ, but a generic early
Merseybeat-style ditty that the Schwarzes perform with their usual diligence,
yet how could they ever beat the Hollies' harmonies — their only serious
advantage as of 1963, and one which still makes these early ditties
outstandingly enjoyable, as opposed to this immediately forgettable cover? The second cover, by the way, is much more
recent — Otis Clay's ʽTrying To Live My Life Without Youʼ, but,
again, it is not clear how the band can improve on the song or make it more
interesting in at least some respect.
Most of the «originals» also turn out to be
pastiches and imitations — like ʽSmall Town, Big Cityʼ, which is
essentially ʽAlley Oopʼ with new lyrics — and it looks like the band
is not even trying to cover that up; maybe Edmunds was the one who convinced
them that «good bands borrow, great bands steal», but they got the causation
wrong — it's not «if you steal, you're a great band», it's «if you're a great
band, you steal», and because of this, here we have a good band stealing,
which is embarrassing. I am not 100% sure that each and every one of these
chord progressions had already been used in some pop / rock / country song in
the 1950s/1960s, largely because my memory is not vast enough to stockpile all
those chord progressions, but it does honestly feel like this is the case, and
then the idea of Brinsley Schwarz as the Stray Cats of the 1970s or something
like that just doesn't seem so hot — except for the tactical idea of preserving
the pleasures and vibes of pre-Beatles entertainment in the mid-1970s, which
has been inevitably obsolete since, well, the mid-1970s, there is nothing about
this music that elevates it above «listenable if you are ever forced to listen
to it, so cross it off the Guantanamo list».
Since Brinsley Schwarz disbanded in 1975, The New Favourites could be regarded as
one last bluff, undertaken to revitalize their image — and I am not saying it
could not have worked, because a large part of the world, fed up with
progressive, glam, and Californian soft-rock, might have welcomed a retro-twist
like this, were it properly presented. But this was a weak band from the very
beginning, and even the addition of a dedicated producer could not have made it
any stronger. Besides, the presence here of ʽPeace, Love, And
Understandingʼ shows that Lowe could
write passionate and powerful songs, at least occasionally — the logical
question then being, why couldn't they write any more like that, instead of
focusing on low-key secondhand stuff. Perhaps they didn't want to, because
low-key secondhand stuff was what they really liked — in which case, well, they
arguably got what they deserved.
ADDENDA:
HEN'S TEETH (1967-1975; 1998)
1) Shy Boy; 2) Lady On A
Bicycle; 3) Rumours; 4) And She Cried; 5) Tell Me A Story; 6) Understand A
Woman; 7) Tomorrow, Today; 8) Turn Out The Light; 9) In My Life; 10) I Can See
Her Face; 11) Hypocrite; 12) The Version; 13) I've Cried My Last Tear; 14)
(It's Gonna Be A) Bring Down; 15) Everybody; 16) I Like You, I Don't Love You;
17) Day Tripper; 18) Slow Down; 19) I Should Have Known Better; 20) Tell Me
Why; 21) There's A Cloud In My Heart; 22) I Got The Real Thing.
Somebody's love for Brinsley Schwarz must have
been bubbling indeed, if it prompted its victim to assemble such a
painstakingly meticulous compilation of just about every studio-based rarity
that the band put out during its lifetime and much, much beyond that. Because
formally, only a few of these tracks are credited to «Brinsley Schwarz». The
first ten tracks represent the small legacy of Kippington Lodge, with Nick Lowe
joining in only about midway through and only having enough time to contribute
one single song. Tracks 17-20 are Beatles covers that were recorded by the Brinsleys
all right, some time in late 1974, but were anonymously credited to «The Knees»
and «Limelight», two different bands with two different styles (!). Tracks
11-12 are yet another stab at anonymity as «The Hitters», from 1973.
Finally, the last two tracks have them as
simply «The Brinsleys» — an odd attempt at name shortening right before the
break-up: did they think it was the name Schwarz
that prevented them from fame and fortune? (Come to think of it, does anybody
know of any famous and fortunate Schwarzes from the UK? Maybe there was something to the idea). And thus,
only tracks 13-16 are properly billed to «Brinsley Schwarz», with two singles
from 1974-75, neither of which is credited to Lowe or Gomm, either (the B-sides
are, but one of the B-sides, ʽI Like You I Don't Love Youʼ, was
already available on New Favourites
anyway).
It isn't much of a pain to sort through this
mess, given that all the information is laid out in the track listings and
liner notes. It isn't that much of a great pleasure, though, to sit through the
music, either: only by some anomalous miracle could an album of Brinsley
Schwarz and «para-Brinsley Schwarz» rarities turn out to be as good as, let
alone better than their regular output. It ain't much worse, either, but I doubt
that, apart from a tiny handful of these tracks, anything here could truly
satisfy even the most forgiving fan of the band — heck, even the liner notes,
written in an age when raving and ranting liner notes are written about anything, admit that, well, you know, it
ain't no great shakes, but, you know, historical importance, charming period
pieces, the regular drill. And yeah, they're kinda right about it.
The Kippington Lodge stuff shows what we'd
probably expect to see — yet another bunch of nice, clean, well-meaning kids
striving to be the Beatles, but falling somewhere in between the Hollies and
just about every other band you heard on Nuggets
II. Most of the songs are from outside songwriters: for instance, the first
song, ʽShy Boyʼ, was donated to them by Tomorrow (the Steve
Howe-nurturing band of ʽMy White Bicycleʼ fame), although this
excited the band so much that they tried to write the B-side themselves — and,
of course, it was named ʽLady On A Bicycleʼ, because, you know,
bicycles are so British and so psychedelic ever since Albert Hofmann rode one.
To be fair, neither of them sounds like the Beatles: ʽShy Boyʼ is a
music hall number much closer to the Kinks, and ʽLadyʼ is more of a
swingin' jazz-pop ditty with a sappy chorus that's more Mamas & Papas than
Lennon/McCartney.
In fact, when they do tackle Lennon/McCartney directly, it sounds awful: ʽIn My
Lifeʼ, released in May 1969, coincided with the era of "let us
reimagine early Beatles songs as grandiose art-pop epics!" (remember
ʽEvery Little Thingʼ by Yes?) and has wailing distorted guitars,
organs, instrumental breaks and vocals overdriven into frenzy mode by the end.
The B-side to that single was Lowe's first solo original: ʽI Can See Her
Faceʼ, a mournful guitar-organ slab of soul-pop that will bring to mind
early Deep Purple, but with every aspect of early Deep Purple brought down to
amateur level. Endearing, perhaps, but as forgettable as every other song by
this early incarnation of the band — real gallant name, though, that Kippington
Lodge.
Of the other stuff, «anonymous» or no, only two
tracks caught my attention: ʽEverybodyʼ was curious because it
probably has the heaviest sound the band was ever allowed in the studio, with
such a gruff riff that, for a brief second, it opens them a little bit of that
door into the Sweet / T. Rex league (not that this is necessarily a plus — just
noting that they so very rarely sounded «glam», every such attempt jumps to
attention). And of those Beatles covers from 1974-75, although ʽDay
Tripperʼ and ʽSlow Downʼ, which «The Knees» play in rock mode,
are pitiful, the other two tracks, which «Limelight» play in «artsy» mode, are
much less so — especially ʽI Should Have Known Betterʼ, where I
really appreciate how they take the song into another dimension by replacing
the harmonica with the organ and the guitar solo with strings, so it's a «Hard Day's Night meets Procol Harum and The Moody Blues» kind of
event that deserves to be heard, maybe even in a higher status than just
«historical curio».
Another historical curio is that the Leroy
Sibbles ska song, ʽHypocriteʼ, turns out to have been first recorded
as a vocal version — with very pretty vocal harmonies at that — and ʽThe
Versionʼ was its instrumental track, for some reason released as the
B-side; and then, for an even stranger reason, it was the instrumental rather
than the vocal version to make it as the coda for Please Don't Ever Change. Accident? Humility? Copyright issues?
Anyway, just another example in a series of tiny odd blunders that probably
contributed to their career never taking off.
Anyway, it all sounds okay, and in each such
retrospective there is at least an instructive value — with the Kippington
Lodge tracks, for instance, you can quickly and succinctly track down much of
the general evolution of the UK musical scene from 1967 to 1969, starting out
as wispy, sensitive, music-hall influenced psycho-pop and then gradually getting
bleak, thick, and heavy, with layers of vanilla fudge strewn over grand funk
railroads — that is, before the roots-rock craze sets in and we become all
downhome and earthy and stuff. Not that the Brinsleys always followed this
simplistic model, but ultimately, this was a band that could not overcome
somebody else's limitations and fully come into its own — in the logical end,
this is why Hen's Teeth is indeed an
appropriate title for this collection.
Part 4. The Age Of Excess (1971-1976)
10CC (1973)
1) Rubber Bullets; 2) Johnny
Don't Do It; 3) Sand In My
Face; 4) Donna; 5)
The Dean And I; 6) Headline Hustler; 7)
Speed Kills; 8) The Hospital Song; 9) Ships Don't Disappear In The Night; 10) Fresh Air For My Mama.
Here be an album so arrogantly brilliant, so
perfectly balanced in its topsy-turvy attitude, that the very idea of the world
forgetting about its existence comes across as preposterous — and yet this is,
more or less, exactly what has happened. You would expect that when an
experienced popmeister, loaded with credentials (Graham Gouldman — among other
things, the author of the Yardbirds' big hits ʽFor Your Loveʼ and ʽHeart
Full Of Soulʼ, and the Hollies' ʽBus Stopʼ), teams up with a
young inventive / innovative guitar player (Eric Stewart), and a couple of lesser
known, but freshly brilliant freakout weirdos (multi-instrumentalists Lol Creme
and Kevin Godley), the results could be
enough to blow the roof off the public conscience.
Unfortunately, even in 1973, public tastes were
already much too differentiated, and it's been getting worse ever since. These
days, the adventurous mind usually shrugs this stuff off as way too commercial
or fluffy to be cared about — while the non-pretentious pop-inclined spirit, on
the contrary, shies away from it as a goofy oddity from days long gone by. How
many of us are looking for a world in which Captain Beefheart and Karen
Carpenter would be able to shake hands and, perhaps, share a double bill?..
As far as my opinion is concerned, 10cc's
intentions, as they set out to conquer the world (or at least the Hammersmith
Odeon, whichever came first), were of the noblest kind — nothing less than
create an entirely new type of pop music, one which would rely almost entirely
on Conventional Chord Sequences, yet also be so thoroughly irradiated with
Sarcasm, Satire, and Unpredictability, that the smelly old «conventionalism»
of the chord sequences would acquire a brand new sheen. Wait, scrap that: not
«acquire a new sheen» — actually, for the first time in existence, it would
finally justify its presence. Finally, someone would be putting these melodic
moves to something far more intellectually loaded than yer average schmaltzy
love song, or yer boring rebellious anthem, or even yer old acid-drenched
flower-power mantra.
To list all of the musical ingredients of 10cc would take at least a sleepless
night of research, and at most, a PhD in popular culture. However, ones that
are recognizable off the cuff include [a] the Beach Boys and surf music in
general (ʽRubber Bulletsʼ), [b] doo-wop and its tributaries (ʽJohnny
Don't Do Itʼ, ʽDonnaʼ), [c] psychedelic pop-rock (splattered
almost everywhere), [d] lush pop à la Paul McCartney — and more, much
more. One might recognize the oddest touches in the oddest places. For
instance, why in the world does the buildup to the chorus on 'Headline Hustler'
sound so much like vintage solo George Harrison, what with its gently weeping
slide guitar and pleading vocals? There is no easy logic here, just an empty
pleasant feeling of coolness.
One strict rule that 10cc, in their finest
days, always abided by, is that no single melody overstays its welcome. Indeed,
most understay it: after a short
while, it is safer to just abandon all hope of easily discerning between
verse, bridge, and chorus, and simply treat every composition, including the
shortest ones, as tiny independent mini-operas (and even then, this is still absolutely
nothing compared to the far more radical approach the band would take on their
sophomore album). With adventurous, but mediocre bands, there is always a risk
that such mini-operas will quickly devolve into unmemorable pretentious chaos,
or that they will treasure the «storyline» far above the music. But Gouldman is
always there, steering the band into «hook» territory with an iron hand — cleverly
combining time-honoured melodic phrasing with unexpected twists and turns makes
the final experience super-weird and
super-catchy.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the
storylines. ʽRubber Bulletsʼ tells us about suffering for trying to
ameliorate your cell block conditions ("...is it really such a crime for
a guy to spend his time at the local hop at the local county jail?"). It
was a smash hit on the UK charts, establishing the band's reputation overnight,
but in a somewhat misguided way — most people probably thought that here, at
last, were the genuine British Beach Boys. It is amusing how the song essentially plays out as a surf-pop rocker
on the ʽJailhouse Rockʼ subject, and then, during the mid-section,
launches into several distinct vocal passages that actually emulate the «art»
era of Brian Wilson's team — but the fact is, of course, that for these
smartypant pre-post-modernists the Beach Boys' legacy was just one small slice
of the pie, and the unsuspecting British boys and girls happily dancing and
prancing around in the audience to the upbeat sounds of 10cc playing the song
on Top Of The Pops never really knew
what hit them.
ʽRubber Bulletsʼ, however, is only
the final step in a process of evolution that led 10cc, originally «Hotlegs»,
away from their parodic, Zappa-inspired takes on the essence of doo-wop. Originally
released as singles in 1972, they were so successful that, despite their
relative slightness compared to most other songs on 10cc, it was decided that they could do no wrong. Of these,
ʽDonnaʼ may be the sweetest send-up on the genre ever released — if
Lol Creme's «honey-overdose» falsetto on the first line of the chorus cannot be
taken seriously, the second line, on
which he lowers it into the «soulful» register, has, for some reason, always
taken my breath away, no matter how obviously the lyrics are just there to kick
the stuffing out of romantic clichés. But ʽJohnny Don't Do
Itʼ, lamenting a wannabe biker with a fatal lack of braking experience, is
far more hilarious — if there ever was something like a Leiber & Stoller
Special Award, this song could easily have been its first proud recipient.
Since almost each of these tunes is a
mini-opera, this review could be stretched out to infinity and beyond, but it
is much wiser to spend that time giving the music one more listen instead. So
let us pack it in briefly: ʽSand In My Faceʼ is a blues-pop
extravaganza about getting your girlfriend back from the local beach bully
("dynamic tension make a man out of you!"); ʽThe Dean And Iʼ
deals with extreme forms of college romance ("it was no infatuation, but a
gradual graduation"), going from brightness and optimism to darkness and
despair and back again; and ʽHeadline Hustlerʼ takes a strong stab
at yellow journalism, dressing it up in an arrangement that only ardent dreams
of George Harrison could have implanted in their heads (but I already mentioned
that).
Lest someone think, however, that this is all
about stories, and that the music comes in as an afterthought, there is also a
special semi-instrumental number ("Speed Kills") which gives the band
ample opportunity to showcase some chops and dexterity. It rocks with a
vengeance, and, the title notwithstanding, would sound cool even today, when
proverbially blasted out of one's car windows on the highway. There is a
curious «synthesized guitar» sound here (as well as on some other solo passages
on the album), produced by a special device invented by Godley and Creme, who
called it the «Gizmo»; it may sound a wee bit experimentally obsolete these
days, but at least the tone is used for actual playing, rather than avantgarde
farting noises.
Finally, one should not forget about the
immense diversity of ways they use to arrange and present this content. Vocal
arrangements alone draw on almost the entire experience accumulated over the
past several decades — solo crooning, group harmony, echoey Floydish background,
highest falsetto, deepest bass, opera, theatre, it's all in there (fortunately,
all four group members happened to be vocally endowed, a rare blessing even for
«supergroups»). Instruments range from basic guitars, pianos, and newfangled
synths to just about everything I have still got to learn a name for.
On an album like this, intellectual reaction
and gut feeling go happily hand in hand, in a way that is usually reserved for
the cream of the crop — the heart simply cannot stop embracing all the pretty
melodies and singing along (be it to "hum-drum days and a-hum-drum
ways" or "he was an angel, such an angel" — if you have already
heard the album, do not tell me this hasn't set you going!), whereas the brain
is stupefied, trying to calculate just how many creative musical and lyrical
ideas one can fit in per 1 square inch of record, provided «one» means «four dorky-looking
guys from early 1970s England». No wonder that, for a very short period of
time, 10cc were looked upon as the finest inclusion into the «Next generation
Beatles» club. 10cc's only comparative
flaw is that much of it sounds silly
— but silly does not equal stupid, and, in a way, this band went to
shit exactly at the same time that they stopped being silly. Coincidence?
Hardly. Just ignore the long-faced critics and join me in my hearty thumbs up.
PS: There are several CD issues of the album;
the true fan should probably look not for the common one that merges 10cc with Sheet Music on one piece of plastic, but for the bonus-heavy edition
that throws on the alternate single version of ʽRubber Bulletsʼ and
four additional B-sides, of which ʽWaterfallʼ is a must-have — a
beautiful ballad in the vein of solo McCartney, with some of Eric's most
memorable and evocative guitar flourishes on record. (It was originally planned
as an A-side, with ʽDonnaʼ as the flip — then the roles were
reversed, which pretty much tells us everything we need to know about classic
period 10cc priorities).
SHEET MUSIC (1974)
1) Wall Street Shuffle; 2)
The Worst Band In The World; 3) Hotel; 4) Old Wild Men; 5)
Clockwork Creep; 6) Silly
Love; 7) Somewhere In Hollywood; 8) Baron Samedi; 9) The
Sacro-Liliac; 10) Oh
Effendi; 11) Waterfall.
The jump from 10cc's first album to their second
one is, in all fairness, enormous. 10cc was basically a set of weird pop
songs. Sheet Music is, on the contrary, a set of pop-tinged weirdnesses.
Not that it's atonal or anything — it is easily their most melodic album ever,
simply because there's an average total of five or six different melodies per
song... sometimes per twenty seconds of it, too. "Never A Dull
Moment" — what is this title doing on a Rod Stewart record?
I have heard criticism that tended to basically
just write off 10cc from this moment as a pack of goofballs. However, if
anything, Sheet Music is even more lyrically focused and biting than 10cc.
No matter how "goofy" the actual songs might be, most of them carry a
message: tearing apart the capitalist world on 'Wall Street Shuffle', acidly
self-ironizing on 'The Worst Band In The World', ridiculing lyrical cliches of
popular music on 'Silly Love', butt-kicking oil-pumping sheiks on 'Oh Effendi',
and even stopping on the way to take the time for a tender lovin' tribute to
the silver screen — 'Somewhere In Hollywood' is almost like a more
sophisticated response to the Kinks' 'Celluloid Heroes', released two years
earlier. All of this makes perfect sense, regardless of the oddness of the form
it has been presented in.
Predictably, my own favourites are those where
the melodies go on just a little bit longer, or at least have a memorable
central theme to them. For instance, the wall-rattling opening riff on 'Wall
Street Shuffle' that is even more of a threat to Wall Street than the lyrics themselves
('Bet you'd sell your mother/You can buy another') — this is instantly classic.
So is the mock-metallic thump of 'Silly Love' that, of course, dissolves fairly
quickly into attractive pop fare ('hey toots, you put the life into living, you
brought the sigh out of sight') and ends up formulating the band's main
principle: 'take up your own time, make up your own rhyme, don't rely on mine —
'cause it's SILLY!'
These two songs that bookmark Side A are the
obvious highlights, but the whole record brims with such boundless, boiling
energy that it never lets go even when it doesn't let you memorize it too
easily. Only once do they take a short breather, on the Gizmo-dominated soft
ballad 'Old Wild Men', but it turns out to be the album's lowlight, because
their incessant shuffle of patterns really only works when it's backed up with
plenty of adrenaline; otherwise, it's just boring.
Of course, it goes without saying that the
amount of genre territory covered is quite spectacular. Completely dropping their
penchant for doo-wop, they instead proceed to deconstruct calypso ('Hotel'),
Haitian tribal-voodoo stuff ('Baron Samedi'), prog rock ('Somewhere In
Hollywood'), folk balladry ('Waterfall') and... uh, whatever 'Sacro-Liliac' is
supposed to deconstruct. And if these songs won't struck you as magnificently
planned compositions, most of them are at least guaranteed to give you a good
laugh (except 'Waterfall', which seems to take itself rather seriously — but
I don't mind, given how pretty the guitar and the singing are).
Not only that, but they really master all these
genres: the pompous, ominous introduction to 'Somewhere In Hollywood' could
easily fit on any second generation prog band record, and the percussion on
'Baron Samedi' could make you swear Kevin Godley must have spent his childhood
drifting around the Caribbean instead of around the boroughs of Great
Manchester. It's only when they start combining the uncombinable — for
instance, bringing in a lumbering hard rock middle eight for 'Baron Samedi' —
that you feel you're living in a post-authentic world after all.
Needless to say, the brain wins the race here
with a solid gold thumbs up, praising the
record for its phenomenal inventiveness. But it should be known that, after
several listens, the heart is well on the way to catch up with the brain, and
if you haven't grooved along to 'Silly Love' at least once in your life, you've
all but missed out on the art of intellectual headbanging, and I feel great
overwhelming pity for you.
THE ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK (1975)
1) Une Nuit A Paris; 2) I'm Not In Love; 3)
Blackmail; 4) The Second
Sitting For The Last Supper; 5) Brand New Day; 6) Flying Junk; 7) Life Is A Minestrone; 8)
The Film Of My Love; 9*) Channel Swimmer; 10*) Good News.
If 10cc was the sound of a genius band
in its infancy, and Sheet Music — the teenage wild child running round
and trying all sorts of nasty tricks on its neighbours, then The Original
Soundtrack is, by all means, a mature and much more responsible young man
looking for a job. (Hint: not everyone will consider this to be a good
thing).
Experimentation is still the word of the day,
and so is Satire and Sarcasm; but Madness and Whirlwind no longer are. They
seem to have gotten tired of genre-hopping, for one thing, and most of the
selections here are strictly within "pop rock" territory, or maybe
"prog-pop" territory... it's still a huge territory, to be sure, but
the most oddball of styles, like the calypso of 'Hotel' or the tribal airs of
'Baron Samedi', do not make any more appearances.
For another thing, the piecemeal melodies are
almost gone as well. They have relegated all the jig-saw puzzle constructing to
just one track, the opening mini-operetta 'Une Nuit A Paris', about the life
and death of a, so to speak, respectable courtesan, but mini-operettas are
supposed to be multi-part, and since when do we have a band like 10cc doing
what it is supposed to do? The element of surprise is pretty downtrodden
here, to say the least.
Or maybe this whole feeling of increased
seriousness and solemnity is due to 'I'm Not In Love', the band's first (and
biggest) hit to not sound like a parody. The song stupefied listeners with its
arrangement — layers upon layers of vocalizing synthesizers and synthesized
vocals that created an atmosphere of such heavenly dreaminess as had never been
experienced before. Today, much of this is routine matter, and the same tones
and tricks have been used over and over again in uncountable "adult
contemporary" ballads, so it's almost as hard to realize the
groundbreaking potential of 'I'm Not In Love' back in 1975 as it is to marvel
at the wonders of the first notes played on electric guitar. But that doesn't
make the song itself any less inspiring, or its lyrics any less inspired — 'I
keep your picture upon the wall/It hides a nasty stain that's lying there'
sounds sad upon first listen, hilarious upon the second one, and soon
afterwards achieves a perfect synthesis of irony and despair so that guess all
you like, you won't be able to discover the primary motivation behind the
composition.
It's little wonder that after the grand opening
of 'Une Nuit A Paris' and the groundbreaking follow-up of 'I'm Not In Love',
the rest of the album seems rather hastily slapped on, or, at best, just
somewhat out of place. For instance, 'Blackmail', a lively pop-rocker about a
hilariously botched attempt at blackmailing a promiscuous girl's husband, would
feel more at home on Sheet Music or even 10cc — closing out the
first side with this little ditty is a bit anticlimactic. And as for the second
side, I can never memorize much of it except for the blistering heavy metal opening
of 'The Second Sitting For The Last Supper' (the lyrics, about how we really
need a second Last Supper these days, are great, though) and the carnivalesque
optimism of 'Life Is A Minestrone' (served up with parmesan cheese, no less).
It's not bad, just not up to 10cc's better standards.
Therefore, although the brain, as usual, is on
highly friendly terms with this band (that is, while it was still a band rather
than a duet), it is only reluctantly that the heart issues its thumbs up, which hardly applies to the second half
of the record. Still, this is certainly not "the beginning of the
end", rather just a momentary loss of focus justified by ambitiousness of
the goals.
HOW DARE YOU! (1976)
1) How Dare You!; 2) Lazy
Ways; 3) I Wanna Rule The World; 4) I'm Mandy, Fly Me; 5)
Iceberg; 6) Art For Art's
Sake; 7) Rock'n'Roll Lullaby; 8) Head Room; 9) Don't Hang Up; 10*) Get It
While You Can.
With How Dare You!, 10cc have
comfortably and gracefully settled into middle age — an age which might have
lasted forever, had the very fact of it not been grating heavily against the
restless souls of Godley and Creme. Usually it is the more
"commercially-oriented" members of the band that tend to carry the
blame for a great unit's falling apart, but in this case the situation is
reversed — Godley and Creme left the band entirely of their own will, unsatisfied
with its creative stagnation (at least, that seems to have been the pretext).
Ironically, the creatively stagnant How Dare
You! turned out to be a far more greater record than anything that either
the experimental unit of Godley & Creme or the "commercial" unit
of Stewart & Gouldman's 10cc managed to produce since 1976. In a way, it
is the band's Abbey Road: a record that consciously rejects any more
musical revolutions, but in terms of pure quality almost manages to outstrip all
of its predecessors. And just like the Beatles may have had a subconscious
feeling that Abbey Road were to be their swan song, boosting the desire
to make it a superb piece of product, so could the four members of 10cc have
felt the same — and turned their creative volume knobs all the way up to
eleven.
There is no return here to either the dazzling
energy level or the diversity of Sheet Music; the songs are generally
more quiet and relaxed, the amount of melodies per song more limited. But
that's merely a sign of maturity. The melodic hooks remain stronger than ever,
the lyrical wit and the unique story-telling ability undamaged, and the
arrangements, if possible, have become even more polished, refined, and complex
than on The Original Soundtrack. The flow is wonderful, with a few
weaker tracks carefully dispersed among the stronger material and the lazier
material only better attenuating the energetic stuff. And if there is no one or
two songs that are particularly jaw-dropping, like 'Silly Love' or 'I'm Not In
Love', that's only due to the quality of the rest.
Much of the album is sweet and sentimental —
Sir Paul might have loved this — like the lead off single, 'I'm Mandy, Fly Me',
sort of a fantasy sequel to 'Clockwork Creep' off Sheet Music, with a
totally off-the-cuff story of how the protagonist is saved by his lovely
stewardess in the midst of an airplane crash. Taking a stupid airline slogan
('I'm Cindy, fly me'), the jokers make it into the basis for a love confession
which, as is usual with 10cc, is stuck somewhere in between sincere and
sarcastic — as confusing for some as it is exciting for others. 'Lazy Ways' and
'Rock'n'Roll Lullaby' have sweet vocal hooks that will send spinning the head
of anyone with a thing for sweet vocal hooks; and the album closer 'Don't Hang
Up' is the band's most realistic ode to quiet desperation, culminating in...
hanging up, of course!
The harder side of the album is illustrated by
the blistering 'Art For Art's Sake' (the opening riff is one of the most
memorable moments in the catalog) which takes several evil punches at The
Artist ('give me your love, give me it all, give me in the kitchen, give me in
the hall'), and the equally biting and hilarious 'I Wanna Rule The World' ('I
wanna be a boss I wanna be a big boss I wanna boss the world around I wanna be
the biggest boss that ever bossed the world around'). And finally, the
'sonically creative' side is featured on the title track — a (possibly)
Zappa-inspired instrumental that isn't so much enjoyable per se as per trying
to figure out where exactly it will be heading off in the next ten seconds.
Good luck hunting!
All said, How Dare You! requires a
little time (say, a decade or so) to properly sink in, as do all such lazy,
mature, deep, flash-less (but certainly not flesh-less) albums. Once it
does, though, there's nothing preventing one from even thinking of it as 10cc's
finest hour — at least, that's one possibility that's worth exploring.
Naturally, with the brain harboring respect for it from the very first minute
and the heart gradually accumulating love for it over the years, this is a thumbs up all the way. Don't hang up on it.
DECEPTIVE BENDS (1977)
1) Good Morning Judge; 2) The Things We Do For Love;
3) Marriage Bureau
Rendezvous; 4) People
In Love; 5) Modern Man
Blues; 6) Honeymoon With B Troup; 7) I Bought A Flat Guitar Tutor; 8)
You've Got A Cold; 9) Feel
The Benefit; 10*) Hot To Trot; 11*) Don't Squeeze Me Like Toothpaste; 12*)
I'm So Laid Back, I'm Laid Out.
Despite leaving so abruptly, Godley and Creme
couldn't help but leaving some scent behind them, and for a brief moment of one
or two years it almost seemed like the castrated Gouldman-Stewart
variant of 10cc might be able to make it anyway. Deceptive Bends may be
a small step down from the level of the fearsome foursome, but it is still a
thoroughly enjoyable and frequently unpredictable record that not only pledges
allegiance to the band's old credo, but even manages to uphold that allegiance
in more than just words.
After all, one might complain that the songs
have become more streamlined, featuring fewer surprising twists and grotesque
stylistic clashes than we came to expect from 10cc, but wasn't that already the
situation on How Dare You? and its "mature" type of sound? Deceptive
Bends is generally made in the same mood, mixing up tongue-in-cheek sarcasm
and sweet sentimentality until you cease to understand which is which and what
is where.
Only occasionally do we get true signs of the
decay and decline to come: the percentage of slow ballad stuff is ominously
going up, and although a song like 'People In Love' is quite melodic and quite
exquisitely arranged with its light-symphonic mixture of pianos, weepy slide
guitars, and strings, in the end it lands in MOR territory where 10cc have
never landed before. 'The Things We Do For Love', too, is like a slightly
de-arenified version of Foreigner, although that might as well be a compliment
(given how Foreigner's first two albums weren't that bad at all). Still, 10cc
turning into Foreigner isn't exactly a heartwarming observation.
And yet these unhappy feelings are still quite
muted next to the album's successes — 'Good Morning Judge', 'Modern Man
Blues', and 'Honeymoon With B Troup', in particular, are all catchy, funny
highlights, showing that the Gouldman-Stewart duo is still able to handle both
ferocious melodic hooks (the opening to 'Good Morning Judge' is simplistic, but
nevertheless one of the most energetic openings on a 10cc record) and snappy
lyrics (no record with lines like 'My baby goes topless and brings her beauty
to a bottomless day' can be all bad).
Finally, the duo's brave take on a multi-part
suite ('Feel The Benefit'), although it feels somewhat meaning- and
directionless next to 'Une Nuit A Paris', is still easily listenable throughout
all of its eleven minutes. I used to get somewhat indignant at its openly
"borrowing" the melody of 'Dear Prudence' for the main opening theme,
but now that I think of it, its complex structure, bombastic conclusion
(featuring some truly soaring leads from Eric — arguably his most
"spiritual" playing in 10cc) and overall feel are all intended to be
Beatles-like, reminding one of the closing symphony on Abbey Road. In
this light, 'Feel The Benefit' is not only pardonable, but forms an excellent
conclusion to the album — and, in fact, just like the closing symphony on Abbey
Road, forms an excellent swan song to the band's career as a whole.
For all I know, Deceptive Bends might,
and should, have been a goodbye record — created by just the duo of
Gouldman and Stewart (with a little help from Paul Burgess on the drums), with
the spirit of Godley and Creme still whirling around in the studio. Everything
that follows is but one large footnote, and one that gives fairly little
pleasure to study. Deceptive Bends is our last and smallest piece of
Turkish delight to gobble up, but it's still a piece of Turkish delight and so
deserves a good thumbs up from both the
emotional and the intellectual departments.
LIVE AND LET LIVE (1977)
1) The Second Sitting For The
Last Supper; 2) You've Got A Cold; 3) Honeymoon With B Troup; 4) Art For Art's
Sake; 5) People In Love; 6) Wall Street Shuffle; 7) Ships Don't Disappear In
The Night; 8) I'm Mandy Fly Me; 9) Marriage Bureau Rendezvous; 10) Good Morning
Judge; 11) Feel The Benefit; 12) The Things We Do For Love; 13) Waterfall; 14)
I'm Not In Love; 15) Modern Man Blues.
For some reason, 10cc never got around to
releasing a live album while still in their prime — not that, being a «pop»
band by definition, they should have felt as obliged to do it as their
colleagues in the heavy rock and prog rock departments. But with Godley and
Creme out of the band, Stewart and Gouldman may have sensed a need for proving
that «10cc still exists!» in as many ways as humanly possible — and so, with Deceptive Bends only six months away,
they hurriedly followed it up with a sprawling double LP of live recordings,
made in June-July 1977 in London and Manchester. Another possible goal was to
flaunt their newly reassembled band, showcasing Rick Fenn (who gets a bass solo
on ʽFeel The Benefitʼ), new keyboardist Tony O'Malley, and no less
than two different percussionists.
Unfortunately, even in their prime 10cc were
not a particularly great band to enjoy outside of the studio — and in 1977, the
only reason to buy this live album was to show financial support for the band.
Deprived of contributions by its weirdest, riskiest members, the 10cc setlist
was now almost exclusively limited to Stewart/Gouldman material, which, of
course, had plenty of winners, but this also means that Deceptive Bends is reproduced here almost in its entirety, so you
are basically buying the same album twice
— and it's not as if the live renditions had anything to prove that was not
already proven in the studio.
Other than that, ʽShips Don't Disappear In
The Nightʼ is stretched out to unreasonable limits with the addition of a
slowed down part; ʽArt For Art's Sakeʼ is stretched out to include a
jamming part at the end, with a passable, melodic, but rather out-of-place solo
from Eric; and ʽWaterfallʼ fares better, since its desperate
romanticism is perfectly compatible with guitar heroics — so Stewart adds an
epic solo built along the same lines as Jimmy Page's solo on ʽStairway To
Heavenʼ (in fact, one might actually state that they are trying to transform ʽWaterfallʼ into their own
private ʽStairwayʼ). All in all, Stewart's guitar playing skills is
more or less the only thing that distinguishes these songs from their studio
counterparts — and they are not nearly as unique or inventive as should be
required to make Live And Let Live
into a lead guitar lover's wet dream.
Nevertheless, the album still sold well,
reflecting 10cc's general level of fame and prosperity: with Deceptive Bends still showing traces of
the classic spirit, Stewart and Gouldman were only on the verge of squandering
the band's artistic reputation, and the power and the glory of their hit
singles still rang out loud and clear — enough to make people buy even
something that nobody really needed. Besides, most of the songs are so good,
why not buy them twice anyway?..
BLOODY TOURISTS (1978)
1) Dreadlock Holiday; 2) For
You And I; 3) Take These Chains; 4) Shock On The Tube; 5) Last Night; 6) Anonymous
Alcoholic; 7) Reds In My
Bed; 8) Lifeline; 9) Tokyo; 10) Old Mister Time; 11) From Rochdale To Ocho
Richdale; 12) Everything You Wanted To Know; 13*) Nothing Can Move Me.
Somehow, 'Dreadlock Holiday' managed to be a
huge hit — maybe because its village-idiot style nod to reggae fell in with the
emerging New Wave's preoccupation with Jamaica (after all, if 'Roxanne' could
be a hit, why couldn't 'Dreadlock Holiday'?). On the coattails of its success,
the entire album managed to sell respectably. In retrospect, however, Bloody
Tourists, now quite explicitly, continues 10cc's slide into mediocrity and
irrelevance.
I feel obliged to stress that the songwriting
is still at a high level, and that there are plenty of decent pop hooks, and
that, given time enough, the album is a "grower", not a
"shrinker". Stewart and Gouldman still continue to do their best trying
to come up with interesting subjects and match them with unpredictable music.
But they're mildly interesting, and the music is mildly unpredictable:
for one thing, they have completely lost the ability to rock out — when the
'hard' section on 'Shock On The Tube' takes over, it turns out to be little
more than 'clown-rock', a term that I think well-suitable but almost
unexplainable.
For another thing, they start going too heavy
on the ballads; in fact, the entire album is divided almost evenly between
straight-faced sentimental balladry and the 'weird' numbers — this sort of
worked on Original Soundtrack, where 'I'm Not In Love' was a swell
tilter that made you lose sleep over thinking just how much they actually meant
it, sandwiched in between 'Une Nuit A Paris' and 'Blackmail', but when these
things become the rule rather than the exception, and when you take them in
perspective — CLICK! — you really understand that this band has changed,
and not necessarily for the better.
But I repeat: if you manage to stay away from
the perspective, Bloody Tourists, on its own, isn't bad at all — I'd put
it on the same shelf with some second-rate solo Paul McCartney album. I do like
'Dreadlock Holiday', with its eerie tale of an unfortunate English guy on an
unhappy vacation in Jamaica (apparently inspired by a real incident that
happened on a real vacation undertaken by Eric Stewart and Justin Hayward) — one
might complain that the band really knows nothing of reggae, but that would be
missing the point, because they're not here to play reggae but rather to
make fun of the reggae craze; I feel happy about the catchy retro-pop of 'Take
These Chains', simple, unpretentious, and fun; I think that 'Anonymous
Alcoholic', appropriately starting out as slow barroom rock and then going into
a hot funky section, is more of an artistic success than a hoodlum failure; and
I even like some of the ballads — why not? They're pretty.
So, as you understand, this is where the brain
enters into a serious conflict with the heart. The best advice here, I think,
would be — for those who were primarily enthralled with 10cc for their
quirkiness and experimentation, to stay away from this album (let alone
everything that follows; it would only get worse from here); for those,
however, who loved 'Rubber Bullets' and 'I'm Not In Love', but hated 'The Worst
Band In The World' and 'Clockwork Creep', Bloody Tourists is
recommendable. And since I do not insist that a record has to be both
intellectually stimulating and emotionally pleasing to be good, I still give it
a thumbs up.
Useless bit of trivia: on this album, 10cc are
once more a 'full' band, adding drummer Paul Burgess, guitarist Rick Fenn,
keyboard player Duncan Mackay, and an extra percussionist (Stuart Tosh). Does
it show? Not really. But some people like to know.
LOOK HEAR? (1980)
1) One Two Five; 2) Welcome To
The World; 3) How'm I Ever Gonnna Say Goodbye; 4) Don't Send We Back; 5) I Took
You Home; 6) It Doesn't Matter At All; 7) Dressed To Kill; 8) Lovers Anonymous;
9) I Hate To Eat Alone; 10) Strange Lover; 11) L.A. Inflatable.
No thank you. I can still look (especially
since the album has two different covers — the UK release had 'ARE YOU NORMAL'
written on it in huge letters, and the US release had a picture of a sheep
reclining on a Roman-shape bed located on a beach, transatlantically
suggesting, perhaps, that the correct answer to the former question is NO),
but I'd rather not hear.
The only redeeming quality of Look Hear?,
in contrast to the following two albums that lacked even that, is that it's
still nicely melodic. Apart from a completely non-descript bad prog rock
contribution by two new members ('Welcome To The World'), Gouldman and Stewart
can still ensure that the bulk of the record is constituted by chord-based pop
melodies that took time to write and incorporate some real feeling as well.
The trouble is, tons of people can write
moderately decent pop, but from these guys we have come to expect more
than that. We expect some wit, some grit, some laughs, some unpredictability
— in short, that 10cc feel that everyone brought up on Sheet Music
instantly recognizes. Well, Look Hear? is the first 10cc album that
sounds nothing like 10cc. It doesn't rock out at all — the closest it comes to
rock is on Rick Fenn's 'Don't Send We Back', but even there the sound is
seriously watered down. It isn't in the least unpredictable: same reliance on
McCartney-style balladeering and reggae influences as on their last record.
But, worst of all, it isn't funny at all.
Almost as if Mother Superior had removed the crucial members' tongue-in-cheek
mechanisms for long-term repair, most of the songs take themselves dead
serious. The love ballads are lyrically straightforward, the character
impersonations almost try to make you care about the impersonations, and
'Don't Send We Back', entrusted completely to the cares of Rick Fenn, is the
band's first ever straight social song — not satire, not sarcasm, but an angry
comment on the sad fates of illegal immigrants. What the heck??
The best song is Gouldman's 'I Hate To Eat
Alone', a pretty and touching ode to loneliness that could have creeped
in as a minor highlight on one of the band's better albums — unnoticed and
unloved at first, perhaps, but cherished later. (See 'Old Wild Men' on Sheet
Music). But the rest of the ballads, such as 'I Took You Home', pompous
beyond reason, or 'Lovers Anonymous', go way too heavy on the melodrama and
unpleasantly remind me of the worst excesses of Seventies' pop. I've already
mentioned how 10cc managed to end up sounding like good Foreigner — on Look
Hear?, way too often, they end up sounding like bad Foreigner without the
heavy guitars. So much so that it's even a relief to have the album ending on a
lightweight, forgettable, but — in the context of it all — heartwarming bit of
generic boogie ('L.A. Inflatable').
So this is the real beginning of the end,
although the agony would be prolonged further for several unhappy years. Thumbs down from the brain, who thinks himself so
insulted he is seriously considering challenging the G-S duo to a brain duel,
and likewise from the heart, which does not accept betrayal of its confidence
lightly.
TEN OUT OF 10 (1981)
1) Don't Ask; 2) Overdraft In
Overdrive; 3) Don't Turn Me Away; 4) Memories; 5) Notell Hotel; 6) Les Nouveaux
Riches; 7) Action Man In Motown Suit; 8) Listen With Your Eyes; 9) Lying Here
With You; 10) Survivor.
The band was once again "stripped
down" for this release, with Gouldman and Stewart exclusively sharing all
the songwriting and most of the playing credits (for the American release,
several songs were replaced by collaborations with American singer-songwriter
Andrew Gold). However, essentially this is just a bit of trivia: in spirit,
there is no significant difference between this record and the few ones before.
Except for the sad fact that there is no spirit
whatsoever on Ten Out Of 10. In fact, it may be the first 10cc record
that has absolutely no reason for existing; I do not have the vaguest idea of
the kind of serious music listener who could be satisfied with it. It's just a
bunch of mid-tempo, mid-volume, mid-relevance, mid-everything mid-pop songs
written by two mid-aged gentlemen that seem to be but mid-knowing what they're
mid-doing. Someone like Paul McCartney could probably allow himself to get
away with it from time to time; but, after all, Paul's gift for melody has
always been more generous than Gouldman's, and Paul's vocals have always been
lovelier than Eric Stewart's (a debatable opinion, that, but I'd probably be
supported by the masses here), and even then Paul did not always get
away with it — and it is hardly a coincidence that Paul's least satisfying
record, Press To Play, was but a matter of several years away from 1981,
and would be representing the pitiful results of his collaboration with none
other than Eric...
...but I digress. Although, frankly, I'd rather
digress a while than speak about these songs. As usual, they fall strictly
into two genres: sappy ballads, only saved from the ultimate depth of fall by
slightly above average lyrics, and limp pop rockers that crumble into reggae
every now and then, as if that still mattered in 1981. 'Don't Turn Me Away'
stands out as an okay representative of the former, and the biting, but
toothless social critique 'Les Nouveaux Riches' stands out as an okay
representative of the latter; both were singles, and both deservedly flopped —
of course, they didn't flop because they were bad songs, but rather because
they sounded so miserably outdated against the background of 1981's hit
material, regardless of quality.
I have encountered several critical opinions on
the record stating that it was really a creative rebound for the band or even
a true "return to form" after Look Hear? I have no idea what
that meant, and I have no idea how or why in between two really weak records
they could have managed to place a true artistic winner. My feelings and
thoughts on Ten Out Of 10 are in full agreement with each other: it's
just one more step down the ladder from two guys who continue to go on making
music because it's their professional duty and for few, if any, other reasons.
And if the album title is indeed a shameless psychological trick (after all, if
you simply state that something is good, there'll always be someone
who'll believe it without questioning), it's just one more reason to hand this
a certified thumbs down resolution.
WINDOWS IN THE JUNGLE (1983)
1) 24 Hours; 2) Feel The Love (Oomachasaooma);
3) Yes I Am!; 4) Americana Panorama; 5) City Lights; 6) Food For Thought; 7) Working Girls; 8) Taxi!
Taxi!
The final squeak from the band, before it went
on a decade-long hiatus. What we have here is a desperate, but even so, only
half-hearted attempt to squeeze the last bit of power from the few remaining
drops of fuel — you can almost literally hear the agonizing sounds of the
engine dying down in the middle of an Arizona desert. Windows In The Jungle
is just another mix of sappy ballads, now veering on the brink of choppy adult
contemporary, and all-natural reggae grooves made from 100% concentrate;
"auto-pilot" is the best way to summarize it in one word.
The saddest thing of all is that the
Gouldman/Stewart duo still had some creative songwriting left within — many of
these songs have sane, interesting melodic ideas, nothing too original, but,
under better conditions, you could at least shape 'Americana Panorama', 'City
Lights' and 'Working Girls' into convincing New Wave rockers. But it's not
enough to string together memorable choruses — you have to imbue them with some
sort of sense, to energize them, so to speak, and neither the musical
arrangements nor the singing betray any signs of energy. The music is all either
synthesizers or Eric's gentle, but — by this point — lethargic jangle, and the
singing is completely passionless.
Windows In The Jungle also has the merit of featuring at least two
of the worst tracks ever created by the band. If the main problem of the album
opener '24 Hours' is the length (eight minutes may be too long even for a good
progressive rock number, it certainly is overkill for a synth-pop one), the
next two songs are enough to kill off any semi-decent impression or semi-tepid hopes
you had for the record. 'Feel The Love' is "cod reggae", an attempt
to imitate Bob Marley that miserably fails because of its rigid and robotic
attitude, and 'Yes I Am!' is every bit as pathetic as the most pathetic ballad
you'll ever see on a Foreigner album — which is pretty pathetic. Just how sad
is it to hear a band that used to have some of the sharpest lyrics on all the
British Isles permit itself a chorus like 'yes I am, I'm ready for love'?
The only redeeming moment on the whole record
is the coda to the album closer 'Taxi! Taxi!', a trifling, but pretty
instrumental passage based around Eric's looping guitar theme and some non-ugly
keyboard work. It is quite sympathetic in its position of a humble goodbye to
the fans (not that Eric and Graham were really meaning it), as long as you
manage to detach it from the rest of the song. There is no greatness here, of
course, just a drop of sadness, warmth, and nostalgia. And it is obviously not
redeeming the existence of this album as a whole, justified only by the fact
that it would be a great help in accelerating the milk-curdling process if you
play it next to your milk. Thumbs down —
from the indignant brain, mostly, because the heart has long since fallen
asleep.
...MEANWHILE (1992)
1) Woman In Love; 2)
Wonderland; 3) Fill Her Up; 4) Something Special; 5) Welcome To Paradise; 6)
The Stars Didn't Show; 7) Green Eyed Monster; 8) Charity Begins At Home; 9)
Shine A Light In The Dark; 10) Don't Break The Promises.
A ten-year long break can sometimes work
wonders... not in this case, though. After spending a decade working on their
individual projects, Stewart and Gouldman have come back to pick up from the
exact same place where they left us with Windows In The Jungle, as if
neither the Eighties, with their tackiness and their perverse charms, nor the
early Nineties with their drastic shift in musical values have ever happened.
Well — you don't have to love this judgement, but maybe you have to respect it.
A long-term tactical blunder hailed this as a
"Reunion" album of the original 10cc — under the pretext that Godley
& Creme were mesmerized into appearing in the studio for the sessions to
add backing vocals for some of the tracks (Godley also sings lead on 'The Stars
Didn't Show'). But it doesn't take a genius to figure out that neither of the
two had even a pinch of creative impact on the proceedings; ...Meanwhile
is, if possible, even more straightforward and simplistic a record than Windows.
It isn't worse, though; perhaps it's even a
little better. About half of it is the same old boring adult contemporary refuse,
but the other half at least cheers up the proceedings with some upbeat barroom
rock, on which the band is assisted by the piano-playing talents of Dr. John.
And the lead-off single, 'Woman In Love', is at least a good pop song: it
somehow manages to tap-dance on the bottle top of retro-Seventies
"cock-sentimentalism" (i. e. sentimental songs emanating from artists
with a general cock rock attitude, by default one of music's greatest offenses
against both good taste in general and the feminine sex in particular) without
getting stuck in the bottleneck, maybe because of exquisite guitar work from
Stewart.
One bothersome thing is a striking number of déjà
vus I am getting — consciously or subconsciously, Gouldman and Stewart
seem to be so strung up on creative songwriting that they keep yielding either
atmospheric or melodic bits that belong not to 10cc, but rather to someone
else. 'Wonderland', for instance, for the most part sounds like the Police
circa Synchronicity; 'Something Special' keeps reminding me of some
McCartney song I can't recall the name of; 'Shine A Light In The Dark' borrows
a line from the Hollies' 'Long Cool Woman In A Red Dress', etc. Not that it's
necessarily bad: if your own sack of ideas is depleted, a little borrowing can
be a big help, and if this helps make ...Meanwhile more listenable — why
not? Except that it doesn't make it all that much more listenable, certainly
not to the point where we could count it as a minor latter day masterpiece. The
best songs here, like 'Woman In Love', or the flat rocker 'Charity Begins At
Home', would still be forgettable filler on any of 10cc's major albums.
Nor do I understand why Godley agreed to sing
lead on 'The Stars Didn't Show', a tepid synth ballad every inch of which is so
square they should make it an anthem of McDonalds' or something. They didn't
even manage to squeeze out any money of this effort, because the old fans had
been washed away and who'd want to be a new fan? Part of the blame can
perhaps be laid at the feet of producer Gary Katz of Steely Dan fame — what may
have been good for Steely Dan, namely, extreme cleanliness and
"stiffness" of the sound, compatible with the Dan's exquisite taste
in arrangements, only augments the suffocation one experiences from Gouldman
and Stewart's late-period musical values. On the other hand, maybe the tables
should be turned and perhaps it was actually Katz who saved the album from
becoming a complete snoozer. But complete or incomplete, it still hurts my
brain so bad that it temporarily shuts down my heart — guaranteeing the usual thumbs down rating.
MIRROR MIRROR (1995)
1) Yvonne's The One; 2) Code Of
Silence; 3) Blue Bird; 4) Age Of Consent; 5) Take This Woman; 6) The Monkey And
The Onion; 7) Everything Is Not Enough; 8) Ready To Go Home; 9) Grow Old With
Me; 10) Margo Wants The Mustard; 11) Peace In Our Time; 12) Why Did I Break
Your Heart; 13) Now You're Gone; 14) I'm Not In Love.
At least this one does not pretend to be a
"reunion", but that's hardly a sufficient excuse for the album's
predictable weakness. If ...Meanwhile was made somewhat marginally
acceptable with the aid of one or two strong melodies ('Woman In Love') and
relaxed party atmosphere on its barroom rock numbers, then Mirror Mirror
plunges the listener back into the stale waters of adult contemporary head-on.
The best I can say is that Stewart is jumping
over twenty-feet high fences, trying at all costs to emulate the melodicity of
Paul McCartney, as if their 1985 collaboration on Press To Play was the
most important event of his life, deserving to be waxed nostalgic about every
time he crosses the threshold of a recording studio again. 'Yvonne's The One',
the opening number, is, in fact, a ten-year old outtake from those sessions,
and Paul even drops by to play rhythm guitar on it, which never saves the song
from being completely pedestrian and forgettable (well, it's hard to expect
anything other from an outtake for the sessions for McCartney's worst album).
And 'Blue Bird' is not a cover of the McCartney song, but it sounds eerily like
a fifty-fifty cross between McCartney and Justin Hayward (also, by the way, one
of Eric's good friends — coincidence? maybe not, although why is the track
credited exclusively to Gouldman, I wonder?); so eerily, in fact, that I am
completely unable to judge it on its own, and the most that it gets me is a
nagging desire to relisten to my Moody Blues collection.
I can't say that Mirror Mirror is not
melodic; that would be a direct lie. But these aren't melodies that one should
live or die for, and certainly not when they're used to convey straight-faced,
deadly serious sentimentality ('Code Of Silence', one of the most revolting
songs about broken relationships I've ever heard from a formerly good artist;
'Grow Old With Me' — much worse than the Lennon song of the same name; 'Why Did
I Break Your Heart' — yuck) with the help of synthesizer arrangements that, by
1995, were already considered the epitome of cheesiness by just about everyone
who wasn't a ten-year old ten years before that. Another heavy blow is that
barroom rock is out, and in its place they reinstate their bland reggae and
calypso schtick ('Take This Woman', 'Margo Wants The Mustard', etc.). And as a
final insult, the record includes a reworking of 'I'm Not In Love' (some
editions include two different reworkings of 'I'm Not In Love'!) that
dares to suggest their limp adult contemporary of 1995 somehow owes something
to their masterpiece of 1975!
On second thought, it does owe
something, but it just goes to show you what twenty years of taste
deterioration can do to one's creativity. Thumbs
down; a most ignoble end to a formerly brilliant career — at least
no one seems to have noticed, because for most people 10cc had already died a
quiet death at least twelve or fifteen years ago, and only a few unfortunates
(like record reviewers) are forced to see these old ghosts.
ADDENDA:
IN CONCERT/KING BISCUIT FLOWER HOUR (1975; 1995)
1) Intro; 2) Silly Love; 3)
Baron Samedi; 4) Old Wild Men; 5) Sacro-iliac; 6) Somewhere In Hollywood; 7)
Donna; 8) Ships Don't Disappear In The Night; 9) The Worst Band In The World;
10) Wall Street Shuffle; 11) Rubber Bullets.
This is the only live album from 10cc recorded
in their glory days (might, in fact, be the only live 10cc album as such), and,
although it is sort of semi-official (like all the "King Biscuit Flower
Hour" releases), it is quite essential for any fan of the band, and even
worth checking out if you're just casually interested in these eccentrics.
Given that most of 10cc songs are strictly and
straightforwardly studio creations, based on meticulously planned combinations
of arrangements, special effects, and tricky melody shifts, one would naturally
be curious to learn how they handled all this on stage (a decade earlier, the
Beatles basically ran off the stage for much the same reasons). Plus, like with
so many art- and prog-rock bands, there was the evident danger of their just
being happy to reproduce the original sound on stage as faithfully as possible
— a feat in itself — and leaving the fans in the audience well-contented and
the live album buyers equally well-disappointed.
In the light of this, it is a relief to learn
that on stage, they behaved themselves like a good rock band is supposed to
behave. This setlist, although it was recorded on November 11, 1975 (Santa
Monica Civic Center), focuses entirely on Sheet Music and, to a lesser
extent, 10cc, even though The Original Soundtrack had already
been released and was riding up the charts. Not knowing the facts, I'd guess
that, perhaps, they might have played some numbers from that album, but that
they weren't too keen about recording and broadcasting them, preferring to let
all the extra listeners in on the simpler, more rocking stuff.
Indeed, it is far more exciting to hear the
band jam on the ending to 'Silly Love' or on the middle part of 'Baron Samedi'
than attempt to recreate the icy synthesizer patterns to 'I'm Not In Love'
or to replicate, bit-by-bit, all the
operatic details of 'Une Nuit A Paris'. The best news is that they can
jam — not that you'd doubt it, given the pedigree of the players, but it's nice
to have documental evidence. Stewart is the main star of the show, playing
inventive, aggressive, and diverse solos throughout, but the rhythm section of
Gouldman and Godley deserves honorary mention as well.
Some of the songs don't have jam sessions and
are, in fact, faithful recreations of the studio wizardry, e. g., 'Somewhere
In Hollywood'. Some are crowd-pleasers that don't always go off as well as
you'd like them to go off ('Donna', in particular, is ruined by some off-key
singing and poor harmonizing - apparently, these guys didn't have a natural
gift for doo-wop after all). And the eight-minute jam on 'Rubber Bullets' might
be pushing things a bit too far. But, twenty percent misfires aside, the album
is still forty percent enjoyable rock'n'roll and forty percent skilled
demonstration of the uniqueness and inventiveness of the band. Therefore, a thumbs up from both the heart and brain
departments.
LIVE IN JAPAN (1993)
1) The Wall Street Shuffle; 2)
I'm Mandy, Fly Me; 3) Good Morning Judge; 4) Welcome To Paradise; 5) Things We
Do For Love; 6) Across The Universe; 7) The Stars Didn't Show; 8) Art For Art's
Sake; 9) Feel The Benefit; 10) Dreadlock Holiday; 11) I'm Not In Love; 12) Bullets
Medley.
Originally released as simply Alive,
with a slightly extended setlist (including cover versions of 'Paperback
Writer' and even 'Slow Down'), but today more easily found as Live In Japan
or Best Of Live or, perhaps, under a further extra dozen titles, and
with fewer tracks. Not that it makes any difference: there is no reason
whatsoever even for major fans to own this album.
It does, I suppose, present a relatively
faithful picture of 10cc's live power circa the early 1990s: golden oldies
mixed in with recent material, performed with enough professionalism and energy
to justify the ticket price. But if the old-time 10cc at least bothered to make
their immaculately polished studio stuff acquire extra vivaciousness, at the
expense of neutralizing some of the hooks but with the added benefit of genuine
rocking-out, this late-period 10cc is, in all respects, stiffer than a stiff.
'Art For Art's Sake' is the only track on which the band dares to jam a little
towards the end, with Stewart churning out a solid extra guitar solo.
Everything else is just scared shitless of adding something to or detracting
something from the originals, no matter how fresh or how bearded those are —
even to the extent of wiping out most of the audience noises, a technique that
is very rarely encountered. We've all heard of "false live albums"
with overdubbed applause, but how often do we hear of true live albums with
suppressed applause?
A particular sign of bad taste is when the bad
songs — like 'Welcome To Paradise' — are given all the necessary time to
further ingrain their badness in us, but the great songs — like 'Rubber Bullets',
'Silly Love', and 'Life Is A Minestrone' — are crammed together into a medley,
as if the people at the show actually bought tickets to hear 'there's a coup
coming on, there's a coup coming on'. Of course, they do faithfully run
through their biggest commercial hits — 'Good Morning Judge', 'Dreadlock
Holiday', and a further adult-contemporarified 'I'm Not In Love' — but none of
that is particularly adventurous either.
Thumbs down, of course, primarily from the brain that is
justified in seeing no reason for the record's existence, although that does
not mean these are technically "poor" performances or that the
setlist isn't mostly consisting of great material (I certainly could do without
the over-emotive cover of 'Across The Universe', and I have little reason to
believe that their 'Paperback Writer' is a threat to Paul McCartney's stature
in any way possible, either). If it's your only chance to get to know 10cc,
there's no reason to turn it down, but it destroys my brain to even attempt to
imagine that kind of real life situation.
RING RING (1973)
1) Ring Ring; 2) Another
Town, Another Train; 3) Disillusion; 4) People Need Love; 5) I
Saw It In The Mirror; 6) Nina, Pretty Ballerina; 7) Love Isn't Easy (But It
Sure Is Hard Enough); 8) Me And Bobby And Bobby's Brother; 9) He Is Your Brother; 10) I
Am Just A Girl; 11) Rock'n'Roll Band; 12*) Merry-Go-Round; 13*) Santa Rosa;
14*) Ring Ring (Bara Du Slog En Signal).
When this record first came out, there was no
ABBA as such; instead, there was the barely pronounceable 'Björn, Benny,
Agnetha & Anni-Frid', and any band with that kind of name must be the kind
of band that is still wavering between a musical career and daytime jobs as
insurance salesmen and art dealers. And while on its own Ring Ring
stands as a decently realized pop record, in the context of major works to
come it looks seriously pale.
Technically, it does feature most of the usual
ABBA trademarks. All of the songs were written by Björn Ulvaeus and Benny
Andersson (with the exception of 'Disillusion', uniquely credited to Ulvaeus
and Agnetha Fältskog), most of the songs have somewhat captivating hooks
that have a weird way of sticking for unclear reasons, and many of the songs
have the two girls joining in classic powerhouse harmony of which nobody was
ever a better master than A & A.
Nevertheless, it is very clearly a record
hastily built up around one monster hit ('Ring Ring') and one mini-monster
semi-hit ('People Need Love'). The former isn't as melodically complex as the
hits that would ensue, and its emotional content is completely trivial ('ring ring,
why don't you give me a call' pretty much describes it all), but then no one
seemed to hold either argument against 'I Want To Hold Your Hand', which is
hardly that much more inspiring from purely compositional terms. What matters
is the powerful riff that drives the song and grabs you right at the very first
second, and the perfect transmission of joy in the chorus. It's dumb, but it
works.
It works so well, in fact, that in comparison
the rest of the tracks end up six inches smaller. The selections are the usual
ABBA kaleidoscope of a little sanitized rock'n'roll, a little faux vaudeville,
a little Swedish music hall, and more than an ounce of James Taylor- and Carly
Simon-like (soon to be Eagles-like) folk-pop; in short — just about everything
that the Knights of Good Taste are supposed to despise in public. This range
would never ever change, except for the addition of disco to the list in later
years; but the real problem is that the melodies are often half-baked, almost
kiddie-level so, and the lyrics, although never ABBA's forte, are particularly
blush-inducing. No one can seriously take a record with song titles like 'Nina,
Pretty Ballerina' or 'Me And Bobby And Bobby's Brother', unless they expressly
represent kitsch, but in this context they are taken quite literally — the
former song does indeed tell us about a ballerina, while the latter does tell
us about Bobby and Bobby's brother, and do you really want to know about
the kind of things they were engaging in with 'me'? Do you? Well, here goes: 'We
would play together climbing the apple tree'. Uh... okay then.
Another disadvantage is that Benny and
Björn sing too much; Björn in particular is taking the lead way more
frequently than good sense would have supposed him to. 'I Saw It In The Mirror',
for instance, may have worked better with the girls' voices, and so would other
numbers. I don't have anything in particular about Björn's voice, but I
always had the impression that his English singing was too tense and way too
straightforward for people to connect with it emotionally (of course, so was
Agnetha and Anni-Frid's, but they at least had the advantage of gorgeous
timbres and rarely matched power).
The resumé is all too simple: by 1973,
the former Hep Stars had not yet fully realized the perfect combination that
would take them to the top. They made a nice try, though. I would never dare to
use Ring Ring as fanbait — if you want to convert someone to the magic
of ABBA, even one of their disco hits would work better — but in retrospect, it
comes off as a somewhat respectable first stepping stone rather than a horrid
mutation of an album that it used to look like to me.
WATERLOO (1974)
1) Waterloo; 2) Sitting In The
Palmtree; 3) King Kong Song; 4) Hasta Mañana; 5)
My Mama Said; 6) Dance (While The Music Still Goes On); 7) Honey, Honey; 8) Watch
Out; 9) What About Livingstone; 10) Gonna Sing You My Lovesong; 11)
Suzy-Hang-Around; 12*) Waterloo (Swedish version).
This isn't a masterpiece, either. It may have
the benefit of being one of ABBA's most diverse albums: rearing for the
international market, the Swedes make stabs at just about every commercial
style of pop music currently in vogue, but, given their generally
"fluffy" disposition, predictably manage to connect with not more
than one or two.
For one thing, there is still a heavy overdose
of Björn on vocals: he dominates 'Sitting In The Palmtree' and
'Suzy-Hang-Around' and is also all over the place alongside the girls on a
whole pack of other numbers. I'm sure there are some major Björn fans out
there that are perfectly happy about it, but it seems that the band eventually
wasn't, because already on the next album the gentleman got seriously cut down
in the singing department. His strength is in the writing; let us not waste it
on areas where it is bound to be wasted.
But the major problem is, of course, that
around half of the album is devoted to stylistic deviations that are clumsy
and awkward. Glam and shock rock was at its public peak around 1973-74, and
it's understandable that the band couldn't resist the temptation to go
"heavy" and "theatrical" with numbers like 'King Kong Song'
and 'Watch Out'; yet they are neither emotionally resonant nor hilarious — in
fact, 'King Kong Song' gives me the impression of a typically bad kiddie song
at a typically cheesy kiddie festival, while 'Watch Out' tries to sound
"scary" but doesn't even reach Alice Cooper level.
Other songs just don't feel focused enough —
'What About Livingstone' is given a "big" sound and
"important" lyrics as if it were making a serious social statement,
but it isn't; their experiments with country-rock and ska are not very
convincing; and their vision of dance music, at this point, still reminds one
of the overwrought, generic sound of bad Italian Europop ('My Mama Said'). All
of these songs are memorable, in a way, but their melodic power is not yet
enough to override the crap factor.
So the record rolls on on the strength of its
hit singles: 'Waterloo', the song that made ABBA in European public conscience,
and arguably the best ever song to win Eurovision; 'Honey Honey', the most
overtly erotic song that the band recorded (the girls' voices drip so much with
sex on here that, at one point, I used to indignantly dismiss the song as
unsuitable for their generally more restrained style, but then it makes no
sense to put down 'Honey Honey' while at the same time praising Madonna's
debut, does it?); and 'Hasta Mañana', a Swedish-only chart-topper with
Agnetha's angelic sweetness all over it. 'Dance (While The Music Still Goes
On)' and 'Gonna Sing You My Lovesong' are also prime ABBA, showing that by
1974, they'd already fully mastered their classic style — they simply weren't
too sure that this was to be their classic style, or that the best
choice for them would be to stick exclusively to their classic style.
For all the good stuff, this does deserve a thumbs up, yet it is still very clearly a
hit-and-miss record hastily built up on the heels of 'Waterloo'; and 'Waterloo'
isn't even in my Top 10 of hit ABBA singles — its over-the-top Wagnerian
bravado does not compare well with all those later classics that put more
emphasis on romanticism and sentiment than on the pomp-and-stomp. Which is not
to say that 'Waterloo' shouldn't be counted, all the same, as Eurovision's most
glorious moment, or that any Europop lover should stay away from this album
just because it features lyrics like 'This is the King Kong song, won't you
sing along?' (For the record, I did catch myself singing along to 'Honey Honey'
one day — that's when I knew there was nothing left in store for me, not ever
again).
ABBA (1975)
1) Mamma Mia; 2) Hey, Hey Helen; 3) Tropical Loveland; 4) SOS; 5) Man In The
Middle; 6) Bang-A-Boomerang;
7) I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do,
I Do; 8) Rock Me;
9) Intermezzo No.1; 10) I've
Been Waiting For You; 11) So Long; 12*) Crazy
World; 13*) Medley: Pick A Bale Of Cotton/On Top Of Old Smokey/Midnight
Special.
It is tempting to speculate, based on these
album titles, that Ring Ring and Waterloo were just it — LPs
hastily brewed around their imperial single, but the self-titled ABBA is
where the band finally announces its explicit arrrival. (Or wouldn't that be
until Arrival?..)
No matter; whatever the historical reality, ABBA
is their first album where the force flows uninhibited and the atavistic
detours are all but eliminated. "All but" — meaning they still insert
a few oddball tracks here and there that break up the pop bliss by simply standing
there and being highly questionable in everyone's faces. I am speaking mostly
of the Björn-led numbers: 'Rock Me' is awkward in its attempt to blend
rock star pathos and sexist lyrics with a toothless music hall arrangement
(well, any song that is called 'Rock Me' but fails to do so could be called
awkward), and 'Man In The Middle', despite showing us that Benny really has a
way with those Stevie Wonder-like funky clavinets, is equally unconvincing as a
piece of social criticism — which, again, goes to show that ABBA are always at
their worst when they're trying to imitate someone from the rock/funk idiom.
But if you just judge these innocent — still
catchy, by the way — bits of fluff as inertia-born relics from the age of Waterloo,
the rest of the songs are power pop heaven. Or "Europop heaven",
provided the reader takes offense at the "power pop" label being
applied equally to the likes of ABBA and, uh, Big Star. Then again, no: ABBA
is quite a few steps away from what we typically call "Europop" and
equate with some generic canzone Napoletana played on cheap keyboards in
a disco arrangement. It is, in fact, Benny and Björn's biggest achievement
that they managed to step over that limitation, and instead produce a brand of
pop that would only superficially be "Euro" (mostly when it came to
guitar and keyboard tones), but, in fact, be based much more on a unique
synthesis of American mainstream pop, classical influences, and such modern
trends as glam and art-rock (later, alas, to be substituted for disco).
None of these songs have any deep meaning — in
fact, they're all rose-colored and tailored so as to appeal to the most
undemanding segments of the market, and I love this, deeply. I love this
because if all mainstream music that appeals to undemanding audiences
were like this — yesterday, today, tomorrow, doesn't matter — the world would
have been a far more interesting and far less irritating place to live in. Few
songs of the Seventies convey the pure, simple, naïve feeling of
overwhelming joy better than 'Bang-A-Boomerang' or 'Mamma Mia'; few display
operatic, but sincere emotion sweeter than 'I've Been Waiting For You'; and
fewer still make the heavy riffage of glam rock put on such a cheery attitude
as the slow-moving 'Hey Hey Helen' or the fast-boppin' 'So Long'. And then
there's 'S.O.S', which even Pete Townshend is known to have praised as a great
piece of music.
Where, normally, a typical pop song waits for
the chorus to deliver its main hook, Benny and Björn have explicitly set
themselves the standard of around three main hooks per song, so that no
one has to wait for thirty seconds of mediocrity to be awarded with fifteen seconds
of prize value. 'S.O.S.' is perhaps the best illustration to this approach —
Benny's simple, instantly recognizable keyboard intro would be enough on its
own to make the tune somewhat worthwhile, but then there's the plaintive verse
melody, played out by Agnetha with the most rueful countenance, the acoustic
guitar-led first part of the chorus, and the dark, almost Gothic-like key
change for the second part. None of this is technically difficult, but genius
shouldn't be.
Thus, after two false, if promising, starts, ABBA
firmly establishes the formula and shows that the men in the band have finally
attuned their antennae in the 100% perfect position, while the women have
blossomed into the perfect vocal surrounding for these antennae. And if the
brain is, as usual, a little cautious about praising, without reservation, this
kind of "safe", "glossy", "mainstream" music,
the heart seems to have no problem with it whatsoever. Besides, what harm can a
little ABBA-loving do to an organism that has already assimilated Zappa and
Zeppelin? Cheer up and put your thumbs up
along with me.
PS. The newest reissue of the album adds one
uninteresting song of Ring Ring caliber ('Crazy World'), but also the
oddest thing ABBA ever did — an ABBA-style medley of three old folk standards,
including even 'Pick A Bale Of Cotton'. I hesitate to say it's good, but
it certainly sounds like nothing else and deserves to be heard for that fact
alone.
ARRIVAL (1976)
1) When I Kissed The Teacher;
2) Dancing Queen; 3) My Love, My Life; 4) Dum Dum Diddle; 5) Knowing Me, Knowing You;
6) Money, Money, Money;
7) That's Me; 8) Why Did It Have To Be Me;
9) Tiger; 10) Arrival;
11*) Fernando; 12*)
Happy Hawaii.
Another perfect title for ABBA's first of two
perfect albums in a row. "Perfect", here, does not necessarily mean
"beautiful" or "great" or even "timeless" —
simply that, as far as the record's goals and ambitions are concerned, they are
satisfied with perfect perfection. On Arrival, there is no
"filler"; not a single note is, in fact, out of place. Huge (and
well-deserved) hits alternate with lesser numbers in a way that's respectful
for the latter and profitable for the former. And, by 1976, ABBA were finally
in full control of their bodily functions when it came to songwriting.
Even if I hated this particular form of glossy
Euro-pop — and, normally, I do, because I have no choice — I would still
be forced to admit that the guys who wrote these melodies were no ordinary
hackmen. Ordinary hackmen do not usually make their verses as memorable as
their choruses, and they do not strive to get their middle eights to sound like
entirely different mini-compositions gracefully wedged in between the verses.
When you've settled in, you start noticing that
Benny and Björn's hooks, particularly the ones they employ on the hits —
like the piano runs in 'Money, Money, Money' or 'Dancing Queen' — are extremely
simple, sort of nursery rhyme level-simple (hardly a coincidence that one of
the songs, 'Dum Dum Diddle', basically is a nursery rhyme), and that may
make you ashamed of falling for these melodies instead of, let's say, Keith
Jarrett. My advice would be to fuck it. There is a time for the beauty of Keith
Jarrett, and then there's a time for the admirable simplicity — and efficacy —
of 'Money money money, must be funny in a rich man's world'.
They certainly could have employed (what with
all the money that'd started rolling in) a better set of lyricists. The slightly
on-the-edge "high school giggle" of 'When I Kissed The Teacher' and
the explicitly and obviously grim "depression" of 'Knowing Me,
Knowing You' (their first 'parting' song, foreshadowing the band's personal
problems to come) are probably the only tunes on here that could scramble for
at least a C+ on the Singer-Songwriter Scale of the decade; everything else
ranges from the thoroughly trite to the unintentionally hilarious ('Dig in the
dancing queen' is quite notorious, but I'd say that the cake is taken by 'And
if I meet you, what if I eat you?' from 'Tiger'). However, I have seen people
dissing these lyrics as if this somehow discredited the whole experience — and
some of these were the same people who, the very next moment, would begin
colorfully headbanging to AC/DC.
In terms of arrangements, Arrival and The
Album are, in between them, the best illustrations of the default ABBA
sound after they'd stripped away all the shortcomings, but before becoming derailed
with the disco wave. Layers of acoustic guitars, usually, with a simple or
electric piano accompaniment, and moderate usage of electric guitars and
strings and, sometimes, accordeons, reflecting Andersson's Swedish folk music
influences. In the end, it is stuck somewhere in between the opposing poles of
hard rock/power pop, the heights of which they never even try to scale, and the
American folk-rock scene, which some of the songs clearly resemble, but
regularly trump in terms of sheer pop energy (after all, Arrival is not a
meditative album à la James Taylor — it's dance music, pure and simple).
As a result, the songs seem quite lively even
today, and show plenty of soul from under the gloss. For many, the album peaks
at the end, when the incompetent lyrics fade away and the title track greets us
with its heavenly waves of Nordic melody — a choral mantra of such bliss that
even Mike Oldfield could not resist from covering it. Following the general
line, 'Arrival', like everything else, is not a technically demanding piece —
basically just one melodic line brushing against you over and over again, but every
good band needs an anthemic mantra to its name, and 'Arrival' has a good chance
of making the shortlist of candidate melodies to welcome earthly saints to the
gates of Heaven (at least in the "pop" category).
Special honourable mention: 'Why Did It Have To
Be Me', arguably the best Björn-sung number in the catalog, blissful
vaudeville which begins as if they were painfully trying to disguise it as
rock'n'roll, but then just drops all the pretense altogether in favour of the
fat brass riff and the pompous chorus delivered by Frida-on-Fire (her campy
punch onstage in the version in ABBA: The Movie is so grotesque that it
has to be seen to be disbelieved). It simply embodies everything about the band
that you might want to consider good, and everything that you might want to consider
bad, if you still have any idea of what these words mean. I do not pretend that
I do, yet I am certain that Arrival will go on finding admirers until
the day we're done with as the human race, and, in keeping with that, I gladly
put my thumbs up.
THE ALBUM (1977)
1) Eagle; 2) Take A Chance On Me; 3) One Man, One Woman; 4) The Name Of The Game; 5)
Move On; 6) Hole In Your
Soul; 7) Thank You For
The Music; 8) I Wonder (Departure); 9) I'm A Marionette.
"Getting serious" is not a concept
that works well with ABBA. In fact, once ABBA and Arrival had
firmly put them up on the big screen, it is hard to imagine how it would have
been at all possible for them to "get serious". Start donning black
leather? Teach Björn the essentials of chainsaw buzz guitar? Hire Lou
Reed as a lyricist? Recast the girls as Debbie Harry lookalikes? Do all these
things at once — and come out as the ultimate clowns in the entertainment?
Naturally, they did not resort to anything of
that type. And still The Album manages to be that one ABBA record which
even the professional haters might somewhat appreciate: sacrificing none of the
trademarks of their classic mid-1970s sound, it injects a few extra elements
that suggest going beyond cheap entertainment — and, might, in fact, indirectly
be responsible for the fact that the band's legacy has so far remained above
ground. Who knows: if it weren't for 'Eagle' and 'I'm A Marionette', we might
not be listening to 'Honey Honey' and 'Mamma Mia' today.
Just like Arrival, this next record is
almost frighteningly consistent — all the more amazing considering the band
were superstars now, jet planes and megatouring and parties and all. Its one
and only attempt at straightahead rocking ('Hole In Your Soul') is, as usual,
questionable — certainly catchy and exciting, but there is always something
cringeworthy in the lines 'there's gotta be rock'n'roll to fill the hole in
your soul' if the song that contains them is not rock'n'roll at all. But
other than that, each song nails its purpose, and quite a few of these
purposes are well worth knowing.
At the heart of the album is its
"mini-musical", 'The Girl With The Golden Hair', dedicated to the
undying issue of the ups and downs of show-business. The innocent and charming
young heroine happens to be musically endowed ('Thank You For The Music'), gets
whisked away from her little hometown by the temptations of showbiz ('I
Wonder'), is sucked into the paranoid whirlwind of the entertainment machine
('Get On The Carousel'; for some reason the song never made it onto the album,
but can be seen and heard performed, e. g., in ABBA: The Movie), and
finally realizes that she has become a helpless victim of the monster — but, of
course, it is too late already ('I'm A Marionette').
The subject is as old as show business itself,
but nobody forced the band to go in for all the dark overtones, and for that
they deserve a bit of praise; what matters most, though, is the excellence of
the music throughout. 'Thank You For The Music', like it or not, is an anthem
for the ages, bound to be treasured by sissies around the world just like 'We
Will Rock You' is treasured by all the tough guys (and it is advisable to check
out the silly cutesy cover version by the Carpenters — who had their share of
admirable covers, but totally missed the boat on this one — just to see
whatever makes the original so great in the first place); 'I Wonder' is not a
favourite, but works well as a solid Broadway-style sendup; and 'I'm A
Marionette', ABBA's grimmest offering so far, shows that the girls can pull off
a convincing 'desperate plea for help'-style song even in spite of all the
Swedish accent. Do not miss Janne Schaffer's exquisite guitar battle with the
strings arrangement during the lengthy instrumental section, either.
This final three song-kicker is not even the
best stretch on the album, though. The biggest shock comes at the beginning,
when 'Eagle' welcomes you with its swelling synth blast and mountainous sound
— first and last time the band starts off an album with something that rises
high above an effective, but superficial pop hook. 'Flying high, high, I'm a
bird in the sky' does not look that great when it's on paper, but few songs I
have heard in my life really capture that feel any better with their musical
arrangement. The acoustic guitars, the pounding majestic synth riff, the
post-psychedelic electric guitar trimmings, the soaring vocals, no other ABBA
song does the job of transporting you somewhere else that effectively.
Perhaps 'Tropical Loveland' did conjure images of hot beaches and papayas, but
what's that next to snowy peaks and heights and swooping up and down along with
the torrents of trippy electric licks, and looking down at the world from the
stratosphere? This is ABBA's masterpiece.
They could have instead chosen to open
the album with 'Take A Chance On Me' — a song that, with its clever usage of
the title as the main rhythmic basis for itself, represents further progression
over the 'Mamma Mia' approach. Or with 'The Name Of The Game', possibly their
best hit in the 'multi-part mini-suite' category. Or with 'Move On', another
whirwind-like anthem whose la-la-las are impossible to forget upon first
listen. Or even with 'One Man One Woman', the album's most lyrically
revealing moment where Frida lets you in on some of the boy-girl tensions
within the band before concluding that 'it's never too late for changing' —
optimistic, aren't they? — and gracefully ending ABBA's most underrated ballad
in the entire catalog.
But they opened it with 'Eagle', and that was a
clear signal that the band did try to "grow", if not in overall image
or lyrics quality, then at least in terms of complexity, inventiveness, and raw
emotion. No matter how much I listen to the song or the album, I can't help
admiring all the little tricks and touches that are all over the place. For me,
this is unquestionably ABBA's highest point — subsequent records never managed
to even begin matching it in terms of exploration (with the possible exception
of The Visitors, an album whose "interestingness", however,
does not catch up with its lack of consistency). In fact, this just might be
the highest point of 1970's "Europop" as a whole — one of the few
reasons that prevent us from forgetting the thing ever existed.
VOULEZ-VOUS (1979)
1) As Good As New; 2) Voulez-Vous; 3) I Have A Dream; 4) Angel Eyes; 5) The King Has Lost His Crown;
6) Does Your
Mother Know; 7) If It Wasn't
For The Nights; 8) Chiquitita;
9) Lovers (Live A Little
Longer); 10) Kisses Of
Fire; 11*) Lovelight; 12*) Summer Night City.
As if ABBA needed yet one more proof of their
being the least cool band on the planet, they finally hit disco at the exact
same time that most cool people were starting to shrug it off. Before Saturday
Night Fever, disco was a silly, but semi-hip trend that was really looked
upon as just one more step in the evolution of R'n'B and funk; after Saturday
Night Fever, it became the curse of all nations, and that was when ABBA
jumped on the bandwagon.
The first sign of change to come was 'Summer
Night City', a "preview" single from 1978 that announced the start
of ABBA's invasion of disco club territory. Almost arrogantly, it downplayed
the strength of both the girls' voices and Benny's instrumental skills:
the singing is mostly 'hushed' and the keyboards are content with beating out
the rhythm, with disco bass taking center stage and the arrangement completely
focused on capturing the heated atmosphere of your local disco bar. Had it come
just a wee bit earlier, John Travolta might have had lots of fun doing his
moves to it. As memorable as it is sleazy, 'Summer Night City' is that one
train stop along the ABBA ride where one might consider getting off — or not.
Me, I distinctly remember hating Voulez-Vous
as the record that set a clear demarcating line between early, peak-level ABBA
with their mixture of classical, progressive, and Europop influences, and
late ABBA with stereotypical disco bass, rudimentary keyboard hooks, and a
conscious attempt to sex-up their image — which works about as well as an
attempt on the part of the Catholic church to canonize Madonna (Ciccone, that
is) for charity and piousness. And for someone whose early affectuation with ABBA
was primarily based on their image (more importantly, their music) in ABBA:
The Movie, it is only understandable that Voulez-Vous will at first
feel like a wholesale transfusion of an incompatible blood type.
On the other hand, there is no denying that,
with The Album, the band's old style had reached a point where they were
already unable to top themselves — logically, they should either have disbanded
or reinvented themselves; and how, in 1979, could a pop band hunting for
further chart success not reinvent itself around disco? Nohow. Disco dumbs down
genius, it's true, but it is not a reason in itself to forsake genius, and
besides, one cannot live on nothing but masterpieces.
It is also untrue that Voulez-Vous is that
primitive musically. Some of its non-hits are just as interesting, at least
from a technical point of view, as the band's non-disco legacy. For instance,
'Lovers (Live A Little Longer)', with its tricky time signatures and vocal
counterpoints, is all but generic; it may even turn off a jaded ABBA fan or two
for being so rough around the corners, but it is clear that Benny and
Björn gave the song a good workover and made it intentionally experimental
(in a relative ABBA way, of course) and confusing; 'acid disco', some call it —
a sharp contrast with the clearly fillerish 'Kisses Of Fire', which, with its
primitive, bland chorus, was probably just written at the last moment to round
out the running time.
The hooks also run strong on the hits — the
title track, one of the darkest, bitterest numbers they ever did, which
probably explains why it hit No. 80 on the Billboard; and 'Does Your Mother
Know', one of the tritest, silliest numbers they ever did, which probably
explains why it hit No. 19 on the Billboard. Did Björn really need
to lecture his audience on the dangers of fan worshipping and sex with minors?
I am sure he must have received quite a few offers from 12-year olds, but it is
highly unlikely that a song like 'Does Your Mother Know' could have fulfilled
the purpose of stopping them. In fact, it was probably the opposite, as you
can easily see by watching the video of the Wembley concert where he is
singing the words right in front of an audience of 12-year olds... and they're
loving it.
Apart from that, the record is not all disco;
the songs generally lack the production lushness of The Album, featuring
fewer overdubs and less orchestration, which is why it gives the overall
impression of a "club record", but certainly the anthemic 'I Have A
Dream' (Frida at her best, although I am hardly a fan of such choral
pomposity), the folksy 'Chiquitita', and the fast-tempo pop rocker 'Angel Eyes'
have nothing to do with disco, nor does the overlooked mini-gem 'The King Has
Lost Crown'. Most of them do seem a little repetitive and "economical"
in terms of musical ideas compared to past successes, though. Perhaps the band
members just had to spend more time sorting out their own personal problems
(Björn and Agnetha, in particular, were getting divorced), and this left
fewer precious moments to embed in more distinct middle eights.
Voulez-Vous is, by all means, a letdown. But unless you just cannot stomach disco
at all, there is no reason to think of it as a catastrophe; rather a slightly
disappointing, but arguably inevitable reinvention. Most of the tunes still
range from endearing to likeable (sure I hate the gist of 'Mother', but can I
resist that big fat chg-chg-chg-chg-chg-chg-chg that opens it? Not on your
life!), and on the strength of that the heart wrenches out a thumbs up, while the brain is still able to
appreciate the clever intricacies of 'Lovers', 'Voulez-Vous' and some of the
rest.
SUPER TROUPER (1980)
1) Super Trouper; 2) The Winner Takes It All;
3) On And On And On;
4) Andante, Andante; 5) Me
And I; 6) Happy New
Year; 7) Our Last Summer; 8) The Piper; 9) Lay All Your Love On Me; 10) The
Way Old Friends Do; 11*) Gimme!
Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight); 12*) Elaine; 13*) Put On Your White
Sombrero.
ABBA reached their disco peak not on Voulez-Vous,
but with 'Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)', a monstrous hit
released in October 1979 and still remembered fondly, as evidenced by Madonna's
blatant sampling of its main riff for her incomparably weak 'Hung Up' single
twenty six years later. The song gives us ABBA doing their absolute immaculate
best to sound their absolute immaculate worst — the hookline is as utterly dumb
as it is unforgettable, the chorus as thoroughly robotic as it is danceable.
And the key question remains unanswered: why is it so that Agnetha Faltskog
needs someone specifically after midnight? Surely this cannot mean... oh
my God...
There is still some straightahead disco on Super
Trouper, the last of the band's commercially stellar records, but most of
its upbeat numbers lead into new areas of dance-pop, replacing disco bass with
less funky, more electronic-style grooves. They have changed their style —
again — not necessarily for the best, since they seemed more humane and lovable
when the sound was a bit more loose, with acoustic guitars and shuffling beats
rather than synth-and-metronome-packed creations like 'Super Trouper'. But this
is not to say that they lost any of their creativity — they simply may
have sacrificed a little bit of it, to fit in with the worsening times.
What's interesting about Super Trouper
is its emotional tug of war. By now, the days of shiny happy pappy (such as the
band experienced around 1974-75) are long gone, and, with the band members'
personal lives in complete disarray, the soap opera is perfectly well reflected
on disc. Yet, as commercial craftsmen, they are also well aware that the buying
public will never want their ABBA spouting nothing but depression, and the
scathing bitterness is so seriously mixed up with "fun and joy" that
only Benny and Björn's seemingly endless stream of great melodies saves
the record from utter confusion.
Case in point: not everyone would dare to place
the album's most optimistically resplendent number — the Frida-led title track
— back-to-back with its gloomiest opus, the Agnetha-led 'Winner Takes It All',
all about you-know-what. The former is instantly memorable, major key, light,
angel-style with its brilliantly arranged vocal parts; the latter is «faux-minor»
(major, but still with a «gloomy» tinge to it), dark romantic, winding up high
with a plea for help rather than out of an overwhelming feeling of joy. But
both work equally well, despite the relative melodic simplicity of each.
The biggest disco leftover is even darker than
'Voulez-Vous': 'Lay All Your Love On Me' is 'S.O.S.' for the new generation,
transmitting its panicky atmosphere through metronomic dance beats and
electronically-altered down-crashing vocals at the end of each verse rather
than more, shall we say it, "classical" means; but, again, it works.
A whole album of tunes like that one might have been unbearable, but to see it jammed
in between the folk stylization of 'The Piper' and the anthemic closer 'The Way
Old Friends Do' is quite acceptable.
The biggest laugh is also unforgettable: 'On
And On And On' shamelessly steals its major keyboard and vocal hook from the
Beach Boys' 'Do It Again', but if the latter, when it came out in 1969, was
utterly nostalgic, an almost desperate calling out to the happy carefree days
of yore, 'On And On And On' transforms it into something totally futuristic,
announcing a new age of dance-pop rather than yearning for a past age of it.
Still, the overall message is about as lightweight as it always used to be:
'Keep on rocking baby till the night is gone, on and on and on'.
But if you still prefer to do it like they used
in the old times, right after 'On And On And On' you get 'Andante, Andante' —
for all we know, this is basically the same meaning and the same message,
except you get in an old-fashioned waltz atmosphere (well, it's not waltz
technically, but it gets you waltzing all the same), with just a few gracious
electric guitar licks to give it a new shiny coat. It's as stately and refined
as 'On And On And On' is reckless. You let your hair down, then you pick it
back up. That's the way life goes.
All in all, this is quite an exciting journey
of an album. Yes, it is somewhat colder and more devoid of living instruments
and their quirky behaviour than I'd like it to be, but it compensates for that
with more maturity (there are even some lyrical passages that are not
half-bad!) and even more diversity than is usual for these guys, and for that,
I'd have to consider it their finest moment in the late, post-1977 stages of
their career. Thumbs up from every beat
of my heart and every impulse of my brain.
THE VISITORS (1981)
1) The Visitors; 2) Head Over
Heels; 3) When All Is Said And Done; 4) Soldiers; 5) I Let The Music Speak; 6) One Of Us; 7) Two For The
Price Of One; 8) Slipping
Through My Fingers; 9) Like An Angel Passing Through My Room; 10*) Should I
Laugh Or Cry; 11*) You Owe Me One; 12*) The Day Before You Came;
13*) Cassandra; 14*)
Under Attack.
The Visitors was not necessarily intended to be ABBA's last album, but, given that
both marriages were in tatters by the time it came along, and also given a
major shift in commercial tastes that prevented the band from being able to
combine its musical vision (yes, they had a vision) with further strings
of number one hits, I am pretty sure they must have felt some premonition.
Already the next year, when they went into the studio once again, they found
themselves incapable of putting together an LP's worth of material. With The
Visitors, the effort did work, but the results were more than strange.
In fact, I remember actively hating the record
upon hearing it for the first time — a shattering anti-climax to Super
Trouper, everything dim and wobbly and lacking in polish, and who in the
world needs an ABBA album without polish? Also, objective assessment would
state that this is the record that has the least share of proverbial ABBA
classics — the biggest and, in fact, the only hit from it was the bitter pop
song 'One Of Us', and even that was sort of a minor achievement even in the
face of their earliest successes like 'Ring Ring' and 'Waterloo'. And who in
the world needs an ABBA album without hits?
But there is also a different kind of opinion,
and I have been slowly working my way from the former right up to the latter.
That opinion states that The Visitors is the only ABBA album that was
not, in fact, targeted at all at hit-making; that Benny and Björn,
consciously or subconsciously aware that their days as prime hit-makers were
at an end, simply let their musical instincts have their way without paying too
much attention to the market, and that the songs on here were written and
performed so as to reflect the kind of things the people in the band were
really going through at the time. Not that ABBA ever lacked a streak of
sincerity — from 'One Man, One Woman' to 'The Winner Takes It All' you can
observe it quite transparently — but The Visitors is the one and only
ABBA album coming straight from the heart.
Therefore, it is only natural that it can take
a little more time to sink in; its hooks are not as painfully obvious, its
potential gloss and shine mostly sacrificed to give way for a slightly more complex
and meaningful melodic approach. Even the lyrics have matured: 'Slipping
Through My Fingers', for instance, tells a similar "family trouble"
story to 'Hey Hey Helen' (one could, in fact, see the mother-daughter split in
'Fingers' as a natural sequel to the wife-husband split in 'Helen'), but in
words that have been chosen with far better care and intelligence.
The weirdness of The Visitors, however,
is nowhere as evident as it is in the title track, which some people keep
mistaking for a tale of a strange encounter with alien beings — probably because
of all the odd sci-fi type arrangements at the beginning, as well as the title
itself — but which seems, in fact, to have been written about the persecution
of dissidents in the Eastern Europe bloc under Soviet domination: ABBA's one
and only overtly political song. It takes some gall to take such a serious
subject and arrange it as a fast-tempo catchy pop number ('Now I hear them moving...'),
but the slightly paranoid tinge of the melody atones for that, and, besides, in
the long run the song's most bewitching part is its opening — a disturbing
polyphony of synthesizer tones with Frida's ghost vocals droning in the
background: 'I hear the doorbell ring and suddenly the panic takes me...'.
Pretty unsettling for a first impression of the world's leading pop band's
latest record; no wonder the public did not have the courage to buy into it.
There is plenty of disturbance and paranoia
elsewhere as well. 'Soldiers' makes some odd allusions to some upcoming
apocalypse, panicky singing and menacing guitar and a strangely "cheerful"
chorus that only makes things even more suspicious. 'Head Over Heels',
sarcastic character assassination over a dark retro-pop melody. And then
there's all the divorce songs, of course: 'One Of Us', 'When All Is Said And
Done', 'I Let The Music Speak' (well, the latter is not technically a divorce
song, but its main message — trying to find consolation in music without much
success — is very much in line with the other two).
But this is still ABBA, and all the paranoia is
well-compensated for with elements of beauty: the melancholic march of 'Let it
be a joke, let it be a smile...' in 'I Let The Music Speak', the graceful
chorus resolution in 'Head Over Heels', the controlled, but burning desperation
in 'one of us is crying, one of us is lying...', the humble majesty of
'Slipping Through My Fingers' — all of this is priceless, and its combination
with elements of the unusual only raises the stakes.
The album's only misfire, as far as I am
concerned, is the Björn-sung 'Two For The Price Of One', a rather
forgettable and lyrically lame tale of a goofy attempt at sexual encounter.
You'd think that by now they would have learned to leave all the
Björn-sung numbers off the record at the last minute, but then, I guess,
life would be so much duller if we did not have at least one permanent flaw in
our genetic structure. Fortunately, we live in the days when we can all make
our own album, and my recommendation is to swap this tune with the excellent
B-side 'Should I Laugh Or Cry', much more suitable for the overall tone of the
album.
It goes without
saying that the album gets an assured thumbs up
judgement on all sides, even though it took me some time to become certified.
Whether the existence of The Visitors does guarantee ABBA a late-coming
blast of "artistic respectability" or not is up to debate. Some might
argue that "artistic respectability" is firmly reserved for the likes
of the Soft Machine or at least Elvis Costello, and The Visitors does
not even begin to touch Elvis Costello. Others might argue from the opposite
side — that ABBA were only as good as they were dumb, and any attempt at
seriousness on their part would smash their artistic integrity the same way
that the career of KISS was undermined by Music From 'The Elder', etc.
But these are brainy judgements, while ABBA's melodies were always directed
primarily at the heart — and in this department, The Visitors does not
fail, although it requires a little more time to succeed.
ABBA LIVE (1986)
1) Dancing Queen; 2) Take A
Chance On Me; 3) I Have A
Dream; 4) Does Your
Mother Know; 5) Chiquitita;
6) Thank You For The Music;
7) Two For The Price Of
One; 8) Fernando; 9) Gimme
Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight); 10) Super Trouper; 11)
Waterloo; 12) Money Money Money; 13) The Name Of The Game/Eagle; 14) On And On And On.
ABBA quietly faded away in late 1982, each girl
going her own way — both Agnetha and Frida managed to pack a few more
international hits under the belt before settling down and mostly disappearing
from public view — and Benny and Björn still occasionally sticking
together, e. g. for the Tim Rice collaboration on the musical Chess and
other projects. Even with the recent revival of the band's popularity — most
lately illustrated by the intentional cheese of Mamma Mia the musical —
they have avoided the temptation to reunite; a wise decision, perhaps, since it
gives them an additional touch of class that most of their pop brethren could
only wish for.
In any case, the lack of new material has
ensured a small, but steady stream of from-the-vaults releases: small, because
the band members seemingly do not want to make every sneeze they ever recorded
public, but steady, because everybody wants to pay the bills. Chief among these
is the live album from 1986, an odd mix of tracks pulled from the Australian
tour of 1977 (which, by the way, is captured much more prominently and
excitingly in ABBA: The Movie), a London gig in 1979 (which, by the way,
is captured much more prominently and excitingly in ABBA: In Concert 1979),
and the Dick Cavett Meets ABBA TV special in 1981 (which, by the way, is
captured much more prominently and excitingly in the Dick Cavett Meets ABBA
TV special, provided you can get a high quality non-Youtube copy).
As things go, this one is clearly a
"memento" above all else. The intermingling of the band's 1977
"Eurofolk" sound with their 1979 disco image is not entirely
unauthentic (after all, they did intermingle that material in 1979), but the
sequencing is poor; the Cavett tunes, recorded in an entirely different
environment, do not fit in well with the rest; the mix is a far cry from the
gloss of the studio records, not to mention rumours of overdubs; and the idea
of arranging 'The Name Of The Game' and 'Eagle' as a medley is a bad
one, even if it belonged to the band members themselves.
Nevertheless, I am totally sure that ABBA
Live deserves its place under the sun and merits hearing even on the part
of non-diehard fans. Reason? Simple: it proves, once and for all, that ABBA were
a band, not just a soulless chemical concoction of Swedish record industry. As
you look through old footage of the band, you might get the impression that
they always lip-synched on camera, but that is mostly true of their videos and
innumerable TV appearances (not the Dick Cavett appearance, though);
for ticket-buying concert fans, everything was honest. Real instruments, real
singing, real kick-ass energy (in places).
Granted, like every band with primary emphasis
on pop perfection, ABBA were always studio-oriented, and for pure enjoyment,
you do not really need to add the "live" element (unless it is to
watch rather than to listen, but even there for each appetizing sight of the
girls wiggling their bottoms you get to stare at Björn's bare chest for
half a minute — oh, was that sexist? sorry — and let's not even mention the costumes).
None of these versions even begin to overtake their studio counterparts;
generally, the closer they are to reproducing the original, the better it comes
off, and while the girls are almost impeccable in that respect, the playing
suffers almost inevitably. Sometimes, for an extra touch of "stadium
rock" atmosphere, they let their real guitarist (not Björn, who
mostly just used his instrument on stage to look cool) fly off with an extended
solo ('Does Your Mother Know', 'Eagle'); he is highly competent, but no Dave
Gilmour, and his well-crafted instrumental breaks in the studio are far more
memorable and inspirational than the improvised guitar heroics on these live
takes.
But, as I was saying, this is not the point: if
there is a noble point to the album, it is merely to show you that the
band generally did a good job on stage, and did not hide behind pre-recorded
tapes and lip-synching, unlike most teenage idols of today. If anything, it is
just one more reminder of how truly awesome, from a technical point at least,
the Agnetha-Frida duet had really been at the band's peak — there is really not
a second on this album that would make me cringe from a displaced note or
discordant harmonizing. Looking at it from this side, I emerge with a resolute thumbs up, even if the cash-in motives behind the
release are more than plain. Now, perhaps, a good way of redeeming executive
greed would be to retire the album from the catalog and replace it with a
couple of remixed and remastered complete shows from "the Golden Era"
— including, among other things, a complete performance of the 'Girl With
Golden Hair' mini-musical. What are you waiting for, industry people? Now that
Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan have reignited the old flames, here is your fat
chance of combining common good with personal gain.
LIVE AT WEMBLEY (1979; 2014)
1) Gammal Fäbodpsalm; 2)
Voulez-Vous; 3) If It Wasn't For The Nights; 4) As Good As New; 5) Knowing Me,
Knowing You; 6) Rock Me; 7) Chiquitita; 8) Money, Money, Money; 9) I Have A
Dream; 10) Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight); 11) SOS; 12) Fernando;
13) The Name Of The Game; 14) Eagle; 15) Thank You For The Music; 16) Why Did
It Have To Be Me; 17) Intermezzo No. 1; 18) I'm Still Alive; 19) Summer Night
City; 20) Take A Chance On Me; 21) Does Your Mother Know; 22) Hole In Your
Soul; 23) The Way Old Friends Do; 24) Dancing Queen; 25) Waterloo.
Oh wouldn't you know it — almost thirty years
later, the dudes return to bring an originally half-assed job to perfection.
The reason why, even after ABBA's popularity had resurged and their classic
hits proved to stand the test of time, they waited so long to put out a proper
live album from the vaults, is that the band members themselves never saw ABBA
as a truly great live band, and had largely shyed away from extensive touring
even at their peak (it is no coincidence that the majority of «live»
performances of ABBA from various TV shows that you can catch on YouTube these
days are actually lip-synched). Yet the botched legacy of ABBA Live, sewn together from various sources and cursed with poor
mixing and electronic drum overdubs, must have finally pushed Benny and
Björn into unearthing the old tapes, and ultimately, as part of the band's
40th anniversary celebrations, they settled upon the November 10, 1979 show
from the Wembley Arena to be released in its entirety, «as was», with nothing
but a proper remastering procedure to separate us from the alleged truth.
Since it was the Wembley shows that also
constituted the bulk of ABBA Live, a
significant chunk of the tracks overlaps between the two releases (and I am
talking exact same performances, not just the same songs) — but even the most
basic comparison shows the new release to be far superior, with a much cleaner,
juicier mix and no silly electronic doctoring. In fact, it pretty much renders ABBA Live expendable, with the
exception of the tracks from 1980 recorded at the Dick Cavett show performance
(and still historically important as ABBA's last live show). It is also a major
improvement on the equally eviscerated ABBA
In Concert video, also culled from the Wembley shows and largely giving us
snippets of the concert (less than half of the songs that were actually performed,
and some in abbreviated versions and interspersed with the usual crapola like
backstage chatter and fan ravings). Basically, it is the first and, so far,
only official document of a complete, authentic, uninterrupted ABBA show from
their peak period.
Okay, well, maybe not exactly «peak», because
we were still living in the disco era back then, and the band was busy
promoting Voulez Vous, which, let's
admit it, was their weakest offering in the entire 1975-82 period of pop glory
— precisely because of too much disco influence. So the setlist, as we now
learn, is quite heavy on tracks from that album (6 out of 10 songs), and I am
still not sure if these, clearly less polished and mechanical, versions of
songs like the title track and ʽAs Good As Newʼ actually improve on
the studio originals (by adding an element of natural roughness) or detract
from them (because these were songs whose intended impact depended on a complete avoidance of all roughness and on total
mechanical precision). In any case, this is a minor encumberance, but it also
reflects on the rest of the performances: classic songs from the pre-disco
years now have a shade of the «been through that, time to move on» spirit — a
feeling impossible to justify properly, but one that still makes me yearn for
a proper live release from, say, the Australian tour of 1977 (which, judging by
what we know from ABBA: The Movie,
was the true peak of ABBA as a live band).
Nevertheless, on the whole, it's a lot of fun.
Yes, many studio nuances inevitably get lost in the live setting, but the
crystal clear mix reveals a beautiful balance of technical precision and human
feeling in the singing — if anything, the girls in the band were working it
much harder on the stage than the guys (Björn was never a great guitarist,
and most of the complicated guitar parts are played by Lasse Wellander; Benny
gets his big break with ʽIntermezzo No. 1ʼ, but otherwise is mainly
just busy tracing out the basic melodic contour of the songs), never missing a
note and taking good care of all the parts that require special effort (such as
Agnetha's ear-piercing high B on ʽHole In Your Soulʼ). Special
mention should be made of: (a) ʽMoney Money Moneyʼ, with Frida and
Benny running rings around each other until an «angry» Frida retorts with
"It's my song!" and sets things straight; (b) ʽWhy Did It Have
To Be Meʼ, which gets a ʽKansas Cityʼ type of introduction to
prove they're playing rock'n'roll which they are not, but it's still hilarious;
(c) ʽI Have A Dreamʼ, performed with the assistance of a local
children's choir — cute to the point of almost puking, but I still cannot blame
them for rewarding the choir with an encore, since every kid deserves his/her
taste of encouragement for a job well done; (d) ʽThe Way Old Friends
Doʼ, receiving here a nice friendly preview with Benny's accordeon; (e) Lasse
Wellander's Rock God Guitar Solo on ʽEagleʼ, although that one has
already been discussed in the context of ABBA
Live (I think it's the exact same performance — and the guy had quite a
difficult job to perform, considering he had to do it with Frida and Agnetha
wrapping themselves around his legs, according to mainstream conventions of
«sexy» at the time).
Overall, the only thing that spoils the
experience a bit is the stage banter — there's nothing really bad I can say
about the performances, it is only the little things in between that show how
unaccustomed the band really was to arena-size performing (an example from
Frida: "I only want to ask you one question... WHAT DO YOU THINK OF OUR
BAND?" — uh, Frida, nobody really came there for your band, did they?). I also suppose that Björn's official
introduction of Agnetha as «the blond one» would not be looked upon with
benevolence by the feminist-oriented mindset of today, but, honestly, I suppose
he just did that because introducing her as «Agnetha» would be too boring, and
he just couldn't think of anything more inventive — thank God at least he did
not refer to her as «the blond one with the big bum» or something like that.
Bottomline: you can safely throw away your ABBA Live now and replace it with this,
far more comprehensive, document — although, while I certainly do not think
that ABBA deserve to have a large archival live catalog, I still think that
they owe us one more live release from the 1976-77 vaults to complete the
picture. Ten years from now? 50th anniversary? We'll be waiting; in the
interim, thumbs
up for this Wembley experience, anyway.
ADDENDA:
SOLO WORK
AGNETHA FÄLTSKOG
WRAP YOUR ARMS AROUND ME (1983)
1) The Heat Is On; 2) Can't
Shake Loose; 3) Shame; 4) Stay; 5) Once Burned, Twice Shy; 6) Mr. Persuasion;
7) Wrap Your Arms Around Me; 8) To Love; 9) I Wish Tonight Could Last Forever;
9) Man; 10) Take Good Care Of Your Children; 11) Stand By My Side.
To be perfectly precise, the solo career of
Agnetha Fältskog began as early as 1968 (yes, let us not forget that ABBA
were ultimately another product of the late Sixties), and she had released a
whoppin' four solo LPs before
submerging her personality in ABBA's collective identity. From what I have
heard, those records had their hits and misses, but since I am really not interested in carrying out a
highly detailed survey of everything that the ABBA people did on their own, and
also since most of these records were really only targeted at the local Swedish
market, we will concentrate on the post-ABBA, internationally oriented products
only.
People who are not major fans of the band, and
are only willing to tolerate them for their melodic skills, but cringe at the
production values, general aura, and visual image, will probably fall back in
horror at the very idea of looking
into the post-ABBA solo careers of any of its members, let alone the girls, who
never did anything but sing and dance. To some extent, they may be right — but
in reality, the worst thing about the international solo careers of both
Agnetha and Frida is that they had the bad luck to sprout in the Eighties, a
pretty rotten decade for commercial pop in general. On the other hand, both
ladies had solid musical tastes, and knew well enough what it is that separates
a well-written and creatively performed song from a hackjob.
Consider this: Agnetha's first post-ABBA LP was
produced by Mike Chapman, the driving force behind such cheeseball artists as
Sweet, Smokie, and Suzi Quatro, but also responsible for such late-1970s pop
classics as Blondie's Parallel Lines
and The Knack's debut — just the sort of guy you'd want by your side in order
to put the magic touch on a bunch of catchy, harmless pop songs. And
songwriting is all over the place: Agnetha herself takes credit for one song
only (ʽManʼ), collecting «tributes» from all sorts of collaborators,
the best known of whom is probably Russ Ballard (of Argent fame), and making
sure that it does not all sound like
ABBA. In fact, very few songs here sound like ABBA.
The big hit was ʽThe Heat Is Onʼ,
which is a little surprising, considering that it was not all that differently
arranged and sung from the original 1979 version by Noosha Fox — talk about the
importance of public image and proper promotion, although Chapman's production
does shed some of the disco-era gloss and goes instead for a slightly
Latin-influenced carnivalesque atmosphere, which is kind of appropriate for a
hedonistic tune about proper summer relaxation. Still catchy after all these
years, I guess, though admittedly way
too shallow even for the ABBA level; but if you have any feeling for «party
music» at all, this one's for you.
Diversity is the key, though, as the party
spirit of ʽHeatʼ is immediately followed by the slightly paranoid
spirit of the Ballard-penned ʽCan't Shake Looseʼ, which even managed
to chart in the generally ABBA-unfriendly United States. Its electronic
production dates it fairly accurately, but the vocal melody is undeniably
catchy, and the subject matter (unbeatable sexual attraction) has always been
right up Agnetha's alley anyway. Melodic slide guitar serves as a solid
heartstring-tugger on the dark pop of ʽOnce Burned, Twice Shyʼ;
ʽMr. Persuasionʼ is a spot-on retro Motown imitation, with Agnetha
doing a convincingly sexy imitation of young Diana Ross; and the pop reggae
rhythms of ʽTake Good Care Of Your Childrenʼ also lay the foundation
for a much better song than could be thought of based on the title — most such
songs are just sappy crap, but here the bluesy harmonica, the occasional odd
police whistle, and the deep background vocals add a pinch of suspense and even
impending danger.
The straightforward ballads are a different
kind of story: lacking the genius hooks of ABBA composers, they always run the
risk of being little other than generic mush. The title track, written by
Chapman himself, is way too deep in «Disney princess» territory; its vocal
melody, journeying across a tricky, challenging path, has some merit, but
should have been supported by something other than the old predictable «strings
of paradise». Agnetha's own ʽManʼ is a sincere attempt to write
something in the old ABBA style, and some of the vocal moves show that it may
have been unfair for Benny and Björn not to ever let the girls partage of
the songwriting credits; but the accompanying music, again, is completely
non-descript.
Still, on the whole this is a pleasant
surprise. Stereotypical male chauvinist thinking tends to regard Agnetha as the
«dumb blonde» and Frida as the «risky redhead», and it is true that, artistically,
Frida's solo debut was a little bit more intriguing, but the question here is
not whether these albums show you the meaning of life — the question is whether
you are guaranteed to fall asleep on the third song, as it happens with so much
generic pop muzak, and Wrap Your Arms
Around Me, despite its generally uneven quality, is still very far from
what I'd call a typically boring album. Besides, if you get the deluxe edition,
one of the bonus tracks is ʽIt's So Nice To Be Richʼ, a tune recorded
for a 1983 Swedish movie that has to count as one of the most hilariously
campy things to ever come out of the whole ABBA camp (sort of a spiritual
successor to ʽMoney Money Moneyʼ, only adapted to the Eighties'
style). Thumbs
up, definitely.
EYES OF A WOMAN (1985)
1) One Way Love; 2) Eyes Of A
Woman; 3) Just One Heart; 4) I Won't Let You Go; 5) The Angels Cry; 6) Click
Track; 7) We Should Be Together; 8) I Won't Be Leaving You; 9) Save Me (Why
Don't Ya); 10) I Keep Turning Off Lights; 11) We Move As One.
The proper way to go about reviewing this album
is sifting through the list of people who contributed to the songwriting. This
time around, perhaps spurred on by Agnetha's proven potential for commercial
success on her own, the array of contenders was really impressive: Elvis Costello (a self-proclaimed ABBA fan —
ʽOliver's Armyʼ, remember?), Jeff Lynne, Eric Stewart of 10cc (who
also produced the album), Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues, jazz guitarist
Phil Palmer, and even the songwriting core of the classic Asia team (Wetton and
Downes). Understandably, who could
resist the charms of that hot blonde ABBA chick? All she needed to do was leave
a recording of ʽI've Been Waiting For Youʼ on their answering
machine.
So far, so good. Now for the inauspicious news.
First, the contribution by Costello — pretty much the only artist of the lot to
have anything to do with «cutting edge» in contemporary music — was not used.
(Instead, it ended up recorded by Billy Bremner of Rockpile, and, sure enough,
it failed to chart — guess those music industry advisor people know their stuff
after all). I have no idea whether poor Elvis ended up shredding all of his
bedroom and bathroom ABBA posters, but in any case, the decision was a little symbolic: even if the song
was not all that great, the fact that Hayward and Stewart got the preference
over Costello meant that the lady did not feel comfortable about overstepping
the boundaries of «suave romance».
Second, by 1985 Eric Stewart had pretty much
squandered away his reputation, having made the transition from smartass
musical innovation to generic adult contemporary troubadouring (and in a year
from then, he would go on to produce one of the worst albums of Paul
McCartney's solo career — certainly not a coincidence). Of the two songs that
he contributes, ʽI Won't Be Leaving Youʼ is a predictably late
10cc-ish corny ballad, more fit for a Disney cartoon than a respectable pop
album, and ʽSave Meʼ is a predictably late 10cc-ish corny dance
rocker, more fit for a Weird Al satirical cover (if he could only find a hook
to latch onto, that is) than a... oh well, you'd have to have an original in
order to do a cover anyway, I guess.
Fortunately, we still have old Jeff to count
upon for salvation: his ʽOne Way Loveʼ is at least written with a nod
to the old Motown and the old ABBA, and has a fun, catchy melody, supported
with guitar jangle (in addition to pesky synths) and a sax outro. Hayward's
ʽAngels Cryʼ, like any song written by Hayward, is also written with
a complex vocal melody in mind, although I certainly wish they'd mixed Agnetha
in a better way, with the vocals more upfront and less personality-effacing
echo on them. On the other hand, the Asia song (ʽWe Move As Oneʼ) is
one of those big fat Asia anthems that has a lot of pomp, but not a lot of
interesting substance, and Agnetha lacks the big Wetton voice to make you fall
under the illusion that this whole grandiosity shenanigan really deserves its
poise.
Recapitulating, I conclude that out of all
suitors, Jeff Lynne is the most easily adaptable to take the lady's hand, but
if dark glasses and big beards put her off, Justin Hayward is the second best
candidate, whereas Wetton, Downes, and Eric Stewart should have been given the
boot right away — certainly they would at least deserve to catch the same train
as Costello. But actually, the best track on the entire album is probably
ʽClick Trackʼ (co-written by Jack Ince and Phil Palmer), an
unassuming pop rocker with sarcastic lyrics and a light, fun, not-give-a-damn
attitude, like a slightly more musically conservative Tom Tom Club or
something.
Bottomline is, the album's not awful, which is already quite an
achievement, given that the record could have been easily filled up with
run-of-the-mill power ballads and all sorts of «adult contemporary» crap.
Well, it does have a bit of each, but
the general idea — to gather contributions from different established
songwriters with different styles — was right, I think, because it at least
gives Eyes Of A Woman a flair of
unpredictability, so very important for a mainstream pop album. Too bad she
didn't get Prince to produce it instead of Eric Stewart, but then, Prince probably
likes to accept his royalties in flesh rather than in cash, and Agnetha
Fältskog is, above all, a proper, well-behaved lady, not accustomed to
grinding with strangers.
I STAND ALONE (1987)
1) The Last Time; 2) Little
White Secrets; 3) I Wasn't The One (Who Said Goodbye); 4) Love In A World Gone
Mad; 5) Maybe It Was Magic; 6) Let It Shine; 7) We Got A Way; 8) I Stand Alone;
9) Are You Gonna Throw It All Away; 10) If You Need Somebody Tonight.
A properly laconic review of this album would
only need to state three things. One: Look at that new hairstyle. Two: Produced
by Peter Cetera of Chicago fame, the author of ʽIf You Leave Me Nowʼ.
Three: Two of the songs are co-credited to Diane Warren. Now multiply these
three, calculate the cheese factor, and pre-draw your own pre-conclusions.
On the other hand, this laconicity would be
just a tad too cruel. Although it is true that the title of the album is fairly
stupid — it would be far more
interesting if Agnetha actually dared to stay alone, rather than in the company
of Pete Cetera, Diane Warren, and her latest hairdresser — it is also true that
all of this album could have been
very easily dedicated to lethargic adult contemporary and embarrassing power
ballads. Fortunately, coming from an ABBA background and all, Agnetha is so
used to pop hooks and so not used to
the generic power ballad format, that even Diane Warren cannot spoil things too
bad: those last two songs, although I'd rather have her save them for Celine
Dion, are formulaically romantic, but never try to go for that «storm in a
teacup» approach that Warren's power ballads usually surmise — flat and forgettable,
but not sickeningly exaggerated.
Furthermore, if we close our eyes on Cetera's
soft-rock / synth-pop production, there is a small bunch of friendly, catchy,
inoffensive pop songs here: ʽLet It Shineʼ, written in the old
tradition of Carole King and Christine McVie, is arguably the best (but I'd so much rather see it produced by the
likes of Lindsey Buckingham — then again, not in 1987, I guess, remember Tango In The Night?), but ʽLove In
A World Gone Madʼ is also salvageable; curiously, its lyrics were written
by Pete Seinfeld of King Crimson fame, who had apparently sold out in the 1980s
and switched from "the rusted chains of prison moons are shattered by the
sun" to "love in a world gone mad, the best thing we'll ever have,
it's so precious what's between us two". Then again, why should poets be
any different from musicians when it comes to survival?
ʽThe Last Timeʼ, ʽLittle White
Secretsʼ, and ʽWe Got A Wayʼ are all decent pop songs as well,
with fairly strong choruses, but always suffering from the «Eighties' bane» —
faceless, stillborn production, with sterile keyboards and processed guitars
(one interesting aspect, though, is that there are no drum machines, and
relatively few drum parts suffer from electronic enhancement). And, no getting
away from it, they are regularly
interspersed with too overtly dramaticized, wishy-washy ballads, including a
particularly disgusting bombastic duet with Cetera (ʽI Wasn't The
Oneʼ) and songs with titles like ʽMaybe It Was Magicʼ that are
unjustly deprived of ironic subtitles (ʽBut, Most Likely, It Was Just
Crapʼ or something like that).
Nevertheless, even if the record still gets a thumbs down
(it must take real magic for an LP to earn a «thumbs up» rating if it has Diane
Warren on it), I must stress that it is not
the proper epitome of a real bad mainstream 1980s pop record, and that my
original expectations were set lower than that: in particular, I was not
expecting any upbeat,
traditionalistic power-pop cuts here, but there they are, supporting our faith
in the overall decent taste of the ABBA crew. And, for what it's worth, I also
have to add that Agnetha's singing is always lovely, properly restrained, and
never overdone even on the worst songs here.
What is even more interesting is that,
apparently, Agnetha was rather reluctant to record the album (apparently,
Cetera had to press really hard to convince her to fly out to California and do
it), and, once it came out, refused to engage in any promotional activities and
went into a 14-year period of retirement from an active music career — a
respectable decision if there ever was one. All of which gives us complete
freedom of choice: we can take the album if we are Eighties buffs and like it,
or we can pretend it never happened because somebody just didn't have the
proper strength to say no at a certain point in time, or happened to be in need
of a California vacation.
MY COLOURING BOOK (2004)
1) My Colouring Book; 2) When
You Walk In The Room; 3) If I Thought You'd Ever Change Your Mind; 4) Sealed
With A Kiss; 5) Love Me With All Your Heart; 6) Fly Me To The Moon; 7) Past,
Present And Future; 8) A Fool Am I; 9) I Can't Reach Your Heart; 10) Sometimes
When I'm Dreaming; 11) The End Of The World; 12) Remember Me; 13) What Now My
Love.
Maybe Agnetha's decision to break the seal and come
out of her retirement was somehow connected to the big «ABBA revival»,
culminating in the stylistically atrocious, but commercially successful Mamma Mia! musical, along with other
things. Maybe it wasn't, and she just felt like singing. In any case, nobody's
expectations should be expected to run too high for a 21st century Agnetha
album — but I also think that, to some extent, an album like this could be
predictable: a nostalgia trip back to the singer's roots, consisting
exclusively of covers of 1960s pop songs. And when I say «pop», I mean pop: Barbra Streisand, Jackie
DeShannon, Cilla Black, Shirley Bassey, that sort of thing. «Girl stuff». Sappy
sentimental ballads. Just the kind of stuff you'd obviously expect a teenage
girl to be growing up with in the early 1960s.
Except for ʽWhen You Walk In The
Roomʼ, which was always a great, upbeat, catchy pop song, regardless of
who was doing it, I have little love for most of these tunes in their original
incarnations — a «genrist bias» I have never really felt the need to be
ashamed of: too much mush, not enough backbone (something that ABBA themselves
used to remedy very well, which is why I'll always hold their music over, let's
say, The Carpenters). However, a «pop standard», if it is established well
enough, may shift its substance over time, and on albums like these, they are
treated like cherished institutions: My
Colouring Book is not really a record about sap and sentiment, but rather a
gallant display of reverence towards the people and the sounds that influenced
the current artist. From that point of view, I am actually more thrilled (if
you could call it that) to hear Agnetha cover Cilla Black's ʽIf I Thought
You'd Ever Change Your Mindʼ than listen to Cilla Black's original — after
all, Cilla Black just wanted to be a star and have a hit, but Agnetha, with
this cover, wants to thank Cilla Black for brightening up her day in 1969, and
that, to me, seems like a way cooler type of emotion.
Of course, you could technically say that any
time about any artist covering any other artist, but the advantage of My Colouring Book is that Agnetha really loves this stuff, and is very
clearly doing this not for the money or because «somebody asked her to». She
was never a great singer (in terms of individuality, at least), but she
approaches this material in just the right way: restrained, but tremendously
expressive within the limits of that restraint, and considering that her vocal
power has remained amazingly well preserved (at 54, her voice has deepened only
slightly, retaining most of its range and power), it is safe to say that this
is one of the best-performed records in her career.
Production-wise, this is «retro» through and
through: lots of strings, and mostly acoustic backing all the rest of the way
(guitars, pianos, brass, drumming — there is a loud electric guitar part on
ʽWhen You Walk In The Roomʼ, which is required, but strings and
pianos normally dominate); again, compared with the average standard of 2004
this is almost «stylish», and, in any case, a much better proposition than
getting her to «modernize» things, which might have turned into a much bigger
disaster than the production on I Stand
Alone.
Because of the «setlist», I cannot properly
afford a thumbs up rating for this album: there is only so much shallow,
overblown orchestrated sentimentality I can take per one sitting, and even if I
somewhat admire the purpose of the record, it is not likely that I will ever
listen to it again, nor can I actively recommend it to anybody who is not as
much of a «lush pop buff» as Agnetha is. But one thing, however, I can say: all
those people complaining about how those ABBA girls «had no soul» on those ABBA
albums, and were merely technically going through the motions, unable to
express or convey genuine emotion with their plastic deliveries, can take a
hike — or, rather, should be forced to listen to My Colouring Book, lie through their teeth about it, and then take a hike. In particular, no
«plastic soul person» should probably have picked out the Shangri-Las'
ʽPast, Present And Futureʼ as one of her choices — a song that wasn't
even a big hit, but was probably the coolest exploitation of Beethoven ever to
express basic teenage emotion, and must have struck Agnetha senseless even way
back when.
A (2013)
1) The One Who Loves You Now;
2) When You Really Loved Someone; 3) Perfume In The Breeze; 4) I Was A Flower;
5) I Should've Followed You Home; 6) Past Forever; 7) Dance Your Pain Away; 8)
Bubble; 9) Back On Your Radio; 10) I Keep Them On The Floor Beside My Bed.
Although this record was heavily advertised as
«Agnetha's first collection of original
material in a quarter of a century!», I would urge even diehard ABBA fans not
to get too excited, and take this information with a bag of salt. Sure, it is
somewhat nice to see the lady still going strong (on the surface at least) —
she looks healthy on the album cover (Photoshop?), she sounds pretty on the
songs (Autotune?), and she is engaged in various promotional activities — live
shows, interviews, documentaries — that prove she still got energy
(stimulants?).
But there is a serious downside: the songs.
These songs are not ABBA (not being penned by Benny or Björn), not typical
early Agnetha solo (not being selected «by tender» from a bunch of respectable
songwriters competing with each other), and they are not Colouring Book-style grateful nostalgia. Instead, the album has
been written in its entirety, as well as produced, by Jörgen Eloffson, the
guy best known for writing the first hit single for Kelly Clarkson, and prior
to that, the co-author of quite a few songs on Britney Spears' first album; as
far as I can understand, he has a tight association with American Idol, Pop Idol,
and all those people.
Friend or no friend, I have no idea why Agnetha
consented to let this guy flood her with his compositions. The album's chief
influences are bubblegum pop, boy bands, and diva balladry, with the songs more
or less evenly distributed between these three categories — there is also a
«retro» category, though, represented this time by ʽDance Your Pain
Awayʼ, a credible stylization in classic disco that could even be
enjoyable if not for the synthesizers, which have infiltrated the song from the
modern technopop era. ʽBack On The Radioʼ is somewhat retro as well,
I guess, and inevitably brings to mind ʽThat's Why God Made The
Radioʼ — the Beach Boys' creative fiasco from the previous year. But this
one's worse, because instead of classic Beach Boys harmonies you get a transparently
autotuned delivery. Intentionally
autotuned, I'd say, as when you use Autotune not to correct vocal weaknesses,
but as a symbolic artistic statement — «well, it's a song about the radio, we
gotta have a little interference in there». It's still ugly.
Trying to seek out «niceties» on this album
would immediately turn this review into a condescending one, so I am not even
going to try — instead, we should probably show our respect to the artist by
harshly stating that A is a bunch of
crap, and that, no matter how hard she tries (and I don't think she tries hard
enough), her generally well-preserved, and still largely beautiful, voice
cannot redeem this shallow, by-the-book material. It's better than the Britney
Spears songs, I'll give you that, but not by much — certainly not in the
production department, which is exactly the same, coating a boring acoustic
guitar / piano skeleton with a tasteless mixture of electronic percussion,
synths, and strings. Its emotional palette is completely predictable, and so
are its hooks.
In short, I have nothing against Agnetha
slipping into soft, slow, nostalgic «granny mode» — given her age, this would
only be natural — but it is the most ridiculous thing in the world to let your
«granny mode» be controlled by the guy who makes a living writing for American Idol. As far as I know, Jeff
Lynne, Russ Ballard, and Justin Hayward are still living — and maybe it
wouldn't be a bad idea, either, to finally
acknowledge Elvis Costello and his burning desire to make himself useful to an
ABBA member. I mean, the possibilities are really endless, so what the hell?.. Thumbs down, and here's hoping
Lady A lives and thrives long enough to get the message. At least, as of 2013,
she can still sing, and feel, and think, but she sure as hell doesn't keep
herself good company.
ANNI-FRID LYNGSTAD (FRIDA)
SOMETHING'S GOING ON (1982)
1) Tell Me It's Over; 2) I See
Red; 3) I Got Something; 4) Strangers; 5) To Turn The Stone; 6) I Know There's
Something Going On; 7) Threnody; 8) Baby Don't You Cry No More; 9) The Way You
Do; 10) You Know What I Mean; 11) Here We'll Stay.
Because of all the casual stereotypes, Agnetha
was always cast as the «dumb blonde» part of the female ABBA component where
Frida was, if not exactly the «dark-haired intellectual», still sort of
regarded as the brainier element of the two. To be fair, Agnetha did get most of the solo parts on ABBA's
lyrically shallowest love ballads, while Frida, with her deeper voice,
accordingly got the parts that tried to probe a little further, but still, that
ain't really sufficient ground for proper discrimination — at best, it shows
that Benny and Björn were in on the «dumb blonde» game as well, because
even songwriting genius does not save one from stereotype attack.
Much more diagnostic would be the kind of situation
where both dames were finally completely independent and had the freedom of
asserting their own identities — Something's
Going On came out approximately at the same time as Wrap Your Arms Around Me, and although both albums consisted almost
entirely of covers (Agnetha, unlike Frida, did write a couple of her own, but
there'd hardly be any difference if she didn't), the difference in tone was
striking. Agnetha's performances were predominantly songs of passionate love and
romance — Frida's were darker (like the hair!), concentrating much more on
paranoia, breakup, loss, and only occasional consolation — romance as antidote
against grief. Roughing it up, we have here the classic opposition between
comedy and tragedy, where you can take your own pick.
It wasn't all Frida's own invention though. For
her first post-ABBA solo album (like Agnetha, she had a few Swedish-only solo
albums before and during ABBA), she teamed up with Phil Collins, being
tremendously inspired and impressed with the freshly published Face Value — a record that was all about paranoia, breakup, and
loss, and, incidentally, was also the first (and best) Phil Collins solo album,
so somehow the two turned out to be sympathetic souls, and Phil not only produced
Frida's record for her, but also contributed one of the songs and even sang
with Frida on the closing duet. Touching!
Naturally, Phil's production style is not for
everybody. We have here the same «gigantic» drum sound as on Face Value, much, though not all, of it
programmed; and all the electronic keyboards / pop metal guitars / echoey
effects on the vocals that were so trendy at the time — the ironic thing is, no
matter how hard Frida tries to distance herself from her ABBA past here, in the
end it all still sounds ABBA-esque, not just because of the familiar voice, but
also because the assembled songs must have been subconsciously filtered. None
of them were written by Benny or Björn, but just try to imagine how it all
might have sounded without Phil in the producer's seat, and you will have
yourself a smooth and natural transition from The Visitors to here. (Whereas with Wrap Your Arms Around Me, the transition would probably be from
1975's ABBA — ʽThe Heat Is
Onʼ is kinda sorta the natural successor to ʽTropical Lovelandʼ,
isn't it?.. on the other hand, it was Frida who sang ʽTropical
Lovelandʼ... oh, never mind).
The big single was ʽI Know There's
Something Going Onʼ (with you and her, not with the world today), written
by Russ Ballard, who, as it turns out, was happy to serve both the red and the white queen at the same time
(ʽCan't Shake Looseʼ, written for Agnetha, did not manage to have
quite the same chart success, though). Behind its production gloss there is a
genuinely ominous vibe, greatly added by Daryl Stuermer's acid guitar solo,
although the song is still too repetitive and dependent on the endlessly looped
chorus hook to be considered an atmospheric masterpiece — so, in an unpredictable
contrasting move, I'd like to declare it melodically inferior to the non-hit,
non-single ʽBaby Don't You Cry No Moreʼ, a nostalgic jazz-pop ditty
contributed by Ballard's former colleague, Rod Argent in person. It may seem
shallow in comparison, but it's got a luvverly piano melody, a cool vocal
resolution, and it reminds you of Paul McCartney's ʽBaby's Requestʼ
with extra vocal flourishes, so who's to complain?
Other highlights include: ʽI See
Redʼ, a disturbingly introspective song written by Jim Rafferty — one year
later, it would turn into a minor pop hit for the chart-hungry Clannad, whose
version was a bit more creepy compared to this reggae-influenced recording, but
Frida, too, is able to sense the paranoid potential of the song, and even the echo
effect on the vocals, normally a bad thing for such an expressive singer, is in
its perfect place, conveying insecurity and uncertainty; the opening pop-rocker
ʽTell Me It's Overʼ, written by Stephen Bishop and as rousing as any
average ABBA pop-rocker; and Per Gessle's melodisation of Dorothy Parker's
ʽThrenodyʼ, very sweetly and lightly arranged — a tight beat
supporting a largely acoustic melody, with mandolins and chimes and just a
short sweet touch of the synth around the edges.
In fact, the only serious disappointment is
that last duet with Phil — ʽHere We'll Stayʼ is, of all things, a Xanadu-tinged romantic disco number,
with Frida being cast in the Olivia Newton-John part and the happy duo even
making a run for the falsetto register during the climactic bits: at the very
least, this is a fairly tacky ending that they came up with, in poor taste
overall, not to mention seriously at odds with the general tone of the album.
They did release it as a single, which is understandable (Frida and Phil, together
for the first time!), but it didn't chart, so the effort was wasted and the
reputation sullied (of course, now that many people are reevaluating that
entire stylistics from a completely different angle, the whole thing may even
seem stylish!). So you just might
want to hit that stop button one track ahead of its time — or suffer the
insufferable.
On the whole, though, this is a decent,
sufficiently moody pop album, not pretending to any huge depth, but not too
dumbed down, either. I cannot say for sure that Phil's production did Frida a
lot of good — but what she obviously wanted was to make a «non-ABBA» album, so
this decision can be respected. What really
matters is that Anni-Frid's vocals are at the heart of each song — and, really, what else should one expect from
an Anni-Frid solo album? Thumbs up.
SHINE (1984)
1) Shine; 2) One Little Lie;
3) The Face; 4) Twist In The Dark; 5) Slowly; 6) Heart Of The Country; 7) Come
To Me (I Am A Woman); 8) Chemistry Tonight; 9) Don't Do It; 10) Comfort Me;
11*) That's Tough.
If you manage to disregard the cheeky album
cover (okay, so the world was living
in the era of ʽPhysicalʼ back then), Shine is actually a very strong, engaging, even «experimental» pop
album. Why it bombed on the charts, turning Frida off recording for more than a
decade and off English-language recording almost forever, is unclear. One guess
is that the world was shaking off the «ABBA cobwebs», setting the band aside as
obsolete fluff until the 1990s revival — thus, even though only one song on Shine really sounds like classic ABBA,
Frida got the boot simply for being Frida. Another guess is the opposite one: Shine is so different from ABBA that
Frida's veteran supporters, constituting the bulk of the buyers, were turned
off by the sound.
And no wonder: this time around, the producer
is Steve Lillywhite, who was, back then, one of the hottest things in town,
masterminding cutting-edge albums by Peter Gabriel, U2, and whoever else wanted
to make use of the latest developments in studio technology in order to record
something dark, freaky, unsettling, or futuristic. The assembled musicians
also represented «the new breed» and had already made big names for themselves:
Tony Levin of King Crimson fame is on bass, Mark Brzezicki of Big Country fame
is on drums, and singer-songwriter Kirsty McCall supplies much of the material,
often co-written with Simon Climie, the man who'd later become known for the
«Climie Fisher» duo (and then for the next stage of ruining Eric Clapton's solo
career with atrocious albums like Pilgrim,
trying to modernize the unmodernisable — but that would be a long, long time
away: here, the guy just plays synthesizers).
The result is a bona fide synth-pop album (with
very limited guitar presence) that takes the already dark overtones of its
predecessor and compacts them into something even more emotionally disturbing.
The title track's release as a single must have confused audiences, because it
is not at all clear what it is — a simple love ballad, or a tale of an
unhealthy psychoaddiction? The "you give me love, you make me shine"
chorus, with its high uplifting harmonies seems to suggest the former, but the
unexpectedly dissonant bass chords, the ghostly harmonies, the aggressive drum
patterns, the sickly "you give me love, you give me love, you give me
love..." repetitions, it all suggests probing certain subconscious depths
that are way below «fluffy lightweight romance» levels. This fluctuation
between the light and the dark throws you off balance and prevents easy
pigeonholing — hence, perhaps, the hesitation to buy up extra copies.
The one small «giveaway» to ABBA fans was
certainly not enough to compensate. ʽSlowlyʼ, which Frida actually
accepted from Benny and Björn (so, for all purposes, one might count it as
a legitimate ABBA song), is awash in typically ABBA vocal hooks, tailored to
Frida's abilities: a «multi-movement» ballad going through several layers of
the emotional spectrum (the way she brings it all around with her velvety
delivery of the title is gorgeous), and, for that matter, showing that the ABBA
pool was anything but spent in the early 1980s. Still, just one song, and it
comes on after the album's «creepiest» number: ʽTwist In The Darkʼ,
contributed by songwriter Andy Leek, is like a slightly more accessible Melt-era Peter Gabriel track — big
booming drums, ghostly keyboards and backing harmonies, and a menacing
hookline. Now it's never really as threateningly Freudist as the description
makes it out, but it's still fairly serious: if you liked the «darker» elements
of The Visitors, this is a logical
development.
Less stunning, but still catchy highlights
include ʽOne Little Lieʼ, a lively synth-rocker with a rather
gratuitous, but harmless, Beethoven lick in the intro, and ʽHeart Of The
Countryʼ, contributed by Big Country's own Stuart Adamson. Individual
disappointments would be limited to ʽDon't Do Itʼ, a rather shapeless
ballad with nowhere-going echoey guitar used purely for atmosphere — written
by Frida herself, and maybe she shouldn't; and ʽCome To Me (I Am A
Woman)ʼ, another ballad, this time, an even gentler and
adult-contemporarier one, but it wouldn't be as embarrassing, I guess, if only
Frida did not sing the chorus as "come to me, I am woman" (without the article!), which, if your
English is on an okay level, gives the oddly dumb impression of "me
Tarzan, you Jane" and dumbs down any hopes at romance.
Still, in terms of our general expectations, Shine is a relative masterpiece —
nobody would demand a genuine Peter Gabriel-level record from an ABBA singer,
no matter who the producer is, if the songwriting remains in the hands of a
bunch of pop-oriented outsiders, but they come as close to this result as
physically possible, and with a rather natural grace. Many people have
floundered in the transition from «typically 1970s» to «typically 1980s» music:
Frida clearly understood how not to
flounder, and thus, it is actually a little distressing that she had all but
severed her relations with the music industry from then on — unlike Agnetha,
who eventually succumbed to DianeWarren-itis, Frida seems like the type who
could have preserved a modicum of good taste throughout the decade (yes,
sometimes my inner optimist does manage to beat up my inner pessimist).
But then, it does not make much sense to talk
in «ifs»: the truth is that Shine
was Frida's last internationally-oriented album, and she only made brief
occasional returns to the public eye since then. One more Swedish-language
album followed in 1996, and that was it. Should we lament the missed
opportunities or appraise the humbleness and modesty? I guess we'd need to at
least be close friends or something to answer that question. In the meantime, Shine gets an expected thumbs up
rating — if you like tasteful synth-pop, and can stand the idea of it being
slightly blemished by superficial sentimentalism, this record is made for you.
Additionally, it is the last ever album to feature a song written by Benny and
Björn and sung by one of the ABBA girls — most likely, this should wrench
a commitment out of some people at
least.
BENNY ANDERSON / TIM RICE / BJÖRN ULVAEUS
CHESS (1984)
1) Merano; 2) The Russian And
Molokov/Where I Want To Be; 3) The Opening Ceremony; 4) Quartet (A Model Of
Decorum And Tranquility); 5) The American And Florence/Nobody's Side; 6) Chess;
7) Mountain Duet; 8) Florence Quits; 9) Embassy Lament/Anthem; 10) Bangkok/One
Night In Bangkok; 11) Heaven Help My Heart; 12) Argument / I Know Him So Well;
13) The Deal (No Deal)/Pity The Child; 14) Endgame; 15) Epilogue: You And I/The
Story Of Chess.
In all honesty, I am quite fidgety about the
musical as a form of art, and would make a fairly predictable and wretched
musical reviewer («thumbs down» being the default and rarely overturned
decision). However, I am also all for overcoming the natural illness of
«genrism», since a «musical», after all, need not necessarily be strapped down
by conventions, such as having to be a heavily diluted, cheapened,
saccharinized, and flashified cousin of classical opera. A musical can be
anything you want it to be, and Chess
is an excellent example of stretching the concept out to include just about
anything.
First, the concept, libretto, and structure of the
musical are quite daring for their time: too daring, in fact, to please the
critics, who'd never waste the occasion to rip the boys an extra hole for the
befuddling plotline, soap opera flavor, and shallow characterization — all of
it justified, but mainly because lyricist Tim Rice (of Andrew Lloyd Webber
fame!) took on the task of creating a story that would cover all the important
bases, from political to personal. Formally, the musical is about
Russian/American tensions in the Cold War as seen through the prism of chess
competition (inspired by the Fischer/Spassky match of 1972), but it is just as
much, or maybe even more, about personal issues — vanity, greed, obsession,
jealousy, depression, loyalty, whatever. This does not leave too much time to explore
every possible (or necessary) nook, but what it does is provide the composers,
Benny and Björn, with a variety of twists that perfectly suit their own
variegated tastes in music, and turn Chess
into an almost bizarre musical mish-mash, whose influences vary from baroque
composers to the most modern strains of electropop.
I could not describe Chess as a collection of great individual songs or musical pieces
(the review applies to the «Original Cast» recording from 1984, produced well
before the actual show in order to help raise money for the staging, but I
imagine the same judgement would probably apply to the later recordings as
well, including the heavily revised Broadway version of 1988). Its biggest song
in the UK was the compassionate duet ʽI Know Him So Wellʼ, sung with
feeling by Elaine Page and Barbara Dickson, but, as a ballad, not even coming
close to the perfectly engineered (in heart-tugging terms) hooks of classic
ABBA ballads. In the US, the largest impact was made by ʽOne Night In
Bangkokʼ, which could probably be best described as a cross between the
electrofunk of Prince and the embarrassing electronic-prog of mid-Eighties
Jethro Tull (or maybe it's just the addition of the flute that triggers this association):
too serious for mindless dancing, too rhythm-driven for serious emotions.
But, as it sometimes happens (and should, in fact, happen) with concept
albums, the sum of the parts of Chess
is greater than its whole — or, to use a more appropriate analogy, it is no big
deal to sacrifice a few pawns or even a couple of rooks to assure a guaranteed
checkmate. Much more important is the feeling of dynamics, as the music
switches between intimate, chamber-style pieces to ballroom grandeur to
post-disco coolness in a smooth, nicely integrated manner (usually because
subtle «modern» elements are always included in the more classical passages,
and vice versa), with little risk of ever boring the listener.
As is usual with Benny and Björn, they
thrive on soaking up classical influences and converting them into
«easy-listening» mode, yet somehow still retaining a sense of taste by not
limiting themselves to hollow pathos. The title track, a «grandiose»
instrumental that reiterates several of the musical's themes, underture-style,
begins like a lite requiem, goes on to become a grand quasi-Tchaikovsky
ballroom piece, then tries to go for an almost Wagnerian crescendo — and
ultimately succeeds as a whole, even if I have no idea why.
I couldn't even say that the singers of the
original Chess have a serious hand
in its success. The main male leads are Murray Head (ʽThe Americanʼ),
whom I have never managed to see as a great vocalist (he was not a great Judas Iscariot, unlike Carl
Anderson) and Tommy Körberg (ʽThe Russianʼ), who is not much
known outside of this role and who comes across as a competent, but not
particularly unique musical singer. The title lead of Florence is given to
Elaine Page, who sang ʽMemoryʼ in Cats — she actually gets into this complex character (well, you'd
have to be pretty complex to be dating both the American and the Russian champion) very convincingly, but she doesn't get
too many memorable parts.
So I guess that any cast will do, really, as
long as the complexity and fullness of the score are retained — the real heroes
of Chess are its librettist and its
composers. Frankly, the record is puzzling and intriguing rather than an
indisputable work of genius, but when we're talking musicals, puzzle and
intrigue work better for me than genius, because anything to shake up and crack the formula is always welcome. As
far as I'm concerned, Benny and Björn's first attempt at a mini-musical
(ʽThe Girl With The Golden Hairʼ, a four-song cycle off ABBA's The Album) will always be their best
(some of its musical moves, funny enough, seem to still echo throughout the
themes of Chess as well), but Chess is where they'd really allowed
themselves to run wild with the form, and it's fun to see them run.
I would have, of course, liked to see the whole
thing in a more «pop» light — as long as Benny and Björn are indulging
their chamber / symphonic appetites, no problem, but the sometimes way too
overlong romantic duets (ʽYou And Iʼ, etc.) still tend to devolve
into schmaltz, which is where I really miss the silly gut punch of ʽLay
All Your Love On Meʼ. Still, all the flaws aside, this really is one
musical that fully deserves a thumbs up — at the very least, it totally trumps Phantom Of The Opera, meaning that Tim
Rice made the right decision, parting ways with the Londoner to team up with
the Swedes.
Unfortunately, it was simply too dense for the audiences, used to
associate the idea of the musical with a simple, easily summarized story rather
than this Dostoyevsky-proportions psychological maze. So these days, as far as
musicals are concerned, you are more likely to know all about Mamma Mia, the most putrid thing ever that could have happened to ABBA's
legacy, and so, naturally, far more popular than Chess could ever hope to be. Of course, Mamma Mia has the seductive grace of consisting of original ABBA
songs — but that's really cheating, you know.
HIGH VOLTAGE (1975)
1) Baby Please Don't Go; 2)
She's Got Balls; 3) Little Lover; 4) Stick Around; 5) Soul Stripper; 6) You
Ain't Got A Hold On Me; 7) Love Song; 8) Show Business.
Australia's national pride did not have much of
a growth period: the basic sound, style, and testosterone level of High
Voltage has remained steady ever since. But in early 1975, the band had not
yet completely slammed the door and turned the key on their intentionally
ascetic rock formula, and the album arguably holds more "surprises"
for the seasoned AC/DC lover than any other in the catalog.
The only AC/DC album to start off with a cover
— and the cover being the album's highlight as well; the only album to feature
guitar sparring duets between brothers Angus and Malcolm Young (after that,
Malcolm would forever stick to rhythm); the only album to have a love ballad
(unless one counts 'Let Me Put My Love Into You' as a ballad, of course); and
all that during the period when lead singer Bon Scott would still occasionally
perform in a woman's dress rather than his later trademark blue-collar
bare-chest outfit. Yes, wonders a-plenty.
History has not held the record in particularly
high esteem, though. Not a single of these songs has earned the status of an
AC/DC classic — even 'High Voltage' (the song) ended up on the next album, one
more victim of the confusing 'title track relocation' principle — and few, if
any, survived into the live setlists of 1976, not to mention later times.
In the long run, this may be just, and if the
Young brothers prefer to remember High Voltage as merely a first-time
semi-successful teeth-cutting effort, I see no reason to argue with them about
it. The album most definitely loses steam after the first three songs, being
built around simple, but not very captivating riffs that fail to deliver the
proper AC/DC crunch: sort of thin and second-rate, particularly 'Stick Around',
'You Ain't Got A Hold On Me' and the totally generic 'Show Business'.
'Soul Stripper', in stark contrast, tries to
give us a somewhat more complex picture, with atmosphere-setting instrumental
intros, an artsy-sounding hard rock melody, and the above-mentioned guitar duel
between Angus and Malcolm as the centerpoint. But they end up sounding more
like Thin Lizzy than AC/DC, and we already have one Thin Lizzy. Worst offender
is certainly 'Love Song': if there ever was one person less fit for conveying
sentimentality, it was the band's lead singer, and if there ever was one
guitarist less fit for generating a state of "emotional catharsis",
it was the band's lead player. On a pure historical level, though, 'Love Song'
is a glorious oddity that deserves to be heard at least once.
Still, High Voltage does have three very
high points that deserve honourable places on any AC/DC collection. 'Baby
Please Don't Go', continuing the tradition of playing this old blues standard
in an ass-kicking, speedy rock'n'roll manner (The Amboy Dukes, Budgie, etc.),
takes it to a whole new level, showing that the Young brothers' playing
technique was perfectly immaculate from day one in the recording studio — the
perfect coordination of the playing, the ability to play fast, precise and
fiery at the same time, Angus' "proto-hammer-on" style, it's all
there. 'She's Got Balls', dedicated by Bon Scott to his wife, no less, is their
first "less-is-more"-type classic, with the dumbest, but scariest
riff on the entire record. And last, but not least, is 'Little Lover', a Bon
show all the way: unremarkable in terms of playing or arrangement, but
establishing his sly, sleazy, sexy, disgustingly lovable personality once and
for all. Where other cock-rockers sounded merely dumb — animal sex machines,
winding up and down when told to — Bon's 'Little lover... I can't get you off
my mind...' is pure Mephisto, and it
feels nice, warm and cozy sitting so close to the flames, doesn't it?
For these three songs alone, High Voltage
would deserve a thumbs up even if all the
rest were Carpenters covers. It simply looks that the band did not have much of
a strong parcel when faced with the prospect of recording their first album, or
perhaps they just wanted to test several directions before choosing the main
one.
T.N.T. (1975)
1) It's A Long Way To The Top
(If You Wanna Rock'n'Roll); 2) Rock'n'Roll Singer; 3) The Jack; 4) Live Wire; 5) T.N.T.; 6) Rocker; 7) Can I Sit Next
To You Girl; 8) High
Voltage; 9) School
Days.
From a certain point of view, AC/DC never made
a better album than T.N.T. Logic? Simple. It is unquestionably an
improvement over High Voltage, as they throw out everything that
promises to screw up the winning formula — pompous guitar duels, love balladry,
glammy stuff like 'Show Business' — and concentrate exclusively on what they do
best: balls-out, crunchy, sweaty RAWK that gives no quarter and shows no
compromise. And since, from here onwards, this description perfectly fits every
other AC/DC album, it is impossible to argue that any single one of them — even
Highway To Hell and Back In Black — shows AC/DC in artistically
finer form than they shaped themselves into by late 1975.
Perhaps only 'Can I Sit Next To You Girl', a
re-recording of the band's first single which they'd released back in 1974 with
Dave Evans as lead singer, and Chuck's 'School Days', the last cover they ever
did, still point one little finger backwards. But even so, one needs only compare
the original version of 'Can I...' — tiny and whiny — with the new one to
understand that there is no going back to the original "glammy" image
these young punks tried on in 1974.
You actually learn everything and more about
AC/DC during the first twenty seconds of the album. Malcolm starts out with
the basic riff: simple, rough, brutal, with a guitar tone that seems fairly
ordinary — but what is it that makes it so uniquely recognizable? Over just a
few bars, you begin headbanging (if you're alone) or toe-tapping (if you have
company) or headbanging and toe-tapping (if you have a company of AC/DC
fans). A few seconds later, joined by Angus: same tone, same brutality, but a
countermelody, something to bring the song out of the pure realm of headbanging
bait into the realm of exciting rock'n'roll. Finally, the drums kick in, only
to make you realize in astonishment that all this time, you've been violently
headbanging to a song whose rhythm was not even emphasized by a steady drum
pattern. But now it's here, and it's steady as a rock, and now they are the
true Gods of this style.
The rest is a bunch of nuances, only serving
the purpose of distinguishing one album from the other in some way at least. On
T.N.T., nuances include: Bon Scott's notorious bagpipe solo on 'It's A
Long Way To The Top', arguably the only time they ever used an extra instrument
in the studio or onstage; the ridiculously ultra-fast tempo on 'Rocker', as they
try to generate absurdly over-the-top excitement, making the rockingest rocker
that ever rocked; and the corny 'oi! oi! oi!' bursts on the title track,
delivered by the Young brothers as Bon Scott's powerload threatens to explode.
We also have 'The Jack', which, depending on your tastes, may contain the
corniest or the wittiest double-entendres of the 1970s ('her deuce was wild,
but my ace was high'); I used to belong to the former group before understanding
that this must have been Bon's heartfelt tribute to the salacious blues greats
of the pre-war era, and thus it works all the better by being AC/DC's starkest
12-bar blues number in the catalog, minimalistic as hell — even the chorus
consists of nothing but 'she's got the jack!' repeated over and over again.
Finally, T.N.T. must be the most
anthemic album recorded by the band: 'It's A Long Way To The Top' and 'High
Voltage' are both heartfelt hymns to rock'n'roll and rock'n'roll lifestyle as
such, while 'Rocker' and 'Rock'n'Roll Singer' (I think I spot a trend here,
don't you?) are odes to particular bearers of that lifestyle. Future records
would generally be restricted to just one louder-than-life statement per album,
but T.N.T., of course, is a powerload. Thumbs
up for both historical (raising ass-kicking standards sky-high) and
personal (bagpipe fan!) reasons.
DIRTY DEEDS DONE DIRT CHEAP (1976)
1) Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap;
2) Love At First Feel; 3) Big Balls; 4) Rocker; 5) Problem Child; 6) There's
Gonna Be Some Rockin'; 7) Ain't No Fun (Waiting Round To Be A Millionnaire); 8)
Ride On; 9) Squealer.
It is hard to write a PhD thesis around this
album. I would like to call it «rushed», but chronologically, it does not look
rushed — the band's only new record in 1976, all the more puzzling since it
gives out a very strong impression of having been stuffed from top to bottom
with rejected outtakes from T.N.T. At the very least, it simply does
not improve on anything.
Unquestionably it does contain two absolute
classics. 'Rocker' has the distinction of being the fastest number in the
band's catalog, and winds their obsession with basic rockabilly up to such an
absurdist level that, once they recorded it, they never ever returned to
rockabilly — what sense would it make if you have already created the ultimate
experience? Angus' solos, in places, remind me of Alvin Lee's hyperbolic
madness on 'I'm Going Home', and the two songs do have a lot in common, except
AC/DC, of course, sound much more like naughty schoolboys. In concert, they
would rather unreasonably stretch the number out to six or ten minutes of
tomfoolery, including Angus riding through the crowd on Bon's shoulders while
soloing, yet I prefer the terse, compact three-minute version. Rock'n'roll at
its drunkest.
And, of course, we have the title track — all
Bon's realm, even though the primary riff is also a sort of minimalistic
treasure. Rather daring for its time (I guess only in Australia, the happy homeland
of the chain-gang, could you so easily get away with singing 'I lead a life of
crime' in such a cheery, gleeful tone), and even today quite a strong vehicle
for titillating the brain, despite all those new levels of lyrical
straightforwardness that we have gained access to since 1976. The band gives
him a strong backing, too — the moment when the Young brothers lower their
voices, grumbling 'dirty deeds and they're done dirt cheap, dirty deeds and
they're done dirt cheap' may be the most hilarious seven seconds in the band's
history.
Against the background of these crazy/evil
masterpieces, the rest just comes out in a rather bleak perspective. 'Ride On'
is slow, moody, bluesy, and unusually sentimental — must be a great favourite
among ardent Bon lovers, as it gives a little glimpse of his vulnerability —
but it is not a style that suits the band well. 'Problem Child' has a great
coda, in fact, one of the band's first great codas (watch out for Angus'
head-spinning trills at the very end), but the song itself is only so-so. Seven
minutes of hollow jamming on 'Ain't No Fun' are openly boring — they try to
make another anthemic piece in the vein of 'It's A Long Way To The Top', but
the riffage is clearly derivative of the former and not as hard-hitting, and
oh my God, seven minutes is just too much. 'Big Balls', to me, indicates that
Bon's stream of successful double entendre's is running dry (do you
think that lines like 'it's my belief that my big balls should be held every
night' constitute some sort of smutty genius? I have my doubts about that).
Etc., etc., etc.
So I will take a little risk here and say that,
for all it's worth, Dirty Deeds merits a thumbs
down. The two classics should be salvaged and treasured, like Pooh's
pots of honey from the flood, but the rest is quite subpar by the band's usual
standards. Why that is, I don't know, but there is such a thing as
occasional loss of focus, or, as philologists say, an occasional fuss of locus,
which is basically the same thing.
LET THERE BE ROCK (1977)
1) Go Down; 2) Dog Eat Dog; 3) Let There Be Rock; 4) Bad Boy Boogie; 5) Problem Child; 6)
Overdose; 7) Hell Ain't A
Bad Place To Be; 8) Whole
Lotta Rosie.
Pay attention how nearly each and every song on
this album begins with a little dry guitar «click» sound, sometimes accompanied
with a muffled, but intentionally preserved, initial countdown. It is a unique
thing for Let There Be Rock: already on Powerage, all the intros
would be made thoroughly clean. So it is symbolic, and the best guess is that
the band is telling us that, having found its schtick on the previous two
albums, it has now found its sound.
Because if AC/DC ever did make the transition
from «hard rock» to «metal», or any other sort of sound-related transition if
these terms do not suit us, this is the spot. Malcolm and Angus add a rough,
leaden touch to their guitars, going for more distortion and «dirt», and
realize the headbanger's dream: a sound so fat and crunchy that, when played
at the proper volume, it never fails to bring out your devil if only God did
not forget to endow you with one.
The album is not without problems. Some of the
songs have lazy riffs — 'Go Down' recalls their least inspired blues-rock
romps, 'Overdose' has never even once surfaced as a live recording, 'Dog Eat
Dog' is equally so-so, and, for some sort of silly censorship reason, the
classic number 'Crabsody In Blue', worth it for the title alone, has never
surfaced on the international version of the record, instead replaced by a
slightly shortened version of 'Problem Child'. This is depressing, especially
given that the whole album hosts but eight numbers.
Still, fillerish as they are, all of these
songs rock as well, and none of them spoil one's appetite for the classics. 'Hell
Ain't A Bad Place To Be' has one of the band's most memorable «angular» riffs
going for it, and a great cool 'Hey you! Yeah, you!' from Bon at the start. The
title track and 'Whole Lotta Rosie' are acknowledged classics, both for their
mock-anthemic quality and the utmost level of madness that Angus achieves with
his solos, literally the musical equivalents of a fire team drowning your
burning house or car in avalanches of foam; at the end of 'Whole Lotta Rosie',
one risks the real danger of suffocating, since there is every chance of you
forgetting how to breathe under the onslaught of the younger Young's incessant
pummeling.
But, upon being heavily saturated with the two
hits, my heart chooses to belong elsewhere. Where 'Bad Boy Boogie' is
frequently viewed as merely a cool element in the band's stage show — it is
that number during which Angus does his strip show — I have gradually come to
the conclusion that it might simply be the AC/DC song. Everything about
it is perfect to perfection. The noisy intro, and how the song's riff grows
out of it. The riff itself — simple, bluesy, amazing in its austerity,
triggering your inner rhythms like crazy. Bon Scott as the ideal man to blurt
out the message: 'It was the seventh day, I was the seventh son — and it scared
the hell out of everyone!' The breathtaking pause before Angus rips into the
solo. The lengthy one-note passage. The deception as the drums kick back into
full gear, only to disappear entirely a few bars later. The build-up back to
the main melody, by which time — notice? — the riff has actually changed,
but did not lose any of its power. Mark Evans' crescendo on the bass, piling up
high high high until Bon relaunches the vocal part. In terms of how much is
going on, it may be the band's most complex creation, ever, and yet it is still
perfectly fit for the hormone level of a seventh grader, a masterpiece of
insulting brutality.
Let There Be Rock is an arrogant, but perfect title.
Presumptuously, it almost seems to imply that before it there was no
rock as such, and that it is only now that this pack of sacrilegious Australians,
playing God, allow it to come into existence. (Presumption seriously confirmed
by the video that accompanied the title track, in which Bon is seen dressed as
a preacher and Angus, oh good heavens, is playing with a self-made halo stuck
on his head). Of course, Bon's lyrics, hilariously retelling the story of the
birth of rock'n'roll, would seem to contradict that. But whoever listens to
AC/DC for the lyrics, hilarious as they might be?
Come to think of it — from a certain point of
view at least, they may be right. Certainly rock had never ever sounded quite
like this, and, more importantly, it has never ever sounded more «rock» than
this. In the whole history of popular music after 1977, no one has ever written
a song that rocks — in the simplest, commonest, basest sense of the term, not
in its intellectualized perversion — harder than 'Whole Lotta Rosie'. So, «let
there be rock» indeed. Thumbs up without
a single question asked, even despite all the filler.
POWERAGE (1978)
1) Rock'n'Roll Damnation; 2)
Down Payment Blues; 3) Gimme A Bullet; 4) Riff Raff; 5) Sin City; 6) What's Next
To The Moon; 7) Gone Shootin'; 8) Up To My Neck In You; 9) Kicked In The Teeth.
A slight dropoff from the high fever of Let
There Be Rock, this record goes generally easier on the ears — cleaner,
tighter, more disciplined, almost everything strictly mid-tempo — but, no
matter how many times I listen to it, just does not seem to have that many
unforgettable riffs. Best tunes are right there in the middle ('Riff Raff' and
'Sin City'), but it takes a long time to get around to them, and an even longer
time to wait after they're gone.
The «laziness» of the record is exemplified by
numerous rewrites: the riff of 'Gimme A Bullet' is really just a variation on
'Dirty Deeds'; 'Up To My Neck In You' was not so good even back when it was
called 'Ain't No Fun (Waitin' Round To Be A Millionnaire)'; and although the
great punkish punch of the riff that opens 'Let There Be Rock' was a viable
contender for the title of 'Best Rock Moment of 1977', there is really no need
to recycle it for the entire melody of 'Kicked In The Teeth'. No wonder the
boys almost never revive these numbers in concert: what good are weaker copies
when you can go straight for the powerhouse originals?
Nevertheless, there is still a relatively
strong pro-Powerage lobby among AC/DC fans, one that transcends the
ordinary attitude («all AC/DC albums kick ass, every AC/DC album is their best
since the previous one») and finds some sort of really special charm in these
songs. This can hardly have anything to do with a change in lineup (new bassist
Cliff Williams is on board, but does that make a big difference?), or with
Angus' new soloing techniques, as he continues coming into his own style rather
than simply speeding up the old rockabilly licks.
Rather, it has to do with Bon Scott's continually
upshifting position in the band. The early records established him as a
competent frontman, capable of matching the Young brothers' guitar power and
writing a hilarious double entendre every now and then. Let There Be
Rock upped the stakes on guitars, and Scott had to comply by developing an
even scarier rock'n'roll roar that confirmed his status as one of the genre's
loudest, most reckless screamers. On Powerage, he continues his
evolution by starting to write interesting lyrics.
Subjects are no longer limited to describing
the bare thrills of carnal pleasures; Scott tries on the shoes of a prophet of
carnal pleasures, one who is no longer content to merely experience them and
state the experience as such, but — God help us! — attempts to ponder
upon that experience. Not only that, some of the lyrics are downright ambiguous
and, sometimes, loaded with metaphors that take time to decipher. All of a
sudden, the idea of earning a Ph.D. based on AC/DC songs no longer looks like a
totally ridiculous matter!
And, actually, Bon could not have found a
better time to reinvent himself as this sort of tough street guru than the
Young' brothers temporary respite: whenever the riffs get tired and lazy, it is
Scott who steps in to overshadow the proceedings. What is the best thing about
a song like 'Kicked In The Teeth'? Why, obviously Bon's ferocious acappella
intro: 'Two face woman with your two face lies, I hope your two face living's
made you satisfied!' The rest is nowhere near as good. What is the best thing
about a song like 'What's Next To The Moon'? Why, obviously Bon's lustful, but
ironic chorus: 'It's yer love that I want, it's yer love that I need!' The rest
is just okay.
None of this prevents the entire band from
adding 'Riff Raff' to their already long list of total classics. Now here is a
phenomenal rock'n'roll riff that is impossible to underrate, along with experimental
scratchy-noisy sections and lengthy barrages of over-the-top soloing that pick
off from where we had been left with 'Whole Lotta Rosie' and carry the ecstasy
even further. Bon's presence here is minimal — two small verses in a sea of
instrumentation — but he still leaves his mark, with simple, but enigmatic
lines ('Riff raff, it's good for a laugh, riff raff, laugh yourself in half' —
how come the fans never take offense at that chorus?).
The only other song whose riff (raff) is still
fresh in my head after all these years is 'Sin City', but it is almost certain
that Scott has had a hand in this, too: his 'I'm going down to Sin City!' is no
less anthemic than the far better known 'I'm on a Highway to Hell!', but far
more refined and sarcastic. I think it is the only song off the album that
they have continued to perform with Brian Johnson on a regular basis — just
because the melody is so stadium-rousing — but, overall, I can see how Brian
would be seriously uncomfortable with most of the material on here (although most
of the songs have occasionally been performed with Brian from time to
time).
I understand that «an intelligent AC/DC album»
is an oxymoron, but pare down the notion of «intelligence» to be level with
typical AC/DC values, and you may have something there. For a brief while — two
short years — the band was on the verge of trading their clownish image for the
status of an Australian Thin Lizzy, and if you like blazing hard rock, but
cannot stand explicit dumbness, Powerage is unquestionably the AC/DC
album for you. But the riffs are really not that good, trust me on that
one. Almost not that good to the point of getting a thumbs down, but thumbs up nevertheless, because that sudden surge
in the level of Bon Scott's charisma has to be reflected in some sort of
judgement.
IF YOU WANT BLOOD, YOU'VE GOT IT (1978)
1) Riff Raff; 2) Hell Ain't A
Bad Place To Be; 3) Bad Boy Boogie; 4) The Jack; 5) Problem Child; 6) Whole
Lotta Rosie; 7) Rock'n'Roll Damnation; 8) High Voltage; 9) Let There Be Rock;
10) Rocker.
A live album from AC/DC, the ultimate live
band, was imminent at some point, and it is nice that «some point» managed to
fall upon the peak years of the Bon era. Of course, there really is no very
particular reason to listen to an AC/DC live album. The band made little, if
any, difference between the studio and the stadium, and I would not at all be
surprised to learn that Angus had a habit of performing his famous «spasms»
even without any audience present. In fact, some of these live performances —
recorded, suitably, in the band's primal habitat, in Glasgow, before a bunch of
wild drunken Scottish cavemen — are decidedly tame compared to the studio
versions.
The AC/DC live show must, of course, be
witnessed live, with the unannounced charisma contest between the lead
guitarist and the vocalist as its primary point of attraction. It is a
brilliant, if sometimes hard to stomach, combination of ugliness, monster
power, and cheerfulness, in which even such a stupid, clumsy mock-ritual as
Angus' on-stage striptease has its proper place. You will headbang, you will
vomit, you will be disgusted and enlightened at the same time, in the best
tradition of drinking stronger spirits. But sound without sight? It's like
sight without taste.
Still, there are three good arguments why it
will not hurt to at least get acquainted with the record. First, it sort of
works as a well-made, well-meaning compilation of some of the band's most
ass-kicking material: I have no problems with the setlist whatsoever,
especially seeing as how it includes all the best tracks from their
best album to that point, Let There Be Rock. Second, it is a very good
showcase for Bon, who not only proves that he can easily tame wild Scottish
cavemen (look at how skilfully he rules over them during 'The Jack' and 'High
Voltage'), but also demonstrates a superb ability to scream on-key throughout
the entire performance.
Last and not least, Angus never plays the same
solo twice, and he is at his most impressive on 'Bad Boy Boogie' (in which they
cut out the «striptease» section, leaving you no time to remove your own
shirt and thus pay tribute to the best hard rock band of all time) and, believe
it or not, 'The Jack', which is reinforced in its status of «AC/DC's Slow
Blues», not to mention getting a new, less double-entendrish, more
sluttish, set of lyrics from Bon. Bad news: 'Whole Lotta Rosie' is sacrilegiously
shorn of its madman coda, and 'Rocker' lasts all of three minutes, when in
reality it was a lengthy, major highlight of the show, with Angus blazing off
solos while riding on Bon's shoulders and stuff. Perhaps the shoulder-ride did
not manage to be captured well enough.
Obviously, this is forty minutes of tremendous,
high-energy-level fun, and one cannot deny the heart a solid thumbs up judgement. But the brain doth protest
that it is very well possible to live without AC/DC live albums, and
this, too, has to be accepted.
HIGHWAY TO HELL (1979)
1) Highway To Hell; 2) Girls
Got Rhythm; 3) Walk All Over You; 4) Touch Too Much; 5) Beating Around The
Bush; 6) Shot Down In Flames; 7) Get It Hot; 8) If You Want Blood (You've Got
It); 9) Love Hungry Man; 10) Night Prowler.
The wild critical and commercial success of
this and the next album is often associated with the switch of producers —
trying something «different», the Young brothers have turned to Robert «Mutt»
Lange, back then, still relatively fresh and unknown, and he did his best to
make the record sell well. At least, that is the general idea.
Certainly Lange's production style is different
from George Young and Harry Vanda's. Those guys, after all, used to be at the
helm of the Easybeats, Australia's garage outfit par excellence, and their idea
— a great idea, too — was to make their Young-er brothers sound even more reckless,
rambunctious, and raw than the Easybeats ever were. But that does not help you
sell records. Lange, on the other hand, takes the Youngs' guitar sound and does
the impossible: preserves the headbang magic, but cuts down on the ear-bleeding
side effect. A lesser producer would have probably turned AC/DC into
Foreigner: a heavy rock sound, formally, but completely stripped of any traces
of primal aggression. Highway To Hell, on the other hand, rocks
ferociously — and, at the very same time, raises the band's commercial stakes
sky high.
But then a producer is only a producer; it is
not Lange that makes the album so enjoyable, simply the fact that the Young
brothers happened to reach their creative peak. Perhaps sensing that they
started repeating themselves in too obvious a manner on Powerage, they
go for a little creative exploring, and end up with a record that, on their
respective level, is the epitome of diversity. We got straight-up speedy rock
('Beating Around The Bush'), arena-style anthems (title track), a little power
pop ('Girls Got Rhythm'), punk-flavored socially conscious statements ('If You
Want Blood'), heavy balladry ('Touch Too Much'), and slow blues ('Night
Prowler'). With all that baggage, it is no surprise that Malcolm and Angus
finally find the time to write some fresh riffs (in fact, some are so
fresh that they kept reusing them, guilt-free, for the next thirty years), or
that Bon Scott, overall, gives his greatest vocal performance.
'(I'm on a) Highway To Hell' has been, of
course, immortalized not so much by the catchy, enticing character of the
chorus as by the fact that, unknown to anybody but our supernatural overseers,
in 1979 Bon Scott was nearing the end of that highway. It is a bit flat in the
melody department, and does not so much give the guitarists a chance to shine
as it gives the audience a chance to flash their empty beer cans, but it is
still awesome in a clucky kind of way.
Generally, though, you judge an AC/DC tune on
the strength of its riff. Here, we got a particularly seductive riff on 'Girls
Got Rhythm', a poppy, almost danceable loop that accompanies Bon as he sings
about his lady who is 'enough to stop a freight train or start the Third World
War'. Note, of course, the slight fall-off from the lyrical level he had
achieved on Powerage — but I guess that if you want to sell records to
love-hungry teens, you gotta sing about love-hungry teens. An even simpler, but
equally effective six-note sequence drives 'Shot Down In Flames', where Angus
actually tries to paint a musical picture of being shot down in flames, and, in
the process, invents a new, metallic style of soloing that would become his
trademark for the next decade.
However, you do not reach the utmost peak here
until the third to last track. 'If You Want Blood', borrowing the title from
the freshly issued live album, is truly the closest AC/DC ever came to
capturing the punk spirit — the song name would have been perfectly usable for
a Dead Kennedys or Rage Against The Machine album title, and even if the tempo
is a bit too slow and the riff a bit too high-pitched to fit into the basic
musical conventions of «punk», Scott's performance is certainly anything but,
as he throws the happy public a message that is normally expected to come from
the likes of Ray Davies: 'You get money for nothing / Tell me who can you trust
/ We got what you want / And you got the lust / If you want blood — you've got
it!'
Even the slow, brontosaurish blues of 'Night
Prowler' that closes the record shows they have come a long, long way from the
early days of 'The Jack'. Again, this is Bon's deal all the way, but only a
very stupid person — such as the guy who allegedly went on a killing spree
after hearing the song, bringing the band lots of unwanted problems — would
honestly believe that Mr. Scott is channelling the spirit of a serial murderer,
when it is clear as daylight that he is living out a hilarious sexual fantasy.
'I'm the night prowler, when you turn off the light', how more obvious can one
get? As far as uncomfortable titillation goes, 'Night Prowler' is certainly no
'Midnight Rambler' — but it is a delightful, powerful theatrical piece, and one
hell of a great way to go out with for good. 'Shazbot, na-nu na-nu'.
For sheer metallic power and breathtaking
highlights, Back In Black is a better place to go than Highway To
Hell, but for a highly balanced mix of consistency, cleverness, and moderate
experimentation, it is Highway that takes the cake. I would say that
Brian Johnson's initiation into the world of AC/DC rule is an absolute
immediate stunner, whereas Bon Scott's final hour is more of a grower, but it
grows fast and secure. The heart may be already accustomed to issuing thumbs up judgements to the Aussies; the brain,
however, is far more mightily surprised at the witty construction of the record
— one might not have expected such a thing from the band at all.
BACK IN BLACK (1980)
1) Hells Bells; 2) Shoot To
Thrill; 3) What Do You Do For Money Honey; 4) Given The Dog A Bone; 5) Let Me
Put My Love Into You; 6) Back In Black; 7) You Shook Me All Night Long; 8) Have
A Drink On Me; 9) Shake A Leg; 10) Rock'n'Roll Ain't Noise Pollution.
Bon Scott died in the proper manner for a noble
rock'n'roller — choking on his own vomit — and his replacement was certainly
different. I do not think Brian Johnson has, or ever had, even a minor part of
Scott's charisma. His lyrics show him to be incapable of matching Scott's wit
and humour, his stage behaviour is rougher and far less subtle, and, overall,
he has rarely contributed towards making the band more interesting and less
predictable. He has always blended in with the band very well, but the blending
was somewhat bland, and it may have been — partly — his fault that the
groove he synthesized with the Young brothers in 1980 has changed less in the
last thirty years than Bon Scott's groove had in five.
Yes — but what a groove! For his first three albums
at least, he gave AC/DC a vocal sound that was previously unimaginable —
neither for AC/DC, nor for his own previous band, Geordie, nor for anyone else.
Singing at the top of his range ninety percent of the time — and going over the
top the remaining ten percent — giving even mediocre tunes an intensity the
band could never have dreamt of in the Scott days — squeezing out the last
remaining bits of «intelligence» in exchange for an all-out assault on the
senses — this is AC/DC reaching the climax in its message.
Plus, there was a certain element of bravery in
their putting out an album as arrogant as Back In Black. I am pretty
sure that even some of the toughest fans of the band might have felt a little
uneasy upon hearing that the man who, only a few months ago, so defiantly sang
'I'm on a highway to hell!' before arena crowds, was taken away so promptly. To
celebrate his death with a grinning, gleeful acknowledgement of the fact that
Hell is, indeed, where Scott belongs ('Hells Bells'), and then to imply that
the same establishment has speedily issued out a replacement ('Back In Black')
— even non-religious people might be shook up with this blatantly «amoral» line
of conduct, let alone those who truly believe that Hell is not to be toyed
with.
On the other hand, I doubt that even the
religious right would be thoroughly immune to the temptations of 'Hells
Bells', possibly the greatest song ever in the AC/DC canon. For me, 'Bad
Boy Boogie' illustrated the perfection of their early rock'n'roll vibe; 'Hells
Bells' is the older, maturated perfection of their heavy metal vibe. Its
depiction of hellish images is cartoonish, both lyrics-wise ('if you're into
Evil, you're a friend of mine!') and musically — you do not truly
intimidate people with simple rock riffs — but, then again, the Devil has a
long history of being portrayed in a delightfully cartoonish manner, and 'Hells
Bells' is far from the first, and, hopefully, from the last, in the series of
these portrayals.
The song is great because it does not have one
wasted second — from the opening bells (might those, in a way, be a nod to John
Lennon's bells at the opening of 'Mother'?) to the slow, meticulously planned
and executed build-up, to Johnson's powerful entry — within three seconds he is
able to show that the band did just the right thing — to his climbing higher
and higher and higher until the chorus explosion, to the deceitful pause before
the storm as Angus takes over the madness, to the maniacal coda as Brian opens
up more and more internal channels for the evil presence, to the utterly
brilliant «guitar thunderstroke» at 4:45. In fact, cartoonish it may be, but I
have caught myself, a couple of times, nervously fidgeting when Johnson goes
into the 'they're dragging you down, they're bringing you 'round' part. Come
to think of it, can anyone guarantee that this is not what was happening
to poor Bon at that exact moment?
The Satanic vibe is then once again recaptured
properly, albeit in a slightly more lightweight and playful fashion, on the
title track that cleverly opens Side B (cleverly, because, for AC/DC albums, I
always get the feeling that critics usually just listen to the first tracks on
each side — the only reason, in my opinion, why the vastly inferior For
Those About To Rock is commonly rated high and above the exuberantly
superior Flick Of The Switch). Combining the uniquely constructed
«step-jumping» riff with Johnson's rapid-fire, over-the-top delivery could
hardly fail, and it never did, giving the band another signature song and
giving Brian his own personal anthem with which he proved, once and for all,
that he did belong in the band.
But if someone had the idea that Brian
Johnson's arrival symbolized the band's slipping further into mock-Satanism,
that someone probably never went beyond the album sleeve and a glimpse of
'Hells Bells'. In reality, Brian Johnson is just a bawdy, fun-lovin' guy from
the Scottish highlands, who has always valued the earthly pleasures of a
smoke, a drink, and a shag way above the dubious honours of purchasing a piece
of property in Lucifer's domain. Accordingly, the rest of the tracks are all
about having a smoke, a drink, and a shag. Actually, plenty of shags — the entire
Side A after 'Hells Bells' is dedicated to that perennial subject.
It helps that the Young brothers were still on
a roll. The riffs for 'Shoot To Thrill' and 'What Do You Do For Money, Honey'
are top notch and very well aligned with Johnson's rampant sexism, the madman guitar
barrage on the ungrammatically titled 'Given The Dog A Bone' efficiently drown
out Brian's inane lyrics about a girl who lives for blowjobs (supposedly old
Scotland is just swarming with these), and even 'Let Me Put My Love Into You',
the closest AC/DC ever got to writing a stupid power ballad and thus committing
a serious blunder, has a chord sequence that stays within the listener for
days.
Side B, after the initial two-way punch of
'Back In Black' and the eternal football crowd favourite of 'You Shook Me All
Night Long' (a song covered live by Celine Dion, no less — a must-see for any
dedicated fan of I Spit On Your Grave!), gives way to more moderate
thrills, and sort of fizzles out with the not particularly successful ode to
popular music ('Rock'n'Roll Ain't Noise Pollution' — great line, but why the
boring mid-tempo?), but then AC/DC were rarely consistent from start to finish,
and there is no use scorning Back In Black for something that is
innately present in each of the band's LPs.
The big difference is that Back In Black
is bigger, denser, darker, and dumber than these guys ever were before. Is it
their best? I do not know, but it can very well be argued that it is, indeed,
the one particular album that God, or his less respectable colleague in the
business, has commissionned from them. And this has very little, if anything,
to do with the fact that Robert "Mutt" Lange has produced it in such
a subtle commercial manner that even grandmas on wheelchairs were rushing to
the stores to order an extra copy, feeling young and strong again as the virile,
Dionysian sounds of 'You Shook Me All Night Long' were flooding their senses.
It is just that, at this moment, they happened to be writing great riffs, using
great tones, handling a great screamer, and pushing the delightful absurdity of
rock music to its utmost limits. This is headbanging incarnate, and no
headbanger's heart can allow it to get away without a major thumbs up.
FOR THOSE ABOUT TO ROCK (1981)
1) For Those About To Rock; 2)
Put The Finger On You; 3) Let's Get It Up; 4) Inject The Venom; 5) Snowballed;
6) Evil Walks; 7) C.O.D.; 8) Breaking The Rules; 9) Night Of The Long Knives;
10) Spellbound.
Back In Black certainly brought in a lot of money and, more importantly, a lot of
confidence, but its success was arguably a bit too much for the band. There was
no reason whatsoever for AC/DC to be turned into a household name: somebody who
regularly puts out songs on the level of 'Hells Bells' can hardly be expected
to become a permanent mainstay in the home of the average Joe. But the devil did
play this ingenious trick on humanity, and, as if having woken up from a deep,
semi-decade-long slumber, people were rushing out to stores for more AC/DC
product. Back In Black did not even have enough time to go all the way
to No. 1 in the US, but its follow-up, For Those About To Rock, did.
Ironically so, because it is one of the band's worst records.
Since it only makes sense to measure AC/DC
albums on the riff-o-meter, the verdict is inescapable: there is not a single
great riff here, nowhere in sight. Nowhere. Most of the time, this is
just lumbering mid-tempo bluesy sludge, not even properly fit for headbanging.
At best, the choruses are catchy — how can they not be catchy, when each one
consists of repeating the song title four times in a row? — but the music is
unimaginably unimaginative. Almost as if the band were simply too busy scooping
up all the accolades, and decided, instead of a proper new record, to put out a
bunch of outtakes from the Back In Black sessions.
Where Back In Black yielded at least
three or four immortal classic tunes of the you-know-which genre, its follow-up
has one — the title track, which picks up at the exact same spot where
'Rock'n'Roll Ain't Noise Pollution' dropped us off the train one year ago. And
even that one is not so much immortal because of its melody (which is just as
rote and unmemorable as everything else on the record), but because of its
pompous, bloated anthemic character. Yes: Brian Johnson delivers the grand line
'For those about to rock — we salute you!' with plenty of flash, and the cannon
blasts add a rare unexpected touch (particularly exciting when they bring them
out onstage). But it is my deep conviction that rock anthems are one thing, and
National Anthems are another, and that the aesthetics of the two should not
be mixed. Somehow, in the Bon Scott days, the band used to understand that,
and made 'Let There Be Rock' into a classic example of a true rock anthem — one
that speaks through kick-ass energy and ironic delivery, not through pompous screeching
and generic power chords that do not add up to anything distinctly meaningful.
There is little desire on my part to discuss
individual songs. Two that may, as far as my opinion goes, rise above
the overall sludgy dreck are the ones that you have to wait for the longest
time. Side A ends with 'Snowballed', the only — get this: the only —
fast rocker on the entire album, far from their best, but definitely a
highlight on this morbid collection. And Side B ends with the
phonetically similarly titled 'Spellbound', which is also mid-tempo sludge, but
unexpectedly darker and grimmer than most of the Johnson-era tracks: for some
reason, for this last track they preferred to drop all the glaring sexual
innuendos, all the show-off-ey worship of Rock'n'Roll, all the cartoonish
Satanism, and simply write a song about internal torment. I am not sure that,
during this moment of glory, Brian Johnson really felt 'spellbound, my world is
tumbling down', but he is definitely convincing.
Everything else is decidedly for the seasoned
fan only. But rest assured: the guitars are loud and crunchy, each song has a
mad Angus solo, and this is the second of only three records in AC/DC history
where Brian still had the full power of his sonic tank. Even Rolling Stone originally
fell for the trick, finally pandering to the record-buying public's tastes and
providing AC/DC with the first truly glowing review — and, what the heck,
anyone would probably give For Those About To Rock a glowing review if
it were the first or second AC/DC album he/she'd ever heard in their life. But
were we to entirely ignore context, we might as well sit tight and cozy with
our «Greatest Hits» and «Best Of» collections instead.
An almost surreal idea is that they may have intentionally
recorded a sub-par LP in order to solidify and purify their fanbase, so that
only the steadfast and loyal would remain, and all the desperate housewives
expecting another 'You Shook Me All Night Long' would go back to their proper
lives, feeding on Boston and Styx. If so, they succeeded admirably: once For
Those About To Rock hit its No. 1 and everyone actually started listening
to it, their commercial status would start dropping immediately, while the
quality of the music would, surprisingly, start growing again. But that is
just a mad, mad thought: the Young brothers are no Bob Dylan, after all.
Consciously shunning the limelight? I must be crazy. But a decisive thumbs down in any case.
FLICK OF THE SWITCH (1983)
1) Rising Power; 2) This House Is On Fire; 3)
Flick Of The Switch;
4) Nervous Shakedown;
5) Landslide; 6) Guns For
Hire; 7) Deep In The Hole; 8) Bedlam In Belgium; 9) Badlands; 10) Brain
Shake.
The idea behind Flick Of The Switch was
that the band had become much too bloated and over-polished — the blame for
which, unsurprisingly, was pinned on Mutt Lange, who had already fulfilled the
important task of securing the band a happy old age, anyway. Subsequently,
Malcolm and Angus fired the man and decided to produce the record on their own.
The changes are not huge, but important. The
brothers do retain the «full» sound of the previous records, making the songs
very bass-heavy and the riffs over-distorted, getting a much more metallic
sheen than they used to in the Seventies. Accordingly, they stick Brian Johnson
way over there in the corner, so that on each single song he has to struggle
tremendously in order to outshout the guitars. This is where you start to
notice the differences: Mutt would solve the problem by emphasizing the vocals
with a bit of echoing, so that, on their best songs of the early Eighties,
Brian would be hovering over the musical waves like a supernatural evil
presence. On Flick Of The Switch, he goes back to being the big nasty
sweaty bulldog in the corner.
But they do achieve their goal — that way, the
album is indeed much rawer and more «immediate» than its predecessors. And, as
if rejuvenated and re-inspired by this approach, the brothers, this time
around, complement it with yet another set of kick-ass riffs. Gone are the
sleepy power chords of For Those About To Rock; in their place, we once
again have perfect musical phrasing — the melody that opens 'Rising Power' may
not be one of their best, but it is a simplistic, catchy, fun hard rock riff,
and there is nothing wrong with it that wasn't equally wrong with a song like
'Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap', for instance.
Other tunes show a renewed interest in the
band's blues roots — 'Badlands' most obviously so, where Angus, armed with a
distorted slide guitar, extracts a «sample part» of a 12-bar riff and somehow
transform it into a headbanger's paradise (the mid-tempo build), but 'This
House Is On Fire' sounds like it might have originally been conceived with the
help of a slider as well. And, finally, they reward the fans with at
least one breakneck speed anthem — 'Landslide' — with an unusually complex
build-up from verse to bridge to chorus and quite a difficult picking pattern
in the main melody, which, I think, Angus only topped with 'Thunderstruck'
seven years later.
The lyrics are the album's weakest point:
admittedly, Johnson never liked writing them all that much, and not only are
all the subjects fairly typical, there is not even any effort to make their
descriptions stylistically polished; lines like 'I'm a pistol-packing man with
a gun in my hand, looking for a woman who will understand' have always left me
wondering what exactly the woman is supposed to understand — for instance, why
the hell does the man need one gun in his pack and another in his hand at the
same time? Big exception: 'Bedlam In Belgium', not only a phonetically
delicious song title, but actually a coherent, well-put account of an unhappy
accident the band happened to run into on their latest European tour. Not
exactly their 'Smoke On The Water', but pretty smouldering all the same.
Amazingly, there is not a single song on here
that does not work in at least some way. The album yielded no hits at all,
because nothing is particularly anthemic or immediately striking — this will
probably explain the all too commonly encountered negative attitude, since, in
AC/DC and general rock'n'roll lore, Flick Of The Switch is frequently
singled out as the start of the decline, the turning point where AC/DC became
«generic» and «stale» and «irrelevant». Such is the general critical consensus,
at least, and even some non-hardliner fans have stated that this is where they
jump ship in indignation.
Rubbish, as far as I am concerned; AC/DC have
always been generic, but as long as they were fun, they were never irrelevant,
and this is their secondmost funnest album of the Eighties. That ascending
guitar line on the title track? FUN. 'Guns for hire, shoot you with desire'?
FUN. 12-bar blues turned stoner rock on 'Badlands'? FUN. The way Brian howls
'Yonder she walked...' from inside a tin can at the start of 'House On Fire'
and then immediately follows it up with a full-volume 'Yow!' as if he'd
crossed a large distance in one second? FUN. The way it takes 'Landslide' a
whole minute of confusing ad-libbed blabber before it cuts to the main lyrics?
FUN. There's lots of such amusing touches on the record — which, to me, prove
that the band were in pretty high spirits indeed when making it, and that is
the only thing that counts. Thumbs up all
the way. And remember, this is the last time in history when you can hear Brian
Johnson's voice in all of its primal glory.
FLY ON THE WALL (1985)
1) Fly On The Wall; 2) Shake Your Foundations;
3) First Blood; 4) Danger; 5) Sink The Pink; 6) Playing
With Girls; 7) Stand Up; 8) Hell Or High Water; 9) Back In Business; 10) Send
For The Man.
For a band that much busy with promoting a dumb
image, AC/DC certainly raise quite a few complicated issues. For instance — we
all know that AC/DC are generally as good as their riffs, but what is it,
exactly, that makes an AC/DC riff, or, in fact, a hard rock riff in general, so
utterly great for the body and soul? And what is it that makes an AC/DC riff
boring and generic? And why would most — not all, but most — people
agree on the greatness of the riffage in 'Hells Bells' or 'Whole Lotta Rosie',
while at the same time failing to notice anything special about the riffage on
'Flick Of The Switch' or 'This House Is On Fire'?
Or — vice versa — some fans and critics, even
those convinced that Fly On The Wall represents AC/DC's all-time lowest
point, would still note that the title track, however, is sort of okay, or even
«excellent». How could that happen? 'Fly On The Wall' (the song), to my ears,
has always seemed the weakest start ever to an AC/DC album, a return to
the power chord sludge of the 1981 album, a song that could have been slapped
together in three minutes on a particularly lazy day. Does it even have
a riff? Can one hum it? Can one appreciate it? If so, how and why can one appreciate
it and another even fail to notice it...?
These are all interesting questions, and to
discuss them is perhaps more appropriate within the review of a mediocre album
than an excellent one. But since I do not even have a hypothetical answer, let
us just skip the theoretical part and concentrate on the record for a while. By
1985, AC/DC were getting older, and their schtick was already illustrating the
definition of «predictable» in every thesaurus, so it is no wonder that fans
and critics alike were not at all happy with Fly On The Wall. Today, in
retrospect, the album still stands as a fine testament to AC/DC's tenacity —
coming out at the height of the hair metal boom, it was, nevertheless, firmly
and frighteningly true to the band's style. Even the drums (now played by new
band member Simon Wright, having replaced Phil Rudd due to the latter being sacked
for non-disciplinary behaviour) have not been enhanced by any modernistic
electronic effects — leaving AC/DC probably the only classic rock act of that
era so steadfastly clinging to the past.
History has rewarded them with the last laugh:
today, Fly On The Wall is one of the few hard rock albums of 1985-86
that does not sound ridiculously dated. If only its material stood up to the
production values, we would all be sitting pretty. Alas, the songwriting has
once again taken a sharp downturn, and the lack of focus on the title track is
but one indication. None of the tracks at all have persisted in the band's live
setlist, and some are just silly macho throwaways that are only
production-wise better than the goofy hair metal crap they were supposed to
contest with. 'Send For The Man'? 'First Blood'? 'Back In Business'? (The
latter's title probably tries to somehow allude to 'Back In Black', but how
could this unimaginative hard-funk riff, somewhat reminiscent of Rainbow's 'Man
On The Silver Mountain', ever hope to compete with the genius simplicity of the
bang - ba-da-bang - ba-da-bang of 'Back In Black'?) All of these songs
have the required crunch and punch, but AC/DC pride themselves on being a
rock'n'roll band, and this is not rock'n'roll — this is pompous heavy rock
posturing, and it is boring at best and ugly at worst.
Still, some nice rock'n'roll is present:
the riffs seem noticeably better on songs like 'Shake Your Foundations', 'Sink
The Pink', 'Playing With Girls', and 'Hell Or High Water', and these also contain
the catchiest, most likeable choruses — getting dumber with each year, as most
people who have ever tried singing along to "ai-yee-yay-yay, shake your
foundations!" will probably agree, but still preserving the fun quotient.
Which makes Fly On The Wall very inconsistent, but certainly not
a complete disaster, as was thought at the time.
One major disadvantage is that AC/DC's magic
only really works when all the ingredients are equally strong; lose or weaken
just one and the seams will start showing. By 1985, Brian Johnson's voice had
finally begun giving in to all the strain, embarking on its transition from the
most powerful high-pitched scream of 1980 to the «stuck pig hoarse rasp» of
1990. At that time, the problems were showing up more frequently onstage than
in the studio; but, for some reason, the band decided that it was necessary to
«mask» them all the same — so they put some kind of ugly echo or reverb effect
on the vocals, for once, yielding to technological pressure.
The result is that the singing problem still
remains and is well visible, but the vocals tend to simply disappear behind
the guitars' wall of sound — to the point that sometimes I almost fail to notice
when exactly the vocalist is supposed to come in, or, at least, when exactly
his ad-libbing in the song intro finally shifts into the verse melody. This is
totally frustrating, particularly on the better songs: I cannot help thinking
how, with improved mixing and production, 'Playing With Girls', for instance, could
have turned into a fabulous classic, well on the level with Back In Black
material. (Could have, I'm not taking any chances).
Throw in the strangest album title so far — the
first AC/DC album title, in fact, to completely dump their power effect
— and the unimpressive album sleeve (an actual fly on the wall? imagine
that!), and there is no disputing the fact that the band has, indeed, ran into
deep trouble. But I still give the album a moderate thumbs
up, on the strength of its strong half and the bravery of its very
existence in the age of Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe.
BLOW UP YOUR VIDEO (1988)
1) Heatseeker; 2) That's The Way I Wanna
Rock'n'Roll; 3) Meanstreak; 4) Go Zone; 5) Kissin' Dynamite; 6) Nick Of
Time; 7) Some Sin For Nuthin'; 8) Ruff Stuff; 9) Two's Up; 10) This Means War.
After the critical and commercial failure of Fly
On The Wall, AC/DC's fortunes perked up somewhat with the release of Who
Made Who, the band's soundtrack to Stephen King's Maximum Overdrive
(apparently, AC/DC happen to be King's favorite band, which should come as no
surprise to King fans because, in reality, AC/DC are everybody's favorite
band, it's just that not everybody has properly understood it so far. But
someday, even you will see the light). Granted, it merely gave the fans an
opportunity to re-buy such old hits as 'You Shook Me All Night Long', along
with two punchy, but forgettable instrumentals and the title track — a catchy
pop-rocker that nevertheless may have alarmed some purists with its big
electronic drum sound.
Two years later, the purists had every cause to
rejoice: not only did the band's next album contain no traces whatsoever of
any electronic tampering, but the Young brothers were obviously dead set on
correcting Fly On The Wall's horrendous mix problems by reteaming with
their old producing duo of Vanda & Young. They were also dead set on
recapturing the ballsiness of yore: for the first time since 1980, they come up
with a proper album title — alluding to healthy destruction and, along the
way, poking fun at MTV; a proper album sleeve — Angus bursting through a
shattered and splintered video screen; and a proper album introduction, as
'Heatseeker' stomps into your room at breakneck speed.
At this point, stylistics would require the use
of a turn of phrase such as «Too bad they manage to strangle all hope by the
time the second song comes along...», and, in fact, such was, and still is, the
attitude of quite a few critics, who have worked hard at creating the image of Blow
Up Your Video as the lowest, or one of the lowest, points in the band's
career. But guidelines for measuring the level of awesomeness of an AC/DC
album do not generally go beyond gut reaction, and what can I do if my gut
reaction reads overtly positive?
Seriously, at least half of these songs are
fun. What other AC/DC record starts and ends with a speedy rocker? And
not just a speedy rocker, but 'Heatseeker' is their liveliest anthem to
the pleasures of headbanging in a long, long time — I will certainly take its
Chuck Berry attitude over the fat pomp of 'For Those About To Rock' any time of
day — whereas 'This Means War' is just as exciting in terms of showcasing
Angus' «tapping» technique as the far better known 'Thunderstruck', just not
as anthemic.
There are also nice apocalyptic notes scattered
here and there, most overtly so in 'Some Sin For Nuthin', with arguably the
most meaningful lyrics Brian Johnson ever wrote: 'Some sin for gold, some sin
for shame, some sin for cash, some sin for gain, some sin for wine, some sin
for pain, but I ain't gonna be the fool who's gonna have to sin for nothing!' —
and the brothers come up with a suitably grim riff and an ominous atmosphere.
«Intellectually oriented» fans of the band like to complain, with generally
good reason, about how the coming of Johnson ruined AC/DC's flashes of street
wit, sarcasm, and self-irony embodied by Bon; but songs like this could have very
easily fit onto an album like Powerage, and might make one want to think
twice before pronouncing judgement on Johnson's cranium capacity (which would
necessarily involve some lame joke about his cap, I suppose).
Other good riffs can also be found. 'Meanstreak'
has one, presented in a cool alternation with a memorable bass line (a
rarity!). 'Two's Up' has one — a weeping one! 'Kissin' Dynamite' hasn't
got one, but the chorus is still fun, and the song, with its slow ominous
build-up, has later been employed as the blueprint for about half of the Ballbreaker
album. It may take a couple listens to get used to the amicable nature of these
hooks — which, perhaps, accounts for the lack of luck, since we generally
expect to be satisfied with an AC/DC record at first listen, otherwise, what's
the point? — but once you're in the game, you won't want to let it go. As for
the filler tracks, there certainly are some (I can never remember a single
thing about 'Ruff Stuff' or 'Go Zone', for instance), but this is the
obligatory blame of just about any AC/DC album.
The saddest thing is the ongoing deterioration
of Johnson's voice. They still put a heavy echo on it, but not nearly as heavy
as the last time around, and the ever-increasing rasp begins to get on one's nerves.
The thing to do is try not to concentrate on it at all; every time I start
thinking about it, I begin to feel a nasty lump in my own throat, and,
instead of just digging the music, experience admiration for the humanism of
the Young brothers, stuck with a pathetic voiceless shadow of a formerly
terrifying singer for the next two decades, yet gallantly refusing to let him
go — surely they didn't just let him tag along because of the fans growing
accustomed to the cap and the wife beater shirt? There's chivalry involved,
right?
All in all, a thumbs
up; this is, by all means, a serious improvement on Fly On The
Wall, even though it is still riddled with problems of inconsistent
songwriting, average mixing, and progressively deteriorating singing. But it
does rock.
THE RAZOR'S EDGE (1990)
1) Thunderstruck; 2) Fire Your Guns; 3) Moneytalks; 4) The Razor's Edge; 5)
Mistress For Christmas; 6) Rock Your Heart Out; 7) Are You Ready; 8) Got You By
The Balls; 9) Shot Of Love; 10) Let's Make It; 11) Goodbye & Good Riddance
To Bad Luck; 12) If You Dare.
The choice of Bruce Fairbairn, the former
producer for Bon Jovi and the corporate incarnation of Aerosmith, was weird,
especially right after the reteaming with Vanda and Young — in spirit, no two
production styles could be more different. However, what with all the critical
lashing and the singer continuing to lose his voice at an alarming rate, the
band needed a commercial shot in the arm, and, most probably, they expected
Fairbairn to give them the same kind of slick stimulus that they had earlier
received from Lange. Amazingly, this is exactly what happened!
The Razor's Edge is AC/DC's «poppiest» record since at least Highway
To Hell, and, although some of the veteran fans despised its clean and
merry nature, the casual listener need not be afraid. Fairbairn was not stupid
enough to try to deprive the band of its trademarks — he simply pushed them
into exploring other directions than the exclusively blues-oriented hard
rock style, and he is probably responsible for the odd diversity of the album.
Indeed, had it sustained the same level of
variety as displayed by the first four tracks, The Razor's Edge might
have become one of AC/DC's biggest artistic triumphs. The famous «tapping»
(actually, «pseudo-tapping») melody of 'Thunderstruck' might have partially
endeared the song to hair metal lovers, but it still retains the tone and the
punkish spite of AC/DC, never ever going into any of the corny van Halenish
«God of Thunder» modes, despite invoking thunder all the time — and its busy droning instantly commands the
listening attention of just about everyone. Who says this band is boring? On
'Thunderstruck', there is about a miriad subtly different ways in which Angus'
and Malcolm's guitars connect with and disconnect from each other, and, at the
same time, it is one of the greatest driving songs of all time. At least today,
when people are no longer cursed with having it blast out of every second car
window, as it used to be in 1990.
'Fire Your Guns' returns us to more traditional
territory, but in a major way — not only is it one of the band's fastest songs ever,
but they seem to have remembered what it is like to plan and record a superbly
constructed three-minute rocker with not one second wasted. Riff, verse,
bridge, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, instrumental bridge, instrumental verse,
bridge, chorus, short maniacal build-up to the finale, each in its right
place: three minutes of getting your ass kicked by the elite squad of
ass-kicking. Johnson sounds like he is busy regurgitating his vomit most of the
time, but, in a way, this only adds to the ass-kicking.
Then — one more surprise with 'Moneytalks',
another hit single that lands them firmly in the «power pop» camp, what with
that anthemic chorus and the song's general party attitude. Who cares? Why
complain? The Youngs have provided not one, but two memorable riffs for
the occasion — I actually like the brain-pounding verse riff far better than
the beer-chugging chorus riff — and what other criteria are there for judging
the quality of their songs? Yes, one can understand some of the old fans
worrying, but there is no need for us to join their ranks, at least not until
we get the true statistics on how many people started going to AC/DC shows
hoping to hear 'Come on, come on, listen to the money talk!' and leaving in
disgust at the sounds of 'Whole Lotta Rosie' or 'Hells Bells'. And even if some
did — so what?
Speaking of 'Hells Bells', the title track
clearly strives for a similar apocalyptic vibe, but with a denser, more
multi-layered and imposing sound, trying to go a little beyond basic ass-kicking
and establish a generally sinister background with its heavy reliance on power
chords and «evil» vocal harmonies. Again, while the approach in itself is not
all that different from 'Hells Bells', the overall synthesis is fairly new and,
I would say, successful. AC/DC were never in great danger of becoming Iron
Maiden anyway, but it is fun to see them trying on this kind of image.
It is with the (un)suitably titled 'Mistress
For Christmas' that the band starts running out of steam and reverting back to
the usual clichés; the remainder of the album is patchy, alternating
tight, focused, but not tremendously memorable, rockers ('Shot Of Love', 'If
You Dare') with slow-moving lumbering monsters that sound like outtakes from Blow
Up Your Video ('Got You By The Balls') and songs that do not have any
creative ideas at all ('Goodbye & Good Riddance To Bad Luck', 'Rock Your
Heart Out'). They are still crisply produced and all, but this is the breaking
point at which Brian's gurgling voice becomes a real nuisance.
Another nuisance is that Brian did not write
any of the lyrics. In some of his interviews, he confesses that he never
really liked that occupation, and was only too relieved to hear Malcolm and
Angus propose that they shoulder this burden themselves. This is strange,
because, next to the Young brothers' word-wielding skills, Johnson is at least
a Yeats (and Bon Scott no less than a Lord Byron). As late as Blow Up Your Video,
Brian was writing at least some texts that dealt — crudely, but
listenably — with the traditional blues topics of trouble, sin, and redemption;
the Youngs, ninety percent of the time, seem to only be able to come up with
the traditional blues topic of the dirty old man. Their idea of a good lyric
goes something like this: "Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the day;
I just can't wait till Christmas time when I can grope you in the hay".
Bon must have been rolling in his grave.
The album is thus riddled with problems — yet
it is still a miraculous achievement for a band of 40-year old codgers who,
long past their prime, were still able to make the world pay attention without
significantly compromising their style and their values. For that fact alone,
as well as the four opening classics, The Razor's Edge is a surefire thumbs up experience. But even on the whole, and
even taken out of its context, and even when you have to sit through all the
filler, it still delivers the right punches. Since then, the band has
failed to deliver anything that would top it, and, at this point, probably
never will.
LIVE (1992)
CD I: 1) Thunderstruck; 2)
Shoot To Thrill; 3) Back In Black; 4) Sin City; 5) Who Made Who; 6) Heatseeker;
7) Fire Your Guns; 8) Jailbreak; 9) The Jack; 10) The Razors Edge; 11) Dirty
Deeds Done Dirt Cheap; 12) Moneytalks; CD II: 1) Hells Bells; 2) Are You Ready;
3) That's The Way I Want My Rock'n'Roll; 4) High Voltage; 5) You Shook Me All
Night Long; 6) Whole Lotta Rosie; 7) Let There Be Rock; 8) Bonny; 9) Highway To
Hell; 10) T.N.T.; 11) For Those About To Rock.
This memento of the Razor's Edge tour
exists in two versions — single-disc and a «deluxe» two-disc variant — and if
you care about the band at all, there is no reason not to go for the double CD
version, giving a much more precise and detailed impression of a late-period
AC/DC show. Culled from various venues, it is very «honest» in that the sound
fades out after each track, but on practice this constant fade-in/fade-out is
annoying and gives the impression one normally gets from cheap Greatest Hits
Live packages, even though the album is actually quite representative of
the true AC/DC live set of the period, big hits, fresh numbers from the last
two albums, and occasional rarities and oddities interspersed.
Arguably, The Razor's Edge tour was the
last time the band rocked on stage with the usual amount of juvenile delight —
during their subsequent live shows, old age started biting at their heels,
which is particularly well visible on video (Angus being a little more
restrained and less psychotic), but is subtly reflected in the overall sound as
well. On Live, there is no such thing — the band rocks like crazy, which
makes it all the more sad to see the further deterioration of Johnson's voice,
particularly showing on the old Back In Black hits. Of course, he tries
to compensate by finishing the announcement of each song's title with a
beastly roar ("this one's called... 'Sin City', YYAARGGH!"), but this
schtick gets fairly obnoxious second time around, not to mention third,
fourth, and forty-fourth. Poor guy.
Apart from the voice problem, the only other question
is the same I have already asked about If You Want Blood: what's the
point of an AC/DC live album in the first place? That previous live record made
good mainly on the strength of Bon and Angus. This live record, on the
contrary, succeeds despite Brian
Johnson rather than because of him, leaving Angus as the only undisputed
hero, but even Angus cannot make all of the tracks special, and the recent
ones, in particular, are played very much by the book ('Thunderstruck'),
meaning you have to pay for more or less the same thing twice.
So, what's actually different? Well, some
things. You get to hear a less squeaky clean production of 'Who Made Who',
without the electronic effects on the drums. You get to hear 'Heatseeker' begin
with a few bars from 'Rocker' (a song that Brian only performed briefly with
the band at the start of his tenure — it was too much of a personalized Bon vehicle
for him to hold on to it). You get to hear 'The Jack' with Bon Scott's original
«uncensored» lyrics — much less interesting than the double-entendre version,
if you ask me (see how censorship rules?). You get to hear Angus play a little
bit of Scottish folk music ('The Bonnie Banks O' Loch Lomond') as a happy crowd
of Scots actually sings the words. And, most importantly, you get to hear
heavily extended versions of 'Jailbreak' (as Angus masturbates — figuratively —
and strips — literally), 'High Voltage' (Brian's bit of audience
participation), and 'Let There Be Rock' (which spends the last five minutes or
so desperately trying to stop, but always failing).
None of this is essential, but little is
disappointing (I would recommend to skip 'Hells Bells', a song that Brian never
managed to get right onstage even in the early days, much less now when the
pearly gates to the required high notes have been sealed with nicotine and
alcohol), and, besides, this is the last young AC/DC album you are ever
going to hear. Three years later, they would officially change their names to
Angus and Malcolm Old, and the world would never be the same. So, thumbs up for now.
BALLBREAKER (1995)
1) Hard As A Rock; 2) Cover You In Oil; 3) The
Furor; 4) Boogie Man; 5) The Honey Roll; 6) Burnin' Alive; 7) Hail Caesar; 8) Love
Bomb; 9) Caught With Your Pants Down; 10) Whiskey On The Rocks; 11) Ballbreaker.
The title is stupid at worst, the songs are
mediocre at best, and the balance is off. In between The Razor's Edge
and Ballbreaker — an interim that lasted five years, seriously longer
than any previous lapse period — AC/DC got old, and this is their panicky way
of denying the obvious. The only thing that is truly «hard as a rock» about
this record is the Young brothers' fingers that certainly get harder with each
passing year — through experience as much as worsening skin condition. The
sound is unmistakable.
Still, it must be stated clearly that Ballbreaker
is decidedly uncommercial: after the occasional power pop melodies,
crowd-pleasing singalong choruses, and dazzling gimmicks of The Razor's Edge,
the band goes to basics again. Strictly mid-tempo, very much bluesy, sometimes
even lazy and relaxed, this is music for the hardcore AC/DC fan, one who
cherishes the vibe of these guys far more than the imprintability of their
riffs in memory.
Not that there aren't any imprintable riffs.
The Youngs stick to two styles — apocalyptic and sexalicious — and when they
are in the «look out, danger ahead» mood, one that can be experienced equally strong
regardless of age, it works: 'The Furor', 'Burnin' Alive', and 'Hail Caesar'
are masterful highlights. 'Hail Caesar', in particular, has them seriously
playing with fire, culminating in a series of mock-Nazi 'Hail!' exclamations as
they warn the unsuspecting beer-guzzling fan against the evils of absolute
power; and the riff, totally trivial but utterly evil, shows that they still
have it in them to wring total genius from utter simplicity. As for 'Burnin'
Alive', its introductory fifty seconds are only second to 'Hell's Bells' in the
band's catalog for the status of «Greatest Tension Mounting Moment in AC/DC
History» — slowly and patiently, the Youngs' guitars urge their way in, like a
couple of vultures circling from afar, finally settling on the carcass to rip
it apart to wild carnal cries of chief vulture B. J.
It is with the sexalicious part of the story
that the real problems begin. Having concocted a cute pop melody for the album
opener and lead single, 'Hard As A Rock', they apparently decided not to bother
with the rest at all. Not only do songs like 'Cover You In Oil', 'Love Bomb',
and 'The Honey Roll' feature some of the most inane lyrics in the band's
pedigree (they base their approach on the innuendo-swarming pre-war blues
style, but second-rate imitations of salaciousness cannot usually be described
by words other than «laughable» or «idiotic»), the melodies are not at all engaging.
And how many rewrites! Haven't we already heard 'Cover You In Oil' as
'Meanstreak' (where it was much better)? Didn't 'Boogie Man' used to be 'Night
Prowler'? And why do they want to parody their own stop-and-start style of
'Whole Lotta Rosie' on the thoroughly inferior 'Caught With Your Pants Down'?
On the positive side again, five decent songs
out of eleven (three ominous numbers plus 'Hard As A Rock' and the title track,
which somehow manages to combine the ominous with the sexalicious) is not an
altogether invalid proposition. Plus, Johnson seems to have somehow managed to
cope with the destruction of his voice — he does not attempt so frequently to
scream his head off, settling into a quiet, but shrill whine that alternates
with sporadic Tom Waits-ish gruffness (the latter works particularly well on
regular blues numbers like 'Boogie Man' — too bad AC/DC are not truly a blues
band), and his presence is thus made more bearable (still, never make the
mistake of playing this back to back with Back In Black).
So, Ballbreaker is not such an utter
waste as it can seem on first listen; a flawed, uncomfortable album whose
creators find it hard to deal with the mid-life creativity crisis, but one that
might be worth revisiting if you are pursuing the study of the evolution of
ballsy hard rock nuances. Judgement used to be thumbs down all the way, but
these days, I'm not too sure. Surprisingly, I find myself returning to 'Hail
Caesar' and 'Burnin' Alive' all the time. They just keep talking to me, the
doggone bastards.
STIFF UPPER LIP (2000)
1) Stiff Upper Lip; 2)
Meltdown; 3) House Of Jazz; 4) Hold Me Back; 5) Safe In New York City; 6)
Can't Stand Still; 7) Can't Stop Rock'n'Roll; 8) Satellite Blues; 9)
Damned; 10) Come And Get It; 11) All Screwed Up; 12) Give It Up.
Returning to elder brother George for
production — and elder brother George helps them restore the balance by
steering them back into the amplified pub rock direction of their earliest
releases. If The Razor's Edge was heavy metal with a power-pop edge, and
Ballbreaker was heavy metal with a blues-rock edge, then Stiff Upper
Lip is no longer heavy metal: it is hard barroom rock, and it works pretty
well for the band at this juncture.
Turns out the Youngs' riffpark is still running
strong. The title track runs on a sly, relatively complex blues riff that
seeps inside only slowly, but gradually it becomes a cool, humorous pub rock anthem
that is neither too lax nor too overstated. It is also fun to see Angus begin
his solo with a series of drunk, disjointed, incoherent licks, only to have a
steady, climactic Chuck-o-Berry melody emerge from under them a few bars later
and smash the listener into the ground. But it is Brian Johnson who takes the
cake, starting the song off with some gruff Tom Waits-like bluesroaring,
tricking one into believing that, perhaps, the high notes are gone forever? —
then, once the main body of the song kicks in, bringing you back those high
notes with a freshness that you have not experienced for over a decade.
(Apparently, he had some throat surgery in the interim).
What makes the song so likable? Thematically,
it is not all that different from 'Hard As A Rock'; but the former was anthemic
and sounded like it took itself too seriously, where 'Stiff Upper Lip' just
kicks some modest ass and presents a little self-irony: "I keep a stiff
upper lip / And I shoot from the hip", Brian sings, and although we all
know that he is quite liable to missing if he really shoots from the hip, there
is some relaxed fun in his voice, indicating that he might be firmly aware of
that, too. 'Stiff Upper Lip' does not try to prove that they are still tough;
it just busies itself with giving you a good time.
The same applies to most of this album. The
doom-laden feeling of 'The Furor' and 'Burnin' Alive' is nowhere to be seen.
The closest this record ever gets to «ominous» is 'Safe In New York City', and
even so, mostly because of the tension-mounting arrangement on the opening riff
and the late-coming association with 9/11, even though the song itself was
released more than half a year before the catastrophe. It is pretty gritty, but
certainly not apocalyptic, just tough in a streetwise way, ridiculing the
concept of a «safe metropolis» as such.
Much more biting and, in my opinion, a minor
overlooked gem, is the slow pounding groove of 'Damned', where the Young
brothers take on the issue of straightjacketing society — apparently, the most
picking issue they have with The Man, as they condemn it with arguably one of
their best sets of lyrics. Johnson catches on to it fairly quickly, and his
"I'll be damned if I drink or smoke, damned if I steal your joke, damned
if I go for broke, damned if I do, damned if I don't!" is surprisingly
relevant and poignant for the modern age.
But most of the other songs are simply about
having a good time. They are ready to rock, they can't stand still, it's
getting hot, you can't stop rock'n'roll, she start a-rockin', come and get it —
all the regular news. No bad songs, no timeless masterpieces. Catchy choruses.
Good clean production with very little metal edge. Johnson totally tolerable
throughout. Throw in a couple extra beers and Stiff Upper Lip goes down
nice and smooth. If they and I live for another two hundred years, there is no
harm in getting a new album like this with every new decade.
BLACK ICE (2008)
1) Rock'n'Roll Train; 2)
Skies On Fire; 3) Big Jack;
4) Anything Goes; 5)
War Machine; 6) Smash'n'Grab; 7) Spoilin' For A Fight; 8) Wheels; 9) Decibel;
10) Stormy May Day; 11) She Likes Rock'n'Roll; 12) Money Made; 13) Rock'n'Roll
Dream; 14) Rocking All The Way; 15) Black Ice.
With most of its members steadily nearing
pension age, each new AC/DC album is a curio in itself, and if there is one
reason behind people sweeping it off the racks, it is most likely the need to
find out — do they still deliver the kind of crunch that is at least
comparable to their classic hits? Can they still cut it? Can I still bang my
head to it?
This time the firm of Young, Johnson, &
Young, Inc., has pushed the waiting period even further: almost eight years
between albums. But the length does not really matter. In a certain sense, the
last ever AC/DC album — and not a very fine one — was Ballbreaker. Both Stiff
Upper Lip and Black Ice function on a different plane: their aim is
not to continue the band's career, but rather to remind us,
occasionally, of the band's existence. And in between reminders, they can take
as much time as they want.
Which is why Black Ice got mostly
positive responses. It's not because the songs are good — frankly speaking,
they are not — it is because, deep down inside, we have all been waiting with
accumulating impatience for a new AC/DC album. Then it finally comes out.
What's it like? How is Brian's voice? Well, it got better, not exactly Back
In Black, but at least back in shades of grey, one can easily listen to it
without cringing. How are the guitars? Well, how can the guitars be? Did
we seriously expect the Young brothers to switch to banjos and ukuleles? How is
Phil Rudd doing on the drums? Well, unless they cut off his arms and legs, he
will always be the perfect drummer for this band. Okay, stop right here. Five
stars out of five? No, wait, let's make that four stars out of five. After all,
only Back In Black can have five.
Black Ice does break some of the rules of decency. First, fifteen songs is way
too much. I understand the Youngs must have accumulated quite a lot during
these eight years, but the more songs there are on an AC/DC album, the easier
it is to spot reused riffs (e. g. 'Spoilin' For A Fight' = 'Bedlam In Belgium',
etc.). Second, they do not need to convince me that they represent the
old guard faithfully protecting the legacy of rock'n'roll. 'Rock'n'Roll Train',
'She Likes Rock'n'Roll', 'Rock'n'Roll Dream', 'Rocking All The Way' — guys,
enough already. Not even Chuck Berry was that obnoxious with his titles.
Third and related, the lead single,
'Rock'n'Roll Train', is not very helpful. AC/DC are at their most punchy with
tight, angry, focused tunes, in which respect 'Stiff Upper Lip' was an
excellent choice; but this here bombastic anthem, instead, tries to invade the
territory of 'Highway To Hell', and, although musically they are about equally
simplistic, the latter was at least provoking, while 'Rock'n'Roll Train' simply
breeds a bunch of stadium-happy chords. Anthems, with few exceptions, are
embarrassing in general; late-period AC/DC anthems are embarrassing in
particular.
So it could have been better. But let me,
nevertheless, join the chorus and say that an AC/DC album of such caliber is
perfectly welcome every ten years (maybe even every five years, although
I doubt they are capable today of meeting those deadlines). The 'Hail
Caesar'-ish menace returns with the fire and smoke of 'War Machines'; the
power-poppy charm of Razor's Edge finds a worthy successor in 'Big
Jack'; in a rare experimental mood, Angus successfully deflowers the slide
guitar on 'Stormy May Day', reminiscent of Led Zeppelin's 'In My Time Of Dyin'
but not truly ripping it off, as some pessimists have complained; and Brian
Johnson follows suit by trying on the shoes of Robert Plant (!) in 'Rock'n'Roll
Dream', arguably the closest these guys have ever come to art-rock in their
career (if you do not believe it, check the eerie «crowing» effects at the end
of the song and tell me there is a precedent).
Best of the bunch, however, is 'Anything Goes',
a brawny pub-rock tune that explodes with the kind of shiny happy delight one
could frequently see on albums by Brian Johnson's original band, Geordie. It is
sometimes mentioned that producer Brendan O'Brien was constantly pushing Brian
towards singing rather than screaming, calling him a «soul singer» throughout
the sessions, and on one song at least, Johnson has managed to remember the way
it used to be in the 1970s — to terrific effect. The result is an uplifting,
powerful tune, absolutely unoriginal, but delightfully breaking up the
monotonousness of the band's hard rock crunch. They even took it with
themselves onstage — and as much as I hate to admit it, this is the
singing style that best suits Johnson's voice and personality, which, in turn,
leads to uncomfortable thoughts about how the man has been pretty much
sacrificing himself for the past thirty years. But if he gets at least one song
like this per album from now on, the payback will be sufficient.
Like Stiff Upper Lip, Black Ice
is the kind of an album that is only real good while it is still real hot — we
listen to it to celebrate the phenomenon of AC/DC in the 21st century, not as
the first choice to satisfy our basic craving for kick-ass rock'n'roll. But what's
wrong about a little celebrating? Thumbs up
for all the good times these guys have given us.
LIVE AT RIVER PLATE (2012)
1) Intro; 2) Rock'n'Roll
Train; 3) Hell Ain't A Bad Place To Be; 4) Back In Black; 5) Big Jack; 6) Dirty
Deeds Done Dirt Cheap; 7) Shot Down In Flames; 8) Thunderstruck; 9) Black Ice;
10) The Jack; 11) Hells Bells; 12) Shoot To Thrill; 13) War Machine; 14) Dog
Eat Dog; 15) You Shook Me All Night Long; 16) T.N.T.; 17) Whole Lotta Rosie;
18) Let There Be Rock; 19) Highway To Hell; 20) For Those About To Rock (We
Salute You).
Throughout the later stages of their career,
AC/DC have taken good care of ensuring a steady flow of live videos — beginning
with 1992's «classic» Live At Donington
— but it has been 20 years now since they last released a live audio album, and
the reasons are obvious: since most AC/DC shows sound exactly the same way, the
only proper way to «relive» an AC/DC show is through the appropriate picture.
Basically, what good is a live Angus chord when unaccompanied by an Angus
grimace? And how are we supposed to tolerate the irritating gurgling produced
by Brian Johnson's larynx if we do not simultaneously get to watch him
fist-pumping the air, in that ever-present working man wife-beater?
So the natural question is — why did they
finally decide to combine the release of this live show, filmed and taped in
December 2009 at a Buenos Aires stadium, with a 2-CD audio release? Can there
be anything special about this
performance? Are AC/DC finally, almost forty years into their career, going to
give us a big surprise? Yes, they are... with a seventeen-minute performance of ʽLet There Be Rockʼ. Bet
you didn't see that one coming.
No, of course not. The only reason for the
existence of Live At River Plate is
to act as a reminder — it has now been thirty years since these guys came back
in black to us, and they are still here, and they are still kicking the same
old ass. To be honest, they do not kick it quite
the same way — not so much age, as basic stage professionalism has set in, and
even the wildest of the wildest of Angus' ecstatic outbursts seem more
disciplined and «ingrained» than they used to be. But that is probably
inevitable: the important thing is, the lads prove the point — not only do they
not sound in the slightest like old
relics, but, on the contrary, the old war machine is still well-oiled and
running faster and tighter than ever. Plus, of course, all the technological
benefits of modern production — guitars, drums, bass, vocals, everything sounds
cleaner and more distinct than ever before. Nothing but the best for these guys
— well, you'd probably have a right to nothing but the best, too, after
spending forty years in the business.
All of which, of course, guarantees one and
exactly one listen to the album, upon which you may safely return it to your
local library or collector's shelf. The fact that they decided to include recordings
from one show only (actually, three nights were involved, but these are petty
details) gives this better continuity and authenticity than the Live album from 1992, but also surmises
the inavoidable — most of the songs are well-known crowd pleasers; in fact, 12
out of 19 songs overlap with Live,
with 4 others played from the latest studio album — essentially, only the decision
to bring back to life ʽShot Down In Flamesʼ and ʽDog Eat
Dogʼ comes across as mildly surprising, and not particularly indicative of
the whole atmosphere.
So what is there to comment upon? Brian
Johnson's voice is in good form for his age, proving that the studio feats of Black Ice were not performed by a fake
(but we trust the band on that one — if we stop trusting AC/DC, what else is
there remaining in the world to trust?). The Young brothers remain reliable
warhorses. The Argentinian audiences are enthusiastic to the core (after all,
for most people in the world, AC/DC is the next best thing to soccer, and some
don't even see the difference all that well). Angus does his striptease thing
on ʽThe Jackʼ, which only works for the video — on the audio, the
unsuspecting novice simply gets to wonder what the hell it is that makes the
people go ga-ga as the band is simply pushing a melody-less 12-bar structure on
them for ages. The new songs mesh in well with the old stuff (although I, for
one, would love to hear ʽAnything Goesʼ for a change). The 17-minute
jam on ʽLet There Be Rockʼ is overcooked beyond mercy, but at least
most of it is set to the song's general frantic pace, so feel free to indulge
your inner headbanger until the head finally falls off.
In short, the universe still stands, so, if
anything, a two-hour long listen to Live
At River Plate is simply a good remedy against the hidden menace of the
Mayan calendar for those who think they might need one. Global financial
crisis? Arab Spring? Justin Bieber? Go on, take one more bite of AC/DC — add
some much-needed stability to your life. Even in the 21st century, some things
never change, and that's cool by me.
ROCK OR BUST (2014)
1) Rock Or Bust; 2) Play Ball;
3) Rock The Blues Away; 4) Miss Adventure; 5) Dogs Of War; 6) Got Some Rock
& Roll Thunder; 7) Hard Times; 8) Baptism By Fire; 9) Rock The House; 10)
Sweet Candy; 11) Emission Control.
The album cover looks suspiciously reminiscent
of Back In Black, and this may be no
coincidence: just like its more than thirty-year old predecessor, Rock Or Bust comes with the loss of a
crucial member — not nearly as lethal, but equally gruesome, since brother
Malcolm, suffering from severe dementia, was unable to continue working with
the band, and had to be replaced. His riffs and «anchoring presence» had been
every bit as vital to the AC/DC sound as the surface flashiness of brother
Angus, so, in theory, this could have been a crippling loss. In keeping with
the family spirit, though, they now enlist nephew Stevie Young to fill in his
shoes — and, surprisingly (or not too surprisingly: a Young is a Young, after
all), we end up not feeling a lot of difference at all: Stevie keeps the famous
tone and the equally famous metronomic precision of Malcolm right there in the
family.
That said, Rock
Or Bust ain't no Back In Black.
If we are talking on the nuanced level, where not every AC/DC album actually sounds the same, remember that Back In Black was tremendously energized by the desire to show the world that «we're
back, we're kicking more ass than ever before, we own this motherfuckin'
universe, and we laugh Death, Hell, and good taste right in the face». In
comparison, Rock Or Bust only tells
us that «we're still here, and we're holding our positions steady enough».
Where Black Ice still had at least
one or two novel ideas to it, Rock Or
Bust, in its entirety, consists of re-assembled and slightly re-tweaked /
re-constructed songs from the past two decades. In fact, you could probably
make a case that it is almost completely derivable from Black Ice itself — most notably, ʽRock The Blues Awayʼ is
a near-total clone of the «poppy» ʽAnything Goesʼ from that record.
The album is also worryingly short — for most
reviewers, 34 minutes seemed like a blessing and one of its major high points
(because AC/DC should be taken in small dosages?), but to me, this feels so
unusual that I cannot get rid of the subconscious feeling: Rock Or Bust exists only
to assert that they «still exist», and serves no other purpose. They might just
as well have put out a single with two songs on it, like the Rolling Stones
have occasionally done in the past decade, to keep the infospace and the public
warmed up a bit. At this point, numbers have no significance — two, twelve,
twenty, two hundred, whatever.
In terms of sound, Rock Or Bust leaves no questions: this is still AC/DC alright.
Angus has not lost anything in terms of energy, precision, or madness, the
rhythm section ticks and tocks away with the usual gruff determination, Brian
Johnson's voice is still at the same «late-period top level» as it has been
ever since Stiff Upper Lip, and
nephew Stevie shows that the Young genetic pool is one of the most stable
things in the universe. (If there are any more Youngs in the family, and if
Brian has a promising relative as well, we could probably keep the band well up
into the 2050s and beyond). Thematic subjects also remain the same: sex (#1),
rock'n'roll (#2), and what's-the-world-coming-to (#3), not necessarily, but
very preferably in that order. Select bits of lyrical wisdom, one per each
thematic direction, include "Let's play ball / Shoot down the walls",
"In rock we trust / It's rock or bust", and "We'll be the dogs
of war / Send me with dogs of war" (I think they were not able to find a
proper rhyme for this last one).
In all honesty, the band commands respect and
even provides some intrigue — now that we know
that they can, at least formally, get it on when they are all past sixty and suffered such a heavy blow, there is
again no telling when they are going to finally fail. With Rock Or Bust, Angus Young remains the only «founding father» of the
band, so I guess that there is no replacing him,
at least, but until he joins his brother in the shadows, I guess we can all say
that AC/DC's future still looks secure. Not in terms of composing, though —
with all these tunes being derivatives of derivatives of derivatives in the n-th degree, I don't even want to waste
any time focusing on their riffs or choruses; for historical/chronological
reasons, the title track may deserve a corner spot on some future anthology,
but that's about it. Nice to hear the old guys can still get it up, though.
"Emission control / It's good for the soul" and all that. Who knows
how it goes in real life, of course, but whatever is coming from those speakers
still has the good old orgasmic effects for their female (and not only female)
fans.
ADDENDA:
BONFIRE (1974-1979/1997)
CD I: 1) Live Wire; 2) Problem
Child; 3) High Voltage; 4) Hell Ain't A Bad Place To Be; 5) Dog Eat Dog; 6) The
Jack; 7) Whole Lotta Rosie; 8) Rocker; CD II: 1) Live Wire; 2) Shot Down In
Flames; 3) Hell Ain't A Bad Place To Be; 4) Sin City; 5) Walk All Over You; 6)
Bad Boy Boogie; CD III: 1) The Jack; 2) Highway To Hell; 3) Girls Got Rhythm;
4) High Voltage; 5) Whole Lotta Rosie; 6) Rocker; 7) T.N.T.; 8) Let There Be
Rock; CD IV: 1) Dirty Eyes; 2) Touch Too Much; 3) If You Want Blood (You Got
It); 4) Back Seat Confidential; 5) Get It Hot; 6) Sin City; 7) She's Got Balls;
8) School Days; 9) It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock And Roll); 10)
Ride On; CD V = Back In Black.
Many fans were seriously disappointed with
AC/DC's first attempt at contributing to the «Boxset Movement». They expected
rarities a-plenty, outtakes, demos, previously unheard or, at least,
well-remastered live recordings, and other surprises. After all, even though
the boxset was only supposed to cover the band's years with Bon Scott — hence
the punny name — there must have been plenty of gold stuff lying in the 1970s
vaults, no?
Well, either no or else they are letting it age
for a couple more decades. Let us see. The first CD is a live performance from
the Atlantic Studios, recorded December 7, 1977. Previously unreleased? Hardly
so; it had a very limited LP promo release as early as 1978, although, granted,
from 1978 to 1997 it only existed as a collectable. The second and third CDs
are the soundtrack to the concert movie Let There Be Rock, filmed in
Paris in December 1979 and already owned on VHS (although not on record) by
every respectable fan.
By the fourth CD, Volts, we finally get
to the vaults (get it? vaults — volts! genius!), and this is where things
become really odd: studio rarities are basically limited to two alternate
versions of songs from Highway To Hell with only slightly different
arrangements (this is AC/DC; their arrangements of one single song cannot be seriously
different), and two early versions of 'Whole Lotta Rosie' and 'Beating Around
The Bush' that are given different lyrics and, hence, different titles, but
that is obviously not enough to fool anyone. Then there are a couple more live
versions and a few tracks from early Australian-only releases.
Finally, the fifth CD is Back In Black.
'Nuff said.
The biggest mistake that one can make about Bonfire,
however, is to think of it from the perspective of hardcore AC/DC fans, who,
for some reason, thought this boxset was for them. It is not. First and
foremost, it is for Bon Scott, whose memory the band still lovingly cherishes
after all these years, and for the band members themselves, who seem to have
taken far more delight in designing and materializing this boxset than in
raking in the money from its sales. Second, it is for novices who do not,
as of yet, own any AC/DC, and for whom a combined set of Back In Black
and some well-recorded live performances (always a better choice than regular
best-of compilations) will do nicely as an introduction to the sleazy magic of
Scott. Third, it is for the rock critic — to give him a nice pretext for
ranting on how disgustingly cool and how street-wise intelligent AC/DC's former
frontman has always been in comparison to his replacement.
For all those reasons, Bonfire is
actually one of the better boxsets on the market. And the performances are
kick-ass. One finally gets unabbreviated live versions of 'Whole Lotta Rosie', ten
awesome minutes of 'Rocker', thirteen of 'Bad Boy Boogie' (alright, this one is
not so fine: much of it is just basic chugga-chugga on rhythm guitar, while
Angus is busy stripping — there was a good reason they filtered that part out
on If You Want Blood), and quite a few Bon-sung numbers from Highway
To Hell, including a 'Girls Got Rhythm' that discards all the «poppy»
production elements and realizes its hardcore potential to the max.
As to the surprising lack of studio rarities,
the Youngs have gone on record stating that there actually were none —
the band pretty much used up all the good ideas it ever came up with, and bad
ideas are hardly worth releasing. Besides, who needs outtakes from AC/DC
sessions if each second album they release sounds like a bunch of outtakes
anyway?
BACKTRACKS (1974-2001/2009)
CD I: 1) High Voltage; 2)
Stick Around; 3) Love Song; 4) It's A Long Way To The Top; 5) Rocker; 6) Fling
Thing; 7) Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap; 8) Ain't No Fun (Waitin' 'Round To Be A
Millionnaire); 9) R.I.P. (Rock In Peace); 10) Carry Me Home; 11) Crabsody In
Blue; 12) Cold Hearted Man; 13) Who Made Who (12" Extended Mix); 14) Snake
Eye; 15) Borrowed Time; 16) Down On The Borderline; 17) Big Gun; 18) Cyberspace;
CD II: 1) Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap; 2) Dog Eat Dog; 3) Live Wire; 4) Shot
Down In Flames; 5) Back In Black; 6) T.N.T.; 7) Let There Be Rock; 8) Guns For
Hire; 9) Sin City; 10) Rock'n'Roll Ain't Noise Pollution; 11) This House Is On
Fire; 12) You Shook Me All Night Long; 13) Jailbreak; 14) Shoot To Thrill; 15)
Hell Ain't A Bad Place To Be; CD III: 1) High Voltage; 2) Hells Bells; 3) Whole
Lotta Rosie; 4) Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap; 5) Highway To Hell; 6) Back In
Black; 7) For Those About To Rock; 8) Ballbreaker; 9) Hard As A Rock; 10) Dog
Eat Dog; 11) Hail Caesar; 12) Whole Lotta Rosie; 13) You Shook Me All Night
Long; 14) Safe In New York City.
Another cooky boxset, released at the peak of the Black Ice hype and
featuring the latest and greatest in boxset technology: a box that represents
a real small working amplifier (one watt power, so as not to disturb the
neighbours). Apart from the packaging delights, however, Backtracks only
goes to show, once more, just how uncluttered the vaults are.
The set exists in two versions — three CDs/two
DVDs and two CDs/one DVD, respectively — and only the first CD really makes any
proper sense, since it carefully collects all, or most, of the B-sides and
rarities that used to make the professional collector a human being of a
different order from the mere mortal. No more. Now even the laymen have
regular, simple access to pleasures they had missed, such as:
—
the B-side
to the 'Jailbreak' single, surreptitiously called 'Fling Thing' but in reality
the same 'Bonnie' that the band sang along with the audience on the Live
album, only in the studio, with nearly inaudible vocals but quite
well-pronounced guitar;
—
the
Australian-only release of 'Rock In Peace' (originally on Dirty Deeds Done
Dirt Cheap) and 'Crabsody In Blue' (originally on Let There Be Rock),
a mid-tempo and a slow blues shuffle respectively, both of which further
develop Bon Scott's sickly predictable brand of teenage humor ('Crabsody In
Blue' is basically 'The Jack Part 2');
—
'Cold
Hearted Man', a rocker from Powerage that sounds exactly like most other
rockers on Powerage and (possibly, for that same reason) disappeared on
the American LP;
—
some
unremarkable Johnson-era B-sides from the late Eighties. If you hate Blow Up
Your Video, don't bother. I don't, but I still don't bother;
—
'Big Gun',
a pretty damn good thing written for the soundtrack of Last Action Hero
(well, it ain't Scorsese, but still a good excuse for popcorn consumption).
That is, until you realize the principal excitement comes from the same type
of vocal hook that used to be 'Bedlam In Belgium' (the riff from that one
they recycled elsewhere).
Granted, this (plus a couple other
unmentionables) is no Ali Baba's treasure cave, but still a good source of iron
for completists. As for the two live CDs, the small bunch of Bon Scott-era live
material is expendable (no surprises next to the wealth on Bonfire);
the nine songs recorded live at Donington in 1991 are a complete waste of space
— they are more or less the same as on the Live album from the 1991 tour
— unless you are a particular fan of the Donington concert (available on video
in its entirety) and are too lazy to rip the audio off your DVD all by
yourself; the live stuff from 1996 lets you see that Ballbreaker was not
all bad, but also shows that, by that time, the band was not able to amass the
same level of fury onstage that it did in the studio; and the extended live
version of 'Jailbreak' from 1985 is terrific until the strip section, where you
will be subject to approximately five or six minutes of the bass drum going
BOOM... BOOM... BOOM... while Angus is slowly trying to figure out whether or
not to give in to the crowd's demand for admiring his manhood. Authentic, but
imminently skippable.
So, basically, the only real reason to own
these extra two CDs is for the eight live tracks from 1981 to 1983, which
capture a still young and fearsome band with hard rock's deadliest singer in
his absolute prime. Granted, Brian, even at his very best and healthiest, never
sang as good on stage as he did in the studio — apparently, lack of
concentration and the necessity to lash and thrash about in order to keep up
with the world's wildest guitarist, not to mention the necessity of constantly
adjusting his cap (why he never came up with the idea of gluing it on is one of
rock's deepest mysteries), hindered him from hitting all the right notes. But
belt it out he could, and did, and once you get adjusted to all
the little mistakes, these live renditions will be a nice change from the
overplayed studio counterparts — plus, they include two of the best songs from Flick
Of The Switch, and I count this as a personal gift.
Overall, while this is not the symmetric
Johnson-era companion to Bonfire that the fans were expecting (under a
guessable title like Brianstorm or Brianshake), it is almost
the thing — the Bon-era material is underrepresented, and the Brian-era
material graciously lets us remember some of the best pages of his legacy. In
that sense, it is a companion, and a must-have for fans, if not for
general audiences.
AEROSMITH (1973)
1) Make It; 2) Somebody; 3)
Dream On; 4) One Way Street; 5) Mama Kin; 6) Write Me A Letter; 7) Movin' Out;
8) Walkin' The Dog.
In the beginning, «The Bad Boys of Boston» were
not all that bad. Aerosmith's debut is loud and raw, but to call it «dirty»
would be pushing things; it is even considerably milder than Rolling Stones'
records from 1971-72, and the Stones were the particular band that Aerosmith
were intent on not just defeating, but obliterating in the big game of sleazy
and smutty.
Perhaps it is the «backlog syndrome» that is
really responsible. All of the songs here, minus one Rufus Thomas cover, are
credited to lead vocalist Steven Tyler (one co-credited to lead guitarist Joe
Perry), and at least some of them had been written or at least conceived as
early as the 1960s, when the art of songwriting still implied certain standards
of decency. What Tyler wrote was irreverent, kick-ass blues-rock, to which
guitarists Whitford and Perry added a tiny touch of glam, and the results
entertained, but did not overwhelm.
Nevertheless, Aerosmith did sound like no one
else from the very beginning. Take, for instance, the opening lines of the
near-classic 'Mama Kin' — today, they sound awesomely familiar, but in 1973,
few, if any, bands really played like that. The principal role model are the
Stones, but Whitford and Perry add an extra bit of technicality — not too
much, just enough — that Keith was always too lazy or too snobby to bother
out, without, however, making a big fuss over it. From the start, they could
play in a more complex and precise manner than the Stones without sacrificing
the fun and raw energy (running a little ahead of the train, the Stones could never
have written anything like 'Toys In The Attic', if you know what I mean).
This does not mean Tyler (and Perry) wrote
better songs than the Stones, or had cooler guitar tones — but it does
mean that questions like «why listen to Aerosmith at all when they're just an
American clone of the Stones?» are really pointless, and, in most cases, stem
from all sorts of biases, from rampant anti-Americanism to being allergic to
the sight of Steve Tyler's facial features (the latter problem I can certainly
understand, but then it's all in the eye of the beholder, and, besides, it is
no mean feat being half-Cherokee, half-Italian).
Anyway, there are some excellent barroom
blues-rockers on the album — apart from 'Mama Kin', whose opening chords were
soon to be shamelessly stolen for Patti Smith's 'Ask The Angels' and
Blondie's 'One Way Or Another', there is the powerful show-opener 'Make It',
the seven-minute harmonica-drenched epic 'One Way Street', the dry, gritty,
sex-driven 'Somebody', and even the Rufus Thomas cover rocks quite effortlessly
(they do not shy away from pinpointing their idols, since the Rolling Stones
also had a cover of 'Walkin' The Dog' on their debut album).
On the other hand, there are no truly memorable
riffs: the best ones are standard, well-known blues-rock phrases that have been
given a little dusting, and the worst ones are just ordinary 12-bar-based
accompaniment. Most of the excitement centers on the guitar tones and
Whitford's totally self-assured, intricate style of stringing chords together;
yes, and Joe Perry delivers a couple red-hot solos. Likewise, Tyler has not yet
grown into the laryngeal monster we all know and fear; his voice might even
sound annoying on some of the tracks, and his forced «throat explosions» during
the climactic moments of 'One Way Street' are somewhat out of control.
In the middle of all this we find 'Dream On', a
song I used to professionally hate for the exact same reason that it has been
entered in gold letters in the Big Rock Songbook — ushering in the genre of the
Power Ballad. Of course, some might say that the first Power Ballad was really
Led Zeppelin's 'Stairway To Heaven', or the Carpenters' 'Goodbye To Love', or
even Hendrix's 'Little Wing' — but of all these early candidates, it is 'Dream
On' that most faithfully satisfies the stereotype. Big, pathetic, anthemic,
building up from sad, silent complaint to explosive prayer without really
changing the melody (unlike 'Stairway', where the «soft» and «power» sections
are really two different songs somewhat clumsily sewn together), it is the
stereotypical «monster ballad» of the 1970s, and its echo still resonates all
around us.
But it is really a good song; taking more than
half of its time to get to the climax (the 'Dream on, dream on...' chorus does
not even begin until the three minute mark!), it totally delivers with its epic
ascending guitar line and Tyler's transition to falsetto during the
culmination. Its mentality is really that of a gospel song, along the lines of
the Stones' 'Let It Loose' or 'Shine A Light', only delivered with a
transparent sense of pain and desperation, and that is what makes it
different from the ordinary, clichéd power ballad (check out the Who's
'Love Reign O'er Me' for a similar case). Particularly stunning is the
realisation that Tyler, if his account is to be believed, wrote the song on the
piano in friggin' 1965 — had it found its way on record back then, it would
have certainly put him on the pop map already in his teens.
Joe Perry, notably, did not like the idea of
balladeering at first, and was only convinced to record it because of the
necessity of generating a radio hit. Turns out that he made the right
concession: without 'Dream On', Aerosmith would be forever pegged as a
«passable debut», but with its presence, even the lesser numbers are given
extra solidness in the context, and a thumbs up
rating is guaranteed properly and sincerely.
GET YOUR WINGS (1974)
1) Same Old Song And Dance; 2)
Lord Of The Thighs; 3) Spaced; 4) Woman Of The World; 5) S.O.S. (Too Bad); 6) Train Kept A-Rollin'; 7)
Seasons Of Wither; 8) Pandora's Box.
No matter how high we may reinstate the value
of Aerosmith in years to come, there can be no second opinion about Get
Your Wings as the album that defined, explained, and firmly stated
the reasons for the band's existence and asserted their individuality. In a
symbolic gesture, it introduced the famous Aerosmith logo and, for the first
time, gave a large picture of the band in black and white, with facial expressions
threatening enough to justify comparison with the famous photo of the Stones
on their 1964 debut.
But let us no longer linger on the Stones
connection. The important thing, of course, is not the photo, but musical
evolution. The debut album, like we said, was mostly 'Dream On' plus a bunch of
solid, but not spectacular blues-rockers. The process of getting one's wings,
on the other hand, involves appropriating two musical styles: (a) sleazy,
swaggery, nasty cock-rock born out of utter despisal and mockery of not just
«the order», but just about every human being in existence — Aerosmith view
females as disposable sex objects not because it simply pleases their hormonal
system, like AC/DC, but because women are trash and deserve to be
treated as such (not that the band has ever had anything against equality of
the sexes — men, for them, are just as much trash); (b) dark, dense,
uncomfortable, provocative art-rock that involves mutilating the blues-rock
idiom until it bleeds enough to resemble the highly convoluted self-expression
of progressive artists of the day, but still retains its rootsy core so as not
to offend future generations of Jethro Tull-hating rock critics (and, also,
because none of the band members ever could, or, in fact, cared about mastering
the complex techniques of prog).
Sometimes both directions are captured at the
same time. For instance, 'Lord Of The Thighs' is one of the band's most
distinctive sleaze anthems, whose point it is to insinuate that mating with the
heavenly beauty of Steve Tyler is, in fact, the primary duty of every
respectable woman. (Another version has it that he is impersonating a pimp
looking for fresh recruits). But what's up with the weird thudding bassline and
its being doubled by Tyler's piano? Why does a simple cock rock song need all
the creepy guitar effects and spaced-out vocal howls? And why the concealed
Golding reference (it is a Golding reference, isn't it)? This is
ritualistic pagan music, accompanying a friggin' phallic religious ceremony,
rather than a mere soundtrack for the simple pleasures of copulation.
Things are much simpler with 'S.O.S. (Too Bad)'
and 'Pandora's Box', where we first have the lead singer complain about not
getting any (life sucks) and then extol the bodily virtues of a lady on a nude
beach (well, occasionally, life is good). Normally, the former song gets
a decent reputation because its melody is desperate and it touches upon the
sordid aspects of slum life, whereas the latter has its worse because the
melody is cocky and the lyrics are worse — truth is, I believe they were
written with about the same level of inspiration and both serve their purposes
quite adequately. If you like Aerosmith at all, you gotta accept 'Pandora's
Box', although, as Tyler sings, "I gotta watch what I say, or I'll catch
hell from women's liberation" — words that ring even truer today than they
did in 1974.
Things are much more complex with 'Spaced',
formally about someone lost in space but metaphorically about someone lost
somewhere much closer to home; and with 'Seasons Of Wither', another epic
ballad that tries to follow the medieval excursions of Led Zeppelin, but,
fortunately, does not stray too far away from restrained folk balladeering.
These are songs that try to find them a corner on the serious artists' market,
and, although they had to bitterly fight for that corner for the rest of their
career — just how many people think of Aerosmith as «serious»? — they are both
good songs, especially 'Seasons' which Tyler manages to inject with plenty of
stateliness.
The lead-off single was 'Same Old Song And
Dance', a simple balls-to-the-wall rocker that tells you that life sucks in yet
another way; but the utmost popularity, for some reason, went to the band's
version of 'Train Kept A-Rollin', which is a great song but to which there was
little to add after the Yardbirds truly showed the world the phenomenal
aggressiveness of its riff. That aggressiveness is perfectly recaptured by Joe
Perry (in a sly fashion, they start the song off as an uncertain, boring
shuffle, before kicking into high gear after a couple minutes), but if there is
any improvement, it is in Tyler's singing, whose creak and crunch kicks the
shit out of Keith Relf (of course, considering that Keith Relf was easily the
worst lead singer to front a great Sixties' band, that is not saying much per
se).
So is the title telling? I guess it is.
Aerosmith are being told to get their wings, and they get 'em all right,
although they are still a little too inexperienced to learn how to flap them
properly. With the solid material easily outweighing the undeveloped
throwaways, this is unquestionably a thumbs up
record — but, even so, the growth period was far from ever.
TOYS IN THE ATTIC (1975)
1) Toys In The Attic; 2) Uncle
Salty; 3) Adam's Apple; 4) Walk This Way; 5) Big Ten Inch Record; 6) Sweet Emotion;
7) No More No More; 8) Round And Round; 9) You See Me Crying.
Had Aerosmith never written or played one other
song next to 'Toys In The Attic', it should still have been enough to ensure
rock immortality — not everyone realizes that, of course, but let me be the
first to tell you. Not all blues-rock played at breakneck speed can be breathtaking,
and, as a rule, blues-rockers dislike playing at breakneck speed, either out of
fear of making too many mistakes or because they somehow feel that the notes
would not be «felt properly». Fools!
If there is any direct predecessor to 'Toys In
The Attic', it might be Zep's 'Communication Breakdown' or Deep Purple's
'Fireball', but I have always felt 'Toys' to be the better song of the three.
As Joe Perry's rough, broken-up, don't-give-a-damn riff breaks out of the
speakers, it combines the speed and precision of those two with the tattered
and battered Keith Richards spirit, and this unique combination, to the best of
my knowledge, has never been improved upon. That single second when, out of a
bunch of cymbal hiss, there erupts Perry's distortion, is the single greatest
moment in Aerosmith history, bar none.
Let us not forget, either, that the song's riff
is only one good thing about it. Tyler expropriates it for another of
his «message» songs about connections between past and present, this time, painting
nostalgia as horror — "voices scream... nothing's seen... real's the
dream..." — and culminating with the ghost chorus of "toys, toys,
toys in the attic" that, on paper, may seem like an unlikely mating pair
for the song's brutal riff, but, on practice, merges with it to form the
perfect psychedelic experience. Somehow, even Perry's frantic guitar break,
all Berry licks and broken limbs, is a great find for this.
The album certainly does not live up to the
strength of its opener — unsurprisingly, since such openers are generally
granted one or two per an entire band's career. But Aerosmith were on a roll
all the same. They had found their style: a synthesis of the Stones' rebellious
spirit with the achievements of hard rock and heavy metal bands of the past
five years, and they were still fresh enough to explore that style's capacities
to the very bottom.
Toys In The Attic does it all. It kicks ass all over the place,
it threatens, it humours, and it is never boring. A few of the songs want
to be boring ('No More No More'; Brad Whitford's 'Round And Round') by putting
too much stock in repetition, but are still saved by the sweet sweet spirit
that inhabits them — Tyler, in particular, delivers every song as if he were
living it out at the exact same moment, and, considering the unique quality of
his voice, this alone suffices to neutralize the repetitiveness, or even turn
it to his own advantage.
On the other end of the pole, there are the
additional classics. 'Walk This Way' is still unkillable by classic rock radio
after all these years (the single great thing about «bad boy anthems»: it is
ten times as hard to get sick of them as it is to get sick of 'Hey Jude' or
'Stairway To Heaven'), and the original version is still a much tastier vintage
than the not-less-famous, but much-more-pragmatic remake with Run-D.M.C. from
the next decade. (On an indirectly related note, Tyler's lyrics can certainly
give most gansta rap a good run for their money: "you ain't seen nothin'
'til you're down on a muffin" is, in fact, prime time American Academy of
Arts material). 'Sweet Emotion', the band's first encounter with the talk box,
defines the idea of «bittersweet» in a rock song — a hedonistic anthem with a
terrified heart, and a chorus that is most befitting to be chanted by a serious
junkie right upon shooting up (which they probably did).
At the center of the pole we find another bunch
of moderate classics, including Genesis According To Aerosmith ('Adam's
Apple'); the joke throwaway cover 'Big Ten Inch Record', where Tyler improves
on the double-entendres by making the line "...she don't go for nothin'
'cept for my big ten-inch record..." sound exactly like "...suck
on my big ten-inch..."; and the obligatory closing ballad 'You See Me
Crying', which tugs at certain non-trivial strings in your heart just like the
Stones could, at their best, tug at them with ballads like 'Moonlight Mile'.
The worst problem with Aerosmith is that much
of the time, given their past record of «Stones worship» and their future
record of selling out, it is hard to take them seriously. Toys In The Attic
fires off a brief, but magical, period in their career when — once you forget
all context — it is hard not to take them seriously. In 1975, Steve
Tyler was the troubadour of the slum party style, far grittier and more
cutting edge than Bruce Springsteen, and Joe Perry was his guitar partner
extraordinaire. The celebration did not last too long, but for two or three
brief years, the band did become the undisputed kings of «shit-rock», in the good
sense of the term. Thumbs up.
ROCKS (1976)
1) Back In The Saddle; 2) Last
Child; 3) Rats In The Cellar; 4) Combination; 5) Sick As A Dog; 6) Nobody's
Fault; 7) Get The Lead Out; 8) Lick And A Promise; 9) Home Tonight.
The Day At The Races to Toys' Night
At The Opera, Rocks mines the same depths and extracts the same amount
of precious metal — if not actually more, because, now that all the
holes have been drilled, the flow is made even easier. The general critical
consensus tends to think that, although it was the big hits on Toys
that continue to make Aerosmith a household name, Rocks is, overall,
more consistent, and pounds harder all the way through. Well: there certainly
is no 'Big Ten Inch Record' on it, and for many, this argument will be
decisive.
Without getting into fights over quality, let
us just notice that Rocks is much thicker than Toys. Since
drugs, internal fighting, and changing times had not yet corroded the band's
creative spirit, they were still willing to try out new approaches and
techniques, which, in the case of Rocks, amounted to more overdubs, an
overall heavier sound (some of the riffs here rank among the band's most
brutal), various small experiments with song structures, and a damn high tax on
Tyler's vocals which he has, nevertheless, been able to pay for several more
decades of concert life.
Another important personal achievement is that
second guitarist Brad Whitford steps into his own element as well: not only is
he directly responsible for writing two of the album's best songs, but he plays
lots of lead guitar throughout, and his quaky, trebly, at times, almost
threateningly psychedelic textures are a great contrast to Perry's «earthier»
riffs. Simply put, Rocks contains some of the greatest bits of twin
guitar interplay on an American rock'n'roll band album; with this record under
their belt, Aerosmith were now completely immune to the «Stones clones»
accusation, since they now rocked way harder than their older brothers. In all
likeness, in 1976 Aerosmith were the world's greatest rock'n'roll band.
The major hit, still overplayed on classic rock
radio, was 'Back In The Saddle', a goofy tale of cowboys, barrooms, and the sex
drive, and that is the spirit of Rocks all right. There is no danger
here, no incentive to run for your life or to lock up your daughters: when
Tyler sings "I'm calling all the shots tonight, I'm like a loaded
gun", you know that, in reality, his protagonist is so full of booze (and
shit) that a single punch of the nose is prone to make him keel over — not to
mention that whether "this snake is gonna rattle" indeed is highly
questionable. But there is no question at all that no average Joe is ever going
to match the tearing intensity of Steven's 'I'm ba-a-a-a-ck!', every instance
of which leaves aching gashes across my own throat from merely hearing
it, or the unbelievable high pitch of the final 'riding high!'. He may be dead
drunk all right, and unable to get it up when it comes to real action, but boy,
what an image — with an attitude like that, few brave men will be able to call
the bluff.
The rest of the album never lives up to the
opening punch, but this is not so much slighting the album as merely stating
the fact that 'Back In The Saddle' is in its own class. The good news is that Rocks
totally lives up to its name: the next seven songs, from start to finish, do
rock like crazy, and manage to do that in lots of different, but equally
exciting ways. 'Last Child' starts out deceivingly, with a mournful line
borrowed from the Beatles' 'I Want You', but in a matter of seconds becomes a
cocky, swaggering funkster that is about... going back to the plough?
'Take me back to south Tallahassee'? Uh, excuse me, has someone substituted
the wrong lyrics sheet at the last moment? Were Lynyrd Skynyrd recording in
the next studio? Oh, all right, just some more irony on the part of the
proverbial bad dudes. One of these days, they are really going to get it.
Also of particular note are 'Rats In The
Cellar', with its breackneck speed that tries to outdo 'Toys In The Attic', and
that evil, evil break in the middle, with its punk riffage and bluesy harp;
and, of course, Slash's favourite song, 'Nobody's Fault', where Tyler drops the
comedy and tries on a true apocalyptic mood. The usual saying is that the song
is about Californian earthquakes, and so it is, literally, but Tyler is trying
to move it beyond that level, to turn it into a macabre pamphlet on man's
stupidity (it does remain a little unclear whether the point is that man is so
stupid that he cannot prevent earthquake damage, or that man is so stupid he
has been sent earthquakes in punishment, or both), while Bradford contributes
the correspondingly «rumbling» music. The song would have made Black Sabbath
proud, and it is no surprise that quite a few metal bands have covered it with
reverence.
The incessant, insane ass-kicking only stops on
the last track: 'Home Tonight' is another textbook example on how one should
tackle the art of the power ballad — by not only writing a decent melody, but
also giving it a great arrangement, with sharp electric pianos and gruff,
garage-style distorted guitar breaks instead of anti-musical synths and
genetically engineered guitar substitutes. And the sense of humor is back,
too, with the Beatles quote (everyone knows, after all, that Ringo Starr was
the first person in the world to say 'Now it's time to say good night',
although, in gentlemanly fashion, he immediately ceded the copyright to
Lennon/McCartney).
Rocks is so very much mid-Seventies, and yet, so very much timeless, still a
delight after all these years — it is exactly the same age as myself, and
here's hoping I might never get old enough for it. Thumbs
up from all sides, of course. This is how Aerosmith are going to be
remembered by future generations, the children of the children of the children
of 'Crazy', 'Cryin', and 'I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing'. No question about that.
DRAW THE LINE (1977)
1) Draw The Line; 2) I Wanna Know Why; 3)
Critical Mass; 4) Get It
Up; 5) Bright Light Fright; 6) Kings And Queens; 7) The Hand That Feeds; 8)
Sight For Sore Eyes; 9) Milk
Cow Blues.
Some of the juiciest records in rock happen to
be «crash albums» — made during that one particular period where everything is
falling apart under the pressure of too much fame, too intense touring, too
stubborn record company executives, too stressed personal relations, and, of
course, way too many samples of heavy substances. It is completely unethical to
expect such albums from your favourite artists — comparable to expecting extra
profits from your plantations once you really start putting the whip to those
lazy slave bastards — but, after all, no pain, no gain.
On the other hand, not everyone is entitled to
a proper «crash album». You cannot be talentless (no one will give a damn about
your going down if you never truly went up in the first place), and you have to
time it carefully — not too soon, because that would be sort of pretentious
(«who do they think they are? one platinum album and they're already snorting
more coke than my wife does at our home parties?»), and not too late, because
if you do it past your creative prime, the results will almost certainly be so
pitiful that you won't be able to inspire even one future generation
of heroin addicts.
Considering all these things, Draw The Line
is one of the absolute best crash albums that can be found on the market. It's
just like Rocks, only with the polar signs reversed: same sound, utterly
different side effects. An album that the band didn't really feel like
recording (not the «proper» way that the studio expected it to be recorded,
anyway), but plowed on regardless. They were still young and brawny, already
professional, and completely wasted, and Draw The Line is like a
reckless, totally drugged out party, with the level of self-exposure reaching
up to the skies.
Think of this: Draw The Line is the only
Aerosmith album not to feature even a single ballad — meaning that the band
really put the commercially-oriented department of their collective brain on
hold. The sequencing is about as abysmal as the ugly band caricature on the
album sleeve: instead of elegantly closing the record with another gentlemanly
goodbye like 'Home Tonight', they shut it off with a rippin' version of 'Milk
Cow Blues', a blues-standard-turned-rock'n'roll that used to serve as a great
album opener (e. g. The Kink Kontroversy). The mix, overall, is
as muddy and dirty as the one on Exile On Main St., to which the album
is often compared. No wonder that ninety-nine percent of the critics either
slammed the record completely upon release, stating that the Aerosmith miracle was
over, or grudgingly acknowledged this to be «the beginning of the end». Which
it was, of course, but could we have two of those, please?
From the opening power chords, slide intro, and
massive, unforgettable riff of the title track, and right to the very end Draw
The Line rocks just like Rocks. Not all the songs are expertly
written, but neither is this a songwriting disaster, as some claim. 'Draw The
Line' did not become Aerosmith's last major Seventies' hit for nothing —
Perry's melody ranks up there with their finest. On 'Get It Up', he
effortlessly switches from rootsy slide to growling funky metal over the course
of one and the same riff; how cool is that? And 'Sight For Sore Eyes' is their
most exciting venture into the realm of sweet sleazy funk.
That said, it is true that the groove is more
important for Draw The Line than the chord sequences. Perry's hoodlum
chops have gotten even hoodlum-er, and he offers us yet another proof to being
the American counterpart of Keith Richards — by getting one vocal solo spot per
album on an entirely self-written song, showing that he has got no singing
voice whatsoever, and still somehow getting by merely on the convincing
strength of the performance ('Bright Light Fright', a song that, in 1977, he
could have easily donated to Keith and no one would have noticed: "It's
the dawn of the day, and I'm crashed and I'm smashed, as it is I'm feeling like
my chips are cashed"). Whitford, unabashed, adds light and color to
Perry's gloom, more responsible for the party spirit of the album than anyone
else. And Tyler, never forgetting how to pharyngealize on key, delivers some of
the most piercing screaming of his career, be it in the climactic verse of
'Draw The Line' or on the rabid screaming of "daaaahhhctor, daaahhhctor,
pleaaaaahse!" in 'The Hand That Feeds' (a much-maligned song, by the way,
but which I have always liked for its sheer madness).
Stuck in the middle of this debacle is 'Kings
And Queens', a song that shows exactly how crazy they were at that time — to
the point of writing an amateurish prog-rock epic! If the rest of the album fit
in relatively well with the angry punk explosion of 1977 (closing our eyes on a
total lack of the «socially conscious» factor), 'Kings And Queens'
singlehandedly aligned them with the rest of the dragons that the Pistols were
out there to slay. For a reputation-killing five minutes, Tyler withdraws from
the party and dreams about how cool it must have been when «long ago in days
untold...» there used to be knights, maidens, swords, Vikings, might and magic,
but — whaddaya know — "Lordy, they died". There are pianos, too,
and synthesizers, and ultra-serious backing vocals, and epic instrumental
passages (at one point, an alarm siren goes off for about thirty seconds,
probably to warn us all of the impending death of everyone and everything).
In a way, this is even more ridiculous than
classic Uriah Heep material, but this is where the power of context comes into
play: the sheer weirdness of hearing this in between 'Bright Light Fright' and
'The Hand That Feeds' adds a pinch of surprise value. Had they written it four
years before and placed it on the same record with 'Dream On', this might have
been judged as a corny, disgusting move (young ambitious whippersnappers who
think that rock music cannot be taken seriously unless it is «serious», i. e.
telling people about St. George and the dragon); on Draw The Line, it is
like a bizarre, unpredictable action of a mental patient. (And it is not all
that bad from a melodical standpoint, either — there, now I've said it).
If I were a professional determinist, I would
probably set out to prove the theory that, after Draw The Line, the band
had but two choices: within a decade, either all of its members, or, at least,
the «Toxic Twins» of Tyler and Perry would be dead from various drug- or
drink-related accidents, or they would have to end up with Permanent
Vacation. Their taking the latter choice was depressing for us true grit
lovers, but sane and healthy for them, and, like all good Samaritans, we must
be happy for their corporal and mental regeneration. The good news is, we don't
necessarily have to participate in it. If the price for this breathtaking
exploration of The Lower Depths with Draw The Line were Desmond Child
and Diane Warren, I'm willing to take it, because Diane Warrens will come and
go, but "Checkmate, honey, beat you at your own damn game, no dice honey,
I'm livin' on the astral plane" will stay forever. Resumé: with the
brain shut off completely, annihilated by the vile flank assault of 'Kings And
Queens', the heart takes center stage and issues the album a thumbs up from its very bottom.
LIVE! BOOTLEG (1978)
1) Back In The Saddle; 2) Sweet Emotion; 3) Lord Of The Thighs; 4) Toys In The Attic; 5)
Last Child; 6) Come Together; 7) Walk This Way; 8) Sick As A Dog; 9) Dream On; 10) Chip Away
The Stone; 11) Sight For Sore Eyes; 12) Mama Kin; 13) S.O.S.; 14) I Ain't Got
You; 15) Mother Popcorn; 16) Train Kept A-Rollin'.
Obviously not a bootleg, but just as obviously
live — the intent here was to beat the bootleggers by offering the public at
large an official equivalent of a bootleg: raw, untampered, and sweaty, yet at
the same time boasting professional sound quality. The stuff that dreams are
made of. The «pseudo-bootleg» touches, like the plain bootleggish album sleeve
or the «missed» listing of one song on the album ('Draw The Line'), are a
show-off, but the rest is genuine.
Two schools of thought dominate here. One says Live!
Bootleg is a rough-hewn, exciting, priceless document of America's
greatest rock'n'roll band at its most intense — that small period right after
the creative peak when everything has started to fall apart, but only just
started, so that this very threat of disintegration keeps things interesting.
The other one says Live! Bootleg does nothing but engage in an awful-sounding,
muddy, sacrilegious destruction of the classics on the part of a bunch of babbling
junkies, thoroughly wasted, basted, and pasted.
Both schools are right, and, furthermore, there
is no contradiction between the two. If you want a tight, fearsome, unstoppable
live performance of 'Back In The Saddle', skip forward fifteen or even twenty
years; I've heard technically better versions from the band dating to as late
as their oldie tours of the 2000s. The difference is that in the 2000s, they
were performing 'Back In The Saddle' as a classic — an untouchable part of the
sacred rock'n'roll treasure grove; in 1977, they were still living it
out. So if Tyler's "I'm baaaack!" on this particular album sometimes
degenerates into butchered-piglet squealing, and Perry's riffage sometimes
stands on its head, it is not just the drugs that are responsible (although
that, too) — it is the classic damn-it-to-hell attitude of the 1970's rocker.
Take it — or leave it.
Of course, with the level of ferocity displayed
on their studio albums, none of these live equivalents are truly equivalent.
Missed cues, flubbed lines, confused chords, all of the big hits have this kind
of shit in spades; you will love this if you think that is what «real life» is,
and hate this if you think that you have had plenty of «real life» already from
your neighbor kid downstairs, a guy so utterly tonedeaf, his parents had no
choice but to buy him an electric guitar for Christmas. Then again, it's not that
bad, and, overall, tragedy usually only strikes on the numbers that are the
most vocally demanding — 'Back In The Saddle', 'Toys In The Attic' (for some
reason, Perry always sings harmony with Tyler on this one, even though the guy
can barely hold a note even on his better days, and those were far from the
better ones), and a couple others.
Minor additional reasons to own the album
include an extended, dark and creepy jam on 'Lord Of The Thighs'; Perry's
ridiculous, but amusing decision to filter the riff of 'Walk This Way' through
a talkbox, a regular fixture on the 1977 tour; and two new songs — the band's
relatively successful cover of 'Come Together' (which they also sang for the
infamous Sgt. Pepper movie, admittedly, one of the few highlights) and
'Chip Away The Stone', a solid, but hardly classic, Rocks-style
mid-tempo rocker.
Major additional reason includes the «bootleg-style» insertion of two old
live recordings from 1973, covers of Jimmy Reed's 'I Ain't Got You' and James
Brown's 'Mother Popcorn', giving us the early bluesy Aerosmith in full flight
and also offering a glimpse of the early funky Aerosmith: nobody beats Brown at
his own game, but at least it gives Tyler a good excuse to show us how deep down
his unusually lengthy larynx he can really go. Actually, both
performances are subpar and as far removed from the classic big smelly
Aerosmith as possible, but what a supercool history lesson — and I wish your
next door band could kick so much ass on a Jimmy Reed number.
So, this was the worst of times, this was the
best of times, in any case, Live! Bootleg gives you a taste of some of
the dirtiest live rock'n'roll playing in history just like Draw The Line
showed us some of the dirtiest studio rock'n'roll production in the exact same
history. For glossy pornographic polish, check out 1975 and 1976; for playing
it rough, Live! Bootleg gets a hearty thumbs
up — at the very least, if you only need one live Aerosmith album,
this one's it, warts and all.
NIGHT IN THE RUTS (1979)
1) No Surprize; 2) Chiquita; 3) Remember (Walking In The
Sand); 4) Cheese Cake; 5) Three Mile Smile; 6)
Reefer Head Woman; 7) Bone To Bone (Coney Island White Fish Boy); 8) Think
About It; 9) Mia.
The burning-out was accelerating almost
exponentially by this point; still, the band were all set and poised for Draw
The Line Vol. 2, another equally delightful mess of dirty bad-boyism without
a cause, and, doubtless, would have managed a perfect duplicate if, midway
through the session, their clueless management had not sent them on yet
another tour in order to repay the accumulated debts. The tour became a
personal disaster and broke out the five years of Tyler/Perry feud, with Joe
slamming the door midway through; he was quickly replaced by Jimmy Crespo, a
strong hell-raiser in his own right but lacking Perry's songwriting talents and
personality.
As a result, the album is seriously flawed,
although, to the band's credit, the Perry part and the Crespo part do not seem
too disjointed or incompatible. Once you disentangle them, the difference is
obvious: with Crespo, they keep falling back on Tyler-dominated power ballads
('Remember', 'Mia'), and poorly conceived covers (the Yardbirds' 'Think About
It') — a long distance from Perry's sleazy boogie that rules the rest of the
record (although it is also Perry's playing, not Crespo's, that we hear on
'Reefer Head Woman', an obsolete piece of generic 12-bar blues that last saw
the light of day around 1973). However, the sequencing is intelligent enough so
that the weaker material seems strengthened by the powerhouse numbers, not vice
versa.
Besides, «weaker» does not mean «worthless».
The decision to go ahead with their cover of the Shangri-La's classic 'Remember
(Walking In The Sand)' as the lead single was ridiculed at the time, and still
remains controversial, but, in all fairness, Tyler gives a good reading, and
the song, with its mix of overdriven teenage pathos and unforgettable melodic
moves, had been screaming for a power-ballad arrangement for at least a decade,
so one can only rejoice that it was Aerosmith who got there first, and not,
say, Bon Jovi. Plus, it gives Steve another opportunity to reach for those
hysterical high notes that fit the song's heartbroken mood; considering that
original singer Mary Weiss could never reach that high, it is only too just
that she herself shows up to sing backing vocals on Tyler's version (but
definitely not just that she was left uncredited on the original single
release).
And, while 'Mia' starts showing the first signs
of balladeering pomposis that ate up the band's soul a decade later, it is
still fairly interesting; at the very least, it leaves you wondering why Tyler
decided to dress this harmless little McCartney-style piano ode to his
daughter in Gothic overtones, minor chords and echoes and sorrowful solos and
ghost-whispered name-calling and all. Fortunately, today Mia Tyler lives the
prosperous life of a heavily tattooed «plus-size model» rather than a
nightmarish Edgar Allan Poe heroine, so Daddy's spook thing must not have
worked.
The hardcore Aerosmith fan, however, will
hardly want to bother with the ballads; the album's true meat is to be found
among the ass-kickers and ball-breakers. The straightforwardly autobiographical
'No Surprize' is a worthy sequel to 'Draw The Line' as an album-opener; the
main riff is not as memorable, but the punch is comparable. 'Chiquita' is not a
Latin dance number, as the title might want to suggest, but rather a thunderous
glam-rock rave-up in the old style of 1972-73, all big waves of distorted
guitars and mean-sounding brass backing. 'Cheese Cake' is way too derivative
of Led Zeppelin's 'When The Levee Breaks', but done the nasty Aerosmith way
(it's about what really matters, after all — wild sex in the working
class, not some meaningless apocalyptic shite). And both 'Three Mile Smile' and
'Bone To Bone' are solid funky rockers that still manage to totally satisfy the
formula, if little else.
In short, if we did not know about the
awful happenings in the Aerosmith camp at the time, it would be impossible to
firmly guess that Night In The Ruts shows something wrong with the band.
At worst, there is a slight shortage of material — which is why the generic
blues of 'Reefer Head Woman' crawls back — but every great artist, even in peak
forms, is sometimes liable to including a bit of filler. Technically, and
under great scrutiny, the cracks start to show, but overall, Night In The
Ruts is just another solid Aerosmith album from their best decade. Turn off
your critical brain, which is often prone to confusing «faint beginning of the
slide» with «artistic catastrophe», and let the heart direct your thumbs up.
ROCK IN A HARD PLACE (1982)
1) Jailbait; 2) Lightning Strikes; 3)
Bitch's Brew; 4) Bolivian Ragamuffin; 5) Cry Me A River; 6) Prelude To Joanie;
7) Joanie's Butterfly; 8) Rock In A Hard Place; 9) Jig Is Up; 10) Push Comes To
Shove.
With Brad Whitford leaving the band no sooner
than the start of the recording session for their next album, replaced by
newcomer Rick Dufay, Rock In A Hard Place, informally, could be regarded
as a solo Steve Tyler album masking as an Aerosmith production. But it
shouldn't. For all its flaws, and it got some, it is, most undoubtedly so, a
proper Aerosmith record; in fact, in a certain important sense, it is the last
proper Aerosmith record.
Clearly, the new-look band, now under Tyler's
unwavering rule (wavered only in direct proportion to the consumed cocaine),
were trying to pull their act together and steer away from the total chaotic jumble
of the last two records. There is a slightly higher level of coherence to the
tracks, a slightly more calculated approach to riffs and melodies, and a
slightly improved attitude towards experimenting with new sounds. However, for
the most part, they still fail to straighten out the mess, and thank God for
that — we need this band as smelly and sleazy as they can get.
The single was 'Lightning Strikes', a
modernized rock song opening with a silly synth intro — because if Queen
themselves deemed it unsuitable to enter the new decade without undergoing keyboardial
defloration, how could the rest not follow suit? Fortunately, the silly sounds
evaporate fairly quickly, leaving us with a kick-ass rock'n'roller (the only
one on the album that still has Brad Whitford playing rhythm). 'Jailbait' was
not a single — maybe the title was deemed too provoking — but is even better, bringing
Tyler's sexual urges to the hardest boil in Aerosmith history: fast, screamy,
agonizing, punctured by a simplistic, but insane descending riff that
culminates with a "ja-a-a-a-ail... BAIT!" — Tyler's vivid impression
of himself as a hungry shark making a swipe at the nearest 15-year old.
Excellent way to satisfy your inner pedophile (which we all have inside, or we
would not be listening to Aerosmith in the first place).
The rest of the album's rockers are not up to
those standards, but the general sound is the same: Jimmy Crespo and Rick Dufay
do not match the drunken hooliganry of Joe Perry and the imaginative powers of
Brad Whitford, but they can definitely understand what is the Aerosmith
sound and what is not. We can all try to imagine just how
differently would, say, 'Cheshire Cat' have sounded with the old guys on
guitars, but we can hardly say that, as it is, it does not sound mean, ballsy,
and aggressive.
The non-rockers are shaky, but still a far cry
from the power ballad swamp of years to come: 'Cry Me A River' is an old torch
song that fails to capture the same level of intensity and desperation that the
band had managed to attain with 'Remember'; 'Joanie's Butterfly' is a really
bizarre art-pop song, one of the most enigmatic creations in Aerosmith history
that will be either genius or garbage to you no matter how hard you try to keep
the middle ground; and the anthemic closer 'Push Comes To Shove' is nearly
destroyed by Tyler's ridiculous decision to sing the chorus in his highest
range (a.k.a. « The Way I Sing While They Are Slowly Sawing Away At My Throat Arteries»).
No masterpieces, but nothing intolerable, either.
For all the negative press the record got in
its time and continues to get (yeah, because only the inimitable twin magic of
Joe Perry and Brad Whitford can bring worth to such Aerosmith masterpieces as
the rock'n'roll guitar monster 'I Don't Want To Miss A Thing') I can only hope
that, in time, Rock In A Hard Place will get its proper respect as an
album that is better — okay, almost better — than all of the band's
subsequent career put together. This is the very last time you get to hear the
Bad Boys truly play it «Bad». No more no more. Thumbs
up, and a big thank you to Jimmy Crespo and Rick Dufay who did their
best to prolong the existence of the true Aerosmith spirit by a few more years.
DONE WITH MIRRORS (1985)
1) Let The Music Do The Talking;
2) My Fist, Your Face; 3) Shame On You; 4) The Reason A Dog; 5) Sheila; 6)
Gypsy Boots; 7) She's On Fire; 8) The Hop; 9) Darkness.
Reunion! Things happen fast with this band — at
the time when their progenitors, the Stones, were just entering the crucial
splintering phase, Aerosmith were already welcoming back their lost guitarists.
Joe Perry, in some of his interviews, remembers how Rick Dufay pulled out of
the new-look Aerosmith of his own free will, stating that this will never work
unless the «Toxic Twins» get back together. No idea about Jimmy Crespo, but the
dry fact is that by late 1984, all five original members were back together,
although still high on drugs much of the time.
Unfortunately, the momentum was lost. The world
had already shown a clear lack of interest in the old Aerosmith sound through
the diminishing sales of Rock In A Hard Place, and then three years of
complete studio silence finished the job. With hair metal on the rise,
capturing the market niche formerly occupied by trashy Seventies' rockers, Aerosmith
had to adapt — sacrificing their integrity — or to fade away to the status of a
small cult band. It is our big luck, then, that in 1985 their minds were still
too clouded by substances for them to see it properly.
Of course, Done With Mirrors is no
longer the Aerosmith of old. Much of the fault lies with the outside
circumstances: having signed a new contract with Geffen Records instead of the
old Columbia association, they dumped their old producer, Jack Douglas, very
much responsible for engineering the classic Aerosmith sound. New guy Ted
Templeton (of the Doobie Brothers and Van Halen fame) had a solid agenda behind
him, but either he was intent on molding a new-look Aerosmith for the new
decade or he had little interest in the band as such, because the unique magic
that made up the band is gone.
Fellow reviewer Mark Prindle couldn't have
stated it better when he mentioned that, all over Done With Mirrors,
«the guitars sound like walls, not like the electrical currents and loose wires
of classic Aerosmith». But is this really Joe Perry's fault? The old boy is
definitely trying, and, even though only a few riffs are memorable (generally
at the beginning of the album), with a little more care this could have been
another Draw The Line. But when the guitars are flattened and
splattered, muted and muffled, hidden under pillows, glossed and glued together
as if someone were afraid that people would laugh at Joe's obvious lack of
virtuoso technique — quite possible to expect of a producer guy whose main
protégé was Eddie Van Halen — you know that the Eighties are
upon us indeed.
Granted, it could have been much worse. The
drums could have been reduced to electronic pulp, instead of simply made to
sound pompously big and non-rock'n'rollish. There could have been a synthesizer
invasion, but the record is mostly keyboard-free. All of the songs are
self-penned, and the ballads are pretty much non-existent (with a little
effort, one could call 'Darkness' a ballad, but certainly not when it picks up
tempo). The choruses are catchy (with a few exceptions, such as Brad Whitford's
'The Reason A Dog', which seems to me about as underwritten as its title),
Tyler is in his usual vocal form — so perhaps we'd better just get over the sad
deal with the production and count this as another solid offering from the band?
Perhaps, except that there is a clear, if
subtle, change in the agenda. On Rock In A Hard Place, the agenda still
went something like «don't mess with the bad boys of rock'n'roll»; here, it is
«you may not believe this, but we are still the bad boys of
rock'n'roll». "Nobody gonna get my rock'n'roll", Tyler screams on
'Shame On You' — hmm, was there any doubt about that in the first place around
1977? And what's with all the self-quoting? "Back in the saddle gets you
sore" ('My Fist, Your Face')? References to Aerosmith and Joe Perry in
'The Hop'? Even musical quotations — when 'Let The Music Do The Talking', a
re-recording of the best song from Perry's short solo career, starts the record
off with a bang, it's like all the problems never happened, but then all of a
sudden it goes into the riff of 'Draw The Line' for a few bars, and you
realize, with fright, that this little bit kicks much more ass than the rest of
the song. That's when you know, for sure, that the band's golden days
are properly over.
And yet, let us be fair. Together with Rock
In A Hard Place, this album has pretty much slipped through the cracks of
the public conscience and the critical appreciation. People have a strange
habit of associating the goodness of Aerosmith with chart positions and total
revenue: for most listeners, these were the «dark years» for the drugged-out
band, steadily on the decline ever since chemicals began to get the better of
them around 1977 and then beginning to «come back» ten years later. But the
«comeback» was actually just a change of master — freed from the iron rule of
drugs, the band sold themselves to fashion.
Done With Mirrors may not be a very good record, a sharp
quality drop-off from the former level, but there is no doubt that, at this
point, Aerosmith were still doing what they wanted to do. Their tragedy was
that no one else wanted them to do it — and that they could not get over it, and
so their heart was not perfect with rock'n'roll their God, and Aerosmith did
evil in the sight of rock'n'roll, and went not fully after rock'n'roll, wherefore
it was said unto Aerosmith, «surely will rock'n'roll be rended from thee, and
given to thy betters». But all that was still a couple of years away; Done
With Mirrors, in the meantime, may be threatened with a thumbs down for the
execution (including the rather silly gimmick of the «mirrored» writing on the
sleeve), but still gets a thumbs up for the
effort.
CLASSICS LIVE! (1986)
1) Train Kept A-Rollin’; 2)
Kings And Queens; 3) Sweet Emotion; 4) Dream On; 5) Mama Kin; 6) Three Mile
Smile / Reefer Head Woman; 7) Lord Of The Thighs; 8) Major Barbara.
This is just a stop-gap record put out while
the boys were in rehab, purging their blood and selling their soul. Classics?
Absolutely. Live? Most assuredly. I am not so certain about the exclamation
mark, though. The LP is a rag-tag-grab-bag of performances both from the Live!
Bootleg era and the Perry-less / Bradford-less stunt (although the liner
notes do not specify most dates for each of the performances explicitly), and
it boasts neither coherence nor quality.
The truth is that, while Aerosmith were
consistently superb at the height of their mid-Seventies powers, from 1977 to
1984 the live performances were uneven and depended a lot on just how far
strung out the band members were — the bad boys from Boston or the crap
boys from Shitrockville? As a matter of fact, spontaneous mistakes and flubs
are the essence of rock’n’roll, but no one has ever revoked the golden middle
principle. For Live! Bootleg, where the band still had the strength to
remain in charge, they made all the right selections — this particular setlist,
though, must have been produced by a tonedeaf programmer in search of data to
test his newly-programmed randomizing algorithm.
If you respect pre-Armageddon Steven Tyler as
much as I do, don’t ever listen to the atrocious rendition of ‘Kings And
Queens’ where the man obviously cannot keep up the high notes — it is,
in fact, amazing how he can keep it up at all, what with all the crack and
booze taking it out on each other inside his system, but why make us all
involuntary witnesses of that battle? (And, while we’re at it, Steve’s idea to
reproduce the alarming synth-string-siren of the original with his own vocal
cords is equally ugly). ‘Dream On’ is only marginally better: this time, the
high notes come out decently, but... at the expense of all the other ones.
As for the rockers, they rock, but, without
Perry and Whitford, it just isn’t the same. The other guys may have been okay
with their own material, and may have given the paying fans a decent time, but
as for the record — no, it just does not feel like they are able to pass on the
same fervent conviction as is oozed out by Perry ninety percent of the time.
One needs only compare the crackling improv on the original live 'Lord Of The
Thighs’ from 1978 and the pro forma version on Classics. Or,
perhaps, one does not even need to compare.
In short, most of this is about as
listenably-mediocre as the lone old studio outtake with which the company tried
to entice the fans (‘Major Barbara’, a lazy, plaintive cowboy waltz from 1973)
— but even so, it is still a way more pleasant experience than having to sit
through all of the band’s Nineties’ hits on their later live records in order
to break through to the golden oldies, especially if one happens be much too
anal about pressing the skip button.
CLASSICS LIVE II (1987)
1) Back In The Saddle; 2) Walk
This Way; 3) Movin' Out; 4) Draw The Line; 5) Same Old Song And Dance; 6) Last
Child; 7) Let The Music Do The Talking; 8) Toys In The Attic.
The second volume in this odd series easily
trumps the first one in terms of quality, but somewhat baffles the mind in
terms of coherence. Most of the tracks are from a December 31, 1984 show
(coinciding with Tom Hamilton's birthday, so there is no escape from the
obligatory h-b-t-y with Tyler directing the audience) — most, that is, with the
exception of 'Let The Music Do The Talking', recorded around two years later,
and 'Draw The Line', recorded around six years earlier. So, technically,
this is all the same band with all the same five members, but representing
three entirely different life stages — the drugged-out pre-breakthrough, the
still drugged-out reunion, and the cleaned-up, er, post-reunion.
The final product might have gained better
credibility had Columbia simply released the entire show from 1984; but,
apparently, the point was not to replicate any of the «classics» from the
previous volume, so here we are with another bunch of hits (but what the hell
is 'Movin' Out' doing among them?) hastily glued together. Another waste of
vinyl?
Perhaps, but it still kicks ass. As the band
was getting ready to enter the «Lite» stage of their career, the live performances
were taking on a special appeal. What I mean is, even twenty years after the
completion of the sellout, Aerosmith were still phenomenal onstage when
performing the old classics; watch any live version of 'Back In The Saddle'
from the early XXIst century and it does not take much to understand that the
Tyler/Perry duo have kept their brawn and grit as fine as, or, perhaps, even
finer than the Jagger/Richards pair. So how could they go wrong in the 1980s —
reunited, refired, and with Tyler's voice so far free from the pranks of old
age?
Classics Live II certainly rocks. There is not much need for it
on the part of anybody who already owns Live Bootleg, but, for the
record, 'Back In The Saddle' is way superior to the 1978 version (all the
screaming is carried off with honor, and Perry never messes up the riff), 'Walk
This Way' is devoid of the talkbox mutation (provided you hated the talkbox in
the first place), and the collective singing on 'Toys In The Attic' generally
manages to stay on key (a very frequent problem for this particular number).
These are the few tempting moments. The rest is just regular professional
entertainment. It won't blow the pants off any regular Aerosmith fan — but,
inasmuch as pure joy is concerned, it is miles better than Permanent
Vacation.
PERMANENT VACATION (1987)
1) Heart's Done Time; 2) Magic
Touch; 3) Rag Doll; 4) Simoriah; 5) Dude (Looks Like A Lady); 6) St. John; 7)
Hangman Jury; 8) Girl Keeps Coming Apart; 9) Angel; 10) Permanent Vacation;
11) I'm Down; 12) The Movie.
Permanent Vacation. What a brilliant title — no, not for the
album, but for the entire career of Aerosmith starting with the unhappy day of
September 5, 1987, when the first record buyers subjected themselves to its
treatment. Or, perhaps, starting with the Run D.M.C. collaboration on 'Walk
This Way' from the previous year? No, probably not. When they did their
rap-rock thing in mid-1986, the band was still drugged out and scary, and the
friendship between rock'n'roll and hip-hop was still an exciting, rather than
languid, thing to consider. In fact, when Steve Tyler popped his head through
that hole in the wall that Perry cut with his guitar, screaming a bloody 'WALK
THIS WAY!' into the surprised faces of his black partners, this just might have
been the very last time we caught him in a genuinely scary appearance.
With the appearance of Permanent Vacation,
the bodies were healed and the souls were sold. This, of course, is not just a
personal impression, but is deeply rooted in factual basis. In order to
«modernize» (shudders!) the band, Geffen Records brought in producer Bruce
Fairbairn, whose main claim to fame was engineering Bon Jovi's Slippery When
Wet, and outside songwriters Desmond Child and Jim Vallance, to «help out»
the band in the same humiliating way that mainstream labels were «helping out»
old-time heroes like Cheap Trick and Eric Clapton. The goal was as obvious as
the quest — the goal, to make a record that sells, the task, to maintain some
sort of artistic integrity and save some sort of artistic face in fierce battle
with the demon of corporate songwriting. The goal was achieved; the quest,
mostly flunked.
I am not saying that Permanent Vacation
is a bad album. It has to be approached according to the standards of its day; as
a chunk of hairy pop-metal, it is actually better than most of the Poison /
Def Leppard / Bon Jovi albums of its era, if only because old-time guitarists
like Perry and Whitford, even if they really wanted to, could not play
in the same flat, leaden, funkless way than the guitarists in most of these
bands. But every effort has been taken to make them sound like these
guys. The worst news is that the guitar melodies do not register any more in my
memory bank. In the Seventies, it was all about the guitar groove; on tunes
like 'Toys In The Attic' or, let's say, 'Get It Up', Joe Perry was the hero and
Steve Tyler the afterthought. On Permanent Vacation, the roles are
permanently reversed. Guitars are there to provide loud, fat (I'd even say
«overweight»), and utterly unmemorable backing to catchy pop choruses. Nothing
else.
And they aren't necessarily ugly pop choruses.
After all, corporate songwriters usually know their job, and at least a guy
like Desmond Child knew a thing or two about catchiness (unlike, for instance,
Diane Warren, the biggest musical orgasm faker in the history of bad sex). If
the chorus to 'Rag Doll' or to '(Dude) Looks Like A Lady' (which otherwise
sounds like a bizarre cross between the Who's '5:15' and a particularly sleazy
AC/DC anthem) does not stick in your brain, you must be tonedeaf or something.
But even 'Rag Doll', arguably the strongest song on the album, is hopelessly
spoiled with its dumb electronically enhanced drums and marinated guitar sound.
Nasty green stuff keeps splurging out all over
the place. What is the point of covering 'I'm Down' by The Beatles, reproduced
note-for-note but with atrocious late-Eighties production values? No point.
What is the point of the closing pseudo-«Kashmir»ian drone 'The Movie'? To reaffirm
the listener's faith in the band as «artists»? Four minutes is hardly enough
time to fish that faith out from the depths of the well in which it has been
dropping for the previous forty. What is the point of the hedonistic title
track — to confirm that the band are having a braindead competition with
Mötley Crüe, even though it was already obvious from the first two
songs? And let's not even get started on 'Angel', the first in a series of
deadly biological weapons commonly known as «The Aerosmith Power Ballad»
(fortunately, these particularly scary death-bringers were still in the testing
stage; real mass production would not start until Get A Grip).
My personal two favourites are in the middle;
'St. John' sort of breaks up the pop-metal formula in favor of something
sincerely darker and more bizarre in the blues-rock vein, and 'Hangman Jury' is
sort of what it would be like to have Leadbelly produced by Bruce Fairbairn —
crass, but fun and, at least, entirely unpredictable. If anything, these two songs
show that the band were still not above searching for new sounds and
experiences, something that the record industry would completely forbid by the
time of Pump.
But these itty-bitty experiments get hopelessly
lost in the sea of sludge and filth, with Steve Tyler, formerly one of the
shiveriest nasty young men in existence, now jumping into the role of one of
the ugliest dirty old sleazebags in the industry. Just like in the good old
days, more than half of the songs are about getting some; but where the
frenzied screams of "doctor, doctor, doctor, get your sweet ass off the
floor" once sounded authentic, all this new stuff like "somebody
better call a doctor or wake me up with a shove" ('Magic Touch') is no
longer convincing at all — a fortyyear old Tyler is, of course, still decades
away from being a Viagra patient (at least, I hope he was), but he is no
longer able to sustain or justify his sex drive all through the album. Granted,
again, there are not as many cringeworthy moments here as there are on Pump
('Love In An Elevator' — GOD!), but they're there all right, and I really
don't want to hear song after song about dirty old men from dirty old men, be
they Aerosmith or the Rolling Stones or Frank Sinatra.
Sometimes I feel genuinely envious of people
who have no problem enjoying Permanent Vacation with the same happy
abandon that they enjoy Rocks or Toys In The Attic, i. e. with
the ideology of «these guys rocked in the Seventies, now they rock in the
Eighties and Nineties! — sure they rock in a different way, but times change,
you know?» Try as we might, I and those with similar feelings will never be
able to experience similar emotions from 'Rats In The Cellar' and '(Dude) Looks
Like A Lady' — but maybe this is just our problem? Maybe we are overintellectualizing
things instead of just letting go?
Then again, if we just let go, pretty much
every rock song with a mid-tempo 4/4 beat may be able to rock our socks off,
and where's the fun in that? Nah. I freely admit there are some good vocal hooks
on the album, and a few creative ideas, but no sober Aerosmith album deserves
anything higher than a rigid thumbs down.
Back to drugs, boys; back to drugs — the only way to save the music. (Then
again, maybe not. Dirty old men are bad enough, but dirty old junkies would
make Requiem For A Dream look like an innocent joyride).
PUMP (1989)
1) Young Lust; 2) F.I.N.E.; 3)
Going Down / Love In An Elevator; 4) Monkey On My Back; 5) Water Song / Janie's
Got A Gun; 6) Dulcimer Stomp / The Other Side; 7) My Girl; 8) Don't Get Mad,
Get Even; 9) Hoodoo / Voodoo Medicine Man; 10) What It Takes.
As promised, the vacation goes on. The only
difference between Pump and its progenitor is that the last traces of
creativity and freshness have been expertly removed from the final product, ensuring
even greater commercial success. The record sets new standards of slickness
which, true to their competitive nature, the band would then raise with every
new studio album.
Everything is loud, roaring, catchy, and
guaranteed to keep the customer satisfied. Intelligent defenders of the album
frequently point out that it does stand out from the average hair metal
record of the day, because, like it or not, Perry and Whitford are still
masters of their instruments, and both gentlemen honestly try to come up with
twisted, sleazy, funky riffs and honest bluesy solos. Remove the pop choruses,
break through the glossy sheen of the production, they say, and you will still
see the same old gritty Aerosmith rockin' out like there was no tomorrow, no
matter how many Desmond Childs there are in the studio ensuring that there be
plenty of tomorrows, and that each such tomorrow bring in a sizable check in
the mail.
As a matter of fact, I absolutely agree. Play Pump
back to back with all them Bon Jovi and Def Leppard albums, and you will
immediately notice what difference there is between a hair-metal album from a
new-generation hair-metal band and a hair-metal album from an old-style
Seventies blues-rock band. Faced between these two monsters, I will undoubtedly
sacrifice my ears to the Scylla of Pump than the Charybdis of New
Jersey or Hysteria (which should, generally, be understood as
simply preferring the old school to the new school rather than a direct
slap-in-the-face for these particular albums — hey, Def Leppard is a guilty
pleasure if there ever was one).
But we are talking Aerosmith in the context of
Aerosmith, and in the context of Aerosmith, 'The Other Side' and 'Monkey On My
Back' is as dull as they come. Most of this blends together into one
never-ending mess of monotonous riffage (again — it may not formally be
monotonous, but Fairbairn's production smoothes out all the edges; even when
Perry is playing something interesting, he makes sure to overdub another
guitar on top of it which is not playing anything interesting),
screaming for the sake of screaming, and big dumb drum patterns that sound
louder than everything else put together. In fact, in between the drums and
Tyler's throat-tearing, everything else just sort of gets lost.
The big hits were 'Love In An Elevator' and
'Janie's Got A Gun'. The former is credited to Tyler and Perry alone, as they
are trying to outdo Mötley Crüe without outside help, and come up
with a catchy, fun, but gruesomely inadequate sex anthem, sending elevated
society into a state of shock with its accounts of making out you-know-where.
Overdone, overplayed, and rather pitiful, it's hardly the worst thing they ever
did, but one cannot even call it «self-parody» — in the past, they sang about sex,
not about silly sexual fetishes flashing in dirty old minds. How come they
never realized — or, if they did realize, how come they were never disturbed by
the fact — that this ongoing sexual bravado simply made them all into show-biz
clowns?
'Janie's Got A Gun' belatedly returns us to the
field of «social relevance». The girl gets raped by her own father and then
pulls a gun on him. This can be cutting edge. But as it sits there in the
middle of all these dumb sexual anthems, it ceases to be cutting edge and
becomes a musical tabloid — somewhat like the Stones' 'Too Much Blood' or any
other song whose author will probably defend it as «an attempt to draw public
attention to important social issues», when in reality it is simply one more
application of the «give the people what they want» principle. Rape, pedophilia,
and murder — all in one bag! Cool. Let's make it a hit single. At least it's a
half-decent pop song (notice, too, how it borrows the alarm siren thing from
'Kings And Queens').
I have, and can have, no personal favorites on Pump.
'Voodoo Medicine Man' could theoretically have gotten my hopes up — why
couldn't they justify the title by turning the song into another Southernish
romp like 'Hangman Jury'? — but it's just another slab of similar hair-metal.
'Young Lust' raves along at a fast pace, but what's the point if the stylistics
is just the same? 'What It Takes' is not the awfulest ballad to disgrace the
name of Aerosmith, but it is still a power ballad that takes the aesthetics of
'Home Tonight' and turns it into a big lump of melodic and lyrical clichés.
To reiterate the obvious, Pump is a step
down even from the standards of Permanent Vacation. Never mind the
experimentation of 'St. John', there are even no traces of light funny funk à
la 'Rag Doll', for which 'Janie's Got A Gun' is no acceptable substitute.
"Going down, Mr. Tyler?" You bet your ass he is, and taking
the whole band with him. Thumbs down.
GET A GRIP (1993)
1) Intro; 2) Eat The Rich; 3)
Get A Grip; 4) Fever; 5) Livin' On The Edge; 6) Flesh; 7) Walk On Down; 8) Shut
Up And Dance; 9) Cryin'; 10) Gotta Love It; 11) Crazy; 12) Line Up; 13)
Amazing; 14) Boogie Man.
If you do not own this album, go out and buy
it, now. Listen to it in your best ceremonial robe, your mind intent on prayer.
Then take it out and solemnly burn it in your back yard, if you have one, or in
the nearest forest, if you live near one, or, if that fails, just grind it to
little pieces and flush it. Repeat said procedure each Sunday, and, provided
you keep it up for at least ten years, you will undoubtedly find grace in the
eyes of the Lord as well as earn gratitude undying in the eyes of your
descendants the way they are pictured in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
"There's something wrong with the world
today, I don't know what it is", they sing in 'Livin' On The Edge'. But it
is not hard to guess, really, because Get A Grip takes its time to
embody pretty much everything that is wrong with the world today. It is
difficult even to decide where to start. How about this: the song before
that features lyrics that go "Fever gives you lust with an appetite, it
hits you like the fangs from a rattlesnake bite", and the song immediately
after that states that "When the night comes, everybody gotta have
FLESH — the only thing that's worth the sweat". Er, I'm pretty sure few of
us would abstain from having a little FLESH every now and then, but if it is really
"the only thing that's worth the sweat", there must surely be
something wrong with the world today, and I do know what it is.
As the «St. George» of grunge bands started
hacking away at the «dragon» of hair metal, one would think that Aerosmith, of
all people, might finally get their heads straight — after all, with their
natural predisposition towards hardest-rock-riffage and punkish attitude, they
could have followed other heroes of the past like Alice Cooper in rejecting
the Bon Jovi aesthetics and re-setting a fine example for the kids. Instead,
they hardened their hearts and came out as defenders of that aesthetics
against the grunge wave. The risk paid off. Get A Grip sold almost
as many copies as Nevermind, became the band's best-selling album ever,
and solidified the basis for «MTV Rock» for years to come, plunging the brains
of millions of teenagers worldwide into a hedonistic coma whose end, even
today, is nowhere in sight.
Get A Grip is a thoroughly evil album — easily in my Top 10 Most Evil Albums Ever
Recorded — and, although I am well aware that this is just a convenient symbol,
the symbolism is just too overbearing so as not to merit a little verbal
pathos. One of the most ironic aspects of its evil is that it's catchy: with
the corporate songwriting machine continuing its run, most of the songs contain
hooks that are exceedingly hard to get out of your head. But what are
these hooks? Mostly the same trashy pop choruses, tolerable, perhaps, if
steeped in moderation, irritating if molded as pseudo-rebellious anthems.
Embarrassment jumps sky high already with the
first track. Musically, 'Eat The Rich' is a poor man's 'Walk This Way' (it even
starts out with a brief quote from the song), whose main vocal melody (verse)
also has the nerve to rip off Zappa's 'Trouble Every Day' (a transparently
obvious observation which, for some reason, I have never met stated elsewhere).
Lyrically, it is exactly what its title suggests: a primitive diatribe against
rich people. Uh... excuse me, Mr. Tyler, may I take a peep at your latest
tax declaration form? Oh, that's right: you only go heavy on "rich folks
who get rude", and you "believe in rags to riches", so you're
only rambling against those who have not earned their right to yacht
clubs and poodles and pills. Oh, excuse me, and here I was thinking that,
perhaps, you were sort of poking fun at your own attire the way it looks
on you in the opening bits of the 'Love In An Elevator' video. How silly of me.
And when you tell me that "you gotta live large, gotta let it rip" in
the very next song, you obviously do not mean that "you gotta live
large" may surmise poodles and yacht clubs. You probably mean it just
surmises having FLESH — the only thing that's worth a sweat. My, my.
Get A Grip is, indeed, a philosophical album; almost every song has its moral. We
get instructions every step of the way. How about this: 'Talk is cheap, shut
up and dance / Don't get deep, shut up and dance'. If so, what is so surprising
about the fact that 'there's something wrong with the world today'? And yet,
there is consistency. 'If you can judge a wise man by the color of his skin,
then mister you're a better man than I', Tyler adds, periphrasing the Yardbirds
— that's about as deep as his understanding of the world's problems can really
reach. Yes, sir, your whole life path is set out here before you. You gotta eat
the rich, gotta get a grip, gotta shut up and dance, gotta love it, gotta line
up, and, of course, you gotta have flesh — the only... oh, excuse me. The whole
album is a veritable Bible of MTV faith.
And I have not even yet mentioned its Psalms — three
power ballads that are all clumped together, with very small breaks, on the
second half of the album. All were hit singles, and all introduced us to the
High Priestess Alicia Silverstone, MTV's house-rebel Barbie doll of the mid-Nineties
whose chief acting talent consisted of knowing how to give the finger with a
dismissive glare on the face. If rumours about introducing navel piercing into
mainstream culture with the video for 'Crying' are true, I wouldn't be the
least bit surprised — the ludicrous idea of mass-marketed self-mutilation as
the expression of «one's true self» or «rebellious attitude» ties in one
hundred percent with the overall shit-aesthetics of Get A Grip. (Or was
it, instead, the cow udder piercing on the album sleeve? which raises the
question of the analogy between Alicia Silverstone and a domesticated
quadruped, and, mind you, it is not me who is responsible).
Of course, it does not help matters much that
'Crying' and 'Crazy' are more or less the same song (the only big difference is
that the first one has brass where the second one has harmonica... oh, wait,
the first one has harmonica, too, never mind...), and that both satisfy the
stereotype of the big bad hairy power ballad to a tee.
Words cannot express the way I hate this album,
even as I can't help but bop along to the funky instrumental break in the title
track, sounding like the accompaniment to some particularly cheesy Nintendo
karate simulator. Against the background of this wave after wave of cultural
pollution, only Joe Perry's 'Walk On Down' sounds like a vague, vague reminder
of this band's fabulous past, and only makes the pill more bitter in the
process. It's one thing to have your intelligence insulted by some
good-for-nothing twenty-year old sucker raised on Grease and Van Halen,
and another thing to realize that the dragon — nay, the Antichrist — of MTV
culture has bought off one of the world's formerly greatest rock'n'roll bands
to serve as its chief weapon of mass destruction. For what it's worth, Darth
Vader has nothing on Steve Tyler. Thumbs? Can't even see where
they went. Too dark, too deep.
NINE LIVES (1997)
1) Nine Lives; 2) Falling In
Love (Is Hard On The Knees); 3) Hole In My Soul; 4) Taste Of India; 5) Full
Circle; 6) Something's Gotta Give; 7) Ain't That A Bitch; 8) The Farm; 9)
Crash; 10) Kiss Your Past Good-Bye; 11) Pink; 12) Falling Off; 13) Attitude
Adjustment; 14) Fallen Angels.
No less than eight outside songwriters
this time, ranging from real old friends like Richard Supa (who'd already
worked with the band on 'Chip Away The Stone' in the late 1970s) to trusty workhorses
like Desmond Child to completely unbelievable surprises like Glen Ballard (of
Alanis Morissette fame!). The biggest disappointment is actually Mark Hudson,
the man who singlehandedly reinvented and rejuvenated Ringo Starr's lackluster
solo career — but not before saddling Aerosmith with the triteness of 'Livin'
On The Edge' and the ridiculousness of 'The Farm' (at least he also takes
responsibility for the second best song on the album, 'Crash').
On the other hand, having to feed so many
mouths must have gotten the band's minds off the idea to expand their role as
godfathers of / spokesmen for «MTV Rock». Nine Lives does not have as
many imperatives in its song titles, as many Alicia Silverstone videos, and as
many obnoxious, hypocrite lyrical banalities as Get A Grip. These are
its good sides. The bad side is that there is no sense of purpose to the
record. The band's old-school rocking instincts, its natural propensity for
pathetic power ballads, and the mainstream pop pull of the outside songwriters
all seem to mingle in one sticky, viscous, ponderous lump where it is no longer
possible to distinguish «ballad» from «boogie», «teen pop» from «hard rock»,
and «sincere» from «forced». Upon first listen, it is bizarre; subsequently, it
is just boring.
The record starts out with a promise. 'Nine
Lives', as an appetizer, is their ballsiest track to open the proceedings since
at least 'Let The Music Do The Talking'. That gruff opening chord, the little
feedback bit, the funny «Steve Tyler outscreeching the local feline
competition» bit, the lyrics that fall back on the exquisite innuendo principle
instead of yer basic foul-mouthing, the drive, the guitar tones... old
Aerosmith back? Not quite. It may take a couple listens to understand that the
balls are, unfortunately, quite low on life-giving content. For one thing,
there is no distinctive riff; just a fast tempo against which Bradford and
Perry play a bunch of basic blues-rock and power chords. For another, the
chorus ("Nine lives, feelin' lucky...") is pure MTV pop again.
Perfect for a headbanging session? No doubt. Timeless classic? No way.
And then the record, head forward, dives into
that strange, strange muck. 'Falling In Love Is Hard On The Knees' — what the
hell is it? Should it rock? Should it bring tears to your eyes? Should it get
you to dance at the local night club? All of these, some of these? Is it even a
good song? It's about as catchy as the average Lenny Kravitz song, and just
about as nutritious. What the heck are 'Hole In My Soul', 'Ain't That A Bitch',
'Kiss Your Past Good-Bye' (in the latter's case, dock a point for Tyler
explicitly uncovering the pun in one of the choruses) — fist-punchers or
tear-jerkers? With Get A Grip, you knew the three ballads and could
easily program them out if they annoyed you more than the rockers; with Nine
Lives, it is not so easy, because all dividing lines have been blurred. If
the melodies were great, this might even have been an asset. As they are, it is
a troublesome bother.
I must confess, though, that 'Ain't That A
Bitch' is a fine performance; the melody is generic power-balladry, but the
mix of slide guitars, strings, blues-rock solos, and Tyler's crescendo from
«lazy» to «schizophrenic» is a vast improvement on the technique of, say,
'Crazy'; one may not go wild about the pomposity, but the song aspires to more
than straightforward dumb teen bait, and it is hard not to at least tip your
hat to the amount of work that went into it. The same applies to quite a few
other tracks as well; some fans may complain about overproduction, but, if you
ask me, overproduction is fine as long as it gives you something to concentrate
on rather than the limp songwriting levels.
True «dumb teen bait» does not really start
until 'Pink', which was, of course, the biggest single, the most famous video,
and the Grammy-winning song off the album. With a title like that and lyrics
like "pink on the lips of your lover, 'cause pink is the love you
discover", it is not difficult to understand the primary target audience
of the song, arranged as loud, but toothless pop without any Aerosmith
trademarks whatsoever (shame on you, Joe Perry). But let us cut them
some slack: when you are a fifty-year old rock star, you have to be extra
meticulous about finding new ways to attract freshly pubescent girls, or you
risk getting stuck with an old, ugly wife forever.
Little bits of experimentation on the album
mostly fall flat, or land like heavy boulders on your toes. 'A Taste Of India'
has Glen Ballard, who'd already once saddled Alanis Morissette with Eastern
influences, for better or for worse, lending the same overtones to Aerosmith,
except that, as one could guess, for Tyler «a taste of India» does not surmise
a trip to the Taj Mahal, but rather something a bit more flesh-related. The
effect is dirty cheap. 'The Farm' begins and ends with snippets of The
Wizard Of Oz, again suggesting unhealthy sexual fantasies about getting it
on with the Tin Man and Scarecrow at the same time (the lyrics make no sense,
but "somebody get me to the farm" somewhat echoes 'Last Child', yet,
again, with more emphasis on the "I ain't no Peter Pan" part, if you
think like I think what they think).
Overall, Nine Lives is a cooling-off
record; it is much less teen-geared than Get A Grip, and thus, comes off
as nowhere near as insulting for Aerosmith's adult audience. But it also
contains fewer guilty pleasures, and it's dreadfully long, too; when half of
your album consists of overproduced mid-tempo rock-ballads, you do not really
need to extend it over an hour. So take your pick: the disgusting titillation
of Get A Grip or the more restrained, but boring pop strains of Nine
Lives.
A LITTLE SOUTH OF SANITY (1998)
CD I: 1) Eat The Rich; 2) Love
In An Elevator; 3) Falling In Love (Is Hard On The Knees); 4) Same Old Song And
Dance; 5) Hole In My Soul; 6) Monkey On My Back; 7) Livin' On The Edge; 8)
Cryin'; 9) Rag Doll; 10) Angel; 11) Janie's Got A Gun; 12) Amazing; CD II: 1)
Back In The Saddle; 2) Last Child; 3) The Other Side; 4) Walk On Down; 5) Dream
On; 6) Crazy; 7) Mama Kin; 8) Walk This Way; 9) Dude (Looks Like A Lady); 10)
What It Takes; 11) Sweet Emotion.
No matter how deep the depths this band has
attained with its latter day career, one thing is for certain: Aerosmith have always
been terrific live performers. This is one unquestionable advantage they have
on their forefathers — most of the Rolling Stones' shows have followed the
hit-and-miss principle ever since the departure of Mick Taylor, always depending
on just how much out of focus the guitar players are on this particular
evening, and on how «playful» the frontman is feeling (as in, «do I want to sing
tonight, or do I just feel like jumping?»).
Aerosmith have steadily remained far more reliable.
There is not a single video or live recording of the band that I've seen that
does not combine a fun atmosphere with a lot of hard work, and their stage
presence has only solidified with age. They could be slightly wobbly in
the good old days of drug rule, as is clearly seen on Classics Live and
bits of Live Bootleg!, but ever since the big clean-up it almost feels
like Perry and Whitford have not missed or flubbed one note, whereas
Tyler's on-key screaming is, if anything, even more precise and powerful than
in the early days. In other words, in the studio they might have still be
selling their souls to the devil from dawn to dusk, but onstage, no matter how
many crappy MTV hits they had tucked behind their belts, they were still one of
the world's greatest rock'n'roll bands.
Which would have surely made this lengthy
double CD of live recordings from the Get A Grip and Nine Lives
tours their best offering to true fans since the Seventies — if not for the
utterly depressing setlist, of course. With but seven out of twenty-three
selections recreating the glory of their classic period, this is not even an
accurate reflection of the way these tours really went, since normally they
used to do about half old stuff, half new stuff. It may, of course, be
simply due to the fact that the band did not want to reuse the same tunes that
everyone had already heard live on Live Bootleg! etc., but it is way
more likely that they were simply hoping to play more into the hands of their
new generations of adoring fans, open-minded to the point of digging 'Livin' On
The Edge' on par with 'Last Child' and 'Hole In My Soul' on par with 'Dream
On'. Well — «no harm in being open-minded», said the executioner, swinging his
axe.
Of course, not all of these new hits are bad,
and sometimes the live renditions can make you think twice of their quality:
'Love In An Elevator', for instance, in this particular version comes across
more like a nice pretext for Perry and Whitford to do some blazing guitar
sparring than a forced attempt to outgross the hair metal bands of the late
Eighties. But what is the point in offering us note-for-note recreations
of all the power ballads they had recorded from 1987 to 1997? As silly
as it looks when the entire stadium is rocking its lighters to the steady
hypnotic sway of the next processed anthem, it is much sillier (and just
as dangerous) when your average fan is doing it alone in front of his stereo.
The one true moment for which the whole record
is worth owning is the start of the second disk, as the band, speared on by
Tyler's mega-yell of "I GOT BLISTERS ON MY SISTERS!", threateningly
launches into 'Back In The Saddle'. "So you like the new shit, the old
shit, where were you in '78?" he teases the audience. "Where the fuck
were you in '79? Magic Mountain, baby, Magic Mountain!" Well, at least the
band still remembers where it was in '78, and is able to rock out with the
exact same strength. Too bad they only do it for one more number in a row,
'Last Child', and then switch back into teen-pop mode with 'The Other Side'. Oh
well; at least they make sure that the album says goodbye with a true classic
like 'Sweet Emotion' rather than a generic power ballad like 'What It Takes' (I
admire Tyler's courage in singing the first verse acappella, but, given the
number's nauseating level of bathos, the effect is even uglier).
Still, despite all the obvious reservations, a thumbs up — if only out of respect for the band's
legacy and its ability to maintain integrity on stage even when wading
through all the dreck. Plus, 'Walk On Down' rocks. They should let Joe Perry
take lead vocals more often.
JUST PUSH PLAY (2001)
1) Beyond Beautiful; 2) Just
Push Play; 3) Jaded; 4) Fly Away From Here; 5) Trip Hoppin'; 6) Sunshine; 7)
Under My Skin; 8) Luv Lies; 9) Outta Your Head; 10) Drop Dead Gorgeous; 11)
Light Inside; 12) Avant Garden.
When this came out, even some of the biggest
fans of Get A Grip must have felt stumped. No matter how slick all of
the band's albums from 1987 to 1993 turned out to be, they were at least nominally
rock'n'roll — loud rhythmic headbanging music with distorted guitars,
screaming, and, if not always fast, then at least always danceable grooves. Nine
Lives was a mixed bag, but you still couldn't say no to the title track and
'Crash' and... well, much of it was boring and bland, yet somehow it was still
«rock music».
But Just Push Play is not «rock
music». About a third of it consists of so-so attempts at mimicking and mining
the latest trends — most notably, the twenty-first century edition of hip-hop
(on the title track and 'Outta Your Head', but, strangely, not on 'Trip
Hoppin') and various electronica achievements (usually in the form of «spicy»
sound effects scattered all over the place). The other two thirds, in dire
contrast, are dedicated to some bizarre retro-psycho-pop thing that, at times,
almost threatens to invoke nostalgia for the sunny Sixties — a place where
Aerosmith, of all people, have never ever set foot before.
In all likelihood, the culprits are fellow
songwriters Marti Frederiksen and Mark Hudson, present on all of the tracks
(although not always together), and if Hudson's decision to steer the band towards
a retro style comes as no surprise, given his previously mentioned successful
restoration of Ringo Starr's solo career, Frederiksen is a darker sheep —
although his first significant contribution is usually logged as writing and
performing for Almost Famous' «Stillwater» — this might give you a clue
if you are familiar with the movie.
Regardless, the simple fact is that Just
Push Play is the most un-Aerosmith Aerosmith album ever recorded. It's not
as unimaginable as AC/DC doing an album of Gilbert & Sullivan covers,
perhaps, but close. A simple test involves playing the first ten seconds of
'Luv Lies' to any of your friends still in the dark — and then making them
believe, prior to hearing Tyler's vocals come in, that this is not frickin'
Electric Light Orchestra they are listening to.
It is no surprise, then, that in terms of
overall respectability, the experiment had failed. It still hit the charts high
enough, but, I believe, more due to inertia power — Aerosmith's «power run» of
1987-1993 has certainly ensured that, like with the Stones (who had their
«power run» much earlier, of course, but it still affects public opinion),
people will continue buying the records no matter what. But quite a few fans —
as can be easily seen by browsing through amateur reviews — were quite unable
to «get it», not the least of them Mr. Joe Perry himself, who has openly distanced
himself from the album in press, saying that the final product had very little,
if anything, to do with Aerosmith as a real band.
The most ridiculous thing about it all,
however, is that Just Push Play is not at all bad! Once one has
discarded the most obvious «ones for the kiddies», there are some interesting
melodies and arrangements to be found. The big hit single 'Jaded' is a solid
power pop anthem, a little on the pathetic side (these are the 'Amazing Crazy
Crying' guys, after all), but with cute «astral» guitars, nostalgic strings and
stuff — it may take a while to understand that the song has nothing serious to
do with the generic Aerosmith power ballad, but it will sink in,
eventually.
'Trip Hoppin', despite the title, has more to
do with Beatlish pop of the Revolver era, only ear-splittingly
overproduced. So does 'Sunshine' — with both songs featuring psychedelic
backing vocals to boot, fresh off the 1966 train. Even 'Light Inside', rushing
along at a far more frenetic pace than the rest, has «Beatles» written all over
it; and 'Avant Garden', again with a totally misleading title, could have been
a non-hit for Big Star, for all I know. There is also a drastic change in the
lyrics — most are far less obnoxious and «mock-dirty» than we are used to.
Now how on earth did Hudson and Frederiksen
drag the band in on this non-trivial project, made three times less trivial by
being donated to Aerosmith, is something that will take only a very skilled
biographer to figure out. Because the biggest weakness of Just Push Play
is not the songs: it is just that the songs have just about the same
relationship to the band to which they were entrusted as the real
Marilyn Monroe has to her robot facsimile on the album sleeve.
What I mean is, out of all the band members
Brad Whitford alone, with his old predilection towards «colourful» guitar
playing, could have readily adapted to this kind of music. Joe Perry, wherever
he is, looks like a fish out of water — when he does not even try to rock out,
the resulting sound is boring, and when he does try, he just gets smacked in
the face with the «poppiness» of the melody that he cannot subdue. And Tyler?
Hard rock screamer, yes; R'n'B belter, perhaps; power ballad guru, by all means
— but there is nothing he can do to make this new style, or these new
styles, his own.
All of which makes Just Push Play an
eccentric, unpredictable, and thoroughly misguided experience. It is not a
«sellout» — they sold out for good fourteen years before the fact; it is, in
fact, their least obviously commercial album in all that time. Rather,
it's a pre-doomed experiment. It's their Satanic Majesties Request, in a
way, but condemned by the epoch — in 1967, you could risk trying to make the
Beatles out of the Rolling Stones and get something weird, but worthwhile in
return. But to make the Beatles out of Aerosmith, long after the band has been
dragged through the gloss, the big bucks, and the cheap, generic sleaze of its
downfall — nah. And Hudson and Frederiksen should bear the blame, no doubt.
"You're so jaded, and I'm the one that jaded you", indeed. Thumbs down, but with a certain dose of respect.
HONKIN' ON BOBO (2004)
1) Road Runner; 2) Shame,
Shame, Shame; 3) Eyesight To The Blind; 4) Baby, Please Don't Go; 5) Never
Loved A Girl; 6) Back Back Train; 7) You Gotta Move; 8) The Grind; 9) I'm
Ready; 10) Temperature; 11) Stop Messin' Around; 12) Jesus Is On The Main Line.
Most bands, sooner or later, experience the
back-to-roots drive — because, once you've got nothing left to prove, the only
thing left is to realize just how much the grass was greener back in the days
when you did have something to prove, and still greener even before
those days. With Aerosmith, though, who were never all that attached to their
roots in the first place, and whose proverbial sellout made everyone see they
weren't even all that attached to the stems, everything was possible —
including the preposterous thought of «Hey, maybe these guys have lost themselves
so hopelessly in the world of Top 10 hits, Vegas galas, and safe, sterile sex
with MTV teenage whores, they will never release their back-to-roots
album?»
But perhaps the disgust that Joe Perry had to
live out every night upon the release of Just Push Play, an album not
horrible in itself but farther from the spirit of Aerosmith than anything ever
associated with the band, had served as a catalyst — and here, three years
after Aerosmith tried to become Lenny Kravitz & The Beatles, is Aerosmith
trying to become The Chess Blues Singers. Or, rather, Kid Rock & The Chess
Blues Singers.
Honkin' On Bobo has been usually billed as their «blues
covers» album, but Aerosmith are not, nor have they ever been, a blues band;
they probably did just one or two pure blues numbers in their entire career,
usually to fill up some empty record space at the last moment (remember 'Reefer
Head Woman'? No? That's what I thought). But if you speed up and toughen the
blues, you get rock'n'roll, and this is what they try to remind us of by
covering Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, and Mississippi Fred McDowell not the way
those guys sang their songs, but the way other guys, less tolerant of
the blues' monotonousness and semi-religious infatuation with itself, sang
them. Loud, fast (if possible), dirty, sleazy — the way slum kids like it the
best.
If this does not work exactly the way it
should, this is because it can't. The 'Smiths have been removed from this
territory way too long to be able to meet anyone along the way who'd tell them
how to do it right. Granted, they even went back to their old producer Jack
Douglas for an extra pinch of authenticity. For brass, they used the Memphis
Horns. On piano, they recruited the legendary Chuck Berry accompanist Johnnie
Johnson (lucky to catch a bit of the good old spirit in him before he died next
year). So many pieces in place, and yet the final product still sounds
fairly calculated and surviving somewhat on artificial breath.
Perhaps the discrepancy is in that Honkin'
On Bobo might have originally been conceived as a semi-improvised,
good-time jam-party record, but then Douglas went on to make it sound like an
Aerosmith album, with emphasis on the second word. I do not care much
for the production; it still bears the patented late-Aerosmith post-1987 gloss,
and as loud and roaring as the guitars are, welcoming you to the hard rock of
'Road Runner', they just don't kick ass the way they used to. Still, if it's
the best we can get, better 'Road Runner' than 'Eat The Rich', I'd say.
This whole idea of «Let's have fun fun fun, but
let's also sell this thing to the kids who want another Permanent Vacation»
sort of ruins the experience. An Aerosmith album for the kids has to have power
ballads, right? And there ain't no such thing as a blues power ballad, right?
So they take Aretha Franklin's 'I Never Loved A Man', change the title and the
lyrics, and make it into the next 'Crazy'. Not good.
Nevertheless, shoot the legs off the context
and 'Road Runner', 'Baby Please Don't Go', 'I'm Ready', and 'You Gotta Move'
rock out well without any back thought (the latter even mutates into some sort
of psychedeliv heavy metal monster midway through; thankfully, Mississippi Fred
missed hearing it by a good thirty years). Backup vocalist Tracy Bonham (no
relation to John) does a good job helping Perry out with the singing on the
swampy 'Back Back Train', and the way they all wind it down with an acoustic
gospel sing-along ('Jesus Is On The Main Line') is truly heartwarming. Maybe
they should have done it all unplugged.
Or maybe not. It's been a long time, after all,
since those of us that drew a sharp line between 'Rats In The Cellar' and
'Monkey On My Back' got the occasion to rock'n'roll to a 'Smith tune without a
vague fear of breaking some unwritten code of honour. So, even if Joe Perry has
not invented any new riffs and Tyler still uses each song as an opportunity to
practice his animal scream (what a scream, though, especially for a guy
in his fifties), it's all decent shit. Certainly better to go out this-a way. Thumbs up.
ROCKIN’ THE JOINT (2005)
1) Beyond Beautiful; 2) Same
Old Song And Dance; 3) No More No More; 4) Seasons Of Wither; 5) Light Inside;
6) Draw The Line; 7) I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing; 8) Big Ten Inch Record; 9)
Rattlesnake Shake; 10) Walk This Way; 11) Train Kept A-Rollin’.
Recorded in 2002 at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las
Vegas, not released until three years later when nobody really cared, featuring
a suitably trashy album sleeve and an oddly short setlist, the album was either
mildly trashed or ignored by the critics — and has no chance whatsoever to join
Live! Bootleg in its semi-legendary status. Too bad, ‘cause it’s a lot
of fun.
On the heels of South Of Sanity, you’d
think the guys would be happy enough to entertain the Vegas crowds with a
generous serving of their glossy hits. They do not; with the exception of two
numbers from their latest studio album (well, they were promoting it,
after all), and one more that is pretty painful to mention at this time,
everything they play goes back to the gold period — including freshly
unearthed rarities such as ‘No More No More’ and ‘Seasons Of Wither’!
Everything changes in an instant. Where the Sanity
tracks, with a few exceptions, reflected Aerosmith honestly earning their
daily bread, giving fans note-for-note perfect versions of pre-polished
plastic rock’n’roll hits, on Rockin’ The Joint they are clearly having
fun. Because with these old classics, you don’t care for ideal execution;
you just care to get your kicks. The way Joe Perry hammers out that riff for
‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ — don’t you want to trade the band’s entire post-1987
career for that experience? The way Tyler screams his head off on the last
verse of ‘Draw The Line’, even if a bit of it is off-key, isn’t it more
exciting than all of his come-in-at-the-right-moment bansheeisms on Sanity?
The way the band jams its toes off during the instrumental sections of ‘Big Ten
Inch Record’, don’t it send these Vegas people into a dance frenzy, so much
more exciting than the alleged two-step of ‘Rag Doll’?
Look at this. Midway through, the waves of
excitement are unexpectedly interrupted as Steven bursts into a perfunctory
rendition of ‘I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing’, the worst song ever to be
associated with the name of Aerosmith — not only is it a power ballad, after
all, but it was written by Diane Warren, a weapon of mass destruction from
outer space fifty times as destructive as the asteroid in the bullshit movie Armageddon
for which she wrote the song and Aerosmith, looking for new, thrilling, and
ever more humiliating ways to sell out, recorded it. (How fortunate it is that
the studio version is only available as a single, or on compilations that
nobody need buy anyway). Anyway, once they’re done with this monstrosity,
obviously targeted at the tasteless gambling ladies in the crowd, “So you like
the old shit or the new shit?”, asks Tyler — “OLD SHIT!” yells everyone in the
audience with the power to yell. Good for Ms. Warren she was not among the
audience that evening.
So, overall, this is terrific — a rejuvenation,
a return to senses, perhaps only temporary, but who cares: this is Aerosmith
playing as if they were in some lousy joint in 1976, and they haven’t lost a
thing — Tyler’s singing still perfect, Perry’s playing still gritty as hell.
Perhaps the Peter Green blues cover, presaging Honkin’ On Bobo
(‘Rattlesnake Shake’) is a bit too slow and drawn out, but they do insert the
fast jam from ‘Rats In The Cellar’ in the middle, so I’d rather hear that than
another rendition of ‘Falling In Love Is So Hard On The Knees’.
Absolute fuckin’ best rock’n’rollin’ moment:
the band totally cuts loose with ‘Big Ten Inch Record’, fluid guitar solos
from Whitford and some guest piano player, and then, when everyone is already
pretty well on their feet, “JOE PERRYYY!” from Tyler and the guy cuts in like
mad, a cross between Chuck Berry and Alvin Lee. Tune in to this and it may yet
make your day. With the sordid exception of the Diane Warren thing — even the
two numbers from Just Push Play are decent — this is Aerosmith’s best live
offering since Bootleg, and one of the best live albums ever from
a band of rock veterans each of which is way beyond 50. For the record, the
Stones have never played with that kind of quality upon crossing the
half-century age range, although they still get by on enthusiasm and great
material. Thumbs up.
MUSIC FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION! (2012)
1) LUV XXX; 2) Oh Yeah; 3)
Beautiful; 4) Tell Me; 5) Out Go The Lights; 6) Legendary Child; 7) What Could
Have Been Love; 8) Street Jesus; 9) Can't Stop Loving You; 10) Lover Alot; 11)
We All Fall Down; 12) Freedom Fighter; 13) Closer; 14) Something; 15) Another
Last Goodbye; 16*) Up On A Mountain; 17*) Oasis In The Night; 18*) Sunny Side
Of Love.
Word of the day is «tedious». Seven years in
the making, during which the band almost came to a complete halt (as Joe Perry
started spreading rumors that Aerosmith would go on with a new lead singer) —
eleven years, actually, since the world's greatest rock'n'roll band, MTV-style,
graced us with their last all-original collection of tightly polished,
relentlessly professional, thoroughly washed-up rock-a-pop. And now — not only
are they back, but what they are offering us is Music From Another Dimension. Sure thing, guys. Any dimension in
which Diane Warren may be residing at present is definitely another by me.
If, like poor deluded me, you ever thought that
the not-particularly-inspired, but still relatively tough, blues-drenched, Honkin' On Bobo gave a weak hint at
salvation, and that the subsequent live release so strongly reminded us of what
was ever so great about Aerosmith in the first place — forget all hopes even
before you put the record on. The album cover is cheesier than ever, and once
again, they fall back on their corporate songwriter squad: Marti Frederiksen!
Jim Vallance! Desmond Child! Russ Irwin! And, oh yes, Lady Di in person, with a
brand new power ballad and she's not afraid to use it. If you thought these
guys were long since packed in naphthalene, you got another think coming.
Another dimension has opened up, and the living dead are upon us.
Except that even the living dead, as it turns
out, are not immune to aging. Where «classic late period Aerosmith» managed to
become an outrageous offense to good taste while still retaining a serious
level of energy and catchiness, Music
From Another Dimension is nowhere near as offensive (it is not altogether
«mentorial», with neither the carnal nor the humanitarian save-the-world side
of these guys over-emphasized as usual) — it is simply dull. Long, overdrawn,
repetitive, monotonous, and deadly, mind-numbingly D-U-L-L.
No one has bothered writing a single new
interesting riff. At best, you get rehashes of ʽLast Childʼ,
ʽDraw The Lineʼ or even ʽWalk On Downʼ, and at worst, you
just get the basic wall of stiffly produced sound that Aerosmith can produce in
their collective sleep, having built up so much experience since 1987. Yes, it
all sounds like Aerosmith — why should it all sound like anybody else? — and it
all sounds tired. Of course, they are old men, and one has to lower the expectations
in proportion to age. Or has one, really? With a million and one bands in the
world still punching out loud rock'n'roll, why settle for somebody just because
they are — just because they used to be — Aerosmith?
Take my advice, if you wish, and make your
decision based on the very first track, since most of the rest will sound more
or less the same way. Loud, compressed, based on a blues-rock melody taken
directly from the stockpile, and featuring multi-tracked vocals from Tyler that
finally show serious signs of aging — he is quite consciously sparing his
throat after the surgery performed in 2006, and avoids overtaxing the larynx.
Obviously, he cannot be blamed, but it is just as obviously clear that,
without Tyler's vocal antics, Aerosmith is going to look no happier than the
three-legged dog on the cover of an Alice In Chains album. (For honesty's sake,
Steve can still hit his famous high notes, but he only does this in exceptional
cases now — mostly saving it up for the «climactic» moments of the
album-closing ballad, ʽAnother Last Goodbyeʼ, and, actually, it isn't
all that pretty any more). And then there are the air-brushed lyrics, no longer
dripping sexy sweat as they used to, but somehow it seems that the taming is
more generally due to the overall aura of political correctness flowing in the
air than the wise decision to finally «act their age»: "Love three times a
day, love your life away... there ain't no other way, it's in your DNA" —
sounds like a Viagra commercial to me, don't you think?
In terms of general «musical philosophy», the
album continues the line of Just Push
Play, subtly erasing the line between «rocker» and «ballad» and throwing on
poppy lines and psychedelic hugs every now and then — but it also cuts down on
the most overtly «Beatlesque» moves of that album; on a purely formal basis, Another Dimension rocks harder (on an
intuitive basis, it does not rock at all). Will this please old-time fans? Not
sure. Even with the fast-moving songs like ʽStreet Jesusʼ and
ʽLover A Lotʼ, there is really no feel that these were recorded with any other purpose than «hey, we still have
to prove that we can do another ʽToys In The Atticʼ». Forget it. They
can no longer do even another ʽFeverʼ.
Then there are the genuinely dorky bits. The
album's equivalent of ʽBack In The Saddleʼ, for instance, is
ʽOut Go The Lightsʼ, with the sexual bravado culminating in a chorus
that will just have to go down the
annals — or the drain, one of the two: "If you wanna take a lookie cookie
/ Tonight might be your lucky". And ʽCan't Stop Loving Youʼ is a
duet with American Idol winner Carrie Underwood — and the song sounds like it belongs on American Idol, one of those
«neo-country» pieces of garbage that even a post-Permanent Vacation Aerosmith should be ashamed of being associated
with.
And it's loooooong. Sixty seven minutes of one
non-descript piece of muzak after another (occasionally my brain even fails to
register the pauses between the tracks). In this totally draggy atmosphere,
there are almost no high- or lowlights: even the Diane Warren ballad is no
better or worse than everything else. Perry gets two lead vocals, including the
one on ʽFreedom Fighterʼ, a
perfunctory anti-war rant that sounds as if made on order; it ain't even no
ʽWalk On Downʼ — back in the days of Get A Grip, you could at least count on old man Perry to strike out
some old-timey rock'n'roll excitement as an antithesis to the band's generally
glossy sound, but here there is no difference: the glossy sound has worn off
some of the gloss, and the exciting bits have lost some of the excitement. It's
all just one big gray blob of sonic murk.
Music
From Another Dimension! is not
a general offense to good taste (at least, not until the American Idol woman enters the studio): even if they still wanted
to, Aerosmith simply no longer have it in them to spearhead the «MTV taking
over the world» movement. But, much like every bit of original material that
their forefathers, The Rolling Stones, recorded in the 21st century, this is
first and foremost merely a reminder — that this here band, Aerosmith, is
still with us, whether we like it or not. Naturally, they have every right to
issue a reminder like that — and we have every right to remind them that this
is nothing more than just a reminder. By giving it a certified thumbs down,
for instance.
TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION (1976)
1) A Dream Within A Dream; 2)
The Raven; 3) The Tell-Tale Heart; 4) The Cask Of Amontillado; 5) Doctor Tarr
And Professor Feather; 6) The Fall Of The House Usher: Prelude; 7) Arrival; 8)
Intermezzo; 9) Pavane; 10) Fall; 11) To One In Paradise.
There is one solid objective reason for why Tales
Of Mystery And Imagination, a concept album based on a bunch of stories by
Edgar Allan Poe, should have been the best album by the Alan Parsons Project —
namely, because the Alan Parsons Project, to a large part, was launched out of
a desire to record a concept album based on a bunch of stories by Edgar Allan
Poe.
Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson met in 1974. The
former wanted to become something more than «the guy who engineered Dark
Side Of The Moon», and the latter loved Poe. The union was blessed, and the
outcome was a record the likes of which did not really exist prior to 1976; at
the very least, to the best of my memory, no rock album presented as a
soundtrack to literary glories had ever captured the public eye so much before
that time. Commercially, it was hardly huge, but it established the Project as
a serious attraction, and has ever since remained as the cornerstone of their
legacy — even many of the active Parsons haters confess to falling under its
charm from time to time.
There is some strange magic at work here
indeed. On one hand, Tales is a huge venture. It covers the matters of
three Poe stories and one Poe poem on the first side, then invests everything
into the lengthy multi-part 'Fall Of The House Of Usher' suite on the second.
It downplays Parsons' manipulations with electronic keyboards in favour of a
whole ton of guest musicians and an entire orchestra. It features a different
guest vocalist on each song, including moderately big names like Arthur Brown,
John Miles, and Terry Sylvester. And yet, on the other hand, apart from a few
isolated moments, it feels wrong to describe it as «bombastic». It has an odd
claustrophobic aura around it, as if one were locked in an ice palace, staring
out the frozen windows at distorted shades of reality and not knowing how real
they really were. It may be off-putting, and it may not be exactly suitable for
Poe-related purposes, but somehow, it works.
Indeed, some original reviews complained that
the album had missed its mark — that, regardless of how good the music was on
its own, it did not convey the proper associations, that the tense sensations
of fear, thrill, death, and gloom were nowhere to be found. They were right,
but, after all, The Alan Parsons Project formed as a progressive rock outfit,
not as a brand of shock-rock à la Alice Cooper. The songs should
be thought of as inspired by Poe rather than reflecting Poe, at
which point they really come to life as original creations.
The first side is the diverse one. 'The Raven'
is taken at an almost martial pace, emphasizing the inescapability of the
bird's message right from the first bass note that drips on your ears in complete
loneliness for a few seconds. 'The Tell-Tale Heart' is molded as a rocking
chunk of Arthur Brown madness — probably the closest they ever get to pinning
down one of Poe's heroes (one might think that the fast blues-rock tempo may
not be the most suitable choice for picturing a crazy protagonist going nuts
over the heart of a murdered man pursuing him from beyond the floorboards —
but then it's also a pretty good approximation of a crazy-beatin' human heart).
'The Cask Of Amontillado' ascends from a lovely ballad (think one half Paul
McCartney, one half Peter Gabriel) to epic horn-held heights of musical
vendetta. And 'Doctor Tarr And Professor Fether' is just a good pop-rocker
with a memorable riff — an amusing trifle in Poe's career, a fun, but not
breathtaking entry in Parsons' catalog.
The second side, almost entirely dedicated to
the 'Usher' suite, is an acquired taste like most prog rock suites at the time
— a piece to be tolerated in some spots and admired in others. Taking a few
cues from Debussy's unfinished opera of the same name, it moves through different
sections that are not as much creepy as «archaic»: the 'Pavane' section lives
and breathes the souls of past generations, but never once does it suggest
death and retribution, which is why the minute-long 'Fall' itself is sort of
flat and anti-climactic. Fortunately, the album prefers to end with 'To One In
Paradise', another ballad worthy of a distinguished disciple of both the
Beatles and Pink Floyd.
(For the record, a little more than a decade
after the album's initial release, on the threshold of the CD age, Parsons
could not resist tampering with the original and significantly remixed it,
adding in some electronic enhancement and, most importantly, several bits of
artistic reciting originally sent to him by Orson Welles soon after the original
release. All of this hardly spoils the final product, but purists with lots of
useless time on their hands will want to go for the «Deluxe» 2-CD edition that
provides access to both versions.)
On the whole, one shouldn't be too harsh on Tales.
It is intelligent, tasteful, and melodic, and if it does not exactly reach
cathartic effects (although the ominous climactic bits on 'Amontillado' come
close), it is only because it does not aspire to them, not because it fails at
them. It also has the dubious honor of being one of the coldest, iciest
prog-rock albums ever released, just by the very fact of its existence, not
because Parsons and Woolfson derive some sort of sadistic satisfaction by
sucking the warmth out of your bodies as you listen to this. It's just a
particular type of musical animal. Rare at its peak, completely extinct today. Thumbs up.
I ROBOT (1977)
1) I Robot; 2) I Wouldn't Want
To Be Like You; 3) Some Other Time; 4) Breakdown; 5) Don't Let It Show; 6) The
Voice; 7) Nucleus; 8) Day After Day; 9) Total Eclipse; 10) Genesis Ch. 1 v. 32.
If asked, «Who would be the perfect artist to
transfer the ideas and the general feel of Asimov's work(s) onto a musical
setting?», the average knowledgeable person would probably name Kraftwerk, or,
perhaps, somebody within their innumerable legions of electronic followers. And
that would be wrong — because Kraftwerk would try to approach the goal
exclusively from the robot's point of view, whereas Asimov's concern has
always been that of depicting the man — machine interaction rather than the
machine itself.
Which means that, in 1977, no one could have
done it better than The Alan Parsons Project, a musical team assembled
specifically for the purpose of gluing together traditional values of melody
and harmony with the world of technical progress and automatic programming. You
may like I Robot or hate it, but what it sets out to achieve, achieve it
does. Not to mention that it is also the most technically complex and
unpredictable record in the band's catalog, which, per se, could be an asset
only for major prog-rock fans — and major prog-rock fans generally tend to
avoid Parsons for all of the man's immaculately calculated commercialism. (They
do fail to remember that if commercial success were Parsons' prime
interest, he could have turned his band into Styx or Journey with one wave of
his hand; he never did).
More than a third of the record is completely
instrumental, with tracks ranging from purely ambient-atmospheric ('Nucleus' —
solemnly happy electronic waves of sound to illustrate physical processes;
'Total Eclipse' — a spooky marriage of Gregorian chant with synthesizer
science) to repetitive, but memorable melodic drones (the title track,
unexpectedly white-funky; 'Genesis 1:32', announcing the next unwritten episode
in the history of Creation but not sounding too happy about it — well, the
Alan Parsons Project is very rarely happy about things). In terms of conceptuality
and complexity, the instrumentals are really the meat of the LP as such, and
they are so well done that any talk of progressive rock being deader than a
doornail by 1977 must be put to rest on this sort of evidence alone. This stuff
sounds good, and it sold, too.
But sell it did, most likely, on the strength
of its vocalized poppier-oriented content. Two of the singles were ballads:
'Day After Day', sung by Jack Harris, is gallantly Floydian in tone and melody,
yet never once injected with Waters' misanthropic venom, and 'Don't Let It
Show', sung by Dave Townsend, is a sappy soft-rock tear-jerker whose artificial
tenderness will undoubtedly lead many to accuse the song of criminal activities
against good taste. I would probably hate it per se, were I to hear it on some
classic rock radio station, but it feels nice and cozy in the overall context
of the LP, where the listener can make sure that, in fact, this kind of sound
is an exception for this album rather than its norm.
Third single was 'I Wouldn't Want To Be Like
You', whose single-power is derived from its being so attractively rhythmic;
with the rhythm section locked in a shy funk groove and the guitar player
taking a lesson in chicken-scratching, you could stick it in the midst of your
local discotheque selections and no one would have noticed. Funk rears its
head on 'Breakdown', too, graced with the instantly recognizable vocals of
Hollies' frontman Allan Clarke, and even more so on 'The Voice' (Steve Harley
of Cockney Rebel fame at the wheel), with a wah-wah solo, no less.
In fact, the only vocal number which does not
reflect a 180-degree turn from the style of Tales is 'Some Other Time':
stately, mid-tempo, solemn brass, choral vocals, cold lonesome feeling, the
works. Everything else is subtly targeted at modernistic audiences. But the
charm of I Robot is that the first impression is still that of an
intelligent, complex, well-crafted album dedicated to a serious topic; it is
not until later that you start to notice how busy Parsons and Woolfson actually
are concocting the balance between paying tribute to Asimov's vision (or, more
precisely, their vision of Asimov's vision) and making a record fit for the
public taste of 1977.
In the end, not all that much is left of
Asimov's vision. The instrumental numbers are ambiguous, and the lyrics, which
are generally described by reviewers as being «about robots», are in fact
somewhat obscure, not to mention clichéd. But there is a huge emotional
palette here, all the same — anger, fear, sadness, tenderness — making I
Robot stand on its perfect own as, perhaps, the richest musical experience
to be gained from the Project; and, disregarding most of the critical scorn
that used to go hand in hand with each of Parsons' new ventures, one should not
really be ashamed of issuing a thumbs up
to this album at least, fantastically solidly constructed from the brainwise
point of view and harboring plenty of delight for the senses as well.
PYRAMID (1978)
1) Voyager; 2) What Goes
Up...; 3) The Eagle Will Rise Again; 4) One More River; 5) Can't Take It With
You; 6) In The Lap Of The Gods; 7) Pyromania; 8) Hyper-Gamma-Spaces; 9) Shadow
Of A Lonely Man.
Pyramid sold a little less than I Robot, perhaps because it was neither punk nor disco, and it did
not have 'Come Sail Away' on it, either. For all the critical derision that the
Alan Parsons Project got through the years, they never abased themselves to
blunt populism. If, with each new album, they were becoming more «pop» than
«prog» — well, heck, so did Pink Floyd, more or less.
On the down side of things, the textures of Pyramid, even on instrumentals that had
so far tended to represent the complex, demanding side of the Project, had by
1978 drifted dangerously close to the Elton John/Billy Joel fief, perhaps over
a conscious attempt to avoid being called cheap Floyd clones (all the more
curious as to why none of the songs were hits; sheer lack of luck, I suspect).
'In The Lap Of The Gods', in quite a few of its places, brings to mind 'Funeral
For A Friend' — the same sort of get-rich-quick-with-a-keyboard-riff attitude
that the seasoned prog fan will want to detest and deride for pandering to the
oligophreny-inclined segment of the population, before retreating into his
world created by Roger Dean and jointly ruled from Canterbury and Kobaia.
On the up side, this is definitely not Styx we
are talking about. Even if going a bit overboard with the sentimental and the
simplistic bits, Parsons and Woolfson have not let down their sense of taste,
and there is not an ounce of cheap populist melodrama on Pyramid that so many of their «Serious» contemporaries had wilfully
submitted to. Think about it: an artist of lesser stature, riding the «pyramid
power» craze of the 1970s, would have, most likely, released a bunch of bullshit
anthems on all sorts of paranormal hogwash. The Project, on the other hand,
upon calling their album Pyramid,
deal out just one cruel, lambasting, but fully deserved blow to Patrick Flanagan's
charlatan tripe ('Pyromania') — and dedicate the rest of the album to the real
historical pyramids and the living gods they were built for. Of course, it's
not like they really did their homework on Egyptian history or anything — but
then, not everyone is supposed be the pop music equivalent of the BBC History
Channel à la Al Stewart.
In basic spiritual terms, The Project remains completely
true to its essence: musical reflections on the sad, pathetic aspect of human
existence. 'What Goes Up...' expectedly ends in "...must come down",
and if the songs are not about the vanity of constructing pyramids, they are
about the vanity of constructing personalities. E. g. my personal favorite,
'Can't Take It With You', a pretty folk-pop song that pairs a very Revolver-like electric riff with very
Byrds-like vocals (Dean Ford takes the lead) to remind us of the fact that we
cannot take it with us indeed — when we go, that is, regardless of what the
"it" is. Banal, yes, but it works.
In this respect, sentimental ballads such as
'The Eagle Will Rise Again' (sung by former Zombie Colin Blunstone) and 'Shadow
Of A Lonely Man' (sung by John Miles) work very well: they are insecure, frail,
and pitiful, with soft, breaking vocals (Miles almost seems to be crying in his
jacket when delivering his lines) perfectly matching the melodies and the
lyrical content, even if this limp thing can turn off many a rockier listener.
The only time when the ensemble does try to rock out — very mildly — is on the
Lenny Zakatek-sung 'One More River', a song that rolls along with a good punch,
but feels a bit out of place, a strange attempt at pointless gung-ho optimism
amidst a sea of self-doubt and cynicism.
Nevertheless, there are really no serious
misfires. If it ain't a masterpiece for the ages, it is still a finely
designed, deeply felt, and professionally executed concept album, on which The
Project's usual «coldness» — as always, provided mostly through Alan's velvet
keyboard sound — for the third time around, is a perfect conductor for the
moods/ideas these guys want to make you experience or ponder upon. They nail
it with the first doom-laden steps of 'What Goes Up...' and never really let
go.
And there is every possibility that even
tracks that are the easiest one to dismiss might come back to haunt you (on the
strength of Pyramid Power, no doubt!) — that keyboard theme from
'Hyper-Gamma-Spaces', for instance, no matter how dumb and repetitive it is, has
pretty much stuck with me for good, I believe; it is about as hard to shake
off as the riff for 'Satisfaction'. As for 'Pyromania', the «kiddie humour»
bit of the album, I really like it, not so much for alleviating the mood (The
Project work as soft, never as hard, depressants, so there is really not much
need for any artificial cloudbursting) as for stating so clearly and
explicitly that the album and the band have nothing to do with cheap pocketbook
mysticism, and are as happy as the next intelligent person to give it a proper
whipping. It's good, clean fun.
In short, if this is «poor man's progressive
rock» — and, from certain formal points of view, it might very well be —
consider stepping into a poor man's shoes for forty minutes, and join me in my
unequivocal thumbs
up.
EVE (1979)
1) Lucifer; 2) You Lie Down
With Dogs; 3) I'd Rather Be A Man; 4) You Won't Be There; 5) Winding Me Up; 6)
Damned If I Do; 7) Don't Hold Back; 8) Secret Garden; 9) If I Could Change Your
Mind.
Up until 1979, The Alan Parsons Project had not
only exercised a total ban on «love songs», but, in fact, the issue of
male/female relationship was almost conspicuously absent from their art as a
whole — so much so that it is highly likely that many must have been
questioning the nature of the relationship between Parsons and Woolfson
themselves. Of course, there is a formal
justification — that issue was not of central importance to their
concepts — but, after all, neither Edgar Allan Poe, nor Isaac Asimov, nor,
least of all, the Egyptian pharaohs were ever above «getting some», neither in
their writings nor in their actions.
Then, in 1979, they released Eve, and the people's worst fears came
to life. Song after song after song, Parsons and Woolfson push forward the idea
that «getting some» is an understandable temptation, but, in the long run,
it's simply not worth it. Look at the string of song titles from track 2 to
track 6: it may be the single longest-running, most expertly and intelligently
crafted assault on the female sex ever committed to vinyl. Move over, Bernie
Taupin, tell Mick Jagger the news. She lies down with dogs, she's winding me
up, she won't be there anyway, so I'd rather be a man, but damned if I do and
damned if I don't no matter what.
The concept was that long-awaited catalyst for critical
oxidation — most of the pen-holding brothers never loved The Project all that
much anyway, but at least the previous three albums, with their immaculate
execution, never provided them with a strong enough excuse to torpedo them
right to the bottom. And it did not help matters either that Eve was, unquestionably, the most
lightweight «pop» album from The Project so far. Individually, there are no
songs here that pander to tastes even simpler than those that demanded 'Don't
Let It Show' and 'One More River', but collectively, Eve is almost exclusively remembered for its catchy pop choruses
rather than dense arrangements or breathtakingly complex «progressive»
instrumentals.
So there is nothing really surprising in the
fact that Eve fell through the
cracks. It must have disgusted women, feminists, and liberal critics (and
conservative critics weren't listening to the band in the first place); it must
have betrayed the expectations of the dwindling, but still present, prog-rock
crowd; and at the same time, it was not that much of a sellout — because the
one thing that was definitely not on
the Project's mind when making the record was making it sell à la Styx
or Journey or the Bee Gees.
Too bad. Eve
is a pop album, for sure, but it is one of the best and, in this writer's
opinion, least dated pop albums of 1979. Yes, the points that most of the songs
make are certainly debatable, but, as with all kinds of art, it is not the substance
of the points that counts, but the coefficient of success with which they are
made. Your woman may not lie with dogs neither literally nor metaphorically,
but if 'You Lie With Dogs' manages to be Biblically-angry enough to convince
you — for that one particular moment! — that she does, then the song is a respectable piece of art. And Lenny
Zakatek sings it in quite a convincing manner, not to mention the trivial, but
unforgettable guitar riff that goes along with the singing.
Likewise, 'I'd Rather Be A Man', with its 'Run
Like Hell'ish echoey guitar, brims with misogynistic paranoia so much that
lead vocalist David Paton must have understood he was running certain career
risks there; 'You Won't Be There' is an excellent send-up of a typical BeeGees-style
Seventies ballad that ends up demeaning its object rather than glorifying it;
'Winding Me Up' subtly conceals its anger behind bouncy rhythms and
Vivaldi-colored interludes; and 'Damned If I Do' does a good job of conveying a
mesmerized lover's desperation. It all works, right down to the sleeve cover on
which two females of suspicious occupation are busy unsuccessfully covering
their herpes sores with stylish veils. Symbolism, what?
Nevertheless, it is sometimes forgotten that
women are given a fair chance to rebound on the album: in fact, Eve is the only record by The Project
that actually features female lead singers: Clare Torry of 'Great Gig In The
Sky' fame ('Don't Hold Back') and Lesley Duncan, an occasional hitmaker and
Elton John backup vocalist ('If I Could Change Your Mind'). The former gives
poor men an optimistic perspective on things, the latter sort of admits that,
whaddaya know, these cold heartless bitches have feelings, too. And, once
again, both make good points: 'Don't Hold Back' is catchy and uplifting, while
'If I Could Change Your Mind' is a fine example of a cheese-free Seventies
ballad that, in a reasonable and refined society, should and would have been a
much bigger hit than — oh, I dunno, 'More Than A Woman', for one thing.
Anyway, do not be misled by the inappropriate
application of political correctness and do not be afraid of liking this record
if it is its subject matter, not its music, that seems off-putting to you.
There are all kinds of women in the world, and some actually «lie down with
dogs» (want it or not, my spam inbox reminds me of the fact every few days),
and it doesn't sit well with some men — that's the kind of situation Parsons
and Woolfson are playing around with, but it doesn't mean they are forcing the
listener into making some absurdly generalizing misogynistic conclusions.
Proof? No true woman hater would have let his patented woman-hating album end
up with a song as gorgeous as Lesley Duncan's ballad, which, on its very own,
makes one forget all about the female transgressions so vividly depicted on
Side 1.
As for the watering-down of the progressive
style in which the band initially started out, well, I would say that mixing
«progressive» and «pop» is a very difficult art in itself, and whoever succeeds
in making the final results not come
across as overtly dumb and cheesy deserves recognition per that success alone.
Pink Floyd had set that standard on Dark
Side, and Parsons, as their #1 disciple, would be expected to follow suit.
I would say that on Eve, for the
first time ever, the band's instrumental compositions — 'Lucifer' and 'Secret
Garden' — while still immaculately arranged and produced, no longer show us
the band's true heart; they are intended more as a lure for old-school fans, an
obligatory tribute to tradition. But I don't think it's a problem at all.
Anyway, the intrigue, controversy, and
originality alone make Eve a
standout in Parsons' discography — and what's wrong with having a bunch of
good melodies finalize the picture? Ani DiFranco will, no doubt, want to rip
me to shreds for this, but a powerful thumbs up all the same.
THE TURN OF A FRIENDLY CARD (1980)
1) May Be A Price To Pay; 2)
Games People Play; 3) Time; 4) I Don't Wanna Go Home; 5) The Gold Bug; 6) The
Turn Of A Friendly Card (i. Part One; ii. Snake Eyes; iii. The Ace Of Swords;
iv. Nothing Left To Lose; v. Part Two).
The pooled brainpower of Parsons and Woolfson
is admirable. This follow-up to Eve,
skilfully crafted according to their continuously high standards, when
dissolved into simple separate components, is just as «pop» as its predecessor
— and yet, through subtle shifts of palette, a more distinct emphasis on
conceptuality, and a correctly calculated touch of musical feng shui, it restores the «art-rock» feel of the band's first
three albums that some fans had started missing on Eve.
The record is about gambling — look at the song
titles. But, of course, it is not literally
about gambling: we only take the art of gambling as a metaphorical pretext to
reflect on the concepts of chance, luck, risk, etc., and their role in and
effect on people's lives. Nothing way too deeply philosophical, but, just like
with Pink Floyd, it works because the simple, age-old truths of the lyrics are
well attenuated by new musical ideas.
«New», however, not in the sense that The
Project pay a lot of attention to trends — The
Turn sounded quite archaic in 1980 (one reason why it sounds surprisingly
modern today). Sometimes the musicians resort to specific «25th frame»-style techniques
— look, for instance, how surreptitiously 'May Be A Price To Pay' hops into a
sort of Saturday Night Fever-ish
dance groove for its instrumental break, then snaps back out as if it were only
a brief dream; or the small out-of-nowhere reggae bit after 'Nothing Left To
Lose' — but for the most part, this is the same classically or folk-oriented
balladry, and the same funkified pop they'd been doing for ages. None of
that New Wave shit for brainwashed kids.
Serious adult music for serious adult people.
For me, it works. First, it works as a concept.
These guys were born to lament the ills and misfortunes of humanity, and the
gambling disease, taken both literally and figuratively, is right up their
alley (besides, it's also a far safer topic for the critical eye than the
«woman disease» of Eve). There may
be only two basic moods explored — the ominous/angry/frustrated and the
melancholic/pitiful/desperate — but, after all, those are the two basic moods of gambling, and they are interspersed well
enough so that the record never feels monotonous.
Second, it works as individual songs. The hit
'Games People Play' is, composition-wise, probably one of the most trivial
tunes on the album, a simple keyboard pattern expanded into a simplistic dance
number whose main source of inspiration almost seems to have been ABBA's
'Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!' (classy smooth guitar breaks, though). However, the other hit, 'Time', is one of the best
Pink Floyd songs that Pink Floyd never wrote (probably because they already had
a 'Time' of their own, har har). There is no presumption of innocence for
pretentious artists that name one of their songs 'Time', letting us mortals
know that they have a better existentialist grasp on the issue of chronospace
than every one of us; and this is exactly why this combination of sweet
McCartney-like vocals, Harrison-like slide, and Parsons-only synth backdrops
works so much better than simply «well».
Among those who take great care to separate the
«intelligent» bits of The Project from the «sellout» bits, 'Time' has garnered
a fair amount of hatred — for its silly clichéd lyrics (indeed), and its
monotonous melody with no sense of development. Not everyone thinks that it was
a good choice to let Eric Woolfson, first time ever, step up to the mike,
either. I beg to disagree: 'Time' is no more a pop sellout than something like
Floyd's 'Us And Them' (whose verse melody it brings up very vividly in my
mind), and Woolfson has a sweet, sensitive, charming voice — which he also puts
to great use on 'Nothing Left To Lose' — that should have been used much
earlier. It may not be more complex in its melody than quite a few Styx or
Journey ballads that we are trained to despise, but the important thing is
that it assumes far less: nobody is ripping his shirt off and sticking his
sweaty, smelly heart right under your nosdrils. So to speak.
The entire second side is one big song... nah,
not really. It is four completely distinct songs (one of them in two parts),
joined together with brief interludes and, sometimes, instrumental reprisals.
But, hey, artistry on the rampage. 'Nothing Left To Lose' is the band's finest
exercise in the folk pop genre, a song that would be an unusually high-standard
attraction on a Barclay James Harvest album, perhaps, or, come to think of it,
on a Baby James Taylor one as well (although, the way I see it, spoiling the
spoils with cheesy Bee Geesy backup vocals was not a good thing). 'Snake Eyes', getting us back into angry mode,
has the most memorable guitar riff on the album. And the title track has us
witness more of Parsons' skill in brass arrangements, as its second part
gradually transforms from a medievalistic ballad into an all-out apocalyptic
romp (last time they did it so well was four years earlier, on 'Cask Of Amontillado').
The only thing that is somehow devoid of
interest are the instrumentals: 'The Gold Bug' is a decent sax-dominated
«fusion» romp that really just works as an interlude, and 'The Ace Of Swords' is, by all means, just an interlude,
fairly well lost in between the big guitar sound of 'Snake Eyes' and the folksy
prettiness of 'Nothing Left To Lose'. As with Eve, this is not a good sign: clearly, the band is investing most
of its powers into the vocal hooks, neglecting the harmony exploration that used
to be such an integral part of their sound. But all you have to do to stop
worrying is just accept that, ever since Pyramid,
maybe even since I Robot, The
Project had been an «adult pop» band — leaving only the more anally-obsessed
ones to argue about the exact prog-to-pop ratios of each of their albums. And Turn Of A Friendly Card, with all of
its songs ranging from tolerably decent to openly beautiful, is one of the best
«adult pop» albums ever recorded. Thumbs up.
EYE IN THE SKY (1982)
1) Sirius; 2) Eye In The Sky;
3) Children Of The Moon; 4) Gemini; 5) Silence And I; 6) You're Gonna Get Your
Fingers Burned; 7) Psychobabble; 8) Mammagamma; 9) Step By Step; 10) Old And
Wise.
This might probably be the most seductive album
ever recorded about Big Brother — and a clever one at that. We are well used
to imagining Orwellian worlds as chilly nightmares, but they were never really
intended to look like that. People don't like
nightmares. They do, however, like nice guys singing catchy melodies with warm,
silk overtones, and as Eric Woolfson steps up to the mike again and sings
"I am the eye in the sky, looking at you, I can read your mind", with
all the lulling cuteness he can muster, it might dawn on you that this might
not really be such a bad thing. Big
Brother — he is, after all, your brother,
supposed to care about you. What's so awful about having your mind read by
somebody who cares?
If there is an «angle» to Eye In The Sky, The Project's most blatantly pop-oriented album so
far and, coincidentally, their hugest commercial success, it is hiding
somewhere in that kind of logic. Smooth-sounding, nerve-calming,
spirit-lowering pop album on anti-Utopian subjects; quite a bizarre
contradiction. 'Eye In The Sky' is really the kind of rhythmic ballad for which
you'd expect a generic love lyric — and it would still be a finely written
piece at that, but it is the jarring contrast between the words and the music
that generates pizzazz, and it works.
The band's «progressive» attractions, this time
around, are strictly limited to one track, seven minutes of the multi-part
'Silence And I', with an out-of-nowhere jiggy instrumental section disrupting
the melancholy wails of the first and last parts; but even here, a few whacky
melodic changes in the middle and the overall length are about the only «prog»
aspects of it. The instrumentals, in the meantime, have totally lost their
significance: 'Sirius' is but a mere chunk of atmospheric intro (and has,
moreover, been since then appropriated by the mainstream as the theme for
sports talk shows — «progressive» my ass), and 'Mammagamma'... well, Parsons
had to try out his brand new Fairlight CMI computer, so he programmed some
disco rhythms on it, added echoey synth guitar in The Wall-style, and, for some reason, smelled art in it. The basic
groove is actually cool, but overall, it is the band's most throwaway-ish
instrumental up to that point.
Throughout, the album mostly relies on the
strength of modest soft-rockers — 'Psychobabble', 'You're Gonna Get Your
Fingers Burned', and 'Step By Step' all groove by without a lot of staying
power, but neither do they annoy; only 'Children Of The Moon', with Parsons'
favorite trick, the martial brass arrangement, packs a bit more ambition than
the rest.
Arguably the most surprising development will
be seen on 'Gemini', a serious exercise in dreamy vocal harmony arrangement,
led by Chris Rainbow and most closely reminiscent of the Beach Boys' late
Sixties work. The Project were always suckers for a good vocal, but never
before did they pay such detailed attention to the voices — and it can hardly
be said they did this out of any sort of commercial drive, either. Come to
think of it, Eye In The Sky, for an
album that came out in 1982, is about as much commercially oriented as it would
be were it to come out today, in an
era when straight, well-written, melodic, and relatively humble pop music has
no chance of selling. Nor did it have a lot of chances in 1982.
But in 1982, somehow, it sold. You know why it
sold? Because 'Eye In The Sky' — the song — is really a great song. With New
Wave, dance-pop, and heavy metal ruling the charts, it would never have sold if it weren't really a
great song. Not sure if people actually listened to the lyrics (maybe if they
did, they would have recoiled in horror), but the music alone is hypnotizing
enough; in a different world, I'm sure Parsons would be well off making a
living as the court composer for The Inner Party. Thumbs up, or we'll all end up in
Room 101.
AMMONIA AVENUE (1984)
1) Prime Time; 2) Let Me Go
Home; 3) One Good Reason; 4) Since The Last Goodbye; 5) Don't Answer Me; 6)
Dancing On A Highwire; 7) You Don't Believe; 8) Pipeline; 9) Ammonia Avenue.
I honestly did not quite grasp whatever
particular social topic Parsons and Woolfson sank their teeth into this time
around. Something about a communication breakdown between scientists, industrialists,
and laymen — one more serious tragedy of humanity filtered through the
Cassandra eye of The Project. Who cares, we're all gonna die anyway.
Ultimately, what matters is that this is just another nice little collection of
adult pop songs.
It is safe to say that, with Eye In The Sky out on the market, any
discussions on the ratio of prog-to-pop on Alan Parsons albums had lost
whatever relevance they once might have had. The biting question has now
totally shifted to the ratio of bad, cheesy, conventional pop where all that
matters is a big, steady beat and a sci-fi attitude represented by the «two
fingers on a Casio» principle vs. pop as a combination of intelligent craft and
genuine feeling.
As far as I know, even those who loathe Parsons
can rarely deny the craft; and as for genuine feeling — what else but genuine
feeling could be responsible for choosing 'Don't Answer Me' as the lead single,
a song that slavishly imitated, of all things, the classic Phil Spector
wall-of-sound style of the early Sixties, additionally empowered only with Mel
Collins' sax solo (which, in turn, recalls Phil's work in the Seventies, e. g.
with John Lennon)? That a song like that, so drastically out of sync with what
was hip in 1984, could have nevertheless gone on to become a big commercial
hit, is nothing short of amazing, and, in my opinion, can qualify as one of pop
music buyers' finest decisions of the year; one of very few «tribute songs»
worthy of occupying the same rank as those creations to which it is paying
tribute.
Elsewhere, of course, the sounds are far more
«modern», but still very rarely stray away from the typical Parsons formula.
Steady beats, smooth keyboards, pretty catchy singing, and the expected pinch
of melancholia. Not everything works — Lenny Zakatek's pathos on 'You Don't
Believe', another in a series of 'Run Like Hell'-style echo-rock concoctions,
and a relatively weak one, is somewhat over the top, and so is Chris Rainbow's sappiness
on 'Since The Last Goodbye' (which is nevertheless a damn finely written
folk-pop ballad). But never say no to 'Prime Time', with one of the most
elegant pop melodies these guys ever had the luck to give us, or to the
Bluntstone-led 'Dancing On A Highwire', or to the title track, which summarizes
the album on a mournful note very much akin to the one we heard on 'Turn Of A
Friendly Card' three years back.
It is hard for me to find instructive things to
say about Ammonia Avenue, and this
might mean that, by 1984, The Project finally hit stagnation; this is the
band's first album on which they did not really manage to find any new twists
(discounting the bizarre, delightful Spector tribute). But if they were no
longer able to change the face of music, they could at least slap on a few
extra beauty marks. Ammonia Avenue
is a record to be quietly enjoyed, not wildly revered or deeply analyzed. Its
role within the «Big Seven» of The Project's uninterrupted run of artistic
successes is graceful, small, and friendly. "Hanging on in quiet
desperation is the English way" — remember that one? Roger Waters pretty
much predicted all of this band's career. Thumbs up.
VULTURE CULTURE (1985)
1) Let's Talk About Me; 2)
Separate Lives; 3) Days Are Numbers; 4) Sooner Or Later; 5) Vulture Culture; 6)
Hawkeye; 7) Somebody Out There; 8) The Same Old Sun.
This hurried follow-up to Ammonia Avenue (it is rumoured the two were originally intended to
form a double album) may be way too
pop for even undemanding listeners. Now that no significantly new ideas were
being contributed, the best they could do was to simply keep the Eye In The Sky formula afloat — but the
Eighties were happening, and, sooner or later, the decade of electronic
brimstone would have caught up with them anyway. Vulture Culture makes a point of railing against soulless
commercialism, all the while being steeped in it. Today, we may say that this
is exactly the way it was meant to be, yet it does not make the effort any
least dated.
Of course, the Project had so much talent
pooled that the results are crudely goofy rather than blandly atrocious.
Something like 'Hawkeye' is probably awful from God's point of view, but if I
describe it to him as «a Depeche Mode style take on Ukrainian Hopak», he might
at least consider the possibility that freedom of choice does exist, because how could the Almighty ever sanction the
production of 'Hawkeye'? That be sheer devil muzak!
Drum machines and crude tape loops spoil many a
creative idea on this album, marrying Woolfson's gorgeous vocals to routine
synth-pop like 'Separate Lives', and adding an aura of dorkiness to the usually
cool performance of Lenny Zakatek on the title track (which is still as catchy
as a dorky pop tune could ever hope to be: «Vulture culture, use it or you lose
it...»). It is also hard to understand why they choose to emulate Supertramp on
'Let's Talk About Me' — who ordered Breakfast
In America with its plaintive vocals and one-finger-on-the-piano melodies?
It's not a bad emulation, but didn't these guys used to have, like, a vision?... all their own?...
The sap also flows a bit too freely on
paradise-style ballads such as 'Days Are Numbers' and 'Same Old Sun', although
denying the sincerity of Woolfson's romantic outbursts or the hard composing
work that underlies them would be rude. One song only, as far as I can tell,
approaches the highest standards of the pop benchmark: 'Sooner Or Later', which
is technically this album's 'Eye In The Sky / Prime Time', i. e. a
metronomically organized pop-rocker with a falsetto chorus from Eric, but
melodically even more seductive than its predecessors — the vocal moves borrow
from Jeff Lynne's style, which in turn borrowed from the Beatles, and I keep
arguing with myself over whether it is the verse melody («Oh what a price we
pay...») or the chorus («Sooner or later I'll be free...») that is the more
touching. Guitar friend Ian Bairnson rises to the challenge, too, offering an
economic, perfectly constructed pop solo.
It is easy to see how Vulture Culture is usually taken for the scapegoat in the band's catalog — their poppiest, their worst
arranged, their runningest-out-of-fresh-ideas, so to say. The mid-Eighties
were no walk in the park for most people. Still, it would only be a thumbs down
by Parsons' own standards, and even then, I do not advise those who like the
man's musical mindset to skip it or anything. Just keep in mind that the plank
has been lowered.
STEREOTOMY (1985)
1) Stereotomy; 2) Beaujolais;
3) Urbania; 4) Limelight; 5) In The Real World; 6) Where's The Walrus; 7) Light
Of The World; 8) Chinese Whispers; 9) Stereotomy Two.
Perhaps, after all, it was the continuing
neglect towards the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe — the man responsible for the
very existence of The Alan Parsons Project — that underlied the Project's slowly
ongoing decay? Just in case, it would make sense to invoke the great spirit one
more time, at least briefly, by calling the album after a rarely-heard
construction term that one usually learns only from carefully reading Murders In The Rue Morgue.
'Stereotomy' is basically the art of taking
big blocks and cutting them in differently shaped small ones; here it refers to
the art of taking talented people and shaping them in various ways to please
the shape master. Or perhaps not. If you really want it, you can read
'Stereotomy' (the title track) as a thinly masked invitation for a BDSM
session: "Silent knives dissect me and I feel no pain... Stereotomy, we
can make it together, do anything you want with me". Woolfson's lyrics
were never all that inspiring, really — it used to be interesting to hear his
poetic interpretations of Poe's prose, but he never truly capitalized on these
early achievements.
The important thing is that Stereotomy is clearly a conscious
attempt to recapture some of the complexity that had been sacrificed for the
sakes of 'Eye In The Sky', 'Prime Time', and 'Hawkeye'. An album gloomier,
denser, and heavier than at least the last three of their records — so much so
that, first time in years, Woolfson even steps away from the mike to avoid the
temptation of falling back on McCartneyisms. A pity, that: I loved his McCartneyisms, certainly much
more so than any given «serious» piece of vocals from, say, Lenny Zakatek.
Ironically, it does not work. By late 1985, it
was obviously too late for these guys to believe that they could still produce
«pure» art-rock masterpieces without leaning too far over to the pop side. One
major reason is instrumentation: no matter how anti-commercial they are trying
to get, Stereotomy fully relies
on generic techniques of the day — stiff electronic keyboards and polished,
glossy «heavy» guitar riffs learned from arena-rock masters. As a result,
overall, the sound is very, very dull, even
for the standards of The Alan Parsons Project, a band very well known for being
commonly hated for the general
dullness of its sound.
There are some songs here that have no reason
to be heard from Parsons and Woolfson. 'In The Real World', for instance,
rather belongs on a bad Foreigner record; give me Woolfson's simplistic, but
lovable and unpretentious pop melodicity over this fat, ugly stadium sound any
day. For 'Limelight', they come up with a first, recruiting Procol Harum's Gary
Brooker to sing lead vocals — and the number sounds, yes indeed, like a weak
outtake from a solo Gary Brooker record, a typically soulful delivery set to
some of the laziest, languid-est keyboard chuck-chucks ever heard. Chris
Rainbow is wasted on 'Beaujolais', a synth-popper whose main claim to fame is a
careful, intricate arrangement of vocal harmonies on the chorus. The other
claim is probably just that it sounds like one of the silliest numbers in
Alan's entire catalog.
Still they plow on, making the title track run
well over seven minutes and returning to the practice of producing artsy
instrumentals — including the bombastic synthfest 'Where's The Walrus?', which
even managed to earn a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental (I think it
lost). The title may be a sly reference to Magical Mystery Tour, but the main theme of the track sounds uncannily
like a potential soundtrack theme to some third-rate detective soap or computer
game — again, primarily due to the unfortunate choices of arrangement. For all
his studio craft, Parsons is not a super-cool master of electronica: he still
represents the «old» school of music-making, and thus, falls in the same trap
as so many of his colleagues who somehow thought that continuing to make music
in the old way with their new digital toys, all those Fairlight CMIs, would
result in a successfully modernized version of the classical spirit. From that
angle, Stereotomy is even more
pitiful than Vulture Culture
(although, granted, both still exercise far more restraint and intelligence
than something like Jethro Tull's Under
Wraps). A transparent and unfortunate thumbs down here — not even a single song I could
wholeheartedly recommend.
GAUDI (1987)
1) La Sagrada Familia; 2) Too
Late; 3) Closer To Heaven; 4) Standing On Higher Ground; 5) Money Talks; 6)
Inside Looking Out; 7) Paseo De Gracia.
If you ever saw the coral reef-style oddity
that is the Temple de La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, you'd probably want to
make a concept album about it, too. Eric Woolfson went as far as to eventually
remake the album into a musical — as close as an artist ever got to realizing
Frank Zappa's sarcastic idea of dancing about architecture — and, at the very
least, got some people to check out information on Antonio Gaudi, Barcelona,
and weirdass architecture in general.
It is a whole different question of whether the
music on here is more stimulating than the intellectual baggage. Gaudi essentially continues in the same
direction as Stereotomy: heavily
depending on by-the-book Eighties' sonic technologies, but also very strictly
safeguarding the stability of the «artsiness» quotient. The title track is a
bombastic, quasi-religious, suite-like structure; the lonesome instrumental at
the end conceptually reprises the theme of the title track; and in between...
well, here is the problem: in between, it's the same old adult contemporary.
Still, it works better than Stereotomy. 'La Sagrada Familia', not
so much about the cathedral or its creator as it is about hope and faith, has John
Miles adopt a Gary Brooker singing style, so that some of the passages sound
suspiciously similar to 'Limelight' off the previous album, or to late period
Procol Harum/solo Brooker records — bombastic and somewhat rigid prayers that
do not overwhelm but do not annoy, either, because the singer is kinda
likeable, not the kind of guy you'd expect to dedicate one song to angels high
in heaven and then the next song to unsophisticated carnal delight, without
making any serious distinction between the two. And Parsons' brass arrangements
are always welcome: it is one of the few areas in which he has never failed, going just as strong as he
used to ten years before.
Woolfson is back on vocals, gracing the
somewhat too generically «angelic» 'Closer To Heaven' (I understand that the
closer you get to heaven, the louder it gets, but the important question is:
how much of a discount does St. Peter get on the SDS5 kit?) and 'Inside Looking
Out', a complex, inspired prayer with some of the most gorgeous vocal moves on
a Project record; it would have been an unquestionable highlight on any of the
classic-period albums, but on Gaudi
it remains mostly unnoticed.
Oddly, these intense, seriously emotional,
prayer-like compositions are interspersed with rather crude synth-pop and
Eighties-pop-rock slabs that provide diversity, but not necessarily quality.
'Money Talks', for instance, is a straightforward protest song whose message is
more or less the same as the message of any other
song with the word 'Money' in it, but this particular angry atmosphere seems
to have been transposed directly from the Pink Floyd song (apparently, Alan's
memories of 1973 had not ceased to haunt him yet), and since it is obviously
futile to try and write a 'Money'-style song that would expand on the original
'Money', John Miles' effort predictably falls flat. 'Standing On Higher
Ground' is too much routed in Norwegian synth-pop to qualify as a success (the
chorus is memorable, though). And
'Too Late' is too much routed in... I don't know, Bryan Adams? Foreigner? Does
anyone still like that ugly clucking
keyboard sound that had all but replaced electric rhythm guitar back then?
Urgh.
The bottomline is: Gaudi is clearly much more inspired and focused than its two
predecessors, and, in a better world, would have easily returned the Project to
the forefront of the conceptual art world, but ever since technology killed the
cat, the Project was way too heavily tainted by the mysteriously ugly world of
dancing electrons to be able to make a proper comeback. Of course, in 1987 Gaudi may have still looked like
art-rock's cutting edge, but today, its good intentions are embarrassingly
dated. Yet I still give it a thumbs up, if only for the rekindled flames, that
are at least responsible for the stunning fanfares of 'Sagrada Familia' and the
beautiful vocals of 'Inside Looking Out'. Remember, next time you're at the
end of your rope, just take a trip to Barcelona — and there's much more to the
city than just the Familia.
TRY ANYTHING ONCE (1993)
1) The Three Of Me; 2) Turn It
Up; 3) Wine From The Water; 4) Breakaway; 5) Mr. Time; 6) Jigue; 7) I'm Talkin'
To You; 8) Siren Song; 9) Dreamscape; 10) Back Against The Wall; 11) Re-Jigue;
12) Oh Life (There Must Be More).
The Alan Parsons Project, in its classic form
of Parsons/Woolfson cooperation, ground to a halt through the creative duo's
personal disagreements over Freudiana,
their next conceptual installment that Woolfson decided, of all things, to
turn into a musical. For Parsons, who had been secretly lamenting the pop
drift of their music ever since Eye In
The Sky, this was a bit too much — there are people for whom the very sound
of the word «musical» is an insult to taste — and eventually, it was decided
that their artistic philosophies had drifted way too far apart, so it would be
more productive to split. Woolfson went on to make musicals, from Freudiana to a reworking of Gaudi and other stuff; and Parsons set
out to refresh and recapture the original Idea that brought the Project into
existence in the first place.
Woolfson's solo career will be tackled in its
own time and space; for now, let us see whether, shorn of its opening article
and closing technical Latin borrowing, those «Alan Parsons» records are in any
way deserving of a good reputation.
Already the credits list shows Alan's biggest
limitations, and why he had to go along with Woolfson in the first place. He
has always been a great arranger, engineer, and producer, and he could even
envisage and materialize a serious, classically- or folksy-influenced
instrumental composition. But to write an art-pop song, with verses and
choruses and lyrics, that must have been a harder task. Without Woolfson
around, he mainly sticks to instrumentals; for songs, his new primary partner
is Ian Bairnson, the Project's trusty guitarist and, overall, the third
important person responsible for the APP's classic sound.
The results are mixed, but ultimately
satisfying. Like most of the Project's albums, this one's not for the younger
people; too frequently the sound borders on «intelligent adult contemporary»,
and keyboards, strings, and ominous pretense win over guitars, good vocals, and
complex experimentation. But with so many different people around to
contribute ideas, this is at least better than post-Waters Pink Floyd (the most
obvious comparison, starting with the regular Hipgnosis album cover and ending
with the overall depressed atmosphere).
Ironically, no matter how much Alan would like
to distance himself from the stark pop overtones of The Project's last period,
most of the tunes still end up catchy (if not necessarily «bouncy»), with
sing-along choruses (if not necessarily commercially calculated ones) and,
occasionally, rather pedestrian melodies (if not necessarily «dumb»): Bairnson
must have tried his best, but he is still no match for Woolfson's melodic gift.
Later on, Parsons simply claimed that the album was still influenced by Arista
executives, as usual, undermining his artistic drive. (Thank God we always have
the bad guys around, or how else would we
look like good guys?).
But on the other hand, from the opening notes
there is no denying that the «Parsons style» has not been seriously tampered
with. 'The Three Of Me' unfurls with a solemn instrumental introduction that
has it all: thunderous power chords, pulsating electronic beats, classical
piano playing, even unexpected psycho-Eastern string arrangements for a brief
moment. The more you listen to it, the stronger Try Anything Once deserves its title: new musical ideas are being
introduced constantly, and this time, it doesn't even look like Alan bothered
to come up with the usual light conceptual wrapper. It's all about trying.
Almost perversely, the best song on the album
originally had nothing to do with Parsons. 'Mr. Time' was written around 1990
by the short-lived, little-known band The Dreamfield, fronted by Jacqui
Copland, whose credentials consisted of little other than having served as
backing vocalist for Duran Duran. Having somehow crossed paths with the band, Parsons
got interested in the song and invited Copland to sing it on his own album; a
terrific decision — not only does it fit in brilliantly with the overall morose
melancholy, it's just an excellent art-pop song. No new insights — there's only
so much you can wiggle out of the concept of Time — but a suitably creepy arrangement
for Jacqui's suitably creepy, light-Gothic delivery. (The rowdy ones in the
audience may want to dismiss it for sounding too close to post-Waters Floyd,
but if at least half of Momentary Lapse
Of Reason sounded like this, I would have enjoyed that record much more.
Come to think of it, close to a half of it does
sound like this, and as the years go by, I find myself more attracted to that
solo Gilmour vibe than I ever believed I could be. "Mr. Time has come for
you" indeed).
Other than that, we get more of those goofy
Parsons instrumentals that feature simplistic melodic hooks dressed in complex,
multi-layered arrangements ('Breakaway' has a silly, annoyingly unforgettable
kiddie sax melody surrounded by a virtual swarm of accompanying sonic effects;
'Jigue' sounds like a combination of Clannad, Pink Floyd, and Depeche Mode;
'Dreamscape' is basically just a lush semi-ambient Bairnson guitar solo). We
get Manfred Mann's Chris Thompson contributing world-weary vocals on Bairnson's
suicidal composition 'Back Against The Wall'; we get 10cc's Eric Stewart
singing a very 10cc-ish pop-rocker ('Wine From The Water') that is still
catchier than most of the stuff 10cc wrote after 1977; and, of course, nothing
works without a grande finale — 'Oh Life', delivered by Ambrosia's David Pack,
tries a bit too hard in the pathos department (you can almost feel the fake
tears soaking through your speakers), but the power chorus, during which the
vocals become less weepy and more hymn-oriented, still manages to be engaging
and convincing — Harry Nilsson used to succeed with these kinds of things, so,
after all, why can't Alan Parsons?
Since the album never got any heavy promotion
(its lead single was 'Turn It Up', a weak adult contemporary number that is not
at all indicative of the record), and since individually released albums formed
from the disintegration of creative duos tend to be frowned upon, Try Anything Once never got the
recognition I believe it deserves; it is certainly a more essential page in
Alan's history than any of the Project's post-Ammonia Avenue albums, and a certified grower if one agrees to
look past the few flaws. After all, Woolfson's contributions to the Project's
sound had not been unanimously wonderful — he could be as gorgeous in his pop
sensitivity department as he could be trite, and in that respect Try Anything Once does not change a
thing: Bairnson can be trite ('Turn It Up') just as fine as he can be exquisite
('Siren Song'). Thumbs
up.
ON AIR (1996)
1) Blue Blue Sky; 2) Too Close
To The Sun; 3) Blown By The Wind; 4) Cloudbreak; 5) I Can't Look Down; 6) Brother
Up In Heaven; 7) Fall Free; 8) Apollo; 9) So Far Away; 10) One Day To Fly; 11)
Blue Blue Sky.
Parsons' second solo album, or, to be precise,
the second album by The Ian Bairnson Project (Alan is credited as co-writer
only on the two instrumentals, as well as 'Fall Free' and 'Too Close To The
Sun'), finds the team independent of major labels (their Arista contract
expired with Try Anything Once),
free to pursue their artistic inspirations full-time, but, alas, somewhat
dulled down and disfocused as time goes by and senses wither.
On the formal side, On Air is Parsons' first major
conceptual release since at least Eye In
The Sky. All of the songs explore the concept of flying, in one form or
another — just look at the titles — and, in theory, this should work well,
since Parsons' sonic landscapes have always been a bit, uh, «airy»; all the way
from Icarus to balloons to parachutes to jet planes to space rockets, surely
Alan can, and should, be your man to give all of them a perfect musical
reflection.
That's just on paper, though. The reality is
such that all the songs were written
by Bairnson, and their pedestrian nature shines through more and more with each
new record. Test case: 'Brother Up In Heaven', a song that must have been
written with the best of motives — to commemorate the tragic death of Ian's
cousin in Iraq — but ends up sounding like a bunch of soft-rock clichés,
more fitting for some radio-fodderish «rootsy-artsy» Seventies' American band
than an act with such a respectable «intellectual pedigree» as the APP.
Vocalist Neil Lockwood adds even more fuel to the fire with his forced,
theatrical pathos; a more restrained performance might have saved the song, but
as it is, I just keep getting visions of onion bulbs attached to the mike.
Most of the melodies aren't completely
hopeless, and all of them get the classy Parsons treatment, but there are simply
no «clinchers» here — no sharp standout tracks like 'Mr. Time' or 'Oh Life'
that not only become minor classics on their own, but also spread their strong
aura on the rest of the album. The angry numbers ('I Can't Look Down') do not
muster enough aggression, the sad gloomy ones ('Too Close To The Sun') do not
accumulate enough despair, the tender pretty ones ('So Far Away') do not
radiate enough beauty. To make matters worse, the folksy 'Blue Blue Sky' that
both opens and closes the record is a poor choice for a theme — folk guitar
ballads are not Parsons territory at all,
and, as decent as the main melody is per se, it kills off Alan's age-old
trademarks: the atmospheric start and the grande finale. Why should a Parsons
album invite comparisons with James Taylor in the first place? I have no idea.
It might have been better if 'Blown By The
Wind' had been the coda, since it is the biggest and grandest of all the songs
on here, and arguably Bairnson's hardest try to match either the classic APP,
or the late period Pink Floyd sound. Again, no great twists in the melody,
which cuddles way too close to a generic power ballad for comfort, but they
provide a solid Floydian guitar backing, Ian adds exquisite solos (he has
always been a much better guitarist than songwriter, as far as I'm concerned),
and Eric Stewart's gentle melancholic delivery stops exactly one inch away from
the line that separates «romantic» from «pathetic» (unlike that Lockwood
person) — in all honesty, he should have stolen that song for a 10cc reunion.
The instrumentals ('Cloudbreak', 'Apollo') are
not at all catchy, but suitably atmospheric, and it is only while listening to
them that I sort of «get» the idea of why Parsons considered On Air an artistically free release —
most probably, no more silly record executives were putting pressure on him to
make his instrumental music hummable. After all, the sax melody of 'Breakaway',
three years before, was no less stupid and cheesy than the synth-folk dance
rhythms of 'Hawkeye' ten years before. 'Cloudbreak' gives you the true Alan
Parsons, a little out of breath, a little tattered, but still striving to
explore new sounds — for once. Then Bairnson takes over again, and runs the
good intentions into the ground.
No bad words whatsoever on the mixing,
engineering, production, playing, singing (from a technical point), or the
fine-looking balloon on the album cover. No denying that it is a thoroughly
«Alan Parsons» album in spirit and form. Now if only the songs weren't mostly
bland and boring, we could all celebrate. As it is, here is one more example of
how somebody can have a great feel for solo guitar melody — and heroically suck
at the art of simple songwriting. (Eric Clapton is, of course, the prime
example here, with but a handful of occasional exceptions, but you all saw that
one coming).
THE TIME MACHINE (1999)
1) The Time Machine (part 1);
2) Temporalia; 3) Out Of The Blue; 4) Call Up; 5) Ignorance Is Bliss; 6) Rubber
Universe; 7) The Call Of The Wild; 8) No Future In The Past; 9) Press Rewind;
10) The Very Last Time; 11) Far Ago And Long Away; 12) The Time Machine (part
2).
This just might be the single least
having-to-do-with-the-artist album by (nominally) a solo artist ever released.
Parsons' only songwriting credit here must have been an intentional joke, or a
trick to get him at least some
royalties: 'Temporalia' is fifty seven-seconds of quiet background choral
harmonies over which particle physics expert Frank Close is talking about how
space itself functions as a time machine. For some reason, Prof. Close is
given no credits, though.
Other than that, The Time Machine is simply more of the Ian Bairnson Project, with
Ian occasionally relegating songwriting duties on percussionist Steve
Elliott. It is not hopeless, and has its own moody charms, but it shares all
the flaws of On Air and adds one
more: Bairnson, Elliott, and Parsons (who still engineers and produces as good
as he can) start toying with the world of techno, which is completely alien to
the classic spirit of APP. The title track is a cheesy disaster. 'Blue Blue
Sky' might have been a disappointing, badly uncommon start to a Parsons album,
but 'The Time Machine' is just stupid. They should have slowed it down, set it
to a normal beat, and put more thought into the layers of instrumentation. What
were they trying to do — come up with a super hot club hit for the young ones?
The conceptual framework here is as sturdy as
the one that framed On Air — and
just as simple, or, perhaps, simplistic: Woolfson's concepts always deviated
much further from the main theme, but that was an essential part of their
charm, and occasional depth. With The
Time Machine, we learn various truisms about the past, present, and future.
The past, you might be surprised to learn, is riddled with mistakes ('No Future
In The Past'), but it used to be much cooler than today anyway ('Ignorance Is
Bliss'), so it would be nice to have all the greats come round and help us see
the light ('Call Up'; I like how they namedrop Jesus and Darwin in the same song
— aren't matter and antimatter supposed to cancel out each other?) so we could
all live for a better and brighter future ('Call Of The Wild'), etc. etc.
Still, once you weed out the silly techno
elements (and they never really go beyond the title track — it took Parsons
five more years to embarrass himself without any hope of deliverance), the
songs mostly range from tolerable to pretty. For one thing, the band does good
to bring in girl power. Clannad's Máire Brennan is always a joy to
experience when she is not prostituted over cheap faux-Celtic synth-pop, and
'The Call Of The Wild' is but an art-pop rearrangement of a traditional Irish
ballad that puts her skills to great use. Beverley Craven is said to be «Kate
Bush lite» for those unprepared to assimilate the real thing; I have not heard any
of her records, but Bairnson's 'The Very Last Time' is a nice enough piano
ballad that fits the definition to a tee — this is something that Kate could
have easily written at the tender age of, say, twelve years.
For another thing, Elliott's 'Press Rewind',
sung by unknown vocalist Graham Dye of unknown band Scarlet Party, is a damn
good Brit-pop song — if you like, uh, Oasis, you'll probably like this as well,
even without the fat distorted guitars. So is Bairnson's 'Out Of The Blue',
riding one of those immediately recognizable Project guitar lines and sung by
the lead vocalist of Spandau Ballet, which begs the question — how come Parsons
didn't start using the vocal magic of New Romantics back in the days when those
guys were still New?
But in general, of course, The Time Machine is nothing to write home about, not even from a
time machine, provided you were gullible enough to bring it along for the
soundtrack. It tries to be truer to the spirit of the Project, with more echo,
somber chords, and mystical pretense than we last heard On Air, yet the triteness of the concept, the mediocrity of the
songwriting, and the failure to come up with respectable instrumentals makes
it another missed opportunity. Perhaps they should have just called it a day
and all joined Clannad instead.
A VALID PATH (2004)
1) Return To Tunguska; 2) More
Lost Without You; 3) Mammagamma 04; 4) We Play The Game; 5) Tijuaniac; 6) L'Arc
En Ciel; 7) A Recurring Dream Within A Dream; 8) You Can Run; 9) Chomolungma.
Part of me wishes there had been a proper
question mark at the end of that title, because I am not at all sure of the
actual validity of this path. Of course, there is nothing particularly good
about stagnation, and in theory it is commendable that, at the age of 56 and
almost thirty years into his artistic career, Alan has undertaken the starkest
revisions to the basic conception of his sound since... well, ever. His entire old team — Bairnson,
Elliott, Blunstone, etc. — is gone, replaced by a host of younger generation
representatives, mostly various electronic artists working in similar, but
different genres. He co-writes, once again, all
the songs, some of them with his son Jeremy. Good news, right?
Both yes and no. There is always a mixed
reaction when the old start taking lessons from the young. It certainly
indicates humility and open-mindedness, but it does not always make for great
art. Case in point: the two completely unnecessary and, in part, offensive
remakes of past successes. 'Mammagamma '04' is a techno/trance avatar of the
track from Eye In The Sky, which was
never one of the Project's better instrumentals in the first place — way too
relying on one single gimmick throughout — and now it makes for half-decent
club fodder, but at the expense of having the last vestiges of «art»
surgically removed from it. 'A Recurring Dream' is, in fact, an electronic
remix / recreation of 'The Raven' that, at best, functions as a curious modern
age deconstruction of the original, at worst, just makes one laugh out loud,
especially when the synthesized vocals start rolling in. What's the point —
other than showing how hip you are to all the new technological breakthroughs?
It is certainly a treat for old fans to see
Parsons make such a bold move away from the basic pop of his last ten or so
records: there are but two or three pure pop songs on the album altogether,
stuck as short breathers in between the lengthy instrumental numbers, and the
instrumental numbers (the ones that are not 'Mammagamma', of course) are true
art-rock compositions with plenty of complexity and development. But are the
employed electronic devices and textures really an asset here, or an
obstruction?
Personally, I do not get the feeling that this
forced breeding of Parsons' idealistic mystique and his new electronic
partners' dryer, sci-fi-er approach is all that good. Apples to apples, oranges
to oranges. The man brings in old friend Dave Gilmour to solo extensively on
the opening 'Return To Tunguska', but the chugging synths and robotic
percussion detract from his contributions rather than happily complement them.
Most of the time I catch myself thinking, «wow, nice moody bit from Alan, the
good old kind», or «hmm, I wonder if I'd be interested in checking out those
electronic guys' own records... nah,
never mind, it's not like I've got nothing better to do». But very rarely, if
ever, at the same time.
Of the vocal numbers, 'More Lost Without You'
is the more memorable one, sounding suspiciously like some corny old
Manfred Mann folk-pop thing stuck in a time warp only to reemerge in this
modernized P. J. Olsson-sung setting. (Predictably, it was the only song to be
sung live on the accompanying tour — the rest just wouldn't fit in at all with the classic hits). Parsons
does sing lead vocals himself — first time ever! — on 'We Play The Game',
displaying a voice that is alarmingly close to Woolfson's but not making much
of an impact since the song sucks anyway.
Were I to review this years ago, I'd probably
just pour sincere shit over all these tracks, singling out 'Mammagamma '04' as
the single stinkiest crapfest Parsons ever had me subjected to, and be done
with it. Today, I am almost ready to
accept this as a bold and honest artistic move. But, to tell the truth, as of
2004, or as of 2010 when I am writing this, I don't want any bold and artistic moves in this corner of the art-rock
market. I wouldn't mind getting another Alan Parsons Project album,
particularly since Alan Parsons is still around and kicking (alas, not Eric
Woolfson, who died of cancer in 2009). I don't even mind young electronica guys
coming in the studio and lending a hand, provided they're qualified. But nobody fucks with the Raven — understood?
Thumbs down,
and that's final.
EYE 2 EYE: LIVE IN MADRID (2010)
1) I Robot; 2) Can't Take It
With You; 3) Don't Answer Me; 4) Breakdown/The Raven; 5)
Time; 6) Psychobabble;
7) I Wouldn't Want To Be Like You; 8) Damned If I Do; 9) More
Lost Without You; 10) Don't Let It Show; 11) Prime Time; 12) Sirius/Eye In The Sky;
13) (The System Of) Dr.
Tarr & Professor Feather; 14) Games People Play.
The Alan Parsons Project, in all of its existence,
never went on the road. That's why it was a «Project», after all, not a
«Band»: a thoroughly studio-based creation. Certainly, once they started out,
it was no longer the Sgt. Pepper
era, and they could have easily replicated most of their stuff onstage had they
wanted to; but they didn't want to. The music was sort of supposed to come without
the faces — and besides, neither Parsons nor Woolfson looked anything like rock
stars.
I am not sure exactly what happened in the
early 2000s to make Alan suddenly yearn for a shift in policy. Probably not
money matters — not being a huge spender, he must have made enough to last him
long enough — perhaps it just went along with the desire to try out all these
new things that we heard on A Valid Path.
However, if Path announced a radical
departure from many of the former trademarks of the Project, the accompanying
tour did nothing of the kind.
Instead, it simply promises — and delivers —
manna from heaven for all the veteran fans of the Project. With his newly assembled
band («The Alan Parsons Live Project» — with Woolfson's permission), in which
he is the only representative of the old guard, Parsons constructed a program
that touched upon most of the classic hits of the Project, pretty much
disregarding his solo career (on Eye 2
Eye, the only new song is 'More Lost Without You'). Statistics speak for
themselves: 2 songs from Tales, 4
from I Robot, 1 each from Pyramid and Eve, 2 each from Turn Of A
Friendly Card, Eye In The Sky,
and Ammonia Avenue, and then silence:
just the right proportions for the Taste Guardian for the Alan Parsons Project.
Predictably, most of the songs are played
fairly close to the studio versions; minor exceptions involve making a medley
out of 'Breakdown' and 'The Raven' (it works) and extending 'Psychobable' with
a prolonged «psychobabble» instrumental passage (I'm not sure it works). The
big difference is with the vocalists, who are, for the most part, all
competent; and it is interesting that all
of the band members (six of 'em) sing, with the original parts distributed to
them based on their own voice qualities. Grandest surprise is Parsons himself,
who is responsible for some of Woolfson's original parts — and shows a nice
singing voice, slightly weaker than Eric's, but capable of pulling out most of
the harmonies and radiating the same intelligent tenderness.
The most frequent vocalist, however, is P. J.
Olsson, who looks approximately like what most people would think Eric Woolfson
should look like (young, blonde-haired, a bit Wagnerian, etc.) and sings with
perfect competence and involvement (his 'Time' is absolutely wonderful and,
just like on the original, takes one's breath away long enough to forget about
the triviality of the lyrics). Actually, it would be ridiculous to suspect any
overall quality problems: Parsons the Perfectionist would have never dared to
put up any show like this without a hundred percent guarantee.
It's an interesting show, all right, to listen
to as well as to watch (the accompanying DVD accordingly places Parsons, most
of the time, in the background, nonchalantly strumming an acoustic guitar) —
and there is even nothing wrong with using the album, provided you can find it,
as a basic introduction into the Project. Live records from art-rockers usually
define the meaning of «superfluous», but that's only when they come in droves; one live record from an art-rocker is always
interesting and instructive, not to mention this
particular record that fans had been waiting for for over thirty years. And
what a setlist — a legacy to really be proud of. Thumbs up.
ADDENDA:
THE SICILIAN DEFENCE (1981/2014)
1) P-K4; 2) P-Qb4; 3) Kt-KB3;
4) ...Kt-QB3; 5) P-Q4; 6) PxP; 7) KtxP; 8) Kt-B3; 9) Kt-QB3; 10) P-Q3.
I am not even sure if this stuff deserves a separate
review, but since it now exists as an officially released separate album —
albeit only as a «bonus» part of the newly released 11-CD boxset that contains
all of the Project's albums — it probably does merit a few words and a chuckle,
if only to show that these guys did have their unique brand of «humor», nothing
about which was technically funny, but still, it does help to learn about this
considering how «stiff» we usually consider these Parsons and Woolfson guys.
So, apparently, the story goes that in 1981,
the two were locked in a formal battle with Arista over some contract details,
and, unsatisfied as they were, decided to get out of the contract by submitting
one last due album that they'd record in three days, rather than the several
months that it usually took their sense of perfectionism to be pacified. So
they went into the studio, quickly threw together a bunch of instrumental
tracks made on-the-spot, named them after various chess moves, figuratively
called the album The Sicilian Defence
(in which Arista people, apparently, played white and the Project played
black), and submitted the results.
Said results, as the rumor went, frightened the
Arista people so much that they gave up without putting up too much of a fight,
renewed Parsons' and Woolfson's contract on profitable terms, and kept Alan
with them all the way up to his first solo album. The Sicilian Defence, in the meantime, was permanently shelved
(just as the duo had hoped it would), and vanished off the radar completely
for more than thirty years. Small bits and pieces were occasionally showed to
the public, but on the whole, Alan had no plans of ever releasing the whole
thing, and probably the only reason why it finally saw the light of day was
acute demand on the part of devoted fans — just the kind of people who'd want
to buy the complete boxset in order to get to the juicy bonus.
Now here is why it may be important to add those few words. The album got this
reputation for being a «musical joke», or even a display of «musical
hooliganry», and I am sure I even saw the word «atonal» used somewhere in a
brief description. This may lead one into thinking that Alan and Eric had
really let their hair down on this one, making something of a ʽRevolution
No. 9ʼ, or of a Metal Machine Music,
and since «musical hooliganry» is definitely not the kind of thing with which we are accustomed to associate
those stern, glossy British gentlemen, this can create an atmosphere of
intrigue — indeed, it might even make one spend all that extra money on the
boxset just to hear what all the hoopla was about.
More than likely, you will be seriously disappointed. There is nothing
«atonal», or «rebellious», or «hooliganish» about this record. And, in fact,
there couldn't be, since it had no gestation period and had to be made in three
days. Instead, it sounds more or less just like you'd expect an Alan Parsons
Project record, made in three days, to sound. A bunch of instrumental numbers —
all of them rhythmic, usually set to simple drum machine patterns, all of them
played either on synthesizer or on piano, all of them probably largely
improvised, but mostly in standard keys, using standard chords, and generating
the usual melancholic aura associated with the Project. Nothing particularly
exciting — and nothing particularly «Awful» with a large A. Boring, as a matter
of fact: just plain old boring.
The two longest tracks, ʽP-Qb4ʼ and
ʽKt-QB3ʼ, are piano pieces, of which the former, also known as
ʽElsie's Themeʼ, was earlier released in truncated form as a bonus
track on Eve, and for good reason:
it has the prettiest melody on the album, nocturnal and elegant, that may
deserve salvation, even if six minutes is still overkill. ʽKt-QB3ʼ is
even longer, mainly consists of one single jazzy theme looped on endless
repeat, and could, perhaps, work as a rhythm part for a more elaborate
composition, but nothing else.
The rest is basically just Parsons dicking
around with synthesizers without much forethought or afterthought — a couple of
the tracks sounding like, say, an early underworked demo for Pink Floyd's
ʽOn The Runʼ (maybe he did
drag out one of these, I have no idea), and others sounding like equally
underworked demos for the Project's own stuff, usually with one or two basic musical
ideas per track. Nothing revealing in here, except that it might be interesting to hear, very quickly, what kinds of things
Parsons could come up with when working on autopilot. Well, it ain't Blonde On Blonde, where composing and
recording on-the-spot are concerned, that one thing at least is for sure.
Best thing about it all is we now know what
exactly is Alan Parsons' idea of the proverbial «album of fart noises» —
apparently, these guys are so stuffy, they cannot even allow themselves to fart
anything other than MIDI grooves and piano romances. Yet I cannot officially
condemn the album with a thumbs down, since we have all been warned and there
has never been one single good word on the part of Alan himself about the
record. Clearly, he didn't even release it in order to make an extra buck —
most likely, he just wanted to implode the «legend», so that people no longer
harass him about the «legendary lost Alan Parsons Project album». So maybe this
review can offer a little modest help with this purpose.
REFLETS (1970)
1) Reflets; 2) Suite Des
Montagnes; 3) Marig Ar Pollanton; 4) Brocéliande; 5) Son Ar Chistr; 6)
Sally Free And Easy; 7) Suite Irlandaise; 8) Sil Vestrig; 9) Tenval An Deiz;
10) Je Suis Né Au Milieu De La Mer.
To place Alan Stivell in the chronological
category that approximately corresponds to «Mid-Seventies» might seem a little
off: he had been recording a bit of this and that since as early as 1960, and
his first LP, Telenn Geltiek
(«Celtic Harp») already had a limited release in 1964. Yet it wasn't really
until the early Seventies that he emerged on the international scene as a major
cultural revivalist as well as an individual artist in his own rights, no
doubt due to the overall folk-rock boom of the era — without groups like
Fairport Convention to pave the road for his much more esoteric, «hardcore»
creativity, he would have forever remained the exclusive stuff of professional
musicologists and a snobby pastime for art college students. Come to think of
it, that isn't very far removed from
what he actually is today, but still...
Anyway, the first real international release from formerly gifted kid Alan Cochevelou,
now turned serious 26-year old message-carrying artist Alan Stivell, is this
album, Reflets, («Reflections»),
released on the Fontana label and carrying a modest selection of traditional
melodies, all of them based on Stivell's Celtic harp playing — his instrument
of choice, without which he is as unimagineable as Ian Anderson without his
flute — but diverse enough because of a wide range of supporting instruments:
bagpipes, organs, cellos, harmonicas, you name it. There are even occasional
outbursts of electric guitar moans, although on Reflets, Stivell had not yet really begun to create the unique
Celtic/Rock synthesis of his later records.
Both song titles and lyrics range from French,
his native language, to Breton, his ethnic legacy language, to English, the new
language of that part of the world where, fifteen hundred years ago, Alan's
forefathers used to reside. Or the language of Hollywood and McDonalds, you
choose. He does have a bit of an accent in English, which is possibly why it is
confined here only to the ballad 'Sally Free And Easy' (but he masks it well
by rendering the whole song in the drawn-out folk style — if you sing well,
then the more you sing, the less funny you sound).
Stylistically, Reflets is not much different from early Clannad albums, except,
perhaps, concentrating far more on the meditative balladry part than on the
entertainment side of the business: only 'Son Ar Chistr', with its background
chorus, 'Suite Irlandaise', with its little jig, and 'Tenval An Deiz', which
does give the impression of a fairly old courteous Breton dance tune, have
strong rhythmic support. The meditative ballads, of course, sound extremely
similar, especially for those who lag behind in their Breton, but Stivell's
fluent, complex, and sensitive playing contains enough magic to at least mold
it all into a pleasant escapist background, and his bardic singing is also an
essential component of his charm.
Finally, of tremendous importance is the
production: lots of echo, subtle fade-ins and fade-outs, and expert
manipulation of background instruments — so much so that, even in the complete
absence of «nature sounds» (such as waves crashing, winds howling, and
seagulls defecating), it is still easy to visualize a wise old druid clutching
his magic harp on a tall, tall hill, as lower-rank human beings are getting
busy way down below transforming it into a quarry for Stonehenge. Or maybe it's
just the subconscious effect of the album cover. Whatever be, the spirit of the
picture does match fairly closely the spirit of the music.
For Stivell, this was just the beginning — he
has but two original compositions here, and as good as the sound is, it does
not yet define him and him only. The obligatory thumbs up is, therefore, modest and
moderate, and there is an understandable, if insufficient, reason why it is
almost impossible to get it on CD these days. Still a must-get for all fans of
Stivell and/or all things Celtic, particularly all things Bretonic.
RENAISSANCE DE LA HARPE CELTIQUE (1971)
1) Ys; 2) Marv Pontkalleg; 3)
Ap Huw / Penllyn; 4) Eliz Iza; 5) Gaeltacht.
No less an authority than Bruce Eder, writing
for the All-Music Guide, once called this «one of the most beautiful and
haunting records ever made by anybody». Truth be told, I believe that this
statement has more to do with basically falling in love with the overall sound
of a well-played Celtic harp than with Alan Stivell's personal-individual
artistic contribution to the world of musical ideas. These days, with Celtic
revivalism going stronger than ever before, whole battalions of twenty first
century minstrels are doing the same thing all over the world.
But it must not be forgotten that most of them
are doing it exactly because, in
1971, Stivell released this key record in his career that launched the «Celtic
hardcore» movement. Before Harpe Celtique, most of these motives
had either been tapped in various folk-rock syntheses, or sculpted into
relatively simplistic LPs with immediate popular appeal. Few, if anyone,
actually dared to explore that sound in more complex, demanding ways.
The album is completely instrumental, a forty-minute
sequence of brief compositions (some authored by Stivell himself, some
recreated from various traditional sources) sometimes formally merged into
longer units — 'Gaeltacht' takes up an entire side, but is really a set of five
or six entirely different tunes. The harp is, of course, the leading
instrument, but it is almost never completely alone, with either a cello or a
fiddle or an organ or a guitar or, in a few spots, some drums — at one point,
even tablas! — providing the accompaniment. More disconcerting for the average
listener might be the fact that very few of the tracks include tight,
«danceable» rhythmic structures: if what you're after in Celtic music is
jigs-a-plenty, you're probably much better off sticking to The Pogues. This is
the sitting man's sound, not the moving one's.
Adequately reviewing Harpe Celtique is akin to reviewing a lengthy chamber music piece:
since no «pop hooks» are surmised, no words are spoken, and no radical mood
changes are involved, you can either get all technical on this (if you're qualified,
which I am not) or just sit back and let the music do all the talking. The only
question one might pose is whether one is supposed to enjoy Stivell's
unquestionably beautiful playing from an «ambient» perspective — heavenly
sounds with a background-embellishing function — or a «classical» one:
fleshed-out, meaningful compositions that should be listened to over and over
again until they finally sink in properly.
For my ear, most of these pieces sound way too
«samey» to justify spending significant time on them so as to learn to know the
difference. (Obviously, I am talking about the basic musical skeleton: the
fact that 'Eliz Iza', for instance, boasts a much fuller sound through the
addition of cello, bagpipes, drums, and choral vocals does not in essence make
it seriously different from the radically minimalist 'Marv Pontkalleg'). After
all, this is an attempt at faithfully
recreating sounds that represent either «folk» or «medieval court» music,
emotional and spiritual but also conforming to an intentionally limited
formula. Best way to assimilate it is pretend you're King of Wales and this
Stivell guy is standing to your left while you're enjoying your banquet — works
great for the digestive system.
Trivia buffs will want to learn that 'Ys' is
dedicated to the legend of the God-cursed, ocean-swallowed Bretonic city of Ys
(hence all the ocean waves in the background); that 'Marv Pontkalleg' ('The
Death of Pontcallec') is an old Breton ballad about a failed conspiracy in the
18th century; that Penllyn is in Wales, meaning that track number 3 takes us
from Bretonic tradition to the closely related Welsh one; and that 'Gaeltacht'
refers to Irish-speaking regions, meaning we now jump to the next island. Not that it is all that
easy to distinguish between Irish, Welsh, and Bretonic music, mind you, but as
far as the various sub-styles of Celtic playing are concerned, Harpe Celtique is fairly diverse.
I have no idea how overtly sincere are those
who, like Bruce Eder, declare this to be one of the most haunting records ever
made, but one thing is for certain: I would be very pleased if this kind of
music were ever able to really haunt me. Ambient or not, it requires additional
listening, and if you are already a major fan of the likes of Fairport
Convention or Steeleye Span, this is the next logical stop — but even in this
case, you might find it somewhat of a challenge. Better still, start learning
how to play the harp, and, if possible, forget any Marx Bros. movies you've
seen, at least, for the time period it takes to get used to this. A reverential
thumbs up.
A L'OLYMPIA (1972)
1) The Wind Of Keltia; 2) An
Dro; 3) The Trees They Grow High; 4) An Alarc'h; 5) An Durzhunel; 6) Telenn
Gwad / The Foggy Dew; 7) Pop Plinn; 8) Tha Mi Sgith; 9) The King Of The
Fairies; 10) Tri Martolod; 11) Kost Ar C'hoad; 12) Suite Sudarmoricaine.
If Harpe
Celtique sounds a bit too extreme, how about this — a full show played by
Stivell at the Olympia music hall in February 1971? No lengthy multi-part
suites, very little Celtic harp (most of it on the opening 'Wind Of Keltia'),
but an amazing sound nonetheless; no wonder the album became a bestseller (in
Europe, at least) and a high watermark in the chronology of «Celtic revival».
(Ironically, it is nearly impossible to find on CD these days).
With a five-piece band behind his belt, Stivell
sets out two humble goals — (a) to show the mass audience that traditional
Celtic music is only as «boring» and «obsolete» as the unskillful non-expert
would make it seem, and (b) to try out a real
synthesis of Celtic and rock music rather than just play simple folk ballads
with electric guitars, or complex Celtic ballads on traditional instruments
and still call it «folk-rock» because they are mixed in with rock songs.
The first half of the album is mostly dedicated
to satisfying the first goal, as he alternates between slow haunting ballads
and livelier dance numbers, constantly varying the instrumentation — violins,
bagpipes, guitars, organs, drums — and the moods (magical-mystical à la Merlin in 'Wind Of Keltia',
Sherwood Forest in 'The Trees They Grow High', sentimental in 'An Durzhunel',
dark and ominous in 'Foggy Dew'). The audience gets to stomp and clap along on
the faster numbers, and continuously rips into applause that, to me, sounds
«frantic» rather than «polite».
Then, halfway into the album, we finally get
some genuine «Celtic rock», with massive electric guitar parts that are not
always «Celtic» in essence: the solo on 'Pop Plinn' sounds like it comes
straight off an early 1970s prog-rock album, but it is set to a traditional
melody all the same. 'Tha Mi Sgith' is just as good (this time, guitar and
fiddle just follow Alan's vocal melody), and by the time they get to the
encore, a smouldering, rabble-rousing Breton anthem ('Suite Sudarmoricaine'), most
people in the audience are ready to subscribe to Neo-Druidism and start
embracing oaks.
Unquestionably, this is the best introduction
to Stivell for any type of neophyte — a failure to grasp this means a basic
failure to grasp the pleasures of Celtic music as such. (Which is not a
condemnation or anything: like most pre-18th century music, this stuff is
generally less palatable to the cathartic nerves of the modern listener). And
even if these performances take us even further away from the «pure» revival
of authentic Celtic melodicity and instrumentation — if such a thing in itself
is at all possible — they prove, better than any attempts at such a direct
revival, that all of these long-time-ago folk musings were not mused in vain. Thumbs up,
once again, more out of intellectual respect than straightforward feeling, but
that's really just a problem of time and space, not one of will and spirit.
CHEMINS DE TERRE (1973)
1) Susy MacGuire; 2) Ian
Morrison Reel; 3) She Moved Through The Fair; 4) Can Y Melinydd; 5) Oidche
Maith; 6) An Dro Nevez; 7) Maro Ma Mestrez; 8) Brezhoneg' Raok; 9) An Hani A
Garan; 10) Metig; 11) Kimiad.
The perfect studio companion to L'Olympia. More or less the same band
and the same approach — a small portable encyclopaedia of all musical things
Celtic, with a few additional ideas thrown in on how to ornate and present them
for the modern listener whose parents have not
taught him how to hunt wild boar or fashion torcs.
Once again, Alan shows off both his egalitarian
principles — dedicating the first side of the LP to the British Isles, singing
in English, Irish, and Welsh — and his native predilections — filling the
entire second side with Bretonic sounds, most of them rearranged from traditional
sources, but also including one completely original composition. By this time,
however, it becomes rather clear which of these two sides, the «broad Celtic»
or the «narrow Bretonic», receives the larger part of the man's spirit.
Because, although side A is pretty damn good,
it does not really transcend the level of «sincere professionalism». Both the
jig of 'Ian Morrison Reel' and the harp balladry of 'She Moved Through The
Fair' are expertly delivered, yet there is no question that I'd rather listen to
Clannad doing both — their jigs are livelier and brawnier, and even after one
has finally acquired a taste for Alan's twangy, shrill manner of singing, can
one still be blamed for preferring the haunting sound of Moya Brennan,
especially when it's tender, sentimental balladry we're talking about?
Let's face it: traditional Celtic music is, in
essence, quite beautiful, but just as limited in formula as any folk tradition, be it Chinese,
Balkan, or African, and picking out the subtle differences between twenty
artists drawing upon the same formula is suitable job for an expert rather than
the average music lover. To my ears, when shifting to Irish and Welsh motives,
Stivell fares no better or worse than most of the recognized soldiers of the
modern day Celtic armies.
His meal of choice, the preparation of which he
has mastered well beyond basic tourist level, is an integration of his native
Armorican sounds with his own creativity and modern technological advances.
This is why the true magic starts as soon as we flip the record over, and 'An
Dro Nevez' greets us with a trance-inducing fiddle duet, soon to be joined by a
grumbly electric guitar rhythm track, occasionally bursting into ecstatic
mini-solos. This is something
radically different, well worth living for.
Even when simply singing acappella, Alan still
does it best in Breton ('Maro Ma Mestrez'), employing a complex, trickily
flowing folk style, the true fish'n'chips of folk musicology students. But his
very best still shines through on original compositions: 'Brezhoneg' Roak' in
itself could qualify as a genre-founding track, with the genre provisionally
called «Bretonic Rock» — it's a loud, bombastic, hard-rocking song that
culminates in an ecstatic prog-rockish guitar symphony, but is at the same time
dominated by «druid harmonies»; a unique creation if there ever was one.
The other traditional tunes on Side B are less
imaginative, but still, the bulk of Stivell's interesting ideas and approaches
about their general arrangements and different kinds of acoustic/electric interplay
are to be found there rather than on the Irish/Welsh side. It's a good thing he
placed the two in this particular order — this way, Chemins De Terre gets an awesome sequencing, from the merely
pleasant to the uniquely impressive and then, letting it slide gracefully with
the bagpipes of 'Kimiad' (no, no, we are still in Armorica. Apparently, of all
the Celtic subcultures Stivell does Scotland rarest of all, for some reason). A
gallant thumbs
up, and if you need a specific recommendation, 'Brezhoneg' Roak' is
required listening for anyone interested in getting a complete musical picture
of the 1970s.
E LANGONNED (1974)
1) E Parrez Langonned; 2)
Gavotenn Pourled; 3) Planedenn; 4) Ne Bado Ket Atao; 5) Bwthyn Fy Nain; 6)
Ffarwl I Aberystwyth; 7) Briste Leathai Pheadair / Mairseal A'Chearc; 8) Dans
Fisel / Gavotenn Ar Menez / An Sagart Cheolnhar; 9) Bal Fisel; 10) Deus Ganin Me
D'Am Bro; 11) Jenovefa; 12) Sagart O'Donaill; 13) Diougan Gwenc'hlan; 14) Ar Voraerion;
15) Faili Faili Oro; 16) Oye Vie.
Probably the most «hardcore» record in Stivell's
catalog, as you can tell by looking at the track names alone: not a single
title in English or even French, only endless streams of user-unfriendly
Breton, Irish, and Welsh phrases. The musical content matches the impression:
taking a break from further explorations in «Celtic Rock», here Alan
concentrates exclusively on traditional motives, moods, and instrumentation.
«Langonned» is actually an odd orthographic hybrid of Breton Langoned = French Langonnet, a Breton commune, yet, once again, the album is not
fully Breton-based — not that it would matter to anyone but obsessive
professional Celtologists and modern day druid culture revivalists with their
blue paint, mistletoe, and menhir fixation.
According to Dave Thompson of the All-Music
Guide, E Langonned «is frequently
described as his (Stivell's) most
accessible album». The passive voice is a marvelous device that helps avoid
responsibility, but I am still deeply curious as to who, and under the aid of
which substances, would ever describe E
Langonned as «accessible». Yes, this is technically unadorned, minimalistic,
individually-interpreted collective-traditional music, but, from the point of
view of any typical rock music listener, it should be much harder to digest
than, say, A L'Olympia.
The tunes are not, by any means, «hooky». Many
of them start out — and many end as well — as pure vocal numbers, and you must really get into the spirit of medieval
folk singing to dig them, including a predilection for melody-varying and top
range reaching on most verses that place the tunes closer to Eastern vocalizing
than to commonly known Western. A few of the numbers, e. g. 'Ne Bado Ket Atao',
represent the traditional Breton style of kan
ha diskan (call and response) — again, very strictly an acquired taste (Vying
for village idiot status? Just play this loud enough in your immediate
neighborhood). But yeah — quite accessible, I'm sure, if you come from a small
Breton village and, preferably, are two or three hundred years old.
There is also a bit too much bagpipe music here for my tastes, most of it on Side A
('Ffarwel I Aberystwyth' is a particularly vicious dog-killer if there ever was
one); and some of the fiddles seem basically attuned to the same wavelength, so
that if the one flows seamlessly into the other, the headache merely shifts its
center of mass. Fortunately, the second side drops it all in favor of generally
more meditative and proverbially pretty harp music, occasionally interrupted by
Alan's acappella chants. As usual, the tunes are impossible to tell from each
other, but I guess you are supposed to get lost in their thicket, rather than
meticulously stuff them into little numbered cells inside your brain. Hey, it
works with me.
I do not believe, though, that E Langonned is an album that you are
supposed to simply enjoy. You can
learn from it — this is about as «authentic» as Celtic music ever gets; if
there is something more authentic, I
don't even want to hear about it. You can, if you wish, seek out the meaning
of life in its depths (which our partial forefathers, the Celts, apparently
knew everything about, or else they wouldn't let the Romans and the Germans
whack their asses so easily). But it is not a record to «like», whatever that
means — unlike, say, Jethro Tull and their
take on the wise old bearded forest-loving clown routine.
E DULENN (1975)
1) Spered Hollvedel; 2)
Délivrance; 3) Ha Kompren't 'Vin Erfin; 4) Tenwal Eo'r Bed; 5) Digor Eo
An Hent; 6) Debhair An Rinceoir / Jig Gwengamp; 7) Pachpi Kozh / Pachpi New;
8) Laridenn; 9) Ton-Bale Pourled; 10) Bal Ha Dans Plinn'; 11) An Droiou.
Now this is more like it, and a worthy
companion to the Olympia concert. «This
nice little live album features folky and electric arrangements of traditional
music», the AMG review informs the listener in a raging fit of laconicity, and,
sure enough, those who have not buried themselves throat-deep in the
intricacies of «traditional music», will probably have little else to say about
the record other than «uh... nice little live album!».
On the other hand, at least there is always the
factual side. Recorded on November 26 and 27, 1974, at the National Stadium in
Dublin (Dulenn). Released in 1975. Played with the aid of Stivell's regular
band, including Dan Ar Bras on guitars and... others. Also involved in the
performances is Bagad Bleimor, a traditional Breton pipe band, equipped with
lots of bagpipes, flutes, and bombards (the reed-shaped ones, not the cannons
— these guys ain't no AC/DC). Tunes are mostly of Breton origin, with a few
Irish divertissements thrown in for
good measure (note the location of the concert — a Breton playing nothing but
Breton tunes in the heart of Ireland would be an odd type of chauvinist, to say
the least).
As for the setlist, there are, actually,
several Stivell originals here, such as the rabble-rousing anthem
'Délivrance', with which he gets the audience up on their feet at the
very start of the show, reciting freedom-loving lyrics to the sound of
freedom-loving bagpipes. But overall, there is indeed heavier emphasis on the
«traditional» here than on the Olympia
concert, with most of Stivell's usual inventive wit invested into
rearrangements. Sometimes the wit is demonstrated head-on: 'Pach Pi Kozh'
(translated loosely as 'Ancient Passe-Pied', a type of Breton dance) starts out
driven by flutes, violins, and pipes, then, two minutes on, is provided with a
rock rhythm section (but no electric guitars).
Of course, merely adding rock drums and bass to
a traditional tune is not necessarily the best indication of wit; the most
glaring example of Alan's «Celtic rock» here is 'Bal Ha Dans Plinn', wisely
chosen as the show closer, as it is here that the band really pulls out all the
stops, as you get flutes folksily whistling the same melody as the progressive
rock guitar in the adjacent channel. Then the violins start coming in, the
bagpipes, the bass starts shredding à
la Chris Squire, the guitar player eventually takes over the flashy
playing à la... Ritchie Blackmore?, and finally it all comes down in a
mighty final clash of all the instruments on stage. Thar be sum b'dass Celtic
rock, mate, as any famous Celtic pirate — Sir Henry Morgan, for one — would
surely testify.
Overall, there is not too much rational
sequencing going on here, but sparsely arranged ballads are mixed well enough
with bombastic folk-rock to prevent any onset of boredom. Of the former,
'Debhair' is a particularly gallant gentlemanly-pastoral masterpiece, and of
the latter, 'Ton-Bale Pourled' deserves special mention as the «heaviest»
number on the album, with a gloomy, murderous riff that some heavy metal bands
would kill for — until, midway through, it vanishes into thin air, replaced by
a couple of fawnish pipes to alleviate the feelings. Quite exquisite.
In passing, it should perhaps be mentioned that
both of Stivell's famous live sets almost never duplicate his contemporary
studio recordings — and, with more emphasis on band interplay and basic brawn
than the generally subtler non-live creations, are every bit as essential as
something like Chemins De Terre.
«Nice little live album», aye. Thumbs up.
TREMA'N INIS (1976)
1) Stok Ouzh An Enez (En Vue
De L'Île); 2) Hommes Liges Des Talus En Transe; 3) Rinnenn XX; 4) An Eur-Se
Ken Tost D'Ar Peurbad (Cette Heure Si Près De L'Éternel); 5)
Negro Song; 6) E-Tal Ar Groaz (Face A La Croix); 7) Ar Chas Doñv'yelo Da
Quez (Les Chiens Redeviendront Sauvages).
Not much to say here. The album serves a very
specific and narrow purpose — a tribute to Alan's recently deceased father
Georges Cochevelou, much less known than the son but without whom the son could
never exist nether physically nor artistically; it was Georges, a professional
interpreter and connaisseur of all things Breton, who originally
«reconstructed» the Celtic harp in 1953 and taught the young Alan to play it.
So Trema'n
Inis ("Towards The Island") is almost entirely dominated by the
harp, and not so much in an «explorative» way as simply to serve as quiet,
meditative background to various bits of Breton poetry (some of it in French,
actually), credited to various Breton poets of all ages. The poetry, all of it
available in French translations in the liner notes, is surprisingly decent,
and only the uncouthly titled 'Negro Song' is expressly hammering in rough
Breton nationalism ("I am Breton, I was a slave", it starts out);
the rest is dedicated to much more transcendent issues.
Unfortunately, there is nothing else to the
record. It either functions as a bunch of meditative background sonic waves,
or as a crash course in the fundamental values of Breton culture (although, to
be frank, once you filter out all the Christian and XIXth century European
influences out of it, it is not quite clear how much is left for the truly «fundamental»).
The sixteen-minute long 'Hommes Liges Des Talus En Transe' is enough to test
your determination — if your inner Celt may be awoken, you will remain «en
transe» for all of its duration, but if there has never been an inner Celt in
you, you will want to turn it off the very second that Stivell puts down the
harp and starts the first of many pathos-spreading French recitatives.
'Negro Song', as a musical composition, is the
only track that stands out, with a grand, chilly stop-and-start structure that
counts as a «hook», I guess. It is well worth searching out (and you may
disregard the lyrics altogether — Breton discrimination, although undeniable as
in the case of just about any national minority, is still somewhat embarrassing
to compare to black slave discrimination). The rest of the record... well...
more Celtic harp, gentlemen?
RAOK DILESTRA (1977)
1) Ar Gelted Kozh (Les Anciens
Celtes); 2) Ar Vritoned 'Ba' Inis-Breizh (Les Britons Dans L'Ile De Bretagne);
3) Ar Vritoned D'An Arvorig (Les Britons En Armorique); 4) Rouantelezh Vreizh
(Le Royaume De Bretagne); 5) Dugelezh Vreizh (Le Duché De Bretagne);
6) An Aloubidigezh Gant Bro-C'hall (Le Traité D'Union Franco-Breton); 7)
Emsawadegoù (Révoltes); 8) Dispac'h Bro-C'hall Ag An 19e Kantwed
(La Révolution Française Et Le 19e Siècle); 9) Lodenn Gentan An Ugentwed Kantwed
(Première Moitié Du 20e Siècle); 10) Eil Lodenn An
Ugentwed Kantwed (Deuxième Moitié Du 20e Siècle); 11) Da
Ewan (A Ewan); 12) Gwriziad Difennet (Racines Interdites); 13) Marw Ewid E Fobl
(Mort Pour Son Peuple); 14) Naw Breton 'Ba' Prizon (Neuf Bretons En Prison);
15) Tamm-Kreiz New' (Nouveau
Tamm-Kreiz); 16) Plinn (Slogan).
For the layman at least, Stivell must be at his
most interesting when he is at his most ambitious. Harp-centered minimalism is
all right for a while, but not when one is dealing with hours and hours of
music varying only through slight nuances. For grand purposes, however, Alan is
always ready to go berserk with extra instrumentation and genre-mixing, and
this is where even a regular prog-rock or folk-rock fan can safely board his
train.
Raok
Dilestra («Before Landing») is
his loudest, brawniest album so far; no wonder — its ambition is to capture
pretty much everything there is to capture about the achievements and the
prospects of the Breton people. Side A is entirely dedicated to a multi-part
suite detailing the history of the Bretons, from their ancient Celtic roots
through all of their migratory tribulations and right down to the 20th century
— a musical lecture of sorts, alternating sung passages with informative
voiceovers over the instrumental sections. Side B, subtitled 'The Present', is
a bunch of disconnected songs dealing with... uh, various Breton-related
subjects.
As a sort of symbol of how much Raok Dilestra is «integrated» into the
better known musical world of its time, it should be mentioned that the album
features guest contributions from Richard Harvey on woodwinds (of Gryphon fame)
and Dave Swarbrick on violin (of Fairport Convention). Most of the instruments
are, however, still played by Alan himself and his regular band (Dan Ar Bras on
guitar, etc.) — and there's plenty of them, ranging from atmospheric background
synthesizers (used quite intelligently and moderately) to sitars (which,
believe it or not, go quite well together with bagpipes. Sometimes).
The opening suite takes some time to build up,
starting off with a bit of moody bagpipe-backed chanting, devoid of rhythm
section support, then getting louder and louder and rockier and rockier as we
slowly progress into the Middle Ages and the modern epoch — 'The Breton
Kingdom' and 'The French Revolution' are musically associated with complex,
constantly signature-changing progressive bombardment reminiscent of Yes, and
'The 20th Century' relies heavily on electronic sounds, incorporating a sci-fi
element (despite our lack of knowledge about the degree of Bretons' involvement
in space travel and nanotechnologies).
As impressive as the suite is, it suffers
somewhat from the usual illness of all conceptual suites — the concept
sometimes overshadows the music — but the illness is thankfully absent from
Side B, which contains several of Stivell's strongest, most individually memorable
melodies. 'To Ewan My Son' is a tender/powerful personal message, sung as a
gorgeous duet with a supporting lady friend, and backed with a barrage of
synthesizers, acoustic and electric guitars, harps, and pipes that is so dense
and so constantly shifting emphasis from one instrument to another that one almost
forgets about the droning nature of the song. 'Dead For His People' is a
hard-rocking kicker, dominated very much by (Swarbrick's, probably) violin
playing and ranking up there with the best of Fairport Convention's material.
'Nine Bretons In Jail' begins in standard kan
ha diskan manner, then clicks into fully-arranged mode, again, jumping
from one lead instrument to another as if it were matching each of them with
each of the nine unfortunate Bretons (well, three or four of them, at least).
And, of course, how could an album so concerned
with Brittany not end with a stern
and serious call to freedom ('Plinn (Slogan)')? Keep in mind that if you are
singing along — and it is tempting to
sing along — you are formally expressing solidarity with Breton separatism, and
position yourself as opposed to the long-term stability of the French
government. On the other hand, Breton separatism is little more than a nice
spiritual game at the moment, and if playing this game helps people like Alan
Stivell to make such excellent music, I'm all for playing.
In short, while the subject matter may be a bit
too constrictive here, and Stivell's «Celtic egalitarianism» forgotten in
favor of a rigid nationalistic approach, Raok
Dilestra still shows the man at the peak of his creativity, and arguably at
the absolute peak of his bombastic creativity; easily in the top 5 or so of the
thumbs up
issued for his output.
UN DWEZH BARZ GER (1978)
1) Trinquons Nos Verres (Let's
Clink Glasses); 2) Ar Wezenn Awalou (The Apple Tree); 3) Henchou Kuzh (Hidden
Ways); 4) Tabud Kemper (Wrath In Quimper); 5) Warlec'h Koan (After Dinner); 6)
An Try Marrak (The Three Knights); 7) 'Tal An Tan (In Front Of The Hearth); 8)
An Nighean Dubh (The Black-Haired Maiden); 9) Slan Chearbhallain (O'Carolan's
Farewell); 10) Inisi Hanternos (North Of Midnight Islands).
A brief interlude, conveniently titled Journée A La Maison (A Day At Home, although the usual
English title is A Homecoming);
taking a break from his bombastic synthesis of Druidism and Steve Howe, Alan
records a short, quiet album of new rearrangements of traditional tunes, fully
stripped of electric instruments and
pretentious anthemic statements. Yet it is not a minimalist creation — the
multi-instrumental approach is preserved. You will not miss the bombarde, or
the tabla, or the cellos. It's like a small home party that the guy throws at
you from his porch. Overlooking the white cliffs of... uh... well, I guess
Armorica has plenty of white cliffs, but I'm not exactly an expert on that kind
of geography (I did visit the Île-de-Bréhat once, quite a long
time ago, though, which should count as some
qualification).
Concerning the music, there is not much to
write about. The only minor surprise is the mini-«Celto-Indian» suite of 'The
Apple Tree / Hidden Ways', accompanied all the way through with a grand sitar
melody. Stivell probably has, or, at least, at the time had a strict monopoly
on crossing Indian instruments with his trademark Celtic harp, so these
resulting sonic waves are unique — I am not sure if they inspire unique
emotions, but if you take a very firm decision to give in to this effect, you
are in for your personal world of magic, able to beat up any other world of
magic in no time. 1001 Nights meets Lord Of The Rings, that kind of weirdass
concoction.
Side B, with the exception of the
near-tribal-sounding 'Black-Haired Maiden', is all dark forests lit with
firefly sparks. Lots and lots of fair harp drones, some crossed with tender
multi-tracked harmonies that relate this kind of music to David Crosby ('Three
Knights' just so totally belongs on If I
Could Only Remember My Name, although, of course, in terms of overall
influences it is Dave drawing his inspiration from acid-drenched night visits
of Queen Guinevere, rather than Stivell popularizing his work by adapting it to
hippie sensibilities).
Overall, this «nice little studio album» is
just a minor blip on Stivell's radar, but many people live for such minor blips
rather than nuclear explosions, and it is to those humble souls that I dedicate
my thumbs up.
Just do not judge the man's position in the pantheon of world music by this
little adventure-on-the-porch.
INTERNATIONAL TOUR (1979)
1) Ar C'hoant Dimezin; 2)
Rouantelezh Vreizh; 3) Dugelezh Vreizh; 4) Stok Ouzh An Enez; 5) Liegemen Of
The Trembling Slopes; 6) We Shall Survive; 7) Cailin Og Deas; 8) O'Carolan's
Farewell/The Musical Priest; 9) An Nighean Dubh; 10) Fest-Hypnoz.
Now this one is truly a «nice little live
album»: enjoyable throughout, but easily the most «skippable» of Alan's live
releases. Recorded at different venues, in Germany for the most part, unlike
his previous concert LPs, this one mostly concentrates on slightly rearranged
versions of tunes from Alan's recent past — an excerpt from the Celtic history
suite on Raok Dilestra, another
exceprt from the Breton poets tribute on Trema'n
Inis, a couple of recreated highlights from Un Dwezh Barz Ger, etc. It's all nice and good, but was it supposed
to signify that the man was beginning to run out of ideas? Not a particularly
ominous sign for the upcoming 1980's.
That said, it only takes a brief comparison of
the originals with the new live renditions to understand that these tour
versions at least try to add to or
improve on the past. For instance, 'Stok Ouzh An Enez' is about two minutes
longer, allowing Alan to launch into some very tricky and sonically enchanting
passages (improvs?) on the harp, masterminding the ringing strings into
something so proverbially Elven-like, even Arwen "Liv Tyler" Undomiel
would likely want it for her ringtone. 'The Breton Kingdom' is played in a much
harder-rocking setting, with Dan Ar Bras really putting that low grumbling
metal thing in his sound, so that the whole idea of «Celtic rock» gets a vivid
upgrade. 'Black-Haired Maiden' gets an extra flute part that seems to have been
lacking on the original (well, they couldn't just let the flute player stand
around empty-handed all day... or, wait, is that Stivell himself playing the
flute? Whatever).
So, in the end, «skippable» refers to those who
want to limit their Stivell collection to a moderately reasonable size — for
those who really dig this Celtic thang, it is a must-own. But neither should
one hesitate to hear it if it happens to be the only Stivell record in sight:
the selections are diverse, the music clearly dominates over the nationalism
(even that long long long piece of poetic propaganda masquerading as Celtic
music on Trema'n Inis is reduced
from sixteen minutes to five, concentrating on sound far more than the
message), and the inspiration has not yet waned, or, rather, has not been
subtly poisoned by changing musical fashions.
Finally, one of the few new numbers, the
show-closer 'Fest-Hypnoz', with its spasmodic flute part will be a great joy to
all you fans of Jethro Tull. Considering that, around 1978-79, Stivell and Ian
Anderson had pretty much the same length of head and facial hair floating
around the upper parts of their bodies, not to mention oddly converging musical
tastes, it seems almost unjust that something like Heavy Horses would still be selling and these albums would not. Sure, all the songs are in this goddamn
internationally incomprehensible language that managed to reduce its
Indo-European legacy to much the same rubble as English, but it's not as if we
so totally understood what Ian is singing about, either, even when he gets all
his articles and tenses right.
SYMPHONIE CELTIQUE — TIR NA NOG (1979)
1) Beaj; 2) Gwerz 1; 3) Loc'h
Ar Goulenn; 4) Divodan; 5) Emskiant; 6) Kendaskren; 7) Imram; 8) Dilestran; 9)
Ar C'hammou Kentan; 10) Ar Geoded Skedus; 11) Ar Bale; 12) Gouel Hollvedel; 13)
An Distro.
It could make sense to say that, perhaps,
releasing one's longest, densest, deepest, broadest, most ambitiously conceptual
double LP in the year 1979, several hundred days into the heyday of punk, New
Wave, and disco, was not the smartest
idea to emanate from Stivell's pathologically artistic spirit. But then again
maybe it wouldn't, because (a) 1979 was, come to think of it, also the year of The Wall (which was also long, dense,
deep, broad, ambitious, conceptual, and still sold like hotcakes — granted, most
people bought it for "we don't need no education", while Stivell was way too conservative to seduce people
with "Disco Druid"); (b) Stivell's corner of the market was fairly
well defined and covered anyway — his
audience never depended on trends. So what did he stand to lose? Nothing but an
All-Music Guide review, and even that situation is so scandalous that eventually
someone is bound to remedy it.
Tír
na nÓg is the name of
one of the Irish mythical worlds — the «Land of Youth» that few mortal men
have reached, except for the legendary tribe Tuatha Dé Danann, the
legendary hero Oisín, and the Marx Brothers right after they dumped
Zeppo. I am not sure if the entire album is strongly dedicated to exploring
this legend; but it is very appropriate, when you are basing a concept album
around a mythical world that emanates from a Celtic conscience but also transcends
it, to make sure that the music, too, transcends Celtic motives. Surely, if the
Irish believed in a land of eternal youth located somewhere in the Caribbean,
they didn't think all of its people would be playing the Irish harp and the
bagpipes all day long?
A mind-boggling seventy guest musicians play on this album, ranging from an entire
Berber female vocal group to a whole pack of Indian artists. It is Stivell's
equivalent of Lifehouse: something
so utterly grandiose in its idealism and spiritualism, the listener is supposed
to almost feel the chains of flesh shatter and fall to pieces all around the
immortal soul. Except, unlike Lifehouse,
this album did come to pass. So?...
One thing is for certain: Symphonie takes quite a bit of time to start properly working its
magic. The entire first LP relies more on drones and ambience than dynamic
themes, even if, at times, there seem to be more instruments involved in the
procedure than on any of Beethoven's symphonies. Still, one has to admit to a
certain interest when a composition is an Indian raga, an Irish mood piece, and
a modern classical experiment at the exact same time ('Divodan'). Throw in a
few electronic background textures, surround it with church organ and mild
chamber pieces — quite a heck of a melting pot.
Lazy listeners may, however, safely skip the
first six tracks and enjoy a shortened, but more «active» experience starting
with the textbook Celtic rock of 'Imram'. This is where the record properly
becomes a «symphony», with all the required formal grandeur and cathartic
moments. Amusingly, the stately rhythmic pieces have an almost Mike Oldfield
feel to them: devoid of confusing, unpredictable signature changes, smooth
nearly to the point of becoming «commercial» (but in the good sense of the
word).
And most are fine, but the truly awesome parts
are cleverly hidden from view until the end: first, the complex vocal overdubs
on 'Ar Bale' weave out a pattern of absolute happiness and tranquility, one of
the finest «visions-of-angels»-type pieces of music I've ever heard, and then
the repetitive, but intelligently expanding melody of 'Gouel Hollvedel', with
fifty different variations on its danceable theme in a row, eventually bursts
out to become Stivell's own little ode to joy — probably the most overtly
celebrative and uplifting piece of music he ever did. The transition, forty
seconds into part IV, when the strings and pipes take over the theme, is my
favourite moment in all of Stivell's catalog — and, as far as my knowledge
extends, the perfect moment in the synthesis of Celtic folk values with
symphonic ones.
It is hard to tell if the presence of all those
seventy musicians was truly justified, but maybe it is not so much their actual
playing that matters as, indeed, the presence:
now that they are all here, there is no backing out of the grandiosity of it
all. And thank God for that — flawed and all, yes, with plenty of parts that
are fairly weak on their own, Symphonie
Celtique is still a one-of-a-kind record that fully justifies the
concatenation in its name; a grand thumbs up.
The sad news is that the effort pretty much
drained Stivell: the creative surge that started with Renaissance De La Harpe Celtique and, all through the decade,
goaded him into curious experiment after curious experiment, ends here — the
remainder of his career, although not without its moments, is basically just
one lengthy footnote after the final glorious notes of Symphonie have faded away. But what's a poor Breton harpist to do
after he has completed his predicament? Go fishing? Poaching boar? Carving
menhirs? Every Celtic rocker has as much of a right to jump the shark as
anybody else.
TERRE DES VIVANTS (1981)
1) Terre Des Vivants; 2)
Rentrer En Bretagne; 3) Beg Ar Van; 4) M. J.; 5) Raog Mont D'Ar Skol; 6)
Androides (parties 1-2-3); 7) Ideas; 8) Androides (partie 4); 9) Hidden Through
The Hills; 10) Cameronian Rant; 11) Q-Celts Fiesta; 12) L'Ere Du Verseau.
Stivell's first album of the musically cursed
decade (granted, in 1981 it had not yet been cursed strong enough) is a
relative oddity — quite curious, but not clearly successful. It leans a bit too heavily on the «rock» side of the
business, and on Stivell's own terms almost plays out as his biggest
concession to popular tastes up to date: the harp is either neutralized or
hidden behind the bombast, and the musical structures are generally simpler and
more repetitive. Not that there are any explicit nods to New Wave or anything,
but at least there certainly are nods
to the courses that progressive rock was taking in the late 1970s: distorted
arena-rock guitars, electronic keyboards, thick, bombastic drumming, dense
echoes, all of this responsible for a drabby, morose, and ultimately generic
sound that threatens to replace the mystique of the Celtic forest with pictures
of post-apocalyptic technocratic worlds ruled by the people in gray. Not
pretty.
Nevertheless, it is still worth a listen, if
only for hosting one of the man's most gorgeous ballads: 'Rentrer En Bretagne'
is simple (and catchy), but he selects his most seductive vocal tone to pass
along the message, and there is something doggone right about the distribution of the melody between the acoustic
guitar, the harp, the bass, the pipes, and whatever else there is in the background
(Mellotron?); a calm, classy chamber piece that every Breton should feel happy
about, because that's the proper way in which one's own country should be
advertised.
As for the rest, it ranges from the okay to the
bizarre. The four-part 'Androides' suite could not have been intended as
anything other than a little «shocker» — why would a master of Celtic music
suddenly turn to sci-fi, be it only in the title (the entire suite is
instrumental, apart from the interrupting 'Ideas'), and, furthermore, dress it
up in jazz-fusion overtones? Meanwhile, the nine minutes of 'Beg Ar Van' are
the first time ever when it is possible for me to say that a lengthy
composition of Alan's clearly overstays its welcome (with the exception of
'Hommes Liges Des Talus', of course, but at least that one never pretended to
being anything other than a music-accompanied recitation of Breton poetry). A
slow, overproduced, cluttery dirge with one verse melody chanted over and over
again — so perhaps Dylan could sometimes get away with this, but at least he
didn't sing in a language that no one except the singer could understand
(sorry, all my little friends down in Armorica, but this guy is working for the international
market). And that saxophone backing — bland fusion territory again.
In short, this may be curious, but not very interesting.
It takes some time to warm up to Stivell's magic, and now here is an album that
almost intentionally cuts down on the magic in favour of finding new types of
arrangements that are clearly not his forté: not so much a «sellout» as
a little bit of self-betrayal, inevitably followed by self-loss. On the other
hand, it would have been a miracle to see the man able to come up with another
great whopper right after the big punch of Symphonie
Celtique, so there is no need to be extra harsh.
LEGENDE (1983)
1) Tour An Arvor; 2)
Marc'heien; 3) Barn; 4) Azenor; 5) Sawen; 6) Tour An Arvor; 7) Eireog
Shineidin; 8) Imram Brain; 9) Les Peuples Dieux De Danu; 10) Dagda &
Morrigan; 11) Eriu; 12) Dans Le Tertre; 13) Le Songe D'Angus; 14) Le Pacte; 15)
Au-Delà Des 9 Vagues.
Stuff started happening to musical
traditionalists in the Eighties that is fairly hard to describe. Without
expressly «selling out», many of them tried to adapt to common shifts in «sonic
value», taking more advantage of various studio technologies than they ever
paid attention to in the previous decades, sometimes putting production and
atmosphere way in advance of the melodies.
Clannad were probably the most notorious
example — all of a sudden, going from a fresh, lively band sound to
exaggeratedly mystical ambience that eventually dissolved them among miriads of
commercially oriented New-Ageists. But at least Clannad never had any serious
progressive ambitions — their scope and reputation always made it obvious that
those guys, if necessary, could and
would go with the flow. But Stivell? In a certain way, the man was a creative
giant of the 1970s; and the higher he ascended, the more cause we all had to
worry with the upcoming change of the third number from 7 to 8.
Légende is the first album from Stivell that, while
not being expressly bad or distasteful, does absolutely nothing for me.
Technically, it consists of two long suites ('Si J'Avais 1,000 Ans' and 'La
Venue Des Peuples-Dieux'), the first one serenely meditative, the second a
musical recasting of a little bit of Irish mythology. Substantially, not only
does it add relatively little, if anything, to our already accumulated hoard of
Stivell wisdom, but it simply sounds slight.
Most of the music just seems like bits of homebrewed harp and flute improvs
without much depth or development — in comparison with Renaissance De La Harpe Celtique, it is almost as if Alan had a
strange idea to reward his fans with old bits and pieces from the scrapbooks of
his youth.
What is
new on the album is what I'd call the «gathering-of-the-clouds» approach: lots
and lots and lots of synthesized background noises, whirlwinds, echoes, dark
choral vocals, etc. — typical New Age stylistics with its silly paradox: using
ultra-modern electronic technologies to create an atmosphere of allegedly
archaic, reverential mysticism. Of course, this stuff can be done well, but if
you just prop it up by humming under your nose, distractedly plucking the same
old chords, that's not inspiration, that's crisis.
I honestly cannot recommend this at all. Thumbs down.
As an amusing bit of trivia, Clannad would release their album called Legend
just one year later — and that, too, would be one of their blandest efforts.
Coincidence or revenge of the old gods?
HARPES DU NOUVEL AGE (1985)
1) Musique Sacrée; 2)
Dor I; 3) Piberezh; 4) Dor II; 5) Rory Dall's Love Tune; 6) Kervalan; 7)
Luskellerezh; 8) Dihun'ta; 9) En Dro Inis-Arzh; 10) Dans Fanch Mitt; 11) Suite
Ecossaise; 12) Dor III.
This is a minor and little-known release, sort
of a tiny footnote in Alan's 1980s catalog, notable for but two things: (a) it
garnered him an Indie Award (his only «official» recognition by the American
industry, if I have not missed anything), (b) simply put, it may well have been
his finest hour for that decade.
What we have here is simply thirty-five minutes
of slow, samey, meditative harp playing. With New Age and ambient stuff a firm
presence on the market, why refrain from showing the world that his old love,
the Celtic harp, can be just as effective at this «maximum mood, minimum melody»
thing that everyone was going so crazy about at the time? If there is an
audience out there for Music For
Airports, surely there must be someone who will lap at the chance to hear
the same stuff reproduced on an exotic plucked instrument.
And? Well, the harp definitely works fine as an
«ambient» instrument. Of course, you have to understand that this kind of
«ambient» is still very different structurally from the Glass/Eno school:
Stivell's «ambience» is derived from — guess what — Celtic folk and the amount
of notes he plays is still fairly high; the difference is that about ninety
percent of this stuff is built on drones or circle loops that go on and on with
but slight changes that only register on the subconscious level. Sort of a
virulent Celtic radiation thing on your brain.
One technical innovation is Stivell's use of a
freshly designed electric harp — which, to my untrained ears, sounds indistinguishable
from an acoustic one (now if he'd only attach a distortion pedal, that would be
something!..), but the man is fond of those kinds of symbolic gestures —
bridging the gaps between the past and the future, that sort of thing.
Anyway, it all sounds lovely and fresh, with
very little in the way of «murky», «cloudy» ambience of his last two records,
certainly a major rarity for an album from 1985. None of the «tunes» seriously
merit individual description, but altogether they add up to a one-of-a-kind
experience from Stivell and show that his fantasy well had not yet completely
run dry by then. On the other hand, I hesitate to freely recommend this to
anyone not yet deeply engaged in meditative spiritual practices — and Zen Yoga
devotees will probably prefer something with a more Eastern flavor.
THE MIST OF AVALON (1991)
1) La Dame Du Lac; 2) Morgan;
3) Camaalot (Hymn 1); 4) Guenievre; 5) Le Chant De Taliesin; 6) La Blessure
D'Arthur; 7) Le Val Sans Retour; 8) Belenton; 9) Olwen; 10) Quest; 11) An
Advod; 12) Horses On The Hills; 13) Strink Ar Graal; 14) From Avallac'h; 15)
Gaelic Tribes Gathering; 16) The Return (Hymn 2).
If you have some tiny suspicion that a title
like The Mist Of Avalon did not come
by accident, but could be targeted at the medium-mass-buyer who mistily
remembers the word «Avalon», but cannot be bothered to look with reverence or
interest at the bizarre intricacies of Breton orthography... well, you might
be onto something. By all means this is Stivell not just at his most accessible,
ever, but also at his most aggressively
accessible. Sixty minutes of Celtic-style arena-rock, dance-pop, and somber,
but rhythmical, New Age noodling.
There may also be some connection here with
Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists Of
Avalon, of course, all the more fitting given how her most humane of all humane retellings of King Arthur's story was
such a popular success in itself a decade before. But this is rather irrelevant
to the traditional Stivell fan, who may probably think of the whole thing as a
sick cheapening of the typical Stivell experience.
Synthesizers. Big electronic drums. Simplified
melodies with improved catchiness (sometimes) and dissipated mystery. Bombastic
vocals. Listen to the first fifteen seconds of 'Le Chant De Taliesin' — is this
Stivell or Black Oak Arkansas when, after several bars of big ol' boozy drum
pounding, the arrival of the main melody is announced by a
"YEEEAAAAAH!" that should typically be followed with a HOUSTON, ARE
YOU READY TO ROCK kind of thing?
Not that it isn't at least curious to see
Stivell sell out — the man does it with class, enough to ensure that the album
will never sell. Lots of singing in French and Breton anyway, too many bagpipes
and harps for the common ear, and if you want to headbang to 'Guenievre' or
'Chant De Taliesin', you still have to endorse the serious medieval agenda. In
fact, once you listen to the tunes really closely, there will be little details
(such as the angelic choir on 'Le Val Sans Retour') that suggest Alan did
actually put some care and some heart into the album. But then you fall upon
the silly-sounding synth loops of 'Gaelic Tribes Gathering' (Around The Mighty
Synth, no doubt), and you begin to wish he didn't.
I cannot bring myself to give this stuff a
thumbs down: even in the grip of strange rock hero delusions and modern
technology, Alan still manages to keep most
of the songs in relatively good taste. But this is definitely not the kind of album that could ever
explain why in the world anybody would want to review the man in the first
place. Not that parts of it wouldn't work fine as a soundtrack for the likes of
Excalibur — oddly murky, dated,
cheap-thrilling music for an oddly murky, dated, cheap-thrilling movie.
AGAIN (1993)
1) Suite Sudarmoricaine; 2) An
Dro / Tha Mi Sgith; 3) Ar An Garraig / Telenn Gwad; 4) The Foggy Dew; 5) Suzy
McGuire; 6) Suite Irlandaise; 7) Spered Hollvedel; 8) Son Ar Chistr; 9) Marv Ma
Mestrez; 10) Kimiad; 11) Suite Des Montagnes; 12) Metig; 13) Pop-Plinn; 14) Bal
Ha Dans Plinn; 15) O'Neill's March/The King Of The Fairies; 16) Ian Morrison
Reel; 17) Tri Martolod.
Either out of nostalgia or out of ideas,
Stivell recorded this album of self-covers that relates to his early output
much like the «enhanced» new DVD versions of Star Wars relate to the originals: with the artist procuring
himself tons of pointless fun watching the fans kill each other over the issue
of how much should an artist really
be allowed to tamper with one's own art. Except that it takes the much less
numerous Stivell fans much less time to exterminate themselves than it takes
Star Wars fans — which must be the reason why we so rarely see them on the
streets any more.
Anyway, all or most of the tracks are new
recordings of old «classics» going as far back as Reflets and, I believe, stopping around Chemins De Terre, with these two albums and the Olympia Concert taking up the lion's
share. Considering that Stivell is an acknowledged technophile, and has always
dreamed of reaching the perfect synthesis between the past, present, and
future, it was perhaps inevitable that one day he'd want to «clean up» the old
stuff. But it is also predictable that «cleaned up» it may be, but improved
upon — no way.
One should admit that, if you play the old
stuff back to back with the new stuff, Stivell's harp sound definitely sounds
cleaner, fresher, «thinner» than it used to be — but one wonders, of course,
if the same effect could not have been reached by simply re-remastering the old
records. The downside is the electronic vibe: swampy synths and booming
electronic drums. They aren't everywhere,
but they sure stick around, and every time they do, I cannot help but think how
come by 1993 Stivell had not yet realized these New Age paraphernalia were no
less dated than hair metal and 'Owner Of A Lonely Heart'.
Some of the stuff is even more dated, and with even less reason to be so: for instance,
'Kimiad' from Chemins De Terre
receives a generic and completely unnecessary «jazz-fusion-style» bass solo in
the middle, something Stivell had not touched upon in the past because there
was really no need. All of a sudden we're in this Joni Mitchell mode circa 1979
— why?
That said, it could all have been worse. It is
not a total crime to become acknowledged with Alan's classics through these re-recordings.
It is a total crime to make this your
one and only Stivell record, though, because Again operates under the presumption of the «Dumb Modern Person»,
unable to perceive the value of any work of art unless it is draped in
contemporary drapes. Even if Stivell's own conception is more noble
(modernization as just another inevitable stage of the creative process), in
the grand scheme of things it still comes out that way. Even the Star Wars
analogy does not quite work — George Lucas, after all, had placed technophilia
above everything else from the very beginning, and it is only natural of him
to renovate the old stuff according to the new standards. For Stivell, on the
other hand, melody and vibe was always more important than production, and Again might easily deviate the innocent
into suspecting the opposite. For all these reasons — an offended thumbs down,
even despite the fact that nothing on the album is explicitly cringeworthy per
se.
P.S. Kate Bush fans may be delighted to know
that she plays keyboards on 'Kimiad', and Pogues fans may be delighted to know
that Shane McGowan duets with Alan on 'Tri Martolod'. Not that there's any real
worthy reason to be delighted, but it's a nice turn of phrase to wrap up an
obligatory trivia bit.
BRIAN BORU (1995)
1) Brian Boru; 2) Let The
Plinn; 3) Mnà
Na hÉireann; 4) Ye Banks And Braes; 5) Mairi's Wedding; 6) Cease Fire;
7) De' Ha' Bla; 8) Sword Dance; 9) Parlamant Lament; 10) Lands Of My Father.
Brian Bóruma mac Cennétig is one
of Ireland's legendary cultural-political heroes, credited with cementing the
Irishness of the Irish in the face of the Scandinavian threat. As is often the
case in such situations, Brian's real role may have been vastly exaggerated by
tradition, but why should the average O'Brien care about it? We all need
someone we can bleed on, as Mick tells us.
Anyway, the title alone is enough to guess that
this must be Stivell's brotherly contribution to the nation of Ireland: not a
mixed pan-Celtic product as usual, but concentrated strictly on all things
Irish. He still does a lot of singing in Breton, though, presumably because of
rather poor pronunciation skills when it comes to enunciating Irish words
instead (so the knowledgeable people say,
at least, although most of us will never know the ultimate truth); and when he
switches to Irish, he is frequently accompanied by fiddle player and singer
Máire Breatnach, endowed with one of those proverbially gorgeous Celtic
singing voices that eventually run the risk of becoming a bit too generically gorgeous. She's alright in
limited doses, though.
As for the music, this is typical late-period
Stivell: some nice, not too original melodies, occasionally spoiled by
overproduction, mixed with an occasional horrible-shit-idea or two. It never
really gets better than the title track, with a well-rounded epic (and
catchy!) duet between Alan and Máire, who, out of nowhere, throws on a
couple verses from Irish poet Caitlin Maude's «Vietnam Lovesong» (!) — which,
obviously, fit in well with an ode to Brian Boru since nobody undertands a
word in the first place.
Then, in standard typical late-period Stivell
manner, he introduces us to 'Let The Plinn', a goofy bass-heavy, effects-laden
«world music» dance number that probably begs for being pigeonholed as «Celtic
rap». It is not so much «cheesy» per se as simply unnecessary, a track whose
only function is to advertise itself as a novelty gimmick, a far cry indeed
from the inspired synthesis of Celtic
Symphony. It is an unusual twist, and it does give Brian Boru a unique facial feature, but would you want to be able
to remember a person primarily because of a huge wart right under his nose, or
something like that?
Still, overall,
Brian Boru is an improvement over Avalon. Stivell's technophile excesses,
with the exception of 'Plinn', are kept to a minimum, the harps and bagpipes
dominate the proceedings, and 'Ye Banks And Braes' and 'Mairi's Wedding' are
beautiful upbeat traditional ballads with well adjusted electric guitar solos.
It does not look like Alan is trying too
hard: the days of master class in creativity are long gone. But with Brian Boru, it seems as if he has more
or less reached a certain truce with himself, comfortably settling into a
formula that pleases his own spirit and his small fan following; and in this
context, the artist is usually guaranteed a steady flow of «B-level» albums,
with a risk of descending into «C-level» territory only if some inner demon
tempts him to transform all of his music into lame attempts at modernization à la 'Let The Plinn'.
Fortunately, the temptation process was never completed on this cozy, lovely,
middle-of-the-road little record. Thumbs up, I guess.
1 DOUAR (1998)
1) A United Earth I; 2) La
Mémoire De L'Humain; 3) Hope; 4) Ensemble (Understand); 5) Crimes; 6) A
United Earth II; 7) Scots Are Right; 8) Ever; 9) Kenavo Glenmor; 10) Una's
Love; 11) Aet On (Into The Universe's Breath); 12) A United Earth III.
Back to musical pan-globalism, with
surprisingly classy results. The target audience of Eunn Douar («One Earth», but, as the exact title suggests, still
seen through the unmistakeable eyes of a Breton) comprises admirers of «world
music» understood as a synthesis of one or two areal traditions with Western
pop music elements and production values (as opposed to, say, «ethnic music»
where you actually listen to a real tribe of hunter-gatherers banging the drums
for fifty minutes as the neighbours go quietly mad). To that end, we have lots
and lots of guest stars, including Senegalese star Youssou N'Dour, Algerian
star Khaled, and a bunch of Stivell's pals from the Celtic musical business
world.
My own knowledge of «world music» is fairly
limited, possibly because I have always regarded it more as a «social tool» than
a set of self-contained art forms. As far as I'm concerned, Youssou N'Dour
exists primarily to inform people of
the fact that there is such a country as Senegal, with its own history,
culture, and art. That's a good, healthy, educational mission. Real specialists
in African art and culture may, however, dismiss the man as a «Western sellout»,
and they will have their point, too (even if they do acknowledge his role in
changing Western perceptions about the rest of the world). In any case, there
has been relatively little «world music» that I have heard which would make me
want to spend time and resources on a full immersion, from the Americas to
Africa to the Middle East to the Pacific and back again.
That said, 1
Douar, with all of its Celto-African fusion bits, is still primarily a
Stivell album. Alan and Youssou N'Dour may duet in their respective tongues on
'A United Earth' all they want, but it is still the quirky Celtic harp rhythms
and the merry sound of ye olde recorder that drive the tune forward, and it is
only on the reprise version that both are complemented by explicitly African-style
drumming. 'Crimes', with Khaled singing a Bedouin raï against Stivell's Celtic folk motive, is more democratic in that
respect — but, perhaps not surprisingly, much less memorable.
The album's true
surprise is 'Ever', a duet with John Cale
of all people, set to hard-rocking distorted guitar chords and an almost
trip-hoppy rhythm track. However, it is also a disappointment, since a little
bit of crunch is just about
everything that separates it from the rest of the tracks, and it is not clear
why John Cale should be associated with crunch
when he is usually associated with lots of other things; a misused presence
indeed.
In general, 1
Douar is perfectly listenable, without any tasteless slip-ups, and its main
theme may well be included in any Stivell retrospective, but it is definitely
not the «comeback» that I have seen a few people call it. Where Celtic
Symphony was a grand, epic, spirit-arousing triumph, this next attempt at
fusion is languid easy-listening stuff, to be played at quiet, inobtrusive
volume levels in your local stylish ethnic restaurant. (Probably goes down
real well with a good helping of baba ghanoush, over a good glass of chouchen,
to celebrate a truly united earth).
BACK TO BREIZH (2000)
1) Vers Les Iles Et Villes De Verre;
2) Rêves (Hunvreoù); 3) Ceux Qui Sèment La Mort; 4)
Arvor-You; 5) Rock Harp; 6) Skoit 'N Treid!; 7) Iroise; 8) Kreiz Hag Endro; 9)
Back To Breizh!; 10) Harpe De Vies; 11) Brian Boru In French; 12) Armoricaine Suite.
«Back» is right: the last time Stivell came out
with an album completely centered on his native locality was in... 1981? 1979?
Whatever. Of course, most people would never notice much difference between
Breizh, Cymru, and Eire in the first place, but it's been a long, long time
since Alan recorded anything for «most people». Back To Breizh, too, is strictly for the fans.
For those nostalgic fans, actually, who dislike
Stivell's synthesis of Celtic and anti-Celtic musical traditions: at the
expense of sounding too monotonous
and retrograde, he sticks to Breton melodicity all the way through, ending the
album with a massive re-recording of 'Suite Armoricaine' and offering new variations
on old melodies that I would hardly dare to call exciting.
The good news include a major improvement in
production values. Synthesizers are used sparingly, so that the «swampy» New
Agish effect is generally missing; most of the tunes show a clean, sparkling
sound that we really hadn't heard on Stivell's song-based albums since the
1970s. At the same time, he is not abandoning modern technologies at all: the
title of 'Rock Harp' speaks for itself, as the man attaches yet another
distorted technogadget to his instrument to make it sound like one of Adrian
Belew's treated guitars. And on the title track, memorable mostly because of
its sentimental-nostalgic melodica 'n' bagpipe curve, he toys a bit with voice
encoding (just a bit, punctuating certain moments in the chorus — just so that
you wouldn't mistake the album for
something recorded around 1976).
Other than that, there is not much to say,
except that this might be Stivell's most «authentic-sounding» record from the
last part of his career, and in 2000, when it must have been lying around at least in some of Europe's musical stores, it was no big crime to use it as
an introduction to his world. These days, there is no reason to seek it out instead of going straight for the real
thing.
AU-DELA DES MOTS (2002)
1) La Harpe, L'Eau, Le Vent
(A); 2) La Celtie Et L'Infini (A); 3) La Celtie Et L'Infini (B); 4) Dihun
Telenn vMarzhin; 5) La Harpe Et L'Enfant; 6) Bleimor, Le Bagad; 7)
Gourin-Pontivy; 8) E Kreiz Breizh; 9) Goltraidhe; 10) Et Les Feuilles
Repousseront; 11) Demain Matin Chez O'Carolan; 12) Harpe Atlantique/La Route De
L'Etain; 13) La Celtie Et L'Infini (C); 14) La Harpe, L'Eau, Le Vent (C).
It does not require a deep knowledge of French
to understand that this is yet another purely instrumental album from Mr.
Stivell, and, as such, not deserving of a long review. This one is less
explicitly ambient than Harpes Du Nouvel
Age: the arrangements are more complex, and the overall spirit is a bit
more dynamic ('Bleimor, Le Bagad' refers to the music of Breton pipe bands
called bagad, and, sure enough, an
actual ear-bursting bagad is
enlisted; and 'Gourin-Pontivy' is a very quiet, hushed-down, but still
danceable tune).
On the other hand, it is certainly no Renaissance Of The Celtic Harp: next to
Stivell's landmark breakthrough record, this one is just a modest collection
of pretty, but relatively unstimulating and mostly unremarkable melodic weaves.
However magical and otherworldly the sound of the Celtic harp may be, there are certain limits to it; being
tailor-made for exclusive needs of traditional Celtic melodic patterns, it
cannot be molded into much of anything else.
Nevertheless, it is probably quite
indispensable for any major lover
and/or student of the harp, as well as for everyone who loves proverbially deep
titles such as 'La Celtie Et L'Infini' (much as listening to the actual melody
convinces me of its oxymoronic nature, unless under 'Infini' he actually means
infinitesimals). Me, I'm only
qualified to acknowledge its soothing New Age-style qualities, rather than
recognize its thematic depth and adventurous spirit.
EXPLORE (2006)
1) Miz Tu; 2) Là-Bas,
Là-Bas; 3) You Know It (Anao'rit); 4) Té (Beyond Words); 5) They;
6) Into; 7) Druidic Lands; 8) Menez; 9) Explore; 10) Un Parfait Paradis (Miz
Tu 2).
From one extremity to the other: if Back To Breizh was a stark piece of
nostalgia, Explore, with its telling
title, is the most «modern» Stivell ever got since his endorsement of prog-rock
trappings back in the Seventies. The harp still plays the lead role on most of
the tracks, but now it is inseparable from hi-tech electronic pulses and
programmed beats — not that he never toyed with either before, but this time,
the experiment is carried through over the course of an entire album, and,
starting from the very first track, it is the electronics that catch most of
the attention, rather than the harp. Particularly if you are already a Stivell
fan and take the harp for granted.
None of the modern elements are taken in a
«dumb» manner: hard-working guy Stivell takes as much care about diversifying
his drum machines and synchronizing them with the harp melodies as he takes
about the melodies themselves. The results are... interesting. At the very
least, they show that the man is consistently sticking to his credo: fusing
deep past with cutting-edge present. At most, their uniqueness may trigger an
unpredictable psychedelic reaction in your brain. Trip-hop rhythms multiplied
by masterful Breton harp — you don't find that lying around on every corner,
not when it is that creative, at
least.
Sadly, I never felt any magic; to my ears, the
combination worked about as well as putting whipped cream on seafood. As an
original «vaccination» against decaying in one's conservatism, it is probably a
good move on Stivell's part. As the possible start of a new genre, say, «Celtic
IDM» or whatever, it is ridiculous, bound to alienate lots of Alan's
«traditional» fans (those who either view any kind of programmed beat as an
immediate sellout, or, like me, just do not see the appeal of these things
going together) and hardly capable of attracting new ones — I mean, if you are
an admirer of the Electronic Arts, what in the world would make you want to
enrich your experience by listening to an old Breton geezer adding plinking
harps and buzzing pipes to a sound that, by nature, should rule out «live»
instruments as atavisms?
Not that there aren't any good songs —
'Là-Bas, Là-Bas' in particular has a marvelous harp «riff» to it
— and not that the whole thing is, in any way, «unlistenable». It is just that
it sets a very high goal, and, for the most part, shows that the goal is
unreachable (to me, at least). Alas, sometimes it is better to just stick to
that harp.
EMERALD (2009)
1) Brittany's - Ar Bleizi Mor;
2) Lusk - Skye Boat Song; 3) Marionig; 4) Tamm Ha Tamm - Rennes, Nantes &
Brest; 5) Gael's Call - Glaoch Na nGael; 6) Harplinn; 7) Goadec Rock; 8)
Eibhlin - Eileen A Roon; 9) Aquarelle - Er Penn All D'Al Lanneg; 10) An Hirañ
Noz - Noël, Espoir - Ar Hyd Y Nos; 11) Mac Crimon (part I); 12) Mac Crimon
(part II); 13) Mac Crimon (part III).
Emerald has the same number of letters as Explore and both begin with an E. The
similarities do not end there, as you understand, but overall, the two records
drift on completely different pivots. This time, Alan is back to «normal»
music-making, and three years of procrastination have done well for the 21st
century druid: not only has he managed to come up with his most diverse album
in years, if not decades, but he has even done what I already believed
impossible — scaled those cathartic heights once again.
It comes on in the very end, though; you'll
have to wait for it, but the three-part epic 'Mac Crimon' is worth every bit
the wait. It is one of Alan's grandest finales, the grandest, perhaps, since Celtic
Symphony, if nowhere near as complex — just a stately piano melody, some
bagpipes, and choral singing ('L'Ensemble Choral Du Bout De Monde', to be
precise) to wind up the solemnity motor. The middle part is the real juicy bit,
but it sits well in its coating of pipes and gloomy acappella singing from both
sides. It probably will not work, though, if there was never a moment somewhere
deep in your childhood when you did not shun away from the opportunity of
shedding a tear over 'Auld Lang Syne'. (Never too late, though).
The rest of the record also aspires to grabbing
one's attention, in a better planned and more seriously concentrated effort
than anything since... quite a long time ago. Simply put, this is a working
synthesis of just about all the directions, with the exception of «world music
fusion», that Stivell had pursued in the past thirty years. Some of this sounds
like cocky Celtic power-pop ('Ar Bleizi Mor'), some, like Mist Of Avalon-style Arthurian opera ('Lusk'), some, like his New
Age experiments, but with more distinctively fleshed out musical themes
('Harplinn'), and for those who like it loud and brawny there is even some
really jarring, grumbly Celtic hard rock ('Goadec Rock' may be driven by the
deepest, heaviest guitar rhythm part in all of Alan's catalog, and, surprisingly,
it sounds quite tasteful at that).
All of which shows that, even if the main bulk
of Stivell's legend is unlikely to get more props (not that it is in dire need
of any more), the 65-year old artist is still going strong. Emerald is the kind of record of which
he could make fifty carbon copies and everybody would be happy — unlike Explore, this stuff is timeless, and as
long as Alan is not infected by the notion that new legions of upcoming young
fans must learn to appreciate Celtic motives by hearing them in hip-hop or
nu-metal or emocore arrangements, all new albums such as these will be an
incessant source of B-level enjoyment (the A-level, I'm afraid, ended with the
Seventies). Thumbs
up.
AMZER (2015)
1) New' Amzer — Spring; 2)
Other Times — Amzerioù All; 3) Matin De Printemps — Kesa-no Haru; 4)
Mintin New' Hañv; 5) Au Plus Près Des Limites — Je Marcherai; 6)
Purple Moon; 7) Postscript; 8) Kala-Goañv — Calendes D'Hiver; 9) What
Could I Do?; 10) Kerzu — December; 11) Halage; 12) Echu Ar Goañv? — Till
Spring?.
For several years, word has been leaking out
about the preparation of a new Stivell album, but then the process became so
stretched out that eventually everybody lost interest. When it was finally
released in 2015, it was done to such tiny fanfare that even some of the
regularly updated Internet databases failed to register the event — but yes,
there it is, finally: a brand new Alan Stivell record that shows the man ready
and willing to settle into very old age, but unwilling to abandon his dedicated
search for the last cosmopolitan chord.
Once again, this is not so much a «Celtic»
album as a fusion between several genres, or, at least, a «Celtic perspective»
on different parts of the globe. In addition to the predictable vocal and musical
motifs of French, British, Brezhoneg, and Gaelic origin, Stivell now displays a
fascination with traditional (and I stress — traditional!) Japanese culture, even inviting a couple of Japanese
ladies to recite some classic haiku lines on some of the tracks. Actually,
that's not really a lot of
internationalization: musically, Stivell remains closely tied to his harp and
the Celtic tradition, and he might be a little too old now to try and pick up
the koto. On the other hand, it does
count as a symbolic recognition of the close connection between all sorts of
folk traditions, Eastern and Western, and the link between Celtic harp melodies
and haiku recitals feels almost surprisingly natural. So, hey, if this is any
help in getting some Japanese cultural fund to donate to the preservation
needs of Brezhoneg culture... why not?
The problem with Amzer (which, by the way, is the Breton word for 'time, weather,
season' and announces the rather obvious conceptual theme for the album) is
that most of the actual music here is not very interesting. According to
Stivell himself, it was largely based upon his improvisation routines, and
also reflected a growing interest in studio experimentation — many of the
tracks feature elements of «computer-assisted deconstruction-reconstruction»,
which sounds cool on paper, but in reality makes the whole thing very confusing
and unfocused. There are really no memorable melodies, just a lot of
atmospheric «harping» around, usually at low volume and with very little energy
— bordering on sheer ambience most of the time, really. As atmospheric background
muzak, it's every bit as good as any Stivell product that remained unspoiled by
silly technology: pretty harp, chirping birds, cloudy synths, and Stivell's
voice, despite the aging process, has not lost a shred of its friendliness or
expressivity. But where even Emerald
was, after all, a collection of compositions, some of them very memorable, this is a decorative piece — yes, like a
cute little Japanese garden or something.
The only actual «song» is ʽWhat Could I
Do?ʼ, a strangely un-cozy, blues-tinged dirge with bits of distorted
guitar and wheezing synths cluttering the background and a general atmosphere of
worry and even depression. It is not completely out of place, because it fits
in rather naturally with the ensuing harsh coldness of ʽDecemberʼ,
apparently illustrating a grim winter mood. But most of the time, the
atmosphere is very light — not exactly joyful, but optimistic and
spiritual-celebrational, right from the opening ʽSpringʼ and until
the album closing instrumental ʽTill Spring?ʼ that brings us full
circle. A quiet, unpretentious affair: despite all the digital experimentation,
Amzer is first and foremost an album
by somebody who's got absolutely nothing new to say, and does the next best
thing — sits on his front porch and cooks up nice radiovibes, dissipating as
quickly as they are generated but leaving a pleasant aftertaste.
I do have to state that if this is really the
best that the man can come up with over a six-year period, this means that he's
largely finished as an artist. But then again, who at this time could expect a
new Symphonie Celtique from him?
These «front porch improvisations» are nice enough to serve as background music
for the time being — and if it happens to really be his last album after all,
who knows, maybe repeated listens in the future will make it seem like the
perfect musical goodbye from an old tradition-cherishing geezer who decided to
go out with a gentle breeze rather than a stunning bang of an album.
THE AMAZING BLONDEL (1970)
1) Saxon Lady; 2) Bethel Town
Mission; 3) Season Of The Year; 4) Canaan; 5) Shepherd's Song; 6) Though You
Don't Want My Love; 7) Love Sonnet; 8) Spanish Lace; 9) Minstrel's Song; 10)
Bastard Love.
There used to be a little-known British band
called Methuselah, whose musical philosophy consisted of merging hard rock,
folk music, and gospel and whose thinly veiled intent must have been to last
for nine hundred and sixty nine years. (Not) coincidentally, their first album
was released in 1969, and was named after the original four members of the
band: Matthew, Mark, John & Luke.
Oh wait, that was a different band. Anyway, instead of carrying on for 969
years, the group, having failed to attract anyone's interest, fell apart in
less than one, and out of its ashes rose Amazing Blondel.
The original members were John Gladwin and
Terry Wincott, both singers and multi-instrumentalists, and the original
purpose was to cut down on the hard rock side of Methuselah (which never stood
any competition with the real hard rock bands of the day) and emphasize the
folky side, digging way deeper into Britain's musical past than the average
folker of the day would usually dig. Many bands had previously borrowed
elements of medieval and Renaissance music, but none of note had yet been
formed around those styles — meaning
that Blondel were not even competing with the likes of Fairport Convention, so
very much a rock band despite all the
folk influences. The niche was free, and Gladwin and Wincott were there to
take it.
Had they been talentless nincompoops, the
taking would not have mattered. Fortunately, Gladwin also turned out to be a
first-rate composer (pocketing the lion's share of credits on all of the band's
albums prior to his departure, and, unsurprisingly, the alleged decline of
Blondel started exactly around the time of that departure), and few artists of
the XXth century managed to prove the viability of Elizabethan and suchlike
music more convincingly than Amazing Blondel did over the three or four years
of deep inspiration that were granted to them.
The self-titled debut, also known as The Amazing Blondel & A Few Faces
(«Blondel», after all, is just one person, and the band always positioned
itself as a collective force, despite Gladwin writing most of the music), is
arguably Blondel's «lightest» and «most accessible» record. With no extended
instrumental suites and not as much academic purism as the band's ensuing
output, it is a perfect introduction for all those who prefer to wade in slowly
than to dive in head first. Ten songs that range from gallant pastoral balladry
to what may pass for 19th century barroom entertainment, with shades of gospel
and even a little R'n'B — each one built around a catchy, friendly, sing-along
chorus and embellished with thick, well-varied «multi-instrumentation».
It can very clearly be seen, though, that the
band's strength tends to increase in direct proportion to the archaicness of
their influences. Stuff like 'Though You Don't Want My Love', which can easily
be imagined as gracing some second-rate Atlantic artist's country/R'n'B
crossover record, is tolerable, and sung with as much fire as possible, but
still sort of useless. The gospel wave of 'Canaan', although delivered with
enough sincerity, is hardly all that exquisite. 'Bethel Town Mission' is a generic
«lowbrow» folk tune, performable by just about anybody etc. etc.
It is the courteous trouveur thing at which the
band really excels, starting with the opening 'Saxon Lady' and continuing with
such fragile beauties as 'Season Of The Year', 'Shepherd's Song', and
'Minstrel's Song'. The arrangements weave together guitars, mandolins, pipes,
subtle orchestration, and sometimes even «extraneous» elements, e. g. sitars
and tablas on 'Saxon Lady', which somehow manage to fit in perfectly with the
atmosphere. The instrumental melodies are not so much original (for the most
part, they must be little more than variations on older themes, although I have
no expertise on that) as they are highly «unusual» in a 1970 setting, and the
vocal melodies are sung in a nice compromised manner between XVIth century
mannerism and XXth century heart-on-the-sleeve style.
However, on the whole I would still classify Amazing Blondel with those records on
which the «so-so» material is ennobled and illuminated by the first-rate
compositions rather than the opposite (first-rate compositions dragged down by
the filler) — because the band is fully committed to making their sound work,
regardless of whatever it is they are actually playing. There is not one truly
«weak» moment here, and, in a way, the diversity of approaches may be easier to
stand than the much stricter «mono-channelling» on some of the more classic
records. Thumbs
up; had I begun my acquaintance with the band ten years earlier, it
would even have been possible for A Few
Faces to be rated above everything that followed.
EVENSONG (1970)
1) Pavan; 2) St. Crispin's
Day; 3) Spring Season; 4) Willowood; 5) Evensong; 6) Queen Of Scots; 7)
Ploughman; 8) Old Moot Hall; 9) Lady Marion's Galliard; 10) Under The Greenwood
Tree; 11) Anthem.
With the addition of Edward Baird to the
line-up, Amazing Blondel become a stabilized trio with one firm goal in life:
be reincarnated alive as authentic «Renaissance men». Discarding gospel, blues,
and contemporary rural folk motives, they concentrate on one style only — that
of the gallant courtier music 'round the 16th century. Their influences now
span a pretty short distance — say, from about Henry the Eighth to about
William Byrd — but at least nobody could now accuse them of lacking an identity
all their own. In 1970, no other band sounded like this on a constant,
workman-like basis.
Now one thing we must all understand is that
the most «authentic» thing about the classic Blondel lineup is their use of
period instruments. Lutes, theorboes, citterns, violas, harpsichords, recorders,
crumhorns, pipe-organs, and so on; dozens of different instruments are listed,
and not a single one of them invented in post-Elizabethan times. And yet, at
the same time, John Gladwin mostly plays his lute the way he'd be playing a
guitar — were I not made aware of the lack of guitars in the credits, I would
have made the mistake quite easily.
Any average connaisseur of Renaissance music,
let alone serious musicologists, would have immediately spotted forgery:
Gladwin's compositions, whether he wants it or not, always tend to drift away
towards simple, basic folk balladry structures rather than inventive musical
experimentation at Tudor courts. In this respect, much more impressive work
would be done later in the decade by Gryphon; as for Evensong, all of the music on it is so light and fluffy, it could
be pigeonholed as «twee-Renaissance».
However, Blondel's saving grace lies in the
fact that none of the band members took this stuff too seriously. They
themselves openly admitted to playing «pseudo-Elizabethan» music; and live,
they would be spicing up their shows with bawdy banter, as if wanting to stress
the fact that they were more jesters than minstrels. Therein lies the reason
why the band has never garnered much attention or respect from «progressive»
audiences: in spirit, these guys really belonged to the mid-to-late Sixties
generation of the innocent, idealistic flower power generation, even if in form
they would be aligned with the stern, technically endowed, strictly music-bent
prog- and medieval-rockers of the early 1970s.
But even if, in a way, Evensong belongs to the category of «fluff», it is terrific, highly
entertaining, irresistible fluff. The kind of fluff that the Monkees would
probably want to play if stuffed inside a time machine and transported five
centuries back. Ten lightweight minstrel ballads here, each one catchy in its
own way, right from the very first seconds of 'Pavan', with Wincott's pastoral
recorder dancing along with Gladwin's guitar-like lute. Most of the themes
concern gentlemen's lady issues ("This is spring season, and the time for
courting's come around", the third track politely states), i. e.
quasi-16th century equivalents of 'I Want To Hold Your Hand', and only the
album-closing 'Anthem', built around a solemn harmonium and organ part, changes
the general mood, in a rather bizarre way — as if to tie up ten gentle and
frivolous ditties with one harsh strand of stern (but optimistic) pomp.
Somehow, it works.
In retrospect, Evensong is really like a general rehearsal before the next two
albums, which are generally acknowledged to form the true cornerstone of
Blondel's reputation. But, being more «feather-light» than those two, it may
actually be truer to the band's essence. One thing's for certain: no one can
complain that on Evensong, Amazing
Blondel bit off more than they could chew. And another thing is my personal
amazement at Gladwin's melodic ideas — for an album composed of ten
similar-sounding, same-mood archaicized ballads to be able to hold my attention
from top to bottom is a rare feat indeed. Thumbs up for all the fair sounds, no matter how
«pseudo» they might actually be.
FANTASIA LINDUM (1971)
1) Fantasia Lindum; 2) To Ye;
3) Safety In God Alone; 4) Two Dances; 5) Three Seasons Almaine; 6) Siege Of
Yaddlethorpe.
Blondel's third album finds the band in dire
need of adding complexity to their sound — what with folk and medieval motives
becoming more and more merged with the «progressive» ideology. Unfortunately,
none of the musicians were quite up to that task, so instead they offered a
ruse: join some of Gladwin's songs into a multi-part «suite» that would swallow
up the entire first side of the album, yet consist of exactly the same catchy
pseudo-Baroque ditties, loosely connected through brief instrumental links.
As strange as it seems, though, either the
links are capable of throwing one off the track, or they assembled the whole
«Fantasia Lindum» from scraps and leftovers — the individual parts are way too
glossy and smooth to stand out. It is twenty minutes of the usual refined
gallantry, but without memorable choruses or particularly distinctive
instrumental lines: everything sounds too
angelic, too even, to make much of a
lasting impression. Perhaps that was the exact intention, keeping in mind the
name of the suite — a tribute to the stately (and static) beauty of Lincoln and
Lincoln Cathedral. But you wouldn't know that, anyway, without consulting the
sources.
At first, I thought this feeling was just some
sort of emotional echo of some of my long-time past difficulties with «complex»
music of the 1970s, but it never passed, and, besides, let us reiterate that
there is nothing particularly complex about Blondel. Then there is also Side B,
which has all the real highlights. 'To
Ye' introduces a vivid demarcation line between soft verse and loud chorus,
with an uplifting recorder melody to boot. 'Safety In God Alone' is one of the
tenderest songs ever offered to the
Almighty — in fact, its tenderness is so sexy that when the chorus enters with
"Light up all your candles, keep the vigil tonight", you'd think they
were singing about escorting the young king to the royal bedroom on his wedding
night rather than about "praying for salvation, for it's always just in
sight".
The only track that seriously stands out from
the rest musically is 'Siege Of Yaddlethorpe', a short martial fantasy with a
Scottish mood created by multi-tracked crumhorns (the more multi-tracked they
are, the more they sound like low-tuned bagpipes) and powerful drumming
courtesy of guest star Jim Capaldi. (For the record, Yaddlethorpe is the name of
a district in Lincolnshire, and, to the best of my knowledge, there has never been any «siege» of it, nor could
there possibly be since there is next to nothing to besiege — just another
little self-ironic hint at how «faux» this whole enterprise really is).
Thus, reaction to Blondel's evolution in this
direction may be mixed. On one hand, yep, it all generally works, and the band is certainly true
here to the rules of the game it has defined for itself. On the other hand,
there are signs of insecurity — if there ever was one «artsy» band at the time that had no need of sidelong
suites whatsoever, it'd be Blondel, and the fact that they went ahead and did
one anyway shows an odd, perhaps subconscious, tendency to «conform» that
spoils part of the fun. Thumbs up, anyway, for I love this style, but they
would still have to tighten up their act one more year before reaching the
perfect synthesis.
ENGLAND (1972)
1) Seascape; 2) Landscape; 3)
Afterglow; 4) A Spring Air; 5) Cantus Firmus To Counterpoint;
6) Sinfonia For Guitar And Strings; 7) Doctor Dulcis; 8) Lament To The Earl Of
Bottlesford Beck.
England is, quite unquestionably, the Amazing Blondel album. It is quite symbolic that John Gladwin
quit the band soon after its release — the direct reason might have been
personal and creative disagreements, but in terms of more global thinking, England had simply fulfilled the band's
purpose. With their limited ambitions and modest technicality, Amazing Blondel
had nowhere left to go after this.
Which does not mean that England is necessarily a «great» album, or even their best. It is
very one-sided and monotonous. It also surreptitiously discards with much of
the Renaissance flavor: real acoustic guitars are back, big time, and
conversely, many of the old-time instruments are gone, replaced by quite
«normal» chamber music arrangements. We are quite clearly stepping out of the
somber medieval halls and into the sunlit XVIIIth century meadows. To be
honest, I am not even entirely sure just how specifically «English» these melodies are and not, say, German, once you really start reshuffling all the influences. But
the band says England, and who are
we to disagree? Either way, the «England», allegedly recreated and venerated
in XXth century folk-prog, has as much to do with the real England of yore as Braveheart has to do with Scotland.
The first side is no longer an interconnected
suite of folk-pop ditties, but rather consists of three majestically unfurling
«folk-ambient» tracks, grouped together as «Paintings». Funny as it may be,
there is not much, if any at all, atmospheric difference between 'Seascape' and
'Landscape'. Both are long, both are propelled forward by gentle flute
melodies, both are wrapped in multi-layered guitar, strings and woodwinds
arrangements, both should be attributed to the «pastoral» genre if it didn't
seem so cooky to call a song named 'Seascape' «pastoral». But, after all, this
is a quiet, pleasant, somewhat lazy
seascape, not the ninth wave or anything. Then the much more brief 'Afterglow'
comes along and wraps things up more or less on the same note.
The somewhat less conceptual second side does
have a couple more formulaically beautiful tunes in the same manner. But, for
diversity's sake, the band throws in a sterner, somberer church hymn ('Cantus
Firmus', quite a tongue-in-cheek performance considering just how many times
they ram Alleluia into your head); a
purely instrumental number ('Sinfonia For Guitar And Strings'), possibly the
most complex composition (and also the most medievalistic) on the album,
although still somewhat ambient-sounding; and yet another instrumental, 'Lament
To The Earl Of Bottesford Beck', which starts off as a church organ piece and
then merges quasi-psychedelic sound effects with more of that pastoral
melodicity.
Today, with music audiences in a state of
permanent fracturing, I am not sure how many people would even want to bother
with England — it is not proggy
enough, not folksy enough, not poppy enough, not ambient enough, not authentic
enough to merit the appraisal of any of the «core groups». Were it just a
half-hearted surrogate of any of these directions, I wouldn't even want to
recommend it. But it's really a synthesis, an attempt to tack together a
special kind of «naive beauty» from lots of simple, but not entirely obvious
elements. Evensong may be more
memorable, after all, but this puppy
is more adventurous, all the while staying true to the conventions of good
taste (for one thing, they never ever go overboard with the sweetness of the
strings), and, at the very least, it is a magnificent alternative to the
generic boredom of early 1970s soft-rock — if you want some wimpy music for
breakfast, take Amazing Blondel in their prime, don't take, oh, I dunno —
America? Thumbs
up.
BLONDEL (1973)
1) Prelude; 2) The Leaving Of
A Country Lover; 3) Young Man's Fancy; 4) Easy Come, Easy Go; 5) Solo; 6) Sailing;
7) Lesson One; 8) Festival; 9) Weaver's Market; 10) Depression.
Although the band did not really change its
name upon Gladwin's departure, I do not think it is just a matter of
coincidence that their 1973 and 1974 albums downplay the word «Amazing», relegating
it to the back of the sleeve. Music lovers may beat themselves to pulp arguing
over just how much exactly the original Amazing Blondel were amazing, but there
is no arguing over the fact that, once Gladwin left for good, he packed most of
the amazement with him.
A Gladwin-less Blondel, everyone knew, would be
somewhat of an Anderson-less Jethro Tull, but somehow Island Records coerced
the remaining duo into writing and releasing another record. Eddie Baird,
previously «assistant songwriter» at best, had to take on the primary duties,
and this resulted in an immediate change: apparently, playing pseudo-Renaissance music was all right with him, but writing pseudo-Renaissance music was
governed by an entirely different mechanism altogether, one that Baird knew
not.
So, the only thing that still ties Blondel to its past is the
soft-silky-pastoral atmosphere: the band clings on to acoustic-based music,
dropping, however, most of the exotic instruments and recruiting, for the
sessions, such thoroughly non-Elizabethan players as Steve Winwood on bass and
Simon Kirke from Free on drums (with the illustrious Paul Rodgers himself
making a guest appearance on one of the tracks).
The results are predictably pitiful, if not
entirely disastrous. This is inoffensive, easy-going, and, in most cases,
instantly forgettable soft-rock, targeted at James Taylor and Bread fans rather
than Renaissance Fair goers. Baird is no stranger to either nice melody or
decent taste, and as generic as the guitar / flute / strings arrangements are,
he does not revel in banalities or hollow Seventies pathos. It's just that
there is no «edge» whatsoever to this kind of music, which, by 1973, was turned
out in droves by softrockmeisters all around the world.
It makes no sense to try and pick out specific
songs. Traces of the original Blondel can only be found on an eight-minute,
two-song sequence on Side B: 'Festival', a flute-led proto-waltz for all ye
gallant gentlemen and lovely ladies, and 'Weaver's Market', shuffling along
like any good homage to Fairport Convention should, with crumhorns and Paul
Rogers trading vocals with a pair of girl singer invitees. But they are no more
than traces, and most of the rest is built around Baird and his acoustic guitar
and his attempts to add introspective singer-songwriter mentality to the mix,
and that is not what Blondel were about and not something they could easily
become, either. Big disappointment, but the worst was yet to come.
MULGRAVE STREET (1974)
1) Mulgrave Street; 2) Iron
& Steel / Leader Of The Band; 3) Light Your Light; 4) Hole In The Head; 5)
Help Us Get Along; 6) See 'Em Shining; 7) Love Must Be The Time Of Your Life;
8) All I Can Do; 9) Goodbye Our Friends; 10) Sad To See You Go.
With this record, Blondel officially close the
book on their pseudo-Elizabethan past and step into their pseudo-Carpenters
present. With a full rhythm section, electric guitar leads, silky hippie vocals,
and generic 1970s soft-rock melodies, Mulgrave Street is... a brave and
honest move forward: the band freely and openly admits that, without Gladwin's
participation, it is unable to draw any more inspiration from the Tudors. Now
they draw their inspiration from Bad Company, all of the members of which
(except Paul Rogers) are here to help them out.
The natural thing to do would have been to
change the name, but since the name remained the only reason why anyone could
bother with buying the new album, it was decided to keep it, much to the dismay
of all future progarchives.com review writers. Yet, to be fully honest, I found
myself enjoying Mulgrave Street. There is nothing specific here to
distinguish it from, say, a contemporary Carly Simon record, but Baird is
clearly a better songwriter in the regular folk-pop vein than he is in the
medievalistic/Renaissance genre, and the arrangements of the songs do not at
least attempt to drown them in a messy strings/pianos/horns syrup, as it so
frequently happens with Seventies' soft-rock.
There is one oddly brief attempt to «rock out»,
on the two minutes of 'Hole In Your Head': the song really sounds like a
snippet that should have been a coda in a larger art-rock epic, the best thing
about it being the cathartic electric guitar soloing from Free's Paul Kossoff —
but it is faded out almost as soon as it starts, a pretty silly teaser (perhaps
the band was still feeling uncomfortable about loud electric lead sounds, but
they must have felt the power of this particular bit anyway — so yeah, thanks
for letting it out of the studio, but give us the whole thing, dammit).
Everything else is silky soft, sweet, melodic,
and occasionally memorable if one's memory stands so much sweetness, romantic
acoustic guitar, falsettos, and cooing back vocals. Highlights include: the
title «suite», particularly its 'Dear Prudence'-inspired first and last movements;
'See 'Em Shining', a song that does borrow some elegance from the band's past,
somewhat amazing in how its exemplary wimpiness is redeemed by a well-written
vocal part; and 'Sad To See You Go', graced by Eddie Jobson's violin playing
and living up to its name.
Obviously, there is no need whatsoever to shoot
for this rare album, not until one has thoroughly assimilated the James Taylor
textbook, at least. But to shoot it down would be fairly cruel: it has
not done anything that bad. The worst thing that Mulgrave Street
could be is «boring», which it is not, due to its cheerful, catchy choruses. As
for «disappointing», «generic», and «wimpy», well, I can live with that for a
while.
INSPIRATION (1975)
1) All Time For
You/Inspiration; 2) Thinking Of You; 3) You Didn't Have To Lie About It; 4)
I've Got News For You; 5) The Lovers; 6) Good Time Gertie; 7) On A Night Like
This; 8) Love Song; 9) Standing By My Window; 10) Be So Happy; 11) They're
Born, They Grow And They Die.
There are several known usages of the word
'inspiration' as defined in Webster. One is: «the act or power of exercising an
elevating or stimulating influence upon the intellect or emotions». Another
is: «a supernatural influence which qualifies men to receive and communicate
divine truth». Thus, all I can say is, if this album has really been created
under a «supernatural influence», we're all doing good staying well grounded in
the non-supernatural; and if it was recorded with the intention of exercising
an elevating or stimulating influence upon my intellect or emotions, I can only
thank God it's not 1975 all over again.
Think a sequel to Mulgrave Street, but this time, with (a) all traces of Blondel's past washed away, (b) any hopes for Blondel's new future
dissipated — no wailing electric guitar solos, no catchy choruses, just a
never-ending string of watery, utterly predictable mid-Seventies soft-rock
à la Carpenters or, at times, even Barry Manilow. There is exactly one fully decent song on here: 'You
Didn't Have To Lie About It', and even that one mostly sounds good in its
context, what with its bass-heavy boppy-poppiness so reminiscent of the
Beatles' style circa Sgt. Pepper
(think 'Getting Better' and the like). But already the second Beatles rip —
title track — commits the utter sacrilege in being built around... a musical
bit that is directly lifted from the instrumental section of 'Something' (!!).
(Which, for a moment, brings me onto thinking that 'Something', in its way,
basically invented the «deep ballad» format of the 1970s, without falling
victim to it, kinda like 'Stairway To Heaven' is the Blessed Mother Power
Ballad of so many rotten kids).
Everything else
is, at best, forgettable, ultra-sweet acoustic pop, and, at worst,
polysaccharidic balladry. Basically, the distinction is simple — as long as
Baird and Wincott hunt for the Beatles, the music is tolerable ('Good Time
Gertie', a 'Dear Prudence' rip-off instrumental, is another OK contribution);
once they start hunting for America or James Taylor, the music is no longer
music, just sap dressed up in musical clothes. To finish you off with one last
staggering blow, Baird ends the album with five minutes of pure orchestral
Mantovani ('They're Born...') as if Inspiration
were some frickin' Hollywood epic in need of a proper exit music arrangement.
Well, I exit here all right. Like I said, Mulgrave
Street was at least sing-along-able, in parts; Inspiration, in comparison, is vomit-along-able, and the only
reason George Harrison did not sue the bastards was that The Chiffons taught
him to be a peace-abiding, court-avoiding gentleman. Thumbs down, without further
debate.
BAD DREAMS (1976)
1) Give Me A Chance; 2) Big
Boy; 3) One Bad Dream; 4) Until I See You Again; 5) It's Got To Be A Girl; 6)
I'll Go The Way I Came; 7) Wait For The Day; 8) Liberty Bell; 9) The Man That I
Am; 10) Call It A Night.
At least this time around, the title is much
more appropriate (which I could not say about the front sleeve — is the webbed
duck foot sticking out of the cuff link supposed to self-ironically symbolize
the band's regressive evolution? Or is it merely some sort of a Burroughsian
flash, conjured at the last moment to give the record a little mystique at
least in terms of visual appearance?). The entire record is, indeed, a series
of bad dreams — not nightmares, which
could at least be memorable; just one icky mental turd after another.
The Big Change, this time around, is that
Blondel no longer stick exclusively to soft-rock (although it is still their
major style of expression): now they turn their attention to contemporary dance
music, which, for the Europe 1976, means smooth, desensualized, cleaned up
pre-disco funk grooves ('Big Boy', 'The Man That I Am') or
horns-and-piano-driven uptempo pop ('Call It A Night', clearly written under
the influence of one too many listens to ELO's recent hits; 'I'll Go The Way I
Came'). And when they do not, it's sugar time again — more dippy ballads that
do not offer anything besides dippiness ('Give Me A Chance', etc.).
Basically, with Bad Dreams the band confirmed its death sentence. By swearing
allegiance to mainstream pop mechanisms and aligning themselves with the Bee
Gees, the band lost its final fans from the old days — yet, naturally, was
unable to procure any new ones, because who needs Eddie Baird providing the
market with third-rate expendable dance grooves when you can have those right
out of the hands of true giants? You really need to be a huge fan of the Seventies, and I mean huge — one who takes pleasure in amassing giant collections of
all the generic crap that legions of long-haired, blue-eyed, bare-chested,
sandal-wearing, coke-snorting young people put out in that decade, forever
devolving the currency value of such notions as «sincerity» and «romance» —
like I said, a huge fan of that vast
marshy territory in order to even notice Bad
Dreams in that collection, let alone evaluate it on its own terms. Everyone
else will just have to stick with the predictable thumbs down.
The best thing Blondel could do under the
circumstances was retire, or, at least, retire the name; fortunately, that is
exactly what they did when it turned out that Bad Dreams sold almost literally fewer copies than there are
fingers on that duck foot. There are some rumors that both Wincott and Baird
went on to have solo careers after that; I only know of one solo Baird album,
called Hard Graft and also released
in 1976, a date which does not make me overtly hopeful. As it is, at the time
being Bad Dreams seemed to have
closed the book on the Amazing Blondel story in tragic mode, with all the noble
protagonists of the novel either metaphorically dead or figuratively pwned.
But the story does not end here.
RESTORATION (1997)
1) Benedictus Es Domine; 2)
Preludium In D; 3) Highwayman; 4) Fugue; 5) Cawdor And Widdershins; 6) Aubaird;
7) Love Lies Bleeding; 8) Edagio; 9) Sir John In Love Again; 10) Interlude; 11)
Road To Sedgemoor; 12) Cawdor Revisited.
Brilliant title, and an awesome idea for a photo to go
along with it — the heroes of Fantasia
Lindum twenty-five years later. With Baird, Wincott, and Gladwin suddenly and unexpectedly crossing their paths once
more, this is indeed a «restoration» rather than a «reunion», since the resulting
music once again carries us into the (not so distant) past in which loyalty to
one's sovereign could bring on great artistic inspiration. (Alas, today we just
have Ted Nugent).
As tempting as it is to state something like «Restoration takes off from where England left us in 1972», this is not quite the case. The original Blondel, at
their most self-assured, tended to drown you in sights and sounds, layering on
archaic instrumentation piece by piece, dub over dub, until you were almost
ready to accept its authenticity just because there was so much. Restoration is a far more low-key
affair than that. The album is completely dominated by classical guitar —
granted, they still prefer to play it mandolin-like — very frequently in a
gentle duet with some woodwinds. The other instruments (organs, harpsichords,
dulcimers, etc.) are used only occasionally, and there is no orchestration
anywhere in sight, unlike on England.
Which means that this is a very moderate
restoration, of a constitutional order, if you wish, rather than an absolute
one. But why should that be a problem? Certainly not in a situation when Gladwin,
once again, assumes his natural role of chief songwriter; Baird is only
credited for two instrumentals (the very oddly spelled 'Aubaird' and 'Edagio')
— which, frankly speaking, merely work as cute interludes — and Wincott comes
up with the tragically martial 'Road To Sedgemoor' (with guest singer Joan
Crowther adding atmospheric vocals).
The rest is Gladwin, and twenty years of
sitting in his nowhere land have not impaired his ability to create enthralling
archaicized hooks none. An atmosphere of chamber solemnity is set immediately
with the Latin-sung hymn 'Benedictus Es Domine' — a little tongue-in-cheek,
perhaps (actually, hopefully a
little tongue-in-cheek), but still inspiring — and then several well-written
Renaissance ballads like 'Highwayman', 'Cawdor And Widdershins', and, particularly,
'Love Lies Bleeding', nothing to do with the Elton John song, just a highly
stylized, manneristic, courtsy lament whose retro gallantry is obvious even
without hearing the music: "Savour the kiss, for love lies bleeding / The
horn beneath her rose pricks your pleading / The end so gently comes disguised
in pity / That flower once warm, sublime, falls bereft in decline" —
pretty impressive Shakespirian stylization, if you ask me. Or is that
Southwellian?
Obviously, the album did not sell (in 1997, the
band could appeal only to its old old fans, most of which were probably sitting
on the dole and couldn't afford the record anyway; younger folk revival
audiences preferred to go with something of a less dinosaurian nature), but I
have yet to see a negative critical response — the only people who noticed Restoration were those who respected
the original Blondel, and if you like Fantasia
Lindum at all, there is no way you won't like this experience. It didn't work out for long: the reunited band
stuck around for some touring, but no further new music came out of this. Well,
no wonder — restorations do not tend to last long, and, considering how much these original guys owed to the original
Tudors, they could hardly hope to outlast the briefly-restored Tudors. But it
was fun, and quite touching, while it lasted — hence, a loyal thumbs up
from your humble servant.
THE AMAZING ELSIE EMERALD (2010)
1) Cool Margarita; 2) Fools Gold;
3) Maybe; 4) Fools Who Try; 5) Don't Turn Your Back; 6) High Time; 7) Next
Time; 8) When I Get Home Tonight; 9) Here At Last.
Betcha didn't know about this, didja? Yes, it's
the new millennium alright, and Blondel are back — as simply Blondel, slyly tossing the Amazing component into the album title,
because, once again, they have returned to the Dubitable Duo of Terry Wincott
and Eddie Baird, bringing the circle back full time. No idea what happened to
Gladwin. Maybe he went to join the House of Lords (there actually is a John Gladwin in the House of Lords,
but not that one).
Last time we saw Wincott and Baird carrying on
the A.B. tradition, they were busy spoiling the band's reputation in sick,
perverted ways typical of the Seventies — which, supposedly, should make one
highly skeptical of the results of a second reunion of such type, because
turning Amazing Blondel into a superficially commercial proposition in the
2000s would mean taking lessons from... uh... the Backstreet Boys? Maybe Taylor
Swift? Yikes.
Fortunately, no. It would take a complete set
of brain drains to believe that an aging folkster duo that was never able to
find steady commercial success even in its prime could raise as much as half an
eyebrow in an era when musical competition is fifty times as cruel as it used
to be — and, lucky for them, Baird and Wincott have aged in a graceful, not
demented manner. Elsie Emerald is
not a masterpiece, it is not even a very good album, but it is a bunch of songs
that the old guys simply wrote and recorded because they felt like it —
because, well, once a songwriter, always a songwriter, and if you do write songs, you might as well want
to share them.
As expected, «Blondel» in duo format steps away
from pseudo-Renaissance stuff and turns to quiet acoustic folk / soft-rock. It
does not quite sound like quiet
acoustic folk, because on most of the songs, they include synthesized strings
arrangements, giving the whole record an odd sound — imagine a generic
Seventies soft-rock LP re-recorded today in your little home studio, substituting
electronic instruments where possible (real drums, though). The oddest thing
is, it does not sound awful! Maybe
just because of the uniqueness of the approach.
Or maybe because the songs, in general, have a
more tasteful atmosphere than on something like Inspiration. There are no sappy ballads; the vocals are very quiet
and restrained, without ever trying to wind up to pathos or senti-falsetto (one
benefit of aging — steals away your capacity for falsetto — not that it ever
stopped Barry Gibb); and the duo even does its best to award each song with a
modestly catchy chorus or something.
The downside is that these guys are no J. J.
Cales, either, and keeping it low and hushed does not automatically make these
songs into soul-delving bathyscaphes. There's no shame in singing along to
pleasantly rhythmic and melodic tunes like 'Cool Margarita' and 'Fools Gold',
or admiring the skill and professionalism with which they are still capable of
weaving their harmonies together on 'Here At Last', but there is no discernible
electric current flowing through this — just a case of two old guys who decided
to give it one more try, for old times' sake. As in, «Can we prove that we can
still make an album that does not suck Gerry Beckley's balls? Can we do anything to redeem the evil of Bad Dreams? Can we put up a hot young
girl in a leotard on an LP sleeve and get away with it without being branded a pair of dirty old wankers?» Yeah, verily
they can do all of it. Which does not, however, make The Amazing Elsie Emerald into a record that anybody, even a seasoned Amazing Blondel fan, should ever wish to own. But if you happen to run
into it by accident, don't be afraid. No preliminary shots required.
ADDENDA:
A FOREIGN FIELD
THAT IS FOREVER ENGLAND: LIVE ABROAD (1972-1973/1999)
1) Introduction; 2) Seascape;
3) Dolor Dolcis; 4) Willowood; 5) Pavan; 6) Spring Air; 7) Shepherd's Song; 8)
Celestial Light; 9) Fantasia Lindum; 10) Landscape; 11) Saxon Lady.
No missing this archive release — for anyone
who is even mildly interested, that is, in learning what Amazing Blondel were
really all about in their prime. Recorded on the band's 1972-73 European tour
(most of the tracks seem to be from some French club gig), it's a prime slice of
live Blondel at their peak — right before Gladwin's departure twisted the neck
of the hen with the golden eggs — and it's LOADS OF FUN.
Basically, if you had any doubts about it,
during the band's live shows the entire presentation was a buffonade — a bunch
of jesters that never for one moment thought of their pseudo-recreation of the
musical gallantry of old as any sort of «solemn» or «serious» activity. Light
entertainment for the ladies and gentlemen of the audience, punctuated every
now and then with bad (occasionally, good) jokes, intentionally flubbed notes,
village idiot impersonations, and at least one sing-along number that's gotta
rank among the goofiest audience-teasers ever put on record.
None of which belies the band's professional
reputation: if anything is played «wrong» here, it is played so on purpose, and
the group's collective harmonies are every bit as concentrated and controlled
as they were in the studio. In fact, most of the songs are generally done very
much by the book, and the performances themselves do not give you an Amazing
Blondel that would be amazing in some sort of different way. The album is
really treasurable for the atmosphere and the unpredictable surprises — such
as singing "I'd screw you if I
could" instead of "I'd woo
you if I could" ('Willowood') to a stone-faced French audience, whose
mastery of «Ænglisc» clearly
does not extend that far.
Concerning other
individual tracks... well, 'Shepherd's Song', turned into a ten-minute musical
joke, may be delightful or annoying, depending on your DNA structure, but is
definitely unforgettable (how could one forget an aggressively out-of-tune
crumhorn?). 'Seascape' and 'Landscape', stripped of their orchestral
arrangements, may please one more if the orchestration on England seemed too corny and overbearing (not to me, though). And
'Fantasia Lindum' is here complete in all of its 20-minute glory (one of the
bits, 'Celestial Light', is even done twice).
Although I am
usually wary of live albums that go over their heads in attempts to be
lightweight and funny, Blondel were all right. They'd built up this weird
collective personality that was, in itself, much more English than the music
they performed, and the album shows that they were fully capable of upholding
it at least for the running length of one performance. Thumbs up. Not sure if Rupert Brooke
would enjoy the joke at his expense, though.
ARMAGEDDON (1975)
1) Buzzard; 2) Silver
Tightrope; 3) Paths And Planes And Future Gains; 4) Last Stand Before; 5)
Basking In The White Of The Midnight Sun.
It is somewhat unfortunate that these guys only
lasted together for one album — on the other hand, I suppose that is pretty
much what you have to expect if you give that kind of a name to your band. A
genuinely true Armageddon can only happen once.
Then the chief culprit gets electrocuted in the bathroom. (Or, rather, in the basement, as the updated and
fact-checked story goes, but bathroom
just sounds so cool, the myth will never die.)
Actually, the band came and went before the tragic demise of Keith Relf
in 1976. At the heart of Armageddon stand two former members of the mediocre,
but not hopeless British art-blues-rock band Steamhammer, guitarist Martin Pugh
and bassist Louis Cennamo. Keith Relf was a good friend, a decent vocalist, and
an inspiring influence, bringing on artistic baggage from his days in the
Yardbirds and in early Renaissance (Cennamo also played bass in the latter).
Finally, percussionist and occasional keyboardist Bobby Caldwell came from the
equally artsy institution of Captain Beyond.
Of course, the band couldn't have chosen a
worse moment to pool their forces together: what they wanted to do was complex
progressive rock with a gritty edge to it, and by 1975, prog rock's days as a
major critical and commercial force were on the wane. And they couldn't even
well enough pass themselves off for a «supergroup» — more like a rag-tag band
of has-beens, what with neither Steamhammer's, nor Relf's post-Yardbirds
career having done all that much of a splash anywhere inside the mainstream
circles. They were also mismanaged, couldn't get enough tour bookings, etc.
etc., the usual works.
All that was left was this one album, typical
of the times and of the chosen direction: five tunes, four of which go over
eight minutes. Funny as it may seem, the atmosphere does remind of the
Yardbirds circa Roger The Engineer:
the emphasis is on jerky, paranoid, highly nervous hard rock atmosphere,
somewhat apocalyptic in nature indeed. Pugh and Relf form a good partnership.
Keith has actually gone a long way from his Yardbirds days — there,
overshadowed by the giant figures of the guitarists, he was merely there to
ensure the band's not turning into a purely instrumental outfit, and that was
that. Now he is louder, huskier, and, overall, making more of a point than he
ever used to. As for Pugh, his playing here is more concentrated and ecstatic
than on any Steamhammer album — gallantly, he agrees to do his best to be the
Clapton/Beck/Page six-string brother to Keith, and, at times, he is almost
successful.
'Buzzard' is the one song from this album that
everyone needs to hear. The song is built on one of the funkiest riffs of the
decade, and with Cennamo's trippy bowed bass guitar playing off that riff and
Relf entering the picture at top volume, the song fully justifies its title: if
that ugly, evil wah-wah is not a fine embodiment of the ugly bird rearing in
the sky in seek of prey, then nothing is. These eight minutes are fully
justified, right down to the psychedelic harmonica solo and the high and mighty
thirty-second coda, driving in these last nails with cruelly calculated
brutality every bit as stunning as on early Jethro Tull records.
Unfortunately, the album never truly lives up
to its powerful opener. The next three songs — the pleasant, but
never-tear-inducing ballad 'Silver Tightrope'; the relatively simple blues-rock
of 'Paths And Planes'; the metronomic hard rock swinging back and forth on
'Last Stand Before' — offer nothing unusual, even if the riffage is
occasionally quite good. There just aren't enough musical ideas to justify the
song lengths; the tunes are not too complex, not too tricky, not too unpredictable...
and at the same time, they do not turn into visionary solo blasts, either —
honestly, I'd rather have 'Last Stand Before' turn into a ten-minute long
psychedelic Cream-like guitar journey than just witness the band run through a
set of so-so hard rock subsections.
The 'Buzzard'-like paranoid style only returns
in full force on the last track, the 11-minute epic 'Basking In The White Of
The Midnight Sun', and by then, the band has already embezzled much of the
confidence. Truth be told, though, Armageddon
ends just as powerfully as it starts.
I cannot pretend that the band was much more
than a footnote in the annals of «rock as art», but they gelled together well,
and, compared to the contemporaneous slowly forming hybrid of metal and prog à la Rush and its future
offspring, had the distinction of being more colorful and less intensely
serious (a nice genetic marker for almost every Sixties veteran). Frankly, I
can't think of any other song in the entire prog genre that would try to do the
thing of 'Buzzard'. I'm pretty sure that there are no «ifs» in this category,
and that the band was doomed from the start, but it's fairly pleasing to have
this album as a memento, and it feels right to give it a thumbs up in the hopes that someone
will be adventurous enough to want to look for it. If anything, just think of
it as the album that drove Keith Relf to the bathroom, har har, uh, sorry
about that.
ASH RA TEMPEL (1971)
1) Amboss; 2)
Träummaschine.
In 1971, «space rock» was still in a state of
infancy, associated either with the lightweight drones of the Grateful Dead or
the harsher, more aggressive sound of early Pink Floyd. Hawkwind were beginning
to stir things up, but had not yet turned into the comic strip monster boss of
all things astral. The electronic genre was still groping its way through all
the complicated knobs and switches of newfangled technological gadgets. In
brief, people had not yet finished finding the proper way of communicating with
faraway galaxies without leaving their home planet.
Why am I saying all this? Mostly to place this
here debut album of Ash Ra Tempel in its proper historical context. With both
electronic and guitar-based «astral muzak» growing faster than a Godzilla on
steroids in a matter of several years, it is easy to overlook the overall
significance and originality of this record, and I have always held the opinion
that an understanding of how fresh a
certain work of art once was actually does
influence our ability to enjoy it as such, even if there is never a direct
correlation.
Besides, there is also something about Ash Ra Tempel that sets it aside from
everything else (even much of the band's own further output). When flexible
guitar player Manuel Göttsching, bassist Hartmut Enke, and
percussionist/keyboardist Klaus Schulze got together in an attempt to forge out
a new mind-expanding sound, they placed the «space» component at the top of
their priorities all right, but they never forgot about the «rock» aspect of
it, either. The album can produce a static effect at one point and a dynamic
one at another, but overall, it feels like a space journey from point A to point B, rather than a constantly
looping orbit circuit, which would soon become the priority of one of Ash Ra
Tempel's chief competitors — Tangerine Dream (with which Klaus Schulze actually
played a brief stint in 1969-70).
Two encouraging factors are at work here. One:
Klaus Schulze, who would leave the band for a solo career soon afterwards, is
mostly active here as a percussionist rather than an electronic wizard, and
you will be surprised at the monster
drum sound he can get going when necessary, firing away on all cannons like
crazy. Two: Manuel Göttsching is, by trade, a professional rock guitarist,
and when he gets carried away, no amount of psychedelic echo effects on his
guitar can hide the fact that he likes
ecstatic, frenetic rock guitar soloing, and that he is actually good at it.
Of the two sidelong tracks (still a relative
novelty in 1971), 'Amboss' is the fast and furious one, and
'Träummaschine' is the more atmospheric and relaxed, although its subtle
ambience still has a dynamic aspect, and, from time to time, Göttsching
and Schulze break out the kick-ass jamming mode even on the latter. Rock kind
of guys, unafraid of lengthy jamming, will most likely favor 'Amboss' — if only
for the reason that, at times, once the motor has been properly wound up, Ash
Ra Tempel end up sounding like an eerily «astralized» version of The Who in
their Live At Leeds mode: check the
groove they get going around the 5:00 minute mark, or, especially, the riff
that Göttsching breaks into at about 8:05 into the tune, and if you do not
hear the influence of a 'Young Man Blues' in there... nah, an impossible «if».
Of course, the track has much more than that —
there is a careful percussion/synthesizer build-up that leads to the main
ferocious groove, there are some funky bits, some free-form soloing with
multiple overdubbed tracks, and a feedback-drenched, Hendrix-inspired coda that
provides the blueprint for decades of noise-rock to come. It actually helps, I
think, that there are only three people engaged in this battle — it helps to
keep things tight and focused, although, clearly, had Schulze and Göttsching
shown less individual awesomeness on their respective instruments, the whole
experience could have quickly degenerated into repetitive boredom. 'Amboss',
however, is nowhere near repetitive — the guys never emulate the exact same
landscape twice.
'Träummaschine', in comparison, is less
immediately appealing, and, I would say, a bit overlong. The tension builds up
gradually, explodes, builds up again, explodes once more, then quietly fizzles
out — stuff like that might work fine in a classical symphony, but on an early
space-rock album feels superfluous. But lop off eight or ten minutes off the
twenty-five, and the piece will stand on its own, quite proudly, like a softer,
less danger-fraught part of the same journey.
As a mostly drums-and-guitar based (Schulze's
synthesizers work as occasional mood-setters here but are almost never at the
center of the sound) mood-oriented astral-rock LP, Ash Ra Tempel has few rivals, and still ends up having its own
individual sound after all these years. Thumbs up are
automatically guaranteed — even if, at the end of the day, I would really love
to have just a few more musical
themes integrated inside these forty-five minutes. Call it «the layman's wish»,
if you will.
SCHWINGUNGEN (1972)
1) Light And Darkness: Light
(Look At Your Sun); 2) Light And Darkness: Darkness (Flowers Must Die); 3)
Suche & Liebe.
As Klaus Schulze drifted off into a solo career
that would very soon propel him to the top of the Electronica movement,
Göttsching was left behind to re-scramble the band and see if the holy idea of Ash Ra was really larger than
the sum of its most talented members. In order to prove this, he resorts to an
expansion of the sound. Wolfgang Müller steps in to replace Schulze on
percussion, but they also bring in Matthias Wehler to blow an alto saxophone
in a few spaces, and, most importantly, we now have vocals, provided by a
certain semi-nameless John L. — whose out-of-nowhereness and style of vocal delivery clearly owes a lot to the vocalists of
Can (both Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki, notable for their ghost-like
appearances).
I could not say that, in between the five of
them, they were able to scale the same heights that the debut album had scaled.
Schwingungen is less edgy, more
rambling; it tries to do more, but ends up achieving less. Some of the ideas
are downright silly in their derivativeness. The first part of 'Light And Darkness',
for some reason, is bluesy, and with
John L.'s mantra of "we are all one, we are all one" set to
Göttsching's crackling solos, it ends up reminding me of... Eric Burdon — yes, his psychedelic
babble with the new-look Animals circa 1967-68 ('All Is One', etc.). I like the
blues, and I like Manuel as a soloist, but these six minutes are just way too
retro-looking for 1972, when everyone was supposed to move forward; what were
they thinking?
Things get better on the second part, which
starts off as a sequence of electronic dreamscapes and then eventually becomes
a part-free-jazz, part-cosmic-voyage jam, whose serious trippiness is, however,
undermined by John L. Perhaps he was really taking his cues from the likes of
Can's Suzuki, but Damo was an actual
madman, and whatever figures of speech and sound he engaged in on Can albums
had the true potential to creep you out. This guy, however, just yells out or
mutters stuff in the manner of a local boozer — not very interesting or
atmospheric, and, after about five minutes, so tremendously annoying that you
cannot help but start looking for that karaoke voice-cancelling switch on
whatever system you're using. Because the guitar/sax/drums/keyboards
interaction is really compelling. Towards the end, in a sea of phasing and
feedback, Göttsching finally takes off amidst fumes and blazes, with the
vocal guy almost burning out — but it takes a long way to get there, and it's
only about two minutes of prime space rock ecstasy.
The first half of 'Suche & Liebe' is
similar in style to 'Träummaschine' — very quiet, magical, and mystical,
all chimes and faraway bells and Mellotrons, as if they shove you within an
enchanted musical box and you just happen to find the entire Milky Way inside.
Then, at around nine minutes into the experience, the quiet is broken with an
ominous tribal drum sound, which, to be frank, sometimes feels as if
Müller took his major cue from Ringo's sole drum solo in 'The End' and carried
on from there (not that I mind). And then, after a few minutes of chaos, the
band enters jam mode once again, this time taking on a solemn and stately Pink
Floydian air — wave-breaking thrashing cymbals, dream-like guitars, deeply
buried vocal harmonies (if they, too, belong to John L., I take away at least some
of the things I have said, or left unsaid, about the guy), altogether, not
tremendously original, but powerful and beautiful enough to just get swept away
by the sound waves without a second thought.
So it does not all work — there are problems — but, clearly, the band had not
stagnated, either, and the best parts of the record (and they include Side B in
its entirety, after all) totally match Ash
Ra Tempel in overall quality, hence, a clear thumbs up, and respectable
recognition as one of the finest records that the year 1972 brought to Germany.
Second only to the Scorpions' Lonesome
Crow, of course, because who could withstand the sheer masculine brutality
of early Teutonic metal? Not a bunch of wimpy, artsy-fartsy German
space-rockers, that's for sure.
SEVEN UP (1972)
1) Space; 2) Time.
The most famous bit of info here is that Seven Up was a collaboration between
Ash Ra Tempel and Timothy Leary — and that the title honours a particularly
memorable experience of spiking the band members' 7-Up drinks with acid (no
idea if it is true). It is also the most useless bit of info, because little
good usually comes out of collaborations between musicians and their non-musical
gurus (who normally happen to be tonedeaf), and Seven Up is no exception.
Not that I have a clear understanding of what
Leary's exact contributions to the album actually consisted. He is supposed to
«vocalize» on some of the extended passages, and he may be responsible for
some or all of its «concept»; but other than that, putting his name on the
front sleeve alongside the band's own moniker must have been more of a general
homage thing than anything else. If the concise message is that, without
Timothy Leary, there would have been no Ash Ra Tempel, I can understand it. At
the very least, even if Seven Up is
quite far removed from the greatest Ashra experience ever, at least the acid
guru's guest spots do nothing to ruin it.
The first side of the LP is, overall, more
accessible, but also slightly less interesting. It is a splicing of several
«normal songs», recorded in a rather generic blues-rock vein, but sewn together
with psychedelic noises, cosmic announcements, and electronic stardust.
'Downtown' is almost pure 12-bar blues, whereas 'Power Drive' is more like your
average garage extravaganza, and 'Right Hand Lover' is Canned Heat-style
boogie-blues. The idea may have been to play all this stuff while being on acid
all the time and see what happens.
Well... if so, there is no better confirmation
to the fact that the best psychedelic music actually comes from a completely
drug-free conscience, rather than a chemically altered one. Because the
psychedelic processing is mostly boring, and, sacrilegious as it may sound, I'd
rather just hear Göttsching play straightforward blues-rock, because
already the self-titled album showed how competent he was in that department.
Or, perhaps, considering the titles of the
tracks, this is an intentional sly hint at how utterly unfascinating the
concept of «space» is next to that of «time». Because Side B is where it's all
really at — a long, drawn-out, half-raga-like, half-ambient meditation, not as
otherworldly magical as 'Suche & Liebe', but very much in the same vein,
like a series of interchanging lullabies, each disseminating its own mood: some
scary ones, to frighten you off to sleep, some majestic ones, to awe you into
sleep, and some trance-like, to freeze you with your eyes open when all else
has failed. Then it all ends in a fizzly cloud of white noise which may
symbolize the relativity and the true static nature of time as such. Or it may
simply be a case of somebody forgetting to turn down the controls at the end of
the session.
Göttsching's playing skills are not as
well displayed on this record as they are on the ones that surround it; Leary's
presence is not annoying, but hardly necessary; and whatever idea could govern
the building of 'Space' wasn't a very good idea. For all these and possible
other reasons, Seven Up is a relative failure, a bit of a misguidance
in an otherwise well-designed program of conquering the world. But even as one
of those big whoppin' question marks, or silly dead ends, it remains curious enough for me not to want to
downgrade it.
JOIN INN (1973)
1) Freak 'n' Roll; 2) Jenseits.
This is the first Ash Ra Tempel album I'd
heard, many years ago, at a time when satisfying all your desires in
chronological order was nowhere near as easy as today — and it is nice to
realize, now, how much of a right
impression it gave me of the band. Because it may not be as groundbreaking as
the self-titled debut, but it is every bit as impressive: a conscious and
successful attempt, after the last couple of decidedly mixed efforts, to
recapture everything that was so mind-cracking about Ash Ra in the first place.
To that purpose, Klaus Schulze returns to the
fold once again, contributing drums and electronics just like in the good old
days. Also like in the good old days,
the album's two long pieces are neatly split into one dynamic and one static
side, brutally kicking ass for 19 minutes and then subtly soothing it for 24
more. Unlike the good old days, side
B also has one more human addition: Rosi Müller, contributing dreamy
spoken sibyl-style vocals. But I wouldn't say this harms the proceedings in
any way. How can a pretty girl with a sweet/stern voice be harmful? We're not
talking of a Yoko Ono here.
Not that either side truly attempted to be a
clone of its correlate on Ash Ra Tempel.
For starters, 'Freak'n'Roll' is a bit less psychotic than 'Amboss'. With its
out-of-nowhere fade-in, it sounds like a no-beginning, no-end extract from a
much larger improvisation, which must have been much less pre-planned than
'Amboss', and thus, has a more live feel to it. Göttsching's guitar is
generally higher in the mix, sharper and bluesier, and the rhythm section of
Schulze and Enke is more interested in exploring all the possible polyrhythmic
combinations than in raising hell. In short, if 'Amboss', with certain
reservations, could be said to be the Krautrock equivalent of a vocalless jam
by The Who, 'Freak'n'Roll' is closer in feel to the psychedelic improvs of
Cream circa 1967 — just add some keyboards.
The lengthier 'Jenseits', meanwhile, is
different from 'Träummaschine' because it invokes a solemn mourning
atmosphere, almost something like a cosmic requiem — great funebral music for
an important alien chief, who bravely gave up his life, trying to protect his
people from detrimental radio waves conveying Osmonds and Bay City Rollers
hits into open space. Schulze is responsible for most of the sound on the
track, playing organ and «synthi A», with Göttsching adding drone-like
guitar that has also been processed to receive a more keyboardish sound. The results
can be classified as ambient — there are very few well-noticeable transitions,
mostly having to do with shift of emphasis from one instrument to another — and
this gives one a great opportunity to bitch about the length, but why should
we? Had they cut it down by five or six minutes, they still wouldn't be using
that space up to replace it with anything different,
because that would ruin the concept. If you think 24 minutes takes us off
limits, no one prevents you from fading the track out after 20 or 15 of them.
All of which literally translates into this: Join Inn comes across as a slightly
less psychedelic, slightly more pure-musical experience. Free-form, muscular
improvisation on one side and a solemn mess in the Gothic Cathedral of
Krautrock on the other, with each member of the band fully up to the task and
cooking. Thumbs
up.
STARRING ROSI (1973)
1) Laughter Loving; 2) Day
Dream; 3) Schizo; 4) Cosmic Tango; 5) Interplay Of Forces; 6) The Fairy Dance;
7) Bring Me Up.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that this album
really «stars» Rosi Müller, who had already been introduced to the
audience on the previous record and isn't exactly getting that much more prime time on here, except for serving as the band's
only representative on the front sleeve. But the title is still not accidental.
Starring Rosi was recorded in a
transitional stage of upheaval: Schulze, as it turned out, was not interested
in rejoining his old band on a permanent basis, after all, and, even worse,
bassist Harmut Enke has also jumped ship, leaving Göttsching as the sole
founding father of Ash Ra Tempel and the only one to decide whether the band
had to live or die.
For a brief while, it had to live — but with
Göttsching providing everything he could be able to provide. He rose up to
the task, playing guitar and bass and all the electronic and
non-electronic keyboards; only for the drumwork he had to resort to hiring an
outside player (Harald Grosskopf). And, for some reason, this sudden shift in
the levels of responsibility also brought about a significant change in sound —
arguably the biggest single-moment change in sound Göttsching ever went
through. A change so strange and utterly unexpected that no accusations of
«selling out», «dumbing down», «softening up», etc., which the loyal Krautrock
guard sometimes presses against the album, can really overshadow the plain old
weirdness factor.
When 'Laughter Loving' begins with twenty
seconds of psychedelically processed... laughter, this is something new (for
Göttsching), but not particularly bewildering. Processed maniac laughter
is stuff one should always be prepared to meet in «cosmic rock». But as the
music kicks in, all of a sudden you realize yourself caught in the midst of a
textbook Southern rock jam, with
melodic country-folk guitar jamming loaded with the spirit of, say, Allman Brothers'
'Jessica' (which, by the way, had only just come out and, thus, could have
easily inspired Göttsching, never an enemy to good old American
roots-rock).
Actually, it is a very pleasing and soothing
Southern rock jam, even if Göttsching's phrasing can hardly be expected to
match the fluidity and ease of a Dickey Betts when it comes to playing this
kind of music. And that's how it is with the rest of the record, which keeps
moving from style to style without ever producing a single masterpiece, but always
bringing on competence and contentedness, so that the sum of the parts
eventually transgresses their individual worth.
Altogether, even if Rosi's laughter comes off
as faux-mystical rather than cheerful, and the rest of her vocal contributions
mostly consist of the same sternly delivered otherworldly monologs that
distinguished 'Jenseits', the album is overall far more lively and optimistic
than the end-of-the-world aura of 'Jenseits' itself. There is 'Day Dream', set
in a minor tonality, dark, repetitive, rather simplistic folk with San
Franciscan overtones, but its dark
does not imply doomsday-dark. There
is 'Schizo', with lots of piercing, high-pitched guitar wailing over wah-wah'd
electronic bubbles, and multi-tracked banshees (Rosi again?) swooping from
above, but that kind of music, too, is just telling you that there's danger
around, not an imminent Ragnarök or anything.
There is even a bit of humor — as represented
by 'Cosmic Tango', whose music perfectly matches its title — and then, on Side
B, almost all of the space is dedicated to harmless magic, culminating in 'The
Fairy Dance', where Rosi strums a bit of harp and Manuel gives the semi-acoustic,
semi-electronic treatment to trusty old Celtic motives; quite an innovative
track, when you come to think of it, considering how little Krautrock people in
general usually paid attention to the traditions of their left-bank Gaulish
neighbours.
There is no doubt that Starring Rosi is the most
immediately accessible record in Ash Ra's catalog, which does not at all make
it, per se, the weakest Ash Ra record — since when have melody and diversity
counted as weaknesses? Personally, I think it is a doggone pity that Göttsching
himself decided to pull the plug on this new direction so early, afraid,
perhaps, of losing his artistic integrity; his subsequent deep plunge into
Electronica had its payoff of beautiful moments, but this here is some fairly exciting, untapped turf for practicing
musical synthesis, whereas in the realm of pure electronics the man had himself
some strong competition.
I am also completely unaware of what happened
to Rosi Müller. Since she is said to have been Manuel's girlfriend, it is
possible that the whole point here was to offer her a unique sort of love song.
Perhaps they simply broke up somewhere around 1974, with personal problems
leading to further musical changes — I was not able to find out. Whatever
really happened, it's a really nice record, and a really nice example of how
positive feelings towards someone can result in musical magic rather than
musical cornball. Not to mention that I'd much rather listen to Rosi
Müller speaking over a musical
piece than to, say, Yoko Ono singing
over one. Thumbs
up, for one of the most «atypical swan songs» in a band's career —
even if, on a substantial level, it would be more correct to think of Join Inn as the last true «Ash Ra
Tempel» record, and interpret Starring
Rosi as a time-filling side project in between Ash Ra Tempel's cosmic rock
and Ashra's... umm, cosmic soup.
NEW AGE OF EARTH (1976)
1) Sunrain; 2) Ocean Of
Tenderness; 3) Deep Distance; 4) Nightdust.
Although, after the final split of Ash Ra
Tempel, Göttsching did actually record a solo album under his own name (Inventions For Electric Guitar from
1975), he quickly returned to the old moniker — afraid, perhaps, that the
trance-inducing powers of the old band's sound made his fans insensitive to
individual members' names, so that an album from «Manuel Göttsching» would
impress them no more than one from Roger Rabbit. But since it was fairly
strange to retain the original name for a solo artist, the compromise solution
turned out to be the shortened variant. Ashra
sounded nice, and today, Wikipedia tells us that it is also an abbreviation for
All-sky Survey High Resolution Air-shower
detector at the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research at the University of Tokyo,
which, coincidentally, was established in 1976 — exactly the year in which
Ashra's first album was released. Bizarre!
Because the album is all about cosmic rays, in
a way. If Starring Rosi took
Göttsching the farthest he ever got away from electronic landscapes, his
mid-1970s output reversed the direction. On New Age Of Earth, synthesizers not only rule the day, but fill it
up for a total of about 90%. So much so that when Göttsching actually
starts adding guitar overdubs, it is possible to miss them — to be aurally
duped into thinking it's all about keys and knobs when, in fact, Manuel has
already been playing lovely lead parts for a couple of minutes.
The major problem with this new «reboot»,
however, is that it is not at all clear what would be the point of Göttsching's new image. With Join Inn and Starring Rosi,
he was, either with the aid of his band members or on his own, carving out
sound paintings that had no direct analogies. But here what he did was land
squarely in the niche already firmly occupied — almost privatized, I'd say — by
Tangerine Dream and, around the same time, his former pal Klaus Schulze. Dynamic
ambient fields of electronic sounds can be diverse enough, but it takes a
braver mind to assess that diversity than in the case of ordinary pop music.
And as pompous as the album title is, it does not exactly provide any brand new
thrills that listeners hadn't already experienced with the aid of Rubycon or Timewind.
But if we only manage to forget such words as
«groundbreaking» and «landmark», and content ourselves with knowing that
Göttsching recorded this simply as a result of falling in love with pure
electronica, New Age Of Earth is a
not half-bad representative of the genre. Divided in two unequal parts, the
former consisting of 'Sunrain' and 'Deep Distance', built on rhythmic loops,
and the latter of 'Ocean Of Tenderness' and 'Nightdust', built on pure
atmosphere, it is at least as good as the electronica-dominated passages on Ash
Ra Tempel's albums. Which, for me, is not saying much, because my favorites,
for the most part, were the not-electronica-dominated
passages.
If you are still more interested in how the
German genius' fingers pluck the strings rather than press the keys, fast
forward to the end of 'Ocean Of Tenderness' and 'Nightdust' — the former
culminates with a series of semi-jazzy, semi-country-rock licks played without
a rhythmic backbone, and the latter ends in a stern distorted solo, on a gruff
apocalyptic note that might also show acquaintance with the Who's Quadrophenia. Altogether, however, this
is about 10% of the complete running time. (Also, the repetitive hum of the
bassline on 'Ocean Of Tenderness' might be physically annoying — I almost
literally got a headache from it, so be warned). The rest is all Beautiful
Bleeping. Don't forget the record on your next trip outside the Milky Way.
BLACKOUTS (1977)
1) 77 Slightly Delayed; 8)
Midnight On Mars; 3) Don't Trust The Kids; 4) Blackouts; 5) Shuttle Cock; 6)
Lotus.
The album cover speaks for itself.
Göttsching must have received a few death threats in his mailbox, or at
least a telegram that went something like this: «Return guitar sound. Join
Keith Relf if failure to comply. Acknowledge through photo with guitar on
sleeve. Long-time admirer.» Naturally, he would never admit the fact of
chickening out to anybody, but hey, this free-form reconstruction of history
may be as good as any other.
The critical reputation of Blackouts, as well as all other subsequent Ashra albums, is weaker
than that of New Age Of Earth, but
this, I'm sure of it, is a technical misunderstanding that will be corrected
with time. With the prominent return of Göttsching's guitar playing, superimposed
on the same electronic loops in a much more obvious and persistent way than
before, this record, unlike its predecessor, regains somewhat of an individual
character.
Its nature is still thoroughly «ambient»:
development of themes is very limited, and even though all of these themes are
rhythmic (each of the tracks is firmly pinned to a repetitive bassline), the
basic sensation is still that of running on the spot. But now that Manuel has
returned to the practice of multi-instrumental overdubbing, his various ways
of soloing over the rhythm tracks not only create entirely different moods, but
are also well worth following in regard to what is actually being played. In
other words — involving.
On '77 Slightly Delayed', for instance, he
returns to a slightly «rootsy» style of playing (remember 'Laughter Loving'
from Starring Rosi), taking the
lightness and cheerfulness of country-rock and leaving out the redneck flair.
'Midnight On Mars' shifts gears towards a more progressive style, with trebly «cosmic»
guitar wailing high over your head. For the 'Don't Trust The Kids / Blackouts'
uninterrupted suite, he experiments with various processed tones, taking a cue
from Fripp, but playing his notes in a more accessible, «emotional» manner.
'Shuttle Cock' is a very odd combination. The
rhythmic base is syncopated, with one guitar playing in an almost reggae
manner, and one or two others laying on funky licks and strict
«musical-geometric» figures — authentic «math-rock» way before the term was
invented, but all the guitar tones still have a spacey feeling to them, so that
these complex forms are not totally devoid of spirit. (Then again, neither is
modern math-rock at its best).
Only the last and longest track, the
four-«movement» suite 'Lotus', cuts down on the explicitness of the guitar
sound, and ends up feeling like an outtake from New Age that did not manage to make it there because of the length.
It produces more or less the same shiny effect as 'Sunrain', the only
difference being that there is a
layer of guitars accompanying the electronics: it is more obviously felt than
heard, but it still gives the experience a genuinely human stamp, much more to
my personal liking but, perhaps, disappointing to electronica buffs.
As far as I'm concerned, Blackouts, far from being the end of Ashra as a significant
proposition (although it is, technically, the end of Ashra as a solo
Göttsching undertaking — starting from the next LP, Ashra would once again
become a real band), is the culmination of Ashra as such a proposition. The
merger of guitars and electronics here is unique: nobody did that in the 1970s,
with the brief exception of Fripp & Eno, and those two had a radically
different approach to the idea. I may not ever listen to this record again, of
course, but it's still a big old thumbs up. Would be a hats off, too, except I
don't normally wear hats.
CORRELATIONS (1979)
1) Ice Train; 2) Club
Cannibal; 3) Oasis; 4) Bamboo Sands; 5) Morgana Da Capo; 6) Pas De Trois; 7)
Phantasus.
Although this is hardly a «masterpiece» of the
jaw-dropping variety, it is still one of the most unusual records of its era.
Recruiting keyboardist Lutz Ulbrich and drummer Harald Grosskopf,
Göttsching goes back to band format — for a good reason. Blackouts showed that he was quite
capable of producing a multi-layered art-rock record on his own, but the idea
of Correlations required extra
people, and he got himself some good ones.
From the most obvious point of view, Correlations is a hands-down sellout.
Its rhythmic base is «generic» 1970s funk, frequently rolling on to disco; and,
normally, if you were an art-rocker, recording of even one disco number around
1977-79 could mean brutally sodomizing your credibility. (The only thing that
could be worse was putting a photo of your hairy chest on the front sleeve).
Clearly, it did matter to Manuel how
many copies his albums would sell. Or did it? Because, in reality, he was
running a serious risk here — he could have easily alienated Ashra's veteran
fans without recruiting any new ones: after all, what would motivate lovers of
Boney M to spread their adoration onto something as odd as this?
Regardless of Göttsching's original
purpose, though, Correlations is a
delight. Art rocker going disco? Why not, if he does not cease to be an art
rocker? What Göttsching does here is simply transpose his usual schtick
(«cosmic rock») onto a bedrock of popular rhythms. If anything, it can pass off
for subtle irony: using a generic, lightweight foundation to support complex
sonic landscapes. A «dance album» poking fun at the dance generation — or, at
the same time, an «art album» poking fun at the snobby art-rock crowds.
Whichever way you want to turn it, it all works.
Actually, while listening to the last track,
'Phantasus', I realized that the closest analogy would, of course, be Pink
Floyd's 'Another Brick In The Wall' — a much better known attempt at merging
«artsiness» and «disco» that managed to become a critical and commercial
success without sabotaging the band's reputation. Ashra, unlike Pink Floyd,
make no simplistic social statements (to make a statement, they'd at least need
to hire a vocalist), but in terms of sheer tenseness and power, the guitar
playing on 'Phantasus' is not significantly below Gilmour's solo on 'Brick'.
Not as tightly focused, perhaps, preferring to weave loops and coils around
your brain rather than bulldoze it like mad, but this only means that,
someday, you might get tired of 'Brick', and that'll be the day when you might
be happy to pick up 'Phantasus' instead.
Or almost any other one of these tracks, for
that matter. 'Ice Train' honestly does
sound like an ice train, moving through fields of snow at a steady set rate as
grim synthesized choruses and robotic funky solos swoop around it: danceable
and evocative at the same time (or at different times if you cannot combine
body and mind activity). The rhythm section of 'Club Cannibal' would be greatly
appreciated by any sleazy Eurodisco act — but I am not sure whether they would
have taken all the accompanying sonic noise, ranging from astral bleeps to
jazz-fusion soloing.
Speaking of fusion, I would actually take Correlations, disco rhythms and all,
over a great deal of «classic» instrumental fusion albums, all of which it
easily beats in terms of direct entertainment, diversity, and a certain «sense
of purpose». (It doesn't beat them in terms of «flash», but that's actually a
good one for the critic — nobody would accuse Göttsching of
«pretentiousness» or «self-indulgence» corrupting the rock'n'roll spirit,
etc.). A few of the grooves are overcooked (the 8-9 minute length for 'Ice
Train' and 'Pas De Trois' is a bit too much; everything works fine when
centered around the 5 minute mark), but, in compensation, each of the grooves
is different: the moods they create are notoriously hard to describe, but they
never repeat each other.
Keep in mind that already the next album would
be significantly divergent in style, too. It may not be the best sound in the
world, but nothing really sounds like
Correlations — the «Tony Manero In
Outer Space» album. Thumbs up, of course. Even if the record's
historical significance is thoroughly undermined by the fact of no one
remembering about its existence, that does not stop it from being an exotic
aural delight for ages to come.
BELLE ALLIANCE (1980)
1) Wudu; 2) Screamer; 3) Boomerang;
4) Aerogen; 5) Sausalito; 6) Kazoo; 7) Code Blue; 8) Mistral.
Another goodie-goodie. With the «disco sucks»
movement in full blossom mode, Göttsching decided to cut down on the
easy-to-ridicule aspects of his newfound accessible sound, and Ashra's
follow-up to the hot funky grooves of Correlations
came out in a colder, sterner, but still quite «toe-tappable» casing, which,
this time around, took good hard notice of various New Wave-related
happenings. Quite content now with following trends rather than setting them, Belle Alliance still set out another
good example of how to follow trends in style, instead of unveiling yourself as
a pitiful lapdog, whining for a bite, or, rather, for a buck.
The album, sort of returning to the old Ash Ra
Tempel tradition, consists of a «hard» and «soft» side, which few people will
be able to enjoy in equal doses. Predictably, my sympathies strongly veer to
the «hard» side, with an overall irresistible punch, lots of stylistic
diversity, and some terrific guitar soloing. 'Screamer', in particular, is a
heck of a screamer, chasing along at super speed like a respectable punk number
(there is even a «chainsaw buzz»-style rhythm guitar track) with some accompanying
mock-shouting, until midway through it gives way to Göttsching's flashy
astral-rock guitar, sometimes issuing bursts of speedy psychedelic licks,
sometimes melting in a sea of distortion and feedback, more often doing both
at the same time. (Should be listened to at top volume in headphones; chances
are the ground will disappear from under your feet).
Following it up, 'Boomerang' may be one of the
finest examples of guitar playing over a reggae rhythm base — especially since
Manuel changes keys several times throughout the track, going from Caribbean to
pop-rock to country-blues stylistics and back. But the best build-up is on 'Aerogen',
which begins as a set of electronic loops, then slowly grows itself a funky
foundation, and finally becomes a lightning-speed rock anthem with a crisp,
fiery rock'n'roll solo. All of these are simply exemplary examples of
intelligently imagined kick-ass instrumental pop music — in my humble opinion
(but don't tell anyone), beating out quite a few much better known «masterpieces»
of fusion, Santana-rock, and suchlike.
Side B is mainly dominated by the snowy majesty
of 'Code Blue', whose primary «gimmick» consists of gradually, almost
unnoticeably, transforming from a pre-Bach-oriented church organ instrumental
into a contemporary electronic ambient landscape. The landscape has some
dynamic aspects to it — over time, Manuel adds extra synth layers and
percussion — but overall, little change is in vogue until the track, without
interruption, seagues into the optimistic/romantic coda of 'Mistral', where
Göttsching's guitar is eventually used in the spirit of Santana (but, of
course, with Manuel's own playing technique). All of it constantly goes from
pretty to majestic or vice versa, but suffers from the usual flaws of ambient —
too thin density of cool ideas per minute to let you override the drowsiness
effect. Will certainly be your
favourite of the two sides, though, if you are one of the drowsy types.
Altogether, the album is such an obvious thumbs up
that Göttsching's subsequent decision to pull the plug on Ashra as a
studio team (he still continued touring with Ulbrich and Grosskopf for some
time after that) is quite surprising. Ashra's official site claims that the man
was «fed up with the corporate music industry business» — quite odd for someone
whose albums never showed the least sign of the music industry business
people's interfering or tampering with any of his work. (Unless, of course, it
eventually turns out that it was the record industry people who forced him to
turn to funk and disco in 1979 — for which I'd like to thank the record
industry people).
Whatever be the real reason, nothing further
was heard from Ashra throughout most of the decade — then again, considering
that the decade was the 1980s, perhaps we should not feel too sorry about that.
In any case, the German musical scene at the time was not the best place to
behold. Just imagine a collaboration between Ashra and... uh... Modern Talking?
WALKIN' THE DESERT (1989)
1) 1st Movement: Two Keyboards;
2) 2nd Movement: Six Voices; 3) 3rd Movement: Four Guitars; 4) 4th Movement:
Twelve Samples; 5) Dessert: Eight Tracks.
After a decade spent doing nothing or nearly
nothing, interrupted only by the recording of the acclaimed solo album E2-E4, in 1988, Göttsching eventually
reteemed with Lutz Ulbrich, and the results of their rather lengthy
collaboration (date of recording is given as «May 1988 – Spring 1989») were
deemed successful enough to be released as the next Ashra album. Much of it
stems from the reworking of a large 65-minute suite performed live on June 4th,
1988 at the Berlin Planetarium, but a large chunk had to be cut out to fit on
one LP — perhaps for the better.
Walkin'
The Desert is certainly not
bad, but it does sound a bit like the title suggests: listening to it is about
as much fun as walking through a desert. Basically, if you have a long way to
go through the desert and not go
crazy from the process, you have to train your mind to recognize the desert as
a colorful, inspirational place to be. Listening to ambient music is different
in that you do not usually have to
listen to ambient music (unless Brian Eno has promised you unlimited access to
his porn collection in exchange for a set of glowing reviews). Thus, it is all
to easy to just put on Walkin' The
Desert and say: «Oh no, not another Göttsching album without any kick
ass guitar solos!» and back out, pleased to feel indignantly offended, much as
I did upon my first listen to New Age Of
Earth.
But, although this record is hardly a
masterpiece, to my ears, it sounds far more intriguing and unusual than New Age. First, it is thematically
coherent. The «movements» are not just an attempt at adding pseudo-academic
«respectability» to the overall experience — they really represent several
different, yet interconnected mood states that one could... well, not
necessarily literally associate with «deserts», but with vast, seemingly empty
spaces; the more you stare at them, the more kaleidoscopic they become before
your eyes. Lots of ambient loops are simply used as tasty (or tasteless)
background decorations; the point of the loops on Desert is to transform
your background and make it float before, or behind, your eyes. That goal may
not be reached on all the tracks, but at least all the tracks strive to reach
it.
Second, there are some nifty individual ideas.
The 'Two Keyboards' part is almost funny: it's like some sort of Chopin prelude
that caught stuck in its first few bars and lost the capacity to evolve into
anything beyond those bars, but is frantically struggling — for eight minutes —
to get out of its cage anyway. 'Four Guitars' uses the experience that
Göttsching and Ulbrich developed in their «disco days» to ground a
minimalistic space-rock set of melodies and effects on a funky foundation, but
without any signs of a rhythm section, so you cannot as much dance to it as you
can... uh... quaver and wobble, I guess. And 'Twelve Samples', each and every
one of them, incorporate some Middle Eastern motive, with a lengthy prayer
topping it off and getting a nice processed treatment — sounds like an
underwater minaret experience. (It does get a bit annoying after the first
couple of minutes, though, and becomes well worth a haraam after the second one — why it had to be the longest track on
the album, we'll never know).
Finally, for «dessert», you actually get a
magnificent echoey Göttsching solo, grand, eloquent, and aggressive, the
way we like it (although the MIDI tones on 'Eight Tracks' could have been less
blatantly Eighties-style). As much as it looks like a consolatory gift for
those who felt themselves let down, the rest of the album is by far the most
interesting non-guitar-centered opus of Manuel's career — a well-placated thumbs up
here.
TROPICAL HEAT (1991)
1) Mosquito Dance; 2) Tropical
Heat; 3) Pretty Papaya; 4) Nights In Sweat; 5) Don't Stop The Fan; 6) Monsoon.
For Ashra, the Nineties began with showing us
that the Eighties did, after all, exist. Tropical
Heat was not released until the dawn of the grunge revolution, but was
actually recorded in 1985 and 1986. And it shows. If Göttsching and Co.
were a bit too slow to catch on all the latest trends and developments of the
club scene, I certainly do not blame them; but Tropical Heat is that one Ashra album for which the use of the term
«dated» can only be with a negative twist.
First of all, that is a cheesy album title, and
it leads to even cheesier song titles. A mood album about lonesome walks in the
desert will, at the very least, bring on visions of Peter O'Toole's blue eyes,
but an album called Tropical Heat
will, at best, bring on visions of tourist ads. Furthermore, what's the use of
building a concept like that on a bedrock of MIDI controllers and similar
stuff? How well guaranteed is it that an album like this, lightweight by
definition, will turn out to be pleasant to all sorts of ears at all sorts of
times, if every now and then you get the feeling that you are listening to a
soundtrack for Sexy Beach?
With next to no guitar (except some rather generic
Spanish chords on 'Don't Stop The Fan'), big stupid drum machines, and robotic
keyboards all along the way, this is not
the kind of Ashra you will want to hear if, like me, you have already tipped
your hat to their «classic» albums. It is not atrocious, because a lot of work
went into it anyhow, and Göttsching, an obsessive perfectionist, would
never release an album «just for the money», unless he would be sure it had some value. Each track has its own
«tropical» groove, sometimes more than one, and the arrangements are complex
enough to ensure that there is always some part to which your ear may latch on
without being offended. Yet it still ends up being offended — always.
Thus, the funky arrangement of 'Nights In
Sweat', with jangling guitar and pompous fanfares, is the coolest combination
on the album; but it is almost killed off by electronic percussion and
excessive length. The «Mellotron»-like cooing waves of sound on 'Mosquito
Dance' are trance-inducing and lovely, but they only come in very late, on top
of all the other keyboard waves of sounds, not worth mentioning — and so on.
In short, Tropical
Heat is an okay record that is badly in need of re-recording; it is a bit
puzzling, in fact, why Göttsching did not take the chance to re-record it —
I am fairly sure that, by 1991, Ashra could make use of far more advanced
production techniques than they had at their disposal in the disastrous season
of 1985/86. But that's the way it happened, so a thumbs down is imminent. Final
opinion — if you are looking for one Ashra album to skip, skip Tropical Heat. Donate your money to
starving Somali pirates instead.
SAUCE HOLLANDAISE (1998)
1) Echo Waves; 2) Twelve
Samples; 3) Niemand Lacht Rückwärts.
Late-period Ashra albums are more of a cult
thing than anything else — but don't let that stop you from knowing that these old masters, even in an age when
the ownership of «Electronica» had essentially passed on to an entirely new
generation of select arrogant revolutionaries and swarming talentless hacks, were
still able to kick some classic ass.
This here is the regular Ashra lineup
(Göttsching, Ulbrich, and Grosskopf), augmented by Steve Baites on
sampling and rhythm machines, playing live at the KLEMDag fest in Nijmegen,
apparently one of those hot spots for cool electronic people who hate living
in the past and are not afraid to boldly proclaim it to each other. That said,
when Ashra takes the stage, all these people are still forced to live in the
past, if only for a little bit — leave it to the genius of Göttsching to
be able to sound modernistic and trendy, and yet still convey the spirit of the
1970s at the same time.
Leave it to his genius, too, to come up with
three titles, two of them running over twenty minutes and one over thirty, and
make it not sound like overkill. Two
components are crucial: rhythm, which
only occasionally switches to «generic» techno, and is otherwise based on
fairly traditional beats (not the least because a real live drummer is
present), and build-up, which has
always been Ash Ra Tempel's, and then Ashra's, greatest know-how. On a certain
level, the thirty minutes of 'Echo Waves' end right at the same spot where they
started, but on another level, it is a track that emulates growth and
development, and by the time the thirty minutes are over, you've become a
thirty years older. Figuratively.
Musically, 'Echo Waves' is all about... echo
waves — like a long long tribute to 'Run Like Hell'. It is melodically
simplistic and trivial; the fabulous thing is how this triviality keeps
reproduced, over and over, on different instruments, with various tones and
pitches, and how the band members steer these waves around each other, now
interlocking, now coming apart, now with a slight delay, now with a slight
speed-up. Twenty-five minutes pass that way before Göttsching picks the
guitar up properly and delivers a
mind-blowing «classic rock» solo. Is it «overkill»? Perhaps, but I feel that
the trance-inducing goals of the track have been fulfilled. Once they catch you
up on their «echo waves», the sense of time becomes blurred, and it may well be
that many a person has emerged from this experience with a whiff of surprise,
as in, «how come my beard is an inch longer than I last remember it?»...
The lengthy version of 'Twelve Samples' from Walkin' The Desert is now stripped of
its vocal overdubs (I like it better this way, actually), and gains a bit in
energy and an almost carnivalesque attitude, particularly towards the end. The
third track is more of a showcase for the drummer (including a long
nearly-solo passage), but also picks up steam towards the end with another
wall-rattling solo and a crazy noisy race-towards-the-end. Neither is as grand
an undertaking as 'Echo Waves', hence the relative «shortness», yet both are
still atmospheric monsters in their own right.
Although all three of these would be later
reprised on @Shra, making the
acquisition somewhat redundant, Sauce
Hollandaise still stands out on its own. For the live shows of @Shra, the band would be adopting a
more techno-oriented sound; here, the keyboards sound, on the whole, livelier
and juicier, and the human-dominated drumming is a major plus as well. This
arguably makes the album the most representative and the most enjoyable Ashra experience in the 1990s, so how could
it not get a massive thumbs up?
@SHRA + @SHRA VOL. 2 (1998/2002)
1) Echo Waves; 2) Twelve
Samples; 3) Timbuktu; 4) Niemand Lacht Rückwärts; 5) Sunrain; 6) Four
Guitars; 7) Hausaufgabe; 8) Oasis; 9) Move 9 Up.
Strictly speaking, these are two different
albums, released subsequently in 1998 and 2002, and thus, should be given
different reviews. But there are at least three combined reasons for which they
deserve to constitute an exception. (1) All of the material is taken from the
same set of Tokyo and Osaka live shows, from the band's Japanese tour in
February 1997; (2) All of the material on @shra,
with the exception of 'Timbuktu', duplicates the setlist on Sauce Hollandaise, so there is little
sense in reviewing it separately; (3) Both albums were eventually combined into
one 2CD set, released in 2008, so we can pretend they never existed as separate
entities in the first place.
To these three reasons, add a fourth: I really
have no good idea on what could be said about these albums that hasn't already
been said before. There is one significant change from the sound of Sauce which I do not appreciate: the
percussion, most of the time, is electronic, resulting in a much more «generic
techno»-oriented sound. Why this is so, despite the fact that the band still
has Harold Grosskopf at its full disposal, is beyond me. Maybe they just
thought that the «Land Of The Rising Sun», with its penchant for all things
robo-related, would appreciate a more mechanized sound than the folks in
Holland, who supposedly like it «jazzier». (Wild, wild guesses). In any case,
if the idea was to get more hip with the times, it could only help in the short
run — in the long one, Sauce Hollandaise
will always be more recommendable than @shra.
On the positive side, the basic recording
quality here is a tad higher than on Sauce:
Göttsching's solos, e. g. on 'Echo Waves', are less echoey, more shrill,
and rise more notably above the mix than they did before — always laudable,
because atmosphere and trance is one thing, but at the bottom of it, first and
foremost, we all come back to Ashra to hear these wall-rattling solos. This is
why the addition of the eight-minute long lightweight safari-style 'Timbuktu'
to @shra does little to improve its
status — no solos!
The second disc has a number of tracks whose
titles I do not recognize (some may be new, some may be reworkings of
Göttsching's solo album tracks), plus an extended version of 'Four
Guitars' from Walkin' The Desert —
and yes, somehow they work up these samplers to replicate all the necessary guitar parts (don't ask me how they manage it
technically, I'm the least close person in the world to a techno buff). The
setlist cleverly alternates between soft, mood-setting pieces ('Sunrain',
'Oasis') and harder, darker stuff ('Hausaufgabe', 'Move 9 Up'); 'Move 9 Up', in
particular, is a guitar monster, starting off in an Ashra-generic «echo-wave»
form and then going off into speedy, punchy, aggressive hard rock mode; unlike
other tracks, where Göttsching would emerge with a solo climax only
towards the very end, 'Move 9 Up' is carried on by guitar fireworks for all of
its 14 minutes, clearly making it the
highlight of Vol. 2.
Overall, if you can stand a little
«umtsa-umtsa» in your life without blushing, or, vice versa, if you are not
offended by your umtsa-umtsa in the hands of fifty-year old farts, @shra is yet another example of one of
Germany's most intelligent gifts to the art of sound incapable of any wrong
moves. As for myself, all I can say is — any electronic album that goes on for
two hours without forcing me to start climbing up walls is okay by me, so a thumbs up
it is.
FRIENDSHIP (2000)
1) Reunion; 2) Pikant; 3)
Friendship.
A full-fledged collaboration between
Göttsching and Klaus Schulze — so full-fledged, in fact, compared to
Göttsching's relatively recent guest-starring on Schulze's In Blue, that the two decided to go
ahead and release it under the old moniker of Ash Ra Tempel. I have no reason
to think of the decision as commercially-oriented — most of the people who'd
care about a real reunion of the two, in 2000, would have to be either dead or
such huge fans of Manuel and Klaus they'd sniff out the album even if it were
credited to «Gothel and Rapunzel».
However, this does not sound much like
«classic» Ash Ra Tempel. In fact, it does not sound much like the basic idea of Ash Ra Tempel, lest I be accused
of requesting the gentlemen to descend into unabashed nostalgia. Ash Ra Tempel
was a band that made solid use of
electronics — the presence of an additional bass player and live drumming, in
particular, was a must. Friendship
is an electronic music record, with no bass at all and all the drumming
strictly programmed, while Göttsching is overlaying his guitar lines
almost in «guest» mode.
Considering that, by the year 2000, Schulze's
solo career already numbered more than thirty original albums (a typical bane
for electronic artists), and that his most significant records had all been
released in the mid-to-late Seventies, it would be imprudent to expect anything
spectacular. And, rest assured, there is nothing spectacular on Friendship. It is a very long, very
modest, very even collection of three rhythmic-ambient landscapes that, at
best, sound nice, but we've all heard
it many, many, many times before. Maybe it actually adds credit to these guys'
reputation that they are not trying to replicate the tempestuous aggressive
atmosphere of Ash Ra Tempel's early years, concentrating exclusively on the
«pensive» side — after all, when you are in your fifties, trying to be the Mick
Jagger of electronics may even look more ridiculous than simply trying to be
Mick Jagger, period. But the down side of this «graceful aging» is... YAAAAWN.
'Reunion', for a merciless thirty minutes,
burdens you with a soft, steady, R&B-ish percussion groove over which
Schulze spreads his walls of humming noise and simple synthesizer loops, while
Manuel keeps coming and going with very minimalistic playing, sometimes hardly
distinguished at all from the synthesizer backing. 'Pikant' is different only
in that it is a wee bit faster; hangs continuously upon one repetitive electric
organ-like loop; and has a brief interlude with Göttsching picking some
rather generic Spanish guitar for us.
Only the title track may interest fans of
Göttsching's playing: fabulously, it's a twenty-five minute long guitar
solo, for which Schulze simply provides some atmospheric background. The first
fifteen minutes are completely rhythmless, before the electronic percussion
enters to add some spice to the proceedings. Unfortunately, the solo is, at
best, just «good»: melodic, yes, but restrained, and much too repetitive to
build up any proper ground for catharsis. In fact, it sounds improvised — for
an improvisation, it's a first-rate world-class solo, but it does not have much
staying power. Plus, improvised guitar solos, in order to have any impact,
should be produced differently. Dressing them up in sonic effects and echo
does not help.
All in all, please disregard that this is
another «Ash Ra Tempel» album — do not let the «fantastic reunion» rumors
conceal the fact that, out of these three tracks, the shortest one runs over 20
minutes, that only the last one has some major guitar playing going on, that
the whole thing is basically «ambient», that there is no bass or real drums,
and that people who can take seventy-five minutes out of their lives to listen
to this stuff and get inspired by it while not doing anything else (except
masturbating) are socially dangerous and should be locked up in cells, stocked
with ABBA and Michael Jackson CDs. Otherwise, pretty good album, though.
GIN ROSÉ AT THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL (2000)
1) Eine Pikante Variante.
I think that the following is going to be quite
close to a thoroughly objective recommendation: Do not go for this one before hearing Friendship, and only go
for this one if you found something in Friendship
that I failed to find. And even then, do not make the mistake of paying for it. Under any conditions,
this album should count as a free bonus.
As the album title states, this is a live
recording from the «reunited» Ash Ra Tempel (Göttsching and Schulze), made
on April 2, 2000. After a brief announcement reminding us that they are playing
together for the first time in thirty years (an implicit apology for ticket
pricing?), the duo revs up their tape machines, straddles their keyboards and
guitars, and goes on to play a non-stop single track for a bleeding sixty-nine
minutes — yes, no track separation whatsoever, although, forty minutes into the
playing, they do actually make a stop for a few seconds.
'Eine Pikante Variante' is not exactly Friendship Live: most of the themes seem to crop up from time to
time (especially 'Pikant' itself, with its memorable simplistic synth loop),
but they are shuffled and mixed with other themes that are either new or stem
from older Ash Ra Tempel or solo Göttsching/Schulze work and which,
frankly, I do not care at all to track down. But the overall vibe is exactly the same as on Friendship. Burbling ambient keyboards
and moody trance guitar played over drum machines. For sixty-nine minutes.
Actually, the initial build-up is done
masterfully. First, setting the scene up with «astral» blurps and bleeps, then
slowly moving on to grumbling earthquakes, then subtly establishing an ambient
synthesizer backdrop, then moving on to minimalistic guitar flourishes and
light percussion tapping, finally, by the twenty-minute mark, going all out
with loud rhythms and moderately aggressive keyboard solos. But as it gets as
good as it ever gets, for the next forty minutes it's all rolling downhill. I
can only hope they did play something else that night, or else I, for one,
would be demanding my money back.
Biggest disappointment: Göttsching's final
solo, his typical trademark on Ashra epics, lasts for something like three or
four minutes out of sixty-nine. If that is not reason enough for a thumbs down,
I do not know what is.
ADDENDA:
LE BERCEAU DE CRISTAL (1975; 1993)
1) Le Berceau De Cristal; 2) L'Hiver
Doux; 3) Silence Sauvage; 4) Le Sourire Volé; 5) Deux Enfants Sous La Lune;
6) Le Songe D'Or; 7) Le Diable Dans La Maison; 8) ...Et Les Fantômes Rêvent
Aussi.
As a post-scriptum, it might be useful to
mention this hour-long soundtrack, recorded by Göttsching in 1975 with
the assistance of Lutz Ulbrich, but still under the moniker of Ash Ra Tempel,
even if its purely electronic, ambient nature was far closer to the style of
«Ashra», or even Manuel's solo projects. But what's in a name? Nothing but the
ability to save your brain from exploding — and why would a respectable
Krautrock artist want to do that?
Anyway, Le
Berceau De Cristal is some sort of crap avantgarde movie by the French
filmmaker Philippe Garrel. Apparently, it stars Nico in the title role, with a
special guest appearance by Keith Richards' witchy girlfriend Anita Pallenberg,
and if that alone is not enough to confirm the movie's unwatchability, try and
find an overall description on the Net — apparently, Zabriskie Point looks like The
Godfather in comparison. Fortunately, we are not here to talk movies.
Göttsching's soundtrack is historically
important in that it is only his second venture ever into the realm of pure
atmospherics, after his solo album Inventions
For Electric Guitar, and, in fact, is even less dynamic and more
trance-inducing than the former, being a direct precursor to New Age Of Earth. Thus, it will be
useless to concentrate on a separate review: everything I wrote about New Age, more or less, applies here as
well. The only difference is that New
Age strives for a more «global» sound, one that preserves the cosmic rock
aspirations of Ash Ra Tempel, but materializes them through pure electronic
means. Berceau, being a soundtrack
to a movie about one woman and her psychotic activity (or something), is less
expansive, somewhat darker, gloomier, colder... in fact, I can very well hear
Nico, in my imagination, deliver her stern Teutonic lines across Göttsching's
synths — it is sort of reassuring to realize that I have a magnificent opportunity
to never, ever do it in reality.
Actually, there is quite a bit of guitar
playing on this album, mainly processed through lots of electronic warp, but
saving the record from total monotonousness. Once you have sat through the
first two epic ambient monsters, you start getting modest rhythms, bass loops,
jangly echo-laden chord sequences, and, on the very last track, even a
«diabolic» distorted guitar solo (short one). So it is not merely a sequence of snowy landscapes and Gothic panoramas. But
fairly close. Recommended for completists, historians, Nico's ex-lovers, and
all those who think that mysterious French titles suit electronic compositions
much better than pedestrian English ones.
ATOMIC ROOSTER (1970)
1) Friday The Thirteenth; 2) And
So To Bed; 3) Broken Wings; 4) Before Tomorrow; 5) Banstead; 6) S. L. Y.; 7) Winter;
8) Decline And Fall; 9*) Play The Game.
There must be something about the name
«Vincent» that drives its owner in the direction of the schizophrenic and/or
the macabre — keep that in mind if you're expecting. In between the well-known
Vincent van Gogh and Vincent Price, we have the far lesser-known, but equally
spooky Vincent Crane. Formerly the organist and «senior partner» in The Crazy
World of Arthur Brown, Crane showed an early interest in all sorts of things
that veered towards the occult, the apocalyptic, the «devilish», and
eventually parted ways with Brown because two psychos like that was a bit too
much for one band.
Teaming up with young drummer prodigy Carl
Palmer and bassist/vocalist Nick Graham, Price formed «Atomic Rooster» — the
name itself, accompanied with the image of a bird with tits on the debut
album's front sleeve, is fairly telling — a progressive-oriented band that was
to follow in the footsteps of Arthur Brown and King Crimson with their fiery
breath, rather than the lighter-spirited, clean-shirtier brands of Procol Harum
or the Moody Blues.
Unfortunately, that one particular «cherry»
that could have kicked the band's reputation high up in the sky — the
dark-devilish attitude — was stolen from under their very noses by Black Sabbath,
whose debut album came out at exactly the same time as Rooster's (February
1970) and immediately exposed Crane and his buddies for the powerless wimps
that they were. The fact that Rooster's lineup was far more professional, the
music — far more diverse and technically complex, and the lyrics far less
straightforward and clichéd, hardly mattered for the average record buyer.
And I can understand the average record buyer: Atomic Rooster has nowhere near the massive and immediate
«gut-kick» that Black Sabbath can
still deliver, even today.
Nevertheless, it is still one of the most
impressive debuts of 1970 (a year that, in itself, was positively exploding in
impressive debuts), and a minor classic of the progressive genre. The original
recording, which I have only heard in bits, had no guitar on it; the leading
instrument was Crane's Hammond organ, and the resulting sound was rather unique
for the time, but drastically thin. However, fairly soon after the album's UK
release, a decision was taken after all, to boost the sound with some rawk
guitar, and master player John Du Cann (formerly of Andromeda) was brought in.
At the same time, Nick Graham quit, with Crane taking over the bass parts on
his organ, à la Ray Manzarek.
Consequently, the band took the original tapes and «fattened» them up by
overdubbing Du Cann's guitar parts on some of the tracks; this became the US
release, and one that is generally more available today.
The overdubbing was done intelligently, and
gave the album extra power. The lead-in track, 'Friday 13th' — the band's
direct equivalent of a 'Black Sabbath', with the lyrics also depicting a devilish,
haunting presence — now became a solid kick-ass prog-rocker, even though its
main riff is based on a somewhat ordinary boogie chord progression (a similar
one would soon be put to better effect by the Rolling Stones on 'Bitch').
Other «rawk» tunes on the album also owe way too much to the already well established
and, in some ways, rather stale British blues-rock tradition, namely, 'S.L.Y.'
and the instrumental 'Before Tomorrow', which, for all they're worth, could
just as well be recorded by the likes of Traffic. It is not the actual melodies
that count, though, but the sheer pleasure of listening to three terrific
musicians locked together in ferocious and dexterous grooving — particularly
impressive if one remembers that the third
musician only locked himself into this groove on a «post-factum» basis. (Be
sure to check Du Cann's soloing on the mid-part of 'Before Tomorrow' — sounds
like an inspired brand of «proto-shredding» with all the gut excitement it can
deliver and none of the «pretentious» side effects).
Crane asserts himself as the leader of the band
on the (superficially) calmer numbers, such as the anthemic proto-power ballads
'Banstead' and 'Broken Wings', dominated by his church-styled organ (and also
featuring great soulful vocals from Graham, delivered with just the right mix
of power, romanticism, and grittiness; at times I actually wonder what ELP
could have sounded like, had Palmer taken Graham along with him instead of Greg
Lake — not that Lake isn't Greg, er, I mean, great, but his voice does have that annoying commanding-preacher aspect
to it that prevents me from enjoying ELP's vocal compositions as much as I
could otherwise). Surprisingly, his piano skills are nowhere near as
interesting: the seven-minute long epic 'Winter' chiefly fails because his
piano parts, mixed in with Graham's limp flute-playing, are nowhere near as
sharp and inflammatory as the Hammond organ numbers. Well — supposedly, the
devil only plays the Hammond organ, leaving pianos for angels, so no wonder,
after all, that this one misfires.
All in all, Atomic Rooster clearly announces the arrival of a «B» level band,
but one that managed to synthesize its own identity nevertheless. Part
blues-rock, part early progressive, part «Satanic» — it was certain, and still
is certain, to find its own small target hardcore audience, because, on a
formal level, no one else really sounded exactly like those guys in 1970. A
pleasant thumbs
up — or, perhaps, should we «raise the horns» instead, just for the
occasion?
DEATH WALKS BEHIND YOU (1970)
1) Death Walks Behind You; 2)
VUG; 3) Tomorrow Night;
4) Streets; 5) Sleeping For Years; 6) I Can't Take No More; 7) Nobody Else; 8) Gershatzer;
9*) Devil's Answer.
Drummer Paul Hammond has never gotten anywhere
near the acclaim of Carl Palmer, but then, let us face it, the music of Atomic
Rooster never really needed Carl Palmer as badly as the music of Emerson &
Lake. Vince Crane's and new guitarist John Du Cann's songwriting did not rely
on lightning-fast tempos or classically-influenced passages that required
arch-complex drumming patterns to match the keyboards. Thus, it is quite likely
that many people will not even notice
the drummer change — especially since Paul Hammond is a fairly good
tomtom-hitter in his own right, supplying all the necessary drive and power
throughout.
What is
noticeable is a dramatic increase in song quality. The self-titled debut album
was hardly recorded «in vain», many of the songs were inspired and creative,
but it lacked the proper atmosphere — and a band that is called «Atomic
Rooster» and is led by a crazy, near-suicidal organist simply cannot be
expected to lack atmosphere. With their second LP, Atomic Rooster are finally
on the level, matching the fire, brimstone, and general evil grin of Crane's
former master, Arthur Brown. Except the actual music is even better.
Death
Walks Behind You is already
much closer to «progressive rock» the way it became fleshed out in 1970 —
music that keeps jumping in between blues-based, folk-based, jazz-based, and
classical-based forms without making a single simple preference. That said, the
majority of the tracks are still blues-based, putting the band in a second-row
position in terms of importance. Only the closing instrumental, 'Gershatzer',
tries to take its cue from The Nice rather than Cream, but I would not qualify
it as comparable in overall complexity. It's got drive a-plenty, and its anthemic
organ riffs are gut-level awesome, but the «complexity» is mainly limited to
including a drum solo and a «psychedelic» section on which Crane has some
unimaginative fun with his instrument, making it suffer in different ways,
most of which had already been patented by Keith Emerson (knives under the
keys, etc.).
None of that matters, though, when you have
songs like 'Death Walks Behind You' — fairly simple, in that it is based around
one looped chorus riff and one descending chord pattern for the verse melody.
But oh boy, are those riffs and patterns ever awesome. The song is not scary in
a Black Sabbath way (the band has nothing like a Tony Iommi guitar tone to
them), nor is it scary in a 'Gimme Shelter' way, because the atmosphere is a
bit too theatrical, if not to say carnivalesque. It is not «scary» — it is
«epic». The little build-up in the beginning, with the bass piano notes and the
isolated guitar screeches — the way it smoothly mutates into the main riff
played on the piano — then the full band joins in — then "Death walks
behind you!" — then the well-staged descent into hell — it all smells of a
show, yes (although staged by a documentally real madman), but a supercool one.
Other devilish highlights include the
instrumental 'Vug' (five minutes of organ and guitar madness: nothing too surprising,
but tremendously energetic); the minor hit single 'Tomorrow Night', gentle and
lyrical text-wise, rough, rocking, and cowbell-driven melody-wise; and two
«rock funeral» pieces, 'Sleeping For Years' and 'Nobody Else', which sound
like... well, imagine the stately baroque-rock sound of Procol Harum injected
with a rebellious hard rock attitude. (Unfortunately, guitarist John Du Cann,
while unquestionably a pro in his own right, has a somewhat more generic style
of playing than Robin Trower — but this is fully compensated by Crane
victimizing his keyboards in a way that would cause Gary Brooker to have a
heart attack).
As a bonus, some CD editions also append
'Devil's Answer', the band's highest charting single that is almost openly done
in the «glam» paradigm — an anthemic riff-rocker, with 'I Can't Explain'-style
power chords and a danceable beat. It is nowhere near as impressive as 'Death
Walks Behind You', but it is also seriously different, illustrating the band's
versatility and open-mindedness. In the future, unfortunately, that
versatility was to lead them into new directions that were too hard to handle.
On Death Walks Behind You, it
ensures them just the right unforgettable place in rock history. Thumbs up
to this «mini-masterpiece».
IN HEARING OF ATOMIC ROOSTER (1971)
1) Breakthrough; 2) Break The
Ice; 3) Decision/Indecision; 4) A Spoonful Of Bromide Helps The Pulse Rate Go
Down; 5) Black Snake; 6) Head In The Sky; 7) The Rock; 8) The Price.
Some things come together in perfect harmony,
others just don't have the luck. Some madmen preserve enough common sense to
live and prosper, others do not even begin to operate in terms of living and
prospering. Apparently, the happy pairing of Crane and Du Cann just wasn't
meant to be: under different conditions, Death
Walks Behind You could have been followed by something even more ambitious, innovative, and
grandiose, but evolution was thwarted by the differences in approach —
essentially, a debate between the two key members over whether it would be the
heavy guitar rock thing that should dominate the next record, or the artsy
keyboard sound. Although, in this debate, Du Cann was the sane guy, and Crane
the mental one, Crane had the advantage of holding the rights to the name of
Atomic Rooster — and, in the end, Du Cann had to go, forever squashing the
band's chance at advancing to first-rate level.
In
Hearing Of... is, therefore, a
transitional album, recorded with the same lineup as Death (with the addition of extra temporary member Pete French on
vocals), but heavily discriminated in favor of Crane's personal vision. Only
two of the tracks are credited to Du Cann: 'Break The Ice', featuring the
album's most memorable guitar/organ melody that almost borders on funk, and
'Head In The Sky', the heaviest number on here, although Crane still does
everything in his power to obscure Du Cann's guitar work with organ «noodling»,
making it all sound somewhat like early, «artsy», pre-Gillan Deep Purple.
The bulk of the material is, however, dominated
by Crane's keyboards and Crane's songwriting. It is mainly middle-of-the-road,
blues-based art-rock that is, at best, pleasant, but rarely exciting.
'Breakthrough', despite the title, does not break through anything — either
Vincent refrains from giving it all he's got, or he ain't got all that much:
these piano riffs and solos do not even have the passion of a young Elton John
murdering his instrument on 'Burn Down The Mission', let alone the fury of a
Keith Emerson in his prime.
«Tepid» is the best word to describe his
attempts at rocking out — as well as his attempts to seduce us with lyrical
balladry ('Decision/Indecision') or «devilish» mid-tempo mood pieces in the blues
paradigm ('Black Snake'). With subsequent listens, the material goes down
easier, but it is not as if there is anything deeply hidden here — just a
question of habit and attitude. And, in my humble opinion, positive proof that
Vince Crane, no matter how talented or how psychopathic, is quite unable to do
anything outstanding on his own. In
Hearing Of... is the closest he ever got to a «solo» album within Atomic
Rooster, and the results are discouraging, if not to say catastrophic — denying
the band a chance to rank up there with the mighty ones.
MADE IN ENGLAND (1972)
1) Time Take My Life; 2) Stand
By Me; 3) Little Bit Of Inner Air; 4) Don't Know What Went Wrong; 5) Never To
Lose; 6) Introduction; 7) Breathless; 8) Space Cowboy; 9) People You Can't
Trust; 10) All In Satan's Name; 12) Close Your Eyes.
Once again, recorded with a totally new lineup:
Steve Bolton on guitar, Ric Parnell on drums, and veteran soulster Chris
Farlowe, once famous for singing blue-eyed cover versions of Rolling Stones
songs ('Out Of Time', etc.), and now fresh out of the jazz-rock team Colosseum,
on vocals. And, although Crane is still responsible for most of the
songwriting, this no longer has anything to do with the Atomic Rooster of old.
This is «Post-Atomic» Rooster: more tits, less balls.
Made in England the record might be, but the
title is clearly ironic: most of the album shows an extremely strong influence
from the soul and funk genres. This may not be so surprising, considering
that, of all the «prog» bands of the early 1970s, Atomic Rooster were among the
most deeply rooted in blues-rock, and the distance from bluesy riffs to funky
syncopation is nowhere near as long as it is from Bach or Bartok to the same.
But white British people engaging in groove-based funk still take on much more
responsibility than white British people churning out blues patterns — and with
Rooster's backlog and general pedigree, prejudices against their switching
direction just like that are fully
justified. Crane is an excellent musician, but plenty of excellent musicians
have fallen flat on their backs tackling rhythm-based music forms, and Made In England, unfortunately, is no
exception.
The album's one redeeming point is that many of
the songs are relatively well written. If the grooves are not all that «hot»,
they are at least memorable, as on the non-hit single 'Stand By Me', be it
through the catchy chorus melody or through some other directly undetectable
trick. The provocative title of 'All In Satan's Name' is never justified by
the proper eeriness of the melody, but the Allman Brothers-like riff that sets
the stage around two minutes into the song is good. And 'People You Can't
Trust', per se, is a fairly respectable attempt to create something in the
style of Funkadelic — except that the song should have rather been donated to
Funkadelic themselves.
The few tracks that still remind us of the
former Rooster include the instrumental 'Breathless', a concentrated and
powerful piano romp, whose new-school wah-wah guitars still cannot conceal the
fact that the track serves as an excuse to demonstrate Crane's technique; and
the lyrical ballad 'Never To Lose' (but not
the album-closing ballad 'Close Your Eyes', a tepid gospel-soul excursion whose
temperature only slightly hovers above zero degrees). The «evil child» of the
record is 'Space Cowboy', a strange track that does seem to want to combine
elements of hoedown stylistics with sci-fi effects — it is up to the listener
to decide if the effect is comparable to an orgasmatron or a necronomicon.
Personal assessment: I have never liked Chris
Farlowe as a solo artist or a member of Colosseum, and I certainly am not prone
to liking him here. Big, bulgy, brawny singers should either be drunk all the
time (like Noddy Holder), or impersonate psychos and street bullies (like Brian
Johnson); «opera star» style is abysmal in the context of a rock-oriented
record, particularly when that style leaves no place for subtlety or, come to
think of it, range — all of these
songs convey a «pompous ass» spirit, no matter how humble and down-to-earth
Farlowe might be in real life.
In any case, the real problem of Made In England is not the actual
quality of the songs — there have been much
more bland and boring records released in the UK that year — but the sad realisation
that it put a premature stop to any serious aspirations that Atomic Rooster
could have at the time, and seriously hints at Crane's instability: only a true
madman could have chased away John Du Cann and replace him with a second-rate
guitarist (I actually saw a video of Steve Bolton supporting the Who on their
1989 reunion tour, where he was filling in for Townshend on the electric
guitar parts — the word «hack» was the only one that came to mind) and a
has-been opera-pop star. At least the album conjures pity rather than hatred —
given the circumstances, that in itself is a major achievement.
NICE 'N' GREASY (1973)
1) All Across The Country; 2) Save
Me; 3) Voodoo In You; 4) Moods; 5) Take One Toke; 6) Can't Find A Reason; 7)
Ear In The Snow; 8) What You Gonna Do.
The second and last Farlowe-containing album
from Atomic Rooster continues in the
direction of Made In England — so
assuredly and predictably that it is even less interesting. By now, the band
has completely transformed into a roots-rock act, evenly spreading its
creativity between basic blues-rock, «blue-eyed funk», and soul balladry.
Crane's piano instrumental 'Moods' is a sole minor glimpse of what used to be,
but even here the melody is R'n'B-ish rather than classically influenced, and,
frankly, the instrumental's emotional effect is nothing to write home about.
Not that Atomic Rooster were ever about
«academicity», though. They were about «Evil as a Side Effect of Mental
Instability» — with Vince Crane's personal problems serving as the driving
wheel for everything that made this band stand out. By the time Nice 'N' Greasy came along, either he
got temporarily better at controlling these problems, or the other band members
were so successful at side-sweeping them, that Nice 'N' Greasy comes out as a perfectly normal — and a perfectly boring
— record. One needn't go further than the limp, unnecessary, funkified rewrite
of 'Friday The 13th', re-titled 'Save Me', saddled with a «celebratory» Sly
& The Family Stone-like brass section, and completely bereft of its
devilish attitude. For this kind of
music, one needs to go to George Clinton anyway.
The only track that still establishes a weak
link to the past is the seven-minute «epic» 'Voodoo In You', which, curiously,
is the album's only non-original
number (a cover version of an older, little-known R&B composition by
Jackie Avery). It is deep, somber, driven by brutal mid-tempo riffage rather
than chicken-scratch, and, although new guitarist Johnny Mandala's lengthy solo
is little more than a set of professionally played, uninventive Clapton-isms,
in this context I would rather listen to a so-so Cream imitation than all the
fruitless attempts to place Funk on the payroll of Vince Crane's personal
demons. (Note that «Johnny Mandala» is actually the first stage name of John
Goodsall, who would later become much better known for his fusion work in Brand
X; in 1973, though, he must still have been learning, because there is nothing
particularly outstanding about the guitar sound on Nice 'N' Greasy).
The UK and US versions of the album were once
again different: the UK version ended with 'Satan's Wheel', and also contained
Mandala's only contribution to the band ('Goodbye Planet Earth'). Both were
rather mediocre R&B, and for that or for some other reason were replaced on
the US version with 'Moods' and... the equally mediocre fast-paced blues number
'What You Gonna Do', whose only point, I guess, is that Farlowe wanted to try
out a B. B. King impersonation. It's passable, as is everything else on here,
but is never going to make history.
On the whole, Nice 'N' Greasy is so painfully «unnecessary» that it must have
been obvious to everyone: the band had stuck its nose into a dead end. Falling
apart was the only reasonable thing to do. Of course, we'd always expect of
Vince Crane to do only unreasonable
things, but there was this little matter of his far more sane friends — and,
after the record label dropped them for losing all signs of vitality, Farlowe
and Co. simply took off and left. Can't blame them, either — after such a thumbs down
reaction, who'd want to stay?
ATOMIC ROOSTER (1980)
1) They Took Control Of You;
2) She's My Woman; 3) He Did It Again; 4) Where's The Show; 5) In The Shadows;
6) Do You Know Who's Looking For You?; 7) Don't Lose Your Mind; 8) Watch Out;
9) I Can't Stand It; 10) Lost In Space; 11*) Throw You're Life Way; 12*) Broken
Windows.
While Crane was busy trying to strike a damp
match with funk and Farlowe, John Du Cann spent his time jumping from one
mediocre, long-forgotten English hard rock band to another, honing his chops
and saving his talents. Fortunately for us all, lightning struck twice, and as
the Eighties loomed upon the nation, the two masterminds behind the golden
years (months?) of Atomic Rooster decided to reconvene and try their luck one
more time. The decision was, in fact, to «reboot» the band — hence a new
self-titled album, and a new, upgraded rooster on the front sleeve. Bigger,
gruffer, and with a real mean look in the eye. Luckily, the album sleeve is
just the very worst thing about the album.
The songwriting here is completely dominated by
Du Cann: Crane is fully credited with one instrumental number, and co-credited
on just three others, although his organ playing is still essential to every
song. Du Cann is also the sole vocalist, since this is a complete re-formatting
of the band (new drummer Preston Heyman is the only other official member).
This helps understand the new direction. All the undercooked soul and funk is
gone without a trace. The new look Atomic Rooster is a brand new fusion of 65%
classic hard rock, 20% power pop, and 15% old-time «progressive» and
«psychedelic» elements.
The mix is not unique or innovative enough to
qualify as a «masterpiece», perhaps, but the album is still fabulous. Each
single song is either insanely catchy, or intelligently moody, or ferociously
bawdy. I do not quite understand why the record is often tagged as being in
line with the «New Wave of British Heavy Metal»: the only thing that brings it
close to a Judas Priest is the overall level of energy, because the driving
force behind it is never brutal metallic riffage — in fact, the actual riffs
are usually unexceptional, it is during their merger with the vocal melodies
and the keyboard phrasing that all the main wonders are happening.
Actually, with Du Cann's vocals having obtained
an even more eerie, mock-sinister sheen since his last gigs with Rooster, the
closest parallel I can think of is Alice Cooper — as the first notes of 'They
Took Control Of You' start screeching from the speakers, and Du Cann grins at
you with the lines "Bright lights they shine down on you / Have they
really come to take you away?", the most blatant association is with
Alice's "Who do you think we are? Special forces in an armored car",
even though that particular creation actually postdates Atomic Rooster by a year. (So who influenced who? Not an easy
question).
Did I mention yet that the new band likes to
take it fast now? 'They Took Control Of You' rolls along at a 'Highway
Star'-ish frenetic pace, only with the band's trademark aura of paranoia instead
of Purple's euphoria. That is not to say that the entire album is paranoid:
'Where's The Show' is a surprisingly happy pop-rocker that might even display a
little punk influence (I could easily imagine the Ramones covering it,
considering that some of the chord changes are exactly the same as on 'Beat On
The Brat').
In between all the ass-kicking, the band does
not forget about their demonic legacy: 'In The Shadows' is a conscious attempt
to come up with another 'Death Walks Behind You', although the lack of an
instantly memorable / mesmerizing melody brings it down almost immediately.
Still, it's a respectable enough seven-minute ghost-epic, with Du Cann at his
snappiest and gnarliest and Crane gathering all of his Gothic tricks in one place.
Du Cann also contributes 'Don't Lose Your Mind', a booming half-power-pop,
half-AC/DC style monster that must have been a veiled song of support for his
unfortunate organist friend — it didn't help in the long run, but at least the
plea's sincerity helped make the song into one of the many highlights on the
album.
The best song, however, is the last one. 'Lost
In Space' starts out slowly and leisurely, tricking the listener into thinking
it's going to be a boring blues-rock shuffle, but, in a minute's time, makes
the transition to one of the greatest power-pop choruses of its time — forget
about Cheap Trick for a moment, and listen to these guys head for the sky,
screaming about how you're «lost in space for sure, lost in space for sure —
losing control, oh no, no, lost in space for sure!» while Crane is hitting
higher and higher organ notes. The depressing message of the song is totally at
odds with the euphoric pounding of the chorus, and usually this brings in
confusion and disappointment, but not this time: this time, the effect is
psychedelic rather than plainly confusing (as in, it ain't necessarily a bad thing to get «lost in space»). A
classic number that ought to be resuscitated, brushed off, and installed as
one of the finest songs of 1980, no doubt.
Alas, just as Alice Cooper's sales were fairly
slow for this period, so were the new look Atomic Rooster's — the album and
accompanying tour went so deadly unnoticed that Du Cann took it personally, and
defected after a while, putting a final stop to all hopes. But let us look at
it from the bright side — they did leave us one excellent souvenir, and who
knows whether they'd have been able to repeat its quality? Thumbs up for this «un-forgotten»
little gem.
HEADLINE NEWS (1983)
1) Hold Your Fire; 2) Headline
News; 3) Taking A Chance; 4) Metal Minds; 5) Land Of Freedom; 6) Machine; 7) Dance
Of Death; 8) Carnival; 9) Time; 10*) Future Shock; 11*) Medley: Watch Out /
Reaching Out.
With Du Cann completely disillusioned about the
band's possible future and jumping ship in 1981, Atomic Rooster managed to hang
on a little longer, before once again disintegrating into elementary
particles. By and large, the band's last album is a Vince Crane solo effort in
all but name. He handles all the keyboards, sings all the vocals (for once!),
and writes all of the music and lyrics (with only his wife Jean lending a
helping hand with the words on a few tracks); although, technically, this is
no less an original «Atomic Rooster» album than the previous one, because old
time guitarist Du Cann is out — and old time drummer Paul Hammond is in.
Not that it matters. On Headline News, Crane consciously moves into modern territory.
Electronics abound from the very onset, and even if Dave Gilmour himself is
credited for some of the guitar parts (along with two other guitarists, Bernie
Tormé and John Mizarolli), this fact alone will hardly cause anyone to
raise an eye, because the approach here is completely «depersonified». Headline News is an icy cold, moody,
un-rock'n'rollish-as-they-come stiff monster of a record, a very far cry from everything this band
ever stood for in the Du Cann era. Consequently, unlike 1980's Atomic Rooster, this one is never
invoked as a «lost gem» — hardly a surprise, considering the difference between
the ecstatic opening riff punch of 'They Took Control Of You' and the slow
synth-heavy buildup of 'Hold Your Fire'.
But find the patience to hang on to it for a
few more moments — and Headline News
may turn out to be the real «lost
gem» in Rooster's pedigree, this time, «lost» so deeply that it's hard even to
scoop up a positive review from the archives (or, for that matter, any review or mention of this album).
With Crane as the only creative force at the helm, Rooster finally turns into
his personal vehicle for self-expression, self-exorcising, and self-cleansing.
A dark, somber, ominous collection of laments, fears, melancholic
observations, and, sometimes, cautious optimism. And all of this, without any
exaggerated «Satanism» or intense revelling in one's own schizophrenia.
The odd analogy with Alice Cooper may freely be
continued here: if Atomic Rooster
was well in line with Alice's brawny, upbeat, New Wave-influenced hard rock
records of 1980-82, Headline News
makes the same unexpected, even overwhelming jump as DaDa — into a mechanic, ice-cold world with little sympathy or pity
for early 1980s record buyers. The incessantly repeated chorus for the fourth
song on the LP goes, "Metal minds will keep you warm tonight", and
this could be used as the tagline for the entire record — which, while we are
at it, has no bad songs whatsoever, because each one is imbued with genuine
worries and cares, and when your worries and cares are genuine, they translate
into musical hooks quite easily.
Much as I dislike Eighties' electronics on the
service of rock veterans, I have no problems when the electronic sound actually
matches the planned atmosphere. So the oscillating synth bass creates just the
right environment for the mercy-begging anti-war diatribe 'Hold Your Fire'; the
bashing electronic drums suit the creepy Gothic ambience of 'Dance Of Death';
and the robotic harpsichord is perfectly fine with the stern, implacable
message of 'Time' (yes, another song
named 'Time' – not quite up there with Floyd's in terms of artistic cruelty,
but definitely grittier and more evocative than either Alan Parsons' or,
perhaps, even David Bowie's).
Lighter-sounding numbers include the echoey
piano-pop charm of 'Land Of Freedom', with some unbeatable vocal hooks and, for
once, uplifting female backup vocals; and the album's one genuine «dance-pop»
escapade, 'Taking A Chance', which, with proper care taken, could and should
have been on the pop charts that year — unfortunately, the production is a bit
too murky and minimalistic to grapple a large audience. (Actually, it was not
even released as a single — 'Land Of Freedom' was, which was probably the
second best choice). But even these relatively «happy» tunes do not go against
context — 'Land Of Freedom' has a disturbing, close-to-paranoid mid-section,
and the optimism of 'Taking A Chance', jammed inside all of the darkness, comes
across as hopeless and desperate. The very next track is 'Metal Minds', after
all, whose aura is the equivalent of acute claustrophobia — with a touch of
autism, perhaps.
The effect is curious and creepy — at first, I
was ready to dismiss the album, like everyone else, as a mediocre, boring
attempt to «fall in» with the post-punk movement, but with each new listen it
was moving closer and closer to the category of «depressing confession from
Lost Soul No. 9», but with its own individuality, nurtured on a bit of Edgar
Allan Poe and Mary Shelley. There is really no other Atomic Rooster album on
which Vincent Crane, the troubled sick man, comes out as such a distinct
personality, making his death in 1989, from an overdose of painkillers (no one
knows whether it was intentional or not), even more ominous. Yes, its overall
sound is badly dated, but at least it is badly dated for a reason, unlike quite a few albums from the same year that I
could name. Which, I guess, makes it «goodly dated» — with a guaranteed thumbs up.
Do not repeat the mistake of ignoring it.
PS: The CD reissue adds a couple extra tracks,
including 'Future Shock' that is credited to the band's new guitarist, John
Mizarolli; accordingly, it is the only guitar-dominated rocker on the whole CD,
and a fairly strong one — that riff may sound generic at first, but its
«resolution» is quite inventive, and the guitar tone kicks honest ass. All in
all, it is simply amazing how consistent Crane and Co.'s songwriting had
gotten at the very end of their tenure — considering that hit-and-miss
songcraft was one of AR's major curses throughout their «peak years».
ADDENDA:
RARITIES (1970-1981;
2000)
1) Moonrise (last recording from
1981); 2) Atomic Alert (US radio ad 1971); 3) Death Walks Behind You (studio live
from 1981); 4) V.U.G. (with Carl Palmer 1970); 5) Broken Windows (outtake from
1980); 6) Alien Alert (US radio ad 1971); 7) Throw Your Life Away (different mix
from 1980); 8) Devil's Alert (US radio ad 1971); 9) Devil's Answer (original demo
with Carl Palmer from 1970); 10) Do You Know Who's Looking For You? (original demo
from 1980); 11) Don't Lose Your Mind (original demo from 1980); 12) He Did It
Again (original demo from 1980); 13) Backward/Forward Revealed (Death Walks
Fans Only 1971); 14) End Of The Day (original demo from 1981); 15) Lost In
Space (original demo from 1981); 16) Hold It Through The Night (outtake from
1981); 17) No Change By Me (outtake from 1981); 18) Play It Again (original demo
from 1981); 19) I Can't Take No More (live from Marqueee 1980).
Over the past twenty years, there has been a
veritable swarm of various best-of, worst-of, lost-of, flossed-and-drossed-of
Atomic Rooster compilations on the market. Some were released without official
authorisation on the part of any of the surviving members, but eventually quite
a few were overseen by John Du Cann personally — to the extent that, I believe,
pretty much every recording these guys ever left in the studio vaults or in the
sidewalks of concert halls has, at some point or other, been officially
released. Reviewing them would, however, be way too much honor for a band whose
A-grade material fits well onto one (okay, maybe two) CDs.
Additionally, most of these compilations (a)
bear the evil blame of mixing original LP tracks with outtakes, demos, and live
recordings, (b) go forever out of print upon initial release, and (c) much of
their content is now available as bonus tracks appended to the seven main LPs.
Very important bonus tracks at that — such as the band's last hit single
'Devil's Answer', etc. — but, altogether, the band now hardly needs a separate Past Masters-type entry in their
catalog.
So we will limit ourselves to some notes on a
single one of these packages — Rarities,
officially released in 2000. The title is honest, because there is no overlap
with regular studio albums, and practically no overlap with the bonus tracks on
new re-issues (except for 'Throw Your Life Away' and 'Broken Windows', which
seem to be the exact same recordings as the bonus tracks to Atomic Rooster, but possibly with
different mixes). And the contents clearly show that only an obsessed
completist need spend his time hunting for extra Atomic Rooster material.
Well, almost.
There is one fairly appetizing chunk of material here: demos (actually,
full-sounding demos, with guitars, keyboards, and drums all in place) of four
new compositions that Crane and Du Cann recorded in 1981, presumably for the
planned sequel to 1980's Atomic Rooster
— a sequel that, unfortunately, never came to pass, even if the songs show they
had every single chance of releasing a worthy follow-up. These are four crunchy
rockers, a bit simplistic for those who prefer their Rooster with a truly
«Atomic» breath, perhaps, but catchy and energetic enough for the average hard
rock fan.
Everything else is just alternative versions of
well-known tracks, but sometimes with additional surprises: an early demo of
'V.U.G.', for instance, with Carl Palmer still on drums; a 1981
live-in-the-studio recording of 'Death Walks Behind You', losing some of its
original eeriness but effectively «metallized» by Du Cann; and a very long
live version of 'I Can't Take No More' that turns into a hot organ/guitar
battle between the two main players midway through — and shows that the reunion
Rooster live shows were quite a serious business right to the very end.
The sequencing is fairly messy, defying
chronology, but it gives the band a good excuse to bookmark portions of the
album with funny old radio ads — "It's coming, it's coming! From out of
the nuclear holocaust of our times, Atomic Rooster is coming!" — and
stress the fact that, whenever Crane and Du Cann came together, be it in 1970
or 1980, the results were uniformly impressive (and I agree). For that matter,
the Chris Farlowe era and the Headline
News coda are completely ignored — unsurprisingly so, since the track
selection was overseen by Du Cann himself, and it is understandable that he had
no interest in those Rooster periods that he had nothing to do with. Not that
there's anything wrong with that — the Farlowe period can just dissipate into
oblivion as long as I am concerned.
Aside from Rarities,
there may be some archive live albums of Rooster's worth getting; at least
several have been released of the band's appearances on the BBC, both with Du
Cann and with Farlowe — although,
once again, many of these live recordings have also been scattered around the
bonus tracks on current original LP releases. Live At The Marquee, from which 'I Can't Take No More' has been
sampled for Rarities, is also
available separately in its entirety, but, apparently, the sound quality on
most of the tracks is considered to be fairly poor, so beware. One doesn't
really want to not experience the
full strength of Atomic Rooster's nuclear blast, or does one?
SHOW YOUR HAND (1973)
1) The Jugglers; 2) This World
Has Music; 3) Twilight Zone; 4) Put It Where You Want It; 5) Show Your Hand; 6)
Back In '67; 7) Reach Out; 8) T.L.C.
In 1973, this record was one of the biggest
novelty items on the UK market. Plenty of British bands had by then already
fallen under the influence of funk, but few, if any, were willing to consciously
establish themselves as legitimate funk acts
— because, well, it is a strange
overseas black thing, and one does not want to look too ridiculous, openly aping an overseas black thing instead of
dressing it up in patriotic clothes, like those early British R'n'B bands used
to do at the dawning of the rock era.
The Average White Band knew that, and took some
precautions. First, they called themselves The Average White Band — a brilliant
PR move, immediately giving the entire act a tongue-in-cheek attitude that told
listeners «do not take us too
seriously», even when the actual songs might seem to be telling the opposite.
Second, armed with all the Scottish verve they could muster (all the original
band members were Scottish, although, curiously, each one was born in a
different town), they practiced hard enough so as to pre-eliminate all possible
accusations of «unprofessionalism». Third and most important — the point was to synthesize a particular version
of «white funk», so that, for the well-trained ear, Show Your Hand could never be mistaken for a genuine «black» album,
nor could it be claimed that it genuinely tries (and fails) to be one.
From the beginning, the sound of the AWB was
very smooth and easy-going. This is not heavy psychedelic funk à la
George Clinton, or wild party grooving à
la Sly Stone. Most of the usual comparisons are with the slightly
watered-down-for-mass-consumption sounds of Tower Of Power (or, perhaps,
Earth, Wind & Fire as well). But even compared with these guys, the AWB are
much more intent on keeping themselves in total check, never taking the
direction of religious ecstasy, common for black bands. This reduces the
possible infectiousness of their groove power, but also reduces the risk of
emotional embarrassment — because, let's face it, it is one thing to learn the
basics of funk music and achieve perfect coordination between all the members
of the band (and a pretty damn hard thing, too), and quite another to pile up
«spiritualism» on top of the trade. It is fortunate
for us that the AWB, in their better days at least, never even tried to invoke spirits dancing in the flesh.
What they tried to do instead was to flesh out
the individual grooves to the point at which they started to resemble pop
hooks. Watch the intro to 'The Jugglers' — a brief percussion flash that leads
straight into a syncopated bass/keyboard riff that is not merely «danceable»,
but memorable, and even somewhat disturbing, which is appropriate given how,
lyrically, the song seems to be about fighting addiction. It is not exactly a
funk-pop masterpiece (the AWB were far too A to produce pure pop perfection
and, as I said, way too W to foment full-force funky flavour), but it is solid
B-level entertainment with a brain.
And it is with these fast-played, precise,
intelligent, and catchy funk tunes that the AWB make the grade. Show Your Hand may not have gained too
much attention in the UK and remained completely unknown in the States (it was
only released two years later, with a slighty different track listing), but up
to this day it remains one of the band's finest hours. Of this fine hour, the
finest five minutes are unquestionably a cover of The Crusaders' 'Put It Where
You Want It', an irresistible proto-disco tune that was already fine enough in
its original incarnation, but is totally cooking here thanks to Malcolm Duncan's
lengthy sax solo at the end — joyful, inventive, hilarious, infectious, and
something else from a more obscure part of the thesaurus. The band seriously
reworked the composition, adding lyrics as well to the formerly instrumental
number — now it is a sort of a sex song that doesn't as much assert its sexiness
in a harassing manner as it learns to approach its subject with nonchalance.
"Put it where you want it, lay it on the line, you can share your love
around and I can share my time" — or perhaps not, whatever, just as long
as that sax is blowing it all out.
Another major highlight is the eight-minute
'T.L.C.', whose complex web of scratchy guitar riffs, geometric figures laid
out by the brass section, and tight vocal harmonies is not what I would call
«ass-kicking» or «sweaty», but rather «subtle» and «well-nuanced». It's like a
public love celebration that, for some reason, you have to hold behind closed
doors in the middle of a small audience so as not to disturb the neighbours —
compensating with subtlety and innuendo for the impossibility of belting it
out loud and proud. It might seem boring to some, but I prefer to think of it
as funny — even touching, perhaps.
The odd average white magic does not work so
well on slower, more lyrical numbers, such as the soulful 'Twilight Zone' and
the title track, both of which move closer to bland, generic soft rock with
little in the way of a backbone. At least 'Reach Out', although structured as
an equally generic blues-rocker, adds some much-needed grit to the
proceedings, with respectable «sting guitar» work from one of the guitarists
(Hamish Stuart, probably?).
Unfortunately, these songs already show the
exact way in which AWB would be developing into WBAWB («Way Below Average White
Band») in a few years. But as they started out, the highlights were numerous
enough to cancel out the lowlights — and even the lowlights were not that low, as even the worst songs here
still feature well-written choruses; their main defect lies in the sanitized
arrangements, and an awful «snowy» keyboard sound typical of very mediocre
jazz-fusion acts of the time (keyboards are, indeed, the weakest musical link
on this record). And even if my gut feelings didn't immediately feel like it, Show Your Hand is one of those strange
albums that one could develop an almost intellectual attraction to — in a way,
I believe I did, which explains the thumbs up reaction better than simply saying «hey,
nice groove».
AWB (1974)
1) You Got It; 2) Got The Love;
3) Pick Up The Pieces; 4) Person To Person; 5) Work To Do; 6) Nothing You Can
Do; 7) Just Wanna Love You Tonight; 8) Keepin' It To Myself; 9) I Just Can't
Give You Up; 10) There's Always Someone Waiting.
This is the one that broke 'em big. Relocated
by Bruce McCaskill from the misty highlands to sunny Los Angeles, and
receiving a proper amount of promotion, The Average White Band unexpectedly
found more acclaim in the States, where their second, self-titled, LP shot all
the way to No. 1 (in the UK, it only climbed to No. 6, and the discrepancy
would be even more noticeable on their next two records). Apparently, American
audiences felt more at home with the idea of this inherently-black music played
by genuine Scotsmen than Scotsmen themselves. You draw the head-spinning
sociological conclusions, I will try to restrict myself to the music.
Success actually came on the heels of the big
hit single 'Pick Up The Pieces', which, up to this day, arguably remains the
AWB's best known and most frequently radio-spun piece to be picked up. For good
reason — unless you disrespect «groove-based» music in the first place, it is
very hard for me to imagine how this particular groove could be resisted. There
are plenty of things that can go wrong with the AWB: they may be too sappy, too
sentimental, too generic, too boring, too «white» in a «black» setting or vice
versa etc. etc., but none of these accusations work in the case of 'Pick Up The
Pieces'.
Roger Ball blows some fine melodic sax in the
solo part, but the main attraction is, of course, the basic groove — bass,
drums, guitar, and sax locking into one another in one of the finest complex
figures that mid-1970s dance music had to offer. And these days, we may
actually drag it out of its cocaine-drenched hedonistic L.A. context and just
enjoy it for the general inspiring atmosphere that it conveys. Who knows,
people might still be wanting to tap their feet and jerk their heads to it long
after L.A. itself finally sinks into the sea... but we digress.
For the most part, the AWB smooth out the edges
even further out here. Most of the traces of 12-bar blues-rock (like 'Reach
Out' from the last album) have been eradicated, so that the album is more or less
evenly divided between «edgy» and «soft» grooves (the only exception is
'There's Always Someone Waiting', which closes the album in «blues» mode, but
even this «blues» has been tampered with by means of funky wah-wah guitar,
fusion-esque keyboards, syncopated drumming, and jumpy transitions from section
to section).
The «soft grooves» sometimes feature exciting
vocal twists — like 'Keepin' It To Myself' and its falsetto chorus — but the
album's reputation still rests on the edgy ones, from 'Pick Up The Pieces' to
the second-best cut 'Person To Person' to the proto-disco 'Got The Love' and 'I
Just Can't Give You Up' (particularly the latter of the two could easily
compete with any given Bee Gees hit of the same era — terrific combination of
ingredients on that one).
As far as I am concerned, the one weak link on
all of these tracks is lack of implosive guitar presence. Hamish Stuart is
competent and moderately inspired, but there isn't one single «fabulous» funky
riff on here, or wall-rattling solo, to jump out at the world and conquer it in
one go. (Actually, 'Got The Love' begins with a faint hint at such a riff, but
it goes away instead of developing in the right direction). Whether that
reflects lack of talent or intentional modesty, I have no idea – but then, if
the saxophone is allowed to lack modesty on 'Pick Up The Pieces', what's up
with discriminating the most important instrument in pop music?
Maybe they thought, though, that too much loud
guitar would disrupt the sexy smoothness of the grooves, supposed to match the
seductiveness of the curves of the letter W on the front sleeve. This is
understandable — the AWB never concealed the fact that they were, essentially,
writing music for couples, be it on the dance floor or on the bedroom one. But
writing music for couples that is neither «fake» nor «cheap» is very hard
business all the same, and if the AWB do not manage to scale much further
heights than achieving that goal, this is still sufficient reason for an honest
thumbs up,
perfectly cleansed from nostalgic overtones.
CUT THE CAKE (1975)
1) Cut The Cake; 2) School Boy
Crush; 3) It’s A Mystery; 4) Groovin’ The Night Away; 5) If I Ever Lose This
Heaven; 6) Why; 7) High Flyin’ Woman; 8) Cloudy; 9) How Sweet Can You Get; 10)
When They Bring Down The Curtain.
Recording of this album was somewhat darkened
by the accidental death of the band’s drummer, Robbie McIntosh, from
overdosing, with a story that would be fairly typical for the rock hero party
style of the time — an unfortunate side effect of «normal» L.A. party
entertainment, with someone «accidentally» substituting cocaine for heroin
(could be from here that Quentin got the inspiration for Pulp Fiction, or from a billion similar stories, I guess).
The evil joker inside me wishes to state that
the rest of the band were too stoned to notice anyway, and that is why they
carried on like nothing happened, with Cut
The Cake continuing in exactly the same vein as AWB; but, as a matter of fact, they did notice (if anything, Alan Gorrie nearly died as well in the
same incident, only saved in the nick of time by Cher — «best thing Cher ever
did», adds the evil joker), quickly replacing Robbie with Steve Ferrone and
dedicating their next record to his memory. If there ever was an
individualistic change in the drumming style, count me too coarse to notice.
Having mentioned the band’s transfer to sunny
California in the previous review, I forgot to mention that the label was
Atlantic, and the new producer was Arif Mardin — the same guy who was, at the
exact same time, responsible for rebooting the career of the Bee Gees; and, for
that matter, I find it quite unfair that even the finest efforts of the AWB have
mostly fled from public memory where albums like Main Course managed to take solid root in it. The Bee Gees had the
unquestionable advantage of finding the better hooks for their dance grooves;
but the AWB were far more respectable as a real groove-based band of actual
musicians, rather than three pretty voices backed by interchangeable session
players.
Even the songwriting, at this point, could be
disputed. Maybe it was their bandmate’s death that provided an unprecedented
fit of sentimental inspiration, but the ballads on this record — ‘If I Ever
Lose This Heaven’, ‘How Sweet Can You Get’, and particularly ‘Cloudy’ — find
beautiful vocal lines to host their emotions, and, at the same time, feel
livelier and less glossy than any ‘More Than A Woman’ could be. They are glossy: Mardin, ever the dedicated
escapist, gives every number the cleanest sound possible and lays enough echo
on the vocals to place an unbreachable distance between the singer and the
listener. But the playing is inventive and even improvisatory, which
compensates for overproduction.
That said, us tough guys will probably want to
throw out the sissy stuff and look for red meat. The juiciest slice is right on
top — the title track, a worthy sequel to ‘Pick Up The Pieces’ as one of those
near-instrumental compositions that the AWB deserve to be remembered for:
another combination of interlocking guitar, bass, drum, and brass lines that is
simply infectious beyond reason, or
adequate description. But there is also ‘Groovin’ The Night Away’, whose
purpose adequately matches the title, and ‘School Boy Crush’, which starts out
cool-struttin’ and arrogant like an Aerosmith number (unfortunately, not really
delivering upon the promises of that terrific bass groove), all of them quite
worth the while of any big fan of the syncopated approach.
And, for that matter, only the last number,
‘When They Bring Down The Curtain’, should probably qualify as proper
«proto-disco», even if the rhythm section is still playing by its own rules
without properly subjugating itself to the simplifications of disco. So for
those who like drawing strict lines between «funk» and «disco», I can safely
certify that Cut The Cake is quite
«old school». It is also one of the AWB’s finest efforts, although the degree
of its adventurousness will probably be better assessed by professional
musicians than an average white listener: like all of its predecessors, Cut The Cake really only starts growing
once your ear has been properly converted into a democratic six-track system,
in which Gorrie’s bass is given the same attention as Hamish Stuart’s guitar
etc. I am not sure I have completed the process, but at least it has progressed
far enough where, without scruples, I would be glad to support Cut The Cake with yet another thumbs up
— if everybody in the world who makes music without a single spark of genius
would at least aspire to this level,
that would certainly save us all a lot of trouble.
PERSON TO PERSON (1976)
1) Person To Person; 2) Cut The
Cake; 3) If I Ever Lose This Heaven; 4) Cloudy; 5) T.L.C.; 6) I'm The One; 7) Pick
Up The Pieces; 8) Love Your Life; 9) School Boy Crush; 10) I Heard It Through The
Grapevine.
The Average White Band Live Experience is
pretty much what you would expect it to be after gulping down the Studio
Experience. Basically, everything is kept the same, with the addition of some
major jam power. Naturally, in an era of double live LPs Person To Person could only be double, but that's understood —
considering that ʽT.L.C.ʼ goes on for fourteen minutes and ʽPick
Up The Piecesʼ is stretched to eighteen, only two LPs could have made this
even the slightest bit representative of the band's actual shows.
Unfortunately, all of the things that confirm
the «average» tag for the AWB in the studio do not seem to dissipate live,
either. First and foremost, the band is still playing it cozy and safe. Stretching
the songs out into jam mode could give them a chance to go wild; but the
individual solos that explain the length of ʽPick Up The Piecesʼ are
still well-mannered and restrained, even Steve Ferrone's drum solo, which is
very pefunctory and boring in comparison to a John Bonham or a Ginger Baker or
a Michael Shrieve. And none of the other members are great soloists, either;
in fact, there must have been a bery good reason why they always emphasized
collective groove over individual showcases on their studio albums — none of
the guitarists or brass players have anything even remotely approaching an
individual style, preferring to blend into the surroundings. (Still wonder why
Paul McCartney spent so much time recording and touring with Hamish Stuart in
the late 1980s / early 1990s? This is
the kind of sidekick that he appreciates the most).
Second, the setlist is good, but far from
perfect. Everything is funky-midtempo or slow-balladry; a fast romp along the
lines of ʽPut It Where You Want Itʼ would have made the experience
far more convincing. Where, in a different context, I would bemoan the presence
of disco, here I find its absence equally bemoan-ful: too much white-boy funk,
even played with all due professionalism and inspiration, can eventually
render the heart immune to its charms. It doesn't help matters, either, that
the two new numbers, previewed from Soul
Searching (ʽI'm The Oneʼ and ʽLove Your Lifeʼ) show
that the formula, good for the first three years, was getting seriously stale and repetitive into its
fourth. And finally, the cover of Marvin Gaye's ʽI Heard It Through The
Grapevineʼ is a genuine failure — it takes the guys a whole three or four
minutes to set up the groove, and then the groove turns out to be rather limp
compared to both the classic «black» and «white» versions (CCR's, for
instance).
Overall, a huge disappointment — funk bands are
supposed to give their best on stage, but this here is clearly not the case. I
still like the fourteen-minute version of ʽT.L.C.ʼ (very few solos
and some nice tension build-ups on the way), but if the boys place more
emphasis on precision and cleanliness of playing than on letting their hair
down, it should be obvious that studio records are the way to go. Hence, a
logical thumbs
down — avoid, unless one of those inexplicable forces of Nature
happened to transform you into a major AWB fan.
SOUL SEARCHING (1976)
1) Overture; 2) Love Your Life;
3) I'm The One; 4) A Love Of Your Own; 5) Queen Of My Soul; 6) Soul Searching;
7) Goin' Home; 8) Everybody's Darling; 9) Would You Stay; 10) Sunny Days (Make
Me Think Of You); 11) Digging Deeper (Finale).
A technical success, perhaps, but this is where
the meter finally started dropping down. Although Soul Searching still shows no signs of the band seriously embracing
disco, it veers dangerously in the department of «suave»: the band, formerly
known for its warm (if not exactly «hot») dynamic grooves, is putting more and
more effort into producing lyrical balladry. Of the nine primary songs on this
record, six are ballads (or, at
least, slow, soft, sentimental grooves), and only three take us back to sweaty, funky territory. Surely this is not
what I usually associate with the
idea of «soul searching» — unless we consider the soul to be six parts honey
and only three parts grit.
Furthermore, the three «gritty» numbers are
nowhere near classic level. Two had already been previewed on Person To Person, where they did not
look particularly inspiring next to big ones like ʽPick Up The
Piecesʼ, and here, they are the best of the lot. On ʽLove Your
Lifeʼ, the whole band still works as a terrifi-team; all that is lacking
is a set of memorable guitar and/or brass riffs, instead of a set of
nice-sounding, but not particularly inspired wah-wah grumbles. ʽI'm The
Oneʼ has a much more interesting brass part, even if the syncopated blasts
were clearly reaped from the same territory on which ʽSuperstitionʼ
had sown its seeds four years earlier. The third dynamic dance groove is the
near-instrumental ʽGoin' Homeʼ, and there is nothing I can say about
it except that... well, it could have worked well in a blackspoitation movie.
As for the ballads, it may be worth one's while
to locate and try to enjoy ʽA Love Of Your Ownʼ, sometimes extolled
as one of the band's finest, although I find the wheezing synthesizer annoying,
the brass backing purely atmospheric, and Gorrie's falsetto completely generic;
ʽQueen Of Your Soulʼ is a slightly better proposition, with a better
oiled rhythm section and tolerable chimes instead of the synthesizer.
Actually, at this point I believe that my favorite band member is... whoever
is playing the bass at any given moment (Stuart or Gorrie): the bass lines, in
general, show more originality and creativity than any other lines on the
album.
It does not help matters much that the record
is dressed up in conceptual clothes, with an ambient ʽOvertureʼ that
previews some of the album's themes at ultra-slow tempos, and an equally slow
and moody ʽFinaleʼ, subtitled ʽDigging Deeperʼ — perhaps a
hint at the band not having found its
soul, after all, but promising to do better next time. In the process, they
ended up giving us some average mid-Seventies equivalent of what would later be
known as «adult contemporary», the only difference being that it is sometimes
interesting to trace the traces of the band members' fingers on their
instruments, whereas in classic «adult contemporary» the very idea of «musical
performance» would be devalued.
Still, that's no reason to go easy on Soul Searching: it must be clinically
boring for everyone but the most dedicated nostalgic funky guy (especially if he
happened to get his first lay to the softporn sounds of ʽWould You
Stayʼ), and since 1976 is my year of birth and I couldn't experience any
nostalgia for this whatsoever, I give it a thumbs down with the clearest state of
conscience that I could ever feel.
BENNY & US (1977)
1) Get It Up For Love; 2) Fool
For You Anyway; 3) A Star In The Ghetto; 4) The Message; 5) What Is Soul; 6)
Someday We'll All Be Free; 7) Imagine; 8) Keepin' It To Myself.
Who would have known it — a derivative,
cautious funk act in the middle of a downhill slide, and a formerly great, but
drastically outdated R&B hitmaker turn out to be a match made, if not in
heaven itself, then at least somewhere on the outskirts. Well, sometimes even
in the world of music two minuses yield a plus, and there is no question that
in 1977, both acts could easily be considered as «minuses», despite their past
achievements.
But this one-album collaboration project
between the AWB and Ben E. «Stand By Me» King somehow managed to reignite the
cold fuel in all parties concerned. At the moment, King was actually not doing
too badly: his disco single
ʽSupernatural Thing (Pt. 1)ʼ had managed, two years earlier, to
return him to a brief resurgence of national prominence. But he was unable to
keep it up, and clearly needed outside assistance. Likewise, the AWB still hit
the charts with regularity; but the original formula seemed to be exhausted.
As the two acts found each other, good things
started happening. King's vocal delivery gave the band that element of authenticity that they usually found so
hard to achieve, precisely because their vocalists could sing falsetto, but
could never reach the level of conviction that great R&B stars seem to
ascend with such natural ease. And the band, in turn, provided King with
excellent backing, heavy on funk and light on strings and sappiness.
Already the first notes of ʽGet It Up For
Loveʼ announce that the ride is going to be much more fun than it was on Soul Searching: a grumbly wah-wah track
wrestles with ringing syncopation, the bass sets a very minimalistic, but stern
and firm groove, and Benny gives us a nice repetitive chorus to sing along
with. But, although the performance is far from a masterpiece, the coolest
thing is that the same level is sustained throughout the album, unlike Soul Searching, which began
promisingly enough with ʽLove Your Lifeʼ and then quickly plummeted
into puddly, wishy-washy balladry. (On Benny
& Us, there is some balladry, too, but much less than we'd expect from
a Ben E. King album, and much nicer than we usually see on an AWB album.)
The centerpiece here is ʽA Star In The
Ghettoʼ — pure dance-pop formula with by-the-book brass and strings
arrangements, but somehow it works for all of its seven minutes. Maybe it is
because it is hard to go wrong when a genuine star from the ghetto sings this
kind of song, but, actually, the orchestral arrangements are quite emotional,
and the transition from verse to chorus has a little bit of cathartic effect
worked into it. Somehow one does get the feeling that this is the real thing — even if it is nowhere near
as catchy as the Bee Gees.
Further on down the line, both ʽThe
Messageʼ and ʽWhat Is Soulʼ are fine dance grooves as well,
although it is King's energy that consistently keeps them above generic
mediocrity (otherwise, ʽThe Messageʼ is not too different from
ʽGoin' Homeʼ off the previous record). Donny Hathaway's
ʽSomeday We'll All Be Freeʼ has King getting into character with more
vitality and passion than anywhere else on the album; the decision to segue the
number right into a somewhat diluted and unfocused cover of
ʽImagineʼ was hardly a correct one, but at least it is not the most
awful take on ʽImagineʼ that you will ever hear (and you will hear plenty). Finally, the revised version of
ʽKeepin' It To Myselfʼ is engineered by King in an Al Green manner,
and nearly blows away the original — except that they change the tonality on
the chorus, and, with this move, strip the song off its major vocal hook (at
least, such is the effect produced on my
ears).
Of course, all the differences are really very
subtle. It is not as if the two acts were so thrilled by bumping into each
other that they generated an accidental masterpiece. Benny & Us never intended to break any new ground — in fact,
it looks fairly conservative and «old-mannered» even next to its disco
contemporaries of the Chic-type crowd. But the two acts liked each other, and clearly enjoyed collaborating, which makes
the results friendly, inviting, and filled with a sense of purpose. Hence, a
friendly thumbs
up.
WARMER COMMUNICATIONS (1978)
1) Your Love Is A Miracle; 2) Same
Feeling, Different Song; 3) Daddy's All Gone; 4) Big City Lights; 5) She's A
Dream; 6) Warmer Communications; 7) The Price Of The Dream; 8) Sweet & Sour;
9) One Look Over My Shoulder (Is This Really Goodbye?).
The jolt, transmitted by «Benny», was
electrified enough to inspire the band for another fine effort, arguably their
best in four years. No changes in style whatsoever — not only disco, which the
guys continue to solemnly ignore, but New Wave influences as well begin to pass
them by. But the compositions go up one or two notches. The slower grooves gain
in the «sexy / sleazy» respects, and the faster ones are pinned to generally
more delicious, juicy melody lines.
The former category is best illustrated by
ʽYour Love Is A Miracleʼ, which is probably the closest they ever
came to capturing the musky smell of Funkadelic — «lite», yes, but all of the
instruments, rhythms, and harmonies work cohesively towards a nasty, dirty
big-boy sound that no morally trained housewife would ever tolerate. The title
track is equally fine, with their most memorable chorus in years — there may
be nothing revolutionary about choosing the line "we gotta have warmer...
we gotta have warmer... warmer communications" as a hook basis, but its
unintentional sex mantra seems to work against all odds.
On the faster side, ʽSame Feeling
Different Songʼ kicks in with the finest brass riff we have heard from the
AWB since ʽPick Up The Piecesʼ, and they keep it strung up and tense
for five minutes, regularly switching the focus from brass to the blubbering, «telegraphic»
guitar and back again. And the instrumental ʽSweet & Sourʼ,
straying slightly away into jazz-fusion territory, is built upon a
dep-reaching, nagging, ascending guitar line that goes straight to the
subconscious and does strange things with it, especially if you are listening
in headphones.
If it weren't for the ballads, which,
unfortunately, cannot be moved from the usual levels of boredom (the cover of
James Taylor's ʽDaddy's All Goneʼ is particularly trite, although,
technically, it «got soul» all right), Warmer
Communications could easily rival their best efforts in terms of
consistency; and the band's conservatism, at this point, becomes almost
respectable — at a time when traditional R&B was starting to get
restructured into its disco and post-disco forms, minimalizing, if not
nullifying, the role of particular instrument players, they continue to tighten
up their act and rely on complex time signatures and tricky chord changes,
instead of watering it all down. It may have been recorded in 1978 all right,
but it sounds positively 1973-ish, and for this type of music, it is an enormous
plus, well worth the usual tepid, but friendly thumbs up. And if four or five
«warmer» funky grooves ain't enough to thrill you, how about that album cover?
Those were the days...
FEEL NO FRET (1979)
1) When Will You Be Mine; 2) Please
Don't Fall In Love; 3) Walk On By; 4) Feel No Fret; 5) Stop The Rain; 6) Atlantic
Avenue; 7) Ace Of Hearts; 8) Too Late To Cry; 9) Fire Burning.
How can I «feel no fret», I wonder, when,
without a warning, all of the advantages gained in 1978 are lost one year
later? The Average White Band finally make their way through to disco, and it
is not a pretty sight. Actually, it is no sight at all. The whole album just
speeds by, and once it's gone, nothing remains but the sad echo of involuntary
toe-tapping.
Let us begin with this: ʽWalk On Byʼ
used to be a decent pop song, a highlight of the Dionne Warwick catalog and
all. What was the reason for trying to reimagine it as a mid-tempo dancefloor
standart sung in disco falsetto? It takes all the power out of the hooks
without adding any extra groove strength. There is nothing wrong with trying to
modernize classics as such, but there has gotta be a point. This particular
rearrangement has none. And that is what's wrong with the whole album
altogether: the band seems to have snapped out of their conservative formula —
and found itself aimlessly adrift in musical space.
The central piece here is the title track. At
six minutes and thirty seconds, it is supposed to demonstrate how firmly the
AWB has now grasped the essence of disco. Sure enough, they reprogram their
rhythm section — hardly a monumental task — speed up the tempo, and provide the
club-goers with an extra bit of dance fodder in case the club-goers run out of
«average white disco» artists before dawn. But the groove as such is
non-existent: the guitars are limited to beeps and bleeps, the brass section
plays nothing but lazy, quiet flourishes, and the keyboards are limited to
«atmospheric» hissing synths. Basically, they just forgot to add some music to
our day.
Unfortunately, I cannot locate any hidden gems,
either. ʽWhen Will You Be Mineʼ is probably the strongest of the lot,
opening with grumbly wah-wah and preserving a strong funky attitude throughout
— it sounds like a second-rate outtake from Warmer Communications, and, for that reason, is quite a traitorous
introduction to the album; once it's over, it's lazy balladry and limp,
unsubstantial disco all the way to the end. ʽAtlantic Avenueʼ is
occasionally extolled as a highlight as well, and it is a semi-notch above the
rest due to its proud anthemic ambition, but the lyrics are ultimately dumb
("So come on, down Atlantic Avenue / Let the samba take ahold of you"
embodies the decade's hedonism without the slightest bit of irony — even the
Bee Gees could do better than that), and the melody only really goes well
together with a leisure suit.
In short, Feel
No Fret simply reflects a complete loss of whatever individuality these
guys had — and I have no idea how it is possible at all to enjoy this without
first constructing a late 1970s dance club atmosphere framework in one's mind.
(For that matter, I strongly believe that ʽPick Up The Piecesʼ or
ʽSame Feeling, Different Songʼ will find their admirers any time, any
day). But if, for some reason, you are in need of a concrete example of how
«transition to disco ruins a solid funk band», a «paired» listen to Warmer Communications and Feel No Fret will do nicely, and a
perfect thumbs
down is guaranteed for all.
(PS: For some reason, the CD edition of the
album not only added four extra tracks, but was even retitled as Feel No Fret... And More — as if we
should all be happy to get more of
the same for the same money exactly when it comes to selling the worst album in the band's history so
far. Marketing is a strange, strange art indeed).
SHINE (1980)
1) Catch Me (Before I Have To
Testify); 2) Help Is On The Way; 3) Watcha Gonna Do For Me; 4) Let's Go Round
Again; 5) Into The Night; 6) Our Time Has Come; 7) For You For Love; 8) If Love
Only Lasts For One Night; 9) Shine.
Somehow I forgot to mention that the noticeable
shift of sound from Warmer
Communications to Feel No Fret
had much to do with the band's change of label and, more importantly, producer:
from Atlantic veteran Arif Mardin they went on to Victor Records and new
producing guy David Foster, one of the big heroes of mainstream Eighties pop.
It was under his guidance that the Average White Band began and completed the
transformation into the Average White Automaton; which, naturally, does not
take the blame off the shoulders of each individual member as well.
Shine is basically Feel No Fret No. 2, but goes even further in the direction of
dispensing with the «live» feel and machinizing the sound of the band. They
still play their own instruments, even the drums, but all of the grooves have
been streamlined, and there is a stiff, robotic feel to all the tracks —
exactly the kind of thing Foster was aiming for. Thus, it does not really
matter any more if it is the AWB playing this shit, or any other
run-of-the-mill dance band with ten years of heavy practice behind its back.
The pretentiously jovial ʽLet's Go Round
Againʼ managed to become a minor hit single here; and as far as generic,
but expertly produced disco goes, it is neither better nor worse than any other
such minor hit single. The chorus is catchy, the rhythm is danceable, the
strings and horns well placed, and Hamish even gets to play a melodic solo. But
crowd pleasers like that really go for a dime a dozen, and I would rather take
ʽHelp Is On The Wayʼ, whose vocal melody is nowhere near as easily
memorable, but not as silly, either.
Alas, the only
track on here that is vaguely reminiscent of the AWB's former «average
greatness» is ʽInto The Nightʼ. It is almost completely instrumental
(apart from a few mood-setting vocal lines in the «chorus»), so you do not have
to put up with Gorrie's formulaic falsetto. It has a perfectly well worked out
brass groove that takes a brief, but effective musical idea and explores it,
unlike the horns on the other tracks, which merely exist to provide an extra
sonic layer. It is «funky-pretty» rather than «disco-crappy», and is more
influenced by Stevie Wonder than Donna Summer. If anything ever survives from Shine, it's gotta be this one rather
than ʽLet's Go Round Againʼ — I'd rather have the mainstream disco
epoch be remembered through its clever facets than its populistic anthems.
Still, if you like smooth, perfectly polished,
un-annoying disco as background muzak to accompany your home chores or morning
aerobics, Shine might find some sort
of useful application: when played loud enough, it will effectively hinder your
sleeping reflexes. This is why the predictable thumbs down reaction arrives
hatred-free.
Curious
P.S.: It is exceedingly funny
how all the reviews of these late-period AWB on Amazon rave about their
greatness and consistently come furnished with 5-star ratings. It takes a
stupid person like me a few minutes to realize that, in most cases, there are
about three to four reviews for each, and that, most probably, they are all
written by nostalgic 50-year old geezers whose memories of this music are
inextricably tied in with memories of their first sexual experience. Teenage
musical experience can be so detrimental,
once you think of it.
CUPID'S IN FASHION (1982)
1) You're My Number One; 2) Easier
Said Than Done; 3) You Wanna Belong; 4) Cupid's In Fashion; 5) Theatre Of
Excess; 6) I Believe; 7) Is It Love That You're Running From; 8) Reach Out I'll
Be There; 9) Isn't It Strange; 10) Love's A Heartache.
I will try to be brief. An album titled Cupid's In Fashion cannot be a great
album – period. An album titled Cupid's
In Fashion and featuring six white-clad guys on the album cover cannot even
be a good album. And an album titled Cupid's In Fashion, featuring six
white-clad guys on the album, and coming from a band that went from playing their instruments to manipulating them, is zooming straight
ahead into the realm of total darkness.
The only comforting thing I can say about Cupid is that, even in 1982, the band
was holding out against going electronic, and, apart from some occasional
robotic tampering with the drums, most of the music was still built around
funky guitar playing, brass riffs, and gentle keyboard patterns. But this time
around, there is not even an ʽInto The Nightʼ in sight — everything
is either pedestrian dance muzak or mushy, instantly forgettable balladry.
ʽReach Out I'll Be Thereʼ is the
obvious standout, of course, since great Motown hits of the past have very
little competition when they are surrounded by flat hackwork; but, predictably,
the band adds nothing to the original, yet detracts quite a lot — and this is
probably the first time I really feel the urge to strangle Gorrie for his
falsetto.
Other than that, the title track is the only
one that even attempts to build up a hookline, but it is a shallow and cold
hookline, and marred with awful lyrics to boot. This whole musical schtick was
hopelessly dated by 1982 — on-the-edge dance music was evolving in the
direction of Controversy and Thriller, which these guys were unable
to follow, being completely stuck in the reserved, «uptight» state of the
1970s. An obvious thumbs down — the only sensible thing they
could have done at that time was to break up, and, fortunately, that is exactly
what they did, once it became clear that Cupid, apparently, was not nearly as
much in fashion as advertised. Especially when the Cupid that you are
advertising looks suspiciously like a rubber doll.
AFTERSHOCK (1989)
1) The Spirit Of Love; 2) Sticky
Situation; 3) Aftershock; 4) Love At First Sight; 5) I'll Get Over You; 6) Later
We'll Be Greater; 7) Let's Go All The Way; 8) We're In Too Deep; 9) Stocky
Sachoo-A-Shun.
Here is one more for the rapidly increasing
collection of proofs that «generic mainstream muzak» in the 1970s was nine
heads and eighteen tails over the same thing in the 1980s. After doing the
sensible thing and packing it in after Cupid's
In Fashion, the AWB, mercifully, spent most of the decade busy with their
solo projects and recreation, but then the devil made them do it and reconvene
just one year before it expired (although it's not as if the album would have
sounded much different had they put it off until, say, 1993: this kind of music had pretty much
solidified in the late 1980s and never truly budged since).
The reconvened line-up is flawed: Hamish Stuart
was busy doing the right thing
(playing guitar on Paul McCartney's Flowers
In The Dirt), and so was Steve Ferrone, here replaced by Eliot Lewis,
credited as much for «programming» as he is for «percussion». Additionally,
Alex Ligertwood, a one-time lead vocalist for Santana, is contributing some
lead and background vocals. With these shifts, the remaining band members (Gorrie,
Ball, and McIntyre) set out to reconquer the world... through the offer of an
achingly wretched collection of «songs» that, for the most part, seem like a
talentless imitation of Phil Collins' No
Jacket Required (an album that, by itself, took no large amount of
God-shared inspiration to create).
Seriously, a reunion has got to at least try to have a purpose; the only «shock»
of Aftershock is to discover that
the record does not attempt to do anything.
All of its seven dance «grooves» and two so-called «ballads» are as hollow,
unmemorable, and sonically annoying as R&B ever gets (and boy, can this «new school» R&B ever get
annoying!). There is not a single moment
anywhere in sight — never mind a complete track — that would attract my
attention. The rhythm section is programmed most of the time (some of the
basslines are real enough, but fairly crude compared to what these guys used to
fabricate); guitars are relegated to the background; and even the vocal hooks
do nothing but drag, drag, drag.
To be completely honest, I would take one of
those infamous pre-Jagged Little Pill
Alanis Morrisette dance pop albums over this tripe — at least the girl had
some goddamn energy to compensate for the awful arrangements and melodic
weakness. But the Average White Band were unlucky in that, from the very
beginning, they always played it «soft», and now, in an age when nobody within
that genre gave a damn about the silly old obsolete notion called
«musicianship», they found themselves still playing it «soft» and «limp», only
this time to programmed beats, streamlined no-presence rhythm chords, and
third-grader keyboard sounds. Had anybody in the band at least found the
courage to stand up and say, "fellas, why don't we stop this awful, awful
shit, when was the last time you listened to your own ʽPick Up The
Piecesʼ?", they might have achieved something. As it is — better just
forget about there ever having been a 1989 in the history of the So Below
Average It's Not Even Funny Anymore White Band. Thumbs down.
SOUL TATTOO (1997)
1) Soul Mine; 2) Back To
Basics; 3) Livin' On Borrowed Time; 4) Every Beat Of My Heart; 5) When We Get
Down On It; 6) Oh, Maceo; 7) Do Ya Really; 8) I Wanna Be Loved; 9) No Easy Way To
Say Goodbye; 10) Love Is The Bottom Line; 11) Welcome To The Real World; 12) Window
To Your Soul.
No band, good or bad, deserves to go out with
an album as lame as Aftershock;
thus, long-time fans just had to wait
for a move of redemption. Fortunately, there comes a time in the life of most
(if not all) artists when they get to think about themselves as too old and
tired to care about following trends — realizing that they'd rather just fuck
all that shit and get «back to basics», which, coincidentally, happens to be
the name of one of the tracks here.
With Gorrie, McIntyre, and Ball still forming
the bulk of the band, and Eliot Lewis on keyboards plus Pete Abbott on drums
supplementing the old guard, Soul Tattoo
may not be a masterpiece of the R'n'B genre, but, coming eight years past Aftershock, it is pure gold in
comparison. It is, in fact, as if the past twenty years never happened. No
awful electronics, drum machines, real instrument playing, real funky grooves
— the band is clearly committed to the safe old formula once again, sending all
those dark times when they were betraying their master style into oblivion. No
disco, either. Just old-fashioned dance-oriented R'n'B and a few old-fashioned
ballads to boot. Giving the finger to all the «new school R'n'B» as well.
GOTTA LOVE THAT.
The rewinding is announced already on the first
seconds of the album, with the opening syncopated chords to ʽSoul
Mineʼ; then, as Abbott kicks in with a solid rocking beat, the bass starts
drawing complex geometric figures in the air, and the repetitive "working
in a soul mine!" chorus starts getting addictive — that is where you actually start to remember that there used to be
things that made you like, if not love, this band. The track does not have a
melodic line as memorable and infectious as their few greatest-ever hits from
the past, but in every other respect it is as hard-driving and authentic as
anything they had ever done — and it sets just the right mood for the entire
album. Even if the only other track that replicates its sweaty, funky success
is the near-instrumental ʽOh, Maceoʼ, a specially constructed
showcase for Roger and his ball, er, sax, I mean. I do mean it — it is one of their most sax-drenched numbers, ever,
probably with more sweat spilled over it than during the entire recording of Aftershock.
The other groove-based tunes are somewhat
smoother and more pensive, but generally move one step beyond «boring», usually
by means of a funny catchy chorus (ʽLove Is The Bottom Lineʼ,
ʽDo Ya Reallyʼ). Eliot Lewis comes into his own as an okay vocal replacement
for Hamish Stuart, but the star of the show is Gorie, whose range has not
deteriorated one bit in twenty-five years time and who is now able to make the
best of his falsetto, rather than blindly imitating the Bee Gees (even using it
for a gorgeously placed vocal hook on the chorus of the album's worst song —
ʽEvery Beat Of My Heartʼ, an over-sappy ballad that incidentally
sounds like a boy band product). That said, it's too bad they did not try to
populate the album with more tunes like ʽSoul Mineʼ and ʽOh,
Maceoʼ — it is highly improbable they were still trying to use that smooth
sound of theirs to charm the pants off ladies, so they could at least kick some
extra ass for the guys.
On the modest critical scale that was specially
invented for the AWB, this is a terrific, completely unexpected comeback, and a
noble end to the band's studio career (unless they plan to reward their long
term, arthritis-ridden fans with another offering — highly unlikely,
considering that there has been no follow-up in fifteen years). Fans of their
classic sound will definitely get a kick out of parts of it, to which I must
add a pinch of pure respect. To come back together, screw the fashion in grand
fashion, and make a defiantly retro album that can, at worst, be «dull», but almost
never «tasteless» — not everyone has it in them, and so the thumbs up
judgement is as much based on rational context analysis as it is on pure
pleasure. Which I am not denying, either: ʽSoul Mineʼ is great fun,
regardless of any damn context.
FACE TO FACE (1999)
1) Soul Mine; 2) Got The Love;
3) A Love Of Your Own; 4) Oh, Maceo; 5) Back To Basics; 6) Work To Do; 7) Every
Beat Of My Heart; 8) Pick Up The Pieces.
Any respectable studio comeback deserves a live
counterpart. Over the past decade, the AWB has released quite a number of
these, actually, and spending a lot of time, words, and web space on them would
be overkill, but Face To Face, as
the first one in the series, deserves a brief mention. Roger Ball left the band
shortly after the recording of Soul
Tattoo, and, for the ensuing tours, was replaced by Fred Vigdor — clearly a
hard-working guy, since he seems able to fill Roger's shoes to the extent that
I honestly do not hear any big difference. The album itself is said to have
been recorded at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco — not the legendary Fillmore of old, of
course, which was closed down by Bill Graham as early as 1971, but still the
Fillmore, lending a bit of extra glitz to the whole thing.
The track listing is somewhat bizarre, though.
Clearly, the band did not want to be perceived as simply an oldies act, so the
inclusion of four tracks from the new album is understandable. But, altogether,
there are only eight (plus a ʽLet's Go Round Againʼ as a bonus on
some releases), and this leaves rather a miserable amount of space for the
classic hits — and, for that matter, where are
the classic hits? Other than ʽPick Up The Piecesʼ, there are none. If
you are going to bring back the
oldies at all, why resuscitate mushy balladry like ʽA Love Of Your
Ownʼ (particularly since mushy balladry is already represented well enough
by the new song, ʽEvery Beat Of My Heartʼ)? Where is ʽCut The
Cakeʼ? What's wrong with ʽPut It Where You Want Itʼ? ʽPerson
To Personʼ, anyone? Huh?..
It is all the more bizarre considering how well
the new-look band actually sounds. ʽSoul Mineʼ almost had me believe
that I am listening to a studio re-recording with fake crowd noises; I hope to
God the suspicion is not true (what point can there be for a band like this to
release a fake live album?). Sound quality is impeccable, as is the level of
coordination between all the band members. Most importantly, they are still
having fun, going at it as if the
past twenty years had not happened, and we were all still huddled in a
circa-1974 club venue, knocking off that sweaty-funky music while it was still
relatively fresh.
So it is no surprise that, most of the time,
the audience is kept well awake and on its feet, with a particularly huge rise
of enthusiasm at the opening trills of the show-closing ʽPick Up The
Piecesʼ ("I think you know this", Gorie adds, and they sure do).
If only they left out the slow ballads — there should be a law out there,
allowing no more than one «slow-burner» per a show like this — and concentrated
more on funky grooves, there could even be a chance of beating the impact of
1976's Person To Person. As it is,
only ʽSoul Mineʼ, ʽOh Maceoʼ (explained from the stage to
be a tribute to James Brown's sax player, Maceo Parker — shame on me for not realizing
that earlier!), ʽGot The Loveʼ, and ʽPiecesʼ help us work
up a respectable sweat. Still, it's a fair enough document, and solid proof —
at least, for the turn-of-the-century period — that it still made good sense to
purchase tickets to an AWB show.
LIVING IN COLOUR (2003)
1) Check Your Groove; 2) Down
To The River; 3) Living In Colour; 4) One Of My Heartbeats; 5) Close To You
Tonight; 6) Half Moon In The Crescent Street; 7) Think Small; 8) I Can't Help
It; 9) I'm Gonna Make You Love Me; 10) Love Won't Let Me Wait.
But wait — they are not done yet! In fact, I
was that close to missing this release at all: very little information on it is
available outside of the band's fan-targeted website, and, furthermore, this
new studio album almost threatened to get lost in the small, but steady trickle
of live releases that the AWB are still baking on a regular basis. Yet there it
is: a brand new studio album, much as I hate to admit that. Let us approach it
with an open mind and a friendly heart, hard as it is to treat that way a
record whose very front sleeve is screaming at you — «do you remember the soft,
sweet, sexy days of 1974? Do you?»
Particularly hard to take if you were born in 1976.
The good word is: this music still sounds very
much like the AWB, despite the fact that there are, by now, only two of the
original members left — and that even long-term post-peak member Eliot Lewis
is no longer in the band by now, replaced by Klyde Jones. But the presence of
Gorrie, who still handles most of the vocals, and Onnie McIntyre on guitar
ensures healthy conservatism. Dubstep influences are nowhere near to be found,
and neither is auto-tuning. In fact, all of the music continues to be recorded
with live instruments.
The bad word, however, is that Living In Colour is a clear step
backwards from the minor revival of Soul
Tattoo. If anything, the band seems to be retracing their original steps —
where Soul Tattoo was a partly
successful attempt to restore the «classic» sound of their first three or four
albums, Living In Colour brings us
back to the late 1970s, the age in which their sound got softened, their
grooves got simplified, and their ability to capture the imagination, not just
the feet, vanished into thin air. What for — I don't know. Maybe they got a
call from a rich millionnaire fan, saying, «oh man, oh man, those days of
rockin' it out to Feel No Fret in
1979 were hot — here's a million
dollar check if you get me one more of those!»
It only suffices to compare ʽSoul
Mateʼ with ʽCheck Your Grooveʼ, which opens this record on a
superficially similar note — «checking the groove» reveals that the groove is
pitifully limp from all points of view. Even the drummer releases zero energy
hitting on the skins, not to mention the twice-as-minimalistic bass. It is
still a well-constructed dance groove, but they forgot to adjust the dentures.
And, unfortunately, it is the best track on the album.
Or, to be more honest, one of the best tracks. As long as they are ready to throw on even
a small pinch of funky energy, the compositions are mildly fun. ʽHalf Moon
In The Crescent Streetʼ, in particular, is a touching anthem to New
Orleans, and its cajun attitudes add some bright colors to the otherwise
dull-gray hue of the record. And ʽThink Smallʼ, presumably recorded
live (although my only arguments are Gorrie's spoken introduction and
occasional applause on the part of a small audience, both of which could be
overdubbed), is a solid brass-led jazzy jam, «in the style of Cannonball
Adderley, or The Crusaders, all the stuff we grew up on», Gorrie says. It is
not tremendously exciting, but it is respectable second-hand jazz-pop.
Most of the rest of the album, unfortunately,
is given to ballads — all of them equally dull and lifeless in their
by-the-book sentimentality, culminating with a particularly lifeless cover of
ʽLove Won't Let Me Waitʼ (which was already fairly lifeless when
Major Harris had a hit with it in 1974, and has only managed to lose its last
shreds of pulse since then). Some are slow and some are a bit faster, but who
really cares? If you are that
nostalgic, just throw on a karaoke version of ʽMore Than A Womanʼ.
Going all mushy on us once again is not
the way to go if you want to uphold your R&B credibility. Thumbs down
— and, as far as I can see, this really is
the last studio album by the AWB; considering that age and lineup issues will
probably no longer allow them to fabricate hot grooves, I can only hope that
they will have the good sense not to release another ballad-soaked record in
their twilight years. Gracefully,
gentlemen; the keyword here is grace.
BAD COMPANY (1974)
1) Can't Get Enough; 2) Rock
Steady; 3) Ready For Love; 4) Don't Let Me Down; 5) Bad Company; 6) The Way I
Choose; 7) Movin' On; 8) Seagull.
«Beware of bad company», they would warn us all
in Victorian times, «nothing like bad company to bring shame and disrepute to
the respectable, intellectually stimulating type of music they call hard rock».
But did we listen? Hell no! And instead of ejecting ex-Free vocalist Paul Rodgers,
ex-Free drummer Simon Kirke, ex-Mott The Hoople guitarist Mick Ralphs, and
ex-King Crimson bassist Boz Burrell from the midst of our good company, we blessed them on their long road towards radio
success, popularizing guitar distortion among truck drivers and competing with
Frank Sinatra for the love of bored housewives. No longer would hard rock have
to be associated with words like «scary» or «creepy». And while it would be
unfair to put all the blame on Bad
Company, they share an impressive enough chunk of it to deserve this opening
shot. It is extremely ironic, in retrospect, that the band was the first act to
be signed by Led Zeppelin's new label Swan Song — considering that Bad Company
stand for pretty much everything in
hard rock that Led Zep usually stand against.
None of which should be interpreted as a
flat-out condemnation of their self-titled debut, which is actually pretty
good, as far as «soft hard rock» ever goes, and may be even better for those
whose ears have not been punished in childhood through continuous exposure to
mind-numbing «Classic Rock Radio». The long-term fiasco of Bad Company could
be predictable right from the start, but the start itself was respectable. All
of the members came from vastly superior bands — Free were among the original
pioneers of blues-based hard rock; Mott The Hoople were among the first outfits
to blend hard rock with singer-songwriting and punk attitude; and King Crimson
were... um, a band with a sitting guitarist — and even though the basic idea was
to keep it simpler, stupider than their predecessors, their «supergroup» status
at first helped minimize the trauma.
Of all the individual band members, in terms of
sheer sonic contribution, nobody matters much here except for Rodgers. On a
Free album, the man would always compete for attention with the guitar player
and the bassist, both of whom were not only accomplished, but earnestly strived
to flash and flaunt their accomplishments. On Bad Company, all of the musicians merely play — doing their best to simply keep a steady groove and lay down
the basic chords. In his Crimson days, Boz Burrell was actually taught how to
play bass by Fripp, and although they taught him well enough to lay down some
fine playing on a few KC songs, by the time he ran away to Bad Company he'd
already forgotten most of it. Mick Ralphs never was a guitar phenomenon even in
his Mott days, much less here. Simon Kirke is a fine drummer, 'sall. All of
which means — no competition for Paul: Bad
Company belongs to him, fair and square.
The general policy of the album is announced
immediately. A brief countdown, a generic C power chord, two more, off you go
— and a greatest hit is born, a song that one could probably learn to play in
five minutes, which is likely to constitute 0.0000001% of the total amount of
time it has been played on radio stations around the world since 1974. I still
cannot understand what it is about ʽCan't Get Enoughʼ that makes it
stick, but somehow it does something for me that ten thousand similar songs, following
in its wake, do not. Maybe it's just Rodgers' personal charm. It certainly
cannot be any sort of «melodic impact».
That said, the only two songs from Bad Company
that I would want to preserve for the
perennial playlist are ʽRock Steadyʼ and ʽReady For Loveʼ,
conveniently placed side-by-side. ʽRock Steadyʼ is like ʽFoxy
Ladyʼ-lite, built around a similar chord sequence, but simplified,
trimmed, lotioned, and meticulously integrated in The Establishment. Still,
the guitar and bass retain some primal meanness which, when multiplied by
Rogers' slightly threatening
intonations, belies the band's nature as totally robotic and artificial.
ʽReady For Loveʼ was brought by Ralphs over from his Mott days (it
had already appeared two years earlier on All
The Young Dudes), and even though the original was rougher and grittier,
with a thick distorted rumble at the center of things, Rodgers is clearly the man to sing it, far more convincing
than Mick Ralphs with his lack of range and vocal power could ever be. (It was
Ralphs rather than Ian Hunter that took the lead on the original Mott recording,
and sizzly-steamy slowburners like ʽReady For Loveʼ honestly deserve
a different fate).
Bad Company ballads are a whole lotta different
story. I can handle the combination of «Paul Rodgers + muscular hard rock
groove», but «Paul Rodgers + wimpy country-rock mush» is a bit too much.
Therefore, ʽDon't Let Me Downʼ (no relation to the Beatles song,
fortunately), ʽThe Way I Chooseʼ (aren't they the exact same song, by
the way?), and even the minimalistic acoustic ballad ʽSeagullʼ, which
have nothing whatsoever to recommend them except for Rodgers' «magic», may
freely and without compensation vanish off the face of the planet for all I
care. The only song that redeems the second side is the title track — a
romantic outlaw painting tailor-made for Rodgers' persona, even distinctly
echoing Elton John's Tumbleweed
Connection in spots.
And still, a thumbs up. Bad Company is what we might call a ʽbad album gone goodʼ,
to paraphrase one of the band's future titles: as lame as the basic idea
behind the existence of Bad Company may be in general, this particular
realization of it exceeds expectations. The band's complete motto for 1974
actually read «keep it simple, but inspired». Over the next two years, with
money, dope, and cheap fame rolling in, that motto would get short-circuited.
STRAIGHT SHOOTER (1975)
1) Good Lovin' Gone Bad; 2)
Feel Like Makin' Love; 3) Weep No More; 4) Shooting Star; 5) Deal With The Preacher;
6) Wild Fire Woman; 7) Anna; 8) Call On Me.
Progress-schmogress? The second album picks up
where the first one left off, then performs a nice 360-degree curve over eight
songs — why change a winning formula while the market is still hot? Straight Shooter sold just as well as
the debut album, if not better, and solidified the band's reputation as
providers of highest quality third-rate hard rock for the masses even further.
It may be hard for some people to understand how an album as generic and
trivial as Bad Company could ever
have a successful sequel in the same style. But it does.
The two hit singles are not quite up to this
band's highest standards: there is nothing here that repeats the subtly dangerous
grumble of ʽRock Steadyʼ or the sly seductive restrain of ʽReady
For Loveʼ. In fact, Rodgers is playing his cards even more in the open
now: when he is not screaming his head off, he is either crooning or
«narrating» (ʽShooting Starʼ), and although, technically, it all goes
well, the «mystical» effect that this man's voice may sometimes produce is
almost never felt on this record. Not that a lot of Bad Company fans would ever
want to hunt for it, of course.
Still, ʽFeel Like Makin' Loveʼ has a
strange charm to it, probably hidden in the transitional folds when the
acoustic verse melody flows into the hard rock riff of the chorus (stealthily
appropriated from a theme from Tommy,
mind you). And the band still has a way to come across as respectably cool
when you no longer expect it — midway through, the catchy, but unexceptional
«semi-power ballad» becomes a psychedelic rocker, as Mick Ralphs suddenly lets
fly with a series of wailing, echoey solos that most fans of the single
probably wouldn't even need, as long as they could simply sing along with the
chorus. Those last two minutes of the song are easily my favourite part of the
album.
ʽGood Lovin' Gone Badʼ, the other big
one, got itself some wildly distorted, sludgy guitar, which could indicate a movement
towards «glam» territory, but not for these guys — one step forward and they
could have turned into KISS. They do make sure that the lyrics are «polite»,
the intonations are ecstatic and emotional, but not «brutal», and the sound
does not stimulate active headbanging. And the main hook is the title itself,
of course: "good lovin' gone bad, yeah yeah yeah!" just sticks, and
there's nothing you can do about it except shoot yourself.
But the album eventually loses momentum, just
as Bad Company did. For starters,
ʽShooting Starʼ is an arena-oriented anthem dedicated to the memory
of «Club 27», and it does not work well beyond the verses — the verses are sung
by Rodgers with a touch of emotional honesty, upon which the weak, unconvincing
chorus seriously lets the song down. Ralphs repeats the ʽFeel Like Makin'
Loveʼ trick with some explosive soloing at the end, but this time, there
is no rock solid riff to go along with it, so it doesn't come off with the same
effect (and besides, where's the fun of a new discovery?).
The album's most in-your-face ballad,
ʽAnnaʼ, was contributed by Simon Kirke, and is probably the band's
first real duffer. Slow, languid,
devoid of invention, hanging exclusively upon Rodgers' ability to pull off a
sentiment, and that coda? "I found me a simple woman, a simple woman for a
simple man" — a line that might be passable when hidden within one verse
out of three or four, but there is a certain paradox when one tries to focus
the listener's attention on a line like that: the trick is, it stops being simple, becoming forcedly
pretentious. Like yeah all right, we all know that Bad Company are a Simple
Band writing Simple Songs for Simple Fans who easily associate with Simple Men
trying to find themselves some Simple Women. Which would beg the question: what
the heck's wrong with complicated men
and women?
In fact, the only song on the second side that
rises slightly above mediocre is ʽDeal With The Preacherʼ, where
Ralphs digs deep into his heaviest tone and Rodgers raises as much fuss as on
ʽGood Lovinʼ. Next to its crunch and energy, the far slighter
ʽWild Fire Womanʼ does not qualify at all; and as much as ʽCall
On Meʼ tries to reach the skies with its solemn piano chords and wailing
guitars (the coda almost reads like a poor, poor man's ʽWhile My Guitar
Gently Weepsʼ), it still has a hard time leaving the troposphere. If not
for Rodgers, all of these songs wouldn't even be worth mentioning, but even his
presence cannot save them from mediocrity.
Still, by and large, Straight Shooter honestly performs everything the people expected
from it, so none of these complaints make too much sense. In fact, I should
probably even reward it with a thumbs up, especially considering how much more
adequate and even inspired this record is compared to whatever would follow.
But, like its predecessor, it still begs the question — these guys were so
obviously capable of so much more, individually and collectively; was it merely for the money that they were
lowering standards, or did they perceive their actions as some sort of High
Mission? As in, take all the fun out of rock'n'roll?.. Because this is not just
«simple» music — it is deadly stern, with far more seriousness than these hooks
could possibly take.
RUN WITH THE PACK (1976)
1) Live For The Music; 2)
Simple Man; 3) Honey Child; 4) Love Me Somebody; 5) Run With The Pack; 6)
Silver, Blue & Gold; 7) Young Blood; 8) Do Right By Your Woman; 9) Sweet
Lil' Sister; 10) Fade Away.
Bad
Company established the
general style. Straight Shooter
provided the vector — milk the formula until the udder runs dry. Run With The Pack gave a clear overview
of how much milk there was in the first place: barely enough to fill two
albums, certainly not enough to fill three, unless one is ready to mix milk
with other, less appetizing, bodily substances.
The most telling thing about the whole project
is that they couldn't even settle on an original composition for a lead
single: the final choice fell on a cover of Leiber/Stoller's ʽYoung
Bloodʼ, a twenty-year old Coasters chestnut already interpreted by plenty
of people. For a questionable, but audacious «theatrical» interpretation, check
out Leon Russell's performance on George Harrison's Concert For Bangla Desh. The song is essentially a lyrical joke
that does not work at all if there is no «rock theater bit» included (deep bass
on "you better leave my daughter alone...", etc.) — how was it at all
possible for these guys not to understand
that? Rodgers just sings the song, Ralphs just plays the guitar melody — no
interesting twirls, not even a goshdarn solo.
Of course, once you have listened to all the
other songs, the faceless cover of ʽYoung Bloodʼ might no longer seem
all that faceless. The band is at a genuine loss for vocal or instrumental
hooks. The songs are so amazingly generic, repetitive, monotonous, simplistic,
that it is hard to believe this was not the band's intention — if you ask me,
I'd suggest that Run With The Pack
was planned as a «super-simple»
record, with all of its songs written, rehearsed, and recorded during one
24-hour session, just because I do not want to think that badly of the people responsible for it: they are all
experienced and respectable musicians, after all.
One thing that would agree very well with this
hypothesis is that the lyrics on most of the songs aren't even laughable,
because there ain't much to laugh at. ʽSimple Manʼ (what a surprising
title!) repeats almost the exact same verse/chorus sequence three times in a
row, and that verse? "I am just a simple man, working on the land / Oh, it
ain't easy / I am just a simple man, working with my hands / Oh, believe
me". Is this supposed to imitate the aura of a salt-of-the-earth folk
song? When was the last time these guys actually consulted any real lyrics of
well-known folk songs? ʽHoney Childʼ: "Well the first time that
I met you, you were only seventeen / But I had to put you down, 'cause I didn't
know where you'd been". Nice start, Mr. Rodgers. ʽLove Me
Somebodyʼ: "Love me somebody, somebody love me / Take me for what I'm
worth / But only love me, but only love me". What is this, 1962? The age
of Merseybeat? If so, how come this is sung within the framework of a James
Taylor-type ballad?
Top prize goes to: "Give me silver, blue
and gold / The colour of the sky I'm told".
I could somehow get used to «silver, blue and gold» as the colour of the sky
(as highly debatable as that is), but there is something about this I'm told, clearly just stuffed in at the
last moment to make it rhyme, that irritates me to no end. Yes, it is true that
even after the Bob Dylan revolution lyrics are not necessarily supposed to be
paid attention to within a rock song. But if the main strength of your band
stems from the soulful vocals of your frontman, it is your patriotic duty to
fill up these vocals with something at least a little bit above primitive,
clumsily stated trivialities. Why even watch Spinal Tap, when you have the real
thing going on here?
Now if you really, really, really like the two first Bad Company albums, you might still want
to check out the third one. ʽLive For The Musicʼ is at least a real
groove-based hard rocker, with a properly enflamed solo and an oddly
proto-disco-shaped bassline. ʽHoney Childʼ, were it taken
tongue-in-cheek rather than seriously, could have fit in on one of the early ZZ
Top records, with its creaky Billy Gibbons-type guitar tone. The chorus of
ʽSilver...ʼ, despite the atrocious lyrics, is the album's only moment
of attractive guitar pop charm, and there is some simple, but melodic slide guitar
and mandolin (I think?) work to make it stand out from the rest. And Rodgers'
vocal parts on the formulaically «dark» ʽFade Awayʼ still have that
fatalist ring. Just forget everything your mama — or your teacher — ever taught
you about the English language, and you'll be fine.
That said, for each single «nice» moment there
will be at least two crimes against taste. Do you, do you, do you, do you wanna
waltz and waltz and waltz to the endless mantra of "do right by your
woman, she'll do right by you"? Do you want to learn how many different
shades of emotion can be concealed within the syntactically uncomfortable
construction "but only love me" if it is repeated six times in a row?
Do you want to sit through three and a half minutes of the limp-rock blandness
of the title track just to hear the band's latest and greatest innovation: a
heavy strings-enhanced arrangement for the coda? I know I don't, and, in
accordance with the principle of «do right by your readers, they'll do right by
you», Run With The Pack receives a
certified thumbs
down from the bottom of my heart, provided the heart can have thumbs
at all. Granted, there is at least some
ground for redemption here. The next several years would flood it altogether.
BURNIN' SKY (1976)
1) Burnin' Sky; 2) Morning
Sun; 3) Leaving You; 4) Like Water; 5) Knapsack; 6) Everything I Need; 7)
Heartbeat; 8) Peace Of Mind; 9) Passing Time; 10) Too Bad; 11) Man Needs Woman;
12) Master Of Ceremony.
Apparently, this album was recorded so quickly
after Run With The Pack that they
even had to delay the release a few months — so as not to let two records
compete on the charts at the same time. But what am I saying? Compete? Only in terms of whichever one
manages to bore the maximum shit out of you. And by now, even the fans were
getting tired: Burnin' Sky peaked at
#15, ten positions below Run With The
Pack, and its only single of any importance (the title track) went no
higher than #78. For a band that placed 100% of its faith in record sales, the
sky must have been burnin' indeed.
But then again, what else do you expect from a
record that allows itself to build a seven-minute long track on a four-note
bass riff? ʽMaster Of Ceremonyʼ may feature plenty of absent-minded
organ punching, a distraught, echoey Paul Rodgers vocal that seems to betray
traces of pot, and even an occasional sax solo or two, but they are just
fooling you: it is really all about the «doo-dum...
doo-dum! doo-dum... doo-dum!» Nazi
torture assault on your brain. Seven bleeding minutes of a pseudo-funky,
pseudo-gritty pseudo-jam whose only purpose is to let you know: «Yes, we can make long improvisations that are
every bit as minimalistic as our singles!»
The rest is divided more or less equally
between rote, unmemorable, trivial rockers and rote, unmemorable, trivial
ballads. The title track, believe it or not, is also based on a four-note riff that is nearly the equal of
ʽMaster Of Ceremonyʼ, and it happens to be the hookiest thing on the
whole album, with Ralphs' electronically treated solo briefly reminding the
listener of the existence of such a thing as «danger». But ʽLeaving
Youʼ, ʽEverything I Needʼ, ʽMan Needs Womanʼ, etc. —
does anybody need to hear these songs even once?
Trust me, the music inside is about as appetizing as the mega-inventive
titles.
Straining my already tired mind, I can perhaps
acknowledge that there is a bit of pretty acoustic picking on ʽMorning
Sunʼ, and the joint effort of the phasing effect between verses and the
pastoral flute interludes is enough to at least recognize the song as
something on which these guys might have worked,
meaning it at least creates an atmosphere (in comparison, something like
ʽPeace Of Mindʼ doesn't even begin to create one — just blunders
about in a mid-tempo puddle of generic country-pop pianos and electric
guitars).
Come to think of it, I may be slightly
downplaying the band's will for change. There is really a noticeable increase
in all sorts of instrumentation that is not hard rock guitar: folksy acoustic
melodies, pianos, saxes, even synthesizers (including synthesized strings).
None of which helps, unfortunately, because the basic ideology and style
remains the same: SMUT (Simple Music for the Undemanding Toiler). Sometimes I
think that the job must have really been a hard one — the guys had so many
things to unlearn about their
playing, I almost feel like pitying them. However, not even this kind of pity
should stay our thumbs
from going down.
This is an album that was born
begging for a thumbs down.
DESOLATION ANGELS (1979)
1) Rock'n'Roll Fantasy; 2) Crazy
Circles; 3) Gone, Gone, Gone; 4) Evil Wind; 5) Early In The Morning; 6) Lonely For
Your Love; 7) Oh, Atlanta; 8) Take The Time; 9) Rhythm Machine; 10) She Brings
Me Love.
Surprise! Just as you started to think it could
never ever get better, the Bad Company boys make one last concentrated effort.
Perhaps even the band members themselves were so horrified with the apathy and
facelessness of Burnin' Sky — Desolation Angels at least sounds as if
somebody gave them a much-needed cold shower.
I know the idea of Bad Company doing disco
sounds horrendous on paper, and that their decision to hop on the train during
disco's last profitable year reveals agonizing desperation, but ʽRhythm
Machineʼ is not utterly trashable as far as trashable disco goes: its
chunka-chunka bassline does not take the attention away from triple guitar
parts, with Ralphs alternating catchy slide lines and razor-sharp electric
leads over a rhythmic jangle. If you can get past such amazing showcases of
lyrical genius as "I'm a rhythm machine, you know what I mean" (not
exactly atypical for disco hits), the thing almost counts as a breath of fresh
air in the context of the ultra-stale BC formula.
The band did not dare to release the song as a
single, though, probably afraid of losing the truck driver segment of their
audience without picking up the «Tony Manero» group. They went with
ʽRock'n'Roll Fantasyʼ instead, which became their last certified big
hit — and also represented a weak effort to catch up with the times: Ralphs is
playing electronically treated, «cold-hearted» guitars, giving the whole thing
a little bit of a «Cars» attitude. Why they decided to further «embellish» the
song with silly-sounding electronic percussion bursts that punctuate the breaks
is not clear. Or, rather, it is quite clear, but I am not sure it works in any
way other than utterly comic. But remember, one reason why Burnin' Sky sucked so much was its total lack of humor, intentional
or not. Even a good laugh at the band's antics automatically makes Desolation Angels an improvement, if
not exactly a proper «comeback».
There is also a feel of increased diversity,
something the band never displayed as a cherished value before. Besides disco
and «electronized» pseudo-New Wave rock'n'roll (the second single, ʽGone
Gone Goneʼ, also belongs to the same category), there is also a touch of
basic country-rock — the unexpectedly catchy ʽOh, Atlantaʼ, which I
really like in all possible ways: upbeat, bouncy, lyrically simple, but
non-moronic, cool singalong vocals: «poor man's Allman Brothers», which really
sounds like a great compliment for the band.
And, of course, a couple traditional varieties
of the band's hard rock spirit: another spin-off from the pub boogie of
ʽCan't Get Enoughʼ (ʽLonely For Your Loveʼ, perfect for
stomping your beer mug on the table) and another metal-tinged blues-rock growler
(ʽEvil Windʼ, also «spoiled» a bit with the band's strange new
passion for electronic percussion). The soft, folksy numbers are nothing to
write home about, but ʽEarly In The Morningʼ could almost be worthy
of a contemporary Eric Clapton solo record — not that this should be a reason
for rejoicing.
In any case, the album puts the band at an
interesting crossroads: the incorporation of synthesizers, disco rhythms, and
a puff of New Wave spirit does not disrupt the continuity — this is still very
much a bona fide Bad Company record — and points a possible way at a marginally
respectable future. Why they preferred not to pursue it any further is beyond
my comprehension. Maybe Paul Rodgers got cornered by one of the truck drivers.
Maybe they experienced a nervous breakdown seeing the «disco sucks» campaign
unfurl at the very moment that they came forward with their first experiment in
the genre. May be a million other reasons — the fact is, this is the only point
in the «listenable» part of their timeline that they had a good chance to
modernize their sound and remain relevant for the next decade. Then again, does
it really surprise anyone that they ended up blowing it?
ROUGH DIAMONDS (1982)
1) Electricland; 2) Untie The
Knot; 3) Nuthin' On The TV; 4) Painted Face; 5) Kickdown; 6) Ballad Of The Band;
7) Cross Country Boy; 8) Old Mexico; 9) Downhill Ryder; 10) Racetrack.
A completely misguided, fatal failure here.
Apparently, the band was not «feeling well» in the early 1980s, due to
personal problems, exhaustion, and, according to some sources, a certain disappointment
in their image and the whole rock star thing, brought on by the deaths of
labelmate John Bonham and soulmate (you wish) John Lennon. Thus, following up
on their hearts' desires, they decided to make a more «personal», «darker»
record than usual.
They forgot one important thing, though: dark
and personal albums absolutely require musical genius in order to make their point. Just to select a few minor
chords, sew them up in a traditionally honored way, and let Paul Rodgers take
care of the rest won't do. But that is exactly how the band preferred to behave anyway, dumping most of their
«conquests» on Desolation Angels —
all the disco and New Wave influences — in favor of the good old brand, without
any interesting riffs but with a lot of feeling. Paul Rodgers isn't feeling too
good, and he wants you to tear your
sorry little ass out of the embraces of Thriller
and know it. Obey!
Okay, it isn't really that gloomy. Actually, the album does veer between the usual
mid-tempo not-so-hard-rock in the pangs of depression, and a set of cheerier, more evidently danceable R'n'B numbers with
heavy emphasis on saxophone support, provided by guest star and one-time Boz
Burrell's colleague in King Crimson, Mel Collins. On any other album most of
these numbers would just look stupid, but here, stuff like ʽBallad Of The
Bandʼ is at least a temporary respite from hearing Rodgers complain about
life's treachery on interchangeable dreck like ʽKickdownʼ and
ʽElectriclandʼ. (Yes, the former is a sincere lament built upon
horror brought on by the Lennon murder. No, it isn't a good song at all. The
very fact of Lennon's death did not exactly set off an extra wave of genius
inspiration in people).
For objectivity's sakes, I can list a few
scraps of relative goodness. John Cook's piano intro to ʽCross Country
Boyʼ (apparently three or four seconds out of one hundred and seventy).
The dumb, but sticky five-note riff in ʽDownhill Ryderʼ (but why the
ʽyʼ?). Mick Ralphs' excellent slide guitar part on ʽRaceʼ —
a last-moment set of gorgeously strung chords, totally wasted in the context of
an otherwise pedestrian song on an otherwise pedestrian album. Not much, eh?
All right: for total objectivity, I must say that the overall sound of Rough Diamonds is fairly decent for a
1982 album. The new style of mainstream-oriented production had not yet taken
over fully, and electronic support is used quite sparingly: a few synth parts
here and there, but no attempt to let the robots take over the real men. On
the other hand, in 1982 this couldn't be qualified as a brave,
integrity-boosting artistic move. It just meant the new standards hadn't yet
been fully established. By 1986, the band would catch on. In short, nothing
saves Rough Diamonds from a
predictable thumbs
down — not even the fact that ʽElectriclandʼ scored
relatively well on the single charts. Everything that had to do with Lennon's
death scored well on the charts, so it doesn't really count.
FAME AND FORTUNE (1986)
1) Burning Up; 2) This Love;
3) Fame And Fortune; 4) That Girl; 5) Tell It Like It Is; 6) Long Walk; 7) Hold
On My Heart; 8) Valerie; 9) When We Made Love; 10) If I'm Sleeping.
Had this band enjoyed a little less fame, and
had I had a little more fortune, I would not be obliged to review this at all.
But it so happened that, after the initial dissolution of Bad Company after Rough Diamonds, as Mick Ralphs and
Simon Kirke were about to team up with ex-Nugent vocalist Brian Howe for just a
little fun and a little cash, some thugs at Atlantic convinced them that the
cash would be flowing far steadier if triggered by the good old moniker.
Besides, how could 1986, arguably the worst year for commercially oriented
music in the XXth century, begin and end without a Bad Company album?
Not that Fame
And Fortune sounds anything like old time Bad Company. Instead, it sounds
like new time Foreigner — no surprise, since it was produced by Foreigner's
producer Keith Olsen. Thus, folksy and bluesy stylizations are mostly out,
replaced by bombastic arena-rock. Heavy, but glossy-safe guitar riffs, crappy
cheap keyboards all over the place (played by Gregg Dechert, whose only claim
to fame so far was playing for Uriah Heep in 1980-81), electronic echo on the
drums, and a generic pop vocalist with Siegfried-size ambitions. Whoo!
It goes without saying that there isn't a
single song on here that even barely approaches «good». The only possible
question is «in a better time and place, could any of these songs be better?» I
am not sure. The riffs are fairly rotten, and the vocal melodies are mostly
dependent on how much pathos the new singer guy is capable of generating.
Considering that 99% of the time he flat out refuses to sing like a normal
human being, I am not sure that replacing him with a Ray Davies could have
saved the situation.
Particularly low points involve the power
ballad ʽWhen We Made Loveʼ (on which Howe's little «rasp» seems even
more annoying than usual); the awful teen pop send-up ʽThat Girlʼ
(unless the chorus reall goes fat girl!,
which is how I hear it every time, in which case it's self-ironic... nah, not
really); and the humiliating ʽHold On My Heartʼ, a suspicious attempt
to write something in the style of Born
In The USA — except that it takes more than simply mimicking Bruce's breathy
intonations to succeed.
The only track here that deserves half a grain
of attention is ʽTell It Like It Isʼ, a rougher-edged rocker,
generally unspoiled by keyboards and somewhat strengthened by a well-meaning
sax backing. This one could be thought of as slightly watered-down, less focused
and intense AC/DC, and in the context of all the chest-beating, synth-pumping
dreck on here it almost feels like real rock'n'roll. Of course, there is still
no reason to keep its memories in your head one hour after the fact. Useless,
spiritually and intellectually offensive dreck. Even honest, hard-working truck
drivers — the band's most faithful audience — acknowledged that at the time,
judging by the charts. Total thumbs down.
DANGEROUS AGE (1988)
1) One Night; 2) Shake It Up;
3) No Smoke Without A Fire; 4) Bad Man; 5) Dangerous Age; 6) Dirty Boy; 7) Rock
Of America; 8) Something About You; 9) The Way That It Goes; 10) Love Attack.
There must be one thing and one thing only that
has determined the sound shift from Fame
And Fortune to Dangerous Age,
and it must have been the success of Aerosmith's Permanent Vacation in the interim. Suddenly, it was mathematically
proven that aging, no-longer-hip rockers could
be cool with the primary record-buying crowd once again, as long as they filled
out a subscription to cheesy pop-metal with an almost clownish approach to sex
matters. And the most awesome thing about it: you don't even have to rely on
synthesizers any more, because synthesizers do not prolong your male dignity
to the same extent as Mr. Rawk Guitar.
So the first thing you get to see when you pick
the album up is the title, and it has the word Dangerous on it. Dangerous? Bad Company? Even Paul Rodgers could
only seem «dangerous» to a very, very bored housewife with pretty low-set
standards of «danger», and Fame And
Fortune was no more dangerous than Chris de Burgh. Then you put it on, and
whoops, a blues-pop-metal riff explodes straight in your face. Then come the
lyrics: "One night ain't no love affair, but I won't ask no more from you
/ One night with you anywhere, heaven knows what we can do". See? It's a
song about a one-night stand. And Brian Howe really only asks to plug her once, like the good old-fashioned gentleman
he is, because he is a God-given gift to all
the ladies. As long as they do their hair in 1988 fashion, enjoy Dirty Dancing, and have not already been
chosen by Steve Tyler whose publicity advantages over Brian Howe are
undeniable.
You have already understood, I gather, that, in
between 1986 and 1988, Bad Company made the «smart» choice to shift from one
sort of awfulness (bland, languid synth-rock) to another:
metal-guitar-dominated cock-rock. «Smart» only in that this really helped them,
on the heels of Aerosmith, to sell more copies: quality-wise, this shit is only marginally better than
that shit, since the change gave the
band more chances to work out some concentrated, precise riffage — most of
which is still fairly rotten.
There is more to this than the riffs, though.
If your goal is to present yourself to the rest of the world as some sort of
orgasmic terror-inspiring sex god of hellfire, you have to know how to do it
with humor and irony — qualities that were no enemies to Steve Tyler or Gene
Simmons, but seem fairly incompatible with Brian Howe and Mick Ralphs. Instead
of truly sounding «dangerous», or at least «hilarious», the title track just
sounds stupid. Chorus lines like "young girl has found her stage, watch
out, she's a dangerous age" are delivered as if the singer is really warning you to watch out. Of
course, the style was not invented in 1988; but it looks ever so dumber when it
is dressed up in musical clichés of 1988 — its glossed-out metal sound,
Big Terror Drums, and satanic echo effects on the dude's voice.
Things can only get worse in a song that has
the word «rock» in the title, and there it is: ʽRock Of Americaʼ, a
certified «truck driver anthem» the likes of which this band had never stooped
to before. It's a good stimulus for punching your fist through the wall to the
merry sounds of "I wanna ROCK!", but it isn't a frustration-venter,
and what's the use of having to pay the repairman if you didn't even properly
vent your frustation? If you really want to rock the rock of America, go climb
Mount Rushmore or something.
Just like Permanent
Vacation, this miserable imitation features just one schmaltzy ballad
(ʽSomething About Youʼ, a song that even Diane Warren could never
have written — I think she generally uses a couple more chords in her
monstrosities), buried in a sea of Sex, No Drugs, and a Facsimile of
Rock'n'Roll — a sea whose individual waves roll over and fade away so quickly,
it hardly makes sense to mention them at all. Recommendable only for those who
are curious about cross-breeding «classic» Bad Company with «classic» hair
metal. Those who have better plans for their time can simply follow my thumbs down.
HOLY WATER (1990)
1) Holy Water; 2) Walk Through
Fire; 3) Stranger Stranger; 4) If You Needed Somebody; 5) Fearless; 6) Lay Your
Love On Me; 7) Boys Cry Tough; 8) With You In A Heartbeat; 9) I Don't Care; 10)
Never Too Late; 11) Dead Of The Night; 12) I Can't Live Without You; 13) 100
Miles.
If Dangerous
Age was Bad Company's Permanent
Vacation, then Holy Water is its
Pump. Of course the gross figures
are incomparable, but look at the tendency: Fame And Fortune – US No. 106, Dangerous
Age – US No. 58, and Holy Water
going all the way up to No. 35! Hitting platinum heights! And the title track
going all the way up to No. 1! Holy water indeed!
Honestly, though, this next try is a little
better cooked than the previous. There are all sorts of funny little rip-offs,
from Aerosmith to Michael Jackson, that are fun to spot; the truck stop anthems
are gone (unfortunately, the power ballads are not); and the overall proportion
of sticky riffs and quasi-fun singalong choruses has also increased. Basically,
Holy Water is as good a pop metal
record as this band would ever be capable of putting out — its «rootsiness» is
long gone now, all of it squeezed out, filtered and concentrated in a brief
two-minute long acoustic ditty that finishes the album on a most surprising
note — drummer Simon Kirke's first lead vocal on a Bad Company record (and the
guy actually shows more soul than Brian Howe, but somehow, that doesn't come off as such a big surprise for me). Other than
those few seconds of hearkening back to the good old days when the rock of
America absorbed its strength from the salt of the earth, it's all strictly
under the rule of hair, hedonism, and high technologies.
But you gotta give hair and hedonism their due
— those first ten seconds of ʽHoly Waterʼ really kick ass. That's one
really mean bluesy guitar roar from
Ralphs, and the song is genuinely impressive until it gets to the chorus, when
it just becomes catchy, but loses the thunder-and-lightning potential as the
ballsy riffage gets lost behind the fruity vocal harmonies. But it isn't the
only relative highlight: ʽStranger Strangerʼ opens out on another
fine riff, and adds sharp slide lead work to its advantages; and even though ʽDead
Of The Nightʼ is not about
zombies, as I had hoped in utter vain, it is still dominated by guitar crunch
rather than poppiness.
ʽFearlessʼ is odd, somewhat of a
cross between generic AC/DC and the funky wobble of ʽ(Dude) Looks Like A
Ladyʼ; ʽWith You In A Heartbeatʼ is more in the style of
Jackson's ʽBeat Itʼ; but then the gentlemen get their revenge by
previewing Genesis' ʽI Can't Danceʼ with ʽI Don't Careʼ
(really, there is a curious similarity between the riffs, although probably not
enough to override chances of sheer coincidence). All of this is silly rather
than stunning — clumsy attempts at coming up with their own hard rock formula
— but at least they had enough sense to cut down just a bit on the machismo
angle, focusing less on the «nasty» lyrics and more on the riffs.
Still, don't get me wrong: the simple fact that
Holy Water might be the peak of the
Howe years does not mean it can be honestly recommended. Why listen to a bunch
of mediocre old pros try to sound like Def Leppard when nobody has so far
deleted the Def Leppard catalog? Why listen to an album where, in the first
song, the singer tells you that he is walking
on holy water, and then in the very next one, he already could walk through fire? If they
themselves don't really know all that well what they are walking through, how
can anyone else?.. Maybe they should have released a Simon Kirke solo album
itself. Somehow, "Hey little girl, I love you so, I'd walk a hundred
miles to let you know" sounds more humane here than everything before it.
HERE COMES TROUBLE (1992)
1) How About That; 2) Stranger
Than Fiction; 3) Here Comes Trouble; 4) This Could Be The One; 5) Both Feet In The
Water; 6) Take This Town; 7) What About You; 8) Little Angel; 9) Hold On To My
Heart; 9) Brokenhearted; 10) My Only One.
Misery comes in different flavors, some of
which are more tolerable than others. For their last album with Brian Howe at
the helm, Bad Company preferred to choose «Romantic Dung», which might explain why the album failed to go
platinum — quite a few people out there prefer to extract their romanticism
out of other substances — but also might explain why, in the end, it did at
least go gold — quite a few people out there are easily satisfied with said
flavor.
At least the previous two albums could qualify
as glossy, pop-metallized hard-rock; Here
Comes Trouble, for the most part, consists of singalong feel-good arena
anthems and «let-me-die-for-you-on-the-spot-every-night» power ballads. No idea
what happened here, or why they suddenly felt the need to mutate the formula in
this particular way — maybe the ongoing «grunge revolution» simply threw them
off balance, and they decided to cut down on the «hair metal» elements in the
music. But in the end, what we are left with is no longer just «uninspiring»,
for the most part, it is simply «unlistenable».
The musicality of the big single ʽHow
About Thatʼ extends to three notes in the riff and one silly old power
chord in the chorus, the rest of the spotlight almost completely occupied by
Mr. Howe pouring his tired old heart out — and ending each chorus with a raspy,
«sexy» "how about that?" which does not even come across as provocative. Just pompous and annoying
in its operatic optimism (which might have sounded more convincing in a
different musical setting).
«Heavy» songs on the album are limited to the
title track — catchy, but riffless — and ʽBoth Feet In The Waterʼ, a
little stronger in the riff department, but less catchy. Nobody needs them anyway,
because Mick Ralphs must have slapped together those arrangements over a
sandwich break or something. And at this particular juncture, titles like
ʽLittle Angelʼ, ʽHold On To My Heartʼ, and ʽMy Only
Oneʼ should probably speak for themselves (the latter in particular is a
synth-led adult contemporary ballad whose first verse runs: "I miss you /
I just can't resist you / I need you like the sun needs the day / Oh please,
won't you come back again" and is delivered with all the seriousness of
feeling you'd expect from a John Donne poem).
True enough, some of the choruses are catchy — ʽHere Comes
Troubleʼ and ʽTake This Townʼ were written as singalong audience
baits, and they work that way. But the music they are equipped with is almost
non-existent, and raises the old issues of «adequacy» and «entertainment vs.
art» and what-not. Maybe if they had thought about reinventing themselves as a
bona fide power pop band, with legit, non-trivial guitar melodies, tonal
variety, unpredictable overdubs etc., these and other songs could have fared
better. Instead, this is rote, banal, instantly forgettable corporate rock that
does not even do justice to the best of the Brian Howe years, let alone Paul
Rodgers. Avoid, avoid — probably their weakest offering since Fame And Fortune; thumbs down all the way and then
some.
WHAT YOU HEAR IS
WHAT YOU GET (1993)
1) How About That; 2) Holy
Water; 3) Rock'n'Roll Fantasy; 4) If You Needed Somebody; 5) Here Comes Trouble;
6) Ready For Love; 7) Shooting Star; 8) No Smoke Without A Fire; 9) Feel Like
Makin' Love; 10) Take This Town; 11) Movin' On; 12) Good Lovin' Gone Bad; 13) Fist
Full Of Blisters; 14) Can't Get Enough; 15) Bad Company.
It is curious, actually, that Bad Company never
released a live album while still in their prime — one of the very few 1970s’
hard rock bands to do so, or so it seems. This was probably accidental, but it
might also have something to do with
the fact that, simply put, they were never a particularly interesting live
band (not that they ever were a particularly interesting studio band, for that matter, but hey, it’s always up to you if
you want to suck twice, rather than once) — and they may have subconsciously
felt it themselves. They certainly gave the fans their money’s worth, but they
never felt the pressure to pay any interest.
All the more strange is this decision to
finally come forth with a live album in 1993 — more than an entire decade after
they’d already shred the last vestiges of relevance. Recorded at various venues
on the 1992 tour of America, the sternly titled What You Hear Is What You Get, subtitled The Best Of Bad Company (not necessarily so, if you take a glance
at the setlist), seems to have but one reason for existence — other than
ensuring a little extra cash flow — and that reason is to satisfy our curiosity
in one department: how well does Brian Howe handle «classic» Rodgers era
material? The predictable choice is between «barely tolerable» and «Godawful»,
of course, but still, that curiosity is
not going away all by itself, so the record warrants at least one listen.
I have to admit that, for the most part, it’s
okay. Howe cannot handle the subtlety where subtlety is needed most of all —
the most glaring fuck-up is on ʽReady For Loveʼ, a song that was,
from the very beginning, very much «made» by Paul drawing out the “I want you
to stay.... I want you today” passage with a bit of subliminal howling, nursing
a dangerously affected libido. Howe just does not «get» it, and cannot convey
this sexual torment that Rodgers captured so well. But on the rockers
(ʽGood Lovin’ Gone Badʼ, ʽCan’t Get Enoughʼ) he is way more
successful, and at least there is no denying the professionalism — you can hate
his tone, or his volume, or his pathetic overtones, but he does hit the right
notes, and when they are stuck on good songs, well... the fans did get their
money’s worth.
The main problem is with the setlist, which
simply features way too many «hits» from recent albums, including the
lacklustre Here Comes Trouble which
they were promoting on that tour — hilariously, the announcer yells «ARE YOU
READY FOR SOME TROUBLE?» at the start of the show and then the band launches
into ʽHow About Thatʼ, arguably the friendliest and most toothless
tune of them all. Furthermore, not all of the songs stand to their studio
counterparts — for instance, the Zeppelinish bluesy riff rage of ʽHoly
Waterʼ is oddly compressed, as if the rhythm guitarist just didn’t see
fit to play all the extra notes (this is probably because Ralphs played both
the rhythm and the lead parts on the studio original, whereas here all the
rhythm duties go to Dave Colwell, a pretty bland player even for the usual
level of Bad Company).
On the other hand, it is Ralphs’ and nobody
else’s fault that the original cool psychedelic guitar swoops on the coda of
ʽFeel Like Makin’ Loveʼ have been replaced by muffled, low-pitched
guitar grumbling that deprives the song of its impressive metamorphosis. Now
it’s just a song about feelin’ like makin’ love. Were you a Bad Company fan in
1992? Did you pay to see them just to hear a song about feelin’ like makin’
love? Do you give the slightest damn about the band compressing the pleasant
little subtleties into a monolithic leaden sound? If you do, remember the title
of this record and stay away from it.
If you don’t, well, the only really bad song on
here is ʽIf You Needed Somebodyʼ (and we can excuse them for it —
what is a mainstream rock’n’roll band without a power ballad?), and the only
laughable «track» is ʽFist Full Of Blistersʼ, a one-minute long drum
solo from Simon Kirke who handles drum solos with about as much love for them
as Ringo, to whom the title is alluding. But maybe he was able to get a bit
more royalties that way. Drummers all over the world, remember — if you do
drum solos, insist on having them credited to yourselves and occupying a separate
track. Best guarantee of not ending up in the gutter.
Other than that, it’s all moderately competent;
there just isn’t any need to listen to any of it. Particularly now that the
archives have finally cracked, and true fans of the band have easy access to
hearing the band live in its «prime» (Live
At Albuquerque ’76). I cannot
bring myself to bestowing the «true fan» label on admirers of Brian Howe, but
I do know that such peculiar gents do exist — for them, this record is a must,
since their idol works as hard as he can on stage. It’s just that «hard work»
and «adequate performance» do not always coincide.
COMPANY OF STRANGERS (1995)
1) Company Of Strangers; 2)
Clearwater Highway; 3) Judas My Brother; 4) Little Martha; 5) Gimme Gimme; 6)
Where I Belong; 7) Down Down Down; 8) Abandoned And Alone; 9) Down And Dirty;
10) Pretty Woman; 11) You're The Only Reason; 12) Dance With The Devil; 13)
Loving You Out Loud.
Believe it or not, but this is a genuine
«comeback». A whole decade after they had broken their allegiance to
roots-based hard rock, trading in the salt-of-the-earth aura for hair metal
posturing and bland pop hooks, Bad Company are on the right trail again!
Goodbye, Brian Howe; hello, Robert Hart, a singer who sounds not at all unlike
Paul Rodgers, and who, along with his voice, brings pack the old predilection
for country-rock, acoustic guitars, barroom boogie, and, well, everything you
need to try and wipe out the memory of that awful last decade.
There is but one problem: the songs, with not a
single exception, leave a uniform impression of «uh? what was that?». The sound is perfectly decent — not
overproduced, stylishly retroish, quite compatible with what they did in the
1970s. But the vocal and instrumental melodies are every bit as good/bad as the
hundreds of «authentic country-rock» records with a hard edge thrown on the market
every year. And even worse, there is a clear feeling that the band has
consciously set the mode to «nostalgia»: "Let us make a record the way we
used to!"
Because, somehow, I cannot get the same kicks
out of something like ʽAbandoned And Aloneʼ the same way the kicks
were coming from some of the Rodgers-era «despair» songs. They have everything
here: a singer ready to rasp his guts out, Mick Ralphs in the mood for shrill
blueswailing, a classic build-up from tense, moody, quiet verse to screechy
chorus — but there is no desire to try and hook your own emotions up to the
song, because it still comes out hollow. I don't know why. ʽJudas My
Brotherʼ tries to bare the band's soul in an even more obvious manner (the
title alone suggests a shirt-ripping tear-jerker), but its power chords are by
now tired rehashings, and its painfully stressed chorus is a stale
cliché. Maybe in a different age these tunes would have sounded more
involving.
But in this age, it's, you know, mostly stuff
you expect to encounter in truck commercials. Too safe, too predictable, too
bland (even for a Bad Company album). ʽClearwater Highwayʼ has an odd
shade of CCR to it — ʽClearwaterʼ in the title may be a conscious
hint, but Hart's vocals on the chorus are very much in a Fogerty style, and the
whole thing seems influenced by the likes of ʽSweet Hitch-Hikerʼ,
which is a bit silly, but at least turns it into a marginal standout. The rest
alternates between country ballads and barroom rockers without any staying
power.
Still, as the last ever Bad Company album
consisting entirely of new studio material, Company Of Strangers is a half-decent way of going out — even the
title somehow alludes to them coming round full circle, and, indeed, all major
fans of the «classic» Rodgers era that jumped ship as soon as Howe came aboard
should feel free to scrape this one off the walls of used bins without feeling
the slightest pang of guilt. If there ever was such a thing as «Bad Company
magic» (well, at least when the gruff riff of ʽRock Steadyʼ is
combined with Rodgers' singing, it does come close), it is probably not
rekindlable any more, not even if they bring Boz Burrell back from the dead.
But at least it is possible to make
another Bad Company record that does not sound as if it came from a bunch of
miserable clowns, applying for whatever job there is to earn one last buck. In
that respect, it is a comeback — to
the state of «satisfactory boredom».
STORIES TOLD & UNTOLD (1996)
1) One On One; 2) Oh, Atlanta;
3) You're Never Alone; 4) I Still Believe In You; 5) Ready For Love; 6) Waiting
On Love; 7) Can't Get Enough; 8) Is That All There Is To Love; 9) Love So
Strong; 10) Silver, Blue & Gold; 11) Downpour In Cairo; 12) Shooting Star;
13) Simple Man; 14) Weep No More.
There can only be two motives behind the
production of this kind of album, and neither of the two is particularly
cheerful. One is that you just don't have enough creative energy in you any
more to produce an entire LP of new material, and have to resort to
re-recording old standards out of plain old desperation. Another one is that,
deep down inside, you instinctively feel that your new material is not up to
par — mildly speaking — and that it would be a good commercial move to somehow
«legitimize» it by mixing it up with classic, sanctified material.
My personal feeling is that Stories Told & Untold must be a
combination of the two, because these new songs really, really suck. They do try to continue the «rootsy revival» of Company Of Strangers, but with a deeper
nod to adult contemporary this time: except for the opening number, ʽOne
On Oneʼ, whose riff sounds gritty enough for about five seconds before you
realize it has been shamelessly lifted from the Stones' ʽCan't You Hear Me
Knockingʼ, everything else is in the deeply sentimental vein and hopelessly
generic. ʽWaiting On Loveʼ and ʽDownpour In Cairoʼ, with
slightly more down-to-earth arrangements, are listenable if,perchance,
encountered on a modern country rock radio station. Everything else is
disgusting plastic soul pathos.
Surely against a background like this the old
classics must sound revitalized and refreshing — especially considering that
the band was so intensely pushing forward Robert Hart's «new Paul Rodgers»
image. And for the most part, he is doing a fine job on the old tunes: I
personally find his tone a little bit more «grayish» than Rodgers', but that's
a purely subjective feeling. The real problem, of course, is that the
re-recordings slavishly follow the original versions, and when they do not, it actually gets worse — for instance,
setting the entire first verse of ʽReady For Loveʼ to a minimalistic
«unplugged» setting simply deprives it of one minute of enjoyment (the deeply
melancholic rhythmic arrangement of the original was one of its major assets).
ʽCan't Get Enoughʼ also gets a laid-back acoustic basis, but it's not
as if the entire idea was to make an «unplugged» version of Bad Company's
biggest hits — it just sort of happened that way, with the old bite
surreptitiously taken out of the arrangements. And these horn overdubs on
ʽWeep No Moreʼ? No, can't say that I'm a fan.
No big surprise that much of the material here
was recorded in Nashville and featured cameos from contemporary country-rock
stars, since it is contemporary
country-rock: professional, clean, formulaic, and deadly dull. It is true that
replacing Howe with Hart made Bad Company sound more like Bad Company, but the
price was that they sort of became the wax facsimile of what they used to be,
and who really needs that? Thumbs down for this whole cheesy business —
not even the regular fans were fooled, and Stories
Told & Untold became even more of a commercial bomb than Company Of Strangers.
MERCHANTS OF COOL (2002)
1) Burnin' Sky; 2) Can't Get
Enough; 3) Feel Like Makin' Love; 4) Rock Steady; 5) Movin' On; 6) Deal With
The Preacher; 7) Ready For Love; 8) Rock And Roll Fantasy; 9) All Right Now;
10) Bad Company; 11) Silver, Blue And Gold; 12) Shooting Star; 13) Joe
Fabulous; 14) Saving Grace.
And now we know who is really the heart and
soul, the kernel and pivot of Bad Company: drummer Simon Kirke, the only
irreplaceable member of the band. It is the year 2002 and things have changed,
and how. After a brief reunion of the original Bad Company in 1998, resulting
in a total of two new songs released on a new compilation of old hits, Ralphs
and Burrell left the band for good, but Rodgers and Kirke decided to carry on,
with the help of Dave Colwell on guitar (who had already backed Ralphs on
several albums in the Howe / Hart era) and Jaz Lochrie on bass.
So what we have here is basically «Paul Rodgers
& Piss-Poor Company», playing a live selection of Bad Company's greatest
hits (1974-1979), one classic Free track — which does not hurt, since ʽAll
Right Nowʼ, in style and mood, could very well be considered the true
progenitor of Bad Company — and two new studio recordings, supposed to carry on
the flames of old. The new band does take itself pretty seriously, as the album
title (directly incorporated into the lyrics of ʽJoe Fabulousʼ)
implies. But do we need to follow the
implications?
Well, at the very least Paul Rodgers is still
in fine voice, as you would probably expect from a lead singer who (a) did
relatively little over several decades to blow it to pieces and (b) was never
famous for a wide-reaching range anyway. He does seem to lose a bit of the
smoothness and «intelligence of phrasing» of old, but that might simply be due
to the live context, where these things can be lost at any time. Other than
that, it's okay.
What is not
okay is that Dave Colwell is no Mick Ralphs, and although he does a technically
respectable job of learning all the required parts, his guitar tones are
blander, and his inventiveness equals near-zero. He is not helped out too much
by Rodgers, either: check Live In
Albuquerque from 1976, where Rodgers is handling rhythm guitar while Ralphs
delivers a blazing solo at the end of ʽFeel Like Makin' Loveʼ — on Merchants Of Cool, Colwell just plays
the old Who-ripped-off-riff over and over again. Most of the melodies are set
to the same grayish distorted tone, often «smudging» the precise riffage of the
original tunes, so you don't even get to enjoy what little there originally was
of a composing talent of the band. You do get to headbang, though, and maybe
that's what is more important in a live setting — who knows.
«Surprise» elements are quite few. There is an
audience participation bit in ʽShooting Starʼ where Rodgers makes the
crowd sing not just the chorus, but even an occasional verse (personally, I'd be deeply embarrassed caught knowing an
entire Bad Company song by heart, but then again, I wasn't there). ʽAll
Right Nowʼ gets an unimpressive bass solo in the middle. And ʽRock
And Roll Fantasyʼ, after an announcement of "I'll take you to a land
you've never seen, come dream with me", flows into a short medley of Beatles songs — with ʽTicket To
Rideʼ and ʽI Feel Fineʼ making guest appearances, even though
the announcement would rather make one think of Sgt. Pepper or Yellow
Submarine. Actually, the gesture feels nice rather than corny, even if all
the songs, be it the Bad Company original or the Beatles covers, are set by
Colwell to more or less the same guitar melody. Makes one think, doesn't it?
The two new tracks are nothing special, but
they are better than the Howe / Hart
stuff — nicer, old-school guitar tones, less country-rock-radio-oriented hooks,
and Rodgers on vocals. If this is where the official studio history of Bad
Company is supposed to end, it is better to see it end with ʽJoe
Fabulousʼ than with Stories Told
& Untold, no question about that. And then it is probably better to just
have them around as an oldies act — in all fairness, they should have stopped
polluting the planet with new «creations» right after 1979, as the setlist of Merchants Of Cool more or less implies
on its own. That is the policy to which Bad Company have been adhering ever
since Rodgers reclaimed the label, although it should be noted that quite a few
different «Bad Companies» have circled the globe in the 2000s, including a
«Mick Ralphs' Bad Company» with Hart on vocals — so don't forget to check the billing
closely if you find a «Bad Company» doing a local gig in your backyard or
something: you might just as well get a Hart / Colwell experience, which is
the last thing anyone in this world really needs.
ADDENDA:
LIVE IN ALBUQUERQUE (1976; 2006)
1) Live For The Music; 2) Good
Lovin' Gone Bad; 3) Deal With The Preacher; 4) Ready For Love; 5) Wild Fire Woman;
6) Young Blood; 7) Sweet Little Sister; 8) Simple Man; 9) Shooting Star; 10)
Seagull; 11) Run With The Pack; 12) Feel Like Making Love; 13) Rock Steady; 14)
Honey Child; 15) Can't Get Enough; 16) Bad Company.
The «Bad Company Archives» are hardly the
merriest place on Earth to spend one's free time, but on this particular
occasion at least, they might be worth a brief visit — in 2006, Mick Ralphs finally
got around to cracking the vaults, within which he had stored a large amount of
live shows taped from the band's classic era, and selecting for release this
lengthy concert, played on March 3, 1976, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the
time when Bad Company's successful run had already begun to lose steam and
purpose (ʽYoung Bloodʼ — "it's a silly tune, really, but we like
it", Rodgers admits right in front of the hardcore New Mexican audience),
but the setlist still consisted of catchy tunes, and the energy level had not
yet sunk below «optimistic». Unfortunately, soon after the original release, Live In Albuquerque was pulled from the
shelves for obscure «licensing reasons», never properly explained in any press
releases, and the 2-CD package is somewhat of a collectible item today — of
course, in our modern age, this does not automatically surmise «unavailability»,
especially considering how many Paul Rodgers fans are still out there.
But is it worth searching for? Surprisingly,
yes. At the height of their powers and influence (a fairly modest height, but
still...), Bad Company actually did follow the golden rule of hard rock bands:
polished and, consequently, somewhat restrained in the studio, lean, mean and
dirty in a live setting. This isn't necessarily a good thing for Paul, whose
secret weapon has always been the subtlety of phrasing, and in the live
setting, especially if he has to play something while singing, it is very hard
to keep that subtlety. But it is a great thing for Mick Ralphs, who, after all,
initially made his reputation with Mott The Hoople as one of the grittiest
rock'n'roll players of the 1970s, and on Live
In Albuquerque, he has plenty of opportunities to confirm that status.
No surprise that he was the chief culprit behind
the album's release — of all the original players, Ralphs gains the most from
making it public. Boz has always been «just a bass player», no exceptions
ever. Simon Kirke is a good enough drummer and that's that (he is given a
little «solo» at the beginning of ʽRock Steadyʼ, which is quite
pathetic — it would be much better not to draw special attention to him at
all). Rodgers is decent, but, as I said, his charisma works fullest in the
studio. But Ralphs? Listen to him go on the final barroom boogie numbers: this
version of ʽHoney Childʼ, had it only been a little bit faster,
could give AC/DC a good run for their money (actually, parts of the
instrumental jam bit sound uncannily like AC/DC's live arrangements of
ʽHigh Voltageʼ — that is, before Ralphs rips into the riff of the
bridge section of ʽJumpin' Jack Flashʼ), and ʽCan't Get
Enoughʼ, as soon as you get through the obligatory audience participation
bit, becomes a rock'n'roll fiesta that no lover of rock'n'roll could honestly
despise.
The best thing about the album, really, is the
setlist — it doesn't just consist of the band's catchiest hits, it also
emphasizes those particular hits that have the most rocking potential. The only
non-rockers are ʽSimple Manʼ — a nasty blight, but they did need to
play some songs off their freshly released third album — and
ʽSeagullʼ, performed to let the rhythm section take a short toilet
break. Everything else is non-stop rock'n'roll ranging from the passable to the
excellent (this version of ʽRock Steadyʼ almost ends up beating the
studio original, were it not for several flubbed vocal lines on Paul's part).
And yes, there are quite a few kick-ass live
rock'n'roll albums that put Bad Company to shame in terms of technique,
loudness, speed, and creativity, but that is not the point here — the point is
to show that, after all has been said and done, Bad Company were still a legit
rock'n'roll band rather than some sort of 1970s-bred perversion of the correct
image. These performances show that they did have as much spirit as Slade,
AC/DC, Aerosmith — any of those baddest boys of their era — even if their act
was «cleaner» and targeted at less risk-taking audiences. In a way, Live In Albuquerque is reassuring —
there is nothing wrong with guarding those Rodgers-era B.C. records on your
shelves, they have their marketing flaws, but it's not as if these guys are
just phoney clowns or arrogantly crass money-makers.
Actually, if the latter were the case, I think
they would have put this album on the market a long time ago — indeed, 1976 was the year when it should have come
out, propping up the band's reputation that had already started wobbling. But
even today is not too late, particularly with the aid of some extra thumbs up
from people whose judgement you can trust (wink, wink). In any case, the whole
thing is much better — sharper,
crisper, louder, reckless-er — than those come-lately live albums from the Howe
era, or Merchants Of Cool which is
not really Bad Company; it takes a Live
In Albuquerque to clearly show that a Bad Company without Ralphs at the
helm is really Bum Company.
MAGIC CHRISTIAN MUSIC (1970)
1) Come
And Get It; 2) Crimson Ship; 3) Dear Angie; 4) Fisherman; 5) Midnight Sun; 6) Beautiful
And Blue; 7) Rock Of All Ages; 8) Carry On Till Tomorrow; 9) I'm In Love; 10) Walk
Out In The Rain; 11) Angelique; 12) Knocking Down Our Home; 13) Give It A Try;
14) Maybe Tomorrow; 15*) Storm In A Teacup; 16*) Arthur.
A bizarre title. This is pretty good music,
here on Badfinger's debut album, but it could hardly be called «magic», and
it's certainly not very Christian, either. So perhaps it is really the
soundtrack to The Magic Christian, an
eccentric black comedy from 1969 featuring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr? Not
really, since only three songs out of fourteen were actually used in the movie:
ʽCarry On Till Tomorrowʼ, ʽRock Of All Agesʼ, and
ʽCome And Get Itʼ — all three songs produced by Paul McCartney, and
the latter one actually written by McCartney, and, as the now-available demo
version on the Beatles' Anthology 3
clearly shows, recorded following McCartney's original arrangement and
instructions to a tee.
Of the remaining 11 songs, 7 were taken by
Apple Records directly off the poorly promoted LP Maybe Tomorrow, which Badfinger released in 1969 when they were
still going around as The Iveys; and only 4 were newly written by the band
members. Still, the results are not really as chaotic as they could seem — in
the early years at least, Badfinger had a pretty steady style of pop
songwriting, and as for production values, there is relatively small difference
here between the styles of Paul McCartney or Tony Visconti, who produced the
early Iveys material: maybe because both of them were still relatively
inexperienced in the tricky art of production, and for the most part, let the
dogs run free wherever they wanted to.
Anyway, it is best to forget about any phantom
«soundtrack» connections (there actually was an entirely different, much more
obscure «proper» soundtrack to The Magic
Christian) and just treat this as a standard debut album, especially since
it's a very good debut album. Guitarist Pete Ham and guitar / bass player Tom
Evans emerge as chief songwriters (although early member and bass player Ron
Griffiths' sole contribution, ʽDear Angieʼ, is among the catchiest
tunes here as well), and they already try their hands at different varieties of
the pop sound.
ʽCome And Get Itʼ, typically of any
McCartney-colored song of the era, became a big hit for the boys, although Paul
had a very good reason for not leaving the tune for himself — it very clearly
sounds underwritten and unfinished, and he probably just could not find the
proper way to turn it into something truly Beatles-worthy, so he just decided
to leave it at a «Badfinger-worthy» stage. It's basically just one verse and a
«semi-chorus» (you sort of expect a second half after the "...will you
walk away from a fool and his money?" line, but it never comes), repeated
several times — with a melodic hook strong enough to trigger a mild attack of
beatlemania and guarantee sales, but not strong enough to bring a sense of
completion to the song, so that I cannot even state that ʽCome And Get
Itʼ is the best song on the record.
Although, granted, it is pretty hard to single
out any highlights. Both Ham and Evans were sympathetic, innocent, romantic
boys with a deep love for «pop beauty» and a good understanding of rock'n'roll,
even if they were always much too «clean» and «pretty» to be able to rock out
along with the best of 'em. There is exactly one bona fide «rock'n'roll» number
on the album — ʽRock Of All Agesʼ, which sounds almost exactly like classic Slade, right down
to the throat-bursting vocals (the likes of which are usually expected to come
from Scotland), and it kicks plenty of ass, but its barroom boogie atmosphere
feels quite out of place on the album (although, as an undercover admirer of
the barroom boogie atmosphere, boy am I glad it's there!). Every other track
where you hear heavy distorted riffage — ʽMidnight Sunʼ and
ʽGive It A Tryʼ, in particular — is in the «power-pop» vein: although
Badfinger did not necessarily pioneer the synthesis of Britpoppy hooks with
heavy guitar sound, it is also true that ʽMidnight Sunʼ, almost gloating over that synthesis, sounds
like nothing else from 1970, when most people were concerned about making an
ultimate choice between the «hard» and «soft» camps.
On the other hand, without displaying any
aversion towards distorted guitars, Badfinger's preferred means of expression
is still a folkish vibe, best served with a mild touch of psychedelia, as on
ʽBeautiful And Blueʼ, the album's finest, most delicate ballad, built
on a complex contrast between at least three different guitar tones (one
hard-rocking, one psychedelic, one country-rockish) and a strings arrangement
on top. Songs like these derail the stereotype of Badfinger as «Beatles-lite»
(as well as it could be supported by the likes of ʽCome And Get Itʼ)
— unlike the Beatles, Badfinger were never as experimental and unpredictable in
the studio, but their arrangements, even though always sticking to
time-approved instruments, could be equally complex and variegated if they
really wanted to.
At the other end of the anything-but-monotonous
spectrum is ʽCarry On Till Tomorrowʼ, starting out nice, quiet,
acoustic, lightly sprayed with high-pitched harmonies, but eventually building
up towards a set of orchestral crescendos and powerful electric solos that
almost presage the emergence of ʽStairway To Heavenʼ (except that
Badfinger, at this point at least, preferred to stay on the optimistic side and
not share the burden of all the griefs and sorrows of humanity).
And in between these mini-epic, homebrewed-grand
highlights, we get pretty ditties a-plenty — unless the concept of a «pop song»
as such annoys you, ʽDear Angieʼ, ʽI'm In Loveʼ, and ʽGive
It A Tryʼ are all charming little catchy trifles, and the boys' slightly
parodic attempt at writing something in the musical genre (ʽKnocking Down
Our Homeʼ) is a bit kitschy, but works due to their «angelic»
harmonization.
In short, do not be fooled by the title of the
album or its patchy reputation: assembled as it is from several various
sources, it already shows all the strengths of Badfinger, even though some of
the craft still remained to be perfected, and some extra seriousness and depth
still had to be attained. It simply happened to become very quickly
overshadowed by No Dice, seen as the
«proper» debut for the band — a little unjust, I'd say, considering that there
is not a single genuine misstep on Magic
Christian. So we will decisively disregard the gesture on the album sleeve
and raise our thumbs
up instead.
NO DICE (1970)
1) I Can't Take It; 2) I Don't
Mind; 3) Love Me Do; 4) Midnight Caller; 5) No Matter What; 6) Without You; 7)
Blodwyn; 8) Better Days; 9) It Had To Be; 10) Watford John; 11) Believe Me;
12) We're For The Dark; 13*) Get Down; 14*) Friends Are Hard To Find; 15*) Mean
Mean Jemima; 16*) Loving You; 17*) I'll Be The One.
It is easy to see why this record is generally
seen as Badfinger's «proper» debut. It is their first album with a stable
lineup, as Joey Molland replaces Ron Griffiths, with Tom Evans switching to
bass duties — and all four members of the band sharing songwriting duties,
while no longer accepting donations from outside songwriters (not that they
were offered any: by this time, Paul McCartney had his own solo career and
could keep all of his non-Beatle-worthy trifles for himself if he wanted them
to appear at all). Furthermore, all the songs were written and recorded within
a limited time period, with the sole purpose of forming a coherent cycle.
And that they do. On No Dice, Badfinger are a perfectly competent, self-assured pop band
with one edge very faintly touching the hard-rock scene and the other one
reaching out to folk- and country-rock. They are not Beatles clones — even
though the album is full to the brim of conscious and subconscious Beatles
references and quotations, No Dice was
made out of love for music, not just out of the realization that «wouldn't
that be cool to be the next Beatles?»
Badfinger did inherit some of the elements of
the early Beatles' spirit — a propensity to keep it simple (occasionally,
simplistic, but we will have to cope
with the fact that the songwriting caliber of these lads was a little less
impressive than that of John/Paul and even George), a predilection for
idealistic sentimentality, and a penchant for expressing loneliness in music.
But all these things seemed to come quite naturally to the band members — they were lonely, idealistic, unsophisticated
sentimentalists, born to create lonely, idealistic, unsophisticated melodies.
And therefore, even their «rip-offs» are
perfectly forgivable. ʽBelieve Meʼ steals half a hook from Paul's
ʽOh Darlingʼ, but steers further proceedings into a soft, ironic,
«homely» direction instead of the deep soul tragedy of its main source of
inspiration. The chorus of the bonus outtake ʽI'll Be The Oneʼ
accidentally (?) coincides with "eight days a week...", but the
arrangement of the song is far more «rootsy» than the Beatles usually allowed
themselves. And Joey Molland's ʽLove Me Doʼ shamelessly steals its
title from one of the Beatles' first songs and almost lifts the basic rhythm from one of their last ones
(ʽGet Backʼ), but did the Beatles ever have those crunchy rhythm chords
and loud, dynamic, distorted boogie solos on their songs? Not these ones, they didn't, if only because these
ones bear the mark of the next musical decade upon them.
The hit single ʽNo Matter Whatʼ is
usually singled out as the major highlight of the album, although the lead-in
number, ʽI Can't Take Itʼ, could be just as representative of
Badfinger's brand of power pop — it's just that ʽNo Matter Whatʼ has
this instantly captivating monster riff and a strong atmosphere of gallant
chivalry about it (speaking in Beatles terms, its chief inspiration would
probably be ʽAnytime At Allʼ), whereas ʽI Can't Take Itʼ is
a bit more diffuse and does not wear its heart on its sleeve. Over time,
though, both songs should be able to take their rightful stand in the "power
pop laureates" corner of the museum — ʽI Can't Take Itʼ, in
particular, could serve on its own as the blueprint for most of Cheap Trick's
career.
At the same time, Badfinger show excellent
skill at exploring the depths of the human heart as well. ʽMidnight
Callerʼ is a ballad written in strict accordance with the McCartney
recipé — simple, but moving piano chords, «humanistic» vocal
modulation, and sincere pity for the protagonist à la ʽFor No Oneʼ. Like McCartney when he's at his
worst, though, the song sounds disappointingly unfinished — "...she
unlocks the door and there's no one there..." is a fairly weak resolution
for the bridge, and, overall, the song seems one or two musical ideas too
short, and the exploration of the human heart remains inconclusive.
Whereas ʽWithout Youʼ, a song that I
would like to like less than
ʽMidnight Callerʼ, preferring lonely melancholy over grand
sentimentalism, is certainly one of the most «conclusive» Badfinger songs
ever, and this version, despite Harry Nilsson's solid job with it several years
later, still remains the definitive one for me (granted, there have been many
covers since, and the only other one I know of belongs to Mariah Carey — no
comments here). One can shed a river of tears to it, or engage in four minutes
worth of Bic-flickering, but what I like most about it is: (a) Tom Evans'
subtle bass work on the acoustic intro, especially the moment at 0:39 into the
song where his syncopated minimalism morphs into full phrasing; (b) the equally
minimalistic beauty of the guitar solo, again, clearly influenced by
Harrison's style but not necessarily following any particular «Harrison-esque»
chord layout. These are among the elements that provide ʽWithout Youʼ
with integrity and even «grit», saving it from tumbling into a sea of cheap
soft-rock mush — a sea that usually eagerly waits for every song whose chorus
goes "I can't live, if living is without you". (At the bottom of this
sea, you'll find Mariah Carey waiting for you).
If there is anything close to a glaring misstep
on the album, it might be ʽWatford Johnʼ — that one time when
Badfinger are not trying to be themselves (by «being the next Beatles»), but instead
try to be... Elvis. (With even a
«teddy bear» reference in the lyrics). As long as you keep yourself from
realizing that fact, the piece works as a bit of generic boogie, but eventually
it just becomes sad, particularly since Badfinger can rock — as long as they do not dress their rock and roll in the
clothes of a rockabilly revival. ʽLove Me Doʼ, snappy and modern as
it is, works very well; ʽWatford Johnʼ is a near-parodic send-up that
doesn't.
But all in all, beginning with the muscular
power-pop of ʽI Can't Take Itʼ and ending with the pretty acoustic
balladry of Pete Ham's ʽWe're For The Darkʼ (a perennial fan
favorite, although I still find the melody somewhat flat), No Dice is the ideal «unpretentious pop album» for 1970 — and marks
a brief moment of good time for Badfinger, when the band really had a chance to
make it on the strength of their singles; a chance blown away almost entirely
due to the incompetence and greed of their management. Not a masterpiece —
mainly because the ratio of «cool ideas» per song is too small — but a very
solid thumbs up
all the same. And the bonus outtakes on the CD edition are well worth taking in
as well.
STRAIGHT UP (1971)
1) Take It All; 2) Baby Blue;
3) Money; 4) Flying; 5) I'd Die Babe; 6) Name Of The Game; 7) Suitcase; 8) Sweet
Tuesday Morning; 9) Day After Day; 10) Sometimes; 11) Perfection; 12) It's
Over.
There is clearly a certain distance that
separates Straight Up from No Dice, but it is hard to express it
in words — with the solid, but not spectacular consistency of Badfinger through
those five years during which the band members somehow managed not to hang
themselves, it takes a little getting used to their style in order to spot the
evolution.
It might have something to do with the
experience that the band gained from playing on Harrison's All Things Must Pass: Straight Up seems to aspire to bigger
pop heights, sometimes even to «epic» heights, as if George and Phil Spector
somehow showed these kids the light, and the light quickly led them away from
the well-focused, but thin sound of No
Dice. This is not necessarily a good thing.
On one hand, it does result in a more
consistent listening experience — not only is there not a single utter
embarrassment here, like ʽWatford Johnʼ, there are also fewer
straightforward «Beatlisms», with the band striving further and further
towards their own identity. But on the other one — surprisingly, there's always
that other one — this does come at the expense of some of the «pure fun»
quotient. Here, Badfinger are getting more serious, more philosophical, more
pensive and gloomy, and no matter how hard you try to tackle the «power pop»
tag on Straight Up, it always seems
to come off in a matter of minutes. ʽI Can't Take Itʼ and ʽNo
Matter Whatʼ — there's your
power-pop: happy crunchy riffs and life-asserting choruses. These songs are more like «epic
folk-pop» or something.
The original Straight Up was rejected by Apple, allegedly at the instigation of
Harrison himself, and for good reason: the recordings, some of which are now
available as bonus tracks on the CD release, sound like demos — with the song
structures, lyrics, and melodies fully worked out, but the production and
playing leave quite a lot to be desired. Harrison volunteered to produce the
new sessions himself, and even ended up playing on a few tracks (he is
distinctly credited for a guitar duet with Pete Ham on ʽDay After
Dayʼ), but eventually fell out of the project because of the Concert for
Bangladesh — where Badfinger actually backed him to return the favor, earning
some ambiguous onstage praise from George ("I don't know if they're coming
through on the acoustic guitars", quoth George during the band
introduction part).
So Todd Rundgren was brought in to complete the
sessions, and a fine job he did, with a thick, heavy, and at the same time
crisp / sharp production style — re-injecting as much basic pop rock energy as
possible into what began life as a somewhat limp folk-pop exercise. Whether
this helped the band commercially is hard to guess: both Straight Up and its singles did moderately well on the charts —
ʽDay After Dayʼ even broke them into the US Top 5 — but, on the
whole, sales and chart positions could hardly be called impressive. There was
nothing «titillating» about this kind of music, be it from a T. Rex, Led Zep,
or Jethro Tull point of view; and the lack of a golden-voiced singer prevented
the band from hitting it with the housewives, either. (I do have to say that quite a few of these here songs could have used
a different vocal approach — Pete Ham bravely, but pointlessly sacrificing his
weak throat on ʽTake It Allʼ is hardly the most pleasant experience
of my life).
And yet, a careful listen to Straight Up reveals more individual character
and maturity than No Dice. The place
of ʽNo Matter Whatʼ, with its seriously clichéd lyrics and, what's
worse, somewhat exaggerated attitudes, is here taken by ʽBaby Blueʼ,
an entirely different type of bombastic love anthem — with open slots for some
personal insecurity and some credible tenderness, condensed and then exploded
with each chorus release of "my Baby Blue...". And instead of
ʽWithout Youʼ, written according to the strict rules of the
sentimental love ballad canon, we now have ʽName Of The Gameʼ — a
piano-driven proto-power ballad with philosophical aspirations, clearly
inspired by all that extra time shared in George's company; its hooks may not
be as well pronounced as on ʽWithout Youʼ, but, on the other hand,
there is no danger of ever sniffing a whiff of cheese on this particular
occasion.
I am not a huge fan of ʽDay After
Dayʼ, if that means somehow singling out this song from the rest of the
Badfinger catalog and putting it on some Top 10 pedestal or other. Its main
vocal hook seems based on a cheap trick (extra loudness emphasis on the song
title in the chorus) and its main instrumental hook seems based on a cheap
flourish (don't those piano notes they hit at the end of each chorus sound a
bit Carpenter-ish to you?). However, for many people the chief point of
attraction here is the Harrison / Ham slide guitar duet (which allegedly took a
very long time to work out correctly, and was the chief problem that prevented
the band from including the song in their live setlist) — and here I'd have to
agree: all the lovers of George's slide style circa 1970-73 will want to
include this resplendent example in their collection (and Pete is certainly no
slouch, either, when it comes to standing up to the master).
Meanwhile, Joey Molland emerges as the band's
only true rocker-in-residence: ʽSometimesʼ and ʽSuitcaseʼ add
a necessary pinch of kick-ass excitement (the latter actually rocks harder in
its original version, with distorted rhythm guitar exchanged for a slide
guitar and electric piano arrangement under Rundgren's supervision), although
the "..tell me why" at the end of the first verse
ʽSometimesʼ brings on uncomfortable associations with the Beatles'
ʽWhat Goes Onʼ. In addition, Molland and Evans collaborate on
ʽFlyingʼ, which also happens to share its title with a Beatles song and
its attitude with colorful psychedelia — but actually sounds more like contemporary
solo McCartney than anything circa 1967.
By the time Straight Up finally hit the record shelves, the band was already
being ripped off by its managers, but its problems had not yet struck full
time; consequently, Straight Up is
the last relatively «cloudless» Badfinger record — its «dense», «serious» sound
has more to do with a sincere desire to grow up and plant themselves some
relevance, rather than with drawing inspiration for their art from their
personal problems. I am not sure they were quite up to the task, and, faced
with an uneasy choice between the «early misguided blunders» of No Dice (ʽWatford Johnʼ) and
the occasionally forced, not-too-natural «seriousness» of Straight Up (ʽPerfectionʼ — I have no love for this song
at all; it just adds some stuffy bullshit philosophy to an acoustic riff that
re-writes ʽNo Matter Whatʼ) — I'd rather choose No Dice, albeit by a very thin margin.
Still, any album with the forceful delicacy of
ʽBaby Blueʼ, the slide gorgeousness of ʽDay After Dayʼ, the
toe-tapping catchiness of ʽSuitcaseʼ, the sweet bitterness of
ʽSweet Tuesday Morningʼ and so on — any such album is a respectable thumbs up
by definition; and anyway, Badfinger were not really a band that would dare to,
or be capable of significantly overstepping their limits. In fact, probably the
only way they could have recorded a bad
album would be to live and let live all the way up to the mid-1980s;
fortunately for us and unfortunately for them, the silly people at Apple
Records took all the necessary precautions so as not to let that happen.
ASS (1973)
1) Apple Of My Eye; 2) Get
Away; 3) Icicles; 4) The Winner; 5) Blind Owl; 6) Constitution; 7) When I Say;
8) Cowboy; 9) I Can Love You; 10) Timeless; 11*) Do You Mind.
Badfinger's last album for Apple Records is
usually considered their «heaviest» record — which automatically generates a
premature bias: «Badfinger? Heavy? Is that a contradiction or a contradiction?»
Well, not so much a contradiction as a slight exaggeration. The trick is, for
some reason Pete Ham took a relatively small part in the songwriting process
this time — he only contributes the first and last track, while the majority of
tunes on Ass belong to Joey Molland,
and Joey Molland was, indeed, the «resident rocker» of the band, its one and
only member who had a genuine penchant for boogie, and was always tempted to create it, not just play it.
This does not mean, however, that Badfinger
tried to go «heavy metal» or anything like that. In fact, there is only one
genuinely «heavy» rocker, with deep metallic bass, dark riffage, and scorching
wah-wah solos — ʽConstitutionʼ, an amusing attempt on Joey's part to
sing about how he chooses to «be like everybody else» against a musical
arrangement that sounds like nothing else Badfinger had ever done before. The
tune is completely generic, but saved in the nick of time by Ham — he didn't
write it, but he plays terrific wah-wah throughout, once again proving how seriously
underrated he has always been as a lead player, learning a little from everyone
but directly imitating no one.
In the meantime, Molland's biggest problem is
that, unexpectedly faced with the reality of becoming the band's main
songwriter, he does not live up to the task, and frequently falls back upon
clichés or, as I suspect, subconscious rip-offs from whomever he
happened to be listening to at the time. The oddest Frankenstein here is
ʽThe Winnerʼ, which takes its vocal hook ("you can drive a car,
be a movie star...") from Ringo's ʽIt Don't Come Easyʼ, its
closing vocal harmonies from the Beatles' ʽThe Wordʼ or suchlike, and
its bridge riff from Deep Purple's ʽSpace Truckinʼ (not quite sure
about the chronology: ʽThe Winnerʼ is one of two songs that the band
recorded while still under the supervision of Todd Rundgren, in early 1972, but
ʽSpace Truckinʼ did come out in March — coincidence?).
ʽGet Awayʼ is faceless (but still not
very heavy) roots-a-boogie as well, leaving the ballads ʽIciclesʼ
and ʽI Can Love Youʼ as Joey's finest contributions to the record —
which is not to say they are very good: ʽIciclesʼ is a bit too flat,
pathetic, and moralistic, and ʽI Can Love Youʼ tries to establish a
cunning hook in the chorus, but fails, I think. Overall, both are just sort of
stuck in inoffensive, evenly flowing mid-tempo without generating much
excitement. Big difference between both of them and Pete's only ballad on the
album — ʽApple Of My Eyeʼ, not too subtly commenting on the band's
severing of relationships with the label. It may not be a huge improvement on
Joey's standards in terms of melody, but Pete was always the better «artist», and
his lyrics, vocal modulation, and phrasing convey the atmosphere of
bittersweetness to a tee — making the song into one of the most gallantly and
chivalrously delivered «fuck yous» in the business.
Evans' and Gibbins' contributions are not
particularly memorable or respectable (Gibbins' ʽCowboyʼ might, in
fact, be one of the most oddly misguided Badfinger efforts ever, along with
ʽWatford Johnʼ: harmonica, fiddle, and steel guitar-driven country-western?
Silliest moment: "...now I know you well enough to say ʽyeahʼ...
YEAAAAH!"), which leaves us with a very weak Side B, and the most
difficult question here is what to do about Ham's eight-minute epic
ʽTimelessʼ, an attempt to suck up to the «pretentious art-rock»
movement, but still following the guidance of the Beatles rather than Yes or
King Crimson — the structure, the mood, the duration, the chords, the lengthy
coda sprayed with blasts of white noise, all of this brings on obvious
associations with ʽI Want You (She's So Heavy)ʼ, although in strict
factual terms the song is, of course, quite an original creation. Does it work
or doesn't it?
It does for me, to some extent. First, everyone
is entitled to a little bit of metaphysical panic from time to time, and Pete
Ham is as qualified as anybody to ask the question «are we timeless?». Second,
it is his first attempt to write something oddly shaped, decidedly removed from
the standards of a potential pop hit — the instrumental melody seems cobbled
from unpredictable chord sequences, and the vocal melody is more akin to a Shakesperian
monolog than a symmetric pop construction. Third, the coda is very well made,
with another of those stirring, aggressive solos of Pete's that are just so
goddamn believable.
In the end, Ass is an album riddled with problems — starting with its very
title (and the illuminative picture of a donkey on the front cover does not
really help out) and ending with the unfortunate story of its creation (Apple
once again rejected the original version, and ended up releasing the final
product something like a year too late, clashing with the band's new first
album for Warner Bros.). It is not a complete disaster, and there is nothing
wrong about including one or two heavy rockers as long as Joey Molland remains
a rocker deep in his heart and Pete Ham can easily slip into rock'n'roll mode
on the strength of his natural gift. But it is
a «middle-of-the-road» effort, as it downplays the presence of the band's
finest songwriter and, on occasion, slips into embarrassment mode (really, ʽCowboyʼ
is something I'd think they should have left behind in their early Iveys days).
Ham's contributions are still strong enough to guarantee a shaky thumbs up,
but, overall, the album is one of those «transitional» efforts that give more
food for thought for band historians than cause for joy for regular fans.
BADFINGER (1974)
1) I Miss You; 2) Shine On; 3)
Love Is Easy; 4) Song For A Lost Friend; 5) Why Don't We Talk?; 6) Island; 7)
Matted Spam; 8) Where Do We Go From Here?; 9) My Heart Goes Out; 10) Lonely
You; 11) Give It Up; 12) Andy Norris.
Badfinger's move to Warner Bros. was hardly
«smooth». The new label would poke its nose into the band's results just as
frequently as the old one did, and for a short while, it seemed completely
unclear what exactly the record people were to expect from this band, and what
exactly this band would want to turn out for the record people — being so 1969
in spirit, when the body was already dragged into early 1974.
A nasty problem of this self-titled album is that
the producer, Chris Thomas, actually did a horrendous suckjob. For some
reason, he must have thought that, since these guys are such mediocre singers,
things will work better if they all sing from under the bed, with a mike stuck
under the pillow. Except Ham, that is, who is the only one regularly allowed a
«clean» sound. Similar muddiness, extra echo, bland guitar tones, etc. mar the
instrumental work as well. And when this sloppy production style is overlaid on
songs that are melodically decent, not spectacular — well, you can see real
well why Badfinger never wooed the
critics upon release.
Sadly, sadly, the record starts out
tremendously strong, with two terrific Ham contributions that might set you up
for a masterpiece. ʽI Miss Youʼ is a heart-on-sleeve piano-and-organ
ballad that might be the most subtly chivalrous piece Pete ever wrung out of
himself; and the interlocking keyboard parts, half McCartney, half «baroque
pop», with no guitar presence whatsoever, are one of the most unusual
arrangements these guys ever did. And then the Ham/Evans collaboration
ʽShine Onʼ flips the switch to catchy, rousing, energetic folk-pop,
flawlessly conceived and attractively executed. Nice, optimistic, energizing,
toe-tappy, whatever.
These two openers really set up the impression
of a bright new beginning — now that the band's troubled Apple days are over,
and Pete Ham is back in the saddle as the leading creative force, they might
finally combine their musicality and maturity in perfectionist bliss. But the
impression is blown away before it can solidify: little, if anything, on the
record manages to approach the one-two punch of ʽI Miss Youʼ and
ʽShine Onʼ.
Funny thing is, there were quite a few things
that Badfinger could do right. They could make excellent «retro» pop songs (it
only took lighting a candle to George or Paul), or they could fit in well with
the soft-rock / folk-pop spirit of early 1970s mainstream American market. They
knew how to rock out — in a very «clean» way compared to the hard rock
standards of the day, but they did have a small stock of the rock'n'roll bug
inside them. With a bit of focus, they could have made an album with no bad
songs on it that would be anything but
monotonous. Instead, they continued delving into genres, styles, and moods
where they had no advantage whatsoever even over second-tier competition.
Pete himself is not exempt from this problem —
his ʽMatted Spamʼ (and what a title!) is a whitebread funk-rocker,
intelligently conceived but completely unfit for his singing style. Throw in a
flexible bass player, a James Brown-caliber vocalist, and a bunch of hot female
back vocalists, and you might have something there... but Badfinger, a funk
outfit? No way.
Meanwhile, Joey Molland is trying to convert
his love for rock'n'roll into something that sounds more «contemporary» — his
mutual understanding with Chris Thomas is that «contemporary» means «thick»,
«muddy», and «lumpy», like ʽIslandʼ, all grayishly distorted power
chords, thrashing drums and cavernous echoes, or ʽLove Is Easyʼ, a
wannabe-boogie whose boogie power is only thwarted by ponderous lead balls
attached to each chord. Instead of simply letting go — the way they did on
ʽLove Me Doʼ, for instance — they are tying weights to their feet. On
ʽGive It Upʼ, it looks like Joey was trying to create something to
match the tempestuous effects of Ham's ʽTimelessʼ, but the build-up
to the climax is a relative failure, and the climax itself is not so much
tempestuous as simply messy in comparison.
Overall, the only other song here that strikes
a chord without overdoing or underdoing it is Evans' ʽWhere Do We Go From
Here?ʼ — soulful vocal hooks, solid electric piano backing, nice tempo,
intelligent atmosphere, admission is free; if not for the all-pervasive echo
and the unnecessary «calypso» sounds eventually breaking in to clutter the
arrangement, this, too, could be perfect in its own humble way. But that
arrangement is still less cluttered and generic than, for instance, the one
given to Ham's ʽLonely Youʼ and ʽSong For A Lost Friendʼ,
both of which just float by me without leaving much of a trace.
In short, Badfinger
is inadequate — it simply does not hold enough authentic «Badfinger» for my
tastes. Rather, it is Goodfinger —
an attempt to trade off some of the things the band held dear in order to
appeal to the radiowaves of 1974, and the attempt played a hideous trick on
them: none of these songs charted even remotely. Not that, with such stupid
decisions, they ever had a chance: instead of doing it right and putting out
ʽShine Onʼ as the lead single, they went with ʽLove Is
Easyʼ. Who the heck is going to buy a single where the lead singer sounds
as if he is whining through a bagpipe while trying to play «kick-ass» rock'n'roll?
Ridiculous.
That said, I still have a tiny soft spot for
the record: it was my original introduction to Badfinger, and Ham's two-song
introduction quickly ensured that I would never regard this band as just a
laughable wannabe-Beatles outfit (as some do), so I could never bring myself to
giving it a negative rating. It does cast off some colorful shades of life
every now and then — as the follow-up would show, the band simply did not have
the time or strength to focus while recording it.
WISH YOU WERE HERE (1974)
1) Just A Chance; 2) You're So
Fine; 3) Got To Get Out Of Here; 4) Know One Knows; 5) Dennis; 6) In The Meantime/Some
Other Time; 7) Love Time; 8) King Of The Load (T); 9) Meanwhile Back At The
Ranch/Should I Smoke.
Wish
You Were Here may be no
masterpiece for the ages, and it might not have the most easily memorable,
stay-with-you-for-life Badfinger songs, but it is definitely the Badfinger-est
album of the all. A record, that is, which tries to dig as deep and to climb as
high as could be physically possible for these guys, without a single overtly
wrong twist or turn, a single glaring lapse of taste, a single court case of
the band trying hard to be somebody else. It probably would not have been a big
commercial success even if it did not undergo the proverbial «Badfinger luck»
treatment (due to legal haranguing
between Warner Bros. and the band's management, it was pulled from the stores
only seven weeks after the initial release; we cannot even technically call it
a «flop», since it did not have enough time to flop). But it is exactly due to
the fact of sounding like a Badfinger album, not like a «1974-oriented album»,
that it has aged much, much better than numerous hit records from that year.
With all the neuroses and psychoses pursuing
the band's members, I do not even manage to understand how they succeeded in
getting it so right after two
relative misfires in a row. Maybe things had temporarily settled down, and the
band just had a chance to sit down, catch a breath, and realize that, perhaps,
if they were not able to achieve success with stuff that they weren't too good
at (hard rock, funk, arena-rock, whatever), then they might be able to do better if they just concentrated on what they
did best — folk-based pop songs with «power» arrangements, with varying degrees
of complexity.
Chris Thomas is still retained as producer, but
who could tell? The production is no longer muddy: the guitar sound is
effervescently clear, and the vocals are for the most part echo-free (with one
or two exceptions) — there is simply no need to compensate for the melodic
weakness with extra varnish, since the melodies are anything but weak.
Furthermore, there is not a single song here — not one — that has any direct
connotations to a Beatles predecessor. On Wish
You Were Here, Badfinger are, for the first time in their life, fully
transformed into a self-sustainable band. Big tragic irony, considering all
that happened next.
Song-wise, Pete Ham is almost absent on Side B,
but his creations dominate Side A, creating a somewhat tilted balance of
quality. ʽJust A Chanceʼ is one of the band's crunchiest pop-rockers:
the riff may not be nearly as much in your face as on ʽNo Matter
Whatʼ, but it's still a good roots-rocky riff that earns extra points for
subtlety — and the song could have easily become a classic rock radio staple,
if only there had been an opportunity to cull a couple singles from the album.
ʽDennisʼ is a slightly veiled ode to Pete's little son, Blair, which
starts off a little lumpy (not unlike, say, a «prog ballad» à la Styx, with a somewhat heavy
accent on «anthemic» power chords), but soon picks up steam, conjures some
genuine fatherly love, and then ends in an optimistic explosion of heavenly
harmonies — the coda is a brilliant example of the band's «lush pop» sensitivity,
here rivaling the Beach Boys themselves in force of expression, I'd say, if not
necessarily in the technicalities (perhaps if Pete Ham only had two brothers
and a cousin...).
Most won'drous of all, and my personal favorite
Badfinger song of all time (yes, with these guys, I'm really quite a sucker for
conciseness and simplicity), is the orthographically silly ʽKnow One
Knowsʼ, which, as a chivalrous love confession, I'll take over ʽDay
After Dayʼ, well, day after day after day. Where that particular classic
had a little blemish — it was way too self-consciously designed as a thing of «heavenly beauty ™» — ʽKnow One
Knowsʼ is perfectly natural, and it might even have been by pure
supernatural accident that Pete (or was that Joey?) fell upon that particular
sparkling guitar tone when recording the rhythm parts, the kind of deep ringing
that affects the subconscious in such a special way (later favored so much, for
obvious reasons, by the Cocteau Twins). The riff itself could hardly be any
simpler, but this is gorgeous simplicity, and taken together with Pete's catchy
and ever so «humanly» singing, the sparse, but meaningful guitar solo aping
the vocal melody, and the strange gimmick of having Japanese artist Mika Kato
reciting the chorus words translated to Japanese over the instrumental section
(somehow it does add a little extra mystery spice, particularly if you have no
knowledge of Japanese) — well, personally, I like to describe these moments as
«breathtaking beauty». There's not much of it in the overall Badfinger catalog,
but there's plenty of bands who aren't capable of even a single moment like
this, so let us give due where due is due, I say.
Amazingly, the rest of the guys generally rise
to the challenge. Gibbins contributes the lightweight, but amicable
folk-rocker ʽYou're So Fineʼ — perfectly adequate, especially when
you remember that, only a year ago, he was veering into the realm of the cowboy
song instead. Evans' ʽKing Of The Loadʼ is a bit of meditative Brit-pop
with Dylanish lyrics, which they decided to set to the sound of two different
keyboards and no guitars (bar Pete's shrieky solo) — again, nothing great, but
it gets where it wants to get. And Molland's highest point is ʽGot To Get
Out Of Hereʼ: an attempt not to «rock out», but to create an oscillating
mood piece that would take you from despair to hope and back to despair and
back to hope depending on whatever simple organ chord is played at the moment.
J. S. Bach would certainly be appalled at the crudeness of it, but for less
demanding tastes, it works quite well.
The two long medleys on Side B are not quite as
striking — I am not even sure they should
have been medleys, even if Ham's ʽMeanwhile Back At The Ranchʼ and
Molland's ʽShould I Smokeʼ do belong together quite naturally, with a
melody overlap in the chorus. They seem to have a little too much of everything
thrown in, without the ability to grow a face of their own. Still, there is
nothing embarrassing about them or even particularly boring — I just wish they
didn't put that goddamn echo on Pete's vocals on ʽRanchʼ — and quite
a few people list them among their favorite tracks on the album, maybe because
of some sort of Abbey Road-esque
thrill which I do not think was intended here at all (in line with the overall
«no more Beatles dependence!» policy).
Contrary to what one could expect, and contrary
to the lonely whiff of the title and the album cover, Wish You Were Here is not a particularly depressed record. On Side
A, in fact, there is only one track dealing with despair — ʽGot To Get Out
Of Hereʼ — and although some of the songs on Side B are a little more
mopey, nothing here even remotely approaches the universalist grief of
ʽTimelessʼ. Rather, it is just a very humane record, and a mature one at that. The love songs are never
sappy, the complaining songs never wallow too heavily in misery, and there are
no attempts to suck up to someone or something just for the sake of «trying out
something that's not us». All of
which makes this one of the most wonderful not-to-be-thought-of-as-wonderful
albums of the decade, and my guess is that, had Badfinger's career not crashed
right upon its release, this is as high as they could go anyway. Naturally, a
delighted thumbs
up.
HEAD FIRST (1974; 2000)
1) Lay Me Down; 2) Hey, Mr.
Manager; 3) Keep Believing; 4) Passed Fast; 5) Rock'n'Roll Contract; 6) Saville
Row; 7) Moonshine; 8) Back Again; 9) Turn Around; 10) Rockin' Machine.
I really should be doing this in the «Addenda»
section, but this album almost made
it on the store shelves. Almost, that is, before Warner Bros. suspected that
the band's manager Stan Polley was stealing funds (actually, Badfinger
themselves suspected the same, but for whatever reason Warners sued both
Polley and Badfinger) and, over the
course of the accident, rejected the completed album. The master tapes were
subsequently left to rot, and were never recovered, so this particular Head First,
finally out with a twenty-five year retardation, has been reconstructed from
rough mixes (so that one can only guess what the actual ʽSaville Rowʼ
must have looked like: this track here is only thirty six seconds long, an
atmospheric, artsy keyboard-based introduction that fades away before you can
even try guessing where it might lead).
Head
First was cut in two weeks
over a focused work period in December 1974 — an admirable feat, actually,
considering the heavy blow that befell the band with the withdrawal of Wish You Were Here, the subsequent
resignation of Pete Ham (replaced by Bob Jackson), the subsequent return of Pete Ham (because Warners were
not willing to work with the band without Pete), and the subsequent resignation
of Molland. Under such circumstances, you'd normally expect either a disaster
or a masterpiece — but Head First is
neither. Maybe the master tapes, had they survived, could produce a different
impression, yet I somehow doubt it.
Just like in the days of Ass, Pete is keeping his head down here. He gets the usual honor of
opening the album, and ʽLay Me Downʼ is a respectable power-popper,
but without a particularly memorable or emotional riff to kick it up to the
skies of ʽNo Matter Whatʼ or even ʽJust A Chanceʼ, and the
nagging chorus of "need your loving, need your loving, need your loving,
it's everything to me" sounds a bit perfunctory and repetitive. The
rhythmic acoustic-and-slide ballad ʽKeep Believingʼ is a little
better if you like your Pete Ham in a subtle / tender / confessional mode better
than you like him in «power» mode, but the hooks are nowhere near great.
Since Molland was already out, Evans, Gibbins,
and new band member Bob Jackson had to take the burden of songwriting on their
own shoulders. Jackson's solo contribution ʽTurn Aroundʼ is a rather
lumpy hard rock anthem that, truth be told, is more Grand Funk than Badfinger,
only without all the testosterone. Gibbins continues with his fairy-light
folksy stuff with ʽBack Againʼ, a pleasant cowboy ditty without any
cowboys, but with some curious harmonica vs. synthesizer interplay. And Evans
is the one to serve as the band's personal spokesman here. He takes it out viciously
and vivaciously on their enemies with telling titles like ʽHey Mr.
Managerʼ and ʽRock'n'Roll Contractʼ — the two best songs on the
album, actually, suggesting that, before setting up an installment plan for
suicide, it might have been a good idea to come up with a fully conceptual
album on the evils of rock management.
Overall, I wish I could say that it doesn't show this whole thing was tossed
off in two weeks time, but more often than not, it does. But if we look at this
from a different side — yes, they really needed something out on the market
quick, yes, they were in a complete mess, yes, none of them were genius
songwriters, yes, these are rough mixes, and still it's a perfectly nice record
that does not in the least pathetically wallow in self-pitying (even such a
lyrically bitter tune as ʽHey, Mr. Managerʼ tries to be as upbeat as
possible when castigating Mr. Manager for "messing up my life"). As a
«swan song» for the original Badfinger, it does not work, but as a worthy
addition to the hardcore canon, it isn't any worse than any of the band's
second-tier albums. Thumbs up, but do not expect a revelation or
anything.
The official edition, by the way, adds a whole
extra CD of mostly acoustic demos saved up from the same sessions — some of
which could have been nourished to full health, had they had the time and will,
but by early 1975, they clearly had nothing left. Was it all really that desperate? Did Pete really have to hang himself, or was that just
the hideous effect of a nerve wreck shattering an already unstable mental
system? Who the hell could tell? In a way, I've always thought that, perhaps,
it wasn't all just a matter of bad luck and unfortunate accidents — maybe the
eerie downfall of Badfinger has to be thought of in «Altamont terms», sort of
one of those symbolic events that separate the idealistic 1960s from the grim
1970s. After all, Badfinger were an
idealistic 1960s band at heart — at a time when the whole thing was becoming
cynically obsolete. They learned to sound different from the Beatles, but they
did not want to learn to sound like the Bay City Rollers, either, and paid the
symbolic price for that. In any case, there must
have been more to the whole thing than just a treacherous manager and poor
understanding from the record industry bosses. Mustn't there?
AIRWAVES (1979)
1) Airwaves; 2) Look Out
California; 3) Lost Inside Your Love; 4) Love Is Gonna Come At Last; 5)
Sympathy; 6) The Winner; 7) The Dreamer; 8) Come Down Hard; 9) Sail Away; 10*)
One More Time; 11*) Send Me Your Love; 12*) Steal My Heart; 13*) Love Can't
Hide; 14*) Can You Feel The Rain.
Slay me on the spot, but I am really somewhat
fond of this one, in spite of all the objective pressure that pressures me
into stoning it together with the rest of the critically-minded crowds. Yes, the
obligatory first impression is that this is a «Badfinger» album in name only,
one of those suspicious cases when a brand is resuscitated mostly for
commercial reasons. The whole thing was not intended to be a reunion — it just
so happened that Joey Molland, in yet another of several failed attempts to
assemble a new band, hooked up with Evans, among other guys who never had
anything to do with Badfinger, and when Elektra Records saw two of Badfinger's
principal songwriters working together again, guess what the reaction was?
Never mind the fact that, by 1979, most of the public's memories of Badfinger
had been completely erased — here was at least a little something to latch on to.
It is true that Badfinger was not exclusively
Pete Ham's backing band: both Evans and Molland contributed mightily to the
original music and image, and one could theoretically imagine the two trying to
resuscitate and preserve the original spirit. That is, however, not the case
with Airwaves. First, much of it was
done with the active participation of a third creative member, guitarist and
vocalist Joe Tansin, whose songwriting and arranging techniques were seemingly
raised not on the Beatles, but rather on mid-1970's dance hits, ballads, and
MOR «classics».
Second, Molland and Evans themselves are trying
to bring their sound more in line with late-1970's «standards» of power-pop.
They completely ignore any punk/New Wave innovations of the past few years —
the backbone of ʽLook Out Californiaʼ, opening the album, is so
defiantly Chuck Berry-esque that it ain't even funny — and that may be a plus,
because a Badfinger taking lessons from Blondie or the Cars sounds like a
miserable idea. But, on the other hand, this does not prevent the current
Badfinger incarnation from taking extra lessons not only from Cheap Trick, but
maybe even from... Billy Joel? At any rate, it all sounds very much like clean-shaven, well-meaning, slick, glossy, generic
mid-1970s pop.
Worst of all, I like it. Behind all the gloss lies a bunch of well-crafted hooks,
memorable melodies and even some genuinely resonating emotional content. Joe
Tansin is responsible for the two weakest numbers — the «heavy» rockers
ʽWinnerʼ and ʽSympathyʼ, combining gruff distorted riffs
with dance beats, keyboards, and strings in a loud show of nothing in
particular (although even under these conditions, there is still some nice
jerky tension in ʽSympathyʼ). But Evans and Molland manage to stuff
this new formula with plenty of fresh meat.
Molland's ʽLove Is Gonna Come At
Lastʼ was the right choice for a single, and it even made a brief chart
appearance (#69 on the US charts wasn't so bad, considering the band's past
reputation of «commercial poison») — dominated by a fabulous slide guitar riff
on top of an old-timey jangle pattern, but with a modernistic-mainstreamish
hook in the chorus (so it sounds a little like ABBA, what's really wrong with that?). Evans'
sentimental piano ballad ʽLost Inside Your Loveʼ is even better —
it's as if he took the whole «Badfinger reincarnation» thing really seriously,
and tried here to compensate for the lack of Pete Ham by coming up with
something comparable in sheer vulnerability: his "what can I say, what can
I do..." is a genuine tugger and ranks among the band's finest moments of
soulful purity, whatever that might mean.
Then, on side B, Joey contributes the excellent
ʽThe Dreamerʼ, a big lump of power chords, lush piano, and romantic
strings, and the mediocre ʽCome Down Hardʼ, an even bigger lump of power chords that uses
the mean trick of double-tracking its rhythm guitar parts to imitate brawn and
hooks; and Evans brings things to a close with the cozy McCartney-esque piano
balladry of ʽSail Awayʼ... yes, eight songs in all, not counting the
brief acoustic intro (title track), but for a «B-quality» record like this,
thirty minutes seems just all right anyway.
At the end of the day, Airwaves still is, in
some way, a Badfinger album — just as it was with the band's output in the
early 1970s, they are modifying their sound to «suit the times», but they still
never end up suiting the times because they never go all the way. Behind all
the production gloss we still see Tom Evans, the charming, idealistic small
town bumpkin, and Joey Molland, the slightly snub-nosed street punk, not having
altered their original personalities one bit. As usual, there are hits and
misses — hardly atypical for even the best Badfinger records — but the hits are
strong enough to keep the album in a modestly respectable position in the
catalog. Thumbs
up.
PS. Please keep in mind that the five bonus
tracks, even though they do a fine job of beefing up the album's length, should
be kept separate — all of them are Joe Tansin songs, with the first three
recorded by the man solo in the
mid-Eighties (the only reason they are here is that they were allegedly written, not recorded, during the Airwaves sessions). Most are power
ballads or synth-pop tunes, and ʽSend Me Your Loveʼ sounds bit-by-bit
like something off a Christine McVie solo album, if you need a guideline.
Skippable.
SAY NO MORE (1981)
1) I Got You; 2) Come On; 3)
Hold On; 4) Because; 5) Rock'n'Roll Contract; 6) Passin' Time; 7) Three Time
Loser; 8) Too Hung Up On You; 9) Crocadillo; 10) No More.
Badfinger's last album was recorded throughout
1979 and 1980 with more lineup changes: no Joe Tansin, a new guitarist in Glenn
Sherba, a new drummer in Richard Bryans, and a new keyboard player in ex-Yes
member Tony Kaye. Since the band was quite heavily touring at the time, the
lineup turned out to be a bit more stable, tight, and focused, and Say No More certainly sounds much more
like a «rock'n'roll band» product than the shiny gloss of Airwaves. But this is where the good news ends (provided this is good news at all).
Because, honestly, Say No More must have been designed as a conscious «antidote» to
the gloss, sweetness, and poppiness of Airwaves.
Everything here is loud, upbeat, more often fast than not, and usually relying
on keyboards and guitars battling it out in a melodic, but «aggressive» manner.
In other words, this is Badfinger trying to be what Badfinger never were — a
muscular, anti-sentimental, sweat-pumpin' pop-rock band and just about nothing
else. Not a single ballad in the pot. Not that Molland and Evans were inept at
rocking out, of course; it's just that their melody skills rarely stood out
whenever they began to «crank it up».
Here, for instance, despite the relentlessly
bash-it-out attitude, there are next to no memorable rock'n'roll riffs, apart
from a few basic chord sequences nicked off past experiences: everything that
could be worth something is invested in the pop choruses. The rock'n'roll
attitude seems to be all-pervasive here for one reason only: to prove
Badfinger's ongoing «authenticity» — none of that commercial shit, none of
those New-Wave-style gimmicks, just good old power-pop straight out of 1971 and
forget about the last ten years. (Renegade Tony Kaye does manage to slip in a
few new-fangled synthesizer solos and effects from time to time, but never long
enough to make the listener suspect «relevance in a modern world» within even a
single song).
The vocals are
sweet enough, though, and Say No More
is never a total waste. The single ʽHold Onʼ, a last-minute
collaboration between Evans and Tansin, even made a tiny bump on the charts —
for a good reason, since Tom's singing here is excellent; it captures a shade
of Badfinger's trademark romantic chivalry with some nifty mood-sequencing
(going from calm, unexciting serenading to the heated-up passion of the chorus
and then to the seductive falsetto resolution of "baby hold on..." —
quite a respectable example of songwriting as far as I am concerned). ʽToo
Hung Up On Youʼ is also a nice love confession, but with nowhere near as
much personality as there is on ʽHold Onʼ (maybe it's all the
double-tracking that spoils the effect).
The basic rock'n'roll stuff, in comparison,
just sounds tasty for 1981, a year in which basic rock'n'roll stuff mattered
about as much as Doris Day (maybe even less); thirty years on, there is little
reason to listen to ʽI Got Youʼ or ʽCome Onʼ if you can
just throw on some vintage Stones or T. Rex instead. Still, even despite the
garage rock clichés of the former and the wannabe-Slade attitude of the
latter, the only real failure is the ridiculously titled and ridiculously
delivered ʽCrocadilloʼ, which they try to do with a bit of a
«pop-metal» flair: a big mistake on
Evans' part, since playing it really down-and-dirty is a no-go for these guys.
There is also a remake here of
ʽRock'n'Roll Contractʼ which, as we now know, was originally recorded
in 1974 for Head First; as could be
expected, the song is tightened and sped up, and now features longer and leaner
guitar solos, yet its gloomy pathos still feels a bit out of place on this
generally cheerful record. As we now know, too, it wasn't really out of place,
given that, in two years time, Evans would be joining Pete Ham in the noose;
but on the whole, Say No More is
even less indicative of the tragedy to come than Wish You Were Here and Head
First were indicative of the upcoming suicide #1.
Fact is, as troubled as Badfinger's life was,
they rarely let their everyday personal
problems influence the atmosphere of the music — unlike, say, Fleetwood Mac,
theirs was the old-time ideology of keeping their «routine» feelings apart
from the artistry, and leaving most of their troubles behind the doors of the
recording studio (even on Wish You Were
Here, most of the real-life inspiration they brought with them was based
on positive, not negative emotions, ʽGot To Get Out Of Hereʼ being
the major exception). Of course, some would condemn this as artistic
insincerity, while others might praise it as a sign of lack of vanity («ain't
it just grand, the way I can make
myself suffer and show it so well on my recordings?»).
But, in reality, it's just whatever works for
you that really matters. And Say No More
does not work all that well, I'm afraid. Not a bad album by any means, but
doomed from the start by the wrongly chosen direction, it now has to formally count
as the band's «swan song» while qualifying more for a sparrow rather than swan
level. It's one of those moments where I wish time would loop the wrong way and
let Say No More be the first,
«tentative» effort of the two reunion albums and Airwaves be the second — because, despite all the gloss and Joe
Tansin, Airwaves has more of the old
Badfinger spirit in it.
On the other hand, who knows how Molland and
Evans would have fared in the future, had Tom not been driven by fate to the
same level of insanity as Pete. Fantasizing about a whole string of Say No More-like albums throughout the
1980s actually makes me feel happier than listening to one single Say No More — the way these guys went
about their music in 1979-81 makes one suspect that they might have withstood
the synthesizer / drum machine onslaught, had they managed to hold on to a
record contract. But maybe that was impossible even in theory, and with the
Eighties upon us, Badfinger just had
to finally go down, once and for all. Maybe, had they not reunited to take this
last chance, Evans would still be alive and well. Maybe it was all a very bad
idea. Still, something deep inside me says that it is a nice thing, after all,
to have these two albums as a last-minute, half-hearted souvenir — Badfinger
have always had this simple magic aura about them, such that even their worst
records can still sound endearing... under certain circumstances, at least.
ADDENDA:
MAYBE TOMORROW (1969)
1) See-Saw, Granpa; 2)
Beautiful And Blue; 3) Dear Angie; 4) Think About The Good Times; 5) Yesterday
Ain't Coming Back; 6) Fisherman; 7) Maybe Tomorrow; 8) Sali Bloo; 9) Angelique;
10) I'm In Love; 11) They're Knocking Down Our Home; 12) I've Been Waiting;
13*) No Escaping Your Love; 14*) Mrs. Jones; 15*) And Her Daddy's A
Millionnaire; 16*) Looking For My Baby.
Curiously enough, Pete Ham's Badfinger actually
spent more time playing as The Iveys — they were known under that name as early
as 1964, when they were still mostly doing small gigs around Swansea, although
back then, Ham was still the only member to remain as part of the classic
lineup (it is a bit ironic, though,
that he'd actually been out on the scene almost as long as the band itself that
was supposed to nurture and foster Badfinger). But throughout the mid-1960s,
the band never found its proper way to a recording contract until the
(mis)fortune of contacting Apple Records; and as «The Iveys», they only
released one sole LP, which, furthermore, never even had any UK or US
distribution, being limited to Germany, Italy, and Japan. (Yes, Badfinger's
streak of bad luck was already there even before they got themselves their
name).
There is not much to say about this album,
really, since seven of its twelve songs would eventually be incorporated into Magic Christian Music, undergoing only
a cosmetic remixing job along the way. The very fact that it did get a limited
CD release in the early 2000s, remastered, repackaged, and with bonus tracks,
is somewhat surprising and goes to show the serious amount of reverence for
these guys that some music lovers still hold (good for them). On the other
hand, the release was not a total waste, since it adds one more informative
stroke to the exciting story of Badfinger's musical evolution.
It is usually assumed that, in creating the
running order for Magic Christian Music,
the band took what they considered the best of these early Iveys tunes, and
left out the dreck. This is not quite the case — the «rejects» were not awful,
they just represented additional directions that they were unable to explore
properly and convincingly. Or at least, they themselves must have thought that
at the time.
Probably the most telling example is Ham's
«epic» mindset on ʽI've Been Waitingʼ, an experiment in heavy
progressive blues-rock à la
early Deep Purple / Led Zeppelin, with lengthy distorted guitar solos,
brutally aggressive drum bashing, and an acid smokescreen — the new-look Badfinger
wouldn't get thus «terrifying» again until Ass.
But they do not have a chance to leave their own imprint on the basic melody
here (borrowed firstand off ʽMilk Cow Bluesʼ), and the heavy-psycho
instrumental jam section can hardly be too exciting if it competes in the same
line of duty as, say, Led Zep's ʽDazed And Confusedʼ.
Other unlucky rejects include: ʽYesterday
Ain't Coming Backʼ — a loud, anthemic ballad with a quintessential «UK Nuggets» spirit, maybe discarded
because it reminded them too much of all those other Brit bands; ʽThink About The Good Timesʼ — an
upbeat, but slightly «hushed» pop-rocker with a funky wah-wah guitar
arrangement, maybe discarded because they eventually got afraid of the wah-wah
(again, the only time they would later use that effect freely would be on the
heavy arrangements for Ass);
ʽSali Blooʼ — lumbering blues-pop that is neither heavy enough nor
memorable; and the triumphant power-pop opener ʽSee-Saw, Granpaʼ,
which they could, perhaps, see as way
too simplistic and happy (but maybe not).
(The CD reissue adds a few early outtakes as
well, even more heavily derivative of contemporary acts — The Kinks, The Move,
The Small Faces etc. — all of them kinda cute and cuddly, but the final
denominator still remains Manfred Mann: dedicated copycat practice without a
face of one's own, only The Iveys happened to lack Manfred Mann's sole serious
advantage — musical professionalism. They did well to restrict these harmless,
forgettable pastiches to B-sides).
All in all, you are not missing much if you
already have Magic Christian Music,
but you will not harm your ears, either, if you take a brief listen to these
scattered remainders. It doesn't hurt to condescendingly pat somebody on the
head for diligently doing their homework on Led Zep and Manfred Mann, and it is
also fun to realize that, before getting into real close contact with The
Beatles, The Iveys never even attempted to model their sound upon the Fab Four
— apparently, there must have been some heavy «Beatles-conditioning» in the air
of Apple Records.
DAY AFTER DAY (1974; 1990)
1) Sometimes; 2) I Don't Mind;
3) Blind Owl; 4) Give It Up; 5) Constitution; 6) Baby Blue; 7) Name Of The
Game; 8) Day After Day; 9) Timeless; 10) I Can't Take It.
Amazingly, Badfinger's bad luck went on to hold
the band in a tight grip even long after all the breakups and suicides. By all
means, they were quite a decent little band when playing live; their goal was
to establish themselves as an authentic «rock» act onstage — developing and
practicing a much more rough and aggressive sound than the cuddly power pop of
their studio records — and in that, they succeeded. Of course, nobody is going
to mention Badfinger while listing the most obvious «gritty rock'n'roll acts»
of the early 1970s, but the very fact that they can please a closet headbanger
like myself (unlike, say, The Beach Boys, who were never truly able to generate
a genuine rocking vibe during their live shows, even though they did try
occasionally) has to count for something.
Problem is, the band never got around to
releasing a proper live album in their lifetime — and by the time public
interest in Badfinger slowly started to grow for nostalgic reasons, most of the
archival recordings were either lost, deteriorated, or turned out to be
unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons. In 1989, Joey Molland got hold of the
tapes recorded at the Agora venue in Cleveland on the band's 1974 American tour
and offered them for official release on the Rykodisc label. Claiming,
however, that the tapes were all but unusable in their original state, he went
on to overdub most of his vocals... most of his guitars... some of Pete's
guitars... a bit of the bass... and... well, you know. Even today, judging by
some of the reviews, people still wreck their brains trying to understand if
the whole thing can officially count as a real Badfinger live album, by seeking
out old bootlegs and running comparative
tests.
The absolute worst thing, however, and one that
really brings Day After Day close to
unlistenable, is that Joey slapped on a thick electronic echo on all the
drumwork. Maybe he wanted to have it out with Mike Gibbins, or perhaps the drum
mike was indeed dysfunctional that evening, but, anyway, the result is honestly
godawful: first thing you get when ʽSometimesʼ hit the speakers is
this moronic BASH-BASH-BASH — and a cognitive dissonance: this is Badfinger,
right? how do they get this
stereotypically Eighties sound in friggin' 1974?
The effect is hard — nay, almost impossible —
to overcome; the ridiculousness of the situation completely bars Day After Day from any sense of
respectability. Which is sad, because the band happened to be in fine form that
evening. The setlist was rather evenly spread between all the albums from No Dice and up to Badfinger, omitted some of the most obvious hits (ʽNo Matter
Whatʼ) in favor of a few dark horses (ʽBlind Owlʼ), and the rest
of the power-pop numbers were sped up, distorted, and «crunch-formed» for extra
rock'n'roll excitement, bridging the gap between formerly cuddly songs like
ʽI Can't Take Itʼ and originally hard-rocking material like ʽConstitutionʼ.
Quite a solid bridge, as a matter of fact.
ʽDay After Dayʼ, deprived of its
piano flourishes for technical reasons, and substituting a sincere, but all too
fragile and thin slide solo for the classic bit of Ham/Harrison interplay, is
the only major disappointment (apparently, the band itself understood that and
refused to play the song live for several years, before finally succumbing to
the temptation in 1974). Minor disappointments include the lengthy jams at the
end of ʽGive It Upʼ and ʽTimelessʼ: Ham and Molland are
good guitarists, capable of emotionally charged lead work in the studio, but
their improvisations tend to fall back on perfunctory blues-rock
clichés, and there is really no reason why you should listen to a
made-on-the-spot long long long solo by Badfinger instead of, say, Jimmy Page
or Santana.
Still, in general,
these crunchy re-modelings are quite headbang-worthy, and do a good job in demolishing
the myth of Badfinger as the «exemplary innocent wimps» of the power-pop movement.
And it would have been a nice, recommendable album, if not for the fact that
Joey decided to take care of it in 1989. Had he waited for an extra decade or
so, with electronic drums finally going out of fashion and sound-cleaning
technologies up a notch, Day After Day
could have overturned the bad luck streak. As it is — who knows where those
tapes are now, or really just gives a
damn about a better remastering job?
BBC IN CONCERT (1972-73; 1997)
1) Better Days; 2) Only You
Know And I Know; 3) We're For The Dark; 4) Sweet Tuesday Morning; 5) Feelin' Alright;
6) Take It All; 7) Suitcase; 8) Love Is Easy; 9) Blind Owl; 10) Constitution;
11) Icicles; 12) Matted Spam; 13) Suitcase; 14) I Can't Take It; 15) Come And
Get It.
And we finish off our exciting journey with the
world's unluckiest rock band by dropping a few words on yet another attempt at a live album, and yet
another somewhat unlucky one,
although it is by far the best one available — certainly a huge improvement
over the horrendous plastic surgery of Day After Day.
Badfinger did three major recording sessions
for the BBC services, one of them apparently lost and two others saved. Both of
the saved ones were recorded in a real live setting, at the Paris Theatre in
London, with a year's interval in between, and both are well representative of
Badfinger's «authentic» live act. The sound, unfortunately, seems to have been
taken from soiled copies, and leaves a lot to be desired, especially for the
first show, where the vocals sometimes barely manage to rise above the noise
level, and the noise level is sometimes a little overwhelming due to the lack
of proper instrument separation. But — hey, still beats an electronic drum
overdub.
On the other hand, here, at last, we get to
fully appreciate Badfinger as a sweaty, hard-rocking band onstage — and not
just hard-rocking, but intentionally and consciously ignoring all of the hits in favor of extended
instrumental jams and crunchified LP-only tracks. Each of the two sets includes
up to not more than two «light» numbers (ʽWe're For The Darkʼ /
ʽSweet Tuesday Morningʼ and ʽIciclesʼ); everything else is
distorted, loud, heavy, well in the scheme of the early 1970s hard rock scene à la Free and Grand Funk Railroad
(as distinguished from the darker «heavy metal» scene of Led Zep and Sabbath).
In a total state of defiance, two of the first
seven numbers even happen to be Dave Mason / Traffic covers — six minutes of
ʽOnly You Know And I Knowʼ and nine minutes of ʽFeelin'
Alrightʼ, although, frankly, the songs are just used as excuses for
jamming, as is ʽSuitcaseʼ, the only number here that was played at
both shows. And the jamming is predictably passable — Pete and Joey do all they
can to create a good mix of their own pop melodicity and the old stock of rock
and roll clichés, but they cannot keep it interesting for longer than a
minute or two, and very quickly start going in circles (on
ʽSuitcaseʼ, actually, they seem to be going in circles for almost the
entire duration — hey guys, if you can't do better than get stuck with the same
riff for bar after bar after bar, it might be a good idea to stop and try
something else).
Much is forgotten for the sheer kick-ass power
of the bookmarks — ʽBetter Daysʼ, sped up and grittified, is as
energetic a lead-in as ʽI Can't Take Itʼ is a lead-out. In general,
the shorter the performance, the higher the resonance: in the overall heated
context, even the funky ʽMatted Spamʼ, which was hardly a highlight
on Badfinger, feels right at home in
between the metallicized ʽConstitutionʼ and ʽSuitcaseʼ.
Cutting it short, these sessions do finally
prove that, with proper planning and effort, Badfinger could have easily landed
themselves a fine, respectable live album that could hold its own next to all
the biggies of the era. Could, but
did not. In order to truly qualify, these BBC sessions should have (a) belonged
to a single, coherent show (because, what, two versions of
ʽSuitcaseʼ? Please!); (b) cut down on the jamming (the six fast
minutes of ʽOnly You Know And I Knowʼ are perfectly enough, completely
lay out all the instrumental techniques of all the band members and do not
require to be further supported by the nine slower minutes of ʽFeelin'
Alrightʼ); (c) included a few of the hits — not ʽDay After Dayʼ,
perhaps, which never worked well live, but why not ʽNo Matter
Whatʼ?; (d) been recorded, or preserved, in better quality. Satisfy all
these conditions, and you get yourself a platter worthy of a... well, of a T.
Rex or a David Bowie live album, at the very least (we won't be pushing things
too far here).
So it's a damn appropriate way to finish up the
section — show just one more thing that Badfinger could have been, yet never
became. In the end, their legacy for the wide crowds consists of Mariah Carey's
version of ʽWithout Youʼ (and she actually learnt the song from Harry
Nilsson and probably does not know the real authors herself up to this day),
and their legacy for the narrow crowds mainly consists of three old power pop
hits (ʽNo Matter Whatʼ / ʽBaby Blueʼ / ʽDay After
Dayʼ) plus, maybe, ʽCome And Get Itʼ (a Top Of The Pops version
of which is, by the way, included on this BBC disc as a small bonus to fill up
empty CD space). Is this explainable? Yes. Understandable? By all means.
Justified? No way. If you haven't already done it, go buy a Badfinger CD. Do good
by Petera Ham, who did not even get to see her dad.
BAKER GURVITZ ARMY (1974)
1) Help Me; 2) Love Is; 3)
Memory Lane; 4) Inside Of Me; 5) I Wanna Live Again; 6) Mad Jack; 7) 4 Phil; 8)
Since Beginning.
In the late 1960s, there used to be a band
called Gun in the UK, run by the creative brotherly duo of Adrian Gurvitz
(guitar) and Paul Gurvitz (bass). Both were accomplished musicians, but not
terribly original songwriters, dabbling in psychedelic art-pop, progressive
hard-rock and whatever else there was en
vogue at the time. They were young, naïve, derivative, and not quite
sure about how best to dispose of their talents. They did have one hit
(ʽRace With The Devilʼ, a grinning mock-evil boogie piece that may
actually have been a bit of an influence on Black Sabbath, evil laughter and
all), but couldn't capitalize on it, dissolved, reunited as yet another band
(Three Man Army), then crashed again in a commercial stupor.
And then along came Ginger Baker, fresh from
the dissolution of his five hundred and fifty seventh project (Ginger Baker's
Air Force). Ginger, of course, wasn't much of a songwriter, but he was much of
an «adventurer», and the ensuing brief romance between Baker and the Gurvitzes
turned out to be almost surprisingly fruitful — particularly on this
self-titled debut album. In a strictly mathematical sense, it was probably
incorrect to label their power trio an «army», but they certainly generate
enough rucus for at least a small squadron.
Essentially, the relative uniqueness of Baker Gurvitz Army comes from the
clashing backgrounds. The Gurvitzes cut their teeth on blues-based «heavy
art-rock», with a somewhat conventional approach to «aggression» and «beauty»
in music. Ginger, on the other hand, came from a less «common-sense-oriented»,
so to speak, jazz background, to which he had also been adding a passion for
the true African roots of jazz (he'd been living in Nigeria in the early 1970s).
And the merger is lucky. On his own, Ginger couldn't have supplied the
songwriting (not to mention the singing), and the Gurvitzes, without his aid,
would have probably just made another Gun album — smooth, bland, and
forgettable.
As it is, the record alternates between
pop-rock anthems à la Grand Funk
Railroad (ʽHelp Meʼ), stern, arena-flavored jazz-fusion workouts
(ʽLove Isʼ), rootsy confessionals with weeping slide guitars
(ʽInside Of Meʼ), orchestrated gospel sendouts (ʽI Wanna Live
Againʼ), freakout jams (ʽMad Jackʼ), electric blues sendups in the
style of Duane Allman (ʽ4 Philʼ), and atmospheric major key
improvisations to brighten up your day (ʽSince Beginningʼ). It's not
really quite as diverse as that, because all of the band members have their
trademark tricks that they reproduce in all genres, but still, fairly
impressive, eh?
Ginger takes the firm spotlight only twice —
during a (fortunately) brief drum solo on ʽMemory Laneʼ and lengthy
spoken (actually, muttered) ramblings on ʽMad Jackʼ. But his presence
is just as deeply felt, and overall, more impressive everywhere else. On
ʽLove Isʼ, for instance, in between all the mammoth riffs and flashy
soloing, it is his polyrhythms, off-beat venturing, and unstoppable energy that
breathe real life into the music. The Gurvitzes may be a little too stiff and
stern at times, taking more care not to make any technical mistakes than to let
in real rock'n'roll drive — Baker, on the other hand, couldn't care less about
conventions, and simply flails in all directions with the same recklessness he
showed in his Cream days (still sort of fresh in his memory, I guess, at such
an early date). For those used to tighter, less impressionistic, but more technically
complex patterns in 1970s prog drumming (think either Bill Bruford or Carl
Palmer), this combination might be a
fine distraction (or a sacrilege).
Not that I'm diminishing the merits of the
Gurvitz brothers in any way, because they do come up with lots of cool riffs
and occasionally breathtaking bits of guitar interplay. The slide melodies of
ʽInside Of Meʼ, for instance, have that emotional enigma that should
be embedded in the best of 'em; ʽ4 Philʼ does deserve the comparison with Duane (as derivative as those
bends and vibratos are, they are delivered with honesty and inspiration); and
ʽHelp Meʼ, as funny as it is, sort of predates all the best sides of
Ozzy Osbourne's solo career a semi-decade before the fact (the idea came to me
as I realized the similarity of the vocal parts, but really, the whole idea —
cheery, melodic pop disguised as hard rock — is quite comparable).
The only track that does not manage to get off
the ground is, amusingly, the one track that formally tries to — ʽI
Wanna Live Againʼ is pompous soul with gospel overtones, too
idealistically pretentious for a bunch of white guys to pull off convincingly and,
furthermore, misplacing Ginger's talents: this is the only track on which he
is just a backing player, nothing else. But I suppose they just didn't dare
put out an album without a single ballad on it, and I cannot imagine Ginger
making a valuable contribution to a ballad, anyway.
Overall, the album did not leave a strong trace
on the scene of 1974, falling through the cracks as usual — too much of a
stylistic melange to amass a strong, devoted fan base, too many fluctuations
to appeal to «prog» crowds, «hard rock» crowds, or «glam» crowds in particular.
But for today's retro-favoring fans of various intellectual or
«intellectualized» directions of the 1970s, Baker Gurvitz Army is a must. It's professional, it's loud, it's
memorable, and it features a one-of-a-kind talent combination — what's to
ignore? Thumbs
up, of course.
ELYSIAN ENCOUNTER (1975)
1) People; 2) The Key; 3)
Time; 4) The Gambler; 5) The Dreamer; 6) Remember; 7) The Artist; 8) The
Hustler.
This is probably the best of the three Baker/Gurvitz
albums, even though the general movement tendency leaves space for worrying:
the vector is strongly biased towards «more Gurvitz, less Baker», which would
culminate in the trio's disappointing final album. But for the moment, the
major difference is just that there is no equivalent of ʽMad Jackʼ. Elysian Encounter, starting already
from the cool-sounding, but overtly pompous title, is bent on taking itself
more seriously and rationally — which leaves more space for
«layman-accessible» melodic overlays and less space for one of the world's favorite
crazy drummers.
Not a lot less space, though; and fortunately,
for Elysian Encounter, a sort of
concept album built as a «musical portrait gallery», the Gurvitzes come up with
a coherent framework, a fine set of riffs, melodic themes, and vocal hooks, and
a fine production style that takes the best of all worlds — progressive,
R&B, fusion, roots-rock — and leaves me no grounds for complaining. Okay,
so the vocals are a bit hicky in places: for some or most of the parts they hire
an additional vocalist, hiding behind the suspicious pseudonym of ʽMr.
Snipsʼ (real name is Steve Parsons), who is absolutely nothing special —
then again, I wonder if hiring Meat Loaf would have really been a better idea. Probably not. In any case, the music of
Baker Gurvitz Army is not about great vocals — it's all about setting up a
melodic groove and putting as much on top of it as the faithful horsie can
stand without burying its hooves in the ground.
Thus, ʽPeopleʼ is exactly the sort of
jazz fusion that I like the most — with all the trademarks of the genre
(technique, speed, complexity), plus a strong basic riff-based hard rock theme,
plus vocals, plus crazy solos that contrast nicely with the vocals. In the end,
the energy, precision, and «intelligence» of the whole thing are not
squandered, but tightly packed into a four-minute long thunderfest that might
well be worth an entire album by the Mahavishnu or late period Soft Machine (not
any album, but you probably know what
I mean).
ʽThe Keyʼ, on the other hand, is a
somber cold shower after the thunderstorm — a tight, swinging groove with a
soulful atmosphere and several «devil-or-angel»-type slide guitar overdubs that
sounds like everything else and nothing else at the same time. Eventually, the
whole thing starts inducing trance, as the slide parts pile up and the wailing
reaches psychedelic heights, with Ginger's drumming and the "God only
knows how I found you" mantra acting as the «lullifier» and the slide
guitars acting as the «covert indoctrinator».
This is just two examples, but, really, each
and every song on this album joins together disparate, familiar, oftentimes
trivial elements and results in a synthesis that is, at worst, curious, and at
best, awesome. Look how, on ʽThe Artistʼ, Ginger masterfully wiggles
his way around a basic waltz melody, and a set of pretty, pastoral slide lead
lines (well fit for a George Harrison solo record) are perfectly integrated
with jarring electric blues solos. Wonder at how ʽTimeʼ sounds so
much like early 1970s Traffic, and yet packs so much more angst and tension
than a typical Traffic track (so is it our
problem that Steve Winwood and his pals never whetted their instruments before
entering the studio?). Think about whether ʽThe Dreamerʼ would have
fit in on the Allman Brothers' Brothers
And Sisters — probably wouldn't, since the vocal melody is more Byrds than
Allmans — making it an even quirkier combination, since these busy country
guitar runs are just so much Dickey Betts in style.
They leave the busiest for last, though:
ʽThe Hustlerʼ wraps up things on an even more frenzied, self-choking
note than they were opened — here we have nearly seven minutes of groovy phased
guitar backing, freight train drumming, and overdriven speed runs (this time,
with some of them worthy of an Alvin Lee or even of an Angus Young) that never feel like seven minutes. It's a bit
cheesy, yes, but heck, that's just what the progressive genre needed in 1975 —
a little novelty and cheesiness, just a little whiff of cheap excitement atop
the complexity and the seriousness.
Maybe if it weren't so over-the-top derivative
in all respects, Elysian Encounter
would not be as forgotten as it is today. People like their masterpieces with
at least something that's totally
individualistic — a personal chord change, a guitar tone, a unique vocal,
anything. This here is a mosaic, consisting of shrink-wrapped, sold, and
delivered pieces, in which even Ginger's drumming style is sort of reduced to a
slightly inferior imitation of itself. But then there's always the cooking
process, and in this particular case, the three chefs are beyond reproach. Thumbs up
— for one of the most underrated records of 1975.
HEARTS ON FIRE (1976)
1) Hearts On Fire; 2) Neon Lights;
3) Smiling; 4) Tracks Of My Life; 5) Flying In And Out Of Stardom; 6) Dancing
The Night Away; 7) My Mind Is Healing; 8) Thirsty For The Blues; 9) Night
People; 10) Mystery.
Now who was it ordered a change in style? They
had such a lovely thing going on, and without a single warning, in just one
year's time, they went from a smooth synthesis of jazz, prog, and roots stuff
to a disheartening brand of heavy funk, bordering on disco (and sometimes
crossing over directly — on ʽDancing The Night Awayʼ, which, alas, is
anything but a throwback to Cream's
ʽDance The Night Awayʼ, even though Ginger at least must have felt a
slight discomfort). I'd like to place this burden on the conscience of Mr.
Snips (because what the hell of a name is Mr. Snips, anyway?), but apparently,
he is only credited for two of these songs, so what we are really dealing with is nothing less than a shameless sellout by
the Gurvitzes — and Ginger playing submissive accomplice.
Not that these songs are all that awful. The
Gurvitzes' songwriting instincts were honed well enough by the first two albums
to produce a set of decent riffs, shuffle in some variety and play around with
guitar tones and overdubs. It's just that ʽHearts On Fireʼ, with its
macho stomp and electronically treated guitar solos, rather belongs on a Peter
Frampton album. These guys did not
really have enough brawn to «sex it up» — Mr. Snips, as a vocalist, lacked
personality or power, and the riffage was too clean anyway to inspire the
expected dirty thoughts.
There is one interesting composition here:
ʽNeon Lightsʼ, despite the misleading title, is actually a tight,
swinging blues-rocker with a subtle, cool-oriented chorus and a weird selection
of guitar tones — hard to describe, but it seems to generate a gloomy
forcefield all its own, with a wobbly psychedelic aura, not terribly original,
but standing out a bit. Everything else is simply «listenable» and even
«memorable» after a few listens, but you'd have to have those few listens
first, and why should you, when there were probably about five thousand albums
released all over the world that year, covering the same grounds?
The band even stoops to including a generic
12-bar piece, dressed in a «blues-de-luxe»
treatment (ʽThirsty For The Bluesʼ) — to my ears, even more
of a lowlight on this album than the cheesy disco stuff: Adrian Gurvitz is no
B. B. King, and neither is Mr. Snips, and the worst they could do was drag down
the tempo so that, for over five minutes, we'd have to slowly savour each bar,
delivered in pseudo-vintage fashion (and wasting Ginger's presence — this man
has no business whatsoever doing generic blues material).
Granted, ʽThirsty For The Bluesʼ may
simply have been a chunk of filler that they came up with at the last moment,
with ideas running low and contractual obligations pressing closer. But the
truth is that I really cannot recommend any other tracks — ʽNeon
Lightsʼ is okay, and «funk-rock» collections may probably benefit from
ʽHearts On Fireʼ and ʽFlying In And Out Of Stardomʼ (the
latter is at least fast and furious, if only they had a better singer), yet
even these are only impressive while they last.
Consequently, here is just another of the many
examples of decent bands eaten up by the commercial bug — since Elysian Encounter did not cut it with
the crowds (it hardly had a chance anyway, with progressive rock already drifting
out of mainstream fashion by 1975), they tried to go the Physical Graffiti-era Led Zep route here with a foray into
accessible, danceable hard-rock and predictably fell flat on their faces. The
only honorable decision after that would be to commit seppuku, and that they
did, disbanding once and for all. Which is a pity: had they been able to remain
satisfied with what little they had, and develop it further, we might have seen
many interesting developments that could organically grow out of the Elysian Encounter stylistics. As it is,
they just cruelly aborted the baby, and for that, they get a merciless thumbs down
from me — even though, on my third listen, having overcome the initial
disappointment, I could already stomach most of these songs with good old
toe-tapping indifference. But is that enough for a change of heart? And
speaking of hearts, an extra -100 for the album title. I cannot exclude that
Mr. Snips' heart was indeed on fire during these sessions (you'd have to be a
professional cardiologist to reach a proper diagnosis), but I am more
interested in Mr. Ginger, and this just isn't the sort of music that he was
born to play.
ADDENDA:
LIVE IN DERBY '75 (2005)
1) The Hustler; 2) Space
Machine; 3) Remember; 4) White Room; 5) Neon Lights; 6) Inside Of Me; 7) Memory
Lane; 8) Sunshine Of Your Love; 9) The Artist; 10) Freedom; 11) Time; 12) Going
To Heaven.
Although, at their peak (and they were almost
always at their peak, considering they only lasted three years), Baker Gurvitz
Army were a real swell live act, somehow they never got around to putting out a
live album — probably because there was little hope of commercial success,
given the failure of the studio ones (too bad they never got inspired by the
example of KISS). The vaults did open, eventually, in the 2000s, with a whole
stream of low-budget, but sometimes surprisingly high-quality releases, the
most representative of which is this show, recorded for a live BBC broadcast
(hence the quality) during the Elysian
Encounter tour.
In the true spirit of progressive ambition, the
setlist barely fits onto a single CD with only twelve numbers — but, in all
honesty, the seventy eight minutes never feel tedious. These are just long
songs, sometimes launching into jam mode for brief periods (this ain't Cream,
really), sometimes giving the guitarist or the drummer an individual chance to
shine (only one, and a relatively brief at that, drum solo — probably at the
BBC's cordial request), but most often fixed in a steady groove mode, just
getting it on, with the Gurvitz brothers providing the hard rock excitement, Ginger
adding a jazz foundation, and the keyboard guy laying on the funk 'n' fusion.
Although, honestly, to hell with the keyboard guy — his presence is notable,
but as a keyboard guy, he is the weakest link in this chain.
The setlist is predictably concentrated on Elysian Encounter, with a couple of
numbers from the debut album, a «preview» of ʽNeon Lightsʼ from Hearts On Fire, and a 7"-only song
(ʽSpace Machineʼ, "our last single that vanished without a
trace", Mr. Snips says) to hold up some balance — as well as two Cream
classics (guess which ones) donated specially for Ginger fans, and a late
period Jimi Hendrix cover, because what fun must it be to feel yourself in the
shoes of The Band Of Gypsies from time to time.
The spirit of the transformation into the band
that made Hearts On Fire is already
evident — there is a very strong emphasis on danceable funk grooves throughout
the show, most obvious on the drastic rearrangement of ʽInside Of
Meʼ, where they drop the melancholic blues and lay on the dirty funk like
there was no tomorrow. But it works much better in the raw live setting than it
would work in the polished confines of the studio. As I said, it ain't Cream —
there is never any feeling that the players are fighting a mortal combat
against each other, even Ginger seems fairly content to be just a member of the
team — but there is no fear, either, of letting their hair down and
sacrificing, where possible, precision and discipline for the sakes of gutsy
excitement.
They could actually do without the Cream
covers, though: it is quite clear that both were performed for purely
perfunctory reasons, and that neither Mr. Snips (who omits an entire verse from
ʽSunshine Of Your Loveʼ) nor Adrian Gurvitz (who refrains from
playing the last solo on ʽWhite Roomʼ) have any real interest in
playing a Bruce or a Clapton. But I suppose that having Ginger Baker in your
band surmises certain ironclad obligations — especially when one starts
thinking of all the potential ticket buyers. Anyway, that is just six minutes
out of seventy-five, and they don't sound awful or anything.
Overall, a content thumbs up here: the whole thing is a
sweaty, crunchy, agile, and intelligent sample of mid-Seventies'
«hard-art»-rock with a respectable balance between the hard and the art parts.
Less elitist and esoteric than something like The Mahavishnu Orchestra,
perhaps, but highly recommendable for all those who'd like to combine
intelligence with headbanging without having to take it from the likes of Uriah
Heep.
LIVE (2005)
1) Wotever It Is; 2) The
Gambler; 3) Freedom; 4) 4 Phil; 5) Remember; 6) Memory Lane; 7) People.
If, for some reason, you are still in the mood for more
gurvitz-bakery, this extra release, also from 2005 and, seemingly, also from
the post-Elysian Encounter tour,
might do the trick. Unpretentiously called Live (or, as some sources put it, Live Live Live, or even longer, depending on how many times you
spin around the CD cover), these are not remastered, but still good quality recordings
that only partially overlap with Live In
Derby, and thus, have some real appeal that warrants at least a quick
reconaissance download (or even a certified purchase, although I am not even
sure that the artists themselves get anything from these limited-issue foreign
imports).
Anyway, there is at least one song here that is
totally unavailable anywhere else — the introductory ʽWotever It
Isʼ, a jiggly hard-funk number, unfortunately, mostly keyboard-driven for
the first half, but once Adrian finally steps in with burning solos, the groove
starts unfurling, and by the fourth minute, the BGA are completely in their
element. Then there is a rather faithful, and not very intriguing, rendition of
ʽThe Gamblerʼ, and a somewhat more intriguing version of ʽ4
Philʼ which, as Ginger says, «starts off as it used to be, and finishes as
it is» — that is, with a new section, now featuring life-asserting vocals from
Mr. Snips, thrown in. Finally, the
major addition to Live In Derby is
the red-hot finale with ʽPeopleʼ — Baker-Gurvitzes are always at
their most infectious live when doing fast stuff, and this here is no
exception.
The stage banter tidbit to be associated with
the album is Ginger's mid-show mumble about how «the police have said that they
are gonna raid the place, but the stage is a sancrosanct area, so you if you
all throw your illegal things onto the stage, we promise we'll look after them
for you». Judging by the average comprehensibility of the mumble, you'd think
that quite a few «illegal things» had already landed on the stage by then —
then you remember that it's just Ginger, and that he always talks that way.
If you are still
in the mood for one more red hot gurvitz on your baker, keep in mind that there
is more: for instance, Still Alive from 2008, featuring even
more archival live stuff from the same tour, scattered on 2 CDs. There is a bit
of good stuff there, too — such as an early, and quite impressive, live
version of ʽHearts On Fireʼ, and the only official live version of
ʽHelp Meʼ (which should really have been a stage favorite — I have no
idea why they didn't do it in Derby). Oh, and during his stage banter bit,
Ginger actually says «drugs» now instead of «illegal things». I guess that must
be the difference between knowing you're being recorded for the BBC and not
knowing you're being recorded at all.
But the whole thing still shows clear signs of
being scraped together, since (a) the overall sound quality is much worse than on Live, and (b) there are no less than four separate drum solos, altogether adding up to about thirty
minutes — and each of them sounds just like ʽToadʼ. To be sure,
Ginger Baker was one of the most distinctive drum soloists in the business, but
it's not as if the fifth minute of a ʽToadʼ-style drum solo is all
that distinctive from the eleventh minute of a ʽToadʼ-style drum
solo. Well, actually, the eleventh minute is usually louder than the fifth
(that's just about the time when the drummer goes into full acceleration mode
on each limb). But that, too, is sort of predictable.
Overall, it is always sort of a lottery — which
one of the «lost legend» bands will be the next in line to start getting the
let-it-all-hang-out treatment, particularly now that the task of digitalizing
an archive recording and releasing it as a «limited issue» pressing has never
been easier. In reality, nobody but the starkest fan should care about Live (Live Live), and nobody but the looniest reviewer should care about
Still Alive. Which should never
detract from the fact that the Baker Gurvitz Army were a dang fine band anyway,
both in the studio and live.
BANCO DEL MUTUO SOCCORSO (1972)
1) In Volo; 2) R.I.P.
(Requiescant In Pace); 3) Passaggio; 4) Metamorfosi; 5) Il Giardino Del Mago;
6) Traccia.
Every «international genre» with a «national
flavor» always runs a certain risk of inheriting not only the finest, but also
the dippiest features of that flavor. A very good case in point is the early
1970s Italian progressive rock scene. The proud Roman nation loved it all, from
Yes to Genesis to Gentle Giant, as so many things there tended to borrow from
their own musical traditions — and eventually joined the fray themselves: 1972,
in particular, saw the debuts by two of Italy's most renowned prog acts, both
with lengthy, flashy names, pompous-sounding to a foreign ear but quite
tongue-in-cheek in reality (Premiata Forneria Marconi were named after a
bakery, while Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso means «bank of mutual aid», and you can
sort of see that in metaphoric form on the album sleeve).
The biggest problem of both bands, though — and
I do understand that many might think the opposite — is that, being Italian,
they, rather naturally, crossed the emerging UK-led school of symph-prog /
jazz-prog / «avant-prog» / whatever with the world of Italian pop. In a way,
Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso is what you get when you cross Emerson, Lake &
Palmer with the Sanremo Music Festival. Within Europe, this seems to have been
a specifically Italian thing: the small French progressive scene, for instance
(Magma and the like), did not see the need to add Charles Aznavour to their
influences, but Italians probably thought that there was no way to capture the
musical market if they did not, in some way at least, pander to fans of musica leggera, which (no offense to my
good Italian friends) is altogether one of the most awful music scenes to
emerge in the XXth century, yuck yuck yuck.
Of course, the very emergence of bands like
Banco was a step in a healthy direction. This is real progressive music —
complex, demanding, occasionally gritty, with a strong will to search for new
forms and solutions. The key(board) members are the two Nocenzi brothers —
Vittorio on organ and Gianni on piano, forming a sparring duo that remains a
relative rarity in the world of European art-rock (Procol Harum comes to mind,
of course, but their keyboards were less flashy and more integrated into
song-based forms). In addition, Marcello Todaro is a competent guitarist with a
serious taste for «hard psychedelia», and the rhythm section of Renato D'Angelo
on bass and Pier Luigi Calderoni on drums did their King Crimson homework well
enough.
The weakest link in the band is the singer,
Franceso di Giacomo. Every time he
opens his mouth — and I absolutely literally mean every time — I want to turn this off and never ever hear it again.
He has this shaky Italian tenor, quite devoid of individuality, far too cheesy
and manneristic to stir up genuine emotionality, yet, obviously, far too weak
and untrained to match the quality of a great opera singer. Most of the vocal
melodies seem slightly tweaked from standard Italian pop clichés, and
the resulting «ailing romantic» aura suffers accordingly.
But the good
news is that di Giacomo is also the most expendable link in the chain. His
vocal bits here and there are more like «solos» — twisted flourishes on top of
the pudding, rather than being at the heart of the music. The focal point of
the album, for instance, is the 10-minute ʽMetamorphosiʼ, where he
only comes in towards the very end. The other two major compositions — the
7-minute long prog-rocker ʽR.I.P.ʼ and the 18-minute-long prog suite
ʽIl Giardino Del Magoʼ (ʽThe Magician's Gardenʼ — hello,
Uriah Heep!) — feature him more extensively, but still more like a bit player
than an actual frontman. All of which means that the singing is an unfortunate
evil side effect that one can learn to cope with in order to savor the real
taste of the album. (Besides, if you happen to like Sanremo style...).
Because, in general, Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso is not about wearing your heart on a
sleeve; it is about how one can generate a cobweb of jazz, classical,
psychedelic, and pop motives in an uninhibited flight of fantasy. Far more
indicative of its overall quality is the introduction to ʽGiardinoʼ,
where Vittorio's steady bluesy organ riff is answered by Gianni's sprinkling
glissandos — nothing particularly «virtuoso» about either, but the combination
is fresh and exciting even for the overall innovative standards of 1972. And
when Todaro comes in, doubling the organ with his light-heavy fuzzy tone, the
freshness and excitement get reinforced with some much-needed crunch. Later on,
we get acoustic guitar, clarinet, and harmonica-imitating clarino parts to add
to the diversity, and in the end, the suite matches its title well — there is
an atmosphere of «lite magic» throughout, not exactly one of celestial beauty
(the band is relatively unskilled in the technical wonders of «atmospheric»
production styles, and it all sounds as if it had mostly been recorded live
over several takes), but definitely one of tasteful prettiness.
ʽR.I.P.ʼ shows that they can rock out
as well, also in «lite» mode, but keeping up a respectable tempo, allowing the
drummer to show some muscle, and coming up with gruff, mean-sounding bass lines
against the background of which even quiet, mumbling jazz-rock «noodling»
acquires an ominous sheen. But it is ʽMetamorphosiʼ that really
represents the quintessence of the classic Banco sound: sounding almost as a
free-form jam session, flying from one tempo and theme to another, with the
piano, organ, and guitar conducting a lengthy trialog on several different subjects
— including whether they like Bach more or less than Chopin, or Robert Fripp
more than Dave Gilmour. For my ears, there are neither any passages of
breathtaking beauty here, nor any moments that rock out to high heaven, yet it
still sounds attractive, and all of the influences are combined creatively,
rather than as direct, unimaginative rip-offs.
As far as my intuition is concerned, the album
is very strictly «second rate» in terms of finding one's own voice, and the
situation is further exacerbated by the lameness of the lead singer (who is
absolutely not needed here at all)
and the superfluous «conceptual» mini-links between the large opera, with
boring atmospherics, pompous declarations, and dated sound effects. But none of
that prevents it from getting a firm thumbs up — what the Nocenzi brothers lack in
terms of technique and genius, they effectively make up for simply in terms of
sticking together, and looking for various ways of making their instruments
talk to each other, fight with each other, and sometimes fuck each other, in
both the good and the bad senses of the word. All in all — a curious, pleasant
experience, and about as 1972-ish as it ever gets.
DARWIN! (1972)
1) L'Evoluzione; 2) La
Conquista Della Posizione Eretta; 3) Danza Dei Grandi Rettili; 4) Cento Mani E
Cento Occhi; 5) 750,000 Anni Fa... L'Amore?; 6) Miserere Alla Storia; 7) Ed Ora
Io Demando Tempo Al Tempo... .
Although the theory of evolution has always
constituted a rich source of material for pop art, I am not quite sure if I
actually know of any other concept album that would be entirely based around
this subject. Of course, lots of artists, starting with The Hollies and ending
with Viper, have had LPs out called Evolution,
but they weren't really about
evolution — they just used a cool word with a progressive ring to it. Hence,
Banco can be commended not only for a formally pioneering artistic effort, but
also for choosing a reality-based theme as a foundation for their concept, in
an era when progressive artists generally preferred constructing fantasy worlds
of their own. (Of course, for some
people, even today, the story of evolution is little more than a fantasy world
in itself — one terrific comment on Darwin!
at RateYourMusic reads: «as much as I
can't stand the Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and atheism, I'm glad it's
in Italian! Because I don't understand a lot of it! GREAT MUSIC TOO!» — but that point of view is beyond our current scope).
I know relatively little about old Charles'
musical preferences, but it is usually claimed that he had a taste for Chopin
and piano-based music in general, so he might
have been pleased to learn how deeply this Italian piano-based prog band was
inspired by his findings. And much of this album, indeed, consists of
fabulously composed, arranged, and performed music. It is not my favorite
Banco album — I would say that the basic musical themes on Io Sono Nato Libero are better fleshed out and even less
conventional — but there is a good reason why it remains a critical favorite
and, essentially, serves as the band's calling card for all newcomers, and that
reason has nothing to do with atheism or scientism. (Well, maybe it does... a
little... but actually, that's a different reason altogether).
Here, the band consciously purges out the last
remainders of the «boogie» approach (such as were still evident on
ʽR.I.P.ʼ), and goes for an organic synthesis of pop, psychedelia,
jazz, and Italian «lite classical» — the latter with much more emphasis on the
piano than on the vocals, and this means relying a little less on DiGiacomo's
vocal trills. Direct influences of musica
leggera are limited to the melodramatic ballad ʽ750,000 Anni Fa...
L'Amoreʼ, DiGiacomo's chief moment of dubious glory on the record — he
ends up sounding exactly like Demis
Roussos in spots, which means that this is, at best, an acquired taste. In the
«lush Mediterranean ballad» category, it may objectively rank quite high, but I
would prefer just to hear the piano.
However, most of the rest of the album avoids
excessively romantic pitfalls, which is only natural considering the decidedly
non-romantic subject of natural selection that lies at the core of the album's
concept. ʽL'Evoluzioneʼ is a grand 14-minute panorama, the chief
musical inspiration for which must have been ELP's ʽTarkusʼ, as it
fluctuates between classically and «jazzily»-arranged parts, going from
stately-majestic to jerky-paranoid and back. But these guys are no power trio,
and their big advantage is not the tightness of their collective sound, but
rather the textural diversity they bring in — pianos and organs are always the
mainstays for the show, yet every now and then they drag out guest stars: Moog
synths, chimes, clarinets, psychedelic guitars with flashing colors...
creativity on the rampage, and, of course, one should expect no less from an anthem
to the leading force in the establishment of organic diversity on Earth, right?
Actually, discussions of individual songs would
only make sense here in the context of a long and detailed study — almost every
track, no matter how short or long, consists of several sections, some of which
duplicate each other mood-wise, and it makes much better sense to simply take
it all in, like an extended ʽTarkusʼ or a compacted Thick As A Brick, especially since few
of the themes are strikingly individualistically memorable on their own. Well,
there is this dangerous-sounding synthesizer motif in ʽLa Conquista Della
Posizione Erectaʼ... and this melancholic music-hall-derived piano melody
in ʽDanza Dei Grandi Rettiliʼ... and this moody clarinet dirge in
ʽMiserere Alla Storiaʼ... but they still tend to blend in unless you
are paying lots of attention.
The important thing is that, like most of the
really great complex prog albums of the early 1970s, this is not something that
demands to be memorized upon first listen — upon first listen, we are simply
supposed to admire the freedom, the genre mergers, the sincerity of intentions,
and the playing dexterity (for that matter, some of the piano parts here could
rank quite high on the Chopin / Liszt fan list). Then, eventually, the
melodies will start sinking in, and who knows, in just a little while you might
find yourself dancing along to ʽThe Dance Of The Great Reptilesʼ,
even if it is really about as danceable as the average Thelonious Monk number.
Perhaps Darwin!
is not really quite up to the task of
providing an adequate musical soundtrack to the bearded one's scientific vision
— perhaps Wagner or Mahler would be more suitable primary influences here than
the comparatively «wimpy» romantic players of the first half of the XIXth
century. In fact, without the album and song titles, or ready access to the
album's lyrics with a bit of knowledge of Italian, no one will probably want to
associate the shifting moods, styles, and tonalities of the record with
billions of years of mutation and selection. But, as you can see, if Darwin's
theory helps inspire this kind of genre-smelting progressive rock, it can't be
all wrong even from a creationist's point of view. Thumbs up — for the influence of the
erect position on classic Italian progressive rock, and for the best
impersonation of the gene flow process ever attempted on a classically tuned
piano.
IO SONO NATO LIBERO (1973)
1) Canto Nomade Per Un
Prigioniero Politico; 2) Non Mi Rompete; 3) La Città Sottile; 4) Dopo...
Niente E Più Lo Stesso; 5) Traccia II.
This record is less known than Darwin! — for a technical reason, I
believe, since «second-row» progressive rock (or any rock, for that matter) bands tend to be illustrated in
textbooks by just one album, and Darwin!
is an obvious choice due to its thematic cohesion. «Italian prog-rockers break
through with an album centered on evolution», etc. This follow-up, in
comparison, tends to be overlooked: it is not as thematically coherent, has
fewer songs, and a long Italian title that, even if it is really hardly in any
need of translation, is still a long Italian title.
However, it is every bit as good as Darwin!, and, perhaps, in some ways
even better. It does suffer from the usual standard issue: ʽNon Mi
Rompeteʼ is yet another in the ongoing series of Banco's romantic
Mediterranean ballads that will either make you swoon — or cringe, depending on
your genetic constitution and social upbringing. Personally, I would gladly do
with just the lovely folk patterns from Marcello Todaro's guitar, watching them
gradually turn psychedelic through added phasing effect and form the backdrop
for Vittorio's «whistle-synth» solo. Alas, I also have to live with DiGiacomo's
«proverbially beautiful» singing — but if you are a fan of that style, it is
probably done perfectly.
But other than the ballad (which would, of course,
go on to become a crowd favorite), the album is dang near impeccable.
ʽCanto Nomadeʼ (ʽA Nomad Chant For A Political Prisonerʼ)
follows up on the album title — a 15-minute suite devoted to issues of personal
and political freedom that mixes classic symph-prog, folk motives, noise,
jazz-fusion improvisation, and a weird tribalistic percussion-dominated section
without any seeming effort, as if to prove us the point about being born free.
The individual themes are not exceedingly striking on their own, but, as in all
of Banco's best works, they have this seductive lightness and fluency to them
— the track hops along butterflyishly, from flower to flower, right down to the
finale, where, fed up with nectar, it finally makes the landing with a swift
and satisfied bombastic thud.
Side B is dominated by two shorter epics:
ʽLa Città Sottileʼ is a dark mid-tempo piano-based epic, and
ʽDopo... Niente E Più Lo Stessoʼ, opening with the album's
catchiest theme — a strange «pastoralesque jig» that almost sounds childish in
comparison to everything else — soon turns out to be the album's resident rock
piece, with heavy electric riffs, aggressive drum patterns, and a steady
build-up to a state of barely-controlled instrumental chaos... before switching
back to the little-boys-and-girls whistling dance once again at the very last
moment.
Does it all «make sense»? Not in any objective
manner — more than anything else, Io
Sono Nato Libero simply seems carried away by its flow: other than the
carefully pre-composed ʽNon Mi Rompeteʼ (and the brief final
crescendo theme of ʽTraccia IIʼ, ending the album with an appropriate
slice of stately majesty), the boys are working according to the «try anything»
principle, as long as the «anything» in question does not carry them too far
away from the shores of melody, harmony, and purity (such things as «feedback»
or «atonality» do not seem to be favored in Banco's lexicon). But that is one
hell of an exciting flow anyway — as usual, not bent on lengthy «noodles-style»
soloing, but on carrying on a lively dialog between various instruments, one
that never sticks too long around a single topic. Hence, it never becomes
boring, and hence, there is always a good pretext to return to the album again.
Thumbs up.
BANCO (1975)
1) Chorale (From Traccia
Theme); 2) L'Albero Del Pane; 3) Metamorphosis; 4) Outside; 5) Leave Me Alone;
6) Nothing's The Same; 7) Traccia II.
I am not sure if Banco, the band's first English-language album, had any serious
merit in putting the band on the international market — chart information is
missing (and it probably didn't chart anyway), and, besides, by 1975 popular
interest in progressive rock was already waning a bit, so it is highly unlikely
that the release of Banco on
Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Manticore label made even a tiny handful of people
aware of the existence of the fine Italian team. Regardless, though, even if Banco were to break them through
internationally, it should by no means be allowed to go on serving as
anybody's introduction to the band.
The very idea is ridiculous — «prog» audiences
are generally expected to be more open towards other languages and cultures
than «pop» audiences, and how's that sound anyway? «Oh no, not me, I only listen to ten-minute suites with
weird time signatures and unpredictable chord changes if the lyrics are in
English, otherwise it's a bit too complicated for me». Not to mention, of
course, that, with certain reservations, the language of music transcends
national boundaries by definition, whereas singing — and emoting — in a
non-native language might be a fairly risky business.
In particular, while I personally do not care
too much for DiGiacomo as the band's lead singer, there is no denying that he
is a perfect natural — raised on the Italian opera / pop tradition and
everything. The same style, transposed on the phonetic and verbal structures of
English, at best, sounds forced, and at worst, embarrassing. Granted, DiGiacomo
does his best to camouflage the proverbial Italian accent, but it still isn't
good enough, certainly not on ʽLeave Me Aloneʼ (ʽNon Mi
Rompeteʼ), which has no business whatsoever being sung in English with
carefully preserved Italian intonations. This is not-ta too good-duh.
Furthermore, it just does not look like the
band was too happy about doing this conversion. Surprisingly enough, they went
to the trouble of actually re-recording all the tracks, maybe because they'd
lost the mastertapes and were unable to wipe DiGiacomo's vocals off the
originals (the completely instrumental ʽTraccia IIʼ is the only
number here that has been directly carried over), but the re-recordings never
reach the same level of power and enthusiasm — and they also go much easier on
the electric guitar (played by new band member Rodolfo Maltese, replacing Marcello
Todaro) and seriously heavier on synthesizers, which is not to my liking at
all.
Finally, what's up with the idea of
re-recording the old stuff anyway? I am not that
much of a fan to spend lots of time comparing the old ʽMetamorfosiʼ
with the new ʽMetamorphosisʼ, and thus, only the first six minutes of
the album are of relative interest: ʽChoraleʼ, subtitled ʽFrom
Traccia Themeʼ, is an atmospheric «look-how-impressively-we-synthesize-church-organ-effects»
composition that has nothing to do with either the original
ʽTracciaʼ or ʽTraccia IIʼ (all three could have been
constituents of a single dismembered multi-part suite, though), and
ʽL'Albero Del Paneʼ (ʽThe Bread Treeʼ) is an uplifting,
dynamic anthem built on the conjunction of ferocious acoustic strum and a sea
of romantic synthesizer joy. I suppose that both were included mainly to
provide the Italian sector of the market with an incentive to buy the album.
As things are, the album seems to be generally
out of print today, and for a good reason. Nobody really needs to understand what the band is singing about — the finest
musical masterpieces require the listener to supply his own images and
interpretations, and once the frontman starts battling with a foreign accent,
all images and interpretations start deteriorating accordingly. A curious
document indeed — but, even though ʽL'Albero Del Paneʼ is
salvageable, it is hardly enough to save the album from a decisive thumbs down.
Recommended to avoid, even if found in a used bin (or, more likely, in some forgotten
dusty container that accidentally did not make it onto the Rome – New York
flight).
GAROFANO ROSSO (1976)
1) Zobeida; 2) Funerale; 3) 10
Giugno 1924; 4) Quasi Saltarello; 5) Esterno Notte; 6) Garofano Rosso; 7)
Suggestioni Di Un Ritorno In Campagna; 8) Passeggiata In Bicicletta E Corteo
Dei Dimostranti; 9) Tema Di Giovanna; 10) Siracusa. Appunti D'Epoca; 11)
Notturno Breve; 12) Lasciando La Casa Antica.
A soundtrack to an obscure Italian movie on the
rise of fascism in the 1920s, this usually counts as a «proper» entry in the
Banco discography — not only does the album incorporate several instrumentals
that were not actually featured in the movie, but most of them do not really
sound much like «movie muzak». The only tangible reference to the movie theme
is in ʽ10 Giugno 1924ʼ, at the beginning of which an angry crowd
keeps chanting "Assassini! Assassini!" (referring to the
assassination of a socialist leader by fascists on that day) — but if you were
listening to the album without any knowledge of its background, you wouldn't be
able to guess what the hell this soundbite is doing there, other than to add a
little whiff of the ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ spirit, perhaps (which would
not be true: avantgarde sound collages were never on Banco's agenda).
The good news for those who, like me, are not awestruck over DiGiacomo's vocal
powers (and, conversely, the bad news for those who are), is that the album is
completely instrumental, with the focus placed exclusively on the Nocenzi
brothers. The bad news is that it is still cursed by the typical soundtrack
curse — although there are no attempts whatsoever here at «dumbing down» the
sound, and from all points of view the album qualifies as rigorous symph-prog,
it still functions primarily as background ambience. All the themes are
tasteful and range from «pretty» to «ominous», but I was not able to spot any
particularly resonant motifs. Except for one — the dark ascending piano pattern
that first appears on ʽEsterno Notteʼ and then is re-introduced in
ʽTema Di Giovannaʼ. Creepy, doom-laden, and... essentially, borrowed
from The Beatles' ʽI Want Youʼ, once you come to think of it (the
fact that they changed the last note, which only makes it less effective, only
confirms the suspicion).
Overall, this is fairly mellow stuff: forty
minutes of witnessing a slow, time-taking competition between the piano and the
organ / synthesizer, played out according to an almost baroque code of combat.
It does not strive to reach previously unexplored ground — adequately enough
for a mere soundtrack, made on order — and there are no moods here that these
guys had not already built up to better effect on their previous albums.
The title track, beginning with a bit of
free-form «self-adjustment» and then stabilizing into a steady blues-rock jam,
was deemed important enough by the band to become incorporated into their live
shows — but this is really the kind of number that the Allman Brothers would
have done with more spice (and more guitar! that «pastoral synthesizer» thing
does get tedious after a while!) on a good day. And it is only overcome in
length by ʽSuggestioniʼ, which has almost no noticeable changes in
dynamics throughout its eight minutes. Ambience!
«Pleasantly boring» is what I call these kinds
of records — acknowledging, at the same time, that obstinate fans of the
symph-prog genre could still find plenty of minute delicacies to savor here.
Unless you are really obstinate,
though, don't bother — your time might be better spent reading a book on the
history of the fascist movement, little as that has to do with the actual
spiritual content of this particular «quasi-soundtrack».
COME IN UN'ULTIMA CENA (1976)
1) ...A Cena, Per Esempio; 2)
Il Ragno; 3) E Così Buono Giovanni, Ma...; 4) Slogan; 5) Si Dice Che I
Delfini Parlino; 6) Voilà Mida (Il Guaritore); 7) Quando La Buona Gente
Dice...; 8) La Notte E Piena; 9) Fino Alla Mia Porta.
Since this is not a soundtrack no longer, but
rather a good old concept album, loosely (very
loosely) based around the theme of the Last Supper, with DiGiacomo returning to
his normal place as band frontman, initial hopes of getting another Io Sono Nato Libero are fairly high.
But alas, as it turns out after a few listens, the main problem of Garofano Rosso was not in being a
soundtrack — incredible as it may seem, the band simply started running out of
fresh ideas and basic energy, and Ultima
Cena continues that process.
It is still essential for the fans, since at
this point, the band does not yet show any signs of «commercializing» their
sound. Technically, we are still dealing with the same old Banco: a complex fusion
of classical, jazz, rock, pop, and «San Remo» influences, formally
unpredictable at every turn and aiming for an equally complex mix of emotional
/ intellectual reactions. Nor is there any technical sign of «slacking»: the
Nocenzi brothers and Rodolfo Maltese give themselves no respite, churning out
riffs, solos, and tonal experiments a-plenty.
Bad news, though: it no longer works so well,
particularly in the context of their earlier successes. Banco's musical themes
were never all that «catchy» — their approach to music was more in the
classical than in the rock vein — and while it paid off well during the early
stages, by 1976 the trick was getting stale. There is hardly anything here that they didn't do better
on their first three albums — which is especially ironic considering how much
there is: just about every single stylistic twist, technical move, emotional
pass, etc., that they were capable of will be encountered on one or several of
the tracks. Everything going on at once — and nothing imprintable.
At first, I was afraid it was just me; then I
began to find out that many reviewers had the same feelings — for instance, the
All-Music Guide review clearly stated that the album «shows signs of
breathlessness», although the reviewer was kind enough to let ʽIl
Ragnoʼ (ʽThe Spiderʼ) and ʽSloganʼ off the hook for
their «power» and «energy». I wouldn't be capable of the same kindness. Sure,
ʽIl Ragnoʼ has a steady beat, a heavy bass line, and a distorted
guitar riff to keep it going, and the introductory part of ʽSloganʼ
tries to be dark and ominous... but none of that goes far enough, or, rather,
all of it goes too far: not one of
the instrumental parts has enough power to impress on its own, and, when taken
together, they cancel out rather than strengthen each other. The cogs are
grinding with all the required mechanical precision, but somehow, the clock
does not run with the necessary effectiveness.
Some small consolation may be taken in the fact
that this time around, the obligatory soft ballads are almost completely
stripped of that irritating Italian suaveness — ʽE Così Buonoʼ
and ʽLa Notte E Pienaʼ are formed by little acoustic-and-flute
patterns that are more in the old baroque tradition than in the «Mediterranean
pop» style, and DiGiacomo's vocals sound much less manneristic and affected in
that setting. Which is not to say that either one is a musical masterpiece of
unprecedented depth and power — only to say that, with their presence, Ultima Cena reaches a consistent
standard of «uninterrupted mediocrity»: an album that is bound to delight
dogmatic fans of «That Classic Banco Sound», wherever it may be found, but is
far more likely to disappoint those who rigidly demand «progress» from their
«progressive». Because this here is not progress — this is a classic example of
stagnation, and (just as it happened with quite a few other «prog» acts) it may
even serve as a weak justification for the band's soon-to-be transition to an
unabashedly pop stylistics.
...DI TERRA (1978)
1) Nel Cielo E Nelle Altre
Cose Mute; 2) Terramadre; 3) Non Senza Dolore; 4) Io Vivo; 5) Nè
Più Di Un Albero Non Meno Di Una Stella; 6) Nei Suoni E Nei Silenzi; 7)
Di Terra.
If you are an old school progressive symph-rock
band, and you want to avoid stagnation, and most of the world is divided into
the New Wave and the disco camps and doesn't give a damn about academic
approaches to popular entertainment, what do you do?
Well, normally you sell out, with faint hopes
of gaining short-term advantages and avoiding long-term reputation loss,
neither of which usually comes true. But every once in a while, just prior to
selling out, you might make a startling, unexpected, out-of-time and
out-of-touch move that will provide your future generation fans with a cool
extra subject for discussion. Never be afraid of going «against the grain» —
even if the results are awful, the very fact of your bravery will go down in
the annals, and there will always be admiring fans who have a thing for
bravery.
As you can already make out from the album sleeve,
Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso have lopped the last three words from their name
already in 1978. That «shortening», following in the wake of their colleagues
in the business, Premiata Forneria Marconi, becoming simply «PFM», is sometimes
associated with the band's transition from serious prog to cheesy pop —
however, that is not accurate, since the first «Banco» album, ...Di Terra, is anything but cheesy pop: on the contrary, it is
one of the most ambitious and «academic» projects the band ever came up with. A
completely instrumental album, once again, but not a soundtrack like Garofano Rosso — this time, it is a
full-blown seven-part symphony, recorded with the participation of the
Orchestra dell'Unione Musicisti di Roma. A classical / jazz / rock hybrid that
was arguably as far from «cool» with the critics in 1978 as... oh wait, I guess
nothing could be farther.
Di Giacomo's absence from the album, this time
around, is feebly compensated by naming all the tracks with lines from a
puffed-up metaphysical poem he wrote — similar in style to Graeme Edge's poetry
he wrote for the Moody Blues but, thankfully, only implied in the music, never
sung or recited in itself. Still, it yields a certain hint — taken together
with the grandiose pull of the arrangements, the title brings on associations
with Mahler's Song Of The Earth, and
even if the music itself has little (but not exactly «nothing») to do with
Mahler, the ambitions are somewhat comparable. As a polyphonous, multi-theme,
«sprawling» instrumental concept album by a nominally «rock» artist, ...Di Terra is sometimes compared with
Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, but
the two are grounded in completely different traditions — Mike's magnum opus was, after all, far more
indebted to Celtic folk and stuff, whereas the Nocenzi brothers' passions
steadily remain rooted in late XIXth / early XXth century classical schools.
Anyway, the end results are impressive.
Reviewing the separate movements of the piece is a task as arduous as reviewing
the separate movements of a Bruckner (or, indeed, a Mahler) symphony, but a lot
of well-schooled compositional activity has been invested here, with great care
for dynamics and development. The «overture» (ʽNeil Cielo...ʼ), for
instance, permanently pinned to a rising-and-falling string theme, gradually
transforms from a «pastoral» setting to a «parade» one, as brass instruments
overtake woodwinds. Then ʽTerramadreʼ leads us into fast-paced
«modern jazz» territory, with rampant dissonance and atonality — replaced three
minutes later by the odd mix of baroque influences, elevator jazz, and New
Age-isms that is ʽNon Senza Doloreʼ. And so on and on, right down to
the «galloping» finale of the title track, which combines most of the
ingredients — a little spaghetti western, a little blues-rock, a little
Tchaikovsky, you name it.
There is not enough power and muscle here —
there probably could not have been, had they seduced Herbert von Karajan
himself to direct the orchestra — to separate your lower jaw from the rest of
your face, I suppose. But this is still a very good, and a very unusual,
application of Banco's «synthetic» powers — all of those jazz and ambient
elements that they mix in so freely with the classical make ...Di Terra a near-unique experience,
and one that probably deserves much more publicity than it has among music
lovers. I have no problem calling this their «last gasp of brilliance» or
something like that, and a firm thumbs up is guaranteed. At the very least, it
does sound like absolutely nothing else produced in the Saturday Night Fever era.
CANTO DI PRIMAVERA (1979)
1) Ciclo; 2) Canto Di
Primavera; 3) Sono La Bestia; 4) Niente; 5) E Mi Viene Da Pensare; 6) Inferno
Città; 7) Lungo Il Margine; 8) Circobanda.
We are still not quite in the Eighties yet, and
this album does not yet have the proper license to be «atrocious». At this
point, it looks as if Banco are taking the relatively easy way out — instead of
properly selling out, like everybody else, and going for a fully «commercial
pop» sound, they are instead becoming a «soft jazz» / «lite fusion» act.
Apparently, the experiment of ...Di
Terra did not work out to critical or commercial success, so for their next
project, they went with something that goes easier on the budget than a
full-scale orchestra, and easier on the average listener than a completely
instrumental «neo-classical» recording.
The album title is right on the money: the
whole thing is a fairly coherent «Spring Song», with mostly bright, sunny,
happy melodies, many of them with a «pastoral» flavor (title track, for instance),
driven, as usual, by the Nocenzi interplay — the only bad thing about which is
that Gianni has completely switched over to new brands of electric pianos and
clavinets, so the whole experience has a decidedly «inorganic» flavor to it.
Even when they throw in some folky bits, making us dance along to the opening
lines of ʽSono La Bestiaʼ, they do it with these rather unsuitable
keyboard tones — eventually, who needs to hear those sounds played on stiff
electric keyboards when you can listen to Ian Anderson doing the same stuff on
real flutes?
Worse, most of the atmospheric textures are
tripartite — the annoying electric keyboards set the first layer of melody, the
brand new synthesizers set the second one, and the third one is usually
provided by Luigi Cinque's echoey saxophone that is not that far removed from the standards soon to be set by Kenny G —
smooth, inobtrusive, «melodic», boring to the point that, if you listen to this
stuff too intensely for too long, the only cure is to throw on ʽYakety
Yakʼ as soon as possible, or you might develop a lifelong incurable hatred
for the instrument.
The melodies are not exactly complete
throwaways — there is a lot of compositional activity going on here, and from a
formal technical point of view, Canto
is probably not any less complex than ...Di
Terra. But the fact that the boys are not officially «slouching» hardly
means anything if there is no exciting dynamics — no rises, no falls, no
climaxes, no Sturm-und-Drang, just a
lot of key and tempo changes that make the separate pieces about as different
from each other as the different blades of grass on that bright green spring
meadow they are singing about. Where are the thrills, the chills, the kills,
goddammit?
On the other hand, with the exception of the
ornamental framework (ʽCicloʼ and ʽCircobandaʼ are two
similar-sounding happy-fusion-esque instrumentals that bookmark the record),
this is all very much DiGiacomo's show — the relatively short tracks offer full
compensation for the man's absence on ...Di
Terra. And with that, the San Remo spirit is back as well: every song is
full to the brim with flourishing mannerisms, exaggerated sentimentality,
beards soaked with artistic tears, and, occasionally, some theatrical martial
punch. None of it holds any serious emotional resonance for me, but most of it
is done reasonably fine and will always have its fans.
In a certain way, what this reminds me of is a
sort of Italian equivalent to Steely Dan's Aja
— except that beyond the smooth, seemingly «corny», «easy-listening» surface of
Aja there hides a darker, leerier
heart (a common thing with Steely Dan), whereas subsequent listens to Canto Di Primavera do not reveal any
surprises. I mean, Italian pop (heck, most Italian music from any time period,
for that matter) usually bares it all at once, and Banco are no exception — and
certainly not when they try to emphasize their «national» side over their
«cosmopolitan» ambitions. In the end, the only thing that prevents this
ball-o'-blandness from a «thumbs down» is that... well, we are still not quite
in the Eighties yet.
CAPOLINEA (1980)
1) Non Mi Rompete; 2) Il
Ragno; 3) Canto Di Primavera; 4) 750,000 Anni Fa... L'Amore; 5) Capolinea, Pt.
1; 6) Capolinea, Pt. 2; 7) R.I.P.; 8) Garofano Rosso.
Why these guys had to wait until 1980 to
release a live album is anybody's guess — perhaps they thought it boring to
jump on the «triple live album» fad while they were still playing the songs
close to the originals, but now that they had so daringly reinvented themselves
for the Modern Age, it was time to show the world how infinite those adaptive
capacities of progressive rock really are? Particularly now that you can actually
dance to those formerly tricky oldies
and all?
All right, so this is not quite the brand new,
Eighties-ready Banco yet. This is a transitional album: they do a selection of
mostly old material, alternating between (a) tear-jerkers — ballads that need very
little readjustment to set the crowds a-weepin'; and (b) old «rockers» remade
according to the electro-funky standards of the day, with hot syncopated
basslines that sometimes go all the way up to disco (even though in general this is not «Banco's disco
album», as the fans sometimes brand it, steeping away in horror — but a dance
album this is, of course).
The only new composition is the two-part title
track, a fast, but relatively old-fashioned boogie piece with alternating
synthesizer and guitar solos, and a bass part that pays proper tribute to the
fusion genre. It's listenable and nimble, but generic, and the synthesizer
tones are ugly anyway. But it may be a better proposition for the fans than the
funkified rethinking of ʽR.I.P.ʼ, or the disco pounce of ʽIl
Ragnoʼ, or the new life of ʽGarofano Rossoʼ as the Italian
equivalent of the Saturday Night Fever
soundtrack.
On the other hand, in retrospect the experience
is sort of amusing — it is curious to hear, at least once, how these old
classic tunes behave in a «nightclub» setting, and it will ultimately depend
upon your attitude towards something like Walter Murphy's ʽA Fifth Of
Beethovenʼ: ridiculous, disgusting, money-grubbin' desecration or cheesy,
bold, tongue-in-cheek experimentation? For Banco, scrap «tongue-in-cheek»,
though: there are no signs of self-irony anywhere in sight, they are clearly
targeting these rearrangements at a new kind of audience — one that is
accustomed to standing up and getting it on at live shows, not sitting down and
contemplating.
The recording quality is fairly good (every
throb of each disco line wobbles your speakers impressively), DiGiacomo is in
fine vocal form (in fact, at this point he emerges as the most «conservative»
element of the music, faithfully reproducing the original vocal melodies), and
the Nocenzi brothers do work their asses off, regardless of the goals and
results. The album hardly qualifies for a proper end-of-the-decade
«summarization» of achievements — it stares way too intensely into the glum
future, and the song selection is too restricted — but, at the very least, it
is a semi-decent way to cap off one's collection of BMS records, because,
compared to what would follow, and follow very soon, Capolinea is a frickin' Mozartian masterpiece. Prophetic title,
too: Capolinea means «terminus» in Italian, so take a hint
before proceeding further.
URGENTISSIMO (1980)
1) Senza Riguardo; 2) Dove
Sarà; 3) C'E Qualcosa; 4) Luna Piena; 5) Paolo Pà; 6) Felice; 7)
Ma Che Idea; 8) Il Cielo Sta In Alto.
Fresh, sizzling, off-the-grill electronic
Italian dance-pop from 1981, anyone? Didn't think so. Perhaps the move to a
blatantly commercial sound was as inevitable for Banco as it was for the absolute
majority of their progressive brethren — but even such brethren as Yes,
Genesis, or Gentle Giant managed to handle the transition with more
self-esteem: thirty years on, it is still possible to think of a few reasons to
dig out 90125 or Abacab other than pure childhood
nostalgia. This transformation, in
comparison, results in such utter shite that the only reason to listen to Urgentissimo is strictly
culturological, as in — you thought US and UK mainstream pop tastes in the
early 1980s went down the drain? have a look at the Italian pop taste!
In the short term, the strategy worked: the
band managed to launch several local hits on the Italian charts, of which
ʽPaolo Pàʼ was the biggest, convincing Banco that this was,
indeed, the way to go on. In the long
run, these corny abominations serve as the perfect textbook example of how it
is possible to take the worst aspects of a successful «intellectual» band and
use them to reforge it into a conglomeration of happy pop idiots.
It is not just that these «post-disco» Eurodance
tunes are utterly primitive in comparison to you-know-what. I am not sure that,
composition-wise, ʽPaolo Pàʼ or ʽDove Saràʼ
are that much more «dumb» or «simplistic» than, say, some Oingo Boingo ditty
from the same time period. ʽDove Saràʼ, for instance, has a
fairly liberal lead guitar score from Maltese, and ʽPaoloʼ has
several keyboard parts with the Nocenzi brothers still competing for the
listeners' attention like they always used to. Basically, if you want «totally
primitive», there are much, much worse examples in the same genre.
The one thing that is really disgusting is a
complete loss of a sense of «adequacy». DiGiacomo's vocal talents are now let
loose to convey «serious emotions» in a musical context best fit for a teenage
disco club — the songs are sung as if they are supposed to mean something when they really don't: the only meaning implied is
«please keep on buying our records so we don't starve in this strange new age».
And the only real purpose behind the Nocenzi brothers' keyboard hooks, this
time, is to get your sorry butt wiggling to those Hot New Funky Sounds — best
illustrated, perhaps, by the repetitive six-note chorus melody of ʽMa Che
Ideaʼ, which could, for all I know, be an old AC/DC riff transcribed for
synthesizer.
Only two of the tracks still preserve faint
traces of more worthy purposes: ʽSenza Riguardoʼ, once you have
suffered through its Big Heavy Mammoth Riff (which honors the slowly emerging
pop-metal movement), has some free-form soloing in the middle, and
ʽFeliceʼ has a brief nod to the band's former fusion pedigree (but
even so, integrates the fusion-esque chord changes into a totally
club-oriented dance number). Note that this paragraph has been inserted
strictly out of considerations of courtesy and politeness — it is not, by any means, recommended that
anybody go out and look for these songs as «lost delights». They are simply
marginally less disgusting than the rest. Also, the brief instrumental album
closer ʽIl Cielo Sta In Altoʼ is supposed to work as an artistic
atmospheric coda, with two synthesizers trading «heavenly» lite-jazz lines
against an irritatingly repetitive clavinet bassline.
Does it work? Well, even if it did, what's two minutes of soft, inobtrusive, jazz-poppy textures
to us after thirty minutes' worth of complete embarrassment? Welcome to one of
the cheesiest sellouts in European pop music history, with a crashing thumbs down.
BUONE NOTIZIE (1981)
1) Taxi; 2) Canzone D'Amore;
3) Si, Ma Si; 4) Buona Notte, Sogni D'Oro; 5) Baciami Alfredo; 6) Michele E Il
Treno; 7) AM-FM; 8) Buone Notizie.
If possible, this is even more «pop» than its predecessor. Now there aren't even any of those
stupid «monster riffs» like the one that opened ʽSenza Riguardoʼ,
nor any attempts to preserve their jazz-fusion legacy like ʽFeliceʼ.
Every single track you can dance to, sometimes in slower, sometimes in faster
motion, and everything is almost unbearably, disgustingly happy — in an odd contrast
with the sleeve photo, where the band members choose to look like a band of
captured partigiani, grimly
preparing to meet the firing squad.
I will not deny that the arrangements are not
always awful, or that the songs are not always hookless. They could have done
a lot worse: this upbeat, playful, New Wave-influenced vibe that they latch on
is at least much better than choosing
to drown themselves in saccharine balladry or update the «San Remo vibe» by
refueling the pomp with synthesizer arrangements — both of these options would
be very easy to implement, and the consequences would have been absolutely horrendous.
Thus, in a way, this particular mode of selling out is probably the least
painful way in which they could sell out at the moment.
This does not, however, remove the basic
problem — these are simply stupid
songs, as in «stupid stupid», not «cutely stupid» or «charmingly stupid» or
even «silly stupid». Even if your Italian is good enough to understand such
witty lines as "Ho un libro di
Bukowsky sull'eiaculazione" (ʽTaxiʼ), it does not save the
situation. The texts, overall, try to be impressionistic, educated, and, occasionally,
socially relevant, but they are set to such «slap-happy» arrangements that any
attempt to get a «message» out of them will be spiritually blocked. All they do
is simply invite you to jump on the spot like a two-year old, in an
incomprehensible paroxysm of rhythmic joy. Fast ones like ʽSi, Ma Siʼ
and the title track are the worst of the lot, but slower lullabies like
ʽBuona Notte, Sogni D'Oroʼ do not actually change the mood — they are
less idiotic, but more boring.
By the general standards of mainstream Italian
dance-pop, this is fairly decent quality, I guess: with keyboards and guitars
still striving for modestly complex melodicity, and with DiGiacomo still in
full control of his voice, the album is technically accomplished. But its
rhythmic base is absolutely, utterly primitive, its emotional impact is
negligible, and its hooks stupid and meaningless. Consequently, yet another thumbs down
— and by now, it seems all but impossible that the band will ever get a chance
to see the light once again.
BANCO (1983)
1) Ninna Nanna; 2) Lontano Da;
3) Moby Dick; 4) Pioverà; 5) Allons Enfants; 6) Velocità; 7) Moyo
Ukoje; 8) Traccia III.
Stuck in between two of Banco's worst excuses
for existence, this eponymous release from 1983 is marginally better — at least
every once in a while it tends to veer into long forgotten «art-pop» territory,
with occasional baroque vocal flourishes and flashes of intellectualism: I
mean, how bad can an album with direct references to Herman Melville, the
French national anthem, and a phraseological expression in Swahili really be?
Well, it can be pretty bad, for sure, but not
entirely hopeless. Granted, the audacity even to suggest that there may be some feeble continuity with Banco's
classic legacy — as evidenced by the inclusion of a short bookmarking
instrumental called ʽTraccia IIIʼ — is hardly permissible, particularly
in view of the fact that the song in question is a bland piece of post-New Wave
dance muzak heavily struck with synthesizeritis. But if we bring ourselves to
forget that there ever was a ʽTraccia Iʼ or ʽTraccia IIʼ in
the first place, Banco has its
better moments.
ʽMoby Dickʼ, in particular, is a
tolerable, at times even jubilantly infectious, chunk of Euro-pop, laden with
catchy choruses, decent slide guitar and ʽDancing Queenʼ-ish piano
patterns, maybe the best track to stem from Banco's pop period in general —
see, it isn't really that hard: all
one needs is not sound too stupid and include some instrumental work that does
not value flashiness and rhythm above subtlety and melodicity.
And make that a big emphasis on «not sounding too stupid» — throughout the album,
the attitudes and tonalities are significantly shifted towards a melancholic,
autumnal mood with a little bit of old-timey romantic idealism carried over
from the progressive days. If only the rhythmic pulses here weren't so utterly
flat and predictable, ʽNinna Nannaʼ could have been a passable
jazz-rocker, and ʽPioveràʼ could have been an okayish fusion
ballad. There is even an attempt at jumping on the «world music» wagon with
ʽMoyo Ukojeʼ, even if its Swahili title is more or less the only «world»
element to it... still, it's a bit of an improvement over ʽBacciami
Alfredoʼ, if you know what I'm talking about.
It's not as if any of these observations
constituted sufficient reasons for the album to exist — it is quickly and
easily forgettable — but, at least, in the general context of the band's
history it comes across as a weak muscle convulsion from what already seemed
like something that «ceased to exist». One could even hope that, had things
continued to unfurl in the same way, Banco
could have been the beginning of a resuscitation. Unofrtunately, the Eighties
were only beginning — Genesis, too, released their best «pop-era» album in
1983, as did Yes, and look what happened later. Could we expect anything
radically different from their Italian brethren? I don't think so.
...E VIA (1985)
1) Notte Kamikaze; 2) Ice
Love; 3) Black Out; 4) (When We) Touched Our Eyes; 5) To The Fire; 6) Mexico
City; 7) Lies In Your Eyes; 8) Baby Jane.
With your permission, I will keep this one
brief. For some reason, the «moody» twist of the self-titled Banco did not appear satisfactory — and
just two years later, the band fell back on its «silly Italo-pop» schtick,
except, this time, with an appropriately (for 1985) larger emphasis on big stupid
electronic drums and «sci-fi» synthesizers. Results are predictable: a record
that is just as dumb as Buone Notizie,
but goes even harsher on the ears.
Summarizing: a total of 4 cretinous (yes, I
need to drag out my thesaurus for this) «hot» electro-pop dance numbers — I can
just imagine the Nocenzi brothers, with naked torsos, getting it on with those
sexy portable synths!; one deeply bathetic power ballad that might as well have
been written by Diane Warren; and three calmer, adult-contemporary numbers, the
last one of them with a faint, distant echo of the band's fusion legacy (but at
this point, that echo is pretty much indistinguishable from the domain of soft
jazz muzak).
Additionally, most of the songs are delivered
in English — never a forte of DiGiacomo's, and at this point, who really cares? I seriously doubt they
managed to sell a single copy of this crap outside the borders, where
everybody had their own national crap
at the time. (Not to mention that a single look at DiGiacomo's facial
expression on that billboard would shoo away even the buzzards). Somebody must
have gone completely wild in the marketing department — or maybe singing in
English over ear-splitting electronic drum backgrounds was all the rage in
Italy circa 1985, which I doubt.
As is often the case on such of the lyrics, a
few of the choruses are «formalistically» catchy, but usually in the form of
«idiot catchiness» — if the Italian line about dancing with the protagonist all
night long from ʽNotte Kamikazeʼ gets stuck in your head for a couple
hours, nothing good will come out of it anyway. Nobody except for the most
corrosively perverted Eighties' buffs need ever bother about locating this
record — E Via, indeed. And yes,
that's the wrong way you are pointing out there, signor DiGiacomo — thumbs down, all the way, never up
or even sideways.
DONNA PLAUTILLA (1989)
1) Ed Io Canto; 2) Cantico; 3)
Piazza Dell'Oro; 4) Mille Poesie; 5) Un Giorno Di Sole; 6) Un Uomo Solo; 7)
Bla, Bla, Bla; 8) E Luce Fu; 9) Mille Poesie (version 2); 10) Donna Plautilla.
Finally, an Eighties album from Banco that does
not at all sound like the Eighties...
hmm, I wonder if this could have anything to do with the fact that all of the
recordings here allegedly date from the late 1960s / early 1970s? The decision
to open the vaults and flood the fans with pre-proto-nostalgic demos, recorded
way back when DiGiacomo was not even a member of the band yet, and most of the
vocals were handled by the Nocenzi brothers themselves, came at a strange time
— just two years earlier, Gianni had left the band for good in order to embark
on a solo career, and what with ...E
Via being the latest and «greatest» trace of their legacy, the band must
have looked essentially finished for everybody still the least bit concerned.
So the fact that they turned to their almost
archaeological past was quite telling: you do not usually bother publishing
your teenage scraps unless (a) you happen to be one of the greatest bands in
the world, in which case your legions of fans will be happy to buy anything, or
(b) you happen to be totally defunct, in which case your three or four
remaining fans will be happy to buy anything. And Donna Plautilla offers few revelations — by default, it happens to
be the best Banco album of the decade due to utter lack of competition, but in
the overall scheme of things, it is primarily of interest for the historian.
The songs are surprisingly well recorded: these
are not bare-bones demos, but full, professional studio productions,
background harmonies, multiple overdubs and all — strange enough, there seems
to be no trace of this material ever having been officially released, even
though I am pretty sure that some of these songs could have been turned into
(at least) modest hits on the Italian market. Rather predictably, this is
mainly «sunny» Italian art-pop, already with some baroque tendencies, but very
much derivative of the typical Italian scene, particularly in the vocal department
— and, speaking of vocals, Vittorio Nocenzi's singing is not all that bad:
nowhere near as distinctive, sharp, or «soulful» as DiGiacomo's, but also less
manneristic and overwrought. Fans of Francesco should probably stay away in the
first place, but non-fans of Francesco who hold the opinion that his singing
frequently distracts one, in an irritating manner, from the intricacies of the
music, could actually find satisfaction — provided, that is, that the melodies
were awesome in any way, and it looks like they are not.
If the songs are arranged in chronological
order (I am not sure), then there is a clear «growth» tendency: the first
song, ʽEd Io Cantoʼ, sounds like a typical late-Sixties pop «nugget»,
a hybrid of hip British psychedelic style with Italian dramatism that is
neither too inventive nor too catchy, while the last one — the instrumental
title track — already boasts the trademark Nocenzi organ / piano duo in full
flight, engaging in a flashy jazzy duel reminiscent of contemporary Traffic
(some of the glissandos and stuff sound inspired by ʽGladʼ off John Barleycorn). In between you have
it all — hyper-driven, corny acoustic ballads (ʽCanticoʼ); distorted
heavy piano boogie (ʽPiazza Dell'Oroʼ); even an early attempt at a
«universalist» epic anthem (ʽE Luce Fuʼ).
In short, they were trying hard, but the short
art-pop song format just does not yield good results for these guys — they
never really hit their stride until they'd finally worked out the long
multi-part instrumental form. Essentially, it is just that some bands function
best in «Procol Harum mode» while others have limited pop sensibility and tend
to thrive in nineteen-minute long symphonic rock à la Yes environments. Thus, Donna Plautilla, while listenable overall and having its occasional
moments, clearly shows that, as an «art-pop singles band», the early Banco had
no chance whatsoever at being noticed in the crowd — there is nothing here
except for general competence. If you want yourself some really solid «Mediterranean» art-pop from the era, equally
influenced by Romance and British (as well as Greek) spirits, check out
Aphrodite's Child instead — hooks galore, plenty of atmosphere, and surprising
diversity out there that expose Donna
Plautilla for the timid training camp that it really was.
Nevertheless, the album is unquestionably of
great importance for those wishing to experience and assess the Banco curve
from start to finish — after all, the marvels of ʽR.I.P.ʼ and
ʽMetamorphosiʼ did not come out of nowhere. And just because the
brothers' playing technique is already well established, as well as for the
sake of having, that way, secured at least one
mildly worthy release in the 1980s (through cheating, but would we rather have
another ...E Via? no way!), I am
definitely not giving it a thumbs
down.
DA QUI MESSERE SI DOMINA LA VALLE (1991)
1) In Volo; 2) R.I.P.; 3)
Passaggio; 4) Metamorfosi; 5) Il Giardino Del Mago; 6) Traccia; 7)
L'Evoluzione; 8) La Conquista Della Posizione Eretta; 9) La Danza Dei Grandi
Rettili; 10) Cento Mani, Cento Occhi; 11) 750,000 Anni Fa... L'Amore; 12)
Miserere Alla Storia; 13) Ed Ora Io Domando Tempo Al Tempo.
As the 1990s introduced their «revivalist»
spirit, and former sellouts, one by one, started shaking off the slick
commercial haze, Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso came to their senses as well — alas,
at the expense of losing Gianni Nocenzi, so this here is a one-kidney band
trying to restore and then preserve what can be restored and preserved of its
former face.
They did it in a strange way, though: by
completely re-recording their first two albums and releasing the new versions
both separately and as a 2-CD package, subtitled with a line from ʽIn
Voloʼ. As far as I understand, they were the only ones of the major prog veterans to have done that — allegedly,
the «restoration» of Yes was also due to re-recordings of old classics (Keys To Ascension), but those were
live shows, and the compositions were taken from different albums. These, in
comparison, are studio productions, completely faithful to both the sequencing
and the arrangements of the original versions. So what's the point?
In all honesty, since the original albums are classics, after all, a fully
responsible review should take pains to carefully compare all the differences
and present a well-researched conclusion on whether the subtle changes
introduced in the re-recordings may be qualified as improvements. Particularly
since some of the tracks are noticeably longer (ʽR.I.P.ʼ,
ʽMetamorfosiʼ, and ʽL'Evoluzioneʼ, in particular, have
each been extended by about three minutes, by means of extended instrumental
sections, so it seems, usually of the «atmospheric» variety — such as the new
lengthy build-up to ʽConquista Della Posizione Erettaʼ). But I am
rather loath to assume this responsibility — the task seems more appropriate
for professional Bancologists, not for someone who is just here to offer a quick
en-passant judgement.
Hence, my irresponsible judgement is as
follows: The re-recordings are listenable, but the subtle changes, on the
whole, are (predictably) detrimental. Of course, in 1991 they do have the
benefit of better production values than in 1972, but that benefit is brought
to nought when you realize that (a) the drums sound pretty bad, with tinny
electronic effects disrupting the tight focus; (b) even though it is the piano
player and not the guitarist who has left (piano parts are handled either by
brother Vittorio or guest player Piercarlo Penta), it is often the guitar parts
that suffer the most, as can easily be seen already on ʽR.I.P.ʼ —
Maltese uses unnecessary electronic effects throughout, so that, overall, the
live and intimate feel of the original is replaced by digital murk that does
not trigger the same kind of emotional response (to put it mildly).
DiGiacomo is completely on the level
throughout, and it is not as if, having never heard the originals, you would
be hard pressed to understand what all the fuss was about — the melodies,
structures, and overall goals are all the same. Maybe they just thought this could eventually turn into a trend:
«refresh» all the classics with the new, improved aid of modern technologies.
Naturally, it did not, so in retrospect, this acquires the status of a
misguided historical curio, for completists only — not that there is any
further danger of mistaking the re-recordings for the originals, since the
originals are back in print, and the re-recordings are out of it, possibly for
ever, so that once again, time is on our side.
IL 13 (1994)
1) Dove Non Arrivano Gli
Occhi; 2) Sirene; 3) Brivido; 4) Sirene, Pt. 2; 5) Guardami Le Spalle; 6) Anche
Dio; 7) Spudorata (pi-ppò); 8) Bambino; 9) Tremila; 10) Rimani Fuori;
11) Emiliano; 12) Mister Rabbit; 13) Magari Che (Gargarismo); 14) Tirami Una
Rete; 15) Bisbigli.
Finally, a proper attempt to justify the band's
obstinate craving for survivalism — an entirely new studio album of freshly
composed material that tries to put the mutuo
soccorso back into the banco, if
you get my drift. An hour's worth of music that still retains plenty of «body
power», but, first time in years, sounds motivated by ambition and exploration
rather than pure dumb fashion — a chance to really
tell the world that the true Banco never really went away, they just spent fifteen
years getting DiGiacomo's beard out of the drum machine.
Perhaps the results could have been better if
they hadn't lost Gianni in the scuffle. Without one of the two key links in the
chain, Banco would never be able to restore its classic sound — and, in fact,
they are honestly not even attempting to do it. Instead, their conception of
«seriousness» in music now involves a propensity for heavy funk — the «rock» in
the «return to prog-rock» agenda is
understood as chuggy syncopated guitar riffs, jumpy bass, and loud, but simple
drum patterns. They had already toyed with R&B elements several times in
their «lost years» — now all they have to do is cleanse it from the ugliness of
Eighties' production, add extra bridge sections and extend the jam parts, and
presto... Art!
Well, not really. Actually, the songs aren't
bad — they don't sound particularly silly, and for that reason alone, are
nowhere near as offensive as it used to be (except that the chorus of
ʽMister Rabbitʼ, with its peculiar Italian insistence on loudly
pronouncing the second word as «rah-bit», brings on inappropriate visions of
kindergartens). They are simply «sparkless» — no matter how fast or frenetic or
ecstatic they want to make themselves look on something like
ʽSireneʼ, it does not sound convincing, not even when their new
guitarist Max Smeraldi breaks into a furious Van Halen-esque metal solo.
ʽBrividoʼ, on the other hand, shows that they still carry a strain of
the «glam-pop» virus — the song begins in atmospheric, Floydian, mode, then
proceeds into the regular «anthemic» territory (pompous synths, big booming
drums, and not a lot in the way of interesting melody or subtle nuances). And
it isn't even contagious.
Arguably the best of the lot are several
«experimental» numbers deprived of vocals — ʽAnche Dioʼ, for
instance, echoes New Wave-era King Crimson with its tricky, off-balance time
signatures and dissonant processed guitars à la Adrian Belew; and
ʽEmilianoʼ is a showcase for Vittorio's jazz piano skills, although
it is hardly likely to ever replace Thelonious Monk on your Ipod — outside of
this album, ʽEmilianoʼ will probably shrivel and die in seconds. Then
there are the acoustic ballads that require the usual tolerance / passion for
Italian pop traditions (ʽTirami Una Reteʼ, ʽRimani Fuoriʼ,
etc.) — still miles above the smelly plastic pablum of...
...yet, anyway, I do not understand why I
should be forced to feel good about this record just because it is less
embarrassing than E Via — no
Herculean feat, really, to make an album that would sound less embarrassing
than E Via, especially in 1994, when
musical fashion temporarily took a turn for the better. In retrospect, Il 13 is simply tolerable, but boring:
Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso are on an egotistical mission to prove that they, Banco, are still a musical force —
and this whole «let us make a stereotypical Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso album, and
throw in a few funky arrangements to throw them off the scent» attitude is an
overall failure. Oh, and it's pathetically overlong — a whole sixty minutes of
this futuristic nostalgia? Thumbs down.
NUDO (1997)
CD I: 1) Nudo, Pt. 1; 2) Nudo,
Pt. 2; 3) Nudo, Pt. 3; 4) E Mi Viene Da Pensare; 5) Prologo #1; 6) R.I.P.; 7)
Il Ragno; 8) Emiliano; 9) L'Evoluzione; 10) 750,000 Anni Fa... L'Amore; CD II:
1) Sul Palco; 2) La Conquista Della Posizione Eretta; 3) Metamorfosi; 4)
Guardami Le Spalle; 5) Roma/Tokyo; 6) La Band; 7) Bisbigli; 8) Passaggio; 9)
Coi Capelli Sciolti Al Vento; 10) Traccia; 11) Prologo #2; 12) Non Mi Rompete.
What good is releasing a double CD if you are only going to put one new song on it? And not
a good one, at that: the three-part ʽNudoʼ suite is most definitely
one of those «failed experiments» where the artist thinks he is being all smart
and complex and cool and modern, but in reality just comes up with something
that makes no sense whatsoever. ʽNudoʼ is very loud, very full of
itself, but fails to come up with melodies that would venture outside
second-rate synth-pop and adult contemporary — it is about as «progressive» as
circa-Union Yes; in fact, it is a
serious stylistic letdown even compared to the already lax standards of Il 13. Granted, the riffs and solos are
at a much higher level of complexity than on E Via, but the synth tones, the drum machines, and the overproduced
guitars make that observation pointless: in the end, there is more pomp here
than style, and far more technophilia than substance.
All the more curious is the fact that the rest of this stuff, even though it all
consists of oldies done anew, is delightful. The first CD, once the accursed
suite is over, is then dedicated to an «unplugged» section where they do their
classic tunes in acoustic mode, with the aid of a young colleague guitarist,
Filippo Marcheggiani (who was not even born when they already recorded most of
their classic albums). The results are hardly essential, but sound almost surprisingly
inspired — lack of amplification does not impact the energy of the melodies,
just gives them more of a «chamber» feel (actually, the lack of amplification
only refers to guitars — synthesizers are still quite prominent, particularly
on ʽL'Evoluzioneʼ).
The second disc (there is also a 1-CD edition
that omits it) contains a selection of properly live titles, recorded at two
shows in Tokyo; the tracks do not overlap with the «unplugged» ones, but are
also mostly classic stuff, with the exception of the Vittorio-sung
ʽGuardami Le Spalleʼ from Il
13 and a new instrumental, flatteringly called ʽRoma / Tokyoʼ —
another pompous symph-rock composition, but somewhat more effective than
ʽNudoʼ, maybe because the live environment makes it feel more like a
real heated battle between all the players than just another demonstration of
their worship of loud-sounding technogadgets.
As for the classics, well, this is actually the
first time we get to hear Banco in full-out live mode playing the classics
without turning them into disco attractions — the versions of ʽConquista
Della Posizione Erettaʼ and ʽMetamorfosiʼ in particular are
quite impressive. Now they share the regular prog-rock live album bane («find
ten differences from the originals... not»),
but with twenty five years lying between the originals and the copies, who
would really blame them? And while we are at it, DiGiacomo's voice has not lost
a thing in terms of range or power, only gained in terms of self-assurance and
professionalism.
Overall, Nudo
clearly shows that at this point, Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso are only functional
as a «nostalgia act», but they can be a damn fine nostalgia act if they really
put their minds to it — their days as composers of quality music long since
gone, their talents for melody and innovation worn out, eaten up, perhaps, by
the syphilis of the reckless musical prostitution of the previous decade, or by
other reasons. Much to their honor, the band members must have acknowledged
this and come to terms with it — although Banco never officially disbanded, and
still continue to play and record, the ʽNudoʼ suite was their last
ever attempt at creating new music. If you know for sure that you are never
going to create anything on the level of Darwin!,
not ever again, why bother hopelessly trying? Just enjoy life as it is, that's
all.
NO PALCO (2003)
1) Prologo #1; 2) R.I.P.; 3)
Il Ragno; 4) Cento Mani, Cento Occhi; 5) Quando La Buona Gente Dice; 6) Canto
Di Primavera; 7) La Caccia / Fa# Minore; 8) Moby Dick; 9) Non Mi Rompete; 10)
Come Due Treni Intro; 11) 750,000 Anni Fa... L'Amore; 12) Traccia I; 13)
Traccia II.
Hey, another
live album — bet you didn't see this one coming. Then again, what a better way
to celebrate the band's 30th anniversary than with a major live extravaganza,
staged in the heart of Rome itself, with a swarm of friends, old and new (some
of which are allegedly big names on the Italian stage), and a setlist that
makes it pretty clear that the Eighties and Nineties never really happened?
And why not release it as an official CD if the performances are generally
flawless, and if Nudo already showed
so clearly that re-recordings of the «old shit» are so inherently superior to
whatever new shit they could try to come up with?
In any case, No Palco is at least interesting in that, for the last bunch of
tracks, the band is joined on the stage by brother Gianni, doing a solo piano
instrumental (ʽCome Due Treniʼ) and taking on the key role in
ʽ750,000 Anni Faʼ and both of the ʽTracciaʼ pieces.
Additionally, Mauro Pagani, one of the founding fathers of Banco's chief
competitors, Premiata Forneria Marconi, makes a guest appearance on ʽNon
Mi Rompeteʼ and ʽCanto Di Primaveraʼ, contributing violin parts,
and even the band's old drummer, Pierluigi Calderoni, sits in on a few numbers.
Meaning that the whole thing does qualify as a celebration of sorts, and is
worth picking up if you are in serious love with the band.
The setlist is actually quite clever, evenly
spread between most of the band's classic period up until 1979 — the only song
from a later date is ʽMoby Dickʼ, an excellent choice to remind us of
the band's only moderately worthwhile album from their creepiest decade of
work; it is preceded by a piano instrumental (ʽLa Cacciaʼ) that seems
to be new, and, additionally, ʽQuando La Buona Gente Diceʼ is
expanded from its original length to become a jam session, with all the keyboard
and guitar players taking turns to prove the world that Italian rock music is
nothing to joke about. (Well, that still won't stop us from... ah well, never
mind).
Other than the general «superfluousness» of the
record, there is nothing to complain about — the setlist is respectable, the
players gel perfectly, DiGiacomo remains in the finest of all possible vocal
forms (his range seems invulnerable to age, and his energy and self-confidence
only seem to increase), and the audience is genuinely enraptured — on ʽNon
Mi Rompeteʼ, they go totally against the message of the title and interrupt
the singer with such verve that he just steps away from the mike and lets them
handle the first verse. Corny, but touching.
Overall, No
Palco («No Stage» — excessive
arrogance or heart-melting idealism?) was such a success that the band would
repeat it ten years later, with Quaranta
released in 2012: I have not heard that one, since (a) there are only so many
BMS live albums one can take and (b) the tracklist includes ʽNudoʼ,
which is not a good sign, but fans should probably take note. In the meantime,
let us close the main book on BMS with a modest thumbs up to No Palco, unless the old boys garner enough strength and ambition
to master another studio recording before finally heading for the great gig in
the sky (with Darwin in person as MC, no doubt). But hopefully, they won't be that silly.
ADDENDA:
SEGUENDO LE TRACCE (1976/2005)
1) R.I.P. (English version);
2) L'Albero Del Pane; 3) La Danza Dei Grandi Rettili; 4) Passaggio; 5) Non Mi
Rompete; 6) Dopo... Niente E Più Lo Stesso; 7) Traccia II; 8)
Metamorfosi.
Well, this totally makes sense: after almost
three decades of waiting, finally release a live album from Banco's golden
days. This particular show, played out at Teatro Verdi in Salerno on April 23,
1975, could easily have been a big hit in the old days, when double and triple
live prog albums were steadily released on a monthly, if not daily, basis —
and the excellent sound quality of the tapes would have made it a standout back
in the day, too, so it is fairly odd that we only get official access to this
as an afterthought. But a twenty-first century release, with progressive rock
having largely regained its used-to-be-tattered reputation, is not that bad
either.
As time goes by and chronology flattens out,
this record is bound to become Banco's equivalent of Yessongs — capturing the band at their absolute creative peak, just
before personal burnout and changing fashion issues cause them to start
faltering, and burning down the stage with absolute pride at their
achievements. The setlist is predictably titanic, the playing is predictably
tight and inspired, and the self-interpretations allow for variability,
improvisation, and general freedom without demolishing the original
constructions.
The only piece of bad news is that
ʽR.I.P.ʼ is presented in its English version: with the band either
working on or having just released their first English album (Banco) at the time, they were eager to
try out at least one of the re-recordings, for which DiGiacomo offers the
audience a blurry Italian apology post-factum. Not only that, but they also keep
the loosened up, funkier rhythmic reinvention, missing a good chance to open
the show with a tight, aggressive punch. A mistake, I think, echoing the even
larger mistake of recording in English in the first place.
However, from then on, there are virtually no
complaints. Apart from the obligatory ballad interlude of ʽNon Mi
Rompeteʼ, one lengthy epic is played from each of their three major
albums: actually, ʽLa Danza Dei Grandi Rettiliʼ from Darwin! is transformed into an epic, stretched almost four times beyond its
original length by means of free-flowing jazz breaks (with Maltese switching
to trumpet and doing his best Miles Davis impersonation) and Latin-colored
percussion solos. Likewise, ʽMetamorfosiʼ gets an extra fifteen
minutes to its already impressive original running time, with the Nocenzi
brothers taking turns to prove us that they really
need these extra fifteen minutes... not really sure about that, but they get
into it with enough verve not to have me worrying all the time about pressing
the fast forward button.
In other words, this here is live-and-breathing
progressive rock the way we remember it — bold, ambitious, pretentious,
self-indulgent, constantly plunging into «musical masturbation» with no respect
for modesty and conciseness... and vindicated by superbly tight internal
coordination and sheer technical mastery of everyone involved. Needless to say,
the record is an absolute must-have for every progressive rock studioso — and
an absolute must-avoid for everyone who still believes that a twenty-minute
live phantasmagoria from, say, Ornette Coleman is «an inspiring feast of
artistic liberty and inventiveness», whereas a twenty-minute live version of
ʽMetamorfosiʼ would be «a pathetically boring display of
meaningless self-indulgence». Fortunately, Seguendo
Le Tracce arrives at a good time for the genre, when the silliness of such
oppositions becomes more and more apparent, and this brings on hope that my thumbs up
for this record will not go completely unnoticed, either.
BARCLAY JAMES HARVEST (1970)
1) Taking Some Time On; 2)
Mother Dear; 3) The Sun Will Never Shine; 4) When The World Was Woken; 5) Good
Love Child; 6) The Iron Maiden; 7) Dark Now My Sky.
With a little extra luck, Barclay James Harvest,
formed in late 1966, could have had their names entered into the «founding
fathers» list of UK art rock. As it happened, the band did not manage to find a
proper record contract until 1970, and spent its first three years admiring the
recording successes of their peers rather than working out their own
individuality. On the other hand, it is not very likely that, had they been
given a chance to release their first album before
Days Of Future Passed, they could
have invented that Moody Blues sound on their own.
Indeed, few albums on the British market as per
1970 were as blatantly derivative as BJH's debut. Just about every song on here
has a well-identifiable proto-type: the list of influences includes the
Beatles, the Bee Gees, the Moody Blues, Procol Harum, Traffic, and King Crimson
— I could probably dig up some more, but on the whole, this list seems pretty
exhaustive. Being influenced per se, of course, is never a problem: what is a problem is that BJH were never a
particularly, let's say, «intelligent» band, and, unlike many of their
competitors, they were unable to, or did not care about, masking, or even
«assimilating», these influences in any way.
All the more amazing is the fact how
unbelievably good this debut album
turned out — derivative or not, in my world this will forever remain the
definitive BJH record, the «one BJH album to get if you only have to get one»,
and, even more importantly, one of the most consistently satisfactory art-rock
albums of 1970. Ironically, BJH started losing it once they began attempting to
develop a personal identity — as long as they were just aping their superiors,
the aping process was irreproachable. Perversely,
the band would later seem to be almost ashamed of the album, quickly dropping
all of the material in their live shows — probably regarding it as one of those
inadequate, embarrassing teenage activities that are best forgotten upon
reaching adulthood (but forgetting that only idiot adults are consistently ashamed of their teenage days simply
because everything you did in your teenage days must be embarrassing, right?).
But as far as my perception is concerned, all
of the seven songs recorded for the album, at worst, have their likeable
moments, and at best, count as catchy, resonant, emotionally effective «little
brothers» of better known compositions, recorded by the band's predecessors.
Altogether, they are still more in the «late 1960s» vein than in the «early
1970s» one — art-pop songs with extraneous influences rather than complex
progressive compositions — but unless we happen to think that the Moody Blues
were only there to prepare the red carpet for ELP and nothing else, there is
nothing wrong with a little extra poppiness and naïveness, is there?
Of the four band members, three are credited with
individual compositions, but not with individual styles: at this point, it is
too early (thank God!) to speak of a «BJH sound», let alone a «John Lees sound»
or a «Woolly Wolstenholme» sound. Thus, guitar player and, at this point, more
or less active bandleader John Lees gets credited for four out of seven songs,
and they are all quite different. His are the only «rockers» on the album that
open both of the album's sides: ʽTaking Some Time Onʼ is a half-folk,
half-psychedelic sing-along anthem very much in a Traffic vein, whereas
ʽGood Love Childʼ arguably takes its inspiration from the heavier
stuff on Revolver (I can almost
imagine the entire band putting on dark shades before the decisive take). Both
have simple, but attractive riffs, plenty of energy, and magnificent production
values — the sea of guitar overdubs on ʽTaking Some Time Onʼ, in
particular, is totally worthy of the bestest in British psychedelic blues-rock,
and ʽGood Love Childʼ is just a load of unassuming pop-rock fun.
On the other hand, it is also Lees who is
credited for ʽMother Dearʼ, a folksy Mellotron / strings / acoustic
guitar ballad in the vein of Justin Hayward — sentimental as heck, but with a
stunning chord change from verse to chorus that adds nervous tension to basic prettiness
and a pinch of uneasy darkness to the general lightness. And it is also Lees
who takes credit for the «magnum opus»
of the album — the huge Crimsonian epic ʽDark Now My Skyʼ
(Crimsonian, I say, because I am pretty sure it must have been inspired by
stuff like ʽEpitaphʼ), with wailing, soaring distorted guitar
melodies, gargantuan piano and organ chords, choral vocals, spoken theatrical
intros... in short, with every requirement for «progressive» status fulfilled,
even if something is still lacking (maybe something very basic, like
instrumental prowess).
Keyboardist Woolly Wolstenholme's ballad
ʽThe Iron Maidenʼ is in the same ballpark as ʽMother Dearʼ,
although it is somewhat closer in style and structure to straightahead British
folk — and no, the title does not have anything
to do neither with heavy metal, nor even with any creepiness normally
associated with iron maidens. (Not even sure that the band members themselves
knew properly what an «iron maiden» is — the title is to be taken purely figuratively).
His other contribution is ʽThe Sun Will Never Shineʼ, which sounds
more like... one of those symphonic pop numbers by the Bee Gees on 1st, only puffed up to five minutes.
Nice epic chorus, cool guitar lines, soulful attitude — no problem there.
Bassist Les Holroyd probably offers the most blatant rip-off: his ʽWhen
The World Was Wokenʼ in almost every single detail, from the high-pitched
breathy vocals to the Bach-style organ parts to the overall manner of crescendo
producing, replicates the approach of Procol Harum (only the heavy use of
orchestration is novel: Procol Harum themselves would not start piling up brass
and string parts until the departure of Robin Trower). But the melody itself is
not ripped off, the crescendo is thought out meticulously, and the rhythmic
bass pulse is a toe-tapper's delight.
In short, you get my drift: there is not a
single genuine clunker on the album. If there is anything that «betrays» this
band, other than this blatant inability to hide their ingredients, it is probably
the lyrics — which are normally very simple, accessible, and clichéd:
"Dark now my sky / The sea of peace has left my shore / No birds sing /
The silent spring will overflow / Oh you'll never know / I love you so / You'll
always be / A part of me" is definitely not something you could ever expect on a King Crimson album. But
BJH had never, from the very beginning, positioned themselves as a «highbrow
entertainment» band — and although this attitude would eventually drag them
down much lower than a good band should be able to tolerate, on Barclay James Harvest it all works,
even with all the trivial wording.
For accuracy's sake, a large part of the
success should be credited to the band's producer — none other than Norman
Smith, the creative engineer behind the Beatles' early records and also the
producer of Pink Floyd's early stuff: he is also responsible for the lush
orchestral arrangements. The very fact of recording at EMI's Abbey Road Studios
must have also been quite inspiring. Unfortunately, neither the producer nor
the environment helped prevent the band's steady downhill course from there on,
but in 1970, that course was completely unpredictable anyway, and the album
gets a certified thumbs up from me — a highly underrated treasure that every fan
of the band's chief idols should be able to enjoy without reservations.
ONCE AGAIN (1971)
1) She Said; 2) Happy Old
World; 3) Song For The Dying; 4) Galadriel; 5) Mocking Bird; 6) Vanessa
Simmons; 7) Ball And Chain; 8) Lady Loves.
Only their second album, and already they are
taking steps in the wrong direction. Granted, the result no longer sounds like
a bunch of easily guessable tributes — something more uniquely their own is
starting to congeal in the middle of the bubbling broth. But what is it? Is it juicy, or even eatable?
Does it stand competition? Does it show taste? Can we put a finger on it?..
Judging by how much Mellotron and strings there
are out here, the band has finally pitched a stable tent somewhere right next
to the Moody Blues' bastions — dumping their rootsy-rocky avatar (ʽTaking
Some Time Offʼ, ʽGood Love Childʼ) for good. In a way, they had
their reasons: the band's overall «wimpy» visual appearance and overall
predilection for artsier material did not agree well with attempts to «rock
out». But on the other hand, John Lees was
a capable rock guitarist who knew how to swing an axe, and now that he had
decided to only swing it in «epic» mode on ambitious symph-pop compositions,
the band clearly lost something.
This time, the heaviest rocker on the album is
actually a blues tune — a Wolstenholme original, somewhat incompetently
sporting the quite unoriginal title
of ʽBall And Chainʼ. Actually, I am not sure what exactly is original
about the song's blues progression, unmemorable vocal lines, or angsty vocals,
but all the guitar work is good: they can
play generic blues with plenty of technicality and energy, it's just that in
1971, if you wanted the latest and greatest in the blues, you went out and
bought yourself some Led Zep. Or Layla,
if you were still scared o' the devil.
Naturally, much more interesting is the band's
latest batch of symphonic art-pop songs with an epic sweep — Les Holroyd coming
out on top with ʽShe Saidʼ, which has that good old-fashioned
«stately desperation» feel, greatly aided by Lees' distorted wailing guitar
parts, also in the blues vein even though the song itself is written well
within the British folk tradition. The chorus tries very, very, very hard to overwhelm — falling very,
very, very short of the mark, because
"and I will always love her, and I will always care" neither
qualifies as a great lyric nor as an unforgettably chanted tagline, but
overall, still quite impressive.
The sad, solitary atmosphere is carried over to
the aptly titled ʽSong For The Dyingʼ and, most importantly, to Lees'
ʽMocking Birdʼ, which would go on to become a signature tune for the
band and one of their most frequently performed numbers. The song is said to
have begun life as an acoustic folk ballad in 1968, but now it has matured into
a full-scale epic, with strings, brass, Mellotrons, and guitars that keep
building up and up and up until you start suspecting the boys of having
ingested one too many Mahler symphonies — not that this really sounds a lot like Mahler, more like Max
Steiner or something, still, they do have a feel for this kind of thing to
match the ambition. The lyrics are, again, the weakest part: "there's a
mocking bird, singing songs in the trees" as the central vocal hook is
something that not even James Taylor would probably allow himself in 1971, and
this here tune aspires to so much more.
Lees is also responsible for the shorter folksy
ballads, such as ʽGaladrielʼ (a Tolkien title was imminently
unavoidable, I suppose, even if there are no direct elfish references in the
lyrics) and ʽLady Lovesʼ (which could just as well have been called
ʽGaladriel IIʼ, for that matter) — on the whole, writing
approximately two-thirds of the album and consolidating his grip on the band, but,
like I said, mostly at the expense of hard rock ambitions. On the whole, they
clearly intended Once Again to be
less «pop» than the Moody Blues — but in their nobly motivated attempt to put
aside not only hard rock riffage, but also any
sort of upbeat, mid- or fast-tempo pop-rock, they created a record that is...
well, you have to be in a very lazy,
relaxed mood to benefit the most out of it. Otherwise, the monotonousness might
quickly wear you down.
Still, there is no denying neither the
complexity of the occasional arrangement, nor the catchiness of the occasional
vocal flourish or guitar shriek, nor simply the fact that, «once again», it works — the band's combination of folk,
blues, pop, and symphony may be a far cry from the reckless experimentation of
their «progressive» contemporaries, but it is melodic, involving, and manages
to combine pomp with a certain humility of character that was not at all
typical of most of the active players on the scene at the time. Thumbs up.
BARCLAY JAMES HARVEST AND OTHER SHORT STORIES (1971)
1) Medicine Man; 2) Someone
There You Know; 3) Harry's Song; 4) Ursula; 5) Little Lapwing; 6) Song With No
Meaning; 7) Blue John Blues; 8) The Poet; 9) After The Day.
The key word is «short»: although ʽBlue
John Bluesʼ almost reaches the seven-minute mark, the record consciously
stays away from «epic sweep» this time around — almost defiantly so, what with
progressive acts all around going in the opposite direction. Even if the
decision was not set in stone (epic length would make a return on the next
album, with rather questionable results), it was still important — BJH letting
us know that they still pledge allegiance to the «art-pop» attitude of Moody
Blues / Procol Harum in an era when the «art» and the «pop» components were
beginning to get segregated once more.
And the results were worth it: most of the
songs still work very well, on some level or other. Mellotrons, cellos,
melodic vocal harmonies, a little baroque mixed in with a little gothic, and
even the song titles and lyrics are somewhat improved, without any
straightforward Tolkien references provoking accusations of cheap fanboyism or
trend-hopping. At the same time, the entire album is permeated with a healthy
sick world-weary spirit — nothing like a strong shot of intelligent pessimism
to make a meaningful statement out of potentially empty art-pop hooks.
Of course, the Merlin-meets-Bradbury words of
ʽMedicine Manʼ are not exactly a peak of «intelligence» per se
("oh what a cold surprise the flying horses cried"?), but the good
thing is that they are vague enough to not warrant any direct analysis, just
like Jon Anderson's blistering logorrhea (provided that the listener is not
familiar with Something Wicked This Way
Comes, which served as the chief inspiration for the song). The important thing is that the orchestral
arrangements once again transform this dark folk ballad into something grand,
stately, and ominous, and thus it sets the general tone for the album: softer
and smoother than ʽShe Saidʼ (in general, Short Stories goes easier on screechy Lees leads, but the loss, for
now, is compensated by many gains), yet just as retro-romantic.
On the other hand, ʽHarry's Songʼ, if
you do not pay much attention to the words, may seem to be one of those «little
man» tunes in a Ray Davies vein — actually, it is about the death of a parrot (no, there will be no gratuitous Monty Python references
here), but parrot or person, it is a memorial song written without a gram of
artificial sentimentality: in fact, it's an angry
song, and the way they resolve the chorus — "something stirred today, and
Harry he passed away", with the record's angriest riff echoing the
pissed-off bitterness in John's voice — makes for one of the record's finest
hooks. Arguably the best song about the death of a parrot ever written.
The «magnum opus» of ʽBlue John
Bluesʼ is allegedly a lyrical swipe at the musical industry; it may take a
few listens to sink in, since its basic structures are more «rootsy» than
«artsy», but it moves quite self-assuredly from a slow piano ballad format to
pub-rock energetics and back, as if illustrating the public demands of cheap
entertainment over introspective depth — quite a clever song, really, that
makes it all the more amazing how the band would very soon lose the ability to
come up with such inventive moves.
In the meantime, Beatles fans — or, rather, ELO
fans — will be mighty pleased with Wolstenholme's ʽSomeone There You
Knowʼ, all of it built upon seductive Jeff Lynnian vocal modulations and
power-pop guitar accompaniment; baroque folk lovers will welcome
ʽUrsulaʼ and ʽSong With No Meaningʼ, two more contributions
to the band's luvvable pastoral backlog; and ʽAfter The Dayʼ is
«Armageddon-lite», way too melodic to properly reflect an end-of-the-world
scenario, but moving all the same.
Overall, I would judge that Short Stories are tied with the
self-titled debut as a solid proposition for BJH's finest half-hour: running a
bit shorter on «major» hooks, perhaps, but without a single misfire or
way-too-obvious rip-off — this here is a band that shows more than simply
fanboy adoration of their influences, coming into its own as a markedly early
1970s guardian of markedly late 1960s values, so to speak. Too bad this homely
magic did not work for long, but at least the tapes are still rolling. Thumbs up.
BABY JAMES HARVEST (1972)
1) Crazy (Over You); 2) Delph
Town Mom; 3) Summer Soldier; 4) Thank You; 5) One Hundred Thousand Smiles; 6)
Moonwater.
I used to think this was a «bad» album, and a
real downer of a closer for the first and best period of BJH's presence on the
scene. But a more just and balanced look would rather suggest that this is
merely a «problematic» album, one that reflects pressure on the band from
within (creative bickerings — something that inevitably creeps up when almost
everybody in the band writes his own material) and without (apparently, some or all of them were exhausted from
touring). And when Barclay James Harvest have problems, they don't beat around
the bush: they simply fall back upon their influences and become even more
derivative than usual, which is their own trademark way of being «uninspired».
The first «problem» is the name of the album
itself — clearly alluding to Sweet Baby
James. Not a smart move: it's bad enough to make a pun on a James Taylor
album if you are going to make
something that sounds like a James Taylor album — it is completely
incomprehensible if you are not going
to make anything that sounds like one. At best, the album opener ʽCrazy
(Over You)ʼ may be said to sound like Crosby, Stills & Nash — in fact,
it does sound very much like Crosby's
ʽLong Time Goneʼ in its chorus — but overall, it wobbles between
art-pop and progressive structures, never truly attempting to toy with the
«California sound» or any other introspective schools of soft rock. And the
wobbling seems a bit out of control.
The album returns to epic format: side A is
dominated by Lees' anti-war suite ʽSummer Soldierʼ, and side B is
ruled by Wolstenholme's orchestral suite ʽMoonwaterʼ — apparently,
the two were recorded separately, with Lees and the rest of the band working in
Stockport while Woolly was rearranging the different pieces of the «Barclay
James Harvest Orchestra» in London. The former is decently sewn together, and
features at least one highly memorable «symphonic guitar» theme in the middle,
one that probably wouldn't be refused by a Steve Howe — however, on the whole
it just doesn't have enough muscle to convey the anti-war sentiment properly
(and the straightforward lyrics with their rally-like structure and
clichéd imagery do not help much). The track's heavy use of sound
effects at the beginning, with church bells, marching feet, gunfire, and looped
tapes of "kill, kill, kill", may have been inspired by ʽThe
Unknown Soldierʼ — but as far as my nerve centers are concerned, the Doors
achieved much, much more over that song's three and a half minutes than Lees
does here in ten.
That said, the Lees opus is still enjoyable and
mildly touching, which is far more than could be said of ʽMoonwaterʼ
— who on Earth wants to hear Woolly Wolstenholme do a straightforward Mahler
tribute, particularly if (as usual) it comes out sounding like Max Steiner
instead? This is neither proper Barclay James Harvest, nor proper progressive
rock: just a lot of romantic melodrama, aping late 19th / early 20th century
masters without any major purpose.
Of the remaining songs, ʽDelph Town
Momʼ is pleasant, well orchestrated folk-rock with a jazz streak;
ʽThank Youʼ is a pleasant, upbeat rocker combining elements of «power
pop» with a brawny «pub» attitude, although its repetitive looped riff is
promoted a bit too heavily; and
ʽOne Hundred Thousand Smiles Outʼ is a rather strange tribute to
ʽSpace Oddityʼ and ʽRocket Manʼ at the same time (the
freshly released ʽRocket Manʼ must have been the stimulus, but
"can you hear me there below?" is way too similar to "can you
hear me major Tom?" to be a coincidence — granted, Les Holroyd's singing
is also at times highly reminiscent of Lennon's style, so the song is a real
crazy mishmash of influences).
Overall, except for ʽMoonwaterʼ,
which is simply an important-sounding waste of time, each of the songs has
something to offer for the not-too-demanding art-pop lover. The album's major
problem is that the band is once again short on genuine creativity — for their
self-titled debut, this could be excused, but now that they had almost begun
coming into a style of their own on Short
Stories, Baby James looks
«regressive» in comparison: solid if judged exclusively on its own merits (and
ultimately deserving of a skeptical thumbs up), but somewhat disappointing when viewed
in context.
EVERYONE IS EVERYBODY ELSE (1974)
1) Child Of The Universe; 2)
Negative Earth; 3) Paper Wings; 4) The Great 1974 Mining Disaster; 5) Crazy
City; 6) See Me See You; 7) Poor Boy Blues; 8) Mill Boys; 9) For No One.
Be warned — this is a different band now, a seriously different one, and without a
single change in the line-up at that. A little of it may have had to do with
the record label change (a shift from Harvest/EMI to Polydor); a little more of
it may be related to the new producer, Rodger Bain, who had previously worked
with Black Sabbath and Budgie. But I would guess that most of it had to do with shifts in popular taste — with complex
symphonic prog already on the way out of fashion, and a more straightforward,
simplified approach to «intellectual music» gaining the upper hand on the
charts, Barclay James Harvest ditched the orchestra, restrained the Mellotron
(without, however, shutting it out completely), cut down on the multi-part
epics, said goodbye to the psychedelia, and decided that they were, after all,
a «rock» band. A nerdy, wimpy, naïve one perhaps, but firmly committed to
the idiom.
In a way, the band now sounds like an English
equivalent of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: socially conscious roots-rock
for the post-hippie age, produced by world-weary music veterans teetering
between idealism and disillusionment. The one thing that they do not have on
CSNY — gorgeous three-way / four-way harmonies, that is — they compensate for
by retaining echoes of their baroque-pop sensibilities: there is still some
occasional «lushness» in the arrangements, and John Lees, when in the mood, can
still cut a richly melodic solo in the romantic idiom (where a Neil Young or
even a Stephen Stills would rough-cut a kick-ass ragged block of «rawk» notes).
But overall, the sound seems significantly impoverished compared to the first
four. Not surprisingly, it was this album that almost put BJH on the charts — picking up the interest of the average
listener. From here on, the second half of the 1970s would be more commercially
viable for the band, but much more disappointing artistically.
Not coincidentally, the album marks the
complete elimination of Wolstenholme from the roster of songwriters: from now
on, Woolly would be getting one, maximum two tracks per album for the rest of
his tenure with the band. (The one track he did write for Everyone, the anthemic ʽMaestosoʼ, was canned by the
rest of the guys, and not released until 1980 on Woolly's first solo album,
although, as a repentant compromising gesture, it is now available as a bonus
track on the remastered CD version). The songwriting is now completely
dominated by Lees and Holroyd — the latter having risen quite highly from an
initially modest position.
Lees, at this point, illustrates both the very
best and the very worst about the band. On one hand, his two tracks that
bookmark the record are probably its high points. Both are anti-war anthems and
could, in fact, be regarded as a two-part suite: ʽChild Of The
Universeʼ opens up from a more personal angle ("I'm a small boy with
blood on his hands"), whereas ʽFor No Oneʼ concludes the subject
in communal prayer mode ("please lay down your pistols and your rifles").
Both are very straightforward, lyrically trivial, and melodically monotonous,
but played with enough strength and conviction to justify the simplicity, and
the stormy wah-wah solo at the end of ʽFor No Oneʼ could rank among
the finest displays of flashy guitar pyrotechnics of the decade (the good ones,
fueled by the spirit, not just the fingers).
On the other hand, it is also Lees who is
behind the corny idea of «reworking» the old classics on the tellingly titled
ʽGreat 1974 Mining Disasterʼ — a song that superficially purports to
reflect current class struggle in the UK, but in reality is a serious-faced
deconstruction of the respective Bee Gees number, right down to a direct aping
of the chorus: very strange, actually, that the Gibbs did not sue for copyright
infringement, since what BJH do here goes way beyond «fair use». Additionally,
the song throws some Beatles ("heard
a song the other day... and though
the song was kind of grey...") and some David Bowie ("...about a
major out in space... about a man who sold the world away...") into the
melting pot, with unclear purposes and ambiguous effects. Altogether, it seems
as if the intention was to make a synthesis that would claim originality and,
perhaps, simulate depth, but ultimately, it gives the impression of intentional
theft due to lack of one's own ideas — an embarrassing failure, the way I feel
about it, although it would soon be overshadowed by the even deeper crime
against taste on the next album.
Holroyd's contributions are generally less
ambitious than Lees'; the most prominent of these is probably ʽPoor Boy
Bluesʼ, which sounds like a slightly «fairy-folksier» variant of Eagles
stuff, and is seamlessly integrated with Lees' ʽMill Boysʼ in one big
Muswell-hillbilly-whole (yes, the Kinks are also in here somewhere). The bass
guy also continues to explore the outer sphere theme with ʽNegative
Earthʼ, one more lonesome romantic space oddity that adds relatively
little to the already available collection and relatively a lot to our
understanding of Les Holroyd as a rather obstinate fellow — who knows, maybe he
would have made an even better astronaut than a musician, had he really been
able to pursue his one true dream.
In overall curve terms, Everyone Is Everybody Else is the beginning of the fall — the
initial transition works reasonably well, but when you start saving up on ideas
(and most of these songs are really based on quite simple, repetitive, and
scarce hooks), it does not usually take long before the infection takes over
completely. With only one openly embarrassing track, at least one major
highlight worthy of the old days (ʽFor No Oneʼ), and an overall
inoffensive aura everywhere else, the album deserves an equally inoffensive thumbs up
— much like, in fact, the Eagles do at their best, or CSNY do at their most
relaxed. But it is an ominous thumbs up: from here on, the «big cheese dip» is
all but completely predictable.
LIVE (1974)
1) Summer Soldier; 2) Medicine
Man; 3) Crazy City; 4) After The Day; 5) The Great 1974 Mining Disaster; 6)
Galadriel; 7) Negative Earth; 8) She Said; 9) Paper Wings; 10) For No One; 11)
Mockingbird.
Released just a wee wee bit too late — I would
much have preferred a live album recorded prior
to the stylistic transition that we see on Everyone
Is Everybody Else, in full-fledged «Stuck Between the Procol and the Moody
Blues Again» mode. As it is, five out of eleven songs are here to promote the
latest studio album, and the difference between the «impoverished» new sound
and the much richer sound of the days of yore is still striking — although,
granted, nowhere near as striking in a live setting, where the sound is beefed
up with thicker guitar tones and denser clouds of Mellotron radiation, as it is
in the confines of the studio.
Still, other than the «intertextual cheese» of
ʽMining Disasterʼ, the new songs all range from great (ʽFor No
Oneʼ) to passable (everything else), and the only reason for sorrow is
that they leave no space in the setlist for anything off the debut album (which
the band had pretty much disinherited long before that anyway). The soundboard
recordings have not been captured too well — or, perhaps, have not received
all the digital remastering they deserved — but the «brutal» aura of the sound
quality is quite appropriate for a live show, where, after all, one does not
expect to revel in all the subtle minutia of the studio equivalents.
John Lees is, of course, the unsung (but
singing) hero of the album: his rough, extra-distorted, but melodic, psychedelically
tinged, and occasionally, quite glammy soloing makes him a serious competitor
of Mick Ronson in the «knock-yer-pants-off» department. ʽMedicine
Manʼ, in particular, is transformed from an acoustic guitar /
strings-based art song into a heavy riff-rocker, with a lengthy instrumental
part where John plays the god of thunder, scattering lightning bolts through
the audience (and Woolly keeps up respectably, playing the god of hailstorm and
occasionally torturing his organ in perverted ways previously known only to
Keith Emerson). But everything else, with the exception of the short and soft
interlude of ʽGaladrielʼ, also bears the burning stamp of his
electric (and electrifying) solos.
I wouldn't say that, except for the completely
revamped ʽMedicine Manʼ, any of these versions open up and explore
previously unknown dimensions. The band knows what the people want when they
come to see them — a feeling of collective ecstasy that involves both romance
and power — and they stock up on the power without losing the grasp on romance,
sticking fairly closely to the original creativity but giving it a little more
gas at the expense of subtlety, which is what a predictable solid art-rock
concert should look like, I guess. Fans of Lees should know that most of the guitar
tones are different, and fans of Woolly should know that the man is capable of losing his head and
getting carried away in a power frenzy. All of this is enough to guarantee a
solid thumbs up,
and leave BJH with at least one all-through excellent live album in their
history — their Yessongs and Welcome Back My Friends rolled into
one, although, funny enough, they did refrain from making it into a triple LP
set.
TIME HONOURED GHOSTS (1975)
1) In My Life; 2) Sweet Jesus;
3) Titles; 4) Jonathon; 5) Beyond The Grave; 6) Song For You; 7) Hymn For The
Children; 8) Moongirl; 9) One Night.
For this somewhat uninspired (very mildly speaking) sequel to Everyone Is Everybody Else, the band
moved to a studio in San Francisco, and either the nice summer climate of California
mollified their brains after the proverbial London rain and fog, or such was
the overall decadent musical atmosphere of 1975 that the rotting process
would have started in any case. The average song quality on Time Honoured Ghosts drops down another
couple of notches — mainly because the band seems intent on purging out both
the last drops of psychedelic influences, and
its hard-rocking component at the same time (the presence of a few distorted
riffs here and there notwithstanding, their collected crunch now never really
rises above Crosby, Stills & Nash level). The melodic quotient still
remains, but so does the narcissistic sentimentalism — and there is only so
much heart-on-sleeve attitude that a tired old sense of perception can stand.
Moreover, it does not help that Lees continues
to explore the gimmickry line, launched with ʽThe Great 1974 Mining
Disasterʼ. This time, we are offered ʽTitlesʼ — a dreamy, more
or less inoffensive mix of the California sound with the European art song, but
rendered unlistenable by staying loyal to its name: the lyrics do indeed
consist of little other than titles of Beatles songs, stringed together to form
a ghostly Profound Message ("across the universe one after nine-o-nine,
I've got a feeling for you blue and I feel fine"). Every artist may have
his, her, their ups, downs, collapses, revivals, breakdowns, and comebacks, but
this, unfortunately, is a kind of
creativity reserved for artists with serious mutations in their taste buds —
not only does it cast its cheesy shadow over the entire album, but it simply
blocks my ability to take these guys seriously.
Once again, Lees and Holroyd share primary
songwriting and singing duties, this time on a more or less equal basis, and
now that the band is firmly rooted in soft rock territory, the styles of the
two also begin to merge. Lees tries to set an intense atmosphere over the first
seconds of the LP: ʽIn My Lifeʼ (another glaring nod to the Beatles,
as if ʽTitlesʼ weren't enough) opens (and closes, after a rather
dreary mid-section) as a fast melodic blues-rocker that probably has more
energy than the rest of the album put together. The preachy lyrics are, as
usual, quite off-putting ("But I was young, did not know, grace is for
God, greed is to know"), but if the entire album had been relatively
faithful to this style, instead of switching to unexciting acoustic foundations,
slower tempos, and exaggeratedly soulful high-pitched vocals (from ʽSweet
Jesusʼ and onwards), the band might have earned more respect from me.
Instead, it just bores me one minute and offends me the next, and there is
nothing I can do to myself to prevent those effects.
Every now and then, Holroyd's
ʽMoongirlʼ on the second side is extolled as the album's definitive
highlight, a magical-mystery art song where Sgt. Pepper-influenced guitars are integrated with Woolly's
enchanting keyboard overdubs like never before or after. I probably would not
mind, had the main chord progression and its key role in the song's coda not
been so blatantly (with very minor changes) lifted from a far superior song —
Eric Clapton's ʽLet It Growʼ, which already has more than everything
that ʽMoongirlʼ has to offer.
In between this «contextual failure» of one of
the album's suggested highlights and the embarrassing pretense of
ʽTitlesʼ, the rest of Time
Honoured Ghosts simply fails to attract this writer's attention or provoke
any interesting comments. So I will finish by saying that, perhaps, the best
song on the album is the sole contribution from Woolly — ʽBeyond The
Graveʼ is yet another of those attempts to emulate the symphonic
ambitiousness of early XXth century music (from Mahler to Strauss), this time
carried out with surprisingly few overdubs and practically no guitar at all:
organs, synthesized strings, and choral harmonies do all the job instead. The
«poor man's majestic effect» is there all right, although I would have honestly
preferred that the song remain completely instrumental — not only are the
vocals needlessly delivered in plaintive Procol Harum mode, but the lyrics, as
usual, are beyond contempt ("we will survive beyond the grave, and as we
sleep we will be saved, life in its essence will endure while still on earth we
can be sure" — we can take stuff like that from Black Sabbath, perhaps,
but hardly in a song that pretends to draw its inspiration from academic styles
of music).
So, although it would still take a long time to
reach the genuine creative nadir for these guys, Time Honoured Ghosts is the first BJH album to which I could not
possibly react with a thumbs up even if a swarm of professional musicologists
were to prove that each of the songs features a variety of subtle, previously
unheard of musical ideas. Mushy, unmemorable, preachy, gimmicky, downplaying
the band's strengths and extolling their weaknesses, it is not a «catastrophe»
— it is a «failure», which is even worse, because catastrophes can at least be
curious and amusing. Well, check out ʽTitlesʼ, perhaps, for such
curiosity's sakes, then join me in my thumbs down if you, too, do not react so
lightly to taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
OCTOBERON (1976)
1) The World Goes On; 2) May
Day; 3) Ra; 4) Rock'n'Roll Star; 5) Polk Street Rag; 6) Believe In Me; 7)
Suicide?
As the band keeps on wobbling between slightly
pleasant and slightly tasteless ideas, this somewhat less gimmicky recording
from 1976 seems like a bit of an improvement over Time Honoured Ghosts. The title makes little sense — it is a pun
on the name of Oberon, making use of the fact that this was to be the band's
eighth record; yet there is absolutely nothing «Oberonian» about it other than
the album sleeve, as that would surmise either medieval folk or at least colorful
psychedelia. But then, we should have already gotten used to BJH's senseless
discrepancies between the sleeves and their contents (a curse they do share
with many other artists). The important thing is that Octoberon is a little less commercial than its predecessor (maybe
by accident, I don't know — it feels a little weird in the overall context of
the curve), and takes a little more time and effort to crack open.
The anti-hero of the album is Les Holroyd. On Octoberon, his mind seems fully and
completely occupied by orchestrated soft-rock of the mushiest category.
ʽThe World Goes Onʼ and ʽBelieve In Meʼ are not entirely
devoid of hooks (the former, in particular, is partly redeemed by a cathartic
pair of guitar solos), but use tenderness rather than melody as their chief
weapon, and Les' high register is just not very interesting or engaging, unless
you simply like high registers, period. Even when he goes for something
different and contributes a simple moral message about the perils of stardom
(ʽRock'n'Roll Starʼ; this time around, it is up to Les, not Lees, to
plunder and pillage the classics with a lyrical and musical quotation from the
Byrds' ʽSo You Want To Be A Rock'n'Roll Starʼ), he does it in such a
sleepy, near-frozen manner that I just can't imagine anybody who'd want to be that kind of a rock'n'roll star.
The «art silk» of these numbers is in some ways
compensated for by Lees. ʽMay Dayʼ, in particular, is a worthy epic
on the subject of ideological confusion, appropriately mixing in a mishmash of
musical segments (some short hard rock blasts, some choral vocals, even a bit
of ʽIt's A Long Way To Tipperaryʼ) over the primary jangle-folk
melody. ʽPolk Street Ragʼ is the heaviest, sleaziest number on the
album, reportedly inspired by Linda Lovelace ("Didn't know when I entered
/ Second seat, second row / It was then that I saw you / But your mouth stole
the show" — yikes!) — cringeworthy, I guess, but at least I prefer this
over ʽTitlesʼ. Finally, ʽSuicide?ʼ is a funny cop-out to
end the album: a song pervaded by vocal and instrumental melancholy, but the
question mark in the title and the line "felt the quick push, felt the air
rush" in the lyrics eventually leave you in the dark as to whether there has been a suicide. After all, Barclay
James Harvest are in no position to negate the value of life — not even Pink
Floyd, to whom they are so indebted, went that far. And so the song forges out
a bushel of pure sadness, but not depression.
All of which leaves Woolly with just one
composition — expectedly, the most far out one out there. Maybe the gentleman
was inspired by an Aida performance
or a trip to Hurghada, but anyway, ʽRaʼ is an attempt to quickly
trace the rise and fall of the great pagan deity over a seven-minute musical
journey. One might ask, perhaps, why the musical journey owes all of it to the
European tradition (Woolly himself admits that the first notes were directly
quoted from Mahler's 1st Symphony — oh
no, not Mahler again!) rather
than trying to go for a mid-Eastern flavor, but then, heck, one could ask the
same of Verdi, I guess. As far as slow, stately, atmospheric multipart epics
go, this one passes for a «poor man's Pink Floyd», with a heavy ideological debt
to ʽEchoesʼ, yet still manages to hold its own — with heavy help from
Lees, who is well willing to get into character and play the role of high
priest-axeman.
So, as you can see, Octoberon is highly uneven in quality, but its diversity is
appealing — Holroyd pulling the band in the direction of Kenny Loggins, Lees
blindly shuffling ideas from his own bag of thoughts and experiences, and
Woolly still being able to remind the guys that they started out as a
classically-influenced art-rock band. Of their mid-Seventies' albums, this is
the one that best illustrates this odd «Steven Stills meets Mahler» melange,
and works well on the nerves (if you are not looking for the sharpest of
thrills in the art rock department). Consequently, the album deserves its
not-too-excited, but honestly-deserved thumbs up.
GONE TO EARTH (1977)
1) Hymn; 2) Love Is Like A
Violin; 3) Friend Of Mine; 4) Poor Man's Moody Blues; 5) Hard Hearted Woman; 6)
Sea Of Tranquillity; 7) Spirit On The Water; 8) Leper's Song; 9) Taking Me Higher.
Well, this record is certainly memorable. From
the «ambitions» point of view, it is a step back from the relative complexity
of Octoberon — more songs on the
whole, and more simple songs in particular, with «soothing repetitiveness» as
one of the key factors that determine memorability. But there are some cool
songwriting ideas here, and the soft-rock atmosphere is still resonating with
echoes of Sixties' art-pop idealism, and the formula still works.
Ironically, the song that helped make Gone To Earth into «the» BJH album of
all time (their biggest commercial success and the first pick of many a critic
in retrospect) is... a joke song. Not
only does ʽPoor Man's Moody Bluesʼ truly sound the way it is called,
but John Lees actually designed it
that way, as a slap-in-yer-face in the direction of many a reviewer who had
previously derided the band as a cheaper imitation of who-do-you-think.
Essentially, it is just one of those silly ideas — like ʽTitlesʼ — to
tinker around with the old treasure chest. And, just like ʽTitlesʼ,
it fails because it never really lets you know what it wants to be.
I mean, for somebody who has never heard
ʽNights In White Satinʼ, ʽPoor Man's Moody Bluesʼ may be a
stately, solemn, chivalrous love anthem rather than a senseless deconstruction
of the original, subtracting most of its pluses (the inimitable Hayward vocals,
the group harmonies, the flute solo, etc.) and offering nothing in return. For
those of us who do know the original,
this is, at best, a self-ironic statement, something like: «...so you thought
we were all a poor man's Moody Blues? well, you couldn't be more wrong, because
here is what a true poor man's Moody
Blues really sounds like, and nothing that we did before is really that ridiculous!» But if such was the
reasoning, it is doubly ironic how
the song became a hit for the band, and ended up as a perennial favourite on
their live setlist.
The other live highlight from the album is
John's ʽHymnʼ, which can be easily mistaken for a loving retelling of
the story of Jesus for kindergarten-age children, then correctly reinterpreted
(with the aid of John himself, who would always clarify the interpretation in
concert) as a warning for the simple folks not to use drugs as a means of
attaining Godlike status. Then, finally, it becomes a Kansas-style moralization
without the Kansas-style musicianship, and the final effect is — too much
preachiness and pathos, but just not enough depth. Granted, it is hard to
explain why something like ʽHymnʼ feels like pablum where something
like George Harrison's ʽIsn't It A Pityʼ, largely designed according
to the same rules, is genius — either George uses the more appropriate
tonalities, or has more soul in his vocals, but the feeling is unmistakable,
even if it may not be shared by everyone.
John gets more interesting on ʽLove Is
Like A Violinʼ, where folk verses are integrated with upbeat, disco-wise
(but not really disco) choruses with an elegant resolution — this time, the
fluff manages to be charming; and on ʽLeper's Songʼ, which sounds
sort of like Supertramp (in fact, it is not the only song on the album that
sounds like Supertramp), but in this context, it is more of a compliment than
anything else. (The lyrics are allegedly inspired by reading Joseph Conrad and
Graham Greene — well, at least this beats ʽHymnʼ, which must have
been inspired by «The New Testament For Preschool Conservatives»).
Holroyd's contributions are a little bouncier
this time, and not all of them emphasize the sugar-and-spice, as it was on Octoberon: ʽFriend Of Mineʼ
is catchy, if hardly original, Eaglish country-pop, ʽHard Hearted
Womanʼ is a dark, mildly brooding, Eaglish country-rocker à la
ʽWitchy Womanʼ, and ʽSpirit On The Waterʼ, breaking the
tendency, is a clear attempt to emulate the Beach Boys circa Sunflower and Surf's Up — and, if you look past the ugly synthesizer tones, an
almost successful one: at least the harmonies are pretty well arranged;
although, truth be told, I wouldn't be surprised (and would be very amused) to
see the song titled ʽPoor Man's Beach Boysʼ, just to complete the
circle.
Meanwhile, Woolly, true to his nature, goes on
with the ʽPoor Man's Gustav Mahlerʼ project, this time in the context
of a space-age song, about being either lost in space or losing the space race
or something like that — ʽSea Of Tranquillityʼ is no better and no
worse than ʽRaʼ, a stately project carried out with some dignity, but
in a completely predictable fashion, with the usual fanfares in their usual
places. The man does know his Mahler and his Strauss — too bad that, cruelly
reduced to one contribution per album, Woolly decided to stick exclusively to
these pastiches; perhaps he thought that this was the best possible antidote he
could offer to the excessive soft-poppiness of his bandmates, but it would
certainly have been nice to see him try out other styles as well.
Altogether, the reasons why Gone To Earth has achieved such a
«special» status in BJH history, other than the accidental popularity of
ʽPoor Man's Moody Bluesʼ — I wonder if the success of that song could
have played any part in the Moody Blues themselves reuniting the following
year, recognizing how much they were still missed? — those reasons remain a
mystery to me, because for those who perceive BJH as an «art» band, Octoberon would be a much better
choice, and those who think of them as primarily soft-pop, light-fluff artists,
have no reason to worry about album favourites in the first place. With the
exception of ʽPoor Man's Moody Bluesʼ, a song that makes me feel very
stupid every time I listen to it, Gone
To Earth is pleasant, inoffensive, and, as I said, occasionally «hooky» and
memorable, so a thumbs
up it is, but in retrospect, it is hardly a high point for the
band, and definitely not up to their classic early standards.
LIVE TAPES (1978)
1) Child Of The Universe; 2)
Rock'n'Roll Star; 3) Poor Man's Moody Blues; 4) Mocking Bird; 5) Hard Hearted
Woman; 6) One Night; 7) Taking Me Higher; 8) Suicide; 9) Crazy City; 10)
Jonathan; 11) For No One; 12) Polk Street Rag; 13) Hymn.
Only four years separate Barclay James
Harvest's second live album from their first — that and the unexpected
commercial success of Gone To Earth,
which must have been the decisive factor in the appearance of Live Tapes, a record that is just as
long as Barclay James Harvest Live
and about twice as unnecessary. The actual tracks are a mix of performances
recorded on the 1976 and 1977 tours, and the original album title was to be Caught Live until somebody pointed out
that, once again, this would only help prolong the «poor man's Moody Blues»
curse, as the Moodies already had a Caught
Live + Five to their name. The advice was heeded, and the band eventually
went along with the genuinely original, groundbreaking, and inspirational name
of Live Tapes instead.
This time around, the band has jettisoned its
pre-1974 incarnation output almost entirely, retaining only a somewhat
perfunctory run through ʽMocking Birdʼ as the only link with their
«progressive past». The result is that the setlist now consists only of their
derivative art-pop songs that leave very little space for improvisation,
restructuring, or rearrangement (besides, songs like ʽPoor Man's Moody
Bluesʼ were already «restructured» in the first place, so how much further
tampering could they stand?). So the only thing that makes the record worth any
of our while is that the live setting removes some of the problems with
extra-glossy production or too much silky softness in the arrangements on the
studio albums.
Concerning the setlist, it is interesting that
not a single one of Woolly's tracks is performed — the poor keyboardist is thus
completely degraded to the role of session player — and that Lees gets a slight
advantage over Holroyd, which is well understandable since it was Lees who was
responsible for writing most of the band's harder-rocking and anthemic tunes,
suitable for an arena-rock setting. As usual, Lees' melodic soloing is
practically always the high point of the performances, and he does get at least
one of those on each song. But the only track that can be seen as a relative
improvement is Holroyd's ʽRock'n'Roll Starʼ: in this setting, it gets
a little more meat on its bones and a little less ground to be accused of
soft-rock bogginess.
From a certain point of view, Live Tapes may act as a decent shortcut
for evaluating the band's entire career in their «silver» period of 1974-77 —
most of the highlights are here, and, fortunately, they do not include such
thorough lowlights as ʽTitlesʼ, and go easy on Holroyd's exaggerated
sentimentalism (only ʽTaking Me Higherʼ manages to break through the
arena-rock filter). But the live setting may be a turn-off just as well — in
particular, the roar of audience approvement that Lees gets after announcing
ʽPoor Man's Moody Bluesʼ as the next song brings on the usual
troubled thought on the elusive nature of good taste... then again, maybe the
good gentlemen wre just happy that, with the Moodies no longer around, somebody was able to go on stage and at
least offer a credible substitute for all the yearning hearts.
XII (1978)
1) Fantasy: Loving Is Easy; 2)
Berlin; 3) Classics: A Tale Of Two Sixties; 4) Turning In Circles; 5) Fact: The
Closed Shop; 6) In Search Of England; 7) Sip Of Wine; 8) Harbour; 9) Science
Fiction: Nova Lepidoptera; 10) Giving It Up; 11) Fiction: The Streets Of San
Francisco.
At least we now know that Barclay James Harvest
were definitely not deaf and blind to recent musical developments, including
that whole oddball «New Wave» thing — considering that the stern-marching
bassline that opens ʽLoving Is Easyʼ was lifted directly from
ʽPsycho Killerʼ. (Perhaps Lees just thought that there was no way the
base audiences of BJH and Talking Heads could have any overlap whatsoever — and
he was probably right, too).
Unfortunately, where the bassline of
ʽPsycho Killerʼ flows quite naturally into the funky guitar riff, and
the funky guitar riff nicely tills the soil for the paranoid vocals, the bass
in ʽLoving Is Easyʼ does not even technically fit in with the rest of
the song — it was stuck there just for a flashy flourish, and this decision
very neatly summarizes the main flaw of BJH: a band that never stopped looking
for ideas (not necessarily their own ones), but ever so rarely had a good understanding
of how to «set up» an idea once it had been found.
It's not even that ʽLoving Is Easyʼ
is that bad an album opener — it's got a catchy Foreigner-style chorus, a
vicious solo, a perky-arrogant synthesizer tone... well, okay, it is pretty bad, because all of it is
hardly enough to override the confused amusement at John's salacious
double-entendres. I mean, "...as I shoot all my love into you"?
"just get a hold and watch how it grows"? I do not exactly remember
anybody ordering a blue plate special à
la AC/DC, although it is the Foreigner comparison that is more appropriate
here: sexist arena-pop with crude, stern hooks and no sense of irony
whatsoever. And leave it to a band as perplexed as BJH to mix all that with the
bassline of ʽPsycho Killerʼ.
If I have unintentionally made the song sound
more curious than it is, I apologize, because, in all actuality, XII is a fairly boring record. Those
who do seriously care about the second phase of poor Barclay's career will
probably still want to own it, and make it their last: after XII, Woolly, disgruntled with
disproportionate discrimination, finally quit the band and became free to
pursue his own Wagnerian-Mahlerian dreams in a solo career. But even as XII still sticks fairly close to the
band's «progressive» or, at least, «art» roots, it seems to run on an even
smoother, less perceptible railtrack than its predecessor. It is melodic,
modestly complex, and rarely indulges in huge lapses of taste, the biggest
exceptions being the aforementioned ʽLoving Is Easyʼ and ʽA Tale
Of Two Sixtiesʼ, where, once again, Lees puts on his old-and-worn Rock
Guru Shoes and pours out a name-filled «baby-boomer complaint» on the decline
of rock music: apparently, "rock and roll died with Easy Rider" and
"I'm cutting out now before the New Wave takes my surf board flair".
(That's all fine, but why steal from David Byrne then?).
On the formal side, the album is notable for
containing ʽBerlinʼ, a typically mushy Holroyd anthem that endeared
the band to the Germans so much, they would go on to sell most of their album
stock in that country — Les is honestly trying to come up with a
McCartney-quality ballad here, and it probably wouldn't be too cringeworthy if
not for his elfish voice, carrying such an overdose of sentimentalism that my
emotional centers immediately regurgitate the stuff.
It is also notable for an «encyclopaedic» twist
on Lees' part: all of John's songs are arranged in «library folders»
(ʽFantasyʼ, ʽClassicsʼ, ʽScience fictionʼ, etc.),
to reflect the wide variety of his interests and the genuine Renaissance nature
of his character. This bold artistic move is a little diluted, though, by the
necessity of mixing his material with that of Les and Woolly, both of whom
refuse to play the game; and by the rather loose adherence to the rules — for
instance, why the hell is ʽLoving Is Easyʼ placed under
ʽFantasyʼ when it clearly should have been labeled ʽAdultʼ
(unless, of course, under «fantasy» we first and foremost understand something
like this)?
And why does he write such deadly boring «fiction» as ʽThe Streets Of San
Franciscoʼ, which closes the album with three minutes of a repetitive
dark-descending-acoustic coda with splutters of barely audible morose harmonica
pasted over it for consolation?
Overall, they seem to have succeeded in
creating a slightly darker, denser, more stylistically unified and,
subsequently, less memorable and «flashy» sequel to Gone To Earth: Woolly went on record stating that he actually
prefers XII (probably, among other
things, because they let him have two songs on it instead of the usual one —
mercy gift before the final breakup?), and in a way, so do I, because it does
not at least have a ʽPoor Man's Moody Bluesʼ on it. But that does not
make it recommendable, either: darkness and density aside, the music is still
as limp and spineless as ever — by this time, only a miracle could lift them
out of this bog, and Barclay James Harvest were a steady, self-assured band
that never really believed in miracles.
EYES OF THE UNIVERSE (1979)
1) Love On The Line; 2)
Alright Down Get Boogie; 3) The Song (They Love To Sing); 4) Skin Flicks; 5)
Sperratus; 6) Rock'n'Roll Lady; 7) Capricorn; 8) Play To The World.
Woolly's departure did not make much of an
actual difference — his regular «one track per album» quota (occasionally
graciously increased to two) seemed to uninspire him to the point of not really
giving a damn, and, with the possible exception of Octoberon, most of his songs recorded in the «silver age» of BJH
were not the major highlights of
those albums. His keyboards may certainly be missed, but the new guest player
Kevin McAlea, drafted in mid-session when it became clear that Lees and Holroyd
were unable to properly compensate without a separate keyboardist, does a fine
job both filling in for Woolly's «old-school artsy» style and propelling the band into the electronic age — ʽLove On The
Lineʼ opens the record with a gruff synth loop in a Kraftwerk fashion.
Would Woolly have wanted that? Would Mahler
have wanted that, for that matter? Isn't this transition a bit too straightforward?
Then again, who cares. Eyes Of The Universe sold exceedingly well in continental Europe,
furthering BJH's reputation in Germany and other neighboring countries, but in
retrospect, the only thing that makes it different is a bit of homage to
contemporary musical styles. ʽAlright Down Get Boogieʼ, for instance,
is a disco-rocker, supposedly tongue-in-cheek, given the unhidden sarcasm in
Lees' lyrics — but if you do not consult the lyrics, it is quite easy to take
the "lights, boogie, lights, get down boogie alright" chorus of the
song for serious, and the more seriously one takes this song, the more stupid
it ends up.
ʽLove On The Lineʼ, apart from its
electronic loops, also makes room for a disco bassline; and ʽThe Song
(They Love To Sing)ʼ is a completely synth-dominated rhythmic ballad that
makes ABBA sound like tough hard-rockers in comparison. Sequenced together and
placed at the top, these three songs really create a strong impression that Eyes Of The Universe is the beginning
of something radically new for Barclay James Harvest — a third period, in which
the gates are finally opened for the onslaught of disco, New Wave, synth-pop,
electronics, and all kinds of fresh new ideas used in predictably bad ways. As
if it were only the presence of Woolly that hindered Lees and Holroyd from
finalizing the bill of sale.
However, once we are past the opening three,
the remainder of the album is much more traditional. ʽSkin Flicksʼ
is an acoustic-based, orchestrated, anthemic ballad about how glitz, glamour,
and easy money separated the protagonist from his loved one, continuing Lees'
ongoing and slightly suspicious fascination with «adult-oriented» themes.
ʽSperratusʼ wobbles from tragic introspective ballad to agitated
pop-rock chorus and back, before launching into a spirited, but somewhat
cartoonish guitar duo battle à la
Thin Lizzy. ʽRock'n'Roll Ladyʼ is one of those many late-Seventies
songs that have a subversive mention of "rock'n'roll" in the title,
but are really targeted at nightclub audiences, with their stiff, glitzy, dancebeat-oriented
atmosphere. And the last two songs are traditionally «wall-of-soundish», but
completely non-descript — ʽPlay To The Worldʼ, in particular, might
be the most boring, uninventive, one-finger-on-a-piano epic ballad that ever served as a coda to a BJH album.
I suppose that it must have been the
double-punch of the silly disco send-up and the achingly boring seven minute
epic at the end that made me, at one time, think of Eyes Of The Universe as one of the worst efforts from an «art» band
in the 1970s, and rate it as 1 star out of 5. In all fairness, it is not that bad — with a few exceptions, BJH do
not have to sacrifice much of their usual melodic talent to keep up with the
times. At the very least, it is about as consistent as XII, and should be rated modestly high by everyone who generally
favors the «poor man's Moody Blues» vibe. Still, for old times' sake, I award
it a thumbs
down, if only because I still cannot stand ʽPlay To The
Worldʼ and everything it represents — pretentious sentimental pomp without
any genuine dynamics whatsoever. Leave it to the mighty state of Germany to
disagree — they are all wusses anyway. Imagine making a national hero of Les
Holroyd instead of Lou Reed.
TURN OF THE TIDE (1981)
1) Waiting On The Borderline;
2) How Do You Feel Now?; 3) Back To The Wall; 4) Highway For Fools; 5) Echoes
And Shadows; 6) Death Of A City; 7) I'm Like A Train; 8) Doctor Doctor; 9) Life
Is For Living; 10) In Memory Of The Martyrs.
This time, the album title is anything but
random: this is arguably the most optimistic-sounding record put out by BJH
since God knows when, if not ever. Perhaps it had just sunk in how much
happier they were without Woolly and his Mahlerisms (not likely), or maybe,
like the song ʽHow Do You Feel Now?ʼ, it reflects John's uplifted
mood upon the birth of his daughter (a little more likely), or it could be a
consequence of the band's surprisingly high commercial success in Europe — in
many a well-known case, all it takes is to start making a little money on artistic
depression to make artistic depression go away. But this is all guesswork, and
the plain fact is that most of these songs (with the deceptive exception of the
opening lost-love-style number) stick together as a consciously designed, and
sincere-sounding, ode-to-joy.
More importantly for long-time followers, Turn
Of The Tide is also the first BJH album to be almost completely
keyboard-dominated: in addition to Kevin McAlea, new guest member Colin Browne
also adds his support on numerous instruments, including synthesizers — and
guitars are all but relegated to either, sometimes, providing a wimpy acoustic
foundation, or, even more rarely, squeezing out a hard-rocking solo or two,
just to remind us that John Lees can still play guitar and remember what a lead
melody is. So, from a purely technical point of view, one could try and argue
that this is the band's first «synth-pop» album — except that, from a deeper
point of view, «synth-pop» also requires a shift of approach to melody as such,
and in this respect, BJH remain staunch traditionalists ("that kind
of rock don't appeal", grunts Lees on ʽHighway For Foolsʼ before
engaging in one of those ass-kicking rock'n'roll solos with wah-wah a-plenty).
Surprisingly, though, it's all neither as
boring nor as tasteless as could be expected. The band pays a little more
attention to the hooks — a little too much attention, in fact, with obsessive
repetitiveness as a key factor in their memorability — and carefully avoids
falling into the trap of mistaken identity (e. g. posturing as disco kings or
«New Romantics»). Instead, they just focus on their old-school, «Beatlesque»
idealism, dress it up in trendy (but not too trendy) new (but not too new)
sounds, give it a bit of punch, and voilà, something listenable is born.
As usual, I could very easily do without the
sappier Holroyd parts. His high point here is probably ʽI'm Like A
Trainʼ — not coincidentally, the least catchy of his songs, but the one
that grows the most, with an almost surprisingly complex vocal arrangement,
coming in cadences and cascades that are normally associated with The Beach
Boys; the whole thing ends with a series of accappella harmonies that were
earlier reserved for the likes of Smile. It's not tremendously great in
all its derivativeness, but a fair try nonetheless — which I couldn't say about
the rather idiotic Caribbean-styled ʽLife Is For Livingʼ, written
with ritualistic arena audiences in mind (it is all based on exactly one
endlessly repeating musical phrase), or about ʽEchoes And Shadowsʼ,
also minimalistic to the point of stupidity (and it doesn't help, either, that
they are selecting some very yucky, long since outdated synth tones for
both).
Lees, however, is in better form, and a more
variegated one: he contributes a sentimental, but clearly heartfelt ballad
(ʽHow Do You Feel Now?ʼ, delivered in a vocal style midway between
Jeff Lynne and George Harrison), a couple of glossy, but crunchy pop-rockers
with a hard edge (the instrumental sections of ʽHighway For Foolsʼ
are the only corner of this record where a heavy rock fan could find some
refuge), a dumb post-disco dance number (ʽDoctor Doctorʼ) that should
probably count as the most «modernistic» song on the album (when applied to a
band like BJH and a year like 1981, this does not promise any bliss, though),
and the obligatory closing anthem — ʽIn Memory Of The Martyrsʼ, where
«the martyrs» explicitly refers to those who perished while trying to cross
over the Berlin wall. Naturally, that last song would have been a success in
Germany even if it were melodically horrible, which it is not: as far as
anthemic acoustic ballads with a singalong chorus and a sophisticated touch
(symbolized by moody fusion-style synth solos) are concerned, it is simply
overlong, but at least the punchline — "we are love, we are, we are
love" is delivered without pathos, and that is laudable.
Altogether, for an «uplifting» record (and in
art rock, good or bad, convincingly «uplifting» records are a relative rarity
— usually reserved for the likes of Yes), Turn Of The Tide is not at all
disgusting, and occasionally entertaining. This is not sufficient grounds for a
thumbs up, but it does show that Barclay James Harvest did not enter the
Eighties completely empty-handed; like most of their art-rock
contemporaries, they still had something to say at that point, or at least it
could have seemed that way. They left the Eighties quite empty-handed,
to be sure, but in that, too, they were quite far from being alone.
A CONCERT FOR THE PEOPLE (BERLIN) (1982)
1) Berlin; 2) Loving Is Easy;
3) Mockingbird; 4) Sip Of Wine; 5) Nova Lepidoptera; 6) In Memory Of The
Martyrs; 7) Life Is For Living; 8) Child Of The Universe; 9) Hymn.
We all saw it coming. I'm guessing they just
ran out of space on the front sleeve, preventing the album from flashing its
true full name: A Concert For The People
(Who Continue To Buy Our Records Because We Wrote A Very Sappy Song About Their
Hometown And They Fell For It, Well What Do You Expect Of Them Dumb Krauts
Anyway). In grateful and sincere recognition of that fact, Barclay James
Harvest did indeed play a live show on the steps of the Reichstag, no less, on
August 30, 1980 — and recorded this historical event (why historical? no idea)
on audio and video for as much posterity as will be ready to stand the band.
Consequently, the biggest problem with this
third BJH live album in less than ten years must have been the setlist. It is
not very likely that they only played the nine songs on the album (although
these are also the same nine songs that are available on the official video):
most likely, they just selected the stuff that was not yet written in the age
of Live and Live Tapes. So the setlist, or at least this particular section of
it, mostly focuses on their recent period — the majority of the songs stemming
from either XII or the
yet-to-be-released Turn Of The Tide
(oddly enough, Eyes Of The Universe
is completely snubbed — too bad, the 175,000 Berliners assembled for the show might
have enjoyed some disco dancing). ʽMockingbirdʼ is also included
since, well, it is BJH's equivalent of ʽSatisfactionʼ; and
ʽChild Of The Universeʼ and ʽHymnʼ make a reappearance
because a live album just ain't a live album without its fair share of
singalong anthems, and XII was
rather lean on singalong anthems.
The album is reported to have been seriously
doctored, since there were multiple problems with the recording equipment (the
spirit of the Reichstag does not take lightly to overseas intruders, so it
seems), and some of the guitar parts had to be recut, which is why the final version
came out so relatively late. This explains why Lees' guitar solos sound so much
cleaner and sharper than they did on the earlier live releases — and, as usual,
plunges us into the philosophical discussion on pre-calculated quality vs.
flawed spontaneity. But at least they did go to the trouble of re-recording
rather than, say, using the solos from the original studio mix.
Still, it is hard to think of any reasons that
would make Berlin an essential
listen. There are a few rearrangements — ʽLoving Is Easyʼ, for
instance, is sped up (which does not make the opening bassline any less
ʽPsycho Killerʼ-ish) and recast in a rockier mode; whereas
ʽChild Of The Universeʼ, on the contrary, seems a bit softer and
slippier than the original, with more emphasis on the keyboards and less
heaviness in the guitar department. But it's almost impossible to understand
what makes this seven-minute version of ʽIn Memory Of The Martyrsʼ
preferable over or in addition to the studio version — naturally, this song,
written in homage of the unlucky Berlin Wall crossers, had to be played there, but it would probably make more sense to
try and get inspired by watching the faces of the people listening to it than
by the audio track of the actual performance. Same goes for ʽHymnʼ,
of course, except that ʽHymnʼ, unlike ʽMartyrsʼ and
ʽBerlinʼ itself, is not specifically targeted at German audiences.
At least, with the possible exception of
ʽLife Is For Livingʼ, they don't play any of their bad material — and the concert catches
them in that short-lived upwards spiral of the post-Woolly era, so it
represents another bookmark in the Amazing Technicolor Story of Barclay James
Harvest that most people couldn't care less about. Oh, and do buy the DVD
rather than the CD if you are really desperate — Lees cuts quite a melodramatic
figure, jumping around in his matching red pants and jacket, and, with his
beard shaved off, he sort of looks a bit like Roy Orbison now.
RING OF CHANGES (1983)
1) Fifties' Child; 2) Looking
From The Outside; 3) Teenage Heart; 4) High Wire; 5) Midnight Drug; 6) Waiting
For The Right Time; 7) Just A Day Away; 8) Paraiso Dos Cavalos; 9) Ring Of
Changes.
There is practically nothing that could be
called «synth-pop» on this album, but neither is there anything that would even
remotely qualify for a «rock» sound. Acoustic guitars, keyboards, and
orchestration fully dominate the proceedings: Ring Of Changes is Barclay's mellowest album since the very
beginning, and that says a lot, considering how mellow they had been since
1974. In a way, this is even curious, because the record goes against the
grain: in 1983, «mellow» usually meant stuffing your songs with bland
synthesizer tones that reached all the way to heaven, not placing your trust in
old-fashioned cellos and violins.
Much of the credit for this must probably go
to the band's new producer, Pip Williams, who was previously mostly known for
producing a long bunch of Status Quo records — but who also helped relaunch
the comeback of The Moody Blues.
And, supposedly, once he had helped the «rich man's Moody Blues» get back on
their creative feet with Long Distance
Voyager and The Present (the
only two of their Eighties' records that could at least partially match the
quality of the old days), it must have been only natural for him to go across
and try and do the same thing with the «poor man's Moody Blues».
The beginning is weirdly promising: a baroque
chamber music passage instead of the expected synthesizers. Midway through, the
strings turn Hollywoodish, though, and then sink into the background as
ʽFifties' Childʼ finally takes shape as a typical BJH number: soft,
romantic, thinly intellectual, mildly nostalgic, just a teeny bit touching
while it's on, and completely forgettable when it's off. The vocal melody in
some respects seems like a variation on the already not-too-awesome
ʽHymnʼ — and the message is of comparable profundity: ʽLove was
a lesson we tried to learn / There were no exams to pass or failʼ. With
each passing year, as nostalgic tributes to Sixties' idealism keep multiplying
and, consequently, depreciating in net value, there is less and less motivation
to be interested in this one.
But you know what? Easily the best thing about
ʽFifties' Childʼ is its bassline — all of a sudden, Holroyd's lines
start drawing more attention to themselves than whatever Lees is doing, because
the guy suddenly gets the urge to make them as melodic and expressive as
possible. Maybe he had some serious Sgt.
Pepper inhalation or something, but the way he explores all possible
swerves from the basic rhythm is really the only thing that prevents me from
falling asleep to Lees' soft preaching. And later on, it turns out that this is
not an exception: about half of the
songs here have excellent basswork: ʽHigh Wireʼ, ʽJust A Day
Awayʼ, ʽMidnight Drugʼ... we probably have Pip Williams to thank
for putting these parts so high in the mix, but, whatever be the situation, Ring Of Changes is the first album in
the BJH catalog that made me aware of Holroyd's above-average talents as bass
player.
Holroyd is also responsible for the most
memorable, if also most repetitive and unadventurous, bass phrase on the album
— the pulsating loop that drives the title track, which is itself an anthem to
the endless cycle of life, going on for way too long (unless the underlying
message is that the endless cycle of life is a continuous bore, which would be
at least worth considering) but cleverly arranged, with the bass loop, the grumbling
electronic bleeps, and the strange Eastern-vibe strings combining in a unique
manner. The bass loop and the bleeps might illustrate the relentless cogs of
life locked in an endless grind, but the psychedelic strings?.. Makes one
wonder.
As for the rest of the songs, they're okay — on
the whole, less satisfactory than Turn
Of The Tide because of the lack of a rock sound (not a single uplifting
Lees solo!), but, as usual, melodic and somewhat memorable for those who will
stand several listens. Occasionally, they do begin to sound like late period
Bee Gees (ʽWaiting For The Right Timeʼ — strange that Les held back
on singing this one in falsetto, all the other adult contemporary ingredients
already present), but on the whole, the 1970s folk-pop vibe is still prevalent,
and as long as they manage to hold out against mainstream Eighties' values, BJH
are still a listenable outfit.
One last particular mention: the orchestration
on ʽParaiso Dos Cavalosʼ, John's hyper-sentimental ode to a horseback
vacation in Portugal, is absolutely marvelous — formulaic and a little cheesy,
perhaps, but the New World Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by David Katz,
gives the song a far more uplifting and grandiose flavor than its main melody.
Probably an accident — on the whole, the orchestral arrangements on the album
are not too adventurous — but every happy accident on a late period BJH album
counts, because that's what a typical late period BJH album usually is: mush
and mediocrity with an occasional tasty treat for the seeker.
VICTIMS OF CIRCUMSTANCE (1984)
1) Sideshow; 2) Hold On; 3)
Rebel Woman; 4) Say You'll Stay; 5) For Your Love; 6) Victims Of Circumstance;
7) Inside My Nightmare; 8) Watching You; 9) I've Got A Feeling.
No big changes from the formula here, either —
just small ones, and, as usual, for the worse. For instance, there is a further
slight tilt into adult contemporary: ʽI've Got A Feelingʼ, another
vile burglarization of a Beatles title, represents Holroyd's most faithful
adoption of the Eighties' sentimental ballad style (watery synthesizers,
trembling falsettos, the works). A little more guitar than there was last time,
but what guitar? The leaden arena riffs of ʽHold Onʼ have nothing to
do with John's lilting melodic solos.
Perhaps the biggest introduced «novelty» is a
set of female singers singing backup, an idea that might have meant wanting to
give the record a little soulful-gospel flavor, but ended up, I think, moving
the band closer to Europop. One needs to go no further than the album opener:
ʽSideshowʼ starts out as a glossy uptempo folk rocker, but then, as
massive strings and female choirs start fountaineering from the speakers, it
becomes an odd mix of Bee Gees and ABBA (in fact, a few of the string movements
are almost openly copied from ʽDancing Queenʼ). As usual, they have
the means to pull it off without embarrassment, but the whole style is really
so alien for John and Les that they have no means whatsoever to turn it into
something remarkable.
Those who have never embarked on an anti-arena
rock crusade might get to like the rockier stuff on here. ʽRebel
Womanʼ (despite the title, this is, curiously, an anti-Soviet song,
written in the wake of the Korean airliner incident) has a streak of grim
catchiness, although it could have done better without the irritating synth
loops — and, perhaps, with an actual
guitar solo (for some reason, Lees saves all of his solos for the ballads on
this album — an unexplainable choice, since he used to do really well on the
fast rockers). ʽInside My Nightmareʼ could have been just as good,
had they kept the girls away from the microphone and made the basic guitar riff
less sterile. At the very least, the two songs are a refreshing change of pace
from the usual mush.
And the usual mush is hardly worth commenting —
lots and lots of ballads that mostly reshuffle old ideas, scraped off Bee Gees
and Elton John (ʽFor Your Loveʼ) records; I wouldn't be surprised,
either, to learn they had been listening to late Genesis and early solo Phil
Collins as well (ʽSay You'll Stayʼ definitely has the same atmosphere
as ʽFollow You Follow Meʼ). The staying power of these tunes is expectedly
close to zero, although, once again, I have to stress: even at this late period, BJH songs are all
«forgettable» and «mediocre» rather than openly offensive and embarrassing
(unless you start bringing in the lyrics).
It should also be noted that this is the first
BJH album on which Holroyd compositions outnumber those of Lees (5:4), and also
the first BJH album on which Holroyd compositions are significantly weaker, as the man completes the transition from
folk-based soft-rock into synth-choked adult contemporary, while Lees still
attempts to at least nominally justify the «rock» heritage of the band. Thus,
even though at this point there is still no talk whatsoever of splitting the
alliance (after all, they didn't just kick Woolly out of the band for nothing: Turn Of The Tide showed how happy they
could be as a duo), it is not excluded that the first faint traces of the
creative rift can be tracked to some time around this period.
FACE TO FACE (1987)
1) Prisoner Of Your Love; 2)
He Said Love; 3) Alone In The Night; 4) Turn The Key; 5) You Need Love; 6)
Kiev; 7) African; 8) Followed Me; 9) All My Life; 10) Panic; 11) Guitar Blues;
12) On The Wings Of Love.
All through 1985 and 1986, some of the worst
years in commercial pop music history, thankfully little was heard of Barclay
James Harvest — in fact, this was the first time ever in the band's history that they decided to take such a long
break, and the musical press must have finally breathed a sign of relief. But
not to worry: refreshed and remobilized, John «Jesus Loves Africa» Lees and Les
«Boy Loves Girl» Holroyd are back, and now they have the opportunity to make
full use of the CD format: the full CD version of Face To Face contains twelve songs and stretches out for a grand
sixty minutes. Turns out that the years weren't simply wasted, after all. But
maybe this is exactly what all the German fans were waiting for — that new,
improved TV dinner from your favourite band, now 20% more nutritious.
The best I can say about Face To Face is that every time I listened to it while doing
something else at the same time, I had no impression / memory / faint
reminiscence of what I just heard ten seconds after I'd heard it. And this was
the good news, because when I finally
got angry with myself, dropped everything, and started focusing in on the
music... well, the most awful thing about this whole late-period BJH trajectory
is that there really was no single-moment werewolf transformation: it was more
like a portrait-of-Dorian-Gray kind of a thing, with each subsequent album adding
another streak to the general degradation. But by this time, Barclay James
Harvest can no longer even be called «poor man's Moody Blues» — this late
Eighties stuff sounds like a parody
on late Seventies BJH, which itself sounded like... oh well.
Without going into serious details (this album
certainly ain't worth it), I will just briefly mention some of its more
appalling elements. Number one: how many song titles with the word ʽloveʼ in them does one really need?
we got the message twenty years back, thank you very much. Number two: didn't
John Lees already set The New
Testament for Kids to music with ʽHymnʼ, a decade ago? so why did he
feel the urge to do that again, in an even more thorough, and even more
trivial, manner? Number three: didn't John Lees already come up with his best anti-oppression / anti-war song more
than a decade ago with ʽChild Of The Universeʼ? Who needs this
particular ʽAfricanʼ, with its plastic synth-rock arrangement? Number
four: excuse me, but the combined evil of the melody, the arrangement, and the
lyrics makes ʽPanicʼ a fine candidate for worst BJH song ever written by Lees on any occasion —
tough as the actual competition might be. The "yeah yeah yeah
rock'n'roll" bit simply shows that the man must have not been in his right
mind at the time: no normal human being could have agreed to release this crap on a commercial basis.
You might think that Les Holroyd is finally
doing better, but no dice: his ʽTurn The Keyʼ is horrendous Phil
Collins-type adult contemporary, his ʽPrisoner Of Your Loveʼ is bland
synth-pop, and, although his ʽKievʼ may have been driven by pure generous empathy with the victims of
Chernobyl, in the context of his past karma it just feels like a continuous
quest to write a sugary love song to every bisyllabic European city: for some
reason, we never got around to hearing his ʽBelgradeʼ or ʽMadridʼ,
and I am still personally and
impatiently waiting for my own ʽMoscowʼ. And, for that matter, do
Barclay James Harvest fans exist in India? China? Central African Republic?
They may want their own personal tribute to their capital cities, too.
All right, enough sarcasm. Truth be told, under
normal conditions Face To Face
provokes neither laughter nor anger — even when the band are at their most
appalling, they cloak it so well with slick, inoffensive production and soft,
inobtrusive singing that all the senses just go plain numb. I do feel like
giving the album a thumbs down this time, though, seeing as how
it has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and even the band's trademark
«melodicity» is reduced to rehashing, recycling, and regurgitating chords and
leads that weren't on anybody's hot list in the first place.
GLASNOST (1988)
1) Nova Lepidoptera; 2) Hold
On; 3) African; 4) Love On The Line; 5) Alone In The Night; 6) On The Wings Of
Love; 7) Mockingbird; 8) Rock'n'Roll Lady; 9) He Said Love; 10) Turn The Key; 11)
Medicine Man; 12) Kiev; 13) Child Of The Universe; 14) Life Is For Living; 15)
Poor Man's Moody Blues; 16) Berlin; 17) Loving Is Easy; 18) Hymn.
If, having lived way past the Gorbachev era,
you happened to forget the exact meaning of the Russian word glasnost', or if, on the contrary, you
are too young to have lived through that era and are in need of a good
translation, look no further than the fourth live album by Barclay James
Harvest! Of course, they forgot to put it on the album cover, but I will gladly
fill it in for you: «Glasnost' is
when they finally let us sing our crappy songs in East Berlin as well!»
Recorded July 14, 1987 at the Treptower Park
(the actual date would rather suggest a different location, like the Place de
la Bastille, but the BJH codex of honor explicitly states that all memorable dates in BJH history must
take place on German soil, or else John Lees' right to a life-long supply of
free Sauerkraut will be forfeit), this is a full CD — these days, actually a
nearly full double CD, containing the
entire concert — of songs played live before an appreciative audience of East
Germans, about a year prior to the demolition of The Wall, but with change
already high in the air. The band was invited to play as part of a larger
celebration of Berlin's 750th anniversary, and the attendance was measured at
way over 100,000, particularly since many were able to get in for free. (In
retrospect, I wouldn't probably go to a BJH concert around 1987 if you paid me,
but those times were sure different).
However, even if there actually was a feeling of liberty and excitement
at the venue (and there obviously must have been), it is not well translated
onto the recording. Chief reason for this is that, even at that juncture,
Barclay James Harvest still refused to come to terms with themselves as an
oldies act, focusing chiefly on new material. Consequently, we get an eye-(and
ear-)popping set of six songs from Face To Face — songs that deserve to be
forgotten upon first listen, much less revived in a live environment — and, on
the whole, more than half of the set is culled exclusively from the
post-Woolly era. With minor exceptions, all of these loyally reproduce the
studio recordings, bringing the sonic wonders of such late-period masterpieces
as ʽHe Said Loveʼ, ʽAfricanʼ, and ʽOn The Wings Of
Loveʼ back to your tired ears just as you thought you would never have to
encounter them again.
Real golden oldies, in addition to the
ever-present ʽMockingbirdʼ, are also represented by the welcome
return of the hard-rocking arrangement of ʽMedicine Manʼ, done in
good style and with the expected frantic solo by Lees. Mid-1970s oldies, though
more abundant in scope, are also totally predictable — ʽPoor Man's Moody
Bluesʼ to drown the crowd in third-rate sentimentalism, ʽBerlinʼ
to justify the paying crowd's expenses, and ʽHymnʼ to merge with the
crowd in throbbing religious ecstasy at the end of the show. Only the album
opener ʽNova Lepidopteraʼ is a relative surprise. but, again, the
live version is almost completely identical with the studio album's. (At least
the new CD edition makes it into a slightly unexpected opening — the original
would open with ʽPoor Man's Moody Bluesʼ!).
Clearly, there are only two groups of people
who should care in the least about this album — (a) the really hardcore BJH fans, those who simply need to have an official live record from Germany recorded on
proper equipment (something that Berlin
did not really offer), and (b) East Germans, particularly those who were there
on that memorable day and, naturally, attach special nostalgic value to the
show; for them this event may have had a very special meaning — anything, after
all, that makes one's life happier and nobody else's life unhappier, should be
worth owning and cherishing. That said, I'm fairly sure that many other good
things — better things — than this
show could have taken place in Berlin on that day, so, for justice' sake, let
us not forget how almost utterly awful this particular setlist is, and settle
with a thumbs
down after all. One thing must be said for Lees, though — he learned
to speak a fairly good German in all those years that the funny old Krauts were
sponsoring his personal and artistic existence.
WELCOME TO THE SHOW (1990)
1) The Life You Lead; 2) Lady
Macbeth; 3) Cheap The Bullet; 4) Welcome To The Show; 5) John Lennon's Guitar;
6) Halfway To Freedom; 7) African Nights; 8) Psychedelic Child; 9) Where Do We
Go; 10) Origin Earth; 11) If Love Is King; 12) Shadows On The Sky.
By the late Eighties / early Nineties, some of
the prog dinosaurs were willing to show signs of life, but most were still
hibernating in «commercial» lairs, and Barclay James Harvest, of all people,
were fairly safe in one of those lairs as long as the East European markets
were open — and open they were, with more and more breachings of the Iron
Curtain, as lovingly commemorated by Les Holroyd in one of these album's worst
songs (ʽHalfway To Freedomʼ). Consequently, Welcome To The Show — no, this is not a live album, wouldn't it be too damn obvious even for a band
like BJH if it were? — simply offers you twelve more slabs of different
varieties of adult contemporary muzak for all tastes. Sappy adult
contemporary, hard-rocking adult contemporary, mystical adult contemporary,
anthemic adult contemporary, ethnic adult contemporary — you name it, we got
it, as long as it is glossy, «serious», and deadly dull.
Needless to say, Holroyd's half is about twice
as putrid as Lees' — mostly either electronic pop junk with a steady beat, but
no true hooks (title track; ʽThe Life You Leadʼ) or Phil
Collins-style big ballads with big brass saxophones and so much h-e-a-r-t
you'll cry out for liver in no time (ʽWhere Do We Goʼ; ʽShadows
On The Skyʼ). Of particularly specific cringeworthiness is ʽAfrican
Nightsʼ, a nostalgic remembrance by Les of the band's tour of South Africa
in 1972 — if the annoying electronic congas do not do you in a matter of
moments, the lyrics surely will: if it is indeed true that one of Les Holroyd's
most lingering memories of traveling through the apartheid-torn South Africa in
1972 is how "the sound man played The Eagles / As we listen / ʽTake
It Easyʼ echoes on through our lives"... words fail me so utterly.
But every once in a while, Lees comes quite
close to matching the tastelessness of his crumblier partner. The juiciest
«highlight» is ʽJohn Lennon's Guitarʼ, a song about how — listen to
this! — a guitar, borrowed from John
Lennon at Abbey Road Studios in 1970, turned out to be instrumental for the
recording of the Barclay James Harvest song ʽGaladrielʼ. Yes,
that is what the song is about, and it tells the story in plain documentary
fashion. No, there is nothing wrong in borrowing a guitar from John Lennon, or
even in acknowledging that fact twenty years later. Yes, one does not usually do this in the form of a
sentimental ballad, for fear of not only looking stupid on one's own, but also
making every recipient of said ballad feel equally stupid. Yes, the Beatles
were great and all, but why all this relentless sucking up? ʽTitlesʼ
were bad enough, and now "I remember the day, I remember the day, the day
that I played John Lennon's guitar, I remember the day, as if it was yesterday,
and I know that the memories will never fade..." — am I the only one to
suspect some neural imbalance here?
Almost as bad, but in a different way, is
ʽPsychedelic Childʼ, a slurred logorrhea of «flower power
clichés» set to... no, not retro-stylized «psychedelic» sounds of fuzz
guitars, harpsichords, and sitars, as could be thought, but to a muscular
riff-rock sound with a serious hair metal flair: the «heaviest» that Lees gets
on this album, perhaps under the influence of a Def Leppard concert or
something in the same style. A song that sounds awful and makes no sense whatsoever at the same time — mission
accomplished to perfection.
Struggling to find anything even vaguely redeeming about the album, I can only think
of two songs that have potential: ʽLady Macbethʼ is John's valiant
attempt at writing and recording something inscrutably mysterious (but the
song is still butchered with plastic electronic keyboards), and ʽIf Love
Is Kingʼ features one of those quintessential-classic Lees solos that can
be melodic, intelligent, and kick-ass at the same time — unfortunately, it has
the unluck to be stuck on top of yet another forgettable pop-rocker, driven by
a corny synth riff. It really baffles me how this obvious talent — at his best,
the guy could rival Dave Gilmour as a soloist — could be combined with such
poor skills at decision taking, but natural selection works in mysterious ways.
If BJH are
the poor man's Moody Blues, then Welcome
To The Show is the equivalent of a poor man's Sur La Mer, and that, as anybody vaguely familiar with Moody Blues
history can easily tell, is not much of a compliment. And, naturally, the album
runs for one whole hour straight, because, according to an unbreakable law of
physics, the worse a BJH album is, the longer it has to run. To give the record
a thumbs
down is to say nothing — I'd like to submit an official demand to
remove it from public circulation, but, fortunately, it seems that nature has already
settled this in its own wise way.
CAUGHT IN THE LIGHT (1993)
1) Who Do We Think We Are; 2)
Knoydart; 3) Copii Romania; 4) Back To Earth; 5) Cold War; 6) Forever Yesterday;
7) The Great Unknown; 8) Spud-U-Like; 9) Silver Wings; 10) Once More; 11) A
Matter Of Time; 12) Ballad Of Denshaw Mill.
Apparently, browsing the Web reveals that a
small bunch of fans continues to regard this album as a «comeback» of sorts —
some call it BJH's most «progressive» effort since the late 1970s. But only a very strong love for the art of John
Lees and Les Holroyd, leading to malicious self-delusion, could trick anyone
into mistaking this vapid, turgid, somnambulant pile of sonic mush for an
artistic comeback. The way I see it, Caught
In The Light simply scales another peak in turning the band into a bland
adult contemporary act — and this time, their act lasts all of sixty minutes,
letting you savour each whiff of that blandness for minutes on end.
Maybe Barclay James Harvest were never a
first-rate art-rock band, and maybe their devolution was slow, subtle, and
treacherous, but it actually makes sense to think back twenty-three years and
compare their first (and, in my opinion, best) album with this piece of junk.
Think, let's say, ʽTaking Some Time Onʼ, a song that seriously and
amusingly mined the psychedelic rock mines, and ʽSpud-U-Likeʼ, a song
about... well, basically, this is John Lees complaining about Gameboy and «Mega
drives» squishing out the rock'n'roll spirit, get it? "Don't want a
Gameboy, just rock and roll... Don't want a system that ain't got no
soul", Mr. Lees complains over a backdrop of electronic drums and
synthesizers that is, altogether, more «Modern Talking» than anything even
remotely approaching ʽrock'n'rollʼ. In a long, long story of one
stylistic embarrassment after another, ʽSpud-U-Likeʼ just might be the lucky one to take first prize.
Subtler, but even more embarrassing, is
ʽOnce Moreʼ. If you already know your BJH well enough, you might,
perhaps, suspect that the title really means «let us re-record an old song»,
and indeed, this is a re-write of ʽMockingbirdʼ, lock, stock and barrel,
only with synthesizers replacing strings — Lees does let go with some frenetic
soloing towards the end, but this does not save the ridiculous monster, it
only raises further questions, such as, if this guy's only remaining talent is
to squeeze out beautiful lead sequences from his guitar, why does he do this on
one or two songs per album, and lets generic synthesizer parts rule with an
iron fist over the rest of it?
But wait, there is more. ʽBallad Of
Denshaw Millʼ is a nine-minute track that is almost completely — barring
the noisy intro and the small solo of the outro — ruled by a keyboard «melody»
that requires the compositional skills of a 6-year old after his second piano
lesson. «Based on a Saddleworth legend», apparently, but who gives a damn? In a
world populated by miriads of atmospheric epics, this one does not even begin
to qualify. ʽForever Yesterdayʼ took me a few listens to understand
its source, but then the title ultimately helped out — of course, the verse melody
is but a slight variation on Dylan's ʽForever Youngʼ, with the first
line completely the same and the rest deviating by split hairs. And if I were offered to cherish the memory of
my departed father with a corny synth ballad like ʽBack To Earthʼ, I
know I would quite certainly be
offended. (And I can certainly understand this grief, but did those lyrics really need to sound like a rhythmic
rearrangement of a schematic memorial service?).
And now for the big one — all of the songs
mentioned above are Lees songs. You can try to imagine what the Holroyd songs
are like — better still, don't even try, because it is fairly hard for a mind
not thoroughly accustomed to sentimentally synthesized adult contemporary to
imagine such a copious amount of pathetic triviality all at once. Each of these
songs must have been composed in about three minutes' time, then took about
three years of huffing, puffing, and convincing oneself that this is one of
the most serious, profound, heartfelt songs ever written. Then they go in, play
the required three notes on the rhythm synthesizer and the required one note on
the «lead» synthesizer and go out.
All in all — my hearty congratulations: after Welcome To The Show, it seemed that
they could already sink no further, but Caught
In The Light successfully conquers an extra five or ten feet of depth (we
are talking sewer territory here, of
course). Then again, for justice sake, it should be remembered that this is just
my irate personal opinion, and there are alternate ones, for instance, such as
«in the age of trivial grunge, these brave people returned with their deepest,
most introspective album in more than a decade!» So take this next thumbs down
with a grain of salt — especially if you have a habit of, for instance,
thinking of Chris de Burgh in terms of «depth», «introspection», and
«progressiveness».
RIVER OF DREAMS (1997)
1) Back In The Game; 2) River
Of Dreams; 3) Yesterday's Heroes; 4) Children Of The Disappeared; 5) Pools Of
Tears; 6) Do You Believe In Dreams; 7) (Took Me) So Long; 8) Mr. E; 9) Three
Weeks To Despair; 10) The Time Of Our Lives.
If you actually managed to stay with me here,
all the way through that interminable string of «papcore» records getting
duller and duller with each subsequent release... well, I wouldn't exactly
call River Of Dreams, Lees' and
Holroyd's last BJH collaboration, a «reward» for all that patience, but at the
very least, it is a partial recompense. It was not intended to be a swan song
for the band — but, luckily indeed, the guys managed to stay together long
enough to not let the totally abysmal Caught
In The Light close the book on Barclay James Harvest.
This, not its predecessor, is the real objective
«comeback»: finally, somebody started
paying attention to how far away the band had drifted from its mid-1970's
sound into the territory of smooth-bland adult contemporary, and the record is
a very conscious, very hard-working attempt to get back where it all... not «began»,
exactly, but where it had that relative balance between being «artistic» and
«commercial». Not only are the guitars back in a big way, fighting back the
synthesizer mush with renewed forces, but so is the «poor man's Moody Blues» /
«poor man's Pink Floyd» / «poor man's Beatles» spirit, which seemed so pathetic
back in the 1970s, compared to what was going on at the time, but, by the late
1980s, was so goddamn sorely missed as the band plummeted into «poor man's Phil
Collins» territory.
Of course, subtlety was never a forte for the
band — you could suspect something of the sort happening just by glancing at
the song titles: ʽBack In The Gameʼ, ʽYesterday's Heroesʼ,
ʽTook Me So Longʼ... And then there is all that musical legacy — the
Harrison-esque slide guitar parts that open ʽDo You Believe In
Dreamsʼ, the unflinching "let me take you down..." quotation on
ʽMr. Eʼ, along with the psychedelic cellos, the Wall influence on ʽYesterday's Heroesʼ... but then again,
without all these links, how could we call this a «comeback» in the first
place? Barclay James Harvest used to make a living out of «plundering» everyone
in sight — the quintessential «art-rock vultures», and now they're back with a
flesh-ripping vengeance.
There is nothing «awesome» about these songs,
and there probably could not be at this point, but there are almost no
embarrassments, and the nostalgia is handled with care. ʽBack In The
Gameʼ opens with a little chamber muzak, then enters energetic pop-rock
mode with acoustic power chords backed by a permanently wailing electric part
and multi-part harmonies — plenty of juicy stuff going on to excuse the
expectedly trivial lyrics about "spirit of the 1970s live forever"
etc.; and, what's more, it is written by Holroyd, who I'd already think had, by
that time, completely forgotten how to write anything other than suave synth
ballads. Lees follows with ʽRiver Of Dreamsʼ, an equally catchy
«arena folk» song — not great, not awful, and vastly helped by being backed
with ye olde electric organ rather than cheesy synth.
Later on, ʽYesterday's Heroesʼ gives
us a rockier sound: the guitar tone is a bit rotten, like on those post-Waters
Pink Floyd albums, but the main echoey riff shows inspiration. The main problem
with the song, I think, is that Barclay James Harvest are too «happy» a band —
at least, have been too happy a band ever since their reformating in the
mid-1970s — to be able to plow the lower depths of depression and desperation:
ʽYesterday's Heroesʼ somehow tries to convey the despairing
realisation of being stuck in an endless wheel of fate, but the growling wobble
of the song's main riff is as far as they can go about expressing that despair.
Still, this is light years ahead of ʽSpud-U-Likeʼ, no question about
that.
The album is not entirely free of Caught In
The Light's nightmarish legacy: sooner or later, electronic sentimentality must take over, and it certainly does on
Holroyd's ʽTook Me So Longʼ, an elevator ballad with no redeeming
value, and on Lees' ʽPool Of Tearsʼ (glycerin ones, I suppose),
riding on pure, and very boring, atmosphere. But these, I'm happy to say, form
the minority among a generally acceptable bunch of songs that honestly try to get back to the source — they
don't always manage to get there, but most of them are at least headed in the
right direction. For that particular reason, I am inclined to mark the album
with a very modest thumbs up,
if only to indicate the huge «upwards» step in comparison to everything they
did in the previous ten years, and to put a checkmark in the «finished career
on a positive note?» box.
LIVE AT HIGH VOLTAGE (2011)
1) Nova Lepidoptera; 2) Poor
Wages; 3) She Said; 4) Galadriel; 5) Ball And Chain; 6) Mockingbird; 7) Taking
Some Time On; 8) Medicine Man; 9) Song For Dying; 10) The Poet; 11) After The
Day; 12) Hymn.
Our saga is almost at an end — technically, it has ended, because, other than a couple
archival releases from the old days on the BBC, «Barclay James Harvest» was no
more after River Of Dreams. In its
place, through a simple budding process, two new entities were generated: «John
Lees' Barclay James Harvest» and «Barclay James Harvest featuring Les Holroyd»
— yes, the only thing better than a Barclay James Harvest are two competing Barclay James Harvests,
each of them with its own personal assembly line.
It is beyond my level of endurance to go for a
close analysis of Lees' and Holroyd's post-split careers, but just a few words
may be in order. Holroyd had always been the «lesser» part of the two, writing
relatively fewer hits and generally acting as a «sissy» counterpart to John's
«toughness» (the distinction is embedded about as firmly as the
Lennon/McCartney division line, which is to say not firmly at all, but there is a distinction) — on the other hand,
he did take the drummer, Mel Pritchard, with him, so, from an arithmetical
point of view, he might have more rights to the name of BJH than his tougher
colleague. So far, «Barclay James Harvest featuring Les Holroyd» has had only
one studio album out (Revolution Days,
2002: the small bits that I have heard confirm the predictable suspicion —
mostly pathetic adult contemporary with melodies as attractive as a bunch of
squished caterpillars), as well as a couple live ones, and I suppose they must
be pretty big in Germany, as always, and pretty small everywhere else.
The story of «John Lees' Barclay James Harvest»
is marginally more interesting, because, in order to even out the quotas, Lees
got back together with Woolly: their first effort, Nexus, released in 1999, mostly consisted of reworkings of old
classics, going all the way back to the early days, with a few new ideas thrown
in. Also featuring Craig Fletcher on bass and Kevin Whitehead on drums, the
band, from then on, mostly stuck to touring, and did that with modest success
until Woolly's suicide in December 2010, caused by mental health problems. He
was then replaced by Jez Smith.
Live
At High Voltage is a rather
typical example of several live performances that the band has released in the
21st century. Recorded on July 23rd, 2011, at the High Voltage Festival in London
(rather than Berlin!), it was then released as a 2-CD set (which, as a «bonus
gift», included a third blank CD on
which the buyer was invited to burn some photos and a video interview from the
band's own site — is that marketing genius, or what?), with a side aim to act
as an honorary tribute to Woolly: they
even performed Woolly's own ʽBall And Chainʼ, which they did not
cover onstage while Woolly was alive.
The first thing, of course, that strikes you
about the album is that none of the
material dates past the late 1970s — and that most of the material (10 songs out of 12!) is from the band's
earliest period (1970-72). Usually, this kind of behavior is branded as
«turning into a nostalgic oldies act», but in this particular case, the aim is
altogether different: for John Lees, who had been creatively stagnating over
two decades, this is a rebirth — almost like a rejection of all that utter
crap, going back to the spring of youth, that sort of thing. Listening to the
band crank the volume up on those early tunes was fun to me, and a good reminder that there did really exist a time
when Barclay James Harvest could lay claim to some depth, creativity, and good
taste.
I mean, a Barclay James Harvest live album with
no ʽPoor Man's Moody Bluesʼ on it? No ʽLove On The Lineʼ?
No ʽLoving Is Easyʼ? No ʽTitlesʼ? Not a single Les Holroyd
ballad? Most importantly, no ʽSpud-U-Likeʼ or any traces of the band's existence in the synth-pop era? Bring it
on, even if the actual performance is far from perfect: Lees' singing has grown
craggy and cranky, the other guys, replacing Woolly, cannot sing expressively
at all, the rhythm section does not feel particularly tight, and John seems to
have lost a bit of the old «fluidity» in his soloing, as seen best of all on
the slightly clumsy phrasing in ʽMedicine Manʼ (arthritis? or just
nervous?).
But they do drag out the very first song on the
very first BJH album — a fairly good run through ʽTaking Some Time
Onʼ, even if, naturally, they cannot properly reproduce the psychedelic
overdub-fest that made the original coda so head-spinningly impressive. They
do the entire ʽPoet / After The Dayʼ suite, with a ferocious solo at
the end that quite compensates for the imperfection of ʽMedicine
Manʼ. They do lots more of that nice early stuff. It's a pretty swell trip
«down the old memory lane».
It is not that I am advocating for anyone to
rush out and look for it, or any
other «John Lees' Barclay James Harvest» record — normally, if you want to
hear ʽTaking Some Time Onʼ or ʽSong For The Dyingʼ, you
should just go back to the original source. The important thing is that this
and other live records fulfill a «redemptory» function: it is pretty much John
Lees saying to us, "yes, ladies and gentlemen, everything I did past 1979
was fairly crappy, and this here is me trying to undo some of the wrongs I'd
done». Well, it seems to be that way
— I may be getting it all wrong, but this is the interpretation that I like the
most, and since I'm a sucker for happy endings, this is just the kind of happy
ending I'd been hoping for. Therefore, all's well that ends well; thumbs up
to this imperfect, but vivacious and well-meaning live album; and here's hoping
that Barclay James Harvest, for a brief while at least, will continue to be
remembered for the many beautiful things they'd done in their early years,
rather than the numerous crimes against Taste, Queen and Country perpetrated in
later ones.
AXE VICTIM (1974)
1) Axe Victim; 2) Love Is
Swift Arrows; 3) Jet Silver And The Dolls Of Venus; 4) Third Floor Heaven; 5)
Night Creatures; 6) Rocket Cathedrals; 7) Adventures In Yorkshire Landscape; 8)
Jets At Down; 9) No Trains To Heaven; 10) Darkness (L'Immoraliste).
Take any random opinion on Axe Victim today, about forty years away from its original synthesis,
and it is very likely that the
opinion will be judging the album from a Ziggy Stardust perspective: «Oh, it's
such a wannabe David Bowie project!»
This is not altogether unfounded, but, for some reason, most of these opinions
miss another connection, in my view, perhaps even better justified — Peter
Hammill. Naturally, many more people are familiar with classic Bowie than with
classic Van Der Graaf Generator or Peter's solo career, but still, I believe
that a description of the early Be-Bop Deluxe sound as a meticulously
engineered «cross» between Bowie and Hammill would be much more accurate than
simply branding Bill Nelson and his associates as a bunch of «Bowie copycats»,
for better or worse.
«Be-Bop Deluxe» was just a posh name for Bill
Nelson, who wrote all the songs, sang all the lead vocals, and played all the
guitar leads — well, okay, his backers on Axe
Victim include Ian Parkin on rhythm guitar, Robert Bryan on bass, and
Nicholas Chatterton-Dew on drums, but no one is supposed to memorize this info,
since already by the time of the second album Nelson had dissolved the band and
recruited a completely different line-up, and also because Nelson is, fair and
square, the only instrumentalist on the album to deserve serious attention: an
«axe victim» indeed, stuffing all possible and impossible bits of space with
his trills, drills, fills, and thrills. If it didn't work so well, it would be
suffocating. Strangely, it does work.
Despite the name, «Be-Bop Deluxe» never played
any be-bop, deluxe or not. Instead, Nelson had a thing for sprawling, glammy,
anthemic art-rock with a futuristic twist — hence the Bowie connection,
particularly well visible in his vocal style (he likes to combine starry-eyed
idealism and snub-nosed sarcasm within a single line) and his guitar playing,
which, of all possible comparisons, indeed, seems closest to Mick Ronson's
classic style — shrill, grand, frenetic playing, thick on high pitch, speedy
arpeggios, crescendos, echo effects, and everything else necessary to throw the
listener in overdrive, whatever it takes. But he does have plenty of real
technique, so it is not just a cheap show-off manoeuvre — nor do the songs ever
turn into interminable boring jams, caressing the player's ego until his
fingers start hurting.
On second thought, it's not that often that the
«songs» ever really turn into actual songs,
either, and this is where the Hammill comparison falls in place. Keeping up
with the rock theater spirit, Nelson does not hold much respect for
verse/chorus structures — his creations are spirited rhythmic rants, prone to
unexpected tonality and tempo changes whenever they feel like it, and to short
or long lead guitar intrusions whenever the lead guitar feels it. The title
track introduces the formula — the vocals enter on the first second, the first
lead line enters on the fourth, and from then on the two seem to be locked in a
death-fight. Will the singer outbawl the guitar player? Will the guitar player
bring the singer down in a lightning barrage? Oh wait, they're the same guy. Well
then, it's sort of obvious that they can't waste too much time on silly things like choruses, hooks, riffs, and any
of that «pop» drivel.
Consequently, it might take a bit of time to
get into the spirit of things — imagine, if you wish, a Ziggy Stardust with all of the obvious attention-grabbing twists
removed, and the operatic nature of it enhanced fiftyfold. What do you get?
Peter Hammill — a little more rock'n'roll-oriented, a little less gifted as a
singer, but a little more skilled at guitar fireworks. The question is: are you
ready to buy this, or is it all just one big, hollow, insubstantial put-on?
Does this guy have a heart of gold or is he made of straw and sawdust on the
inside? (I couldn't put this any other way, so excuse me the clichés).
Personally, I like this stuff. The way Nelson gets right down to business,
jumping into the spotlight with his big voice and bigger guitar from the very
first second, displays a stunning lack of fear at being branded «pretentious» —
and as his lyrics spin strange tales of vain stage glories, sci-fi escapism,
and ruined English countrysides, and his guitar throws out semi-improvised passages
that seem inspired by pop, rock, blues, jazz, and classical alike, depending on
the artist's mood, Axe Victim has
every chance of eventually placing you under an odd spell.
For those who really cannot imagine their life
without a catchy hook, it may be advisable to start out with ʽJet Silver
And The Dolls Of Venusʼ, which is probably the closest they got to a
«glam-pop» sound here (the song was actually released as a single) — it's a
glorious mess that is equal parts Cream's ʽAnyone For Tennisʼ, Kinks'
ʽWaterloo Sunsetʼ, Bowie's ʽStarmanʼ, and probably several
other influences / quotations / inspirations I missed, but fused into something
completely different anyway — a spaceship joyride that is actually believable,
mainly due to Nelson's personal charisma. Cool guitar, nice voice, right
pitch, proper mood.
Other highlights would be ʽJets At
Downʼ, a seven-minute epic ballad with another bunch of lilting solos; the
honestly amazing, mostly instrumental rocker ʽNo Trains To Heavenʼ,
all of it holding together exclusively through Nelson's energy, sweat and blood
on the axe; and... well, just about everything else. Take it from me —
normally, I would be the first to condemn this sort of record, but sometimes
all it takes is an intelligent vocal style and a little demon hiding in one's
fingers to turn potential boredom into overall excitement. Axe Victim may not be particularly deep, and it may not show a lot
of compositional genius, and it certainly does not break a lot of new ground,
but it takes good care of the old one, and it kicks serious ass — something
that «rock theater» à la early
1970s does fairly rarely. Thumbs up.
FUTURAMA (1975)
1) Stage Whispers; 2) Love
With The Madman; 3) Maid In Heaven; 4) Sister Seagull; 5) Sound Track; 6) Music
In Dreamland; 7) Jean Cocteau; 8) Between The Worlds; 9) Swan Song.
This stylistically similar follow-up to Axe Victim sounds somewhat inferior to
me: the novelty of approach is gone, the hooks do not seem to be quickly
hurrying to the rescue, and the slight toning down of «glam» elements results
in the whole thing looking more sullen, solemn, and serious in form, but not
necessarily in substance — at the same time sacrificing some of the humor and
irony of Axe Victim.
The band itself is completely different: this
time, we have a trio, with Charlie Tumahai (originally from New Zealand, no
less) on bass and Simon Fox on drums — and the music produced by Roy Thomas
Baker, who had earlier worked with Queen and Hawkwind, among others. However,
the show is still completely run by Nelson, now overdubbing his own rhythm,
lead, and keyboard playing — so that only a highly perceptive ear will notice
the subtle changes from Axe Victim,
at least, the ones that do not directly deal with Nelson's own artistic evolution.
The subtlest change, perhaps, is that there are
no more songs like ʽJet Silver And The Dollsʼ: that strain of
ceremonial-idealistic space anthem songwriting has been eliminated in favor of
sharper, sneerier compositions that look more and more like free-form
post-Shakesperian monologs. An example is ʽBetween The Worldsʼ,
released as the first single from the album but withdrawn after just one day of
(non-)sales — a stormy, theatrical performance that gets by on the strength of
Nelson's passionate guitar parts and Hammill-esque vocals, but little else. It
was then quickly replaced on the shelves with ʽMaid In Heavenʼ, a
shorter, more heavy riff-based power anthem that could, perhaps, be described
as «Boston covering Hunky Dory-era
Bowie»: emotionally uninvolving music, redeemed by the frontman's personality
and then, for some reason, provided
with an extra level of thick distortion, phasing, background vocals, etc., as
if putting on all this makeup might be enough to finally make our heads spin.
No, I don't think it really works.
Sometimes it does — when the frontman manages to come up
with a truly impressive musical or «sonic» solution. ʽSister
Seagullʼ, for instance, has a two-part heavy / high-pitched riff that registers
well in the head, and the «seagull» motif is featured very consistently in
Nelson's playing, nowhere more so than in the directly birdcry-imitating outro.
ʽStage Whispersʼ opens the album with a barnstorm of crazy licks,
promising to be even more of a gas than ʽAxe Victimʼ — but then it
ultimately fails to deliver on that promise. Everybody can produce that sort of
gallop; not everybody can make it stand out, and this time, even Nelson's
technique does not help.
I give the album a thumbs down. It was a tough
decision to make: the frontman has lost none of the conviction, energy, or
technique, and I have no reason to doubt that this boldly anti-commercial
music (although one could probably list Nelson's kick-ass guitar-hero playing
style as a commercial element all the same) truly comes «from the heart». But
I was not able to get into almost any of these songs, with the exception of
ʽSister Seagullʼ; even the music-hall and pastoralist elements in the
Brit-pop-influenced ʽMusic In Dreamlandʼ never seem to gel together
into anything genuinely meaningful, or at least «probing». On the whole, this
just looks like one of those «sophomore slumps» — the best ideas having all
been used up for Axe Victim, Futurama is just scraping the bottom of
the original proverbial barrel.
SUNBURST FINISH (1976)
1) Fair Exchange; 2) Heavenly
Homes; 3) Ships In The Night; 4) Crying To The Sky; 5) Sleep That Burns; 6)
Beauty Secrets; 7) Life In The Air Age; 8) Like An Old Blues; 9) Crystal
Gazing; 10) Blazing Apostles.
Turning temporary session player Andy Clark
into the band's resident keyboard master was probably not the main reason why Sunburst Finish might look like a
serious improvement over the «sophomore slump». After all, he is never credited
for any songwriting, nor is he some sort of Rick Wakeman, capable of adding
exciting (if not always meaningful) passages to melodically unexciting
compositions. On the other hand, fleshing the band out with an additional layer
of sound could somehow have brought
about a more disciplined approach to songwriting... well, the point is, Sunburst Finish is a little less about
virtuoso guitar playing than Axe Victim,
and a little more about meaningful hooks than Futurama. In other words, all the three albums of Be-Bop Deluxe's
«glam» period are similar, yet all are also different.
Although ʽFair Exchangeʼ opens the
record with feedback blasts, these are quickly replaced by quite
modern-sounding synthesizer patterns — inspired, one might add, not so much by
the robotic fantasies of Kraftwerk as by the idealistic pulsations of Who's Next: modern they might be, but
the New Wave penchant for «refrigerator electronica» had not yet caught up with
Nelson by that particular point in time. In fact, electronic pulses soon give
way to good old-fashioned rock and roll guitars (playing a riff akin to AC/DC's
ʽHigh Voltageʼ), enhanced with a grand piano sound that seemes to
show Roy Bittan's influence. Bruce Springsteen meets the Young brothers — hey,
that could actually work, and on
ʽFair Exchangeʼ, it does. As is often the case, it is hard to get
what the song is about, but it is definitely about somebody's highbrowed anger, and the riffs, solos, and
keyboard enhancements are all in agreement on that.
However, Nelson is willing to compromise his
artistic integrity even further: ʽShips In The Nightʼ, released as
the «commercially oriented» single from the album, is basically a ska song, tripped up and decorated with
artsy passages, but, in the end, with an overall message that is hardly much
different from that of ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ: "Without love, we
are like ships in the night, selling our souls down the river", sung to a
boppy, cheery pattern. There is not that much guitar on the song at all — it is
primarily driven by the rhythm section and the keyboards, culminating in a
«mock-sax» electronic solo that almost puts the song in campy parody territory.
Who knows, maybe it was a parody —
Nelson's ironic take on a «commercial» tune that paid off very well, since the
song became Be-Bop Deluxe's highest point on the charts. But I think that it
must only have soured Bill's impression of the true meaning of «chart life»
even further.
That said, ʽShips In The Nightʼ is
hardly the best choice to convey the general spirit of the album. Such a choice
could, for instance, be ʽSleep That Burnsʼ, an ambitious chunk of
composing that rolls through hard-rocking choo-choo sections, music hall
extravaganzas, psychedelic interludes with backwards solos, and finally
explodes after a massive guitar/keyboard build-up in the coda. And it does have a catchy chorus behind all
that, despite its primary goal of conveying an atmosphere of hyperactive
personal torment: the «sleep that burns» in question is of a kind that causes
the patient to chuck his TV out of the window rather than pop pills and
moonwalk. Emphasis is always on burning, not on sleeping (or not sleeping).
Or it could be Nelson's equivalent of the power
ballad spot — ʽHeavenly Homesʼ, an inspiring mix of romantic piano,
acoustic guitar, and glam riffs that, once again, sounds like an arithmetic
mean between Bowie and Hammill, but grander than the former and more
«song-like» than the latter. For all his irony and cynicism, Nelson has nothing
against the old heart-on-sleeve trick from time to time, except that he never
forgets to back it up with a return to harsh reality — ʽHeavenly
Homesʼ joyfully flutters past the stars for several minutes before
smashing, full speed, into the hardbodied asteroid of the "Heavenly
homes... are hard to find..." chorus, set to a variation on Pink Floyd's
descending/ascending ʽEchoesʼ riff for a sharp doom-laden effect.
Since most of the songs are marinated in the
same musical and lyrical idiom, it makes little sense to comment on all of
them: chances are that if you like one, you'll like the rest as well, so a thumbs up
is quite imminent. But note that it also makes sense to hunt for the CD
reissue, which adds three interesting bonus tracks: an almost totally
instrumental psycho-funk jam (ʽShineʼ), a dark romantic ballad with a
surprisingly tender and introspective underbelly (ʽSpeed Of The
Windʼ), and a slow dance-style B-side with a psychedelic guitar/synth duet
(ʽBlue As A Jewelʼ) — all three are curious in their own ways, and
all three are quite different from the average style of the album itself.
MODERN MUSIC (1976)
1) Orphans Of Babylon; 2) Twilight
Capers; 3) Kiss Of Light; 4) The Bird Charmers Destiny; 5) The Gold At The End
Of My Rainbow; 6) Bring Back The Spark; 7) Modern Music; 8) Dancing In The
Moonlight (All Alone); 9) Honeymoon On Mars; 10) Lost In The Neon World; 11)
Dance Of The Uncle Sam Humanoids; 12) Modern Music (reprise); 13) Forbidden
Lovers; 14) Down On Terminal Street; 15) Make The Music Magic.
Even more disciplined and «song-oriented» than Sunburst Finish — although one needn't
get any false ideas about shifting the overall style by simply looking at the
album cover: suits and ties they may be sporting, but the hair is still fairly
long, and even the word «modern» in the album title does not necessarily mean
«New Wave», «punk», «reggae», «electronica», etc. For now, only one concession
is being made, albeit a serious one: Modern
Music shows serious quotas introduced on «guitar wizardry». For the first
time ever, Nelson intentionally refuses to stretch out with heroic solo
passages on any of the tracks — which is why most of them are so unusually
short — and concentrates on songwriting and atmosphere rather than dazzling
technique.
In fact, he might even be concentrating a bit
too hard. The final version of the record has 15 tracks instead of the usual
10, and, although some of these are represented by very brief musical «links»,
the general feeling is that there is too much going on. Some of the songs are
genuinely meaningful and evocative, but on the whole, Nelson is not a master
songwriter, and when he suddenly sets himself this challenge — to generate as
many songwriting ideas as possible per one LP — it is probably inevitable that
a large fraction of these ideas will not work, and those that will may get lost
in the forest. And when I say «forest» with a negative connotation, I mean
tracks like ʽHoneymoon On Marsʼ: big, pompous, Ziggy Stardust-age
compositions, all echo and phasing and anthemic vocals and little in the way of
interesting melodic concept. Unfortunately, there is a lot of such stuff here,
and it has nothing to do with suits and ties, in fact, it almost sounds nostalgic
in the context of 1976.
On the other hand, this is the album that also gave us ʽKiss Of Lightʼ — a
conscious attempt, I think, at recreating the success of ʽSister
Seagullʼ, since both songs are driven by a major hook in the form of a
screechy, high-pitched guitar riff, and both are among the decade's finest
brand of «burly romantic» arena-rock anthems, combining crowdpleasing potential
with intelligence and craft. On paper, a crude start like "the woman of
moon flew into my room last night" might make one cringe, but put it
together with Bill's tricky shuffling of thick distorted riffage and liltingly
clean melodic lines — and it works. Maybe because underneath all that romance,
as the guitar and the vocals suggest, lies a thick layer of irony.
It is also not true that the pomp is never
enjoyable. On ʽThe Gold At The End Of My Rainbowʼ, it most certainly
is, since the anthemic chorus is so elegantly and conclusively shaped — and the
song becomes a credible power ballad even without the power of the guitar solo.
But in general, the most interesting moments of Modern Music are those where Nelson strays the farthest away from
the already well-known formula: for instance, on the funk oddity ʽDance Of
The Uncle Sam Humanoidsʼ, which, according to its title, should be about
something anti-American, but, since it's instrumental, who can really tell
(unless the occasional sound effects such as bullets whistling over your head
count as implicit condemnations of Yankee violence). Or on ʽTwilight
Capersʼ which, for no obvious reason, quotes the Dragnet theme out of the blue. Or on the title track which opens
with a series of radio noises — including the listener tuning in, out of sheer
accident, of course, on ʽAxe Victimʼ and ʽSister Seagullʼ — before turning into the album's
most sentimental number, almost a prayer to the power of music on the
radiowaves.
Actually, ʽModern Musicʼ is not
entirely self-contained, but rather acts as an introduction (and, later on, as
a reprised coda) to an Abbey Road-style
futuristic mini-suite — the one that includes both boring (ʽHoneymoon
On Marsʼ) and exciting (ʽUncle
Sam Humanoidsʼ) parts. Presenting it all as «modern music» seems like a
funny miscalculation: futuristic it may be in spirit, but on the whole, it is
still way more old-school glam-rock than a foresight of the radically new
things to come. But the idea of transition from lengthy, drawn-out space jams
to these economic snippets, where Nelson's guitar forms the backbone of the
song, but leaves out the fireworks, might
be such a foresight — as if putting on that suit and tie was a symbolic gesture
that also surmised imposing limits on Nelson's «sonic ego».
The bottomline is — it all depends on whether
you have more love and respect for Bill as a player or for Bill as a
songwriter. If one of your favorite Be-Bop Deluxe songs is ʽNo Trains To
Heavenʼ, you will need to come to terms with Modern Music, and live with the fact that the end of 1976 was
marked by imposing a heavy tax on guitar pyrotechnics. If, however, going
against the grain of mainstream criticism, you find Nelson to be a great master
of melody, Modern Music has every
chance of becoming your favorite Be-Bop Deluxe album — good melodies or bad
melodies, there is a lot of them
here, and the old spirit, perhaps not as freely roaming as before, is still
largely intact. Anyway, a thumbs up is still well guaranteed.
LIVE! IN THE AIR AGE (1977)
1) Life In The Air Age; 2)
Ships In The Night; 3) Piece Of Mine; 4) Fair Exchange; 5) Mill Street
Junction; 6) Adventures In A Yorkshire Landscape; 7) Blazing Apostles; 8)
Shine; 9) Sister Seagull; 10) Maid In Heaven.
Recorded on a UK tour in early 1977, this is
the official answer to all of the fans' red-hot prayers for a live Be-Bop
Deluxe record — but coming just a wee bit too late in the band's career, I'd
say. Because there is no better reason to hope for some documentation of Bill
Nelson's live powers than a desire to check the man's guitar prowess in action
— yet, by that time, Nelson was already edging away from the status of a guitar
hero and moving more in the direction of «economic» songwriting. There is plenty of guitar prowess on display
here, not to worry; but not the sort of bold, reckless melodic experimentation
as first seen on Axe Victim — for
the most part, things are kept under tight control, almost as if, with new
musical values on the horizon and all, Nelson was becoming afraid of potential
accusations of «wankery».
Altogether, the selected setlist, spread across
an unusual format of one LP and one «bonus» EP, includes but two sprawling
workouts. ʽAdventures In A Yorkshire Landscapeʼ, extended by a good
four minutes from the original running length, contains several fusion-style
workouts in the spirit (though not quite in the form) of John McLaughlin,
interspersed with Simon Clark's less involving, but pretty, keyboard solos. In
stark contrast, ʽShineʼ (not the same as the studio recording,
appended as a bonus track to Sunburst
Finish) goes for a completely different mix of funkiness and psychedelia —
real trippy, far-out-there stuff that sounds like nothing else in the band's
catalog.
The majority of the other tracks comes from Sunburst Finish — oddly enough, none of
the material from Modern Music was
seen fit for inclusion, even though the tour itself was allegedly held to
promote the latest record — and they are not too drastically different from the
original, being about as well-polished and well-rehearsed as the studio
blueprints. Then, almost as a «for-the-casual-fans» afterthought, Futurama is represented by quick,
polite, but honest runs through ʽSister Seagullʼ and ʽMaid In
Heavenʼ on the last side of the EP.
All in all, due to solid choice of material and
professional commitment, In The Air Age
is never «bad» or «unlistenable», but it is still a disappointment — adding
very little, if anything at all, to our understanding of and «spiritual bond»
with the band and Nelson in person. Serious fans will, of course, enjoy the
many nuances and appreciate the minute differences in tones, tempos, and
textures, but this really ain't no Live At Leeds or Made In Japan, where these differences just jump out and kick you
in the face, regardless of how many years of experience you have had with the
bands in question. A pity, that — Be-Bop Deluxe was one of those bands that
seems like it had enough brains and
brawn to make their stage act into a separate phenomenon from their studio
creativity. Maybe it was just a case of unlucky selection, but, whatever be the
answer, I am not going to implore you to run off in search of Be-Bop Deluxe
live bootlegs based on this particular
experience; sticking to the studio albums seems quite enough.
DRASTIC PLASTIC (1978)
1) Electrical Language; 2) New
Precision; 3) New Mysteries; 4) Surreal Estate; 5) Love In Flames; 6) Panic In
The World; 7) Dangerous Stranger; 8) Superenigmatix; 9) Visions Of Endless; 10)
Possession; 11) Islands Of The Dead; 12*) Blimps; 13*) Lovers Are Mortal; 14*)
Lights.
It seems very easy to mistake Drastic Plastic for a New Wave album,
but if we are operating with genrisms in the first place, I would still rather
think of it in terms of «glam». Up to the very last moment of its existence,
the Be-Bop Deluxe sound was loud, expansive, flashy, cocky, whatever, even
long after Nelson had reneged on the principle of choking his basic melodies
with mountains of guitar improv. Yes, he did cut down on guitar heroics, add
more keyboards, expand his horizons with new ideas, but Drastic Plastic still betrays a child of the early 1970s, as far as
my ears tell me, at least.
It is a good album all the same, and it may, in
fact, even contain the single largest number of memorable hooks that Nelson
ever had the chance to collect on a single LP. However, its being all over the
place — as Bill explores page after page of the blues, pop, funk, hard rock,
even rockabilly books — is not necessarily a plus. The songs are not that good, and the overall impression is
that of a highly experienced and talented, but kinda clueless artist in search
of... well, in search of a new light for an old direction, so to speak. I enjoy
this stuff, sure, but I am not certain if there would be any reason for me to
come revisit it some time later.
ʽElectrical Languageʼ is a pretty
attractive power-pop opener with a romantic (not «New Romantic», just romantic) flavor and a very
democratic balance between the synthesizers, now turning cold but still
friendly rather than robotic, and Nelson's guitar. One could see where it might
have been some invigorating introduction to a concept album of sorts — on how
to express old feelings with new technologies, that kind of thing. Then,
however, we start meandering. Titles like ʽNew Precisionʼ and
ʽNew Mysteriesʼ, especially if they are sitting right next together,
suggest that the focus will be on
«technocracy», and both have a certain «Gary Numan scent» to them, but they are
not exactly the epitome of admirable precision or deep thrilling mystery — they
just kind of roll along to more or less the same martial rhythms, nothing too
mystifying or terrifying about them. Rumour has it that Nelson was, in fact,
closely monitoring the latest developments in his major idol's career, but
these songs are nowhere near the psychic intensity of Bowie's «Berlin trilogy»
— among other things, this is also because Bowie had Eno to keep him company
(not to mention an occasional Robert Fripp as well), whereas the keyboards on Drastic Plastic are handled with taste
and reservation, but without any seeming touch of genius.
Still, the record gets by merely on the
strength of its bizarre plunges into the unpredictable. For instance,
ʽLove In Flamesʼ sounds like a proto-New Waver's parody on hard rock
ecstasy — with a guitar-hero finale in which Nelson is channelling the spirits
of Angus Young and Alvin Lee at the same time in a hilariously flashy mode.
ʽDangerous Strangerʼ is nothing if not a «new-era rewrite» of Eddie
Cochran's ʽSummertime Bluesʼ (even the bass vocal line is retained
from the original), inessential fun but curious simply in terms of its
existence. ʽPossessionʼ is glossified garage, Alice Cooper style —
all that is missing is that extra snarl in Nelson's voice to make the track
register on the same shelf as something from Alice's own Flush The Fashion.
Arguably the best track (although some
competition is provided by the humorous catchy pop song ʽPanic In The
Worldʼ) is the album closer, ʽIslands Of The Deadʼ, a fine
tribute to Nelson's own departed father — no predictable sadness, no trivial
sentimentality, just a solid folk-based art-pop song with a friendly pagan
concept (others would have probably sung about the joys of Heaven; Bill goes
beyond the boring tenets of monotheism). Still, it is not fabulous «per se»;
its classiness is mainly provided by the context — writing a song about the
dearly departed without falling on musical and lyrical clichés by the
dozen is complicated even for a genius, and Bill Nelson does not quite fit my
vision of genius (at the very least, just like Bowie, he is just too smart to
let the genius come awake, and usually gets by through the force of intellect).
In any case, even if I do not see anything
drastic about this plastic, this is yet another stimulating experience —
rounding out a small, but remarkably even (with the possible exception of Futurama, where I do not see eye to
eye with the fans) collection with another respectable thumbs up. Less than a year later,
Nelson would pull the plug on Be-Bop Deluxe, realizing that, in the immortal
words of Decca executives, «guitar bands are on their way out» and finally
shifting to the intellectual department of modern sound exploitation — leaving
behind the oh-so-seventies image of the «brainy guitar rocker». Come to think
of it, he may not have had another choice. But it was fun — although a very strange kind of fun — while it lasted.
ADDENDA:
RADIOLAND DELUXE: BBC RADIO 1 LIVE IN CONCERT (1976-1978/1994)
1) Life In The Air Age; 2)
Sister Seagull; 3) Third Floor Heaven; 4) Blazing Apostles; 5) Maid In Heaven;
6) Kiss Of Light; 7) Adventures In A Yorkshire Landscape; 8) Fair Exchange; 9)
Ships In The Night; 10) Modern Music; 11) New Precision; 12) Superenigmatix;
13) Possession; 14) Dangerous Stranger; 15) Island Of The Dead; 16) Panic In
The World.
This is one of those BBC packages which
collects tracks that were actually played at theater venues in front of live
audiences and broadcast subsequently, so it does function as a «real» live
album, not «live in the studio», and is in some ways preferable to Live! In The Air Age. Most of the
tracks are also chronologically coherent, dating back to early 1976 (the Sunburst Finish era; tracks 1-4,
recorded at the Paris Theatre on the 15th of January) or late 1976 (the Modern Music era, recorded at the
Hammersmith Odeon on the 10th of October) — with a further six-track «appendix»
from a show at Golders Green Hippodrome on the 19th of January, 1978, represented
exclusively by numbers from Drastic
Plastic. (Note also that the whole package was originally released in 1994,
then remastered and re-released in 2002 under the somewhat less clumsy title of
Tremulous Antenna).
There is not really that much to say about the
whole thing, except that the sound quality is excellent — Nelson's vocals and
guitar blaze across the living room with as much power and clarity as you'd
expect from a well-produced studio recording — and that the band, as expected,
is precise and consistent throughout. The major problem is the same as with Live!: the songs just do not depart all
that much from the studio counterparts, or at least the departures do not jump
right out at the listener, and should rather be appreciated by long-term
hardcore fans. This is a particular concern for Drastic Plastic-era material, where Nelson was leaving less space for
improvisation and variation — not so much for the early stuff; in that respect,
as usual, ʽAdventures In A Yorkshire Landscapeʼ is the primary focus
of attraction, with Nelson and keyboardist Andy Clark taking turns to offer
their spontaneous bursts of inspiration to the listeners.
On the other hand, it may be interesting, for
instance, to hear the entire ʽModern Musicʼ suite performed without
the cloak of studio trickery, or ʽNew Precisionʼ without the «walking
into the sea» overdubs of splashing water, but with extra guitar and keyboard
noises to suggest aquatic
interference rather than simply bring it over, or a slightly «lazier», but no
less mind-blowing call of the seagull at the end of ʽSister
Seagullʼ... there, I have pretty much exhausted the list of differences.
But when all has been really said and done, Radioland is basically just a way of revisiting the different, but
similar faces of this band one last time — particularly since I have no problem
whatsoever with the track selection (no repeats, as is BBC's custom, and no
mediocre material from the early Futurama
days, bar the great concise hits). Thumbs up.
BETTY DAVIS (1973)
1) If I'm In Luck I Might Get
Picked Up; 2) Walkin' Up The Road; 3) Anti Love Song; 4) Your Man My Man; 5)
Ooh Yeah; 6) Steppin' In Her I. Miller Shoes; 7) Game Is My Middle Name; 8) In
The Meantime; 9*) Come Take Me; 10*) You Won't See Me In The Morning; 11*) I
Will Take That Ride.
In 1967, Betty Mabry was in luck, as she
happened to be picked up by Miles Davis himself — and although their marriage
lasted but three years (Miles later complained she was «too wild» for him, and
whatever that really meant, I don't
think I even want to know), it is said to have been greatly mutually
beneficial: she introduced him to the «electric» scene of the psychedelic
Sixties, thus being partly responsible for his transition to the fusion period
of In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew (being one of the
«witches», a.k.a. «bitches», herself) — and he
introduced her to... umm, his bank
account? Whatever — anyway, without that marriage, there would neither have
been a «Betty Davis» name tag, nor, quite likely, any of these strange albums
that the funk lady engineered during her short, but vivid, career.
The reason why that career never really took
off, with all those albums flopping one after the other, is as plain to see as
the reason why, in recent years, it has been given a serious re-evaluation, so
that these days, Mrs. Davis is finally enjoying some serious popularity in
knowledgeable circles. First and foremost, Betty Mabry was not much of a
singer, and back in those days — heck, back in any days — a black performer, particularly a female one, was
expected to live up to the standards: if you couldn't belt it out like Aretha,
or coo the pants off your listeners like Diana, or rattle the walls and shatter
the glass like Tina, you hardly stood a chance, regardless of how much
character or personality you could offer in compensation. A racist standard,
come to think of it, but nobody said stereotypes can be that easily overthrown.
Second, Betty Mabry was not that much of a
songwriter, either. In reality, her «songs» are performance acts — theatrical
monologues set to whatever musical backing she may be offered. Since all of her
records are funk records, you can dance to these tracks, but you are not very
likely to be humming them, or memorizing the (usually non-existent) choruses.
They have neither any pop chart potential, nor any seductive value for those
looking for musical innovation: Betty did not know that much about music to
truly care about the notes, and the musicians backing her were simply having a
good time in the studio.
Third, Betty «Game Is My Middle Name» Davis was
admittedly way too wild, confusingly
so, even, for 1973. Everywhere you look for info on the lady, you will see
comparisons to Madonna and Prince popping up, but neither Madonna nor Prince
were on the scene in 1973, and both
Madonna and Prince, when they did appear on the scene, compensated for their
provocative behavior with catchy hooks, so that you could simply close your
eyes on the former — I mean, not even Tipper Gore found out about this before
it was already too late. Not so with Betty Davis: the very major, if not the
only, point of these «songs» is to drench the listener in waves and showers of
aggressive, near-sadistic sexuality. Then again, what does one expect of a girl who, as far as rumors go, wrote her first
song at the tender age of 12 and named it ʽI'm Going To Bake That Cake Of
Loveʼ?..
Put it all together, and you can easily see
that, even if the crazy musical climate of 1973 could allow for such an album
to come out, the somewhat more predictable «consumer climate» could hardly
allow it to be successful. Nowadays, though, as our tastes have shifted and
mutated, the picture looks entirely different. Of course, Betty is not a
«singer» in the technical sense, but what she does with her voice is impressive
all the same — think something of a black female equivalent of early Iggy Pop,
going all the way and never looking
back. The lower part of her larynx, which she heavily exploits throughout, is
her chief instrument: the lack of diversity of delivery may eventually get a
bit on one's nerves, but the album is fairly short anyway, going off in one
brief concentrated punch — or like a thirty-minute brutal «vocal rape», if
you'll excuse the crudeness of the definition. She may be singing about
wanting to "get picked up", and how she is "wiggling her
fanny" to achieve that purpose, but it is pretty clear who is really doing the picking.
None of that would matter, though, if the
assembled musicians were not so totally hip to whatever Betty was doing. The
roster here is impressive — due to her connections in the biz, she gets no less
than the regular Sly Stone rhythm section of bass genius Larry Graham and drum
expert Gregg Errico, as well as certain members of Santana, including Neal
Schon on guitar (well on his way to form Journey, but we will ignore that
particularity), and some brass players from Tower Of Power, while The Pointer
Sisters are providing background vocals. And they all cook — maybe not a
prime-series «bitches brew», but, if you ask my opinion, that very title would
convey the essence of Betty's debut much better than it conveyed the essence
of Miles' hymn to fusion. Here we do have a certified «bitch», and she's
brewing it up to high heaven.
Most of the songs follow the same simple
pattern: set up a riff-based groove going, around which the lead instruments
(guitar, organ, brass, in that particular order of preference) play circles
with a very high degree of freedom allowed, to match the equally high degree of
freedom for Betty to scatter, spit, and snarl out the exotic tales of her own
sex drive and, occasionally, offering acid comment on other people's lives
(ʽSteppin' In Her I. Miller Shoesʼ is a mean-spirited diatribe
against the «celebrity itch»). This sounds fairly simple, and too much like a
potential recipe for disaster to be credible — but just wait until you actually
hear it.
The trick is that Betty's spitfire act must
have invigorated the musicians as well, so that everybody is trying to match her in terms of «badness» and
«nastiness». ʽIf I'm In Luckʼ starts sizzling from the very first
second, as the Zeppelinish blues-rock riff rips through the speakers and is
soon joined by the equally «badass» bass and organ parts. The time signatures
and lead riffs change from song to song, but the drive and passion stay the
same — occasionally, the message shifts from direct aggression to a more subtle
threat, but this does not make it any less vicious: ʽAnti Love Songʼ,
driven by bass-'n'-keyboards interplay rather than guitar, is the album's best
tune, in fact, it is probably the hottest tune about sexual abstinence ever written.
By the time they get around to the last
movement of this molten-lava-suite (ʽGame Is My Middle Nameʼ
accidentally borrows the «crawling» guitar melody from The Doors' ʽBack
Door Manʼ, and, while we're on it, this gal could definitely teach ol' Jim
a thing or two about pork and beans), the floor has already most likely caved
in from exhaustion — the only problem is that they were not able to come up
with a properly soothing conclusion: ʽIn The Meantimeʼ is sort of a
«ballad» that tries to wrap things up on a softer note, but this is also where
Betty's disabilities as a singer come to the forefront, and the gospel organ
melody that dominates the song is a snoozer compared to what they just did on
the meat'n'potato numbers.
Still, one mediocre piece of dessert should not
spoil the basic impressions of the main course — besides, if you get the
remastered CD version, there are three extra, previously unreleased, cuts from
the same sessions that yield 12 more minutes of violent sexual games, mid-1970s
fashion, ensuring that you get your money's worth. Just remember that this
ain't Funkadelic or Sly Stone — it's all a bunch of provocative «punk-funk»
(Betty is sometimes called the godmother of Nina Hagen, although Nina was a far
better singer and a far loonier type of person), which does not get by on the
wings of inventiveness of diversity. But it does show that sometimes all you
need is a spirited «bitch», a decent hard-rock riff, and a well-hewn backing
band to create an enduring classic, or, at least, a resurrection-worthy one. Thumbs up,
or we can just «wiggle our fanny» in acknowledgement.
THEY SAY I'M DIFFERENT (1974)
1) Shoo-B-Doop And Cop Him; 2)
He Was A Big Freak; 3) Your Mama Wants Ya Back; 4) Don't Call Her No Tramp; 5)
Git In There; 6) They Say I'm Different; 7) 70's Blues; 8) Special People.
Out of the three completed original LPs
engineered by Betty during her short career, this is the most «quiet» one, if
the term is at all applicable to someone so bent on mixing glamor with a Zulu
warrior image. The «quietness» mainly means that, this time around, Betty was
not able to assemble such a stellar cast to play for her —there are at least
twenty different people credited in the liner notes, but most are relatively
unknown, and, unlike the 1973 band, they do not seem to understand that well what particular sort of
«bitch-from-hell» they are supposed to be backing. Consequently, the grooves
are still well-cut and the riffs are still memorable, but they generally lack
the crackle, sizzle, and sparkle they had on Betty Davis.
Maybe the best way to understand what the hell
I am talking about is to listen, in succession, to the first five seconds of
each of the opening tracks. The bluesy riff of ʽIf I'm In Luckʼ
snarls and threatens from the very first note — the funky riff of
ʽShoo-B-Doop And Cop Himʼ is softer, subtler, and sleazier, and Betty
complements it with a softer, more «sly» and «seductive» delivery than her
"if I'm in luck I might just get picked up!" where you'd really be
smart if you thought twice before picking up that hot little thing. In the case of ʽShoo-B-Doopʼ,
though, she seems to be showing us a less aggressive side — going ash far ash
introdushing a shweet little lishp to her articulation: "...and when the
clock shtrikesh twelve..." Sssshekssshy!
Overall, there is a little less emphasis on
heavy rock and a little more on hot funk throughout — I wouldn't mind if the
band were a perfectly tight littlwe funky outfit, but it seems to be crafting
arrangements rather than snatching them out of the clouds; no wonder, perhaps —
given how many different musicians there are, it is not likely that many of
them had enough time to gel together. Still, just like before, most tracks get
along well because they have some sort of nifty compositional idea — a
bassline, a twin guitar dialog, a funny clavinet phrase, something to pin it
all to with certainty. That way, even something like ʽDon't Call Her No
Trampʼ, which essentially consists of little other than Betty barking out
the song title, becomes contagious: that clavinet is really «nasty» in a
ʽSuperstitionʼ-like kind of manner.
The title track here is a black-pride anthem to
pre-war and Chicago blues heroes, appropriately set to a series of
«swamp-blues» licks — Betty explicitly establishing her link with the spirits
of the past: "My great-grandma didn't like the foxtrot / Instead she'd
spit her snuff and boogie to Elmore James... that's why they say I'm strange /
that's why they say I'm funky". Lots of sincere feeling, I guess, but
somehow it still comes across as posturing, maybe
because the average pedigree of a Robert Johnson or a Leadbelly does not get
superimposed so smoothly over the Greenwich Village pedigree of the young
Betty Mabry. (Then again, she did
spend her youth on her grandma's farm in North Carolina, so at least what she
sings about not liking the foxtrot is most probably true). Anyway, it doesn't
sound bad, but it is hardly as convincing as when the lady is singing about
wiggling her fanny — seems more like an attempt to explain herself in a predictable
fashion (you think this is nasty? go
listen to some of my predecessors!).
Like last time around, this record also ends
with a bit of «crude tenderness» — ʽSpecial Peopleʼ has Betty cooing
and purring to the sounds of soft jazzy electric piano (with a punchy rhythm
section playing along, it's not a «sissy» ballad or anything), showing off the
uncomfortable imperfections of her voice and almost reveling in the amateur
flair of it all. Too amateur,
perhaps, but then there should be a discount for female Zulu warriors
contributing to the blacksploitation scene, I suppose. One notch down from the
self-titled debut, yet still a thumbs up — the grooves hold and the kettle is
still boiling.
NASTY GAL (1975)
1) Nasty Gal; 2) Talkin'
Trash; 3) Dedicated To The Press; 4) You And I; 5) Feelins; 6) F.U.N.K.; 7)
Gettin' Kicked Off, Havin' Fun; 8) Shut Off The Light; 9) This Is It!; 10) The
Lone Ranger.
Maybe Betty herself felt that the second album
was a bit softer and a tad more compromising than the first — in any case,
something must have stimulated her to pull herself together and make damn sure
that the third one would blow the lid off the kettle. The band was wound up
tighter, the record label was changed to Island for better production and
distribution, and look at that album sleeve: too hot to handle or what?..
Other than, perhaps, again lacking the same
consistency of crunchy riffage as Betty
Davis (none of Betty's guitar players simply had as much flashy arrogance
as Neal Schon), Nasty Gal is in
every other respect a funk monster. First and foremost, this is because Betty
is simply unleashed: obviously, her vocal range has not improved one bit, but
for sheer nastiness / bitchiness, look no further — if the singing circa 1973
might still sound a little repressed and stiff at times, in 1975 there are no
inhibitions whatsoever. Usually, it takes a very well-developed artistic
persona to make a slogan like "I ain't nothing but a nasty gal!"
sound like the real thing — in this
particular occasion, I do not even wish to consider this «artistry», it seems
to be the real thing. I'm sure Tina
Turner could do this if she wanted to (in fact, being a much better technical
singer, she could have done this even better), but the truth is that she just didn't do it, and neither did anybody
else. And when everybody else started
doing it, it was too late anyway, because the accompanying music had turned to
shit long ago.
Every single song on here is great in its own
way. The music, heavily dependent on clavinet and funky bass parts, takes
active cues from Stevie Wonder (you can almost tell how many times each of
these musicians had spun Innervisions
before walking into the studio), but exchanges Stevie's socially charged spirit
with a sexually charged one. The nagging «nasal» riff of ʽTalkin'
Trashʼ agrees with the «talking trash» message of the song to perfection;
the speedy mix of keyboard and guitar notes on ʽFeelinsʼ reflects the
physiological message of ʽFeelinsʼ ("pinch her, squeeze her, help
her live again!", and the whole song is nothing but a rapid succession of
«pinches» and «squeezes», like an aggressive-erotic musical massage); and few
funk tunes have the catchiness of ʽShut Off The Lightʼ, whose
clavinet backbone could almost rival ʽSuperstitionʼ, except that it
intentionally goes in a «nasty fun» rather than «danceable seriousness»
direction.
Somehow, even every kind of approach that did not work earlier on now does work.
ʽF.U.N.Kʼ continues the line of ʽThey Say I'm Differentʼ,
with Betty once again resorting to the «list principle», counting off her
idols — this time, they are R&B and funk people rather than old bluesmen,
though, culminating in a brief reminiscence of the good times Betty had with
Jimi (nobody really knows if they had an actual affair, but Miles sure thought
so), and this whole stuff is much more up her alley, not to mention the music,
which is darker, thicker, and, well, funkier. Even the obligatory ballad
(ʽYou And Iʼ), recorded in big band jazz style, is good, as she
finally learns to bypass her limitations and, instead of trying to cope with a
complexly modulated vocal hook, just turns it into a hot sexual dream
("I'm just a child, trying to be a woman...") that, goddammit, is
almost believable (as much as the old «nasty bitch got soul» trick is a
cliché, every once in a while somebody comes along and executes it to
perfection one more time).
However, the lady seems to be sitting firmest
of all in the saddle when she's got someone, or something, to play off — in
ʽDedicated To The Pressʼ, she addresses those critical naysayers that
dared to condemn her style for extreme wildness, and for about four minutes
turns her vocal tract into a veritable cat-o'-nine-tails: "Well I really
don't know what they're talking about / I just can't seem to keep my tongue in
my mouth / That's all folks". True enough, but it's not the tongue that matters so much, actually,
as it is the throat — and not the actual words she speaks, but the way that they are spoken. The press
happens to be lucky that the message was delivered by vinyl transfer — anybody
who got that personally, face-to-face, would have probably melted away on the
spot.
Throw in a couple of slower, steamier, subtler
sexual provocations (ʽGettin' Kicked Offʼ; a newly re-recorded, and
much sharper, version of ʽI Will Take That Rideʼ, now retitled
ʽLone Rangerʼ), and Nasty Gal
wins out even in terms of diversity — the message may be the same throughout,
but there are several routes of delivery, thoroughfares, shortcuts, and space
warping included. It is amazing that an album of this level of verve ultimately failed to chart, even despite heavy
publicity from Island Records, but, apparently, the «black market» at the time
was even more conservative than the «white market», with people opting for
Earth, Wind & Fire, Al Green, Kool & The Gang, and The Pointer Sisters
instead; all of them worthy contenders, but in terms of sheer bravado, not even
close to the level of fury that Nasty
Gal has to offer.
But make no mistake — the reasons behind my
enthusiastic thumbs
up here are not at all limited to the «unleashing» of the sex demon
in Betty's persona, because much, if not most, of Nasty Gal is fine, top-level funk stuff as well. Even without the
vocals, it would still be an impressive instrumental feat — one might think,
though, that it probably couldn't have existed that way without the vocals,
because, no doubt about it, it was nothing but the lady's fiery personality
that managed to rev the musicians up to these ecstatic heights. A coin toss
between Betty Davis and Nasty Gal as the finest she had to
offer, but then, why choose at all when her recording career was so unfortunately
short anyway?
IS IT LOVE OR DESIRE? (1976; 2009)
1) Is It Love Or Desire; 2)
It's So Good; 3) Whorey Angel; 4) Crashin' From Passion; 5) When Romance Says
Goodbye; 6) Bottom Of The Barrel; 7) Stars Starve, You Know; 8) Let's Get
Personal; 9) Bar Hoppin'; 10) For My Man.
Recorded in 1976, not released until 2009, when
the small «Light In The Attic» label somehow managed to got hold of Betty's
entire stock and reintroduce it to the small segment of knowledge-seeking
public. This is not a bootleg, though, or some obscure rag-tag collection of
demos — this is a bona fide Betty
Davis LP that Island Records were supposed to release, but canceled for unknown
reasons, possibly over some creative falling out with the artist or simply
being way too disappointed by the low sales of Nasty Gal. In any case, from a commercial standpoint their decision
may have been right: I seriously doubt that Is It Love Or Desire could have sold more copies than its
predecessor.
For one thing, the record not only clashed with
the times, it made a point out of
clashing with the times — ʽBottom Of The Barrelʼ is a fierce
anti-disco stand, recorded at an age when disco had not yet completely pushed
«classic funk» out of the limelight, but was already invading its territory
with a vengeance, being still relatively fresh, hip, and, in the eyes of some
people, «progressive», so any type of battle cry like "take off that
disco, dance to what you're hearing", not to mention "remember how
it used to be in the Sixties", might have easily been interpreted as a
self-pitying retrograde rant. But, for that matter, it is probably the first rant, chronologically, that consciously
opposes the cool sounds of the Sixties to the down-in-the-dumps musical state
of today, which makes it somewhat historically important, I'd say.
Yet on the whole, Betty's fourth album itself
is a little «dumpy»: one additional reason why the people at Island decided to
condemn it to a quarter century of shelf life is simply that it does not stand
competition with Nasty Gal on any level — songwriting, performance,
production. The music is not bad at all, but it seems that throughout her short
career Betty worked in sine function mode: one «red-hot» record followed by a
«tempered» one, and, following that principle, Is It Love Or Desire? had in its mind to explore some new sound combinations,
throw in a few subtle and not-so-subtle new messages, and also lend more space
to Betty's backers than Betty herself. That last point is probably the most
important: this is the only album in Davis' catalog where the primary emphasis,
due mainly to production reasons, frequently shifts from Betty to the instrumentalists
and additional vocalists, so that the «nasty gal» feels more like part of a
band than the out-of-her-mind band leader.
And, even though it was never in Betty's
character to forget all about the music and just concentrate on her
personality in the first place, this shift of balance is still unpleasant — I
mean, who the heck would want to listen to a Betty Davis album on which she
feels like a bit player in her own band? Yet this is exactly the kind of thing
that greets us on the title track, where the lady seems altogether lost in a
thick mesh of clavinets, guitars, and back vocalists who are mixed almost as
high as the front vocalist herself. The basic clavinet groove, as usual, is
funky, tough, and ideally suited to her style, but the vocal presence leaves a
lot to be desired. Perhaps it is just a fault of the mix, I am not denying that
— but then it's a fault that permeates the entire album.
The hideously titled ʽWhorey Angelʼ
is the album's centerpiece, and it is as deeply flawed as it is great — the
introductory riff alone makes life worth living, but then most of the tune is
given over to Fred Mills (the band's keyboard player) to sing, and there is
something about his duet with Betty that just doesn't seem right; maybe a lack
of distinct personality — technically, he is a better singer, but hardly a
more interesting one. Still, it's a good exercise in tension-pumping: their
dynamic build-up towards the "I spread my wings" bridge rocks just
fine with me.
Oddly enough, it is the more quiet,
suspense-oriented tracks here, with fewer overdubs and more Betty presence,
that seem to crawl under the skin on a more consistent basis. The minimalistic
R&B ballad ʽWhen Romance Says Goodbyeʼ and particularly the album
closer ʽFor My Manʼ (unfortunately, an all-too short quasi-snippet)
are really dialogs between two thrilling, subconscience-undermining bass lines
and Betty in «dark sentimental mode», and both of them point to a very
interesting, unpredictable line of future development — it is hard, after all,
to retain the same «nasty gal flame» for years on end, but it is also a shame
to lose the flame, and stuff like ʽFor My Manʼ shows how the flame
can be very successfully internalized.
Still, despite this uncomfortable muffling of
personality, the actual music on the album does rule throughout, no matter if
the band is playing it soft or loud, and there is little doubt that a character
as strong as Betty's would be agreeing to compromise quality — thus, faced
between the choice of compromising or disappearing, it is no wonder that she
preferred to disappear. After her breakup with Island Records, she resurfaced
only once: in 1979, a recording session was held where she redid some of the
songs from Is It Love and threw in a
few new ones, later bootlegged under the name of Hangin' Out In Hollywood without the artist's consent and not
generally held in high esteem by the connoisseurs. Upon that, she retired
completely from the music scene, and who could blame her? Most of the sweaty
funk outfits of the 1970s did not survive the transition to the new decade
either, crashing down in flames or, even worse, evolving into trashy, anti-musical
automatons; most people never had the luck of a Michael Jackson, or the
enhanced-for-the-Eighties genius of a Prince...
...but that is really digressing way beyond the
point, and the point is: strike my criticism off the record and, if you have
already heard Betty's first three albums, get this one as well. Everybody needs
an honest-to-God disco-bashing funk song in their collection, everybody needs
to learn that "stars starve, you know" as narrated by a
too-hot-for-stardom artist, everybody needs some catchy reggae-pop à la ʽBar Hoppin'ʼ, and
on the whole, of course, this is a certified thumbs up.
#1 RECORD (1972)
1) Feel; 2) The Ballad Of El
Goodo; 3) In The Street; 4) Thirteen; 5) Don't Lie To Me; 6) The India Song; 7)
When My Baby's Beside Me; 8) My Life Is Right; 9) Give Me Another Chance; 10)
Try Again; 11) Watch The Sunrise; 12) ST100/6.
The legend of Big Star, the proverbial
«out-of-time underdog», radiates such a strong field that for each of Big
Star's three «classic» albums, there is its own group of champions — and then
there is a fourth one that claims all three are equally great, but my
understanding is that these guys are mostly poseurs, because there is no way
one could have equally strong feelings for #1
Record, Radio City, and Sister Lovers, so different are they in
terms of songwriting, production, attitude, and cohesiveness. Personally, I
have always belonged to the #1 Record
camp, and the more I listen to this album, the more I feel that the band's
legendary status may be fully justified by it and it alone. Speaking of Big
Star in clichéd terms of «the greatest band you have never heard of» is
an uninteresting occupation, but, fortunately, one does not need to do that in
order to just sit back and enjoy some of this wonderful music.
The actual «wonder» is generated by a brief,
happy collaboration period between two talented songwriters — Alex Chilton,
formerly of the Memphis-based blue-eyed soul combo The Box Tops; and Chris
Bell, formerly of Rock City and Icewater, also Memphis-based but incomparable
to The Box Tops in terms of chart success or overall notoriety. Chilton's
original idea was to establish a Simon & Garfunkel type of partnership,
but Bell convinced him to retain the rock'n'roll band format, and, fortunately,
good sense prevailed, or else we'd have no power-pop aesthetics and millions of
aspiring indie kids and hipsters would be deprived of their biggest idols.
Of course, «power pop» is an extremely vague
term, and if you think of it in purely musical terms («pop songs with hard rock
guitar riffs» or something like that), #1
Record hardly even qualifies. There might be, like, just two or three
«power pop» songs like that on the entire album — ʽFeelʼ, ʽIn
The Streetʼ, probably ʽWhen My Baby's Beside Meʼ (ʽDon't
Lie To Meʼ has more of a blues-rock feel to it, not a proper «pop» tune).
Most of the songs are quite soft, with acoustic foundations, owing much more
to the folkie idioms of the West and East coasts than to the Kinks, the Small
Faces, or Cream. This, by the way, is the source of much misguided
disappointment: plenty of people come to #1
Record, expecting «power», and come away disappointed because all they got
was some sissy acoustic strumming and whiny vocals.
But the real trick of #1 Record is not «power». Its real trick is a mix of emotional
simplicity, naïve idealism, musical honesty, and melodic talent. Chilton
and Bell sounded just as passionate and convinced about what they were doing as
the craziest prog rock stars of the time, but saw no need for infusing that
passion into ever-more-complicated musical formats. On the other hand, they saw
no need to pander to ongoing trends and fashions, either, eschewing excessive
sentimentalism or artificial sweetness à
la Carpenters — everything on #1
Record sounds totally healthy and organic, no sappy strings or cheap
Broadway inference allowed.
The second side of the album has been
especially frequently subject to criticism by «power pop fans» — a silly thing
to do, really, because, to my ears, it contains one of the finest sequences of
beautiful ballads ever committed to tape. How they managed it is something I
cannot understand, and can only ascribe to a great big positive influence that
Chilton and Bell had on each other, and which neither of them could
subsequently recreate on their own. ʽGive Me Another Chanceʼ deals
with a fairly simple and well-studied topic — guy gets mad at girl, girl throws
guy out, guy repents and begs forgiveness — but each and every line of the
vocal melody is so totally realistic (this may be the sorriest "I'm sorry,
I'm sorry" I've ever heard) that one cannot help but be reminded of all
those Lennon ballads, late in his Beatles or early in his solo career, that
operated along the same lines: take a simple theme of love / repentance / sadness
/ anger, etc., and strive to make it sound like you really mean it.
Or ʽTry Againʼ — isn't it a wonder
how its melodic twists so meaningfully echo its lyrics? "Lord, I've been
trying to be what I should...", done in a slightly lazy, twangy, hammocky
country mode (so you already get a feeling that maybe the hero hasn't been
trying that hard). Chord change, a
touch of tenseness and darkness, "but each time it gets a little
harder", a Harrison-esque "I feel the pain" (and he does, he
does), "but I'll try again" — loop, revert back to the beginning.
ABC-level simple, 100% efficient. Then the vocal melody is lended over to the
guitar, and they repeat the same stuff without words — to exactly the same
effect. Chillin'.
When it comes to loudness and, well, «power»,
Chilton and Bell are equally capable. Look at how ʽFeelʼ is all based
on descending chord patterns — echoing the «personal apocalypse» mood of lines
like "you're driving me to ruin" and "I feel like I'm dying, I'm
never gonna live again" — even though, in general, the song is so loud and
rock'n'rollish and even has a brawny brass section during the instrumental
breaks. Conversely, the main riff of ʽIn The Streetʼ is always rising
and going in circles, well adapted to the song's «cruising anthem» stylistics.
And ʽWhen My Baby's Beside Meʼ is their equivalent of ʽI Want
To Hold Your Handʼ — repetitive, triumphant, oblivious to everything
other than that overwhelming love wave.
But the album's magnum opus, no doubt about it, is ʽThe Ballad Of El
Goodoʼ. A young pop boy's impression of a deep gospel-soul anthem — a song
about standing up for oneself, with just a little help from God — it sounds
particularly ironic in the overall context of Big Star's misfortunes, yet at
the time it was written, the future did
look promising, and Chilton's performance here is totally credible. The hooks
are actually very simple: the song does not «properly» pick up until the chorus
/ bridge part, and, basically, all they do is hammer the same two-part message
in your subconscious — "ain't no one going to turn me round" and
"hold on" — but the first part is determination incarnate, and the
second part gets by not through shouting, but through stretching out the "hold"
part so as to actually convey the impression of hooooooolding on to something.
So simple, so clever, so unforgettable. If ʽFeelʼ does not succeed in
making you a lifelong friend of this band, ʽEl Goodoʼ will complete
the task with a flourish.
Even though I have not mentioned all the
greatness of this album (ʽThirteenʼ and ʽMy Life Is Rightʼ
deserve their own extended kowtows), the things that have been said probably suffice — #1 Record is a product of spontaneously, perhaps even accidentally,
generated melodic genius, and the first in a never-ending, though slowly
dwindling, series of great records that kept the simplistic pop idealism of the
Sixties alive and kicking through the following decades. From that point of
view, there was no competition whatsoever for this sort of style in 1972, since
the other two ends of the «holy power pop» triangle of the early 1970s,
Badfinger and The Raspberries, did not have Big Star's ambitions. Chilton and
Bell were «pretentious», yes, and it shows up not only in their chosen band
name or their chosen album title, but in their playing style, in their vocal
harmonies, in their quasi-religious attitudes, but all of that, when coupled
with said melodic genius, is to their advantage. Pretentious, but simple;
trivial, but bombastic; always accessible, but never «fluffy», #1 Record is certainly not an album
that could be brushed off as mere light entertainment — it does lay a serious claim to the status of #1 record for the year
1972, at least in the «simple pop» department. (Although, for the record, I do
wish they would have kept bassist Andy Hummel's ʽThe India Songʼ off
the album — it is superficially pretty, but not only does it have nothing to do
with India, being all acoustic guitars and flutes, it actually sounds like a second-rate
flower power era outtake from some long forgotten Frisco hippie band).
On a historical note, rumors saying that #1 Record was either ignored or
maligned at the time are grossly exaggerated: most of the critical reviews
recognized the album's genius (and how could anybody with ears not recognize it?), and, with proper
marketing strategies, at least its rocking numbers, such as ʽIn The
Streetʼ or ʽWhen My Baby's Beside Meʼ, could have been major hit
singles like anything else at the time. Unfortunately, Stax Records,
responsible for the distribution, somehow flunked at it, and even though the
record got sufficient airplay, it was simply unavailable for purchase
throughout the States, or so it has been said — a proverbial tale of bad luck
and the importance of good management for great art to find its way. On the
other hand, really great art will
always find its way, eventually, even without proper management, so I am happy
to know that #1 Record does not need
my thumbs up
endorsement in the slightest to help it achieve «classic» status: like the
even less-selling Velvet Underground's debut, it is one of those albums that
launched a thousand ships anyway.
RADIO CITY (1974)
1) O My Soul; 2) Life Is
White; 3) Way Out West; 4) What's Goin' Ahn; 5) You Get What You Deserve; 6)
Mod Lang; 7) Back Of A Car; 8) Daisy Glaze; 9) She's A Mover; 10) September
Gurls; 11) Morpha Too; 12) I'm In Love With A Girl.
By the time Big Star got around to recording
its second album, it had already gone through the loss of a founding member
(Bell), the return of a founding member (Bell), another loss of a founding
member (Bell again), disbandment, and reunion. All of which means: if, somehow,
ʽO My Soulʼ happens to sound to you like a rusty, creaky,
patched-and-mended old engine ready to fall to pieces at any second, but still
puffing away and doing its job — well, this is no coincidence. Chilton, Hummel,
and Stephens are learning to play as a trio, and it shows.
The absence of Bell logically leaves Chilton as
the primary songwriter (Hummel wrote ʽWay Out Westʼ and gets
songwriting co-credits on a number of other songs; also, Bell's input has been
acknowledged for two of the album's best songs — ʽO My Soulʼ and
ʽBack Of A Carʼ, even though he has not been officially credited),
and opinions on that turn of events happen to differ. Personally, I lament it:
Alex may have been a talented, sincere, and «visionary» songwriter and
performer, but he lacked the self-discipline and patience necessary to shape
all those ideas in a proper musical form. At the same time, his mental health
was certainly stable enough so as not to make him eligible for the «mad genius»
category where we put people like Syd Barrett and Skip Spence; neither Radio City nor its even more bizarre
follow-up really qualify as «schizophrenic» albums. Radio City, in particular, shows a fairly conventional
understanding of melodicity, and its lyrics and basic emotions are not all that
different from the ones of #1 Record.
Essentially, these are all simple pop songs, and their uniqueness stems as much
from «personal untidyness» as it does from one-of-a-kind artistry.
This explains why, no matter how much I listen
to Radio City, there are probably
only three or four songs that stay with me when the music's over. Take
something like ʽMod Langʼ, for instance — there may be some potential here for an impressive glam-rocker, but
neither its distorted blues-rock riff nor its vocal melody ever manage to come
together in a proper hook. These chords really sound like something a Pete
Townshend could have stumbled upon in one of his 15-minute long live improv
pieces, fussed around with for a few seconds, then dropped in favor of some
other ideas — and here we have Chilton trying to build an entire song around
it, but he cannot find anything better than a repetitive snap of "how
long... can this go on?" for the chorus hook. Stuff like that is, at best,
okay for some bonus demo outtake.
It does not necessarily get better on the moody
sentimental stuff: a song like ʽWhat's Going Ahnʼ may have plenty of
sad autumnal atmosphere, but its guitar lines and harmonies seem disconnected
and underworked, while its lead vocals seem artistic, but simply telling a sad
story rather than drawing the listener in with the same tricks of inflection
and modulation as, say, ʽGive Me Another Chanceʼ or ʽTry
Againʼ. Worst of all, every once in a while Alex comes across as a pathetic,
annoying whiner rather than a noble broken heart — so maybe there is something to be said about extra
spontaneity and «honesty», but then this is
supposed to be art, not life, doggone it, and I'd rather hear «heartbreaking
polish» than «irritating rawness». (That is not to say that rawness cannot be
heartbreaking, or that polish may not be irritating, of course — it's just the
way it seems to work with Big Star in particular).
Naturally, these complaints should not be extrapolated
to the high points of the album. ʽO My Soulʼ, in particular, be it by
accident or not, sounds like nothing else ever written — the funkiest power pop
song ever made, or was that the poppiest power funk song?... whatever, the
interaction between Hummel's «surf-style» twangy bass swoops, Chilton's merger
of jingle-jangle with chicken-scratch, and Stephens' exuberant «look-at-me
I'm-so-power-trio gonna-be-Keith-Moon- for-a-while» assault on his drumset
creates a completely unique sound. Probably accidental — they never did
anything even remotely close to this one ever again. No proper vocal hook,
which is one of several reasons why the single flopped commercially, but it
could just as well be an instrumental number — the vocals are the least interesting
aspect of this maniacal celebration of the wonders of life.
It is less interesting to rave on about
ʽSeptember Gurlsʼ, as that song has long since left the lower
stratosphere where it could be affected by criticism — «hating it» would be
telling more about the hater than the song, and «praising it» would bring no
new stimulus to this world. Clearly, its legend is all about that guitar tone —
candy-sweet compression with an aggressive punch, jangle and power all in one,
«Roger McGuinn meets Pete Townshend», the sound that launched a thousand
bands. Everything else is secondary: the lyrics do not match the mood (the
protagonist may have been "crying all the time", but it hardly
shows), the Byrdsey solo, as usual, is as crudely thought out as they come, and
the line "I was your butch and
you were touched" really only makes sense now when the Bangles sing it,
but who cares? That song is immortalized by its first twelve seconds, and
everyone knows that the first twelve seconds are always the most important ones
in any song, unless it's a sidelong or something. Or, if not everyone, then at
least the Beatles knew that, and weren't Big Star trying to... well, you
know?..
I mean, they obviously were on ʽBack Of A Carʼ, whose title resembles a
then-recent McCartney song from Ram
but whose overall mood is certainly closer to the fumes of Rubber Soul, except that it sounds more like the unruly, shirt-out,
pants-down, heavily ungroomed younger brother of ʽNowhere Manʼ and
ʽIf I Needed Someoneʼ than a disciplined copy-cat effort — which, I
will admit that, may be an essential part of its charm: if you are going to rob
your idol's apartment, at least do not forget to rip up the bedsheets and piss
in the closet for extra spice.
Altogether, this ramble-tamble certainly
deserves a thumbs
up, if only for being such a great candidate for the title of
«messiest power-pop album ever released». Many people actually love this mix of fabulous guitar tones
with green-banana pop hooks, forming the liberal «Radio City Party» in
opposition to the similarly influential conservative «#1 Record Party» (and the
much less popular, somewhat extremist «Sister Lovers Party») — since both
albums are usually sold on the same CD these days, it makes no sense to
formally recommend one over the other, but my own opinion is on record: Chilton
is good enough, but Chilton/Bell is better, and if we are talking influence,
well, the Chilton/Bell example of how to add good form to your pop instincts
should have been much more influential than the solo Chilton example of how to
flash your pop instincts while avoiding good form. Unfortunately, it wasn't —
and I am pretty sure I would have a much
more favorable general opinion of modern indie pop bands if they were taking
their clues from #1 Record than from
Radio City.
THIRD/SISTER LOVERS (1975/1978)
1) Kizza Me; 2) Thank You
Friends; 3) Big Black Car; 4) Jesus Christ; 5) Femme Fatale; 6) O, Dana; 7)
Holocaust; 8) Kangaroo; 9) Stroke It Noel; 10) For You; 11) You Can't Have Me;
12) Nighttime; 13) Blue Moon; 14) Take Care; 15*) Nature Boy; 16*) Till The End
Of The Day; 17*) Dream Lover; 18*) Downs; 19*) Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On.
Lord knows I am far from the world's biggest
Big Star fan, and I am even farther away from being the biggest fan of their
third and strangest attempt at world domination, but man oh man is
ʽHolocaustʼ a terrific song — one of the most unique and greatest
ever recorded. There have been many different ways tried out in the history of
pop music to make musical pictures of «human wrecks», and there have been tons
of experts on human wreckage, from Ray Davies to John Lennon to Bob Dylan to
Pete Townshend etc., but none of them ever
scaled such odd depths of, well, let's call it «darkly haunting romanticism»,
as Alex Chilton on this particular song.
I do not know if this was the first ever usage
of the word ʽholocaustʼ in a pop tune, let alone a metaphorical
usage: Chilton himself prudently saves it for the last line of the song, as if
everything that came before was just an atmospheric buildup to the culmination
— "you're a wasted face / you're a sad-eyed lie / you're a holocaust"
(and thank God the song never became a huge hit, or he would have imminently
been forced to eat shit from idiots who would accuse him of calling the
Holocaust a sad-eyed lie). Anyway, if it was, it is a well-deserved first, a
daring move that is perfectly adequate for such a musically daring composition.
The piano/guitar duo alone would be worth any musical prize, as the faraway
slide licks, cooing, weeping, or wailing like small packs of seagulls, are
upheld by the romantic piano — then there is the grim cello part, hanging over
it all like a dark cloud, occasionally spilling some ice-cold rain — then there
are the vocals: bittersweet, detached, caring and tender on the surface, but
emotionally dead deep inside.
When it all begins — "your eyes are almost
dead / can't get out of bed / and you can't sleep..." — that is exactly
the message that we are getting. Unlike Syd Barrett, Chilton did not drive
himself to genuine madness or any drug-induced cerebral coma, but he sings the
song as if he were frozen in space, locked forever in a state of
semi-functional dismantlement. Was he justified in this? Did the clumsy flop of
his previous two albums, in which he had invested so many hopes, really trigger
this state, or was it an artistic put-on? As usual, it does not matter — what does matter is that his personal
troubles unexpectedly uncovered and enhanced his greatest talent, that of
creating haunting moods out of incoherent, sometimes downright chaotic musical
fragments.
If Big Star's first album opened in «sexually
frustrated teenager» mode, and the second album in «idealistically exuberant
adult» mode, with both ʽFeelʼ and ʽO My Soulʼ setting much
of the tone for whatever would follow, then Third opens in dangerously disturbed maniac mode. Chilton's
relationship with Lesa Aldridge, who is the ʽLesaʼ of the song and to
whom it is obviously dedicated, was said to have been stormy, and it shows:
dating a guy who sings "I want to feel you deep inside" with all the
passion of a Buffalo Bill from Silence Of
The Lambs is not a very wise
thing to do. ʽKizza Meʼs schizophrenic piano part is like a bunch of
brain cells set in some random Brownian motion, and what does "I want to
white OUT!" even mean? In a way,
this might really be one of the scariest love confessions ever recorded.
In between ʽKizza Meʼ and
ʽHolocaustʼ, opening and closing the first side of Third/Sister Lovers as «properly»
reconstructed by producer Jim Dickinson when the album was finally released on
CD in 1992, lies a small world of weirdness and unpredictability. The
recordings themselves were made in 1974, almost immediately after the flub of Radio City, but already after the departure
of Andy Hummel; in fact, Chilton did not even think about them as «Big Star»
material, which allowed him to break away from the «power pop» formula. But
since he did record it with Jody Stephens on drums (and a host of session
musicians on bass, extra guitars and keyboards), and since Jody contributed at
least one song (ʽFor Youʼ), the name «Big Star» was retained after
all — now doubly ironic, since both #1
Record and Radio City at least
had some actual «big star potential», whereas Third had no commercial prospective from the very start. Which is
exactly what the record executives decided: upon hearing the freshly pressed
promotional copy in 1975, they immediately shelved it for posteriority. The
album was not released until 1978, on the PVC label, in a differently running
track order. Whether it sold more than ten copies, I have no idea.
As far as the first side is concerned, Third fully deserves its cult-legend
reputation. Besides the two already mentioned highlights, there is ʽThank
You Friendsʼ, which may be one of the finest demonstrations of how
important the proper intonation and modulation can be to whatever you are
singing — the lyrics per se do not give out a single hint, but just listen to
the way Alex sneers at us with his "thank you friends / wouldn't be here
if it wasn't for you" and you will almost feel sorry for his so-called
«friends». There is ʽJesus Christʼ, where he does pretty much the
same thing by sending up the idea of a Christmas carol — although in this case,
there are several layers to the song, as if Chilton were truly rejoicing at the
beauty of the story of Christ while at the same time satirizing its time-worn
clichés and the associated brainless traditionalism. (Nice guitar lines,
too — the closest they actually get to the good old «power pop» here). There
is a faithful, very much à propos
cover of the Velvets' ʽFemme Fataleʼ (with pretty backing vocals from
Lesa), and an oddly hysterical, near-crying «folk-soul» number (ʽO
Danaʼ) with Chilton babbling out nonsense in an utterly heartbroken
manner.
Second side of the LP does not hold nearly as
many thrills, in my opinion: too often, these terminally ill «songs» drift off
into pure atmosphere (ʽKangarooʼ), which can still be delightful because
of all the odd combinations of different melodic bits played by different
instruments (ʽStroke It Noelʼ is like a mix of Vivaldi and acoustic
Neil Young), but lack proper hooks and, too often, seem to lack intellectual or
even emotional interpretation — as if, at some points during the sessions,
Chilton would let his unhappiness, disillusionment, and paranoia completely
overrule his artistic wit and just carry him wherever his subconscious would
go, and, despite what we are so often told by music critics, letting your
subconscious directly in the pilot seat rarely, if ever, results in solid,
long-lasting art. Still, even the worst material on this album, despite
sounding like chaotic sketches of bizarrely mixed ideas, is always arranged
with taste, and fans of «experimental baroque pop», whatever that means, will
find everything to their delight.
Rock critics usually love «broken albums»
recorded by «broken artists», the madder the better, and consequently tend to
overrate Third. Like its
predecessor, the album could have benefited from longer sessions, better
planning, and more catchiness — none of which would be incompatible with
wallowing in self-pity and reveling in madness. But if you happen to be
wallowing in self-pity yourself, and need a trusty companion, Alex Chilton is
your man on this happy occasion. Scare away your girlfriend, viciously trash
all your friends, insult your religious neighbors, have your mum call for the
paramedics — Third does all that and
more, and for this psychological help alone deserves a clear-cut thumbs up.
PS. On a further technical note, the CD edition
contains five «bonus» tracks, recorded at the same sessions, some of which used
to appear before on some of the multiple versions of the album (e.g.
ʽDownsʼ and a completely out-of-place cover of ʽWhole Lotta
Shakin' Going Onʼ, so very bad that its only function here is that of an
oxymoron — find the song that is as far removed, mood-wise, as possible from
the overall theme of the album, and throw it in with the rest). Of these,
ʽDream Loverʼ is of essential value — like a blueprint for about 50%
of the total output of trendy indie art-pop bands of the 2000s: twisted,
bizarre, moody, pretentious, and if you learn it by heart, you may easily be
excused for missing out on the entire career of, say, Deerhunter. Well, yes, I am exaggerating, but you can't really
make an efficient point these days without a hyperbole.
IN SPACE (2005)
1) Dony; 2) Lady Sweet; 3)
Best Chance; 4) Turn My Back On The Sun; 5) Love Revolution; 6) February's
Quiet; 7) Mine Exclusively; 8) A Whole New Thing; 9) Aria, Largo; 10) Hung Up
With Summer; 11) Do You Wanna Make It; 12) Makeover.
What a sweetly awful album — well worth
hearing, actually, if only to procure oneself a proverbial example of how
everything can go utterly wrong when one thinks way too much about getting everything just right.
When Chilton and Stephens were making Third, they may have been wasted, but
one thing they were not trying to consciously make was a «Big Star
recipé». The album simply reflected the state of Alex Chilton's head at
the time, give or take a few neurons. Fast forward to 2005 now, by which time a
revamped, strictly nostalgia-oriented «Big Star», consisting of Chilton,
Stephens, and two members of The Posies, a new-school UK power pop band with
plenty of their own entertainment value, had been touring the local circuits
for more than a decade, concentrating almost exclusively on a #1 Record/Radio City setlist. With the
Big Star legend riding strong and re-gaining in popularity among the hipster
crowds, somebody must have come up with the idea of giving people a little bit
more of what they want — and this is how In
Space, a collection of 12 bona fide power pop songs co-written by Chilton,
Auer, and Stringfellow, was born.
First things first: do not believe those that
say «this does not sound like Big Star at all!» (and pay even less attention to
those who retort with «well, times change, don't they, why should you expect
this to sound like the Big Star of old?»). Because In Space does sound very
much like Big Star. The idea was, by
all means, to make an album that sounded very much like Big Star, and since it
is not tremendously difficult to make an album that sounds like Big Star,
unless you are a complete musical moron, there was no way In Space would not end up sounding like Big Star. Pop rhythms;
guitars that glitter and jangle; guitars that play colorful distorted pop rhythms;
psychedelic vocal harmonies; lyrical themes of sun, summer, and
sentimentalism; occasional breakthroughs into more rocking territory;
retro-oriented production values — what have I missed?
The correct criticism to make is not that In Space «does not sound like (classic)
Big Star»; the correct criticism is that it tries too hard to sound like
classic Big Star, and concentrates so much on the form that it totally forgets
about substance. The absolute majority of these songs — nay, all of these songs, without a single
exception — are melodically bland, three-times derivative, and completely
devoid of any artistic sense. Ballads, pop rockers, hard rockers, whatever,
everything here is a cliché, pulled out of the dusty storage box full
of Beatlisms, Beachboyisms, and, somewhere at the bottom, Marcbolanisms and a
few other ism-ism-isms. Sometimes those isms are fully intentional, which does
not make them any better: for instance, ʽTurn My Back On The Sunʼ
begins with a «deceptive» quotation from ʽWouldn't It Be Niceʼ, which
would be acceptable if the song itself were any good, but it isn't, so it
wouldn't.
As for original hooks, there simply aren't any.
None whatsoever. Which is actually quite amazing: so maybe Chilton's
gift for songwriting had gone down the drain as a combined result of too much
stress in the 1970s and largely laying off the business in the subsequent
decades, but Auer and Stringfellow weren't too bad as main songwriters for the
Posies — so I will just have to assume that they inadvertently drove their
songwriting instincts into the wall when operating under the self-imposed
command of «write a Big Star album». For every song that is crafted even a wee
bit more exquisitely than the average mass (ʽLady Sweetʼ has a whiff
of genuine elegance about it), they compensate with something honestly terrible
(ʽLove Revolutionʼ is one of the cheesiest chunks of pop-funk ever
put to tape by a non-R&B artist; even if it were intended as a parody, its
immediate effect is simply that of a bad song) — but the average mass simply
elicits no emotional response whatsoever. Dull, empty shells of songs, which
neither the nice guitar tones nor the pretty harmonies can help to save — even
though I am fairly sure that it is exactly the nice guitar tones and pretty
harmonies that have tricked many a power pop fan into accepting or even
admiring In Space, as seen from
multiple Web reviews.
Do not waste money on this pathetic cash-in, if
it can be helped at all; most likely, the very existence of this album will go
down in history as just a minor unfortunate footnote to the legacy of Big Star.
My biggest regret is that Chilton did not live long enough to remedy the
situation — in 2010, he died of a heart attack, remembered, respected and loved
by all those who (I hope) were willing to look past his latest failure, a
disgraceful thumbs
down if there ever was one. Take a lesson here, kids, and don't ever
let nostalgia rule the day when it comes to writing music. Influence — yep,
inspiration — for sure, but never nostalgia. It'll only make you look stupid.
ADDENDA:
LIVE (1974/1992)
1) September Gurls; 2) Way Out
West; 3) Mod Lang; 4) Don't Lie To Me; 5) O My Soul; 6) Interview; 7) The
Ballad Of El Goodo; 8) Thirteen; 9) I'm In Love With A Girl; 10) Motel Blues;
11) In The Street; 12) You Get What You Deserve; 13) Daisy Glaze; 14) Back Of A
Car; 15) She's A Mover.
Arguably the most symbolic, and the saddest,
moment of this album is when, in a short interview that links the two parts of
the radio concert (recorded at Ultrasonic Studios in NYC), the announcer/interviewer
says, "...I just came across a review of your new album called Radio City, and the guy started off the
review by saying, ʽhere it is only January, and we already have the album
of yearʼ... you're getting an awful lot of critical acclaim for your new
album, it's really good!". "Yeah, that's, uh, nice", replies a
quite transparently lemon-faced Chilton, "I hope it sells. We've had critical
acclaim before".
Whether this internal panic is somehow
reflected in the band's actual live performance is debatable, but it is hard not to perceive this archival release
from that particular point of view — a tense, nervous Chilton, having to cope
with the recent loss of yet another band member (Hummel quit right after the
recording of Radio City, briefly
replaced by John Lightman, who is captured live on this album) and with worried
anticipation of whether they might be able to make it this time around. Nowhere does this tension show as strong as on
the solo acoustic performance of ʽThe Ballad Of El Goodoʼ, a song
that I'd never have thought could work without all the psychedelic-gospel
harmonies and cool flanging guitar effects, but it does work very well, with
just a slight extra drop of desperation in each of Alex's "ain't no one
going to turn me round", as the man slowly comes to realize that, soon
enough, he might be facing a choice of agreeing to be turned round — or to be
turned down by circumstances beyond his control and determination.
On the whole, this is not one of those great
lost live albums of all time, since Big Star was first and foremost a studio
band, only as perfect as the harmonies, the overdubs, and the mixing on each of
their songs. But it is still well worth hearing, if only to admire how closely
their «minimalist» lineup (one guitar, bass, drums) comes to recapturing all
the essence of their best songs. Even the short acoustic set that Alex
generates all on his own in the middle of the performance is fully adequate — I
have already mentioned ʽEl Goodoʼ, but ʽThirteenʼ with just
a six-string is every bit as gorgeous as the fuller arrangement on #1 Record. (ʽMotel Bluesʼ, a
rather whiny folk ramble, is not as good, a song written more for its plaintive
lyrics than anything else, and wisely left off the original albums).
A few of the numbers are somewhat botched: I am speaking particularly of the very
disappointing choice of ʽSeptember Gurlsʼ for the opening number,
since Alex was not able to reproduce that caramelly tone of the original which
constitutes about 50% of the song's success, and that is one song that really
cannot work with just one guitar and no harmonies. But ʽO My Soulʼ,
on the other hand, is terrific, with Lightman in full control of Hummel's
quirky bass zoops, Alex playing the funky rhythm parts with perfect precision,
and Stephens firing away with as much excitement as he displayed in the studio.
Most of the rock-oriented material from Radio
City is, in fact, beyond complaining, particularly when the original songs
themselves were good (because no amount of raw live rock'n'roll energy can save
something as pointless as ʽMod Langʼ).
My only sorrow is that the material focuses too
much on Radio City rather than #1 Record, but this is predictable —
with Bell long since out of the band, and the whole radio concert basically
serving as a promotional spot, and the «rockier» material of Radio City being altogether more
suitable for a live performance, complaining is futile. And who would dare to
complain, really, when listening to an obviously troubled musician who can
still play his fairly complex guitar lines and
sing on key and in tune at the same time? Unless you are a Big Star maniac or
something, you probably will not find yourself listening to this all the time,
but even one listen may generate some serious extra respect for Chilton both as
a human being and as a master craftsman, and from that point of view, Live is an essential archive release,
fully deserving of a thumbs up.
KEEP AN EYE ON THE SKY (2009)
[Track listing limited to titles that do not appear on regular Big Star
albums.]
CD I: 1) Psychedelic Stuff
[Chris Bell]; 2) All I See Is You [Icewater]; 3) Every Day As We Grow Closer
[Alex Chilton]; 4) Try Again [Rock City]; 7) In The Street (alt. mix); 8)
Thirteen (alt. mix); 10) The India Song (alt. mix); 11) When My Baby's Beside
Me (alt. mix); 12) My Life Is Right (alt. mix); 13) Give Me Another Chance
(alt. mix); 15) Gone With The Light; 16) Watch The Sunrise (single version);
17) ST 100/6 (alt. mix); 18) The Preacher (Rock City); 19) In The Street (alt.
single mix); 20) Feel (alt. mix); 21) The Ballad Of El Goodo (alt. lyrics); 22)
The India Song (alt. version); 23) Country Morn; 24) I Got Kinda Lost (demo);
25) Back Of A Car (demo); 26) Motel Blues (demo).
CD II: 1) There Was A Light
(demo); 2) Life Is White (demo); 3) What's Going Ahn (demo); 9) Mod Lang (alt.
mix); 10) Back Of A Car (alt. mix); 14) Morpha Too (alt. mix); 16) O My Soul
(alt. version); 17) She's A Mover (alt. version); 18) Daisy Glaze (rehearsal
version); 19) I Am The Cosmos (Chris Bell); 20) You And Your Sister (Chris
Bell); 21) Blue Moon (demo); 22) Femme Fatale (demo); 23) Thank You Friends
(demo); 24) Nightime (demo); 25) Take Care (demo); 26) You Get What You Deserve
(demo).
CD III: 1) Lovely Day (demo);
2) Downs (demo); 3) Jesus Christ (demo); 4) Holocaust (demo); 5) Big Black Car
(alt. demo); 6) Mañana; 25) Till The End Of The Day (alt. mix); 26)
Nature Boy (alt. mix).
CD IV: 1) When My Baby's
Beside Me; 2) My Life Is Right; 3) She's A Mover; 4) Way Out West; 5) The
Ballad Of El Goodo; 6) In The Street; 7) Back Of A Car; 8) Thirteen; 9) The
India Song; 10) Try Again; 11) Watch The Sunrise; 12) Don't Lie To Me; 13) Hot
Burrito #2; 14) I Got Kinda Lost; 15) Baby Strange; 16) Slut; 17) There Was A
Light; 18) ST 100/6; 19) Come On Now; 20) O My Soul.
A short-lived band like Big Star is an ideal
proposition for a comprehensive boxset — 3 or 4 CDs can easily digest everything that it has released
officially, as well as offer an exhaustive tour through the vaults of demos,
alternate versions, outtakes, and even samples of «band-related» work that was
not officially credited to it upon release. Keep An Eye On The Sky, released just a year before Chilton's death
(nice to know he was able to take one last look at his collected legacy before
finally heading out to his Big Star), proclaims to be doing just that. The
perfect box, right? «Drop everything and run», right?
Well, not quite. First and foremost, if you think
that buying this boxset eliminates the need to buy the albums, pay closer
attention. It does include all of the completed recordings for all three classic
Big Star records (and completely ignores the embarrassment of In Space, which is a plus as far as I'm
concerned), but at least a third part of them comes in «alternate mixes», which
sometimes include a few extra seconds of studio talk or noise before the song
comes in (not necessarily a good idea) and do, indeed, mix the tracks slightly
differently. Whether the old mixes or the new mixes sound better is a debatable
issue which you could easily debate without my participation (I am definitely
no «Mr. Mix Guy»), but the fact is, if you are a dedicated fan, this means you
will have to have the boxset and the
separate albums as well. In fact, I am fairly sure that the «alternate mixes»
were little other than an intentional bait to raise interest on the part of
fans who, naturally, already owned all the CDs.
Suppose, though, that you are a newcomer to Big
Star, and that you do not own any of their albums — would it make sense, then,
to go straight for the box? I do not think it would, no. All three albums put
together are cheaper, and the bonuses... well, this is where the interesting
part begins, though, frankly speaking, it is not that interesting.
Truthfully, one may Keep An Eye On The Sky for as long as it plays on, but the sky
hardly seems to hold a lot of surprises in store. Arguably the best additions
here are Chilton's acoustic demos, particularly of songs recorded for Radio City and Third. Most of them work very well on their own, with solid,
inspired playing and singing, although, frankly speaking, only a few of them
are actual «demos» — in the case of Third,
we generally hear just the basic tracks laid down in preparation for the
overdubs. Even so, ʽHolocaustʼ has its own eerie minimalistic charm
when it's just Alex and his piano.
As for the small bunch of previously
unavailable songs, they are no big deal. Early pre-Big Star tracks from the solo
careers of Chilton and Bell are basically the work of inexperienced Beatles
apprentices. Thus, ʽAll I See Is Youʼ by Icewater (one of Bell's
early bands) is nothing that you won't hear in a much better rendering by
Badfinger; actually, the chorus sounds suspiciously close to Lennon's "all
I want is you" from ʽDig A Ponyʼ, but since the song was
admittedly recorded in 1969, when Let It
Be had not yet come out, I have to assume a bizarre coincidence. (On the
other hand, ʽGone With The Lightʼ, an outtake from Big Star's early
sessions, does rip off ʽGood
Nightʼ, which, as I assume, they realized just in time to keep it off the
album). Bell's ʽPsychedelic Stuffʼ, which opens the chronology,
predicts nothing particularly enlightening with its title, and, sure enough, it
is psychedelic, but nothing else.
Later outtakes also include ʽMotel
Bluesʼ, of whose existence we were already aware through its inclusion on
the Live album — this version is
neither better nor worse; ʽGot Kinda Lostʼ, a rather grayish pop-rocker
in the style of Rubber Soul, but
without much passion; and several alternate versions of well-known songs with
different sets of lyrics (ʽCountry Mornʼ is really ʽWatch The
Sunriseʼ). Furthermore, there are also two singles from Chris Bell's solo
album, I Am The Cosmos, which, in
2009, acted as a «teaser» for the upcoming re-release on CD — showcasing his
own journey into the realm of ambitious art-pop, far more disciplined than the
paranoid ramble of Third, but also
somewhat less haunting, and making one regret even more that Bell and Chilton
only had the space of one LP to work on with each other.
Disc 4 of the package is probably the one that
might have the fans salivating: a complete recording of a live show played at
Lafayette's Music Room in Memphis in January '73, right after Bell's departure,
but with Hummel still in the band. The show is most notable for the setlist —
predictable entries from #1 Record
and previews of Radio City numbers
are then followed by an interesting set of covers, as the boys promote the
Kinks (ʽCome On Nowʼ), Todd Rundgren (ʽSlutʼ), T. Rex
(ʽBaby Strangeʼ), and even The Flying Burrito Brothers (ʽHot
Burrito #2ʼ) — instructive, since Gram Parsons is probably not the first
person one would associate with Big Star's sound, image, and atmosphere, but
now that they bring it on themselves, there most certainly has to be an influence. Unfortunately, the downside of the
recording is poor quality: audience noise does not interfere for the simple
reason that there were probably something like ten or twelve people present
altogether, but the equipment must have been piss-poor. And as for those
covers, well, you've heard them once for educational reasons, you probably
won't feel any need to hear them again. (Unless you simply want to show your
admiration for a band that can cover the Kinks, Todd Rundgren, T. Rex, and Gram
Parsons in one gig, and I do admit that bands like these are not always easy to
localize in one's neighborhood).
All in all, this is simultaneously a great boxset
(with particular care given to packaging and liner notes) — and a serious
disappointment. If anything, it would have made better sense if the whole
shenanigan was just put together as the three original albums, cleaned up and
remastered, each CD accompanied by a large set of bonus tracks, plus the Live album with bonus performances of
the Kinks / Rundgren / Bolan / Parsons tunes from the Memphis show. In this
particular form, Big Star's legacy looks somewhat fussy, chaotic, and «gappy».
Then again, who knows? A band as fussy and chaotic as Big Star might actually
look more adequate with a fussy and chaotic boxset to go along. It's up to you
to decide.
JUST AS I AM (1971)
1) Harlem; 2) Ain't No
Sunshine; 3) Grandma's Hands; 4) Sweet Wanomi; 5) Everybody's Talkin'; 6) Do It
Good; 7) Hope She'll Be Happier; 8) Let It Be; 9) I'm Her Daddy; 10) In My
Heart; 11) Moanin' And Groanin'; 12) Better Off Dead.
There has certainly been many a strange album
recorded in 1970-71, as idealistic psychedelia began losing ground to musical
psychotherapy, but the official debut of Bill Withers definitely deserves a
special place of its own. He was certainly not the first performer to combine
aspects of the post-Dylan «singer-songwriter» approach with the foundations of
soul and R&B, but he may have been the first black artist to try it out on
such a consistent basis — generating a sound and a feel that you cannot get
from any other artist, black or white, circa 1971. The title of the album itself
seems almost ironic in that light: Just
As I Am? It actually takes quite a while to figure out just as what exactly the man is, and even then,
it's hard to be sure.
Unlike typical R&B performers, Bill Withers
materialized out of nowhere — rather than being spotted in some local church or
club and put through a period of grooming, he just sent in some demo tapes to
L.A.-based Sussex Records; the label owner Clarence Avant liked what he heard,
signed Withers to a contract, and assigned no less than Booker T. Jones himself
to produce the man's first album. (Yes, boys and girls, it used to be that
easy, provided you had real talent to burn and a proper place to turn it up).
More than that — on his debut album, Withers is accompanied by Jim Keltner on
drums, Chris Ethridge (of the Flying Burrito Brothers) on bass, and Stephen
Stills on electric guitar. Any other debutant could have pissed his pants from
utter happiness right there in the studio — but one single listen to Just As I Am will suffice to understand
that Bill Withers is as far from a potential pants-pisser as can be.
Most encyclopaedias and online review sites tag
Just As I Am as a «soul» or
«R&B» album, just because it had some members of Booker T. & The MGs
playing on it, and was sung by a black performer, and we all know black people
used to sing «soul» or «R&B» before they all turned to rap and other crap.
In reality, this is ridiculous: Just As
I Am is a dark, seriously disturbing and
disturbed singer-songwriter album that mixes some elements of traditional soul
and R&B (and blues, and jazz) with the «whitebread» folk-rock scene of the
time — in fact, it is more James Taylor than Al Green, I'd say, but way, way
bleaker than both. In fact, if we were to believe that the album title tells
the truth, we probably wouldn't want to mess around with the guy. The album
ends with the sound of a gunshot, for Christ's sake!
Most of the time, however, the album simply
resonates with tension, never coming to the brink of a genuine explosion.
ʽHarlemʼ initiates us into the world of Bill Withers with a swinging,
danceable rhythm, and lines like "Saturday night in Harlem / Ev'rything's
alright / You can really swang and shake your pretty thang / The parties are
out of sight" would suggest that we are invited to have fun — but the
dark bass groove and almost threatening strings, gradually rising up and
gaining in shrillness, insist that the party is rigged, and then there's the
counterpoint: "It's too hot to sleep / And I'm too broke to eat / I don't
care if I die or not". Immediately, it is made clear that we are not to be
entertained — that the performer's vision of Harlem and everything that goes
with it is certainly not encumbered by rose-colored glasses.
From there on, song after song deals with the
little horrors of life — loneliness (ʽAin't No Sunshineʼ), nostalgia
for dead relatives (ʽGrandma's Handsʼ), losing your loved one to
another (ʽHope She'll Be Happierʼ), and losing a battle with alcohol
(ʽBetter Off Deadʼ — the idea of shooting oneself in a bout of alcoholism
would later be explored by Alice Cooper on ʽPass The Gun Aroundʼ to a
more dramatic, but less subtle and suggestive effect). Every now and then the
atmosphere is a bit alleviated with the joys of a healthy sex life (ʽSweet
Wanomiʼ, ʽMoanin' And Groanin'ʼ), but when romance is rather
seen as temporary salvation from a life full of misery and self-inflicted
stupidity, maybe «healthy» is not quite the right word to use.
Creepiest of the lot is ʽI'm Her
Daddyʼ, a gloomy, threatening blues-rock number whose lyrics may look
innocent on paper — a father demanding to see his six-year old daughter of
whose existence he was only recently informed — but sound nearly psychopathic
on record, even though Bill himself resorts to screaming only occasionally,
preferring to impersonate the neurotic father as quietly as possible, to convey
an even more disturbing image. Not grief, not remorse, and obviously not
happiness — this is a «give-me-back-my-daughter-you-bitch-or-face-the-consequences»
type of rant, stunningly realistic and just a tad shivery.
On the other hand, as long as the protagonist
is not high and does not present an immediate threat to society, he is prone to
acute fits of murderous loneliness — ʽAin't No Sunshineʼ, which became
Bill's first major hit and went on to be covered by lots of people, tells it
like it means it, in a brief series of four-line verses, each line pinching
sharp and painful. One of the verses did not work out at first and was
temporarily filled by Bill with a series of "I know, I know, I know..."
that he was later convinced to keep — this must be a technical record of sorts
(how many "I know"s can one fit within one breath?), but it also
works very well emotionally within the song. For that matter, Bill is a
fantastic singer — check out the way he drawls out "she's gone" on
ʽHope She'll Be Happierʼ without a single wrong fluctuation in the
airwave.
Strangely, the only relative «misfires» on this
weird, haunting album are two cover versions, neither of which is particularly
bad, yet they just do not seem to fit. Well, ʽEverybody's Talkin'ʼ could fit thematically, but in the
process of reinventing it, Bill somehow flushes out the sad-and-tired mood of
the original; and the gospel-style, clap-your-hands-together rewrite of
ʽLet It Beʼ can only be qualified as sheer filler. There ain't no
talk about finding inner peace, like the song suggests, on this album —
ʽLet It Beʼ and ʽAin't No Sunshineʼ are mutually exclusive,
not to mention ʽBetter Off Deadʼ which is sort of an anti-ʽLet It Beʼ if there ever
was one. It's almost as if they told him, "hey, we won't release the
record unless there's a McCartney number on it", and he went, "oh
yeah? I'll show you McCartney!"
— and recorded this quasi-parodic deconstruction that replaces solemnity with
stupid forced cheerfulness.
Everything else rules, and is as far removed
from «formulaic» soul records of the period as possible; if anything, Just As I Am belongs on the same shelf
as John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and
Joni Mitchell's Blue and all those
other singer-songwriters' confessionals, even if the lyrics are relatively
straightforward in comparison — but when it comes to psychological layers,
there is comparable depth in here, sadly, not often mentioned in reviews of the
album, which prefer dwelling on formal aspects (such as the subtle textures of
Stephen Stills' electric guitar, which are
important to the album's sound — in fact, I could easily see some of these
songs covered by Stills on an auspicious day — but are hardly at the very heart
of it). Major thumbs
up.
STILL BILL (1972)
1) Lonely Town, Lonely Street;
2) Let Me In Your Life; 3) Who Is He (And What Is He To You)?; 4) Use Me; 5)
Lean On Me; 6) Kissin' My Love; 7) I Don't Know; 8) Another Day To Run; 9) I
Don't Want You On My Mind; 10) Take It All In And Check It All Out.
More than anything, Bill's second album clearly
demonstrated that the man's success was not a fluke one — and I certainly do
not intend to prove that by adducing the example of ʽLean On Meʼ,
which went on to become Bill's greatest commercial hit and probably the song that is most commonly
associated with the man due to ferocious radio rotation, innumerable cover
versions, and other what-not. The funniest thing about it is that ʽLean On
Meʼ, honestly good soul number as it is, is completely atypical of the album and of Bill's classic artistic
personality as a whole. It is a well thought out, understandably manipulative
musical remedy, uplifting and not uninteresting from a compositional point of
view (especially in how it sews together its personal-sentimental and
clap-your-hands-together-anthemic sections) — but there are no other songs like
this on the album, and if there were, well, frankly speaking, they would
completely eliminate the very reason for Bill Withers' existence. I mean, if
you want uplifting gospel-rock, you have just about everyone from the Spinners
to Earth, Wind & Fire to Aretha. Come on now.
What is really
fascinating about the record is that, even with the near-complete removal of
star power (this time, the album was recorded and produced by a bunch of
relative unknowns), it still sounds fabulous and is full to the brim of
perfectly written and convincingly played out little musical «character
studies». Still Bill is a perfect
title, since Withers usually impersonates the same type of character here — an
unbearably sensitive, touchy, jealous, paranoid, sarcastic guy who would love
to enjoy life but feels like it's too much of a bitch to let him enjoy it. His
philosophy is perfectly summarized in the first lines of ʽAnother Day To
Runʼ: "If you don't look into your mind / And find out what you're
running from / Tomorrow might just be another day to run". And he follows
that philosophy to a tee — most of the album involves prying into his own mind
and trying to find out what it is that he's running from.
Paranoia as the ruling force of the record is
immediately established in the very first notes — when the acoustic rhythm, the
electric lead, and the funky bass guitar all play the same «shaky» syncopated
melody to stress the idea of uncertainty and insecurity. The Bee Gees, too,
would later have a song about «Big City Stress» opening an album that praised
the glamorous rhythms of the big city, but the difference is that people could
enjoy the glam of Bee Gees' disco without smelling its dangerous underside,
whereas Withers, writing songs that you can dance to, puts that underside up
front — lyrically, musically, vocally ʽLonely Town, Lonely Streetʼ is
a blinking warning, a groove that pulsates with nervous tension of the
ʽGimme Shelterʼ variety.
Then there are some nifty tunes about jealousy
and separation. ʽWho Is He (And What Is He To You)?ʼ is a small
masterpiece of unresolved suspense, matching its threatening bass and lead
lines to fit Bill's reserved, but on-the-brink vocal delivery, and the lyrics
may just be the very best discrete psychological description of a jealous
lover, peppered with classy lines like "you're too much for one man, but
not enough for two". ʽUse Meʼ (which was the second single and
was far more representative of the album's sound than ʽLean On Meʼ)
is driven by a Stevie Wonder-worthy clavinet riff that «grumbles» its way
through just like Bill himself grumbles about how "all you do is use
me" — before admitting, grudgingly, that he doesn't mind.
Eventually, though, the lovers do separate, and then we have ʽI
Don't Want You On My Mindʼ, trotting along at a mind-numbing tempo and
punctuated by «ugly» wah-wah wails, illustrating brain pulsations: he doesn't
want you on his mind all the time, but, of course, this is exactly what he has
on his mind all the time. The song proper ends at around the three minute mark,
but is then followed with a coda that could illustrate the painful process of
trying to clear out the protagonist's mind — unfortunately, it fades out too
quickly to let us know how successful he was.
There is a bunch of more conventional songs
here as well (the rather syrupy ballad ʽLet Me In Your Lifeʼ; the
somewhat-too-happy funk-pop number ʽKissin' My Loveʼ), but they are
not without their own hooks, either, and, ultimately, as much as I hate these
«whole world is silly» rants, in this case I do feel like ʽLean On Meʼ is the weakest song on the
album, and if it happens to be the only thing you know about Bill Withers, be
sure not to jump to conclusions — that would be a bit like judging the Beatles on
the strength of ʽYesterdayʼ (certainly not a «weak» song, but just
imagine a "oh, so that's what
those Beatles sound like" kind of reaction!). Instead, just get the whole
album and brace yourself for Mr. Withers' fascinating world of wit, pain, and
psychologism on the dangerous edge of insanity. One more thumbs up like this and you'd really
start to wonder how many girlfriends this individual has buried in his
backyard.
LIVE AT CARNEGIE HALL (1973)
1) Use Me; 2) Friend Of Mine;
3) Ain't No Sunshine; 4) Grandma's Hands; 5) World Keeps Going Around; 6) Let
Me In Your Life; 7) Better Off Dead; 8) For My Friend; 9) I Can't Write
Left-Handed; 10) Lean On Me; 11) Lonely Town, Lonely Street; 12) Hope She'll Be
Happier; 13) Let Us Love; 14) Harlem / Cold Baloney.
Well, apparently it does not take that much practice to get to Carnegie
Hall — the bare minimum is to have yourself a No. 1 single with clap-along
potential. Not that Bill Withers did not deserve a show at Carnegie Hall on
October 6, 1972, or a live double album memorizing the event, but it is a
little ironic how quickly he got there, especially keeping in mind that his two
first albums easily convey the impression of an introvert loner, hardly fit for
the large stage at all.
I must say that the concert performance,
despite actually having happened, does not dispel that impression. Like a
typical R&B show, it incorporates some lengthy groove-based workouts:
ʽUse Meʼ, opening the proceedings, is stretched out from its original
length to around eight minutes (could have been shorter, but Bill does a second
re-run of the jam section at the crowd's request), and ʽHarlemʼ,
closing the show, runs for about thirteen minutes, mutating into another funky
jam, sarcastically titled ʽCold Baloneyʼ.
In a way, it is cold baloney: Bill's backing band is no James Brown Orchestra or
Parliament, and Bill himself is not much of a crowd stimulant — he can certainly
lead the audience in an R&B ritual, entrancing them with a couple looped
lines from ʽShake 'Em On Downʼ, but his talents in that sphere are
nothing out of the ordinary; it's more like he is engaging in a genre-obliging
convention here. In fact, even the main groove of ʽUse Meʼ,
converted from clavinet to guitar, seems a bit limp and toothless when compared
to the studio original. The audience, still under the fresh spell of the song,
did not seem to mind, but in retrospect, I am not sure whether anybody would
want to trade in the studio version for the live run.
The show's greatness certainly lies elsewhere —
in between the obligatory dance-oriented bookmarks, the material is gradually
unwrapping like a multi-angled portrait of Bill Withers, «the thinking man's
R&B artist» and an all-around interesting person. First, there's some
incredibly cool stage banter, probably some of the best you'll ever get on a
live R&B album, ranging from innocent, but funny jokes concerning members
of the band ("on bass, we got cool Melvin Dunlap... Melvin's so quiet, he
said eight words last year, and six of those were 'airport'...") to fabulously
worded accounts of his past, such as the one that introduces ʽGrandma's
Handsʼ and, together with the song itself, should now probably count as the coolest eulogy that anybody ever
gave to his grannie in show business. Bill's feelings towards the ladies
(ʽLet Me In Your Lifeʼ) and the Vietnam War (ʽI Can't Write
Left-Handedʼ) are also made known in a manner that is sensitive,
intelligent, and reasonably funny at the same time (well, «funny» in case of
the ladies, that is, not the Vietnam War).
But, of course, the banter is still only
secondary next to the songs themselves: we have faithful renditions of lots of
classics, not particularly different from the studio versions but sung with the
same combination of abandon, introspection, and technique (the extended
"she's gone" bit at the end of ʽHope She'll Be Happier With
Himʼ draws excited audience applause, as does the "I know I
know..." trick on ʽAin't No Sunshineʼ), and then, most
importantly, there is a bunch of new songs here that never made it onto any
official studio LP. Of these, ʽWorld Keeps Going Aroundʼ is a dark
confessional, sort of a personal exorcism set to a bubbling mid-tempo funk
groove; ʽFor My Friendʼ is equally shivery, foreboding blues-rock
with a particularly gloomy bassline and a wah-wah lead croaking in the darkness
(a bit of an unsettling background for a tune that allegedly deals with the
issue of making up among friends — unless the friend in question is Satan
himself, of course); and the already mentioned ʽI Can't Write
Left-Handedʼ is a repetitive, but haunting groove, supported by the band's
collective graveyard harmonies. Subtle and moving tribute to the dead, with one
leg in the old Afro-American tradition and the other one well in the present.
There is no evident
reason for us to call this one of the greatest live albums of the decade:
Bill's band is competent, but restrained (which is probably due more to the
bandleader's conscious will than to lack of experience, since most of the
members were professionals, recruited from the wreck of the Watts 103rd Street
Rhythm Band), the songs are mostly not «reinvented» live, and Bill's commitment
to the performance is pretty much at the same high (but not «hyper-high») level
in the studio and in the live hall. But the general atmosphere of the event,
which cannot really be described in words, makes the experience as a whole very
rewarding; there is a certain naturalness and completeness to Bill Withers
here, in this long setting, that could be missed on the much shorter studio
records.
My only gripe is that the long jam sections
should have probably been sacrificed to make way for better songs (so much
great stuff on Still Bill that is
not featured here!) — I understand the decision to frame the «Bill Withers
soliloquoy» with a few numbers that make the listener feel as one with the
performer, it's just that this guy here is one performer who has a far better
chance to get under your skin when he is singing dark odes to loneliness to the
solitary sound of an acoustic guitar than when he gets you to clap his hands and
stomp your feet along with the band. Oh well, standard laws of the world of
entertainment, and, after all, Bill was never a self-conscious «rebel» against
the laws, which only emphasizes his humbleness. Thumbs up.
+'JUSTMENTS (1974)
1) You; 2) The Same Love That
Made Me Laugh; 3) Stories; 4) Green Grass; 5) Ruby Lee; 6) Heartbreak Road; 7)
Can We Pretend; 8) Liza; 9) Make A Smile For Me; 10) Railroad Man.
By the time Bill got around to recording his
third studio LP, it seems like his sudden burst of popularity went to his head
a little bit — the album shows much
more «self-importance» than its predecessors, starting from the
incomprehensibly scribbled sermon on the front cover ("life, like most
precious gifts, gives us the responsibility of upkeep..."), and ending
with the songs themselves: ʽYouʼ, the five minute long soft-funk
opener, is one continuous preachy rant that does not even begin to bother with
the issue of a chorus.
Of course, Bill Withers is an insightful
individual and an above-ordinary lyricist, so that his preaching as such never
gets irritating, and sometimes you even get caught up in it — ʽYouʼ,
in fact, should be counted among the angriest, most sharp-tongued AAPs
(Anonymous Antagonist Putdowns) in the history of popular music this side of
ʽPositively 4th Streetʼ. ("You're like a man loving Jesus / That
says he can't stand the Jew" is just one of the many spikes). But even so,
preaching is sort of a universal business, and Bill's idea to try and re-route
his music in the direction of «lessons in morality» goes against his individual
gift — musical, lyrical, and theatrical impersonation of the psychologically
imbalanced person.
The main problem with the two lengthy «epics»
that bookmark the album (ʽYouʼ and ʽRailroad Manʼ, the
latter featuring José Feliciano on congas and, as it often happens in
songs about trains and railroads, nostalgizing about Bill's childhood) is that
their length is not backed up by musical dynamics — it is more or less exactly
the same funky groove from beginning to end, restrained and repetitive. And at
least ʽYouʼ bothers to come up with enough fire-and-brimstone lyrics
to pull it through, but with ʽRailroad Manʼ, Bill just repeats the
same lyrics twice, as if they really really mattered or as if they did not
matter at all, and we were just supposed to get in the groove and carry on for
six minutes. But it ain't that cool a
groove, even if Feliciano can indeed bang some mean congas.
Fortunately, there are still some very good
songs in between. ʽThe Same Love That Made Me Laughʼ is a catchy
dance number that successfully combines proto-disco toe-tappiness with Bill's
melancholic attitudes (unfortunately, its release as the album's lead single pretty
much confined Bill back to the R&B chart section). ʽStoriesʼ is a
beautiful piano ballad with the album's finest vocal delivery (the «airplane
lift-off» modulation on Bill's voice does
make it soar, and blends in brilliantly with the otherwise corny harps and
strings). ʽRuby Leeʼ may not be a masterpiece in all of its
ingredients, but its «insinuating» bassline is easily the single greatest
bassline that Melvin Dunlap came up with (and Bill made the just decision to
reward him with a songwriting co-credit for it). And ʽHeartbreak
Roadʼ is... well, sort of fun to tap your foot and clap your hands to.
Nice, if a little silly-sounding, keyboard accompaniment.
So, on the whole, it wouldn't be at all bad if
Bill himself didn't sound disinterested and rather «ordinary» much of the time
— especially on Side B, much of which is given over to sentimental ballads and
generic preachiness that cannot be fully redeemed even with a lead acoustic
guitar part from Feliciano (ʽCan We Pretendʼ). And a song like
ʽLizaʼ, a hyper-tender ode from "a worldly old uncle" to
"a very innocent young niece", will probably have to wait until you
are just in the right mood for it — its potential «gorgeousness» stems mainly
from the vocal and keyboard tone rather from any jaw-dropping melodic moves,
and not all of us are always on the ready for that kind of tone to make us
swoon and fall over. Whatever be the case, it'd be best to wait until you have
a very innocent young niece.
Criticisms aside, +'Justments does earn its thumbs up, but remember: if, like myself, you
loved the first two albums for their unique attitude, you will most probably
find that the attitude has changed, and that this post-Carnegie Hall edition of Bill Withers, modified by
success, public attention, and simply the passing of time, is not nearly as
unique as it used to be. However, the «base mix» of R&B groove with
singer-songwriter atmosphere is still very much in place, so, in a way, you
could say all that's really lacking
is that tasty cherry on top.
MAKING MUSIC (1975)
1) I Wish You Well; 2) The
Best You Can; 3) Make Love To Your Mind; 4) I Love You Dawn; 5) She's Lonely;
6) Sometimes A Song; 7) Paint Your Pretty Picture; 8) Family Table; 9) Don't
You Want To Stay; 10) Hello Like Before.
So Sussex Records eventually folded, and Bill
found himself in the arms of Columbia. Without some serious digging, it is hard
to understand whether this very fact led to a change in sound or if, as usual,
it was all just part of the global trend to adapt or survive. The fact is, Making Music is an album that is even
more smooth, slick, glossed-out than +'Justments,
and, consequently, is easier to categorize as a «typical mid-Seventies R&B
album», which is not really what Bill Withers was about in the first place.
Some of the songs are still in the orchestrated folk-pop ballpark, but they are
getting uncomfortably sentimental and sappy — alcoholics, jealous lovers, and
prodigal fathers are more or less out of the picture, replaced by romantics,
moody lovers, and grateful descendants. We have an all-too-happy Bill Withers
here, and that doesn't spell good.
The songs are still mostly enjoyable — the
problem is that they draw much of their strength from being too repetitive. The
slow, lazy funk groove of ʽMake Love To Your Mindʼ, combining wah-wah
guitar, «cool» bubbly synthesizers, and proto-disco strings, is really all
about making us enjoy and wallow in the awesomeness of the basic message:
"before I make love to your body / I wanna make love to your mind", a
refrain repeated so frequently that you are almost tempted to look for some
extra depth in it. But there's no particular depth, just a quirky turn of
phrase that Bill thought useful and attractive. It is, but not for six minutes.
There is nothing wrong as such with the lush
pastoral ballad ʽPaint Your Pretty Pictureʼ, either, but exactly how
many times do we need to hear that the protagonist is going to "paint your
pretty picture with a song"? By the fourth minute, the repetition begins
to border on parody, and there's still two more to go. Same applies to
ʽShe's Lonelyʼ, a song that could be described as «anti-feminist»:
"what she's doin' does some good", Bill admits, "but she lonely,
but she lonely, she lonely, but she lonely". Would it have hurt to work on
that chorus a little more? Because
the song is really good — just way too repetitive.
The biggest departure from the old sound is on
ʽFamily Tableʼ, a song with a nostalgic message taken from the same
box as ʽGrandma's Handsʼ (but much flatter, lyrics-wise) but a melody
that pushes Withers very close to
disco, if not melodically, then at least in terms of all-out-danceable
atmosphere. Again, it's not a bad tune at all — catchy, fun, probably still
quite sincere — but to say that it downplays Bill's talents would be an
understatement, since, other than the catchy vocal hook in the chorus, it
leaves no space for any talent whatsoever.
Closest thing to a «classic» here would
probably be ʽSometimes A Songʼ, which delivers the leanest, meanest
groove on the album — I don't know whether the bass player is James Jamerson or
Louis Johnson, since they are both credited in the notes, but whoever it is,
thanks for that killer rockin' bass line that adds gruff seriousness to Bill's
message. If Bill does not convince you that a good song is a real bitch, that
bass line will. Of course, it is also a song that could have been written by
anybody — from Curtis Mayfield to Isaac Hayes to even Billy Preston — but by
1975, it was clear that Bill had nothing against «streamlining» his
musicmaking, and this here is sort of a cut-off point beyond which only serious
lovers of solid, but «faceless» R&B are welcome, not those who welcome
unique manners of artistic self-expression. At the very least, an album like Making Music should never serve as your
introduction to Bill Withers, since there is very little Bill Withers here to
introduce.
NAKED & WARM (1976)
1) Close To Me; 2) Naked &
Warm; 3) Where You Are; 4) Dreams; 5) If I Didn't Mean You Well; 6) I'll Be
With You; 7) City Of The Angels; 8) My Imagination.
It is always at least a little sad to see a
favourite artist turn from the utmost sincerity to arrogant dishonesty.
Nevertheless, we must brace ourselves
and face the facts. There is definitely a serious probability as to Bill
Withers being «warm» on that album sleeve, given its immediate context — sunny
skies, a summer attire, and suitable ultraviolet-ray-blocking headwear. But
unless my eyes trick me into some sort of optical illusion, I would state it as
a given fact that the description «naked» does not apply at all. One never
knows, of course, whether this could be an act of last-moment censorship imposed
upon the artist by the record label, but even so, the album cover is tacky
enough without the title — with the title, it's tacky and self-contradictory. And it is with
this troubled feeling of deception already creeping in that we proceed on to
the music.
And — sure enough — the music more or less
matches the album cover in terms of tackiness and self-contradictions. Most of
the songs still show the same disappointing direction, towards soft, thoroughly
inoffensive balladry and soft funk grooves that take the bill out of the
withers without providing anything in return. Keyboards have completely taken
over as the musical foundation, with that typical mid-1970s sound that
dissolves the musical bone under the pretty skin. And it no longer matters
whether any of this is or is not properly «disco» — I've heard dozens of
«legit» disco tunes that had far more grit and snappiness to them than
something as instantly forgettable as ʽWhere You Areʼ, even if the
latter has a fairly tricky time signature.
The only tunes that register even a tiny bit
are the title track — only because it
turns into a repetitive, but enigmatic, jam in the end, where Bill keeps
asking us whether we want to go to Heaven in such a worried tone that one might
start believing that really ain't such a good idea; and ʽDreamsʼ,
where the electric piano, bass guitar, and synthesizer engage in a pleasant
enough trialog while our host for the evening is trying to convince us that
"dreams are as good as the real thing sometimes". At least the tonality
of the song gives us a whiff of the old paranoid Bill Withers, not this new
romantic face, indistinguishable in a crowd of similar faces.
Worst of the lot, unfortunately, and the one
song that I would really consider a
«failure», as opposed to the «nothingness» of the rest, is the sprawling 10-minute
epic ʽCity Of The Angelsʼ, Bill's sudden attempt at going «artsy» on
us. Starting off with a 4-minute proto-disco groove, he then shatters it in a
sea of analog and digital keyboard sprinkle, and the next six minutes are all
spent wading through this quasi-ambient sonic mush. It is almost as if he were
really writing a song about an «angel city» (the tune as such is about Los
Angeles, as we could all guess), and thought that the perfect soundtrack to a
gathering of angels would be this atmospheric «piano soup» — but, to tell the
truth, if this kind of atmosphere is typical of angels, then I'd just as rather
not go to Heaven, thank you very
much. Nothing against ambient muzak per se, but these arrangements sound like one lengthy boring prelude to an equally
boring generic fusion jam.
On the whole, this might just be the single
lowest point in Bill's career, and I have no idea what he was thinking to
himself at the time, unless he was on drugs or something (then again, California
occasionally has this really unhealthy anti-artistic effect on Easterners) —
one of those cases where a thumbs down is quite well correlated with the
fact that the album was not released on CD until 2010. For very major fans only.
MENAGERIE (1977)
1) Lovely Day; 2) I Want To Spend
The Night; 3) Lovely Night For Dancing; 4) Then You Smile At Me; 5) She Wants
To (Get On Down); 6) It Ain't Because Of Me Baby; 7) Tender Things; 8)
Wintertime; 9) Let Me Be The One You Need; 10) Rosie.
Strangely, even though this album is even more upbeat, sunny, and dance-oriented
than Naked & Warm, it seems to
produce an overall stronger impression. Maybe it is because of consistency and
coherence — this time around, Bill is not even beginning to pretend that he
still has any of that old «dark streak» left in him, not to mention that there
is no ʽCity Of The Angelsʼ anywhere in sight, or any other attempts
to carve an «art» sound out of the basics of the California dance scene. This
time around, it's all about romance, chivalry, happiness, and smooth body music
in the disco paradigm — soothing entertainment to relieve you of your troubles,
not to remind you of your troubles. Meet Bill Withers, next in line for the
title of The Ladies' Man.
The best news for miles around is that the
album begins with ʽLovely Dayʼ — incidentally, one of the best
«happy-sunny» R&B grooves of the decade, pulled up by the hair into the
stratosphere by Bill's ability to hold one note (the right note, of course!) for what seems like an eternity, while his
backup singers have enough time to pull in and out several times. It is really
a simple trick, and it eclipses the rest of the song (which is actually quite
commendable for its well-thought out funky bassline at least), but without the
trick, we would not find ourselves coming back to it for any special reason.
Whatever be, the song manages to ooze happiness without exaggerating it — the
arrangement is fairly minimalistic, and Bill sings everything, including the
extended notes, in an easy, relaxed, self-controlled manner, implying that you
don't really need to jump out of your
pants in order to convey that happy feel. But you do need technique and
discipline.
The rest of the album never quite lives up to
the subtle punch of the opener, but the opener sets up the mood, locks it shut,
and somehow ensures that the record stays listenable and non-irritating right
to the very end. Oddly, it is the funkiest / disco-est numbers that stay around
for the longest time, probably because of all the repetition in the grooves — I
wouldn't ever want to speak of ʽShe Wants To (Get On Down)ʼ as a
dance-pop masterpiece, but the call-and-response vocal hook is infectious
against my will, as is the "get up and dance with me" exhortation on
ʽLovely Night For Dancingʼ (yes, there is a lot of invitations to dance throughout the album — and who'd be
surprised, with Saturday Night Fever
coming 'round the bend at any time?).
On the other hand, there is no need to pretend,
either, that, apart from ʽLovely Dayʼ, Menagerie has any reason to be singled out of a swarm of similar
R&B products on the mid-1970s market. The dance numbers are still
undermined by Bill's «softness» and «gentlemanliness» (next to the «ruffian
sound» of Chic, for instance), and the ballads... well, even the previously
unissued demo version of ʽRosieʼ, now appended to the CD version of
the album, with just Bill and his piano, fails to move me beyond the
expectably-predictable «niceness», so when it comes to full arrangements,
things get worse — Bill used minimal arrangements on most of his masterpieces,
and most of the string and harmony parts on songs like ʽLet Me Be The One
You Needʼ suffer from corny melodic moves, too much syrup, and too much
formula.
In the end, while this is not a «thumbs down»
record per se (the presence of ʽLovely Dayʼ and the absence of a
ʽCity Of The Angelsʼ equivalent guarantees some neutrality), neither
is it a miraculous «return to form» as one could conclude from reading the
occasional happy-faced review. Then again, not being particularly familiar with
the story of Bill's personal life (I only know that 1976 was the year of his
second and happiest marriage), I am quite willing to suggest that the man was
simply playing the honesty card — a well-balanced, content, peaceful personal
life, with all the demons exorcised and crucified, might be translatable to a
musical record like Menagerie with
the utmost sincerity. Good for him — Marvin Gaye might have had a far more
exciting musical career from beginning to end, but nobody in one's right mind
should wish anybody else the life of a Marvin Gaye rather than that of a Bill
Withers, right?
'BOUT LOVE (1979)
1) All Because Of You; 2)
Dedicated To You My Love; 3) Don't It Make It Better; 4) You Got The Stuff; 5)
Look To Each Other For Love; 6) Love; 7) Love Is; 8) Memories Are That Way.
This relatively uninspiring sequel to Menagerie was produced by Paul Smith, a
legendary jazz pianist mostly known for accompanying Ella Fitzgerald; he also
co-wrote several of the songs and played on all the recordings. If there ever
was a waste of talent, though, that must be it, because 'Bout Love has nothing to do with classic jazz and everything with
generic, «tepid» R&B: no disco as such, just another bunch of friendly,
danceable, and almost completely interchangeable grooves that leave no lasting
impression whatsoever.
Unfortunately, this time around there is no
ʽLovely Dayʼ to redeem the album with at least a single unbeatable
hook, and not even a ʽShe Wants To (Get On Down)ʼ to add frenzied
energy: indeed, I would rather welcome a fast, tight, determined disco-rocker than
have to listen to these happy, toothless, family-friendly grooves one after
another. ʽYou Got The Stuffʼ, with a funky rhythm pattern, probably
comes the closest to satisfying the desire for a bit of grit, but it more or
less makes its point over the first thirty seconds, and then just goes on
grooving without any development — if it were a live funk jam, that'd be one
thing, but in this context the musicians just stick to the groove and refuse to
let go of the pre-arranged patterns. And where the heck is Paul Smith and his piano chops? He is, indeed, co-credited, but
it is not highly likely that this is the kind of arrangement he would have
offered to Ella.
Are the songs catchy? Perhaps. As on his
previous two or three albums, the choruses are so repetitive that all these
"high as the birds that fly above the clouds..." (ʽAll Because
Of Youʼ) and "love is caring, love is needing..." (ʽLove
Isʼ) will end up sticking to your brains after a few listens. But it is a
boring kind of catchiness: try as the man might, he just isn't able to come up
with any outstanding take on the
virtues of love. As supercool as he was when exposing the underbelly of the
human soul, Bill Withers as a Preacher of Goodness continues to be just another
smiling face in the crowd. It is a pleasant, likeable, friendly face alright —
you know that guy on the front sleeve
will be a gas to hang out with, since that smile don't lie — but it doesn't
come equipped with any wonderful musical ideas.
As usual, there is at least one song per album to offer a brief
reminder of the old Bill Withers: this time, it is the album closer,
ʽMemories Are That Wayʼ, a slow, moody ballad with inarguably the
best vocal performance from the man — infused with melancholia and sadness,
peppered with drawn-out, painfully soaring notes, and actually featuring some
discernible piano playing from Paul Smith for a change. It is completely
incompatible with the rest of the album — an «afterparty» song, to be savored
for last once the basic club audiences have all gone home and the entertainment
is over — and, interestingly enough, it is the only song here credited solely
to Bill, as if he surreptitiously wanted to lay at least a part of the blame on
the shoulders of his co-writers, but decided to save up the best song
completely for himself.
All in all, ʽMemories Are That Wayʼ
is definitely worth salvaging, and perhaps one or two of the tighter grooves
here, such as ʽYou Got The Stuffʼ, might be worth including on
compilations for historical purposes, but on the whole, 'Bout Love drops one notch below Menagerie in quality. No thumbs down, what with everything being so
innocent and harmless, but only really recommendable for fans of standardized
1970s dance music, and maybe also for that elusive subcategory of «shiny happy
people» who might want to mind-meld with Bill on that one.
WATCHING YOU, WATCHING ME (1985)
1) Oh Yeah!; 2) Something That
Turns You On; 3) Don't Make Me Wait; 4) Heart In Your Life; 5) Watching You,
Watching Me; 6) We Could Be Sweet Lovers; 7) You Just Can't Smile It Away; 8)
Steppin' Right Along; 9) Whatever Happens; 10) You Try To Find A Love.
No matter what the circumstances are, generic,
unadventurous R&B from the Seventies will always be preferable to generic,
unadventurous R&B from the Eighties — for the simple reason that in the
Eighties, musicianship as such was
pretty much exiled from the world of generic R&B, replaced by plastic
electronics and robotic dance grooves. Consequently, the only good R&B to
come from the Eighties is non-generic
R&B, and the more it violates these standards, the more chances it has to
be good.
I sure wish Bill Withers' last studio LP could
have satisfied this hope, but alas, that was not to be. Produced and engineered
by a bunch of hacks, this pathetic result of Bill's long-awaited return to
Columbia studios is a stylistic disaster, and should rank, along with Naked & Warm, as one of the biggest
disappointments in a formerly great artist — the distance between Still Bill and Watching You, Watching Me is comparable to... well, then again,
pretty much any great R&B artist
ruling the public tastes in the Sixties or Seventies sucked in the Eighties.
The difference is that Bill, at his best, was so much more than an R&B
artist — and here, well, he ends up sounding like a roughly trained disciple of
Luther Vandross.
Electronic drums, synthesizers, and ecstatic
guitar wank-a-thons that plague Watching
You are, however, only one half of the problem — the other half is that
most of the songs are completely uninteresting. Bill's voice, always pleasant
in and out of itself, is still in great shape, but it is applied to rotten
melodies whose only purpose is to sound «uplifting». It's not as if the melodic
structures of the songs got too simplified or ran out of inspiration — it is
simply that the album is drenched in banality, and Bill's one-time ability to
play this multi-faceted, almost perversely fascinating character, sweet and
frightening at the same time, has completely evaporated. This endless stream
of superficially diverse, but substantially quite interchangeable love ballads
and softly lukewarm dance rockers is instantaneously forgettable.
The only possible exception, which might not
even reveal itself upon first listen, is ʽSteppin' Right Awayʼ, a
slightly grittier groove that begins as an ode to the secret magic of love and
then ends up incorporating The Lord's Prayer in the funkiest arrangement ever
seen since the days of Jesus, when the Master, no doubt, used to get it on with
his disciples on a daily basis. Nowhere near a classic, the song stands out
simply because everything else is so forgettable — I am sort of interested in
thinking what would somebody like Prince have made out of it, given the chance,
because Bill, unfortunately, can put a groove under his control, but cannot
develop it to any sort of climactic peak, if you know what I mean.
No other track here deserves even a brief
mention. Everything is as glossy and sterile as the album sleeve suggests —
with its dashing white colors more suggestive of a stuffy hospital than of
Paradise — and the result is a rather ignoble thumbs down and a pretty sad end
for a career that began with so much promise. I do not know why Bill chose to
retire from the music business (or, at least, from studio recording) almost
completely after this album, but I would not be surprised if, deep inside
himself, he actually understood that he had nothing left to say to the world,
and that his life hours would rather be spent somewhere else than wasted on
further impotent attempts at songwriting and recording. One might also suggest
that here was just another victim of stupid musical fashions and cruel music
business. Whatever be the case, you'd be much better off saving yourself the
trouble and forgetting this album ever existed.
ATTILA (1970)
1) California Flash; 2) Wonder
Woman; 3) Revenge Is Sweet; 4) Amplifier Fire; 5) Rollin' Home; 6) Tear This
Castle Down; 7) Holy Moses; 8) Brain Invasion.
From time to time, critics get bored and go on
a hunt to find «the worst album of all time». As a rule, the hunt process does
not involve the critics specifying what they mean by «worst», so, depending on
one's own criteria, they might return with either Rod Stewart's Blondes Have More Fun or Sgt. Pepper hanging on their belt — no
matter, really, as long as the album seems «outstandingly» something.
Outstandingly pretentious, outstandingly unprofessional, outstandingly
overproduced, outstandingly conceptually-idiotic, whatever. You cannot take,
say, a Backstreet Boys album and declare it the worst ever just because it is
so utterly boring. Boring is not outstanding. The album has to scream I'M THE WORST right in your
cringing face.
Viewed from that angle, Attila is as easy a piece of game as they come. Recorded in 1970,
at the peak or near-peak of trendiness of all things «heavy» and «progressive»,
it features young aspiring keyboardist and singer Billy Joel, his pal Jon
Small on percussion, and... that's it.
An organ / drums combo, with Billy, like Ray Manzarek, supplying the required
bass parts with his second (sometimes third) hand. A unique experiment, to be
sure, within the «rock» world at least, and one that would surely have to be
loved, if it succeeded, or hated, if it failed. Guess which.
Ever since the album's release, it has quite
consistently been featured on all sorts of «worst ever» lists, with its status
currently codified by S. Th. Erlewine in the All-Music Guide: «there have been
many bad ideas in rock, but none match the colossal stupidity of Attila» — a phrase that, I am sure of
it, has increased Attila's
popularity twentyfold and sends dozens, if not hundreds, of curiosity seekers
and cheap thrill aficionados in search of used copies or faithful uploads of
the album on a yearly, if not daily, basis. Who could ever stay away from
savoring The Most Colossal Stupidity in Rock? The sight of the two thoroughly
stoned Huns in quasi-authentic attire alone, standing as they are inside a meat
locker, would be enough to ensure proper cult status.
What is more
interesting, however, is whether any of these people would actually want to
agree with Erlewine's and other critics' assessments. As far as mine is
concerned, I find nothing inherently wrong in the «idea» of Attila, and even find a few things to
like about how the idea was realized — the one major flaw of the record is its
monotonousness, as the same basic emotional state is being generated and
explored on virtually every song. For
instance, with Billy being a competent organist, you'd think they might have
allocated a couple spots for «softer» stuff — mixing in some gospel, soul, or
classical influences. In fact, knowing Billy's subsequent reputation, you
would probably very much expect a
couple spots for «softer» stuff! But no, what you get throughout is «Billy
Joel, The Organ Godzilla», and as fun as it may be to watch Godzilla blast its
way through several blocks of Manhattan, you'd probably fall asleep midway
through, were you forced to watch the beast's entire journey from Battery Park
to Isham Park.
That said, it is downright hilarious to see the dinosauric duo open up with a set of
distorted, overdriven organ hiccups that clearly mimic the intro to Hendrix's
ʽVoodoo Chile (Slight Return)ʼ — but only to serve as the opening
fanfare for a song about a... male stripper? Whatever. Along the way, as Billy
unfurls the silly saga of «California Flash», he makes his organ squeal, grunt,
roar, and make just about every aggressive noise that the poor instrument is
capable of when connected to every amp, pedal, and special effect generator
that could be afforded by two struggling barbarian musicians operating from
inside a meat locker. However, I have no idea what the aforementioned Mr.
Erlewine is talking about when he speaks of a «wall of white noise» — no matter
how much gadgetry Billy has hooked up to his keys, he is most clearly playing them; and, while we're at it,
the funky bass riff he blasts out at about 1:06 into the song is awesome.
Fairly often, Attila sounds like Gillan-era Deep Purple with Gillan (and
Blackmore, and Paice) removed — similarities between Jon Lord's incorporation,
use, and abuse of classical motifs and Billy's «experimental» approach are
inescapable, although, to be fair, it must be noted that In Rock, on which Lord finally consented to adopt a heavy distorted
sound, was only released a month prior to Attila,
and it is not even clear if Billy and Jon knew at all about Deep Purple's existence
on the other side of the ocean. In any case, extended organ jamming on tracks
such as ʽAmplifier Fireʼ and ʽBrain Invasionʼ is stylistically
quite similar to the lengthy escapades one hears from Lord on early Purple
jams, and even though Joel's technique and complexity seems to be slightly (but
not tremendously) below Jon's, Attila
is not to be castigated for being inept or incompetent — both men had enough
qualification to work in any second-rate «progressive» band of the time. The
question is, with so many first-rate
progressive bands around, why would we actually care about their employment?
Ultimately, it all depends on whether you
believe that a combo like this could actually «rock». This is, after all, what
they set out to do in the first place — «tear the castle down» with «amplifier
fire» in an all-out «brain invasion», «Holy Moses»! There is no place for
subtlety, spiritual depth, or contemplation here. Even a forty-minute album by
Hendrix himself with that much brawn
on the outside would be capable of melting your brains — now what about a forty-minute
album where, instead of inventive electric guitar soloing by one of the most
visionary players who ever lived, you get formally competent, but utterly
derivative distorted organ soloing by a guy who would later go on to give us...
well, you know.
I have read statements that complained how
Joel's organ tones on this album gave people headaches — a little amusing,
really, for anybody living in a post-Metal
Machine Music world. Much more troubling is to realize that the songs work
as «unintentional comedy», reminding one of parodies
on the whole «let's rock the classics» movement, like ELP's
ʽNutrockerʼ, except that the only people in the world who do not
realize the album's parodic value are its very authors. But on the other hand,
I also believe that at least half of these songs do feature interesting riffs,
and that in terms of composition alone, Attila
is hardly worse than a large part of Billy's subsequent output. It's all wasted
— on a curious, but inadequate enterprise, but «worst album ever?» Come now,
Uriah Heep's Very 'Eavy, Very 'Umble
was released at the same time, shared many of Attila's problems (silliness, pretentiousness, extra overdrive) and
actually had fewer memorable riffs. Just because the band actually had its own guitar player should not
automatically act as a status raiser. And a rotting head on the album cover is
not too much of an upgrade over a couple of «Huns» in a meat locker, unless
you're a vegetarian and a necrophile
at the same time. Oh, and the rating? Well, thumbs down, without any
provocative iconoclasm, but a mildly amused one. Still worth a listen, if only
to capture just a bit more of that ultraviolet from 1970.
COLD SPRING HARBOR (1971)
1) She's Got A Way; 2) You Can
Make Me Free; 3) Everybody Loves You Now; 4) Why Judy Why; 5) Falling Of The
Rain; 6) Turn Around; 7) You Look So Good To Me; 8) Tomorrow Is Today; 9)
Nocturne; 10) Got To Begin Again.
One would be hard pressed to think of a more
confused and silly-running beginning of a professional career than Billy
Joel's. So you have just formed one of the strangest combos in rock music and
released one of the most maligned and ridiculed albums of all time, and you
really have no one to blame for that but yourself. So what is your next move?
Naturally, to elope with the wife of your drummer (Elizabeth Small / Joel, whom
Billy would marry in 1972 and divorce ten years later when she got too old for
him, a process that he subseuqently put in replay mode). When this, too,
somehow failed to bring him artistic success, Billy started feeling like a
brokedown table — and drank a whole bottle of furniture polish to remedy the
situation.
Had he succeeded in that, B. J. would have forever remained in our hearts and souls as
the «Meat Locker Hun», a perennial scarecrow to shoo novices away from
dangerous musical excesses and distorted organ overdosing. Fortunately, the
good fairy intervened at the last moment and turned the furniture polish into a
20th century equivalent of Brangäne's Love Potion: overnight, Billy woke
up with a sick stomach and the tender, sentimental spirit of a romantic
balladeer. No more ridiculous «hard rock» for yesterday's Hun — in July 1971 he
was back in the studio, recording his first «proper» album for the soft-rock /
folk-pop market.
Cold
Spring Harbor is kind of a
special record in the hearts of some of the fans. Although it is not really
«transitional», since it pretty much lays down all the foundations of the Billy
Joel formula for centuries to come, it still has its own distinct personality
— the relative sparseness of arrangements, where, all too often, it is just
Billy and his piano, sets it apart from the full-band style of Piano Man and subsequent releases, so
we have sort of an Intimate Portrait of the Budding Artist here. Or maybe it's
just the fact that he still got his moustache, I'm not really sure. In any
case, there are backing musicians
(such as Richard Bennett, Neil Diamond's resident accompanyist, on guitar;
Emory Gordy Jr. on bass, etc.), but they are really only there to save the
record from becoming too monotonous.
Of which there is a serious danger, since
Billy's commitment to modern-day troubadour aesthetics is fairly
unidirectional. Completely jettisoning his «psychedelic rock» persona, he now
declares an open love for sweet piano pop in all of its forms — hearkening back
to pre-war vaudeville and Hoagy Carmichael as much as being influenced by
Carole King, Paul McCartney, and that whole newly nascent merger of pop, folk,
country, and watered-down rock which, by 1971, had already became one of the
most popular types of music in mainstream entertainment. Furthermore, Billy
selects the «starry-eyed», «heart-on-sleeve» attitude rather than the
self-consciously ironic or hyper-intellectualized approaches — nothing that
would particularly appeal to fans of, say, Randy Newman or Joni Mitchell.
Under these conditions, the only thing that can
save one's music is raw talent — playing, singing, composing, or, better still,
any of these combined. The problem is that, on all these scales, Cold Spring Harbor registers as «okay».
In the playing department, Billy's self-taught technique is impressive (he
certainly spent far more time practicing than McCartney), but not enough to put
him over any particular top — the instrumental ʽNocturneʼ, for
instance, is not likely to make Chopin roll over, making its point with
persistent repetition of the theme rather than throwing in any intricate
variations. As a singer, he certainly earns more respect here than with Attila, and his tones and phrasing suit
his melodies fairly adequately (it would have been much worse if he'd tried to
pull off a Neil Diamond), but the voice lacks «that certain something» to carve
out its own niche — as much as I like to poke fun at something like Neil
Young's whiny soundwaves, they at least have their own personality, whereas the
presence of any sort of «personality» in the ballads of Cold Spring Harbor (or any of its follow-ups, for that matter) is
under doubt.
What remains are the melodies themselves:
Billy's chief claim to fame — yet they, too, give the impression of
«competence» rather than «genius». A song like ʽShe's Got A Wayʼ has
all the external signs of a gorgeous love ballad, but falls quite a few slices
short of a loaf, earning the listener's love with atmosphere rather than chord
sequences or elegant, admirably symmetric construction of the vocal melody.
You'd think there'd have to at least be some sort of an explosion in the bridge
/ refrain, but there is none, other than a slight pitch rise on the final
"...I get turned around", which is basically just a simple cop-out of
an unsolved problem, so it seems. The result is a «pretty», not too annoying,
tune that never truly reaches for those strings that lead directly to the seat
of emotions — and I'd probably rather take something as simple as Paul
McCartney's ʽWarm And Beautifulʼ (a little-remembered tune from Wings At The Speed Of Sound) over this,
as well as just about any other ballad on the album.
As it happens, Cold Spring Harbor wouldn't even begin making it into my personal
Top 100 chart for 1971 (to be fair, nor did it with the general public at the
time, although Billy himself used to ascribe this to an unfortunate incident in
which the tapes were slightly sped up during the vinyl transfer, making him
sound like a bit of a chipmunk — since the reissue, this has been corrected,
but who really knows? maybe the record was
more fun that way). In fact, it is a record that almost invites you to despise
it: mediocre, generic, striving for lofty heights with trivial means, and I
have not even begun to talk about the lyrics. (ʽTomorrow Is Todayʼ is
said to be Billy's recollection of the furniture polish incident — "Made
my bed, I'm gonna lie in it / If you don't come, I'm sure gonna die in it"
is quite a furniture-polish-level couple of lines, to be sure).
Still, somehow, somewhere, just like Attila ended up surprisingly better
than its reputation, Cold Spring Harbor
also exudes a certain mystical charm that prevents me from cringing all the way
through. Maybe it's a matter of production — all this minimalist flair, with
minimal orchestration (Artie Ripp, the guy responsible for the speeding-up
mistake, originally added orchestration to ʽTomorrow Is Todayʼ, but
Billy later removed it). Maybe it's because some of the simple little vocal
hooks — very simple little hooks —
that Billy adds to sapfests like ʽYou Can Make Me Freeʼ or ʽTurn
Aroundʼ are delivered in an accordingly simple manner: no pomp means no
hate. But most of all, maybe it is because Cold
Spring Harbor is very much a «homebrewed» affair: unlike, say, a Neil
Diamond album or a Carpenters album, you do not get the feeling of The Big
Corporate Machine backing up Billy's moustache. It's his own game here,
sincerely conceived and honestly laid down. «Poor man's Paul McCartney / poor
man's Elton John», for sure, but at this stage, this is at least an honestly
poor man trying to lay down his feelings as best he can (and doing tolerably
well), not a spoiled ugly millionaire divorcing his third wife.
PIANO MAN (1973)
1) Travelin' Prayer; 2) Piano
Man; 3) Ain't No Crime; 4) You're My Home; 5) The Ballad Of Billy The Kid; 6)
Worse Comes To Worst; 7) Stop In Nevada; 8) If I Only Had The Words (To Tell
You); 9) Somewhere Along The Line; 10) Captain Jack.
Third time's the charm: on Piano Man, Billy Joel finally found Billy Joel and confronted him
face to face. The album title may have been a little arrogant, because by 1973,
everybody knew who was the real piano
man — Elton John; Billy, however, indirectly insinuated that the US of A should
have its own piano man for its own
patriotic reasons, and that he was perfectly willing, capable, and ready to be
to Elton what the Monkees were to the Beatles. And for now, let us assume that
this is a compliment for the Monkees, not a slur for Billy.
After a live Philadelphia radio broadcast of
ʽCaptain Jackʼ garnered much interest, Billy got himself a contract
with Columbia, moved to Los Angeles, got himself a professional backing band,
and finally recorded an album that managed to present him as a coherent artist
without, however, having to pigeonhole himself directly in one image, be it a
mad organ grinder or a sentimental serenader. Piano Man is a well-balanced mix of roots-rock, vaudeville, folksy
singer-songwriting, orchestrated ballads, and a little bit of old-fashioned rock'n'roll
— essentially the same formula as Elton's, but ever so slightly «Americanized»
for local enjoyment. No coincidence, after all, that the very first song greets
us with banjo, fiddle, and a general honky-tonk atmosphere.
One thing Billy never thought of was hiring a
good lyricist: all the words to his songs come from his own mind, and neither
depth of meaning nor complexity of expression were ever among his fortes —
which, on one hand, helped him find mass appeal, but, on the other, exposed him
to plenty of critical ridicule. He is
a clumsy one, for sure: ʽThe Ballad Of Billy The Kidʼ, for instance,
takes great liberties with the historic facts on Billy The Kid (who was never
hanged, for that matter), without ever letting us know why it does that, creating the impression that the author was
either illiterate or had a warped understanding of the meaning of «artistic
license». Or take the title track — «meaningless lives commemorated at the
local bar stand» is a worn out theme that, nevertheless, can always use a
little extra exploration, but Billy's «telling it like it is» approach reeks
of boredom and limited verbal talent rather than artistic realism.
None of which would be too bad if Piano Man were one of those albums
where «the lyrics do not really matter», but they do, since Billy wires them up
to his melodies; and just like his lyrics, his melodies are easily
comprehensible, accessible, and even memorable, but not particularly interesting.
On the «epic» tunes, such as the title track, ʽBilly The Kidʼ, and
ʽCaptain Jackʼ, Joel seems to be more interested in telling a story,
with predictable musical accompaniment throughout, playing the part of a
«street poet-observer» (or, in the case of ʽKidʼ, «dirt road
poet-observer»), and your ability to enjoy these songs as a whole will surely
depend on whether the guy manages to hook you up in the first few minutes,
whether that stark, simple combination of voice, piano, and content will make
you feel inspired, or cringe in disgust, or leave you utterly unaffected in
either direction. And that, in turn, will surely depend upon your previous
experience. For instance: if you have heard Elton John's ʽBallad Of A
Well-Known Gunʼ and Billy Joel's ʽThe Ballad Of Billy The Kidʼ,
what would you prefer? And if you prefer the former, would it, in any way, bias
you against the latter? In my case, it does.
The thing that works in Billy's favor is that
it takes impoliteness and cruelty to shoot the piano man. His singing on the
album is exceptional — powerful, ringing, well-ranged — and his playing fluent
and fun as usual. He is neither being too humble or minimalistic so as to let
anyone suspect unprofessionalism, nor trying to rise to particularly
pretentious heights: ʽCaptain Jackʼ comes a little close, but it's
about heroin addiction, after all, and when you are subtly campaigning against
heroin addiction, anything goes. These songs aren't great, because great songs
ought to have a mystery component, and my feelings detect no mystery here
whatsoever — but they all sound «okay» where they could have sounded much
worse, and maybe it's even for the better that Joel sets them to such basic,
familiar melody patterns.
Actually, from a melodic standpoint, Billy's
best compositions should probably be sought among the shorter tracks here —
particularly ʽWorse Comes To Worstʼ, distinguished with a funky
wah-wah guitar part that sounds highly unusual for this kind of album (and this
is probably the only time in music history when somebody tried to marry funky
wah-wah guitar to an accordeon!); and
ʽSomewhere Along The Lineʼ, which might be the most blatantly Elton
John-like tune on the entire record (echoes of ʽBorder Songʼ and
ʽTake Me To The Pilotʼ all over the place), but it still takes talent
to come up with such a good variation. The orchestrated coda to ʽBilly The
Kidʼ is fairly good, too, come to think of it: Billy's take on what a
«Billy Joel Piano Concerto No. 1» would probably look like.
If we are going to give any thumbs up
to Billy at all, Piano Man is as
good a record as any in his catalog to be our first choice. Of all the flaws to
be found on Billy's records, it only shows those general flaws that are
inherently wired in «Billy The Artist» as a concept — there is really no
complaining about how the songs lack hooks, or how the production lacks taste,
or how the singer lacks commitment, or how the lyricist is a stupid moralizer,
etc. Like myself, you may feel no pressing need to ever hear a single one of
these songs again — but that would be no reason to deny or condemn access to
them for other people, because Piano Man,
unlike, say, something like Aerosmith's Get
A Grip or a late period Rod Stewart album, seems completely harmless for
the central nervous system and the future paths of human evolution. Just as
long as you don't spend too much time looking at the album sleeve, that is —
I've heard rumors that Medusa
look on the cover acts as a strong petrifier on people with low immunity
levels.
STREETLIFE SERENADE (1974)
1) Streetlife Serenader; 2)
Los Angelinos; 3) The Great Suburban Showdown; 4) Root Beer Rag; 5) Roberta; 6)
The Entertainer; 7) Last Of The Big Time Spenders; 8) Weekend Song; 9)
Souvenir; 10) The Mexican Connection.
Brace yourself for a serious statement — this
is not just a «piano pop» album, but a sprawling panorama of California circa
1974. A couple of instrumental tunes and a couple of universally suitable
ballads can be still tied in with the general concept, which revolves around
the perceptive and insightful singer-songwriter sick and tired of the gay,
nonchalant, sunny lifestyle on the West Coast that yields only superficial
comfort and prevents the artist from aspiring to higher goals, because how can
you ever aspire to higher goals with mountains of coke and hordes of
bikini-clad beauties blocking the sun from you? "Such hot sweet
schoolgirls, so educated", "going into garages for exotic
massages" and all that. Tough, ungrateful life without any redeeming
qualities whatsoever. Damn all that hot sun and light sea breeze.
The music honestly reflects the darker, sterner
processes in Billy's mind — it is now less oriented at a «rootsy» sound and
seems more influenced by the progressive movement, as the man procures himself
some trendy synthesizers (most prominently heard on ʽThe
Entertainerʼ), rolls out some dark piano colors, strengthened by hard rock
guitars (most prominently heard on ʽLos Angelenosʼ), and does
everything in his power to come up with an album that would be traditionally
«accessible», yet not too overtly «commercial» — the only single was ʽThe
Entertainerʼ, a song that actually bashes
the ideology of entertainment and the structure of the charts so explicitly
that even the public seems to have gotten it: few people bought the single,
even fewer people bought the album, and in the end, Streetlife Serenade cost him some public support without compensating
for any extra critical favor.
The basic problem remains the same as before:
the ambitions of the artist are by no means matched by artistic genius. ʽThe
Entertainerʼ raves and rants about the cruel industry ("It was a beautiful
song / But it ran too long / You're gonna have a hit / You gotta make it fit /
So they cut it down to 3:05"), but if the lyrics do indeed refer directly
to Billy's struggle with the record industry people over the length of
ʽPiano Manʼ — well, Billy, not everybody
in the world agrees that ʽPiano Manʼ actually deserves a six-minute
running time; it's just a generic waltz, for Christ's sake, not a Beethoven's
9th or even a ʽHey Judeʼ, for that matter. How about some modesty
here? For that matter, without all the righteous anger ʽThe
Entertainerʼ could have been a nifty little pop teaser, vocally catchy and
with fun use of the synthesizer, but using that sort of melody for a Big Cultural
Statement is off-putting.
If you «mentally delete» most of the lyrics and
some of the heroic posturing, Streetlife
Serenade isn't too bad, though, and should probably rank up there with
«second-tier» Elton John albums (although, of all the songs, only ʽLast Of
The Big Time Spendersʼ sounds directly like one of those semi-inspired
Elton ballads). ʽStreetlife Serenaderʼ has an inoffensive, nicely
flowing piano melody whose lack of dynamic flow is somewhat compensated by
nuanced little flourishes that show Billy's romantic classical piano influences
without compromising good taste. ʽThe Great Suburban Showdownʼ
skilfully combines pedal steel with synthesizers and ends up sounding like a
Bee Gees song circa Life In A Tin Can
— yet another record with a brotherly spirit about how boring life can be in
L.A., but ʽShowdownʼ would have probably been a highlight on it.
ʽWeekend Songʼ is a good one to enjoy on a lonesome evening when
you'd like to get drunk and go on the town but lack the money, the spirit, and
the real will to do so.
And then there are the instrumentals.
ʽRoot Beer Ragʼ sounds pretty much the exact way as the title would
suggest — with a few whiny whees from synthesizers that creep up behind your
back every now and then, but mostly just relying on the good old honky tonk and
Scott Joplin for inspiration. ʽThe Mexican Connectionʼ begins like
an incidental piece of elevator muzak, cuddled around a pretty, but repetitive
pop riff, but then does break into a
Mexican part, also justifying the title. In the end, both provide some harmless
fun.
What totally kills off Streetlife Serenade, though, and opens up all sorts of
possibilities for getting seriously irritated, is its — and Billy's in general
— total lack of any sense of humor.
So ʽRoot Beer Ragʼ is «funny», because, you know, it's ragtime played
light and fast, that's always funny by definition, but we are not talking about
that: we are talking about how deadpan serious this whole thing plays out, even
if the man simply cannot handle «serious» on the same level with the truly
«serious» performers. Even the irony is delivered with a vengeful attitude, but
even when Billy Joel was playing Attila the Hun, he could never begin to hope
to scare the shit out of you — much less now, when he is playing lyrical pianos
and futuristic synthesizers.
The whole thing is about as huge a Social
Artistic Statement as you'd expect from the average Miss North Carolina,
memorizing answers to generic questions on family values and world peace from
cue cards. And I sure wish I could forget about it and just enjoy the tunes,
but the awful thing is, the tunes just aren't that great — decent, not great — to win over you on their own. They
are served to you on the same platter with personality, and you can't really separate
one from the other. The only reason I can sit through an album like this
without cringing is that I honestly like Billy's voice and phrasing — even when
he is splurging out banalities, he sounds more like a genuine human being than,
say, Tom Jones or David Coverdale, and for that alone, Streetlife Serenade should be redeemed from the numerous
accusations by professional «Joel haters» who could spend their time more
wisely hating somebody else. Leo Sayer, for example. Why don't we all go hate
Leo Sayer? He sold a lot of records, too.
TURNSTILES (1976)
1) Say Goodbye To Hollywood;
2) Summer, Highland Falls; 3) All You Wanna Do Is Dance; 4) New York State Of
Mind; 5) James; 6) Prelude / Angry Young Man; 7) I've Loved These Days; 8)
Miami 2017 (Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway).
Billy Joel is back on the East Coast, and he
wants you to know it. No, scrape that, make it «he wants you to feel it with
the most sensitive fibers of your soul». He did not like it in California, he
likes it a lot better in New York, and this provides him with enough
inspiration for 36 conceptually organized minutes — and a rather odd-looking
album sleeve photoshoot where he is looking at you as if you were a policeman,
readying to apprehend the artist for attempting to take a subway ride without a
ticket. Meanwhile, each of the people behind his back is supposed to illustrate
one of the stories behind the songs, solidifying this comprehensive panorama of
life in the Big Apple as forming a much more interesting, if not necessarily
much more wholesome, opposition to life on Sunset Boulevard.
The album quite consciously begins with a
Californian touch — not only is the message of ʽSay Goodbye To
Hollywoodʼ totally transparent already from the title, but it also chooses
the rhythmics and arrangement style of Phil Spector's and the Ronettes'
ʽBe My Babyʼ for its backbone: not coincidentally, the original song
was recorded at the Gold Star Studios in LA, even though both Phil Spector and
the Ronettes were both from the New York area, so this is as good a hint as any
at Billy's «transition» — bye-bye Hollywood, hello Manhattan.
But it's all fine and dandy with the symbolism,
what about the actual song? Well...
it's «okay». Decent imitation of Spector's wall-of-sound, big bombastic drums
and saxes and all, except Phil used these things to imitate romantic soaring of
the spirit, while Billy seems to imitate them just because he wants to. The
repetitive chorus of "say goodbye to Hollywood, say goodbye my baby"
quickly sticks in your head all right, but I have no idea what I am supposed to
feel about it. Laugh? Cry? Ache? Rejoice? For a good example of a tribute that
is quite spiritually true to Spector's vision, check out ʽDon't Answer
Meʼ from Alan Parsons' Ammonia
Avenue; ʽSay Goodbye To Hollywoodʼ, in comparison, is technically
accomplished but emotionally dead.
Not that it necessarily gets better even when
the song is quite emotionally alive: few things in this world are cornier than
ʽNew York State Of Mindʼ, where Billy channels about 50% Sinatra
spirit and 50% Ray Charles and, once again, ends up like a really cheap, but
extremely pretentious, shadow of both. It may be one of the most lyrically
direct and slavering anthems to the city ever written, but the lyrics are
awfully crude and straightforward, the melodic moves are too textbookishly
predictable, and the resulting love declaration really has all the potency of a
birthday greetings card bought in the nearest Five and Dime. It is too bad
that the talents of sax master Phil Woods, specially recruited by Billy to add
depth and authenticity to the song, are unable to save the song — it still
sounds way too much like the product of somebody's rashful decision to have
himself his own ʽGeorgia On My Mindʼ or die trying.
Unfortunately, I do not have anything better to
say about the rest of the songs. The only one I'd really care to hear again is
probably ʽAngry Young Manʼ, mainly due to its introductory
ʽPreludeʼ section — which arguably packs more composing ideas than
the rest of the album in its entirety, and provides the album's lightest, most
adequate and simply-friendly two minutes of entertainment. What follows,
though, is an attempt at yet another Deep Important Statement, in which our
hero expresses profound sympathy towards the collective Angry Young Man
("he's been stabbed in the back, he's been misunderstood") while at
the same time decisively distancing himself from such a personality ("I
believe I've passed the age / Of consciousness and righteous rage"). It is
very hard to refrain from snickering at lines like "I once believed in
causes too", though, looking back on Billy's past and remembering Attila
the Hun in the meat locker — does that count as one of the causes? Look at the
«angry young man» of Attila and,
say, the «angry young man» of ʽMy Generationʼ or ʽLondon's
Burningʼ, then tell me who is really
an expert on the «age of righteous rage» and whose credentials are more
trustworthy.
And we have not even begun to mention the really awful songs on the record — such
as ʽJamesʼ, a tepid electric piano ballad that swaddles you sick, or
ʽAll You Wanna Do Is Danceʼ, which, seeing as how it is a song about
New York in 1976, should have been a disco track, but, for some reason, is
really ska (taken much too seriously once again for such a style). Here there
is really no interesting composing to speak of — but the tone and the message
stay as intentionally serious as everything else. The man is simply riding on
his own wavelength, overestimating his talents and insights to such a huge
extent that he is simply bound to get
himself a fanbase, out of all the people who regularly confuse style with
substance. Throw in a bit of orchestral bombast with ʽI've Loved These
Daysʼ and a bit of «rock'n'roll bombast» with the half-Elton,
half-Springsteen ʽMiami 2017ʼ, and voilà, you are already a source of simplistic inspiration
for a massive audience, and ʽNew York State Of Mindʼ gets covered by
Barbra Streisand and Tony Bennett.
To be fair, Turnstiles was a serious commercial letdown for Billy, with sales
dropping quite radically from the level of his Californian records — it would
take the extra sophistication of The
Stranger for New York to finally accept his new streetlife serenader.
Musical life was rich and diverse in the Big Apple in 1976, way too colorful
for people to fall in droves for this third-rate piano pop pretending to major
artistry level. Unfortunately, this did not prevent the songs from eventually
becoming radio and concert staples: once Billy Joel became a household name,
ʽNew York State Of Mindʼ, ʽI've Loved These Daysʼ and
ʽAngry Young Manʼ became a constant presence in American life — and,
for some reason, in a «rock» context at that, despite really being a set of
Broadway musical tunes.
As usual, «hatred» for this album is out of the
question: on the whole, Turnstiles
is not so much «godawful» as it is «useless», a record that has no reason to
exist in the presence of Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, and, I am afraid to
say, even Bee Gees albums of the same era. And maybe I wouldn't have been so
direct in this judgement if it weren't for Billy's provocative pose on the
album sleeve — every time I take another look, it's like he's staring me
directly in the face: «Well? What do you think, really? Have I made it? Is it
on the level? Are they gonna let me past that turnstile? See, I've brought some
friends with me, they'll all vouch I'm a good guy, really! Honestly! Swear
to God, I do belong!» Come on now, Mr. Joel, you don't need to be trying that hard, really. Nothing against you
personally, but it gets irritating. I'd like to like this music, but I can't
stand that striped tie of yours, so a thumbs down it is.
THE STRANGER (1977)
1) Movin' Out (Anthony's
Song); 2) The Stranger; 3) Just The Way You Are; 4) Scenes From An Italian
Restaurant; 5) Vienna; 6) Only The Good Die Young; 7) She's Always A Woman; 8)
Get It Right The First Time; 9) Everybody Has A Dream.
Add a good producer to Turnstiles, and you get The
Stranger — Billy's critical and commercial zenith; indeed, a good candidate
for «Billy Joel at his ultimately possible best». Phil Ramone had only just
produced Paul Simon's Still Crazy After
All These Years, a bright example of singer-songwriterish soft-rock
elevated to high artistry level, so Billy's interest in the man was natural,
and laudable, seeing as how the poor production quality of Turnstiles was among that album's weightiest flaws. And when I say
«poor production quality», I do not merely mean engineering and mixing — I mean
choice of arrangements, lyrics-to-melody matching, excessive reliance on
imitations and clichés, and other such things for which Joel could have
used a good mentor by his side. The
Stranger corrects that mistake.
But first, about Billy's own «progress». From
my general point of view, the value of the average Billy Joel album can be
aptly described with the formula «catchiness divided by self-importance» — in
other words, the heavier the message, the cringier the impression. In that
respect, The Stranger is a major
improvement over Turnstiles: there
is no big overriding concept here, such as «Los Angeles, the Whore of Babylon,
vs. New York, the Thinking Man's City», or «The Artist and His Management». The
lyrical and emotional content of the album still strive for seriousness, but
they are scattered all over the map and rarely impose on the listener in a
brutal manner — even such a magnum opus
as ʽScenes From An Italian Restaurantʼ is merely an understated
narrative; and in most cases, words and music combine with each other quite
sensibly.
Speaking of the music, the album's loudest
tracks now consistently resemble Supertramp — the same kind of glossy
vaudeville combined with elements of «progressive» complexity and delivered in
an atmosphere of bitter irony. And insanely catchy — ʽMovin' Outʼ is
one of the liveliest tunes about the trials and tribulations of hard-working
immigrants ever written. You listen, you have a good time, you tap your feet,
you play air guitar, and you sympathize for poor Anthony working in the grocery
store. (Of course, soon enough he might be hitting it off with Karen Lynn
Gorney, but Billy's vision is not always that
far-reaching). The main melody, especially when played on solo piano, stands
way too close to the instrumental coda of Clapton's ʽLaylaʼ for comfort,
but this is just an impressionistic observation, not really a criticism.
In fact, by this point in time criticizing
Billy for lack of «originality» becomes a moot point — the man has made a
living out of thriving on other people's ideas, clinging on to their catchiest
bits, re-piecing them together «billy-lite» and introducing as much minor
variation as possible so as to avoid technical (or legal) complications. Listen
intensely enough to these songs and chances are you will come up with a
suitable prototype, either melodic or stylistic, for each one, distilled and
diluted for easier consumption, but always with that little «pretense to
emotional depth» — just the kind of thing that drives professional Joel-haters
so crazy. On the other hand, you'd have to be really stuck up to generate hatred vibes for these songs: as
transparent as their structure and emotional content is, they always value
«craft» over «bloat».
Thus, the ballad ʽJust The Way You
Areʼ clearly takes its cues from 10cc's ʽI'm Not In Loveʼ, from
the proto-New Age keyboard sound right down to the psychedelic vocal harmonies.
The tempos are a bit faster, the sax solos bring the whole thing closer to
lounge jazz, and the lyrics completely dispense with 10cc's irony. This helped
it win the Grammy for both «Record of the Year» and «Song of the Year» and
eventually turn into a modern vocal jazz classic (the presence of Phil Woods
certainly had something to do with it as well), even though in terms of
composing it is one of the simplest and laziest pieces on the entire album —
the whole song rides on one generic groove from beginning to end, and its
ability to charm the listener depends mostly on the listener's vulnerability to
Joel's charisma.
Perfectly crafted ballads also include
ʽViennaʼ and ʽShe's Always A Womanʼ, both of these rounded
up and smoothed out so much better than, for instance, ʽShe's Got A
Wayʼ, that it is impossible to deny how far Billy has progressed in half
a decade. ʽViennaʼ is really good — a much more sensible candidate
for «Song of the Year» if you really
had to choose from a Billy Joel album: the lyrics are seriously above average
for the man, with «Vienna» unexpectedly used as a metaphor for taking it easy
and settling down (like Billy's own father did), and the music would be good
enough for Neil Young on a lazy day. It is not entirely clear what that
decidedly Parisian accordeon break is doing on a track named
ʽViennaʼ, but then again, Austria is
known as the homeland of the instrument, so maybe Billy is simply clearing up
our stereotypes here.
The title track and ʽScenes From An
Italian Restaurantʼ are arguably the two songs here written in an attempt
to appease the «demanding» segment of the public — longer, more complex
(multi-part), and more ideologically ambitious than the rest. For the main
theme of ʽThe Strangerʼ, Billy came up with a somber Morricone-style
melody that Phil had him whistle rather than dress up in a complex arrangement;
not my cup of tea outside a good Western, but reasonably atmospheric as an
intro to the main part of the song, which sounds kinda like Leo Sayer in a bad
mood. (This is not really an accusation, since, come to think of it, Leo Sayer
is never in a bad mood). As far as catchy funk-pop goes, ʽThe
Strangerʼ qualifies, but its quasi-Freudian lyrical message, urging you to
"let your lover see the stranger in yourself", is not exactly
mindblowing, as is the music.
ʽScenesʼ are much better, probably
the best track on the album: seven and a half minutes of more than decent
music-hall piano pop, telling a simple, unadorned nostalgic story of two lovers
that hardly offers any serious insights into the subject (not since Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage it doesn't), but you
are not forced to dig deep into it — just enjoy, if you can, the piano riffs of
the slow part and the catchy boppiness of the fast part, including the
"whoa-whoa"s, which are cute, funny, and make much more sense than
choosing an abstract "Italian Restaurant" as the backdrop for
everything that is happening when the music itself has nothing specifically
Italian about it. Watch out for the clarinet breaks — lite-jazz fans will
appreciate Richie Cannata's work, I think.
All in all, speaking about massively commercial
pop albums of the time, The Stranger
is certainly no Rumours when it
comes to sharpness, intensity, and pure compositional talent — rather, it is
in the same league with Hotel California,
as a finely designed and produced, relatively adequate and memorable
collection of pop songs which (and this is one of its major advantages) still sounds fresh and enjoyable. Come to think
of it, Joel has to be commended for
not sticking exclusively to the trendy styles of the times — with his talents
and instincts, he could have easily turned half of the record into stuffy disco
grooves and the other half into Barry Manilow and still win in the short run.
As it is, he won in the long run: The
Stranger is still capable of garnering new fans in the 21st century, with
its clever mix of then-contemporary and retro ideas. And even the album sleeve
remains weirdly attractive with its «masked mystery» pantomime, rather than
just another expressionless photo of The Piano Man. With all the usual
reservations, I give the album a thumbs up — I could perhaps even find a slot for
it on a later schedule, if I am in a specific mood for «lite-art-cabaret
entertainment with a rock production angle» or something.
(Except I would probably have to cut off the
last track: Billy as a gather-round-the-Christmas-tree gospel preacher of
future happiness on ʽEverybody Has A Dreamʼ is an inevitable evil if
we agree that the album requires a Grand Finale / Happy Ending, but I'd rather
have it end with ʽViennaʼ, on a humbler note. Taste, you're a bitch.)
52ND STREET (1978)
1) Big Shot; 2) Honesty; 3) My
Life; 4) Zanzibar; 5) Stiletto; 6) Rosalinda's Eyes; 7) Half A Mile Away; 8)
Until The Night; 9) 52nd Street.
This follow-up to The Stranger does not seriously mess with the formula and even
retains the same golden-egg-laying producer, but the general layout,
nevertheless, has somewhat changed, possibly reflecting Billy's awareness of
the market's increased demand for shorter, less ambitious musical pieces. To
say that 52nd Street, in any way
whatsoever, acknowledges the arrival of punk and New Wave, would be a
tremendous overstatement (although I guess that the dirtiness of the wall on
the album sleeve could be taken as «punkish», in some manner), but it does
acknowledge the arrival of disco (ʽMy Lifeʼ), and the lack of
multi-part suites like ʽScenes From An Italian Restaurantʼ is quite
telling.
The album title formally refers to the location
of both Billy's record label and the studio where the sessions were held, but,
since 52nd Street is commonly known as the center of NYC's jazz life, 52nd Street is sometimes referred to as
«Billy's jazzy album» — even though its seriously jazzy bits only come through
every once in a while, most notably on Freddie Hubbard's flugelhorn and trumpet
instrumental breaks on ʽZanzibarʼ. In reality, the album, like its
predecessor, goes for an all-encompassing, diverse approach. There is no
single theme or style that dominates over the others, but there are also no
true standouts. It's just a solid Billy Joel record, by Billy Joel's own, not
particularly demanding, standards.
The big hit single was ʽMy Lifeʼ —
the disco song — and I have no idea why it was so big in the first place, but
the keyboard riff at its melodic base is indeed quite catchy, and the
arrangement is a bouncy fun generator, although Billy's lyrical message is once
again much too overtly serious ("go ahead with your own life, leave me
alone") to go along with the fun. Come on now, Mr. Joel! How come you can
write funny music without learning how to be
funny? How can we leave you alone when you are making millions on such an
inadequate approach to art?...
The nearly-as-big hit was ʽBig Shotʼ,
whose opening riff sounds decisively brutal before you understand that the man
really nicked it from Ray Charles' ʽSticks And Stonesʼ. But that's
all right, he put it to good use, as long as, once again, you manage to ignore
the lyrics that viciously lambast some poor spoiled socialite victim of Joel's
verbal cruelty (some have speculated about Bianca Jagger, no less) — and,
speaking of Bianca Jagger, her soon-to-be-ex-husband would pretty soon treat
her no less malignantly in ʽRespectableʼ, but the big difference is,
Mick always had a perfectly clear sense of humor about such things (which
showed up first and foremost in his theatrical-style delivery), whereas Billy
here, and there, and everywhere, sounds deadpan serious, as if he really hates Halston dresses, Elaine's, and Dom
Perignon (but in that case, how is it that he knows so much about all this stuff?). Anyway, like I said, ignore
the lyrics, and the tune is a decent pop rocker with a slightly hard edge to
it — no more, no less.
But enough with the hit singles, or I will have
to say something about the ballad ʽHonestyʼ when I'd much rather talk
about ʽZanzibarʼ, whose Steely Dan vibe with a light touch of
mysticism seems to fare much better than Billy's «angry» songs. Freddie Hubbard's
parts are indeed the obvious highlight, but there is something about the
entire tune that makes it sound genuine. In fact, it seems as if Billy is
always at his most natural when he's not doing much except sit at the bar — the
closer he is to that particular stand, the more convincing his self-expression.
"I've got a tab at Zanzibar, tonight that's where I'll be" — this is,
like, the most believable statement on the entire album. No wonder Hubbard is
being so enthusiastic with his support.
I also happen to like the quiet Latin ballad
ʽRosalinda's Eyesʼ, with elements of jazz fusion woven in and a
top-level chorus resolution (although I sure hope he'd find something less
clichéd to rhyme the title with than "Cuban skies"), and
ʽHalf A Mile Awayʼ, which is a blatant rip-off of Elton John circa
ʽLove Lies Bleedingʼ, but a skilled one. The only true stinker on the
entire record is ʽUntil The Nightʼ, a corny folk ballad that, for
some reason, was awarded the dubious honor of the album's most bombastic style
of production — not Phil Spector style, but rather a proto-power ballad style
that could have easily influenced Bryan Adams. (Actually, Billy says the song
was influenced by The Righteous Brothers... but why?).
In short, life is fairly routine, but diversified
and relatively easy-going on 52nd Street.
ʽZanzibarʼ, in particular, shows that Billy could have thrived,
sucking on that Steely Dan vibe à
la Aja; his mistake, the way I
see it, was in putting just as much emphasis on his «hard rocker» and «anthemic
balladeer» sides, where ambitions overwhelmed talent. Still, the album is
pretty well-balanced between the relative highs and the relative lows, and I
would even feel justified to mark it with another thumbs up — the difference with The Stranger is that the former took
some risks that unexpectedly paid off, whereas this one hardly ever takes any,
but it still pays off.
GLASS HOUSES (1980)
1) You May Be Right; 2)
Sometimes A Fantasy; 3) Don't Ask Me Why; 4) It's Still Rock And Roll To Me; 5)
All For Leyna; 6) I Don't Want To Be Alone; 7) Sleeping With The Television On;
8) C'Etait Toi; 9) Close To The Borderline; 10) Through The Long Night.
Another step in the right direction. This album
is usually tagged as Billy's «hard rock record» — not simply for harboring more
distorted guitar-driven pop rockers than usual, but for a general toughening-up
of the attitude. Oh look out there, he's really
gonna crash that glass house on the album sleeve, isn't he? He did crash it, didn't he? We all heard
the breaking glass at the beginning of ʽYou May Be Rightʼ, and we all
saw the resulting hole on the back sleeve photo. What an angry young man! What
a punk, eh?
In reality, there is at best one or two
«socially relevant» tracks here, and that is very, very good news. The
«toughness» helps as long as it keeps Billy away from one too many lounge jazz
ballads, but Billy Joel as a public agitator, particularly in the age of punk
and New Wave, would not be a good idea at all. What Glass Houses really is is a good old-fashioned pop rock record,
reasonably well written, almost completely free of ambitions/pretentions
(maybe even more so than 52nd Street),
and containing exactly one corny tune
with sickening potential — ʽYou Were The Oneʼ, an attempt to imitate
the sentimental vibe of the French pop scene (even including some actual
singing in French, with a fairly bad accent, as one can guess). But it's all
right, too. A Billy Joel album without a single bad Billy Joel song would be
too much of a mindshaker.
ʽYou May Be Rightʼ is really just an
old-fashioned pub rocker, walking an assured line between cockiness and
catchiness, putting back the rock'n'roll ecstasy in its guitar and saxophone
solos, and, most fun of all, setting it to an electric folk-rock rhythm pattern
that recalls the Beatles circa 1965-66. ʽSometimes A Fantasyʼ follows
it up with echoey guitar and vocals that either pay tribute to the man's
rockabilly idols, or show that he has
been paying attention to New Wave, after all; on second thought, it does sound
more like the Cars than Gene Vincent. But attention or no attention, "it's
still rock'n'roll to me", the man says on the album's most anthemic track.
Three minutes of brisk guitar trot that slightly recalls the Shadows — and
proclaims that the more it changes, the more it rests the same. Cool sax solo,
nice bounce, and only a slight touch of self-righteousness at that.
The album also contains what might possibly be
Billy's finest ever stab at being Paul McCartney — the bouncy (sorry for that
word again, but Glass Houses really
keeps up this non-stop bounce for almost unreasonable periods of time!), yes,
the bouncy acoustic pop song ʽDon't Ask Me Whyʼ, which could have
easily fit on... on... well, I'm not exactly
sure on what particular McCartney album it would fit best of all (Flaming Pie?), but it's got all the
right McCartney moves. All it needs is a Paul-style falsetto to complete the
picture, but Billy no like falsetto. Oh, and the Latin piano interlude in the
middle is a little out of place, too. Still, excellent try.
Everything else is all right, I guess. There
really isn't a lot one could write about songs like ʽAll For Leynaʼ
(power-piano-pop with a mildly desperate edge), or ʽSleeping With The
Television Onʼ (Elton strikes again on the verses, but the "all night
long, all night long" chorus is a bit too bland and smooth even for
Elton's mid-1970s standards), or the album closer ʽThrough The Long
Nightʼ whose intent is to finally put you to sleep with the aid of
suitably lullabyish vocal harmonies. Not a lot, but they are all decent,
adequate compositions, well produced, as usual, by Phil Ramone and mostly
concentrating on thinly disguised stories of relationships.
Thus, another thumbs up here: nothing truly stands
out in particular (other than ʽC'Etait Toiʼ, in a bad way), but the album still forms an
integral part of Billy's winning streak, particularly now that the man has
learned the secret to true success — with his strong, but limited talents, the
less important he sounds, the better it is. The best thing about Glass Houses is that he never really
threw that stone, you know. He never even planned to. What, did you think Billy
Joel capable of something as stupid
as that? He's just doing it all for Leyna.
SONGS IN THE ATTIC (1981)
1) Miami 2017 (I've Seen The
Lights Go Out On Broadway); 2) Summer, Highland Falls; 3) Streetlife Serenader;
4) Los Angelinos; 5) She's Got A Way; 6) Everybody Loves You Now; 7) Say
Goodbye To Hollywood; 8) Captain Jack; 9) You're My Home; 10) The Ballad Of
Billy The Kid; 11) I've Loved These Days.
What is the more ethical choice — put out a
live album of your greatest and best-known hits, or put out a live album of
your obscurities from the vaults (or «from the attic», to be more precise)?
Maybe the most ethical choice would
be not to put out a live album at all. Concentrating on hits is too redundant
and predictable, whereas concentrating on the rarities is pretentiously vain —
isn't there a reason that they were
obscure in the first place? shouldn't one just give people what they want?
isn't there a sort of «look-at-me-how-great-I-am» mentality issue here?... and
so on.
In the case of Billy Joel, whom I certainly do
not consider a «great» artist, this dilemma is even more pronounced. But I am happy to say that the concept behind Songs In The Attic — getting his «new»
audiences, turned on to him since the success of The Stranger, to get better acquainted with the man's past — is
pretty darn classily executed, by means of two things: (a) a thoughtful,
meticulous selection of material that manages to avoid most of the lows and
focus on all the highs; (b) a relative reinvention of many of these songs;
formally — to better fit Billy's format of playing with his more or less
permanently assembled band, in reality — to try to improve on the original
production and arrangement flaws wherever possible.
The reinventions are never too radical, though;
they are mostly done in the spirit of «virtual remastering», which is quite
impressive considering that these are actual live recordings. Billy's singing,
in particular, has never been better: he pays full attention to getting all the
harmonies right, and does not spare his voice any trouble — even turning it
into a snappy roar at the climactic moments of some of the tracks
(ʽCaptain Jackʼ). Meanwhile, the backing band bravely takes it upon
itself to compensate for the lack of overdubs, with David Brown's thick
electric guitar tone replacing string arrangements (ʽThe Ballad Of Billy
The Kidʼ); or, sometimes, it actually makes the arrangements denser than
they used to be (ʽEverybody Loves You Nowʼ now has a frantic acoustic
strum pushing it forward, in addition to Billy's flashy piano rolls).
As for the setlist, well, it did not manage to
shift my original disappointed feelings for ʽShe's Got A Wayʼ (a song
that feels as melodically unfinished to me as ever), but, apart from that, it is a fairly representative and solid selection from Billy's pre-mass
popularity years, very evenly distributed between his first four solo albums
(the only thing that's lacking is an ass-kicking organ grind from Attila — I mean, would it have hurt the man to throw in a
ʽCalifornia Flashʼ every once in a while, just for some good plain
fun?). To keep the concept stable, he keeps away from all the pre-Stranger hits (ʽPiano Manʼ,
ʽThe Entertainerʼ) and popular tunes such as ʽNew York State Of
Mindʼ, and it helps, since Billy's hits always tended to be selected from
either his most repetitive or his corniest strata of material.
Some fans almost literally swear by Songs In The Attic, convinced that it
is the album to succesfully prove
that Billy Joel is «The Artist», or, at least, that the album managed to
breathe a wholly new strain of life into the old songs. I would not go that
far: the essence of the songs always remains the same, no matter how many
extra piercing guitar solos David Brown prefers to add to the new ʽCaptain
Jackʼ. But if you only have room for two or three Billy Joel albums in
your collection, it goes without saying that Songs In The Attic would be a good substitute for the entire
1971-76 period — with mostly the best selections, and each performance either
fully matching the power of the original or slightly improving upon it, what
you get here is a comprehensive overview of the man's formative years, recorded
in pristine sound quality.
Oh, and, just in case you didn't know it, the
audiences did go wild over the old
songs; sometimes, it has to do with Billy's choice of location (at least one
show was recorded in NYC, so every time he mentions Brooklyn or any other such
place on ʽMiami 2017ʼ, the crowds go nuts), but usually, they just
love him regardless of which East Coast city he is playing in. And, for the
record, there is a shitload of different locations from which the selections
(recorded in June/July 1980) were made, but the Westernmost we ever get was
Milwaukee (Wisconsin) and St. Paul (Minnesota). (Not that Billy never played
California since relocating back to NYC, but perhaps the crowds were slightly less enthusiastic back there —
especially if he ever tried to play ʽLos Angelenosʼ to any of them).
Anyway, the popular reaction shows that at
least the people who actually went to see Billy play live were already well
familiar with his back story. But this did not prevent Songs From The Attic from still going triple platinum and reaching
an impressive (for a live album) No. 8 on the charts — and while that might be
pushing it a bit too far, it certainly agrees well with my own thumbs up
on the issue.
THE NYLON CURTAIN (1982)
1) Allentown; 2) Laura; 3)
Pressure; 4) Goodnight Saigon; 5) She's Right On Time; 6) A Room Of Our Own; 7)
Surprises; 8) Scandinavian Skies; 9) Where's The Orchestra?
In Billy's own words, this is the material he
is most proud of, and that would be reason enough to get scared. A concept
album about the lives and fortunes of baby boomers at the start of the Reagan
era — a conscious decision to push into Springsteen territory, made by a man
whose lyrical talents, emotional insights, and sense of music-to-lyrics
adequacy have no hopes of ever coming close to Bruce's (regardless of how one
actually feels about Bruce). Just a couple extra wrong steps here, and The Nylon Curtain could easily turn
into Billy's worst embarrassment.
Funny, but it isn't. Knowing full well his
musical preferences and his strong and weak sides, it is not to Springsteen
that Billy turns for inspiration, but rather to the same old crowds: the
Beatles, Elton John, Jeff Lynne, and various other late Sixties' / early Seventies'
artists. Almost every single melody here is deeply rooted in one influence or
another, leaving pretty limited space for creativity — but when the influences
are that good, and the digesting is carried on with sufficient intelligence and
craft, and, most importantly, when this retro vibe prevents the artist from
getting swallowed and assimilated by all that new Eighties stuff that he
wouldn't be able to conquer anyway, what sense would there be in complaining?
To tell the truth, unless you really sit down
with the lyrics sheet, you might not even get a sense of how «self-important»
the album claims to be. A song like ʽAllentownʼ, with its honest, but
not particularly poetic portrait of out-of-work blue-collar workers in a
depressed community, has garnered much discussion, mostly concentrating on the
song's words — has Billy been able to paint a proper picture of these people's
lives? is he being respectful or insulting?... But musically, the song is just
a somewhat routine, inoffensive acoustic rocker, mildly catchy, with a vocal
part that is strangely buried in the mix as if the singer were a bit shy of his
own voice (this kind of mixing is a common thing, for instance, on George
Harrison's solo records). It isn't better or worse than dozens, if not
hundreds, of similar songs. And its symbolic factory whistle at the beginning,
as well as its symbolic industrial clanging at the end, are just tacked on for
information's sake — there is nothing in the music that would suggest a connection with disillusioned, despairing
workers. Inadequate? If you bother to check the lyrics, for sure. If you don't,
ʽAllentownʼ is not about blue-collar suffering. It's about tapping
your feet and strumming your air guitar.
Or let us take another of the album's most
famous tracks, the Vietnam epic ʽGoodnight Saigonʼ. Would you really be willing to participate in a
discussion of how precisely Billy has managed to convey the lives, feelings,
and memories of the veterans? Honestly? Chirping crickets and helicopters
aside, this is a cozy acoustic ballad with a rather clumsy power chorus («and
here is something for our friends in the arena to get wild to», Billy probably
thought as he threw in the "and we would all go down together" bit),
one that would have fit in much better with memories of your troubled, but
innocent childhood rather than the living hell of Vietnam. Which is, really,
just the way I hear it in my head — there is no more genuine Vietnam in
ʽGoodnight Saigonʼ than could be found in, say, ʽOb-La-Di
Ob-La-Daʼ. Which, as far as I am concerned, does not prevent
ʽGoodnight Saigonʼ from being a pleasant song (if you only take out
the «gung-ho chorus»).
Or take ʽPressureʼ — with a title
like that, you'd expect the song to be about the hardships and tension of
everyday life in the modern age, and lyrically, it is, but musically, it is
completely dominated by a synthesizer riff with a ridiculously sterile tone
(this is probably the most «modern» Billy got on this album for 1982's
standards) and a chord structure that sort of walks the line between nursery
rhyme and football field chant. (Maybe that's what all the Peter Pan and Sesame
Street references are all about?). Overall, the song is a little weird, a
little funny, definitely catchy (in a good way? in a bad way? still trying to
tell), but «serious», no.
And then there's all the rest, where you just
gotta sit back and admire, or despise, or take into neutral consideration
Billy's chameleonesque nature. ʽLauraʼ sounds almost precisely like
Jeff Lynne and ELO circa 1972-73, vocals, harmonies, guitars, strings, tempos,
dynamics, the works. ʽA Room Of Our Ownʼ picks up the rhythmics of
the Beatles' ʽShe's A Womanʼ and adds a few extra layers for some
extra fun. ʽScandinavian Skiesʼ, with its drawn-out, «floating» sound
elicited from all the instruments and vocals, aims for light,
happy-but-ominous psychedelia. And in the not-so-big finale, ʽWhere's The
Orchestra?ʼ suddenly remembers about the artist's vaudevillian roots and
jumps to self-irony — arguably the album's best lyrical moment is the opening
to this particular song: "Where's the orchestra? Wasn't this supposed to
be a musical?" Well... you said it, Mr. Joel. You really said it.
I like this album — not a lot, just a normal,
regular like, you know. The certified Billy Joel hater will hate it for being
too pretentious — I don't really manage to hear that pretentiousness. I would
never understand a blue-collar worker who'd want to make ʽAllentownʼ
his personal sacred anthem, or a Vietnam veteran who would shed tears to
ʽGoodnight Saigonʼ, or, for that matter, a girl called Laura who'd go
on to say that the song ʽLauraʼ really nails all her troubles. But I
wouldn't mind playing The Nylon Curtain
some more, every once in a while: it is diverse, sufficiently creative,
reasonably memorable, almost free of
annoying moments, and if you take it in its historical context, it sounds
amazingly good for a 1982 album recorded by a «veteran». In fact, it sounds
fairly timeless — an even bigger thanks to Phil Ramone here, who was able to
safeguard Joel from the easy pitfalls of the new decade — and I see no reason
whatsoever to deprive the album of its well-deserved, if a little tepid, thumbs up.
Nice stuff. Nothing too serious. Except, maybe, that he says the word
"fucking" once, but I sincerely hope this isolated fact will not
suffice to turn your whole world upside down.
AN INNOCENT MAN (1983)
1) Easy Money; 2) An Innocent
Man; 3) The Longest Time; 4) This Night; 5) Tell Her About It; 6) Uptown Girl;
7) Careless Talk; 8) Christie Lee; 9) Leave A Tender Moment; 10) Keeping The
Faith.
Once again, you gotta give it to Billy — in an
era when New Wave, electrofunk, synth-pop, and glam metal were all the rage,
going out there to record an entire album of tributes to late 1950s / early
1960s pop, rock, and R&B and
making it chart, as well as yield a whole bunch of big hit singles, is a
genuine accomplishment if there ever was one. In retrospect, An Innocent Man does not particularly
stand out from the general streak of Billy's change-face-records, but in its
historic context, it probably holds the record as «least expected thing for
Billy to have done at the given moment». This already makes it worth hearing,
at least once.
The album, as Billy admits himself, was
triggered to life by his divorce from his first wife, which allowed him
(finally!) to date hot young Cosmopolitan chicks like Elle Macpherson and
Christie Brinkley (whom he finally married two years later) and «feel like a
teenager all over again». As a result of this, the seriousness and pessimism of
the previous two albums are cast to the wind, and we are invited to a
retro-styled rock'n'roll party, where one by one, Mr. Joel impersonates a long
series of his idols — R&B entertainers, soul belters, doo-wop crooners,
rock'n'rollers, Motown stars, you name it. There is no attempt to veil,
conceal, or modernize these influences: on the contrary, the album openly
bills itself as a tribute, and should be regarded as such, so there is really
no sense in criticism like «this song is a blatant Wilson Pickett rip-off, how
can it be good?». The real questions are — (a) how close do these imitations
come to recreating the right spirit? and (b) is there any reason to listen to
them instead of the real stuff?
Question (a), I think, should rather be
answered in the positive. There is no doubting the professionalism of Billy
Joel, or of Phil Ramone who agreed to go along with the idea and adapted his
production to all the old-time values. There is no doubting, either, the
sincerity and adoration that went into this project — Joel really truly loves
this music (and why shouldn't he?), and, more arguably but still quite likely,
understands its spiritual essence. Throw in his hook-crafting potential, and
voilà, all the required ingredients are there. ʽEasy Moneyʼ
bangs the ground with typically Pickettish ferociousness, ʽChristie
Leeʼ pounds the piano with typically Little Richardish abandon,
ʽCareless Talkʼ steals and remixes all the right vocal inclinations
from Sam Cooke, ʽTell Her About Itʼ is pulsating with all the right
catchy-excited romanticism of Motown girl groups, and so on. An Innocent Man succeeds not only on
the surface, but deeper as well — with the understandable reservation that
most of the songs and styles imitated here by Billy were never that deep
themselves, to begin with.
The second question is trickier. There are even
some major Billy Joel fans out there who do not think much of the album, since
to them, «this is not the real Billy», and one might even feel offended to
have ʽGoodnight Saigonʼ immediately followed up by such a
light-hearted pastiche as ʽTell Her About Itʼ. But we are not really
discussing this from the point of view of major Billy Joel fans — as far as I
am concerned, I have no idea of what exactly is «the real Billy Joel»: for all I know, «the real Billy Joel»
could mostly be about wanting to bed hot Cosmopolitan models, so let us just
steer clear of the issue for safety reasons. The real concern is whether you
could, for instance, intersperse these songs with ʽMustang Sallyʼ,
ʽCupidʼ, ʽYou Can't Hurry Loveʼ, ʽSecond That
Emotionʼ, etc., and not feel a «cringing» moment whenever a Joel song
comes along on the setlist. Or, even worse, a «boring» moment.
My own answer is that I do not. Or, rather,
that I think these songs are typically as good as the stuff they are imitating,
with one major exception: Billy moves uncomfortably close to «blackface mode»
when he is openly imitating the vocal styles of great singers — it is a little
ridiculous to hear him try out the vocal attack of Pickett on ʽEasy
Moneyʼ, or Sam Cooke's modulation routine on ʽCareless Talkʼ,
or go ahead and bawl like Little Richard on ʽChristie Leeʼ. He is a
good singer, and he does a fairly decent job with these approximations, but
«doing impersonations» is not really quite the same as «paying tribute».
Other than that, I like the results — the
brass-punctured fast Motown sweep of ʽTell Her About Itʼ, the Four
Season-ish vocal harmony-drenched pop punch of ʽUptown Girlsʼ, the
R&B gallop of ʽEasy Moneyʼ (although I thought that, after The
Doors had already exploited that rhythm on ʽThe Changelingʼ, there
would be little reason for white performers to try it on for size again), and
even the soft, echoey Drifters-like style of the title track. I am much less
enamored of ʽThe Longest Timeʼ, which sounds as silly and corny as
most of the doo-wop that it imitates, and of ʽThis Nightʼ, which
sounds like it belongs on Zappa's parodic Cruising
With Ruben & The Jets, but I think Little Anthony himself must have
been in awe of the melody.
I think that, in the end, it all depends on the
level of worship. If you think of all these old tunes as light, friendly
entertainment for the simple senses, Billy's copycat imitations, stylistically
matching the originals but with sufficient melodic divergencies so as not to
count as «stolen items», are equally light, friendly entertainment for the
simple senses (more or less the job
that Billy Joel, the Artist, was born into this world to carry out). If you put
them on a higher pedestal — for instance, as proud expressions of the
liberated Afro-American spirit — in that case An Innocent Man might seem misguided and even offensive. If bashing
Billy Joel for all the sins of the world is on your agenda, this is a great and
innovative way of performing the task. But it really isn't on mine, so I'll
just say this: An Innocent Man is
nice, harmless fun, and if you take it in the overall context of commercial
1983, it is extraordinarily nice,
harmless fun.
So I give it a nice, harmless thumbs up,
at least until I can think of a way to prove that ʽYou Can't Hurry
Loveʼ boasts a more sophisticated and groundbreaking style of composition
than ʽTell Her About Itʼ. For the moment, all I can say is that I
prefer Diana Ross as a singer to Billy Joel, but that would be a lame excuse.
THE BRIDGE (1986)
1) Running On Ice; 2) This Is
The Time; 3) A Matter Of Trust; 4) Modern Woman; 5) Baby Grand; 6) Big Man On
Mulberry Street; 7) Temptation; 8) Code Of Silence; 9) Getting Closer.
Once again, a pound of respect to be handed
over to Billy Joel for recording a very-much-not-1986 album in 1986. With the
dark star rising for the absolute majority of «rock veterans» that year, Billy
Joel, of all people, could be expected to participate in the championship as a
major contender. But while The Bridge
does indeed show a significant drop-off in quality, lucky for Billy, by that
time he had so much solidified in his «retro» mentality that a full embrace of
all the trappings of 1986 was out of the question.
Yes, we do have some plastic synthesizers, some
electronic drums, a bit of power ballad atmospherics, even a couple of
Rambo-style pop metal riffs, but at the heart of it all we still have the same
old Broadway show — a big ball of vaudeville and jazz-pop and old time
balladry, lightly seasoned with some production elements that do land the album
in the 1980s, but do not disqualify it as a victim of the 1980s. On an
important sidenote, The Bridge marks
the last time Billy worked with Phil Ramone, and it is clear that Phil was as
adverse to submitting to those global suffocating trends as his regular client.
The opening number of the record is rather oddball, though: ʽRunning
On Iceʼ is an unmistakable tribute to Sting and The Police circa 1979-80
(yes, even when Mr. Joel is emulating modern acts, he still can't help being a
little retro with it!), with Liberty DeVitto impersonating Stewart Copeland
and Billy himself adopting Sting's vocal modulation. The fussy,
syncopated-paranoid verses could really be mistaken for a forgotten Police
outtake — it is only when we get around to the happier-sounding ska chorus that
a certain «it's really Billy» feeling starts creeping in, because The Police
would never choose an ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ chord sequence for the
hook. Still, as a homage, ʽRunning On Iceʼ is a great showcase for
Billy's chameleonesque abilities, and in the overall context of the album, it
probably packs more fun than any other number here.
After that deceptive opening, though, The Bridge slowly starts creaking and
collapsing. The songs are not particularly awful, they are simply not too well
written. Somehow, over those three years that separate the intentionally hook-laden
Innocent Man from Joel's next public
statement, the emphasis has shifted from «instrumental hook» to «soulful vocal
expression», and too many of these songs focus on «Billy the passionate singer»
rather than «Billy the creator of interesting piano and guitar melodic lines».
Consequently, in order to like The
Bridge, you have to really like Billy Joel as an artistic personality and a
sensitive soul. And that can be tough.
The double faux-punch of ʽThis Is The
Timeʼ and ʽA Matter Of Trustʼ, in particular, seems tremendously
anticlimactic after the opening number. The former is an adult contemporary
ballad with a Diane Warren-worthy chorus and probably the most dated production
values on the entire album; the latter is one of those «steroid-muscular» pop
songs, pinned to a boringly distorted pop-metal riff, that everybody was trying
at the time, hoping to become Springsteen (including Springsteen himself) — in
fact, Billy's epic-hero 1-2-3-4 count-off at the beginning is already enough to curdle fresh milk.
Eventually, as the artist begins going
backwards in time, the atmosphere gets more tolerable. Stuff like ʽBaby
Grandʼ, a soul duet with Ray Charles himself, and the big-band style
ʽBig Man On Mulberry Streetʼ, is completely free of cringeworthy moments
— the latter may be more atmosphere than melody, and the former may be way
longer than its basic theme requires (actually, the basic theme probably
requires some instrumental improvised parts, but Billy imprudently saved all of
them up for the live shows), but stylistically, I'd say they are both beyond
reproach, and, together with ʽRunning On Iceʼ, are the only songs on
here worth remembering. The rest is a mixed bag of rootsiness, poppiness, and
schmaltz that ranges from blandly forgettable (ʽGetting Closerʼ;
ʽCode Of Silenceʼ, with wasted backing vocals from Cyndi Lauper) to
overcooked in the vocal department (ʽTemptationʼ, with a bit too much
heart on that sleeve, as if he were offering a little bit of it to every person
in the arena).
Still, simply in recognition of the fact that
this is, truly and verily, a 1986 Billy Joel album that sucks nowhere near as
bad as a 1986 Billy Joel album could have sucked in a logically structured
parallel world — I refrain from a thumbs down. The Bridge is well worth owning by any legit fan of Billy's, and
well worth hearing at least once for anyone who is merely «tolerant» of the
man. It is almost an objective fact that The
Bridge marks the beginning of the slide, but we do have to admit that it
was a slide like no other slide: unlike so many of his peers, Billy seems derailed
not so much by the changing standards in recording and production, as he is by
finally overrating himself as a «soul serenader».
KONTSERT (1987)
1) Odoya; 2) Angry Young Man;
3) Honesty; 4) Goodnight Saigon; 5) Stiletto; 6) Big Man On Mulberry Street; 7)
Baby Grand; 8) An Innocent Man; 9) Allentown; 10) A Matter Of Trust; 11) Only
The Good Die Young; 12) Sometimes A Fantasy; 13) Uptown Girl; 14) Big Shot;
15) Back In The USSR; 16) The Times They Are A-Changin'.
It is really lovable how Amazon, and quite a
few other websites (and maybe even book sources, too), announce this album as Kohuept, a word that sounds like a
rather gross mix of Greek, Aztecan, and Klingon, but in reality, merely a
consequence of one's inability to correctly transliterate the word concert in its Cyrillic orthography.
(First prize in this competition certainly goes to Paul McCartney's Choba B CCCP = Snova V SSSR, a.k.a. "Back In USSR" in Russian, but it
seems to be Billy's regular fate to always remain the second runner-up next to
Paul in everything he does. Even if «Kohuept»
came first, in terms of sheer chronology).
Anyway, Billy took to the stage in Leningrad in
the summer of 1987, with the Perestroika already in full swing but the
Communist system still rigidly enforced, so I suppose that not a lot of people
were even aware of the show taking place (certainly not myself, being 11 years
old at the time and not having the least idea of who Billy Joel was in the first
place — ah, the happy years...). Getting Western artists to perform in Russia
was still a mind-boggling task, since everything had to be approved by Party
officials responsible for culture policies; but then, the Party had already
given the green light to Elton John nearly a whole decade ago, and if Elton was
considered «clean» enough for innocent Soviet youth, I suppose there was no
reason to be particularly suspicious of Billy Joel. (Merely two years later,
in 1989, we'd already have Black Sabbath in the country, but 1987 was still
pretty much iron-curtainish for everybody).
Funny retro-bits keep cropping up throughout
the show — for instance, the way it opens with a one-minute choral piece
delivered by a Georgian folk ensemble (ʽOdoyaʼ), probably as a welcome
sign of Soviet international brotherhood, as well as a subtle reminder that all
music stems from The People, rather than individualistic capitalist
entrepreneurs; or the presence of a stiff, dorky-sounding, but perfectly
professional interpreter, translating Billy's banter for the Russian audience
(a practice that evaporated with the transition to capitalist economics, when
it became necessary to pay these people money for their work); or the relative
lack of excitement from the same audience after many tracks — since it was
still common practice for Soviet audiences to sit quietly and politely at
concerts, or you'd be in serious trouble with security. And, of course, there
was no way in hell Billy could not do
a cover of ʽBack In USSRʼ, especially since some of the Party
officials present probably had difficulty distinguishing him from Paul in the
first place, whereas the real music lovers present must have been hungry for anybody coming out there and doing
ʽBack In The USSRʼ for them in real time. Could have been Uriah Heep.
How was the show itself? Decent. Leaning a bit
too heavily on The Bridge material,
perhaps, but this is understandable — a promotion tour is a promotion tour, let
alone the fact that there was not much chance Soviet buyers could rush to any
musical store in 1987 and get themselves a fresh copy of Billy's latest.
ʽA Matter Of Trustʼ still sucks, ʽMulberry Streetʼ is still
okay, and ʽBaby Grandʼ, deprived of its biggest attraction (Ray
Charles), is now quite boring. The rest of the setlist is more or less evenly
spread between all of Billy's career moments since 1976 (no early stuff at
all), and the songs are performed with care and professionalism, but add
nothing important to the original versions. The best thing I can say is that
there are almost no clunkers on the list, but also no surprises — mostly just
the hits.
At the end of the show, Billy trots back on
stage with an acoustic guitar and plays us ʽThe Times They Are
A-Changin'ʼ: a sensible gesture, since they were, but probably less
appreciated than he could surmise, since Dylan's popularity in the USSR was
largely restricted to a small intellectual circle (language barrier and all).
And that pretty much sums it up: the entire Kontsert, from the very moment of its release, was more of a
symbolic gesture than a really-necessary live album from a man who certainly shouldn't
rank among the great live artists of his generation (and, to be honest, never
ever strived for that kind of ranking). In the end, it makes much better sense
to watch the video version of this stuff, if only for culturological reasons;
without the picture, it's just another average Billy Joel show.
STORM FRONT (1989)
1) That's Not Her Style; 2) We
Didn't Start The Fire; 3) The Downeaster "Alexa"; 4) I Go To
Extremes; 5) Shameless; 6) Storm Front; 7) Leningrad; 8) State Of Grace; 9)
When In Rome; 10) And So It Goes.
It is really a huge consolation that Billy sat
out most of the Eighties in the lap
of Phil Ramone. But as the last year of the decade swung around and everybody
felt it was time for another shot of artistic expression, Billy suddenly decided
to modernize. He fired much, if not most, of his regular band, put together a
huge crowd of session musicians, and exchanged Phil for Mick Jones of Foreigner
fame in the producer seat. Whee! Granted, it could have been much worse, but
fortunately, Phil Collins was not available at the time.
The result is an album that, in genre terms,
stands somewhere on the intersection of «arena rock» and «barroom rock». (Maybe
think of a barroom converted to a mini-arena, or vice versa). Gone altogether
are the old-timey jazzy and vaudevillian stylizations, replaced by steady 4/4
beats, macho blues-rock guitar chords, and singalong choruses. Loud drums,
bombastic synthesizers, and singing verging on the point of shouting also
become the norm of the day as Billy tries to «make himself look big» by having
everything puffed up around him; the only catch is, Billy himself is not what
you'd call a «big guy» at all, and that translates, way too often, to a rather
ridiculous effect (the title track is an obvious example).
Worst of all, to paraphrase the man himself,
«that's not his style» — this sudden desire to make music in the style of
Foreigner goes against Billy's natural melodic skills, and, most importantly,
why should he want to imitate this
music? It takes little effort to churn out a bunch of simplistic arena-rockers;
but unless they happen to be accidentally adorned with genius vocal hooks or
master riffs, they are usually worthless — and Billy has had very little
experience with «master riffs». Vocal hooks are better handled, to some extent,
but the playing and production style leaves little place for subtlety.
It does not help, either, that the album begins
with one of the corniest numbers the man ever had the gall to come up with —
ʽThat's Not Her Styleʼ is a misguided lyrical defense of his then-current
wife Christie Brinkley ("some people think that she's one of those
mink-coated ladies..."), listing all the popular accusations with such
precision and detail ("gave the pilot somethin' extra for a perfect
ride" — really?) and doing it in such a moronic singing tone that the only
thing it manages to convince us of is that that is her style very much indeed (but maybe that's exactly the way it
was intended to be... irony?).
I have sort of mixed feelings for the album's
grand slam number. Some might say that ʽWe Didn't Start The Fireʼ
only went to #1 because all the teenagers of America started buying it as a
handy shortcut replacement for textbooks on modern history. Others might object
that it has got one of the catchiest choruses in Billy Joel history, which
helps overlook the crappy-sounding keyboards and the musical monotonousness. I
would classify it as one of those harmless «novelty» numbers that quickly run
out of fun potential — along the lines of the Beatles' ʽAll Together
Nowʼ (although the latter at least had a far more tasteful musical
arrangement, but then it wasn't put together in 1989, either). There is some
serious incongruency between the song's nursery-rhyme aura and the
«seriousness» of the message, however — "we didn't light it but we tried
to fight it" does not say much about how
they were fighting and what they were
fighting — was it Belgians in the Congo, Ben Hur, or hula hoops?.. Silly old
Billy, always getting himself in some kind of fix with his «moral lessons».
The rest of the songs fluctuate between the
already mentioned uninspiring/uninspired arena-rockers (title track;
ʽState Of Graceʼ), cartoonishly soulful adult contemporary ballads
(ʽLeningradʼ, a souvenir from Billy's Russian trip that might have
healed a few simple psychological traumas back then, but now comes across as
one of those oddball artistic children of Perestroika — "the Russians love
their children too" and all that stuff), and a couple attempts at «art
pop» songs, marred by production excesses and superfluous pomposity (ʽThe
Downeaster Alexaʼ, which must have increased Billy's popularity with
baymen worldwide, but sounds fairly crass and manipulative otherwise).
Some fans have praised the closing number,
ʽAnd So It Goesʼ, as the best song on the album and maybe even an
all-time classic — too much praise, I'd say, for a number whose melodic
potential is completely exhausted in the first twenty five seconds (possibly in
the first five seconds, as I am quite
sure any professional musicologist would be able to predict the next twenty).
Those few bars of solo piano are indeed quite nice, and at least the entire
coda sounds refreshingly simple and unadorned next to the glossy production of
the original.
But if anything, it is a glaring example of
what is altogether wrong with the entire album: horrendously lazy songwriting.
In the past, Billy had always used his ideas sparingly, distributing
interesting chord changes and vocal modulations between songs in a miserly
manner, but Storm Front is the first
album where you really begin to wonder whether he has reached the bottom of the
barrel. Of course, no talent lasts forever, yet it still seems odd — Billy had
shown so much discipline in not allowing himself to «burn out» over two decades
of music-making that the quality dropdown of Storm Front is surprising. Perhaps we should blame it all on
Christie Brinkley. You know — Christie Brinkley, Mick Jones, crappy drums and
synth tones, Leningrad, miss my Dad, rock is just a passing fad, we didn't jump
the shark, no we didn't jump it, we just tried to hump it... sorry, what I
really meant to say was just a thumbs down.
RIVER OF DREAMS (1993)
1) No Man's Land; 2) The Great
Wall Of China; 3) Blonde Over Blue; 4) A Minor Variation; 5) Shades Of Grey; 6)
All About Soul; 7) Lullabye; 8) The River Of Dreams; 9) Two Thousand Years; 10)
Famous Last Words.
Regardless of how one feels in general about
Billy Joel, you must give the man his
due: ʽFamous Last Wordsʼ, closing out this album, may not be
particularly famous, but, up to date at least, they have really been «last». "That's the story of my life", the
man tells us, "now it's time to put the book away", and, against all
the predictably sneering «yeah rights», River
Of Dreams remains the very last album of original pop compositions recorded
by Billy Joel, the quintessential Sometimes Thinking Man's Artist of his
generation. He gave his word, and he kept it. How often does that happen with
public figures in general, let alone corny pop stars?
Even more curious is the fact that River Of Dreams has earned quite a
shaky reputation, when it is actually not half-bad. Where Billy's previous two
albums showed plenty of rot, as the man naturally drifted towards mushy adult
contemporary and dumb «muscular pop-rockers», River Of Dreams actually sounds as if the man were trying to pull
himself up, one last time. Like he did in the early 1980s, Billy goes against
the grain and delivers a well-produced nostalgic album (California folk-rock
veteran Danny Kortchmar comes on board as one of several co-producers) — not
nostalgic enough to make us think it was really made in the Seventies, of
course, but not at all in line with the mainstream pop values of 1993, either.
The word of the day is «stylistic diversity»:
as a final gesture, Billy decided to revisit most of the styles that he used to
excel in, and even throw in a couple new ones — the «dark horse of the family»,
this time around, is ʽShades Of Greyʼ, an unconcealed tribute to
Cream (its opening and recurring «bap-pa pa-doo-wap-pas» are lifted directly
from ʽSweet Wineʼ) that remains as Billy's one and only open foray
into the area of blues-based psychedelic pop. It is not a great song, but it is
catchy, a little bizarre, and features Leslie West of Mountain fame (the
closest facsimile Billy could find of Cream's Clapton guitar) on a couple of
colorfully scorching guitar solos.
Psychedelic notes are also apparent on
ʽThe Great Wall Of Chinaʼ, whose floating strings sound like a cross
between true Far Eastern sounds and the orchestral parts of ʽI Am The
Walrusʼ — and form a nice contrast with the minimalistic «crunch chords»
of the verses — and, to a lesser extent, in the darkly romantic falsetto of the
chorus to ʽBlonde Over Blueʼ, although, in general, that song is more
in the vein of the «midnight uptempo balladry» of Bryan Ferry or some other
decadent crooner. Perhaps Billy does not quite have the vocal chops to do the
song the way it deserves to be done, but at least he wrote it with good
intentions.
Other than that, we got us our basic angry
power-rock (ʽNo Man's Landʼ), some brass-adorned blues-rock (ʽA
Minor Variationʼ), some working man soul-rock (ʽAll About
Soulʼ), a solo piano ballad (ʽLullabyeʼ), a light choral
spiritual (title track), a bombastic power ballad (ʽ2000 Yearsʼ), and
those ʽFamous Last Wordsʼ that might just as well have been written
by Danny Kortchmar himself, so much do they sound like a friendly early 1970s
folk-rocker. Not too bad for a swan song, I'd say — even if, of course, the
individual merits of all these tunes are quite different from each other: my
own tastes push the indignation level ever higher when it comes to bombast,
then bring it down together with the volume level, but with a selection like
that, no two people will probably get to completely agree on the highlights and
lowlights.
Lyrically, it's all the same old shit — some
love stuff, some attempts at introspection, and lots and lots and lots of
social criticism, this time, as Billy grows older, with a noticeable «grass was
greener» angle to some of the songs, particularly ʽNo Man's Landʼ.
All I'd like to say is that I really
love the line about "give us this day our daily discount outlet
merchandise", which might just be the single best line ever penned by
Billy Joel, the Daily Discount Man's Artist. Say what you will, Roger Waters
can only dream about writing a line
like that, can he?
That said, apart from the final track, the
album does not properly feel like a swan song or musical testament; you'd have
to cobble that impression together out of its stylistic diversity (an all-out
binge for the big final!), its nostalgic components, maybe even out of its front
sleeve painting (Christie Brinkley repaid her husband for ʽThat's Not Her
Styleʼ by painting him almost in the guise of a Christian martyr — which
did not prevent the latter-day saint and the mystery woman from separating one
year later). But, contrary to rumors spread by reviewers who probably did not
even listen properly to the songs, River
Of Dreams was hardly a dishonorable way to go out of the songwriting
business. As far as my own judgement goes, it was at least a definite improvement
over Storm Front, to the extent that
Billy would be justified to claim that he went out of the business not because his songwriting gift had run
out, but before his songwriting gift
would have run out. Consequently, I (a) give the album a thumbs up and (b) sincerely hope
that Billy continues to keep his word and releases no more pop albums in the
future. Just keep on touring those stadiums until they tear 'em all down, Mr.
Joel!
2000 YEARS: THE MILLENNIUM CONCERT (2000)
1) Beethoven's Ninth; 2) Big
Shot; 3) Movin' Out; 4) Summer Highland Falls; 5) The Ballad Of Billy The Kid;
6) Don't Ask Me Why; 7) New York State Of Mind; 8) I've Loved These Days; 9) My
Life; 10) Allentown; 11) Prelude / Angry Young Man; 12) Only The Good Die
Young; 13) I Go To Extremes; 14) Goodnight Saigon; 15) We Didn't Start The
Fire; 16) Big Man On Mulberry Street; 17) 2000 Years; 18) Auld Lang Syne; 19)
River Of Dreams; 20) Scenes From An Italian Restaurant; 21) Dance To The Music;
22) Honky Tonk Women; 23) It's Still Rock And Roll To Me; 24) You May Be Right;
25) This Night.
While River
Of Dreams was slowly running dry into oblivion, Billy Joel was not doing
much of anything — divorcing his next wife, putting on a little weight, growing
himself a bit of a wise old man beard, losing some hair off the top of his head
for compensation, and collecting enough royalties to eventually become an
institution. And who but a whole institution should have had the honor of
welcoming in the new millennium at Madison Square Garden, NYC? It's been a
long, hard, excruciating road all the way from JC to BJ, but here we are at
last. At the center of the Universe is Earth, and at the center of the Earth
is New York City, and at the center of New York City stands Madison Square
Garden, and in the center of Madison Square Garden sits Billy Joel, playing his
piano and telling us that science and poetry rule in the new world to come, and
what an amazing future there will be.
Naturally, it would not have been in line with
Billy's usual modesty to appropriate this entire important mission all to
himself, and the stage at MSG that night was shared by multiple guests,
reflecting large, notorious parts of musical history. As you can see from the
track listing, we also have here The Rolling Stones (brilliantly impersonated
by Billy Joel on ʽHonky Tonk Womenʼ), Sly & The Family Stone
(with Billy Joel subtly sitting in for the band on ʽDance To The
Musicʼ), Robert Burns (impressively recreated by Billy Joel with a couple
verses from ʽAuld Lang Syneʼ), and no less than Ludwig van Beethoven
himself (I am not sure if Billy Joel himself is playing all the orchestra parts
and singing all the choral parts on the intro sections of the 9th Symphony, but
I certainly wouldn't be surprised if he were). A little extra research on the
cuts that did not make it onto the 2-CD edition shows that Elvis Presley, Jimi
Hendrix, and Led Zeppelin were there on that night, too, transforming the
already unforgettable event into a completely supernatural phantasmagoria, but
the No. 1 Recording Company in Heaven, for selfish reasons, would not release
them from their Doomsday contract, so their contributions had to be scrapped
from the official album. You can, however, ascertain their presence through
various bootleg versions (beware, though, as they do not bear God's official
seal of approval).
Needless to say, it would have been very surprising if all that star
presence and the grandiosity of the occasion itself did not go just a
teensy-weensy bit over Billy's head. And, as a matter of fact, it's a good thing
they do, because The Millennium Concert
can be quite hilarious in places. It is not up to me to guess the amounts of
alcohol consumed prior to the show (and no matter what the amount, I would
never blame the man for needing a little stimulation to overcome the nerves),
but Billy's banter with the audience should probably be taken as a hint. «First
of all, I wanna thank all of you for paying those ridiculously expensive ticket
prices... I don't know who bought those $999 jobs, I might have gone for that if
Hendrix came back, you know?.. How many people here are rich?... [boo boo boo]... Oh, so you paid, like,
those scalper prices? Well, I'm sorry...» Allow me to refrain from further
comments.
Oh yes, the music. Well, Billy's voice has
deepened a little, which probably empowers him to do more of that «rock and
roll stuff», or to sing some of the older tunes in a more hard-rock manner (the
opening ʽBig Shotʼ, for instance), but every once in a while,
champagne literally or figuratively goes to his head, and he turns a certain
song into an over-drawn, over-sung showpiece of the drunk variety — ʽNew
York State Of Mindʼ was never a subtle masterpiece to begin with, but here
it is turned into a screamfest, and then culminates in a grossly overdone coda
where the man literally sounds as if
he is taking a really painful dump, suffering from a serious constipation
problem. Is that a typical thing for New Yorkers? Hopefully not. Does that mean
that a «New York state of mind» is really just a bowel problem? Not a nice
thing to suggest when you're sitting at the center of the Universe, surrounded
by rich New Yorkers who'd just bought a bunch of $999 tickets for scalper
prices.
Questions, questions, questions. Why does
ʽDon't Ask Me Whyʼ become
ʽDon't Axe Me Whyʼ? It's
not as if we were in the deep South or anything. Why does ʽMy Lifeʼ
open up with a bass-heavy, quasi-hard-rock introduction, when the song itself
has nothing to do with this stylistics? Why is there only one song from Billy's
pre-1976 period? (Apparently, ʽSouvenirʼ and ʽPiano Manʼ
were cut from the final release, but that does not eliminate the question).
And, most importantly, did Billy really
write ʽ2000 Yearsʼ seven years before the show with the secret goal
of performing that particular song right before the clock struck twelve and the
date changed to 2000? (And even more importantly, was he aware that only 1999
years had passed up to that point and, strictly speaking, we were still living
in the old millennium?).
But questions aside, the show itself wasn't too
bad. Even the «guest spots» were done professionally enough to carry their
«symbolic» value, regardless of the general stiffness with which the band launches
into Sly & The Family Stone's funky groove, or of the fact that Billy's
guitar player for the evening, Tommy Byrnes, does not seem to get which
particular licks make the guitar solo on ʽHonky Tonk Womenʼ into more
than just another guitar solo. The setlist, or what of it made onto the album,
is hardly problematic, predictably skewed in favor of classic hits, but what
else are you expected to play before people who bought tickets for scalper
prices? Play it wrong and they just might want to scalp you on their way out. The important thing is that the audience does
seem to feel like they're getting their money's worth, and Billy sounds so
drunk that he seems to believe he is having himself a good time as well, so
everybody's happy, and the conjured benevolent spirits were just enough in
quantity to help us overcome the Y2K problem, and — get this — Billy Joel
actually remembers all the lyrics to ʽWe Didn't Start The Fireʼ in
the correct order even under intoxication, which might just be the major Herculean feat of the past
2000 years. How do you get to Madison
Square Garden on the eve of the new millennium? Practice... your history
trivia.
FANTASIES & DELUSIONS (2001)
1) Opus
3. Reverie (Villa D'Este); 2) Opus 2. Waltz # 1 (Nunley's Carousel); 3) Opus 7.
Aria (Grand Canal); 4) Opus 6. Invention In C Minor; 5) Opus 1. Soliloquy (On A
Separation); 6) Opus 8. Suite For Piano (Star-Crossed); 7) Opus 5. Waltz # 2
(Steinway Hall); 8) Opus 9. Waltz # 3 (For Lola); 9) Opus 4. Fantasy (Film
Noir); 10) Opus 10. Air (Dublinesque).
Try and make a hit record out of this. Seven years into doing nothing
much of anything, Billy finally decided that it was time to branch out. If Paul
McCartney can do this — and Paul McCartney hasn't even been much of a «piano
man» anytime in his life — why not Billy Joel? Going classical should be a
natural thing for an artist who'd already explored so many different roads (in
fact, he'd already experimented with the classical format a long time ago —
remember ʽNocturneʼ from his solo debut?); and if you are a piano
player by trade, it is only natural that you should begin diligently and
humbly, with a set of piano pieces rather than anything as bombastic and pretentious
as an oratorio (eat that, Sir Paul).
As a champion of the simple folks, Billy does
not set his sights particularly high or cast his net particularly wide. This is
certainly not «modern classical», nor does it show any influences of old-school
innovators like Debussy, nor does it attempt to cover too much technically
challenging ground — although even the way those pieces were written, Billy did
not dare play them himself, and passed this honor to his friend, Richard
Hyung-ki Joo, a British-Korean pianist specializing in shows that combine
classical music with comedy. Not that there is any attempt at comedy on Fantasies & Delusions (unless you
think that Billy Joel going classical is in itself sufficient reason for
comedy). There is simply an attempt to write a bunch of waltzes, ballads,
scherzos, and nocturnes (no mazurkas detected, though), largely in the style of
Chopin — the best combination of exquisiteness with accessibility imaginable —
with maybe just a little bit of Liszt and Rachmaninoff thrown in for good
measure. Oh, and just one brief quasi-Bach piece (ʽInvention In C
Minorʼ), over in just a minute.
Now, how could I ever rate this? I do not
review classical music, unless bits of it happen to be incorporated into
progressive rock albums, since any music that is properly «composed», that is,
put down in sheetnote form (Tin Pan Alley notwithstanding), requires a very
different writing approach, and from that point of view, Billy Joel is no
exception. It is the easiest thing in the world to say that Chopin rules and
Billy Joel sucks (and it is highly probable that it would be true), but you'd
need to say why, and this requires serious musicological analysis that I would
not be capable of providing.
On a layman level, I would just say this. The
pieces sound «accomplished» — I think they would have earned a reasonably high
score on any music school graduation test. The general rules of mid-19th
century music making are adhered to fairly well; at the very least, it's not as
if Billy were occasionally hopping into Broadway territory or anything. (Well,
maybe once or twice he does, but then, it's always possible to count that as
artistic license). He understands
Chopin and the other romantics — that much, I think, we can all admit. Whether
he can replicate them, however, not to mention add something of his own to
this replication, is a different matter.
In the case of Chopin, at least, Chopin's best
piano pieces are extremely catchy, even for the untrained ear — we all
recognize the waltz in C sharp minor well enough even without being able to
identify the piece — due to wondrously well worked out and strategically
repeated main themes. The most surprising element about Billy's exercises,
however, is that «catchiness» does not even begin to enter the picture — and
this coming from one of pop music's greatest master of sheer «hookery»! The
pieces sound «nice», but the themes lack individuality and character, never
take any musical risks, and, overall, simply consist of playing various scales
in different tempos and at different volumes. Some of the pieces are more
dynamic than others, but certainly not enough to generate «drama». Enough,
perhaps, to be used for a soundtrack to a quiet evening in a local (Italian?)
restaurant. Hardly more than that.
Which begs for the question: why? In
interviews, Billy himself has admitted that it was just an experiment, nothing
too serious or ambitious about it, and that he himself was surprised that it
managed to sell more than a few copies. Nothing too surprising, I'd say, considering the huge army of Joel
fanaticists who'd probably buy anything associated with the man, even if he
decided to sing Wagner arias to an accompaniment of Jew's harp and washboard.
(On second thought, I'd definitely buy that, too). But what would be the posterior
use of this product? If it managed to fulfill an educational purpose — for
instance, increase the interest of at least a small chunk of these buyers in
classic romantic piano pieces — more power to Billy. More likely, however, it
just prompted some of these buyers to rave about how «Billy's towering genius
allows him to create highbrow music along with the best of 'em!», a reaction
that Billy himself would explicitly distance himself from (but secretly might
enjoy).
Consequently, upon deliberating, even though I
do not actively «hate» what I have heard, I still give the record a thumbs down.
It is humble and vain at the same time: humble, since the chosen musical style
is devoid of formal bombast, and vain, since, want it or not, it triggers comparison
with the «academic greats», and, consequently, still has a bit of that «I want
to be the greatest sorcerer in all the world» spirit to it. Of course, this is
ironically reflected in the album's title — and the compositions are more
«delusions» than «fantasies» by definition. Nobody needs to hear this, really;
nor are the late Artur Rubinstein or Vladimir Horowitz shaking in their graves
at the glorious Steinway sound coming from under the fingers of Mr. Joo here.
Oh, and, to add injury to insult, this whole damn thing runs for seventy-five
minutes — which is more than all of Chopin's Etudes put together, so, in a
highly improbable situation where you might
be tempted... just do yourself a favor and do not fall for bland facsimiles. Or
at least consult your local musicologist.
PS. I especially like how exquisitely they
labeled all of Billy's compositions as opera,
and then shuffled them around so that the track listing looks like a genuine
recital. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Waltz No. 2 was chronologically written after
ʽFantasyʼ, not right after Waltz No. 1, and we have to reflect that,
or else we will be disrespectful to the composer with our inaccurate listing.
Even if the entire catalog is not too likely to be expanded in the future...
then again, just recast all of his previous compositions as Lieder and you have yourself a friggin'
Schubert in the works.
LIVE AT SHEA STADIUM (2011)
1) Prelude/Angry Young Man; 2)
My Life; 3) Summer, Highland Falls; 4) Everybody Loves You Now; 5) Zanzibar; 6)
New York State Of Mind; 7) Allentown; 8) The Ballad Of Billy The Kid; 9) She's
Always A Woman; 10) Goodnight Saigon; 11) Miami 2017 (Seen The Lights Go Out On
Broadway); 12) Shameless; 13) This Is The Time; 14) Keeping The Faith; 15)
Captain Jack; 16) Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel); 17) River Of Dreams/A Hard
Day's Night; 18) We Didn't Start The Fire; 19) You May Be Right; 20) Scenes
From An Italian Restaurant; 21) Only The Good Die Young; 22) I Saw Her Standing
There; 23) Take Me Out To The Ballgame; 24) Piano Man; 25) Let It Be.
In 2008, they decided to tear down Shea
Stadium, and three guesses who was selected to play the venue's last couple of
shows... nay, not even Sir Paul McCartney, although he does make a guest appearance. Up to date, Live At Shea Stadium has been Billy's last live album, and with at
least two others under his belt from the new millennium (the previous one was 12 Gardens Live, once again from
Madison Square), it will really be sort of pathetic if he tries out yet another
one, what with the setlist generally repeating itself over and over.
At the very least, this is a tighter, better
controlled affair than the half-drunk slop of The Millennium Concert, but there are disadvantages to this as
well — everything is a bit too strict this time, and the songs are played the
way Billy's live audience at the stadium wants to hear them, not the way a
skeptically minded live album listener would. Tight band, good singer (adapting
the songs to his ever-lower range and not trying to pull any weird stuff like
the «constipation blues» coda of ʽNew York State Of Mindʼ on Millennium), what else?
Well, a few guest stars couldn't hurt, and this
is where the CD edition makes some bad choices: the first CD features singing
duets with Tony Bennett (appropriate for ʽNew York State Of Mindʼ,
perhaps, but multiplying the song's cheese factor by two) and Garth Brooks (on
ʽShamelessʼ, which was never even that good a song to begin with), as
well as new generation guitar hero John Mayer adding bland blues-pop licks to
ʽThis Is The Timeʼ. With these three guys close together in the
setlist, it's like he had to have a special «quota on bad taste» to fulfill, and
this is a little sad considering that Steve Tyler and Roger Daltrey were also
among the invited guests on those nights, singing, respectively, ʽWalk
This Wayʼ and ʽMy Generationʼ — even if they were out of vocal
shape, I'd rather have a hoarse Daltrey than a perfectly well-calibrated Garth
Brooks.
At the end of the show, Sir Paul McCartney is
being dragged out by the breeches to sing ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ
and ʽLet It Beʼ — how come it was Paul McCartney as a guest of Billy
Joel and not vice versa is still a mystery to me, but then, why should Paul
McCartney ever consider adding Billy Joel as a guest? These are decent
performances, anyway, except that Billy's guitarist is so stiff that he can't
even grasp the art of spiritually igniting the solos on these songs. Oh, and
there is another stiff Beatles moment when Billy inserts ʽA Hard Day's
Nightʼ in the middle of ʽRiver Of Dreamsʼ where it has no reason
to belong.
Stage banter is kept to a minimum this time, if
you don't mind Billy giving the people a little bit of mundane advice every now
and then — for instance, at the end of the show: "drive safe, not like me,
and don't take any shit from anybody!" Whatever you say, O Great Champion
of the People — 50,000 fans have presumably never taken any shit from anybody
ever since (whether they all still drive safe, though, is an unresolved issue).
The setlist does include a few relative «rarities» from the old days, like
ʽEverybody Loves You Nowʼ, but not a lot, and you'd do much better
with Songs From The Attic for those
purposes.
The one classic moment worth experiencing here
is when the band launches, without announcement, into the rock drive of
ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ, and then... "ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome, Sir Paul McCartney!" and the whole stadium explodes in a
way that no Tony Bennett or Garth Brooks could ever have dreamt of — no Billy
Joel, for that matter, either. I am not saying that «Paul stole the show»: he's
not that long on the stage, and Paul's own band would have performed the songs
in a livelier manner than Billy's — but the roar over the tribunes certainly
brings on analogies with the Beatles' classic performances in 1965-66 at the
same location.
Is it symbolic that they brought in Billy to
draw the curtains on one of the most famous landmarks of 20th century pop art
(especially if you also add sports to pop art)? Probably not, but it is still
curious how the man is constantly used to close the door on something, be it the old millennium or
simply fifty years of baseball and rock'n'roll. The irony is that Billy Joel
does not really belong in the new millennium — where «intellectual» styles of
music have long since advanced to unreachable (for him) heights, and «popular»
styles of music have mostly sunk to unthinkable (for him) lows. These are good
old-fashioned simplistic family values celebrated here, from the good old boys
of ʽGoodnight Saigonʼ to the unemployed factory workers of
ʽAllentownʼ, sung to old-fashioned chords and with old-fashioned
words, and as corny as those songs used to be in the 1970s and 1980s, now there
is a certain «relic from the past» aura around them that might, for a few
moments, make even a veteran Billy Joel hater come to terms with the man and
his values. (Even if it only takes Sir Paul McCartney a few seconds to show
who's really timeless here.)
BLUE ÖYSTER CULT (1972)
1) Transmaniacon MC; 2) I'm On
The Lamb But I Ain't No Sheep; 3) Then Came The Last Days Of May; 4) Stairway
To The Stars; 5) Before The Kiss, A Redcap; 6) Screams; 7) She's As Beautiful
As A Foot; 8) Cities On Flame With Rock And Roll; 9) Workshop Of The
Telescopes; 10) Redeemed.
Heavy metal does not really need to be stereotyped. While there is no escaping the fact
that distorted heavy riffage will inescapably be associated with «the forces
of evil» in one way or another, there is really a lot of different
opportunities, and dungeons, dragons, Mordor, Satan, wars, gore, guts, nuclear
apocalypse, and the Four Horsemen are only a subsection of these. By the early
1970s, though, Led Zeppelin sort of epitomized the magical-mystical-medieval
aspect of the heavy metal business, Black Sabbath prioritized intimate
relationships with The Horned One, and that, kinda sorta, was it.
Two bands, emerging more or less at the same
time, showed, however, that heavy metal (or heavy rock, at least — without getting bogged down in terminology) could
be made to sound quirky, ironic, and tongue-in-cheek. The lesser one of the two
was Budgie, and the bigger one was Blue Öyster Cult. In fact, that umlaut
over the O pretty much says it all: a humorous quasi-«Germanization» of the
band name, suggesting some sort of terrifying Teutonic brutality, but at the
same time so self-consciously silly that not even the dumbest fan of this band
would probably be tempted to check the proper spelling of the word «oyster».
Come to think of it, it is even hard for me to imagine how this band could have
had any dumb fans in the first place — certainly not in their earliest and
finest period.
What can one say, really, about a band that was
managed and directed not by one, but by two
art critics and intellectuals? Sandy Pearlman «manufactured» the band way back
in 1967, when they were still called «Soft White Underbelly», in order for them
to write music to his lyrics, and later on, Richard Meltzer, his fellow student
and author of The Aesthetics Of Rock,
also joined in the fun. Blue Öyster Cult were their «experimental
Monkees», in a way, although all of the band members participated in the
songwriting process from the very beginning (on the debut album, five of the
songs are co-credited to Pearlman, two to Meltzer, and three were written
without any inteference from the literary gurus).
Interestingly enough, the band's earliest opera
sucked plenty: several of their recordings from 1969, when they were engaging
in some sort of comical bluegrass-rock, are appended as bonus tracks to some of
this album's CD editions, and they are uniformly boring and instantaneously
forgettable, regardless of the lyrics. It all changed overnight, with the
release of Black Sabbath's first album — suddenly, the band had a point: they
were to become the «intellectual equivalent» of the Sabs, playing comparably
heavy, but less predictable music, set to first-grade rock lyrics that would
clearly expose Geezer Butler for the lazy schoolboy that he was.
Under different circumstances, the album may
have been an epic failure — the band could have turned out to be too smart for
its own good, and from a commercial angle, they certainly were: Blue Öyster Cult only barely
scraped the charts, probably allowing the band to make about as much money as
would be enough to cover Ozzy's 24-hour coke supply. Hip New York critics loved
them, though, with Lester Bangs himself issuing a glowing review in Rolling Stone, and they had their point:
Blue Öyster Cult were weird and unpredictable, but they also rocked. At their best, these songs can
be wild snarling beasts, or they can be sizzling pots of voodoo gumbo, or they
can be loaded with heavy soul — these guys, hired by Pearlman and pointed in
the right direction by Meltzer, turned out to be classy, evocative musicians.
The music is not really as heavy as Sabbath or
Zeppelin: there is only a small bunch of monster riffs on the album, and it is
just as strongly influenced by basic boogie-rock or moody pop-rock in the style
of The Doors as it is by the metal masters. Lead vocals, alternately shared by
four out of five band members, are efficient, but nothing to write home about.
Technically, that is: when it comes to delivering the basic storyline, Eric
Bloom is an effective actor, as are most of his colleagues, who all like
getting into character, be it the sad, moralistic storyteller in ʽThen
Came The Last Days Of Mayʼ, nobly and epicly narrated by Buck Dharma, or
the arrogant hellraiser in ʽCities On Flame With Rock And Rollʼ,
wailed and growled out by drummer Albert Bouchard. Melodies, arrangement
tricks, vocal flourishes — most of the time they compensate for the (relative!)
lack of brute power.
This is not exactly «thinking man's heavy
metal», because, fairly speaking, many of the lyrics are absurd or parodical,
with Pearlman and Meltzer having more fun assembling and blowing up rock
clichés rather than genuinely engaging the thinking man's thinking
mechanisms; and the music is quite openly derivative, sometimes almost
mockingly deconstructive (as when they suddenly launch into the melody of
ʽMemphis, Tennesseeʼ in the middle of ʽBefore The Kiss, A
Redcapʼ), and certainly not «progressive» in any possible sense of the
word (and how could it be, with the music produced under the supervision of the
author of The Aesthetics Of Rock?).
None of which prevents the songs from being cool, classy, and kick-ass quality.
Being a sucker for a good heavy metal riff, I
will not deny that ʽCities On Flame With Rock And Rollʼ, one of the
tunes not having to do anything with
the Pearlman/Meltzer agenda, has always been my instantaneous favorite on the
album. The riff in question is derived from Black Sabbath's ʽThe
Wizardʼ, but packs more suspense and condensed evil: this is really one of
the best songs in existence that drives the idea of rock'n'roll exuberation
through a filter of hellflames, Sodom and Gomorrah — the transition from the
relatively merry chords of "let the girl, let the girl rock and roll"
to the macabre "cities on flame now, with rock and roll" resolution
is totally thrilling.
Other than that, I could not name any
particularly outstanding highlights, but this is a good thing, because the
album is amazingly consistent, and each song presents its own intrigue.
ʽTransmaniacon MCʼ announces the band's entrance as a scary eruption
of the forces of evil, with references to Altamont, terror, pain, steel,
"a plot of knives", and a nasty lead guitar part that bursts out in
sneering laughter after each chorus — the band's own take on ʽSympathy For
The Devilʼ, if you wish. ʽI'm On The Lamb But I Ain't No Sheepʼ
further raises the stakes on tension and paranoia, its fast and nervous tempo
matching the lyrics about a pursued fugitive (and the additionally sped-up,
super-paranoid coda is pure genius). ʽStairway To The Stairsʼ uses
brutal, bludgeoning chords and mutilated vocals that are reminiscent of ZZ
Top's Texan rock (except ZZ Top themselves had not yet quite mastered that
style by 1972), and Meltzer's lyrics that poke fun at the newly emerged rock
star image are right on the money.
The subtle-and-subdued vibe also agrees with
these guys: ʽLast Days Of Mayʼ almost makes you want to shed tears
for the poor drug dealer suckers betrayed and murdered by their own colleague
in crime — roots-rock of the Eagles variety (Desperado was not yet released, though) turned on its head: Buck
Dharma's show all the way, as he writes the song, sings it in a mournful,
soulful manner with spiritual echo all around, and euphonizes the poor dead
guys with the most ecstatic leads on the album. ʽShe's As Beautiful As A
Footʼ is consciously absurdist ("didn't believe it when he bit into
her face / it tasted just like a fallen arch"?), musically structured like
a parody on the classic Doors sound, with Krieger-esque melodic leads, but
endowed with a mystery aura of its own. And most chilling of all — the way
ʽScreamsʼ opens with that ghoulish phased vocal track ("screams
in the night, sirens delight...") right out of Hell's own lush antechamber.
Special kudos for ending the album with
ʽRedeemedʼ, a song contributed to the band by outside friend Harry
Farcas, utterly nonsensical and Bonzo Dog Band-ish in nature (apparently,
ʽSir Rastus Bearʼ was the name of Harry's pet dog, but that doesn't
help matters much), but it has the word "redeemed" in the title and
in the chorus, so you get to think it is some sort of grand gospel folk anthem
to logically wind things up, and it does
sound uplifting and optimistic next to everything else on the album — another
pop cliché, carefully extracted, bottled, processed, and mutated for
public enjoyment.
In short, even if this is not Blue Öyster
Cult's highest point (but it might be), this is definitely their atmospheric
masterpiece — an album so tightly stuffed with mystery, intrigue, suspense,
irony, and implicit intelligence that in many ways, topping it would be
impossible, certainly not if they wanted to achieve commercial success. Not
only that, but it is also a certain landmark in the story of «rock music taking
an introspective look at itself», chiefly due to the Pearlman/Meltzer
contributions, but then neither Pearlman nor Meltzer wrote or performed the
actual music, so we have to assume the band members were totally in on the
masterplan. «Black Sabbath meets Frank Zappa» — wouldn't be a totally legit
comparison, of course, since there's a lot more other influences here, and
only a few of the Sabbath or Zappa features would be implied, but it could work
for starters, especially if you need a tempting stimulus to get the record. Thumbs up
from all possible perspectives: a record that is as intellectually stimulating
as it is emotionally enjoyable.
TYRANNY AND MUTATION (1973)
1) The Red & The Black; 2)
O.D.'d On Life Itself; 3) Hot Rails To Hell; 4) 7 Screaming Diz-Busters; 5)
Baby Ice Dog; 6) Wings Wetted Down; 7) Teen Archer; 8) Mistress Of The Salmon
Salt.
It is still a little puzzling why the band
decided to re-write ʽI'm On The Lamb But I Ain't No Sheepʼ from the
first album as ʽThe Red & The Blackʼ, opening the second one, but
at least the rewrite helps immediately tag the significant difference in style
between Blue Öyster Cult and Tyranny And Mutation — beginning here
and continuing throughout. Unfortunately, it is not a difference that would,
from my point of view, seriously benefit the second album.
Although the basic ingredients (band line-up;
the Pearlman/Meltzer connection, to which is now linked an additional
connection with the still little-known underground personage Patti Smith;
emphasis on hard rock values, mixed with a post-modern attitude) remain the
same, Tyranny And Mutation is
notoriously more «rock and roll» than the «mysterious heavy rock» of its predecessor.
The production is clearer and much more in your face, as the guitar sound now
brutally lashes you across it, rather than emerges from some distant dark
enchanted forest. Eric Bloom and the rest of the singers rely more on the
snarling, sneering «glam» posturing vocal attitudes on the day than the eerie,
hushed, voodoo-drenched deliveries. The tempos are faster, the riffage is
briskier and, on the whole, more generic (ʽO.D.'d On Life Itselfʼ
starts out with one of the most common barroom rock patterns in existence). In
short, most of this album will probably be more palatable for fans of the Faces
or, say, Billion Dollar Babies-era
Alice Cooper, than Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin. Sort of.
Which is not to say, of course, that the album
is just «boring»: the band has simply switched to a type of music where it
takes a little more effort to keep things enticing, and since they are still
fresh and enthusiastic, they do manage to keep up with the challenge more often
than they do not. The only condition is that one must learn to employ both gut
feeling and intellectual reasoning at
the same time to get the best out of tunes like ʽ7 Screaming
Diz-Bustersʼ: the pure rock'n'roll punch of this seven-minute epic is
incomparable with anything a band like AC/DC might have to offer, but its
structure, switching back and forth between a maniacal «rock'n'roll rondeau»
and a whole slew of different time signatures, compensates for this in an
experimental manner. The «diz-busters» in question have not been identified,
but, judging by the urgency and unstoppability of that main «choo-ka-choom, choo-ka-choom»
riff, they are the modern world projection of the «four horsemen», presenting
their own deconstructed strategy for the end of the world.
Other songs worthy of extra comment include
ʽHot Rails To Hellʼ, which is a little more fast and a little more
lyrically obscure than ʽHighway To Hellʼ, but essentially deals with
the same problem — and, for what it's worth, has a better fundamental riff,
not to mention a far more imaginative coda, in which the other riff of the
song almost literally «gets fried» as you descend into "the heat from
below" that "can burn your eyes out"; the Patti Smith-cowritten
ʽBaby Ice Dogʼ (always refreshing to hear a female-penned lyrical piece begin with the line "I had this
bitch you see..."), with one of the most minimalistic and saddest guitar
solos ever committed to tape; and ʽMistress Of The Salmon Saltʼ,
which starts out with the same chord punch that we all know from the far more
famous ʽSpace Truckin'ʼ but then goes on to make a completely
different point (not that I know what
point, exactly, but at least it's a catchy one).
On the whole, though, the album tends to drag a
little, especially everywhere where the band tries to be moody without being
heavy — there isn't a single song on here, for instance, which would match the
soulful tension of ʽLast Days Of Mayʼ or the spookiness of
ʽScreamsʼ: something like ʽWings Wetted Downʼ, whose tales
of black horsemen and echoes of empires also suggest apocalyptic predictions,
does not manage to infiltrate my mind on any serious level, sounding more like
one of those second-rate late-Sixties psycho-art songs usually done by British
people but sometimes copied by Americans as well, and they are not giving it
any special flavor.
A thumbs up rating is still guaranteed in the end
(wings wetted down, it all turns around), yet, in a way, one could easily build
up a case against the band stating that «it all went downhill from here» —
actually, it did not, but such an easy, almost casual dropping of some of their
most intriguing properties shows how it could. On the other hand, if you prefer
worshipping your blue oyster cult
with less psychedelic smoke and fog, and more kick-ass rock'n'roll, your
feelings will be reversed in comparison, so, naturally, this disappointment
should not be taken as an absolute. Besides, this seems to be the very first
appearance of a Patti Smith poem in the context of a rock and roll record,
which sort of makes it a collectible by itself, I gather.
SECRET TREATIES (1974)
1) Career Of Evil; 2)
Subhuman; 3) Dominance And Submission; 4) ME 262; 5) Cagey Cretins; 6)
Harvester Of Eyes; 7) Flaming Telepaths; 8) Astronomy.
Each of these early BÖC albums has its own
separate identity, but it is hard to delineate them without resorting to
technicalities. If the appropriate keyword combination for the self-titled
debut was «ironic mystique» and then Tyranny
And Mutation replaced it with «in-yer-face ironic hard rock», well, I'd say
Secret Treaties is neither of these
things. It is noticeably lighter — still technically «hard rock», but with a
stronger nod to pop and, most interestingly, with a certain minimalistic
flavor: the riffs are getting more sparse, abrupt, and laconic, occasionally
predicting the highly expressive minimalism of AC/DC or even the punkers.
Listen to ʽDominance And Submissionʼ and tell me you don't recognize
ʽWe're A Happy Familyʼ (incidentally, the Ramones were one of the
opening acts for BÖC in early 1977, and the song was on the setlist — how's that for a little detective work?).
As such, I don't know about enjoyability, but
they do manage to throw on some extra intrigue after the slight relative
disappointment of Tyranny. By
calming down a bit and concentrating seriously on musical development and
lyrical content, the band produces a «hard-art» record that actually taps into
some serious matter — not «proverbially dark» or «theatrically eerie», but
snappy in a genuinely disturbing way if you pay sufficient attention. Nowhere
more so than on the album opener, ʽCareer Of Evilʼ, a naughty grin of
a song that could very well fit onto any Alice Cooper record; all the more
amazing that its hyperbolic lyrics, presented from the point of view of the
allegorical meanest motherfucker you've ever seen in your life, were penned by
Patti Smith (then again, this is the
Patti Smith of ʽRock'n'Roll Niggerʼ fame, too). The repeated line
"I'm making a career of evil" concludes one of the catchiest choruses
in the band's history — so prepare to forever suffer the harboring in your head
of a song that threatens to steal wives, inject brains, and "do it to your
daughter on a dirt road", yuck. Nasty.
ʽDominance And Submissionʼ hits
sparingly, but harsh, its grim simple chords delivering powerful punches and
its lyrics seemingly dealing with the impact of the media on public conscience
(I think). The second part of the song (starting off with "In Times Square
now people do the polka") is one of the weirdest bits they ever did — the
"dominance! / submission! / (radios appear)" sequence is two minutes
of sheer delirium, followed by an even more delirious guitar solo, and in
combination with all the not-so-innocent references to 1963, 1964, digging
ʽThe Locomotionʼ, and questionable rides in backseats with «Susan and
her brother, Charles the grinning boy», this is pretty disturbing nostalgia, if you ask me. They overplay it so hotly
that, eventually, it becomes more bizarre and/or hilarious than creepy, but
fishing creepiness out of the depths of weirdness is a respectable activity in its
own rights, isn't it?
They pull the whiskers of public taste even
more strongly on ʽME 262ʼ, whose lyrics depict an aerial battle in
WWII from the perspective of a German
pilot, no less: "Must these Englishmen live that I might die"?
Granted, BÖC are an American band, not a British one, and run a slightly
lesser risk of being dragged through the mud in New York than they'd run it in
London, but still, if you throw in the fact that ʽME 262ʼ is really a
happy-sounding barroom boogie number at heart, and that they also illustrated the
song vividly on the album cover, that's one hell of a provocative move:
"Hitler's on the phone from Berlin, says I'm gonna make you a
star...".
As we move forward, it becomes more and more
obvious that Pearlman, Meltzer, and Patti Smith have really formed a «secret
treaty» to turn Blue Öyster Cult into a critical weapon, launched against
public manipulation and sheep mentality — a title like ʽCagey
Cretinsʼ speaks for itself, while the ʽHarvester Of Eyesʼ seems
to be a metaphor for your TV set. The lyrics are always ambiguous enough to
suggest multiple interpretations (or refrain from interpretation altogether),
but the «satirical» interpretation complements the music best of all, adding
extra depth to these odd riffs, like the «probing claw» mini-melody of
ʽHarvester Of Eyesʼ that seeks to implant itself in your brain and
take possession of your ears, eyes, and everything else. And the desperately
weeping intonations of ʽFlaming Telepathsʼ go together fairly well
with the recurrent line — "I'm after rebellion, I'll settle for
lies", which is like a funny retort to the Who's ʽWon't Get Fooled
Againʼ. It occupies the album's niche for «mini-epic», with Moog, piano,
and guitar solos fueling the big pathos furnace until the song suddenly begins
to match its ambitions and overwhelm the senses — regardless of whether you
understand who the hell are the "flaming telepaths" in question and
whether the lyrics are supposed to be taken socially, personally, or to the
incinerator.
My only problem is with ʽAstronomyʼ,
which closes the record off on another grand note, but with some pretense at
«soul» — as if somebody thought it'd be a good idea to pay a joint tribute to
Elton John and Van Morrison at the same time, but ended up sounding like
Journey instead, or some other second-rate/hand quasi-prog band. To succeed at
this sort of thing, they'd need at least one or two individual geniuses among
them, a great vocalist or a super-flashy soloist or two, but their strength has
always been in the collective realm, and from that point of view,
ʽAstronomyʼ is neither as weird as ʽRedeemedʼ nor as
tightly assembled as ʽMistress Of The Salmon Saltʼ. If it is an
intentional send-up of «pretentious», «romantic» values, it would be more
logical at least to place it in the middle, because using it as a coda
aggrandizes it, want it or not, and it does not seem to deserve any proper
aggrandization, I think.
Still, these are minor nitpicks next to how
altogether consistent and stimulating the record is — one of the most
intellectually challenging hard rock artefacts of 1974. Which is not saying
that nobody should ever listen to the self-titled KISS debut from the same year
in the event of availability of Secret
Treaties, because Secret Treaties
is not a headbanger's delight, it just uses hard rock as a useful tool for
something completely different, and it is this difference more than anything
else that earns it a thumbs up. It rocks, sure enough, but more
importantly, it's quirky, and it cannot be easily cracked upon one listen — and
it's one of those «meta-rock» albums which should really only be appreciated
once you've thoroughly gone through all of the usual biggies. If you're only in
it for the rock'n'roll, well, better stay away from records where Patti Smith
might be responsible for at least some of the words.
ON YOUR FEET OR ON YOUR KNEES (1975)
1) The Subhuman; 2) Harvester
Of Eyes; 3) Hot Rails To Hell; 4) The Red & The Black; 5) 7 Screaming
Diz-Busters; 8) Buck's Boogie; 9) Last Days Of May; 10) Cities On Flame; 11) ME
262; 12) Before The Kiss (A Redcap); 13) Maserati GT (I Ain't Got You); 14)
Born To Be Wild.
I guess we all saw that coming — a double live album,
the ultimate prooftest for all of the era's art rock and hard rock performers.
Even if the basic image and substance of Blue Öyster Cult was of the
«meta-...» nature, and most of the music was sharply tongue-in-cheek, one
should not forget that there was still a serious dividing line between the
band's ideological gurus (Pearlman, Meltzer, the occasional Patti Smith, etc.)
and the actual boys in the band, most of whom had authentic rock'n'roll hearts;
in fact, were it otherwise, the band would have never made it so good. Behind
all the irony, there was a real beast out there, and On Your Feet Or On Your Knees, culled from several performances
from their 1974 tour in support of Secret
Treaties, was clearly supposed to focus on the beast rather than the irony.
Not that «the beast», unleashed on the
audience, is completely free of the irony. The biggest difference of these
performances from their studio equivalents is that some of the songs are
seriously stretched out — most notably, ʽME 262ʼ and
ʽDiz-Bustersʼ — and by «stretching out», Blue Öyster Cult
usually mean «engaging in ridiculously overdone guitar pyrotechnics», like the
ʽFreebirdʼ solo or the sonic acrobatics that Mick Ronson would
perform before the front rows of bedazzled screaming kids during a Ziggy
Stardust show. Some of the time the stage show focuses on Buck Dharma's
soloing, at other times Bloom joins him with «stun guitar», creating a
high-wailing, sense-overloading wall of sound that plays up to the «rock hero»
image about as much as it sends it up — anyway, whatever happens out there in
the middle of ʽME 262ʼ isn't really «rock and roll» in its purest
form (like at a Stones concert or something), more like a consciously staged
behaviorist experiment. Not a criticism — just a statement.
The
actual songs are not changed all that much from the studio versions, except for
the tempos, dutifully sped up for extra excitement at some expense of playing
precision — sometimes it is for the better (ʽThe Red & The
Blackʼ), but sometimes it hurts: ʽCities On Flameʼ loses much of
its demonic sheen by not allowing the guitar riff to fully realize its grin —
the timing is off, and the main body of the song is over much too quickly.
Unfortunately, the mix is not ideal, either, with the vocals suffering
throughout and some of the subtleties of the rhythm guitar probably lost due to
technicalities. It wouldn't matter if the losses were compensated for with
added rock'n'roll excitement, but... see above on rock'n'roll excitement.
The
setlist, while omitting several obvious highlights of the first three albums,
is still quite strong, and features three further additions to the catalog.
ʽBuck's Boogieʼ is a lengthy instrumental, most of it happening at
breakneck speed and featuring the personal talents of Mr. Donald Roeser (as far
as live performance goes, it was actually quite an oldie by 1974, and a studio
version is now available as a bonus track on Tyranny And Mutation). ʽMaserati GTʼ is a reimagined
version of the old Jimmy Reed tune ʽI Ain't Got Youʼ with lotsa extra
jamming; and ʽBorn To Be Wildʼ is the band trying to be Steppenwolf —
I suspect that it is actually a studio track thrown on at the last moment,
maybe as a friendly gesture or because they had it lying around and didn't know
what else to do with it. It's all passable, the only question being: why did
they have to throw an excerpt from ʽCat's Squirrelʼ into both ʽBuck's Boogieʼ and ʽMaserati GTʼ? Is that an
unpleasant hint at the paucity of improvisational imagination — or just an
unfortunate coincidence?
In
any case, while you can tell that I am not head-over-heels in love with the
album, it would be useless to insist that the Blue Öyster Cult Machine is
not a real machine, but just an imitation. They do pack a good punch; the
problem is that there is too much «show» here and not nearly enough «spirit».
When we're talking bands like the Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, or Deep
Purple, in all those cases their classic live shows, different as they are from
the studio activities, will rank at least as high as the studio activities.
Blue Öyster Cult, on the other hand, seem to be primarily a
studio-oriented band, even despite all the hard rock muscle that would seem so
naturally geared towards live performance. But live, they are more of a «glam»
act than a «rock» act, and this is why, like Bowie or T. Rex, no matter how
much of a hell of a live show they could put on, and no matter how much their
live records sold (and they did
sell), they are more likely to be remembered for what they did in the studio.
Still, thumbs up
for all that hard work, and for featuring Buck Dharma in full flashy capacity
for a change.
AGENTS OF FORTUNE (1976)
1) This Ain't The Summer Of
Love; 2) True Confessions; 3) (Don't Fear) The Reaper; 4) E.T.I. (Extra
Terrestrial Intelligence); 5) The Revenge Of Vera Gemini; 6) Sinful Love; 7)
Tattoo Vampire; 8) Morning Final; 9) Tenderloin; 10) Debbie Denise.
Sometimes live albums are just live albums, and
sometimes live albums mark off, or summarize a certain period — been there,
done that, recapitulate, draw a line, time to move on. This is one of those
cases: the Blue Öyster Cult of Agents
Of Fortune is not the Blue Öyster Cult of Secret Treaties or any previous records. Goodbye, heavy metal —
hello, pop rock.
Of course, it's not as if the band had always
been a stranger to «softer» forms of music: from ʽRedeemedʼ to
ʽWings Wetted Downʼ to ʽAstronomyʼ, their repertoire had
frequently had its nods to folk, art-pop, and «progressive» styles. Nor is Agents Of Fortune completely devoid of
riff-based tunes: ʽTattoo Vampireʼ has a riff as gritty as anything
they'd done previously. But it would be futile to deny that the accents have
seriously shifted — with the band being more preoccupied with melody and
harmony now, rather than the good old kick-ass routine.
Case in point: if there is one logical
predecessor to the album's big hit song and the one number that is today most
commonly associated with Blue Öyster Cult — ʽ(Don't Fear) The
Reaperʼ — it would hardly be any of the hard rock bands, but rather The
Byrds circa 1966-67. Buck Dharma's famous «jangly» riff is like a minor
variation on the riff that opens ʽSo You Want To Be A Rock And Roll
Starʼ, and the gentle folksy harmonies, culminating in the simplistic
la-la-las of the chorus, sound as if coming straight out of sunny California,
rather than the twisted, post-modern alleys of New York City. Add to this that
Roeser envisioned the song as a fairly straightforward invitation to get rid of
the fear of death — nothing ironic in that — and the "seasons don't fear
the reaper" line, with its associations with ʽTurn! Turn!
Turn!ʼ, and there you have it. Oh, and don't forget all the raga
influences in the guitar break, too, which just about clinches it.
Why the song became such a big hit and such a
ubiquitous staple is hard to tell — it was popular way before Will Ferrell and
co. immortalized it for the hip crowds in the «more cowbell» SNL sketch, but I
am not altogether sure that the cowbell itself could have had such a hypnotic
effect on the public. Maybe its «optimistic melancholy», embodied in Roeser's
unusually tender singing, filled in some sort of spiritual niche that was empty
in 1976, or something. It is a good enough folk rock song, for sure, but hardly
a classic example of «The BÖC Special» — knowing the band through this
tune is a bit like knowing The Rolling Stones through ʽMiss Youʼ
(which, I guess, could also be quite an option for a young person circa 1978).
Now if we take ʽThis Ain't The Summer Of
Loveʼ, now we're talking: for
all the difference that Agents Of
Fortune makes, it opens in classic-traditional fashion, with heavy
distorted guitars, eerie grinning vocals ("this is the night we
ride!"), and a mock-apocalyptic message that is only a little bit set back
by the raucous barroom-rock abandon of the chorus — the hookline is delivered
by a bunch of bozos who've had one too many, rather than the Four Horsemen in
their prime. You should not read too much profundity into the song — by 1976,
everyone in the world knew fair well that «the summer of love» had ended with
Altamont seven years back, or so they said — but this is not to say that the
song has no snap, or has that snap misplaced. Most importantly, they can still
generate that snap through music rather than words: the heavy riffage on
ʽTattoo Vampireʼ, for instance, is so much more engaging than the
silly lyrics about the protagonist's adventures in a tattoo parlor that the
song may have worked better as a mean, fast-paced, athletic instrumental. (On
the other hand, the endless references to vampires, daggers, demons, and flying
skulls do a good job of directing one's mind to various «dark» associations for
the music — otherwise, it might just as well be a modernistic tribute to Link
Wray).
But the bulk of the record is far softer than
that — you have your Band-style ʽTrue Confessionsʼ, dominated by
honky-tonk piano and oddly plaintive vocal harmonies resolving in a falsetto
hook; your arena-rock-oriented ʽExtra Terrestrial Intelligenceʼ, with
bombastic guitars and anthemic choruses (all that's missing is a stadium and a
neon-lit flying saucer landing in the middle); more falsetto harmonies on ʽSinful Loveʼ, mostly
memorable for its bizarre refrain ("I love you like sin, but I won't be
your pigeon"); more cowbell on
ʽTenderloinʼ, where Eric Bloom suddenly decides to introduce a little
bit of croon into his vocals and the whole thing ends up sounding like a
slightly toughened up Billy Joel rocker; and ʽDebbie Deniseʼ, which
is their softest album closer since ʽRedeemedʼ — pop harmonies all
around and a chorus that, from my perspective, borders on sea shanty (or maybe
it is just because I keep mishearing the "where I was out rolling with my
band" line as "where I was a-rowin' with my band").
This should not, however, be taken as a
criticism, for one simple reason: most of these songs are fun. They are imaginative, intriguing, (sometimes) lyrically
challenging, memorable, and, most importantly, they come alive — it's almost as
if the band were temporarily rejuvenated by gaining the right to step away from
the hard rock formula and explore some contiguous territory. I mean, they even
get Patti Smith to not only continue supplying some of the lyrics, but — now
that her own musical career had kicked off with Horses a year ago — actually acquiring the right to duet with them
on one of the tracks (the vampire anthem ʽRevenge Of Vera Geminiʼ):
regardless of whether you are partial or not to the idea of Patti's warbling
voice echoing Bloom, this is evidence of the band frantically searching for
new solutions.
It all smells of a little campiness, where even
ʽThe Reaperʼ might eventually begin to look like a parody on the
«serious life-and-death message» song than the real thing, but ideologically,
the album is not all that different from the early «meta-rock», «post-modern»,
«intertextual» etc. BÖC — most of the songs really work whichever way you want them to work, so that ʽVera
Geminiʼ may look creepy one moment and hilarious the next one. In any
case, ʽReaperʼ or no ʽReaperʼ, the record as a whole is a
success, hard as it is to understand exactly what is so special about it. Maybe
it's just that whole aura, a mix of sleaze, sarcasm, and «modernist
spirituality», and the amazing discovery that it still stays relevant and
involving even as the band rejects the gritty hard rock stomp as the primary
means for conveying it. Thumbs up.
SPECTRES (1977)
1) Godzilla; 2) Golden Age Of
Leather; 3) Death Valley Nights; 4) Searchin' For Celine; 5) Fireworks; 6) R.
U. Ready 2 Rock; 7) Celestial The Queen; 8) Going Through The Motions; 9) I
Love The Night; 10) Nosferatu.
This is actually a very good album, but I see
how it can be (and is) often viewed as a major disappointment, coming right
off the heels of Agents Of Fortune.
First of all, its lead-off track and best known song, ʽGodzillaʼ, is
a straightforward novelty number — never yet had Blue Öyster Cult sounded
as close to «parody» as on this song, whose thick, grumbly, but ultimately humorous
riffs sort of mockingly imitate the tread of Japan's beloved monster, and whose
braggard chorus announces ʽGodzilla!ʼ as if it were a bunch of male
cheerleaders welcoming the world's latest heavyweight champion, stepping out of
his limousine on the red carpet. Ironically, both of the band's biggest
successes of the 1976-78 period are credited to Buck Dharma — but
ʽGodzillaʼ couldn't be more different from ʽReaperʼ, and
any fan who had previously admired ʽReaperʼ for subtlety and depth
would only find crudeness and silliness in ʽGodzillaʼ. Which, however,
does not make the song any less catchy or fun.
The rest of the album, however, remembers that
the band's chief strength lies in putting meanings on top of other meanings,
and not only in choosing bizarre subjects for their songs, but also in finding
bizarre structures and sequences to present them in — and from that point of
view, Spectres is still classic Blue
Öyster Cult in very good form. If there is an overall complaint, it is
that the record all but says goodbye to the pop vibe of Agents Of Fortune, but does not return to the lean, crunchy hard
rock of earlier times. Instead, the band is now regularly going for an «arena»
type of sound — taking its cues from Boston and Foreigner rather than Black
Sabbath, with power chords, glossy, «clean» guitar melodies, lots of keyboards,
and a rather grayish production tone plaguing good and bad songs alike.
Something like this could, of course, be
guessed just by looking at one of the titles: ʽR. U. Ready To Rockʼ —
amusingly, the song was recorded around the same time as Queen's ʽWe Will
Rock Youʼ, and this is telling, considering that News Of The World was also the most «arena-rock» type release that
Queen ever offered its audiences. Except that ʽWe Will Rock Youʼ, as
cheaply populist as it was, at least fulfilled its promise, whereas the
BÖC song, slow, meandering, and with a lazy riff, only shows that, while you may be ready to rock, the band has
pretty much forgotten how to do that effectively, even in a post-modernist
manner.
Fortunately, the meat of the record lies not in
its unconvincing appeals to rock'n'roll, but in some of its imaginative
mini-world journeys. ʽGolden Age Of Leatherʼ is an ironic, multi-part
saga about bikers — from folk chant to ballad to James Bond theme to catchy
pop-rock (later to turn into ʽDemolition Manʼ by The Police), the
tune has it all. Albert Bouchard's ʽFireworksʼ is a mystical story of
romance and tragedy, one of those songs where the verse melody hits harder than
the chorus (I love those rapidly descending "she, went, down,
to-her-house, by-the-water..." sequences and the moody guitar lines that
echo them, creating a sense of doom in a highly unconventional manner). And
the band's obsession with the occult/supernatural culminates in not one, but two songs about vampires closing out the
album — ʽI Love The Nightʼ approaches the subject from a
sentimental-romantic angle, while ʽNosferatuʼ is essentially a brief
retelling of Bram Stoker's Dracula,
done in properly Gothic fashion (echoey vocals, doom-laden pianos and
Mellotrons, stately descending harmonies, whatever).
Synthesizers and thick, bulgy, arena-rock
pop-metal riffs populate many of these songs, and do not always make up for
fascinating listening, but the songs can grow on you over time, with hooks and
meanings slowly arising from the somewhat murky turf: even something as dumb as
ʽSearchin' For Celineʼ, one of the band's rare excursions into
funk-pop, eventually makes its point as one of those obsessive, stalker-type
songs, whose relentless exploitation of a single chord (or a couple of them)
intentionally sets up a paranoid atmosphere. In the end, the only song to which
I could not warm up was ʽDeath Valley Nightsʼ, a total musical
disaster that rests on nothing but simplistic «bashing» power chords, and
cannot be distinguished from a million billion overloud arena rockers en vogue at the time. On the other hand,
ʽGoin' Through The Motionsʼ, which would later be even covered by
Bonnie Raitt, is a good example of harnessing that production style by choosing
an upbeat tempo, a catchy pop hook, a Farfisa organ (I think), and church bells
to compensate for all the «gray». In the end, one or two bad songs aside, Spectres is nowhere near the awful
letdown as it is sometimes proclaimed by those who actually fear the reaper,
and deserves its stable thumbs up.
SOME ENCHANTED EVENING (1978)
1) R. U. Ready 2 Rock; 2)
E.T.I. (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence); 3) Astronomy; 4) Kick Out The Jams; 5)
Godzilla; 6) (Don't Fear) The Reaper; 7) We Gotta Get Out Of This Place.
At the moment, I only own the original short
version of this album: in 2007, it was doubled in length with the addition of a
whole bunch of extra performances, which might have doubled its value, I don't
know — fact is, it was the original 36-minute long platter that managed, for
some odd reason, to become the band's best-selling album ever. Maybe it was just the fact that here was a chance to get
ʽReaperʼ and ʽGodzillaʼ on the same record, so people just
mistook it for a best-of compilation — or maybe everybody and their grandma
just wanted to own a pretty picture of The Reaper sitting atop a black horse
with a rather stoned expression on his face.
Anyway, even more so than On Your Feet, and even despite the short running length, Some Enchanted Evening presents the
band as a fire-breathing rock monster sent from rock hell to kick everybody's
ass, even though the band's tongue remains firmly in the band's cheek, as they
more often send this image up rather
than across. To honor their
rock'n'roll legacy, they perform a couple of covers — the MC5's ʽKick Out
The Jamsʼ is significantly tightened up, its primal chaos converted into a
more crowd-friendly blast of focused «social anger», and ʽWe Gotta Get Out
Of This Placeʼ shows that they... well, understand how to play around with the obsessed, paranoid soul of
that song, even though not one singer in this band is an Eric Burdon when it
comes to «winding yourself up» during the performance.
Other than the hip classics, the track list
(again, culled from several different venues — don't be fooled by the reference
to Atlanta, Georgia in the ad-libbed section of ʽReady To Rockʼ,
because that's just one of the songs) concentrates on their recent albums,
going only as far back as Secret
Treaties, with an extended version of ʽAstronomyʼ that downplays
the original's prettiness (replacing pretty pianos with ugly synths), but has
many more passionate distorted guitar solos in store, all in line with the
«kick-ass» attitude. Even ʽThe Reaperʼ trades «clean» jangle and
subtlety for a rougher, coarser approach, robbing the song of some of its
otherworldly magic — but probably making it easier for the fans to headbang
non-stop.
The funniest thing about the record, I'd say,
is the intro. "ATLANTA, GEORGIA! ARE YOU READY TO ROCK'N'ROLL?" So
many millions of times we've heard about this sermon, but fact is, you don't
hear the "ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?" mantra on actual live albums all
too often, unless you regularly listen to really
stupid bands — which makes it all the more hilarious to hear it done by one of
the smartest bands (at the time). The only problem is, this album rocks nowhere
near as hard as On Your Feet: for
all their bravado, Blue Öyster Cult have already moved well into their
second, «smoother» phase, and most of the hard rock on this album is either
cumbersome and lumpy (ʽGodzillaʼ — meant to be cumbersome like its protagonist, but that don't make it
biting, snappy rock'n'roll, and the «Japanese» ad-libbing actually pushes it
close to comedy), or closer to the power-pop idiom (ʽE.T.I.ʼ, which
in this setting sounds almost exactly like something you'd hear from Cheap
Trick in their Budokan era — come to think of it, this was Cheap Trick's Budokan era, and the two bands could easily learn
a few expensive tricks from each other).
Which should not be taken as a criticism — it's
a fun album, except that I do not particularly feel any desperate need for its
existence, other than simply to document the then-current BÖC at the top
of their arena-rock popularity, and that popularity has always seemed a little
weird to me. In other words, it still does not convince me of the greatness of this band in its live
incarnation, more like, of its ability to successfully manipulate the audience,
following in the footsteps of the decade's early glam heroes like Bowie or
Bolan, and in all these cases, I tend to view the live avatar of the artist as
perishable, contrary to the studio avatar. Subsequently, the record does
deserve a thumbs
up if we're not being too serious about it, but if we are being serious about it, just stick
to their studio albums.
MIRRORS (1979)
1) Dr. Music; 2) The Great Sun
Jester; 3) In Thee; 4) Mirrors; 5) Moon Crazy; 6) The Vigil; 7) I Am The Storm;
8) You're Not The One (I Was Looking For); 9) Lonely Teardrops.
As the band's commercial fortunes started
slipping somewhat with Spectres, a
shift of direction and environment was thought of as a potential good move. A
radical shift indeed — the band not only ditched Pearlman (temporarily) and
long-time co-producer Murray Krugman (permanently), but it also betrayed its
alma mater — New York City, going to California for the bulk of the recordings.
The new choice of producer wasn't too bad: Tom Werman, the guy behind several
classic late-1970s Cheap Trick albums — but the choice of location certainly
was, at least for 1979, the last year of the classic disco era.
Mirrors is not a disco album, but it is certainly one
of their most danceable records, going very
light on heavy metal riffs (no ʽGodzillaʼ for a hundred miles around)
and very heavy on California-style
folk-pop and contemporary R&B influences. Technically, it is not so much a
sellout as an experimental attempt to plant the «BÖC spirit» into a
different kind of soil and see how it works — the songs are still relatively
«weird» in construction terms, and the lyrics still contain plenty of the
mock-Gothic, ironic-romantic imagery of yore. On ʽThe Great Sun
Jesterʼ, they even enter into collaboration with a new familiar face —
fantasy goon Michael Moorcock, who probably needed a change from his long-term
collaboration with Hawkwind. All in all, this here is not a case of «band on autopilot»: Mirrors is an honest-to-goodness attempt to reinvent themselves
and stay up-to-date while at the same time conserving the old essence.
Naturally, it is a little offensive when a song
called ʽDr. Musicʼ opens the album and sounds like a mix of
ʽPretty Womanʼ, ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ, and some dinky
mid-1970s proto-disco dance number that I can't quite lay my finger on. But it
is essentially a comedy number, more of a straight parody on sexy posturing
than anything else — Bloom's vocals are quite indicative of that — and
condemning the band for this experiment, while trying in vain to get its catchy
chorus out of your head, would be as useless as condemning the Beatles for
ʽMaxwell's Silver Hammerʼ. It is much easier to condemn the closing number: Lanier's ʽLonely
Teardropsʼ, riding on a Clavinet line not unlike the one in
ʽSuperstitionʼ, and taking it a little more serious than necessary
(the "Lord I tell you, all I want to do is get back home" bit sounds
achingly poignant, but the rest of the track is so dance-centered that the
vibes clash and explode).
Yet the album is diverse, enough for everybody
to be able to pick at least one or two favorites. I really like ʽThe Great
Sun Jesterʼ, for one thing — a fun, exciting lite-prog epic, which I could
have easily imagined on a Yes album, exuberantly sung by Jon Anderson instead
of Eric Bloom and with a high-in-the-sky Steve Howe solo for the climax, but
even in the hands of this here band it still rolls along with a wallop of
life-asserting optimism, a little surprising for a song that laments the «death
of the fireclown» (a Moorcock fantasy personage), but where there's death,
there's always rebirth, you know.
On the other end of the pole, there's ʽI
Am The Stormʼ, the album's only seriously rocking cut: a little
Boston-glossy, perhaps, but it does rock the socks off, true to its name, with
magnificent lead guitar from Buck Dharma and a hyperbolic-exaggerated old-testamental
anger at the betrayal of love that we haven't seen since ʽI Can See For
Milesʼ. It's a pop song at heart, but they work hard to imbue it with rock
fury, and I am quite won over by its theatricality. Heck, I am even won over by
the theatricality of ʽMoon Crazyʼ, with its odd wobbling between
old-time Kinksy music-hall and new-style whitebread 1970s pop — especially when
it goes into overdriven drunken Slavic rhythmics and wild guitar pirouetting at
the end.
Quite a bit of the time the record is boring,
or somewhat limp: you'd have to be a major
fan of the decade's conventional pop balladry, for instance, to get any thrill
out of the ballad ʽIn Theeʼ (delivered way too sincerely to be
salvaged by irony), and ʽYou're Not The One (I Was Looking For)ʼ
seems to be a very self-conscious effort to write something in the style of
that hot new Boston sensation, The Cars, but with those boring power chords for
the chorus hook, the song becomes Foreigner rather than the Cars when it comes
to climaxing, and gets the death sentence for that. Even so — it is at least
interesting to watch it start out so promisingly and then self-destruct so
maddeningly.
Underwhelming as the effort is next to Spectres, with the lack of a definitive
highlight (ʽI Am The Stormʼ comes close, though), I still give it a thumbs up
— if you want to look for something really
bland in this style, check out the average Average White Band from the same
time period; Mirrors has its own
intrigue, diversity, and charming clumsiness when you view it in context and
see them try to corrupt all those new influences with their irreverent
approach. One of these days we might even forget them the temporary move to
California, I guess.
CULTÖSAURUS ERECTUS (1980)
1) Black Blade; 2) Monsters;
3) Divine Wind; 4) Deadline; 5) The Marshall Plan; 6) Hungry Boys; 7) Fallen
Angel; 8) Lips In The Hills; 9) Unknown Tongue.
Kind of a confused record, but not without some
major points of interest. As the disco backlash hit the streets, Bloom and Co.
must have realised that they'd wandered a bit too far off in the back alleys — even if songs like ʽDr.
Musicʼ and ʽLonely Teardropsʼ were not without their merits,
hearing them in 1980 might make the fans feel as if they'd just caught the band
with their pants off or something. Quickly, the boys devised Salvation Plan B —
drop all the vaudeville and get realigned back to heaviness. For extra
security, they teamed up with famous hard rock producer Martin Birch, fresh off
work on Heaven And Hell, the new
album by the new-look Black Sabbath (with Dio) — and once Birch helped them
get out their own record, they even went on tour with Sabbath together (an old
video, still officially unavailable on DVD, predictably called Black And Blue, actually captured that
glorious moment).
Getting back some of that heaviness was a good
thing, and, in fact, what with all the advances in technology and all, Cultösaurus occasionally sounds
thicker and denser than anything they ever did before (Birch certainly
saturates some fat inside Joe Bouchard's bass, for one thing) — but don't let
that fool you: this is not an
improvement on the first three albums, and, in fact, I'd rather we did not
compare them at all, because the poor skeletal beast will not survive the
procedure.
With just a couple exceptions that I will save
up for a little later, Blue Öyster Cult have finally entered what is
commonly referred to as «Spinal Tap territory». The typical song here is a big,
bombastic, superhero-style light metal rocker — sometimes equipped with its own
riff, but more often not (I'm still trying to locate one in ʽBlack
Bladeʼ, but to no avail: most of the time it is the bass that drives the
song rather than the rhythm guitar). The first songs start us off in sci-fi /
B-movie mode, but as the album progresses, the band moves on to the subject of
«Rock And Roll Hero», dedicating song after song to issues of superstardom,
rebellion, and fall from grace — and much of this stuff just sounds like parody
(sometimes rather pedestrian parody) on rock'n'roll aesthetics. Not deconstruction of rock'n'roll
aesthetics, as it used to be in the glory days, more like relatively simplistic
parody.
The «epic» number that opens the album is
ʽBlack Bladeʼ, another collaboration with Moorcock on one of his
fantasy subjects (the «soul-sucking» sword of Elric) — but, unlike ʽSun
Jesterʼ, this one has no emotional subtlety whatsoever, and even though
its fat chords, Neanderthal vocals, and screeching guitar leads do a good job
visualising images of Boris Vallejo characters, the melody is not particularly
memorable, and the song is neither awesomely impressive nor awesomely funny, so
I am not exactly sure what to do with it. ʽMonstersʼ is much more
interesting, melody-wise, especially the way it manages to combine jazz with
hard-rock (the mid-section reveals direct influences of King Crimson's
ʽ21st Century Schizoid Manʼ), but... it doesn't sound much like
«monsters». More like a passable jazz-fusion piece integrated with some generic
hard rock passages. No visions springing up.
The second side is dominated by the shadow of
ʽThe Marshall Planʼ, a bombastic saga of a proverbial rock'n'roll
hero, peppered with lyrical references to Don Kirshner, quotations of the
ʽSmoke On The Waterʼ riff, fake audience noises, and endless
namecalling of a certain «Johnny» — good thing the album was released a good
half-year before the Lennon shooting. As a glam-rock theatrical piece, it's
okay, I guess, but not particularly necessary after we've had ourselves that
lengthy Alice Cooper streak of early 1970s albums, much more powerful on the
whole. Again, musically it is the shorter songs that have more pull.
ʽHungry Boysʼ is a rare case of a New Wave-influenced pop-rocker
here, with electronic effects and slightly robotized vocals that contrast with
fully traditional rock and roll guitar leads; and ʽLips In The Hillsʼ
is a good showcase for the boys' guitar interplay — nasty swirling arpeggios overlayed
with stinging solos, fully redeeming the song for Meltzer's whacko lyrics.
But all of this is merely «decent». The only
moments where the album approaches an oasis of greatness are, interestingly
enough, ʽDivine Windʼ and ʽDeadlineʼ — two songs credited
solely to Buck Dharma, indicating that, at this particular time, he was the
most reasonable of the band members. ʽDivine Windʼ is melodically
unexceptional — a fairly standard blues-rocker — but, alone of 'em all, it
actually sounds serious: Buck's chorus — "if he really thinks we're the
devil, then let's send him to HELL!", with heavy threatening emphasis on
the last word — occasionally sends a shiver down my spine. Apparently, never
mind the actual title, but the song was referring to the Ayatollah and the Iran
crisis, and in these politically sensitive days would probably count as
warmongering and maybe cost Blue Öyster Cult their place in respectable
society and align them next to Ted Nugent, but things were kinda easier in
1980, and besides, regardless of deeper causes, the Ayatollah was one rather sick son of a bitch, so I
can empathize. Most ardently, though, I empathize the howling guitar breaks and
the doom-laden basslines.
ʽDeadlineʼ, one of the record's
lighter tracks, memorizes an incident in which one of the band's booking agents
was shot by a guy from whom he wanted to wrestle out a gambling debt — and the
memorial is well held, with a chorus that somehow implies that being resolute
and determined is not always a good
thing ("he missed the deadline / he passed the deadline, darling"),
and some moody, echoey guitar leads for atmosphere. Lighter it may be, but
ultimately it cuts deeper than anything else on here, and I'd certainly return
to the album in the future for ʽDeadlineʼ rather than ʽBlack
Bladeʼ or ʽThe Marshall Planʼ.
Unquestionably a thumbs up here, because even the
«bad» songs are so obviously tongue-in-cheek that only an idiot could get
offended. But I would be lying if I said the album didn't have its problems —
the major one being a noticeable disappearance of good rhythm guitar. You can't
live on solid Buck Dharma solos for eternity, and the riffs did provide a
reliable foundation for the BÖC legend in the past. Taking them out and
substituting «theatrical pomp» in their place, hoping that we do not notice, is
a bad move, and one that would eventually lead to their downfall. Fortunately,
here we are still some way away from it.
FIRE OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN (1981)
1) Fire Of Unknown Origin; 2)
Burnin' For You; 3) Veteran Of The Psychic Wars; 4) Sole Survivor; 5) Heavy
Metal: The Black And Silver; 6) Vengeance; 7) After Dark; 8) Joan Crawford; 9)
Don't Turn Your Back.
Seeing as how everybody and their tattooed
grandmothers seem to love ʽBurnin' For Youʼ, I won't say anything
particularly bad about this song — but I do
want to express a little sorrow in light of the fact that, where their first
big hit (ʽReaperʼ) sucked up to the Byrds and their second big hit
(ʽGodzillaʼ) sucked up to... well, let's say The Move and Roy Wood's
Wizzard, among other things, their third
(and last) big hit sucks up to Foreigner. And it's written by the band's
bestest melody-writer (Roeser) and bestest lyricist (Meltzer), no less! Yes,
gentlemen, change is definitely in the air, and not necessarily for the better.
Not that ʽBurnin' For Youʼ is a
particularly disappointing spokessong for the arena-rock genre: as a catchy,
danceable vehicle to express longing and torment, it is totally on par with the
best that Foreigner and Boston had to offer us. Nor would I want to deny Buck
Dharma the right to contribute another «serious-sounding» rather than
«tongue-in-cheek» song, after he'd proved himself so capable with
ʽReaperʼ and ʽDeadlineʼ. But the pop metal riff tone that
he generates (or is made to generate by Martin Birch, once again returning into
the producer's seat) is so far removed from the classic hard rock sound of
BÖC, and the chorus hook is so unashamedly «commercial» (in the
not-so-good sense of the word), that even if we «accept» the song, it will
still be clearly indicative of the numerous embarrassments to follow.
On the whole, Fire Of Unknown Origin still preserves the basic accoutrements of a
typical BÖC product. The original line-up is still intact, Meltzer is on
board, and so is Moorcock, contributing the lyrics from another of his fantasy
scenarios; and so is Sandy Pearlman, with lyrics for ʽHeavy Metalʼ, a
song that, along with several others, was intended to appear in the soundtrack
to the animated movie of the same name; and so is even Patti Smith, helping out
with the title track. There is sci-fi, fantasy, spoof horror, and campy,
grotesque atmosphere a-plenty, starting with the album cover and ending with a
song about Joan Crawford as a ghoul that has risen from the grave to keep on
tormenting her unfortunate daughter (ironically, the album was released three
months before the premiere of Mommy
Dearest with Faye Dunaway, so who influenced who?..).
But the music, oddly enough, even though they
still retain their heavy metal producer, once again veers off the «heavy»
trajectory (as they tried to re-establish it with Cultösaurus). Those pop metal riffs I have mentioned are, in
fact, the heaviest element of the sound — which is otherwise very much dominated by synthesizers.
Thankfully, they try to use them creatively and in diverse ways, from
background tapestries (title track) to doom-laden church-organ substitutes
(ʽSole Survivorʼ) to playful, danceable New Wave patterns à la Cars (ʽAfter
Darkʼ), and, besides, we have only just begun to knock upon Eighties'
doors, so there is a good sense of balance. Additionally, we must keep in mind that the band was
essentially a «meta-rock» formation, meaning that they had to present their own
quirky take on whatever was currently en
vogue, so this shift to an early amalgamation of pop metal and synth-rock
was probably inevitable. However, that does not mean that we have to enjoy it, and I would not call this
album tremendously enjoyable.
In fact, out of its exaggerated, cartoonish,
corny darkness (well fit for the exaggerated, cartoonish, corny darkness of Heavy Metal, for which many of these
songs were written, but almost none were used), I would say that I
instinctively enjoy only two songs, for different reasons. ʽVeteran Of The
Psychic Warsʼ somehow, almost as if against its own will, manages to
capture a bit of the war-weary, troubled-paranoid syndrome — forget about
Moorcock's fantasy-based lyrics, it could just as easily be about Vietnam —
with an impressive build-up towards the ominous conclusion of the chorus
("oh please don't let these shakes go on..." is almost creepy), and
its sonic atmosphere, with those booming martial drums, is vaguely reminiscent
of Peter Gabriel's ʽIntruderʼ, perhaps not accidentally so. A
mini-masterpiece that I would recommend, hands down, over ʽBurnin' For
Youʼ as the album's best track any time of day, night, or the interim.
The second track that I get a real kick out of
is... yes, ʽJoan Crawfordʼ. It is a silly joke, yes, but a hilarious
one, as if the band is spoofing its own predilection for the subject of
vampirism and revenants — I can see how some stuck-up admirers of
ʽNosferatuʼ could be offended by being offered this parody, but as a
(self-)parody, I'll be damned if it doesn't work. Not only is it one of the best-produced
tracks on the album (classical Chopinesque piano instead of synths! old-school
distorted guitars!), but that little ghostly whisper ("Chrissssteeena!
Mother's home!...") gets me every time. Plus, for what it's worth, there
might be a glimmer of wisdom to this parody — in addition to sending up their
own obsessions, it also sends up the exaggerated «celebrity-bashing» wave after
the sensationalist publications of Crawford's daughter had turned the late Joan
into a model monster. Maybe the song does not have a great melody, but it has
great theater.
The remainder of the songs are tolerable and
not without compositional decency or hooks, but tunes like ʽSole
Survivorʼ keep getting stuck halfway between «serious» and «campy», not atmospheric
or heartfelt enough to overawe the senses and not funny or inventively arranged
enough to be appreciated as first-class parody, satire, or intriguing exercise
in post-modernism. ʽHeavy Metal: The Black And Silverʼ is the worst
of the bunch (Spinal Tap incarnate); ʽVengeanceʼ sounds like it
should be the personal anthem of Conan the Barbarian, but would he have liked
all those keyboards, really?; and, closing the album, ʽDon't Turn Your
Backʼ is a repetitive, syncopated white R&B number that wants to say
goodbye to us with a moody, but friendly piece of advice for the road
("don't turn your back, danger surrounds you...") but, in all honesty,
sounds about as exciting as The Average White Band — which, all through the
1970s, BÖC never were. White, yes, but definitely above average.
Even so, Fire
Of Unknown Origin deserves a lukewarm thumbs up. Its flaws are very much defined by its
epoch, and the band's interest in pushing forward the boundaries of their sound
and in exploring various alleyways around their main street is still very much
intact. By all means, it could have been much better if they had a better grip
on the really exciting things that were going on in the musical world around
that time (for comparison, one of their chief American competitors in the
«glam and satire» market, Alice Cooper, did get a much better grip — his Flush The Fashion was a far smarter and
snappier exploration of the New Wave scene at the time). But even the way it
turned out, it was anything but a
simplistic sell-out, or a betrayal of the band's ideals. They just thought
it'd sound more cutting-edge with the keyboards, that's all.
EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIVE (1982)
1) Dominance And Submission;
2) Cities On Flame; 3) Dr. Music; 4) The Red And The Black; 5) Joan Crawford;
6) Burnin' For You; 7) Roadhouse Blues; 8) Black Blade; 9) Hot Rails To Hell;
10) Godzilla; 11) Veteran Of The Psychic Wars; 12) E.T.I. (Extra Terrestrial
Intelligence); 13) (Don't Fear) The Reaper.
Okay, so maybe Blue Öyster Cult do need that many live albums out, if
only to demonstrate how far they had evolved as a touring act over the decade —
just as far, actually, as they'd evolved as a studio band, from once having
been a tough, experimental, tightly focused meta-hard-rock act to now realising
the wet dreams of Spinal Tap fanbase right there on the stage. On Extraterrestrial Live, it's «rock and
roll burlesque» all the way.
Not that I really
mind. By 1982, the band was so grotesquely over the top that only the most
hateful listener, or the most naïve listener, could suspect them of being
serious in their approach. The whole concert was basically one big circus show
— so that founding member Albert Bouchard, who was either kicked out or left
inimicably halfway through the tour, should have been glad to be deprived of
the dubious honor of participating in this debacle. And yet, there is something
delightfully silly about how they
re-deconstruct their already deconstructed material and poke irreverent fun at
themselves, their music, the audience, and the «rock mentality» even as they
give out the superficial impression of embracing it.
Invocations to the great power of rock and roll
start immediately, right from the hysterical "one two three four!"
that opens ʽDominance And Submissionʼ. Then, taking over from the
departed Bouchard on vocals, Eric Bloom gleefully salivates over the words
"rock and roll" in ʽCities On Flameʼ — and then there's
simply no stopping the band, particularly on ʽGodzillaʼ and an
extended cover of the Doors' ʽRoadhouse Bluesʼ, which they try to
turn from a mere «epic» track into a multi-mega-arch-epic
powerhouse-of-a-track, adding extra repetitions of the "let it roll"
section and a lengthy monolog on the details of the process of waking up and
getting myself a beer. Meanwhile, ʽGodzillaʼ, complete with a spoken
warning about the nuclear peril, finally de-cloaks itself as a contemporary
update of ʽWild Thingʼ, but hip enough to quote ʽMilk Cow
Bluesʼ in the instrumental section. In short, it's all a madhouse.
There is one serious reason to own this record, though: Buck Dharma. You could
always count on that guy to save the band out of a tight spot, and on this
record, he seems like the only member who can still remember what a proper
straight face looks like. His playing throughout is awesome, but nowhere more
so than on the lengthy solo in the middle of ʽVeteran Of The Psychic
Warsʼ: with little warning, they suddenly pick up the tempo and let Mr.
Roeser explode in a super-fast, flashy passage that is totally overflowing with
passion and ecstasy — unquestionably one of the best ever guitar solos captured
on a live album, period. Even though he did not write the original song, he
must have sensed its potential — that, despite its Moorcock origins, it was
really that one sci-fi tune in the band's catalog that could have a universal
application, Cold War and Vietnam associations included — and he gave it his
due.
In addition, just like their preceding two live
offerings, Extraterrestrial Live
also serves as a marking time album, closing the door on the «third age» of
Blue Öyster Cult — the band as seasoned veteran cosmic rockers with a
penchant for campy excess and arena-oriented bombast, towards which they
re-orient even their older material. Little did anybody suspect to what sort of
depths this band would soon plummet, even if in retrospect, it does look fairly
predictable that 1981-1982 would just have to be the last years where good
taste and common sense could at least occasionally prevail over market demands,
or at least go hand-in-hand with them. In memory of that, let us conclude the
review with a big fat thumbs up («big fat» being a reference to the
overall sound of the record, not the emphatic nature of the thumbs up in
question).
THE REVÖLUTION BY NIGHT (1983)
1) Take Me Away; 2) Eyes On
Fire; 3) Shooting Shark; 4) Veins; 5) Shadow Of California; 6) Feel The
Thunder; 7) Let Go; 8) Dragon Lady; 9) Light Years Of Love.
Rule of thumb: if you go to the producer of
Loverboy, who has only recently completed production of a multiplatinum album
by Loverboy — do not be surprised if your album ends up sounding like
Loverboy. That is, of course, provided your original plan, for some reason, was
not to have your album sound like
Loverboy — but for all we know, the 1983 edition of Blue Öyster Cult,
replete with new member Rick Downey on (mostly electronic) drums, wanted to sound like Loverboy. See, the
whole idea behind Blue Öyster Cult was that they had to override this «cult» status — had to be super-bizarre, post-modern, ironic rockers of stadium,
rather than small club, caliber. And if you need stadium-size audiences, you
gotta hang on to stadium-size commercial success. So off you go and find
yourself one of the hottest new things in town: Bruce Fairbairn, the guy who
would very soon not only be the guy behind Loverboy, but also the guy behind
Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet and
Aerosmith's Permanent Vacation and Pump.
The real weirdness of the situation does not
begin to come out, though, until you realize that substantially, fundamentally
nothing has really changed. The band is still working with Meltzer
(ʽVeinsʼ), Pearlman (ʽShadow Of Californiaʼ), and even
Patti Smith (ʽShooting Sharkʼ). They are still writing songs about
darkness, thunder, dragon ladies, and all sorts of sordid subject matters, and
are still willing to play their «grinning gods of rock» game with anybody still
willing to stick around and listen. They do not seem to realize, as it is, that
something vital has gone out of their sound with this transition to a new style
of playing and production — they probably think, like so many of their
contemporaries, that it's just a matter of stylistic progression.
And back in 1983, it might have been, but in
retrospect, that «stylistic progression» turns out to have been a near-complete
loss of face. Songs like Gregg Winter's ʽEyes On Fireʼ are little
more than instantaneously trashable synth-rock, devoid of grit and decent melody — but when they try to
preserve the grit, the results are even more pitiable: no matter how much
ʽFeel The Thunderʼ begs me to obey its title, all I have to say in
response is «I have no true feel for Rambo Metal», regardless of whether I hear
it on Alice Cooper's Constrictor or
any other record. Get rid of those ugly keyboards first, and then we'll talk — maybe.
Production, occasional bad ideas, and poor
outside contributions aside, Revolution
By Night (can I be spared the task of pasting in yet another of these
gratuitous Umlauts?) has its share of «decent beginnings» — ʽShooting
Sharkʼ and ʽShadow Of Californiaʼ are both solid epic tracks
that deserved a much better fate. The former is a collaboration between Buck
Dharma and Patti Smith, a dark, smoky ballad of love gone bad with a touching
vocal performance, a catchy funky bassline (courtesy of guest star Randy
Jackson — Joe Bouchard does not have a knack for this funky shit), and moody
lead guitar and sax parts: somewhat monotonous, perhaps, but still one of those
ʽReaperʼ-type songs where Roeser's melancholic-romantic personality
makes a temporary break from the band's usual tongue-in-cheek attitude prison.
On the contrary, ʽShadow Of
Californiaʼ is completely tongue-in-cheek, a hilariously spooky portrait
of a band of Hell's Angels as a Satanic symbol of the West Coast — apparently,
Pearlman still hasn't quite managed to exorcise his demons, or satisfy his
fetish, since the days of ʽTransmaniacon MCʼ. With a memorable riff,
evocative guitar work that does
resemble a swarm of bikes casting a shadow that "will grow to cover
California", it could be that
perfect devilish antidote to the angelic ʽCalifornia Dreamin'ʼ that
all of us cynics had been waiting for — if not for the production, which
predictably sucks a couple pints of blood out of this organism. Dammit, why
couldn't they have written this circa 1976 or 1977?
Alas, but in addition to these problems, there
are further embarrassments: ʽLet Goʼ starts out promisingly
punkishly, like a deconstructed take on ʽI Can't Explainʼ, but
quickly degenerates into lameass stadium football chants ("B-O-C! You can
be whatever you want to be!") that rank among the tackiest things this
band has ever stooped to. And the closing ballad ʽLight Years Of
Loveʼ makes ʽAstronomyʼ sound like the epitome of refined
profoundness and complexity in comparison — not only are the lyrics here
completely pedestrian ("our love is like the shining sea?" — come on
guys, we know you can do better than
that), but they are delivered by Joe Bouchard in such a pathetically whiny
manner, and accompanied with such a stiff guitar tone, that the song has no
life whatsoever, and I have no idea who the hell it was meant to woo over —
early Eighties' teenagers? bored housewives? certainly not the veteran fan guard.
We almost forgot to mention the opening track
and lead single, ʽTake Me Awayʼ, but that is only because there is
very little to mention: it is just another leaden, lifeless, stillborn arena
rocker from Bloom and his Canadian friend Aldo Nova. There's an embryonic silhouette
of a good riff somewhere at the end of the chorus, but other than that, it's
pop metal mess personalized. All in all, thumbs down seems to be the only reasonable
solution — a pity, since I'd almost gotten partial to ʽShooting Starʼ
and ʽShadow Of Californiaʼ, but two good songs (one of them overlong
at that) do not a recommendable record make. Blame it on the Eighties if you
will, but really, given the band's evolution over the Seventies, we all saw
this one coming, I guess.
CLUB NINJA (1986)
1) White Flags; 2) Dancing In
The Ruins; 3) Make Rock Not War; 4) Perfect Water; 5) Spy In The House Of The
Night; 6) Beat 'Em Up; 7) When The War Comes; 8) Shadow Warrior; 9) Madness To
The Method.
Hello, I'm Leonard Pinth-Garnell, and welcome
to «Bad Rock Music». As I throw a sideways glance at the calendar, I happen to
notice that we are, indeed, right in the middle of 1986, and as every true
connaisseur of rock music is liable to knowing, 1986 is a year well famous for
producing — indeed, festering, as
some might say — some of the absolutely worst rock music ever known to man,
woman, kitten, or door-to-door salesman. As we have only just found out, the
year was no exception for once popular and
creative, ever so slightly post-modern rock act «Blue Öyster Cult», who
have confirmed the rule with their newest LP, one that sports no less than one
of the absolutely worst LP titles in the business — Club Ninja — and contains some very, very, very bad songs that seem almost custom made for our show.
To begin with, it must be noted that, while
this band had previously been known to write the majority of their material
themselves, and harvest some verbal help from the likes of acclaimed
celebrities and pop-culture-intellectuals such as Richard Meltzer, Sandy
Pearlman, Patti Smith, and Michael Moorcock, Club Ninja is their first record to have a mind-blowing four songs
provided by completely outside
songwriters — corporate songwriters, one might add. With contributions by
Larry Gottlieb (who had also written songs for Marie Osmond and Kenny Rogers
that very year), Bob Halligan Jr. (a hard rock singer who'd written a couple of
tunes for Judas Priest), and another song taken over from the Leggat Bros.,
there is little reason to doubt that Columbia Records played the usual trick on
the poor fellows — saddled them with «commercial» material in order to have a
hit on their hands. Unfortunately, what worked for Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, and
even Eric Clapton (in terms of popularity, not artistry) backfired for Blue
Öyster Cult, who simply lost their reputation without any financial gains to compensate for the shame.
In the midst of this utter travesty, it remains
almost unnoticed that the band also lacks their keyboardist, Allen Lanier, now,
temporarily replaced by Tommy Zvonchek. This might even be for the better,
because the keyboards are not so much at the center of the sound now as they
were on the previous albums — but what is
at that center? Rotten, faceless pop metal guitar, for the most part, acting
primarily as a monotonous background for the band's pop metal gang choruses. If
you thought "B-O-C! You can be whatever you want to be!" was bad
enough, wait until you hear "ROCK NOT WAR! Make ROCK NOT WAR!" or
"BEAT 'EM UP! BEAT 'EM UP!" (the latter song, courtesy of Bob Halligan
Jr., also features probably the worst verse in BOC history, which simply must be quoted: "You take a
lickin', keep on kickin' / This fight we both can win / We'll stop sockin' when
you stop rockin' / You don't give up, you just give in" — the idea, of
course, is that you are supposed to deliver these words while keeping a
straight face, which was probably only possible circa 1986).
The biggest disappointment is Roeser, who finds
himself very much a part of this travesty — for instance, handling the lead
vocals on ʽDancing In The Ruinsʼ, the Larry Gottlieb song that was
supposed to become a hit for the band but did not, perhaps because the song
never manages to properly let us know if it is «romantic» (Roeser sings it that
way) or «apocalyptic». In any case, the great American nation much preferred to
be ʽDancing In The Darkʼ at the time, so Buck Dharma's effort to make
this boring piece of schlock come to life was doomed artistically and wasted
commercially. The problem is, his own contributions are not much better:
ʽSpy In The House Of The Nightʼ does not even reach the catchiness of
ʽBurnin' For Youʼ, and I really
hate the way he drawls out the word "rendez-vous", as if he were a
Vegasy crooner for a second.
Arguably the only song on the entire record to
merit somebody's attention is ʽMadness To The Methodʼ, a seven-minute
final epic where the band suddenly remembers that their «bad boys of rock and
roll image» is supposed to be an ironic front, after all. Had the album been a
commercial success instead of a flop, the P.M.R.C. would probably have had a
thing or two to say about such totally gross lines as "it's the time in
the season for a maniac at night" or "there's a lot to be said for a
blow to the head", but, of course, the song really just pokes bitter fun
at the «violence mentality» of rock music, or, at least, it definitely reads
that way when it is not «drunk caveman» Eric Bloom taking lead vocals, but
«quiet melancholic» Donald Roeser. Even so, the song never truly grips the
senses — musically, it is a rather generic, monotonous New Wave-style rocker
that sounds tired rather than inspired. Ironically, it is Mr. Zvonchek, the
band's new keyboardist, who provides the best bit with a beautiful piano solo
at the end — probably wanted to make a real good impression for his first time.
After all this, minor questionable trivia (such
as the infamous Howard Stern reciting the spoken-word introduction to
ʽWhen The War Comesʼ) are of no importance, and all that remains is
to issue the predictable thumbs down and deposit the unfortunate LP in
the specially designed trash bin. The worst thing about this, though, is that
we cannot even say «This is no longer Blue Öyster Cult», because it is — the band's fascination with all
things BÖC-ish is still very much in place, you know, darkness, vampirism,
sci-fi, heaviness, «rock warriors in po-mo garb», whatever. It has simply
mutated into a totally gross, grotesque, faceless form. And, ironically, it is
also their first record in a while for which Sandy Pearlman has returned as a
producer. Boy, did he ever produce a mess. Bad, bad rock music.
IMAGINOS (1988)
1) I Am The One You Warned Me
Of; 2) Les Invisibles; 3) In The Presence Of Another World; 4) Del Rio's Song;
5) The Siege And Investiture Of Baron Von Frankenstein's Castle; 6) Astronomy;
7) Magna Of Illusion; 8) Blue Öyster Cult; 9) Imaginos.
What do you mean, it took us nearly twenty
years to realize that the true purpose of Blue Öyster Cult was to serve as
a backing band for a sprawling sci-fi rock opera, adapted from the wrinkled
pages of Sandy Pearlman's school yearbook? Here we were thinking that this band
was some sort of high-falutin', acid-satiric, pre-post-modern take on rock and
pop culture, and in reality it was just this imaginative young fellow with the
hots for Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, and whatever cheap sci-fi flicks they
were making in the hot-for-outer-space Sixties. Of course, the band very
quickly got out of control and started following its own path, but the shadow
of Sandy Pearlman haunted them all the way, and in the end, it got 'em.
Actually, as far as I understand, by the time
1987 rolled along, Blue Öyster Cult as a viable project was altogether
finished. Their latest albums bombed and
sucked at the same time, band members were scurrying away from the ship like
rats on speed, and the remaining ones were aging, sulking, and uncomfortable.
In other words — the perfect
condition (not!) for Sandy Pearlman to try and resuscitate the original idea of
a major concept album (at one point, the idea was for a trilogy of double
albums — no mean feat indeed, although, funny enough, I think that Ayreon eventually
did something like that) about Imaginos. Who is Imaginos, you're asking me?
Well, I used to think that «Imaginos» was the fictional name for a band of
Mexican rogues, but apparently, it is about this «modified child» born in 1804
in New Hampshire, and there's this group of seven extraterrestrial beings
called Les Invisibles, see, and they foster the child's occult and mystical
powers, and then he goes to Mexico to search for a magic artefact, and his ship
sinks and he is picked up by Les Invisibles and their servants, who call
themselves Blue Öyster Cult (with an Umlaut, for certain. How do we know
that? Well, they all wear specially designed T-shirts), and they accept him as
a member and give him a new name, Desdinova (have you said your prayers tonight, Desdinova?), and he begins to
influence world history, and...
...well, to cut the story short, you see now
that Pete Townshend's Lifehouse has
got nothing on this: Sandy Pearlman takes the whole thing seriously, and, unlike Pete, he actually offers a reasonable
explanation to why World War I and II actually happened. (No, not because
people did not buy enough Blue Öyster Cult records). I suppose that the
story, had it been realised properly and had all the loose ends been logically
tied, wouldn't have been any worse than your average sci-fi epic — of which I
have never been a magic fan — but ultimately, the only thing that matters in
all these mixtures of sci-fi concepts and rock culture is the music. The
question is: was this sudden stab at «conceptualization», in an era when
«concept album» and «commercial offer» had become antitheses, at least capable
of producing anything better than Club
Ninja?
You'd think that it could, since, anyway, bits
and pieces of the «Imaginos» concept had already been scattered throughout many
of the band's albums — ʽAstronomyʼ, for instance, which was a song
about Imaginos discovering that the stars are the source of his knowledge of
powers — and, furthermore, the album itself had been a long time coming. Within
the band, the biggest fan of Pearlman's fantasy concept was drummer Albert
Bouchard, and the two had been working on a separate album already in the
1970s, and even more so after Bouchard had been fired from the band: in fact,
if you look at the credits, you will see that Bouchard is listed as composer on
7 out of 9 tracks — appropriate, since most of the basic tracks actually date
back to 1981-84, when they were produced (along with many others) as potential
candidates for inclusion on Bouchard's first solo album. Lots of people guested
on those sessions, even including Robby Krieger of The Doors and several
members of the Ian Hunter Band. Fun time it was, but Columbia Records refused
to release the album. Smart lads.
Fast forward to 1987, and here we are wondering
where to now, St. Peter, after Club
Ninja turned out to be such a turd. The group is falling apart, but
Pearlman steps in with the proposition that Blue Öyster Cult complete work
on Imaginos. Since most of the work
had already been done, a small budget is allocated to clean up, refresh, and
remix the tracks, as well as add lead vocals by Eric Bloom and Buck Dharma. The
budget is spent way too quickly, so not too much work is done: only nine songs
(some of them stretched to rather absurd lengths if seen in proportion to their
pure musical value), mixing different parts of the story in an order that
blocks the listener from understanding the concept without a separate digest.
The album is then released, left without any promotion (to be fair, I am not
certain how it could be promoted in
this form), neglected by the public, rejected by the critics, and for a long
time, it even remained unavailable on CD.
No wonder then, that Imaginos came to be regarded, under all these circumstances, as
something of a «legendary» object — an overlooked epic classic or something
like that. Unfortunately, it isn't. Had Pearlman had his way in the early
1970s, and forced the band to fully accept and realize his vision while they
were still young, fresh, and unspoiled by the «hit mentality», Imaginos might have had a chance to be
the ultimate in «fantasy-rock». This, however, is but a pale shadow of what
could have been: enough of a shadow, that is, to genuinely hint at some
potential greatness, yet only a shadow nevertheless. Most unfortunately, they
chose a very wrong time period to go
through with that concept.
For starters, the production on the album is
atrocious — most, if not all, of it is realized within the «pop metal»
framework: big booming drums, «steroid-powered» riffs, and a deep, cavernous
echo on everything. If this really were
pop metal, like Mötley Crüe, that'd be a different story, but I do
not understand why a concept album about supernatural beings altering the
course of world history should sound like a cheap soundtrack to Conan The
Barbarian: surely these guys deserve better than taking their instructions from
the hairy giants of the day!
Even when there is a moderately interesting
riff pattern going on (ʽThe Siege And Investiture Of Baron Von
Frankenstein's Castleʼ, for instance), the guitar tone and drum/keyboard
overdubs still end up sucking all the life out of it. (And let's not even
mention the awful wheezy lead vocals of guest star Joe Cerisano, who used to
sing backup vocals on Michael Bolton records, among other interesting details
of his pedigree). I used to be disappointed with the original ʽAstronomyʼ, but that was like a total
masterpiece next to the complete and utter butchering of the song's melodic and
atmospheric potential that they do here. ʽDel Rio's Songʼ is supposed
to be about Imaginos' shipwreck off the coast of New Orleans — so why the heck
does the song sound like one of Bon Jovi's pop hits? What is this, the only extant rock opera in the hair metal genre?
The only reason why I am not giving this a
thumbs down is that I think I sense potential. Many of these songs were
conceived at much earlier dates than 1987; Bouchard and the other members of
the band do have enough of respect for Pearlman to approach the task with
reverence; and even though Buck Dharma's guitar is usually misplaced or
misproduced, there are enough scattered flashes of brilliance (check out the
lead parts on the final jam part of the title track or the stinging lightning
bolts on ʽLes Invisiblesʼ) to make me yearn to have these solos
transplanted in a more deserving setting. Fairly speaking, the more you listen
to these metallic slabs of sheer bombast, the more lumpy, amorphous goodness
you smell beneath them — there are some inspired piano parts, some nice sax
solos, some moody vocal lines every now and then. It just never really comes
together into anything fully satisfactory.
In fact, guys, as of 2014, it's not too late
yet to do the job right. Most of the original band members, with the exception
of Lanier, are still alive, as is Pearlman. Now,
when anything can be done right even on a very tight budget, is just the time
to do it right. Double album (three double albums, if you wish, as per the
original plan — if Ayreon can do this, anybody can), convincing guitar tones,
completed and polished riffage, come on, you can do it, you got nothing better
to do anyway. Make Imaginos that
latter day equivalent of SMiLe and Lifehouse that you know it has always
deserved to be, at least according to the laws of the universe of Michael
Moorcock.
CULT CLASSIC (1994)
1) (Don't Fear) The Reaper; 2)
E.T.I.; 3) M.E. 262; 4) This Ain't The Summer Of Love; 5) Burning For You; 6)
O.D.'d On Life Itself; 7) Flaming Telepaths; 8) Godzilla; 9) Astronomy; 10)
Cities On Flame With Rock'n'Roll; 11) Harvester Of Eyes; 12) Buck's Boogie; 13)
(Don't Fear) The Reaper (instrumental); 14) Godzilla (instrumental).
Yes, you have heard all these songs before, and
no, this is neither a live album nor a greatest hits compilation. These are re-recordings. That is right,
straightforward re-recordings of BOC classics, engineered at several different
studios in New York City in early 1994 by three original members of the band
(Bloom, Roeser, and Lanier) and the band's then-current rhythm section (Jon
Rogers on bass and Chuck Burgi on drums). Not «reinventions» or «special guest
mixes» — just really rigid, rigorous, note-for-note re-recordings of the original
songs.
Do not ask me the obvious question: I do not
have enough information to give a convincing answer. The «polite» version that
I have encountered is that the band was trying out those tempting new alleys
of digital recording, and wanted to engineer their best songs in a brand new
format that breathed modernity and coolness. I myself tend to veer towards the
cynical version, though: seeing as how they were dropped from the big Columbia
label that must have owned the rights to their old recordings, they simply went
to all that trouble for good old financial reasons. After all, if the customer
walks into a store and sees an album called Cult Classic and it's got that ʽReaperʼ song on it, how
is he going to tell the difference between the original and the copy? He ain't
no musical art dealer, he's just a customer.
Therefore, BUYER BEWARE: Cult Classic with all these classic Cult songs is NOT a compilation! Others, too, have
been part of this fraud program — I vaguely remember Eric Burdon, for instance,
re-recording the old Animals classics with a band that had nothing to do with
the real Animals — but nobody I know
of, at least if you're talking the real great ones, came as close to genuinely
duping the consumer as the good old Blue Oyster boys. You have to remember your classics fairly well to understand that
something's wrong here.
On the positive side, when it comes to
evaluating the material here on its own terms, I would not know where to begin
complaining. Re-recordings they may be, but they are surprisingly good re-recordings, and if you ever
wanted to have a good case for digital recording over analog, you simply cannot
go wrong with Cult Classic. The
sound is crystal clear, the mix is as perfect as it could possibly be, and that
guitar tone... well, suffice it to say that the opening riff of ʽHarvester
Of Eyesʼ simply blows away the original. Thicker, creepy-crawlier,
breaking out of the speakers to run you over with its track, leaving behind
lifeless pulp with eyes extracted.
I have no idea how they did this, but
everything sounds totally authentic, not one bit spoiled by any production
excesses — in addition, Bloom's vocals have not deteriorated one bit, and that
new drummer guy is every bit as dexterous as Bouchard used to be. It is possible, of course, to prefer the
old versions, but it is impossible to deny that they did a fine, fine job
copycatting them twenty years later. Oh, and for ʽAstronomyʼ they
actually preferred to remake the live version of the song — the one where they added
a lengthy coda with a killer solo by Buck Dharma. The one here is not as
impressive, but still serves as a very useful tension-builder in a song that I
have, until now, tended to underrate.
It is not quite clear how an album like this
could merit a thumbs up — but, curiously, I will not recommend it as a
representative introduction to the greatness of Blue Öyster Cult for all
them youngsters not because it is a «rip-off», but because the youngsters might
actually remain unimpressed with the original recordings from the 1970s in
comparison, just because of all these vastly improved production values.
Originals are originals, and they
have their little sonic nuances that, want it or not, probably did get lost in
the re-recording process. But it would take us some time to find, properly
feel, and describe this, with multiple relistens and stuff — who wants to spend
valuable time doing that? I certainly do not — veteran fans of the band,
though, unless they believe in such a thing as «desecration», should by all means
check this stuff out and try to savor new values quite respectfully applied to
the old classics. That said, the band certainly loses points from me if I ever
find out that the record, when sold in record stores, did not bear an explicit
sticker with the word «RE-RECORDINGS» on it. At least a small one. At least in
minuscule print or something. They obviously handled this whole re-recording
business with love and care — so why mix it with customer dishonesty?
HEAVEN FORBID (1998)
1) See You In Black; 2) Harvest
Moon; 3) Power Underneath Despair; 4) X-Ray Eyes; 5) Hammer Back; 6) Damaged;
7) Cold Gray Light Of Dawn; 8) Real World; 9) Live For Me; 10) Still Burnin';
11) In Thee.
Say, it's a new Blue Öyster Cult album,
and perhaps I'm «damaged», but I like
it. It is not really a proper «comeback» album, because, as it happens, the
band never truly went away — they just stopped producing new music for a while,
but the original duo of Bloom and Roeser, usually combined into the original
trio with Lanier, never really split, continuing to tour on a limited scale and
quietly biding their time. That time finally came in 1998, with a new record
deal with the indie label CMC, and a new traditional collaboration with one of
the pulp fiction guys: John Shirley, specializing in cyberpunk sci-fi and other
stuff that I have little interest in. I do
have some interest in moderately successful career rejuvenations by oldies'
acts, though, and Heaven Forbid,
while certainly and predictably not on the scale of BÖC's classics, passes
the test — as surprising as that is.
First and foremost, it sounds good, and that is what counts. Almost no synthesizers (gone
are they together with the Eighties); healthy, grumbly, nicely distorted heavy
metal tones, occasionally lapsing into pop metal style, but usually reminiscent
of the band's classic sound; great drumming from Chuck Burgi; unspoiled
powerhouse vocals from Bloom — I have not a single complaint about how the
record has been produced. In fact, come to think of it, they haven't sounded that well since at least Fire Of Unknown Origin... hmm, perhaps
even earlier. Okay, so perhaps the iron Teutonic grip of ʽHammer
Backʼ pushes them a little farther into Accept territory than us
conservatives would have desired, but they understand how to handle this
approach, and make the song kick as much primal ass as any Accept clone would.
The songs — that's a different matter. The
songs are not too memorable, and it would have been a total wonder if they
were. It's not that there aren't any hooks: it's simply one of those records
that may enthrall while it's on, and then quickly evaporate when it's off. But
that in itself is already a sign of some progress. And then there is at least
one song here that is totally on par with the classics: ʽCold Gray Light
Of Dawnʼ, a grim, dusty slab of doom-laden-rock, burns with terrifying
implied threats as properly as anything they'd done earlier. The "you
can't hide the truth, hide the truth anymore" bit at the end of the chorus
hits hard, as does Buck Dharma's soloing throughout. I sure wish they'd
re-record some of the Imaginos
material in the same style.
A couple other songs seem to have been written
by Roeser in «heartfelt» mood as well, and I think that ʽHarvest
Moonʼ and ʽLive For Meʼ, reflecting Buck Dharma's trademark
«heavy lyrical» style, both have potential; at the very least, there is no
denying a certain mournful nostalgic pull of ʽHarvest Moonʼ, whose verses,
with Roeser recounting the imaginary losses borne by all sorts of people, are
actually emotionally superior to the chorus. Then again, I guess that, as Buck
Dharma grows older, his little death-and-misery fetish must only get stronger
and stronger. So more songs about famine, devastation, and nuclear fallout,
please.
As for such simpler, less moody, more directly
hard-rocking tracks as ʽSee You In Blackʼ, ʽPower Underneath
Despairʼ, ʽDamagedʼ — well, they're okay. Catchy choruses, not
too catchy riffs, and an atmosphere that never gets too out of bounds
("I'm damaged, and I like it, I live for rock'n'roll" is as close as
they come to «campy» here, but it's not that bad when it's taken at such a fast
tempo and with such a cocky-funky attitude). Nothing to go bananas over, but
nothing to seriously complain about, either.
There is some playing around with their own
legacy here that we could all do without — for instance, there was no need to
name one of the songs ʽStill Burnin'ʼ, as it is not even
stylistically similar to ʽBurning For Youʼ (it actually sounds more
like a Van Halen tribute), and the decision to finish the record on a live acoustic
performance of ʽIn Theeʼ is a dubious one: it's a nice performance,
but gestures like these inevitably bring on associations with creative burnout
— all the more surprising since, on the whole, Heaven Forbid shows that the band, on the contrary, has somewhat
picked up steam after a decade and a half of drifting around in a figurative
sea of radioactive waste. But then I suppose that it is really hard to avoid the temptation to fall back upon
auto-quotations when you want to remind your old fans what was it that was
great about you in the first place. Even if you do stupid things in the
process.
Anyway, a pleasant minor thumbs up here, and a rock-hard
recommendation for the seasoned fan. Also, there are two alternate album covers
for the record: the normal one features a horribly mutilated guy with a glass
eye and half of his face burnt, and the ugly one features Morgan Fairchild
following printed instructions on how to probe her patellar reflexes with a
steel-cast female gender symbol (or so I read). Thank you, Blue Öyster
Cult, for proving in such an innovative manner that «freedom of choice» remains
more than an empty idiom in 1998.
CURSE OF THE HIDDEN MIRROR (2001)
1) Dance On Stilts; 2)
Showtime; 3) The Old Gods Return; 4) Pocket; 5) One Step Ahead Of The Devil; 6)
I Just Like To Be Bad; 7) Here Comes That Feeling; 8) Out Of The Darkness; 9)
Stone Of Love; 10) Eye Of The Hurricane; 11) Good To Feel Hungry.
This is, fundamentally and spiritually, as
close to a legitimate «comeback» as the aging remnants of (Rotten-)Blue Öyster
Cult could ever hope to get. Everything, beginning from the title of the record
(which echoes Mirrors and just
generally sounds like a good title for a BÖC-related something — indeed,
it was taken from an old unreleased song going all the way back to 1970), going
on to the stylish album cover, and ending with the unexpected return of Meltzer
as a lyricist on one of the tracks, just screams
that they want to be the real Blue Öyster
Cult just this one more time, and make some music that is, if not worthy of
their legacy, then at least consistent with that legacy. And in some respects,
they succeed.
Where Heaven
Forbid made a big point of being loud, heavy, and brutal, this
quasi-follow-up is more subtle. The songs still rock, but there is very little
stuff here like ʽDamagedʼ or ʽSee You In Blackʼ, because
the emphasis tries to be on dark, brooding atmosphere. They continue their association
with John Shirley, who keeps on supplying them with lyrics that fluctuate
between mysticism and psychoanalytics, yet the lyrics take second and third
place to melodies, harmonies, and dark, cavernous production when it comes to
justifying the record's existence. Exciting freshness and instantly gripping
melodies are the only things that do not let you forget that this is, after
all, «just one of those comebacks», and not a proper follow-up to the band's
classic stretch.
Individual missteps are an occasional pest, but they'd always had some of these, even
on the best of days, so let us forgive them when, every once in a while, they
accidentally slide into bland adult «hard-pop» while trying to pen another
sentimental rocker in the vein of ʽBurnin' For Youʼ (ʽHere Comes
That Feelingʼ). And let us even disregard the fact that the Meltzer-aided
song ʽStone Of Loveʼ begins with the lines "There is a box that
I have shown / And in the box / There is a fox that I have known" (swear
to God, these are the exact words,
and this is the only song I know of that has actually dared to rhyme
ʽboxʼ with ʽfoxʼ). Really, none of it matters.
What matters is that the best songs on this record (a) take some getting used to and (b)
even when you get used to them, they still sound like songs written and
performed by old men, who are really more tired than they let you see, and are
way too preoccupied about glancing back at their past, and maybe even
idealizing it a little. Is this bad? It certainly ain't unpredictable, and it
is much better than it could be — in
fact, from that angle, Curse Of The
Hidden Mirror is a pretty damn good last word, addressed by BÖC to
themselves and their veteran fans. ʽThe Old Gods Returnʼ, all by
itself, is a frickin' anthem to the past: Shirley may have written the lyrics
about something completely different, but when Bloom sings lead vocals on that
song, culminating in a series of ecstatic "forever! forever!"s, and
Roeser whips out the ol' axe, there is no doubt who they actually mean under
«old gods».
Once the songs do sink in, there are some nice
riffs and choruses, though — even if they now seem a bit too dangerously close
to other people's: ʽOne Steap Ahead Of The Devilʼ could be easily
mistaken for a late-period Aerosmith rocker, with its «glossy-swampy» main
blues riff, and the verses of ʽDance On Stiltsʼ sound rather leaden
and lumpy, like a Black Crowes song, and I am still trying to figure out what
the hell that dancey funky bass figure on ʽGood To Feel Hungryʼ
reminded me of. More Aerosmith? Oh well, all the better than emulating «Rambo
metal», which they were sometimes guilty of in the past, but not here.
Although Bloom still hasn't lost his caveman growl (I suppose the man is on a
steady raw meat diet three times a day, right?), the most pinching moments
still come from Buck Dharma — where ʽHere Comes That Feelingʼ fails,
the power-pop anthem ʽPocketʼ that could just as well have been done
by the Bangles (sorry, couldn't help it) succeeds, with a bit of a heartfelt
tug, and if you can distance yourself from the hilariously abysmal words of
ʽStone Of Loveʼ, that one, too, is a pretty emotional tune. In fact,
now that everything has been laid so bare, it is funny to see Bloom and Roeser
so vividly illustrate the two faces of Blue Öyster Cult — the «Alien Neanderthal»
of the former and the «Alien New Romantic» of the latter, happy as the latter
occasionally is to pour some additional kerosene on the former's bonfire.
Their musical faces may have become wrinkled and a tad ugly, but they have not
melted away.
Unfortunately, by 2001 most of the veteran fans
of the band seem to have faded away, and the young ones were not interested —
the album failed, and, consequently, their record label (Sanctuary)
unflinchingly gave them the boot (ironically, since Sanctuary used to specialize on jaded-faded rock stars of
the past), meaning no new attempts at studio production. On the other hand, why
unfortunately? Further clones of Curse
Of The Hidden Mirror would have been just that (clones), and this record
really works much better as The Godfather
Part III than as anything that supposedly has a future. It is good that
they were able to say goodbye to us in this-a-way, much more fitting than Heaven Forbid or any of those awful
Eighties' records — Curse comes full
circle, reminding us of the band's original purpose and mission and pretty much
saying «mission accomplished, thank you, beddy-bye now». So just a modest thumbs up
here to a fitting career conclusion (not too disappointing, not too uplifting),
and all in all, it's been a fun ride, despite a few bumps every now and then,
particularly on those last circles.
A LONG DAY'S NIGHT (2002)
1) Stairway To The Stars; 2)
Burning For You; 3) OD'd On Life Itself; 4) Dance On Stilts; 5) Buck's Boogie;
6) Quicktime Girl; 7) Harvest Moon; 8) Astronomy; 9) Cities On Flame; 10)
Perfect Water; 11) Lips In The Hills; 12) Godzilla; 13) Don't Fear The Reaper.
Okay, one more encore — just because you asked
for it so nicely and persistently and obsessively, here is yet another live Blue Öyster Cult
album. Everybody knows by now that each cohesive period of this band's
existence has to be summarized by a live document, and just because we have
moved into a new millennium does not mean that the principle warrants an
exception. This one was recorded in Chicago on June 21, 2002 (solstice day!),
and came out on CD and DVD; I have
not seen the DVD in its completeness, but it is longer by six tracks, all of
them from the band's most classic period, so, reasonably, the DVD release is
the one you should be more interested in. For marketing purposes, though, the
DVD lacks the 10-minute version of ʽAstronomyʼ, including Roeser's
most gut-wrenching guitar solo of the entire evening, so if you are a true fan
of the salmon salt, you have no choice but to get both.
With Bobby Rondinelli on drums and Danny
Miranda on bass as a perfectly reliable and well-involved rhythm section, there
is little reason to doubt that the whole thing will be professional and
suitably spirited, but what can be said about yet another bunch of live
performances of ʽGodzillaʼ, ʽReaperʼ, ʽCities On
Flameʼ etc.? Setlist-wise, much more curious is the inclusion of
ʽPerfect Waterʼ from Club
Ninja — apparently, the band takes this «retrospective show» concept seriously, leaving no stone unturned;
but, as you might have guessed, the live version eschews the evils of Eighties
production, and sounds much more like a normal sentimental hard-rocker in Buck
Dharma's usual style than a bad reminiscence of 1986. Another surprise is the
long-forgotten ʽLips In The Hillsʼ from Cultosaurus, with all of its frenzied arpeggiation intact. And the
two songs from the band's latest record, while not on the classic level, still
align pretty damn well with the classics in style and mood.
Still, all this professionalism can be a bit
tiresome — the Rolling Stones, for instance, whose live performances from
around 1975 to 1982 had turned into a sometimes exciting and hilarious, but
persistently drugged-drunken sloppy mess, later tightened up their act
significantly and made the contrast between their «early», «mid-life», and
«late» live albums so interesting that most of them are worth owning, for one
reason or other. In comparison, these
guys just evolved from a tightly professional hard-rock act to a tightly
professional arena-rock act to a tightly professional oldies act. Compare the
original live performance of ʽBuck's Boogieʼ from 1975 with this one
— generally the same stuff, but just a wee bit more «formal» on the 21st
century side of the business. Rondinelli gives it a much steadier, but also
less youthfully exciting rhythmic base, and Roeser sounds ever so slightly
by-the-bookish on it.
In any case, we should not take the record for
anything other than what it is — a document of the entertainment potential of
this band circa 2002. If you were wondering, back then, whether to attend or
not a BÖC show, A Long Day's Night
would have suggested «yes» (these days, more than a decade later, with further
lineup changes and Lanier dead, I really have no idea). If you have any special
personal memories of your own of a late-period BÖC show, here be a memento
status, obviously. But other than that, A
Long Day's Night is probably not
turning into your favorite live album from these guys any time soon — it's got
plenty of worthy competition from past decades to render itself superfluous
after just one listen. Oh well, at least they keep the silly audience teasing
bits in ʽGodzillaʼ on a tight leash this time.
MUSIC INSPIRED BY LORD OF THE RINGS (1972)
1) Leaving Shire; 2) The Old
Forest & Tom Bombadil; 3) Fog On The Barrow-Downs; 4) The Black Riders
& Flight To The Ford; 5) At The House Of Elrond & The Ring Goes South;
6) A Journey In The Dark; 7) Lothlorien; 8) Shadowfax; 9) The Horns Of Rohan
& The Battle Of The Pelennor Fields; 10) Dreams In The House Of Healing;
11) Homeward Bound & The Scouring Of The Shire; 12) The Grey Havens.
«Inspired» is the right word. If all of these
compositions pretended to the status of an actual soundtrack to Lord Of The
Rings, it'd be a Lord Of The Rings
in which Frodo would be a somnambulant lunatic, Tom Bombadil would be a
decrepit old organ player, stoned out of his mind in a basement, Lothlorien
would be the name of an opium den, The Battle of the Pelennor Fields would be
carried out by Grateful Dead fans in a mosh pit, and «leaving for the Grey
Havens» would be a euphemism for a heroin injection. But as it is, the music
does not pretend to anything — it simply happens to be inspired by LOTR. And some elvendust and magic mushrooms.
In all honesty, these pieces of music that the
Swedish multi-instrumentalist Bo Hansson put together for his first solo album
do not have much to do with Tolkien, and the title might even be a little
misleading: for one thing, people who have never joined the club of J. R. R.
admirers, or people who actually find Tolkien's significant influence on
1960s-1970s music somewhat embarrassing (remember Plant's lyrics for ʽRamble
Onʼ, eh?) are quite likely to be turned off by the title, thinking that
this is just some silly slobbering fanboy tribute. Tribute it might be, in
name, but in actuality Hansson is too busy concocting his own magical mystical
world to grovel and kowtow before somebody else's.
The world is not characterised by a staggering
amount of diversity. It most closely resembles the efforts of Pink Floyd circa
1970-72, when they were already out of their wildest psychedelic / avantgarde
phase, but were not yet ready to flood the world with their newly awakened
social conscience, and were mostly content with exploring the possibilities for
strange ambient beauty. Hansson, playing most of the instruments himself (Rune
Carlsson is handling the drums, and a couple of additional sax and flute
players are also available from time to time), sees himself as a mood-brewer:
these are smooth, quiet, repetitive instrumentals that invite the listener to
relax and soak in the atmosphere. The actual melodies are so straightforward
and simple that you will be humming them in no time if you set your mind to it
— much like Floyd's melodies, come to think of it — but the simplicity is
meaningful and seductive enough to forgive the lack of flash.
Hansson's keyboards are the essential link:
originally, he was a major Hammond player (as part of the late-Sixties duo
Hansson & Carlsson), and here, too, the organ remains his instrument of
choice, although he's also added the Moog to his inventory (whose first notable
appearance is impersonating a nasty wight in ʽFog On The
Barrow-Downsʼ). Whatever simple melody is playing at any given moment,
there is almost always a quiet baroque (or pseudo-baroque?) keyboard «floor»
under it, and together with Hansson's respect for the echo effect, these are
his major world-building ingredients. He does not manage a sound as vast as
Floyd do on their better tunes (like ʽEchoesʼ), but he is not hunting
for that — his space is fairly well shut in, so if you want my Lord Of The Rings association, I'd
say that the majority of these tracks should be stripped of their titles, sewn
together and renamed «The Crossing Of Mirkwood, Pts. I-X», because that is
exactly how it all feels to me — an endless, monotonous journey on a narrow
forest path, barely looked over by some feeble rays of light: boring, perhaps,
but also hypnotic in some strange, undescribable way.
Every now and then the music picks up the pace
a little, but really, even ʽThe Battle Of The Pelennor Fieldsʼ,
despite the quirky «treated» electric guitar part that presages Mike Oldfield,
sounds more like a merry Celtic dance than a fierce combat between the forces of
good and evil. «Evil», in fact, tends rather to be impersonated by «scary»
fiddling with the Moog, from the already mentioned ʽFogʼ to ʽA
Journey In The Darkʼ, while «beauty», be it ʽLothlorienʼ or the
romantic gallop of ʽShadowfaxʼ, is associated with simple, clean,
sometimes slightly jazzy electric guitar licks. All of it is very homebrewed
and not a wee bit «epic»: as we get to ʽGrey Havensʼ, for the Grand
Finale we are offered nothing but a stern couple of sliding electric licks (to
mirror the movement of oars?), some quietly bubbling organ parts, and
Carlsson's usual «muffled» percussion, to avoid any direct references to a
«rock sound», if possible.
Considering how unassuming the music is, it is
curious that it even managed to reach the ears of a large audience in the first
place. Hansson originally recorded and released it as Sagan Om Ringen in Sweden in 1970, but later on, it caught the
attention of Tony Stratton-Smith (the guy behind the success of Genesis), and
by the time it hit the UK and US shelves in 1972, Hansson was already a minor
celebrity in the prog-rock ranks. Maybe it is
this quiet, ascetic nature of the album that made it stand out even back then,
when most people were being so flashy and bombastic — anyway, it is a good
thing that Tolkien's agents never let him carry on with the idea of adding
voices to the record, because I believe that any singing here would have spoilt
the overall effect. As it is, this is just one of those albums that will go
down easy with a cup of camomile tea — not «stunningly beautiful», but «quietly
becalming» in much the same way as something like Brian Eno's Another Green World, just on a less
radical level. Thumbs
up.
MAGICIAN'S HAT (1973)
1) Big City; 2) Divided
Reality; 3) Elidor; 4) Before The Rain; 5) Fylke; 6) Playing Downhill Into The
Downs; 7) Findhorn's Song; 8) The Awakening; 9) Wandering Song; 10) The Sun
(Parallel Or 90 Degrees); 11) Excursion With Complications.
This is one of those classic situations where
one tries to correct the balance between accessibility / entertainment and
complexity / intellectualism and may end up pushing the slider too far in the
opposite direction. On one hand, Magician's
Hat, Bo's second foray into the world of progressive instrumental
exploration, takes reasonable precautions to protect itself from the vicious
sarcasm of critics crusading against starry-eyed idealism and fanboyism —
namely, although quite a few of its tunes could have easily been slipped onto
the previous record without anybody noticing, there are no direct references to
Lord Of The Rings, and the
compositions are open to any sort of unrestricted personal interpretations.
That is probably good.
What is probably not so good is that Magician's Hat sounds awfully scattered
and even less focused than its predecessor. Some of the reviewers define it as
a «folk-prog» album, others describe it as moving away from folk influences
and more into jazz-fusion territory, still others just say that «this is great
music that takes you to another dimension» without even trying to specify what
sort of dimension that might be. The logical truth is that Magician's Hat is all
these things — «folksy», «fusionesque», «otherworldly» — and more; and also,
unfortunately, that this is not the kind of diversity that makes a whole lot of
sense. As pretty as these soundscapes are, the album has not managed to
override the «pleasant background music» tag that my subconscience has slapped
on it during the very first listen.
Case in point: the epic-length ʽBig
Cityʼ which, in its original form as ʽStorstadʼ on the Swedish
edition, ran for 11 minutes, then was cut down to 7 on the international market
release, then, finally, was restored back to full duration on the CD edition.
I'd like to call the track «epic», but that would mostly refer to the sheer
running length and the number of different «movements» — if that is enough, so
be it, but normally, «epic» also surmises the idea of power, rising and falling
dynamics, build-ups, crescendos, climaxes, etc., whereas ʽBig Cityʼ
just sort of... trots along,
sometimes a little faster, sometimes a little slower, mutating from blues-rock
to choral folk chant to bossa nova to samba to fusion to a bit of avantgarde,
being all over the place but fairly low-key most of the time. Not only does it
not give out the impression of a ʽBig Cityʼ (more like a bunch of
very small ones that you pass by in an old car at half-speed), but there are
also next to no memorable themes — it is like a mediocre jazz album, with
professionally set grooves and competent, but never too enlightening solo
improvisations.
As we move away from the lengthy suite and into
the realm of shorter tracks, things do not get better — because giving the
short tracks separate names does not change the fact that the rest of the album
is essentially just more of the same stuff. Every now and then, you do meet up
with an interesting theme (ʽPlaying Downhillʼ has a curiously
constructed brass/organ jazz melody that seems almost mathematically
explorative), but, like fireflies, the interesting ones light up and fade away
just as quickly as the uninteresting ones. Hansson has a ton of ideas in store
for the album, but he gives poor ones as much space as rich ones, and almost
never takes the time to prove that melody so-and-so actually needed inventing.
Some might see this as a challenge, and set
themselves a worthy goal of learning to hum all the 20+ melodies of Magician's Hat, so as to easier win
friends and influence people. I, however, seem to suffer from attention deficit
syndrome in this situation, and keep on seeing all this as the result of
dissipation of focus — professional instrumental noodling whose lack of
conceptual purpose strips the music of the necessary energy. You know it's not
really a good sign when the album's most memorable moment is basically a
musical joke — in this case,
ʽExcursion With Complicationsʼ, which begins as a somber bluesy
march, dominated by doomy organs and stern, electronically treated solo guitar,
and then transforms into a New Orleanian piece of carnivalesque boogie-woogie,
thus ending the album with the author's tongue sticking out.
The album may
hold up to repeated listens, I guess, if one deals with the fact that this is
«prog-rock» with the «rock» component surgically extracted and dissolved in
acid — as was the case with its predecessor, you'd better get yourself all
comfortably relaxed to enjoy its smooth, inobtrusive hooks, atmospheric
echoes, and tasteful, but uneventful soloing (including lots of guitar parts,
which are now at least as prominent as the keyboards). Unfortunately, few of us
will probably have the time to determine just how much Magician's Hat reflects subtlety of vision rather than lack of
vision. And it goes without saying that, having originally come out in 1972
(under the Swedish title Ur Trollkarlens
Hatt), the album would be very quickly quenched by Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells — where most of the
pieces of the puzzle would logically come together, instead of being lazily
scattered around, as they are here.
ATTIC THOUGHTS (1975)
1) Attic Thoughts; 2) Time And
Space; 3) Waiting...; 4) Waltz For Interbeings; 5) Time For Great Achievements;
6) The Hybrills; 7) Rabbit Music; 8) Day And Night; 9) A Happy Prank.
For what it's worth, Attic Thoughts is little more than a second installation of Magician's Hat. Same variation of short
tunes and lengthy multi-part epics, same freedom of thought and direction,
same unpredictability of influences — and the same quiet inobtrusiveness,
making it excessively hard to remember what you have just heard, or to
experience any particularly strong emotional responses. «Tastefully pretty» and
«slightly moody» pretty much does it.
The album was recorded with more or less the
same backing band as Hat, and this
time around, released in the same year in Sweden (as Mellanväsen) and abroad. Bo's influences were again diverse
and scattered, one of them being Watership
Down, the weird novel about rabbits by Richard Adams — eventually, he'd
devote an entire LP to this work, but for now, just one two-part suite
(ʽRabbit Musicʼ) should be sufficient. However, the overall effect
remains the same — that of a slightly weird, magical «other» world where, truth
be told, nothing much ever happens, but then, why should anything happen? Your average magical world can be just as
boring as your average non-magical one, and I suspect that this is exactly what
Bo wanted to show us: a «realistic», «uneventful» musical universe, completely
free of any pretense at «rocking».
As far as actual musical texture is concerned,
of course, «uneventful» is pushing it. Many of the songs feature multiple key,
tempo, and mood changes — ʽWaltz For Interbeingsʼ being the most
impressive example, I suppose, where bits of genuine waltz are interspersed
with fast fusion passages and something that I could only describe as Bo's
futuristic preview of the lambada. All of it occupies the space of three and a
half minutes; the longer compositions, like ʽRabbit Musicʼ and the
title track, naturally feature even more changes. However, I would still assess
them as fairly «uneventful» changes — they never radically shift the mood, or
rev up the energy levels.
Nor is it all that easy to get overawed by Bo's
omnivorous nature. Okay, so ʽTime For Great Achievementsʼ glues
together a possible theme for a spaghetti-western with electronic psychedelia
and a little more jazz-rock, but what is the meaning of this fusion? All the
individual components sound nice, and make for decent background muzak, but
why is it exactly in this sequence that they should be listened to, and would
the effect be diminished/spoiled if we changed it all around? I have no answer
for these questions.
In the end, Attic Thoughts seems like it must have taken even more effort on
Bo's part than Hat (more ideas, more
movements, more influences), but the lack of focus stays the same, and once
again, I am a little sad that he did not use any single piece as a chief
influence — Lord Of The Rings, with
its conceptual organization, made a little more sense than this disjointed,
messy, tepid collection of «snippets», inoffensive as it is. Nevertheless, this
is perfect «progressive elevator muzak», and I do not regret even one second of
listening — I only wish I had something more meaningful to say about it, but I
don't, and apparently, neither does anybody else (most of the reviews of this
album that I'd browsed through made zero sense as well).
MUSIC INSPIRED BY WATERSHIP DOWN (1977)
1) Born Of The Gentle South;
2) Allegro For A Rescue; 3) Legend And Light; 4) Trial And Adversity; 5) The
Twice-Victory; 6) The Kingdom Brightly Smiles; 7) Migration Suite.
Even after ʽRabbit Musicʼ, the furry
bunnies from Richard Adams' novel still plagued Bo's mind so terribly that he
had to dedicate his entire next album to the little guys, making this his
second record completely «inspired by» a literary work. The original Swedish
release was called El-Ahrairah,
after the name given to one particular trickster rabbit in the book, but for
the international market, it was apparently thought that a more explanatory
title was in order — or perhaps the
record industry people thought the name sounded too Arabic for the eyes and
ears of the Western public, and would trigger visions of hijacked planes and
terrorist attacks.
Regardless, the album never charted even with a
«safe» title, and its total lack of commercial success was one of the factors
responsible for Bo's subsequent withdrawal from the music scene. Indeed, given
that the age of prog rock's «coolness» was long gone, in 1977 you had to
conform or combust, and it is quite evident from these tunes that Hansson had
no wish whatsoever to set aside his personal muse and suck in any of the
arena-rock, disco, or New Wave influences. Instead, he just used up the last
drops of credit he'd earned from the success of Lord Of The Rings to do the same thing as always — and then faded
away.
The few tepid reviews I have seen of this album
were mostly dismissive, with «nothing new» being the most often repeated
motive. This is surprising, because, from a general point of view, ever since
making his mark with the Tolkien tribute, Hansson had kept on making «nothing
new» records on a steady basis, and if we are to maintain accuracy, El-Ahrairah actually sounds more
different from Attic Thoughts than
the latter does from Magician's Hat.
For one thing, the compositions tend to be a bit louder, angrier, and more
relying on electric guitar playing than ever before — possibly to capture some
of the dynamic spirit of the book, but possibly also because he wanted to brush
away the illusion of creating «progressive elevator muzak», and put together
some tunes that would force the listener to pay more attention.
Indeed, on the opening multi-part suite
ʽBorn Of The Gentle Southʼ, the composer pulls all the stops —
tempos, tonalities, moods shift constantly like the wind, going from slow
soul-burning Floydisms to spinning polkas with psychedelic guitar solos to grand
gospel passages to vicious blues-rock blasts to whatever else is imaginable.
Whether all these ingredients are cohesive enough to form an impressive whole
is up to you to decide; personally, I happen to feel that none of the ideas are
given enough time and space to blossom properly, but then, I could probably say
the same of quite a few classical concertos and symphonies, so let's just say
that I find the suite easier to pay attention to (because of its dynamic
jumps), but just as generally unmemorable as any average Hansson composition on
the previous albums.
The best tracks, in my opinion, are
ʽLegend And Lightʼ, where there is an interesting contrast between
Bo's solo piano passages (merging music hall with avantgarde jazz) and the
grand anthemic resolutions in the «chorus» parts, making the track a
«teasing» experiment worthy of Zappa; and ʽThe Twice-Victoryʼ, whose
main stately theme, slightly reminiscent of the spaghetti western style, is
probably the most successful stab at grandiosity on the album — too bad it is
never given enough time and space to bl... oh, okay, never mind.
Unfortunately, I am at the disadvantage of not
actually having read the source novel (there's only so much fantasy that I can
digest, which is not very much), so it is hard for me to understand how these
musical themes truly relate to that entire rabbit business. Even more
unfortunately, it is hard for me to visualise any concept to which this music, as a whole, would be applicable.
There is Bo's usual strain of sorrow and melancholia stretching throughout the
entire work (those are some fairly morose and somber rabbits indeed), but that
is not nearly enough to blow one's mind — although I have to admit that out of
all four albums, this is easily the one that tries to invoke the spirit of
grand tragedy on the most regular basis. If only these invocations didn't
usually end up sounding like «Pink Floyd lite», the album could have been
1977's dark masterpiece — as it is, it's more like 1977's dark coffee-table.
Bo Hansson did make one more record later on in
his career: the Swedish-only Mitt I
Livet came out in 1985, never got an international release, never came out
on CD, and remains a little-heard obscurity (so I have no way of ascertaining
whether it is in the same style or if he finally decided to make a transition
to synth-pop). Twenty-five years later, he died, and to this day, he remains
generally revered in a small circle of connoisseurs — a curious figure, capable
of inspiring chivalrous devotion and
agonizing boredom, sometimes at the same time. Whatever be the case, he may not
have written the best Tolkien soundtrack ever, but one thing is certain: he did
manage to forever change my casual perception of rabbits.
SOUL REBELS (1970)
1) Soul Rebel; 2) Try Me; 3)
It's Alright; 4) No Sympathy; 5) My Cup; 6) Soul Almighty; 7) Rebel's Hop; 8)
Corner Stone; 9) Four Hundred Years; 10) No Water; 11) Reaction; 12) My
Sympathy.
For all those who are accustomed to Marley's
Island-era worldwide hits, from ʽNo Woman No Cryʼ and ʽI Shot
The Sheriffʼ to ʽOne Loveʼ and ʽJammingʼ, these early
albums by the Wailers, produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry and recorded
back when «the Wailers» did not yet signify «any interchangeable body behind
Bob's back», but meant an actual reggae band with elements of active democracy,
might sound a little... tough.
Soul
Rebels is a good example of
«hardcore» reggae, one that does not try to render itself more accessible to
the ears of the global listener — by incorporating «rock» elements, or simply
by trying to be more melodic — but instead concentrates almost exclusively on
groove, atmosphere, and its own type of rugged spirituality. This is Perry's
typical style of work, and this why Soul
Rebels is as «authentic» as these guys are ever gonna get. For proof,
compare this here version of Peter Tosh's ʽ400 Yearsʼ with the
fuller-arranged, slower, subtler arrangement on Catch A Fire three years later — both have their own strengths, but
this early one has a brutal roughness, expressed by the prominent position of
the bass guitar and the «scratch» pattern of the rhythm, without any further
embellishments, that would eventually be gone.
Although the Wailers had already been around
for more than half a decade, this particular incarnation, consisting of the
«original» Wailers (Marley himself; Peter Tosh on guitar, keyboards, and
vocals; Bunny Wailer on percussion) as well as the Barrett brothers, formerly
from Perry's "Upsetters" (Aston on bass and Carly on extra
percussion), was transitional — the «originals» would part ways with Marley in
1974, while the Barretts, on the other hand, would hold on until the very end.
In this particular case, «transitional» might easily mean «best», the single
largest accumulation of talent in the Wailers' history — except that you really
have to «get it» before you can make proper use of that accumulation.
The key test, I think, is in whether one has
any good words to say about the album's final track, ʽMy Sympathyʼ,
which is really just an instrumental variation on the main theme of the album's
vocal title song (ʽSoul Rebelʼ; for the record, the remastered and
expanded CD edition of Soul Rebels
adds a whole big bunch of instrumental takes on the songs). The main groove is
set about in the first three or four seconds, after which nothing new happens right until the final fadeout at 2:43 — just
the same rhythmic pattern, with scratch guitar and Tosh's quietly bubbling
organ part in the background repeating the same chord pattern over and over
again. It is the easiest thing in the world to call this thing «crap», but that
could very logically lead to calling the entire album crap, and, subsequently,
the entire reggae genre, or, at least, Marley's entire career.
The thing is — if the groove is well set, the
groove is likeable. Just as it is
possible to dig the 12-bar blues progression, per se, and dig it specifically
when it is performed with extra gusto, so it is possible to feel abstract
sympathy towards the skank, straight or shuffled. A whole album of instrumentals
like ʽMy Sympathyʼ would soon become unbearable, but this placing of
one instrumental «re-run» at the end of an album is sort of a symbolic gesture
— this is who we are, and this form of music is what we play, and it is through
this groove that we convey everything that we have to say, because that's how
Jah set it all up, basically. One of the most fascinating things about the
groove is how, despite requiring very strict rhythmic coordination, it ends up
giving this impression of nonchalant friendly laziness, steaming in the
Jamaican heat — I guess they don't emphasize the «offbeat» quality of the
rhythms for nothing.
Still, it goes without saying that the most
important part of the compositions are the vocals — leads, harmonies, tones,
mantras, expressions. The primary topic, «escape from Babylon» and everything
that it entails, dominates the album's theme, from the title track, now and for
all time branding Marley as a «soul rebel», and right to ʽ400 Yearsʼ,
sung by Tosh and serving as the album's, if not the entire movement's,
definitive anthem of liberty. These two are the most memorable bits of the
puzzle — ʽSoul Rebelʼ not only because of Marley's bittersweet
confession, but also because of the way it opens, with Aston's soul-pumping
bass brought all the way up to 11 by Perry and immediately pulling your ears
down to the ground, because that sound weighs a frickin' ton, no less. As for ʽ400 Yearsʼ, it really makes you
wonder why Tosh did not take up lead vocals more often — his voice, lower and
more «solemn» than Marley's, was really great for taking on grand, anthemic
statements. They say he was kinda lazy, though, in a Rastafari manner.
Other, less notorious, highlights include
ʽNo Sympathyʼ (where the Wailers do a great wailing job, joining the
lead singer on the last mournful vowel of each line) and a series of «funny»
numbers that show a strong James Brown influence, such as ʽMy Cupʼ
(actually a cover of James' own ʽI Guess I'll Have To Cry, Cry, Cryʼ)
and ʽSoul Almightyʼ, full of references to doing the alligator and
the mashed potato. Both songs are firmly reggae-based, yet even in this
«hardcore» setting, they show that the Wailers were perfectly okay about
interacting with other black music subgenres. Indeed, ʽSoul Almightyʼ
could probably be called a halfway hybrid between reggae and funk — so much for
the idea of stark monotonousness.
One thing that, at this stage in their history,
the Wailers still pull off weaker than the rest is the love theme: songs like
ʽTry Meʼ and the heavily allusive ʽCorner Stoneʼ
("you're a builder, baby, here I am, a stone") never really go beyond
«nice» into that territory where Marley's relations with women start taking on
an almost religious quality. Their little «humorous» interludes, such as
ʽRebel's Hopʼ, are also relative trifles without a whole lot of
replay value — in other words, Soul
Rebels is not entirely filler-free. But then again, neither were the
Wailers quite prepared for prime time: Soul
Rebels is very much an album for «local consumption», and there is no way
for most of us to assess its sound the same way it was assessed around Kingston
in the year 1970. For all I know, ʽRebel's Hopʼ may have been a local
smash.
In any case, the album as a whole gets a thumbs up
from me, which I would never deliver solely for the sake of «politically
correct» reasoning — there is no getting away from the original Wailers'
charisma, no matter who they were and what cause they were standing for. I do,
however, have to repeat the warning that Soul
Rebels requires affection, not sheer tolerance, for reggae. It is technically possible to be completely
indifferent to reggae as a whole and still love an album like Natty Dread — whether this would work
with these Perry-produced records is not so clear to me. Then again, I really
don't know a whole lot about the various kinds of reggae, and I seem to dig
this, so maybe that's a sterner judgement than necessary.
SOUL REVOLUTION (1971)
1) Keep On Moving; 2) Don't
Rock My Boat; 3) Put It On; 4) Fussing And Fighting; 5) Duppy Conqueror; 6)
Memphis; 7) Soul Rebel; 8) Riding High; 9) Kaya; 10) African Herbsman; 11)
Stand Alone; 12) Sun Is Shining; 13) Brain Washing.
Even though this second album, too, was
produced by Lee Perry, it actually sounds quite different from the first one —
lighter and much more playful, in contrast with the more firmly pronounced
«protest» spirit of Soul Rebel.
Maybe this was deliberate, to show how the true Rasta spirit is supposed to
concentrate on the positive by default, leaving the negative for very special
occasions — in any case, the fact is that most of these here songs are not
about four hundred years of slavery, but rather about the delights of chillin'
out, gettin' down, ridin' high, and swingin' low, not necessarily in that
order.
The record does begin with ʽKeep On
Movingʼ, one more song about escape, salvation, and sweet dreams of
"a land somewhere not near Babylon". But musically it is a lazy,
nonchalant, almost melodic tune, friendly to boot, as if the singer were
dreaming of all these things while enjoying some warm Jamaican sun in a
swinging hammock — the misery and agony of the Rasta preacher is only implied,
not expressed in easily understandable terms. Later on, ʽFussing And
Fightingʼ, calling upon all of us to stop the aforementioned, is delivered
without the slightest trace of anger or anguish in Bob's voice (well, maybe
only at the end of the song does he get heated up enough to raise his voice a
bit: "LORD, I wanna know!"). And then there's the final track,
ʽBrain Washingʼ — if you really need to know, it is a rant against...
nursery rhymes and fairy tales, all of which are acknowledged to be "just
the poor's brain washing", and "I don't need it no longer" —
sure enough, when you got Haile Selassie, who needs Cinderella and Little Miss
Muffet?
This is about as «rebellious» and «political»
as the album gets. In between these tracks, there is a lot of short, tight,
often catchy, always friendly, and usually quite endearing little numbers about
smoking pot, making love, and not giving a damn if the ganja is worse than
expected or the lover is jivin' around with some other, temporarily luckier,
soul brother. There is a lot more vocal harmonies from the Wailers on these
tracks, too, echoing the band's early days and owing a lot to old-time gospel
and, occasionally, doo-wop (ʽPut It Onʼ). There are also more
keyboards, and there is even an extended melodica solo from Peter Tosh on
ʽMemphisʼ, an instrumental formally credited to Chuck Berry for some
reason (I fail to see any resemblance with ʽMemphis, Tennesseeʼ
whatsoever — did they just want to toss ol' Chuck some royalties for no
particular reason?). In short, it's really all fun and games over there in
sunny Jamaica.
One of the main highlights is ʽKayaʼ,
arguably one of the finest combinations of exuberant joy and simplicity in
Marley's repertoire — catchy and invigorating enough for him to revive it half
a decade later on the Island album of the same name. Ironically, in 1978 Kaya would be written off by quite a
few fans and critics alike as a disappointingly «relaxed» follow-up to Exodus — but the story actually begins here, with Soul Revolution being an equally «relaxed» follow-up to Soul Rebel without the Wailers having
any international notoriety whatsoever. Sure enough, reggae can be fiery and
militant, but what about peace, love, and understanding, then? Marley's
"got to have kaya now, got to have kaya now, for the rain is fallin'"
acknowledges sufficiency of «the bare necessities» without a shred of
self-aggrandizing — even if few of us can tell the proper difference between
kaya and ganja, you don't even need to understand exactly what he is reaching
for on the song to succumb to its peacefulness.
Another highlight is ʽSun Is
Shiningʼ, punctuated by Tosh's lonesome, slightly gloomy, but not
desperate melodica puffs — I don't think the song does much of anything except
simply proclaim the fact of life: "here I am / want you to know just if
you can / where I stand". Its mood is somewhere in between «neutral» and
«sad», so that both the melodica and the occasional overtones in Bob's singing
hint at life's harsh realities — yet, at the same time, it is quite clear that
as long as "we'll lift our heads and give Jah praises", ultimately,
it's going to be all right. So what is this if not the ultimate anthem of the
primordial way of life? Even if it was recorded in a modern studio, listening
to the song can still transport you thousands of years back.
The album also includes a cover of Richie
Havens' ʽAfrican Herbsmanʼ, which is probably the closest they come
to the subject of ʽ400 Yearsʼ, but, again, in a far more lightweight,
even poppy, manner, with a spritely-hoppin' bass line and tender harmonies that
seem a little odd when applied to lyrics about "old slave men" who
"grind slow but it grinds fine", yet that is the record's message —
even dire, gruesome subjects are approached with a levity of heart and mind.
Hatred, hysterics, and vengefulness have no place here; maybe that is what Soul Revolution is really all about, brother. Thumbs up for that.
Technical note: although most sources show the
album sleeve to include the title Soul
Revolution Part II, the real
«Part II» was actually a «dub» companion to the vocal version, consisting of
purely instrumental tracks of the same songs — a special offer for cannabis
patients, I suppose. In the process, Part
II somehow also got stuck on the cover of Part I, so that unsuspecting
people might think that the record was intended to be a conceptual sequel to Soul Rebel, which is not the case (it
being an «anti-Soul Rebel», in a
sense). To confuse matters further, three years later there would also be a
special UK release of the album, retitled as African Herbsman and replacing a couple of the tunes with non-album
singles (including an early version of ʽLively Up Yourselfʼ, among
other things). You'd think that musicians had finally got rid of that messy
crap, so typical of the mid-Sixties and so passé after LPs had finally
become a respected medium, but apparently, Jamaica caught on slowly to those
new trends. Must be all that heavy smoke.
THE BEST OF THE WAILERS (1971)
1) Soul Shake Down Party; 2)
Stop The Train; 3) Caution; 4) Soul Captives; 5) Go Tell It On The Mountain; 6)
Can't You See; 7) Soon Come; 8) Cheer Up; 9) Back Out; 10) Do It Twice.
This is a fairly weird entry in Marley's
yearbook. To «the best of» my knowledge, this is the only The Best Of... album in existence that is not actually a true «best of», but rather just a collection of
tracks recorded during a brief time period, none of them previously issued.
Namely, these songs were recorded by The Wailers circa 1969-70, prior to the
band's engagement with Perry and under the supervision of equally notorious
(back then, at least) producer Leslie Kong. Something stalled or backfired,
though: the band did not get along with the man too well, eventually abandoned
him for Perry, and the tracks remained shelved for about a year and a half.
As the band started gaining traction, though,
Kong decided to capitalize upon those leftovers, and released them under this
super-arrogant title — translated to «you thought the Wailers with Scratch
Perry were good? you ain't heard nothing yet, you silly amateurs!» According to
urban legend which is too awesome to be true, Bunny Wailer, upon hearing Kong's
plans, told him that it would really only be the «best» Wailers if the man
didn't live long enough to hear anything else by the band — and, true enough,
Kong died of a heart attack, aged 38, one week upon release. I'm positive Bunny
just invented that story post-factum, but the fact does remain that the album
was released without the band's consent, and
with a stupid title to boot.
Not that there's any serious reason to
complain, because, best or not best, these ten short tracks (making up for a
«mini-LP» at the most) are really quite good. Without Perry around to make them
concentrate on the basic essence (or should I say «bassic essence»?), they are
somewhat croonier, poppier, and doo-woppier than anything on Soul Rebels, and, in fact, the whole
album still gravitates more towards old-fashioned ska than newly-born reggae.
The atmosphere still reminds of the early days when the Wailers used to wear
suits and ties, and cut their hair short — but the music is already bubbling
with fine songwriting ideas, and the «social value» of the songs, while not
immediately jumping out at the listener, is already quite deeply embedded.
The only number to appear on later releases in
a re-recorded format is Tosh's ʽStop That Trainʼ, showing a Sam Cooke
influence (ʽGood Timesʼ), but completely readapted for the sound and
style of the wailing Wailers — Peter's powerful delivery and barely concealed
desperation makes the song every bit of the band's equivalent for the Beatles'
ʽHelp!ʼ: a "lonely man" brought down by something that is
hard to express in words and searching for refuge/salvation, all the while
clothing his desperation in poppy choruses and friendly rhythm patterns. And
his sheer vocal strength and soulful conviction, both here and on the
traditional hymn ʽGo Tell It On The Mountainʼ, are two more reasons
to sorely lament his parting ways with Marley, since he is every bit the
better, or, at least, definitely the more «epic» singer of the two.
Interestingly enough, at least half of the
songs are credited to Rita Marley rather than Bob, showing that her stature
within the band was even more prominent in those early years than later
(although she is still responsible for a good bunch of the Wailers' mid-period
classics, like ʽCrazy Baldheadʼ etc.). Like her husband, she is not
specializing in any particular direction: ʽSoul Shakedown Partyʼ, for
instance, is a quiet love celebration (the best thing about which is its
simple, instantaneously memorable organ riff), whereas ʽSoul
Captivesʼ and ʽCheer Upʼ are quiet
by-the-rivers-of-Babylon-style anthems of hope and liberation: danceable
rhythms, relaxed, optimistic Caribbean/surf lead guitar parts, and statements
that "freedom day will come", so we might as well start rejoicing on
the spot.
Other than ʽStop That Trainʼ and
ʽSoul Shakedown Partyʼ, the only true standout is once again Tosh's —
ʽSoon Comeʼ, another dissatisfied rant about expecting stuff and not
getting it (technically, complaining about being constantly let down by a love
interest, but allegorically interpretable as complaining about being let down,
period). The trivial hook — song
title made into a falsetto mantra — bites into you at once, and focuses your
attention on one of Peter's finest examples of «getting into character»,
whereas Bob, throughout the album, is playing it cool, never letting himself
get carried away. Funny, yes, but at this point it was not at all certain who
would eventually come out «on top» within the Wailers.
Although, technically, this is more like a
footnote in the story of Bob Marley, the record is still an essential
acquisition for all the fans of Peter Tosh, all the admirers of Rita Marley as
a songwriter in her own rights, and all those who want to remember Leslie Kong
as one of the first influential Jamaican record producers, responsible for the
rise of reggae. For those who just love good music, it is probably not so
essential, but there is nothing whatsoever to dislike — amicable rhythms,
pleasant solos, cool organ riffs, catchy harmonies, and some social value. Thumbs up,
closing our eyes on the ridiculousness of the title.
CATCH A FIRE (1973)
1) Concrete Jungle; 2) Slave
Driver; 3) 400 Years; 4) Stop That Train; 5) Rock It Baby; 6) Stir It Up; 7)
Kinky Reggae; 8) No More Trouble; 9) Midnight Ravers.
And now we see The Wailers get in the big
league. From a certain justified point of view, this is where Bob Marley «sold
out to the system», making the jump from local Jamaican labels and the local
Jamaican market to a major label (Island Records, which, not coincidentally,
was founded by Chris Blackwell in 1959 on Jamaica, but had been operating from
London as early as 1962, and was not at all limited to ska/reggae by the time
Marley signed his contract) and to an international audience — Catch A Fire got all the way up to #171
on the Billboard charts, and Marley's commercial stance would only be
toughening up since then, all the way to Exodus.
More importantly, and somewhat predictably, the
jump was accompanied by a significant change in sound. In order to properly put
Bob on the international scene, some concessions would have to be made:
listeners worldwide, it was deemed, would hardly have the assiduous tolerance
for the «hardcore reggae» approach of Lee Perry, meaning that the songs would
have to be a little more «pop», and the arrangements would have to be a little
less Spartan. After The Wailers had recorded the master tapes in Jamaica and
brought them over to Chris Blackwell in London, the latter took the decision to
«spice 'em up», hiring a host of session musicians, such as Wayne Perkins on
guitar and Rabbit Bundrick on keyboards, to generate ear-pleasing overdubs that
would put that stuff more in line with the commercial sounds of the Seventies.
Marley, ever the vigilante man, sensitive to trends and striving for world
recognition, did not object — yet I am not so sure about how Peter Tosh reacted
to the whole thing, and whether that was not one of the reasons for the
beginning of his alienation from Marley.
Nevertheless, I will admit to the «embarrassing» reality — I do find the Wailers with extra overdubs more accessible, and I do find these overdubs in very good
taste. Case in point: ʽStir It Upʼ, one of Bob's most charming,
tenderest reggae ballads, has a wah-wah lead from Wayne Perkins that utilizes a
gruff, grumbly tone to play a suitably tender part, and adds an extra
individual voice to the beautiful, but repetitive group harmonies of the
chorus. Would the song have become a hit without that lead guitar, or without
Tyrone Downie's organ accompaniment? Possibly, possibly not, and who cares
about the exact number of sold copies anyway: the important thing is, these
additional layers steal nothing from the «base» of the song, but add quite a
lot. Naysayers may go back to the original two-chord ska version from 1967 —
just remember that, had all of Bob Marley's output been like that original
version, most likely, very few of us would have ever heard of who the hell Bob
Marley was in the first place.
Quite a few other songs here are oldies as
well, including both of the Tosh-sung numbers (ʽ400 Yearsʼ and
ʽStop That Trainʼ) — these ones, curiously, are taken at much slower
tempos than the originals, sung and played with less energy, but more «soul»,
that is, not necessarily with more feeling but a bit more in line with what is
usually expected of the experienced soul singer / showman. This makes them no
better or worse, just a little different, but ʽStop That Trainʼ does
get an extra guitar riff that makes the song even more memorable.
That said, the album is really all about its
first two tracks — ʽConcrete Jungleʼ and ʽSlave Driverʼ.
The former is as highly tragic as Marley can ever get, putting his optimism
aside for a moment and lamenting about the impossibility of escaping from this
«concrete jungle» (all the more appropriate considering the Wailers' temporary
relocation to the big cities). Perkins adds another suitably wailing guitar
solo to the track, but really it's all about Bob losing his head and shouting
"illusion! confusion!" as if banishing by name the evil demons that
have turned all our lives into such a wretched mess. As for ʽSlave
Driverʼ, one of the most sparsely arranged tracks on the album, well,
what can be said? Other than this is probably one of the calmest, most
self-contained «rebel anthems» ever recorded? "Slave driver, the table is
turned, catch a fire, so you can get burned" — never was an extremist
slogan presented before in such a catchy, collected, almost friendly singalong
manner.
Catch
A Fire leaves plenty of space
to explore the Wailers' non-political side — besides ʽStir It Upʼ,
there's also the equally catchy and lovable ʽRock It Babyʼ, and
ʽKinky Reggaeʼ is one of those novelty numbers that veers between
total absurdity and presentation of society's flipside — but it ends more or
less the same way it begins, with the anthemic ʽNo More Troubleʼ
demanding to give peace and love a chance and the arousing ʽMidnight
Raversʼ offering a rather uncomfy apocalyptic vision, ten thousand
chariots without horses and all. Clearly, there is a strong sense of purpose
here: Bob knew that the album had to
break in him and his message, and so there is an extra «push» to this record
that would gradually weaken and abate with the coming years, right until Exodus when Bob would give himself the
next such push.
Not coincidentally, Catch A Fire consistently occupies one of the top spots in the
ratings of Marley's catalog — a turn of events with which it is very hard to
disagree. A great, diverse, inspiring job from everybody, starting with the
Wailers' core and ending with the understanding session musicians (Wayne
Perkins, apparently, did not know a thing about reggae when he was asked to
contribute, yet he got into the spirit immediately), and a very natural thumbs up.
BURNIN' (1973)
1) Get Up, Stand Up; 2)
Hallelujah Time; 3) I Shot The Sheriff; 4) Burnin' And Lootin'; 5) Put It On;
6) Small Axe; 7) Pass It On; 8) Duppy Conqueror; 9) One Foundation; 10)
Rastaman Chant.
Once something has caught fire, it then usually
proceeds to burn — a simple truth that, until 1973, found no expression in a
succeeding line-up of album titles, though. But clearly, the underlying idea of
Burnin' was to dispel the popular
myth of the Rastafari movement as just some local Jamaican version of the
hippie wave. As per Bob Marley, reggae people may be friendly and pacifist, but
that does not mean that they completely reject forceful activity or even
violence in their behaviour and their music. Branding and condemning Babylon is
noble enough, but there's nothing like watching Babylon burn, really.
The sociopolitical ferocity of Burnin', reaching such levels of
energy, passion, and explicitness that all of the Wailers' previous efforts
seem like Tiny Tim in comparison, has arguably led all the politically correct
people to somehow overrate the album. Technically, it was recorded in a bit of
a rush, forcing the Wailers to fall back once more on their back-stock from
Kingston (at least three tracks are re-recorded from earlier times), and this
time, there are no overdubs from additional session players, so the sound
returns to Spartan standards. (Still, there is no Lee Perry anywhere in sight
to rev up that bass: the Wailers would never again return to the same
«skeletal» type of sound they'd been awarded on Soul Revolution).
Most commonly, Burnin' is known and revered for its rebellious classics —
ʽGet Up, Stand Upʼ, ʽI Shot The Sheriffʼ, ʽBurnin' And
Lootin'ʼ, to a lesser extent ʽSmall Axeʼ as well — and almost
certainly, much of that knowledge and reverence has been stimulated by the Eric
Clapton cover of ʽI Shot The Sheriffʼ, which became a major hit in
1974 and probably made millions more
people aware of Marley and reggae in general. To be fair, Eric Clapton singing
ʽI Shot The Sheriffʼ, a song very much rooted in the realities of
Jamaican life, is as awkward as if Jimi Hendrix decided to put his stamp on
ʽLa Donna E Mobileʼ, but he does always play a mean guitar on that
song, so let us not be too harsh on the «white boy perversion» that did help
bring reggae to a larger audience, and ended up making the world a better place
(we hope!).
ʽI Shot The Sheriffʼ is not so much
rebellious, though, as it is fatalistic: the gradually descending melody of the
verse is like the grim pull of destiny, swirling and spiralling and eventually
cutting the thread in one final desperate flash. The lyrical matter is pretty
much the same kind of stuff you can find in so many folk, blues, and
country-western songs, but Bob sings it in the first person (Clapton once
pressed the man into telling him whether the story was true or not, and Marley
said that parts of it were, but he wasn't going to say which ones), and the
effect is intimately haunting. It's all simple and accessible and unforgettable
— the falsetto harmonies on the chorus may take some getting used to (mainly
because that kind of voice has become so firmly associated with disco,
post-factum), but they do provide the
important hookline that helps draw your attention towards the rest of it (and,
come to think of it, the verse part of this song is far more emotionally
resonant than the catchy chorus).
Likewise, ʽBurnin' And Lootin'ʼ is
more of a philosophical mourning, or a bitter justification of Jamaican
violence, than a direct call to action. As if to enhance the understanding that
the chorus is not to be taken too literally, the Wailers expand upon the
initial "that's why we gonna be burnin' and a-lootin' tonight" with
the metaphorical "burnin' all pollution tonight, burnin' all illusion
tonight" — for those who want to hear it, of course. The slow, gently
swaying groove is nowhere near «aggressive», either: the chorus sounds more
like a cross between a lullaby and a funeral march than anything «punkish» or
genuinely violent in nature. At the same time, you do have your "how many
rivers do we have to cross / before we can talk to the boss?", which, as has
been previously noted, is like a clever retort to Jimmy Cliff's ʽMany
Rivers To Crossʼ, and implies that real
burnin' and real lootin' is not a
totally excluded solution, either.
The most aggressive and militant song on the
album, of course, is ʽGet Up, Stand Upʼ — one of the few songs in the
Wailers' catalog that could really be called a revolutionary anthem, and one
that would certainly have rallied plenty of troops around the banner of Jah in
case of need. For the first time, Bob is properly and intentionally feeding
upon negative energy, learning how to throw thunderbolts, and even Peter Tosh,
replacing him for one of the verses, is adding an angry vibe to his formerly
epic, but peaceful tone. It is more of a sermon than a song, instructing people
to search for Heaven on Earth rather than wait for a time when "Great God
will come from the skies, take away everything and make everybody feel
high". But it is set to one of their most tightly focused, clenched-teeth
grooves ever — just as lyrically it disbands the myth about Rastaman people
«feeling high» all the time and not giving a damn about much of anything else,
so, musically, it can dispel the myth of reggae being «relaxed»,
«lazy-sounding» music. ʽGet Up, Stand Upʼ has as much rocking power
as ʽSuperstitionʼ or ʽSatisfactionʼ, if «rocking power» is
to be understood as the impulse that shoots extra adrenaline into your brain
and makes you feel as if you could take on the world with your bare fists.
In between these particular landmarks of class
struggle reflected in music, the rest of the tracks on Burnin' veers between hit and miss. Side B, in particular, has
always felt like a relative letdown to me: the «socially relevant» material
there seems to lose some of the energy and focus, either degenerating into too
much monotonousness (ʽRastaman Chantʼ — with its ʽLouie
Louieʼ-ish musical attitude, this one does
feel like everybody finally got high at the end of the sessions) or swerving
into too much pleasantness (Tosh's ʽOne Foundationʼ is way too friendly in comparison with the
first side's barn-burners). On the other hand, Side A reaches near-perfection
with the addition of the gospel-reggae chant ʽHallelujah Timeʼ and
the hypnotic feel-them-spirit mantra of ʽPut It Onʼ — also monotonous,
but it does convey a good impression of somebody being taken over by a
benevolent spirit and busily merging the manly and the godly in one's own
person.
It is hard to tell whether the legend of Burnin' owes more to the quality of the
music or the loudness of the expressed social feeling — I would personally
suggest that, from a sheerly musical point of view, Catch A Fire contains more original and exciting ideas, but about
half of the songs on that one are love songs, whereas Burnin' is completely dominated by tunes «with a message». But then
again, this is reggae we are talking about, where the power of the groove is
always more important than any melodic hook, and in terms of power, the first
side of this album easily trumps Catch A
Fire and would not, in fact, be matched until the appearance of Exodus. So let us just call this
another relative triumph, give it a thumbs up and, just in case somebody stupid lands
on this page, remind one more time that Bob Marley and The Wailers are not advocating violence, and that they'd
rather you burn up your illusions than anything physically flammable.
NATTY DREAD (1974)
1) Lively Up Yourself; 2) No
Woman, No Cry; 3) Them Belly Full (But We Hungry); 4) Rebel Music (3 O'Clock
Roadblock); 5) So Jah Say; 6) Natty Dread; 7) Bend Down Low; 8) Talkin' Blues;
9) Revolution; 10*) Am-A-Do.
And so Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer split off,
and the band becomes «Bob Marley and The Wailers» — forever splitting the fans,
too, as some hardcore veterans accused Marley of exercising too much of his
«I», while others pointed out that this was simply a wise move that helped
spread the word of Jah far wider into the world than could have ever been
foreseen. Who knows who's right and who's wrong? In the end, all we should care
about is the music.
Naturally, Natty
Dread is completely different from everything that came before it. While
reggae rhythms are still its foundation, there is a whole lot of other stuff
here — catchy pop choruses, pleasant female backing harmonies, complicated
brass overdubs, relatively loud guitar solos from the band's newest member Al
Anderson, in short, a whole lot of stuff to take your attention away from the
bare groove and draw it to the same elements that, in 1974, you'd be attracted
to on various «rock» albums. But the recompense is that almost each and every
song here has its own separate face — try and accuse this record of being monotonous; you might just as well apply the
same accusation to The White Album.
Interesting enough, only two songs on the album
are credited to Bob himself, of which at least one (ʽBend Down Lowʼ)
is a playful bit of filler, catchy in a nursery-rhyme way (its main opening
theme is somewhat of a cross between Mother Goose and ʽLet It Beʼ),
but nothing more. The other one does set a good tone for the rest of the album
— ʽLively Up Yourselfʼ opens the proceedings on a «lively», jumpy
note, while at the same time being driven by a slightly scary bassline: once
the brass section starts doubling the bass, the atmosphere becomes downright
threatening, or, at least, solemn to the point that the recommendation to
lively up yourself becomes a stern order. "You rock so, you rock so"
— yes sir, whatever you say sir.
There are all sorts of speculations as to
whether «Vincent Ford», a little-known Jamaican personage, actually wrote
ʽNo Woman No Cryʼ or if that was just an act of generosity on Bob's
part, giving away a song to the needy (although, in retrospect, it wouldn't
become all that famous until next year's Live!
version). Its popular appeal is easily crackable — where Marley's lyrics are
often obscure to those not well versed in Jamaican cultural or linguistic
realities, everybody, including non-English speakers, easily understands what
"no woman no cry" and "everything's gonna be alright" is
supposed to mean. But singling it out from the rest of the album would be
absurd — as good as that organ melody is, its overall emotional power is
neither weaker nor stronger than the power of the more overtly political
material here.
At the very least, the Barrett brothers and
Rita Marley show that they can be every bit as cool at songwriting as Mr.
I-And-I himself. My personal favorite on the album is actually Rita's ʽSo
Jah Sayʼ, a song whose stern bass and Mount-Sinaic brass simply breathe the Old Testament down our backs
— every time I hear that introduction, it makes me want to prostrate myself
before His Presence, whoever He might be (the Great God of the Left Speaker, or
was it the Right one?). On that one, genre considerations simply melt away, and
you are no longer aware of what you are listening to — reggae? R&B? soul?
gospel? Essentially, it is the genre of «solemn musical prophecy». You can
shake your body to these sounds, sure, but it will be a shamanistic kind of
shaking, not just a fun dance kind of thing.
Another good one is Aston Barrett's ʽRebel
Music (3 O'Clock Roadblock)ʼ, a lengthy song that knows how to gain in
intensity by rising the pitch on every next chorus of "aaaaaaaaah, rebel
music!", reaching new levels of desperation while the harmonica blasts add
a «swampy» atmosphere to the proceedings. Better than most songs on here, it
manages to convey the impression of a world where danger might be around every
corner, and where people's brief moments of happiness are constantly
interspersed with a «watch-your-back» sense of vigilance. Every now and then,
we are told to "forget your troubles and dance" (ʽThem Belly
Fullʼ), and we do, but "I've been down on the rock for so long / I
seem to wear a permanent screw" (ʽTalkin' Bluesʼ).
This idea of a «permanent screw» is actually
important in that Natty Dread, even
despite taking good care of its individual components, still works better as a
whole entity. Now that Bob has the full weight of the band on his shoulders, as
well as the responsibility to bring The Message to every new-fangled fan of
ʽI Shot The Sheriffʼ, he has to uphold a thematic unity and maintain
a serious tone throughout the album on a whole new level, and he totally rises
to the occasion: other than ʽBend Down Lowʼ, each song is tied to the
ones around it with one uniting idea — end the suffering. Other than the man's
conviction that Heaven can be found on Earth, the rest is so totally in line
with early Christianity that sooner or later, you'll figuratively begin looking
for figurative traces of stigmata on the man's figurative hands. Is that
emotional manipulation? If it is, it's one of the highest order — bring it on,
I like to be manipulated that way, even if there's no chance convincing me of
the Second Advent where I have enough trouble with the First already.
Anyway, a great record whose total is so much
more than its parts. One can only wonder what it would have sounded like if
Tosh and Bunny decided not to split — but something tells me they would have
objected against all the colorful overdubs, and I cannot imagine these songs
without Al's weeping-and-wailing lead guitar, or without those brass parts that
add a symphonic component. So, cutting it short, just put your hardcore
worries behind your hardcore back, all you great lovers of Lee ʽNothing
But Scratchʼ Perry, and join Mr. Marley on his last and grandest ride
through the mid- and late Seventies as reggae's, Jamaica's, Haile Selassie's,
and all the oppressed and suffering people's messenger to the world. Thumbs up.
LIVE! (1975)
1) Trenchtown Rock; 2) Burnin'
And Lootin'; 3) Them Belly Full (But We Hungry); 4) Lively Up Yourself; 5) No
Woman, No Cry; 6) I Shot The Sheriff; 7) Get Up, Stand Up; 8*) Kinky Reggae.
To have witnessed an actual show put on by Bob
Marley & The Wailers is usually considered as one of the luckiest possible
things that could have happened to a human being. The presence, the vibe, the
energy, the brotherly love, the dance, the groove, the inspiration, do I even
have to go on with this list? Naturally, one could try to be cynical about it,
insist that it was all really just show business (to a certain extent, it
certainly was), bring out the old argument that «when the Wailers lost Peter
Tosh, they really lost it all», but nobody could deny the primal effect that
Marley had on his audience. He was a Jamaican witch doctor (a benevolent one,
lucky for us all), and his audience were his willing and obedient patients. It
was as simple as that.
However, I am not nearly as sure as the
majority that this whole vibe was so easily captured on record. All hype and
rave aside, the Wailers' first album, recorded at the Lyceum Theatre in London,
July 19, 1975, is an excellent performance, but the sound does not really
easily provide the impression of the pastor and his church joining as one into
a single, focused, star-bound spiritual wave of energy. The Wailers are doing
their thang, the people are listening and frequently going wooooh! (most importantly, at the beginning of ʽNo
Womanʼ), but it's not as if being in the presence of his flock pushes Bob
to any extra heights that have not already been reached in the studio, nor does
the flock itself seem to inspire any additional emotions. Perhaps it is simply
one of these «you had to be there» moments.
Anyway, formally speaking, there is no
complaining, because the songs are so great, and performed with a fine mix of
spirit and discipline. At the very least, there are enough tweaks in the
arrangements to warrant an additional listen: ʽNo Woman, No Cryʼ is
taken at a slower, softer tempo, and Al Anderson adds his lead guitar lines
everywhere where he wasn't able to earlier (ʽBurnin' And Lootin'ʼ,
ʽI Shot The Sheriffʼ, etc.). The biggest tweak is added to ʽGet
Up, Stand Upʼ which, as it winds down to its conclusion, is expanded with
a different groove, including a call-and-answer session with the audience —
and, believe it or not, a bass riff that seems to have been borrowed right from
John Lennon's ʽHow Do You Sleepʼ (coincidence, probably, but after
the naggin' question of «where the hell did I hear that before?» had pestered me for several days, once the answer
finally came, there was no way I could leave it out of the review).
Come to think of it, the way the audience
swoons in tact with Marley's "everything's gonna be alright" on
ʽNo Womanʼ, or his ee-yo-yo's on ʽGet Up, Stand Upʼ, the
album does show some glimpses of the
shepherd and the flock becoming one — in that respect, it's got plenty of
historical importance, demonstrating the Western world's, or at least, part of the Western world's recognition
of dreads, reggae, Rastafari values, and the poor black man's struggle for
peace, freedom, and happiness in a thoroughly unjust universe. But outside of
that context, «live reggae» is not a huge improvement over «studio reggae» if
both are done reasonably well. I admire the vibe (as long as, as it happens
with any religion, I do not have to focus too much on its external paraphernalia),
but I see no reason to prefer these versions to their studio counterparts — not
even the famous live rendition of ʽNo Woman No Cryʼ, because I really
have no use for it as a stadium anthem and prefer to hear it in a far more
natural, intimate setting. I mean, it's a dialog between Bob and his woman, for
Chrissake. Why do we need several thousand mouths singing along to it in
unison? Beats me.
On a technical note — curiously, the original
LP was only 37 minutes long; plans for an expanded deluxe edition still have
not come to fruition (not that it is particularly important, considering the
overall wealth of live Marley material already on the market). The remastered
CD version does add ʽKinky Reggaeʼ as a bonus track, used for Bob as
a setting to introduce his «brothers» and «sisters», but otherwise, fairly true
to the original.
RASTAMAN VIBRATION (1976)
1) Positive Vibration; 2)
Roots, Rock, Reggae; 3) Johnny Was; 4) Cry To Me; 5) Want More; 6) Crazy
Baldhead; 7) Who The Cap Fit; 8) Night Shift; 9) War; 10) Rat Race; 11*) Jah
Live.
Although this record became Bob's big
breakthrough in the US, selling lotsa copies and yielding his most popular
single in that country (ʽRoots, Rock, Reggaeʼ — supposedly American
people were reluctant to buy up reggae singles that did not have the word
«rock» in the title), I would say that Rastaman
Vibration is somewhat less impressive than the two studio albums flanking
it in Marley's discography. Natty Dread
was somewhat of a challenge, in that Marley had to prove he still had it in
himself to survive without the rest of the original Wailers — and the
soon-to-come Exodus would be fueled
with mega-ambition, some of it perhaps brewed up in the aftermath of the
unsuccessful attempt on Bob's life in December '76.
In comparison, Rastaman Vibration has neither quite the impressive hooks of its
predecessor, nor the undeniable grandeur of its follow-up. It is as sharply
politicized as ever, perhaps even more ("it's not music right now, we're
dealing with a message", Marley himself told interviewers in 1976), and in
this intermediate context, such politicization means a certain unity in the
groove: every track starts off with
more or less the same little explosive drumroll from Carlton Barrett, after
which you get more or less the same tempo, more or less the same
instrumentation, more or less the same vibe, and more or less the same body
temperature. Throughout.
This does not mean it ain't a nice enough vibe
or temperature. By now, Marley has fully mastered the art of capturing the
listener's attention with a bare minimum of means — his punch is economic and
simplistic, but it is hard not to feel it every time. Even when the music really occupies second place next to the
message — ʽWarʼ is little more than just a famous UN speech by Haile
Selassie set to a rhythmic pattern — just by simply repeating the mantra
"everywhere is war, me say war" at the end of each paragraph, Bob
makes his point (but note how he has this trembling wave of sadness inserted,
just so you know that it is not his declaration of war, but rather his
constatation of other people making
war on his people: a defensive, not
aggressive stance).
This bit of trouble determining whether he is
on the attack or on the defense ain't accidental: there is always some sort of
vague mystique, incomprehensibility, ambiguity, associated with Marley — like
all great people, he was not that easy to pigeonhole. Another good case is
ʽPositive Vibrationʼ, with another unforgettable chorus hook (the
"Rastaman vibration ye-e-ah, positive..." bit) that is nevertheless
offset by the positively threatening bassline, which makes it seem as if the
man is harassing you into
"making way for the positive day" (at certain points, when they begin
asking you "are you pickin' up now?", the melody once again goes
straight into ʽHow Do You Sleep?ʼ territory — terrifying, almost!).
He'd probably deny any such intention, but the fact is, even when Mr. Marley
seems to be spreading that positive vibe, the music is anything but shiny and happy. Gloomy reggae, not
some kiddie-happy ska here that Paul McCartney appropriated for ʽOb-La-Di
Ob-La-Daʼ (now that was some
«positive vibration» indeed).
On ʽRoots, Rock, Reggaeʼ, the band's
mantraic declaration — "play I some music, dis-a reggae music" — is,
in itself, stern and war-like: for Marley, new trends in music should
necessarily be accompanied with new trends in spirituality, and he is unwilling
to offer the people just the music
without the message. The trick is that he is singing "we're bubblin' on
the top one hundred / just like a mighty dread" with the same intonation
he normally uses to describe the sufferings of his people in and out of
slavery, and this works: you might
think you're just boppin' and hoppin' around to a nice little rhythm, but in
reality you're, like... joining The Cause! And the funniest thing of all, the
single did get into the top one
hundred, so it's not just you.
On the whole, though, Marley raises his voice
noticeably high only once here — not on ʽCrazy Baldheadʼ, as one
might think, whose basic seemingly-aggressive message ("we gonna chase
those crazy baldheads out of town") is delivered in a surprisingly peaceful
tone instead, but rather on ʽWant Moreʼ, a song that seems to be
usually overlooked in the huge Marley catalog, yet it is really the strongest
precursor here to the Moses-and-Aaron-rally of Exodus, with the sharpest, shrillest riff on the album, well
matched with Marley's «driven-to-the-edge» point: "you get what you want,
do you want more?..." "You think it's the end, but it's just the
beginning" is one of the most threatening moments here in Wailers history,
so do not overlook it.
Like most of Marley's output, this record
almost automatically gets a thumbs up regardless of specific criticisms — not
out of an act of boring political correctness, but more like a recognition of a
steady genius, capable of delivering gripping material even in a temporary
state of «musical inertia», so to speak. (Technically, Rastaman Vibration is somewhat innovative in that it introduces
synthesizers into the Marley sound, but this is really so peripheral that I
almost forgot to mention it in the first place). No fan, after all, could properly
call himself a fan without having grooved heavily to the sounds of
ʽPositive Vibrationʼ or without witnessing the peaceful constatation
of ʽWarʼ (as opposed to, for instance, the gross misuse of the song
by Sinead O'Connor, whose radical stance makes Bob Marley look like Rush
Limbaugh in comparison). But in a larger context, somehow, many of these tunes
seem a bit like... peanuts, maybe, for the real
level of Mr. Marley and his team.
EXODUS (1977)
1) Natural Mystic; 2) So Much
Things To Say; 3) Guiltiness; 4) The Heathen; 5) Exodus; 6) Jamming; 7) Waiting
In Vain; 8) Turn Your Lights Down Low; 9) Three Little Birds; 10) One Love /
People Get Ready; 11*) Roots.
I am pretty sure that this album would have
been impossible without Marley's brush-with-death experience in late 1976. With
a miraculous escape like that, you start thinking, quite naturally, of all the
things you have not yet completed in your life — you get an incentive to
accelerate, to realize your grandest ambitions, no matter how much energy and
spirit it costs you. So, perhaps Exodus
is not necessarily the best Marley album lying around, as critical ratings
often evaluate it (and it is even more absurd to call it «the best reggae album
ever», because Exodus honestly does
not give a damn about what musical style it was accidentally cast in). But it
is quite clearly the «biggest» Bob
Marley album, in scope and in execution; there is no use denying that the man
set himself pretty high marks here, and there is no need to insist that he did
not manage to hit most of them as best he could.
Exodus means Moses, and it is this album that turned
Bob Marley into a modern-day Moses indeed: particularly the first side, all of
which is structured like a multi-part sermon from the most esoteric depths of
the Old Testament. "There's a natural mystic blowing through the air / If
you listen carefully now you will hear / This could be the first trumpet /
Might as well be the last". The musical backing is nothing particularly
special — sparingly minimalistic, but with a necessarily ominous ring to the
bass, and most of the overdubs (guitar, occasional brass) have been pushed way
back into the mix: this helps generate the impression that the man is somewhere
over there (on Mount Sinai, perhaps, receiving the latest instructions from
Jah), letting you, the listener, in on his serious conversation — and the rest
of the crowds are someplace down there. Waiting for the trumpets and all.
Although the first four songs are all good, in
reality they all sound like honest-to-God dress rehearsals for the title
track. At 7:40, it is the longest track so far on a Wailers album, and its epic
length is not accidental: most of the actual musical secrets of the groove are
disclosed within the first minute already, but, like all great grooves, it is
supposed to put you in a state of trance that you'd wish could last forever.
The combination of stinging wah-wah guitar, that ominous bass, and the funky
brass section that almost seems temporarily loaned from Sly & The Family
Stone is quite worthy in itself, but it is the vocal shamanizing that pushes
the whole thing over the top. Did Bob Marley truly believe that, like Moses, he
could rally the people around him, leading them out of «Babylon»? (Should be
«Egypt», of course, but it's all the same to them Rastas anyway). Even if he
was naïve enough to believe that, the ensuing idealism, bottled in this
track, still suffices to give you a spiritual jolt — maybe not strong enough to
set you on the proper path of demolishing Babylon, but enough to make you go
out and feed a homeless kitten or something.
The song is not even properly a «reggae» song,
more like a reggaeified funk vamp, full of grim determination that is as far
removed from the usually more relaxed atmosphere of reggae as possible. There
is one motto throughout — "move! move! move! move!" — echoing around
the room like a retranslation of Jah's own command, and you can just feel that
crazy, but disciplined drive urging and urging you on. The heat that is
generated by the moment is on a James Brown level, but James Brown, even at his
very best, was an entertainer, not a prophet, and his trance inductions could
only be called «religious» figuratively, whereas ʽExodusʼ is indeed a
religious musical ritual that even Moses himself could appreciate. Easily the most single powerful track of 1977,
a year that was fairly ripe on powerful tracks — but no anthem from the punk or
New Wave crowds could pack that much depth.
The second side of the album intentionally
brings the level of tension down: not only are there some tender love songs,
but even the political ones, like ʽOne Loveʼ, are delivered in a more
lyrical and friendly key. There is ʽJammingʼ, which has always seemed
like a fairly tame and unimpressive little ditty next to ʽExodusʼ to
me — go figure why it has become so insanely popular, but I guess that the majority
of the population can't take it as heavy as ʽExodusʼ, and needs
something lighter and catchier for their personal freedom anthem. If anything,
I like ʽThree Little Birdsʼ with its nagging little keyboard riff,
more than ʽJammingʼ, maybe because it is so simple and childish in
every aspect of its execution that it comes out as more adequate — a simple
love message for a simple song. Then again, it really makes no sense to
compare.
Some people complain that Exodus is too glossy — that they like their Wailers «raw», not prepared
carefully in the studio according to some particular technological recipe. I do
not buy this accusation, and neither should anybody: by 1977, Bob Marley was
anything but committed to the formulaic demands of «hardcore reggae», yet at
the same time he had lost none of the fiery spirit of old — if anything, that
attempt on his life only rejuvenated that spirit — and if Exodus sounds overproduced to you, well, so does Pink Floyd, and we
have never found that aspect of their
sound to be a problem. On the other hand, the «gloss» and all the extra
overdubs really help to overcome the sometimes uncomfortable simplicity of the
basic groove and push the songs towards masterpiece status on the strength of
their atmosphere.
Listen, for instance, to ʽThe
Heathenʼ and to whatever Julian Jr. Marvin, the band's new lead guitarist,
is doing out there in the background, sometimes sending out small, compact
thunderballs of distortion and sometimes letting go with killer screeching
blues-rock leads, and how Tyrone Downie begins his part with simplistic
three-note synth phrases and then gradually buries himself in some real crazy
jazz-fusion stuff. Or how Julian adds some lovely country guitar licks to
ʽTurn Your Lights Down Lowʼ, a song that brings Marley dangerously
close to «adult contemporary» (or, at least, some really boring 1970s R&B)
but keeps its distance because of the devotion of the nuances of the indivudual
players. That may all be «gloss», but unless I am in some very special mood, I
will take that gloss over Lee ʽScratchʼ Perry's minimalism any
regular time of day. Deep bass groove, after all, is not the only possible way
to worship Jah.
In all possible respects, Exodus is an outstanding record that goes way beyond the basic
values of reggae as a musical genre and/or of Rastafarianism as a religious
ideology. It is a triumph of inspiration and active drive, a certain spiritual
push-up that Marley would not be able to replicate ever again (in fact, and
perhaps to his honor, he did not even try). Not the best place to come looking
for hooks — Catch A Fire or Natty Dread would be more obvious
choices; not the best place to understand what the hell is «reggae» supposed to
mean (since, even technically, about half of this album is not really reggae);
but just a great place, no doubt about it, if you're looking for a little
outside aid to charge up your batteries. Exodus, movement of Jah people, the
works. Major thumbs
up guaranteed.
KAYA (1978)
1) Easy Skanking; 2) Kaya; 3)
Is This Love; 4) Sun Is Shining; 5) Satisfy My Soul; 6) She's Gone; 7) Misty
Morning; 8) Crisis; 9) Running Away; 10) Time Will Tell.
Look no further than Kaya for a good argument why records may mean different things when
taken on their own and when taken in context. The level on which Kaya works best is the level of
contrast with Exodus — the Wailers'
most bombastic, exuberant, quasi-messianic statement to date quickly followed
up by Marley at his most peaceful and mellow, with nary a single song carrying
a sharp political message (with the possible exception of ʽCrisisʼ
and ʽTime Will Tellʼ) and most of them simply inviting you to quiet
down, relax, share a joint, and strive for inner peace rather than actively
pursue the issue of human rights. Well, let's face it, even Moses could have
hardly endured forty years in the desert without taking a well-deserved break
every now and then.
Not only that, but Bob even falls back upon the
idea of digging into his past, resuscitating at least two oldies here (the
title track and ʽSun Is Shiningʼ), as if he were a bit lazy to come
up with a whole album of original tunes — on the other hand, the arrangements
are completely different now, so this is not so much laziness as nostalgia, a
throwback to the good old days when the Wailers were quite far from embarking
on a world-level mission, and were fully content to enjoy the bare necessities
and complain in allegory, or, at least, in a hushed voice.
Many people dislike the new arrangements,
implying, once again, that the «raw» originals work better. They do have a
point — when we compare the original melody of ʽKayaʼ, carried by
bass vocal harmonies, with its new incarnation, where the human voice is
replaced with a not-too-empathetic synthesizer tone, it must be hard on one's
conscience to take a stand near the synthesizer rather than the original
Wailers. But somehow, when this new production gloss is being sanctioned by
Bob himself, and when his vocal delivery on the new version is just as
life-asserting and uplifting as it used to be, I can easily disregard the lack
of rawness, and enjoy Bob in all of his hi-fi rather than lo-fi glory. As for
ʽSun Is Shiningʼ, it is given almost three extra minutes to let the
groove soak in deeper, and give Junior Marvin enough space to seduce us with
his nerve-tingling bluesy licks (many of which he probably lifted from Clapton,
but who's complaining?).
As is now usual with Bob, there are no bad
songs on the album — repetitive, obsessive vocal hooks are all over the place, Kaya really being a fine pop record,
thinly masked as another exercise in reggae grooving. ʽIs This
Love?ʼ asks the obvious question in the same way in which a melodic,
sensitive, romantic Californian singer-songwriter would have asked the same
thing. ʽShe's Goneʼ actually has elements of crooning to it — yes,
putting a traditional melodic spin on that vocal delivery bit. And on ʽRunning
Awayʼ, the singing duties are largely relegated to back vocalists, while
Bob moves amusingly close to scat singing, and the entire arrangement pays
serious tribute to lite-jazz entertainment.
None of these songs really sweep you off your
feet, but together, they combine into a very pretty, very pleasant relaxation
package — this is not Bob Marley «losing steam», this is Bob Marley turning
down the temperature a bit, wooing you over with his sentimental side, and it
goes without saying that he is doing a much better job about it than the
average professional crooner with his predictable pathos. However, as I already
said, context is key: a whole string of Kaya-like
records, had this turned into a mission to cross reggae grooves with sweet
sentimentality, would have quickly become routine and unbearable. As it is,
this particular dish is really best served after the inspirational,
hyper-stimulating main course of Exodus,
a sweet, refreshing lull after the big storm, and it is mainly in this context
that I give it a certified thumbs up.
P.S. And, just for the record, if you can find
a sweeter, more emotionally calming way to sing the line "think you're in
heaven but you're really in hell" (ʽTime Will Tellʼ) without
losing the seriousness of this message, let me know. Kaya places its bet to win — even the harshest truths on this
record are unequivocally delivered in the soothing-est of possible tones.
BABYLON BY BUS (1978)
1) Positive Vibration; 2)
Punky Reggae Party; 3) Exodus; 4) Stir It Up; 5) Rat Race; 6) Concrete Jungle;
7) Kinky Reggae; 8) Lively Up Yourself; 9) Rebel Music; 10) War/No More
Trouble; 11) Is This Love; 12) Heathen; 13) Jamming.
It is interesting that, although the tracks for
Marley's second live album were all recorded in mid-1978 on the Kaya tour, only one song on the setlist
is from Kaya itself, although quite
a few more were actually played as a regular part of the show. Clearly, the
resulting live album had to expand and deepen the image of the Wailers as
cutting-edge «social» artists with a message — no wonder that the record begins
with a Rastafari greeting in the name of Haile Selassie and all his
living-godly splendor. And then there's that whole «spiritual party» aspect,
where the performer and the audience join souls and dissolve in the universal
conscience on a sub-atomic level. Not so easy to do with Kaya songs, which are typically more individualistic.
As far as I can figure out, fans generally prefer the earlier Live! to this one, and I cannot quite
understand why — maybe they find that Babylon
By Bus is a bit too megalomaniac an exercise to properly convey the humble
reggae spirit. It also makes a point of not repeating any tracks from Live! (with the notable exception of
ʽLively Up Yourselfʼ), meaning that neither ʽI Shot The
Sheriffʼ nor ʽNo Woman No Cryʼ, two of the most iconic Marley
songs, appear here, but it's not as if the man had nothing to offer in their
place. So, instead of ʽSheriffʼ you can take the plaintive
stateliness of ʽConcrete Jungleʼ, and instead of ʽNo Woman No
Cryʼ, you can relax a few minutes to the tender rocking of ʽStir It
Upʼ.
There also seems to be significantly more
difference between the originals and the live versions now than there used to.
Many of the songs are extended, sometimes simply to give the groove more time
to soak in, but sometimes also to place the spotlight on individual players —
most notably on ʽHeathenʼ, where Junior Marvin gets to play an incendiary
blues guitar solo in the best tradition of blues-rock (the studio version was
twice as short and had no solos). Some of the tempos are sped up, and some of
the production gloss that could be a source of irritation on the studio albums
has also been shed (inevitably). This is not always an advantage:
ʽExodusʼ and ʽRebel Musicʼ, for instance, are inferior to
the originals — the former is a tad more loose and less rigorously mobilized,
dissipating the required feel, and the latter suffers because the "aaaaah,
rebel music!" backing vocals are less well coordinated. But as a general
tactic to «lively up yourself» and add some extra energy and volume to the
live show, it works.
That said, I am once again at a loss when it
comes to commenting on specific performances — everybody is having a good time,
and that's about it. Just because the album is longer (and more Marley is
better Marley), and because it does a better job of showing off Junior's
talents, I'd rate it very slightly over Live!
and give it a minor thumbs up — oh, actually, there is one more
reason: the audience reaction is better captured on tape this time around
(maybe because there is simply more
audience, period), so if you really want to suck on the vibe, Babylon By Bus is your most obvious audio
ticket to the spiritual unity between the shepherd and the flock. Too bad the
shepherd, free as he was to tour Babylon by bus, remained altogether unable to
properly lead the flock out of Babylon — maybe that Haile Selassie guy is not,
after all, nearly as powerful (or empowering) as they make him seem, eh?
SURVIVAL (1979)
1) So Much Trouble In The
World; 2) Zimbabwe; 3) Top Rankin'; 4) Babylon System; 5) Survival; 6) Africa
Unite; 7) One Drop; 8) Ride Natty Ride; 9) Ambush In The Night; 10) Wake Up And
Live.
Kaya was a very smart follow-up to Exodus — a spiritual detour showcasing
«the other side of Bob Marley» — but
as internal and external pressure on Bob's spirit to return to full-scale
prophet mode increased, a «proper» follow-up to Exodus, one that would push the rebellious, militant spirit of The
Wailers even further, was inevitable, and Survival
is all about the message — an honest, noble, progressive, if sometimes a bit
naïve or even misguided, message, but one that, unfortunately, works against
the music: this is the first Marley album that I would have to dub «generally
unsatisfactory» — mildly speaking.
The best thing that can be said about the music
is that the songs are still catchy. And they should be: a set of powerful political anthems should have quickly gripping, easily sing-alongable choruses that
seem to come so easily for Bob at all times. The fervor and charisma are still
there, whether Bob is crying out his soul at how there's "so much trouble
in the world", or grimly stating that "we're the survivors, yeah the
Black survivors", or calling on Africa to unite, or urging us all to
"wake up and live, y'all!" (a bit creepy, considering his own
beginning battle with cancer at the time). However, the balance is just not
right — there's too much fervor and charisma this time, not enough sheer
musical power.
Honestly, I do not care all that much about Bob Marley as a prophet.
His idealistic vision of Africa as a potential spiritual paradise where people
can break free from their chains and show the world the one true way is
endearing, but desperately naïve — «uniting» is by far the last thing on
the minds of the majority of Africans, too busy with much harsher problems,
and, while in 1979 it might have seemed progressive, today the ode to the glorious liberation of Zimbabwe, in the light
of what has happened in that country ever since, sounds totally ridiculous.
That said, even the most ridiculous plight, or creed, or ideology can be
pardoned and lived with if it is expressed in the form of genius — and on
previous records, the Wailers were not only prophets, but also serious musical
innovators and «groove-masters». Had something like ʽExodusʼ (the
song) lyrically been an ode to Robert Mugabe, it would not have (seriously)
influenced my admiration for the power of the recording.
But compare ʽExodusʼ (the song) with
ʽSurvivalʼ (the song), and you will probably see how the power level
suddenly has dropped down — ironically, the more politicized the message gets,
the less energy and passion there is in the playing. ʽSurvivalʼ is a
not-too-bad groove in itself, but it lacks the sharp funky horns, the tense
harmonies, the mystical echoey production, the "Move! Move!" bits
that drive you to action, basically, all the flourishes that made
ʽExodusʼ such a symphonic experience. At the same time,
ʽSurvivalʼ is not an exercise in stark minimalism, either: it has a
fairly standard arrangement, with a bit of everything thrown in (keyboards,
horns, harmonies), but nothing in particular standing out.
I do not think even a single one of these songs
has managed to attain truly «classic» status, even though not a single one of
them is truly «bad» (except for some of the lyrics) and the album is pretty
even, and goes down very easy. There's nothing wrong, in fact, about singing
along to these choruses, but I only wish that a song called ʽWake Up And
Liveʼ would really make me want
to wake up and live — this one, instead, with its completely static, unyielding
groove, puts me into a somnambulant trance. (A great idea would be to transform
it into a zombie anthem soundtrack in the next instalment of Night Of The Living Dead or something).
Political blunder of the day: ʽAfrica
Uniteʼ is a kind slogan all right, but was Bob really so naïve as to
think that the majority of Africans would be inspired by a unification anthem
with lines like "we are the children of the Rastaman"? Most likely,
they'd simply think that sly old Bob is pushing for a pro-Ethiopian agenda here
— Africa united under the bening rule of the followers of Haile Selassie. What
works for Addis Ababa might not necessarily work for Kinshasa, you know. Real
noble utopian sentiment, though.
UPRISING (1980)
1) Coming In From The Cold; 2)
Real Situation; 3) Bad Card; 4) We And Them; 5) Work; 6) Zion Train; 7)
Pimper's Paradise; 8) Could You Be Loved; 9) Forever Loving Jah; 10) Redemption
Song.
The last album released by Marley in his
lifetime is sometimes criticized for being way
too overtly Rastafarian and message-directed, and sometimes criticized for not
being too interesting from a musical standpoint, but my general impression is
that such criticisms should much more appropriately be reserved for Survival, whereas Uprising is actually a musical rebound — a brighter, more colorful
record that attempts to break out of the rigid reggae formula way more often
than you'd expect from somebody who was not only clearly past his absolute
peak, but also dying, as a matter of fact. The latter circumstance one should
keep in mind, I guess, when looking at the album cover and seeing Bob depicted
as a mythical awakening giant — an excusable bit of self-aggrandizing for a
cancer patient, who may already be more concerned about his image in the
afterlife rather than the here and now.
Anyway, Uprising
is surprisingly diverse and even «poppy» for Marley: there is no telling where
the Wailers would go had he been kept alive for another half a decade at least,
but Uprising shows that they could
have expanded into such areas as R&B (ʽWorkʼ), dance-pop
(ʽCould You Be Lovedʼ), and acoustic balladry (ʽRedemption
Songʼ), without losing the «Marley spirit» nor the «Wailers sound».
ʽWorkʼ sews together reggae and a slow funk groove, along with some
ominous bluesy guitar playing and larger-than-life vocal harmonies. ʽCould
You Be Lovedʼ bops along as if it were a party-time summer dance piece,
pinned to a bassline that shakes its musical butt like an oversexed young lady,
and it is fun, not to mention a little baffling to be hearing this and
realizing it is, in fact, a piece by Bob Marley, and not by Kool & The
Gang.
Then there is ʽRedemption Songʼ, of
course, widely celebrated for its humble understatements and simple acoustic
beauty — and, cynical as it sounds, hugely aided by the fact of being the last
song on Marley's last album, thus forming a natural musical-lyrical testament
for the guy: "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery / None but
ourselves can free our minds". Musically, there's not much here, and
lyrically, there's not a lot of news, but you could say the same about Lennon's
ʽImagineʼ, I guess — some things are easy to criticize, but not easy
to wipe out of the collective conscience, and Bob's "won't you help to
sing these songs of freedom?" is one of those naïve, but persistent
questions that will probably dangle in the air till the end of time.
In between these formula-challengers we have
our usual reggae schtick, but with the balance smoothly corrected from
«messagism» to «catchism», so that a song like ʽComing In From The
Coldʼ first grips you with its repetitive, but funny chorus, and only
later, if you want to, you can begin pondering its predictably serious message.
Equally catchy is the chorus to ʽPimper's Paradiseʼ, a song made
ever so moody with some clever synthesizer textures in the background that it
will take some time before you begin wondering whether, this time, the message
is not just a tad too conservative
and moralistic for a guy who wants us to emancipate ourselves from mental
slavery (some might even call the song «misogynistic» — of course, that would
be pushing it too far, but somehow, up until now Bob had had no incentive to
rail against party-going women).
There is no question of these songs being truly
on the level with Marley's best stuff, but sometimes, all you really need to
have to get by is «solidity», and this is as solid a swan song for Bob as, say,
something like In Through The Out Door
was for Led Zeppelin the previous year, or Who
Are You was for the Keith Moon-era Who the year before that: a bit tired,
lumpy, and grumpy, but still capable of looking out for new ideas and adapting
themselves to the rapidly changing world. Well worth a thumbs up, anyway.
CONFRONTATION (1983)
1) Chant Down Babylon; 2)
Buffalo Soldier; 3) Jump Nyabinghi; 4) Mix Up, Mix Up; 5) Give Thanks &
Praises; 6) Blackman Redemption; 7) Trench Town; 8) Stiff Necked Fools; 9) I
Know; 10) Rastaman Live Up!.
As an equally-righted Bob Marley album, Confrontation is nothing special, and
it certainly does not stand out that much against the background of the
similarly-titled Survival and Uprising. But as an album released
posthumously, worked up by Rita Marley and friends and colleagues from a set of
raw demos left over from Bob's 1979-80 sessions, this is an excellent job: most
chances are that you won't even be able to guess that the final record was
released without Bob's explicit consent — although, who knows, maybe Rita did
feel the presence of such a consent, transmitted directly into her conscience
from the lower levels of Jah heaven.
The songs mostly go back to the Survival sessions, so the album feels a
bit less «poppy» and innovative than Uprising,
once more going back to the rather stern, stiff, anthemic style of the
fight-for-your-rights propaganda of 1979, with some inevitable lyrical failures
— for instance, ʽBuffalo Soldierʼ uses the image of the enlisted
black man in late 19th century US army as a symbol of fighting for freedom and
independence, when in reality the «Negro Cavalry», formed already after the conclusion of the Civil War,
was regularly used to mop up natives in the Indian Wars, or at least clean up
after the whites had mopped up the Indians, so using that particular image as a
symbol for all things good and progressive is rather questionable. Then again,
poetic licence and all, and the phrase ʽbuffalo soldierʼ has got such
an empowering ring to it, who could really resist temptation to use it in a
freedom-loving context?
Anyway, one more word on that and we will be
falling into the trap of placing the words before the music. The problem is,
there is not much I, or any other reviewer, could say about the music, other
than just re-stating the fact that all the post-Marley overbuds, applied to his
demos, are quite consistent with the Marley spirit — synthesizers, horns,
backing vocals, which is not all that surprising, considering that they have
been applied by the same people who'd worked with him through the last
half-decade of his life. The horns, by the way, are the only thing that adds a
little distinctiveness to such tunes as ʽTrenchtownʼ, which they
Latinize a little bit; and the synthesizers help transform ʽI Knowʼ
into the closest thing to a «dance-pop hit» that Bob could ever have (I know
that he expressly wanted the song to be turned into a single, but I do not know
if that was before or after the pseudo-orchestral synths had been added to it).
Probably the single best song is ʽJump
Nyabinghiʼ, referring to one of the oldest Mansion of Rastafari and
featuring here more as a positive, light-headed, celebration of life and love
than an anthemic call-to-vigilance. Just due to that, it stands out in a bright
light against the rest, not to mention a funny reference to smokin' it
("we've got the herb! we've got the herb!") the likes of which, I
believe, we have not heard since Kaya
hit the stores. Its chorus may not be as catchy as the one on ʽRastaman
Live Up!ʼ, ending the album on one final sloganeering note, but it sounds
more wild and tribal than anything else on here, the only time where Bob comes
close to briefly losing his head and giving in to the ancestral spirit inside.
All of this is harmless fun, yet upon hearing Confrontation, I have to say that I am
somewhat relieved that Marley did not leave enough stuff in the vaults to last
Rita and the boys for another half of a lifetime. Whichever direction he was
planning to take (if he was planning anything at all) after Uprising, we can only guess about — the
problem is that, after all has been said and done and all the homages have been
paid, Bob Marley was essentially a one-trick pony (okay, two-trick, if you succeed in separating his romantic troubadour
side from his hero of the people side), and Exodus took that trick to levels that could not have possibly been
outdone: just like no classical opera can surpass The Ring on the 1-11 scale of «grandiose regality», so no record
that subscribes to the reggae idiom can trump «Movement of Jah People!». Could
he have moved out into other areas? Would he want to? Certainly Confrontation
is not the right kind of record to address that question to — but if your
demands towards the man's art are reasonable, it is quite the right kind of
record to own and enjoy, in loving memory of Haile Selassie's most loyal
servant.
ADDENDA:
TALKIN' BLUES (1973-75/1991)
1) Talkin'; 2) Talkin' Blues;
3) Talkin'; 4) Burnin' And Lootin'; 5) Talkin'; 6) Kinky Reggae; 7) Get Up
Stand Up; 8) Talkin'; 9) Slave Driver; 10) Talkin'; 11) Walk The Proud Land;
12) Talkin'; 13) You Can't Blame The Youth; 14) Talkin'; 15) Rastaman Chant;
16) Talkin'; 17) Am-A-Do; 18) Talkin'; 19) Bend Down Low; 20) Talkin'; 21) I
Shot The Sheriff.
Although the format of this album is rather
strange, yet in a way, Talkin' Blues
may be the most important live record
by the Wailers ever put out. Essentially, this is the complete or near-complete
show that the band played for a San Francisco radio station on October 31,
1973, with the original lineup still in place — interspersed with cut-up
segments of an interview that Bob recorded for Jamaican radio in 1975, and
throwing on, as a bonus, some alternate studio cuts and a lengthy, bombastic
performance of ʽI Shot The Sheriffʼ from a London show, also in 1975:
not a trivial way of sequencing your data, by any means.
The interview bits are a tough nut for anyone
not used to Jamaican English — about 70% of the time I have absolutely no idea
what the man is saying, although you can generally guess the topics (music,
spirituality, communication with people, relationships with Peter Tosh, etc.)
and then you probably have some vague idea about what is being said even
without making out the particular words. Not that any of it is particularly
important — in fact, I'd say that the very sound of Marley's voice earns him
far more sympathy and admiration than whatever semantic content is concealed in
that sound. Like most modern-day «prophets», he was never particularly deep or
innovative in his message, and as for the deep meaning of his music, well, I'd
always prefer to somehow infer it from the music on my own than strain myself
to understand his verbal explanation.
But hey, at least these spoken bits substantiate the «punny» album title.
The performances are an entirely different
matter. These are the young Wailers here, unspoiled by fame or fortune, still
earning their «musical Messiah» credentials, captured live in the studio in
pristine sound quality, not having to toy or fool around with their audiences,
but having something to prove in the way of musicianship. As they launch into
ʽBurnin' And Lootin'ʼ, the degree of internal coordination between
all five involved musicians is awesome — they are already way past the
«minimalistic» Lee Perry stage, when the bass was all that really mattered, but
quite far away from the stage when the music began to matter less than the
Exultation / Exorcism ritual. All of these performances, without exception, are
at least as good as their studio analogs, and sometimes may be even better —
for instance, the guitar duet on ʽGet Up, Stand Upʼ is much more
lively (extra scratch, bark, and snap) than it was in the studio.
For those who want something more than a set of
alternate versions, no matter how flawlessly executed, there are also some
rarities — including Tosh's ʽYou Can't Blame The Youthʼ, a song that
is quite questionable as to its lyrical content (all reservations applied,
Christopher Columbus was a very great
man, and so was Marco Polo — not so sure about the pirates Hawkins and Morgan —
and this is just not a very convincing example of why the elders, rather than
the youth, are to be blamed for current problems, even if they really are), but
quite admirable by way of its basic groove and lively workin'-team harmonies.
The previously unreleased outtake ʽAm-A-Doʼ is nothing too special,
but any outtake from Marley's most
important period is... important? Whatever be the case, you will not leave here
empty-handed.
To be fair, the talking and singing are
actually integrated rather than interspersed randomly. For instance, at one
point they have a short conversation with the interviewer about Bob's playing
the flute, and this is followed by an alternate take of ʽBend Down
Lowʼ that does indeed have a flute lead scattered all over the place —
never made it to the final runthrough, and it is somewhat of a pity, since the
extra touch of pastoral tenderness is quite appropriate. But in the end, it
really does not matter — if the talking bugs you, it is extremely simple just
to edit it out and still have a respectably lengthy live album, worthy of an
assured thumbs
up. For obvious reasons, Talkin'
Blues will never be anybody's first choice for a live Marley album (the man
is too strongly associated with the «shepherd-and-the-flock» imagery to make
one believe to try him out first in a radio studio environment), but that's
alright as long as you do not forget about its existence: an essential
acquirement, really.
LIVE AT THE ROXY (1976/2003)
1) Introduction; 2) Trenchtown
Rock; 3) Burnin' And Lootin'; 4) Them Belly Full (But We Hungry); 5) Rebel
Music (3 O'Clock Roadblock); 6) I Shot The Sheriff; 7) Want More; 8) No Woman
No Cry; 9) Lively Up Yourself; 10) Roots Rock Reggae; 11) Rat Race; 12)
Positive Vibration; 13) Get Up, Stand Up/No More Trouble/War.
Although this performance, recorded at The Roxy
in West Hollywood on May 26, 1976, had been widely bootlegged ever since its
original radio broadcast, it was not until the release of the complete
performance, together with its lengthy encore, in 2003 on Tuff Gong Records
that it became sort of a consecrated Holy Grail for Marley fans, quite a few of
whom now swear by it as the ultimate Marley live album, putting both Live! and Babylon By Bus to shame. This means that it at least merits a
separate mention, if not necessarily a lengthy review.
The encore is actually the kernel of the
legend: without it, the performance was already previously available as a
bonus disc on the «deluxe» edition of Rastaman
Vibration (yes, «grabbing for cash» is a practice not unfamiliar to people
dealing with the legacy of the world's most famous Rastaman). It is a 24-minute
non-stop medley of ʽGet Up, Stand Upʼ, ʽNo More Troubleʼ,
and ʽWarʼ, one that not only confirms that most reggae songs can
indeed be played to the exact same rhythm pattern without a single change (as
if we didn't know!..) but also confirms that the Wailers were perfectly able to
hold a steady, unnerving, unyielding, constantly energetic groove for as long
as Jah was willing them to hold it. There are no build-ups, or climaxes, or
gimmicks, or audience teasers — the team sounds pretty much the same at any
given moment, but somehow, the performance does not ever get boring or really feel like 24 minutes, probably because
of Bob's ability to hold the listener's interest by merging three songs into
one and making it look as if he is
slowly building up to the «vocal climax» of ʽWarʼ, and then gradually
taking us back down through the same stages.
Other than that, Live At The Roxy is perfectly solid, but I could not confirm that
the quality of the performance definitively «trumps» the rest of Bob's live
catalog or anything. For one thing, Earl ʽChinnaʼ Smith on lead
guitar is a decent player, but too humble for an arena performance: Julian
Marvin's arrival in 1977 would change things significantly, adding more lyrical
individuality to the music, whereas Live
At The Roxy is really all about the collective groove, and there is nothing
wrong with that, but maybe not for 86 minutes. For another thing, this is
already Bob Marley in his «mission» era, where there is a constant danger of
putting more emphasis on the «message» than the «music» — on a purely technical
level, there is no accusation that could be justified against the band's
playing, but instinctively, I still prefer the live band on the 1973-74
recordings, prior to the departure of Tosh and Bunny Wailer.
That said, if you belly hungry for another
Marley live album, and "now you get what you want, do you want
more?", that kind of thing, Live At
The Roxy is indispensable. One major argument in its support is the
excellent sound quality — although all of Bob's live albums were recorded
indoors, The Roxy must have had the best acoustics of 'em all, so that you
really get to hear all the musicians close-up and uninhibited by the audience
or by empty space, almost as
intimately as if they'd been recording in a radio studio. Plus, I think this
one has the only live version of ʽWant Moreʼ to be released on an
official album — a fine, tense, desperate song to be played live and really get
the juices flowing, somehow overlooked elsewhere. Probably I could scramble together
a few other minor arguments as well, but on the whole, such things should
rather be left to seasoned Marley veterans, so I will just say goodbye here
with a conventional thumbs up.
BONNIE RAITT (1971)
1) Bluebird; 2) Mighty Tight
Woman; 3) Thank You; 4) Finest Lovin' Man; 5) Any Day Woman; 6) Big Road; 7)
Walking Blues; 8) Danger Heartbreak Dead Ahead; 9) Since I Fell For You; 10) I
Ain't Blue; 11) Women Be Wise.
Upon entering Radcliffe College, Bonny Raitt
majored in social relations and African studies, and it shows — what other type
of artist would have covered not one, but two
songs by (then still fairly obscure among everybody but very hardcore blues
aficionados) Sippie Wallace? Both of which are, of course, all about social
relations (gender relations, to be exact) in the Afro-American community of
the 1920s, and not at all out of date or out of touch in the early 1970s. Yet
it is not so much the actual subject that is interesting here as it is the
approach, which can make all the difference and make you love this record, hate
this record, or use it as casual background for the «boring» category of house
parties.
Roots-rock, in those days, used to come in
extremes — it could be reverential and self-consciously «spiritual»,
downplaying the earthiness of the music (they don't call it «roots» for
nothing, but too many people played «roots rock» as if it were «angels' rock»
instead), or it could assume the «dirty» form of hard-rockers, pub-rockers,
shit-rockers, or whatever you'd like to call the self-consciously irreverential
crowds. If it didn't come in
extremes, though, it was running an even higher risk of not finding its own
face. And it is very easy not to be
impressed by this record and just walk away saying, «yeah, so what's the big
deal?..»
Because on most counts, the 21-year old Bonnie
Raitt is professional, but whether she is anything special is not so evident. She knows how to play guitar, pleasantly
but not exceptionally (and in any case, her playing on this debut album is
intentionally devoid of any flashy demonstration of her later-to-be-respected
slide technique); she is a good enough singer, but her voice is physically
weak, or, rather, at this juncture she has not yet learned to control it
rigorously; and she is not at all a «singer-songwriter», because she writes
very few songs — the two numbers that are credited to her are, respectively, a
rather generic folk-pop ballad and a rather simplistic blues vamp.
She is,
however, an interpreter and a blender of tradition; perhaps the most
interesting aspect of the album is its choice of cover material — ranging from
then-contemporary songs by Stephen Stills and Paul Siebel (and Bonnie's own, of
course) to Motown (the Marvelettes) to vocal jazz to old acoustic blues to,
most intriguingly, the «urban blues» tradition of the 1920s, as illustrated by
the two Sippie Wallace covers: love for Robert Johnson, one of whose songs is
also covered here, may have been ubiquitous in the early 1970s, but proper
understanding of the importance of the female blues singers of the
pre-Depression era was yet to come (I think that even Bessie Smith was more
revered for her legend than actually listened to — unless that feeling is being
secretly nurtured by the association with the Band song of that name that bears
no resemblance to Bessie Smith's real style whatsoever. Whatever).
There is no particular strife for
«authenticity», thank God, outside of Bonnie hiring blues legend Junior Walker
to contribute harmonica throughout — and the production by Willie Murphy is
intelligent and tasteful, as he tends to avoid any unnecessary tricks or
effects, but makes good use of all the immense host of musicians that Bonnie
dragged into the empty summer camp on Lake Minnetonka to help her carry on the
musical tradition. And this is important, because Raitt sees to it that the
album never becomes a pure guitar celebration — pianos, harmonicas, flutes,
saxes, even a tuba, comically-importantly puffed into by Freebo on ʽBig
Roadʼ, are just as important to make this whole experience into a
celebration that is as much «blues» as it is «vaudeville», not to mention
«jazz» or «R&B» or «folk-based singer-songwriting, California-style», all
one.
Under this sauce, style becomes far more
important than substance: I'd like to complain that Bonnie's folksy ʽThank
Youʼ is not very memorable, and that the straightforward blues covers
where she is being «tough» (ʽMighty Tight Womanʼ) hit harder than the
easily-dissipated ballads, but that impression would probably apply to anybody, be they as talented as Ms.
Raitt or much less talented. The truth is that Bonnie intuitively gets where
it's at: she is able to present herself as a strong, independent character, but
does that in the same restrained, self-contained, «polite» manner as her
pre-war idols. This is an attitude that does not work wonders for short-time
entertainment value — not surprisingly, the album failed to chart — but might
command certain respect in the long run.
From a certain point of view, this is Bonnie
Raitt at her very best; with a song selection like that, when «old masters» are
only marginally offset by contemporary singer-songwriters, Junior Walker on
harp, and production that cleverly updates the old honky-tonk without
succumbing to the usual 1970s clichés (like drowning everything in a sea
of syrupy strings, for instance), if you don't like Bonnie Raitt, you won't like Bonnie Raitt, and if you don't get Bonnie
Raitt, there is no stopping you from completely despising her for
everything she's done once she stopped drinking, put out Nick Of Time, and became the roots-rock-spokeswoman for people
without a proper sense of humor. But you know, it can actually be fun trying to
get Bonnie Raitt, at least, in that period of hers where she still had some
sort of meaningful agenda, rather than just wanting to hang out with all the
other cool people. Thumbs up.
GIVE IT UP (1972)
1) Give It Up Or Let Me Go; 2)
Nothing Seems To Matter; 3) I Know; 4) If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody; 5)
Love Me Like A Man; 6) Too Long At The Fair; 7) Under The Falling Sky; 8) You
Got To Know How; 9) You Told Me Baby; 10) Love Has No Pride.
No attempts at tweaking the formula here, just
tightening it up by hiring even better musicians, writing one more song than
the last time around, and possibly playing a bit more electric guitar, too,
although it is hard to guess who is playing what without the individual credits
for each song, considering that no less than six different guitar players are
listed in the notes. These are all just subtle nuances, though, so do not let
the album cover shift (from dark living room to sunny countryside) fool you
into imagining that something major has changed.
Bonnie's songwriting abilities have not improved
by much — and, to tell the truth, they would never improve by much — but you still gotta admire somebody who has
the gall to write a song in the near-authentic style of 1920s vaudeville
(ʽGive It Up Or Let Me Goʼ) and then immediately follow it up with a
song written in the near-authentic style of Carole King (ʽNothing Seems To
Matterʼ — transpose that guitar melody to piano and you'd be able to sneak
the song on Tapestry without anyone
noticing). The third song, ʽYou Told Me Babyʼ, is written in the
near-authentic style of blandly-friendly Californian blues-rock, I think, but
it is really not so much a «song» as an excuse to trade some classy guitar
licks between two or three guitarists in the coda.
The covers, like before, are split between
forgotten golden oldies (Sippie Wallace's ʽYou Got To Know Howʼ),
classic R&B (Barbara George's ʽI Knowʼ), and contemporary
material, with the balance seriously tipping now in favor of the latter — not
necessarily to the benefit of good taste, since there is just a tad too much
sentimental melodrama here; certainly ending the record with an
honest-to-goodness, but way too emotionally puffed-up ʽLove Has No
Prideʼ is not a great choice compared with ʽWomen Be Wiseʼ on Bonnie Raitt. Still, at least she is
still diligently splicing quotas: other than sentimental ballads, there are
also tough blues-rockers (ʽLove Me Like A Manʼ) and upbeat
country-rockers (Jackson Browne's ʽUnder The Falling Skyʼ), and
ʽToo Long At The Fairʼ is at least one song that transcends
sentimental clichés and, aided with some lush singing and a carefully
engineered crescendo, rises to nearly epic heights.
But on the whole, it seems clear that Bonnie
Raitt's second album predictably confirms what was already suggested by the
first one — namely, that she is a competent, likable, respectable blues mama
who is not afraid to dig all the way down into the roots and the original
functions of the blues (one of which is just sheer entertainment), and that
everything else, whether she likes it or not, comes across as more of a
concession to modernity. ʽGive It Up Or Let Me Goʼ, with its
self-confident swagger, jazzy flavor, and cocky slide guitar playing, is the
album's best performance, the rigid 12-bar blues of ʽLove Me Like A Manʼ,
which she sort of sings like a man,
comes second, and Wallace's ʽYou Got To Know Howʼ, putting the final
touch on Bonnie's fully solidified «wise woman» image, comes third. The more
emotional and psychological she gets, though, the less use there seems to be
for this music — in light mode, there's always Carole King, and in heavy
(emotionally, not musically, that is), there's always Joni Mitchell.
Nevertheless, the album is consistently
listenable: with so many people around and such relatively complex, yet
seemingly spontaneous, arrangements, Give
It Up generates a loose, good-time, friendly atmosphere that not many
«generic» blues-rock records can offer with such ease. Additionally, you get
Paul Butterfield himself blowing his harmonica on a few tracks (ʽUnder The
Falling Skyʼ), and some really tight brass players jazzifying the
proceedings along the way. So, nothing too special in the grand scheme of
things, and not even necessarily an improvement on her first try, but still
well worth an empathic thumbs up, I'd say.
TAKIN' MY TIME (1973)
1) You've Been In Love Too
Long; 2) I Gave My Love A Candle; 3) Let Me In; 4) Everybody's Crying Mercy; 5)
Cry Like A Rainstorm; 6) Wah She Go Do; 7) I Feel The Same; 8) I Thought I Was
A Child; 9) Write Me A Few Of Your Lines/Kokomo Blues; 10) Guilty.
Third time's a charm? Actually, all three times had their charm: Takin' My Time is the last piece of the
«original Bonnie Raitt trilogy», stylistically and ideologically continuing the
old trend and, in some people's opinions, perfecting it to the highest possible
degree. (In Bonnie's own opinion, too, as far as I know, although she has her
own personal reasons — at the time, she was romantically involved with Lowell
George of Little Feat, who is also contributing to this record and was even
considered for primary producer at one time).
The credit list for this record is even longer
than for Give It Up, and involves
some stellar players: besides Lowell George and some of the old regulars like
Freebo, we have Taj Mahal on guitar, Ernie Watts (mostly known to the layman
for his Rolling Stones association in the early 1980s) on sax, both Jim Keltner and Earl Palmer on
drums, and even Van Dyke Parks, the creative soul behind the Beach Boys' SMiLe project, on keyboards; as usual,
I am not exactly sure who is playing on which of the tracks, but on the whole, Takin' My Time does indeed sound
awesome much of the time — as far as «regular» early 1970s roots-rock records
with a soft edge go, you would be hard pressed to find anything more tasteful than this.
However, the chief virtue of the album, once
again, is its excellent eclecticism and stylistic balance. Although pre-war
material is no longer present (unless you technically count the Mississippi
Fred McDowell cover as «pre-war style», even though Fred himself was a post-war
artist), Bonnie's Motown vibe is still active, as is evident from the opening
number, a brashly swinging, funky version of Martha and the Vandellas'
ʽYou've Been In Love Too Longʼ. To this, she adds a brief flirtation
with Pete Townshend's favorite, Mose Allison (ʽEverybody's Crying Mercyʼ,
here arranged as a slightly threatening «midnight blues» number with creepy
harmonica lines from Taj Mahal); a quick affair with the calypso groove, in the
guise of a suitably arrogant and amusing take on Calypso Rose's ʽWah She
Go Doʼ; and a rejuvenation of the old fast tempo doo-wop hit ʽLet Me
Inʼ, which must have been all the rage when The Sensations first
introduced it in 1962, but had, of course, been completely forgotten since.
And these are not «just» covers, mind you —
they have all been reworked, in a good way, actually, in different, not always predictable, ways. The Martha and the
Vandellas song is seriously funkified, getting an extra snappy edge that the
original, fairly formulaic, Motown arrangement never had. The Mose Allison song
gets this serious dark boost from the thick bassline and Taj Mahal's harmonica
— Bonnie understands the «eerie» vibe of Mr. Allison and does her best to
enhance it. As for ʽLet Me Inʼ, this is where she really unlocks her
pre-war vaudeville closet, letting out a whole merry brass section to cheer up
the speakeasy atmosphere: again, the song gets a whole new layer of meaning
that the original never sought.
As for the more contemporary material, a few of
the songs unpleasantly point the way to the commercial blandness of albums to come,
but this is rather an accidental development: on the other hand, you have stuff
like Chris Smither's ʽI Feel The Sameʼ, a «modern blues» with a terrific
arrangement — particularly the screechy, angry, but tastefully reserved slide
guitar lead parts, which I really hope were played by Bonnie herself.
Eventually, the song develops into one of those late-night jams, with several
acoustic and electric guitars trading gruff short phrases — not exactly Crosby,
Stills, & Young level, but fairly comparable if you make the necessary
adjustments for «soft mode» rather than «hard mode».
So when the album ends with a
slightly-more-serious-than-necessary reading of Randy Newman's
ʽGuiltyʼ (Bonnie has no chance of preserving the author's sense of
irony and deeply ensconced «Jewish sarcasm», but she does good about preserving
the world-weary attitude), it's almost like, «yeah, she finally drove her point
all the way home»; the point in question, of course, being the ability to come
out as conservative (or, rather, «preservationist» in a Kinksy sense of the
word) and innovative at the same time — «new skin for the old ceremony», as the
title of a certain Leonard Cohen album goes. Oh well, I guess it never hurt
anybody to have an affair with a guy as classy as Lowell George, but never mind
whether this consideration has any impact on the strength of this here thumbs up
evaluation. Just enjoy the music while you can, because this would be the last
time that it would be so tastefully enjoyable.
STREETLIGHTS (1974)
1) That Song About The Midway;
2) Rainy Day Man; 3) Angel From Montgomery; 4) I Got Plenty; 5) Streetlights;
6) What Is Success; 8) Ain't Nobody Home; 9) Everything That Touches You; 10)
Got You On My Mind; 11) You Got To Be Ready For Love.
Listen to Takin'
My Time and Streetlights back to
back and you get a valuable lesson in what was deemed «more commercial» and
«less commercial» circa 1974. While some
of the songs on Takin' My Time sound
just like the songs on Streetlights,
the big difference is that everything
that constituted Bonnie Raitt's own artistic sauce has pretty much been ditched
— her guitar playing skills, her diversity in selecting other people's
material, her very important feel for pre-war blues and vaudeville music, and
even her own humble attempts at writing songs.
None of that matters, thought Bonnie's new
producer Jerry Ragovoy, and pushed her towards becoming a «normal» artist —
singing soft orchestrated acoustic ballads, collected from outside contemporary
songwriters. Apparently, the new idea was to market Ms. Raitt as a singer:
Warner Bros.' answer to Karen Carpenter, or something of the sort. Although her
career was slowly gaining traction, with Takin'
My Time finally making it into the Top 100, apparently, they succeeded in
convincing her that a slight image change was necessary in order to attract
larger audiences — and that this image change necessitated dropping Sippie
Wallace covers from her repertoire, for one thing, and replacing them with
something more «relevant».
Okay, says Bonnie, and starts things off with a
cover of Joni Mitchell's ʽThat Song About The Midwayʼ. She nails the
sentiment of the original pretty darn well, but then comes the inevitable:
what's the goddamn point? The arrangement has been made a little more
«user-friendly» as we add some bottom, in the form of a delicate bassline and
some soft congas, and later on, some inobtrusive strings and woodwinds — and
you could say that the vocals also make the song more «user-friendly», since
Bonnie's voice is higher than Joni's, not to mention free from the peculiarities
of Joni's irregular jaw structure, so the average listener might deem Ms.
Raitt's rendition «nicer» than Ms. Mitchell's. But in a different lingo, that
same thing is called «watering down», and I, for one, have no need whatsoever
of anybody watering down Joni Mitchell. Radical transformations are one thing
(e. g. ʽThis Flight Tonightʼ in the hands of Nazareth), but this sort
of treatment adds nothing whatsoever to the original.
Adding almost an insult to almost an injury,
the second track is a cover of James Taylor's ʽRainy Day Manʼ — this
time, the arrangement adds some jazzy electric guitar licks, louder drums, and
a heavily muffled brass and string section, all of them superimposed in such a
polite manner that the song becomes boring almost before it has started. Again,
Bonnie does a good job, but there is no «edge» to the material, and whatever
sentiments James Taylor himself had conveyed through the song, there ain't even
a single extra one here.
The rest does not stray too far away from the
path: songs are reduced to more or less the same soft, «shallow-introspective»
register, regardless of whether they have been penned by overrated superstars
(Taylor) or semi-obscure cult legends (John Prine's ʽAngel From
Montgomeryʼ). By the time we get to the second side, things start heating
up a little, as Bonnie includes several R&B numbers, relatively higher on
energy level (Allen Toussaint's ʽWhat Is Successʼ, with a hilariously
«ominous» string arrangement; Ragovoy's own ʽAin't Nobody Homeʼ,
where the brass section is finally given free reins), but even that idea is
discredited on the last track — ʽYou Got To Be Ready For Loveʼ is a
campy proto-disco number that is as far removed from Bonnie's artistic
inclinations as possible (as they hop through the chorus, I cannot help
imagining the lady in ABBA-like glitter, grooving along to the good vibe, and
thinking back on how far people are ready to go for vague «image demand»
purposes).
Nothing, except for that last track, is
properly «bad» — the ballads have occasional hooks, the material has been
chosen with intelligence (after all, covering Joni Mitchell and John Prine can
hardly get one accused of bad taste, right?), and Raitt still has at least the
distinctive feature of being able to make a transition to «rough blueswoman
snap» mode whenever she feels the song might demand it: an important footnote,
because neither a Joni Mitchell nor a Karen Carpenter could have managed this
trick. Unfortunately, she does not resort to it too often, not to mention that
sometimes, due to the nature of the material, it just makes her seem like a
Nashville cowgirl, and that ain't nothing special, either. In the end, Streetlights simply streamlines her
talent, instead of allowing it to develop into something truly outstanding —
and that, woe and alas, is pretty much the way it would generally stay
throughout the rest of her career.
HOME PLATE (1975)
1) What Do You Want The Boy To
Do; 2) Good Enough; 3) Run Like A Thief; 4) Fool Yourself; 5) My First Night
Alone Without You; 6) Walk Out The Front Door; 7) Sugar Mama; 8) Pleasin' Each
Other; 9) I'm Blowin' Away; 10) Your Sweet And Shiny Eyes.
All right, so even if «something» had truly
died forever with the transition from Bonnie's first three albums to Streetlights, that does not necessarily
mean she would not be able to still turn in a decent record from time to time.
In the place of Jerry Ragovoy we now see Paul Rothchild, the legendary producer
for The Doors — and, incidentally, also for the last Janis Joplin album; perhaps
the Warner executives were secretly aspiring for the man to be able to dress
Ms. Raitt up as a legitimate successor to Janis?
Well, not even the most astute producer could
handle such a task, I guess, but one thing that was done right was to pull Bonnie out of that «introspective
singer-non-songwriter» mode and get her to play a little rock'n'roll instead.
Once again, there are no originals, and once again, most of the songs represent
contemporary material, but the arrangements are more energetic and electric
this time, and the album sounds more like a bawdy roots rock party than an
intimate confession session, which is a good thing with Bonnie Raitt: as a
bawdy roots-rocker, she is more interesting and involving than she is as a
lonesome sensitive soul.
One noticeable thing about the album is how
heavy it is on backing vocals (with at least a dozen supporting singers,
including such luminosities as Emmylou Harris and — no shit! — Tom Waits himself listed in the credits,
although back in 1975, I guess that his voice was still usable for «regular»
backup purposes). This gives many of its blues-rock compositions a bit of a
gospel/soul feel: indeed, the main hook of Bill Payne's ʽPleasin' Each
Otherʼ, multiplied by the choral harmony approach, sounds like a rip-off
of Leon Russell's ʽSpace Captainʼ as done by Joe Cocker (with the
"pleasin' each other, pleasin' each other can't be wrong" refrain
replacing the original "learning to live together, learning to live
together 'til we die"). But it is done very well all the same — Bonnie is
not trying to compete with Cocker, entrancing her audience in the same shamanistic-possessed
manner, she is putting more emphasis on melody and build-up, and there is a
nice balance between strength and tenderness in the end.
She even manages to «tame» those proto-disco
rhythms: ʽGood Enoughʼ, with a bouncy groove and a funky Stevie
Wonder-like clavinet line, is a tremendous improvement over ʽYou Got To Be
Ready For Loveʼ — no strings, a tightly coordinated performance, and a vocal
that asserts strong personality over sentimental cliché. But even this
one does not hold a candle to material on which the lady gets to play slide
guitar: ʽSugar Mamaʼ (a gender-based remake of Texas blues rocker
Glen Clark's ʽSugar Daddyʼ) is a delicious slab of blues-rock
feminism — if she does not do «proper» female urban blues no more, at least
this contemporary revision still hearkens back to that old independent spirit,
and with a deliciously aggressive slide tone to boot.
There is even a touching ballad here: I
heartily recommend J. D. Souther's ʽRun Like A Thiefʼ, which starts
out quite generically, but then delves into one of those tugging vocal hooks
that you either fall for (and subsequently become vulnerable to at least some
of the songs by Linda Ronstadt and/or the Eagles) or stay immune to — I
confess to liking the notes she holds on the "run in the night, run in the
night, run in the night like a thief" chorus, or, at least, feeling like
mentioning them, which is already a big plus when you're talking generic
country-rock balladry. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about ʽMy
First Night Alone Without Youʼ and ʽI'm Blowin' Awayʼ (was the
latter responsible for the silly album cover, or was that Bonnie Raitt's idea
of how «going over the rainbow» would look like?) — those sound exactly like
all the instantly forgettable, wishy-washy stuff on Streetlights.
Still, even with all the filler, there are
enough quality performances here to merit a weak thumbs up — most importantly, the
album feels more loyal to the true essence of Bonnie Raitt than its
predecessor, including the important component of having fun, of which she had so much on her first three records. I'd like
to see more of that fun coming back,
but I guess we have to be grateful for what there is, and give out special thanks
to Rothchild. For all we know, they could have cut the budget and limit the
sessions to just Bonnie and her acoustic guitar, and for all her charms, she
ain't no Nick Drake, let alone Syd Barrett.
SWEET FORGIVENESS (1977)
1) About To Make Me Leave Home;
2) Runaway; 3) Two Lives; 4) Louise; 5) Gamblin' Man; 6) Sweet Forgiveness; 7)
My Opening Farewell; 8) Three Time Loser; 9) Takin' My Time; 10) Home.
Produced by Rothchild once again, this one
marked Raitt's first and lesser commercial peak, climbing all the way up to No.
25 on the charts and even yielding a modest hit single — her cover of Del
Shannon's ʽRunawayʼ, a great song that, like most of the old hits
back in 1977, was contemporarily out of vogue and could certainly use some
twitching to get upgraded to the basic standards of commercial music in the
1970s. Right?
Well, maybe, but this harder-rocking
arrangement is surprisingly soulless: neither the music nor Bonnie's
«powerhouse» singing convey the light melancholy of the original that was its
greatest asset — its essence, in
fact. Melody-wise, ʽRunawayʼ is finely constructed, and that
construction is dutifully preserved and just a little bit tweaked on this
album, but on an emotional level, it does not really work as a loud
«rock-and-soul» number: as it opens with a harsh distorted chugging riff and a
swampy harmonica blast, your senses prepare for something dark and apocalyptic
rather than something tender and personal. Bonnie's vocal work is technically
great, but makes little sense — strong enough to make people sit up and notice
and buy the single, though.
On the whole, Sweet Forgiveness is more «rock» than anything she previously
offered us — perhaps the idea was to try and recast her a little bit in the
vein of successful sentimental arena-rockers like Foreigner. The session
musicians have largely been sacked — there's only about 15 different people
credited on the record, which is really a miserable number (normally, there'd
be about twice as many) for a Bonnie Raitt album, and even so, most of the
instrumental parts were simply played by the members of her regular touring
band, so the album on the whole is tighter, tenser, and rockier than it used to
be. This is neither good nor bad in itself, but it does guarantee that there is
no going back — the spirit of Sippie Wallace is no longer hovering over the
studio in any of its forms.
The sheer strength of Raitt's voice means that
she is perfectly capable of putting out a regular hard rock record — the only
problem is that this particular hard rock record cannot boast great
songwriting, and refuses to take any chances whatsoever when it comes to laying
down the tracks. Something like ʽGamblin' Manʼ, for instance, is just
standard-fare mid-tempo blues-rock, with neither the rhythm guitar nor the lead
guitar nor any other part ever rising above the «we get paid for this, we're
doing our job as honestly as the contract requires» level.
Composition-wise, the title track, written by
songwriter Daniel Moore, is probably the most unusual thing here, spliced
together from several different parts (a funky rocking part and a gospel-tinged
uptempo ballad part) — even so, both parts are so tepid on their own that it is
only the sharp contrast between the two, as Bonnie hops forward and backward
from «aggressive» to «forgiving», that makes the final result worthwhile.
Musical and emotional restraint, sometimes useful because implying certain things works better than saying them out loud,
work against Raitt because there is really nothing implied here anyway. Slick
and clean, ʽSweet Forgivenessʼ is a technically decent product that
does not make me too angry or too forgiving.
Still, while the album is on, it's generally
okay. The ballads have their little tugs (ʽTwo Livesʼ is kinda sad,
though the Carpenters would probably have made it lovelier; ʽLouiseʼ
is kinda sympathetic, though Joan Baez would probably have made it sharper and
shriller), the rockers are superficially fun (ʽThree Time Loserʼ has
an expressively flowing slide guitar part), and even slow «grand» roots-rock
numbers like ʽTakin' My Timeʼ have a generally tasteful sound, decorated
with pianos, organs, and battling guitars. The atmosphere of the whole thing,
in any case, is much superior to the
general arena-rock atmosphere, because nobody is trying to be too flashy, to
lay down that old soul as if it were the biggest, fattest, most monumental soul
of all time.
This is why, in spite of all the complaints,
I'm still giving this a thumbs up — as I am usually doing with all «high
quality mediocre albums». Do not, however, make the mistake of forming an
opinion here based only on ʽRunawayʼ: it may be typical of the
general style of arrangements on Sweet
Forgiveness, but it is not typical of the general style of songwriting,
and, most importantly, it will almost inevitably set your mind on the path of
comparisons between Bonnie Raitt and Del Shannon, which is not at all what
anybody had in mind for Sweet
Forgiveness, I'm sure.
THE GLOW (1979)
1) I Thank You; 2) Your Good
Thing (Is About To End); 3) Standin' By The Same Old Love; 4) Sleep's Dark And
Silent Gate; 5) The Glow; 6) Bye Bye Baby; 7) The Boy Can't Help It; 8) (I
Could Have Been Your) Best Old Friend; 9) You're Gonna Get What's Coming; 10)
(Goin') Wild For You Baby.
Whenever we are dealing with more than one
stage in the career of the illustrious Bonnie Raitt, we are dealing with
nuances within nuances and subtleties within subtleties — but speaking in terms
of nuanced nuances and subtle subtleties, I think I like The Glow one subtle nuance more than I like Sweet Forgiveness. Perhaps because it's got a bit more of that
«sandpaper» edge to it. Or maybe the leading lady just got me covered and
trapped with that reproaching stare on the front cover — looking every bit the
same at thirty as she'd later look at sixty, and communicating a «what the heck
do you want from me, anyway?» kind of
message, as if I ever wanted anything
from her in the first place — or anybody else, for that matter.
A more serious reason might be a better
playlist: unlike Sweet Forgiveness, The Glow temporarily returns us to a
better balance between contemporary songwriting and the old classics — no, no
Victoria Spivey covers, but some good old-fashioned soul, rock'n'roll, and
Motown pop here, nestled among the obligatory James Taylorisms (actually,
Jackson Brownisms and Robert Palmerisms, to be much more precise). Still
another factor may be a near-complete change of the playing team — trimmed down
to about 12 people (that ain't much for Bonnie) and consisting almost entirely
of first-rate players on the market: Danny Kortchmar and Waddy Wachtel on
guitars, Paul Butterfield on harmonica, guys from Little Feat, and even David
Sanborn comes along to contribute a sax solo or two.
There are only three ballads out of ten, and
all three are decent. Browne's ʽSleep's Dark And Silent Gateʼ begins
to redeem itself already with its title and ends with an inspired, tasteful and
highly lyrical guitar break from I don't-know-who (Danny? Waddy? Diddy Wah
Diddy?). The lengthy title track, dealing with the perils of drinking (all too
actual for Bonnie at the time) is nothing to really write home about in
ecstasy, but it is nice that they arrange it as smooth midnight jazz rather
than orchestrated schlock, so that the most prominent thing about the song are
its wobbly basslines — always a cool thing in ballads. And the closing
ʽWild For You Babyʼ, as poor as it is as an original composition, has
that slightly distorted guitar lead improvising various figures around Bonnie's
croon, again, adding some much-needed «earthiness».
The punchy stuff includes a quirky gender twist
as Bonnie remakes ʽThe Girl Can't Help Itʼ into ʽThe Boy Can't
Help Itʼ, grinning at her male audience with sarcastic slide guitar runs
("you know the boy can't help it, he was born to please" must have
been particularly humiliating for all them male chauvinists), but overall, the
punchy stuff is there just to be punchy — with the opening drum roll for the
old Sam & Dave hit ʽI Thank Youʼ, Raitt springs immediately into
action, and this «cut the crap, let's get right down to business» attitude is
well felt throughout the record, whether she is putting the 1970s rock stamp on
Mary Wells' ʽBye Bye Babyʼ or asserting some lean 'n' mean
personality on ʽBest Old Friendʼ. Most importantly, she is now
milking that slide guitar sound with a tight grip, and adjusting her own
singing voice to it — together, they form a very natural-sounding sneery duo,
much better united than anytime in the past.
On the whole, this one earns a much more
assured thumbs
up from me than its predecessor, but, of course, far be it from me
to fool anybody: The Glow is not a
«great» album by any means, just as fine a record as it ever gets in the
vicinity of the middle of the road, and only really recommendable if you are a
big sucker for that clean, smoothly engineered, technically precise and humbly
soulful roots-rock sound of the 1970s. It is
somewhat of a miracle, though, in a way, how they manage to be so completely
dismissive of all the musical and technological innovations of the New Wave era
— so get it if you are a certified conservative in life, too.
GREEN LIGHT (1982)
1) Keep This Heart In Mind; 2)
River Of Tears; 3) Can't Get Enough; 4) Willya Wontcha; 5) Let's Keep It
Between Us; 6) Me And The Boys; 7) I Can't Help Myself; 8) Baby Come Back; 9)
Talk To Me; 10) Green Lights.
Another interesting change of pace here — reflecting
the end of the Seventies and, in a way, the end of the singer-songwriter era, Green Light is a simple, ballsy, and
ever so slightly New Wave-influenced rock'n'roll album. Once again, the entire
songwriting and recording team has been shifted. The new producer is Rob
Fraboni, best known for working on various roots-rock projects of the previous
decade (such as The Band's Last Waltz
and Eric Clapton's No Reason To Cry;
not coincidentally, The Band's own Richard Manuel gets credited in the liner
notes for background vocals), and the most notorious instrumentalist on the
album is Faces' veteran Ian McLagan, who, I think, is chiefly responsible for
the somewhat nonchalant, barroom-boogie attitude that rules on Green Light.
For all of Bonnie's «excesses» of that era,
brought about by heavy drinking, and for all of her desire to let it all hang
down for a bit, the record is still quite reserved and delicately polished — no
use expecting sloppiness or high levels of distortion and fuzz from the lady.
However, as you can easily see from the title track, she is not above allowing
modern production techniques (including a little bit of electronic treatment),
so that today, ʽGreen Lightsʼ is quite easily datable back to the
early 1980s. This is not a problem, though — the whole album pretends to little
more than casual lightweight entertainment, for which aims the production is
adequate.
There are almost no ballads on the album: the
closest thing is probably ʽRiver Of Tearsʼ, contributed by long-term
partner Eric Kaz, but even that song's melodic base is blues-rockish — in fact,
the opening guitar lines sound like they were lifted directly off some
alternate version of ʽHonky Tonk Womenʼ, open G-tuning and all; it is
only the overall broken-hearted sentimentality of the lyrics and the slight
whiff of angry tragedy in Raitt's vocals that would allow to classify the song
as a «heartstring-puller», if there were any need for such a classification.
Everything else just ranges from straightahead rock'n'roll to dynamic
Motown-style R&B (ʽI Can't Help Myselfʼ).
Interestingly, one of the exceptions from that
formula, ʽLet's Keep It Between Usʼ is a Bob Dylan reject that he
occasionally performed in concert but never recorded in the studio — no idea if
he could be able to flesh it out into something more exciting than the slow
12-bar blues on this album, but before I took a look at the liner notes, I had
not the smallest inkling to associate the song with Bob: clearly, Bonnie is
much better at capturing the spirit of pre-war black female blues singers than
nailing the Zimmerman essence (it may be a good thing, after all, that they
never got her involved in the 30th anniversary show in 1992 even if, on the
surface, she'd make a far more natural choice than Sinead O'Connor). It's just
boring.
The speedy numbers, though, like ʽMe And
The Boysʼ or ʽTalk To Meʼ, are catchy, harmless fun. Curiously,
ʽTalk To Meʼ, opening with a couple of chords nicked from Blondie's
ʽOne Way Or Anotherʼ and then quickly turning into a «post-disco
dance-rock» number, was written by Jerry Lynn Williams, the same guy who wrote
hit songs for Clapton in the mid-1980s (ʽForever Manʼ,
ʽPretendingʼ, ʽRunning On Faithʼ — the latter one was
actually quite good), but ʽTalk To Meʼ sounds most closely to the one
song that Williams did not write for
Clapton, namely, ʽTearing Us Apartʼ, from which I conclude that
Williams not only wrote songs for Clapton, but also inspired Clapton to write
songs in the style of Williams. It's a pretty complicated network out there in
the world of show-biz, as you can tell.
Considering that the band behind Bonnie's back
is competent and tasteful, and that Bonnie's own vocal style is perfectly
compatible with barroom rock (strictly reserved to those barrooms that do not let their clients throw up on the
counter and pass out on the floor), I have no problems about a friendly thumbs up
for the album, despite its expectable problems — the four lines from ʽMe
And The Boysʼ pretty much sum up everything about what's right and what's
wrong here: "Me and my buddies just like to go / We'll have fun, everybody
knows / We don't fuss and we never cry / We just groove, taking in the sights".
No fuss and no crying, indeed. Very cautious groove, too, but some new sights
are definitely taken in. And — no doubt about it — any relations with the boys
are restricted to the purely platonic sphere. But then, you don't always have to imitate Lemmy in order to
play good rock'n'roll.
NINE LIVES (1986)
1) No Way To Treat A Lady; 2)
Runnin' Back To Me; 3) Who But A Fool (Thief Into Paradise); 4) Crime Of
Passion; 5) All Day, All Night; 6) Stand Up To The Night; 7) Excited; 8)
Freezin' (For A Little Human Love); 9) True Love Is Hard To Find; 10) Angel.
I find it a little bit funny — and a little
ominous — that the title of this album would ten years later be appropriated by
Aerosmith, because this here is the beginning of the «Aerosmith-ization» of Bonnie
Raitt. Of course, she'd never exactly been a symbol of «artistic independence»
as such, but up to 1986, there was very little evidence for branding her a
«tool of the industry», either. However, in 1983, already in those early stages
of the «adjust-or-perish» period, Warner Bros. showed her who really is the boss by rejecting a completed
album for lacking commercial potential, and only after two years of nervous
bickering, finally allowed her to put out an alternative, recutting and
rearranging most of the tracks.
Nine
Lives is far from the worst
album I have ever heard (I mean, every time we get exposed to this kind of
stuff, remember Rod Stewart in the Eighties to be brought back to senses), but
it is certainly a record that could be cut by anybody — completely faceless and
robotic even for the standards of Bonnie Raitt, who isn't exactly Ms.
Inimitable Personality herself. It's a big band affair (once again, the number
of people credited in the liner notes is skyrocketing to ridiculous heights),
molded as a very generic, sterilized pop-rock record, heavy on synthesizers,
electronic drums, processed guitar sounds, and corporate songwriting. Revealing
moment: the first song, ʽNo Way To Treat A Ladyʼ, was written by
Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance, and was released in the same year, 1986, by still
another Bonnie — Tyler! And it is fairly hard to decide whose version is more
pompous, overproduced, and deadly dull.
The entire album is full of cringeworthy
moments. Synthesized horns on ʽRunnin' Back To Meʼ, with all these
trumpet players in the studio? Why? Muscular-metal guitar on the steroid power
ballad ʽStand Up To The Nightʼ — who the hell could see Bonnie Raitt
competing for space with Heart and Cher in the Eighties? The simplistic
electro-pop groove on ʽFreezin'ʼ — who the hell could see Bonnie
Raitt competing for space with Prince, or associate her with «music for the
body» as such? And then there's the lyrics disease — as corporate songwriting
sinks to new degrees of lowness, we get lines like "my body is the only
place where we meet anymore" (!!!!!). Good job, Danny Ironstone and Mary
Unobsky, whoever and wherever you may be, for saddling a formerly reputable
performer with ʽCrime Of Passionʼ, arguably one of the most
embarrassing entries in her entire catalog.
In an ultimate bout of irony, ʽTrue Love
Is Hard To Findʼ, a bland cod-reggae offering, features none other than
the 88-year old Sippie Wallace herself on background vocals — Bonnie's personal
idol finally got a chance to back up her disciple something like a few months
prior to her demise on November 1, 1986. Shame it had to happen on this
particular track, in this particular setting and epoch — about twelve or
fourteen years too late for the move to have any serious meaning. For the
record, her cracked vocals, in those few moments when she can actually be heard
above the production din, have more personality here than everything else put
together — but then they are quickly washed away by the coda, a dull
piano-based blues ballad written by Bonnie's old friend Eric Kaz and sporting
the title ʽAngelʼ. The following year, a power ballad called
ʽAngelʼ would be released by Aerosmith for Permanent Vacation, their
first album to mark the transition from living human beings into automated
mannequins. Coincidence? Yes. And no,
if you think of certain deeper reasons. Thumbs down.
NICK OF TIME (1989)
1) Nick Of Time; 2) Thing
Called Love; 3) Love Letter; 4) Cry On My Shoulder; 5) Real Man; 6) Nobody's
Girl; 7) Have A Heart; 8) Too Soon To Tell; 9) I Will Not Be Denied; 10) I
Ain't Gonna Let You Break My Heart Again; 11) The Road's My Middle Name.
Unlike Nine
Lives, Nick Of Time could hardly
be accused of «not being Bonnie Raitt». No, that's her all right — a balanced
mix of «tough» blues and «soft» ballads, not exploring any weirdly unfamiliar
territories, played by the usual army of professional roots-rock sidemen, and
feeling as sincere as they come. So how to explain, in plain simple words of
the English language, why it sucks so much that I'd rather have Nine Lives?..
Put it this way: there's something tremendously wrong in the air when a
record like this tops the Billboard charts, sells five million copies, and gets
all the Grammies. We can admit that in 1971-1973, back when Bonnie Raitt made
her only records that are still worth relistening to on a constant basis,
competition was way more tough, and what seemed like a mere blip on the radar then could aggrandize itself into
something much more impressive in 1989, at least in the antiquated world of
«traditional» rock'n'roll. But even then, there were so many «traditional
rock'n'roll» albums in 1989 that could have made the same grade — why Nick Of Time?
Admittedly, the record gave Bonnie Raitt a new
face. The singles mostly charted as «adult contemporary», and the whole thing
was strongly marketed as an emotionally charged record for aging baby-boomers —
no way any of the kids could get interested in these songs. In a couple of
years, the same strategy would work with Eric Clapton's Unplugged: calm, steady, «wise» music for those old rockers who had
no wish to pretend they were young any more, and preferred the quiet,
slow-burning sounds of Clapton and Bonnie Raitt to the «eternally young» sounds
of the Rolling Stones, perceived as fake and strained. There must have been a
strong demand for this among the elders who were too tired to keep on searching
— «nick of time» indeed.
But this lack of innovation, this desire to
settle down and do something simple and honest, this «graceful acceptance of
age» — who ever said it all had to come with such poor packaging? Producer Don
Was, who would soon become a major provider for rock veterans (the Stones,
Dylan, Ringo Starr, Joe Cocker, etc.), gives Raitt the slickest production she
ever had — yes, he is a magnificent master of sound, polishing, scrubbing, and
disinfecting each note until it glitters like fake gold on a piece of
pseudo-antique furniture. The keyboards, which dominate all the ballads and
even some of the blues-rock numbers, are those modern (well, for 1989)
synthesizers and electric pianos that never had any soul to begin with, glossy
and boring like everything else; the guitars, always kept in strict check, give
the impression of being pre-programmed; and the voice... well, the thing about
Bonnie's voice, which has changed very little since the early days, is that
most of the time it blended into the surroundings, and usually sounded exactly
as good as the non-vocal instrumentation. Nick
Of Time is no exception.
These songs aren't even «bad» per se — except
maybe for the biggest hit, ʽHave A Heartʼ, whose robotic reggae
rhythms are only the second worst thing after the chorus (each time she sings
"hey, hey, have a heart!", I cannot instinctively understand if we are
being implored for human mercy or if we are being offered a delicacy in a brand
new restaurant opened up by cannibals). Some are even catchy, although that
catchiness never ventures beyond the safe walls of predictable blues patterns,
and the blues-and-ballads formula is strictly observed, the two main-and-only
mottos being «don't mess around with tough mamas» and «tough mamas have broken
hearts, too». Lack of taste, good sense, or adequacy is no good grounds for
whipping out a subpoena — taken to court, Nick
Of Time would have you roasted in return and paying all expenses.
But oh man, is it ever simply boring.
«Lifeless» — no. There is plenty of
life in that voice, it's just that it is an altogether uninteresting life, and
I have no idea who could be emotionally entangled in it. These arrangements,
where you have musicians forcefully restraining themselves so as not to break
out of the «easy listening» mold — yes, songs like ʽI Will Not Be
Deniedʼ and ʽReal Manʼ could
have turned the spark into flame, if they'd let the former develop some instrumental
fury and the latter a sloppy-drunk aura, but no: word of the day is
«sterilized», or there'd be no chance for a Grammy.
Even as somebody who is inevitably drifting
closer to mid-age, and has an open attitude towards many records that may have
seemed dull and plodding at 20, but take on new life as we get older, I cannot
see myself ever cherishing an album
like Nick Of Time, not even on any
sort of deathbed. Clapton's Unplugged
was really a different thing — a successful attempt to pour out some soul in a
masterful series of acoustic reinventions, and it worked. Nick Of Time brings nothing new to the table except for gloss,
calculation, and uninspired smoothness that tries to pass itself off as
«experience».
Unfortunately, its commercial success,
surpassing Bonnie's wildest expectations and making her into a household name
after two decades of hanging on the fringes, would guarantee, iron will and
all, that she'd pretty much spend the rest of her career trying to remake this
album, over and over and over again. No, it is not the worst fate imaginable —
Rod Stewart or even Clapton himself, with embarrassing attempts at
«modernization» like Pilgrim, would
produce plenty of «unlistenable» stuff — but sometimes you wonder what is
really worse: go for total stiff «preservation», or try and change with the
flow, even if this is done for obviously commercial purposes. As far as
ratings are concerned, though, this is a fickle opposition: all things are
equal in a thumbs
down judgement.
LUCK OF THE DRAW (1991)
1) Something To Talk About; 2)
Good Man, Good Woman; 3) I Can't Make You Love Me; 4) Tangled And Dark; 5) Come
To Me; 6) No Business; 7) One Part Be My Lover; 8) Not The Only One; 9) Papa
Come Quick; 10) Slow Ride; 11) Luck Of The Draw; 12) All At Once.
I will wholeheartedly admit that Luck Of The Draw, building up on the
commercial success of Nick Of Time
and managing to sell even more copies
(as more and more baby boomers passed a certain age limit?), is a better album,
and probably holds up a little better after all this time. However, the only
reason for this is us passing into the next decade — gradually wringing
ourselves out of the clutches of truly bad, suffocating production. This time,
everything is handled more smoothly, and has a much more «natural»-looking
superficial flavor. Whether this lack of obvious ugliness makes for extra
depth, not to mention entertainment, is a different thing.
I will even admit that ʽI Can't Make You
Love Meʼ, one of those pillars of adult contemporary (yet also a song
fully and completely rooted in early 1970s soft-rock / country-pop / whatever),
is a song that operates efficiently on gut level. As much as I perversely
expect, every single time, her to rhyme the line "here in the dark, in
these final hours" with something ending in "golden showers"
(admit it, it's such a natural rhyme,
isn't it?), there is a real tug there on the "I can't make you love
me" bit that Bonnie nails just right. She does have a knack for capturing
that entire "two meters away from happiness, but no way we're gonna make
it" vibe, and if only a little bit more effort went into the music...
...the problem, of course, being that the music
is completely uninteresting. Blues,
ballads, full arrangements, sparse arrangements, fast tempos, slow tempos —
there is not a single guitar lick or piano chord to be found here that would
step one inch out of the ordinary. Not one inch! As in, you know, you just
don't want to mess up a good formula — no need to upset your potential
audience. Consequently, the best track on the album is probably the one where
little upsetting could be done in the first place, due to format limitations —
the little acoustic ditty ʽPapa Come Quickʼ, with a New Orleanian
accordeon overdub for company, sounding like something out of The Band's Cahoots stage, though less ambitious.
It's traditional, predictable, enjoyable, forgettable, and unregrettable —
everybody does just what they can do. In almost every case, much more could be done. But wasn't.
Where it can still get offensive is in the
«message» area. For instance, ʽSomething To Talk Aboutʼ, written by
Canadian songwriter Shirley Eikhard, is about — imagine that! — two representatives
of the opposite sex wrongly assumed to be having an affair by the outside world
and wishing to — you don't say! — capitalize on this. This almost TITILLATING,
nearly ADULTEROUS subject should have probably been set to a nasty, sleazy,
Stonesy soundtrack, but instead, all we get is some bland keyboards, some weak
soul harmonies, and a shamefully lazy slide guitar solo that probably took
three minutes to figure out. Not convincing!
A bit of atmosphere is injected in Bonnie's own
ʽTangled And Darkʼ, although both the melody and the atmosphere have
triggered an association with The Grateful Dead's ʽWest L. A. Fadeawayʼ
in my mind — and probably not just in mine. (One thing that is special to this
track is a set of brass overdubs that give it extra nocturnal, slightly spooky
flavor.) On the other hand, the mix of «jello-wobble keyboards» and «ethnic»
whistles on ʽOne Part Be My Loverʼ feels like an attempt to ride
that New Age wave — not something that can, or should, be ever done in a
half-assed manner: if you want to be Enya, you should go all the way and farther than that, or else you're simply
channelling a new route for boredom and an inferiority complex.
In short, as we get to the title track, written
by Paul Brady, there's a nagging suspicion that she means it: "Forget those movies you saw / It's in the luck of
the draw / The natural law". That this album and its predecessor managed
to enjoy such a huge success — out of literally hundreds of such releases — has very much to do with «the luck of
the draw», and I am not even beginning to search for any scientific
explanation. At the same time, if it's really luck and not well-programmed
calculation, I guess that this eliminates the need to plant seeds of hatred for
either Bonnie or her producer. Except for some of the really slow ballads and
that whole inescapable sensation of
«why-the-heck-am-I-listening-to-this-when-I-could-be-Superman», Luck Of The Draw is completely
inoffensive and perfectly listenable for all those who appreciate clean,
smooth, professional roots-rock, sometimes bordering on «adult contemporary».
Comestible enough circa 1991, but who really
wants to drag it along into the next century?
Except for Adele, perhaps, who has frequently
covered ʽI Can't Make You Love Meʼ in live performance. But then
again, with all due respect, Adele and her voice could make Bonnie Raitt's
diary come alive, let alone one of her glossy ballads that does accidentally
feature a pre-set working hook from the very beginning.
LONGING IN THEIR HEARTS (1994)
1) Love Sneakin' Up On You; 2)
Longing In Their Hearts; 3) You; 4) Cool, Clear Water; 5) Circle Dance; 6) I
Sho Do; 7) Dimming Of The Day; 8) Feeling Of Falling; 9) Steal Your Heart Away;
10) Storm Warning; 11) Hell To Pay; 12) Shadow Of Doubt.
By the mid-1990s, Bonnie's sound gradually
returned into the river bed of «straight» country-blues and blues-rock, cleaned
up from the excesses of «synthetic» production. In fact, the only song on Longing In Their Hearts, her third
album with Don Was, that would adequately fit the bill of «adult contemporary»
is ʽYouʼ — for some reason, her biggest hit in the UK. Silky
jazz-fusion bass and a hazy screen of synthesizers are responsible for this,
even though the song would have sounded much better if things were kept down to
just the acoustic guitar and accordeon; as a matter of fact, it does have quite
a lovely vocal part, with Bonnie dropping her trademark rasp on the chorus and
showing that she could have become quite an impressive falsetto crooner, had
she wanted to. Fortunately, she did not, but nobody minds a little bit of
falsetto.
Everything else is kept clean, tasteful,
professional, and as for excitement, well, you now know very well what you are
going to get. Surprisingly, it is not the fully arranged, rhythmic, «energetic-aggressive»
blues-rockers this time that attract most of the attention, but the
stripped-down balladeering stuff: as Bonnie ages, her vocal style becomes more
and more sensitive and even sensual on the tender songs, whereas the
«don't-mess-around-with-me» schtick gets less and less convincing. The best
track on the album is arguably her cover of Richard Thompson's ʽDimming Of
The Dayʼ — just a couple of acoustic guitars (some keyboards still make
their way into the song midway through, but are kept down), some backing
vocals, and wonderfully dramatic modulation throughout. The second best track
is the swamp-blues ʽShadow Of Doubtʼ that closes the record — nothing
extraordinary, but a nice enough synchronization of her voice with the slide
guitar and harmonica overtones.
As soon as the band steps in, though, the whole
thing becomes just another routine country-rock experience, the kind that you
can get plenty of in just about any big or small American town that can allow
itself to wine and dine some well-trained musicians. The title track; ʽI
Sho Doʼ; ʽHell To Payʼ; and the record's biggest hit, ʽLove
Sneakin' Up On Youʼ, all follow the same formula. ʽLoveʼ has the
catchiest chorus of 'em all, but "it ain't nothing new", and, worse
than that, it ain't nothing particularly credible. Everybody sounds
professional, nobody sounds particularly inspired — the message is delivered
with the tone of a very boring college professor, completely disinterested in
explaining a potentially exciting subject.
As usual, most of the mainstream reviews raved
on about this one, though — and I guess that if you're in business for this
kind of album, it would be hard to think of a better one. Everything is so
perfectly in its right place and so perfectly «normal», one is either bound to
love this silly or be bored to death. As much as certain people hate the solo
career of Eric Clapton, at least that
guy had it somehow going up and falling down, switching from relatively
exciting highs to abysmal lows: with Bonnie, we have this technically
unimpeachable formula where, at a certain point, you actually begin secretly
wishing for an embarrassment — a techno beat with Autotune? a lengthy rap
interlude? a duet with Montserrat Caballé? anything, just to keep the boredom away. Then you come back to your
senses, of course, but that does not make the record any friendlier. Or,
rather, it is already way too friendly to be any good.
ROAD TESTED (1995)
1) Thing Called Love; 2) Three
Time Loser; 3) Love Letter; 4) Never Make Your Move Too Soon; 5) Something To
Talk About; 6) Matters Of The Heart; 7) Shake A Little; 8) Have A Heart; 9)
Love Me Like A Man; 10) The Kokomo Medley; 11) Louise; 12) Dimming Of The Day;
13) Longing In Their Hearts; 14) Come To Me; 15) Love Sneakin' Up On You; 16)
Burning Down The House; 17) I Can't Make You Love Me; 18) Feeling Of Falling;
19) I Believe I'm In Love With You; 20) Rock Steady; 21) My Opening Farewell;
22) Angel From Montgomery.
From a logical perspective, live Bonnie Raitt
should always be better than studio Bonnie Raitt — less gloss, more energy,
better opportunities to let herself really
go on that slide, in short, everything to celebrate the spirit rather than
worship the form. Which, of course, begs for the question: why wait so long?
Surely a live recording from the old «drunken days» would have captured a
little more fire, not to mention a little higher percentage of good songs?..
The answer is that in the 1970s, Bonnie Raitt
was not as much «part of the machine» as she became with Nick Of Time, and since she did not sell that much, nobody, herself
least of all, probably thought that a live album could help raise any serious
extra cash. But now, with three commercially successful albums in a row under
her belt, a live follow-up would seem like the most obvious thing. Precautions were taken, however — Bonnie Raitt
on her own could hardly have sold as much as Bonnie Raitt and Friends. And if
old-timers like Jackson Browne and R&B veterans Ruth and Charles Brown are
not necessarily going to cut it, then relatively recent chart toppers like
Bruce Hornsby and Bryan Adams sure will.
Even the setlist has been constructed with
almost mathematical precision. Four songs from her latest, for promotional
reasons. Three songs each from Nick Of
Time and Luck Of The Draw — her
biggest commercial successes to date. Three more songs from Sweet Forgiveness, the only album from
her past that could be called commercially successful, to a degree (odd enough,
no ʽRunawayʼ, though). And a small bunch of songs, usually one per
album, from her earliest period when she was still interesting as an individual
artist, so that nobody could accuse Road
Tested of not presenting an
accurate chronological portrait of Bonnie Raitt, all the accents dutifully
lodged in their right places.
Big surprise of the day involves the band
offering a lively take on Talking Heads' ʽBurning Down The Houseʼ,
even though none of the Heads is guesting on the recording (which, by the way,
was made on July 11-19, 1995, at the Paramount Theater in Oakland). The groove
is lifted reasonably well, but Bonnie Raitt replacing David Byrne is a bit like
Al Gore replacing Woody Allen — totally different personalities, and if you
take the vocal atmosphere of irony and paranoia away from the song, the song
becomes pointless. And, with all due respect, you couldn't find an artist less capable of playing absurd character
roles than the totally straightforward Bonnie Raitt. In all honesty, I'd rather
see her doing ʽClose To The Edgeʼ than this.
Anyway, getting right to the bottom of it, the
big deal about Road Tested is that
you get more spontaneity and more slide guitar solos, with ʽKokomoʼ,
for me, being the obvious high point of the show — but honestly, just about
every song from these last three albums is enhanced when you don't have your
engineer diligently smoothing out all the sharp edges. This is never good
enough to make me fall in love with any of these songs (and no spontaneity can
save ʽHave A Heartʼ), but good enough to make me forget for an
occasional moment or so just how much Bonnie Raitt had become the walking/sliding
symbol of adult contemporary. Unfortunately, as soon as Bryan Adams walks out
on stage to duet with the lady on their collectively written ʽRock
Steadyʼ, that old nasty feeling kicks back with all its might. And just
how many songs titled ʽRock Steadyʼ does the world need, I wonder?..
One final moment, though: if you want to try a
bite of this anyway, try to lay your hands on the DVD edition rather than the
one-disc or two-disc CD edition. Somehow, Bonnie's self-assured strutting,
mighty red hair, sexy black outfit, and visual slide technique all seem much,
much more cool than whatever you get from just the audio channels. Much of that
visual image is in common with certain female country music superstars, of
course, but she is still on the bluesier side of things, and at least there
ain't no flag-waving or anything like that. It's also fascinating how her
less-than-stunning looks circa 1972 had paid off so splendidly, as she hardly
looks one day older in 1995 than she did more than twenty years earlier. Totally
stable mediocrity can be worth some respect, too — although in a better world,
Bonnie Raitt might have become the female equivalent of a Rory Gallagher, and
earn herself much more respect than
that. Less money, though.
FUNDAMENTAL (1998)
1) The Fundamental Things; 2)
Cure For Love; 3) Round & Round; 4) Spit Of Love; 5) Lover's Will; 6) Blue
For No Reason; 7) Meet Me Half Way; 8) I'm On Your Side; 9) Fearless Love; 10)
I Need Love; 11) One Belief Away.
You can probably already guess without
scrolling that Fundamental will be
anything but. "Let's get back to the fundamental things", the first
track incites us, but if so, what's up with the production? Its «moaning»
guitar hook may have a certain primal potential, but everything else is just
the same old cozily packaged gloss, as overseen by Bonnie herself, her new
co-producers Tchad Blake and Mitchell Froom, and her latest big bunch of
assistant songwriters, too numerous to mention — loaded with songwriting and
playing regalia to boot, but boring.
Perhaps what they really want to say is that Fundamental takes a sharp turn from the
primarily commercial sound of the previous albums back into blues territory.
Or, more precisely, just «takes a turn» — the word ʽsharpʼ is better
not used in any descriptive Bonnie Rait chronology. Maybe so: the album feels
bluesier on the whole, with no adult contemporary ballads on it and only one
cod-reggaeified number to close out the proceedings (ʽOne Belief
Awayʼ). If that is an achievement, feel free to rate Fundamental much higher than Nick
Of Time and its offspring. If you do not care all that much for the way
Bonnie Raitt plays the blues (in the studio, at least), feel free to pass up on
it like on everything else.
The closest that the record actually comes to
some real fire is probably on ʽSpit Of Loveʼ, a self-written song
that talks about the «aggressive» side of love business and tries to create a
suitable atmosphere, with deep dark basslines, threatening electric piano, and
«howling» lead guitar parts which are probably the most experimental thing that Raitt had done on guitar in
God-knows-how-many years. Towards the end, when she adds some playful vocal
howling as well, it almost manages to sound spooky for a little bit. And even
so, there is always that hard-to-define something that prevents the song from
crossing the threshold of greatness. What is it? Why is the similarly styled
ʽRun Through The Jungleʼ a Fogerty masterpiece and this one just one
of the more decent Bonnie Raitt tracks? No idea. Just intuition.
Still, on a scale of A and B, where B =
«awfully bland, spoiled by too much sentimentality and production gloss» and A
= «listenable, mildly tasteful, instantly forgettable», which seems to pretty
much exhaust the range of Bonnie Raitt in her post-alcohol days, Fundamental is a bona fide A all the
way. The Los Lobos cover ʽCure For Loveʼ has some Chicago-style
shrill electric guitar soloing; the Willie Dixon cover ʽRound &
Roundʼ is friendly acoustic dance-blues (those soporific "round and
round and round..." vocal harmonies really
have to go, though); John Hiatt's ʽLovers Willʼ has probably the best
pure slide guitar solo on the album, one of those reminders that the lady has to do an instrumental album
dedicated to the art of slide playing before she goes; and ʽI Need
Loveʼ, by Joey Spampinato, is kinda funny, set as it is to the ʽGet
Backʼ rhythm and featuring a fairly unorthodox approach to soloing for a
Bonnie Raitt song (as if somebody were messing with a harpsichord from the
inside of the instrument for a few bars).
This is still not really enough for a proper
thumbs up, but at least the quality curve perks up a little bit — at the same
time as Raitt's commercial potential began to drop down again, what with the
album only going to No. 17 (it still managed to reach platinum status, but not
multi-platinum as its predecessors): apparently, a large subset of Bonnie's
admirers was not too pleased about the lack of plasticine-heavenly ballads, so
they all went to buy Eric Clapton's Pilgrim
instead. Which does remind me that, as tepid as these Raitt albums are, I'd
rather have her retro attitude all the way than the horrendous attempts to
«modernize» one's roots-rock sound like the one that pretty much cut the throat
of Clapton's recording career with Pilgrim.
SILVER LINING (2002)
1) Fools Game; 2) I Can't Help
You Now; 3) Silver Lining; 4) Time Of Our Lives; 5) Gnawin' On It; 6) Monkey
Business; 7) Wherever You May Be; 8) Valley Of Pain; 9) Hear Me Lord; 10) No
Gettin' Over You; 11) Back Around; 12) Wounded Heart.
«Raitt's
singing has never been more finely tuned, especially on... the final track, ʽWounded
Heartʼ, a breathtaking duet recorded in one take with keyboardist Benmont
Tench; after nailing it, Raitt reportedly fled the studio, moved to tears; any
second attempt proved both undoable and unnecessary» (Robert L. Doerschuk,
All-Music Guide; I have not been able to find additional confirmation, but no
clear reason to disbelieve the story).
This pretty much
tells us all we need to know, because ʽWounded Heartʼ, a piano ballad
written by contemporary singer-songwriter Jude Johnstone (who also included it
on her own debut album which came out twenty days after Silver Lining), is the very definition of «trivial»: the entire
song rides on exactly one endlessly repeated and not particularly fresh (to say
the least) musical phrase, and the lyrics go like this: "If you listen you
can hear the angels' wings / Up above our heads so near they are hovering /
Waiting to reach out for love when it falls apart / When it cannot rise above
a wounded heart". You could pardon bad wording if it were set to glorious
music, or you could pardon the boring music if it were accompanying brilliantly
stringed verbal phrasing, but damn, this is bad
— generic, corny singer-songwriter fluff that doesn't even begin to approach
the level of some of Bonnie's old ballads like ʽLouiseʼ, let alone
any really high standards of ballad
writing. ʽWounded Heartʼ? More like ʽWooden Heartʼ if you
ask me.
In other words,
the relative «comeback» that she had with Fundamental
has pretty much ended, as we see Ms. Raitt return to the comfortable territory
of soft-rock / adult contemporary. The entire album consists of bland ballads,
limp rockers with a funky underbelly but no energy whatsoever, and
somnambulant folk-pop, completely devoid of hooks, fresh ideas, or
individuality. The miriad of players and contributing songwriters are
completely unrecognizable to me — seeing as how I have little interest in this
particular marketline — and not a single song here stimulates me into getting
to know any one of them better (I did skim through a couple tracks off that
debut album by Jude Johnston — my bad).
In the middle of
it all, though, unexpectedly comes ʽGnawin' On Itʼ, a blues-rocker
with a dirty, distorted rhythm track reminiscent of Paul Burlison's playing in
the Johnny Burnette trio — in other words, a real good sound as compared to everything else on this flaccid affair,
and in order to match it, Bonnie digs deep and recovers some of her trademark
gritty huskiness. The slide work on the track is also good and merges fine with
Steve Berlin's sax — what I'm a-guessin' is that Los Lobos had their hand here,
as well as Roy Rogers, a fine guitar player who had first made his name with
John Lee Hooker in the 1980s... well, all right, some people with a sense of taste actually were involved in the making of this record. Too bad they only made one track sound like it had a decent
pair of musical balls attached.
Do not get me
wrong: softness, tenderness, emotionality, sensitivity, vulnerability are all
very much welcome on a Bonnie Raitt record, or on anybody else's record — as
long as they go hand in hand with some melodic or vocal move that is at least
remotely interesting, unlike the dissipated atmospheric phrasing of, say, the
title track, which combines a hell of a lot of different string, keyboard, and
percussion instruments into a melting pot where they never come together into
anything coherent or more-than-superficially-pretty. Worse still, many of these
songs try to rock (ʽFools
Gameʼ, ʽMonkey Businessʼ) — but why would you want to listen to
Bonnie Raitt going middle-of-the-road funky, when you can listen to, say,
Prince going all the way? What would
you be — afraid to enjoy somebody
going all the way? Maybe that is what «adult contemporary» is all about —
people too scared to turn their emotional stove up all the way, or it might,
you know, blow up and hurt somebody.
Total thumbs down — and I am not taking that pun-based hint from the match between the album
title and the «silver lining» foxily flashing out of the ongoing general
redness of the lady's hair. If this is her way of communicating to us that one
need not be afraid of aging, and that aging only brings on more wisdom and a
sharpened sense of responsibility (towards one's fans, for instance), I will
opt for a whole load of irresponsible stupidity instead.
SOULS ALIKE (2005)
1) I Will Not Be Broken; 2)
God Was In The Water; 3) Love On One Condition; 4) So Close; 5) Trinkets; 6)
Crooked Crown; 7) Unnecessarily Mercenary; 8) I Don't Want Anything To Change;
9) Deep Water; 10) Two Lights In The Nighttime; 11) The Bed I Made.
There's a little less tepid funk and wishy-washy adult contemporary on Souls Alike than on Silver Lining — and a little bit more
blues and jazz; consequently, it marks a (at least temporary) return to
Dullsville from Offensivetown. There might even be a small handful of
relatively decent songs for those who normally despise all forms of «soft
rock». The problem is, 2005 is not the kind of year where anybody could have a
«change of heart» concerning anything
that might be done by the likes of Bonnie Raitt, and a detailed discussion of
any such album could only be of interest to hardcore fans with a penchant for
distinguishing between the «fifty shades of grey».
Not addressing
that category, we shall keep it very brief here. Randall Bramblett's ʽGod
Was In The Waterʼ is a pretty good song — dark, unsettling country-blues,
well adorned here with bitterly, but rather unsentimentally weeping organs,
wah-wahs, and swampy slides, and even the lyrics are good, finding a fresh
angle for the old perspective: "God was in the water that day... / Castin'
out a line to the darkness / Castin' out a line but no one's biting". And
Bonnie's bitterish vocal tone is practically perfect for this particular
setting.
Emory Joseph's
ʽTrinketsʼ is another standout: introspective nostalgia without the
obligatory sappiness, sort of a «talking blues» (at times, coming close to
«rapping blues») with a bit of musical muscle, not particularly catchy, but
each of Bonnie's bitter dry "when I was a kid..." verses has a whiff
of intrigue. I mean, with a little bit of imagination you could see Lou Reed
doing a song like this, and it's a rare Bonnie Raitt song that allows you to
cast such a projection. Nicely fluent piano and slide dialog in the outro, too.
Finally, there is
Jon Cleary's ʽUnnecessarily Mercenaryʼ, a sly, but big-hearted New
Orleanian romp that could actually benefit from a brass section — but the
well-worded chorus remains memorable even without any extra support. Cleary
himself plays the piano solo, and he pretty much owns the song (as well as any
other song here where he is prominent enough), being a well schooled disciple
of the Professor Longhair / Dr. John school of Mardi Gras Keyboards. As usual,
just a tad more energy and wildness couldn't have hurt, but it's still fun.
The rest is hardly
worth a mention — blues and ballads, gently rippling through the air without
generating much excitement. The trip-hop beats on ʽDeep Waterʼ are an
intentional «modernistic» nod that fails for that exact reason (do it because
it's good, not because it's a special
gesture that puts a chronological seal on the album). The final number,
ʽThe Bed I Madeʼ, is a moody jazz ballad written by David Batteau
where Bonnie tries to be Madeleine Peyroux, but she doesn't have the voice or
the knack for it — so at least there's more
going on here than on ʽWounded Heartʼ, but it is still a very
(appropriately) sleepy conclusion for an overall sleepy album. So just borrow
ʽGod Was In The Waterʼ for your «Contemporary Roots-Rock Nuggets»
compilation and ʽUnnecessarily Mercenaryʼ for your «New Orleans
Lives!» compilation and feel free to forget the rest if you feel like
forgetting the rest.
BONNIE RAITT AND FRIENDS (2006)
1) Introduction; 2)
Unnecessarily Mercenary; 3) I Will Not Be Broken; 4) God Was In The Water; 5)
Gnawin' On It; 6) You; 7) Love Letter; 8) Two Lights In The Nighttime; 9) Well,
Well, Well; 10) Something To Talk About; 11) I Don't Want Anything To Change;
12) Love Sneakin' Up On You.
Once again, this significantly shortened
version of the show is objectively inferior to the complete DVD release — not
because more Bonnie Raitt (and friends) is better Bonnie Raitt (and friends),
but because watching the lady perform
is somehow always a more satisfactory experience than hearing the lady perform, even if for this particular evening
(September 30, 2005, at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City) it seems as if
she slightly overdid it with the «amazing technicolor dreamcoat», in Tim Rice's
words. Fortunately, no jealous brothers of Joseph stuck around long enough to
tear that outfit to bits after the show.
The actual guests include Wolfman, Dracula and
his son... that is, I meant to say, there is Keb' Mo', Ben Harper, Alison
Krauss, and Norah Jones — four major professionals with impeccable taste, four
«keepers of the flame» who keep it relatively low, but firm and steady, and,
just like Bonnie herself, each of them could be accused of being frequently
bland and even more frequently boring, but not of not knowing their craft.
Consequently and predictably, the album is even, well-combed, tastefully sensitive,
and instantaneously forgettable.
A large part of the problem is the setlist,
though: I was actually hoping that with a supporting pool like that, Bonnie had
a chance of actually going back to the roots of the roots and doing stuff like,
well, for instance, a whole bunch of cover versions of old urban blues and
country blues numbers — recuperate some Sippie Wallace and/or Memphis Minnie
obscurities, for instance. Alas, six
out of twelve numbers included here are taken directly from her latest album,
and most of the others do not go back further than Nick Of Time, either. So what's the big deal?
As it happens, Keb' Mo' is pretty much wasted
on ʽLove Letterʼ (he does play better lead guitar than on the studio
original, but the solos are too short and non-flashy to notice that). Norah
Jones duets with Bonnie on ʽI Don't Want Anything To Changeʼ, a limp,
all-atmosphere ballad from the latest album that hardly gains anything from the
addition of Norah's «affected» singing style (for some reason, that little «wheeze»
of hers really irritates me, direct predecessor as it is to the even more
atrocious «husky» style of such glossily packaged femme-fatales as Lana del
Rey). Much better is the duet with Krauss on ʽYouʼ — a good idea to
bring in an additional spoonful of vocal beauty to a song that was already
quite pretty in the first place.
But arguably the major highlight is the duet between Bonnie and Ben Harper on
ʽWell, Well, Wellʼ, an old-timey blues tune with new lyrics (by Dylan
himself) but that old Blind Willie Johnson spirit. They tear it up on the
acoustic and slide guitars so fabulously (well, maybe «tear» is not quite the
right word) that, once again, I have no
idea why so much of that other space had to be wasted on the adult contemporary
crap or faithful renditions of decent tunes like ʽUnnecessary
Mercenaryʼ and ʽGod Was In The Waterʼ that simply sound like
identical twins of their studio counterparts. Yes, it is still «smooth» and
«safe», but I'd rather see Bonnie Raitt go on carrying a time-honored tradition
than engaging in a time-dishonored one.
Ultimately, if you want to interpret «Bonnie
Raitt and Friends» as «Bonnie Raitt gets together with some mighty fine blues
musicians and dabbles in old-time fun with the lot of 'em», do not. Really, this is mostly just Bonnie
Raitt promoting her latest album in a non-totally-dull fashion. That album was
not among her worst, and the friends do provide some extra amusement, and the
live CD goes down well (and the live DVD even better), but ain't nothing to
write home about even if you are in
the habit of writing home about Bonnie Raitt, in which case you must be a
pretty weird specimen of H.S.S.
SLIPSTREAM (2012)
1) Used To Rule The World; 2)
Right Down The Line; 3) Million Miles; 4) You Can't Fail Me Now; 5) Down To
You; 6) Take My Love With You; 7) Not Cause I Wanted To; 8) Ain't Gonna Let You
Go; 9) Marriage Made In Hollywood; 10) Split Decision; 11) Standing In The
Doorway; 12) God Only Knows.
Odd, but I like this album. It isn't altogether
different from any other Bonnie Raitt album, but I like it more than anything
she's offered us in... let's see here... scroll up... scroll up... scroll...
scroll... more scroll... okay, Green
Light was the last time I gave her a thumbs up, wasn't it? well, looks like
the most sympathetic (cautiously refraining from using the word «best») record
she gave us in thirty years. Quite a record, that.
Good choice of co-producer in Joe Henry (never
mind that the guy is married to Madonna's sister: his production credits
include veterans like Mose Allison, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Solomon Burke,
as well as Aimee Mann's The Forgotten
Arm, so he's cool by me). Relatively small band mostly consisting of Bonnie
regulars (the Hutchinson-Fataar rhythm section, etc.) and some surprising guests
like experimental guitar guru Bill Frisell. Very few signs of adult
contemporary. But most importantly —
there's a touch of sharpness here throughout, chasing out the flabbiness and
genericity whose shadow haunted Bonnie's work since Nick Of Time (and some acid-tongued folks would say, since she
first stepped into the studio).
It is something on which you cannot put a
finger at all — just a pinch of crispness in the vocals, bitterness in the
playing, a slightly grumblier tone for the electric rhythm guitar, a basic
instinctive feeling that is slowly generated out of a hundred tiny nuances. It
may have something to do with the lady's age: as she hops over the 60-year
barrier and feels that two thirds, or maybe more than two thirds of the way
have passed by, a sniff of the imminent scythe (cynically speaking) sometimes
works wonders for the artist. Hardly a coincidence, wouldn't you say, that she
covers here not one, but two songs
from Dylan's Time Out Of Mind —
probably the most quintessential «death harbinger» album from a rock veteran?
None of the two are ʽNot Dark Yetʼ, but that would have been way too obvious.
However, Slipstream
on the whole is not a slow, moody, soft-textured record. ʽUsed To Rule The
Worldʼ is not a particularly optimistic title for the album's opening song
— indeed, written once again by Randall Bramblett, it is a set of bitter
thoughts on the failed illusions of the baby-boomer generation — but in its own
restrained way, it rocks, and Raitt spits out the angry summarizations ("Your
life had come and gone / Now you're mystified / Standing with the rest of us /
Who used to rule the world") as if the blame were to be placed on the baby
boomers themselves (and maybe that is
exactly where it is to be placed), as well as delivers her fieriest slide work
in ages, both here and on several other of the rocking tracks. (Actually, her
best slide work on the album is on ʽSplit Decisionʼ, a humorous
«boxing» song full of lyrical double entendres, written by guitarist Al
Anderson who also figuratively duels with Bonnie on the solo parts — this is as
close as a Bonnie Raitt song ever gets to «fun» and «exciting»).
The Dylan covers are done really well, and I mean musically, not merely in a «Bonnie sings
them credibly» manner, which would be dull, because she sings almost everything
credibly (dull). But on ʽMillion Milesʼ, there is a mean, swampy,
overtone-loaded slide solo, and on ʽStanding In The Doorwayʼ, there
are some really exquisite slide licks that remind me better than anything else
how she can turn the instrument from slithering snake to high-hoppin' singin'
bird in a single moment. And, no doubt, this all has to do with the fact that
these are just the right songs selected by her at exactly the right time — in
fact, I am sure that the album could have been even better had she simply
decided to donate 70% of the space to appropriately selected Dylan covers. Hey,
the man has written gazillions of songs on death and despair — each of them
more gripping than anything Gerry Rafferty or Kelly Price could offer.
Slipstream is Raitt's first album of original material
since 2005 — seven years between albums is the longest break she ever took, and
while there is no evidence whatsoever that it might be her last record, it does
look as if now, at her age, she were still interested in regularly
expectorating new stuff like clockwork, which is good, because it gives more
opportunities for a meaningful statement on something fundamental every now and
then. Perhaps my scent has been misled by the seductive Dylan covers, or by too
much theorizing, but what the heck, just one more thumbs up will not hurt anybody. We
will even overlook the fact that the quasi-obligatory boring piano ballad at
the end has the nerve to be titled the same way as Paul McCartney's favorite
song in the world, despite not being worthy to kiss its footprints.
Two things annoy me the most about Ms. Raitt —
her way-too-tight integration in the formulaic roots-rock industry, and her
courteous self-restraint and «politeness». Slipstream
may still be well integrated and much too gallant for its own good, but at
least this time around, it doesn't exactly make a cult of these values, and we'll take it as a positive sign. And if
it does happen to be the last Bonnie Raitt album, we'll take it as an even more positive sign — as decent as it is
on the whole, I seriously doubt that she will be ever able to top it.
DIG IN DEEP (2016)
1) Unintended Consequence Of
Love; 2) Need You Tonight; 3) I Knew; 4) All Alone With Something To Say; 5)
What You're Doin' To Me; 6) Shakin' Shakin' Shakes; 7) Undone; 8) If You Need
Somebody; 9) Gypsy In Me; 10) The Comin' Round Is Going Through; 11) You've
Changed My Mind; 12) The Ones We Couldn't Be.
The unimaginativeness of those album covers is
beginning to get me down, but then again, it does fit in very well with the
music. So here we are now — another four years, another album that shows Bonnie
doing her thing, not giving a damn, getting rave reviews from mainstream
critics for doing her thing and not giving a damn, and pretty much ignored by
the world at large and probably to be forgotten at the precise moment that she
releases her next one, despite all the rave reviews and despite doing her thing
and despite not giving a damn.
Is there anything particularly unpredictable
here? Well, she covers Los Lobos (ʽShakin' Shakin' Shakesʼ), which is
sort of a first, and INXS (ʽNeed You Tonightʼ), which is a complete
surprise, but then ʽNeed You Tonightʼ is one of the band's most rocking tunes, and it's cool to see Bonnie's
band redo it in the manner of a Stones' rocker (incidentally, the Stones
themselves had already recycled the song's trademark trilling riff on
ʽLook What The Cat Dragged Inʼ ten years before). For that matter, a lot of stuff here sounds like Stones-lite
— Bonnie's second guitarist George Marinelli suddenly decides to go all Keith
Richards on tracks like ʽThe Comin' Round Is Going Throughʼ, while
Bonnie's slide lead wraps around him like a Ronnie Wood solo.
Not that I mind — in fact, at this time I don't
mind at all whatever she is doing,
because neither the Stonesy rockers nor the country ballads sound annoying or
distasteful: there are no objections I could raise against the arrangement and
production values of the tunes, or against the professionalism or even against
Bonnie's vocals: now, after all those years, she finally reaps the fruits, with
a vocal delivery every bit as strong and technically perfect as it was
forty-five years ago, when her vocals were considered emotionally and
technically mediocre compared to so many of her peers... and where are her
peers now? But if you want a nuanced
opinion, I'd say that Dig In Deep is
a little weaker than Slipstream,
because it sounds more like a bunch of bluesy jams recorded for fun in the
studio rather than a record with an attitude.
That's about all I can say before I turn into
Thom Jurek of the All-Music Guide and start peppering you with enticing, but
meaningless phrases like "her earthy singing voice is more disciplined and
holds more emotional authority than ever before". Isn't
"disciplined" sort of the opposite of "emotional"? And,
anyway, if what he is trying to say is that Bonnie Raitt only gets better as
she gets older, wouldn't that be somewhat underselling her early records? As
far as I can tell, she's just stuck in a formula, and all she can do is polish
that formula to professional perfection, and the only reason why this stuff is
preferable to the Nick Of Time era
(and it is) is because it avoids the pitfalls of hollow, soulless production.
And that's about it.
PS. I actually enjoyed listening to this album,
and even toe-tapped and played air guitar on a couple of tracks. Honestly, I
did. I'm just jotting this down because I will most likely never ever hear it
again, so check: "In 2016, I did truly and verily enjoy Bonnie Raitt's Dig In Deep". Let posterity be the
judge.
UNORTHODOX BEHAVIOUR (1976)
1) Nuclear Burn; 2) Euthanasia
Waltz; 3) Born Ugly; 4) Smacks Of Euphoric Hysteria; 5) Unorthodox Behaviour;
6) Running On Three; 7) Touch Wood.
I kind of like that album cover, you know. Oh
man, that look, that priceless look
in the guy's sole discernible eye peeking out at you from behind the blinds, as
if saying: «Yeah, hi everybody, it's me, your old friend Phil from Genesis, but
shh, don't tell anybody I'm playing in this fusion band, see, they'll sort of
beat me up if they find out, they'll maybe even do bad things to my contract,
and then I won't be able to write ʽFollow You Follow Meʼ and change
the face of the music business, but you know, they're telling all sorts of bad
things about me now, but what I really like to do most of all is just drum like
crazy in a fusion band, see, and we got this new fusion team all lined up for
you to hear just how cool I can be behind the drumset, because those frickin'
buddies of mine out there in Genesis, they're all these folk-and-classical
nutsos, they have no idea how to syncopate, and I'm a major Buddy Rich fan and
all, and... uh... d'you think I'm letting too
much sun inside this place?..»
Okay, fun's over. In reality, the album sleeve
was designed by the mighty Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis fame, and the partial
face staring at you from behind the blinds most likely has nothing to do with
either Phil Collins or any other member of the band. It is just an artistic
trick, really, that would make you think that something creepy, weird, and
maybe even illegal, or at least perverted, is going on — especially when taken
in combo with the album title. So, like any normal person, you rush out to
immediately buy it... only to discover that the music behind it is rather
standard fare jazz-fusion, without any such deeply questionable connotations.
Still, the illusion, once generated, does not go away so quickly. There's a
sick mystery tied in to the album cover, so eventually you will still be trying
to pick up on it in different corners. Besides, one of the tracks is called
ʽEuthanasia Waltzʼ. I mean, how sick is that?..
Not particularly sick. The band, which was
really started off almost by accident, through some executive fancy at Island
Records, consisted of «core» members John Goodsall on guitar (previously only
known from a brief stint in Atomic Rooster), Percy Jones on bass (previously
not known at all), and Robin Lumley on keyboards (likewise) — and Phil Collins
just happened to be walking by as they began thinking about growing up from a
meandering «jam band» into something more serious and equipped with a
recording contract. Phil, having just ascertained his future as lead singer in
Genesis with the success of A Trick Of
The Tail, probably felt himself ready to tackle two completely different
projects at the same time — especially since the Genesis project never really
allowed him to show off everything that he could do with his kit.
Now, as far as I can tell, «fusion» is
generally allowed a rather low quota in public memory — despite the enormous
wealth of fusion-style material to come out of the Seventies, most people only
remember two or three figures, maybe John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Chick
Corea... some might come up with Weather Report or mention the brief «fusion
period» of Jeff Beck, and the rest is really mostly for connoisseurs.The
reasons are simple enough — the marriage between jazz and rock was not all that
warmly embraced by fans on either side, with jazzmen thinking that it was a sellout
and rockers thinking that it was a wankfest. And indeed, even to my ears a lot of fusion sounds like both things
at the same time. But there are exceptions, even credited to names that are not
as big as Chick Corea, and I think Unorthodox
Behaviour is an excellent record that belongs in that category.
First, the album hits a very decent balance
between «meaningful composition» and «technical proficiency». These players are
all undeniable professionals with impressive technique, but they rarely, if ever,
strive to amaze the player with million-notes-per-second,
flight-of-the-bumblebee-in-under-one-minute runthroughs and the like — heck,
there's not even a single drum solo anywhere in sight. The emphasis is often
on groove and sometimes on improvisation, but most often it is on perfectly
stating a theme, developing it and carrying it to a logical conclusion: Brand X
really compose, they do not merely
rely on the Great Sonic Spirit to take them into the stratosphere and drag
them through an endless chain of space bars and galactic hangouts.
Second, some of the themes are really quite
engaging. ʽNuclear Burnʼ, for instance, takes about a minute and a
half for the players to «gather themselves», warm up and tone their muscles
around a collected groove, and then to launch into the slightly
Spanish-influenced Goodsall guitar theme, aggressive and melancholic at the
same time, fast, complex, and yet totally memorable, especially when it is
echoed to a tee by Phil's drumming patterns. ʽBorn Uglyʼ starts out
as something hot and funky, with a groove not unlike any given James Brown
number, but soon makes it known that its main hook will not be the funky
guitar, but a series of three-chord sequences played by Lumley that sound as if
they'd rather belong in a pop song — and so, what's a nice piano chord like you
doing in a funky groove like this? Well, don't ask me, really, but I find the
contrast hilarious, and its establishment at the beginning of the tune makes
it easier to sit through the entire eight minutes, even if later on it does
tend to meander and sometimes degenerate into empty finger-flashing (for very
brief periods of time, though).
It is not every day, indeed, that you find good
strong riffs in fusion, but Goodsall comes up with a riff that is most
certainly good and strong in ʽSmacks Of Euphoric Hysteriaʼ — maybe
not the best title for a track that rather resembles the triumphant dance of a
belligerent tribe on the eve of their first major military victory, euphoric,
perhaps, but not particularly hysterical. It is also not every day that you
find fusioneers influenced by Brian Eno, but the title track here is indeed
based on Eno's ʽOver Fire Islandʼ, borrowing its rhythmic pattern and
bass line and extending the formerly spooky two-minute piece of incidental
music into an eight-minute long exploration of «musical jungle», as guitars,
keyboards, and chimes engage in dialogs, trialogs, and polylogs like birds and
beasts in the trees, while the bass melody ties them all together like The
Force. Kudos to Lumley for all the hilarious bells-and-whistles from his
keyboards — they make it all sound really, really cool, and Phil provides a
suitably convincing tribalistic backing.
Most of all, Unorthodox Behaviour is just fun.
All you have to do is to let it through the proper gate in your mind, and a
record that might seem dull and generic under different conditions will
suddenly appear as sprightly, colorful, and amusing, completely free from both
the annoying pedantism and the murky pessimism that often make fusion hard to
stand. These gents here are not really trying to show you how great they are
(well, perhaps Phil is trying, just a
little, but cut the guy some slack — after five years spent sitting in the dark
behind some guy in flower costumes and fox masks, you'd probably want to show
off, too), nor are they trying to prepare you for the end of the world or even
to crack open your overwhelmed and superawed mind. They're just sharing some
light, harmless, positive fun with you. I'd say, for one, that that is pretty unorthodox behaviour,
wouldn't you agree? Thumbs up, of course.
MOROCCAN ROLL (1977)
1) Sun In The Night; 2) Why
Should I Lend You Mine (When You've Broken Off Yours Already); 3) Maybe I'll
Lend You Mine After All; 4) Hate Zone; 5) Collapsar; 6) Disco Suicide; 7)
Orbits; 8) Malaga Virgen; 9) Macrocosm.
The title of the album is a pun that is
somewhat misleading, because, while this album certainly contains a dose of
rock and roll and shows some definite
Moroccan (or North African / Near Eastern in general) influences, neither the
first nor the second components are all that essential to its essence and
success. Instead, what Moroccan Roll
is really about is team playing: like
most of the good fusion albums, what
matters is how the musicians gather around the groove, regardless of where the
groove is coming from — jazz, blues, Malhun, Chaabi, or polka.
In fact, Eastern influences are mainly limited
here to the first track, ʽSun In The Nightʼ, which is fairly atypical
of the album as a whole — a slow, quasi-spiritual-meditative number with
sitars, ethnic percussion (some or all of it contributed by new band member
Morris Pert), and, most surprisingly, vocals
from Phil Collins, singing in Sanskrit, no less. It's only a few lines,
repeated several times, but still, somewhat of an achievement — too bad he
didn't try that one again on No Jacket
Required, it might have helped save his reputation with the
progressively-minded. The results are amusing rather than enlightening — as, to
tell you the truth, would seem to be the general case with jazz-blues-rock
people straightforwardly appropriating Indian, Near, or Far Eastern motives for
«deep-reaching spiritual purposes» — but the track does generate positive
vibrations, and is almost guaranteed to make you smile.
Already on the second track, though, Moroccan Roll becomes More Unorthodox Behaviour: once more we
enter the realm of funky beats, syncopated bass grooves, speedy guitar runs,
and sci-fi era keyboards. The good news is that the band remains inspired and
dedicated, and you can see that they are still having fun playing together. It
does not always result in memorable music: the 11-minute long ʽWhy Should
I Lend You Mineʼ gives the impression of being seriously improvised, with
the first part of the jam played at a steady mid-tempo, but never really going
anywhere in particular, and the second part slowing down to a crawl and
attempting to generate a romantic, but maybe slightly dangerous nocturnal
atmosphere. It is all too easy to dismiss it as a boring noodlefest — much less
so if you approach it from a «free flight» angle, just watching all four
(five?) players trying to stay coordinated with each other and yet take the
groove in a slightly different direction every twenty seconds. Sure it's a
typical thing with jazz/blues improvisation, but not everybody always sounds
like a natural at this.
Amusingly, it is precisely this somewhat
meandering jam that is credited in its entirety to Phil Collins —
soon-to-become master of the concise (and much more annoying) pop hook. As we
move on to tracks credited to Lumley, Goodsall, and Jones, we end up with
tighter grooves and more distinctly expressed themes: ʽHate Zoneʼ has
a lightly ominous descending riff whose final cadence leads us into a sort of
«funky hell», punctuated by jerky bass and guitar figures; ʽDisco Suicideʼ
has nothing whatsoever to do with disco (and, I would like to hope, with
suicide), but is instead a moody, contemplative track for most of its duration,
filled with romantic piano solos and even a brief chime-and-choral part at the
end — celebrating the suicide of disco with bells and joyful da-da-da's?
whatever. Finally, the mid-section of ʽMacrocosmʼ is the fastest bit
on the entire album, with some amazing guitar/drum interplay, even if the track
as a whole does not quite justify the ambitious title — these guys still have a
long way to go if they want their music to reflect a Mahler-type vision or
something like that.
Amusingly, I'd say that this is one Brand X
album that probably has most in common with contemporary Genesis — its overall
contemplative, but simultaneously fussy mood, mixed with an ounce of melancholy
and gloom, a slightly autumnal atmosphere, would be quite compatible with Wind & Wuthering, and fairly
representative of «the autumn of prog» in general. But then again, one
shouldn't be reading too much into a rather light-hearted venture like this —
just give it one more thumbs up and move on.
PS. And yes, apparently so it seems that the
album was originally (mis)titled Morrocan
Roll, but don't blame them record people too much for this. Everybody's
entitled to a mispelleng every once in a while, and besides, it's sort of a
relief to know that people were as bad with names of foreign countries in 1977
as they are now.
LIVESTOCK (1977)
1) Nightmare Patrol; 2) -Ish;
3) Euthanasia Waltz; 4) Isis Mourning, Pt. 1; 5) Isis Mourning, Pt. 2; 6)
Malaga Virgen.
Live albums by fusion artists are somewhat of a
puzzle — first, because fusion as such always tends to be associated with the
«live-in-the-studio» principle, what with its being the rock-era inheritor to
classic jazz and all; second, because jazz-rock musicians are simply not
expected to wear different faces for their studio and live avatars. So, unless
the live album consists entirely of new material, its only purpose would be to
prove that the actual musicians in the band are, indeed, cunning and dexterous,
and can keep a tight groove going in real time — and even so, that would be
thin proof, since nobody knows to what extent the results could be doctored in
the studio. Unless you want to be real obnoxious about it and compare them
with bootlegs. But are there really people in this world who are obsessed with
hunting for Brand X bootlegs?
Anyway, Livestock
was put together from recordings that cover a period of one whole year and two different
drummers: three tracks were culled from London club gigs with Collins and two
more — from an August 1977 concert at the Hammersmith Odeon with Kenwood
Dennard, replacing Collins who had only just completed his duties for Genesis'
Wind & Wuthering tour. And it
does have to be admitted that much of the material is new: ʽEuthanasia
Waltzʼ and ʽMalaga Virgenʼ are the only tracks (though they do
take up more than a third of the album) to have been previously available. Not
that the new material sounds all that difficult from the old one, though — but
then, nobody would expect it to.
As it happens, they could have omitted the
references to «live» altogether. The tracks either fade in or fade out; the
audience response is limited to maybe just a couple seconds of applause every
now and then; and there is no stage banter whatsoever (according to the «if you
don't sing, you don't speak, either» principle that is also rather typical of
the instrumental jazz tradition). The two songs taken over from the studio
catalog are almost totally identical to the studio versions (except for muddier
production values in the live setting), and so the album's real worth lies in
the new material — not because it is live, but because it is new.
From that point of view, the opening
ʽNightmare Patrolʼ is one of their best compositions from that period
— it does have a slightly ominous, nocturnal atmosphere to it, if not
necessarily nightmarish, as well as a dreamy-poetic guitar riff and an
involving adventurous mid-section in which they show themselves able to build
up suspense and then happily release it to everybody's relief and satisfaction.
It is also the first track to feature the new drummer who shows himself quite
worthy of the crown, although, for my money, his fills and rolls are not nearly
as smooth and totally natural-sounding as Phil's.
The central composition on Side B is ʽIsis
Mourningʼ, where they bring down the tempo and try to inject a little
«soul» — lots of atmospheric synthesizers and weepy bluesy soloing, but the
focus is still on group playing, so neither Lumley nor Goodsall get to properly
show off just how passionate, loud, and overflowing with salty excretions Isis
could be in mourning. So, instead of trying to be moved to tears ourselves, we
should probably just enjoy the interplay instead — the way Goodsall and Jones
trade licks, arpeggios, scales, and occasional dissonances around each other
once the tempo slows down and they get a better chance to impress us with the
musical dialog. Hardly unique, but fun, and they never hang around one repetitive
theme or gimmick for too long — Goodsall, in particular, has this knack for
frequently changing the tones and effects within a short time, so once you get
close to getting tired of hearing him do minimalistic jazz licks, he'll sense
that and start spitting out funky wah-wah chords, before going into 12-bar
territory and back to jazz guitar again.
Still, the fact remains that as a composition, only ʽNightmare
Patrolʼ seems to have stick-around potential — the rest are more like
temporary vamps, enjoyable because of the players' professionalism and
creativity, but hardly pretending to much else. Throwing in the album's
slightly inferior sound quality (as compared to the studio albums, of course —
on the whole, the recording is perfectly acceptable), I would certainly not
recommend it as a point of entry. Once you have become a Brand X fan for life
by assimilating Unorthodox Behaviour
and Moroccan Roll, feel free to
proceed. Or, at least, take additional advice from some genuine fusion expert,
the kind of person who can actually offer a serious opinion on why one fusion
album is «better» than another fusion album — my own opinions here are as innocently
amateurish as any thoughts I might have on global warming or the Big Bang.
MASQUES (1978)
1) The Poke; 2) Masques; 3)
Black Moon; 4) Deadly Nightshade; 5) Earth Dance; 6) Access To Data; 7) The
Ghost Of Mayfield Lodge.
Telling «bad fusion» from «good fusion» is a
worthless, ungrateful task if you are not a fusion musician yourself. But there
is no getting away from gut feelings, either, and mine tell me that somehow, in
some way Brand X «lost it» with the loss of Phil Collins, yes indeed. Perhaps this
is not really related, but it is a
fact, or, rather, two facts, that (a) Masques
is the first album not to feature Phil at all, and (b) the first Brand X album
about which I genuinely do not feel at all thrilled. Could these facts be
related? We'd need to waste a lifetime to find out.
Anyway, this here is a very straightahead, no
bull, no deviation, highly formulaic fusion album. No Moroccan influences,
vocals, or anything that would distract us from jazzy grooving. Only the first
track, ʽThe Pokeʼ, is based on a steady rock beat, but what they do
with it is not very interesting — it sounds a bit like Rush in places: gruff
hard rock molded into a complex, «progressive» form that has more to do with
dry musical geometry than spiritual excitement (not that Rush always sound
unexciting or anything, but they do have a lot
of filler passages like this one). Once ʽThe Pokeʼ is over, though,
it's all about Percy Jones and his trademark «bass zoops» for the rest of the
album. Even if he only wrote or co-wrote two tracks here, this album sounds
like it belongs to the bass player almost exclusively.
The bad news is that this time, there are no
particularly intriguing or moving themes. You'd think, for instance, that an
11-minute long track named ʽDeadly Nightshadeʼ should have a properly
deadly sound, deserving of its name — instead, it just moves from slow to fast
and back to slow sections without even trying to look like it were going
somewhere. A lot of stuff is happening, but essentially it is just a meandering
jam. Likewise, ʽThe Ghost Of Mayfield Lodgeʼ has a cool title, too,
and is apparently based upon ghost stories about a real lodge in which Percy
Jones used to dwell for a while, but apart from a minute-long rhythmless
section that could be interpreted as «ghostly interplay» between keyboards,
bass, and percussion, there is nothing I would regard as all that «ghostly»
about the track — just another groove. In fact, you could transplant parts of
ʽNightshadeʼ into ʽMayfield Lodgeʼ and vice versa and no
one would probably take notice.
The only more or less memorable theme is
discoverable in ʽEarth Danceʼ, but that one, too, once they move away
from the theme into soloing, is interchangeable with ʽNightshadeʼ. And
even the theme is not that awesome — a rather basic salsa variation.
Apparently, there's no place like Cuba if you want to envision something as
grandly universalist as an «Earth Dance». Kind of a lightweight atmosphere,
I'd say, for such an ambitious venture.
All said, I'm almost tempted to put the thumbs
down for this, but two things stop me from being so mean — first, there'd be
much worse stuff on the way, and second, well, boring or not, it is clear that
they were still working their asses off on these grooves. If I completely clear
my mind from that «context» thing, Masques
still provides almost fifty minutes of exemplary playing — on autopilot,
perhaps, but not without the collective guardian angel from the Fusion
Department guiding minds, hands, and plugs. As background music, this is still
first-rate; I'm just disappointed that the tunes are so completely
association-free this time around. Or maybe we should read the title more
literally, and agree that the band is indeed playing with their «masques» on,
and then spend the next ten years of our life trying to peek behind them.
PRODUCT (1979)
1) Don't Make Waves; 2) Dance
Of The Illegal Aliens; 3) Soho; 4) Not Good Enough/See Me!; 5) Algon (Where An
Ordinary Cup Of Drinking Chocolate Costs L8,000,000,000); 6) Rhesus Perplexus;
7) Wal To Wal; 8) ...And So To F...; 9) April.
A good title indeed. Not «commercial product»,
or «soulless product», but just «product» — this and the following album were
the results of a bizarre rotating line-up where Goodsall would essentially play
with two different bands. One included Percy Jones on bass, Morris Pert on percussion,
and newcomers Mike Clark on drums and Peter Robinson on keyboards; the other
had John Giblin on bass and, surprisingly, Robin Lumley on keyboards and our
old pal Phil Collins, back on drums and, yes, on vocals.
So put together the fact that we actually have
«Brand X» and «Brand Y» here, and also the fact that we have two Collins-sung
pop songs on the record, and you can see why it is a «product», in the sense
that there is hardly any pretense at spontaneity and getting carried away on
the wings of inspiration. Not that the two playing ensembles sound all that
different from each other, or any different from what they used to sound — in
fact, if anything, this fresh-blood-mix approach shook everybody up a little
bit and made Product an overall more
interesting LP, I think, than Masques
before it. But the approach is not without its problems.
First, many fusion fans went berserk at the
idea of including ʽDon't Make Wavesʼ and ʽSohoʼ, both of
which really sounded more like contemporary Genesis than genuine Brand X; all
the more curious that the first song was actually written by Goodsall, and the
second co-written by him with Collins. It is true that both are no great shakes
— overproduced pop-rock without any particularly interesting hooks or
enthralling messages — and neither of the two agrees thematically with the
band's general fusion sound. But it's not as if their presence here is particularly
annoying, and it's certainly not as
if their inclusion blocked the way of any instrumental masterpieces, judging
by the quality of what else we got. At the very least this presence comes
across as a surprise — are Brand X gearing up to become a daughter project of
Genesis? Is Phil Collins capable of turning fusion into adult contemporary pop
as expertly as he does with prog?
Well, for the moment it just looks like a timid
experiment, because the rest is quite traditional. Amusingly, the first of the
two long jams is called ʽDance Of The Illegal Aliensʼ, presaging the
title of a well-known Genesis pop hit several years later — hardly a
coincidence, even though the track was written by Jones, does not feature Phil
at all, and has nothing to do with illegal aliens outside of the title (but a
lot to do with Jones' magnificent «rubber bass» patterns, though apart from of
that, I cannot applaud or remember much of anything else). Likewise, the second
of these jams, ʽNot Good Enoughʼ, is almost completely about Percy
and his bass — occasional synth and guitar solos surrounding it are simply
keeping it company.
Of the last four tracks, three are
unremarkable, but ʽ...And So To F...ʼ is a bit of a standout: although
an instrumental, it is credited to Collins, and it's got serious art-pop
overtones that remind one of Genesis' style on Trick Of The Tail (particularly ʽLos Endosʼ). Thus,
ironically, Product turns out to be
the only non-Genesis album on which you can get a taster of circa-1976 Genesis and circa-1982 Genesis at the same time,
even as they peep in and out of a generally fusionistic environment. This is
weird, and if at least half of these tunes were as catchy or emotionally captivating
as classic Genesis, and the other half were worthy of Brand X's early days, I
would have certainly awarded the album a thumbs up. But on the other hand, it's
«product», and the careful manufacturing does not seem to leave a lot of space
for genuine inspiration, so I guess I'll pass.
DO THEY HURT? (1980)
1) Noddy Goes To Sweden; 2)
Voidarama; 3) Act Of Will; 4) Fragile; 5) Cambodia; 6) Triumphant Limp; 7)
D.M.Z.
I think it is technically enough just to state
that all the tracks here are outtakes from the Product sessions, and that if the band did not think them good enough
for Product, then we are completely
free from any respectable obligations. Arguably the best thing about the record
is its cover, and even that one is fairly tacky in a New Wave-era fashion. The
second best thing are probably the liner notes, just because they were written
by Michael Palin (and the album title itself is an elusive reference to
witches from The Holy Grail).
The third best thing would have to be at least
one stand-out track, but everything that stands out here is actually not good: most notably, ʽAct Of
Willʼ, which sounds like a hookless Alan Parsons Project-style adult pop
song, with meaningless verses sung by Goodsall through a vocoder for «mystical»
effect. I suppose the guys had a lot of fun with this in the studio, but Brand
X as an adult pop band is a suicidal proposition by definition. Goodsall's
other attempt to write a «dark and serious» composition is
ʽCambodiaʼ, slow, dense, arpeggiated, gradually layering on heavy
riffs and shrill solos, but never truly realizing its potential — somehow, it
seems to promise an apocalyptic crescendo, yet all it eventually squeezes out
of itself is a simple ceremonial blues theme that is neither too threatening
nor too awe-inspiring.
Most of the rest consists of Jones-dominated
numbers that just give us more fusion clichés and no truly memorable
themes. Fans of Percy's fretboard-walking will certainly enjoy them, but
ʽNoddy Goes To Swedenʼ, ʽFragileʼ, ʽD. M. Z.ʼ —
they all sound like technically flawless, spiritually pedestrian fusion jamming
to me. Robinson's piano work on ʽD. M. Z.ʼ is funny in places, as if
he is trying to deconstruct some pre-war pop melody with his odd tempos and
dissonances, but that is just the main theme, and the rest is guitar and bass
noodling, mainly, and this time, it really begins to look as if the alleged
«freedom of self-expression» has become an invisible cage for these guys.
ʽTriumphant Limpʼ, the title of a half-hearted and ultimately
forgettable attempt to bring a more hard-rocking sound into their lives, would
have been a much more telling title for the entire album — «triumphant»,
because you have to admire both their tenacity (clinging to the tried-and-true
in spite of changing musical fashions) and their nimbness, agility, and
professionalism, but «limp» because, well, this music has long since ceased to
be «progressive» in any reasonable meaning of this word. Thumbs down.
IS THERE ANYTHING ABOUT? (1982)
1) Ipanaemia; 2) A Longer
April; 3) Modern, Noisy And Effective; 4) Swan Song; 5) Is There Anything
About?; 6) Tmiu-Atga.
Yes indeed, the title is a not-so-subtle
reference to the process of «scraping the barrel». Despite the 1982 date (by
which time Brand X no longer even existed as a functioning outfit), most of
these tracks were recorded in 1979, hailing from the same sessions that already
yielded the previous two albums — all but the title track, which dates from an
even earlier period. As if that weren't enough, ʽA Longer Aprilʼ is
indeed a much extended version of ʽAprilʼ from Product, and ʽModern, Noisy And Effectiveʼ is based on
the backing track from the pop song ʽSohoʼ, also from Product. That should give you some
ideas.
To be fair, seeing as how the band had
effectively run its course, and how that particular brand of fusion had pretty
much worn itself out by the end of the Seventies, it may be a good thing that they did not stick
around to reinvent themselves as an electrofunk party or a synth-pop outfit. At
the very least, Is There Anything About?
does not irritate — nothing on it is really seductive or mind-blowing or of
much use to anybody, but it has the same predictable Brand X style as anything
else the band did, and you do get to hear more Collins percussion (he is
credited for all the drumwork, since the outtakes here do not seem to include
any of the Clark/Pert sessions).
The title track may have originally been
rejected because it does not have a particularly distinct theme, but it does
remind one of the jerky suspense of Unorthodox
Behaviour, before the band settled on an overall smoother style —
Goodsall's sizzling-bubbling wah-wah lines and Jones' «nervous-breakdown-style»
bass rip at each other like crazy, and Phil wacks them both on the back
relentlessly to keep things permanently hot. The difference between this track
and something like ʽIpanaemiaʼ is clearly visible — the latter is a
smooth, easy-going, soft-funk mood piece with soothing Spanish guitar passages
and ambient synthesizer background, high quality elevator muzak with little
artistic pretense. But that's okay. If more elevators played muzak like this,
humanity would only benefit.
On the down side, ʽModern, Noisy And Effectiveʼ
sounds much more silly than ʽSohoʼ, now that the vocals have been
wiped out and replaced by simplistic «happy» keyboards of the «your local TV
sitcom» variety, where you are expected to jump up and down in a fit of
artificially induced happiness as the credits roll on. Unless the effect here
is intended to be parodic, this is
really stupid, but, unfortunately, there are no straightforward hints at irony
or sarcasm. And some of the titles continue to be misleading — ʽSwan
Songʼ neither literally nor
figuratively sounds like a swan song, unless Lumley's squeaky synth parts are
supposed to remind you of swans, which they do not (more like pigs than swans,
if you ask me). Some nice harmonies, though.
Still, as a bunch of outtakes to wrap up the
original story of Brand X, this could have been much worse. The band's biggest
mistake, I believe, was when they began to hunt for «beauty» in their music
rather than «mystery» — even if this does not qualify by itself as a sell-out,
it sold short their actual talents and blended them in the already
hard-to-tell-apart mass of instrumental peddlers of the late Seventies. Had
they pursued a somewhat more, let's say, «aggressive» path of action, history
would have been kinder to them. But even so, for four years they did not make
one single move that would definitively place them into the «easy listening»
category, and that's gotta count for something — especially if your band has Phil Collins in it.
XCOMMUNICATION (1992)
1) Xanax Taxi; 2) Liquid Time;
3) Kluzinski Period; 4) Healing Dream; 5) Mental Floss; 6) Strangeness; 7) A
Duck Exploding; 8) Message To You; 9) Church Of Hope; 10) Kluzinski Reprise.
Say what you want, but there are dumb careers
and there are smart careers, and even if you happen to be instinctively bored
by any sort of jazz fusion, you will still have to admit that Brand X had an
almost unusually smart career for a band that was once started by Phil Collins.
For instance, they totally sat out the Eighties, a most unfortunate decade for
old-timers as a whole, and only once its excesses were over, Goodsall revived
the old brand once again — this time, envisioning Brand X as a lean and mean
«power trio». The only old veterans here are Goodsall himself and Percy Jones
(the two guys who were most important in the first place), with new drummer
Frank Katz perfectly adequate to the task ahead. As for the keyboard layers,
they are all being taken care of by means of new technologies — namely,
Goodsall's MIDI-guitar.
The result is a very solid record whose fanbase
will probably count up to a few hundred people, as it happens with most jazz
teams on the planet these days — nothing groundbreaking, just a tasteful and
intelligent application of the formula with a few quirky, amusing, and/or
memorable nuances. No toying around with dance pop, adult contemporary, stadium
rock, or New Age motives — just forty-five minutes of good old fusion where
your ear only tells you that we are way past 1976 because of those MIDI guitar
tones (hence, occasional flashes of Belew-era King Crimson before your eyes).
Another more modern association might be with
Steve Vai, except Goodsall never goes for the gusto with distortion, special
effects, or shredding — but he does now occasionally integrate monster heavy
riffs into tricky time signatures, alternating them with softer jazzier
passages, as it happens on the opening ʽXanax Taxiʼ, where the first
half is jackhammered inside your head and the second half lightly tap-dances on
the crushed dust of your skull. Also, on the suitably titled ʽChurch Of
Hypeʼ he has a few «rock god» flashes where he turns his guitar into a
Harley-Davidson for a brief while, but, like Vai, there's a reasonable sense
of irony there if you can feel it.
More often, though, what makes this album stand
out a wee bit above the rest are the little things — for instance, the way
Goodsall sustains that intense vibrato on the main theme riff of ʽLiquid
Timeʼ; or the little «pseudo-orchestral» interludes on ʽKluzinski
Periodʼ (who the heck is Kluzinski, I wonder?) where the man's MIDI
guitars occasionally break in like a strictly disciplined army of
business-meaning cellos, before we go back to «sloppy» free jazz mode; or Percy
Jones' predictable, but still-fun-after-all-these-years bass showcase on ʽStrangenessʼ;
or all the weird noises on ʽA Duck Explodingʼ (there might be something exploding there, but
how can a duck explode for seven minutes?).
Most importantly, there is enough musical
diversity in these tracks to make them distinguishable from each other, which,
as far as I am concerned, is the key thing in distinguishing good fusion from
bad fusion — there's even an acoustic guitar interlude in the middle
(ʽHealing Dreamʼ), and none of the pieces are there simply as excuses
for jamming. Again, this does not make them great as such, but it does assure
you that XCommunication is more than
just a «nostalgic comeback»: it is a bona fide attempt to push the Brand X
sound into further territory from where it was standing a decade ago. If the
results are not overwhelming, it is solely because it is hard to think how they
could be overwhelming at this
juncture (you don't exactly see, say, John McLaughlin revolutionising the
world of music circa 1992, and John Goodsall ain't him). Other than that,
though, it's all certainly worth a thumbs up, for the fans at least.
MANIFEST DESTINY (1997)
1) True To The Clik; 2)
Stellerator; 3) Virus; 4) XXL; 5) The Worst Man; 6) Manifest Destiny; 7) Five
Drops; 8) Drum Ddu; 9) Operation Hearts And Minds; 10) Mr. Bubble Goes To
Hollywood.
A fairly ambitious title — particularly for an
album that went by practically unnoticed, disappeared in a flash, and was not
followed by any new Brand X record ever since. Of course, if the intended
intention was to manifest that Brand
X's destiny is to fade away and never come back, then everything is perfectly
correct. Especially because the record kinda sucks.
Well, no, I guess it doesn't exactly «suck» as
such, but compared to XCommunication,
it does not offer even the same kind of «moderate thrill». Obviously, Goodsall
and Jones wanted, once again, to show that the old rocking horse could still
learn new tricks. So now, instead of continuing to work in the nice and
concise trio format of XCommunication,
they puff up the band, recruiting two
additional bass and keyboard players (Franz Pusch and Marc Wagnon), one more
drummer (Pierre Moerlen of Gong fame) and even a flautist (Danny Wilding) — and
proceed to reinvent their sound in this configuration.
The results are... well, it seems as if they
finally have decided to modernize their classic sound, but do it gradually, so
that, despite being recorded in 1997, much of the record sounds like it was
done in the Eighties. Now they have
some New Wave influences, some adult contemporary, some pop metal, some
Prince-style electrofunk, some Belew-style electric guitar, and the overall
tone of the album is more robotic, stiff, and harsh than it had ever been in
the past. And this is not really a good thing, because making stiff robotic
records prevents them from exploiting their biggest strengths as guitar- and
bass-playing musicians.
For one thing, Goodsall's guitar here
frequently sounds atrocious — already on the first track, he goes into
overdrive and starts shredding all over the place, sending off metallic blasts
that would rather be enjoyed by fans of Joe Satriani, and occasionally invade
the particularly corny turf of Yngwie Malmsteen. Fortunately, this is not an
all-pervading problem, but he does display this new penchant for finger-flashing
in «virile metal mode» quite a few more times, and he never really did that
before. For another thing, with this heap of new players, Percy Jones'
fundamental role in the band is diminished — he still gets to have some great
bass parts, particularly on his own compositions such as ʽThe Worst
Manʼ and ʽDrum Dduʼ, but they are buried in the mix.
Finally, there is a serious lack of memorable
themes: it just seems like they are so happy to test out this new lineup of
theirs and the new groovy sound effects and playing styles that they forgot to
write meaningful tunes. The only composition here that produces the immediate
impression of «well thought out» is ʽXXLʼ, a «cool-sounding» funky
dance number that has a sharp groove, some awesome fretboard finger-running
from Percy, and even some vocals mixed deep in the background — but its «sexy»
sound is hardly what we come to expect from Brand X, nice as it is to know that
they have a fondness for James Brown and Prince.
Overall, the most memorable aspect of Manifest Destiny is its relative
weirdness — as if the band were trying to change lanes on the highway and ended
up swerving off the main road and finding itself lost in the middle of nowhere.
This is a very subjective judgement,
because, after all, we are dealing here with a fusion album from 1997, but it
does sort of objectively agree with what would happen in the future for Brand X
— nothing, that is. As of 2015, when this set of reviews is being finalized,
the band has kept quiet for eighteen years: I guess Goodsall and Jones are
still trying to come up with a good answer to the question «what should ʽunorthodox
behaviourʼ look like in the 21st century?», and until they believe they
have found one, we're relatively safe from Manifest Destiny Vol. 2.
NO PUSSYFOOTING (w. Robert Fripp) (1973)
1) The Heavenly Music
Corporation; 2) Swastika Girls.
«Both of these compositions are terrific, or
both are crap, I can't decide» — that's what I wrote ages ago about this album.
So much time has passed, though, and now I believe I can.
In 1973, albums with just one track per side
were nothing new, and neither were lengthy droning compositions that took ample
time to explore a single musical groove, idea, chord sequence, believing that
there was no better way to go totally transcendental. What did not happen yet was a fortuitous meeting
between two musicians — one with a beyond-the-ordinary vision for electric
guitar playing, another one with an above-the-common understanding of the
possibilities of electronic gadgets — who could pool their talents together
and come up with a deeply intellectual conception for how The Perfect
Psychedelic Record could sound.
Eno and Fripp began working on No Pussyfooting in 1972, back when the
former was still an official member of Roxy Music, but already felt
uncomfortable about having to compromise his vision for the sake of Bryan
Ferry's flamboyance. The main pretext was to test out the tape-delay system
commonly known as «Frippertronics», because nobody was ever able to figure out
how it works except for Fripp himself. Actually, it shouldn't be all that
complicated — essentially, it's just a special technique, requiring two
tape-recorders trading signals back and forth so that your guitar sounds like
it's being played in a deep, multi-sectioned cave with a great echo system.
But, of course, you have to coordinate the recorders so that the delays and
echos do not turn the whole thing into an atonal mess, and in order to do that,
you probably have to be Robert Fripp.
Still, when it's just one guitar, even
hallucinating like that, one can feel a little lonely, and this is where Eno
really comes in. On both these tracks (which were, by the way, recorded almost
a year apart of each other), it is his ambient loops that provide the
foundation for Fripp's guitar. On ʽHeavenly Music Corporationʼ, the
loops are mostly droning buzz, wobbling in amplitude and continuously yielding
a cello-like sound, as if you were stuck in some fifteen-minute snippet from a
particularly dark Wagner passage. On the much more merry sounding (and even
more merrily titled!) ʽSwastika Girlsʼ the loops are completely
different — high-pitched, ringing, more imitative of a fairy-tale harp sound
than anything else.
Whether Fripp actually coordinates his guitar
playing with Eno's loops or not is hard to say, especially since a lot of work
was done by Eno at the mixing stage — apparently, he had himself a lot of fun
with Robert's tapes, cutting and splicing at will. In any case, the best thing
about both of his extended and transformed solos is that they are actually
solos — not one-chord drones or anything, but thoughtful improvisations along
the same lines as contemporary King Crimson. On the first track, the solos come
quickly and are stern, dark, brooding, but not particularly angry or unhappy —
sometimes they resolve themselves into majestic swoooooops that sound like birds of prey unleashed by the «heavenly
corporation» upon the listener, but they don't cause any damage or anything. On
the second track, there are many more overdubs, including what seems to be a
droning acoustic guitar loop mixed with Eno's vibes, and the actual soloing
arrives later, around the eighth minute — and it sounds a lot happier. In fact,
I've got a hinch that they originally wanted to call the composition
ʽRainbow Girlsʼ, but changed their minds at the last moment and
called it ʽSwastika Girlsʼ instead. Not that much of a difference
anyway.
So how good
is it? Groundbreaking — for sure, but is this something that is still worth
listening to? Personally, I now believe it all totally works as an emotional
experience. On one hand, the pieces can be classified as «ambient», but on the
other hand, they are not really «minimalist», since there is simply too much
going on there. The first track is actually quite tempestuous in nature, and
the second has this resplendent, kaleidoscopic nature that sort of celebrates
diversity and singularity of everything at the same time. And if you can see
the beauty in Fripp's guitar playing at
all, then these fourty minutes will be anything but boring: inspiration and
soul-seeking dominate both tracks.
Ultimately, it is the combination of these two
powers that wins me over. Eno's dark-wobbly or shiny-clinky loops + Fripp's
multi-layered «intellectual drones» are a perfect combination, it's a joy
watching them making this «pseudo-conversation» with each other, and it does sound somewhat transcendental. It
would never be the same with just a regular keyboardist, who probably would
have just played some Bach tribute instead of Eno's Terry Riley fetish. And
best of all, there is not a single ounce of noise
on the record — no feedback, no crunch, nobody trying to drown the proceedings
in a sea of nasty distortion to mask the lack of talent. Nope, it's all clean
and melodic in its own way, even humorous, as Fripp sometimes makes the guitar
grumble, growl, or croak in laughter. Great record, totally worth a thumbs up
after all these years.
HERE COME THE WARM JETS (1973)
1) Needle In The Camel's Eye;
2) The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch; 3) Baby's On Fire; 4) Cindy Tells Me; 5)
Driving Me Backwards; 6) On Some Faraway Beach; 7) Blank Frank; 8) Dead Finks
Don't Talk; 9) Some Of Them Are Old; 10) Here Come The Warm Jets.
If you dissect Eno's proper debut album into
its integral components and muss over each one separately, you will probably
find nothing new under this particular sun. Brian's chief musical inspiration
in terms of basic melody must have come from the Velvet Underground —
references to the banana LP are in abundance here, and we will mention a few
later on — and his use of crazy-looking and crazier-sounding electronic devices
owes a lot to minimalists, Krauts, and maybe even Keith Emerson. His «affected»
vocals are Marc Bolan and Tiny Tim at the same time, and his lyrics are...
Captain Beefheart, perhaps? Whatever.
None of this prevents Here Come The Warm Jets from still
being one of the most stunning and unusually striking debut albums in
existence, because never before had there been such a brash, exciting, colorful
amalgamation of catchy pop structures, weirdass studio trickery, surrealist
lyrical and sonic imagery, intelligent humor, and heartfelt emotion at the same time. Above and beyond everything
else, this is a pop album — it is totally
accessible to those who have issues with staggering song lengths, off-putting
time signatures, excessive noise, or jarring dissonance — but it is a pop album
created by an experimentalist intellectual pretending to be the patient of the
world's largest nuthouse. And he's got soul, too.
The busily droning three-chord guitars that
usher in ʽNeedle In The Camel's Eyeʼ are exactly midway in between
the Velvets' ʽI'm Waiting For The Manʼ (which had two chords, I
believe) and the Ramones' ʽBlitzkrieg Bopʼ (which also had three),
but the accompanying vocal melody is actually sung rather than recited — in
fact, if you dig it out from under the guitars that keep it buried as if in a
tightly sealed sarcophagus, it's a perfectly catchy vocal melody that would
feel right at home on any Beatles album: "Those who know / They don't let
it show / They just give you one long life and you go...". Hmm, sounds
like something Lennon could write, too. But then there comes this gruff bass
solo, and it's like the one on the Velvets' ʽSunday Morningʼ — and
then it makes an unexpected couple of pit stops, like on King Crimson's
ʽSchizoid Manʼ — and then we reprise and fade away with da-da
harmonies — and what you just heard was a relatively simple pop song, but very bizarrely produced.
It is probably because of the loud distorted
guitars that people sometimes call this a «glam» album — which it certainly is
not if by «glam» we mean «epic rock theater» like Bowie's Ziggy, or even if we just mean «rock'n'roll with a really, really loud and thick guitar sound»,
because the latter does not crop up here too often. But really, it is just for
the lack of a specific term that the word «glam» is used, because Here Come The Warm Jets stubbornly
defies pigeonholization: what is ʽThe Paw Paw Negro Blowtorchʼ, for
instance? Seems to be a blues-pop number with a pubroom attitude and with
vaudevillian vocals — that is, right before two or three synthesizers enter the
room and start chatting with each other about their casual robotic problems of
the day, and it all becomes some sort of a sci-fi freak show, and by the time
we get back to the vocal part, it is too late because the backing guitars have
completely gone off their rocker and now sound as if somebody put 100,000 volts
through them.
The album's got a great feel for dynamic shift,
too — if the first song is (technically) an optimistic anthem, then the second
already moves in the direction of a deranged carnival, and by the time we get
to the third one, the mood has shifted to positively mean: I mean, "Baby's
on fire / Better throw her in the water / Look at her laughing / Like a heifer
to the slaughter" isn't exactly a reassuring view on personal
relationships, and the extended solo by Robert Fripp here is much darker than
his usual work, especially when it starts flashing and wobbling on the lower
strings in an almost Black Sabbathy fashion. On the whole, it's a rare glimpse
inside the «evil» part of Eno's mind, which he usually does not allow free
access into the studio.
Then, once the evil has been properly
exorcised, we get the tender heart of Eno — ʽCindy Tells Meʼ is
another throwback to the Velvets, both in the lyrics ("Cindy tells me the
rich girls are weeping..." — compare "Candy says I've come to hate my
body...") and melody-wise (some of the chord changes are once again
reminiscent of ʽSunday Morningʼ), but there is no misanthropy or
reclusiveness here: Eno has a much more positive view on things than Lou Reed
(I mean, even ʽBaby's On Fireʼ is more like the mock-evil grimacing
of a mischievous imp than a blast of the devil's proper hellfire), and where
the Velvets used their atmosphere to sing about femme fatales and Freudian
matters, Eno uses it to sing about the unforeseen consequences of too much women's
lib ("they're saving their labour for insane reading", "perhaps
they'll re-acquire those things they've all disposed of" — disgusting male
chauvinist porn fan).
The show never ceases to amaze — these are just
the four first songs, and then there is the out-of-tune paranoid insanity of
ʽDriving Me Backwardsʼ, the epic piano-and-synth gorgeousness of
ʽOn Some Faraway Beachʼ (presaging the peaks of ambient-pop that
would be reached on Another Green World
and Before And After Science), the
«Bo Diddley goes New Wave» hooliganry of ʽBlank Frankʼ, the
McCartney-esque piano pop of ʽDead Finks Don't Talkʼ (psychedelic
backwards guitars included), the choral harmonies of ʽSome Of Them Are
Oldʼ, and the instrumental title track — which, as far as I'm concerned,
could serve as the blueprint for a staggering amount of indie-rock creations of
the 21st century, with its simple, repetitive, triumphant synth blare over
propulsive tribal beats: British Sea Power and even Arcade Fire, eat your
as-of-yet-unborn heart out, or at least acknowledge your debts. Not that it is
all that easy to acknowledge one's debts to a song that, according to rumor,
surreptitiously glorifies «golden showers», but since when has rock music been
a stranger to kinky metaphors?
As you might have already guessed, Here Come The Warm Jets is quite a
juicy album, but the thing I like the most about it is that it's really got a
heart — some of the tracks are almost religiously beautiful (ʽFaraway
Beachʼ) or inspiring (those synth blasts on the title track are pretty
much welcoming you to a brand new world), or hilarious (the «chatting robots»
on ʽBlowtorchʼ sound much more human to me than some actual humans
from that particular era). No filler, plenty of creativity, even a touch of
spontaneity (achieved by cramming tons of «incompatible», according to Eno,
guest musicians in the studio), and there you go — one of the best
«intelli-pop» albums ever released. It even managed to chart, very briefly,
reaching #26 in the UK, a feat that no other Eno album managed to repeat (then
again, Eno has never cared much for promotion campaigns, let alone touring).
And it actually makes you feel great about the man's split-up with Roxy Music —
which allowed for two masterpieces
(this one and Roxy's Stranded)
rather than one to be released the same year. In short, an exuberant thumbs up.
TAKING TIGER MOUNTAIN (BY STRATEGY) (1974)
1) Burning Airlines Give You
So Much More; 2) Back In Judy's Jungle; 3) The Fat Lady Of Limbourg; 4) Mother
Whale Eyeless; 5) The Great Pretender; 6) Third Uncle; 7) Put A Straw Under
Baby; 8) The True Wheel; 9) China My China; 10) Taking Tiger Mountain.
The title of the album, borrowed from one of
the eight «model operas» produced for the needs of the Cultural Revolution in
China, seems to hint at some sort of «strategic design» for the album, but it
will take a lot of analysis and research to uncover the design in question —
or, for that matter, any actual Chinese influence: even a song called
ʽChina My Chinaʼ shows no signs of Eno's preoccupation with any Far
Eastern motives. Eno was, however, much interested in Oriental philosophy and
mysticism, and it is said that the process of creating this album involved the
usage of «Oblique Strategies», a set of printed cards with cryptic remarks like
«Honour thy error as a hidden intention» or «Work at a different speed» that
was largely influenced by the I Ching
(one wonders why they didn't just go ahead and use the I itself).
The one thing that does get noticed is that the album is much more quiet, leisurely
paced, and stripped of vocal and instrumental «hooliganry» that was all over Here Come The Warm Jets. It is by no
means «ambient» or «becalmed» (only the final title track approaches true
serenity), but it feels much more «planned», evenly paced and well-measured, as
if there was, indeed, some imaginary chessboard upon which the songs were
strategically arranged into a well-fitting configuration. The tempos are
mostly similar (slow to mid-tempo), with only one jarring exception that will
be discussed later; the vocals are natural, easy-coming, and mostly unaffected;
the hooks are laid out in strictly disciplined geometric patterns; and the
lyrics, though largely nonsensical, create the illusion that we are being
communicated something important, in impenetrable code: "The fat lady of
Limbourg / Looked at the samples that we sent / And furrowed her brow... Her
sense of taste is such that she'll distinguish with her tongue / The subtleties
a spectrograph would miss / And announce her decision / While demanding her
reward / The jellyfish kiss".
So is this just one of these «put-on» albums —
something that aspires to deep meaning but is in reality an empty shell? By no
means. Taking Tiger Mountain is a
terrifically successful exercise in «intellectual spirituality» — an attempt to
make a rule-based mix of intentional strategy and fateful chance, where songs
would be carefully crafted and guided
by spontaneous decisions at the same time: think Blonde On Blonde with a mathematically precise mind behind all the
crazy ruckus. Actually, do think so —
doesn't ʽBack In Judy's Jungleʼ give the impression of a much more
tightly disciplined ʽRainy Day Womenʼ?
On the whole, the album is decidedly less «fun»
than Warm Jets, but also on the
whole, it is darker and more mysterious. The first two songs are somewhat
lulling and friendly — ʽBurning Airlines Give You So Much Moreʼ does
sound like a charming, leisurely bit of publicity (for a burning airline, that
is), and the aforementioned ʽJudy's Jungleʼ is a merry-go-round that
is only slightly offset with a slithering, nasty guitar tone (is that Eno
playing his «snake guitar»?). But beginning with ʽFat Lady Of
Limbourgʼ, the record assumes a somber tone that is rarely abandoned
(only ʽPut A Straw Under Babyʼ, another lighthearted waltz,
temporarily lets some sunlight through the clouds), although «somber» does not
equal «depressing» or «threatening». Rather, these tracks weave together a
tapestry in which some professional alchemist is busy brewing up green bubbly
potions in his tower — with just a tinge of black magic, but it's not as if
it's being used for particularly sinister purposes. More out of curiosity.
The album particularly comes to a boil (sorry
for another cauldron reference) on ʽThe Great Pretenderʼ, whose
clattering bass pattern does sound related to a (not very frightening) horror
movie, and then on ʽThird Uncleʼ, the fastest, busiest track on the
album that certain superficial critics used to call an «early precursor to
punk», even if it would be harder to find someone more removed from the
quintessential punk mindset than Eno — this here is just another strategy of
his, where maybe they just pulled out that card that read «Work at a different
speed», so they sped it up, and Manzanera thought it adequate to play a
howling, «angry» guitar solo, and the result is just another of Eno's little
mysteries, maybe one that takes you on a wild, out-of-breath chase through a
thick bamboo jungle.
I must confess, though, that the «strategic
layout» of the album has always seemed a bit too calculated for me — out of Eno's «big four», Taking Tiger Mountain is the one that
has the least amount of pure soul, in fact, «soul» does not properly emerge
until the serene conclusion of the title track. There is no complaining over
the fact that the entire album sounds like one huge musical conundrum — such
was the artist's intention, no less, and this is what makes it unique, and
indeed, it may be awesome fun listening and re-listening to these songs, trying
to make wild (and most probably wrong) guesses about its internal logic just
like a crazed-out Sinologist would make wild guesses about the I Ching. But I would not recommend it as
a representative introduction to Eno's «pop period», because it would give you
the wrong impression of «Eno the alchemist» instead of the correct one — «Eno
the trickster with a heart of gold», which you can get from any of the other
three classics.
Nevertheless, it must also be stated that the
record sounds more original and individualistic than Warm Jets — this time around, it is much more difficult to reduce
it to the sum of its influences; I guess we have to thank the «Oblique Strategies»
for that, as well as the active presence of Phil Manzanera and Robert Wyatt,
neither of whom were interested in imitating anybody else. In any case, this is
absolutely essential listening — haunting, intriguing, literate, creative, and
totally open to whatever interpretation your own mind comes up with for it. Thumbs up.
ANOTHER GREEN WORLD (1975)
1) Sky Saw; 2) Over Fire
Island; 3) St. Elmo's Fire; 4) In Dark Trees; 5) The Big Ship; 6) I'll Come
Running; 7) Another Green World; 8) Sombre Reptiles; 9) Little Fishes; 10)
Golden Hours; 11) Becalmed; 12) Zawinul/Lava; 13) Everything Merges With The
Night; 14) Spirits Drifting.
Attention all instrumental album composers!
Remember this — if you're going have minimal vocals on your record, or no
vocals at all, the only thing that's going to explicitly speak up for you is
SONG TITLES. So if you have this really frenetic, delirious, free-form mess
instrumental going on, well, I know
you like being cool and all, but come on now, it does not make rational or irrational
sense if you call it ʽAunt Jemima Goes Shopping For Proustʼ. And if
you have this slow, soothing, transcendental electronic hum thing, with
minimalist overdubs, you are not
going to convert any extra fans by calling it ʽMore Salami, Pleaseʼ.
You might claim that by forcing the
listener's brain to search for available connections between the words and the
music, you are unblocking previously unknown neural pathways — but you wouldn't
exactly have scientific proof for that, and without scientific proof you'd just
be a pretentious dick here.
What I really love about Another Green World, which one could alternately call «the most
ambient of Eno's pop albums» or «the most pop of Eno's ambient albums», is how
it all makes sense largely because of
perfect matches between song titles and the music. He has created an alternate
universe here — a very natural, organic world completely represented by sound —
whose elements, while not being perfectly unambiguous, still take on far more
concrete shapes than almost anything you previously heard on «otherworldly»
psychedelic records. It is probably the closest equivalent, in art-pop music,
of Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition
— a series of vignettes that transmit particular impressions and situations,
except that the whole thing takes place in a parallel world rather than our
mundane reality (then again, ʽBaba Yaga's Hutʼ was not exactly a
local landmark, either).
First, the very title of the record. It is
«another world», yes, but it is also a «green» world, which is an important
connecting link — so it's got chlorophyll, and oxygen, and we can all breathe
in it and relate to it, and the music reflects that: as many odd types of sound
as Eno manages to get out of his electronics and effects this time, they all
have an emotional stratum in them. You can go ahead and call these tunes
«gorgeous», «romantic», «playful», «somber», «threatening», etc., as much as
you like — this is a very deeply human approach to electronic equipment, unlike
the contemporary robot-like approach of Kraftwerk (which was still very much
understandable) or completely abstractionist electronica à la Autechre,
which is all about «what the heck is this and how am I supposed to wire my
brains to ʽlikeʼ it?»
The song sequencing
is probably the only thing about which I'd like to voice a second opinion. For
instance, ʽSky Sawʼ is a brilliant composition, but I am not sure
that our introduction to this «green world 2.0» should be dominated by a lead
guitar that does sound like a «sky
saw», threatening to saw the sky in half in manual regime first, and then (in
the «solo» section) in chainsaw mode. Phil Collins and Percy Jones, soon to
become partners in the fusion band Brand X, provide the rhythm section; John
Cale plays the whirling (dervish) viola part; but it is Eno's own «snake
guitar» that provides the tune's major unforgettable hook, and if you play it
loud enough, the effect can be really terrifying. Whatever is happening out
there sure ain't pretty, and should have at least occurred after the title
track. Then again, maybe it's just like one of those modern novels that have to immediately plunge you into the
action on the very first page, even if they have to start the story from the
middle that way — because otherwise they run the risk of losing your attention
and failing to make the New York Times bestseller list in time for Christmas.
In any case, now that the playlist era is upon
us, you can divert yourself by making these tracks segue into each other any
way possible — and since there are 14 of them, this means you can have any of
your own 14! (where are you, calculator?) journeys to make. For instance, in
order to arrive at your destination you could first take ʽThe Big
Shipʼ — a steamer, judging by the puff-puffing percussion, whose mighty
engines not only work perfectly, without any glitching, but also instill a
regal-heroic feel in the listener. At a certain point in time, the ship becomes
a flying ship and takes you ʽOver Fire Islandʼ — this is not at the
center of our green world, but a separate location where you can look but you'd
better not touch: dominated by Jones' bass work, the track only gives you a
very faint glimpse of what is happening down below, and it ain't pretty.
Once you're finally there and your new habitat
welcomes you to the threshold with Eno's «desert guitars» fanfare, you are free
to roam in the green world's enchanting spaces (the transcendental meditation
piece ʽBecalmedʼ), its playful areas (ʽLittle Fishesʼ use a
number of prepared pianos to produce a very vivid impression of said fishes
jumping in the air), or its dark and creepy confines (ʽSombre
Reptilesʼ — I bet they eat little fishes for breakfast; ʽIn Dark
Treesʼ — dare to enter that and
you are bound to get confused and disoriented by the echoes, oscillating howls,
and rhythm generators that sound like wild pigs foraging in the bushes). And,
of course, ghostly presences are a must — a parallel world without
dematerialized entities would be of no use, so ʽSpirits Driftingʼ
give you exactly that, with synth tones that are neither friendly nor hostile,
just... substanceless. Either it is the spirits drifting through you, or you
are drifting through them.
There are a few vocal numbers here, too, whose
main function seems to be commercial (they relieve the atmosphere for those of
us who are too unused to completely
instrumental pop albums) but who nevertheless fit in fairly well. ʽSt.
Elmo's Fireʼ is a catchy and welcoming little travelog, sort of Brian's
answer to ʽYellow Submarineʼ, though decidedly less childish;
ʽEverything Merges With The Nightʼ is like a piano pop song to which
somebody wrote the introduction but forgot to write everything else, and thank
God for that; and ʽI'll Come Runningʼ is probably the only song here
that could qualify for hit single status — provided you could get 1975 kids to
hum "I'll come running to tie your shoe, I'll come running to tie your
shoe" all day long.
The vocal numbers may be a little disrupting, since they are not nearly as
otherworldly as everything else, but then they give you another dimension —
you could, for instance, think of them as reflecting a sort of reality, with
everything else being a dream (or vice versa), in and out of which you keep
floating throughout the album, like a chronologically more complex variant of Alice In Wonderland. In any case, individually
they are as pretty, catchy, and «gallant» as anything Eno ever wrote, so no
need to make a big conceptual fuss over that.
The critical status of Another Green World has aggrandized so much over the years that it
is now very commonly regarded as the ultimate peak of all things Eno-related,
and it is not uncommon to hear people complain «ah, if only all his
ʽregularʼ ambient albums sounded like this!» There is no question
that the album was a milestone in the emergence of what is now sometimes called
«post-rock», and you can feel its influence on everyone from the Cocteau Twins
to Sigur Rós, but I would never say that it stands head and shoulders
above any of the rest of the «classic four», even if it has a very distinct
personality. In particular, if we are allowed to use the clichéd term
«spirituality», I would say that some of these instrumentals now sound like a
grand rehearsal before the genuinely breathtaking minimalist epiphanies of Before And After Science — that the
music here strives a little too much to describe the fantastic worlds without us rather than the no less
fantastic ones within us. But then
again, this just might be the subjective reaction of an introverted
personality. Maybe some day a team of
neuroscientists and anthropologists will discover a connection between
fanboyish love for AGW and extreme
tourism, and another team will find a similar connection between adoration for BAAS and shutting oneself in dark
basements. Until then, we will just tacitly assume that there is no accounting
for taste, particularly when it comes to musical masterpieces like these ones,
nitpicking over which can be intellectually stimulating, but materially
unrewarding. So, just a big thumbs up here.
DISCREET MUSIC (1975)
1) Discreet Music; 2) Fullness
Of Wind; 3) French Catalogues; 4) Brutal Ardour.
First things first: in general, I «like» and
«accept» Eno's ambient albums, or, rather, the philosophy behind these albums.
They are not supposed to be listened to — they are supposed to be heard when you're busy doing other
tasks, and not only is that something right up every reviewer's alley, it is
an understandable and perhaps even necessary niche, that «furniture music»
conception of Satie's. Of course, any
piece of music could become furniture music if you so desired, but the mistake
of so many mediocre artists is that they aim for loftier goals while never
rising above furniture music level — not to mention that, like furniture
itself, furniture music can widely vary in quality.
Do not, therefore, make the mistake of
listening to Discreet Music
intently, in order to achieve some transcendental illumination or advance to
Arhat level with a super cheat code. Legend says that the idea to make this
kind of music came to Brian when he was lying in a hospital bed, listening to
an album of 18th century harp music with the volume turned all the way down,
unable to get out of bed and turn it up — «feeling» the sounds rather than
«hearing» them directly. Perhaps if this accident had not happened, he would have
gone on making pop records, all the way into 1986 and beyond. But it did, and
although Discreet Music is not tied
into it directly (not featuring any harp music at all), it marks the start of
the gradual, and utterly painless, transmutation of Brian Eno into furniture.
As a first try, though, the album is distinctly
different from the «typical» Eno ambient album. The first side (30 minutes of
the title track) is all electronic, but the second side is not — it consists of
three minimalist chamber pieces, performed by the so-called «Cockpit Ensemble»,
conducted by Gavin Bryars who also co-arranged the pieces with Eno, all three
being «deconstructed» variations on Pachelbel's Canon In D Major. In the future, Eno would largely refrain from
twiddling around with classical motives (at least those not transposed to the
electronic format), but this remains a curious and somewhat unique experiment,
though, obviously, not to everybody's liking.
The algorithmic nature of ʽDiscreet
Musicʼ has been described in many sources, and I would probably mess
something up trying to retell the process — all that interests us, really, is
that there are only two simple superimposed musical phrases here, produced by
an EMS Synthi AKS machine and then subtly played around with for half an hour.
The «melody» has a becalming, somewhat pastoral feel (you could imagine it as a
call-and-response session between several shepherds, piping each other in some
high mountainous area), and for about three or four minutes, you could even
give it your attention — then go on about your business if you have any business. If you don't...
well... try to get some. It'll save you the trouble of hating the track's last
twenty minutes, and pointless hatred tends to shorten people's life spans.
The three «Pachelbel variations», all based on
cutting out small pieces of the original and stretching, twisting, and looping
them until they begin to look like polyethylene pieces under a microscope, all
have the same mood and feel — a seemingly endless sea of extended violin tones.
Fortunately, the violins are well tuned and there is no musical hooliganry
involved, so the sound never becomes irritating, which is an essential quality
for furniture music.
The simple reason why this experiment, to me,
looks like a successful one, is because it lacks ideological pretense.
«Minimalism» as such tends to take itself seriously, even when the minimalist
is clearly endowed with a sense of humor — think Steve Reich, for instance —
and this results in experiments that are ugly and crazy when you «listen» and
annoying and off-putting when you restrict yourself to «hearing». Eno's
understanding of ambient, however, has not the slightest intention of messing
up our layman conventions of «musical beauty» — such as were, among other
people, set up by the likes of Pachelbel himself.
The idea is simple: you just cut yourself out a
small piece of that beauty, then magnify it tenfold, fiftyfold, hundredfold,
and set it out as a desktop background, and see (hear) what happens. It is even
reflected, I believe, to some degree in the punny album title: this is
«discreet» music, as in, «music to be played privately and quietly», and it is
also «discrete» music, consisting of these separate chopped-up and meticulously
scrutinized pieces, each of which is taxed to the max for every ounce of
«beauty» it can yield. I am totally at home with this ideology, as long as I am
not forced to play this stuff at top volume with my ears glued to the speakers.
I will not, however, give it — or any of Eno's «good» ambient albums, for that
matter — an individual «thumbs up», since it kind of goes against my principles
to describe furniture music in terms of blue, red, or gray. And in any case,
discreet music should be rated discreetly. No need to shout about it.
EVENING STAR (w. Robert Fripp) (1975)
1) Wind On Water; 2) Evening
Star; 3) Evensong; 4) Wind On Wind; 5) An Index Of Metals.
Eno's second collaboration with King Frippson
is often described as more precisely pre-planned and more explicitly artistic
than No Pussyfooting, and I think it
is easy to hear that even without reading anything about it — besides, even
from a purely logical stance, Fripp and Eno had been working together for three
years already, and what was an almost completely «experimental»,
«let's-press-this-button-and-see-what-happens» approach in 1973 had become an
established working technique by 1975. Also, by this time Eno's «ambient
fetish» was out of the closet, and it is no coincidence that the album has so
many nature references — the album cover, the track titles (ʽWind On
Waterʼ, ʽWind On Windʼ) — where No Pussyfooting was essentially a pure psychedelic experience, with
few visible ties to the natural world.
Which all basically translates to this:
although both albums are credited to «Fripp & Eno» and were recorded just
several years apart, they are so different in scope and purpose that it is hard
to make a useful opinion on which one's the better of the two. Evening Star, or at least its A-side,
is definitely more accessible, in that both players concentrate on «prettiness»
or even «beauty» as opposed to experimental «ugliness» in which they both used
to delight just a short while back. You could even say that the dudes are
mellowing out here — chillin', in fact, paying a technological tribute to
Mother Nature, and temporarily fed up with feedback and «ugly» instrumental
tones. Which may have come across as a surprise for Fripp fans, what with the
harsh, aggressive King Crimson sound of the 1973-74 lineup.
The first three tracks consist of typical
minimalistic Eno loops, over which Fripp applies his Frippertronics, but this
time, with grace and gentleness — his soloing on the title track sounds like
the approximate aural equivalent of a sweet violin part on some romantic
sonata. He is much less visible on ʽWind On Waterʼ and
ʽEvensongʼ, preferring to blend his parts in with the electronics,
and completely absent on ʽWind On Windʼ (which is actually an unused
part of Discreet Music that was
originally intended to serve as a backdrop for Fripp's soloing), but that's all
part of the plan — this is, after all, supposed to be an impressionist album,
not a dynamic plot-based one, and most of the time, Robert is merely content to
add one more layer to Eno's stately, repetitive, evocative, pantheistic
melodies.
It does get very
different on the second side, which returns us to the world of twenty-minute
(in this case, almost thirty-minute) long compositions, and, more importantly,
to the world of uneasy sonic nightmares. ʽAn Index Of Metalsʼ, in
stark contrast to the lovely naturalistic soundscapes of the first side, is a
mess of grim electronic hum, gradually building up in intensity until it begins
sounding like a nuclear reactor just about to blow, and Fripp solos that are
technically quite similar to the ones on ʽEvening Starʼ, but in a
different tonality, this time, much closer to Crimsonian improvisation circa
1973, though still nowhere near as jarring and demanding on the listener. Perhaps
the word «nightmare» is too strong — especially since the noisy crescendos are
deliberately restrained, again, so that the tune would not have too many
blatant «peaks» and «dives» — but the impression is definitely unsettling
compared to the lush beauty that was unfurling here before our ears just a few
minutes ago. And, well, yes, you might say that thirty minutes is pushing it a
bit too far. Who knows how symbolic that is, though? Beauty is discrete and
brief — ugliness is continuous and lengthy. Something like that.
Other than ʽIndexʼ being overlong,
though, I really appreciate the idea of this «light / peaceful» vs. «dark /
unnerving» contrast — meaning that on the whole, the album succeeds more than
it fails. Maybe from an ideal point of view, both sides would have to be more
symmetrical: throwing in a couple more «scary» tracks like these and reducing
the length of ʽIndexʼ could have rounded out the experience to
perfection. But then, symmetry like this can seem boring to some, and doesn't
the very concept of «Frippertronics» somewhat defy or even mock symmetry? Anyway,
an assured thumbs
up for the album here, even if only for the sake of a near-perfect
first side. Be sure to enjoy it in its proper setting, though. It most
certainly works best when you get to play it against some natural background
that looks like its front cover. You might have to move to Mars for that,
though, or something.
CLUSTER & ENO (w. Cluster) (1977)
1) Ho Renomo; 2) Schöne
Hände; 3) Steinsame; 4) Wehrmut; 5) Mit Simaen; 6) Selange; 7) Die Bunge;
8) One; 9) Für Luise.
This is the first of two collaborations between
Eno, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and Dieter Moebius — the latter two of the
experimental/electronic «Krautrock» duo Cluster (sometimes thought of as a trio
because of their long-term association with producer/musician Conny Plank, at
whose studio this record was made as well). German electronica was riding high
in artistic circles at the time, with Kraftwerk making it big, and it is no coincidence
that Bowie's «Berlin period» happened around the same time — all these albums
should really be seen in the context of one another, as all these people were
really excited about how all the new technologies allowed them to create new
aural art with completely different textures.
Set against Eno's best works of the period, Cluster & Eno inevitably gets a
little lost, and I remember not at all being impressed when I first heard it
decades ago. However, its main difference is simply that there are no
immediately resonating themes/hooks that would shatter your brainwaves at once — like that searing-cutting
sound of the Sky Saw that opens ʽSky Sawʼ. Cluster & Eno should not be formally classified as «ambient»:
its basic melodies and overdubs are too complex and dynamic, requiring the
listener to pay some attention at least. But on the other hand, its eventual
charms are so subtle that paying this attention is a bit of a chore. This is
why the album used to leave me somewhat frustrated... but I'm feeling better
now.
One key to enjoying the record is realizing how
diverse it is, and how many different, unpredictable combinations these three
guys have managed to search out. ʽHo Renomoʼ, for instance, combines
a pretty piano ballad with an impassive electronic pulse, a specially treated
«diving bass» part that sounds like Indian percussion, and faraway droney
echoes of guitars that add an extra dimension to the experience.
ʽSteinsameʼ is based on a draggy synthesizer melody reminiscent of
some Bach organ piece and doubled on Fripp-style howling guitar (the actual
player, if credits are to be believed, is Okko Bekker). ʽFür
Luiseʼ, founded on a series of synthesizer power chords, ties them
together with rising and falling electronic «swoops» that sound like a
particularly drunken musical saw, tottering, wobbling, and just a little
melancholic. ʽSelangeʼ sounds like an unfinished demo for a stern
blues-rocker, for which somebody has recorded a piano part and some rudimentary
percussion — then decided to turn it into an atmospheric piece instead by
adding «heavenly» synthesizer overdubs. And ʽDie Bungeʼ is like a
soundtrack to a rocking horse ride, with an electronic bug caught up in the
fray, buzzing its way around you, unable to escape the gravity pull among all
the gentle merriment.
It's no great shakes, for sure; the record
would be of serious interest only to ardent fans of both Eno and Cluster — think something like
Cluster's Sowiesoso crossed with a
slightly more developed version of Discreet
Music, where elegant electronic soundscapes are integrated with romantic
piano loops. But it is a nice kind of sound, not aspiring to much depth,
perhaps, yet still evocative, synthesizing a little cozy universe of its own,
where you have caves, clouds, fogs, blizzards, swamps, pools, and, yes, rocking
horses — no cozy universe should be without its own rocking horse. The three of
them would get much better on After The Heat, but this one is totally
deserving of its thumbs up as well.
BEFORE AND AFTER SCIENCE (1977)
1) No One Receiving; 2)
Backwater; 3) Kurt's Rejoinder; 4) Energy Fools The Magician; 5) King's Lead
Hat; 6) Here He Comes; 7) Julie With...; 8) By This River; 9) Through Hollow
Lands; 10) Spider And I.
In my life, this little record holds a very
special position. There are musical pieces that you learn to respect or at
least tolerate, there are those that you «sort of like», but could live your
life without, and then there are albums that serve as your own personal
«gateways» into certain spheres, of which, prior to this, you were unsure if
you could ever connect with them on
some deep personal level — to the «this is it!»
point. Selling England By The Pound,
by Genesis, was my such introduction or, more correctly, initiation into the
world of progressive rock which, up until then, I preferred to treat, at best,
on a «politically correct» level. But Before
And After Science was an even more major turning point — ultimately, it was
the one album that convinced me, much
more than formally, that the spirit of music did not die circa 1975, and that,
most importantly, there is no such musical form that cannot, one way or
another, be properly inhabited by the musical spirit, if the artist is endowed
with one.
Why do I bestow this praise on Before And After Science, an album that
has earned its rightful share of averaged critical acclaim but is hardly ever
considered on the same level as Talking Heads, Joy Division, or U2 when it
comes to lining up masterpieces from the punk / post-punk / New Wave era? There
is no simple answer to this question, so let us first talk a bit about the album
in general, as well as some of its particular points, and maybe the answer will
gradually crystallize out of all the different observations — on its own.
The record was not specifically intended to
become the «swan song» for Eno as a pop-rock performer — it just so happened
that after its release he concentrated on various ambient projects — but it
does eerily sound like a certain «wrap-up» of all the different directions that
he pursued in the mid-1970s. It combines and stratifies both his
energetic/dynamic side, as previously seen on Warm Jets, and the transcendental/ambient side of Another Green World, but with a new
level of maturity and sonic depth that neither of these albums had seen.
Formally, Side A is «rocky» and «bouncy» while Side B is slow, moody, and
intimate, but the album is sequenced in a way that does not make the shift
jarring (ʽHere He Comesʼ, which could technically be classified as a
«folk rocker», is really a transitional point between the two halves), and many
of the textures on both sides are quite comparable in style. Furthermore, both
sides show a state of spiritual calmness — if there is one single difference
from all that was before, it is that Before
And After Science is no longer the album of a seeker; it is the album of a
finder.
If Side A is to be considered the «Before
Science» part, this implies that rhythm and energy are a vital force only for
those who have not yet made the big intellectual leap — but make no mistake
about it, these are rhythmic and energetic tunes that are as intelligent as it
gets. The sci-fi funk of ʽNo One Receivingʼ, driven by a vivacious
polyrythmic percussion track from Phil Collins (with which Eno has some
additional fun as he loops the drums into mysteriously fading out rolls, as if
the drumkit were located on a giant see-saw), takes James Brown's inventions
and turns them into a strangely beautiful alien-tribal ritual. The dark
seriousness is then immediately alleviated with ʽBackwaterʼ, which
sounds like an oddly deconstructed McCartney «nursery ditty» of the ʽAll
Together Nowʼ variety, with completely nonsensical lyrics and a highly
catchy melody, simple as heck but gradually layered over with more and more
synth and guitar overdubs until it becomes a three year old's equivalent of the
Ode to Joy — repetitive, intentionally silly (the song, that is, not the Ode to
Joy), but infectious like no other Eno pop tune.
ʽKurt's Rejoinderʼ, featuring Percy
Jones on bass, is instrumentally reminiscent of contemporary Brand X — no
wonder, since both Percy and Phil were key members of that quirky fusion
outfit, and a bit of a wonder considering the additional fun elements that Eno
brings to the formula, so much so that one can only guess how much more
memorable could the Eno touch actually have made those already impressive Brand
X workouts. The lyrics are once again delivered in a childish style (they
almost sound like a counting rhyme), but what really matters is the interaction
between the propulsive rhythm section and the minimalistic electronic overdubs:
the whole track is like a non-stop maniacal run through a musical jungle with
flurries of ghosts hovering over your head the whole way. Percy and Phil are
the heroes here, but without the electronic overdubs and the odd «kid vocals»,
the song would never be so effectively visualized.
Then, after a brief moody instrumental
intermission (ʽEnergy Fools The Magicianʼ — more cool «scrambled»
bass lines here), comes the first side's conclusion and its most representative
track. Although ʽKing's Lead Hatʼ is well known to be an anagram of
ʽTalking Headsʼ, by this time Eno was not yet involved with the Heads
as such, and the song itself, with its straight 4/4 beat and insane tempo, is
not particularly reminiscent of the band — it just shows Eno as a big lover of
anagrams and other word games, which he is (is that "the kilocycles, the
kilohertz" or "the killer cycles, the killer hurts"?). More
importantly, this is one song where we all so desperately needed a Jon Landau
to come along and say something like "I have seen the future of
rock'n'roll, and its name is ʽKing's Lead Hatʼ", because, unlike
most Springsteen songs, ʽKing's Lead Hatʼ really does have (or at least credibly emulate) the true rock'n'roll
spirit, and it does so in a technologically updated way that shows how
electronics, tape manipulations, and other technological trickery are in no way
an obstacle to just ripping it up like there was no tomorrow.
There are just so many things to love about
that song — the maniacally strummed phased guitar, the little electronic
mosquito-sting pings punctuating the
beat, the weird «quaking» electronic pulses, and, of course, that insane
half-Jerry Lee Lewis, half-John Cale pummeling of the piano (did the poor
instrument even survive that instrumental break?). Throw in the hilarious
lyrics that make no sense as usual but contain some of the most brilliantly
absurd word combinations this side of Dylan ("the biology of purpose keeps
my nose above the surface" has been my personal motto of existence for
almost twenty years, and, come to think of it, "the passage of my life is
measured out in shirts" may be much deeper than it seems at first sight),
and the awesome «mercurial explosion» of the electronic signals that Brian
saves up for the coda, and you have yourself a modernistic rock'n'roll
masterpiece that I can never tire of hearing.
Most people that I know of, however, believe
that it is not until the second side, where the absurdity and the childishness
gives way to a much more relaxed, philosophical, meditative pace — now we are
in the «After Science» territory — that the record truly hits its stride, and I
am okay with that (these are probably the same people that prefer Lennon over
McCartney as well). No need to worry, though: all these slower tunes have every
bit as much melodic bliss and catchiness, even if their «ambient» nature can
occasionally bore a not particularly easy impressionable listener. But who
could ever dislike at least the mid-tempo folk-rock of ʽHere He
Comesʼ, which is somehow produced so that you really feel yourself gradually
"rising above the clouds", not to mention "rising above
reason"? There is the same kind of vocal melody here that you'd encounter
on a record by some magical folk queen like Sandy Denny, but Eno, as usual, has
it his own way: just barely speeding up the tempo so that nobody gets dulled
out, dressing the jangly folk-rock guitars in silky electronic overcoats,
throwing on New Age-y harmonies, and then coming up with the awesome idea of a
bass solo — other people would probably just add some extra jangle, but the
master of contrast tries out something completely different, so that you can expressly
get yourself a distinct dark shape making a beeline through the guitar-jangle
and synth-hum clouds. If this ain't ethereal beauty, nothing is.
Then, just to show you that beauty comes in all
sorts of different shapes, including uncomfortable and dangerous ones, he
switches from the day-light, cloudy ambience of ʽHere He Comesʼ to
the twi-light, foggy ambience of ʽJulie With...ʼ. As the tempo slows
down to a crawl and the lyrics suddenly become one with the music ("I am
on an open sea, just drifting as the hours go slowly by..."), time begins
to stand still and the slow rocking of the musical boat becomes so mesmerizing
that you have no intent of wondering whether this slice of «suspended beauty»
is of a good or of an evil nature (as somebody rightfully observed, the song
could be seen from the perspective of a romantic poetic admirer every bit as
completely as from that of a serial psycho killer). Special mention should be
made of the occasional one-note guitar «sighs» that punctuate the song at
certain moments, minimalistically resolving the gradually accumulating tension
— it would still be great without them, but they give it so much more, don't
they? This is probably the most perfectly Taoist piece written by Eno in the
«pop song» format — dark, mysterious, impenetrable, all-pervading, and completely
devoid of «action», not to mention Brian's vocals that seem to be full of
feeling by being completely stripped of feeling.
ʽBy This Riverʼ was co-written with
Cluster, which is maybe why it sounds like the saddest, coldest, and most
fatalistic track on the entire album — then again, with Eno there is no real
sadness to be spoken of, because the man is at such a stage of enlightenment
that he never lets pure emotion overcloud reasoning. The song's minimalistic
piano melody is just one phrase that could well be inspired by some Schubert
sonata — forming a soft backdrop for yet another magnificent vocal: the
transition from the almost romantic-sounding "here we are, stuck by this
river, you and I..." to the doom-laden "...underneath a sky that's
ever falling down, down, down, ever falling down" that he finishes on his
lowest note is just harsh. You know
there's no escape... but somehow, you don't care, because at this point,
tragedy is as much an inescapable and natural condition of being that it is no
longer tragic. In fact, it is more beautiful than tragic.
Skipping the instrumental ʽThrough Hollow
Landsʼ (nice, but I still cannot view it as anything other than a brief
intermission between the two final major movements), we then go to ʽSpider
And Iʼ, which ends this bliss on a perfectly transcendental note. If
ʽBy This Riverʼ had a deeply intimate, piano-based sound, this one
employs organ tones to mimick grand cosmic waves to which the protagonist
attaches his personal conscience — "Spider and I sit watching the sky on a
world without sound...". More Taoism here, perhaps, but what I am really
amazed at is how the heck the man gets to create the illusion of such depth and
broadth with just a bare handful of polyphonic notes — and the illusion
actually grows as the song goes by. As the final blasts fade away, you begin to
realize that, perhaps, after ʽSpider And Iʼ the man really had
nothing left to say in the «song» format, that he is being carried away on the
waves of nirvana, and now all we have to do is listen to him put three notes on
an album for the rest of our lives, which are short enough, and his life, which
is most likely eternal and not measured out in silly concepts like time, space,
or Grammy awards.
If, by now, you have not yet glimpsed some of
the possible answers to that question I asked in the beginning — why this record and not some other one? —
you probably just need to listen to this thing for yourself. But the review
still necessitates a conclusion, so I will try this. The balance of
cutting-edge musical technology; pop sensibility; accessible, but not
watered-down, mystical metaphysics in music and lyrics; and general humanity of
it all (from humor to silliness to tenderness) — there is not a single album
in the «New Wave and later» era of modern music making that has this kind of
balance to it, and yet, somehow, at the same time, «getting» Before And After Science has, at one
point, allowed me to «get» so much more of everything else. A minimalistic spiritual
masterpiece that is almost too good for a routine thumbs up, but then again, let us
not become too carried away and get way too ecstatic about it — such a reaction
would, after all, be somewhat against its very nature.
AFTER THE HEAT (w. Cluster) (1978)
1) Foreign Affairs; 2) The
Belldog; 3) Base & Apex; 4) Tzima N'Arki; 5) Luftschloss; 6) Oil; 7) Broken
Head; 8) Light Arms; 9) The Shade; 10) Old Land.
Do not miss out on this one — the second
Cluster/Eno collaboration is notably more ambitious than the first one,
and a strong, reliable, supportive companion to both Another Green World
and Before And After Science, not just because it is really the last
time in a long, long while that Brian would be working in the «song» format (My
Life In The Bush Of Ghosts excluded), but also because it is the last time
in a long, long while that you are going to get some massive, stimulating,
maybe even mind-blowing art-pop hooks from the guy.
We are talking, first and foremost, about
ʽThe Belldogʼ, a six-minute atmospheric masterpiece which truly
feels like a collaboration — a perfect synthesis of industrial-robotic
Krautrock with Eno's ability to generate a transcendental aura out of almost nothing.
The lyrics could be interpreted as usual nonsense — or they could be
interpreted as another constatation of the inevitable «man-machine merger»
("then in a certain moment I lose control and at last I am part of the machinery"),
which is supported by the music: the heavenly synthesizers, the relaxed, but
rhythmic chimes, the impressionistic piano «spills», and Eno's graceful singing
are the «human/spiritual» part of the equation, and the steady electronic pulse
that serves as the rhythmic basis for the song represents the «machinery».
Without the electronic pulse and the lyrics, the song would have easily fit in
on Science, but Science, despite being all smothered in
electronics, never once strived for a «robotic» feel — ʽThe Belldogʼ,
on the other hand, has this clearly designed internal conflict between
artificial intelligence and spiritual essence, where both sides seem to come to
terms rather than destroy one another; fascinating and a bit creepy at the same
time.
However, although it is hard to notice this at
first, After The Heat is actually more than one song. Its goals and
results are more diverse and more dynamic than those of Cluster & Eno,
even if the overall feel of both records are compatible — the «depth» provided
by Eno is combined with the «sternness» and «solemnity» of Cluster, resulting
in a cold, physically uncomfortable impression that is perfectly compatible
with the dark-blue seascape on the front cover. Occasionally, there is some
humor: ʽTzima N'Arkiʼ, for instance, could have been a gloomily
deconstructed «post-blues-rock jam», but for some reason Eno decided to
accompany it with backward vocals, including the chorus to ʽKing's Lead
Hatʼ (the song title is apparently the reversed phonetic transcription of
ʽEconomiesʼ, which is itself an anagram of ENO IS COME — yes, so the
man has an unhealthy obsession with the power of sounds and letters, sue him if
you have nothing better to do) — anyway, this makes the tune kind of funny, but
the overall feel of the album is not.
The average instrumental here is cold and
remote, like ʽBase & Apexʼ, where an electronic pulse similar to
the one in ʽThe Belldogʼ is wedged between freezing minimalistic
keyboard chords and recurrent ghostly «sighs» that seem to be produced by
treated slide guitars, but I am not exactly sure; or ʽOilʼ, with a
creepy bassline, swoops of more ghostly synth wings, and premonitions of
ecological catastrophes (this is ʽOilʼ, see?). Every now and then a
ray of sunlight does appear, like in the form of the sprightly pop piano melody
of ʽLuftschlossʼ, which is continuously stuck in «introduction mode»,
never receiving the chance to break out of the minimalist pattern, but the
sunny impression is there all right. However, even without the obviously
uplifting patterns After The Heat has nothing depressing or «horrendous»
about it — like most other Eno and/or Cluster records, this is a weirdly
executed celebration of beauty, and beauty should not always feel totally
comfortable and predictable.
At the end of it all, ʽOld Landʼ
leads us out with slow, stately, meditative synth and piano patterns —
somewhat similarly to ʽSpider And Iʼ, although the textures are much
less dense and much more economical. I mentioned the «pop» nature of many of
its tunes, but it is, of course, also clear that on the whole it is already far
more influenced by minimalism and ambience than Before And After Science,
a record almost «commercial» in comparison, and will hardly ever produce an
impression of comparable force. Nevertheless, almost each track has its own
face here, and ʽThe Belldogʼ towers over everything else like...
well, like a belldog, so this is a very worthy addition to the overall catalog
— a thumbs up without further doubts or
questions.
AMBIENT 1: MUSIC FOR AIRPORTS (1978)
1) 1/1; 2) 1/2; 3) 2/1; 4) 2/2.
The biggest problem with Music For Airports
is that it is not really music for airports. It was briefly used at one of the
terminals of the LaGuardia Airport as an experiment, but I assume that people
complained too much, or perhaps the airport personnel just went crazy after a
while, and the idea fell through. Ironically, it was actually thought of by
Brian as a pragmatically oriented therapeutic measure against the tense, stuffy
atmosphere of your average airport. But could you imagine being stuck out
there, waiting two or more hours for a delayed plane while the soft piano
tinkle of ʽ1/1ʼ gets looped and re-looped and trans-looped and
be-boop-a-looped into your ears? Eventually, you'll begin wishing for twenty
crying babies at your side instead.
That is the biggest problem with Eno's ambient
experiments: no matter how much he may insist that the music is not to be
focused upon on its own, but merely taken in as a side dish next to whatever
else it is that your are consuming or producing, it is difficult to do
so. Sooner or later, you will want to say, "okay, does ʽ1/1ʼ
really have to be 17 minutes long?", and once you say that, the
carriage turns back into the pumpkin, Snow White bites the apple, and Brian Eno
drops the sheepskin and is exposed for the big bad wolf that he really is,
duping poor credible art lovers into believing that they were presented here
with a masterpiece.
Technically, these four recordings are not the
simplest pieces on Earth, but there is also nothing radically challenging about
them — ambient minimalist pieces that owe their structures to Steve Reich, and
mostly just exploit the idea of incommensurable cycles, with different loops
repeated under different time patterns, creating infinite variety out of a
minimal amount of sounds, but this is not something you'd notice until you were
paying very close attention, and you're not supposed to do it — you're
supposed to be biting your nails at an airport terminal, wondering about
whether you'll be able to make your connection rather than wondering whether
the distance between occurrences of loop A is really 23 seconds and the
distance between two instances of loop B is really 27 seconds. So it's a little
confusing this way.
Indeed, the little piano melody on
ʽ1/1ʼ (co-credited to Robert Wyatt and producer Rhett Davies) is very
impressionistic and pretty. The holy-ghostly vocals on ʽ1/2ʼ,
recorded by Eno with three additional female vocalists and sounding very much
like the heavenly overdubs on 10cc's ʽI'm Not In Loveʼ three years
earlier, are a little creepy. Then ʽ2/1ʼ puts the minimalistic piano and
the ghostly vocals together, and then ʽ2/2ʼ yields the field to
synthesizer tones, brightly announcing a new dawn (for the tired traveller who
finally had to cuddle up and spend the night on the hard, unwelcoming airport
bench, lulled to sleep and called to reveille by the all-pervasive
sounds of Ambient 1). They're all nice, they just don't have to run
for... oops, sorry.
Any additional writing on the subject would
cause either excruciating pain or embarrassment; you would not really want to
find yourself in the shoes of the AMG reviewer, for instance, who wrote that
«these evolving soundscapes... can
hang in the background and add to the atmosphere of the room, yet the music
also rewards close attention with a sonic richness absent in standard types of
background or easy listening music», as if the reviewer were an active specialist
in all types of background music and immediately knew how to distinguish the
«sonic richness» of Music For Airports from... umm... Forest Sounds
With Soft Rains & Gentle Winds: For Deep Sleep, Meditation & Relaxation
(yes, they sell these on Amazon, too). Even if there is «sonic richness»
in the way the loops meet each other and then go on their merry way at
different rates, it is not clear how that translates into an awesome spiritual
experience. So let's just cut the crap — instead of thinking all the wrong
thinks, just imagine you're an airport and then decide whether this
one's for you, or if you'd like to pass it on to Pyongyang Sunan International.
MUSIC FOR FILMS (1978)
1) Aragon; 2) From The Same
Hill; 3) Inland Sea; 4) Two Rapid Formations; 5) Slow Water; 6) Sparrowfall
(1); 7) Sparrowfall (2); 8) Sparrowfall (3); 9) Alternative 3; 10) Quartz; 11)
Events In Dense Fog; 12) There Is Nobody; 13) Patrolling Wire Borders; 14) A
Measured Room; 15) Task Force; 16) M386; 17) Strange Light; 18) Final Sunset.
Nice choice here for those who'd like to own an
Eno ambient album but feel stupid listening to the same 3-5 notes over and over
again. This collection, where recordings span an almost four-year period,
originally had a limited release, largely serving as a bunch of «promos» sent
out to various studios and film directors — although, apparently, only very few
of the pieces eventually found their way to celluloid (Derek Jarman, one of the
greatest heroes of somber arthouse, used up as many as two of them, but most
«normal» directors allegedly had a hard time synching the material to any of
their own visuals), and it is not very likely that Brian actually believed that
these bits would be used in actual films — much like it would be hard to
suspect him of naïvely believing that Music
For Airports would ever become a favorite theme in any actual airport,
other than the platonically ideal airport of his own dreams.
Nevertheless, the illusiveness of the title by
no means signifies the worthlessness of the music. As far as Enambient is
concerned, these pieces are (a) short, (b) relatively diverse, (c) showing
subtle dynamic elements, and (d) not always completely electronic — some of the
tracks are, in fact, outtakes from the Another
Green World and Before And After
Science sessions, so you will find such guest stars as Robert Fripp, Fred
Frith, John Cale, Phil Collins, and even Rhett Davies on trumpet scattered
among the electronic jungle. Most importantly, while it is almost inevitable
that 18 snippets like this (and on the early edition, the number ran all the
way up to 27) will contain a share of filler, Music For Films still features the genius in, well, genius mode.
Thus, for instance, ʽEvents In Deep
Fogʼ sounds exactly like one could expect from the title — there's not
really all that much that could happen in dense fog, and there isn't a lot
happening here, but what matters is the awesome haziness of the selected tones,
and how the music completely dies down every few bars, and then resurfaces like
a new shadow of some blurry object emerging from the haze, and also how the
atmosphere feels so close to some of the tracks on David Bowie's Low, and yet there is no sense of
dread, because the music here pursues — and accomplishes — different goals,
with largely the same means.
The instrumental combinations here range from
subtle (like the minimal acoustic guitar twangs on ʽFrom The Same
Hillʼ, a lonesome expressive voice against the collective electronic hum)
to quite tricky — like ʽTwo Rapid Formationsʼ, where Eno is joined by
Fred Frith of Henry Cow, Bill MacCormick of Matching Mole, and Dave Mattacks of
Fairport Convention, and the four concoct a suspenseful, «cavernous» attitude
where you get the feel of slowly making your way through some damp underground
tunnel while occasional pairs of bats, or ghosts, or interstellar ambulance
vehicles make their way past you at an alarmingly regular, but harmless, rate.
Sometimes there is even a whiff of aggressiveness: ʽPatrolling Wire
Bordersʼ features John Cale almost literally biting into his viola,
playing the same note over and over again as if sending out a distress — or an
attack — signal, which is then picked up and echoed in a metal-scrape manner by
one of Eno's processors (I think; I'm not sure what actually goes on there, but
the effect is very much «industrial», and where most of the tracks here have a
«natural» or «transcendental» flavor to them, this one just grinds all over the
place).
I am a little bit disappointed by the finale:
ʽFinal Sunsetʼ, despite being the longest track of 'em all and
clearly positioned as a conclusive coda, is not one of Eno's best statements of
grand serene beauty — too light, perhaps, and way too inobtrusive, probably
feeling like a real sunset all right, but hardly the «final» one. Still, this
disappointment is relevant only if you decide that Music For Films should necessarily feel like a musical story,
coherent from beginning to end, which it is not: it was never intended as
anything other than a loosely tied together collection of electronic vignettes
— in fact, Eno might have done it a disservice by going over the original (lack
of) sequencing and rearranging the tracks in a more «meaningful» order on the
EG reissue, since, in a way, this is just a matter of useless tampering with
the original artistic (lack of) intent. As a series of brief, ultimately
forgettable, but instantaneously very pleasing impressions, this thing totally
succeeds. Although, if you are a young aspiring film director looking for a
good soundtrack, I would advise staying away from this stuff — most likely,
your movie already sucks, so why
consider any additional ways to make it even more unwatchable?
AMBIENT 2: THE PLATEAUX OF MIRROR (w. Harold Budd) (1980)
1) First Light; 2) Steal Away;
3) The Plateaux Of Mirror; 4) Above Chiangmai; 5) An Arc Of Doves; 6) Not Yet
Remembered; 7) The Chill Air; 8) Among Fields Of Crystal; 9) Wind In The Lonely
Fences; 10) Failing Light.
In this collaboration, it must be acknowledged,
the leading role clearly belongs to Harold Budd, who plays piano on all ten
tracks, while Brian is either diverting himself by putting various magical
effects on the played chords, or, more frequently, just adds his own
synthesizer gravy to the piano melodies. Nevertheless, since the record was (a)
released in the «Ambient» series as #2, (b) features Eno as an active
collaborator rather than just producer, it makes sense to include it in his
regular discography, even if he is acting rather like a henchman here.
I am not well acquainted with Harold Budd, but
I did hear parts of his alleged masterpiece from 1978, Pavilion Of Dreams, which was actually produced by Eno as well. That album could by no means qualify as
«ambient» — more like «impressionistic», building upon the legacy of Satie,
Debussy, and others, while also introducing elements of jazz and world music.
However, Eno was probably attracted to Budd because of their mutual penchant
for naturalistic soundscapes — and so it is hardly a surprise that The Plateaux Of Mirror is all about
naturalistic, or, rather, super-naturalistic soundscapes.
The album title is right on the money:
«plateaux» implies heights, «mirror» implies glass and transparency, and most
of the tracks do sound like you've been lifted high up in the air and put up on
an uneven glass surface, where the slightest breeze causes psychedelic sonic
repercussions. If you think I'm talking bullshit, look at the titles —
ʽAbove Chiangmaiʼ and ʽAmong Fields Of Crystalʼ should be
enough to confirm the rightness of the vision. The album also hints at a
certain pace of development, as all the action begins to take place with
ʽFirst Lightʼ and ends with ʽFailing Lightsʼ, so with a
little help from your imagination you could actually generate some kind of
story to go along with the tracks — provided you can get that obsessed with this record.
Budd's frugal melodies follow the «accessible»
trail of minimalism — usually, they sound either like Bach or like 19th century
romanticists with 95% of the notes removed — and, as a direct sequence, there
is not a single moment here that would sound «unpleasant» even to the not well
trained musical ear. However, I doubt it that even the most discriminating Bach
listener would easily memorize these compositions and distinguish them from one
another, not because they aren't
different, but because every effort is directed at making them fuse together in
a hazy, foggy, superglued jello mass that disorients and distracts your perception
organs and reassures you that nothing whatsoever is happening, when in reality,
when you come really close and pay really serious attention, it becomes
obvious that there are actual melodies played on real instruments. That be the
colorless magic of Eno production.
Unable as I am to speak about the individual
tracks, I only have to say this — «beauty», whoever she is, does reside here,
gently swaying on the sound waves. Importantly, this is the first time an Eno
album gets a professional classical pianist all over it, which makes it very different from something like Discreet Music, not to mention Music For Airports: Budd's introduction
of these «sonata elements» ties Eno's vision to Western musical legacy much
tighter than could be achieved through Brian's work alone — though whether
this is a «good» thing is anybody's guess. My
guess is that this is a serious work of art, deserving to be studied rather
than just be used as a routine sonic tapestry. Unfortunately, I'm hardly
competent to study it, so all I can really say is — sure is one cold, slippery,
transcendental-magical plateau. Oh, actually that's plural — plateaux, which does make sense, because
the melodies wobble in and out of your conscience as if taking place in a
multi-dimensional space. But I guess, where there's one imaginary plateau,
nothing prevents you from upgrading your imagination to the next level.
MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS (w. David Byrne) (1981)
1) America Is Waiting; 2) Mea
Culpa; 3) Regiment; 4) Help Me Somebody; 5) The Jezebel Spirit; 6) Very, Very
Hungry; 7) Moonlight In Glory; 8) The Carrier; 9) A Secret Life; 10) Come With
Us; 11) Mountain Of Needles.
This album is frequently hailed as a milestone
in the history of sampling — the first ever LP to employ sampling techniques on
a regular basis, as a fundamental element of the music, as opposed to sporadic
earlier experiments by other people; all the more fascinating from our modern
perspective in that everything here was still recorded on analogue equipment,
and apparently it took a lot of fuss to synchronize the samples with the beats
(but must have been fun, though). But as nice as it is to know that, I don't
really give a damn: use of samples is not a blessing per se, no matter how many
mediocre hip-hop artists might think so, and unless it serves some bigger purpose
than «coolness», it's just an additional layer of sound.
Actually, from that perspective My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts is not
really an Eno album, and should probably be discussed under «David Byrne» — but
we will take the easy way out and decide that, since it is credited to «Brian
Eno — David Byrne» and not vice versa, Brian is recognized as senior leading
partner (or, at least, as someone whose first name starts with a B rather than
a D). In reality, though, the majority of the instrumental tracks here sound
very, very close to the Talking Heads sound of Remain In Light — hardly surprising, since they were actually recorded
in between Eno's work with the band on Fear
Of Music and Remain In Light itself;
it is only because of additional legal problems with getting permission to use
all the samples that the release of the record was delayed, by which time Remain In Light had already come out
and changed the face of popular music.
That said, things wouldn't change much if the
release order were reversed, because My
Life is by no means a «popular» album — its tracks, though definitely
musical and even danceable, relay on weird samples for vocal content, and have
nothing that would even vaguely resemble a singalong chorus. The samples
themselves are usually of two varieties: either Near Eastern singers or American
radio evangelists, exorcists, and politicians — which might be understood as a
symbolic indication that the spiritual values of traditional and
(post-)industrial societies are not as far removed from each other as could be
thought. Or maybe Eno just randomly selected stuff that appealed to him on a
(sub-)sonic level, and then left it open for anybody's interpretation. In any
case, the final product was obviously and arrogantly «bizarre», and the
impression was only further magnified with its title (taken from a 1954 novel
by Amos Tutuola about the adventures of a West African boy that neither of the
artists had even read) and its abstract painting on the front sleeve (which was
actually taken from a video monitor, so that's probably the most digital part of the whole thing).
But it is
a «visionary» kind of bizarre, all right, and I just can't see any fan of Remain In Light remaining in the darkness
concerning this record, which really looks a bit like its older, slightly less
gifted, but maybe even more eccentric brother. Eno used to refer to it as a
«psychedelic vision of Africa», yet I think he was kind of selling his own
product short: African rhythms and African instrumentation play as big a part
in this as they did on Remain In Light,
but the record itself is not about Africa as such — and certainly you wouldn't
get that impression based on the very first track, whose main sample goes
"America is waiting for a
message of some sort or another". With all these evangelists, exorcists,
and radio hosts walking all over the funky rhythms, My Life is the busiest album to have ever been released with Eno's
name on it — a staggering contrast with all these hush-hush ambient records —
and if it is a psychedelic vision of anything,
it is more likely a psychedelic allegory for life on the streets of a big
modern city, where African rhythms and polyrhythms just illustrate the general
hustle and bustle. In fact, you could choose a good half, if not more, of these
tracks to accompany some mad police chase scene in Miami Vice or anything similar — whereas the other half could be a good soundtrack for crowded bar scenes. The
album does sort of quiet down towards the second half, with subtler, slower,
more suspenseful soundscapes, but you could argue that it simply reflects the
passage of time, Side A taking place in broad daylight and Side B taking you on
a trip into the shadows of night.
Individual highlights do not exist on this
record: it really exists as a single conceptual piece with multiple movements.
The grooves do not struggle for memorability: ʽThe Jezebel Spiritʼ,
for instance, is very close in texture to the fast danceable numbers of Remain In Light, but has no central
super-memorable riff or lead line, just a paranoid bass pulse and recurrent
machine-gun rounds from various guitars and keyboards that are either too brief
or too simple to imprint themselves in memory — and the same applies to most
other tracks, but that's OK: My Life
is supposed to produce a general overwhelming impression, not a set of
particular small ones. In reality, no two tracks really sound the same, be it
the rhythmic base, the musical overdubs, or the used samples, but the basic gut
reaction from each one is the same — «fussy». Which is a perfectly normal state
of being for Byrne, but not usually for Eno: the last time he got that fussy was on the first side of Before And After Science (whose own
funky rhythms, by the way, are a direct predecessor to some of these tracks
here).
And yes, returning to the samples, the samples
do work. Arguably the best example would be the exorcist in ʽJezebel
Spiritʼ, who just blends in so well with all that funk (and I am fairly
sure the whole track must have been an influence on King Crimson's monstruous
masterpiece ʽThela Hun Ginjeetʼ, released later in the year), but
Reverend Paul Morton hardly lags behind on ʽHelp Me Somebodyʼ (I have
no idea how they could secure the rights to that
piece of sermoning, unless they somehow convinced the Reverend that, you know,
God moves in mysterious ways), and Dunya Yusin is especially haunting on the
creepy ʽRegimentʼ, whose syncopated bass line and Frippertronics
(yes, Robert was there too) create quite an ominous atmosphere by themselves,
but it never hurts to reinforce the atmospherics with the aid of a Lebanese
mountain singer.
Fun fact: the first track on Side B on the
original release was ʽQur'anʼ, for which Brian and David sampled the
chanted recital of The Holy Book by a bunch of Algerian Muslims — only to have
it removed and replaced with ʽVery, Very Hungryʼ (formerly the B-side
of ʽJezebel Spiritʼ) at a later date due to the insistence of the
Islamic Council of Great Britain, "in deference to somebody's
religion", Byrne said later. Hey, we understand — nobody wants not to wake
up one morning with Yusuf Islam's dagger sticking out of your back, guys, even
if those were not exactly the Je suis
Charlie times. You can still listen to the finished track on Youtube these
days, though (for now) — there is really nothing offensive about the way the
recital is sampled, what with the groove itself having a distinct near-Eastern
flavor, but of course the «protests» were issued more on general principle than
any particular gripes.
Anyway, just forget about the alleged
historical importance — sampling is such a poorly understood and clumsily
theoretized business (like a lot of developments in modern art) that singling
out its «revolutionaries» and «torch-bearers» is like dancing without a floor.
The best way to get into this album is just to adapt yourself to the groove and
then mentally transfer yourself to some imaginary setting — and then understand
that setting as an actual metaphor for your own everyday life, particularly if
you're a big city dweller that just keeps on running. Adopt this perspective,
and thumbs up
are guaranteed. Renounce it, and the whole thing will just be a weirder, but
more boring imitation of Remain In Light.
I know which one I choose.
AMBIENT 4: ON LAND (1982)
1) Lizard Point; 2) The Lost
Day; 3) Tal Coat; 4) Shadow; 5) Lantern Marsh; 6) Unfamiliar Wind (Leeks Hills);
7) A Clearing; 8) Dunwich Beach, Autumn 1960.
Once you have travelled long enough in the
ambient microcosm, the realisation that not only does it not all sound the
same, but that it is actually capable of showing an impressionistic palette as
broad as anything else will eventually come. For instance, On Land may seem just like «another Eno ambient album» — but in
reality, it sounds like nothing he'd ever done previously. Most of his previous
ambient albums focused on minimalistic keyboard melodies — short, meaningful
phrases placed under a sonic microscope. On
Land, allegedly recorded over a period of three years, was the first
attempt to completely break away from that and go further, into the realm of
sheer sonic atmosphere that is more hum and noise than melody. Nothing
generally revolutionary about that — Krautrock authorities, among others, had
pioneered that approach a decade earlier — but somewhat revolutionary on a
personal level.
Above everything else, it would be interesting
to see how Eno, a guy with a very traditional-emotional understanding of music
deep in his heart, would handle such a transition to «non-melody»: and indeed,
he handles it in the most melodic way possible, if we mean «melody» in its
etymological sense, which is «limb-song», implying a harmonious and logical
combination of parts into a whole. If the action of On Land really takes place on land, this is a dark, creepy,
uncomfortable type of land — something in between the Forest of Mirkwood and the
Misty Mountains, if you pardon my resorting to Tolkien for a second — but also
a very naturalistic type of land, every bit as believable as Another Green World, even if this one
seems anything but green (and it is
no wonder that Eno would go from here straight on to Apollo Atmospheres).
It is curious, though, that many of these
tracks are actually named after various locations in England — ʽLizard
Pointʼ, ʽLantern Marshʼ, ʽLeeks Hillsʼ, etc. —
implying that these are, after all, musically transformed and deconstructed
impressions of real landscapes that Eno was familiar with; if so, this is
definitely one of the gloomiest depictions of non-industrial England ever put
to tape, and one good reason to refuse knighthood for Seigneur le Baptiste de
la Salle if the issue ever comes up (that and the man's unconcealed pornography
fetish, of course). Even if nothing much really happens on ʽLizard
Pointʼ — basically just the wind blowing over some humming synth tones —
but midway through, the wind gets joined by ghostly voices, as if it were
carrying around the spirits of all those unfortunate who happened to drown
there (Lizard Point, the most southerly tip of England, actually has a rather
nasty history in that regard).
«Ghosts» are, of course, an almost obligatory
presence on almost any Eno ambient album, just because it is so easy to get
«ghost tones» out of your synthesizer — but, let's face it, the man has perfect
control over his ghosts, and a perfect understanding of what a ghost is all
about. Above all, a ghost is not something that is actually supposed to harass
you — a ghost usually just floats around, minding its own (rather mindless)
business, so neither on ʽLizard Pointʼ, nor on the somewhat less
creepy, but not less evocative, ʽLantern Marshʼ do these ghosts sound
personally intimidating — the ghosts on the ʽMarshʼ are just
whistling and hustling past you, creating an illusion of being in a hurry, when
in reality they just spin in circles. And in ʽUnfamiliar Windsʼ they
just seem to huddle together and hum their own ghostly little requiem, provided
it makes sense for ghosts at all to sing their own requiem.
Or maybe not their own. The final track of the album is ʽDunwich Beach,
Autumn 1960ʼ — no idea what happened there in 1960, when Brian was just 12
years old (but he did grow up in nearby Ipswich, so perhaps some childhood
recollection is involved), but Dunwich itself is a textbook example of the
rise-and-fall thing, having once been the capital of the Kindom of the East
Angles and having since then deteriorated into a depopulated village due to
coastal erosion. The track is as gloomy and fatalistic as (almost) everything
else here, lonesome droplets of electronic water trickling down the grooves to
a mournful electronic hum — and suggests that the entire On Land be taken as one huge mourn for something. A lost childhood,
a lost England, maybe a lost world or universe altogether, something that once
stood firm but now is only represented by echoes, murmurs, and wordless ghosts.
Once that understanding falls into place, On
Land really begins to work as a whole, and scores another non-triumphal
triumph for the man.
For the record, Jon Hassell, the famous trumpet
player, is present here on ʽShadowʼ, where his sporadic blows are
almost unrecognizably merged by Eno with the vague-fuzzy female vocal part;
guitarist Michael Brook is responsible for some of the mentioned «droplets» on
ʽDunwich Beachʼ; and various frogs, insects, and other organic
compounds have also been credited for contributing, although I am not so sure
about the royalties. But don't get any ideas — you are not going to get any
«nature sounds» stuff here, because everything is processed through the Enochip
before getting back at you from the speakers, so occasionally you might have a
hard time distinguishing the frogs from the trumpets, not to mention guitars
from keyboards. Nothing is what it seems, even if at first it may all seem like
one big nothing.
APOLLO: ATMOSPHERES & SOUNDTRACKS (1983)
1) Understars; 2) The Secret
Place; 3) Matta; 4) Signals; 5) An Ending (Ascent); 6) Understars II; 7) Drift;
8) Silver Morning; 9) Deep Blue Day; 10) Weightless; 11) Always Returning; 12)
Stars.
One thing I really love about Eno is his sense
of realism, which almost always
shines through even the most bewildering of his experiments. As much as the guy
likes challenging conventions, he is really not an abstract artist — he
produces logical, reasonable soundtracks to different universes, some of them
real, some imaginary and fantastic, but still perfectly visualized with the
minimum effort. This, I believe, is the main reason of this big demand on his
music when it comes to soundtracks for movies that challenge our imagination: it's
not just that Eno is the «obvious choice» because nobody knows any better,
it's that he has this ability to sort of jump right in the middle of any given
ambience and convert its chemical substance to sounds so efficiently that you,
the listener, will be able to reconvert it back even without any clues.
No better place to make this point than the
review of an actual soundtrack to a universe that is not entirely imaginary, but for most of us, is no different from
imaginary — the world of space travel. Curiously, looking back upon all of
Eno's projects before 1983, I fail to see anything that would be directly
related to space: most of his
soundscapes took place here on Earth (or, alternately, there on an alternate Earth), anywhere from jungles to high
mountain peaks, sometimes rising as high as the stratosphere, but never really
making a dash for deep space. Perhaps he thought these associations to be too
trivial or something, already well explored by everybody from Pink Floyd to
Tangerine Dream. But when he was approached by director Al Reinert with a
request to provide a musical backing for a documentary about the Apollo Moon
missions, well... as a dedicated public servant, Seigneur De La Salle just
couldn't refuse.
What also makes a big difference is that this
is his first major collaboration with guitarist and sound guy-extraordinaire
Daniel Lanois — from here, you could draw a straight line to The Joshua Tree if you so wished, which
kind of makes sense seeing as how The
Joshua Tree was, after all, U2's
big attempt to shoot the moon, which is what Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks is all about. Although
Lanois, as anybody familiar with his production style knows well, also has a
penchant for minimalism, he is not extreme about it, and cares more about
depth, echo, and suspense than about riding atop a single soundwave for thirty
seconds. This makes the collaboration ideal for the purpose, and the purpose
ideal for the collaboration.
The record, even if it might be supposed to
just represent a collection of incidental music for an ambitious documentary,
actually seems divided in two parts — call them «the Atmospheres part» and «the
Soundtracks part» if you like, but here's the deal: the first part, from
ʽUnderstarsʼ to ʽDriftʼ, is largely electronic and
«atmospheric», but starting with ʽSilver Morningʼ, the compositions
begin to feature a lot more guitar, and you feel... well, you may feel as if your scary voyage through
black holes and cosmic anomalies has finally led you out towards a brand new
world, be it an imaginary Moon or an imaginary summer resort for Jon Anderson.
In other words, this is by no means a static
album — despite all that we know about Eno, and despite all that we know about
incidental music for films, it can be construed to tell a story.
Even at its most purely atmospheric (in the
first half), the music still acts —
on ʽUnderstarsʼ, for instance, which mostly consists of pulsating
electronics representing the various heavenly bodies, there is this odd creepy
bassline, sounding as if it were an unexpected intruder from some jazz-fusion
universe, like a black snake spirit writhing its way through the twinkle.
ʽMattaʼ portrays some sort of quietly bubbling primordial soup, yet
every once in a while some early predatory life form bursts through to the
surface and emits a deep solitary howl. When the music does not act, this, too,
follows a certain logic — ʽSignalsʼ is a melodic interpretation of
radio waves flowing through ether, and ʽDriftʼ... well, you don't
expect much of anything to happen when you're just drifting, do you? But then
ʽDriftʼ takes you directly into ʽSilver Morningʼ, and that
is the point of arrival where the natives send out a greeting delegation that
plays you a nice welcome tune, somewhat influenced by Indian music... oh wait,
it's the Moon, there's nobody there. Well, seeing as how we're listening to
this outside the documentary, why not just make one more step and allow a bunch
of Moon people inside your imagination?
Granted, these Moon people also seem to have
developed a strange taste for blues and country-western: tracks such as
ʽDeep Blue Dayʼ and ʽWeightlessʼ, defined by Lanois'
reserved, but melodic and even somewhat memorable guitar melodies, alternately
bring to mind either Bob Dylan's soundtrack to Pat Garrett or some of David Gilmour's bluesy musings. But there is
nothing really wrong with that, and some of the chord changes in
ʽWeightlessʼ reveal a nice understanding of musical depth on Lanois'
part — after all, Brian does not choose his partners straight out of the blue,
does he? This duet with Lanois sounds and feels nothing like the Eno/Fripp
musical marriage, but is every bit as natural, simply replacing wild movement
and aggressiveness with safe, cozy, and introspective calmness.
The last track, ʽStarsʼ, brings us
back into the «atmospheres» camp, as if it were a last reminder: Moon people or
no Moon people, all of us are just dust in the... sorry. Anyway, it is a nice
conceptual come-around, where you start out with electronic imitation of The
Cosmic Conscience, progress to having guitars imitate organic life infused with
said Conscience, and then zoom out back to the point of magnification where
said organic life ceases to be significant. And oops, all of a sudden this is a
multi-layered conceptual album like The
Dark Side Of The Moon, rather than just a bunch of ambient tracks for
movies. All it took on our parts was a benevolent desire to bury ourselves in
the little details for a bit. See, not all
of Eno's post-pop-rock career is really worthless — you just have to wait for
the right moment to hit you, and then you can trace the ups and downs of this
ambient stuff the same way you trace the ups and downs of somebody really
dynamic in comparison, say, David Bowie. But yes, it takes a little getting
used to.
MORE MUSIC FOR FILMS (1983)
1) Untitled; 2) Last Door; 3)
Chemin De Fer; 4) Dark Waters; 5) Fuseli; 6) Melancholy Waltz; 7) Northern
Lights; 8) From The Coast; 9) Shell; 10) Empty Landscape; 11) Reactor; 12)
Secret; 13) Don't Look Back; 14) Marseilles; 15) Dove; 16) Roman Twilight; 17)
Dawn Marshland; 18) Climate Study; 19) Drift Study; 20) Approaching Taidu; 21)
Always Returning II.
I might be on Brian Eno's payroll,
surreptitiously inflating his reputation for hundreds of people who like to be
brainwashed by Only Solitaire, but not even a really generous helping from the
man's most highly treasured private stash of juicy porn could make me state,
poker face-style, that More Music For
Films is not an album «for completists only». Originally titled Music For Films Vol. 2, it used to be
an even less helpful proposition than it is today — because on the original
release, about a third of the tracks were simply carried over from Apollo. In 2005, when it came to
remastering the material for the CD age, some wise decisions were taken:
«doubling» tracks were mostly removed, and in their place Eno shoved lots of
snippets that were either completely unavailable up to then, or had been
released earlier, as rarities, on the 1993 boxset Eno Box I, which was out of print anyway.
But regardless of this, both the original
release and the new one feel
scraggly. The original Music For Films,
too, was rather heterogeneous, yet Eno managed to put the different pieces
together so well that, even if they never had the coherence of Another Green World, there was a
certain... well, mood continuity, let's
call it. In any case, it was an original and conceptual undertaking, whatever.
This «sequel», though, is really just scraping the barrel — gathering together
everything that, for one reason or other, had hitherto avoided being gathered,
and throwing it out with little regard for proper sequencing. All sorts of
snippets and outtakes in all sorts of styles: take your personal pick, chances
are you'll like at least some of it,
but you certainly won't be walking away from it thinking, «wow, that was some album I just listened to!»
Amusingly, around the time of the original
release Brian would remark that the second volume is quite distinct from the
first largely because the tunes, on the average, are longer — but with the CD
release, that distinction has been largely erased, because most of the new
tracks are very brief, usually
minute-long, snippets that do not have a serious chance to make a lasting
impression. ʽUntitledʼ, for instance, sounds like an outtake from Before And After Science, probably with
Percy Jones on bass again, but the overall composition only barely begins to
find its footing by the time it's over, and ends up sounding like a warm-up
rehearsal at a Brand X recording session (as well as the next two tracks, by
the way).
Elsewhere, you get some transcendental
electronic drone (ʽDark Watersʼ), some transcendental country muzak
(ʽMelancholy Waltzʼ indeed), some solemn baroque ambient (ʽFrom
The Coastʼ), some menacing industrial grind with Frippertronics
(ʽReactorʼ), and then the last third of the album, which is really
the only part that overlaps with the original Vol. 2, largely sounds like a continuation of Apollo, if you were all that desperate for a sequel, because, you
know, Eno always leaves you with a cliffhanger — many of us are still dying to
see the thrilling suspense of Music For
Airports resolved, one way or another.
On a concluding optimistic note, I really enjoy
the track ʽDawn Marshlandʼ. It might be one of the closest times he
ever came to capturing that «nature sound» without there being anything
«natural» about the track — synthesized hum and slightly spooky bird hoots,
creating a foggy dawn atmosphere that veers between the mystical and the
terrifying. As usual, nothing too complex about it, just this stunning
realization that... you know, so many people are doing these things and so many
people have trouble coming up with good semantics
behind them. And with Eno... right or wrong, but with so many of these short
tracks, logical semantic interpretations just hop inside your brain, easy,
focused, like bees inside a hive. How does he do that? He really is one of the very few people in the world who make
electronic instruments feel so utterly natural (which, of course, could also be
used as a criticism — what's the point of making electronic instruments sound
«natural» when you can just use «natural» sounds instead? which could lead to a
lengthy discussion, but that would be well beyond my current point). For the
moment, we'll just assume that the man is smarter than most of them (and most
of us), pending logical proof, and move on.
THE PEARL (w. Harold Budd) (1984)
1) Late October; 2) A Stream
With Bright Fish; 3) The Silver Ball; 4) Against The Sky; 5) Lost In The
Humming Air; 6) Dark-Eyed Sister; 7) Their Memories; 8) The Pearl; 9)
Foreshadowed; 10) An Echo Of Night; 11) Still Return.
It is not
easy, by all means, to find those precious words which would explain the difference
between the second Budd/Eno collaboration and the previously discussed first
one (Plateaux Of Mirror).
Technically, this one does not bear the subtitle Ambient #, which does not, however, make it any less ambient; and
also technically, this one was co-produced by Eno and Lanois, which does not,
however, imply that Lanois played anything on it or contributed something in
the way of production technique that we would never hope to perceive on a
completely Eno-produced record. I mean, when it's U2 playing their instruments
or Bob Dylan shaking up the musical world with a mighty comeback — yes, that is
when Daniel's production really makes its mark. But when it's just Harold Budd
at the keys and Eno responsible for synth hums, no, not really.
Which is not to say that The Pearl is somehow deficient in comparison to Plateaux. Thematically, perhaps, its
soundscapes are now more closely related to water,
rather than air and heights, yet I wonder how much of that
impression has been forced upon me by secondary reasons — such as the album
cover, or the album title, or ʽA Stream With Bright Fishʼ. Maybe it
also has to do with Budd's regular piano-playing occupying even more time here,
or with his using the sustaining pedal more often, giving the melodies a
«rippling» effect (title track is a good example). In any case, it's a
convenient impression that allows me to put both records together as companion,
rather than competing, pieces.
Again, if you wish, you can interpret the
sequence as an uneventful, but highly impressionistic journey, from the wake of
a ʽLate Octoberʼ day, culminating in the finding and blissful contemplation
of ʽThe Pearlʼ and ending with ʽAn Echo Of Nightʼ (this is
the one track where Budd almost completely disappears and lets Eno and Lanois
spin a crepuscular web of chirping crickets, chilly night breezes, and deep
ghostly sighs), after which, as a post-scriptum, ʽStill Returnʼ
offers either a dream perspective or an outsider archangel's look at the
sleeping world. None of the tracks stand out, as usual, or offer any particularly
stunning musical solutions, but that is not the point — for stunning musical
solutions, check out Debussy's Préludes
instead. The Pearl is still an
exercise in minimalism, where you are supposed to admire the beauty of the
overtone rather than the beauty of the chord change. On his own, Budd is hardly
a great composer or a great piano player — but Eno (and Lanois) simply use his
phrasing as source material for transforming the piano into a «super-piano»,
enhanced with studio technologies and contrasted with electronic backgrounds
for increased effect. It may not work well enough to encourage them to repeat
the experiment with Budd playing actual Bach / Schubert / Debussy pieces, but
it works well enough with Budd's own pieces, and that counts.
THURSDAY AFTERNOON (1985)
1) Thursday Afternoon.
For full, originally intended effect this
single track, stretched out over an hour, should go hand in hand with a video
installation, where, allegedly, seven immobile shots of a semi-nude model were
filtered through various video effects. Without the accompanying visual
impressions, the sheer transcendence of the sonic palette will travel through
your conscience unfertilized, and you will be forced to quench your spiritual
thirst with imperfection. Damn you, Brian Eno, then, for allowing Polydor
Records to distribute this work of art as a stand-alone audio CD, providing the
illusion of perfection for your fans worldwide when in reality they are
surreptitiously offered but one half of the apple of revelation.
Then again, who in his right mind would want to
spend sixty minutes (or even more) staring at a video installation? Even if it
shows semi-nude models? If it happened to be any of you reading this review,
please take the time to leave behind a happy memory of an epiphany you had in
the process, one that alleviated for you the uneasy task of opening your mind
to possibilities and looking at the material and trans-material world in front
of you with a different set of eyes. If it did not happen, well, let us join
forces and see what we can make out of these sixty minutes of sounds, and how,
even today, it can help us cure cancer and neutralize ISIL leaders.
One visual association that I definitely do not get is with semi-nude
models. The composition consists of a set of seemingly random, but in reality
quite complicatedly patterned processed piano notes, playing against a very,
very slow crescendo of electronic hum. The notes, as is quite common with Eno's
ambient experiments, are subject to delay, subtle timbre change, and overlaying,
so, technically, you probably could not state with certainty that «it all
sounds exactly the same», but from a layman's point of view, it certainly does.
The electronic hum eventually drowns out the piano tinkling, but only around
the 58th minute or so, after which the humming machine simply fades out.
If there is
a visual association, it would most likely be something in the cubist style...
no, not even cubist: more like De Stijl. Yes, actually, Thursday Afternoon would have made a fine audio companion to a van
Doesburg exhibition — its piano «plops», appearing on the surface as quickly as
they vanish again into nothingness, are just like randomized, proto-Tetris
geometric figures on De Stijl design pieces. Which is not really a compliment:
De Stijl, as far as I am concerned, works much better on T-shirts and table
cloths than it does in a museum, but would then Thursday Afternoon also
have a purely pragmatic function? Other than, I guess, you could set it as the
default receiving melody on your cell phone and spiritually illuminate all your
contacts instead of picking up the phone and replying to their petty
harassments?..
This is a piece of music that is, in the words
of certain business executives, "inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da,
optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional"; the only option that is not observed here is that "it must
be 3¼ seconds long", because the quotation, as retold by Brian, refers,
of course, to the Windows 95 theme, which was basically Thursday Afternoon condensed to that sort of length (imagine
Windows 95 taking sixty minutes to load, though). That was a nicely pragmatic «applied» use for Eno's magic. Other
than that, you could set it to run in
the background, for relaxation and harmonization and purification purposes
(burning some incense alongside would be nice as well), but I am afraid that,
whatever else you'd be doing at the moment — scrubbing the windows, doing your
taxes, writing your novel, or, God forbid, making love to your equally nutty New
Age-y girlfriend — you would begin slowly going crazy around the 15 minute
mark, and finalizing the deinstallation around the 40th minute, because this
stuff is naggy: the synth hum is
okay, but the piano notes may eventually cause the same effect as dripping
water in a torture cell.
That said, (a) the main «theme», if run for
about a couple of minutes, is every bit as beautiful and mystical as anything
the man ever did, and (b) if you are a professional risk-taker or just an avid
listener, hardened in many a battle against arrogant genius, submitting
yourself to the full experience at least once is probably not the stupidest
way to delete sixty minutes of your life. Which, like anybody else's life, is
worthless anyway next to the deep mysteries and wonders of the universe — and
we might just as well proclaim this as the basic overall meaning of Thursday Afternoon, an album that one
might easily condemn, but hardly ever forget.
WRONG WAY UP (w. John Cale) (1990)
1) Lay My Love; 2) One Word;
3) In The Backroom; 4) Empty Frame; 5) Cordoba; 6) Spinning Away; 7) Footsteps;
8) Been There Done That; 9) Come In The Desert; 10) The River; 11) You Don't
Miss Your Water*; 12) Palanquin*.
With Thursday
Afternoon behind his belt, Brian Eno unofficially changed his name to Brian
EnoUGH, and focused primarily on installations and all sorts of musical
carpentry — so when he came back in 1990 with his next proper «musical» album,
that part of the world for whom the name still mattered was probably quite
shocked to learn that (a) not only would it be a collaboration with John Cale,
another giant from the past, but (b) it would also be a pop album — Eno's first pop album in thirteen years, to be correct.
And if anything, as you listen to the opening
electronic-syncopated rhythms of ʽLay My Loveʼ that opens the record,
it's like those thirteen years never happened. Maybe the keyboard tones are a
little different, since, clearly, Eno uses a different set of sound-generating
gizmos in 1990 than he did in 1977, but the basic style of the song is not one
inch different from Eno's basic style on Before
And After Science, or, for that matter, Here Come The Warm Jets. Not one! Just the same combination of
catchy melodicity, warm friendly vocals, tense rhythmics, and overall weirdness
that used to make those records so accessible and so inimitable at the same
time.
Behind all the joy there are problems, however.
One is that, although all but one songs are jointly credited to Cale and Eno, Wrong Way Up does not sound like much of
a collaboration. When you had Eno and Cluster, or Eno and Budd, or even Eno and
Byrne, it was rather easy to spot the individual talents and tell who's
contributing what, and it all added up to all sorts of exciting combinations
of vibes. This record, in comparison, feels like half-Eno, half-Cale, and even
if technically Cale probably plays keyboards, strings, and horns on some
(all?) of the Eno songs and vice versa, the other guy is always being low-key
while the first guy is singing and flashing his personality. So you have the
Eno part (ʽLay My Loveʼ, ʽOne Wordʼ, ʽEmpty
Frameʼ, ʽBeen There Done Thatʼ, etc.) and the somewhat smaller
Cale part (ʽIn The Backroomʼ, ʽCordobaʼ, ʽFootstepsʼ,
etc.), and they're quite different: Brian is still largely the friendly guy
with a grin, Cale is still that second-gloomiest guy from the Velvet
Underground after, you know... the first-gloomiest guy. The two personalities
do not mesh that well.
Of course, they are not necessarily supposed
to: Wrong Way Up could run on
contrast rather than coherence. But this is where the second problem knocks on
the door, and that is — these songs are not that good, honestly. After the
first pangs of pleasure at the familiar sight and sweet memories triggered by
ʽLay My Loveʼ are over, you begin to realize that the song is neither
as fresh nor as tightly gripping as anything Eno did in the 1970s, even if the
looped string riff is kinda cute and uplifting. This is just too much of a «let's
go back there and see what we can do with the same old ingredients again» spirit to allow me to rate the
song on the same level as ʽNeedle In The Camel's Eyeʼ or ʽNo One
Receivingʼ, if you get my drift. It's a nice song, but it just doesn't —
has no intention to — stick around all that long.
They even selected one of the songs here for a
single, and it even charted in the States: ʽBeen There Done Thatʼ is
a New Wave-stylized pop hopper that nicks its verse melody from Paul McCartney's
ʽJunior Farmʼ (isn't that actually weirder than anything else on
here?), is fairly infectious while it's on, but in the end just sounds like
any medium-quality New Wave pop hit produced in the late 1970s or the early
1980s. Again, it's all fair, but it's Eno-lite, no surprises, all smoothness
and nostalgia and, if you pardon the expression here, not a lot of soul. And
then ʽThe Riverʼ sounds nice, but it is essentially fashioned in the
mode of an old country-pop tune, something of a cross between the darkness of
Johnny Cash and the sweetness of Ricky Nelson. I can understand Brian wanting
to write and record something like that, but surely he could have no illusions
that this (rather than, say, ʽBy This Riverʼ) is something that
he would be remembered by long after Johnny Cash, Ricky Nelson, and his truly
have given that unpredictable trio performance at Live Aid: A Benefit Concert
For The Children Of Limbo, organized and sponsored by the Archangel Committee.
I must say that, in a way, I actually prefer
the «purely Cale» slices on here — apparently, he was in some sort of Spanish
phase here, so ʽIn The Backroomʼ is a moody Mexican tale with
castanet overdubs and echoey guitars and violins, and ʽCordobaʼ is a
subtly haunting minimalistic ballad about... nothing in particular; it tries to
conjure a little bit of puzzling mysticism out of thin air and generally fails,
but at least the attempt is worthwhile. In other words, whatever John is doing
here does not simply seem like a stab at recapturing and repackaging old
glories — Eno, on the other hand, can almost literally be seen hopping with a
butterfly net after that elusive «spirit of 1977», and it is just a little odd
for such a respectable gentleman to be seen hopping around.
Since none of the songs are decidedly bad, a thumbs up
is still in order: the disappointed tone of the review is explained primarily
by context — with those almost impossible quality standards that Eno's pop
albums were setting in the mid-1970s, you could predict that any «comeback»
like this would be a disappointment, but you'd still secretly hope for another grand slam. Still, let us look at the
good sides, too — for instance, they pay no attention whatsoever to the actual
pop trends of the time, bent completely on doing their own schtick by their own
standards. And, as is usual with Eno, there are no attempts at
self-aggrandizing or putting on Elder Statesman clothes or anything like that —
aside from the usual cryptic lyrics that may or may not hold the key to the
meaning of life, it's all quite unpretentious. And catchy, and well-produced,
and enjoyable; but as for replay value — only for big fans of both artists, I'd
say.
NERVE NET (1992)
1) Fractal Zoom; 2) Wire
Shock; 3) What Actually Happened?; 4) Pierre In Mist; 5) My Squelchy Life; 6)
Juju Space Jazz; 7) The Roil, The Choke; 8) Ali Click; 9) Distributed Being;
10) Web; 11) Web (Lascaux Mix); 12) Decentre.
The revival of Eno's «pop» career ended as
quickly as it began: in 1991, Brian almost finalized what would have been his
first completely solo pop record since the Seventies, ironically calling it My Squelchy Life — but at the last moment,
the project was scrapped, shelved, and ultimately replaced with Nerve Net, an allegedly much less
accessible affair that did incorporate some material from MSL, but on the whole, did not look much like a «pop» album, let
alone anything even remotely close to the nostalgic spirit of Wrong Way Up.
What Nerve
Net is, actually, is an attempt to modernize and «harshen up» the man's
electronic sound. Throughout the Eighties, Eno was largely following his own
path, making all sorts of becalmed ambient albums that fit in with nothing
else. But he may have eventually
noticed that, in doing this, he had pretty much fell out of time — and even as
a producer, he'd hit his cutting-edge peak with Talking Heads in 1979-80 and,
well, that was that. Nerve Net
sounds like a conscious, even desperate attempt to catch up, and since the
hottest thing around to catch up with was IDM (well, actually, the term IDM
itself wouldn't be coined until 1993, but still...), this is what he is
catching up with here. Electronic textures set to dance rhythms — produced by a
man who hadn't really come close to a dance rhythm in at least a decade.
Saying that Nerve Net is a «bad» album wouldn't be meaningful at all. Rather,
it is the stereotypical useless
album: an old-school pro treading on the turf of younger artists who are much
more agile and knowledgeable in this department — I do not think that many a
fan of Aphex Twin will think all that highly of Nerve Net in comparison. It is creative and moderately diverse, but
the tunes are neither memorable nor all that powerful, and one reason behind
that may be their compromising nature: the rhythmics may be modern enough
(although the actual rhythms are rarely techno — more like good old syncopated
funk), but the guest stars, including old friends Robert Fripp and Robert Quine
on guitar, are old school veterans, and are just doing their usual schtick, not
looking particularly excited about Eno's call for rejuvenation.
Problem is, if you're making a dance album (and
this is a dance-oriented album), it
has to go all the way, but this one does not. It sets up groove after groove
with tense, nervous atmospherics (hence the name Nerve Net, right? right?), but it's almost as if Eno's decade of
creating relaxed ambient sounds were refusing to let go off him, and every
groove that tries to go for a harsh, grim, merciless effect ends up sounding
soft and tender. In fact, about half of them sound like Brand X reprogrammed
for drum machines and keyboard loops — atmospheric jazz-funk that tended to get
boring even with live players, and gets useless with machines.
Attempts at singling out «better» tracks have
been fruitless for me. Maybe it is the ones that have Fripp soloing all over
them, like ʽWire Shockʼ with its vocoder-ish guitar tone vomiting all
over your living room. Or maybe it is ʽAli Clickʼ, just because its
funky groove sounds more loose and cocky than any other, and there's also this
fade-in-fade-out piano line swooping down, and Eno is rapping something out on
top of the music as if this were a surrealist pop number out of the past? Or
maybe it's ʽWebʼ, because its «web» of distorted synthesizers and
scared piano tinkling is the most ominous soundscape on the album? Whatever be,
to me these observations do not come naturally — I have to concentrate really,
really hard on the tunes to be impressed by them. Not that they aren't
professional or creative or anything like that: they are simply too busy and
fussy to be «ambient», yet too reliant on atmosphere and repetitiveness to be
properly «dynamic».
Disturbing bit of trivia: apparently, the
vocoder-distorted vocals on ʽWhat Actually Happened?ʼ encode the
discussion of a rape situation. You
wouldn't notice it unless you listened in very attentively or checked the
lyrics online, but there it is. The words would agree with the general tone of
the album — nervous, paranoid, deranged, psycho — but their blurriness also
agrees with the general timidity of the album: Selected Ambient Works it sure ain't. On the other hand, those who
still like to have their dynamic, kick-ass electronica with a bit of a humanoid
face to it (all these guitar solos and drum loops that give the impression of
being hand-generated) might still want to give this a try. Eno's mediocrity
does have growth potential, you know.
THE SHUTOV ASSEMBLY (1992)
1) Triennale; 2) Alhondiga; 3)
Markgraph; 4) Lanzarote; 5) Francisco; 6) Riverside; 7) Innocenti; 8)
Stedelijk; 9) Ikebukuro; 10) Cavallino.
And now, back to magic ambient territory. This
is actually a collection of various tracks, most of them recorded by Eno in the
second half of the 1980s for assorted installations around the world (hence all
the titles where you can distinguish Italian, German, Dutch, and Japanese words
that relate to installation geography) — and then put together as a mix tape
for the Russian artist Sergei Shutov. The latter, as it happens, contacted Eno
saying that he loved to work to the sound of his records, but that he also had
limited access to these records (I guess the contact either took place before
1991, or else Sergei was too poor at the time to buy imported CDs and too
honest to stock up on bootlegs), so Eno took pity on the music-hungry artist
and put together all these tracks as a present (I guess Sergei didn't mean to
say that he was actually shaking his ass off to Here Come The Warm Jets while working — now that would have been
one funny case of artistic miscommunication).
Eventually, Eno liked his own mix tape so much
that he proclaimed there was a common theme to all these tracks (mere mortal
men will not be able to see it, though, so it is a good test on whether you are
predisposed to immortality), and put it out commercially. Normally, I tend to
avoid commenting on his «installation albums», because there's so many of them
and they are so interchangeable, but The
Shutov Assembly does not formally count as one, and at the same time it
does give you a very representative peek into Eno's music-as-painting approach.
Unlike Thursday Afternoon, this one
can be rather easily sat through: all the tracks but one are relatively short,
there is some diversity involved, and the minimalism is rarely jarring,
because, for the most part, this is not Eno trying to see how much he can
squeeze out of one note — this is Eno producing soundscapes to match visual
settings, and the degree of minimalism here most likely depends on the type of
visual setting.
Nothing here counts as a breakthrough idea or
anything like that, but it might be the best kind of «guess your environment!»
game album by the man since Another
Green World (stuff like Apollo
was all just one environment, and the
Music For Films series were quite
scattered and sketchy). Here is a quick runthrough, made up on the spot.
ʽTriennaleʼ is clearly a quiet,
beautiful, and slightly dangerous underwater environment, small currents and
aquatic organisms gliding past you without paying much attention.
ʽAlhondigaʼ is a cavernous setting, with various minerals glistening
off the walls and cool, fidgety breezes running through the tunnels in the form
of white-noise swooshes or violin-like tremolos. ʽMarkgraphʼ is a
dusty old dungeon, inhabited by loyal spirits of the former occupants quietly
hooting around. ʽLanzaroteʼ probably takes place on a moonless night
somewhere in a large clearing, surrounded by deep forest on all sides — you're
placed in the middle and you have to sniff out which side does the danger come
from. (Hint: it never ever comes). ʽFranciscoʼ takes you to a cave
once again, but this time it is a magical one, maybe Ali Baba's or something,
with gold glistening all around that you find yourself afraid to touch.
ʽRiversideʼ, despite the title (which
really just refers to Riverside Studios in London), could have fit in well on Apollo — it's full of little space
bleeps that convey the serene beauty of nothing out there.
ʽInnocentiʼ is actually similar in mood to ʽRiversideʼ, but
has a larger amount of robotic electronic noises, so maybe it has you inside the spaceship rather than on the
ʽRiversideʼ outside. ʽStedelijkʼ has lots of church
organ-like tones, so you could try and imagine yourself inside some sort of
futuristic temple where you float through the air when communicating with God,
because gravity prevents you from successful communication.
ʽIkebukuroʼ, the longest track on the album, is also the weirdest one
— a 16-minute pattern of deep faraway chimes that echo off each other,
overdubbed with what sounds like furiously, frantically, and pointlessly flapping
wings... umm... Pegasus caught up in a musical spider web? Whatever. Finally,
ʽCavallinoʼ is a quiet, but stately sunset that also takes place on a
distant planet with its own Sun.
If there really is a «common theme» to it all,
I have yet to find it, although one must not forget that the thin line between
deep insight and ridiculous bullshit in modern art is dainty thin indeed. Regardless,
this is a pretty nifty collection of atmospheres: I certainly wish he'd taken
some unnecessary fat off ʽIkebukuroʼ (sixteen minutes of wing-flap
brings this way too close to Thursday
Afternoon for comfort), and the degree of diversity isn't really so high as
to make it his latter-day equivalent of Another
Green World, but at least this is one fine gift for the likes of Shutov.
NEROLI (1993)
1) Neroli.
«Thanks to the calming nature of the piece, Neroli has been implemented in some
maternity wards, both to instill a sense of calm as well as enhance the organic
nature of childbirth» (Wikipedia). I am not quite sure how exactly a series of
intricately looped, digitally synthesized notes is supposed to «enhance the
organic nature of childbirth», but who am I to question advanced psychotheurapetical
practices? Let us instead concentrate on the title — most likely an anagram,
but what for? "Lorien"? Unless the elves actually spend most of their
time frozen in cocoons, not very likely. "Lenoir"? That's a pretty
common surname; probably not the
inventor of the internal combustion engine, though, as that would be too loud
for this album. "Nilore"? What does the man care about nuclear
technology research sites in Pakistan? Beats me.
Anyway, this is basically Thursday Afternoon Vol. 2 — only a «darker» counterpart to that
record's «lighter» aura, as the played notes are much lower; there is also no
humming electronic background whatsoever, so the only thing left between you
and the gradually fading soundwaves of the dripping notes is silence. Imagine
your roof leaking in a regular pattern, with a set of pots capturing the
droplets, as the pattern very slowly shifts due to the droplets dropping at
different speeds, yet essentially remains the same, and that is basically Neroli for you, except the dripping
process has been given an electronic coating. And, of course, it is almost one
hour long.
Perhaps it really does help young mothers, lying in beds resting with nothing much to
do. Perhaps it is a cool soundtrack to help you meditate — as an experiment,
you could try playing it in its entirety every evening before you go to bed,
and it might drain your brain of all the silly, disturbing, nerve-wrecking
events of the day. I am not denying the worth of this as a medical tool (it
should definitely have at least some sort of placebo value), and I am not even
denying it the status of an artistic statement, one that would prompt people to
exclaim: "Ah, that Neroli!
Verily, has a more astute metaphor for the entire universe behaving just like
circles on the water been thought of by mortal man? That Eno — musical
philosophy has never been more profound in its simplicity and directness! Not
even John Cage has got anything on him!"
What I am
denying is the capacity of these «circles on the water» to do much of anything
for me, or for people who, while not denying the powers of «ambient» as a
genre, think that minimalism in composing is long past being valuable per se. Honestly, one Thursday Afternoon per artist is quite
enough; so I would prefer to simply label this «Brian Eno's Limited Time Offer
For Maternity Wards — Not To Be Taken Seriously» and forget that it ever
existed.
SPINNER (w. Jah Wobble) (1995)
1) Where We Lived; 2) Like
Organza; 3) Steam; 4) Garden Recalled; 5) Marine Radio; 6) Unusual Balance; 7)
Space Diary 1; 8) Spinner; 9) Transmitter And Trumpet; 10) Left Where It Fell.
As most of those people who are supposed to
generally know stuff about people named «Jah Wobble» already know, but those
people who find names like «Jah Wobble» kinda funny probably may not know, Jah
Wobble was an old friend of the Sex Pistols' John Lydon, and together they
originally formed PiL, where he played bass guitar before he got bored and
moved on to an even more experimental/avantgarde solo career. That a guy like
that would eventually attract Brian Eno's attention was quite probable, but it
is important to keep in mind that Spinner
was not really a «collaboration» as such.
Instead, what happened is that Eno simply sent
Wobble a bunch of his tapes that were originally recorded for the soundtrack to
one of Derek Jarman's experimental movies — just, you know, because what do you
do with a bunch of tapes left over from a soundtrack? Why, you send them to Jah
Wobble! Like, what could be more natural and predictable? Remember, Jah Wobble
is always there behind your back to make good use of your leftovers (provided
your skill level is at least 20 points, which makes you eligible for
co-operation).
The results are not particularly thrilling,
though. Wobble decided not to disrupt the steady ambient flow of Eno's tapes —
instead, he just made them more bass-heavy, added some rhythm (in places), and
emphasized the dark / mystical / ominous aspects, but all very gently, even on
those of the tracks that also received a volume boost from percussion and
electric guitar overdubs (some of the percussion was handled by Can's own Jaki
Liebezeit, which is particularly noticeable on the title track with its fussy,
overspilling drum track). What emerges is a mix of ambient, industrial, and
even dub compositions that are never too intrusive, not very illuminating, and
mainly just keep returning you to those dark sonic caverns that you have
probably already explored in depth on earlier Eno albums.
It's not bad, and not even meaningless, but
none of this inspires any creative writing: the beats sound normal, the synth
and bass tones are nothing special, the «acid jazz» overtones that sometimes
arise out of nowhere are fairly routine, and the last track, which goes on for
15 minutes, according to Brian himself, was not liked by anyone, so he called
this style, self-ironically, «unwelcome jazz», which it is: starting out like
a limping jazz-fusion shuffle with Eastern overtones and wildly wobbling volume
levels, it is then transformed into something that sounds like an intro to a
soothing smooth jazz instrumental, only looped to eternity. Yes, it's moody,
but so is everything Eno ever did.
Overall, it is weird: there is actually much
more happening on this record than is usual for Eno's ambient projects, but in
the end you are left with the feeling that you got much less than you bargained for. Apparently, Enoisms and Wobblisms
just do not make good partners — the ambient soundscapes are not in agreement
with the bass grooves, and the end product is a disappointment somewhat on the
same grounds as Neroli: an attempt
to sound harshly modern that still relies on old-fashioned ideas of beauty — a
conflict of interests that remains unresolved. But I guess that the very manner
in which the record was produced automatically precluded it from potential masterpiece
status. It's not as if Eno cannot work in a dynamic environment — his work with
Talking Heads and David Byrne is best proof that he can — it is simply that
here, there was no dynamic environment to begin with, just a bit of quick
fiddling about by correspondence. Definitely not essential for fans of either
Eno or PiL, I'd say.
THE DROP (1997)
1) Slip, Dip; 2) But If; 3)
Belgian Drop; 4) Cornered; 5) Block Drop; 6) Out Out; 7) Swanky; 8) Coasters;
9) Blissed; 10) M. C. Organ; 11) Boomcubist; 12) Hazard; 13) Rayonism; 14) Dutch
Blur; 15) Back Clack; 16) Dear World; 17) Iced World.
True to its name, I believe that all of this
album, except for the last track, is about «the drop». Since gravity causes
different effects depending on the nature of the object subjected to gravity,
things, you know, tend to drop at different rates with different sonic
repercussions, and this is exactly the subject that Brian Eno explores on this
album. And if you think the subject is slight, well, think again — can you even
imagine a world without dropping?
It's not every second, mind you, that a starving child dies in Africa — but
every second, millions and billions of objects around the world effectuate The
Drop. And has anyone in the history
of music ever made a work of art about that? Absolutely nobody, not even The
Fall.
On the down side, when you dig deep into the
art of dropping, it shows little potential for fascination. If you emphasize
it and make tricky electronic interlocking patterns, like Autechre, it can have
some crazy appeal — but if you treat it minimalistically, like Brian does here,
it doesn't do all that much. Sixteen short tracks — snippets, really — that
range from rhythm-less atmospheric textures to (theoretically) danceable tracks
with drum-'n'-bass support, and most of them just float by without awakening
any unusual thoughts or feelings. There is little here that wasn't already done
better on Nerve Net or Spinner, and those, too, weren't
exactly huge artistic successes. At best, this music feels like a collection of
moody intros to potentially gripping songs — some mildly intriguing groove is
set up, you subconsciously expect it to develop / transition into something
more exciting, it never does, and you walk away... dissatisfied. Maybe you will
get an idea of what a ʽBelgian Dropʼ really is, but how exactly is
that going to help you develop your spirituality and keep in touch with The
Eternal?
Since the tracks are so frustratingly
non-descript, I believe that the only thing that remains is to point out that
the last track, called ʽIced
Worldʼ and stretching out for more than thirty minutes, is actually just
an extended version of the second part of the last track from Spinner, and that nothing particularly
different happens in those 25 minutes of it that were not included on Spinner.
I do wonder if there's a skyscraper high enough anywhere in the world that
would require a 32-minute ride with ʽIced Worldʼ as the soundtrack.
If there is, they should be waiting for you with a straitjacket at the top,
just for the purpose of extra security — or, at the very least, you might never
ever want to hear a piano again as long as you live.
It is so ironic, of course, that the worst of
Eno's ambient albums seem to be those on which something actually happens — at least Music For Airports, with its Zen-Spartan poise, entrances you with
its superficially humble arrogance, but this «unwelcome jazz» thing that Brian
got going in the late Nineties is just yawn-inducing. Never even mind that
these albums put him at a total disadvantage with all the experimentation and
innovation that was happening at the same time on the electronic scene — it's
just a bunch of bland sonic collages by itself, in and out of any context. I
can understand that the man was bored, but rubbing your boredom off on others
is simply impolite, especially for such a great artist.
DRAWN FROM LIFE (w. J. Peter Schwalm) (2001)
1) From This Moment; 2)
Persis; 3) Like Pictures, Pt. 1; 4) Like Pictures, Pt. 2; 5) Night Traffic; 6)
Rising Dust; 7) Intenser; 8) More Dust; 9) Bloom; 10) Two Voices; 11) Bloom
(instrumental).
Definitely an improvement here. Apparently, J.
Peter Schwalm is a German experimental musician and composer, primarily a
drummer and later on a human synthesizer, combining elements of jazz and
electronica to produce some of that sweet music of the future. And considering
how much Eno was moving in that direction himself, first with Jah Wobble and
then on his own on The Drop, the two
guys were probably destined to work together. Or, to put it more accurately,
one of those days Eno was destined to work with an electro-jazz guy from
Germany — the fact that this guy was J. Peter Schwalm we will ascribe, however,
to historic incident.
The pair collaborated first on an esoteric
project — an «image album» for a manga (Music
For Onmyo-Ji) where the first disc was allocated to a Japanese gagaku ensemble, and the second one
featured six Eno/Schwalm compositions. The partners having apparently taken a
liking to each other, they decided upon a «proper» follow-up that would be in a
position to make more waves, and not only did they carry it through, but they
even went as far as to tour in
support of the album, which, if I am not mistaken, was Eno's first tour since
the faraway days of Roxy Music (although he did have occasional sporadic
concert appearances, such as with 801, from time to time) — interesting how a
totally unknown Peter Schwalm succeeded in dragging him out, where neither
Robert Fripp nor David Byrne could do the trick.
In any case, the product of their collaboration
is arguably the most... eventful
record, let's put it that way, to come out of the Eno camp since at least Wrong Way Up. Formally, it continues
his obsession with «unwelcome jazz», but the compositions seem more inspired,
meaningful, and dynamic than ever before — not all of them, perhaps, but enough
to bring back a little bit of faith in the man, unless it is really Schwalm
who's doing all the composing here. Memorable themes, diverse atmospheres,
suspenseful build-ups, and, most importantly, that old feeling of getting lost
in a surreal, but totally realistic musical world, it's all here to some
degree, and without any hints of either forced nostalgia or forced
modernization.
The most impressive compositions are arguably
the ones that bookmark the album (discounting the brief intro and outro
sections) — ʽPersisʼ and ʽBloomʼ. The former, a
juxtaposition of Peter's drum'n'bass tracks and Eno's synthesizer textures, is
a great example of «suspenseful ambient», as you keep waiting for these chimes
and drips to resolve into something creepy, and eventually there is some sort
of «intermediate» resolution, when an ominous string riff appears out of nowhere
and heightens the suspense — dark clouds on the horizon, approaching at an
alarming rate, that sort of thing. Of course, the storm itself never comes, but
that would be too much to ask for from a guy who is only interested in
premonitions.
ʽBloomʼ, on the other hand, is a far
more calm, gently-wobbling, trip-hop-influenced track, a careful musical
rocking horse with bubbly percussion and a two-note cuckoo-clock-style synth
rhythm, somewhere behind which you can distinguish (though hardly understand)
the merry patter of a little kid. As a bonus track, the album also adds a
purely instrumental version of the same track, but, curiously, it works better with the kid — the contrast, or,
rather, the perfect synthesis between the serenity of the lightly orchestrated
musical track and the child's cute little noises is endearing without being
cloying, and also helps remind us of this charming humanity that infests the
best of Eno's works, despite all of their technophilia.
In between the two, there's all sorts of stuff,
good and bad: extremely ugly and
dated vocal effects on ʽRising Dustʼ, which sounds like somebody
having too much fun with Autotune and not minding the consequences is
something I could easily do without, but ʽNight Trafficʼ is another
case of Brian's solemn organ-like keyboard parts and Schwalm's stern,
doom-laden basslines well complementing each other, and ʽMore Dustʼ
has a pretty, if not downright beautiful, minimalistic guitar/keyboard pattern
that slowly «drips» on the listener and is much more evocative than anything
on The Drop (or maybe it is just
because in reality, I am charmed out by the equally minimalistic bass «zoops»
that have an entrancing quality to them).
In short, if we are ever to move away from
«minimal minimalism» and closer to a world that requires a rhythm section and
some musical development, the direction of Drawn
From Life is a promising one — it's as if we have Brian slowly awakening
from a slump here, correcting the mistakes he'd been guilty of ever since Nerve Net led him closer to the «techno
world» and made him forget about his own identity and his own strongest sides.
I am not sure if, given the strange strange strange musical standards of
ambient, New Age, and all these next-level-of-conscience musical genres of the
modern world, this record could be objectively called a «comeback», but in my
personal ledger at least, nobody could deny me such a record, or the
prerogative of recommending the album to all of those people who'd lost their
faith in St. Brian ever since the attempt to forgive him for Thursday Afternoon ran into
translational difficulties. (That said, if you happened to lose your faith in
the man right after Before And After
Science, the recommendation still does not apply — intelli-pop music this
ain't).
THE EQUATORIAL STARS (w. Robert Fripp) (2004)
1) Meissa; 2) Lyra; 3)
Tarazed; 4) Lupus; 5) Ankaa; 6) Altair; 7) Terebellum.
Long time no see! The last «Fripp & Eno»
album had been released almost thirty years ago, even though, technically, the
two sonic wizards still managed to cross creative paths every now and then.
Lots of water under the bridge, too, and while the title of this third
full-scale collaboration also happens to have the word star in it, the album has very little in common with Evening Star, or, in fact, with
anything that you'd normally associate with Robert Fripp.
Genre-wise, this here is not «noise», or
«drone»: The Equatorial Stars, a
record dedicated to the still, visibly immanent beauty and mystery of those
little lighted dots above our heads, is a 100% ambient record, focusing on
static atmosphere much more than on any sort of musical development. And old
man Robert seems perfectly content here to stick to a quiet, inobtrusive,
repetitive style of playing, without any dynamic pre-planning of where a
particular guitar melody is supposed to go or how it could gradually and
subtly gain in intensity. In other words, a perfect setup is made for one of
the most boring albums ever released — a record in which Robert Fripp, the
demon hero of ʽ21st Century Schizoid Manʼ, signs a contract with your
local airport.
Strangely, though, the setup works, and scrolling up to see which was
the previous Brian Eno ambient album that I liked to a comparable degree, I
stopped at Apollo, which was hardly
surprising — it's like The Equatorial
Stars simply forgets about everything Eno did in between 1983 and 2004, and
acts as a logical sequel to that mini-masterpiece. Only instead of grizzly
Canadian bear Daniel Lanois you get clean-cut English gentleman Robert Fripp,
who never forgets to wear a freshly starched collar under that space suit. Do
they offer five o'clock tea on Meissa? Probably not, which is why they had to
visit all the other stars as well.
Actually, Fripp as a contributor to the frozen
field of ambient turns out to be surprisingly efficient. On ʽMeissaʼ,
set against Brian's twinkle-twinkle-little-star droplets of electronic
keyboards, he plays a minimalistic bass-heavy humming solo, which often sounds
as if someone were really slowly
bowing a cracked old cello with just one string on it — and the two parts merge
together blissfully, as if Eno's high-pitched sounds were «life», Fripp's
low-grumbling solo were «death», and everything else was trapped in between. Or
if you think that's pretty far-fetched, you can just return to the usual idea
of various types of aliens roaming the galaxy. Small, hasty, fussy ones
engineered by Eno and large, slow, grumbly ones manipulated by Fripp.
The formula is repeated in a number of similar,
but slightly different ways throughout the record, and it's not as if every
track here has its own face: in fact, your conscience will probably only be
slightly altered with ʽAltairʼ, where we have some programmed
percussion and a surprisingly funky, though very faintly mixed, rhythm track —
hello from the age of Nerve Net? —
that might just as well not be
present. Maybe they got it from a reliable source in the astrological community
that the population on Altair is particularly fond of nightclubbing, but more
likely, they just had this rhythm track lying around by accident and they
thought that it would be a nice incidental way to confound some people's
expectations. Because it doesn't really matter — what matters are those little
whistling flushes and flusters of guitar-like keyboards and keyboard-like
guitars, probably representing the careless (and purposeless) spirits of all
your dead ancestors who were seduced by low rent costs on Altair over the
millennia. The rhythm track is just an echo of the irritating boombox that one
of the brothers forgot to turn off.
Anyway, to me it all seems like a decent return
to ambient form by Eno, and a startling side project for Fripp — unlike those
two early albums, Equatorial Stars
may not lay any claim to any sort of innovation, but it is still a somewhat different project, and it actually makes
an even colder, an even more dangerous and impenetrable place out of open space
than Apollo ever did. It seems too
busy to get everything possible out of just one type of atmospheric texture to
be really comparable to Apollo —
but it does achieve what it set out to do. Probably the best way to experience
it, though, would be by blasting it at full volume into the sky on a
particularly clear and starry night while lying on your back in the grass and
trying to remember as many constellation names as your memory allows you to
carry. This will bring you one step closer to rupturing the spacetime
continuum, I'm sure, and you'll never want to worry about the little things again.
ANOTHER DAY ON EARTH (2005)
1) This; 2) And Then So Clear;
3) A Long Way Down; 4) Going Unconscious; 5) Caught Between; 6) Passing Over;
7) How Many Worlds; 8) Bottomliners; 9) Just Another Day; 10) Under; 11) Bone
Bomb.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it; if it done got
broke — for goodness' sake, just replace
it already. All of Eno's half-hearted attempts to make bits of vocal pop music
past the Seventies, be it with Cale, Schwalm, or anybody else, were
incomparable in quality to the classic era; so why, after all this time, once
again return to the vocal format, and this time, for an entire album? This
attempt was simply bound to be half-hearted again, and it is.
Tucking some modern rhythms behind his belt,
enlisting the help of some proverbially progressive stars, and alternating
between sung, spoken, mumbled, and jumbled vocals, Brian here gives us an album
that is both ambient and pop at the
same time — or, rather, one that is neither ambient nor pop. Essentially, it's
a platter of moody mush that presents itself as something much more deep than
it really is, and also contains some really bad sonic decisions, such as the
frequent use of Autotune to transform Eno's normally handsome vocals into the
last sounds of a rapidly melting Wicked Robot of the West.
Saddest of all, Another Day On Earth shows that Eno totally lost the capacity to
amaze — now, when he is generating pop music, he is just generating pop music. It's not as if ʽThisʼ were a
bad song, but it just sounds like any other semi-decent New Wave and later
art-pop song. The drum machines are openly crappy (oh, where are those happy
days when studio technology and organic Phil Collins could join in bliss and
ecstasy on an opening track?), but much worse is the hidden crap effect, when the song is over and you realize that you
don't remember anything about it except that, uh, it was... kind of
happy-sounding and peaceful.
Or maybe this entire album is just a bit too
happy-sounding and peaceful. See, when you combine faint pop hooks with friendly
ambient soundscapes and meditative disposition, there's always a danger of
losing focus, of drifting apart in your own mellowness. It's one thing when you
are directly producing a stereotypical ambient album — it's totally another
when you are using ambience as a support for a «song», because then you get
something like ʽA Long Way Downʼ, which is neither here nor there: as
an ambient piece, it is let down by the inclusion of vocals, but as a vocal
piece, it suffers from melodic minimalism. Like, would those Harold Budd
collaborations have been better if Eno thought they needed vocal overdubs?
Probably not, or he would have added those overdubs. Then why make that mistake
here?
In the middle of the album, we unexpectedly get
an almost upbeat, McCartney-esque pop ballad (ʽHow Many Worldsʼ),
riding on a simple acoustic guitar riff and sporting unusually pathetic lyrics
for Eno; I would have thought that lines like "our little world turning in
the blue" would be way below his usual level of acceptance, but there you
go — actually, the credits state that the lyrics were co-written with Michel
Faber, the Dutch writer, and I sure hope he writes better novels than he does
poetry. Anyway, it's kind of pretty, but it's also kind of childish: where in
the past Eno had this knack for finding minimalist melodies that sounded like
they were telling you The Lost Chord Truth of the universe, ʽHow Many
Worldsʼ seems poised for a Sesame
Street soundtrack. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course,
but then offer it for a Sesame Street soundtrack, goddammit, not
your long-awaited «pop comeback».
ʽJust Another Dayʼ, arriving near the
end of the album, tries to somehow summarize it all and present a stately
finale, and it's decent — with Brian using his imposing lower range on a basic
vocal hook that, in a typical Eno manner, tries to marry the macrocosmically
grand with the utmost in simplicity. Decent, but not devastating: just like
the song tries to convince us that "that was just another day on
Earth", so is the song itself "just another song", celebrating
Eno's gift for serenity and bliss in a routinely manner. After all, the music
behind all this is just another mix of humming electronic textures, isn't it?
And the percussion is dreadful.
The one really
weird song on the album is ʽBone Bombʼ, serving here as a totally
unexpected afterthought-style appendix — a series of bass and keyboard pulses,
over which a vocally desensitized lady with a Laurie Anderson flair (not
Laurie Anderson, though) piles up strings of free-form poetry, as if from the
point of view of a suicidal terrorist ("bone bomb" is apparently a
technical term for a suicide bomber whose own bones serve as lethal
projectiles). Predictably, it's kind of creepy, although the subject matter is
masked well enough for most people not to take notice. And even though the
track is not pop at all, and even though I am not generally a fan of this kind
of pretentious pseudo-shocking Relevant Art, I find myself strangely wishing
that Another Day On Earth contained
more of the same, instead of generally relying on that safe, cuddly, no longer
all that interesting sound.
The sad truth is that the days on which Eno
released albums like Another Green World
and Before And After Science were
not «just another day on Earth» kind of days — they were really special days
with special musical events. We may, of course, simply agree with the artist
that these days are gone for ever, and now every new day is just another day,
regardless of whether you find a new Brian Eno record waiting for you or not.
But if so, I don't think I want to be explicitly told about it; I sort of know
it already, you know. Disappointing.
BEYOND EVEN (1992-2006) (w. Robert Fripp) (2007)
1) Ringing Beat; 2) Gasp; 3)
Sneering Loop; 4) Tripoli 2020; 5) Behold The Child; 6) Timean Sparkles; 7)
Dirt Loop; 8) The Idea Of Decline; 9) Deep Indian Long; 10) Hopeful Timean; 11)
Glass Structure; 12) Voices; 13) Cross Crisis In Lust Storm.
More Fripp & Eno for those who prefer their
ambient spicy and with extra feedback on top. This album, too, has had a rather
strange release history: originally made available only as a digital download,
under the odd title of The Cotswold
Gnomes, it was later released on CD as Beyond
Even (1992-2006) in two versions: a single-CD package and a double-CD
edition where you could either listen to all the compositions separately or segued together by means of rather unsophisticated
fade-ins and fade-outs. Additionally, discographies tell me that at least one
limited edition print of the CD (Japanese, I think) came under the title Unreleased Works Of Startling Genius —
which, I assume, may be a title
inspired by the form term «Area Of Outstanding National Beauty», which is
actually applied to Cotswolds, referenced in the original name. But enough with
this detective crap, or it may begin to look as if I'm actively interested in
this or something.
As the title (one of the titles) tells us,
these are indeed collaborative works with Fripp, many, if not most, of them
being outtakes from the Equatorial Stars
sessions. Since, however, there is no intended conceptual unity here (which
sort of makes you question the necessity of making that special segued version),
the tracks are more variegated in texture, mood, and arrangements: some are
rhythmic, some purely atmospheric, some dark (more often), some light (more
rarely), and at least one where a lisping (or Japanese) lady whispers
"behold the child" in a multi-layered loop — good choice if you want
to make your Christmas celebration as modernistically psychedelic as possible,
although I might be misreading the artists' lofty spiritual goals here.
Additionally, where on Equatorial Stars Fripp would largely dissolve his solos in the
surrounding atmosphere, adopting a quiet minimalistic mode as if he were
Brian's humble disciple in the art of staying invisible (and inaudible), here
there is a bit of the good old Frippertronics in the air, and some mighty
devilish Crimsonian soloing from time to time, which comes greatly in handy
when you want to shut your mind off, get all conservative as heck and just
enjoy the old man getting all pissed off and volcanic on his guitar. For these
purposes, I'd especially recommend ʽSneering Loopʼ (which is indeed
a loop, and a fairly sneering one), parts of ʽRinging Beatʼ (although
the wildest guitar parts there are locked inside a near-soundproof
sarcophagus), and... and... okay, looks like I went over a top a bit. Oh no,
there's actually some more on ʽThe Idea Of Declineʼ, bu that's about
it.
Perhaps I was misled by the frequent presence
of fellow Crimsonian Trey Gunn on a lot of these tracks — hugging the band's
famous «Chapman Stick» that communicates a ferocious bass groove to most of
them and greatly enhances the overall feeling of darkness by itself, so that
Fripp can just sit back and modulate nonchalant cosmic rays with his
six-string. That's how it goes on ʽTripoli 2020ʼ (the equivalent of
cool jazz for the electronic age) and on most of ʽRinging Beatʼ.
Elsewhere, the grooves are just replaced by impressionism (ʽGlass
Structureʼ, which makes you feel trapped inside one, desperately trying to
get out), exorcism (ʽVoicesʼ, taking you away to Ghostland), and
try-your-patience minimalism (ʽDeep Indian Longʼ, which is like one
bass note stretched out to five minutes — even a drone would drop dead from
this drone).
On the whole, it's okay — definitely more
«entertaining» than Equatorial Stars,
but it also feels like these guys are long, long past the peaks of their
creativity, because the tracks that remind of their early work are inferior to
that work, and the tracks that try to take them into the future or at least
keep them suspended in the now are most likely useless to fans of Aphex Twin or
any other major IDM hero that was younger than fifty years old when he first
began dabbling in IDM. On the other hand, you can't also get around the issue
of professionalism and experience, or from the philosophical intrigue of what
actually separates «a young man's ambient» from «an old man's ambient» — with
rockers, as they age, the differences usually become clear, but what about
wizards of atmosphere and technology? Seems like there's no proper dividing
line here... or is there? Maybe that
is the only credible reason why we still keep listening to these new Eno albums
when we really should not be doing that.
EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS WILL HAPPEN TODAY (w. David Byrne) (2008)
1) Home; 2) My Big Nurse; 3) I
Feel My Stuff; 4) Everything That Happens; 5) Life Is Long; 6) The River; 7)
Strange Overtones; 8) Wanted For Life; 9) One Fine Day; 10) Poor Boy; 11) The
Lighthouse.
Everything that happens once in Eno's life
eventually happens once again — you just have to be patient enough, sometimes
for twenty-seven years, which is the timespan that separates this record from My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. However,
this album sounds nothing like it.
Maybe it would be improper to say that Eno and Byrne have mellowed out with age
— but some of their sides definitely have, and it is these sides that are facing each other now. The Wandering Knight of
Electronic Havoc and The Roving Shaman of Spastic Rock cast off their armor,
pack up their rituals, and quietly settle down on the porch of the house that
occupies the front sleeve. Not exactly a hobbit-like design, but a fairly
hobbit-like atmosphere all the same.
Since all the songs here feature vocals and are
quite Byrne-like in spirit, I was not altogether sure whether this should have
been included in Brian Eno's section — but as it turns out, most of the music
here actually belongs to Eno, who gave a bunch of his half-finished demos to
David and urged him to add his own vocal melodies. Interestingly, Eno himself
plays not just the keyboards here, but guitars, bass, electric drums, and even
some brass parts, although this is not really a one-man (or two-man) affair:
quite a few additional musicians were drafted to complete the proceedings,
most importantly, Leo Abrahams on guitars and Seb Rochford on drums.
In other words, this is not a «poppified ambient» record; Eno specifically selected those
of his demos that had a sharper pronounced rhythmic/dynamic flair to them, then
proceeded to convert them to full-fledged song status — and made one of the
finest decisions in his 21st century career to engage Byrne. Because one of the
things that actually didn't work well with Another
Day On Earth were the vocals: that whole «impersonal» approach to singing,
which worked well when he was young and creepy, seems to have gotten a bit
bland once he got older. Byrne, on the other hand, has lost none of the
strident charm of his youth even as his hair got all white, and his singing
adds a lot of personality and style to Eno's melodies.
Not that this is a great record — it is,
intentionally and purposefully, a laid-back record, an exercise in leisurely
contemplating life in all of its beauty and ugliness, in the face of a troubled
past, a shaky present, and an uncertain future, and somehow it seems even more
poignant and helpful in 2015, when I am writing this review, than it was in
2008. It totally works, yes, because Eno's melodies sound as if they were
conceived in a hammock on a hot, lazy summer day, and Byrne here is the good
old Byrne of ʽThis Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)ʼ, if you remember
that cozy, comfy coda to Speaking In
Tongues. A few of the tunes have jerky rhythm tracks, and a couple plunge
into disturbingly dark electro-funk (ʽPoor Boyʼ), but on the whole,
this is a very peaceful, though by no means rose-colored, affair. Byrne takes
all sorts of stuff for lyrical inspiration — but even something like ʽThe
Riverʼ, allegedly inspired by the Hurricane Katrina disaster, is a
friendly, slow-rolling, sentimental ballad in execution. And even if few songs
are catchy or heartbreaking, Byrne makes it all worthwhile by being as
seductive as possible — sometimes, when he rises all the way to falsetto, he
almost comes across as A-Ha's Morten Harket with a less cheap sense of taste
and more intellectual experience. It's... odd, but good.
Some descriptions, following Eno's and Byrne's
own interviews, pin this album down as «electronic gospel», and there might
indeed be a certain influence — primarily mood-wise, in its determination to
rejoice against all odds; but even such tracks as the closing
ʽLighthouseʼ could hardly be categorized as gospel, since they lack
the energy and straightforward passion of the average gospel epic (not to
mention a good old choir of black singers in the background). I would rather
take this description as tongue-in-cheek — a joking, but meaningful metaphor;
and use it as a ʽLighthouseʼ for those who are weary and desperate,
maybe equally disillusioned with the old world and afraid of the new one, but
refusing to wallow in dead-end pessimism, because "Everything that happens
will happen today / And nothing has changed but nothing's the same" in the
long run, and I guess this applies equally well to this album's music (heck, to
music in general) as it does to life in general. And this album kind of sucks,
but it sort of rules, and it gets a thumbs down but what you see is a thumbs up.
SMALL CRAFT ON A MILK SEA (2010)
1) Emerald And Lime; 2)
Complex Heaven; 3) Small Craft On A Milk Sea; 4) Flint March; 5) Horse; 6) 2
Forms Of Anger; 7) Bone Jump; 8) Dust Shuffle; 9) Paleosonic; 10) Slow Ice, Old
Moon; 11) Lesser Heaven; 12) Calcium Needles; 13) Emerald And Stone; 14)
Written, Forgotten; 15) Late Anthropocene; 16) Invisible.
Chocolate milk sea, that is, if there is any
significance in the album sleeve; but perhaps Eno thought that an extra word
like that would make the whole thing seem too childish, particularly for an
album that marked his formal entrance into the world of Warp Records — the
sanctuary of Aphex Twin and other IDM geniuses. Not that Eno hadn't tried
(mostly unsuccesfully) to tread on that turf for years now: he'd capitulated
before the army of Modern Electronics as early as 1992, with Nerve Net, and there was hardly any
reason to expect that, since he was now with Warp, this would somehow enable
him to put out product that would be totally on the level.
Then again, in 2010, who the hell can tell
what's on the level when it comes to electronica? It's more of a fluctuating
fashion thing now than of anything having to do with indisputable breakthroughs,
and this works fine for Brian — where those Nerve Net-era pieces sounded tentative and half-hearted against
contemporary cutting edge artists, in 2010 he already knows this stuff on the
same level as decade-old formerly-cutting edge artists, and these albums seem
far more self-assured and reasonably meaningful. And above all, Eno is still
Eno, an artist with a love for well-organized beauty, rather than flashiness and
coolness.
On this record, Brian is assisted by Leo
Abrahams and Jon Hopkins (co-credited for all the tunes), the former mostly
contributing guitar parts, the latter more commonly responsible for piano; this
does not mean that this is not primarily an electronic record, but it is very «naturally textured» on plenty
of the tracks, sometimes hearkening back to the days of collaboration with
Harold Budd and sometimes to Daniel Lanois. The compositions themselves are
split between «soft / atmospheric / ambient» and «hard / groove-based /
IDM-ish», the latter mostly concentrated in the middle of the record, so that
the whole milk sea journey seems to consist of three complex movements — the
serene set-up, the shaky-stormy climax, and the dark-mystical denouement; this
promises more spiritual excitement than you've had in years.
The opening pieces, in fact, feature quite a
few lovely passages — ʽEmerald And Limeʼ is more like a 19th century
romantic piano ballad with floating electronic overtones than mere sonic wallpaper;
ʽComplex Heavenʼ places Heaven at an intersection between serenely
Budd-ian minimalistic piano chords and an echoey stairway of acoustic guitar
notes, while Eno's synth clouds and winds occupy all empty space; and the title
track has probably the most chime-dependent impersonation of a milk sea that
you've ever heard (not that it sounds much like a craft crossing a sea, but
perhaps milk seas behave in their own milky ways?).
Once the synthesized drums kick in and we find
ourselves in techno / house territory, though, things get predictably less
seductive — this is not Eno's forte, and his collaborators aren't exactly
making much of a mark on such rump-shaking tracks as ʽBone Jumpʼ or
ʽDust Shuffleʼ, either. It's all just one forgettable IDM panorama
after another. ʽPaleosonicʼ tries to make a difference by throwing in
bits of finger-flashing jazz-fusion guitar solos (!), but it's more like a
«let's be different» post-modern trick than a sincere, well-placed tribute to
Alan Holdsworth.
On the other hand, if you think of that
12-minute sequence as a slightly overextended bookmark, separating the warm
atmospherics of the album's start from the cold atmospherics of its finish,
then it's not that bad — beginning with ʽSlow Ice, Old Moonʼ, we
enter familiar, but still haunting territory, where spirits of black nights,
cold winds, subterranean caverns, and aquatic depths come back to do their, you
know, spiritual schtick. Our small craft makes it through the calm, but subtly
threatening zephyrs of ʽLesser Heavenʼ, wobbles through the weird
wind-and-bone rattle of ʽCalcium Needlesʼ, and eventually ends up in
the age of ʽLate Anthropoceneʼ, which, according to Eno's musical
philosophy of humanity, sounds like subtle organic processes within a
well-isolated cocoon — I'm not sure if Eugene Stoermer, who allegedly invented
the term, would agree with this futuristic interpretation, but we'll just have
to come back in a couple thousand years and see whether Eno was right after
all.
On the whole, this might just be the best
instrumental Eno album since Apollo
— not as «shock-oriented» as Thursday
Afternoon or Neroli, not as
catch-up-with-the-times-oriented as Nerve
Net, not as static as Shutov
Assembly, not as filler-clogged as Drawn
From Life, etc. It is not, and probably could not be, formally
«innovative», but it is still a fresh update on Eno's conception of the
musical form, and it's got enough pure loveliness to just enjoy it out of any
particular context. The journey continues, even if you have to invent yourself
a milk sea to keep it challenging and imaginative.
DRUMS BETWEEN THE BELLS (2011)
1) Bless This Space; 2)
Glitch; 3) Dreambirds; 4) Pour It Out; 5) Seedpods; 6) The Real; 7) The Airman;
8) Fierce Aisles Of Light; 9) As If Your Eyes Were Partly Closed...; 10) A
Title; 11) Sounds Alien; 12) Dow; 13) Multimedia; 14) Cloud 4; 15) Silence; 16)
Breath Of Crows.
So apparently this guy Rick Holland is a «poet
and independent artist», as Wikipedia tells us (but really, isn't «independent
artist» sort of a pleonasm? I always thought that the more «dependent» you are,
the less you are of an artist), and his first book, Story The Flowers (how deliciously delightfully ungrammatical!),
was published in 2010 and was constructed in the tradition of psychogeography.
Up to now, I thought «psychogeography» meant getting naked, taking acid, and
wrapping yourself in a world map, but oh boy was I ever wrong about that.
Knowing what we know of Eno, it was only a
matter of time before he'd enter into a collaboration with an expert on
psychogeography — besides, he'd had joint albums with all sorts of musicians
before, and written music for all sorts of artistic installations, but this is
the first time that he tried out a symbiosis between ambient music and recited
poetry, and if anything, the album was at least instrumental in introducing yet
another word to the oversaturated English language: poetronica, the ingenious art of hybridizing verbal textures with
digital sounds and breathing new life into two established forms of artistic
expression.
Immediate disclaimer: I am almost totally
desensitized to any form of modern poetry — conservative, innovative, English,
Russian, whatever — and leave it to you, much more sensitive or much more
pretentious reader, to decide for yourself whether the words of Rick Holland
elevate you to a new level of consciousness or degrade you to the state of
thinking really bad thoughts about people. One sample, I believe, is enough:
"Bless this space / In sound and rhyme / As we suspend it / Arrested from
the race / For meaning / By these slices / Of cityscapes / Each one / To the
site of a thousand Londoners / The reburied and reborn / Brought together / In
one life". Personally, I think the word ʽLondonersʼ does not
belong, but then I'm not an editor or anything.
However, somewhere deep inside I nurture a hope
that Eno did not really choose Holland as a collaborator for the unfathomable
beauty or deeply hidden meaning of his words — but rather just because the
rhythmic basis of that poetry was eccentric and diverse enough for him to experiment
with various ways of not only setting it to music, but also of playing around
with the words themselves. Besides himself and The Poet, there are five extra
ladies and one extra gentleman delivering the words in a variety of
silver-and-gold vocal tones, to which Eno may or may not add psychodigital
processing, depending on his mood, the weather, and stock market values. And it
works! Some people have said that they liked the completely instrumental
version of this album better (it is available as a separate CD in the Deluxe
Psychogeography Edition), but I disagree — the music here is not jaw-dropping
on its own, but is made more fun and less predictable by the addition of this
varied set of vocal overdubs.
The record begins in «clubby» mode, with a
couple rhythmic tracks (ʽGlitchʼ, in particular, comes close to acid
house, and has the most robotic-sounding vocals on the album), but then
switches over to a more comfortable ambient mode, with recitations accompanied
by minimalistic piano (ʽDreambirdsʼ), Lanois-style guitars
(ʽPour It Outʼ), cloudy synth hum (ʽThe Realʼ), industrial
grumble (ʽFierce Aisles Of Lightʼ), and... well, suffice it so say
that, amazingly, no two tracks here sound the same — there's 15 of them here,
and each one is a separate autonomous part of the sonic kaleidoscope. In a way,
it is almost as if Brian took this concept as a pretext to run a condensed
retrospective of everything he made so far — you will find echoes of Thursday Afternoon, of Apollo, of the Budd collaborations,
even of Brian's vocal pop glories (ʽDowʼ, where his merry listing of
Holland's groups of objects somehow reminds me of ʽKurt's
Rejoinderʼ). So even if the album does not have a specific point to make,
at least it's never truly boring.
Two of the tracks, ʽThe Realʼ (near
the middle) and ʽBreath Of Crowsʼ (the finale), take nearly seven
minutes to wind down to a close, but there's got to be something on an Eno album to put you in trance, right? A bit too
much Autotune on ʽThe Realʼ for my tastes, making the lady singer
sound like a chromium clone of Björk, but ʽBreath Of Crowsʼ is a
fine, stately conclusion, all chimes and deep bass vocals, like a mourning song
without dread/desperation or a last lullaby before the inevitable apocalypse.
The sort of stuff you'd expect from a Dead Can Dance on a dark day, or from
Current '93 on a bright day.
I do urge you, even if it runs against your
modernistic / futuristic / nihilistic attitude to A-R-T, to ask the question
«what the hell does this whole thing mean?»
every once in a while, if only for psychological sanity reasons. The album
title, actually, does sound meaningful to me — reminding me of The Bell And The Drum, a classic
monograph on ancient Chinese poetry with which Brian may very well have been
acquainted and whose major point was to seek out the origins of the poetic form
in ritual music and dance; and what we have here is a reverse merger of the
poetic form with ritual music, so that's hardly a coincidence. Let's be real
stupid, then, and say that Eno's major purpose here is to generate magic through the marriage of spoken
word and played sound. Whether he succeeds in that or no depends on whether,
upon playing this record in its entirety, you are able to uncover a hidden
portal in your wardrobe. If you're not, this probably means that your faith was
insufficient, so go on and do it once more, this time with feeling. But if you are not floating in space third time
around, Rick Holland will be happy to return your money and go back to coal
mining, panhandling, and ghostwriting for Dr. Seuss.
LUX (2012)
1) Lux 1; 2) Lux 2; 3) Lux 3;
4) Lux 4.
With all these collaborations and new ideas and
attempts to conquer the world of body-oriented electronic pulses, we'd almost
forgotten Eno's primary function in
the world of instrumental electronic music — as provider of heavenly ambient
soundscapes. Ever since Thursday
Afternoon made a, ahem, definitive
statement on that, «heavenly ambience» became largely reserved for scattered
installations and Windows themes; I think that The Shutov Assembly was really the last album tagged as simply
«solo», whereas purely ambient releases from later years were all supposed to
go along with the installations.
Actually, Lux,
too, was originally commissioned as a soundtrack to an art gallery (and, prior
to that, was exposed at airport terminals), but it counts as an artistic work
in its own rights — not to be specifically associated with any particular
space, time, or n-th dimension.
Consisting of four tracks that run for about 18-19 minutes each, it returns us
to the good old days when Mr. Eno was trying to make us understand and slowly
savor the inherent beauty in one single piano note before moving on to another
one — a nostalgic trip, if you wish, to the times of Music For Airports and On
Land, when the world was so young and unspoiled and Man had plenty of time
to relax and chill out after unloading all the fresh kill and waiting for Woman
to cook his supper.
These days, we've all advanced to a new level
of conscience — and preoccupation — that probably will not let you get in the
100% proper mood to enjoy this new musical painting. For what it is worth,
though, I find it every bit as well-developed and beautiful as anything he'd
ever done in the genre. All four tracks sound very much alike, with relatively
minor nuances responsible for minor mood shifts, so, in a way, it is sort of
like a somewhat busier, more involving Thursday
Afternoon, where the point is no longer to infuriate you with its subtle
arrogance, but to honestly entertain you with visions of yet another glass
castle... or tropical aquarium, whichever way your imagination takes you,
provided you have one and it includes hardware support for Enotronics.
The specific catch is that, in addition to Eno,
Lux also features the contributions
of Leo Abrahams on «Moog guitar», and of Neil Catchpole on viola and violin: I
do not even remember when was the last time, if there even was a last time, that Brian recruited string players for his purely
ambient projects, and these textures make a lot of difference. Usually it is
just a single note, of course, bowed smoothly and steadily somewhere in the
background, fading in and out ever so slightly, but in combination with the
slowly tinkling keyboards this can have an even stronger hypnotizing effect
than bare keyboards (unless the wheezy sound happens to irritate you; if so,
better shut off and reboot your ears in safe mode before continuing).
Most of the positive responses to Lux, I think, came from people who
never realised before how seriously tired
they were of all the information overload and all the frantic activity (or
frantic simulated activity) of modern music (particularly electronic) —
probably putting it in the same category as all those «slow reading clubs» and
other feats of deceleration and downshifting — so it is quite possible that
this was Eno's intention all the way: for him, to release Lux in 2012 is pretty much the same as it would be for a major
former disco star to put out a canonical disco record. Just to see if it still
holds up, you know. From that point of view, Lux is a total success: critics liked it, fans seemed pleased, and yes,
the man can still put you to healthy
sleep after all these years. And, as I have always insisted, there's nothing
wrong with music that puts you to sleep if its original intention is to put you
to sleep. The nagging question is: if you pay full price for a ticket to one of
those galleries where they play this, are you offered a complementary pillow
and blanket, or do those cost extra?
SOMEDAY WORLD (w. Karl Hyde) (2014)
1) The Satellites; 2) Daddy's
Car; 3) Man Wakes Up; 4) Witness; 5) Strip It Down; 6) Mother Of A Dog; 7) Who
Rings The Bell; 8) When I Built This World; 9) To Us All; 10) Big Band Song;
11) Brazil 3; 12) Celebration; 13) Titian Bekh.
Still another addition to the already seemingly
endless list of Eno's collaborators, this time in the form of Karl Hyde, one of
the founding fathers of the electronic band Underworld and, since 2013, also a
solo artist. In other words, this is the first time since the Peter Schwalm
collaboration that Brian enlists another electronic musician as equal partner;
and considering how frequently the old guru gets in creative trouble when
trying to saddle more modern styles of electronica, the setup suggests disaster
from the get-go — once again, the master of soft nuance will try to convince
us that he's just as good at techno-trance as the youngsters? (Let alone the
fact that Karl Hyde himself is only nine years younger than Eno himself).
Surprisingly, the suggestion is screwed: not
only is this not a disaster, but Someday World is, in fact, one of the
most impressive, if not the most
impressive, record to come from the Eno printing press in the 21st century. Its
basic denomination is pop — most of the tunes feature vocals, repetitive
structures, hooks, choruses — but the individual styles, mostly furnished with
electronic arrangements, are quite varied, ranging from Eno's classic upbeat
style of the 1970s to dance music styles that rather reflect the «Hyde
generation» of the late Eighties / early Nineties than anything considered
«modern» in the 2010s. Which is a good thing — the two gentlemen are doing here
what they do best, without necessarily attempting to sound in line with the
times.
There are a lot of synthesized horns here,
although, since there are also real horn players (including none other than
Roxy Music's Andy Mackay on alto saxophone), it is not always easy to tell
digital brass from analog brass with digital treatment; on ʽThe
Satellitesʼ, for instance, real and «fake» horns often play off each
other, creating a wildly polyphonic, dense sound. Sometimes they go into
overdrive: ʽDaddy's Carʼ plays out like a cross between some wild
Latin dance and classic Stone Roses, with the addition of a wall of background
harmonies and maniacal funky percussion. Sometimes you get echoes of Talking
Heads and King Crimson (ʽMan Wakes Upʼ; the short instrumental
ʽBrazil 3ʼ, whose throbbing electronic theme sounds like they're
quoting the beginning to ʽBurning Down The Houseʼ). More often,
though, they are being quiet, subtle, and vaguely creepy, with lulling sweet
vocals over threatening bass lines — even if the absolute majority of the songs
here are «beat-conscious», as they say.
Mostly, though, it's the hooks, and the almost
unbelievable ease with which they produce an atmosphere of solemnity that is
quite reminiscent of the glory days. Check ʽTo Us Allʼ — taking two
minutes to build up some tension, then finally exploding in an anthemic vocal
sermon, a prayer in the face of the whole universe, well represented by a few
beautiful guitar and keyboard parts. The eerie ʽMother Of A Dogʼ is
one of the best Radiohead songs that Radiohead never wrote (actually, there's
quite a few of these, isn't there?), with so many peacefully conflicting
overdubs in the background that you'd easily get lost if not for the "I
was raised by the son of the mother of a dog, I was raised by the mother of a
dog" mantra that glues it all together (and no, the verses will not make
it any easier to understand what they mean — it is up to you, in this as well
as all other cases, to come up with your own interpretation). Eventually, they
just run out of words and either put their strength in simple vocalizing
(ʽBig Band Songʼ) or dispense with vocals altogether
(ʽCelebrationʼ), but the musical themes are sufficiently interesting
and/or pretty to agree with that decision (although Hyde, who takes the lion's
share of the vocals, is a fairly good singer).
Despite all the moments of darkness, though, Someday World is basically a happy,
optimistic album — I mean, come to think of it, Eno never made a truly
depressing record (although some of his ambient opera may come across as scary
or alienating), and the older he gets, the more hopeful he seems to become of
humanity as a whole (bless his trusting old heart). There is one song here on
which they have the nerve to speak for God himself — ʽWhen I Built This
Worldʼ — but despite all the unpleasant things the Lord says of us in an
uncomfortably auto-tuned voice, and despite the upsettingly funky-paranoid
interlude that immediately follows the declaration, the second part of the
song sounds carnivalesque and oddly uplifting. Well, nice to know we don't have
to expect the next great flood anytime soon.
I could probably live without the lengthy
acoustic ballad that ends the album (and sounds like something Greg Lake might
have contributed to an ELP record in one of his «I'm so romantic, I could just
die» moments), but it has its legitimate place there — as a stripped-down,
intimate coda to an overall «lush» experience — and if you couldn't quite guess
the overall friendly and courteous mood of the album while the electronic
pieces were playing, the coda lets you do this in «old school mode», so let it
stay. On the whole, it's just nice to know that the man can still realize a
visionary project like this — a little bit of complex intellectual
naïveté never hurt anyone anyway; and since this is ultimately a
modern pop album, not a confusedly ambient one, I have no difficulty giving it
a major thumbs
up.
HIGH LIFE (w. Karl Hyde) (2014)
1) Return; 2) DBF; 3) Time To
Waste It; 4) Lilac; 5) Moulded Life; 6) Cells & Bells.
Usually, when an artist releases a quick
follow-up to a recent project, stating that the point is to "extend some
of the ideas we'd started" (in Eno's own words), what you think of is a
collection of outtakes that weren't good enough for the main record — a
collector's item for the way too deeply impressed individuals. This is
definitely not the case with High Life.
It does extend some of the ideas
they'd started, sometimes almost literally so (ʽDBFʼ sounds like a
longer, funkier, slightly more developed version of ʽBrazil 3ʼ, for
instance), and it did come out just one month later than Someday World, but it has a very
different spirit. If you merged them together as one release in one 2-CD
package, it would be like... well, like the difference between the first two
LPs and the Apple Jam segment of
George Harrison's All Things Must Pass.
Of course, that is a mediocre analogy, because Apple Jam had no conceptual purpose, was
completely spontaneous and was only valuable inasmuch as some stellar
musicianship was involved. But it did place the magic of the groove over the
magic of pre-meditated composition; and likewise, High Life is also all about the groove, where Someday World was more about the spiritual-beautiful aspects of
music-making. Basically, it's like this: we have
said all we wanted to say about our vision 2.0 for the future, so now let's
just drink to it and be merry. And dance, provided you share our perspective on
certain dance moves for the future.
Personally, I do, and I particularly welcome the lengthy running times it takes these guys
to expand their grooves to full strength. There are vocals here occasionally,
but they do not mean much next to the instrumental pastures, where Hyde
supplies the simplistic guitar drone and Eno dresses it up in select rainbow
colors. ʽReturnʼ and ʽLilacʼ are the best examples. On the
former, Hyde strums two guitar chords like a slightly more robotic shadow of Lou
Reed for nine minutes (well, most of it is probably tape-looped anyway), with
happy electronic bells and whistles, as well as Arcade Fire-style
schoolboy-choir harmonies surrounding him — the effect is that of a speedy,
monotonous train ride through a hustlin'-bustlin' Elysium. ʽLilacʼ is
far more focused on the guitars, with two (or more?) rapidly droning parts
superimposed and only slightly attenuated by electronics: the sound reaches its
loudness peak around the fifth minute, and from then on it's four more minutes
of smooth, repetitive, trance-inducing funkiness. It should be boring, but
there's something so mysteriously daring and teasing about the whole thing that
you just get caught up. Maybe they are
slowly shifting volume levels in the mix, because somehow it gives you the feel
of an inescapable crescendo wave without there actually being a real crescendo. In any case, it's absolutely infectious in
its measured rush.
Two shorter tracks, ʽDBFʼ and
ʽMoulded Lifeʼ, are even more
funky, with more sexy syncopation going on than seen on any Eno album from the
past several decades — if not for all the tape manipulation, you could easily
mistake it for a special King Crimson experience. ʽMoulded Lifeʼ,
however, also has industrial overtones on top of the funkiness, plus some
Eastern phrasing in the synthesizer passages, plus psychedelic harmonies, and I
must state that it works much better
with Hyde's guitar as the foundation than if it were simply a 100% electronic
track (a subtle cue for all you IDM fans out there). At the same time,
ʽTime To Waste Itʼ has a notable reggae influence in the rhythm, and
although it is yet another example of treated electronic vocals spoiling the
cake (I will probably never get used to this idea of vivisectioning the human
voice, of which Eno has become a major fan lately), on the whole it is also
quite celebratory and life-asserting.
Finally, ʽCells & Bellsʼ is a far
more typical and convincing finale than the prog-balladeering at the end of Someday World — a textbook example of a
transcendental Eno mantra. The crazy rhythms fade away, we find ourselves
stranded in an odd electronic swamp, with duralloy frogs croaking and titanium
trees swaying and silicic acid dropping from the skies and The Master himself
reciting some distantly futuristic form of The Lord's Prayer, with the line
"cells and bells and flesh skins build a new career" replacing the
traditional Amen. Well, I suppose that cells and bells may have actually built
a new career for Eno, but I don't even want to know what he means by
"flesh skins". And, as is often the case, the conclusion is neither
optimistic nor pessimistic in itself — like the best tracks on Before And After Science, this is a
meditation whose extreme emotionality comes from being fully detached of any
emotions.
I will conclude by re-stating: despite the
short time gap and the obvious similarities, High Life is a completely autonomous piece of work, and it may very
well be that you can get bored by one of the Eno/Hyde collaborations — any one, depending on whether you're in
the mood for a song or in the mood for a groove — and get thrilled by the
other. I am glad to find myself delighted by both, in two different ways, and
also to find that they perfectly complement each other. Given Eno's usual
promiscuity, it is not very likely that Brian and Karl will ever go for a third
one, but most likely this is as close to perfect as it is ever going to get
with them, anyway. Thumbs up for what turns out to be one of the most
successful team projects for the man ever,
well on par with his work with Fripp, Byrne, and Cluster: no mean feat for an
artist past sixty-five, I'd say.
THE SHIP (2016)
1) The Ship; 2) Fickle Sun
(I); 3) Fickle Sun (II): The Hour Is Thin; 4) Fickle Sun (III): I'm Set Free.
Back to solo territory, and to (almost) pure
ambience again. The major difference being that this is the first of Eno's
ambient albums where his own voice serves as one of the ambient instruments:
the original plan was to simply have the whole thing as another «installation»,
but then, as Brian told Rolling Stone, he suddenly discovered that he was able
to sing the lowest notes of the piece due to the aging of his voice — and this
impressed him so much that he decided to add vocal support for the whole piece.
Which certainly does not make it «poppier» or more accessible — merely adds
another layer of sonic support to the picture.
ʽThe Shipʼ in question is the
Titanic, of course — the idea is that of a conceptual piece that is probably
focused on the adventures of the broken Titanic underwater (where «adventure»
is to be understood philosophically — in a sense, if nothing whatsoever happens
to you, this is by itself quite an adventure). The «lyrics» to the piece were
not written by Eno himself, but rather selected by him from a string of
sentences randomly generated by a Markov chain algorithm from a data pool that
included a passenger's account of the sinking of the boat, plus some
translations of dirty French songs from World War I for a change (although that
last detail might be a hoot — don't see any particularly dirty tidbits in the
lyrics; perhaps the algorithm included a modesty clause); fun, but ultimately
pointless, in my opinion — although, come to think of it, quite consistent with
Eno's general fatalism, belief in luck, and fascination for stuff like Tarot
cards (and maybe helpful in some way
— he did rant, for instance, about the greatness of the line "the hour is
thin" that was totally computer-generated, and, uh, he just might have
something there...).
Anyway, what's really good about The Ship is that its ambience is of a
stern, metallic character, with elements of the industrial style consistently
incorporated throughout — for ʽThe Shipʼ, you really do get the
impression of being placed underwater and watching the huge metal monster groan
and moan while tiny currents and occasional biological organisms swish and
swoosh past the metallic covering. Ropes and seams are creaking and straining,
little gas bursts escaping, and multiple vocal overdubs sound like a mix of
ghost apparitions and aural hallucinations. After twenty minutes of completely
static ambience, the first part of ʽFickle Sunʼ comes on in a much
more dynamic manner — as a slow anthem of death, with almost Gothic overtunes,
gradually gaining in intensity, with grinding feedback waves and
quasi-orchestral pomp (reminiscent of classic Coil, really) — and then, again,
somewhat randomly, the same «suite» continues as ʽPart 2ʼ (with a
professional, but boring voiceover by Peter Serafinowicz over a simple ambient
piano melody) and as ʽPart 3ʼ, which, out of the blue, is a very
1970s-sounding cover of The Velvet Underground's ʽI'm Set Freeʼ,
beautifully sung by Eno and once again featuring Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins
on additional instruments.
Fans of Eno's melodicity will most definitely
want the album for that cover — it is quite proverbially gorgeous, stripping
away all the lo-fi «ugliness» of the original and replacing it with a
paradisiac atmosphere: violins, violas, layers of keyboards, and, above all
else, the semblance of a beautiful tribute to Lou Reed, who, upon finally being
«set free», certainly does deserve an angelic tribute from the man who, after
all, forty years back, raised the «angelic standard» to nearly unreachable
heights: this is a fascinating cross-breed of Velvet Underground values with
Eno values, even if I still struggle to see its relationship with the bulk of
the album. But as for the bulk of the album, well, it's not generic Eno by all means, but it is
neither the beautiful ambient Eno nor the dark and mysterious
out-there-in-space ambient Eno, and I am not sure I am capable of squeezing yet
another ambient Eno in my storage room — I'd just say that the album is
sufficiently atmospheric to be a curious listen, but I can't say it really
gave me a whole new perspective on what it would be like to spend 100 years in
incorporeal form at the bottom of the ocean.
REFLECTION (2017)
1) Reflection.
It has been a long while since Eno last went
totally hardcore on us — or, at the very least, most of his «hardcore ambient»
output tended to be written for art installations rather than the regular LP
market. Reflection takes no such
compromises: released on CD and vinyl from the start, it is intended as a
purely musical piece, and with its rigid minimalism embodied in a single
54-minute track, the obvious and inevitable comparison is to Thursday Afternoon, and the obvious and
inevitable reaction is, «oh no! not again! why????...»
Well, first of all, the older Monseigneur de la
Salle gets, the more likely he probably will be to return to his meditative,
introspective, reflective side than to try and compete with the acid electronic
buzz of today (let alone any accompanying pop inspirations). And with so many
of his friends and colleagues dropping dead around him, the more inclined he
will be, naturally, to contemplate his own physical mortality / spiritual immortality.
Eno himself describes the record as a "psychological space that encourages
internal conversation", and he's not bullshitting you with this one —
except, I think, that it may have been vice versa: as the title itself
suggests, Reflection may have been a
reflection of an internal conversation that the artist happened to have with
himself during one of the days of the much troubled year of 2016.
And since everything is always understood
better in comparison, it is only natural to go back to Thursday Afternoon and trace the differences between the two. The
1986 exercise was, above all, an affair of The Light — the perfect soundtrack
of finding yourself slightly under the surface of the water with your eyes wide
open and experiencing the rays of sunlight penetrating that surface, here and
there, out of a skyline beset with rapidly, but gently moving white clouds. It
had this caressing, floating ambience of whiteness and purity to it that could
have served to illustrate any miraculous experience, from the resurrection of
Jesus to losing your virginity. The textures of Reflection, in comparison, are also gentle and soothing, but deeper
and darker, as if an invisible hand has firmly pushed you way down below the
surface, and any sources of light that you now have access to have to come from
the bottom of the sea — or, perhaps,
from the depths of your imagination — rather than from the top.
Here, too, there are two layers to the sound: a
basic rhythmic «hum», though less polyphonic in texture than the one on Thursday Afternoon, across which
minimalistic bits of keyboard melodies vary in pitch and timbre — cold and
emotionally detached, though, and you are probably not expected to experience
any basic human feelings over them; you are simply expected to revel in the
mystery, be it on your own microcosmic level or on the macrocosmic one — you decide if the music of Reflection is more about Outer or Inner
Space. I would probably opt for the latter one, because I think Eno is more
interested in what goes on within his own head now than whatever it is
happening to the universe at large.
Of course, as of 2017, there is nothing
particularly innovative about the concept, except for, maybe, the fact that
the project comes equipped with its own multimedia application, and apparently,
there is a «generative» plugin for this thing that allows the listener to tweak
the settings and modify the textures depending on the time of day and other
factors — something I do not really have the time to explore, although, perhaps,
this is where the real money value of
Reflection actually lies. Yet,
strange enough, as I briefly rewind my recollections of Brian's various ambient
projects, there is nothing there that sounds exactly like Reflection
— they are either too dynamic and melodic (yes, the ʽ1/1ʼ part of Music For Airports is like Beethoven
compared to this), or, on the contrary, even more radically minimalistic (like Neroli), or, as I said, create a
completely different atmosphere (Thursday
Afternoon). It's like you always saw this sort of record coming from Eno's
meditative mind, yet it still took him almost fifty years to achieve it.
I mean, I can understand him when he seems to
speak so proudly of this achievement — I'd never describe it myself as a
«culmination» or «catharsis» record, but it seems very much... like him, something like a perfectly faithful
sonogram of his internal state of mind, where most of his previous ambient
exercises sounded more like musical reimaginations of various things outside of
that mind, be it little fishes jumping in the water or the faraway craters of
the Moon. And since, after all, Brian Eno is only a man, it may well be so that
your internal state of mind is not
that far different from his — particularly if you, too, experience these
strange periods of «worried tranquility» where nervousness emanates from
complete calm and dissolves back into it. That's kind of what Reflection is for me, and it makes a
fine, healthy addition to the man's ambient catalog, even if I am probably
never going to listen to it again — not until my dying bed, at least.
GREETINGS FROM ASBURY PARK, N.J. (1973)
1) Blinded By The Light; 2)
Growin' Up; 3) Mary Queen Of Arkansas; 4) Does This Bus Stop At 82nd Street?;
5) Lost In The Flood; 6) The Angel; 7) For You; 8) Spirit In The Night; 9) It's
Hard To Be A Saint In The City.
No sooner had Bruce Springsteen and his band
recorded ten songs that were to constitute his aspiring debut album than Clive
Davis, the president of Columbia Records, began to complain that there were no
potential hit singles on the record. Subsequently, the release was postponed,
three songs were deleted, and two new songs, including the rousing opener
ʽBlinded By The Lightʼ, were written by the Boss and placed in strategic
locations. Both Davis and Bruce miscalculated — neither of the singles managed
to chart, though, ironically, four years later, when Springsteen's fame had
already reached nationwide limits, Manfred Mann's Earth Band managed to correct
that mistake and turn ʽBlinded By The Lightʼ into a smash success.
This seems like a small enough detail, but it
is an important one when you begin to consider all the Dylan/Springsteen
comparisons, especially in the early period. While Dylan did have hit singles,
I am not aware of anybody ever forcing a «hit single» on him — and yes, it is
very easy to pin the difference on chronology, where record labels, including
that very same Columbia Records to which Dylan was brought by the very same
John Hammond who recruited Springsteen a decade later, would give the artists
more freedom in the Sixties than they did in the Seventies, and where the
Seventies forced artists for harsher compromises than the Sixties. Very easy,
but not very correct: unlike Dylan, who has always followed his muse and nobody
else's, «The Boss» has always kept his ratings high by regularly giving the
people what they want. If there's one
motto with which we could describe his lengthy career, it would be something
like «One for myself — two for y'all». Not that there's anything wrong with
that, right?
In fact, you could probably make a case that
out of the two — Mr. ʽIt-ain't-me-babeʼ Dylan, quietly sitting in a
corner and mumbling gibberish under his nose, and Mr. ʽThunder-roadʼ
Springsteen, boxing the shit out of his sweat-drenched Telecaster under stadium
lights to the sheer delight of the roaring thousands — it is Mr. Springsteen
who is being the more humble and less pretentious, making himself one with the
earnest folks whose spiritual needs he is covering, rather than putting up an
invisible, but impenetrable force field between the two. But then this logic
would rather quickly lead us to recognizing the saintly nature of Billy Joel,
Jon Bon Jovi, the Backstreet Boys, and ultimately even Taylor Swift, and that
is not the road down which I would have the strength — and humility — to
travel.
Anyway, Greetings
From Asbury Park, N.J., even though it has rarely, if ever, penetrated anybody's
Top 5 for Springsteen, and even though it happened to slip through the cracks
of the public consciousness back at the time, already finds the Springsteen
formula well established. The hinges yet have to be oiled, and the front still
lacks a glossy paint coating, but the sound is that of a guy who knows very well what it is he is doing and
what his main talents are and how they should be applied (well, after all, he
had almost eight years to figure it out, having first begun to play in regular
bands like The Castiles in the mid-Sixties).
What puts Greetings
apart from the majority of singer-songwriter stuff circa 1973 are not the
lyrics (who still own a lot to Dylan, Robbie Robertson, and Van Morrison) and
certainly not the melodies (who also own a lot to Dylan, Robbie Robertson, Van
Morrison, and all the legions of anonymous people in the pre-rock era folk
music tradition to whom these three
guys own their melodies). It is the overall approach to arranging and recording
these lyrics and melodies — an approach that would arguably induce me to the
somewhat sensationalist claim that it was Bruce Springsteen and nobody else who
actually invented «folk-rock», or,
rather, «folk-rock'n'roll», or, if
you don't like that either, «hard-folk-rock».
If we think of «folk-rock» in terms of, say, the Byrds, as we often do, it is
clear that even at their heaviest, the Byrds did not have even half of the
maniacal stomping energy that the Boss stores in his musical batteries. If you
listen to some of Bruce's earlier material, like stuff he recorded with Steel
Mill in the early Seventies, you will see that they were essentially a gruff, brawny
hard rock band along the lines of Bloodrock or Grand Funk Railroad — and even
as he moved to more sensitive, thoughtful territory, the idea of Rocking The
House Down never left his mind for a second.
But you don't really need a maddeningly loud,
terrifyingly distorted heavy rock guitar to rock the house down. You can easily
do it with an acoustic instrument, and a piano, and a saxophone, and a regular
rhythm section — and record something like ʽGrowin' Upʼ, a song that,
technically, has nothing to do with hard rock, but ultimately rocks as hard as
any hard rock there is, because it's the spirit that counts, not the
amplification. You wanted yourself some James Taylor and some Eagles, but they
had too little crunch for your rocking heart? You were almost ready for Budgie,
Steppenwolf, and even Sabbath, but they repelled you with the dumbness of their
sound? You would be happy to endorse yourself some «progressive rock», but
couldn't stand the unnecessary complexity and meandering of the twenty-minute long
suites? Well, then, your problems are at an end now — and, by the way,
greetings to you from Asbury Park, N.J.!
One reason why I have always complained about
Bruce's approach was that I found it «populist», but I would like to rephrase
this, so as to avoid getting stoned by the majority — it is not so much
«populist» as it is (or, if it is «populist», it is so due to its being)
«mystery-free». Whether or not The Boss calculates his formula with cold,
detached, psychologically insightful precision, it is a formula that is very
easily laid out, scrutinized, and understood, upon which it finds itself prone
to inducing boredom or even annoyance. Frantically strummed guitars;
aggressively punched drums; pianos and saxes going at full power nearly all the
time, with every member of the band equally important to the final sound;
lyrics that carefully alternate between metaphor-laiden poetry (for the
intellectual critics) and «streetwise clichés» (for the average Joe),
never forgetting the powerful singalong hook explosion in the chorus; and a
good understanding of the magic power of diminuendos and crescendos.
Doubtless, even a perfectly understood formula,
when it is taken to the utmost limit, can still impress and seduce (see AC/DC's
ʽHells Bellsʼ for a great example). But here begin the local
problems: Greetings does not yet
take that formula to its limits. If you take the typical «big» songs here, like
ʽFor Youʼ or ʽBlinded By The Lightʼ or ʽIt's Hard To
Be A Saint In The Cityʼ, you will see that the overdubs still leave a lot
to be desired (there's just too few of them), that the guitar sound is still
underdeveloped (largely due to Steven Van Zandt, Bruce's sparring partner, not
yet being a regular member of his E Street Band), and that The Boss has not yet
begun to fully exploit the earth-shaking capacities of his vocal cords — apart
from just a few chest-tearing moments on ʽLost In The Floodʼ, which
mainly serve as a teaser for things to come, he sounds here like a shy younger
brother of Van the Man, and ever so often, even comes across as a pitiable whiner rather than a fearless
commoner-preacher of rock'n'roll.
Indeed, the two «solo songs» that are included
here without full band support — ʽMary, Queen Of Arkansasʼ and
ʽThe Angelʼ — are arguably among the weakest spots in his entire
catalog. Meandering, folksy-derivative, and overlong, they end up being
irritating rather than soulful; and even if the basic vibe of ʽMaryʼ,
come to think of it, is no different from the basic vibe of ʽBorn To
Runʼ and ʽThunder Roadʼ ("I know a place where we can go
Mary / Where I can get a good job and start all over again" — "sure
Bruce, but you have to grow yourself some facial hair and get a second
guitarist before you can really
convince me"), the presentation is lamentable, and you really have to have
some religious love for the man, I think, to appreciate this stuff. It is not
surprising that when it came to deciding which songs would have to be pushed
off the album in favor of the freshly written and recorded «potential hit
singles» — the «band songs» or the «solo songs» — it was three of the latter
that they decided to sacrifice. Maybe Bruce was just being generous to his
pals, but clearly, at this point he was not yet ready to go «solo».
ʽBlinded By The Lightʼ I find to be
too obvious a rip-off of some song from Astral
Weeks or its periphery, but the record does have at least two really fine
offerings. ʽSpirit In The Nightʼ, where Clarence Clemmons finally
gets his first chance to shine on his own
(the main instrumental hook is his sax riff), the chorus features cool
call-and-response vocals between Bruce and his men, and the grizzly
«life-on-the-streets» atmosphere is well reflected in the nonchalantly, but
menacingly shuffling music. And then there is ʽLost In The Floodʼ,
the first and far from the least of the man's «tragic masterpieces» — nothing
all that great in the way of melody, but a fairly great theatrical delivery
from The Boss as he carefully builds the tension over each long verse to lead
us to the climax. I must state here and now that I always prefer the pessimistic Springsteen to the optimistic
Springsteen (not that it is always easy to tell the difference), and so,
naturally, the most pessimistic song on his debut album is also the best song
on it.
When it comes to the final rating, after some
deliberation, I think I would rather stay on the fence. No thumbs up will be
coming for a record on which Bruce Springsteen is simply being Bruce
Springsteen, because I cannot count that as a rewardable virtue; and there are
too few seductive «extras» on Greetings
to push the spirits any higher. Yet, on the other hand, this here is a new, workable, reasonable formula
for 1973, and neither the «populism» of the approach, nor the immediately
noticeable influences, nor the two forgettable «solo» tracks should count as
arguments for hating or dismissing the album. And a first effort is always a
first effort, after all, there being something in common between so many of
them. "Last night I said these words to my girl — I came for you, but you
did not need my urgency — I know you never even try girl — I came for you, but
your life was one long emergency". See? Always something in common.
THE WILD, THE INNOCENT & THE E STREET SHUFFLE (1974)
1) The E Street Shuffle; 2)
4th Of July, Asbury Park; 3) Kitty's Back; 4) Wild Billy's Circus Story; 5)
Incident On 57th Street; 6) Rosalita (Come Out Tonight); 7) New York City
Serenade.
Before there was Born To Run, an album that put it all on red and won, there was this thing — and I do wish I had the
chance to judge it from the perspective of 1974, when nobody except Jon Landau
had the prescience of seeing Bruce Springsteen as the sweaty sacred prophet of
blue-collar stadium rock. Lyrically, blue-collar themes are, of course,
prevailing on this record as well, but the soundtrack to which they are set is
a different thing — for once, it seems as if the Boss took up a more active
interest in music than usual, rather
than in sheer power. I have seen some
people twitch at this record's «jazzy flourishes», justly stating that «jazz»
is not something they expect from Springsteen. But they are wrong, because
Springsteen is a talented professional who could probably master anything if he
wanted to — the «Springsteen formula» is narrow and occasionally stultifying
because he intentionally made it so, not because he wasn't capable of making
the E Street Band into a more aggressive version of Steely Dan.
As opposed to the debut album, there are but
seven songs here, and four of them go over seven minutes — partly because the
man has some long-winded street life stories to tell, but also partly because
he wishes to showcase the instrumental skills of his E Street Band, especially
on the energetic numbers ʽKitty's Backʼ and ʽRosalitaʼ. The
«innocent» part of the record, allocated for sentimental, heart-wrenching
gutter romantics (ʽ4th Of Julyʼ, ʽWild Billyʼ,
ʽIncident On 57th Streetʼ, ʽNew York City Serenadeʼ), is
primarily for personal fans of the big man, but the «wild» part of it really
showcases the E Street Band at their absolute best — a grand-sounding, tightly
coordinated, perfectly oiled machine for the production of... of...
...well, Landau and the rest of 'em would
certainly say «rock and roll», but, as I already stated in the previous review,
the E Street Band never played «rock and roll» in the sense that the Rolling
Stones, or the Who, or even the Beatles played «rock and roll». It is hard to
define this sound with one term, and it may be wrong to even try. ʽThe E
Street Shuffleʼ begins with a brassy jazz intro (Blood, Sweat & Tears,
anyone?), continues with a spritely, happy-sounding funk riff (Average White
Band?), and finally merges jazz, funk, and folk in a democratic trinity that
combines the freedom of the first one, the dynamics and vivaciousness of the
second one, and the earnestness of the third one in a combination that could
have very easily blown people's minds back in those days when you expected Thin
Lizzy to be over here and David Bowie over there, rather than meld their minds
in a brawny-brainy synthesis like this one.
The only song here that really tries to «rock»
for a while is ʽKitty's Backʼ, opening with scorching blues-rock
licks from the Boss himself (he is actually credited for all the guitar playing
on the album) and later developing into a tight, fast jam with Bruce leading
the band to the heights of an almost psychedelic crescendo. But it is merely
one of the many different ways in which he expresses his feelings — and far
from the most preferred one. ʽRosalitaʼ, for instance, is already a
song that I would not define as «rock and roll», because behind all the fatness
of the sound lies something like your average folk dance, devoid of the
sharpness and rebelliousness of true rock and roll. Not that there's anything
wrong with that: whoever said that energetic dance music must have the listener clenching his fists to be «great» or
«artistically relevant»? But it is also important that we try to use different
words to describe ʽJumping Jack Flashʼ and ʽRosalitaʼ,
because the two songs go for completely different purposes and responses.
Now, naturally any long-winded review of any
Springsteen album should normally mention the lyrics, or it would look really strange. But see, I don't like these lyrics — none at all. There
is something horribly, off-puttingly inadequate about Bruce's «pseudo-working
class poetry». In real life, his Little Angels and his Sandies and his Kitties
and his Billies and his Spanish Jonnies and whoever the hell is else on here do
not talk like this, and do not think like this, and do not get carried away so
much by these romantic ideas or impulses. Maybe if the man took a more detached,
third-person view of his characters (as Dylan does whenever he is telling one
of these stories), it would have made more sense — but most of the time, he
makes himself one with his
characters, and this inevitably results in an atmosphere of fakery. Everything
is too complex, too convoluted, too intellectualized, in a way: as a convincing
lyricist, I will take the much more straightforward and much more verbally
challenged Phil Lynott over Springsteen any time, and heck, I might even take
Bon Scott over Springsteen. (And yes, for the record, I've never been a big fan
of West Side Story, either).
This is why the best way for me to enjoy an
album like this is to simply shut my brain off towards all of its «realistic»
pretense, and to imagine that something like ʽNew York City Serenadeʼ
takes place in an alternate reality — one where young ruffians walk the
midnight streets actually thinking of how to "shake away your street
life, shake away your city life, and hook up to the night train". Then it
works — the midnight lounge jazz piano rolls, the low-key strings, the vocals
that gradually build up from barely audible sleepy soulful croon to the
full-chest screaming when it comes to the "junk man" who is
"singin', he's singin', all dressed up in satin, walkin' past the alley"
(another detail for the parallel reality, where all junk men are jazz men and
they tend to casually dress in satin because they happen to find it mucho
poetic).
Sometimes even that doesn't help — like on the
album's weakest track, ʽWild Billy's Circus Storyʼ, which fulfills
the function of ʽMary Queen Of Arkansasʼ on this album. Not only are
these circus metaphors older than the oldest circus performers, but the
tuba-accordeon-acoustic arrangement is cheesy and generic, and it is really no
fun listening to The Boss on his own here when this is clearly an album that
thrives on full band support.
Still, it has always been my belief that The Wild was one of the most
open-minded and promising records of the man's career. It isn't perfect, but
it spreads out in many directions, and the only straightforward «populist» song
here is ʽRosalitaʼ — no wonder that it became the regular show closer
for years to come. It did not sell much, and it did not cement any
stereotypical images of Springsteen — had he decided to come out with, say, an
instrumental jazz-folk-fusion record after this one, nobody except for Landau
would have pinned him down to the ground for such a sacrilege. The problem is,
this whole approach was just too convoluted and messy to really click with
those «blue collar folks» who were his main lyrical protagonists. An
incoherence, yes, both for the critics (who could be pampered in retrospect)
and the Billboard charts (who couldn't), that would be rectified with his next
release. Unfortunately. Anyway, this is arguably the first and last time you
get a chance to observe «Bruce the Musicmaker» — so hurry up and support me on
this thumbs up
before he turns into «Bruce the Superhero», once and for all.
BORN TO RUN (1975)
1) Thunder Road; 2) 10th
Avenue Freeze Out; 3) Night; 4) Backstreets; 5) Born To Run; 6) She's The One;
7) Meeting Across The River; 8) Jungleland.
After all these years, my favorite song on this
album is still ʽ10th Avenue Freeze Outʼ. You know why? Because it is
the only song on this album that inherits and develops the style of its predecessor
— with that tight, cocky, vivacious, and not in the least simplistic jazz-pop
sound. The guitar is sly and boppy rather than bombastic, Roy Bittan's
honky-tonk piano and Clemmons' saxophone parts are deliciously New Orleanian,
and as the verses merrily lead to the "10th avenue freeze out, 10th
avenue freeze out!" chorus, defiantly shot out word by word, the track, to
me, offers more sincere «rebellion» than a thousand ʽThunder Roadsʼ
could ever hope to.
But the song is an anomaly here, on an album
that is not about having defiant fun
on the street corner. Born To Run is
all about size — everything bigger than everything else, including life itself.
Now that Jon Landau had seen rock'n'roll's future, and now that the man had
properly cut his teeth with two uneven, but ultimately successful records, in
Bruce's own words, he wanted to make «Roy Orbison singing Bob Dylan and
produced by Phil Spector», yes indeed.
We could just leave it at that, stating the
obvious fact that Bruce Springsteen does not possess the voice of a Roy
Orbison, the verbal talents of Bob Dylan, and the studio experience of Phil
Spector. But that would not be honest, because in reality, he never tries to sing like Roy Orbison, write
lyrics like Bob Dylan, or rip off Spector's wall-of-sound techniques. The
statement has to be understood allegorically — all of these guys were the
smashing-est in their class, and Born To
Run tries to be smashing in all these respects, too: big tales of passion, hope, and despair sung with a big voice and played in a big sort of way. Melody? Groove? Yeah
it's nice if we can have some of that, too, but it ain't what matters here.
I mean, ʽThunder Roadʼ has a riff
alright (the piano-sax duo), but it only really appears in the coda section,
once the tale is over — before that, all that matters is the crescendo, as the
Boss gradually revs himself into action. The intrigue is — where does it all
lead? Instruments enter one after the other, the voice rises higher and higher,
and once it becomes clear that the protagonist is gonna grab his guitar, get
Mary (another appearance by the Queen of Arkansas?), hop in the car, and
skedaddle out of here, there's just no way we wouldn't be having that mighty
coda. Melody-wise, I still have no idea what goes on there: I only know it
started out small and inconspicuous and ended up bigger than a brontosaur's
ass, and that's probably the only thing that matters in the grand scheme of
things. Very grand scheme of things.
The question is — are you ready to get caught
up in these windy blasts that the Boss is huffin' and puffin' at you, or have
you got second thoughts about it? All
of these «classics» — ʽThunder Roadʼ, ʽBackstreetsʼ,
ʽBorn To Runʼ, ʽJunglelandʼ — all of them have always left me with mixed feelings. The skill, the
craft, the energy are undeniable, and there has hardly been any «working class
poet» in the pop music business (certainly not in 1975) who could beat the man
in this department. The sincerity of it could be doubted, of course, but why?
It's not as if Bruce wrote and recorded ʽBorn To Runʼ out of some
cynical «yeah, the boys back home will really dig this one and finally make me
a superstar» motive — and it wouldn't really be until the Eighties, anyway,
that «commercially oriented music-making» would become a big part of the man's
life.
The key to this dissatisfaction is, I believe,
in the songs' combination of simplicity, monotonousness, and predictability.
The «Springsteen formula» gets established here as a viable critical and
commercial proposition, but hardly as a gift for those who do not cherish
pathos and bombast on their own, even if they are done really convincingly. The
six-note riff of ʽBorn To Runʼ (which, if you pin it down, sounds
like somebody trying to master the style of Duane Eddy) is okay, but it just
serves as the backbone for a lot of instrumental bombast, and come on now,
you're not here for the guitar or even for the crazy sax break, you're really
supposed to be here to sing along with Bruce, also wanting to know if love is
wild, or if love is real. "Tramps like us, baby, we were born to run"
— that "us" does not mean me and my lady friend, it really means me and
you, my devoted
soon-to-be-stadium-rock-fan. But this sort of emotionalism is just too crude
and too stereotypical. And, yes, too populist, of course — even if no cynical
intention is suspected.
Other than that, few people talk about the
non-classics, and for good reason — ʽNightʼ is really like a lesser
quality preview of ʽBorn To Runʼ, rather pleonastic in light of the
latter; ʽShe's The Oneʼ wastes a good Bo Diddley beat on an
unsuitably pompous arrangement; and ʽMeeting Across The Riverʼ,
dominated by Randy Brecker's midnight trumpet, meanders and sinatras its way
across the brief filler space that leads us to the much more prominent
ʽJunglelandʼ. A skeptic like me could have tried to build up a
stronger case for these lesser known songs, but no, they have every reason to
be lesser known — two out of three at least following the album's general
logic, but failing to deliver quite as well in the energy and bombast
department.
If there is one indisputable hero on Born To Run, it is The Big Man — sax guy
Clarence Clemons. I am pretty sure that without his contributions the album
might have flopped as badly as its predecessors, because nothing here hits as
hard as his blasts: not even Bruce at his brawniest, when he is roaring out
"hiding on the backstreets, hiding on the backstreets!", can really
compare with the totally focused, totally magnetic short solo on the title
track — and the best instrumental passage by far on the entire album is the
famous sax solo on ʽJunglelandʼ, well worth waiting for even if you
happen to find the rest of the urban tale somewhat of a drag. Unfortunately,
there's only so much you can do with a saxophone, and all of Clarence's breaks
set the same mood — perfectly compatible with Bruce's lonesome-heroic approach
and more nimble and awe-inspiring than any other voice or instrument here, but
the guy is really used as much as he should be used, no more, no less.
I think he's also pretty much absent on
ʽBackstreetsʼ, where Roy Bittan is instead the hero — and he plays it
loyal and regal, but six minutes of his keyboards are boring, because... well,
could he play something else for just a
moment? Oh no, he could not, because the Boss really just needs him to
accompany his power Lied about Terry (and, by the way, we still do not know if Terry was a man, a woman, a dog, or Ziggy in
disguise). Do not get me wrong — the basic punch of ʽBackstreetsʼ
punches heavy and hard, but when the
major hook in your song is the sound of your own voice screaming, it's... well,
imagine ʽWon't Get Fooled Againʼ getting along solely on the strength
of Daltrey's final roar. Would we want to spend those nine minutes so we could
all just live up to it? And in ʽBackstreetsʼ, there's just too much
pathos and not enough resolution.
Ultimately, Born To Run sealed the man's fate. Before that one, his creative
trajectory was still somewhat unpredictable — but the success of this «future
of rock'n'roll» project established him as Working Class Rock Hero ¹1, and
since a working class hero is something to be, this leaves less space to
experiment with music and piles up many more obligations to conform to the
image. But that would be later: on Born
To Run, he still has that image to construct, before he can begin to conform
to much of anything, and so the album is not so much «calculated» and «manipulative»
as it is simply «mono-focused». We just want everything to be big, huge,
voluminous beyond measure. Whoever said it was in bad taste to be young, wild,
and ambitious circa 1975? Even Billy Joel was young, wild, and ambitious circa
1975.
So there's really no reason to insist upon
«hating» the record or viciously thumbing it down. It was unquestionably an
event, it went on to become a classic that still attracts young listeners even
today, it's got its share of unforgettable songs and its undeniably brilliant
musical moments. It is probably responsible, at least in part, for the
subsequent careers of Bob Seger, John Mellencamp, Bryan Adams, and God knows
who else, but we are not going to hold that against it, either. It introduced
the «big bearded muscular man with Telecaster» image, too, which is not
accidental because of all guitars in the world, nothing resembles a mighty
sledgehammer as much as a good old Fender Telecaster — cue Working Class Rock
Hero ¹1 image yet again — but why
should we suppose anything other than just a personal preference for this
particular model? Let's just say this: Born
To Run is sort of a fascinating record, torn between genius and mediocrity,
richness and cheapness, rampant imagination and clichéd formula. A
formula which, by the way, Bruce would go on to easily tear down on his next
album — only to have it rebuilt from scratch for the next one — and tear it
down again — and build it up — and tear it down — and then we lost count, and
it wasn't so fun anymore anyway.
DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN (1978)
1) Badlands; 2) Adam Raised A
Cain; 3) Something In The Night; 4) Candy's Room; 5) Racing In The Street; 6)
The Promised Land; 7) Factory; 8) Streets Of Fire; 9) Prove It All Night; 10)
Darkness On The Edge Of Town.
Three years of litigation with his former
manager kept the people in frenzied suspense over the sequel to Born To Run — over this period,
Springsteen wrote a veritable shitload of songs, some of which would later
spill over to The River and others
would surface much later on Tracks
and The Promise. As the legal
troubles finally wound down and it came to deciding which of the songs should
be finally given the green light, Bruce made the correct decision — instead of
going the «Formula Lockdown» routine like a B-grade entertainer, he chose the
«Artistic Sabotage Route» like a proper A-grade artist. Sure enough, Born To Run wrote him into history, but
it was Darkness On The Edge Of Town
that ensured his perspectives for longevity.
I guess there may have been a bit of «punk»
influence reflected here, not in the music as such which is very decidedly
traditionalistic and features not a single nod to punk or New Wave, but in the
overall spirit (including the album cover, where we certainly have a much
«punkier» mugshot of Bruce than the bearded guitar-hero posturing of Born To Run). But if so, that is more
of a chronological coincidence than a deliberate exploitation of the prevailing
mood — you really do not need to dig in much into the musical context of
1977-78 to understand the stylistic shift from Born To Run to Darkness;
this has much more to do with the artist's internal reshaping (or, at least,
the happenings in his personal life) than any social context.
Ironically, the song that Bruce selected to
open the album, ʽBadlandsʼ, is somewhat misleading — its opening
piano riff is actually taken from the Animals' version of ʽDon't Let Me Be
Misunderstoodʼ, but the song is transposed from B minor into E major, and
the mood is shifted from tragic to uplifting-optimistic, with a message that is
fairly close to ʽBorn To Runʼ: "We'll keep pushin' till it's
understood / And these badlands start treating us good". The arrangement
is nowhere near as pompous, though: technically, all the ingredients are the
same, but the band is tighter, «poppier», and a little less wild — the «drunken
fervor» days are over, and here we get a more sober protagonist who "got
my facts learned real good right now". Yes indeed, but ultimately the song
should still be classified under «optimistic anthem», and it gives you the
impression that this is going to be a
similarly-styled sequel to Born To Run,
if a little bit more grown-up and restrained.
But then we have ʽAdam Raised A
Cainʼ, and all expectations are shattered — the single blackest song in
the Boss' catalog that far, and in some ways, maybe the single blackest song in
his catalog altogether. I still find myself surprised that, for some reason,
very few people ever single it out from the rest of the tunes here, and that quite a few people completely
misinterpret it as a failed attempt at playing a «wild guitar hero» or even at
«cock rock» (!!; yes, I've actually seen it called that by at least one or two
persons). The only explanation I can offer is that it is too unsettling, too
unusual for the average Bruce fan. But as for myself, this is the only song by
the man that almost literally makes my hair stand on end if I'm in the right
mood.
Melody-wise, it is just a decently written
blues-rock number, but its strength is in the perfect combination of lyrics,
vocals, and guitar playing — few, if any, other songs convey so well the idea
of it being impossible to escape the chains that bind one to one's past.
Formally, it's just about the relation between the singer and his father
(Douglas Springsteen was alive and well at the time, and probably felt a bit
miffed upon hearing this), but it applies equally well to any other blood or
non-blood ties, and the use of Biblical imagery in the title is justified
because this is the first time when Bruce does
get all Old Testamental on our asses — the solemnity, the darkness, the
cruelness of the situation. The guitar solo on the song is his best ever —
simplicity itself, but blind rage incarnate as the man throws his entire weight
on those couple of strings, now in fast tremolo mode, now in slo-mo, now
alternating low-pitched groans with high-pitched wails. And the «overscreaming»
for which he is sometimes blamed has nothing here to do with the usual
melodrama — it's aggressive, violent, deadly serious and deeply personal
overscreaming, comparable with anything Lennon did on Plastic Ono Band. This here is really a man channelling some of his
deep childhood traumas you don't want to know about, but to which many of us
could probably relate one way or the other. As he works those muscles at the
very bottom of the vocal tract on the final "Lost but not forgotten, from
the dark heart of a dream!...", it is like a final blast of self-damnation
— no escape! — and the final «tribal» harmonies, slowly fading out, are
escorting our hero straight away to Hell because "you inherit the sins,
you inherit the flames". No matter what you do, no matter who you are, it
all ends the same.
Clearly, there was nothing even remotely like this kind of vision on any
of the preceding three albums — and once the album derails from
ʽBadlandsʼ and establishes this tone, it casts its shadow on
everything else, though no other tune quite matches the intensity level of
ʽAdam Raised A Cainʼ. It does come close on ʽStreets Of
Fireʼ, where we have ourselves more screaming and more of those ecstatic
guitar solos and more of that existentialist desperation — even without the
blood ties aspect, we are still "stranded on the wire across streets of fire",
which is a pretty nerve-wrecking experience, and I think that it is musically
supported by something like two chords on the organ and an equally minimalistic
bass line, and the Boss giving his best «Neanderthal ancestor of Van Morrison»
impression. Again, compare something like ʽBackstreetsʼ — the former
barked a lot, but this one bites, snaps, and spits out. Just compare how the
ecstasy is handled on "hiding out on the backstreets!" and how the
inner rage is externalized on "streets of fire, streets of fire!".
Yes, I sure prefer the aggressive Springsteen to the romantic Springsteen. If
this is what they call «maturity», I'll take it.
Even ʽRacing In The Streetʼ, which
once again returns us to the territory of Bruce's «epic stories of the working
class», has a darker sheen here than ʽJunglelandʼ or
ʽBackstreetsʼ — we will forget for a minute that its main
piano/vocal melody pilfers Neil Young's ʽAfter The Gold Rushʼ, will
agree that the "summer's here and the time is right for racin' in the
street" line is an intelligent rephrasing of Martha & The Vandellas in
a brand new context, and will take this for an honest-sounding late night drunk
moment of self-introspection by the guy who used to think that he was «born to
run» but now finds out that «racin' in the street» is all he's really capable
of. Is the song better written than anything on Born To Run? Hell no. There ain't that much «composing» involved
on either of the two albums. But grimness and subtlety agree much better with
this guy than grandiosity and that old on-top-of-the-world feel.
The record still smells of «teen drama» every
now and then — for instance, the highly unusual spoken word intro to
ʽCandy's Roomʼ is most reminiscent of the old style of the
Shangri-Las, the uncrowned proto-emo queens of Sixties' suicidal teen-pop. It
has its lyrical drawbacks — ʽThe Factoryʼ is just way too blatant even for Bruce, who,
after all, never pretended to be Woody Guthrie in the past and has no reason to
begin pretending now. It has its
uncomfortable outbursts of brutal masculinity (if any song actually comes close
to real «cock rock» on the album, it
is ʽProve It All Nightʼ, but I guess there should have been at least
a little something for Bruce's adoring lady fans on the record, or they'd all
desert him for Lou Gramm). It ain't perfect, because Bruce Springsteen never
made a perfect album — he couldn't have, by definition.
But of all the albums that Bruce Springsteen
churned out in his career, this one is my favorite. Not because I automatically
prefer «dark» over «light» (hey, I'm a big McCartney fan, after all), but
because Bruce's «dark» always feels more natural, less contrived/theatrical to
me. Born To Run was an explosive
escapist blast, all power and volume and energy and extrovertness; Darkness On The Edge Of Town im-plodes rather than ex-plodes, and sends out probes into the
darkest corners of the soul — sometimes they just shoot by, but sometimes they
hit right in the middle, and this makes me convinced that Bruce Springsteen does have creepy magical powers, except
he is always being careful about not relying on them too much. I mean, yes, I
do believe that ʽAdam Raised A Cainʼ is the best song he ever came up
with, but good luck trying to turn that
one into a popular megahit — you might as well try and do it with a Swans song.
I should probably also add that the record has
a great big share of memorable piano riffs — if Clarence Clemons was the Boss'
main guy on Born To Run, here the
key player is unquestionably Roy Bittan, whose phrasing dominates all but two
or three of the tunes (ʽStreets Of Fireʼ with its Federici organ is
the major exception), and although the riffs are simple and, as has already
been hinted at, frequently unoriginal, they are
memorable and somewhat easier to pin to your brain cells (well, my brain cells at least) than anything
off Born To Run. This, of course, is
a natural precursor to the even more simplified and streamlined keyboard pop of
Born In The USA, but as long as it
is done in an emotionally meaningful manner, it's more of a blessing than a
problem. I mean, it is clear that at this point the «jazz-funk» experiments of
ye olde E Street Band are no longer a viable proposition anyway, so we might
just relax and wish The Boss a successful career of developing sharp pop
instincts instead. Here, he's really doing a good job.
Some day, perhaps, when «revisionists» like me
get the upper hand and Truth triumphs over Circumstance-Triggered Critical and
Commercial Success, Darkness On The Edge
Of Town will become regarded by the mainstream as this man's finest hour.
Until then, I'll just be holding my thumbs up a little longer than usual and hope for
the corresponding cumulative magical effect. Then again, most people don't care
that much for bleakness and pessimism, and upon second thought, that's probably
more of a blessing than a curse in the long run.
THE RIVER (1980)
1) The Ties That Bind; 2)
Sherry Darling; 3) Jackson Cage; 4) Two Hearts; 5) Independence Day; 6) Hungry
Heart; 7) Out In The Street; 8) Crush On You; 9) You Can Look (But You Better
Not Touch); 10) I Wanna Marry You; 11) The River; 12) Point Blank; 13) Cadillac
Ranch; 14) I'm A Rocker; 15) Fade Away; 16) Stolen Car; 17) Ramrod; 18) The
Price You Pay; 19) Drive All Night; 20) Wreck On The Highway.
How do I put this right? Basically, with this
album Bruce Springsteen was pretty much over
as a major artistic force. He himself admitted that The River more or less shaped out and defined his songwriting
style for the rest of his career, and there is indeed a bigger barrier between Darkness On The Edge Of Town and The River than between any other two
subsequent albums in his life, including all the great ones and all the real
shitty ones.
As the «album rock» era drew to a close and the
hit single (and, fairly soon, the hit video) reclaimed its positions in the
early Eighties, Springsteen and Landau chose the «top» road over the «bottom»
road — which meant intentionally dumbing it down in search of mass appeal.
There are still patches of uncomfortable darkness on The River, and a few clever songwriting ideas, but for the most
part, this is by far the least
musically interesting record he'd done to date. Never mind that it is a double
LP and that we should expect some filler on a double LP — from a purely songwriting
perspective, I would dare say that most
of these tunes are filler. Remember all those Roy Bittan piano riffs on Darkness that could be perceived as
intelligently composed and inspired? Not a single one like that here. Instead,
all we get is variations on all sorts of classic rockabilly, folk rock, and
Phil Spector progressions — very blatant variations at that, because The River is not about music-making, it
is all about image codification.
This time, we are ʽOut In The Streetʼ
again, with the «blue collar life philosophy» thrown right in our face by the
simplest, straightforwardest, brawniest of means. ʽI'm A Rockerʼ, the
Boss tells us in his cockiest track so far, which sounds like an Eddie Cochran
number updated Eighties-style, with a triumphant, exuberant,
over-the-top-joyful delivery that basically screams out, "this, boys and girls, is how real
rock'n'roll is supposed to be done today!"... well, guess some people are
entitled to a different opinion. And this is not even the over-the-top
exuberance of ʽBorn To Runʼ: it is something... cheaper. In all
respects — the lyrics, the vocals, the instrumentation, the renewed
application of the same formula with more predictability and less trepidation.
And these joyous «rockers» come one after another, one after another, and
they're all pretty much the same. Is there really
any big difference between ʽCrush On Youʼ and ʽCadillac
Ranchʼ, or between ʽTwo Heartsʼ and ʽYou Can Lookʼ, or
between ʽThe Ties That Bind and ʽJackson Cageʼ?..
Nor does the «dark» stuff offer that much redemption.
Lyrically, there's too much open manipulation — the title track, with its sad,
but clichéd tale of innocence-lost, is a slightly over-arranged folk
ballad which could have worked a little better in «stark naked» form (in two
years' time, Bruce would realise the dignity of such an approach himself), but
the way it is presented here, crumbles down very quickly under its own pathos.
The same can be said about ʽPoint Blankʼ, which tries to melt our
sympathetic hearts down merely on the strength of its lyrics and atmosphere,
created at the intersection of Bittan's and Federici's soft, romantic jazzy
playing — but no real hooks in sight. And why did ʽDrive All Nightʼ
have to be eight minutes long? Why not eight hours then — so that the title
could reflect reality? Particularly since there is nothing going on at this
relaxed tempo, other than some basic dull atmospherics.
So much for the disgruntled moping. But then,
once we have gotten that off our chests, let us also admit that in some ways,
particularly in certain primal and straightforward ways, The River is... a lot of fun. Yes, these are clichéd,
well-worn hooks, but... I can complain about ʽCadillac Ranchʼ all I
want and write pages on how this stuff only pretends
to be rock'n'roll and how it ain't got the truly authentic spirit, but do I
deny the catchiness and the energy and the dedication of the E Street Band and
its leader? Or even the rough sense of humor displayed in ʽYou Can Look
(But You Better Not Touch)ʼ, where the protagonist is prevented by a
stringent society from indulging in his friendly animal instincts, all set to
another one of these neo-rockabilly melodies and enhanced with a garage-style
lead guitar part? Or the efficiency of the basic hook of ʽHungry
Heartʼ, with a Supertramp-ish keyboard melody and Beach Boy harmonies
combined to render the idea of unfulfilled emotional yearning as simply as it
gets?
Basically, I would not want anyone to think
that I am scornful of The River's
vibe in the same way that I would be dismissive of, say, Bon Jovi (who would
take quite a few lessons from their New Jersey neighbor, but never to good
effect). These here are safe, simple, über-accessible tunes that directly
pander to the lowest common denominator, but what saves them from constituting
an anti-musical / anti-intellectual criminal act is that they are written and
performed in the spirit of youthful innocence. Although the instrumentation is
already smelling a bit of the Eighties' technological boom, The River is anything but a New Wave album — its melodic and
atmospheric carcass is almost completely construed from Eddie Cochran rockabilly,
Ricky Nelson teen pop, Johnny Cash country folk, and Phil Spector grand pop
elements from the late Fifties/early Sixties, and this surmises an atmosphere
of total innocence and directness.
If there is a problem as such, it lies not with
Bruce, but with the way this album has been treated in «mainstream» musical
criticism — like some sort of sprawling, majestic, all-out-American panorama,
with endless five-star ratings and continued admiration for how well the songs
depict «the
small victories and large compromises of ordinary joes and janies whose need to
understand as well as celebrate is as restless as his own» (guess who). Relax,
people! The more serious you get about The
River, the less respect you have to pay to your own intellect. The best way
to treat it is just to regard it as two hours of simple headbanging fun, with
occasional patches of theatrical darkness thrown in for diversity's sake. Then
at least you don't have to bother about «filler» — because there is really no
filler here as such, everything is more or less on the same level of musicality
and intensity.
So is this a thumbs up
or what? Ultimately, yes. An unambitious Springsteen is not nearly as
impressive as the successfully ambitious Springsteen of Darkness, but he still seems more agreeable here than the
way-too-uncomfortably ambitious Springsteen of Born To Run. And as for the record being too long, I respectfully
disagree. I do not at all see any «great single LP» hidden inside this «merely
good double LP», and since most of the songs do not outlast their welcome and
the general vibe is acceptable, it could have been a triple or quadruple one,
for all I know (in fact, it really
could have, considering how many outtakes from the Darkness sessions ended up here and how many more songs were
written in 1979-80). And you can turn this opinion both ways — on one hand, the
songwriting formulae of The River
work so well that they would indeed be reused by The Boss on a regular basis
for the next thirty-five years, on the other hand, it ensures that from now on,
Bruce would forever remain in this «kinda okay
artist with lotsa mass appeal» role, permanently locked out from more
interesting or, dare I say it, experimental artistic inspirations. So, if
you're one of these «looking for extra character development» types, The River might just be the last
Springsteen album to look out for (well, you could also use Nebraska for a nice post-scriptum
flourish, but that's about it).
NEBRASKA (1982)
1) Nebraska; 2) Atlantic City;
3) Mansion On The Hill; 4) Johnny 99; 5) Highway Patrolman; 6) State Trooper;
7) Used Cars; 8) Open All Night; 9) My Father's House; 10) Reason To Believe.
And here comes another self-conscious «career
bomb». An album even darker in tone than Darkness
On The Edge Of Town, and this time, with Bruce doing it all alone — just a
man and his guitar, with a little harmonica on the side. A perfect
counterbalance, one would think, to the basic bigness of The River and its all-out-rockin' arena hits: an album that would
never be able to sell as many copies by its very nature, even if, on the
strength of Bruce's already respectable reputation, it did reach #3 on the
charts (not the singles that were culled from it, though).
If analogies are still allowed to be indulged
in, then this is Springsteen's John
Wesley Harding, surprising the populace with its humble, intimate scope
just as they'd finally gotten used to the grand scale of the previous records.
However, if Dylan at least actually came from an original acoustic folk background,
Springsteen's prowess with the guitar-harmonica schtick was previously largely
confined to occasional songs like ʽMary Queen Of Arkansasʼ: the man
was anything but a moody six-string
loner, and although his troubadour nature always hinted that something like
this might one day appear on the horizon, I guess it still took most people by
surprise when he emerged with the actual results.
But while these results are generally good, the
project on the whole suffers from the obvious: a lack of mystery. Suppose that
you have never heard a solo acoustic Springsteen album — now close your eyes
and try to think real hard what such an album would probably sound like. Some
folk melodies, some country waltzes, a bit of blues, maybe a touch of
rockabilly, right? Strong, friendly, masculine, but tired, disillusioned, and
weather-worn vocals? Lyrical themes that cover issues like poverty, depression,
crime, maybe a little nostalgia, and properly mix desperation with just a
spoonful of hope so that nobody kills oneself in the end? Everything sincere,
passionate, and catchy, but probably not very imaginative or unpredictable?
Yep, this is Nebraska all right, even if I cheated and formulated these
questions after listening to the
album. Now as proof that the record «sucks» this would, of course, be
laughable: formula is formula, and most artists live and die by the formula
anyway. The problem is that it takes a great deal of skill and effort to make a
minimalistic record like this that would truly stand out — and this one, for the most part, stands out just
because Springsteen stands out. But do the songs stand out? What about the
songs?
In my own humble opinion, there are only two
songs on this record that have a special «pull» to them. ʽAtlantic
Cityʼ ended up being arguably the most famous one, and for good reason: it
is the other side of the ʽBorn To Runʼ coin, another desperately determined
attempt to escape, but this time realising all too well that the escape takes
place in the direction of Hell, since Heaven has been closed off tight — and
this psychological mix of near-weeping desperation with clenched-teeth
determination is brilliantly carried over by the vocals. Live, the Boss would
turn it into a grand ten-minute E Street Band-backed anthem, with the entire
arena chanting "put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty / and meet me
tonight in Atlantic City" as if celebrating a new beginning, but, as
usual, there is quite a bit of irony here.
My personal favorite, however, is ʽState
Trooperʼ, which carries the minimalist vibe of the album to a logical
conclusion — two chords altogether, somehow sufficient to generate a spooky, tense
atmosphere, and nervous mumbled vocals from which we gather that the
protagonist is probably guilty of something (most protagonists on Nebraska are guilty of one thing or
another) and that "Mr. State Trooper" might actually get it if he
tries to stop our guy. It's all in that tension — three minutes of incessant
D-major-A-minor reflecting the relentlessness of the pulse, and then, right
before the fade out, the tension is released with a single, short, well-placed
scream that will have you jumping out of the chair... yes, one of these moments
that still have me jumping after all these years (like the loud band opening on
The Wall).
These two tracks, the way I see it, show a
certain amount of divine inspiration, and confirm that Nebraska should by no means be considered as nothing but the result
of stylistic calculation. Unfortunately, the rest of the songs seem fairly
pedestrian in comparison. The title track is basically just a generic murder
ballad — the story of a serial killer and his girlfriend, Badlands in four and a half minutes, concluding with a strand of
rather cheap «folk wisdom»: "They wanted to know why I did what I did /
Well sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world" really doesn't cut
it when you hear it from the lips of a supposedly literate singer-songwriter
rather than some anonymous pre-war folk balladeer. Nostalgic musings like
ʽMansion On The Hillʼ and ʽMy Father's Houseʼ have nothing
but the unmistakable tone of Bruce's voice to recommend them. And ʽOpen
All Nightʼ sounds like one of them clichéd rockabilly rockers from The River that would certainly have
benefited from a full band sound, if it cannot already benefit from innovative
songwriting. And so on and on and on.
What makes it worse is that, despite all the
superficial «humility», it is clear that Springsteen himself must have felt
pretty assured about the strong reactions these songs would cause — otherwise,
there would be no need to wrap it up with ʽReason To Believeʼ, a tune
that largely exists with the sole purpose of «providing hope» after the general
bleakness of the record is supposed to wear you down and make you lose your
faith in the human race and all. Yes, the world is just this one big Nebraska
place where people lose jobs, lovers, health, and confidence, become crooks,
hitmen, and serial killers, but don't worry that much, because "still at
the end of every hard day people find some reason to believe". Credo quia absurdum. Hope that helps,
folks. Do not begin reaching out for your razors and cyanide capsules just yet.
Because of the individual greatness of
ʽAtlantic Cityʼ and ʽState Trooperʼ, I am that close to a positive rating, but a
thumbs up here could be taken as a sign of my belief in Springsteen as a
successful folk singer-songwriter, and I do not have any "reason to
believe" this. At least this record is livelier, wittier, and less
thoroughly drenched in banality than the truly abysmal Ghost Of Tom Joad, awaiting us further on down the line, but
overall, I think I'd rather have Woody Guthrie — who, as a poet, may have been
far cruder and blunter than Springsteen, but who at least knew better how to
separate his big ego from the struggle for working class rights.
BORN IN THE USA (1984)
1) Born In The USA; 2) Cover
Me; 3) Darlington County; 4) Working On The Highway; 5) Downbound Train; 6) I'm
On Fire; 7) No Surrender; 8) Bobby Jean; 9) I'm Goin' Down; 10) Glory Days; 11)
Dancing In The Dark; 12) My Hometown.
There's no use pretending that this album is
devoid of magic. There's no going against the bare facts: two listens at most,
and these songs will stay with you forever — just remember the title, and the
whole picture will come to you in a flash. Yes, this is largely because there
is very little original songwriting here: most of these brawny rockers feature
completely formulaic chord sequences, borrowed from blues, folk, country, and
rockabilly, and very well tested by Father Time. But ol' Bruce knows how to
make them come alive again under his own personal identity, and which
particular notes, nooks and angles should be flash-lighted by means of the
technological wonders of mid-Eighties' production. This could not have
been anything but his commercial high peak — a simple, straightforward,
immediately accessible and invigorating collection of kick-ass pop-rock tunes
that was almost impossible not to buy in 1984.
Of course, it is also almost shamelessly
manipulative. Liberals and democrats of all trades like to use the title track
as indicative of conservative stupidity — always remembering how the Reagan
people actually got in contact with the Springsteen people, asking them to
allow the president to use the song in his ongoing campaign for re-election,
despite the lyrics being so clearly ironic. But in fact, the Reagan people were
certainly not stupid: most people, when hearing the song, would first
and foremost be swayed by its anthemic, heck, its almost «jingoistic» refrain,
and would hardly notice the lyrical content of the verses until much later.
Does anybody really think this was not intentional — that neither Bruce
nor Landau had anything but sheer intellectual irony on their minds? Maybe when
it was still a humble acoustic demo during the Nebraska sessions, sure —
but certainly not when it was transformed into this braggartly declamation,
driven by Max Weinberg's killer drums and Bittan's fanfare-like synth riff.
Like many other Springsteen songs, this one has a pair of different faces — one
for the money, two for the show, and you have your choice of which one you'd
like to consider the more important one.
Legend has it that after Nebraska,
Springsteen actually engaged in a body-building program (any coincidence that First
Blood came out in 1982?), and when you see the videos that accompanied the
album — title track, ʽDancing In The Darkʼ, even ʽI'm On
Fireʼ (where who else could our hero represent than a hard-working auto
mechanic?) — you can understand that the man was really going all the way to
refresh, solidify, and unify his image across all modes of perception, in a
much more populist manner than even Born To Run could ever hint at. One
reason why Bruce never made, or even tried to make, another album like this is
that there was no need: Born In The USA made him into a living legend
overnight, and from then on he could have released nothing but industrial noise
or minimalist ambient albums all his life — having made his mark on the entire
American nation, and even on quite a few people outside it, even if,
technically, Born In The USA stigmatized him as a «local» phenomenon
more than any other record.
And I have to admit that, on a sheer gut level,
I feel more enthralled by this simplistic, straight-in-your-face approach than
by the «quasi-progressiveness» of Born To Run. Case in point is
ʽDancing In The Darkʼ, a song written at the last minute to complete
the album and capture the man's then-current state of mind — the catchiness of
its synth riff and elegantly resolved verse-chorus attack is not a simple formality,
it is the perfect summarization of The Boss's entire
«hope-in-the-face-of-impossible-odds» philosophy and quite a powerful musical
anti-depressant in its own rights. In the famous video (and subsequent
recreations of the video during the man's touring schedules, where he would
pull out allegedly random girls from the audience for the last dance section),
the song was primarily loaded with sexual connotations — what sort of a girl
would refuse a fiery hunk like that? — but even its sexual connotations seem
warranted here, not to mention all the other ones. And yeah, they found the
perfect riff to fuel the fire.
Another personal favorite of mine has always
been ʽBobby Jeanʼ, the most romantic-nostalgic track here and one of
the few that could have perhaps fit in on Born To Run as well — a
favorite largely because of Bittan's ABBA-style «grand» piano chords (three of
them? four? no matter, less is more) that mesh so well with those vocals. It's
a goddamn street romance story like every other, and I have no idea why it
moves me so much more than ʽThunder Roadʼ, but there's just something
about that piano and those hoarse vocals, and then of course Clarence
has to come up and blow you away with one of those desperate sax solos. Such a
simple, such a perfectly effective formula, I cannot resist it.
Yes, the genius of Born In The USA is
that, unlike The River which was somewhat bland, this one is really Darkness
On The Edge Of Town, repackaged in this much more simple way. Most of the
songs are pretty bleak — ʽCover Meʼ is about using love as a last
resort, ʽDownbound Trainʼ is about when not even love can help,
ʽI'm Goin' Downʼ is about when love turns out to be a drag, and
ʽI'm On Fireʼ is about... uh, well, it's kinda creepy, actually, when
you listen to his "six-inch valley through the middle of my skull"
metaphors. You don't want to mess around with The Boss when he's singing about
his sex drive — Mick Jagger would be mincemeat against this heap of muscles
circa 1984. But even so, ʽI'm On Fireʼ is explicitly about not
getting any, and does anyone have any idea how many horny teenagers identified
with the song that year?
On the other hand, if the album were all
bleak, this might have hurt sales — so there's one for the truck drivers
(ʽDarlington Countyʼ), one for the chain gang (ʽWorking On The
Highwayʼ), one for the school skippers (ʽNo Surrenderʼ), one for
the old folks (ʽGlory Daysʼ)... basically, it would only be the jaded
intellectuals, I guess, who wouldn't have a tune here designed especially for
them, everybody else in America had at least one or more. Really, the
construction of the album is totally admirable — it is a perfectly thought out
mechanism, no cog or wheel wasted, not a second out of place. Look how each of
the two sides ends with a «softie» — ʽI'm On Fireʼ slowly putting out
the flame of Side A, then ʽMy Hometownʼ, on an almost «adult contemporary»
note (ironically, presaging much of the sound of Tunnel Of Love), quietly
calms us down after ʽDancing In The Darkʼ had us all riled up. These
are darn clever engineering solutions. Darn clever. How could this not have
been such a huge success? After all, people who bought the record were only
people. Defenseless against such a well-armed construction.
Is there any actual harm, though, from falling
under the spell of Born In The USA? Well, there's nothing particularly
wrong with liking Springsteen in general or this record in particular — it
ain't sleazy, it doesn't have too much pretense, it isn't too dumb from
a general musical standpoint (yes, these synth riffs are simpler than anything
so far, but in many cases, this is genius simplicity, even if I do feel
silly listening to ʽGlory Daysʼ), and it kicks ass. Many «hardcore»
Springsteen fans seem offended by its simplicity — this sudden appeal to
millions rather than just thousands makes them feel that Bruce is intentionally
cheapening his act here, and he is, but see, the thing is, there's nothing
inherently wrong about cheap acts if they're done with spirit. Even if he is
acting all the way, Born In The USA sounds more adequate and convincing
to me than Born To Run, and I can neither admit to hating it nor even to
wanting to find a reason why I should.
Rereading an older review of this record by a
much younger me, I'm sort of amused how I used to take this «he's dumbing it
down, oh God no how come he's dumbing it down so much?» thing so much to heart,
essentially leaving The Boss in a «damned if you do, damned if you don't» position:
when he is «glorifying» and «complexifying» the common man on Born To Run,
he gets slapped — when he is talking to the common man in common language on Born
In The USA, he gets destroyed, come on now, this just ain't fair. As a
symbol of repentance, I have just happily sung along to all the sha-la-la-las
of ʽDarlington Countyʼ, and you know what? it was fun, you
should try it, too, some day. Thumbs up,
I'm going to play air guitar to ʽWorking On The Highwayʼ now — just
please don't ask me to jack off to ʽI'm On Fireʼ, because that would
be taking this album way too seriously and spoiling all the fun.
LIVE 1975-85 (1986)
1) Thunder Road; 2) Adam
Raised A Cain; 3) Spirit In The Night; 4) 4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy); 5)
Paradise By The "C"; 6) Fire; 7) Growin' Up; 8) It's Hard To Be A
Saint In The City; 9) Backstreets; 10) Rosalita (Come Out Tonight); 11) Raise
Your Hand; 12) Hungry Heart; 13) Two Hearts; 14) Cadillac Ranch; 15) You Can
Look (But You Better Not Touch); 16) Independence Day; 17) Badlands; 18)
Because The Night; 19) Candy's Room; 20) Darkness On The Edge Of Town; 21)
Racing In The Street; 22) This Land Is Your Land; 23) Nebraska; 24) Johnny 99;
25) Reason To Believe; 26) Born In The USA; 27) Seeds; 28) The River; 29) War;
30) Darlington County; 31) Working On The Highway; 32) The Promised Land; 33)
Cover Me; 34) I'm On Fire; 35) Bobby Jean; 36) My Hometown; 37) Born To Run;
38) No Surrender; 39) Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out; 40) Jersey Girl.
Nothing but the biggest for The Boss! Unless
I'm very wrong, this was the first ever live album to be released not on two or
even three LPs (that did happen in
the prog-rock era), but on five. And
of course, it is a live retrospective that spans a whole decade, but even so, I
don't think even the Grateful Dead had the gall to put out anything like that
in 1986. Bruce did have a certain excuse, though — he had established his
reputation as a major kick-ass live performer already at the time of his first
studio records, yet somehow even after the major success of Born To Run live albums did not appear
on the horizon. Modesty? Laziness? Lack of interest?
Well, whatever. Live 1975-85, released as a sort of major summarization of Bruce's
live career, is neither modest nor lazy, and, judging by its careful
construction, shows somebody who is very
interested in establishing a memory of himself as one of the greatest live
players in his generation, so we should assume that this is just Bruce catching
up. (We could assume that he intentionally
waited all this time, so he could accumulate enough material and market the
biggest live album ever made — but then, rock musicians don't usually plan that far ahead). The downside, of
course, is that the album is so goddamn sprawling, there probably are very few
people in the world, bar complete Springsteen nutsos, who sat through it more
than once — and I, too, have to confess that I am writing about it after only
just one listen. It was a good listen, though, and I might find myself coming
back to at least parts of the monster at later dates.
The title is actually a bit misleading, because
only one song here, out of a whoppin' 40, really goes back to 1975 — the
opening ʽThunder Roadʼ, presented here in its stripped-down, totally
non-thunderous rendition (just piano, chimes, and harmonica). To listen to
Bruce in all his early bearded glory, loyal bootleg-hating citizens would have
to wait for another twenty years, until the archival release of Hammersmith Odeon '75. The real bulk of
this album, though, begins July 7,
1978, at the Roxy Theatre, and takes us through three consecutive sections: the
1978 tour, the 1980-81 River tour,
and the largest and the most recent section, occupying almost half of the set —
the 1984-85 Born In The USA tour.
Understandably, most of the sections focus seriously on contemporary material,
but, also understandably, the first section dips heavily into the man's early
catalog, so, all in all, all of his seven studio albums up to that date are
well represented (Nebraska suffers
the most, but it would also be the least reasonable source of material for live
performances, unless Bruce started doing all those acoustic songs in full E
Street Band arrangements or something. Which he would later do, but not in
1984).
Unless you are of the utterly cynical
persuasion, it makes no sense to insist that the tremendous energetics that has
always been the norm for Bruce's shows is somehow not felt on this collection: it is, all the way through. Regardless
of the «inherent» quality of the song being played, it is always played at the
top level — admittedly, maybe the man could have occasional weaker nights, but
that is what the selection process is there for (though I guess that tracks
were shuffled from different shows largely because of varying sound quality).
As the E Street Band kicks in with full force into ʽAdam Raised A
Cainʼ (great choice for a
lead-in track), you understand that this live rendition from The Roxy is every
bit as powerful as its studio counterpart, and the studio counterpart was one of Bruce's most powerful moments
in the studio, ever. Later on in his career he would, unfortunately, begin to
slur and speed up the words, disrupting the perfect flow of the song, but back
in 1978, when it was still fresh, he just made sure that his demons were
properly exorcised in front of the population, night after night.
Most of the other songs also stay true to their
studio versions, with just a few variations (ʽCover Meʼ gets a
pathetic-dramatic introduction, with Patti Scialfa wailing "nowhere to
run!" and her future husband calling back drama-pop-metal fashion —
totally unnecessary, I'd say, but apparently Bruce thought back in 1984 that
the song needed something to «cover» it up. Some great soloing from Lofgren and
the Boss himself, though). Nothing really needs to be reinvented, though, as
long as the songs come to an extra life on stage due to the raw passion of all
the players involved. Stuff like ʽRosalitaʼ would be the perfect
example, but for some reason I am really
digging this version of ʽCadillac Ranchʼ — a song that never jumped
out at me that much when it was on The
River, but here, it is just admirable how great a song consisting of 16
simplistic bars can be if you just give it your all (unfortunately, it also
means that these bars have become so permanently lodged in my head that it will
take quite a few days to get it out — I guess I have The Big Man to thank for
that. By the way, if you check some of the old live videos for that song, Bruce
does some really hilarious dance moves at the end).
It is somewhat different about the stories, though — an integral and
indisputable element of each of the man's shows, but every time he starts out
with some recollection of how he was abused by his parents (ʽGrowin'
Upʼ) or of his girlfriend troubles (ʽThe Riverʼ, naturally),
some red light comes up in my mind: «man, you're overdoing it». The music is
heartfelt enough; do we really need that additional element of intimacy?
Granted, we are spared here from his foam-at-the-mouth impersonations of an
Afro-American preacher, all set to baptize you in the alleged name of
rock'n'roll, that would become the norm at later concerts — but those nasty
jabs at his folks that accompany ʽGrowin' Upʼ are really just as
irritating. This is where Bruce the musician, in my opinion, becomes
completely overshadowed by Bruce the populist, and I don't really buy it that
the two are inseparable — after all, these stories were not present on the
studio recordings, were they? At least if they were improvised and spontaneous,
that'd be an excuse, but clearly they were just as well rehearsed as the songs
themselves. Not good at all.
Fortunately, that's just three or four spoilt tracks
out of forty, and for compensation, you have a bunch of tracks that were (back
then) unavailable anywhere else — such as Bruce's own rendition of
ʽBecause The Nightʼ (he did right to give the song to Patti Smith,
who sings it better, but she never had the full power of the E Street Band
behind her, alas); ʽFireʼ, which ended up as a huge hit single for
The Pointer Sisters, but is actually done better by Bruce (less pop, more
feeling); ʽSeedsʼ, a surprisingly tough and gritty blues-rocker from
the Born In The USA era that may
have been left off the album due to being too heavy (bad synths, though); and a
couple of R'n'B covers like ʽRaise Your Handʼ and ʽWarʼ, to
which the man's hoarse roaring voice is ideally suited. Oh, and just so that
you do not forget where the roots are, the record ends with a cover of Tom
Waits' ʽJersey Girlʼ (whose lyrics Bruce doctored a little bit,
replacing "whores" with "girls" so that, you know, Jersey
people would feel less confused about their homeplace).
Because this monster is so big, this makes it really hard to get into any of the
tracks in major detail — and it probably isn't the point anyway. The point is
that the monster is big, big, B-I-G, American size big, and whether
you like it or whether you don't just don't matter, because it is simply an
objective fact. Tons of songs, top volume, top energy, most dedicated people in
the business, and sooner or later, the atmosphere becomes contagious. Despite
the length, at no particular point does the record become boring (maybe only a
little bit during the Nebraska
section, but it also has its place as a «breath-catcher» in between all the
high energy jolts), and, well, it's just three and a half hours long in the end
— the approximate length of a single Springsteen live show, as it were. Thumbs up.
TUNNEL OF LOVE (1987)
1) Ain't Got You; 2) Tougher
Than The Rest; 3) All That Heaven Will Allow; 4) Spare Parts; 5) Cautious Man;
6) Walk Like A Man; 7) Tunnel Of Love; 8) Two Faces; 9) Brilliant Disguise; 10)
One Step Up; 11) When You're Alone; 12) Valentine's Day.
There are two ways to think about Tunnel Of
Love. The first one is that this is one more unexpected career twist —
after the thunder, the sweat, the blood-pumping of Born In The USA, The
Boss just flushes the «Rambo rock» down the drain and goes all adult
contemporary on us. The second way of thinking is that this is simply where The
Boss... grows old. Take a mental snapshot of the man in the ʽDancing In
The Darkʼ video — then, with that snapshot still in active memory, take a
look at this album cover. Two different people. Heck, he almost looks like
Vincent Vega in that outfit and with that particular posture.
Thing is, I can easily live with either way of
thinking, or with both at the same time, but in either case Tunnel Of Love
is simply not very good. Going introspective, personal, and depressed after the
flamboyant extravert show that was Born In The USA is all very good, but
in 1987, it just does not look like Bruce was all that ready for such a
metamorphosis. He really was depressed, worn down by his «pop idol»
image as well as devastated by the collapse of his first marriage, but he was
not able to channel his depression into music — the songs on Tunnel are
as simple and straightforward as they used to be, but now they're just
depressed. And boring.
The synthesizers on Born In The USA may
have had crappy Eighties' tones, but when you are caught in that kind of
frenzy, let's face it, you don't really give a damn about the synth tone. The
album suffered from mediocre production, but more than made up for it in terms
of drive, energy, and hooks. Not so on these songs. Electronic drums,
«dinky» lead keyboards and «heavenly» synth tones in the background dominate
the turf here, and what does it all have to do with Bruce Springsteen? The
title track is a bland dance number that could have been sung by Kim Wilde,
with each one of the above-mentioned elements present, and some awful metallic
guitar solos to complete the picture. Even the lyrics, which many critics have
praised, are nothing special — "You've got to learn to live with what you
can't rise above / If you want to ride on down in through this tunnel of
love". Not very original, if you ask me.
The recording was originally planned to be a
Springsteen solo recording, before he relented and let some of the E Street
Band members to sit in — a misguided decision, methinks, because with Bruce,
it's either all the way or no way at all. Maybe if all the tracks were
completely acoustic, just the man and his guitar Nebraska-fashion again,
it would have produced a stronger impression because of the intimacy. But when
I listen to a decent track like ʽBrilliant Disguiseʼ, I can't help
thinking how much better it would have been with a full-hearted rather than
half-hearted approach — more guitars, louder drums, a wild sax solo, some
shouting, the band wilding out, and who cares about the lyrics being so
personal? He did let other people play on the track anyway, didn't he?
And not going all the way, he let it get limp. And who knows, he might
have had another ʽBobby Jeanʼ in his pocket here. The accompanying
minimalistic video, shot in black and white and featuring the man adding live
vocals to an acoustic track, is offset by the bland musical backing — if it is
a song of such personal strength and depth, why is it so blandly arranged and
so devoid of any decent musical hooks?
Fact is, if it were a record by anybody other
than Bruce — Sting, for example, not to mention Bryan Adams — critical
attention would probably pass it by. However, as this was a dark, deeply
introspective album following the man's biggest success to date, it was tacitly
decided that Tunnel Of Love would be endorsed: it is, after all, so
tempting to have the big guy first scatter his thunder and lightning around,
then suddenly let you in on his deepest secrets, make himself vulnerable, open
up his bleeding heart and disclose to the public that even the People's
Champion has his own personal problems that tie into human, not social
relations. And this temptation was stronger than simply admitting that
ʽTougher Than The Restʼ and ʽWalk Like A Manʼ are lazy,
poorly written, crappily arranged ballads that cannot be said to contain more
«soul» than any given adult contemporary ballad of the decade — unless your
position is that any track on which Bruce Springsteen opens his mouth
already got soul a-plenty.
Re-reading my old vitriolic assessment of this
record years ago, I thought that, heck, I myself am one year older now than
Bruce was when making this album, maybe the reaction would be different this
time — but it wasn't. I do not find the atmosphere of Tunnel particularly
seductive, captivating, or intriguing; I do not find any interest in its
melodies; I have no frickin' idea why so many people reward it with so many
stars as if it were the ultimate breakup album. I have no idea why
ʽValentine's Dayʼ drags on for so long, or what exactly the swamp
rockin' ʽSpare Partsʼ is doing here (I wish I could call it the best
song on the album, but that would probably get dogs snappin' at my heels). I
feel sorry for the guy circa 1987, but I am also glad that he made it out very
easily — all it took was realizing that fellow musicians make better wives than
models (but don't tell Keith Richards, or there'll be a violent Telecaster
battle somewhere out in space). So no hard feelings whatsoever, but a thumbs down all the same: as an artistic
statement, Tunnel Of Love is bland and boring, and as an entertainment
package, it does not even begin to exist.
HUMAN TOUCH (1992)
1) Human Touch; 2) Soul
Driver; 3) 57 Channels (And Nothin' On); 4) Cross My Heart; 5) Gloria's Eyes;
6) With Every Wish; 7) Roll Of The Dice; 8) Real World; 9) All Or Nothin' At
All; 10) Man's Job; 11) I Wish I Were Blind; 12) The Long Goodbye; 13) Real
Man; 14) Pony Boy.
There are some big problems here that even a
topsy-turvy assessment of Springsteen's like mine could find hard to ignore.
Four years in the making — so long, in fact, that the succeeding Lucky Town caught up with it and both
were released on the same day — Human
Touch finds the Boss jettisoning the E Street Band almost completely,
retaining only Roy Bittan to go on playing the worst kind of synthesizers
imaginable. Even worse, it also finds him moving to Los Angeles, of all places — recording
in Los Angeles — and employing Jeff Porcaro from Toto to contribute percussion,
the rest of his new band members being almost completely unknown.
Perhaps if this album were yet another moody
brooding in the vein of Tunnel Of Love,
where it was all about personality and very little about energy, the flaws of Human Touch might have been overlooked.
But it is not — it is a very blatant attempt to return to the frenzied
arena-rock style of Born In The USA,
or, at least, it is simply a very distinctly pronounced rock album, period. And playing rock without the E Street Band does make him feel a bit like a duck
out of the baking oven... ten minutes earlier than it should be, that is. The
playing throughout is stiff and very «professional» — just your usual session
musicians getting paid for whatever it is that they are getting paid for. Bad
keyboards, overprocessed guitars, and although Jeff Porcaro is quite well
respected in musical circles, next to Springsteen he just doesn't have the same
regal stature as Max Weinberg. This is not his native turf, anyway — why should
he be doing anything other than, you know, drumming?
But the irony of it all is that the songs
themselves, on the whole, are not that much better or that much worse than any
randomly picked tune on Born In The USA
(ʽDancing In The Darkʼ and its absurdly genius synth line excluded).
Most of the time, this is uninventive, but still catchy pop-rock, not as
«anthemic» as it used to be (though some of the songs, like ʽRoll The
Diceʼ, unsuccessfully try to come across as inspiring anthems), just
moderately exciting Bruce'n'roll that does not ask you to worship it but sort
of tries to invite you to have a good time. Repeated listens will let you get
over the weakass production, and then you will understand that very little has
actually changed in Bruce's songwriting ever since he adopted the River formula. And since he's always
been relatively content to go along with the general musical flow, never
distancing himself from the current mainstream trends, well, no wonder that in
1992 he sounds like they all sound in 1992 (granted, maybe still a little
worse: with the grunge explosion hitting hard and influencing even the veteran
rockers, you'd think those guitars could use a little overdrive without
spooking off the population — I mean, ʽMan's Jobʼ almost sounds like
the frickin' Cure's ʽFriday I'm In Loveʼ! not that this would be bad
for The Cure, but it is fairly weird for the Boss).
Thematically, everything here is quite
simplistic — largely just love songs, though every once in a while Bruce still
lashes out tangentially at those weird ways in which the world has developed:
ʽ57 Channels (And Nothing On)ʼ is not the most intelligently written
anti-TV song ever written, but it is a pretty funny satirical blurb for Bruce —
a talkin'-blues musical joke, on which he even took up the bass guitar himself,
and whose message, simple as it is, is unfortunately still relevant for a large
part of the population worldwide. But even in that song, "home
entertainment was my baby's wish", and most of the other songs are quite
straightforwardly about his baby — kind of understandable, considering how
Bruce managed to patch up his personal life after Tunnel Of Love and was several years into a happy marriage with
Patti Scialfa.
The less said about individual songs, the
better. Personally, I am still very much bored when he is getting soft and
sentimental (the title track; ʽWith Every Wishʼ), but it gets much
better when he lets in a little bluesy darkness and a little more hoarse-throated
soul (ʽSoul Driverʼ, with a nice vocal journey from angry verse to
pleading chorus), or when he is just raving and ranting about the fool he has
been (ʽGloria's Eyesʼ, which, if I am not mistaken, borrows the
guitar hook from Don Covay's ʽMercy Mercyʼ, but this is not an album
where you're supposed to be noticing any guitar hooks anyway). Then it gets
worse when he stoops to braggardly cock-rock (ʽAll Or Nothing At
Allʼ, where one of the implied lines is "you'd slip me just a piece
of ass", last word coyly masked
as the neutral "it", but
rhymes don't lie!), but again it gets better when he rises to purely romantic
sexism ("lovin' you baby is a man's man's job" — even despite the
song's message sounding so atavistic in the era of gay marriage, the
catchiness of the chorus can't be denied; hopefully, we'll hear a George
Michael cover some day).
Clearly, at 59 minutes this sucker's just plain
overlong: when, towards the end, nearing exhaustion, you are forced to sit
through the triumphantly moronic synth riff and the clichéd masculinity
of ʽReal Manʼ, ideas of progressive taxes on bad songwriting start
taking actual shape. But trim it down to a decent size, and Human Touch shows an artist who may be out of touch and a little out of shape,
yet still essentially true to his formula. Lyrics, production, and energy all
show signs of wear — but what about those of us who were never all that awed by
his lyrics in the first place, and occasionally felt a little embarrassed about
those levels of energy? To those people the deep gap that separates Human Touch from Born In The USA, or the allegedly even deeper gap that separates it
from Born To Run might not feel that deep — nothing that can't be
bridged with, you know, just a little of that human touch.
LUCKY TOWN (1992)
1) Better Days; 2) Lucky Town;
3) Local Hero; 4) If I Should Fall Behind; 5) Leap Of Faith; 6) The Big Muddy;
7) Living Proof; 8) Book Of Dreams; 9) Souls Of The Departed; 10) My Beautiful
Reward.
Local lore says that Bruce went into the studio
to record one last song for Human Touch,
ended up recording ten more, and eventually just decided to put them on a
separate album and release both on the same day. The decision was not just a
marketing ploy — Lucky Town is
different in mood, scope, goals, whatever, even if both titles are so
structurally symmetric that I sometimes confuse one with another. That said,
it's still a late period Springsteen album, and even when he is at his best,
the Boss finds it hard to reinvent himself — when he is not at his best, you could probably build a computer program
correctly predicting most of his moves.
Anyway, this relatively short collection is
less overproduced, somewhat more stripped down and domestic (although the man
still employs a full band), and focuses more on Springsteen's personal life
than on character impersonating. And since Springsteen's personal life was sort
of normalized, with a loving woman and a little child at his side, the songs
here reflect that — Lucky Town is a
fairly happy album of generally satisfied songs. "These are better
days", "I'm going down to Lucky Town, I wanna lose those blues I've
found", "Looking for a little bit of God's mercy, I found living
proof" — well, at the very least he's being honest: certainly it is no
good to write bitter, angry, or depressed songs if you don't feel bitter,
angry, or depressed.
The problem, however, is not that we refuse to
acknowledge Springsteen's right to be happy, or his right to express that
happiness in his songs and then sell them to anyone who's buying. The problem
is that, for twenty years, it was either negative emotion or passionate drive
that were responsible for his successes. Were he a fantastic composer, or a
Musician with a capital M, there is a chance that he could come up with some great
happy songs — cozy, settled-in, with unforgettable melodies. But as sincere as
ʽLiving Proofʼ, a song about his newborn son, probably is, from a
musical standpoint it ain't no ʽIsn't She Lovelyʼ, and does not even
begin to come close to those musical pieces that actually manage to convey that
pure baby-joy. ʽLiving Proofʼ just sort of states the fact, you know.
He's happy, he's had a son, we feel happy for him too, end of story, period.
What's so special? Certainly not the musical wrap-up of the info.
It is rather eerie that on the front cover, he
kind of looks like Dylan on the cover of Infidels
ten years go, back when it was Bob who was entering the third decade of his
career — and, likewise, with an album that told us, "Hi! I'm nice and
friendly, but please do not count on me for any new revelations or insights,
I'm really just here to let you know that life goes on, and the ragged hair and
dark glasses mean that I'm still a little hip, but also a little lost and
confused as to my creativity, and also I just don't want to look you straight
in the eye because I might end up looking embarrassed, so shades seem like the
best option". But at least Infidels
had ʽJokermanʼ, which was a great epic song, and it had all those
ridiculous, but fun, Zionist connotations — Lucky Town is just a record about a loving husband and a happy
father.
Okay, so there is one «dark» song about the
Gulf War — ʽSouls Of The Departedʼ, with swampy guitars, echoes, and
overproduction that suggest it rather belongs on Human Touch, and must have ended up here by mistake. It is bitter, though not exactly accusatory
(more like an abstract deep mourning for those about whom we never know whether
they died in vain or not), but it is also very restrained, and Bruce just does
not have that invisible intelligent coolness that can make his rock songs work
without the man going berserk on them — this laid-back attitude actually makes
it seem like he's being indifferent about what he sings. Which is probably not
the case, or else he would not sing about it, but that is how it comes across.
But all said, Lucky Town is also an album to which I would feel ashamed to issue
a thumbs down judgement. It doesn't sound too shitty, the songs are not too way
below Bruce's usual level of catchiness, it is sincere and accurately conveys
his then-current state of mind — it's probably the best he could do at the
moment, indeed, stuck in a safe, not-too-exciting rut of domestic happiness.
At least he's not posing, or calculating, or puffing up his image (there is
even an ironic song here about his own personality cult — ʽLocal
Heroʼ). There is no need whatsoever for anyone to hear or own this record
unless you have to know all the
details of the ups and downs of the man's artistic career — however, within that
career it has its own certified place, a little lake of musical tranquility
straight in between the musical storms of 1984 and 2002.
IN CONCERT/MTV PLUGGED (1993)
1) Red Headed Woman; 2) Better
Days; 3) Atlantic City; 4) Darkness On The Edge Of Town; 5) Man's Job; 6) Human
Touch; 7) Lucky Town; 8) I Wish I Were Blind; 9) Thunder Road; 10) Light Of
Day; 11) If I Should Fall Behind; 12) Living Proof; 13) My Beautiful Reward.
Considering the veritable ocean of live Springsteen releases that were freed from the vaults
in the past decade, there really is not one single reason in the world why
anybody but the most diehard completist could want this one in the collection.
Sure, it was different in 1993: MTV's «Unplugged» series were all the rage (at
least, in the mainstream world), and the only officially available live album
from the Boss was the 1975-85 boxset
that could be intimidating even to the serious fan, not to mention the serious
fan's wallet. But even in 1993, few people went bananas for the Bruce-MTV
combination, and it is easy to see why.
First, the man's involvement with the franchise
occurred at the wrong time — he'd recently disbanded The E Street Band, and
was touring with what was jokingly called «The Other Band», where only Roy
Bittan was retained from the veterans, and everybody else was just...
professional, with little of the common enthusiastic spirit that had carried
the Boss and his players through the previous two decades. Second, he was
touring in support of Human Touch
and Lucky Town — as we have already
seen, not altogether godawful records, but certainly formulaic and «safe» ones,
and definitely undeserving to overshadow the man's classic catalog; yet 8 out
of 13 songs here are all from Human
Touch and Lucky Town, and «The
Other Band» is not hurrying up to make them come much more alive on stage than
they were in the studio.
Third, as is already obvious from the record's
title, the album is not un-plugged —
the only acoustic performance is the opening ʽRed Headed Womanʼ, a
somewhat tongue-in-cheek folk-blues serenade to Patti Scialfa that is really
more of a cute musical/lyrical joke than anything else. Once it is over, it's
"let's ROCK it!" time, as
if Bruce and his new pals were performing some incredible feat of bravery by
defying MTV's scenario and turning the tables on them. Bruce later explained
that, apparently, acoustic versions of these songs «did not work» when he tried
them out with the band, and indeed I can believe that — the only way they could
have worked would be for Bruce to just perform all of them solo, and that would
have been Nebraska Live, but with
generally worse songs, so maybe it's a good
thing they brought those cables.
In the end, though, what we have is just a
regular audio equivalent of a generic Bruce concert circa 1993 — with most of
the classic stuff left off, but lots and lots of «okay» songs that, truth be
told, do not differ all that much from the studio versions. The stripped-down
rendition of ʽThunder Roadʼ will not overwhelm the equally
stripped-down version on 1975-85;
the anthemic rocking version of ʽAtlantic Cityʼ is best heard with
The E Street Band; and the lengthy, aggrandized rocker / jam / sermon
ʽLight Of Dayʼ, to tell the truth, is a strange choice for an «epic»
— it's a bit of aggressive roughneck fun as a rocker, but why it is this song in particular that deserves a
foam-at-the-mouth New Jersey gospel interlude in the middle sort of beats me.
Besides, didn't he originally give the song to Joan Jett? Her version actually
has more silly-funny aggression in it
than Bruce's own take — he adds too much masculine brutality, killing some of
the fun cells.
Ultimately, this is not a bad performance; it
simply has too many factors working against it, and it really has no deeply
hidden redeeming arguments — such as interesting rearrangements, obscure
brilliant rarities, or even original stories, much as I am mistrustful of these
when they are driven by the man's populist ego. And while I am not as
dismissive of the entire MTV series as some (it did produce its fair share of
intimate gems), going plugged on the series really just sucks all sense out of
the idea. Next time, let's rock it in a different setting and with a different
band, okay, Boss? This one's sort of a misfire.
THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD (1995)
1) The Ghost Of Tom Joad; 2)
Straight Time; 3) Highway 29; 4) Youngstown; 5) Sinaloa Cowboys; 6) The Line;
7) Balboa Park; 8) Dry Lightning; 9) The New Timer; 10) Across The Border; 11)
Galveston Bay; 12) My Best Was Never Good Enough.
Perhaps another solo acoustic album, a return
to the simpler-than-simple values of Nebraska,
was precisely what Bruce needed at the time — to help cleanse out some of that
«generic rock» and «adult contemporary» residue that had accumulated to
disturbing levels over the previous ten years. Maybe so, and maybe it is even
so intricately construed that there would be no Rising without Tom Joad,
no reconvening of the E Street Band after a fresh start, and, oh gosh, no Tom
Morello fireworks on subsequent live and studio reinventions of the title
track. And you have to admit, Tom Morello fireworks are exciting, even if you
find them silly.
Nevertheless, to like this album you have to be
very, very warm to the idea of solo
acoustic Springsteen — without the pop-rock hooks, without The Big Man, without
the devilish energy, and, I have to say, without most of the things that make a
Boss out of a mere Bruce. Yes, «naked Bruce» is a very positive, humanistic
soul, and his spiritual connection to Tom Joad and all those waiting for the
chimes of freedom is natural and almost certainly sincere. But last time I
checked, The Ghost Of Tom Joad was
billed as a new musical album with twelve new songs on it, and this is what we are here for, songs. Melodies. Moods. Chords. And a little freshness.
Instead of this, we get hardcore — real hardcore. Aside from the
instrumentation, which is actually a little less sparse than on Nebraska (some occasional percussion,
some occasional accordeon, and a lot of hazy, foggy synthesizer background,
fortunately, pushed very deep in the
background so it does not even begin to threaten to overshadow the gentle
guitar picking), this is a record that serves one and only one noble, but
narrow purpose: make you, the
listening receptacle, deeply feel the sad and lonesome plight of the common
man. First, the ghost of Tom Joad is summoned as a non-living witness (and
potential protector), and then, one by one, we go through a gallery of
characters, already known to us all too well, I'm afraid — but this time, there
is no getting away from the characters, because nothing stands in the way
between them and you. Nothing except a little bit of soft, quiet guitar
plucking to get you in the mood. Well, there has to be some difference between listening to this record or to an audiobook
version of Grapes Of Wrath
(personally, I'd still prefer the latter).
Okay, so it might be fine not to have any
original melodies. A few of these songs are almost exactly the same, and many
more just recycle the chords of gazillions of folk tunes that people were
composing and re-composing before Woody Guthrie, after Woody Guthrie, and being
Woody Guthrie. It is not technically impossible, though, to reinvent these
melodies one more time in some new context. But that is not Bruce's point here
— no, the point is to strip them down to the barest of the bare, cut straight
to the heart and stay there, wiggling the knife a little to the left and a
little to the right, until the very end. The problem is, when you just do it
like that, the process is not very interesting to watch.
It is useless to discuss these songs one by
one: all of them set and hold exactly the same gray melancholic mood, mixing a
little bit of hope for a brighter future to the desolation and desperation of
present conditions. Are the lyrics any good? Sometimes they are, sometimes they
aren't; even for an undoubtedly talented person such as Bruce, it gets hard to
find new ways to state the same common old truths (so sometimes he resorts to
almost literally quoting Steinbeck). It really does not matter, though: be they
randomly strung together bunches of dusty clichés or a genuine verbal
revolution, they are always delivered in exactly the same way, and you know
what way it is. The way you'd expect a singer to sing after he'd just finished
unloading a couple of trucks or climbed out of a coal mine. Nothing bad about
that, but... maybe not for 50 minutes without a single second of respite.
Unfortunately, I do not subscribe to the idea
that anything (a) acoustic, (b)
relating to the plight of the simple person, (c) «composed» and performed by
Bruce Springsteen should automatically be praised to high heaven because it is
so sincere, emotional, and deep. Sincere, perhaps; but way too predictable and formulaic
to deserve to be called emotional, and «deep» only if you have had no prior
experiences with folk music whatsoever. Moreover, I have a gut feeling that
with the level of the man's undeniable talent, he could crank another Ghost Of Tom Joad maybe once every
couple of months, and would we be supposed to cheer every single goddamn time?
My decision, made up a long time ago, still stands: Bruce Springsteen has too
little diversity, subtlety, or (very importantly) sense of humor in his bones
to make successful acoustic albums. At least Nebraska had an element of surprise to it (and, actually, some bits
of composing — ʽAtlantic Cityʼ alone is worth Ghost in its entirety), but this here is just totally pedestrian
stuff, and my conscience will not bother me if I reinforce a thumbs down
judgement here. Just do yourself a favor and go read (or re-read) some
Steinbeck instead. Or hear the electric version of the title track with Morello
— at least, you know, that's entertainment.
LIVE IN NEW YORK CITY (2001)
1) My Love Will Not Let You
Down; 2) Prove It All Night; 3) Two Hearts; 4) Atlantic City; 5) Mansion On The
Hill; 6) The River; 7) Youngstown; 8) Murder Incorporated; 9) Badlands; 10) Out
In The Street; 11) Born To Run; 12) 10th Avenue Freezeout; 13) Land Of Hope And
Dreams; 14) American Skin (41 Shots); 15) Lost In The Flood; 16) Born In The
USA; 17) Don't Look Back; 18) Jungleland; 19) Ramrod; 20) If I Should Fall
Behind.
While it is common (and reasonable) to state
that the last and, from a certain point, the most stable, predictable, and
self-assured stage of Bruce Springsteen's career began with The Rising, which was itself triggered
by the events of 9/11, in effect The Boss's transformation into the solidified
«elder statesman» of rock began earlier — the most solidifying event being his
1999 reunion, after more than a decade of wandering, with The E Street Band.
The «Reunion Tour» was a huge event, and culminated in a series of MSG shows,
some of which were professionally shot with all the benefits of modern
technology and broadcast on HBO. Since then, Bruce and the camera became almost
inseparable on all his subsequent tours, but in 2000, this was still relative
news, and thus Live In New York City
— the video and the accompanying 2-CD package — has quite a bit of historical
significance.
And not just on a purely technical level,
either. Most of the young people these days are only really familiar with this
21st century edition of Bruce Springsteen — one for which certain changes had
to be introduced, given some limitations imposed by the aging process. Although
for a 50-year old he was still in great physical shape (hey, those
body-building years couldn't just go to waste, could they?), his voice had
aged, and he could no longer sing and
strut with the same amount of energy and precision as he used to — not to
mention that, had he tried to, it might have looked just a bit silly now. So
this new look Springsteen is quite a bit less stage-crazy than he used to, and
everybody else in the band has put on a bit of weight as well (literally,
figuratively, or both), and the resulting sound is somewhat more «imposing»
than it is «invigorating».
Not that this is in any way tragic if you tend
to value The Boss for his «Soul» as much as you value him for his «Raw Power».
Of the former, there is a lot here — starting with the hugely extended,
atmosphere-above-all-else version of ʽThe Riverʼ and ending with the
exaggeratedly tearful ʽIf I Should Fall Behindʼ, where all standing
members of The E Street Band take their turn at the microphone, and Patti
Scialfa's hiccupy "wait for me...e...e...e...e" refrain garners as
much acknowledgement from the crowds as anything uttered by her husband. Of the
latter, there is expectedly somewhat less than there was in evidence on Live 1975-86: in particular, simplistic
rock'n'roll-de-luxe crowd pleasers from The
River, namely ʽTwo Heartsʼ, ʽOut In The Streetʼ, and
ʽRamrodʼ, seem overloud, lumpy, and perfunctory, but how could a
legit Springsteen show do away with all of these? It cannot, and you just gotta
have 'em.
Bruce does everything in his power, though, so
as not to make it all seem like a
has-been parade of old glories. The hits are cleverly interspersed with
rarities and obscurities: the album even kicks off with an ancient outtake
(ʽMy Love Will Not Let You Downʼ) that surprisingly turns out to be a
perfectly anthemic, rabble-rousing little gem of an opener, and later on, you
get ʽMurder Incorporatedʼ, dating back to the days of Born In The USA, on which it could have
easily been the angriest, most fucked-up song, had Bruce decided to make the
album any more angry and fucked-up and compromise its commercial success.
New material, premiered during the tour, is
also well in evidence — including ʽAmerican Skinʼ, a poignant topical
tune based on the shooting of Amadou Diallo; and ʽLand Of Hope And
Dreamsʼ, a gospel-rock inversion of the old ʽThis Trainʼ
chestnut. And some of the old songs continue to undergo renovations — the
formerly acoustic ʽAtlantic Cityʼ and ʽYoungstownʼ are
given full band arrangements that work very well: the fanfare-piano riff works
brilliantly as a counterpoint to the "meet me tonight in Atlantic
City" chorus, and as for ʽYoungstownʼ, well, anything to relieve the tedium of a
generic Ghost Of Tom Joad number is
always welcome, and you just can't go wrong with the fully unleashed fury of a
complete E Street Band, even past its prime.
The shows are also almost completely free of
story-telling this time (perhaps the stories were simply edited out, but they
didn't tell us anyway), which I personally find a blessing — especially since
the only track on the album that does have a long spoken interlude is rather
embarrassing: in the middle of the overall entertaining ʽ10th Avenue
Freezeoutʼ, Bruce takes a lengthy detour, impersonating a gospel preacher
of the (sexual) healing powers of rock'n'roll, which goes on for way too long before we eventually
understand that this is just a pretext for a really pompous introduction of
each and every member of the E Street Band. For a couple minutes out there, the
thing is hilarious, but eventually it just ruins an initially fine performance.
(The good news is that the other
extended foam-at-the-mouth prayer to the delirious god of rock'n'roll, inserted
in the middle of ʽLight Of Dayʼ, was left off the album and is only
featured in the video version — maybe because the audio ecstasy was already
presented to us on MTV Plugged).
Other than this bit of misguided misdemeanor,
and a few other minor complaints (such as the attempt to transform ʽBorn
In The USAʼ into a steel guitar swamp blues tune — I understand the desire
to get away from its arena-anthem appeal, but not at the expense of losing the
pop hook, please!), anyway, aside from that, this is a pretty damn good live
album for someone reshaping his stage image for age purposes. This is certainly
not how the «Bruce Springsteen Live»
brand will go down in history in the long run, but it's a fairly accurate
picture of it for the age of the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame, social networks,
hipsters, hi-def audio/video, and glamorization, to the latter of which not
even Springsteen remains completely immune. No matter how healthy, sweaty,
sincere, and «real» it all seems, do not forget that essentially, the B.S. live
show is as much an integral part of the show-biz machine as, say, a Rolling
Stones show, or even a Britney Spears one, and I am fairly sure The Boss is
more aware of this than anyone.
Still, it's a fairly close approximation to «real»,
and quite a few moments here cause real heart-throbbing — be it the powerful
intro to ʽProve It All Nightʼ, or the seconds when Clarence kicks in
with his frenetic sax solo on ʽBorn To Runʼ, or his extended soulful
workout on ʽJunglelandʼ, or the way The Boss gets it so perfectly right
at the climactic releases of each verse of ʽLost In The Floodʼ. Since
the release of Live In New York City,
the floodgates have really opened, and lots and lots of newer shows are now
available in pristine audio and/or video quality — but this one is still a bit
special, since you can clearly feel the atmosphere of excitement about working
with his home band once again, and turning over a new page in his life; if just
for this reason alone, the album deserves a thumbs up. For a fuller appreciation
of whatever was going on, though, you'd really have to see the video — while
Steven Van Zandt's Baba Yaga stage image leaves something to be desired,
Clemmons and Weinberg cut even more dramatic figures as they get older, wiser,
and grander, and hey, priceless close-ups of thick drops of sweat on The Boss'
guitar! The man ain't making his money for nothing, that's for sure.
THE RISING (2002)
1) Lonesome Day; 2) Into The
Fire; 3) Waitin' On A Sunny Day; 4) Nothing Man; 5) Countin' On A Miracle; 6)
Empty Sky; 7) Worlds Apart; 8) Let's Be Friends; 9) Further On (Up The Road);
10) The Fuse; 11) Mary's Place; 12) You're Missing; 13) The Rising; 14)
Paradise; 15) My City Of Ruins.
The very idea of a 70-minute long album,
primarily inspired by the events of 9/11 and intended to serve as mass
spiritual therapy for the aftermath of 9/11, makes me feel somewhat uneasy.
There is no getting away from the fact that Bruce Springsteen is the living
patron saint of the entire New Jersey area and its immediate surroundings, including
New York City — and to ignore 9/11 in his music would have been regarded as a
personal insult by most of the people living there and as a bewildering puzzle
by the musical press; after all, Springsteen is no Dylan, and occasional confounding
of people's expectations is as far as he is willing to go. And yet, an entire
album? Isn't this too much of a temptation to play God — something that Bruce
had come pretty close to, but never quite nailed at least a few times in his
career?
And maybe the biggest problem with The Rising is also its most predictable
problem: striving, as usual, to reach the largest possible audience, the Boss
trivializes the issues at stake and addresses them on a very simple (and safe)
gut level. There has been a terrible tragedy. Many people have died, and even
more people lost their loved ones. The grief is almost unbearable and makes you
question the very meaning of your existence and whether it makes sense to go on
at all. But, as we have always done before, we will pull through, rebuild our
lives from scratch, if necessary, and hold on to our beliefs and ideals because
there's nothing wrong with them. This is what The Rising is all about — no less, no more. There is not the
slightest attempt here to put the whole thing into a larger context: other
than, perhaps, a very thickly veiled
lyrical hint at the distance between East and West (ʽWorlds Apartʼ,
Bruce's not-half-bad attempt at introducing Near Eastern motives into his
songwriting), 9/11 is basically just pictured as an ordinary natural disaster.
Like an earthquake or something. Well... nobody said it ain't permissible,
right? But then... looks a bit cheap. But then again... since when has Bruce Springsteen been all that expensive,
anyway? Everything is just the way it should be.
The best thing about The Rising, however, is not that it gives us any new, deep,
revealing insights into the tragedy of 9/11 or an amazing spiritual
instruction on how to overcome the aftershock of that particular tragedy — the
best thing is that, somehow, the tragedy inspired Springsteen into writing his
most consistent, powerful, memorable, and just plain interesting set of songs
in almost two decades, and also one that he has not been able to top ever
since, despite the steady rate of new studio output in the 21st century. These
songs are bombastic, but convincingly so, thanks to the definitive return of
The E Street Band into the studio; emotionally straightforward and (usually)
not-too-subtle, but diverse and hard-hitting; rhythmically plodding in the same
4/4 midtempo most of the time, and yet still somehow experimental for the man's
standards, due, among other things, to the heavy (and thoughtful) use of
strings.
Quite a few of the songs here were actually written well before 9/11, but Bruce specifically took the ones that could be directly or indirectly related to the event (ʽMy City Of Ruinsʼ was originally written about Asbury Park, but whaddaya know) and hammered them together into this coherent requiem/oratorio for E Street Band and orchestra, where everything seems organic, and expressions of sorrow, sympathy, and temporary despair regularly alternate with tremendously life-asserting songs — without a single hint of corniness, I should admit.
Some of the sorrowful songs sound like outtakes
from the «adult contemporary» era: ʽNothing Manʼ, for instance, with
its hazy aura, would have fit in very well on Tunnel Of Love. But when this stuff comes in small dosages, is well
produced and armed with a good vocal hook, it works much more efficiently than
anything on his lazy breakup record. ʽEmpty Skyʼ is simple, direct,
Biblical, and best distinguished by its hoarse, almost distorted harmonica
line, Bruce's local version of the Archangel's trumpet. But maybe the saddest
song here is really ʽThe Fuseʼ, a deeply atypical, unconventional,
almost psychedelic song for Bruce — hip-hop beats, samples, «cosmic» guitars, by
the end it becomes more ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ than good old
Springsteen, and the lyrics are genuinely disturbing, alternating between
wedding night imagery and "blood moon risin' in a sky of black dust",
all delivered in a voice that has been intentionally stripped from all emotion,
like in a Robert Bresson movie. This is one of those unique Springsteen songs,
like ʽAdam Raised A Cainʼ, that shows to what sort of scary
psychological depths the man can really go when he lets out his demons instead
of keeping them on a commercial leash.
Fortunately, there's much to laud here even
about the simple, unadorned, easily accessible stuff. Like ʽWaitin' On A
Sunny Dayʼ, whose instantly memorable riff is entrusted to strings (for
the first time in Springsteen history, right?) and thrusts a good chunk of
sunny hope right in your face before taking it away once again with the next
song (ʽNothing Manʼ). Or the ultra-traditionally titled ʽFurther
On (Up The Road)ʼ, which has nothing to do with the old Bobby Bland blues
song except for also being bluesy in essence, but promises redemption in a
gritty, sweaty, grimy way, through brutal riffage and «dirty» harmonica
playing. Or ʽMary's Placeʼ, which shows some resemblance to
ʽRosalitaʼ — a happy, exuberant romp in the face of all disasters and
calamities, well supported by Clarence's sax (and a whole brass section in the
background), even if the protagonist of ʽRosalitaʼ is visibly older
now, almost by thirty years. But he still remembers Sam Cooke with fondness,
and wants to invoke a bit of his name to help brighten up your day.
As we get to the anthemic title track, the
ground has been tilled well enough to make it seem like a gargantuan climax to
the whole oratorio — an echo is laid on Bruce's voice to make it sky-high, the
background singers woo-hoo like well-trained angels, the lyrics are Catholic to
exhaustion, and for those of you who want more rock than soul, the Boss plays a
shrill, distorted, ecstatic, Neil Young-ian guitar solo, so that basically just
covers everything. And just in case you didn't get it first time around, you will be prompted to rise up one more time,
during the long, bombastic prayer of ʽMy City Of Ruinsʼ. (The first
prayer of the album was already recited near the beginning, with ʽInto
The Fireʼ, which should probably be made into the International Fireman
Anthem or something — it just begs
to).
It's all simple and a wee bit manipulative, but
it works, and at least it's all for a good cause. In fact, maybe the best thing
about The Rising is that it is not
tightly bound to its historical context — even the lyrics are crafted
thoughtfully, so that they do not have to be associated with any particular
details. It's just a very good rock record about tragedy and recuperation in
general, taking away Bruce's usual emphasis on «aggrandizing the little man»
and replacing it with something even more sweeping and grandiose — the collective experience of tragedy and the
collective hope for a rebirth. Amusing,
but The Boss never really did anything like this before; certainly he did not
have to assume the position of a newly elected military leader, gathering up
the remains of his forces after a crushing defeat. And he must be given credit
for carrying out the operation in good taste, without descending into
simplistic jingoism and paying as much attention to the musical backbones and
arrangements of the songs as he does to the lyrics and vocals. All in all, The Rising still remains one of his
best albums — no small feat for a rock artist thirty years into his career —
and with every new year that takes us farther away from 9/11 and dissipates its
contextual relevance, it seems to sound better and better to me. Thumbs on up
for The Rising, although we probably
should not be thanking Osama bin Laden for rekindling the creative fires of a
nearly-has-been rock visionary. The price may
have been just a wee bit too steep.
DEVILS & DUST (2005)
1) Devils & Dust; 2) All
The Way Home; 3) Reno; 4) Long Time Comin'; 5) Black Cowboys; 6) Maria's Bed;
7) Silver Palomino; 8) Jesus Was An Only Sun; 9) Leah; 10) The Hitter; 11) All
I'm Thinkin' About; 12) Matamoros Banks.
If you are not a dedicated Boss man, most
likely you will not be interested in any Springsteen albums past The Rising. He deserves mega-respect
for the effort, which was not only his most gargantuan, but also most daring
and experimental blast in years — but it seems to have drained his creativity,
and everything released since then played it safer, homelier, and more
predictable. The man had little left to prove, after all, and was only too
happy, it seems, to slip into a stable «elder statesman» image, promoted by
such institutions as Rolling Stone (whose editors would never dare to give any
of his subsequent records anything less than 4.5 stars) and the Rock'n'Roll
Hall Of Fame (where he is one of the most frequent guests whenever anything
presumably important is going on). This is not to say that he's turned to crap
or anything — however «frozen» his sound has become, it is at least frozen in a
tasteful configuration, unlike, say, Aerosmith — but, I repeat, unless you are
a diehard fan, it is not easy to get a natural adrenaline rush from listening
to anything he created after the Twin Tower crash.
With Devils
& Dust, released three years after the triumph of The Rising, Bruce repeats the old trick of «cooling down» — a
low-key, largely acoustic record, made without the help of the E Street Band,
to reroute the huge external emotional rush of its predecessor and internalize it. A move that, by now, has
become all too predictable, and all too dangerous, given how The Boss is such a
master of the «big and bulging», but not doing so good at the «subtle and
nuanced», where he'd never really managed to dethrone Dylan or Johnny Cash.
Luckily, this is not a flat-out bad
album like Tom Joad; but neither
does it have any staggering highlights like Nebraska's ʽState Trooperʼ or ʽAtlantic Cityʼ.
Then again, on Nebraska what we saw was a still young, hungry, and angry Bruce
Springsteen, and even some of its worst songs could still vibrate with
emotional tension. Here, what we have is an old, tired, and contemplative Bruce
Springsteen — and, I dunno, he might not really
be that old and tired, but he's playing out that role anyway. The title track
was written from the perspective of a soldier in the Iraq war, and it is a
very quiet, soulful, mournful, and maybe even bashful acoustic ballad that
simply describes the psychological
effects of war rather than rails
against them. It is decent, but it is absolutely unexceptional — lyrics,
vocals, melody, arrangement, atmosphere, all of this is rather standard
singer-songwriter fare. And by 2005, I'm sure, all of us have heard so many
anti-war songs that this one will not be likely to come across as an amazing
epiphany. All I can say is that it sounds «authentic», like one more
professionally performed exercise in folk-style songwriting — and the same
goes for just about everything else here.
Of course, the Boss remains a revered word man
to an even larger extent than a music man, and he offers plenty of points for
lyrical discussions here — in ʽRenoʼ, for instance, he imagines (or
remembers? whatever) an encounter with a local hooker in almost
pornographically explicit details, making his subset of housewife fans blush
all across the neighborhood; of course, the main
point is not that the song features the line "two hundred dollars straight
in, two-fifty up the ass", but that even during a quick local dirty sex
act, the protagonist is still reminiscing of "sunlight streaming thru your
hair" and "that smile coming out 'neath your hat" — but, you know,
those kinds of lines we all know in
Boss songs already, while "two-fifty up the ass" is definitely a novelty.
And then there's ʽThe Hitterʼ, which is his personal ʽThe
Boxerʼ, only set to some Woody Guthrie melody rather than a Paul Simon
one. And then there are stories of ramblers, cowboys, lots of Mexican imagery
for some reason, and a bit of Jesus on the side.
But even if you can still extract a few samples
of clever folk-poetry images from some of the songs (not all, though —
ʽJesus Was An Only Sonʼ is so oddly straightforward, it could just as
well have been an outtake from Dylan's Saved),
as songs, these things aren't all too
compelling. Looking back one more time, I can remember being mildly entertained
by two of them — ʽMaria's Bedʼ has some seductive slide guitar riffs,
played à la George Harrison circa
1973-74, a catchy vocal melody, and an irresistible toe-tapping groove; and
ʽAll I'm Thinkin' Aboutʼ is a humorous folk boogie where Bruce is
attempting to express his feelings for his baby by rising all, or most, of the
way up to falsetto — it's shakey, but fun.
Unfortunately, both of these songs are
semi-comic interludes, and it is the «heavy», «serious» stuff that largely
leaves me unmoved. It's all listenable — it's simply not clear why exactly we
need somebody of Bruce Springsteen's caliber to perform it, when any
experienced old-timer from Nashville or Oklahoma could easily do instead. Worst
of all, these really aren't deep
songs: this is Springsteen trying to write something in the half-century-old
folk idiom, instead of adapting that idiom to his own personality, as he'd
occasionally done in the past. Perhaps this is a noble case of artistic
humility, but if so, I would be perfectly happy to bow down in acknowledgment
— humility is a rare and respectable quality — and move along to the next record.
WE SHALL OVERCOME: THE SEEGER SESSIONS (2006)
1) Old Dan Tucker; 2) Jesse
James; 3) Mrs. McGrath; 4) O Mary Don't You Weep; 5) John Henry; 6) Erie Canal;
7) Jacob's Ladder; 8) My Oklahoma Home; 9) Eyes On The Prize; 10) Shenandoah;
11) Pay Me My Money Down; 12) We Shall Overcome; 13) Froggie Went A Courtin'.
Was this inevitable? Bob Dylan entered his
«roots revival» stage in the early Nineties, having turned 50, and even though
many more people probably praised Good
As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong
than people who actually keep on listening to these records a quarter century
later, at least nobody will deny that they did help revitalize his artistically
sagging career and, in a way, prepared the ground for Time Out Of Mind. Springsteen enters that same stage comparatively
a little bit later (about five years or so), but a bigger difference is that,
unlike Dylan, Bruce never had an early folk-loving stage — his very first
albums were already influenced much more by Dylan himself than any of Dylan's
folk hero predecessors, and Bruce was never known all that much for covering
other people's songs, anyway.
But I do not think that, once the initial news
leaked out that Springsteen was recording a whole bunch of traditional folk
songs from the Pete Seeger songbook, anybody doubted that he could make these
tunes his own. I'd rather think that, perhaps, one could doubt whether he could
have preserved something of the old spirit of these songs — instead of just
Springsteen-izing them — and it is for this precise reason, arguably, that the
sessions were held not with the regular E Street Band, once again temporarily
put on hold, but with a bunch of new musicians from the New Jersey Area, not
at all well known but apparently well versed in traditional music. Acoustic
guitars, fiddles, banjos, old-timey percussion, the works. On top of that, one
major surprising addition are The Miami Horns, regularly sitting in on most of
the tracks and giving them a decidedly New Orleanian flavor — and on top of it
all, there's The Boss and his
well-worn raggedy voice, now perfectly adaptable to conveying that grizzly
folk spirit.
How does it work? Well, the biggest flaw of the
album is that it's almost predictably
good. Most likely, you already know many of these songs — and unless you just
hate the folk tradition as such, these are all fine examples of the genre. Most
likely, you already know how The Boss inspires his backing bands to play at
top energy level — and how well he can impersonate that proverbial Working Man,
taking his time on the front porch after a hard day's work to provide some
simple, unadorned musical joy for himself, his family, and his neighbors. Most
likely, you also know how The Boss is stubbornly resistant to musical fashions
(especially having learned his lesson with bad production in the Eighties), and
you know he is not going to rearrange
these songs as raves, raps, or metalcore. A project like this has a near-zero
probability of failure, and this is precisely what makes it not very exciting.
I don't even want to comment on any of the
songs individually, because most of them serve the same purpose: entertainment. This is not some sort of
sanctifying project where one turns the songs upside down and shows you the
interesting stuff in those little corners and pockets that you never saw there
before. These are big band arrangements for party halls and country fairs, to
which people simply dance the night away, regardless of whether the lyrics tell
bloody stories of Jessy James, Biblical parables, sailor sagas, or silly kid
tales of how Froggie went a-courtin'. This is why the tracks are long and
repetitive, and all the choruses are catchy because they are looped almost to
infinity — you're not really supposed to notice that, you're simply supposed to
keep on dancing, caught up in a rhythmic whirlwind. And the Boss is right
there, giving you a prime example of inexhaustible energy and passion. You stop
only when he stops, no earlier.
That said, I am still content to have this. The
brass arrangements of the material are somewhat of a novelty, yet they work —
giving the songs an extra «cabaret» flavor, perhaps, but one that does not feel
alien to the material. And if you want to hear those old-timey numbers played
with gusto, with as much bravado, volume, and recklessness as possible, I'd be
hard pressed to come up with a better candidate than The Seeger Sessions — Bruce never relents, and on songs like
ʽJacob's Ladderʼ or ʽO Mary Don't You Weepʼ, you can almost
feel him pushing, pushing, pushing the band to further heights of passion with
each new reprisal of the chorus. Subtlety is not a welcome guest on the record;
subtlety is left over to the real Pete Seeger, or the likes of The Country Gentlemen.
Here, it's all about going wild, and who's better at going wild than
Springsteen? And at the tender age of 55, too, it's like the perfect balance
between being old enough to lend some spirit of authenticity here, but young
enough to still be able to kick up a good ruckus.
This does not conceal the fact that the record
is lightweight, and in general more of a temporary amusement for Springsteen
rather than a serious project — but clearly, the man has earned a right to some
lightweight detours, and paying tribute to a musical genre without which your musical genre would not exist in
the first place may be the best choice for such a lightweight detour. I will
probably refrain from an explicit thumbs up here, because after the first few
songs, the predictability effect becomes so strong that tediousness begins to
set in; however, I will never say that the album is completely expendable,
either — at the very least, it is a meaningful chapter in the Springsteen book,
if not necessarily a meaningful milestone in the art of folk music revival.
LIVE IN DUBLIN (2007)
1) Atlantic City; 2) Old Dan
Tucker; 3) Eye On The Prize; 4) Jesse James; 5) Further On (Up The Road); 6) O
Mary Don't You Weep; 7) Erie Canal; 8) If I Should Fall Behind; 9) My Oklahoma
Home; 10) Highway Patrolman; 11) Mrs. McGrath; 12) How Can A Poor Man Stand
Such Times And Live; 13) Jacob's Ladder; 14) Long Time Comin'; 15) Open All
Night; 16) Pay Me My Money Down; 17) Growin' Up; 18) When The Saints Go
Marching In; 19) This Little Light Of Mine; 20) American Land; 21) Blinded By
The Light*; 22) Love Of The Common People*; 23) We Shall Overcome*.
Apparently pleased with the vibes, results (and
sales?) of We Shall Overcome, Bruce
took The Seeger Sessions Band on tour — and not just anywhere on tour, but all
the way to The Point Theatre in Dublin, to show these Irish sissies what a real
man's reel really sounds like. The Irish sissies did not mind, and gave The
Boss a truly international welcome. Probably feeling sanctified about getting
to sing tura-lura-lura-lay smack dab in the heart of tura-lura-lay country and
getting away with this, Bruce released the proceedings as a live DVD and a live
album — not just «another live album», but a special one.
The obvious problem here is that The Seeger
Sessions Band, as you might have guessed, mainly plays songs from The Seeger
Sessions — all of that album is
reproduced here with the exception of ʽJohn Henryʼ (too political?),
ʽShenandoahʼ (too intimate and dirge-y?), and ʽFroggie Went
A-Courtin'ʼ (now THAT I consider the crime of the century — depriving
worthy Dubliners of a passionate, rabble-rousing, ball-breaking ʽFroggie
Went A-Courtin'ʼ? What were they
thinking?). Naturally, with the exception of a few extended jam bits, these
songs sound mostly identical to the studio versions, which were produced less
than a year ago, and it's not even a question of adding «live spirit», because The Seeger Sessions were themselves
imbued with live spirit. So the enthusiastic roar of the Irish crowd may add a
little adrenaline, but on the whole, when it comes to «paying me my money
down», most people will think twice
before paying twice for more or less
the same thing.
The gimmick of the record is that, in addition
to all the traditional songs, Bruce sneaks in some of his own material,
rearranged... nay, rewritten in the same
format, and then it all depends on what you think of the idea. Personally, I
think it sucks. Perhaps he thought that he had no choice — the people wanted to
hear at least some of his own songs, yet they would obviously sound strange
wedged in between the old folk classics, so he just had to reinvent them as
«pseudo-old folk classics». But who needs an ʽAtlantic Cityʼ shorn
of its hooks and recast as a speedy, but utterly generic bluegrass romp? Or
ʽBlinded By The Lightʼ losing the verse-chorus contrast and reduced
to a mumbled vocal delivery set to a relentless ska beat? Or ʽFurther On
Up The Roadʼ turned from a dark, grizzly blues-rock number into a happy
highlander anthem, with flutes and accordions and bagpipes (okay, no
bagpipes... but there should have
been bagpipes)?..
As a one-time experiment, this may be amusing,
but artistically, this is a dead end: Bruce may have succeeded as an interpreter of traditional old-school
songwriting, but as an imitator, he
does poorly even when compared to Woody Guthrie, let alone all those nameless
ballad writers whose legacy has outlived their identities just because the
legacy meant so much more to people than the identities. Likewise, he does not
fare that well when he takes old songs with well-established forms and tries to
recast them into something completely
different — his multi-vocalist take on ʽWhen The Saints Go Marching
Inʼ, remade as a soulful acoustic ballad, is plain boring. Besides, what's
up with having a fully formed brass section, capable of hitting up that New
Orleans sound in no time, and not
doing ʽSaintsʼ the way it should be done? Shouldn't he be old and
wise enough now to stop with these «confound-all-expectations» childish games?
Come on out and decide, Mr. Springsteen — is it «give the people what they
want», or is it «the artist bows down to no public pressure»? You've been
having it both ways at the same time for so long now, it's become downright
irritating at times.
Anyway, it's not as if I did not enjoy Live In Dublin — it's just that, on the
larger scale of things, it feels like a conjectural appendix to The Seeger Sessions. Or you might turn
it around and say that the Springsteen vibe really only shines to its brightest
extent in the context of an arena, in which case The Seeger Sessions will be merely a warm-up prelude to the mass
epiphany of Live In Dublin. But
viewing both as equally important would be quite illogical, and I, personally,
choose the former — it's more concise and compact and it lacks any failed
self-experiments. The only track I'd gladly salvage from here is ʽOpen All
Nightʼ, which I didn't even recognize at first, an old Nebraska number completely redone as a
rollickin' / rip-roarin' honky-tonk number with a bedazzling piano part. Put it
as a bonus track onto The Seeger
Sessions and that's all we need.
MAGIC (2007)
1) Radio Nowhere; 2) You'll Be
Coming Down; 3) Livin' In The Future; 4) Your Own Worst Enemy; 5) Gypsy Biker;
6) Girls In Their Summer Clothes; 7) I'll Work For Your Love; 8) Magic; 9) Last
To Die; 10) Long Walk Home; 11) Devil's Arcade; 12) Terry's Song.
Please take a good, hard look at the grumpy old
guy on the front sleeve and tell me if you notice any «magic» there. Come on
now, I want you to admit, right here and now, that «magic» is the first word
that springs to your mind when you look at that picture. No? Not really? Not
even the slightest association? Now listen to the music on this album. More
than likely, you will have to admit
that the mood of music — autumnal, rough, gritty, grumpy, sulky, etc. — more or
less suits the facial expression and even the tint of the front cover. So
where's the magic?..
Really, even though after The Rising the Boss was untouchable from the critical angle, it is
as if that record just sucked all the spirit of adventure out of the old guy. Magic is totally Springsteen by-numbers,
as pattern-dominated and monotonous as The
Rising was unpredictable and clearly inspired. All songs are brand new (no
outtakes this time), and all songs feature the E Street Band, but essentially
this is the E Street Band equivalent of Devils
& Dust — the Boss is not really trying on this one. Of course, it gives
the songs and the arrangements an air of spontaneity and looseness, and the
songs do have their points and all; and yet, there is nothing new.
This isn't quite the equivalent of Human Touch or Lucky Town, though: in his respectable position of elder statesman,
the Boss sees it as his duty now to write songs about big issues on a
much-more-than-personal level, and there is plenty of comment here on the
current state of things in America and the world at large, mostly
concentrating, of course, on wartime issues (but sometimes also on ʽGirls
In Their Summer Clothesʼ, because, well, war is over there and girls in
summer clothes are over here, after all). In this way, Magic does look like a sequel to The Rising, and is perhaps best appreciated from this angle — only
where The Rising was a strong
electric jolt to put the nation back on its feet, Magic is the sound of asthenia setting in, a depiction of the
directionless meandering of the nation, unable to find new cures for old
problems.
"This is Radio Nowhere / Is there anybody
alive out there?" is sort of the leitmotif
of the entire album. It's a decent song, for which Bruce has adopted a crunchy,
but muted and gray alt-rock guitar tone, and that tone is a frequent guest
here, suggesting the usual power and energy of the E Street Band, but with
something gone rotten in the process. From there on, it is the usual 4/4 snare
beat and the well-worn mid-tempo without end, grooves that have been recycled for
the dozenth time and only occasionally salvaged by fresh vocal hooks —
faithfully holding up that grim, thoroughly non-magical mood, as if the man
were all set on telling us: "Just get out of here, I'm depressed like hell
and you want me to wreck my brain trying to come up with inventive songwriting?
Why don't you do something inventive
for a change — like go out there and vote the Republicans out of office, for
instance?"
Which, you know, is a fine enough imaginative
stance that I can buy, but uninventive songwriting leads to uninventive
reviewing, and therefore I will just say that there are three more songs that
stand out in various ways. ʽGirls In Their Summer Clothesʼ is a
Springsteen-ized power pop song, with echoes of Phil Spector and Motown, where
he actually tries to sing instead of grumble (to the same mid-tempo beats,
though). ʽLong Walk Homeʼ has the album's catchiest chorus and may
have been seriously influenced by the Seeger sessions with that folksy refrain
("hey pretty darling, don't wait up for me, gonna be a long walk
home" sure sounds like it belongs in an Irish barroom song). And
ʽDevil's Arcadeʼ is the only tune here that seems like a Rising outtake — with its ominously
bombastic guitar, keyboard, and string overlays, it almost matches the epic
peaks of that record, though even in this song all that desperation, poured
into melancholic melodicity, feels somewhat stiff, numb and frozen. But maybe
it's just because the man's voice got lower, and all the instruments have to
accommodate.
Anyway, it is possible to look at Magic both ways — as simply another
by-the-book uninspired batch of same-sounding, deeply derivative Bruce songs,
or as an anti-climactic companion to The
Rising, reflecting how the shock, grief, and decisive «start it all over
again» attitude got bogged down in stupidity, backwardness, and
disillusionment, with the music following suit. In both cases, though, this is
an album conceived, arranged, and performed without too much energy or
inspiration — either intentionally or unintentionally, I don't really care.
It's not bad, but I could definitely stand a bit more diversity in melodies and
arrangements. Heck, I could even use another rewrite of a ʽCadillac
Ranchʼ or a ʽRamrodʼ for a change — this monotonousness could be
justified if the sonic atmosphere or the melodies were outstanding, but as it
is, fourty seven minutes of Springsteen being depressed over the Iraq war and
God knows what else is real hard to take. I wish I could say "Oh well, at
least this ain't another stab at Nebraska",
but fact is, not even the E Street Band can help out here. Even The Big Man is
playing his sax solos in a completely perfunctory manner — like, "oh
yeah, here we play like we did in ʽJunglelandʼ". Not good.
WORKING ON A DREAM (2009)
1) Outlaw Pete; 2) My Lucky
Day; 3) Working On A Dream; 4) Queen Of The Supermarket; 5) What Love Can Do;
6) This Life/Good Eye; 7) Tomorrow Never Knows; 8) Life Itself; 9) Kingdom Of
Days; 10) Surprise, Surprise; 11) The Last Carnival; 12*) The Wrestler.
This one was released seven days after Obama's
inauguration — coincidence? Perhaps, but the fact that the mood here is way
more sunny and optimistic than it was on Magic
is not a coincidence at all, especially keeping in mind that the title track
was first played live at the November 2, 2008 concert in support of Obama, two
days before the general elections. And now comes the blatant question: do you
prefer your Springsteen morose and grumpy, or do you prefer him humorous,
lightweight, and idealistically optimistic?
Of course, it really depends on a lot of other
factors. ʽWorking On A Dreamʼ (the song), for instance, is a sunny
power pop anthem that feels more like Christine McVie than Springsteen, possibly
because the "aa-ooh la-la-la, aa-ooh la-la-la" backing vocals had
been borrowed directly from ʽSay You Love Meʼ (it's true, I swear!)
and possibly because Bruce was all set to beat Bill Clinton's success with
ʽDon't Stopʼ. Like, Americans all over the States heard the song on
November 2 and the fate of the elections was sealed, you know. But that
doesn't prevent the tune from sounding a wee bit silly and manipulative in
retrospect.
Not as silly, granted, as ʽQueen Of The
Supermarketʼ, which arguably features the worst extended lyrical metaphor
of the man's career — okay, there's nothing wrong about writing yet another
story of sexual attraction between two simple people, but "take my place
in the check-out line"? "I'm in love with the Queen of the
Supermarket, though her company cap covers her hair"? Worst of all,
"beneath her white apron her secret remains hers"? Boy, we've come a really long way since ʽIncident On
57th Streetʼ and the like. At least if there were some indication that this is an intentional tongue-in-cheek
self-parody or something... apparently, though, this is an UN-intentional self-parody, ohmygosh.
The embarrassment does not stop there, because
the real burning question that has gone unanswered since 2009 is this: Does
the sprawling quasi-Western epic ʽOutlaw Peteʼ consciously nick the primary melody of KISS' ʽI Was Made For
Loving Youʼ, or is this just a really unfortunate coincidence? Never mind
that the lyrics of the song are once again triter than tripe (just put the
words next to, say, ʽJunglelandʼ, and see for yourself how fickle
that poetic gift is) — why does this
have to sound like a cross between Tommy
("can you hear me? can you hear me?") and a three-decade old corny
disco song? Was that a serious attempt at breaking away from the formula? Well,
ʽOutlaw Peteʼ is a strong
breakaway from the formula, but the price is just too high.
And even that is not all: why does the song
ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ borrow its title from the Beatles and its
scratch-guitar opening from CCR's ʽLooking Out My Back Doorʼ, yet
ends up sounding like neither, but instead turns out to be a simple, fast-paced
country tune with steel guitar and female backing vocals a-plenty? Why do I
actually have this strange uncomfortable feeling that Bruce's desire to make a
cheerful «roots-pop» album has lessened the gap between himself and his
compatriots, Bon Jovi, in their «country» phase?..
Yes, about half of these songs have sunny pop
hooks that might even get entangled in some of your nerve nodes
(ʽSurprise, Surpriseʼ is a good example: you might reasonably
complain about the word "surprise" being repeated way too many times,
but it'll still get you), but this is still Bruce Springsteen, you know — all
these slight, simple pop hooks are imbued with his sweaty earthiness, and thus,
it is a simplistic, lightweight record that demands to be taken as seriously as
ever. Which is where we have a communicative failure. How can you take Bruce
Springsteen seriously when he's (sub)consciously stealing melodies from KISS,
for Christ's sake? Oh well, at least that
is a bizarre oddity that does go against formula. But most of the songs here do
not go against formula, and stuff like ʽQueen Of The Supermarketʼ
just parodies the formula (honestly, it's the kind of tune I'd expect to see
featured in some SNL broadcast).
On the positive side, this is really the Boss
at his happiest since... Lucky Town,
I guess, which probably makes Working On
A Dream the relative equivalent of that album for the next decade. Not
exactly a compliment, I know, but we should be glad to see other people in
happy moods, shouldn't we? After all, it's not as if he'd give us another Darkness On The Edge Of Town now even
if America invaded half of the world's countries at once, so we might as well
relax and give the man a break. If he wants to flirt around with supermarket
clerks, that's none of our business, it's all between the man and Patti anyway.
WRECKING BALL (2012)
1) We Take Care Of Our Own; 2)
Easy Money; 3) Shackled And Drawn; 4) Jack Of All Trades; 5) Death To My
Hometown; 6) This Depression; 7) Wrecking Ball; 8) You've Got It; 9) Rocky
Ground; 10) Land Of Hope And Dreams; 11) We Are Alive.
Okay, so at least the surprisingly elevated
«poppiness» of Working On A Dream
put a special mark on it. Fans may have been irate at Bruce borrowing musical
ideas from KISS, but one cannot deny that, in this way, he at least gave us
all something to remember that record by. Fast forward now to 2012 and his
next studio LP, and here is something that is completely by the numbers — conforming to all known stereotypes of
The Boss and violating none of them.
Naturally, Springsteen feeds on social problems
and regurgitates them as vibrating, spirited music, which is where he is
usually at his best — and this time, the incentive behind the music and the
anger has been the global financial crisis: a great opportunity to finally
realize one's dream to become an authentic
Woody Guthrie, strolling through Depression streets and providing voice services
to all those devoid of voices. Never mind that by 2012, the crisis had largely
abated; it only matters that there be a spark to light up the fire, and as
prolific as Bruce usually is, he likes
to have these sparks flying around, rarely venturing into the studio without a
good pretext.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wrecking Ball conjures active memories of The Seeger Sessions: even though all the songs are original, they
are mostly written in the folk paradigm, with simple, repetitive, traditional
structures that have more in common with highland ballads than with Bruce's
usual rock formula. Only a few members of the E Street Band appear on the
record, and even then not on all the tracks; there are a few sax solos from
Clarence Clemons, who died in 2011, a few tracks with Weinberg on the drums,
and a couple Van Zandt mandolin tracks — the rest is taken care of by session
musicians, which has a negative impact on the album's energy levels, but I
guess if the Boss decided the E Street Band was not appropriate enough for
these songs, he must have had his own reasons.
Alas, if he hoped this would be a new Rising — in the sense of that major
«jolt» to put the nation back on its feet or something like that — I am afraid
that it has only been one in the minds of Rolling Stone-style critics. The
songs aren't exactly bad (in fact, relying on these formulas is a good
guarantee against «badness» in general), but without the E Street Band, and
with his own strength also beginning to give up after all these years, Bruce
gets bogged down somewhere in between a whimper and a bang.
ʽWe Take Care Of Our Ownʼ, the
opening song, was once again used in Obama's (second) presidential campaign,
and it is a perfect song for a
presidential campaign — loud, muscular, optimistic, smooth, safe, catchy,
cozily played out by the New York String Section, and ultimately forgettable
like any of your average anthems. It
has its rallying use, I guess, but it is essentially one simple musical phrase
repeated over and over again in a glossy manner: the muscle is there all right,
but there is hardly any genuine sweat on it. It sounds like something made on
order — and yes, I remember well that ʽBorn In The USAʼ was all made
up according to the same principles (and its synthesized sound had dated fairly
quickly, unlike this string orchestra thing), but at least back in 1984
Springsteen still had plenty of youthful soul and stamina to push into that
form. ʽWe Take Care Of Our Ownʼ is just... limp.
As is most of everything else. A particularly
good example is ʽLand Of Hope And Dreamsʼ, a fairly old song that was
performed live as early as 1999, and used to be one of the highlights of
Bruce's show — with a "this train..." section that may be the man's
sincerest and most emotional contribution to the gospel genre — but this version is surprisingly flaccid
compared to the way it used to sound, not just because the man's voice is
giving out, but also because the arrangement replaces raw energy with a
wall-of-sound approach. Still a good song, but give me the Live In New York version of this any time.
I have not even mentioned that the man's lyrics
seem to turn more and more into tripe as the years go by. You may adore or hate
the lyrics of ʽBorn To Runʼ, but you have to admit that, in any case
whatsoever, something like "This is my confession / I need your heart / In
this depression / I need your heart" is just way below the threshold — and
this song is supposed to be a spiritual consolation for all the poor souls
ravaged by the crisis. Or this: "We are alive / And though our bodies lie
alone here in the dark / Our souls and spirits rise / To carry the fire and
light the spark / To fight shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart" — exactly
how many dusty clichés are entrenched within this passage? No matter, as
long as old and new fans alike are willing to gobble it up. And then there is
the irony of the title track, which can be taken half-literally (as a cocky
protest of the old Giants Stadium against its demolition) and figuratively (as
a nation's cocky stand-off against economic trouble), but then when you realize
that the Stadium was demolished after
all, the line about "bring on your wrecking ball" takes on a fairly
ironic shade.
In the end, as simply a collection of songs Wrecking Ball is relatively okay. But
as a major social statement, it seems to me a transparent misfire, embarrassed
by its own ambition and buried in its shallowness-masquerading-as-depth; and if
Magic at least still showed signs of
life, and Working On A Dream still
showed signs of searching for life, Wrecking
Ball is like a wad of chewing gum that finally ran out of the last bits of
flavor. At the very least, it shows that being deeply moved by other people's
troubles no longer guarantees high quality — or, who knows, it might show that
in this particular case, the Boss was not that
deeply moved by other people's troubles. After all, with the Democrats in power
and the crisis clearly not being on the level of the Great Depression, it's
hard to believe that the man was in some really deep apocalyptic mood; and
thus, we just have another set of optimistic «we shall overcome» statements
where, truth be told, it is not quite clear even to the artist what exactly it
is that we need to be overcoming.
For the record, ʽRocky Groundʼ here
features the first ever appearance of a rap vocal on a Springsteen album —
provided by backup singer Michelle Moore (happily for all of us, Bruce changed
his original mind about performing the rap himself).
So there's at least one objective argument for defending the man's ability to
keep up with the times, about twenty years too late but better late than never.
This patented bit of sarcasm, however, has nothing to do with my thumbs down
assessment of the album. Rather, the thumbs down have to do with the bitter
realisation that, in a way, Bruce Springsteen has turned into a pale parody of
his former self. And if you happen to disagree and are preparing an angry
retort here, please take the time to
relisten to Darkness On The Edge Of Town
first, and then see if your angry retort has lost any of its anger.
Oh, and if you happen to be David Fricke from
Rolling Stone, the author of a five-star review that began with the phrase
"Wrecking Ball is the most
despairing, confrontational and musically turbulent album Bruce Springsteen
has ever made", I do so hope that you be rewarded in the afterlife by
having to listen to nothing but Billy Joel, of whom you also seem to be a huge
fan.
HIGH HOPES (2014)
1) High Hopes; 2) Harry's
Place; 3) American Skin (41 Shots); 4) Just Like Fire Would; 5) Down In The
Hole; 6) Heaven's Wall; 7) Frankie Fell In Love; 8) This Is Your Sword; 9)
Hunter Of Invisible Game; 10) The Ghost Of Tom Joad; 11) The Wall; 12) Dream
Baby Dream.
I guess it's a big help for us all to see the
ol' Boss still asserting his masculinity with such confident posture on the
cover of his nine billionth studio album, but wait ten more years and people
will start mixing him up with Clint Eastwood, and then where will we be? Another question is whether a brand new
album from the Boss is really
necessary, when we have not yet completed our disappointment ritual with Wrecking Ball? Why does he refuse to
come to terms with the fact that millions of fans all over the world just want
to hear ʽBorn In The USAʼ and ʽBorn To Runʼ, because they
don't have time to learn all those new words?
Actually, High
Hopes is a bit of a cop-out. On most of his previous albums, Bruce had
freely resorted to resuscitating some of his outtakes and older raw ideas, but
High Hopes is the first one in a
long time, if not ever, to consist almost exclusively of outtakes and old ideas
— even a casual fan like me immediately recognizes ʽAmerican Skin (41
Shots)ʼ, which was played as early as the Live In New York City tour, and, of course, ʽThe Ghost Of Tom
Joadʼ is not just a re-recording of the old title track from that one LP,
but a studio take on a live electric version with Tom Morello that Bruce had
also been playing since God knows when (I know I first saw it on the Rock'n'Roll Hall Of Fame 25th Anniversary
Concert in 2009 and was duly impressed with Morello's fireworks, and here
you have them all over again). Information on the provenance of the other songs
is easy to come by as well, but we shall not dwell too much on trivia here.
Instead, the good news is that, for all of its
mixed nature, High Hopes somehow
ends up being more interesting and involving than Wrecking Ball — maybe precisely because
the man had no single, obsessive, and poorly executed concept here, but simply
rounded up a bunch of isolated good ideas and left them for us to piece
together. There's some of that traditional Seeger-inspired folk rock here, some
typical old school Springsteen epics, and some really odd stuff, like the title
track, which was originally written and recorded by the obscure artist Tim
Scott McConnell, a.k.a. «Ledfoot», the self-proclaimed creator of the «Gothic
blues» genre; actually, Bruce recorded his first version of the song as early
as 1996, but this is a totally reinvented version, with Morello's pyrotechnics
and a crazed-out Latin brass rhythm section turning the tune into a tribal
dance round the fire (funny enough, the drum intro almost tricks you into
thinking that the band is all but ready to launch into Led Zeppelin's
ʽRock'n'Rollʼ — probably an accident, though).
The songs, as usual, are relatively simple and
often tremendously repetitive, which is excusable on folk stylizations like
ʽDream Baby Dreamʼ (a cover of Suicide!) but a little irritating on
the originals like ʽHeaven's Wallʼ. Nevertheless, there are some good
hooks, including orchestral ones — ʽHunter Of Invisible Gameʼ is a
generic folk ballad in form, but well redeemed by the orchestral line that
pierces the song throughout and essentially plays the same role that the Charlie
McCoy guitar flourish plays on ʽDesolation Rowʼ. And some good
lyrics, too: ʽThe Wallʼ is a genuinely moving tribute to Vietnam
vets, not even so much because of the lyrical trumpet part, but because the
words are so well put together: "Apology and forgiveness got no place here
at all, here at the wall". Then again... he wrote this circa 1998, back
when the old imagery bag still had some good stuff tucked away at the bottom.
The strange alliance with Tom Morello actually
works out well for the album: not only does the man add his flashy, indulgent,
but oddly efficient guitar fireworks to several of the songs, but he was also
the motivator behind Bruce's unpredictable choice of covers — not that
ʽJust Like Fire Wouldʼ and ʽDream Baby Dreamʼ are such
great songs per se, you understand, but the idea of Bruce Springsteen covering
The Saints and Suicide, if only to acquaint the general public with these
bands' existence, is endearing, and doubly endearing, perhaps, if we remember
that this is being done in 2014, by which time no layman is supposed to
remember anybody but Michael Jackson and Madonna from that decade. This is at
the same time a «retro» move for the man, and a bold leap forward — let's have
high hopes for a Captain Beefheart cover next time around.
Without much of anything else to say, I would
just like to let this go with a thumbs up. By its very nature, High Hopes, comprised as it is of odds
and ends, could not be a «great» Springsteen album. But at this time, I'd
rather have a «simply good» Springsteen album that does not strive for much
rather than a «would-be great failure» like Wrecking Ball, which struggles to ensnare you with its Grand
Message, but falls flat compared to all those early Grand Messages. Some hooks,
some decent lyrics, some diversity, a bit of weirdness... no, really, can't
complain. Perhaps it was a good idea
to let all those songs stew for a decade or more — sometimes it does not work
(like with the weak version of ʽLand Of Hope And Dreamsʼ on Wrecking Ball), but here, these
particular studio sessions caught the Boss in an invigorated mood, and even
ʽAmerican Skinʼ sounds every bit as punchy as its live counterparts.
ADDENDA:
TRACKS (1972-1995/1998)
CD I: 1) Mary
Queen Of Arkansas; 2) It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City; 3) Growin' Up; 4)
Does This Bus Stop At 82nd Street?; 5) Bishop Danced; 6) Santa Ana; 7) Seaside
Bar Song; 8) Zero And Blind Terry; 9) Linda Let Me Be The One; 10) Thundercrack;
11) Rendezvous; 12) Give The Girl A Kiss; 13) Iceman; 14) Bring On The Night;
15) So Young And In Love; 16) Hearts Of Stone; 17) Don't Look Back.
CD
II: 1) Restless Nights; 2) A Good Man Is Hard To Find (Pittsburgh); 3) Roulette;
4) Dollhouse; 5) Where The Bands Are; 6) Loose Ends; 7) Living On The Edge Of The
World; 8) Wages Of Sin; 9) Take 'Em As They Come; 10) Be True; 11) Ricky Wants A
Man Of Her Own; 12) I Wanna Be With You; 13) Mary Lou; 14) Stolen Car; 15) Born
In The U.S.A.; 16) Johnny Bye-Bye; 17) Shut Out The Light.
CD
III: 1) Cynthia; 2) My Love Will Not Let You Down; 3) This Hard Land; 4)
Frankie; 5) TV Movie; 6) Stand On It; 7) Lion's Den; 8) Car Wash; 9) Rockaway The
Days; 10) Brothers Under The Bridges ('83); 11) Man At The Top; 12) Pink
Cadillac; 13) Two For The Road; 14) Janey Don't You Lose Heart; 15) When You
Need Me; 16) The Wish; 17) The Honeymooners; 18) Lucky Man.
CD
IV: 1) Leavin' Train; 2) Seven Angels; 3) Gave It A Name; 4) Sad Eyes; 5) My
Lover Man; 6) Over The Rise; 7) When The Lights Go Out; 8) Loose Change; 9)
Trouble In Paradise; 10) Happy; 11) Part Man, Part Monkey; 12) Goin' Cali; 13)
Back In Your Arms; 14) Brothers Under The Bridge.
Ohgodohgodohgod, how am I ever gonna do this.
Okay, let's put it into personal perspective: I write a new review almost every
day, and never ever would I want to defend each and every one of these texts as
«insightful», «original», or even properly written (let alone the fact that I
never have much time for proofreading). Even if all the records I was writing
about were dazzlingly original and adventurous, I'd still end up repeating
myself, falling back on stock phrases, underwhelmed on bad days, and overhyped
on good days. It is a routine process, after all, and routine eats away
inspiration and insight like a termite infestation.
Tracks, a monster 4-CD boxset of (mostly) previously
unissued material that Bruce prepared in the late 1990s, may be a coveted
treasure house for fans — but to me, it shows, first and foremost, that for
Bruce, the art of «songwriting», too, was a very routine process. Of course,
it's not as if he came up with a new song every day of his life, but during
numerous periods in his life, he generated them with the speed of a
well-written spammer script; and the sheer number of these tunes that had to be
locked in the vaults, biding their time, shows that the «Springsteen formula»,
which we really saw originate on Darkness
On The Edge Of Town and reach sexual maturity on The River, actually worked with twice, if not thrice, the
efficiency that we could suspect by listening to the officially released stuff.
If you were ever worried about all that generic
filler on The River; if you were
ever troubled about the formulaic, simplistic approach to melodies and
arrangements on Born In The USA; if
you ever felt like The Boss was dumbing down and/or copy-pasting the hooks on Tunnel Of Love or Human Touch — all of your worries, troubles, and suspicions will be
fully confirmed with this 60+ item set of second-hand tunes. It is instructive
that out of 4 discs, 1 is given up almost entirely to outtakes from The River, 1 consists of leftovers from
Born In The USA and Tunnel Of Love, and 1 is allocated to
the Human Touch/Lucky Town period —
which leaves only one disc to all of
the Seventies, a decade when Bruce's «gigantomania» extended not just to the
big sound of The E Street Band, but also covered the fields of lyrics (which
were more complex), melodies (which were more jazzy and experimental), and
song structures (which used to have fare more intros, codas, and internal
development than any of his post-1978 stuff).
It is also precisely on that one disc, as soon
as you pass a bunch of forgettable (historical interest only) early acoustic
demos of well-known songs, that you get to encounter the best and least obvious
material — compositions over which you can actually lament that they were taken
off the respective albums for space reasons (although nowadays, with the CD
format, there's always room for them if they ever want to come back). The most
obvious highlight is ʽThundercrackʼ, an eight-minute epic that was
probably cut from The Wild in favor
of ʽRosalitaʼ, another long and even more exuberant track admiring a
lady's charms, but even though ʽRosalitaʼ is faster, rowdier, and
would always constitute a better turn-on for concert audiences,
ʽThundercrackʼ may actually be its musical superior — especially when
the band gets to the lengthy instrumental passage and starts cracking out
terrific lead riffs, one after another, with occasional support from Clarence's
ever-helping sax. There's some delicate subtlety and exquisite romance in this
song that very rarely cropped up in Bruce's songs even in the early days, and
then disappeared forever once he made the complete transition to arena-rock
mode.
A much less popular, but very unusual and offbeat inclusion from those days is ʽBishop
Dancedʼ, a rough-rugged folk-dance tune driven by acoustic guitar and
accordeon and slightly reminiscent of The Band — the recording is live, taken
from an early 1973 show at Max's Kansas City, and, judging by the audience's
lively response, stuff like this could excite small crowds just as strongly as
ʽBorn To Runʼ would later excite large crowds. Well, maybe not quite,
but still — it's fun seeing him stringing together these off-the-wall lines of
chaotic imagery, still very much influenced by Dylan but also still trying to
experiment with musical form, putting his own stamp on the folk dance genre,
way before turning into the predictable «working class champion».
That said, even for those early days you can
easily see why stuff like ʽSanta Anaʼ or ʽZero And Blind
Terryʼ were left off the final product — they're okay, but they add
nothing extra to the moods and vibes that are already there. And as time goes
by, these «superfluous» tunes become more and more the norm — for just about any track here past
ʽThundercrackʼ you can pinpoint one or two officially released songs
that said all the same things and more, or better. Do believe me when I insist
that you will not discover any hidden
sides of The Boss by listening to these songs, even if I also have to admit
that there are almost no stylistic embarrassments or openly bad / dumb material
included (well, maybe "Ricky's almost grown, Ricky wants a man of her
own" comes close to dumb, but it's really just one of those
Fifties-imitating nostalgic teen-pop numbers that he really had a crush on in
1980).
The relative consistency of these songs
facilitates the listening process — I sat through the entire hog twice, which
would be a real chore for most 4-CD collections of outtakes, but this one went
surprisingly easy — however, I just don't feel like talking about the songs:
whatever I'd have to say was already probably said in conjunction with some other song. To fill space, here are just
some random observations: (A) I don't mind that ʽSo Young And In
Loveʼ borrows the intro from ʽLawdy Miss Clawdyʼ, but how come
ʽGive The Girl A Kissʼ is so blatantly influenced by Fleetwood Mac's
ʽDon't Stopʼ? The intro and outro are simply lifted from that song,
almost as if the man had a subconscious desire for some of that Rumours gold to rub off on himself; (B)
the Nebraska-era acoustic demo of
ʽBorn In The USAʼ has a vibe amusingly similar to ʽState
Trooperʼ and is so totally tragically paranoid that one can only think how
hilarious it would have been if Reagan's advisors got the man to consent to
lend them the song — in this version;
(C) ʽMy Love Will Not Let You Downʼ was one rejected song from the Born In The USA sessions that Bruce
actually salvaged for his concerts, and although here it sports the ugly dated
early Eighties synth sound, it is still gloriously anthemic and somewhat
exceptional; (D) ʽFrankieʼ is a weird 7-minute long epic that I would
have never guessed was also a Born In
The USA outtake — it's a winding epic tale of Born To Run proportions (perhaps Bruce reminded himself in time
that it was too melodically similar to ʽThunder Roadʼ), though,
again, not vastly original.
And that's pretty much it. I would find any
attempts to pick «bad» and «good» songs here so subjective and depending on
such thin nuances that I'd much rather discuss angels dancing on the head of a
pin. Clearly, this is first and foremost «for the fans»; Dylan's Bootleg Series, whose popularity may
have inspired Bruce to follow suit, at least had a small bunch of major lost
gems on each of its discs, whereas Tracks
is far more evenly «mediocre» (people often complain about the last disc or the
last two discs being inferior to the rest, but these are people who like to imagine
a huge qualitative gap between Born To
Run and Born In The USA — I am
not so sure it was that huge in the
first place), and simply offers «more of the same» for those who'd like to have
more of the same. But it ends up putting the reviewer in a bad position, and I
don't want to be one of those guys who can exude the same glowing intonations
for a bunch of outtakes as they can for a genuine paradigm-shifting
masterpiece.
Bottomline: I genuinely enjoyed listening to
this, but no spiritual revelations ever manifested — and that is even if we
define «spiritual revelation» in the broadest possible sense, like including
frenetically banging my head against the wall to the bulgy sound of
ʽCadillac Ranchʼ. Didn't really find no ʽCadillac Ranchesʼ
here, either.
HAMMERSMITH ODEON, LONDON '75 (1975/2006)
1) Thunder Road; 2) Tenth
Avenue Freeze-Out; 3) Spirit In The Night; 4) Lost In The Flood; 5) She's The
One; 6) Born To Run; 7) The E Street Shuffle; 8) It's Hard To Be A Saint In The
City; 9) Backstreets; 10) Kitty's Back; 11) Jungleland; 12) Rosalita (Come Out
Tonight); 13) 4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy); 14) Detroit Medley; 15) For
You; 16) Quarter To Three.
Although you could theoretically apply the tag
«archival release» to Live 1975-85
as well, or at least parts of it, that sprawling monster was a mish-mash
retrospective, joining the past with the present, and not really part of the
«vault-emptying drive» that began with Dylan and truly caught up with the
majority of classic rockers at the turn of the millennium. Having successfully
entered the game with Tracks, what
Bruce really needed at this point was a bona fide recording of a complete,
unaltered performance from the glory days — and hardly a better choice could
have been made than this show from November 18, 1975, Bruce's first ever gig across the ocean in which he
managed to conquer the somewhat skeptical British audiences in one two-hour
long shot.
The recording, made available in both CD and
DVD format, as some cameramen were fortunate enough to capture the young Boss in
all of his bearded, hat-wearing, proto-indie-rock glory, has tremendous
historical importance — although Born To
Run was already climbing up the charts and critics were already outgushing
each other, this is still Bruce Springsteen in his «pre-superstar» days, when
all the now-classic material was still fresh and vibrant, and he got to perform
ʽBorn To Runʼ not because, you know, what's a Boss show without
ʽBorn To Runʼ? but simply because he'd only just written it and meant
every word and every note of it. This is that particular era where the man had
to work hard, and though nobody can accuse Bruce of not having worked hard
enough even after the world was his for the taking, there are different kinds
of hard out there, and this is one of these shows that actually caused people
like Landau to go nuts, so...
In terms of surprises, there's not a lot of
them, though people unfamiliar with the man's mid-Seventies routine might find
it amusing to hear Bruce insert so many strains of his various influences into
the songs: Sam Cooke, Little Richard, Van Morrison, Isaac Hayes, and even Gary
U. S. Bonds are all channelled, either by themselves, or as threads interwoven
into the man's own compositions. Not that these bits are in any way the best
parts of the show — as good as Bruce is at setting fire to his own songs, he is
usually awful when covering other people, because he's really only got one mode
of functioning (Boss mode!) and he always converts everything to that mode, no
matter how much he might like and respect the originals. Was that really a piece of Sam Cooke's
ʽHavin' A Partyʼ at the end of ʽThe E Street Shuffleʼ? Did
he really lead ʽKitty's Backʼ into Van Morrison's
ʽMoondanceʼ at one point? Oh, I'm sorry, I thought that was just some
random small twist in the arrangement.
This is why the most easily skippable part of
the album is the so-called ʽDetroit Medleyʼ, where Bruce mashes
together some Shorty Long and Little Richard tunes with seemingly no other purpose
than demonstrating his Rock And Roll Credentials, or else people might want to
think of him as a jazz-pop artist or something. Not that the E Street Band
couldn't carry a proper rock and roll tune — on the contrary, they just try way
too hard, and yet it still feels that this isn't the kind of music that comes
naturally to them. One catch is that Springsteen has always had a poor sense of
humor, and for basic rock'n'roll humor is essential
— he's singing ʽGood Golly Miss Mollyʼ as if he were pounding it with
a wrecking ball or something, with his pay depending on how many small bits and
splinters he could produce: energetic, powerful, and deadly serious. Okay,
Cap'n, we got it, just stop it right there, please? The poor girl can't take
any more of this.
For his own stuff, though, this approach is
naturally the perfect one, and the performance is generally stellar, with
relatively little in the way of storytelling to prevent Bruce from setting up
Fort New Jersey in what used to be Gaumont Palace. The songs are not too
different from the studio counterparts, except for maybe ʽE Street
Shuffleʼ, which is much countrified from its funky origins and features
an extended slide guitar solo that might remind you of the Allman Brothers, although
the sprawling, messy nature of the tune on the whole shows more of a Van
Morrison influence (no wonder ʽMoondanceʼ is quoted, albeit inside another song); and the opening
ʽThunder Roadʼ which, as was typical for Bruce at the time, is
performed in its stripped-down version, with keyboards and harmonica bearing
the brunt of the melody.
But, of course, you don't need me or anyone
else to tell you that this here stuff is all about youthful exuberance and
total conviction, rather than about making the live audiences witness something
they could never encounter on the studio record. In terms of sheer intensity,
these versions might really blow some of the originals out of the water — if
you prefer the man's full-throttle roar to the inevitably slightly more
subdued, controlled singing in the studio — and let us not forget that The E
Street Band on stage takes pride in being even tighter and more focused than
when contributing overdubs to studio tapes. Me not being the major Springsteen fan on the block, the originals are not that
well ingrained in the brain to allow for astute nuance-spotting comparisons
with this show — but, heck, even I have to admit it was one hell of a show.
It probably makes more sense to just watch the
video, though, which (at least in the original release) came packaged together
with the CDs (in fact, the video was released even earlier, on the 35th
anniversary edition of Born To Run)
— the image quality is not much to speak of, but at least it is professional,
and it really is fun to see The Boss working hard to earn that title, rather than just keep on confirming it. The beard!
The hat! No muscles! Little Stevie still years away from his Baba Yaga image!
How could this not be a thumbs up?
THE PROMISE (1977-1978/2010)
1) Racing In The Street; 2)
Gotta Get That Feeling; 3) Outside Looking In; 4) Someday; 5) One Way Street;
6) Because The Night; 7) Wrong Side Of The Street; 8) The Brokenhearted; 9)
Rendezvous; 10) Candy's Boy; 11) Save My Love; 12) Ain't Good Enough For You;
13) Fire; 14) Spanish Eyes; 15) It's A Shame; 16) Come On (Let's Go Tonight);
17) Talk To Me; 18) The Little Things (My Baby Does); 19) Breakaway; 20) The
Promise; 21) City Of Night.
And the rains keep falling and falling, and now
we learn — those of us, that is, who have not been avid bootleg collectors over
the years — that in compiling Tracks,
Springsteen intentionally sidetracked
one particular period in his history, the «murky years» in between Born To Run and Darkness On The Edge Of Town when he was busy fighting his former
manager and waiting for the ban on his new records to be lifted. Indeed, of
these new songs only ʽRendezvousʼ was formerly available on Tracks, and even there, only in a live
version.
The wonderful thing about The Promise, for hardcore fans at least, is that it plays out like
a cohesive, even conceptual, double
album — The Great Lost Springsteen Album; yes, a few of the songs would later
be reworked for Darkness, but they'd
change significantly in the process. The not-so-wonderful thing is that his
first official double album, The River,
had already shown the excessive simplicity and repetitiveness of the new churn
formula; and The Promise, had it
been released to the general public in 1977 or 1978, would have been his first The River, albeit a little less
exciting and more predictable than the 1980 album.
Just like the material on Tracks, these songs are decent and nothing more. What distinguishes
them is that, oddly enough, The Promise
is really just one big huge enormous tribute to the music of Bruce's teenage
years — early rock'n'roll, Motown, R&B, Phil Spector's wall-of-sound,
whatever. We know he'd returned to
those inspirations in 1980 and then, occasionally, on later albums as well, but
never did they seem to be so consistently and naggingly on his mind than in
those «murky years». Perhaps he sought consolation from all his troubles in the
music of the Ronettes, the Crystals, the Supremes, Ben E. King, and Buddy
Holly, or maybe he thought that, since he'd already been branded «the saviour
of rock'n'roll» and stuff, he'd really
have to go back to his roots and save the goddamn son of a bitch a second time,
this time for real. Who really knows? The thing is, say a big thank you to Mike
Appel, who effectively kept this from becoming the disappointing sequel to Born To Run at the time and whose
activity ultimately boxed the Boss into a much darker, and psychologically
deeper corner.
Perhaps if you listen to this album in «fresh»
mode, taking a long, long break from Bruce-lore, the songs will find a way to
appeal to you on song-individual level. My problem here is that I find myself
in a position to write about The Promise
as a conclusion to a lengthy chronological run, and each of these chords,
tones, words is as familiar to me now as the wallpaper staring me in the face.
And I will harshly state that this is Bruce's problem, not mine — we are not
guilty, after all, that ever since the man locked in on national and
international fame, he'd become such a fabulously lazy songwriter, mostly
exploiting familiar chord sequences and making them his own by putting them on
a steady Springsteroid diet.
There is nothing inherently wrong, of course,
in putting your own unique stamp on music that you have so openly derived from Phil
Spector or Buddy Holly. Problems begin when you overdo it, and The Promise overdoes it with gusto:
song after song, you have exactly the same vibe, and remember, back in the
Sixties, you had this stuff in single
format, or, at best, in relatively brief 30-to-40 minute LP format. Here, you
have an hour and a half of Buddy Holly with Springsteen vocals (ʽOutside
Looking Inʼ), the Ronettes with Springsteen vocals (ʽSomedayʼ),
Mary Wells with Springsteen vocals (ʽOne Way Streetʼ), Roy Orbison
with Springsteen vocals (ʽThe Brokenheartedʼ), the Supremes with
Springsteen vocals (ʽAin't Good Enough For Youʼ — okay, actually I
must admit this is the best song the Supremes never got to sing, the piano
melody is so infectious), Elvis with Springsteen vocals (ʽFireʼ),
Solomon Burke with Springsteen vocals (ʽSpanish Eyesʼ)... need I go
on?
Had he had
the opportunity to put it out in the old days, it might actually have been
clipped and compacted into a shorter, more easily assimilated record (and he'd
also patented the concept way before Billy Joel's An Innocent Man, although Billy's retro-tribute probably had more
contrastive impact in the synth-pop days of 1983 than Bruce's would have had
in 1977). But then we should also remember that in 1978, once his legal
troubles were over, nobody could prevent him from releasing or at least
re-recording these tracks — the fact that he chose not to do that, and came out
with the much more original (and meaningful) Darkness instead shows that he was probably looking back on this
stuff, already then, as a trifling business.
You can still hear shades and echoes of The Promise on Darkness — for instance, the lyrical connection between ʽRacing
In The Streetʼ (also included here in an early version) and ʽDancing
In The Streetsʼ becomes much more clear, since worship of Martha & The
Vandellas is a totally integral part of this album; also, ʽFactoryʼ
is explained as a lyrical re-write of the much more lightweight ʽCome On
(Let's Go Tonight)ʼ. But there is almost nothing of Darkness on The Promise
— aside from maybe the title track itself, whose first lines already suggest
the whole lyrical trajectory ("Johnny works in a factory / Billy works
downtown..." — kids in middle school should be given this couple of lines
as part of the regular «Write your own Bruce Springsteen song!» assignment) and
whose refrain makes it a logical pessimistic sequel to ʽThunder Roadʼ.
However, it comes in so late in the evening that it changes nothing about the
general perspective on the record as a whole.
Still, despite all the criticism, it is
probably a good thing that Bruce eventually got around to cleaning up this
particular shelf. After all, these are not raw demos or anything — it is a
coherent, self-sufficient piece of product; it nicely plugs in the odd
three-year gap in what still remains Springsteen's most creative and important
decade of all; it is an undeniably generous gift to the fans; and I'm even sure
it will be perfectly listenable and enjoyable for me in the future, once the
«Springsteen overdose» effect wears off. One thing, however: this polished
version of ʽBecause The Nightʼ still leaves me convinced that Bruce
made the perfectly right decision when he donated the song to Patti Smith. He
sounds pathetically constipated on these verses — I don't know, maybe there's
something in them that only makes it right for female voices. Or for
demon-haunted avantgarde convention-defying crazy feminist voices, for that
matter.
BUDGIE (1971)
1) Guts; 2) Everything In My
Heart; 3) The Author; 4) Nude Disintegrating Parachutist Woman; 5) Rape Of The
Locks; 6) All Night Patrol; 7) You And I; 8) Homicidal Suicidal.
Apparently, the distance between Birmingham,
England, and Cardiff, Wales is smaller than 120 miles — no wonder, then, that
the stylistic difference between early Budgie and early Black Sabbath is so tiny,
your first and fully legitimate reaction should be: «Rip-off! Inferior rip-off!» Of course, this is
actually better explainable by the fact that all these early albums shared the
same producer, Rodger Bain; having just completed work on Sabbath's Master Of Reality, he clearly had
little strength or desire left to search for a different sound when faced with
the task of producing another hard
rock-oriented bass/drums/guitar combo.
Indeed, when that low, rumbling, carnivorous
seven-note riff of ʽGutsʼ breaks through the audio channels, then
gets augmented by the rhythm section several bars later, then finally gets
completed with another, more high-pitched but even more mean and hungry second
guitar overdub, differentiating this sound from classic Sabbath is downright
impossible without prior knowledge. This is, in fact, precisely the same type
of sonic buildup that Bain had just engineered on ʽSweet Leafʼ and a
few other Sabbath songs. And since that sound was clearly in high demand at the
time, we can hardly blame the band for embracing it. The question is: does it
hold up? After all these years, is there a safe place for Budgie on your shelf next to Paranoid?
My own answer would be a definitive yes, because behind all the superficial
similarities, Budgie are actually quite a different band from the Sabs.
Although not exactly a «thinking man's heavy metal group», their heaviness was not so much due to their fascination with
B-movies and the occult, but was rather inherited from the psychedelic excesses
of Vanilla Fudge and Blue Cheer, to which they added a tongue-in-cheek attitude
and a sense of irony that presaged and predicted Blue Öyster Cult. Oh, and
let us not forget the thin, nerdy, bespectacled countenance of bass player and
helium-voiced lead singer Burke Shelley — the earliest prototype for Mr. Geddy
Lee, with whose four-letter band these guys also share occasional similarities
(particularly if you think of Rush's first couple of albums, before they went all-out
Ayn-randian on us).
None of that would matter, though — we could
just keep treating these guys as second-rate imitators or pale predecessors of
their betters — if their songs weren't so well-written. The key to enjoying
Budgie is the same as the key to enjoying the Sabs: if the riffs are good, the
songs are swell, but if the riffs are boring, the songs are shite. And in Tony
Bourge, the band had the great luck to own a riffmeister who, while not quite
on the same level with the other Tony (Iommi), still had a God-given knack for
simple, meaningful, powerful note sequences delivered in deliciously fuzzy
«earthquake tones». Like the one in ʽGutsʼ, yes — a giant mutant mole
burrowing through your back yard regardless of any obstacles. Just run for your
lives.
Like Sabbath, Budgie prefer drawn-out,
multi-part compositions, where slow parts alternate with bits of boogie (and,
for what it's worth, they're actually better at boogieing than their occultist
Birmingham brethren); in between we may find a few short acoustic «links», but
they are really not necessary here — minute-long snippets of Burke Shelley
romancing the band's potential girl fans before turning his full attention to
the band's potential boy fans: "yes, you are everything in my heart",
even repeated four times, is not nearly as convincing as the protagonist's
psychosleazy visions of a ʽNude Disintegrating Parachutist Womanʼ,
descending upon him on the clouds of yet another classic early stoner rock
riff. That song, by the way, with its nearly nine-minute running length, is the
clear central point of the album, and a fabulous ride it is — first in its hazy
slow part, then in the lengthy speedy boogie escapade, probably influenced by
the Amboy Dukes' ʽBaby Please Don't Goʼ (which they would later cover
directly) and Deep Purple's ʽWring That Neckʼ in equal degree. Bourge
gets a good solo on that part, but really Budgie sound their best when the
guitar and the bass player are galloping along in complete unison — for one
thing, Budgie could be really incredibly tight,
far tighter than the Iommi/Butler/Ward combo ever got to be.
My only gripe is that at this early point, the
Budgie formula is not quite ripe yet;
they'd polish it to near-perfection on the next two albums, but here, they are
sometimes too obsessed with the lyrical message over the musical substance
(ʽRape Of The Locksʼ, a stereotypical rant in defense of long hair as
part of one's ego — heavy on accusations, low on A-level riffs), and have not
yet learned to seamlessly integrate soft acoustic and heavy electric parts
(ʽThe Authorʼ seems like a mere warm-up to similar numbers on Squawk). But in the face of classics
like ʽGutsʼ, ʽParachutist Womanʼ, and ʽHomicidal
Suicidalʼ, this is but a minor gripe.
Derivative as hell, Budgie is still instantly likeable — which is far more than I could
say about similar «derivative» albums by modern day acts like Black Mountain,
to whom you still have to warm up for quite some time. Just goes to show that
you can't kill the vibe — back in 1971, there was this special something in the air that allowed you to
put out a really solid album in somebody else's style (styles), even if you had
no truly groundbreaking ideas of your own. Well, other than naming your grizzly
Welsh band after a pet parakeet, of course. That alone could be worth a thumbs up,
but fortunately, there's also a bunch of kick-ass songs here as a bonus.
SQUAWK (1972)
1) Whiskey River; 2) Rockin'
Man; 3) Rolling Home Again; 4) Make Me Happy; 5) Hot As A Docker's Armpit; 6)
Drugstore Woman; 7) Bottled; 8) Young Is A World; 9) Stranded.
This was originally my first introduction to
the Budgie sound, and so I am somewhat partial to their second album, even
though, when you put it in the proper context, it loses to the self-titled
debut in terms of freshness and to their third album in terms of polish and
ambition. Still, it seems clear enough that Squawk is not just a mechanical retread of Budgie: in the year 1972, broadening of the horizons was still
considered more noble than locking oneself into a tight, never-changing
formula, and next to Budgie, Squawk has a bit more of everything —
more acoustic numbers, a stronger folk and even Delta blues influence, and a
small, but solemn progressive streak that suggests Moody Blues and King Crimson
as humble, but insistent competitors to Black Sabbath as the band's primary
musical mentor.
Two tracks in particular stand out, each one
illustrating a different facet of the band. On the in-yer-face blood-and-guts
hard rock front, the neorealistically titled ʽHot As A Docker's
Armpitʼ is an early classic, with a super-catchy pop-metal riff whose
notes are precisely echoed by Shelley's vocals (even if it requires introducing
a rather silly stutter) and a speedy mid-section with one of Bourge's speediest
solos ever played (possibly influenced by ʽChild In Timeʼ), while the
final section, with its bolero structure, plays out like a Jeff Beck tribute.
Derivative as heck, yes, but its swagger cannot be beat — and while it is
possible to be distracted or irritated by Shelley's «goat» vocals, I think they
work very well in the context of this ironic, irreverent music that never asks
you to take itself too seriously. There's some sort of early proto-hipster
snootiness about all this that could be despised in a different context, but
comes across as delightfully hilarious when you remember all the «serious» hard
rock bands playing around in 1972 — yes, even Deep Purple.
The second track is ʽYoung Is A
Worldʼ, showcasing Budgie's romantic / sentimental / artsy-folksy side —
their initiation, in fact, into this tricky world, and a fairly successful one.
The acoustic introduction, the Mellotron touch, Shelley's oddly seductive
declarations of "I can be big" and "I can be small",
Bourge's massive infusions of thick riffs and droning solos that come and go
while the main romantic theme keeps returning — all of this is not exactly King
Crimson quality, but a reasonable facsimile; at the very least, this helps them
break out of Sabbath's shadow, since Sabbath themselves would not begin their
own «artsy» phase until a year later. Even outside of any context, though,
ʽYoung Is A Worldʼ is just a nicely pulled off epic track, and
Shelley in particular plays the part of a naïve wild child very
convincingly — he should have actually sung more often in this high-and-deep
register.
The rest of the material, though not as
immediately hooky or epic, is still quite consistent. ʽWhiskey
Riverʼ cleverly introduces a funky vibe into an otherwise generic
blues-rocker (Ray Phillips' drumming is particularly recommendable here); the
title track begins like it wants to rip off Jimi's ʽIf 6 Was 9ʼ, but
then moves into Zeppelin territory instead and becomes their answer to
ʽWhole Lotta Loveʼ; ʽBottledʼ is a short and cool slide
guitar instrumental (hence the title); and on ʽRolling Home Againʼ,
Budgie become the Monkees and play a friendly little country-pop ditty, which
sounds totally out of outer space in this context, but feels like a very
welcome companion. I am definitely not a fan of such relatively by-the-book
blues-rockers as ʽRockin' Manʼ and ʽDrugstore Womanʼ (the
titles kind of speak for themselves), but I don't have anything against them,
either — there's enough sectional changes and plenty of energy to keep them
afloat without raising too much interest.
Nevertheless, I do have to admit that if Squawk happened to be the last record
by this band, any memory of it would have washed out fairly quickly. Its thumbs up
are perfectly well guaranteed, but it is not here, no, that Budgie would
briefly turn into an unstoppable monster on the brink of dominating the hard
rockin' scene. To do that, they'd need to tighten and sharpen their act some
more — and one element of that was shedding their Sabbath skin completely, by
getting rid of Rodger Bain in the producer's chair.
NEVER TURN YOUR BACK ON A FRIEND (1973)
1) Breadfan; 2) Baby Please
Don't Go; 3) You Know I'll Always Love You; 4) You Are The Biggest Thing Since
Powdered Milk; 5) In The Grip Of A Tyrefitter's Hand; 6) Riding My Nightmare;
7) Parents.
Smart move — replacing Rodger Bain with Roger
Dean. After all, when it comes to production Budgie could very well be their
own producers, but when it comes to painting your album sleeve, none of the
band's members could draw worth a damn, so why not hire the hippest of the hip?
The style is immediately recognizable; the only question is, will that style be
superimposed on music that will be closer in sound to Yes — or to Uriah Heep?
The answer is neither. The album cover may be
colorful and enigmatic (what the hell is
that guy doing with that mutant eagle?), but Budgie stubbornly remain a heavy
rock band above everything else — only one track on here displays extra
«progressive» ambitions, and, to be honest, they are not even the kind of
ambition that Black Sabbath displayed that very year, when they got Rick
Wakeman to play for them a bit. To compensate for this, though, they tighten up
their formula to the max: there is really no other Budgie album where they
would kick ass on such a consistent, inventive, and, might I add, intelligent
basis. (Yes, kicking ass can actually
require inventiveness and intelligence).
Of course, I suppose that the true reason why
this record is usually brought up as Budgie's finest hour is
ʽBreadfanʼ — not only would that be the only Budgie song to be
revived and popularized in the future (by Metallica), but it is clearly also the Budgie song, period; the one that,
in Mick Jagger's own words, "makes a dead man come". Bourge's opening
riff is so good that the band repeats it over and over for almost a minute
before Shelley starts singing — a classic combination of speed, precision, and
fury that predicts the stylistics of thrash metal a good decade before thrash metal. There's other
goodies scattered around, too — like the hilarious (anti-capitalist?) lyrics
with nursery rhyme elements, or the slightly creepy dark-folk acoustic bridge; but
essentially it's all about the riff, and if you think the song is too abusive
and repetitive, well, it's meant to be that way. It must actually be quite a
chore, I suppose, to be able to play that tricky riff so many times in a row so
quickly without making any mistakes — of course, with the advent of Slayer and
Megadeth this all became standard practice, but I honestly don't know a single
other track from 1973 that would have a riff like ʽBreadfanʼ's.
Still, the album is much more than just
ʽBreadfanʼ. Their cover of ʽBaby Please Don't Goʼ, which
they borrowed from Them (and the Amboy Dukes) rather than Muddy Waters (and
which would later be re-borrowed by AC/DC), has the crunchiest rhythm sound of
all these covers and an excellent slide guitar solo that puts Ted Nugent to
shame (and I am quite a fan of Ted
Nugent's guitar playing) — AC/DC would have more fun with the track, but this
one's my bet if you want a stone cold dead face to go along with it. ʽYou
Are The Biggest Thing Since Powdered Milkʼ could certainly live a
healthier life without the silly «phased» drum solo that eats up almost two
minutes, but other than that, it is still a major riff-fest, even if it is arguably
the most Sabbath-derived tune here (particularly when the second,
boogie-oriented, part comes along).
On Side B, you have the magnificent ʽIn
The Grip Of A Tyrefitter's Handʼ, where Tony has a brilliant idea — chop
the minimalistic four-chord riff in two parts and place both of them in different
channels, so you get the effect of two guitars chatting with each other in
point / counterpoint mode; beyond that, the instrumental breaks totally
dispense with solos in favor of an extra bunch of riffs, including an oddly
tuned «pseudo-Eastern» one. And then there is ʽParentsʼ, a 10-minute
epic about the perils and insecurity that await you upon graduating from Dad's
and Mom's care — not a particularly innovative or insightful topic, but somehow
they manage to get the tragic vibe just right. I still don't know why they
thought it useful to mimic a seagull squad on top of these solos, but
apparently «seagulls shrieking» = «thunderstorm coming», and that's, like, a
metaphor for the perils of grown life once you're ripped out of your safety net.
Anyway, it's a major improvement on ʽYoung Is A Worldʼ and arguably
Budgie's best attempt at a sentimental, heart-on-sleeve, and simultaneously
heavy/thunderous epic.
In the end, my only gripe with the album are
the acoustic links — ʽYou Know I'll Always Love Youʼ and ʽRiding
My Nightmareʼ definitely overdo the soft-and-tender thing, and Shelley's
falsetto actually grates on my nerves far worse than his normal «bleating» on
the harder tracks: there is something very unnatural about his trying to pass
for Art Garfunkel. Fortunately, that's just two short tracks that can be
skipped if you find this style an irritant, too.
No unreasonable expectations, please —
ʽBreadfanʼ may indeed contribute their most significant contribution
to the world of heavy music, but other than that, Never Turn Your Back On A Friend is just a solid piece of work in
an already well-functioning and properly explored area. But it is a solid piece of work: I mean, if a
band can be complex-and-catchy (ʽBreadfanʼ) and simplistic-and-catchy (ʽIn The Grip...ʼ) on the same
album, it's gotta count for something. Derivative or not, Tony had the golden
touch at the time, and even made a few tentative moves to wiggle himself out
from under the other Tony's shadow
(even ʽIn The Grip...ʼ sounds like nothing Sabbath ever did up to
that point, let alone ʽBreadfanʼ). Clearly a thumbs up here — this record is a
must-hear for any hard rock fan, even those who have a natural aversion towards
Roger Dean covers, because you can sometimes find a Jon Anderson hiding
underneath.
IN FOR THE KILL (1974)
1) In For The Kill; 2) Crash
Course In Brain Surgery; 3) Wondering What Everyone Knows; 4) Zoom Club; 5)
Hammer And Tongs; 6) Running From My Soul; 7) Living On Your Own.
Despite some minor inconveniences, such as the
departure of drummer Ray Philips (replaced by Pete Boot), at least the first
side of Budgie's entry for 1974 is as strong as anything they ever did; maybe
even stronger than anything they ever
did, if you consequently test all four links in this chain. The title track
borrows its introduction from Jeff Beck's cover of ʽI Ain't
Superstitiousʼ, but then quickly segues into an original monster riff, one
of Budgie's heaviest ever — think Sabbath's ʽChildren Of The Graveʼ
with the accents reversed, so you get a lumbering Godzilla instead of a
charging T. Rex. There's not much more to the song than the riff and how well
it agrees with the chorus tagline ("...the meaning of life is I'm in for
the kill"): the bridge section devolves into run-of-the-mill blues-rock,
and they couldn't think of a good coda, so they just fade it out after a while.
But that riff, woohoo boy, I could listen to it for the entire six minutes.
Such a deep, crisp, refreshing guitar tone to go along with it. Snappy!
The two short songs that ensue, likewise,
represent one of Budgie's best rockers and one of their best ballads.
ʽCrash Course Surgeryʼ, later covered by Metallica along with
ʽBreadfanʼ, is actually remixed from a much earlier version,
originally released in 1971 as a single (so it features Ray Philips on drums).
If anything, it is this band's answer to ʽParanoidʼ — the same type
of short, concise, anguished heavy rocker with a nagging, repetitive riff
racing along the short track with grim determination — and although the level
of intensity is not nearly as high (mainly because this riff is not tying our
attention to a single note), it is still an excellent specimen of the «crash
course» approach to heavy metal. And then, finally,
with ʽWondering What Everyone Knowsʼ, Budgie emerge with an excellent
acoustic ballad — going for a depressed-melancholic rather than sweet-romantic
attitude, which suits Shelley's vocals much
better. The lyrics are too obscure to allow for a straightforward
interpretation (lost love? dearly departed? cold turkey? whatever), but this
only works to the song's advantage as it conveys an atmosphere of general
confusion.
Finally, there's ʽZoom Clubʼ, a
lengthy epic with funky and progressive overtones, possibly inspired by some
of Zeppelin's work on Houses Of The Holy,
but also, in a way, presaging much of
Zep's subsequent work on Physical
Graffiti (Bourge's guitar work on the song's first two minutes should
remind you of the likes of ʽCustard Pieʼ, ʽTrampled
Underfootʼ, etc.). Shelley cooks up a vocally challenging chorus (the
resolution on the "..move on, music man!" bit of the chorus is quite
unusual and unexpected), and Bourge throws in a long instrumental passage,
alternating funky riffage with bluesy solos in a way that should have
definitely earned some respect from Jimmy Page: the song is totally on the
level, and at nearly ten minute length, it does not feel particularly overlong
due to the never-slackening intensity of the groove.
Unfortunately, they do seem to run out of great
ideas on the second side, with three more songs that never stick around for too
long. ʽHammer And Tongsʼ is slow, lumpy blues-rock that is so utterly derivative of ʽDazed And
Confusedʼ that it isn't even funny. ʽRunning From My Soulʼ is a
piece of generic boogie blues, which is not what this is band is really about.
And ʽLiving On Your Ownʼ is another epic piece, but this time devoid
of memorable riffs — then, for some reason, it transitions into an uncredited
cover of ʽBeck's Boleroʼ (Jeff could have very easily sued the band, except that the instrumental's
authorship has always been problematic — there's a still unresolved dispute
between Beck and Page over the priorities), before returning to the original unfocused
melody. Not particularly bad, just lacking in inspiration.
Nevertheless, the first side alone is worth
stating that Budgie had entered the mid-Seventies with enough dignity, and were
going to survive at least into the late Seventies era; the album clearly
deserves its thumbs
up, at least as a 20-minute long near-perfect EP with 20 more
minutes of take-it-or-leave-it bonus tracks. And, might I add, that's a pretty
mean-lookin' budgie out there on the album sleeve. Shouldn't they have renamed
themselves "Killer Eagle", given the chance? I mean, just think about
how the name "Budgie" must have negatively influenced their sales
among the hard rock crowds...
BANDOLIER (1975)
1) Breaking All The House
Rules; 2) Slipaway; 3) Who Do You Want For Your Love; 4) I Can't See My
Feelings; 5) I Ain't No Mountain; 6) Napoleon Bona-Part, pts. 1 & 2.
Arguably the last album of Budgie's «classic»
period, Bandolier is also fairly
short — just six compositions, with the long ones being fairly repetitive at
that. Nevertheless, it is hard to guess that they were running out of steam,
because on the whole, the results are quite satisfactory. The music is a little
less heavy than last time (nothing even remotely approaching the evil bass
blasts of ʽIn For The Killʼ), but still heavy enough and
riff-a-licious enough to keep the entertainment value high while they're poking
around basic boogie, funky R&B, and faintly proggy flourishes. Oh, and they
have yet another drummer here, Steve Williams, although I honestly can't tell
where he is to be found on the album sleeve — those parrakeet heads are quite
confusing.
Anyway, the spot to aim for here is the epic
ʽNapoleon Bona-Partʼ. The first part is a rather inconspicuous,
melancholic acoustic/slide ballad, but the second is a vicious galloping
monster with a chuggin' riff that is half-thrash and half Morricone, heroic
vocals and solos, and a brace-yourself race to the end; the bit where Tony
enters with yet another high-pitched, banshee-wailing counter-riff at around
5:20 is, in fact, my single favorite sonic moment in the entire Budgie catalog
— the perfect answer to that eternally nagging question, «how to double the
excitement when it's already there?» With a little nudge to the imagination
department, you could also think of that second part as a musical
representation of a Napoleon cavalry assault — crushing everything in its path
as presumed, but then suddenly disappearing into thin air. Kind of agrees with
the Napoleonic fantasies of the protagonist, too — and, come to think of it, they
were almost ready for their own Waterloo just as well, if you pardon the triteness
of this remark.
Next to ʽNapoleonʼ, the opening long
number is a bit more primitive and lightweight, but I still respect it how the
band is able to take one of the world's most obvious five-note sequence and promote
it like The Riff To End All Riffs, returning to it over and over and over until
it suddenly begins to produce a mantra-like effort, especially at the end,
where there's, like, no escaping it —
the band should have stopped long ago, but it just keeps returning and
returning, like a homeless dog that can endear itself to you by stubbornly
sticking around, until it feels like family despite your strongest
psychological resistance. Maybe this
is what they really mean by ʽBreaking All The House Rulesʼ, although,
actually, the song is about a family man succumbing to some fleshy temptation.
Can you imagine a nerdy, freaky
fellow like Burke Shelley succumbing to temptation? On the other hand, it doesn't
seem like he is the one taking the
initiative here.
The rest of the album is spottier: ʽWho Do
You Want For Your Loveʼ starts out on the wrong note, either as an unfunny
parody on or an unsuccessful imitation of a sentimental funk ballad, then picks
up a more proper groove, but still refuses to match the awesomeness of
ʽZoom Clubʼ; the ballad ʽSlipawayʼ has some pretty solos,
but little else; ʽI Can't See My Feelingsʼ, later covered by Iron
Maiden, relies too much on borrowed chords (from ʽSunshine Of Your
Loveʼ, ʽFoxy Ladyʼ, and a couple Sabbath songs) to provide much
of a memorable melody; and what the hell made them go out and cover Andy
Fairweather-Low? ʽI Ain't No Mountainʼ sounds like a really, really
stupid hillbilly joke, a barroom rocker without any redeeming humor to it.
Would the next step be Gary Glitter? This just isn't like Budgie at all.
Still, that one kind of embarrassing song
aside, the rest of the album ranges from awesome (the bookmarking tunes) to
passable (everything else), and to me, that is enough for a modest thumbs up
rating, particularly since after 1975, such ratings would be harder and harder
to come by. You can already see the beginning of the demise — the fate of this
band was always directly dependent on the strength of Tony's riffs, and with
the musicians moving into other, less riff-dependent directions, they would
inevitably lose out. But Bandolier
still features barely enough of the classic, vintage Budgie style to make the
jump. As to whatever follows — buyer beware!
IF I WERE BRITTANIA I'D WAIVE THE RULES (1976)
1) Anne Neggen; 2) If I Were
Brittania I'd Waive The Rules; 3) You're Opening Doors; 4) Quacktor And Bureaucrats;
5) Sky High Percentage; 6) Heaven Knows Our Name; 7) Black Velvet Stallion.
Budgie's first serious misstep on the road to
oblivion — and what makes matters sadder is realizing that this was not even
an intentional commercial sellout, but rather a confused, uncertain attempt to
branch out and experiment without any clear understanding of where they were
going and why they were going there. Alas, some people are born to make their
mark in many places, but some should rather stick to set formulae. Imagine
AC/DC trying to play James Brown-style funk or Canterbury-style progressive
rock — this is not exactly what
happened to Budgie on this album, but it comes close.
The title track here, for instance, is a real
mess. Opening up with a decent enough metal riff, it quickly dispenses with it
in favor of a light, wimpy funk groove alternating with boring folkish
arpeggios, then eventually slips into disco territory, with Shelley in
full-fledged Studio 54 mode and Bourge previewing the Nile Rodgers style; all
that's missing is some of those disco strings to complete the picture. Not that
there's anything wrong by default
with Budgie playing disco, but this particular section seems to exist only for
the sake of contrast with the opening heavy metal bits — and it's a rather
meaningless contrast, frankly. All the song does is waste a potentially good
pun on a stupid musical synthesis where the individual parts exist only for the
sake of a collective effect, and the collective effect is best described as
"what the..."?
Worse, they are beginning to lose it even when
staying in more familiar territory. ʽAnne Neggenʼ, opening the album,
is an honest rocker, but they probably had so much fun shaping a mondegreen
from the refrain ("and again, and again, and again...") that they not
only forgot to throw in a good riff, but did not even bother to bring the track
up to their esteemed standards of heaviness — Bourge plays almost the entire
song as quietly and cautiously as if he were afraid to wake up the neighbours.
In the past, all of their albums started
out with impressive heavy openers (ʽGutsʼ, ʽBreadfanʼ,
ʽIn For The Killʼ, etc.) that immediately set a sympathetic tone for
the entire album; ʽAnne Neggenʼ immediately sets the wrong tone, as if we are being
introduced to a forced change of musical diet for health reasons.
As we go further and further, corrections to
these mistakes are not being made.
The ballad ʽYou're Opening Doorsʼ sounds like another preview — to
bad Foreigner. ʽQuacktor And Bureaucratsʼ at least starts out with a
thick, distorted tone for the rhythm guitar, but hopes for something crunchy
and snappy are quickly dissipated as the song proves to be a fairly (sub-)standard
baroom rocker with totally predictable chords and no musical development
whatsoever. ʽSky High Percentageʼ is a generally okay, but
unmemorable piece of boogie, and the second ballad just completely passes me
by.
In the end, there is exactly one song worth
salvaging off the album: ʽBlack Velvet Stallionʼ somehow succeeds as
an epic piece despite the melody hanging upon a four note syncopated
bass/rhythm guitar riff throughout, the kind of phrase that tends generally to
be used for transitions from one section of the song to another. However,
Shelley manages to inject a good dose of the old «Budgie sorrow», and Bourge
finally gets a chance to unleash some inventive soloing, going from minimalist,
almost ambient mode into a series of scorching bluesy licks and then building
up to an awesomely climactic coda. What exactly prevented them from featuring
the same level of intensity on all those other
songs, I have no idea.
Usually, when trying to explain such failures,
people pronounce the word «drugs» (which is a great universal key to everything — as we know, both the
greatest music ever and the shittiest
music ever always owe their success/failure to drugs), but I don't even know if
drugs were involved in the first place. More likely, they just said to
themselves at one point, "Hey! We're doing great, but it's all because we
have awesome riffs and guitar solos. Why don't we show them how great we can do
if we toss away the awesome riffs and guitar solos? If we were Brittania, we'd
waive the rules, you know!" I almost hate to be giving this a thumbs down,
because deep down inside, I respect failed experiments, but these failed
experiments aren't even particularly fun to listen to for the sake of
understanding where and how they failed. And one good song out of seven, coming
on as a comforting bonus for your patience, does not count for much.
IMPECKABLE (1978)
1) Melt The Ice Away; 2) Love
For You And Me; 3) All At Sea; 4) Dish It Up; 5) Pyramids; 6) Smile Boy Smile;
7) I'm A Faker Too; 8) Don't Go Away; 9) Don't Dilute The Water.
A brief, if somewhat half-assed, return to hard
rock quality here. Perhaps they realized that Brittania took things a little too far and placed them in danger
of completely losing whatever little bits of identity they had. In any case, Impeckable rocks with more energy and
has somewhat better riffs — but that's about it, then: not a single song has
the stunning power of a ʽBreadfanʼ or the viciousness of ʽIn For
The Killʼ. Which is too bad, because some stunning power and viciousness
would have fit in very well with the look on the face of that black cat on the
cover. Wait a minute, though... the cat is aiming for the budgie, right? So
what is this, a hint at the dark hand of fate poised to tear the band in two?
As in some other cases as well, the best songs
here are probably the first and last tracks. First one comes on as a strong
imperative (ʽMelt The Ice Awayʼ), boogies like crazy, and builds a
nice descending ladder in the chorus, while Bourge tries on Angus Young's
speed-choked soloing style for a change. Last one is a prohibitive (ʽDon't
Dilute The Waterʼ) has some well constructed sectional transitions and
arguably the best riff on the album (there are several, actually, but you'll
know the one when you hear it), providing us with at least one «snappy» moment
(meaning that you'll actually be feeling the guitar attacking you, lashing out
at your heels, rather than just doing its independent shtick somewhere out
there in the atmosphere).
In between... well, some of the songs are
really strange, like ʽLove For You And Meʼ, where the verse sounds
like a preview of late period AC/DC (slow lumpy leaden riffage) and the chorus
borrows its formulaic soulfulness from Foreigner; or like ʽDish It Upʼ,
where they once again make the mistake of descending into funky territory. But
the power ballad ʽAll At Seaʼ is surprisingly not bad, with
tasteful, lovely, melancholic harmonies in the chorus; and the return to acoustic
guitars and falsetto harmonies on ʽDon't Go Awayʼ seems to me to be
more successful than ʽRiding My Nightmareʼ from their best album.
Still, it is clear that re-embracing the past
is no longer an option for these guys: something went wrong, and now it is as
hard for Bourge to stay sharp and inspired as it was for his senior pal Iommi
that very same year (Sabbath's Never Say
Die alos showed a sharp drop in quality — was it really the wind of change,
or, more accurately, the New Wave of change that kicked the ground from under
all these old heavy rockers' feet around 1978?). Even the best songs meander,
and it never feels as if the players believe in themselves and their mission.
At least Tony certainly did not: right after the album was released (and
flopped), he quit the band for good.
Essentially, Impeckable was released at a turning point for the heavy metal
scene — the old school ideas were running out of steam, and the New Wave hadn't
quite kicked in yet, let alone the speed and thrash idioms. On the other hand,
since the «refreshed» Budgie of the 1980's never truly managed to make a
respectable transition to the new values, a half-hearted, meandering,
transitional record like this is still preferable to whatever happened when Mr.
Shelley switched his role model from Black Sabbath to Judas Priest. Seen from
that angle, ʽDon't Dilute The Waterʼ is at least a fitting swan song
for the classic era of this band.
POWER SUPPLY (1980)
1) Forearm Smash; 2)
Hellbender; 3) Heavy Revolution; 4) Gunslinger; 5) Power Supply; 6) Secrets In
My Head; 7) Time To Remember; 8) Crime Against The World.
I used to be excessively harsh on this album,
and, in truth, it is hard not to be
harsh on an album that sounds like an unimaginative cross between Judas Priest
and AC/DC. But then it might also be a little silly to accuse Budgie jumping on
the early Eighties metal bandwagon, if only because Budgie had always been professional wagon-jumpers,
ever since ʽGutsʼ so openly nicked off the Sabbath sound ten years
before. So how could we call it a crime when, upon Bourge's departure from the
band, Shelley instigated a transition into more «modern» territory?
If there's a problem here, it is with Shelley's
personality. One thing that early Eighties metal demanded was brutal, sweaty,
swaggering frontmen that could match the sweat, brutality, and swagger of that
new guitar sound — and Burke Shelley, with his lean lanky nerdy figure, whiny
vocals, and encumbering bass, could hardly qualify. His voice is high-pitched
enough, for sure, and he can raise it to a proper scream when necessary (see
the chorus to ʽHeavy Revolutionʼ), but it has none of the steel
overtones of a Brian Johnson or a Bruce Dickinson, and that scream can never
turn to roar; just not the same level of aggression, sorry. Just like it's hard
to imagine Geddy Lee doing a credible cover of ʽHell's Bellsʼ, or
something like that.
New guitarist John Thomas is quite competent,
though, I'll give them that. He can come up with riffs that are almost as good
as K. K. Downing's, and he can play insane-delirious solos just like Angus
Young — both these skills are immediately evident on the opening number,
ʽForearm Smashʼ, where in the mid-section they nearly pull off a
ʽWhole Lotta Rosieʼ. ʽHellbenderʼ and ʽHeavy
Revolutionʼ are also not half-bad, riff-wise, with all those nasty tones
and clever use of stock metal licks. Nothing too special, but the instrumental
sections of these songs are seriously enjoyable — provided you like the
not-too-experimental, ass-kick-oriented style of early Eighties metal in
general, I don't see how it is possible not to toe-tap or play at least a
little air guitar to these songs. They're fun.
If you try to subject them to a little closer
analysis... well, don't. You might stumble upon the lyrics to ʽHeavy
Revolutionʼ, which seem to be a sincere
appraisal of the arena-rock image: "Our heads jumping up and down / Heavy
rock bands are back in town", without a single noticeable shred of irony —
quite embarrassing to see them associated with Mr. Shelley and his nerdy looks
(it's a good thing that no video footage of the band from that era has been
preserved). Essentially, all of Budgie's «cleverness», including those nutty song
titles which used to relate them to Blue Öyster Cult, seems to have
evaporated, replaced with far more explicit and provocative imagery. Not that
Budgie lyrics have ever mattered much — and the words do go well with the
music, they just don't go all too well with the singer.
There's exactly one power ballad in the mix
(ʽTime To Rememberʼ), mediocre, but not awful (depending on whether
you think the echo on Shelley's vocals — "time... time... time... to
remember" — is an impressive or a stupid idea). There's exactly one song
with an acoustic introduction (ʽGunslingerʼ) that dutifully segues
into an epic rock guitar battle of life against death. There's exactly one slow rocker (ʽCrime Against The
Worldʼ) that concludes the album on an almost relaxed note compared to
most everything else. And most everything else taps their not-so-large «power
supply» to the max. So at least they're going for it hardcore-style — no «sissy
keyboards», not too much overblown sentimentality. Certainly could be worse,
had they hired a less competent guitarist. But do remember that this is «Budgie
2.0», a completely different thing from what it used to be, and even if you
loved Impeckable, you have to have
yourself a ʽHeavy Revolutionʼ to love Power Supply.
NIGHTFLIGHT (1981)
1) I Turned To Stone; 2)
Keeping A Rendezvous; 3) Reapers Of The Glory; 4) She Used Me Up; 5) Don't Lay
Down And Die; 6) Apparatus; 7) Superstar; 8) Change Your Ways; 9) Untitled
Lullaby.
I cannot really make up my mind whether I
should feel more empathy towards Power
Supply-era Budgie or Nightflight-era
Budgie. What's the difference, you might ask? Well, there is some — basically, their second album with Thomas is a step back
from the «hardcore» new-wave-metallism of the 1980 offering, as they try to
sweeten and mollify Power Supply's
dry brutality with some poppy and even «retro-progressive» (is that even a
word?) elements. Probably, this means that Nightflight
will have a little more appeal for fans of classic Budgie — yet on the other
hand, it is also clear that the classic days will never come back, and it does
not make a whole lot of sense trying to force
them back.
I am talking about ʻI Turned To
Stoneʼ, of course, the six-minute «folk-metal» anthem that opens the
record on a very different note from
ʻForearm Smashʼ. We get those melancholic minor chord acoustic
melodies, powerful build-ups and slide-downs, and the metal-soulfulness which
these guys could master well earlier on (ʻParentsʼ, etc.).
Ultimately, however, the guitar tones are too much «early hair metal», the main
riff of the chorus sounds like «under-chugged» Sabbath-lite, and although John
Thomas unleashes some nice furious soloing in the sped-up gallop coda, it is
hardly enough to redeem the song on the whole. Nice try, though.
Curiously, the tone of the record gets much
lighter after that, and some of the tunes could, in fact, qualify as «lightly
metallized» power-pop — ʻKeeping A Rendezvousʼ, ʻShe Used Me
Upʼ, ʻChange Your Waysʼ are toe-tappy sing-along pop-rockers
with a fairly light mood. However, they wobble on the edge of MOR blandness,
and sometimes go right over that edge: ʻApparatusʼ is a faceless
power ballad that could be Foreigner, Foghat, Styx, or whatever you wanted it
to be in the late Seventies.
Arguably the most memorable — in a rather
stupid way — tune here is ʻSuperstarʼ, a song that must have very
clearly been influenced by AC/DC's ʻGirl's Got Rhythmʼ, which would
have been perfectly fine if Shelley were able to demonstrate a better sense of
humor; instead, for some reason, he intends to transform this funny, harmless
little pop chugger into a serious social statement on superstar hypocrisy, for
which he has neither the charisma nor the power of conviction. The variation on
the ʻGirl's Got Rhythmʼ riff is a nifty one, though, I'll admit that
much.
Overall, I guess it's just different from Power Supply
— not for better or worse. At this time, «better» and «worse» aren't even valid
options for Budgie: Shelley seems lost in space, unable to bring back the
aesthetics of old and not quite getting the new realities, either. Not that
this was a good time for power trios: heavy metal was all about creative guitar
duos, of the Judas Priest type or the Iron Maiden type, or, if you only had one
guitarist, you had to make sure it was a Van Halen type. John Thomas is a nice
guy, but he doesn't experiment much, and he hasn't quite got the flashy
technique of even one of the Iron Maiden guitarists, not to mention a Van
Halen. So they try to get by, and I've heard much worse albums than this, but I do not think there'll come a
time in anybody's life when ʻI Turned To Stoneʼ is exactly the kind of soul-crushing epic
one is in dire need of at any particular moment. Unless you're so much a child
of the Eighties that your ears only perk up at the sound of those thick,
overproduced heavy guitar tones.
DELIVER US FROM EVIL (1982)
1) Bored With Russia; 2) Don't
Cry; 3) Truth Drug; 4) Young Girl; 5) Flowers In The Attic; 6) N.O.R.A.D.; 7)
Give Me The Truth; 8) Alison; 9) Finger On The Button; 10) Hold On To Love.
The less said about the last Thomas-era Budgie
album, the better. I wish things could be explained as easily as «they hired
themselves a keyboard player, and it totally ruined them», but even without
Duncan Mackay's keyboards (which are not the worst sort of keyboards played on
a metal album, no) these songs seem absolutely pitiful in the era of classic
Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, not to mention absolutely unworthy of Budgie's
own legacy.
At least Power
Supply had those jagged Priest-like riffs, and Nightflight tried a bit of a pop-metal approach that was
essentially listenable — here, the band goes for «power», with lots of power
chords, gang choruses, brawny-hero screaming, and stadium appeal. Bad move for
everybody involved: Shelley is about as natural in this "scream for me
Long Beach!" role as Woody Allen, and the guitarist's modest, but non-zero
talents are more or less wasted on this collection of completely
interchangeable power-fests.
The influence of the pop style of Nightflight is still evident — most of
the choruses aim for catchiness, though usually of the super-stupid kind
(ʻHold On To Loveʼ is a particularly annoying example, with an
anthemic refrain that probably took five seconds to write and whose simplicity
is not redeemed by its stupidity, because when you deliver simple-and-stupid with
such grand pathos and no signs of irony, how can you truly convince the demanding fan of how important it is to
"hold on to, hold on to love, everyone hold on to love?").
Respecting the spirit of the times, they do a
political song that wishes to offend politics but ends up offending countries
(ʻBored With Russiaʼ is really one of the most misguided titles in
the history of Cold War-related pop songs) — fortunately, the song is so bland
that it should have been called ʻBored With Budgieʼ instead, with a
chorus that is more adult contemporary than solid hard rock or metal. They also
do a ballad on which the synthesized strings drown out the vocals and the vocal
melody seems to be written only up to a certain point, after which the singer
just takes the sentimentality wherever it takes him (ʻAlisonʼ). And they do an «epic» number
(ʻFlowers In The Atticʼ) about abandoned children or something like
that with a power ballad chorus and not a shred of personality.
Overall, this was a clear sign that the band
had better vaporize before it put out something even more embarrassing (and
this was only 1982, the decade still being so young), so upon getting the
predictable thumbs
down from just about everybody, Budgie were no more.
YOU'RE ALL LIVING IN CUCKOOLAND (2006)
1) Justice; 2) Dead Men Don't
Talk; 3) We're All Living In Cuckooland; 4) Falling; 5) Love Is Enough; 6) Tell
Me Tell Me; 7) (Don't Want To) Find That Girl; 8) Captain; 9) I Don't Want To
Throw You; 10) I'm Compressing The Comb On A Cockerel's Head.
Anyone up for a new Budgie album in the 21st
century? I originally had sort of assumed that after the release of Deliver Us From Evil, Shelley just
retired the band's name and went on to have a solo career or something —
apparently, though, «Budgie» as a touring band functioned all the way into
1988, and even after the last gigs Shelley never did much of anything except
for a few collaborations on side projects. But supposedly, boredom got the
better of him after a while, and there you have it — a brand new Budgie album
in 2006, replete with a typically Budgie title and a typically Budgie album
cover.
The music, unfortunately, is not at all typical
Budgie. The original post-1974 drummer Steve Williams returns as a loyal
servant, but the guitar player is brand new: a guy called Simon Lees, who was
actually born one year before the
release of Budgie's first album, and began his guitar training at the height of
the hair metal era, and it still shows, no matter how much he is trying to hide
it. In any case, the guitar sound on this album is largely bad —
overcompressed, genetically modified, synthetically treated, and way too much
influenced by nu-metal — and the aesthetics of the album is way too heavily
rooted in the Twisted Sister / Poison camp, which is all the more surprising
considering that Budgie did not even have the proper time to live into the hair
metal age. It's as if at least half of these songs were really written circa
1984-85 (and why not?), then given the «modern» production treatment.
The record is not without a certain bizarre
charm: Shelley and Lees use the pop metal idiom without subscribing to the pop
metal lifestyle — this is not a collection of "let's party" anthems,
cock rockers, and power ballads; the approach has elements of unpredictability,
surrealism, and Budgie's obfuscated social criticism. But what of it all if the
riffs are no good? To be sure, songs like ʻJusticeʼ and ʻDead
Men Don't Talkʼ are full of metal riffage, but this is just metal riffage
like tons of other metal riffage — no revelatory note combinations, no juicy
tones, no personality whatsoever. In addition, Shelley has to really strain his
aging voice to outshout the plastic electric noise, and he was never a screamer
and still isn't.
Ultimately, the only songs on the record that
have a bit of emotional resonance are the quiet ones. The title track is a
decent ballad, leaning towards toothless adult contemporary, but with some
pretty harmonies in the chorus — pretty enough to make me believe that,
perhaps, we are all living in cuckooland indeed, or else why would we have to
bother with this record in the first place? ʻCaptainʼ is a bit of
acoustic folk that would be 100% filler on a classic Budgie album, but here
becomes a highlight just because it is one of the few not-overproduced,
not-overscreamed tracks. Is this praise? Doesn't sound much like praise to me.
Strangest of the lot is ʻI'm Compressing
The Comb On A Cockerel's Headʼ, a track that sports a trademark Budgie
title but sounds like a cross between Devo and Limp Bizkit, spludging along to
a martial-industrial-metal rhythm and a particularly ugly vocal melody, as if
Shelley tried to imitate the death metal growl to the best of his abilities.
Adding insult to injury, almost the entire second half of the lengthy track is
given over to a «phone-dialing» synth solo (or is that a synth guitar solo?)
the likes of which went out of style at the end of the New Wave era, I think.
Again, there's a certain bizarre attraction stemming from the stupidity of it
all, but should we give the songs a thumbs up just because they're so ridiculous?
The real bad news is that the record will most
likely confuse and baffle veteran Breadfans who'd like to be in for the kill,
without attracting any new fans because that
task is impossible unless Shelley somehow gets some of his Metallica admirers
to guest star on the record. Ultimately, the best thing about this unfortunate
«reunion» attempt remains the album cover — yes, the lanky bassist still
retains some style, but the substance, alas, is still long gone and can never
be recovered again. Thumbs down.
ADDENDA
RADIO SESSIONS 1974 & 1978 (2005)
CD I: 1) Breadfan; 2) You Are
The Biggest Thing Since Powdered Milk; 3) Hammer And Tongs; 4) Zoom Club; 5)
Parents; 6) Rocking Man.
CD II: 1) Melt The Ice Away;
2) In The Grip Of A Tyrefitters Hand; 3) Smile Boy Smile; 4) In For The Kill /
You Are The Biggest Thing Since Powdered Milk; 5) Love For You And Me; 6)
Parents; 7) Who Do You Want For Your Love; 8) Don't Dilute The Water.
Budgie proudly subscribe to the rule that says
the less important a certain band is, the more archive releases it has to put
up on the market (because ten cheaply assembled albums will eventually sell
more than two, even if the total number of copies will still be hardly enough
to cover your cigarette expenses). There's quite a few packages of outtakes,
rarities, and live performances out there for the hardcore devoted fan — we are
only going to focus on a couple, and rather briefly at that, because...
...well, see, one of the reasons why Budgie
never put out a live album in the Seventies (just like Black Sabbath) is that
they were never a particularly outstanding live band, and this double live CD
is a very representative example. We have two shows here, one recorded
relatively early in the band's career (London, 1974) and one from the Impeckable era (Los Angeles, 1978) —
different drummers, but Bourge is the guitarist on both shows, so you could
theoretically hope for the best. Unfortunately, even if you disregard the
questionable sound quality of the 1974 show (the 1978 one is much better), it
is not easy to recommend them as useful additions to the studio versions, let
alone suitable replacements.
Technically, the band sounds good, although
Shelley occasionally finds it hard to sing and play bass at the same time
(ironically, he has his worst flubs on ʻBreadfanʼ, where you'd rather
expect Bourge to slip every once in a while on the speedy riff). But the songs
are performed very close to the studio originals and inevitably pale whenever
Tony finds it impossible to reproduce all the original overdubs (he does try to
insert a few screeching gulls on the early version of ʻParentsʼ, with
questionable effects, but he hardly even tries any more on the later version).
There is no extra improvisation whatsoever, with the exception of an
obligatory-unnecessary drum solo in the middle of ʻRocking Manʼ; and
the songs are not taken to a new level of wild wild metal energy because...
because, I guess, Budgie are not really wild wild metal people.
Basically, the guys were hard working pros with
a knack for a certain humbleness (and maybe so much for the better, because
Burke Shelley as a Robert Plant-style swaggering frontman would only embarrass
people) — perfect for the studio, not so interesting for the stage. Add to this
the occasional problem with the setlist (ʻHammer And Tongsʼ does not
cease to be a lame ʻDazed And Confusedʼ rip-off just because it is
rolled out on the arena), the occasional problem with the sound, and most likely you will not be returning to
these recordings fairly soon. Which should not prevent you from having at least
one good listen, though. But Live In
Japan or Live After Death this
ain't, not by a mile.
THE BBC RECORDINGS (1972-1982; 2006)
CD I: 1) Rape Of The Locks; 2)
Rocking Man; 3) Young Is A World; 4) Hot As A Docker's Armpit; 5) Breaking All
The House Rules; 6) Crime Against The World; 7) Napoleon Bona-Part 1 & 2;
8) Forearm Smash; 9) Panzer Division Destroyed; 10) Wild Fire; 11) Breadfan
[lost edit].
CD II: 1) Sky High Percentage;
2) In The Grip Of A Tyrefitter's Hand; 3) I Turned To Stone; 4) Superstar; 5)
She Used Me Up; 6) Forearm Smash; 7) Crime Against The World; 8) I Turned To
Stone; 9) Truth Drug; 10) Superstar; 11) She Used Me Up; 12) Panzer Division
Destroyed.
Okay, here is another one worth a quick
mention. Again collected from radio
transmissions, but this time spread out over a much larger period and
concentrating way too heavy on the John Thomas stage of the band, including not
one, but two mini-shows (or excerpts from shows) at the Reading Festival, in
1980 and 1982 respectively, which explains why some of those less-than-stellar
songs are captured here in two versions.
Of course, fans might be interested in the John Thomas version of the band
performing ʻBreadfanʼ — just to see if he can nail that fabulous
riff, and you know what? He comes somewhat close, but he can't, which is
probably why they cut down the number of bars repeating it, and did not include
the number in the original transmission either (it is qualified as a «lost
edit» here, with a lopped off intro and probably a lopped off outro as well,
since it concludes with a lengthy show-off guitar solo without returning to the
opening theme). Just a somewhat telling bit of difference between the old and
the new guitarist — or, rather, between classic Seventies and early Eighties
styles of metal playing.
On the other hand, the disc is historically
treasurable for containing some of the earliest live Budgie recordings caught
on tape — four tracks from a 1972 show at the Paris Theatre in London, with Bourge
setting the world on fire with his soloing on ʻYoung Is A Worldʼ and
ʻHot As A Dockers Armpitʼ, the band still riding that old Sabbath
vibe for all it's worth. The two tracks from 1976 are not nearly as stellar —
ʻSky High Percentageʼ is a throwaway from one of their weakest albums,
and the classic riff of ʻTyrefitter's Handʼ sounds so much shriller
and sharper in the studio that they might as well have left it out of the
setlist for good.
And the new stuff? Well, one thing's good: the
decision not to include (or perform) any of the awful songs from Deliver Us From Evil, except for one
(ʻTruth Drugʼ, which was originally not transmitted, but the Devil
made them excavate it anyway). I certainly do not mind them doing their
AC/DC-type schtick like ʻForearm Smashʼ and ʻSuperstarʼ,
except that AC/DC have ways to make their stuff even more exciting live than it
is in the studio and these guys are too laid back to do it. The audiences love
it, though — from both festivals, you have your fans going wild and screaming
their heads off for "Budgie! Budgie! Budgie!" (One question, though:
why didn't you buy the records, if you loved the band so much?).
In any case, this collection still does not properly satisfy the
demand for a Budgie live album, and makes one wonder how the hell is it at all
possible that not one single complete recording of a classic era Budgie live
show has survived in acceptable quality to complete and dignify this series of
semi-satisfying archive releases. Was the band too hard up back in those days,
or were they just too lazy to set up a bunch of recording equipment, letting
the BBC do it all for them? (Note that there is at least one officially released live album from the reunion era
— 2002's Life In San Antonio, but
the setlist there is way too unappealing, with way too many songs from the
expendable 1980-82 era, for me to bother).
Part 5. From Punk To Hair
Metal (1977-1988)
SECRETS OF THE I CHING (1983)
1) Grey Victory; 2) Poor De
Chirico; 3) Death Of Manolete; 4) Tension; 5) Daktari; 6) Pit Viper; 7)
Katrina's Fair; 8) The Latin One; 9) National Education Week; 10) My Mother The
War.
There are two kinds of people who may piss
themselves silly over the classic sound and style of 10,000 Maniacs: the
Natalie Merchant fan and the Robert Buck fan. Right from the start I will
proclaim that I tend to gravitate towards the latter, hold no animosity towards
the former, but cannot distinctly acknowledge myself as either. So the
Maniacs, after all, are not my cup of tea. But they, too, have their strange
place in history.
Secrets
Of The I Ching is, as its name
so bluntly tells us, sung entirely in Chinese and boldly promises to succeed
where so many professional and eminent Sinologists of the past have met their
final destiny. The blending of traditional Southeast Asian motives and
instruments with the New Wave standards of the time is an interesting and
well-rewarding move, and if only all of us knew what the hell the band is
singing about...
...okay, now that I've actually heard the record, it's really none of
that. Robert Buck and John Lombardo on guitars, Steve Gustafson on bass, Dennis
Drew on keyboards, and Jerry Augustyniak on drums mostly just play unassuming,
rhythmic, almost danceable folk-pop, close in attitude to early R.E.M., over
which a 20-year-old, but already not-so-hot, Natalie Merchant sings or, more
correctly, «melodically recites» something that may or may not be considered poetry.
The band's debut, which sounds like it was
written, recorded, and mixed in about two hours' time (but don't worry, most of this band's music gives that
impression), together with a short preceding EP (Human Conflict Number Five), originally came out on a small indie
label, cheerfully called Christian Burial Music, and quite soon became all but
completely unavailable until the two were eventually combined on one 1990 CD
called Hope Chest: The Fredonia
Recordings 1982-1983. It is not,
however, a typical case of «early immature crap»: I see nothing in these tunes
that makes them that much inferior to the band's hit years to come.
Frankly speaking, for quite some time I saw
nothing in these tunes at all. But
the reason was plain: like so many others, I made the mistake of concentrating
too much on the importance of Natalie Merchant's persona. And taking a serious
liking to this lady is a stark exercise in voluntary auto-washing of the
brain. She has a technically nice, but never ever special voice with a very
limited range (if any; she would get a little better with the years, but even
her biggest admirers will have to admit that vocalizing is not her main strength). Her «poetry» is competent, I guess, but
just as most male rock poets have a hard time beating the standards once set by
Dylan, so do female rock poets have an equally hard time beating Joni Mitchell,
and besides, this is music, not words, that we are supposed to be getting.
Finally, her attitude — self-righteous, deadly serious, and so often bent on
generic liberal moralizing — is just plain annoying. Did we, in 1983, really need another naïve, but
pretentious 20-year old reminding us about the horrors of atomic warfare ('Grey
Victory')? I wouldn't be surprised were I to find out that the band took
special care that a brand new copy of the album, along with a notarially
certified Russian translation of the lyrics, be FedExed to Yuri Andropov in
person.
But it all changes once you realize that the
major creative force behind the Maniacs is never really Merchant. No, the best
thing about this band, the one saving grace that prevents it from being
forever dated as Eighties' college rock radio fodder is the guitar playing of
Robert Buck and John Lombardo. Buck, in
particular, is every bit the equal of his namesake Peter (what is it with
Eighties' folk-pop-post-punk and awesome guitar players named Buck?), tossing
out not particularly catchy, but extremely nice-sounding riffs, now turning to
Byrds-y jangle, now to distortion-less post-punk chainsaw, now to
wah-wah-emphasized whoos and whees: the «Johnny Marr» effect to Merchant's
clumsy Morriseyisms, even if the band's first EP preceded the Smiths' debut by
a good two years.
It also helps that most songs move along at a
nice pace. The fast tempos quench any attempts that Natalie might make at
actually singing the lyrics rather than scattering them all over the place in
jagged, disconnected syntagms, but they are the album's only chance at avoiding
plunging the listener into a general state of lethargy — were all of this
reduced to slow balladry, not even the guitarists' talents could have done anything,
because they sure as hell can play, but even surer is the fact that not a
single member of this band can write a memorable tune to save Natalie
Merchant's life. As it is, it's just a joy listening to these quirky little
blasts of notes that they give out, no matter how derivative or even how
out-of-place they could be.
For the record, the band's idea of «diversity»
is to change, occasionally, from the standard «fast post-punk» formula to ska
('The Latin One'), reggae ('Poor De Chirico', 'National Education Week'),
calypso ('Daktari'), and even rough disco ('Pit Viper') — not bad, and it
helps, but it's not like they do any of these genres any better than they do
their primary schtick. 'Grey Victory' and 'My Mother The War', bookmarking the
record, are still the best examples of what these guys can do. Maybe it
wouldn't have been a bad idea to dump the vocalist altogether — after a few
listens and a newly-gained appreciation for all the guitar work, I have learned
to tolerate Merchant, but to believe
that she may be one of the album's assets
is completely out of the question. At this juncture at least, 10,000 Maniacs
could just as easily hire an assistant professor from the Berkeley College of
Letters and Science in her place — granted, that would have cost 'em.
THE WISHING CHAIR (1985)
1) Can't Ignore The Train; 2)
Scorpio Rising; 3) Just As The Tide Was A Flowing; 4) Lilydale; 5) Back O' The
Moon; 6) Maddox Table; 7*) The Colonial Wing; 8) Grey Victory; 9) Among The
Americans; 10) Everyone A Puzzle Lover; 11) Cotton Alley; 12*) Daktari; 13) My
Mother The War; 14) Tension Makes A Tangle; 15) Arbor Day.
Recording for Elektra Records now, with Joe
Boyd as producer — upon first sight, an excellent choice, considering his
immaculate folk-rock pedigree (The Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention,
Nick Drake, Maria Muldaur, you name it). Real improvements, though? A few.
Natalie Merchant is slowly, but steadily learning to sing (as in, «draw out
vowels for a short extra length of time, sometimes raising or lowering the
pitch»). Keyboard player Dennis Drew is given a little more breathing space,
sometimes even a chance to solo (nice organ work on 'Just As The Tide Was A
Flowing'). And overall, the sound is, of course, fuller and denser than it used
to be.
Elsewhere, the approach remains the same — so
much so that the band has even carried over some of its supposedly best tunes
from I Ching; 'Grey Victory',
'Daktari', and 'My Mother The War' are sometimes said to have been re-recorded
for this album, but they sound completely identical on my copies — the only real re-recording is 'Tension', now called
'Tension Makes A Tangle' and truly sounding much better, due to a much more
self-confident (and just plain loud)
delivery from Merchant.
The bad news is that they still haven't figured
out how to write songs, and yet are already ready to mellow out a bit,
loosening the rhythm section and too often misusing the talents of Robert Buck.
The latter, now that Joe Boyd himself has recognized him as a folk player,
happily hauls out the mandolin, an instrument which is usually great for
providing counter-melodies and extra flourishes, but is too medievalistic to
carry a good hook, if you know what I mean. And there is a mandolin track here
on at least half of the songs, I
think, sometimes with accordeon to boot.
Yet we cannot really fault the producer,
because he clearly has no intention of spoiling the band's vibe — on the
contrary, he just wants to clean it up. In fact, given that the band was signed
by an English manager and recorded their major label debut in London with a
famous British producer, the idea could have been to establish some sort of
cross-Atlantic alternative to R.E.M. (although, ironically, R.E.M. themselves
had only just recorded Fables Of The
Reconstruction in London with the same Joe Boyd at the wheel) — despite the
fact that all the band members were American, there is a lot of subtle «Britishness»
around The Wishing Chair, from
Merchant's angry anti-colonial ode ('The Colonial Wing', originally a B-side,
now part of the album) to straightahead immersions into Anglo-Saxon folk
history ('Just As The Tide...' — a rearrangement of a traditional tune).
The overall sound is still classy and pleasant,
and the tempos are still generally upbeat, helping to overcome the lack of
instantly captivating melodies. Given time, the loudest of these, e. g. 'Scorpio
Rising', will start penetrating the spirit; as usual, one needs to scrape
Merchant's residue off the ears though — her presence may have improved, but it
is still blocking the music rather than supporting it; and her lyrics may have
become more coherent and «tolerably intellectual», but there is still no
serious incentive to start analysing them seriously, no matter how serious are
the particular problems she is singing about.
Word of the day is «transitional» — the band
makes it into the big leagues, but does not yet properly learn to behave in
these leagues. Definitely not a record to be used as one's introduction to the
stern joys of 1980's college rock.
IN MY TRIBE (1987)
1) What's The Matter Here?;
2) Hey Jack Kerouac;
3) Like The Weather;
4) Cherry Tree; 5) The Painted Desert; 6) Don't Talk; 7) Gun Shy;
8) My Sister Rose; 9) A
Campfire Song; 10) City Of Angels; 11) Verdi Cries.
This is where 10,000 Maniacs definitively
become the backing act behind Natalie Merchant. With John Lombardo out of the
band, she gets around 30% more songwriting credits, and if previously it could
seem like the lyrics and the music were created independently of each other,
or, even more radically, like some of the lyrics were just randomly thrown on
to pre-written and arranged backing tracks, now it is the opposite: most of the
songs feel constructed around Natalie's ever more aspiring, self-assured, and
moralistic verbal paintings.
Musically speaking, there is little to speak
of. 'Like The Weather' has a beautiful ascending riff, a cozy little melodic
invention that, unfortunately, happens to be an unreachable peak for all the
other songs. To be utterly fair, though, it's not like R.E.M., generally
considered a far greater band than the Maniacs, had a great amount of unique
melodies. You can't get really far
away, after all, if you are usually content to stay within the folksy-jangly
formula. And for some bands, it is preferable to stay within that formula — the
attempt to mess around with Mexican rhythms on 'My Sister Rose' really comes
across as corny; if the intended effect was to lighten up the generally somber
attitude of the record, they couldn't have miscalculated worse. Or, perhaps,
the effect was to show how much they
suck at faking gaiety, so be happy now that we're back to our usual state of
morose judge-ment-ality.
These days, when liberalism, political correctness,
and active-cause-support are almost a sine
qua non of all «respectable» music acts (up yours, Ted Nugent!), it is sort
of hard to take seriously a record that almost literally reads as an
in-yer-face manifesto of all these things. Very little is veiled even thinly,
as Merchant takes on child abusers (track 1), the issue of illiteracy (track
4), army problems (track 7), capitalist greed (track 9), and then moves on to
scale truly Biblical heights (the last two tracks that seem to already
transcend the problems of humanity). But, on the other hand, every type of
young brain in every generation needs to learn about these things, and not
everyone can be bothered to read Charles Dickens instead of easily-listening to
'Campfire Song' (a collaboration between the Maniacs and Michael Stipe, by the
way).
Plus, the more this girl is in the business,
the more charisma she is able to raise: her singing has now become fully
confident, yet at the same time intelligently restrained — a great benefit, setting
her apart from the punky female crowd attitude that would be soon reshaping
itself into the Riot Grrrl approach. The charm of 'What's The Matter Here?',
for instance, is not in the fact that, technically, Merchant refuses to give a
definitive answer to the question of whether or not one has a moral right to
report the abusive behaviour of the parents in your neighbourhood; she is not
so much refusing to do it as scorning all those who refuse. The charm is that,
as much anger as there is in the song, she does not give it away. When
performing these blasting accusations live, she'd be prancing around the
microphone as if the song in question were 'Let's Go To The Hop' (and
technically, her prancing is awful, choreographed the way a two-year old girl
dances to her Sesame Street tape — but intentional, I guess). It looks and
feels odd — but, somehow, right.
Of course, there is always Robert Buck, who
consistently saves all the songs, one by one, with an endless variation of
same-but-different takes on the folk jangle, sometimes going U2-ish on the
louder numbers ('Don't Talk'). So it is a perfectly healthy listen up until
'Verdi Cries', on which Merchant is left all alone with a piano and a chamber
string section, a track that is a mighty fan favorite but, to me, sounds like a
second-rate Elton John imitation — the same type of epic piano ballad, only
without the patented hook in the chorus (certainly the la-la-la's don't count).
Lyrics are good, but the song just goes to show that, at this point at least,
Natalie without her boys is still a musical non-entity.
As impressively as R.E.M.'s best material seems
to have outlived its time, In My Tribe
remains chained to its epoch, and is unlikely to inspire new generations. But
as a curious and moving document of that epoch, it deserves salvation — and
then again, there are always those who prefer clear, clean, ringing-out girl
singing to the mumble-grumble of Michael Stipe. So thumbs up anyway, and then it's up
to you the tight-collared college-rock lover to make your choice. Ooh, fun
fact, almost forgot: apparently there used to be a decent cover of Cat Stevens'
'Peace Train' on this album, but once the band learned of Mr. Yusuf Islam's
approval of the Salman Rushdie fatwa, they pulled it off all subsequent
releases. Up yours, too, Mr. Islam. Should have known better in 1971 than to
write silly peace anthems instead of doing the RIGHT thing. And how are you
going to keep up your Al-Qaeda contributions now, without these much needed
royalties from 10,000 Maniacs' albums? :)
BLIND MAN'S ZOO (1989)
1) Eat For Two; 2) Please
Forgive Us; 3) The Big Parade; 4) Trouble Me; 5) You Happy
Puppet; 6) Headstrong; 7) Poison In The Well; 8) Dust Bowl; 9) The Lion's
Share; 10) Hateful Hate; 11) Jubilee.
Every bad poet, given time and persistence,
will produce at least one masterpiece — and if he is really, really bad, he
might even produce two. Anyway, 'Eat For Two' is a tremendous song. It is
impossible to explain why — it is written exactly the way all of the other
upbeat tunes by 10,000 Maniacs are usually written, but somehow Merchant,
banging on solid rock, managed to dislodge a single speck of gold lodged in one
tiny nook. The wobbly, paranoid guitar backing from Buck, joining with
Natalie's grim recounting — "I eat for two, walk for two, breathe for
two..." — is a perfect setting for one of the darkest songs about
accidental pregnancy ever written (actually, I'm not even sure what other songs about accidental pregnancy I
can remember at present).
What makes it even more cool is the ambiguity
of the message — is this conveying happiness? tenderness? anxiety? desperation?
horror? a little bit of everything? who knows? All the soon-to-be-mothers in
America must have been eagerly listening to the song back in 1989, and now,
from a retro perspective, it is clear that this
is exactly that one song that no one could ever do better than Ms. Merchant.
Any other gal would have overcooked it. Here, she's perfect.
Unfortunately, the rest of the album does feel
very much like a blind man's zoo, no matter how sincerely the band tries to
convince us it's really a metaphor for the whole wide world we live in. Take
the paranoid guitar waves and the morose chorus away from 'Eat For Two', and
here is your recipé for all the other upbeat songs on the record. And
things only get screwed up more by the bluntness. If Merchant wants to ask the
world for forgiveness on behalf of the entire United States of America for
their nasty imperialist behavior, it may not be a particularly spectacular
artistic choice to call the song 'Please Forgive Us' — and make sure that the
song's major (and only!) hook is the title itself, delivered in a supremely
guilt-ridden tone. Yes, liberal guilt is a noble feeling alright, but
converting it into popular music as if that
were the sole purpose of popular music makes the results not any more
different from yer average «Christian rock» on the other side. And don't even
get me started on the other titles — I mean, 'Hateful Hate'? Is this supposed
to be a good title just because no one ever used it before? Isn't there, like,
a good reason for the fact that no
one ever used it before?
Three songs break the paralyzed formula.
'Trouble Me', wisely chosen as the other single along with 'Eat For Two', is a
relatively simple and touching fast ballad — not memorable at all, but a light
little «breather» in between all the preaching. 'Dust Bowl', lyrically, is
almost like a sequel to 'Eat For Two', and musically, is full of beautiful
interlocking jangly folk lines. And for the coda ('Jubilee'), they enlist a
small string section to deliver a six-minute long chamber piece, also not
particularly memorable, original, or even good,
but... different at least.
Not that it changes things all that much. In
strict accordance with the band's agenda, they just give you an attitude-filled
diary of world events — Natalie Merchant wants to be your conscience, not your
entertainment. Obviously, good music under such conditions can only be produced
in a somewhat accidental manner. BUT! — and I do mean but! — before writing it all off, you'd better check it out with
your conscience first. Who knows, you might find some parts of it, or even all
of it, misplaced somewhere. If so, I reverse my judgement, Blind Man's Zoo is a damn fine record to help one grow back the
damaged parts.
(There is also a great recipé to help
you confound your friends and befuddle your enemies — put Blind Man's Zoo together with Ted Nugent's Love Grenade on one playlist and hit shuffle. Nuclear reaction
guaranteed). Thumbs
down, by the way, but I guess that was already understood.
OUR TIME IN EDEN (1992)
1) Noah's Dove; 2) These Are Days; 3) Eden;
4) Few And Far Between;
5) Stockton Gala Days;
6) Gold Rush Brides; 7) Jezebel; 8) How You've Grown; 9) Candy Everybody Wants;
10) Tolerance; 11) Circle Dream; 12) If You Intend; 13) I'm Not The Man.
Merchant's last studio album with the Maniacs
is a bit of an enigma. In all respects, it feels terribly, almost
excruciatingly mature. Earlier on, you could justify your bad attitude towards
the band by laughing at the simplistic grey melodies, or poking fun at the
preachy lyrics, or ironically dismissing Natalie's half-spoken poetry-bent
vocals. Our Time In Eden is hardly
more enjoyable than any other of their albums — same old problems all over the
place — but it's their one record that I, for one, find absolutely impossible
to laugh off.
Virtually no traces left here of the once bouncy,
pop-rock-driven band that liked to deliver a socially conscious message like a
bunch of frenzied schoolchildren. Even the fast tempos are driven mostly
through somber moods, with the guitarists laying on echoes, low keyboard notes
high up in the mix, and Merchant, for most of the time, assuming a wisened-up
world-weary tone. Furthermore, the lyrics have taken a turn for the
disturbingly personal, and even the socially conscious bits are veiled. 'I'm
Not The Man' is by far the only song here that usually receives a literal
interpretation — a song about an unjustly jailed and executed person — but it
does not really come across as anything other than just another metaphor, a
comparison of her own inner tribulations with the feelings of an I'm-not-the-man
kind of person.
Also, growth and development abound as the
band, once again, brings in a swarm of outside musicians to beef up the sound
(including Merchant's later replacement, Mary Ramsey, on violin), and even goes
for an R'n'B-type approach, with prominent horns and dance rhythms, on two of
the tracks ('Few And Far Between' and 'Candy Everybody Wants' — still dark dance tunes, if you ask me), which
they were smart enough to release as singles, because, heck, even nerdy college
students that form the bulk of this band's audience like to move it sometimes.
Nothing, however, changes the golden rule: each
single 10,000 Maniacs album sounds pretty, but contains only one or two truly
treasurable songs surrounded by the Idea of Prettiness (And Depth), unattached
to a material object. Here, the only two songs I could ever latch on were
'Stockton Gala Days', a grand nostalgic trip to somewhere highlighted by a
very special enunciation of the line "...you'll never know!" (well,
if you say so); and the above-mentioned 'I'm Not The Man', which was fortunate
enough to combine Merchant's somber singing with an equally somber supporting
line from a bassoon — almost spine-tingling, in a way, if you manage to set
your spine in the proper tingle-ready position. Everything else, even the
dance tunes, just spins around. Intelligently.
Still, dumb-good or dumb-bad, I go with a thumbs up,
if only because I may not like this record, but it is the one 10,000 Maniacs record I would like to like. Melodic hooks
aren't everything, after all, and
even if, after a while, Out Of Eden
stops dead in its tracks growing on you, there still lingers some strange,
unexplainable goodness about it — like that neighbor girl with her plainest of
plain faces, simplest of simple clothes, predictable attitudes, humble
disposition, going around every day concentrated on minding her business; most
likely, you'll never propose to her, but you're sure gonna miss her if she
goes. (And I mean this as a musical
metaphor — do not take this as an indirect evaluation of Natalie Merchant's sex
appeal, which is an altogether different matter. Fairly complex, too).
MTV UNPLUGGED (1993)
1) These Are The Days; 2) Eat
For Two; 3) Candy Everybody Wants; 4) I'm Not The Man; 5) Don't Talk; 6) Hey
Jack Kerouac; 7) What's The Matter Here?; 8) Gold Rush Brides; 9) Like The
Weather; 10) Trouble Me; 11) Jezebel; 12) Because The Night; 13)
Stockton Gala Days; 14) Noah's Dove.
In August 1993, Merchant announced her
resignation from 10,000 Maniacs, admittedly because she said she needed more
creative freedom — which must have given a serious confidence boost to the
other band members, considering that the average Joe must have always thought
of the Maniacs as a bunch of backing musicians for Natalie's ego anyway: The
Curse of the Frontwoman Dancing Barefoot.
Generously and wisely, the announcement did not
take place until the recording, a few months earlier, of 10,000 Maniacs' most
satisfying and well-summarizing album — the fact that it took the MTV Unplugged series to trigger it is a
little quirky, but, want it or not, the project did yield quite a few excellent
results, from Eric Clapton to Alice In Chains; and there are few people who got
more lucky out of it than the original Maniacs.
First, the setlist: consistently consistent,
with the band concentrating almost exclusively on their «hookiest» songs (bar
just one or two soporific numbers from Our
Time In Eden, which they did have to promote heavier than the rest, after
all). Use this as your introduction to 10,000 Maniacs and you might find
yourself easily intrigued and steeped in wonder at why I keep dissing all the
studio LPs for lacking interesting ideas. Even the single surprise of the
evening, a cover of Springsteen / Patti Smith's 'Because The Night', adding
nothing eye-opening to the original, does not take anything away either and is
as nicely listenable as everything else.
Second, the setting is very convenient. One
might simply want to package all of the studio originals on a Best-Of, or demand a full-blown
electric concert album instead — one would be wrong, because at heart all of
these guys are folkies, and this is the first time that their sound seems to
have soared in a new fit of inspiration ever since they traded in the sharper
punk-folk style of the early 1980s in favour of blander overproduction of the
second half of the decade. What I mean is — sometimes it is better to go all
the way and prove why the «soft» in
«soft rock» has any real reason to exist, than to try and mask it with
pseudo-rock styles of production. If you're unhip, just come out and say so. MTV Unplugged sort of does, and gets my
respect for it.
Third, the atmosphere sort of works wonders
attenuating the soft, humble charms of Ms. Natasha. This is, after all, her
only official live album with her band, and she sings each song to perfection
without ever trying to stick out with
some on-the-spot vocal gimmick or to spice up the proceedings with lots of
moralistic or simply forced banter (compare Ani DiFranco with her eternal
nerve-wrecking giggle whose only purpose is to tell us «yeah, I do have a sense of humor — a stupid sense of humor, perhaps, but at
least you will leave this show
convinced that I'm not just a man-hating bitch, no matter how much the actual
songs make you all feel inferior»). There's grace and loveliness and humility
and it all compensates for the boredom and monotonousness.
Can't say, however, that I'm a great fan of
this slowed-down, «sensitivized» new reading of 'Eat For Two' — the disturbing
paranoia of the original was a much better message than this suddenly appearing
aura of melancholic tenderness. But the rest of the songs, from the lovingly
crafted guitar hook of 'Like The Weather' to the dark bassoon palette of 'I'm
Not The Man', faithfully carry over all of the original good points, for which
the band recruits lots of supporting musicians (including, once again, Mary
Ramsey, soon to inherit the band from Natalie). Thumbs up without a question — even
Republicans might want to add this to their collection, much as Ms. Merchant
would want to personally remove all of their internal organs and feed them to
Africa's starving children.
LOVE AMONG THE RUINS (1997)
1) Rainy Day; 2) Love Among
The Ruins; 3) Even With My Eyes Closed; 4) Girl On A Train; 5) Green Children;
6) A Room For Everything; 7) More Than This; 8) Big Star; 9) You Won't Find;
10) All That Never Happens; 11) Shining Light; 12) Across The Fields.
Here must it be said that, after leaving the
band in 1986, co-founder Jon Lombardo refocused his attention on a new project
— the neo-folk duo «John & Mary», along with classically trained violinist
Mary Ramsey. With John & Mary regularly opening live sets for the Maniacs,
it was only a matter of time before they started guesting in the studio,
particularly Mary with her violin contributions to Our Time In Eden. And then it was only a matter of time before John
was back in the band — and then along comes Mary, and did she ever want to be a
steady chick... uh, sorry, wrong band.
No matter how hard it were to believe this from
time to time, 10,000 Maniacs were a band,
not a faceless vehicle behind Natalie Merchant's personality — and, by all
means, they were not responsible for her departure, so there could hardly be
any ethical question about their right to carry on. There could be a question of whether they would remain the same old
boring 10,000 Maniacs, or perhaps profit from the occasion by incorporating
elements of grindcore and acid jazz. They did not, and fans were relieved to
still hear the same middle-of-the-road tepidness.
Nevertheless, Mary Ramsey still managed to
bring on huge changes. Politics and social consciousness have been more or
less expurgated from the lyrics and the vibe. From now on, the Maniacs would
be just a folk-rock act — singing light, friendly, comfortable fare about
stars, hearts, shining lights, fields, grasshoppers, and fucking in the barn.
(Okay, that last one is merely surmised).
You want environmental concern and liberal propaganda — off you go to follow
Merchant and her solo endeavours. This band is bound for the music-only train
now.
Not only for this, but also out of some sort of
general disenchantment reviewers generally fell upon Mary Ramsey, condemning
her for lacking the spirit, the fire, the passion, the dedication, the blah
blah blah of Merchant. All of this was true, but hardly a proper pretext for
criticism; Mary is simply different, a quiet, humble, seemingly introvert
performer who, nevertheless, obviously loves this kind of music and has the
proper combination of grace, intelligence, loveliness, and vocal training to be
suited to it. Never ever pretending to possess even a tenth part of Merchant's
rowdy personality, I can still see how it would be possible to like her overall
approach even more, particularly if one cherishes humility in art above
posturing.
The problem with Love Among The Ruins is definitely not Mary Ramsey — it is the ongoing inability of the band to create
music that would rise one hair-width above «pleasant background». 'Rainy Day'
is an A-grade, hopeful kick-starter, mainly because of its clever use of
silence to introduce the vocal hook, but after that, they only come relatively
close with 'Green Children', an epic retelling of an old legend about a pair of
alien children (almost by chance falling upon a fine chord progression in the
chorus), and then with a more than adequate cover of Roxy Music's 'More Than
This' — predictably, they cannot beat the original (it would be impolite
towards the lady to begin comparing her range and strength with that of Bryan
Ferry), but they do not spoil it, either, and, frankly, at this point I'd
rather hear them do lots of covers of good songs than pile up the world's stores
of mediocrity by continuing to write their own ones.
Still, it almost feels cruel to give this new
version of the band a negative rating. With the guitars, violins, and pianos
sounding so nice, and Mary singing so
nice, and the whole vibe being so nice, is it their fault that their
parents forgot to endow them with songwriters' genes? Let us not forget that
there are, on the other side of the globe, tons of great songwriters who could
never even begin to assemble together this kind of a nice sound. Surely there must be something said for niceness. I place this album together
with my ambient Brian Eno collection: the perfect way to rock you to an easy,
pleasant, revitalizing sleep, for about fifty minutes.
THE EARTH PRESSED FLAT (1999)
1) The Earth Pressed Flat; 2)
Ellen; 3) Once A City; 4) Glow; 5) On & On (Mersey Song); 6) Somebody's
Heaven; 7) Cabaret; 8) Beyond The Blue; 9) Smallest Step; 10) In The Quiet
Morning; 11) Time Turns; 12) Hidden In My Heart; 13) Who Knows Where The Time
Goes.
This review will be kept short. Most of the
band's second studio album with Mary Ramsey consists of outtakes from sessions held for their first. Therefore, everything
said about Love Among The Ruins
applies to this album, along with the self-understood warning that these songs
were not seen fit for inclusion by
the Maniacs on an album which, all by itself, was already a typically tepid affair. With that in mind, fans of Mary
Ramsey are welcome to enjoy the songs.
One strangely annoying aspect of this record,
worth a brief mention, is that, starting from track six, the tunes initiate a
continuous run with little in-between-song links eliminating pauses; these
range from absent-minded mandolin plucking to ambient synthesizer landscapes to
even a little bit of goofy rapping on Mary's part. Very annoying in all,
because little bits of silence are sometimes necessary on 10,000 Maniacs
records to be able to tell when one song is over and the next one has begun,
plus it adds a whiff of ambitious conceptuality that is not at all justified by
the material. You can't really turn a third-rate album of second-rate outtakes
into a work of art.
That said, there is some nice echoey picking on
the title track, and 'Once A City' and 'On & On' both have their
stereotypical bits of charm. And the cover of 'Who Knows Where The Time Goes',
in the usual Maniacs fashion, works as a likeable, listenable tribute to an
original whose true heights these guys would not even know where to begin to
scale.
It is almost fortunate that The Earth Pressed Flat became the
Maniacs' last studio album so far: almost, because a good reason behind this
could be the band's realization that the world really did not give a damn about their getting it on — but instead,
it turned out to be Robert Buck's death from liver failure one year later. Not
that the story was over. Various band members still continued to tour and
record occasional live albums as 10,000 Maniacs (in the mid 2000-s, they even
released a couple of them done by a line-up that included singer Oskar Saville
from the Chicago band Rubygrass — and no, don't worry, Oskar Saville is really
a girl), and as of 2011, with Mary Ramsey officially back in the band, rumor
has it that they are planning on a new record — one that, if it does come out,
will probably redefine the meaning of the word «tepid» one more time in its
already cluttered history. I'll let you know.
MUSIC FROM THE MOTION PICTURE (2013)
1) I Don't Love You Too; 2)
When We Walked On Clouds; 3) Gold; 4) Triangles; 5) Live For The Time Of Your
Life; 6) It's A Beautiful Life; 7) Whippoorwill; 8) Fine Line; 9) Tiny Arrows;
10) Downhill; 11) Chautauqua Moon.
Okay, so I promised to let you know, after all,
and yes, our favorite band, Ten Billion Maniacs, are back with a brand new
album, although maybe not even all the fans know of its existence. Yes, three
of the original members (the rhythm section and Dennis Drew on keyboards) still
remain, and, after a long period of absence, Mary Ramsey is back, too. The
late Robert Buck has been replaced by Jeff Erickson, who not only handles the
guitar duties, but also sings lead vocals on a couple of numbers — is that a
first for the band or what?
Those who actually liked Love Among The Ruins, the band's friendly, but uninspired attempt
at carrying on after the loss of Merchant, will be pleased to know that very
little has changed — as of the early 2010s, guess what? they are still busy writing and recording
friendly, but uninspired music. Mary Ramsey sounds warm and lovable, more like
a young happy mother cuddling her child than a moody, insecure, guilt-ridden
young girl; and her violin always stays in tune with her vocals. The guitars
and keyboards breathe with folksy life, never subject to overproduction or
encumbered with smart modern sound effects. Even Dennis Drew, at liberty to do
what he wants, gets a lead vocal on the somberly waltzing ʽDownhillʼ,
and it's a likable middle-aged «croak» (or «quack»?) that fits the song's mood
perfectly. So?..
So the only problem is that, just like before,
the individual songs never stick. Every second is more or less equally «pretty»
as every next or preceding one, and if this band never «tore it up» when it was
young, why should we even expect that it could add more dynamism when it got
old? The overall genteel atmosphere knocks on your door with the opening
seconds of ʽI Don't Love You Tooʼ (a message expressed by Ramsey with
the outmost courteousness and gallantry) and fizzles away with the closing
seconds of ʽChautaqua Moonʼ (a little chamber chat between violin and
viola, probably overdubbed by Mary as she is credited for both). And rarely
shifts to anything else, and practically never congeals into any memorable
hooks.
On ʽIt's A Beautiful Lifeʼ, they
dabble in a bit of experimentation, changing from folk-pop to reggae-pop, while
the lyrics of the song present a slightly reworked version of ʽBig Rock
Candy Mountainʼ. They pull it off without embarrassment, but reggae is a
limiting form by itself, and they have no time or strength to do anything
«special» with it other than offering a brief repose from the more standard
formula. Other than that, I think I could only loosely single out ʽWhen We
Walked On Cloudsʼ, with its focus on fast acoustic picking, «cloudy» organ
background, and dreamy nostalgic singing, as a humble highlight that produces a
«deeper» feeling than anything else on the album. But only loosely.
That said, I reiterate that the band still
sounds adorable, and, at any rate, more enamored of and more sensitive towards
this kind of music than most indie bands of the 21st century trying out this
pastoral, idyllic, inoffensive brand of folk-rock. It might, indeed, be even
better than Love Among The Ruins,
since the band has aged and wisened up, and 10,000 Maniacs always tried to
sound like they were «so much older then», and now they're sort of getting
adequate, even if they do it at the expense of a near-total loss of songwriting
skill. (Okay, I'm just beginning to get something
back from the ringing electric riffs of ʽWhippoorwhillʼ... but it's
such a thin, «wimpy» sound, it's going to take a while to woo these ears).
Anyway, no thumbs up, no thumbs down — strictly
for the fans, but if you're a fan, seek it out while there still remains a
micro-blip of it on the news radar. And that title: it's almost as if they knew they were releasing an album
designed strictly for background listening!
TWICE TOLD TALES (2015)
1) Lady Mary Ramsey; 2) The
Song Of Wandering Aengus; 3) She Moved Through The Fair; 4) Dark Eyed Sailor;
5) Misty Moisty Morning; 6) Bonny May; 7) Canadee-I-O; 8) Do You Love An
Apple?; 9) Greenwood Sidey; 10) Carrickfergus; 11) Death Of Queen Jane.
As of 2015, it's officially alive — and no,
it's not «Mary Ramsey and friends», it is still
a more or less authentic version of the 10,000 Maniacs, with the original
keyboardist, bassist, and drummer still loyally in place, and even John
Lombardo making an appearance as the protective husband and the keeper of the flame, all in one. The only problem is that
this time, they did not bother to compose any original material at all;
instead, the idea is to really put
the old «folk» back into «rock» and come out with an album of nothing but old
folk tunes — an idea that both Natalie Merchant and the late Peter Buck would
probably have abhorred. But it is 2015,
and chances are that even if they manage to come up with another ʽDon't
Talkʼ or ʽNoah's Doveʼ, nobody will give much of a damn anyway;
so why, indeed, can't they just relax and be playful?
Actually, it's a nice little record. Not much
to speak of: the arrangements are very straightforward and conventionally
accessible — bass, drums, acoustic and soft electric guitars, some strings and
keyboards, strictly middle of the road: no odd touches of electronica, and no
attempts at strict acoustic-only «authenticity». It just sounds good, and Mary Ramsey's vocals still
sound young and sweet, despite her recently pushing 50. Of course, it's also
the kind of record that has already been produced countless times — more like Tales Told To Infinity, if you ask me —
but if this material is handled with enough love and depth, well, it won't hurt
to enjoy the old stuff once more in a very slightly different reading.
Oddities include the record being bookmarked by
two strings-only performances of the instrumental ʽLady Mary Ramseyʼ
(amazing that, with a Mary Ramsey actually in the band, they never tried this
stunt before!) and an accappella rendition of Yeats' ʽThe Song Of
Wandering Aengusʼ, which sort of acts as a promotional introduction to our
ageless national treasures, like a foreword or something. There the oddities
end, and you get your predictable selection of Saxon, Irish, and Scottish
ditties, shanties, canticles, and an occasional murder ballad thrown in.
I do reiterate that everything sounds nice, and
they even put some effort in the arrangements — for instance, ʽShe Moved
Through The Fairʼ gets a fairly complex set of overdubs and even a vaguely
psychedelic guitar solo. The worst thing about the record is probably its album
cover, cheesy to the point where you'd have to be a very cartoonish stereotype
of a folk enthusiast to even want to pick up a CD like that at your local
store; I do give my word that the music is much more rewarding than the album
art would make it seem. However, none of the songs deserve individual comments —
even Loreena McKennitt injects more personality into ʽCarrickfergusʼ
than Mary Ramsey and 10,000 Maniacs, who, by the way, should really have
changed their name to «10,000 Diligent, Respectful, Bookish Folkies» before
giving us something like that.
Still, it's somehow nice to know that the band
still has enough fans to support them, as the album was funded through
PledgeMusic and released on an independent label — although why it feels nice, I'm not able to
answer even to myself. I mean, when Jon Bon Jovi gets old and tired and washed
up and penniless and starts appealing to fans on PledgeMusic, will that feel nice, too? Shouldn't that kind
of compassion be reserved for people who still have something left to say even
when long past their prime?.. Ah well, anyway, that would be taking it too
seriously. All I know is, this record generated a decent vibe for fifty
minutes, then sank into the swamp, but maybe it still made me a better man in
the process; who really knows?
PLAYING FAVORITES (2016)
1) What's The Matter Here?; 2)
Like The Weather; 3) Love Among The Ruins; 4) Trouble Me; 5) More Than This; 6)
Can't Ignore The Train; 7) Stockton Gala Days; 8) Because The Night; 9) Rainy
Day; 10) Candy Everybody Wants; 11) My Sister Rose; 12) Hey Jack Kerouac; 13)
These Are Days; 14) My Mother The War.
Apparently, the performance used for this live
album was recorded prior to Twice Told
Tales (on September 13, 2014, at an arts center in Jamestown), but they
held off releasing the recording for almost two years for some reason. This is
not the first live album for the band — besides the obvious Unplugged, there is also an obscure
2006 release (only sold on tour) Live
Twenty-Five, commemorating the band's jubilee and featuring short-term
lead vocalist Oskar Saville. This one, however, seems to be more widely
distributed, and besides, it features no less than four original members of the
band — everybody except for Merchant and the deceased Robert Buck is present,
making the record almost, you know... legitimate.
The kick is that everything sounds very nice.
They run through their own minor hits and classics without any glitches
whatsoever — new lead guitarist Jeff Erickson is respectful of Robert Buck's
original style, and the extra guest musicians (a brass section, a cellist, and
an additional backing singer) flesh out their more musically ambitious songs,
like ʽCandy Everybody Wantsʼ, to near-perfection. Of course,
considering how thoroughly the tracks have been cleansed of any signs of
audience participation (they even choose the fade-in, fade-out principle to
present the material, with no in-between-songs banter whatsoever), the problem
is that most of the performances just faithfully reproduce studio originals.
But then again, considering that most of us probably have serious trouble
remembering how any of those 10,000
Maniacs hits used to go, I guess this isn't too much of a crime, considering
how technically smooth the performances are.
And then, of course, this is the only live
album by the 10,000 Maniacs where you get to hear Natalie Merchant songs
performed by Mary Ramsey — well worth hearing at least out of sheer curiosity.
(They also do three tunes from Love
Among The Ruins, but you can tell that, as much as they love Mary as a
bandmate, the band's post-Merchant musical output is not exactly bursting with
«favorites»). All her life, Merchant was a crusader, unlike Ramsey, who seems
more like the quiet, earthy, folk-loving type; so it is interesting to hear her
add a touch of that earthiness to the band's «socially troubled» classics, and
I would not hasten to declare her performances less touching or less tense than
Merchant's just because her voice is lower or because her phrasing is a tad
slower. These are not her songs, but she still does them a special kind of
justice.
The only surprise on the record is the final
track: not only do they drastically rearrange ʽMy Mother The Warʼ,
making it sound much more like modern bombastic indie rock à la Arcade Fire or British Sea Power rather than typical
New Wave pop-rock from the early Eighties that it used to be, but they also
invite returning founding member John Lombardo to sing on it — probably not a
very good decision, because the man cannot sing worth a broken nickel, but a
touching gesture all the same. Actually, the entire album is a touching
gesture: if you really like the old 10,000 Maniacs classics (enough to keep on
relistening to them on a regular basis), I heartily recommend it as a tasteful
diversion from the usual routine. If you think they are just all right, though,
I doubt that switching from Merchant to Ramsey will work wonders in terms of
your love, recognition, and support.
ADDENDA:
CAMPFIRE SONGS:
THE POPULAR, OBSCURE & UNKNOWN RECORDINGS (2004)
CD I: 1) Planned Obsolescence;
2) My Mother The War; 3) Tension; 4) Scorpio Rising; 5) Like The Weather; 6) Don't
Talk; 7) What's The Matter Here?; 8) Hey Jack Kerouac; 9) Verdi Cries; 10) Trouble
Me; 11) Poison In The Well; 12) You Happy Puppet; 13) Eat For Two; 14) Stockton
Gala Days; 15) Candy Everybody Wants; 16) These Are Days; 17) Because The Night;
CD II: 1) Poppy Selling Man; 2) Can't Ignore The Train (demo); 3) Peace
Train; 4) Wildwood Flower; 5) Hello In There; 6) To Sir With Love; 7) Everyday
Is Like Sunday; 8) These Days; 9) Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You; 10)
Starman; 11) Let The Mystery Be; 12) Noah's Dove (demo); 13) Circle Dream (alternate
lyrics demo); 14) Eden (alternate lyrics demo).
Not to be confused with the Animal Collective
album of the same name — which, odd enough, had only just come out one year earlier — this
is a 2-CD compilation of assorted 10,000 Maniacs stuff, compiled in strict
accordance with the common and abominable principle: «layman gets one half, fan
man gets one half, tax man gets to laugh». Meaning, of course, that each of the
ten thousand maniac admirers of the band, before buying this, would do better
to find an average Joe on the street and convince him to split the deal in
half. Only that-a way will everybody be happy. One CD of greatest hits, one CD
of obscure demos and outtakes. How else does one manage?
That said, if
the split does not happen, the average Joe may still remain pleased, and the
average maniac will be comforted by the fact that the second disc is actually
very strong — much stronger, in fact, than any average original LP by the band.
Both CDs are quite comparable in quality, so that, without any additional
information, I doubt that one will be easily able to tell which of the
recordings are «popular» and which ones are «obscure».
There is a
simple reason behind this, though: the absolute majority of the songs on disc 2
are cover versions, and the Maniacs had always been a credible, trustworthy
cover band, specializing in doing justice to source material without ever
threatening to improve upon it. Even when they are experimenting — for
instance, going wildly Jamaican on David Bowie's 'Starman' — they still sound
passionately nice, and when they are not and are just going for the goods, they
sound stately and gracious, e. g. 'These Days', which Merchant interprets along
the same Gothic lines as Nico used to, but her voice will, of course, be always
more palatable to everyone who feels uneasy about Nico's odd-accented iciness.
Equally fine are the covers of John Prine, Morrisey and Tom Waits, and there is
even a wild two-minute turkey chase fiddle romp as the band rip their way
through the Carter Family's 'Wildwood Flower'. Finally, their faith in Cat
Stevens is reinstated, as the original cover version of 'Peace Train' once
again makes its way onto a 10,000 Maniacs album. Someone just got smarter!
Add to this a
couple fun collaborations (a live version of 'To Sir, With Love' with a
sentimental duet between Merchant and Michael Stipe, and another duet with David
Byrne on Iris DeMent's 'Let The Mystery Be') as well as one excellent original
outtake (Merchant's 'Poppy Selling Man', driven by the finest organ riff these
guys ever came up with; not the tiniest clue as to what made them keep the song
in the vaults all those years), and it really makes you wonder how come they
missed their chance at becoming America's hottest shit when they had so much
going for them. They could even write
good songs — they... sort of... chose
not to.
Anyway, if only
the first CD were to be replaced with Unplugged,
the resulting package would really
make for a killer collection of non-overlapping material. On the other hand, if
you already know that one album from the Maniacs is your uncrossable threshold,
go for Campfire Songs, and do not be
afraid of the B-sides and outtakes. Some may say that Natalie Merchant was born
into this world to sing 'My Mother The War' and 'Can't Ignore The Train'; I say
that she might have equally well been
born to remind us of the fine qualities of Cat Stevens, Nico, and John Prine,
even if it has to be done through the prism of her own ego. I don't think
there's anything wrong with that, really. Thumbs up.
THE LEXICON OF LOVE (1982)
1) Show Me; 2) Poison Arrow; 3) Many
Happy Returns; 4) Tears
Are Not Enough; 5) Valentines Day; 6) The Look Of Love; 7) Date Stamp; 8) All Of My Heart; 9) 4
Ever 2 Gether; 10) The Look Of Love (part 4).
History has commanded that ABC remain in it
represented exclusively by their first album: a cruel decision, considering
that The Lexicon Of Love is just as
much owned by the band's production team as it is by its own songwriting and
performing. ABC were certainly not a «manufactured» outfit: guitarist Mark
White and sax player Stephen Singleton play their own instruments, and play
them fine, lead vocalist Martin Fry howls, wails, and croons in his own voice,
and all of the songs are completely self-written. But the real reason why The Lexicon Of Love became huge in
1982, and continues to remain huge in the brains of all retrospectivists up to
this day, has nothing to do with the band.
Because, essentially, The Lexicon Of Love is the album that created The Art Of Noise:
assigned to the production guidance of Trevor Horn, ABC soon found their songs
tampered with and embellished by about half a dozen extra musicians, including
Anne Dudley, who was put in charge of the orchestration, and J. J. Jeczalik,
responsible for most of the keyboard programming. This was the first time Horn,
Dudley, and Jeczalik worked together, and they liked it so much they decided
that, next time around, they would be
changing history on their own, without no nerdy pop kids spoiling their fun
with silly danceable love songs.
Of course, if you're a pop kind of person
rather than a freaky avantgardiste, The
Lexicon Of Love, to you, will be the best Art Of Noise album that Art Of
Noise never made. I cannot help (predictably) mentioning, though, that, like
most of the popular stuff made in the 1980s, it is unpleasantly dated. The
keyboards, more often than not, sound just like the cheap, lifeless,
hollow-ringtone stuff that they should
sound like; and the programmed drum machines are totally in line with the
whole «let's cut down on budget expenses by firing the drummer» ideology of the
time (ironically, ABC still had a
real drummer, David Palmer, and he was pretty damn good when they actually let
him drum).
Discount that time-related factor, though, and The Lexicon Of Love will probably
appear to you exactly as the unquestionable masterpiece that most critics have
proclaimed it to be. Nine well-written songs (plus one reprise), each dominated
by at least one catchy vocal chorus/hook, but never forgetting about real meat
value when it comes to instrumentation either: there are enough funky
basslines, quirky guitar riffs, and mesmerizing sax patterns to fill out a
minor band's entire career. Meanwhile, Horn and Co. ensure that the background
be properly strewn with as many overdubs as it takes to instigate a symphonic
feeling, but never too many so as not
to drown any of the songs' original attitudes. After all, this is supposed to
be «the lexicon of love», not «the lexicon of cool studio tricks».
The difference
it takes is striking when you compare the original single release of 'Tears Are
Not Enough', produced by Steve Brown, with the Horn team re-recording: from the
very first seconds, the chicken-scratchy guitar rings out as if it were trying
to establish itself as an art form, rather than simply mumbling quietly in the
background, allowing you to dance to it and nothing more. This pushes the disco
form much further than, say, Giorgio Moroder's style, further away from the
hunting territory of «body music» and more into the realm of the «anything can
happen» spirit. But, of course, technically it's still dance music.
The hit singles
— 'Poison Arrow', 'The Look Of Love', 'All Of My Heart' — were all deserved,
but really, any of these songs would
do as a hit single, despite the fact that the album is sometimes described as
«conceptual». Obviously, when you give that kind of a title to your record,
people will expect to see an actual «lexicon» — for instance, each song
describing a separate kind of love-related emotion. But even if that were so,
each of these emotional tugs would still work on its own. In this respect, it
is Martin Fry's personal achievement that the band pulls it off: frequent
comparisons with Bryan Ferry are an exaggeration (Fry never had the range,
smoothness, or slickness of Mr. Lounge Rocker; it is really the visual style of
his performance that is primarily responsible for the comparison), but he has
enough intelligence, both in his lyrics and his voice, to perform all of his
relatively simple, and potentially quite banal, duties well in style.
A firm advice
is to go for the recent 2-CD «deluxe» edition of the album. Not only does it
throw on such tasty outtakes as a whole whoppin' big 'Overture' (featuring
Dudley's orchestrated renditions of each of the album's songs, unfortunately,
dropped off the original album except for a few opening bars at the beginning
of 'Show Me') and a hilarious eight-minute version of the disco rave-up
'Alphabet Soup' (showcasing the impressive instrumental skills of each of the band's
members); the real highlight is a complete live performance at the Hammersmith
Odeon in November 1982, with pretty much the entire album reproduced. You'd
think it'd suck without the Art of Noise to lend a helping hand, but it does
not: on the contrary, you get to hear a live, fresh, young, aggressive sound,
with real crunchy drumming throughout
to compensate for the lack of studio trickery. If the original release
understandably gets a heart-felt, mind-endorsed thumbs up, the reissue is reason
enough to grow an extra pair of thumbs.
BEAUTY STAB (1983)
1) That Was Then But This Is Now;
2) Love's A Dangerous Language; 3) If I Ever Thought You'd Be Lonely; 4) Power
Of Persuasion; 5) Beauty Stab; 6) By Default By Design; 7) Hey Citizen!; 8)
King Money; 9) Bite The Hand; 10) Unzip; 11) S.O.S.; 12) United
Kingdom.
A classic case of «sophomore slump». Or,
perhaps, not so classic. Normally, «disastrous second time» usually means that
the band had spent a lot of time polishing their act and practicing their art
of songwriting, then unloading its full potential with the debut record — and
then finding out, much to their surprise, that they have to make a second LP
already the next year, without having the time or the strength to write some
equally good material.
Beauty
Stab suffers from a different
problem. The songwriting is pretty much at the same level: handy-dandy guy
Martin Fry and his friends are churning out brisky New Wave anthems at a very
regular rate. However, the Horn/Dudley production team was already busy
establishing itself as The Art Of Noise; only Gary Langan was left behind to
help them put out the record, and it does not look as if he cared all that much
about arrangement flourishes.
Also, there seems to have been more emphasis on
coming across as a «rock» band this time. To that end, the band cuts down on
the keyboards (a bit) and compensates in the way of guitars (a lot). Were they
funky guitars, like the way they sound on Lexicon
Of Love, it would have been one thing; but, clearly, they felt some sort of
need to distance themselves from formulaic dance rhythms (maybe they'd just
caught on to the idea that disco sucks), and they are mostly «hard rock
guitars», of the ugly, over-processed, Eighties kind. Expectedly, the more they
strive towards «authenticity», the more fake it all sounds.
The public
never went wild over this «anti-dance stance» foolishly taken up by ABC in the
year of 'Flashdance... What A Feeling', and from there onwards the band's
commercial and critical reputation never truly recovered (although both did go
one notch up with their next record). Still, the songs are mostly decent. ABC's
powers of hook-making still rate highly: the post-pause sax riff of 'That Was
Then But This Is Now' gives the song a stern, crunchy, decisive character that
agrees well with its title; 'Unzip' is a delightfully sleazy call for sexual
liberation ("she's vegetarian except when it comes to sex" is one
hell of an immortal line), with its mesmerizing bassline and endless background
mantraic repetition of the chorus almost work as a subconscious call to lose
your virginity (and many did, I bet); and the same bass also transforms 'If I
Ever Thought You'd Be Lonely' from a boring ballad into a little bit of a
musical thriller.
Best of the
bunch may be 'Bite The Hand', which sounds like a near-perfect cross between
the style of Lexicon and this newly
established «synth-rock» idiom: starting out with disco-style orchestration
and syncopated bass, it eventually adds near-Sabbath heavy metal guitar which
flows in and out of the ravaging instrumentation, and does so quite
harmoniously. 'Bite The Hand' is a «socially conscious» song, as are many
others on here — perhaps Fry got sick of all the Bryan Ferry comparisons and
intentionally decided to move into territory that Bryan would never touch with
a ten-foot pole. Not that it matters, though: atmospherically, the «ominous» in
his socially relevant songs is indistinguishable from the «ominous» in his love
tunes, and 'Bite The Hand' could just as easily be about a bitchy vamp as it is
about the upcoming apocalypse.
Thumbs up for the songwriting; but if Lexicon Of Love has dated like a vintage
Charlie Chaplin movie, Beauty Stab
is more like some third-rate Douglas Fairbanks picture — still entertaining,
amusing, and pleasing if you really feel like it, but not worth hunting for
unless you have a strong penchant for Ferry/Fry-style personalities.
HOW TO BE A ZILLIONAIRE (1985)
1) Fear Of The World; 2) Be Near Me; 3) Vanity Kills; 4) Ocean Blue; 5) 15 Storey Halo; 6) A To
Z; 7) How To Be A
Millionaire; 8) Tower
Of London; 9) So Hip It Hurts; 10) Between You & Me.
One thing you cannot deny about early ABC is
that these guys never intended to settle on a formula. Lexicon Of Love was unrepeatable anyway, and Beauty Stab did not work well enough to establish them as a rock
band with synthesizers; thus, on their third album they threw away all of the
«rock» elements — together with half of the band members — but kept the
synthesizers in order to try out a new image, that of a trans-hip, meta-pop
team that would subtly ridicule the excesses of the decade (which, by 1985,
had already shown all of the warts and scars on its glossy face) by fully
embracing them.
Fry and Mark White are responsible for all the
songs and arrangements, with minor external participation from a couple of
freaky art-world characters, such as David Yarritu and «Eden», a.k.a. Fiona
Russell-Powell; in normal life, both functioned as musical journalists and
photographers, but, as the clock struck twelve, mutated into epatage-crazed
«beings». Their contributions to the actual record consist of little other than
an occasional bit of spoken voice overdub or record scratching (rumor has it
that even Fiona's infamous self-presentation on 'A To Z' — "Hi, I'm Eden,
I want you to kiss my snatch" — was recorded not by herself, but by Fry,
who used a simple voice-altering device; of course, that may have been one of
Fiona's later inventions), but visually, they were employed by Fry and White as
a pair of grotesque mannequins that emphasized the band's new stage show in a
novel manner.
Not that it helped their sinking popularity in
any way; in the UK, the album sold even less than Beauty Stab, and the only single that managed to crack the Top 40
was 'Be Near Me', a danceable ballad whose one-finger-on-the-keyboard melody
is indeed quite difficult to get out of your head — but it is in no way typical
of the album (and, in fact, isn't even its best ballad; that honor should
arguably go to 'Ocean Blue', blessed with an excellent jazz-fusion bass part
that really had no business being there, but, as it is, turns the song from
routine junk into something treasurable).
What is
typical of it is a set of jumpy, paranoid, and overtly sarcastic
«synth-boppers» — 'Vanity Kills', '15 Storey Halo', 'Tower Of London', the
title track — all of them light, trashy, catchy, and, overall, tons of fun,
because it is all but impossible to take them «seriously». You do have to lend
your ear to the lyrics from time to time, or else you could mistake this clump
of annoyingly clever kitsch for a half-witted attempt to get in with the times
and win over new waves of synthesizer-happy idiots who'd be glad to dance to anything
as long as it's got a beat at all, or
as long as it's got a mind-numbing repetitive vocal hook like the "scoobey-doo-ba"
refrain in 'Tower Of London', which is really, above all, a send-up of «cool
people»'s love for chic places.
It is quite telling, one might argue, that,
although the lead-in number reasserts Leibniz in that "We are living in
the best of all possible worlds" and the chorus goes "Fear of the
world — No fear, no fear of the world!", the title of the song is still 'Fear
Of The World' rather than the expected 'No Fear Of The World': on paper, the
tune optimistically tells you to battle and overcome your troubles, but in
reality, there is grim sarcasm oozing out of every pore. All of which makes How To Be... an excellent case study of
the epoch — and could make it a mini-masterpiece, if only the instrumentation
were not so horrendously dated.
All of these beats, synth rhythms, cheap-sex
backing vocals, everything needed to
be done differently, if only Fry and White could look just a little ahead of
their time; today, it makes no sense putting the album on for a friend and saying
«how about me introducing you to a real smart record from 1985?» — most people
just wouldn't understand. Thumbs up for the concept and the hooks, but
clearly a thumbs down, in retrospect, at least, for execution.
ALPHABET CITY (1987)
1) Avenue A; 2) When Smokey Sings; 3) The Night You Murdered Love;
4) Think Again; 5) Rage And Then Regret; 6) Ark-Angel; 7) King Without A
Crown; 8) Bad Blood; 9) Jealous Lover; 10) One Day; 11) Avenue Z.
After a two-year hiatus during which Fry was
treated from Hodgkin's disease (a rather serious type of cancer, actually,
which he was lucky to survive), ABC once again split their fans with an album that
some thought to be their most boring and irrelevant so far, and others lauded
as the only slightly inferior, long-expected sequel to Lexicon Of Love.
Dropping most of the goofiness, sarcasm, social
critique (not too good), but dropping also the ornamental duo of «Eden» and
Yarritu (pretty damn good compensation), Mark and Martin turn to Chic veteran
Bernard Edwards for guidance, and record a slick, strictly commercial, but not
altogether insubstantial set. I mean, personally, I hate bad or even average
synth-pop with a vengeance, on an animal level, but I do not have any
seriously negative feelings for Alphabet
City at all. It really must have something to do with Fry's personality,
because the arrangements are quite sterile (despite a welcome return from Anne
Dudley to arrange some strings for a couple of numbers), and none of the
humor, be it brilliant or annoying, of Zillionaire
is to be found.
The real big deal are the hit singles. 'When
Smokey Sings' is one of the decade's finest exercises in rose-colored glasses
production: as silly as the chorus line "When Smokey sings, I hear violins"
may sound, it is perfect in the context of this really silly, happy, but,
somehow, quite intelligent tribute to the world of R'n'B (not only Smokey, but
"Marvin", "James", "Sly", "Luther" are
mentioned as well). And it is certainly a better song than whatever Smokey was
singing at the time — I'd like to
think that Fry is relying more on his childhood memories here than on an accidental
glance at Smokie on some late-Eighties TV show.
Meanwhile, 'The Night You Murdered Love' and
'King Without A Crown' return us to more familiar territory, two similar, but
equally memorable and convincing breakup tales, each based on a terrific bass
groove and at least two different vocal hooks. 'The Night...', in particular,
is structured like a well-calculated series of vocal blows, each one landing
heavier than the former — as generic as the subject matter is, Fry's singing
on it almost deserves a thorough note-for-note study from a psychological point
of view. Not to be overlooked is Howie Casey's geometric wonder of a saxophone
solo part, either (for the record, Howie Casey is quite a notorious session
player in England; it is his sound you hear on Paul McCartney's 'Jet', for
instance).
The non-singles are a lesser breed, and usually
come across as paler recreations of the singles, with limper grooves and
wobblier hooks. 'Bad Blood' is sometimes listed as a highlight of the LP, but
I'm not sure about that: it just takes on a slightly more solemn, knitted-brow
attitude than the rest, sacrificing tightness of groove for that purpose. 'One
Day', however, with Dudley's strings guiding it as if it were some sort of
Ravellian piece, is a fine, stately conclusion, breaking away from the basic
synth-pop formula.
Altogether, Alphabet City should be commended: not everyone, after slipping
into shock/goof mode with a post-modernist flavor, can return to «romantically
serious» (in an Eighties dance style, no less!) and make it sound attractive
once again, rather than end up with an embarrassing flop on one's hands. For
its period of time, with its type of sound, against its superficial attractions,
it's almost a masterpiece, even if nothing but the singles and 'One Day' really
holds up after all these years. Thumbs up.
UP (1989)
1) Never More Than Now; 2) The
Real Thing; 3) One Better World; 4) Where Is The Heaven; 5) The Greatest Love
Of All; 6) North; 7) I'm In Love With You; 8) Paper Thin.
Well, there was every chance it would come to
this, so why should we be angry at all? Toying with electronic dance-pop is
about as risky as living in a «bawdy house» with no knowledge of «barrier
devices», if you get my meaning; you're bound to catch something, sooner or later. On Up,
ABC decided to go one step further about modernizing their sound, bringing in elements
of house — which could only mean one
thing: the boys were no longer cutting edge at all, and, instead of coming to
terms with it and continuing to live out their own dream, embarked on a pathetic
recreation of somebody else's.
These here songs still have something ABC-ish
about them, occasionally, but for the most part, it's just empty, lengthy,
excruciatingly boring exploitation of a so-so dance groove. Forget about Anne
Dudley's orchestration or Trevor Horn's quirky arrangements: even the return of
«Eden» would have made Up a little
less bland than it is. Worst of all is the dissipation of Fry's personal magic
and charm, as the tri-unity of lyricist, singer and lady's man turns transparent
against the background of beats, beats, beats and pretty much nothing else.
'One Better World' was certainly the band's
most disappointing single release so far: the artistic content of the song laps
at zero level, as the only thing it does is stimulate the wish to jump up and
down in the utmost happy stupidity at the perspective of, one day, getting to
live in "one better world", where "underneath the moon we are
all the same" (why the moon, we
never get to know; supposedly the song was to become the International Werewolf
Anthem, but they couldn't quite understand where to mix in the howling
effects).
If the other songs are slightly less yucky
kiddie-happy, this does not mean they are in any way more deserving. Everything
sounds plastic and silly, even stuff like 'Never More Than Now', which may be
the only salvageable track here because of a classy saxophone arrangement and
the only musical idea on the album which I'd call great — a hot, swinging jazz
piano solo in the instrumental part, the only short moment during which Up comes alive. Well, not quite: if you
have the patience to wait for it, the closing number 'Paper Thin' is somewhat
of a reminder of what it was that used to make ABC into ABC, with less emphasis
on dance-dance-dance, dumb falsettos and one-finger-on-a-keyboard melodies and
more on Fry's decadent-critical personality.
Even so, it did not need to drag on for six
minutes; it is way to "paper thin" indeed to deserve that length. And
neither of the two songs are respectable enough to justify the album title —
this is ever so much a thumbs down record rather than a thumbs Up one.
ABRACADABRA (1991)
1) Love Conquers All; 2)
Unlock The Secrets Of Your Heart; 3) Answered Prayer; 4) Spellbound; 5) Say It;
6) Welcome To The Real World; 7) Satori; 8) All That Matters; 9) This Must Be
Magic.
The sea horse on the album cover is just about
the best thing about this album, if you favour exotic life forms in the first
place. As for the music — there is hardly anything exotic about these songs.
The duo's move to EMI accomplished nothing whatsoever, except providing them
with one more kind chance to prove their usefulness in the post-New Wave era,
and, accordingly, they blew it one more time.
Just like Up,
this is a personality-deprived, instantly forgettable collection of dance
tunes, not all of them entirely hopeless, but all of them eventually merging
into a single mass of similar «modern R'n'B» grooves. One of the singles, 'Say
It', is «innovative» in that it combines a disco bass line with a techno rhythm
— apparently, though, instead of finding a way to multiply two negatives, they
add them up, and the results are predictable.
The music is pretty much non-existent — most of
the «melodies» are just simple synth loops tacked on to drum machines — and
Martin Fry, as a bleak shadow of his former personality, only maybe appears on
one or two of the bleaker songs (the best moment, for me, is the itsy-bitsy
roar he lets out on the chorus of 'Spellbound'; just a tiny thing, but, somehow,
the most notably human moment on the entire record). But generally, the album
strives way too much to be happy, and, as a result, is just cloying, like its
lead single, 'Love Conquers All' (pretty discouraging title for a band who used
to make its reputation with 'Tears Are Not Enough' and 'Poison Arrow').
Arguing about whether Up or Abracadabra should
be considered the absolute low for the band would be a ridiculous activity, so
I will just say that Up, at least,
has 'Never More Than Now' and 'Paper Thin', which I could see gracing an anthology. On the other hand, Abracadabra got the sea horse, so it's
up to you to decide in the end. But an egalitarian and, I believe,
uncontestable thumbs
down for both is in order in any case. Yuck, mainstream Nineties dance
muzak.
SKYSCRAPING (1997)
1) Stranger Things; 2) Ask A
Thousand Times; 3) Skyscraping;
4) Who Can I Turn To; 5) Rolling Sevens; 6) Only The Best Will Do; 7) Love Is
Its Own Reward; 8) Light Years; 9) Seven Day Weekend; 10) Heaven Knows; 11) Faraway.
Six years later, ABC returns once again... as
Martin Fry & A Bunch Of New Faces, confirming the idea that a «rock group»
is driven by an ethereal musical spirit that can inhabit whatever material
body it prefers. Or, if you wish, the idea that a «rock group»'s longevity is
proportional to the degree of egotistic assholishness displayed by whoever was
smart enough to pocket the brand name in the first place.
I believe it's both at the time: on one hand, Skyscraping could just as well be a
Martin Fry solo album, on the other, it is as perfectly ABC-ish as a perfect
ABC album should be. With Mark White disappearing on the horizon, Fry draws in
his old competitor Glenn Gregory (from the synth pop outfit Heaven 17) and
Keith Lowndes, and finally, in a long, long while, offers the world something
decent.
Comparing Skyscraping
to ABC's better albums like Alphabet
City is somewhat useless, since the sound is much less grounded in
electronics. Of all their previous LPs, only Beauty Stab made that much emphasis on guitars and other live
instruments — and Skyscraping is a
much stronger effort. This is not a «label» album; first time in ages, Fry is
not attempting to jump on any bandwagon (having, no doubt, learnt the ugly
lesson of Up and Abracadabra), but is simply writing and
performing fine, solid, hookish, and quite pretty pop-rock material.
The opening track, 'Stranger Things', also
released as one of the singles, is quite typical of the album: if it is up
your alley, there is more of 'em here. Acoustic guitar undergrowth, pianos,
strings, quasi-Mellotron effects in the background, lyrics that wobble between
the sentimental and the anti-social, and a beautiful vocal snare when Fry
throws in a falsetto hook with "It's funny how it used to be...". By
now, he has lowered just about all of the defenses — if 'Stranger Things' is not
a declaration of slavish love to Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry in person, nothing
could ever be — but who cares? At this point, the man is adequate enough to
simply do what he pleases, and if it please him to write Roxy Music-style, why
not? Especially considering that Roxy Music have not been around for fifteen
years.
The title track is a little different, a
conscious nostalgic nod to New Romantic days, but it was another great choice
for a single: catchy, danceable, and utterly charming in its modest escapism.
The mood is later reprised on 'Faraway', a classic case of how to build up an
unforgettable five minutes on a single hook — this time, the chorus line
"you're as faraway as faraway can be", which may seem silly on paper,
but works astonishingly well on the air.
Many of the songs «rock» — in a compressed,
glossy way, as faraway from true rock'n'roll as faraway from true rock'n'roll
can be, but still fun when the melodies are strong, e. g. 'Seven Day Weekend',
which takes the brass brashness of classic T. Rex and mixes it with vocals that
seem to be influenced by 'Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting' (surely
Martin's "seven day, seven day... seven day weekend" must be at least an unconscious homage
to "saturday, saturday... saturday night's alright"). 'Rolling
Sevens' adds threatening wah-wah roar; 'Light Years' adds astral-psychedelic
lite; 'Heaven Knows' is simply first-rate power-pop with no blemishes; and so
on.
Simply put, Skyscraping is one of the 1990's best pop albums from a 1980's
survivor. Why does nobody seem to care? For a simple reason — the world is not
interested in survivors, much less 1980's survivors. Even had there been some
real marketing behind Skyscraping,
with strong MTV rotation and such, chances are nobody would give as much as
half a smile, because, well, we all know — ABC is that bunch of guys who gave
us Lexicon Of Love, and we do not
remember ourselves giving them permission to give us anything else. But take a
good, hard listen to the album, and you will know that, in many ways, this is
the Fryest of all Fry albums that are not Lexicon
Of Love. And when it comes to cool-walking, smooth-talking ladies' men, I'd
rather empathize with Fry at his Fryest than, say, Tom Jones at his Jonesiest.
Thumbs up.
LEXICON OF LIVE (1999)
1) Poison Arrow; 2) Stranger
Things; 3) When Smokey Sings; 4) How To Be A Millionnaire; 5) Be Near Me; 6)
Who Can I Turn To; 7) Show Me; 8) Skyscraping; 9) Rolling Sevens; 10) One
Better World; 11) Tears Are Not Enough; 12) All Of My Heart; 13) The Look Of
Love.
There is obviously so not much to say about
this record that the current Wikipedia entry on it is marvelously laconic, and
very much up to the point: «The Lexicon Of Live is a live album
released by pop group ABC. Although Martin Fry was the only member left, he had
a backing band, and came out in his trademark gold suit». I guess that pretty
much says everything a layman needs to know, but just for the sake of
I-don't-know-what, let's add a few extra details.
Apparently, ABC never toured all that much
while they were still all together, which makes this Skyscraping-era «coming out» with a live album even more of an odd
cash-in. On a video, at least, you could enjoy the gold suit in proper
lighting, but as it is, all you have to do is sit through a bunch of ABC
classics, interspersed with a few selections from Skyscraping, as they are faithfully and professionally reproduced
on stage by Martin and his then-current backing band. It's not as if Fry
sounded too disinterested or anything — he gets all of those songs' original
strengths through without any problems — but neither is he interested in
letting the people experience anything above and beyond these original
strengths.
The setlist is respectable, predictably
concentrating on Lexicon Of Love
material and the most popular hits that followed (ʽWhen Smokey Singsʼ,
etc.), and the disappointing Up/Abracadabra
period is represented only by ʽOne Better Worldʼ, which at least
sounds a little better with real drums, and is also shortened by about a minute
and a half. They also take the best material from Skyscraping, so, on the whole, no complaints in that direction. But
ABC were so much of a studio band in all possible ways and manners that,
paradoxically, only their bad songs
would benefit from a live rearrangement — all the good songs inevitably suffer from poor mixing and lack of studio
gloss that defines the ABC sound.
For reasons of politeness, we do have to thank
the band for being tight, and Fry's backup vocalists for being appropriately
sexy, but a live ABC album simply does not compute, let alone a live ABC album
that only pretends to be an ABC album
(at least it might have been vaguely interesting to witness original member
Mark White play some guitar on stage). I guess you really have to be into gold suits in order to convince yourself to
own it.
TRAFFIC (2008)
1) Sixteen Seconds To Choose;
2) The Very First Time; 3) Ride; 4) Love Is Strong; 5) Caroline; 6) Life Shapes
You; 7) One Way Traffic; 8) Way Back When; 9) Validation; 10) Lose Yourself;
11) Fugitives; 12) Minus Love.
The ABC anabasis continues into the 21st
century with the help of VH1's Bands
Reunited, a Mephistophelian show that tried to bribe former bands into
reuniting, but, for the most part, only succeeded with those bands that were
crappy in the first place. In the case of ABC, they only managed to convince
ex-drummer David Palmer to join up with Fry (understandably, drummers generally
tend to be more pliable than band members that occupy the front of the stage), but somehow this led to a permanent reunion
of the two, followed by a new «ABC» tour — and, in four years time, a new ABC
album.
Because of all the «reunion»
business, and also due to old friend Gary Langan also returning to produce the
album, Traffic got generally
benevolent reviews, some even hinting that, finally, nearly thirty years after
the fact, ABC managed to come up with a true successor to Lexicon Of Love. I honestly believe most of these people simply
missed out on the much less advertised Skyscraping.
ABC is simply not ABC without a strong dose of the head-in-the-clouds factor,
and Skyscraping had that in spades,
starting from the album cover and all over the actual songs.
In comparison, Traffic is a grittier, more hard-rocking, heavy-beat-oriented
affair that is very likely influenced by the post-punk scene — everything from
Franz Ferdinand to Arctic Monkeys and beyond. After the ethereal atmosphere of
'Stranger Things' that ignited things in classic ABC mode on Skyscraping, the rough, almost
garage-style 'Sixteen Seconds To Choose' that opens Traffic is the last thing you'd expect of Martin Fry — sounds more
like modern day Alice Cooper, if you ask me. It's not bad at all — it kicks
some impressive ass in its bullying glamminess, even though the chorus line
"Prestige, power, money, money, money" seems quite hammy. It simply
tempts one into asking: WHY?
There are
a few songs here that carry on little quanta of classic ABC frailty — 'Love Is Strong',
for instance; 'Validation' and 'Minus Love', too... perhaps. But they are not
very memorable. It is as if all the songs on here are strictly separated into
those that are powered by instrumental hooks (most of the «rocking» stuff) and
those powered by Fry's charisma (the «tender», «frail» stuff), but at their
best, ABC could have both at once, and Traffic
is not quite up to the task.
Still, it sounds good: guitars and keyboards
are mixed in satisfactory proportions, and, of all the songs, only 'Caroline'
sounds dangerously close to «adult contemporary» — big, big kudos to Fry,
actually, for not succumbing to the temptation of clouding his Mystifying
Vocals in Enigmatic Synthesizer Clouds. 'Validation' may not be a great song,
but it is so nice to be able to get
to the instrumental break and hear an acoustic guitar solo underpinned by an
electric organ rhythm track where a less taste-oriented guy would prefer Kenny
G-ish sax against a background of Casios.
All said, I do not guarantee that fans of
classic ABC will inevitably want to adopt Traffic,
and it is also possible that big personal fans of Martin Fry will be disappointed
with his modest presence. But it's okayish, B-level 21st century pop that
won't embarrass your 21st century speakers.
THE LEXICON OF LOVE II (2016)
1) The Flames Of Desire; 2)
Viva Love; 3) Ten Below Zero; 4) Confessions Of A Fool; 5) Singer Not The Song;
6) The Ship Of The Seasick Sailor; 7) Kiss Me Goodbye; 8) I Believe In Love; 9)
The Love Inside The Love; 10) Brighter Than The Sun; 11) Viva Love (reprise).
Five or six years ago, perhaps, the very idea
that a stylistically loyal sequel to ABC's «Eighties Rule Supreme!» masterpiece
The Lexicon Of Love, could be
anything more than ridiculous self-parody by a strapped-for-cash old geezer,
would have seemed impossible to me. But as we move farther and farther into the
21st century, it seems that the dominant ideology is «anything goes»: in the
face of a near-total lack of any true
progression, 2016 is a good a year as any to put out a sequel not only to The Lexicon Of Love, but also to Revolver, Kind Of Blue, The Rite Of
Spring, Hamlet, and the Code of
Hammurabi — each of these enterprises has approximately as many chances of
becoming a smash hit / bestseller as the next upcoming attempt by some «innovative»
indie band to knock us off our feet with their unprecedented artistic vision.
So, therefore, do give old boy Martin Fry a
chance and at least be merciful enough to hear him out. After all, he hasn't
been completely washed up for all
these years — both Skyscraping and Traffic were decent pop albums, and I
cannot believe that The Lexicon Of Love
II was made with money in mind: just how many people these days actually
remember how popular the original was thirty-five years ago? On the other
hand, if remembering the romantic punch of Lexicon
could bring some extra inspiration to a much older Fry, why not give it a go?
The worst thing that could happen would be another album that sucks, no big
deal.
And, upon first listen, it does look like it could suck, because The Lexicon Of Love II truly does try to sound like the first
record — the dance rhythms, the sweeping strings, the luscious vocals, the
romantic hooks, all of that is quite consistent with the original, except the
much smoother production that gives you a fuller, less cavernous sound, without
all those un-organic echoes of the classic Eighties. You hear all that and it's
like, «oh no, next thing we'll be having is the return of polyester suits». Or,
at least, you go, «no no no, he's trying too hard, who is that guy to pull that
ʽaging Casanovaʼ shit on us, how can anybody listen to such
corniness?»
Yes, that was me for a short initial while. But
two things managed to turn the emotional tide. First, the songs are written....
well, as scrupulously, I'd say, as possible. Fry really wants them to be as good as his best stuff — you can see how much
energy he involves into finding the right kind of vocal hook for all of them.
Yes, I do cringe at the song title ʽViva Loveʼ (it offends my
linguistic taste as much as would something like ʽMake L'Amour To Meʼ),
but I cannot deny that it's a well written pop stomper with some genuine
feeling to it.
The second piece of good news is that there's
no Lexicon Of Love without Anne
Dudley — and now Anne Dudley is back, together with her orchestral arrangements
that really make all the difference. The album opens with an orchestral
prelude, finishes with an orchestral finale, and carefully and tastefully
arranged strings are all over the place, including even a near-flawless simulation
of a slow 18th century baroque menuet on ʽThe Love Inside The Loveʼ
(for which she is dutifully co-credited together with Fry). It is, in fact,
possible to forget all about Fry in the first place and just concentrate on the
orchestration — yes, it is that good.
The strings on ʽViva Loveʼ, for instance, seem to obey the general
rules of disco, while at the same time retaining baroque elegance (I couldn't
ever formulate that in strict musicological terms, but I'm old enough to have
the right to trust my impressions). And on the slow ballads where Fry's
hooklines are the most worn out, the strings are the only thing that saves the
tunes from stinking (ʽTen Below Zeroʼ).
Subject-wise, Lexicon Of Love II breaks no new ground, and Martin never pretended
that it would — he is merely revisiting the same topics (Endless Battle of
Instinctive Feeling Vs. Rational Intellect) from the point of view of a much
older man who is still capable of making the same mistakes (rephrasing here
something he said himself in an interview), and the unabashed and downright
simplistic (but turbulent) romanticism of it all may indeed sound antiquated
for the modern ear, but give me a record full of decent pop hooks and beautiful
orchestral arrangements over a quasi-serious post-modern statement of a nobody
about nothing in particular any day, I say. In fact, it must kind of take guts
for someone these days to release a song called ʽI Believe In Loveʼ
(curiously, based on a hand picked acoustic pattern not unlike Lindsey
Buckingham's ʽBig Loveʼ, before the synth-pop spirit takes over) —
and not only that, but also (a) sing it without the slightest irony and (b) not be an Elton John or a Bryan Adams or
somebody else who is fond of wrapping emotional platitudes in very boring
music.
Fry's personal manifesto is perhaps best summarized
in the last track — he admits that "I'm a man out of time, trapped in
rewind", but "when all is said and done... our future's looking
brighter than the sun", because, you know, them good old-fashioned values
will never be gone completely, and might even return triumphantly. There's no
scientific evidence, of course, why it should be so — it's a matter of belief,
and ʽBrighter Than The Sunʼ perhaps succeeds better than any other
song on here in convincing me just how strong his belief really is; Fry's personal
charisma, picked up and magnified by the lens of Dudley's orchestration, might
even radiate stronger here than on the original Lexicon, when ABC were still an actual band and their synth-pop
hooks were more impersonal. For what this sequel lacks (in comparison) in
grappling melodic patterns, it almost compensates with personality, and I, for
one, am always ready to appraise a decent, not too overbearing, old-fashioned,
nicely composed batch of romantic pop tunes. Most definitely recommended — not
just for veteran fans of the band, but for anybody; for my money, this is as
good as any «average-good» record of
2016, regardless of whether it comes from a fifty-year old dinosaur or an
eighteen-year old rising indie star. Thumbs up, and looking forward to The Lexicon Of Love III from a
ninety-year old Fry, with predictable titles like ʽI Still Believe In It,
I've Just Forgotten The Wordʼ and ʽVi(v)a Gra (The Flames Of Desire,
Rekindled)ʼ.
ACCEPT
1) Lady Lou; 2) Tired Of Me;
3) Seawinds; 4) Take Him In My Heart; 5) Sounds Of War; 6) Free Me Now; 7) Glad
To Be Alone; 8) That's Rock'n'Roll; 9) Helldriver; 10) Street Fighter.
For the abstract «casual metalhead», Accept
usually begins with Restless & Wild (1983), culminates with Balls
To The Wall (1984), and shoots its final load on Metal Heart (1985);
at least, such is the picture that one usually gets from run-of-the-mill music guides.
As is quite common, the picture is seriously flawed, confusing «notability», «commercial
success» and the «so-many-bands-out-there-why-waste-time-on-more-than-two-or-three-records-for-each»
attitude with the simple gut pleasures that come from enjoying good music. I
would beg to differ, and go for the slightly more complicated view that says
Accept were cool from the very start — maybe not «awesomely» cool, but with a
hard rock punch that already bore a sign of uniqueness.
On their first album, much like on every other
album, Accept clearly state that they don't do nothing much except just play
rock'n'roll. It does not take a leap of genius to deduce this if one of the
songs in question is titled — three guesses? — ʽThat's Rock'n'Rollʼ. Granted,
Accept were never quite as hilariously obstinate about it as AC/DC. For one
thing, they always allowed themselves the liberty of adding a power ballad
or two. Also, their guitarists (Wolf Hoffmann and Jörg Fischer) placed
heavy accent on traditional melodicity, occasionally dipping into classical
sources of inspiration, just like certified metalheads. But overall, this is quite
basic, brutal, gut-wrenching, head-banging music for gutwrenchers and headbangers.
And in terms of basic headbanging power, Accept delivers the goods in
fine German style almost every bit as well as the records from the band's «classic»
period.
At this stage, they are essentially modeling
their sound (crunchy, but precise and punctual riffs + fluent melodic solos +
on-key screeching from an «insane» vocalist) on the already well-established
Scorpions model. But this is hardly a problem if they happen to be writing
songs every bit as lean and mean, and sometimes leaner and meaner, than those
of their «teachers». ʽTired Of Meʼ, ʽSounds Of Warʼ, ʽThat's
Rock'n'Rollʼ, ʽHelldriverʼ — all solid hard rock with catchy vocal
choruses (and a healthy enough injection of the pop spirit as well: ʽLady
Louʼ almost sounds like an early rehearsal version for Ozzy's ʽCrazy
Trainʼ!). And the band is already professional enough to know the
difference between «gritty» and «stupid»: lead singer Udo Dirkschneider
displays a set of pipes that is more likely to commandeer respect than
ridicule, whereas Hoffmann and Fischer's riffs are rarely, if ever, boring:
these guys actually know how to
encapsulate genuine anger in metallic notes.
They know it so well, in fact, that quite
frequently they almost seem to be catching the punk virus of the time; this is
best demonstrated in tracks like ʽStreet Fighterʼ (with the lyrically
banal, but emotionally honest refrain of "hate you hate you, leave us
alone man!"), as well as the reckless speed and crazy drum punch of ʽThat's
Rock'n'Rollʼ that is moderately reminiscent of Mötorhead (but is, of
course, much «cleaner» in the purely musical sense). In short, for an album
that even the band itself has been prone to dismiss ever since, and almost
everyone else normally considers to be «formative», there is too much food for
thought here to let it go with one pitiful star, as a clueless «evaluator» from
the All-Music Guide once did without listening to the album.
The album's centerpiece, and the most complex
track, is ʽGlad To Be Aloneʼ, one of the most bombastic pieces the
band ever recorded. Alternating between slow, power-balladeering parts (although,
since the main attraction of these parts is Udo's masterfully hateful ranting at
the world, it is a bit of a stretch to bring up the term «power ballad») and
faster «art-metal» choruses, it is hardly a masterpiece, but the band still
pulls it off surprisingly well, mainly thanks to Udo and to the fact that the
lead guitarist does not just run up and down the scales, but bothers to
squeeze the obligatory arpeggios into honestly emotional and memorable solos.
The bombastic approach does not work nearly as
well on the album's one true power
ballad, ʽSeawindsʼ — but that particular track was bound to be a
misfire, because the whole schtick of Accept really works only as long as they
are pissed off, and the miniature goblin figure of Udo Dirkschneider waxing
lyrical over some trifling matter is nobody's idea of a cool time. (The band
would learn a few subtle tricks as time went by, but not a lot).
All in all, this may not be the place to start
with Accept if you are only looking for a brief romance; but I see no reason
not to own and moderately cherish it if your intentions are more serious than
that. Accept is no major feast for
the intellect (the album cover alone should be able to tell you that), but its
power grooves and brawny German anger can work well on the gut level, and this
is where all the thumbs up really come from.
I'M A REBEL (1980)
1) I'm A Rebel; 2) Save Us;
3) No Time To Lose; 4) Thunder And Lightning; 5) China Lady; 6) I Wanna Be No
Hero; 7) The King; 8) Do It.
Udo Dirkschneider doesn't like this album very
much, because of "unsuccessful experiments", as he himself said.
Well, I can understand, except that it's not so much experimentation as an odd
will to conform to standards that mars the record. They set an excellent
standard with the title track, a number formerly written by Australian
guitarist Alex Young for his brothers in AC/DC (they say AC/DC even recorded it
back in the day) — that's why it's got a bit of a drunken party sound to it,
which is unusual for Accept who have always sounded stone cold sober, but
still, it's an AC/DC-worthy song, and any song like that can be handled well by
Accept.
Unfortunately, right after that the album
starts shaking. There is only one other number that is truly solid from head to
toe: 'China Lady', built upon an unforgettable riff and an equally unforgettable
banshee wailing part from Udo. A couple more rockers are so-so, and then
there's the cringeworthy stuff: power ballads that match simplistic melodies
against pathos, the kind of stuff that, at the same time, was eating away the
Scorpions' intestines ('No Time To Lose' may be my least favourite Accept song
of that entire period), and then we're watching the unwatchable as Accept do
disco ('I Wanna Be No Hero'), something that they are so poorly adjusted for
they can't even help imitating Kiss (if the 'I can give you nothing but love
babe' line does not, for you, immediately bring to mind 'I was born for
loving you baby', you must be the unassociative type).
Disco motives even show up in the album's third
best song, 'Save Us', which starts out strong and spiteful but then turns to
silliness in the middle-eight, including "choral" singing that should
be banned from Accept records once and for all; if the only member in your band
who can sing well is Udo, what's your problem? Bass guy Peter Baltes knows how
to stay on key, for sure, but what's the use of staying on key if you're
staying on key on songs like 'No Time To Lose'?
The good news about all this is that 'I'm A
Rebel' (the song) did become a hit for the band, and this must have helped them
to get by and gather their forces for a full-fledged return to form. But
nevertheless, my heart is also a rebel, and it rebels all the way against
disco-metal and rotten power balladry, and, ripping the two side-openers off
the album, proceeds to reward it with a hearty thumbs
down, while the brain is, of course, still sleeping on this one.
PS. As irrelevant as it is to the review, I
can't help but publish the idea for the greatest of all non-existent Weird Al
Yankovic parodies: the heavy metal anthem 'I'm A Rabbi' ('I'm a rabbi, I'm a
rabbi, don't you just know it?'), dangerously bordering on the sacrilegious but
all the more fun for all the titillation. Where can I patent this?
BREAKER (1981)
1) Starlight; 2) Breaker; 3) Run If You
Can; 4) Can't Stand The Night; 5) Son Of A Bitch; 6) Burning; 7) Feelings; 8)
Midnight Highway; 9) Breaking Up Again; 10) Down And Out.
With Breaker, Accept finally... no, not
"find their voice" — they'd already found it two years earlier — but
rather manage to convince themselves that their voice is truly their voice,
and nobody else's, and that nobody else's will do. Breaker initiates a
string of four or five records whose only flaw is that they all sound like each
other, but if you like that sound, and I can't imagine anyone who's at
least marginally partial to hard rock and heavy metal not liking that sound,
you'll have no reason to complain.
Apart from the silly decision to let Peter
Baltes sing on one more silly soft ballad ('Breaking Up Again'), there is not
another single weak spot on the album. Eight fantastic hard rockers with
blazing riffs and catchy choruses, plus one more ballad ('Can't Stand The
Night') that is, thank God, saved by the wise, wise, wise choice of letting Udo
rather than Baltes carry it through with his grizzled out, world-weary
delivery. A metal lover's paradise all the way through.
One thing that's formally new is that they have
learned how to play it real fast, but without turning the performance into the
worst kind of melody-deprived thrash. 'Starlight' and 'Breaker' exemplify this
new skill, with the band gelling perfectly, especially the latter with its
double-tracked riffs and perfect drumming from Steven Kaufmann. (It's amazing
to think they'd eventually top this combination of speed, precision, and
melodicity on their next album!) These two stem from the new school of heavy
metal as pioneered by Judas Priest; but the band shows itself equally versatile
at the old school as well — 'Burning', recorded in a 'quasi-live' setting, is
good old Berry-style rock'n'roll dressed up in modern production and polished
with modern guitar tones, yet not for a single second does it actually lose the
good old rock'n'roll spirit. 'I say hey rock'n'roller, power in your hands, you
and your music made me a rockin' man' may not be the smartest type of lyrics to
set to this kind of music, but with this here insane level of headbanging, one
has to be stone cold sober in the spirit to stop and pay even the smallest
attention to the lyrics!
Finally, it is impossible not to mention the
hilarious 'Son Of A Bitch': you haven't lived if you haven't heard Udo
Dirkschneider scream 'cocksucking motherfucker' along with a string of other
obscenities that the band must have been copying directly from a slang
dictionary as they went along. Maybe the original intention was to present this
as a terrifying, threatening rocker, but with all of its great riffs and Udo's
craziness, it works beautifully even as a ridiculous send-up of every
terrifying, threatening rocker ever made.
In the end, even the brain has little choice
but to applaud the cleverness of it all, but the main player here is still the
heart, which, after having pumped wildly for all of the album's duration (only
getting a short break to cool off during Peter Baltes' turn), has no choice but
to reward it with the most headbanging thumbs up
ever given.
RESTLESS AND WILD (1982)
1) Fast As A Shark; 2) Restless And Wild; 3)
Ahead Of The Pack; 4) Shake Your Heads; 5) Neon Nights; 6) Get Ready; 7)
Demon's Night; 8) Flash Rockin' Man; 9) Don't Go Stealing My Soul Away; 10) Princess Of The Dawn.
It is funny that even with bands whose records
all sound (generally) the same, there is some sort of inner feeling that even
so, they aren't just rolling along a smooth highway, but still steadily
climbing up the mountain — until they reach the peak, of course, and then
there's the inevitable slide down. And all that time, the records STILL sound
the same!
There is even some sort of a consensus on this
in many cases. With AC/DC, for instance, many, if not most, people think about Back
In Black. With Motorhead, almost everyone thinks Ace Of Spades. It's
impossible to define why, it's just a question of inner feeling, a very certain
inner feeling at that. And with Accept, the certain feeling rests on Restless
And Wild.
One thing that has always seduced me in particular
about this record is how perfectly they put the two best songs at the start and
at the end — and how the wildly different moods of these two songs perfectly
suit the start and the end. To begin with, they beat the speed record of
'Breaker' and 'Starlight'; 'Fast As A Shark', true to its title and even more
so, is the fastest Accept have ever played, and, in fact, it might be the
fastest metal track ever played which manages to be melodic at the same time
(I'm sure Slayer can outrun even this, but whether they can retain the
precision and fluidity of Accept's guitarists at the same time is an open
question). Steven Kaufmann's unbelievable double bass-drumming is another
asset, practically redefining the meaning of drums in heavy metal history. And
furthermore, it's just good old catchy rock'n'roll, once one has finished
admiring it from the technical side.
If 'Fast As A Shark' is the band's ultimate
headbanging number, then 'Princess Of The Dawn' closes the album on their best
dungeons-and-dragons note. Most metal and "heavy prog" bands have to
rely on cheesy synthesizers to build up atmosphere on their fantasy-oriented
work, almost immediately cheapening the results (because some people think that
once you get that particular tone out of your Casio, you've already set
up the atmosphere). On 'Princess', Accept achieve that eerie medieval-mystical
effect without hitting one single piano note — just by doubletracking the
guitars, attenuating them with an equally ominous bass, and having Udo sing in
his world-weary, "old grizzled magician" voice which is his second
best after the "straightjacketed maniac" one. The whole song is an
amazing kaleidoscope of memorable riffs, enchanting vocal hooks, and melodic
solos — all set to an unnerving mid-tempo rhythm that effortlessly transports
you through six minutes of medieval mystery until it abruptly cuts off in
mid-song, almost like a nod to the Beatles' 'I Want You' (maybe a conscious
one, given the brooding atmosphere of both compositions, although the adjective
'brooding' pretty much drains the resemblances).
In between these two metal masterworks, you get
more great Accept songs that are not worth describing in detail. No sissy
ballads, no Peter Baltes on lead vocals (finally!), just one great riff tune
after another, just like on Back In Black. 'Neon Nights' probably could
qualify as a power ballad, but, after the misleading acoustic introduction, it
is inaugurated with a second electric intro of such effect-laden heaviness that
one could never accuse the boys of selling out with it. Not that with Udo's
voice it is even possible for them to sell out, of course.
Predictably, a wild thumbs
up emerges from the bottom of the heart, but even the brain, even
today, after many, many listens, still remains amazed at the album's ideal
consistency. The only puzzling thing is why they decided to title it after the
song 'Restless And Wild', when an even truer approach would be to title it
after 'Ahead Of The Pack', because that's exactly what they were for that brief
moment in 1982: 'Ahead of the pack — never look back!'.
BALLS TO THE WALL (1983)
1) Balls To The Wall; 2)
London Leatherboys; 3) Fight It Back; 4) Head Over Heels; 5) Losing More Than
You've Ever Had; 6) Love Child; 7) Turn Me On; 8) Losers And Winners; 9)
Guardian Of The Night; 10) Winter Dreams.
Nothing beats Restless And Wild, but one
cannot spend all one's life listening to Restless And Wild. When you've
learnt it by heart, try Balls To The Wall. Having now studied the
essence of their talents and having reached the peak of their creativity,
Accept just continue, without seeming effort, to crank out not particularly
imaginative, but solid, explosive metal tunes — one after the other, they just
go off like a series of splendid, if samey, firecrackers.
Balls To The Wall, on average, is somewhat slower, denser, and
darker than its predecessor. After 'Fast As A Shark', Accept have all but
renounced breakneck thrash tempos; only 'Fight It Back' and 'Losers And
Winners' (the latter's riff is superficially based on Black Sabbath's 'Symptom
Of The Universe') fit the bill, but even these fall beyond their previous speed
records. Apparently, they'd simply taken the speed thing as far as they could
take it, and were now happy with concentrating more on the melody aspect.
So, in sharp contrast to 'Fast As A Shark' and
'Starlight', the album begins with a really slow song. But oh my God, what a
song. It took real balls — pardon the pun — for Accept to begin their new
record with (and this is my firm conviction) the best ever opening riff
in a heavy metal song, only to retire it several bars into the song and never
ever show it up again. It is the perfect opening. An opening that makes even
non-metalheads pay attention. A riff that, perhaps, only a Teutonic metal
guitarist could be capable of.
Still, now that I think of it, that riff belongs
in the intro — I don't see it easily reappearing anywhere else, nor can I
imagine Udo singing over it. And besides, the song itself easily lives up to
its opening. The revolutionary lyrics — the same old subject of the oppressed
masses rising up and breaking their chains — are trite, but they're basically
just a pretext for showing how mighty pissed-off Udo and the gang can be.
Accept aren't revolutionaries, they're rock stars, and I have no idea just how
much they care for the working class, but one thing I do know: few, if any,
things let you vent your frustration better than singing along to '...they're
coming to get you and then — you'll get your BALLS TO THE WALL, MAN!' After
all, this is so much more humanistic and time-saving than actually strangling
your boss when you feel like it, right?
Previous Accept albums were relatively even in
terms of quality; here, nothing even comes close to matching the sheer
motivated power of the title track — one reason why I always get a little
annoyed with the album. At the same time, just like on Restless, there
is not a single stinker: just more and more catchy metal riffs and choruses.
American critics and listeners have often reacted strongly to what they
perceive as a 'gay thread' running through the album — starting from the hairy
leg on the album cover and ending with 'London Leatherboys' (actually a song
about bikers rather than gays) and 'Love Child'; but then, it's the same
American critics and listeners for whom the issue of Hamlet sleeping with
Horatio overshadows "to be or not to be", so there's no need
whatsoever to perceive Balls To The Wall as a specifically 'gay metal'
record — it just toys with the subject on one track (and why shouldn't it?).
Odd as it may seem, my second favourite track is
the album closer, 'Winter Dreams'. After nine rounds of explosives, they round
out the proceedings with a ballad — but not a power ballad, rather a dark,
brooding ballad where Udo sings in his world-weary voice, very appropriate in
this place, as if tired and exhausted from giving it his all on the previous
nine numbers. With its minor acoustic chords, church bells, and deep, echoing
riffs, you once more (as you did on 'Princess Of The Dawn') get a
medievalistic/D&D atmosphere, but this time combined with a very realistic
sense of melancholia and futility of being. Nine balls of fire — and a cold
shower at the door.
Balls To The Wall begins Accept's slow descent into mediocrity —
but begins it barely a few feet down from the peak, so that you can only get
such an impression from a later, general perspective on their career. As it
is, it would merit an unbiased thumbs up for
the title track alone — even forgetting the fact that a lesser band would just
as likely kill for any of the rest.
METAL HEART (1985)
1) Metal Heart; 2) Midnight Mover; 3) Up To The Limit; 4) Wrong
Is Right; 5) Screaming For A Love-Bite; 6) Too High To Get It Right; 7) Dogs On
Leads; 8) Teach Us To Survive; 9) Living For Tonite; 10) Bound
To Fail.
The followup to the big commercial
breakthrough, Metal Heart, like most similar followups, offers no
surprises. But under the circumstances, they could have done much worse — for
instance, intoxicated by the fumes of the power and the glory and the big
bucks, turn into a cartoonish hair metal band. Instead, there is no sign of
compromise. It is sometimes suggested that they did make Metal Heart
slightly "poppier", adding more catchy chorus hooks for the public to
go along, but I don't see it in the least — not that these chorus hooks aren't
catchy, but having the audience easily singing along to their choruses had
always been Accept's priority.
Just like on Balls, the most ambitious
track on the album is the title one that opens it. Unfortunately, this time
around they haven't been able to come up with a bunch of riffs for it that
would knock the pants off you in the same effective way. But they still find an
alternative way to draw you in — by incorporating symphonic influences, quoting
Tchaikovsky in the intro and Beethoven in the guitar solo.
"Symph-metal" can be awful in the wrong hands, but if you get your
classical quotations right, arranging them so that the power of the original
melody is smoothly stretched alongside the power of heavy metal guitar, the
effect can be awe-inspiring, and Wolf Hoffmann channelling the spirit of
Beethoven turns out to be a majestic embellishment of 'Metal Heart' rather than
a ridiculous embarrassment.
On the rest of the tracks, it may be said that
the band is "coasting": the riffs are still loud and powerful, but
generally simpler and more derivative of former glories than they used to be.
Some are even suspiciously reminiscent of similar power-chord driven AC/DC
stuff — not a good thing, because the riff-playing skills of Accept are, from a
technical point of view, more sophisticated than those of AC/DC, and that's the
way Accept fans would probably have liked them to stay. And this, for the first
time in a long stretch, makes one experience the old nasty feeling of 'formula':
one high-adrenaline level rocker after another, buildup, bombastic chorus,
kick-ass guitar solo, lead-out section, buildup again, bombastic chorus again
etc. — you don't so much feel these things when the songs are awesome, but if
they're just one small notch below awesome, the atmosphere changes radically.
Still, what am I saying? — 'Up To The Limit',
'Wrong Is Right', 'Too High To Get It Right', 'Dogs On Leads', these are all
first-rate metal stalwarts, each and every one a headbanger's dream. 'Up To The
Limit', in particular, is the number two Accept song to help you vent your
frustration — it doesn't have the great chords of 'Balls To The Wall', but, in
partial compensation, it's got the speed and the fury to match. And 'Screaming
For A Lovebite' and 'Living For Tonite' are as great for party-hellraising as
anything this band ever did.
Therefore, Metal Heart's main weakness
is that it gives a bad premonition — a premonition that the end might be near,
that the band already has some trouble sustaining the same high quality level.
But if you don't believe in premonitions — and if you're 'living for tonite',
why should you? — then Metal Heart has got no serious weaknesses
whatsoever, and, no matter how much one's brain might complain about the band
turning into AC/DC and losing its identity, the heart just keeps going along
with the thunder. Thumbs up, no doubt
about it.
RUSSIAN ROULETTE (1986)
1) T.V. War; 2) Monsterman; 3) Russian
Roulette; 4) It's Hard To Find A Way; 5) Aiming High; 6) Heaven Is Hell; 7)
Another Second To Be; 8) Walking In The Shadow; 9) Man Enough To Cry; 10) Stand
Tight.
One picture that can be constructed around the
recording of this album is that it is darker and less compromising than Metal
Heart, going easier on simple hooks and heavier on grim atmosphere, and
that this reflected the creative struggle between grittier front man
Dirkschneider and more flexible lead guitarist Wolf Hoffmann, a struggle in
which, for this round, Udo had the upper hand but which eventually led to his
departure from the band that Hoffmann would be free to lead to complete
disaster.
At least this is what you get from reading the
yellow press on the Internet; the real picture... well, you know. Russian
Roulette is certainly a departure from Metal Heart, but in more ways
than one, and both good and bad ways. The good news is that they start varying
the approach a bit; that nasty nagging feeling that you're listening to a
pre-programmed algorithmic artefact, where all the songs are modeled on the
same formula, is gone. There is more diversity to the moods and tempos, and
even a return to "epic" form (title track; 'Heaven Is Hell'). The bad
news, alas, is that not all of this works, and that the band begins to sound
tired and out of steam.
You know they're tired and out of steam
when the first song of the album begins in the style and tempo of 'Fast As A
Shark' — but forgets to pack an equally convincing and memorable riff, and ends
up sounding like respectable, but still generic trash, elevated to this status
of "respectable" more through a purely psychological understanding
that this is still Hoffmann on the guitar on Udo on vocals, and there's no
escape from their onslaught.
You know this even better once you understand
that the convincing and memorable riff of the second song ('Monsterman') is
actually lifted directly from Judas Priest's 'You Got Another Thing Coming' —
intentionally or subconsciously, doesn't matter. And this is also where you
could start getting the uneasy feeling that, first time in years, it is the
gruff chorus chanting that interacts with Udo's solo wailing which is the major
thing to get stuck in your head. 'I am the monsterman!' on 'Monsterman'. 'WAR
GAMES! SHANGHAI'D!' on the title track. 'HEAVEN IS THERE WHERE HELL IS — AND
HELL IS DOWN ON EARTH!' 'WALKING IN THE SHADOW, WALKING IN THE NIGHT!' All of a
sudden, it's not that hard to understand the rest of the band might have
developed the suspicion that they could go on getting by without Udo's help.
None of this should be disconcerting per se.
'Heaven Is Hell' is a glorious epic along the lines of 'Balls To The Wall' (but
certainly not a rewrite of it, as some detractors have suggested) that deserves
eternal recognition in the metal canon. The sense of doom and gloom on 'Russian
Roulette' arguably echoes the sense of doom hanging over the band itself, and
is fully realistic, for that matter. Some of the shorter songs, like 'Aiming
High', also reach their mark through the usual combination of grittiness and
catchiness.
Yet they also recline back into the cesspool of
arena rock — 'It's Hard To Find A Way', 'Man Enough To Cry', and the closing
anthem 'Stand Tight' are, by all means, not the kind of songs that this
band should be writing. Maybe it's the Hoffmann stamp, maybe not, but these are
songs for the likes of Foreigner, not the Udo-led combo that, at their best,
either avoided sentimentality or found subtler cloaks for it than power chords
and passionate choral vocals. Looking back at the calendar, it's nothing short
of amazing that it was 1986 — as far as I'm concerned, one of the worst years
in history for popular music — and they still managed to get only two or three
of those, but this realization doesn't make them any more listenable on their
own.
So the crisis here is obvious, but
"crisis" needn't necessarily be a horrendous thing — in times of
crisis, you can start wildly fluttering around your cage, trying out every
direction, and end up hitting upon a few gaps in the bars (as well as a few
particularly rough spots). There is still that element of fascination in Russian
Roulette, with its mixture of pompous failures and equally pompous hits,
that prevents it from being the kind of blemish on Accept's reputation that
their next album would turn out to be. The brain is, therefore, intrigued, and
the heart gripped by mixed emotions, and I can't give this either a positive or
a negative rating, but I do recommend hearing this at least once, because
sometimes "confused" heavy metal albums give more food for both the
heart and the brain than perfectly self-assured ones.
EAT THE HEAT (1989)
1) X-T-C; 2) Prisoner; 3) Love
Sensation; 4) Chain Reaction; 5) D-Train; 6) Generation Clash; 7) Turn
The Wheel; 8) Mistreated; 9) Stand 4 What U R; 10) Hellhammer; 11) Break The
Ice.
With each new account of yet another glorious
Accept album, I risk the risk of passing for a devoted metalhead, which I am
frankly not. What with all the diversity and complexity that, today,
characterizes the heavy metal genre, at heart it is still fairly silly and
clichéd, and, for me, the deal with every metal album I listen to is
simple — is this particular album strong enough to make me, for a few
moments at least, forget about the silliness of it all? Are the riffs
powerful enough to overcome the stench of machismo? Is the singer superhuman
enough for my organism to recognize him as a true rather than a false prophet?
Very few albums, very few bands actually manage to pass that test, and Accept
are one of the lucky few that had this lucky streak for a long, long time —
half a decade at least, a whole eternity of music-making by pop standards.
But if Russian Roulette contained only
the first signs of an upcoming headache, then Eat The Heat is hangover
in full flight. Udo Dirkschneider left the band due to a creative falling out
with Hoffmann, reluctant to pursue a more commercial, "hair-metal"
style direction, and nothing but a blind, uncontrolled desire to get more
airplay explains the band's decision to replace him with a new frontman. That
was an American, going by the name of David Reece, very little known in heavy
rock circles outside his former local base in Minneapolis; but I dare say that
it would have made little difference even if they had had the good fortune to
pick someone of the high stature of Ronnie James Dio or Bruce Dickinson
instead.
Because it isn't just that Reece's vocals,
powerful as they are on their own, are no match for Udo's one-in-a-million
powerhouse screaming. More important is that Reece was a nobody — due to his
newcomer status, he could hardly have much creative influence on Eat The
Heat. The songs, as usual, are credited to "Accept" for music and
"Deaffy" (a pseudonym of Hoffmann's wife, Gaby Hauke) for lyrics,
and it probably wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say that it is mostly Hoffmann
himself who is responsible for the band's new sound.
Eat The Heat isn't exactly "bad" — for instance, it goes very easy on
pathetic power ballads, where 'Mistreated' (no relation to the vastly superior
Deep Purple/Rainbow song) is the only serious offender, and the aggressive
rock songs still bear traces of the old Accept crunch. Yet everything, every
single song has been recast in the dominating hair-metal mold: the production
is cleaner and glossier, the guitar tones are brighter and less frightening,
and the catchy choruses seem to emphasize "brute power" over
"intelligent hatred", so that the simple average lad off the street
wouldn't be turned off by too much scariness.
Alas, the problem is that in this corner of the
market, Accept were unfit for the competition. All they could do was lose the
old fans, pissed off at this change of direction — and fail to bring in legions
of new ones, already well-satisfied with the likes of Poison and Cinderella. Of
course, it was a gamble where one could theoretically win, like Alice Cooper
did with Trash; but Trash, released the same year, was a far more
intelligently crafted record than Eat The Heat — for one thing, it
sacrificed none of Cooper's personality, ensuring its own identity among the
crowd, whereas no personality whatsoever is evident on Eat The Heat.
I might also add that musically, the record is
pretty lazy — completely lost in the effort to commercialize the sound,
Hoffmann had forgotten to write any original riffs. One listen to the opening
track, 'X-T-C', is enough to give you a general impression of the entire thing:
everything sounds very powerful, but you know you've heard it all before, and
you know the main emphasis here is on making you just blindly headbang to the
music until you reach the chorus, which is the point at which you're supposed
to become happy. This isn't so much heavy metal as it is bland arena-rock with
crunchier overtones. And this certainly isn't a true Accept record.
In terms of individual songs, there is nothing
to discuss. I am amused by the somber chorus of 'Generation Clash', a song
whose message could have been much stronger had it been better backed up in
terms of music, and by the rousing chorus of 'Hellhammer' ('HELL HAMMER, HELL,
HELL HAMMER!'), so it might be fun to think about covering these two in a more
convincing manner if, by any chance, you're in a metal band (or, for that
matter, in a bluegrass combo — a fun melody is a fun melody in any genre). But
this is certainly not enough to stop the heart from sulking in a relentlessly thumbs down mode, or the brain from wondering
just what exactly was it in the Eighties that made so many talented people go
so utterly crazy you'd think the first of the Four Horsemen was upon us already
— maybe playing drums in one of those L.A. hair bands, as a warm-up.
OBJECTION OVERRULED (1993)
1) Objection Overruled; 2) I Don't Wanna Be Like You;
3) Protectors Of Terror;
4) Slaves To Metal; 5)
All Or Nothing; 6) Bulletproof;
7) Amamos La Vida; 8) Sick, Dirty And Mean; 9) Donation; 10) Just By My Own;
11) This One's For You.
The little blunder is over: Reece is out, Udo
is back, having lost neither his honour nor his powers: six years without
Accept haven't impacted his singing in the least (actually, he'd been doing
pretty much the same old thing with his own band, U.D.O.). Nor has anything
else been impacted: Objection Overruled sounds as if neither hair metal
nor grunge ever happened. Just more of the old supertight metallic rock'n'roll,
crisply produced and sounding quite close to you, without the echoey effects of
Metal Heart; as if the Metal Gods finally decided to come down from
above and have fun with their fans on the small stage of a local bar — without
ever forgetting that they're Gods and the fans are scum in their faces, though.
As far as "reunion" efforts go, Objection
Overruled is excellent, and since no one expects any more musical
revolutions from Accept anyway, perfectly enjoyable as simply more classy material
from these guys — classy and uncompromising. Brutal riffs, catchy choruses,
passion and power above pathos, and Udo and Hoffmann battling for attention as
usual. There are misfires: the power ballad 'Amamos La Vida' is somewhat boring,
the marching anthem 'All Or Nothing' is somewhat silly, and the instrumental
'Just By My Own' is somewhat excessive. But if we are studying Accept in
chronological order, this little weakness they have for over-the-top ballads
and anthems is well-known to us, and as long as it doesn't overwhelm the album,
it's possible to live with it like it's possible to live with a hump on your
shoulders or smallpox traces on an otherwise beautiful face.
On the other hand, the rockers are a ton of fun
— like the title track, where Udo pleads not guilty to an unforgiving chorus
jury of his guitar players over blinding speed riffs, or like the traditional
fuck-you hate peon of 'I Don't Wanna Be Like You', or the double-edged macho
slash of 'Protectors Of Terror' (that's them others) and 'Slaves To Metal'
(that's the band).
A minor surprise is 'Donation' — which sounds
exactly like prime time AC/DC in terms of lyrics, music, and singing; although
I'm not sure, I think it was consciously intended as a tribute to the band,
given the line 'there she was, shaking more than my foundation' (cf. AC/DC's
'Shake Your Foundations'). Actually, another nod to their Aussie brethren can
be found on 'I Don't Wanna Be Like You', whose main riff bears an uncanny
similarity to 'Sin City' and whose lyrics include lines like 'the walls can be
shaking, the earth could be quaking'. This may be upsetting to people who
prefer Accept as a much more refined, and maybe even much deeper, version of
AC/DC, but there's no question that the German band, from the start, owed quite
a bit to the Young brothers, and I find nothing wrong about doing a song or two
directly in the AC/DC style, especially if they do it well, which they do. No
one would probably want to see them put out another Eat The Heat instead
— right?
Of course, they already sound a bit out of
time, no longer as sincerely menacing as before, but time slowly levels these
effects, and for today's listeners, Objection Overruled may easily kick
as much ass as Balls To The Wall. My rock'n'roll heart was perfectly
happy with it, anyway, and thumbs up were
always guaranteed.
DEATH ROW (1994)
1) Death Row; 2) Sodom And
Gomorra; 3) The Beast Inside; 4) Dead On!; 5) Guns 'R' Us; 6) Like A Loaded
Gun; 7) What Else; 8) Stone Evil; 9) Bad Habits Die Hard; 10)
Prejudice; 11) Bad Religion; 12) Generation Clash II; 13) Writing On The Wall;
14) Drifting Away; 15) Pomp And Circumstance.
This isn't bad. But if you want to get a decent
idea of what this record sounds like, try taking a deep breath and yelling out
all the song titles, in a row, taking note of my brief comments: "DEATH
ROW!" (mid-tempo, martial-like, as if you were sending someone in that
direction); "SODOM AND GOMORRA!" (fast, indignant, as if this is
where you were living in); "THE BEAST INSIDE!" (mid-tempo,
sneeringly, like a cross between Punch and Mephisto); "DEAD ON!"
(slow, with a good mixture of self-importance and machismo); "GUNS 'R'
US!" (mid-tempo, with a modicum of pride, as befits someone who could
have this written on his door); "LIKE A LOADED GUN!" (mid-tempo,
stern, could be from an imaginatory Terminator soundtrack!); "STONE
EVIL!" (mid-tempo, ominous, don't go there or it will tear you limb from
limb); "BAD HABITS DIE HARD!" (fast, a little bit à la
Dirty Harry, sounds great right before you whomp that sucker);
"PREJUDICE!" (mid-tempo, boring, out of steam); "BAD
RELIGION!" (mid-tempo, boring, completely out of steam).
Death Row is every critic's dream — it is an album that's more formulaic than the
critic's own approach; if musicians can be so predictable and derivative, why
can't people that write about the music? One riff per song (not all the riffs
are good), one gang chorus per song, and not even Udo can elevate this to a
higher level because he frankly sounds disinterested: like a seasoned pro, he
gives it his all, but he doesn't try even remotely to give it something extra.
The album makes good use of the allowed length
of the CD — for instance, instead of one pompous, unnecessary instrumental, we
have two (in a row!), and it also allows the band to offer us a remake of
'Generation Clash', with Udo on vocals this time (it doesn't work much better
than the first time, though). This means that you can pretty much shut the
album off after 'Bad Religion', but not every dedicated fan will probably be
able to sit straight through everything else: the stiff formula gets so
mind-numbing eventually that one can honestly become ashamed about letting
one's brain gather dust on the nearby shelf for so long.
Technically, this is Hoffmann's show all the
way — he handles lead and rhythm duties, making the arrangements seem a bit
sparse. He's also trying to be inventive, throwing on wah-wah and other effects
to make the proceedings more "brutal"; in the process, the band
pretty much invents "nu-metal" with the title track ('Death Row' does
not at all sound unlike Korn and Limp Bizkit). He also tries to brush up on his
classical influences with the reproduction of Khachaturian's 'Sabre Dance'
theme in 'Sodom & Gomorra' — pure kitsch but quite refreshing in the
overall context of the album, I must say.
Overlong, uninventive, curiously lifeless, this
is a serious letdown after the promises of Objection Overruled;
nevertheless, lower your expectations, throw away your ambitions, and you'll
still have enough to get your ass kicked properly. Thumbs
down from the brain, but the heart insists on having a tight E.P.
shaped from the album's four or five best tracks and thereby proving that in
1994, the band was still going relatively strong.
PREDATOR (1996)
1) Hard Attack; 2) Crossroads; 3) Making Me Scream; 4)
Diggin' In The Dirt; 5) Lay It Down; 6) It Ain't Over Yet; 7)
Predator; 8) Crucified; 9) Take Out The Crime; 10) Don't Give A Damn; 11) Run
Through The Night; 12) Primitive.
Again, this isn't awful, but the band sounds really
tired, as if the invisible hand of fate had rounded all the members up right
after their having run an up-the-hill marathon and placed them in the studio
with no creative ideas, no prepared material, and a total lack of commitment. A
band of one notch less quality than Accept, under such conditions, would have
produced some monstrosity; Predator isn't one, but the end results
clearly showed that the band was so much out of steam that it was high time to
call it a day.
It's funny, but in the light of Predator
even the endless streak of "gang choruses" on Death Row seems
refreshing and memorable. Predator cuts down on much of the heaviness,
cuts down even more seriously on the speed aspect, features a slicker, less
involving production style from veteran hair metal producer Michael Wagener,
and even reintroduces Peter Baltes on vocals on a couple tracks (they're not
power ballads this time, but they're still pretty so-so). The riffs are mostly
recycled from their own and other people's songs, and even Udo sounds
disinterested. To make matters worse, the album closer 'Primitive' may just be
the silliest and ugliest Accept song ever put on record: it's an
unfortunate experiment at making some sort of ugly industrial-metal hybrid,
quite unsuitable for Accept's overall style.
All of this calls for an unquestionable thumbs down, but as long as Accept aren't truly
betraying their essence, as they did on Eat The Heat, there is, and will
always be, at least something redeeming about each of their records, and, in
the end, 'Hard Attack', 'Don't Give A Damn', 'Crucified', and 'Making Me
Scream' are all decent rockers with plenty of headbanging power. 'Run Through
The Night' is actually one of their better "rocking ballads", with
curious jangling guitar arrangements from Hoffmann (he is in charge of all the
guitarwork on the album again). So there's no reason for the fans to stay away
from it; people have been known to end their careers on notes far more pitiful
than Predator, and, in fact, we can only applaud Accept for their wisdom
— once they perceived that the thing was no longer working smoothly, they just
packed it in, instead of stubbornly sticking around, wasting money and good old
CD plastic.
BLOOD OF THE NATIONS (2010)
1) Beat The Bastards; 2)
Teutonic Terror; 3) The Abyss; 4) Blood Of The Nations; 5) Shades Of Death; 6)
Locked And Loaded; 7) Kill The Pain; 8) Rolling Thunder; 9) Pandemic; 10) New
World Comin'; 11) No Shelter; 12) Bucket Full Of Hate; 13*) Time Machine.
But what is this? Fourteen years into the
future, and once again Accept are riding the waves? Did anyone see this coming?
Actually, maybe yes. After all, Wolf Hoffmann did not have much of a stunning
career in the interim, and in between the perspective of retiring to sell
Sauerkraut and staying in the big leagues with the big name, it was at least a
50-50 chance that, sooner or later, we'd see the familiar logo once again.
So the band is back, with a mixed line-up.
Hoffmann and Baltes represent the original forefathers; surprisingly, they
managed to re-recruit second guitarist Herman Frank from the Balls To The Wall lineup, but at the
expense of losing the original drummer (Stefan Schwarzmann replaces Kaufman).
No matter; the sound is decidedly Accept-able (har har), with all the brutal
tones and jagged riffs and rigid metallic beats faithfully preserved and
worshipped.
The biggest concern, naturally, was with the
vocalist; Udo did not care to participate in the reunion this time, being
fairly happy with his solo career. This time, however, the band chose their new
vocalist carefully, avoiding the David Reece blunder of 1989: Udo's
replacement, a little-known metal belter called Mark Tornillo, is unquestionably
the closest substitute for Dirkschneider
that they could find. His voice is a little lower, so you cannot confuse the
two, but just as raspy, provocative and powerful, enough to eliminate the
cheese factor.
This in itself gives a transparent hint as to
Hoffmann's goals: make, once again, a «quintessentially Accept» record,
something that would faithfully recreate the form and spirit of something like Metal Heart. It works. Every single
song off Blood Of The Nations sounds
like 1985 all over again — not a single shred of the influence of nu-metal or
any of those other silly unnecessary innovations that the hard-rocking kids
had come up with over the last decade. Just straightforward uncompromising
metal for the masses, all the way through.
There are problems, though. The nearly
seventy-minute long duration is not one of them: the material is monotonous,
yes, but also very even in quality, so you can shorten or extend it at will, or
change the running order of the tracks with no loss of conceptuality. The real
bad piece of news is that there is not a single riff on here that would swipe
me off my feet — all the best ones we've already had on one or another of
their previous releases, with only the tiniest of variations, and, come to
think of it, the same applies to the worst ones.
So what happened is that, in his respectable
drive to bring back the power of Metal
Heart, Hoffmann predictably bumped in the predictable hole. When Accept
were recording Metal Heart, the
pervasive idea was, «Let's record some songs to kick ass with!» Here, the idea
is «Let's record another Metal Heart!»
— feel the difference? Many of the fans, judging by the rave reviews, obviously
do not, but I sure do. All of these tracks — with the exception of 'Kill The
Pain', a generic and severely trashable power ballad — are enjoyable, but not a
single one stays home with you the same way an 'Up To The Limit' or a 'Dogs On
Leads' was able to stay.
On the other hand, I did say that Blood Of The
Nations honours not only the form of Accept, but its spirit as well. The sound is awesome, and I can totally
understand the positive reception: if the collective brain of the band has not
been spared by time, at least its collective brawn is firmly in place, and with
a heavy metal outfit like this, you never really know which one is the more important.
For an Accept or a metal fan in general, the record is a must-have; for those
who like their riffage to be more inventive, however, it is passable. A
brawny, not brainy, thumbs up.
STALINGRAD (2012)
1) Hung, Drawn And Quartered;
2) Stalingrad; 3) Hellfire; 4) Flash To Bang Time; 5) Shadow Soldiers; 6)
Revolution; 7) Against The World; 8) Twist Of Fate; 9) The Quick And The Dead;
10) Never Forget; 11) The Galley.
Considering the generally warm welcome for Blood Of The Nations, a quick follow-up
was most likely inevitable, and almost as likely predictable. With its
Teutonic balls, nerve, and verve so finely displayed for all to see, could they
have lost it in but two years' time? They probably could, if they saw some
reason to change the formula; but the early 2010s did not exactly spearhead a
revolution in heavy metal values (or in any other values, for that matter), so
what you get is another piece of work in full accordance with the spirit of Metal Heart.
The title might make one think of some
conceptual «metal opera» revolving around World War II — but, in a way, the
majority of German metal bands have always revolved around World War II one way
or another, and the only song here that addresses the topic directly is the
title track, replete with Hoffmann's kitschy guitar recreation of the melody
of the Anthem of the Soviet Union in the coda section. Otherwise, Stalingrad is just the current code
name for the general atmosphere of merciless brutality and the world's
dog-eat-dog nature which supplies 90% of the required oxygen for Accept.
(Together with the album sleeve, it also looks and feels suspiciously like the
packaging to some strategy-based video game — somebody in the band must have
had registered for a crash course in modern marketology in the interim).
In terms of energy, precision, volume,
instrument mix, and other technicalities it all sounds exactly the same as Blood Of The Nations — some fans point
out that Stalingrad is somewhat more
«melodic», which I decode as «it has some slower songs on it», but slow or
fast, it's all heavy and brutal anyway, no pandering whatsoever to the metal
balladry sector. Riff, gang chorus, riff, gang chorus, solo, gang chorus,
build-up to final blow-up, repeat formula eleven times with minor variations —
nothing new.
Alas, nothing new also in the sense that the
main problem stays the same: just like Blood
Of The Nations, Stalingrad does
not have even one fresh riff — most are minuscule variations on what already
used to be. Some of the gang choruses are catchy (at least, when you look at
the title of ʽHung, Drawn And Quarteredʼ or ʽAgainst The
Worldʼ, you immediately remember how they went), but the melodies have not
improved. The only thing that saves them is the classic crunchy Accept guitar
tone — as long as Hoffmann sticks to that tone (and it looks like he will be
carrying it off to Heaven, or Hell, when he goes), I cannot complain while the
music is on.
Come to think of it, Metal Heart did not have a ton of great riffs, either — that album,
too, rode primarily on the strength of its choruses, which might be the reason
why Hoffmann explicitly chose it as the «role model» for this next stage in the
band's career. Wrong as I may be, it seems to me that to come up with something
like one little intro to ʽBalls To The Wallʼ takes far more genius
than it takes to come up with an entire Stalingrad
— where, so it seems, newcomer Mark Tornillo has completely taken over the
function of «emotional jackhammer» from the resident guitarists. But it is also
evident now that Tornillo is even more of a one-trick pony than Udo used to be
— capable of functioning only in the scream register — and as good as he is at
it, the show does begin to get tedious after a while.
As usual, speed saves, so if you want to get a
rewarding taste of the record, go for the faster numbers first — ʽHung,
Drawn And Quarteredʼ, ʽFlash To Bang Timeʼ, ʽThe Quick And
The Deadʼ, etc. — then check out the Soviet National Anthem for a quick
laugh, and then go back to your old copy of Restless And Wild, unless you are a modern production freak (in
which case, get your old copy of Restless
And Wild and have it remastered). On the positive side, at least this ain't
no sellout — and now we have an active countdown going on on how many more
years (decades? centuries?) this band will continue to retain its holy
integrity.
BLIND RAGE (2014)
1) Stampede; 2) Dying Breed;
3) Dark Side Of My Heart; 4) Fall Of The Empire; 5) Trail Of Tears; 6) Wanna Be
Free; 7) 200 Years; 8) Bloodbath Mastermind; 9) From The Ashes We Rise; 10) The
Curse; 11) Final Journey; 12) Thrown To The Wolves.
Riding high on the national stereotype wave, I
would say it is a little less surprising to see such stern, brutal discipline
from our German metal friends than it is from Lemmy Kilmister and his unruly
gang in Motörhead. But even so, it is
a little hilarious to watch 21st century Accept settle into this unwavering
mode of releasing, every two years, a new album that sounds exactly like its predecessor. I guess it
also saves the reviewer extra work: all I really
need to say about Blind Rage is that
if you liked Blood Of The Nations,
and then you liked Stalingrad
without paying attention to the fact that it was the same record with minor
variations, you are, without the slightest doubt, going to like Blind Rage — and, as it is now made
obvious, probably every next Accept record as long as Hoffmann keeps on pushing
these riffs and Tornillo keeps up his best Dirkschneider impression.
I don't want to talk about good songs, I don't
want to talk about bad songs, I just have to confirm that the band still sounds very much like the red bull
on the album cover. The guitar tones have all the crunch, the lead vocalist has
all the banshee credibility, the gang choruses are firmly in place, the drummer
bashes his kit like Satan's page, and the band as a whole seems to have complete
confidence in itself and whatever it is doing. This is all true, and yet, and
yet, and yet I still happen to hold
empty hope that perhaps, one day, we might yet see another ʽPrincess Of
The Dawnʼ from these guys — you know, from the old days when they could
not only kick ass, but throw in
something genuinely creative and mind-blowing from time to time.
As it is, just brace yourself for one more hour
of ball-crushing bullpower. When you see that the first song is called
ʽStampedeʼ, you just know
what it is going to be — fast, furious, aggressive, quickly building up towards
the big gang chorus, which is, of course, "STAMPEDE!... STAMPEDE!..."
interspersed with Tornillo's one-liners, and culminating in a lengthy Hoffmann
solo. Then the second track slows down a little, and becomes a lyrical
celebration of heavy metal, with references to black sabbaths, purple hazes,
silver mountains, screaming with vengeance, and phrases like "the zeppelin
led its voyage thru skies of purple deep", which might fairly well offend both Jimmy Page and Ritchie Blackmore,
but seems to represent a respectful tribute for these guys: "and we salute
you — The Last of the Dying Breed!". Well, silly as it is, Accept
themselves are the last of the dying
breed: this vibe that they still brew so well belongs so utterly to the 20th
century that it does sometimes amaze
me how they have managed to carry it over so well into the 21st. Who cares if
all the songs sound the same, really, or if they are completely incapable of
coming up with another ʽBalls To The Wallʼ-level hook? It's all in
the vibe, man.
Subsequent themes involve anti-imperialism,
anti-militarism, prophecies of doom, bloodbaths, the fall of mankind, and the
eternal struggle of good versus evil — you know the regular drift. Some
choruses are catchier than others (ʽFrom The Ashes We Riseʼ is very
singalong-able), some tempos are faster than others (ʽTrail Of Tearsʼ
is probably the fastest song about the Indian plight ever written — I had no
idea that the Cherokee pioneered speed metal to wreak vengeance on the white
man), but writing about this in any sort of detail should be relegated to
highly specialized Accept fan boards, or, at least, professional metal
magazines.
So let me just conclude with this minor detail:
it is actually worth seeking out the edition with the bonus track ʽThrown
To The Wolvesʼ, since the song (an AC/DC-themed anthem of sexual hunger)
begins with an overdriven, ultraloud riff that threatens to eat you alive more
convincingly than any of the melodies on the «proper» album. Maybe they decided
to leave it off the main body because of the theme — Blind Rage, is after all, more of a conceptual, «socially-relevant»
album. But it's funny that the apex of their ferociousness is reached just as
they leave behind the social topics and embark on a «fleshy» trip instead.
Which just goes to show that the best heavy metal is, after all, just yer basic
rock'n'roll — goes best with sex, rather than social protest.
RESTLESS AND LIVE (2017)
1) Stampede; 2) Stalingrad; 3)
Hellfire; 4) London Leatherboys; 5) Living For Tonite; 6) 200 Years; 7) Demon's
Night; 8) Dying Breed; 9) Final Journey; 10) From The Ashes We Rise; 11) Losers
And Winners; 12) No Shelter; 13) Shadow Soldiers; 14) Midnight Mover; 15) Starlight;
16) Restless And Wild; 17) Son Of A Bitch; 18) Pandemic; 19) Dark Side Of My
Heart; 20) The Curse; 21) Flash Rockin' Man; 22) Bulletproof; 23) Fall Of The
Empire; 24) Fast As A Shark; 25) Metal Heart; 26) Teutonic Terror; 27) Balls To
The Wall.
Considering how much respect this 21st century
Accept has been getting in the metal community, it is probably inevitable that
sooner or later they would summarize it all with a live album — but I guess
nobody really expected such a gigantic package: a BluRay / DVD video of a
complete performance from a 2015 festival in Balingen, Germany, plus a 2-CD
live album with twenty seven live
tracks (almost two and a half hours worth of music!) culled from different
venues of the 2015 tour; amusingly, most of them are from Russia — St.
Petersburg, Moscow, even Yekaterinburg... yes, we Russians love our sweaty,
masculine (and somewhat gay) Teutonic metal. Then again, they did not insert a
piece of the USSR anthem inside ʽStalingradʼ for nothing.
The track listing is almost equally spread
between the songs from the Tornillo era (predictably focusing on Blind Rage) and the classics, with the
proportion of the latter steadily increasing as the pieced-together show draws
to a close. It should also be noted that there are some serious lineup changes:
after Blind Rage, Herman Frank quit
the band, replaced by Uwe Lulis (formerly of Rebellion), and this means that
Hoffmann bears the largest brunt of responsibility for all the lead guitar work
— not that he has any problems with this. In fact, not that anybody has any
problems with anything on the album: this is two and a half hours of non-stop
kick ass metal with barely a single mistake produced by anybody. They just roll
on like a perfectly oiled machine, charged up 100% and disciplined to a tee —
ironically, the Führer would probably be proud of these boys, even if all
of their songs (nominally) rail against the Führer.
The only tiny problem I see is that, as
technically awesome as this guy Tornillo is (you just don't find 60-year old
singers every day who could execute all these gruesome vocal parts night after
night), his work on the classics shows that he cannot properly replace
Dirkschneider — for one thing, he does not have his high vibrato, so the
fabulous choruses of songs like ʽRestless And Wildʼ and ʽFlash
Rockin' Manʼ come off flat, since he just roars through them instead of
vibrating like crazy. For another thing, he does not have much of an
interesting personality — like everybody else here, he tears through the
material with machine-like precision, where Udo would make himself look a
little more humane and even funny on occasion. But hey, this is why Udo is
U.D.O., and Mark Tornillo is just... Mark Tornillo.
As for the setlist, I will not even begin
trying to identify the highlights. Stylistically, the old shit and the new shit
mesh seamlessly, especially because the old shit selections are intentionally
chosen to match the new shit — so we hardly ever get any of Accept's classic
«oddities» like ʽPrincess Of The Dawnʼ: this here is fist-clenching,
blood-curdling rock'n'roll from start to finish. Of the new shit, ʽNo Shelterʼ
features a particularly intense bass / lead guitar battle that blows away the
studio equivalent; and ʽPandemicʼ matures into a modern metal classic
as its fade-out is extended into a climactic-epic coda. Of the old shit, I am
particularly amused that they decided to unearth ʽSon Of A Bitchʼ,
which may have been the single most ridiculous thing they originally recorded
with Udo ("cock suckin' motherfucker, I was right!" always goes off
with a bang). And altogether, perhaps the best compliment to the album is that
I actually sat through it twice (that's a whoppin' five hours of non-stop metal
crunch!) and genuinely enjoyed most of it. Good old metal'n'roll entertainment
— well worth a thumbs
up, even without Udo.
ADDENDA:
STAYING A LIFE (1990/1985)
1) Metal Heart; 2) Breaker; 3)
Screaming For A Love-Bite; 4) Up To The Limit; 5) Living For Tonite; 6)
Princess Of The Dawn; 7) Guitar Solo; 8) Restless And Wild; 9) Son Of A Bitch;
10) London Leatherboys; 11) Love Child; 12) Flash Rockin' Man; 13) Dogs On
Leads; 14) Fast As A Shark; 15) Balls To The Wall.
A slightly belated live album, recorded in
Japan on the Metal Heart tour — although the belatedness may have
ultimately done the band a favour; since it was released almost at the same
time as their wretched Udo-less dwarf of a studio effort, Eat The Heat,
the world, and the band itself, were reminded of their former glory and
splendor, and possibly contributed towards the successful reunion with Udo.
(Empty, but realistic, speculation).
Anyway, Accept are one of those bands that have
no serious need for a live album: it is hardly within human capacity to make
their live show even more "restless and wild" than what they give out
in the studio. You cannot play 'Fast As A Shark' faster than a shark, and if
one of their songs on Metal Heart flashed the title 'Up To The Limit',
you may be sure that so it was, and the limit is the limit. The primary meaning
of a hard rock live album is that it cranks up the level of headbanging,
usually at the expense of polish and "cleanness" of sound; but what
good is a live album if it still sacrifices a bit of polish, but is unable to
crank up the headbanging?
Well, except for the bare fact that any Accept
recording in Accept's prime is worth listening to as such, Staying A Life
has a few major and minor advantages. First, it functions well as a "best
of" package — somewhat uncomfortably tilted towards Metal Heart,
the weakest of their "immaculate stretch" of records, but still
touching on most of the major highlights of Breaker, Restless And
Wild, and Balls To The Wall. Second, it'll be a special delight for
Wolf Hoffmann fans, since the guy generally gets more time to stretch out
(there is even a special four and a half minute solo which, in a nice nod to
the psychedelic tastes of the Sixties, incorporates the theme from 'Hall Of The
Mountain King'). Third, 'Princess Of The Dawn' does not get cut off, but is
played well to its logical end (some might prefer the odd studio ending,
though).
Fourth, it is worth owning this recording if
only for the small bit of audience participating at the beginning of 'Fast As A
Shark', when Udo leads the crowd in a series of call-and-response vocals. Each
"call" is longer and more complex than the previous one, but the
Japanese crowd does not yield — doing its best to collectively emulate his war
cries. Then he comes up with a particularly impressive ascending line, which no
single living human being can emulate. The audience, however, gives it their
best, and is almost able to match it. But just as the people — I think —
start sighing in relief, believing they were finally able to catch up with Udo
at his most complex...
Oh well, looks like this review is getting too
long anyway. The album obviously gets a thumbs up,
but so would probably just about every Accept show from 1982 to 1986. The
recommendation, however, is not to use it as a greatest hits-type
shortcut, because that way you will be missing out on 'Burning', 'Starlight',
'Ahead Of The Pack', and lots of other classics. [Note: the album can also be
found in a somewhat more rare, 2-CD, edition, which does have 'Burning'
— extended beyond need and inferior to the original — as well as a couple
other songs.]
THE FINAL CHAPTER (1997/1998)
1) Starlight; 2) London
Leatherboys; 3) I Don't Wanna Be Like You; 4) Breaker; 5) Slaves To Metal; 6)
Princess Of The Dawn; 7) Restless And Wild; 8) Son Of A Bitch; 9) This One's
For You; 10) Bulletproof; 11) Too High To Get It Right; 12) Metal Heart; 13)
Fast As A Shark; 14) Balls To The Wall; 15) What Else; 16) Sodom & Gomorra;
17) The Beast Inside; 18) Bad Habits Die Hard; 19) Stone Evil; 20) Death Row.
Another live album, originally released as All
Areas — Worldwide with 14 tracks; once it became known that, disappointed
with the way Predator came out, the band finally decided to drop the
line, it was hastily renamed The Final Chapter and re-released with 6
more tracks slapped on from the Death Row tour (the other 14 were from
the Objection Overruled one).
This one is strictly for the fans, though;
Accept live are only desirable when they're able to bare all of their teeth
without the risk of exposing yellow decay or an occasional black hole or two,
and while I cannot find any such flaws in Staying A Life (apart from its
ungrammatical title), these late-period concerts show just enough wear to
become somewhat expendable. No hard feelings — nobody is getting younger,
except for those who were born old, like Neil Young — but no significant desire
to revisit this particular record ever again.
For one thing, you will frequently hear how
time has miraculously spared Udo's voice, but that is not entirely true: it is
fairly obvious that he can't hit those shrill high notes any longer already on
the opening track — he roars the chorus to 'Starlight' instead of wailing it,
which makes the song so much more ordinary. Chunks of 'Fast As A Shark', 'Metal
Heart', and 'Son Of A Bitch' are also botched, not fatally, but enough to
eliminate the possibility of these versions ever becoming as much loved as the
originals. In fact, he seems more confident when singing new material
now, either from being somewhat bored with the oldies or simply because the new
songs are better suited for his diminished vocal power. (But do not get me
wrong: the basic strength of his delivery has not, indeed, suffered one bit).
For another thing, all the tracks here fall
into two categories: note-for-note recreations of the studio recordings
(particularly the new material from Death Row, where the only difference
is lack of excessive studio processing) or slightly re-arranged — almost always
for the worst — oldies. The hardest blow has been dealt in the direction of
'Princess Of The Dawn', whose magnificent riff is simply GONE, replaced by a
bunch of boring power chords. I don't get the joke. I don't understand the
necessity of inserting a bass solo in it either (the extra two bars of bass
intro to 'London Leatherboys' were quite enough). Another unpleasant moment is
dropping the obligatory "audience participation" bit on the 'Für
Elise' instrumental passage in 'Metal Heart'; I do not share the feeling that
getting a metalhead audience to chant Beethoven in a crowded stadium is either
educational or amusing. But that's personal preference, of course.
Still, it's a decent enough document, and a
decent enough performance selection; I can't deny having had the usual
headbanging fun listening to it, and it's only at the dire insistence of the
brain department that I'm giving it a thumbs down.
A must have for fans, though, even if I'm pretty sure there are more convincing
bootleg recordings from those tours available for their pleasure. These
official «highlight selections» frequently have a reputation of having been
selected by industry people born with cotton wads in their ears.
DIRK WEARS WHITE SOX (1979)
1) Cartrouble (parts 1 & 2);
2) Digital Tenderness; 3) Nine Plan Failed; 4) The Day I Met God; 5) Tabletalk;
6) Cleopatra; 7) Catholic Day; 8) Never Trust A Man; 9) Animals And Men; 10)
Family Of Noise; 11) The Idea; 12*) Zerox; 13*) Whip In My Valise; 14*) Kick.
With the New Wave squad fully formed by
somewhere around mid-1978, Adam And The Ants caught the bus just a little too
late to get their full share of the impact. Even though the band's first
playing gig took place in May 1977 and their first radio show in January 1978,
their first single, 'Young Parisians', was not released until much later in the
year (already with a different lineup from that of the 1977 shows), and their
first LP only came out in 1979, by which time this kind of sound was no longer
shocking, although still trendy.
This little delay pretty much ensured that
Stuart Leslie Goddard, a.k.a. Adam Ant, and his original pals would be forever
branded with the unpleasant tag of «second hand artists» — something one might
get to know, if one were so inclined, only after having done the obligatory
homework on the Cars/Talking Heads/Police/Elvis Costello etc. school of pop
music. Justified, perhaps, but behind this justification we might just lose
the realization that Dirk Wears White
Sox sounds nothing quite like any
of these individual artists.
What Adam Ant, another in an endless line of
half-intelligent, half-wild art college dropouts, had in mind at that early
stage of his career was a synthesis of all sorts of Seventies-cool. Each of the
tracks on the album, if you are at least superficially acquainted with the
decade, will remind you of something, but nothing will sound like a complete
rip-off. If you strike out the electronic obsessions of New Wave artists (note
that the album is almost entirely keyboards-free), there will be a rather
straight and strict logical line: from the proto-punk scene — on to the heavy
guitar glam scene — on to the glam-shedding punkers — on to the whacky artsy
New Wavers, and there is a little bit of everything on Dirk Wears White Sox.
At one point, I was inclined to call this whole
thing «what would happen if The Sex Pistols misread Talking Heads» — since way
too many songs employ tricky guitar melodies played in a blunt and dirty
manner, and since the weirdness of the album's words and moods comes out as
hilariously goofy rather than disturbingly paranoid. The definition would not,
however, cover all of its flaws and assets, plus, it would sort of imply that
Adam Ant was an idiot, and that would be sort of rude. He probably just dug
David Bowie more than David Byrne.
Certainly, as 'Cartrouble' opens the record
with its successive layer addition — a simple steady drumbeat, then an oddly
flirting bassline, then a choppy ringing guitar riff, then some high-pitched
whiny overdriven vocals — it is somewhat hard to fight the feeling that someone
might have simply spun 'Psycho Killer' a few times too often. But as the song
progresses, switching tempos and adding bizarre falsetto vocal harmonies, it
begins to find a weak voice of its own, not thoroughly convincing, but at least
mildly intriguing.
It helps that Adam Ant could write decent
melodies and hooks, keeping the intrigue alive at the start of each new song.
Little touches, such as the intro riff to 'Family Of Noise', for instance, or
the little «ding-ding-ding» interludes between each line of the normally
hard-rocking 'Day I Met God' are innovative and cool, and, what's more, they
can be found almost all over the place, you just have to look hard. The band
fares pretty well in terms of atmosphere, too — the brooding overtones of 'Tabletalk'
are quite impressive (although I am actually grateful to them that there is
only one song of that kind on the album, because these «early Ants» were really
made for rocking your ass, not hypnotizing your brain).
That said, intrigue and fun, as essential as
they are to the success of the album, cannot quite fully compensate for its
overall lack of purpose. The ridiculous title itself — allegedly referring to
Sir Dirk Bogarde, who did indeed wear white socks on occasion, but who the hell
cares? — already hints at the possibility that, while Adam Ant was indeed a
creative young man, his creativity may have been rather, shall we say,
randomized. Dirk is neither a
«socially conscious» piece of product, nor is it a focused hundred-miles-an-hour
drive along Absurd Highway à la
Wire. There are, of course, occasional stabs at satire and character
assassination ('Nine Plan Failed'), and a few tracks emphasize the gross-out
factor ('Cleopatra', focusing on the queen's oral skills; sacrilegious
allusions to the size of God's knob in 'The Day I Met God'; 'Catholic Day',
possibly the rudest song ever written on the JFK subject, etc.), but, for the
most part, the songs just ring hollow.
Exciting, but devoid of substance — no big deal
when you are dealing with unpretentious pop clichés, but a little
embarrassing when coming from an album that is so clearly «Art Rock». Still,
time and tolerance tell us that there's something to be said for empty shiny
shells as well. In the mood for some mindless headbanging, but too proud to put
on a KISS album? Out for some mildly intricate guitar work, but too dismissive
of pretentious Heads-style «weaving»? Well, you happen to be in luck — it might
be just for you that Dirk decided to put his socks on. Thumbs up, with at least one-listen
guarantee from both the brain and the heart.
Customer
notice: The album comes in a
whole variety of versions. The original release included 11 tracks as listed
above; the 1983 re-release, supervised by Adam himself, dropped 'Catholic Day'
and 'The Day I Met God' (Adam was probably attempting to smoothe out his image
to accommodate his armies of teenage fans), replacing them with three
single-only tracks that I list as bonuses; and the 2004 remaster finally does
us all justice by including everything, plus alternate single versions of some
of the other tracks.
KINGS OF THE WILD FRONTIER (1980)
1) Dog Eat Dog; 2) Antmusic; 3) Los
Rancheros; 4) Feed Me To The Lions; 5) Press Darlings; 6) Ants Invasion; 7) Killer
In The Home; 8) Kings Of
The Wild Frontier; 9) The Magnificent Five; 10) Don't Be Square; 11) Jolly
Roger; 12) Physical (You're So); 13) The Human Beings.
Soon after the release of Dirk, at the instigation of evil genius Malcolm McLaren, «the Ants»
segregated from Adam in order to form Bow Wow Wow. This never bothered Adam in
the least, since, after all, he wrote most of the songs himself (or, at least,
mostly had them credited to himself), and besides, since when has it ever been
difficult to collect any number of ants? If anything, his new batch was even
trickier than the first, led into action by guitarist and songwriter Marco
Pirroni, who had formerly played a bit with Siouxsie & The Banshees as well
as a few other lesser bands. And not only that, but he had two drummers now — and a brand new set
of ideas, including African music influences that McLaren originally offered
his former band, but which he had the opportunity to nick all to himself.
The result is Adam & The Ants' confusing
masterpiece, an album that either justifies Adam Ant as a unique ant-stituion,
or clearly shows the ridiculous, parasitic nature of modern art, whichever way
you want to face it. «New Wave Rock Theater» would be a good call, implying
that the music is very modern-sounding by the standards of 1980, but the
creative ideas behind it owe far more to the absurdist/futuristic strains of
early Seventies' glam rock than to the gritty streetwise ideals of the
post-1976 era. Certainly Adam's picture on the front cover will make you think
David Bowie, rather than Elvis Costello.
The «concept» behind the whole thing is rooted
both in the past and in the future. It presents Adam and his buddies as «The
Ant people», a.k.a. «The Sex people», a new race of humanoids who seem to take
a lot of pride in their deep tribal ancestry — because they play
African-influenced music while singing about Native American tribes — but have
also chosen to resign from the norms of ordinary human life, mutating into ant
form in order to achieve spiritual and sexual liberation. They still preserve
their fierce warrior hearts, though.
If any of this were funny, we could say that,
finally, Monty Python have met their match. Unfortunately, it isn't; when you
get around to hearing the album, all of it will sound just as stupid as it
probably seems to you from reading that last paragraph. Bowie's futuristic
constructions may have served as inspiration, but only a ten-year old retard,
to put it mildly, could have taken this stuff seriously. Plenty of ten-year old
retards in the UK did, though, sending the LP to the top of the charts and launching
an «Antmania» craze, comparable in form and scope to the teenage delirium
around Marc Bolan a decade earlier — except, of course, that, compared to
Bolan, Adam Ant would hardly register on a larger-than-petty-dwarf scale.
But on the bright side of life, Kings Of The Wild Frontier really
sounds like nothing else. Music that is equal parts punk pop, glam rock, and
random surprises (from the «Burundi drum sound» to spaghetti-western surf
muzak), lyrics that alternate ridiculous slogans like «No method in our madness
/ Just pride about our manner / Antpeople are the warriors / Antmusic is the
banner!» with clever puns like «We depress the press darlings», and plenty of
raw rock energy to keep things from becoming too artsy — you don't have to love
this kind of creativity, but there is at least no shame in acknowledging it.
Plus, these songs are just damn catchy.
Senseless, unfunny, but still, somehow, «fun». 'The Magnificent Five' is
infectious punk pop, 'Don't Be Square' exploits contemporary dance rhythms but
infuses them with Zappa-style craziness, 'Los Rancheros' is one of the
boppiest, most memorable tributes to the cartoonish alter ego of Clint
Eastwood, 'Feed Me To The Lions' finds a perfect way to voice the question
"Too emotional, are we?", and so on, right down to the unforgettable
chant of Indian tribe names in 'The Human Beings' (highly recommendable to
everyone taking a basic course in American ethnography, for sheer mnemonic
power). One should not underestimate the talents of Pirroni, either, coming up
with high quality riffs at least as frequently as your average riffmeister in
your average great punk rock band of the era ('Ants Invasion' may be his one
single defining moment, but certainly far from the only one).
It is hard to say that some of Adam Ant's
albums have dated worse than others — the whole conception of «Adam Ant» had
become irrelevantly alien even before the man quit the musical business — but
at least in terms of perceivable involvement, vigour, and catchy songwriting,
the common opinion that Kings Of The
Wild Frontier was Stuart's finest hour is hard to beat. The album is well
worth getting to know, even if its inclusion in the «1001 Albums You Have To
Hear» list is hardly justified: more like, «10,001 Albums» (what kind of sucker
would be satisfied with a measly thousand and one records these days anyway?). Thumbs up.
PRINCE CHARMING (1981)
1) Scorpios; 2) Picasso Visita
El Planeta De Los Simios; 3) Prince Charming; 4) 5
Guns West; 5) That Voodoo!; 6) Stand And Deliver; 7)
Mile High Club; 8) Ant Rap; 9) Mowhok; 10) S.E.X.
The sequel to Kings is just your stereotypical sequel — same stuff, less
inspired, more predictable, and probably your best bet to diagnose yourself as
a major fan or a passing admirer of the artist. From a slightly detached point
of view, Prince Charming's main
goals have even less to do with music than those of Kings, and much more with image. One need not go further than the
promo video for the first single, 'Stand And Deliver', to understand that
Stuart Goddard's greatest dream in life all along had been to show off in an
18th century dress before millions of people. (I have to admit that he wears it
real well, though.)
With the abandoning of the «Burundi drum
sound», the music loses a good chunk of its energy, and to my ears it also
sounds like Pirroni goes lighter on interesting new riffage. After all, the album's
title track, another huge commercial success, has eventually been identified as
a complete rip-off — not «tribute» or «imitation», but straightahead theft — of
Rolf Harris' far less known 'War Canoe' from 1965 (granted, the song itself was
based on a traditional rowboat theme, but that is beyond the point); who really
knows what other obscure compositions may have served as backbones for the rest
of these tracks? It is as if, upon gaining self-confidence after the fame of Kings, Adam had decided that not only
was style superior to substance (that
he knew all along), but, in fact, substance was a major obstacle to style.
Write good melodies and, what do you know, people may start concentrating on them rather than on your beloved kitsch.
Still, as another self-indulgent exercise in
humorless absurdity, Prince Charming
may deserve recognition as Kings'
sincerely trying, but far less gifted younger brother. For the most part, the
band has dropped the «Antpeople» gimmick, locking it inside just one of the
album's tracks (and also arguably the worst one: 'Ant Rap' makes the early
white attempt at hip-hop sound as pathetically miserable as Debbie Harry,
exceptionally, managed to make it sexy). But many of the other gimmicks have
been successfully transplanted here as well, including The Pirate Gag ('Stand
And Deliver'), The African Gag ('That Voodoo!'), The Native American Gag
('Mowhok'), and even The Spaghetti Western Gag ('5 Guns West', a latecomer in
this world to feature in the soundtrack to Blazing
Saddles, but firmly inside the same aesthetics nevertheless).
It is also quite likely that, depending on the
ratio of your coolness, you will want to like and defend any track that goes by the name of 'Picasso Visita El Planeta De
Los Simios' — not so much for its music, which is just by-the-book power pop,
but for the hipness of its subject matter. Never mind that the song does not
even begin to compete in emotion with 'Picasso's Last Words' or in humor with
Cale and Richman's 'Pablo Picasso', but a song about Picasso! visiting the
Planet of the Apes! titled in Spanish! how awesome is that?
Not nearly as awesome as some exercises in
post-modern synthesis can be, I'm
afraid. 'Stand And Deliver' is still the album's best song: Stuart is so goddamn
happy to be playing the «dandy highwayman» that the happiness is well bestowed
on the music, simple as it is, and even if it is not the epitome of a great
vocal melody (most of the verses are just shouted) or a great hook (the chorus hardly
represents the basic philosophy of «standing and delivering» the way it should
get down to you), it is at least infectious in terms of pure enthusiasm. The
rest does not go that far.
FRIEND OR FOE (1982)
1) Friend Or Foe; 2)
Something Girls; 3) Place In The Country; 4) Desperate But Not Serious;
5) Here Comes The Grump; 6) Hello I Love You; 7) Goody Two Shoes; 8)
Crackpot History And The Right To Lie; 9) Made Of Money; 10) Cajun Twisters;
11) Try This For Sighs; 12) Man Called Marco.
The difference between an «Adam & The Ants»
album and an «Adam Ant» album would seem to be minimal — in terms of sheer band
members, there is actually more difference between Dirk and Kings, both
«Ants» albums, than there is between Prince
Charming and Friend Or Foe: Adam
might have officially disbanded the Ants in the interim, but he did retain the
writing and playing services of Marco Pirroni, the second and last major
creative link in the Ants' career of 1980-81. Why the name change, then?
Well, I guess that the proper commemoration of
the finest bunch of tunes ever assembled on a Stuart Leslie Goddard album
deserves a proper name change. Kings Of
The Wild Frontier may have been the most successful way of showcasing the
hollow, but fun philosophy behind «The Ants»; Friend Or Foe dumps that philosophy altogether in favor of simple pop
music — terrific pop music — and there is no longer any reason to pass it off
for «Antmusic», since Goddard is no longer playing Bowie-like characters.
Already Prince Charming didn't quite
work that way, so the right thing to do was simply to try and concentrate more
on the music, less on the image.
I strongly suspect that Pirroni was given a big
chance here to write most of the music, since it retains most of the
attractive elements of its predecessors and ditches most of its dubious ones.
It is not at all easy to even call this stuff «New Wave»: it has the big
bashing drum sound and echoey guitar tones that are typical for post-punk
records, but the melodies owe far more to Sixties' Brit-pop, surf-rock, and
rockabilly than the funky-punky stylistics of cool modern people from the late
1970s. In 1982, that wasn't exactly going against the grain — there are, for
instance, clear intersection points with the popular neo-rockabilly scene
(Stray Cats, etc.) — but it wasn't the major
trend, either: had Adam wanted to go fully commercial, he would, no doubt, have
chosen the New Romantic image instead.
As it is, Friend
Or Foe is an entirely unexpected case of rejuvenation after Prince Charming's slump. How could it
even be possible to resist the mad thumping punch of 'Goody Two Shoes'? The
combination of breakneck speed, pummeling drums, and exuberant brass fanfares
may be as simplistic as a typical Ramones tune, but it is also every bit as
irresistible. Even if the song was not the epitome of fashion in 1982, it
simply couldn't help becoming Ant's biggest hit — no one can remain indifferent
to this kind of thermonuclear blast.
The catch is that all of the album is bursting with the same kind of energy. For
instance, the sequence of 'Something Girls' (everyone loves a catchy power pop
anthem — based on an unforgettable whistling riff, no less!), 'Place In The
Country' (another breakneck brass-led piece of deliriously poppy rock'n'roll —
Ramones meet the Dave Clark Five?), and 'Desperate But Not Serious' (a dark,
ominous, sexy tune with Pirroni's trademark «spaghetti-western» overtones) is
easily one of the most breathtaking one-two-three sequences on any pop record of the decade: only the
arrival of 'Here Comes The Grump', a nice, but lighter folk-rocker finally
lowers the adrenaline level, serving as a breather before the upcoming
senses-overkill of 'Goody Two Shoes'.
The second side is not nearly as consistent,
with a couple less interesting, more restrained funk-rockers, but even that
complaint is like a tiny glitch. The cover of Jim Morrison's 'Hello I Love
You', although professionally executed, may seem superfluous — yet it is quite
symbolic of the album: one of the Doors' poppiest, lightest (and, if one takes
serious the Kinks rip-off accusation, least original) tunes that nevertheless
contains an expected particle of the Doors' dark heart — and this is exactly
what Friend Or Foe is all about,
straightahead pop music with a bit of sense-deranging spice to each of the
songs. Even the final number, a Pirroni instrumental conveniently titled 'Man
Called Marco', contains plenty of uneasiness — think of a cross between
Morricone and the Ventures, with spooky falsetto harmonies and suggestive
whistling to boot.
Ant's obscure lyrics, making the songs'
messages hard to decipher (with only a few straightforward exceptions like the
wife-bashing 'Made Of Money'), are the album's weak point: he is still unable
to match the poetic heights of a Byrne or a Costello, yet refuses to go the
«accessible» route all the same. So if these songs succeed in driving you
wild, spooking, or just plain bedazzling your feelings, you may eventually find
yourself wondering what the hell that bedazzling was all about. Really, though,
it don't matter. Like I said, Friend Or
Foe simply works on the level of a nuclear blast: by the time it hits you,
it is of little use to wonder about its nature. Just a thumbs up, without much ado.
STRIP (1983)
1) Strip; 2) Baby, Let Me
Scream At You; 3) Libertine; 4) Spanish Games; 5) Vanity; 6) Puss'n'Boots; 7) Playboy;
8) Montreal; 9) Navel To Neck; 10) Amazon.
Normally, we prefer to keep our «smart» rock
music on one shelf and our «horny» rock music on the other. There is, after
all, something unusually perverse about exercising one's brain and one's groin
at the same time — at the very least, the two aren't supposed to enjoy direct
benefits from combined interaction. Adam Ant, in 1983, decided to experiment
and see if he couldn't prove that point wrong — and, in addition, make some
money out of it.
Strip is a solidly conceptual album about getting
some, dressed up as a commercially-oriented late New Wave record and seriously
downplaying Ant's «rock» side: although Pirroni is still listed as
co-producer, co-writer, and credited with most of the guitar work, his
trademark innovative riffs rarely show through, overwhelmed by both standard
fare such as keyboards and electronic drums, on one side, and unusual touches
such as swooping orchestration, on the other. And tons of vocal overdubs, all
over the place.
The November 1983 date of release makes me strongly
suspect that Goddard could have been influenced by Madonna's debut: at the
very least, Strip can be very easily
read as a «male answer» to the lady's tramp classics such as 'Burning Up'.
Besides, he'd been admired by teen girls for so long for obscure reasons —
wouldn't it be high time to give them a real
reason? Adam Ant, The Ladies' Man?
Any computer running on a twenty-year old
processor could have easily concluded that, for these reasons alone, Strip couldn't be as efficient an album
as Friend Or Foe. More keyboards,
less guitars, intelligence sacrificed to lustful innuendo — and, try as hard as
he could, Ant could never hope to become the new Bon Scott — and, on top of
that, to produce their new singles, they brought Phil Collins into the studio.
How could this be good? Most critics probably never even gave it a serious try.
Which is too bad, because the singles are
hilarious. 'Strip' does work as sort of a semi-parodic answer to the Madonna
approach: the sex drive is not so much worshipped as it is being poked fun at,
and who could take seriously a song whose chorus goes "We're just
following ancient history — If I strip for you, will you strip for me?"
«Seriously», of course, as in «sexually seriously», because music-wise, it is
terrific, especially when those disco-era strings, remodelled for the new
decade, emerge in the chorus. It does sound a bit like stuff from Phil Collins'
solo albums, but the good one, not the boring one.
'Puss'n'Boots' is almost just as much fun, and
if 'Strip' trashed the sex culture from within it, then this here tune assaults
it from without: sticking needles in mannequin bodies of "Pussycats going
to London, looking for love and love for fame" may not be a very demanding
job ("I wish somebody had told her / City folks ain't the same"),
but it's a very satisfying one, especially when set to such a catchy melody and
that ridiculously appealing light strings arrangement.
In general, ideas seem to run a little thin by
the end of the second side, but there is still enough to cover our basic needs.
Gypsy flourishes on 'Spanish Games' — synth-pop straightforwardness on 'Playboy'
("What do you wear in bed? Some headphones on my head") — cheesy
Bowie-style decadence on 'Vanity' ("She says she likes the accent, she
thinks it's so polite") — and my personal favourite, 'Montreal', whose
melodic essence is simply undescribable: rockabilly, Brit-pop, psychedelia, and
disco all rolled in one, with a harmonic chorus to die for.
I find no significant reasons to write the
whole thing off, other than, perhaps, «not quite fitting with the times» — but
this would be wrong — or «way too campy» (did that ever stop anyone from loving
Bowie's Let's Dance, which is just
as questionable from the artistic point as these oddball Ant records). Stock
this in your «sex'n'brains» category of albums, next to all those Sparks
albums, even if, arguably, Strip has
dated more quickly. This prevents me none from calling it underrated. Maybe it
does try so hard to be smart that it ends up being silly, and for some, this
sort of «silly» may fit in with their conception of «awful». I don't know.
1983? I think Rod Stewart was «awful» in 1983. Adam Ant was OK by me. Thumbs up.
VIVE LE ROCK (1985)
1) Vive Le Rock; 2) Miss
Thing; 3) Razor Keen; 4) Rip Down; 5) Scorpio Rising; 6) Apollo 9; 7) Hell's Eight
Acres; 8) Mohair Lockerroom Pin-Up Boys; 9) No Zap; 10) P.O.E.; 11) Apollo 9
(reprise).
For their next album, Ant and Pirroni were
teamed with the legendary producer Tony Visconti, probably a great confidence
boost to Adam given how David Bowie, one of Visconti's veterans, had always
been his major idol. At that time, Visconti's reputation as a rock'n'roll
producer was pretty much impeccable — serious lapses of taste would arrive only
later in the decade, when, instead of saving The Moody Blues, he happened to
only contribute to their artistic ruination. But in 1985, he was still capable
of rerouting Adam's energy to the correct channel, that of smart, sarcastic
rock'n'roll instead of the smart, but cheesy pop direction of Strip.
The result is an album much closer in spirit to
Friend Or Foe, and perhaps even more
consistent overall, although the individual highlights never approach the
intensity level of 'Goody Two Shoes' or 'Desperate But Not Serious'. The title
track is, after all, merely a generic piece of boogie — but, throught the
collective effort of Ant, Pirroni, and Visconti, elevated to the status of
monster glam rock suitable for the Eighties; not the cheesy hair-metal kind of
glam rock, no, just a modernized version of the same Bowie / Bolan vibe that
owed so much to Visconti a decade earlier. Perhaps 'Vive Le Rock' is too smart
for its own good to pass for a general good-time rock'n'roll anthem, but for a
freak subculture rock'n'roll anthem ("Look out," cries the man,
"Rockers going Star Wars!") — why not?
Song after song is steady, healthy, hilarious
rockabilly fattened with Pirroni's post-punk guitar sound and Visconti's thick,
glutinous production. They get away with nearly everything — such as ripping
off Carl Perkins' descending intro riff to 'Honey Don't' for 'Hell's Eight
Acres'; turning Chuck Berry's 'Memphis Tennessee' into 'Rip Down' by adding
extra bite to both the melody and the now completely inscrutable lyrics; and invoking
the spirits of both Gene Vincent and the entire lineup of Sha-Na-Na for the
foot-stompin' rock'n'roll march of 'Mohair Lockerroom Pin-Up Boys'. And no
serious review of the album could be complete without mentioning 'P.O.E.', arguably
the cheerfulest, drunked-est song about the nuclear threat ever written (I'm
sure there must be a reason why the song namedrops Khrushchev instead of more
up-to-date Soviet leaders, but then Mr. Ant was eight years old at the time of
the Caribbean Crisis, confirming the old idea that most art is stimulated by
one's childhood memories).
The album's big single was somewhat different:
'Apollo 9', actually released one year before, was Ant's rather pretentious
attempt to invent a new type of «space rock» that would merge classic
rock'n'roll, New Wave, and synth pop all in one and make it all fun, in contrast with the astral gloom
of the New Romantics. The record buying public was confused, and sales were low
both for the single and for the ensuing LP. And this is, paradoxically, its
biggest flaw: Vive Le Rock was
clearly tailored for hit status, but in between its 1985 release and 1982's Friend Or Foe, public tastes had
changed so much that this approach could no longer chart. Which means that only if songs like 'Apollo 9'
didn't try so hard to be
commercial... they could be even better!
However, this is all merely cold post-factum
reasoning that should in no way denigrate the album's pure entertainment
value. The naked fact is that Vive Le
Rock means little, if anything, but it brightens up your day in no less
vivid a manner than, say, a good Paul McCartney solo record. Sadly, never again
would an Adam Ant album be that much fun; its commercial failure threw Adam off
the tracks completely, and when he returned five years later, he was never
quite the same. A hearty thumbs up.
MANNERS & PHYSIQUE (1990)
1) Room At The Top; 2) Rough Stuff; 3) If You
Keep On; 4) Manners & Physique; 5) Can't Set Rules About Love; 6) U.S.S.A.;
7) Bright Lights Black Leather; 8) Piccadilly; 9) Young Dumb And Full Of It;
10) Anger, Inc.
With the release and ultimate commercial
failure of Vive Le Rock, Ant
disappeared for about four years from the music stage in order to pursue an
acting career — dreaming, perhaps, of beating his idol, the Thin White Duke,
at least in that particular area.
Unfortunately, he could not even place a Man
Who Fell To Earth under his belt, let alone a Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence; compared to Bowie's generally
pathetic filmography, Ant's list of achievements is arch-pathetic. (Cold Steel? Spellcaster? Midnight Heat?
The titles alone speak for themselves). Eventually and inevitably, Mr. Goddard
had little choice but to bring back Marco Pirroni and return to the world of
note-splicing and leg-wiggling.
Fate was, however, cruel enough to assure that Ant's
«comeback» album would be the absolute musical nadir of his entire career.
Besides Pirroni, the third leading contributor happened to be bassist
André Cymone, notable for several years of working in Prince's band,
upon which he switched to mostly producing records for third-rate dance-pop
artists, hopelessly — and, possibly, badly — teaching them rudiments of the
Prince approach. Unsurprisingly, he tried to do the same to Adam: the biggest
catch of 'em all — and the most deplorable results.
Apart from the sardonic, modestly intelligent
lyrics (which can hardly be heard anyway behind all the multi-tracking and
echo), there is not much Adam Ant on this album, and, sadly, virtually no
Pirroni: the crackling, oddly twisted riffs that used to distinguish Ant's pop
songs from his competition, have been wiped out in favor of primitive dance
melodies, and moreover, guitars are frequently used as merely a wall of jarring
background noise behind one-finger-on-a-keyboard synthesizer patterns. 'Bright
Lights, Black Leather', a lyrically sane depiction of the youth subculture of
West Berlin (another hi from Bowie), in the musical department sounds like
Modern Talking — few things can be more distasteful to my ears than that
Godawfully abysmal chucking keyboard sound. No album with a song like that on
it deserves a positive review, be it surrounded by a dozen equivalents of
'Satisfaction' and/or 'Hey Jude' (not that such a thing is possible; there must
be a mathematical proof for this somewhere).
Actually, some of the songs still manage to be
catchy — this is, after all, a carefully crafted and marketed dance-pop album,
and 'Room At The Top', with its infectious beat and whoah-whoahs, managed an
expected and, from a commercial point, fully deserved dent in the UK and US
charts. But it really fits in better with all those other so-called artists
produced by Cymone — Pebbles, Jermaine Stewart, etc. — than the good old
«Antmusic». On 'Rough Stuff', with its in-yer-face R'n'B-isms of "lagga-lagga-boom-sh-boom",
Ant feels completely out of his league — it's a miracle they even managed to
complete that take, let alone turn it into another minor (non-)hit. Not just
out of his league — «pitifully replaceable» should be the right term for it.
In short, I recommend to reject the record on
ideological grounds: this kind of music can only be enjoyed when accompanied by
videos of scantily clad hot girls doing aerobics (preferably with a lot of
bend-overs), and even then, probably only from a nostalgic angle. (Actually,
the official video for 'Rough Stuff' more or less satisfies that requirement,
so not all is lost). Sadly, there are
some good lyrics here that make vicious fun of contemporary social life, all of
them wasted on trash muzak that is sucking up to contemporary social life.
Some sources state that Manners & Physique shows a heavy influence of the «Minneapolis
Sound» pioneered by Prince — don't believe a word: at its best, the
«Minneapolis Sound» depended on first-rate musicianship, whereas on here
there is no musicianship to speak of in the first place. Did Prince, even
considering the permanently increasing amount of filler in his pockets, ever
release a song as awful as 'Bright Lights, Black Leather'? I don't think so. Thumbs down.
WONDERFUL (1995)
1) Won't Take That Talk; 2)
Beautiful Dream; 3) Wonderful;
4) 1969 Again; 5) Yin & Yang; 6) Image Of Yourself; 7) Alien; 8) Gotta Be A Sin; 9)
Vampires; 10) Angel; 11) Very Long Ride.
Maybe it was a good thing, after all, that by
1995 the world had all but forgotten Adam Ant and certainly had little basic
need for his presence. After another five-year gap spent wasting his life on a
miserable acting career that still
did not take off — although maybe he enjoyed all of it, I have no real idea — and
after suffering the humiliation of having an entire new record rejected by his
label, he eventually reteamed with Pirroni as well as Morrissey's guitarist Boz
Boorer and managed one more album, his last solo offering to date.
Wonderful isn't all that wonderful, but it is certainly
a huge leap in sense and quality over its predecessor — more than that, it is
a notable first for Ant: the first album on which, most of the time at least, he seems to be impersonating himself
rather than somebody else. There are no attempts, be they forced or natural, to
sound hip to the times or to wring out a hit record at any cost. There are no
stereotypes to be adhered to, no genre conventions to respect. (Granted, much
of this could have been motivated by the commercial success of new Brit-pop
acts like Blur, but there are no specific «Blurrisms» that I could refer to). Even
the album sleeve, first time ever,
shows us simply «the man» without any special attire or makeup.
Obviously, since Adam Ant is no Paul McCartney
or Neil Young, great songs do not come to him easily, and few, if any, of these
songs overwhelm other than through the mere realisation that the man has
finally decided to talk to us unmasked (or, at least, pretended to be talking to us unmasked — you never really know
with that breed of chameleons). But this new approach, which comprises a heavy
reliance on acoustic guitars, folk-pop harmonies, and bits of retro
psychedelia, at least ensures that when a song's hooks are well written, the
song is a marvel, and when they're badly written, it is at least enjoyable.
The title track still managed to hit the
charts, but I do not remember it nearly as vividly as the opening number,
'Won't Take That Talk', which by all means should also have been a single, but
they probably chose 'Wonderful' over it because of the danceable rhythm. Too
bad, because the hooks are sharper and more emotional on 'Talk', a song that
may be reflecting that one major change in Ant's attitude: "Got to stop
treating people / Like they have no feelings, / Stop treating people / Like
they have no meaning". An excellent folk-rocker with good acoustic and
electric parts, crescendos, and that weird overall feeling of honesty that
makes it such a unique opener in the history of Ant LPs: there is something in
the way he softly, but firmly pronounces the line "I won't take that talk
from no one" that makes you understand he really might mean it.
Second runner-up, and one of the finest
Brit-pop creations of the decade, is '1969 Again', with a guitar sound too
juicy to reject and vowel harmonies too gorgeous to forget, even if the lyrical
message is not quite clear (looks like someone in the big leagues made Adam a
bit unhappy). There is also the dreamy neo-psychedelia of 'Yin & Yang',
the fast bouncy pop of 'Gotta Be A Sin', the Hunky Dory-style folk-rock exhuberance of 'Vampires', and other
little things that only come to one's attention through successive listenings,
quite warranted.
At the end of the road, Wonderful might turn out
to be wonderful: it is, so far, Ant's only album whose meaningfulness may want
to unravel itself slowly, an album that shows there is more to the man than
just the image far better than even a compilation of his very best stuff from
the «classic» years. The fact that he still has not come out with a new studio
offer has more to do with accidental causes — primary among them all the
psychic health problems he's been dealing with — but who knows, maybe it's
better that way: Wonderful is an
exquisitely tasteful and wise choice for a career swan song, and in time, when
the number of people for whom the name «Adam Ant» still has a musical meaning
dwindles to about ten or fifteen, will be sure to hold its rightful place
alongside Kings Of The Wild Frontier
and Friend Or Foe as an equally
worthy album. Thumbs
up; track it while it's still in print.
ADAM ANT IS THE BLUEBLACK HUSSAR IN MARRYING THE GUNNER'S DAUGHTER (2013)
1) Cool Zombie; 2) Stay In The
Game; 3) Marrying The Gunner's Daughter; 4) Vince Taylor; 5) Valentine's; 6) Darlin'
Boy; 7) Dirty Beast; 8) Punkyoungirl; 9) Sausage; 10) Cradle Your Hatred; 11)
Hard Men, Tough Blokes; 12) Shrink; 13) Vivienne's Tears; 14) Who's A Goofy
Bunny; 15) How Can I Say I Miss You; 16) Bullshit; 17) How Can I Say I Miss You
(reprise).
In a fashion somewhat atypical of «has-beens»,
Adam's comeback actually culminated
in a new album rather than started out with it — for about three years, since
early 2010, he had been resharpening his teeth on stage, remembering old
material, polishing the new one, and generally getting back into character.
Actually, he'd invented a new
character — the «Blue Black Hussar», which was also the name of his new private
record label — but it really only signified a return to his old fetish with
18th / early 19th century styles and uniforms. A return to his trusty old self,
really, the last signs of which we had glimpsed back in 1985, with Vive Le Rock arguably being the last
«genuine Adam Ant» album.
Now, in 2013, Adam Ant has completed the
comeback, and he wants us all to take notice — not only is the album title his lengthiest ever, offering some
modest competition to Tyrannosaurus Rex and Fiona Apple, but the album itself
is his lengthiest ever: seventeen tracks stretched over seventy minutes, taking
full advantage of the CD format in an age when the average artist seems to have
already outgrown that stage (and Michael Jackson is dead). Which means that
there is a lot here to digest and
assimilate — and it might take some serious time, because Adam Ant is not out
there to make the job easy for you. The
Blueblack Hussar is hardly his worst album, and it is most likely not his
best, but it is the toughest nut he has offered for us to crack so far.
Even after five listens, most of the songs
still feel emotionally alienated, but not emotionally empty. This is
definitely the Adam Ant of Wild Frontier and Friend Or Foe, but acting his age: the songs are taken at slower
tempos and stripped of superficial wildness (tribal drumming, lunatic yelling,
martial parade atmospheres, etc.). Adam's character impersonation routine still
puts a heavy «glam stamp» on it, but on the whole, his attitude nowadays is not
unlike David Bowie's — that of an aged guru, striking a careful balance between
the tastefulness of the arrangements, the impressionistic / symbolic /
confusing nature of the lyrics, and the retro vs. modernistic production ratio
that could keep both the old fans and the occasional new listener happy.
Clearly, such albums run a very high risk of
being flat-out boring, and for many people Adam's latest offering — especially
if they put it on with ʽGoody Two Shoesʼ on their minds — may well be
the epitome of boredom. The melodies (most of which, strangely enough, have a
folksy acoustic guitar foundation, with the occasional exception of a heavy
electric riff only proving the general rule) are fairly routine — to get note
sequences of this caliber, one certainly does not need to drag a sixty-year old
New Wave freak out of the closet. And the «vibe»... well, it is not even clear
if those particular audiences that did not grow up on Adam's classic records
will get the sarcastic/absurdist gist
of it all.
But I think that, according to Adam's own
standards, the record is a success. Where, for instance, Alice Cooper remained
unable to recapture the crassy horror-show temptation of Welcome To My Nightmare with his direct sequel, Stuart Leslie
Goddard has managed to demonstrate that the good old Adam Ant is still alive,
sharp-witted, and stubbornly independent. To begin with, he opens the record
with ʽCool Zombieʼ, which uses a swampy, slide-guitar-based
arrangement to sabotage and blow up the old «Southern rock» values — "for
a time I lived in Tennessee, a pretty hillbilly, a cool Zombie", says the
guy, ensuring that one place where
this record will never get much airplay is any random Nashville radio station.
It is not «great» or «catchy» — it is «sharp», and it pretty much sets the
general standard for whatever is to come.
The individual songs are often slow, but steady
growers. ʽStay In The Gameʼ eventually comes to life as a moody
younger brother of the Doors / Joy Division vibe (with a squeaky, jarring
guitar sound on the Joy Division side, and catchy poppy vocals on the Doors
side). ʽVince Taylorʼ is a morose, but punchy tribute to an old,
forgotten rock hero (Adam Ant's worst nightmare, eh?). The mock-sexy,
mock-psychedelic aah-aahs of ʽValentine'sʼ have a sad, but decadent
flavor that stops exactly midway between gallant prettiness and intentional
self-parody (well, at least it stopped for me and hasn't moved an inch ever
since). ʽCradle Your Hatredʼ has an anthemic R&B chorus that
feels almost as sincere as the metallic breath of ʽHard Men, Tough
Blokesʼ.
All in all, by the time we get around to
ʽWho's A Goofy Bunnyʼ, a song allegedly dedicated to the memory of
Adam's good friend and mentor Malcolm McLaren, you might want to start asking
that question on your own. Is it Adam Ant who is a goofy bunny, putting on this
retro show in slow mode despite having long since outlived his time? Is it the
«public taste», symbolized by the likes of McLaren and churning out demand for
silly rock theater? Is it us reviewers, wasting our time trying to sort out the
meaningful from the meaningless and ending up with extra frustration on our hands?
Maybe we're all just a bunch of goofy
bunnys ever since we separated art from its pragmatic ceremonial purposes and
started pretending that it has additional meaning...
...in any case, one thing is for certain: a
record that gets one to ask these kinds of questions cannot be a total failure.
Just like Adam Ant was teasing us in the New Wave era, challenging listeners to
a winless game of «guess who's smart and who's dumb», he is efficiently doing
the same stuff now, only with a
little more restraint and age-related corrections. In other words, this is a
confusing record — but it is a stimulating confusing record, which is the good
kind of confusing, and I give it a thumbs up even despite not being able to say if I
«like it» or even «understand it». You will just have to find out on your own;
all I can say is, at the very least Adam Ant is not back for nothing — he is
definitely back with something,
whatever the heck it is.
ADOLESCENTS (1981)
1) I Hate Children; 2) Who Is
Who; 3) Wrecking Crew; 4) L. A. Girl; 5) Self Destruct; 6) Kids Of The Black
Hole; 7) No Way; 8) Amoeba; 9) Word Attack; 10) Rip It Up; 11) Democracy; 12)
No Friends; 13) Creatures; 14*) Welcome To Reality; 15*) Losing Battle; 16*)
Things Start Moving.
The Californian hardcore punk scene has one
solid advantage over most other scenes: while the kids who would later create
it were growing up, their moms and dads grooved to the sounds of Jan and Dean
and the Beach Boys, and even though these sounds may not always be directly reflected
in their children's music, there is still a definite line connecting the two.
Adolescents grew out of Agent Orange, one of
the first «surf-punk» bands, when Steve Soto, the bass player for the latter,
decided to pursue a somewhat grittier line of work and teamed up with three
former members of Social Distortion — so one might think of Adolescents as one
of the first, and best, «supergroups» in hardcore. The original idea was... no,
wait, there was no original idea.
These guys would not go the way of the Dead Kennedys and their political
agenda. The emphasis is on bare, brutal emotion dressed in the simplest, most
accessible, musical forms.
Adolescents could play their instruments (like
all good hardcore bands that managed to remain in history — the ones that
didn't merely pretend to ignorance,
but were truly ignorant, predictably
lapsed into oblivion), particularly lead guitarist Frank Agnew, but the rhythm
section of Casey Royer on drums and Steve Soto on bass was pretty hot as well.
Not only do they keep up a great beat on all of the songs, but the basslines
are occasionally melodic, and so are
Agnew's solos. Singalong choruses, occasional «moody» interludes, throw in a
talented way of creating lyrics that seem blurted out on the spot, yet are
surprisingly smart when you take a look at them — no wonder Adolescents is widely considered as one
of hardcore's peaks in the history books.
Hardcore spirit is no big friend of mine, but
even I cannot deny being overwhelmed by these guys when they are at their most
focused and collected. Strangely, the song length factor plays in reverse
here: the longer these songs are, the
better they get. Longest one, 'Kids Of The Black Hole', clocks in at 5:27, a
sacrilege to hardcore formula, but, after a brief ominous intro, it's five
minutes of non-stop apocalyptic frenzy that uses the metaphor of 'The Black
Hole' — an abandoned apartment somewhere in Orange County used as a punk house
— to complain about how life stinks in general, and how there's not much to do
for a poor boy except to contribute further to the stinkiness. They just blaze
on and on and on and on, doing a hundred and twenty on an endless highway,
transforming this simplest of grooves into a one-of-a-kind generation anthem.
Second longest song, 'Amoeba', is respectively
second best — another, very similar, fiery groove, this time comparing us
humans to one-celled creatures whose life has no purpose: ring a bell? The
Adolescents offer no way out of the cage, they have simply decided that the
more you thrash against its walls, the more you're able to lay your mind off
the really bad thoughts. By giving
kicks, no matter how pointless, you get
kicks, and if you ain't kicked real hard by 'Black Hole' or 'Amoeba', all I can
say is your soul might be in good need of a descaling agent.
Shorter tracks either create props for longer
ones or serve as quirky, fun little statements in their own right: 'I Hate
Children' is pretty much defined by its title (and how many people have, at one
time or another, secretly wished they could join a hardcore band to gain a
right to sing "Kill all children dead"?), 'No Way' adds a mean
militant spirit to the Ramones-pioneered "lobotomy rock" genre,
'Democracy' is a song whose lyrical message will be appealing to kids
throughout the first world for as long as it has not been washed away by the
third, and then there's 'Creatures', the band's signature song which is...
pretty stupid, really. But it works.
To «get» hardcore, I believe, one needs to
swallow it in one quick gulp, vodka-like, which is why all the classic hardcore
albums are so short. Once Adolescents
is over and you start wondering if there ever was a peculiar, individual taste
to this record, or perhaps it was just like any other hardcore album ever
done, completely interchangeable, it might strike you that not a single note
really rang false; that the thirty-minute wave that threatened to drown you,
but eventually left you just high and dry, came on as a true force of nature
rather than a mere theatrical stunt, and that its center of gravity, 'Black
Hole', must have hit you as hard today as it hit kids and grown-ups thirty years earlier. And they may not have known it
themselves, but there is a great feel of balance on the record — between brute
force and subtle intelligence, primitive chainsaw buzz and delicate, complex
soloing, brevity of the punk statement and lengthiness of the carried-away jam.
For all of this, Adolescents
deserves a big thumbs
up, and Orange County deserves not to be nuked, after all.
BRATS IN BATTALIONS (1987)
1) Brats In Battalions; 2) I
Love You; 3) The Liar; 4) Things Start Moving; 5) Do The Freddy; 6) Losing
Battle; 7) House Of The Rising Sun; 8) Peasant Song; 9) Skate Babylon; 10)
Welcome To Reality; 11) Marching With The Reich; 12) I Got A Right; 13) She
Wolf.
No surprise when I say that nobody really needs to hear anything by the
Adolescents other than Adolescents,
for the safe, simple, predictable reason that when the Adolescents started
recording their second album — a whoppin' six years, sixty member changes, and
six hundred personal cataclysms after their first — they were no longer
adolescents, and what use can one make of an Adolescents album in name but not
an Adolescents album in nature?
Even though, somehow, for these 1986-87
sessions the band managed to get most of its original, and best, lineup, back
in place (except for Frank Agnew, replaced by his no less Agnew, but much less
talented brother Alfie), Brats In
Battalions suffers from punk's commonest disease: the inflammatory conflict
between the acute desire to grow and the gross inability of growing. By
embracing various substyles and experimenting from different angles, Cadena,
the Agnews and the rest of the band are clearly trying to say something. But oh
how better it was back when the only thing they were trying to say was that
they couldn't really say anything.
The whole album is summarized fairly well by
their misguided cover of 'House Of The Rising Sun', which they start out as a
«regular» dirty folk-blues number and then, after a couple verses, transform
into hardcore. The question is — why? It doesn't sound like a meaningful
reinvention; it sounds like lame self-parody, neither angry, nor funny, just
dumb. And one big, dumb joke like that can actually be enough to soil the whole
experience.
There is still enough decent material here to
compensate, and it is interesting to watch the band's guitarists diversify and
complicate the rhythm work, taking lessons from the thrash and speed metal
scenes while still retaining a completely punkish attitude — the title track is
a prime example of that approach; if only the entire album managed to uphold
the same spirit, but, alas, trouble starts seeping in already on the third
track. 'The Liar' is a slab of anti-Reaganist propaganda, so crude it makes the
Dead Kennedys sound like Jean-Paul Sartre in comparison ("Reagan plays the
liar, power's his desire, there's nothing in the world we can do!" — how
about calling on Superman?), and only matched for embarrassment by 'Marching
With The Reich', whose first chords recall Blondie's 'One Way Or Another' and
whose spirit is about as frivolous as Blondie's, too, even though the message
is supposed to be serious.
Honestly, things could have perhaps worked out
better if the band just dropped the «hardcore» pretense completely and became a
Black Sabbath tribute ensemble, because the best thing they could do at that
point was hammer out metallic riffs, e. g. the 'Spirit Of The Universe'
look-alike in 'She Wolf' (should have dropped the odd psychedelic interludes,
though) and the Stooges kind of darkness-filled 'Things Start Moving'. Instead,
they are caught somewhere in the middle between becoming a real band of
musicians and an amplified social manifesto, but not working hard enough to
become the former and too lenient and embarrassing to justify the latter.
Despite the few good songs, this is a rather obvious thumbs down.
BALBOA FUNZONE (1988)
1) Balboa Fun Zone (Riot On
The Beach); 2) Just Like Before; 3) Instant Karma; 4) Alone Against The World;
5) Allen Hotel; 6) Frustrated; 7) Genius In Pain; 8) It's Tattoo Time; 9) Til'
She Comes Down; 10) Modern Day Napoleon; 11) I'm A Victim; 12) Balboa Fun Zone
(It's In Your Touch); 13*) Runaway; 14*) She Walks Alone; 15*) Surf Yogi.
Recorded without lead vocalist Tony Cadena;
Steve Soto and Rikk Agnew share most of the vocal duties, and you can actually tell the difference because
in between the two of them, they sound a heck of a lot uglier than Tony used
to be on his own. Not that it matters — we're not exactly talking La Scala out
here. Hardcore music calls for hardcore values.
But is this really hardcore music? Without the
speed, the intensivity, the youthful aggression of old? The Adolescents' third
album seems to make even fewer nods to their rebellious past than its immediate
predecessor. 'Riot On The Beach' starts things on the proper note (even though
that main riff sounds suspiciously Anthrax-like, showing off their interest in
thrash) — fast, flashy, and totally furious, but then the band, once again,
starts veering off on all sorts of tangents, digging into power pop,
retro-metal, surf-rock, even folksy acoustic musings.
Upon first sight, all the nasty things that
could be said about Brats In Battalions
are just as easily applicable to Balboa
Fun Zone, with the addition of lamer vocals. Upon second sight, this is a
major improvement: the band has finally learned to add expertise and convincing
force to many of their ventures in all these genres. They may not have learned
to justify their existence, but at least they have made it more tolerable.
Thus, the obligatory unpredictable cover — this
time, John Lennon's 'Instant Karma', no less — is a lot better, because they mostly
stick to the original mood, melody, and tempo, without any silly attempts at
«deconstruction»: it's a solid, faithful, tribute that preserves the tune's
fine spirit (although why in the
world it needs to preserve anything still remains a mystery), even if the
vocalist sounds like he'd been living in a trash heap north of the Polar Circle
for most of his life.
Some of the gritty hard-rockers are also quite
good, mixing catchy choruses with well-played crunchy riffs ('Til' She Comes
Down', 'Allen Hotel'); again, provided that one's nerve centers react well to
mixing punk with metal and power-pop at the same time. Lyrically, there's
nothing interesting going on, and few things can be more irritating than, e.
g., sincere odes to the art of mutilating one's own bodies ('It's Tattoo
Time'), but when they're played with verve and the chorus is memorable, who
really cares?
All in all, I really think that Balboa Fun Zone does a much better job
at finding its potential audience, but it is still hard to understand what
kind of an audience that might be. The craft has been improved, the souls have
matured, and the result is a well-made album that has no clear reason for
having been made. Are they being serious? Ironic? Post-modern? Ante-modern? The
next time you hear someone dismissing solo McCartney as «pure fluffy craft»,
tell him that McCartney, at least, knew when he was going for prime time
«fluff» with a clear-cut goal of putting you into an intentionally fluffy mood.
Albums like Balboa Fun Zone, on the
other hand, simply do not know what it is they are going for. No matter how
catchy a song like 'Allen Hotel' is, no one is ever going to make it his first
choice for being in a mood for hard rock.
So it is a good thing, in the end, that the
Adolescents' second attempt at ruling the world came to an end in the spring of
1989, when they called it a day once again. Historical interest is by far the
only reason to listen to this period's output, unless you happen to be really out of hard-rocking material —
but even in that case, will these middle-of-the-road studies in seneselessness
bring you satisfaction?
OC CONFIDENTIAL (2005)
1) Hawks And Doves; 2)
Lockdown America; 3) Where The Children Play; 4) California Son; 5) Guns Of
September; 6) Pointless Teenage Anthem; 7) Death On Friday; 8) Into The Fire; 9)
Within These Walls; 10) Let It Rain; 11) OC Confidential; 12) Monsanto Hayride;
13) Find A Way.
For representing Orange County's pride and joy,
the Adolescents have certainly earned a right to reunite anytime, anyplace and
in any line-up, as long as it brings further pride and joy to concert-going
headbangers. However, playing old hits live is one thing, and recording an
entirely new album is another — especially considering that even their
mid-1980s output wasn't too hot; what does the band have to offer us now, with
most band members in their fourties?
Answer: the second best album to bear the name
of Adolescents. No longer rough and tattered, boasting the cleanest, most
distinctive production they ever had, OC
Confidential reinvents the band as a semi-intelligent, highly melodic
pop-punk act, comparable (and, in the reviewing circles, many times compared)
to the likes of Green Day but, somehow, still looking as if they'd arrived at
this kind of sound entirely on their own.
In any case, regardless of how wary one might
feel about pop-punk, OC Confidential
is certainly not an attempt at going commercial — it's merely an attempt to
sound their age without sacrificing too much of the old punch. Unfortunately,
Rikk Agnew is absent from this reincarnated version, but brother Frank is
still in, and his chainsaw riffage has not changed one bit since 1980; improved
production values, in fact, make it sound tighter and angrier than ever. Ditto
for Steve Soto's bass work, and with Tony Cadena back in the band, they have
overcome the singing problem that was so rampant on Balboa Fun Zone.
Most importantly, the songs are fun! No silly
misguided covers, no failure-bound experimentation, just yer basic
catchy-chorus-based rock'n'roll. More than half of the numbers invite you to
sing along, and if it weren't for the generally lame lyrics, I'd happily go
along. (Then again, I do not see any reason to condemn the record for the low
poetic and primitive social level of the lyrics — most critical assessments of
punk rock usually praise the lyrics if the music is good and laugh at the
lyrics if the music is awful; with a minor handful of exceptions, punk rock artists
rarely scale the heights of Lou Reed, or, in fact, feel the need to).
A lot of effort has been put in these choruses,
as well as into the surprisingly high quality of background vocals. 'California
Son', 'Guns Of September', 'Lockdown America', 'Let It Rain' — all of these and
more show a completely new level of songwriting. Of course, there is a downside:
they actually sound like consciously planned and crafted pieces of music,
rather than the God-, or Satan-driven clouds of dark energy delivered in 1980.
But this is where we have to remind ourselves of the date of release: you
cannot ride the same dark cloud for twenty years.
Last time the band tried to consciously shift
its image, it ended up with the absurdity of Balboa Fun Zone. This time, they ended up with tighter, catchier,
polished music that will make you smile rather than clench your fists, but what
of it? (At least someone did the job
better than Pink and Avril!) As long as you refrain from digging too deep into
the lyrics and concentrate on just savoring the moment, OC Confidential is good one-time proof of the punk's-not-dead
thingy. There's hardly any reason to savor it more than once, of course, but
isn't a flash in the pan exactly what the whole idea is about? Thumbs up,
over and out.
THE FASTEST KID ALIVE (2011)
1) Operation FTW; 2) Inspiration;
3) Wars Aren't Won, Wars Are Fought; 4) One Nation, Under Siege; 5) Babylon By
Bomb; 6) Too Fast, Too Loud; 7) Learning To Swim; 8) Can't Change The World With
A Song; 9) Orange Crush; 10) Serf City; 11) Jefferson Memorial Dance Revolution;
12) Tokyo Au Go-Go; 13) No Child Left Behind; 14) Branded; 15) Peace Don't
Cost A Thing.
Something like five years in the making — it
took the band so long to record the songs, in fact, that everybody had enough
time to forget that they even existed. Where OC Confidential was met with at least some reviews and even a faint appraisal, The Fastest Kid Alive justified its title — it came and went so
fast, nobody had the proper time to notice it. Which is a pity, because it is
certainly no worse than its predecessor.
With not a single Agnew in sight, guitar duties
this time are handled by Mike McKnight and Joe Harrison; never heard of either
before, but they handle their duties well. As usual, people will want to
complain about the way-too-clean sound, but let us just remember that it's been
a long, long time since the Adolescents were really «punk»: musically, this is
just good old-fashioned rock'n'roll that happens to have borrowed some chainsaw
guitar for the rhythm tracks. And for that kind of music, Fastest Kid Alive is neither over- nor underproduced. Just the
right amount of crunch for those who like it medium rare.
The cool news is that the long wait period has
not decreased the songwriting capacities: Steve Soto and Tony Reflex are still
baking kick-ass anthems that may have
— not always, but frequently enough — loud catchy choruses, colorful poppy
solos, and sometimes, even offer fun little twists on well-known riffs. Nothing
is genuinely great, but there is enough genuine energy, fast tempos, and cute
hooks to keep you occupied throughout.
Most importantly, perhaps, you get the feeling
that they really have things to sing about — the album is even heavier loaded,
on the socio-political side, than OC
Confidential, and the intensity of the singing and playing stays on the
sincere side for most of the show. Of course, the impact is slightly muffled by
the fact that most of these songs were still written in the Bush years, but, as
you can understand, only slightly. This time, Tony and Steve take it out on
America with such vengeance, I'd gladly offer them to emigrate to Russia, a
paradise-haven of freedom and progress in comparison, if I only could. But,
humor aside, acute hatred may be bad for politics, yet it is usually good in
art, and here, it serves as first-rate fuel.
Monotonousness of the Adolescents' anti-war
feelings aside, the songs are fun once again. The opening ʽOperation
FTWʼ, with its four-time "Hello!" and a list of all the
countries that the USA might have an issue with, might be rather flat,
lyrics-wise, and quite predictable from the second verse on, but the trick
sticks, with the listener getting himself a crudely hilarious basic piece of
rock'n'roll to blast from the windows of his Obamanos-decorated car. And then, one by one, they flash by, always
fun while they're on, not entirely forgotten when they're gone.
Personal favs include the aptly titled ʽCan't
Change The World With A Songʼ (sure enough); the aptlier titled ʽSerf
Cityʼ (with blatantly ironic elements of surf rock from Steve's Agent
Orange past); the intelligently emphasized "fuck you"s of
ʽJefferson Memorial Dance Revolutionʼ; and the album closer
ʽPeace Don't Cost A Thingʼ, which tries very hard to recapture the breakneck ominousness of ʽKids Of
The Black Holeʼ — and comes somewhat close.
But personal favs do not really mean anything
on an album where all the songs essentially sound the same. The important
things are the drive, the tasty sound, and the... well, let's call it «careful
attitude towards melodic flow» or something like that. I enjoyed it. It didn't
exactly revolutionize my views on American foreign policies, or on the timelessness
of punk rock lyrics, but I had myself a good time, and that's worth a bit of a
thumbs up.
Now you, too, can be a good boy/girl and go fight the system for about forty
minutes.
PRESUMED INSOLENT (2013)
1) The Athena Decree; 2)
Conquest Of The Planet Of The See Monkeys; 3) Forever Summer; 4) Riptide; 5) In
This Town Everything Is Wonderful; 6) Big Rock Shock; 7) Dissatisfaction
Guaranteed; 8) Presumed Insolent; 9) Broken Window; 10) 300 Cranes; 11)
Snaggletooth And Nail; 12) Daisy's Revenge; 13) TicTac At The Alligator Tree.
Two years later, the Adolescents are back and
their formula has not changed half an inch. There is a new guitar player (Dan
Root) replacing an older guitar player (Joe Harrison), but who gives a damn?
The Adolescents were never known for individualistic styles of guitar playing.
What matters is that the album is even more
monotonous than its predecessor, and offers the listener an even harsher
retro-encapsulation of the band's classic sound that you thought was possible —
one of the most rigidly conservative «rebel» albums I've ever heard.
The sound is every bit as pristine and exciting
as it used to be, but this time around, the songs are really glued together — same length, same tempo, same chord
patterns, same mood for each of these thirteen numbers. Worst of all, the
production is muddier and more muffled than it was for Fastest Kid, so that the guitars rarely sound as «crisp», and the
vocals are diffused in the mix and lack proper rousing power. The basic aural
impression is a rather «sludgy» one, and no matter how much of an effort the
band makes, the songs never make me want to clench my fist like ʽKids Of
The Black Holeʼ used to do.
A few of these numbers have power-pop potential
that is never properly realized — I think that ʽBroken Windowʼ, for
instance, could make better use of its vocal melody, had Tony bothered to
record his voice more prominently, or had one of the guitar players bothered
«coloring» that tone a little differently. But the thing is, they are still
operating on this «strictly spontaneous» basis, where too much seasoning is
supposed to spoil the broth — a mistake, because times, brains, and attitudes
have changed well enough since 1981 to allow this «spontaneity» to be tinged
with genius. Within these thirty-two minutes worth of music lies a perfectly
palatable power-pop EP, with a running length of 15-20 minutes; all they had to
do was give themselves a little more time and a little more sophistication to
get it out of their system.
But no, this is «hardcore punk», pretending to
old glories, and now it doesn't even have the comeback excitement of Fastest Kid, let alone the fact that
each of these songs probably took five minutes to write. The song titles look
appealing — ʽTicTac At The Alligator Treeʼ is one of my favorites,
regardless of what it is all about (the words are predictably undecipherable
throughout, and hunting for lyrics to hardcore punk albums is not my favorite
cup of tea) — but the emotional punchline is always the same, and fully
predictable.
Consequently, as much as Fastest Kid was a pleasant surprise, so is this quickie follow-up a
major relative disappointment, a stern exercise in «purism» that can only
appeal to the band's original bunch of devotees — 45-year old geezers for whom
the ideal adrenaline rush has been permanently defined as a concentrated blast
of speedy Californian punk, regardless of how much effort or talent went into
it. Alas, a thumbs
down.
LA VENDETTA... (2014)
1) Monolith At The Mountlake
Terrace; 2) A Dish Best Served Cold; 3) Bulletproof; 4) Double Down; 5)
Fukushima Lemon Twist; 6) The Last Laugh; 7) 30 Seconds To Malibu; 8) Silent
Water; 9) Talking To Myself; 10) Formula 13; 11) Rinse Cycle; 12) Ricochet
Heart; 13) Nothing Left To Say; 14) Sludge; 15) Sanctuary & The High Cost
Of Misery; 16) Let It Go.
They're speeding up in their old age — only
about a year's difference now between Presumed
Insolent and its follow-up: sixteen more songs, all of which not only sound
completely alike, but also sound completely like the previous thirteen songs. This means that everything from the previous
review applies to this album as well, and we might just as well leave it at
that, but crappy old blasted «reviewer's honor» demands at least one or two
observations off the top of my head (if only to prove that I have actually
listened to the record, which I did), so here we go:
— first, with a song like ʽFukushima Lemon
Twistʼ they put themselves at serious risk of losing their Japanese
audience (do they have a Japanese
audience? actually, doesn't everybody
have a Japanese audience?); the tune is ostensibly about the misuse and abuse
of atomic power, but some sensitive souls with a poor understanding of Tony
Cadena's pronunciation might take it the wrong way, and start nostalgizing
about the days of Pearl Harbor;
— second, when they slow down the tempo for the
first time on ʽSilent Waterʼ, it seriously helps: against the usual
background, its unhurrying lead guitar growl and transition from verse to
chorus are positively memorable and emotionally impressive. Just add better
production that does not reduce the rhythm guitar to concrete fodder, and you
get yourself a humble retro-classic;
— third, the same principle miraculously works
on the album's second slow song, appropriately titled ʽSludgeʼ, where
there is a really cool «guitar thunderbolt» thrown in during each chorus, and
it makes me think the sacrilegious thought that, perhaps, the thing that most
roughly prevents these late period Adolescents albums from being good is speed as such;
— fourth, it took me way more time to think of
these three than this album deserves, so I am going to end this right here with
a rigorous thumbs
down, much as I respect the religious dedication of the band and
even enjoy their overall sound as cool background muzak.
MANIFEST DENSITY (2016)
1) Escape From Planet Fuck; 2)
Hey Captain Midnight; 3) Unhappy Hour; 4) Silver And Black; 5) Nightcrawler; 6)
Jacob's Ladder; 7) American Dogs In Europe; 8) Spring Break At Scar Beach; 9)
Catfish; 10) Lost On Hwy 39; 11) Bubblegum Manifesto; 12) Rat Catcher; 13) Vs.
Two things: (1) no, that is not a typo in the
album title, it's a brave, unrewarded swipe-in-the-dark at cleverness; (2)
ʽEscape From Planet Fuckʼ is a noble and understandable wish, but a
fairly crude song title that would have been more appropriate in 1980 than it
is in 2016. Then again, it is
perfectly appropriate for a band that called itself The Adolescents in 1980 and
made it a major ideological point not
to change that name in 2016.
Other than that, I have to say that I find this
record even less deserving of a discussion than La Vendetta. More than ever now, it looks like Tony Reflex and his
friends have invented themselves a long-term ice bucket challenge — how long
will they be able to go on making hardcore records like this before they run
out of extra dole money? And the fact that the playing is as muscular, the
screaming as furious, and the lyrics as anti-establishment-vicious as ever, no
longer plays to their advantage, because every song sounds like it wants to
change the whole world, yet there is probably only a tiny smudgeon of people
who even know of its existence in the first place. And this time, there's not
even a single attempt at doing something out of the ordinary — song after song
after song, it is the same fast tempo, the same fuck-the-system scream, the
same anthemic refrain, the same generic melodic lead guitar, and the same 100%
lack of that hardcore magic that, thirty-six years ago, set them apart from the
pack.
Really, it's so humiliating, they even have
their Manifest Density page on
Wikipedia marked for potential deletion because of «lack of notability» — what
a frickin' shame for a band writing songs like ʽAmerican Dogs In
Europeʼ. But honestly, enough with these ever-deteriorating clones of The Fastest Kid Alive already! And see,
this is why, when all other parameters are levelled out, good old hard rock
like AC/DC wins over punk rock — at least the Young brothers, even in their
least inspired days, still tried to come up with a slightly different riff for
every song; on this record, I
struggle to find even one half-decent guitar melody. Thumbs down.
ADDENDA:
LIVE 1981 &
1986 (1981, 1986; 1989)
1) Amoeba; 2) Who Is Who; 3)
No Friends; 4) Welcome To Reality; 5) Self Destruct; 6) Things Start Moving; 7)
Word Attack; 8) Losing Battle; 9) I Got A Right; 10) No Way; 11) The Liar; 12)
Rip It Up; 13) L. A. Girl; 14) Wrecking Crew; 15) Creatures; 16) Kids Of The
Black Hole.
Originally released as sort of a last goodbye
for the band, perhaps to refreshen the memories of those who were too
disillusioned with the aimless meandering of Balboa Fun Zone — to remind that, no matter what, the Adolescents
ripped it up on stage both in 1981 and 1986, even if their studio avatars
were widely different in those two periods.
The two setlists are quite intelligently
trimmed, so that not a single song gets repeated; as a result, what you get is
the eponymous album reproduced almost completely, plus all three songs off the
accompanying EP Welcome To Reality,
later re-recorded in somewhat different manners for Brats In Battalions, and just a tiny handful of original songs from
Brats, so as not to darken your day by
juxtaposing the majorly classic with the mildly competent.
Sound quality is fairly decent for club
recording level (not to mention that a live hardcore performance hardly begs
for a super-professional hi-fi sheen), and, of course, the band fully justifies
its live reputation by playing it all even faster and uglier than it was in the
studio (although in terms of pure speed, it does not look like they ever set
out to beat the Ramones' record). The downside is that the vocal harmonies, on
those few songs where they do matter, sound terrible ('Amoeba'), and that some
of the anthemic numbers do not quite deliver the concentrated, thick,
knock-over punch that is their main
purpose ('Kids Of The Black Hole').
But as pure neighbor-annoying musical
hooliganry (not to mention priceless historical document), it works fine
enough. The band intentionally tries to present itself as being much dumber
than they really are (first «joke» on the 1986 performance: "Good evening,
we're the Bangles!... I'm into the Bangles, Ma! I'm in love with Sue!"),
which sort of ties in well with the eponymous album material, but can also be
irritating to those who see the Adolescents as something more than, well, adolescents
— proceed at your own risk.
Whatever be, the Adolescents rock live. Guitar
work is fine, up to the Agnews' usual intricacy level, Tony's screaming is
ideal hardcore, what else is there to say? If you're an admirer, go get it. If
you're not, it won't hurt too bad to try and become one. Thumbs up.
RETURN TO THE BLACK
HOLE (1989; 1997)
1) No Way; 2) Who Is Who?; 3)
Word Attack; 4) Self Destruct; 5) L. A. Girl; 6) Brats In Battalions; 7)
Welcome To Reality; 8) Wrecking Crew; 9) Do The Eddie; 10) I Love You; 11)
Losing Battle; 12) Creatures; 13) All Day And All Of The Night; 14) Rip It Up;
15) Amoeba; 16) Kids Of The Black Hole; 17) I Got A Right.
If the idea of splicing two different shows
from two different periods does not appeal all that much to you, then here is
the Adolescents' first ever, and, possibly, last ever official recording of one
full show from 1989. (Amusingly, the show was recorded in the same year that the archival Live 1981/1986 was released,
and then shelved all the way until 1997 — even though they were clearly going
for a record release straight away, as the audience is told sometime during the
show: "We're recording this for a live album — but we won't sell out like
Sham did!" So they didn't).
The results are not utterly spectacular, but
they are as utterly satisfactory as possible. First, the record catches the
Adolescents in a state of primal reunion, with all the right members in all the
right positions. Second, sound quality is as prime as you are ever likely to
get on a live hardcore album. Third, they are concentrating, reasonably, on the
classics, playing 10 out of 13 songs from the self-titled record. Fourth, the
band sounds tight, well-oiled, and just as ready to incite pointless riots as
it was one decade before. Fifth, they do 'All Day And All Of The Night'. The
world won't fall to pieces if you never hear it, but there is always something
brutally touching in general about hardcore bands paying tributes to Sixties'
heroes, and something subtly intelligent about the Adolescents acknowledging
their debt to Ray Davies.
Minuses? Not much, except for an occasional
lame joke or two ("I don't care if you sing along, but don't take my mic,
or I'll kill you!"), regular off-key singing on the harmonies (so 'Amoeba'
is ruined one more time, big deal), way too many pauses between tracks, sometimes
filled with annoying feedback noises (the band's equivalent of tuning up, no
doubt), and the perennial question of the true significance of live albums as
such. My answer? Just another thumbs up.
LONE RHINO (1982)
1) Big Electric Cat; 2) The
Momur; 3) Stop It; 4) The Man In The Moon; 5) Naive Guitar; 6) Hot Sun; 7) The
Lone Rhinoceros; 8) Swingline; 9) Adidas In Heat; 10) Animal Grace; 11) The
Final Rhino.
It is strange that Adrian Belew only released
his first album after he'd already engaged in serious collaborations with Frank
Zappa, David Bowie, Talking Heads and King Crimson — maybe it had to do
with some sort of natural shyness that had to be overcome — but, on the other
hand, it's also a great benefit, because his very first album shows a
completely formed artist at the height of his powers. Then again, maybe not that
much of a great benefit: with an album like Lone Rhino under his belt,
he's always had a very hard time topping it ever since.
In order to enjoy Adrian Belew, you have to be
a little whacko in the aural department. The man's life-long love is electric
tones and special effects; sometimes you'd think he could be completely happy
left alone with just his 10,000 pedals and no guitar at all. Yet he is one of
the few who can actually breathe real life into all of these pedals, rather
than engage in completely soulless robotics, because deep down inside, he's a
sympathetic, friendly, pop-loving guy like most of us.
Only when one realizes that Adrian's insides
are, in fact, not controlled by whammy bars and Electro Harmonix, will
it be easier to understand, for instance, his alternate obsession with nature
and its sounds. From the title of the album, to its delicious sleeve painting
(Adrian entertaining a rhino with his demented riffs, or, perhaps, learning to
imitate a rhino with his demented riffs?), to its song titles and lyrics, and,
of course, to its actual sounds — much, maybe most, of it is his inspired
filtering of animal life and behaviour through the double sieve of his
imagination and his electronic equipment. The results may not immediately bring
to mind the stomping of odd-toed ungulates or the roar of Pantherinae, but they
can certainly be derived from there.
'Big Electric Cat', for all I know, may be Adrian's
masterpiece. The funky rhythm pattern, the dry crackling of high-charged guitar
loads, sometimes deep frying, sometimes exploding the listener, the sexy lyrics
that juxtapose femme fatale and feline beauty, and the catchy chanting
of the refrain — everything that Belew does best is captured here, on his
first solo track. Experimental, but memorable; whacked-out, but meaningful; sonically
dangerous, but imminently attractive, my ideal of an intelligent pop
composition.
But there is much more; the album rocks out
quite consistently, in a "Euro-funk" manner mostly, occasionally
pausing in its charge with one or two moody landscapes ('Naive Guitar'; 'The
Final Rhino', with Ade's four-year old daughter joining him on piano — quite
impressive for that kind of age, by the way, although by now we know she
eventually failed to become the nex Mozart), and displaying an impressive
palette of atmospheres, from a little misanthropy ('The Lone Rhinoceros', where
Adrian gives the best sonic impression of a rhino's moaning I've ever heard,
not that I've ever heard a rhino moan) to a little humor ('The Momur') and a
little social sarcasm ('Adidas In Heat', whose opening verses nod ever so
slightly in the direction of 'Subterranean Homesick Blues').
Adrian's specific vocal tones and constant
desire to add an extra layer of sonic noise may pose a problem to one's
heartfelt enjoyment of this material; I know it certainly has been a problem in
my case, with the brain never hesitating for once to reward the record with a decisive
thumbs up but the heart always hesitating
to follow suit. But Adrian's total dedication to his craft, along with his
really down-to-earth nature (unlike Robert Fripp, his grumbly older partner in
King Crimson, he never gives the impression of being stuck up in any way),
manage to convince me that he sincerely loves these things he's doing, and that
all of these whizzes and whangings are there for a real reason, not merely out
of a snobby desire to out-whizz and out-whang all competition.
TWANG BAR KING (1983)
1) I'm Down; 2) I Wonder; 3)
Life Without A Cage; 4) Sexy Rhino; 5) Twang Bar King; 6) Another Time; 7) The
Rail Song; 8) Paint The Road; 9) She Is Not Dead; 10) Fish Head; 11) The Ideal
Woman; 12) Ballad For A Blue Whale.
Although Belew's second album came out high on
the heels of Lone Rhino, and his backing band is mostly the same, it
sounds strangely different — and, in my opinion, inferior. For some reason,
production values have dropped down, as if the artist was too lazy to drop by a
proper studio and stuck to his bedroom instead; and there is clearly more
emphasis on his solo guitar playing (or, should I say, guitar strangling?) than
on a band-type sound.
As a result, Twang Bar King neither
rocks as hard as its predecessor nor manages to reach the same levels of
'moodiness'. On the first count, it does try, because technically, it features
two of the most overtly rock'n'roll numbers in Adrian's life story: a maniacal
cover of the Beatles' 'I'm Down' (!) and the title track, a funny marriage of
the traditional "rock'n'roll hero" cliché with Adrian's
undying love for the whammy bar. The second, however, is so short that you
barely manage to acknowledge its power, and the former is... dubious — not
enough of a "deconstruction", not too successful a
"tribute".
Twang Bar King also goes heavy on MIDI technology, freshly
designed a year before and — perhaps — already implemented on Lone Rhino,
but, in any case, only explored properly on this particular record. And the
sounds that Belew synthesizes here are questionable to my ears: very
computerish and, in some respects, dated just the same way that we feel about
late-Eighties MIDI music in computer games. Belew's technique is not to be
questioned, of course, but no technique is worth serving to produce ugliness,
and much of this sounds openly ugly.
Also, where Lone Rhino gave us a fairly
independent Belew, Twang Bar King yields a Belew that is much more
Crimson-ian in form, with the same familiar dissonances, polyrhythms, and
pseudo-pop songs that we all know in better avatars on King Crimson record
(where they benefit from the participation of Robert Fripp and the gang). E.
g., 'Paint The Road' may sound fantastic to the uninitiated, with its
off-the-wall funk and grit, but in reality it is just an inferior reworking of
the King Crimson classic 'Thela Hun Ginjeet' — who needs fish without
the chips when you can always have the chips?
Overall, considering that Belew isn't known as
a prolific writer, capable of churning out five masterpieces over one night of
heavy sleep, I'd say that he was a bit spent here, having already donated his
best ideas at the time to Lone Rhino and the King Crimson records; or
maybe it is just the ugly MIDI tones that deviate me from savouring the genius.
One truly gorgeous atmospheric piece that I would, however, heartily recommend
to all those who believe that technology need not be the enemy of beauty, is
'Ballet For A Blue Whale', which is neither a ballet nor is really intended
for blue whales, but, in your imagination, can easily be both. You do have to
wait for all the computerish sounds to go away, though, as it's the very last
track on the album, but in reward you'll get some otherworldly tones, moans,
and groans that are, perhaps, the only piece of truly timeless shit on this
collection. Thumbs down overall, but flashes
of brilliance here and there.
DESIRE CAUGHT BY THE TAIL (1986)
1) Tango Zebra; 2) Laughing
Man; 3) The Gypsy Zurna; 4) Portrait Of Margaret; 5) Beach Creatures Dancing
Like Cranes; 6) At The Seaside Cafe; 7) Guernica; 8) "Z".
The most sonically audacious of Belew's albums
of the decade, it's also the one that is bound to appeal the most to burnt out
King Crimson fans. Fully instrumental and almost completely jettisoning
Belew's "pop" side — which would unexpectedly come back in full swing
on the next four albums — it is definitely not for the faint-hearted.
Nevertheless, I can hardly call it an "avantgarde" record in the
full sense of the word, because its weirdness comes from Adrian's ongoing
passion for bizarre tones and effects, as well as from its sonic
unpredictability, rather than KC's trademark desire to break the limits of
traditional harmony.
The album is relatively strictly demarcated in
the middle: the first side is generally rhythmical, featuring
"regular" melodies played in odd ways ('Tango Zebra' is a partial
exception, because it's long and has multiple sections, but at its core is a
relatively clear free-jazz rhythm pattern), and the second side, at least after
'Portrait Of Margaret', is more generally "atmospheric" and, therefore,
less accessible. But there are highlights in both camps. 'Laughing Man', for
instance, frivolously justifying its title with ugly laughing sounds from a
mechanical toy, is a neo-psychedelic interpretation of an elegant, romantic
waltz — before it collapses midway through, giving way to some slithery
Eastern-tinged improv (but also quite neo-psychedelic in character).
It's amusing and visionary at the same time.
Then, on the second side, it's easily matched
in quality by 'Guernica', a song so obviously inspired by Picasso's painting
that, I believe, it is even possible to get that impression without knowing its
title. In a matter of two minutes, Belew gives us the roar of the Condor
Legion, the detonation of the bombs, the sirens, the chaos and confusion, the
cries and moans of the dead and wounded, and perhaps even some of Pablo's
bull-and-horse imagery to finish the picture. I have not been able to locate
anybody else's appreciation for the composition — I guess it's too short and modest
a piece on a way too obscure album — but I insist upon calling this one of
Adrian's most meaningful and interesting experimental creations.
Everything else on the album can be described,
more or less, by taking these two numbers as starting points. Belew is, of
course, "nuts", and Desire Caught By The Tail will be best
appreciated by similar-minded individuals. However, Mike DeGagne of the
All-Music Guide is quite right in saying that "there is a method to Belew's
madness", which, I'd like to add, quite a few "sane" people
might be seriously interested in deciphering. The brain is, thus, much more
interested in these sonic equivalents of cubist painting than the heart,
forcing a thumbs up decision, but the
album is vivid and colorful enough to make me believe that this might, indeed,
reflect the way Belew actually feels about the world around him rather
than the way he dissects the world into crazyass guitar patterns.
MR. MUSIC HEAD (1989)
1) Oh Daddy; 2) House Of
Cards; 3) One Of Those Days; 4) Coconuts; 5) Bad Days; 6) Peaceable Kingdom; 7)
Hot Zoo; 8) Motor Bungalow; 9) Bumpity Bump; 10) Bird In A Box; 11) 1967; 12)
Cruelty To Animals.
This is the first in a sequence of four records
in a row on which Belew's main goal was to exorcise his inner pop demon; from
1989 to 1994, he intentionally displaced his avantagarde Crimsonian schtick to
backstage status and tried to be all four Beatles at the same time instead.
Serious fans paying serious attention to Adrian's career already knew that one
day it would come to this, of course, given his pop contributions to King
Crimson's albums and the playfulness of Lone Rhino, but perhaps some of
them still prayed to the Great God of Weirdness about not letting it happen — to
no avail.
Come to think of it, serious fans had probably
already heard Adrian's previous two records with The Bears, their eponymous
album of 1987 and Rise And Shine from 1988, both of them essentially a
bunch of tight retro-power pop songs modernized by Belew's guitar; but The
Bears could have been thought of as a lightweight side project, a little bit of
"divertissement" or maybe even a red herring. That Belew would go on
in the same direction after parting ways with the Bears was somewhat sensational
all the same.
And yet, nevertheless, I have never come across
any major accusations of "selling out". Perhaps it's because,
technically, Belew never managed to really sell out: the funny video for 'Oh
Daddy' got some MTV rotation and earned him a single hit, and so did the Bowie
duet for 'Pretty Pink Rose' off the next album (arguably, just because of
Bowie's name attached to it), but that was it — he never made that much money
from this stretch. Perhaps, also, it's because this whole stretch took place in
the interim between two major rocket launches for King Crimson; you can't
really accuse a guy of "selling out" if the "selling-out"
is clearly shaped as a bit of self-indulgent hobby in between "serious
work".
But I would say that the main reason these
albums are viewed, even by Belew's strongest critics, from the "weird man
overdoes the weirdness" angle, rather than the "weird man loses
honour and goes straight" angle, is that, for 1989-1994, they are, when
judged by their own value, decidedly uncommercial. For one thing, Beatlesque
pop has ceased to be of immediate commercial value ever since the Beatles broke
up — Belew did not have any more chances of firing up the public-at-large's
attention than Big Star and Badfinger two decades earlier. For another thing,
his records, although clearly "tributary", were still Adrian Belew
records and nobody else's. His lyrics, his vocals, his rhythmics, his guitar
tricks — he may not be playing in 13/8 all the time, and he may go easier on
the whammy bar, but this is by no means "commonplace" pop music.
Most of the instruments are played by Adrian
alone (Mike Barnett is credited for string bass on a couple of tracks), meaning
that, as in all such cases, you will not get a "live feel" for the
proceedings; this is technically admirable, but I think the record would have
seriously benefitted from a few more overdubs, as well as better drumming (I
hate beat boxes, especially on non-beat-box oriented albums); the lack of
smoothness detracts from being able to fully appreciate Belew's inventiveness
and songwriting talent. This is a serious drawback, I think — but, essentially,
the only one, because the songs are all very strong.
Some are still molded in the old
"paranoid" tradition that Belew carries over from the New Wave style
of 1980's King Crimson and Talking Heads — such as 'Motor Bungalow' and 'Hot
Zoo'; they are, however, mixed with post-psychedelic anthems to serenity and
tranquility ('Peaceable Kingdom') and fun, lightweight pop-rockers and ballads
that cast Adrian in a nostalgic or sentimental mood, wearing his heart on his
sleeve or at least pretending to ('One Of Those Days', where he could be
mistaken for a modern day Jerry Lee Lewis; 'Bad Days', with a gorgeous vocal
part). On most of these numbers guitar trickery is reduced to a minimum —
you'll have to look for classier guitar work on the grittier rockers, e. g.
'Coconuts' with its bee-sting tones, or 'Bumpity Bump', one of the more
authentically Crimsonian displays of grimness on the album. But these are
exceptions: Mr. Music Head will not go down in history as a
guitar-lover's paradise.
Disregarding the CD-only bonus sonic collage
('Cruelty To Animals', only there to further satisfy Adrian's faunistic
fetish), the record's two most memorable tunes are the ones that bookmark it.
'Oh Daddy' is a sweet, heart-warming, but highly sarcastic take on the "I
wanna be a star" syndrome, cleverly structured as a dialog between Adrian
and his now-11-year-old daughter (who can sing backup vocals even better than
she could play piano as a 5-year-old) — all the more ironic seeing as how this
"lament" about not being able to make it to the top was the closest
Belew ever came to becoming a real pop star. And the mini-symphony '1967',
almost completely acoustic, is usually recognized as cast in the vein of the
Beatles' mini-sequences, although melodically I do not spot any direct Beatles
influence — but it is a very interesting piece nevertheless, alternating
between a little vaudeville and a little blues and a little folk-pop, and all
the time you can't really tell whether it's got real soul or if it's just a
hollow exercise in genre-hopping without changing the guitar around your neck,
but it's interesting all the same.
In short, Mr. Music Head is an album
tailor-made for that little middle-of-the-road segment of the audience who like
their pop music weird, and their weirdness poppy. Unfortunately, experience
shows that we live in an age of extremism, so that the Simple Guy will find
this too jarring and twisted, and the Complex Audiophile will dismiss it as
"pop-slop". Since I never subscribed to either stereotype, I happily
award this a thumbs up, with the brain in
the lead (marvelous, unpredictable design) and the heart catching up (on the
strength of 'Oh Daddy' and 'Bad Days' as already in the bank, and quite a few
other songs poised to get there eventually).
YOUNG LIONS (1990)
1) Young Lions; 2) Pretty Pink
Rose; 3) Heartbeat; 4) Looking For A UFO; 5) I Am What I Am; 6) Not Alone
Anymore; 7) Men In Helicopters; 8) Small World; 9) Phone Call From The Moon;
10) Gunman.
The sound is so much fuller on this record, you
could swear Adrian finally hired a backing band of his own, but he didn't; he
just seems to have figured out better ways of getting all his different parts
together. Also, perhaps the impression is a bit illusionary, caused by grander
diversity and the use of David Bowie as a guest star (Belew used to play for
Bowie in the late Seventies, so it's only just that the famous frontman of Tin
Machine return the favour).
Young Lions is my favourite "pop" record from Belew's backlog: better
fleshed out than Mr. Music Head, yet somewhat less Beatle-worshipping
than the subsequent two and, therefore, more true to Belew's own nature. The
only song here where "core melody" is neglected in favour of
weirdness is 'I Am What I Am', a tribal psycho-rocker featuring muffled spoken
radio DJ-style vocals over a bundle of guitar pyrotechnics — fun stuff,
hearkening back to the good old days when Belew would play the old game of go
insane onstage with the Talking Heads. Everything else is Belew-style pop,
highest category.
Naturalistic romanticism pulsates from every
pore of the title track — real wild: 'In the guise of a lioness, the wind
kisses her burning dress, you can feel her animal eyes, you can hear them cry,
be the jewel around my neck, never a tear on my burning dress...' (I shiver at
the thought of what Adrian's sex life must look like). With ferocious tom-tom
percussion work (delivered by some Dutch percussion ensemble called Van
Kampen), more guitar fireworks, this plunges you into a mixed holodeck of
African jungle and Planet SoGo, but Belew's vocals also add a bit of genuine
soul and tenderness (unlike, say, 'Big Electric Cat', all sci-fi and flash)
and, thus, an extra layer of meaning and interest. No wonder it has become a
stage favourite even in his avantgarde and experimental shows.
An even hotter kicker is the Belew/Bowie duet
'Pretty Pink Rose', a song David wrote for his former guitarist but liked enough
to include it in his own setlists from time to time. It's a perfect match of
wit, kick-ass attitude, and guitar fire — with one of the most exciting
transitions from the first twenty seconds of relaxed ambient intro to the main
rhythm of the song that I know. The other duet between the giants, 'Gunman',
is, on the other hand, paranoid and bleek, which does not work nearly as well
in the overall context of the record, but it is quite inspired all the same.
There's plenty of unpredictability throughout —
such as Belew's decisions to remake the King Crimson standard 'Heartbeat'
(solid, if not all that necessary); to cover the Traveling Wilburys' (!) 'Not
Alone Anymore' (but he does give a pretty fine Roy Orbison impression); to
offer just one, but a really good one, relaxed atmospheric ballad ('Phone Call
From The Moon'); and to disguise his eco-sensibility as the album's fluffiest,
cheeriest pop tune ('Men In Helicopters', where you really have to pay
attention to the lyrics to get its actual bitterness). And it all makes Young
Lions' forty minutes flash by in an instant and leave you yearning for
more. Thumbs up without a doubt — once
again, the guy manages to feed both the intellectually yearning and the
emotionally demanding parts of the organism at the exact same time.
INNER REVOLUTION (1992)
1) Inner Revolution; 2) This
Is What I Believe In; 3) Standing In The Shadow; 4) Big Blue Sun; 5) Only A
Dream; 6) Birds; 7) I'd Rather Be Right Here; 8) The War In The Gulf Between Us;
9) I Walk Alone; 10) Everything; 11) Heaven's Bed; 12) Member Of The Tribe.
Inner Revolution is certainly the purest pop album Belew ever
gave his increasingly befuddled fans, but not necessarily the
"truest" to his inner self. This time, he does not simply include a
tribute or two to the Beatles; he seems to have asked himself the question,
"What would the Beatles sound like today if they were frozen solid around
mid-1966 and, upon defrosting in 1992, put together in a modern type
studio?" Then he spends the rest of the time trying to answer it.
To be fair, only about half of the songs try to
ape the Beatles, chief culprits among them being 'Everything', 'Birds', and
'Big Blue Sun'. And there is hardly any danger of one's mistaking even these
for the real thing (as could be the case with, say, 'Lies' by the
Knickerbockers), because Belew is much too idiosyncratic, and his guitar
playing style is so much his know-how that he probably could never play his
instrument Lennon-wise or Harrison-wise even if he wanted to — despite the
fact that, technically, he obviously trumps both at the same time. But be it as
it may, he does attempt to crawl into somebody else's hide, and the results are
questionable.
I guess I might as well say right here what it
is that bugs me about Belew's pop style. He understands fairly well that one
of the Beatles' main points of attraction was the inexhaustible cheerfulness
and optimism (at least, until drugs, mutual hatred, and Sgt. Pepper
kicked in) on their early records, and on songs like the ones just mentioned
above he literally jumps over his head trying to recreate that youthful, naïve,
unbridled optimism. But I cannot buy it — even though I have little reason to
think of Adrian Belew as, deep down inside, a depressed, sardonic, misanthropic
sad creep, I still cannot buy it. The arrangements are shiny-happy major key
ones, the singing is loud and welcoming, but the word to describe it all is
"overwrought".
Maybe he needed a big band to do this; maybe
this kind of sound just does not tie in well with a man-orchestra. Maybe the
songs themselves are exceptionally well written and contain all the proper
hooks. But as much as I admire the craft that went into them, neither 'Big Blue
Sun' nor 'Birds' bawl me over and make me feel all happy inside the way 'Good
Day Sunshine' or 'I'm Happy Just To Dance With You' made me feel. I like all of
them, but they contain no magic, just professionalism and good taste.
It clicks once: 'I Walk Alone', driven by piano
instead of guitars, is a Roy Orbison impersonation that works almost as well as
the real thing — Belew certainly does not have Roy's range or control, but he
has his feeling, and if on the previous album he has shown us that he can do
honor to a great Orbison-led song ('Not Alone Anymore'), then here he can
actually write and record a song well worthy of an Orbison. This one has
solitaire romance in it, as well as restraint and tenderness, and it's lovely
and stately at the same time.
On the other hand, when Belew does have to
scream his head off, it always comes off better on his own style numbers, such
as the 'Three Of A Perfect Pair'-look-alike 'This Is What I Believe In' or the
funky guitar blizzard of 'Member Of The Tribe', or even the rather simple title
track. Here, he nails 'em every time he hits 'em.
Still, it is impossible for me to give this
anything other than a big thumbs up. The
heart may be aglow only about a third of the time, but the blessed reason
points out quite correctly that all of these songs are expertly written,
feature original and meaningful melodies, and serve the generous purpose of
keeping Sixties-style power pop alive and updated for the next decades, regardless
of how many people have actually heard this album. As for
"sincerity", nobody authorised me to represent Adrian Belew's
subconscious, so I'll have to pass on that one.
THE ACOUSTIC ADRIAN BELEW (1993)
1) The Lone Rhinoceros; 2)
Peace On Earth; 3) The Man In The Moon; 4) The Rail Song; 5) If I Fell; 6)
Burned By The Fire We Make; 7) Matte Kudasai; 8) Dream Life; 9) Old Fat
Cadillac; 10) Crying; 11) Martha Adored.
The A Cappella Adrian Belew would be more like it. Normally, electric
guitar wizards record "unplugged"-style albums as sort of an
"experience in refined taste" — to let the fans know that they can
create sonic wizardry without any technical gadgets just as easy as with them,
that they simply prefer the electric sound most of the time because it rips,
but every once in a while it kind of rules to stress that everything begins
with nylon, wood, and finger technique.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But
with The Acoustic A. B. it doesn't even begin to work, because the
purpose of the album is anything but demonstrate to the listener that A.
B. is an acoustic virtuoso. For the most part, he plays the simplest of chords,
the most standard of rhythm accompaniments — at least, that is the way it
sounds to my ears; I may not be getting the deep-hidden complexity of what and
how he picks, but I am pretty sure that The Acoustic Robert Fripp would
have sounded nothing like that.
So what's the point? Maybe he can do
better than that on acoustic, but there is no sign of that here; why release
the album at all? My answer is — it has little, if anything, to do with Belew
the guitarist; it has much more to do with Belew the vocalist, Belew the
lyricist, and Belew the gentle, sentimental artist. With the minimalistic,
hushed playing (not only is everything indeed completely acoustic, but Belew
is the only player on it), the emphasis is clearly on the impression conveyed
by his singing — which is why he includes not only some of his poppiest,
catchiest numbers, but also Beatles ('If I Fell') and Roy Orbison ('Crying')
covers.
Once you come to terms with that, The
Acoustic Adrian Belew ceases to be a disappointment and becomes a nice,
soothing, unspectacular, record to relax to. I would never call Adrian's voice
"great": it is a bit too even and devoid of personality for my
tastes, but he does have a nice range and an excellent ability to creep into
other people's styles — he certainly "gets" the essence of 'If I
Fell' and 'Crying', even if nature has not allowed him to reproduce it
vibe-for-vibe. His own songs pass off even better — they are, after all, his
songs — and for some fans it will be a nice distraction to hear the intimate
takes on 'The Lone Rhinoceros', 'Matte Kudasai', and 'Burned By The Fire We
Make' (a preview of the upcoming material from Here) without
concentrating on the guitar trickery of the "full" versions.
Under this light, the disappointments are minor
— some of the original 'rockers', like 'Young Lions', take a lot of strain to
be properly transferred into an acoustic settings; and the closing number
('Martha Adored') is played backwards in its entirety, probably goading
the listener into finding a means to reverse it, but count me uninterested
(not that it is a hard thing to do in these days of music-editing
software). As a bonus, the listener gets to hear 'Old Fat Cadillac' from the
catalog of The Bears — pretty damn fine song if you ask me. Thumbs up — moderately, as this is, after all, a
trifle by Adrian's standards.
HERE (1994)
1) May 1, 1990; 2) I See You;
3) Survival In The Wild; 4) Fly; 5) Never Enough; 6) Peace On Earth; 7) Burned
By The Fire We Make; 8) Dream Life; 9) Here; 10) Brave New World; 11)
Futurevision; 12) Postcard From Holland.
Here concludes Belew's quadrilogy of pop artefacts on a pretty high note —
still fairly distant from the semi-experimental rocking mode of Young Lions,
but equally restrained in the matter of direct Beatles imitations. In fact, I
only count one, even if it is the most Beatlish of them all: 'I See You', as
Merseybeaty as it gets, straightahead McCartney on the verses and Lennon on the
middle-eights and Harrison on the reversed guitar solos. As usual, it is fun,
catchy, and a wee bit awkward and phony. I love it.
Lyrically, Here is quite
straightforward. All the songs are (a) about Adrian; (b) about ecology; (c)
about Adrian and ecology. And if something does not fit into one of these three
categories right away, it will eventually. The messages are also quite clear:
(a) Adrian is in love and feeling happy; (b) the ecology is in a mess and
getting worse; (c) Adrian's knowledge of the ecology being in a mess and
getting worse will not prevent him from being in love and feeling happy. (Say,
my feelngs exactly. Maybe I ought to record a Beatles ripoff album,
too.)
'May 1, 1990' is Belew at his prettiest — a
little research shows that this was the day he met his wife Martha — and at his
sincerest, a great slab of angelic idealism painted as power pop. But
highlights are around every corner: 'Burned By The Fire We Make' could win
Greenpeace quite a few new converts were they to adopt it as their anthem,
'Never Enough' uses a simple droning guitar riff to convey the mood of
'addiction to love' to great effect, 'Dream Life' is a charming acoustic
serenade that is all but impossible to dislike or ignore, and 'Fly' features
far more complex guitar picking techniques than all of The Acoustic Adrian
Belew put together behind a small wall of psychedelic effects — funny
enough, the song, despite all of its psychedelic trimmings, is essentially
about fear of flying.
In fact, cut for cut, Here may be even
stronger than Young Lions, except the highs are not nearly as high
(nothing really reaches the heights of ecstasy provided by 'Pretty Pink Rose';
perhaps Belew should consider dragging Mr. Ziggy into the studio a bit more
often). That the record, just like the previous three, went down unnoticed by the
public at large and scorned by professional King Crimson fans, only goes to
show what kind of an unprofessional opinion I hold on both. It is high time
history butted in and carried out the proper justice; in the meantime, I can
only hold my thumbs up one more time and
pray that, some day before getting pie in the sky, Adrian gives himself another
chance at recording something like this.
THE GUITAR AS ORCHESTRA (1995)
1) Score Without Film; 2)
Portrait Of The Guitarist As Your Drum; 3) Piano Recital; 4) Laurence Harvey's
Despair; 5) Piano Ballet; 6) Rings Around The Moon; 7) Seven E Flat Elephants
Eating Acacia Of A C# Minor Forest; 8) If Only; 9) Alfred Hitchcock's
"Strangers On A Train" Starring Robert Walker; 10) Finale; 11*) Stage
Fright.
We cannot say that we have not been warned. The
album cover glows with the extended title: "Experimental Guitar Series,
Vol. 1: The Guitar As Orchestra". Considering that Belew's guitar playing
had always been experimental, even on his pop albums, a title like that should
inevitably lead one to the question: «If this is 'Experimental Guitar Vol. 1',
then do we presume that everything before it, in the guy's eye, was
'Non-Experimental'?»
Presumably. For many people, 'experimental' in
music is nearly synonymous with 'unusual' or 'weird', i. e. 'a way of playing
music that strays away from conventional approaches'. Which is, of course,
hardly the basic meaning of the term: 'having the characteristics of
experiment', i. e. 'an operation or procedure carried out under controlled
conditions in order to discover an unknown effect or law' (Webster). The
Guitar As Orchestra fully confirms to this definition and is, as a result,
utterly and intentionally unlistenable as "music".
But it is fairly intriguing as
"experiment". Using a wide range of pedals, guitar synthesizers and
processors, Belew makes his guitar sound like violins, cellos, harps, organs,
chimes, and, above all, pianos, playing either in the "modern
classical" or the "minimalist ambient" styles. I would say that
the title is somewhat misleading: the guitar is actually very rarely used as an
"orchestra" — most of the pieces are played with just one or two
leading "fake instruments", so the word should rather be understood
here as signifying "a whole heck of different stuff".
I do not suppose that any of these tracks have
any serious musical vision behind them. Of course, just how good Adrian is at
"modern classical" is something you will have to decide on your own;
my organism produces no emotional response whatsoever to that kind of music, be
it Varèse, Schoenberg, Zappa, or Belew. But something tells me — for instance,
the near-total lack of admiration expressed for the record on the part of
«super-cool» music aficionados — that history will probably not be placing
him on the same level with the other three.
His ambient panoramas work somewhat better, but
even here he presents no threat to great masters of the style. There is nothing
on the level of his own 'Guernica' from Desire Caught By The Tail — these
images, no matter how complex and twisted their titles may be, lack a language
of their own. The titles are, in fact, the most telling element on here:
'Portrait Of The Guitarist As A Young Drum' is a pretty good mirror image of
the guitarist, who does indeed behave as a young drum on most of the tracks.
As a pure experiment, though, the album achieves
its goals admirably — to the point that you can always capitalize on its
surprise value as long as you still have an uninitiated friend or two. Then you
can invite him to your house, play him 'Alfred Hitchcock's 'Strangers On A
Train'', and, once he is properly worked up to the point of shouting 'Cut it
out, this Nazi guy should be shot for fuckin' butchering that piano!',
triumphantly object 'What piano? That's no piano — that's a guitar! Don't tell
me you can't tell the difference between guitar and piano!' That will certainly
be one great way to assert your musical authority, and you can thank Adrian
Belew for guidance. I actually tried it out once. What do you know, it worked.
OP ZOP TOO WAH (1996)
1) Of Bow And Drum; 2) Word Play Drum Beat; 3) Six
String; 4) Conversation Piece; 5) All Her Love Is Mine; 6) I Remember How To
Forget; 7) What Do You Know? (Part 1); 8) Op Zop Too Wah; 9) A Plate Of Words;
10) Time Waits; 11) What Do You Know? (Part 2); 12) Modern Man Hurricane Blues;
13) In My Backyard; 14) A Plate Of Guitar; 15) Live In A Tree; 16) Something To
Do; 17) Beautiful; 18) High Wire Guitar; 19) Sky Blue Red Bird Green House; 20)
The Ruin After The Rain; 21) On.
To look back at the fate of this record is a
little funny and a little sad. From a purely theoretical standpoint, it should
be remembered as Belew's magnum opus — a long, diverse, ambitious album
that pursues the goal of capturing all of his sides: Belew the sci-fi freak
rocker, Belew the guitar-driven, Beatlish style pop lover, Belew the avantgarde
whacko explorer, Belew the incurable romantic loner. On practice, Op Zop
Too Wah has not yielded even one 'classic' Belew track, and is usually left
aside in any serious discussion of the man's music.
Why? The obvious answer would be that there is
just so much of everything that, in the end, there is too much of nothing. But
then the same argument could be flung at The White Album; if the songs
are good enough, their cumulative effect would override any confusion. So maybe
it's just that the songs are not good enough? But I really would not say that.
Look all over the place and you will find plenty of inspirational bits in all
styles. Obviously, if you jam twenty-one tracks onto one CD, some are bound to
come out as (relative) failures, but what's a few one minute-long failed bits
to a generally solid recording?
Quite a lot, as it turns out. The album oozes
ugly discoherence, maybe because the connecting bits are as loud and in-yer-face
as the main songs, and although the desire to transform a simple rectangle into
a Möbius strip is understandable, it sacrifices the pure value of the
songs to the overall bizarre atmosphere that is not even totally new or
particularly interesting. As a result, I find many of the individual tracks
lovable once I tune in to them individually, but the album as a whole impresses
me about as much as its cover: green, wobbly, and yucky.
My advice is to try and filter out all the
short links, rearrange the remaining thirteen songs in an order that you find
personally comfortable, and this will leave you with about forty-five minutes
of good music. Then it becomes possible to sort out the dreamy psychedelic
ballads ('All Her Love Is Mine'), the Zappa-style guitar heroics ('High Wire
Guitar' — a parody, actually, on useless guitar wanking, replete with silly
"crowd cheering" as the fans admire their "idol"), the power
pop exercises with a little Roy Orbison flavour ('Six String', a love ode to
Adrian's favourite fetish; 'I Remember How To Forget'), the sentimental
acoustic idillies ('Time Waits'), the obligatory Beatlisms ('On', a tribute to
Lennon circa Revolver; 'Something To Do', a tribute to McCartney
circa... uh, Red Rose Speedway?) and something else I apparently forgot.
On the average, these songs may be
slightly weaker than the average estimate of his 1989-1994 records. At least,
there is nothing to make me relive the weighty stimulus of 'Young Lions' or the
catchy heart-on-sleeve atmosphere of 'Burned By The Fire We Make'. But this is
something that can be lived with; many of the tunes are growers. What really
disrupts the continuum are all the silly links. It is as if, looking at his
past efforts and also "rejuvenated" by the latest phase of King
Crimson's career, Adrian, having made a fifth solid pop album, decided, at the
very last minute, to spice it up for the sophisticated fan. But then the
sophisticated fan, being perfectly happy with the Fripp-dominated KC, would not
buy Belew's "pop stuff" in the first place.
So, in the long run, I doubt that Op Zop
will fully and completely satisfy anyone. But brain-wise, I still give it a thumbs up because it gives me enough savory
ingredients to make up my own concoction. It is a failure only inasmuch as it
aspires to be more of a success than the previous records — and ends up less.
Which is not to say that 'Six String' does not rock, or that 'Time Waits' does
not comfort, or that Adrian Belew is any less of a damn fine chap than usual.
BELEWPRINTS (1998)
1) Men In Helicopters; 2)
Cage; 3) I Remember How To Forget; 4) Young Lions; 5) Never Enough; 6) Things
You Hit With A Stick; 7) Everything; 8) Big Blue Sun; 9) Bad Days; 10) One Of
Those Days; 11) Return Of The Chicken; 12) Dinosaur; 13) 1967; 14) Free As A Bird
(Live At Longacre Theater); 15) Nude Wrestling With A Christmas Tree.
Subtitled The Acoustic Adrian Belew Volume 2,
this is exactly what it is, and, from a general standpoint, a big improvement
over Volume 1. The basic message is the same as before: this is not a
technically-minded, virtuoso-bestowed experiment, but just a modest bunch of
Adrian's pop numbers sung, played, and arranged minimalistically, friendly, and
with feeling. But there are a few pleasant additional touches that are worth
mentioning.
First, the arrangements are a bit more complex
and diverse; many of the numbers have Belew adding bass and drums, or
switching from guitar to piano, bringing on a true "Unplugged"
feeling rather than deconstructing everything in favour of his singing. As
such, some of the songs, like 'Young Lions' and 'Never Enough', still manage to
rock out even in this setting. The album also opens with a big surprise: 'Men
In Helicopters' accompanied by a string quartet (the only non-Belew musical
presence on the album), a very joyous touch.
Second, the song selection is perfect — apart
from three pieces of musique concrète (which are actually short
and fun), Adrian runs through his catchiest, pleasantest pop creations from
1989 to 1994, even reproducing the entire mini-suite '1967' which I am adoring
more and more with each passing day: in this setting, with all its
unpredictable, but memorable sections laid out even more transparently than in
the original, it threatens to convince me of being his one true masterpiece in
the psychedelic pop genre.
One last surprise is the live recording of
Lennon's 'Free As A Bird', taken from Adrian's acoustic solo interlude during
King Crimson's Broadway show. Ever the hip purist, Belew covers Lennon's
original demo rather than the McCartney-enhanced version on Anthology,
refusing to reproduce Macca's 'Whatever happened to...' section and sticking
instead to the mumbled la-la-la's of John's old recording, and even the
audience seems to be getting the point and digging it. Maybe it symbolizes a
sincere belief in purity and authenticity; maybe it is snubby and pretentious;
but, in any case, it is one more small non-trivial move from a small
non-trivial artist. A most heartfelt thumbs up,
even for such a trifle.
SIDE ONE (2005)
1) Ampersand; 2) Writing On The Wall; 3)
Matchless Man; 4) Madness; 5) Walk Around The World; 6) Beat Box Guitar; 7)
Under The Radar; 8) Elephants; 9) Pause.
In 2000, Belew released a futuristic
compilation seducingly called Coming Attractions — a set of «sneak
previews» of tracks from records to come. Then, in an almost insulting manner,
he delayed the release of the real records for a smashing five years.
Granted, he had a serious excuse: in the early 2000s, King Crimson was again on
the move, and in between recording The ConstruKction Of Light and The
Power To Believe and touring in support of both, there was not much chance
of resuscitating the solo career.
By 2005, however, Belewstuff was on the market
again, in the form of three consecutive records, all three so short that, with
a little insignificant loss, they could easily fit onto one CD — but that would
leave us with no gimmick, a very boring result considering how long fans had
been waiting for something extraordinary. So the gimmick splits Adrian's
personality into three «sides» and gradually acquaints us with each over a
year-long period.
Side One, for the most part, gives us the «futuristic pop» Belew, and for that
reason is my favourite. Except for a few brief ambient interludes, the songs
rock — in weird time signatures, as befits a true Crimsonian, but with honesty
and passion. Particularly notable are the first three numbers, where Adrian
forms a power trio with bassist Les Claypool of Primus and drummer Danny Carey
of Tool — they are not necessarily the best songs, but they are certainly
covered with the juiciest flesh and the prettiest skin.
'Ampersand' puts a psychedelic Beatlesque vocal
on top of music that is, very much indeed, equal parts King Crimson, Primus,
and Tool, and, with a stronger dose of PR, could have been judged one of art
rock's top creations of the decade. 'Writing On The Wall', although mostly
vocalless, is only a tiny notch below in quality, and then the trio cools it
down a bit with bongos, backward guitars, and opium den atmosphere of 'Matchless
Man'. A very modernistic mix of beauty and weirdness, catchiness and
experimentation — if the world were a better place in the first quarter of
2005, this would be the perfect Top 40 material, while Mario's 'Let Me
Love You' and 50 Cent's 'Candy Shop' would be justly relegated to the status of
semi-legal biological weapons, inflicting permanent brain damage on alien
invaders.
The «solo» material that follows predictably
sounds a little tossed-off in comparison, and we've heard it before — 'Madness'
is an apt title, but this type of paranoid, pressure-pumping, guitar
thunderstorm (or, rather, a cross between a thunderstorm and a deranged
beehive) was already explored to the limit on Crimson's early 1980s
instrumentals, and the rest of the tracks — with the exception of the
intentionally trendy lo-fi sound of 'Beat Box Guitar' — are also firmly
grounded in the values of Discipline and Beat. Not that it's a
bad thing — these have always been exciting values — but it is a little strange
to see that, after an eight-year pause, Belew is unable to offer us anything
seriously fresh, unless he gets professional outside support.
On the other hand, one cannot invent a new
fashion of the wheel with each new decade, and even a guy as permanently whacko
as Adrian Belew must get old, eventually. Whatever be the case, if you do not
expect a musical revolution, Side One shows that the man still has
plenty of ideas, and that his sensitive soul has not entirely burned out yet,
either. And it is nice to know he is still a fan of the whole wildlife
shenanigan — not above giving us some more cooky elephant noises as a trifling
postscriptum to the record. Thumbs up, by
all means.
SIDE TWO (2005)
1) Dead Dog On Asphalt; 2) I
Wish I Knew; 3) Face To Face; 4) Asleep; 5) Sex Nerve; 6) Then What; 7)
Quicksand; 8) I Know Now; 9) Happiness; 10) Sunlight.
This is Adrian's experimental facet. There is
no way to surgically separate it from his pop side, so Side One
occasionally featured avantgarde bits where Side Two occasionally lets
in pretty vocal melodies, but the general difference is quite clear. The power
trio never shows up; Belew handles all the instrumentation himself, and, in a
way, this is his starkest and least accessible offering since Desire Caught
By The Tail (it would be hard to call Guitar As Orchestra an
«offering» in the first place).
On the other hand, perhaps the word
«experimental» no longer fits this kind of music. Belew has been surprising the
world for so long that he has pretty much run out of surprises. So we still get
non-trivial time signatures, non-trivial sonic effects, superb playing
technique, and even a decent smorgasbord of tones and atmospheres... but most
of this just about barely passes the grade of «Contemporary Ambient Sonics for the
Seasoned Elitist».
There is a certified dreamy aura to the entire
record; even when it rocks, the rocking sound seems to be beamed down to you
from some faraway fantasy world, but there is no delight in understanding that
— it is more like, "oh no, not another fantasy world, for God's
sake". The connections of the fantasy world with the real one are not
clear, either. For instance, the lead-in track, 'Dead Dog On Asphalt', is really
supposed to be about a dead dog on asphalt — reflecting a recent accident that
happened to Belew — but the track, recycling the riff from 'Beat Box Guitar',
could just as well be called 'Shooting Ducks In Outer Space'.
The whole experience is unsatisfying. Lazy and
a bit tossed-off, almost as if Adrian ran out of fresh ideas by the time of Side
One's release, yet became trapped in his own project, forced to come up
with two more records despite being landlocked. So the record is just as short
— in fact, it could have easily fit on the same CD with Side One — and,
although the guitar solos are impeccable (getting Belew to play badly would
require professional virus software), the arrangements are openly crappy.
Crappy beatbox percussion, crappy synthesized bass, crappy effects.
Maybe I am way off here, but I think a guy like
Belew, with all that enormous experience behind him, can toss off a record like
Side Two in just about the same half hour that it takes to sit through
it. Incredible: to have fans waiting at his doorstep for a decade only to
placate them with thirty minutes of first-rate music — and then follow it up
with thirty minutes of boring, unimaginative ramblings. My brain would like to
challenge this man to a duel for this insult, but, seeing as how it would
probably get its ass kicked in seconds (do brains have asses?), it will,
instead, just cowardly slip him a thumbs down
rating — and be done with it.
SIDE THREE (2006)
1) Troubles; 2) Incompetence
Indifference; 3) Water Turns To Wine; 4) Crunk; 5) Drive; 6) Cinemusic; 7)
Whatever; 8) Men In Helicopters V4.0; 9) Beat Box Car; 10) Truth Is; 11) The
Red Bull Rides A Boomerang Across The Blue Constellation; 12) &.
I fully understand the desire to end Side
Three with a reworked version of 'Ampersand' (here, given its far more
laconic symbolic equivalent '&'); it adds a last-minute touch of coherence
and conceptuality to Adrian's three-headed dragon. Less understandable is a set
of new variations on 'Beat Box Guitar' ('Beat Box Car'), and completely less
understandable is yet another version of 'Men In Helicopters', practically
the same as on Belewprints but with the addition of a martial percussion
overdub. That's three songs that we already know well — on an album with a
running time of 38:40?
Unlike the poppier Side One and the
weirder Side Two, this one brings on an Op Zop Too Wah style
synthesis of the two sides, and the pop element of it, once again, succeeds a
bit better than the odd element — for reasons already explained in the previous
review. But even the pop songs seem outtakish; the funky 'Troubles' and
'Incompetence Indifference' are the best of the lot, yet neither produces any
fresh impressions. And too much of this, once again, is in the guise of «links»
or raw demos, enceinte with musical glory but aborting it after one minute of
pregnancy (e. g. 'Truth Is', which could have been a beautiful ballad in the
vein of some of Adrian's late period King Crimson songs, but ends almost
before we realize it).
Overall, it just looks to me like Adrian wanted
to get over with this as soon as possible, so as to resume touring with his
hands free of studio matters, and certainly Side Three does not deserve
its own lengthy review. As a coda, it works well; but my final opinion is that
releasing all of these songs as three separate albums has been the worst
art-structure decision ever since, at the very least, the dissection of Kill
Bill. On its own, Side Three is decidedly a thumbs down; but there is simply no reason to
judge it on its own.
SIDE FOUR (2007)
1) Writing On The Wall; 2)
Dinosaur; 3) Ampersand; 4) Young Lions; 5) Beat Box Guitar; 6) Matchless Man;
7) A Little Madness; 8) Drive; 9) Of Bow And Drum; 10) Big Electric Cat; 11)
(Thanks); 12) Three Of A Perfect Pair; 13) Thela Hun Ginjeet.
Like every true Crimsonian, Adrian Belew
prefers working in the Power Trio format — that is, whenever his social
instincts call for a change of the Power Solo format — and by 2006, he has
finally procured himself a more or less permanent backup, consisting of brother
Eric Slick on drums and sister Julie Slick on bass. Both siblings had been
picked up on Adrian's inspection of «Paul Green's School of Rock», a place
where one actually pays money to be taught how to play Bon Jovi guitar solos;
but the teachers definitely know their trade, because the Slicks are, indeed,
at a level of competence where they can at least stand up to Belew's level.
Stand up, but never pose a threat, that is: Adrian
has been smart enough to pick a team with which he need not be ashamed to mount
the stage, but also one that will never be able to blow him off it. There are
no signs of battling it out: when they play live, Belew is the star throughout
— and the Slicks are a nice pair of youngsters, blessed by Fortune with the
ability to bask in the glory rays of the beautiful (if balding),
super-dexterous (if predictable) Guitar God.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. Side
Four is the unexpected «even» conclusion to Adrian's outburst of creativity,
topping it off with the recording of a live performance (at Canal Street Tavern
in Dayton, Ohio, no less) — Belew's first «proper» solo live album, discounting
the live acoustic parts of the 1993 and 1998 records. The setlist mixes new
stuff, oldies, and a few King Crimson hits, and focuses on songs rather than
improvisation, possibly because the Adrian Belew Power Trio did not improvise
all that much on the tour. Where there is improvisation, it is all
centered on Adrian: for 'Drive', he lets the siblings take a break and indulges
in seven minutes of pure guitar fun, even incorporating a razor-sharp psychedelic
solo that faithfully reproduces the melody of 'Within You Without You' (!). The
only other lengthy, semi-improvisational suite is 'Beat Box Guitar', extended,
partially deconstructed and incorporating bits of 'Discipline' and some other
stuff I do not recognize.
Belew is, as usual, in great form — has there
been one single instance when he was not? — and the whole experience is a lot
of fun, including seeing him refresh and rejuvenate real old classics like 'Big
Electric Cat' and 'Young Lions', or dragging out some obscurities like 'Of Bow
And Drum' off the pretty much forgotten Op Zop Too Wah album. Note,
also, that I was perfectly right about Side One representing the
«proper» Belew and Two and Three representing a frustrated
Belew, struggling to keep his promise: 'Drive' is the only track from either of
these two sides, whereas Side One is represented by no less than five
different performances.
The only drawback here is the usual stale sense
of predictability — and even that is softened with all the reinventions, as
well as the curiosity of seeing the «Adrian Belew School of Rock» in action. May
it be hoped, eventually, for an official video with professional camerawork,
because that Julie Slick is kinda h... uh, is a great master of the fretboard.
E (2009)
1) A; 2) A2; 3) A3; 4) B; 5)
B2; 6) B3; 7) C; 8) D; 9) D2; 10) E; 11) E2.
The contents of the first official studio
release by the Adrian Belew Power Trio — Adrian & The Slicks — are easily
guessed by anyone who has combined an acquaintance with the general Crimsonian
attitude with a quick glance at the «songs»' titles, or at the modern
geometrical design of the album cover.
Namely, it is a rigid exercise in math-rock:
complex, angular riffs played over complex, angular bass runs, leaning on complex,
angular drum patterns. Technically, this is a very impressive show,
particularly for the Slicks, who have it far more rough and demanding here than
they had on the live album, where, after all, the emphasis was on Adrian's more
accessible side. Of course, as official «disciples» of a new generation, they
lack the freshness and inventiveness of such former rhythm section giants as
Bruford and Levin, but it seems they do not only match the dexterity, but also
understand the spirit. Basically, Adrian puts them to the test, and they pass
it with flying colors — delight!
On the other hand, it is hard to get rid of the
feeling that this is exactly what it is: a test for Belew's fresh rhythm
section. The music itself has been radiating weirdness for so long — thirty
years now — that the novelty has worn off; and how could it not have been, when
most of these riffs and themes keep reminding me of Adrian's previous exploits?
Making matters worse, E is frustratingly non-diverse (in fact, it helps
if you just think about it as one continuous suite rather than a set of
different compositions — which, to be honest, is more or less the way Belew
advertised it): most of the parts are centered around looping arpeggios and
meticulous scale runs, with my best impression of it summarized as
«continuously climbing the many sides of a rotating polygon» — with no end in
sight.
In E's defense, I will say that it could
have made a great soundtrack to some pretentious art-house movie (preferably, with
a crazy, but visionary mathematical genius as the protagonist, and The Pink
Panther as an indirect influence); also, I will say that it is far more
listenable than some of King Crimson's exercises in terraforming dissonance.
But there is also something very sad and disappointing about the whole
concept of «predictable weirdness». In the end, I can only recommend it for
Belew diehards — or for old fogeys who think of the newer generations as a
well-trained, strictly disciplined army of lazy good-for-nothings. In the
latter respect, E is pleasantly instructive.
ADDENDA:
THE BEARS
THE BEARS (1987)
1) None Of The Above; 2) Fear
Is Never Boring; 3) Honey Bee; 4) Man Behind The Curtain; 5) Wavelength; 6)
Trust; 7) Raining; 8) Superboy; 9) Meet Me In The Dark; 10) Figure It Out.
Stuck somewhere in the cracks between Adrian
Belew's tenure in King Crimson and his mildly successful solo career is that
particular part of his life which was spent as a member of The Bears — not a
very small part, either, considering that they managed to put out four studio
albums, one live record, and dedicate quite a bit of their lives to touring.
Unfortunately, they generated next to no publicity: apparently, people were
more prone to perking up at the words «Adrian Belew» than willing to listen to a
band called «The Bears».
Too bad, because there is some delightful pop
music to be found on these records. As it turns out, The Bears were the first
proper polygon upon which Adrian dared to test out his pop instincts.
Originally, they were not The Bears, but «The Raisins», a Cincinnati-based pop
group that included Rob Fetters on guitar, Bob Nyswonger on bass, and a couple
other guys who didn't make it further: Adrian, who was at the time still an
active part of the KC lineup and also fiddled around with the first, half-pop,
half-avantgarde stage of his solo career, befriended them and produced their
first and last LP in 1983. After it flopped, the band fell apart, and out of
the ashes of The Raisins, with the addition of drummer Chris Arduser, rose The
Bears — a band in which Adrian Belew, the famous inventive-progressive
guitar-wiz kid, would feel right at home going «all-out pop» without the fans
snickering or spewing behind his back.
Now there is nothing all that special about
this particular brand of guitar-based pop that The Bears profess — but let me
tell you that these songs, all ten of them, are every bit as solid as any
random lost-genius «power pop» band from the Eighties, mussed and sused over by
the retro-hipster crowds. In fact, it might even be better than most,
considering how consistently strong the hooks are: the vocal melodies, provided
by Adrian and Rob Fetters, always latch on to some emotional center or other,
and although they are rarely supported by equally strong instrumental hooks,
the overall guitar sound, produced by the regular Adrian Belew Sound Factory,
is always tasteful and creative.
More than that, The Bears pride themselves on
writing mildly intelligent, easily understandable, decidedly «un-artsy» lyrics,
usually with a social message, and delivering them in an easy, down-to-earth
manner that should be quite seductive for all those who fidget at the sight of
pretentiousness or «intentional inaccessibility». The very first song,
ʽNone Of The Aboveʼ, is a manifesto of sorts: "Top ten well
dressed men... epitome of taste... always willing, always hot, all these things
I am not". Fetters' thin-voiced "none of the above, none of the
above...", wimpy and sarcastic
at the same time, echoed by Belew's equally thin and evilly cackling guitar
line, reminds me of some of Pete Townshend's solo material, except The Bears,
by definition, are unable to convey the same heartfelt pessimism and bitterness
as Pete does — they're too cheery by nature to do that, and even their anger
always comes with a smile.
Instrumentally, they are gifted enough to set
up a friendly funky groove, as on ʽFear Is Never Boringʼ (a
re-recording of a mini-minor hit they had in 1983 as The Raisins), and
sometimes add a brass section to fatten up the sound (ʽHoney Beeʼ,
ʽFigure It Outʼ), perhaps as a tribute to the long-gone glam-rock era
or because somebody just wanted to play some sax, I dunno. If Adrian wants to,
he can provide plenty of guitar overdubs for an «epic» sound (as he does in the
introduction to ʽTrustʼ), but ultimately, the idea is to depart from
«pop» as rarely as possible — and when they do it, it is usually in order to
indulge in Ade's psychedelic soloing (said ʽTrustʼ includes a
lengthy and quite melodic passage constructed out of backward-recorded notes).
Ultimately, the one thing that separates The Bears from Adrian's solo career is
that most of the choruses, and even many of the verses are sung by Belew and
Fetters in unison, and sometimes they are also joined by the drummer (and
sometimes there may only be one of them, but he's double-tracked anyway). This
seems to be intentionally done in order to give the album a more «group»
feeling, à la early Beatles
and all, but the two gentlemen are not as expertly synchronized in tone and
mood as Lennon and McCartney, and the combination of their overtones does not
result in anything noticeably better than their individual tones. Had they
worked more creatively on their vocals, this might have given the record a
kick in the diversity area — as it is, its economic 34 minutes paradoxically feel
much longer, a problem not atypical of the usual retro-pop approach, in the
Eighties or at any later date, but one which a guy of Belew's level of
intellect and giftedness might have easily avoided. Then again, he probably did
not want to avoid it: The Bears were
set up as a bona fide «niche band», and The
Bears is appropriately a «niche album», and you have to take it or leave
it, and under these circumstances I most certainly take it, and gratefully
award it a friendly thumbs up.
RISE AND SHINE (1988)
1) Aches And Pains; 2) Save
Me; 3) Robobo's Beef; 4) Not Worlds Apart; 5) Nobody's Fool; 6) Highway 2; 7)
Little Blue River; 8) Rabbit Manor; 9) Holy Mack; 10) Complicated Potatoes; 11)
You Can Buy Friends; 12) Best Laid Plans; 13) Old Fat Cadillac; 14) Girl With
Clouds.
Although this album is a little longer than the
first one, it gives the impression of being even more formulaic. No attempts at
walls of sound, no brass section anywhere, just a very basic, very tight
pop-rock sound. Two guitars, one bass, and a drumset. Of course, with Adrian
Belew constantly honing his skills as a «guitar-orchestra person», this means
that there will be numerous overdubs where his six-string will sound like a
one-string, a two-string, a no-string, or a little bird twirping away high up
in a tree, but eventually, you get used to the predictability of it, too.
The first five songs here really just go past
through me like a knife through warm butter — mood-wise, there is nothing to
tell them apart, and when all of your hooks look like they've been passed out
from the assembly line, there is no reason to call them «hooks» as such.
Pleasant, same-sounding midtempo pop with buzzing or meaouwing guitars
(sometimes buzzing and meaouwing at the same time, courtesy of Adrian's never-ending
tone variation effects) and friendly choruses. The album does not even try to
begin to steer a different course until ʽLittle Blue Riverʼ, which
slows down the tempo, adds a pinch of tender folksy harmonies, and tops it off
with a psychedelic coloring for the lead guitar part.
Further on, things become more interesting with
ʽRabbit Manorʼ, a quirky avantgarde-funk workout with a feel of
not-too-dangerous suspense and a touch of classic Belew paranoia;
ʽComplicated Potatoesʼ, with Belew (or is that Fetters?) adding some
distortion to his sound; and ʽBest Laid Plansʼ, with a
mystical-hypnotic guitar line dominating the verse (for the chorus with its
questionable pun — "the best laid plans never get laid" — they shift
to the usual power-pop mood). But arguably the best song, and the only one that
made it over to Adrian's solo career (you can find a live version on 1993's The Acoustic Adrian Belew) is ʽOld
Fat Cadillacʼ, for which he came up with a more «New Wave»-y guitar
pattern and a memorable riff.
The overall arrangement and performance of
ʽCadillacʼ does suggest that this is more of an «intimate Adrian
Belew moment» than a collective Bears tune, and this, in turn, suggests that
there was a certain reason why The Bears were put on hold after Rise And Shine, like its predecessor,
failed to interest the public: namely, because the most interesting songs on
here are the ones where «the band» is not intentionally striving to sound like
«a band», but more like «a backing band» for the chief personality. When it's
de-personalized rhythm guitar and group harmonies, they are neither the epitome
of heavenly beauty nor a wallop of unstoppable energy — but on ʽOld Fat
Cadillacʼ, Belew's individual emotionalism comes shining through.
Besides, the original novelty and excitement of
it all had worn off, and now they sound a bit too much like a relatively
mindless pop factory (good taste and all) where songs like ʽMeet Me In The
Darkʼ and ʽNone Of The Aboveʼ were honestly more fun. Style-wise,
I have no problem with the record, but it just feels too much like one of those
«let us get together and make a guitar-based pop-rock album with no purpose
other than showing how much we like guitar-based pop-rock» ventures, and we've
probably all had our fair share of these already. And what's up with that big
old hinomaru on the album cover? Was
that a surreptitious attempt at sucking up to the Japanese market? Bizarre, but
I'm not even sure the album got a Japanese release in the first place (much as
the Japanese love to release and re-release everything, especially if it got
bonus tracks).
CAR CAUGHT FIRE (2001)
1) Life In A Nutshell; 2)
Under The Volcano; 3) When She Moves; 4) Mr. Bonaparte; 5) What's The Good Of
Knowing; 6) Dave; 7) Caveman; 8) Waiting Room; 9) 117 Valley Drive; 10) Safe In
Hell; 11) Success; 12) Sooner Or Later; 13) As You Are.
As Adrian's solo career finally took off and he
found himself enjoying moderate success on his own, The Bears were put on hold
while he was too busy dividing most of his time between his solo status and
King Crimson. However, the split was not inimical, and throughout the 1990s,
members of The Bears would frequently back him on his records and solo tours,
while at the same time pursuing their own lines of work (for instance, dubbing
themselves «the psychodots», with lowercase p,
and even releasing an album with the same title).
By the time the 2000s rolled about, though,
Adrian either got bored playing on his own, or he decided that, after all,
«pure pop» was something that could be better created and enjoyed in the
company of friends, whereas his solo ventures should be more experimental and
«whacko». This hypothesis is indirectly supported by the fact that his Side One, etc. projects of 2004-05
would all be seriously avantgarde — whereas the resuscitated Bears' third
album, Car Caught Fire, is every bit
as pop-based as the first two. More interestingly, it is also better than the
first two: in fact, it is easily the
one Bears album to own if you want to quickly learn everything that this band
is capable of.
Car
Caught Fire does not sound
very much like the Bears' first two albums with their «New Wave pop» sheen,
«King-Crimson-made-accessible-to-the-masses» approach. Nor does it sound much
like Belew's solo pop career from Mr.
Music Head to Here, which was
seriously retro-oriented. Instead, it sounds a little timeless (as, indeed, do
quite a few, if not most, albums from
the last decade and a half), borrowing a little from every decade and every
style as long as it allows to write and record a decent, catchy, pretty pop
song.
ʽLife In A Nutshellʼ, for instance,
opens the album with a typically Belew-style twangy guitar riff, only to have
it backed, within a few seconds, by an out-of-nowhere «swampy» harmonica part,
and then sweetened up with an old-fashioned pop vocal melody. ʽUnder The
Volcanoʼ, with Fetters (I think) on lead vocals, sounds like something
Phil Collins could have done if he were into steady, rhythmic, guitar-based pop
instead of drum machines and synthesizers, and, in addition, Belew wrings out a
screechy, scratchy guitar solo that sounds more like John Cale's viola experiments
on the Velvet Underground's first album than anything more human in nature.
ʽWhen She Movesʼ sounds like... Tom Petty? All except the song's main
seven-note riff, which seems taken from some quirky New Wave-era keyboard rock
hit or something. And so on.
In other words, eclecticism is the norm — Car Caught Fire is as diverse as Rise And Shine was monotonous, and a
detailed analysis of these songs would have me listing their possible influences
from dawn till dusk. At the same time, it is all expertly and contemporarily
produced, so that the album sounds no less modern than at least your Strokes or
your Ash or whatever was popular in those days. Even if you want yourself some
basic rock'n'roll with just a small touch of weirdness, you have your
ʽCavemanʼ — a song about how we all really behave like cavemen
(Belew's favorite subject) appropriately set to a grumbly, distorted hard rock
riff, and with a specially designed chorus so we could all gleefully join the
band singing "I'm a caveman, I'm a caveman!" without realising that
the joke is on us.
It should probably be noted that Belew is by no
means the primary songwriter: ʽCavemanʼ, for instance, is credited to
Nyswonger, and on the whole, songwriting is more or less equally split between
all of the band's members — and almost all of the songs have something to
offer. It is hard to speak about individual styles: ʽLife In A Nutshellʼ,
ʽMr. Bonaparteʼ, and ʽ117 Valley Driveʼ are probably
identifiable as Belew songs by being based on unorthodox riffs, but the rest
trade their various influences and quotations quite freely between different
songwriters, which is absolutely no problem at all. Well, maybe a little bit of
a problem, when acoustically based songs such as ʽDaveʼ bring their
sound too perilously close to the sentimental side of the Barenaked Ladies —
then again, this is almost inevitable with «nerdy» music like this when the
authors decide that it is time for a little sentimentality.
That said, it is not much easier to write up a
meaningful assessment of Car Caught Fire
than it was the case for the previous albums — even while raising the stakes so
high in terms of intelligence and pure entertainment, it still feels a little
«empty». You cannot blame the lyrics, which are consistently decent and deal
with real problems (internal and external), and you cannot blame the players,
who seem genuinely driven by a desire to say something, and, formally speaking,
they do. Still, something seems to be
missing, and I cannot for the life of me determine what it is. Maybe it's some
sort of «willingness to go all the way» or something: with all their variety
and creativity, the songs seem to be holding themselves back, as if there were
some kind of conflict here between the will to entertain and the will to do it
in a cliché-avoiding manner. This may also be responsible for the fact
that I have no idea what would be the «highlights» on here — not able to
pinpoint even one absolute «favorite». Maybe ʽCavemanʼ, but that
would be just because its hard rock riff separates it from the rest.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter, because the
same kind of complaint could be addressed at just about anybody (hell, some
people accuse The White Album of
being a soulless mish-mash, too). As a pop album, it is at least better than
any single Barenaked Ladies record, so that alone guarantees a thumbs up
rating already (and I do like the Ladies when they are being fun and quirky,
rather than trying to pump up seriousness).
LIVE (2002)
1) Honey Bee; 2) What's The
Good Of Knowing; 3) Dave; 4) Robobo's Beef; 5) Mr. Bonaparte; 6) Under The
Volcano; 7) Success; 8) Little Blue River; 9) As You Are; 10) Trust; 11) Complicated
Potatoes; 12) Figure It Out; 13) Caveman; 14) Man Behind The Curtain.
This album, recorded live at some small club in
some irrelevant location on the underbelly of the universe, makes me happy with
its tracklist — the three studio Bears albums are given the exact same
priorities that I have defined for myself: 7 songs from the best one, Car Caught Fire, 4 songs from the
second best (The Bears), and only 3
from the worst (Rise And Shine). Of
course, 4 against 3 may not seem like much, statistically speaking, but
remember the proportions, too: Rise And
Shine was about ten minutes longer than The Bears, so the figures are
valid. Also, one might object that the band was simply promoting Car Caught Fire at the time, but, you
know, that'd be just guesswork, while here we have a strong factual correlation
and all.
Anyway, it is not very significant. What is significant is to understand that the
difference between a Bears studio album and a Bears live album is in no way
similar to the difference between, say, a King Crimson studio vs. live album.
The Bears have pledged to be a pop
band — not an experimental avantgarde one or even a rock'n'roll one — and they
do not see themselves obliged to «rip it up» on stage the way King Crimson
could, when they showed the world how this strange, otherworldly, New
Wave-influenced music on their early 1980s records could be brought to a
boiling point (and bring your brains to the same point in the process). The
Bears take things much lighter, and simply give their little fan club a good
time.
It is not uninteresting, though, to hear these
songs without the heavy «studio tinkering» they had been given, particularly to
compare the real old ones with the new arrangements — ʽHoney Beeʼ
without all the «twang» effects on the guitars and vocals, for instance; or
ʽTrustʼ, which is stripped clean of its feedback blasts and given a
largely acoustic setting; or ʽFigure It Outʼ, which, due to the
band's limited budget, is deprived of its brass section, but Belew and Fetters
compensate for this with some wild guitar sparring (with respect for each
other's styles — I mean, Belew can probably slaughter anyone in a sparring
match, but they make it work instead).
On the whole, there are few major departures
from the original structures or moods: other than the acoustic takes on
ʽTrustʼ and ʽAs You Areʼ, I have noticed an extended
psycho-coda to ʽSuccessʼ — the only place on the album where Belew
engages in some serious guitar pyrotechnics, probably to appease those people
who only came to the show in hopes to catch a glimpse of the famous mad
guitarist — and that's about it. I am also not completely satisfied with the setlist: instead of the sulky
ʽDaveʼ, I'd rather have ʽOld Fat Cadillacʼ or any other
spritelier number, but they probably had to support the delicate balance
between all the songwriters and singers. Still, good songs, good vibe, the
audience goes wild (enough to roar in ecstasy, as if this were a stadium show,
before the encore, and chant "Bears! Bears! Bears!" after the encore),
and the songs are let free to roam outside of their tight studio shells —
reason enough to give it a try. "Pop music is not dead!" one of the
band members declares as they slip out of ʽMr. Bonaparteʼ, and even
though, on a global scale, this is a debatable statement, at least The Bears
offer here much more than just empty words in its defense. Thumbs up.
EUREKA! (2007)
1) Zelda Fitzgerald; 2)
Veneer; 3) On; 4) Troubled Beauty; 5) Normal; 6) We Never Close; 7) Think; 8)
Keep Your Own Counsel; 9) Idiot In The Sky; 10) Doodle; 11) Comin' Round The
Mountain.
This must be some sort of tradition for The
Bears now — alternate the release of one really fun pop album with the
subsequent release of a really lacklustre one. You'd think that in between the
six years that separate Eureka! from
Car Caught Fire, the band members
would have had the strength to come up with another fine batch of tunes —
instead, what you get is about thirty minutes worth of something seriously
undercooked, unmemorable, and just plain boring.
I have no idea what happened, but these ten
songs (eleven, if you count the pretty, but fully dispensable cover of
ʽComin' Round The Mountainʼ) do not move me in the least. The band is
still there in its proper incarnation, with all four members dutifully supplying
more or less equal shares of songs as they did on Car Caught Fire, but they are really boring, and I do mean really.
This time, it all sounds like one of
those yawn-inducing moralistic records by the Barenaked Ladies — every single
song. Even Belew's three songs are generally subpar: ʽDoodleʼ has
some funny falsetto harmonies, but is melodically repetitive, just a lazy vamp
on a single jumpy-jerky distorted riff, and the other two sound like outtakes
from some uninspired King Crimson session.
Most importantly, it's as if the fun factor was
never there in the first place. This is serious-faced «intellectual pop» with a
social / environmental message, mostly, but if it's intellectual, then where is
the intellectual wish to come up with something
new? For each of these songs, there are two or three Bears songs alone that say
the same thing, let alone the output of other artists, and say it with more
verve and energy. Eureka!? Really?
As far as I understand, the exclamation that adequately conveys the atmosphere
of the record is Oh, Shhhiiii...
It's not too tasteless or anything — it's
vintage Bears, featuring all their trademarks, just none of their spontaneous
wit and charm. In such situations, it is very hard to even begin to explain why
one record is good and another one is bad, and I am not sure it is worth my
time to really strain myself over the issue, so you'll have to just take my
word on this. If you like The Bears for their overall style, you will probably
want to disagree with me — if you are relatively indifferent towards their
style, but care about their hooks, you probably won't. It is objectively telling, though, that (a) this record is so very
short (so, obviously, they did not have too many ideas when they got together
in 2007) and (b) the Bears have not reconvened ever since, even after Belew had
finally been fired from King Crimson and gained as much free time on his hands
as possible. After all, funny friendly lightning did strike twice on their
behalf already, but now it seems like the game is finally over. No hard
feelings whatsoever, but a thumbs down all the same.
CROSSING THE RED SEA WITH THE ADVERTS (1978)
1) One Chord Wonders; 2) Bored Teenagers; 3) New
Church; 4) On The Roof; 5) Newboys; 6) Gary Gilmore's Eyes; 7)
Bombsite Boy; 8) No Time
To Be 21; 9) Safety In Numbers; 10) New Day Dawns; 11) Drowning Men; 12) On
Wheels; 13) Great British
Mistake.
Arriving on the scene just a little too late to
upstage the Sex Pistols, disbanding way too early to scale the epic heights of
the Clash, The Adverts are relatively rarely remembered these days among the
general public. Still, their debut LP had almost immediately gained huge
critical success, and has never been off the critical lists since then; nobody
with even a faint interest in the first wave of the British punk movement can
pretend to have never heard about it.
And the critics are damn right — Crossing The Red Sea, an album whose
very title is a perfect reflection of its ambitious drive, is not just one of
the best 1970s punk rock albums; it is one of the best 1970s albums, period. These thirteen songs (eleven on
the original release, which omits one crucial hit single), all penned by band
leader and vocalist T. V. (Tim) Smith, encapsulate everything that was good
about the punk movement, omit most of what could be bad about it, and,
actually, go way beyond the stereotypical punk formula.
From a certain point of view, this isn't even
«punk»: the guitars are not inclined towards chainsaw buzz, which sets them way
apart from the Ramones, and the vocalist tends to actually sing rather than bark, which sets them even more apart from the
Pistols and the Clash. The band had been formed in 1976, and their idea must
have been to continue the noble work of Sixties garage and «proto-punk» acts
rather than to try and invent some radically new sound. This sort of «traditionalism»
is indirectly supported by the sarcastic lyrics of 'Safety In Numbers':
"What are you going to do with your new wave?.. Here we all are in the
latest craze, stick with the crowd, hope it's not a passing phase... what about
the new wave? did you think it would change things?"
This sceptical atmosphere is completely
balanced by The Adverts' approach. They are here to do two things: write
aggressive rock songs and voice relevant complaints on life's various
injustices — actually, you could say it's all just one thing. No toying with
reggae or electronics, no arrogant post-modern minimalism à la Wire, just simple, direct, accessible statements. Had
T. V. Smith happened to suffer from melodic cluelessness, or had his band been
one ounce less committed to the idea, Crossing
The Red Sea would — today, at least, with the floodgates chugging in tons
of old albums by justly forgotten bands every day — be a disaster. As it is,
it's a masterpiece.
Even though most of the songs feature the same
formula (loud, fast, usually too lazy to even introduce a proper bridge
section), each one has an irresistible vocal hook, hammering in a specific
crazy feeling. 'One Chord Wonders', from the very start, bares their
self-conscious attitude, slyly goading the listener into a state of shame — as
T. V. Smith, in a Christ-like pose, proclaims how outcast his amateurish band
is going to be among the audiences, yet "The wonders don't care — we don't
give a damn!", one can't help but admire the self-sacrifice. 'Bored
Teenagers' has Smith playing his own psychoanalyst and, in passing, producing
one of the year's most sing-along anthems for the young 'uns. 'No Time To Be
21' is fun to interpret as a follow-up to Cooper's 'I'm 18': the confused,
disoriented teenager now adding violence and indignation to his emotional
spectrum, just the kind of thing you'd expect to happen in three years' time.
Although guitarist Howard Pickup and drummer
Laurie Driver are merely «competent» on their instruments (which they could
certainly play with the required energy and dedication, and who are we to
demand more?), second important Advert after Smith is unquestionably his
girlfriend Gaye Black or Gaye Advert on bass — not only the first ever
successful female punk star, but, seemingly, the one band member who bore the
biggest brunt of shaping Smith's ideas into musical form. This is why, out of
all the possible paths to take when trying to expand on the «punk» image, the
band usually chooses the doom-and-gloom thing: 'On Wheels' begins with several
bars of a near-Gothic melody played solely on bass, which is still dominating
the song even after the guitar and drums have kicked in. (With an atmosphere,
by the way, that is way more
reminiscent of classic Alice Cooper circa Killer
time than any of the band's contemporary competition).
This «evil» streak, just a tiny bit theatrical,
but quite realistic all the same, works ever so well with 'Gary Gilmore's
Eyes', depicting an imaginary situation in which the protagonist has been
transplanted the eyes of a murderer — but the chorus, spat out at the listener
in a shower of descending notes played and sung by Gaye and Smith in unison,
is delivered as a punkish message, so you are forced to read this as some sort
of social metaphor — not an easy thing to do — so bizarre and challenging —
quite an efficient trick to pull it up on the charts. Although far less famous,
the «evil» and «angry» sides of the band are just as marvelously matched on
'Bombsite Boy'. Few, if any, people in the history of rock music could deliver
the line "Thank God I never compromised" with more power than these
lovable whippersnappers.
The CD reissue of the album remasters the
original admirably — Gaye's imaginative basslines and Smith's passionate vocals
never wash out each other, and the whole thing (produced by a still young John
Leckie, later famous for his work with The Stone Roses) is among the crispest
records of the year 1978. The bonus tracks, unfortunately, are not up to par —
mostly single versions of LP tracks, and a bunch of live performances taped in
horrendous quality, a real cold shower after the perfect studio sound. None of
which has anything to do with the fact
that this album is to be owned, propagated, and, of course, played very, very
loud. Thumbs up!
CAST OF THOUSANDS (1979)
1) Cast Of Thousands; 2) The
Adverts; 3) My Place; 4) Male Assault; 5) Television's Over; 6) Fate Of
Criminals; 7) Love Songs; 8) I Surrender; 9) I Looked At The Sun; 10) I Will
Walk You Home; 11*) Television's Over (single version); 12*) Back From The
Dead.
More or less conventional wisdom has it this
way: Just like so many great punk bands, The Adverts had only one great album
in them. Having said everything they had to say on Crossing The Red Sea, they tried to say the same stuff in a
radically different way on their second album — sacrificing most of their
strengths and turning out forgettable cheesy shit. Consequently, out of the two
sole choices available to all Great Punk Bands — go on dragging through the
dirt for decades or disband — they chose the latter. Curtains.
This story you usually get from people happy
with conventional, simplistic models. Reality, however, shows that, as
convincing as these models look in theory, there is, in fact, very little evidence
to back them up each time you pick a particular case. For one thing, The
Adverts did not disband because they felt embarrassed about this album — quite
on the contrary, T. V. Smith always talked about how Cast Of Thousands was a good record misunderstood by the masses —
and they did not disband because they no longer believed in The Idea Of The
Adverts or any such crap. For another thing, there is nothing inherently wrong
with Cast Of Thousands.
Sure, it does not rock with the same explosive
force as the band's debut — the same could be said about a million other bands,
raising hell in the early days and calming down as time went by, and there is
no unbreakable law about preferring one side over the other: surely a guy like
Van Morrison, for instance, is not a
primary object of reverence these days because of his garage output with Them,
no matter how scorching that output could be. And yes, it somewhat downplays
the talents of the band's lovely bass player: one reason, perhaps, why The
Adverts eventually went their own ways — T. V. Smith towers over his bandmates
on this album in a way that is decidedly un-brotherlike. Well, it never hurt
Jethro Tull, so why quibble before listening?
Somewhat more biting are accusations of musical
degradation. Fans did not quite see the deep meaning of placing the production
in the hands of Tom Newman, a one-time session guitarist for Mike Oldfield, and
of his burdening the band with the piano playing of Tim Cross, another Oldfield veteran — watch his
slightly dorky appearance on Mike's recently released Live At Montreux 1981
video to understand that his compatibility with the rough-tough Adverts can
hardly be taken as a given.
Nor is it necessarily a good thing to see so
many good old-fashioned concentrated rapid-fire guitar assaults replaced by
near-operatic bombast: big, burly, overdubbed arrangements that, from time to
time, gravitate towards the E Street Band, or even — God forbid! — the likes of
Meatloaf. Cast one thought in the wrong direction and you may get the evil idea
that T. V. Smith is trying to become a commercial arena-rock hero. It is not
that the band seems to be «betraying» the punk aesthetics — quite a few great
bands, from the Clash to the Police, couldn't help but be bored with upholding
that aesthetics for more than one or two records — it is simply that, unlike
those others, they seem to have taken quite the wrong road to betrayal.
But if Cast
Of Thousands let down expectations back in 1979, there is no reason why it
should still be judged according to those expectations of a long-gone era. In
retrospect, it is simply less of a bare-bones rock'n'roll album. Yet T. V.
Smith's gift for songwriting is still there, and so is his artistic dedication.
The whole thing is a bit more tragic, a desperate lament to the disillusionment
of the punk movement, some say, but every bit as sincere and emotionally
ravaging. Tim Cross is actually an excellent addition, contributing lovely
«sub-melodies» throughout. And as for the cheapening of the guitar sound, well,
Howard Pickup was never all that hot as a player to begin with. It's the
de-emphasis of the bass, really, that saddens me the most.
The title track and 'I Looked At The Sun' are
the two staggering highlights — total punkish abandon given an almost Phil
Spector sheen, pompous, but also ass-kicking and catchy anthems on which even
the synthesizer parts feel completely at home (but their somewhat «progressive»
inclinations, of course, must have provoked quite a few spasms of rage among
British teenagers). The lead single, 'Television's Over', puts the same Big
Gloss mantle on the band's Gothic ways of expression (with doom-laden harmonies
on the chorus and Cross' keyboards imitating funeral bells). More straightahead
punk statements preserve the poppy melodicity of old, reminding those who are
willing to be reminded that The Adverts were never the quintessential
1977-style punk band in the first place ('Male Assault', 'Love Songs' — the latter
almost completely sounds like one of those sleazy barroom-issued New York Dolls
numbers). And the closing number, 'I Will Walk You Home', is probably the
gloomiest song ever recorded about walking someone home. (Would make a terrific
contrastive flip to somebody covering Fats Domino' 'I Want To Walk You Home' on
the A-side).
Thus, while it may be too much of a fuss to
call Cast Of Thousands a criminally
underrated classic, it is fairly obvious, at this time, that it should be at
least considered the legitimate second half of The Adverts' story, rather than
a misguided, forgettable footnote, and that, historically, The Adverts may have
been a «one-album band», but artistically, they qualify quite fully for a
«two-album band». The only difference is — to love Crossing The Red Sea, all you have to do is to have an appreciation
for the punk rock spirit. To love Cast
Of Thousands, you have to have a separate appreciation for the spirit of T.
V. Smith. But then again, for some people, it may be easier to understand and
love the spirit of one particular person than that of an abstract, never
clearly defined, some say musical, some say social, some say cultural, some say
spiritual movement. And furthermore, if you hate generalizations and
over-analysis, Cast Of Thousands is
simply one more collection of well-written, memorable, butt-kicking music
bits. Thumbs up.
ADDENDA:
LIVE AT THE ROXY CLUB (1977; 1990)
1) Safety In Numbers; 2)
Newboys; 3) One Chord Wonders; 4) On The Roof; 5) New Day Dawning; 6) Great
British Mistake; 7) Bombsite Boy; 8) No Time To Be 21; 9) Quick Step; 10) New
Church; 11) Bored Teenagers; 12) Gary Gilmore's Eyes.
Given the legendary (cult) status of The
Adverts, it is almost surprising that the number of postmortem releases on
their part is so embarrassingly small — just this one live album, released on
the Receiver label, and a bunch of radio performances or something. The Adverts
were quite well known for the ferocity of their live shows, true to the core of
the punk spirit and all, so it makes total sense to have them commemorated with
this early and relatively intimate (but wild) club session that took place at
the Roxy Club before the first album
was even recorded. Fortunately, the sound quality, while far from perfect, is
satisfactory enough to both enjoy the show in its «totality» and to pay
attention to all the individual contributions.
Setlist-wise, you can predict that this is
going to be Crossing The Red Sea With
The Adverts Live, and it is — they play 11 out of 13 songs live, adding the
B-side ʽQuick Stepʼ and offering no particularly new melodic insights
into the legend. However, you can also very easily see that they still share
the old rock aesthetics of keeping it «dirtier» on stage and «cleaning it up»
in the studio. The studio recordings, underneath all the heaviness, could have
an acoustic underbelly, or at least some colorful electric «jangle» — live in
1977, everything is plastered with
chainsaw buzz. Understandably, this undermines the songs' melodic potential,
but adds tons of power, and if even subtle artists like The Who understood the
payoffs, why shouldn't The Adverts? Howard Pickup, Gaye Black, and T. V. Smith
are seen here as a simple, straightforward, and totally focused three-head
beast who know exactly what they want — state that they do not know what they
want in a laconic set of bash-your-head-over movements.
I do not really have much to say here except
that this is one of the best live documents from the early punk era — raw,
lo-fi (but listenable), replete with the idealism of 1977 when certain young
people once again got the idea that they could somehow change the world, or at
least shake it out of its general indifference and somnambulance. For all the
notes that T. V. Smith flubs in this performance (compared to the much better
rehearsed and engineered singing on the studio record), there is that
spontaneous, taken-over-by-spirits yearning in his voice that convinces you
even today — this whole enterprise may be futile, but it certainly is not fake.
Nor is his reluctance to communicate with the audience, as all the songs are
introduced with a brief "this is..." and sometimes concluded with an
even briefer "yeah!" (not a single «thank you», I believe, even
though the audience sounds quite enthusiastic throughout).
It does have to be remarked that, for a band
that almost prided itself on knowing exactly one chord (figuratively speaking),
The Adverts are remarkably tight live; the drummer may be their weakest spot on
the whole (though he's at least competent enough not to let the rhythm slide),
but the bass/guitar duo always keep up the tempos and are well coordinated with
each other, leaving the singer free to roam on his own. Nothing exceptional,
but once again, the legend of proper punk bands «not knowing how to play» is put
to rest — restricting yourself to the bare musical minimum is certainly not the
equivalent of not knowing how to play that minimum. Check out ʽNo Time To
Be 21ʼ as proof — there's a relatively lengthy instrumental part there
where Gaye and Howard are musically flirting with each other, she playing
simple, but fun bass figures around his sea of distortion and he eventually
leading his guitar towards a set of orgasmic screeches (okay, this reads
sexier than it sounds, but now that I wrote it, I am beginning to feel that it
is actually starting to sound sexier than it reads).
On the whole, a well-assured thumbs up
here — if the studio albums convinced you that The Adverts were much more than
a mere footnote in the early punk movement, Live At The Roxy is an essential addition to the legacy, rather
than a footnote to a footnote. From what I read, its title may be an
unfortunate lie (as the album is now said to have been recorded at Nottingham's
Rock City), but everything else is the truth, and a good source of youthful
inspiration even when you're listening to it at the age of 50.
LIVING IN DARKNESS (1981)
1) Too Young To Die; 2) Everything Turns Grey; 3)
Miserlou; 4) The Last Goodbye; 5) No Such Thing; 6) A Cry For Help In A World
Gone Mad; 7) Bloodstains; 8) Living In Darkness; 9*) Pipeline; 10*) Breakdown;
11*) Mr. Moto.
Agent Orange's Living In Darkness might be the
perfect place for the quintessential hardcore punk skepticist (or any punk
skepticist, for the matter) to start shattering that skepticism. Like every
respectable hardcore punk band, Agent Orange only released one perfect album,
clocking in at about twenty minutes without the bonus tracks; unlike most of
the standard hardcore punk perfect albums, though, Living In Darkness took just as much from surf-rock and power-pop
as it did from the Clash, and the resulting album happened to be just as
melodic as it was ripping — an awesome rarity from the white trash crowd of Orange
County, CA.
The band's major driving force is Mike Palm. He
writes all of the songs (except for the surf-rock covers, of course); sings
most of the vocals — in a manner that is more reminiscent of rough, but
note-respecting garage-rock vocalizing than the unmannered barking of the
post-Sex Pistols era; and plays respectable guitar that places high emphasis on
speed, volume, and crunch, but also
on precision and melodic phrasing. In short, the guy is as punk as it gets, but
always strives to temper the punkishness with a little finesse and a little
nostalgia.
It goes without saying that, under such a
strong leadership, the rest of the band has to conform, and the rhythm section
of Scott Miller on drums and James Levesque on bass provides Palm's style with
all the required tightness and ferociousness. Their collective performance on
'Miserlou' is like a second mini-revolution: just as in the early Sixties this
Middle Eastern/Greek ditty suddenly started to sound like it was the
embodiment of surf-rock itself, so do they effortlessly transform it here into
a frickin' hardcore standard.
But, although the band's interest in merging
surf with punk is well-pronounced (and 'Pipeline', appended here as a bonus
track from a 1982 EP, is even more crunchy and brutal, with an almost
proto-Metallica guitar tone), they are certainly not just a band of merry teenagers inspired by the same Californian
vibes that gave us Brian Wilson twenty years earlier. Most of the songs are typically
early Eighties punk in spirit — mean, cynical, desperate anthems to how fuckin'
bleak it all looks in the near perspective. Just look at the title tracks.
It is, however, the fact that this
run-of-the-mill punk spirit is so neatly packaged in instrumental and vocal
hooks that makes Agent Orange's debut so special. 'Everything Turns Grey' is
simply one of the hardest rocking and simultaneously grandest and stateliest
rock songs of the early 1980s, with its cascading, unescapable guitar
machine-gunning, self-oblivious vocal runs that tumble over the edge with each
refrain of "No matter what you think or do or say, everything turns
gray", and the climax — a guitar solo crescendo that is so brilliantly
executed, it's a wonder the local hardcore union did not sue the band for unprofessional
behavior.
'Everything Turns Grey' is just one major
standout — 'The Last Goodbye' is, in a way, even more apocalyptic; 'No Such
Thing' denies the reality of love as decisively as the other songs deny the
reality of social happiness; 'Bloodstains' is one of the sharpest-biting songs
against the temptation of cheap thrills ever recorded (should be required
listening for every aspiring rock star preparing to earn his first million);
and the title track manages to convey an atmosphere of personal fear and sadness
even through all the loudcracking.
In short, these twenty minutes are real killer
stuff — the Adolescents and the Angry Samoans may have been more proverbially
«hardcore», but I could not really claim that their classic debuts, free of
Sixties' nostalgia and concentrating more on the feeling than on song quality,
really reflect the tormented spirit of the times better than Living In Darkness. This here is just
an attempt to tell the same story in a wee bit more traditionally-oriented way,
while at the same time making ideal use of all the sonic achievements of the
hardcore movement. By the rules in me little red book, that's cooler than cool,
and almost automatically commands a thumbs up. Unfortunately (or fortunately?),
nothing else in the band's catalog sounds quite like this masterpiece.
THIS IS THE VOICE (1986)
1) Voices (In The Night); 2)
It's In Your Head; 3) Say It Isn't True; 4) Fire In The Rain; 5) In Your Dreams
Tonight; 6) Tearing Me Apart; 7) So Strange; 8) Bie The Hand That Feeds (pt.
1); 9) I Kill Spies; 10) This Is Not The End.
Curiously, some reviewers still see it fit to
employ the term «surf-punk» while describing bits and pieces of Agent Orange's
second album, but this must stem from a common desire to look deeper than the
soil (and find bare rock). Because, from a purely sensual standpoint, this is
«apocalypse punk», darker, bleaker, much less friendly and much more
pretentious than Living In Darkness.
Retaining the melodicity and retro spirit of the original, the band moves
further away from hardcore territory and somewhat more into artsy hard rock —
a good decision, since it helps them to avoid the pitfall of «sophomore
hardcore».
Because, come to think of it, normally it is
hard to imagine a hardcore punk performer advocating you to "intensify the
feel, the sound, the sight — I promise I'll be in your dreams tonight".
You could expect this from a David Bowie, a Bryan Ferry, perhaps even a Sting,
but from an Orange County whippersnapper? And yet it works, because the band keeps the hardcore crunch while letting go
of the hardcore ethics. More than half of these songs smell of creepy mysticism;
parts of this impression are due to awful production (the singer sounds like
he's been placed in a bucket and lowered down a hundred feet-deep well, and all
the instruments seem re-recorded by placing two cassette players next to each
other), but even the awfulness of production, I believe, was, to a certain
degree, deliberate.
That This
Is The Voice somehow failed to become a bona fide Eighties' classic is
something I'd like to ascribe to an unfortunate coincidence. Every single song
here is memorable and «messageable», to coin an appropriate term on the spot.
How can anyone with at least a passing interest in conspiracy theories or film
noir, not love 'I Kill Spies'? How could 'Fire In The Rain' avoid being hailed
as an epoch-defining anthem for its generation? Any possible explanations, such
as lame production, defied expectations (people possibly wanted for the band to
keep on delivering updates of surf classics), or lack of proper publicity,
should by now be judged obsolete.
Even when the band slows down, almost
descending into «goth-rock» on the doom-drenched 'Bite The Hand That Feeds'
that echoes Joy Division, they still sound impressive: Palm rings, rather than
rocks, his guitar like a set of hell's bells, and the rhythm section switch
from breakneck pummeling into a stern metronomic mode as if it were no problem
for them at all. Minimalistic arrangement is sort of crude for this attitude,
of course, but it's not like in the Eighties you had to be a
workaholic-master-technician like Robert Smith in order to get respect for your
artistic drive — London Calling was
done just as crudely, and look where that got it.
I have to admit, though, that This Is The Voice, if heard immediately after Living In Darkness, can be fairly off-putting. «Surf-punk» just somehow
seems like an overall nicer idea than «apocalypse punk» whose new motto is to
wail and to threaten rather than to bark and to hate. You have to give it
plenty of time to grow and plenty of chances to convince you that «maturation
from hardcore» can actually be finalized with success. Living In Darkness still wins out as the band's brightest hour
because of its freshness, uniqueness, and energy combined, but here we have ten
more songs every bit as valuable, if a lot different. Thumbs up.
REAL LIVE SOUND (1991)
1) Fire In The Rain; 2) Everything
Turns Grey; 3) Tearing Me Apart; 4) Too Young To Die; 5) It's In Your Head; 6) I
Kill Spies; 7) Bite The Hand That Feeds (pt. 1); 8) Somebody To Love; 9) No
Such Thing; 10) Say It Isn't True; 11) Bloodstains; 12) Pipeline; 13) The Last
Goodbye; 14) Police Truck; 15) This Is Not The End; 16) Shakin' All Over.
Agent Orange's only live album tends to get
occasional flack from fans, mostly for ideological reasons: it was not
entirely «real live», not because the playing
was «doctored», but because, apparently, the producers threw in extra audience
cheer, making the band's show at the Roxy in L.A. seem like a concurrent pop
metal stadium show. The horror!
Fact is, this does not bother me personally one
little bit. Already on their second album, Agent Orange were a
big-sound-oriented rock band rather than a compact hardcore punk outfit, and
their material may be as well suited to the needs of arena-rock as it may be
compatible with smaller clubs. If there is a little too much audience screaming
in the background, this is, at worst, stupid (The Beatles Live At The Hollywood Bowl is not the kind of experience
one needs to associate with an Agent Orange show), but who really cares if all
the instruments are captured reasonably well? At least the shouting
miraculously goes away during most of the solos.
For the record, Mike Palm is the only surviving
original member on here; Brent Liles, originally from Social Distortion,
handles the bass duties and Derek O'Brien, originally... also from Social
Distortion, is on drums. They are fairly good, though, perhaps, a little less
trained in surf-style playing than their predecessors (as can be ascertained by
comparing the live version of 'Pipeline' with the studio original — then again,
a live setting is a live setting). Palm himself is in fine form, never
neglecting the vocal hooks and taking good care to preserve all the captivating
build-up tricks in his solos (the solo on 'Everything Turns Gray' is only
marginally less breathtaking than in the studio).
Setlist predictably draws heavily on the two
studio albums, with nice alternations between the rapid-fire attacks of Living In Darkness and the gloomy
creepers of This Is The Voice. We
also get two tracks off the 1984 EP, When
You Least Expect It..., both of them classic covers betraying the band's fanatic
embracement of the Sixties — the Airplane's 'Somebody To Love' is reworked as
an «old school punk» number, and for the Pirates/the Who's 'Shakin' All Over'
there is not even any true reworking to be done, but both are also stretched
out with relatively lengthy solos from Palm — both of which totally rip, by the
way.
In short, the album is a must for the A.O. fan
and a solid recommendation for anyone interested in seeing the band, or the
Mike Palm Project, whatever, as not just a one- or two-album wonder, but as a
god-honest representative of the good old force of rock'n'roll: come to think
of it, not many other bands around 1990 could sound as close to that force as
the Mike Palm Project. Me, I'm perfectly happy with a regular thumbs up.
I mean, with the first track being 'Fire In The Rain', and the second being
'Everything Turns Gray' — two of the sharpest-delivered shots of the decade —
how could anyone complain?
VIRTUALLY INDESTRUCTIBLE (1996)
1) This Is All I Need; 2) Make
Up Your Mind And Do What You Want To Do; 3) Electric Storm; 4) Wouldn't Last A
Day; 5) Let It Burn; 6) Broken Dreams; 7) Unsafe At Any Speed; 8) So Close And
Yet So Far; 9) The Truth Should Never Be Concealed; 10) You Belong To Me; 11)
Just Can't Seem To Get Enough; 12) Tiki Ti.
Well, obviously, your band will be «virtually
indestructible» when you reserve the right to rotate band members at will
around your sole exclusive personality. The rhythm section here is Sam Bolle on
bass and Charles Quintana on drums and there is nothing of note that could be
said about them except that they probably wouldn't be there in Palm's band if
they didn't know how to keep the beat and steer the groove. But there they are.
Considering that Agent Orange, a.k.a. The Mike
Palm Project, had only released three original studio LPs in twenty years, it
would be understandable and forgivable if they all sounded the same;
miraculously, they all sound seriously different. On Indestructible, Palm pretty much loses the last traces of «punk»,
everything bar the angry spirit (which is, after all, diagnostic of any good
rock'n'roll, not just the Ramones/Pistols-twisted variant of it). This is more
like «garage metal». Or «hard pop-rock». Or... well, you can come up with your
own favorite synthetic term.
The major difference is the guitar sound: here,
it is big, fat, sonically overwhelming, deeper, denser, lower, and more
distorted than it used to be, which normally does suggest moving away from
«punk» into «pop metal» territory («pop», because former punksters usually lack
the chops to begin competing with true speeders and thrashers). On practice,
this often leads to awful results — lotsa head-splitting noise with no positive
side effects — but Mike Palm is a smart guy. Most of the songs here are either
(a) anthemic, meaning that the noise is compensated by catchy singalong and
fight-along vocal melodies, or (b) riffalicious, meaning that the noise is
somehow molded into a series of distinct notes, out of which there sometimes
emerges a tremendous hook.
Both categories are best illustrated by the
opening tracks. 'This Is All I Need' is a perfect rip-roarer, on which a
hundred-percent sincere Palm asserts that "I'll never stop until the music
takes control" to a breakneck-speed-beat. Normally, I'd expect this kind
of song to open one of those dinosauric comeback albums that need a
one-two-three kick-start punch to convince the listener on the spot — Aerosmith
really need to consider covering this
— but since, with Agent Orange, it is hard to speak of «comebacks» («Halley's
comet» is rather the term that springs to mind), it is sad that such a classy
punch will basically be wasted into thin air. 'Make Up Your Mind', on the other
hand, is just a catchy hard-rocker that could as well come from the hands and
minds of, say, Accept — its chorus, whose simplistic message seems to have been
decoded from a 1967-launched time capsule, is also anthemic, but it is nowhere
near as attractive as the metallic riff used for the verses.
From then on, the two approaches — anthems with
fat tones and riff-rockers with subtler melodies — alternate between each
other in comparable quantities, with only one or two notable exceptions:
'Broken Dreams' is an almost sunny power pop number, and 'Tiki Ti', coming at
the end, is like a sudden remembrance that, decades ago, this band had a reason
to be labeled «surf punk», and this saddles it with a reputation that needs to
be upheld.
Overall, as you may have guessed, the album is
far from a masterpiece, and will never threaten to upstage Living In Darkness as the
reason to remember Agent Orange, but it is still a decent collection that
rocks much better than you'd expect a
former hardcore band to rock fifteen years after its bursting-out masterpiece. Thumbs up,
modestly.
GREATEST & LATEST: THIS, THAT-N-THE OTHER THING (2000)
1) It's All A Blur; 2) Say
It Isn't True; 3) Breakdown; 4) Wouldn't Last A Day; 5) Everything
Turns Grey; 6) Message From The Underworld; 7) Eldorado; 8) Tearing Me
Apart; 9) Cry For Help In A World Gone Mad; 10) I Kill Spies; 11) Bloodstains;
12) What's The Combination?; 13) Bite The Hand That Feeds.
No one knows why this record exists. It's not
like the band owed anybody any contractual obligations. There are three new
songs here: the originals 'It's All A Blur' and 'What's The Combination?' are
decent, crunchy, speedy riff-rockers in the vein of Virtually Indestructible, and 'Message From The Underworld' is a
cover version, recorded as tribute to a nearly-forgotten, but quite pioneering
punk band from the West Coast — the Weirdos. That's all fine, but...
...the rest
is just a bunch of re-recorded versions of Mike Palm's favourite songs — a
career retrospective with a penchant for unnecessary modernization, as if Palm
were some sort of «George Lucas of hardcore», unhappy with the thin guitar
tones and lo-fi production of the originals. I don't know, sounded quite
adequate to me the first time around. Not that the re-recordings are devoid of
spirit, feeling, passion, or technique, the guy still recreates the laser-like
solo on 'Everything Turns Grey' as if he were presenting the song to us for
the very first time. But couldn't they at least do like all good people do and
release this as a live album? We can
all be smartasses and state that there is really no big difference between Greatest Hits Live In The Studio and Greatest Hits Live Before A Bunch Of
Passed Out Riff-Raff In A Downtown Bar, but somehow tradition has it that
even a very small bunch of passed out
riff-raff lends authenticity to the spontaneity — it's a whole different thing
when you're playing into a glass wall.
Anyway, the good news is that, as of 2011,
Agent Orange still exist and tour, meaning that this weird bastard recording
may not be their very last — although, considering that more than a decade has
already passed by without a new Agent Orange record, chances are getting
slimmer with each new day. In the meantime, 'It's All A Blur' is worth hearing,
it's like a brief confirmation that the Force still remains with these guys —
oh no, not another Star Wars
reference — and that, perhaps, it is better to have this teeny-weeny bit of a new millennium welcome from them than a
whole new album of mediocre washed-upness. Clearly, though, spending money on this CD is only worth it if you
want to set an example as the President of the Make Mike Palm A Millionnaire
For Chrissake Foundation.
VICTIM IN PAIN (1984)
1) Victim In Pain; 2) Remind
Them; 3) Blind Justice; 4) Last Warning; 5) United & Strong; 6) Power; 7)
Hiding Inside; 8) Fascist Attitudes; 9) Society Sucker; 10) Your Mistake; 11)
With Time.
The term «hardcore punk», to me, has often
seemed somewhat misleading. To put bands like Agnostic Front and, for instance, Agent Orange into the
same subgenre category, de-emphasizing the differences between the two, is just
so wrong it's even hard to find the right words to explain why it is so wrong. Basically, the dividing line is just
chronological. Punk bands that came before
Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys are just «punk» — starting from the early
1980s, if you were «punk», you were almost automatically «hardcore». So why not
just simply talk about «early punk» and «late punk» instead?
Obviously, there are substantial differences as well. These later bands, for the
most part, played faster and more brutal, raised the viciousness quota in the
lyrics sky-high, and tended to forget that such a refined activity as «singing»
was ever invented by humanity (or, rather, by that particular part of
humanity whose chief duty was to distract the exploited masses from issues of
oppression and inequality with fake, misleading, but seductive illusions of
«beauty» and «art»). Yet even among those
bands, the degree of respect for musicality varied immensely.
Agnostic Front will do nicely as a prime
example of a band that justifies the «hardcore» label to utter perfection —
especially considering my basic reaction to their «seminal» debut, Victim In Pain. Although I felt no real
pain while listening to it (at this point in life, my ears have been polished
by so many different sounds that I consider myself almost immune to «painful»
music — heck, I even sat through a Justin Bieber song once), there was hardly
any pleasure, either — yet, at the same time, there was also no temptation to
write these guys off as a bizarre absurdist joke, as it usually happens with me
and the «grindcore» extension of this sound.
Anyway, Agnostic Front were a bunch of hateful,
but idealistic skinheads that came together in 1980, went through a series of
member changes in order to pick out the filthiest possible candidatures, and
finally stabilized around the «core duo» of guitarist Vinnie Stigma and lead
sin... er, voc... uhm, voice provider
Roger Miret. The rhythm section for Victim
In Pain was Rob Kabula on bass and Dave Jones on drums, but you are not
supposed to memorize these names,
since they did not hang around for too long. (I don't blame them). Note, also,
that «filthiest» does not mean «least experienced»: all of the musicians know how to play their instruments. (Had
Vinnie Stigma not been really fluent in wielding his axe, there is no way these guys could have later made
the crossover into more «metallic» territory).
Now this must be told — if, above everything
else, «hardcore» is about getting your rocks off in the most aggressive,
spontaneous, chaotic way possible, Victim
In Pain is the ultimate hardcore experience. Its only ties to the generic
understanding of «music» is a tight rhythmic structure that is, throughout the
record, well-respected by all three players (not sure about the voice provider,
though). Other than that, it is eleven yelps of hate, anger, and desperation
that flash before one's eyes in fifteen brief minutes.
Of course, there is no telling one song from
the other. Stigma's riffs are just familiar variations on trivial chord
sequences that had already been overused to death by the previous six or seven
years of the punk reign, and the band's understanding of «diversity of
approach» seems limited to playing it real fast and then playing it real slow
— or, more often, vice versa, since quite a few of the songs begin with a
«mood-setting», bass-heavy slow intro, then, twenty seconds later, rip into
lightning speed mode (with the exception of 'With Time', which, for some
reason, they forgot to speed up at all — making it the album's longest number
at an overwhelming 2:15). As for Roger Miret, his task is to scream his way
through just as the anti-social moronic idiot that he is supposed to represent
is supposed to behave. That
particular task he is well up to.
In stark contrast to other representatives of
«hardcore», the lyrics of Agnostic
Front intentionally avoid displaying even the slightest hints at intelligence.
Miret does not mince words, nor is he a good friend of the metaphor.
"People say that I'm insane / A society's victim just in pain / Society's
rules have made me cruel / I'm just the opposite, ain't no fool" pretty
much sets the standard for the entire record. But hey — think of all those
thousands of NYC slum kids whose brain power was not developed well enough to
get in tune with even the likes of Greg Ginn or Jello Biafra. Here was a band
right up their alley — too bad most of these kids probably didn't have the
faintest idea of whether «Agnostic» was the name of some shit country or an
STD.
Still, where I certainly agree with the critics
is in admitting that Victim In Pain
is a terrific historical document of late 1970s / early 1980s New York in its Taxi Driver incarnation — a place filled
with brutal violence and primal stupidity, mixed in explosive proportions. (But
what excitement! What thrills!) In California, after all, there always exists
this temptation to «soak up some sun» — even the roughest Orange County bands
couldn't resist paying off a debt or two to the teen pop of their childhood.
Agnostic Front, on the other hand, could only blossom in the specific
conditions of the NYC climate. The very existence of such an album should be
enough to alert authorities — provided the authorities are equipped with the
proper cerebral mechanisms — to the fact that something may be steadily going the wrong way on their turf.
Ten years ago, I would have chucked the album
away as fifteen minutes of unlistenable crap, but these days my mind is ripe
enough to take it as fifteen minutes of listenable
crap — way too ridiculous and way too dumb to provoke fist-clenching reflexes,
but still a fascinating element of underground culture that, in its time,
actually provided a source of inspiration for people from all walks of life.
And I mean «all» — how many
respectable Wall Street brokers, terminally bored with «broking», would
skedaddle over to the Village after work to scoop up a copy of Victim In Pain? No wonder the C.I.A.
ranks that information as classified, so we'll never know.
CAUSE FOR ALARM (1986)
1) The Eliminator; 2) Existence
Of Hate; 3) Time Will Come; 4) Growing Concern; 5) Your Mistake; 6) Out For
Blood; 7) Toxic Shock; 8) Bomber Zee; 9) Public Assistance; 10) Shoot His Load.
More chronicles of big city life from New York's
trustiest slum kid advocates. Fortunately, there are some changes made, or else
I wouldn't know how to write one extra word on Agnostic Front's sophomore
release. Musically, they are moving a little bit closer to the metal side of
things and — dare I say it? — even a little bit closer to a melodic sound, mostly due to the
addition of second guitarist Alex Kinon. «A little bit» in that a few of the
riffs are discernible, and some of the solos run up and down the scales just
like they are supposed to for heavy metal players.
Add to this that Roger Miret occasionally
delivers the lyrics with mildly careful enunciation —after all, if you want to
share your tales of street ugliness with the fans, you might as well ensure
that the fans understand at least a
tenth part of what is being told — throw on some kickass metallic «gang
choruses», and you get as close as this band would ever get to a song-based
«album» instead of simply a twenty-minute slab of sonic brutality. Not that Cause For Alarm really isn't a slab of sonic brutality — it
most definitely is — but by the average standards of A.F., it almost sounds
like a «sissy» album.
Not in its lyrics, though, which scale new
levels of animal hatred (either genuine or ironically simulated, depending on your
own endorsement of hatred and/or irony). "Killing's my business and
business is fine" is the line that opens the record — clearly, someone in the band had just turned a
big Megadeth fan (Killing Is My Business
came out one year before), and another song that «neutrally» — no subjective
evaluation offered whatsoever, except for a couple inconclusive apologetic
remarks — describes the infamous Bernhard Goetz incident
('Shoot His Load') is the album-closer. In between, there's paranoid thought,
apocalyptic thought, anti-religious thought, anti-social thought, and lotsa
talk of death and killing.
In an unusual twist, one song — 'Public
Assistance' — openly turns against welfare suckers, as if to prove that
Agnostic Front are no close-minded, reality-ignoring leftists; politically
speaking, this earns them a few extra points for the ability to assess the
situation from different angles, but then, discussing the «ideology» of Roger
Miret and his friends on a serious level is much like discussing the impact of
'All You Need Is Love' on world struggle for peace. (For the record, I do not
deny that there has been an impact —
it's just that one needs to embark on a serious quest in order to locate the
ones impacted).
Although, for the most part, the band still
clings to laconicity, size no longer matters as much to them as it did before.
There is even one four-minute song
here ('Growing Concern'), with a near-epic structure — a grim drum-and-feedback
fade-in, a «long» solo passage, and a slow «desperate» coda; it only remained
to make the main riff a bit more distinctive, and they could have ended up
with an all-time hardcore classic. But, on the other hand, that could tempt
somebody into ripping one of the songs out of its context — and, just like
their debut, Cause For Alarm is an
album to be engulfed altogether, in one sitting.
In the «recommendation» department, Cause For Alarm is a better proposition
for «non-hardcore fans of hardcore» than Victim
In Pain — more lyrically and instrumentally diverse, more tolerable in
terms of singing, and the colorful album cover contains no elements of
distasteful hyperbole (after all, no matter how hard and dangerous NYC life
could be in the early 1980s, I doubt that anybody out there would volunteer to
exchange it for even one year of vacation in the Eastern Europe of 1939-45). On
the other hand, supposedly all fans
of hardcore are hardcore, so it's hard to see how any of them could view this
transition in a positive light. Which, allegedly, explains the next
permutation of Agnostic Front.
LIBERTY & JUSTICE FOR... (1987)
1) Liberty & Justice
For...; 2) Crucial Moment; 3) Strength; 4) Genesis; 5) Anthem; 6) Another Side;
7) Happened Yesterday; 8) Lost; 9) Hypocrisy; 10) Crucified; 11) Censored.
Ugliness is supposed to be at the heart of
hardcore — reflecting the ugliness of reality — but dumb-sounding ugliness risks missing its mark, and boy, does the
band's leader sound ever so utterly dumb on this album. This is neither
singing nor shouting, it's more like
frantic, agonizing attempts at gulping for air, song after song after song: the
lyrics lose any sort of relevance, since they are vomited in the listener's
direction in slime-covered, stinky, disjointed pieces.
The album was engineered by the guy who worked
with Anthrax at the time, meaning that the thrash metal elements, introduced on
Cause For Alarm, are in full flight,
although this time they are also delivered by an entirely new lineup: the core
of Miret and Stigma is augmented by Steve Martin on guitar (no, not that Steve Martin, although doing a gig
with a hardcore punk band for diversity's sake probably would not be totally
out of question), Alan Peters on bass and Will Shepler on drums. The guitar
solos do sound a bit flashier and thrashier than they used to be.
I can't remember any of the songs, though, even if opening the record with a bunch
of zombiefied schoolchildren pledging allegiance to the flag is a neat trick,
and the cover of hardcore brothers' Iron Cross's best-known song 'Crucified'
has a catchy chorus. But obviously, that is not the point. The point was that
Agnostic Front wanted to become even more
wild than on their first two albums, and to do that, the guitarists had to
further metallize their sound and the vocalist had to consume three pounds of
rotten fish before each session. Oh well. At least the lyrics still offer
profound, intelligent social critique.
LIVE AT CBGB (1989)
1) Victim In Pain; 2) Public
Assistance; 3) United Blood; 4) Friend Or Foe; 5) Strength; 6) Blind Justice;
7) Last Warning; 8) Toxic Shock; 9) United & Strong; 10) Crucified; 11) Liberty
& Justice; 12) Discriminate Me; 13) Your Mistake; 14) Anthem; 15) With Time;
16) Genesis; 17) The Pain Song; 18) Fascist Attitudes; 19) The Eliminator.
Yes, it is indeed a live album from Agnostic
Front, playing their hearts out in a place that was once sacred to American
music history (until they raised the rent). And it is nice to know that, although
a live setting usually gives one a good chance to loosen up and go for extra
chaos, Miret, Stigma & Co. are as tight and concentrated live as they are
in the studio. Which does not make Live
At CBGB a necessary addition to your hardcore catalog — but justifies
getting it instead of the three
original studio albums if, like me, it takes you a really long time to figure
out all the differences between the individual tracks.
Or perhaps not, considering how Miret now
sticks to his Liberty & Justice
vocals on pretty much every single track. Granted, singing it live, without the
benefit of extra session time and extra takes that stupidify the lungs to the
required extreme, is a bit of a relief. You can even make out a few words in
the English language every now and then. But overall, all the vocals are redone according to AF's latest pattern — and
some of the song choruses have been recast in the «gang» model (e. g. 'Victim
In Pain', whose "why... am I..." etc. is now barked out loud by the
entire band rather than Roger solo).
Other than that sad little turn of events,
there's nothing to dislike about Live At
CBGB that we didn't already dislike. There is a small amount of banter to
variegate the pot, but it is not very interesting and generally predictable
(Miret dedicating songs to the NYPD etc.); in an amusing twist, Roger also
makes the audience take the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of 'Liberty
& Justice For...' in the place of the studio original's kiddie
introduction (curious how many people at the bar actually remember the silly words). That's about all there is to say,
really. Except for a trivia bit — I may
be wrong about it, but I think it was the very first official live album
actually recorded at CBGB, or, at the very least, the very first album titled Live At CBGB. Kinda odd, considering
how CBGB's main claim to fame is in breeding and nurturing the 1975-77 crowds,
not the hardcore mutants that started sprouting several years later. Of course,
the band had always had a very special relation with the club — which reminds
me to remind you not to confuse the original
Live At CBGB with the entirely
different 2006 release sporting the same name, from a period when Agnostic
Front and others were trying (unsuccessfully) to prevent the place from
shutting down.
ONE VOICE (1992)
1) New Jack; 2) One Voice; 3) Infiltrate;
4) The Tombs; 5) Your Fall; 6) Over The Edge; 7) Undertow; 8) Now & Then;
9) Crime Without Sin; 10) Retaliate; 11) Force Feed; 12) Bastard.
Two years in jail had not quenched Miret's
rebellious spirit, but they certainly seem to have thrown him off the track.
Clearly, his new-gained experience provided him with new inspiration. 'New
Jack' opens Agnostic Front's new album with prison sounds — chain rattles and
some passionate monologue about "telling the world what goes on behind
these bars", that might have been extracted from some movie I cannot
identify — and the lyrics are telling: "You thought in the streets that
your life was so unfair and cruel / Make one careless mistake here boy and
you'll drown in your own pool".
It's too bad the band was unable to make proper
use of that inspiration. Part of the blame lies on Roger himself, still
gurgling out the words in his Liberty
& Justice manner. But most of the actual songs are co-credited to
Miret and the new lead guitarist, Matt Henderson — curiously, the only line-up
change since the pre-jail period (apparently Stigma, ever the loyal consigliere, played the major part in stringing the band
together, patiently waiting for Miret's reappearance), but a most significant
one.
Because One
Voice moves ever closer and with ever more aggressive defiance into heavy
metal territory. Few people would identify it as «hardcore punk» — the guitars
are low, crunchy, and, for the most part, slow:
even on the fast-tempo numbers, such as the title track, the guitarists play
half-notes rather than quarter-notes (or something like that), so that feeling
of over-the-top insanity that you get from hardcore is replaced by cold
metallic calculation.
In metal, this can, and will, work if the riffs
are good — but these guys here are no Sabbath or Metallica; in their entire
career, Agnostic Front have not produced one single riff that could compete
with any of the metal greats. Hence, the twelve tracks just float by as a
predictable single lump of boring metallic mush. Lots of chugga-chugga-chugga,
growling power chords, but not even any kind of novelty value. I can vouch for
the fact that the riffs are different
from each other — but that still does not make them any different from each
other, if you get my drift.
Professionally trained metalheads, perhaps,
will be able to squeeze out some enjoyment, but I don't see why the heck anyone
should listen to this instead of Slayer. Maybe because the lyrics are less dumb
and more down-to-earth? But, first of all, you can't make out the lyrics
without a piece of paper anyway (and what sort of idiot would listen to a
hardcore or thrash metal album with a
lyrics sheet on his knee?), and, second, we already know just about everything
Roger Miret has to say. I mean, I'm sorry for the guy's prison term and all
(although it's not as if he did not deserve it — as far as I know, nobody ever
said the drug charges were trumped up), but it is hard to claim that he had had
some sort of grand poetic revelation grow out of his personal problems. If you
insist that life sucks, then life sucks, period — regardless of whether you're
in the streets or in jail. Nothing else to it. Thumbs down. Very boring stuff.
LAST WARNING (1993)
1) Undertow; 2) Your Mistake /
Victim In Pain; 3) One Voice; 4) Infiltrate / Strength; 5) United Blood; 6) Public
Assistance / Over The Edge; 7) Blind Justice / Last Warning; 8) Crucified; 9)
Toxic Shock / United & Strong; 10) Fascist Attitudes; 11) Anthem / The
Eliminator; 12) No One Rules; 13) Final War; 14) Last Warning; 15) Traitor; 16)
Friend Or Foe; 17) United Blood; 18) Fight; 19) Discriminate Me; 20) In Control;
21) Crucial Changes.
I like this, but let us keep it brief and up to
the point. This is yet another live
album recorded at CBGB, in December 1992. Although there are 11 tracks
altogether, they frequently splice two songs in one whole (perhaps keeping up
that way with their newfound metallic image and distancing a little from
classic hardcore), which brings the total up to 17. The setlist depends quite
heavily on material from One Voice,
apparently quite a treat for fans of all of their stages, because they seem to
have been downplaying that period after the next reunion. However, all of the
three «classic period» albums are also sampled with proper respect.
As usual, everything blurs together, but I like the overall sound they have going.
Metallizing the «classics» transforms the band from a formerly drunk,
blundering Godzilla, pulverizing skyscrapers at random, into a stone cold
sober and meticulous Godzilla, demolishing the neighbourhood according to a
carefully structured plan. Chaos and confusion remains to be sown by Miret and
his usual trachea-style vocalization. In a few million years, I could even
learn to love this.
Until that time has arrived, I will just remark
that the mix here is totally excellent. The crunch of the rhythm guitar pours
out of the speakers, and the speed metal leads wail and whine on top of that in
such crisp, clean tones you'd think this was so doctored in the studio... hey wait a minute... oh never mind, I
don't even wanna know. Also, this is the first time on record that we hear Miret
give out long rants — and his spoken
voice is actually quite nice, especially when he talks about helping «abandoned
children with AIDS and other terminal diseases» etc. (For some reason, such
announcements coming from Agnostic Front sound nowhere near as annoying as when
you hear them from Bob Geldof or Bono. Maybe it's just the rich man / poor man
effect).
As a bonus, you get to hear, in its entirety, United Blood, the band's debut EP from
1983. For the info, the entire EP consisted of songs that rarely exceeded one
minute in length ('Fight' is over in 15 seconds) and is, consequently,
considered a lost classic. But if you ask me, there was a reason they still decided to switch to two-minute length on
their LPs. For die-hard-core fans only, and historians of the genre.
SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE (1998)
1) Something's Gotta Give; 2) Believe;
3) Gotta Go; 4) Before My Eyes; 5) No Fear; 6) Blinded; 7) Voices; 8) Do Or Die;
9) My War; 10) Bloodsucker; 11) The Blame; 12) Today, Tomorrow, Forever; 13) Rage;
14) Pauly The Dog; 15) Crucified.
Another surprise! After three or four years of
lay-off, Agnostic Front are back — with a vengeance, some might say, but it is
too hard for me to separate hardcore vengeance from hardcore offense. With the
position of second guitarist officially unoccupied (inofficially filled in by
fellow punker Brad Logan, but only on some of the tracks), and Vinnie Stigma's
chops on their own leaving much to be desired, the band has now completely
dropped all metal influences and retreated back into familiar territory. Almost
as if starting from scratch, they now make a record that, technically at
least, sounds closer to Victim In Pain
than anything they ever did since then.
Not that this makes me happy, in any way,
because, being so loyal to their legacy, they also retain the condition that
no two songs should sound different from each other, and no one song should sound different from
tuneless, if rhythmic, noise. The condition is broken on but two occasions.
'Gotta Go' is a curiously well-composed singalong «revolutionary» anthem with a
real vocal melody to sing along to. Obstinately repetitive, simplistic, but it
does work as yer basic call to arms when your goal is to enlist those who can't
read or write. And then there is that unexpected, shocking break into folk
territory with 'Pauly The (Beer Drinking) Dog'. Just to show the world that
these guys sometimes like to play the fool without
resorting to insane speed and distortion. Otherwise, it is not even
particularly funny.
The only ittsy-bittsy smidge of consolation is
that Miret's vocals have de-evolved back to the level of gruff barking, so
that he no longer comes across as a village idiot with a chicken bone in his
throat who just won the charity lottery to become Slayer's next vocalist. Had
he continued to expectorate in the style of the preceding decade, this, coupled
with the near-complete lack of songwriting and/or interesting playing, would
have made the album completely unlistenable. As such, it is simply generic
hardcore, palatable for lovers of the genre, but not yours truly. In a way, it
is admirable that the band still packs plenty of punch after more than a decade
of tribulations, but the songs have no lasting value whatsoever. Thumbs down.
RIOT, RIOT, UPSTART (1999)
1) Police State; 2) I Had
Enough; 3) Riot Riot Upstart; 4) Sit And Watch; 5) Blood, Death & Taxes; 6)
Frustration; 7) Sickness; 8) Shadows; 9) Nowhere To Go; 10) Trust; 11) My Life;
12) It's Time; 13) Rock Star; 14) Nothing's Free; 15) Price You Pay; 16)
Jailbreak; 17) Bullet On Mott St.
If you ask me to name three different things
between this album and the previous one, I will name them — their titles each
consist of three different words. If you ask me to name ten different things between this album and the previous one, I
will name three, and the rest you'll just have to figure out by induction.
But I also admit I did not give the album more
than the prescription-required three listens, during all of which I only had
one potentially productive idea — namely, that somehow Mötörhead have
now joined the list of influences on this band, something that should have
decidedly happened a long time ago (or maybe it did, and I only just noticed).
Check out the vocal melody on 'Sickness' (yes, I said vocal melody) — isn't it lifted straight off 'Mötörhead'
(the song)? At least, until the chorus starts and turns it into a New
Wave-style power-pop thing?
Overall, the whole thing may be a tad more melodic and, if you so wish, even memorable than Something's Gotta Give. Certainly
'Police State' is memorable, consisting of nothing but the lines "New
York, Police State! / New York we hate you! / Giuliani Giuliani Giuliani fuck
you!" shouted over and over again for one minute — and it may help you
memorize the name of NYC's former mayor where all else fails. (On the other
hand, it also dates the song — inserting 'Bloomberg' instead would be fairly
difficult in rhythmic terms, not to mention garnering anti-Semitic
connotations). The title track is also a fairly inspiring rebellious anthem,
but, like everything else here, it would require a more cleverly thought out
rhythm guitar part to become truly special.
In general, all complaints remain the same: the
songs are direct, honest, brutal, completely devoid of MTV-punk gloss, but
individual tunes rarely stand out, and when they do, it is mostly due to a gang
chorus repeated sixty times over a hundred and twenty second ('My Life').
Agnostic Front do not have the Ramones' supernatural ability to turn simplicity
into genius — their simplicity,
sooner or later, degenerates into boredom, and most of the songs are as boring
as their titles, nearly each of which I remember associated with a much better
song.
'I Had Enough'? Paul «Agnostic Front Suck
Because They Kill Animals» McCartney. Better. '(It's) My Life'? Eric «Agnostic
Front Will Never Be More Punk Than Me When I'm Drunk» Burdon & The Animals.
Much better. 'Trust'? Elvis «It Was I
Who Created Agnostic Front And Everyone Else With The Sheer Strength Of My
Intellect» Costello. Much much
better. 'Nothing's Free'? Alice «If That Miret Guy Likes To Shock Some Much,
Where The Fuck Is The Guillotine?» Cooper. Much
much much better. 'Jailbreak'? Phil «Don't Tell Me About The Evils Of Growing Up In The Streets» Lynott & Thin
Lizzy — much much much much better.
And we could go on like that all night — there's a whole seventeen tracks here,
the only good news being that the album still clocks in at less than 29
minutes.
But from what my gut instincts tell me, by the
average standards of average hardcore, this is still damn good average hardcore. For lovers of the genre, this should
register just about on the same level as, say, one of those late period B. B.
King albums should register for blues lovers.
DEAD YUPPIES (2001)
1) I Wanna Know; 2) Out Of
Reach; 3) Everybody's A Critic; 4) Liberty; 5) Club Girl; 6) Uncle Sam; 7) Urban
Decadence; 8) Love To Be Hated; 9) No Mercy; 10) Politician; 11) Pedophile;
12) Alright; 13) Dead Yuppies; 14) Standing On My Own.
Recorded with Mike Gallo on bass this time, and
I almost think I can hear the difference — some damn fine basslines on
occasion, particularly on 'Pedophile' (no implications meant). It is also one
of those 2001 releases that got in accidental trouble for you-know-what: the
title Dead Yuppies was generated before 9/11, and the album sleeves were
most likely printed before that date, too, or else the band would have probably
changed the title. As it was, all they could do was delay the release by a few
weeks — and then slap an annoying sticker on each copy, explaining how deeply
they feel about the plight of, er, all them «dead yuppies». Cowards, I say. Hypocrites.
But you know what? The album itself is
decidedly not half-bad. In fact — in response to surprised complaints about
why I should spend time reviewing the entire lengthy career of a band I so
obviously do not give a damn about — it was almost
worth it sitting through Agnostic Front's shitty efforts to arrive at something
like Dead Yuppies. To me, it sounds
like the culmination, and the most sensible product of the band's second
pure-hardcore phase of existence.
Basically, the songs are a wee bit slower, a
tad less noisy, a trifle more disciplined, and a tiny touch more melodic than
on the previous two albums. Without sacrificing the spirit, they have somewhat
improved on the form. At its best, Dead
Yuppies sounds like it actually is
carrying on the tradition of early 1980s accessible hardcore — the one that was
more concerned with toughening up the achievements of «pop punk» rather than
with breaking the barriers between punk and pure noise.
Among other things, Dead Yuppies contains my absolutely favorite Agnostic Front song —
'Liberty', an anthem as straightforward as any they have ever written, but completely
noise-free and with a catchy singalong chorus to boot. It is almost amazing how
a phrase as trite as "give me liberty or give me death" can still
sound so inspiring in the year 2001, but somehow, it does. This is the magic of
Agnostic Front: they may have very little musical talent (or so it would seem),
and their metal yearnings may more often lead them away from the path of
righteousness than onto it, but when they're on, they're ON — there is no doubting the genuine heat of the fire that is working
out their steampower.
I am also amused by 'Love To Be Hated',
featuring the hilarious phrase "well I know somebody somewhere is gonna
FUCK ME!" delivered in an utterly hilarious way; by the above-mentioned
'Pedophile', whose shift between the loud chainsaw-buzz sections and the quiet,
bass-driven parts is certainly more of an achievement than the chorus ("Kill
yourself, suicide, it's about time you fuckin' die" — Miret's paternal
advice to the protagonist); and by 'Standing On My Own', another fairly
convincing anthem. Actually, it may be so that the chief attraction of Dead Yuppies are its gang choruses and,
uh, «vocal harmonies», adding melody, structure, and individual hooks to the
band's usual pile of similar-sounding energy blasts. But why not?
Even if most of the other songs still fall
short of occupying the proper memory cells, it is important to understand —
here is an album recorded in 2001 that sounds exactly like it could have been recorded in 1981, not a year
later. For comparison, could the Rolling Stones circa 1983 record an album
that'd sound totally 1963? And not just from a purely technical standpoint, but
actually conveying the same spirit?
I'd say this alone is a fine achievement on the part of these guys, and merits
at least an «intellectual» thumbs up, if not necessarily an emotional one.
Especially considering all the evolution (= degradation) of the punk scene
over that 20-year period.
ANOTHER VOICE (2004)
1) Still Here; 2) All Is Not
Forgotten; 3) Fall Of The Parasite; 4) Pride, Faith, Respect; 5) So Pure To Me;
6) Dedication; 7) Peace; 8) Take Me Back; 9) Hardcore! (The Definition); 10)
Casuality Of The Times; 11) I Live It; 12) It's For Life; 13) Another
Voice.
Oh fuck NO. Just as these guys were almost
about to turn into a marginally interesting
band in the context of the new first decade, Matt «Metal God» Henderson is
back, and with him, the dreaded «crossover» sound. Even if you are in the dumb
half of Agnostic Front fans, the very title of the album will remind you of One Voice — and, unless you are in the very dumb
half of the dumb half of Agnostic Front fans, will teach you to steer clear of
the record.
Once again, Miret is through with shouting
and/or singing, and picks up the practice of, uh, let's call it expectorating. Only this time, with much
cleaner and crisper production, his vocals are never lost in the metal guitar
growl, and now, to quote Ian Anderson, he is «spitting out the pieces of his
broken lungs» right in your face, so arm yourself with napkins a-plenty before
turning on the music. I have no idea what kind of world this person must be
living in if there were even two or three people who supported him on taking up
this vocal approach. «Right on, Roger! Be the envy of professional wrestlers
worldwide!»
The utter stupidity of the vocals is hardly
helped by the fact that Matt Henderson loyally continues dis-providing fresh
riffs — most of the current batch seems like regurgitated old stock footage,
stolen out of the vaults of everybody from Sabbath to Slayer — and that I did
not even notice any guitar solo passages whatsoever. Not that solos would have
seriously helped, of course, but, in order to be at least briefly relieved of
the endless, monotonous, gray-tone chugga-chugga, I would have welcomed even
Yngwie Malmsteen as a guest star on a couple of tracks.
The only dubiously redeeming quality of this
bunch of metalcore garbage is that the band still seems to have plenty of
dedication to whatever they are doing — in fact, 'Dedication' is even the name
of one of the tracks — and that they are still running high on genuine
testosterone. Unfortunately, pure, undiluted testosterone only makes me puke. Thumbs down.
WARRIORS (2007)
1) Addiction; 2) Dead To
Me; 3) Outraged; 4) Warriors; 5) Black And Blue; 6) Change
Your Ways; 7) For My Family; 8) No Regrets; 9) Revenge; 10) We
Want The Truth; 11) By My Side; 12) Come Alive; 13) All These
Years; 14) Forgive Me Mother; 15) Break The Chains.
Matt Henderson is out again, but the
«metalcore» stuff is still in, nurtured by new guitarist Joseph James, whose
playing is able to keep the band at a respectable level, but does not bring in
any interesting individuality. They may have earned the right to call
themselves «warriors», but, the way my ears perceive them, they still keep
fighting in the 3rd Clone Division.
But this time around, they are also nostalgic clones. The single 'For My
Family' does nothing if not tug at the feelings of the hardcore crowds around
1982, targeted at those few survivors who are still able to recall those days
of hard drink, heavy sweat, grizzly tattoos, and pulsating hatred for The
Oppressors with fondness rather than embarrassment. Musically, it is every bit
as forgettable as everything else on here, but at least its silliness is
somewhat touching — in a way, almost sentimental,
with the appropriate correction as to what may constitute «sentiment» when
we're talking Roger Miret and Vinnie Stigma.
Other than that, Miret's vocals are a little
less rough this time. For Another Voice,
he had made every effort to sing like a retarded piece of scum with serious
larynx problems; on Warriors, he
sounds like a retarded piece of scum who has just undergone successful clinical
treatment for laryngitis. (To prevent libel suits, I am not insinuating or
implying anything, merely laying out subjective impressions in the exact
particular order that they are overflowing my mind). Unfortunately, he still is not singing, screaming, or
spitting out anything I'd ever like to hear again.
No change in musical values, either. No solos,
no unexpected musical trickery, just textbook metallic riffage that may only
sound enticing to those who believe that thrash metal was invented by Municipal
Waste — or to those who piss their pants from happiness every time they hear a
metal line, no matter how old, simple, or «hollow», flash past their senses at
jet plane speed. Thumbs down for all that — and for the stupid album sleeve
in particular. (I'm not saying I feel any happier about all those Nazi-themed
covers from yesteryears, though, but at least they were direct and intentional
offenses against taste — Warriors-style
imagery is simply cheap).
MY LIFE MY WAY (2011)
1) City Streets; 2) More Than A
Memory; 3) Us Against The World; 4) My Life My Way; 5) That's Life; 6) Self
Pride; 7) Until The Day I Die; 8) Now And Forever; 9) The Sacrifice; 10) A Mi Manera; 11)
Your Worst Enemy; 12) Empty Dreams; 13) Time Has Come.
Over the first three or four songs on this
record, my nose seemed to smell out a bit more «vocal harmonies» and «catchy
choruses» than on Warriors, so, for
about five minutes, I was sort of entertaining the thoughts that, perhaps, this
would be an attempt at fusing together the band's hopeless «crossover» thing
with the old pure-hardcore schtick that worked so much better on Dead Yuppies. That way, I could at
least feebly recommend the album, be done with it, and get on with life's more
precious chores.
Alas, pretty soon it turned out that I was
completely wrong. Joseph James is still in the band, and the overall sound is
almost exactly the same as it was on Warriors.
The album blurb on their official record label, Nuclear Blast, proudly states
that "...the title of their tenth studio album “My Life My Way” underlines perfectly what Hardcore means to Stigma
and his bandmates: It’s not just music, it’s an attitude to life!" They
almost got it right — simply scrap that "just", and the motto will be word-perfect. (For the record,
the same blurb states that Miret considers this to be "our catchiest
record to date", so don't go complaining how I only present my opinion on
all these albums and nobody else's. Now you know how the band's frontman
sincerely feels about his latest record. And he probably felt that way about
the previous one, too, and the one before that, and each and every time he must
have been completely sincere, and one cannot blame him).
In a brief news release, here is what they do
on this album:
(a) first time ever (I think) sing in Spanish
('A Mi Manera'), to broaden their fanbase among illegal Mexican and Puerto
Rican immigrants, after a recent statistics poll has shown that these people
are chiefly motivated to leave their families and risk their freedom and safety
by the enticing opportunities to access indie record stores in L.A., N.Y.C.,
and other major metropolises;
(b) sing about themselves in the past tense ("It was us against the
world... we fought to survive"), apparently, from out of the geriatric
refuge of their rocking chairs, enlightening the younger generation, who might
otherwise erroneously suppose that it has always been Pink to fight against
the world — too bad the nationwide coverage is so reluctant to pick that up;
(c) then suddenly declare that "TIME HAS
COME... to show the world this revolution HAS BEGUN" on the last track.
Considering the timeline, I can only assume they are referring to the Arab
Spring here, which makes me wonder why the song has not been explicitly
dedicated to «our blood brothers and sisters in Libya and Egypt» (including
The Society of The Muslim Brothers and other merry gentlemen who would gladly
watch the N.Y.C. hardcore scene sink to the bottom of the ocean, along with
the rest of N.Y.C.).
Actually, though, it's all in the line of work.
You can close your eyes, forget all about the cultural and temporal context,
and simply kick out the jams with these guys. If there is anything at all admirable,
it is how their stamina level never ever decreases through all these years —
the only possible motive that could drive me to still pick up their albums
when they are in their seventies and eighties, and be happy to learn that the
revolution never ever ceases to begin on each subsequent one. Which will hardly
prevent each of these albums (unless they decide to drop the metal schtick once
again, with Miret reverting to a normal kind of voice) from getting a thumbs down
— this one is no exception.
THE AMERICAN DREAM DIED (2015)
1) Intro; 2) The American
Dream Died; 3) Police Violence; 4) Only In America; 5) Test Of Time; 6) We Walk
The Line; 7) Never Walk Alone; 8) Enough Is Enough; 9) I Can't Relate; 10) Old
New York; 11) Social Justice; 12) Reasonable Doubt; 13) No War Fuck You; 14)
Attack!; 15) A Wise Man; 16) Just Like Yesterday.
Yes, in case you weren't aware, the American
dream just died, but you probably wouldn't believe this anyway unless you were
told about this by someone who sounds exactly like a 300-pound Neanderthal who
just sat down with his bare ass on a hornets nest. In other words, yes, ten years after the fact, Roger
Miret still shows no signs of getting weary from his Another Voice — maybe the idea is that in a few decades we will
finally get used to it, and once that happens, Agnostic Front will finally get
a chance to rule the world. All you have to do is be tenacious.
I do respect that attitude, but I think that I
respect the idea of keeping it short (this record barely goes over 27 minutes)
even more. If I understand this right, the album once again moves away from
metal and towards the good old hardcore — not just because of the song lengths
(several of these are well under one minute in duration), but also due to
another lineup shift, with Craig Silverman replacing Joseph James on second
guitar and the music embracing «noise» and «grind» over relatively complex
metal riffs or solos. What with all the nostalgia and everything, they may think they are channelling the
spirit of Victim In Pain here. But
not with that «gorilla in heat» voice they aren't, never in a million years.
As usual, there are no problems with the
overall energy level or the conviction with which the testosteronic riffs and
the anti-establishment lyrics are delivered. Just as usual, there is nothing
whatsoever worth discussing in the melody department, and the «gimmicks» this
time around consist of a two-minute intro with police sirens and news flashes
on the crimes of and ruptures within the evil capitalist system, and of a brief
quotation from Taxi Driver at the
beginning of ʽOld New Yorkʼ, in which Miret complains about "the
Bowery slums turned into fashion boutiques" and the lack of drug dealers
and freaks on the street. Uh... okay. I'm not sure I really want to comment on
that particular attitude.
Other than this brief piece of information, all
you really need to do is to look closely at the song titles — then understand
for yourself whether you may or may not need this in your life (depending,
among other things, on whether you have «occupation of Wall Street» coming up
on your calendar any time soon). The best I can do is not give the album a
thumbs down — because, somehow, I am marginally impressed at how those old
punkers seem to draw even more energy
out of their frustration at growing old (and irrelevant) than they used to. I
mean, the music is shit in any case, but as they get older, they learn to fling
it with increased force and accuracy, even if nobody seems to care any more.
Besides, it's not as if a whole lot of young artists these days cared much
singing about social problems — so, perhaps, there is still some niche space
left for the good old hardcore warriors.
HUNTING HIGH AND LOW (1985)
1) Take On Me; 2) Train Of
Thought; 3) Hunting High And Low; 4) The Blue Sky; 5) Living A Boy's Adventure;
6) The Sun Always Shines
On T.V.; 7) And You Tell Me; 8) Love Is Reason; 9) I Dream Myself Alive;
10) Here I Stand And Face The Rain.
For some reason, it is quite psychologically
daunting to look back on the Golden Age of Synth-Pop and make a conscious
attempt to stratify the chaff and the wheat. Somehow the gap between the likes
of, say, Depeche Mode, with their clear interest in expanding the borders of
the genre and using it to explore man's dark side, and, for instance, Modern
Talking (a.k.a. «The Black Plague of Eastern Europe» in the 1980s) always
seems narrower and more bridgeable than a superficially similar gap between
the likes of the Beatles and the Dave Clark 5, or Thin Lizzy and Foreigner, or
Mötley Crüe and Guns'n'Roses.
Perhaps it has something to do with the
instrumental minimalism displayed by all parties concerned (just how many
classic synth pop melodies sound as if it took one cheap keyboard and one
finger to play them?), or by the common shared ugliness of the genre's
obligatory requirements, such as electronic percussion etc. Most likely, people
raised and reared on the genre will not agree, but their generation (my
generation, to be sure) is a cursed one in any case, and their opinions on the
matter value about as much as an oil magnate's opinions on alternate sources of
energy.
A-Ha (more correctly, a-ha with no capitals,
but this looks horrid in printed text, so I will allow myself the sacrilege of
capitalization) — Norway's pride and joy, and one of the major factors in the
prolongation of the average lifespan of Norwegian population — probably
symbolize the art of unpretentious synth-pop better than any other 1980s band.
Without infringing on the gloomy Freudian territory of Depeche Mode, or on the
decadent cosmic synth-rock turf of Duran Duran, they still manage to sound
similar to both — and present a viable alternative for those who want their
dance beats simple and stupid, and their mood elegant and romantic with no
oddities. Is this awful? Is this beautiful? I don't know.
The music is definitely not very exciting. The
trio of A-Ha does include a guitarist, Paul Waaktaar, but Hunting High And
Low, the band's debut, does not ever let us hear him in full flight, since
he seems to mostly be busy providing acoustic backdrops that are «felt rather
than heard». He is, however, the principal songwriter for the band, which makes
him the principal accused. Keyboardist Mags Furuholmen is responsible for the
overall sound — one finger on the keyboard, remember — and then there is the
band's biggest surface attraction, singer Morten Harket, the one destined to
reap the biggest female harvest.
In all honesty, Harket is a great singer.
Listen to 'Train Of Thought' and you might think, like me: 'Gee, I had no idea
David Bowie could sell out to that extent!' But then listen to 'Take On
Me' and you will think: 'Say, since when did James Taylor develop that kind of
falsetto?' And it is not like Morten is consciously imitating anyone: he simply
has an excellent range and is in perfect command of his cords, and all the
different moods go off quite smoothly. In conjunction with strong melodic hooks
(vocal hooks) of Take On Me', 'The Blue Sky', 'Living A Boy's Adventure'
and a few other songs, this definitely gives A-Ha an edge, and explains their
huge commercial success better than any other reason. I freely and openly admit
that some of these songs are prime examples of the most gorgeous singing in
synth-pop history.
Alas, if only the music were up to par. There
is not a single track on the record that would whisper "hey, what an
interesting, original musical decision" in my ear. Without Harket's
contributions, all of this would go down the drain immediately: no complex
riffs, no non-trivial arrangement touches, just a bunch of generic keyboard
loops, drum machines, and «heavenly» keyboard effects to prove that Harket,
like a true knight of the synth-pop order, is singing down to his worshippers
from the faraway Electronic Temple on Casio Mountain. Predictable.
So, apparently, Hunting High And Low
will not be appreciated in years to come as much as it has been appreciated
upon immediate release, making the band a permanent chart presence and MTV's
prime time darlings. But it still works well as an inspiring testament to the
abilities of the human voice, and, for that reason, I give it neither a
definitive thumbs up nor a decisive thumbs down — this would depend on whether
I am in the mood for some great singing, or for some very, very crappy
synthesizer loops.
SCOUNDREL DAYS (1986)
1) Scoundrel Days; 2) The
Swing Of Things; 3) I've
Been Losing You; 4) October; 5) Manhattan Skyline; 6) Cry Wolf; 7) We're
Looking For The Whales; 8) The Weight Of The Wind; 9) Maybe, Maybe; 10) Soft
Rains Of April.
Regardless of one's overall feelings for synth
pop, A-Ha's second album is a major improvement over their first in every
department I can think of. The melodies are tighter and more emotional, the
singing even more diverse, and, most important, the instrumentation is livelier
— no longer are we pursued by synth loops on every corner, as real guitars
steal part of their thunder, real strings arrangements sometimes arrogantly
tread upon the sacred turf of «heavenly synths», and real, non-robotic drumming
from actual drummers nurtures our souls on no less than four out of ten tracks!
Now this is what I call good news.
In all honesty, Scoundrel Days is one of
the highest points of the «New Romantic» movement. Its closing song may be
erroneously called 'Soft Rains Of April', but its overall mood is decidedly
autumnal (plenty of rain, though): a shade of elegant depression and
desperation spread over urbanistic landscapes. 'Manhattan Skyline' is a great
title — most of the time, Harket truly sounds like he is singing from the top
of a skyscraper, spreading his vibes throughout the city. But the safety
harness is in its due place: A-Ha are not the Cure, and the sadness they sow is
never suicidal: you know for sure that, once the show is over, Harket is not
jumping, but taking the elevator back to the ground floor's restaurant, for
some champagne and caviar to soothe the aching heart.
With that reservation in mind, it is still not
a crime to enjoy this mood and at least some of the songs that go along with
it. On the title track, Harket goes into full-blown Bryan Ferry mode, and if
only he had a clone of Eno and another of Manzanera to go along, together they
could have recreated the magic of Roxy Music's Avalon; as things stand,
this is a cruder, but still dramatic experience, and the strings are a
beautiful antidote for the generic keyboards. So is the melancholic brass
backing for 'October', which, along with Harket's hushed vocals, makes me
forget the silly pssht-pssht of the accompanying electronic percussion.
The upbeat, danceable singles — 'The Swing Of
Things' and 'Cry Wolf' — are at least hardly any worse than concurrent Duran
Duran hits; in fact, 'Cry Wolf' is probably the greatest hit Duran Duran ever
missed writing, and 'The Swing' places Harket squarely back into David Bowie
mood, with excellent results. The only serious misstep here is the overtly
cutesy, ska-influenced 'Maybe, Maybe' — two minutes of unnecessary schoolgirl sissiness
that nearly ruins the atmosphere they had been so carefully constructing for
the previous eight songs.
Fortunately, they then come back to their
senses and end the record with one of their very best ballads — 'Soft Rains Of
April', every second of which is meticulously calculated, but to great effect.
Synth loops are almost drowned out by ominously synthesized orchestration, and
Harket is hero again, going from a dreamy, «progressive» delivery on the vocals
to a poppier chorus before abruptly ending it all with a gorgeous breathy 'over!'
that sort of leaves you wishing it weren't over so soon. Not the kind of wish I
would normally expect from an A-Ha album, but there it is.
It is only too sad that, today, most people
will probably dismiss Scoundrel Days as just one more generic synth pop
atavism, without giving its sophisticated textures the proper attention they deserve.
Hardly fair; there is no reason for a world that worships Frank Sinatra to
forget about Morten Harket. Or is there? Follow my thumbs
up and then decide for yourself.
STAY ON THESE ROADS (1988)
1) Stay On These Roads; 2) The Blood That Moves The Body;
3) Touchy!; 4) This
Alone Is Love; 5) Hurry Home; 6) The Living Daylights; 7) There's Never A Forever Thing;
8) Out Of Blue Comes Green; 9) You Are The One; 10) You'll End Up Crying.
A couple listens into A-Ha's third album, I
have decided to convince myself that 'Stay On These Roads' is one of the most
gorgeous synth-pop ballads ever written, and one of the best pieces of evidence
for the genre not being so utterly worthless. However, I do not quite
understand the reasons that drove me to such action, and I am not even sure
that I have the proper strength to perform it.
For one thing, the «synth-pop» aspect of this
song totally sucks: there have been cases when Eighties-style adult
contemporary arrangements managed to contribute to a true atmosphere of lushness
and beauty (Enya!!!), but, by the time A-Ha's third effort rolled along, it
should have been perfectly clear that their music gets progressively better
when these arrangements are muted and muffled in favor of real instruments, and
vice versa. 'Stay On These Roads' is no exception.
But what does work in its favor is the utterly
gorgeous vocal delivery. Harket literally pulls all the stops: there is the
tender falsetto, there is the towering scream, there are the hushy interludes,
and there are just about all the transitional states there could be. Over and
over again I wish they'd recorded the whole thing completely acappella, or in
a more «classical» style, never feeling entirely secure that the song would
have benefited from that, but secretly hoping it would. My senses are too jaded
and withered for the song to completely re-awaken the idealistic romantic in me,
but maybe there is still some hope for those whose favourite Sixties' artist is
Scott Walker (not that I dare to compare the genius of Scott with the machinery
of A-Ha, but this is the exact reason why I like so much to concentrate on the
vocal gift of Harket while trying very, very hard to sonically erase the
surround sound from the accompanying acoustic waves).
Other than the title track, though, there is
little to praise about the album. Most people know 'The Living Daylights', a
fairly common synth-popper used as the title theme to one of the least successful
James Bond movies ever (probably not due to A-Ha's involvement in it, but
one can never tell), and some may know the other two singles — 'The Blood That
Moves The Body', mid-tempo and boring, and 'Touchy!', fast and ugly. Back in
1988, they coped with their duty of stimulating the average white male's
biorhythms fairly well, but today, they have been replaced with other (not
always better) ways of stimulation, and seem completely useless.
Two moodier, less psychologically comfortable
tracks arguably stand a better chance: 'Hurry Home' is a relatively convincing
portrayal of a prodigal husband aching to make things right once again, and,
likewise, the epic 'Out Of Blue Comes Green' also puts Harket in a hysterically
confessional mood and somehow works, despite the length. Overall, I would say
that «Harket the Repenting Sinner» appeals to me better than «Harket the Disney
Lover» — not only because that role is less clichéd in general, but also
because Harket himself seems to get into his tormented mood with more spirit
and dedication than into his sweet and soothing one. Somehow I would not want
to take a peep at the hidden corners of his soul, even if an offer were made,
not even out of pure curiosity.
Thumbs down: too little of this solid enough melodically
to get the same attention as Scoundrel Days, and on my Top Ten Thousand,
'Stay On These Roads' probably hits something like #9,876, if we are to strive
for useless accuracy. Still, like almost every A-Ha album, it is at least
listenable and shows that the band still cares for a certain degree of artistic
integrity to go along with the big bucks (and even the bucks were not that big
in 1988, to tell the truth).
EAST OF THE SUN, WEST OF THE MOON (1990)
1) Crying In The Rain; 2) Early Morning; 3) I Call Your Name; 4)
Slender Frame; 5) East Of The Sun; 6) Sycamore Leaves; 7) Waiting For Her; 8)
Cold River; 9) The Way We Talk; 10) Rolling Thunder; 11) (Seemingly) Nonstop
July.
This is good shit. It does not exactly light my
fire, but it does not annoy me, either, and that is no mean feat for a
mainstream pop album from 1990. This is where A-Ha first tried to become a
«real» band, trading in some of their rusted synth gear for more traditional
instruments — guitars, pianos, drums, even some brass and some strings. Electronica
still provides the atmospheric backgrounds, but overall, this is definitely
not «synth pop». Ironically, it also marked the start of their commercial
decline — apparently, some of the old fans felt betrayed (indeed, what could
ever be a more awful downer than hearing an actual boring old piano instead of
a brand new Casio?), and new fans would rather dig in to groovier, trendier
stuff emanating from the likes of Manchester.
But for me, this might just be the ultimate
A-Ha experience. They may have betrayed the childhood dreams of their oldest
admirers, but they certainly have not abandoned the quintessence of their
style. As usual, there is plenty of cool grace flying around, plenty of
autumnal depression, plenty of old-style romanticizing, and plenty of pop
hooks. And, in fact, the switch to traditional instruments makes them work
harder for it: the arrangements have to be more complex, the melodies slightly
less predictable, the singing more upfront. Like it or not, East Of The Sun
is quite a masterful construction.
Some tracks are very easy to deride,
particularly the ones where the band try to «rock out». Upon first listen,
something like 'Cold River' feels like a highly stupid attempt at a «tough»
sound that does not at all fit in with the band's personality. The obvious
Beatles reference at the beginning ('Asked a girl if she needed a ride, she
said, "sure babe, but I wanna drive"') may also seem irritatingly
flat. But then you could throw the same accusation at the Beatles themselves,
couldn't you? Wasn't 'Drive My Car' a stupid attempt at a «tough» sound? Hardly
— it was a well-conceived pop-rocker that stopped at the exact borderline
between «strong and catchy», something the Beatles did well, and «tough and
aggressive», something they did not believe in with the same ease and,
therefore, could not transmit all that well.
The same happens to A-Ha: they never overstep
their boundaries, and even 'Cold River', with its thumping bass, bashing drums,
flat lyrics, and Harket singing in a more rock'n'rollish manner than usual, is
tolerable fun. Although, to be sure, I like the doom-laden 'Sycamore Leaves' a
hell of a lot more — nothing beats its funereal organ rhythm and solo. Add an
extra few dozen layers of guitars and keyboards, and one could pass it off for
a lost Cure classic.
Most of the album's material continues,
however, in a softer vein. 'Crying In The Rain' is their first attempt at
covering outside material — and the selection of a Carole King/Everly Brothers
number is more than appropriate and in very good taste, not to mention the
symbolic gesture of placing it at the start of the album, as if to stress the
straight line of development from the Everlys right down to A-Ha: sacrilegious
for some, perhaps, but factually true. 'Early Morning' and 'Slender Frame' are
minimalistic, catchy, inoffensive adult contemporary, elegantly woven around
the denser, more evocative mini-worlds of the pompous 'I Call Your Name' and
the dreary title track. And then, finally, the unpredictable ending: an
intimate ballad, just a little acoustic guitar and a piano, with Harket
crooning out the lyrics as sweetly and nonchalantly as possible.
Who knows: once the novelty of A-Ha's «classic»
synth-pop era albums finally fades away along with my nostalgia-ridden
generation of the Eighties, East Of The Sun may take its rightful place
as the album to remember these guys by — it already sounds far more
timeless than Hunting High And Low and even Scoundrel Days. In
the meantime, I will do my own tiny part by advertising it with a
straightahead thumbs up. Good, good
stuff.
MEMORIAL BEACH (1992)
1) Dark Is The Night For All;
2) Move To Memphis; 3)
Cold As Stone; 4) Angel In
The Snow; 5) Locust; 6) Lie Down In Darkness; 7) How Sweet It Was; 8) Lamb
To The Slaughter; 9) Between Your Mama And Yourself; 10) Memorial Beach.
A-Ha's last album before calling it quits for
the rest of the decade is sort of a mixed bag — a failure by most objective
standards, but very possibly a success by certain subjective ones. The biggest
problem is that, having lost their original face, they were still experiencing
difficulties about finding a new one. On East Of The Sun, they at least
tried several possible directions, and came out with a relatively diverse and
talented collection. Memorial Beach, on the other hand, seems to pool
most of the band's resources into a fierce competitive effort with the
'Madchester' scene — not only about two years too late (by 1992, the Stone
Roses were no longer the hottest thing around), but also with no hope
whatsoever.
Could anybody ever hope to believe that the
sweet teen idols of yesterday would be able to stand their ground next to the
biggest, weightiest «alt-dance» bands of the era? That Morten Harket could
come off as cool as Ian Brown? Obviously not. For a bunch of Norwegian
nearly-has-beens to make a serious new impact on the British dance scene, the
music had to be a real rocket; Memorial Beach is more likely to be
compared to an antique choo-choo train, slowly grumbling its way through the
night.
Critics hated it, the public ignored it, and it
was pretty obvious that the world simply had no need for more A-Ha product
unless it ceased to be A-Ha product and became something else. A predictable
disaster. But the more we look back on Memorial Beach, the more it turns
into a veritable memorial beach, one that may be worth paying a lonely visit
for no particular purpose, but absolutely risk-free.
A-Ha's brand of modern funk is, of course,
tremendously derivative, but the songs themselves are not altogether boring or
pointless — 'Move To Memphis' has a catchy chorus; the eight-minute monster
'Cold As Stone' puts its two cents on «atmosphere» and more or less pockets a
solid winning; 'Lie Down In Darkness' has swell vocal harmonies; and on 'How
Sweet It Was', Harket lays down his best vocal performance on the album. No masterpieces,
but still a soft touch of class on each of these things (and from a purely
technical point, they are unassailable — these guys may not have the
inventiveness or the freshness of the fathers of 'Madchester', but they have
definitely studied the scene to perfection).
The ballads are shakier, as the band descends
deeper into the pits of adult contemporary, with the required lack of focus,
cheesy harmonies, and lyrical triteness — but there is no denying the sincerity
of 'Angel In The Snow' (or the nice fact that its keyboard accompaniment is
provided by a snowy winter electric organ) or the unusual otherworldliness of
'Locust', the band's only song written in «hypnotic lullaby» mood and deserving
it. The choice of the album opener 'Dark Is The Night For All', which some
critics have sneeringly compared to U2, for the single, was, however, unhappy —
its anthemic strife is not well supported by its hooks, and its exaggerated
idealism is an entirely false preview of the things that follow, which are
really much better, but which may seem like a bored disappointment after the
grand sweep of 'Dark Is The Night'.
Do not believe the one-star reviews when you
meet them: no sane person had a good reason to listen to this record when it
came out, but today, when no sane person has a good reason to listen to music at
all, and what we are left with is either insane people or bad reasons,
one-star reviews like these are hopelessly obsolete. A little bit of thumbs up is in order here, and if you are interested
at all in seeing A-Ha's career as reflecting the inner emotional journey of
Morten Harket and his vocal tract, Memorial Beach is indispensable, if
only to hear him sing 'The mirror sees you — so alone — cold as stone... yeah!'
and still be able to admire his cool.
MINOR EARTH MAJOR SKY (2000)
1) Minor Earth Major Sky; 2)
Little Black Heart; 3)
Velvet; 4) Summer Moved On; 5) The Sun Never Shone That Day;
6) To Let You Win; 7) The Company Man; 8) Thought That It Was You; 9) I Wish I Cared; 10)
Barely Hanging On; 11) You'll
Never Get Over Me; 12) I Won't Forget Her; 13) Mary Ellen Makes The Moment
Count.
There is probably no harm in speculating on the
idea that A-Ha's comeback could have been triggered by the popularity of the
new wave of vocal groups, such as the Backstreet Boys — after almost a decade's
worth of grunge, Brit-pop, and R'n'B dominating the charts, sexy teen idols initiated
their revenge, and, considering that Morten could still qualify as such
(apparently, he is very careful about his diet, which works wonders for both his
voice and his good looks), A-Ha agreed to give it one more chance.
It all started with 'Summer Moved On', of
course; the resting band was conjured to reconvene at the Nobel Peace Prize
Contest in 1998, for which occasion Paul wrote a new song — and everyone liked
it. I like it, too. It features the well-recognized gimmick of having the longest
note held (in a hit song, at least) — during the bridge, Morten drags the line
'there's just one thing left to ask...' for over twenty seconds (and has, in
fact, done this ever since in most of the band's live shows). But even without
this bit of Guinness trivia, it is still a golden standard to which every
writer and arranger of mainstream adult contemporary ballads should aspire.
Rarely, if ever, does this genre feature anything close to Morten's falsetto
interaction with the thunderous strings that give it a quasi-Beethovenish
punch, although they take great care to preserve the general autumnal mood
that accompanies most of their hits.
With such an obvious success under their belts,
it was clear that more activity would follow. Minor Earth Major Sky put
them back on the European charts, but failed to make a significant impression
on the critics. Yet, again, in retrospect it definitely trumps the Backstreet Boys,
even though much of it updates the A-Ha sound in an officially «late Nineties»
way. Waaktaar-Savoy gets most of the credit: as good as Morten is throughout,
it is his minor hooks that ensure listenability and, sometimes, even depth.
And it is worth waiting for them — at first, the tunes might just seem the
usual middle-of-the-road pop stuff with standard mid-tempo dance rhythms,
«safe» acoustic backing tracks, predictable structures etc. But with a gifted
songwriter and a tasteful singer, A-Ha have broken through the synth-pop of
the mid-Eighties and subdued the funk-pop of the early Nineties; what problem
could they have with taming the teen-pop of the turn of the millennium?
Denying the beauty of Minor Earth is like denying the beauty of a
Marilyn or a Sophia Loren — it's possible, it may be tempting, but don't you
have anything better to do?
There are misfires. 'I Won't Forget Her' is
very catchy, but songs that combine mid-tempo ska-ish rhythms with bubbly
synthesizer tones are an official disgrace that should be forever reserved to
third-grade pop acts in developing countries; I am astonished that the tune
finds a spot on the same CD as 'Summer Moved On', almost to the point of
writing a petition. There are a few more songs, nowhere near as offensive, but
which simply fail to register. Yet so much is good! The title track, with its
cloudy atmosphere, gritty bassline, and genuinely psychedelic chorus. 'Velvet',
whose ethereal female harmonies remind me of AIR. The humility of 'To Let You
Win', which just floats by at first, but then grabs you by being the only song
on the album that absolutely refuses to grab you. The odd melancholy of
'You'll Never Get Over Me': it is hard to imagine a context for the lines
'you'll never get over me, I'll never get under you' that would not be
humorous, but the music leaves no place for humour, only elegant sorrow.
If these little shards of compliments do not
sound convincing, how about the band dragging out a friggin' Mellotron
for the conclusion — the strange, haunting ballad 'Mary Ellen Makes The Moment
Count'? Supposedly it is the band's personal take on the subject of 'Eleanor
Rigby', with the depiction of a somewhat similar character, and I would not
deem it out of place on any classic late Sixties' art-rock album. It may have
been a bit pretentious of them to close the record that way — «look at us, we
play it straight and simple, but we will go out with an art-pop song so your
last memory will be of us as relevant, responsible, and refined artists» — but the
key point here is that they qualify as such, if only with one or two
songs, and this raises the overall score. It also delights the brain, a
much-needed shot in the arm after the deadly mistake of 'I Won't Forget Her';
and the heart — the heart has long since pledged its support to Morten if he
works hard enough to deserve it, and his is one of the most hard-working (not
to mention hairless) bare chests in existence. Thumbs
up for a respectable comeback.
LIFELINES (2002)
1) Lifelines; 2) You Wanted
More; 3) Forever Not Yours;
4) There's A Reason For It; 5) Time And Again; 6) Did Anyone Approach You?;
7) Afternoon High; 8) Oranges On Appletrees; 9) A Little Bit; 10) Less Than
Pure; 11) Turn The Lights Down; 12) Cannot Hide; 13) White Canvas; 14)
Dragonfly; 15) Solace.
A whole team of different, but equally respectable
producers helped the band out on this one. You'd think the result should have
been a mess, and you'd be right: Lifelines is a mess. Surprisingly,
though, it is not an exciting mess of breathtaking successes and
misguided failures. It is simply a lightweight, vapid, fake-sounding mess. A
mess such as would naturally result from the band's expressing a serious
desire... to become the new Backstreet Boys. Did they really? I hope they did
not. But reason tells me they really did.
These are horrible arrangements. Horrible.
The instruments have lost all life, the rhythm section reduced to stereotypical
bad movie soundtrack pulsations, the melodies relying on clichés, the
lyrics being clichés. Good moments — moments — abound throughout,
but they are almost immediately washed away by rivers of syrup, streams of
corn, and oceans of cheese. How the heck could this be possible, so soon after
the inventive dark maturity of Minor Earth? Who told them to return to
the primitive teen aesthetics of 1986, accomodating it to the needs of the new
millennium? At least in 1986 they were pretty much teens themselves. But in
2002?..
The only song that qualifies as a relatively
solid bit — the only one — is the title track, whose dreamy sequence of
'What do you see, what do you know? One sign, what do I do?..' recreates the
treasurable part of the A-Ha spirit in a believable manner. Its «adult
contemporary» sound seems to have a wee bit of depth that the rest of the songs
does not. But the other hits do not even begin to reach it: 'Forever Not Yours'
is American Idol-style pablum, miserably failing to put Morten's singing
to good use (the way he bleats out the chorus is just painful), and 'Did Anyone
Approach You?' is clearly just a marketing ploy, concocting a «mysterious»
atmosphere around a very flat dance melody that is really no fun whatsoever.
'Less Than Pure' is just about the only song on
the album that preserves faint traces of aggressive desperation, the same
emotion whose puncturing made previous records so enjoyable. But even that song
is definitely «less than pure». Everything else is simply too shallow, too
happy, too disgustingly clean. Clearly, the experiment did not work. Thumbs down for a record that the band members,
if they are really smart, should have long ago disowned, putting the blame on
their producers. Amazing, though, considering that one of the producers used
to produce for the Pet Shop Boys, and the other two used to produce for Elvis
Costello. Was this a subtle revenge on their part, getting even with their
protegés' commercial competition in the Eighties?
HOW CAN I SLEEP WITH YOUR VOICE IN MY HEAD (2003)
1) Forever Not Yours; 2) Minor
Earth Major Sky; 3) Manhattan Skyline; 4) I've Been Losing You; 5) Crying In
The Rain; 6) The Sun Always Shines On TV; 7) Did Anyone Approach You; 8) The
Swing Of Things; 9) Lifelines; 10) Stay On These Roads; 11) Hunting High And
Low; 12) Take On Me; 13) The Living Daylights; 14) Summer Moved On; 15*)
Scoundrel Days; 16*) Oranges On Appletrees; 17*) Cry Wolf; 18*) Dragonfly; 19*)
Time And Again; 20*) Sycamore Leaves.
Glossy pop bands do not generally need live
albums — it's not like they often feel the need to improvise or pull weird
artsy rarities out of their backlog — but this particular proposition from our
Norwegian charmers may be worth your attention, anyway. The bad news is that it
was recorded on the Lifelines tour, and, consequently, feels obliged to
include a pinch of dreck from that disaster. The good news is — just about
everything else.
Actually, the two important questions here are
as follows: (a) will Morten be able to sing all his complex parts live as
effectively as he does them in the studio?; (b) will the band's overall sound
tend to rock out more — will they, in fact, be able to sound like an actual band?
If the answer to even one of these questions were to be «no», the album would
have a very good reason not to exist. And with a band as wobbly as
A-Ha, you never can predict anything: they are just as capable of ugly blunders
as they are of explosions of genius.
Yet it turns out that fortune is on our (and
their) side this time. Harket is in great form; not a single one of these
performances has a thing to be ashamed of, and if this is a typical
night for A-Ha, he should be welcome to the ranks of the hardest-working live
performers in show-biz. Twenty years of performing have not worn him out one
bit. I am pretty sure that, today, he curses Waaktaar to high heaven for
setting him up with that twenty-second long note on 'Summer Moved On' — but in
2003, at least, he was still able to handle it perfectly (although notice that
it does leave him briefly out of breath for the next lines).
As for the overall sound, yes, it is very
sensible. Synth pop fans may quibble and complain, but they do some, if not most,
of the old numbers with less emphasis on the keyboards and more emphasis on
Paul's guitar riffs, cranking up the volume and churning up a whiff of
distortion; check out the difference between the original 'I've Been Losing
You', for instance, and this new treatment, with the song seriously funkified
and enlivened. Even 'Take On Me', while still true to its roots, keeps boiling
and boiling and, although the main recognizable synthesizer melody remains
intact, Paul eventually takes over and turns it into a power-pop guitar anthem.
Not everyone will be happy about 'The Living
Daylights' — a James Bond theme song arranged as the centerpiece of the show,
with the audience forced to sing the chorus and a reggae interlude? But I guess
a hit is a hit, and this is, after all, A-Ha's most well-known tune
(remember that 'Take On Me' is only familiar with the Eighties generation,
while 'The Living Daylights' is being regularly consumed by everyone watching
the Bond TV marathons).
If you have the chance, go for the 2-CD
edition; the bonus disc offers note-perfect renditions of 'Scoundrel Days' and
'Cry Wolf', a pretty sentimental performance of 'Dragonfly', and Paul taking
lead vocals on my personal favourite, 'Sycamore Leaves' — which forms a far
more interesting and tasty conclusion to the whole experience than the awesome,
but predictable 'Summer Moved On'. (But why have they removed the organ riff?
That was the creepiest part!)
How Can I Sleep is not the only live album by A-Ha (the
recently released Live At Valhall, from an earlier performance in 2001,
is another solid offering), but I do not think there exists a serious reason to
own more than one: once you know what their live show looks like, you can safely
go back to the studio offerings. Still, if you are still in doubt about the
overall validity of this band, I think that it is definitely a shot in the arm
to their reputation rather than a kick in the guts. A hearty thumbs up.
ANALOGUE (2005)
1) Celice; 2) Don't Do Me
Any Favours; 3) Cosy Prisons; 4) Analogue; 5) Birthright; 6) Holy Ground; 7)
Over The Treetops; 8) Halfway Through The Tour; 9) A Fine Blue Line; 10) Keeper Of The Flame; 11)
Make It Soon; 12) White Dwarf; 13) The Summers Of Our Youth.
East Of The Sun may have been the ultimate A-Ha experience,
but Analogue is simply the best A-Ha album — even though, for the most
part, it sounds not one bit like A-Ha. It got some mild critical praise,
yielded a couple briefly high-charting singles for the European market, and
then got washed away for good, failing to shift the general memory of A-Ha as
the «'Take On Me' group with the sexy singer». Why should it?
Well, there are some good reasons. Almost as if
Lifelines never happened, the boys make a sharp stylistic turn,
completely jettisoning modernistic trappings and making a record that hearkens
back — way beyond Eighties synth-pop, aiming straight at the heart of the
art-pop movement of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Of course, they
always had that tendency — but this is the first (and last) time they made a
record that does not sound ashamed of it, but, on the contrary, proudly
throws its retro-ishness in your face.
With too much force, perhaps: I was all
but astonished at reading people condemning the beauty of Analogue on
various fora, until it dawned on me that most of these people must have grown
up listening to 'Take On Me' and 'The Living Daylights', and that this
is what they still expect from Harket and Waaktar-Savoy — whereas people who
could care less about Norwegian teen idols in the 1980s hardly have a big
reason to care more about them today. In other words, the good old tragedy of
clumsy niche-jumping.
But am I ever glad they made that jump. It was
obvious, almost from the start, that Analogue is a record these guys
always had in them, what with all the talent; that it took them twenty years to
finally get around to it is nothing compared to the fact that it is finally
here. Plus, age has certainly wisened them up, opened new horizons, raised new
issues, and made them independent enough to produce the record in exactly the
right way.
What are the album's influences? Well, I hear a
little McCartney, a little Elton John, a little Neil Young, a little Badfinger,
a little Moody Blues, and if I listen to it some more, I will most certainly
double the list. One might say that, behind all these influences, we do not get
to hear much A-Ha, but there never was one particular, immutable brand
of A-Ha; the main virtue of these guys is that they are musical chameleons,
whose only near-constant assets are hooky songwriting and Harket's angel voice.
This you certainly get on Analogue, in spades.
Thirteen tracks that range from «nice» to
«gorgeous», each song meaningful (even if the meaning never goes too deep) and
evocative. We have some synths, but generally the album is dominated by (in
descending order) piano, acoustic and electric guitars, the latter with a heavy
psychedelic sheen sometimes. For instance, on 'Over The Treetops' Harket gets
helped out from Mr. Graham Nash in person on backing vocals — and the two end
up sounding like... Neil Young (!) on some of his early records, although the
song's vibe is more akin to LSD-fuelled artists of the decade.
'Halfway Through The Tour' is another clear
highlight — a gloriously anthemic Beatlesque pop-rocker for the first three
minutes, a folk-ambient Brian Eno-ish instrumental for the last four; the two
parts creak at the seams a little bit, but are equally uplifting. For a band
that never did instrumental compositions before, that four-minute coda is a
true marvel of sound. Also, the lyrics, vaguely dealing with the issues on life
of the road, do not fit the melody very well (too earthly for its heavenly
aspirations), but no one forces you to take them literally; think of the «tour»
as a metaphor for a journey through parallel realities and it all falls
together.
"Give it up for rock'n'roll, give it up
for how it made you feel", Harket sings on 'Keeper Of The Flame', and one
might think of the song as cheap nostalgia for the good old days — but the emphasis
is not on giving it up for rock'n'roll, the emphasis is on giving it up,
period; it is a beautiful ballad of mourning for things that never came to be:
"Monumental monuments, sentimental sentiments, you could have been the
keeper of the flame". A strange song, but as gorgeous a piano pop ballad
as they ever write them.
None of these were singles, though. The ones
that were are a little less obviously retro. 'Celice' is a kick-ass pop-rocker,
pushed forward by a simple, persistent, undetachable guitar riff and paying
tribute to Cocteau Twins in the background, where Paul concocts a wall-of-sound
of guitar trills and spacey effects. The title track is a kick-ass pop-rocker,
pushed forward by a simple, persistent, undetachable piano riff and paying
tribute to no one in particular in the background, where Paul, nevertheless, still
concocts a wall-of-sound of guitar trills and spacey effects. And 'Cosy
Prisons' sounds like contemporary Paul McCartney. A bit.
Where the record is not proverbially gorgeous,
it is, at the least, engaging by being utterly unpredictable. 'Make It Soon',
for instance, begins as a bare-bones acoustic ballad, with only the slightest
touch of a hint at its being able to «explode» — and even so, no one can guess
that, when it does explode, it does so through a wildly distorted psychedelic
guitar solo, before settling back into its dangerously romantic vibe once more.
There is little doubt in my mind that, had this
not been an official A-Ha album, but an obscure indie record by an obscure
indie band released on an obscure indie label, the people from Pitchfork and
similar places would have been falling all over it, putting it on Top 10 lists
and writing about it defining the sound of the new millennium. As it is, no one
is supposed to listen to former teen idols in the new millennium, and few will
be convinced that this is not merely an intricate reorganization of the 'Take
On Me' approach. Their loss, brother. Thumbs up
from the brain, amazed at how much work went into this thing, and same from the
heart that has, by now, learned to look past Morten Harket's bare chest and
sleazy haircuts — in fact, to hell with all that image stuff altogether, let
us just enjoy the music while we can.
FOOT OF THE MOUNTAIN (2009)
1) The Bandstand; 2) Riding
The Crest; 3) What There Is; 4) Foot Of The Mountain; 5) Real Meaning; 6)
Shadowside; 7) Nothing Is Keeping You Here;
8) Mother Nature Goes To Heaven; 9) Sunny Mystery; 10) Start The Simulator..
Yes, I do believe that only a serious decision
to split up for good could have redeemed the release of Foot Of The Mountain.
It does not happen too often when an artist releases his weakest effort right
after his strongest one, and it is an even more rare case when it is so very
easy to precisely pinpoint what the hell went wrong, and so very hard
to understand why it went so wrong.
The melodies are okay. All the songs are
originals, and expert songwriters like Paul and Magne do not simply shed their
pop skills overnight. This is A-Ha all right, simple, but effective keyboard
chord changes and Morten «Penthouse Romance» Harket's angelic croon all over
them. But for some devilish reason, someone in the devil's personal pay
suggested that it would be nice to revisit the band's original synth-pop style.
After all, Sixties' nostalgia does not pay off so well any more — whoever buys
records when they're over sixty? But Eighties' nostalgia — now we're talking.
Lots of hungry forty-year olds out there, yearning for another 'Take On Me'.
And even those old hairstyles, ridiculed and seemingly forgotten a long time
ago, are on the verge of becoming fashionable once more.
And so Foot Of The Mountain takes the
plunge; but these guys are not adolescents any more, they could not really
produce another 'Take On Me' even under the threat of having their entire
catalog pulled off the shelves. The final result sounds like a clumsy cross between
the cheesy, but explosive synth-pop of Hunting High And Low and the
boring, overproduced, meaninglessly modernistic pap of Life(less)lines.
If there are good songs buried here — and I freely admit this possibility —
they are not merely buried, but nailed tight to their coffin with the finest in
electronic stakes.
The synth tones that Magne is choosing do sound
fairly close to what it used to be, but they do not, cannot, need not, must not
convey any real emotion. Listen to the ten seconds that open the album ('The
Bandstand'): this is what it all sounds like, more or less. Silly techno
sounds, but this time around, without the youthful drive that somehow
redeemed them in the past. Just silly, forgettable techno sounds.
I refuse to name individual songs or discuss
them. Re-record them with guitars and pianos and we might resume this
discussion. (Actually, the title track that is dominated by a piano
melody, is the closest it ever gets to an effective song). As it is, I
personally will prefer to think that the true swan song of A-Ha sounded four
years earlier, with Analog. Foot Of The Mountain is merely an
afterthought, a misguided, clueless «gift» to their oldest fans. Quite likely,
some of the oldest fans may have been pleased with it. More power to them! I
give it a thumbs down. And — how dare
they even say 'Riding The Crest' has been inspired by Arcade Fire's Neon
Bible!
ENDING ON A HIGH NOTE (2011)
1) The Sun Always Shines On
TV; 2) Move To Memphis; 3) The Blood That Moves The Body; 4) Scoundrel Days; 5)
The Swing Of Things; 6) Forever Not Yours; 7) Stay On These Roads; 8) Manhattan
Skyline; 9) Hunting High And Low; 10) We're Looking For The Whales; 11)
Butterfly, Butterfly; 12) Crying In The Rain; 13) Minor Earth, Major Sky; 14)
Summer Moved On; 15) I've Been Losing You; 16) Foot Of The Mountain; 17) Cry
Wolf; 18) Analogue; 19) The Living Daylights; 20) Take On Me.
Fairly literally
so: the famous high E that concludes the chorus to ʽTake On Meʼ is the last note taken on by Morten at
the end of the show. Now in all fairness, this live album (available in CD as
well as DVD format) is only there for the ultimate fan — approximately three
quarters of the setlist are exactly the same tunes as had already been released
less than a decade earlier on How Can I
Sleep..., so the primary purpose here is clearly to provide documental
proof of what, in 2011 at least, was presented to the public as the very, very,
very last show A-Ha would ever play
as A-Ha. (But set your watches up for a Silver Jubilee Reunion anyway).
The exact date of the last show was December 4,
2010, and it was reverentially played at home, at the Oslo Spektrum; the 2-CD
concert includes all but two songs played that night, and it is interesting to
note what was excluded: (a) ʽBowling Greenʼ, an Everley Bros. cover
that they probably cut because they thought two
Everley Bros. covers on one live album would seem like overkill — and how can
there be an A-Ha live album without ʽCrying In The Rainʼ?; (b)
ʽThe Bandstandʼ — the opening number on Foot Of The Mountain, an album they were sort of supposed to
promote with that tour, but which, in the end, turned out to be represented by
just the title track. Not that we should feel sorry — at the very least, it is
reassuring to know that the band did not regard its last album as a
masterpiece.
Anyway, the general quality of an A-Ha live
show usually seems to be in direct proportion to the state of their lead
singer's voice, and I see no problem here: be it the enchanted falsetto of
ʽTake On Meʼ or the lengthiest-soundwave-on-Earth of ʽSummer
Moves Onʼ (diversified here by adding just a tiny touch of non-irritating
melisma), he remains in fine form from start to finish — one can only hope that this is indeed the end
of A-Ha, and that general listeners will not have to endure the suffering as
Harket's pitch inevitably deteriorates over the years à la Ian Gillan or (even worse) Art Garfunkel.
If there is
a general problem with the show, it is only that the band has set itself up, in
accordance with its reputation, as more of a «synth-pop» ensemble than a «rock»
one — in other words, the «purification» of their image, introduced on Foot Of The Mountain, is carried over
to the live show, with keyboards taking a generally more active part than
guitars. This exerts a negative influence on songs like ʽMove To
Memphisʼ (whose teeth-grinding funky rhythm is smothered by wishy-washy
synths and limp percussion) and ʽMinor Earth, Major Skyʼ, where the
cosmic-psychedelic atmosphere of the original also seems cheapened by the
keyboards. Still, most of the songs performed, want it or not, are in the synth-pop aesthetics, so why
complain?
The setlist, as can be seen, covers the band's
entire career, leaving no stone unturned though predictably concentrating on
the hits, but it is nice to see them
not leaving out Analogue (alas, only
the title track gets performed, but then it would
have been too much to expect them sing ʽHalfway Through The Tourʼ
when they are already done with the tour), and they also do ʽButterfly,
Butterflyʼ, the last studio recording they released as a single — a
pleasant, if not too memorable, ballad, backed by regular pianos and acoustic
guitars.
I suppose that most of the fans went home fully
satisfied that night, and it is only in (slight) retrospect that we realize the
show is not fully representative of the band's true potential, being too
heavily skewed in the ʽTake On Meʼ direction. But then there are very few people in the world in the
first place who would agree to thinking of A-Ha as something more than just a
sweet boy band with a digital fixation, one more gross relic of the funny hair
decade, and Harket and co. may be excused for not specifically pandering for that minor subset of their fanbase. And
on the whole, I really enjoyed this, so what's to stop us from one more final thumbs up?..
CAST IN STEEL (2015)
1) Cast In Steel; 2) Under The
Makeup; 3) The Wake; 4) Forest Fire; 5) Objects In The Mirror; 6) Door Ajar; 7)
Living At The End Of The World; 8) Mythomania; 9) She's Humming A Tune; 10)
Shadow Endeavors; 11) Giving Up The Ghost; 12) Goodbye Thompson.
I honestly do not understand why they need to
do this. Morten Harket has a perfectly fine solo career going on, and now this
is what, the third A-Ha reunion in
history? Fourth? Fifth? What do we do with Ending
On A High Note, rename it to save face or pretend it never existed? «Final
tour», my ass. If you're gonna go, go in style. Take an example from the
frickin' Beatles.
Besides, the new album does little to quench
the indignation, and so I would like to keep it short. Not only is this no Analogue (and God knows I've secretly
always hoped for them to make one more Analogue),
this isn't even a Minor Earth Major Sky.
Instead, it is a completely by-the-book, song-by-song-predictable «A-Ha-ish»
album: fragile, bittersweet romance non-stop, with each song setting exactly
the same mood as the previous one and we all know very well what that mood is.
A dozen updates on ʽSummer Moved Onʼ, without even one single song of
the same epic caliber. Rumor has it that many of these were actually outtakes
and quick polish jobs on old ideas, and I believe this — just a quickie to
serve as an incentive for more touring.
Supportive fans will want to argue that this is
what the band does best, or point out the awesome shape in which Harket's voice
still finds itself, or at least state that, you know, this is an improvement on Foot
Of The Mountain. And yes, the songs are a little less embarrassing. But at
least Foot set up a curious goal —
recapture the inspired innocence of the band's early synth-pop beginnings —
and it was instructive to see it fail. Cast
In Steel sets itself no goals: it is just a bunch of tolerable,
unimpressive, unambitious adult contemporary pop songs that all sound the same.
I mean, believe it or not, the exceptional status of A-Ha was due to their not being a one-trick pony: over that
ʽSummer Moved Onʼ vibe, they could always drop a touch of hard rock,
or a splosh of colorful psychedelia, or a rousing anthemic call. Nothing like
that here.
Of course, there are melodies, and sometimes
briefly memorable vocal hooks, and yes, Harket is still a fine singer, though,
creepy as it is, he seems to have almost completely lost (or discarded) his lower range as he grew older. Long-time
fans who just want to have more of the same will not be disappointed. Me, I
can't even bring myself to writing a few words about even one single individual
song on here. Just keep touring, guys, as long as you're still able to wring
some emotion out of the old classics — the new ones are as thumbs down-worthy as they come.
NO PAROLE FROM ROCK'N'ROLL (1983)
1) Island In The Sun; 2)
General Hospital; 3) Jet To Jet; 4) Hiroshima Mon Amour; 5) Kree Nakoorie; 6)
Incubus; 7) Too Young To Die, Too Drunk To Live; 8) Big Foot; 9) Starcarr Lane;
10) Suffer Me.
No account of 1980's rock would be complete
without a proper lambasting of the impressive Tower Of Cheese that was
Alcatrazz, the launching pad for Yngwie J. «Release The Fuckin' Fury» Malmsteen's
career. Suffice it to say, it is hardly possible to truly appreciate the
greatness of bands like Accept or Judas Priest if they are not seen in
comparison with the likes of this band, a few songs of which still occasionally
pollute the airwaves of cheap hard rock stations.
Alcatrazz was put together by Graham Bonnet,
ex-lead singer of Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow; this alone should have raised
suspicions, since Bonnet was pretty much a so-so singer in comparison with his
predecessor, the illustrious Ronnie James Dio, not to mention coming from a primarily
R'n'B background — not exactly the best pedigree to serve as the basis for a
new hard rock group. On the other hand, his sole album with Rainbow, Down To
Earth, was a best-seller, and it could be hoped that Alcatrazz would be at
least a commercially, if not artistically, successful proposition.
(Un)fortunately, it wasn't.
Most of the songs are credited to Bonnet and
his young guitarist, Swedish prodigy Yngwie Malmsteen; supposedly, Bonnet
takes care of the lyrics, while Yngwie is responsible for most of the musical
side. There are only two problems to this arrangement: (a) although Bonnet has
a fine singing voice, he is a thoroughly pathetic lyricist, and (b) although Malmsteen
is as technically accomplished as his legend goes, he is about as good at
songwriting as Ed Wood at directing. Other than that, No Parole From
Rock'n'Roll is a damn fine record.
At this point, I have to confess an allergy: I
belong to the category of people that finds it almost impossible to find
any sort of personal pleasure or overall artistic merit in combining «hard
rock» or «heavy metal» with «soul». To me, the combination is rotten a priori.
Hard rock should put you in an aggressive mood; soul music should mellow you
out. How is it possible to be mellow and aggressive at the same time? Imagine
saying, "I'll assfuck any bastard that even dares to suggest I'm gay"
— think on this for a while — then come back to this album.
Occasionally, the combination might still work
somehow — but only if accompanied by meaningful melodies. The ones that
Malmsteen writes, however, do not have any meaning that I can discern, other
than the general idea of «look at me, here I am soaring towards the sky, but
God help me if I know why I'm actually doing it». And whenever he does succeed
at finding a groove pregnant with a sincere impression (usually stolen, e. g.
'Hiroshima Mon Amour', which pockets the riff of 'You Really Got Me'), up comes
Bonnet with his silly, pompous vocal tone to run it into the ground — and then
Yngwie plays a hollow set of flashy solo licks to bury it once and for all. And
have I mentioned the corny early-Eighties keyboard sound yet?
There is not one single track on this record,
be it a fast thrasher, a mid-tempo rocker, or a slow ballad, that would tug at
one single string inside me — a rare occasion indeed. All the more surprising,
since the closest thing this Alcatrazz sound can remind one of are similarly
structured Gary Moore records of the early Eighties, and those
definitely had their share of excellent songs next to absolute stinkers, even
though Gary followed the exact same formula: leaden, moderately complex riffs,
finger-flashing solos, soulful vocals. (It is hardly a coincidence, by the way,
that, concerning the above mentioned 'Hiroshima Mon Amour', Gary had recorded
his own 'Hiroshima' a couple years earlier; apparently, the metal-pathos vibe
they were getting seemed equally appropriate to both to be interpreted as a
sort of «musical Hiroshima». Well... it was a musical Hiroshima all
right, if not exactly in the sense they envisaged it. At least Gary Moore had
the good taste of not drawing poor innocent Alain Resnais into the
picture).
Well, only thing left to suppose is that Mr.
Moore just had a bit of God's gift in him, or, to be precise, invested some of
that gift into the art of songwriting; Mr. Malmsteen, unfortunately, put all
of it on the Zero of technical accomplishment — and won, to the world's utmost
sorrow. No Parole From Rock'n'Roll? Come on, guys, this isn't even a
good internal rhyme. And this isn't rock'n'roll, either. Thumbs down.
LIVE SENTENCE (1984)
1) Too Young To Die, Too Drunk
To Live; 2) Hiroshima Mon Amour; 3) Night Games; 4) Island In The Sun; 5) Kree
Nakoorie; 6) Coming Bach; 7) Since You've Been Gone; 8) Evil Eye; 9) All Night
Long.
Of the two Alcatrazz albums with Malmsteen on
board, this live performance, recorded on their 1984 tour of Japan, is unquestionably
the better proposition, for at least two reasons. First, if you are going to
sacrifice good taste, do it all the way — a «ridiculous» album is bad enough,
but a «boring ridiculous» album will not even find its way to the currently
in-print EBT (Encyclopaedia of Bad Taste). And Live Sentence certainly
goes all the way, by putting Yngwie directly into the spotlight, as he plays
even more notes than on the studio records, extends his solos, and gets
a couple numbers all to himself, including an obligatory Bach guitar
arrangement with an obligatory awful pun for a title ('Coming Bach').
I do not want to mindlessly succumb to the idea
of Yngwie Malmsteen as the prototypical heartless finger-flasher who, with no
understanding at all of the essence of music, had somehow put it in his head
that speed is all that matters. His solo career has its ups and downs — mostly
downs, but let us not entirely discard the ups — and he can play with
feeling when he gets his hormones under control. Unfortunately, during his
stint with Alcatrazz, it was all about the hormones. Bonnet sings with
feeling; his singing does not mesh well with the music, and the songs are
mostly rotten, but at least the record makes clear that he really came to Japan
so as to share his emotions with some of the mystifying people from that
mystifying land. (It is a little awkward, though, for a guy from
Lincolnshire to sing about Hiroshima to the Japanese — not to mention finishing
the song with a sloganish "don't forget Hiroshima! No more war!" as
if it were only his, Graham Bonnet's presence, that could save the poor people
of Japan from forgetting about one of their greatest national tragedies).
Malmsteen, however, came to Japan with one
major goal in mind: to show how he can play faster than Eddie Van Halen. If
some of the riffs manage to make sense, none of the solos do. Take your musical
space, chop it up in an astronomical number of even spaces, fill each one up
with a random note, and you basically get the scale equivalent of white noise;
most of these performances could have been filled with static and the effect
would be comparable. Granted, seeing and hearing this in a proper live setting
may pass for a special psychotropic treatment, but one that has only
superficial resemblance to «music as art». On the other hand, young Yngwie's aim
is not to make art; it is to make PR, and he achieved that aim splendidly.
There is a second reason, though, why Live
Sentence is mildly superior: although the majority of the songs are
predictably pulled from their only studio album up to date, they also do a
couple of Rainbow numbers from 1979's Down To Earth, and much as I
dislike that record in comparison to classic Dio-era material from 1975-78, at
least the songs there were all written by Blackmore and Glover: in this
setting, 'Since You've Been Gone' and particularly the big radio hit 'All Night
Long' tower over the rest of this material like a couple of jötunn giants
over a pack of dwarves. Even Yngwie calms down a bit, sticking mainly to
melody. Decent stuff. There is no escaping the obligatory thumbs down, of course, but if you are interested
in a bad vibe with elements of entertainment rather than a bad vibe with no
redeeming qualities at all, Live Sentence is the place where you start
with Alcatrazz.
DISTURBING THE PEACE (1985)
1) God Blessed Video; 2)
Mercy; 3) Will You Be Home Tonight; 4) Wire And Wood; 5) Desert Diamond; 6)
Stripper; 7) Painted Lover; 8) Lighter Shade Of Green; 9) Sons And Lovers; 10)
Skyfire; 11) Breaking The Heart Of The City.
As the 1984 tour drew to a close, Yngwie left
Alcatrazz for his solo career — a reasonable decision, because, whatever one
thinks of Malmsteen's solo albums, it is, almost by default, better to
experience his musical masturbation on its own than as a background for the
puffed-up pathos of Graham Bonnet. In his place the latter recruited a
different guitar wiz — Steve Vai.
Weird pairings, like B. J. Wilson of Procol
Harum fame drumming on AC/DC's Flick Of The Switch (even if only on
non-final track versions), do not happen every day in the world of rock'n'roll,
and, for the sake of pure knowledge, it may be interesting to hear the results
of one such pairing between the thoroughly mainstream, anthemic R'n'B belter
Graham Bonnet and the deeply experimental, near-avantgarde guitarist Steve Vai.
One might even think that, although the results would almost certainly be
dreadful, they'd at least be intriguing.
Unfortunately, they are not. It is hard to
guess Vai's logic for enlisting in Alcatrazz; perhaps, after several years of
playing with Zappa and an obscure (if perversely brilliant) solo tryout with Flex-Able,
he finally succumbed to the temptation of finance and fame. Why Bonnet? Why
Alcatrazz? Well, the band did have some sort of reputation, and, besides, he'd
be writing all the music anyway; as long as it was good, who'd care about the
singer?
But it was not good. As interesting as Vai can
be in the studio when he creates experimental material, influenced by his
long-term Zappa association, he is completely bland when it comes to applying
his talents to macho arena rock. Disturbing The Peace, like any good old
Alcatrazz album, has plenty of loud, rip-roaring anthems, but not a single
meaningful riff. Apparently, Steve just cannot work right in this kind of
setting (not that I blame him — it'd be a tough break for anyone to inject
life into Alcatrazz). Sometimes, he really tries, like for the first few bars
of 'Sons And Lovers', where he plays a funny little melody quite in the vein of
Flex-Able; but then Bonnet kicks in with the vocals, and we are back to
rote corporate faux-rocking.
Nothing helps. Not even provocative titles
('God Blessed Video', which, thank God, is ironic — but you will really
have to listen to the lyrics to understand that), nor occasional attempts to
emulate the sarcastic style of Van Halen (on 'Painted Lover', Bonnet goes for
a bit of snickering character assassination à la David Lee Roth), nor
brief folk-art-rock passages ('Lighter Shade Of Green', forty seconds of a
decent instrumental that begins like an Arcadian idilly, continues as a barrage
of psychedelic shredding, and belongs nowhere on this record).
It is possible that, had Zappa himself volunteered
to fill in the boots of Alcatrazz' guitar player, he, likewise, would have been
unable to write any good songs for the band. The catch is, in order to write
dumb songs for a dumb band, one has to be a dumb songwriter; this is, more or
less, the only way to make the final result into something exciting. Few
things are more irritating, or more easily forgettable, than a clever
songwriter, much less an experimental songwriter, writing an intentionally
dumb song (and I do not mean «parody» — Zappa has written plenty of clever parodies
on dumb songs); Disturbing The Peace is a perfect example, a record
where everything went wrong because the laws of nature predicted that it would
go wrong — and, in order to defy the laws of nature, you'd at least have to be
Michael Jackson (not that I'd wish that to anyone). Thumbs
down once again.
DANGEROUS GAMES (1986)
1) It's My Life; 2)
Undercover; 3) That Ain't Nothin'; 4) No Imagination; 5) Ohayo Tokyo; 6)
Dangerous Games; 7) Blue Boar; 8) Only One Woman; 9) The Witchwood; 10) Double
Man; 11) Night Of The Shooting Star.
As Steve Vai must have realized the error of
his ways, he reasonably quit, and, in a last attempt to keep the band going,
Bonnett hired Danny Johnson in his place, whose main credits up to then
included playing on several Rick Derringer records, as well as Rod Stewart's Tonight
I'm Yours and Alice Cooper's Special Forces. This suggests several
possibilities, some good, some bad; the reality is such that, in Johnson's
hands, Alcatrazz' last album sounds like a cross between what it used to be and
Rod Stewart: a mix of dumb hard rock and equally dumb electronic pop.
But even under these conditions, it is still
the best album Alcatrazz have ever released, although I am voicing an opinion
here that is entirely my own. The usual consensus over Alcatrazz is that the
band pretty much said it all with No Parole, then misfired twice, once
by including Vai who was too good for the band, twice by including Johnson who
was too bad for it. (An alternate consensus, of course, is that Alcatrazz only
misfired once, by forming). I believe, however, that such a consensus is most
likely to emerge from people who either have not listened to the records in the first
place, or those who scooped them up in «genre-expecting» mode — bracing
themselves for crunchy metal when what they got was Eighties' pop.
As far as
Eighties' pop goes, we have all heard worse. Yes, Dangerous Games
blandly exploits all of the decade's clichés, adding lifeless keyboards
and familiar simplistic dance beats to audience-friendly, harmless metal
guitars and Bonnet's macho yelling. In that respect, it is horrible. But the
songs are better: Johnson, as opposed to both of the wizards whose shoes
he was filling, writes the music in an attempt to produce decent tunes rather
than serve as launchpads for his sonic rocketships. Not that he cannot play —
he has got plenty of technique — but there is only a very small bunch of
ecstatic solos here, meaning that, in all likelihood, he was consciously trying
to shift the band's image from «Mad Guitarist Sanitarium» to something more
modest.
It is all
best illustrated by their choice of a cover tune: the Animals' 'It's My Life'
is given a predictably bleary arrangement, with the main riff sounding thrice
as loud and monstruous as it used to be in 1965, but thrice as less threatening
— yet the song itself has never lost any of its greatness, and to hear it even
in this arrangement (which is at least true to the original melody) is preferable
to wasting time on four minutes of Malmsteen's rucus.
To cut a long
story short, rockers like 'That Ain't Nothin', 'Blue Boar', and the title
track, pop songs like 'Undercover', and even soul ballads like 'Only One
Woman' all have modest hooks that deserve being tried out with better
arrangements (and perhaps a different singer). Not that it really matters:
saying that Dangerous Games displays a higher level of songwriting than Disturbing
The Peace is, above all, just pedantic, and, like all other Alcatrazz
records, it cannot hope for anything other than a thumbs
down rating. But if mainstream pop-rock in big frizzy Eighties fashion
does get your juices flowing, go for this — you will get all the muscles and
all the big hair without all the guitar masturbation. It is a different
sort of lack of taste.
INSIDE MY BRAIN (1980)
1) Right Side Of My Mind; 2)
Gimme Sopor; 3) Hot Cars; 4) Inside My Brain; 5) You Stupid Asshole; 6) Get Off
The Air; 7*) My Old Man's A Fatso; 8*) Carson Girls (demo); 9*) I'm A Pig
(demo); 10*) Too Animalistic (live); 11*) Right Side Of My Mind (live).
Hardcore punk, when done properly, is a delight
for the thinking man — in fact, much of hardcore punk came from the hands and
brains of thinking men. Dig into the individual biographies of the Angry
Samoans and you will find out that founding father # 1, Mike Saunders, used to
write for Rolling Stone (he is often credited as the inventor of the term
«heavy metal», no less, which earned him the nickname of «Metal Mike»), while
founding father # 2, Gregg Turner, used to write for Creem and is now a
distinguished math professor (!).
It is quite transparent, then, that only men
endowed with vast intellectual powers, able to come up with revolutionary
musical ideas synthesized through intense brain activity rather than picked up
from God on a purely intuitive and irrational basis, could have materialized
the sound of the Angry Samoans. The band's debut EP, Inside My Brain,
burns with hardcore passion, but each and every second of that fiery burning is
achieved through very cold fusion. The basic aesthetics, the way it seems most
obvious to pick it out, is as follows:
A) Brevity is the sister of wit, and these guys
go as far as to place the two in an incestuous relationship. The whole
thing is over in less than ten minutes (although future re-releases with bonus
tracks double the running length), and individual songs usually make their
points in less than two ('Hot Cars' says it all in thirty seconds). Lesson
taken from the likes of Wire, but in terms of overall conciseness, they flat
out bust their teachers.
B) Verses and choruses are for sissies who wank
to old-fashioned shit like the Ramones. Truly clever, truly rebellious punk
rock does not pander to commercial formula.
C) Offense is golden. To explain why you
are offending someone is way beyond the dignity of the artist — in fact, it
insults the intelligence of your audience, the only thing worthy of respect.
Say «fuck you» first, ask questions later, or, in fact, don't ask questions at
all. Patronizing DJs get it first ('Get Off The Air', directed against
influential music biz guy Rodney Bingenheimer, an extremely important Kulturträger
of the day whom the band, perhaps correctly, accused of dictatorial
aspirations), but neither queers, nor girls, nor, in fact, anyone else escape
the swing of the blades when the shit hits the fan.
D) Above all, the necessity of the illusion
that all of this is just a semi-articulate stream of conscious. Ragged shreds
of angst, anger, and violence — blurts on insanity and murder that are supposed
to carve out the proper image of the vicious young man with no hopes of ever
finding the right direction (even such a delight as pussy no longer means
anything, as is clearly seen in 'You Stupid Asshole': "You took your
clothes off / I started to laugh / That's when I knew it was through / I guess
I'll go take a bath").
Oh, and what about the music? Well, these guys
can certainly play; even though by 1980 we had already heard the absolute
majority of these riffs, for a bunch of rock critics, they raise plenty of
hell. It is not thoroughly uniform; the expanded reissue at least shows that
Saunders and Turner had a good ear for pop (check out the introductory riff to
'Carson Girls'), and, instead of hiding beneath bunches of sloppy power chords,
they instead take their cues from classic heroes — the Who are clearly echoed
on at least a couple of the tracks, and Link Wray on at least a couple of
others ('Hot Cars', eh?).
The overall result is not exactly «hilarious»,
but it achieves its ultimate goal — making the Ramones' debut sound like Quadrophenia
in comparison. Of course, all of this ongoing struggle against the stale
conventions of the pop formula also ensure that Inside My Brain, along with
the rest of the Samoans' catalog, will never be as gut-enjoyable as earlier,
«conventional» punk classics, but it is fun all the same to witness these guys'
interpretation of the quintessential rock aesthetics, even if it's all just a
bit of modernistic theater. Thumbs up.
BACK FROM SAMOA (1982)
1) Gas Chamber; 2) The Todd
Killings; 3) Lights Out; 4) My Old Man's A Fatso; 5) Time Has Come Today; 6)
They Saved Hitler's Cock; 7) Homosexual; 8) Steak Knife; 9) Haizman's Brain Is
Calling; 10) Tuna Taco; 11) Coffin Case; 12) You Stupid Jerk; 13) Ballad Of
Jerry Curlan; 14) Not Of This Earth.
The proper LP debut of the Samoans runs all of
a glorious seventeen minutes and honourably fulfills the promise of being the
most skilfully offensive record of 1982. Or does it? A brief glimpse at the
lyrics, odd enough, shows that, apart from such predictable target groups as
parents, Jews, and gays, most of the insults are hurled either against a vacuum
— stuff like 'You Stupid Jerk' barks and spits at no one in particular — or
against the band itself.
Musically, there is not much change, except for
generally faster tempos (which is why 'You Stupid Jerk' is able to make all of
its points in exactly twenty seconds) and a very cohesive, uniform hardcore
sound that meticulously wipes out all outside influences: no power pop
hints anywhere in sight. For a 17-minute running time, though, this is quite
all right.
Whether the stuff they are doing is «funny» or
«humorous» is a matter of personal taste, debate, and street fighting. Some
people will doubtlessly find lyrics like "They saved Hitler's cock, they
hid it under a rock... if Hitler's cock could choose its mate, it would ask for
Sharon Tate!" hilarious; others — unusual, but stupid; still others —
offensive without a good reason to be so. But in any case, it seems that humour
was not among the Samoans' primary goals here; if some of the tunes come across
as funny, it is rather a side effect of trying to be innovative in the art of
defying mainstream standards of «taste».
Of course, though, the finer these guys achieve
their goals, the more they fail in them. At least half of the songs are furious
odes to the art of being braindead and liking it — in 'Lights Out', we are
admonished to poke our eyes out, 'Steak Knife' is a further elaboration on all
the lobotomy-related topics of the Ramones, etc. But not a single one of these
songs could have ever been written by a true braindead punker; on the contrary,
it is hard to imagine anyone other than a bunch of former rock critics to
devise them. In the long run, Back From Samoa is nothing but a hyper-intellectual
art-rock album.
In the short run, it is necessary to add that,
although I do not believe the band members have really «written» a single one
of these riffs, they choose good ones from the standard punk repertoire, and
the choruses are fairly catchy — and where there are no riffs or choruses to
speak of, some tunes get by on the strength of gimmicks alone, like the
contrastive 'Ballad Of Jerry Curlan', where they seriously take it out on a
stereotypical «success story guy» (with a real historical prototype, no less)
by alternating soft «ballad»-style compliments with every hardcore insult they
are able to come up with.
This light entertainment value is what keeps Back
From Samoa still somewhat viable today — its offensive power long since
withered and tattered by changes in morality standards. Plus the usual level of
technique: 'My Old Man's A Fatso', reduced here to ninety seconds of pure
flame, combines genuine rock'n'roll drive with a level of precision worthy of a
first-rate (okay, second-rate) thrash metal band. To sum up, Back From Samoa
is what gives hardcore its good name, and for that, deserves an expected
thumbs up.
STP NOT LSD (1988)
1) I Lost (My Mind); 2) Wild
Hog Rhyde; 3) Laughing At Me; 4) STP Not LSD; 5) Starring At The Sun; 6) Death
Of Beewak; 7) Egyptomania; 8) Attack Of The Mushroom People; 9) Feet On The
Ground; 10) Garbage Pit; 11) (I'll Drink To This) Love Song; 12) Lost Highway.
Perhaps Back From Samoa did have a
«revolutionary» quality to it. But the Samoan rock critics did not really set
out to revolutionize music; their goals were more modest and, at the same time,
far more complex — distillation, bottling, and distribution of the
quintessential «rock spirit», the Holy Grail of every rock critic. And, much as
the punk movement in its original phase claimed the same goals, continuing to
move in the «hardcore» direction would, in the end, only displace, if not
actually profanate them.
So, instead, the Samoans fell back on their
roots — garage proto-punk and irrevent psych-folk of the mid-Sixties. The 1987
EP Yesterday Started Tomorrow introduced the retro styles in earnest,
culminating in a Jefferson Airplane cover, and by 1988, it was clear that these
guys had totally switched to recreating (with only minor updates) the visions
of The Sonics and The Holy Modal Rounders, with a bit of Velvet Underground
for good measure.
Nobody really got it, and very few were happy
about it. Who needs the Angry Samoans when they are not all that angry
any more? Speed is reduced, cussing is cut down, and what about all these acoustic
folk songs making fun of backwoods dwellers? What is this, Greenwich Village?
Where is anything even vaguely on the level of 'Right Side Of My Mind'?
But let us take a peep at the bright side. STP
Not LSD is anything but non-creative. If you like the classic garage
aesthetics, there is every reason to enjoy the Samoans' take on it. If people
see a reason for the existing of Brian Setzer and Dave Edmunds, and are willing
to argue that these guys are not totally expendable even if you have proper access
to all the treasure groves of classic rockabilly, then the same case can be
argued for the Samoans.
All I know is that STP Not LSD is fun.
The band still holds together tighter than a buttplug, the lyrics, if not as
obnoxiously obsessive, are on the same demented level, and even if all the
riffs are pilfered from old garage classics (which they may or may not be),
they're good riffs, and the sources are not always easily identifiable. Plus,
there is diversity a-plenty: for instance, Metal Mike employs just about every
single nasty, crunchy guitar tone ever recorded in the Sixties logbook and
beyond. (My favourite is the introduction to 'Death Of Beewak' — hello, San
Francisco!) Switches to acoustic, too, every now and then.
Certainly no amount of consolation is ever
going to turn the record into the kind of trailblazing classic that Back
From Samoa will be considered for as long as the trails do not become overgrown;
but the subgenre of «hardcore punks doing retro shit» is not tremendously large
in itself, which means STP Not LSD might deserve a bit of space in your
collection, too. Give it a modest thumbs up,
and don't be afraid to play it, say, once a year — it's only twenty-three
minutes.
RETURN TO SAMOA (1990)
1) Are You A Square? 2)
Permanent Damage; 3) D For The Dead; 4) 1981 (Trip Or Freak); 5) Matchstick
Men; 6) Radio Ad; 7) Posh Boy’s Cock; 8) Time To Fuck; 9) Wild Thing; 10)
Somebody To Love.
A bunch of outtakes from I'm not exactly sure
when; the album itself was sort of semi-official and is likely impossible to
find in non-bootlegged form. My own bootlegged copy comes with a healthy
addition of more than 15 live tracks played in some lousy NYC joint around
1981, which gives a fairly decent picture of what the band was really all about
at its dubious peak. But the album «proper» is just ten tracks that run the
typically Samoan length of 20 minutes.
The songs mostly catch the Samoans in a
transitional state here, fresh off the humorous/mental hardcore of Back From
Samoa and starting to pick up with the retro-garage thing. There is a very,
very intentionally lame cover of 'Somebody To Love', exactly the way a retired
rock critic and an upcoming PhD in math would be covering it while being drunk
or while pretending to be drunk; and a much tighter, but still lame version of
'Wild Thing' with improvised ad-libbed vocals that break all possible taboos in
the crudest ways (best moment: an impassioned "put your face in my
p...", then, suddenly aware of unwanted androgynous connotations,
"my p... penis!"). There is even a rendition of Status Quo's
'Matchstick Men' that starts off very faithful to the famous psychedelic
drone of the original before launching off into hardcore heaven.
'D For The Dead' may be of interest to
B-culture addicts, the Samoans' only anthem to zombie flicks; '1981', both with
its title and with its melody, is a clear, and not very exciting, evocation of
the Stooges' '1969'; and there might be lots of other references that I'm too
lazy to write about. The real good news, however, is that in sloppy outtake
form, the Samoans may be even better than they are in the final version —
because Saunders' and Turner's ideology is faithfully reflected on albums like
Back From Samoa in all but one respect: the required spontaneity feels
artificial and staged. With the likes of "put your face in my
penis", though, it's all too real. Return To Samoa proves, once and
for all, that these guys were quite willing to live out their rock'n'roll alter
egos at least in the studio, if not always in real life.
On stage, too, if you take into account the
live bonus tracks from 1981, where they play most of the stuff from their first
two albums and then aimlessly meander and dick around in between the tracks,
shooting off their mouths, inserting quotes from 'Matchstick Men' and 'Smoke On
The Water' and cool-heartedly remarking that "this must be the third amp
we've killed tonight" along the way. Piss-poor sound quality and thin
applause from a colossal audience of about five or six people complete the perfection
of the picture. Thumbs up, of course.
What other choice?
THE 90'S SUCK AND SO DO YOU (1998)
1) I'd Rather Do The Dog; 2)
Letter From Uncle Sam; 3) Suzy's A Loser; 4) In And Out Of Luv; 5) Mister M.
D.; 6) My Baby's Gone Gone Gone; 7) Beat Your Heart Out; 8) Don't Change My
Head.
By the mid-Nineties, little was left of the
Angry Samoans but Metal Mike who, for some reason, was still in love with the
name, mildly justifying it, perhaps, by the continuing presence of original
drummer Bill Vockeroth. The only studio memento of that incarnation was this
predictably laconic, unpredictably boring eight-song disc, the best thing about
which might have been its title — ringing truer than any given piece of its
content, even though one can just as easily replace «The 90's» with any
other decade.
The album is, overall, heavier than STP,
but even less deserving of getting aligned with the rest of the Samoans'
legacy. Basically, it's just minimalistic, heavily distorted power pop, reading
like a sincere, but uninspired tribute to the Ramones — which means that we
would all be much better off simply listening to the Ramones instead, since
even their worst, most heavily derivative albums contain more excitement than
this leaden platter.
There is absolutely no «band presence» here;
the credits do list two extra bass players and one additional guitarist
(Alison Victor), but ninety percent of the mix are occupied by Saunders' fuzzy,
always same-sounding riffs and blubbery nasal vocals. This is bad: punky-pop needs
band presence to convince and satisfy. The riffs are technically well played,
but most have been regurgitated so many times already over the past twenty
years that they can only generate emotion in a newborn baby. The vocals totally
suck — Saunders sings everything in a daze, as if they'd thrust that microphone
under his nose just as he was slipping out of some narcosis. Maybe that was his
idea of imitating the rough tenderness of Joey Ramone's love ballads, but it's
a total failure: Joey could generate innocent sentimentalism in a jiffy,
whereas when Metal Mike sings that "all the girls are after me", the
effect is not even funny, it's that of a big question mark.
The bottomline is that it is really unnecessary
to pursue the band's career after Back From Samoa; in fact, it would
make much better sense to pretend that the band never really existed after
1982, an assumption that would make them the perfect hardcore band — one
that said everything it had to say in the appropriate 20 minutes it took to say
it, and then was no more, which might be an even greater artistic achievement.
The idea that even now, in the XXIst century, there is still a band called the
Angry Samoans, playing assorted West Coast pubs to whatever unlucky souls they
might find there, is, in fact, so absurdly preposterous, that I simply refuse
to believe it. As for the album, I'd theoretically like to give it a thumbs
down, but the right side of my mind tells me that it is just a phantom — like
the Amityville Horror or something, so why bother?
FISTFUL OF METAL (1984)
1) Death Rider; 2) Metal
Thrashing Mad; 3) I'm Eighteen; 4) Panic; 5) Subjugator; 6) Soldiers Of Metal;
7) Death From Above; 8) Anthrax; 9) Across The River; 9) Howling Furies.
The East Coast response to the Californian
thrash explosion of 1983 starts here — and, frankly speaking, I have a hard
time understanding how to compare Fistful Of Metal with the likes of Kill
'Em All or Show No Mercy, except that people seem to generally like
the latter two but pan the former because it, uh, is too heavy on the Judas
Priest influence. Or something. Sure it is — anyone who names one of his songs
'Subjugator' already has a royalty debt to Rob Halford.
It does, however, look that Anthrax's first album
rides the coattails of the new storm rather than participate in its creation.
All the ingredients have been studied and replicated perfectly. Rhythm
guitarist Ian Scott emits steadily pulsating riffs which, when slow, are indeed
similar to the sharp polygonal figures of Judas Priest, and, when fast, display
technique that is fully on the level with Metallica and Slayer. Lead guitarist
Dan Spitz yields speedy melodic solos quite on par with Iron Maiden. Vocalist
Neil Turbin bawls, screams, and roars like any good disciple of the Ian Gillan
School of Bawl, Scream, and Roar should. And the rhythm section — Danny Lilker
on bass, Charlie Benante on drums — do just the kind of things a rhythm
section is expected to do in a thrash metal band; no more, and most certainly
no less.
But if there is any real reason to why Fistful
Of Metal gets a bad rap, it may be understood by simply glancing at the
song titles. Few people who name one of their songs 'Metal Thrashing Mad' can
count upon immediate recognition — unless they at least give it the
spirit of a 'For Whom The Bell Tolls', or the riff of an 'Enter Sandman' or
something. All of these tunes are decent, middle-of-the-road thrash which,
however, almost always promises more than it delivers. If I am given 'Howling
Furies', I expect the song to sound like howling furies; if, however, it
only sounds like a basic headbanging experience, I am bound to be disappointed.
The album's big surprise is a cover of Alice
Cooper's 'I'm Eighteen', which, according to legend, took an entire two days to
record because bassist Dan Lilker could not get into the right mood. Its
original spirit is completely incompatible with the rest of the record, and
Neil Turbin's rendition is totally rotten: he just screams it out like
everything else, leaving all the confusion and desperation of the protagonist
behind the door. Why they were so intent on paying this particular tribute is
beyond me; metal bands do owe a lot to the original Alice Cooper band, whether
they like it or not, but the song would have worked far better on one of those
collective tribute albums (that no one listens to anyway) than wedged in
between their apocalyptic metal fantasies.
Still, come what may, 'Deathrider' and the
title track at least deserve to be recognized as classic, if not ultimate,
thrash anthems that, at the very least, prove that Anthrax have graduated from
the Academy of Metal with perfect marks, and set the stage for further drilling
into the hard-to-penetrate soils of the heavy metal genre. My judgement is
neutral: well-performed, but generic, thrash is about as much use as
well-performed, but generic, blues — gives you a bit of fun time without being
as spiritually repulsive as, say, generic prog-metal — and is, therefore, quite
recommendable to headbangers all over the planet.
SPREADING THE DISEASE (1985)
1) A.I.R.; 2) Lone Justice; 3)
Madhouse; 4) S.S.C./Stand Or Fall; 5) The Enemy; 6) Aftershock;
7) Armed And Dangerous; 8) Medusa;
9) Gung-Ho.
Big changes all around. New bass player Frank
Bello may or may not be as good at his weapon as Dan Lilker, but he is
certainly more disciplined. More importantly, new vocalist Joey Belladonna
(real name of Bellardini) provides the band with an entirely new image.
Unlike Neil Turbin, Joey is not a screamer (he can scream, as is clearly
demonstrated on 'Medusa' and a few other songs, but clearly does not want to
capitalize on that); most of the time he sounds like a normal, sweaty, friendly
working class guy that, for some totally unclear reason, ended up in a thrash
metal band without belonging either to the banshee or the Cookie Monster
variety.
The contrast works, if only due to the surprise
factor. So when you listen to the big hit 'Madhouse', it is fun to interpret
lines like 'Trapped in this nightmare, I wish I'd wake' and 'It's a madhouse,
or so they claim, it's a madhouse, am I insane?' as sincere psychosis on the
part of the singer who, in a perfect world, would rather find his place in REO
Speedwagon than a thrash band. But then these are hard times, calling for heavy
answers, and even normal guys like Joey Belladonna have to join Anthrax
instead of Grand Funk. What is thrash metal, after all, if not a suitable
reflection of all the evils and wrongdoings of society? And why does it
have to be dominated by grotesque singing personalities, if it's all about the
common guy anyway?
But if the image has changed, the music has
not. They slowed down a bit; fewer songs are taken at ultra-speed than before,
and the excessive Judas Priest influence, of which they had been accused the
previous year, is nowhere any more obvious than on 'Madhouse' itself. The riffs
are just as moderately memorable, to be admired for their precision and power
rather than specific emotions stirred up differently on different songs. The
choruses are not too catchy. In short, I fail to see how the band's songwriting
— always their weakest side — has managed to improve with the departure of
Lilker and Turbin.
The important thing is, they are trying to get
rid of the cartoonish factor, or, rather, the stupid cartoonish factor.
The songs still deal with all the traditional themes of thrash metal, but with
the earthlier singing and slightly less clichéd lyrics, the intelligence
bar rises, and with it — the level of critical respect. With Spreading The
Disease, Anthrax managed to find themselves new, more demanding fans,
without losing the old ones. The difference is clearly seen if you compare the
bulk of the album with the last song, 'Gung-Ho', a leftover from the Neil
Turbin days. Belladonna still tries to save it with his humanly presence, but,
overall, the insane tempo multiplied by idiot lyrics about the evils of army
service condemns the song to the realm of silly excesses.
My favourite numbers are the simply titled
'Madhouse' and 'Medusa'; the former — because it is the perfect summary of
everything that Anthrax are about at this time, thrash riffage and grit and a
bit of anti-social punch, and the latter — because it is a cool epic metal song
about a mythological monster... 'nuff said. But, of course, I wouldn't know
how or what to write about them individually. The important question is: does
this stuff kick plenty of ass without making one feel like a third-grader? The
answer, I think, is yes, but then I have missed the third grade for so
long that I cannot feel too sure already.
Definitely a thumbs
up: emotions-wise, the senses perk up each time Belladonna clashes
his jaws behind a mighty Ian Scott riff, and brain-wise, I understand how this
is heads and tails above the «average» thrash product (or maybe I don't — truth
is, real thrash metal requires so much effort on the part of the player
that the brain is almost bound to be impressed). But hardly all the way
up — I don't remember much except the two 'M'-songs once the experience is
over, and if I were to train my brain to melt in the face of each well-trained,
well-armed band, there'd be very little of it left in no time.
AMONG THE LIVING (1987)
1) Among The Living; 2) Caught
In A Mosh; 3) I Am The Law; 4) Efilnikufesin; 5) A Skeleton In The Closet; 6)
Indians; 7) One World; 8) A.D.I./Horror Of It All; 9) Imitation Of Life.
Some random guy on some random website called
this «happy metal», and said he'd rather stick to blacker stuff. I don't know;
I think it would take an absolute musical genius to make such an over-the-top
genre as thrash metal truly «black». Do Slayer really scare you? Does Megadeth
make you want to hide under the bed? Perhaps Metallica does have a way of
crawling under one's skin in an uncomfortable way — but they are also the least
«generic thrash» of all such bands; surely not coincidentally.
So Among The Living finds Anthrax moving
further away from «unintentionally funny» (= awful) to «intentionally funny»
(= awesome). Letting the band members' infatuation with Stephen King and comic
books burst through, they now lend their steel riffs to songs about Judge Dredd
and Randall Flagg. Certainly a novel approach, but one that lets them find
their own face in the tiny confines of the thrash cell block: a grotesque
marriage of speed metal and pop culture. And it does not even matter much that
far from everyone in the world is acquainted with these characters: particular
names come and go, but the popcorn stays forever.
Of course, if a song like 'I Am The Law' were
written in all seriousness... but surely it is intended to be half-admiration,
half-irony, a brief role game to make life more exciting. It is more difficult
to say just how serious they are when writing about more earthly, socially
conscious issues ('Indians', about Indians; 'One World', about fighting for
peace) — the lyrics are far more trite, and it is not easy to spread good
morals together with headbanging riffs; as we see, some people even get
offended with the «happy metal» vibe.
But the band is at its most intelligent and
snappy not when singing about comic book heroes or about politics, but when
they turn on their own audiences, as in the classic 'Caught In A Mosh', which I
freely consider one of the greatest thrash anthems ever written. The main riff
is one of the few Anthrax riffs that are truly unforgettable — all beastly
power and speed — and the song offers the audience a chance to let off major
steam while at the same time (provided you pay attention to the lyrics)
understanding how ridiculous they look when doing it: "Cold sweat, my
fists are clenching, stomp, stomp, stomp, the idiot convention". Does the
song approve of the practice of moshing or does it condemn it? This band is
clever enough to avoid a straight answer.
Overall, the riffs they come up with seem to
have slightly increased in both complexity and memorability, but not enough to
make them more discussable than their lyrical subjects or basic attitude. The
important point is that they have learned how to imbue these riffs with — for
lack of a more suitable expression — somewhat intellectual content, earning the
thrash genre extra points in respectability. If you are the moshing
sort, you will adore all fifty minutes of this; if you are not, you are still
welcome to recognize the craft and care and even humour that went into it, like
I certainly do, even though my own headbanging instincts were only seriously
triggered once (as the awesome bass riff of 'Caught In A Mosh' creeps in and blows
you away). Thumbs up from the brain; the
album's «classic» status is understood and deserved.
STATE OF EUPHORIA (1988)
1) Be All, End All; 2) Out Of
Sight, Out Of Mind; 3) Make Me Laugh; 4) Antisocial; 5) Who Cares Wins; 6) Now
It's Dark; 7) Schism; 8) Misery Loves Company; 9) 13; 10) Finale; 11*) I'm The
Man.
This was preceded by what is today recognized
as one of Anthrax's highest points — the EP I'm A Man, whose lead-off
track can be found on some editions of State Of Euphoria as a bonus; it
is one of the earliest examples of straightforward «rap metal», a crossover
that, hard as it is to believe today, was fairly jaw-dropping back in 1987.
But it is still moderately funny, lashing out at idiot stereotypes and
employing the barely discernible 'Hava Nagila' riff in the chorus.
Then something changed, a dark cloud rolled
through the evening sky, and all of a sudden Anthrax were not funny any more. State
Of Euphoria was not only their heaviest, but also their bleakest album up
to that point — never mind the misleading title. Dropping the comic book aspect
entirely or almost entirely, the boys concentrate on rebellion topics and
social criticism, all taken very, very seriously. Even the riffs are blacker,
although that may be just an intuitive impression triggered by the lyrical
gloom.
The critics, who were secretly hoping for more
popcorn and more Judge Dredd, responded by hating the record. Obviously, since
these guys do not have Metallica's chops — they're good old rock'n'rollers in
thrashers' clothes, not some sort of reverend prophet-artists of the apocalypse
— they should leave the darkness and the holy anger to those who can make good
use of it. Here they had a terrific niche carved out for themselves, and then
to go and lose it all of their own free will? Is that proverbially stupid or
what?
Indeed, State Of Euphoria sounds much more
«generic thrash» than their previous two albums. But it is more polite to
compare it to the generic thrash of Fistful Of Metal — and see just how
much these guys have grown since then. The riffage has improved a ton, with
each song at least sporting one or two meticulously constructed melodies, even
if far from all of them are heart-breaking; and the attitude has shifted from
balls-to-the-wall, brains-against-the-wall exaggerated aggression to things
that make much more sense. Not that I am deeply moved by their preaching,
which, in lyrical terms, rarely moves beyond leftist propaganda for
first-graders ('Schism'), but it is nowhere near as off-putting as the caricature
image they began with four years earlier.
Technically, then, there is no problem with State
Of Euphoria. It is respectable, intelligently (if the word is applicable to
the genre at all) conceived thrash, with occasional original flourishes — like
the surprise cello line that announces 'Be All, End All' and then mutates into
its evil guitar riff — and, in places, a punkish spirit, e. g. on the Trust
cover 'Antisocial'. The album may be formulaic and unoriginal, but the band
definitely sounds inspired to me, quite sure of what they are doing and
shifting their focus from cheesy pop culture to darker matters not because
someone forced them to, but because they really felt like doing it.
Describing the songs is pointless — how many
different words can one come up with to depict a thrash metal riff? — so I can
only say, once more, that I think this to be a decent thrash offering,
not exceptional, but well acceptable to any fan of the genre, which I am not,
so the thumbs up thing comes from the
brain side exclusively.
PERSISTENCE OF TIME (1990)
1) Time; 2) Blood; 3) Keep In The Family; 4) In My World; 5) Gridlock;
6) Intro To Reality; 7) Belly
Of The Beast; 8) Got
The Time; 9) H8 Red; 10) One Man Stands; 11) Discharge.
Anthrax's last album with Belladonna raises the
stakes introduced on State Of Euphoria even further, leaving behind all
humour and concentrating almost exclusively on human rights, personal
freedoms, and the meanest imaginable thrash riffs to have ever supported
democracy and progress. By overriding the speed limits, they had won back some
critical support, and in general statistical terms Persistence seems to
have earned itself more points than its predecessor.
This is understandable; the band quite
transparently throws itself at the listener this time, desperate to make a
rousing statement — more than half of the songs are rebellious anthems, thrashy
in form, punkish in spirit. Hate! Hate! Hate! Hate! Hate! Do you know that at
least five out of ten songs on here have the word 'hate', and, quite
frequently, more than once? The last time they had so much hatred packed into a
record was on Fistful Of Metal, but they were little kids back then,
scribbling dirty words on their teacher's chair when he wasn't looking. Now
they have an official party agenda about it.
Even the lead-off single, a surprising cover of
Joe Jackson's relatively inoffensive 'Got The Time', has been transformed into
a fit of mad rage from an immediate lobotomy candidate. (Punk rockers might
find it their favorite Anthrax tune — it sounds almost exactly like the
Ramones, only freshly taught to actually play their instruments). But 'Got The
Time' is simply a frustrated complaint at being overloaded with all the little
nuisances of life; imagine, then, what happens when the band finds itself a
more personified victim? The greatest concentration of bile and dynamite is
packed into 'Keep It In The Family', a seven-minute rant against «sheep
mentality» that never was a single but still became a fan favorite purely on
the strength of its intensity and dedication ('this one's the happiest one on
the album', Joey would sometimes announce in concert); but most other songs are
not far behind it in said intensity.
I do not know if it is the extra injected
testosterone or closer attention to songwriting that is responsible for the
impression that the songs are generally more memorable. There are interesting
hooks — the Sabbath-esque guitar twist on the "paranoia, amped and
wired" chorus of 'Time'; the chest-baring, inspirational "I'm not
afraid, I'm a walking razor blade" refrain of 'In My World'; the
apocalyptic atmosphere of "it's a long time, long time comin'" on
'Gridlock', and others. Not my style, never my style, but theoretically quite
attractive all the same.
Thus, in a year most rife on classics of the
thrash genre — The Black Album, Seasons In The Abyss, Rust In
Peace etc. — Anthrax seem to have held their own against all the big
brothers, and certainly came out as the most socially active of all, be it just
an act of posing or not. Few hold it as their very best (no Judge Dredd, see),
but many hold it as their last bout of greatness, and my own brain tends to
agree on that and confirm it with a thumbs up.
ATTACK OF THE KILLER B'S (1991)
1) Milk; 2) Bring The Noise; 3) Keep
It In The Family (live); 4) Startin' Up A Posse; 5) Protest And Survive; 6)
Chromatic Death; 7) I'm The Man '91; 8) Parasite; 9) Pipeline; 10) Sects; 11)
Belly Of The Beast (live); 12) N.F.B. (Dallabnikufesin).
This pun-heralded collection of B-sides and
rarities, spanning from around 1987 to 1991, would normally belong in the
«Addenda» section, but not only is owning it an absolute must for anyone even
remotely interested in Anthrax, I would even go as far as to state that this is
the one Anthrax album to own if you decide to only own one (a rather natural
wish, actually).
To be more precise, it is one of those rare
cases when a rag-taggy bunch of an artist's throwaways and temporary
distractions may turn out to be more involving than his «regular» stuff.
Everything that we know and love (hate) about the band is here, along with
quite a few new facts in their biography, and the diversity is very refreshing
if you like your thrash slightly watered down with extraneous influences.
The album opens quite conveniently with 'Milk',
a solid, predictable thrasher originally recorded by the Anthrax side project
S.O.D., but after that the only standard thrash metal tunes are live renditions
of 'Keep It In The Family' and 'Belly Of The Beast'. The rest can simply be
defined as «Anthrax Meets...», with the object position filled in in either a
literal or figurative way, e. g.:
—
«...Public
Enemy»: 'Bring The Noise', sometimes viewed as the second most historically important
rap-rock collaboration after 'Walk This Way' by Aerosmith/Run-D.M.C., although
the main riff can hardly stand competition with Joe Perry;
—
«...Hardcore
Punk»: the cover of 'Protest And Survive' by British punk rockers Discharge is
one of their strongest injections of punk aesthetics inside the thrash riffs;
—
«...The
Simple & Stupid»: their take on KISS' 'Parasite' is tons more accomplished
in the technical sense than the original (this can be easily guessed without
even hearing the song), but the band's «street feeling» makes them succeed in not
losing the dumb fun factor of the original, either;
—
«...The
PMRC»: 'Startin' Up A Posse' sews together speed metal and cowboy muzak (!) to
deliver an adequate answer to Tipper Gore's initiative. It may not be as funny
as intended (the lyrics are too straightforward, and the inclusion of each
single specimen of «strong language» that they could think of is too
predictable), but it works, and whatever works in the war against censorship
should pass each and every seal of approval;
—
«...surf
rock» (!!) — a phenomenal idea to dress up the head-whirling speed
entertainment of the genre in metal guitar clothing, illustrated by their
hearty rendition of The Chantays' 'Pipeline'. So when is that thrash metal
album by The Ventures coming out in response?;
—
«...corny
Americana balladeering»: 'N.F.B.' is the album's only bit of genuine parody
with no additional meaning, and, as such, a suitably unforgettable final flourish
to the record. Not in a million years could one guess that the last phrase on
an Anthrax album would be "Joey, give me some tissue".
Among The Living may have been Anthrax's greatest contribution
to this world, but, frankly speaking, it was not until I had thoroughly
assimilated Killer B's that the true — and usually carefully concealed
— scope of the band's talent became understandable. Why they felt it necessary
to confine their wild genre experimentation to such hard-to-find periphery and
streamline most of the LPs in a far more generic manner, we will never understand;
the likeliest answer is that they felt a spiritual/financial obligation to all the
«moshers», too dumb to accept anything beyond the basic headbanging pattern —
but, on the other hand, it's not like they ever made it all that high on the
charts (certainly never higher than someone like Faith No More, who had no problems
whatsoever about merging intelligence with moderate commercial success). So
there is really no ground for speculations. Thumbs
up, and a hearty recommendation for even non-metal fans as long as
they are ready to appreciate the power of invention in popular music.
SOUND OF WHITE NOISE (1993)
1) Potters Field; 2) Only; 3) Room For One More; 4)
Packaged Rebellion; 5) Hy Pro Glo; 6) Invisible; 7) 1000 Points Of Hate; 8)
Black Lodge; 9) C11H17N2O2SNa; 10)
Burst; 11) This Is Not An Exit.
Some things never change, but this is not one
of them. Suddenly, Anthrax no longer sound like Anthrax — they sound like Alice
In Chains! Where is the irony? Where is the healthy, sanitary aggression? Where
are the generic shredding thrash rhythms? Why is the new vocalist singing
through his nose like a grunge queen? Why are all the songs so depressing? What
in the world made them think this was what the fans needed?
Well, see, first they lost Joey Belladonna due
to some internal conflicts that did not get a lot of publicity, and replaced
him with John Bush, essentially an «old school metal» singer, formerly of
Armored Saint, one of America's biggest non-thrash (and non-glam,
for that matter) metal bands in the early Eighties. Second, they signed up with
a new label (Elektra Records). Third, right on the heels of his work with Bush
on the last LP for Armored Saint, they teamed up with Dave Jerden — who, as it
turned out, just happened to be the producer of Alice In Chains! With all these
new developments, the reformed Anthrax were only too happy to incorporate certain
grunge elements inside their sound and see how it work out.
How? Perfectly! The worst thing I can say of Sound
Of White Noise is that, unlike Among The Living, it does not have a
unique identity of its own; by throwing in extra darkness and seriousness at
the expense of «moshing», Anthrax have aligned themselves with the main pack of
the grunge warriors, allowing themselves to be pigeonholed far more easily. But
this has little bearing on the fact that so many songs on here rule not only
without mercy, but also with a modicum of added intelligence that we never saw
during the Belladonna era.
There are some totally amazing, unbelievably
strong riffs on the album, as if the band woke up overnight with a ten times
more intense belief in the impending Coming Of The End than it ever shared.
Case in point: the main riff for 'Invisible' that enters the stage around 0:56
— brutality that ranks up there with the best of Sabbath and Metallica. The
relentless pounding of 'Only', 'Room For One More', and 'Packaged Rebellion'
may be the most terrifying trio sequence in Anthrax history, and it does not
even matter what words John Bush is pronouncing (although, for that matter, the
rant against «packaged rebellion» is one of the cleverest things they ever
produced, all the more ironic because so much of Belladonna-era Anthrax is
«packaged rebellion» in itself), as long as they stream out to some of the most
melodic, and, at the same time, grim-reaperish passages from Scott Ian and Dan
Spitz.
At a certain point, the record takes a strange
turn, as the band members declare themselves fans of Twin Peaks and
collaborate with the series' composer Angelo Badalamenti on the dark ballad
'Black Lodge', which, frankly speaking, sounds very little like either
Badalamenti himself (he contributes some of his trademark synth moods, but they
are rather deep in the background) or like Anthrax in any of their
incarnations; more like a cross between Dada-era Alice Cooper and
any-era Rush, if you ask me, but curious all the same. And then, starting with
their punkish, but not highly memorable, anthem to sodium pentathol, they move
in closer to the old thrashy sound, as if having run out of grunge-metal ideas,
somewhat diluting and spoiling the effect of the grinding first half, before
coming back to their senses on the most Alice In Chains-ish song of them all,
the terrifying 'This Is Not An Exit'.
Yes, at this moment in their lives, everything
was going as right as it could — the band desperately needed a reinvention and
it chose the best possible model. Why that model did not manage to last very
long is anybody's guess; in the meantime, a brutally honest thumbs up, and a hearty recommendation to
everyone who loves their metal grumbly, gruffy, and melodic. Of course, it is
also easy to understand the old guard fans who felt betrayed by the band's
stylistic jump — but, as John Lennon used to say, "you have all the old
records there if you want something round and hard up your butt". Or something
along those lines. You get the general idea.
LIVE: THE ISLAND YEARS (1994)
1) N.F.L.; 2) A.I.R.; 3)
Parasite; 4) Keep It In The Family; 5) Caught In A Mosh; 6) Indians; 7)
Antisocial; 8) Bring The Noise; 9) I Am The Law; 10) Metal Thrashing Mad; 11)
In My World; 12) Now It’s Dark.
It is hard to imagine the Anthrax live sound
significantly different from the Anthrax studio sound, unless, in a paroxism of
cool, they’d want to baffle their fans by playing nothing but symphonic
rearrangements of Phil Collins hits. This weakness of imagination,
unfortunately, is in full agreement with reality, so the only problem of this
live retrospective is that one who has already studied the studio albums needs
it not.
Brief factual notes: all the tracks are from two
shows with Belladonna still at the wheel, one in 1991, one in 1992; major
emphasis is on the hits, although there are a couple surprises. e. g. ‘Metal
Thrashing Mad'’from the early Neil Turbin era; and a joint performance of
‘Bring The Noise’ with Public Enemy is included, the only number to be
seriously reworked from the original, but, as far as I can tell, seriously less
focused and more chaotic.
Brief critical opinion: essential for
slavery-bound fans and completists, but hardly worth the bother for those
without significant brain damage. To be «caught in a mosh» during an Anthrax show
is, in all likelihood, an unforgettable experience (and one that I would not
wish for myself even in exchange for world peace), but listening to such a show
on record inevitably brings forwards all the flubs and off-key singing, which,
in a genre as demanding as thrash, are unpardonable. ‘Caught In A Mosh’
itself, for instance, starts off decent, but they totally ruin the chorus by
failing to synchronize the vocals.
At its best, Live succeeds in
replicating the power of the studio albums without augmenting it; at its worst,
it shows how much care and rehearsal must have gone into the studio recordings,
because spontaneity is definitely not on these guys’ side. Not exactly a
thumbs down, but it is hard to praise live albums whose main point is to
certify that the artist did not suffer from stage fright.
STOMP 442 (1995)
1) Random Acts Of Senseless
Violence; 2) Fueled; 3) King Size; 4) Riding Shotgun; 5) Perpetual Motion; 6)
In A Zone; 7) Nothing; 8) American Pompeii; 9) Drop The Ball; 10) Tester; 11)
Bare.
This is where the band officially turns to
shit. No one knows why exactly, but three factors may be of importance: (a)
Scott Ian has crossed the 40-year mark, automatically putting him into the
«Metal MILF» category, an acquired taste if there ever was one; (b) lead
guitarist Dan Spitz, a major pillar of melody for the band in the past,
abandoned his comrades, unofficially replaced by his former guitar technician (!)
ominously named Paul Crook; (c) most importantly, even though the band insists
on more or less continuing in the same doom-laden, smile-free style they had on
White Noise, they went from producer Dave Jerden — who knew how
to get that style right — to a brand new veteran producer duo, who quite
obviously do not know how to get it right. They call themselves The
Butcher Bros., and that's just about right.
The riffs have lost all sensitivity; still
brutal and venomous, but no longer communicating with the listener. So much so
not communicating, in fact, that, first time ever, I find the best song on here
to be the acoustic ballad 'Bare', graciously offering a last-minute respite to
those brave few who have withstood the metallic pressure to the end; and even
then, there is hardly anything special about that number. It merely reminds
you of the long-forgotten fact that music may have actually been
designed by its original creators to nurture your senses, not torture them.
There is nothing informative or meaningful I
can say about these songs. The band complained that Elektra Records had let
them down by refusing to promote the album, but, for once, I see the record
company's point very clearly — what was there to promote? There is not even a
single song that could qualify as a stand-out single. It's all about the
branding-iron guitar tones and the clenched teeth vocals from a totally
misused John Bush.
Earlier on, I mentioned how State Of
Euphoria may not have a lot of outstanding tunes, but sort of gets by
through conviction and passion alone. The idea does not, however, work with Stomp
442. As hateful and aggressive as it is, the band has completely lost
direction — it is hateful and aggressive because that's what the fans expect
out of them, not because they want to experiment with the emotion of hatred.
The results are predictable and boring, and there are few things in the world
more threatening to one's love of music than having to sit through a boring
metal album. Thumbs down; stay away
unless you're into dental extraction.
VOLUME 8: THE THREAT IS REAL (1998)
1) Crush; 2) Catharsis; 3)
Inside Out; 4) Piss 'N' Vinegar; 5) 604; 6) Toast To The Extras; 7) Born Again
Idiot; 8) Killing Box; 9) Harms Way; 10) Hog Tied; 11) Big Fat; 12) Cupajoe;
13) Alpha Male; 14) Stealing From A Thief.
Self-produced, fortunately, and immediately a
big improvement over the unfortunate Stomp. By now, we have a fairly
good idea of what to expect from a Bush & Ian-led Anthrax: a series of kill
'em all style Panzer attacks (or was that Pantera attacks, given the
near-complete merger of the two bands' styles?), a few alt-rock style acoustic
ballads, and a couple ridiculous, but engaging comic links to dress it all up.
The only question is whether it works or it sinks.
I certainly had a better time trying to groove
along to the sounds of Volume 8 than its predecessor. Either Paul Crook
has succeeded in adapting to the band's mentality, or they simply spent more
time sifting out the insipid, but both the riffs and the vocal hooks go at
least one notch up. Here be just a brief going-over through the good moments:
"Won't you crush on me, crush on me" from 'Crush', followed by some
first-rate headbanging; "Angels in my heart, devils in my eyes" from
'Catharsis', steady good rocking tonight; "From on top of the world, I'll
throw you down a rope" from 'Hog Tied'; "Carrying the weight of the
world in my hands!" from 'Big Fat' — these are well-designed, melodic,
meaningful hooks.
The funny country rocker (!) 'Toast To The
Extras' and the closing ballad 'Pieces' (a «hidden track») rule by nature of
being throwaways — if you heard these songs on, say, a post-reunion Lynyrd
Skynyrd album, you'd probably throw up, but in the context of the usual Anthrax
grinder, they bring in an element of coziness that may win you over.
All in all, they seem to be retreating back to
the grungy atmospherics of White Noise, even if there is fat chance they
will ever be able to completely reiterate its success. Still, switching back
and forth between the tracks of the 1998 and the 1995 album, I can't help but
be surprised at how consistently better they managed to sound this time.
Really, most of it is about the guitar sound: on Stomp 442, loud as it
was, it came across as muffled and muzzled — here, it's as if The Butcher
Bros. left and took the muzzle along, so you not only get to hear all the
snarling in the proper tone, you get to experience some real tearing at the
throat. BLOOD! That's what you want when listening to post-Belladonna Anthrax,
and on Volume 8, you do get some, though perhaps not as fresh and
smokin' as a true metalhead usually likes it.
WE'VE COME FOR YOU ALL (2003)
1) Contact; 2) What Doesn't
Die; 3) Superhero; 4) Refuse To Be Denied; 5) Safe Home; 6) Any Place But Here;
7) Nobody Knows Anything; 8) Strap It On; 9) Black Dahlia; 10) Cadillac Rock
Box; 11) Taking The Music Back; 12) Crash; 13) Think About An End; 14)
W.C.F.Y.A.; 15*) Safe Home (acoustic); 16*) We're A Happy Family.
The album title is, more likely than not, a
gruesomely black-humored nod to the «anthrax scare» of the psychologically
unstable post-9/11 period, and, be that in bad taste or not, it is easy to understand
the desire to capitalize on the stroke of luck that befell the band when every
person in America inadvertendly added one more Greek word to his/her lexicon.
Of course, Anthrax the band came for «all» no
more than any of those letters with white powder: on the contrary, the band's
ninth album is their most rigidly thrash-dedicated in years, as they either purge
out outside influences or assimilate them and their carriers. Can you tell,
without looking, that none other than Roger Daltrey himself guest stars as
second vocalist on 'Taking The Music Back'? The song is certainly a little
poppier than on the average, but Daltrey's contribution to it, for the most
part, sounds like John Bush's echo — and it is only the 'Won't Get Fooled
Again'-style scream at 2:29 into the song that gives him away, and only if you
are listening to the song with the utmost attention because you happen to be
writing a thesis on the album.
Nevertheless, the conservatism works well; Volume
8 had some catchy material, for sure, but here, with the addition of new
lead guitarist Rob Caggiano, they also tighten up the accompanying sound. The
guitars never manage to reach the fearsome heights of White Noise, but
neither do they all blend together in a boring sludge mess. No single riff is
worth a special description, no single chorus is worth particular admiration,
no single piece of lyrics deserves its own praise, but the overall impression
is positive all the way through. Yes, a few of these choruses may veer too
close to «nu-metal» ('Superhero'), but that is no immediate reason to
anathemize them — Anthrax have too deep and honorable a pedigree to debase
themselves to the shallow extremes of this unhappy sub-genre.
With nothing but metal purism in mind, there
are no ballads here, but the lead single, 'Safe Home', was actually the closest
they got to unabashed sentimentalism on the album, and, although some
metalheads were disappointed, I think it is no crime to buy into this — Bush is
quite capable of carrying on a straightforward Love Anthem, plus Caggione comes
up with a tremendous, flaming solo that is definitely the album's highlight. (Some
editions of the album also add an early acoustic demo of the song as a bonus
track where it is a ballad, and a good one).
What with heavy metal's unfortunate tendency to
degenerate into sludgy boredom or shameful self-parody, these days, if a non-groundbreaking
metal album manages to avoid both, it's already a terrific achievement — one
that We've Come For You All definitely achieves. (John) Bush-tolerant
Anthrax fans will love it; (George W.) Bush-tolerant Republican fans will hate
it; non-metalheads like me might listen to it with moderate interest. These
three points merit some sort of conditional thumbs
up, I suppose.
MUSIC OF MASS DESTRUCTION (2004)
1) What Doesn't Die; 2) Got
The Time; 3) Caught In A Mosh; 4) Safe Home; 5) Room For One More; 6)
Antisocial; 7) Nobody Knows Anything; 8) Fueled; 9) Inside Out; 10) Refuse To
Be Denied; 11) I Am The Law; 12) Only.
Pretty damn good live album (packaged as
one-half CD, one-half DVD; my review only applies to the CD portion), provided
you approve of John Bush's frontman image; the live banter is actually quite
consistent with his studio spirit — «tough guy with a slightly bigger brain
than that of most tough guys». His dedication to patching up the band's uneven
history is clearly seen in the intro to 'Antisocial': "How many old
schoolers are there in the audience? How many new schoolers are out there? How
many people don't give a flying fuck about school?" — this should be taken
as a veiled excuse for singing old Belladonna classics, I guess, but it is
pretty smart put all the same. Why should we, indeed, give a flying fuck about
school?
Besides, he does sing the old classics fairly
well; what the guy lacks in swaggering charisma, he easily compensates with
sincere workmanhood and stamina. Under his lead, 'Caught In A Mosh', for
instance, becomes tighter and more grueling than we heard it on The Island
Years — no longer does the chorus fall to pieces. And with all the extra
iron in his voice, 'I Am The Law' acquires an extra amount of seriousness that
makes the «old school» more in line with the «new school», whether one likes
it or not.
The setlist is consistently great — with the
exception of, at most, a couple duds from the slipaway period of Stomp
and Volume 8, they concentrate on all the right material, including
ripping renditions of 'Room For One More' and 'Only' from Bush's best record;
and 'Safe Home' is one number to actively benefit from audience participation
(it is an anthem, after all), yet the crowd roar is not loud enough to overbear
the perfect reproduction of the flaming guitar solo.
It is ironic, of course, that the album,
summarizing Bush's decade-long presence in the band, would turn out to be his
last — even as Music Of Mass Destruction seems to prove that Anthrax
have found a perfect compromise between their early classic humorous image and
the later transformation into a deadly serious grunge-o-metal monster, pretty
soon it became clear that no one was really happy about that compromise. Still,
the album shows that the decade was not a complete waste at all, and I suppose
metal history will be sort of lonelier, decide we to erase the Bush years out
of our collective memory. Thumbs up.
ALIVE 2 (2005)
1) Among The Living; 2) Caught
In A Mosh; 3) A.I.R.; 4) Antisocial; 5) Lone Justice; 6) Efilnikufesin
(N.F.L.); 7) Deathrider; 8) Medusa; 9) In My World; 10) Indians; 11) Time; 12)
Be All, End All; 13) I Am The Law.
Here is touchable proof that Anthrax did
give a flying fuck about school. Nobody saw this reunion coming, yet it still
came out of nowhere: the original lineup, with both Belladonna and Dan
Spitz reembracing with Scott Ian for a full-scale concert tour. And John Bush?
Quietly given the sack as if he were nothing but a sack himself.
The resulting album and DVD is, in all honesty,
Alive 3, if we count The Island Years — and we should — but it
ties in perfectly with forgetting all about the John Bush era. Apparently, it
was all right for Bush to sing old Belladonna material, but there was no way
Belladonna would be singing «new school» stuff. No 'Room For One More' for this
guy: the setlist freezes strictly at 1990. They still sing the pre-Belladonna
material ('Deathrider'), though.
The performance is rock solid, to be sure:
Belladonna's voice got a little bit deeper with age, but essentially unspoilt
through the rock'n'roll lifestyle, and, in comparison to The Island Years,
the band generally spends less time dicking around and is more concerned about
getting the sound right ('Caught In A Mosh', in comparison with the old
version, is pulled off brilliantly). Stage banter is reduced to an absolute
minimum, although audience participation in the singing of 'Antisocial',
'Indians', and other tracks is still a must.
As for the setlist, on the tour they would
frequently perform Among The Living in its entirety (this is reflected
in the accompanying DVD), with Spreading The Disease taking honourable
second place; anyway, no complaints can be voiced, and purists may rejoice in
seeing that 'Bring The Noise' has been omitted from the CD tracklist, so that
everything is pure, stark, blistering thrash from top to bottom.
Anthrax's career after the reunion has been
somewhat of a crude mess, though. The Belladonna reunion was short-lived, and
produced no new studio material. Then it was followed by two years with Dan
Nelson as the band's new vocalist — no new studio material, again, even though
the band did hold studio sessions, laying the basis for a new record. Then
they fired Nelson and, for another year, reunited with John Bush — no new
studio material. Then they fired John Bush again and reaccepted
Belladonna (!!) — so far, no new studio material. All that is left for us to do
is restock our popcorn and wait for the next episode. When is the reunion with
Neil Turbin?
WORSHIP MUSIC (2011)
1) Worship (Intro); 2) Earth
On Hell; 3) The Devil You Know; 4) Fight 'Em 'Til You Can't; 5) I'm
Alive; 6) Hymn 1; 7) In The End; 8) The Giant; 9) Hymn 2; 10)
Judas Priest; 11) Crawl; 12) The Constant; 13) Revolution
Screams.
Okay then. Eight years into their personal
history, Anthrax have finally reemerged with a new studio album. The birth
process was long and painful: many of these songs had been recorded as early as
2009, with Dan Nelson on vocals, but after Nelson quit the band, the results
were shelved indefinitely. Re-enter John Bush, for a little while, but, feeling
somewhat odd about overdubbing his vocals on material with which he had not
been engaged previously, re-exit John Bush and re-enter Joey Belladonna — who
had no such qualms, apparently, although some of the songs still had to be
re-recorded, and a few completely new ones added.
Anyway, Worship
Music is a genuine Anthrax album with an authentic Anthrax lineup; not a
«reunion», since the band had been active all these years, and definitely not a
«nostalgia trip», because there are no conscious attempts here to emulate the
sound of any particular «classic» album, be it Among The Living or Sound Of
White Noise. Nor is it a trendy, «modernized» record that could try to suck
up to nu-metal fans or some other crowd. It is 100% Anthrax — which explains
the mostly positive reviews that critics gave it (and most of the critics that
gave it positive reviews were Anthrax fans to begin with).
Unfortunately, I cannot join in, no matter how
hard I try. Technically, everything is done right. We have crunchy riffs, wild
solos, a strong vocalist who has not yet lost any of his youthful stamina, and
a stab at «relevance» — Worship Music?
More like Warship Music, as every
second song on here is an aggressive battle cry, proving to the world that
these days, it may need a thump on the head from the likes of Anthrax more than
ever before. With that, I might even concur.
It's just that the material is weak. First,
Belladonna's return does not imply the return of sarcasm and irony of the
band's classic period. All of the songs are as dead serious and self-important
as everything Anthrax ever did since John Bush led them into a
firmly-clenched-teeth direction. And as good as Joey can be, he is much better off adding a comic,
tongue-in-cheek whiff to the proceedings, than playing a heart-on-the-sleeve
street hero.
Worse, the riffs are uninteresting. Now we know
for sure that John Bush was not the problem — the problem was that, ten years
into their career, Anthrax had thoroughly exhausted the small pack of ter-riff-ic chord sequences yielded by the
supernatural forces. I see how, on many of these songs, they consciously try to
come up with creative melodies — as the riffs get longer and more complex — but
there is no individuality to any of these songs. The only thing that remains is
pure brawn. 'Fight 'Em Til You Can't' is clearly the centerpiece here, and if
you want to adopt it as your everyday anti-establishment anthem, you are
welcome, but I find the main riff emotionally hollow, and the vocal melody only
«vaguely» catchy. Maybe it's my personal problem — but then how the heck do we
explain the entirely different reaction to Sound
Of White Noise?
Most of the songs, with the exception of several
brief instrumental links, follow the exact same formula — fast thrash rockers
(only 'Crawl', true to its title, slows the tempo down a bit), many of them
with the exact same Martial Punch, which might be a good thing to lift up the
spirits of a pack of Freedom Fighters on a particularly long march, but is
fairly boring if you are just sitting in your room, imagining the Fight for
Freedom in the confines of your mind. I was hoping that at least a song called
'Judas Priest' would turn out to be more inspired than the rest — on the contrary,
it is one of the album's lowest points, an empty mess of aggression with not a
single unusual ear-catching moment.
If this is the best that Scott Ian and co. can
come up with in eight years, both of
my hands, thumbs and all, openly vote for the band to call it a day — or, at
least, become a certified «oldies act», particularly now that they are together
with Belladonna again. Go back, relisten to Among The Living or Persistence
Of Time and remember them when they were so much more experimental,
diverse, catchy, and funny. Actually, that might be their only chance — try and
get some fun back into the music.
Trying to get somewhere on the strength of «fight the power» alone will get
them about as far as it gets every one-trick heavy rock band. The gutter.
Thumbs down, even
though I may be alone on this, judging by the near-universal acclaim — but I'd
still like to explain it by the mere fact of fan hunger for new material. I
mean, it's a new Anthrax album! Loud! Crunchy! Aggressive! Joey on vocals! A
headbanger's paradise! Under those circumstances — who the hell needs creative
songwriting?
ANTHEMS (2013)
1) Anthem; 2) T.N.T.; 3)
Smokin'; 4) Keep On Runnin'; 5) Big Eyes; 6) Jailbreak; 7) Crawl; 8) Crawl
[remix].
A fun footnote in Anthrax's catalog, this one:
a short EP of songs that pay tribute to the band's childhood heroes — the
testosterone-worshipping, sweat-grinding, crunch-rockin' dudes of «The Me
Decade». «Tribute albums» like these seem to become the norm of day in the 21st
century (as more and more people begin to realize that they can do no better
than the dinosaurs, after all), but usually the tribute-payer in question is
trying to present this in sort of a «Me and Mr. Amadeus» manner, recasting the
original in his/her/their own image and, more often than not, butchering the
classic and embarrassing the reputation.
In contrast, Anthrax do not go for that kind of
shit. The six songs they cover are played as closely to the original as
possible — the only difference being that the guitar melodies are dutifully approached
from the thrash angle. Even Joey Belladonna tries, as far as possible, to
imitate the styles of the original singers — no mean feat, considering they run
all the gamut from Geddy Lee to Phil Lynott. And I would say the results are
not only fun, but even a little moving: you don't really need to listen to the
whole thing more than once, but you do
get the feeling that they really really love music in general, and these old
bands in particular. (We leave aside the fact that, in 2013, there is not that
significant an age difference between any of them and Anthrax themselves — chronologically, the last song covered is
Journey's ʽKeep On Runnin'ʼ, released the same year that Anthrax was
formed in the first place).
Anyway, the band's tastes are pretty much what
you'd expect: they have been fans of anthemic hard rock of all directions, be
it ironic sleazy stuff (AC/DC), socially-conscious «street intellectual» stuff
(Thin Lizzy), melodic power-pop (Cheap Trick), bombastic arena material
(Boston, Journey), or «progressively» oriented composition (Rush). The only
important links that tie all of these together are loudness, power, and crunchy
riffs, which is what Scott Ian and the boys latch on to and never let go. I
think they capture the essence of each of these songs perfectly, except I am
not really sure that it was such a
good decision for Joey to concentrate so exclusively on getting those vocal
styles right — he spends too much time guarding his voice's modulation to remember
about the clownish irony of Bon Scott's ʽT.N.T.ʼ performance, not to
mention the subtle Weltschmerz in
Lynott's ʽJailbreakʼ (Joey's "hey you good lookin' female, come
here!" is taken quite literally, when in Thin Lizzy's original it was more
like a... well, let's say «reluctant acknowledgement of nature's calls»).
Authenticity is occasionally provided by adding
guest musicians, such as Fred Mandel to play the «smokin'» keyboard parts on
ʽSmokin'ʼ, or Motörhead's Phil Campbell to play the guitar break
on ʽJailbreakʼ — not that Rob Caggiano couldn't have handled that one
on his own, but apparently they thought they needed somebody «extra dirty» to
do that part. But for the most part, they don't really need anybody else — all
of this stuff is really in their blood, and it is useful to be thus reminded
that it's all really part of the same chain, especially for those who only listen to thrash metal and those
who never listen to it.
I wouldn't even have minded sitting through more:
it wouldn't be tough for them, I guess, to come up with at least a couple extra
covers instead of inexplicably finishing the EP with the original version of
ʽCrawlʼ (which was already present on their last album) and another
remix of the same song with keyboards, orchestration, and backup vocals. The
remix is fairly creative, and Anthrax with strings works surprisingly better
than one could have thought, but why? the song has nothing to do with the
general concept. They could have covered us some Sabbath or Slade instead.
In any case, this is one of those albums that
does not require a rating — calling it «good» would suggest calling for more of
the same (not recommendable), and calling it «bad» would mean they didn't do a
good job with it, which they did. I'd say this: if Anthems manages to get even one Anthrax fan into Cheap Trick, it's
a success. If all it does, though, is get more Anthrax fans into Journey — now that would be lamentable.
FOR ALL KINGS (2016)
1) Impaled; 2) You Gotta
Believe; 3) Monster At The End; 4) For All Kings; 5) Breathing Lightning; 6)
Breathing Out; 7) Suzerain; 8) Evil Twin; 9) Blood Eagle Wings; 10)
Defend/Avenge; 11) All Of Them Thieves; 12) This Battle Chose Us; 13) Zero
Tolerance.
As the legendary thrash heroes grow older and
older, each new album becomes a test of willpower and endurance: can they
still make it? won't it feel too embarrassing? is tinnitus finally setting in?
It's not as if a band like Anthrax really has a choice of switching to acoustic
folk or didgeridoo music, even if an ethnic reworking of ʽCaught In A
Moshʼ, if done authentically enough, might be curious.
Anyway, the good news: Anthrax are still
together, featuring more or less the classic lineup — only lead guitarist Rob
Caggiano has been replaced by Jon Donais, but he was never part of the classic
lineup anyway, so good luck to him in Volbeat or whatever other Scandinavian
metal band he'd wish to join. Technically, the rhythm section remains tight,
and Joey is still Joey, keeping a youthful spirit at the age of 55 (which we
now know is not that hard to do —
hey, my own memories of a 55-year old Mick Jagger make him seem like a
youngster at the time). Even better, though even more subjective, news: it seems to me that this new bunch of songs
is somewhat better written than the disappointing Worship Music. Better riffs, catchier choruses, it all kind of makes
a bit more musical sense.
But everything comes at a price, and one other
definite feel I get (among with quite a few other critics and fans, it seems)
is that For All Kings is somewhat
lacking in energy. Where Worship Music
tried too hard to sound like classic Anthrax, this one does not try enough
(yes, I know we amateur writers are hard to please, but what can you do?
Writing about Anthrax albums is almost impossible without comparing them to
each other and to that one
classic-ideal-immaculate Anthrax LP that they never really recorded). For
starters, most of the songs are too slow: there is not a single proper brutal
lightning-speed thrasher to remind you of this band's ultimate powers. Far be
it from me to demand that all their
songs be like that — but a couple would still have been nice. Instead, we get
way too many tunes that sound like «regular» metal, or hard rock, or even
pop-a-roll: not really bad or anything, but not exactly something that we need
an Anthrax for.
Second, the older they get, the more they tend
to sermonize: most of the songs here carry social or generally moralistic
messages, ranging from the individuality-acclaiming title track to ʽEvil
Twinʼ which condemns the Charlie
Hebdo killers (because, as we all know, Anthrax are especially popular among Islamist terrorists and ISIL leaders, and
whatever Scott Ian tells them to do, they will execute instantly to wild cries
of «Anthrax akbar!»). Again, even if there's nothing particularly new that
they might tell us, it wouldn't be such a problem if one didn't get the feeling
that the message is occasionally more important than the execution, and also
because Joey Belladonna simply might not be the best voice to deliver these serious messages — even after all
these years, I still keep seeing him in a sarcastic haze, playing the fool a
little. To be Moses or Jonah, he'd probably need extra vocal powers sent from
above, and if they didn't arrive thirty years earlier, it's useless to wait for
them now.
That said, I honestly enjoy bits and pieces
here — even stuff like ʽThis Battle Chose Usʼ, with its singalong pop
chorus that arrogantly bridges the gap between Anthrax and Bon Jovi, is endowed
with gutsy riffage, and I'm all in favour of the sacrilegious transition
between the more thrash-like verses and the clearly pop metal chorus and
backwards. The title track starts out almost accappella style, as if Joey,
inspired by the title, were going to deliver us an epic Anglo-Saxon ballad from
ye olde times — fortunately, it picks up steam very soon, but then nothing
about the song really is as interesting as this contrast between the
introduction and the main riff. And the riff itself is nowhere near as tough as
the one on ʽBreathing Lightningʼ — now here, after a boring epic intro, we get a monstrous variation on
the ʽCaught In A Moshʼ riff that almost sounds like classic Anthrax.
And then it, too, gets betrayed with an epic «melodic» chorus that turns this
band into something it ought not to be. Belladonna singing in an operatic tone?
He's neither Rob Halford nor Bruce Dickinson, why should he bother? (Oh and,
by the way, note them cop the riff of ʽThe Song Remains The Sameʼ for
a bit in the mid-section).
In short, this is Anthrax all right, but an
aging Anthrax, with slightly (or maybe seriously) diminished powers of conviction,
but an ever-increasing level of social consciousness that drives them to taking
themselves more seriously than ever before. But time is a bitch — as is
evident, for instance, from the way less than stellar live rendition of
ʽCaught In A Moshʼ that is included as a bonus track on the expanded
edition of the album, with Ian messing up the classic bassline and the entire
band messing up the playful call-and-response harmonies on the chorus. This performance
might serve as an allegory for the entire new album — if you think I'm dreaming
things up and this current live incarnation goes every bit as strong as it used
to, you'll probably also love For All
Kings, but... well, I am not suggesting that the band retire or anything,
but yes, they are getting old,
there's no getting around it, and I feel as if they have not chosen the ideal
way to adapt to it. Although, frankly speaking, I have no idea what that ideal
way would be, so it's damned if you do, damned if you don't all the way. At
least the old pals are still together, and there's always something to be said
about long-lasting musical friendship.
WHO'S AFRAID OF THE ART OF NOISE? (1984)
1) A Time For Fear (Who's
Afraid); 2) Beat Box (Diversion One); 3) Snapshot; 4) Close (To The Edit); 5)
Who's Afraid (Of The Art Of Noise); 6) Moments In Love; 7) Momento; 8) How To
Kill / Realization.
Today, sampling is so much part of the everyday
culture — regardless of whether one loves the art for its unlimited
capabilities or hates it for demeaning the whole idea of music — that albums
like Who's Afraid Of The Art Of Noise are often thought of as possessing
nothing but historical value. Critics with the ability to look back over their
shoulder still rate it highly, but popular opinion no longer holds the
hooliganry of Trevor Horn, Anne Dudley, and Paul Morley in any kind of high
esteem. For better or for worse?
Obviously, this album — preceded by an EP
called Into Battle With The Art Of Noise which I am not discussing
separately (both of its major tracks are reproduced here) — is as much the inevitable
offspring of the Fairlight CMI sampler as it is a creation of artistically
minded humans. And, obviously, samplers have gotten much more clever since
then, and humans have learned to use them in more sophisticated ways. But there
is always something to be said for the joy of initial discovery; and whenever
I listen to Who's Afraid, I share this giggly feeling, that of a mischievous
little kid given full reins on some exciting naughty project — in dire contrast
with lots and lots of complex electronic stuff from the last two decades, whose
biggest fault is taking itself way too seriously. This bunch of noise is
light and exuberant, in comparison.
Ironically, it is the most «serious» track that
has managed to retain the most appeal; 'Moments In Love', whose sexy sensual
synthesized sighs still impress impressionable lovers around the world. It may
be aiming a bit too squarely at the «gorgeous» target — becoming a variety of
penthouse muzak for post-graduate romantics — but it is still heads and tails
above most competition in the genre, and it also helps to have the full
ten-minute version that leads you into several different, unexpected directions
along the way.
But the true soul of Who's Afraid lies
in those tracks that take the art of hooliganish collating to the limits: 'Beat
Box', 'A Time For Fear', and, of course, the famous single 'Close (To The Edit)'
with its infamous video of a dressed up mini-Madonna-girl smashing up musical
instruments. Even after all these years, the use of a car's startup noises as
the backbone for a rhythm track still excites, as well as the understanding
that, no matter how many times you listen to the composition, you can still
never remember well what comes next — a synth horn blast? a funky bass riff? a
shout of 'hey'? a bird chirping? a tra-la-la? a bunch of angelic backing
vocals? and what the heck is it all supposed to mean?
Nothing, of course. Read all you want about it,
but it is perfectly obvious that there was no concept, no ideology, no
understanding. Just a bunch of people excited with new technologies and
instruments and doing weird stuff with not the vaguest idea of where it will
lead them. It is a good thing that all of them were accomplished musicians with
a good ear for melody and a good foot for rhythm, because in less experienced
hands such an approach would never have paid off. As it is, Who's Afraid
is clearly dated, but I do not see how anybody who admits the values of
sampling and electronica in the first place could pronounce that with shades of
gray in his voice rather than yellow, orange, and red. It is not the actual sounds
of the album — admittedly, coming across as cheaper and flatter than whatever
can be produced today — that constitute its value, nor is it the alleged
facelessness of the album (at that time, the band stood opposed to most competition
in remaining as anonymous as possible). Instead, it's just the spirit: light,
playful, humorous, and not giving the slightest damn about what the hell is
going on. Except that the stakes are high, and that the question of "Can I
say something? Can I-Can I say something?", endlessly looped on one of the
tracks, would be a far more telling choice for the album title than the
provoking question they put on the sleeve instead. Why else would they want to
sample the Who's 'Baba O'Reilly', of all choices, if not to underscore that,
whatever they are fiddling with here, they intend it to come across as an
anthemic experience for the new generation?
As surprising as it may be, I think Who's
Afraid is a record more for the heart than for the brain. All these
collages and samples are pretty naïve indeed for today's standards, and
they probably weren't all that complicated in 1984, either, not with the new
sampler hanging around. But the fun part of it all, that's what's priceless.
Like the end of the title track, with that echoey laugh and the girl going
"Boom! Boom!" like she were just fooling around in a cave, enjoying
life's options instantaneously as they come along, no second thoughts about it.
That's so goddamn symbolic of it all. Kids at play, with creativity on the
rampage. Thumbs up.
IN VISIBLE SILENCE (1986)
1) Opus 4; 2) Paranoimia; 3) Eye Of A
Needle; 4) Legs/Slip Of The Tongue; 5) Backbeat; 6) Instruments Of Darkness;
7) Peter Gunn; 8)
Camilla: The Old, Old Story; 9) The Chameleon's Dish/Backbeat; 10*) Peter Gunn
(extended version).
Since The Art Of Noise could be easily
described as electronic punks, it would have made sense if they ceased to exist
as a team upon the release of their first album — which, like all true punks,
they would never ever manage to beat in terms of freshness, impact, and overall
fun. Instead, they tried to show the world that the hooliganish impulse that
was Who's Afraid? could be transformed
into a regular mode of living.
Which is why In Visible Silence, their stylishly titled follow-up, would, by all
acounts, be destined to be far more boring. We know the formula now: randomly
selected samples, used partly to set up a rhythmic groove, partly to pepper it
with oink-oinks to keep the listener intrigued. And how difficult is it to
select a random sample? Not difficult at all if you've spent some time in the
electronic business. Much more difficult to convince people that this
particular collocation of different samples bears that particular symbolic
meaning that makes it «art» (of noise or whatever else).
However, In
Visible Silence still places the right bet on the right factor: diversity.
Where the first album combined elements of the randomizer with those of the
contemporary dance floor, the follow-up delves into many more types of
traditional musical territory, and so, if the shock value has decreased, the
basic inventiveness has not. Of the three singles to herald the album, only
'Legs' sounded like an outtake from Who's
Afraid? 'Paranoimia', on the other hand, rode an odd stuttery funky
bass-dependent groove (the track was specially written for the AI TV character
Max Headroom, still somewhat fun to watch even today), and 'Peter Gunn' — well,
'Peter Gunn' is always 'Peter Gunn'; the band even got Duane Eddy in person
(probably caught in a tight cash-strapped situation) to guest on the track,
reawakening public interest in his old version from 1960 and also making this
one of the oddest collaborations of the decade.
In addition, 'Eye Of A Needle' is built upon the
foundations of generic lounge jazz / elevator muzak, and 'Backbeat' features
uplifting classically-oriented sections with synthesizer patterns that almost
seem lifted from The Who's Quadrophenia.
Taken together, these five tracks are an impressive collective illustration of
the power of tape-tampering, and prove that The Art Of Noise did have something left to prove after
having broken the ground two years earlier.
Some other tracks clearly do not work so well.
'Camilla', for instance, is a rather obvious «re-write» of 'Moments In Love',
going for the same type of hushed lushness, but it fails to produce a hook that
would be nearly as memorable. And 'Instruments Of Darkness' relies too much on
voiceovers — today, its value is nearly all historical (e. g., most of the
spoken bits come from the mouth of P. W. Botha, stimulating the curious
listener into doing research on the recent history of South Africa) and pretty
much non-existing otherwise. But with wildly experimental albums like these,
particularly from the early days of the sampling craze, inconsistency is to be
expected and made mental peace with before one even puts on the record.
The way the initial punch of Who's Afraid? flows so seamlessly into
the wider ambitions of Silence is
somewhat astonishing, considering the band's fluctuations at the time: the
three core members (Anne Dudley, J. J. Jeczalik, Gary Langan) had just torn
themselves away from creative gurus Trevor Horn and Paul Morley, amd,
consequently, away from Horn's ZTT label and away from the «faceless» artistic
ideology that required them all wearing masks during promotion. Live activity
was increased, too, with a whole show filmed for video at the Hammersmith Odeon
— as weird as it is to see the band reproduce parts of their loops and samples
in real time, they did this quite convincingly. Eventually, it would be this
very tendency to restore a «live» feeling to their music that finally killed
the project — nothing surprising about that — but in 1986, it all worked fine,
and twenty-plus years after the fact, In
Visible Silence still sounds bawdy and fresh, teaching us new ways to
enjoy common sounds. Thumbs up.
IN NO SENSE? NONSENSE! (1987)
1) Galleons Of Stone; 2)
Dragnet; 3) Fin Du Temps; 4) How Rapid?; 5) Opus For Four; 6) Debut; 7) E.F.L.;
8) A Day At The Races; 9) Ode To Don Jose; 10) Counterpoint; 11) Roundabout
727; 12) Ransom On The Sand; 13) Roller 1; 14) Nothing Was Going To Stop Them,
Anyway; 15) Crusoe; 16) One Earth.
On their third album, Art Of Noise decided to
hit it off the deep edge. Now reduced to the core duo of Dudley and Jeczalik,
no chains prevented them of making the psycho-electronic equivalent to Jethro
Tull's Thick As A Brick: a
sprawling, not-obviously-coherent mess of tunes, effects, and ideas whose main
point is «never let the listener understand where he is going to find himself
the next moment».
My version of this album is not actually
divided into sixteen tracks; just like the original CD versions of Thick As A Brick, it only contains two,
and I have never given myself the trouble of trying to understand which
sections of these two correspond to the sixteen «songs» listed on some of the
editions — and I am pretty sure that the dynamic duo themselves never intended
for any of their fans to waste time on that trouble. No single track on the
album truly stands on its own; it all works as a single-breath forty-minute Art
Experience.
As usual, the saving grace, particularly for
those who are not amused at the idea of art for art's sake, is «fun». Certain
chunks don't go anywhere and are really quite boring (particularly the ones
that go for that old «breathy moody» style of 'Moments In Love'), but every
once in a while they bring out the brawny dance rhythms, inject them with
samples of whatever they heard on TV the previous day, then interrupt and
replace them with crap stuff any time they feel like it — then, as you start
cursing under your breath, bring them back... for a while. In short, they cling
on to their reputation as the arrogant hoodlums of sampling, and that counts.
The only single piece of it that stuck with
audiences was, unsurprisingly, the band's rearrangement of the classic theme
from the old TV show Dragnet (to
serve as a modernized version for the 1987 movie), maybe out of sheer amazement
that no significant pop artists since Ray Anthony in 1953 had ever wanted to
ingrain it into the public conscience as much as, say, the Batman theme. The rearrangement is as fine as the theme itself (and
pokes some concealed fun at the show's trappings by looping the spoken line 'I
carry a badge' many times over), but sort of obscures the fact that much of
the rest of the album also consists of music,
and not only that, but music originally written by the band members themselves.
A thing, in itself, controversial: the album
that presented Art Of Noise in their least compromising, most seriously
inaccessible emploi, at the same time
betrayed their original purpose — to serve as spiritual guides to
machine-crafted art — like no other. There's guitar solos a-plenty on the
record, violins playing classical interludes, lounge jazz pieces coolly swung
on electric pianos: they're almost becoming a real band. Sure it all goes away
then, replaced by crowd recordings or wobbly white noise, to remind us that we
are still in 1987, but then wham, you get a fresh saxophone solo passage or
something. Want it or not, the human still shows through the machine.
Overall, it is the kind of album that really
makes me wish Anne Dudley were born ten years earlier and had herself a little
stand next to Yoko Ono's at the Indica Gallery, because In No Sense — in all
senses — is that particular musical statement that 'Revolution No. 9' could
have been, but never was. Of course, one big difference is that Art Of Noise,
at their best, were intended to be fun: laughing-smiling, celebrating life's
absurdities or, at least, mocking them rather than being terrified at their
sight. But then that's exactly what the Beatles' spirit was, too, isn't it,
before life made them all bitter and grim? I don't know about everybody else,
but this is just the way I like my
modern art: self-ironic, easy-going, butterfly-style. You may hate this album,
but you will almost certainly snicker at it at least once or twice, and that's
enough by me. Thumbs
up for all the good feelings.
BELOW THE WASTE (1989)
1) Dan Dare; 2) Yebo!; 3) Catwalk; 4)
Promenade 1; 5) Dilemma; 6) Island; 7) Chang Gang; 8) Promenade 2; 9) Back To
Back; 10) Flashback; 11) Spit; 12) Robinson Crusoe; 13) James Bond Theme; 14)
Finale.
Paul Morley never had much respect for Art Of
Noise and their work since he left the project in 1985. Obviously, he had a
certain right to be pissed; and when his former colleagues scored their biggest
commercial hit (a cover of Prince's 'Kiss') in the form of a collaboration with
Tom Jones, he had himself a golden pretext to dismiss them in interviews as
sellouts and novelty goons. Then out came Below
The Waste, an album that showed maybe about a third of the inventiveness
and maybe about a thirty-third of the humor of their glory days, and then The
Art Of Noise was shot down, burned, and buried by popular and critical opinion
alike. Leading them into disbanding the following year, disgruntled and
confused.
The ultimate irony of it all, of course, is
that it was exactly the Morley/Horne years when the project was a true
«novelty» act. Throughout all of the four years that they spent free of their
artistic gurus' domination, Dudley and Jeczalik had been trying to find the
ideal middle ground between crazy cutting-floor wizardry and common appeal;
ultimately, they did not succeed, and ended up with curses from hardcore fans
and relative indifference from the general public. But they tried all the way,
and Below The Waste, be it or not
their weakest original-period album, by no means shows any slackening of the
spirits.
It is different, and arguably the most
«accessible» of all their albums, in the sense that there is almost no «sonic
hooliganry» going on anywhere. The individual tracks are melodic, semi-live, semi-electronic
compositions, sometimes atmospheric, sometimes rocking out, and they go real easy
on sampling, copying, and pasting. 'Yebo!' lasts all of seven minutes, and all
of them essentially on the same groove — a thing unheard of in the early days.
Play it all at mid-level volume and even the most generically-oriented of your
buddies may remain unstimulated to ask the sacred question of «what the fuck is
that shit». No question about it: the original ideology of the band has been
shelved. Art Of Noise? More like Art Of Nice, if you ask me.
All that remains is take Below The Waste on its terms and see if it helps. I have always
believed that it actually does. There is moody filler, of course, but there are
also compositions that have a life of their own. For one thing, this is the
only spot in their career where they were trying to actively toy with «world
music», incorporating various ethnic elements into the usual electronic framework.
This is especially characteristic of the first two tracks. 'Dan Dare' has much
less to do with The Pilot Of The Future than it has to do with an odd mix of
African tribal chants, North Indian war cries, Andean panflutes, and quite
European classical strings arrangements (I may be exaggerating the diversity a
bit, but that the tune is chockfull
of syncretism is inarguable).
'Yebo!' is even better, and, I dare say, one of
the ultimate classics of the entire «world music» craze. With vocals provided
by Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, a world-famous Zulu band ('Yebo!' means
'yes' in Zulu, in case you wanted to know), it somehow manages to respect and send up the trend at the same time —
they set up a captivating dance groove, load it with a catchy Bantu vocal
melody, then loop it all up in ridiculous proportions. The most seductive thing
about it is that there is none of that in-your-face kowtowing before the sacred
age-deep wisdom of the Tribal Elders that makes so much of «world music» from
the likes of Paul Simon or Sting such an intolerable bore, none of that fake
reverence that prevents you from sucking in musical influences with the best of
all goals — to have fun. 'Yebo!' is
fun, from head to toe.
African and other tribal elements pop up on
'Dilemma', 'Chang Gang', and 'Spit' as well, but the assault is not as focused
on these tracks as on 'Yebo!'; besides, they are heavily interspersed with
pure, and somewhat fillerish, mood pieces ('Island', 'Robinson Crusoe'). The
band also came under heavy fire for including their interpretation of the
James Bond theme — five minutes of electronic surf-rock that, for many
listeners, seemed to have become an unpleasant overload of all things
Bond-related. (It might not have been such a total coincidence that the year's
Bond movie, License To Kill, is
recognized as one of the least financially successful in the franchise; perhaps
the same people who hated Timothy Dalton took this hatred one step further?). I
would say that 'The James Bond Theme' is, indeed, the most «novelty»-like track
on the album, but I still like all the weird things they did with it — for
instance, how they begin with a very faithful rendition, then proceed to
completely deconstruct the thing in the middle, and then make it interbreed
with elements of free jazz for a change.
Overall, Below
The Waste is like totally that particular type of record that is going to
be actively hated by 20% of the people, actively ignored by 78% of the people,
and liked by about 2% that happen to include this here reviewer — a
«compromising» album in a world mostly populated by people that don't give a
shit about the complex art of compromising. 'Yebo!' alone is enough to
guarantee it a heartfelt thumbs up, and then they're raised further up
through reasonable analysis that states it a federal crime to condemn albums so
cleverly conceived and executed.
THE SEDUCTION OF CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1999)
1) Il Pleure (At The Turn Of
The Century); 2) Born On A Sunday; 3) Dreaming In Colour; 4) On Being Blue; 5)
Continued In Colour; 6) Rapt: In The Evening Air; 7) Metaforce; 8) The Holy
Egoism Of Genius; 9) La Flute De Pan; 10) Metaphor On The Floor; 11)
Approximate Mood Swing No. 2; 12) Pause; 13) Out Of This World (Version 138).
Perhaps The
Rape Of Claude Debussy would be a more fitting title. The Art Of Noise
disbanded soon after the critical failure of Below The Waste, either seeing their noisartistic mission as
complete or realizing that there was no more mission to speak of in the first
place. Then, a decade later, nostalgia kicked in — and some sort of arrogant
realization, on the part of several of the founding fathers, that the history
of The Art Of Noise would never be enshrined if the ideas that they set out
with around 1984 were not brought back to life, one more time, at the turn of
the millennium. For that one occasion, at least, The Art Of Noise had to be
resurrected — and, if chance would have it, come up with something brilliant.
So Trevor Horn, Paul Morley, and Anne Dudley
held hands once again, although Jeczalik and Langan stayed out of the picture
(either they were wise enough not to tempt fate, or, perhaps, Horn and Morley
never invited them in the first place, putting all the blame for the original
corruption of the Art of Noise aesthetics on these guys); instead, Lol Creme
of 10CC/Godley & Creme fame was brought in full-time to work on the
project.
The project's ambitious backbone was to
concentrate on the life and art of Debussy, in a highly (and obviously)
symbolic manner — Debussy's major art works were also created at the turn of
the century, and Debussy's major art purpose was also to shock and
revolutionize. Here, then, is a tribute album from pop music's biggest bunch of
(self-proclaimed) hooligans to one of classical music's greatest hooligans. And
just so that it all don't seem way too primitive, The Seduction must not simply
sound as straightforward Debussy sampling set to Art Of Noise's usual rhythmic
patterns. It must incorporate everything — from Debussy's piano work to opera
to jazz to pop to techno to hip-hop, a celebration of the man's twisted legacy.
Yes, there is a curve from Debussy
all the way to Rakim, even if takes The Art Of Noise to prove it.
I cannot firmly state that such a concept was,
or always will be, doomed to fail; as you understand, the statistical sampling
is way low on this. I cannot say, either, if Claude Debussy, wherever he is at
the moment, was indeed seduced by the album, or whether he loathed it (as I did
when I first listened to it) or simply remained indifferent (as I am now).
Quite a few people were seduced, and
some not only consider its purpose fulfilled to a tee, but even think of it as
the band's grandest and most unforgettable statement. But I would rather join a
different school of thought here — I think the purpose of the record may be admirable, yet the way it is realized
does little, if any, justice to all parties, including Debussy, The Art Of
Noise, and the target audience.
Debussy was, of course, a fearless modernizer,
but he was also an idealist, and his impressionistic music was written for the
heart of the listener, much like the impressionistic paintings of the era,
however strange they might have looked to the conservative eye, were painted
for the heart. In that, he succeeded admirably — no matter how different his
bitonality and pentatonic experiments sound, even for the untrained ear, from
the great composers of the XIXth century, today
his output is still alarmingly «normal». But The Art Of Noise, at their best,
had always preached the postmodern, sneeringly hip attitude, creating sounds
that, even now, more than twenty years after their heyday, still sound
sneeringly hip, blowing your mind, perhaps, but not your heart. If there is a
special telephone line from Debussy to The Art Of Noise, different from the
general network that connects all forms of music, I fail to see it, and The Seduction does not help me much.
Other than occasional sampled sprinklings from Debussy's work, scattered here
and there, The Seduction bears
little resemblance to the man's spirit, and pays even less respect to his
legacy.
As a typical «Art Of Noise» album, it does not
make a great mark, either. There is none of the band's usual sense of humour;
steeped in modernistic pretentious reverence, it demands to be taken seriously
every step of the way — unless one finds humor in letting Rakim rap on a couple
of tracks, or in track titles like 'Metaphor On The Floor' (at least you can
always count on these guys to come up with a non-trivial pun). The seriousness
is also punctuated by constantly annoying voiceovers from John Hurt,
reminding us of the enormous cultural status of Debussy — no shit, Sherlock.
The band justified it by dubbing Seduction
«the soundtrack to a non-existent movie about Debussy»; we can only thank them
for not extending their vision that far.
The grooves, way too often, run for way too
long without having too much to say — and most of them are so inobtrusive
(say, a combination of soft percussion rolls, deep-buried repetitive piano
riffs, and «heavenly» synth-orchestration) that you'd have to qualify them as
«ambient» music; but since when have The Art Of Noise, one of the rudest, most
hyperactive electronica-based projects of the XXth century, been reclassified
as soft, inobtrusive ambient sounds to soothe the soul? And how does that tie in with the bombastic concept?
I cannot even label this as a «grandiose
failure», because there is nothing grandiose about it, except for the original
idea, given one of the lamest realizations in the history of grandiose original
ideas. If you want Debussy, listen to Debussy; Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune kicks Trevor
Horn's ass all the way to high heaven. If you want The Art Of Noise, listen to Who's Afraid?..., or 'Yebo!', at least.
If you want a good mixture of both, get yourself a good piece of music software
and revel all you want in your own freaky perversions. If you want to tell me
something along the lines of: «Forget about Debussy, forget about the Art Of
Noise, just close your eyes and enjoy the musical rapture», well, I tried — but
every time I did, a faint whiff of either Debussy or the former Art Of Noise
came along, telling me to drop all this shit and go listen to the real thing.
In the end, I just had to give up. Thumbs down.
Who knows, maybe some day someone will get it right.
24→24 MUSIC (1981)
1) #1 (You're Gonna Be Clean On
Your Bean); 2) #5 (Go Bang!); 3) #2 (No, Thank You); 4) #7; 5) #3 (In The Corn
Belt); 6) #6 (Get Set).
Technically, this record is credited to
«Dinosaur L», but that was just one of the many fleeting monikers that Arthur
Russell would use over his chaotic career; in reality, this is his first succesful
attempt at putting out an LP — no mean feat, considering that he'd already been
a major fixture on NYC's underground scene for more than half a decade by
then. However, like quite a few other unfortunate souls, Russell suffered from
acute perfectionism, which led to very sporadic releases — and, as it always
happens with perfectionists, drastically imperfect ones.
Before this album, Arthur had already made a
name for himself writing and recording several club hits in the disco vein,
most notably 'Kiss Me Again' and 'Go Bang!' (the latter is actually included on
the LP). The idea behind most of them was to get smart and turn disco into an
art form, just like the Beatles managed to do with basic pop rock a decade
earlier; in fact, another side project, «Loose Joints», headed by Russell in
1980, openly declared an intention to come up with a «disco White Album», but eventually had to eat
shit —because «genius», per se, does not yield amazing product.
Still, while I'd never go as far as to claim
that Arthur Russell had true «genius», one has to admit that 24→24 Music, an experimental
30-minute LP exploring the true power of disco rhythms, is disco the way you
never heard it. For starters, its title is derived from the fact that each
track undergoes a rhythmic/melodic shift every 24 bars. To my ears, that
certainly is not the case, but it
certainly is true that every single
track undergoes several radical shifts as they go along — in stark contrast to
the usual story with club disco grooves, stretched out to eternity so as to
offer all sorts of dance opportunities.
Not that one couldn't dance to these tracks —
on the contrary, the rhythm section makes it certain that the
seven/eight-minute grooves continue uninterrupted. But as the beat goes on, in
the background you virtually have a musical slide projector, incessantly
shifting gears, from jazzy organ solos to R&B-ish brass explosions to
funky, bluesy, or metallic guitar breaks, to strange and completely
unpredictable vocal overdubs. And, sometimes, various combinations of all
those. It's an odd melange of ideas, some of them mediocre, some fabulous, but
all of them rushing before your eyes and ears way too quickly.
As a matter of fact, most of these ideas were
improvised: Russell preprogrammed the beats, and his musician friends played
whatever would be playable on top. If that idea sounds odd, it might actually
seem odder that nobody really thought of it before — after all, disco is just a
simplified, mechanized form of funk, and for a hot bunch of musicians to go
«disco jamming» would hardly be a serious problem if they set out such a goal. On
the other hand, the final product, with all these shifts and cuts (Russell must
have worn out several pairs of scissors assembling the LP version), sounds
anything but improvised.
Of course, the album falls into the unhappy
category of «no-man's-land-records»: real disco fans would hardly bother with
it because it was so weird (not to mention being so late: was anybody even buying regular disco stuff in 1981?), and
regular music intellectuals would definitely not become attracted to the style
just because some weirdo from Oskaloosa, Iowa had found a way to express his
creative artistic nature through it. And, frankly, as much as I'd love to love
this record just because it sounds so totally like nothing else... well, there
just might be a good reason why everything else sounds nothing like it. If I
want to dance (which I don't), I'd rather just choose one of those Donna Summer
grooves. But if I don't want to dance... do I really have to spend my time counting out sequences of 24 bars for
thirty minutes? Now there's a good question to ask Arthur Russell, if, by any
chance, you die and meet him in Heaven before the end of the day.
Still, a thumbs up, if only for the masterfully hellish
atmosphere set up on parts of '#6 (Get Set)', especially when the dry distorted
glam-rock guitars start dueting with Sly Stone-style brass fanfares. Don't
forget to turn the volume up when that bit comes along — it's as sleazy as
classic mode R&B ever gets, and double sleazy if we remember that, at that
very same time, Michael Jackson and Prince were dealing the final death blows
to classic mode R&B.
TOWER OF MEANING (1983)
1) Tower Of Meaning; 2) Tower
Of Meaning; 3) Tower Of Meaning; 4) Tower Of Meaning; 5) Tower Of Meaning; 6) Tower
Of Meaning.
The only reason to listen to this record —
once, if you can stomach it — is if you have already assimilated the oddness
of 24→24 Music, and want to
experience one of the most bizarre transitions from album to album since Lou
Reed followed up Sally Can't Dance
with Metal Machine Music.
«Open-minded» opinions on such albums usually imply that it is the ability to
«get» such artistic statements that separate superhumans from mere mortals; I
am more of the «close-minded» type, who just thinks it's misguided crap, so
bear with me.
Apparently, though, it wasn't supposed to be that crappy. Tower Of Meaning, like basically all of Russell's projects, is an
unfinished recording. It was supposed to become a soundtrack for an avantgarde
staging of Medea, with voices and
additional sound layers recorded over the cello, keyboard, and orchestral parts
laid down by Russell. However, the composer and the director eventually parted
ways because they quickly began hating each other's guts, and Arthur decided to
simply put out whatever was finished, because, clearly, by the time he was
fired from the project, he knew he would not have the enthusiasm to go on
messing around with it.
In the end, Tower Of Meaning became an interminable forty-five slab of
«incidental music», released on a private label run by (who else?) Philip
Glass. A comprehensive description would be «Ambient Symphony for Cello and
Orchestra»: most of the space is occupied by repetitive two or three note
phrases drawn out to various lengths and thickened by various combinations of
(mostly string) instruments. Sometimes it sounds like tuning up; sometimes
(very rarely) it sounds like «generic» modern classical slowed down to a creep
and deconstructed to the bare essence; and sometimes it sounds like a stray dog
killer.
I can definitely agree with a reviewer who
found some «gloominess» lurking inside the recording — it certainly does not
convey any happiness, that's for sure. But there is really no sense in pretending
that it somehow affects the senses on a spiritual, rather than purely
physiological level. Basically, my idea of «experimental music» may be
stretched out far and wide, but nowhere does it cover a gloomy lonesome guy
replaying the same few notes on his cello for 45 minutes. At least when Brian
Eno does that, there is no effect of somebody drawing out a hacksaw and getting
to work on your poor harmless ears. Thumbs down — this is a classic example of a
«failed experiment» if there ever was one, although, granted, Russell may only
have been guilty of deciding to make the raw materials public, instead of
grinding them in the trash can. (Gotta love the title, though: as ironic as
irony can get).
WORLD OF ECHO (1986)
1) Tone Bone Kone; 2) Soon-To-Be
Innocent Fun / Let's See; 3) Answers Me; 4) Being It; 5) Place I Know / Kid
Like You; 6) She's The Star / I Take This Time; 7) Tree House; 8) See-Through;
9) Hiding Your Present From You; 10) Wax The Van; 11) All-Boy All-Girl; 12)
Lucky Cloud; 13) Tower Of Meaning / Rabbit's Ear / Home Away From Home; 14)
Let's Go Swimming; 15*) The Name Of The Next Song; 16*) Happy Ending; 17*) Canvas
Home; 18*) Our Last Night Together.
If you only know about this album from the
All-Music Guide review — beware, beware! The author, "Blue" Gene
Tyranny, tags the record as «an incredible assemblage of solo versions of this
influential and unique downtown musician» and describes it as «subtle, transcendental
with gentle rock beats and new music influences in patternings and textures».
But then, of course, at the other end of the playground there's always Joe the
Plumber, who calls World Of Echo
«the biggest pile of sonic shit I've ever seen — and, believe you me, when I'm talking about seeing shit, I damn well know what I'm talking
about!» With both sides of the story thus in the can, it's up to you to make
your own choice.
If the title of Tower Of Meaning could only be perceived with irony, World Of Echo is pretty
straightforward. It is mostly just Arthur and his cello, sometimes with a
little extra percussion thrown in; the cello itself is either bowed in a
modern-classical manner, or plucked to get a jazzy rhythm going on (so much for
«new music influences»: by 1986, none of these tricks were new, although,
granted, it was rather novel to hear them from a guy formerly known as an
enthusiastic «intelligent disco music» activist).
The big difference is that, well, everything
has an echo. The plucked cello, the bowed cello, the vocals, even the
percussion — everything is run through echo effects of varying force. As a
result, the louder you turn up your speakers, the more you get the feeling that
either it is you sitting inside a
deep stone well and the cellist is performing on top, or vice versa. Some would
call this effect psychedelic, but, the way I see it, psychedelic music is an
attempt to mimic the complex, unpredictable, and uncontrollable processes
going through your brain, and this
sort of effect is fully external
rather than internal. If you ever
experience something like World Of Echo
going inside your brain, better see a doctor at once — most likely, you have a concussion or something.
I have seen people swear by this album as the
lone forgotten masterpiece of 1986. Unfortunately, I can neither join them nor
jeer at them, because every time I listen to these «tunes», or, rather, what
sounds to me like raw improvisatory attempts to put together a set of tunes, I
cannot understand if there is some
compositional or artistic genius inside, or if there isn't: the damn echo keeps
getting me all muddled. Content-wise, World
Of Echo could be called «diverse»: there's some gentle pastoralism
('Soon-To-Be-Innocent Fun', 'She's The Star'), power-pop ('Being It'), New Wave
('Place I Know'), garage-rock ('Treehouse'), hard rock ('Wax The Van'), maybe
something else, but you could just as well shift some of these tags around —
that's just some spur-of-the-moment impressions. Formally, it's all just «echo
music», and I am unable to determine if it's all a huge attempt to arrogantly
mask the lack of genius by drowning
it in the excessive abuse of production gadgetry, or an attempt to humbly mask
the presence of genius by hiding it
behind a wall of innovative production ideas. (Occasionally, I tilt towards the
latter, because some of these tunes, e. g. 'Wax The Van', are alternate
versions of the man's notable disco hits from previous years – but, on the
other hand, not all of these tunes were that
fabulous in the first place).
One thing is for certain: World Of Echo sounds like nothing ever done before. This sort of
experimentation has its firm roots in avantgarde and jazz history, as well as
occasional explorations in pop music territory (I'd say Skip Spence's Oar might be one of the forefathers),
but the combination of length, chosen instruments, and a total lack of
compromise ensures that this will always be a cult favorite, no matter how
small the cult. Even for naysayers, it might be useful to listen to this stuff
once, make an effort not to make
«hate this useless crap» into a final verdict, and then put it away, with a
possibility to return to it once more... some day. Which is exactly what we are
going to do right now, and move on.
PS. The
most curious track is actually available now as a bonus on the new CD edition:
the eight minute long 'The Name Of The Next Song', where, every few bars,
Arthur stops playing and says "The name of the next song is...", then
invents some crazyass title which I cannot make out because of the goddamn
echo (yeah, I suck at airport loudspeakers too), and goes on playing the same
cello-raga with different words. It's so overwhelmingly silly, it just works.
ANOTHER THOUGHT (1994)
1) Another Thought; 2) A
Little Lost; 3) Home Away From Home; 4) Lucky Cloud; 5) This Is How We Walk On The
Moon; 6) Hollow Tree; 7) See Through Love; 8) Keeping Up; 9) In The Light Of The
Miracle; 10) Lucky Cloud (Return); 11) Just A Blip; 12) Me For Real; 13) Losing
My Taste For The Night Life; 14) My Tiger, My Timing; 15) A Sudden Chill.
For his legacy to live on, Arthur Russell had
to die. This took place on April 4, 1992, four months after Freddie Mercury and
for the exact same reason (although, hopefully, because of different partners).
Since the man had allegedly left several thousand tapes worth of unfinished
recordings behind him, it was only a matter of time, and personal devotion,
before someone would eventually get to them and reveal the hidden-iceberg part
of the Tortured Genius™ to the public.
The first of many posthumous releases, Another Thought is basically World Of Echo without the echo (or, at
least, with much less echo), which is why it will probably work best as an
introduction to the minimalist, introspective side of Russell. Only a few of
the tracks feature fuller arrangements, with dance beats and additional
backing vocals; for the most part, it's just Arthur, his cello, and sometimes a
little acoustic guitar or bass to add spice.
Like World
Of Echo, this one is never ever about hooks. Some of the vocal lines might
have staying power, but only unintentionally so. If there is a true spiritual
predecessor to this kind of music, it is Tim Buckley circa Starsailor: it's all about complex, not-easy-to-memorize vocalization
patterns woven around equally complex chords that mix pop, jazz, and modern
classical sequences in the most unpredictable manner.
Although the resulting atmosphere seems to have
mystery, soul, and emotion a-plenty, this is still a very tightly controlled
set of tracks — certainly not your average «mad man» record. The sonic pattern
of a single track may change several times over a couple of minutes, with the
cello bowed, plucked, scraped, pulled, moving from dissonance to perfect
harmony and back, but this is not improvisation, these are all attempts at
introducing a new type of singer-songwriter: the progressive experimentalist.
Does it work?
For me, it does not. The greatest asset that my
tastes can discern is Russell's singing voice: smooth, intelligent, not exactly
«powerful» or «technically developed», but seductive in its innocence and
friendliness, along the same lines as Ray Davies. And, since the cello backings
are not intentionally «ugly», but relatively well-ordered, this gives a certain
unique type of pleasant, gently rocking, «cloudy» sound that would be quite
tolerable as background music for... well, for a trendy installation or
happening, rather than your average evening.
But I do not see how this kind of sound could
ever go beyond «interesting». Despite all the diversity, it is still too
monotonous and way too self-concentrated. (Excuses that these are just «unfinished
demos» do not really work — this album is better
than World Of Echo, officially
sanctioned by Russell for release during his lifetime). Russell's cello speaks
to me with a voice that I cannot understand or appreciate, and pretty much
cancels out the positive effects of his
voice. And as for the rhythm-based numbers, they are hardly among his best: 'My
Tiger, My Timing' has too much annoying tennis-ball-style percussion and a
mind-numbingly repetitive chorus, and 'In The Light Of The Miracle' features
inventive vocal harmony overlays, but little else.
I rate this whole approach as a «failed
experiment». Were this guy a real loonie, like Syd Barrett, he would have a
greater appeal. Were he a master player — a pop equivalent of a Rostropovich or
something — he would have an even greater appeal. But I could never praise an
artist to high heaven just for the sake of his «trying to be different». Aren't
we all, for Chrissake? This is boring experimental cello music with good
vocals. The only «song» I really liked was 'Keeping Up', with an unknown female
vocalist joining Russell to create a psychedelic, but optimistic duet that
alleviates the boredom for about six minutes. The rest is not for me — if I
want «sensitive» and «fragile», I'll stick with my Tim Buckley, Skip Spence,
and Nick Drake. As for the final judgement, let's put it this way: Another Thought is way too smart a
thought to be tagged as «stinky pseudo-intellectual crap», but I do not see
myself getting into a fist fight with anyone else who'd like to do the honors.
CALLING OUT OF CONTEXT (2004)
1) The Deer In The Forest Part
1; 2) The Platform On The Ocean; 3) You And Me Both; 4) Calling Out Of Context;
5) Arm Around You; 6) That's Us / Wild Combination; 7) Make 1, 2; 8) Hop On
Down; 9) Get Around To It; 10) I Like You!; 11) You Can Make Me Feel Bad; 12) Calling
All Kids.
The floodgates really opened in 2004, when some
of Russell's former friends and partners, backed by the Audika Records label,
struck a deal with Arthur's estate that allowed them to prepare and release
anything of worth that could be located in his vast archives. Calling Out Of Context and its
follow-ups essentially opened up a second life for Russell — now, suddenly, after
a long period of oblivion, he would be reincarnated as a hipster idol. Smart,
cool, ahead of his time, experimental, lonely, misunderstood, romantic, played
the cello, toyed with disco beats, died young and abandoned — Jesus Christ, eat
your heart out.
If we are to believe the liner notes, most of
the tracks here date from mid- to late 1980s, including selections from one
fully finished, but unreleased, album, and one unfinished and, consequently, also unreleased album. Most of the
playing is by Arthur himself, with the exception of live percussion and drum
programming by Mustafa Akhmed, and synthesizer backing by Peter Zummo. And the
big difference from Another Thought
is that most of the tracks are danceable — beats, steady bass, and synth loops
are all over the place here.
Melody-wise, most of it sucks. The drum
machines are ugly, and memorable grooves are lacking. The overall goals are
either «minimalistic» (when everything bar the drums and vocals is kept very quiet and in the background), or
«expressionistic» (when cellos, guitars, and synths rumble and grumble without
too much coherence, and you are supposed to school your soul into finding that
coherence on your own). I cannot even tell which way I like it more, because in
either case, horribly annoying 1980s percussion takes the cake.
As usual, the day is saved (or at least,
redeemed) by whatever we have here of Russell's persona. Possibly not on
purpose, most of the songs here are tied together by a lonesome romantic
stretch: this is even more of a love ballad collection than Another Thought, and, as repetitive as
they are, Arthur's vocal hooks on these tracks are absolutely the best thing about the album. You will
have to wait for them, though, tearing through the long stretch of 'The
Platform On The Ocean', whose neo-psychedelic vocal overdubs over a boring
distorted guitar track are sort of pointless.
However, 'You And Me Both', 'Arm Around You',
'Get Around To It', and 'I Like You!' all have charming bits of falsetto
gorgeousness, which, in typical Russell fashion, is lightly sprayed from your
speakers across the room rather than concentrated and ejected forcefully in
your face, as on a typical disco album. These are soft, melancholic, but highly
friendly deliveries, the likes of which you can certainly never encounter in combination with such specific melodic backing
as on an Arthur Russell album. It is almost incredible, in fact, that they were
deliberately combined with this sort of music by the very same person — had I
not known the details, I could have sworn that somebody just pilfered the lead
vocals off some intelligent 1970s soft-rock album and spliced them over this
odd mix of programmed beats.
Best of the lot is 'That's Us/Wild
Combination', a heartwarming duet with Jennifer Warnes where, for once, the
drumbeat is simply a drumbeat, unassumingly hacking away in the background and
leaving the singers alone, backed just by a spare cello part. The song is, in
fact, a good starting point for getting acquainted with Russell — for everyone,
that is, who requires a fast initial seduction by the artist in order to be
persuaded to explore the artist's career in-depth. Here you have cello, beauty,
romance, intelligence, toe-tapping, echo, and
accessibility.
Elsewhere, you have... problems. Much of the
time, they can be overridden. Sometimes, they can't. In any case, it's a good
thing the record is out: as far as it is from a masterpiece, it still salvages
for us one more piece of this strange man's soul. As long as it does not breed
dozens of wannabe-Russells, all of whom just happen to «really understand» what
this man was all about because they are all so very much like him, Calling Out Of Context is a worthy
addition to the already extravagant puzzle of «The True Colors Of Music In The
1980s».
THE WORLD OF ARTHUR RUSSELL (2004)
1) Go Bang (Dinosaur L); 2)
Wax The Van (Lola); 3) Is It All Over My Face (Loose Joints); 4) Keeping Up; 5)
In The Light Of The Miracle; 6) A Little Lost; 7) Pop Your Funk (Loose Joints);
8) Let's Go Swimming; 9) In The Cornbelt (Dinosaur L); 10) Treehouse; 11)
Schoolbell/Treehouse (Indian Ocean).
Combing the archives and separating «what looks
to have been almost finished» from «what looks to have been barely started» is
an entertaining occupation, but what the world really needed was a comprehensive compilation of stuff that Russell
had managed to officially release back in the good old days, under a variety of
different monikers — stuff that earned him his reputation in the first place.
Most of it only came out as singles (highly collectible by now) or scattered
tracks on «various artists» releases.
The aptly titled World Of Arthur Russell is not fully comprehensive; it covers most
of the directions and projects Russell was involved in throughout the 1980s,
but never exhaustively (for instance, of the three songs released by the
«superproject» Loose Joints, only two are included here). Nevertheless, it is a good starting place to get to know
the man in both of his most important incarnations: the «thinking man's
dance-pop wizard» and the «echoey cello romantic». Some have lodged complaints
about the final product sounding quite disjointed, but, heck, it's a compilation,
not a rock opera: feel free to re-join it any way you want.
Rhythmic grooves dominate the record, which is
not surprising, since rhythmic grooves were Russell's main means of earning
his living. And, starting with arguably his best-known track, 'Go Bang' (originally
released as «Dinosaur L»; different mix here from the one used on 24→24 Music), and ending with
the electronic bongo showcase 'Schoolbell' (a collaboration with Peter Zummo
from around 1986), they all share more or less the same ideology, despite being
very different from a technical point of view. It is as if Russell managed to
see the worst flaw of disco and post-disco music — the «robotization» of sound,
the replacement of the «living and breathing groove» by the formally
impeccable, but spiritually meaningless mechanic techniques and technologies —
and decided to turn it upside down by multiplying and diversifying his own
robots.
I cannot even say that I like any of these tracks — but I am impressed by each and every one of them. Listen to 'Wax The Van', a
1987 collaboration between Arthur and singer Lola Blank. The rhythm section is
trivial, with the bass line sounding like something you'd hear on a generic
Eighties Eurocrap album. The singer sounds like a parody on early Kate Bush.
The cheap Casio lines are... cheap. The minimalistic electric piano solo at the
end of the song has been done many times before. But taken together, all these
elements mutate into one single mega-odd entity. You can think of it in a
variety of ways — music of the future, ahead of its time by two thousand light
years; psychological bait, paving the way for mindless kids at the disco to
plunge into more complex music; reflection of the soul state of a deeply
troubled, insecure person etc. But whichever particular way you prefer, there
is no denying the bravery of this and other experiments — here was a guy who,
instead of choosing a safe (but boring) career in modern classical,
intentionally penetrated the dumbest of all spheres of pop, and infused it with
a creative avantgarde spirit.
I mean, much of this sounds like «parody» (the
«sleazy» 'Pop Your Funk' is the most glaring example), but I am not even sure
if humor and satire were ever present on Arthur's mind while writing and
producing this material. «Sexy» dance-pop frequently borders on unintentional
self-parody by itself, and putting all these flourishes on the style cannot
help but make it funny. However, that is not the main point. The main point is
that thirteen minutes of 'In The Light Of The Miracle' are like an insane
«dance-prog» epic, where Latin percussion rhythms, ambient synth landscapes,
tricky interweaving vocal harmonies à
la Gentle Giant, and dissonant avantgarde cello passages all coexist in a
state of mathematically justified psychedelia.
Whenever you are ready to take a break from
this befuddling mix of weirdness and banality, Russell's sensitive side is
here for you, with nice, accessible versions of 'Keeping Up' and 'A Little
Lost' that remind us of how exactly the guy missed a successful career in
romantic balladeer-ism. And the brief two-minute version of 'Treehouse' echoes World Of Echo, reminding us of how
exactly the guy used to undermine all the LPs released during his lifetime with
«unlistenable» production technologies, palatable only for those select few who
spend half of their lives training their ears to orgasm at the sounds of
Einstürzende Neubauten.
In brief — yep, this here is one truly eclectic
collection, although it certainly does not open up the entire world of Arthur Russell. But it is definitely the place to start for the uninitiated
person. If you do not get interested in anything beyond 'Go Bang' and 'Wax The
Van', it is also the place to end; but if the «quiet» and «echoey» side of
Arthur intrigues you as much as his dance side, by all means, go on to World Of Echo and Another Thought. In the meantime, this is the easiest, even if not
at all «heart-friendly», thumbs up in his entire catalog.
FIRST THOUGHT BEST THOUGHT (2006)
1) "Instrumentals"
Volume 1; 2) "Instrumentals" Volume 2; 3) Reach One; 4) Tower Of
Meaning; 5) Sketch For The Face Of Helen.
This monster 2-CD set is not for the common
man. Completely instrumental and mostly «minimalist / ambient» in scope, it
is a great discovery for the Giants of the Open-Minded Approach. In the
meantime, I can only try to review it from the humble viewpoint of the Dwarf of
the Open-Minded Approach, with all the honesty and integrity that go along with
it. (Besides, it's always a great opportunity to use dirty words and get away
with it).
The first CD includes two «volumes» of
«Instrumentals» – two sets of meditative musical paintings, at least the first
of which goes back to the mid-Seventies, when it was designed to accompany
some nature photos taken by a Japanese photographer (A-R-T, boys and girls!).
For some reason, though, only the second
volume saw the light of day in Russell's own lifetime (originally released in
1984)...
...which, I think, is a great injustice, since
Volume 1 is far more interesting. Listening to it synthesizes the idea of an
«art-pop jam» in my mind, which is something fairly unique. We all know jazz
jams, blues jams, psychedelic drone jams etc., but this stuff sounds a bit
like... well, imagine Brian Wilson's backing band on Pet Sounds that, one of those days, suddenly decided to take a
break and just kick back and improvise on some of the themes, without soloing.
Basically, it's a set of free-flowing rhythmic
motions, with lots of instruments that behave «normally», but
«atmospherically», just drifting around without any apparent goal. Horns,
strings (including Russell's own cello), and percussion are usually in the
lead, but guitars, bass, and probably numerous other instruments are also
present. Technically, it is «boring», and not exactly «beautiful» in the
conventional sense of the word, but it also does not feel one bit pretentious.
Somehow, it manages to create a minimalistic impression without actually being
minimalistic — with all these instruments, you'd think there'd be a lot of
stuff going on, when nothing really goes on. So, if you want to really learn
how to create Nothing from Lotsa Something, this here is a ten-section crash
course that I find amazingly instructive.
'Volume 2' is where the problems start. To
learn my opinion of it, please refer to the Tower Of Meaning review — not accidentally, Tower Of Meaning itself constitutes the bulk of the second disk
here, flowing almost seamlessly out of the second chunk of 'Instrumentals'.
Although the first track still has some percussion and extra stuff, it is
dominated by cello droning, which eventually squeezes out everything else. If
you like to spend long winter evenings listening to gusts of wind howling in
the pipes... ah, well, forget it.
To «round things out», the second disc ends
with a very early experimental composition (the sixteen-minute long 'Reach
One', on which Russell records a competition in minimalism between two Fender
Rhodes pianos), and 'Sketch For The Face Of Helen', on which a field recording
of a started-up tugboat is combined with an electronic tone generator — tons of
fun for the entire family, especially if the father is an electrician at the
local harbor.
Still, the presence of 'Instrumentals Vol. 1'
makes the album a very important release in Russell's post-mortem history,
maybe even a must-have for all those interested in collecting as many diversified
approaches to music-making as possible. These are cool, melodic, thoroughly
un-ugly, and yet, quite unique trills coming from your speakers, and they do a
far better job of «colorizing» the guy than about 50% of his released output.
(The rest, for all I know, may be exclusively for those A-R-T people whose
grandmothers were abducted by aliens).
SPRINGFIELD (2006)
1) Springfield; 2) Springfield
(DFA Remix); 3) Springfield (Detail); 4) See My Brother, He's Jumping Out
(Let's Go Swimming #1); 5) Corn #3; 6) Hiding Your Present From You; 7) You
Have Did The Right Thing When You Put That Skylight In.
I do not even know why this is available in the first place. The only «autonomous»
track on this mini-album is 'Springfield' itself, a track recorded some time in
the late Eighties, but not late enough to serve as a tribute to Matt Groening.
It is not at all different from many other «synth-prog» grooves that we already
know, and, in fact, I find it deadly boring. The gimmick consists of a rigidly
scraped cello looped as one of the rhythm tracks. So what? There is neither
melody nor atmosphere here.
The rest of the record seems to have been
hastily assembled around this «masterpiece», but most of the tracks are
actually better. In the nearly instrumental 'DFA Remix' of 'Springfield', the
subtle brass overdubs are pushed higher in the mix, so that the track gets a
slight atmospheric injection. 'See My Brother, He's Jumping Out' features a
somewhat more complex style of percussion programming (still way too much
Eighties for me to be enjoyable) and various small sonic effects, mostly in the
form of synth bleeps and cello scratches, that help it get along. And 'Hiding
Your Present From You' is, at long last, an actual song, allowing Russell's otherworldly optimism echo through the
contradicting layers of ambient cloudy synths and distorted noise-rock guitar.
Still, the only track of any true interest on the album, I think, is
the last one, which sounds as if it itself had no idea of where it was coming
from or going to. Basically, it is a heavy cello freakout, not unlike something
in the vein of Adrian Belew, but done with a bow rather than a pick, and with
far more echo and wobble than Belew would ever allow himself — to conceal the
lack of technique, perhaps, as experimental players often do — but the reality
is such that this sound is cool. If
you have a cello, do not try this at home, though. Might as well just start
pouring acid on your floorboards.
Considering that the well of unissued treasures
had by no means yet run dry, I seriously question the purposes of this release.
It may only be of interest to seriously hardcore fans of Arthur Russell, and I
seriously believe that all of them
dwell together in a two-bedroom apartment somewhere in the Village. Thumbs down,
despite some occasionally pleasant quirkiness.
LOVE IS OVERTAKING ME (2008)
1) Close My Eyes; 2) Goodbye
Old Paint; 3) Maybe She; 4) Oh Fernanda Why; 5) Time Away; 6) Nobody Wants A
Lonely Heart; 7) I Couldn't Say It To Your Face; 8) This Time Dad You're Wrong;
9) What It's Like; 10) Eli; 11) Hey! How Does Everybody Know; 12) I Forget And
I Can't Tell (Ballad Of The Lights Pt. 1); 13) Habit Of You; 14) Janine; 15) Big
Moon; 16) Your Motion Says; 17) The Letter; 18) Don't Forget About Me; 19) Love
Is Overtaking Me; 20) Planted A Thought; 21) Love Comes Back.
This is yer friendly, cozy, homely companion to
The World Of Arthur Russell:
Audika's most widely celebrated and acclaimed archival release so far. It is
one of the very few Russell albums to feature a clear, unaltered, and even
somewhat «pastoral/cowboyish» picture of Arthur on the front sleeve — and the
sleeve matches the contents, because the tracks that are assembled here,
stretched over the man's entire career, are, for the most part, acoustic demos
and sparsely arranged live instrument recordings. Programmed beats? Fuzzy
avantgarde cello? Echo-laden hypnotic vocals? Forget it. On Love Is Overtaking Me, Arthur Russell
says hello to James Taylor. To Bob Dylan. To Lou Reed. And, sometimes, to the
Cars.
On this album, Arthur Russell is just a normal,
lyrical kind of fellow. Fragile, insecure, a little romantic, a little
paranoid, the works. Like a slightly less mystical and wizardly version of Nick
Drake, or a slightly more coherent and down-to-earth version of Syd Barrett. He
plays acoustic guitar — a lot; engages in lots of folk- and country-rock,
particularly during the first half of the album; and, overall, through the
careful selective work of his mediators, comes out as a soulful hero of the
lo-fi style, ideal for modern hipster consumption. Released, say, somewhere
around the mid-Eighties, the album would have left no trace; today, it is a
mini-sensation.
Unfortunately, I cannot pretend to be impressed.
It is a very nice, accessible, intelligent collection, but I fail to see any
signs of genius. Melody-wise, the folk/country-ish half of the album is not at
all rich on ideas — some generic waltzing, some minimalistic minor chord
constructions that remind me of Nick Drake's Pink Moon (an album I have always considered to be overrated exactly because of its disappointing
«minimalism»), some songs that sound like outtakes from a Bob Dylan album
circa his Planet Waves period ('I
Couldn't Say It To Your Face', etc.). You really have to have a special feel
for Russell's personality in order to count any of these tunes as masterpieces;
myself, I prefer to just view them as a marginally impressive additional side to
that personality.
Luckily, the more fully arranged half of the
record contains quite a few good pop songs. For instance, 'Hey! How Does
Everybody Know' is stylish, catchy folk-pop à
la Beau Brummels; 'I Forget And I Can't Tell', with its fast tempo and
positive beat, could also have been a minor hit circa 1963 or so. 'Habit Of
You' is a major highlight, a tune so insecure of itself it pushes New Wave
synths, country-rock slide guitars, art-rock vocal harmonies, and classic
singer-songwriter's paranoia into one three-minute package. 'Big Moon', on the
other hand, sounds so oddly close to a typical 1970's soft-rock hit that one
begins to wonder whatever made Russell experiment with that kind of songwriting — could it be that he was actually a
closet fan of Bread? The versatility hits home, though, when the very next song
('Your Motion Says') betrays him as the invisible fifth member of The Cars
(same interaction between guitars and keyboards). Etc. etc.
Summing up, Love Is Overtaking Me is an album best taken in perspective, both
in its own and within the rest of Russell's catalog. From what I have just
written, one could get the impression that Arthur was just a musical chameleon,
a sort of American David Bowie with even wider scope and, arguably, even less
talent. This is absolutely not the case. Russell's music is driven far more by
his hear-and-soul complex than by intellectual calculation, and none of these particular songs sound like
conscious experiments, they simply reflect various strains of influences that
this omnivorous gentleman had embedded in himself. But it is only in this whole
palette of influences that an «interesting» Arthur Russell begins to take
shape. Individually, none of these songs have any intrigue; collectively, they
represent one of the oddest intrigues of our time, and you do not even need a
hipster conscience to come to that conclusion. Thumbs up.
ASIA (1982)
1) Heat Of The Moment; 2) Only
Time Will Tell; 3) Sole Survivor; 4) One Step Closer; 5) Time Again; 6) Wildest
Dreams; 7) Without You; 8) Cutting It Fine; 9) Here Comes The Feeling.
In the big book of rock music, Asia (and its follow-up, Alpha, recorded with the same lineup)
must hold the record spot for «Largest Amount of Wasted Talent Ever Assembled
in One Spot». It took all the expertise of Family/King Crimson bassist/vocalist
John Wetton, Yes guitar wiz Steve Howe, ELP drum giant Carl Palmer, and Geoff
"Video Killed The Radio Star" Downes —to release the «arena pop»
album to end all «arena pop» albums, and, in the process, to serve as a
textbook illustration of so many things that were wrong with the Eighties.
Let me be heard here: I would actually love to try and see Asia re-recorded, or, at least, re-mixed from the original tapes
with new overdubs. There are some genuinely strong pop melodies here. There is
an atmosphere of starry-eyed idealism carried over from the Yes/ELP camp, as if
the spirits of Greg Lake and Jon Anderson were silently watching over the
studio. There are some really nifty guitar parts: Howe is always Howe, no
matter which crazy project he is getting drafted into. It's just that, in the
end, everything is ruined by the «heat of the moment» — namely, the commercial
requirements of the time.
In a different age, under different stage
lights, these people might have come together to record a new Close To The Edge, sharpened by a touch
of Red and tempered with a dip of Brain Salad Surgery. But "now you
find yourself in '82", according to what the album opener tells us, and
the next two lines load and display the program: "The disco hot spots hold
no charm for you / You can concern yourself with bigger things". See? How
do you justify the fact that you have just gone from playing in the
intellectual-est prog bands of the last decade to churning out generic arena-pop?
Simple — just put yourself in the position of «educating the masses».
Yesterday, they were all grooving along to 'Jive Talking'; today, prog masters
are leading them on into bigger and better things. It's The Three Tenors!!!
Yet I have to admit — for some reason, I really
like this record. Every once in a while, it plunges into the unbearable, like
the power ballad 'Without You' (a disgrace to the respectable name of the other power ballad 'Without You' — the
Badfinger one); but for the most part, it is catchy, not always trivial, highly
melodic stuff whose main deficiency lies in the arrangements. Chief culprit is Downes, playing lifeless, predictable
string-imitating Eighties keyboards. Minor culprit is Carl Palmer, not so much for
the unnecessary electronic enhancement of his drums as for not really
justifying his presence on the songs — most of these parts could have been
performed by anyone. The lyrics are better left alone, to avoid getting burned
by their mock-Byronesque seriousness. Other than that — Asia rules (on all of the rather small territory that remains).
My personal favorites include 'Only Time Will
Tell', mainly for the excellent in-between verse breaks, punctuated by a
screeching guitar part from Howe (also, imagine how much better those synth fanfares
would have sounded if played by real
brass); and the first part of 'Cutting It Fine', with Wetton's vocals and
Howe's guitar locking their jaws in a slightly more aggressive bite than usual.
The big, anthemic hit single 'Heat Of The Moment' needs to be mentioned, but it
is way too radio-oriented to remain in memory as a major highlight. Suffice it
to say that the generic pop-metal guitar tone, so popular with the arena-rock
of the times, appears on Asia in all
of its steroid-based muscular form only
on 'Heat Of The Moment'. The rest of the songs are usually rhythmically driven
by the keyboards, whereas Howe's guitar is reserved for gentle melodic soloing
(and that soloing is well worth tracking out and following throughout the
album).
It is, I think, predictable, that four guys
like that could not have created an utterly
worthless album. They tried their best, to be sure, but, in the end, Asia still emerges as a «survivor» — a
record hopelessly chained to its rather tasteless epoch, but with enough
merits to compensate for the tastelessness. Put it on for your kid if you want
to teach him what the «overground» used to be like in 1982. At least it beats
Kim Wilde. Thumbs
up, if that helps.
ALPHA (1983)
1) Don't Cry; 2) The Smile Has
Left Your Eyes; 3) Never In A Million Years; 4) My Own Time (I'll Do What I
Want); 5) The Heat Goes On; 6) Eye To Eye; 7) The Last To Know; 8) True Colors;
9) Midnight Sun; 10) Open Your Eyes.
The follow-up to Asia was much less successful, both commercially and critically. No big surprise there,
considering that Howe and Palmer, the two acknowledged «giants» of the
supergroup, are now completely missing from the credits — all of the songs are
associated exclusively with the Wetton/Downes songwriting duo. Critical hatred
may have engulfed «progressive rock» as a whole, and Yes and ELP as its
representatives, but it was never targeted against individuals — you could be
disgusted with Yes, but not its guitarist, and with ELP, but not its drummer.
So, critics were asking, what exactly is
the point of having one of the best guitarists and one of the best drummers in
the world in your «supergroup» — and relegating them to the position of easily
replaceable bit players?
It is
true that Howe's role on Alpha is
diminished even in comparison to Asia.
I do not recall a single interesting or, in fact, noticeable guitar riff or
solo on the entire album. But, on the other hand, it's not as if Asia's main points were about guitar
work, either — and as for Palmer, he was drastically underused from the very
beginning. So my bottomline is clear: if you like Asia at all, get ready to like Alpha,
because they are twin brothers, concentrating on bombastic, but catchy arena
pop-rock. That's about all there is to it.
I will not talk much about individual songs;
they are fleshed out more or less in the same way, and alternate democratically
between romantic balladry ('The Smile Has Left Your Eyes', Wetton's signature
tune for years to come), upbeat happy arena-pop ('Don't Cry') and slightly
harsher, grittier «rockers» ('The Heat Goes On', mood-wise = 'Cutting It Fine'
from the previous record and, consequently, my personal favorite). The
«progressive» spirit is only present on the coda to 'Open Your Eyes', but only
in the form of a catchy and quite commercial «romantic mantra» that will
emotionally convert fans of Styx and Journey rather than Yes and ELP.
What has always puzzled me is the question —
why is it that I do not actively hate
either Asia or Alpha? Both records seem to be the perfect candidates for stirring
up green-tinged emotions. One key reason may be Wetton's singing voice: like
Greg Lake's, it does not have that «operatic» flavor that so many
arena-oriented vocalists often develop, thinking that, the closer you sound to
Pavarotti on your records (and never mind the years of training — any idiot can
sing opera as long as he ain't completely tonedeaf), the closer they get to
Real Art. Wetton knows his limits and is always careful not to overstep them.
But even more important may be the fact that
all of these songs are, essentially, quite well arranged. Lack of a distinct
guitar sound may disappoint, but I would say it might have been an advantage —
otherwise, too many of these songs could sound like Aerosmith power ballads. There
is just enough guitar here to avoid the tag of «synth-pop», and the decision to
generally avoid solos, or, at least, «egotistically mixed» solos, with the
soloist high on top of everything else, was also correct (reducing potential
threats of «pretentiousness»).
There may be other things at work, too, but I
just want to draw attention to the fact that Asia and Alpha, of all
the «dumb» arena-rock out there, are some of the «smartest» records in the
genre. This does not mean that the «smartness» blows away the strong cheese
smell, or that even a single of these «ecstatic» anthems merits even a single
tear out of anyone's eyes (unless it's all about «how low the mighty have
fallen»). But I believe this reasoning is at least enough to justify the thumbs up
that I would not deny Alpha as Asia's little brother.
ASTRA (1985)
1) Go; 2) Voice Of America; 3)
Hard On Me; 4) Wishing; 5) Rock And Roll Dream; 6) Countdown To Zero; 7) Love
Now Till Eternity; 8) Too Late; 9) Suspicion; 10) After The War.
By 1985, Asia had pretty much squandered all of
its critical credit (never impressive to begin with), and sales were also
dropping — perhaps because that sole characteristics they were still retaining
from their «progressive» past, their stern pompous solemnity, was getting on
the nerves of the MTV generation. Too adult, too boring.
The last straw was the departure of Howe,
replaced by former Krokus guitarist Mandy Meyer. (John Wetton, too, was kicked
out of the band for about a year, with Greg Lake replacing him on tour; but he
managed to find his way back in before that lineup had a chance to record a new
LP). The happening was more symbolic than substantial, because Howe's
contributions to Alpha were minimal
(at least, the ones that could be defined as «uniquely Howe-style») — but an
asset is an asset, and the loss of an asset is always painful. Inspired by this
misfortune, critics had a field day — and the album never even made it to the
Top 50.
However, looking back on the entire sequence,
it is really hard to tell why Astra
should be «disappointing» after Alpha
and even Asia. The only reason I
would dock it half a star in comparison, were I still «starring» albums, is
that it lacks a song in the style of 'Cutting It Fine' or 'The Heat Goes On',
that is, a touch grittier than the rest. On Asia, Wetton functions in two modes only: (a) «exuberant» and (b)
«lamenting». But, let us face it, both of those were his preferred modes on the
earlier records as well.
Most of Astra
is simply the same old catchy, shallow, but generally non-disgusting arena-pop.
New guitarist Mandy Meyer does, unfortunately, bring in more of a pop-metal
sound compared to Howe (most clearly evident on the lead-in single 'Go' with
its steroid-muscular riffs), but, like Alpha,
the music is mainly driven and dominated by Downes' keyboards, so it does not
matter all that much. A few of the melodies are actually quite nice, e. g. the
rhythmic ballad 'Wishing' (very close in style to The Alan Parsons Project —
I'm fairly sure Alan would have arranged it far more tastefully, though); the
«apocalyptic» mid-tempo rocker 'Countdown To Zero'; and the nuclear war «epic»
'After The War' (quite sincere in nature and relatively complex in execution).
The only pieces that really overdo the pomp thing are 'Voice Of America' — an
almost Diane Warren-ish power ballad with unbearable pathos — and 'Rock And
Roll Dream', which commits the ultimate crime of stuffing the words «rock and
roll» in the title of a song that has nothing whatsoever to do with rock and
roll. (Perhaps if it weren't seven minutes long...).
Okay, so perhaps 'Suspicion' moves the band way
too close to adult contemporary and Bryan Adams, but on most of the tracks,
they still manage to stay one tiny step ahead of the pack, even though I can
hardly prove that gut feeling.
I used to roll along with the critics at one
time, thinking of Astra as a huge
dip in quality — perhaps as the consequence of being way too appalled by the
anthemic low points. But it may be ridiculous in general to speak of the «quality» of Asia from a 2012 point of
view. Their entire sound has been discredited so much that there is really no
point in listening to the band at all these days, unless you are a real sucker
for that Eighties keyboard sound (understandable, for me, only as a nostalgic
side effect). These days, they are just a historic curio. And taken from that
point of view, it does not seriously matter if your personal favorite is Asia, Alpha, or Astra. The
melodies are always comparable in catchiness, and Wetton's singing is always
comparable in tone and pitch — what's to worry about? The same tepid,
historically stimulated thumbs up as always.
THEN & NOW (1990)
1) Only Time Will Tell; 2) Heat
Of The Moment; 3) Wildest Dreams; 4) Don't Cry; 5) The Smile Has Left Your Eyes;
6) Days Like These; 7) Prayin' 4 A Miracle; 8) Am I In Love?; 9) Summer (Can't
Last Too Long); 10) Voice Of America.
The worst sort of rip-off there is: not only
was this a straightforward attempt to cheat clients out of their money with
minimal effort, but the ludicrous title also added a streak of smug hypocrisy,
passing this off as a «conceptual» artistic decision: «First, close your eyes
and we will help you remember how Asia sounded five years ago. Now, open your
eyes and you will hear how Asia sounds TODAY! Isn't this a fabulous experience?
Hear the difference? No? You are absolutely correct. Neither do we. Sorry, no
refunds.»
That was then,
of course; now the financial issue is
no longer so pressing, due to obvious circumstances. But the original rip-off
still remains a rip-off: Then & Now
is of potential interest to the rare breed of diehard Asia fans (yoohoo,
anyone under 30?) and Roger Dean album art collectioners. The idea may have been to record a new album,
after five years of procrastination, but if so, the well was so dry the band
had to resort to cheating. In the end, they did not even fill out an entire
side: the Then part takes up all of
Side A, then gives way to four brand new «Now»
tunes, then returns to wind things up with 'Voice Of America'.
I shouldn't even be reviewing the album as
such, but it does have 'Days Like This', which I honestly consider a good
song, with a strong vocal part from Wetton and a relatively tasteful way of
delivering its upbeat, optimistic message. The production is predictably awful:
maybe someday somebody will have the brains to cover it in the style of classic
Cheap Trick, with crunchy power pop guitars, and throw in a real brass section
during the anthemic climactic moments. But they do nail it fairly well on the "days like these I feel like I
could change the world" chorus — there is a brawny, fists-clenched aura
about it without the song degenerating into hair metal or heart-shredding
power balladry that I really like. It may not be coincidental that the song was
not written by any of the band members, but by Steve Jones of the little-known
roots-rock band The Unforgiven. Or it may
be coincidental. After all, it's not as if Asia band members themselves never
ever wrote a single good pop song. I «despise» the band like any fine,
upstanding citizen of the world, and even I am not ready to make that claim.
Unfortunately, they do a fine job of provoking
me into it on the other three songs. 'Prayin' 4 A Miracle' may have some
integrity (if you like Wetton's singing at all, you have to admit that the
«praying» thing in the chorus has a bit of epic touchiness to it), but, on the
whole, is still rather languid and draggy. 'Summer (Can't Last Too Long)' is
neither epic nor all that catchy, just a regular bouncy throwaway with zero
meaning. And worst of the lot is 'Am I In Love?', a textbook example of «adult
contemporary», but done with a touch of Diane Warren. On top of the song's
creamcheese-and-corn atmosphere, the chorus "Am I in love, or is it the
magic of tonight?" might just be romantics' darkest hour. I have no doubt
that, at one point or other, it must have been syndicated for Santa Barbara.
As for the Then
part, well... the selection is fairly mediocre, focusing on the hits and
additional band-cherished material on which we probably do not see eye-to-eye
(I would rather prefer 'The Heat Goes On' and 'Cutting It Fine' than 'Wildest
Dreams', obviously). But even if this were the best possible compilation out of
a hundred choices, this wouldn't matter: Then
& Now is a rotten, fake concept at the heart, and deserves nothing but
a thumbs
down regardless of the circumstances. Not even the well-fed, glossy
Pegasus, towering over all three past mascots of Asia on the front cover, can
save the day with its unsubstantiated symbolism.
LIVE IN MOSCOW
(1991)
1) Time Again; 2) Soul
Survivor; 3) Don't Cry; 4) Geoff Downes – Keyboards; 5) Only Time Will Tell; 6)
Rock And Roll Dream; 7) Starless; 8) Book Of Saturday; 9) The Smile Has Left
Your Eyes; 10) The Heat Goes On; 11) Go; 12) Heat Of The Moment; 13) Open Your
Eyes; 14) Kari-Anne.
Later in the decade, having officially settled
in the elite center of Crapsville, Asia started releasing something like a
dozen live albums per year, so that the grateful fans could savour every tiny
nuance of their magnificent power ballads. But in the early 1990s, they were
still focusing on the studio, which makes their first venture into live album
territory worth at least a brief separate mention. Besides, as a certified
Muscovite, I just couldn't ignore this one, could I?
The fact is, of course, that in 1990 the Soviet
Union had only just opened its doors to Western acts, and each big live show
from an established rock act was a major «happening». This is how old has-beens
like Deep Purple and, God forgive me, Uriah Heep made their huge cult
followings in Russia — they were among the first acts to probe Russian
territory, and, like any efficient pioneer, their efforts were rewarded. (I am
guessing that when Ian Gillan strikes ninety and gets to be wheelchaired on the
stage to rasp out the old hits in a range of exactly one note, Russia will be
the last place where he will still be able to sell out a stadium).
I do not know whether Wetton and Co.
understood, on that fateful day (November 9, 1990), that the wild screaming,
coming from 40,000 members of the audience at the Olimpiyskiy complex, was not
so much for them personally as it was for them as «symbols». I suppose they
did, as I have no reason to doubt their human intelligence (no matter how songs
like 'Kari-Anne' would like me to think otherwise). But in any case, it was
reasonable enough to commemorate the event, plus Wetton probably did not want
his Russian-learning efforts to go to waste (nothing special, though, everybody
can be trained to say spasibo with an
awful English accent).
In any case, this «edge» is necessary, because,
taken out of context, the performance is not at all impressive. Not a single
song presents any interesting developments over the studio version. Wetton
sings well, but occasionally either flubs a note or two or steps too far away
from the mike. The lack of Howe is quite noticeable: temporary replacement Pat
Thrall is good at generic speed runs and Rambo-style guitar-god posturing, but
he cannot even reproduce the exquisite Yes-style bits during the climactic
chorus-back-to-verse transitions on 'Only Time Will Tell' (hmph). And Geoff
Downes gets to have a lengthy piano/synth solo improv piece, as if he were Rick
Wakeman — but last time I checked, he still wasn't.
These are the bad news. The good news is that,
overall, the setlist is respectable — yes, they do play 'The Heat Goes On', and
they even manage to make it rock with an impressively wild (for Asia standards)
organ solo. I could do without the overtly sentimental hits like 'The Smile Has
Left Your Eyes', but they are in the minority, and to sweeten the deal, Wetton
throws on a couple of his old highlights from the King Crimson era — probably
to placate the few «true» progressive rock fans in the audience while the rest
are still impatiently waiting for 'Heat Of The Moment'. Strange enough, neither
'Starless' nor 'Book Of Saturday' sound way too out of place on the album —
probably because, without Fripp, they are somewhat effectively Asia-nized (still
sound like specific hotspots for Wetton, though).
One new studio creation is tacked on at the end
— a particularly dumb «love rocker» titled 'Kari-Anne', which, unfortunately,
is not a re-spelled cover of the
Hollies' 'Carrie Ann', but an entirely new song that you can dedicate to your
loved one only if you are living under highly
strenuous social conditions; it boldly paves the way to Payne-era Asia, and
how. My advice is to just ignore it and concentrate on the live show — or,
better still, not concentrate on the live show either, because there is
honestly no need for this record unless you do research on Western cultural
influence on late-Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. In that respect, the decibels
generated by a 40,000 strong Russian crowd assembled from all corners of the
SU are far more important here than the ones generated by this sad memento of
mainstream Eighties' spirit.
AQUA (1992)
1) Aqua, Part 1; 2) Who Will
Stop The Rain?; 3) Lay Down Your Arms; 4) Heaven On Earth; 5) Someday; 6) Crime
Of The Heart; 7) A Far Cry; 8) Back In Town; 9) Don't Call Me; 10) Love Under
Fire; 11) The Voice Of Reason; 12) Aqua, Part 2.
Okay, this is where things start to get
irredeemably bad. It has little to do with the loss of a crucial member: one
needn't really have a problem with John Payne, who came out of nowhere and replaced
Wetton fairly well, with a similarly powerful, but, overall, intelligent manner
of singing. New guitarist Al Pitrelli was already a seasoned pop-metal player
who'd made a good name for himself playing with Alice Cooper in his Trash/Hey Stoopid period (where he was at least a fairly tolerable
replacement for the «Rambo» style of the Coop's previous axman). And besides,
Steve Howe agreed to guest-play on some of the tracks. Carl Palmer, too, was
still an official member when the
sessions started (but left to rejoin ELP before they were over).
So the people are okay. What is not okay is a sense of total
wretchedness. The style of the band was pathetic enough in the 1980s, but at
least it was sort of en vogue at the
time, and that provided enough inspiration — not just in order to come up with
decent melodies, but to play and sing them like there was some hope for
tomorrow, if you know what I mean. By 1992, however, even mainstream tastes
were changing, and only those who, for some reason, fell way too deep under the
«Eighties charm», could continue enjoying this cr... uh, I mean,
«eccentric-romantic» approach to music making.
Aqua does not give out one single bloody hint that the band even noticed the bug of the
times, let alone tried to capture it. Same stuffy electronic arrangements, same
booming drums, same pathos, same arena-rock choruses — still riding the old
formula, and quite depleted and worn out at that. What used at least to be
novel is now predictable and utterly annoying; and no matter how much
«Authentic Care For The World's Problems» Payne is trying to convey with his
voice, nothing works. Personally, I cannot even make myself believe that they
really cared about anything at this point — it is as if someone just put the
entire band in a state of trance and ordered them to plow through on
auto-pilot.
Some of these choruses are still catchy, but
why bother? I could imagine someone taking 'Crime Of The Heart' and rearranging
it as a moving acoustic folk ditty, but until this is done, why in the world
should we bother with the original? Simple, undeserving musical ideas are being
puffed up to symphonic size here, the same way a bad scientist, having made a
trivial discovery, turns it into a 500-page dissertation, with an emphasis on
very long words with very little meaning. The utter banality of it all is best
illustrated with the intro to the generic love ballad 'Don't Call Me' —
starting, of course, with the sound of a tone dial and a female
"Hello?" — you know, to set the proper mood and all. Even Jeff Lynne,
with his 'Telephone Line', handled that better.
The more energy there seems to be, the more it
seems to be fake, fake, fake. Fake rockers ('Back In Town'), fake power ballads
('Love Under Fire'), fake prophetic anthems ('Who Will Stop The Rain',
cautiously titled with the full form of the auxiliary so as not to offend fans
of CCR), even fake acoustic prayers ('The Voice Of Reason') and fake
intro/outro «atmospheric» instrumental pieces ('Aqua') built on clichéd
classical guitar figures and boring sound effects. Some fans say that Geoff
Downes at least renewed and remodeled his synthesizers. But is this supposed to
mean they sound any more alive than
they used to? The fact that he managed to achieve the highest standards of
adult contemporary is not particularly recommendable.
Fun fact — although Aqua, almost predictably, failed to chart in either the States or
the UK, it still went all the way to No. 1 in Japan. (Then again, I suppose everything goes to No. 1 in Japan sooner
or later, since they live in a parallel reality where time flows ten times
slower than in the preoccupied Western world.) On that happy note, let us
simply issue the expected thumbs down, and move along: the real Trail of
Tears has only just begun.
ARIA (1994)
1) Anytime; 2) Are You Big
Enough?; 3) Desire; 4) Summer; 5) Sad Situation; 6) Don't Cut The Wire
(Brother); 7) Feels Like Love; 8) Remembrance Day; 9) Enough's Enough; 10) Military
Man; 11) Aria.
Since most fans gave up on Asia completely with
the release of Aqua, I am sure that Aria is remembered even less —
particularly since no one could deny that it simply tries to repeat the formula
of Aqua. An odd decision — with the
overall flop that Aqua was, one
would have thought that the boys would take a look around and try and introduce
some changes. But, horrendous realization as it is, it is quite possible that
they actually liked what they were
doing with Aqua. Let's face it, if
even a handful of the fans still liked what they were doing, why shouldn't the
band be entitled to looking at their pathetic blintzes as «artistic
statements»?
But Aria,
strange as it is, slightly improves over its predecessor. Compared to Aqua, there is less sap and less power
balladry: most of the «romance» is given an upbeat pop sheen, whereas the
«epic» numbers tend to be presented as dark and ominous rather than
heart-on-sleeve declarations. The fakeness of it all never disappears, but
fakeness is always easier to digest when it is not overcooked, and Payne's
vocal hooks, crescendos, and phrasing show a tad more restrain. As a result,
this is still boring, but not sickeningly
so. (With the obvious exception of the Titanic-bound
'Feels Like Love', but that is just one song and I am going to pretend I forgot
all about it).
Fans of Yes' Big Generator might even enjoy 'Are You Big Enough?' and its
steroid riffs: I always imagine that the question of the chorus is addressed
directly to those riffs, rather than the listener, which makes it a much more
fun listen than the song actually deserves. 'Don't Cut The Wire' is another
salvageable track, with an impressive three-step build-up from verse to bridge
to chorus — bring in a decent guitar track (something swampy, perhaps), a grand
piano, remove some of the vocal overdubs, and there just might be something
there.
Plus, some of the choruses are just damn
catchy. The pathos of 'Military Man' challenges Michael Bolton, but I still
cannot get that goddamn "don't come running here to find me..." bit
out of my head. So is the chorus of 'Enough's Enough', which, upon close
inspection, turns out to be a Marxist anthem: "Enough's enough / It's
eye to eye / Enough's enough, we cry / Enough's enough of smoke and steel /
Enough's enough of turning this wheel" — and now, ladies and gentlemen,
you all know the secret of why Asia were still selling something: they were positioning themselves as the working man's progressive rock act. (No wonder a few of these
tracks sound like they could easily fit on some of Springsteen's late-period
flops, like Human Touch).
According to some sources, there is an
objective explanation for these feelings — namely, that Aqua was essentially made up of rejected leftovers, a quick
throw-together act to solidify the band's relationship with Payne, whereas Aria was more carefully thought out and
represented genuine «hard-working» collaboration between Payne and Downes.
Basically, that answers the question of which album to get first — although, in
a perfect world, none of us would even need to pose that question, because a
perfect world has no need for either. Then again, a perfect world would give
little incentive to produce art as such. Fact is, in order to have Carole King,
we must also endure Diane Warren; and without an Asia, there might never have
been a Yes — even if they do come in reverse chronological matter.
Anyway, thumbs down, but without any particularly hard
feelings; more of a puzzle here — what in the world made these presumably
intelligent human beings and professional musicians work in this mode, from album to album? This is
not a Black Sabbath sort of case: in 1994, it was clear to everyone that nobody whose opinion matters would ever have a kind
word to say about the album, never in a million years. Did they enjoy being
called names? Did they see it as a brave defiance of current taste standards?
Such a poor album, and such a lot of mystery.
ARENA (1996)
1) Into The Arena; 2) Arena;
3) Heaven; 4) Two Sides Of The Moon; 5) The Day Before The War; 6) Never;
7) Falling; 8) Words; 9) U Bring Me Down; 10) Tell Me Why; 11) Turn It Around;
12) Bella Nova.
One would expect Asia’s heroic ambitions,
already well above and beyond their songwriting abilities and sonic taste, to
burst right through the roof — with the release of an album titled like that; and Roger Dean’s winged lion on
the sleeve is like a pre-ordered symbol of unbearable pathos. But, in a
suprisingly unpredictable move, Arena
turns out to be just the opposite: Asia’s most «restrained», even
«down-to-earth» offering so far.
It must have been an intentional shift of
style: the lineup is more or less the same here as on Aria, with the exception of guitar duties, for which the newly
departed Pitrelli is now replaced by two players: Aziz Ibrahim, formerly of
Simply Red, and Elliott Randall, formerly of whatever God wants. But there have
always been two and only two instruments in Asia that really mattered: the synthesizer (still manned by Father Downes)
and the drum (still kicked by Mike Sturgis). Plus the human voice, of course,
still provided by John Payne. And all three have been toned down for Arena, although the most obvious change
is in the drum sound — Sturgis pretty much renounces the big, electronically
enhanced, 1980s sound, going for a softer, more natural approach.
There are, in fact, congas on the opening track
instead of basic drums, played by guest percussionist Luis Jardim, as the
whole instrumental is set to more or less the Latin rhythm of Steely Dan’s ‘Do
It Again’. This does not save it from sounding like unremarkable elevator
muzak, but it is still the most unusual introduction to an Asia album since
first we learned what a typical Asia album looks like. Experimentation? In some
cases, even unsuccessful experimentation is better than continuing to sink in
the same boring dreck — and since, on the whole, I ended up getting more kicks
from Arena than from either of the
preceding records, this must be one of those cases.
So as not to make the review too long, I will briefly
list what it is that does not suck
about Arena. The way ‘Heaven’ begins
— with echoey guitars lifted directly from ‘Another Brick In The Wall’ and then
the echo waves suddenly transforming into synthesizers
and then the whole thing just going away into the background to give way to an
upbeat pop song (which, in itself, does suck rather badly). The silly catchy
chorus to ‘Two Sides Of The Moon’ which is so very un-Asia-like, more like
simple generic 1980’s synth-pop (perhaps Downes was feeling ever more nostalgic
about the young and innocent days of The Buggles). ‘Never’ and ‘Falling’, two
more okayish pop rock contributions that do not provide much happiness but do
not overreach or annoy, either. And ‘Turn It Around’ has a tiny pinch of
clenched-teeth grit that always made Asia albums easier to assimilate (and an
ear-catching guitar lead from Randall).
Basically, it’s just a livelier, slightly more
diverse, and slightly less pompous proposition than it used to be. This does
not excuse the nine minutes of ‘The Day Before The War’, the album’s sorry
excuse for a «prog epic», or that the «big drums» finally start announcing
their presence on tracks like ‘Words’, or, let us be frank, that the very
concept of the band known as «Asia» still existed in 1996. But in our quest
for musical justice, we cannot not
acknowledge that «…at least they tried». The title track states that “Into the
arena we climb / We look to the sky” — words that might easily be interpreted
as a new declaration of the right to fight for their artistic freedom and
expect support from where it can least be expected.
Plus, an arena is the place to deal out thumbsets, isn’t it? The only problem is,
when no one really gives a damn about the fight, it becomes somewhat irrelevant
whether the fighters in question live or die at all. I would prefer to withdraw
judgement as well — giving a thumbs up to a Payne-era Asia album is strictly
prohibited by the Laws of Adequacy, but giving a thumbs down to Arena in particular would not
acknowledge its honest attempt to break away from the formula, and I do not
want to propagate the wrong concept that «All Asia (var.: All Payne-era Asia)
sounds the same». That’d almost be like saying that all Asia looks the same, and that would be
racist.
ARCHIVA (1996)
CD I: 1) Heart Of Gold; 2) Tears;
3) Fight Against The Tide; 4) We Fall Apart; 5) The Mariner's Dream; 6) Boys
From Diamond City; 7) A.L.O.; 8) Reality; 9) I Can't Wait A Lifetime; 10) Dusty
Road; 11) I Believe; 12) Ginger; CD II: 1) Obsession; 2) Moon Under The Water;
3) Love Like The Video; 4) Don't Come To Me; 5) The Smoke That Thunders; 6)
Satelite Blues; 7) Showdown; 8) That Season; 9) Can't Tell These Walls; 10) The
Higher You Climb; 11) Right To Cry; 12) Armenia.
Apparently, this is how this album (actually, two albums — Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 came
out separately, but I am no superhero to review them together) came through.
One fine day in 1996, upon returning to their studio, the band members found
out that a pipe burst through, destroying much of the equipment and,
apparently, quite a few archival tapes lying around. At this moment, as I can
reconstruct the situation, «oh no!», said Geoff Downes, «just imagine — all of our unreleased treasures could
have been destroyed! not that we were ever going to release it, since it all
sucks anyway, but imagine coming in here one day and IT'S ALL GONE! Would
history ever agree to pardon us? Isn't this a sign from God and all?»
Well — you understand what happened next.
Apparently, these frickin' bastards had tons
of songs they'd recorded over the past few years, none of which originally made
the grade; and now, just because a silly pipe had to blow up at an
inappropriate moment, they pushed twenty-four of these on the market. Now you
might think that, with such a large number of tracks, there could be surprises.
After all, it does happen sometimes that, driven by an odd understanding of the
word «commercial», artists release sterile crap while keeping the real keepers
under the pillow. If so, you can relax: this is clearly not the case here.
Most, if not all, of these tracks were left unreleased because there was a
damn good reason to keep them unreleased.
Basically, these are all outtakes from the pre-Arena era of Payne — the worst single
stretch in Asia's entire career. One single listen to one single choice of a
cover track will suffice: the way this band butchers ʽShowdownʼ, one
of my favourite ELO songs, is inexcusable, with an abysmal combination of
plastic drumming and pop-metal riffage replacing the subtle textures of the
original. And everything here is
molded according to the same stylistics, be it «rocker», «ballad», or, God help
me, «mood piece».
Every once in a while, I feel like a hypocrite
here — after all, it's not as if I were ever bothered by the production style
of ABBA, for instance, where other people would say exactly the same that I am
saying here: «yes, there may be melodies all right, but how can one stand these arrangements? Glitzy trash!»
Yet, for all its unfortunate glitziness, the music of ABBA never for one moment
took itself as doggone seriously as Asia. Truly and verily, I cannot stand a
song like ʽHeart Of Goldʼ because each single instrument, each single
vocal note, each single second of it pretends to be Lord Fuckin' Byron, dark
hair waving in the stormy wind as the Turkish guns raise hell from all four
sides and the earth rumbles under the feet. Against this impression, unless
your music is at least Beethoven-quality, no single pop-rock melody, no matter
how good — and these melodies,
whatever one might say, are at the very least nowhere near «genius» — will be
able to come across as anything other than «moronic to the core».
I wish I could recommend at least one of these
tracks, but as I browse through them once again, they all seem to be doing one
thing — compete with each other in the single nomination of «How High Up In The
Sky Can You Deliver Your Romantic Battle Cry?». Even when they try to let their
hair down and just deliver some good old-fashioned rock'n'roll
(ʽA.L.O.ʼ) or blues-rock (ʽSatellite Bluesʼ), the effect is
the same. With these drums and guitars, you might just as well be
rock'n'rolling on your PC's motherboard — and the «social» bite of
ʽSatellite Bluesʼ is completely lost against the same background as
well. "Underground is just the place to be", howls Payne — not a bad
idea, guys, why not actually try it out?
Overall, this is all awful: expect no random
wonders, and keep a close eye on those pipes. Body waste freely floating around
is fairly yucky, but at least it's natural,
unlike this kind of «spiritual» waste, which has all the markings of a strong
chemical weapon on it. Thumbs down, and if it were up to me, I'd slap
a biohazard sign on it as well.
RARE (1999)
1) The Waterfall; 2) The
Journey Begins; 3) The Seasons; 4) The Gods; 5) The Whales; 6) The Journey
Continues; 7) The Reservation; 8) The Bears; 9) Under The Seas; 10) At The
Graveyard; 11) Downstream; 12) The Ghosts; 13) The Sun; 14) The Moon; 15) The
Sharks; 16) The Journey Ends; 17) The Indians; 18) The Angels; 19) The Horizons;
20) To The Deep; 21) The Game; 22) The Exodus.
Without a doubt, this is the most unusual album
in the Asia catalog; and since, for Asia, the more «unusual» their music is,
the better it is by definition — few things can be less exciting in this world
than «usual» Asia music — Rare is
not only «rare», it is also curious, and, on particular days of the week, may
even be enjoyable.
Essentially, this is a joint combination of two
different soundtracks that were commissionned for the band, or, rather, for its
crucial members (only Downes and Payne were involved in the project, recording
all of the parts): one for a documentary on the migrations of salmon (!),
another one for a SEGA game that ended up unreleased. With the release of Archiva, the rulers of Asia had already
shown how much they care for their residue, so it was probably predictable that
these atypical sessions would find their way out to the general public as
well.
But this time, the decision was right. If anything,
Rare reminds us of the fact that
Geoff Downes, behind all the stiff commercial glitz, started out as an
innovative professional composer, capable of stringing together interesting
sequences of notes — exploring the ways of music, rather than choosing the
safest, easiest way into the hearts of people whose emotional receptors do not
work well on levels beyond formulaic soap operas and Broadway shows. He was
never all that great at this kind of exploration — one reason, probably, why he
ended up drifting towards the lowest common denominator — but he was hardly
talentless, either.
Take these two soundtracks, for instance. They
actually defy straightahead categorization. There is a lot of New Age influence
here, of course, but the salmon journey is hardly generic «ambient»: there are
numerous classical and pseudo-classical piano themes, there is some dissonant
avantgarde, there are a few «ethnic» themes (ʽThe Reservationʼ, with
Indian motives), some elevator muzak, some electronic grooves, etc., all of which
can make a salmon's life pretty colorful. The themes usually match the titles —
ʽThe Bearsʼ is stern and menacing, with heavy emphasis on
mock-Wagnerian synth-horns; ʽThe Whalesʼ goes heavy on special
effects to imitate the animals' breathing and other activities; ʽThe
Sharksʼ sends the keyboards swooshing back and forth to mimic fast
underwater travel, etc. — so I am pretty sure that whoever actually watched the
documentary must have walked away a deeply changed man, one who will no longer
crave for salmon roe, but will instead work hard to make the world a better
place. By all means, Geoff Downes and salmon were made for each other.
The second soundtrack is louder and more
dynamic — no big wonder, since no video game developer would probably want the
music to be done Brian Eno-style — eventually diving into a mix of trip-hop and
heavy guitar rock (ʽThe Gameʼ) and then into techno (ʽThe
Exodusʼ). It is also fairly diverse, but, in general, sounds cheesier and
lacking «naturalistic inspiration». Still, there are quite a few impressive
musical ideas out there, be it in the heavenly synth overdubs on ʽThe
Angelsʼ or in the pipes-and-guitars combination on ʽTo The
Deepʼ.
In short, I have no problems about giving the
whole thing a thumbs
up. It goes without saying that it sounds remarkably fresh and even
stupefying when surrounded on all sides by the ugly walls of Payne-sung
non-hits (I did not explicitly mention that there is not one bit of vocals on
the entire album, except for some atmospheric backing harmonies), but even out
of context, it is, at the very least, a perfectly «okay» specimen of a
multi-purpose soundtrack. In a better world than the one that made the
existence of «Asia» possible, Geoff Downes would be spending most of his days
recording projects like these — and John Payne would be there to assist him,
wisely keeping his mouth shut and helping people to get more kicks out of their
video games rather than spoiling their tastes with corny pomp. Of course, it
also happens to be one of the few Asia albums that are now strictly out of
print.
AURA (2001)
1) Awake; 2) Wherever You Are;
3) Ready To Go Home; 4) The Last Time; 5) Forgive Me; 6) Kings Of The Day; 7) On
The Coldest Day In Hell; 8) Free; 9) You're The Stranger; 10) The Longest Night;
11) Aura.
A return to the tried and true. As on Rare, the list of steady personnel only
includes Downes and Payne, but this time it is unnatural — Aura is not a side project, but a typical Asia album, and the fact
that the duo either did not manage, or did not bother to assemble a steady
line-up is a hint at the degree of disarray in which they had thrust their
affairs. No less than five different guitarists make guest appearances
(including Howe on two tracks and Arena's
Elliott Randall only on two other ones; Ian Chrichton of prog band Saga and
Guthrie Covan of nowhere in particular handle most of the duties), and no less
than four different drummers are there to help them out (including Chris Slade
of AC/DC fame and Michael Sturgis from Wishbone Ash).
Musically, Aura
tries to carry on the aura (sorry) of Arena:
rhythmic adult contemporary synth-pop with decreased emphasis on symphonic pomp
and fanfares and increased emphasis on «moodiness», vocal hooks, and overall
danceability. The songs, however, are generally weaker, and the little odds and
ends that made Arena a bit of a well-welcome
surprise after the early Payne years are nowhere to be found. Alas, it says a
lot about the album that, of all things, they chose a late period 10cc cover
(ʽReady To Go Homeʼ) as the lead single — a big word of welcome from
one dreadfully dull mainstream pop outfit to another; they might as well have
covered Michael Bolton or Bryan Adams, to let us know for sure where their
loyalties truly lay.
The only song here that got me interested a bit
was the title track, a somewhat tepid instrumental prog-rocker that still
sounds mighty energetic and inspired relative to everything else. Fast, not too
spoiled by layers of production, and with plenty of aggressive soloing from
Crichton that clashes nicely with Downes' keyboard riffs, it is intelligently
designed and cheese-free. But it is the album closer, and thus, seems to
represent a last-minute donation to «serious Asia fans» who are always willing
to humiliate themselves by paying good money for all of the pop crap in order
to get around to a few minutes of «prog lite».
Other songs that are probably intended to
deserve mention are ʽFreeʼ, an eight minute monster with Howe
throwing on some respectable licks in the instrumental section, but, otherwise,
quite unremarkable; ʽAwakeʼ, an underproduced anthem to open the
album that is modestly catchy but far more straightforward and generic than
ʽArenaʼ; and a few tunes that also have annoyingly catchy vocal
choruses but are disgraced by the lack of interesting chord sequences
(ʽYou're The Strangerʼ, ʽLongest Nightʼ).
Anyway, it's all just a big bunch of mediocre
supermarket muzak, easily disposable upon one or two listens. Big fans of Howe
will need it for his signature presence in a couple of spots, but otherwise...
even for generically mainstream tastes, the sound of Aura, in the 21st century, can only be appreciated on a nostalgic
kick, and probably by the same people who get a nostalgic kick from The Blue Lagoon or something comparable.
(Actually, we could think of at least one understandable reason for The Blue Lagoon, which could definitely not be applied to Aura). Thumbs down, of course.
SILENT NATION (2004)
1) What About Love; 2) Long
Way From Home; 3) Midnight; 4) Blue Moon Monday; 5) Silent Nation; 6) Ghost In The
Mirror; 7) Gone Too Far; 8) I Will Be There For You; 9) Darkness Day; 10) The
Prophet.
If I were a musician, and if my career had
started at any point after 1985, I would have thought thrice about writing a
song called ʽWhat About Loveʼ. Not only does the title ring stupid as
such (what about love?), but it had
already undermined the coolness of one formerly good band — and I am pretty
sure that, in 2004, there must have been quite a few people looking at the
track list and going, «oh no!...
covering a Heart power ballad now?..
what next, Diane Warren?»
On the other hand, accusing Asia, especially in
its Payne/Downes configuration, of showing inexcusable lapses of taste is like
accusing Gene Simmons that his tongue is an inch too long: he can't help it,
and neither can these guys. Instead, let us look on the bright side of things
and admit that Silent Nation
represents a brave, and not entirely unsuccessful, attempt at «rebooting the entire
franchise», as they say. Indeed: for the first time ever, a «proper» Asia album
whose title does not consist of an A...A word, and whose album sleeve is not
designed by Roger Dean. An album released with a more or less stabilized
lineup, without a host of extra musicians cluttering the proceedings with
close-to-zero efficiency. And, most importantly, an album that, for once, tries
to be denser, more complex, more musical, and more «progressive» than it ever
used to be — at least, in the Payne era. You have to admit that all of this at
least sounds curious.
The overall sound has definitely changed. The
songs are bigger, with more numerous and lengthier instrumental passages; guitarist
Guthrie Govan gets to have a bigger impact all over the place than even Steve
Howe was ever allowed; and Downes himself generally plays a normal organ (or,
sometimes, a normal piano) — so consistently that, when he eventually jumps
over to a cold synthesizer on ʽDarkness Dayʼ, this may be greeted as
a welcome sign of diversity. Clearly, clearly, the band is trying to push up
its status, migrating from «arena synth-pop» to «classic prog-lite for the masses».
Should we welcome the transition?
I would, except there is still one thing that
bugs me — Silent Nation takes itself
way too seriously, perhaps even more so than on the average Asia album. Most
of the songs are social anthems, with one or two love ballads mixed in for
«balance», and, although they raise important subjects, they usually do so in
trivial ways, further losing adequacy points for oversinging and «overacting»
— Asia bombast is, of course, easier to take when it is delivered through
old-school instrumentation than through the usual Downes-synthesizers, but it
is still Asia bombast.
ʽWhat About Loveʼ, unlike the Heart
song, is not about a power chord celebration of amorous relationships between
two people, but is dedicated to the entire human race — built on a catchy,
brawny pop melody, but delivered without any sort of finesse: the chorus barges
in with as much brute force as in the Heart song, yet its anthemic aura, as
interpreted by Payne, sounds reserved and insincere. (The benchmark for such
choruses is always ʽLove Reign O'er Meʼ the way it was carried out by
Daltrey — at the top of his capacities and perhaps even overstepping them,
which made it fully believable. Payne always keeps himself in check).
The «epic», multi-part compositions, such as
ʽMidnightʼ and ʽBlue Moon Mondayʼ, have their share of
moodiness, but still end up sounding like «prog theater». Payne is one of the
culprits, but it's all in the air — the way they overdub the choral harmonies,
the way they still utilize these pop-metal Eighties-style riffs, the way they
pair feather-light acoustic guitars with big bashing drums (ʽGhost In The
Mirrorʼ)... this band just cannot
be «good», no matter how much they try, and on Silent Nation they try very
hard.
I still give the album a light thumbs up,
partly out of the general feeling of surprise (as it was with Arena, when the Payne lineup first
tried to shake things up), partly because... well, you have your catchy
choruses, your occasionally pleasant guitar solo, your goofy impersonation of a
modern-day Gregorian chant (ʽGone Too Farʼ) — although the album is
stretched over an entire hour, it does not feel overlong because of all the
different tricks they try, and that is worth some respect. As for longtime fans
of the band who are used to approaching them from a different perspective, I
am sure most of them will be delighted with Silent Nation — the finest of all theoretically possible
conclusions to the Payne period.
FANTASIA – LIVE
IN TOKYO (2007)
1) Time Again; 2) Wildest
Dreams; 3) One Step Closer; 4) Roundabout; 5) Without You; 6) Cutting It Fine;
7) Intersection Blues; 8) Fanfare For The Common Man; 9) The Smile Has Left
Your Eyes; 10) Don't Cry; 11) In The Court Of The Crimson King; 12) Here Comes The
Feeling; 13) Video Killed The Radio Star; 14) The Heat Goes On; 15) Only Time
Will Tell; 16) Sole Survivor; 17) Ride Easy; 18) Heat Of The Moment.
Most likely, it was just a matter of time
before the original Asia came back — old proggers, lite or hardcore, are
particularly prone to nostalgia kicks. As far as I know, the breakup between
Downes and Payne happened somewhat unexpectedly, and not very politely:
according to one version, Downes simply «dumped» Payne once he had perceived a
serious chance for the original lineup to get together once again. As a result,
the insulted Payne formed his own
Asia («Featuring John Payne»), and the two bands currently co-exist — although,
fortunately for us all, only one of them records new studio albums.
Anyway, somehow the stars aligned into a
position that brought all four original band members back together in 2006 —
and they have never been apart since, although most of them wisely alternate
their duties between Asia and other projects (Howe with Yes, whom the reunited
Asia actually supported on their tours; Palmer with occasional reunions of
ELP, etc.). To celebrate the rebirth, they started out «modestly»: with this
2-CD live set recorded in... well you know. And, although I am not reviewing
Asia's entire live catalog due to its hugeness, this particular live record
certainly deserves a mention, at least as a historical event.
The setlist is telling: they play Asia in its entirety (not a single song missing!), plus only a handful
of hits from Alpha, and nothing
whatsoever not only from the Payne era, which is understandable, but even from
Astra as well. Instead, they occupy
the remaining space with songs from their progressive past — each member gets
to choose one track that will represent him. Howe chooses
ʽRoundaboutʼ from Yes career; Palmer chooses ʽFanfare For The
Common Manʼ; and Wetton, oddest of all, chooses ʽCourt Of The Crimson
Kingʼ even though he was not a part of King Crimson in 1969, and, in fact,
I do not think he has even performed the number in concert during any of his
shows with Fripp and company. As for Downes, he gives us a new rendition of
ʽVideo Killed The Radio Starʼ — what else? (Something from Drama could be imaginable, but the Yes
hotspot is already occupied with ʽRoundaboutʼ).
All of this means that the reunited Asia tries
hard to defend its «progressive honor» — implying that Asia was actually a serious prog effort, deserving to be mentioned
on the same plane with the best of Yes and King Crimson, but also indirectly
admitting that everything after it was a failure in terms of artistic
integrity. We need not buy it (there is no abysmal gap whatsoever between their
debut and everything that followed), but it is an interesting, somewhat
unexpected stance. And as the Asia
songs themselves get expanded with various instrumental passages, occasionally
rearranged and reinvented (ʽDon't Cryʼ, for instance, is redone as a
weepy acoustic ballad), and mixed in with the old classics, the illusion almost
works.
Concerning the way they sound, my only
disappointment — but one that has to be dealt with — is the deterioration of
Wetton's voice. It has not lost much in range, but it has lost a lot in sheer
power and volume: an old man's voice that can no longer rise to the epic
heights demanded by the material (never mind if these are «poor man's epic
heights», they still need to be scaled). If you think of it from a different
angle, the singing has become less pompous and more homely, but it's not as if
it was a conscious choice or anything. Then again, he can still master the
required grit and spite for such numbers as ʽCutting It Fineʼ and
ʽThe Heat Goes Onʼ...
...and, furthermore, the band does everything
in its power to ensure that it does not exclusively depend on superhero-style
vocal hooks. The real star of the
show is certainly not Wetton, nor is it the omnipresent Downes, but Howe — who,
I would think, only agreed to join the band under the condition that they'd
finally let him have his way. And
they do; and this is the only reason, really, to own this album other than out
of a sheerly documentary interest. Howe plays lots more guitar, and in a lot
more prominent way, than on the original album — just listen to the wah-wah
having a field day on ʽSole Survivorʼ, both for the solo and the lead
flourishes between the verse lines, where formerly it used to be so reserved
and shut out. He gets a brief acoustic solo spotlight all to himself
(incorporating parts of ʽThe Clapʼ and something else, I think), and
we also get to hear the ecstatic battle cries of the instrument during the
climactic moments of ʽOnly Time Will Tellʼ that no other player was
able to perfectly reproduce.
Thus, if the brand new Roger Dean cover is not
worth the thumbs
up all by itself, Howe's presence nails it for me. The songs have
not become any better (they do cut a fine ʽRoundaboutʼ, and Downes'
Mellotron imitations on ʽCourt Of The Crimson Kingʼ come quite close
to the real thing), but they are performed as close to «non-commercial mode» as
possible. I have also heard complaints about sound quality that I do not quite
understand — they do not have poor recording standards in Japan, and I, for
one, can hear each of Howe's notes perfectly well, and that's pretty much all
that matters here. Final judgement: «passable» for «passive» Asia fans, but a
strict must-own for Steve fans. Like it or not, on those joint Asia/Yes tours
he was equally committed to both projects. (And it's a pretty tough fare, to be
playing both for the main and the
opening act).
PHOENIX (2008)
1) Never Again; 2) Nothing's
Forever; 3) Heroine; 4) Sleeping Giant / No Way Back / Reprise; 5) Alibis; 6) I
Will Remember You; 7) Shadow Of A Doubt; 8) Parallel Worlds / Vortex /
Déyà; 9) Wish I'd Known All Along; 10) Orchard Of Mines; 11)
Over And Over; 12) An Extraordinary Life.
Uh-oh. Here we go inflating the old balloon again.
As you might recall, the one thing that made «late-period-Payne» Asia slightly
more palatable than «early-period-Payne» Asia was that the band considerably
toned down their ambitions, positioning themselves as relatively «humble» adult
contemporary artists rather than the save-the-world type. Now that Payne is out
and Howe, Palmer, and Wetton, the authenticated mastodonts of prog, are back
in, the new old Asia's first stab at a studio album is re-brimming with
ambition.
Yeah, let us face it, «pretentious» is a fairly
appropriate word to use in the negative sense when you have to review a record
that immediately greets you with such lyrics as "I saw the universe, I
held it in my hand / The planets and the stars, merely grains of sand".
(This seems to be an Asian translation from Yesian, which makes it more
understandable for the people at large, but also more vulnerable to vitriolic
critical stabs). The words come riding on the back of a Big Generator-style pop-metal riff, and eventually burst out in an
anthemic chorus where we learn that "Never again will I bear arms against
my brother, never again will I dishonour anyone", which Wetton sings with
such passion, bravour, and authenticity that I am actually inclined to take a
cautious look into his criminal record.
Apparently, it was decided that there was no
point in making another Asia album if it did not try to take the band to the
next level, rather than just being an exercise in nostalgia. As a result, this
particular Phoenix seems to have
risen out of anabolic ashes: almost everything is loud, big, sprawling,
multi-layered, «cosmic», whatever. Unfortunately, everything is still Asia, and
that means more often silly-sounding than cathartic. The illusion might be that
they have reinvented their sound, and are now trying to conjure the classic
«progressive» spirit — in reality, though, they are still spinning rather
trivial arena-pop, whose triviality is only barely covered with layers of
keyboards and guitars.
One thing to say, though: Steve Howe. Either
they begged him, seeing the error of the old ways, or he blackmailed them,
having nothing to lose either way, but more than half of the songs feature
fabulous guitar playing from Steve, and I don't
mean the Big Generator riffs: I mean
richly melodic, free-flowing, complex solos that the man normally reserved for
Yes or his solo projects. It starts already on the second track, the happy-sad
anthem ʽNothing's Foreverʼ, but peaks later. The opening to
ʽAlibisʼ, for instance, is clearly reminiscent of the heavenly pedal
steel playing on ʽAnd You And Iʼ, and the song's coda, where Howe
duels with Downes' harpsichord, is far more imaginative and elegant than the
vocal part.
The most depth and complexity is attained on
the ʽParallel Worldsʼ suite, where the vocal part only functions as a
thematic introduction ("There's a vision I see..." and the rest is
self-understood). The voyage through a ʽVortexʼ and into the
psychedelic world of ʽDeyaʼ is excellently structured, going from a
dynamic, swirling section that features Palmer's most energetic drumming for
the day, into a paradisiac section, first with a bit of cheesy Spanish guitar,
but then with an electric solo that, to tell the truth, is mood-wise more
Steve Hackett than Steve Howe (replete with prolonged wailing notes so typical
of the other Steve), but is nevertheless quite moving.
Besides, Howe is the only one in the band who
remembers anything about subtlety. One of my favourite tracks here is
ʽOrchard Of Minesʼ (no, no, it is not
about Bosnia or Iraq; it is actually a cover of a song originally done by the
Globus «ensemble», of Immediate Music), if only for those barely audible
high-pitched notes that Steve plays against Wetton howling "to know... to
feel... to play me once again" during the song's climax. If you ever
happen to listen to that song, don't forget to tune your ears in at around 3:45
into the song for some elite aural delight. (I'm sure there must be other
moments like these on here, but I couldn't bring myself to waste time on
additional listens: Howe or no Howe, this is still an Asia reunion, and there
is only so much time one can allocate oneself on an Asia reunion).
As for the pop stuff, well... it's manageable,
not too annoying arena-pop with moments of genuine catchiness. Trivial, but
sincere: ʽAn Extraordinary Lifeʼ was apparently written by Wetton
after a risky surgery, and reflects all the honest joy that one usually does
not feel about life until after having been exposed to the risk of losing it,
so, no matter how banal the sentiment, I cannot bring myself to feel too bad
about it. And Wetton's aged voice actually serves him well: even a romantic ballad
as straightforward as ʽHeroineʼ is sung normally, without trying to rise to operatic heights (but when will
these lyricists ever learn not to use
the word "heroine" in a love ballad? Don't they understand that this
brings an entirely new light to the line "I hold the razor blade up to my
face" that begins the song?).
On the whole, Phoenix is probably as good as Asia could ever get at that point,
and almost probably better than everyone believed it could get. The old boys
handle their pomp with care, allocate plenty of time to their best musician,
and get away with at least one complex prog instrumental. Of course, trying to
convince us that they are continuing the tradition of classic Seventies'
progressive rock rather than their own one is useless: to do that, they would
have to get rid of Geoff Downes and John Wetton and bring in Rick Wakeman and
Jon Anderson... could be a great band, come to think of it. But, in any case, Phoenix upholds and strengthens the
modest reputation of Asia. Had they simply disbanded around 1985, it would
have been an old men reunion. Instead, it is a semi-successful attempt at
setting things straight. Thumbs up.
OMEGA (2010)
1) Finger On The Trigger; 2) Through
My Veins; 3) Holy War; 4) Ever Yours; 5) Listen Children; 6) End Of The
World; 7) Light The Way; 8) Emily; 9) Still The Same; 10) There Was A Time; 11)
I Believe; 12) Don't Wanna Lose You Now.
This would have sure made for a great title to
the band's swan-song album (and makes me envision the prospect of a supercool
band whose very first album would be titled Alpha, with the subsequent catalog running through all the letters
of the Greek alphabet — a priceless idea, and here I am giving it away for
free). Unfortunately, no sooner had it come out that they disappointed everyone
with predictably dull statements — «we thought it was just a nice word to use,
it doesn't really mean anything» or something to that effect. What a turn-off.
It's not as if listening to Omega would make me want to scream
«just retire already!». It's hardly worse than Phoenix, and in some respects, maybe better. There are no longer
any conscious attempts to revive any «authentic prog vibe» — an impossible
task for a band that never had any to begin with. All of the songs are strictly
within the four-to-five minute range, and all are pinned to recurrent pop
hooks, with no far-fetched ideas of massive sonic exploration or whatever,
although Steve Howe is still given plenty of opportunities to shine, and his
presence graces the album even more now that they are no longer willing to
remind us «we are the sidekicks of Yes, we are the sidekicks of Yes» every
several minutes.
As a result, all of this is mostly decent,
well-produced, multi-layered music – never terribly exciting, but memorable
enough to keep the head occupied and restrained enough to keep the senses
un-annoyed. Occasionally, they still tend to let Geoff in the front with the
big old «heavenly keyboard» sound, with Wetton belting out a
standing-on-the-cliff-waving-his-hair-in-the-wind power ballad against it (ʽEver
Yoursʼ), but most of these
tracks could be played as background music without any major embarrassment.
ʽFinger On The Triggerʼ may not have
been the best of all possible openings, though. They introduce it with one of
those old-school «pop-metal» riffs, as if to convince us that they still have
that «kick-ass crunch», but if they didn't really have it then, why would I
start believing that they have it now? It's not an awful pop-rocker — the chorus is catchy, and Steve eventually
breaks away from the lumbering rhythm-work and into the realm of high-pitched
melodic solos. But already the second track, ʽThrough My Veinsʼ, on
which they slow down the tempo and turn the mood to «rhythmically meditative»,
sounds more effective, even if, technically, it is more «boring». Maybe it is
because, at this point, Wetton's vocals just do not work on rock-out-oriented
material: he does fine enough on the «wisened old man» front.
From then on, it's all fairly even – some love
ballads, some social statements, some end-of-the-world predictions (even a song
called ʽEnd Of The Worldʼ in case you don't feel it), but nothing
ever stands out. With tremendous mental effort, I am only able to single out
ʽEmilyʼ as a relative high point, exclusively due to Steve's fabulous
slide work which raises this mid-tempo piano pop ballad out of adult
contemporary mediocrity and adds a slight ʽAnd You And Iʼ-like shade
— always welcome. Eventually they wave us goodbye on ʽDon't Wanna Lose
You Nowʼ, which wisely reproduces the life-is-great optimistic conclusion
of Phoenix — a fairly effective
conclusion, considering that only a couple of songs before they did little but
complain about the various evils and injustices of the world. But never worry —
it's all gonna be okay, as long as these guys are together to serve as our guiding
lights. A world without Asia is, after all, a much more lonely place than a
world without Europe, don't you agree?
(I mean the bands,
naturally, not the continents).
XXX (2012)
1) Tomorrow The World; 2) Bury
Me In Willow; 3) No Religion; 4) Faithful; 5) I Know How You Feel; 6) Face On
The Bridge; 7) Al Gatto Nero; 8) Judas; 9) Reno (Silver And Gold); 10) Ghost Of
A Chance.
I tried looking for some smart 'n' sleazy joke
on the album title, about Asia finally making it in the adult entertainment
business after all these years or something like that — all in vain, because
dirty jokes stick to Asia about as well as they do to a freshly cut block of
ice. Who would I be kidding? Naturally, XXX
is just about the thirty years of the band's existence in a world of Roman
numbers, Roger Dean album covers, and Popular Romantics. In fact, you could
even argue that the title of the album is simply Asia, once more — since the «xxx» is actually formed by six little
fish less-than-randomly trying to escape the jaws of the now-senile, but still
actively hunting Asia dragon. Now that
might be sexually suggestive, perhaps.
Anyway, strange as it is, 2012 finds the
reunited band still reunited — all four members still perfectly happy to work
as a team — and still turning out unmistakably «Asian» material. There are no
attempts to return to the mildly progressive experiments of Phoenix: XXX is a direct sequel to Omega,
a steady, balanced stream of relatively short stadium-pop songs with loud and
catchy Wetton choruses and immaculately crafted backgrounds with thickly
layered keyboards and choral vocal harmonies. No corny power ballads
whatsoever, not a single one: a few upbeat «power anthems», perhaps (like
ʽFaithfulʼ or ʽI Know How You Feelʼ), yet overall, the guys
admirably act their age — it's almost maddening, but I can't think of a single
insult to fling at these songs.
The only disappointment is that, once again,
Steve's role begins to get downplayed, almost as if they were intending to
replay the old story another time. He does get to solo on many (not all) of the
tracks, but the solos are usually short and supportive, never at the heart of
the matter — and the primary melodies are almost exclusively keyboard-driven,
or founded on rather unassuming, safely generic power-pop riffage
(ʽJudasʼ). That heavenly slide tone is still out there somewhere —
look for it in the deliciously flowing phrasing on ʽGhost Of A
Chanceʼ, for instance; but that
is the problem, since you really have to look for these bits. Otherwise, they
just slip by through the cracks in your attention span, dissipated among the
evenly rolling waves of the Asian Sea and those singalong Wetton choruses,
surfing on the surface.
I do have to confess that ʽBury Me In
Willowʼ is touching: maybe it is the heart surgery that Wetton underwent
in 2007, or simply the fact of time rolling on, but as far as introspective
songs that reflect on one's mortality go, this one is fairly strong, no matter
how utterly «mid-1980-ish» the drums and keyboards make it sound. Supposedly,
it all has to do with one's opinion on the natural properties and the
«spiritual adjustment» of the lead singer's voice — well, I, for one, think
that Wetton is one of the best guys around to carry on that retro-chivalrish
tragic-epic vibe, and his "this is my final day, you know I would not
joke, so bury me in willow, not in oak" strikes a fine chord somehow.
In fact, most of the songs here do. They are
all stylistically similar, extremely even in terms of lyrics and sentiments, no
highlights, no lowlights — moderately intelligent, catchy «adult pop»
(actually, «old geezer pop» at the moment, but hey, that's a market niche,
too). Thirty years after its inception, is this late-period brand of Asia
actually any worse than it was at the beginning? Certainly, they've lost the
freshness of approach and a bit of energy — but they make up for this in terms
of accumulated «wisdom», as they now seem to know perfectly well what works for
them and what does not. And since Asia has never really been a «young man's band»,
it is little wonder that they can get
better as they get older.
I think I'll go with a thumbs up here, after all. I have no
idea what to say about individual songs — so totally interchangeable most of
them are — but the formula still works, and the funny thing is, the less they
have left to prove, the better it works. It used to be that Asia was this
unwieldy, cheesy «synth-art-pop» monster, polluting popular taste with their
perfectly shaped, but consistently stillborn anthems. Now, somehow, in some way,
perhaps because they have been doing it so long that nobody gives a damn any
more, their creations show tiny glimpses of life — the stillborn reanimated,
through increased scientific progress. It's probably a corny way of describing
the situation, but that is the impression I get when looking back at this oddly
corroded thirty-year history — and it could have been a much worse impression.
GRAVITAS (2014)
1) Valkyrie; 2) Gravitas; 3)
The Closer I Get To You; 4) Nyctophobia; 5) Russian Dolls; 6) Heaven Help Me
Now; 7) I Would Die For You; 8) Joe DiMaggio's Glove; 9) Till We Meet Again.
And this thing just flat out refuses to die.
Even with Steve Howe out of the band again, the new old lineup of Asia carries
on well beyond its 30th birthdate, replacing the founding father with Sam
Coulton, whose age — 27 years — means that the band is well on its way to go on
living forever, gradually replacing its grandfathers with their grandkids, as
long as they honor and cherish the big, brawny spirit of Asia. Like Sam
Coulton does.
Is this a good album? Not really. Is this an
Asia album? Very much so, and not in name only. One thing has gone again: the
attempt to connect with the old «progressive» spirit, launched with Phoenix and pretty much dissipated
already by the time of XXX. Gravitas consists of (superficially)
catchy, chorus-driven pop rockers and sentimental pop ballads, almost every one
of which could be a commercial hit single (except that Asia hasn't had a
commercial hit single for over 20 years now, and the public is not likely to
make that change). Sam Coulton is a competent player, and his fluent, melodic
style of playing meets the requirements of Asia, but he is not willing to lead
the band in any daring experiments (and, given the context, would probably be
simply happy to apply his talents to whatever the «veterans» tell him to).
We do know, though, that Asia at their best can
excel in the «arena-pop» sphere as well; unfortunately, the songs that Downes
and Wetton wrote for this record are anything but excellent. Safe, predictable,
and totally respectful of the «Asia formula», they are not even all that catchy,
when you get down to it — numbers like ʽValkyrieʼ and
ʽNyctophobiaʼ really only seem
catchy because their hooks just consist of chanting the title over and over
again for about five million times ("Val-kee-REEEEE!
Val-kee-REEEEE!", like a drunk Wagnerian, or "NYC-TO-PHO-BEE-A!
NYC-TO-PHO-BEE-A!" like a teacher at the local spelling bee). The only
guitar riff worth of any note is on ʽI Would Die For Youʼ, and
sources indicate that it was actually reworked from an old 1987 demo — and, frankly
speaking, I think I understand why it was shelved, because the riff is so
straightforward and simple that it should have been rather used as a flashy
coda for some other song than as a backbone for an entire composition. But it
is still better than the title track, which uses up two and a half minutes of
«atmospheric» keyboards for the introduction and then becomes a sentimental
bore, hopping along to the rhythm track of Judas Priest's ʽYou Got Another
Thing Comingʼ.
The ballads, meanwhile, show a new low in the
lyrics department: "How did my heart become so soft / Like Joe DiMaggio's
glove?" is quite an excruciatingly extorted metaphor to use as the song's
primary hook, I'd say, but it is nothing compared to the crude romance
interspersed with memories of a night trip from Moscow to St. Petersburg on a
track perversely called ʽRussian Dollsʼ (which really means
Matryoshkas, but could just as well be taken to refer to certain ladies of the
night that the band members might have picked up at the station — well, I'm
sure they're all well-behaved gentlemen, but the lyrics are ambiguous). And these attempts to add an aura of depth and
mystery to mundane experiences... well, it just doesn't work when all these
tired old scales and production tricks have already been used a million times
for that.
So what do we rate a record where the biggest
surprise is a simple riff from 1987, and the biggest disappointment is a total
lack of surprises? A thumbs down assessment seems like the obvious choice, yet,
for some reason, I hesitate to think of Gravitas
as a definitively «bad» record. Maybe as these guys get older, their pompous
arrogance starts being perceived as some sort of melancholic nostalgia, one
with which you could empathize easier than with youthful cockiness-à-la-synth. However cheesy and
generic the arrangement for ʽValkyrieʼ may be, there is no doubt in
my mind that Wetton takes his vocal part seriously and sincerely — "Peace
at last, fade to grey / My war is over now / This is the price I gladly pay /
Surrender to her light" is not the best verse ever written, but this is
his clumsy attempt to convey some genuine feelings on aging and death (and, for
that matter, it is quite easy to forget that the man is pushing 65, just
because his singing voice does not seem to have aged one day since King
Crimson's Lark's Tongues In Aspic),
and as far as my senses tell me, they are
conveyed.
In other words, while formally Gravitas is more «simple» and
«pop-oriented» than the band's «Howe-adorned Renaissance period» albums, it is
a simplicity that logically follows the departure of their most creative
member, not a simplicity born out of an intentionally realised desire to be
simple. There may have been slightly more sophisticated Asia albums in the past
that I actually hated for their arena-oriented pretentious brutal dumbness — Gravitas, on the other hand, somehow
justifies its title, being a little more «earthy», and also a little darker and
bleeker-feeling, than before, and, at the very least, I am sure that old-time
fans, who have aged together with the band, will find it easy to align with the
band's feelings.
THE AFFECTIONATE PUNCH (1980)
1) The Affectionate Punch; 2) Amused
As Always; 3) Logan Time; 4) Paper House; 5) Transport To Central; 6) A Matter Of
Gender; 7) Even Dogs In The Wild; 8) Would I… Bounce Back?; 9) Deeply Concerned;
10) A.
Although there were many places around the
world in which a man could get unhappy in the early 1980s, Scotland would
probably count as one of the top contenders. Cold climate, coal mining, and
bagpipes will do that to you, I guess; throw in Margaret Thatcher, and there's
a good enough recipe for suicide, even if took Billy MacKenzie, the frontman of
the Associates, twenty years of an up-and-down musical career to remember how
it goes.
In 1979, the chief idol for this young aspiring
creative unit, consisting of MacKenzie, multi-instrumentalist Alan Rankine,
and whoever else would drop in at the local studio, was David Bowie; they even
released his own ʽBoys Keep Swingingʼ as their debut single.
Unsurprisingly, much of The Affectionate
Punch actually sounds like Bowie,
although, of course, on a much less professional and experienced level. On
the other hand, it's got such factors as youth, fresh energy, and novelty on
its side — and, perhaps, even a dim feeling that Billy MacKenzie might be more
genuinely «into the spirit of it all» than the lovable old con man Bowie.
After all, Billy MacKenzie did end up killing himself, and the old con man is
still alive. Crap argument, I know, but still worth some sick consideration.
Anyway, this is what they usually call
«post-punk», meaning «music that punks begin to play when they get tired of
being punks». Dark, angry, melancholic, aggressive, heavy on the bass, the
echo, and the creepy guitar effects, low on solo instrumental passages and
pretty melodies. The vocalist sounds like a slightly higher-pitched Bowie most
of the time, but occasionally tries on the morbid Old Testamental solemnity of
Scott Walker, and always sings with an echo, because he obviously does not like
the idea of getting too close to his audience. The multi-instrumentalist
clearly has more fun laying on the bass parts, which are loud, driving, catchy,
and moody, and less fun adding the guitar, which he regularly plays in Andy
Summers mode (i. e. the fewer notes played, the better, because the great
reggae gods told us so). And, apparently, Robert Smith of The Cure adds some
backing vocals — which I could not ever tell without the liner notes, but I'm
thinking that his actual presence in the studio was a bigger kick for MacKenzie
and Rankine than any possible contribution he could make. Because, let's face
it, just one look at Robert Smith, and your depression quotient goes up five
points.
But also, The
Affectionate Punch is the band's most «rock»-oriented album, with a general
live feel to all the tracks — pretty soon the duo would be moving in a
synth-poppier direction. Not that this is particularly important: the
Associates rocked on a moderate scale, with a bit of theatrical restraint and
somewhat limited playing technique. They fare much better on the songwriting
scale: quite a few of these tracks easily stand competition with Lodger-era Bowie in terms of creative
ideas, even if, to me, only one stands out as instantly memorable: ʽEven
Dogs In The Wildʼ, a superbly bleak, pessimistic look at humanity,
encapsuled in a grumbly bass groove, an anthemic-romantic guitar riff, and a
repetitive chorus that somehow trascends its repetitiveness and grows into a
mantra of despair: "Even dogs in the wild, even dogs in the wild... could
do better than this". This is the one they snatched from Heaven; not so
sure about the others.
Still, as long as the others move along at
decent tempos, they manage to be tense, sharp, and paranoid, just as the
doctor ordered. The title track bounces on a sea of old-fashionedly distorted
guitar chords and piano counterpoints, as MacKenzie and his vocal backers sing
about "the affectionate punch" that "draws even more blood".
Think about the deep meaning long enough to go crazy, and fandom will be your
reward. ʽPaper Houseʼ shuffles along to a tricky tempo and a flood of
wailing licks that remind of The Edge's style, but without the heroic echo
effects. And on ʽWould I... Bounce Backʼ, MacKenzie wonders "if
I threw myself from the ninth storey, would I levitate back to three?"
against a wall of phased guitar sound that does seem to be bouncing up and
down. (Don't try this at home, though).
Some of the slower ones really drag and require
a deep admiration for MacKenzie's handsome, but not all that original operatic
intonations to turn into personal favorites (ʽLogan Timeʼ; the
noise-drenched ʽTransport To Centralʼ). But, since the band has a solid
understanding of all their influences, and since MacKenzie rarely, if ever,
goes completely over the top, and since the lyrics are appropriately obscure
and ambiguous most of the time, The
Affectionate Punch has no glaringly obvious downsides, other than failing
to make it into the year's top 10 most impressive releases. And for all those
who think that pop music really reached its zenith with Berlin-era Bowie, Joy
Division, and Echo & The Bunnymen, The
Affectionate Punch is required listening in any case. One could even say
that the MacKenzie/Rankine duo paves the way for the much better known pairing
of Morrissey and Marr — although the differences are as copious here as the resemblances.
Anyway, a modest thumbs up.
FOURTH DRAWER DOWN (1981)
1) White Car In Germany; 2) A
Girl Named Property; 3) Kitchen Person; 4) Q Quarters; 5) Tell Me Easter's On
Friday; 6) The Associate; 7) Message Oblique Speech; 8) An Even Whiter Car; 9*)
Fearless (It Takes A Full Moon); 10*) Point Si; 11*) Straw Towels; 12*) Kissed;
13*) Blue Soap.
It is hard to surprise anyone by describing an
early 1980s album as «dark and cold». Even the New Romantics, whose basic goals
involved finding fresh new ways to get girls to sleep with them, thrived on
sounding «dark and cold» — the colder you are, the hotter will be the girls
that you are going to get. And, considering how much the Associates' debut was
influenced by the Bowie/Eno team, it would be very easy to dismiss their
further developments on Fourth Drawer
Down as even more bandwagon-jumping.
But during this very brief streak, the
Associates were not really jumping on the bandwagon — on the contrary, they
were helping to build the bandwagon.
First of all, these six singles, first released separately, then knocked
together in a coherent single monster, are wildly experimental. Rankine and
Mackenzie were not interested in simply trading in their post-punk guitar band
sound for a bunch of synthesizers: nearly each of the tracks had to include
various sound effects and overlays that would all contribute to the «authentic
eeriness» of the atmosphere. Second, throughout the working process Mackenzie
was feeding the band his personal disturbance and paranoia — and where it did
not seem enough, they were enhancing the mood with drugs (allegedly, both of
the key members even had to be hospitalized at one point).
In terms of complexity or meticulousness of
production, Fourth Drawer Down does
not stand comparison with The Cure, for instance. But it does not really have
to. Robert Smith's target has always been the arena — his internal anguish had
to be projected over the entire world, and that, by itself, required a
tremendous amount of work so as not to come out as laughable. Mackenzie, on the
other hand, is not singing about the end of the world or about humanity being
forever chained to eternal bleakness, despair, and soul torment. Hence, this
is «chamber-oriented» art-pop, not the «symphony-oriented» brand of Robert
Smith; and most of the sonic waves seem oriented straight at myself, rather
than at occupying the airspace around.
Starting, actually, with the first throbbing
pulses that open ʽWhite Car In Germanyʼ. As your subwoofer threatens
to blow up under the weight of the song's massive «leaden» punch, Mackenzie
pours out waves of lyrical nonsense with such keywords as "cold",
"infirmary", "spies", "surgery", "premature
senility", and, yes, "white car in Germany". Whether it's all
about an ER vehicle or something else is irrelevant: the main aim is to get a
shivery, clinically sterile, living-dead sound, a variety of «morgue muzak», if
I may say so. There is no overexaggerated depression or faked insanity here — it's
simply an anatomical deconstruction of death with no emotional evaluation
attached. None needed, in fact.
ʽWhite Carʼ is one of the album's
least guitar-dependent songs, though; a more typical formula involves some
particular, relatively simple, but catchy, guitar figure, devised by Rankine
and used as the basic anchor — the unnerving voice of your internal doomsayer.
Next come Mackenzie's ice-cold operatic waves, and finally, all the extra
overdubs. It applies to ʽA Girl Named Propertyʼ (where several
guitars drone on, layered across each other, in a disturbingly Crimsonian
manner); the faster-paced, but still living-dead ʽKitchen Personʼ;
and ʽMessage Oblique Speechʼ. ʽQ Quartersʼ pushes the
guitar drone into the deep background, keeping the foreground minimalistic-ambient,
with a little bit of pseudo-harpsichord to ensure that the mood is still
flowing. And ʽTell Me Easter's On Fridayʼ floats on a thin little
keyboard riff instead, probably being the closest to generic «synth-pop» that
this record gets.
The original record only included eight songs,
still managing to run for a good forty minutes because of the length; however,
the six bonus tracks on the CD reissue, bringing back all the nearly lost
B-sides, add a brief epic touch — the extra twenty-five minutes will probably
just irritate you if you find yourself incapable of «getting in the spirit», but
for those who like a solid morgue-oriented album from time to time,
ʽPoint Siʼ, with its quasi-annoying buzzing guitar groove, and
ʽStraw Towelsʼ, one of the album's fastest songs, will be fine
additional touches to the sonic panorama. (The only true misstep is the final
number, ʽBlue Soapʼ, which features Mackenzie singing accappella
through a megaphone or something, set against a backdrop of dripping water and
what sounds like a faraway orchestra rehearsal — gimmicky and quite
meaningless).
It is thoroughly not «my kind of album» — quite
inevitably, I find myself bored each time I get to the third or fourth song on
it. Me, I'd rather hear one more time about the end of the world than be
reminded, in such an intricate manner, of the existence of the cold-room. But
if that's the point, Fourth Drawer Down
definitely succeeds in making it — don't forget to throw on a sweater or
something before loading the record into your CD player. Oh, and the melodies?
I'd say they are on the same level as with The
Affectionate Punch: modestly catchy «growers» with little, if any,
«gripping» power. Oh, and the sound effects? Well, there's typewriters,
coughing, singing through vacuum cleaner hoses, probably lots of other stuff —
no string quartets or nightingales, as could be guessed — it all contributes to
some atmosphere, I guess. I could turn my thumbs down,
theoretically, but they seem to have been frozen in the thumbs up position.
SULK (1982)
1) Arrogance Gave Him Up; 2)
No; 3) Bapdelabap; 4) Gloomy Sunday; 5) Nude Spoons; 6) Skipping; 7) It's
Better This Way; 8) Party Fears Two; 9) Club Country; 10)
Nothinginsomethingparticular; 11*) Love Hangover; 12*) 18 Carat Love Affair;
13*) Ulcragyceptimol; 14*) And Then I Read A Book; 15*) Grecian 2000; 16*)
Australia; 17*) The Room We Sat In Before.
Considering the noticeable increase in tempos
and repetitive choruses, it is hard to refrain from the thought that Mackenzie
kept pushing the band in a more commercial direction — leading, eventually, to
a split with Rankine, who (not without reason) thought that he was becoming
sidetracked, and left for a solo career. On the other hand, «commercial» is
not an easy word to use when you are dealing with the deliriously paranoid lifeform that is Billy Mackenzie: for every
new fan that he was gaining with the band's re-orientation on the dance-pop
market, he was probably alienating at least one old (pissed off at all the
trendy keyboard sounds) and at least one potential (scared of Mackenzie's
hystrionics).
The recent CD re-release of Sulk is seventeen tracks long, and
since the style generally remains the same, may be overkill. However, the
expansion is due to a healthy bunch of A- and B-sides from around the same year
that the LP came out, and some of them are honestly better than the stuff they
put on the LP. Arguably the best way to enjoy the trip is to program out the
five or six tunes that you find too boring or annoying — and believe me, everyone will have a bunch of annoyingly
boring favorites on Sulk — and be
left with the catchiest, and most energetic collection of electronic dance-pop
romances in the band's history.
The best of the lot never made it on the
original LP: it is a thoroughly disloyal cover of Diana Ross' ʽLove
Hangoverʼ, throttling the sweet lovey-dovey attitude of the disco original
and replacing it with a lower, darker groove over which Mackenzie spreads out
a tour-de-force performance. As a matter of fact, Diana's original never
sounded much like a «hangover» — if our hangovers took on the form of her sweet
ecstasy, we'd all be doomed alcoholics by now. In the hands of Mackenzie,
however, the song finally justifies its title: the man plays out a real «hangover»
— it's killing, yes it is, splitting
headaches and all, but, for some reason, this is the state that he'd rather
remain in for life. «Love» becomes a bout of masochism here, not some sort of
generic abstract «pleasure».
This idea of reinterpreting ʽLove
Hangoverʼ ties in brilliantly with the band's original vision. Sulk is almost nearly a conceptual
album about the psychic dangers of love — at least half of the songs, both
musically and lyrically, are about suffering from its side effects. Way too
dark to be able to compete with the comparatively «fluffy» Duran Duran, yet
much lighter than the contemporary Cure records, because Billy Mackenzie's ego
never amounted to even half the size of Robert's Smith (yet again, not that
it's necessarily a good thing: Robert
Smith regularly offered plenty of musical fat to prop up the size of his ego —
and no, that is not a veiled hint at
the man's weight problems).
I have to confess that the actual music behind
this attitude is fairly routine. With Rankine assigned to synthesizer duties,
spending far more time at the keys than at his guitar strings, the toughest
musical link in the band at this point is bass player Michael Dempsey, who,
incidentally, joined the Associates soon after quitting The Cure. Considering
that Three Imaginary Boys from 1979 was
one of The Cure's bass-strongest records, that hardly comes as a surprise: most
of the bass grooves on Sulk are
first-rate, particularly on ʽSkippingʼ and ʽParty Fears
Twoʼ. The keyboard work, on the other hand, leaves much to be desired.
Most of the time I just feel like Rankine is weaving little flourishes around
Mackenzie's «arias» that never take our attention span away from the vocals.
Proving my point, the two completely instrumental numbers that bookmark the
record are both utterly forgettable — minimalistic synth patterns pinned to
bouncy rhythms; you could get that kind of stuff for a dime a dozen in 1982.
Mackenzie himself is quite good, though. Besides
ʽLove Hangoverʼ, he also reinvents the old jazz standard ʽGloomy
Sundayʼ (also known as ʽHungarian Suicide Songʼ) — it is fun to
listen to his version alongside Billie Holiday's, showing how much and how
little has changed over the forty years that allegedly shook the world.
ʽParty Fears Twoʼ remains stuck in the head as well, if only for the
wall-rattling "AWAKE ME!" that serves as its climax — it's one of
those tunes that is exactly 50% drunk romantic happiness and exactly 50% bleak
suicidal despair, an explosive mix inherited from Roxy Music, but stripped of
Bryan Ferry's salon smoothness. On the other hand, sometimes the
silliness-as-seriousness is a bit too much to take — ʽBap De La Bapʼ
is a dumb title, and the lyrics match its dumbness without even compensating
with a bit of humour that could be expected from such a title. Dumb title, dumb
lyrics, dumb «spooky» vocal delivery + annoying synthesizer sound = the
Eighties forget no one.
Sulk is no masterpiece, and won't become one even
when all the fat has been trimmed. In most retrospectives, it usually cuts off
the «highly starred» period of the Associates' career, because most reviewers
instinctively think that «loss of a key member» is always an objective event
that the band needs to be penalized for. But Alan Rankine never was a
particularly awesome guitarist, just a good one; and Sulk makes relatively little use of his talents in a relatively
useful way — this is the Mackenzie show through and through, so the gap between
it and the next stage of the «band» is not nearly as huge as one could believe
from just browsing through the All-Music Guide. Still, it's got some good
hooks, and, most importantly, when it is at its best, it's got that odd mood — how would you like to slit your
veins while feeling totally happy about it? never mind, don't try that at home
unless you are a Struggling Artist — that alone justifies a respectable thumbs up.
I mean, I'm not sure I like that mood
— in fact, I'm pretty sure I don't — but hey, a mood is a mood, and sometimes
you just have to respect a mood while being detached from it. If everybody
starts driving scooters into the oceans to the sounds of ʽLove Reign O'er
Meʼ, that's gonna take a heavy toll on the fish population.
PERHAPS (1985)
1) Those First Impressions; 2)
Waiting For The Loveboat; 3) Perhaps; 4) Schampout; 5) Helicopter Helicopter; 6)
Breakfast; 7) Thirteen Feelings; 8) The Stranger In Your Voice; 9) The Best Of
You; 10) Don't Give Me That I Told You So Look.
Post-Rankine era Associates are generally
forgotten, since even the band name does not really make any sense when nobody
is genuinely «associated» with Billy Mackenzie any more. Naturally, if your
original image is built on the successful collage of «guy with guitar» and «guy
with ego», critics and fans alike will not be impressed when the «guy with
guitar» is gone, and you simply retain the original name for publicity
purposes. Perhaps took a fairly long
time to make — two years of recording only to get completely scrapped and
restarted from scratch — and when it eventually came out, it fared poorly.
Still reaching something like #23 on the UK charts, but it didn't stay there
long, even despite the sexy suit on the front sleeve.
But you know what? I actually found it much
more interesting than Sulk. At this
point, nobody pretends any more that this has anything to do with a «rock»
sound: the entire album is stereotypical synth-pop, with very few guitar
overdubs of any importance — and, instead of having Rankine, a modestly
inventive, but technically mediocre, player, handle the goods, Mackenzie hires
expert player Stephen Betts, a.k.a. Howard Hughes, as a full-time member. The
record is no longer produced by Mike Hedges, too, removing and discarding most
of The Cure associations; instead, there is a whole bunch of various
synth-poppers responsible for production, and it seems to me that their chief
task along the way was to steal away as much of Mackenzie's usual darkness and
schizophrenia as possible. Much of it still remains — at his peak, Mackenzie
was all darkness and schizophrenia,
so you couldn't steal away everything, no matter how hard you tried — but
overall, Perhaps is much less
disturbing than Sulk.
So, it is synth-pop, it is relatively lighter
and brighter than usual, it is a solo album masquerading as a band effort, a
re-recording made at the record company's insistence — by all these parameters,
it's a suckjob that doesn't even deserve its own review at the All-Music Guide.
But its opening number, ʽThose First Impressionsʼ, happens to be the
most beautiful song in Mackenzie's career. If you happen to be fond of stuff
like Roxy Music's ʽMore Than Thisʼ and other Avalon-era creations, there is no way you won't be impressed by
ʽImpressionsʼ — its more than tasteful mix of minimalistic piano
chords, quiet horn and guitar perks, grumbly bass explosions, and, most important
of all, a gorgeous vocal melody from Billy. It may not be entirely true to his
personality, but it is hard for me to believe that the entire performance
could be «faked» when it is such a flawlessly executed vocal tour-de-force.
Sweet, touching, danceable, immaculately produced (the voice is not lost in the
mix even for one second, always dancing several feet above the instrumental
surface), a genuine gem of 1980s electronic pop.
None of the other tunes can keep up, but there
is plenty of creativity anyway. ʽWaiting For The Loveboatʼ and the
title track are hook-filled, memorable pop-rockers whose choruses can potentially
annoy, but are definitely not senseless (ʽPerhapsʼ is at least as
good as your average Depeche Mode hit). ʽHelicopter Helicopterʼ is
fast and crazy, not unlike a goofy Oingo Boingo number with its robotic-funky
horn and synth arrangements. ʽBreakfastʼ places its faith in a
French-tinged piano and strings arrangement — it should be a particularly
acquired taste, but it's interesting to see Mackenzie try out something
completely different. ʽThe Best Of Youʼ has an excellent bass groove
(although the vocals, courtesy of guest singer Eddi Reader, are questionable).
And minor melodic attractions can be found just about anywhere.
All the way through, I kept pinching myself,
but the truth is out: I am really, really quite impressed by the record. It
does have one major flaw: almost all of the songs are drastically overlong —
they are not that good to deserve
five-to-six minute running times, so that a humble collection of just 10
numbers runs well over fifty minutes. This isn't really a «party» album to keep
the guests on their feet, no matter how many technically danceable numbers
there are — it is still an attempt to hew out some «art», and I would
definitely feel strange dancing to songs that reference "deeper days of
quintessential innocence" and such. Hence, no need to keep the groove up
and going once it has worked out its potential.
But other than that, it is an imaginative, diverse,
and honest attempt to make a progressive synthesis of old school chamber pop
and R'n'B with the new electronic inventory at hand. Like all such attempts
done in the mid-Eighties, it remains thoroughly dated (the drum sound, in
particular, is mostly horrible) — but repeated listenings let me look past
that, and simply appreciate the record for all of its little inventions, the
power of Mackenzie's voice, and the undeniable beauty of ʽThose First
Impressionsʼ. Thumbs up.
THE GLAMOUR CHASE (1988)
1) Reach The Top; 2) Heart Of
Glass; 3) Terrorbeat; 4) Set Me Up; 5) Country Boy; 6) Because You Love; 7) The
Rhythm Divine; 8) Snowball; 9) You'd Be The One; 10) Empires Of Your Heart; 11)
In Windows All; 12) Heaven's Blue; 13) Take Me To The Girl.
Even the record company failed to find enough
trust in this album: upon completion, it was rejected by the label and
remained unreleased until 2003, when it was finally given the green light during
a general campaign to remaster and re-release the entire Associates catalog.
The only difference is that the label did not see the album as «commercial»;
me, I just don't see it as «interesting» or «inspired». Or could that be the
same thing? Sometimes, at least?..
It is odd, because some of the ingredients are
still there. Mackenzie still got his voice, his personal problems and
sentiments, and some desire to experiment. The whole thing is not «just» another
synth-pop crapfest. But when your work happens to be within the synth-pop
idiom, tremendously strong vitaminization
is required to make stuff work. Perhaps
still had plenty of exciting ingredients. The
Glamour Chase has next to none.
ʽReach The Topʼ, for instance, is the
worst start-off number in Associates history so far: other than the chorus
vocals, it has nothing even vaguely reminiscent of a hook, and even the vocals
are delivered in a flat, lifeless way, without making use of Mackenzie's
impressive potential. Basically, it is just a song that could have been done
by any generic act of the era —
possibly an attempt on Billie's part to really go «commercial» and give the
club kids a fresh butt-wiggler. The shame, the awful shame.
Likewise, what was the point of covering
Blondie's ʽHeart Of Glassʼ? It's not just that the original already
was pure disco perfection; it's that the song cannot possibly benefit from a
Mackenzie touch, unlike, say, ʽLove Hangoverʼ — its superficially
happy sarcasm cannot be re-molded into an Associates-type pattern, and it
isn't. It's just a stupid, overlong, completely unnecessary cover, probably
feeding off the assumption that people may need to be reminded of how cool it
was to dance to disco-Blondie in a past era. A tenth anniversary tribute to the
song or something.
The only tunes here that are at least
marginally interesting are those that try to cross synth-pop with older genres.
ʽCountry Boyʼ turns the chorus into a «traditional» crooner-fest; and
ʽSnowballʼ dives into cabaret territory (a thing that Robert Smith,
however, had already done much better with ʽLovecatsʼ). But even
these little tactical victories are nullified when seven-minute long monsters
like ʽIn Windows Allʼ come along and bore you with slow, draggy,
pompous synthesizer minimalism — few things are more evil than a solemn
synth-pop epic devoid of mind-blowing chord sequences to justify the size.
In the end, all that remains is just a small
bunch of cherries — a cool violin twist here, a juicy bass pluck there, and
some vocal parts that will be definitely appreciated by Billy fans (ʽThe
Rhythm Divineʼ is fairly soulful — if only the music were in the least bit
interesting as well). In general, though, the well is running dry; had the
album remained in the vaults forever, the world would hardly have missed a
chance to become a better place than it already is. Thumbs down, although, if Billy
Mackenzie is your soul brother, you will probably still want to scrape some
soul off the bottom of this barrel as
well.
WILD AND LONELY (1990)
1) Fire To Ice; 2) Fever; 3)
People We Meet; 4) Just Can't Say Goodbye; 5) Calling All Around The World; 6)
The Glamour Chase; 7) Where There's Love; 8) Something's Got To Give; 9)
Strasbourg Square; 10) Ever Since That Day; 11) Wild And Lonely; 12) Fever In
The Shadows.
I do not understand why The Glamour Chase was rejected and Wild & Lonely was accepted. Or, rather, I do: because Billy was
dropped by WEA and went to some obscure minor label instead. Which had nothing
to do with the music on the record — most of which was awful. At least The Glamour Chase was a disappointing
failure; Wild & Lonely is just
an annoying pimple on the pop music surface.
Two things are certain: (a) Billy Mackenzie
still got his pretty voice; (b) most of these songs are danceable. This is more
or less all the accolades I can screw out of my brain. It is hardly possible to
discuss individual songs, because how do you tell bubbly synth patterns one
from another? I doubt anyone will ever be interested in the tablature for any
of these songs.
Initially, there is serious temptation to trash
the whole thing as primitively disgusting «Eurodance». It takes several
listens to even begin to understand that Billy actually did take some care of the arrangements. For
instance, ʽFeverʼ, in addition to the basic chugging synth bass part,
has layers of pianos, (synthesized) strings, and (synthesized) harps, all of
which could theoretically add up to something distinctive. But they don't,
because none of the parts make any sense other than a «oh, that sounds too
naked, let me throw on some "artsiness" here».
Worse, it takes serious digging to clear a way
to Billy's heart — most of the songs are so utterly faceless, it's as if he'd
completely lost all sense of purpose. Why the heck does a thing like ʽCalling
Around The Worldʼ even exist? Its horn-driven theme is cheesy, its «happy«
vocals are phony, its chorus is unmemorable. Where are the angst and the
anguish? The despair and the disenchantment? The gloom and the glamour? Shame, shame, shame.
If you suffer long enough, you may get a mild,
inadequate reward in the guise of the title track, which completes the record
in a soft-jazz / adult-contemporary mode. As the electronic drumming gets
softer and slightly «Latinized», the synth bass dies down to an echo, and
minimalistic piano chords and strings take center stage, Billy gives a tragic-romantic
delivery in the grand tradition of a Scott Walker (or a David Bowie, if you
prefer someone with advanced star power). Does it help much? No. It's just one last song, and it isn't very memorable, and
there is no way it would save the album from an inevitable thumbs down. But at least it
sounds natural, which is the last word I would want to associate with the rest
of this record.
After the predictable, and justifiable, flop of
the album — it might have helped if Billy were a hot young teenage girl in a
leotard, but no guarantee — Mackenzie finally had the good sense to retire the
«Associates» brand, a thing that he should have done at least three years
earlier (Perhaps can still be
qualified as an «Associates» record in spirit). As far as I know, having only
listened to brief snippets, his last solo album, Beyond The Sun, released just before or just after his suicide in
1997, somewhat reinstates his standing, moving away from generic dance-pop, but
I have no plans for a detailed review of Billy's solo career. It's too bad,
though, how the Associates thing ended — what began as an inspiring combination
of elements ended up ground and chewn in the stupid pop cliché machine:
one more victim of the mercyless Eighties.
ADDENDA:
THE RADIO ONE SESSIONS VOL. 1 (1981-1983; 2003)
1) Me, Myself, And The Tragic
Story; 2) Nude Spoons; 3) A Matter Of Gender; 4) It's Better This Way; 5) Ulcragyceptimol;
6) Waiting For The Love Boat; 7) Australia; 8) Love Hangover; 9) A
Severe Bout Of Career Insecurity; 10) God Bless The Child; 11) This Flame;
12) Helicopter, Helicopter; 13) Theme From Perhaps; 14) Perhaps (schizophrenic
version); 15) Don't Give Me That I Told You So Look; 16) Breakfast.
Due to the briefness of their shooting star,
the original Associates never left behind a proper live album; nor, perhaps,
did they really need one, because their sound relied much more on studio craft
than explosive live-by-the-moment energetics. For this reason, you might well
think, just like I did, that their live radio sessions, released seriously
postfactum from the BBC archives, may be ignored without serious consequences.
Don't make that mistake! Every once in a while, obsessive completism pays off
properly.
The first nine songs on this collection,
recorded on April 28, 1981 and March 6, 1982, respectively, not only feature Rankine
on guitar, playing some of the band's best material: they present the best sound that you will ever get out of the
Associates. Recorded live in the BBC studio, the songs only allow that much excessive Eighties gloss to be
spoiled with. Real live drumming; a minimum of keyboard layers; and, most
importantly, guitar a-plenty, guitar that screams and wails as much as it wants
to, instead of being subject to rude discrimination. But at the same time, it's
still the Associates — moody, echoey music, hysterical vocals and all.
Take ʽA Matter Of Genderʼ, for
instance. The original was an atmospheric rocker, whose spark was ignited by
rubbing together a heavy funky bass line and a slight, shrill, «see-saw-y»
guitar riff. Live, the guitar minimalism is expanded to become a veritable
banshee celebration of the instrument — it does not exactly become better, but
it sacrifices a little bit of «mystery» in order to gain the guise of a
tempest. The pseudo-Eastern riff that opens ʽIt's Better This Wayʼ is
played out with twice as more muscle, and the vocals do not creep out like a
swampy echo from behind the generic electronic drums, but are delivered
straight in your face. And ʽNude Spoonsʼ? The guitar buzzes and
stings like a swarm of bees on speed, where on the Sulk studio original it just left a dirty trail of sonic slime in
the back of your speakers. Cool!
In addition, there are a few tracks that never
got album release — the instrumental ʽMe, Myself And The Tragic
Storyʼ is another brawny, flashy, inspiring composition, if not
particularly memorable; and ʽA Severe Bout Of Career Insecurityʼ probably
has the best pure piano melody on any Associates record of the Rankine era.
Also, ʽLove Hangoverʼ gets a long near-accappella introduction (with
just a few piano notes to back McKenzie), a must-hear for everyone who just
sits there waiting for one more chance to go crazy over McKenzie's tonal magic.
The remaining seven songs are from 1983 and
already feature several early versions of McKenzie's Perhaps compositions. These are less exciting, because there are
fewer differences from the final takes, and with Rankine's departure, the new
band was no longer interested in emphasizing the «live» nature of the sound.
Still, there is an interesting take on the Billie Holiday classic ʽGod
Bless The Childʼ — I abhor it, currently, but just because I cannot see
anyone improving on the original; Billy really does a fine job in his style.
In any case, the first nine tracks alone merit
a rock-solid thumbs
up: one of those indisputable cases, I think, which fully justify
the existence of the BBC Archives — they may have put out a huge lot of
redundant, hardcore-fan-only «pale-shadows», but this is one of the major
exceptions. It's too bad they didn't record their entire catalog that way — or
I'd have no problem recommending to just go for the BBC stuff, and forget
about regular studio work.
THE RADIO ONE SESSIONS VOL. 2 (1984-1985; 2003)
1) A Matter Of Gender; 2)
Message Oblique Speech; 3) The Affectionate Punch; 4) Kites; 5) The Crying
Game; 6) Even Dogs In The Wild; 7) Gloomy Sunday; 8) Heart Of Glass; 9)
Obsession Magnificent; 10) Take Me To The Girl; 11) Give; 12) Helicopter
Helicopter; 13) Breakfast; 14) Perhaps.
The second volume of The Radio Sessions covers the first years of the «Associates»
without Rankine — which is already disheartening — during which McKenzie was
still more concerned about aesthetics than about choreography — which is a
little better. It is no way as overwhelmingly strong a collection as the first
volume, which goes as far as to present the band in a certain light that is
unshed by their studio catalog. But it is still more of a must-own for McKenzie
fans than The Glamour Chase or Wild And Lonely.
Curiously, the 1984-85 sessions that McKenzie's
«Mark II» Associates did for Radio 1 were not at all centered around tracks for
the upcoming Perhaps. Three tunes
from that album that are tacked onto the end of the CD are not live at all:
they represent either alternate mixes or simply the exact same tracks (I don't
have the time or will to check it out more accurately) as Perhaps itself — padding out the running length without any clear
reason. The real live tracks all date
back to The Affectionate Punch / Sulk era, and represent McKenzie's
attempts at somehow prolonging these songs' breathing period by reinventing
them.
The first four tracks give us a more
disciplined, a more tightly buttoned Associates brand, where the drummer looks
more like a robot than a punk on fire, the guitarist shuns unpredictable syncopation
or flourishes like plague, and the wall-of-sound, if present, seems static
rather than «constantly evolving». However, they still sound like an actual
band, perhaps moving closer to The Cure in spirit, and this means that, for
instance, ʽA Matter Of Genderʼ gets one more life here — the original
studio take, the Rankine-era live version, and the post-Rankine rendition all
sound like different statements. And ʽMessage Oblique Speechʼ, a
track I never noticed much on Fourth
Drawer Down, is seriously sped up, given a repetitive, but catchy new
synth-riff, and becomes a hysterical anthem instead of a meditative bore.
The second session yields three stripped-down
performances, centered around McKenzie's singing and a lonesome piano: a
torching rendition of Dave Berry's ʽThe Crying Gameʼ, plus beautiful
takes on ʽEven Dogs In The Wildʼ (the song works great with a
bass/piano/finger-clicking accompaniment — and that chord sequence in the
chorus, probably the deepest, most inspired thing these guys ever came up with,
sounds even more stunning on solo piano than in its original electric guitar
arrangement) and ʽGloomy Sundayʼ — it all sounds surprisingly fresh
and lively compared to the stuffed synth-pop aura of all the post-Rankine
productions.
The final section has a couple tracks that are
unavailable elsewhere (ʽObsession Magnificentʼ, ʽGiveʼ), as
well as an early take on ʽHeart Of Glassʼ that is much better than
the «finished» version on Glamour Chase,
with more of a live than computer feeling — at the very least, it sounds
inoffensive enough to actually let you start thinking of the possible benefits
that a replacement of Debbie Harry by Billy McKenzie could accrue in this
context. Or maybe not. But it does
sound inoffensive enough — real guitars instead of synth loops are a good
guarantee.
Overall, if you decide to own Vol. 1, there is no reason to stay away
from Vol. 2, but you got to be
prepared for its being a little different. It is a good travel companion to Perhaps, despite focusing on earlier
(or later!) material — and an invitation to feed some more on the bleeding
heart of Billy McKenzie that should be taken quite seriously by all of his
vampire admirers. My own fangs are a bit short, but a thumbs up is still guaranteed.
HIGH LAND, HARD RAIN (1983)
1) Oblivious; 2) The Boy
Wonders; 3) Walk Out To Winter; 4) The Bugle Sounds Again; 5) We Could Send
Letters; 6) Pillar To Post; 7) Release; 8) Lost Outside The Tunnel; 9) Back On
Board; 10) Down The Dip; 11*) Haywire; 12*) Orchid Girl; 13*) Queen's Tattoos.
Every time I listen to New Wave pop from the
early 1980s, all these fresh new faces wishing to leave their mark on musical
history and all, I can't help wondering whether all that stuff would be more
enjoyable without all the
electronics. Leave in the smarter brands of lyrics, the R'n'B, reggae, and
«world music» influences, the commercial hooks, but leave out the
digitalization — would that make the songs more durable and intelligent-sounding?
Well, look no further than the Aztec Camera
debut record to answer that question. The opening track, ʽObliviousʼ,
greets you with a funky drum beat rather typical of the time — but the rhythm
part is pure acoustic guitar, and, apart from a thin electric organ part that
comes in later, that's all the instrumentation you get. A danceable pop song
composed and performed in a contemporary manner, but rigorously set to a stark
acoustic guitar backing — who else did that in 1983? Mind you, we are not talking «college rock» à la R.E.M. here: Roddy Frame,
the 19-year old Scottish mastermind behind Aztec Camera, was clearly aiming for
the charts.
And ʽObliviousʼ did hit the UK charts, eventually going as
high as #18, which is fairly high for an acoustic pop hit at the time. But then
again, it's not just the instrumentation. It's Roddy's voice — free of
mannerisms or extra pathos; Roddy's lyrics — freshly intricate and
thought-provoking in the verses ("they'll call us lonely when we're really
just alone" is quite a nice line), seductively straightforward in the
chorus; Roddy's hooks — the chorus has just enough chord changes and is
reprised just the exact number of times to stick firmly. It's not a
jaw-droppingly great song, but it oozes quality and inspiration all over, and
it is particularly excellent in a 1983 context.
Acoustic guitar is not the only leading
instrument on Aztec Camera's debut, but the only other leading instrument is the electric guitar, and I have only
been able to spot electronic percussion effects in a few places where they
never spoil the impression. As for the music, Roddy does not subscribe fully to
the «new school» of musical thought. He is clearly influenced just as much by
the likes of Phil Spector (check out the «wall-of-sound» chorus on ʽWe
Could Send Lettersʼ), smooth jazz (ʽReleaseʼ), even
gospel-tinged R'n'B (ʽBack On Boardʼ), not to mention just about
every school of pop from the Beatles to ABBA.
The only thing that prevents High Land from reaching «total
masterpiece» status is a certain monotonousness in the arrangements. It is
nice that Roddy and his backers can install the wall-of-sound with just a bunch
of acoustic guitars and a few harmony overdubs, but overall, the minimalistic
approach to arrangements gets a bit samey: at the very least, it prevents the
listener from immediately dropping down dead in amazement — you have to let the
songs gradually establish their individuality, get used to the difference in
messages and atmospheres that is conveyed mostly through different chord
structures.
But when you do, the album can overwhelm you with a wow!-effect when you least expect it, because the songs are worth
it. "Walk out to winter, swear I'll be there" is tremendously uplifting
and chivalrous without fake sentimentality. ʽThe Bugle Sounds Againʼ
uses a clever military metaphor and ironically-pathetic martial atmosphere,
influenced by Scottish folk, to talk about good old love some more. The
"Once I was happy in happy extremes..." chorus of ʽPillar To
Postʼ easily matches the emotional impact of any of Elvis Costello's
greatest songs (not to mention that Roddy has an advantage here — no one has to
undergo the fussy procedure of getting used to the pitch and tone of his voice).
The whole thing is wildly optimistic in spirit:
no syrup and a constant readiness to confess problems and pain, but always
with hopes of redemption and an outlook to a better future. Everything sounds
intelligent and sincere, including
the more intimate songs like ʽReleaseʼ where Roddy complains that
"I wanted the world, and all I could get to was a gun or a girl" —
yes, its past tense is almost believable, despite the guy being all of 19 years
old at the time (and the song may have been composed even earlier: Aztec Camera
released their first single when he was 16). The album itself, having started
out with a fully rhythmic pop hit, ends on a humble note with just Roddy and
his guitar, trying out a simple folk ditty (ʽDown The Dipʼ) that's
equal parts Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson. "I put all the love and beauty
in the spirit of the night / And I'm holding my ticket tight / Stupidity and
suffering are on that ticket, too / And I'm going down the dip with you"
is a chorus I like so much I even took the time to retype it.
It is this combination of intelligence and
optimism that distinguishes High Land
from so much dreck around it — intelligent songwriters at the time tended to
veer towards bleakness and depression, leaving hope and romance for commercial
hacks. Roddy Frame was one of the few exceptions who tried to kick the ground
from under the feet of commercial hacks, beating them at their own game. He did
not succeed, but the legacy of High Land
is one of those blessings that helps seek out and destroy stereotypes. As far
as I'm concerned, the album should be in any «Top 20» for 1983, and even higher
if we want the list to be maximally diverse. And a respectable / admiring thumbs up
from both sides of human nature.
KNIFE (1984)
1) Still On Fire; 2) Just Like
The USA; 3) Head Is Happy (Heart's Insane); 4) The Back Door To Heaven; 5) All
I Need Is Everything; 6) Backwards And Forwards; 7) The Birth Of The True; 8)
Knife.
«Atmosphere». Why do people sometimes think
that, once they got «atmosphere», they got everything? Why do they sometimes
think that, just because they have gained access to electronic equipment, the
«atmosphere» that they create with it will be properly expressing their hearts'
desires and sentiments? Why did Knife
put a quick and humiliating end to Roddy Frame's conquest of the world? Fuckin'
atmosphere.
Oh, I'm not talking about short-term commercial
success. In the UK, it charted all right, on the heels of the high reputation
of its predecessor and further boosted by the choice of Mark Knopfler as
producer (and some members of Dire Straits guest-starring in the studio as
well). However, it only yielded one single, ʽAll I Need Is
Everythingʼ, which failed to repeat the success of ʽObliviousʼ,
and overall, it was clear that Frame did not intend Knife to be a singles-oriented collection at all. Instead, he
probably intended for it to show more maturity, seriousness, and psychological
depth: the 20-year old songwriter was already getting too old for simplistic
dance music, the new charge had to show a sophisticatedly intelligent glow to
it. The band didn't simply choose Mark Knopfler because of his fame — they went
after his image as a wise old young man. They forgot that, as a side effect,
the man could also be deadly boring, and inflict his boredom on others at will.
That is exactly what happened.
First and foremost, Knife sounds nothing like its predecessor. The first album was
completely dominated by acoustic and, less frequently, electric guitar. On Knife, keyboards, played by Guy
Fletcher, climb to the top of the mountain from the very start and very, very
rarely get down from there. This alone makes the whole thing rather
unexceptional as far as commercial music from 1984 is concerned. Second,
placing most of his effort in the lyrics, Roddy seems nowhere near as concerned
about the musical hooks as he used to be. I don't know, maybe he thought
Knopfler would be providing the hooks somehow, with his production. Wait a
bit... Knopfler providing the hooks?
All Dire Straits fans like myself are supposed to see the irony in this.
There are a couple of songs, for sure, that
feature occasional pretty / bouncy guitar lines. ʽAll I Need Is
Everythingʼ is actually one of them, and is close in mood to matching the
intelligent romantic optimism of High
Land. But ooh, these rotten keyboards, «atmospherically» sighing in the
background and casio-chuckling in the foreground. And the generic Spanish
guitar solo at the end? Who needs that? Atmosphere strikes again. ʽJust
Like The USAʼ, a song that has nothing to do with the USA and everything
to do with Roddy's attempts to evaluate his place in the world, is actually
much better — it's the only song on the album where the guitar remains charming
and playful throughout. Nowhere else is the poor instrument allowed that much
freedom.
Most of the compositions actually roll along at
a steady, unnerving, unchanging, flat mid-tempo, serving as carriers for
Roddy's poems. They are interesting poems, for sure, ambiguous, open to various
interpretations, but who is really going to wreck his brain trying to decipher
the intellectual message of something like ʽThe Back Door To
Heavenʼ? "My eyes are stuck on sleepless dreams / The world is never
what it seems / We've sold it short, it's what we're taught / Lost it in the
living" — okay there, Roddy, it's an acceptable, if familiar, message, but
why accompany it with such insipid music? This way, you will never in a million
years convince anybody that "the back door to heaven is open wide to me".
If the back door to heaven is anything like this generic set of flourishes, I'd
much rather use the front.
The nadir is left for the end. The title track
is not a cover of the classic Genesis
composition (not that there could really be any hope), but a nine-minute
original, dragging along at a snail's pace, intended to become Frame's ultimate
confession, but set back by a complete lack of melody — nothing but atmosphere,
created in the same predictable way. Serious minor chords on the piano,
philosophically colored repetitive guitar lines, a one or two-note bassline
dripping along like a broken faucet, and vocals that plead, sigh, and complain
instead of singing. Of course, every one in a thousand, or one in ten thousand
people, or whatever, will find the effect mesmerizing and heartbreaking. Try it
out — you may be one of the few lucky ones. I happen to find every single
component of the composition unoriginal, un-individual, and devoid of sensual
or intellectual stimulation. In other words, it's a horrific bore.
I really hate it when a magnificent first album
gives way to a heavily disappointing second one, and in each such case, I would
really, really like to think that the problem is somehow only in me, not in the
music. But then, what can I do? Me and High
Land took to each other rather quickly; me and Knife feel no mutual empathy whatsoever. Maybe it's just because I
like bouncy acoustic guitar more than I like crawling electronic keyboards.
Maybe it's more complicated than that. Maybe I'm not getting this whole
«maturity» thing. Maybe I instinctively hate Mark Knopfler, whose second album
was also a major disappointment after the first one, and who may have, since
then, inflicted the same damage on everybody he produced. But I gotta say this
— Brothers In Arms, whatever be, was
a much better album than Knife. Which gets me thinking that
Roddy Frame might have managed a great cover of ʽWalk Of Lifeʼ. But
not ʽMoney For Nothingʼ. He doesn't have enough spite in him to cover
ʽMoney For Nothingʼ. Thumbs down.
PS. The album sleeve is unquestionably the
coolest thing about it, but it does not match the contents one bit. Take my
warning.
LOVE (1987)
1) Deep & Wide & Tall;
2) How Men Are; 3) Everybody Is A Number One; 4) More Than A Law; 5) Somewhere In
My Heart; 6) Working In A Goldmine; 7) One And One; 8) Paradise; 9) Killermont
Street.
One thing that is hard to deny about Roddy
Frame: the guy definitely had no big love for standing in the same spot long
enough to slip into formula. High Land
was a fusion of classic pop with New Wave attitudes, and it worked. Knife was a fusion of classic
«singer-songwriterism» with Eighties-type Knopflerisms, and it didn't work. And
now, three years later, comes Love,
a fusion of dance-pop with adult contemporary. Predictions, anyone?..
Predictions can be wrong, though. While, upon
first listen, this sounded awful, subsequent immersion showed that the
«sellout» actually helped Roddy with his creative juices. And, technically
speaking, this was a major sellout: no less than six different producers, most
of them coming from mainstream markets, worked on the project, which also
featured a completely different session band, with a host of musicians hired
specially for the sessions and then going their separate ways again. The songs,
however, were still written exclusively by Roddy: this is one area where the
corporate machine was strictly forbidden to enter.
Because of its dependence on generic dance
rhythms and fairly bland musical arrangements, Love generally tends to get flack from fans. But remember the
contrast between High Land and Knife and realize that, whatever the
side effects, Roddy generally works better when the songs are upbeat and
rhythmically stimulating; drag him down into the world of slow tempos and heavy
moods and he will quickly lose his focus and forget about everything but the
lyrics.
Even assuming that most of these songs are bad (which they are not), Knife certainly did not have anything
of the caliber of ʽSomewhere In My Heartʼ, a certified Aztec Camera
classic that justifiedly hit #3 on the UK charts, going much higher than the
far more «contemporarily-arranged» singles from Love, because sometimes people actually go for intensity of
delivery instead of the production trinkets — and Roddy's "somewhere in my
heart there is a star that shines for you..." is pretty intense. The
arrangement, with its simple synth patterns and sax blasts, is nothing special,
but it never detracts from the hooks. It's a simple, but intelligent, solid,
powerful love song that should be able to proudly walk into anybody's pop
collection.
As for the rest of this stuff, well, it depends
on where one draws the line between catchiness and tastelessness. For instance,
ʽEverybody Is A Number Oneʼ and ʽOne And Oneʼ certainly
have infectious choruses, but whether these are benevolent or malicious
infections is hard to determine. Both songs try so doggone hard to get you «on
your feet» with their artificial party atmosphere that it quickly becomes
irritating — particularly on ʽOne And Oneʼ, with its
call-and-response vocals. I do like the arrangement on ʽEverybody...ʼ,
with its funky guitars, horns, and «synth-vibraphones» meshing quite colorfully,
but it still might be a bit too overtly «joyful» — on the other hand, it seems
as if Roddy were consciously going for a power-to-the-people-ish Lennon vibe on
this number, sacrificing a bit of good taste to keep the blood boiling, and I
respect that.
It is the slower-moving ballads on which «Roddy
the Aztec» seems to be really losing his grip, slipping into adult contemporary
clichés, or, at least, writing melodies that are hard to distinguish
from such clichés. Stuff like ʽHow Men Areʼ and
ʽParadiseʼ tries to create a brand of Roddy-soul that requires very close inspection to distinguish it
from contemporary R'n'B-ism. There are some acoustic guitars to keep the
live-sound lovers happy, but overall, the synthesizers are overbearing, the
hooks are mediocre, and the ideas behind the songs do not warrant the presence
of an individual singer-songwriter. If there is something that makes Roddy
Frame different from George Michael — and there must be! — it is not immediately obvious on these songs.
Even so, it does not prevent him from ending
the album on a very high note — ʽKillermont Streetʼ, along with
ʽSomewhere In My Heartʼ, is the only other reason to own and cherish Love. Ironically, it is also slow and
draggy; but the acoustic guitars are uncluttered by cheesy synth overdubs, and
it succeeds very well where ʽKnifeʼ failed — by being a lot shorter,
a little faster, a tad catchier, with a nice vocal melody resolution, and
seriously more optimistic.
These two songs are «classic Aztec Camera», the
perfect embodiment of Roddy's «well-tempered optimism» that ties together
suffering and hope through awesome vocal work where you don't even need to
learn the lyrics to get the message. No matter how weak or atmospherically corrupted
the rest of the tunes are, these two are the anchors that manage to color the
whole experience, and, since my brain loves them both and refuses to get
irritated by the rest of this stuff, altogether, Love demands a modest thumbs up. Which is good, because where would we
be if we all started giving love our
thumbs down? Aww.
STRAY (1990)
1) Stray; 2) The Crying Scene;
3) Get Outta London; 4) Over My Head; 5) Good Morning Britain; 6) How It Is; 7)
The Gentle Kind; 8) Notting Hill Blues; 9) Song For A Friend.
Along with High
Land, Stray is considered one of
the two key cornerstones of the Roddy Frame legacy, and I concur. Nothing beats
the startling originality of High Land,
but Stray takes Roddy on an
entirely different goal — it is his take on The White Album, an ambitious stab at covering everything in sight
and sound, and one that nobody really saw coming, certainly not after the
Knopflerisms of Knife and the
dance-pop-a-roll of Love.
Mainly self-produced, with an entirely new
backing band (as usual) and a welcome guest spot from ex-Clash guitarist Mick
Jones, Stray does exactly what it is
supposed to do: it strays. In all sorts of directions. Pop rock, folk rock,
smooth jazz, rhythm and blues, and just a pinch of adult contemporary for
dessert — as much as one lonesome artist is able to cover in about forty minutes.
Fortunately, he also happens to be a talented artist, which he almost made us
forget about on the more unbearably tedious moments of Knife and the cornier tricks of Love.
First off the bat, the two upbeat pop singles
released from the album are two of Roddy's best ever pop songs — ʽThe
Crying Sceneʼ is a masterpiece from top to bottom, be it the beat, the
jangle, the lyrics, or the structure of the chorus vocal melody; of all the pop
songs to hit the mainstream in 1990, this was the most perfect mixture of
modern sentimentality with retro flavours, and "Life's a one take movie
and I don't care what it means / I'm saving up my tears for the crying
scene" is a fantastic two-liner if there ever was one. ʽGood Morning
Britainʼ, due to Mick Jones' presence, does have a whiff of classic Clash
arrogance to it, but the carefully engineered melodic flow of the chorus is
still one hundred percent Roddy. The only minus is that there are two many
keyboards on the song and not nearly enough guitar interplay between the two.
The non-hit rockers are not much worse —
predictably, they are just a little less hooky, but ʽGet Outta
Londonʼ is a nice companion to ʽGood Morning Britainʼ, more
vicious in its verbal attack ("down where the streets are paved with sick
schemes, the river's running like a snake through a dream" — how come the
great god of the Thames hasn't swallowed him up yet in retaliation?), somewhat
less inventive in terms of hooks; and on ʽHow It Isʼ, Roddy immerses
himself in lyrical and, especially, vocal Dylanisms, sort of trying to
recapture the man's radioactive sneer of old and stuff it into a brand new 1990
bottle. Effective.
I am less impressed by the softer numbers — the
gentle guitar/piano acoustic flow of the title track, the Chet Baker-influenced
vocal jazz of ʽOver My Headʼ, the roots-/synth-pop fusion of
ʽThe Gentle Kindʼ. But, unlike the fast stuff that latches on almost
immediately, these things are growers. The most difficult situation concerns
ʽNotting Hill Bluesʼ, whose seven-minute-long sprawl clearly marks it
as a climactic point, and it does feel like the most personal and directly felt
number of the lot — it is simply not too interesting from a musical standpoint.
Banal as it may sound, Roddy's confessionals strike hard only when they are
catchy. Without his pop instincts, he ain't no Van Morrison to work you up with
just the power of his voice — something that Knife already showed well, yet, for some reason, here he is falling
for the same problem just as Stray
was heading for complete perfection.
Nevertheless, occasional flaws and fillerisms
aside, the album is a major success,
and I am surprised that it seems to have all but vanished from the radars — in
1990, Britpop simply did not get much better than this. (In fact, what with the
time gap between the Smiths and Blur/Oasis, Britpop as such almost did not exist in 1990. And, for the record, we are using a broader definition of
Britpop here than the one that pins down Blur and Oasis as founders of the
genre). A thumbs
up all the way: the very fact that Roddy did not collapse under this
burden of diversity, but bravely bore it out, only slipping a bit towards the
end, deserves respect.
DREAMLAND (1993)
1) Birds; 2) Safe In
Sorrow; 3) Black Lucia; 4) Let Your Love Decide; 5) Spanish Horses; 6) Dream
Sweet Dreams; 7) Pianos And Clocks; 8) Sister Ann; 9) Vertigo; 10) Valium
Summer; 11) The Belle Of The Ball.
After the diversity and energy of Stray, this follow-up initially feels like
a big disappointment. Instead of drawing upon the success of ʽCrying
Sceneʼ and ʽGood Morning Britainʼ, Roddy decided against being
pigeonholed, and intentionally made a record that tries to be everything that
its parent was not. Soft, monotonous, slow-to-mid-tempoish, with «moodmeister
extraordinaire» Ryuichi Sakamoto as the general overseer. At times, this is
more Sade than Aztec Camera, and the first couple of listens are beset with the
temptation to just let it go.
But my advice is, just keep on listening;
eventually, it turns out that Dreamland
is not that far removed from Stray, after all. Sakamoto's
production, predictably heavy on atmospheric keyboards, dates the music, but
does not destroy or even obscure it. The synths, strings, and angel-clad back
vocalists just sort of dangle in the background, and some of the back vocals
are actually quite pretty (for instance, the "dream sweet dreams"
harmony bit in the chorus of the same-titled song). The real catch is whether,
this time around, Roddy's vocal melodies, subtle guitar phrasing, and
«intelligently idealistic» attitudes will work their charm on you. After all,
there is always the danger of repeating the mistakes of Knife — leave it to another professional (be it Knopfler or
Sakamoto) to supply the «mood» and just follow it up with words, words, words.
Fortunately, in Dreamland words, moods, and subtle melodies mesh together in a less
forgettable way. ʽLet Your Love Decideʼ is a good example — the
introductory twenty seconds of simple synthesizer patterns seem like prime-time
generic adult contemporary, but then the song begins to grow. Minimalistic
pianos, quiet guitar jangle, a little smooth jazz trumpet solo, a thoughtful vocal
buildup to the chorus, Roddy's genuinely seductive voice, a cute little violin
solo at the end — this is not only «too much» for «generic adult contemporary»,
this is what separates a genuinely heartfelt, touching «mood ballad» from a
hollow commercial fake. So it seems to me.
Roddy was only 29 when the album came out, but
we all know what sort of an overgrown kid he was from the beginning — so it
probably shouldn't be surprising that Dreamland
gives the feeling of being written from the point of view of a 35-40-year old.
There is a kind of maturity here that seems aimed at tempering all the
excesses, building up a highly proportional mix of melancholy, optimism,
disillusionment, idealism, humility, and solemnity.
Listen to ʽBirdsʼ — it's a stylistic
enigma. It could have been just a slow-moving, static, boring piece of radio
fodder, but instead, you are left wondering whether the protagonist is really
complaining about «lost joy» or if he never knew that joy in the first place.
It's a song that sets a goal similar to ABBA's ʽEagleʼ, with better
words and far slighter hooks, but more mystery and subtlety. Or ʽValium
Summerʼ — here is a song we should all probably hate for its choice of
instrumentation and mixing job, but it's got the same enigmatic shroud around
it. Why "valium"? Why the «alarm», so clearly discernible in the
backing vocals? Do the «penthouse jazz» overtones supplied by the bass and
keyboards agree with the mixed emotions of the lyrics, or are they just an
extra flourish to add cheap «class»? I don't know, but I do like the song.
A couple of the songs are sung with somewhat
more tightly clenched fists — I am quite partial to the lonesome romanticism of
ʽSafe In Sorrowʼ and its well-placed old-school electric guitar
solos, and especially to ʽVertigoʼ, which has one of the strongest
vocal lines that Roddy ever came up with ("...so I feel it and I heed it
and I need it then I let it be done" and later variations), and, of
course, to ʽDream Sweet Dreamsʼ, which is the most retro-oriented
song here (guitar jangle right out of the Byrds' parlour + chorus partially extracted
and rebuilt from ʽGolden Slumbersʼ = derivative pop bliss), but
there are really no «weak» points at all; each song has a point to make.
I do reiterate — on every formal level, Dreamland can only be classified as
«adult contemporary», and if the thought of building up an emotional response
to soft-and-silky keyboards, wimpy percussion (or, on the contrary, big,
bashing, electronically enhanced drums), and endless «whining» already turns
you off, stay away from the record. For now, at least; pack it off until you
hit the same mental age as Roddy did at 29 (poor guy). Thumbs up — like Sade at her best,
this is the ideal way to record and market this kind of music (if there ever
was an ideal way to record it: deep down at the bottom, it is still quite
soporific).
FRESTONIA (1995)
1) Rainy Season; 2) Sun; 3)
Crazy; 4) On The Avenue; 5) Imperfectly; 6) Debutante; 7) Beautiful Girl; 8)
Phenomenal World; 9) Method Of Love; 10) Sunset.
The last album to be released under the name of
Aztec Camera (although, truth be told, it is not clear what exactly separates
an «Aztec Camera» record from a Roddy Frame solo record) contains a small
batch of terrific songs — which literally begs for the question: why is it so small? The basic impression
is that Roddy underwent a momentary fit of inspiration, then, happy as hell,
rushed into the studio, put down the moments of inspiration, found out there
were still thirty minutes to fill out, and then...
...but everything in its due order. ʽRainy
Seasonʼ is probably the most cathartic song Roddy ever wrote. Do not dig
in too deep in its lyrics, or you might strike disturbing misogyny in there (or
maybe not; like every experienced misogynist, Roddy likes to put a heavy mask
on that status); just relax in the powerful beauty of its simplistically
effective piano line, its invigorating build-up right up to the “well, baby I
never said I was gonna be Jesus” climax, or the way it picks itself up once
again for an all-out rip-roaring coda. One of the best «singer/songwriter pop
music» creations of the decade — right up there with Aimee Mann and whoever
else in the same confessional vein you might think of.
Then there is ʽSunʼ — kicking into
high gear so quickly that you begin to suspect Frestonia is quickly gearing up to become the pinnacle of Aztec
Camera. Everything about the song is beautiful: the folk-pop guitar jangle
(generic, but pretty, and besides, it only serves as the basic foundation),
the psychedelic guitar tones, the upbeat tempos, the way Roddy is able to dress
a rather simple lyrical metaphor (“I’m just like anyone, I wanna see the sun”)
in such additional wordy clothes that it does not come across as too trivial.
And the fabulous race to the end — by the time he gets around to “I wanna see
the sun, I wanna see the moon, I wanna see the stars, I wanna see them shine”
there can be no doubt that this is exactly what he wants to do. Figuratively,
of course. Just the kind of intellectual idealism that every good person needs.
And then the album takes a plunge. No, it’s not
a «mood piece» like Dreamland, and
it cannot be pigeonholed as either a synth-pop or an «adult contemporary»
record. It’s all quite consistently guitar-driven (sometimes piano-driven) pop.
But where the first two songs hit hard with a careful attitude towards hooks,
build-ups, and come-downs, little else stands competition. For instance, there
is no reason for ʽDebutanteʼ to run nearly seven minutes when it
never creeps above «pretty». It is tastefully arranged — everything here is in
Roddy’s usually exceptional taste — but it just sort of rolls and rolls and
rolls along, slowly and humbly, without any dynamic range (the transition from
bridge to chorus, where you could expect something exceptional, is in fact
disappointing). ʽCrazyʼ and ʽImperfectlyʼ, although
shorter, follow more or less the same pattern; ʽBeautiful Girlʼ is
cutely upbeat but oddly unfocused; and ʽPhenomenal Worldʼ never quite
lives up to the lively distorted croaking of its opening riff.
In short, with the brief, hard-to-notice
exception of ʽOn The Avenueʼ, a beautiful, tears-in-yer-eyes little
piano-and-acoustic lament, Frestonia
seriously sags in the middle, all the way to ʽSunsetʼ, a reprise of ʽSunʼ
in a different arrangement, with more emphasis on acoustic guitar, organ and
strings — maybe there is a slight structural nod to Harrison’s ʽIsn’t It A
Pityʼ here, especially since, just as it used to be with George, it is not
immediately clear which of the two arrangements is better. ʽSunsetʼ
has no separate coda, though.
Still, even if Frestonia may not have all the best Aztec Camera songs — although
ʽRainy Seasonʼ, ʽSunʼ, and ʽOn The Avenueʼ are
timeless and should be heard by everyone — the entire album gets a surefire thumbs up,
if only because it simply sounds so
terrific. Every time Roddy put out an album, its sound was either «quirky» (High Land), or a bit alien to his
personality (Knife, Love), or a bit too heavy on trendy
production, smooth jazz, and electronic stuff. Frestonia, on the other hand, is all about cleanly recorded,
reasonably mixed basics — acoustic and electric guitars, real, fresh pianos,
genuine string arrangements, and vocals that clearly care even if the
accompanying melody is a little below par.
The symbolism of the album title — «Frestonia»
was the name of a short-lived «independent state» formed by a small London
community in 1977 — comes across as a bit too bold: neither Roddy himself nor
his music are that special to have a
right to claim complete independence from the musical world. On the other hand,
it might be just right if we consider the irony — the real «Frestonia» only
had as much independence as it had imagination and self-illusion, and the
overall sadness of the LP tone is more like the melancholy of an inmate
longing for freedom than an ode to joy from one who has already found it. Fact
is, the whole existence of Aztec Camera has not allowed Roddy Frame to “see
the sun”; and his retirement of the band name after the release of Frestonia might just as well imply
admittance of defeat over an idealistic struggle. But don’t you worry, Roddy —
others will always be there to take your hopeless place.
THE B-52'S (1979)
1) Planet Claire; 2) 52 Girls;
3) Dance This Mess Around; 4) Rock Lobster; 5) Lava; 6) There's A Moon In The
Sky (Called The Moon); 7) Hero Worship; 8) 6060-842; 9) Downtown.
For all of punk and New Wave's pretense to «alleviating»
the heavy, stuffy atmosphere in which prog-rock and arena-rock acts had plunged
popular music in the first half of the 1970s, most punk and New Wave acts were
fairly stuffy themselves. The songs were either too rabid and angry or too
intellectualized, the sound was too quirkily non-traditional, the whole «new
school» approach required some getting used to (and many never really got used
to it anyway). The Ramones could claim a serious teen pop influence, but they
were still punks first and foremost. Only Blondie could be seen as a «fluffy»
act, perhaps, but one might question whether Blondie had much to do with «New
Wave» at all — mainly in appearance, much less in the music itself.
So when the B-52's came along, and they stuck
around for two years at least before landing a serious recording contract, the
niche they decided to occupy was practically empty — even if, of all the
available niches, it was one of the most glaring: combine all these quirky New
Wave influences with kitsch, bubblegum, pop culture fetishism, and see what
happens. The album cover alone, with its flashy colors, oversize wigs, and
fashions that seem stuck somewhere in between the 1960s and 1970s, speaks
volumes about what this record might turn out to be: lots of vapor-headed fun
with a healthy dose of self-irony, annoying «serious» music lovers, but
delighting nerdy college students all over the college world.
Or it could be just a dumb, unmemorable, chaotic
load of cretinous kitsch. Fortunately, already the opening track, ʽPlanet
Claireʼ, confirms the positive impression. Riding on a grim, but seductive
surf-rock / James-Bond riff (they eventually had to co-credit the song to Henry
Mancini because of its similarity to the Peter Gunn theme) combined with a
robotic organ part that the band might have just as well picked up from
Kraftwerk, it's a stylish, thrilling, and completely meaningless dance ride.
But by combining the word "planet", invoking psychedelic
associations, with the French name Claire, invoking Eric Rohmer and stylish
European retro-modern à la
1960s, the B-52's create an illusion that the song is about something —
maybe about the seductive magic of fads? — and the guitar/organ duet on the
tune still remains one of the most memorable flashes of the decade's end.
However, the first time that the B-52's had
really caught the public eye was with ʽRock Lobsterʼ, a track that
has all the same ingredients as ʽPlanet Claireʼ but keeps them going
for a longer period of time, and, more importantly, makes better use of all
the vocal talent aboard — Fred Schneider sings the absurd lyrics about
catching rock lobsters in his best stern Krautrock impersonation, while the
band's ladies, Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson, surround him with single and
double harmonies, calls-and-responses that tremble, bleat, wheeze, and bounce
off each other like a set of pop harmony clichés that, all of a sudden,
felt itself bad in the head and had to be straightjacketed. Here is the song
that killed John Lennon — according to his own words, ʽRock Lobsterʼ
was one of the main reasons he returned to an active music career, since it
reminded him of what he and Yoko were doing in the early days of Plastic Ono
Band. (And, it is true, some of the girls' vocalizing does owe a good deal to
Yoko's brand of avantgarde «Nip-pop»).
The formula mostly stays the same throughout the
album — sparkling surf-pop or power-pop riffs dressed in New Wave organs,
B-movie-influenced lyrics, and inventive vocal arrangements that pin
Schneider's overzealous nerdiness against the ladies' «pseudo-bimbo» lines that
want to be Yoko Ono one minute and the Shangri-Las the next one. And this is
not mentioning that most of the songs are crazily catchy — ʽThere's A Moon
In The Skyʼ and ʽ52 Girlsʼ are delicious swinging vignettes;
ʽLavaʼ rocks as hard as its relatively wimpy arrangement allows a
song whose lyrics involve lines like "My heart's cracking like a
Krakatoa"; ʽ6060-842ʼ is an obvious throwback to young and
innocent days when sympathetic, sexy R&B performers could turn phone
numbers into hits (ʽBeechwood 4-5789ʼ) — hey, what's a bona fide pop
album without a good phone call song?; and the cover of Petula Clark's
ʽDowntownʼ dissipates any final doubts about the record's major
influences, if you still had any by the time the last track comes along.
In short, thirty years before the Pipettes,
there were the B-52's, who showed the world what it really means to preserve the bubblegum legacy without falling into
the trap of generic nostalgia — the best way to preserve old stuff is to
carefully mix it with the new stuff. And this mix, almost completely unique
for 1979, is really what raises The
B-52's status of «dumb catchy pop» to «landmark recording» — and also what
makes it so timeless, because it still sounds just as lovingly bizarre, and
endearing, today as it did back in the age of leisure suits and walrus moustaches.
Thumbs up,
of course.
WILD PLANET (1980)
1) Party Out Of Bounds; 2)
Dirty Back Road; 3) Runnin' Around; 4) Give Me Back My Man; 5) Private Idaho;
6) Devil In My Car; 7) Quiche Lorraine; 8) Strobe Light; 9) 53 Miles West Of
Venus.
This sophomore offspring is by no means a
«slump» — it just lacks the novelty and immediacy of its predecessor. The
B-52's hit upon a winning formula, and they were not willing to let it go too
quickly. Same lineup, same ideology, even the same recording studio (Compass
Point at Nassau, Bahamas — a perfectly fine place to record wild party
albums), even some of the songs were really old standards that they had played
live since 1977. And the public had enough time to catch on as well — Wild Planet fared much better on the
charts, since the band was by then a well-established phenomenon.
That said, even if we do know now what exactly
to expect from the B-52's, and this friction slows down the excitement force a
little bit, the tunes themselves are still consistently strong. Guitar riffs,
vocal hooks, energetic tempos are all there, and, most importantly, so is the
general «bite» of the band — if anything, they are getting snappier, ridiculing
social conventions by the dozen with most people probably not even noticing
that they are getting ridiculed.
The punk roots of the band show best of all on
ʽPrivate Idahoʼ, which has the sharpest, stingiest «rockabilly-punk»
riff of them all (reminiscent of ʽBrand New Cadillacʼ by the Clash)
and obscure character assassination lyrics that may just as well be assassinating
sociopaths and socialites alike (well, the line "you're living in your own
Private Idaho" could easily be taken both ways). The inclusion of the song
is a great move — since most of the other tunes are either about partying or
about surrealistic kitsch, it sort of sets the band straight for those who
would like to dismiss Wild Planet as
simply one more bunch of meaningless decadent fluff.
But it's not like that at all, really. The
opening single ʽParty Out Of Boundsʼ is not just hilarious — it is
also thought-provoking, a wild romp where Schneider and Pierson lambast the
party culture to bits (which never prevented the song from becoming a cult
party anthem, of course), and the culmination, with the girls chanting
"party gone out of bounds, party gone out of bounds" is so symbolic
of the B-52's entire existence that Schneider eventually ended up using the
song title for his own radio show. ʽStrobe Lightʼ is an irresistibly
fast R'n'B dance number, first and foremost, but also a clear-cut hyperbolic
satire on club culture excesses ("wanna make love to you under the strobe
light" — yeah, right), featuring the immortal original innuendo "then
I'm gonna kiss your... pineapple!"
And ʽQuiche Lorraineʼ — now here
is an anti-socialite rant if there ever was one, masked in a heart-rending
story about the relations between a poodle and her owner.
While there are no melodies on the record that
are as instantaneously seductive as the guitar / organ interplay of
ʽPlanet Claireʼ, every song has at least something going for it in
the line of vocal hooks (these usually consist of the girls chanting the song's
title or whoo-hoo-hooing), and the keyboards rarely get in the way of pop
guitars. That, in fact, is the main problem for the reviewer: the formula is so
diligently observed on each of the songs that, mood-wise, there is almost no
difference between them, and there is no point in trying to discuss minuscule
stuff like the slightly bigger emphasis on paranoia in ʽRunnin'
Aroundʼ versus the touch stronger accent on obsessive-compulsive disorder
on ʽGive Me Back My Manʼ.
Overall, Wild
Planet is a modest success that should be swallowed in one gulp — you could
try and take away individualistic highlights (starting with ʽPrivate
Idahoʼ), but why? The songs are relatively short, the whole album only
runs 35 minutes, and everything is linked together thematically as one large,
hyperbolic send-up of all the ridiculous things that make people part of the
same society. Funny, catchy, kitschy, and smart, there is no way that the album
does not deserve an almost equally heartfelt thumbs up as its predecessor.
MESOPOTAMIA (1982)
1) Loveland; 2) Deep Sleep; 3)
Mesopotamia; 4) Cake; 5) Throw That Beat In The Garbage Can; 6) Nip It In The
Bud.
This six-song EP, an important turning point in
the B-52's career, frequently gets a bad rap from critics and fans alike. Not
too happy, perhaps, with the perspective of recording the same album third time
in a row, and also looking for a little «artistic maturity», the band eagerly
took up the offer of teaming up with David Byrne to produce their next album —
a heavenly match, one might think, given the many intersection points between
the B-52's and the Talking Heads; in a way, one could even think of classic-era
B-52's as «Talking Heads for kiddos».
For some reason, the relationship turned out
sour: the parties ended up disagreeing on the final mixes, and this, together
with excessive pressure on the part of the record label, brought the sessions
to an early halt — what was conceived as a full LP came out as a six-song EP
(although three other songs from the sessions were later re-recorded for Whammy!). And when it did come out, people were disappointed.
Gone was the humor and the young teenish rave-up atmosphere that ruled supreme
on The B-52's and Wild Planet. Instead, we found cold
wobbly-funky Heads-styles riffs, a Byrnish atmosphere of absurdist paranoia,
and synth/horn arrangements that would rather suit boring parties than awesome
ones.
But in all honesty, I fail to see what exactly
is wrong with that. Yes, Mesopotamia
is all that and more, but it works fairly well as a «second-rate Talking Heads»
experience with a few shades of classic B-52's carried over and a few extra
influences thrown in the mix as well. This is not so much a «loss of direction»
as a conscious attempt to give it a slight change, and the actual songs —
credited, by the way, exclusively to the band members, never to Byrne — do not
sound at all like they didn't believe in what they were doing: the music, as
usual, is rather calculated and detached, but the singing, especially when the
girls join in, is fab. All in all, Mesopotamia
really does sound like the «grown-up» version of Wild Planet. Those sharing the preconception that a band like The
B-52's cannot possibly grow up, but can only explode trying, should stay away.
Others may, and hopefully will, find a lot to like.
The title track is the clear highlight — it
takes a huge risk starting off with exactly one minute and five seconds of a
repetitive groove that does sound
like second-rate Talking Heads (I personally get a splitting headache from the
jungle-jangle around the twentieth second), but then turns into a cool mix of
robotic dumbness. "I ain't no student of ancient culture", Schneider
sings, "before I talk, I should read a book", and he's not joking
about that one: trying to locate "the third pyramid" in Mesopotamia, of all places, hardly makes
any more sense than inviting us to "turn your watch back about a hundred
thousand years", but that is just the point — the song is not about
Mesopotamia as such (bring on somebody like Al Stewart for historic accuracy),
it's about the distorted perspective on things that can fasten itself to
anybody's mind, and the dogmatic «rectangular» guitar lines and half-zombified,
half-somnambulized back vocals from the girls only enforce the feeling. Could
the Heads have done it better? Not sure. Byrne would probably have gone
hysterical at some point, and that would not be what the song requires.
Cindy Wilson bakes up terrific performances on
ʽLovelandʼ, which opens the EP, and ʽNip It In The Budʼ,
which closes it — the songs may not be built on the best grooves in the world,
but the girl is capable of sexy solemnity on the former, and of cocky
impertinence on the latter. Actually, ʽNip It In The Budʼ and
ʽThrow That Beat In The Garbage Canʼ are the only two songs on here
to conjure an atmosphere of moderate hooliganry, reminiscent of the days of old
— except now they use synth loops and horn overdubs to back it (but it still
works).
On the other hand, ʽCakeʼ is
something they never did before — a rather straightforward dance number so full
of GROSS sexual innuendos that it could make Prince blush (speaking of Prince,
the dialog that Kate and Cindy get going in the mid-section is basically
proto-Wendy-and-Lisa stuff. "It says in this cookbook it takes a long time
to rise...", yeah, right). But it is
a fun, sexy number, if not exactly fit for a nice little college party.
ʽDeep Sleepʼ, a slow mood number, may perhaps be the one true weak
link in the chain, but it does have an attractively melancholic piano hook, and
even on a six-pack like this, one slightly saggy slow-burner is not enough to
drag down the overall impression.
Mesopotamia is available in several guises these days,
including a UK version with extended mixes of several of the tracks, and a new
remix from 1991, released on CD together with Party Mix! (originally an EP of remixes of the band's «classic»
tunes from 1981). Too much honor for an album that almost destroyed the B-52's
reputation, some critics would grudgingly say; but I have the pleasure of
disagreeing, and happily award the record a thumbs up. In all fairness, I cannot
even say how much Byrne himself was responsible for this shift of direction —
but if he was, after all, it's a pity
they didn't get to spend even more time together.
WHAMMY! (1983)
1) Legal Tender; 2) Whammy
Kiss; 3) Song For A Future Generation; 4) Butterbean; 5) Trism; 6) Queen Of Las
Vegas; 7) Moon 83; 8) Big Bird; 9) Work That Skirt.
Goodbye David Byrne, hello electronic age. The
B-52's have tasted maturity and found it somewhat unpalatable, so Whammy! is all about rolling back into
nerdy adolescence, but with proper respect to changing musical tastes. The
biggest technical change is that this time around, only two out of five members
are credited for actually playing any instruments — Strickland and Wilson
handle all the guitars, bass, keyboards, and percussion duties, with
synthesizers and drum machines being far more notable than anything else
(there is also a small brass section guesting on ʽBig Birdʼ), whereas
Schneider and the girls only contribute their vocal talents — that is, besides
writing most of the material.
The discrimination of guitars in favor of
electronics was trendy at the time, but, like most of such decisions, turned
out to be «artistically incorrect» in the long run. «Live» instrumentation was
an essential part of the early B-52's, and their quirky guitar riffs were just
as important in creating their nerd party atmosphere as the vocals. The
electronic arrangements are not as good an alternative to go along with that
atmosphere, although, to be honest, there is still plenty of guitar parts
scattered around, and the synth melodies try, as best they can, to generate the
same cheesy mix of mystery and hilariousness as the earlier stuff, so my main
beef is probably with the drum machines — most of the drum machine parts do
not offer us a good reason for being there. Peter Gabriel could handle them
meaningfully, but the B-52's just used them because everybody else did at the
time, with hordes of angry hungry drummers in line for the soup kitchen.
On the good side of things, the B-52's had not
yet traveled a sufficiently long way with Byrne so as to be unable to slip back
into their old hooliganish skins. Four years deep into their recording career,
they can still easily plunge you into the same old world of New Wave-processed
pop culture — best illustrated on the album's two «shiniest» tracks, ʽSong
For A Future Generationʼ and ʽButterbeanʼ. The former was released
as a single and remains one of the band's most defining anthems — every member
voices his or her Zodiac sign and all the band joins together in listing every
pop cliché they can recollect ("wanna be the captain of the
Enterprise / wanna be the king of the Zulus / let's meet and have a baby
now!"). And everybody gets so involved that it is almost tempting to
forget the irony. Fortunately, tempting, but impossible.
The rest of the songs cling to more particular
mini-subjects: the lyrics usually stick together in little storylines, such as
a tale of successful counterfeiters in ʽLegal Tenderʼ, or an account
of a successful gambling strategy in ʽQueen Of Las Vegasʼ, or an ode
to sci-fi means of transportation in ʽTrismʼ, or ʽBig
Birdʼ, which, as amazing as it is, is really a song about a big bird.
These are all fairly straightforward subjects, and the real charm of all these
songs is in how vehemently, with complete devotion and abandon, Fred and the
girls launch into the respective deliveries — which is where it all turns from
triviality into high-class absurd.
Mind you — not nearly as high-class as in the
«old days», when the lyrics used to be more undecipherable and the guitar
passages took active part in the formation of silly mysteries. Whammy!, from an overall part of view,
is more straightforward and accessible. In addition, ʽMoon 83ʼ is a
somewhat unnecessary electronic remake of the earlier ʽThere's A Moon In
The Skyʼ (as it now stands — replacing the track on the original LP, which
was a cover of Yoko Ono's ʽDon't Worry Kyokoʼ, later taken off for
legal reasons), and the final instrumental ʽWork That Skirtʼ is a
rather bland bit of «electronic boogie» that could really use some vocal hooks.
All of which makes Whammy! much less than perfect — yet it is still a bona fide B-52's
album, capturing the band in a youthful, experimental (maybe a bit too
experimental for their own good), and razor-sharp state of mind. Look past some
of its dated aspects and who knows, you might be chanting "come on mammy,
give me that whammy" in no time. Thumbs up.
BOUNCING OFF THE SATELLITES (1986)
1) Summer Of Love; 2) Girl
From Ipanema Goes To Greenland; 3) Housework; 4) Detour Thru Your Mind; 5) Wig;
6) Theme For A Nude Beach; 7) Ain't It A Shame; 8) Juicy Jungle; 9)
Communicate; 10) She Brakes For Rainbows.
Goodbye Ricky Wilson, hello 1986. Had we not
known the circumstances, it would be tempting to speculate that Ricky Wilson
took his own life so as to be free of the terror of witnessing the worst year
in musical history, but in reality, of course, he died of AIDS several months
after the initial sessions for this record were completed. Predictably, the
band plunged into depression, distractedly patched up the final product,
released it with relatively little promotion, did not go on tour, and
eventually just took a long, long hiatus.
But the main problem with this album is
certainly not Ricky's death, since, after all, most of it was written and much
of it was recorded while he was still alive, and carefully concealing his illness
from his friends and relatives. The main problem... wait, there are two main
problems, actually. First, that musically they have practically completed the
transition to regular synth-pop. Not all of the record is electronic, but when
the opening number populates the entire first minute with nothing but drum
machines and synths, you know where the priorities lie.
Second, and even worse, is the realization that
the band's ship finally collided with the reef of seriousness, and it isn't the
reef that's going down. From top to bottom, Bouncing Off The Satellites is loaded with quasi-sincere
romanticism (ʽSummer Of Loveʼ, ʽShe Brakes For Rainbowsʼ),
social messagism (ʽCommunicateʼ), eco-friendly anthemism (ʽJuicy
Jungleʼ), and stone-faced absurdism (ʽGirl From Ipanema Goes To
Greenlandʼ, a straightforward synth-rocker whose title is far more
interesting than its contents).
There is only one number on the entire album
that tries to recreate the old party atmosphere, and in doing that, it goes
over the top — ʽWigʼ, celebrating the principal visual fetish of the
band's entire career, ultimately sounds like somebody's rather flat parody on
the B-52's, filled with cheap «wig humor» and minimal lyrics. And in the
context of the album its absurdly fast tempos, «exuberant» group harmonies,
and repetitive mantras ("wigs on fire, wigs on fire!") sound like
something they forced on themselves at the last minute ("hey guys, this
thing's coming out too morose, let's make the silliest song in the universe or
something").
It is not utterly without redeem. The band
still remembers the craft of vocal hooks, the girls and Fred are still in fine
voice, and they still know how to weave a good mood, even if the thread now
consists of about 80% electronic fiber. ʽShe Brakes For Rainbowsʼ, in
particular, is a very pretty conclusion, which could, in a way, be seen as
Cindy's paradise-evoking eulogy for her brother: considering the circumstances,
Bouncing Off The Satellites could be
justified to end on a colorful, melancholic-romantic note. Pierson's
ʽHouseworkʼ is hilarious — a wicked send-up of the «tough girl» image
of 1980's pop culture that you could read literally, ironically, or both
("don't need a man to make me mean / I need a man to help me clean").
And ʽDetour Through Your Mindʼ, Fred's stream-of-conscious collage of
sci-fi, psychedelia, and social critique run through a simple, but not too
annoying dance track and the girls' cloudy harmonies, merits additional listens
(including a backwards one, in order to decode the spoken message at the end —
which, unlike Wikipedia, I won't ruin for you).
I have also learned to near-enjoy ʽJuicy
Jungleʼ, despite its straightforward environmentalism (nothing wrong with
environmentalism, but when I want to hear about jungle preservation, I don't
think Fred Schneider should be the first person I'd have in mind) — the «stern»
chorus is just too catchy. On the other hand, ʽSummer Of Loveʼ and
ʽGirl From Ipanemaʼ let their synth-pop arrangements overshadow the
vocals, vibes, and lyrics; and ʽTheme For A Nude Beachʼ is literally
the worst B-52's song up to date — it gets easier to swallow if you keep
reminding yourself that it is really a parody on the decade's
epitome-of-tastelessness «beach romance dance numbers», but it's still hard to
do because the song itself, every now and then, seems to forget that it's a
parody and takes on a quasi-serious life of its own.
Overall, I'm on the fence here — initial pure
hatred for this record has slowly dissipated once the hooks and some
intelligence came through, so, in the end, I would just regard it as an
ill-fated product of its epoch, infected by its most frequent viruses. All of
these songs could have been written and recorded in 1979, with a completely
different effect. One should hardly force oneself to like Bouncing Off The
Satellites, but to me, it is clearly a product of a «misguided» band here
rather than that of a «washed up» one. In retrospect, we can probably forgive
and ignore the flaws — in a way, it's a wonder that, given the circumstances,
they still managed to come up with something listenable in the first place —
and concentrate on the strengths.
COSMIC THING (1989)
1) Cosmic Thing; 2) Dry
County; 3) Deadbeat Club; 4) Love Shack; 5) Junebug; 6) Roam; 7) Bushfire; 8)
Channel Z; 9) Topaz; 10) Follow Your Bliss.
Three years into Ricky's death, with Keith
Strickland switching to guitars and keyboards from drums, the B-52's once again
appeared on the scene. Three years can be a long time, though, and this is not
quite the same old B-52's we used to know. If there is an objective proof for
that, it would be the almost unexpected commercial success — Cosmic Thing went quadruple platinum,
spawned a whole bunch of hugely popular singles, and turned the band from
semi-underground club favorites into a mainstream attraction. The closest
analogy to this whole situation that I can think of is the 1987 «comeback» of
Aerosmith.
The good news is that the B-52's did not have
to sink to the same bottom of the tastelessness pond that Aerosmith chose to: Cosmic Thing preserves a large chunk of
the old spirit, humor, sarcasm, and wittiness. But things have changed. All of the songs here sound extremely polished —
calculated, measured, rehearsed, with no space at all left to the delightfully
unpredictable «hooliganry» of old. This becomes less surprising when one learns
that the album was produced by Nile Rodgers, the slickness master behind Chic,
Bowie's Let's Dance, Madonna's Like A Virgin, and, most notably, Mick
Jagger's seminal masterpiece She's The
Boss; but that does not make the contrast between Wilson-era and
post-Wilson-era B-52's any less jarring.
Still, it makes little sense to complain. It is
clear that after the shock of 1986, the B-52's could no longer be quite the
same, and, besides, they were ten years older than when they started — and had
every right to polish up their sound, adjusting it to their current age. At least
none of these songs sound «unnatural» or, God forbid, «nostalgic». And,
furthermore, at the end of the day what really matters is whether these songs
have hooks (they have), show intelligence (they do), and manage to cleverly
bypass or tone down the sonic clichés of late 1980s pop.
The latter is actually quite important: the
music relies on a healthy mix of real drums, guitars, and keyboards (most of
them supplied by a host of session musicians; Strickland is the only band
member credited with a lot of instrumental work). It is sometimes mildly
spoiled with electronic enhancement, but, on the whole, Cosmic Thing does not come across as something tightly tied to the
year of 1989 — most of it could have been recorded, say, in 1981. Only one
track, ʽChannel Zʼ, bears the «experimental» trademarks of generic
late-Eighties dance-pop, and might therefore polarize audiences; I think it
actually works, and the robotic dance-pop arrangement fits in well with the
song's thematic message ("I am livin' on Channel Z, getting nothing but
static, static in my attic from Channel Z"), but any band that goes all
the way from ʽRock Lobsterʼ to ʽChannel Zʼ goes a long way
indeed, and once you remember that, it gets a little disturbing.
The big hits — ʽLove Shackʼ,
ʽRoamʼ, ʽDeadbeat Clubʼ — are all catchy, pleasant enough
pop tunes, and now they mostly work on the contrast between Fred Schneider's
eternally nerdy vocals (one thing that hasn't changed a bit since the early
days) and Kate and Cindy's now-well-disciplined singing. The reason why they
became so popular probably has to do with the «party atmosphere», particularly
on ʽLove Shackʼ, which one could almost see coming from the likes of
Prince — of course, as usual, the new generation of fans mostly missed the
irony. It would be much harder to miss it on ʽDeadbeat Clubʼ, one of
the most sentimental tributes to wasting one's life away in the history of pop
music, but I suppose that it can be done, too — there are, after all, quite a
lot of people who are genuinely happy to belong to the «Deadbeat Club».
Meanwhile, ʽJunebugʼ and
ʽBushfireʼ are fast-tempo pop-rockers that mostly get by on the
strength of their vocal hooks (wonderful arrangements of the girls' vocals on
ʽBushfireʼ, in particular); ʽTopazʼ is a lightly anthemic
bit of musical utopia with an atmosphere of disarming innocence; and the final
instrumental ʽFollow Your Blissʼ is romantic surf-pop with electronic
overtones that certainly makes much more sense than ʽWork That Skirtʼ,
for instance.
Essentially, I cannot fault any of these songs
— not a single one of them ever drifts towards adult contemporary (an easy
temptation) or completely generic dance-pop that places most of its faith in
the beat rather than the melody; and I am certainly less troubled about the
commercial win of Cosmic Thing than
about the insane popularity of late-era Aerosmith, and join the fray with an
assured thumbs
up. But nobody who wants to understand what the B-52's were «all
about» should ever begin with Cosmic
Thing, because this here party is set up according to strict rules, whereas
classic era B-52's rarely ever gave a damn about rules in the first place.
GOOD STUFF (1992)
1) Tell It Like It T-I-Is; 2)
Hot Pants Explosion; 3) Good Stuff; 4) Revolution Earth; 5) Dreamland; 6) Is
That You Mo-Dean?; 7) The World's Green Laughter; 8) Vision Of A Kiss; 9)
Breezin'; 10) Bad Influence.
You'd think that, perhaps, a band as nerdy-hip
as the B-52's would know better than to respect the law of «never change a
winning formula». But apparently, the temptation was too heavy: three years
after the successful «sellout» of Cosmic
Thing, Freddie «Slick» Schneider and his gang are back, still goaded by
Nile Rodgers to do more of the same. Cindy Wilson, however, took some time off,
and thus avoided directly involving her name in this project — arguably the
silliest and slumpiest in the band's entire career.
Essentially, Good Stuff is just a laughably pale copy of its predecessor. The
overall sound is just as generic and just as «non-awful», but the
«risqué» songs sound more silly and the «serious» songs sound more
boring. The three opening numbers have plenty of energy, but much of it goes to
waste already on ʽTell It Like It T-I-Isʼ, which holds a flat boogie
pattern over five minutes to inform us that the band wants to «tell it like it
is» without saying a word about the «it» in question — faintly funny for about
two minutes, then starts getting repetitive and annoying as heck. ʽHot
Pants Explosionʼ puts us shin-deep in sexual territory, blankly firing
with some of the stupidest lines to grace a B-52's record ("If you would
be so kind / Put on those red hot pants and take a stroll through my mind"
— what?). And the title track is a
certified exercise in double entendres — "gonna wallow in your lovin'
hollow", yeah right.
But at least, if all these tracks do make it
seem like the band has completely forgotten its magic touch where words are
concerned, the dance grooves and Kate Pierson's vocal flourishes on all three
are still enough to redeem the sinners. Particularly the flourishes — the lady
works authentic magic with the aiyee-aiyeehs on ʽTell Itʼ, the
whoah-whoahs on ʽHot Pantsʼ, and the bom-bom bom-boms on ʽGood
Stuffʼ so fervently that I find all three cases irresistible. Schneider
has the unfortunate disadvantage of always sporting the same robotic-nerdy personality
that does not allow for a lot of variation (a robot is a robot) — Kate, with
her reckless party gal stance, always gets to be more versatile and expressive.
Once the album starts getting bogged down in
less gimmicky compositions, however, not even the vocals help much longer.
ʽDreamlandʼ sacrifices seven and a half minutes in an attempt to join
dance-pop and psychedelia on a groove that never seems to change upon initial
installation and, overall, sounds like it needs many more overdubs and
attention to detail in order to achieve its goals. ʽThe World's Green
Laughterʼ manages to be a quirky, completely instrumental eco-anthem, but
it states its point in thirty seconds and then wastes my time for another
hundred and fifty. Finally, ʽVision Of A Kissʼ pushes us into completely
generic territory — is this song at all worthy of the B-52's signature? Doesn't
it belong in the world of Whitney Houston?..
In this pathetic, undeserving «sequel» attempt
to cash in on their newly found fortune, the band seems to have finally «jumped
the shark» — taken completely out of context, Good Stuff is a semi-decent dance-pop exercise, but as a conclusion
to a fifteen-year old career, it is embarrassing. Even the sci-fi references
(ʽIs That You Mo-Dean?ʼ) now sound wedged in between cliché
and nostalgia. And if we can tolerate some tastelessness on the part of these
guys — they are too smart, after all, to be disgustingly
tasteless — tolerating boredom is something we should not be doing in anybody's
case, much less a band that used to regularly infuse their grooves with surprisingly
emotional content.
Yes, Good
Stuff is about as exciting as you'd expect any album with such a title to
be — if you knew your record was going to be a masterpiece, a title like Good Stuff would hardly be on your list
of serious candidates. I am not giving it a thumbs down for only one reason: I
am totally in awe over how such an obviously, blatantly fail-oriented record
still manages to have occasionally catchy hooks and devote enough care to convincing
us that all those thirty or so session musicians credited in the liner notes actually did play on it. In other words, Good Stuff should have been awful stuff
— through some miracle of the human brain, it is actually mediocre stuff. But
there is still a long distance to be covered from mediocre to good — or,
rather, from merely existing as a band to the stage where that existence
continues to be justified. In 1992, there seems to have been little
justification for the continuing existence of the B-52's.
FUNPLEX (2008)
1) Pump; 2) Hot Corner; 3)
Ultraviolet; 4) Juliet Of The Spirits; 5) Funplex; 6) Eyes Wide Open; 7) Love
In The Year 3000; 8) Deviant Ingredient; 9) Too Much To Think About; 10)
Dancing Now; 11) Keep This Party Going.
So here is the question. Is it at all possible
for the once greatest nerd-party band of all time to still put out something
even vaguely credible once its members are all pushing past fifty? (Kate Pierson,
the eldest of the lot, actually turned 60 in 2008). Yes, in the past two
decades we have all learned to cope with the «too old to rock'n'roll, too young
to die» mentality, and some of us have even been able to come to terms with
Grandpa Mick still wiggling his bellybutton with an oxygen tank waiting
backstage. But the B-52's — well, there is something different here. Despite Mesopotamia and David Byrne, despite
Ricky Wilson's tragic experience, despite all of the ups and downs and changing
fashions, they never really managed to grow out of the «college party soundtrack»
genre — they just reshaped its angles from time to time.
And now, here is one more record from the
B-52's — more than fifteen years after the success of Cosmic Thing and Good Stuff
gave them enough moolah to finally have the guts to call it a day and retire...
for a while. Well, actually, they did not retire as such: they just banned
themselves from the studio (only recording a couple new tracks for the 1998 Time Capsule anthology) and cut down on
live appearances, but still regularly appeared on public every now and then.
Until, it is said, Keith Strickland heard New Order's Get Ready and decided that here was just the kind of sound that the
band could turn to their advantage in the 21st century. So they grabbed New Order's
producer and went into the studio. And?...
Well... I like it. It is advisable to forget
about the age problem, or else the vision of a 60-year old Kate Pierson (or is
that Cindy? I still have some occasional trouble telling one from the other,
not that it seriously matters) opening the show with "I look at you and
I'm ready to pump" might be a gross turnoff (unless you're into
cougarism, that is). But reality is such that, even after all these years, both
Kate and Cindy sound almost exactly
the same way they sounded in 1979 — more experienced, perhaps, more
professional, disciplined, and taking a little extra care so as not to
over-exert themselves, but essentially just ringing out with the same clarity
and youthful audacity as they always did. So does Schneider, although this is
less of a surprise: his «nerdy-talky» vocal style obviously takes less effort
to preserve through the years. Let's take a look at him when he's pushing
ninety, and then start expressing admiration.
Also, this new sound works very well. An
excellent balance between some new-fangled electronics and old-school guitar
rock, masterminded by Strickland — everything sounds modern and trendy, yet, at
the same time, is quite consistent with the basic legacy of the B-52's. The
melodies themselves are not particularly memorable or original, since the main
effort, as always, is invested in the pop choruses, but they sound swell: the
guitars either pack a good deal of distorted crunch or play funny funky riffs,
and the synthesizers throw on a huge variety of tones and modes, imitating
organs, electric pianos, strings, jumping from sci-fi to techno to ambient
colors with each next number. Yes, everything is way too polished and
calculated to hope to match the old glories, but nothing else could be expected
anyway ever since Cosmic Thing
convinced the band that «polish» is one of the major keys to success. Besides,
being reckless and chaotic is fun for the young ones. As you grow older, it is
quite natural to calculate your fun in advance.
And these «calculated» songs are all excellent
samples of the calculated approach. The first three songs are all fast-paced
variations on the same single topic, but they are all exciting variations, and
I have no idea which one I like better — "pump it up, give it up, turn up
the track!", "shake it to the last round, shimmy in a Lurex
gown!", or "lovin' it, lovin' it... ultraviolet!" Maybe the second
one, with its echoes of 1960s dance-pop. You might prefer the much more modern
ʽUltravioletʼ. Who cares? "Keep doin' what you're doin' cause
you're doin' it right", Schneider says in ʽUltravioletʼ, and
that's the ticket indeed.
They actually break away — just a little bit —
from the formula only once, on the (still danceable) neo-disco ballad
ʽJuliet Of The Spiritsʼ, a surprisingly adequate adaptation of the
subject of a Fellini movie (mid-aged matron daring to open up and discover the
«sensual world») to the current B-52's aesthetics (mid-aged perennial nerds
still justifying their own seclusion in that same world). The arrangement is a
little dumb, especially considering that, while still in their prime, the
B-52's normally shunned disco (also in its prime), but the catchy vocal hooks
and the reasonable sentiments are still attractive. (And if the song urges
somebody to go see Juliet Of The Spirits
— well, it ain't one of Fellini's best, for my money, but a little
enlightenment never hurt anybody).
After that, the «party» formula reasserts
itself in dictatorial mode. "It's a shallow existence, but oh yeah... I
need it, I want it, I got to have it" — these words, spoken in breathy,
sensual mode (ʽDeviant Ingredientʼ) pretty much say it all, as
usual: superficial shallowness, seriously deepened by some acid irony, which might
go unnoticed by those listeners who only saw the B-52's as «party animals»,
without paying attention to the «nerdy» part of the formula. But even without
the irony, these songs have a fine rock sound, lively, pulsating grooves and
brilliantly worked out vocal hooks, so what's not to like?
Once it all ends with the aptly titled
«message» song ʽKeep This Party Goingʼ ("we've gotta be part of
the universe, keep this party going all night long"), you would expect to
be tired and worn out from the monotousness — just how many mid-to-fast-tempo
party-pop-rockers can one's organism stand without overdosing? — but I never
felt any tiredness, certainly not with these sharp brain-needles (like the
girls' frenzied "things are getting dirty down in Washing-TOON!...")
strategically inserted at all the right spots.
In the end, although, overall, this is a
«typically late-period» B-52's record, I'd say that it knocks down Good Stuff with a vengeance, and that
it is slightly less embarrassing than Cosmic
Thing — and more consistent, too: there are no particular high points here,
but this is only because it is hard to imagine how any of these songs, all
based upon the same winning formula, could be much better than others. The very
fact that the album managed to reach #11 on the US charts — after fifteen years
of silence, coming from a band of old nerdy farts, and on a fiercely
competitive market at that — shows how much seductive power this Funplex has, and my own experience does
not deny that power, so a thumbs up by all means. Plus, check out their
videos from circa around 2008 — hard to believe, yes, but they still look cool
(or hot, whichever you prefer).
WITH THE WILD CROWD: LIVE IN ATHENS, GA (2011)
1) Pump; 2) Private Idaho; 3)
Mesopotamia; 4) Ultraviolet; 5) Give Me Back My Man; 6) Funplex; 7) Whammy; 8)
Roam; 9) 52 Girls; 10) Party Out Of Bounds; 11) Love In The Year 3000; 12)
Cosmic Thing; 13) Hot Corner; 14) Band Intros; 15) Love Shack; 16) Wig; 17)
Planet Claire; 18) Rock Lobster.
«Classic era» B-52's never put out a live
album, which does not mean they couldn't put on a great live show: most likely,
they saw no real need for this, since they allowed themselves so much freedom
of action on their studio albums already — and the concerts were more
remarkable in terms of show-biz flashiness and visuals (aw, those wigs!!!) than
music, which mainly just strived to reproduce the whirlwind hooliganry and
extravagance.
If so, why put out a live album when you're old
and gray? Well, for one thing, it somehow seems easier to put things out in our
modern era of overproducing everything. For another thing, this live CD is
technically just an appendage to the live DVD — recording an entire show that
the band did for their 34th anniversary at the Classic Center in Athens, GA.
Hence, it does not really make much sense to hunt for the audio separate from
the video, even if the level of energy and the sheer ratio of crazy things done
onstage is predictably nowhere near the stuff one can see in the band's early,
sketchy, skimpy camera relics.
But, with all the necessary age-related
corrections introduced, the band still looks and sounds great. Somehow, Kate and Cindy manage not to come across as freaky grandmas,
and it has far less to do with the wonders of plastic surgery than with the
amazing fact that their vocal powers have remained practically intact. Well, almost — it is a fact that they can no
longer hit the highest notes on the "wigs on fire, fire, fire, fire"
bit, but the scale is still scaled to an impressive height all the same. And
Fred... well, Fred will always be Fred, even after they freeze him out of the
storage locker in ten billion years' time.
The «anniversary setlist» is a little
disappointing — you'd expect it to be a more representative career overview,
but instead, they focus too closely on Funplex
material, as if, three years into its release, there'd still be people around
needing to be convinced to buy it. Five out of eleven songs is definitely a bit
of an overkill. Although, granted, the live performance of these numbers
scrapes away some of the stuffy production polish — ʽLove In The Year
3000ʼ, in particular, benefits heavily from a little less electronics and
a bit more liveliness from the rhythm section.
The «oldies», meanwhile, are quite predictable:
most of the big hits are here, with just a few notable exceptions like
ʽDeadbeat Clubʼ, and the only album that gets completely snuffed is Good Stuff — probably not because it is
their worst offering, but because it lacked Cindy's input, and she might have
been unwilling to add her parts to the likes of ʽHot Pants Explosionʼ
(and I can so totally understand it). The only unexpected, and much welcome,
inclusion is ʽ52 Girlsʼ from the debut album; elsewhere, you just know that the setlist has to end with
ʽLove Shackʼ (for all the young hedonists), ʽPlanet
Claireʼ, and ʽRock Lobsterʼ (for the certified veterans).
What else is there to say? The sound quality is
expectedly perfect, the stage banter is limited (even the entire band
introduction, what with all the extra players, is performed in a matter of
about forty seconds), and the professionalism is undeniable — they still put on
an energetic, funny, and intelligent live show, and all it takes is about
thirty seconds' worth of ʽPrivate Idahoʼ to understand this (you try reproducing all these
woo-hoo-hoos without erring as you hit sixty). If With The Wild Crowd is destined to become the last bit of
semi-original product from The B-52's — although they might easily have another
Funplex-level album somewhere deep
inside their systems — it's a nice, well-rounded swan song. And am I really glad they did not forget about
ʽMesopotamiaʼ: this live version is a real atmospheric super-killer
even compared to the studio version, which was no slouch either. Thumbs up.
BAD BRAINS (1982)
1) Sailin' On; 2) Don't Need
It; 3) Attitude; 4) The Regulator; 5) Banned In D.C.; 6) Jah Calling; 7)
Supertouch/Shitfit; 8) Leaving Babylon; 9) F.V.K.; 10) I; 11) Big Take Over;
12) Pay To Cum; 13) Right Brigade; 14) I Luv I Jah; 15) Intro.
So, as it turns out, «hardcore» is yet another
genre that white suckers shamelessly stole from their black brethren — or did
they? Bad Brains' debut came out in crappy cassette form in 1982, much later
than the first LPs by the Dead Kennedys, the Angry Samoans, the Circle Jerks,
whatever, but the band began playing their stuff as early as 1977, and at that
time, did it faster than any imaginable competition — their advantage being that they actually began life as a
jazz-fusion ensemble circa 1975, converting to the loud, the rough, and the
obscene two years later under the influence of the newly-emerged «slow» punk
scene.
This unusual status — a formerly
«intellectualized genre» combo switching to hardcore, and an all-black one at
that — impressed the band's peers and fans so much that every once in a while
someone will acknowledge Bad Brains as the best hardcore band of all time, or Bad Brains (the album) as their
favorite album of all time (actually, the CD reissues all come with an endorsement
from the Beastie Boys who do just that). But beyond the race, pedigree, and who-did-what-first
issues, I really have very few clues as to what should be the standards to
judge «hardcore». Catchiness? Ridiculous. Speed? What do you want me to do,
hold a speedometer? Technique? At those speeds, it takes really special ears to measure the subtleties. Social relevance?
You play it like that, you are socially relevant by definition even if you only
sing about having gay sex. (Actually, you reach the peak of social relevance if you sing about having gay sex, but that
is sort of a different story).
In any case, Bad Brains do have some
specificity beyond all that. All four members — H.R. on vocals, Darryl Jenifer
on bass, Earl Hudson on drums, and the de-facto band leader Dr. Know on guitar
— are open Rastafaris, and like every respectable late 1970s act, their major
passion, besides speedy punk runs, is classic reggae à la Bob Marley;
hence, the odd wonder of this album is that every now and then, in between the
brief one-two-minute slash races, they bring the process to a state of chilled-out
relaxation with a longer, and utterly un-ironic, reggae groove (and the grooves
actually get longer and longer as time goes by — first one is 2:31, second one
is 4:10, third one is 6:23 — and you can probably guess which ones are the
reggae ones quite easily by scrutinizing the titles without listening).
The band's background is best seen on some of
the instrumental passages — for instance, the intro to ʽDon't Need
Itʼ, where Dr. Know lets rip with a swirling «jazz-metal» pattern rather
than the usual chainsaw; later on, right after the solo, there is also a bit of
idea exchange between the drums and the guitars that they must have
incorporated from their «artsy» past. H.R.'s «spoken-spluttered» parts are
generally much less impressive, although his nasal-wheezy-sneery tone could be
a refreshing alternative to the typical «growl» or «bark» of the average
hardcore punkster — but they aren't powerful enough to match the volume and
intensity of the instrumentalists, and thus, detract from the music rather than
add to it.
As could be expected, the quality of the
original recording is abysmal: calling this stuff «lo-fi» would be dishonoring
the lo-fi genre. Victim # 1 is Darryl Jenifer, whose basslines are actually
just as nifty as and sometimes niftier than Dr. Know's riffs, but for the most
part, they are «felt» rather than «heard» (except for the reggae parts, where
he is saved by all the syncopation, but that is also when he is at his least interesting). Yet the guitar
lines, too, could have benefited from a cleaner mix — after all, if you are
going to surprise us by introducing fusion-gained technique into punk
aesthetics, this could have been done
by means of an album that doesn't sound like it was recorded in somebody's
flooded basement with the mikes placed on the roof.
Still, a plan is a plan, I guess: whosoever
decides his music should sound like shit, be it in his perfect right to carry
out the decision. Personally, I think that thirty-six minutes is a bit of an
overkill for this stuff, as they really say it all in about, well, ten minutes at the max, and then just
duplicate it all for no reason. ʽSailin' Onʼ is an impressive intro
with a «pop» slant to it (they even try out some cheesy falsetto backing
harmonies, without letting the tempo down for a second); ʽDon't Need
Itʼ has that non-trivial set of guitar runs that lets you know these guys
are ultimately deconstructionists rather than good-for-nothings; ʽThe
Regulatorʼ is Jenifer's ideal bass spotlight; ʽBanned In D.C.ʼ
is an important autobiographical statement (the band was indeed banned in D.C., their hometown, for a while); ʽJah
Callingʼ is the first, shortest, and best of the reggae numbers — an
instrumental with the emphasis on Dr. Know's trippy atmospheric playing rather
than all the vocal clichés of the genre. After that — whoever did not
get enough, there is more of the same for you. 10-15 minutes is quite all right
for me, well sufficient to issue out a receptive thumbs up, and then I pretend I just
accidentally hit the «repeat» button.
ROCK FOR LIGHT (1983)
1) Coptic Times; 2) Attitude;
3) We Will Not; 4) Sailin' On; 5) Rally 'Round Jah Throne; 6) Right Brigade; 7)
F.V.K.; 8) Riot Squad; 9) The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth; 10) Joshua's Song;
11) Banned In D.C.; 12) How Low Can A Punk Get; 13) Big Takeover; 14) I And I
Survive; 15) Destroy Babylon; 16) Rock For Light; 17) At The Movies.
This is basically a «do-it-right-this-time»
upgrade of Bad Brains. Same line-up,
same style, same ideology, same technique, even a bunch of the same songs — but
this time, recorded in a proper studio, released on a proper label (PVC), and
produced by a guy with credentials, namely, Ric Ocasek of The Cars... Ric
Ocasek???!!! ...but no, no worries, Rock
For Light sounds nothing like The Cars — there isn't a synthesizer anywhere
in sight, and the only rudiments of «pop hooks» are occasional melodic patterns
in Dr. Know's riffs which were there all along, you just couldn't hear them too
well.
Actually, if there is any substantial improvement, it mostly concerns the reggae numbers. Not
coincidentally, perhaps, none of the reggae tunes from Bad Brains were chosen to be re-recorded — instead, they wrote some
new ones, tighter, more focused, and more catchy than the old ones. Reggae
really only amounts to something bigger than local hoodlum ganja fun when it
starts hunting for that Old Testament spirit, becoming downright uplifting for
some and downright scary for others. And ʽThe Meek Shall Inherit The
Earthʼ, for instance, definitely has a particle of that spirit (along with
some powerhouse percussion work) — H.R. sings the lyrics, for once, instead of
barking or growling, and the band's beliefs and convictions come forth as
credible (even if the Rastafari religion as such seems like a bunch of baloney
to you — heck, it probably is
baloney, but if it makes these guys' lives happier, let 'em have it, "in
the way of our lord JAH!").
As for the speedy punk songs, they continue to
be properly undescribable — now that the production is so much clearer, we
should simply enjoy them the way they are: disjointed quanta of one big whole,
brief punk blasts whose main attraction lies in their being sped up to
ridiculous tempos. Play this any slower and it will be quite boring, even with
the technical skills of the band members — it is not as if Dr. Know is
delivering any amazing, hitherto unknown chord sequences... actually, except
when he is off to churn out one more finger-flashing solo, he is not even
playing it too fast: the main punch is delivered by the rhythm section.
H.R.'s ecstatic sneer on the fast punk numbers
tends to be overrated by reviewers, maybe for exotic reasons — after all, you
do not usually see this sort of style from black vocalists — but I really
prefer what he is doing on the reggae rather than the hardcore numbers, where
the tone is just a tad too hysterical to properly match the instrumental
crunch. As for the Rastafari influence on the lyrics of ʽCoptic
Timesʼ, ʽJoshua's Songʼ, and others, it is certainly novel, but
it would be more fun to somehow manage to see a musical combination of reggae and hardcore rather than a lyrical
one, and of that, the band is not capable (not that anybody could blame them —
«hardcore reggae» is sort of an oxymoron, since combining pot with speed is
usually not recommendable).
Overall, the only two reasons I still go with a
thumbs up
here are (a) the improved reggae numbers and (b) the improved production —
both of which sort of permit Rock For
Light to count as a successful update of the Bad Brains sound for the audiophile. However, a second (third?) album with the same
sound and style would have been untenable — Bad Brains would end up mutating
into somebody like Agnostic Front. To their credit, the band realized that: we
may debate whether their subsequent changes were amazing or disappointing, but
regardless, it is actually a good thing that they only made one Rock
For Light, without dissipating its legend over the course of a thousand
faceless clones.
I AGAINST I (1986)
1) Intro; 2) I Against I; 3)
House Of Suffering; 4) Re-Ignition; 5) Secret 77; 6) Let Me Help; 7) She's
Calling You; 8) Sacred Love; 9) Hired Gun; 10) Return To Heaven.
While it may be a good thing that Bad Brains'
second «properly» recorded album does not have it in mind to repeat the formula
of Rock For Light — after all, the
best hardcore bands are those with just one hardcore album, «THAT» album — I absolutely fail to see
the reasons why this follow-up gets its near-immaculate critical reputation.
It was the band's best-selling album,
for sure, but this is hardly a point worth noting when one is, essentially,
dealing with a cult underground act for which a few thousand sold copies is
already an «achievement». Must be the lyrical impact, as usual — Rastafari
lyrics are always in high demand on the critical market.
The speed, with a couple exceptions, is gone,
and with it, the one reason to keep a Bad Brains album going regardless of
individual song quality. In its place, the band introduces relative diversity
— as long as the guitar tones remain dark and crunchy, they can play «slow
tempo punk», heavy metal, or funkified post-New Wave rock, with the minimum
goal of not boring their listener to death and the maximum goal of achieving
some sort of synthesis between all these things and their jazz-fusion pedigree.
Sounds good, doesn't it?
Problem is, I Against I is still boring, and the synthesis does not produce
decent results. For instance, the chief metal inspiration for the band does
not seem to be either the old school Sabbath or the new school Metallica — some
of this stuff sounds dangerously close to the inoffensive, pop-oriented «hair
metal» schlock o' the day. ʽSacred Loveʼ, with its Rambo-style power
chords and syncopated echoey riffage, epitomizes pseudo-toughness, and H.R.'s
megaphone-processed vocals lose any sort of mystery they could have possessed
against this stiff background. ʽShe's Calling Youʼ could just as well
have been recorded for Alice Cooper's Constrictor
from the same year (except that Alice's stuff was at least catchy, whereas this
song has no vocal hooks whatsoever, and its chief melodic guitar riff is
hopelessly damaged by the «muscular» effects on the recording). And ʽHouse
Of Sufferingʼ is notable only for making a reference to «Jah love» within
the frames of a song that, melodically, owes much more to Sabbath's
ʽSymptom Of The Universeʼ than to anything ever associated with Bob
Marley. And it is pretty fast, for
once.
The album's more traditionally oriented punk
material (ʽLet Me Helpʼ) rolls along on autopilot, and the «funky»
stuff (ʽSecret 77ʼ, ʽHired Gunʼ) is sheer atmosphere. At
this point, in fact, H.R. seems to be the only band member who is genuinely
excited about what they are doing — his street poetry is intended for
rabble-rousing, and his psychologically thought-out choruses ("hired gun /
he's on the run / better watch out, boy / cause he don't know fun")
certainly have their appeal for those in the know. But if you have trouble
with your English, or if you have trouble accepting this stuff as something
that goes beyond «trite», I have no idea whatsoever what it is about I Against I that should be supposed to
make it a good album, let alone a
«classic».
Because this time around, it is impossible to
just applaud the results as a «megablast of energy with a strong social
undercurrent» or something like that. That «megablast», for Bad Brains, was Rock For Light (or the eponymous album
if you prefer your megablasts with a wallop of shitty production on the side). This stuff aspires to something beyond kicking
the old, wrinkled, but still durable ass of the Establishment: it obviously has
some «pure» musical ambitions as well — but all I can hear is a bunch of dudes
learning to succeed in the fields of New Wave and heavy metal, and failing in
the attempt. This ain't nowhere near the Cure if you want intellectual,
meticulously «researched» musical textures, and it ain't nowhere near Metallica
if you want headbanging crunch. Thumbs down — try it out if you really want
to, but don't buy the hype.
LIVE (1988)
1) I; 2) At The Movies; 3) The
Regulator; 4) Right Brigade; 5) I Against I; 6) I And I Survive; 7) House Of
Suffering; 8) Re-Ignition; 9) Sacred Love; 10) She's Calling You; 11) Coptic
Times; 12) F.V.K.; 13) Secret 77.
Since the studio sessions for Bad Brains were
never really carried out in the Sgt.
Pepper vein, the differences between Bad Brains in the studio and Bad
Brains onstage are in the cosmetic sphere. The only significant point is the
status of H.R. — onstage, he tends to get a bit further off his rocker,
leering, grinning, screeching, and, overall, putting on more of an Exorcism
Show than when recording without an actual audience. Whether this is good or
bad is up to you to decide — personally, I grow tired of this monkeying around
rather quickly. It is one thing to watch
the guy — complete with full body vibration and his trademark back-flips — and
another thing to listen without
seeing (a similar dissatisfaction concerns, e.g., Mick Jagger in his «less
harmony, more bark» period, when hitting the notes took a backseat to hitting
the stage). Oh well, at least the vocals for ʽSacred Loveʼ are no
longer recorded over the telephone.
Recorded at various dates played in 1987-88, Live predictably focuses on material
from I Against I (six out of nine
songs are faithfully reproduced), occasionally diversifying it with older stuff
— to a rather faint effect, since the «oldies» are naturally much shorter on
the average, and some of the choices, or, rather, some of the omissions are
sort of odd. For instance, there is only one reggae number altogether — ʽI
And I Surviveʼ, although, in generous compensation, it is slightly
extended — and neither ʽRock For Lightʼ nor ʽBanned In
D.C.ʼ are played (or seen fit for inclusion on the album, at least),
despite being some of the more highly «marked» tunes from the old days of
blazing hardcore. Maybe it is just a coincidence, but, overall, Live does not convey the impression
that the band actually cares for its
established image of «speed-punk pioneers doing it in the name of Jah» — that
they are much happier now with their punk-metal fusion. Who could tell back
then, in 1987, that the speed-punk pioneering would stay forever young, and the
punk-metal fusion would quickly go senile?
If it helps any, the sound quality is pretty
damn good — now you get to hear
ʽThe Regulatorʼ and ʽAt The Moviesʼ in all their raging
glory without all the (in)glorious lo-fi in yer face, and H.R. is mixed in well
above the guitar roar, so that you can properly assess the degree of his
irreplaceability in the band. And it's all strictly business: no stage banter,
no lengthy pauses between songs, no cheaply directed audience interaction — forty
minutes of non-stop headbanging. (Some later CD editions are further extended
by including a cover of the Beatles' ʽDay Tripperʼ, which is nice —
an unexpected surprise never hurts on an album like this).
Overall, though, recommended only for, and by,
major fans of the band, such as the reviewer at the All-Music Guide who had no
qualms about calling Bad Brains «the greatest live rock & roll band»
(really? isn't that taking liberal guilt a bit too far?) and warning us to «watch out for flies and swirling
debris while your mouth is hanging open for a half hour». (For the record, his
name was «Jack Rabid», and it looked fairly appropriate for the occasion.) As
for myself, I cannot deny the energy and passion, but these are still mediocre
songs, and a mediocre song delivered with redhot passion only makes me feel
sorry about the ultimate waste of redhot passion.
QUICKNESS (1989)
1) Soul Craft; 2) Voyage Into
Infinity; 3) The Messengers; 4) With The Quickness; 5) Gene Machine/Don't
Bother Me; 6) Don't Blow Bubbles; 7) Sheba; 8) Yout' Juice; 9) No Conditions;
10) Silent Tears; 11) The Prophet's Eye; 12) Endtro.
What we have here is a rather blatantly obvious
sequel to I Against I. Recorded in a
rather fussy manner: H.R. quit the band in 1986, then returned already after
their next recording had been completed — with the band so happy about it that
they agreed to erase the vocals by Taj Singleton (who filled in for H.R. on
their 1988 tour) and redo it all over again. By this time, though, H.R. seems
to have completely gone off his rocker, so much so that the lyrics on Quickness keep veering somewhere in
between Rastafarianism, Pastafarianism, Satanism, and plain old schizophasia —
and the vocals mostly comply.
All of which actually gives the record a
certain unique flavor — I mean, it may be politically incorrect (even for the
time) to blame the spread of AIDS on gay people, imploring them to "ask
Jah and he'll make the change" (ʽDon't Blow Bubblesʼ), but at
least it is less boring than having to sit through just another bit of generic
Rasta preaching. And, in general, having H.R. play the «holy fool», with syntactically
disconnected splinters of phrases covered in smoke, spit, Spirit, and, most
importantly, tons and tons of spite, is quite an experience.
Unfortunately, all of it is completely wasted
on a set of songs that make even less sense than the ones on I Against I. Just as before, these are
«metal punk» melodies, too slow and too complex in structure to satisfy the
demands for good punk, yet too deformed and too loose to constitute good metal.
At least ʽSacred Loveʼ and ʽShe's Calling Youʼ, much as I
dislike their «vibe», had some basic melodic impact. On Quickness, the riffs cease to make any sense whatsoever: loud,
somewhat math-rockish (but way too noisy and poorly mixed to impress with any
sort of precision or head-spinning chord changes), and thoroughly unmemorable.
Even worse, it seems as if every second song or
so has the exact same riff patern on repeat — at the very least, ʽVoyage
Into Infinityʼ and ʽGene Machineʼ are definitely the same song, happily chug-chug-chug-chugging away like
nobody would mind. Sometimes it gets faster, sometimes it gets slower, but in
the end, it's all the same — this is an album written on complete autopilot,
and a thorough waste of Dr. Know's talents (and at this time, it is beginning
to be permissible to actually start doubting that there was any talent in the
first place — at the very least, not in the songwriting department, that is
for sure).
The «slower metal / faster metal» formula is
betrayed only once, when at the very end the band unexpectedly returns to
explore its reggae roots with ʽThe Prophet's Eyeʼ — reflecting H.R.'s
state-of-the-art dementia this time, the song sounds more like a parody on what
they used to do than anything genuinely serious. As disappointing as the rest
of the record.
Technical note: although Earl Hudson is
officially credited for percussion work, the real drumming here belonged to
session player Mackie Jayson. Not that this changes anything: the best drummer
in the world could not save this utterly uninspired puddle of muddle. Of
course, if you experience uncontrollable spasms of joy at any random thrash
riff addressing you from your speakers — Quickness
is highly recommendable. But honestly, I'd rather just get me some Slayer instead:
I am honestly not interested in
trying to metabolize this fodder into efficient vitamins for the body and the
soul, even with the help of H.R.'s eccentric behavior. Thumbs down.
THE YOUTH ARE GETTING RESTLESS (1990)
1) I; 2) Rock For Light; 3)
Right Brigade; 4) House Of Suffering; 5) Day Tripper / She's A Rainbow; 6) Coptic
Times; 7) Sacred Love; 8) Re-Ignition; 9) Let Me Help; 10) The Youth Are
Getting Restless; 11) Banned In D.C.; 12) Sailin' On; 13) Fearless Vampire
Killer; 14) At The Movies; 15) Revolution (dub); 16) Pay To Cum; 17) Big
Takeover.
A good setlist can work wonders. This is not
brand new stuff — the recordings were taken from the same support tour for I Against I that gave us the Live album (recorded just a wee bit
earlier), so it could formally qualify for «archival» status, except in this
case, it worked more like a stopgap while the band was busy sorting it out
with H.R. — eventually replacing him with Chuck Mosley from Faith No More.
Hilariously, the «stopgap» turned out to be far better than the original
official live album, though...
...for an obvious reason — the setlist here is
more intentionally targeted at the band's punk legacy than the metal one. Only
three out of seventeen songs are from I
Against I. The rest generally stem from their two first and best studio
albums, which means speed, excitement, and, overall, a better application of
their crunch than the slow, lumbering, and generally wasted metal riffage on
that album. Furthermore, the recording quality at that particular show at the
Paradiso Theater in Amsterdam was well on the level, and so was the
inspiration.
Obscurities include the title track — a reggae
number that did not make it on any studio album and is well worth knowing,
mainly because of its clever integration of a smooth funky bassline into the
general reggae structure, so that you never really know what it is you are
listening to; and the unexpected synthesis of Beatles and Stones — a
reggaeified medley sewn together from bits of ʽDay Tripperʼ and
ʽShe's A Rainbowʼ, with additional lyrics from H.R. By all accounts,
this is a novelty number, but the very fact of making a reggae medley of a
Beatles and a Stones song counts as a novelty number that may just as well turn
out to be unforgettable — even if, ultimately, you just find it a stupid idea.
And overall, since we do have fabulous live versions of ʽRock For Lightʼ and
ʽBanned In D.C.ʼ this time around, The Youth Are Getting Restless, with its high production quality
and energy levels, may be a pretty damn good introduction to the band. What
else is there to say? Absolutely nothing, so a fast, but firm thumbs up
to it and let us move along.
RISE (1993)
1) Rise; 2) Miss Freedom; 3)
Unidentified; 4) Love Is The Answer; 5) Free; 6) Hair; 7) Coming In Numbers; 8)
Yes Jah; 9) Take Your Time; 10) Peace Of Mind; 11) Without You/Outro.
No, no, and no. I am nowhere near H.R.'s
biggest fan — his hypnotic powers were never matched by sufficient singing or
«voice acting» ability, as far as I am concerned — but I do acknowledge that
there is a unique Bad Brains vibe, and that vibe consists of H.R. vs. Dr. Know
much the same way as the Rolling Stones vibe consists of Jagger vs. Richards. A
Bad Brains without H.R.? It would take a proper Jah miracle to make it work.
The new vocals guy, called «Israel Joseph I»,
if you can really believe it, is not a bad singer — in fact, he seems to have a
stronger, tougher, more disciplined set of pipes than H.R. — but that is just
the problem. Rise simply has too much discipline. It is a
professionally constructed mix of about 15% hardcore, 15% grunge, and 70%
mid-tempo thrash metal, with a couple reggae tunes thrown in for good measure —
and in between all the calculations, they seem to have completely lost the
emotional aspect. Of course, it had already started on Quickness, but even that album had a few songs that did not seem
written merely for the sake of keeping themselves busy.
I have nothing to say about these songs. Much
emphasis is placed on crunchy brutality — Dr. Know's guitar tones and Israel's
snarls are more often in the «evil» department than elsewhere, but it is never
convincing: the riffs are highly derivative and uninspired, and the vocals are
way too theatrical. Maybe it would help to be able to evaluate the record
completely outside of its context — as it is, one cannot help but inevitably
compare the «thinner», but genuinely insane vocalizations of H.R. with the
«fully-in-control» attitude of this guy. They simply belong in different
worlds (think a Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett replaced by Alan
Parsons, or any other such analogy).
The last track is particularly surprising —
ʽWithout Youʼ is a funky, but intentionally sentimental ballad, the
closest they had ever come to a properly «sell-out» track thus far. It neither
lies in solid Bad Brains territory, nor is it in any way a good track: and who
were they willing to fool with a goddamn love song? You do not shed tears to Bad Brains material — might just as well start
expecting a symph-rock suite from the likes of AC/DC.
Yes, Dr. Know and his cronies (including
drummer Mackie Jayson, now as a full-term member) are professionals, and this
means there will always be people thinking that there is no such thing as a
Good Brains (= «bad Bad Brains») album, and if you really want to, you can
headbang along to some of these songs quite nicely — ʽUnidentifiedʼ
is fast as hell, and ʽTake Your Timeʼ grinds and howls with all the
mercilessness (if none of the charm) of an Alice In Chains track. But why would you want to, when the world
has so much more, and so much better, in store for you? Trust the critics on
this one — it holds no revelations or epiphanies, other than the revelation
that someone can live with a name like «Israel Joseph I». Thumbs down.
GOD OF LOVE (1995)
1) Cool Mountaineer; 2) Justice
Keepers; 3) Long Time; 4) Rights Of A Child; 5) God Of Love; 6) Overs The
Water; 7) Tongue Tee Tie; 8) Darling I Need You; 9) To The Heavens; 10) Thank
Jah; 11) Big Fun; 12) How I Love Thee.
Good news: H.R. is back (again), giving the
band a chance to remind us of why we ever bothered reserving a separate line
for them in the first place. Bad news: what good is being given a chance if you
are completely disinterested in taking it?
In a way, actually, this is even worse than Rise. That album may have been generic
and negligible, of marginal interest for meticulous thrash collectors, at
best, but at least it was consistent: «Israel Joseph I» was willing to adapt to
whatever Dr. Know was playing, and if they did not succeed in too well in
tapping into one's emotions, at least they tried. But with H.R. back in the
band, it seems as if the two main participants pay as little attention to each
other as possible. The guitar player is still punching out second- and
third-hand metal riffs — and the singer is whining or barking against them in
an ugly nasal manner that does not agree with the style at all.
The result is a lengthy string of songs that
lack any sort of purpose. There are good
and bad albums out there, tasteful or corny, innovative or formulaic, catchy
or unmemorable, but records like these, in a way, are the worst of the lot
because I honestly cannot figure out why they exist at all. To keep up
conveying H.R.'s personal take on the Rasta stuff? But how does this personal
take agree with the all-too familiar power chords and metal arpeggios from Dr.
Know's fingers? To kick ass? But how do you properly
kick ass with such a mentally unstable guy at the wheel? To prove that Jah
loves metal no less than he loves reggae? But they already did that on I Against I, and it must have been
obvious to everybody except for the most obstinate ones that it only got less
and less and less convincing from then on. It is not simply a dead horse they
are flogging here — it is a horse in the last stages of decomposing.
Not a single interesting riff, not a single
melody worth remembering or discussing, not a single moment of being
«impressed». Out of sheer curiosity, you might try the opener, ʽCool Mountaineerʼ
— it is quite typical of the entire album: a roaring mid-tempo mess of power
chords, auto-piloted «ecstatic» solos, and a misplaced H.R. gleefully cackling
some nonsense about how "like a bird in the tree, Cool Mountaineers shall
be free". If you find something in there that I have not been able to,
more power to you — not that I was trying real hard, but then again, it is supposed to be somewhat of a
quid-pro-quo process, and there was no initial act of giving. Nary a tiny hint that someday, someway, ʽCool
Mountaineerʼ might turn out to have something of value.
The reggae numbers are back with a vengeance,
too, no less than three or four of them, and even if reggae, unlike metal, is
the motherland for Bad Brains, they are hardly working its fields properly —
at best, Dr. Know is having himself some «fun» with various electronic effects
(ʽTo The Heavensʼ), and at worst, it he is not doing anything at all
(ʽOver The Waterʼ, generally unlistenable as H.R. is practicing his
vibrato — regular nasal whine is bad enough, but vibrating nasal whine is a Nazi-worthy device).
And it is all wrapped up with ʽHow I Love
Theeʼ, which is not even as much reggae as it is a combination of sterile
modern R&B and adult contemporary — the band tries to end things on a
tenderly sentimental note, and you can rather safely predict that it will be
just as bad as everything else, and maybe worse, because «sentimentality» is
one thing that could never be associated with Bad Brains when they were at
their peak.
As is usual for this stage in their career, the
personal and communal life of Bad Brains at this juncture was far more
exciting than their musical development — the laziness and ineffectiveness of
these songs rather surprisingly contrasts with H.R.'s ongoing erratic behavior,
including fights with skinheads, security guards, and managers while touring,
and eventually, getting kicked out of the band once again. Might make for some
exciting reading if you're into tabloid stuff — but it has nothing to do with
the disgusted thumbs
down awarded to the accompanying pablum.
I & I SURVIVED (2002)
1) Jah Love; 2) Overdub; 3) How
Low Can A Punk Get; 4) I & I Survive; 5) Cowboy; 6) Gene Machine; 7)
Ghetto; 8) Rally; 9) September; 10) Ragga Dub; 11) Gene Machine (remix); 12) I
& I Survive (Shiner massive mix).
Yes, you know a band is real deep in trouble
when its best album in at least fifteen years turns out to be a throwaway, most
probably recorded on the whiffy spur of one moment — in this case, a pack of
instrumental reggae (a.k.a. dub) re-workings of their past compositions, both
originally reggae ones and hardcore
ones. The fans were mostly outraged, judging by the average «popular» reviews
of the album; the critics remained indifferent or mildly amused; H.R. remained
uninvolved (I am not even sure if he was with the band in 2002); and overall,
this generally counts as a minor footnote in their discography — but, as it
happens, footnotes sometimes turn out to be more informative and insightful
than the main body of the work.
The thing is, these are not just reggae or «reggae-squared»
reworkings of older material — these are atmospheric and, at the same time,
technically impressive variations, with more creativity and diversity involved
here than on any previously released Bad Brains record. This creativity does
not always make sense; the reggae rhythmics occasionally gets tiresome for
those who have not been particularly graced by Jah; and, clearly, this has
nothing to do either with H.R.'s personal aesthetics or the hard rock pedigree
of Bad Brains with which we associate the band. But are these really flaws?
Just look at this:
— ʽJah Loveʼ eschews guitar heroics
in favor of a jazzy horn section, playing big, but mournful brass riffs over
minimalistic echoey backing; the brass parts return later several times, most
notably on ʽI & I Surviveʼ where they mimick H.R.'s vocals (to
much stronger effect than the original, I must say);
— ʽOverdubʼ is carried by a mildly
ominous bassline, over which Darryl Jennifer dubs lamenting melodica parts, and
Dr. Know throws in some electric organ flourishes for extra effect; the whole
thing feels like a short walk through uncharted, slightly dangerous and
unpredictable, jungle;
— ʽHow Low Can A Punk Getʼ finally
introduces heavy riffage and arpeggiated metallic soloing which then goes away,
replaced by a trip-hop section with more horns and strange electronic hoots
with even more of that odd «nighttime» atmosphere;
— ʽCowboyʼ features a quirky ska
arrangement where bass, guitars, organs, and chimes weave pretty tiny rings
around each other (sometimes even an occasional mandolin breaks through and
tries to turn the whole thing into a Spanish folk song, then fails, excuses
itself and goes to the bathroom) for a rather mysterious, humble, and quiet
four minutes...
...and so on, right down to ʽRagga
Dubʼ whose title hints at an Indian synthesis, and that is exactly what
it is. As weird as this thought seems on paper, Dr. Know seems to have selected
this album, and no other, to test
out all the ideas that he had been storing in his head for over a decade,
without daring to let them out on Bad Brains' «regular» albums. By the time we
come to the second half of the record, some of these ideas start repeating
themselves (for instance, ʽSeptemberʼ adds relatively little to
ʽGhettoʼ), but in light of the band's usual fuck-diversity attitude,
this does not even begin to feel like a problem.
The regular problem with reggae, like blues, is
that it «all sounds the same», but once you start thinking of blues and reggae
basics as simply a formulaic foundation (after all, there are no limits to
architectural variation, even if most of the buildings are based on the same
skeletal principles), this problem can be easily annihilated — and with all the
electronic tinkering, horns sections, experimental basslines, and fifty
different modes of guitar playing, I
& I Survived is... if not exactly a «masterpiece», at least a very
pleasant surprise from these guys, despite not kicking the usual (wrinkled) ass
and not serving as a polygon for H.R.'s (pathetic) madness. Thumbs up
— these particular Bad Brains seem quite good to my tastes.
BUILD A NATION (2007)
1) Give Thanks And Praises; 2)
Jah People Make The World Go Round; 3) Pure Love; 4) Natty Dreadlocks 'Pon The
Mountain Top; 5) Build A Nation; 6) Expand Your Soul; 7) Jah Love; 8) Let There
Be Angels (Just Like You); 9) Universal Peace; 10) Roll On; 11) Until Kingdom
Comes; 12) In The Beginning; 13) Send You No More Flowers; 14) Peace Be Unto
Thee.
Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys produced this
one, and his young grateful-apprentice influence on the old masters cannot be
underestimated: Build A Nation
promptly returns Bad Brains to their classic reggae-meets-hardcore formula and,
for the most part, keeps them there, for better or for worse. Unfortunately, I
sort of get the feeling that Yauch must have been the happiest participant of
the sessions — maybe Dr. Know did not really mind being steered back to the
styles that started it all, but I do not sense much enthusiasm, either.
H.R. might be the one to blame: no longer
having the drive or energy to sound like the slobbering madman of old, he
prefers to go for a calmer, hazy-mysticism-soaked vocal style on pretty much
every song, be it fast or slow, loud or quiet, but his nasal overtones make the
overall effect irritating rather than mesmerizing. On the other hand, it's not
as if Dr. Know was sending him tons of freshly baked awesome riffs to undermine
— as expected, no songs here suffer from excessive memorability, so to speak.
If this is the best original material they could come up with in twelve years,
it can only mean that they did not really bother coming up with anything — just went into the studio and
bashed all of this out on the spot, with Yauch's stylistic guidance as the only
point of potential attraction.
Yes, it is
a «comeback» of sorts — for one thing, there are some super-fast tracks here,
first time in God knows when; however, if you compare these new quickie-speedy
one-minute recordings like ʽPure Loveʼ and the title track with
anything from the Rock For Light
era, you will see that these ones are tighter, cleaner, better structured than
the exuberant noisefests of old. A professional's dream, perhaps, but the
whole point of Bad Brains used to be in how anthemically mad they were — Build A Nation, in contrast, is much
too calculated and stiff, a problem it certainly shares with the absolute
majority of 21st century music, but that is no reason to be forgiving.
As for the reggae numbers, too much of this
stuff comes in direct prayer form — the album opens with the partially
acappella ʽGive Thanks And Praisesʼ, continues with ʽJah
Loveʼ, and ends with ʽPeace Be Unto Theeʼ. Rasta people might,
perhaps, be wooed, but none of these songs, really, is ʽMy Sweet
Lordʼ-caliber: just ordinary reggae prayers for regular reggae crowds. Not
even a single juicy apocalyptic ride on the waves of syncopation.
By all means, this is Bad Brains' best album
since at least 1986 (not counting the surprisingly creative dub work on I & I Survived), and, if you, too,
dislike the band's transition from hardcore to metal, even since Rock For Light — but this simply isn't
saying much, given the generally abysmal quality of their studio stuff ever
since they first asked themselves the fatal question, «what next?». An almost
surefire delight for hardcore fans; a mostly predictable disappointment, I
guess, for everyone else, although, out of sheer respect for the collaboration
between Yauch and the old boys, it might be best to refrain from a direct
thumbs down this time around. But it goes without saying that you won't ever
build a nation with this brand of
brickwork.
INTO THE FUTURE (2012)
1) Into The Future; 2) Popcorn;
3) We Belong Together; 4) Youth Of Today; 5) RubADub Love; 6) Yes I; 7) Suck
Sess; 8) Jah Love; 9) Earnest Love; 10) Come Down; 11) Fun; 12) Maybe A Joyful
Noise; 13) MCA Dub.
Unfortunately, Adam Yauch was prevented from
producing the next Bad Brains album by his death from cancer in 2012.
Consequently, the band produced the album on their own — exactly the same way
as Adam would have produced it, or so they thought, dedicating the record to
his memory. Supposedly, Into The Future
refers to the future of the Beastie Boys' legacy, and maybe to Yauch's future
life and achievements in Heaven, than to Bad Brains' own future — which, by the
looks of this album, does not seem too different from their past.
In fact, by this time we pretty much have a
stable understanding of what a «late period Bad Brains album» is supposed to
sound like: a loud, clean, meticulously sanitized mix of hardcore, metal, and
reggae with a middle-age spiritual undercurrent. The latter bit seems
ineffective — I am not sure how many people there still remain to seriously
care about H.R.'s preaching: if lines like "The youth of today / Is the
man of tomorrow / They don't live in tears / Beg, steal or borrow" seem
promising to you on paper, H.R.'s grinning joker-tone may add to the promise,
but then again, it might not — by now, it is so completely predictable in its
theatrical poise that the original «mystique» is in danger of mutating to
«irritation».
The thing is — as long as Bad Brains were young
and keen on following their basic instincts, and also as long as they were
playing beyond top speed and on the verge of chaos, they had intrigue: even if
you were not wooed over by their playing style, there definitely was something
intellectually incomprehensible about their music. But now, just take a listen
to the title track. Its melody is deliberately stuck somewhere between old
school garage rock and new school hardcore, each chord polished and dusted off
as if this was an introduction to the friggin' «Well-Tempered Electric
Guitar». Except that the chord sequences hardly display any freshness or
originality: this is discipline without verve, a soul-free pro job that no
longer has any musical meaning.
Perhaps this point might be even better
illustrated by a song named ʽFunʼ — although it is about as far from
any real fun as a Celine Dion ballad. Generic thrash metal chugging alternating
with languid distorted power chords, set to a rather silly mantra ("Let's
have fun, we all need fun, and this music is fun, school is fun, love is
fun") — unless they actually think it's ironic, which it is not, this is
one of the least appropriate anthems to fun-making that I have ever heard. If
you listen to it long enough, it may begin to seem catchy, but the trick is
that a properly catchy song has to
catch you with an emotion, not with repetition. And what is that emotion?
Overall, I refrain from any judgements on this
record, just like I did with its predecessor. It is formally listenable, even
the posh reggae numbers with amazing titles like ʽJah Loveʼ, but
emotionally and intellectually, it is basically just a blank, and both of the
key members are to blame — Dr. Know just seems content to sit on his legacy,
and H.R., having said goodbye to his old madman image... is really just a Paul
D. Hudson like any other Paul D. Hudson in the London area.
ADDENDA:
BLACK DOTS (1979/1996)
1) Don't Need It; 2) At The
Atlantis; 3) Pay To Cum; 4) Supertouch/Shitfit; 5) Regulator; 6) You're A
Migraine; 7) Don't Bother Me; 8) Banned In D.C.; 9) Why'd You Have To Go; 10)
The Man Won't Annoy Ya; 11) Redbone In The City; 12) Black Dots; 13) How Low
Can A Punk Get; 14) Just Another Damn Song; 15) Attitude; 16) Send You No
Flowers.
This set of demos, recorded by the band as
early as 1979 at the soon-to-be-famous Inner Ear Studios in Arlington (at that
time, located in the basement of recording engineer Don Zientara), had long
since passed into legend before it was officially released as an archival
treasure in 1996. Quite a few fans still worship it as Bad Brains' finest hour
— which is hardly a major surprise for a hardcore act, where «first» frequently
equals «best» just because nobody needs a «second». And even though
acknowledging this means being really mean to Bad Brains and Rock For
Light — after all, there must have been a reason why they did not want to
make these tapes public in the first place — after a few listens, I feel
almost ready to concur.
The trick is that in 1979, the «classic» sound
of Bad Brains was not quite ready yet. Most importantly, the band had not yet
developed their insanely fast tempos: ʽPay To Cumʼ clocks in at 2:02
here, compared to 1:25 on Bad Brains,
and the proportions for the rest are quite similar. This certainly does not
mean that these tempos are «slow» — they do take a bite out of the band's alleged
uniqueness, but let's face it, there is a certain point where acceleration
starts bordering on the ridiculous — or, at least, the rhythm section parts
start blurring together like telegraph posts out the windows of an express
train, creating the illusion (or, sometimes, the reality) of sloppiness and
out-of-control chaos. On Black Dots,
the band takes care not to cross that border — they are being very fast and
very aggressive, but never go over the top.
On the other hand, in 1979 Bad Brains had not
yet fully worked out their reggae schtick: there is only one reggae number on
the record, ʽThe Man Won't Annoy Yaʼ, and even that is more of a
tentative reggae/rhumba hybrid than a proverbially solid Rasta prayer from H.R.
and the gang. Everything else is straightforward, monolithic, ultra-vicious
punk stuff — no prisoners taken, no mercy granted, and H.R. is still singing it
in a somewhat traditional punkish bark: snarling and vengeful, but not yet
schizophrenic.
The only thing that is mildly merciful are the
tempos, which allow you to better appreciate Dr. Know's creaitivty: for
instance, the intro riff to ʽDon't Need Itʼ turns out to be a cool,
well thought out rock'n'roll riff, which I never noticed once it had been sped
up into an incomprehensible wobbly mumble on Bad Brains. Additionally, the band's sense of humor is more overt
here than it would be once their Rasta fixation got the better of them —
ʽJust Another Damn Songʼ, for instance, feels like a subtle sendup of
the very hardcore / minimalist values the band allegedly set out to promote,
since lyrically, musically, and mood-wise it is just another damn song.
There is even a sort of equivalent of a «love
ballad» here — ʽWhy D'You Have To Goʼ sounds like an (intentional?)
parody on old-school sentimental garage rock (music) and blue-eyed soul (H.R.'s
breaking down vocal): hardly a «good song» in any sense, and they would never
ever try this again, but actually, in the absence of proper reggae
counterbalance, it is good to have an occasional breakaway from the
«rock'n'roll speedboat pattern».
Overall, the album fully deserves its
reputation. The sound quality is actually higher
here than it would be on Bad Brains,
so there is no reason to shy away from the «demos» sticker. And even if the
individual songs still do not stand out as brightly shaped as one could hope,
given the slight decrease in tempo, Bad Brains were still one of the speediest bands around in 1979, and the H.R./Dr.
Know duo — one of the most badass duos of the year.
It all conforms to the observation that
hardcore bands generally «blow their wad» over the first 20 or so months of
their existence — Bad Brains just spent too much time without a proper record
contract on their hands: by the time they released Rock For Light, their first properly recorded and engineered
record, they'd already spent six long
years in hardcore mode, so no wonder Black
Dots gets so much respect. Rock For
Light may still remain the definitive «mature» Bad Brains album to play off
both their aggression and spirituality, but Black Dots reminds us more properly of how they made their name in
the first place — a naturally inevitable thumbs up here if we agree to care about this band
at all.
LIVE AT CBGB 1982 (1982/2006)
1) Big Takeover; 2) I; 3) Jah
The Conqueror; 4) Supertouch/Shitfit; 5) Rally Round Ja's Throne; 6) Right
Brigade; 7) FVK; 8) I And I Survive; 9) Destroy Babylon; 10) Joshua's Song; 11)
Unity Dub; 12) The Meek; 13) Banned In D.C.; 14) How Low Can A Punk Get; 15)
Riot Squad; 16) I And I Rasta; 17) We Will Not; 18) The Regulator; 19) All Rise
To Meet Jah.
And, I suppose, a representative account of Bad
Brains would not be quite complete without a few words on this archive release — the only official live album that captures
Bad Brains at their glory day peak, sometime in December 1982, playing their
guts out to an enthusiastic CBGB crowd with Rock For Light still to come and the unfortunate metallic
reinvention of I And I still way
beyond the horizon.
The immediate bad news is that the sound
quality, particularly on the hardcore ultra-fast stuff (the reggae grooves end
up a little less blurry) is abysmal. Allegedly, the recording was professional,
since Bad Brains were also captured on several cameras that evening — the
official release is doubly precious, since it comes in both audio and video
form. But either they used really cheap audio equipment, or the mikes were set
up all wrong, in any case, the sound is so seriously messy that I would never
have guessed on my own that it did not originate from an «audience quality»
bootleg tape. So heed this warning.
The other news is that there are no news — as I already said in the
review of Live, at their most revved
up, Bad Brains offer little difference between the psychopathic thunderstorm in
the studio and the psychopathic thunderstorm on stage. Watching the spectacle is an entirely different matter, although
not necessarily a pleasant one (I, for one, would definitely not want to find myself at CBGB on that
particular evening, judging by the erratic behaviour of some of the audience) —
but listening to it post-factum in garbage-pail sound quality is sort of
superfluous, at best.
You do get to hear them play more classic
super-fast shit and more of their good
reggae numbers than on any other live release, and there are a few tracks here
that did not make it on any studio record, either (mostly also reggae stuff
like ʽJah The Conquerorʼ). But these are tasty bits for big fans:
overall, Live At CBGB is more of an
important historical document — and, for some people, also a potential energy /
vitality-charged battery, if they get it together with the accompanying DVD.
As a piece of music, it is nearly worthless; as a source of inspiration for
those who agree that H.R. and Dr. Know did embody the genuine spirit of 1982 — it may be priceless.
HOW COULD HELL BE ANY WORSE? (1981)
1) We're
Only Gonna Die; 2) Latch Key Kids; 3) Part III; 4) Faith In God; 5) Fuck
Armageddon... This Is Hell; 6) Pity; 7) Into The Night; 8) Damned To Be Free;
9) White Trash (2nd Generation); 10) American Dream; 11) Eat Your Dog; 12)
Voice Of God Is Government; 13) Oligarchy; 14) Doing Time.
One might think that competition among hardcore
punk acts is somewhat like competition in between a pack of wild buffalo —
thriving, aggressive, life-asserting, but ultimately they all look alike
anyway. Which is why, even though early Bad Religion were by all means a worthy
competitor, it makes lots of sense that they only released one full-length, «generic» hardcore
album before embarking on a complex quest to find their own identity.
«Generic» does not necessarily mean «stupid and
boring», though. From the early start, Bad Religion put serious emphasis on
technicality (as opposed to «virtuosity») and melodicity, although in terms of
melody they would rather veer off into metallic territory rather than
power-pop, as did many of their LA colleagues. In the rhythm section, bassist
Jay Bentley frequently benefits from moments of silence that allow him to throw
in some nicely thought out, quiet lines (check the coda to ʽInto The
Nightʼ). Guitarist Brett Gurewitz throws out riff after riff after riff,
mostly variations on standard Ramones fare but with an occasional nod to
Sabbath as well — and then he overdubs flashy, wailing, melodic solos in the
brave rock'n'roll spirit of Mötörhead. (On one of the songs,
ʽPart IIIʼ, the solos are played by Greg Hetson, who would soon
become an integral part of the band's sound). And the vocals?
Well, it is true that Greg Graffin had not yet
found a distinct vocal style. But it is already
quite clear, if you ask me, that he is heading for one, just as lyrics like
"Early man walked away as modern man took control", not exactly
standard fare for yer average illiterate punker, already seem to presage his
future academic career. He does not sing much, or else he would be violating
the hardcore aesthetics, but neither does he go for straightforward toneless
barking — his is a more restrained approach, sort of a hoarse snobby sneer that
allows for slightly more distinctive articulation: what use, after all, is
heavy investing in your lyrics if no one understands them anyway? This might
not make How Could Hell Be Any Worse?
an «intellectual's dream» by itself, but this is one instance where words
actually do matter, since many of
them go way beyond the generic «my girl's a bitch, fuck the system» thematics.
Graffin does favor fucking the system, of
course, but he frequently sets his sights higher — for instance, Bad Religion's
ʽPityʼ shares pretty much the same message with George Harrison's
ʽIsn't It A Pityʼ; it is only the speed and the tone of delivery that
are different, and the terser, more sociological phrasing — "if we endure
the aggression that's inside all of us, we'll wipe out our own species... pity
on the masses of ignorant people, on the future centuries to come". How
the emotion of «pity» can be yoked together with the musical aesthetics of
hardcore is not easy to understand — but, apparently, that is the essence of early Bad Religion: take a detailed, if not
exactly original, philosophy of society and convey it to the hardcore crowds.
Better us future university professors than ignorant skinheads, right?
Memorability is a touchy issue with these
songs: a few of the choruses are catchy enough, either as «shout-along» slogans
(ʽFuck Armageddon, This Is Hellʼ, in which the «this» should come in
italics, I guess; ʽWhite Trash, Second Generationʼ) or simply as
agonizing outbursts (ʽInto The Nightʼ), but the riffs all drift
together after a brief while, so that generally, the songs are only
distinguishable when they are adorned with some particular gimmick — such as
the sarcastic «Christian» speech in ʽVoice Of God Is Governmentʼ, the
classic garage-rock soloing on ʽLatch Key Kidsʼ, or the almost
psychedelic guitar tone that appears on ʽDoing Timeʼ to conclude the
album. But such tricks are quite rare.
Overall, this is definitely a must for every
fan / historian of hardcore, but those who like to associate their hardcore with explicitly youthful rebellion might be
disappointed: Greg Graffin does not care all that much whether you are young or
old, socially rewarded or socially discriminated — his pity is for all of us,
whether we want to take it or not. "You're just gonna die anyway",
goes the last line of the album, and who could disagree? Pretty powerful
statement here. I give the whole thing a modestly curious thumbs up — modestly, because (a)
I'm not much of a hardcore fan myself, and (b) I prefer the Adolescents, and
maybe even the Dead Kennedys. But in general, a hardcore record must be judged
according to whether it sounds dumb or smart, and this one sounds quite smart,
if not, perhaps, quite deserving of a UCLA professor. But then again, Greg wasn't
quite a UCLA professor yet. For a 17-year old, this is quite impressive.
INTO THE UNKNOWN (1983)
1) It's Only Over When...; 2)
Chasing The Wild Goose; 3) Billy Gnosis; 4) Time And Disregard; 5) The
Dichotomy; 6) Million Days; 7) Losing Generation; 8) ...You Give Up.
Apart from being one of the most bizarre
releases in the history of hardcore, Into
The Unknown is not particularly enlightening, interesting, or exciting. It
is usually quoted as «that unfortunate prog experiment by Bad Religion», which
is not very accurate, I think; the word «progressive» only appears in
conjunction with the main band members (Graffin and Gurewitz) having once
proclaimed to have had a crush on progressive rock acts. There is, at most, one track here that bears a direct
influence of classic 1970s prog — the seven-minute, multi-part epic ʽTime
And Disregardʼ — but everything else is more like «anthemic power-pop with
a heavy keyboard fetish». And totally godawful production values.
Bad Religion's entire rhythm section quit in
protest over this unexpected change of direction, and they can be understood:
just as the band was starting to make headlines with their brand of «intelligent
hardcore», lo and behold, Greg Graffin drags a keyboard out of the bushes and
learns to sing instead of... well,
you know. The new look band's live shows were reported to be abandoned by fans
in droves at the first sight of the synthesizer. In the end, they just had to
acknowledge that the whole thing was a silly mistake. As far as I know, the
entire album has never even been released on CD so far (although, curiously
enough, it has been re-released on
vinyl for the 30 Year Anniversary Box
Set — go figure!).
The album does
suck, for sure, but not because of the «switch» — I'm always happy to witness a
switch when it works. The biggest problem is that the songs are just no good. It
is quickly evident what has been lost
— the speed, the energy, the sneering, the standard punk riffage variations
that become appreciable once you get to know them — but it is not immediately
clear what it is they have gained. As
a «pop» or «prog» singer, Graffin has no distinct personality; as a guitar
player in either one of these genres, Gurewitz has little credibility; and the
keyboards really, really suck, as if they only had saved up for the cheapest
available model — oh, these tones, not even worthy of a late-period Genesis.
Even those few songs that preserve a bit of rock'n'roll crunch are seriously
cheesified by them (ʽLosing Generationʼ).
And, since we are no longer hardcore, what we
need here is outstanding melodies. Instead, we get flat, faceless «martial»
rhythms or boogie lines, where the role of rhythm guitar is limited to putting
down a bedrock of power chords (some of the solos are sufficiently melodic, to
be fair, but are we really supposed to simply wait for the solo each time?
Gurewitz ain't no Clapton anyway). ʽChasing The Wild Gooseʼ alone
tries to open with something that resembles a catchy riff, then realizes it
sounds a bit too close to ʽZiggy Stardustʼ (thanks to Mark Prindle
for pointing that out) and quickly shifts to a one-chord mid-tempo melody with
rotten vocals.
Lyrically, the album moves away from hardcore
bluntness and into the realm of obscure metaphors and ellipses that still seem
to be dealing with the same major topic («society rot»). Seeing the lines to
ʽTime And Disregardʼ on paper, I could perfectly well picture them
sung by the likes of Peter Hammill — someone whose average care for melodic
memorability was more or less on the same level as Graffin's, but whose ability
to credibly «get into character» was quite unsurpassed, whereas Graffin here
does not even begin to try.
Overall, it just looks they did not pack enough
supplies and undergo the proper physical training to justify a serious cosmic
journey Into The Unknown. The
braveness — nay, the craziness — of the gesture may be appreciated, of course
(much like the «braveness» of jumping off the 20th floor to see what happens),
but the results are, at worst, disastrous (each time the keyboards start
staging a particularly ferocious assault on the senses) and, at best, just
boring. Even if ʽLosing Generationʼ chugs along at a fine speed, I'd
rather re-enjoy the same chug on something like, say, The Amboy Dukes'
ʽJourney To The Center Of The Mindʼ. Thumbs down.
BACK TO THE KNOWN (1985)
1) Yesterday; 2) Frogger; 3)
Bad Religion; 4) Along The Way; 5) New Leaf.
I do not normally review brief EPs — as
important as the format used to be for most of the «underground» artists with
no opportunity for / an aversion to serious record contracts, it usually provides
very limited grounds for a full-fledged review. But every now and then there are
vital exceptions. This particular release, for instance, although it clocks in
at a measly ten minutes (allegedly, Side A of the EP was left mirror-blank for
obscure artistic purposes), is one of the most important albums in the Bad
Religion catalog — and besides, isn't ten minutes sort of the ideal format for a self-respecting hardcore artist?
Basically, it is a bit odd to be reviewing Into The Unknown without saying a few
words on its quintessential antipode — Back
To The Known, released a year later and firmly returning Bad Religion to
its feet on familiar territory. Not only that, though: «back to the known» it
may be, but the songs do not sound much like the ones on Hell. In fact, they are seriously better.
First of all, they got themselves a cleaner
production style. All the guitars now sound like they belong on a major label
speed metal album rather than on some lousy bedroom tape. Does that compromise
the spirit? Hardly — because everything else, the speed, the riffage, the
lyrics, the vocal aggression all remain at the same level; should we blame the
recording engineer for a simple human wish to capture more of the frequencies
and cut down on the noise levels? Second, all of the tunes have clearly been
designed as «melodic songs» rather than «punkish rants» — not only do they try
to make the riffs more distinctive, but Graffin actually tries to sing, including attempts to sing poppy hooks, some (most? all?) of which
actually work. No limits to miracles!
In addition, there have been important lineup
modifications: in particular, Circle Jerks guitarist Greg Hetson replaces
Gurewitz as the new-look band's chief guitarist (although Brett is still
credited as the album's co-producer), and new bass player Tim Gallegos replaces
Paul Dedona. Not sure just how much of an influence these particular shifts had
on the overall sound, though, so let us just turn to the actual songs.
ʽYesterdayʼ, far from being a
hardcore deconstruction of Paul McCartney, could have easily been written by
the likes of The Easybeats two decades earlier — but it wouldn't have kicked so
much ass without this raging bull of a guitar sound, nor would it be allowed to
contain the classic line "kiss your ass goodbye with a shadow dream of
yesterday". ʽFroggerʼ inserts a fun lyrical and musical
reference to the 1981 arcade game as a one-minute metaphor for life in general.
The title track is a «cleaner» remake of the band's anthem, originally released
on their first EP (Bad Religion) in
1981 — and I think it improves on the early take, due to a clever use of the
stop-and-start technique and somewhat more restrained (and hence, more subtly
dangerous) vocals.
ʽAlong The Wayʼ slows down the tempo
for a «hard-folk» anthemic march, spiced up with a healthy dose of wah-wah
blabber and a less healthy dose of moralizing, including Tommy, of all things, as its point of reference ("Like Tommy,
you are free, and you will not follow
me"). Finally, ʽNew Leafʼ goes as far as to feature some
wannabe-melodic backup vocals (and a barely audible guitar solo to wrap things
up). Neither of these two songs is a real smasher like the title track or
ʽYesterdayʼ, but they do inject a nice shot of diversity.
Not all the fans loved this — most were pleased
to see the band drop its heretical «progressive» attitudes, but many would have
loved to see them really get back to
the actual «known», that is, release a clone of Hell: these five songs, in contrast, were seen as too «tidy» and
poppy. But, like I said, the whole thing still sounds completely authentic and
credible, and it takes talent and hard work to make a «clean hardcore» record,
kicking your ass in not just a brutal, but a subtly brutal manner. I wouldn't hesitate to count this among their
very best offerings, and a thumbs up is firmly guaranteed.
SUFFER (1988)
1) You Are (The Government); 2)
1000 More Fools; 3) How Much Is Enough?; 4) When?; 5) Give You Nothing; 6) Land
Of Competition; 7) Forbidden Beat; 8) Best For You; 9) Suffer; 10) Delirium Of
Disorder; 11) Part II (The Numbers Game); 12) What Can You Do?; 13) Do What You
Want; 14) Part IV (The Index Fossil); 15) Pessimistic Lines.
Imagine Woody Guthrie taking a crash course in
modern sociology, plugging in, speeding up, and throwing on some distortion,
and there you have it — one of the most famous hardcore albums of 1988. For Suffer, Graffin and Gurewitz, coming
back together, managed to squeeze out the last traces of the Clash and the
Ramones; this here is a natural «folk-punk» album, turned into hardcore only
on a formal level. Behind all the fuzz, loudness, and vocal barking really lies
the equivalent of ʽThis Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Landʼ.
It is sort of fun to realize this, enough to
forgive the stark, mercyless monotonousness of the fifteen songs on here —
ultra-short as they may be, the riffs, tempos, and moods are so similar that
there is genuinely less diversity here than on Back To The Known, which was a five-song EP, if you remember. No
guitar solos, no stops and starts, only a couple songs at best that sew
together faster and slower sections, and permanent bombardment by «socially
relevant» lyrics that occasionally sound like a complicated philosophical
thesis set to rudiments of music. Prepare yourself for embracing some
bombastic minimalism.
Normally, I should be hating an album of this
kind, but, surprisingly, I enjoy Suffer
quite a bit. Most of the thanks go to Graffin. By now, he is able to establish
just the perfect balance between punkish bark, intellectual sneer, and — most
importantly — distinct enunciation, and even if his lyrics add very little to
what we already know about the flaws of society, they still cut a little deeper
than yer average leftist propaganda. (Besides, one thing that all the hardcore
movement has always sorely needed , were good lyricists, capable of ennobling
the genre). And it is mostly his singing that helps — not always, but often
enough — to draw differentiating lines between songs. After a few listens,
ʽ1000 More Foolsʼ, ʽGive You Nothingʼ, and the title track finally
sink in as songs that actually have
vocal melodies — rising and falling, falling and rising, sometimes resolved in
a fascinatingly slap-in-yer-face way ("I give you me, I give you
nothing!", to me, sounds like the album's absolute peak here).
The band's two guitarists, old warhorse
Gurewitz and not-yet-veteran Hetson, mostly play in unison, without straying
far from the base; this is probably not the easiest thing in the world to do
even when you are playing these simple riffs — but at what speed! — and it
gives the music a thickly scrumptuous coating, the notes under which still
manage to sound distinct: you can hum these riffs quite easily (unlike, say,
something by Agnostic Front) — not that you'd probably want to, but it is possible.
The record takes an almost fascist approach to
«gimmickry»: the only «out-of-line» bit on the entire album is a distorted,
slowed-down recording of Graffin (or somebody else) robotically intoning
"delirium of disorder, delirium of disorder" at the beginning of said
track. Consequently, there is no sense in extending this review — describe one
song and you have betrayed 'em all — but it might be useful to stress, once
again, the main reason why I am giving it a thumbs up when, normally, records of
this kind get negative ratings.
Basically, Suffer
is a hardcore album that respects all the formal requirements of hardcore
(short length, fast tempo, distorted heavy riffage, angry anti-social mood,
etc.), yet dispenses with the true spirit of hardcore — playing the whole thing
out with much more precision, collectedness, melodicity, and lyrical complexity
than one usually expects from the genre. Even set against How Could Hell Be Any Worse?, Suffer
is the well-printed hardcover equivalent of the former's exciting, but
carelessly glued paperback. Monotonous, repetitive, not at all inventive, it's
far from a «masterpiece for the ages», but the limited task that it sets out to
accomplish — that one it accomplishes to complete perfection. And, for that
matter, where else on a hardcore album are you going to meet brave lines like
"When will you try to change the logarithmic face of kissing things
good-bye?" Oh, you just wouldn't believe all those tricky things we do to
impregnate all those young punks' minds with the joy of mathematics...
NO CONTROL (1989)
1) Change Of Ideas; 2) Big
Bang; 3) No Control; 4) Sometimes I Feel Like; 5) Automatic Man; 6) I Want To
Conquer The World; 7) Sanity; 8) Henchman; 9) It Must Feel Pretty Appealing; 10)
You; 11) Progress; 12) I Want Something More; 13) Anxiety; 14) Billy; 15) The
World Won't Stop.
As awkward as it is to say, No Control is only the very first Bad
Religion album in the Bad Religion catalog that sounds exactly like its
predecessor — meaning, apparently, that for the first time in their life Bad
Religion hit upon a formula that they really, really liked. Or maybe they were
just so proud that Suffer managed to
sell a few thousand copies, it seemed like a good idea to try and do the same thing
all over again. Surprisingly, it worked, and the next album already sold a few dozen thousand copies — an amazingly
high record for a record that places its listener in between packs of
pummeling, breakneck speed punk riffs and lyrics that can be qualified as
poetic adaptations of everything from existentialism to neo-Marxism for the
middle school level.
There is no way that a review of a 25-minute
long album that sounds exactly like its 35-minute long predecessor could be
longer than a few paragraphs, so here are just a few scattered observations on
individual songs:
— ʽI Want Something Moreʼ runs for a
record-short 0:47, of which the last eight seconds are brilliantly shaped into
a one-breath coda. All of B.R.'s songs are «anthems», one way or another, but
this one takes the cake as the greatest use of laconicity on a B.R. record,
period;
— ʽSometimes I Feel Like...ʼ leaves
the last slot in its title conspicuously open, to be occupied within the song
itself by the album's only straightforward moment of musical gimmickry, and it
does seem possible that Graffin sometimes feels himself like that, because, heck, don't we all?;
— ʽSanityʼ and the beginning of
ʽProgressʼ slow down the tempo (although the latter quickly picks it
up again) for no reason in particular, but the Gurewitz-Hetson guitar tone
retains its nasty crunch regardless of the number of beats per second;
— ʽThe World Won't Stopʼ has the only
example of the adverb phylogenetically
that I can think of in a lyrical piece — and it is not that easy to pronounce it at that kind of speed, mind you. The song
itself, melody-wise, is as non-descript as they come, but "Your
achievements are unsurpassed / You are highly-ordered mass / But you can bet
your ass / Your free energy will dissipate / Two billion years thus far / Now
mister here you are / An element in a sea of enthalpic organic compounds"
— boy, that's gotta count for
something. We sure have come a long way here from "And I wanna move the
town to the Clash city rocker, you need a little jump of electrical shocker",
not to mention "beat on the brat with a baseball bat" — each of these
lyrical approaches has its value and its effects, but Graffin's professorial
verbosity seems unprecedented, regardless of whether one likes it or not.
Most importantly, No Control rocks with the exact same frenzy and conviction as Suffer. Penalizing it for recycling
the already worn-out riffs would be silly — the whole idea here is to ask
themselves the question: «Gee, that worked so well, can we do it again, but
faster, tougher, even more focused and compact?..» and answer in the positive. Unoriginal,
yes, but sometimes all you need is a little inspiration, a little fire, a
little intelligence, and (last, but not least) a reasonably short running time,
and you got yourself a certified thumbs up.
AGAINST THE GRAIN (1990)
1) Modern Man; 2) Turn On The
Light; 3) Get Off; 4) Blenderhead; 5) The Positive Aspect Of Negative Thinking;
6) Anesthesia; 7) Flat Earth Society; 8) Faith Alone; 9) Entropy; 10) Against
The Grain; 11) Operation Rescue; 12) God Song; 13) 21st Century (Digital Boy);
14) Misery And Famine; 15) Unacceptable; 16) Quality Or Quantity; 17) Walk Away.
The last album in Bad Religion's classic
trilogy — for some fans, the best, and for some the worst of the lot, although,
personally, the only big difference that I can see is that the guitar solos are
back, in a big, easily noticeable way. More than ever before, the band now
sounds like a slightly «cleaner» version of Mötörhead — «cleaner»
only because Jay Bentley is just a bass player, with no ambitions of turning
his instrument into Hell's own jackhammer like Lemmy does. In all other
respects now, this goes beyond a simplistic headbanger's dream and heads for
the pleasure centers of the raving fan of the air guitar.
The only other flash of individuality is that
this is the album that has ʽ21st Century (Digital Boy)ʼ on it. Slower
than the rest, with more overtly melodic vocals and a downright «poppy»,
sing-along chorus, it stirs some fans the wrong way — especially since it has
gone on to become Bad Religion's most famous number, despite not being ideally
typical of their sound (sort of like Blondie with ʽHeart Of Glassʼ,
which still makes many people erroneously remember them as a disco band).
Still, the riffs are anything but pop, and the chorus is not just simplistically
catchy, but rings out loud and proud with Bad Religion's usual spirit.
Besides, goddammit, those catchy lyrics are
wond'rously prophetic: "'Cause I'm a 21st century digital boy / I don't
know how to live but I got a lot of toys / My daddy's a lazy middle class intellectual
/ My mommy's on valium, so ineffectual" may have already been partially
true in 1990, when it was written, but now that the 21st century is finally
here, the song is ten times as relevant as it used to be. The epitome of irony
is that, during the fade-out, Graffin hums a cross-reference from King
Crimson's ʽ21st Century Schizoid Manʼ — "cat's food, iron claw,
neuro-surgeons screamed for more, innocents raped with napalm fire" —
perhaps hinting at just how silly these visions of World War III, nuclear
apocalypses, ultra-fascist dictatures etc. have turned out to be next to the real danger to society, eh?..
Of the other songs, which mostly just soldier
on and on in nearly identical uniforms, the title track, with its shrill
seven-note riff and easily imprintable sloganeering ("against the grain,
that's where I'll stay") is a clear standout, as is ʽModern Manʼ
(who happens to be a "pathetic example of earth's organic heritage",
and try singing that in two and a half seconds without losing the message),
and ʽThe Positive Aspect Of Negative Thinkingʼ — typing in its title
takes almost as much time for the slow-moving typist as it runs (0:57), but it
still manages to incorporate a «boogie» and a «grindcore» section and a large
political, philosophical, and even linguistic ("syntactic is our
elegance"?) manifesto.
The whole package is longer than No Control (seventeen tracks in all),
but with all these ecstatic, anger-choked guitars, tiny injections of
poppiness, and even cleverer slogans than before, may be even easier to
tolerate and assimilate for the non-hardcore customer in the hardcore store.
Hence, another thumbs
up — yes, there would be a
moment when Graffin and co. would finally start a downhill slide, but Against The Grain still finds them dashing
along a straight line.
GENERATOR (1992)
1) Generator; 2) Too Much To
Ask; 3) No Direction; 4) Tomorrow; 5) Two Babies In The Dark; 6) Heaven Is
Falling; 7) Atomic Garden; 8) The Answer; 9) Fertile Crescent; 10) Chimaera;
11) Only Entertainment.
Enough subtle changes here to introduce a
demarcation line between the earlier trilogy and this new period in Bad
Religion's life, as the band grows older, «wiser», and a little more concerned
with the melodic side of its art than sheer energy levels. Unfortunately, it is
a bit too late to care about melody if you haven't already done that in your
formative years — and, as a result, Generator
is just a little bit more limp and lax than its predecessors, without
necessarily being more memorable or emotionally complex.
Alarmingly, the title track opens things with
what sounds like sped-up alt-rock rather than hardcore, especially due to the
vocal melody, openly sung, rather than recited, by Griffin, and the guitar
interplay, which wouldn't be out of place on an Ash record. This is not awful
or ominous per se, but it takes a large bite out of the reasons why Bad
Religion would need to exist in the first place — not as a footstool to
accommodate Graffin's poetry, but as a monstrous locomotive to propel it along.
Reduce the speed by 10 mph, and where does that get you?
What remains is the conviction:
ʽGeneratorʼ, with its universal anger, and the more specifically
targeted ʽHeaven Is Fallingʼ (anti-war) and ʽOnly
Entertainmentʼ (anti-TV) are tradition-respecting anthems that word their
concerns cleverly and sloganize their choruses accordingly: chanting these
titles along with the band ensures close emotional unity, and, possibly, a
willingness to break the neck of anybody who'd dare claim that all these songs
are kinda monotonous.
Breaking that monotonousness are the slower
numbers — such as ʽTwo Babies In The Darkʼ, the best thing about
which are the wailing «woman-tone» guitar breaks, and ʽThe Answerʼ,
structured as a guruistic parable with a logical conclusion ("everyone's
begging for an answer without regard to validity" — something that every
true scientist should always bear in mind), but so much bent on its dogmatic
aspect that it almost forgets to rock. And the day when we have to accept Greg
Graffin as our spiritual leader, based simply on the words he speaks, is the
day when we no longer have to accept Bad Religion as a band worth a pound of
dogshit.
If pressed hard to name one major highlight, I
would probably have to stop at ʽAtomic Gardenʼ. Nicely found
simplistic, elegantly looped riff, cool whiny, psychedelic guitar tone for the
leads, non-preachy lyrics that probably deal with nuclear issues but you
wouldn't want to wager on that (and namedrop Gorbachev one year after the man's resignation — get your
relevance level right, you guys!), and, overall, some nice old school garage
rock influence here, rather than the usual hardcore jackhammer or, worse, a
smoothed-over alt-rock approach.
But overall, you'd really have to be a major
admirer of Graffin's views on world issues and ability to express them in
order to love Generator as much as
its predecessors. The grip has been relaxed, stylistic concessions have been
made, and the band seems ready to begin considering moving into the realm of
«elder statesmen». Thumbs up anyway, because nothing here really rubs
me the wrong way — however, do remember that «fresh» Bad Religion starts
morphing into «yesterday's papers» somewhere around here.
RECIPE FOR HATE (1993)
1) Recipe For Hate; 2)
Kerosene; 3) American Jesus; 4) Portrait Of Authority; 5) Man With A Mission;
6) All Good Soldiers; 7) Watch It Die; 8) Struck A Nerve; 9) My Poor Friend Me;
10) Lookin' In; 11) Don't Pray On Me; 12) Modern Day Catastrophists; 13) Skyscraper;
14) Stealth.
Unfortunately, the degeneration continues, and
on Recipe For Hate starts getting
seriously noticeable. While musical change is certainly welcome per se, the
reasons behind this kind of change had more to do with Graffin's growing
self-importance than any sort of desire to explore new musical ground. As the
mean punch grows weaker, the pathos gets stronger, and the album hardly even
begins living up to its name — by now, influences from pop, country, folk, and
the newly nascent grunge scene (Eddie Vedder even contributes guest backing
vocals to one of the songs) have seriously eroded Bad Religion's ability to
generate pure, raffinated hatred.
To be fair, the title track works well in the
old style (except for the bridge, which slows down the tempo and turns the song
from hardcore into grunge), but already ʽKeroseneʼ, with its
sing-along, melodic chorus shows that Bad Religion have made a serious
investment in the pathos market, and it only gets worse from there. Now we have
an abundance of slow tempos, melodies drowned in buzz and distortion, and
vocals that invite us to sing along with anthemic pride. Yes, the lyrics are
still decent enough, but it's not as if things have changed much, or Graffin
has found any new subjects to sing about, in the past few years — just a bunch
of verbal modifications to describe the PSS (Permanent State of Shit) in which
happy America finds itself.
Even though I will have a hard time remembering
them, the best songs here are the ones that would fit in well on Against The Grain — speedy, bitey, with
flashy solos and fast-fleeting vocals, like the title track, ʽMy Poor
Friend Meʼ, and ʽLookin' Inʼ. I couldn't care less about
ʽMan With A Missionʼ, which tries to spice things up with a slide
guitar part and «soulful» vocals that sound like a cross between Eddie Vedder,
Bono, and John Doe from downtown (Eddie wins, because in the end it does sound
just like a sped up Pearl Jam with some country guitar on top). Nor do I give a
damn about the «martial» overtones of ʽAll Good Soldiersʼ, or about
the pub-folk vibe of ʽWatch It Dieʼ, no matter how vehemently it
keeps on preaching the apocalypse.
Apparently, at this moment the apex of Bad
Religion's creativity is supposed to be ensconced in a track like
ʽStealthʼ — a forty-second splicing of excerpts from George Bush's
Union Address, making him say stuff like "this weekend I will spend over
800 million dollars on drugs" and "I will continue pushing free
narcotics for all low income people". Umm... what? Is that considered to
be funny, or instructive, or inspirational? Okay, so it is just a silly joke
tucked on to the end of the album, but somehow I've always preferred "her
Majesty's a pretty nice girl".
It's fairly indicative of the overall spirit,
though — as «socially relevant» lyrics and statements totally get the better
of the band, they simply become... boring.
I mean, why write new and worse songs
about the same old shit if you can just keep on singing the old and better ones? Recipe For Hate, you say? Well, I prefer my hate to be cooked without any fucking recipes. Good title, good
album cover, fairly sorrowful content-to-form match — even if it was their best-selling album to date,
but that's just because people usually do not like to take their medicine at
breakneck speed: with Bad Religion taking more and more cues from the grunge
movement, their commercial potential keeps growing at an exponential.
STRANGER THAN FICTION (1994)
1) Incomplete; 2) Leave Mine To
Me; 3) Stranger Than Fiction; 4) Tiny Voices; 5) The Handshake; 6) Better Off
Dead; 7) Infected; 8) Television; 9) Individual; 10) Hooray For Me...; 11)
Slumber; 12) Marked; 13) Inner Logic; 14) What It Is; 15) 21st Century (Digital
Boy); 16*) News From The Front; 17*) Markovian Process.
Another year... The only generalization that
can be generalized about this record has already been made in the All-Music
Guide review: Bad Religion sign up with a major record label and, in order to
convince the fanbase that this is not a sellout, try their best to come up with
an «authentic» BR record, dumping all the variety of the previous two albums.
That is as correct as they come: Stranger
Than Fiction is all tense, all fast, almost all a stylistic clone of Suffer. Whether this is good, bad, or
who-the-heck-cares is a different thing. In a way, Bad Religion might be like
AC/DC — it's very easy to get sick of the formula, but nothing else seems to
work as efficiently. Change and perish, always stay the same and prosper.
For tactical reasons, the band re-recorded
ʽ21st Century Digital Boyʼ for this album — now that they had a
larger distribution base, re-releasing their most famous song seemed like the
right thing to do. According to one of the versions, they were forced to do
this by the people at Atlantic who wanted a hit single and saw no potential in
the rest of the songs. Were they right or were they wrong? Well, let's just
take a look at these other singles.
ʽInfectedʼ, the album's slowest and
«grandest» number, starts off with a few blasts of feedback that almost sound
like a pompous brass introduction — then chuggishly builds up towards a
look-at-me-suffer chorus. It is the only song here that would not seem fit for
their late 1980s albums, and for a good reason: it sounds like a boring
post-grunge teen-angst anthem — not even graced with another set of Graffin's
intellectualized lyrics: "You affect me / You infect me / I'm afflicted /
I'm addicted / You and me" is not exactly the most inspiring chorus in BR
history.
Third single was the title track: London Calling-style punk-power-pop
here, upbeat, martial, lyrically rich — and not catchy in the least. You know
something's not right when the song's idea of «catchiness» is to insert the
word "obituary" in the empty musical space between the chorus and the
next verse. It's not even shocking.
And the fact that "Life is the crummiest book I ever read / There isn't a
hook, just a lot of cheap shots" is not something I'd be willing to take
for an excuse. Even if that is true, it does not mean that art has to follow life
in everything. I, for one, did not start listening to Bad Religion for any
«cheap shots».
That leaves us with the fourth single, and it
is the only one worthy of close attention: ʽIncompleteʼ is probably
the best song on the album, just because the tough, passionate start —
"Mother! father! look at your little monster, I'm a hero, I'm a zero, I'm
the butt of the worst joke in history" — is overwhelming, the best shot of
inspiration on the album. This is classic Bad Religion stuff: anti-social
ranting, well constructed lyrics, speed, fury, hatred, madness, and wisdom.
There are quite a few other songs like that on Stranger Than Fiction, scattered here
and there — ʽTiny Voicesʼ, ʽThe Handshakeʼ,
ʽIndividualʼ, etc. — but there is also quite a bit of stuff that goes
easy on the hatred, or the lyrics, or the speed, or the fury, and that's bad,
because it does not add much to the album's general feel of diversity, yet
makes it less intense and cutting-edge than the Suffer-era trilogy. And the very fact that they had to re-record a
much earlier song to stimulate interest in the album is quite telling.
THE GRAY RACE (1996)
1) The Gray Race; 2) Them And
Us; 3) A Walk; 4) Parallel; 5) Punk Rock Song; 6) Empty Causes; 7) Nobody
Listens; 8) Pity The Dead; 9) Spirit Shine; 10) The Streets Of America; 11) Ten
In 2010; 12) Victory; 13) Drunk Sincerity; 14) Come Join Us; 15) Cease; 16*)
Punk Rock Song (German version).
Still with Atlantic, but with some major
changes in personnel: (a) this is the band's first record without Gurewitz,
who left for a variety of reasons (he himself quoted the need to concentrate on
managerial work at Epitaph Records, whereas Graffin would hint at increased
drug use); (b) this is their first — and only — record produced by none other
than Ric Ocasek of The Cars. Both of these factors could finally hint at a
fresh change in the overall sound, for better or for worse. And? Take a
guess?...
...you are absolutely correct, The Gray Race sounds exactly like Stranger Than Fiction. New guitarist Brian Baker, formerly of
Samhain, Government Issue, Junkyard, Minor Threat, The Meatmen, Dag Nasty,
Doggy Style, and probably a host of other hardcore outfits that only the most
hardcore fans have heard about, is not seriously distinguishable from Brett;
and as for the production, unless Ocasek saddled this band with synthesizers —
which was probably out of the question — would have to remain the same anyway.
So, here is another set of mostly
interchangeable and rather generic «melodic hardcore» from the world's leading
combo of human rights activists who happen to like speed, distortion, rock
poetry, and moralizing at the same time. At this point, their mid-tempo stuff
is already close to unbearable — I have no business listening to metronomic
crap like 'The Streets Of Americaʼ, no matter how anthemic Graffin always
makes it sound; and, unfortunately, quite a few of the fast songs start
sounding just as boring and clichéd as the slow ones — ʽDrunk
Sincerityʼ, for instance, just seems like they threw on an extra drum part
as an afterthought.
The lead singles were ʽA Walkʼ, which
is not a bad song (at least there is a nice, tense buildup from verse to chorus,
as the rising bassline takes your spirit higher); and ʽPunk Rock
Songʼ, which is just too clean, poppy, and politically correct to merit
the title — yes, it is a punk rock song in general form and structure, but
there is nothing in the world to justify it as an exemplary punk rock song, which it isn't, and re-recording it in
German (this extra version is appended as a bonus track) does not help much to
elevate its status.
Since, other than ʽA Walkʼ, there is
not a single song here that commands my attention (not even the title track
this time can boast a strong hook), this is the first Bad Religion album since Into The Unknown that demands a
certified thumbs
down. As long as the verve and inspiration were there somehow, I could respect the style
enough to acknowledge its existence. But with Gray Race, Bad Religion seem to finally cross that line — for me,
at least — where «respectfully tolerable» finally morphs into «unbearably
dull». For other people, that line might have come significantly earlier, or
somewhat later, but it is clear that somewhere, somehow one simply has to draw that line. My tired buck,
sick of recycled punk riffs and idealistic sentiments rekindled like burnt out
matches, sort of stops here. And I am sure that this has even nothing to do
with the departure of Gurewitz. It's just a question of time.
TESTED (1997)
1) Operation
Rescue; 2) Punk Rock Song; 3) Tomorrow; 4) A Walk; 5) God Song; 6) Pity The
Dead; 7) One Thousand More Fools; 8) Drunk Sincerity; 9) Generator; 10) Change Of
Ideas; 11) Portrait Of Authority; 12) What It Is; 13) Dream Of Unity; 14) Sanity;
15) American Jesus; 16) Do What You Want; 17) Part III; 18) 10 In 2010; 19) No
Direction; 20) Along The Way; 21) Recipe For Hate; 22) Fuck Armageddon; 23) It's
Reciprocal; 24) Struck A Nerve; 25) Leave Mine To Me; 26) Tested; 27) No
Control.
Get out the calculators. 3 completely new,
previously unissued songs; 5 songs from The
Gray Race (1996); 2 songs from Stranger
Than Fiction (1994); 4 songs from Recipe
For Hate (1993); 3 songs from Generator
(1992); 2 songs from Against The Grain
(1990); 3 songs from No Control
(1989); 2 songs from Suffer (1988);
1 song from Back To The Known
(1984); 2 songs from How Could Hell Be
Any Worse (1982). Boy, do these guys have a large discography — and boy,
do they love to love it. All except Into
The Unknown, that is, which is important, because it is the only clue we
have here that Greg Graffin can
actually accept a few mistakes (or at least one mistake) in his life.
If there could ever be a point in a Bad Religion
live album, then Graffin and Co. make everything in their power to avoid it.
First, a real good live punk rock show should last about the same as a real
good punk rock album — no more than half an hour at best; Tested spills over an hour-long vessel, and listening to Bad
Religion for more than sixty minutes is only recommendable for real strong guys
with lots of frustration to vent,
more than I could ever imagine (and I'm feeling pretty pissed off right now
myself). Second, even in punk rock, it does help if you try and make your
material a little bit different from
the studio originals — even if you just speed it up a bit, like the Ramones —
and this might be the main reason why punk bands do not frequently bother with
live recordings, since most of them already have a live-in-the-studio sound.
Third and most important, Graffin chose a very
strange approach here: instead of doing like everybody else and «miking the
stage», he simply directed all the instruments straight into the recording
console. This allowed the sound to be captured as faithfully and cleanly as
possible, and the reasonable point to be lost completely. The new, crazy point
is to answer the question: «How fuckin' good — technically — are Bad Religion
when they go onstage and play their material?» The normal answer to that question, in a logical world, would be: «Who
fuckin' cares?» Only a band with a very
puffed up sense of self-importance would demand a different one.
In addition, the actual recordings were all
taken from different shows and selected with great care out of a pile of
look-alikes — you'd think it was Glenn Gould here sorting through the tapes,
not the leader of a generic hardcore outfit regularly operating at a
three-chord level. With no continuity whatsoever to the proceedings, they
don't even formally qualify as a «live punk rock show». What's the actual
sense, then? Just try to assert your intellectual superiority over all
competition by «doing something different»? How about some humility here? Would
be nice for a band whose workbag of musical ideas is kinda skinny, to put it
mildly.
Not that the whole thing is utterly bland,
uninspired, disgusting, or anything. The song selection is all right — at this
point, it is fairly difficult even to remember what were the «highlights» and
the «lowlights» on the band's original albums anyway — and of the new songs,
only the super-slow, ultra-pathetic ʽDream Of Unityʼ goes over the
top in an adequacy-defying manner. As a general retrospective, it isn't too bad
(although one wonders why they didn't arrange the songs in chronological order,
if they are fading out after each track anyway). But high up above the simple
«like it or hate it» level, most live albums set out to prove a purpose — and Tested seems to prove all the wrong
ones. Thumbs
down, simply because I doubt I'll ever listen to it again. In fact,
I have similar doubts about plenty of other BR albums, but if there is anything
in particular that the title of Tested
refers to — it's patience, yours and mine. In any case, buying the album won't
solve the world's problems, as Graffin would have you do. You might just as
well donate your money to a financial pyramid.
NO SUBSTANCE (1998)
1) Hear It; 2) Shades Of Truth;
3) All Fantastic Images; 4) The Biggest Killer In American History; 5) No
Substance; 6) Raise Your Voice!; 7) Sowing The Seeds Of Utopia; 8) The Hippy
Killers; 9) The State Of The End Of The Millenium Address; 10) The Voracious
March Of Godliness; 11) Mediocre Minds; 12) Victims Of The Revolution; 13)
Strange Denial; 14) At The Mercy Of Imbeciles; 15) The Same Person; 16) In So
Many Ways.
If I were Greg Graffin, I would think twice
before calling one of my albums No
Substance. Not only do you have to wait until track no. 5 before certifying
that he means America as a whole and not just himself as part of it, you have
to find a way to convince yourself that this next batch of same-sounding,
completely predictable, and, by now, thoroughly toothless Bad Religion slogans
somehow pretends to having more
substance than, oh I dunno, the Bill Clinton government, to give but one of the
many examples.
The thing is, No Substance probably represents the highest peak of Graffin's
political activism — at this point, he is not merely the «hardcore equivalent»
of Noam Chomsky, he is making every single effort he can to shove that fact
into our faces. Yes, there is nothing inherently wrong with politics in music,
and yes, Noam Chomsky has just as many rights to owning a personal musical
agent as Rush Limbaugh, but at this point, there is so little that is truly
«musical» about Bad Religion that I have no idea about the size of the
potential dividends.
The transparent culprit is clearly ʽThe
State Of The End Of The Millenium Addressʼ (yes, «millenium» explicitly
printed with one ʽnʼ — what else do you expect from the rotten
imperialist swine at Atlantic Records? guess they had to derail the message any
stinky subversive way they could, embarrassing Mr. Graffin before all of his
educated college audiences): over a threatening wall of feedback, you get to
hear about how "The Internet has expanded our ability to pacify average
Americans better than ever by offering fantastical adventures to every corner
of the imagination", etc. etc. Perfectly convincing, but the only nagging
suspicion is — if just about everything is part of The Plot, how about Bad Religion
themselves? Where do they come in?
Honestly, I have no idea, except that three
required listens to No Substance
have drained me of 135 minutes of time that might have been more effectively
spent planting bombs in the headquarters of The World's Most Evil Government,
wherever that one is. As usual, there are a few catchy choruses — there always
are at least a few catchy choruses on a Bad Religion album — but some of them
are hicky almost beyond belief, such as "fa fa fa fa, fa fa fa fa, fa fa
fa fa, raise your voice!": are we now relying on Sha Na Na methodology to
convey the message? Others are just
stupid (ʽThe Biggest Killer In American Historyʼ; ʽThe Hippy
Killersʼ — both songs designed simply to make the listener sing along to
the title), and I can only quote Mark Prindle on ʽMediocre Mindsʼ:
"Next time Greg wants to bitch about somebody with a «mediocre
mind»" I'll ask him to kindly not rip off the melody of ʽYummy Yummy
Yummy, I've Got Love In My Tummyʼ in doing so". Pretty much summarizes my idea of
the album, too.
Basically, what
makes the difference between a Suffer-type
album and a No Substance-type album
is that the former somehow tried to express frustration in the music, while the
latter invests 90% of the funds in the lyrics. All of these riffs, rhythms, and
solos are punched out on total autopilot — although you cannot get this
feeling by just comparing individual songs
(Bad Religion does not operate in terms of songs), you have to listen to the
albums from start to finish. There is no reason to doubt Graffin's sincerity,
but that is the typical problem of «The Disillusioned Idealist»: the fewer
people you see following your sermons, the more bitter you get about it, until,
at some point, you simply start living for these sermons, dumping everything
else. Well — if I want a sermon, I'll just download myself an audio book from
Noam in person, rather than listen to his «musical» lackeys. Thumbs down, all you brothers and sisters under
oppression.
THE NEW AMERICA (2000)
1) You've Got A Chance; 2) It's
A Long Way To The Promise Land; 3) A World Without Melody; 4) New America; 5)
1000 Memories; 6) A Streetkid Named Desire; 7) Whisper In Time; 8) Believe It;
9) I Love My Computer; 10) The Hopeless Housewife; 11) There Will Be A Way;
12) Let It Burn; 13) Don't Sell Me Short.
A bit of a change here, and an overall
improvement. First, none other than pop master-craftsman Todd Rundgren himself
was brought in as producer — and, although working relationships between
Graffin and the «True Star» were said to be rather tense, Todd still managed to
leave a very strong power pop stamp
on the proceedings: quite obviously, he did not give a damn about Bad
Religion's hardcore reputation, and did everything he could to slow down the
freaky tempos, add extra ring and color to the guitars, smother the melodies in
choral harmonies, and, overall, try to have the band play four chords wherever
they would previously settle for three.
In short, even though Graffin is still listed
as sole writer on most of the tracks, it is probably not a coincidence that it
is exactly this Rundgren-produced album to feature a song that begins with the
words "I don't want to live in a world without melody / Sometimes the
rhythmic din of society is too much for me" — substitute «society» for
«Bad Religion» and you will see just how much «The Wizard» was able to
hypnotize Graffin. Of course, even without Todd, the band was already moving
from «hardcore» to «popcore» for quite a bit of time, so the seeds fell on
fertile soil. The problem is — what are we planting, exactly?
And here comes the second first: the album is a
huge lyrical improvement over No
Substance as well. Although the main focus is on society perspectives as
usual, there is a three-song «suite» stuck in the middle focused on far more
personal affairs: ʽ1000 Memoriesʼ is about Graffin's recent divorce,
while ʽA Streetkid Named Desireʼ and ʽWhisper In Timeʼ deal
with past memories and, basically, add a little bit of introspection — ever
wanted to know how come Greg Graffin became what he is? well, here is your
chance to get a glance at the man behind The Man.
But the rest of the songs, too, are delivered
in a somewhat different key, shifting the emphasis from Chomsky-style radical
hatred and propaganda to visionary sermons: with track names like ʽYou've
Got A Chanceʼ, ʽIt's A Long Way To The Promise Landʼ, and
ʽThere Will Be A Wayʼ, you can see that there is — just for a change
— an attempt to stir up some positive emotions, and do it in a way that is not
necessarily linked to the right here and the right now, but at least purely
formally aspires to the timelessness of the message. Not that the message
itself is new or anything — and the lyrics are definitely not among Greg's best
("Shut your eyes, see the future's distant shore / March ahead more
enlightened than before / And there's sure to be bumps and distractions / But I
know we'll get through / There will be me, there will be you" — yes, years
of radicalism and hardcore musicianship may inflict heavy damage even on a
university professor). But at least you no longer feel yourself stuck in the
middle of a narrow-minded political
rally, behind locked and barred doors, and that is a big relief.
All this leads to an overall increase in
memorability — with the choruses bent just a bit more on melody and just a bit
less on indoctrination, they are occasionally fun to sing along (unless they
become too anthemic, as on the title
track). There is even an «experimental» track — ʽI Love My Computerʼ,
the next installment in Greg's ongoing saga of «How Electronics Helps Ruin Our
Lives And Turn Us Into Mindless Puppets», this time with a mock-subliminal
message of "click me, click me" built in and little electronic burps
and blurbs adding up to the atmosphere. Hilarious, but the chorus of "I
just click and you just go away" is the catchiest bit on the album. And
highly instructive, too. For instance, I just clicked — and Bad Religion just
went away. Amazing, isn't it? The wonderful world of technology.
On a technical note, The New America sees Gurewitz briefly returning to the fold —
co-writing one of the songs, ʽBelieve Itʼ, and playing guitar on it,
presaging his eventual permanent return on the next album. Curiously, it is one
of the poppiest, jangliest numbers on the album, even though Gurewitz was never
the primary pop engine in the band — well, blame it all on Todd, I guess.
Anyway, just for a change, I give this album a thumbs up
in recognition of its rather unusual status in BR's catalog, and most
importantly, in the overall context — it is such a huge improvement on the
pathetic loaded boredom of No Substance
that this simply has to be somehow
reflected in the overall chronology. Do keep in mind, though, that it is far
from a fan favorite: even those who are accustomed to the «popcore» direction
often have a hard time acknowledging Todd Rundgren's right to put his nose in
the genre.
THE PROCESS OF BELIEF (2002)
1) Supersonic; 2) Prove It; 3)
Can't Stop It; 4) Broken; 5) Destined For Nothing; 6) Materialist; 7) Kyoto
Now; 8) Sorrow; 9) Epiphany; 10) Evangeline; 11) The Defense; 12) The Lie; 13)
You Don't Belong; 14) Bored And Extremely Dangerous; 15*) Shattered Faith.
No more Todd Rundgren, but a whole lot more
Brett Gurewitz, back full time not only as guitar player, but also as one of
the two chief songwriters — although, frankly speaking, decades of living
either under or in the shadow of the Bad Religion banner has pretty much
neutralized the styles of the two: I am not strong enough to easily discern
between Brett's and Greg's signatures. Lyrics-wise, Graffin tends to be more
issue-specific than Gurewitz and more prominently show off his educated
intellectualism in his radicalism, but musically, these melodies are almost
totally interchangeable between brothers-in-arms.
Anyway, the reunion, the sacking of Rundgren,
and the label move from Atlantic to Epitaph resulted in some predictable
nano-changes. The ensuing album is a little less pop, a little faster, and a
little crunchier in terms of guitar tones. Select opinions — and with each
passing year, opinions on Bad Religion's new albums become more and more
«select» — suggested that here was a deliberate move in the backwards
direction of Suffer. Who can really
tell without a microscope? All I know is, the production still sounds 2002
rather than 1988, with the guitars all muffled rather than «trebly», and what
other difference could there be?
As usual, let us talk in terms of singles.
ʽSorrowʼ managed to become a minor hit, but the only interesting
thing about it is that it starts out as a reggae number — the band's first
foray into the genre thus far — before quickly shifting gears and launching
into the usual «folk-punk» mode à
la «Woody Guthrie goes hardcore». ʽBrokenʼ is a tune about human
relationship between actual humans (no shit!) that switches to near-complete
acoustic backing for the verses — another first? Not too memorable otherwise.
ʽSupersonicʼ is classic quintessential Bad Religion: as fast as the
title suggests, energetic, and kinda meaningless: "I gotta go faster, keep
up the pace / Just to stay in the human race" — is that why they keep on releasing a new album every two years?
Best of the bunch is probably ʽThe
Defenseʼ, for which the band cooked up a little atmosphere: backward
guitars, Mid-Eastern / symph-metal chord changes (well, maybe not quite), a far
more tricky than usual vocal architectonic structure, and a suitably
apocalyptic set of lyrics. Without overrating its complexity or effectiveness,
I could safely say, at the very least, that it is just a good song, and that it
stands out on its own — something that you very, very rarely get on any given
BR album (I mean, unless you are a religiously devoted fan, how many different
BR songs can you actually single out from the rest and remember as individual
entities?).
Curiously, all
four singles were credited to Gurewitz — maybe in a fit of gratitude on
Graffin's part. In fact, the songwriting is evenly split in half, but out of
Graffin's material, I could only say something about ʽBored And Extremely
Dangerousʼ ("With nothing better to do / I woefully conclude / To
take it out on you" — aw come now, Greg, you have been taking it out on us
for twenty years now), which has a few seconds of «non-music sounds»
interrupting the flow to further impress us with how bored everyone really is;
and about ʽKyoto Nowʼ, which is the only straightforward pro-Protocol
piece of propaganda dressed in the form of popcore that I know of (there must
be others, I guess), but has no other merits to speak of.
Okay, so that's about it. Faster, louder,
crunchier than they used to be over the past several years, so if you're only
in it for the ass-kicking, The Process
Of Belief might be right up your alley. But the usual problems won't go
anywhere any time soon, either, and now that they have entered the middle age
of dynamic compression, this is not
going to be the Bad Religion of old. So yes, it does matter whether you are
buying The Process Of Belief or Against The Grain as your introduction
to America's chomskiest rock band.
THE EMPIRE STRIKES FIRST (2004)
1) Overture; 2) Sinister Rouge;
3) Social Suicide; 4) Atheist Peace; 5) All There Is; 6) Los Angeles Is
Burning; 7) Let Them Eat War; 8) God's Love; 9) To Another Abyss; 10) The
Quickening; 11) The Empire Strikes First; 12) Beyond Electric Dreams; 13) Boot
Stamping On A Human Face Forever; 14) Live Again (The Fall Of Man).
Perhaps, after the initial period of happiness
at Gurewitz's return had ended, Bad Religion would have withered and died down
again — but, as fate would have it, soon after The Process Of Belief came the Iraq war, and along with it, the
Bush doctrine of preventive strikes; and there is nothing more effective than a
little imperialist warfare to get the old flames reignited up to high heavens
when it comes to Bad Religion. Of course, when you are as radically left as
these guys, you will always have enough reasons to fuel your fire (at least,
until communism comes and your music gets officially banned by the local Party
secretary), but still, radical protest under Clinton is one thing, and under
George W. is quite another. Suddenly, for a while, everything starts making
better sense than it used to, and you might even find grounds for true
inspiration.
There are actually a couple of genuine popcore
classics here, both contributed by Gurewitz. ʽThe Quickeningʼ ranks
with the best they ever did — the speed, the infectious chorus of "to come
alive, to come alive", the good old Mötörhead-style guitar solo,
all of that stuff is really catchy, fun, and «igniting». And the title track,
although much slower, shows great skill in the vocal arranging of the band's
major political declaration — "don't wanna live, don't wanna give, don't
wanna be E-M-P-I-R-E" with several lines of overdubbed pleading vocals,
convincingly striking out a note of utmost black despair.
ʽLos Angeles Is Burningʼ was the
single — maybe they calculated that any track titled «[Insert Major City Name
Here] Burning», once The Clash set the initial trend, would automatically be a
hit, but this one wasn't much of one, and for a good reason: a bitt too slow
and lumbering for a proper anthem, and, for some reason, stealing the main riff
from the Ramones' ʽBeat On The Bratʼ for the major hookline. (Mike
Campbell of Tom Petty & The Heartbeakers' fame adds some guest star guitar
for a change, but it does not help much).
Still, cute little hooks can be dug up in other
spots as well — they come up with a good chorus for ʽAll There Isʼ,
add a strange lo-fi guitar coda to ʽAtheist Peaceʼ, get a fine
anthemic triple guitar intro for ʽLet Them Eat Warʼ, invent a gruff
dirge-like riff for ʽBoot Stampingʼ... overall, it looks like
Gurewitz's return has achieved the impossible — for a brief while, the band
seems to be caring about the sonic side of their business almost as much as it
continues caring for their public image. Like Alice Cooper says, "it's
just the little things that drive me wild", and, surprise surprise, there
are enough of these little things on The
Empire to make it into Bad Religion's most interesting album of the 2000s,
even though — mind you! — this is not saying much. But at least it is enough to
fish them out another thumbs up.
NEW MAPS OF HELL (2007)
1) 52 Seconds; 2) Heroes &
Martyrs; 3) Germs Of Perfection; 4) New Dark Ages; 5) Requiem For Dissent; 6)
Before You Die; 7) Honest Goodbye; 8) Dearly Beloved; 9) Grains Of Wrath; 10)
Murder; 11) Scrutiny; 12) Prodigal Son; 13) The Grand Delusion; 14) Lost
Pilgrim; 15) Submission Complete; 16) Fields Of Mars.
Nothing I can say, write, or even think of will
seem fresh, relevant, or startling when it comes to New Maps Of Hell, Bad Religion's 14th studio album that could just
as well be 5th, 12th, 16th, or 667th. By now, it is clear that there are only
two types of Bad Religion albums: those that are fast, aggressive, and
kick-ass, and those that are slower, feebler, and duller. With Gurewitz still
in the band, and Hetson and Baker still sticking to second and third guitar
respectively, and — most importantly
— the George W. Bush administration still in power, you may make a safe bet
that this album will rather fall in the first than the second category. And
that's about all that may matter to anyone who ever cared about Bad Religion.
Well, on second thought, let us be fair:
Gurewitz and Graffin are still trying
to come up with new chord sequences and new patterns of guitar interplay. As
simple as the basic formula is, any musicologist will tell you that its raw
potential is not that limited —
particularly when you have three guitars at your disposal and a permission to
work poppy vocal hooks into your choruses. ʽHeroes & Martyrsʼ may
be indistinguishable from ʽGerms Of Perfectionʼ upon first listen,
going for the same mood at the same speed with the same guitar tones, but the
main riffs are different — first one a little more syncopated and metallic,
second one a little more «folk-punkish» (first one credited to Gurewitz, second
to Graffin: feel the difference?).
And goddamnit, but they do sound great on
ʽNew Dark Agesʼ — an even better anthem than ʽThe Empire Strikes
Firstʼ, especially for those ready to believe that the «new dark ages» are
indeed upon us (living in Putin's Russia helps plenty, but is hardly an
obligatory condition). The scratchy choo-choo train riffage, the well-crafted
vocal buildup to the chorus, the desperate release of "these are the new
dark ages and the world may end tonight" — all that's lacking is one of
these bursting-with-madness Mötörhead-ish guitar solos.
What this means is, if there is at least one great track on a Bad Religion album
that one feels pressed to mention, this is already a positive sign — there
actually may be others. You just have to grope around a bit; I do not have much
time for that, so I can only say that ʽFields Of Marsʼ has a brief
piano intro (which then returns for an interlude), and that ʽProdigal
Sonʼ features a blunt lyrical reference to Fogerty's ʽFortunate
Sonʼ (just for the sake of being able to sing "I ain't no prodigal son" instead of
"fortunate son" — intertextuality ahoy!).
In the end, we will just let it be with another
thumbs up
— maybe the songs, overall, are a trifle less inventive than the ones on Empire, but the motivation, the fire,
and the hooks are all there, even if albums like these are like a wave of
reviewer's nightmares.
30 YEARS LIVE (2010)
1) Fuck Armageddon, This Is Hell;
2) Dearly Beloved; 3) Suffer; 4) Man With A Mission; 5) New Dark Ages; 6) Germs
Of Perfection; 7) Marked; 8) A Walk; 9) Flat Earth Society; 10) Resist Stance;
11) American Jesus; 12) Social Suicide; 13) Atheist Peace; 14) Tomorrow; 15)
Won't Somebody; 16) Los Angeles Is Burning; 17) We're Only Gonna Die.
I suppose that every band that has managed to
last for 30 years — yes, even Chicago! — is entitled to a live album
commemorating such a jubilee, particularly if it is offered as a free download,
so that nobody has any official reason to complain: if you don't want it,
pretend it never existed, and don't worry about your refunds. And besides —
honestly, not every rock'n'roll band will last 30 years without losing a single
vibration of their original sound. Of course, sticking to hardcore regulations
helps a lot: unlike, say, The Rolling Stones, you have to keep yourself in
super-tight shape at all times to match the format. No matter how many chords
are involved — throw yourself off the rhythm once or twice and you're dead.
From that point of view, 30 years on, Bad Religion are, indeed, very much
alive.
Most sources state that the 30-year jubilee
tour went a notch higher in pomposity than usual: every night, the band would
play exactly 30 songs, which extended the preferable length of the show to
about twice as long as required by everybody's understanding of the norms of
hardcore. (For some reason, they only played about 20 dates, though, which
drags down the symbolic value of the tour). Furthermore, no single setlist
repeated itself more than once, assuring us all that Bad Religion are capable of such endearing silliness
as memorizing their entire catalog (not that it should require a particularly
large stock of memory cells, but Graffin does
have to remember all the words, not to mention spitting 'em out at rapid-fire
rates — that university degree has got to count for something, after all).
Disappointingly, the resulting album only has
17 songs, clocking in at a measly 41 minutes — a strange decision, since a
70-minute download with thirty songs in 2010 would hardly result in
overclocking anybody's bandwidth. The «defective» setlist consequently
overlooks several key albums — nothing from No Control or The New
America, for instance — and is heavily biased towards the «new shit», with
around three songs each for the new albums and even a preview of a couple
numbers from the upcoming Dissent Of Man.
Obviously, this is supposed to mean that even thirty years into their career,
Bad Religion are still as relevant for the world as they used to be — and even
though we might be sick to death of them already, we still have to admit that,
in a way, this is absolutely true.
Rating this album feels useless: the
performances are predictably top-notch and just as predictably predictable,
with both sides canceling out each other's excitement and boredom. The setlist
does tilt somewhat into the «non-hit» direction: many of the oldies and most of
the «newies» are either second-row singles or non-singles, so you get a chance
to refresh stuff like ʽMarkedʼ or ʽTomorrowʼ in your
memories. And, conspicuously, the album both opens and closes with a number from How
Could Hell Be Any Worse?, implying that, perhaps, after all, the band does
acknowledge that it already had said it all on their first LP — and that
everything that followed was just for the pinheads who didn't get it straight
the first time. Other than that, there is really nothing else to prompt any
serious mental activity on the part of the reviewer.
THE DISSENT OF MAN (2010)
1) The Day That The Earth
Stalled; 2) Only Rain; 3) The Resist Stance; 4) Won't Somebody; 5) The Devil In
Stitches; 6) Pride And The Pallor; 7) Wrong Way Kids; 8) Meeting Of The Minds;
9) Someone To Believe; 10) Avalon; 11) Cyanide; 12) Turn Your Back On Me; 13)
Ad Hominem; 14) Where The Fun Is; 15) I Won't Say Anything.
Everybody is free to choose the breaking point
at which the next review of a Bad Religion album consists of a single phrase —
«Yes, this is another Bad Religion album that sounds just like a Bad Religion
album». Most of the non-obsessed people would probably experience that breaking
point somewhere around Suffer or, at
most, Against The Grain: obsessed as
I am, I managed to struggle my way almost to the very end, although none of
these reviews could probably count as particularly insightful.
With The
Dissent Of Man, I finally wash my hands. Yes, this is another Bad Religion
album that sounds just like a Bad Religion album. But I will still add that the
current highlights are Graffin's power-poppy ʽSomeone To Believeʼ,
with a colorful guitar solo, and Gurewitz's ʽTurn Your Back On Meʼ
(unusually sentimental for a Bad Religion song, despite the usual crunchy
backing).
Actually, wait, there is something to add. Compared to most of the previous releases, The Dissent Of Man is almost
scandalously apolitical. There are love songs, nostalgic memoirs, character
portraits — and only a tiny handful of songs that explicitly mention
Afghanistan (ʽAd Hominemʼ) or descend into moralizing, with more of
a Biblical flavor sometimes than a Chomsky one ("well I know what's wrong,
and I know what's right, and I know that evil exists sure as day turns into
night" — a simplistic, but damn well constructed couple of lines,
actually).
This is either a sign that the band is getting old, after all, and getting
ready to pass on the torch, or perhaps it is just a side effect of the Obama
factor, but in any case, it works well in terms of the general atmosphere —
there is nothing on here that could be filed under «cringeworthy banality»,
although there is nothing that comes close to the apocalyptic fervor of
ʽNew Dark Agesʼ, either. All that remains is give this stuff another thumbs up.
Which, at this point, merely indicates that «Bad Religion have not lost it yet»,
although, presumably, only death itself — or three severe cases of either
finger arthritis or Alzheimer's — will
break this interminable chain, because writing and recording songs like these
is theoretically a process without any boundaries whatsoever.
TRUE NORTH (2013)
1) True North; 2) Past Is Dead;
3) Robin Hood In Reverse; 4) Land Of Endless Greed; 5) Fuck You; 6) Dharma And
The Bomb; 7) Hello Cruel World; 8) Vanity; 9) In Their Hearts Is Right; 10)
Crisis Time; 11) Dept. Of False Hope; 12) Nothing To Dismay; 13) Popular
Consensus; 14) My Head Is Full Of Ghosts; 15) The Island; 16) Changing Tide.
Each of us is at liberty to select the final
stage when the ensuing judgement for a Bad Religion record is made of just one
statement — «Verily, here is one more Bad Religion record that feels exactly
the same way as any Bad Religion record». The majority of the not-giving-a-damn
public would have been likely to go through that final stage circa the release
of No Control or, at the latest, Generator. I did give a damn, and
eventually succeeded in making it right to the finals, even if nary a single of
those album descriptions could qualify as somewhat instructive.
With True
North, I end up throwing in the towel. All right, so here is one more Bad
Religion record that feels exactly the same way as any Bad Religion record. I
only have to mention that the prominent tracks include Graffin's power-poppy
ʽCrisis Timeʼ, with a colorful guitar solo, and Gurewitz's
ʽDharma And The Bombʼ (unusually titled for a Bad Religion song,
despite the usual antiwar sentiments of the lyrics).
If these two paragraphs feel stylistically
close to the beginning of the previous review, this is understandable —
reviews have to reflect their object, and what better way is there to reflect
two near-identical objects than writing two near-identical reviews? Especially
considering that, under standard conditions, Bad Religion are immune to most
criticism. Here is how the average critic is expected to act: [A] Listen to the
latest Bad Religion album; [B] Admire how fast, energetic, socially conscious,
and deeply sincere all the songs are; [C] Write a review, beginning with
"[N] years into their career, Bad Religion are still at it / going strong
/ rocking their heads off / tearing down walls / kicking establishment's ass /
... / ..."; [D] Forget every single thing about the album three seconds
after the review has been submitted; [E] Go out there, have a life, meet your
lifemate, have a kid, marry, settle down, wait 2-3 years; [F] Loop back to [A],
repeat process. (Okay, so it doesn't really mean you should have a new kid
every 2-3 years, but you do get the overall message, I hope).
It all works perfectly unless you make the haywire decision of reviewing all the Bad
Religion albums at the same time — and just as I put a final stop to the
pseudo-review of Dissent Of Man, lo
and behold, here comes another Bad Religion. Fresh from the oven, sixteen songs
in thirty-five minutes, half Graffin, half Gurewitz, a few slow ones, mostly
fast ones, and each one is either predicting the apocalypse or hinting that it
might already be here, we are all simply too dumb and zombified to notice. The
most introspective that Graffin gets here is when he is trying to explain to us
why he likes saying «fuck you» so much (ʽFuck Youʼ) — apparently,
because "sometimes just a word is the most satisfying sound". Well,
uh, yes, whatever. He probably wrote that one for his university colleagues or
something.
But I have spent too much time with these guys
to even pretend to feel bored about it — I know perfectly well what to expect,
and I sort of... expect it. In fact, I'm probably going to feel a little
something missing from my life once Bad Religion finally breaks up for good —
except I suspect that they are going to outlive me eventually, because Greg
Graffin ain't gonna stop until The Man is down and The People are totally
enlightened, so get ready for repeating the Bad Religion ritual in a couple
more years.
ALL OVER THE PLACE (1984)
1) Hero Takes A Fall; 2) Live;
3) James; 4) All About You; 5) Dover Beach; 6) Tell Me; 7) Restless; 8) Going
Down To Liverpool; 9) He's Got A Secret; 10) Silent Treatment; 11) More Than
Meets The Eye.
We will not be remembering them for
ʽEternal Flameʼ — we will remember them for this album, one of the
finest treasures to come out of the «Paisley Underground» and a fine reminder
for everyone that it is possible to
be retro and innovative, old-fashioned and new-fangled, style-centered and
catchy, formulaic and emotional at the same time. Of course, its national and
international fame did not really come until Prince arrived on the scene and
turned them into gilt-bronze two years later, but who's to be surprised? They
don't call it underground for
nothing.
All
Over The Place was not the
Bangles' first release: two years earlier, it was preceded by a five-song
self-titled EP, which some critics predictably hail as the Bangles record to abide by — not because it still features
original founding mother Annette Zilinskas on bass (soon to be replaced by
Michael Steele), but because it is still delightfully lo-fi, released on the
aptly titled indie label «Faulty Products» instead of Columbia. However, other
than better production, All Over The
Place does not really represent any fallbacks from the aesthetics of Bangles — both the EP and the LP even
share exactly one cover of an old garage «nugget» (The La De Da's ʽHow Is
The Air Up There?ʼ and the Merry Go-Rounds' ʽLiveʼ,
respectively), and are best taken together, which would only bring the total
length to 44 minutes anyway.
So what's good about these Bangles? First, they
really love their guitars: both Susanna Hoffs on rhythm and Vicki Peterson on
lead have rich, thick, powerful, and
colorful power-pop tones. They like to jangle that stuff (ʽLiveʼ),
but they can just as well use it for crunchy purposes (ʽRestlessʼ),
or throw in wailing pop riffs that rival their idols, Big Star (ʽGoing
Down To Liverpoolʼ). The two have just enough technique to think of
various interesting things to do over the instrumental breaks (like the
Nashville-influenced guitar break on ʽAll About Youʼ; or the way
ʽJamesʼ starts out deceptively as a funk-rocker, only to take a
completely different turn ten seconds later and never go back again) — but not
enough to engage in empty flash. As light and insubstantial as most of these
songs are, these ladies are musicians, not «babes with guitars».
Second and most important, they are excellent
B-rate songwriters: B-rate, because all the elements are familiar, and they do
not even try to conceal it (ʽI'm In Lineʼ off the EP is built on the
ʽTaxmanʼ riff, and God knows how many Beatles or Big Star chord
sequences are less openly involved in the other numbers), but excellent,
because it never really bothers me — the ingredients are reshuffled expertly
and with feeling, the tempos are lively and exciting, and the singing is...
well, always nice to hear some simple, happy, ringing, innocent-sounding tones
in an era when the female intellectual ideal was defined by the likes of Kate
Bush or Siouxsie Sioux — not that I have anything against either, but there is
always room for a Susanna Hoffs as well.
Highlights include... just about everything.
ʽHero Takes A Fallʼ and ʽJamesʼ are probably the most
anthemic and easily memorizable / recognizable songs, although the album as
such is more frequently identified with a cover of Katrina and The Waves'
ʽGoing Down To Liverpoolʼ — a song that the Bangles took up, colored
up with less distortion and more treble, made a little less angry with more
melodic singing (drummer Debbi Peterson carries the lead), and they still ended up with a credible rocking
attitude. ʽRestlessʼ is more in the blues-rock idiom (with the lead
vocal going to the lower-pitched Vicki Peterson here), but pulled off quite
credibly; and their janglier, or their country-western-er sides (ʽDover
Beachʼ; ʽTell Meʼ) are also delightful.
It all works, because there is not only
unbridled love for guitar-based pop rock, expressed here so freely in an age of
dance beats and synthesizers, but there is also one thing that prohibits most
of today's bands from recreating the Bangles' success: a total lack of fear of
being judged too «silly», too «lightweight», too «fluffy» — these songs are innocent and simple in mood and
execution, and they have no double bottom or any other secrets to slowly
unravel over repeated listenings. But neither does any of this sound like an
expertly calculated retro-affair — the girls have been raised on a punk
bedrock, after all, and overall, an album like this would have been impossible
in the pre-Ramones, or, more accurately, the pre-Patti Smith era: as retro as
it is, in terms of character toughness displayed, it clearly belongs to their
time.
Actually, come to think of it, All Over The Place is simply timeless —
unpretentious high-quality entertainment for the ages, even topped off with a
little bit of chamber pop: ʽMore Than Meets The Eyeʼ is a good title
to introduce the accappella opening, the Merseybeat-style harmonies, and the
modest string quartet that form the album's coda, and show an additional side
to the girls' versatility — they not only know their ʽTaxmanʼ but
their ʽShe's Leaving Homeʼ as well. Naturally, it's all «fluff» — no
deep insights are to be gained or previously unexplored paths unlocked from
listening to the Bangles even at their best — but in 1984, it took brains,
brawns, and guts to produce this particular kind of fluff. Thumbs up.
DIFFERENT LIGHT (1986)
1) Manic Monday; 2) In A
Different Light; 3) Walking Down Your Street; 4) Walk Like An Egyptian; 5)
Standing In The Hallway; 6) Return Post; 7) If She Knew What She Wants; 8) Let
It Go; 9) September Gurls; 10) Angels Don't Fall In Love; 11) Following; 12)
Not Like You.
Almost everybody who cares about the Bangles
more than about the history of MTV usually speaks of Different Light as a serious step down in overall quality for the
band. However, this is «symbolically» true rather than «truly» true. The
moderate success of All Over The Place
had opened the doors to fame and fortune, and the girls were definitely not
above trying it out — they agreed to tour with Cyndi Lauper and eventually
attracted the attention of Prince himself, never the one to nonchalantly skip
over such a «tasty treat». And this encounter pretty much sealed their fate:
once you start taking orders (or even recommendations) from Prince, there is no
turning back — besides, considering how niftily Prince managed to remain his
own master while at the same time drawing in the big bucks, taking advice from
the guy naturally seemed like a big win.
So we have ʽManic Mondayʼ, written by
The Artist specifically for the Bangles and released as the first single from
their second LP. Is it a good pop song? You bet it is. The little baroque keyboard
riff that functions as the main melodic hook is unforgettable, as is the vocal
melody of the chorus (and if you think that "it's just another manic
Monday, I wish it was Sunday, 'cause that's my fun day" is a lame lyric,
you probably come from way before the era of Rebecca Black). Is it «an
important, progressive development» in the history of Bangles sound? No, it
isn't, since it shifts the emphasis away from the poppy, but bite-y electric
guitars and the sarcastically intelligent atmosphere of that sound — and moves
into the kind of territory inhabited by... not even so much by Prince as by
Madonna: the "all of my nights..." midsection could very easily be
pictured sitting somewhere in the middle of True Blue. Moreover, Susanna Hoffs does her best to sex up her
vocals, developing a «bedroom voice» that does sound suspiciously close to
Madonna's.
Most albums are usually judged on the strength
of their lead single — in this particular case, ʽManic Mondayʼ is not
very representative of the rest of
the album. First, most of the songs are still originals, composed by Hoffs and
the Petersons, or covers of artists you'd expect
them to cover (Big Star, Jules Shear). Second, the guitars make a loud return
on the second track already, and rarely let us down afterwards — and they are
good, trusty, jangly Bangl-y guitars, not the generic pop metal crap that
ruled over mainstream rock releases in 1986. What does unite these songs with ʽManic Mondayʼ is (a) the
production, which feels slicker and more technology-dependent than before, and
(b) the overall feel — where All Over
The Place kicked ass and felt strong and self-assured, Different Light comes across as a spiritual surrender... «...in
which the ladies embrace their feminine side and purge their pretty heads of
superfluous ideas».
Not totally, of course. New bass player Michael
Steele, for instance, gets to contribute ʽFollowingʼ, a sparse
acoustic ballad (which could have been even more effective, I think, without
the unnecessary synthesizer hum in the background) that could serve as a
blueprint for most of Ani DiFranco's career: punchy jazz/folk chords, strong,
independent vocals, harsh post-breakup lyrics etc. It is not as immediately
overwhelming as the big pop hits, but in time, it gets its warranted status of
overlooked highlight.
But on the other side of the deal, you have
ʽWalk Like An Egyptianʼ — written by Liam Sternberg, the song is
musically innovative (it sounds like a light calypso number turned into a
speedy rock anthem at the last moment) and lyrically fun, yet ultimately quite
light-headed and trifling: naturally, it ended up becoming one of their largest
hit singles, if not the trademark
song to be remembered by (particularly since everyone except for Debbi trades
lead vocals across the different verses). Great stuff for parties, but if you
ain't much of a party goer, chances are you will get tired of these friendly
hooks fairly quickly.
Nevertheless, far be it from me to call Different Light a «bad» album —
«disappointing», yes, but if all «disappointing» albums had this kind of
quality, we would have to rethink the meaning of the word itself. Frankly
speaking, there are no bad songs here. The Jules Shear cover is irresistible,
even if the main guitar riff is made to sound like ABBA and Hoffs' vocals are
once again done Madonna-style. The interpretation of Big Star's ʽSeptember
Gurlsʼ, once again with Steele on vocals, is respectful and well executed
(and was quite instrumental, by the way, in restoring Big Star's reputation and
earning the struggling Alex Chilton quite a bit in royalties). ʽStanding
In The Hallwayʼ, ʽReturn Postʼ, ʽNot Like Youʼ — all
of them catchy, fun, enjoyable numbers. Calling them «slick» is probably
justified, but if we only get to remember what was really slick in 1986, one of the worst years in mainstream pop
music history, Different Light will
have no choice but to, well, be seen in a different light.
In other words, the album is nowhere near close to a catastrophe on its own — it sets
the girls up for a fall, indicating the inevitably downwards direction their
career would take from that point, but the LP itself is well above any
devastating criticism, and still a must-have for all lovers of good pop music,
though probably not for the average
«girl power» fan. Isn't it ironic, really, that Prince was so impressed by one
of the girls' punkiest songs (ʽHero Takes A Fallʼ), that it stimulated
him to write them one of their «girliest» songs — one that they accepted and
swallowed up without a hitch? Isn't that
much better proof of the man's Mephistophelian powers than whatever Tipper Gore
ever spotted in his silly sexist lyrics?.. Oh well, never mind. Sexist,
feminist, slutty, or punkish, or both, this is a certified thumbs up in any case.
EVERYTHING (1988)
1) In Your Room; 2) Complicated
Girl; 3) Bell Jar; 4) Something To Believe In; 5) Eternal Flame; 6) Be With
You; 7) Glitter Years; 8) I'll Set You Free; 9) Watching The Sky; 10) Some
Dreams Come True; 11) Make A Play For Her Now; 12) Waiting For You; 13) Crash
And Burn.
There are two things that make Everything feel like an artistic
embarrassment: the album cover and ʽEternal Flameʼ. The album cover,
because it pictures the Bangles in typical late-Eighties glamor fashion, quite
a far cry from the sharp looks earlier in the decade; and ʽEternal
Flameʼ, because it is the song
on the album to go along with that look. If it weren't to become the girls'
greatest commercial achievement, it wouldn't be so heartbreaking. But it was,
and it would.
As far as power ballads go, ʽEternal
Flameʼ is hardly the worst example. Not only was it not written by Diane Warren (instead, Susanna Hoffs is aided here
by the corporate songwriting team of Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly), it doesn't
even begin to properly pick up «power» until half of the song is over, and its
vocal melody is at least mildly imaginative; plus, it is actually a nice
showcase for Hoffs' vocal range — she is not much of a mighty «belter», but it
is technically impressive, at least, how she inflects the chorus in so many
varieties.
None of which matters when we take the song in
its context. This is not Whitney Houston we are dealing with here — these are
the Bangles, America's pride and joy in the realm of colorful guitar-based
power pop, and to sing a song like ʽEternal Flameʼ for them means musical prostitution, fair
and square. Yes, one could say that the loss of innocence had occurred long
before, with the coming of Prince, or maybe even prior to that, with the girlie
looks, the make-up, and the coquetterie they had sported from the start, but
there are «problems on the way», and then there is the «point of no return»,
and there is a crucial difference between the two. With ʽEternal
Flameʼ, the group commits a travesty that is not easily forgotten — kind
of like a vegan accidentally being caught munching on a lamb chop.
It does not even matter that the rest of the
album, for the most part, does not even remotely resemble the style of
ʽEternal Flameʼ. Although the band relies more heavily on
synthesizers than they used to, and, in accordance with the times, goes along
with the electronic coating on the drums and a metallized sheen on formerly
«clean» guitars, the songs are still mostly in the pop-rock idiom, not too
different from the ideology of Different
Light or even All Over The Place.
After all, the album does not open with ʽEternal Flameʼ — it opens
with ʽIn Your Roomʼ, a fun, fast, vivacious, love-struck rocker, and
with a psychedelic coda to boot (mid-Eastern flavor for the synths and Revolver-style acid harmonies — whee!).
And the rest of the songs generally follow ʽIn Your Roomʼ rather
than ʽEternal Flameʼ, just as well.
Michael Steele contributes two jangle-pop
numbers, of which ʽComplicated Girlʼ is the lighter one, a fun pop
nugget, and ʽGlitter Yearsʼ is the bitter one, with a bit of
misplaced nostalgia ("I don't really know how we survived the glitter
years" — come now, 1988 was hardly any less «glitter» in essence than
1973). The Petersons rock their hearts out on ʽBell Jarʼ, a song that
could have been an easy highlight on an early Blondie album — the chorus is
very accurately written in classic Debbie Harry language. Occasionally, songs
are quite seriously spoiled by cheesy arrangements (ʽBe With Youʼ),
but the catchiness still cannot be denied.
In fact, the only other ballad on the entire album is ʽSomething To Believe
Inʼ, whose adult contemporary nature and lack of proper hook (the main
melody sounds like an impoverished variation on Paul McCartney's ʽListen
To What The Man Saidʼ) only proves further that the Bangles, fortunately
for us all, are simply incapable of writing ballads, period. And even more
fortunately for us, they do not really try — 11 pop rockers vs. 2 ballads is a
ratio that I quite approve of, even if it would have been much better for us
all if they'd at least waited until the «grunge revolution» to release these.
My original review for Everything gave it a really low score and complained about the lack
of songwriting — presumably, the combined treachery of ʽEternal
Flameʼ, hideous hairstyles, and sickening production values went to my
unexperienced head: nowadays, it seems that the core structures of these songs
do not generally fall behind what used to be. And yet, this does not, per se,
make Everything any less of a
sellout. Unlike some other artists, the Bangles did not enslave themselves to
the industry bosses, but they agreed to a humiliating compromise — with a
short-term gain and long-term loss, since the working relationships within the
band broke down completely as a result, and the girls parted ways soon after
the album's release.
Actually, most of these songs (expectedly)
sound much better when they are played live (especially when they make it to
the setlists of the reunited Bangles in the 21st century), so, in the end, let
us be generous and blame it all on the times, not on the artists. Interestingly
enough, the band's big hit from 1987, a cover of Simon & Garfunkel's
ʽHazy Shade Of Winterʼ that they recorded for the soundtrack of Less Than Zero, did not make it onto Everything — maybe because they intuitively
felt how pathetic all of their songs
would sound next to the genius of Paul Simon? (Actually, I guess Susanna Hoffs' own biggest hit from 1987 was her
underwear dance stint in The Allnighter,
but since it was done to the sounds of Aretha Franklin rather than her own
songs, there was no place for it on Everything,
either. Still gets millions of Youtube views, by the way — true art never
dies!).
Anyway, seeing as how I honestly enjoy most of these songs now, I give
the album a thumbs
up today — a humiliating compromise it is, perhaps, but play it
back-to-back with, say, something from late 1980s Heart to see what truly
constitutes a genuine nosedive in this sphere: even ʽEternal Flameʼ
is miles ahead of ʽWhat About Loveʼ in the taste department.
DOLL REVOLUTION (2003)
1) Tear Off Your Own Head; 2)
Stealing Rosemary; 3) Something That You Said; 4) Ask Me No Questions; 5) The
Rain Song; 6) Nickel Romeo; 7) Ride The Ride; 8) I Will Take Care Of You; 9)
Here Right Now; 10) Single By Choice; 11) Lost At Sea; 12) Song For A Good Son;
13) Mixed Messages; 14) Between The Two; 15) Grateful.
Unfortunately, this is not quite the comeback
one could hope for. You know how it sometimes works: good band digs up fine
formula, then sells out to silly cheesy trends and fads, then breaks up, then
comes back again with a cleared-up head, ready to tackle fine formula once
again with extra added maturity and professionalism at the expense of youthful
excitement and freshness — solid four stars as compared to the original five.
Doll
Revolution, too, could be
expected to work that way. Surely, if the Bangles had any reason to overcome
their personal problems and reconvene, it wouldn't be to recreate their glossy
mid-to-late Eighties sound — not now, not in the early 2000s, with the garage
rock revival in full swing? And since they never really lost their songwriting
skills, not even on Everything —
they simply yielded to external pressure that required mainstream-oriented acts
to rely on corporate writers — couldn't we hope for yet another ʽHero
Takes A Fallʼ, twenty years on?
Unfortunately, no. The first song on the album
inspires confidence: energetic mid-tempo, pulsating bass, nicely distorted
garage guitars, catchy vocals, aggressive bite-me delivery, and clever lyrics.
Then it turns out that the song is actually an Elvis Costello cover, taken from
his When I Was Cruel album from the
preceding year. That in itself is not a problem — better Elvis Costello than
Prince, at least if you're a Bangle. The problem is that nothing else on Doll Revolution even begins to come
close in matching that level of energy and vivaciousness.
The first single off the album, and the only
one that made even the tiniest ripple on some European charts (but not in the
US), was ʽSomething That You Saidʼ — a nostalgic trip to the realm of
1980s synth-pop, with Hoffs' creaky, but still sexy, vocals adorned by drum
machines and electronics a-plenty; no «power ballad» aspects here as there
were on ʽEternal Flameʼ, but melodically and mood-wise, the song is
even cornier. Again, there is nothing else here that sounds the same way, yet
the commercial calculation is clear — the song was designed to appeal to
contemporary dance-pop and soft-rock radio stations, almost as if someone
really thought there might be a good reason for somebody to be interested in
this shit coming from such a relic of the past.
Everything else here is stuck in between the
two extremes — nothing is either as fun as the rollicking, snappy title track
or as irritating as the barren romance of the synth-pop non-hit. The songs
generally fluctuate between smooth-flowing, even, not too exciting jangle-pop
(much of which is sung by Debbi and Vicki) and slower, not too exciting ballads
(many of them sung by Susanna). The level of spice-and-spunk is so low, really,
that some of the tunes may easily be mistaken for a Christine McVie solo
project (ʽHere Right Nowʼ) — nothing awful about it, but hardly the
rightest choice for the Bangles, who, at their best, always had some sharp
claws hidden behind the furry-purry surface.
Lyrics-wise, most of the songs are equally
«plain» — simple love messages, sometimes with a little bit of flailing of the
male hero, sometimes with a few tears over some faraway breakup; one tune,
ʽSingle By Choiceʼ, credited solely to Vicki, comes across as very
strange — the confidently delivered message ("single by choice, never
marry, never ever divorce") sounds a bit weird in the context of our
knowledge that "Peterson married musician John Cowsill on 25 October
2003" (i. e. less than two months after the release of the album). Unless
the whole thing is supposed to be ironic, but it honestly doesn't come off that
way. Weird.
Overall, the whole thing sounds... nice, which is certainly not enough of a
reason to justify this comeback, because the jangle-pop market in the 2000s is
so huge anyway. Sure, the production (other than on ʽSomething That You
Saidʼ) is tasteful, the girls' voices still sound vibrant (although Susanna's
has thinned out a wee bit), and the songs are not too poorly written. But the
album is also overlong — at sixty minutes, it could have certainly used some
trimming — and monotonous: as far as unpredictability is concerned, I miss a
ʽWalk Like An Egyptianʼ or some such adorable genre twist in between
all the jangly sweetness.
On the other hand, there is no question that it
could have been much, much worse, and that true Bangles fans will not be
disappointed — at least, not completely disappointed — by what has been
offered. And an album that loyally preserves a firm link to the legacy of Big
Star and Fleetwood Mac cannot be a complete failure in any case. Just don't
call it Doll Revolution — Doll Mummification would probably be
closer to the truth.
SWEETHEART OF THE SUN (2011)
1) Anna Lee (Sweetheart Of The
Sun); 2) Under A Cloud; 3) Ball 'n' Chain; 4) I'll Never Be Through With You;
5) Mesmerized; 6) Circles In The Sky; 7) Sweet And Tender Romance; 8) Lay
Yourself Down; 9) One Of Two; 10) What A Life; 11) Through Your Eyes; 12) Open
My Eyes.
If you liked Doll Revolution more than I did, this slow-on-the-move follow-up will
probably enchant you even further. If, however, you were left somewhat
unimpressed, then beware — most of the problems are still here, and as the
Bangles get older and their marrow gets stiffer (although they still manage to
remain visually attractive), chances are that this level is as good as it is
ever going to get. Father Time is a pretty hard guy to beat.
Still, at least this time around there is a
sense of tasteful purity here, filtering out any production excesses on the
level of ʽSomething That You Saidʼ — no attempts whatsoever to appeal
to the current mainstream tastes in pop music, easy as it could have been for
them to try on the pitiable red-dress / white-horse glamor of Taylor Swift. All
the guitar melodies and vocal harmonies bear the time-approved stamp of the
Paisley Underground (and, by induction, that of the Byrds-and-Beatles brands of
jangle-pop); all the rhythm sections are in strictly manual mode, with no signs
of being tampered with in the final production stage; all the lyrics are as far
away from modern day problems as possible — in short, just a good sip of that
old-timey California sun essence.
It all sounds wonderful: from the opening riffs
of ʽAnna Leeʼ (a song that inexplicably shares the name of its
imaginary protagonist with an old Beach Boys song, yet borrows its chief chord progression
from the overture to Tommy) and
right down to the respectfully performed cover of Todd Rundgren's ʽOpen My
Eyesʼ, there are no formal complaints to be lodged. The album was
carefully planned — some of the songs, according to the liner notes, had a
fairly long history of development, and ʽOpen My Eyesʼ was remembered
as one of the first songs the girls liked to perform live in the early days —
and just as carefully executed, even despite the fact that Michael Steele is no
longer in the band, so the songwriting was more or less evenly distributed
between Susanna, Vicki, and Debbi.
But the problem of Doll Revolution remains — all of these songs are strictly
second-rate, a nostalgia trip for lovers of nostalgia trips, with the words
NOSTALGIA TRIP imprinted in large blinking golden letters all over the place.
Speaking of which, All Over The Place,
too, could certainly be accused of being nostalgic and derivative — but it was
conceived and realised at a time when its «unhip» nostalgia clashed so fiercely
with the futuristic sheen of mainstream pop that it created an exciting
cultural wormhole; plus, the girls were young, fresh, snappy, snazzy, punchy,
and aggressive. Sweetheart Of The Sun,
in comparison, has very little «punch» to it: a song like ʽBall 'n'
Chainʼ, put forward by Debbi, is a rock'n'roll number alright, but its
sound is stiff and formulaic, way too clean, polished, and calculated, not to
mention utterly derivative, to make the song matter even the slightest bit once
it's over.
I will be the first to admit that there are a
few numbers here where the harmonies are really, really lovely. Hoffs'
ʽUnder A Cloudʼ, for instance, is a steady grower and has her working
that «head in a cloud» lovestruck charm to perfection. ʽMesmerizedʼ
does not quite match its title, but still comes up with a fairly emotional
nursery-rhyme type Brit-pop chorus. And it wouldn't hurt if Vicki's acoustic
ballad ʽCircles In The Skyʼ someday managed to replace ʽEternal
Flameʼ in the public conscience (well, at least we are allowed to dream).
But for every such grower, which still requires about two or three listens to
cast its spell, there is one or two inferior copies of it — and the overall monotonousness
of the proceedings is inavoidable.
In short, if I am mistaken about the Bangles
making age-based concessions (and I would love to be wrong), the only
alternative critique would be that they simply go way too far in the «sunny»
direction. Perhaps, like most normal people, they have simply settled down,
found inner peace, and only sing about whatever it is that they really have in
their hearts these days — music for honest, hip, and time-honoured family
entertainment. If so, I am very happy for them, and I certainly do not regret
spending time on listening to their happy songs of the new millennium. But even
John Lennon, in his happiest hour that was so ominously cut short, was not
above adding a drop of honestly experienced (or, at least, magnificently simulated)
doom and gloom (ʽI'm Losing Youʼ) to his happiest record (Double Fantasy) — so here is one more
reminder that the Bangles are not the Beatles. An album can only have that much value if it gives you
songwriting competence and emotional fluff instead of songwriting genius and
emotional depth, and Sweetheart Of The
Sun goes as far as it can go with its limitations, but alas, that just
ain't far enough.
BATHORY (1984)
1) Storm Of Damnation; 2)
Hades; 3) Reaper; 4) Necromansy; 5) Sacrifice; 6) In Conspiracy With Satan; 7)
Armageddon; 8) Raise The Dead; 9) War; 10) Outro.
Whatever you think of the whole «black metal»
schtick, it has to be acknowledged that, for an 18-year old, Bathory is quite a stunning
achievement. There is one thing I am not sure of, and that is the whole «lo-fi»
approach. On one hand, it is quite consistent with the general ideology of this
band that their output should sound
as if it were recorded inside a tightly packed garbage can. On the other hand,
even the Devil himself probably likes to ride in style, rather than appear in
the image of Freddy Krueger, the only guy who would have probably found the
production standards of Bathory completely to the liking of his charred guts.
Which is too bad, because this record, even
sharing as it does most of the clichés associated with «extreme» musical
genres, is genuinely innovative (for its time) and impressive (for ours). The
music is basically a cross between Venom and Slayer, with the grinning hellish
carnival attitude of the former set to the thrash metal punch of the latter.
Venom serve as the primary inspiration: not only is the goat picture on the
front sleeve conceived as a tribute to the front cover of Black Metal, but even several of the songs share the same titles
(ʽSacrificeʼ, ʽRaise The Deadʼ). But the music is faster,
angrier, «punkier» than Venom ever got, and clearly reflects the influence of
the thrash scene — as far as Bathory's opinion is concerned, the Horsemen of
the Apocalypse ride fast and hard, and the music has to reflect that fact.
Most importantly, though, the music reflects
the unquestionable talents of Thomas Börje Forsberg, usually known by the
name of Quorthon, who, by the tender age of 18 years, had not only mastered the
high level of guitar technique required to qualify for «metal master», but also
developed a taste for complex and interesting riffage. Sure, it takes time and
patience to rip through the awful production barrier (the whole album was
slap-dashed together in a garage, converted to a recording studio), but after a
couple of listens — which go by fairly fast, as the entire album clocks in at a
very wise 26:52 — the riffs come through, and they are all similar, but
different enough to distinguish one part of this twenty-six minute suite of
death and destruction from another. Which is all that is required of them; the
rest consists of a sworn dedication to kick ass at top speed (only ʽRaise
The Deadʼ slows the tempo down a little bit, probably because the dead are
not accustomed to rise as quickly as the Four Horsemen are accustomed to ride).
Quorthon's vocals, at this point, are strictly
locked in the «evil scream» mode — a bit less laughable than typical
«growling» vocals, just as his lyrics are a bit less laughable than the average
black metal lyric, especially
considering that they come from the mind of an 18-year old Swedish guy. (Well,
they are laughable, but for the most
part, the words are strung together without offending style or grammar). Just
how serious the guy was exactly is hard to tell — as far as I know, nobody ever
caught Quorthon in the act of burning down a church or feasting on the flesh of
freshly baptised Christian babies, but, of course, stuff like "The lies of
Christ will lose / The ways of Hell I choose / I drink the floating blood /
Defy the fury of God" (ʽIn Conspiracy With Satanʼ) shows
character — and helps build plenty of it.
Anyway, even though I cannot, for the life of
me, award an explicit thumbs up to anything with this kind of production (if
cleverly constructed riffs are your main forté, I can find no acceptable
excuse to insult these riffs with cheap equipment), and, besides, Bathory would
move on to much higher ground in the future, this self-titled debut is a fairly
amusing listen — could even be one for open-minded Christians, who are not
above a smirk or two at a caricaturesque, but professional musical depiction
of the Antichrist. Rumour has it that Quorthon expressed surprise and distress
when, upon the release of the album, the band started receiving blood-written
letters and dead animals in the mail — then again, it only means that he
managed to get into character all too well. (But a funny trivia bit:
apparently, Quorthon's father was the head of a Swedish record label, and
helped the kid out with recording and distribution during the early days of his
career. So either we have to conclude that the band was a completely phony act
from the beginning, or they got pretty liberal record label heads out there in
Sweden).
THE RETURN... (1985)
1) Revelation Of Doom / Total
Destruction; 2) Born For Burning; 3) The Wind Of Mayhem; 4) Bestial Lust; 5)
Possessed; 6) The Rite Of Darkness / Reap Of Evil; 7) Son Of The Damned; 8)
Sadist; 9) The Return Of The Darkness And Evil; 10) Outro.
It would be unwise to expect a sophomore album,
titled Return, to be seriously
different from its predecessor. There are
a few changes, though. First, the production is a little better: Quorthon's
guitars no longer sound like the echo of a drilling machine three miles away —
they actually sound like real guitars, if still a little farther away from the
mike than would be recommendable. Second, as impossible as it sounds, the album
is even more «consistent» than its predecessor — everything, apart from the dark-weathered «satanic-ambient» intro,
is brutally fast (Bathory, at the
very least, slowed down for ʽRaise The Deadʼ).
Unfortunately, the consistency and dedication
also means that musically, this is a step down: second time around, it is clear
that brutality, «darkness and evil» are far more important for Quorthon than
musicality. Most of the riffs are now interchangeable — based on rather
standard chord sequences, typical for hardcore and thrash artists. Quorthon's
solos are, in fact, more commendable than the riffs: he does not indulge in
them on every track (an interesting
link between Bathory and the hardcore punk attitude here, rather than their
metal brethren), but when he does, they are not so much empty technical feats
of finger-flashing as a device to heat up the atmosphere: he plays fast, but
(as I suppose) relatively simple flurries of «angry» licks, sometimes with
heavy echo effects, that have virtually no dynamics of their own (start in one
place, go visit another, finally end up in a third one or where you started
out, that sort of thing), but all rather sound like the musical equivalent of
flashing lightning to the rhythm section's roaring thunder.
Quorthon's vocals are also clearer in the mix
now, and incorporate more growling than they used to, even if it is still
hardly possible to describe them as classic «growling» — more like «hoarse
screeching» on the part of the protagonist whose larynx has just been shredded
by the lances of all the Four Horsemen, and now Lucifer in person is doing a
little tap dance on the bloody bits. Bad news — still not scary at all, Mr.
Forsberg. Consistent, though.
Individual songs are hardly worth commenting
upon, particularly since I have no favourite riffs on here, and vocal
«melodies» are non-existent in the first place. Recurrent listens do show that
the album has various influences — for instance, ʽBorn For Burningʼ
is based on a very familiar «New Wave of Heavy Metal» kind of pattern, with a
riff that would sound perfectly in place on a Judas Priest album. On the other
hand, the basic pattern of ʽRite Of Darknessʼ is much more simple and
straightforward, and with a slight tonality change most likely would have
become a Ramones number. Some reviewers have, in fact, noted that, at the time,
Bathory were really much more about the atmosphere than the technical accuracy
and complexity normally demanded of metal bands — in fact, the limited time
they had for their studio sessions leads to occasional mistakes on the part of
the rhythm section, something that would be unbelievable for a «true» metal
band. But, of course, the atmosphere itself, with its carnivalesque Satanism,
has nothing to do with the «hardcore» attitudes.
For some Bathory fans, The Return... and its follow-up are the quintessential Bathory albums, and I understand this: the
take-no-prisoners, show-no-mercy approach is demonstrated here with 100%
efficiency, if that is what you want
from your grotesque genre of black metal. A compact, quickly passing thirty-six
minutes of speed, thrash, and Dr. Evil riding on the coattails of The Horned
One. But, of course, if you are just an innocent by-passer with a bit of
curiosity to spare, any one of these
songs will do for a brief taster — try the title track, for instance.
UNDER THE SIGN OF THE BLACK MARK (1987)
1) Nocturnal Obeisance; 2)
Massacre; 3) Woman Of Dark Desires; 4) Call From The Grave; 5) Equimanthorn; 6)
Enter The Eternal Fire; 7) Chariots Of Fire; 8) 13 Candles; 9) Of Doom; 10)
Outro.
As «good» as their second album was, it is Under The Sign Of The Black Mark that
is usually extolled by fans as the absolutely quintessential and mind-blowing
Bathory release from Quorthon's hyper-aggressive youth. Frankly, I do not see
much difference except for, once again, slightly improved production (or maybe
I am just getting used to it), and... well, let's call it the «gradual getting
into character» aspect: third time around, Quorthon feels so confident about impersonating
Countess Bathory's loyal henchman that he finds the time for additional
flourishes, occasional experiments with tempos, more varied lyrics, and,
overall, lets us know that even the Prince of Darkness himself sometimes gets
bored with the rigidity of the formula.
Light-speed thrashers do serve as both the
lead-in (ʽMassacreʼ) and lead-out (ʽOf Doomʼ, specially
addressed to the band's growing fanbase and proclaiming how the fans are really
one with the band — no free Christian blood offered, though) tracks; musically,
they are all but indistinguishable from ʽChariots Of Fireʼ and
ʽEquimanthornʼ — the latter does start out quite promisingly, with a
poisonously cool fuzz bassline, but it almost immediately disappears under the
usual onslaught of thrash metal guitar. However, ʽWoman Of Dark
Desiresʼ (an anthem to Elizabeth Bathory in person) is different, mainly
because of the insane jackhammer drumming pattern — they make it sound a little
Mötörhead-ish by saving on the beats, and somehow come out with an absolute
black metal classic (if you disregard Quorthon's attitude towards «singing»).
But about half of the songs do not pay that
much importance to the tempo — the album's central point, ʽEnter The
Eternal Fireʼ, is played at least twice as slow as usual, and ʽCall
From The Graveʼ also prefers to be ominous and threatening in its gradual
onslaught rather than all-out psychopathic. Supposedly, these tunes now have
more of a historical than any other kind of importance — back in 1987, few
people were willing to go that far in
their theatrical recreations of evil and destruction, and certainly, compared
to the hair metal vaudeville of the time, these
tunes, with their shitty production that only emphasized the bloody guitar
distortion, and with Quorthon's defiantly anti-musical wild beast roaring on
top, could send a genuine shiver or two down yer spine. These days, it is much
harder to understand just what all the fuss was about, considering how many
people have done the same thing since then with improved production, musicianship,
lyrics, and vocals. But, as is the usual thing with all such pioneering
efforts, the trick is in using your sixth sense to locate the «bravery angle»
in this stuff — the excitement of daring to be among the first to go all the
way that is somewhere in there.
That said, my opinion on the album is that it
represents a bit of a stagnation point: subsequent history shows that Quorthon,
unlike many of his colleagues, did worry about being stuck in the jaws of one
rigid formula, and it is not by sheer coincidence that his stylistics started
to change most seriously, beginning from the next album — he must have sensed,
too, that Under The Sign Of The Black
Mark did not manage to say much that had not already been said on the
self-titled debut. As such, it may be the best-sounding record in the early
trilogy (although the use of the word «best» should not offer any false hopes),
but it does not even have the best riffs. Well, it may have the best attitude.
But that is only if your spirit is properly prepared to tremble before the
hellfire bolts of the mighty Quorthon. If — like me — you think black metal at
its best is ridiculous, corny, B-movie-level fun, then attitude alone is not
going to carry you through the experience, safe, sound, and happy: there's got
to be some plotline substance to be interested in, and the sheer music throughout Black Mark does not quite cut it.
BLOOD FIRE DEATH (1988)
1) Odens Ride Over Nordland;
2) A Fine Day To Die; 3) The Golden Walls Of Heaven; 4) Pace 'Til Death; 5)
Holocaust; 6) For All Those Who Died; 7) Dies Irae; 8) Blood Fire Death.
According to false rumors, the original title
was to be Wine, Women, And Loud Happy
Songs, but this was ultimately deemed way too scary for Bathory's target
audience, so they settled on the far more cozy and conventional Blood Fire Death instead. After all, it
was just another quiet, uneventful, peaceful, friendly, sunny day in the
Bathory neighborhood when Quorthon and his trusty companions with easily
pronounceable names, Vvornth on drums and Kothaar on bass, set out to record
what some would later call «the first true example of Viking metal».
Actually, this is a prime example of a
«transition» album: predating the full turnaround of Hammerheart, Bathory's fourth record introduces multiple new
elements — epic intros, slower tempos, acoustic guitars, occasionally «clean»
vocals — but still largely rests upon the same old vicious, «sincerely evil»
thrashing style. The ideological change from «Black Metal» to «Viking Metal»
does begin here, though. Maturation takes on specific forms in specific people,
and for Quorthon, it meant moving away from Satanic posturing (which, no matter
how sincerely he tried to get into it, still retained the status of
posturing... fortunately for him and for us all) and, predictably enough,
embracing his mythical Scandinavian heritage.
So, instead of yet another concept album about
the next coming of the Antichrist, we are now invited to look back into the
past rather than the future, with a concept album about... on second thought,
the most «Viking» thing about the album is the title of the opening ambient
instrumental: ʽOden's Ride Over Nordlandʼ (I do presume Quorthon,
whose spelling skills are not clear enough to me, means Odin, and not a Japanese winter dish consisting of several
ingredients such as boiled eggs, daikon radish, konnyaku, and processed fish
cakes stewed in a light, soy-flavoured dashi broth) is little more than some
medieval choral harmonies mixed with very distant thunder and not so very
distant vigorous horse neighing. But it does set up a better atmosphere than
any other previous Bathory intro.
Then, ʽA Fine Day To Dieʼ starts out
with a dark acoustic pattern — already an acknowledged instrument for «artsy»
metal bands, but feeling almost like a sellout signal for Quorthon, who had
never before stooped to anything softer than a viciously distorted,
blacker-'n'-night guitar tone. But unlike many other metal epics, this one
makes a genuine point with its acoustic intro: setting a deceptive "orgy
of silence, conspiracy of peace" tone for the coming onslaught. The
acoustic guitars and church harmonies will be returning later, but the bulk of
the song is given over to carefully thought out and terrifiedly played
«martial» black metal riffs (with a strong Metallica influence, I suspect, but
it is not likely that Quorthon's proud Scandinavian nature would ever let him
admit being influenced by a bunch of Californian sissies).
Barring the intro, the record is bookmarked by
two epic length songs: ʽA Fine Day To Dieʼ has enough potential for
eight and a half minutes, while the title track, which essentially picks up
where the other one left off, clocks in at 10:29. Actually, it is not quite true that they have enough
potential: each one is dominated by one riff only, and there is not enough
dynamic rising and falling, particularly with Bathory's limited
instrumentarium, to rise above the «mesmerism for headbangers» level. But it is
also true that each of the riffs is great to headbang to, and Quorthon is also
improving as a lead player — his solos are now becoming highly melodic without
having to depend on any Van Halenesque displays of technicality.
On the other hand, Blood Fire Death is not at all free from «old-school» speedy thrash
blasts: ʽGolden Walls Of Heavenʼ and pretty much everything else in
between the two epics are taken at same old breakneck tempos (although some of
the songs, like ʽDies Iraeʼ, consist of alternating fast and slow
sections), and, considering how much the production has improved here — in
fact, Blood Fire Death marks
Bathory's assured transition from lo-fi to hi-fi — these songs are probably
your best bet if you want to hear classic Bathory speed/thrash metal in decent
sound quality. Whether these tracks are good examples of thrash songwriting is another matter — as far
as my ears are concerned, they are all interchangeable, with the exception of
the slightly slower and even dumber-sounding ʽFor All Those Who Diedʼ
(this track also has the unfortunate distinction of trying to make a «hook» of
Quorthon's accappella laryngeal screaming in the chorus — not a good idea if one is aiming at a genuinely shivery
atmosphere).
Moreover, even the lyrics for those
«thrashers», many of which are written in the old «Satanist» manner, show that
the crossover might actually have begun not prior to, but during the sessions
for the album — with the two «battlefield epics», presaging the sonic scapes of
Hammerheart, framing the
traditionally-oriented material simply because Quorthon was just testing the
waters, and still had a bunch of old unused stuff lying around. As it is, Blood Fire Death is either a good
choice for a Bathory beginner — getting to know Quorthon as «Satan's sidekick»
and «Epic warrior» at the same time — or an obligatory choice for a Bathory completist,
but for those people (like myself), who can really only appreciate a band like
Bathory when it is at its very, very best and «quintessential», Blood Fire Death may seem like a
historically important, but artistically clumsy compromise. So, no thumbs up
here, but a significant promise that will be honestly capitalized upon in the
next installment.
HAMMERHEART (1990)
1) Shores In Flames; 2)
Valhalla; 3) Baptised In Fire And Ice; 4) Father To Son; 5) Song To Hall Up
High; 6) Home Of Once Brave; 7) One Rode To Asa Bay; 8) Outro.
Bathory's one true masterpiece. Yes, it may be
a bit hard for those who are not innate fans of the formulaic «epic fantasy»
genre to acknowledge this — that a pompous, thoroughly un-ironic, crudely
recorded metal album about the forceful conversion of one's Viking ancestors to
Christianity could ever deserve being called a masterpiece. It has not been
easy for me, either. But I did get over it, eventually, and now am confidently
re-stating this: Bathory's Hammerheart
is a masterpiece, and probably the one «Viking Metal» album to get if
you only plan to get one. Unless you have vikingophobia or something.
So what is the key to Quorthon's secret here?
The key is quite simple — in fact, simple
is the key. Where the general trend among power metal and progressive metal
bands was to make the music more complex, by adding more and more notes to the
riffs, more and more sections to the songs, more and more influences to the
styles, etc., Quorthon, having temporarily jettisoned the «evil speed metal»
warhorse, has retained the overall idea of keeping his melodic base as simple
and repetitive as possible. Had the guy been utterly talentless, this would
probably have been the end of him. But as it is, the slowing down reveals his genuine
knack for «basic» heavy melodies with a strong emotional undercurrent. Be it
the old pagan gods that inspired him for this one, or some other unknown
factor, these here riffs work, and work admirably.
Naturally, the album is not «authentic». No
matter how bloodthirsty / pure at heart / worthy of adoration / awesome in
every way Quorthon's Northern ancestors might have been, they did not entertain
each other with heavy distorted riffs and heavy artillery-style drumming. Nor
was the process of converting to Christianity always as dramatic and tragic as
Quorthon paints it to be in ʽOne Rode To Asa Bayʼ (even if violence
was indeed involved in many a particular occasion). But, like most Viking
metal, going all the way back to Led Zeppelin's ʽNo Quarterʼ, this is
not a case of «history in music» — this is musical mythology, standing with one
toe in facts and the rest in inflamed imagination, and the value of Hammerheart is not in educating the
listener, but in spreading the inflammation.
ʽShores In Flamesʼ and ʽOne Rode
To Asa Bayʼ are the two major epic pieces that open and close the album —
the former presenting the «Viking» world at its apogee (a tale of raiding and
ravaging, of course) and the latter at its nadir, with Christianity taking its
revenge and burying the old pagan pride and warpower six feet under.
ʽShores In Flamesʼ has all the required scenery: sound effects
(steady rowing at the beginning, burning embers at the end); eerie build-up
(acoustic intro with faraway vocals, gradually unfurling into fire and fury);
anthemic sing-along battle march delivered in tandem with the riff, early
Black Sabbath-style; and some of the most bloodthirsty, banshee-wailing soloing
ever delivered by mortal man. Special honorable mention goes to the percussion
onslaught of «Vvornth» — nothing particularly complex, but the guy was clearly
picturing himself in the guise of a mighty fur-clad warrior, with each beat
falling like a heavy blow from a mighty warhammer. Evocative!
My personal favorite number, however, is
ʽBaptised In Fire And Iceʼ — this one wastes no time with no sissy
intros, but plunges headfirst into one of the most beastly-brutal riffs in
Bathory history... wait, there are at least three different riffs here: the verses are driven by a simplistic,
one-chord pattern that might as well have a punkish origin, then the bridge is
turned over to one of those «deep sea metal» riffs invented by Toni Iommi, and
then the "baptised in fire and ice!" chorus is accompanied by
something in between the two extremes (and sounding fairly grungy, or
alt-rockish, whichever you prefer). Against this background, Quorthon's
«singing», now mostly free of growling and throaty screeching, is perfectly
credible — the guy may have no range or subtlety, but neither would we expect it
of an idealized duty-bound Nordic warrior, whose spirit this guy is channelling
so successfully. In fact, it is a good thing that Quorthon does not have a very
powerful voice: it adds a bit of realism to the proceedings — otherwise, the
whole thing would have taken on a cartoonish, Manowar-style aura, and that
would be the end of Hammerheart as
we know it.
Because, indeed, the most amazing thing about
the album is that it does not feel «cheesy», not to me, at least. Its subject
matter is anything but new, and rather banal in theory; its English lyrics,
though surprisingly literate and well-articulated for a Norwegian guy with a
fantasy fetish, are still nothing to write home about; its instrumentation is
minimalistic, and its music repetitive (ʽOne Rode To Asa Bayʼ is like
an endless droning saga, going on and on and on until you are finally forced to
believe in its utmost importance through sheer length alone). But, having lost
the crazy speed and the aggressive Satanism of his early years, Quorthon still
preserves the essence of Bathory — an uncanny ability to substitute the boring
«institutional» pathos of power metal for a snappy, snarling, attacking style
of delivery, so that even at his most pompous, he is still directly kicking the
listener's ass instead of roaring away pointlessly somewhere high up in the
sky. The balance between mediocre production, sparse, but loud arrangements,
good riffs, and genuine inspiration is pretty much unique here — so much so
that, despite the superficial simplicity of the formula, even Quorthon himself
was never again able to capture it quite so well.
It goes without saying that for some of
Bathory's veteran fans the stylistic change was a bit too much — those who were
won over by the original trilogy could not pardon Quorthon for releasing a
record so completely devoid of crazyass Satanic thrashing. And for others, Blood Fire Death, with its compromise
mix of the old and the new, remains the definitive Bathory album for ages to
come. But personally, I hold the opinion that it is only on Hammerheart that the guy achieved his
purpose on Earth, and came as close to fully realising his true potential as
possible, even if, technically, the album is less diverse than its predecessor
— then again, was there ever a time in music history when a heavy metal band
could be seriously criticized for lack of diversity? Thumbs up, Viking brothers and
sisters. But don't you go burning any Christian churches — for the record,
please note that Hammerheart
provokes anything of that sort no more than ʽThe Night They Drove Old
Dixie Downʼ provokes anti-Yankee partisan action.
TWILIGHT OF THE GODS (1991)
1) Twilight Of The Gods; 2)
Through Blood By Thunder; 3) Blood And Iron; 4) Under The Runes; 5) To Enter
Your Mountain; 6) Bond Of Blood; 7) Hammerheart.
This thematic follow-up to Hammerheart is even more epic and ambitious in nature than its predecessor
— starting out with the mere fact that it runs close to an hour, something that
was utterly unthinkable in Bathory's early speed metal days, and even Hammerheart itself stated its point in
about forty minutes. The subject matter stays the same (the album title could
not be more transparent), but the balloon has been inflated to the limit.
Lengthier, moodier intros; darker, ever more shadowy backing vocals; singalong
anthemic choruses; and, most importantly — this is probably the farthest that
Quorthon ever ventured away from stereotypical metal aesthetics. Formally,
this is still heavy metal («power metal», «Viking metal», whatever), but it
does not feel much like heavy metal —
more like a heavy rock opera with a dark folk basis.
There is nothing wrong in this per se, of
course, but one big reason why Hammerheart
worked so well were its undoubtedly metallic, undoubtedly killer riffs —
outbalancing and justifying the relatively shallow pathos. It may or may not
have given us a distinct musical vision of pre-Christian Scandinavia, but at
least it was a true blood-boiler. Twilight
Of The Gods, in comparison, places far more faith in atmospherics — slow,
leaden, repetitive, epic monsters, progressing in a regime stuck between stoner
rock and snail rock. There is some sense of impending doom, yes, but it tends
to quickly dissipate in the head once the tunes are over — which, it seems to me,
is a sign of somewhat inefficient musicality.
The title track picks up right from where we
were previously left with ʽOne Rode To Asa Bayʼ: twelve minutes of
bitter ranting against the perils of monotheism (Quorthon even lashes out at
«TV preachers» and such, implying that the «loss of innocence» described in Hammerheart is anything but simply
ancient history, still influencing our lives on an everyday basis — and who
could actually argue?), with a deeply repetitive structure, but ultimately
feeling like the «smouldering ashes» sequel to the raging fire of ʽAsa
Bayʼ. It is moody, and its simplistic dirge-like melody is convincing, but
still overlong, not to mention the rather excessive acoustic intro and outro
(with Quorthon's lack of overpowering playing technique or unpredictable
inventiveness, it does not seem right for him to allocate so much space to
pedestrian acoustic plucking).
Everything else follows the same formula: slow
tempos, monotonous rhythms, stern Gregorian back vocals, and Quorthon himself
epically wailing about what the loss of Thor's hammer and other such gadgets
cost humanity in the race for survival. The best riff is probably saved for
ʽBlood And Ironʼ — that particular chord sequence seems alive with
the spirit of classic Black Sabbath and conveys the necessary atmosphere of
sheer ravaging brutality: ʽTo Enter Your Mountainʼ, very similar in
tone and structure, is already a little less efficient, and so on.
An attempt to come up with something completely
different is saved for last: ʽHammerheartʼ (another of those strange
cases where the would-be title track for an LP is suddenly carried over to the
next LP) is nothing less than a rearrangement of Holst's Jupiter with an extra vocal part written by Quorthon and delivered
in his best imitation of a «folk-operatic» voice (surprisingly tolerable for a
guy who was previously known mostly for spasmodic guttural shrieking). Not particularly
awful for a solemn, stand-up-and-join-together coda hymn, but naturally
amateurish: King Crimson might have the guts to tackle Holst, or, at least,
some well-oiled, well-experienced symph metal machine like Opeth — Quorthon
alone isn't quite fit to handle the weight.
Still, while it is almost inevitable that Twilight Of The Gods largely sinks
under the heaviness of its titanic ambitions, the final result could have been
much worse. The difference is that it is quite clear that this whole stuff
really means a lot to Quorthon — the album's lack of gloss, the elaborate (if
not particularly original) lyrics, the snap and snarl in Quorthon's
intonations, the relentless energy expended for the repetitive punching out of
the simple riffs, it all has a positive effect. It's just that you either give
your listeners a heavy metal album — and in that case, Twilight Of The Gods suffers from a lack of classy riffs — or a
«heavy-art» album, in which case, it suffers from extreme monotonousness and straightforwardness
of approach.
For all the bravery and an overall lack of
embarrassing moments (even ʽHammerheartʼ, amateurish as it is, does
not qualify as «offensive» in my book), Twilight
Of The Gods deserves a thumbs up alright. But in retrospect, it seems
like a wrong move, a case of overstepping into alien territory, and, although
few people can be said to have been well acquainted with the odd workings of
Quorthon's mind, it may well be that the man was disappointed with the final
product himself — sufficiently disappointed to plunge head first, as a
misguided counteract, into the corniest phase of his lonesome career.
REQUIEM (1994)
1) Requiem; 2) Crosstitution;
3) Necroticus; 4) War Machine; 5) Blood And Soil; 6) Pax Vobiscum; 7)
Suffocate; 8) Distinguish To Kill; 9) Apocalypse.
This has got to be one of the most bizarre
twists not just in Bathory history, but in the entire history of heavy metal.
Nobody could have expected that — all of a sudden, after one suitably transitional,
one fully established, and one somewhat stagnant, but still understandable
stylistic follow-up, Quorthon completely jettisons the whole «Viking metal»
angle, and puts out a bona fide thrash metal album, conforming to all the laws
of the genre. Insane tempos, jackhammer riffs, growling vocals, complete
disregard for variety, and a running length of 33 minutes.
Now, considering that this was Quorthon, after
all, the guy that moved from speedy black-metal satanism to the sacred hammer
of Thor in less than half a decade, something radical could have been
predicted, but hardly this, an album that shows no traces whatsoever of
anything that made Hammerheart so
unique. And the really bad news is that there is nothing whatsoever that would
make Requiem comparably unique. It
has been reported that Quorthon's goal here was simply to pay a brief tribute
to some of his early metal influences — to take a break from rolling the epic
stone and do something just for the momentary fun of it. Perhaps so, but this
neither explains why the trend continued on his next albums, nor makes the
whole experience gain in intelligence.
Two things somewhat redeem this strange
decision. One, the production continues to be miles ahead of Bathory's early
stuff, and Quorthon's guitars produce meticulously differentiated strings of
metallic notes rather than the thick black goo of the first three albums.
Second, strange as it is, many of the thrash riffs that he knocks together for
these songs are fun — slow them down
a bit, paint them less black, and you can get a pretty memorable hard rock
album. With everything taken at the same tempo (except for the mood-setting
intros, which tend to be slow and sludgy), the riffs are very similar in
structure and mood, but each single song does have its own riff, with slight
variations, and after a couple listens you might even start appreciating the
melodic component — at any rate, these songs are not ultra-quick knock-offs,
because you would have to be a
musical genius to knock 'em off in a couple of minutes, and Quorthon is hardly
a musical genius, but he sure was a hard worker.
So it is not the riffs (which are quite fine
for a generic thrash record), nor the solos (which, I do believe, show further
improvement in Quorthon's technique) that irritate. Irritating factors involve
(a) the drumming: «Vvornth» was fine and dandy working with the slow epic stuff,
but with the fast stuff, most of the time he is just too busy trying to stay on time so as to try something
interesting — a regular bane with both thrash and hardcore, making the
drumming patterns sound moronic instead of properly aggressive; (b) the singing:
gone altogether are Quorthon's clean vocals, replaced by sore-throat growling
that is not even banshee-style evil like on the early records, just sounds like
a freshly excavated zombie from a zombie-trash style movie.
Lyrics-wise, Quorthon moves back to images of
gore, violence, and Satanism, occasionally going to such extremes that, once
the lyrics sheet is finally pulled out and examined, the parodic status of the
album may no longer be doubted — I mean, "the altar covered in lifegiving
cum / the smell of forever running wet cunts"? that's not even close to
the style of the first three albums, more like Cannibal Corpse or something.
But I seriously doubt that somebody will ever want to look at those lyrics with
a magnifying glass — in general, my only wish is for this album to have been
presented as completely instrumental, in which case we could simply take all
these riffs home and stay safe, sound, and undamaged by the expelled shards of
Quorthon's Miraculously Self-Regenerating Larynx.
Thumbs up for the brave decision for a radical
change — already the second one in Bathory's history, propelling Quorthon's
team to further levels of uniqueness — but much as I like some of these riffs,
the experience as a whole is so ridiculous that the same gesture can hardly be
applied to the music. Still, nowhere near as bad, mind you, as some of
Bathory's disappointed fans, yearning for another meeting with the
Scandinavian pantheon, would have you believe.
OCTAGON (1995)
1) Immaculate Pinetreeroad
#930; 2) Born To Die; 3) Psychopath; 4) Sociopath; 5) Grey; 6) Century; 7) 33
Something; 8) War Supply; 9) Schizianity; 10) Judgement Of Posterity; 11)
Deuce.
This is where we hit total rock bottom: think Requiem, but without all the good riffs. Keeping the tempos, Quorthon completely
jettisons any attempts at decent songwriting — most of this stuff is headed
straight for the moshing pit and nowhere else. Perhaps the idea was that Requiem did not manage to be nearly as
extreme as Quorthon envisaged it, so he gave us something even more blunt,
minimalistic, and «parodic» in the bad sense of the word.
If it can be any consolation, the vocals are
cleaner this time, closer in execution and effect to classic early Bathory than
the «gargling-one's-own-vomit» approach of Requiem.
On the other hand, the lyrics have deteriorated beyond repair: ʽ33
Somethingʼ is Quorthon's «tribute» to the execution of serial killer John
Wayne Gacy, about which he must have read in the papers circa 1994, and if the
«song» is supposed to make one experience disgust towards the killer, it fails
— by offering neither a hint at melody nor a glimpse of truly scary imagery.
"Blooded hole, twisted soul, eat my shit, suck my dick", goes the
refrain. Okay then.
One does not have to go much farther than the
song titles — ʽPsychopathʼ, ʽSociopathʼ (back to back!),
ʽSchizianityʼ — to understand what it is all about: a dumb experiment
in going to sonic and verbal extremes, perhaps (who knows?) consciously aimed at offending and
alienating Quorthon's heavily expanded fanbase. In the process, lines are
completely blurred between heavy metal and hardcore (much of this record could
have very easily come from the hands of, say, Agnostic Front), but not in a
triumphant synthesis of the genres, rather in a catastrophic meltdown of both.
A few of the songs slow down the tempos (ʽCenturyʼ,
ʽSchizianityʼ), but then they end up sounding like derivative and
cumbersome attempts to revive the old New Wave of British heavy metal — not as
utterly dumb, perhaps, but just as forgettable.
Biggest surprise, and most decent entry on the
album, is a cover of ʽDeuceʼ — yes, the KISS song, possibly thought
of as another ironic slap in the face to the fans: Bathory's evil / brutal
sound used to be as far removed from the glam-rock theater of KISS as possible,
yet here is Quorthon coming out of the closet, confessing his loyalty not only
to the old-school thrash masters (which could be understood), but to the
make-up wearing poseurs as well. As an expectation-breaker, the gesture could
actually be adorable — if not for the fact that the cover is all too faithful,
yet all too perfunctory, carrying over neither the caveman cockiness of Gene
Simmons, nor the garage crudeness of early KISS guitars (for that matter, cold
as I usually am towards KISS, ʽDeuceʼ is one of their greatest songs,
and nobody has ever played it quite like those guys).
In short, another failure — experimental
failure, to be precise, not a corny «sell-out» or anything, just firm final proof
that not everything Quorthon tried to
do turned to gold. Black metal, yes; Viking metal, for sure; but troglodytish
thrashing — no. (I almost caught myself trying to type in something like
"the guy was just too intelligent to properly get this style", but
then realized I have way too little knowledge about Quorthon's degree of
intelligence to make this into even a purely hypothetical statement). Thumbs down,
and it would be easy to pretend that this album never actually happened — after
all, «failed experiments» do not have to be considered as a natural part of the
artist's general curve.
BLOOD ON ICE (1996)
1) Intro; 2) Blood On Ice; 3)
Man Of Iron; 3) One Eyed Old Man; 4) The Sword; 5) The Stallion; 6) The Woodwoman;
7) The Lake; 8) Gods Of Thunder, Of Wind And Of Rain; 9) The Ravens; 10) The
Revenge Of The Blood On Ice.
Apparently, the story is as follows: In between
the «transitional» Blood, Fire And Death
and the stylistic revolution and public success of Hammerheart, Quorthon had actually recorded yet another album —
one that explored his newly-acquired interest in his Scandinavian heritage even
farther than Hammerheart, being sort
of a highly cohesive «rock oratorio». Inside was a Nordic fantasy, loosely
based on the motives of Germanic mythology, but «creatively reworked» by
Quorthon, presumably in order to avoid being sued by Odin's and Thor's legal
representatives for copyright infringement — you never know when that
lightning might strike you.
Having recorded the master tapes, Quorthon, however,
had second thoughts about releasing the album for public consumption — feeling,
as he admitted himself, that his fanbase was not yet ready for such a radical
image reinvention. The project was therefore shelved, and Quorthon started
working on Hammerheart instead. Only
six years later, having accidentally leaked the information and received lots
of feedback from the fans (who, by that time, were not only well accustomed to
his Viking schtick, but probably also felt seriously irritated by Quorthon's subsequent
move to stupid thrash territory), he returned to the old tapes — cleaned them
up, remixed them based on improved technology, and finally made them available
to everyone under the title of Blood On
Ice, which at least sounds a little better than «King Arthur on ice», I'd
say.
Frankly speaking, it is not quite clear why
this album, had it been out there in 1989, could have been more of a «shock» to
fans than Hammerheart. It does
suffer in comparison to the latter, but not because of its storyline, or any
sort of extra pomposity, or anything like that: it simply does not match Hammerheart in terms of sheer quantity
of good ideas. The storyline is a
little corny, as is every one-man fantasy-style reworking of any mythological
tradition — elegantly shaped and steadily balanced through hundreds of years of
«natural selection» — and perhaps he did feel a little shy about unfurling his
story of one-eyed wise men, twin-headed Beasts, and eight-legged stallions,
replacing it with the superficially more impressive pseudo-historism of Hammerheart. However, Quorthon's verbacity
rarely stands in the way of proper music: the real reason why Blood On Ice feels a little
disappointing is that, unlike Hammerheart,
this one is really envisioned as a «musical saga», and the one flaw that could
be naturally expected of a musical saga is monotonousness and repetitiveness.
From that angle, Blood On Ice, with its emphasis on the «never-ending riff» rather
than the «awesome riff», has more in common with Twilight Of The Gods, or those particular parts of Hammerheart that pre-announce Twilight (most notably, ʽOne Rode
To Asa Bayʼ). The tracks are typically long and repetitive, only
occasionally jolted by vocal gimmicks (such as the deep «iron-man» spoken
passage in the middle of the title track, or the «one-eyed old man» monolog on
the same-titled tune) or an acoustic interlude (ʽThe Ravensʼ;
ʽMan Of Ironʼ, despite its title, is actually a crudely constructed
acoustic folk ballad as well).
Elsewhere, the riffs are really only there to
propel the song forward — martial-wise (title track; ʽThe Stallionʼ)
or, sometimes, in a more blues-rocky, almost swampy mode (ʽThe Lakeʼ
— did I just say «swampy»?). This is all fine and dandy for a «saga», if we are
simply supposed to take this as a heavy backing to Quorthon's story, but if the
story happens to be the last thing in
which we might be interested on a Bathory album, the number of memorable events
on Blood On Ice will not be too
large. (For some reason, the only thing that still sticks with me after several
listens is the juxtaposition of thumping hooves and bleating sheep — even
though I have never suspected myself of anything close to a pastoralist or
nomadic mindset...).
Altogether, this one is definitely for the
fans, although it goes without saying that it does feel a lot like a gulp of
fresh, methane-free air after the previous two albums — and that the story, corny elements and all, does show a deep,
sincere interest in the Scandinavian pagan tradition: there are conceptual
elements in Blood On Ice that may
feel clumsy or poorly stated, but there is no denying the passion and the
obsessive involvement. Unfortunately, this is not quite enough to properly
«reward» the album with a thumbs up.
DESTROYER OF WORLDS (2001)
1) Lake Of Fire; 2) Destroyer
Of Worlds; 3) Ode; 4) Bleeding; 5) Pestilence; 6) 109; 7) Death From Above; 8)
Krom; 9) Liberty & Justice; 10) Kill Kill Kill; 11) Sudden Death; 12) White
Bones; 13) Day Of Wrath.
For all those torn between the «epic-Viking»
personality of Hammerheart-era
Quorthon and the «thrash-hammer» style of his Requiem/Octagon period, here is the ultimate in gift-showering: a
65 minute-long package that gives you the best of both worlds! Bombastic
Scandinavian epics and mosh heaven at
(almost) the same time — could anything be better in this world for an
open-minded heavy metal admirer?
Now, considering that both the latest
Viking-style and the latest
thrash-style offerings from Bathory were, at best, questionable (Blood On Ice was somewhat dull, and Octagon was somewhat horrendous), even
a very open-minded metal admirer would probably think twice before putting his
trust into Destroyer Of Worlds. And,
sure enough, some of the problems are carried over: the «epic» compositions are
long-winded and repetitive, while the thrash stuff is marred by the same old
stupid vocals that are stuck somewhere in the gutter that separates «singing»
from «growling» and are more likely to irritate and offend rather than impress
and entertain. This I have to say: Quorthon is always Quorthon, despite his
seemingly many faces, and, although you can look to Hammerheart for near-perfection, it is more typical of the guy to
stick to his formulaic guns than to try and make them look more and more
refined over time.
That said, with all the disclaimers in place, Destroyer Of Worlds is a surprisingly
good record. We start out with three songs that could have very easily fit on Twilight Of The Gods, and with a little
more squirming, even on Hammerheart,
although the subject matters are a mixed bag — Quorthon seems to be jumping
from his favorite Satanism schtick (ʽLake Of Fireʼ) to images of
nuclear apocalypse (title track) and then to Scandinavian pagan anthems
(ʽOdeʼ). This means there is no and there will be no further
conceptual unity to the album, but that's okay — it was clearly designed that
way, as a diverse series of vignettes, and who really cares as long as the vignettes
in question work as planned? ʽLake Of Fireʼ adds little of interest
to the Bathory canon, stately and threateningly creeping along like all those
medieval procession-type songs on Twilight,
but it forms a good contrast with the ensuing sturm-und-drang of the title
track — and then ʽOdeʼ comes on and blows both of them away with
another medieval procession, but this time set to a belligerent, muscular,
angular riff.
Then we start moving into true thrash and speed
metal territory — ʽBleedingʼ («anatomy metal» with all the expected
lyrical imagery), ʽ109ʼ / ʽDeath From Aboveʼ (a nice double
tribute to the powers of the Luftwaffe), ʽKromʼ (a somewhat pathetic
anthem to the biker tribe), ʽKill Kill Killʼ (yoohoo,
anti-establishment!), ʽSudden Deathʼ... wait, is this about somebody
getting clubbed to death during a frickin' hockey
match? See how this guy Quorthon is dying
to show you how versatile and unpredictable he can be if he puts his mind to
it? Vikings, Satanists, necrophiliacs, nuclear holocausts, WWII air raiders,
bikers, hockey players — suddenly, the Bathory world has stretched out to an
almost ridiculously huge size, sucking in almost everything in sight, like the
Vacuum Cleaner Beast in Yellow Submarine.
But do we get decent music to go with all that?
I'd say, rather yes than no, and that covers even the thrash numbers —
suddenly, many of them turn out to be endowed with riffs far more expressive
and colorful than anything on Octagon.
ʽKromʼ, for instance, does its best to mimic a bike engine roar,
turning the steel machine into an animated Godzilla. ʽ109ʼ does the
same from the perspective of a Messerschmitt fighter. And ʽSudden
Deathʼ does honestly try to imitate the hustle and bustle of a hockey game
gone wild — okay, so it does sound a bit like an imaginary soundtrack to
WrestleMania or something, but Quorthon manages to make it fun anyway.
As the album ends with two more long
compositions (ʽWhite Bonesʼ starts out in generic slow-thrash mode,
then suddenly becomes a bluesy / artsy instrumental epic midway through, with
Quorthon picking up a psychedelic guitar tone that he never used before;
ʽDay Of Wrathʼ returns us to medieval procession mode), it sort of
begins to dawn on you that more work must have gone into the construction of
this whole thing than on most Bathory albums put together — all the more
impressive considering that the entire record was done by Quorthon alone: he is
credited for everything, including the rhythm session. At the very least, Destroyer Of Worlds may be counted as
the most bizarre and baffling of all Bathory oeuvres — considering that
Quorthon had always been a weird person, this judgement is not to be taken
lightly.
Sure enough, from a purely formal / technical
point of view, other than the completely unpredictable lyrical topics, there
is not much new here — but what matters is that, for the first time ever,
Quorthon has really sewn all of his ends together, and it works much better
than anybody could have expected, and in much stranger ways: for instance, it
took me my third listen to actually get that something was «really happening»
here, so to speak — but once it did, the intrigue never went away again. It's
still there with me, so a quick thumbs up here before the enthusiasm wanes and I
start getting angry at those dumb vocals once again (or at the lyrics, which
could be even worse — other than the Viking epics, most of these verses do
suck).
NORDLAND I (2002)
1) Prelude; 2) Nordland; 3)
Vinterblot; 4) Dragons Breath; 5) Ring Of Gold; 6) Foreverdark Woods; 7) Broken
Sword; 8) Great Hall Awaits A Fallen Brother; 9) Mother Earth Father Thunder;
10) Heimfard.
By early 2002, the «recuperation» process was
over. Time to get back to the regal / brutal majesty of Hammerheart, quoth the Quorthon, and finally make something overtly
and inherently epic once again. The project to be realized had to be his most
ambitious ever, spanning an astonishing four
CDs worth of the vikingest music ever created by a son of Scandinavia.
Unfortunately, the wicked Christian god spoiled this noble undertaking like
he'd previously spoiled everything else, recalling Quorthon to his heavenly
prison (or hellish torture — the pagan devotee probably would not care either
way) only two albums into the project.
In a way, the transcendental divinity had his
own good reason, because Nordland I,
the first bunch of the projected four to see the light of day, is certainly no Hammerheart, and four major servings of this dish in a row might have caused serious
aural diarrhea. More precisely, it tries very hard to be an
improved-and-updated Hammerheart,
and in doing that, loses much of the spontaneity, freshness, and
«discovery-triggered excitement» of its ideal. Listen to the first song here
and you will pretty much know 90% of what comes next: slow, plodding,
monotonous riff-rockers cast in the mold of repetitive sagas. With stern
medieval vocal harmonies; occasional presence of, but more often, complete
lack of build-ups and crescendos; a screechy, but not particularly
«pretentious» guitar solo every now and then; and generally clean vocals
singing something about snow, ice, swords, hammers, dragons, and the great hall
in the sky.
Exceptions to this formula are intentionally
scarce: ʽRing Of Goldʼ is a pure acoustic ballad (although not any
less slow, plodding, or monotonous), and ʽBroken Swordʼ is a speed /
power metal anthem that is very
welcome in terms of tempo, but that's about it, and that is the way it was
meant — that is the way, Quorthon
must have felt, that one really goes about in honoring one's warrior ancestors,
and if you don't like it, you might as well just leave it. You're not
necessarily supposed to enjoy the steady, stately, «dull» flow of a medieval
Icelandic poetry recital either.
However, with a little bit of tolerance,
patience, and secret feelings for fantasy lore, Nordland quickly goes from «listenable» to «enjoyable» and even
«respectable». The riffs are far from genius, but they do a generally good job
here of supplying proper atmospherics: similar to each other in that most of
them precisely follow the rhythm, making fairly short use of half and quarter
notes, but each one vigorous and meaningful in its own right. The riff of ʽNordlandʼ
plows on with a decisive militaristic sweep; ʽVinterblotʼ is infected
with almost «industrial» venom, becoming one of the heaviest tracks in
Bathory's entire history; ʽDragons Breathʼ tries out yet another
poisonous tone, no doubt, going for a symbolic recreation of the song's title;
ʽGreat Hall Awaits A Fallen Brotherʼ goes for a «choo-choo train»
playing style, as if the Great Hall in question could be reached by a heavenly
railroad, and so on.
The downside is that, yes, most of these songs
make their point over the first minute (of the song proper, discounting the
noisy moody intros to some of them), and then mostly go on to reiterate these
points — you really are in luck if
you get to hear a brief solo, or if the song, like ʽForeverdark Woodsʼ,
does indeed turn out to consist of two separate parts with two different riffs.
For deep fans of Bathory's Viking style, this will be a plus; for everybody
else, most likely, a minus — particularly if one starts thinking how all these
vast spaces could have been filled up by something much more creative. It also
goes without saying that, in 2002, «art metal» bands in general were capable of
immensely more creative work than
this (Opeth alone would suffice, as a good example of a giant idea-generator next
to Quorthon's tiny one).
But, as with Hammerheart, only on a smaller scale, there is still this strange,
wond'rous feeling of how this guy, working completely on his own, is able to
achieve so much with so little — even if this whole stuff does not necessarily
feel «Nordic», it still feels authentic, with a real blazing fire roaring
within these notes, and a real dragon's breath escaping from these licks when
push comes to shove. I am not in love with the record, but I respect this kind
of deep bite, and that alone is worth a thumbs up. Besides, even if it does lack the
diversity and the surprise element of Destroyer
Of Worlds, it also evades that record's low points — this is, after all,
the kind of thing that Quorthon was really
born to do, rather than generate strange thrash metal anthems about bedlam and
bloodshed on the hockey field.
NORDLAND II (2003)
1) Fanfare; 2) Blooded Shore;
3) Sea Wolf; 4) Vinland; 5) The Land; 6) Death And Resurrection Of A Northern
Son; 7) The Messenger; 8) Flash Of The Silver Hammer; 9) The Wheel Of Sun.
Considering how much time — around five minutes
altogether — ʽThe Wheel Of Sunʼ requires to go through with its
massive coda, one might have thought that Nordland
II was not only designed to be the last Nordland installment, but was actually to be the last Bathory album
ever, that last big fat chord after which Quorthon could finally retire, or
remove his presence from this Christianity-soiled earth altogether. Which he
actually did around June 7, 2004, allegedly dying of heart failure — so very
impatient to finally honor that Valhalla reservation.
In reality, though, Quorthon himself had stated
that there were to be four Nordland albums, and a third one was
already in the works when misfortune fell. And, indeed, other than the grand
coda to ʽWheel Of Sunʼ, there is nothing on Nordland II to suggest intentional account closure. Quite on the
contrary, it sounds a wee bit disappointing as a follow-up to Nordland I: obviously, one could not
expect any major stylistic changes, but a minor twist or two would have been
nice. The only minor twist I see here is that the ultra-heavy, «industrial
metal» vibe of Nordland I has all
but disappeared, and that, consequently, the second volume made one small step
away from brutal heaviness and towards «artsiness» — a tiny step that will
make it seem a bit more visionary to some fans and a bit more boring to others.
The «fanfare» sequence that opens the album is
a good illustration: three and a half minutes of stern icy synth-pomp — for my
tastes, this stuff is way too crudely composed and produced to be emotionally
engaging, but there will always be some Bathory fans ready to see it as a Grand
Opening of the Gates to Ancient Scandinavian Consciousness. Thereupon,
ʽBlooded Shoreʼ is a stately one-riff march, full of predictably
martial solemnity, but it is neither heavy enough to properly wake up my inner
Viking, nor perfectionistic-majestic enough to disturb that old Wagnerian
temptation. The song, and most of the other ones that follow, is worthy of a
sleepwalking Quorthon, not so much a Quorthon ambitious to prove that he is
able to go beyond the confines of Hammerheart
while playing by the rules of Hammerheart.
In fact, the album is surprisingly mild and
slow all the way through to ʽDeath And Resurrection Of A Northern
Sonʼ, where the old thrash instinct finally awakens and starts generating
truly thunderous riffage: too bad that the «thunderous» sections of the song
occupy less than half of its ten-minute duration. The major highlight comes a
little later, in the form of the shortest song on the album: ʽFlash Of The
Silver Hammerʼ (Paul McCartney and Maxwell dropped by to say hello, no
doubt) is the first, if not the only, number to dispense with the stately majesty
and simply bash it out in a «take-no-prisoners, show-no-mercy» style — none too
soon, actually, or you might start wondering whether Quorthon really began to
mellow out in his last years.
He did not, but overall, Nordland II is hardly an achievement to brag about: if the
remaining two albums were to show the same quality, my guess is that the man
would be running a serious risk of running out of fans before the saga was
over, except for the usual bunch of diehards who would be happy enough if their
idol released an entire album of minimal variations on ʽThe Hall Of The
Mountain Kingʼ. The only saving grace of the album is the man's commitment
to his mission, and clear understanding of his own role in it — but it is well
nigh impossible for music like this to run on commitment alone: would it have
hurt too much to add some emotional
variety and a slightly larger number
of memorable riffs? As of today, only Odin knows the answer.
DADDY'S HIGHWAY (1987)
1) Treason; 2) Sir Queen; 3)
Round And Down; 4) Take It; 5) North By North; 6) Tragedy; 7) Block Of Wood; 8)
Miss These Things; 9) Mid City Team; 10) Some Peace Tonight; 11) Had To Be You;
12) Daddy's Highway; 13*) Calm Before The Storm; 14*) Candidate; 15*) Mad On
You; 16*) Trouble In This Town; 17*) Made Up In Blue.
The Bats are Robert Scott on rhythm guitar,
vocals, and songwriting duties; Kaye Woodward on lead guitar and vocals; Paul
Kean on bass; Malcolm Grant on drums. The Bats formed in 1982, released their
first EP in 1984, but had to wait half a decade before releasing their first
LP, Daddy's Highway, in 1987,
featuring twelve original compositions by Scott and also making additional use
of session guest Alastair Galbraith on violin. Oh, and they are, of course,
from New Zealand (from the wonderfully named city of Christchurch, to be
exact).
These are the dry facts that no one need deny.
The accompanying assumption is that The Bats loved their homoplastic relatives
The Byrds, and everything that had to do with folk-pop jangle in general.
Subsequently, they did not exactly invent what is informally known as «Kiwi
pop», but they very much defined it and helped substantiate its stereotypic
«nice and jangly» image — and they themselves were never nicer and janglier
than they are on this here LP debut.
Few things are simpler than the Bats formula —
maybe the Ramones, but then, punk thrives on simplicity, whereas folk-pop need
not necessarily be as one-dimensional as Daddy's
Highway. Steady, danceable rhythm, usually taken in mid- or fast tempo for
optimal effect; two guitars — one with lower pitch, one providing the jangly
flourishes; quiet, relaxed vocals, either solo or with doubled harmonies,
always keeping fairly low in the mix; inobtrusive, usually introspective,
lyrics that are not meant to be paid serious attention to. This description
pretty much applies to every one of these twelve songs, as well as the five
bonus tracks taken from B-sides and EPs and appended to the CD reissue.
If you really like this sound as such — and,
for all its minimalism, it is a
pretty seductive sound, and it must have been even more seductive, coming on
the airwaves in the synth-pop dominated 1980s — Daddy's Highway may appear to you as an endearing sonic
masterpiece. Compared to something like R.E.M. or The Smiths, the music is
clearly «fluffy», but, on the other hand, it is not here to accompany a
pretentious, «artsy-fartsy» personality like Stipe or Morrissey: Robert Scott
humbly stays out of the spotlight, letting the music always speak for the man.
This is not an endorsement of those who hate pretentious personalities — just a
reminder that there is a time for everything, including a time when the simple,
pretty, monotonous music of The Bats might work more efficiently than the more
demanding, but not necessarily more satisfying music of R.E.M. or The Smiths.
Individually, the songs are not divided into
highlights or lowlights: from the opening life-asserting guitar dialog of
ʽTreasonʼ and right down to the bass-heavy sounds of the title track,
the songs are all nice, mildly memorable, and generally interchangeable.
Vivacious tempos help out a lot — every time the band slows down, like on
ʽMiss These Thingsʼ (with surprisingly out-of-tune guitar, which
might have been intentional), they tend to lose my attention. But almost every
song, at the very least, tries to generate and develop its own hook, even if it
does not always succeed — subsequent listens, once you've gotten past the
similar atmosphere and start picking up the actual differences in melody,
reveal that some songs are better
written than others.
For instance, I would suggest that
ʽTreasonʼ, with its ascending-descending riff, is better than
ʽTragedyʼ, with its rather tired and worn-out folk chord pattern; or
that ʽNorth By Northʼ, with its gritty rhythm section workout and
«quasi-spooky» echoey vocal overdubs, rocks harder than the happy bounce of
ʽTake Itʼ; or that the siren-esque double guitars that open
ʽBlock Of Woodʼ are a much catchier introduction than the somewhat
distracted strumming that opens the way-too-Smiths-like ʽSir Queenʼ.
I could suggest all this and more — but then, in the end, this would all look
like nit-picking, and rather belong in some parallel world, where The Bats are
recognized as the greatest band of all time and armies of musicologists are
paid to offer competing interpretations of each chord change in each of their
songs.
Therefore, having said all I really have to
say, I leave you here with a thumbs up and an extra recommendation for the
bonus-tracked edition: the last song here, ʽMade Up In Blueʼ (the
title track from their 1986 EP), shows that The Bats were capable of «anthemic»
choruses as well, and rocks almost as hard as ʽNorth By Northʼ.
THE LAW OF THINGS (1989)
1) Other Side Of You; 2) Law
Of Things; 3) Never Said Goodbye; 4) Yawn Vibes; 5) Time To Get Ready; 6) Ten
To One; 7) Mastery; 8) I Fall Away; 9) Cliff Edge; 10) Nine Days; 11) Bedlam;
12) Smoking Her Wings.
If there is
a «law of things» according to The Bats, it is unquestionably the law of
preservation — the band's second album does not introduce even a single serious
change to the formula. Same lineup, same twin guitar jangle, same guest
violinist, same vibes, same moods. Same crude production style, too, except
that Robert Scott's lead vocals frequently get clearer in the mix and are not
as often double-tracked with Woodward's, so you can get a better picture of the
sonic palette of New Zealand's Roger McGuinn — if you'd like to get a better picture, of course, because his voice isn't
exactly the epitome of expressivity, to put it mildly.
The album is rarely, if ever, described as a
«sophomore slump», but critical reaction here usually follows the well-known
critical principle of «If A precedes B and B = A, then A is better than B», as
the band is supposed to run out of its originally accumulated cloud of
inspiration and slip into a «regular workman» routine. It is a dangerous sign
when it is the opening and the closing track that are usually found listed as
highlights — meaning that the listener, most likely, fell asleep right after
the first song and woke up towards the end — and this is more or less what
happened to The Law Of Things.
Granted, the closing track, ʽSmoking Her
Wingsʼ, which was also the single, is
a little different: if anything, it sounds like the little brother of Joy
Division rather than The Smiths, with a vague hint of threatening doom
emanating from its droning guitar parts and with an unusually stern, almost
«ceremonial» singing tone — yes, I think the late Ian Curtis would have dug
this, even if The Bats, byt their very nature, are physiologically unable to
generate those dark clouds: at best, this is just a slight patch of fog, but
even in this way, it stands out from the rest.
And the rest is the rest: average-fast
pop-rockers driven by pretty, but unexceptional folk-pop melodies and
singalong-style choruses, almost always in the same relaxed-idealistic
emotional state. I suppose that ʽTen To Oneʼ, stuck in the middle, is
also a bit of a standout — guitar and vocals pack a bit more crunch, and even
Alastair Galbraith's violin screeches and scrapes like somebody just stepped on
its tail, er, neck. But that's just two and a half minutes out of a half hour
of overall pleasant sameness. Feel free to pick your favorites — I, for one,
think that the album only loses if you begin to think of it in terms of
individual melodies. (For instance, the melody of ʽNever Said
Goodbyeʼ borrows its first chords from McCartney's ʽListen To What
The Man Saidʼ — which, subsequently, makes its last chords sound like a botched version of that song's melody. I
could easily see somebody preferring the ragged, unglossed-over production of
The Bats as artistically superior to McCartney's «stiffly polished»
arrangement, but in terms of general melodicity and catchiness, Paul wins over
this particular phrasing, hands down).
Still, especially in the context of its times, The Law Of Things as a whole is quite a
thumbs up
experience. The title ʽYawn Vibesʼ may be appropriately self-ironic,
but at least these are some happy, tasteful yawn vibes we are getting provided
with.
FEAR OF GOD (1991)
1) Boogey Man; 2) The Black
And The Blue; 3) Dancing As The Boat Goes Down; 4) The Old Ones; 5) Hold All
The Butter; 6) Fear Of God; 7) It's A Lie; 8) Straight Image; 9) Watch The
Walls; 10) You Know We Shouldn't; 11) Jetsam; 12) The Looming Past.
On a strictly song-by-song basis, Fear Of God just might be The Bats'
greatest album, narrowly beating out Daddy's
Highway. The life-giving formula remains intact, but the overall impression
is that they gave it their best by tightening the screws with all remaining
strength — as a result, the riffs are sometimes sharper, the choruses
occasionally memorable on-the-spot, and the sound, without losing any of its
jangle foundation, is toughened and more «rock-bound». Some of the songs are,
in fact, closer to that very early «jangle-punk» style captured on ʽMade
Up In Blueʼ, and this gives the record a mildly darker tinge. And dark is
good, as we know.
Above all, my own personal favorite Bats song
is here: ʽDancing As The Boat Goes Downʼ is as «doom-laden» as this
band ever got. The alarming guitar ring, the ominous viola dance (provided by
guest star Alan Starrett, replacing Alastair Galbraith in the status of «our
regular guest guy to do the bowing»), and the perfectly phrased deterministic
chorus — what is this, Robert Scott preaching about the imminence of the end?
And being fairly convincing, too, without having to resort to dark basslines
and dreary gravel-voiced intonations? This is by no means «happy» music, but it
is not «obnoxiously depressing» music, either. Very good stuff.
The only other tune on the album to share the
worried grimness of ʽDancingʼ is the title track — a deeply paranoid
love song, rather than having anything to do with stances on religion; this one
does have a dark bassline, and a fuzzier rhythm guitar as well, but is not as
effective as ʽDancingʼ because the chorus is not nearly as catchy. We
couldn't really rave about a generally «serious» or «mature» tone of the album
as a whole just because it happens to have the words ʽfearʼ and ʽGodʼ
rather than ʽDaddyʼ in its title. Yet on the other hand, even the
«lighter» songs also frequently give the impression of being more «mature», if
by «mature» we mean «accomplished» or «requiring a little bit more time to
bring them up to quality level».
Thus, the single ʽBoogey Manʼ opens
with their purest-sounding set of twin guitar chords so far, spun in a pretty
revolving loop together with the vocal verse melody, with the chorus providing,
as its «counterpoint», yet another such loop in a different tonality — everything
perfectly coordinated, if not altogether deeply emotional. The accordeon and
organ flourishes on ʽThe Old Onesʼ nicely shadow the caressing vocal
harmonies. On ʽStraight Imageʼ, the rhythm guitar is put in banjo
mode, creating a particularly «busy» melody for the verses that contrasts with
the melodic folk-pop line of the bridge — two entirely different voices
co-inhabiting the same song without imposing on each other. ʽYou Know We
Shouldn'tʼ does a great job of amplifying its hook by having the chorus
doubled by an equally loud lead guitar line; together with the power chords
that triumphantly conclude each verse, this makes it into one of the band's
most efficient embodiments of the stereotypical «power pop» ideology.
As before, though, the band's weak point —
though others might think it their strong point — remains the lack of a
distinct frontman personality. ʽThe Looming Pastʼ, with its title and
lyrics about the nighttime plight of the protagonist who's lost the capacity of
being in love, demands to be taken seriously, but neither the music nor Scott's
monotonous vocal delivery really live up to the drama. The delivery is
tolerable, and the music, with its zydeco-ish accordeon echoes, is pretty, and
that's it: not a whiff of drama. Ian
Curtis, Morrissey, or Michael Stipe would probably have had a thing or two to
say about it. But on the other hand, you might say that The Bats are just
playing it safe — for every single admirer of Curtis, Morrissey, and Stipe,
there is also a hater, whereas «hating Robert Scott» would be a totally absurd
activity.
Then again, «personality bluffing» is a part of
this game, too: there must be a reason why Joy Division, The Smiths, and R.E.M.
are all immensely popular, while The Bats have, for the most part, remained a
New Zealand phenomenon, and it doesn't exclusively
have to do with the fact that the average person in the Northern hemisphere is
usually unsure whether New Zealand is a part of Australia, a country in its own
right, or a name for a particularly wicked cocktail. As good as Fear Of God is, it is also smooth,
even, and not very inspirational. But it also works every time you are not
necessarily in the mood for inspiration — and that's just the time to catch it,
enjoy it, and give it a thumbs up before that old «yearning for something
grander» starts to set in.
SILVERBEET (1991)
1) Courage; 2) Sighting The
Sound; 3) Too Much; 4) Slow Alight; 5) Valley Floor; 6) Love Floats Two; 7)
Green; 8) No Time For Your Kind; 9) Straight On Home; 10) Before The Day; 11)
Stay Away; 12) Drive Me Some Boars; 13) Half Way To Nowhere.
The title is probably a pun on the Silver
Beetles — but if this means that, in some way, The Bats are really trying to
compare themselves to this early stage in the Fab Four's career, they are totally
off the mark. Most likely, it just seemed like a funny wordgame to somebody,
funny enough to be commemorated with an LP title.
And the LP itself is basically Fear Of God, Vol. 2: the same brand of
«tough» folk-rock, played in a tight, disciplined manner, crisp-clearly
produced, with a slightly ominous tinge and a small touch of «social
consciousness» to some of the songs (ʽGreenʼ, for instance, is a
commemoration of the Rainbow Warrior
incident from 1985 — more firmly embedded in the minds of New Zealanders than
anyone else, since the bombing took place in their waters, but well worth
remembering for everyone, including Bats fans around the globe). But just as The Law Of Things was a slightly less
interesting minor brother of Daddy's
Highway, so is Silverbeet, on
the whole, a little more stale than the freshened up Fear Of God.
As usual, everybody here will have one's own
favorites. ʽCourageʼ is often singled out because it opens the album
and was its lead single as well, but I find it too repetitive (the song hangs
on one simple guitar line from first to last second) and lacking a vocal hook.
On the other hand, people rarely talk about ʽLove Floats Twoʼ, which
I find to be one of their best love songs — guitars, lead and backing vocals
all conspire to make the "you know love floats two, and there's room
enough for you" chorus sound a little creepy, as if the boat in question
were really floating out towards the world's end. Nor do I hear much mention of
ʽNo Time For Your Kindʼ, featuring the album's most impressive chord
change from verse to chorus — the lyrics are a little muddy, so it is hard to
ascertain what exactly is troubling Scott on this particular occasion, but at
least the main hook, a.k.a. the song title, is delivered to stern prohibitive
perfection.
Some of the other songs place their trust in
near-subliminal guitar lines, like the psychedelic electric wail that appears
in between the verses of ʽToo Muchʼ, or the even more desperate
howling backing Scott on ʽStay Awayʼ — on the whole, the band's drift
towards more and more somber melancholia, as compared to the easier-flowing,
lighter-colored days of Daddy's Highway
is becoming more pronounced. But this change is neither for the good nor the
bad — because Scott and Co.'s skills at writing melodies and dressing them up
steadily remain at the exact same level of competence. Since the sound is
unshakeably pleasant, and the humble hooks are as well hid as always, and
ʽLove Floats Twoʼ is a kicker and all, Silverbeet gets another thumbs up — albeit with an ever so slowly
decreasing level of enthusiasm.
COUCHMASTER (1995)
1) Outside; 2) Afternoon In
Bed; 3) Around You Like Snow; 4) Work It Out; 5) Train; 6) Land 'O' Lakes; 7)
Chain Home Low; 8) Supernova; 9) Shoeshine; 10) Crow Song; 11) Smorgasboard;
12) Knowledge Is Power; 13) It's Happening To You; 14) Lost Weekend; 15) For
The Ride; 16) Out Of Bounds; 17) Down To Me.
Do not let yourself be scared by the huge number
of individual tracks — several represent brief instrumental interludes,
consisting either of atmospheric noise (ʽOutsideʼ) or simple rhythmic
drones (ʽSmorgasboardʼ), inserted for the sake of... God only knows
what. If you ask me, the idea of
inserting little fluffy «links» in between The Bats' songs, many, if not most,
of which are fairly little and perfectly fluffy themselves, is odd. Then again,
odd ideas on Bats' albums are so rare anyway that this one at least makes Couchmaster stand out in some way.
Actually, there is a better way. The relative
quality of a Bats album is practically always measurable by counting out how
many memorable / evocative guitar lines and catchy singalong vocal hooks they
offer the listener, and on that scale Couchmaster
registers impressively high; at least, my gut feeling tells me that it is an
improvement over Silverbeet. Brief
isolated impressions of some of the better songs are as follows:
ʽAfternoon In Bedʼ — nice «murmured»
guitar line, quite adaptable to the idea of spending an afternoon in bed. Not
exactly ʽI'm Only Sleepingʼ-quality (too fluffy and friendly, almost
inviting, and who the heck would really invite anybody else to their bed in
the afternoon?). ʽWork It Outʼ — another fine line, either «weeping»
or buzzing around you like a harmless mosquito; leave it to The Bats to synthesize
that «sadness-lite» flavor, not strong enough to kill yourself but long enough
to guzzle a pint. ʽLand O' Lakesʼ — no particularly strong guitar
parts, but one of those clever choruses that are at once singalong-style /
anthemic and dreamy / personal. ʽShoeshineʼ — subtly engineered piece
of melancholic dream-pop; excellent idea to put Kaye Woodward on vocals, and an
exquisite swirling guitar flourish on top of everything. ʽIt's Happening
To Youʼ — from somewhere deep in the woods, comes a lilting guitar tone of
sheer utmost beauty; if only its voice were a little louder and cleaner!
ʽFor The Rideʼ — a little faster and angrier than everything else,
with a phased / wah-wah guitar accompaniment that puts «psychedelia» ahead of
«folk» for the first time in this band's career, so it seems. ʽOut Of
Boundsʼ — best guitar melody on the album, no doubt about it; this one
just seems specifically designed for situations when you are alone, depressed,
and are in special need of that one friendly pat on the shoulder to chuck you
out of that needless silly state.
I think this is pretty much all that is
necessary to convince myself that
they took a little extra care this time around in the songwriting department,
and came out with probably the best swan song they could have theoretically
come up with. Swan song, that is, because Couchmaster
turned out to be the last Bats album in a decade, after which they all went
their separate ways to raise their separate families — but not before offering
this very fair deal for their fans,
because the overall quantity of pleasant melodic ideas captured here is, I
think, several times as high as on The
Law Of Things; and offering one tightly-packed album in ten years is
certainly preferable to offering five with one memorable spot per record.
Hence, a grateful thumbs up for a particularly moody way of saying
goodbye.
AT THE NATIONAL GRID (2005)
1) Western Isles; 2) Horizon;
3) Hubert; 4) Bells; 5) Single File; 6) Pre War Blues; 7) The Rays; 8) Things;
9) Mir; 10) Up To The Sky; 11) We Do Not Kick; 12) Flowers & Trees; 13*)
Untitled.
Ten years later, The Bats are back to conquer
the third millennium. But do they make any concessions? Do they even attempt to recognize how much has
changed? Naturally they do not, or else the would not be The Bats. At The National Grid does not sound exactly the same way as Daddy's Highway, but if there are any
differences in sound, they sure as heck ain't due to no sissy changes in
musical trends and fashions. The Bats love their folk rock, and they couldn't
care less about trends and fashions, and that obstinacy deserves respect —
unless it comes from stupidity and lack of talent, which is not something
Robert Scott could be easily accused of.
There is some bad news, though. With age, The
Bats seem to have seriously mellowed
out — not that they ever subscribed to the «rock'n'roll» idiom in the first
place, but they did have a knack for
solid, steady beats and sharply focused electric jangle. At The National Grid opens with
ʽWestern Islesʼ, a pretty, but highly
fragile-sounding piece — acoustic guitars picked by elves, vocals contributed
by hobbits, background vocals added by sylphids. Add the predictably monotonous
mood (no dynamics or development whatsoever throughout the song's three
minutes), and that essentially leaves you with three choices: (a) imagine
yourself as a fairy, (b) plunge into deep sleep, (c) fail to notice that
something was just played from your speakers in the first place.
The soporific effect is tentatively rectified
already on the next track — ʽHorizonʼ adds drums, jangly rhythm
guitar, and a distorted psychedelic lead guitar part. But «tentatively» is the
key word, because the song is still essentially a drone (instrumentally) and a
hum (vocally), the only difference from «shoegazing» lying in its fast tempo —
yet whoever said that it is impossible to shoegaze with some acceleration? The
whole point of this song, and this whole album, is in its atmosphere and
attitude.
Construction-wise, National Grid picks up exactly where Couchmaster left off — it, too, has a few of those brief
instrumental interludes, usually consisting of one or two simple musical phrases
locked in a trance-oriented cycle (ʽHubertʼ; ʽWe Do Not
Kickʼ), that have no major purpose other than humbly introducing
themselves to you. Hello, we are the interludes, we have no idea what we are
doing here, they probably just forgot to add vocals to us, but you know, it was
nice meeting you all the same, hope you have a good time out there.
But melody-wise, the album is not that strong
because it has no such intention. The evocative lead lines of Couchmaster, such as the one that made
ʽAfternoon In Bedʼ such a cute little classic, are nowhere to be
found — everything is melted down to acoustic strum and electric droning, with
the vocals (particularly Kaye Woodward's sleepwalking performance on
ʽMirʼ) floating on essentially the same frequencies all the way
through. The atmosphere, as could be expected, is tasteful and friendly enough
so as not to stimulate any thumbs down — in the end, The Bats are simply too
good at their formula to ever make a truly bad record — but really, the album
is only for diehard fanatics of this style.
THE GUILTY OFFICE (2008)
1) Countersign; 2) Crimson
Enemy; 3) Broken Path; 4) Like Water In Your Hands; 5) Castle Lights; 6) Two
Lines; 7) Satellites; 8) Later On That Night; 9) Steppin' Out; 10) The I
Specialist; 11) The Guilty Office; 12) The Orchard.
A little bit more rock-oriented than its
predecessor, as if Scott himself had realized that At The National Grid took things way too far in the rock-a-bye-baby direction. More electric guitar,
louder drums, and even a whole new fast-tempo song (ʽSteppin' Outʼ) ensure
that The Guilty Office does not
really intend to put you in a stupefying trance — it honestly wants you to
think of it as a collection of individual pop-rock songs. With that in mind,
let us see how many autonomous, self-contained, and positively stunning tunes
Scott has managed to come up with this time.
ʽBroken Pathʼ could be one, creating
an atmosphere of moderately deep gloom with its network of clean jangly, dirty
distorted, and wailing psychedelic guitars. ʽTwo Linesʼ could be
another, but not because of any vocal hooks — its main point of attraction is
the guitar vs. strings battle in the coda, a very straightforward one, where
baroque chamber atmosphere is pitted against purple haze and we may want to
pick a favorite. ʽSteppin' Outʼ is not only fast, but brings back the
idea of the «Moody Melancholic Melody» that the lead guitar plays in tandem
with the rhythm strum, best represented on Couchmaster.
And this is pretty much it: even these particular descriptions are piss-poor, and the rest
of the songs is thoroughly undescribable in layman terms. At this point, even
switching from acoustic to electric guitars for volume, sharpness, and energy
considerations does not help — the songs lack distinctiveness and may only be
appreciated for the general style. I have nothing further to say.
FREE ALL THE MONSTERS (2011)
1) Long Halls; 2) Simpletons;
3) Free All The Monsters; 4) See Right Through Me; 5) It's Not The Same; 6) In
The Subway; 7) Fingers Of Dwan; 8) Spacejunk; 9) On The Bank; 10) Canopy; 11)
When The Day Comes; 12) Getting Over You.
A long-term fan of The Bats who would expect any change from the band as late as 2011
might as well expect AC/DC's Brian Johnson to star in a Broadway musical... oh
wait a minute, he nearly did star in
a Broadway musical, so The Bats take first prize. Free All The Monsters continues the tradition of irregularly
alternating «strong» Bats albums (cutesy folk-rock with hooks) and «weak» Bats
albums (cutesy folk-rock without hooks), and it seems to me, on the whole, to be a minor improvement over Guilty Office, but with a huge stress
on seems — it might just be the
atmospheric pressure on the brain conditioning the judgement here.
Fans of Kaye Woodward might take a particular
liking to such tracks as ʽSimpletonsʼ, where she sings harmony with
Scott — the end result is a disarmingly charming twee pop nugget of a disarmingly
romantic nature; ʽSee Right Through Meʼ, where her role is mainly
reduced to wispy ooh-oohs in the background; and, come to think of it, most of the other tracks have her vocal
presence as well — and when you put enough echo on Woodward's voice, it gives
her the presence of an Elven Queen (it's a different question whether that
automatically makes Scott an Elven King or not, but it does seem that they feed
off each other, and that mixing their voices together helps soften their
individual weaknesses and highlight their collective strength).
The instrumental parts, however, do not offer
much respite — all atmospheric texture, as usual, no individuality whatsoever
to the songs: even the instrumentals, like all Bats instrumentals, are
predictable drones that are more likely to rock you to sleep than to rock you
to any sort of action (ʽCanopyʼ). Only the title track can boast an
anthemic riff, mixing tenderness with determination, but it took me three
listens to single it out, lost as it is in the monotonous production jungle.
For the sake of objectivity, I must mention
that the general critical and public
opinion alike on Free All The Monsters
was quite positive — however, I ascribe that primarily to a three-year long
deprivation from fresh Bats material. Just another three years, just another
Bats album.
THE DEEP SET (2017)
1) Rooftops; 2) Looking For
Sunshine; 3) Rock And Pillars; 4) Walking Man; 5) No Trace; 6) Diamonds; 7)
Antlers; 8) Busy; 9) Steeley Gaze; 10) Durkestan; 11) Shut Your Eyes; 12) Not
So Good.
Just another six years, just another Bats album. Yes, these guys are tenacious —
they really are bent on earning their
«AC/DC of jangle-pop» status. Same stable lineup, same pleasant sound, and...
you know, as I am listening to these songs more than three years after I'd
written my last Bats review, I realize that I remember very well what the overall Bats sound used to be, but I do not
remember how even a single one of those Bats songs went. Not one. Not even the
very best ones that I praised in those reviews.
So I am going to make this very short — yes, I
listened to The Deep Set thrice, and
I liked it, and I can guarantee any Bats fan that if he/she is buying this
record, he/she is buying an authentic Bats record and not a polka or a death
metal or a modern classical version of The Bats. Consequently, you will get
yourself some steady mid-tempo jangle-pop (ʽRooftopsʼ), some slow
stuttery jangle-pop (ʽLooking For Sunshineʼ), some bouncy Merseybeat
jangle-pop (ʽRock And Pillarsʼ), some heavily overdubbed mid-tempo
jangle-pop (ʽWalking Manʼ), some fuzzy, sharp-edged jangle-pop
(ʽNo Traceʼ), some slow jangle-pop with elements of electronica
(ʽDiamondsʼ), some jangle-pop mixed with power chords and shit
(ʽAntlersʼ), some jangle-pop with a busier lead guitar part than
usual (ʽBusyʼ), some jangle-pop with dreamy overtones (ʽSteeley
Gazeʼ), some politically-oriented jangle-pop (ʽDurkestanʼ), some
adult-contemporary jangle-pop (ʽShut Your Eyesʼ), and some totally
non-descript jangle-pop for the last number, because God forbid you take this
record off with memories of an outstanding finale (ʽNot So Goodʼ).
Needless to say, all of this should be taken as
a hearty recommendation for those Bats fans who feel themselves strong and able
and are in no danger of having their stomachs pumped from an overdose of
jangle-pop. Everybody else please remember that The Bats in 2017 sound exactly
like The Bats in 1987, and that this is the only significant point that this
record makes.
IN THE FLAT FIELD (1980)
1) Double Dare; 2) In The Flat
Field; 3) God In An Alcove; 4) Dive; 5) Spy In The Cab; 6) Small Talk Stinks;
7) St. Vitus Dance; 8) Stigmata Martyr; 9) Nerves; 10*) Dark Entries; 11*)
Telegram Sam; 12*) Rosegarden Funeral Of Sores; 13*) Terror Couple Kill
Colonel; 14*) Scopes; 15*) Untitled; 16*) God In An Alcove; 17*) Crowds.
First things first: let us get the harmful
genrism crap out of the way. Wherever you go to stock up on basic information
about Bauhaus, you are sure to learn that they are «the fathers of goth rock»
or, at least, «counted among the progenitors of gothic rock as a genre». There is
only one piece of serious evidence to back up this idiotic stereotype — namely,
the name of the band's first single: ʽBela Lugosi's Deadʼ. Naturally,
every band whose first song mentions Bela Lugosi, vampires, and blood, deserves
to be pigeonholed as «gothic rock», but one might just as well tag The Jimi
Hendrix Experience as a «folk-rock band», since their first single was a cover
of ʽHey Joeʼ. (For that matter, Bauhaus' third single was a sped-up
cover of T. Rex's ʽTelegram Samʼ — about as «gothic» in essence as
ʽMary Had A Little Lambʼ.)
Even if we do accept «goth rock» as a legit
musical genre and describe it as, well, let's say, dark, gloomy, bass-heavy,
minor-key music with a lyrical and atmospheric fixation on misanthropy, death,
suicide, ghosts, and red blood on white sheets, In The Flat Field, the band's first and arguably best album, only
fits certain parts of that description. Moodwise, this brainchild of Peter
Murphy's is a whole lot more cheerful than Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, from which it draws much of its inspiration —
not to mention certain albums by The Doors, Lou Reed, or Nico that I could
mention, all of which are far more deserving of the «early goth rock» nametag
than this relatively lively, tongue-in-cheek, occasionally quite funny piece of
entertainment.
In fact, if you glance at some of the original
negative reviews of the record, you can sometimes see people condemning it for
not living up to their expectations — "sluggish indulgence instead of
hoped for goth-ness", Dave McCullough quipped in Sounds. Indulgence — for sure; sluggish — vile slander. In 1980,
there was nothing sluggish about the playing style of Peter Murphy, Daniel Ash,
David J, and Kevin Haskins. On the contrary, like all those fresh, young,
seriously idealistic New Wave outfits, particularly those based in such centers
of trendiness as London, they were determined to prove that they could combine
new meaningful musical ideas with the verve and energy of their glam-rock and
punk rock idols.
Just like the Smiths, Bauhaus' image is
generated at the intersection of «the eccentric vocalist» (Peter Murphy) and
«the inventive guitarist» (Daniel Ash). Of those two, Murphy is the less interesting
component: he adds little to the accumulated legacy of Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop,
and Ian Curtis, and his trademark gloomy baritone has fairly little emotional
range or depth. He is a competent singer, and his singing style matches the
moods and the messages of the songs fairly well — you couldn't really imagine
somebody like Elvis Costello singing these songs instead, or if you could, you
shouldn't — and other than a couple cases of potentially overlong
overscreaming, he never does much to irritate the listener; that's about as
high as my praise can go.
The guitar playing of Daniel Ash, though, is an
entirely different matter. Like most of the prominent guitarists of the New
Wave era, he tends to eschew solos, but the style is by no means minimalistic —
on the contrary, it is ambitiously synthetic, with little regard for any pre-established
«genre rules». ʽDouble Dareʼ, for instance, opens the album with a
few nasty feedback blasts, out of which quickly emerges an even nastier
growling «industrial metal» riff. Then the title track, in contrast, is all
based on distorted scratchy droning, in loving memory of Lou Reed, Phil
Manzanera, and Tom Verlaine. ʽGod In An Alcoveʼ updates the old
garage sound, where folksy arpeggios alternate with bluesy block chords and
psycho trills (and to top it off, Dave J sometimes makes his bass adopt a disco
pattern — what a nuthouse, eh?). On ʽSpy In The Cabʼ, he plays a
depressing dirge, while the limp, but arrogant shuffle of ʽSmall Talk
Stinksʼ could have easily been picked up by the likes of Marc Ribot for a
Tom Waits album.
Nothing on Flat
Field really hits harder, though, than the looped metal riff doubling the
already established bass melody at 0:50 into ʽStigmata Martyrʼ. The
song is a masterpiece of tongue-in-cheek «religious horror» in music — all due
to the expressiveness of Ash's guitar, imitating all sorts of physical (and
spiritual?) pain on an almost literal level. There is no real horror here (as in, «vivid musical projection of real life
horror or the uncomfortably dark depths of one's soul»), it is all sheer
theatrics, but it still perturbs the senses in some way. Even as a cheap
thrill, songs like these show that Bauhaus are really onto something.
It may well be so that the original critics
were confused — In The Flat Field
is, indeed, too flashy, extravagant, and even «cheery» to genuinely convey any
dread, doom, and despair (you do know for sure that Peter Murphy is no Ian
Curtis, and that the rope is not a solution), but if it does not genuinely do that, what the hell is it here for in the
first place? These songs make very little ideological sense; Murphy's lyrics,
at best, convey a feeling of stupid adolescent decadence; and the band's being
all over the place without firmly indicating where they do belong disorients the potential reviewer into a state of
irritated hatred.
But get over it, potential reviewer. So what if
these arrogant kids have reduced your precious Joy Division to the
sarcastic-vaudevillian framework of a dark rock cabaret? Surely there might be
an empty space left for this stuff somewhere on of your empty shelves. And
there is really no logic in worshipping Tom Waits, who did much the same thing
with his favorite types of music, and
despising Bauhaus — who, at least, never took themselves too seriously. In the end, In
The Flat Field may not «mean» much, but it is inventive, experimental,
catchy, energetic, and fun, right down to the slow build-up (love those
suspense-generating tick-tocking keyboards straight out of the local torture
chamber) and massive explosion of ʽNervesʼ. Subsequently, I would
like to give the album a thumbs up right
now, and attempt to explain what particular major changes for the better it
introduced to my life later, once I have enjoyed those changes to their
fullest.
PS: Any newcomer to the band would do well to
pick up the expanded reissue. For some reason, it does not include ʽBela
Lugosi's Deadʼ, but it does include the rest of their early singles, including
the brilliant ʽTerror Couple Kill Colonelʼ (dedicated to the murder
of Paul Bloomquist, with a delicately crafted folk-pop guitar part from Ash,
and with the chorus always misheard by me as «pterodactyl kill carnal», adding
even further to the mystery) and the insanely accelerated ʽTelegram
Samʼ; also, ʽCrowdsʼ is a romantic piano ballad that should be
owned by every admirer of Paul Murphy's (not that I'd ever like to have a hand
in convincing anybody to become an admirer of Paul Murphy's, but if you are an admirer, you do have to hear this
little Peter Hammill-style depressed confessional), and ʽRosegarden
Funeral Of Soresʼ is probably the only song on the entire CD that would
indeed be fit for playing at a Goth-themed funeral. (Particularly if you wanted
to raise the chances of the deceased person rising from the dead, that is — it
is rather painful to have to endure Murphy's hysterical roaring at the end of
the initially calm track).
MASK (1981)
1) Hair Of The Dog; 2) The
Passion Of Lovers; 3) Of Lillies And Remains; 4) Dancing; 5) Hollow Hills; 6)
Kick In The Eye; 7) In Fear Of Fear; 8) Muscle In Plastic; 9) The Man With
X-Ray Eyes; 10) Mask.
This critically respected (for the most part)
follow-up to Flat Fields is all
right, but, for the most part, it does not add anything particularly
unpredictable or even «useful» to the Bauhaus image. Formally, the band cannot
be accused of slackery — they bring in occasional new instrumentation
(keyboards, acoustic guitars, etc.), and Daniel Ash is as keen as ever to try
out new guitar sounds and fuss around with studio technology. But they have a
successful formula now, and they do make sure to stay well within its safe
boundaries. This ensures that the album, like its predecessor, is cozily
coherent, but there is really nothing that can be said about Mask in general that has not already
been said about Flat Fields in
general, so let's just chat about some of the individual songs instead — in
terms of favorites and «why favorites?».
Especially because this time, it is fairly easy
to choose a favorite — ʽHollow Hillsʼ is one of the band's best
songs, and, for that matter, one of the tiny handful of bona fide «goth» songs
in their catalog, a slow, creepy-crawly, atmospheric dirge, possibly inspired
by an Arthur Machen story, whose mystical bass line is amusingly similar to the
one used on Nirvana's ʽCome As You Areʼ (coincidence or was Bauhaus a
closet love of Kurt's?). It is not any less theatrical than any other Bauhaus
song, so one is not expected to shed sincere mournful tears for the abandoned
magical hills even if «so sad, love lies there still» — but Ash's clever
overdubs and sound effects still open the door to some sort of a different
dimension. Never mind the witches and the goblins and Oberon, the sound of it all is much more meaningful
than the literal sense.
The only other song on the album that lays more
emphasis on the atmosphere than on the beat is the title track — but it is
still a bit too distorted and industrialized for my tastes, especially when the
fuzzy grind of the rhythm guitar gets coupled with all the backwards tapes
prepared by Ash. Midway through it becomes something else, when the grind is
suffocated and a paranoid medievalistic mandolin-imitating acoustic guitar
starts playing in a ʽBattle Of Evermoreʼ fashion — yet even so, it is
not enough to make a satisfactory conclusion to the album, certainly not one
that would overwhelm the listener like a «grand finale» is supposed to.
The remaining eight songs are all rockers, and,
to a large extent, interchangeable — with few, if any, jaw-dropping melodic
discoveries, and pretty much the same message throughout: «if you really have to dance or, at least, tap your
foot to pop music, might as well make it dark, cool, and enigmatic». One of the
songs is even called
ʽDancingʼ, and its verbal listing of all the different ways to dance
brings to mind a similar enterprise once carried out by Roxy Music with
ʽDo The Strandʼ — yes, back when the odd pioneers of a new musical
style were slyly taking the old pre-war genre of
«let-me-introduce-you-to-a-new-dance» and adapting it to a whole new world of
values. But in 1981, that world was already established, and here Bauhaus just
sound like a bunch of not particularly convincing also-rans.
As for the songs chosen for single release,
those were ʽKick In The Eyeʼ and ʽThe Passion Of Loversʼ,
the former sounding like Young Americans-era
funkified David Bowie with an extra touch of bass darkness laid on from the
Berlin era and the latter being yet another clone of early Joy Division style;
the lyrics are fairly well «gothic» ("the passion of lovers is for
death" goes the refrain, after all), but the atmosphere does not even
reach the creepiness level of ʽHollow Hillsʼ, let alone Joy Division
themselves — Ash plays interesting guitar lines that have nothing to do with
death or decay, and Murphy delivers the lyrics more like a beginning
Elizabethan actor than like a person who'd really
want you to consider the imminent link between love and death.
As you can probably already tell from the
review, I am not too fond of this record. Where Flat Fields added something
to the already well-formed world of «bleak post-punk», Mask actually allows to see better what that something was — a mask indeed, and a fairly sticky one.
The heroes of Flat Fields revelled
in their roles of sophisticated evil clowns, and their excitement at being let
out on the stage was contagious, but already on the second album it looks like
they are simply doing their job now, content with their wages and quietly
sweating and stagnating under the makeup. If not for Ash and his bag of studio
tricks, Mask would be gruesomely
boring; as it is, it is still eminently listenable, just underwhelming.
Brain-wise, the songs seem sufficiently fleshed out to deserve a minor thumbs up,
but the heart finds no pleasure in most of this. (And just to make matters
clear, yes, the album «rocks», but what sort of New Wave album with a warped,
screechy guitar tone did not rock in
1981?).
THE SKY'S GONE OUT (1982)
1) Third Uncle; 2) Silent
Hedges; 3) In The Night; 4) Swing The Heartache; 5) Spirit; 6) The Three
Shadows, Part 1; 7) The Three Shadows, Part 2; 8) The Three Shadows, Part 3; 9)
All We Ever Wanted Was Everything; 10) Exquisite Corpse.
With Bauhaus now firmly marketed as a «goth»
band, their third album seems to have been seen by many critics and fans alike
as straying too far away from a
formula to which the band had actually never ever subscribed in the first
place. Essentially, The Sky's Gone Out
is frequently accused of being too meandering, too scattered, too unsure of
where to go. But if you ask me, I much prefer this «insecurity» to the
way-too-predictably-monotonous formula of Mask
— just how much more «dark dance music» does one really need?
This is, indeed, the peak of Murphy and Ash's
experimentalism: not always succeeding, perhaps, but not afraid, either, of
risking an occasional miss among a bunch of successful hits. The idea to open
the proceedings with a cover of Brian Eno's nearly decade-old rocker
ʽThird Uncleʼ, in particular, is brilliant — Bauhaus' transparent
link to Joy Division had always obscured their earlier roots, but they are
really much closer in spirit to the «morose glam theater» of early Roxy Music
and early solo Eno, and they slice through the insanely fast drone chords of
ʽThird Uncleʼ like butter: not adding much to the original, I guess,
but perfectly capturing its joint vibe of lunacy and irony — and, although
Ash's technique does not fully match Phil Manzanera's, this is barely
noticeable, because the spirit of that original solo is reproduced to a tee.
None of the originals come close in terms of
general frenzy, but they do not intend to: ʽThird Uncleʼ is just a
benevolent warm-up, followed by one «big freeze» that comes in several
different models. If you expected to be able to dance the night away, clad in
black cloacks and mascara shades, you will be disappointed. But stepping away
from pop rhythms allows them more space for invention — with a little patience,
it becomes obvious that every song has something to offer, and a few of them
have something incredible to offer.
Actually, when I use the term «incredible», I
am mainly referring to ʽSwing The Heartacheʼ — a track like no other
in the Bauhaus catalog. This is the Ash show all the way: after a long, intriguing
set-up of electronic howling, he kicks in with such a nasty loud riff that I
can't help being reminded of Black Sabbath and ʽIron Manʼ — that
«earth ripped apart» effect! — and from there on, the whole song becomes a test
pad for all sorts of guitar madness, including a repetitive «whistling» effect
that may easily wreck an unstable nervous system. Altogether, there are enough
cool musical ideas in this song to fuel a small album, but they all work
together towards a common purpose: drive you right out of your head. (And I'm
pretty sure that will happen the minute you turn the volume up real loud in
your headphones).
The band is being more merciful to the listener
on such classics as ʽSilent Hedgesʼ (featuring the album's meanest
bassline) and ʽIn The Nightʼ, which is lyrically a song about
suicide, but musically more of a pissed-off «slow punk» rocker, drastically
speeding up towards the end. ʽSpiritʼ is a portentous anthem —
Bauhaus' own idea of a ʽWe Will Rock Youʼ, culminating in an endless
loop of "we love our audience, we love our audience!", clearly
written for the fans but, considering that Murphy's image does not require
«loving» anybody, coming off as ironic all the same. The best thing about
ʽSpiritʼ, anyway, is how they manage to combine an essentially
rockabilly bass line with a folk-themed melody — somehow, it works.
Experimentation hits hardest on the second side
of the album, especially with the three-part suite ʽThe Three
Shadowsʼ, its first movement purely instrumental and atmospheric, its
second one a melancholic funeral waltz, its third one a short «folk-punk» coda
with a little Irish dance flavor. I guess this description alone helps understand
why the «scattered» nature of the album was so confusing, but, really, this
odd mix of different elements should hardly be any more confusing than, say,
Kate Bush's much-revered suite on the second half of Hounds Of Love — it's just that the «point» of it may not be for
everyone. Murphy's lyrics hardly make any sense, and sometimes seem drastically
underworked ("but I... will always... exist... because... I always...
exist" — nice logical chain out there), but it is the music, not the
words, that matter, and there is a clear emotional link between all three
parts, from the somber ricocheting guitar licks of the intro right down to the
slightly dissonant piano / fiddle duet on the outro.
What may really
count as scattered is the last track — ʽExquisite Corpseʼ is more
like a collection of loosely, if at all, connected snippets than anything else,
as if, having recorded 35 minutes worth of material, they simply decided to
cram all their remaining ideas into the other five, regardless of how well
they could be sewn together. Indeed, the coda, especially coming right after
the lovely acoustic balladeering of ʽAll We Ever Wantedʼ, is a bit
anti-climactic: some of the snippets are okay, but I was really looking forward
to some grand conclusion after all the freaky imagination outbursts. Still,
that's a small price of disappointment to be paid for such an overall
satisfactory experience.
In any case, do not follow the naysayers — The Sky's Gone Out still captures
Bauhaus at the top of their game, and just because it refuses to conform to the
clichés of «goth» does not mean that these guys do not know what they're
doing. Okay, so they probably do not know what they're doing, but they're doing
it fine anyway: not even on Flat Fields
has Ash been more thoughtful about his instrument, or more lucky about putting
those thoughts in practice.
PRESS THE EJECT AND GIVE ME THE TAPE (1982)
1) In The Flat Field; 2) Rose
Garden Funeral Of Sores; 3) Dancing; 4) The Man With The X-Ray Eyes; 5) Bela Lugosi's
Dead; 6) The Spy In The Cab; 7) Kick In The Eye; 8) In Fear Of Fear; 9) Hollow
Hills; 10) Stigmata Martyr; 11) Dark Entries; 12) Terror Couple Kill Colonel*;
13) Double Dare*; 14*) In The Flat Field; 15*) Hair Of The Dog; 16*) Of Lillies
And Remains; 17*) Waiting For The Man.
Visually, Bauhaus live were not vastly
different from any other punk / post-punk act of the era — their act was much
less theatrical than the music would suggest — but in terms of sound, it was
primarily on the stage that they played out their «goth rock» reputation in
earnest. The setlist concentrates on the darkest songs in the catalog, and the
towering centerpiece is ʽBela Lugosi's Deadʼ, longer, grander, and
weightier than anything else on here — nine minutes of grave macabrity that
Alice Cooper would probably have rejected for being too pretentious and
humorless, but for Bauhaus, it is their life, as Murphy gets to get so heavily
into character and Ash gets to scatter round his entire bag of guitar tricks,
imitating every single variation of a bat wing flap on his instrument and
feeling quite at home.
On the whole, the live Bauhaus experience has
little reason to be experienced outside an actual theater — the songs are not
significantly modified from their studio bases, usually retaining the
structures, the tempos, and the general dynamics. But yes, if you need to hear
it from me, both Murphy and Ash do behave more wildly on stage: Murphy becomes
a bit more of a screamer, and Ash allows himself to fool around with even more
feedback effects. So if you decide that songs like ʽStigmata Martyrʼ
rock harder and blow up more nerve cells here than in the studio version, I am
not going to argue — I just happen to find the difference sort of negligible,
and even more negligible on the short dance-oriented stuff from Mask, such as ʽDancingʼ or
ʽIn Fear Of Fearʼ, where I was almost afraid at once that they'd
simply put some audience noises over studio takes (well, you can't blame me for not memorizing every studio
nuance of those tracks).
Technical notes: most of these songs were recorded
in October 1981 and February 1982 in London and Liverpool, so there is
predictably nothing included from The
Sky's Gone Out; and, in fact, the live album itself was originally released
as a bonus addition to Sky, only
later gaining the status of an «autonomous» LP — initiating a rather strange
tradition which eventually resulted in Bauhaus having as many live albums out
as they have studio ones. Furthermore, the CD re-release added a bunch of extra
tracks recorded at a December 1981 show in Paris, with ʽDouble Dareʼ
as a particular highlight for those who love the Murphy scream, but the tracks
also have significantly poorer sound quality. The most curious, and the least
professionally recorded, inclusion is that of a Manchester performance where
they join forces with Nico on a delightfully (atrociously?) chaotic rendition
of the VU's ʽWaiting For The Manʼ.
On the whole, I would probably recommend
skipping this, but apparently, the Old Vic London show from 1982 had also been
videotaped, so this is a good bet to check out the young Murphy in his prime,
belly-dancing and all, while Ash and his supercool mohawk are weaving guitar
rings around him (really piss-poor lighting job, though, based on the bits I
have seen). But as for me, I do not care much for that early 1980s visual
stylistics anyway, and for those who think that Bauhaus are better heard than
seen, Press The Eject will not be of
much use.
BURNING FROM THE INSIDE (1983)
1) She's In Parties; 2)
Antonin Artaud; 3) Wasp; 4) King Volcano; 5) Who Killed Mr. Moonlight; 6) Slice
Of Life; 7) Honeymoon Croon; 8) Kingdom's Coming; 9) Burning From The Inside;
10) Hope.
Considering who we are talking about here, the
phrase «nothing predicted a bleak future for Bauhaus in 1983» sounds rather
silly — this is one band that could always do with some bleak future, the
bleaker the better. Let me try and rephrase that: by early 1983, Bauhaus were
going stronger than ever, and there is no telling how many successful results
this Murphy/Ash collaboration could yield throughout the decade. But fate
commanded that, just as the band entered the studio to begin sessions for their
fourth LP, Murphy fell ill with a real heavy (some say life-threatening) case
of pneumonia — and the remaining members actually had the nerve to carry on recording
without him, even to the point of Ash
and David J singing lead vocals on several tracks. Whatever tensions between
the vocalist and the instrumentalists there were up to that point were
instantly magnified tenfold, and the band played their last show at the
Hammersmith on July 5, one week prior to the release of Burning From The Inside.
Tension, dissent, and various forms of cracks
within a band are not always detrimental — quite often, this actually stirs and
freshens creative juices, and there is nothing like a heavy splash of healthy
hatred to produce great art, anyway. Unfortunately, this is not what happened
here — with the partial absence of Murphy, Bauhaus... well, it just isn't
Bauhaus any more. Apart from a few trademark songs, Ash and David J push the
band into softer, more «melodic» territory that draws its inspiration from dark
folk and Kurt Weill rather than Joy Division. It may be tasteful and relatively
interesting territory, but it puts The Bauhaus Beast to sleep (and it sometimes
puts me to sleep, which is not good
at all).
There is really only one classic number here,
which accordingly opens the album and was also released as its only single —
ʽShe's In Partiesʼ has everything you could expect from a Bauhaus
song: dark «glam-hellish» delivery from Peter, going into a nostalgic trance
for the glitz, the vanity, and the noir
of the classic age of Hollywood; a simple, nasty, unforgettable riff from Ash,
eventually mutating into a series of heavily treated swoops and meltdowns, as
if somebody were pouring acid on the amps; and a gloomy solo dance by the
bassline for a coda. The song is so good that its very presence already sort of
redeems the album, so that the ensuing disappointment is not so disappointing —
then again, it is hard not to be disappointed when you slowly understand that
nothing else here comes close to matching the dark power of its opening number.
Most of the Murphy-less stuff is what I'd call
«for the fans». The boys mean well and have no intention of simply pelting us
with filler: ʽWho Killed Mr. Moonlightʼ, for instance, is a carefully
thought-out epitaphy to starry-eyed romance, a piano / organ-dominated
melancholic ballad on how "someone shot nostalgia in the back, someone
shot our innocence". Problem is... it's boring. They do not seem to be able
to do anything interesting with these instruments, let alone the saxophone
doodling that Ash is quietly arranging in the background. It's basically just
five minutes of fluffy atmospheric wallowing that is neither too pretty nor too
sad to activate the emotions. It's just something that is not-theirs-to-do.
Nor am I too impressed with the half-drunk,
half-tribal waltzing of ʽKing Volcanoʼ (tries to achieve a
phantasmagoric effect but fails), or with the acoustic folk balladry of
ʽKingdom's Comingʼ (monotonous, instantly forgettable); ʽSlice
Of Lifeʼ is a little better because Ash's vocals at least match the
nervous tension of the instrumental melody, and this is the only track on which
he succeeds in building up some maniacal paranoia — still, Murphy would have handled
that so much better. Really, none of these songs has any genuine staying power.
In addition, it is a little weird
that, all of a sudden, without Murphy in the studio, Ash so abruptly decided to
place his faith in the acoustic guitar: he is not a master picker, and his
greatest talent was always in the sheer number of different effects and
impressions he could derive from electricity.
Things do not always work out fine with Murphy, either: case in point is
the title track, which starts out nice enough, with cruel, brain-melting riffs
and pleasantly extremist abrupt jumps from dirge-goth to «punk-funk» and
convenient lyrics about "razor weeds" that reach up to one's knees,
but then somehow gets stuck in a five-minute repetitive coda that annoys rather
than enchants, as if your vinyl got caught in the groove for some purely
mechanical reason. Those five minutes, I doubt it not for a second, were
clearly thrown in to fill up space: there must
be more atmospheric ways of getting the message of "I don't see you
anymore" into your listeners' heads than this.
Finally, what sort of a Bauhaus record finishes
with a song called ʽHopeʼ? Uplifting acoustic guitars? Hippie-style
choral vocals? "Your mornings will be brighter, break the line, tear up
rules, make the most of a million times no"? Who do they think they are —
Jefferson Airplane? Time to call it a day, boys; I have no more interest in
hearing this from my Bauhaus than in
listening to the Beach Boys doing hip-hop or to Elton John singing opera arias.
Of course, the album is not really a «sell
out»: it is simply plagued by circumstances beyond artistic control, and a
failed attempt to compensate for these circumstances with a series of experiments
that downplay the band's traditional strengths and lay open their weaknesses.
Many fans are still willing to accept it, particularly since ʽShe's In
Partiesʼ is such a strong opener that it does set the tone for the entire
record, and that's quite alright. My point is simply that Burning From The Inside is «diluted Bauhaus», and that I'd rather
go listen to R.E.M. than to ʽKingdom's Comingʼ, or to Peter Hammill
rather than to ʽWho Killed Mr. Moonlightʼ — why settle for anything
but the best, after all, when history has already provided you with such an
ample choice?
REST IN PEACE: THE FINAL CONCERT (1983 / 1992)
1) Burning From The Inside; 2)
In Fear Of Fear; 3) Terror Couple Kill Colonel; 4) The Spy In The Cab; 5) Kingdom's
Coming; 6) She's In Parties; 7) Antonin Artaud; 8) King Volcano; 9) Passion Of
Lovers; 10) Slice Of Life; 11) In Heaven; 12) Dancing; 13) Hollow Hills; 14)
Stigmata Martyr; 15) Kick In The Eye; 16) Dark Entries; 17) Double Dare; 18) In
The Flat Field; 19) Boys; 20) God In An Alcove; 21) Hair Of The Dog; 22) Bela
Lugosi's Dead.
This certainly cannot be a long review, since
most of what needs to be said about the live avatar of Bauhaus has already been
squeezed out for the review of Press The
Eject... Formal info is as follows: Rest
In Peace is a faithful recording of Bauhaus' last concert, played at the
Hammersmith Palais in London on July 5, 1983, one week prior to the official
release of Burning From The Inside
and fifteen years before all four members would play again. The show itself, although
captured on tape, remained in the vaults for almost a decade, before it was
finally released on two CDs in 1992 — and the appropriate title «rest in peace»
actually reproduces the words of David J, spoken at the very end of the show,
once the final echoes of ʽBela Lugosiʼ have died down: most of the
fans present, unaware of the band's suicidal plans, never figured out what that
properly meant until it was too late.
The large delay between recording and release
is understandable: first, it seemed pointless at the time to put out two live
albums in such a brief time interval, and second, the sound quality is highly
questionable — almost as if they were taping this as a personal memento rather
than a potential commercial product or even historical document. Studio or
live, Bauhaus is one of those bands that draws its power from atmosphere and
sonic nuances rather than particular chord changes, so listening to a
poor-sound-quality Bauhaus album falls in the same category as watching a
black-and-white version of Snow White.
For those who still have all the hits ringing and reverberating in their ears,
subconscious will do the trick and restore the missing colors, but God forbid
you ever fall upon Rest In Peace as
your introduction to the band.
The setlist is relatively predictable: in the
first part, the band largely concentrates on recent material from the
still-unreleased Burning, and later
on, they fall back upon the classics with a vengeance — the encore is almost
half an hour long, reminding us of just how fruitful the short career of
Bauhaus was in the first place, if they need so much time to properly summarize
it. On the other hand, they do need some extra time to include a few rarities:
the distorted post-punk-rocker ʽBoysʼ (originally the B-side to
ʽBela Lugosi's Deadʼ) and, oddest of all, a prayer-style, nearly
accappella (accompanied only by a thin pseudo-church organ melody) rendition of
David Lynch's ʽIn Heavenʼ from Eraserhead
— come to think of it, Eraserhead and
Bauhaus must have come out of the same womb, even if it took Murphy and Ash
several years to realize that ("we got the words wrong", Murphy
admits in the middle of the performance, which must imply they did not have too
much time learning them).
Altogether, the show was certainly done on the
level, but the wooden sound quality does drag it down, and the relative lack of
surprises means that even hardcore fans will probably not want to sit through
the whole thing more than once. Unless, that is, the hardcore fan should happen
to be a major specific admirer of Burning
From The Inside — this is the only live Bauhaus album where you are going
to get so many non-Murphy-targeted songs in one place (this covers most of the
difference from the post-reunion Gotham
performance). For me, however, that's a minus.
GOTHAM (1999)
1) Double Dare; 2) In The Flat
Field; 3) God In An Alcove; 4) In Fear Of Fear; 5) Hollow Hills; 6) Kick In The
Eye; 7) Terror Couple Kill Colonel; 8) Silent Hedges; 9) Severance; 10) Boys;
11) She's In Parties; 12) The Passion Of Lovers; 13) Dark Entries; 14) Telegram
Sam; 15) Ziggy Stardust; 16) Bela Lugosi's Dead; 17) All We Ever Wanted Was
Everything; 18) Spirit; 19) Severance [studio version].
In 1998, Bauhaus took the world of mascara by
surprise — it may have seemed to everyone that Murphy's ways were no longer compatible
with the rest of the band (who were doing fine for themselves, under the name
of «Love And Rockets»), but time either heals your wounds or empties your
pockets, or both, and, anyway, somehow in 1998 the original Bauhaus did come together
— and in quite an imposing manner, too. The «punny» album title may seem to
indicate that they have finally agreed to settle into the appropriate pigeon
hole, but on this particular occasion, since the concerts were indeed played
in NYC (September 9-10, 1998, at the Hammerstein Ballroom), the title is really
perfect for the occasion.
Moreover, the first few minutes of Gotham are suspenseful and
breathtaking. Small nuclear blasts of bass rumble set against excited audience
screams, gradually increasing in intensity until Ash properly opens up the
feedback barrel and sets people flying from their seats — then David J distorts
the bass riff of ʽDouble Dareʼ to living-hell status, and finally,
Murphy crawls out of the shadows to sing a seriously amended set of lyrics...
which is where the fun starts getting colder, since his stage antics had
dwindled over two decades, and the scenic delivery is professional, technically
perfect, and spirited, but not as bold or exuberant as it used to be.
From there on, it is hit after hit, classic
after classic, expertly delivered, meticulously captured, thrilling for the
audience of the Hammerstein, and, as it happens with all of Bauhaus' live recordings,
not particularly rewarding for the casual fan. The tracklist predictably venerates
the first record, respects the second, acknowledges the third, and ignores the
fourth (with the equally predictable exception of ʽShe's In
Partiesʼ) — one not-so-surprising omission is ʽStigmata Martyrʼ,
a song that always used to be the
major highlight of the show, but was not performed because of its Christian
overtones, since Murphy had switched to embracing Sufism by that time; and one
surprising inclusion is ʽSpiritʼ, heavily rearranged and done largely
as a group harmony chant, with Ash's phased acoustic guitar as the only
instrument and the entire "we love our audience" part completely
melodically re-written so that it now sounds much less ironic than it used to.
The «dark horse» of the album is a cover of
ʽSeveranceʼ, a Dead Can Dance cover from 1988's The Serpent's Egg — true to the spirit of Dead Can Dance, Bauhaus,
too, do this thing as an atmospheric mood piece, but neither the live version
nor the studio recording, tacked on to the end as a bonus track, manage to be
as intoxicating as the band they set out to cover. It is quite natural for
Bauhaus to regard Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard as their «stepchildren», what
with their first album coming out next year after Bauhaus' demise, as if they
inherited that spirit, but in reality the two bands are extremely different,
and their material does not crossbreed that easily. Still, a curious
intersection here, and if it helps fans of one band to get interested in the
other, we will respect the gesture for its promotional value at least.
Other than that, Gotham simply shows that the band had never lost it, or if it did,
it found it as soon as it stated a desire to do so. As a bona fide live
overview of the band's entire career, recorded with excellent quality and
featuring the band in top form, it works very well; as a candidate for
«Bauhaus' best live album», it does not hold a candle to Press The Eject, mainly because of the absence of ʽStigmata
Martyrʼ and because Peter Murphy is not so young and not so crazy any
more; as an important historic document witnessing the «restoration of a
legend», it has its undeniable value, and even a certain amount of thrill. And
it never hurts to own yet another version of ʽBela Lugosi's Deadʼ —
the bats always seem to scurry and shuffle around the ceiling in a musical
configuration that is quite different from last time. If anything, it helps not to play those old Bauhaus
numbers for so long — gives you an incentive for reinventing some of them a
little bit in the meantime.
GO AWAY WHITE (2008)
1) Too Much 21st Century; 2)
Adrenalin; 3) Undone; 4) International Bullet Proof Talent; 5) Endless Summer
Of The Damned; 6) Saved; 7) Mirror Remains; 8) Black Stone Heart; 9) The Dog's
A Vapour; 10) Zikir.
Was there any sense in Bauhaus reuniting, this
one last time (or so they insist, at least), to write up and produce a brand
new studio album? A reunion tour for nostalgic reasons is one thing, but the
band as a creative unit was so
definitively tied in to the early Eighties, it is almost impossible to imagine how
they could have made up for all that lost time. It's not as if, during their
relatively short career, Bauhaus showed no will for or capacity of evolving —
it's just that they didn't have the time to completely break out of the
stereotypes, and a 2008 album that would have had to pick up from where Burning From The Inside had left us
twenty-five years earlier might easily have been a misguided embarrassment —
curious, perhaps, but embarrassing all the same.
Indeed, when Go Away White made its first rounds, some of the reviews were
mighty skeptical — comparing the band to a «stately stone mausoleum», for
instance, not particularly relevant, not to mention necessary, in the 21st
century. A moot argument, that, for if the 21st century did not need stately stone
mausolea, all of them would have been demolished long ago anyway. In fact, the
band itself takes care of that argument right away: the very first track is
ʽToo Much 21st Centuryʼ, on which Murphy complains that "they
all wanna be something better", and that there is "too much fake...
too much to take". Not a particularly fresh or original complaint, but one
to which I can always relate, and delivered with so much energy and conviction
that the listener has to take it seriously. Bauhaus have returned to take one
last look at this world, decide that it ain't worthy, and then go away forever,
like the Angel of Bethesda, appropriately photographed from the back for the
spooky album sleeve.
But when they do take that one last look, they
do not take it quite the same way as they used to. Self-produced as usual, the
album does make use of improvements in technology — the mix is crisper,
subtler, more aurally satisfying than on any old Bauhaus record, with each of
Ash's overdubs, effects, atmospheric layers etc. perfectly discernible, and
Haskins' drums retain their gothic sternness without having to depend on
epoch-bound electronic enhancements (although, where they find it more to the
song's benefit, the drums are still electronic, especially when they drift into
mystical atmosphere, e. g. on ʽThe Dog's A Vapourʼ). Another
difference is that Ash has developed a taste for distortion, and many of the
riffs that push the songs forward have a brawny crrrrunch that was not at all typical of early Bauhaus, with the
exception of a few special show-stoppers like ʽStigmata Martyrʼ.
ʽToo Much 21st Centuryʼ, in fact, kicks off with a rumbling riff that
borders on heavy metal (one tone lower and that'd be it), and
ʽInternational Bullet Proof Talentʼ rocks as hard as if they'd let
the Young brothers guest star — again, not something you'd want to directly
associate with «classic» Bauhaus.
Comparisons aside, though, it mostly works.
Murphy's voice alone, retaining all of its tombstone solemnity of yore and even
lowering it just a wee bit more due to age reasons, is enough to make one
suspect that these guys, or at least their frontman, are still living in the
past, but they succeed in making this «peek from the grave» thing into an interesting experience. The first half
of the album is, in its essence, almost completely sarcastic — instead of
plunging you into a phantasmagoric setting à
la ʽBela Lugosi's Deadʼ or revving you up for breakneck dancing
with the spirits à la ʽIn
The Flat Fieldʼ, Murphy uses the potential of his musicians to grin and
jeer at the unconscious evil-making of the modern world. This prevents the
songs from becoming too haunting or ensnaring, but helps enhance their
intelligence quotient.
ʽAdrenalinʼ, for instance, is far
from the best song the band has ever come up with, but its superimposition of
bubbling-buzzing high-pitched guitar and distorted bass over Murphy's sarcastic
lyrics about how «adrenaline» (in this modern world of ours) is the answer to
all the problems is one of the smartest ideas in Bauhaus history. And when they
throw in a one-finger-on-the-piano bit in the middle of the song, it is almost
like a tribute to John Cale and his production of ʽI Wanna Be Your
Dogʼ — a hidden (unintentional?) reference to those heroes of long ago who,
too, found themselves stuck in the ambiguous position of enjoying the
temptations of the modern world and hating them at the same time.
As the album progresses, though, the sarcastic
riff-rockers become fewer in numbers and eventually give way to atmospherics —
beginning with the psychedelic oratorio of ʽSavedʼ (where the state
of being «saved» is made equivalent with «unconscious») and reaching its
culmination with the final double-punch of ʽThe Dog's A Vapourʼ and
ʽZikirʼ. The first of these is unquestionably the highest point of
the album, a complex, multi-layered midnight concoction with Ash and Murphy at
their very, very best. When the sirens and banshees make their major strike at
4:12 into the song, it produces the eeriest, most jump-starting effect since
ʽSwing The Heartacheʼ did something similar (but on a much humbler
sonic scale: ʽThe Dog's A Vapourʼ, in comparison, would be on the
level of Mahlerian polyphony).
The fact that this is a «Bauhaus»-type record
indeed, and not just a combination of whatever the individual musicians were
doing at the time, may be seen from the fact that Murphy's Islamic (more
precisely, Sufi) adherence is mostly saved until the last track,
ʽZikirʼ, a three-minute-long atmospheric fadeout that reflects his
past experiments with Turkish music, but does not fling them too abruptly in
the listener's face. It is, indeed, quite impressive that, despite the huge
artistic differences that continued to accumulate between Peter and the rest
of the band, and despite some hard times that they had to endure together in
the studio, they were able to bring
the project to completion and release the record — a little less tolerance, and
none of this would happen. As it is, Go
Away White is clearly not the record by which this band will be remembered
in history, but it is an adequate, respectable, and enjoyable epilog. One of
the worst things about Burning From The
Inside was that ʽHopeʼ as the final Bauhaus song was as confusing
and fake as it could be: it had to take them a quarter century to rectify that
mistake, but better late than never, and for that alone, Go Away White would already be eligible for a thumbs up. As it happens, it never
once makes a false move, even if only a few of the moves it makes deserve the
status of a «classic Bauhaus moment», ʽThe Dog's A Vapourʼ being
transparently the No. 1 candidate.
PS. Funny bit of trivia: out of several
indignant one-star reviews of this album on Amazon, at least one explicitly
states that «this is not Bauhaus, this has more of a Love and Rockets feel to
it» and at least another one states with the same forcefulness that «I have not
heard Bauhaus, I have heard a Peter Murphy solo album here». Count me happy on
this.
ADDENDA:
SWING THE HEARTACHE: THE BBC SESSIONS (1980-1983/1989)
1) God In An Alcove; 2)
Telegram Sam; 3) Double Dare; 4) The Spy In The Cab; 5) In The Flat Field; 6)
St. Vitus Dance; 7) In Fear Of Fear; 8) Poison Pen; 9) Party Of The First Part;
10) Departure; 11) The Three Shadows, Pt. 2; 12) Silent Hedges; 13) Swing The
Heartache; 14) Third Uncle; 15) Ziggy Stardust; 16) Terror Couple Kill Colonel;
17) Night Time; 18) She's In Parties.
As a minor bonus to all the faithful fans,
Bauhaus were honored by this archival release from the BBC — originally issued
as early as 1989, when this tradition was still relatively fresh and the
officially released BBC recordings were still regarded as a gap-filling remedy
for those artists whose live catalog left a lot to be desired. These particular
sessions, mostly recorded for John Peel's and David Jensen's broadcasts, cover
the chronological entirety of Bauhaus' classic career, from 1980 to 1983, and
work very well as a basic introduction to the band's work and image —
pleasantly concentrating on whatever was relevant for the band at the time of
performing rather than just on reproducing the commercial hits.
This means that the package may not pretend at
being a «comprehensive anthology» (how could one have a comprehensive anthology
without ʽBela Lugosi's Deadʼ or ʽHollow Hillsʼ?), but it
provides several impressive snapshots of particular moments in time — for
instance, on a 1982 session they play the second (waltzing) part of ʽThe
Three Shadowsʼ and the non-album oddity ʽParty Of The First
Partʼ, where parts of the dialog soundtrack to the cartoon ʽThe Devil And Daniel Mouseʼ (itself
a send-up of The Devil And Daniel Webster)
are backed by an eerie lounge jazz exercise, a fairly atypical achievement for
Bauhaus, but with an effect that is just as comically creepy as their
straightforward «Goth» business.
One does, however, have to be careful, because
a few of these tracks turn out to be exactly the same as already present on
studio albums — ʽThird Uncleʼ, for instance, is not a real live take, as might have been hoped, but the exact
studio mix of the song as first heard on The
Sky's Gone Out, and the same applies to ʽZiggy Stardustʼ (the
single version). A bit of a cheat there, but at least it is compensated for by
featuring the only live version of
ʽSwing The Heartacheʼ in official existence — no wonder they named
the entire album after it, as it is clearly the
major highlight of the package, with Ash doing his best to retain and, if
possible, enhance the industrial sonic nightmare of the original.
Other minor surprises include ʽPoison
Penʼ, a muscular dark funk workout almost completely dependent on bass/drum
interplay as Haskins and David J box each other to death in a sweaty
three-minute match; and a cover of the old garage classic ʽNight
Timeʼ by The Strangeloves — neither suited too well for Bauhaus' usual
image nor giving them an adequate opportunity to change it, but raising the bar
on unpredictability, which is always good for any band locked into a stereotype.
As for the predictable inclusions, everything is played with the expected
verve, but nothing is superior to the studio versions, for reasons already
discussed previously. But at least the sound quality is better than on the
«regular» live albums.
Serious fans will need to own this if only for
all the «rarities» — casual ones might want to give it an uninterrupted spin or
two if only to marvel at how a band, over such a short period, can sound in so
many different ways, yet always remain the same at heart. We have basic
rock'n'roll, funk, lounge jazz, glam rock, post-punk, industrial, even some
acoustic waltzing and old-time garage, but all of these things are given the
Murphy/Ash treatment of implosive vocals and explosive guitars, and it
neutralizes the whole package into three years from the life of an obnoxious, but
impossibly smart and perversely attractive Evil Clown. The very fact that the
album offers such a perspective (well, at least I've been able to formulate it
somehow) leaves me no choice but to give it a thumbs up, skeptical as I usually am
about all those BBC packages. But then again, the magic may not work tomorrow.
It's a quantum kind of thing.
BEAT HAPPENING (1985)
1) Our Secret; 2) What's
Important; 3) Down At The Sea; 4) I Love You; 5) Fourteen ('83); 6) Run Down
The Stairs ('83); 7) Bad Seeds (live); 8) In My Memory; 9) Honey Pot; 10) The
Fall; 11) Youth; 12) Don't Mix The Colors; 13) Foggy Eyes; 14) Bad Seeds; 15) I
Let Him Get To Me; 16) I Spy; 17) Run Down The Stairs ('84); 18) Christmas; 19)
Fourteen ('84); 20) Let's Kiss; 21) 1, 2, 3; 22) In Love With You Thing; 23)
Look Around.
This is one of those records that usually
triggers interminable and unwinnable discussions about what is music, what is
art, what is taste, what is good and bad sound, and whether we're supposed to
have admiration for something just because it was endorsed by Kurt Cobain, and if
yes, should we also admire heroin and Remington Arms, etc. etc. In other words,
a reviewer's paradise regardless of how much the reviewer likes or hates the
record in question.
The fact remains that, as evidenced by this
particular recording, «singers», «songwriters», and, most comically,
«multi-instrumentalists» (yes, that's the way they're encyclopaedically
described) Calvin Johnson, Heather Lewis, and Bret Lunsford, upon getting
together, found out or confirmed that they could not sing worth a damn, that
they were unable to competently play any of their instruments, and that their
songwriting talents did not significantly exceed those of an average 5-year
old. Additionally, they did not have access to professional studios and did not
even own a drum set (they had to borrow one or build up a cardboard imitation).
In other words, they were, like, the first true
punk band in history, except they did not want to be punks. Instead, they just
took the most brilliant decision that could be taken, given the circumstances.
And that decision was — if our skills and
talents match the average level of a 5-year old (okay, maybe a 10-year old for
accuracy), why not imitate a 10-year
old? "I was walking in our town / I was walking through the store / I saw
a pretty girl / She held open the door / I said ʽI like youʼ / She
said that she liked me / And we could be friends / In our special stupid
way". That is the way this album opens (well, the new CD edition does, anyway), and isn't that something you'd pretty
much expect to be written by a 10-year old when pressed into writing «poetry»?
Okay, so the word ʽstupidʼ gives it all away: no 10-year old would
voluntarily describe him/herself as ʽstupidʼ. So it's not quite as perfect as it may have been.
But then, they have to have some points of intersection with their grown-up
audiences — after all, Beat Happening
is not advertising itself for a pre-pubescent public. I mean, another of the
songs goes, "I had sex on Christmas / I had sex three times today / Three
different women taught me how to be bored / In their own separate sweet little
ways". So let's put it this way: this is an album written by grown-ups
about grown-up issues through the prism of the mentality of a little kid, one
such as could have come up with the drawing for the album cover.
Does it work? Well, that's a tough question to
answer once you've done your duty of acknowledging the innovative (or, rather,
«novel») nature of the overall approach. As far as I can tell, it does not work
on the level of «base catchiness»: beyond the fact that the primitive chord
sequences that they can master on their guitars are all taken from various
classic or not-so-classic pop records, they don't really know what to do with
them, or, rather, they just don't care, because any extra tinkering with
melodies would qualify as «polish», and a 10-year old wouldn't be supposed to
care about that. It certainly doesn't work on the level of «conventional
prettiness», either: viciously off-key singing and annoyingly out-of-tune playing
are the norm of day (although some songs violate melodic conventions more than
others), so don't expect to be angelically charmed. So what else is there to
compensate for poor songwriting and horrible execution? (And, oh yes, awful
production, but that goes without saying, since the first thing about Beat
Happening that you learn in textbooks is how they were the real «pioneers of
lo-fi»).
Well, there is
a fair amount of innocent charm in all this stuff, whose fairy godmother is actually
Maureen Tucker on ʽAfter Hoursʼ (yes indeed, for everything in the
Seventies, Eighties and beyond there has
been a blueprint at least as early as 1969). Just the way this trio launches
into this material, with such gusto and all, challenges conventional
expectations — instead of upgrading themselves to the level of a very mediocre,
undistinctive, third-rate guitar pop band, they have chosen to downgrade themselves, and in doing so,
they have attracted our attention rather than dissipated it. The lo-fi
production and poor playing, in this case, enhance the experience — we are not
being shown some pretentious, idealized, «childfully angelic» world, but are
drawn into the process as is, warts and all: Beat Happening do not invite us to
admire them, to fall head over heels in love with their cuteness and
cuddliness, but instead provoke a mix of curiosity, laughing, irritation, and,
on occasion, even some intellectual stimulation.
There is one song here (actually, presented in
two versions on the new CD edition, one of which is a barely audible live
performance) that is intentionally written in a «punkish» idiom — like, what
would a 10-year old scribble in his classroom after his first encounter with
The Clash or The Sex Pistols? With a quasi-surf rock guitar line and a stiff vocal
performance that brings up visions of the B-52's rather than Duane Eddy,
ʽBad Seedsʼ is like a really really silly, really really bad punk
rock anthem if you take it on its own, but placed in this general context, it's
just the album's protagonist momentarily caught in a bad mood — usually, his mood is much better, when
he is trying to pen something romantic and optimistic, but sometimes the world
gets him like that, and all he can do is just grin back at it: "we're
ba-a-a-a-d, bad bad seeds" (should be delivered with all the theatrical
evil that a little harmless, inoffensive kid can possibly gather up).
Special prize goes to Miss Heather "Mr.
Fish is having a party" Lewis here, for serving as the prototype for
thousands of intellectually endowed, innocently sounding indie ladies that
would start springing up at alarming rates in the 21st century — on a gut
level, I feel relieved every time that she takes lead vocals, because she is
either too afraid or to ashamed to sing as completely out of tune as Mr. Calvin
"The best part of sex is walking home" Johnson, who is simply reveling in the pleasure of making your
ears curdle. But you're supposed to take it like a man: I mean, would you
really be as insensitively cruel as to tell a 10-year old who's really, really
trying that your singing totally sucks, lil' buddy? Come on now. In a few
years, he'll start taking serious singing lessons, and then we'll see. And these guys here, they're just growing
backwards.
And some of the songs are genuinely funny —
ʽI Love Youʼ, for instance, has nothing to do with just loving you,
but everything to do with our proverbial 10-year old trying to compete with the
beatniks: it's something he might have written the next day after having his
mind blown by Dylan's ʽSubterranean Homesick Bluesʼ, with such
deliciously bad semi-rapped lines as "Those poets grin / Who never sin /
They fight with Russians / And have discussions / With the KGB / At the Baltic
Sea". It actually takes something good to create something that bad, you know. It is also amusing
that, although our «kid» seems familiar with sexual experiences (so let's raise
that 10 figure to at least 12-13 for comfort), he always seems to downplay and
denigrate them: "You got five other guys saying love me do / You know what
they want from you / Me, all I ask is love / And, honey pot, my love you can
trust" (ʽHoney Potʼ), or check that quotation from
ʽChristmasʼ again. On the other hand, we may very well be dealing
with a virgin here who's just shooting his mouth off about having sex on
Christmas, so, upon second thought, bring that figure back to 10. Any more than
that and we begin to have our doubts about the whole thing.
Overall, on a conceptual basis Beat Happening is quite endearing,
hilarious, and occasionally rather unsettling, since some of these songs come
very close to nailing the phenomenon of mental retardation (the Ramones used to
take too much pride in passing themselves off as mental retards: Beat Happening
do that humbly and quietly, and this makes it all the more unsettling). On an
individual song level, it is practically non-existent, though, even compared
to their later records where «polish» would reduce the importance of the
concept and increase the importance of separate song units. Also, the LP/CD
re-issue from 1996 which added a whole bunch of bonus tracks, particularly ones
taken from the later EP Three Tea
Breakfast, makes the whole experience somewhat overlong (23 tracks in 45
minutes — they come close to beating Wire's record with Pink Flag!). Regardless, it totally makes sense as an artistic
statement and deserves its thumbs up, although I'll have to wait until I go
completely mental before I start really enjoying it on a casual everyday basis.
JAMBOREE (1988)
1) Bewitched; 2) In Between;
3) Indian Summer; 4) Hangman; 5) Jamboree; 6) Ask Me; 7) Crashing Through; 8)
Cat Walk; 9) Drive Car Girl; 10) Midnight A Go-Go; 11) The This Many Boyfriends
Club.
Second time around, the joke is not quite so
funny any more. True to tradition, this is still a very short album with very
short songs (making any of these go over three minutes would severely violate
the Geneva convention), but there isn't much progress other than the proverbial
«10-year old kid» growing some pubic hair and discovering (in a not-so-independent
process) the joys of feedback, distortion, and RCR (Rebellious Caveman Rock!).
Seriously, if there is any way to describe the opening number ʽBewitchedʼ, it is
this and only this: a product from the Build-Your-Own-Stooges-Song Set. The
opening feedback, the threatening distorted riff, Calvin's nasty baritone, and
those lyrics — "I see you hang in the crowd / Staring me down... / What am
I to do? / I got a crush on you" — if this isn't a conscious attempt to
build their own ʽDown On The Streetʼ, I don't know what it is.
Except, of course, that you have to take it as completely tongue-in-cheek, or
else it is just a travesty. You could
make that riff thicker, throw in some supporting lead lines, add extra bite and
snarl to the vocals, get a real good drummer, and end up with one of those
proto-punk classics from either Funhouse
or Raw Power, because the riff is
actually quite cool — but you don't do that. You just end up with this
corrupted, lo-fi, off-key demo version, because that's supposed to be the
point. Okay then.
In fact, the songs here are, if anything, even
more intentionally and defiantly «demo-like» than on the 1985 album. The title
track is just Calvin singing off-key to a primitive drum machine; ʽAsk
Meʼ is just Heather, singing slightly more on-key to... nothing at all,
although the vocals do form a cohesive and catchy pop melody that should have
had a full backing... or should it, really? Who knows, maybe if they added
guitars and a rhythm section, it would have been just another run-of-the-mill
twee-pop number — whereas this deconstruction is... like... allegorical in
form, metaphysical in content? Fifty-eight seconds of the never-ending battle
between the Nacheinander and the Nebeneinander. Art imitating Life or
Life imitating Art? "Five hands crawling up my back / Thump, thump, have a
heart attack". Nursery rhyme in the left corner, lo-fi aesthetics in the
right corner. Clinch, clinch.
The thing is, until we actually see these songs
«completed», it is very hard to tell if they are quality embryos, produced
with fine, healthy genetic material, or if they're just a bunch of unfertilized
cells whose main, if not only, attraction is that very «unfertilized» look.
Some of the vocal, ahem, «melodies» can stick around, largely because of their
repetitiveness, and some of the tracks will stick around just due to sheer
ugliness (like the last track, ʽThe This Many Boyfriends Clubʼ,
apparently recorded live and featuring Calvin at his absolutely ugliest — the
vocals are more hideous than a bunch of tomcats in the night, and the
accompanying feedback blasts have all the proper effect of
nails-on-chalkboard); «enjoyable» these songs can only be for those who also
«enjoy» watching Night Of The Living Dead.
(With a few exceptions, of course: whenever Heather takes lead vocals, the
songs take on a friendly-sweet and generally listenable air — but she does not
do it too often).
But if you disregard the individual songs and
once again just embrace the concept as a whole, the downside is that,
«faux-Stooges numbers» like ʽBewitchedʼ and ʽHangmanʼ
aside, the concept remains more or less the same as it was: a tongue-in-cheek
look at «musical failure» as an artistic statement in itself. And second time
around, it's really not that fun anymore, which is why I can no longer be
generous enough for a thumbs up — I mean, there's no way I could recommend Jamboree to anybody with a good ear for
music, and there's no reason I should recommend Jamboree to anybody interested in music-centered artistic
statements because, well, there's just one thumbs up allowed per exactly the
same music-centered artistic statement if there's not much else to go along
with the statement. Unless, of course, you have doctor-prescribed aural pain treatments,
in which case ʽThe This Many Boyfriends Clubʼ is a total must. Play
it once every day at top volume, and you will be totally immune to drills,
jackhammers, and televangelists for the rest of your precious life.
BLACK CANDY (1989)
1) Other Side; 2) Black Candy;
3) Knick Knack; 4) Pajama Party In A Haunted Hive; 5) Gravedigger Blues; 6)
Cast A Shadow; 7) Bonfire; 8) T.V. Girl; 9) Playhouse; 10) Ponytail.
Our 10-/12-/14-year old continues to grow up,
and now he seems to be entering a mean streak — about half of the songs here
have dark overtones, be it the bass riffs, Calvin's ever-lowering vocals, or
lyrics that tend to drift into the spooky-scary corner of the absurd. Not that
this is «goth» or Alice Cooper stuff, but at this point in the life of the
protagonist, I'd stay away from him if you were a girl, because he is liable,
you know, to drop a spider in your panties or something. "Drip my blood /
Fall in love / Chew my cud / Mess my head" does not look very appetizing
as a replacement for the simplistic romancing of the first two albums.
I am very much tempted to write these thirty
minutes off by saying that the joke finally got too old, and that's it — on the
other hand, the songs continue to be moderately catchy, and this new darker
vibe counts for progress, so I guess it would be more honest to admit that by
1989 Beat Happening still had not completely outlived their initial purpose.
Not that I seriously want to talk about these songs. For one thing, it's
frustrating that Heather only gets to sing lead once, on the twee-cutesy
ʽKnick Knackʼ, whose repetitive, but seductive and optimistic refrain
of "you see a ghost, I see a halo" contrasts nicely with Calvin's
gloominess — it's as if she was allowed, just once, to make a retort and used
this opportunity to provide a bright, reassuring, idealistic feminine
counterpoint to Calvin's dark brooding masculinity (a yin-yang role reversal!).
But one song out of ten? She may not be the technically better singer of the
two, but at least she's the nice one.
For another thing, what is there to talk about, really? I could mention that
ʽOther Sideʼ opens the album with a melody that is very similar to
Zappa's ʽWowie Zowieʼ, and that this may not be a total coincidence (Freak Out! had its fair share of
intentional «childishness» as well), but other than that, well, you see, it no
longer has that freshness and strangeness of approach — it sounds more serious
than anything they've done before, enough to dispel the aura of «innocent young
teen delightfully failing in his sincere artistic inclinations», yet not
serious enough to wow or stun you with its melodic potential or unique
atmosphere. Honestly, I am not sure that I really need Beat Happening if I want
someone to invoke me to "let's find a way to the other side" — plenty
of people in the psychedelic era did this more convincingly.
Some stuff here is just plain misguided — the
finger-click-accompanied ʽGravedigger Bluesʼ, for instance, sounds
like an inane parody on Nick Cave; it could be funny if only the singing wasn't
so terribly offkey, but as it is, it is not. ʽPlayhouseʼ finally adds
an agenda of sexual innuendos to what used to be a much more chaste approach,
and for that reason, also sounds more like a self-parody than a serious
statement. The pseudo-surf rock ʽBonfireʼ and the pseudo-Stooges ʽPajama
Party In A Haunted Hiveʼ sound more like frustratingly incomplete genre
exercises than intellectual deconstructions of their respective genres — I
understand that the difference is fleeting and subjective, but I just don't
feel any enticing atmospherics here.
In other words, they are trying to make some progress without abandoning the core
ideology, but there's only so much you can achieve when your starting capital
consists of not knowing how to play or sing and not being afraid to use that
lack of knowledge. Think of Black Candy
as the band's "We wet our beds, but we want to be Jim Morrison!"
record or something — maybe that'll help. At least it's nice to know that it is
still no longer than thirty minutes.
DREAMY (1991)
1) Me Untamed; 2) Left Behind;
3) Hot Chocolate Boy; 4) I've Lost You; 5) Cry For A Shadow; 6) Collide; 7)
Nancy Sin; 8) Fortune Cookie Prize; 9) Revolution Come And Gone; 10) Red Head
Walking.
And the growth process goes on and on, and here
is where we reach a stage where there is almost nothing left that could
rekindle those old feelings of endearing cuteness. The primitive guitar
melodies stay strictly primitive, while the lyrics strive towards increasingly
meditative, introspective, impressionistic poetry — which creates an
unpleasant imbalance: you'd think that more sophisticated wordplay exercises
deserved a songwriting jolt as well, but no, these guys are just too lazy or
too stubborn to come up with better melodies.
At least Heather gets to sing three whole
songs, two of which sound exactly the same and one of which (ʽCollideʼ)
sounds like an early Sonic Youth demo. Her twee-ness makes it easier to sit
through Calvin's usual deconstructed surf-rock stuff, which shows no progress
whatsoever from the previous album. Only one tune somehow stands out, both because
it's longer than the rest and because it is the closest so far that they have
come to amateur-emulating the Velvets: ʽRevolution Come And Goneʼ, a
song not about any actual revolutions, but rather about a love-and-hate relationship
with strong sexual implications — however, the rhythm guitar work and the
inflection-free vocals are so mind-numbing that I'd rather have me 17 minutes
of ʽSister Rayʼ than have to listen to yet another four minutes of
this song.
In fact, fourth time around it is clear that
the formula has finally «locked in», and that Dreamy is a proposition strictly for those who have already been
converted. Yes, these songs are still catchy in the same way that early Beach
Boy songs like ʽSurfin' Safariʼ were catchy, or Jan and Dean, or Link
Wray, etc., but these are not freshly invented hooks (fans of early Sixties
rock will probably find no new melodic moves whatsoever), and their execution
leaves everything to be desired — so
there's really nothing except for an abstract «lo-fi aesthetics» left to defend
them. And there is nothing I can say about songs like ʽMe Untamedʼ,
ʽHot Chocolate Boyʼ, or ʽNancy Sinʼ that I have not already
said about their earlier tunes, so why say anything?
My limited time subscription to this aesthetics ran out with Jamboree anyway.
Bottomline: if you are a fan of running once
fresh, but eventually quite stale artistic jokes so deep into the ground that
nobody except you can even see them anymore, Dreamy is there for you. I, however, feel more bored by its thirty
minutes than if I'd had to spend all that time listening to a Grateful Dead
jam. You get similar reactions from late period Ramones, but at least late
period Ramones didn't have to harbor an irrational pride for shitty production,
poor playing, and offkey singing. Which is too bad, because Calvin's lyrics are actually getting better —
he's got quite a unique way of looking at relationships now, and with a slight
change of aesthetics, I could see how something like ʽCry For A
Shadowʼ might have been reworked into a really efficient, even therapeutic
love song. Unfortunately, I cannot at all stomach this approach to «being different»: when your music makes Lou Reed
seem like the Jascha Heifetz of electric guitar, you know you're taking huge risks, and I believe that, if you think in
context, Dreamy is where they reach
the end of the line. Thumbs down.
YOU TURN ME ON (1992)
1) Tiger Trap; 2) Noise; 3)
Pinebox Derby; 4) Teenage Caveman; 5) Sleepy Head; 6) You Turn Me On; 7)
Godsend; 8) Hey Day; 9) Bury The Hammer.
A tricky question here: will the Beat still be
Happening if, for once — just for once — the band actually decides to record
music that does not intentionally
sound bad? As in, quality hi-fi production, predominantly on-key vocals,
well-tuned guitars and all? The song structures may still be minimalistic as
hell, restricted by 2-3 chords at max, and the atmosphere may still smell of
lobotomy post-op, but the technical quality is improved to the point of there
actually being some technical
quality, and isn't that, like, sacrilegious for this band? Is there a point
here? Didn't we really all enjoy Beat Happening just because of the aural
masochism?
In any case, it is a good thing that they
recorded this, because otherwise we'd just have empty speculations — and here
is your actual chance to witness a cleaner, tighter, more overtly musical
variant of Beat Happening before it's too late. Additionally, there is one more
important change: the songs are much longer now on the average, varying from
around 4 to 6 minutes, with ʽGodsendʼ clocking in at an
awesome-awful 9:28 — and no, this is not some sort of «progressive» tendency,
because the Spartan melody stubbornly stays the same all the time. If you can listen to our shit for two minutes, you
might as well listen for nine. Let the chords soak in.
My honest opinion is that the gamble pays off
quite well. In essence, this is the same old Beat Happening — Calvin, the
grumpy one, and Heather, the bright innocent one, with their guitar melodies
reflecting the two different personalities — and the improved sound quality is
a blessing for their vocal hooks, which, although repetitive, finally get a
chance to properly materialize and solidify (particularly when they prop them
up with multi-tracked vocals).
So you could say that the inexperienced kid of
seven years ago has finally matured here, advancing to the level of writing
some really densely encoded lyrical
observations on love and death and to the level of actually mastering some
professional techniques to set them to music — yet all the while remaining at
about the same level of rudimentary musical talent, and retaining the twee
innocence and the gloomy sarcasm of
yore. Actually, one thing that you can sense fairly well is that the
personality is almost completely split in two now: Heather and Calvin move in
such different directions that it almost feels uncomfortable to have something
as sweet, optimistic, and encouraging as ʽSleepy Headʼ and something as grinningly ghoulish as
ʽPinebox Derbyʼ (a song about hunting witches and sealing them in
coffins, no less!) on the same album. Or, a minute later, have to listen to the
quasi-Satanic mantra of "turn me on dead man, turn me on dead man"
and then, right next to it, learn that "it's just the things you do, you
make it true, you're a godsend" over the course of a friendly nine-minute
mantra.
Indeed, approximately half of this album sounds
as if it were recorded in the dead of night at your local cemetery, while the
other half was recorded in broad daylight on some green lawn in Central Park.
The two halves lock together on the final track, ʽBury The Hammerʼ, a
relatively rare case of an actual duet between Calvin and Heather that urges to
"forgive and forget, it's time to make amends", as if the previous
forty minutes were spent in the state of a hostile rift, and now the creepy
cemetery joker and the sunshine-loving dame are coming together in one final embrace...
yeah, I could picture something like that.
And yes, the vocal hooks are nice. Not very original — just nice. For
the record, one bit of vocal modulation on ʽSleepy Headʼ is borrowed
from the Stones' ʽAs Tears Go Byʼ, and I'm sure that most of the
other parts can be traced back to their old-school pop roots as well, from
Motown to the Kinks, but they are reworking, not stealing, and matching the old
hooks to their modern personalities. Be it the mournful "we cry alone, we
cry alone" of ʽTeenage Cavemanʼ, or the adoring "you make
it true..." bit of ʽGodsendʼ, or the nonchalantly mumbled
"bury the hammer, bury the hammer" mantra, they're all a tiny tiny
bit «new», and they're all meaningfully attractive.
Overall, this is clearly a thumbs up kind of album — I hesitate
to call it the «culmination» of all things Beat Happening, since it objectively
sounds very differently from
everything they did previously; but as the end of the journey, it is at least
as important as the self-titled debut. You can easily skip the middle of the
road, but it makes sense — and a little intrigue — to take a look at how they
ended up if you already know how they started out. Ironically, this was not originally supposed to be Beat
Happening's swan song: it is more like one of those albums that unintentionally
come out looking like swan songs, and then subvert the band into breaking up because
there's just no way they could really pick it up and continue on. Another
record like that, and the spiral of mediocrity would start swirling again; but
as it is, You Turn Me On remains the
band's most immediately accessible and likeable record, and I'm glad they went
out with it.
ADDENDA:
MUSIC TO CLIMB THE APPLE TREE BY (1984-2000/2003)
1) Angels Gone; 2) Nancy Sin;
3) Sea Hunt; 4) Look Around; 5) Not A Care In The World; 6) Dreamy; 7) That
Girl; 8) Secret Picnic Spot; 9) Zombie Limbo Time; 10) Foggy Eyes; 11) Knock On
Any Door; 12) Sea Babies; 13) Tales Of A Brave Aphrodite; 14) Polly Pereguinn;
15) I Dig You.
As a very brief, but obligatory post-scriptum
to the true story of Beat Happening, we should mention this collection of
singles, EPs, and other rarities, spanning about fifteen years. It was first
made available as one of the CDs in the Crashing
Through boxset, released by K Records in 2002 and containing just about
everything the band ever did; then, a year later, it was issued separately,
for the benefit of those veteran fans who already had all the records.
As it usually happens with these things, you
will not find any major surprises here, though. Historically, I guess, the
most important tracks are the last four — recorded by the band in 1988 in
collaboration with another indie outfit, Screaming Trees, and containing the
proto-grunge rocker ʽPolly Pereguinnʼ that was later named by Kurt
Cobain as his favorite song of the 1980s. It does stand somewhere halfway
between the heavy psychedelia of the late Sixties and Nirvana's somber grunge
declarations of hatred for humanity, but honestly, it's not that good — not even in a
bang-your-head-against-the-wall suicidal variety of «good». The sound of it, with the heavily distorted
descending riff (a little derivative of Cream's ʽWhite Roomʼ, if you
ask me), the deafening bass, and the stone-dead vocals, is morbidly seductive,
but the hook-power is quite limited. But I guess the sound was well enough for
Kurt on this occasion. Besides, it's really a Screaming Trees song, not a Beat
Happening one, so why am I even discussing this?
Another interesting inclusion is the single
ʽAngel Goneʼ, which was actually recorded during a brief reunion
period in 2000 — and shows that very little had changed in the meantime, except
that Calvin's baritone became even deeper, but also more controllable: he is
now capable of weaving fluent, even slightly mesmerizing vocal melodies (over
the same monotonous two-chord guitar jangle) that confirm the band did have talent, after all, no matter
how efficiently they tried to hide it for all those years. And the B-side,
ʽZombie Limbo Timeʼ, shows that they never lost the scary graveyard
side of their personality either — although this
track, to be honest, sounds like straightahead black comedy (and could also be
easily mistaken for a B-52's outtake).
Fans of You
Turn Me On will also be happy to have the single ʽSea Huntʼ,
which preceded the album and presaged its style — anthemic singing, heavy echo,
and just a touch of offensively out-of-tune violin to remind us that these guys
were still downshifters and deconstructors, and what was good for The Velvet
Underground was even better for Beat Happening. The rest of the tracks,
including alternate (single) versions of ʽNancy Sinʼ and
ʽDreamyʼ, just sort of pass by, though. That said, I do admit that I
have not been, as of yet, able to
listen to the record properly as recommended — namely, while in the state of
climbing an apple tree — and cannot accurately guarantee that it will not sound completely different to the
ears of someone busy grappling a tree trunk with all four limbs. Unless, of
course, this is simply a veiled hint at the fact that this kind of music can
only appeal to 12-year olds, or to any-year olds with the mind of a 12-year
old, or to any-year olds who can efficiently simulate the mind of a 12-year old
whenever they want to recover from the latest political scandal or personal
tragedy. Beat Happening, ladies and gentlemen. Give 'em a big hand and all.
THE HAMMER PARTY (1982-1984/1986)
1) Steelworker; 2) Live In A
Hole; 3) Dead Billy; 4) I Can Be Killed; 5) The Crack; 6) Rip; 7) Cables; 8)
Pigeon Kill; 9) I'm A Mess; 10) Texas; 11) Seth; 12) Jump The Climb; 13)
Racer-X; 14) Shotgun; 15) The Ugly American; 16) Deep Six; 17) Sleep!; 18) Big
Payback.
No question about it, Steve Albini is one sick
puppy. As far as I can tell, there are no credible records of his going
through any serious childhood traumas — unless, of course, the move from
Pasadena, California to Missoula, Montana at the tender age of 12 counts as
one, which may be possible — so blame it on a rogue gene or something. Of
course, it is a natural thing for artists of all types to focus on the
underbelly of society, but some go farther, stay longer, and breathe louder
than others, and Albini is most definitely on the short list here.
I have to confess that, as a rule, I do not
experience any pleasure at getting my face stuffed in a toilet bowl,
metaphorically speaking — not to mention that it happens all too often in real life (metaphorically speaking
again!) for me to want to come home and get even more of that out of my stereo
system. I do believe in freedom of expression, and think that the presence of
people like G. G. Allin is a sign of healthy society / art scene, rather than
the opposite (well, at least as long as the guy does not take his laxative on my front porch, that is) — but that does
not mean I would ever want to waste time listening to a G. G. Allin record, God
rest his soul; the guy is just an extreme example of a social activist, and has
about as much to do with «music» or «art» in general as «Pussy Riot», or Abbie
Hoffman, or the Holy Roman Emperor.
Steve Albini, on the other hand, is definitely an artist, and the «Big
Black» project was founded by him in 1981 with a definite aim of producing art
— socially relevant art, that is, rather than artistically irrelevant social
activity. By his own account, he enjoyed the brutality and viscerality of both
heavy metal and hardcore punk, but ultimately found both genres laughable, a
feeling that many of us could probably empathize with: in my own case, I have
to always remember to put myself in a particular frame of mind when listening
either to Iron Maiden or the Dead Kennedys, otherwise it all ends in a facepalm
barrage.
Thus, the idea behind Big Black was to make
music that sounded equally loud, furious, and visceral, but at the same time
could really kick the shit out of the
listener. Something that would be very painful, from a musical angle, but would
also look real, would make sure that
you are suffering from an actual cause, something that could turn your insides
out and bulldoze them on the spot, and make you feel enlightened and grateful
rather than simply offended for the sake of being offended. In other words,
the kind of stuff that the Nick Cave-led Birthday Party were doing at the same
time — except that the Birthday Party had freakier, more abstract lyrics, and
depended all too much on the «musical epilepsy» of their frontman, whereas
Albini placed his bet on far more
straightforward, accessible lyrical imagery and a clearer, sterner head.
The
Hammer Party, released in
1986, was not a proper album, but a compilation of Big Black's first two EPs: Lungs (1982) and Bulldozer (1983) — subsequent CD re-releases would also include a
third EP, Racer-X from 1984. All
three, however, are essential building blocks of the Big Black legend, and
nothing could be more natural than starting the story right from where it begins.
In 1982, «Big Black» was really a one-man project, with Albini recording all
the guitar, bass, and vocal parts himself, entrusting the percussion duties to
a drum machine (credited as a full-time band member by the name of «Roland»!),
and only occasionally letting his college friend John Bohnen help him out with
saxophone parts (or, rather, «bleats»). A year later, on Bulldozer, Big Black was already a band, with Jeff Pezzati on bass
and Santiago Durango on second guitar — and this was also the breaking point
where Albini arrived at his trademark guitar sound, «inventing industrial music
in the process», as some say, although, of course, a more correct answer would
have been «merging industrial music with hardcore punk» (Einstürzende
Neubauten had their first «industrial» album out in 1980, and the roots of the
genre go way back). Thus, any narrative on Big Black that kicks off with Atomizer would be somewhat... headless.
Already on Lungs,
Albini shows himself to be a master of tone,
above everything else. He himself was modest enough to all but disown the
songs, either because he found the lyrics too crude or the «search process for
best tone ever» far from complete, but most of the songs sound fairly great to my ears, at least.
ʽSteelworkerʼ opens with a guitar part that I could only describe as
«syphilitic funk» — a melody that would rather be expected on a heavy metal
album, but pitched all the way to high heaven, shrill, trebly, pulling the
nerves right out of your teeth, as Albini cheerfully informs us that "the
only good policeman is a dead one / the only good laws aren't enforced"
and then goes on examining his deepest murder instincts. It's not exactly scary, but the experience is more
disturbing, indeed, than any random heavy metal tune of the year, or decade.
Subsequent topics do not stray far away from
the commonly unfathomable — exploring the lower depths on ʽLive In A
Holeʼ, dabbling in Vietnam zombie trash on ʽDead Billyʼ,
inviting suicide on ʽI Can Be Killedʼ, and so on. Melodically, the
songs all follow the New Wave aesthetics, but seem more influenced by acts like
Pere Ubu, Wire, Joy Division, etc., rather than Albini's punk scene competitors
— which is already enough to make whatever the guy is doing more interesting
for the modern listener, and that is not yet mentioning all the different
guitar tones (where the «white lightning» of songs like ʽSteelworkerʼ
and ʽI Can Be Killedʼ is opposed quite radically to the «black
terror» of bass-heavy songs like ʽRipʼ and ʽLive In A
Holeʼ).
The «textbook» Albini, however, only arrives on
Bulldozer — for ʽCablesʼ,
he invents his «clanky» sound by sticking sheet metal clips in his guitar
picks, so that every note now sounds like the clang of a weapon against a metal
shield. ʽCablesʼ still remains one of the best exponents of that
sound, with a brief «teaser» introduction as a lesson on how it works (of
sorts), and the cruel lyrics (inspired by personal experience with a Montana
abattoir) perfectly matching the cruelty of the new sound. Not that the other
lyrics lag anywhere behind — the entire EP is taken over by such delicious
subjects as poisoning pigeons and buying knives, and populated by colorful characters
with hick, racist, and bigoted backgrounds. Just
the kind of thing, in other words, that deserves a special manner of guitar
playing invented in special honor of it.
ʽCablesʼ has the meanest and ugliest
sound, but Albini can also throw «hilarious» in the can, too, as is the case
with ʽTexasʼ, which is sort of an «avant-hardcore» freakout, a series
of speedy buildups and comedowns serving as a freaky background for one of the
most laconic and the most vicious putdowns of the Lone Star in history — the
only reason why Dallas never made a persona
non grata out of Albini in return is that nobody in Dallas probably heard
the record in the first place, except those few like-minded fellows who hate
their own state anyway. ʽSethʼ is much darker in tone, beginning with
a taped phone hotline chock-full of eloquent racial slurs bordering on the
absurdist (where else will you hear Martin Luther King called a
"doubly-degenerate, Jew-led, Red jungle bunny"? Priceless!) and
building its protest rage from there. But musically, my favourite tune is
ʽI'm A Messʼ, if only for the utterly terrific bass-guitar duo that
unintentionally ends up sounding like a hardcore take on ʽThe Hut Of Baba
Yagaʼ — in addition to everything else, let us not forget that Big Black
actually cared about their melodies,
rarely letting themselves get too carried away with just the rage, just the
lyrics, or even just the guitar tone. There is all that, yes, but there are
also interesting and serious musical ideas scattered all over the place,
although they only become noticeable once the overall impression stops clouding
the brain and it becomes interested in the compositional process as well.
Racer-X, in comparison, is not that much of a big leap
forward, since the basic formula has been established on Bulldozer and the band members remain the same. Nevertheless, the
title track, ʽThe Ugly Americanʼ (with John Bohnen returning on «sax
bleats» to make it all sound like an early precursor to John Zorn's Bad City),
and ʽSleep!ʼ are all treasurable highlights, particularly
ʽRacer-Xʼ with its alternating soundscapes of grim lonesome drum
machine and all-out guitar nightmare — most of the other songs have their
moments, too, even if, on the whole, this third EP seems to be more of a
«breather» in between Bulldozer as
the moment of Big Black's true arrival and Atomizer
as its first full-scale LP-length statement. But who cares about
particularities? The whole package, taken together, deserves its certified thumbs up,
and, to this day, remains one of the strongest musical indictments of
retrograde darkness ever recorded. Yeah, yeah, I know, in reality Albini is
merely exorcising his own personal demons, but there's no harm in driving them
through certain areas of the American landscape along the way.
ATOMIZER (1986)
1) Jordan, Minnesota; 2)
Passing Complexion; 3) Big Money; 4) Kerosene; 5) Bad Houses; 6) Fists Of Love;
7) Stinking Drunk; 8) Bazooka Joe; 9) Strange Things; 10) Cables (live).
When you follow Bulldozer up with Atomizer,
chances are you are not really in the
mood for significantly changing your formula. Indeed, the basic ingredients all
remain the same: Albini's «clanging» guitar tone as the main attraction,
pummeling industrialized beats and tempos as the main framework, and lyrics
about perverts and perversions as the main subject of reference. Also, the
entire LP runs just over half an hour, which probably is the longest possible time one could listen to this sonic
nightmare without getting well-adjusted, numbed down, and bored. In fact, were
it up to me, I'd probably cut it down by another five or ten minutes, because
the EP format works best with the likes of Big Black.
With the formula set so tightly in place, the
overall quality of the album depends on how many different and emotionally
evocative riffs / grooves / arrangements the band can offer, and, fortunately,
Albini's creative juices are peaking — almost every one of these nine songs
delivers, one way or another. The central piece, bravely extended to a
six-minute running time, is ʽKeroseneʼ; from a classificatory angle,
it would probably count as «hardcore industrialized funk», with relatively
complex (for Big Black) interplay between the bass and guitars and several
crescendos that perfectly match the song's lyrical message ("never
anything to do in this town... there's kerosene around, something to do... set
me on fire, kerosene!"). Few songs have managed to tackle the «violence
born out of boredom» topic so efficiently, as Steve's guitar goes from
high-pitched, monotonous, whiny funk chords («boredom») to shrill, crackling,
ascending lines — musical flames engulfing the listener. Fabulously cool and
inventive.
The shorter songs are predictably less
ambitious — just state their simple, repetitive points for a brief interval of
time to give way to the next sketch in the «Panoramas of Perversion» series.
ʽJordan, Minnesotaʼ takes on the issue of a 1983 scandal of child
abuse in said little town, and I'd bet anything Albini was particularly happy that the little town was named after the holy
river, throwing the issue of hypocrisy into the mix. The song's main riff has
nothing particularly original about it, but sounds double-threatening when
played Albini-style, and by the time the song has burst into complete hysteria,
with insane screams of «suck daddy, suck daddy, suck daddy!» almost drowning
out the guitar background, you may well be itching for a nice hot shower. Exploitative
to the core, yes, but effective.
Other, ahem, «highlights» for me would have to
be ʽFists Of Loveʼ — the subject matter is easy enough to guess, and
all the melodic lines have been specially selected and received the Steve
Albini Stamp of Approval for Matching Physical Pain; and ʽBazooka
Joeʼ, which is about as complex as your average Ramones song, but still
generates a certain trance-inducing effect — Steve's «pleading-aggressive»
repetitive mantra of "you don't have to be alone Joe... hang with me
Joe...", recited over the song's dark rhythm pattern, may act funny on the
brain.
The rest of the songs are difficult to describe
in any other terms than the ones already used, but what really saves Atomizer from becoming «filler city»,
even with this short overall length, is that each song works as its own
separate anecdote — you are walking here through a picture exhibition, glaring
at child molesters, bored kids in provincial shitholes, sexual deviants, whorehouse
clients, corrupt policemen, alcoholics, and racial issues. It doesn't always
sound different from each other, but it's one hell of a panorama, and I'd say
it elevates the level of social consciousness far more efficiently than, say,
any given sermon-riddled LP by Bad Religion. Definitely not just «gross for
grossness' sake», Atomizer never
really overcooks its slum-taste pasta, so here is another thumbs up in return.
SONGS ABOUT FUCKING (1987)
1) The Power Of Independent
Trucking; 2) The Model; 3) Bad Penny; 4) L Dopa; 5) Precious Thing; 6)
Colombian Necktie; 7) Kitty Empire; 8) Ergot; 9) Kasimir S. Pulaski Day; 10)
Fish Fry; 11) Pavement Saw; 12) Tiny, King Of The Jews; 13) Bombastic Intro;
14) He's A Whore.
And by «fucking», Steve Albini, of course,
conveys all the possible meanings of
the word, literal as well as figurative. The album title may sound a little exploitative
these days, but it fits the music, the lyrical subjects, the atmosphere fairly
well — at the very least, it's a much more appropriate title than Songs About Making Love or Songs About Sleeping Together, which
wouldn't be a Big Black-ish title at all.
Ideologically, the record never departs far
enough from the internal logic of Atomizer,
the basic formula remaining the same — jarring, aurally disturbing guitar
tones, deranged vocals, and stories of various types of sick fucks
(particularly truckers — Albini seems to have a special bone against the honest
trucker, as if he'd spent all his childhood being molested on the highway). But
since these stories come in all sorts of different varieties, this keeps the
moods and melodies fresh and diverse enough to make up for another thirty
minutes of stimulating musique-noire
entertainment. Even though this time around, there is no central masterpiece
like ʽKeroseneʼ to act as a reliable anchor, and all the dirty
vignettes just roam around in a slightly disconcerting manner.
At least one of the creative decisions is quite
bizarre, but fascinating: I have no idea how the band came around to covering
Kraftwerk's ʽThe Modelʼ, a song that originally made perfect sense as
a part of The Man Machine, with its
electronic equation of a glamor model with a human robot — here, electronic
futurism is replaced with BDSM guitars, so that the story of the submissive
model ends up on the same plane of being as the story of the fornicating trucker
and the story of the Colombian necktie. Additionally, we get good proof that
Albini's «clang guitar» can be used fairly well to play pop-style lead
melodies, even if the whole thing is more of an ironic experiment than a
serious attempt to branch out.
Slightly more serious are some experiments on
the second side of the album, which Albini would later describe as relative
failures, at least in relation to the more spontaneous, free-flowing, punky
songs on the first side. In particular, ʽKitty Empireʼ stomps along
like some sort of arrogant «progressive hardcore» epic, taking the life
experience of «King Cat» as a likely allegory for something less cuddly and
cutesy and pinning it to a slow-moving, grinding industrial nightmare that
gradually builds up in intensity, then cuts out abruptly just as you were
beginning to hope for an apocalyptic climax. But as «epic» as it tries to be,
the song is just too monotonous to overwhelm the senses — and no matter what
they say about him, «King Cat» just does not sound like a scary enough
personage to perfectly match the brutal repetitive riff pattern of the song.
Maybe ʽGoblin Empireʼ might have been a better fit, but that'd be too
much fantasy for these guys.
Much more effective, I think, is ʽFish
Fryʼ, also on the second side, which contains the album's most daring
piece of art news — a story of a murderer hosing his truck after chucking the
dead body out in a nearby pond — and sets it to one of the album's most
head-wrecking melodies, where Albini's mutilation of his high strings is like a
manipulation of sharp psychedelic needles twitching in your brain; even by Big
Black's usual standards, the song is an impressive bit of
psychological-physiological torture. Lyrically less explicit, but musically
even crazier, though, is ʽErgotʼ, where Albini is trying to provide
the musical equivalent of a particularly violent onslaught of St. Anthony's
Fire — you'd have to consult an actual sufferer to understand how close he got
to achieving the right effect, but if you listen to this stuff loud enough in
headphones, twitching and occasional spasms are near-guaranteed.
That said, it is terribly hard to dedicate
space, time, and opinions to individual songs on here, even if most of them do
have their own individuality — like the seven deadly sins, or the individual
members of the Manson Family. So let me just conclude by saying that, on the
whole, the album is a little deeper, a little more ambitious, a little more
image-risking than its predecessor, but possibly not quite as directly
hard-hitting, either. And that's good — considering that Big Black only managed
to release two original studio albums, this gives a good opportunity for the
fans to live their lives fighting over which one is closer to «the true Big
Black». Personally, I cannot decide, so I just give the whole album another thumbs up,
despite the fact that I'd certainly refuse to answer the question «do you really like Songs About Fucking?» in a straightforward manner — it's a
trick sort of question.
SOUND OF IMPACT (1987)
1) Ready Men; 2) Big Money; 3)
Elephant Joke?; 4) Cables; 5) Yanomamo Indians; 6) Pigeon Kill; 7) Passing
Complexion; 8) Crack Up; 9) RIP; 10) Jordan, Minnesota; 11) Firecrackers; 12)
Cables; 13) Pigeon Kill; 14) Kerosene; 15) Bad Penny; 16) Deep Six; 17) RIP;
18) Rama Rama.
An «un-unofficial bootleg»: the album was
originally released on a UK indie label rather than Big Black's own Homestead
Records, and whatever was the reason for that, legal trouble was avoided by
leaving not only the band's name off the packaging (which consisted mainly of
reprints of black box transcripts, hence the «title»), but even the song titles
(currently restored, the 18 tracks were first denoted by completely different
monikers, although retaining some connection with the originals — for
instance, ʽCablesʼ was ʽKill The Cowʼ, and ʽPigeon
Killʼ was ʽBird Thangʼ). Since then, however, the record has
occasionally been re-released, and generally features as an integral part of
Big Black's discography.
And for good reason, too, since Big Black are
one of the few artists in the whole punk/post-punk pool that really deserve to
be heard live. Pigpile gives a
better general impression of a classic Albini show, but Sound Of Impact, recorded in two different locations (which is why
some of the tracks double each other), is a bit more of a «glorious mess», a
little less loud and a little more prominent on stupid, but memorable Albini
jokes. Anyway, even despite the fact that they mostly play the same songs on
both albums, owning both is not an exercise in redundancy.
The funny thing is that it takes a good listen
to a live Big Black album to properly understand that the band does pay a lot of attention to proper
mixing and even melodicity of sound on their studio records — in the live
environment, Albini's and Durango's guitars omit or blur some of the subtle
twists of the originals (e. g. ʽDeep Sixʼ), greedily going for more
noise, power, and energy, just the way it befits a good old-fashioned
rock'n'roll performer. But where they lose in complexity and subtlety, they
expectedly gain in blowing your brains out. With a little extra distortion on
the «clang» tone, the songs are transformed into walls of ferocious white fire
— if the bass is at regular volume, as on ʽKeroseneʼ or
ʽPassing Complexionʼ — or black fire, if the bass is turned all the
way up, as on ʽBad Pennyʼ or the second of the two ʽPigeon
Killsʼ.
In between the firethrower blasts, Steve
entertains the not-too-grateful listeners with «shocking» stories, such as the
one about the mouse with the BMW and the elephant with a big dick (ʽElephant
Joke?ʼ), or one about certain violent and sexist customs of particular
Indian tribes (ʽYanomamo Indiansʼ), or introducing ʽBig
Moneyʼ by saying "we stole it from Rush", or finding some other
way to come across as a shock-oriented prankster. It does add some personality
to the show, but what sort of personality is up to you to decide. I'm still
trying to figure out why his unfunny jokes do not annoy me — whether it is a
Monty Python sort of way, with absurdism compensating for the occasional
unfunniness, or maybe I'm just a covert fan of artistic rudeness.
Of the setlist, the only big surprise is the
closing track, a cover of an obscure composition by the short-lived post-punk
band Rema-Rema (mostly famous for its guitar player Marco Pirroni, who would
later become a close associate of Adam Ant) — nothing special about it, and it
was probably played for an encore to confuse the audience even further; then
again, like every respectable indie prophet, Albini did have this hunch for
dragging out obscurities (being as he was, to a large extent, an obscurity
himself). But this record is not about surprises, it is about putting the «Big»
back in «Black», if you get my drift, and it does that fairly well and it gets
a thumbs up
and you can't get it anywhere legally, not even on iTunes, so Steve Albini
welcomes you to break the law in this particular case.
PIGPILE (1992)
1) Fists Of Love; 2) L Dopa;
3) Passing Complexion; 4) Dead Billy; 5) Cables; 6) Bad Penny; 7) Pavement Saw;
8) Kerosene; 9) Steelworker; 10) Pigeon Kill; 11) Fish Fry; 12) Jordan,
Minnesota.
This is such a quintessential live Big Black
recording that it is quite weird how it took them five years to release it —
the actual gig was played on July 24, 1987, in London, during the band's
farewell tour of Europe, and it was one of those farewell tours where the
«farewell mindset» actually adds to the general energy and excitement level
rather than takes away from it. In addition to that, the setlist is constructed
as a representative retrospective, covering all of Big Black's output with the
exception of the Racer-X EP, and
with the aid of superior sound quality, acts as a terrific and deserving
conclusion to the band's career.
You do get the usual bad-taste jokes
("this is a song Jerry Lee Lewis wrote before he killed one of his
wives"), and you also get Albini's trademark "one, two, FUCK
YOU!" live intros (that were unexpectedly absent on Sound Of Impact), but none of these really matter next to, say, the
complete recasting of ʽDead Billyʼ from its rather humble beginnings
into a veritable wall of melodic white noise, or to ʽFists Of Loveʼ
dropping its slightly «Gothic» production in favor of razor-blade sharp guitar
playing and simulation of totally maniacal violence. As on Sound Of Impact, these live versions by no means outshine the
originals or make them obsolete — they simply blast them away with heavy
artillery, for better or worse.
The major kicker is astutely saved for last: a
nearly seven-minute version of ʽJordan, Minnesotaʼ in which the
unspeakable activities of the protagonists are «simulated» by the guitar in a
feedback assault that yields some of the cruelest aural effects I've ever had
the mispleasure of hearing. No, fortunately, this is not the audio equivalent
of Salò or any such work of
vomit-art, but the things Albini is doing on this track, in terms of my general
barriers of tolerance, beat just about everything, from Throbbing Gristle to
Ministry. Play it loud enough in headphones and see how much Real Man you
really are — baptised through fire and brimstone rather than holy waters.
It is interesting that, having disbanded Big
Black, Albini put the name to rest, even though the «band», from the very
start, was his one-man project and he could have easily preserved the moniker
for his future projects like Rapeman and Shellac. But all of these later
incarnations are, in fact, substantially different from the «Big Black sound»
that Steve had all but abandoned — the «drum machine vs. clang guitar» thing
was buried for good, almost as if the man had realized that he'd taken the
formula as far as it could go, and that it was high time for an image change.
Much like Nick Cave on the other side of the planet, Albini would «soften» his
approach (although he'd never «stoop» to soulfulness and sentimentality), but
this was probably inevitable if he wanted to try and progress further —
otherwise, subsequent Big Black-style albums would most likely soon degenerate
into complete self-parody. As it is, the Pigpile
memento provides a perfect final touch, well worth a thumbs up, both to the career of Big
Black and the whole «noisy post-punk» thing, soon to be absorbed into the much
more commercially successful, but nowhere near as provocative, grunge and
alt-rock scene.
LIFE'S A RIOT WITH SPY VS. SPY (1983)
1) The Milkman Of Human
Kindness; 2) To Have And To Have Not; 3) Richard; 4) A New England; 5) The Man
In The Iron Mask; 6) The Busy Girl Buys Beauty; 7) Lovers Town Revisited.
This might be the single most influential (or,
at least, most revered) LP in the history of pop music (or, at least, UK pop
music) that takes no more than sixteen minutes in total to tell you
everything it needs to tell you. A much later CD edition has expanded it to
more than twice its length with the addition of demos and rarities, but even
then it was divided into two discs and the first one contained nothing but the
original album — so you don't ever forget the importance of brevity in this
line of artistic business. (I only have the record as part of the 1987 compilation
Back To Basics, so I have not yet heard the additional tracks on the
expanded release).
Now even though for Billy Bragg social activism
and politics have always been every bit as important as his music, Life's A
Riot already clearly shows that he is a «singer-songwriter doing
politics», not a «social activist pretending to be a musician in his spare
time». The thing that he does here was something largely unheard of in 1983:
«folk-punk» in the most literal sense of the word, where the artist is a one-man
band, playing energetic, uptempo tunes on an electric guitar, but using it in
the manner of a folk troubadour. Give the man a complete rhythm section to go
along, and you will have something in between The Clash and Elvis Costello; as
it is, what you have is a modern day Woody Guthrie, updated to reflect
contemporary realities and certain advances in playing, writing, and
verbalizing that took place since the 1940s.
The way to enjoy and understand Billy Bragg is
through his «persona» rather than any specific musical gift. As you see them
here, these songs are neither particularly well written nor amazingly well
performed: sure Billy can write, play, and sing, but there is nothing about
these chord changes, guitar tones, or vocal inflections that has not been done
better by more artists than you will have the chance to listen to in your sweet
short life. However, once you put it all together — his choppy garage-rock
guitar chords, his rough, earnest, Strummer-influenced voice, his deep-reaching
lyrics (way above whatever you'd expect from the average leftist
stereotype), and that stripped-down attitude, as if he were just recreating his
usual busking on the streets of London in the studio — the whole is far more
impressive than the parts.
Besides, at this point it is not even
completely clear if social messages are more important for Billy than pure
expression of emotion: after all, the album opens with ʽThe Milkman Of
Human Kindnessʼ (already an awesome song title, isn't it?), which is
basically just a romantic love song (unless, of course, you want to interpret
the line "I will leave an extra pint" as indication that the
protagonist is simply willing to make love to as many women as there are milk
bottles, and that the current addressee is just one of the many. Ah well, still
a romantic love song, just with an additional Don Giovanni twist then). As the
song opens with loudly blasting, ass-kicking folk-rock guitar chords, you most
naturally expect the opening to be followed with the band kicking in — bass,
drums, second guitar, maybe Al Kooper on the organ or something — but it never
does, and I still wonder just how much better the song could have worked
on its own, if given a full arrangement. Not much better, perhaps, because
the chorus has no well-placed hook (that "I will leave an extra pint"
is merely memorable because it is a fun line delivered accappella for the whole
world to hear and memorize) — but no harm in wondering.
Social conscience begins to kick in with the
second track: ʽTo Have And To Have Notʼ is basically the Clash's
ʽJulie's In The Drug Squadʼ (or some other Clash song, no matter)
with new lyrics ("just because you're better than me doesn't mean I'm
lazy"), but since it's more derivative, it's also catchier, and Billy's
enthusiasm may even be more infectious than Strummer's, precisely because of
the stripped-down arrangement. ʽA New Englandʼ makes a subtler point:
"I don't want to change the world / I'm not looking for a new England /
I'm just looking for another girl" could be superficially understood as
reluctance to introduce changes, but in fact, it is quite clear that getting
another girl is a difficult task in old England, so... anyway, the
chorus here is probably the most charismatic spot on the entire record,
combining a bit of melancholy, a bit of puzzled confusion, and a bit of
optimism in the face of depressing odds. Additionally, it's a good example of
Billy's way of genre-welding: "I was 21 years when I wrote this song, I'm
22 now but I won't be for long" is written and sung as if it were an old
talkin' blues (close your eyes and hear Woody, or Dylan, sing this), but the
accompanying guitar is doing it surf/rockabilly-style. Kinda cool.
The odd man out on this short record is
ʽThe Man In The Iron Maskʼ, which totally eliminates all the
garage/punk stylizations, slows down, and turns to dark European folk for
inspiration — again, singing about torturous unrequited (or betrayed) love rather
than social problems, and singing surprisingly well: given Billy's
well-defined, in-yer-face cockney accent all over the place, his take on the
«quasi-medieval balladry» genre works out all right, as he never falters on the
prolonged notes and switches from higher to lower registers to good effect.
Maybe this is not exactly a Lou Reed or a Peter Hammill level of deep-reaching
psychologism, but for just a guy with just a guitar, this is exceptionally well
crafted stuff.
Nevertheless, like I said, Life's A Riot
earns its thumbs up «on the whole», as a
successful first-time stylistic experiment of merging the «wisdom» of old folk
with the «brute force» of new punk, rather than through individual tracks — and
yes, to do that, sixteen minutes are just enough (already the last two
ultra-short songs bordered on «slightly tedious»). Being the people's champion
and all, though, Billy even made sure that you do not get overcharged:
"Pay no more than £2.99 for this 7 track album", the front
cover says in ineffaceable type (which still seems a bit high — that's
something like £9.50 in today's prices, which is the price of a solid CD,
but then again, it looks like three pounds was a fair price for a
12" release back then). Ironically, the 2-disc edition as sold on Amazon
in the UK goes for £7.89 today — and the cunning bastards have erased
the original small type, replacing it with the boring (but serving its purpose)
tag of «30th Anniversary Edition». Apparently, there's just no getting away
from capitalist swine games even for a true people's champion. Tough world.
BREWING UP WITH BILLY BRAGG (1984)
1) It Says Here; 2) Love Gets
Dangerous; 3) The Myth Of Trust; 4) From A Vauxhall Velox; 5) The Saturday Boy;
6) Island Of No Return; 7) St. Swithin's Day; 8) Like Soldiers Do; 9) This
Guitar Says Sorry; 10) Strange Things Happen; 11) A Lover Sings; 12*) Between
The Wars; 13*) The World Turned Upside Down; 14*) Which Side Are You On.
Compared with Life's A Riot, Billy's first full-length LP seems almost
orchestrated — not only are there a few extra players spicing up the songs
every now and then (Dave Woodhead on trumpet, or Van Morrison's keyboard
player Kenny Craddock on organ), but Billy's own guitar parts seem fuller, more
fleshed out, more in line with the traditional understanding of what a «punk /
garage rock song» should sound like. Still, I have to confess that, as much as
his lonesome busker approach might have seemed revolutionary at the time, it is
very hard for me to overcome the «rockist» attitude and appreciate these songs
— be they well written or not — on the same emotional level as if they were
full band productions.
Let's just face it, something like the bravado
guitar intro to ʽFrom A Vauxhall Veloxʼ, for instance, just begs for rhythm section support — it's one
thing just doing this on a street corner or in your living room, but in the
studio... well, on a purely intellectual-symbolic level, it's all understandable,
but on the level of pure instinct, it's all about «oh shit, too bad the guy was
on such a tight budget, couldn't even afford himself a bass player». It just
can't be helped, that's all, no matter how much intoxicating London charisma
he is sweating out while the tapes are running.
But yes, there are some dang good songs here —
not John Lennon level, I guess, but definitely at least Elvis Costello level.
Thematically, Billy goes on to develop his two major concerns: (a) fuck the
system that is ruining our lives and (b) fuck the bitch that is ruining my life — and the two are so tightly
intertwined that I can't help thinking, is it the system that is supposed to be
responsible for the breakdown of human relationships, or is it the breakdown of
human relationships that is responsible for the collapse of the system? One
thing's for sure: Billy allocates the exact same amount of passion for both
themes, which is ultimately good, I guess, because a two-track mind in art is
always preferable to a one-track one.
And here comes another confession: at this
point, I actually prefer Billy's love (or «anti-love») songs to his political
statements. The reason might be very simple: they work better as stripped-down
ballads, whereas the political songs are the ones that suffer the most from
lack of additional musicians. (Although even there, once Billy starts to croon
he begins to sound like Morrissey's ragged twin, and the songs start looking
like early demos for Smiths ballads. But this problem is notably easier to
overcome). ʽThe Myth Of Trustʼ, for instance, is not only lyrically
smart (offering its own interpretation of the allegory of Adam and Eve with
the serpent left completely out of the picture), but also has a creepy «dark
folk» twist to it — later on, Adam and Eve make a much happier comeback in the
organ-backed ʽA Lover Singsʼ serenade, but they have to pass through
some highly uncomfortable moments before they find out all about love.
Of course, though, the album will still be
generally remembered not through its ruminations on the nature of sexual
attraction, but through its political statements — the anti-Thatcherite
ʽIt Says Hereʼ and the anti-war anthems ʽLike Soldiers Doʼ
and ʽIsland Of No Returnʼ. Of these three, ʽIslandʼ packs
the biggest punch and is probably the single most underworked song here: the arrogant
lyrics, the furiously strummed power chords (with some funky syncopation thrown
in for good measure), the way he massacres his not-too-inherently-strong voice
on the line "...in his hand was a weapon that was made in Bir-ming-haaaaam!..." — these are
all hallmarks of a good song... but yes, it could have been better.
Still, all in all there is definitely some
progress. Billy's lyrics are thought-provoking both on the love front and on
the social struggle front; his guitar playing skills, if anything, are
demonstrated here even better; and the occasional guest instruments are
selected with loving care (did I yet get a chance to mention the cute
ʽPenny Laneʼ-like trumpet solos on ʽSaturday Boyʼ, placed
there and nowhere else because this is, like, the tenderest song on the
album?). For all these reasons, the thumbs up rating should never be placed under
doubt — even if the final brew, alas, is just not strong enough for my tastes,
and I cannot picture myself voluntarily returning to this record whenever I
want to hear a love serenade (if we're talking about the same time period, I'll
still predictably pick The Smiths) or a fuck-the-establishment statement (if
we're talking about the same time period, I'll still predictably pick The Clash).
Then again, who knows? Maybe in a few years' time rhythm sessions will become
so passé, your spirit will realign to electric guitar busking without
you knowing it, and then...
...anyway, on a technical note, these days this
album also comes in a 2-CD edition with plenty of bonus tracks (including some
Smiths and Stones covers with Johnny Marr himself guest-starring on second
guitar), but I have only heard it as part of 1987's Back To Basics compilation, so my
bonus tracks are three more songs from the 1985 EP Between The Wars — one of them an old cover of a pro-union song,
and another one (ʽWorld Turned Upside Downʼ) is a Leon Rosselson song
about the Diggers' Commune of 1649. Well... the EP was just too short a format
to make space for any more love serenades, I guess.
TALKING WITH THE TAXMAN ABOUT POETRY (1986)
1) Greetings To The New
Brunette; 2) Train Train; 3) The Marriage; 4) Ideology; 5) Levi Stubbs' Tears;
6) Honey, I'm A Big Boy Now; 7) There Is Power In A Union; 8) Help Save The
Youth Of America; 9) Wishing The Days Away; 10) The Passion; 11) The Warmest
Room; 12) The Home Front.
Finally, after years of hardcore studio busking, Billy
Bragg relents upon us — if only a little bit. There is still a lot of
minimalistic electro-busking here, but on many of the tunes, Billy agrees to
use additional musicians, sometimes even including a rhythm session, with John
Porter playing bass and several different percussionists, one of which happened
to be Kenney Jones himself (ex-Small Faces and ex-Who), who also took upon
himself the production duties. Ken Craddock on organ, Dave Woodhead on trumpet,
and even Johnny Marr on guitar also make appearances, continuing their
relations with Billy from where they left off on the previous album.
Concerning the album title, I was all set to
make some clumsy joke around it when I fortunately discovered that it was
actually the translation of the title of a Russian poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky
(something I would never have guessed on my own because the Russian original
has the convoluted financial inspector
rather than taxman — the poem was
published in 1926, when the USSR had no «taxmen» to speak of) — the main idea
of the poem being «defense of poet's honor», stating that the profession of a
poet is a legitimate occupation even in the new world, ruled with the iron fist
of the proletariat dictature. Honestly, I am not quite sure how that point is
to be applied to this Billy record — other than implying that he is somehow
justifying himself for not working in the coal mines, back to back with The
People, but rather sitting his ass off in a warm recording studio, because,
well, if The People want their champion, they have no choice but to let him sit
his ass off in Livingston Studios, London. I mean, he probably could take his
guitar and his tape recorder and record these songs right in the coal mine, but
then they'd sound... dusty. No chance of getting any hit singles that way.
In any case, the album seems better constructed
than Brewing Up: lyrically and
musically, there are more nuances here, and the record does not immediately
come off as this unnatural, clumsily constructed «now I'm singing about
people's rights» — «and now I'm singing about bitches» — «and now I'm singing
about people's rights again» — «and now I'm singing about bitches again»
monstrosity. Mind you, he is still
mostly singing about people's rights and bitches, but the song titles, the
melodies, the lyrical imagery become more diversified, and in fact, you know
what? in the very first song, he actually combines
the two aspects: "Shirley, your sexual politics left me all in a muddle /
Shirley, we are joined in the ideological cuddle... Politics and pregnancy /
Are debated as we empty our glasses...".
Unfortunately, even though there are more
pianos, trumpets, and bass guitars on the album as before, I also have to
state that this comes at the expense of interesting melodies. The most obvious
case is ʽIdeologiesʼ — which is simply a cover of Dylan's
ʽChimes Of Freedomʼ with new, «updated» lyrics by Billy, and even if
he is not stealing it, but honestly indicating Dylan as a co-author in the
credits, this is somewhat symbolic: lyrics and pure passion have completely
overridden his pop writer instincts. This is not a crime — in fact, it may be a
deliberate and rational decision, because the man would hate to be labeled as a
«pop artist» anyway — but it still makes me sad. Intelligent political
statements set to pop hooks give you so much more than just intelligent political statements (even if intelligent
political statements by pop artists are by themselves much preferable to any
political statements by politicians).
The most musically interesting songs here are
the subtlest and most psychological ones: ʽThe Marriageʼ, a seemingly
weak protest against the ties of society ("marriage is when we admit our
parents were right", the chorus goes), is set to an interesting mish-mash
of choppy jazz chords, blues lines, and flamboyant trumpets that has no direct
analogy in the past — and ʽThe Passionʼ, symmetrically disposed on
the second side of the album, also has a wonderful gliding waltz melody, not as
original, but with a very deep and tender-sounding weave of two guitars sliding
in and out of each other, as if symbolizing the now agreeing, now discordant
relations between kids and parents that forms one of the lyrical topics of the
song. There's also ʽLevi Stubbs' Tearsʼ, a mildly haunting portrait
of an outcast whose only source of permanent comfort are The Four Tops (and
suchlike) — a good example of the man's busking technique where he alternates
between throttling/choking his guitar and letting it wail free: again, not
particularly original, but very well suited for the character he is singing
about.
Political stuff like ʽPower In The
Unionʼ and ʽHelp Save The Youth Of Americaʼ (I do hope there was
some sort of a plan to spread the song in the States — I mean, who really
needed it in the UK?) is of passable interest because of the lyrics and little
else. The Randy Newman-esque ʽHoney, I'm A Big Boy Nowʼ, with its
shambly tack piano and nonchalant country attitude, also shows that this kind
of music should better be left to musicians across the other side of the ocean;
and ditto for ʽWishing The Days Awayʼ, which may be a parody on the
Nashville style for all I know, but it hardly works even as a parody — more
like a pack of people that decided, for no reason at all, to record a country
song despite having had no experience whatsoever. Or maybe they're
intentionally «deconstructing» it, I don't think it works anyway. On the other
hand, ʽThe Warmest Roomʼ is an almost
accomplished pop song — all it needs is a nice, memorable lead line, and this
would be as close as the album comes to a potential hit (not that there was
ever any thought about releasing it as a single: that honor fell to the somber
ʽLevi Stubbs' Tearsʼ).
It would be almost impossible to say that the
focal point of the albums are not its lyrics — for Billy, the meaning of what
is sung is clearly more important than the manner in which it is sung (which is
why serious comparisons with Dylan would be out of question), and it is good to
know that, once again, his idea of «championing the people» is not so much to
throw shit at The System as it is to try and pull the people themselves out of
their somnambulant state, which is why we have all these character portraits of
disenchanted lovers, disillusioned housewives, Mother and Father and Grandma,
presented with just as much psychologism (sometimes more — after all, we're
standing on the shoulders of giants and all that) as in any poem by Ray Davies
or (early) Tom Waits. Still, now that the original novel shock at the sight of
«electro-busking» has passed, Taxman
comes across as a somewhat hesitant, and not very interesting transitional
record: even all these extra musicians still do not feel like they have been
properly integrated with Bragg's original solitary vision. A few nice songs,
but nothing spectacular.
WORKERS PLAYTIME (1988)
1) She's Got A New Spell; 2)
Must I Paint You A Picture?; 3) Tender Comrade; 4) The Price I Pay; 5) Little
Time Bomb; 6) Rotting On Remand; 7) Valentine Day's Over; 8) Life With The
Lions; 9) The Only One; 10) The Short Answer; 11) Waiting For The Great Leap
Forward.
If you were a mathematical model, you'd be
alarmed by now — we go from just one Billy Bragg on Life's A Riot to three additional musicians on Brewing Up to a whoppin' eleven backup singers and musicians on Talking With The Taxman to, finally, an
amazing nineteen people offering
their support (and Party mandates) to somebody who, deep in his heart, still
remains the same old scruffy electro-busker and does not really need anybody in
particular; yet wouldn't it be strange for a union-loving leftist to just keep
on doing it all alone? I mean, what sort of example would he set for society?
Solitary singer-songwriters, after all, are more like Ayn Rand fodder, when you
come to think about it. If you're asking for proletarians all over the world to
unite, well, at least get yourself a fuckin' rhythm section to deliver the
message.
Then again, despite the album title and the
general artistic reputation, one need not forget that only three out of eleven
songs here are political — the other eight, predictably, are about how hard it
is, in a million different hard ways, to forge out comfortable relations
between a male and a female spirit. Ironically, the political songs are the
weakest of the lot: ʽTender Comradeʼ is an accappella piece where
Billy has to struggle so hard to keep in tune, he does not have much strength
left to worry about emotional resonance (and the anti-war lyrics aren't that
great, either), and ʽRotting On Remandʼ is just a generic prison
ballad where even the lyrics do not advance that much in comparison to your
average Woody Guthrie.
There are, however, quite a few songwriting
mini-gems in the love story department, where we should probably single out
ʽThe Price I Payʼ, built on a lovely piano swirl with a tinge of
sweet sorrow and a catchy, if a little too repetitive, vocal hook; the uptempo
ʽLife With The Lionsʼ, saved from its underdone-country fate with a
playful, inspired, poppy piano part from new band member Cara Tivey (she gives
the whole thing a bit of a New Orleans vibe, which is always cool to have);
and, uh, I guess ʽMust I Paint You A Pictureʼ, opening with a guitar
line that seems like somebody'd spent way too much time listening to Hendrix's
ʽLittle Wingʼ, also has a certain subtle charm nested somewhere in
between guitar, piano, and vocals, though I am still in the process of trying
to come up with an adequate description for it (the charm, that is).
The big problem is that, as a love poet, Billy
still has a huge problem coming up with his own unique perspective on things —
other than the occasional melodic invention and the occasional astute or
cool-sounding lyrical twist such as "between Marx and marzipan in the dictionary
there was Mary", he still does not do anything here that hadn't already
been done by Elvis Costello, that is, the «intellectual-psychological love
ballad with poppy overtones, non-professionally sung with some half-charming,
half-irritating British accent». And therefore, each time he writes (or,
rather, «under-writes») a song whose hookpower is anything less than obvious,
it is instantaneously forgettable — no free, freshly painted memory cells to
accommodate these unremarkable new lodgers. Sometimes they get a very nice,
very tasteful chamber-pop sound going on (ʽThe Only Oneʼ, with a
lonely viola dueting with the acoustic guitar), but nothing in the song rises
above mildly pleasant — the pain is only hinted at, never properly conveyed by
the instrumentation.
In the end, love and politics come together
once again, and at least do a good double job of providing a satisfactory
final note with the tragicomic ʽWaiting For The Great Leap Forwardʼ,
the closest thing this record has to an anthem, but an ironic one: "Join
the struggle while you may / The revolution is just a T-shirt away", Billy
says, either urging you to dive
inside a Che Guevara tricotage shell, or making fun of you for doing so — you
go ahead and try to determine his level of intellectual penetration yourself.
The song is bouncy, catchy, has a group chorus romp sort of thing to it, enough
to forgive the album for its frequent moments of boredom and ultimately maybe
even try and issue it a faint thumbs up, just because, you know, it is at least
Billy's first thorough attempt at an actual pop-rock album, and it deserves
some way of recognition.
THE INTERNATIONALE (1990)
1) The Internationale; 2) I
Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night; 3) The Marching Song Of The Covert
Battalions; 4) Blake's Jerusalem; 5) Nicaragua Nicaraguita; 6) The Red Flag; 7)
My Youngest Son Came Home Today.
I am afraid there is very little to be said
about this album, and what little there is
to be said is nearly all bad. Perhaps the best thing is Billy's new lyrics to
ʽThe Internationaleʼ, which deemphasize the violence of the
original and focus on "being inspired by like and love". Not that
this really matters any more — who has really given a damn about the anthem
ever since the Soviet Union abandoned it in favor of something even more
pompous and imperialistic? — but sort of a nice idea, all the same. Couldn't
say the same for Billy's vocal delivery or for the mariachi-style arrangement,
though: looks like he's still buskin' out there, despite the increased number
of players, and if I happened to pass by, I doubt I would have spared a penny.
Might even have to go and report them — not for communist propaganda, but just
for offending good taste.
I guess somebody must have told Billy one day,
«you know, for a guy who's supposed to use music for political purposes, you
sure have a lot of songs about chicks on each of your albums», so Billy
eventually decided to show his true colors and record at least a small album
(an EP, in fact) that would be nothing but
political: anthems and workers-rights-ballads all the way, with traditional
melodies, but largely new lyrics to, like, bring them more up to date in a
world still largely ruled by Thatchers and Reagan-Bushes — whether you're a fan
of these rulers (not highly likely if you're an avid rock music listener) or
whether you hate them as much as Billy does, it is sort of a logical fact that
the most blatant way to stand out
against them is sing a Marxist anthem, even if you're no Marxist yourself.
You do not have to do much, really, except just
take a glance at the titles — I mean, ʽI Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last
Nightʼ, indeed? Sung accappella? At least when Joan Baez did this at Woodstock
with the original, this could make sense to fans of Joan Baez' voice, period.
Are there any fans of Billy Bragg's voice out there? (As in — real fans, people who think of him as a
unique, outstanding singer, that is, not just people who have no problems with
his voice, like myself). If not, well, okay, this is a tolerable, but
derivative memento to Phil Ochs. "And did those feet in ancient
time"... — in between Greg Lake and Eric Idle, my pop-style associations
of ʽJerusalemʼ find themselves exhausted already. ʽNicaragua
Nicaraguitaʼ? I sympathize with the people of Nicaragua, but not
necessarily with the Sandinistas, and even then, I'm sure they can get along
well enough without Billy's support. ʽThe Red Flagʼ? Oh no...
Had this album remained as just an EP, it would
have quickly been forgotten in LP-centric discographies, and we would all have
been better off. Unfortunately, it was re-released in 2006 as part of a 2-CD
edition that also contained the 1988 EP Live
& Dubious — a mix of live performances from Berlin and somewhere in the
Soviet Union (Lithuania, I believe), where he must have been invited as a
Representative of the People, although some of his comments must have rubbed
off unpleasantly on the shoulders of Party officials (for instance, having
explained why the song is called "Help Save The Youth Of America", he
then states that the song might just as well have been called "Help Save
The Youth Of The Soviet Union").
So now this thing is very much a regular part
of his musical career, and it is probably the weakest link in that career —
think John Lennon's Sometime In New York
City, but even that album was a groundbreaking, earth-shattering
masterpiece in comparison, since Lennon at least composed his own political
songs, and came up with all sorts of ideas about how to maximize their effect
with various instrumentation and production tricks. The Internationale is as barebones as it gets, and for all of
Billy's undisputed sincerity and enthusiasm, he should have probably just
released the title track as a collaboration with Pet Shop Boys — I can easily
imagine a synth-pop version and a revolutionary (in both senses of the word)
video, bringing the man all the way up to the top of the charts and effectively
ending Conservative rule for eternity. As it is, the album just gets a thumbs down
— I don't even see it having a rallying effect, much less any musical value.
DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME (1991)
1) Accident Waiting To Happen;
2) Moving The Goalposts; 3) Everywhere; 4) Cindy Of A Thousand Lives; 5) You
Woke Up My Neighbourhood; 6) Trust; 7) God's Footballer; 8) The Few; 9)
Sexuality; 10) Mother Of The Bride; 11) Tank Park Salute; 12) Dolphins; 13)
North Sea Bubble; 14) Rumours Of War; 15) Wish You Were Her; 16) Body Of Water.
How nice and thoughtful of the man it is — to
follow up his almost inarguably worst album with what should almost inarguably
be deemed his finest hour. Yes, literally so, since Don't Try This At Home, unlike Billy's earlier albums, stretches
across almost sixty minutes, and contains the finest bunch of songs he had
written, arranged, and performed up to that moment. Ironically, this is his
most «mainstream» and accessible record up to date — nary a sign of
electro-busking anywhere, and the list of guest players here (which includes
Michael Stipe and Peter Buck of R.E.M., Johnny Marr, Mary Ramsey of John &
Mary and later 10,000 Merchants, and Kirsty MacColl) reads like a solid pledge
of allegiance to the folk-rock community, all union dues paid strictly on time.
But the songs, man! The songs are good.
Maybe the full band arrangements have reduced
the individuality quotient: with his fairly regular Cockney voice, Billy was
never able to score too many points for uniqueness of timbre or phrasing, and
the novelty factor of «the man and his amplification» partially compensated for
that. But on the other hand, as I already said, this left most of the songs in
a sort of unfulfilled state, so that you found yourself looking at sketches and
desperately wishing for complete paintings. And eventually, yes, that talent
which was kept strictly in check for so long — well, it is really hard, I
think, to listen to this record and not recognize the talent. Whatever this
album may lack in distinct personality, it makes up for in terms of hooks,
diversity, humor, lyrical acuteness, and, last but not least, an overall sense
of taste (which was so sharply lacking on Internationale).
It will take one or two listens to the opening
track, ʽAccident Waiting To Happenʼ, to understand whether the entire
record will appeal to you — this is smart, unassuming, boyishly energetic,
well-played pop-rock that remains completely grounded all the time: no attempts
to plunge to the mystical depths of your subconscious à la Stipe, no romantic mannerisms à la Morrissey, and no attempts to make you feel co-guilty
for all the miseries of the world à
la Natalie Merchant (who is, by the way, also here somewhere in the background
— on the new CD re-release, she sings lead vocals on one of the bonus tracks).
Fun lyrics about breaking up with a girl who is "a dedicated swallower of
fascism" (a cheeky phonosemantic variation on the Ray Davies quote), nice
unspectacular vocal melody leading to a climactic catchy chorus, inspiring
echoey guitar jangle for a solo — perfect recipe for healthy goodness, if not
greatness.
The only surprise that follows is the
completely unexpected level of diversity, as Billy (with a little help from his
high profile friends) extends into various pop subgenres, including influences
from the «dreamy» side of the business (ʽCindy Of A Thousand Livesʼ,
dedicated to photographer Cindy Sherman and sounding very much like a
gentlemanly psychedelic nugget from mid-1960s England), baroque (ʽRumours
Of Warʼ), Sade-style light jazz-pop (ʽWish You Were Herʼ), and
epic balladry — arguably the most unpredictable inclusion is a cover of Fred
Neil's ʽDolphinsʼ; on its own, it pales when compared to interpretations
by people like Tim Buckley (whose vocal wizardry Bragg could never hope to
reproduce or surpass), but in the general context of the album, it serves as a
welcome drop of romantic grandioseness (but not like Morrissey, no!) in the
middle of the record's overall humble inclinations.
Like I said, the hooks are not great, but
they're good, and when they come packaged together with intelligent lyrics and good humor, how could
we complain? ʽNorth Sea Bubbleʼ is the catchiest and merriest tune
about the complexity of the revolutionary process ever recorded — essentially,
a «folk-twist» ditty with a beautifully spinning guitar line and somewhat
sarcastic comments on both the people in Leningrad and the man's "American
friends" who "don't know what to do / But they'll wait a long time
for a Beverley Hills coup". That's political, but it isn't that much in
your face, and emotionally, it is not too different from the fast country-pop
of ʽYou Woke Up My Neighbourhoodʼ, to which Michael Stipe adds his
background vocals and Mary Ramsey her danceable, but sentimental fiddle part —
both songs just make you want to dance, and you can throw in your reactions to
the lyrics at any later date.
The main single culled from the proceedings was
ʽSexualityʼ, which actually managed to reach a respectable position
on the UK charts and should probably be included in liberal textbooks for lines
like "just because you're gay I won't turn you away" and especially
singalong chorus lines like "sexuality, your laws do not apply to me...
sexuality, we can be what we want to be", but musically, it is hardly a
standout here — in fact, its somewhat ridiculously repetitive and badly
harmonized chorus reminds me of the commercial formula behind Eighties'
synth-pop. Clearly, Billy wanted some kind of easily memorable, nursery-rhyme
level LGBT anthem here, and he got one, but I prefer to hunt for subtler, more
insightful things, which this record actually has in spades:
ʽSexualityʼ is simply the most blatant number on here.
Integration of the personal and the political
feels fairly smooth here, because sometimes they are directly related
(ʽAccident Waiting To Happenʼ is a prime example), and at other
times, well, if your English skills are below par you won't even be able to
tell the difference — ʽMother Of The Brideʼ, another fast catchy
country-pop ditty about an unhappy separation in love, rolls along like a potential
song of social protest, whereas the bitter piano-and-strings ballad
ʽEverywhereʼ, about the post-Pearl Harbor mistreatment of American
Japanese, could equally well be a Romeo-and-Juliet type of song. And it all
ends in just a little bit of symbolic mysticism, as the closing ʽBody Of
Waterʼ waves us goodbye on a speedy, determined, hard-rocking note, with
Philip Wigg contributing an ecstatic guitar-hero solo (but it fades out rather
quickly, because God forbid a genuine rock'n'roll solo would be given full freedom
on a record like this). "I will cross this body of water / If you promise
you won't try this at home", Billy tells us, implying, perhaps, that years
of electro-busking can seriously boost your Jesus potential, but years of listening to electro-busking do jack
shit in that department.
Ultimately, this is an assured thumbs up,
all the more assured, that is, given how easily a record like this could slip
into all sorts of ideological and bad-musical extremes and how it absolutely
does not. For a folk-pop album, this stuff actually rocks harder than most
R.E.M., and yet manages to come across as moderately intelligent. Maybe it
could benefit from at least one utter genius song (something like Billy's
equivalent of ʽLosing My Religionʼ), but then again, maybe it's better
this way: 16 «good» tunes in a row, with not a single one that did not at least
try to be catchy, or a little different, or a bit smart — next to even one
masterpiece, they'd all look dusky. And the title is actually misleading: this
is the kind of style that aspiring songwriters and musicians should be trying at home, all the time.
You know — simple, derivative, but tasteful music that means something. If you ain't Brian Wilson, you could very well try
to be Billy Bragg.
WILLIAM BLOKE (1996)
1) From Red To Blue; 2)
Upfield; 3) Everybody Loves You Babe; 4) Sugardaddy; 5) A Pict Song; 6)
Brickbat; 7) The Space Race Is Over; 8) Northern Industrial Town; 9) The
Fourteenth Of February; 10) King James Version; 11) Goalhanger.
After the relatively colossal (in comparison to
everything that preceded it) Don't Try
This At Home, Billy's late-coming follow-up at first feels underwhelming.
Five years in the planning and making, delayed by personal life events such as
the birth of his son, it is a very low-key effort, featuring none of the major
guest stars from 1991 and feeling far more intimate, insecure, vulnerable, and
confused. Some reviewers took that for a bad sign, and stated that Bragg's muse
must have abandoned him, at least temporarily. I don't think so, though.
See, this here William Bloke (a rough downgrade on William Blake) is not a return to the young and innocent
days of electro-busking. Even if the arrangements are stripped, they are
varied: Billy makes as much use of the acoustic guitar and piano here as he
makes of the old electric, and the songs do not feel underworked and so much in
desperate need of a rhythm section as they did on his first records. This is
just a regular singer-songwriter album, produced in the intimate-confessional
singer-songwriter paradigm, but with a sufficient amount of pop hooks to keep
things from becoming too boring. It is true that the songs are not quite as
well written and produced, but this is somehow to be expected — any record that
puts the emphasis on «deeply personal» usually suffers in the hook department,
since the artist tends to invest more in lyrics and vocal expression than he
does in captivating chord changes.
The good news is that, to an extent, the
investment pays off: some of the songs here, while not at all melodically
great, show a level of rough sentimentality that was not yet achieved before.
Perhaps it is his family life experience or something, but a song like
ʽFrom Red To Blueʼ, where the protagonist is forced to either accept
his partner's compromises for the Establishment or split ("should I vote
red for my class or green for our children?") really does give us a confused, disappointed, deeply puzzled individual,
who is capable of expressing all that mixed ball of emotions in three minutes'
time, helped out by a little electric guitar and a little electric organ. If
you scrutinize the lyrics too hard, you'll find the man to be judgmental
("the ideals you've opted out of, I still hold them to be true / I guess
they weren't so firmly held by you"), but not nearly enough to become
repelling — just scratching his head in bewilderment.
Elsewhere, the vaudevillian
romantic-melancholic piano ballad ʽEverybody Loves You Babeʼ sounds exactly like Randy Newman (save the
accent) and would probably have been much lauded had it been written by the
latter. ʽSugardaddyʼ, an indictment of spoiled parents, uses melodic
vocal harmonies for the chorus (even some sha-la-la's!) and sounds like a cross
between 1970s McCartney and Ray Davies — which, for Billy, is at least an
unpredictable novelty, and actually I think it works well. And then there's
ʽBrickbatʼ, probably the most personal tune on the album, whose
mournful string accompaniment reflects the song's confused introspection:
"I used to want to plant bombs at the last night of the proms / But now
you'll find me with the baby in the bathroom", Billy either complains of
his weakness or acknowledges his maturation.
Anyway, it is easy to see why the critics,
expecting yet another powerful anti-Establishment blast from the man, were
miffled — but Billy Bragg is not crazy,
he's normal, and every normal person
sooner or later has to acknowledge that routine and mundane affairs are as much
a part of one's life as rallies, protests, and revolutions. Besides, routine
and mundane affairs as presented here are merely a natural continuation of the
man's romantic side that was there all the way from the start; and it's not as
if he's completely settled down,
either — ʽNorthern Industrial Townʼ is a half-ironic,
half-compassionate look at life you-know-where, and ʽA Pict Songʼ
takes an obscure poem by Rudyard Kipling (Billy Bragg covering imperialist
scum? No way!) and turns it into the album's only electro-busking anthem, with
a thick distorted guitar tone and an anthemic refrain with which Billy does his
best to give it a revolutionary stance.
Throw in a couple merry numbers like the
brass-led upbeat pop tune ʽUpfieldʼ and the album closer ʽGoalhangerʼ,
a cleverly worded exercise in character assassination ("he hangs around
like a fart in a Russian space station" is particularly expressive) set to
a toe-tappy ska beat — and you get yourself a fairly assured thumbs up
type album. Yes, it has to sink in a little bit after the major shakedown of Don't Try This At Home, and there are a
few other ballads here that do very little for me, so we're not talking
perfection or anything, but the album as a whole makes a sensible, sincere, and
heartfelt soft counterpoint to its throbbing predecessor, and besides, every
social activist-musician needs to sing about babies in bathrooms every once in
a while — it's not as if he were shitting out little red flags every time he
goes to that bathroom, anyway.
MERMAID AVENUE (w. Wilco) (1998)
1) Walt Whitman's Niece; 2)
California Stars; 3) Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key; 4) Birds And Ships; 5)
Hoodoo Voodoo; 6) She Came Along To Me; 7) At My Window Sad And Lonely; 8)
Ingrid Bergman; 9) Christ For President; 10) I Guess I Planted; 11) One By
One; 12) Eisler On The Go; 13) Hesitating Beauty; 14) Another Man's Done Gone;
15) The Unwelcome Guest.
It is, perhaps, ironic that when Nora Guthrie
was deciding on the artist to whom she could entrust her father's trove of
unused lyrics, she ended up with an Englishman. Was there really nobody in the
United States in the mid-Nineties who could be considered the current
reincarnation of Woody Guthrie? Come on now! Not anyone? Not even Eddie Vedder?..
Even Billy himself was a bit scared of the
honor, and agreed to set Guthrie's lyrics to music only in collaboration with
somebody more authentic. Eventually, his eye fell on Wilco, and since Jeff
Tweedy was born in Illinois, which is at least somewhat closer to Woody's
Oklahoma than Billy's East London could ever hope to be, and also because the
Uncle Tupelo/early Wilco lineage was the closest to a raggedy, authentic, but
still modern-sounding rootsy sound that you could get at the moment, a musical
friendship was struck — and the result was Mermaid
Avenue, an album of 15 modern roots-rock tunes set to hitherto unknown
lyrics by Woody Guthrie.
First things first — these hitherto unknown
lyrics, practically all of them, have
such a contemporary feel and are so
remote from Woody Guthrie, «the Dust Bowl hero», that I would not be at all
surprised to learn that the whole thing was a big scam, or that at least the
lyrics were seriously doctored by Bragg and Tweedy before reaching our ears. If
it is not a scam, though — and who of us would want to seriously accuse the
daughter of mystifications in the name of the father? — then the «non-public»
Guthrie was simply a very different figure from the «public» Guthrie: far more
intimate, romantic, and complicated than his officially released
man-of-the-people stuff would suggest him to be. Pending proper linguistic
expertise, let us assume that this is the case (in fact, I am only writing
about this concern due to surprise that nobody anywhere has expressed the
smallest shadow of doubt), and anyway, it does not matter that much because we are mostly concerned with Billy Bragg here,
Wilco coming second and the Guthries only third.
Whatever be, it's a fun, engaging, and catchy
record that utilizes Billy's and Jeff's talents to the fullest — the capacity
for introspection, the sense of humor, the versatility in arranging and diversifying
the material, it's all there. The music is roughly divided in half between
Bragg and Wilco (represented by either Tweedy alone or the Tweedy/Bennett duo),
and, as you could expect, the Bragg half is usually more sparse and closer to
the classic folk idiom, whereas the Wilco songs often sound like outtakes from Being There, and this is good, since
the shuffling principle allows to keep the proceedings diverse and mildly
surprising until the end.
Accordingly, Bragg usually chooses the more
repetitive, singalong tunes to set to music — such as the opening comical piece
ʽWalt Whitman's Nieceʼ, imagined by him as a rowdy chunk of pub rock
with the lads presenting an anti-thesis to each line ("last night or the
night before that — I won't say which night", etc., and was that in the
original lyrics, too, I wonder?), or the sorrowful acoustic ballad ʽEisler
On The Goʼ — a counting-rhyme song about communist leader Gerhart Eisler's
tribulations in a post-WWII Western world (I reckon) that was probably not intended by the original writer to
sound so mournful, but then Eisler probably wasn't dead when Woody wrote it,
and now he's been dead for 30 years; sufficient cause for sorrow.
On two songs, Billy invites old friend Natalie
Merchant: she backs him up on the playful (if still a bit sad) ʽWay Over
Yonder In The Minor Keyʼ and takes over lead vocals on ʽBirds And
Shipsʼ, which is probably the worst decision on the record — unlike Bragg
and Tweedy, Merchant is not endowed with a sense of humor (or, if she is, she
puts it under lock and key when starting off for the recording studio), and her
predictably broken-hearted delivery, perfect for the expectoration of 10,000
Maniacs-style liberal guilt, feels seriously out of place on this record. Still,
a friend is a friend, I guess, and she did
choose a song for which those plaintive intonations would seem natural outside
of the general context of Mermaid Avenue.
Not to slight Billy, though, Wilco in general
and Tweedy in particular steal the spotlight more often, starting with the very
first number — ʽCalifornia Starsʼ is made into an immediate Wilco
classic, what with that tricky way that Tweedy places the repetitive song title
«outside» the main melody, creating the impression of one-breath continuity for
his intellectual romanticism. ʽHoodoo Voodooʼ is transformed into a
ʽSubterranean Homesick Bluesʼ-type rap number (the lyrics, coming in
punctuated bursts of half-folk, half-proto-beatnik imagery, do suggest that
kind of treatment); ʽAt My Window Sad And Lonelyʼ is made into an
epic ballad that stops just short of becoming a «power» ballad by disallowing
the presence of electric guitars; and ʽChrist For Presidentʼ is a
delightful country stomp that Jeff delivers in an intentionally cracked, hoarse
voice, but the real hero there is Jay Bennett, laying on layers of pianos and
banjos, each of which sounds drunker than the other. Verily and truly, could a sober man ask for ʽChrist For
Presidentʼ?
Mermaid
Avenue is not a «great»
record. Both for Bragg and for Wilco, this was a side project, and regardless
of whether all the lyrics here are authentic original Guthrie or if some of
them were edited, there is too little of the real Woody here to make the music
(rather than the texts) of any importance to the Guthrie legacy. But it is at
least as good as, say, a Traveling Wilburys record — pleasant, intelligent
rootsy entertainment that strikes an impressive balance between tradition and
modernism, and throws in the intriguing novel aspect of bringing together a
British electro-busker, an American revolutionizer of the folk-rock idiom, and
the Dust Bowl musical pioneer who, if this is to be believed, was secretly in
love with Ingrid Bergman even after
she dumped her husband for Roberto Rossellini. Then again, what sort of respect
for the solemnity of family values do
you expect from someone who had eight kids from three wives? Thumbs up
for this shameless violation of the rules of decency.
MERMAID AVENUE VOL. II (w. Wilco) (2000)
1) Airline To Heaven; 2) My
Flying Saucer; 3) Feed Of Man; 4) Hot Rod Hotel; 5) I Was Born; 6) Secrets Of
The Sea; 7) Stetson Kennedy; 8) Remember The Mountain Bed; 9) Blood Of The
Lamb; 10) Against The Law; 11) All You Fascists; 12) Joe DiMaggio Done It
Again; 13) Meanest Man; 14) Black Wind Blowing; 15) Someday Some Morning
Sometime.
Okay, almost everyone says this one's not so
good, and how could it be? Maybe the impressive success of the first volume was
not enough to make them go back into the studio and record some more — but it
was enough to make them release most of the stuff that did not make it onto Vol. I, and if these are outtakes,
well, there must have been reasons for their being outtakes from the very
beginning, right? Scraps are scraps,
even if you're a giant of popular music.
Honestly, though, I do not share this popular
opinion about the sequel being so seriously inferior. Maybe it is because I do
not view the original Mermaid Avenue
as a masterpiece — merely as a very pleasant, very insightful, very tasteful synthetic
exercise — and without elevated expectations for the sequel, the sequel just
comes across as yet another such exercise. In fact, one reason why these songs
were discarded originally may have been not the lack of quality, but their
being generally much more distant from the standards of «folk rock» than the
songs on the first album: here, Billy and Jeff really go a long way, adapting Woody's words to so many different
musical styles that poor Woody must have rolled over in his grave much more
than once. They may have ditched some of this first time around just so as not
to have Norah scratch her head and wonder whether the decision to entrust this
stuff to a couple of modernist clowns was such a good idea in the first place.
But second time around... there's just no stopping them.
See for yourself. ʽMy Flying Saucerʼ
is a folk-pop song all right... in Buddy Holly, not Woody Guthrie style (starts
out ʽPeggy Sueʼ style). ʽFeed Of Manʼ is a slide
guitar-heavy swamp rocker that sounds like Rory Gallagher with Brian Jones on
second guitar. ʽSecrets Of The Seaʼ is an indie pop song that is
100% Summerteeth-era Wilco.
ʽAll You Fascistsʼ is speedy blues-rock with crazy guitar and
harmonica romps that may have been inspired by Five Live Yardbirds. And weirdest of all is ʽMeanest
Manʼ, a song with such strange lyrics that the only thing Bragg could do
about it was turn it into a wannabe Tom Waits number... and sing it like Tom Waits, too. (Why didn't
they try to get the real Tom Waits, I
wonder? They got Natalie Merchant and Corey Harris as guest stars — Tom Waits
would kick their limp folksy asses).
Most of the other songs, too, sound very much
«appropriated» by either Tweedy or Bragg, to the extent that the album closer,
ʽSomeday Some Morning Sometimeʼ, a gentle ballad with kaleidoscopic
electronic overdubs, would seem like a natural predecessor to the futuristic
«folktronic» soundscapes of Yankee Hotel
Foxtrot. Most importantly, they use Woody's lyrics to create moods that go
way beyond Woody's lyrics — yes, it
is true that these lyrics show us a much more profound and diverse Guthrie than
the Dust Bowl Poet stereotype, but these guys go further than that: ʽBlood
Of The Lambʼ, for instance, is cast as a bitter, sarcastic cabaret
vaudeville, where Tweedy's vocals take on an almost mocking air as he sings
that "I've learnt to love my peoples / Of all colors, creeds and kinds /
I'm all washed in the blood of that lamb". Was it supposed to be ironic? Maybe it was. Who the heck knows?
Or ʽMeanest Manʼ — okay, so Woody
writes about all those evil things that he could
have been, but he isn't because of
the kindness of the people around him; is it right, then, to have the song
delivered pirate-style, as if the protagonist were the meanest man? Or maybe he really is? Maybe this is just a tiny hint at the creepy dark side of the
man?.. Oh God, perhaps Norah should have reconsidered, after all. Then again,
if the original intent was to create a multi-dimensional portrait of a man
equally beset by angels and demons on all sides, then this is exactly what
Billy and Jeff are doing for us here. They may have largely invented this
portrait, filling in all the blank spaces with bits of their own personalities
(Billy the streetwise jester and Jeff the idealistic dreamer), but there
probably was a little bit of each in the old Woody anyway, so no prob.
In any case, as far as the songwriting and the
arrangements are concerned, half of these tunes are bona fide Billy Bragg
tunes, the other half is first-to-second-rate Wilco, a must have for all fans
of the classic Wilco sound, and as a special bonus you get another brief acoustic ditty tenderly sung by Natalie Merchant's
faience shepherdess — shake it, but don't break it; it's a good thing, after
all, that nobody tried to make a 10,000 Maniacs album out of this set of
lyrics, «This Guitar Kills Politically Incorrect Male Chauvinists»-style. This
one gets another safe, friendly thumbs up. And please note that, as of 2012, both
are also available together as Mermaid
Avenue: The Complete Sessions, a sprawling boxset that adds yet a third bonus CD of even more stuff, which
I have not heard so far, but I'm pretty sure that three's good company, and
judging by Amazon prices, it's also quite a good bargain compared to buying all
the stuff separately.
ENGLAND, HALF-ENGLISH (2002)
1) St. Monday; 2) Jane Allen;
3) Distant Shore; 4) England, Half English; 5) NPWA; 6) Some Days I See The
Point; 7) Baby Faroukh; 8) Take Down The Union Jack; 9) Another Kind Of Judy;
10) He'll Go Down; 11) Dreadbelly; 12) Tears Of My Tracks.
Curiously, it took Billy almost twenty years to
do this, together with the experience of working with Wilco and then with his
own specially assembled band, The Blokes — but England, Half-English finally does the trick: here be a pretty
decent «political pop» record, where the majority of songs is given over to
liberal-political manifestos, and yet does not suck from a detachedly musical
standpoint. Yes, that's a very rare thing in general, and almost like a first
for Billy, whose best musical numbers up to now were usually of a lyrical
nature.
This may be, of course, due to active
collaboration with The Blokes, who, for this album, also included Ian McLagan
of the Faces on keyboards, and Lu Edmonds of The Damned and PiL on guitar — and
about half of the songs here credit them both or at least one of them as
co-writers. More than that, ʽSt. Mondayʼ, the spritely record opener,
is credited to Billy solo, but the cheery piano rolls that open and then
dominate the tune are prime McLagan — nothing like a true veteran of
Brit-pop-rock lending his spirit and good will to make a tune so optimistically
infectious, especially for all those who, like Billy, hate working on Mondays.
But who did what and why is all just
speculation; the pure fact is that I really like the record and think that it
hits home more often than it does not. Even the title track, which, as you have
probably already guessed, lashes out at anti-immigrant sentiments by
accentuating the perpetually mixed nature of English culture ("St. George
was born in Lebanon / How he got here I don't know / And those three lions on
his shirt / They never sprung from England's dirt") and could have allowed
itself doing and being nothing else whatsoever (Important Social Statement
being enough for liberal musical critics), is a fairly odd musical concoction
that deliberately tries mixing together elements of Latin and African rhythms,
with a little bit of vaudeville in between. It's danceable, it's catchy, it's
got a rippin' percussion track, and it makes some good culturological points —
what's not to like? Unless you're a member of the Enoch Powell fan club or
something. (Like Eric Clapton.) (Who would now deny it.) (But truth will out!)
Stuff like ʽNPWAʼ (ʽNo Power
Without Accountabilityʼ) is more trivial musically — just a straightahead
mid-tempo blues rocker — but it still sounds okay, as emphasis is made on the
sternness, harshness of the arrangement, with all the musicians (particularly
the drummer and the organ player) getting into the same accusatory spirit as
Billy and hammering out these largely familiar chords with meaningful determination.
And while most people will only comment on ʽBaby Faroukhʼ from an
"Oh look, here's a happy song about a pretty baby written from a
pro-immigration perspective!" (you never can really tell, though — it
could be about Freddie Mercury, for all we know), the song actually has a fun
guitar melody and a classy instrumental break, equally divided between pretty
acoustic and electric slide guitar licks. (The vocal harmonies are a little
hicky, though — a somewhat clichéd representation of the «Oriental
ladies chanting a newborn baby's praises» idea).
There's a couple really good songs here, too, where «good» means «deep-cutting»
rather than just «satisfactory». ʽHe'll Go Downʼ, for instance, is a
subtle, haunting ballad where Billy becomes Tom Petty when singing the chorus,
but usually tries to be Leonard Cohen, and the organ and the guitars play
little contemplative melodies off each other in spooky-midnight mode. And
ʽAnother Kind Of Judyʼ, following an almost Madchester-style rhythm,
might be the best fully arranged properly Eighties-style pop song Billy ever
put on record — a decade too late, perhaps, but then nothing is really too late
in the 21st century, where you can be anybody from Socrates to Kurt Cobain and
still feel at home with at least one target audience group.
Anyway, by the time he gets around to the
smarty-pants ʽTears Of My Tracksʼ — reverting a Smokey Robinson title
to sing a lament for his freshly sold vinyl collection — the record has
fulfilled its proper function and proven that yes, sincere and straightforward liberal propaganda need not be
defiantly anti-musical, no matter how many hardcore artists try to convince you
otherwise. A masterpiece for the ages this might not be, but it gets its thumbs up
anyway. Now it's up to you, Ted Nugent, to take up the challenge!
MR. LOVE & JUSTICE (2008)
1) I Keep Faith; 2) I Almost
Killed You; 3) M For Me; 4) The Beach Is Free; 5) Sing Their Souls Back Home;
6) You Make Me Brave; 7) Something Happened; 8) Mr. Love & Justice; 9) If
You Ever Leave; 10) O Freedom; 11) The Johnny Carcinogenic Show; 12) Farm Boy.
Six years between albums is a long time even
for the 21st century — you'd think that, perhaps, the artist has completely run
out of new things to say (which, of course, has never prevented bad or
desperate artists from putting out new music anyway, so it's actually more of a
compliment than a critique in this case). And when, eventually, new things had accumulated to a proper degree,
what we saw was an almost strangely humble and low-key Billy Bragg, almost as
if he'd seen his turning fifty as a sign from God to quiet down and start
acting his age. No loudness, no tension, no screaming, no anger — a wisened-up
elder statesman.
The music is still nice, though. Sentimental,
touching, with a pinch of catchiness and the usual intelligent Billy Bragg
charisma, even if it is occasionally wasted on very local pieces of progressive
propaganda (yes, ʽThe Johnny Carcinogenic Showʼ is a rant against the advertising of tobacco companies on TV, which
is a noble cause in general but makes for poor art in particular). But these
pieces are not frequent — somehow,
peace, love, and tranquility seem to be the album's main topics, since even the
anti-Iraq war tune (ʽSing Their Souls Back Homeʼ) is more of a sincere
prayer for the soldiers' safe return than a passionate rant against the crooked
politicians who sent them there in the first place.
And that's all right, as it seems that Billy
does honorably perform the artist's main duty — follow the tugs of the heart,
wherever it happens to find itself at the moment. The tone of the record is
immediately set by its opening and arguably best number, ʽI Keep
Faithʼ: true to the title, the song has subtle gospel overtones (mainly
reflected in the use of organ and vocal harmonies), but it is anything but
traditionally religious — the artist keeps faith in humanity rather than God,
and proves it with a low-key anthem where, perhaps, the greatest asset is the
tone that he has chosen for his voice: cracked, worn, and weary, yet
deliberately friendly, optimistic, and supportive. Nice chorus resolution, too,
and a good mix of pianos, jangly guitars, and strings.
Everything that follows is plain, simple,
unadorned, and direct, yet with enough stylistic and instrumental diversity to
be very easily sat through without getting bored. Sometimes it's just a bit of
a carefree pop-rock romp at the happiness of having something that still conforms to the man's socialist ideas
(ʽThe Beach Is Freeʼ, with a slightly «de-syncopated» Bo Diddley
rhythm expressing the happiness); sometimes it's a dark folk dance
acknowledging the sadness of the ultimate crash of these ideas (ʽO
Freedomʼ, featuring the most paranoid, Richie Havens-worthy, acoustic
backing track and the mantra "o freedom, what liberties are taken in thy
name!" for the chorus); but most often, it's just a quiet love song — not a
breakup song, not a bad bitch song, but an "if you ever leave me, my dear,
there's nothing for me here" type of song.
And at the end of it all, Billy offers us a
confession — as it turns out, he is "just a farm boy" and he is
"just dreaming of the time when I can go home". Formally, it's just
another anti-war song, but it can also be interpreted as a sort of "I'm
tired" statement in general, tired especially from being pushed around by
idiotic and/or oppressive decisions of, you know, the System, without really
being able to do anything about it. There is no exaggerated desperation or
frustration, it's all more of an "I'm old and tired, I'd just like to
settle down and love my wife, but they still keep pestering me with all that
shit" vibe that most of us are likely to empathize with more and more as
we reach mid- and then old age. It's a reasonable vibe indeed, and it's propped
up by a set of okay songs that suit it well — not too striking, but not
completely unoriginal, either. And maybe it's just me, but it seems as if Billy's
abilities as a singer are only improving as time goes by (and his drawn-out
Cockney accent, funny enough, is also much less prominent). No great shakes,
but enough love, justice, and honest songwriting on the record to guarantee a
modest thumbs up.
TOOTH & NAIL (2013)
1) January Song; 2) No One
Knows Nothing Anymore; 3) Handyman Blues; 4) I Ain't Got No Home; 5) Swallow My
Pride; 6) Do Unto Others; 7) Over You; 8) Goodbye, Goodbye; 9) There Will Be A
Reckoning; 10) Chasing Rainbows; 11) Your Name On My Tongue; 12) Tomorrow's
Going To Be A Better Day.
Billy's latest release so far has been, if
possible, even more humble and
low-key than Mr. Love & Justice.
This time, he is largely acoustic, with a minimal backing band, and all the
songs are shushy — quiet, reserved, introspective, even introvert. Yet it all
sounds so completely natural that you almost begin to wonder if this is not the
real Billy Bragg, and all these years
of electrobusking and political activism were merely an attempt to cure himself
of a natural shyness; and now it's all coming back to him.
Or maybe it is simply that Woody Guthrie
experience — you begin as an idealistic activist, but eventually you just get
tired, say «fuck it», and become a whisperer rather than a shouter. Not that Tooth & Nail is, by any means, a
cynical or a mean record: Billy is still willing to spread the good vibe, not
the bitter vibe, as the song titles clearly show (ʽDo Unto Othersʼ,
ʽTomorrow's Going To Be A Better Dayʼ). It is just... quiet. No grand
rallying statements, just good old timey music from the living room, where you
use the medium for a quickie cheer-up. Or cheer-down, because the songs here
aren't exactly «cheerful». But they're not all that sad, either.
It is all about the vibe, and the vibe is very
cool. Billy's voice has finally matured to the point of providing us with a
real personality — this homey, cozy Brit guy who's worried about all the
problems in the world, yet is really just a quiet family man in the depths of
his heart. A song like ʽHandyman Bluesʼ, where he admits that
"the screwdriver business just gets me confused / It takes me half an hour
to change a fuse / I'm not your handyman!", goes all the way straight to my own heart, and so do most of the
others as well. The melodies are nothing to remember — your regular old folk
and country chord changes, with simple, tasteful, unadorned acoustic guitars,
pedal steel, and piano to carry them out — but when taken together with the
personality, they become charming and endearing.
Sometimes he seems to be pushing it:
ʽGoodbye, Goodbyeʼ could easily be taken for a song of resignation,
of closing the door on his rowdy past — which is probably not quite what is meant, seeing as how Billy
did not exactly become a recluse in 2013 or anything. On the other hand,
ʽTomorrow's Going To Be A Better Dayʼ concludes the album with a
generally optimistic statement, telling you not to "become demoralized by
this chorus of complaint" — even if the song itself is so quiet and shaky
that it seems as if the man himself were having trouble believing in his own
words. Oh well, I guess that if a musically generic, but atmospherically
charismatic record presents itself as a bundle of contradictions, it's all for
the better.
The album's «biggest» song is arguably ʽNo
One Knows Anything Anymoreʼ, played out a bit louder than everything else
(at least, the drums are loud enough) and laying out Billy's general perception
of things: "No one knows anything anymore / Nobody really knows the score
/ Since nobody knows anything / Let's break it down and start again", he
suggests to a leisurely tempo and lazy country-rock backing. If this is a
denial of progress, you know, he just might have something there — at least,
this is consistent with the album's general message: stop the crazy rush,
relax, take the time to take it slow and easy (and who knows, maybe you'll also
kill a little less people that way). I'm all for progress, but I'm also partial
to this vibe, and so, even if the songs here are musically generic, I'm giving
the record a thumbs
up for all it's worth.
HEE HAW (1979-1980; 1988)
1) Mr. Clarinet; 2) Happy
Birthday; 3) Hats On Wrong; 4) Guilt Parade; 5) The Friend Catcher; 6) Waving
My Arms; 7) Catman; 8) Riddle House; 9) A Catholic Skin; 10) The Red Clock; 11)
Faint Heart; 12) Death By Drowning; 13) The Hair Shirts.
Technical note first. The CD edition of Hee Haw, released long after the ashes
of The Birthday Party had been scattered by the wind, actually consists of (a) The Birthday Party — the band's LP
debut from 1980; and (b) Hee Haw, an
EP from late 1979 which they still released under the earlier name of The Boys
Next Door. Prior to that, The Boys Next Door had an even earlier LP release,
appropriately titled Door, Door, but
since it was poorly recorded, released on a completely unknown minor
Australian label, and Nick Cave has subsequently pretty much disowned it as a
childish first attempt, we will let it pass by here. Special mention must be made of an early epoch,
scattered bits of which are still preserved in Australian TV archives, when
Nick Cave used to dress up for public appearances and seemed to take his
primary cue from Paul Weller.
But forget about it, anyway. The real career of
The Birthday Party starts with the move to London, by which time the five
Australian boys (not all of them next door) had gotten their act together and
not only knew exactly what they wanted to do, but also knew exactly how to get
it done. The Birthday Party played its own version of «art-punk», a fairly
unique brand of music that combined elements of garage rock, hardcore punk,
avantgarde jazz, goth, electronica — anything goes, really, as long as the
production style is hot, sweaty, and jungly, the lead singer sounds like a
madhouse client imagining himself to be Tarzan, and the two major players
(Rowland S. Howard on guitar and Mick Harvey on just about anything) make as
much noise as possible.
«Oh no», you'd say, «not another early Eighties' band of crazy noisemakers!» But throw on
ʽMr. Clarinetʼ, and from the very outset you will find that this
amounts to much more than crazy noisemaking. The Birthday Party were not
slackers — they learned not only how to play those instruments, but also how
to combine them in complex, innovative ways without it all falling apart.
Harvey's heavily distorted organ (substituting for an actual clarinet, I guess)
plays sort of a psychedelic fugue, against which Nick Cave is howling and
bellowing like a prime patient that's been subjected to way too many re-runs of
Alban Berg operas. The abstract absurdity of the results separates them from
the punks, but neither is this poppy enough to put them in the same house with
Siouxsie & The Banshees, nor is it solemn-demonic enough to warrant a
comparison with Joy Division. First track = first head-scratching enigma.
Things become a lot clearer when they get to
ʽHappy Birthdayʼ, arguably the quintessential track of the album (and
the one that is connected to the band's crucial name change — from the direct,
but boring Boys Next Door to the symbolic Birthday Party). If ʽMr.
Clarinetʼ left any doubts, ʽHappy Birthdayʼ dissipates them —
this is Modern Madhouse Music at its modern maddest. In the deep past, the
Stooges used to conjure this spirit, but the Stooges, being good kids of the
Sixties, accessed their psychic innards on the express train of sexual
tension: Iggy channelled his aggression into physical lust, whereas The
Birthday Party direct their youthful
adrenaline into the brain areas responsible for maniac depression,
schizophrenia, and other mental disorders. Of course, there is a social basis
for these disorders — it ain't much fun to play mad unless you can convincingly
prove that it is your society who drove you to this brink. In the first case,
you're just playing mad; in the second case, who knows? You might be producing
A-R-T.
ʽHappy Birthdayʼ, with its spooky
tale of a «wonderful dog chair... that could count right up to ten» (I wish I had one!), is the perfect example —
tricky, off-putting time signature; knife-edged, ribbon-cutting bluesy/funky
guitar riffage; and the perfect send-up of the happy «birthday chorus» where
you get to hear Nick Cave woof-woof-woofing, consciously and passionately «ruining»
an actually catchy vocal pop melody. In doing so, The Birthday Party created
just the perfect birthday song to crash, bust, and burn any birthday party
that you'd wish to avoid, but can't, seeing as how it was cruelly sprung on you
by circumstances beyond your control. And as far as I can tell, nobody knows
anything about the woofing dog chair. Still one of those mysteries.
If the songs do get more «tight» and
«collected», they start sounding too dangerously close to their competition — a
case in point is ʽWaving My Armsʼ, which anybody could easily mistake
for a lost Bauhaus outtake, what with the dark gothic bassline, the echoey
jangling guitar, and the repetitive, but thoroughly disciplined chorus. None of
which means it is bad — on the contrary, it is the album's most easily
memorable song, rallying the band to action like a deranged set of the Four
Horsemen's cousins: the line "and we won't get to sleep for fifty thousand
years" will probably keep ringing in your ears longer than anything else
off the album (with the possible exception of "woof woof woof woof
woof").
Speaking of the Stooges comparison and the
alleged «asexuality» of the songs, ʽCatmanʼ, if you just look at the
lyrics, should, of course, count as an example to the contrary — "catman's
coming, looking for a girl, better hide your sister, man" — but even if
Nick's yelps and yowls are clearly influenced by Iggy, he still sounds like a
man in a straitjacket, chained to the battery, his major problem never
descending anywhere below his head; and Rowland Howard's guitar is still reveling
in droning, atonality, and complicated patterns that are way too intellectually
controlled and experimental to be counted as «penis-driven». It might be best
to simply ignore the lyrics (many of which, at this point, seem crude and
underworked anyway) and just bang your head against the wall instead. If you
get to do this on time, you get to experience the complete bliss package of The
Birthday Party.
In conclusion, the only flaw of this package is
a comparative one — in retrospect, it now looks like a masterful rehearsal
before the genuine thunderstorm of Prayers
On Fire — and it should by no means lessen the sincerity of the thumbs up.
Nor is the average quality of the original Hee
Haw EP, appended here as a bonus, any less impressive: early «jazz-goth»
pieces like ʽThe Red Clockʼ and ʽFaint Heartʼ have their
share of inventiveness and spookiness, too. No wonder the boys would blow all
competition off the stage back in the early Melbourne days — even those who
consider their early efforts too silly and immature will have to respect the
level of playing and internal coordination.
PRAYERS ON FIRE (1981)
1) Zoo-Music Girl; 2) Cry; 3)
Capers; 4) Nick The Stripper; 5) Ho-Ho; 6) Figure Of Fun; 7) King Ink; 8) A
Dead Song; 9) Yard; 10) Dull Day; 11) Just You And Me; 12) Blundertown; 13)
Kathy's Kisses.
Hee
Haw was mighty good, but this
LP and its follow-up are the real shit when we speak of The Birthday Party. For
one thing, it sounds like nothing else — the band has not only found, but laid
a unique claim to their own identity, impossible to confuse with Bauhaus, Joy
Division, or any other single New Wave band, UK or elsewhere. For another (or
maybe it's the same thing, just differently stated), the band has «unleashed
the fuckin' fury», to quote an undying classic. I am not sure about any actual
praying going on, but «on fire» gets it just about right.
For some reason, Nick Cave later admitted
embarrassment about ʽZoo-Music Girlʼ (maybe because of the lyrics
and their objectifying the lady of Nick's dreams a bit too overtly?), but it's
hard to make out the words anyway; what is important is the collective
onslaught — drums, bass, organ, guitar, vocals: five berserk warriors
zig-zagging around the compound, trampling out everything in their path. This
is mad, mad, mad tribal music, a shamanistic whirlwind, yet with just the right
amount of self-control so as to never fall apart, and be able to quickly pick
itself up after each pause of its tricky stop-and-start structure. And then the
brass part comes in, and hoopla, it is suddenly a schizophrenic avantgarde jazz
masterpiece. What's to be embarrassed of?
The true power of Prayers On Fire is not in the amount of sheer ruckus it manages to
generate — it is in its insanely unexpectable quantity of melodic ideas. The
«songs», or, rather, dashing musical disgorgements, are chockfull with stunning
Rowland S. Howard riffs, acid organ parts, and spooky basslines; at least one
of these distinguishes every song, and sometimes, all three do battle with each
other. On ʽCryʼ, Howard and Harvey both wield guitars, first playing
against each other, then complementing Nick on the chorus with united series of
arpeggios that formally represent the protagonist «crying» over his girl
dumping him. But the «cry» in question, be it Nick's vocals or the two
guitarists' choking trills, is not really a cry — more like a madman's
agonizing gurgle, or an epileptic fit. Very naturalistic.
The band's «goth» angle, in the meantime, has
evolved to the level of ʽNick The Stripperʼ, which makes additional
use of the talents of the Melbourne jazz combo Equal Local (the album was recorded
in Australia) and, consequently, sounds a bit like «lounge jazz from hell»,
where Equal Local's brass section is the hot, sensual, glamorous counterpart to
the black devil sound of the bass and Nick's voice, intentionally mangling
"insect" and "incest" as if the change of just one sound
doesn't really do a hell of a lot of difference. The ʽNickʼ of the
song may refer to anybody, but in this particular context, it is clearly
understood as self-referential: "Nick the Stripper, a-hideous to the eye,
well he's a fat little insect..." — self-hatred was rarely, if ever,
expressed with so much animal brutality as it is on this song.
Of course, the basic emotional content of all
the songs is more or less the same, and this makes it hard to comment on the
individual tracks. «Confusion», «frustration», «infuriation», «insanity», all
of these abstractions and their closest neighbors rule on every track,
generated in tandem by all of the musicians — the greatness of The Birthday
Party is in the fact that everybody
contributed on the level, everybody strove to add their own pinch of tightly
controlled (or loosely controlled) chaos. As far as songwriting is concerned,
Cave gets credited on most of the tracks, but usually in collaboration with
Howard, and sometimes Howard is the only credited writer, e. g. on the ominous
piano rocker ʽDull Dayʼ — in reality, though, this is very much a
collective product; I could not imagine the songs having nearly the same impact
if even one of the players here suddenly
slacked out and remained there to simply fill the required space.
Nick himself was particularly proud of
ʽKing Inkʼ, which has possibly the creepiest bass melody on the
entire album, but is not so good guitar-wise (too much noise, not enough
geometrically insulting melody). Me, I prefer «Nick the demented patient» of
ʽA Dead Songʼ, also not particularly exciting melodically, but
featuring his most expressive and credible performance on the entire record —
credible, as in «this really makes you believe the guy spent several weeks in
the madhouse to observe and practice». But in reality, these preferences differ
by split hairs: the album has to be swallowed as a whole (plus the two bonus
tracks on the CD edition, of which ʽKathy's Kissesʼ, a stumbling,
stuttering post-punk deconstruction of Kurt Weillian cabaret, is a particular
highlight), and the thumbs up rating applies in near-equal mode to all
of its parts.
JUNKYARD (1982)
1) Blast Off; 2) She's Hit; 3)
Dead Joe; 4) The Dim Locator; 5) Hamlet; 6) Several Sins; 7)
Big-Jesus-Trash-Can; 8) Kiss Me Black; 9) 6" Gold Blade; 10) Kewpie Doll;
11) Junkyard; 12*) Dead Joe; 13*) Release The Bats.
This is a monster
record if there ever was one. Okay, there was one: Fun House by the Stooges, released twelve years earlier. But in a
whole twelve years, during which dozens of genres had come and gone, the world
hadn't truly seen another monster record. Punk, post-punk, heavy metal, Goth,
sheer sonic hooliganry Throbbing Gristle-style, the world had it all, but
nothing really came close to the blazing, genuinely frightening musical hell of
Fun House. Somebody had to match that achievement in the
Eighties, and why are we not surprised that the «somebody» would be Mr.
Nicholas Edward Cave from Australia?
The nightmarish fun begins already on the album
sleeve — look at the picture closely and yes, this is more or less what the
music sounds like. The color palette is a little too... colorful, perhaps (I'd
rather see this in black and white), but other than that, the diversity of
elements, their absurdity, their energized appearance, and their sheer
ugliness, everything driven to hyperbolic heights, totally fits in with the
songs, or, rather, the nightmarish rituals that The Birthday Party has chosen
to perform. And I'm assuming that the album sleeve pictures their sacred altar.
Interestingly enough, the original LP, which
only contained ten tracks, did not start with ʽBlast Off!ʼ — it was
the B-side to a concurrent single. When the album was released on CD, however,
the song was not simply tacked on as a bonus track (like its A-side,
ʽRelease The Batsʼ, notable for being the «Goth»-est number released
by the band and allegedly much favored by Bauhaus fans); instead, they put it
on top as the album's flagman, for reasons so obvious that it is now hard for
me to imagine how Junkyard would
have ever fared without it. Briefly put, ʽBlast Off!ʼ is a loud and
proud signal for that thingamabob on the album sleeve to... blast off. This is
Captain Beefheart gone berserk, a flurry of avantgarde-influenced drum rolls,
bass runs, and dissonant guitar shrieks, on top of which Crazy Captain Cave
announces that the band is finally moving out. Prayers On Fire showed us the mustering of the forces inside the
asylum; Junkyard flings the asylum
doors open, and out pours the scary army of Lunacy, Epilepsy, and Maniac
Behavior.
Viewed from that angle, the first side of Junkyard is pretty much flawless. Most
of the tunes deal with violence and death; only one, ʽThe Dim
Locatorʼ, focuses primarily on pure insanity as such — the melody can be
traced all the way back to Kurt Weill, but the mood is «square root of Jim
Morrison multiplied by Iggy Pop», and now they have this disgustingly dirty,
swampy, lo-fi, echoey production, too, that makes it all sound like it was
recorded in a particularly filthy sewer. One in which a zombie-faced Nick Cave
is wading, knee-dip in muck and shit, grumbling and snarling: "They call
me Dim, I am the Dim Locator, loco-lomo-loco-lomo-wow-wow-wow". It ain't a
pretty sight, but it sure looks realistic enough to want to take cover.
But a bigger bet is staked on sheer visceral
brutality: ʽDead Joeʼ jackhammers your guts into your spine with
Motörhead intensity, as the song tries to recreate the impression of a
«car crash apocalypse» and the ensuing panic ("you can't tell the girls
from the boys anymore"), and ʽHamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow!)ʼ does the
same thing, but sadistically takes extra time to arrive at the desired effect —
the «Hamlet» in question, transferred to modern times, is now the equivalent of
a religious psychopath ("Hamlet got a gun now, he wears a crucifix"),
a hidden menace that trots around at a brisk jazzy tempo before exploding,
every once in a while, in a series of snarling pow-pow-pows as «Hamlet» gets
carried away.
On the other side of the street, ʽShe's
Hitʼ andʽSeveral Sinsʼ move slowly and refrain from descending
into sheer utter epileptic madness, but then again, even the maddest madmen
should take a break from rolling on the floor foaming at the mouth from time to
time. And there is some genuine emotional depth here — behind all the
discordant jazz-punk wailing of ʽShe's Hitʼ Nick manages to put down
an atmosphere of tragic sadness, while ʽSeveral Sinsʼ counts off the
beginning of his fire-and-brimstone streak ("I forgot to tell you several
things, Ma, I forgot to tell you 'bout the seven sins"). The song is also
interesting in that it announces the arrival of Barry Adamson, temporarily
replacing Tracy Pew on bass while the latter was doing a two-month term for
drunk driving — Adamson would later go on to become one of the Bad Seeds. Not
that ʽSeveral Sinsʼ is a particularly complex track, bass-wise, but
Barry quickly gets in the general gloomy groove of the band, and helps make the
song a true «dead letter tale» as it promises in its opening line. The only
question is, how in the world could they all turn in such a credible
performance when they barely had something like twenty-five years or so to
indulge in the seven sins?
If there is one general flaw on Junkyard, it is the length: forty
minutes may be a bit too much even for the veteran listener, especially
considering that Side B of the disc does not stray too far from the same
territory, and may give the impression of the band getting a little tired, or
maybe it's just the listener who got tired. ʽBig Jesus Trash Canʼ
walks pretty much the same turf as ʽBlast Off!ʼ, ʽKiss Me
Blackʼ raises the same ruckus as ʽDead Joeʼ, the title track is
a slow-burning dirge that does not exceed the effects of ʽShe's
Hitʼ, and so on. Individually, each song is strong, but collectively, it
does begin to get a bit samey after a while, and this, I am afraid to say,
cheapens the overall experience: being shocked to the bone at the sight of an
epileptic shaking in convulsions is one thing — having to watch him do it for
half an hour and slowly getting used to it, let alone getting bored with it, is another. Consequently,
it might make sense to listen to Junkyard
one side at a time.
No matter what your particular preference might
be, though, Junkyard remains the album that The Birthday Party was
sent into this world to leave us with. Some might find it too far out, too
violent, too messy, and prefer the slightly more subtle and, if I may say so,
slightly more «poppy» Prayers On Fire
instead, but the way I see it, if you are born into this world to be a
gut-puller, then the harder you pull on those guts, the better you are
fulfilling your destiny. On Junkyard,
Nick and his friends are not merely engaging in senseless musical hooliganry —
they are engineering an avantgarde masterpiece that may not be as inventive
and revolutionary as Trout Mask Replica,
but sounds much more meaningful to my ears. This is more than just a regular thumbs up:
Junkyard should, by all means, end
up on all the representative top lists for the decade.
MUTINY / THE BAD SEED (1982-1983; 1989)
1) Sonny's Burning; 2)
Wildworld; 3) Fears Of Gun; 4) Deep In The Woods; 5) Jennifers Veil; 6) Six
Strings That Drew Blood; 7) Say A Spell; 8) Swampland; 9) Pleasure Avalanche;
10) Mutiny In Heaven.
After Junkyard,
The Birthday Party had no place left to go. They'd taken the formula to its
absolute extreme — one more step in the same direction and the band would have
exploded in its own madness. On the other hand, there could be no talk of stopping
and stagnating, either: Nick Cave was not about to let his band turn into an
endlessly self-repeating hardcore-goth-mix machine, forever releasing inferior
sequels to Junkyard. There had to be some changes made, but this
meant running into internal creative conflicts. Throw in some trouble with the
rhythm section (drummer Phil Calvert was fired for alleged loss of competence,
and bassist Tracy Pew had temporarily vanished from the radar due to law
troubles), and the end becomes predictable.
The
Bad Seed, an Evangelical title
that Nick would eventually appropriate for his next band's name, and Mutiny were two EPs that the band
released over their last troubled year of existence, later to be put together
on one CD and now seen as the Birthday Party's last testament. It is very
tempting to call them «transitional», a bridge between classic Birthday Party
and early Bad Seeds, but that would depend on how one actually perceives the
difference between B.P. and B.S. As far as I can see, the arrival of Blixa
Bargeld to replace Rowland S. Howard as Nick's principal sparring partner was the principal change from one to the
other — Howard's flashy, psychotic style of playing always took a lot of
emphasis off Nick's performance, whereas Bargeld would rather play off Cave,
adapting his guitar parts to attenuate the man's self-expression.
From that point of view, Mutiny/The Bad Seed is still a bona fide Birthday Party record,
even despite the fact that Bargeld already appears on ʽMutiny In
Heavenʼ, adding a distant wall of industrial clang in the background. On
the general scale of «intensity», these EPs, I'd say, fall way below Junkyard, but still remain above Prayers On Fire. Only a couple of
songs, like ʽSwamplandʼ, sound like they could have been outtakes
from the Birthday Party's aggressive peak — the rest are either slower than
usual, or more disciplined than usual, or, sometimes, more subtle and quietly
spooky than usual (not in a «Bad Seeds» way, though).
Nothing is radically new, but the songs,
particularly on the Bad Seed EP, are
still perfectly written and executed. Nick's "HANDS UP WHO WANTS TO
DIE?" at the beginning of ʽSonny's Burningʼ is as classic a
Birthday Party moment as anything, and the rest of the song gallops along like
a mix of hardcore epic with old style psychedelia, with the chainsaw buzz
replaced by (catchy!) acid guitar riffs and mind-twirling «astral» leads.
ʽFears Of Gunʼ is only a tad slower, more in a jazz/blues-rock vein,
but a viciously murderous one, as bits of guitar shrapnel fly in all directions
while Mr. Cave is running down the street, loudly announcing that "the
fears of Gun are the fears of everyone" («Gun» is animated and
personalized in this song).
On the opposite side of the business,
ʽWildworldʼ and ʽDeep In The Woodsʼ lean towards the Goth
angle, particularly the latter, all of it hanging upon a cruel descending
bassline, each bar taking us deeper and deeper in the woods where "the
woods eats the woman and dumps her honey body in the mud", well, you can
imagine the rest. I do have to say, though, that after Junkyard, these spooky horror shows come across as a little too
grotesque and theatrical: way too many DIEs, DEATHs, and DEADs rolled up in
gravel for the hyperbole to work in a properly intimidating (rather than
black-humorous) manner. Of course, once Rowland S. Howard cuts in with all of
his «wounded mammoth» might, everything is forgiven.
As for the last EP, it sounds a bit too fussy
and disorganised, with fairly strange rockers like ʽSix Strings That Drew
Bloodʼ that never seem to properly understand whether they are headed for
musical coherence or musical chaos. ʽJennifer's Veilʼ and ʽSay A
Spellʼ tread the same turd as ʽWildworldʼ, but with less
interesting results. Only ʽSwamplandʼ, a convict-on-the-run performance
that initiates Nick's decades-long series of scum-of-the-earth impersonations,
truly stands out in its relentless punch — Cave seems invigorated by the very
idea that his «madman» image can be put to more realistic use, and if you
thought you could do without any more throat-tearing screaming after the
entirety of Junkyard, you might at
least make an exception for his "down in swampland...!", delivered as
if the hound dogs were already tearing at his calves, pulling him down in the
filthy muck.
On their own, the songs are strong enough to
merit an unquestionable thumbs up — in terms of the global curve, though,
these EPs mark relative stagnation. Nobody questions the ability of Cave and
Howard to come up with «hook after hook», vocal-wise or guitar-wise, but emotion-wise, they all sound now like
variations on themes fully explored before, and while that might have kept old
veteran fans of the band happy, it sure didn't keep the band members happy. New
configurations were necessary, so it is only natural that ʽMutiny In
Heavenʼ concludes the album on a note of new partnership: Nick Cave and
Blixa Bargeld, meeting up in Berlin after the Birthday Party relocated there
in 1982, disappointed with the London scene. And really, we should all be
happy: The Birthday Party lived the exact amount of time it was supposed to
live, reaching its absolute peak and breaking up at the first signs of
stagnation, its members re-emerging in fresh new formats. Good lesson for too
many people who refuse to learn.
ADDENDA:
LIVE 1981-82 (1999; 1981-1982)
1) Junkyard; 2) A Dead Song;
3) The Dim Locator; 4) Zoo-Music Girl; 5) Nick The Stripper; 6) Blast Off!; 7)
Release The Bats; 8) Bully Bones; 9) King Ink; 10) (Sometimes) Pleasure Heads
Must Burn; 11) Big-Jesus-Trash-Can; 12) Dead Joe; 13) The Friend Catcher; 14)
6" Gold Blade; 15) Hamlet; 16) She's Hit; 17) Funhouse.
Although The Birthday Party pretty much built
up their reputation through live performance, they never released a live album
while the band was still active — possibly because they felt no need, what with
the studio records already letting off as much steam as any live performance
could accumulate. The first «semi-official» Birthday Party live LP only came
out about two years after the split — It's
Still Living, capturing an Australian show from 1982, was released by their
former manager without anybody's consent, and is usually chastised for vastly
inferior sound quality and other problems.
It took almost two more decades before an
archival Birthday Party live release finally appeared that could sort of serve
as a proper «benchmark» for evaluating and enjoying the band's sound. Here,
everything was improved — courtesy of the respectable 4AD label, the
performances are well-recorded and nicely cleaned up, and the setlists offer a
fine retrospective of the Party's career, focusing primarily on Prayers On Fire and Junkyard, unquestionably their two
finest offerings, but also featuring some rarities and oddities. Most of the
material was culled from two shows in London and Bremen; a historically
important bonus piece is the recording of ʽFunhouseʼ by their
spiritual forefathers, The Stooges, in Athens from September 1982, although,
unfortunately, it is also the one track that suffers the most from near-bootleg
sound quality.
I should emphatically stress, though, that The
Birthday Party live do not get much wilder than The Birthday Party in the
studio — frankly speaking, it would be hard to imagine how they could get much wilder than that, unless
it meant dragging out random audience members on stage and cutting their hearts
out in black voodoo rituals (and even then, you'd have to get this on DVD to
genuinely enjoy the proceedings). But on the other hand, The Birthday Party
live do not get any less wild than
The Birthday Party in the studio — if this was really typical of their live
sound, it means they could work themselves to exhaustion every night, and still
come back for more. From the first track and right down to the last one, each
single member of the band is playing at the top of his powers, and Nick's devil
roar never sags, not even for a second.
From an audiophile point of view, these
recordings could actually be preferable to some of the original takes — in the
studio, the band went for too much echo and lo-fi, whereas here all the
instruments are completely out front: the vicious lead guitar parts on
ʽDim Locatorʼ, for instance, shoot at point blank range into your
ears here, whereas on the original version they sounded rather remote. You may
like or dislike it, but it does make the listening experience significantly
different — a rare case of an underground band's archival live release sounding
«cleaner» than what they did in the studio, and one that may offer additional
insight into the art of Mick Harvey's and Rowland Howard's guitar playing. Or
compare Tracy Pew's bass on the original ʽShe's Hitʼ and the almost
ʽDazed And Confusedʼ-style thick doom sounds on this version — it's
like he's tugging at these strings from inside your own head. On the other
hand, that studio echo did account for some extra eeriness, so that it is impossible
to objectively prefer one over the other.
The final performance of ʽFunhouseʼ,
adding guest player Jim Thirlwell on saxophone, would be a more than perfect
conclusion here if the sound quality were reasonable, but even as such it is
still a noisy sensation — every time the guitar, the sax, and the singer lock
forces in a hysterical outburst, on the illusionary verge of totally losing
control, we have Bedlam incarnate, though it is interesting to go back and
listen, for comparative purposes, to Iggy doing this stuff on the original Funhouse. The Stooges were summoning
the flames of Hell — the Birthday Party sound much more like your local
madhouse band, celebrating the joys of clinical insanity rather than demonic
possession. It may simply have something to do with Nick's «mooing» voice not
having as much guttural power as Iggy, but you could also say this about Ron
Asheton vs. Rowland Howland (the former makes his instrument sound like a spray
hose of hellflames, the latter prefers to evoke the atmosphere of a serious
nervous breakdown), so yeah, similar intentions, different spirits.
Finally, we are offered occasional glimpses of
Nick Cave's tender side — through bits of stage banter like "thank you, I
love your haircut as well", casually, but respectfully cast off towards
somebody in the audience right before launching into a fiery version of
ʽZoo-Music Girlʼ. As few as they are, they are important — seventy minutes of this unending assault and
battery might make you feel that we are dealing with a bunch of psychopaths
beyond salvation (an alternate version of GG Allin and friends), so even a
single nicely spoken sentence of sanity, dropped in casually like that, can be
reassuring, and further confirming the obvious thumbs up and the obvious recommendation
to pick this up and never let it go.
THE FIRST FOUR YEARS (1978-1981; 1983)
1) Nervous Breakdown; 2) Fix
Me; 3) I've Had It; 4) Wasted; 5) Jealous Again; 6) Revenge; 7) White Minority;
8) No Values; 9) You Bet We've Got Something Personal Against You!; 10) Clocked
In; 11) Six Pack; 12) I've Heard It Before; 13) American Waste; 14) Machine;
15) Louie Louie; 16) Damaged I.
I suppose that putting out three EPs with three
different singers in four years is
some sort of record, but what really makes it a unique record is that each
following singer was worse than his
predecessor. Keith Morris, handling the lead vocals on 1978's Nervous Breakdown, still sings more or
less in the «first wave punk» tradition, with a snappy, sneering attitude and
relatively understandable enunciation of the words. Sometimes he can even hit
different notes and hold them, a fairly anathemous thing to do for America's
quintessential hardcore band. His successor, Ron Reyes, also lovingly called
«Chavo Pederast» by his fellow band members, already comes across as a professional
hardcore screamer on 1980's Jealous
Again, but he still shows some understanding of pitch, may function in one
of several emotional states, and knows what sarcasm is (ʽWhite
Minorityʼ). Finally, Dez Chavena, active on the Six Pack EP and also featured on several additional outtakes, just
seems like a plain old simple street guy with an unreliable throat (it is said
that he couldn't handle proper live shows, and eventually pleaded to be
relegated to second guitar, once Rollins came along).
What binds all these short stages together is
the music, credited mainly to the band leader and main guitarist, Greg Ginn,
and occasionally, to the bass player Chuck Dukowski. Although, due to Greg's
insistence, the band positioned itself as «professional» from the very
beginning, spending lots of time in rehearsal, these early songs do not yet
disclose the full scope of Ginn's talents or interests. For the most part, the
early EPs are more like «the Ramones taken to eleven» — ʽWhite
Minorityʼ, for instance, begins like ʽBlitzkrieg Bopʼ and then,
just a few bars later, slips into ʽBeat On The Bratʼ — but the songs
are notably shorter (one to one-and-a-half minute running length is common),
and, most importantly, notably meaner.
Black Flag has its own sense of humor, of course, but it's mostly dark, bitter
humor, full of aggressive sarcasm; and most of the time, they just sound like
they want to put their fist in your face, rather than party around.
Quality-wise, I suppose this whole disc does
not really get any better than its opening track — ʽNervous
Breakdownʼ tells you everything you ever wanted to know about early Black
Flag, and, in fact, about early hardcore in general. Poor production; Ginn's guitar
as the only properly audible instrument, sounding like a cross between the
chainsaw buzz of Johnny Ramone and the underworld rumble of Tony Iommi (Ginn is
a lifelong Black Sabbath fan, and it always shows); and a singer gradually
going from pissed-off snarl to frenetic roar, as his promise of being about to
have a nervous breakdown is swiftly realized over the course of the song's two
minutes. The next three songs basically repeat the same message —
ʽWastedʼ being a particular highlight, as it packs the required angst
and anguish into a single-breath fifty seconds. It does beg the question,
though: why the past tense? "I was
so wasted" — is that supposed to mean that things are all right now?
Everything else on the EP is in present tense, you know.
For Jealous
Again, Ginn already implements a few stylistic changes: most importantly,
the guitar playing becomes more melodic, as he adds screechy bluesy leads to
the title track and ʽRevengeʼ. More questionable is the decision to
address the band's own problems: ʽYou Bet We've Got Something Personal
Against You!ʼ slams down the freshly departed Keith Morris, who allegedly
stole the band's material for his new band, The Circle Jerks. Then again, maybe
venting one's frustration against concrete people for concrete problems might
be considered a more honest and authentic way to go than just spewing out
another predictable anti-authority rant in general.
The first signs of «classic» Black Flag,
however, only begin to appear closer to the Dez Cadena period, as the songs
become more interesting from the compositional and arrangement-based points of
view. The guitar solos on ʽClocked Inʼ become exceedingly maniacal,
with elements of atonality; ʽSix Packʼ opens with thirty seconds of
suspenseful bass/drum interplay and features several tempo changes and
completely crazyass lead lines along the way; and ʽI've Heard It Beforeʼ
features Ginn in full swing, as his guitar imitates a fire alarm siren gone off
its rocker. These are no longer examples of an «angrified Ramones» approach;
this is something different.
Most divergent of the lot are the last three
songs: ʽMachineʼ is a bass-solo-gone-noise-rock experiment over
which Cadena screams that he is not a machine (so you could as well call it an
anti-Kraftwerk protest song); the cover of ʽLouie Louieʼ, with a new
set of lyrics, arguably features the most atonal guitar solo ever suggested for
that song; and the original version of ʽDamagedʼ, with a relentless
four-minute industrial punch to it, as Ginn suddenly finds himself getting
closer to the aesthetics of Einstürzende Neubauten, is one of the most
aurally brutal things they ever came up with (much heavier and uglier than what
it became later with Rollins).
«Liking» or «loving» a collection like this is
almost out of the question, I think, since it is so diverse in functionality —
I mean, if the early songs are your average teenage hormonal stuff, and should
primarily fall in line with the average 17-year old as he gets his first
serious whupping from Life, the later songs are already more suitable for the
ear of the avantgarde lover. So this whole process is interesting, even
thrilling perhaps, from an «evolutionary» point of view, but the individual
parts all have their flaws — the early stuff is too derivative and formulaic,
and the later stuff, weird as it is, feels a bit underdeveloped, and also
suffers from Cadena's lack of personality, as the man is essentially a one-note,
one-vibe character. Naturally, on the whole the collection still gets a thumbs up,
but in general curve terms, it is hard for me not to perceive it as just a gradual
build-up — a four-year training camp — for the true success still to come.
DAMAGED (1981)
1) Rise Above; 2) Spray Paint;
3) Six Pack; 4) What I See; 5) TV Party; 6) Thirsty And Miserable; 7) Police
Story; 8) Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie; 9) Depression; 10) Room 13; 11) Damaged II; 12)
No More; 13) Padded Cell; 14) Life Of Pain; 15) Damaged I.
Black Flag's first album with Henry Rollins as
lead throatist has acquired a reputation that even a thoroughly negative review
would not be able to smear in the least, so I won't even try. This is one of
those «classic» hardcore pieces, made ever so more classic by the fact that,
having gotten it out of their systems, Ginn and Rollins immediately started
moving away from that sound and style, so it is one of a kind. Never
repeated... never could be repeated
without sounding like an inferior copy for boring lovers of sequels, for that
matter.
That said, I suspect that the original impact
of Damaged has been seriously
diluted by the tidal wave of hardcore acts that followed in its wake (or
competed with it originally, since most of the individual hardcore idioms had
already been fully construed in L. A. clubs circa 1979). In the very early
1980s, playing an album like this against the dance-pop, New Wave, and even
«classic» punk records of the day could give an electric jolt like nothing
else — next to Damaged, an album
like London Calling would feel like
a tame kitty, and even properly hardcore acts like the Adolescents or the Dead
Kennedys sounded positively melodic and «poppy» in comparison. But as time went
by and more and more acts started speaking the same language as Black Flag, Damaged had little choice other than
to go through an identity crisis.
The best way to enjoy Damaged is not to allow yourself to stop and think about it. Just
as you hear that tsunami wave of distortion and speed ʽRise Aboveʼ,
your best bet is to catch it and ride it all the way through to the end, where
it leaves you ʽDamagedʼ, spluttering and coughing up muck on the
shore. Taken that way, it's one hell of a joyride, as you get carried through
layers of pissed-off protest, vicious sarcasm, maniacal despair, and
revolutionary exuberance, sometimes condensed into one-breath thirty-second
blasts (ʽSpray Paintʼ) and never once feeling phoney or
straightforwardly dumb.
Once you do
stop and take an analytical perspective at what you've just been through, a
certain vibe of disappointment may settle in. For one thing, Henry Rollins is a
serious screamer, but that is pretty much the only thing that happens here. The
screaming may sound meaningful, believable, infectious, stunning, etc. — yet
there is really nothing extraordinary about it, and at this time, the album
does not really do much justice to the overall breadth of Mr. Rollins' talents;
in fact, his only visible advantage over Dez Cadena is that he is tougher, and
can handle all that visceral stuff without
being left all «damaged».
For another thing, Ginn's riffage, as opposed
to his lead playing, still mostly relies on stock phrasing, borrowed from the
repository of Black Sabbath, AC/DC, and the Ramones, lightly shaken about, sped
up, and toughened with extra thick distortion. The lead playing is a different
matter — whenever Greg goes into solo mode or just throws in a flash-in-the-pan
countermelody, he offers us one of his offbeat atonal experiments, cleverly
disguised as stereotypically punkish «inability to play». But, let's admit it,
it would be a really strange thing to
call Damaged, above and beyond
everything else, a classic example of adventurous lead guitar playing.
Finally, from a purely ideological point of
view, the album does not offer much insight that we were not already aware of.
While I do share the common point of view that ʽTV Partyʼ is
lyrically funny, I am certainly past the point where the very fact of making
fun of generic TV audiences glued to their generic TV shows could automatically
make me predisposed towards a song like that. What really saves the song is not
its lyrics, but rather the band's decision to arrange it as a hardcore musical
parody on a happy pop tune: take away the distorted guitars, change the lyrics,
and that "we've got nothing better to do / than watch TV and have a couple
of brews" chorus could be easily modified into a football fan anthem or a
Sesame Street singalong. That's kind
of funny, not the simple fact of making fun of the average (non-)working Joe.
But let us stop here: this is too much
criticism for a record that places all its faith and focus in something
completely different. Like The Clash
four years earlier, Damaged is not a
collection of carefully crafted songs, but a laser blast to the conscience,
where form takes precedence over essence, or, more precisely, essence is
dissolved in form. Damaged may have
been worshipped and imitated many times over, but this is where it all started,
and you can still hear the echo of these guys' excitement at what they are
doing — sacrificing all known musical conventions in order to make way for the
ultimate experience in exorcising their own demons. Make no mistake, though: Damaged is not a «dark», «vicious»,
«scary» record — like most of its predecessors in the «classic punk» style, it
is more of an optimistic call-to-arms, and even when Rollins is impersonating
a raving lunatic on ʽDamaged Iʼ or ʽDepressionʼ, his
screams sound more like some symbolic constatation of the problem than the
product of a real sick person. Black
Flag have a bone to pick with the system, and it is the system that they are
accusing of driving people crazy — whereas a band like The Birthday Party, for
instance, was reveling in madness that went way beyond the evil activity of the
powers-that-be, probing into the darkest corners of human nature as such, and that was scary as heck.
It is sort of symbolic that the famous album
cover for Damaged was all set up —
naturally, Henry Rollins never put his fist through no mirror, which, instead,
was diligently smashed with a hammer as Henry's hand was being accurately
covered in red ink. It would not be difficult to say that the entire album is
as «fake» as its sleeve photo, but then, the entire punk movement, in all its
forms, is «fake» to a certain degree: after all, you wouldn't expect Henry
Rollins to go rolling on the streets, screaming "AAAARGGH! I can't see
nothin', I'm blind! DAMAGED! DAMAGED!" at the top of the lungs, on a
casual basis. It's all just a matter of art. For its historical importance,
artistic significance, sheer focus and energy, I eagerly give the album a thumbs up
— despite not managing to hold even a single separate song as an autonomous
entity anywhere in my head.
MY WAR (1984)
1) My War; 2) Can't Decide; 3)
Beat My Head Against The Wall; 4) I Love You; 5) Forever Time; 6) The Swinging
Man; 7) Nothing Left Inside; 8) Three Nights; 9) Scream.
After a three-year break in recording,
partially triggered by legal hassles with their record label as well as
personal problems — such as losing their drummer and their bass player for different reasons — Black Flag came back
with a vengeance for 1984, releasing no fewer than three new studio albums that year. But whoever was expecting
another Damaged from these guys (or,
better still, three more Damageds!) had to take a hike: Greg
Ginn and Henry Rollins were not about to let their progressively-oriented brain
machines be overridden by rigid formula.
The first side looked promisingly conservative.
The title track breaks in at an acceptably fast tempo (not nearly as fast as
ʽRise Aboveʼ, though), delivers a classic Rollins scream-hook as he
spits "you're one of them! you're one of them!" right in your face,
almost making you blush in embarrassed confusion, and turns Ginn's guitar into
a well-oiled machine gun, as he bathes you in sonic shrapnel from behind
Henry's muscular back.
ʽCan't Decideʼ, despite the already
suspicious gargantuan running length of 5:22, is even better as a song — as its
discordant sonic intro eventually morphs into another set of machine-gun
phrasing, Rollins and Ginn construct a series of verses on the issue of having
to suppress one's true emotions that subtly-brutally build up towards an
explosive resolution: Henry's "I can't decide, I can't decide, I can't
decide ANYTHING!" may be one of the most credible expressions of total
frustration since the Who's ʽI Can't Explainʼ. Why they decided to
include a gazillion of dissonant guitar solos and verses is beyond me — the
song would probably have worked much better as a laconic 2:30 blast — but, most
likely, expanded lengths like these simply meant refusing to kowtow to
established «hardcore standards», take it or leave it.
The remaining four songs on Side A do not add
any extra emotional range: the energy level never drops, and Rollins' lyrics
never cease scorching the earth (the first line of ʽI Love Youʼ is,
after all, "I put my fist through the door" — we've come a long way
from 1964), but the musical structures and moods follow the same principles,
and Ginn's laudable willingness to keep experimenting with chord sequences comes
at the expense of catchiness: there are some fairly monstruous and not
particularly meaningful polygonal riff-monsters here, and the best thing about
them is probably the guitar tone — low, grumbly, distorted, but cleanly
produced, with tight control exercised over echo and feedback.
Side B, although it retains the tone, is a
different proposition altogether. It is given over to something quite
unexpected: three lengthy, slow, draggy slabs of what could only be described
as «early sludge metal», most notably derivative of Black Sabbath but nowhere
near as poppy or catchy, especially when Greg throws in one of his dissonant
solos whose sound I could only describe as «what you'd expect to happen if Lou
Reed started playing like Frank Zappa». Critical opinion on these weird
creations is usually negative, with «self-indulgent» as the mildest epithet in
their direction — but once you really start thinking, it seems as if it is only
the tempo that truly separates them
from the first half. Everything else is the same — the guitar tones, the
dissonances, the darkness, the lyrics, the screaming; if you took ʽI Love
Youʼ and slowed it down, you'd have yourself another copy of ʽNothing
Left Insideʼ. Therefore, by loving the first side and hating the second
side, one essentially admits that the only reason why «hardcore» deserves to
exist is its speed — a logical position, but not a very useful one, so it
seems.
I think that the monotonous, draggy trilogy of
ʽNothing Left Insideʼ, ʽThree Nightsʼ, and
ʽScreamʼ is at least «kinda curious», and at most, if you let
yourself ride its wobbly waves, a quasi-psychedelic rough trip that mixes early
1970s pothead-ism with modern punk to an unpredictable effect. ʽNothing
Left Insideʼ, in particular, succeeds in generating a cool, smoky, downer
atmosphere where, at times, Rollins and Ginn howl in unison like a pair of
stray dogs, freshly run over by a truck. Nothing too serious, just "pain hurts my heart, nothing left
inside". Oh, needless to say, eighteen minutes of this atmosphere are easily
sustainable probably only if you are
a pothead, but the experience is not a total waste, and «self-indulgence» is a
word I'd rather reserve for a 15-minute Kansas epic than for this brave, only
partially successful attempt to invent «slow hardcore» (or «anti-hardcore»,
whatever).
All in all, the experimental nature of My War has its attractive sides, and
the album captures and bottles something
— at the very least, this is certainly not a case of a band with nothing to
say. I am pretty sure that all of this could have been said better, maybe with some extra overdubs,
or with a little more range to Rollins' character, or with a little less
slobbering adoration for Tony Iommi that prevents Ginn from straying away from
that one single path. But even as it is, My
War still deserves a thumbs up, since its «bravery» (maybe even literal
bravery — the hardcore market is already so small that most of the suppliers
usually try not to alienate any parts of it) does not come at the expense of
meaning, and the album has some replay value.
FAMILY MAN (1984)
1) Family Man; 2) Salt On A
Slug; 3) Hollywood Diary; 4) Let Your Fingers Do The Walking; 5) Shed Reading
(Rattus Norvegicus); 6) No Deposit – No Return; 7) Armageddon Man; 8) Long Lost
Dog Of It; 9) I Won't Stick Any Of You; 10) Account For What.
Black Flag's project-number-two for the
prolific year of 1984 happens to be the most universally despised Rollins-era
Black Flag album, and for quite an objective reason: this is not really «Black
Flag» as such, but rather two brief solo mission statements from Henry and
Greg, the former reciting unaccompanied examples of his spoken-word poetry,
and the latter playing a bunch of his avantgarde punk improvisations. The two
cross paths in the middle of the record with ʽArmageddon Manʼ, but
in an almost accidental manner — with Henry overdubbing his texts across Greg's
«noodling» without any idea of voice-melody unity.
Defending Family
Man would be indeed a hard task; whether you are able to like it or not
will really depend on how much you like «opening your mind» to pretentious,
self-consciously arrogant «groundbreaking artistic ideas» that choose shock
value, provocation, and minimalism over hard work and traditional lines of
inspiration. The title track quickly sets up the scene: after Rollins has
informed us that "I come to infect, I come to rape your women, I come to
take your children into the street, I come for you, family man!", there is
little left to do other than join the man in his crusade against petty
bourgeois morality — or yawn in a «oh no, not another crusade against petty bourgeois morality!» kind of way.
Personally, I have nothing against such crusades in general, when it comes to
artistic expression; but Henry Rollins simply does not strike me as a person
who has any particularly great way with words. I mean, for that matter, didn't
Patti Smith already say it all almost ten years earlier?
Out of all the other spoken-word exercises, I
vaguely remember ʽSalt On A Slugʼ (where the «slug» in question, of
course, is yet another metaphor for the ugly, smelly, bloated underbelly of the
bourgeois society), recorded in worse quality than everything else since it
seems to have been taken from some public reading (and, consequently,
accompanied by rather silly laughter outbursts from the small audience
present), and ʽLet Your Fingers Do The Walkingʼ, which largely
consists of the title repeated over and over. Is this important? I have no
idea.
As for the instrumental parts, my only
comparison could be that of a headless chicken running in the yard. Many of
these riffs and solos sound like they totally belong in any number of classic
Black Flag tunes, but without a specific focus, usually provided by the
frontman, they simply make no sense. At least the last two tracks are fast,
which makes listening to them slightly less excruciating than sitting through
the entire nine minutes of ʽArmageddon Manʼ (if that is what the Armageddon is supposed to look like, I am totally
retiring my financial support for the Antichrist this very instant).
Of course, Family
Man is yet another self-conscious «experiment» in the endless war against
artistic stagnation, and could be partially redeemed by the good old «well, at
least they're trying» argument. But
the bottomline is that I cannot imagine anybody wanting to give the record a second
spin of their own free will — in the place of, say, giving a third spin to Damaged — and if such people do
exist, it is only because they probably feel themselves wronged by the family
man, and take exquisite sadistic pleasure from pouring salt on slugs, be they
only metaphorical ones. My own level of bourgeoiserie still allows me full well
to enjoy Damaged, but sort of starts
boiling over with Family Man — if
you want to poke fun at conservative conventions, at least have the
intelligence to poke it in an unconventional manner. As it is, I consider the
experiment a failure, and give it a retrograde thumbs down.
SLIP IT IN (1984)
1) Slip It In; 2) Black
Coffee; 3) Wound Up; 4) Rat's Eyes; 5) Obliteration; 6) The Bars; 7) My Ghetto;
8) You're Not Evil.
Definitely an improvement over the excesses of Family Man and an overall better balanced collection than My War — for what it's worth, this
might actually be the finest of Black Flag's releases in the oh-so-prolific
year of 1984. Most of the tracks work as actual «songs», sometimes sillier than
necessary, sometimes longer than they should be, but the important thing is,
the talents of Ginn and Rollins seem once again to be put to good use.
Okay, so I am not altogether sure what to think
of the title track, whose title is to
be understood quite literally (featuring future L7 guitarist Suzi Gardner
engaging in a strictly adult conversation — and simulated activity — with
Rollins). From an innovative point of view, this may be the first ever attempt to use hardcore punk, rather than the
more traditional genres of R&B and funk, as the musical equivalent of
violent intercourse; but even with all the sex noises generated by both
participants, the track does not become particularly «hot» or «sexy». As a
soundtrack to having sex, it's not particularly well applicable — you probably
won't be able to keep up the speed (and if you will, physical injuries to both
parties are imminent). As a metaphor on the brutal underbelly of sexual
relations, it may lead to uncomfortable associations and conclusions —
"you say you don't want it, but then you slip it on in" is kinda
risky. But, on the other hand, you don't have to admire the song — you just have to admit it's... different.
It is much easier to admire ʽBlack
Coffeeʼ, one of the band's strongest anthems — a fantastic concentrated
burst of dark energy, where Ginn's sludgy hard rock riff and Henry's chorus
roar work in full unison. Like the title track, ʽBlack Coffeeʼ has
nothing political about it — it is a song about the effects of jealousy — but
it is extremely vivid, and conveys emotional frustration so well that it is
quite easy not to notice the irony behind the cover (expressed mainly through
Henry's over-exaggerated intonations, and some of the lyrics). In fact, Rollins
sounds even more like a researcher, exploring various psychic types, on this
album than he used to before. When he is not moralizing in a straightforward
manner (ʽYou're Not Evilʼ), he is busy drilling into the soul — to
understand its limitations (ʽThe Barsʼ), its mutant ugliness
(ʽRat's Eyesʼ), its pretentiousness (ʽWound Upʼ), or its
poverty (ʽMy Ghettoʼ). I'm not saying it all works, but it is
certainly more interesting than if the band had simply decided to put out
another generic batch of political rants.
Unfortunately, the music shows no breakthroughs
(not that Ginn would have enough time for any breakthroughs, what with the
frantic workpace of the band and all) — same old broken riffs and dissonant solos,
with the songs distinguished mainly by their tempos and lack/presence of vocals
(ʽObliterationʼ is a lengthy instrumental). If it weren't for Henry's
raw passion and actor's talent, Slip It
In would not have been that much different from the second side of Family Man, maybe with the exception of
a couple fast and focused riff-rockers. And even Henry is not enough to justify
the seven-minute running length of ʽYou're Not Evilʼ — it is fun to
see them switch between different tempos with such ease every few bars, but
midway through, it becomes predictable, and two-thirds into the song,
annoying.
Still, this is such a strong rebound from the
misguided experimentalism of Family Man
that I give the album a thumbs up without a shred of guilt. «Existentialist
hardcore» with a Freudian subtext is, after all, just the kind of thing that
this band was sent down to Earth for — if they are not always as good at it as
we'd like them to be, that's just because it is really hard to be constantly good at it. Probing the dark depths
of your soul at those speeds and with that sort of vocal range can only be that
much successful, and I'm perfectly okay with being impressed by about half of Slip It In (ʽBlack Coffeeʼ is
classic), and letting the other half roll by on impulse. And ooh, such a
suggestively blasphemous album cover, too!
LIVE '84 (1984)
1) The Process Of Weeding Out;
2) Nervous Breakdown; 3) I Can't Decide; 4) Slip It In; 5) My Ghetto; 6) Black
Coffee; 7) I Won't Stick Any Of You Unless And Until I Can Stick All Of You; 8)
Forever Time; 9) Fix Me; 10) Six Pack; 11) My War; 12) Jealous Again; 13) I
Love You; 14) Swinging Man; 15) Three Nights; 16) Nothing Left Inside; 17)
Wound Up; 18) Rat's Eyes; 19) The Bars.
As if three
studio albums weren't enough, the hyper-prolific year of 1984 ended with Black
Flag summarizing all their latest achievements with a live recording —
generated in some seedy Frisco nightclub and initially released only in
cassette format; the CD version dates from 1998, when Ginn remixed the album
and, as the rumor goes, seriously «doctored» the sound, although you'd need the
original tape to verify that piece of vile slander.
Unless you are a master veteran with
grizzled-sizzled ears, it is probably not recommendable to listen to the entire
record in one go; it takes 75 minutes to finish, and 75 minutes of the Black
Flag schtick, particularly post-Damaged,
is quite a heavy attack on the senses. No shit — the very first track is an
extended take on the EP-only ʽProcess Of Weeding Outʼ: eight and a
half minutes of Ginn's «atonal» soloing, next to which an equally extended
Frank Zappa guitar jam sounds like Bacharach. This is as welcomish a welcome as
this band gets, and although the running lengths of inidivudual songs start
dropping down after that, it hardly ever gets easier.
The setlist is predictably dominated by recent
stuff: much, if not most, of My War
and Slip It In are reproduced, with
only a few nods to the first four years and, most surprising of all, almost nothing carried over from Damaged — in particular, the absence of
ʽDamagedʼ itself, or of ʽRise Aboveʼ, cannot be regarded as
unintentional: clearly, these guys must have known what was their fans'
favorite record, and clearly, that was the
one record stuff from which they were the most reluctant to play. Of course,
you don't have to love it, but you gotta have respect for the gall.
Since most of the songs were still fresh in the
players' minds, there is not a whole lot of difference between their studio and
live incarnations: if anything, the biggest wonder is that they can keep it up
live for such a long time, without Ginn's crazy fingers or Henry's rabid bark
giving way even once, as they deliver perfectly professional facsimiles of
their latest creations. The sound quality, at least on the remastered version
(I have seen people seriously complaining about the original cassette), is
actually very good, so that you even get to hear the subtlety of the rhythm
session — no nitpicking here on my side, at least.
That said, I must note that Live '84 does not have the proper feel of a live album; surprisingly
enough, it is the club environment (normally an ideal setting for a live
record) that may be responsible for this — there is almost no audible audience
reaction throughout, possibly because there was only a couple of stragglers,
accidentally dropping in to catch this weird band in action, and without the
audience reaction, it just feels like a reduplication of studio work. In fact,
I'd say that on a record like this, a few spoken word poetry fragments from
Rollins would not be so much out of place as they were on Family Man — at least it'd have given the album more of an actual stage feeling (provided there would be
no overdoing it).
On the technical side, if you are interested in
checking out post-Damaged Black
Flag, but abhor the idea of sitting through all of their LPs from 1984, the
live album is a faithful enough «abridged» introduction into the band's
fantasy world around that time. You know what they say — a spoonful of Ginn a
day helps keep bourgeois rot away. But no more than one spoonful, or you might
get geographical displacement syndrome.
LOOSE NUT (1985)
1) Loose Nut; 2) Bastard In
Love; 3) Annihilate This Week; 4) Best One Yet; 5) Modern Man; 6) This Is Good;
7) I'm The One; 8) Sinking; 9) Now She's Black.
Leave it to a band like Black Flag to have
their most «normal» album in years to bear the title of Loose Nut — because, frankly speaking, it sounds like the nut in
question has been tightened rather than loosened. The whole thing almost seems
«commercial» when compared to the excesses and experiments of 1984. Steady
beats. Relatively conventional solos. Hook-based, even catchy choruses.
Structures. No spoken word «poetry» or unpredictable jazz-punk jams. Even a few
fast, concise, focused, gang-chorus-led punk numbers that remind one of Damaged. What next — a dance duet
between Henry and Madonna?..
Joking aside, Loose Nut seems to have received a rather tepid welcome from
critics and fans alike, and I have no idea why. The most frequently voiced
complaint is that the album sounds «too metallic» — but seeing as how Ginn
never really placed a proper delimiter bar between «punk» and «metal», that is
kind of silly, and besides, it isn't the kind of «metal» that thrashers like
Metallica or Slayer were doing at the time, let alone the pop metal thing; this
is Greg's standard sludgy sound, thick, gruff, and grumbly, far more in line
with the punk spirit than the doom-laden, hellfire-breathing tones of the
thrashers.
And there are some really strong songs on here,
a couple of which I really like, despite not being a heavy subscriber to this
kind of aesthetics at all. ʽSinkingʼ, for instance, which really sums
up much of the grunge spirit several years before «grunge» as a phenomenon came
into being — sludgy, but catchy riffs and a depressed, near-suicidal singer. To
my mind, it is one of the finest moments in Greg's and Henry's history as a
team, when the former's wailing solos finally become the perfectly soulful counterpart for the latter's gangrenous
growls of "it hurts to be alone, it hurts to be alone...". In 1984,
it seemed way too often that the two were operating on unrelated wavelengths,
but on ʽSinkingʼ, and quite a few other songs on Loose Nut, they are finally getting back in touch with each other.
In a different vein, ʽBest One Yetʼ
may indeed be their best one yet since Damaged
— short, speedy, melodic, angry, and derisive of the band's fanbase ("you
say you don't like the things I've done / you say you don't like what I've
become" — well, you can preliminarily guess the verdict); again, nothing
really to complain about. ʽThis Is Goodʼ latches on to a seemingly
dumb, but efficient idea — cross Henry's lyrical masochism ("I smash my
fist / Into my face / I can feel it when I close my eyes / And this is
good...") with a «geometric» noise-jazz guitar pattern reduced to a
minimal, repetitive set of chords, creating a special genre of «primitive
blockhead music» which really is a
convenient soundtrack for repeatedly punching your fists into the wall at
moderate time intervals — and the repetitiveness of the chorus is all set here
to numb the effect.
These potential highlights are nested among a
slew of lesser tunes with varying degrees of likeability, but one thing is
clear — the guys are still far from spent, and the album in general feels as if
they almost managed to find a good
balance between formula and experiment this time around. In addition, they
threw in a bit of closing intrigue, with drummer Bill Stevenson's contribution,
ʽNow She's Blackʼ, inciting endless discussions about whether the
song is «racist» or not — although, to be honest, except for the poor word
ʽblackʼ itself, there is hardly anything in the song to allude to the
protagonist's girlfriend racial characteristics, and, most likely, the
ʽblackʼ in question has to be taken quite figuratively; and Rollins
sings it from his usual desperate madman point of view, not a KKK member or
anything.
Clearly, Loose
Nut is the band's most «accessible» album since Damaged; whether it should also make it their second best or not is
debatable, but even if you like your
Black Flag to go out on a limb, burying you under thick, endless layers of
guitar dissonance and lulling you to sleep with streetwise spoken word
declamations, that in itself would be no reason to accuse these guys of
«selling out» when the only thing they really did here was work out a
compromising style that allowed both «stars» to work on the same emotional
level at the same time. Meaning another thumbs up, even if I still tend to «respect» this
stuff much more than «feel» it — but then I guess that whoever cannot get his heart strings properly
afflicted by the likes of Henry Rollins should probably count himself a real
lucky guy in this world.
IN MY HEAD (1985)
1) Paralyzed; 2) The Crazy
Girl; 3) Black Love; 4) White Hot; 5) In My Head; 6) Out Of This World; 7) I
Can See You; 8) Drinking And Driving; 9) Retired At 21; 10) Society's Tease;
11) It's All Up To You; 12) You Let Me Down.
Surprise — for the first time... ever?, here is
a Black Flag album that does not sound significantly different from its
predecessor. For once, the band has sort of «agreed» to the sound they had gotten
going for themselves, and settled upon refining and perfecting it rather than
coming up with some new radical reinvention of image. And it works: In My Head reaches a tight, well-kept
balance between jazz, pop, punk, and metal, or, if you wish, between free-form
experimentation, pleasant catchiness, pissed-off frustration, and brutal
crunch.
The album shows Rollins receding ever farther
in the dark, uncomfortable corners of his subconscious: long gone are the days
when this band still used to remember that some of the world's troubles may be
directly ascribed to «The System», and now Henry is busy full-time exorcising
his, my, and your demons, one by one, exposing Man (the species, that is) for
the inherently aggressive, sexually imbalanced, mentally challenged nature
freak that he (or she) has no way of not being. Curiously, the album is
occasionally said to have begun life as an instrumental venture, intended by
Ginn to be released as his first solo album. But then Henry came along,
listened to the tracks, and wrote a bunch of lyrics for them — and they fit in
so well that the solo career was postponed. Not for long, but we do have ourselves one more Black Flag
classic.
Case in point: the title track, a mix of stern martial
metal with sadistic experimental soloing — Ginn trying to cross Tony Iommi with
Ornette Coleman one more time — over which Henry's "I WAN-na BE the
BUL-let that goes RIP-ping through your SKULL..." flies like a bunch of
bullets that go ripping through your skull. It's one of those songs on which
everything comes together in its right place. Yes, Rollins can be an irritating
personality, and Ginn's music often comes across as meaningless noise, but
every once in a while, when they put their minds and not just their guts to it,
they lock together like nothing else.
Maybe the most obvious place here where they
lock together like this is ʽDrinking And Drivingʼ, probably the
album's most easily noticeable song — simple, repetitive, nagging riff and a
chorus of provocative imperatives help it rise above everything else, at least
on first listen. They had a video done for it, too, full of car crash images
and other chaotic bits, so that the song can function both as a tremendous
piece of anti-drunk-driving propaganda and,
if you wish, a larger metaphor for the perils brought about by erratic
anti-social behavior (not exactly a prime time topic for a «hardcore punk»
band, but what sort of asshole would want to pigeonhole Black Flag together
with, say, Agnostic Front?). The best thing about it, though, is that Ginn's
twisted, atonal solos, which he usually inserts in every song regardless of its
nature and purpose, are directly symbolic in this case — musically recreating
chaos and catastrophe — and work in full tandem with Henry's iron-voiced
"drink! drink! don't think! drive! kill!...".
Some of the songs go down really deep: ʽThe Crazy Girlʼ is stuck somewhere between
nymphomania and homicidal urges as Henry fantasizes on circa-Jack the Ripper
topics, and ʽBlack Loveʼ sure ain't about an innocent flirt with an
Afro-American passion. Then again, you'd probably think of Jack the Ripper or
even worse things, too, had you been exposed to these nasty riffs and gotten
the urge to set them to appropriate lyrics. But there are also faster, simpler,
«brighter» numbers that recall the old-school Black Flag of Damaged — most importantly,
ʽRetired At 21ʼ, as good a slice of catchy «pop-punk» (in the good
sense of the word) as the band ever came up with, and ʽIt's All Up To
Youʼ, a surprisingly tight piece of production on which Bill Stevenson
uses a sharper, thinner, cracklier drum tone than he usually does, making the
whole thing sound atmospherically closer to classic Ramones; fans of old school
punk might very well find this song to be the major highlight on the album.
There is still a small bunch of rather
yawn-inducing duds (ʽWhite Hotʼ, I think, is five wasted minutes of
pointless sludge), and, with a couple of exceptions, the individual songs are
not amazing enough to make us forget the general black monotonousness — yet
the album meets and exceeds its goals, and, on the whole, is probably the best
proof that Black Flag's continued existence post-Damaged was not at all meaningless. It might have been too
outrageously experimental, or too unnecessarily provocative, but meaningless,
no. Thumbs up.
WHO'S GOT THE 10½? (1986)
1) Loose Nut; 2) I'm The One;
3) Annihilate This Week; 4) Wasted; 5) Bastard In Love; 6) Modern Man; 7) This
Is Good; 8) In My Head; 9) Sinking; 10) Jam; 11) The Best One Yet; 12) My War;
13) Slip It In / Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie; 14) Drinking And Driving; 15) Louie
Louie.
At the time when this live album was released
(March 1986; the actual show was played in Portland in August 1985), Black
Flag were still a functional unit, and would remain that way until August 1986,
when Ginn broke up the band: as it seems, he was simply fed up with stuff, and
decided to explode it before genuine stagnation would set in. The scenario is
well confirmed by this live album — in terms of production, energy, and
tightness, if not necessarily the setlist material, it is arguably their most
successful statement of live power.
The original single LP was later expanded to
include most, if not all, of the show, so that the latest CD edition includes
over an hour of material. The setlist includes nearly all of Loose Nut, with the exception of
ʽNow She's Blackʼ — not because of political correctness, of course,
but because the song's author, drummer Bill Stevenson, was no longer with the
band at the time, replaced by the less «brutal», but more polished Anthony
Martinez. There are also a few previews from the yet unreleased In My Head (including some of its best
tracks, such as ʽDrinking And Drivingʼ); a few scattered
reminiscences from the 1984 albums; and virtually nothing from Damaged, except for ʽGimmie
Gimmie Gimmieʼ, reworked into a rather silly «comical» sex-based
performance in which we learn that, of all people, it is Kira who got the 10½ — gender discourse in a hardcore
paradigm can be a terrifying thing.
Not having a huge lot to say about the studio
counterparts of these songs, I certainly have even less to say about the live
renditions — except that the band is tight, playing most of the songs at
slightly speedier tempos, with the new drummer keeping everything in good shape
and Henry trying to actually sing wherever some singing is required. On a whim,
I'd also say that there is a little less «sludge» to Ginn's guitar playing live
than there was in the studio; this means that, if any of those albums gave you
a headache, there is no harm in trying out the live equivalent with its ever so
«thinner» guitar sound, if only a little bit. There is a four-minute
ʽJamʼ there which is quite skippable (just Ginn trying out a bunch of
ideas or what looks like ideas), but other than that and the dubious
inch-measuring game played by Henry, it's just song after song of solid late period
Black Flag material. And, for dessert, a Black Flag-style ʽLouie
Louieʼ which you can probably imagine how it goes even without hearing
it.
In short, it isn't exactly like Loose Nut —
the new drummer kicks tighter ass, and the guitars buzz and squeal instead of growling
and howling, so there's no harm in comparing the two and deciding for yourself
what kind of sound you like best. Personally, I might even prefer the live
stuff, but even if not, it still deserves a thumbs up, simply for the sake of
being the tightest, most focused, clenched-teeth-disciplined live album from
these guys ever. This is as «un-sloppy» a hardcore record as hardcore ever
gets. No wonder they exploded after that — too much discipline tends to
overload the engine.
WHAT THE... (2013)
1) My Heart's Pumping; 2) Down
In The Dirt; 3) Blood And Ashes; 4) Now Is The Time; 5) Wallow In Despair; 6)
Slow Your Ass Down; 7) It's So Absurd; 8) Shut Up; 9) This Is Hell; 10) Go
Away; 11) The Bitter End; 12) The Chase; 13) I'm Sick; 14) It's Not My Time To
Go-Go; 15) Lies; 16) Get Out Of My Way; 17) Outside; 18) No Teeth; 19) To Hell
And Back; 20) Give Me All Your Dough; 21) You Gotta Be Joking; 22) Off My
Shoulders.
Good title. Anyone up for a new «Black Flag»
album, the band's first in 17 years, with Ron Reyes, a.k.a. «Chavo Pederast»,
returning to work with Greg Ginn? And no Rollins, no Kira, no Bill Stevenson,
in short, nobody of particular interest, in addition? And with an album cover
that could only be interpreted as a kiddie parody on the classic Raymond
Pettibon artwork of old? They say that Ron Reyes designed the cover himself —
wouldn't surprise me in the least. The guy's painting talents are a fairly good
match for his singing ones.
I have no idea why, after all those years of
experimentation, Ginn decided to return to the stultifyingly rigid approach of
the «classic hardcore punk» formula. Twenty-two «songs» over forty-two minutes,
mostly played at fast tempos and each one written according to the same
recipé: multi-tracked guitar riff, funky bassline, and a guy howling out
anti-social proclamations as if he were suffering from an acute stomachache
that just won't go away. If this is an attempt to go back to the ascetic values
of Damaged, it's a total stylistic
and substantial failure, but I don't really think this is what it is. More
likely, it is an attempt to get back to the roots of the roots — for once, Ginn
has decided that he has had enough with experimentation and that, perhaps, at
this particular point of time the most experimental thing to do would be to
produce a deliberately non-experimental
record.
Which would all be fine and dandy, if not for
two things. First, these riffs are bad. I'd honestly rather have two or three
good riffs, spread over long numbers, than twenty-two riffs that are impossible
to distinguish from each other — in the end, what with the short running
lengths and all, it all falls together in one thick riff soup. Worse, for some
reason, Ginn settles on a different, previously unfavored, guitar sound for
him: double-tracked in stereo and run through some sort of wah-wah pedal that
creates a constant «bubbling / perking» effect, obscuring the melody; such
things might be okay for a brief climactic solo, but when they are at the very
base of the sound and never leave that base, you soon begin wondering what the
hell is going on.
Second, I can fully understand Ron Reyes'
artistic decision to bawl over each single recording like your friendly
beer-chuggin' neighbor with a thick skull and poor social skills — for all I
know, that description might apply to «Chavo» in real life — but the truth of
the matter is that, merely two or three songs into this nightmare of an album,
the combination of Ron's «vomit into the microphone» and Greg's «use the guitar
as a baseball bat» approaches starts giving me such a terrible headache that
sitting through this muck even once
becomes a heroic feat, and every attempt at a second or third listen only
makes it worse. If the powers-that-be still accept immoral suggestions, I would
certainly advise them to add the album to the National Registry of «Potential
Guantanamo Torture Devices for Future Use».
In fact, were this an instrumental record, we'd
all feel better — you could treat it as some sort of Metal Machine Music, an arrogant move to remind us that «hardcore»
is really all about being unbearable, and that the aural suffering that you
experience should work as shock therapy. But with the vocals in tow,
«unbearable» becomes «unbearably dumb», and that is a different beast. Hearing
Ron Reyes holler "shut up! shut up! just shut the fuck up!" or
"get out of my way!" or any other single imperative chorus with the
intonations of an unrefined street gangster is stupidity's death blow to any
possible signs of intelligence. The fact that Ginn employs the theremin on some
of the tracks is completely irrelevant in the light of this circumstance; no
ʽGood Vibrationsʼ or ʽWhole Lotta Loveʼ can come out of
this mess.
The only «good news» is that Reyes only lasted
a short time in this version of the band, being quickly ousted by Mike Vallely
— but, frankly speaking, everybody is responsible for the failure, and Ginn, as
the leader, should take most of the blame. A tremendous disappointment,
especially for those fans who actually did wait for a new Black Flag album all
these years, and let us not kid ourselves by offering the usual justificatory
excuses ("they had to move on", "they dislike being
pigeonholed", "this is the way the band sounds in the 21st century,
deal with it", etc.): this album is just downright stupid, and I am sure
that even Greg Ginn's greatest fans understand it in their hearts. One of the
most assured thumbs
down I've ever given out.
BATTALIONS OF FEAR (1988)
1) Majesty; 2) Guardian Of The
Blind; 3) Trial By The Archon; 4) Wizard's Crown; 5) Run For The Night; 6) The
Martyr; 7) Battalions Of Fear; 8) By The Gates Of Moria; 9*) Gandalf's Rebirth.
According to genre rules, the debut album by
Blind Guardian is neither «thrash metal» nor «power metal», but rather «speed
metal», which seems to be lodged somewhere in between the two — metal music
played at extreme tempos, but with more emphasis on melodicity and «cleanness»
of sound than thrash. Oh well, whatever. The real question is: when all your
songs are played at the speed of fifty billion notes per second, is there
anything you can do to make any of them stand out? How do you avoid falling
into the usual trap — where your whole LP sounds like one extended track with a
few seconds of air inserted every now and then?
Well, Battalions
Of Fear shows that it can be easily done: you just have to compensate with
the vocals, and make sure that every individual track has its own distinctive
chorus. If there is one single thing that might make these songs «stick», it is
the simple, basic, anthemic bits — "OH, MAJESTY! ", "GUARDIAN,
GUARDIAN, GUARDIAN OF THE BLIND!", "HALLOWEEN!", "RUN FOR
THE NIGHT! BURN AWAY!", and so on. This is a tactic they may have
inherited from Iron Maiden, who are easily the single hugest influence on these
guys, but they need it so much more than Iron Maiden, who usually played at
slower tempos and could rely on complex riffage and challenging song structures
even without a vocal hook.
Unlike Maiden, Blind Guardian do not rely on
«guitar weaving»: the two guitarists in the band seem to have their duties
delineated quite properly, as Marcus Siepen concentrates on the chugging
rhythms and André Olbrich is responsible for all the melodic lead parts.
Hansi Kürsch, the frontman, is at this point still combining the double
duties of the bass player and the vocalist, though clearly favoring the latter
job more than the former — he's got a voice similar to Bathory's Quorthon,
«snapping» rather than «barking», without any traces of corny sentimentality,
perfectly suited to this type of metal-theater material. Lastly, drummer Thomas
Stauch is as good as your average speed metal drummer gets, but there's not a
lot to add to that description.
The artistic influences of Blind Guardian are
completely clear: first and foremost, they are rabid Tolkien fanaticists (no
less than three different songs — four, if you count the bonus track ʽGandalf's
Rebirthʼ on the re-issue — are based on Lord Of The Rings), and second, they like all sorts of horror
fantasies and occult dabblings, with Stephen King and Aleister Crowley each
providing inspiration for one of the tracks. Current events in this here
mortal world only concern them as long as their global evilness begins to match
fantasy visions — the title track, in particular, is about the horror of SDI,
which they probably considered on par with the construction of Morgoth's Thangorodrim
or something of the sort. This is a consistent position of theirs, and while
their musical style would change significantly over the years, the «vision»
would not, so please be warned that it's a little hard to get deep into Blind
Guardian without having previously done your Tolkien homework, and yes, that
actually means reading the books — all
of them.
With the basic formula for this early record
sort of set in stone, there is not much mood variation, and the atmosphere
generated by the melodies does not always match the lyrics — for instance,
ʽMajestyʼ seems to be about the last King of Arnor losing his kingdom
to the forces of evil and running for cover, but the melody is neither
doom-laden nor tragedy-bound, but, like all the rest, pushes forward with
martial brutality and determination. The two things to look out for are the
already mentioned chorus hooks — and Olbrich's solo passages, which show an
honest desire to become the Paganini of the heavy metal guitar solo, combining
technical virtuosity with careful attention to melodic structure.
Unfortunately, my own spirit remains somewhat insensitive to this approach, but
it is hard not to admire these results at least «formally».
Likewise, the instrumental ʽBy The Gates
Of Moriaʼ hardly refers to the Gray Company relaxing in the shade of said
gates, but could probably trigger an association with the bloody battle between
Orcs and Dwarves that took place there much earlier — and who will now
recognize, unless specially informed, that the melody actually quotes
Dvořák's ʽFrom The New Worldʼ symphony? Everything is
made to serve the same purpose: kick ass, hero-style. One of my favorite tracks
is ʽTrial By The Archonʼ: it serves as a brief, concise intro to
ʽWizard's Crownʼ, but has a completeness of its own, stating the
theme, then consecutively offering the spotlight to the band's riffmeister and
the band's lead hero. The theme is suitably ominous, the riffage is more inventive
than on the vocal tracks, and the solos are brilliantly constructed, but I can
only imagine your average Archon conducting his
average trial in this particular manner if he had a schedule of around 300
trials to perform per day, two minutes per each — state the accusation (opening
theme), take in the prosecution (riff variations), hear the defense (solos),
pronounce final judgement (closing theme), next in line please.
No matter how monotonous this atmosphere is,
though, the album as a whole, by metal standards, deserves an unquestionable thumbs up;
in fact, its monotonousness may ultimately be its major advantage, since, not
having yet established their own personal style, Blind Guardian would probably
have achieved little if they tried to walk all over the metal turf — by
sticking to this one particular gun, they are at least able to «mine» this
speed metal formula all the way down to its logical conclusion. In terms of
songs, you'll probably only remember the epic choruses — but in terms of
overall cohesiveness, you will probably retain a very precise general
impression. And there is no one but J. R. R. Tolkine to blame, I guess, that in
the metal world, Battalions Of Fear
is altogether so less popular than Slayer's Reign In Blood, even though, for all I know, they are more or less
on the same level in the «goal-achieving» department.
FOLLOW THE BLIND (1989)
1) Inquisition; 2) Banish From
Sanctuary; 3) Damned For All Time; 4) Follow The Blind; 5) Hall Of The Ring; 6)
Fast To Madness; 7) Beyond The Ice; 8) Valhalla; 9) Don't Break The Circle*;
10) Barbara Ann.
Not exactly a «sophomore slump» here — more
like a temporary turn in a questionable direction. Like its predecessor, Follow The Blind is bona fide «speed
metal», but distinctly less melodic than Battalions
Of Fear: consistently wilder tempos, not as many catchy choruses, and,
saddest of all, downgrading of Olbrich's guitar playing to rather generic
shredding on most of the tracks. Apparently, the band members had developed a
temporary fetish for thrash metal, and this is reflected in the extra
aggression at the cost of melodicity.
In situations like these, it is often the case
that the first couple of tracks will look like the best ones on the album, and
the rest will simply bore the listener to death, regardless of the compositional
particularities of the songs. Indeed, ʽBanish From Sanctuaryʼ is so
emblematic of the entire record that you are not missing much of anything if
you limit your listening experience to this one song. Faster than
ʽMajestyʼ, two guitars rattling away at machine-gun speed, Herr
Stauch pounding away on his cylinders with robotic precision, and, amazingly, a
vocalist that can actually sing at this insane tempo rather than just growl.
Great, marvelously precise sound — problem is, apart from perhaps the vocal
melody of the chorus, I can hardly tell it apart from ʽDamned For All
Timeʼ or, in fact, the absolute majority of the songs that follow.
The epic-length title track, with its acoustic
intro and outro, presence of slower sections, complex structure and a slightly
more interesting set of solos than usual, is the album's central point of focus, but with its lack of truly piercing
riffage, seems more like a tentative Metallica imitation than an attempt to
find and/or preserve their own face. Metallica influence may also be reflected
in the name of the album's major instrumental composition (ʽBeyond The
Iceʼ, bringing to mind ʽTrapped Under Iceʼ), but on the whole,
it just sounds like one more excuse to perform some exercises in casual
shredding.
Other than ʽBanished From Sanctuaryʼ,
the only song here to have lingered on in the band's setlist was
ʽValhallaʼ, either because you simply don't lose a song title like that, or because it's got the most
seductively sing-along-ish chorus on the entire album: "VALHALLA!
Deliverance, why've you ever forgotten me?", repeat ad infinitum until
Thor and Odin are finally forced to expedite a return letter with some legal
explanation of why they have ever forgotten you. There's also a special bridge
section with Kai Hansen, of Helloween and Gamma Ray fame, contributing guest
vocals that culminate with his famous high-pitched screeching at the end (but I
must say I far prefer Kürsch's «roaring» approach on the live versions
instead). It's a decent track, but hardly all that different from ʽHall Of
The Ringʼ or ʽFast To Madnessʼ, in terms of composition or
energy. Maybe it's a little more Blind Guardian-esque than the oh so Iron
Maiden-esque ʽMadnessʼ or the oh so Slayer-esque ʽHall Of The
Ringʼ, but who could really
tell?
Perhaps the true spark of greatness that is
placed in this record is the completely unpredictable finale — a
minute-and-a-half-long rendition of ʽBarbara Annʼ with a bit of
ʽLong Tall Sallyʼ thrown in, on which the band's producer Kalle Trapp
sings lead vocals and plays guitar. This is just a musical joke, but arguably
an indispensable one after forty minutes of incessant, monotonous thrashing.
In fact, I sure wish there'd have been more of them — a minute-long interlude
of good old surf-rock or rockabilly done heavy metal style in between all the
jackhammering might have worked wonders on the senses. As it is, the lack of
diversity, multiplied by this decisive «speed over melody» approach, will
certainly limit the audience of Follow
The Blind to the hardcore public. I remain fully impressed by the band's
technical ability to pull it all off without a hitch, but, in the light of
their future successes, this one seems to belong to their «diligently earning
their credentials / raising their qualification» phase — a stop-gap effort, in
other words, never really going any place special.
TALES FROM THE TWILIGHT WORLD (1990)
1) Traveler In Time; 2)
Welcome To Dying; 3) Weird Dreams; 4) Lord Of The Rings; 5) Goodbye My Friend;
6) Lost In The Twilight Hall; 7) Tommyknockers; 8) Altair 4; 9) The Last Candle.
This is where «the legend of Blind Guardian»
properly begins — although, frankly speaking, the difference between this album
and Battalions Of Fear isn't nearly
as huge as you'd think upon reading up on the band's evolution course.
Nuance-wise, Tales features a bit
more diversity, a tad more choral vocals, a trifle more epic vocals — but the
«speed metal» core of the band is still intact, since the majority of these
songs are taken at the usual breakneck tempos, and the melodic components are
again limited to the songs' vocal melodies and Olbrich's classically influenced
guitar leads. Perhaps the conventional wisdom that Tales moves away from «speed» and into «power» has to do with
Kürsch's singing, as he tones down the growling elements and emphasizes
the «tough romantic warrior» approach. Or maybe it is just the contrast with
the far more «thrashing» Follow The
Blind that preceded it.
Whatever. Genrist discussions aside, Tales is simply a very solid metal
album, as solid as starry-eyed fantasy-centered metal albums ever get. This
time, the band is all over the place: in addition to Tolkien and Stephen King,
literary influences here include Frank Herbert and Peter Straub, not to mention
that ʽGoodbye My Friendʼ is said to have been inspired by E.T. (although, frankly, the music would
be more fit for Alien), and the last
track has something to do with the universe of Dragonlance, something that
should probably appeal to D&D fans. In short, these guys take their fantasy
roots like real pros, not some chubby amateur who thinks himself a fantasy geek
just because he had the nerve to include the word «goblin» in some line or
other.
Not that it really matters, because in a world
where Paul Atreides, Gandalf, and E.T. speak the exact same language, they
could have just as well derived any of their stories from The Catcher In The Rye or The
Penal Code Of Pakistan, whichever would be closer at hand. What does matter is that the choruses are
their catchiest to date — occasionally in a dumb way, as the chorus to
ʽTommyknockersʼ which recreates the nursery rhyme in King's novel
("late last night, and the night before..."), but more often, in an
inspiring one.
ʽLost In The Twilight Hallʼ (yes,
about Gandalf's wandering in between the worlds of the dead and the living) is
a good example — the interaction between the band's choral vocals and Hansi's
solo retorts is perfectly staged, with an unforgettable contrast in betwixt the
pathos-filled "I'm lost in the twilight hall" and the final doom call
of "...that's when the mirror's falling down". Just as memorable are
the choruses to ʽWelcome To Dyingʼ and ʽThe Last Candleʼ —
indeed, tremendously illustrative of what «power» can really mean within a
«power metal» setting. Forget subtlety, forget nuance, forget emotional
fluctuation, forget what all those words that they sing mean, literally or
figuratively: it's all about churning out rocket-fueled anthemic slabs, with a
full-on cavalry charge, blasting away with complete disregard of possible
consequences. «Cheesy» or «campy» are words that have no meaning in the Blind
Guardian army.
And, while I lack the proper qualification to
write anything properly meaningful about the guitar work on this album, it is
still necessary to put in at least a meaningless good word for Olbrich's
melodic developments — perhaps best illustrated on tracks like ʽWeird
Dreamsʼ, a short instrumental that goes through an aggressive
opening/middle/closing theme, a couple of quasi-symphonic interludes, and just
a tiny bit of shredding in exactly 1:20 — but similar compositional ideas are
found on almost all the other tracks. You can sort of see that this guy's
primary rock inspiration is Brian May, but he's also kept doing his primary
classical homework as well (more Paganini!) — my favorite bit might be the
final solo in ʽTwilight Hallʼ, where both guitars «fall together» for
the rapid-fire shredding parts and then Olbrich's guitar falls out to follow
its individually twisted baroque course, but really, it's all quite consistent
throughout.
The only disappointing track on the album is
ʽLord Of The Ringsʼ — not because it is rather a vain idea to
compress all of the novel into three minutes (eat that, Peter Jackson!), but because the song abandons the standard
formula in favor of a medieval-esque acoustic ballad setting, and (a) they do
not have the compositional genius to make it particularly memorable, (b) they
do not have the arranging genius to make it particularly haunting, (c) keeping
it quiet puts you at risk of actually paying attention to the lyrics, which is
always a bad idea with Blind Guardian. Then again, you cannot seriously blame
the band for deciding to include an acoustic «breather» in between all the
assault and battery going on. And besides, it's The Lord Of The Rings in three minutes, how cool is that?
Anyway, it is all a rather straightforward
fantasy game, no particular «depth» to it, no serious possibility of
allegorical readings or anything, but, as a representative of the
«not-at-all-addicted-to-fantasy» camp, I will
admit to still being impressed. Most importantly, Tales From The Twilight World really only uses all those literary
influences as a front to deliver music that has its own, independent value. It
is fantasy music, yes, but it is Blind Guardian fantasy music, not Tolkien or
Stephen King fantasy music. Can you imagine ʽLost In The Twilight
Hallʼ used in the soundtrack to The
Fellowship Of The Ring? Obviously not. All the more reason for an honorable
thumbs up.
SOMEWHERE FAR BEYOND (1992)
1) Time What Is Time; 2)
Journey Through The Dark; 3) Black Chamber; 4) Theatre Of Pain; 5) The Quest
For Tanelorn; 6) Ashes To Ashes; 7) The Bard's Song: In The Forest; 8) The
Bard's Song: The Hobbit; 9) The Piper's Calling; 10) Somewhere Far Beyond.
Not a lot of progression happened in between
this album and the previous one: rather, the band just seems so happy with
their perfected formula that they try it out one more time, just to see if it
all really comes naturally to them now. There is a little more acoustic guitar
(in fact, the album opens with an acoustic intro, which is why I remembered), a
little more keyboards and additional instruments (including a whole swarm of
bagpipes on ʽThe Piper's Callingʼ), but really, these are all just
minor nuances: the core of the formula stays sanctified for now.
Under such circumstances, it only makes sense
to talk about individually striking songs if they are present, and this is a
little more complicated than before — after several listens, only two of them
seem to naturally stick around. The ultimate highlight of the album, and one of
Blind Guardian's greatest ever songs, is ʽAshes To Ashesʼ —
ironically, the only song on the
album to commemorate a real event rather than reflect some literary fantasy,
namely, the passing of Hansi Kürsch's father. Blind Guardian's major
know-how now is all about ensuring a blazing transition from speedy verse to
anthemic chorus, and ʽAshes To Ashesʼ totally satisfies: as the group
cuts down the maniacal tempo and enters with the solemn "ashes to ashes,
dust to dust..." requiem bit, the hand of doom does materialize in the
mind — and Kürsch's decisive conclusion of "time... isn't here to
stay!" might be one of the single fiercest accappella power metal lines
sung in the history of the genre. At the very least, when it comes to power
metal, I have yet to hear a more impressive ode to the mercilessness of time in
this style.
Other than ʽAshes To Ashesʼ, one more
spot where this approach (ride your flash metal train at the speed of light,
then smash it right into the solid wall of a stately martial chorus) works very
well is ʽThe Quest For Tanelornʼ: lyrically, the song is based on
some usual nonsense from Michael Moorcock, but «physically», the transition is
pretty mind-blowing, as the band almost ends up transforming itself into Yes
for a few bars, before heading back to the surface and continuing the mad mad
ride. Unfortunately, the anthemic chorus feels sort of underdeveloped — the
line "on our quest for Tanelorn..." is sung with such epic gusto that
you almost feel a bit cheated when, several bars later, they just resume the
chugga-chugga as if it were all just a dream. Still, the trick works, there's
no denying it.
Arrangement-wise, the most bombastic piece on
the album is ʽTheatre Of Painʼ, based on Poul Anderson's The Merman's Children — taken at a
significantly slower tempo than usual, drenched in orchestra-substituting
synthesizers, going through several complex sections and providing Kürsch
with a suitable background to properly display all his theatrical capacities: I
am still not sure of whether to laugh at the hysterical pathos of "Now I'm
gone... and it seems that LIFE HAD NEVER EXISTED!..." or to bow down to
its sheer energy, since, after all, I have never sworn allegiance to operatic
metal delivery, but then again, this guy really does bring the dial all the way over to eleven, which at least
makes this a better proposition than, say, Queensryche.
On the other hand, regular speed monsters such
as ʽJourney Through The Darkʼ and the title track fail to do much for
me except confirm that I am, indeed, listening to yet another Blind Guardian
album. More interesting is the two-part experiment of ʽThe Bardʼ,
where the first part is an acoustic round-the-campfire anthem and the second
part is a bombastic metal rocker and they are essentially set to the same
melody — the experiment has not only earned the band their nickname (ʽThe
Bardsʼ), but its second part is probably the heaviest song ever recorded
about a hobbit. Still, as a purely musical piece, it is no great shakes,
really.
If you get the expanded CD edition of the
album, you do get an additional highlight — a magnificently sung cover of
Queen's ʽSpread Your Wingsʼ, one of those power ballads that I've
always liked, because it evokes a genuine feeling of power (and freedom) rather
than a fake imitation, and the band offers a very tasteful «metallization» with
Kürsch at his very best, adding a bit of guttural roar to the arrogant
snappiness he takes over from Freddie's delivery. In fact, sacrilegious as it
may seem, I would hardly have anything against Blind Guardian including covers
on their original LPs, mixing them with their own compositions (something like
that would be forthcoming on The
Forgotten Tales, but that one's a compilation of a dubious nature, so it
doesn't really count) — they have a good nose for catchy material that they can
adapt for their own purposes, and the fact that they even did ʽBarbara
Annʼ shows that they can be... flexible?
Upon careful consideration, I do give the album
a thumbs up.
Its passable material is nevertheless energetic and listenable, and its
highlights, like ʽAshes To Ashesʼ, deserve to be enshrined in the
great metal treasury. That said, I have no idea what some people mean when they
speak of the band's «great leap forward» — to use a suitable metal analogy, I'd
say this is their Piece Of Mind
coming right after their Number Of The
Beast: a respectable, but not particularly amazing or surprising follow-up
to a classic in the same style.
TOKYO TALES (1993)
1) Inquisition; 2) Banish From
Sanctuary; 3) Journey Through The Dark; 4) Traveler In Time; 5) The Quest For
Tanelorn; 6) Goodbye My Friend; 7) Time What Is Time; 8) Majesty; 9) Valhalla;
10) Welcome To Dying; 11) Lost In The Twilight Hall; 12) Barbara Ann.
Blind Guardian's first live album is exactly
what you'd probably expect of Blind Guardian's first live album — terrific,
powerful, energetic, ripping, and completely expendable unless you are capable
of putting it on, turning the volume all the way up, closing your eyes, and
mentally transporting yourself to Koseinenkin Hall in Tokyo, Japan, on the
fateful night of December 4, 1992. With several thousand stark-raving-mad
Japanese fans accosting you from all sides, singing all of your favorite
anthemic choruses in complete unison. Power!!!
But my problem is predictable: there is just no
way these here songs could sound more
powerful played live than when recorded in the studio. So you get the same mad
tempos, the same metal hero vocals, the same super-fluent, intelligently
constructed metal-Paganini solos from Olbrich — yes, amazing how they can
recreate all that so perfectly-flawlessly on stage and all, but hardly
warranting more than one listen. Serious fans will, no doubt, discern and cling
on to minor variations, yet I have only noticed that they offer a much louder
rendition of ʽLord Of The Ringsʼ — electric, with a big drum sound in
the climactic finale, and it hardly makes the song any better, though, of
course, it is more suitable for an arena setting that way.
The setlist mainly draws upon Tales and Somewhere Far Beyond, with only ʽMajestyʼ retained from
the debut album and only ʽBanish From Sanctuaryʼ and
ʽValhallaʼ from the second one; it's all okay, although I sort of
miss ʽAshes To Ashesʼ and ʽThe Last Candleʼ. Hansi is
playing the Big Barbarian Boss for the audience, occasionally encouraging them
to join him in his pagan chest vocalising — the effect can be irritating, but
that's how you play this game, and at the very least, he does sound like he drinks his enemies' brains right from their
freshly cracked skulls at breakfast, so he's a winner at that game regardless
of whether you play or not. Nothing to complain about in any of those
departments, really.
Technically, the album was sewn together from bits
of two different shows, so it's a little patchy with all the fade-ins and
fade-outs; and the decision to include ʽBarbara Annʼ in their live
show might irritate genre purists (I am not irritated, but I do have to remark
that if this was a gesture of the «we are really not that serious» variety, it was still a little misplaced — I mean,
normally, you either have a sense of
humor, in which case it shows up rather regularly in many of the things you do,
or you do not have a sense of humor:
this «two extra minutes of fun for the sake of proving we can be fun» feels
somewhat contrived. Anyway, somehow it worked better in the studio). So these
may be minor flaws if you need any. Sound quality, however, is perfect (Tokyo
factor strikes again, those Japanese accept nothing less), no flaws here. Oh,
and, for the record, if I am not mistaken, the band likes double-tracking their
guitars in the studio, so if you dislike that simple trick, here's at least one
minor reason to seek out the live versions instead.
IMAGINATIONS FROM THE OTHER SIDE (1995)
1) Imaginations From The Other
Side; 2) I'm Alive; 3) A Past And Future Secret; 4) The Script For My Requiem;
5) Mordred's Song; 6) Born In A Mourning Hall; 7) Bright Eyes; 8) Another Holy
War; 9) And The Story Ends.
If you are not deeply entrenched in the
intricacies of the various sub-varieties of heavy metal, you will probably feel
that what separates Imaginations
from earlier Blind Guardian can be summed up as «small details, shades, and
nuances». A bit of a slower tempo here, a bit of a choral overdub there, same
old story on the larger scale. But go visit a Blind Guardian discussion board,
and every now and then you will be able to come across a flame war between
«speed metal fans» and «power metal fans», extolling the relative crimes
against taste or leaps forward in
creativity that the band has committed while making the transition to a whole
new era.
As far as I am concerned, «ideologically» this
new outburst of creative energy from the world's most ardent «don't-mess-with-my-fantasy-world»
musical sect is as orthodox as orthodox can be. Nine more epic tunes, brimming
with power and arrogance, each based on the already familiar artistic
strengths of Kürsch and Olbrich, and each dealing with a fantasy theme
(sometimes a thick mish-mash of fantasy themes, like the title track).
Regarding the factor of speed, only three of the songs are relatively slow in
their entirety: the largely acoustic ʽA Past And Future Secretʼ is
more «epic folk» than metal altogether, and ʽBright Eyesʼ, along with
the grand finale of ʽAnd The Story Endsʼ, could not technically be
ascribed to the «speed metal» bin, unless you were cheating and playing them at
78 rpm. The rest, while they do accumulate stylistic «ruffles» that make them
more palatable for the «artsy-minded» people, are quite conservative in
essence.
If there is any serious change at all, it is to
be sought in the melodic structures: even the speedier parts are getting more
complex, like the brilliant introduction to ʽBorn In A Mourning Hallʼ
that preserves the tempo, but replaces the usual «amelodic» chugga-chugga with
a series of riffs that, you know, play actual notes and stuff. I am not quite sure that this represents
compositional genius — despite increased complexity, the individual melodies
are not specifically evocative — but at least it represents hard work, which,
when combined with an energetic punch and sincerity of execution, should be
respected.
Perhaps it is also to be sought out in
increased ambitions. The title track may have been intentionally conceived to
be the «ultimate» Blind Guardian visit card — lyrically, it summarizes just
about every single one of the band numerous fetishes, and offers an explicit
justification for their brand of escapism: "Come follow me to wonderland /
And see the tale that never ends... But still I know / There is another
world... / I'll break down the walls around my heart / Imaginations from the
other side" — an optimistic-nostalgic ode to the «never grow up» mindset.
It's like a slightly delayed explanation that they feel they owe the world —
delivered to the sounds of one of their most bombastic arrangements up to date.
Swirling, swooshing, wailing spirits, church bells, gothic keyboards, monstrous
metal riff, operatic vocals with ghostly answers — way too heavy, one could
remark, for a song whose primary points of reference are Peter Pan, Alice in
Wonderland, and the Wizard of Oz, but then, nobody said childhood was supposed
to be a rose garden, and all these books have their classic moments of
brutality.
Another super-bombastic tune is ʽThe
Script For My Requiemʼ, where grandiosity begins already with the title
and never lets go — "Returning of the miracles / It's my own requiem"
is even more solemn than the chorus of ʽQuest For Tanelornʼ, and
there is even a quick subtle quotation from Jesus Christ Superstar ("crucify, crucify!") that further
raises the stakes. In most people's hands, the song would be totally laughable,
but Blind Guardian are the AC/DC of power metal — if you cannot override the
clichés of this genre, you can at least ride them faster, louder, and
brassier than everybody else in the market, which in itself can be considered
overriding.
The rest of the songs, as usual, are too
stylistically monotonous to deserve extensive comment, so, instead of that, I
will just remark that, on an interesting note, the album was produced by Flemming
Rasmussen, the co-producer on several of Metallica's classic records of the
Eighties — not that Imaginations
sounds any more like Metallica than any other Blind Guardian record, but it is
curious that the increase in complexity does somewhat parallel Metallica's
development from bare-bones thrash to «art-metal». I am not necessarily
overjoyed by this, because at a certain level, once you start putting too much «intellect»
into heavy metal music, you begin killing off its vitality (Black Sabbath is
and will always be the ultimate benchmark for me), but, fortunately for
Kürsch and company, they are expanding their musical horizons without
sacrificing their inner child — indeed, they glorify their inner child, as is obvious from the title track — and
this combination of increased compositional smartness with endearing,
seemingly honest kiddie silliness works well for Imaginations. Respectfully, a thumbs up.
THE FORGOTTEN TALES (1996)
1) Mr. Sandman; 2) Surfin'
USA; 3) Bright Eyes; 4) Lord Of The Rings; 5) The Wizard; 6) Spread Your Wings;
7) Mordred's Song; 8) Black Chamber; 9) The Bard's Song (live); 10) Barbara
Ann/Long Tall Sally; 11) A Past And Future Secret; 12) To France; 13) Theatre
Of Pain; 14*) Hallelujah; 15*) Beyond The Realms Of Death; 16*) Don't Talk To
Strangers.
This is a «stop-gap» album that, by all
accounts, only deserves a brief mention in passing. As the band were too busy
touring, or resting, or preparing for a properly epic follow-up to Imaginations (check all pertinent
options), they put out this odds-and-sods compilation, about half of which is
devoted to acoustic / orchestral rearrangements of their old material, and the
other half consists of cover versions of songs by other artists (as far as I
understand, collected from different recording sessions and not necessarily
recorded specially for this album). Additionally, there is a live performance
of ʽThe Bardʼ, the band's signature-campfire-song, on which Hansi
very quickly transfers matters into the hands (throats) of the audience. A
campfire is a campfire, after all.
There is hardly anything to say about these
rearrangements — as a rule, they uncover no hidden depth to the songs, and the
bombastic instrumental re-write of ʽTheatre Of Painʼ simply goes to
show that Blind Guardian music without the quintessential Blind Guardian
elements (heavy guitars and powerhouse vocals) is just boring, like a
forgettable soundtrack to one of the Heroes
Of Might And Magic installations. Besides, wasn't ʽLord Of The
Ringsʼ acoustic (and not very good) in the first place? I think I'd rather prefer a re-arrangement of
ʽMajestyʼ with didgeridoo and bagpipes as the sole instruments.
Preferably preserving the original tempo.
As for the covers, they display a staggering
level of variety — ranging from blatantly «joke» material to some really,
really good tributes to some bizarre, but not utterly nonsensical, choices.
ʽSurfin' USAʼ and a medley of ʽBarbara Annʼ with ʽLong
Tall Sallyʼ clearly fall in the «joke» category (see what happens when you
replace surf guitar with power metal guitar), although ʽMr. Sandmanʼ
takes first prize in this department — starting out in full-fledged music hall
mode, then gradually picking up steam and finally grinding it out, vocal-wise
and guitar-wise, as it rushes towards the madhouse conclusion. Mike Oldfield's
ʽTo Franceʼ is overproduced, and the vocals peek out from under the
dense mix in a manner that pretty much kills the song (whose major hook had
been provided by the clear ring of Maggie Reilly's vocal cords). ʽThe
Wizardʼ, unfortunately, is the Uriah Heep song, not the Black Sabbath
one, but you probably already guessed that (Sabbath are way too «earthy» and
«grounded» for Blind Guardian to latch on to them properly, unless we are
talking the Dio years).
The single best choice is unquestionably the
cover of Queen's ʽSpread Your Wingsʼ, but I have already talked about
it (as a bonus track) in one of the previous reviews, so no need repeating
that. Actually, Forgotten Tales has
some bonus tracks, too, of which ʽHallelujahʼ pales next to the Deep
Purple version: much as I like Kürsch, he is not capable of giving it the
soulful, heartbreaking vibe that Ian Gillan was so capable of in his «Jesus
Christ years». Much better is the cover of Dio's ʽDon't Talk To
Strangersʼ, but, again, here you will have to decide according to your own
preferences: Kürsch belongs to the same class of singers as Ronnie, yet to
my ears, Ronnie still appears as the more versatile and «emotionally dynamic»
of the two, even if he does not eat nearly as much iron as Hansi for breakfast.
All said, unless you are a major adept, do not
pay attention to the pretty album cover, so similar to all the other pretty
album covers by Blind Guardian, and do
pay attention to the title: there is an actual reason to why these particular
«tales» are «forgotten». And given that some of these songs are now available
as bonus tracks to other releases, this decreases the incentive for owning the
record separately to an even further degree. Harmless fun, though, on the
whole.
NIGHTFALL IN MIDDLE-EARTH (1998)
1) War Of Wrath; 2) Into The
Storm; 3) Lammoth; 4) Nightfall; 5) The Minstrel; 6) The Curse Of Feanor; 7)
Captured; 8) Blood Tears; 9) Mirror Mirror; 10) Face The Truth; 11) Noldor;
12) Battle Of Sudden Flame; 13) Time Stands Still; 14) The Dark Elf; 15) Thorn;
16) The Eldar; 17) Nom The Wise; 18) When Sorrow Sang; 19) Out On The Water;
20) The Steadfast; 21) A Dark Passage; 22) Final Chapter (Thus Ends...); 23)
Harvest Of Sorrow.
Okay, brace yourself: a concept album based on
nothing less than a complete (well,
actually, nearly complete) version of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion — as the chief protectors of the Professor's
legacy, Blind Guardian accept nothing less than completeness and perfection.
You can look at this as a soundtrack to an imaginary movie, or the score to a
non-existent musical, but whatever it is, not since the days of Bo Hansson and
his Music Inspired By The Lord Of The
Rings has the Professor received such a royal treatment — and this one is
almost twice as long as Bo's work, and it isn't merely inspired by the novel, it is a musical re-telling of the novel.
Two British actors were hired to provide the
(mercifully brief) narration parts, including actual bits of impersonation of
the novel's most colorful hero (Morgoth, of course, for whom Blind Guardian
have a special predilection). These are packed into brief spoken links, usually
accompanied with movie-like sound effects, introducing the various songs or
simply separating them, and all the songs are highly specific, relating to
different events over the course of the First Age, from Morgoth's flight with
the Silmarils and right down to the utter defeat of the forces of good by the
forces of evil (although, funny enough, all of this is framed by the
introductory track as Morgoth reminiscing of his history while standing on the
verge of final defeat).
Fans of Blind Guardian usually stand divided
over the record, which is no surprise — there are those who love these
fanatical Germans for their obsession with fantasy worlds, and then there are
those who just love them for all the monster riffs and virtuoso solos and
general blood-pumping skills. For that second group, Nightfall will be a disappointment: not only does all the spoken
material detract from the music, but the music itself is much less «heavy» than
it used to be, now placing at least as much emphasis on stately choral
harmonies and ornate mock-classical synthesizer flourishes as on heavy guitar
phrasing and «brutal» vocal parts. As a symbol of this transition, Kürsch
even relinquishes his position as regular bass player for the band: Oliver Holzwarth,
while not officially a regular new member of Blind Guardian, joins as his
regular session replacement both for studio recordings and live performances.
Personally, I am not quite sure what to think.
To be sure, the whole experience smells of cheese, but so does the band in
general, and is it even at all possible to make a rock opera based on The Silmarillion that would smell of
something else? It would most likely take somebody of a Wagnerian caliber to
achieve the task, and even then it is one thing to put your own personal stamp
on a thousand year old mythological tradition, and quite another one to put it
on a «simulacre», no matter how high quality. What really bugs me, though, is that if we actually want to put Tolkien
to music, Nightfall In Middle-Earth
is very far from my personal ideal vision of it. I am not at all sure what that
vision is, but it definitely is not
Blind Guardian vision.
First and foremost, Blind Guardian are really a
power metal band. They are at their best when audializing battle scenes —
violence, brutality, clashing swords, stampeding Oliphaunts, whatever.
Consequently, the best realized tracks here are the militaristic ones:
ʽTime Stands Still (At The Iron Hill)ʼ, for instance, is a rousing,
gripping epic that does convey the spirit of personal combat of an elf warrior
against the Lord of Darkness pretty well. Even better is the track that begins
it all: ʽInto The Stormʼ, starting the Silmarillion tale from the moment where the bad guys initiate their
conquest of Beleriand, fleeing from the light into the dark — no special
build-ups or atmospheric introductions, just a straightforward plunge into
aggressive frenzy that could illustrate everything that includes speed, fire,
and devastation, from the flight of Morgoth and Ungoliant to the Four Horsemen.
On the other hand, as they get into more
psychological details (ʽThe Curse Of Feanorʼ) or into lyrical matters
(ʽWhen Sorrow Sangʼ), the limitations of Blind Guardian become
obvious: once again, they use exactly the same approach for everything.
Eventually, you just lose sense of what is going on — where are the good guys
and the bad guys (Kürsch uses pretty much the same vocal style for the
Dark Lord Morgoth and the Elven Lord Fëanor, and no, this is not due to an artistic decision to blur the lines
between good and evil, which would agree with Tolkien's own storyline, but
simply due to the singer's limitations), where are the battles and the peaceful
interludes, where are the triumphs and the sufferings. Everything is
neutralized.
And this is where the complaints of the «metal
camp» fans can be heard, too: the music generally loses much of its «kick-ass»
quality, without necessarily compensating for this from the «beauty» angle,
because the band is not very good at incorporating medieval folk motives and
exquisite baroque synthesizer passages. Their chief musical talent had always
been Olbrich, and now he is almost like a bit player in a symphonic ocean, and
not a terrifically inspiring at that. Even within a polyphonic production,
you'd like to hear individual voices, but there is not a lot of them here. Try
and go straight for ʽThe Eldarʼ, one of the few songs on the album to
feature a different approach — a mournful piano ballad (with guest star Michael
Schüren at the grand piano), where Hansi goes from soft, tragic falsetto
to raging scream and back. If the song shakes you to the core, count yourself
an altogether well-rounded, properly initiated Blind Guardian fan; but to me,
there is too much melodrama, too little in the way of truly interesting melody.
All said, though, ambition alone... no, well,
ambition alone probably wouldn't cut it, but ambition coupled with Blind
Guardian's pedigree, experience, and professionalism make Nightfall In Middle-Earth a curious artefact. Curious success?
Curious failure? That is up to you to decide, but my current opinion — as a
Tolkien soundtrack, this is a failure, but as a Tolkien-inspired self-standing
musical fantasy, it definitely has its moments. At the very least, as is the
standard case for Blind Guardian, nearly each track has its own catchy chorus,
so let that be one final argument for a stable thumbs up. I sure wish they'd hire
some other guy to impersonate Morgoth, though. Wasn't Christopher Lee a
more-than-obvious choice? Or does he dislike Blind Guardian because they're
Krauts or something?
A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (2002)
1) Precious Jerusalem; 2)
Battlefield; 3) Under The Ice; 4) Sadly Sings Destiny; 5) The Maiden And The
Minstrel Knight; 6) Wait For An Answer; 7) The Soulforged; 8) Age Of False
Innocence; 9) Punishment Divine; 10) And Then There Was Silence.
Come to think of it, every night with Blind Guardian is like a night at the opera, isn't
it? With all that wealth of grand fantasy spectacles they had accumulated by
the end of the millennium, the collective repertoire could very well lay claim
to its own frickin' Bayreuth Festival. And there is little use in reminding
yourself of all the previous people who had used that title, either, be it
Queen or the Marx Brothers, because there is no connection whatsoever other
than the very idea of a «grand» effect upon the listeners. And if you thought
that, perhaps, the Marx Brothers association suggests that Blind Guardian have
finally begun to take themselves with a grain of salt and a modicum of
self-irony — well, Judas Priest have a classic rock recommendation for you.
Although there is no such serious conceptual
unity this time as there was on Nightfall
In Middle-Earth, for the most part, the album still revolves around a set
topical field — mythology, both pagan and Christian, and, to a lesser extent,
history, rather than fantasy (only ʽWait For An Answerʼ, based on
Kürsch's own fictional tale, and ʽThe Soulforgedʼ, based on Dragonlance, constitute exceptions). If
anything, this helps justify the band's position in preserving the grand-epic
style of Nightfall — once again, the
emphasis is squarely put on «power» and «pomp» rather than heaviness. When it's
all over for the first time, what you are going to remember is not the metal
riffs, but the huger-than-life choruses, most of which explicitly remind you of
the fact that «chorus» and «choir» are originally the same word after all.
Here is a funny trivia tidbit that is not so
much typical of the record as symbolic: the very first track, ʽPrecious
Jerusalemʼ (as far as I know, marking the first appearance of JC himself
as the protagonist of a Blind Guardian fantasy), contains a transparent musical
reference to Jesus Christ Superstar
— the "risin' up from the heart of the desert, risin' up for
Jerusalem" passage brings to mind both
the "when do we ride into Jerusalem?" and "roll on up
Jerusalem" melodic phrasings from the Andrew Lloyd Webber opera, even if
the rest of the song has nothing to do with Sir Andrew, being instead cast in
the usual power metal mold. Still, this obvious link with the old art of «rock
opera» is quite telling. No wonder the band's original drummer, Thomas Stauch,
quit after the album was completed — even within the Blind Guardian camp, not
everybody was satisfied with the way things were turning out.
Still, the balance between keyboards,
orchestrations, and choral vocals, on one hand, and heavy riffs and blazing
electric guitar solos, on the other, seems quite intelligently handled to me.
There are a couple «power ballads» here, like ʽThe Maiden And The Minstrel
Knightʼ (how come Blackmore's Night have not covered that one yet?), where
the balance predictably tilts towards the «light» instrumentation, but this is
justifiable — a ballad is a ballad, after all — and besides, the song has the
most memorable chorus on the entire album. In anybody else's hands, the
mock-Wagnerian solemnity of the choral "will you still wait for me, will
you still cry for me" and Hansi's throat-ripping retort of "come and
take my haaaaaand!" would just look ridiculous, but these guys now have
such a long history of «going all the way to eleven» that it is hard not to get
overwhelmed by the results. (Just play 'em real loud, or else you violate the
rules of the game).
On the other hand, songs like ʽUnder The
Iceʼ, ʽSadly Sings Destinyʼ, ʽThe Soulforgedʼ, and
some others formally preserve the core of the Blind Guardian sound. There is an obligatory chugga-chugga thrashing
riff, and a thick, melodic, sometimes multi-tracked, often wah-wah-enhanced
lead guitar part that are loud enough in the mix so as not to allow themselves
to be drowned out in an ocean of keyboards, strings, or choral vocals. And it's
not as if the drummer had anything to complain about on his behalf — the tempos are consistently fast and give him all the
usual conditions to exercise the traditional sledgehammering style.
The basic problem is the usual one — monotony.
After a short while, as the hilarious quotation from JCS fades into history, the songs inevitably begin blending and
melding with each other, and this time around, there are no storytelling links
to keep them apart. In small doses, the album is perfectly palatable, but you'd
really have to be an iron man to sit through this «night at the opera» in one go
and get sixty-seven minute of incessant kicks out of it. (Predicting the
possible question, yes, this «opera»
is far more melodically monotonous and emotionally single-routed than any good
classical opera — among other things, Blind Guardian are totally unfamiliar
with the principle of crescendo, which they replace with the principle of «and
now... switch on THE POWER!!!!!»).
The worst is saved for last: a fourteen-minute
epic (ʽAnd Then There Was Silenceʼ) about the fate of Cassandra,
which somehow feels longer than the entire first act of Berlioz's Les Troyens — for all of its numerous
melodic changes, nothing truly interesting ever happens throughout the song,
and I have no idea whatsoever why it needed to be 14 minutes long in the first
place. And instead of a proper bang, it ends in... a fadeout, with a corny synthesizer solo striving for orchestral grandeur?
What an embarrassment, really. Without this track, A Night At The Opera could have been poised for at least a minor
thumbs up, keeping in mind the unabated energy levels and the cleverness of the
instrumental mix and the sheer overwhelming strength of Hansi's vocals. With this track, A Night At The Opera moves dangerously close to a failed experiment
— an attempt to outdo themselves in the «grandeur» department without being
able to come up with any new substantial
trick to successfully complete that attempt.
LIVE (2003)
1) War Of Wrath; 2) Into The
Storm; 3) Welcome To Dying; 4) Nightfall; 5) The Script For My Requiem; 6)
Harvest Of Sorrow; 7) The Soulforged; 8) Valhalla; 9) Majesty; 10) Mordred's
Song; 11) Born In A Mourning Hall; 12) Under The Ice; 13) Bright Eyes; 14)
Punishment Divine; 15) The Bard's Song; 16) Imaginations From The Other Side;
17) Lost In The Twilight Hall; 18) A Past And Future Secret; 19) Time Stands
Still; 20) Journey Through The Dark; 21) Lord Of The Rings; 22) Mirror Mirror.
Tokyo
Tales were clearly not enough.
Released way back when (at a time when Blind Guardian were still more of a
«metal» band than the resplendent kings of musical fantasy), clocking in at a
measly 72 minutes, long out of print (in fact, even its original distribution
was mostly limited to Japan itself and the band's native Germany)... all in
all, no way to reflect the glorious legacy of the most majestic minstrels of
Middle-Earth.
So, I guess we all saw this one coming: a
mega-arch-sprawling (over 130 minutes of sound!), hyper-poly-bombastic double
live album that summarizes all of Blind Guardian's best and worst sides.
Actually, since Blind Guardian only really have one side, this makes it their best and worst at the same time — and there is no need to tell you that
all of these performances are fairly predictable, and that the album is
mainly for the fans. In fact, it is very
much for the fans: in its ardor to loyally represent the atmosphere at a Blind
Guardian, a large chunk of the content (I'd say, not less than 15-20 minutes
out of 130) consists of nothing but audience noises — applause, cheering,
chanting, olé-olé-ing, and singing along. Yes, you too will be
impressed by the level of adoration these guys hold for Blind Guardian when you
will hear them loudly echoing every
single word of the Morgoth/Sauron dialog that opens the show over
loudspeakers (ʽWar Of Wrathʼ) — "I RELEASE THEE, GO! MY SERVANT
YOU'LL BE FOR ALL TIME!" Quite staggering publicity for The Silmarillion, in fact.
Naturally, there is also a lot of fan
interaction, conducted by Hansi in different languages, since the album was
recorded all over the place (Italy, Spain, Germany, Japan again, etc.), which
explains why he keeps confusingly switching from Italian to English and then
to German for the last big chunk of the show. Other than that, the tracks are
tacked together quite coherently — the album does not have a particularly
disjointed feel, as some other hastily cobbled together live records sometimes
have — but this coherence may, of course, be also explained by the simple fact
that... shh... come closer... all the
songs sound the same, don't they?
If you feel bad about orchestration on Blind
Guardian studio records, you are in for a pleasant treat: other than Michael
Schüren on keyboards, the band is on too limited a budget to drag a whole
orchestra around the world, which forces them to concentrate more on performing
their songs as tight, compact metal anthems. Additionally, back-to-back
comparison shows that, in a live setting, Olbrich consistently chooses more
shrill, sharp, aggressive lead guitar tones than the comparatively smoother,
glossier equivalents in the studio. So I do admit that the sound is, indeed,
more «raw» on the stage: for old-school fans who had pretty much given up on
Blind Guardian for their betrayal of «metal roots», this can be a stimulating
boost to check out the record.
Setlist-wise, only the band's first two albums
are side-stepped (with the usual exception of setlist mainstays
ʽMajestyʼ and ʽValhallaʼ, respectively) — everything else
is represented quite democratically, with no special emphasis on the
then-currently-promoted Night At The Opera
(fortunately for us all, since I am still not convinced, even with all the
extra rawness, that there is anything worth remembering about ʽPunishment
Divineʼ). Of course, they could have easily crammed in two or three extra
highlights at the expense of some lengthy periods of crowd noise, but it is
quite likely that they included their entire setlist for the tour anyway.
Hansi, now free from his bass-playing duties
(Oliver Holzwarth covers those, just as he now does in the studio), is in
perfect vocal form throughout, although I would not say that being liberated
from the extra weight of bass guitar has significantly improved his ability to
stay on key or anything — perhaps he had simply decided that proper
impersonations of Morgoth, Mordred, and More Morbid Morons come off better when
the impersonator is free from the obligation to fiddle about with a musical
instrument. (Then again, what kind of an instrument would the real Morgoth have
played if he had to choose? Bass guitar seems like the obvious answer).
Olbrich, as I said, shines throughout, free to flash his instrument high in the
mix whenever he gets the chance, and the rhythm section is expectably
impeccable.
All this is enough to hand out a surefire thumbs up
rating, despite a few weak songs and these irritatingly long periods of having
to listen to all them fans chant "Guar-dian! Guar-dian! Guar-dian!",
as if they were a bunch of hungry prison inmates or something. But even that
irritation, I guess, is in the line of duty when it comes to «metal royalty»
like Blind Guardian.
A TWIST IN THE MYTH (2006)
1) This Will Never End; 2)
Otherland; 3) Turn The Page; 4) Fly; 5) Carry The Blessed Home; 6) Another
Stranger Me; 7) Straight Through The Mirror; 8) Lionheart; 9) Skalds &
Shadows; 10) The Edge; 11) The New Order.
Damn those misleading, conflicting titles.
Throughout the entire duration of the album, I was waiting and waiting for a
«twist» — instead, I should have gotten the authentic
clue from the title of the first song, ʽThis Will Never Endʼ. A Twist In The Myth is basically just A Night At The Opera, Vol. 2, and considering how monotonous
the first installation was, you'd have to be incurably idealistic to expect
any major shifts from the second. If anything, it is even smoother and less involving:
producer Charlie Bauerfeind, despite a strong reputation (he had been working
with the band since Nightfall, and
he was also responsible for producing all of Angra's best albums), «muffles»
and overcompresses the sound more and more with each next record — not that
«raw» production would help a lot in making these songs more memorable.
I'd say that, by this time, the most useful
thing about Blind Guardian albums is the insane amount of unpredictable
influences on Hansi's metallic mind — you can pretty much use them as a personal
guide into the complex twisted world of fantasy. For instance, the first track
here was written courtesy of Walter Moers' novel A Wild Ride Through The Night, in which the author creates a
mythological biography for Gustave Doré as a young boy whose task is to
defy Death itself: I had no idea that anything of the sort existed, and now my
knowledge is enriched by the experience (not that I'm running to my local
library or anything), and, well, I suppose that the song's maniacal tempo and
Hansi's banshee screaming on some of the verses are in accordance with the
«young hero vs. Death» motive, even if the song itself has nothing in the way
of a properly memorable memory (just a generic chugga-chugga thrash theme for a
basic pattern).
ʽFlyʼ refers to Peter Pan and Finding Neverland — not the first
reference to the subject in Blind Guardian history, but the most direct one;
the song's chorus is one of the album's minor highlights (there is something
about Hansi's "I'll teach you how to fly then..." that, for a brief
second, tricks me into thinking of him in PeterPanish terms indeed), although
the main melody has as much to do with Neverland as a Wall Street contract, not
to mention the silly dinky keyboards that cheesify the proceedings even
further. Why do they have to employ
these stupid synthesizer paterns over and over again? Why not harps, or
mandolins, or didgeridoos?.. Are they on such a tight budget, or do they mean
that they really enjoy those sounds?
Other than an occasionally slowed down anthem
with Celtic motives and bagpipes (ʽCarry The Blessed Homeʼ), or a
generic medievalistic acoustic ballad (ʽSkalds & Shadowsʼ), the
songs are so much interchangeable throughout that continuing this review is as
painful as it is senseless. I give the record a certified thumbs down of the «eaten up by
their own formula» variety, and invite you to make your own musical analysis if
fantasy-based power metal is your personal cup of tea and you are prone to
sudden fits of humming ʽOtherlandʼ in the shower. Myself, I'd not refuse
a little bit of actual «progress», otherwise what incentive is there for
writing album reviews in the first place?
AT THE EDGE OF TIME (2010)
1) Sacred Worlds; 2) Tanelorn;
3) Road Of No Release; 4) Ride Into Obsession; 5) Curse My Name; 6) Valkyries;
7) Control The Divine; 8) War Of The Thrones; 9) A Voice In The Dark; 10) Wheel
Of Time.
I have little personal interest in playing Sacred 2: Fallen Angel (RPGs have never
been a favorite genre of mine — adventure games were always more like it), but
I guess we have to thank its designers all the same for giving a much needed
shot in the arm to Blind Guardian. The one track they recorded for it,
ʽSacred Worldsʼ, is arguably their best composition in years, if not
in a whole decade or so: not just an «epic» track (all of their tracks are
epic), but a full-blown power monster, replete with complex and highly dynamic
orchestration — provided, for once, by a real orchestra. And it frickin' works!
First, the strings and horns prepare the
setting in a mock-mixture of quasi-Strauss and quasi-Shostakovich, then the
band gradually begins to take over with the rhythm section and the metal
chugga-chugga, and then they kind of sort it out with the orchestra over the
next seven minutes, in perfect balance with each other. It does not have a
perfect particular hook or an arch-memorable theme, but that is not necessary
— all you have to do is admire how the orchestra meshes with the band. Without
the orchestra, the song could have been as boring as anything on Twist In The Myth, and without the
band, the orchestral parts would have been just passable imitations of the
greats, but together, they truly raise the bar on epicness, and ʽSacred
Worldsʼ should rank up there along with Therion as far as «symphonic
metal» is concerned (and is certainly better than anything Nightwish ever
did).
Alas, the incentive was not strong enough (or,
perhaps more likely, the budget was not large enough) to retain the orchestra
for the entire album — it only comes back one more time to close off the album
with ʽWheel Of Timeʼ, this time with a decisively Eastern twist to it
(there is a lengthy instrumental passage in the middle to which you could belly-dance
if you got the sudden urge), and again, quite interesting composition-wise. In
between these two lengthy mini-suites, though, what you get is standard Blind
Guardian fare — eight more power stompers, very little about which can be
described as «innovative» in any sense of the word.
I do have to admit that some of them feel a bit
«stronger» — for instance, even though ʽTanelornʼ is already their second song about Tanelorn, its chugging
riff produces a more efficient brainshaking wave than anything on the previous
album, and the song's coda, with a mad over-the-cliff rush to the final chord,
kicks ass quite explicitly. But on the other hand, I also have a nagging suspicion
that it is simply the electrification caused by ʽSacred Worldsʼ that
gets inductively extended onto several following tracks that gets me so
excited. Who knows?
On a different note, one curious moment of
confusion arrives when you realize that the main riff of ʽControl The
Divineʼ is taken, almost note-for-note, from the Animals' classic version
of ʽDon't Let Me Be Misunderstoodʼ — coincidence? subconscious
adaptation? intentional rip-off? it's not as if they were running out of their
own riffs, because they had been masters of unmemorable riffs for quite a
while already, it would have been no problem to supply a bunch more. Then
again, they had always been big fans of «classic rock», from the Beach Boys to
Queen, so adapting a bit of the old gold is in the line of duty, and it's
probably better than covering the song anyway (for a pretty cheesy metal cover,
check out Gary Moore's version).
In any case, the opening and closing tracks
alone make this whole experience such an undeniable improvement on Twist that the album has to be
supported with a thumbs up, also because in all other respects it does not let
you down, either — power, volume, monster riffage, and classic Hansi vocals
that show no signs of age-based deterioration whatsoever. One might, of course,
find the idea of «orchestrated Blind Guardian» too insulting for their brawny
metallic power, but that power had long since been dissipated anyway, and if
you ask me, the orchestra here helps them consolidate the power once again,
rather than wipe away the last traces of it. Besides, it does not happen too
often when an orchestra and a rock band manage to understand each other so
perfectly (remember Deep Purple?), so count me really happy on this one.
BEYOND THE RED MIRROR (2015)
1) The Ninth Wave; 2) Twilight
Of The Gods; 3) Prophecies; 4) At The Edge Of Time; 5) Ashes Of Eternity; 6)
The Holy Grail; 7) The Throne; 8) Sacred Mind; 9) Miracle Machine; 10) Grand
Parade.
Now look, this isn't even funny any more. Not
only have they already used the word
«beyond» in at least one of their album titles and the word «mirror» in at
least several of their songs ("mirror mirror on the wall..."), but I
think that every word and idiomatic
combination in these titles, if not in the entire lyrics, had already been
commissioned by our fantasy friends sometime in the past. Unsurprisingly,
pretty much the same can be said about the music. And it took them, what, a
whole five years? To come up with an album that, maybe more than anything they
did in their career, sounds like a barely noticeable rearrangement of the same
jigsaw puzzle?..
At the very, very least, they could have followed
up on the success of ʽSacred Worldsʼ and ʽWheel Of Timeʼ,
two tracks where the mix of guitar metal and orchestration seemed to open up a
whole new world of possibilities to explore and exploit. But with Beyond The Red Mirror, it's as if those
two songs were never written — as if they admitted to themselves that this was
a failed experiment. What happened? Did the money run out? No, it did not,
because there is an orchestra here —
in fact, there are two: Hungarian Studio Orchestra Budapest and FILMHarmonic
Orchestra Prague (the latter is the same one that was used for ʽSacred
Worldsʼ). Did they commission research on fanboard opinions, and come to
the conclusion that use of the orchestra was «lame» and that it «sissified»
their sound or something?
I have no idea, but the fact is, that we are
generally back to square here: vocals, guitars, keyboards, pound pound pound,
stern martial chorus of Elven warriors who prefer their battles over their
ladies, everything mega-powerful, ultra-melodic, algorithmically predictable,
and immediately forgettable. If there is at least a shadow of some new idea
here, it is the use of a baroque choir on the introduction to ʽThe Ninth
Waveʼ — I think that previously, all of the harmonies were done by the
band members themselves, but here they went for a fuller approach. Not that the
use of such choirs in metal should come as a surprise, either, and with the
song itself so unremarkable on the whole, the stern religious harmonies hardly
add any awesomeness.
According to what my ears tell me, this album
does not contain a single memorable riff or a single truly impressive vocal
chorus. The reasons for this could be
technical: for instance, when they finally get to ʽGrand Paradeʼ,
obviously intended as a grand finale, the chorus is completely ruined by flat
production where the vocals, the orchestration, and the choir merge together
in a muffled, sloppy mush that feels completely mechanical and soulless, neither
tragic nor joyful nor endowed with any
emotion, just big-big-big. So, perhaps, bad production and dynamic overcompression
are to blame. But this hardly settles things: even without the poor production,
this is a sleepwalker's album, riding along on years and decades of accumulated
experience and professionalism and not a drop of actual inspiration.
But then, who cares? I have seen so many rave
reviews by newly fascinated fans that it is quite clear — they can remake the
same record fifty more times and still not worry about their
not-particularly-demanding fanbase. And I really almost literally mean «remake
the same record»: this here regurgitation is worse than yer basic AC/DC,
because at least with the Young brothers, it is the riffs that count, and every time they set out to make a new album,
they know they have to present some new «skeletal structures» (and if there are
too many recycled riffs on an AC/DC album, it is by definition an
unsatisfactory AC/DC album) — whereas with these Blind Guardian records, the
denseness of the arrangements, the orchestrations, Hansi's mammoth vocals all
mask the «skeletal structure» and make it look insignificant next to the
overall style of the presentation. And that style never changes. And these are
the rules of the game, I know, but I also know that not every metal band is necessarily supposed to abide by these rules,
and if you do not know how to bend them or at least how to make them serve a
good purpose, too bad. Thumbs down.
BLONDIE (1976)
1) X Offender; 2) Little Girl
Lies; 3) In The Flesh; 4) Look Good In Blue; 5) In The Sun; 6) A Shark In Jets
Clothing; 7) Man Overboard; 8) Rip Her To Shreds; 9) Rifle Range; 10) Kung Fu
Girls; 11) The Attack Of The Giant Ants; 12*) Out In The Streets; 13*) The Thin
Line; 14*) Platinum Blonde.
Like the Renaissance began out of a fervent
drive to return to the «healthy» values of Antiquity, rather than a conscious
desire to create something «innovative» and «revolutionary», so did New Wave
originally grow out of a desire to return to the «innocent» values of the early
rock era, with a new teenage generation more influenced by Buddy Holly, pre-Pet Sounds Beach Boys, the Shadows, and
Phil Spector than by Hendrix or Pink Floyd. If that ain't all of the story, it
is at least an important component of the story, and I don't think any other
record of the early New Wave period illustrates this any better than the
self-titled debut by Blondie.
The songs, mostly written by guitar player
Chris Stein, keyboardist Jimmy Destri, and Our Lady Deborah Harry in the flesh,
were certainly no great shakes, composition-wise. For the most part, they just
show how omnivorous these guys were when it came to late 1950s / early 1960s
pop culture: Motown, doo-wop, light pop-rock, tango, rumba, you name it —
curiously, the one thing that is nearly missing in this master scheme is
«gritty» rockabilly, or anything, in fact, that would make their debut album
sound «punkish». The melodies are catchy enough, but overtly derivative and, more
often than not, a little «undercooked»: in fact, the entire band sounds almost
defiantly, do-it-yourselfishly amateurish — Phil Spector would probably have
fired them on the spot, or at least would have had to resort to one of his
figurative bullwhips as a sanitary measure.
However, this is one of those cases where
«derivative melodies» are totally redeemed with the elusive, but real
«atmospheric» component. First and foremost, there's Debbie — one of the most
fascinating pop characters of the epoch. Not having much of a vocal range or
any particularly impressive singing technique, she compensates for this by an
amazing ability to «get into character», and on almost each and every one of
these short tunes, she plays a slightly different, and always convincing,
type. Whether seducing a police officer in ʽX Offenderʼ, viciously
putting down an image competitor in ʽRip Her To Shredsʼ, enjoying
life's simple pleasures ʽIn The Sunʼ, offering sexual consolation to
her lover in ʽLook Good In Blueʼ ("I could give you some head
and shoulders to lie on" got to be one of the crudest double entendre's in
the history of pop music, and it's all because of the word some!), or just stalking a potential lover ʽIn The
Fleshʼ, she gives this kind of music exactly the kind of thing that its
primary influences lacked — a realistic, believable protagonist. It's like an
authentic corporate pop album without any corporate songwriting, if you know
what I mean. It's all been there before, and yet it's never been quite like
this.
Second, there is the band's uncanny ability to
focus in on the essential. The production could use some gloss, the overdubs
could be more inventive, the hooks could be better thought out, but this is, in
a way, the same kind of exercise in absolute minimalism that Blondie's pals,
the Ramones, were doing at the same time from their «punk» angle. As a rule,
each song establishes a single, punchy, repetitive, obnoxious groove (the
triumphant organ line in ʽX Offenderʼ, the stern tango rhythm of ʽLook
Good In Blueʼ, the mock-doom-laden synthesizer riff of ʽA Shark In
Jets Clothingʼ etc. etc.) and sticks to it through thick, thin, and
whatever's in between — and it works, because all the songs are short enough to
remain committed to one or two musical ideas and not bore the listener,
particularly if Debbie Harry is staging her little life dramas across the
surface. Later on, the band would hone both its songwriting skills and its
instrumental chops (Clem Burke, for instance, is not yet immediately perceived
as one of the top drummers of his generation), but at the cost of this
obnoxiously disarming brutality.
Since all the songs, without a single
exception, follow this relatively straightforward, but tremendously efficient
recipé, I couldn't even talk about highlights and lowlights — although,
given the record's stylistic diversity, you are almost certain to end up with
your own individual personal favorites. My early ones were all cuddled together
on Side A, the more sentimental and purry one: the tempting little guitar
swirls on ʽLittle Girl Liesʼ, the doo-wop tenderness of ʽIn The
Fleshʼ (mixed with the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing venom of its jealously
competitive mid-section), the femme-fatale attitude of ʽLook Good In
Blueʼ, with Debbie adding a bit of Marlene Dietrich to her personality,
the not-a-care-in-the-world joyful rave-on of ʽIn The Sunʼ.
Next to these, Side B might originally pale in
comparison, but later on you come to understand that this is where they provide
an outlet for their weird side: ʽRifle Rangeʼ has a bit of a James
Bond flair to it, with «mystery» organ and spooky backing harmonies and lyrics
that hint at what, the protagonist being afraid of her homosexual urges? In the
meantime, the last two songs seem both inspired by cheap movie thrills, including
Asian martial arts (ʽKung Fu Girlsʼ) and crappy sci-fi horror
(ʽAttack Of The Giant Antsʼ, utilizing a merry Rio-carnival-style
melody to support pleasant lyrics like "then they eat your face, never
leave a trace", and crossing it with a chaotic mid-section that lets you
know what the roar of a giant ant might actually sound like).
However, where those two last songs are
essentially novelty numbers, the mystery of ʽRifle Rangeʼ leaves a
much more lasting impression, and so does ʽRip Her To Shredsʼ, which
is, in a way, the quintessential
Blondie song (along with ʽOne Way Or Anotherʼ) — you can really tell
there is nothing in the world that Debbie Harry likes quite as much as tearing
up cartoonish figures, just by the way she mouthes out these words ("oh
you know her, Miss Groupie Supreme"...). This is the only song on the
album that seems more influenced by the Rolling Stones circa Aftermath and Between The Buttons than pre-1965 music, and its presence alone
would have convinced me that this band really has got what it takes. Meet
Debbie Harry, devil and angel bottled
in the same package.
The remastered and expanded CD edition of the
album adds some important bonus tracks — for historical reasons, it is useful
to hear their cover of ʽOut In The Streetsʼ, confirming The
Shangri-Las as one of their most essential spiritual mentors in the art of
streetwise romancing, and ʽPlatinum Blondeʼ, a very simple and straightforward
pop tune that was the first song Harry ever wrote — straightforwardly
presenting her ironic life philosophy and, funny enough, written and recorded
in a «glam-rock» rather than in «New (Old) Wave» style (the demo is from 1975,
when the band was just starting to find its footing). But they also confirm
that, in those two years that chronologically separate Blondie's formation as a
band in the heart of New York City from the release of their first LP, they'd
already significantly evolved as songwriters — Blondie may be still a little raw and rough around the edges (and
hey, some people would love it just for that), but it is completely
self-assured, and can easily compete with their acclaimed classics from the
next few years to come. Old ideas given a fresh new lease on life, funny,
charming, and irreverent to the perfect degree — thumbs up without a hitch.
PLASTIC LETTERS (1977)
1) Fan Mail; 2) Denis; 3)
Bermuda Triangle Blues (Flight 45); 4) Youth Nabbed As Sniper; 5) Contact In
Red Square; 6) (I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear; 7) I'm On E; 8) I
Didn't Have The Nerve To Say No; 9) Love At The Pier; 10) No Imagination; 11)
Kidnapper; 12) Detroit 442; 13) Cautious Lip; 14*) Once I Had A Love; 15*)
Scenery; 16*) Poets Problem; 17*) Detroit 442 (live).
Sometimes identified as a «transitional» album,
wedged in between the sheer shockin' novelty of the self-titled debut and the
stunning pop gloss of Parallel Lines,
Blondie's sophomore effort tends to be a little overlooked these days, although
back in 1977, it was a much bigger commercial success than Blondie, and landed the band their
first big chart hit all over Europe. Ironically, that big hit was fairly
atypical of the album — ʽDenisʼ was the band's cover of Randy &
The Rainbows' ʽDeniseʼ, a 1963 pop song with elements of doo-wop and
Buddy Holly: Blondie more or less drop the whole doo-wop aspect and enforce the
Buddy Holly aspect by freely quoting from ʽPeggy Sueʼ where the
original had no such thing. The song's popularity, so it seems, was more of an American Graffitti-type of event, except
it happened to be more popular in Europe than in Blondie's native US of A — go
figure.
Anyway, even tossing ʽDenisʼ aside,
had we wanted to, we could build up a very
strong case for Plastic Letters as
the «definitive» Blondie album, or maybe even the «best» one where these
notions are correlated. Here they are still essentially a raw, untamed,
unspoiled semi-underground outfit, hanging around NYC's «advanced» musical
establishments, but showing an ever-increasing level of diversity and wildness
of imagination. Arguably, some of the songs aren't quite as catchy as the ones
on Blondie, but this is well
compensated for by the band coming up with all sorts of «stories» and
«situations» — lyrical and atmospheric subjects include mysteries, suspense,
spy tales, catastrophes, femme fatales, and, of course, lots of character
assassinations. At the same time they also stretch out and expand their musical
boundaries: due largely to Jim Destri's complex keyboard palette, Plastic Letters, one way or another,
covers the whole history of pop music from the late Fifties up to modern times.
Doo-wop, rockabilly, Motown, and Merseybeat are here in symbiosis with
modernistic punk, electronica, and even a bit of the «progressive» genre, and
it all feels natural, because one thing that ties it all together is fun.
Well, that and Debbie Harry's hormonal
activities, I guess — which take up a significant chunk of the album, ʽFan
Mailʼ, ʽ(I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dearʼ and ʽI
Didn't Have The Nerve To Say Noʼ being the ultimate highlights.
ʽPresenceʼ is the best realized of the three, and all the more fun
when you understand that what they really do here is take that classic Byrds
sound and turn it on its head, shedding the solemnity and stately beauty of
Roger McGuinn's company and replacing it with sexy playfulness. Then again, I
guess Debbie Harry could sing ʽBells Of Rhymneyʼ and make it sound
exactly the same way — this is simply in their inborn nature, they can't help
being playful. Even when the love thing goes drastically bad, they still
deliver the news swiftly and merrily (ʽLove At The Pierʼ, not the
catchiest song on the album, but who else but Blondie would finish the song
with lines like "Now I go to beaches with my girlfriend / No more love
splinters in my rear end"?).
But the Byrds are far from the only musical
reference / influence on the album. ʽBermuda Triangle Bluesʼ, in
contrast, takes it slow and careful, with a delicate, yet stern-and-solemn
guitar weave pattern that might recall stuff in the «epic folk» vein, anything
from Neil Young to Van Morrison. It feels unfinished — cutting out just as
Destri really begins picking up the heat on that organ and you start thinking
that maybe Chris Stein will want to join him in a furious jam or something,
just to illustrate the atmospheric pressure over the Bermuda Triangle — yet I
would say that a certain portion of the charm of Plastic Letters is that so many things on here sound unfinished:
«we saw, we conquered, we moved on without completing». The incipient spy epic
ʽContact In Red Squareʼ, for instance — had that song been conceived
by such experimental jokers as 10cc (and it could), they would have turned it
into a six- or seven-minute mini-opera; for Blondie, two minutes of that
experiment (which, if you listen close enough, includes some elements of
Russian folk dance muzak for comfort) is firmly enough.
As consistent as the album already is, it
actually seems to be getting stronger and stronger as it moves towards its
conclusion. The last three songs, in particular, sound nothing like each other,
but I don't even know which of the three I like the better —
ʽKidnapperʼ, with its «Debbie-as-Elvis» bit, references to Norman
Bates and Ray Milland, blues-rock harmonica, and garage guitar solo;
ʽDetroit 442ʼ, the heaviest song in the band's catalog (imagine what
a ʽLet There Be Rockʼ-era AC/DC song would sound like with one of the
Young brothers switching to piano instead of guitar!); or ʽCautious
Lipʼ, the album's longest, most heavily nuanced tune that I have no idea
whatsoever how to categorize — is it «electronic blues»? «psychedelic
swamp-rock»? what sort of mind effect are they going for, anyway? All I know is
that the song wouldn't have sounded out of place on Their Satanic Majesties' Request, you know, one of those records.
All in all, Plastic Letters is that one Blondie album I can never see myself
getting tired of — there is simply so much going on here, in all directions,
that every time you put it on, you will discover yet another splatter of
creativity on your jacket. Smart, hip, playful, diverse, stimulating, not
particularly profound, perhaps, but never as dumb as an unexperienced novice's
first listen to ʽDenisʼ could make the band seem for a moment,
either. Like all great artists growing up on «pop trash», Blondie could take
that slice of culture and viciously send it up for all of its clichés, while
at the same time declaring undying love for it — as expressed in the energy,
inventiveness, and wild combinatorics of the music. Their pop hooks would only
become genuine weapons of mass destruction with the next two albums, but they'd
never again make a record as, well, witty
as Plastic Letters, and for this it
deserves a thumbs
up rating every bit as enthusiastic.
PARALLEL LINES (1978)
1) Hanging On The Telephone;
2) One Way Or Another; 3) Picture This; 4) Fade Away And Radiate; 5) Pretty
Baby; 6) I Know But I Don't Know; 7) 11:59; 8) Will Anything Happen?; 9) Sunday
Girl; 10) Heart Of Glass; 11) I'm Gonna Love You Too; 12) Just Go Away; 13*)
Once I Had A Love; 14*) Bang A Gong (Get It On) (live); 15*) I Know But I Don't
Know (live); 16*) Hanging On The Telephone (live).
In which Blondie go professional, and now there
is no turning back — no more «young and innocent days» for you once you've
passed through the skilled hands of Mike Chapman, master of glossy candy
packaging whose previous clients included Sweet, Smokie, Suzi Quatro, and
various other acts, intensely groomed and pampered for stronger commercial
effect (Sweet were actually the best of the lot — most of the rest were like
100% unlistenable). Blondie's manager convinced them to team up with Chapman,
probably hoping that he would be able to hone their best pop instincts without
making them completely reject their identity — and on the whole, he was right: Parallel Lines is very commercial, but
it does not betray the general spirit that the band had concocted already with
its very first songs.
Still, there may be such a thing as «too much
perfection», and this complaint does apply to Parallel Lines, as the guys, the girl, and the glossy LA producer
so ardently hunt for the ideal sound and forget about some of the band's
legacy. Unlike Plastic Letters, Parallel Lines is all about the simple
things — girl-and-guys relations, with gender roles accordingly reversed (Debbie
as the hunter and guys as the game — hell, look at the album cover alone, where
they all look like identical dorks and she
looks ready to bitchslap you in a
moment). That's all very well and suitable and Blondie-compatible, but I do miss all those stories of kung fu
girls and giant ants and Red Square spies and youths nabbed as snipers. Where
did they go? Well, it's not that easy to make hits out of such ideas, so let us
turn to more basic hormonal stuff instead.
But how is it possible to resist temptation
when the first two songs on the album are ʽHanging On The Telephoneʼ
and ʽOne Way Or Anotherʼ — one of the fiercest, most stunning
guitar-pop attacks on the senses since the days when the Beatles roamed the
planet? Debbie's a little funny in her attempt to be as sexually aggressive as
possible, even going all the way to gather a little phlegm so as to roar out certain lines in both of these
songs like some thunder-and-lightning black diva à la Tina Turner — but we can forgive her, because on the
whole, she is being very convincing about it (or «about It», to be more
accurate. Or «about Id», to be more
Freudist). And then there is the music — the mad rush simulation of
ʽTelephoneʼ, a perfect musical equivalent of blood boiling, and the
unforgettable guitar riff of ʽOne Wayʼ, apparently written by the
band's bass player, Nigel Harrison. ʽOne Wayʼ may, in fact, be one of
the greatest blends of a typically hard rock riff with a typically pop
structure — and, accordingly, the greatest emulation of sexual aggression
paired with «pretty looks». Madonna got nothing on this, not even close — then
again, who'd ever write a riff like that
for the likes of Madonna?
The greatness never stops coming, because
ʽPicture Thisʼ, while playing for the third time in a row on the same
ideas (if she ain't gonna get this
one, she'll get that one, or that one, or that one over there...),
adopts a slightly different approach — a bit more lyrical, only gradually
revving itself into overdrive, and it is every bit as effective, because
sometimes subtlety works better than a straightforward assault. I've never
really understood the temporal connection of the lines "I will give you my finest hour..."
(future tense) "...the one I spent
watching you shower" (past tense), but what sort of a regular male could
resist Debbie Harry purring so tenderly reminiscing about watching him shower?
Oh, yeah, well, uhm, the melody's quite catchy too, I guess.
All of which brings us a little bit
fast-forward-style to ʽHeart Of Glassʼ, a song that actually began
life as ʽOnce I Had A Loveʼ way back in 1975 or so, and which
Chapman, from its early syncopated funky beginnings, developed to immaculate
disco gloss. In retrospect, the song pretty much destroyed Blondie's reputation
— most people who «don't care all that much» probably only associate the band
with this song now, and while it certainly does capture some of the essence of
Blondie fairly well, there is no way it could make you understand the whole
story, or at least prevent you from mistakenly putting Blondie in the same boat
with Donna Summer or any of those gazillion Eurodisco bands. But in the general
context of all things Blondie-related, ʽHeart Of Glassʼ is, of
course, still a masterpiece.
One word of warning to the neophyte, though — do avoid the relatively crappy 5:50
«disco version» with which the bandits at Chrysalis had replaced the original
3:45 cut on quite a few reprints, starting with a vinyl pressing in 1979 and
ending with the remastered CD version, because this is a clear case of
«longer» not being «better»: all you
get is a never-ending repetitive loop of na-na-na's at the end, instead of the
fabulous fade-out coda of the original — fabulous, because it featured a set of
Clem Burke's most inventive drumrolls in history, as if the man wanted to show
us that it was, after all, possible
to be an expressive, musically-talkative drummer within a disco setting. That
bit is just not there in the longer
version, which is a travesty. At least they do not use the bubbly keyboards to
hide the guitar riff, which is in itself a masterful blend of funk and pop —
and, again, a perfect match for Debbie's vocals in terms of atmosphere: cynical
disillusionment at its most light-hearted and «superficially superficial» (but
really quite deep).
These mega-monster pop hits tend to swallow up
the rest of the record, which is almost a shame, but that's the way life goes —
only gradually you come to realize that ʽPretty Babyʼ and
ʽSunday Girlʼ may be a little lighter and wussier in style, but are
really just as strong melodically as everything else; that ʽFade Away And
Radiateʼ, with its slow tempo, psychedelic keyboards, enigmatic drum beat,
acid guitar solos, and somnambulic vocals, is not the «black sheep», but rather
the «white swan» of this record, a moody masterpiece that is every bit the
worthy successor to ʽCautious Lipʼ; that the Buddy Holly cover
injects young punk venom into the old, somewhat limp rockabilly vein; and that,
ultimately, at the very end Debbie gets so sick and tired of all her male
counterparts that the only natural conclusion for the album is to tell them all
ʽJust Go Awayʼ — when you come to think of it, a hilariously
antithetical conclusion to ʽHanging On The Telephoneʼ. You mean to
say, all that effort wasn't really worth
it? I'm speechless...
Comparatively, I cannot say that Parallel Lines is more «consistent» than
the other Blondie albums — the one thing that it is, it is more consistently aggressive. Louder, prouder, more forceful
than the rest, with a small bunch of particularly flashy, irresistible
highlights, a special chapter in Blondie history, but not necessarily «that
one Blondie album you have to get if you only get one», because, well, just
don't be stupid and get all of them.
Major thumbs up,
of course, and a major turning point, but Blondie existed before it and would
go on to exist after it.
EAT TO THE BEAT (1979)
1) Dreaming; 2) The Hardest
Part; 3) Union City Blue; 4) Shayla; 5) Eat To The Beat; 6) Accidents Never
Happen; 7) Die Young Stay Pretty; 8) Slow Motion; 9) Atomic; 10) Sound-A-Sleep;
11) Victor; 12) Living In The Real World; 13*) Die Young Stay Pretty (live);
14*) Seven Rooms Of Gloom (live); 15*) Heroes (live); 16*) Ring Of Fire (live).
When Blondie entered the studio to record Parallel Lines, they were a bunch of
quirky, unpredictable proto-hipsters with relatively little knowledge of what
it takes to be a world class star. When one year later they returned there to
record the follow-up to Parallel Lines,
they were a throng of Pop Gods, with Debbie Harry as Sex Symbol Supreme and the
indisputable ruling Pop Queen of the Universe, whether they wanted to or not.
And knowledge and acceptance of this is all over Eat To The Beat, which is both good and bad news.
The good news is that there are songs here that
make me kowtow on an instinctive level. The opening track,
ʽDreamingʼ, and ʽUnion City Blueʼ is what I'd call «regal pop» — grand, epic scale pop
compositions, borrowing their attitude from Phil Spector, throwing in a pinch
of Europop, and tempering it all with classic, colorful, thick electric pop
riffs. This is what ABBA would sound like if the production on their records
owed more to rock'n'roll than to glossy «adult pop» (if you listen closely, you
will hear that Debbie's vocal moves on the bridge section of ʽDreamingʼ
are like 100% ABBA-esque in construction). More importantly, these are just
gorgeous, dazzling micro-pop-symphonies, whose combination of a steady
mid-fast-tempo with deep, bombastic production and a mighty, inspirational riff
(with Debbie often singing in unison with it) makes the songs soar to high
heaven — in terms of romance, this is no longer the purr of a teenage vixen,
more like the sensual amorous fantasies of a mature woman. "I'd build a
road in gold just to have some dreaming, dreaming is free" and
"power, passion, plays a double hand" are two of the most memorable
lines in pop music history (of course, only if you take them together with
their musical history).
This newly found «regality», which they could
do so well, goes hand in hand with «diversity»: if Parallel Lines did indeed put them on a sky-high pop pedestal, then
it is only natural that they should aim for their own version of The White Album now. Thus, in addition
to this «lush» pop-rock style, Eat To
The Beat has its Bowie-influenced funk-pop (ʽThe Hardest Partʼ),
more traditional (for Blondie, that is) New Wave-style pop (ʽAccidents
Never Happenʼ), reggae (ʽDie Young Stay Prettyʼ), more disco
(ʽAtomicʼ), some basic rock'n'roll (ʽLiving In The Real
Worldʼ), and even a waltzing lullaby (ʽSound-A-Sleepʼ). No heavy
metal or Andean music, but I guess cautious Mike Chapman just wouldn't let them
go for double album format.
Maybe he was right, too, because not all of this works. While Side A of the
album is every bit as strong as everything they made and maybe even stronger,
by the time we get to Side B they begin allowing themselves an occasional dud.
The usual culprit is ʽAtomicʼ, a rather blatant attempt to capitalize
on the success of ʽHeart Of Glassʼ by coming up with another disco hit
— but this time around, they make the big mistake of not placing Debbie Harry
at the center of it: instead, much of the song is instrumental, pinned to a
repetitive riff and running out of ideas long before it fades out at the 4:30
mark. It's not a «bad» riff as such, but the principal difference is that
ʽHeart Of Glassʼ was just a good, fun song that was able to benefit
from a disco cloak, whereas ʽAtomicʼ sounds like it was specially
pre-designed to provide basic entertainment for the dancefloor, and I have no
idea why they decided to go that way in the first place. Ironically, Robert
Fripp, who had earlier provided eerie guitar backing for ʽFade Away And
Radiateʼ, was once again invited to guest star on ʽAtomicʼ —
maybe they thought they could get him to recreate the effect he had on David
Bowie's ʽHeroesʼ, but they couldn't. (To compensate, they did play
ʽHeroesʼ with Robert Fripp at the Hammersmith Odeon concert in 1980,
a track that is included in the bonus section of the remastered CD edition of Eat To The Beat).
The worst song on the album, though, is not
ʽAtomicʼ, but rather ʽVictorʼ, a confused and confusing
screamfest that really sounds like it was quickly thrown together at the last
moment to fill up empty space — a practice that I could not accuse the band of
up to now. (The title track, while also containing elements of chaotic
hooliganry, is actually much more tight, and its humorous message, condensed in
the ʽEat To The Beatʼ title, is reminiscent of the band's young and
innocent days). This is the first sign to indicate that maybe things weren't really going all that well, and pointing to
the soon-to-come creative exhaustion. But on here, it's more like an
unfortunate accident, one of the few that does
happen, despite us being told to the contrary (ʽAccidents Never
Happenʼ, another fabulous pop rocker with Debbie at her most
femme-fatale-like).
In case you thought ʽDreamingʼ and
ʽUnion City Blueʼ were the only true highlights, I'd also like to
single out ʽSlow Motionʼ — a perfectly spritely tune, all pins and
needles from the rhythm section and the keyboards, and especially those
"slow motion!... stop!... take me back!..." jolts from the background
singers (including Liza Minnelli's sister Lorna Luft) that add such stark
conclusiveness and arrogance to the song. And I'd also like to single out
ʽThe Hardest Partʼ: wedged in between two of the lushest soundscapes
ever is this mean, lean, punkish, hard-rocking tune about robbing an armored
car (hey, a good enough return to the «musical situation» style of Plastic Letters — welcome back) that
goes from screechy, ugly funk verse to an even sterner disco chorus where Nigel
Harrison's bass appropriately sounds like a machine gun.
Ultimately, discounting the silly
ʽVictorʼ and the rather poor sequencing of Side B (by all means,
ʽSound-A-Sleepʼ should have been the last track, an appropriate wind-down after the disco heat of
ʽAtomicʼ), Eat To The Beat
is only a shade less consistent than Parallel
Lines, representing the band at the peak of its «mainstream commercial»
powers without compromising its playful and intelligent essence (well, maybe
ʽAtomicʼ does compromise it a little). It is also notable for being
one of the first, if not the first,
album where each song was accompanied by its own video — a costly, but curious
publicity act that is still fun to watch after all these years. Most importantly,
it is just another great lesson in how you can
pass through the grinder of the music industry and still end up with great
melodies and cool meanings. Major thumbs up, of course.
AUTOAMERICAN (1980)
1) Europa; 2) Live It Up; 3)
Here's Looking At You; 4) The Tide Is High; 5) Angels On The Balcony; 6) Go
Through It; 7) Do The Dark; 8) Rapture; 9) Faces; 10) T-Birds; 11) Walk Like
Me; 12) Follow Me; 13*) Call Me; 14*) Suzy & Jeffrey.
Despite selling even stronger than Eat To The Beat and yielding at least
one more iconic Blondie single in ʽRaptureʼ, the band's fifth album
was greeted rather coldly by the press — and, in retrospect, seems to have
acquired a rather suspicious reputation. Scan the average bunch of people's
reactions on the Internet and, even without hearing the album, you will put
together a clear picture: on Autoamerican,
Blondie try to bite off more than they can chew, going off in a million
different directions, but writing dull, bland songs in each one. The fun is
gone, replaced by pretense and ambition. This is not the Blondie we used to
know and like.
Indeed, it does seem as if something had
happened. Judgemental statements aside, Autoamerican
is a total downer of an album — in the place of exuberance, arrogance, bright
humor, and delayed-teenage happiness (some of which was still in evidence on Eat To The Beat) comes a record whose
brief moments of fun-fun-fun are so brief indeed, they almost seem like ironic
auto-send-ups in the overall context. They say sometimes that one of the
album's pervasive subjects is cars
(the title, the spoken bits in ʽEuropaʼ, ʽT-Birdsʼ, the
eating cars bit in ʽRaptureʼ), but that looks more like a coincidence
to me. What is really pervasive is an
overall sense of gloom; not panick or depression as such, more like a dark,
disturbing premonition of some hard times to come. If there is one title here
that is better suited for the choice of album title, it is ʽDo The
Darkʼ — much more telling than Autoamerican,
which really says nothing.
Looking at the record this way, as a sort of
«Blondie gets sick» signal, is much
better than just coming to it in search of another bunch of stellar pop tunes à la ʽDreamingʼ or
ʽOne Way Or Anotherʼ. Diversity, as such, has never been this band's
enemy: they were exploring different musical styles as early as in 1976, and if
there is a little more experimentation here than usual, why should that be a
problem? ʽEuropaʼ, the odd neo-classical instrumental that opens the
album, will never be deemed a self-standing masterpiece, but it isn't meant to
— it simply provides a suitably moody grand opening for the record. In the
short run, it was a miscalculation to place it right at the start: after
ʽHangin' On The Telephoneʼ and ʽDreamingʼ as classic upbeat
openings, people were certainly not prepared to encounter those morose,
slightly dissonant strings and that Pink Floydian guitar riff. But today, we are prepared.
The album's centerpiece is ʽRaptureʼ,
which we all know, of course, as (a) one of the first examples of rapping
recorded by a white artist and (b) that song about the man from Mars who keeps
on eating cars and when he's through with cars he's eating bars. What sometimes
escapes our attention is the inherent bitterness
in the song — no signs of delight or giddiness or happiness, and a lot of
mock-irony that actually overwhelms and downplays the absurdity of the rapped
lyrics. The song does not celebrate club life; its robotic pulsation and
somnambulant vocals play up its dehumanizing aspects rather than anything else.
ʽAtomicʼ — now that was a
happy disco song. ʽRaptureʼ is dark, creepy, and much closer in
spirit to ʽMidnight Ramblerʼ (come to think of it, the man from Mars
might just be a different incarnation of the midnight rambler); and when Debbie
seductively croons out "...in raaaaaptuuure..." at the end of the
sung part, she really truly sounds like an angel. The death angel, that is.
Speaking of angels, ʽAngels On The
Balconyʼ, written by Destri, may actually be the best song on the album —
another gloomy, smoky pop song that tries
to become more cheerful in the bridge section ("they can still see him
singing on the corner...") but fails. Empty theater, afterglow, cold
outside, fading memories, ghostly lowered voice, cold backing synthesizers,
more Bauhaus than Blondie, but with much more «natural» production. The
moderately fast tempo and powerful in-between-verse riff suggest that life is
still going on, but there's no getting away from past shadows and closet skeletons,
want it or not.
Even when they go retro-all-the-way on our
asses and toss off a light, 1920s-influenced vaudeville number (ʽHere's
Looking At Youʼ), catchy as heck and almost hilariously authentically
arranged, its mood and tone are still bitter (it's in the «drowning one's
disillusionment and personal grudges in a liquor glass» style of delivery).
And then there is the gloomy danceable ʽLive It Upʼ ("your old
lover's lying in the gutter"), the gloomy danceable ʽDo The
Darkʼ (actually, it is one of the happiest songs on the album — using its
darkness-evoking lyrics and snake-charming synth lines to titillate rather than
to spook), the midnight jazz balladry of ʽFacesʼ, all drenched in
some tragic nostalgia... need I continue?
Against this background, ʽThe Tide Is
Highʼ, a cover of an old ska tune by The Paragons (here given a far more
lush arrangement that almost turns it into a mariachi band tune), sticks out
like a sore thumb. Since the people still loved their Blondie when she was happy
much more than when she was feeling like shit, they had no problem pushing it
all the way up to No. 1 (and, perhaps, subconsciously they were aided by the
chorus line "I'm gonna be your number one" as well?), but it is not
at all indicative of the overall atmosphere of the record. It's just that they
needed a hit, and Mike Chapman obviously felt that the only surefire hit by
Blondie is a happy hit, so here it is. It's a jolly good cover, too, but these
days it feels a bit... slight, perhaps, against the general heavy weight of the
record.
On the whole, I would go as far as agreeing
that Autoamerican represents «the
beginning of the end». This is an evolved band, one that has already tasted its
best taste of happiness and success and is now embracing «post-maturity». This
gloomy style does not come to them as naturally as the giddy style of their
early records, but it isn't faked, either. The songwriting is kinda limp in
places (ʽWalk Like Meʼ, for instance, sounds like a lifeless shadow
of their once brashly arrogant approach), but more than half of the record is
still comprised of great tunes — also, if you get the reissued remastered
version, ʽCall Meʼ, the band's biggest hit single, is on there as
well, one of the grandest songs of the disco-rock era, though, like all such
specially commandeered songs (for the soundtrack of American Gigolo, in this case), it is rather faceless, though
undeniably catchy. In any case, unlike the original band's last album, Autoamerican, whether you like it or
not, is an integral and necessary-to-know part of the band's legacy.
Personally, I am quite partial to its disgruntled spirit, and have no problem
with a strong thumbs
up rating — it's not my
fault, and, come to think of it, it's not even their fault that somebody would categorically refuse to accept them
in any mode other than «power pop», which this record does not even try to be.
THE HUNTER (1982)
1) Orchid Club; 2) Island Of
Lost Souls; 3) Dragonfly; 4) For Your Eyes Only; 5) The Beast; 6) War Child; 7)
Little Caesar; 8) Danceway; 9) (Can I) Find The Right Words (To Say); 10)
English Boys; 11) The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game.
Blondie's last album (before the reunion)
continuously gets a very bad rap from fans and critics alike, and I am pretty
sure that a lot of this has to do with Debbie's wig on the front cover (yes,
please relax, that is not real hair,
she would'nt have had enough time to grow so much since the cover of Autoamerican) — everything about that
front cover screams Eighties, and then so does the music, and not altogether in
a good way, you understand.
Objectivity seems to be on the fans' and
critics' side, too: nobody wanted all that much to do the album, plagued as the
band was with all sorts of personal troubles (not the least of which were Chris
Stein's health problems), but they were still contractually obligated to get
one more record out to Chrysalis, so, almost over their dead bodies, they had
to get back to the studio, summon Mike Chapman to the rescue, and deliver
something as «contemporary» and «relevant» as that trashy collective sci-fi
look on the front sleeve.
On its own, The Hunter is indeed rather disastrous. Too many synthesizers, too
much modernistic production, too many moments of meandering mushiness weighted
against too few songwriting ideas. In the context of Blondie's usual output, it looks even worse — the
more you think about this being the same band that did ʽOne Way Or
Anotherʼ or ʽDreamingʼ just a few years ago, the easier that old
cliché about the fall of the once mighty springs to mind. However, in
the context of «Blondie's age curve» — the childhood of Blondie, the adolescence of Plastic
Letters, the glorious youth of Parallel
Lines, the ripe maturity of Eat To
The Beat, the woe-from-wit old age premonitions of Autoamerican — the last record logically corresponds to respectable
senility, with a pessimistic nudge to it, and that is exactly the kind of
expectation I have for it, and I am not at all being disappointed.
The
Hunter is a moody, dark, dense
album, with a bit of a «sonic jungle» feel to it, and a very natural one — you
can easily tell things were not well, and there are no songs here that would
try and mask this, presenting the band as something that they were not, at the
time. One possible exception is ʽIsland Of Lost Soulsʼ, a
superficially «happy» calypso dance tune that was released as a single,
because, you know, it's frickin' Blondie, they need a «happy» single for all the happy people out there. Never
mind that on the cover of the single they look just as gloomy and depressed as
on the cover of the album (and Debbie sports a different wig), the single has
to appeal to the average idiot dancer, whatever the problems. If you read
deeply into the lyrics, you will see that they represent a troubled state of
mind ("In Babylon / On the boulevard of broken dreams / My will power at
the lowest ebb..."), but that percussion and that friendly brass section
and the rambunctious whoop-whooping, that'll get you going anyway.
Outside of that, though, it is one picture of
nightmarish decadence or anti-utopian futurism after another. On ʽOrchid
Clubʼ, Debbie is cooing "where are you, where are you?" from
under a dense thicket of tribal percussion, church-organ-imitating
synthesizers, and groaning Fripp-style guitars; this is the first time we see
the band so deeply depressed.
ʽDragonflyʼ is a New Romantic-era epic rocker about some sort of
futuristic drag race, with some clever guitar interplay between Chris Stein and
Frank Infante as they impersonate the sci-fi racers, although the song is quite
clearly stretched way beyond rational limits. And ʽFor Your Eyes
Onlyʼ, following in the steps of Alice Cooper's ʽMan With The Golden
Gunʼ, joins the league of «Bond Themes Rejected for Being Too Scary for
the Average Idiot Viewer /Courtesy of Motion Picture Association's Opinion/» —
not that it is very scary or
anything, but its life-defying moody arrogance and lack of lyrical transparency
do make it a rather suspicious choice for inclusion in the Bond spectacle.
All these songs really have their moments, but
the two definite highlights on the album are ʽWarchildʼ and
ʽEnglish Boysʼ — autobiographical tunes that might have felt more at
home on any of Harry's solo albums, but ultimately, who cares? ʽEnglish
Boysʼ, a nostalgic mind trip back into Debbie's adolescence, is simple,
sweet, and tender, with a totally endearing chorus ("does it feel the same
to you?..." is Debbie at her most seductively sentimental), whereas
ʽWar Childʼ, pinned to a futuristic synth loop and electropop dance
groove, turns to anger and self-defense as its basic emotional undercurrent —
"I'm a war child, I'm a war baby / And that's the difference between you
and me", as performed by the 1945-born Debbie Harry, sounds as authentic
as it could have sounded in any type of heated argument between the protagonist
and her imaginary antagonists (including, as the lyrics unflinchingly suggest,
fans of the Khmer Rouge and «PLO lovers courting after the curfew» who «have
the West Bank blues» — oh, what is this, rightist sentiments in one of
America's most progressive bands? crucify 'em!).
Additionally, the album ends on a
moodier-than-moodiness-itself cover version of the Marvelettes' ʽThe
Hunter Gets Captured By The Gameʼ — as Blondie's final song for the next
two decades, I'd like, of course, to take it double-metaphorically, reflecting
not merely the imaginary story of a vamp falling in love with her victim, but
the whole story of Blondie, a band catapulted by fate into an unlikely
whirlwind of commercial success and public acclaim, and ultimately destroyed
by their very own fortune. Maybe they had that additional meaning, too, which
is why the song sounds so sad and poignant, clearly more important here to
Debbie than it ever was for the Marvelettes themselves, or Smokey Robinson, who
never dreamed about any such third layer of semantics when he wrote it.
Of course, there are throwaway songs here as
well, like ʽThe Beastʼ or ʽDancewayʼ, of which I cannot tell
you anything interesting, except that they, too, good or bad, are permeated
with a sense of dreariness, tiredness, and uncertainty of where to go from
here. This «dark gray» atmosphere, best correlated with some ugly late
autumnal panorama of dirty skies and sickly slushy rain, is, I think, what
turns people off this record even more than its lack of quality melodies. But
in reality this musical ugliness has every reason to exist alongside the
colorful rainbows of Blondie's past — in fact, has a somewhat perversely thrilling reason to exist that-a-way —
and there are still enough quality melodies here to guarantee a low, but honest
thumbs up
from me, implying that the original Blondie were so talented that they never
really made a bad record per se, they
just made a final one that seriously smells of antidepressants. And do not even
try judging it objectively before you hit your midlife crisis or something like
that.
NO EXIT (1999)
1) Screaming Skin; 2) Forgive
And Forget; 3) Maria; 4) No Exit; 5) Double Take; 6) Nothing Is Real But The
Girl; 7) Boom Boom In The Zoom Zoom Room; 8) Night Wind Sent; 9) Under The Gun;
10) Out In The Streets; 11) Happy Dog; 12) The Dream's Lost On Me; 13) Divine;
14) Dig Up The Conjo.
I must confess that, to my ears, the worst
thing about post-reunion Blondie is not the quality of the music (inconsistent,
but can be gotten used to), not the gloss of the production (they'd turned into
a «gloss-oriented» band as early as 1978), not the questionability of the
reunion itself (in an age that has essentially stopped producing musical revolutions,
veteran reunions should be valued every bit as high as aspiring «new» bands —
and, actually, they are) — the
saddest thing is the deterioration of Debbie Harry's voice, which is just...
well, sad.
I mean, we all age, and we all have to come to
terms with the fact that only singers like Tom Waits gain in awesomeness with
aging, but some of us age worse than others, and some of us adjust to aging worse than others. In
those 17 years that separate The Hunter
from No Exit, as one can actually
witness in more detail by scrutinizing Debbie's solo career, her voice has
sunk, losing a very important part of its higher range and acquiring a late-age
«breathiness» — which certainly does not prevent the singer from singing on
key, or even singing reasonably well, but a huge chunk of the original appeal
was in the sexiness, and this loss makes it painfully obvious that here, in
1999, is a performer struggling to be
«sexy», where in the past it all came so naturally. An aging diva throwing a
pointless challenge to the unyielding hand of time.
Again, this is a problem that could be
circumvented if they tried to make the music suitably different (Marianne
Faithfull's Broken English
immediately comes to mind under such circumstances) — but nooooo, they are Blondie, they are the supreme royalty of 1970s pop
music and they want it to stay that way, besides, they never really fell apart,
they just took a long break, right? They want to be picking up from exactly
where they left with The Hunter, no,
with Autoamerican, because The Hunter was a closing-gap throwaway
piece. They want to make a true Blondie album. Loud, arrogant, stylistically
diverse, only technically-formally modernized for the new age, but otherwise
true to the band's essence.
In many ways, they are still qualified. Not all
of the old guys are aboard for the continuation of the ride (Nigel Harrison and
Frank Infante either refused to take part or were not involved at all, and even
tried to sue the others for using the «Blondie» tag — honestly, though, I don't
think it makes much sense to sue Debbie Harry for the use of the word
«Blondie», not until she dyes her hair pitch black), but Chris Stein, Jim
Destri, and Clem Burke are, and they can still play all their instruments as
good as new, and they can still write songs in different styles, covering the
usual eclectic grounds: straightforward old school pop rock, mostly, but
extending their reach to areas both older than that (lounge jazz and even
country-pop) and younger than that (some adult contemporary, some hip-hop).
Yet I have never been properly fascinated by
ʽMariaʼ, the big hit single from the album that had the power to
throw the band into the spotlight once again — just how many comebacks from
veteran bands are accompanied with a #1 single? — but while the melody is
undoubtedly catchy and infectious, the «joyful» atmosphere of the song is
completely spoiled for me by Debbie's «motherly» tone. The tune's proper
intention might simply be to describe the visionary beauty of an unnamed
protagonist, but whenever the singer inquires "don't you wanna take her?
wanna make her all your own?", I cannot help picturing Debbie Harry as the
imposing, self-confident matron in a whorehouse, offering us some appetizing
love for sale. Where this «sexiness» thing worked like a charm circa 1976-78,
this time there is some sort of awful mismatch between voice, lyrics, and
melody that harshly stings the brain on an instinctive level. Good pop song,
sure, but it simply should be sung by somebody else.
At this point, I'd say Debbie comes off much better when she is singing sad
songs rather than happy ones — which is why I much prefer the second single,
ʽNothing Is Real But The Girlʼ. It is just as old-school-catchy as
ʽMariaʼ, every single bit, but it has a deeply melancholic spirit instead,
with vocal and instrumental melody alike targeted at «ice» rather than «fire»,
and in this case, the changes in Debbie's voice actually work to her advantage.
Likewise, she's still great when singing songs of defiance and self-confidence
— the country waltz ʽThe Dream's Lost On Meʼ, as much as I am always
skeptical of country waltzes, actually turns out to be the record's most
arrogant, gravity-defying number: the lady's "I come out shootin' when
trouble comes knockin', I greet bad news by sending it walkin'" sounds
totally believable, and if you thought that the last thing you'd ever want to
see was a Debbie Harry in a Nashville mood, you might rethink that thought upon
hearing the song — regular, conformist, conventional country it ain't.
Some of the «foxy» songs are so cool anyway
that the voice factor does not bother me too much — ʽHappy Dogʼ, for
instance, a swaggery syncopated blues-rocker with awesome triple-guitar
interplay (swampy slide tone + dry distorted «woman tone» + funky rhythm = pure
awesomeness indeed!), feels a bit uneasy when she sings "I wanna wag for
you baby", and the Stooges reference ("I wanna be your dog") is
way too obvious, but the musical arrangement is just so juicy that I always
want to look past the voice, to where those guitars are battling each other
(way to go, Chris Stein and session guy Paul Carbonara). On the other hand,
when she invites you to go ʽBoom Boom In The Zoom Zoom Roomʼ (the
lounge jazz song), the results are once again... nervous, to put it mildly.
But anyway, personal impressions aside, a more
objective judgement would say that the music on No Exit, as a rule, is quite good. Without pretending to any
particular «innovations» (except on the title track, where they try to fuse
Toccata In D Minor with nu-metal and a rap part from Coolio — sounds as bizarre
as it reads, yes, but it might get your attention), the tracks, one by one,
deliver instrumental and vocal hooks, moods, and textures. And this is not
really a «Blondie In The 1990s» album — it's just a Blonide album, period. A
few of the tracks are fillerish, and the cover of the Shangri-La's ʽOut In
The Streetsʼ (a song they'd originally recorded as early as 1975, so this
is hyper-nostalgia catching up) is also unnecessary, and the grotesque ska
pumping of ʽScreaming Skinʼ lasts about two minutes longer than it
should, but leave it to Blondie to end the album on a fascinating mix of tribal
music, pop melodies, and Eastern psychedelia and make you suspect that this
band still «matters», after all these years (ʽDig Up The Conjoʼ — an
unsuspected tribute to ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ, perhaps?).
In fact, I would go as far as state that
Harry's, Stein's, and Destri's songwriting talents, on the whole, have managed
to retain all of their original sharpness — a rare case for a comeback, and the
thumbs up
rating is only slightly marred by the fact that, well, they are not young any
more, yet they still make music predominantly targeted at a young audience, or,
perhaps, at their old audience who want to feel themselves as young as the
band members do. Nothing illegitimate or immoral about that, just a tiny whiff
of routine fakery that I am sure we can all live with.
LIVE (1999)
1) Dreaming; 2) Hanging On The
Telephone; 3) Screaming Skin; 4) Atomic; 5) Forgive And Forget; 6) The Tide Is
High; 7) Shayla; 8) Sunday Girl; 9) Maria; 10) Call Me; 11) Under The Gun; 12)
Rapture; 13) Rip Her To Shreds; 14) X Offender; 15) No Exit; 16) Heart Of
Glass; 17*) One Way Or Another.
While in their prime, Blondie never released a
live album — the «cult of the live album», so sternly supported on the
prog-rock and hard-rock circuits, hardly existed at all among the punk and New
Wave outfits of the late 1970s (not that there weren't exceptions, and for some
bands, like Talking Heads, the art of live performance was every bit as
essential to their reputation as their studio output). Bootlegs and scattered
semi-official archival releases show that this was rather imprudent — Blondie could be quite an awesome live band,
benefiting both from the instrumental skills of its members (Clem Burke's
drumming, for instance) and their creativity onstage, experimenting with their
own material as well as covering other great artists; not always successfully —
their take on Bowie's ʽHeroesʼ, for instance, bordered on the
dreadful — but when it comes to live playing, the «win some lose some»
principle is always preferable to «play it safe and sound», and they practiced
it regularly.
In the light of this, the band's decision to
finally come out with their first proper live album (and live DVD as well) in
the middle of their surprising comeback has to be qualified as a «cash-in».
With ʽMariaʼ riding on top of the charts, sales for No Exit showing a positive balance, and
the band's live shows receiving a warm welcome from fans — why not a live album
to prop up the comeback and keep the news flowing? They wouldn't exactly be
rushing in to write up and record a new bunch of original songs, anyway, so a
live LP would be just fine.
Five out of sixteen songs on the recorded
setlist are from No Exit,
demonstrating that the album was more than just an excuse for the old guys and
girls to get together — however, most fans would naturally be more interested
in whether they still have it as far as the golden oldies are concerned. As you
can easily see from the tracklist, they offer a rather predictable, but
representative retrospective, covering all the records except for The Hunter (understandable) and Plastic
Letters (inexcusable — not even ʽDenis Denisʼ? come on now, that was a hit, wasn't it?), but usually
concentrating on commercially successful radio standards.
Equally predictably, I would have no problems
whatsoever with these performances — they sound sufficiently tight and energetic
to ward off technical criticism — if it were not for the unfortunate demise of
Debbie Harry's voice as a magical device of the Viagra variety, and its rebirth
as a dull chunk of homeopathic placebo; meaning that every now and then, you
are likely to come across some dryly admiring statement like «Ms. Harry's
voice, contrary to malicious rumors, is in surprisingly fine form». She is
certainly more alive than dead, and she does not hit many bum notes, or flub
the lyrics, or mix up the moods — it's just that there is no more magic in that
voice, period. So much for drinking, smoking, and hanging out with those types
from Chic.
In stark contrast with their struggling
vocalist, the band's instrumentalists perform their required push-ups
admirably. Mr. Burke is beyond reproach — just listen to his drumming alone saving
ʽScreaming Skinʼ from perishing under its own five-and-a-half-minute
repetitiveness, as his rolls and fills become the most individualistic and
expressive part of the performance. And yes,
that fabulous coda to ʽHeart Of Glassʼ is retained essentially
intact, plus there is an extra coda where he gets to be Keith Moon for about
thirty seconds (and I am being serious — had he really wanted to, he could
have become the most authentic Keith Moon impersonator in the world, he can get
that close to invoking Moonie's
spirit). Paul Carbonara, standing in for Frank Infante on lead guitar,
slavishly reproduces all the original parts with total success, and session
player Leigh Foxx on bass gets a chance to shine on ʽAtomicʼ, which
is here stripped of its disco gloss and made to sound more like a
trance-inducing psychedelic dance extravaganza (which it might have been from the very start if not for the unfortunate
circumstance of being recorded at the height of the disco era). Meanwhile, the
«angry» songs like ʽRip Her To Shredsʼ receive heavier arrangements,
with thicker, more distorted guitar tones that you'd probably expect in the
post-grunge / alt-rock era — quite fine with me when you're talking live
performance.
Ultimately, the further you can get away from
the idea of «Blondie» as a backing band for the seductive pop charm of Debbie
Harry and the nearer you can move towards the idea of «Blondie» as a musical
band, period, the more prepared you
will be to enjoy Live as a bona fide
reflection of a tight, crunchy, sweaty musical show. It does have the benefit
of finer production than any archival release from the old days, as well as the
benefit of a strong, mostly filler-free setlist (although I'd much rather hear
them do ʽNothing Is Real But The Girlʼ and ʽHappy Dogʼ than
ʽForgive And Forgetʼ and ʽNo Exitʼ), and do not be too
offput by my putting down Debbie's vocal transformation — in the end, it's not that bad to have your attention
transferred from front-lady to back-gentlemen. Who knows, they may have been waiting for this to happen for the previous 25
years, so why wouldn't we want to oblige them?
THE CURSE OF BLONDIE (2003)
1) Shakedown; 2) Good Boys; 3)
Undone; 4) Golden Rod; 5) Rules For Living; 6) Background Melody; 7) Magic
(Asadoya Yunta); 8) End To End; 9) Hello Joe; 10) The Tingler; 11) Last One In
The World; 12) Diamond Bridge; 13) Desire Brings Me Back; 14) Songs Of Love.
Everybody knows what the real «curse of
Blondie» is, and has always been: being mistaken for «Blondie», a male-oriented
post-Marilyn, pre-Madonna pop factory churning out Viagra substitutes à la ʽHeart Of Glassʼ.
Small wonder, then, that in the 21st century the curse gets stronger than ever
— everybody needs that kind of «Blondie» when she's in her twenties or even
thirties, but now that she is pushing sixty, you'd almost be getting into some
sort of Harold And Maude situation,
and not that there's anything wrong with that,
but... well... you know...
...anyway, the title of the album seems to
reflect irony, but it wouldn't hurt if they'd added, somewhere in minuscule
letters at least, «getting over...»,
because this is exactly what they are trying to do here. The only improvement
of this album over No Exit is that,
while some of the songs still reflect the old Blondie style, The Curse Of Blondie no longer toys
with sexual imagery at all: there is nothing like ʽMariaʼ or
ʽHappy Dogʼ or, thank God, ʽBoom Boom In The Zoom Zoom
Roomʼ on this record. The lyrical and emotional tones are far more serious
and, crucially, far more in line with the age-induced changes in Debbie's
voice: no cognitive dissonance for me this time while undergoing the influence
of her vocal timbre.
The flaws of this record, unfortunately, are
very much in your face just as well. First and foremost, it is overlong: simply
put, they did not have enough songs to fill up the space of 60 minutes, yet,
for some reason, decided to do it anyway and stretched most of the compositions
out to totally unreasonable lengths. Basically, this is a set of 14
mediocre-to-good three-minute pop songs that seem to overrate themselves: 60 - (14×3)
means that for about 18 minutes you will, most probably, be bored stiff out of
your mind. Second, there is way too
much emphasis on «sounding contemporary»: the lead (and only) single from the
album, ʽGood Boysʼ, was strictly in the electronic dance-pop vein,
and there are quite a bit more «commercial» throwaways like these on the album.
Whatever the situation, Blondie has always
been a guitar-based band, and trying to cross over thus late in their career
will almost inevitably lead to embarrassments — and it does, even despite the
fact that ʽGood Boysʼ has a catchy chorus.
And yet, despite the fact that it is so uneven,
The Curse Of Blondie still contains
a few melodic surprises and harmonic joys — too bad that you have to filter
them out, but let me try and name a few, as a small aid. ʽGolden Rodʼ
is a fine guitar pop song, on which they remember the old wailing Fripp/Belew
lead tones, introduce a little bit of sped-up droning into the melody to make
the atmosphere more scary, throw in a Patti Smith-like mid-section (Debbie even
sounds like Patti when she is singing "my reaction, what's gonna happen,
gets no help from me"), and complete the whole thing with lyrics that
turn it into a thinly veiled anti-drug statement (or at least, that's how all
these lines like "mother says it's just a weed" read out to me).
Later on, they do a fine job saddling Japanese
pop influences on ʽMagicʼ — actually, an electric arrangement of a
traditional Okinawan folk song (ʽAsadoya Yuntaʼ) where a
multi-tracked Debbie sounds well in line with a high-pitched female Japanese
choir, and is also well aided by psychedelic backward-recorded guitar solos:
nothing earth-shaking, but a little tender innocence well integrated with a
little bit of studio magic can sometimes go a long way. Perhaps it is not «true
Blondie», but in 2003, it is certainly truer Blondie than ʽMariaʼ —
besides, «true Blondie» has always been about reaching out into the unknown, so
Okinawan folk music ties in pretty well into that category.
The band shows that they can still bulge those
muscles, too, with a hard rock anthem that carries plenty of grit and
desperation — ʽLast One In The Worldʼ — unfortunately, marred again
with piss-poor production, flattening out the guitars and cluttering the mix
with unnecessary extra layers of percussion and keyboards, but essentially a
good song all the same. Finally, ʽSongs Of Loveʼ, though drastically
overlong, is a wonderfully moody folk-jazzy conclusion, essentially in the
«late night» vein, but with jangling guitars and pulsating «astral» electronic
keyboards instead of the usual piano-and-bass accompaniment associated with
such songs. Although Debbie does not have the proper voice for this (we'd
rather need a Billie Holiday here, or at least some of the other old school
jazz divas), she still does what she can, and sounds more convincing as a romantic
crooner than a sexy feline, forever stuck in kittenhood.
Much of the rest is hit-and-miss, as subjective
as these judgements are: for instance, I remain completely unmoved by
ʽHello Joeʼ, the band's allegedly heartfelt tribute to their
long-term New York pal Joey Ramone — not only does the song's genre (a light acoustic
pop-rocker) have no relation whatsoever to the Ramones, but even the song per
se is melodically way too simplistic for the usual Blondie standards, as if
they thought that a lyrical reference to hey-ho-let's-go would suffice in
making the song work. More seriously and generally, the rhythm guitar parts on
the album suck more often than not (overprocessed, overcompressed, the usual
stuff), and the keyboards too often sound like a novice, frosted out after
twenty years of repose and frantically trying to «catch up» with the hottest
trends.
On the whole, though, still a thumbs up
here rather than the dustbin treatment: I like the attitude, the maturity, the
still-not-too-bad songwriting, the way they sometimes (alas, not too often) succeed
in overcoming their disadvantages in the new age, and just the basic fact that
they have managed to avoid turning into complete self-parodies — one true sign
of a great band, actually (retaining self-control and adequacy even after the
cutting edge has long since been passed). And if somebody trimmed this whole
thing down to reasonable length, re-mixed and re-produced most of the songs,
and erased all their «intentional modernity» impulses, then it might have been
a very strong thumbs up, for all I know.
As it is — who knows, maybe that curse of
Blondie does exist, after all, and is
way different from the way I have described it? For instance: «the curse of
Blondie is that they will never be able to release a fully satisfactory record
in the 21st century»... nah, too obvious. «The curse of Blondie is that they
will never be able to free themselves from the illusion of being obliged to
their fans to release superficially commercial singles, instead of just being
true to their musical hearts». Too pretentious. «The curse of Blondie is...
what kind of a stupid band calls itself Blondie, anyway?» Okay, never mind.
Curtains, please.
PANIC OF GIRLS (2011)
1) D-Day; 2) What I Heard; 3)
Mother; 4) The End The End; 5) Girlie Girlie; 6) Love Doesn't Frighten Me; 7)
Words In My Mouth; 8) Sunday Smile; 9) Wipe Off My Sweat; 10) Le Bleu; 11)
China Shoes.
Another chapter in the Book of the Curse of
Blondie, and a confusing one — I am still not quite sure whether Panic Of Girls can be called a proper
Blondie record. It comes together with a major loss in the Blondie camp: Jim
Destri, who left the revamped band soon after The Curse Of Blondie due to personal problems. In his place, we
have a totally new, young, trendy, flashy keyboard player (even his name, Matt
Katz-Bohen, implies flashy-trendy), so seriously determined to put his own
stamp on this band and bring them up to date in the digital age that I would be
surprised it did not come to blows with Chris Stein, had I not known that Stein
actually approves of the transition
just as much as Debbie does.
More importantly, look at the credits: only one song out of eleven is credited
exclusively to real Blondie members (Harry / Stein), and, not surprisingly, the
album-closing ʽChina Shoesʼ is the only song that does sound like real Blondie — a dark,
distorted ballad with that fabulous mix of playfulness and tragedy that used to
grace tracks like ʽAngels On The Balconyʼ, though taken here at a
slower, more thoughtful tempo and tied to a grumbly-grungy rhythm track that
would have made Lou Reed proud.
Most of the other songs, however, try too hard to give Blondie that new look —
and not a very good look: Katz-Bohen and producer Jeff Saltzman are helping
them to turn into a fashionable, glitzy outfit, relying on stereotypical
dance-pop electronics to keep the crowds interested. Sometimes, when the
approach is a compromise between the old and the new, the results are not that
bad: ʽMotherʼ, co-written by Debbie with early producer Kato
Khandwala, has a heart-tugging chorus that overrides all the silly electronics
— the song is really a poignant «anti-nostalgic» look at the singer's past
("in the patent leather life I was foolish you were right...") and
its frantic tempo and tenseness corresponds perfectly well to the singer's
desperation at having missed something important and unrecoverable.
On the other hand, when they go all the way, the results can be drastic
— as is the case with ʽWipe Off My Sweatʼ, which is simply the worst
song ever released under the Blondie moniker. Trying to imagine that it is just
a tongue-in-cheek parody on neo-Latin dance schlock (everything from J-Lo to
Shakira) does not alleviate the pain — the synthesized rumba rhythms are
vomit-worthy and Debbie sounds like a clinical idiot throughout (rather a
normal thing for the garbage pop of today, but up to now, this band has always
managed to avoid garbage — why stick their noses right in the middle of the
trash heap now?). Other Katz-Bohen
creations, like ʽWhat I Heardʼ, are not as directly annoying,
perhaps, but I do not need my Blondie sounding like Katy Perry any more than I
need them sounding like Shakira.
They do try to conform to lots of things at the same time, so that the reactions are always
different: for instance, they cover a recent Beirut tune (ʽSunday
Smileʼ), which you will like if you like Beirut, but happen to have an
alergy to Zach Condon's bleating voice — not only is the spirit of the brassy
original preserved fairly well, but it suddenly reveals an eerie resemblance to
the old spirit of ʽThe Tide Is Highʼ (talk about generational links
and all that). The cooperation with songwriter / producer / universal artist
Barb Morrison results in ʽWords In My Mouthʼ, one of the more
guitar-oriented songs on the album, hard to categorize (blues-rock rhythm
guitar + adult contemporary synths + aggressive character-assassinating lyrics
= ?), though also somewhat hard to memorize due to the lack of outright hooks.
And then there's Debbie's fascination with French pop (ʽLe Bleuʼ) —
her singing in French has not much improved since the days of ʽDenis
Denisʼ, but it does come as a major relief after her singing in Spanish on
ʽWipe Off My Sweatʼ.
All in all, this is not an «awful» record as
such — inconsistent, yes, and pandering way
too much to mainstream pop standards of 2011 (which is way more artistically
suicidal than pandering to mainstream pop standards of 1978-1979, as far as my
opinion is concerned), but not uninteresting either from a culturological point
of view (it is instructive to observe and analyze the many ways in which they
try to chameleonize themselves) or from a Blondie-centered point of view,
because songs like ʽMotherʼ, ʽWords In My Mouthʼ, and even
that obscure old Sophia George cover (ʽGirlie Girlieʼ), dug out from
the depths of 1985, are still very much Debbie Harry-esque. So, tread with
care, but do not ignore completely — they do not yet hit pop bottom here.
GHOSTS OF DOWNLOAD (2014)
1) Sugar On The Side; 2) Rave;
3) A Rose By Any Name; 4) Winter; 5) I Want To Drag You Around; 6) I Screwed
Up; 7) Relax; 8) Take Me In The Night; 9) Make A Way; 10) Mile High; 11)
Euphoria; 12) Take It Back; 13) Backroom; 14*) Put Some Color On You; 15*)
Can't Stop Wanting; 16*) Prism.
The release of this album was accompanied by a
most strange marketing move: it was issued only
as an integral part of a 2-CD package, collectively called Blondie 4(0) Ever and containing, in addition to the main disc with
13 new songs, a Greatest Hits Deluxe
Redux disc with new studio re-recordings of 11 «classic» songs, «to
commemorate the band's 40th anniversary», so it was stated in press releases.
Weird way to go about it, if you ask me, but then marketing does often work in
weird ways — who am I, next to an
experienced marketologist, to measure the degree of weirdness to which the
average buyer's mind can be professionally attuned?
Anyway, we will not be concentrating on these
re-recordings: based on brief snippets that I have heard, they are all
technically very close to the originals, Debbie's aged voice being the main
differentiating factor, and I assume they just did this out of sheer fun, to
check whether they still could or could not recreate their old schtick in a
bookish manner. And still another possible factor is the effect of contrast — because
with Ghosts Of Download, they have
now moved away as far from the old schtick as is humanly possible. The only
link is that they are still a pop
ensemble (as opposed to, say, Napalm Death or Tokyo String Quartet), on a
mission to churn out catchy pop songs. Everything else is different.
Logically continuing the line that was barely
hinted at on The Curse and had very
much solidified with Panic, Ghosts Of Download is almost completely
dependent on electronics; in genrist terms, it is one of those «electropop»
records (I believe that «techno» is now considered uncool) that trade live
instrumentation for programmed loops and beats because it shows how modern,
trendy, and advanced you are (well, at least it used to — I am not that sure
about the situation as of 2014). Not surprisingly, upon first listen I hated it
with all the instinctive passion I could muster: everything sounded tasteless,
stupid, and annoying to the max.
As the first nasty impressions clear away,
though, I have to admit that the songs here are not really «bad» as such. The
lyrics, the basic melodic hooks, the relative levels of complexity and
diversity — a lot of work, and perhaps even a little inspiration, must have
certainly been involved in the construction of the album. At the very least, it
is incomparably more interesting than, say, Britney Spears' Femme Fatale, just as an example off
the top of my head — even though it is rather a sad state of affairs when you
find yourself inclined to draw a comparison between Blondie and Britney Spears
in the first place.
Again, most of the songs feature outside
songwriters, although either Harry or Stein or, usually, both of them, share
the credits with outsiders. There are also plenty of guest appearances by
trendy hip-hop, R&B, and LGBT people (Los Rakas, Miss Guy, Beth Ditto —
thank you, Ms. Harrie, for introducing us to so many here-today-gone-tomorrow
personalities!), which sometimes makes sense (ʽA Rose By Any Nameʼ,
featuring Beth Ditto, is a pro-gay anthem) and sometimes does not (the Spanish
rap on ʽI Screwed Upʼ feels quite out of place to me), but, in any
case, they are not there to make or not to make sense, but to establish a link
between the older and the newer generations. Do they? Perhaps they do — the only problem is, in 50 years people
will still be returning to those Blondie albums, but whether they will still be
interested in Los Rakas seems much more questionable to me.
Only one tune on the entire record feels
completely «authentic» to me: ʽWinterʼ, relatively free of the
electronic coating, is a mid-tempo introspective rocker with Harrie's vocals
mixed properly upfront and moving gracefully up the scale from verse to bridge
to chorus as she picks on some poor soul for being too cold. It was not a
single, it did not get any airplay, it does not feature any guest stars or
particularly noticeable gimmicks, but to me, it feels like the absolute best
that Ghosts Of Download have to
offer me.
Still, I have no intentions of badmouthing the
rest of the songs: I just don't feel like talking about them. Many of them do
have the «Blondie sneer» alright, and after two or three listens, most of the
choruses get properly stuck in your head — but I do not feel the ability to
connect to these not-too-inventive electronic grooves. Perhaps they have been
regretting, through all these years, about having disbanded way too early in
the Eighties to give the world a proper synth-pop album, and now seek that
extra profit, by way of the «Eighties' nostalgia wave» that seems to have swept
over the population and still not dissipated? If so, how wonderful it is that
they had missed that window — first, reunion albums are always easier to ignore
than non-reunion albums, second, at least Ghosts
has the added benefits of improved technology and a more complexly layered
approach to integrating electronics with real instruments. For instance,
ʽI Want To Drag You Aroundʼ has some sitars interacting with the
shit-synths — probably synthesized as well, but if they went synth-pop in the
Eighties, there would hardly have been a sitar break on this song at all.
Their retro kick still occasionally flares up
in the strangest places: for instance, there is a long, multi-part version of
the old hit ʽRelaxʼ (Frankie Goes To Hollywood!) — more famous for
its controversial, free-all-inhibitions music video, if I remember right, than
anything else. But musically, the song is so trivial and repetitive (I'd even
say «manipulative» if there was anything to manipulate) that the purpose of
reviving it escapes me. Unless, of course, it is accompanied by a video of
Chris Stein and Matt Katz-Bohen engaging in simulated anal sex, while a
leather-clad Harrie puts the whip to both ("relax, don't do it, when you
wanna come" is a pretty good tagline for such a special occasion).
On the whole, not even the hooks will prevent
me from a thumbs
down here. Fact is, I have always loved my Blondie for their moods —
punkish and arrogant, sarcastically sexy, romantically gloomy, whatever — and Ghosts Of Download have too much of a
plastic coating to reveal those moods to me. They are there, but you have to «tolerate» many elements of the
production in order to enjoy them properly — elements that add nothing of
significance and are really only there so that the band members can point to
them and state, «see, we are not old farts, and we have some documental
evidence for that». But really, Debbie and Chris, you do not need to take lessons from Lady Gaga to prove that you're still
savvy about the 21st century. There's plenty of better teachers around, honest.
Provided you need teachers in the first place.
BON JOVI (1984)
1) Runaway; 2) Roulette; 3)
She Don't Know Me; 4) Shot Through The Heart; 5) Love Lies; 6) Breakout; 7)
Burning For Love; 8) Come Back; 9) Get Ready.
We often tend to define the different genres of
popular music through both form and meaning — for instance, The Clash play
speedy, distorted, simplistic electric guitar riffs and sing about social injustice and rebellion, so they're «punks»;
Black Sabbath play more complex, lower-pitched riffs and sing about Satan, so they're «metal». Every once in a while,
though, along comes such a drastic incongruity that all rules and assumptions
have to be revised, or even rejected. Sometimes this is done intentionally, as
an understanding «mockery» of established tradition; sometimes it is simply done, because it just seems like the
times were calling for it.
Few bands in the history of mankind, I think,
have from the very beginning put so much of everything on «fake» as Bon Jovi — and did it with such
a natural ease at that. Normally, when we hear «pop metal» and remember The Big
Hair Decade, we would think of all those bands that carried on the tradition of
shocking and grossing out their audiences: Twisted Sister, Mötley
Crüe, Poison, etc. Much, if not most, of the music that they produced
sucked, but at least it kind of agreed with the image — «break all rules»,
«fuck everything that moves», that sort of thing. In comparison, Bon Jovi
continuously produced music whose lyrical and emotional content was completely tame: unimaginative romantic
love songs, mostly, with just a wee bit of animal sexual passion thrown in
occasionally (on their debut album, ʽGet Readyʼ is the only song that
explicitly deals with humping — placed right at the end, too, as if to say,
«okay, getting a little tired with all that schmaltzy stuff, let's get down to
some real business for a change»).
Tame, yes, but still retaining all the
superficial «metal» trappings, starting from the band's visual image and ending
with the musical arrangements — booming drums, grumbly distorted riffs, gang
choruses, screechy high-pitched solos, the works. Keyboardist David Bryan is
very much at the center of the sound (no small coincidence that the album opens
with his nasty, primitive synthesizer clunking), but the guitar duo of Jon Bon
Jovi (rhythm) and Richie Sambora (lead) never let the listener forget that this
is Metal here, or, at least, Heavy Rock. In fact, they do not want you to think
of them as soft-hearted pussies so much that there isn't even a proper «power
ballad» anywhere on the album: all the songs are taken at mid- or fast tempos,
and the sentimentality is restricted to Jon's (and sometimes to backup) vocals
and to David's keyboards — they can wail and weep all they want, but the
guitars will still sound harsh and brutal.
This seems like a rather jarring stylistic
contradiction, but on a certain level, it works. For instance, people who had
an instinctive attraction to the new «heavy» sounds, but were repelled by the
«shock» image of the usual glam rockers, would probably see Bon Jovi as a
guiding light — you can headbang to this music all you want, but you don't have
to cuss, and you don't have to be afraid of embarrassing your God-fearing
friends from the PMRC. And it works the other way round, too — if you come to Bon Jovi, merely out of scientific
curiosity, expecting to hear the most godawful shite ever recorded, this lack
of power ballads, for one thing, will be an almost pleasant surprise.
Still, even with all the pleasant surprises,
this is some of the most godawful
shite ever recorded, and the reason is simple enough: TEH DRAMA! You can almost
literally feel the veins and arteries all over the well-exercised body of Jon
Bon Jovi puff up and explode from being overworked as he piles up tons upon
tons of sympathy for the protagonists of his songs (usually himself, but
sometimes outsiders, too — ʽRunawayʼ is the ʽShe's Leaving
Homeʼ of the hair metal world, and the poor thing has become addicted to
steroids since 1967). The general focus is not on how to make these primitive,
if sometimes catchy, pop melodies more interesting, but on how to convey the
agony and the suffering — because, you see, he's ʽBurning For Loveʼ
as he calls upon her to ʽCome Backʼ, but ʽLove Liesʼ that
ʽShe Don't Know Meʼ, so he's ʽShot Through The Heartʼ in an
always-losing game of Russian ʽRouletteʼ. Figuratively speaking, of
course. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely
coincidental. (Not that there's much danger of anything here bearing
resemblance to any activity by a real person, of course).
This is why, even acknowledging the pop hooks
of the band's choruses, I find them ineffective. You can find yourself out on
the street, distractedly humming "ooooooh, she's a little runaway" if
you are not too careful, but it's a crude, blunt, shallow chorus, devoid of any
subtlety or musical point of interest, relying on the power of the
"oooooh" and the stop-and-start bit of the chorus to win over the
hearts of undemanding fans. Oh, and the speed, of course — the speed at which
these choruses are delivered are an integral part of the album's success. And
then there's more drama in group vocalizations (ʽBreakoutʼ), gang
shouts ("SHOT! SHOT! SHOT!"), and, of course, Sambora's ecstatic
solos all over the place.
Interestingly enough, the album's only (still
rather minor) hit was ʽShe Don't Know Meʼ — the only song in Bon
Jovi's discography not written or
co-written by a member of Bon Jovi; I guess their record label, at this point,
did not yet trust Jon and Ritchie's hitmaking capacities, relying on outside
songwriters. Indeed, the song is the least «metal» thing on the album and the
closest thing here to a power ballad (though still taken at a much faster tempo
for that) — more accurately, this is the closest Jon Bon Jovi comes to sounding
as if he'd been having a crying fit on the album, always a big winner for all
them lady fans.
Everything else follows pretty much the same
formula — and, to be fair, we must state that Bon Jovi pretty much invented
that formula, or at least became its absolute dominators: the «Keep It Simple,
Serious» formula. In other words, their music is similar to Van Halen, but
composition- and realisation-wise, it is much simpler, and attitude-wise, it
takes itself far more seriously, with not an ounce of humor or sarcasm in
sight. An atrocious formula, to be sure, but there's also something perversely
attractive in its atrociousness, at least for the first time around — enough to
suggest at least giving a single spin to ʽRouletteʼ or ʽShot
Through The Heartʼ, probably the two best examples of Bon Jovi's «heavy
metal broken heart» schtick on here. Despite the massive reputation of Slippery When Wet, it really doesn't get
much better in the future — in fact, there wouldn't be a future Bon Jovi album where they'd play so fast on the
average, and speedy Bon Jovi, warts and all, is always preferable to slow Bon
Jovi, no exceptions.
7800° FAHRENHEIT (1985)
1) In And Out Of Love; 2)
Price Of Love; 3) Only Lonely; 4) King Of The Mountain; 5) Silent Night; 6)
Tokyo Road; 7) The Hardest Part Is The Night; 8) Always Run To You; 9) (I Don't
Wanna Fall) To The Fire; 10) Secret Dreams.
IN AND OUT OF LOVE!
IN AND OUT OF LOVE!
IN AND OUT OF LOVE!
IN AND OUT OF LOVE!
This here is, like, one of the most blatant
uses of the word «love» as a metonymical euphemism for «snatch», which is
itself a euphemism for... oh, never mind. Anyway, it's sort of reassuring to
know that on their second album, the boys from Bon Jovi are feeling more and
more at home with the next stage of sexual revolution (i. e. the infamous
Eighties progression from «fuck your partner in the name of peace, love, and
understanding» to «fuck everything that moves in the name of GOING WILD!»). If
the first song on the first album (ʽRunawayʼ) was a Serious Social
Statement on parent-offspring relationships, then the first song on the second
album has the protagonist getting to business with the little runaway in question
— "she's here to make my night complete". From ʽShe's Leaving
Homeʼ to ʽStray Cat Bluesʼ in a jiffy.
The bad news is that Bon Jovi as a dick-waving
band are just about as unimpressive as they are in their «serious message
carrier» capacity. ʽIn And Out Of Loveʼ never evolves much beyond its
opening lines, or even simply beyond the five syllables of its title, a dumb
hook so blatantly obvious that I cannot even understand where they nicked it
from — probably most other songwriters were just too ashamed to make something that simple into the be-all-end-all for
a pop song (and even record buyers were sort of bashful about taking it to the
top of the charts). And even so, it is arguably the best song on the album.
In a bout of bad news, 7800° Fahrenheit adds power ballads to the Bon Jovi setlist:
ʽSilent Nightʼ, thoroughly soaked in power chords and keyboards,
slows down the tempo and shifts the balance from «muscle» to «sentimentality»:
an anthem to lost love that puts forward Jon Bon Jovi's vocals as the major
point of attraction. While we are on it, I do
have to admit that I'd rather have Jon's «street-wise», hushed, slightly croaky
troubadour pipes than the mock-operatic posturing of power-pop-metal singers
like Glenn Hughes or Dave Coverdale — meaning that even a song like
ʽSilent Nightʼ would rather be described as «pointless» and «boring»
rather than «utterly disgusting» and «intolerable». And, for that matter, I
find Richie Sambora's guitar tone and approach to the construction of the solo
on that song somewhat interesting — not altogether predictable as far as «power
solos» go. But none of that justifies the very fact that, whatever «integrity»
Bon Jovi had with their first album, with ʽSilent Nightʼ they have
compromised it, once and for all — and now there is no turning back.
Besides ʽSilent Nightʼ, «muscular
sentimentality» also ruins ʽOnly Lonelyʼ, ʽThe Hardest Part Is
The Nightʼ, and ʽSecret Dreamsʼ, even though their tempos are
quicker and the I'm-the-loneliest-guy-in-the-world vocals are not so totally
upstaging everything else — not that there's much of anything else, just the
same uninteresting riffs and predictable bluesy solos. Of the other tracks,
ʽKing Of The Mountainʼ and ʽTokyo Roadʼ are the only ones
worth some mention — ʽTokyo Roadʼ is at least unusual in its
selection of a quote from a Japanese folk song for the introduction, while
ʽKing Of The Mountainʼ is so ridiculously bulgy and sludgy that it
stands out for that very reason, with all of its heavily accentuated beats. But
yet again, «standing out» does not necessarily make a good song.
According to reports, the band itself was
dissatisfied with the final results, and used that dissatisfaction as a
pretext to break up with its original producer Lance Quinn. Other than a
heavier dependence on keyboards, though, I do not hear that much crucial difference between this style and Slippery When Wet — why this album was
a relative flop where its successor would be a mega-million-seller remains a
bit of a mystery to me. Perhaps it was due to the general deterioration of
public taste that reached its apogee in 1986. Or perhaps it was due to the use
of the talk box. Yeah, that must be it, it's all about the talk box. A little
pig grunting on a hard rock track can work wonders — just ask Peter Frampton. Thumbs down,
by the way.
SLIPPERY WHEN WET (1986)
1) Let It Rock; 2) You Give
Love A Bad Name; 3) Livin' On A Prayer; 4) Social Disease; 5) Wanted Dead Or
Alive; 6) Raise Your Hands; 7) Without Love; 8) I'd Die For You; 9) Never Say
Goodbye; 10) Wild In The Streets.
There is one hilarious discrepancy between
ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ and its accompanying video which, I think, more
or less summarizes all you need to know about Bon Jovi. The lyrics and the
«aural autmosphere» of the song reveal it as a dumbed-down, trivialized take on
Springsteen: here's Tommy who works on the docks, there's Gina who works at the
diner, times are tough, but they got each other and that's a fact, and
eventually we disentangle ourselves from the scary grip of the grunting talkbox
and make the transition to the optimistic, hope-inspiring chorus: musical
medication for the weary souls of the working class, what's not to like?
But then we take a look at the video and...
what the heck? It's a video about Bon Jovi, the band, rehearsing their
flying-over-the-stage routines and then carrying them out in the presence of an
ecstatic stadium audience. What exactly does that have to do with Tommy and Gina? Answer: nothing, and there's
no reason it ever should, because the song is not about Tommy and Gina, it is
about excess, escapism, and adrenaline. The bassline makes you want to dance,
the talkbox makes you want to pull scary faces, and the chorus... the chorus is
like Beethoven's friggin' ʽOde To Joyʼ, well, sharing the same
spiritual function, I mean. It also has the word «prayer» in it, which would
probably appeal to all the religious members of the audience (a lesson that
would soon be learned by Madonna and God knows who else).
Still, the lyrics are important — Jon Bon Jovi
sends out a clear signal that he is here for all the dock workers and all the
diner servers in America (and the world as a whole), and certainly not for any
sort of pretentious elitist snobs who value vague ideas like «complexity» and
«class» over a very concrete and easily understandable idea like «instantaneous
mass appeal». Joining forces with promising young producer Bruce Fairbairn and
promising young corporate songwriter Desmond Child (both of whom would soon
become walking symbols of the glam metal era), Bon Jovi trim some of the
excessively electronic fat from Fahrenheit,
put some tighter screws on the hooks, and come out with an album that,
according to popular statistics, has so far managed to sell about 28 million
copies — we could add «because every dock worker and every diner server in the
world got at least one», but that would be a cheap insult to two respectable
professions that are really far more useful and noble than the profession of a
glam metal artist.
The amazing commercial success of the record
was not, I think, exclusively due to the «magic» of the songwriting and the
production — in a large part, it was due to the fact that by 1986, the world
was ready for Bon Jovi in a way in which it was not yet ready for Bon Jovi two
years, or even one year earlier. And there were lots of things that had
gradually prepared the world for it — not the least of them Bruce Springsteen
himself, whose catchy, glossy rock bombast on Born In The U.S.A. must have been no less a major inspiration for
Bon Jovi than the hedonistic pop metal of Van Halen and friends. The main point
being — even if we distance ourselves from issues of «taste», «class», or
«intelligence», it's not as if we see the birth
of a new formula here on Slippery When
Wet: we merely witness its acceptance by the world at large.
The music is now neatly divided between power
rockers and power ballads, the former praising the material joys of life and
the latter reminding of spiritual pleasures — curiously enough, «tits and ass»
being more or less equally split here between the material and the spiritual
half (this would soon be remedied on New
Jersey, their most quintessential «glam» recording of all time). That said,
there is really very little structural or compositional difference here between
the rockers and the ballads — other than tempos and slight tweaks in Sambora's
guitar tones. And why should there be, if even the two biggest hits of the
album are based on the exact same bass line? ʽYou Give Love A Bad
Nameʼ (itself a re-write of ʽShot Through The Heartʼ from the
first album) is really almost the same song as ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ,
except it doesn't have the talkbox effect, which, I guess, makes it inferior.
I must admit that «catchiness» applies to the
absolute majority of these choruses. In records like these, what matters is
whether you can look back at the song titles and reconstruct the melodies from
them in your head, and yes I can: "nothing would mean nothing WITHOUT
LOVE!" (double negative alert!), "NEVER SAY GOODBYE! NEVER SAY
GOODBAYIEEAY!" (this one was like a blueprint for 99% of Aerosmith power
ballads, wasn't it?), "we were WILD IN THE STREETS! WILD, WILD, WILD IN
THE STREETS!" — hey, I get most of it, and I can totally see why
100,000,000 Bon Jovi fans couldn't be wrong. I think that only the glam-cowboy
anthem ʽWanted Dead Or Aliveʼ falls foul of this formula, and should
by all means be qualified as unsuccessful filler in this context: too slow and
too distant from the true goals of the album (not to mention that it has a
little too much syncopation in it — not a good thing, people might start
spilling too much of their beers from those plastic cups).
To be fair, though, I was able to do that with Fahrenheit as well, so there is no
reason why this record should be rated any higher in comparison; besides, we
are long past 1986 and its values, even if those values have not managed to
find a better defender than Bon Jovi ever since, so I cannot exclude that the
album will still be listened to a hundred years from now, at least by those who
find its friendly, hedonistic, excessive vibe «retrospectively refreshing» or
something like that. The gut appeal of Slippery
When Wet is undeniable, and there is no need to fight it if you properly understand
the place of this music among other types of music — the problem is that most
people simply refuse to understand.
My thumbs down will not make any serious
difference here — it will merely indicate that in this particular case, I think
that the «guilty pleasure» aspects of this album do not excuse its
embarrassingly manipulative nature, nor do they compensate for the very poor
ratio of musical complexity to anthemic pretense. That said, I also have to
admit that the moment where the talkbox guitar kicks in on ʽLivin' On A
Prayerʼ is one of the most psychologically efficient moments in the
history of hard rock — too bad they had to go and spoil it with one more
idiotic anthemic chorus, instead of simply keeping on grossing out the little
old ladies and scaring the shit out of little children.
NEW JERSEY (1988)
1) Lay Your Hands On Me; 2)
Bad Medicine; 3) Born To Be My Baby; 4) Living In Sin; 5) Blood On Blood; 6)
Homebound Train; 7) Wild Is The Wind; 8) Ride Cowboy Ride; 9) Stick To Your
Guns; 10) I'll Be There For You; 11) 99 In The Shade; 12) Love For Sale.
Scrutinizing the million shades of awful is
kind of an ungrateful affair, but such is our trade, and therefore, I have to
state that the concept of «Bon Jovi as decadent superstars» somehow feels more
forgivable to me than the concept of «Bon Jovi vying for decadent
superstardom». There's just something hilarious about seeing these guys work
out of the understanding that they are
the biggest band in the world (and have to uphold that image), rather than just
diligently push forward in the faint, but prophetic hope of gaining that
title. More than once, I have seen the word «confidence» spring up in the
discussion of New Jersey — and
indeed, this is Bon Jovi at their most self-confident, hairiest, glammiest,
narcissistic ever. It's just that the
album has no talkbox, but in every other respect it outbellies its predecessor.
I mean, you can hardly get any more arrogant
than naming your album New Jersey
(naturally, to remind your fair country that you come from the same place as
The Boss, and, incidentally, would not mind claiming the same title), and you
can hardly get more blasphemous than calling your first song ʽLay Your
Hands On Meʼ, as if you imagined yourself to be... well, you know. With
overdubbed crowd noises, overwhelming drums, martial vocal harmonies — the
intro to the song states the fact that Bon Jovi are now very, very, very big and they like it that way.
Throw in a church organ-imitating synthesizer and a clearly gospel chorus, and
what you get is a double metaphor: evangelical clichés as a substitute
for a love serenade, and a love serenade as a substitute for letting you know
that Bon Jovi are now bigger than Jesus Christ. (Well, at least that hair sure beats the Son of God in most of
the cultural depictions.)
Then there's ʽBad Medicineʼ — written
according to the usual hit formula, but arguably with far more swagger than any
of their previous hits, as the boys feel completely loose and totally
self-confident, as if the results of clinical analysis had just come in and it
were now medically confirmed that the collective length of their virility
organs could girdle the Taj Mahal three times over, and not even Mötley
Crüe could beat this achievement. It isn't even a particularly smutty
song, lyrics-wise — it just rains so much testosterone that the effect becomes
comical, especially at the end, when Jon «urges the band on» with one last
chorus: "I'm not done! One more time! WITH FEELIN'!" I'd like to hate
this song for the usual melodically primitive, intellectually offensive piece
of glam-pop tripe that it is, but I'm just a bit too busy laughing to do that.
In fact, there is only one song on this album
that is seriously offensive — its main offense being in taking itself too
seriously. ʽBlood On Bloodʼ, a brawny sentimental reminiscence on Bon
Jovi's childhood friendships, once again intrudes on Springsteen territory, as
all the band members take their cues directly from the corresponding members of
the E Street Band, but interpret them according to their own limited musical
vision, which places loudness, pathos, and emotional simplicity above
everything else. I can see myself getting entertained by Bon Jovi in an uncomfortable
dream — I could see myself getting inspired over a passionate epic anthem by
Bon Jovi only in the worst of nightmares.
Fortunately, the next song is ʽHomebound
Trainʼ, which takes us from Springsteen into the tenets of Southern
rock-cum-pop-metal, toying around with a bit of me-and-the-devil imagery, but
ultimately just a vehicle for some head-spinning sleazy-funky jamming, with a
fairly long instrumental section that may or may not have been the inspiration
for Aerosmith's ʽLove In An Elevatorʼ (the two songs are quite
similar in tone, although ʽTrainʼ is faster and more aggressive in
spirit). Together with ʽBad Medicineʼ, ʽ99 In The Shadeʼ,
and the closing acoustic ditty ʽLove For Saleʼ (allegedly recorded at
a drunken party, but with some pretty nifty acoustic solos played out for a
drunk guitarist), this all forms the «cock rock» basis for New Jersey, around which you see sprinkled the occasional bad
social statement like ʽBlood On Bloodʼ and a bunch of by now
inescapable power ballads like ʽI'll Be There For Youʼ that you have
to be ready for in any situation — nobody wants to deliberately lower his odds
of getting laid, after all.
In brief, this is that one perfect juncture in
Bon Jovi's career when they had already «gone pro», but did not yet feel the
need or pressure to «mature»: New Jersey
is mostly about having fun, and succeeds even better simply because by now, the
band has no nervous obligation to «prove itself» (apart from demonstrating that
their success was not a fluke, which is not that difficult if you keep Desmond
Child and Bruce Fairbairn by your side). There is still no talk, nor will there
ever be, of the band putting out a genuinely «good» record, but it only made me
puke once or twice, and that's certainly something to remember.
KEEP THE FAITH (1992)
1) I Believe; 2) Keep The
Faith; 3) I'll Sleep When I'm Dead; 4) In These Arms; 5) Bed Of Roses; 6) If I
Was Your Mother; 7) Dry Country; 8) Woman In Love; 9) Fear; 10) I Want You; 11)
Blame It On The Love Of Rock'n'Roll; 12) Little Bit Of Soul; 13*) Save A Prayer.
One thing you gotta give to these guys: they
sure know how to adapt to the changing times. Or, perhaps, somebody knew how to adapt them to the changing times. The majority
of hair metal bands could come and go and leave no trace whatsoever, but Bon
Jovi were the major hostages of the
system par excellence: the biggest band in the world, or something close to
that, does not just come and go at will. They had to reinvent themselves and come out on top as usual, or
something would be revealed as wrong with the business model.
In other words, in this era of triumphant
grunge and «alt-rock» values, as rock'n'roll music once again seemed to be
entering a «serious» age, Bon Jovi had to get serious, too. That entire
"bad medicine is what I need!" schtick had to go, although there are
still some traces of it here, in the form of the oh-so-flat barroom rocker
ʽBlame It On The Love Of Rock'n'Rollʼ, for instance. Not that this
was any sort of problem for Jon Bon Jovi, who had always, more than anything in
the world, be Mr. Bono Springsteen the Third, and now it's as if Father Time
himself was knocking on his door: "Two minutes to Big Social Statement
Ball, Mr. Bon Jovi!"
The change of producer was accidental: they
wanted Bruce Fairbairn on the job again, but he was busy producing guess what?
— Aerosmith's Get A Grip, of course!
— and so they had to settle for the next best thing: Bob Rock, who helped
Mötley Crüe become a household name with Dr. Feelgood. The overall production values or sound type have not
changed much, actually, except for one obvious thing — the album is much more bass-heavy, both in the guitar
and keyboards department, symbolically reflecting an increase in Depth. As for
the songs, the good old «power ballad» is not going anywhere, what with it
already having had Depth from the beginning; but the «cock rocker» is
thoroughly replaced by the «heart rocker».
I would guess that anybody who first saw the
track listing on the new Bon Jovi album would have to go, «oh no, they're Christian rockers now!» But in fact,
calling the songs ʽI Believeʼ and ʽKeep The Faithʼ was just
a cozy trick to attract a part of the religious audience — lyrically, it is
never made clear what it is exactly that we have to believe in, and what sort of
faith should we keep: both tunes are just vague-and-vapid «spiritual anthems»
of the «life-is-shit-but-we-will-pull-through» variety. There's also a song
with the word «soul» in the title, and if you get the bonus-tracked edition,
the last song is called ʽSave A Prayerʼ. Well — only natural, now
that you have probably made love to every single young female on the planet, to
save a little prayer for desert, and make us all think about our souls, if only
for a little bit.
Now here comes the strange part: many, if not
most, of these songs are fairly catchy — no matter how much more pomp they
pump, the vocal hooks are still there. ʽI Believeʼ is a slavish
imitation of U2, and Jon's Bono-influenced wail is wailed at just the right
climactic moment in just the right intonation to convince a hundred
thousand-strong stadium to sing along. ʽKeep The Faithʼ, the band's
first experience with that new, trendy, funk-poppy, Madchester-style sound that
keeps your body so busy, also does a good job of gradually climbing up towards
the explosion. And I will even put down the grin for a moment and admit that
ʽFearʼ is a good song — notwithstanding the open theft of the main
chorus riff from Michael Jackson's ʽBeat Itʼ, its paranoid buildup
has something really scary about it (it doesn't hurt, either, that the song is
not as mercilessly stretched out as everything else on here, clocking in at
3:05 like a good lad).
Even so, they manage to overdo it every now and
then. The most obvious case is ʽDry Countyʼ, a song squeezed out to
Epic Proportions because Epic Points need to be justified by Epic Length. How
do you know which one is a record's major artistic statement? — by the size, of
course. Building up, falling down, stopping for breath, kicking the shit out of
that drumstand, unwinding the most frickin' ecstatic guitar solo of your life —
all of this going hand in hand with lyrics about the failure of The American
Dream, be it for one person in particular or for all mankind. Are you game
enough to join Jon and Richie in their eulogy for idealism? I'm not. The whole
experience is way too artificial and calculated, and who really needs it if you
can have Neil Young's ʽRockin' In The Free Worldʼ instead of this
combination of gloss with primitivism?
Yet on the whole, despite all the predictably
calculated aspects and despite the rather irritating length, Keep The Faith is probably the last Bon
Jovi album that is consistently listenable. The songs keep their «tough»
musculature and frequently rock, the choruses are well thought out, and you
could trim these 70 minutes down to a reasonable 40 if you pruned out some of
the power ballads (ʽBed Of Rosesʼ is just awful, and would be just as
awful even if it did not contain the
hilariously-unintentionally-blasphemous line "I wanna be just as close as
your holy ghost is") and removed some of the verses and/or bridges from
others. And yes, ʽDry Countyʼ would have to go — not because it is
the worst song on the album, but simply out of principle. Quod licet Iovi, not licet Bon Jovi, as the Romans said, which freely
translates into English as: «What the hell is a nine-minute song doing on a Bon
Jovi record, of all possible places?»
THESE DAYS (1995)
1) Hey God; 2) Something For
The Pain; 3) This Ain't A Love Song; 4) These Days; 5) Lie To Me; 6) Damned; 7)
My Guitar Lies Bleeding In My Arms; 8) (It's Hard) Letting You Go; 9) Hearts
Breaking Even; 10) Something To Believe In; 11) If That's What It Takes; 12)
Diamond Ring; 13) All I Want Is Everything; 14) Bitter Wine.
By the mid-1990s, they took it way too far. At least Keep The Faith still retained some
features typical of a rock'n'roll album — These
Days took its formula of ecstatic power ballads and foam-at-the-mouth
social anthems to such a hardcore conclusion that even Richie Sambora's
electric guitar sounds like a superfluous addition, used mainly to control the
high volume levels rather than melodic potential and rock'n'roll energy. The
goddamn thing is long, too — fourteen tracks that go on forever, one
demonstrative stab of one's own heart after another until you just can't help
but wonder, how much soul can one heart contain, physically?
Every song on this album is soaked in sentimentality
of the most blatant order: not even ol' Bruce himself probably could cram that
much in 73 minutes. The band did say that they were under heavy influence from
old soul and R&B records at the time, but stylistically, they sound as if
they were probably just trading influences between themselves and Aerosmith: if
Permanent Vacation sounded totally
modelled on Slippery When Wet, then These Days takes its lessons from Get A Grip — ʽThis Ain't A Love
Songʼ and ʽHearts Breaking Evenʼ in particular sound like carbon
copies of ʽCrazyʼ and ʽCryingʼ, even borrowing some of
Tyler's vocal moves, let alone the total similarity in arrangement and mood.
Consequently, all of this sounds well tested, unimaginative, and supported
only by the sheer physical strength of these guys, as if making music were in
the same department as pumping iron.
As always, I make no claim about tracks like ʽHey
Godʼ or ʽSomething To Believe Inʼ lacking sincerity. Sincerity
is so much in the eye of the beholder that it is useless to speculate on how
much Jon Bon Jovi was really worried
about all the evil in the world, or on whether it is at all ethical for a millionnaire
rock star to sing songs about poverty and social injustice (it is hardly a
coincidence though, I guess, that both These
Days and Get A Grip begin with
such a song: first and foremost, the world must be shown that they really care). It is not the lack of
sincerity that bothers me — it is the «overcooking» of these products, whose
instrumental melodies never stray away from tattered alt-rock clichés,
but whose vocal execution taxes Jon's voice to an extent where he cannot pay
these taxes, yet still makes us believe that he can; check out his attempt to
«gurgle» and stay in key at the same
time on one of the "somethiiiiiing... to believe in!" of the
«climactic» chorus — anything goes to
show us just how much he cares. Who gives a damn if you're a poor songwriter?
Just beat your working class breast like nobody else.
On the other flank of the love front, the band
is now trying out an additional formula: stripped-down acoustic balladry with
Jon in weeping troubadour mode (ʽLetting You Goʼ, ʽDiamond
Ringʼ). Its effect is exactly the same, though: the songs could pass for
inoffensive, unimpressive filler if not for the DRAMA in the singer's voice
that immediately converts them into unlistenable crap. Maybe somebody like Willie
Nelson could uncover the true potential of ʽLetting You Goʼ, but this
rendition carries an instantly lethal overdose of sweetness. Just as a song
with a title as pretentious as ʽMy Guitar Lies Bleeding In My Armsʼ
(a monster hybrid of ʽWhile My Guitar Gently Weepsʼ and ʽLove
Lies Bleeding In My Handsʼ, I suppose) carries an instantly lethal
overdose of TRAGEDY GLOOM DESPERATION KILL YOURSELF NOW NOW NOW. Also, "I
can't write a love song the way I feel today", he says, but then
apparently today turns into tomorrow, because the very next song is a love song. Oh well.
Occasional catchiness is the only redeeming
factor for this wreck of a record, but this time it is not enough to get it off
the hook — These Days pretends to
more seriousness than any other preceding Bon Jovi album without any musical
development whatsoever. Give me a straight, no-frills, no-pretense song like
ʽBad Medicineʼ over ʽSomething For The Painʼ any time of
day: as I already said, New Jersey
had the optimal balance between ambition and potential that these guys could
ever establish for themselves, and since then it's all been downhill, and These Days is the first Bon Jovi album
where I cannot fix myself a positive outlook even on one single song. Totally thumbs down
to a band that should have never outlived its big hair, really.
CRUSH (2000)
1) It's My Life; 2) Say It
Isn't So; 3) Thank You For Loving Me; 4) Two Story Town; 5) Next 100 Years; 6)
Just Older; 7) Mystery Train; 8) Save The World; 9) Captain Crash & The
Beauty Queen From Mars; 10) She's Mystery; 11) I Got The Girl; 12) One Wild
Night; 13*) I Could Make A Living Out Of Lovin' You.
Thirty-eight is not an age to joke about — for
some people, the nostalgic pull is stronger than ever around that particular
time, and Crush is the first Bon
Jovi album to ride the nostalgia vibe real seriously. Textual, musical, and
atmospheric references to past idols abound here — the Beatles, Bowie, James
Brown, and, of course, the young Bon Jovi themselves: ʽIt's My Lifeʼ
opens the record with unmistakeable references to ʽLivin' On A
Prayerʼ — in the reference to "Tommy and Gina", and in The
Return Of The Son Of The Talkbox. On the whole, for the first time in his life,
Jon seems to be looking backwards in his career rather than forward. Could this
help to improve the music, considering how it had mostly been awful all the
time he had been looking forward? Will the Beatles help?..
Not bloody likely. Given that «Bon Jovi» is
really a disease, the best we can do about it is to keep it relatively harmless
— sometimes even slightly enjoyable, as in a nice light warm fever when we are
looking for an excuse to not get out of bed. From that point of view, Crush alternates between sickly
convalescence, when the mind is no longer delirious but still too weak to
pursue a serious course of action, and occasional painful relapses — whenever,
for example, the band strikes up yet another «knight-in-shining-armor»-type
power ballad (I am still trying to figure out which one makes for more
efficient torture — ʽThank You For Loving Meʼ or ʽSave The
Worldʼ; current bets are on the latter, if only for the atrocious lyrical
metaphors: "I wasn't born a rich man / I ain't got no pedigree / The sweat
on this old collar / That's my Ph.D.").
But there are some interesting lines of
experimentation. The album's most ambitious undertaking is ʽNext 100
Yearsʼ, an epic anthem with grand harmonies à la ʽHey
Judeʼ and swooping psychedelic orchestration that also apes the Fab Four
circa 1967 (a few string lines are lifted almost directly from ʽI Am The
Walrusʼ). Although the main part of the song is rather boring, the instrumental
coda, especially when the tempo is accelerated and Sambora steps in with a
harsh, but melodic solo, merging the borders between orchestral art-pop and
hard rock, for a few minutes I manage to almost forget about what band it is
that I am listening to. At the very least, ʽNext 100 Yearsʼ is miles
above any overtly sentimental power pop ballad they ever did.
Another «kinda fun» track is ʽCaptain
Crash & The Beauty Queen From Marsʼ, the band's tribute to the classic
era of glam rock whose title by itself, as you can see, is immediately
associated with Elton John and David Bowie at the same time. Nothing
particularly inspiring about the generic midtempo rock melody of the song, but
its nostalgic flair is surprisingly free of irritants — even the allusive line
about "dressed up just like Ziggy but he couldn't play guitar" is
funny, especially if you take it to be self-referential. And if I am not
mistaken, ʽI Got The Girlʼ is an intentional attempt to write (and
even sing!) a song in the style of Tom Petty's ʽAmerican Girlʼ or the
like, and if you ask me, it's a big relief to hear it bounce and rock like that
after the first verse has just threatened your life with the perspectives of
yet another power ballad. In other
words, if retrograde nostalgia results in unpredictable surprises, so be it.
That said, three decent songs are not enough to
make up for a good album — which is still being dragged down, not just by the
ballads, but also by stuff like ʽIt's My Lifeʼ (where the talkbox
sounds stupid rather than scary, and the chorus is even more pedestrian than
the one in ʽPrayerʼ) and the neo-country-rock of ʽMystery
Trainʼ (no relation to the Elvis classic). At least, with all this
nostalgic flavor, they had the good sense to end the record with a throwback to
the good old days of totally dumb hair metal — ʽOne Wild Nightʼ is
just the kind of song that goes perfectly well hand in hand with lion manes,
freaky outfits, and flying over the stage with golden sparks rattling off the
sides of your guitar. So, generally speaking, Crush is an improvement over These
Days — a little less pretense, a little more surprise, maybe showing a
little more maturity and sensibility to the band, but the tasteless parts and
the boring parts stay as tasteless and boring as they'd ever been. Hey, God
bless nostalgia in the children of the 1960s and early 1970s — at least it
shows how growing up on the Beatles and David Bowie was healthier for the
spirit than growing up on Bon Jovi.
ONE WILD NIGHT: LIVE 1985-2001 (2001)
1) It's My Life; 2) Livin' On
A Prayer; 3) You Give Love A Bad Name; 4) Keep The Faith; 5) Someday I'll Be
Saturday Night; 6) Rockin' In The Free World; 7) Something To Believe In; 8)
Wanted Dead Or Alive; 9) Runaway; 10) In And Out Of Love; 11) I Don't Like
Mondays; 12) Just Older; 13) Something For The Pain; 14) Bad Medicine; 15) One
Wild Night.
It is very hard to decide whether a Bon Jovi
live album would be better thought of as a single performance from a single
show (or at least a bunch of shows from the same tour), or as a sprawling
retrospective like this one, with performances drawn from 1985, before they
even matured into major stars; 1995-96 (the height of the «rebranding» era);
and the most recent tour in support of Crush.
Normally, tight and compact works best for live performance, but only when the
band in question is tight and compact, and can boast a fabulous live sound;
with Bon Jovi, chances of their ever producing a Live At Leeds have always been negative at best.
As it happens, though, it really does not
matter: Bon Jovi have always been a
rather boring band when plopped on stage. Sure they had the looks, and the
hair, and wings to fly (sometimes almost literally so), but they never truly
gave any of their songs any additional life on stage, beyond maybe an extended
intro or two (these days, for instance, they always start off ʽLivin' On A
Prayerʼ with an actual simulation of a «musical prayer», which may last
almost as long as the song itself — not here, fortunately, where there is just
a little bit of atmospheric talkbox fun before the entire band kicks in). This
is actually quite normal for a «pop» band — which they were despite all the
«rock» trappings — and if one does not demand radical stage reinventions from
Paul McCartney, why should one do so with Bon Jovi?
The problem being, of course, that Bon Jovi
play Bon Jovi songs. Mostly — sometimes, when they play non-Bon Jovi songs, you
wish they wouldn't: Neil Young's ʽRockin' In The Free Worldʼ loses
all of its tragic flavor when stripped of Neil Young's voice and Neil Young's
guitar, in the place of which we have Bon Jovi choral harmonies and
hair-metallic Samborisms — melodic all right, but without any individual style.
From the same 1995 tour, they also include a duet with Bob Geldof on ʽI
Don't Like Mondaysʼ — nice song, sure enough, but why would the world need
a Bon Jovi version? It's essentially a vocal-driven musical number, to which
Jon cannot add anything that is not already present in Geldof's vocal timbre.
It goes without saying that they could have done much worse (for instance,
chosen an Osmonds song to cover), but these particular examples are totally
uninspiring.
As for the originals, it's competence throughout
and brilliance nowhere in sight. The talkbox sounds terrific on ʽLivin' On
A Prayerʼ, blown into with even more versatility than in the studio
(considering that this version is from 2000, I guess you can't go wrong with
more than 15 years of experience), but the vocals are consistently weaker — not
out of tune or anything, just sort of feeble; with all due respect, Jon has
always been more of a looker than a singer, and although in the studio he can
usually work hard enough to get that «perfect take» or close to it, live you
really have to see him to fall in love with him, if you're the falling-in-love
kind: Mr. Tom Jones he ain't. Just compare the studio and live versions of
ʽKeep The Faithʼ for proof.
The good news, and the only reason why the
record will not be getting a thumbs down from me, is that they intentionally
avoid allmost of their power ballads — how this happened, I don't know, but
there's no ʽI'll Be There For Youʼ, no ʽBed Of Rosesʼ,
nothing. They must have performed them, but they aren't here: the album relies
almost exclusively upon «rocking» material. This is sort of an uncommercial
decision, and if it was undertaken in order to make way for the retrospective
approach and make more space for old renditions of ʽRunawayʼ and
ʽIn And Out Of Loveʼ, so much the better. Still, the album as a whole
— and any other live Bon Jovi album — may really only be recommended to people
who probably do not read these reviews.
And, although this really has nothing to do
with the music, what's up with the incongruent title? Is this One Wild Night or Live 1985-2001? Or is
this a subtle metaphorical point — that the entire time from 1985 to 2001 has,
for this particular band, been like «one wild night»? If so, it's not as if the
metaphor were seriously substantiated by these performances, whose level of
«wildness» often leaves a lot to be desired. These guys aren't cavemen by no
means — they are very much a product of the technological era.
BOUNCE (2002)
1) Undivided; 2) Everyday; 3)
The Distance; 4) Joey; 5) Misunderstood; 6) All About Lovin' You; 7) Hook Me
Up; 8) Right Side Of Wrong; 9) Love Me Back To Life; 10) You Had Me From Hello;
11) Bounce; 12) Open All Night.
After the «crush», comes the «bounce»... if we
were talking predators, I guess the two should have been turned around, but
first, Bon Jovi are no predators, and second, Bounce is supposed to deal with the issue of «bouncing back» from
9/11. Since the music business logically supposed that the American people were
now in more need of spiritual guidance from established artists than ever
before, there was no way Bon Jovi could not
write their country an album about it — after all, Bruce Springsteen did, and
even Neil Young did, even being from a different country and all, and I suppose
Billy Joel would have done one, too, had he still been interested in writing
pop songs rather than recasting himself as a 21st century reincarnation of
Chopin.
In all honesty, 9/11 was a pretty clumsy
pretext for writing topical anthems — perhaps because so many people rushed to
use it for inspiration, and, as it often happens in such cases, most, if not
all, of the results felt flat, or, at least, have not outlived their momentum
(anybody still remember Paul McCartney's ʽFreedomʼ? Even ʽGive
Ireland Back To The Irishʼ had more lasting value...). The Bon Jovi album
is hardly an exception, but on the whole, Bounce
has more or less the same feel as Crush
— not knowing its context and not listening to the lyrics, you'd hardly get the
impression that something particularly awful and life-changing had inspired
its appearance. ʽUndividedʼ opens the record with a song of dread,
hope and unity, but essentially it is just a common-sounding alt-rocker whose
best part is Sambora's short and elegantly constructed guitar solo; the
harmonies on the "one for love, one for truth" chorus come together
in a muddy howl, singing along to which is not much fun, although, of course,
if any of the band's fans want to pretend that doing so really makes them feel
"united" and "undivided", it's their Jove-given right.
Much more efficient is the lead single that
preceded the album itself — ʽEverydayʼ consists of all the same
ingredients (plus a little bit of the talkbox to immediately let you know who's
been sleeping here), but it's got a credible paranoid pulse to it, with a
solidly doubled bass-guitar riff and a respectable verse-bridge-chorus buildup,
one of the boys' most successful pop-rock concoctions from the last millennium
(and another good guitar solo, too). And it's not the only such song here:
ʽHook Me Upʼ and the title track are also energetic, catchy, and not
particularly suffering from overproduction. Jon's good-boyishness certainly
shines through in how he does not dare go all the way with the "me, I just
don't give a f-f-f-f-f..." of the bridge, but when you are dominated by
the rules of the game of much of your established audience (at least, the
hypocritical part of it), I guess there ain't much to do but to follow the
rules.
In between these few rockers comes a lot of
softer stuff that mostly just flies out of the window right away. As Jon grows
older, he gradually turns away from imitating Springsteen to imitating Billy
Joel — ʽJoeyʼ and especially
ʽRight Side Of Wrongʼ sound almost note-for-note tributes to Piano Man: grand epics where pianos and
strings matter more than guitars, and pathos matters more than pianos and
strings. I do, however, have to admit that the orchestral arrangements on these
and other songs immediately struck me as the best thing about them, so it was
no surprise to learn that they were at least partially handled by David
Campbell (the father of Beck and, not coincidentally, probably the best
orchestral arranger in pop of the past thirty years). The strings at least make
life less miserable when you are forced to give in to the «spiritual majesty»
of these tunes. Nothing, however, redeems the band's excourses into neo-country
such as ʽYou Had Me From Helloʼ and ʽMisunderstoodʼ which
could just as well be performed by Taylor Swift or somebody else in a sexy red
dress.
Bottomline: once again, not «awful» — the
pluses and minuses outbalance each other fairly well to come together in a
«neutral» assessment — but still not enough to raise Jon and Richie to the
level of «artist who actually has something worth hearing to say». I mean, okay,
it begins with a few songs about 9/11, but it still ends with a song about Jon
Bon Jovi's role in Ally McBeal and
how it should have turned out. Far be it from me to pass judgement upon whether
it is ʽUndividedʼ or ʽOpen All Nightʼ that encapsulates a
greater part of the man's spirit. But it could be argued that the album's
construction is still symbolical — no matter how horrendous the scope of your
latest catastrophe may ne, when it all ends you are still going back to your soap operas, want it or not. Maybe that's
what the proverbial «bounce» is all about.
THIS LEFT FEELS RIGHT (2003)
1) Livin' On A Prayer; 2) Bad
Medicine; 3) It's My Life; 4) Lay Your Hands On Me; 5) You Give Love A Bad
Name; 6) Bed Of Roses; 7) Everyday; 8) Born To Be My Baby; 9) Keep The Faith;
10) I'll Be There For You; 11) Always; 12) The Distance.
Oh my sweet Jesus. I get shivers all over
trying to reconstruct, step by step, the abominable logic behind this album.
Because the optimal reconstruction goes something like this:
«I (we) feel tremendously dissatisfied with
myself (ourselves), the way the world thinks about me (us) and my (our) music.
Yes, the superstardom, yes, the money, yes, the admiring fans, yes, the ability
to make it onto the front cover of Rolling
Stone without sarcasm. But does the world really get Bon Jovi? Does the world really feel the depth, really suck in all the potential concealed in those
Bon Jovi songs? Can't it simply be that the world loves a steady rock'n'roll
beat and loud distorted electric guitars? Could it be that the world dances
like crazy to ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ just because it is being seduced
by the talkbox effects? What about the message?
The bitter inner truth? The emotional angst? The religious connotations? That
ain't a world livin' on a prayer — it's a world livin' on a talkbox and a
chuggy bassline. No, really, it's high time that something should be done about
this! So maybe we have cut our long hair and began dressing in T-shirts and working
class jackets — that ain't enough. Too superficial. Something from the heart!»
This
Left Feels Right is a wicked
affair — a complete deconstruction and reconstruction of most of the band's
major hits in what could only be called «Heart-On-Sleeve Remixes». Not really
«unplugged» as such (although many of the guitar parts are, indeed, acoustic),
the album stakes it all on the «melodicity», «emotionality», and «spirituality»
of these songs, as they are rearranged with soft, sometimes electronic,
drumming, folk/country guitar overdubs, mellow keyboards, and almost angelic
vocal harmonies (ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ is reconceived as a Tommy/Gina
duet with Mike d'Abo's daughter Olivia — curious that Jon was not able to find
anybody of higher stature, but perhaps the addition of a superstar was thought
of as incompatible with the «humble» ideology of the project).
One has to admit that a lot of work went into
the project: most of the time, the rearrangements are truly drastic, making the
songs completely unrecognizable, especially the old-time rock hits like
ʽBad Medicineʼ and ʽYou Give Love A Bad Nameʼ, both of
which are redone as «country-blues-pop» numbers with slide guitars that either
weep like George Harrison or go all swampy on us. The ballads, just by being
ballads, stay closer to what they used to be, but with most of the electricity
going out of them, emphasis is also fully transferred onto the vocal harmonies.
The results are predictable: This Left Feels Right sets out to seduce you and leave you in a pool of
sentimental tears, as the personal charisma of Jon Bon Jovi and the band's
«heavenly» hooks climb into your brain and take control. If it works, it works;
but with the overall triviality of the band's melodies and lyrics, if any of
these songs made sense in the first place, it was only when they went over the
top. Simply put, there is no other
setting than its original drunken-swaggery hair-metal arrogance in which a song
like ʽBad Medicineʼ would be acceptable. Whether you do it in this
stripped-acoustic-bluesy manner, or whether you hire a full Wagnerian orchestra
to perform it, or whether you do an instrumental didgeridoo-only version, this left won't ever feel right to
anybody who knows right from left.
Ultimately, This Left feels as if all the banality inherently present in Bon
Jovi's work has been carefully distilled, filtered out, pressed, folded, and
re-packaged for universal consumption. The basic hooks still remain
(sometimes), but they have been stripped of their rocking power and relative
fun quotient, and forcefully converted into «spiritual anthems». In other words
— I could hardly think of a more stupid career move, that is, of course, if Bon
Jovi's career ever had «musically intelligent people» as part of its target
audience. Much to people's honor, This
Left Feels Right sold quite poorly, compared to the band's regular albums —
still, the total number of sold copies is said to approximate something like a
million and a half, and if this reflects the number of music buyers who are
willing to take Jon Bon Jovi as their soul brother and spiritual guru, well, it
may not be such a large figure, but still, walk carefully out there, and don't
let just about anybody know that
you, too, would award the record a thumbs down.
HAVE A NICE DAY (2005)
1) Have A Nice Day; 2) I Want
To Be Loved; 3) Welcome To Wherever You Are; 4) Who Says You Can't Go Home; 5)
Last Man Standing; 6) Bells Of Freedom; 7) Wildflower; 8) Last Cigarette; 9) I
Am; 10) Complicated; 11) Novocaine; 12) Story Of My Life; 13) Who Says You
Can't Go Home (duet); 14*) Dirty Little Secret; 15*) Unbreakable; 16*) These
Open Arms.
And with this friendly statement, Bon Jovi
become Nickelback. Thirteen (sixteen, if you count the bonuses) tracks of
non-stop, completely interchangeable, instantly forgettable, absolutely similar-sounding
guitar drivel — just the kind of music that gives «rock» such a bad name among
progressively-oriented youngsters these days. Up to now, Bon Jovi had been
almost everything, from dreadfully tasteless to surprisingly effective when they
had their hooks properly aligned, but never before had they been so utterly dull.
Whatever potential any of these songs may have
(and as far as their bare-bones melodies go, I guess they aren't that much
better or worse than the regular Bon Jovi fare), it is all wasted away on
arrangements that put volume and pure energy (or imitation thereof) in the
place of creativity, and then support them with pathos. The title track greets
us with a forcedly passionate "Why you wanna tell me how to live my life?"
— even though we'd think, after all these years, there would hardly be anybody left in the world to want to
tell Jon Bon Jovi how to live his life. (He'd even cut his hair already, by his
own free-will decision). "When the world gets in my face, I say — have a
nice day!" And when was the last time it actually happened?
Oh, that's right — these songs aren't about (or
at least, aren't for) Jon Bon Jovi,
they are about and for his young (or not so young already), rebellious
audiences. This ʽHave A Nice Dayʼ song — what a perfect anthem to arm
yourself with, right? And shove it in the face of anyone who tries to bug you?
"My daddy lived a lie, that's just the price that he paid, sacrificed his
life just slaving away", but that's not me, sure enough, I ain't gonna repeat the same mistakes.
(Instead of slaving away and living a lie, I'm just gonna sit around the house
and play Grand Theft Auto all day).
What a wonderful song — "standing on the ledge, I'll show the wind how to
fly" (these generic power chords sure could teach the wind a lesson or
two).
If you have honestly listened to and reached an
opinion on ʽHave A Nice Dayʼ, and if that opinion happens to
resemble mine in any way, feel free not to bother with the rest — like I said,
all the other songs here are stylistic clones of the title track. Sometimes the
tempo slows down and they dig into a source of romanticism (ʽBells Of
Freedomʼ, with Desmond Child co-credited for some reason, even if there is
not a single vocal or instrumental hook here that hasn't been regurgitated
from the preceding annals of pop history), sometimes the tempo speeds up and
the whole song rolls along fast and smooth, a perfect soundtrack for a routine
trip along the highway, but in the grand scheme of things, it's all the same
all over the place.
It is so much the same, in fact, that for a
time I didn't even notice that they did ʽWho Says You Can't Go Homeʼ twice — the second time, as a duet with
Jennifer Nettles. Official sources say that the alternate version is a «country
version», I suppose because, in addition to Nettles, who is herself ranked as a
country artist, they add a fiddle and a slide guitar part, without amending anything
in the basic mix. How easy it is to switch genres these days — throw in an
electric guitar solo and you get the «rock version», a fiddle and a Southern
gal and you get the «country version», and then they market you to all these
neatly charted sectors of the market, and nothing is really as
ʽComplicatedʼ as that track implies ("I'm complicated, I get
frustrated, right or wrong, love or hate it") — Kurt was far more
convincing, but at least there ain't no big danger of Jon blowing his brains
out any of these days: for all its fakery, Have
A Nice Day shows a human being with a perfectly normal psychic health
system.
Upon release, Have A Nice Day sold very well, was lauded in the mainstream rock
press, got lots of air- and videoplay, and certainly pleased the dedicated fan by
keeping alive the Bon Jovi spirit and
sounding modern, relevant, and aware of the latest trends in rock music at the
same time. Those latest trends, of course, being rather conservative:
"Keep your pseudo-punk, hip-hop, pop-rock junk and your digital downloads"
(ʽLast Man Standingʼ). Even disregarding the fact that I got this
album as a digital download, say, Mr. Bon Jovi, I thought your career, from the very beginning, very much qualified as
«pop-rock junk», or am I being led astray? Who are you singing about again —
Robert Fripp?
Confused, but not amused, I give this record a thumbs down,
because any other decision might imply that you are telling me how to live my
life. «Have a nice day».
LOST HIGHWAY (2007)
1) Lost Highway; 2)
Summertime; 3) (You Want To) Make A Memory; 4) Whole Lot Of Leaving; 5) We Got
It Going On; 6) Any Other Day; 7) Seat Next To You; 8) Everybody's Broken; 9)
The Last Night; 10) Til We Ain't Strangers Anymore; 11) One Step Closer; 12) I
Love This Town.
And with this dusty cliché, Bon Jovi
become Taylor Swift. Twelve tracks of non-stop, completely interchangeable,
instantly forgettable, absolutely similar-sounding guitar drivel — just the
kind of music that gives «country pop» such a bad name among people who try to
make life more colorful these days. Up to now, Bon Jovi had been almost
everything, from dreadfully tasteless to surprisingly effective when they had
their hooks properly aligned to utterly dull when they just wanted to tell you
how much better they were than everybody else, but never before had they been so thoroughly embarrassing.
Then again, it was a long time coming: with
«affairs of the heart» occupying a central place in the Bon Jovi rulebook ever
since Keep The Faith transformed
them from hair-clad cock-rockers into leather-clad spiritual heralds, the «Bon
Jovi country album» was imminent, sooner or later, because where else can your
spirit really find a safe place to
rest other than Mother Earth and those musical styles that grow right out of
it? This album should be played loud and proud — in a corn field, preferably.
With some rocks and rapids close by, so you and your loved one can wash that
road dust off your sexy bodies whenever you feel the need, as that trusty Bon
Jovi soundtrack serenades you with sounds that sound so natural, so organic,
you'd swear the creeks and the meadows themselves wrote them just for you and
your mate.
And I do stress «you and your mate», because
the majority of these songs are romantic — ballads or pop-rockers, they are all
about the protagonist's relations with that special someone, coming or going or
staying or leaving. No mentions of life on welfare or social unjustice, this
one's strictly for all you lovebirds out there. The exception being the tracks
that bookmark the album — ʽLost Highwayʼ and ʽI Love This
Townʼ are both about the will to live on this planet despite all the
setbacks and troubles, so if you feel like killing yourself, Lost Highway will try to dissuade you
from the task. (If you also feel like an intelligent human being — it will
probably fail, though). They are also the only two genuinely catchy tunes on
the album, even if the «happy» fiddle-and-banjo arrangement of the title track
makes me sick, and the gang-friendly atmosphere of ʽI Love This Townʼ
feels extremely contrived.
Oh, wait, there's one more exception —
somewhere in the middle of this wheatfield wasteland comes ʽWe Got It
Going Onʼ, a talkbox-adorned throwback to the good old dumb days of the
1980s if there ever was one, a song that feels so utterly dumb and so
completely out of place that it had no choice but to become a highlight of the
show for me, clearly reminding why New
Jersey, on which this song would totally fit in, was really the pinnacle of
this band's career. Okay, so it's good to know that the old boys can still
dress up in gorilla furs when they feel like it. This band was born to party,
not to cruise lost highways.
Everything else hardly seems deserving of
wasting extra bytes of precious cyberspace, so I will be brief: pick out a random
Taylor Swift song, replace the gorgeously packaged young blond female beauty
with a gorgeously packaged not-so-young blond male hunk, and voilà, your
lost highway lies right before you. And it merits a thumbs down — I mean, highways
don't just get lost without a good reason, and I think this particular one got
lost sooner than it was put into actual operation.
THE CIRCLE (2009)
1) We Weren't Born To Follow;
2) When We Were Beautiful; 3) Work For The Working Man; 4) Superman Tonight; 5)
Bullet; 6) Thorn In My Side; 7) Live Before You Die; 8) Brokenpromiseland; 9)
Love's The Only Rule; 10) Fast Cars; 11) Happy Now; 12) Learn To Love.
The best I can say here is that at least they
had the good sense to swerve off that cheeky country road. The Circle is, without a doubt, a «rock» album again, with bluesy
electric riffs reclaiming their territory back from twangy slides, and lyrics
about the world and its problems stealing our attention away from lyrics about
traveling on lost highways, breaking up, patching up, breaking up again, and
romancing the local ranch lady 'til the cows come home. So, at the very least,
Jon and Richie are back on their natural turf where they are theoretically
capable of doing something as good as... well, at least as good as a whole
album of ʽWe Got It Going Onʼ.
Unfortunately, theory and practice rarely go
hand in hand when you deal with aging rockers who were never all that awesome
to begin with. In general, The Circle
follows the same standards as Have A
Nice Day — lots of stale rock'n'roll with worn-out hooks, lots of
self-repetition and not a lot of energy. I mean, if the album really
"sounds fresh", as Richie claimed in an interview (and what else could he have claimed?), why is it that
the foundational bass line of ʽWork For The Working Manʼ is taken
directly from ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ? Or why is it that the lead
single, ʽWe Weren't Born To Followʼ, sounds like ʽBorn To Be My
Babyʼ and ʽIt's My Lifeʼ at the exact same time? Whatever be the
general case, The Circle, as an LP,
was certainly born to follow; it is very hard for me to name even one single
outstanding moment on the entire record.
Here is one funny bit of brainwork: I thought
that, although the song itself was totally formulaic and dull, Sambora's guitar
solo on ʽThorn In My Sideʼ somehow did stand out, and even managed to
set the jaded spirit on fire for a few bars. How and why remained unclear, but
then it dawned upon me, as that important third listen came around, that it was
really simple — all he had to do was lift a few licks from Lindsey Buckingham's
guitar solo on ʽGo Your Own Wayʼ. Subconsciously, perhaps, but the
songs do have similar chorus beats, so it may have triggered some special
mechanism. And in this way, what officially looks like a third-rate Fleetwood
Mac imitation becomes the best moment on The
Circle.
Of course, we also have ourselves some talkbox,
because a Bon Jovi album just ain't a proper Bon Jovi without some legitimate
pig grunting (the completely unremarkable otherwise ʽBulletʼ); we have
ourselves some de-lovely ballads (ʽLearn To Loveʼ, in case you still
haven't after decades of professional scholarship under the guidance of Jon
Bon Jovi, Ph. D.); and we do have one or two attempts at «modernizing» their
sound — ʽLove's The Only Ruleʼ, with its dutifully «electronized»
lead guitar, is probably the best example. I forget, though, who they are
imitating here... U2? Must be U2, I guess. They probably wouldn't have heard of
the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Besides, they weren't born to follow, at least not those
who were born after them. Following
U2, chronology-wise, does not violate the rules of filial piety.
It's not as if they seem totally incapable of
putting out another record that would at least be on the level of Crush and Bounce — they just don't seem to care all that much, or perhaps
they just leave it all in the hands of the producer. On Bounce, they had the good luck of having David Campbell, a musician
ten times the size of anyone in the band, write orchestrations for them; on The Circle, they put themselves at the
mercy of John Shanks, whose past credits include Miley Cyrus, Take That,
Jessica Simpson, the Backstreet Boys, Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, and, uh,
Lindsey Lohan (remember her?). (Admittedly, he also co-produced Fleetwood Mac's
Say You Will, which was a fine
recording, but it is hard to imagine Lindsey Buckingham not supervising his
work every inch of the way). All very safe, predictable, glossy à la 2009, and completely without
any surprises — hence, a natural thumbs down.
INSIDE OUT (2012)
1) Blood On Blood; 2) Lost
Highway; 3) Born To Be My Baby; 4) You Give Love A Bad Name; 5) Whole Lot Of
Leaving; 6) Raise Your Hands; 7) We Got It Going On; 8) Have A Nice Day; 9)
It's My Life; 10) I'll Be There For You; 11) Wanted Dead Or Alive; 12) Livin'
On A Prayer; 13) Keep The Faith.
Yes, it is 2012 and Bon Jovi can still afford a
live album. No, they are not going to put any songs from their latest studio
record, The Circle, on it because
that album sucked and they know it, even if you have to really get them in a
ditch in order to admit it. Yes, it has lots of titles that you will most
likely recognize; in fact, you can probably predict two thirds of the setlist
with your eyes closed. No, there is not a single reason in the world to own
this record, listen to this record, or remain aware of this record's existence.
Let me, therefore, be very brief here and say
that the «Bon Jovi spectacle» is really nothing like the «Rolling Stones
spectacle», despite both of them being spectacles. At his old age, Mick Jagger
may prance around the stage so much that keeping in tune becomes an
impossibility, and Keith Richards may be forgetting more and more chords and
harmonic rules with each passing year — a 50-year old Jon Bon Jovi and his lead
guitar pal are doing their jobs far more properly, singing and playing in tune,
diligently working their asses out without their superstar halos getting the
better of them. But nothing can save us from the fact that Bon Jovi are boring. The band is just... no fun. They
are standing there, playing their boring songs in their predictable ways. They
are boring when they are serious and they are even more boring when they try to
be funny. They are boring when they do stage banter, they are boring when they
interact with the audience. They are professional, they are tuneful, they are
pretentious, they are irritating — but first and foremost, they just make your
milk curdle.
It may be just me, but it also seems as if they
are now reducing all their songs from
all their periods to exactly the same «alt-rock» formula. You couldn't really
tell here that ʽBorn To Me My Babyʼ or ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ
were written in the Eighties, that ʽKeep The Faithʼ used to be so
very Nineties, or that ʽLost Highwayʼ is from their short-lived
neo-country period in the 2000s. It's just the same old gray grind all over the
place. No mistakes, nothing out of tune, just a bunch of experienced rockers
giving a good time to some friendly folks in an arena or two. This is how they
live now — beginning ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ with an actual «prayer» in
an act of transcendent spiritual unity between the Artist and the Audience.
It's all very emotional, really. You can also get an accompanying DVD (Live At Madison Square Garden) where
there are many more songs and you can actually see the heroes being... uh... heroic.
Anyway, better for Bon Jovi to go on
ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ than ʽLiving In Sinʼ, right?..
... I don't think it's a good idea to attempt
to continue this review.
WHAT ABOUT NOW (2013)
1) Because We Can; 2) I'm With
You; 3) What About Now; 4) Pictures Of You; 5) Amen; 6) That's What The Water
Made Me; 7) What's Left Of Me; 8) Army Of One; 9) Thick As Thieves; 10)
Beautiful World; 11) Room At The End Of The World; 12) The Fighter; 13*) With
These Two Hands; 14*) Not Running Anymore; 15*) Old Habits Die Hard; 16*) Every
Road Leads Home To You.
It was a little funny, I must confess, reading
lots of irate reviews about how this record is not really «hard rock», is not
really «Bon Jovi», represents «the beginning of the end» for the band and other
equally sour reactions. Was there ever
a period when this band was after anything but
mass popularity? The only reason why Jon Bon Jovi has not turned into Nicki
Minaj — which, if necessary and possible, he'd do in a jiffy — is because he's
got, uh, T&A problems. Also, he's kinda old-fashioned and prefers to stay
in that comfort zone where well-built, muscular guys rip the shit out of their
guitars, at least visually. And since that kind of music still sells reasonably
well today, despite all the attempts to push «classic rock» out of the
spotlight, well, why change anything? Just another day, just another dollar.
The album did cause a rift between Jon and his
loyal guitarist: Sambora was not seen all that much on the accompanying tour,
throughout which he was largely replaced by session guitarist Phil X, and soon
afterwards announced his departure from the band. True enough, he is only
co-credited for about five out of twelve songs, while on the rest Jon shares
credits with such seedy figures as John Shanks and Billy Falcon; has not a
single interesting or outstanding riff to contribute; and is seriously misused
even in the lead guitar department — the absolute majority of these songs
depend on nothing but vocal hooks. Oh, sorry, vocal hooks and pomp — as the years go by, Jon Bon Jovi takes himself more and
more seriously each day, and on What
About Now, he is much more of a preacher than an entertainer.
I will not deny, though, that some of these
songs are hooky. The anthemic
singalong chorus of ʽBecause We Canʼ, the punchy album opener, is
Super Bowl material alright, though I'm pretty sure it must have been lifted
wholesale from some earlier roots-rock or country tune. Same with the
sentimental ʽPictures Of Youʼ, same with the heroic-romantic
confession ʽThat's What The Water Made Meʼ — although I know what the
water really made that guy: it made
him surreptitiously nick the inspiring background guitar/synth melody of David
Bowie's ʽHeroesʼ and appropriate it for his own, much less original
and much less subtle purposes. No, I am not being too judgemental, and I have
no problems with musicians borrowing and recycling other people's ideas — it's
just that this one feels way too
blatant. Don't say I didn't warn you if on his next record J.B.J. samples
ʽRide Of The Valkyriesʼ in one of his Big Social Statements.
Are we being too cruel? Well then, let me just
backtrack a little and redeem myself by saying that somehow, on a certain level
I do feel sympathetic to ʽWhat's Left Of Meʼ — as uninteresting as
the generic «banjo-rock» arrangement of that song is, its «I'm-still-standing»
vibe sounds more sincere than anything else here: the guy does sound like he
really means it when he says "God, I miss the smell of paper and the ink
on my hands" and when he complains about how "they sold old
CBGB's". Not that Bon Jovi ever had much to do with CBGB's in the first
place — yet somehow it is true that, as of 2013, Bon Jovi and the old CBGB
residents seem to have much more in common than they would have in the
mid-1980s.
But that does not change the general attitude.
Had ʽWhat's Left Of Meʼ and ʽBecause We Canʼ been the most pretentious songs on the album,
with the rest of it given over to regular vocal-hook-based pop rock fare, life
would be adequate. As it happens, these are just the tasters for the real
«Celine Dion-style» gala prayers — the syrupy, orchestrated ʽAmenʼ
was written twenty years too late for the Titanic
soundtrack, and the "never give up, never give up!" chorus of
ʽArmy Of Oneʼ is more Alicia Keys, or even more Disney, than Bon
Jovi. Oops, I think I'm falling into the same trap as all those allegedly
cheated fans — let me quickly correct myself: what we have here is Bon Jovi
trying to naturally morph their way into a Disney cartoon.
The album ends on a soft acoustic note, with
Jon making yet another not-so-subtle reference to some of his heroes: "I
am the fighter, though not a boxer by trade". What is it, then, about
ʽThe Boxerʼ that will make that song stand the test of time, while
ʽThe Fighterʼ is already forgotten? It's not really the melody — it's
the attitude. Even at his softest and tenderest, Jon Bon Jovi still sounds like
a straightforward, predictable, cocky guy who thinks way too much of himself —
and, most importantly, believes that «thinking too much of himself» is already
sufficient to write a song about it and offer it to the world. And nobody told
him, or nobody was ever able to convince him that such is usually the recipe
for a boring song at best — an offensive song at worst. But then again, who the
heck could convince him if these
sometimes boring, sometimes offensive songs kept selling like hotcakes all
around the world? And neither my own thumbs down here, nor anybody else's will
really make a difference. For that matter, What
About Now hit the top of the charts all right — even though, in the era of
predictably dwindling album sales, it sold less than any previous Bon Jovi album.
But yes, the guys are still popular.
BURNING BRIDGES (2015)
1) A Teardrop To The Sea; 2)
We Don't Run; 3) Saturday Night Gave Me Sunday Morning; 4) We All Fall Down; 5)
Blind Love; 6) Who Would You Die For; 7) Fingerprints; 8) Life Is Beautiful; 9)
I'm Your Man; 10) Burning Bridges; 11*) Take Back The Night.
The title of this album refers not to the split
between Jon and Richie Sambora, as could have been easily suggested, but to the
split between Bon Jovi and Mercury Records, the label with which the band had
been associated from the very beginning. Apparently, their long-term contract
ran out, and both sides agreed not to renew it — and, well, I can sort of
understand Mercury Records, because what do you do with a band that so
decidedly does not belong in the 21st
century, not to mention one that hasn't produced even a semi-decent record in
more than a decade? And, on a more objective note, whose sales have been on a
steady decline ever since the world discovered Britney Spears? (Not that
there's any direct connection... or is there?).
Anyway, I'd like to say that Burning Bridges is their worst album in
a long, long while, but in a way, it is not even an album — it is a hasty
assemblage of songs culled from various vaults, with just one or two new numbers,
released as a contractual obligation to facilitate the band's transition to a
new label. This probably explains the presence of Sambora on the credits to at
least one song (the bouncy pop rocker ʽSaturday Night Gave Me Sunday
Morningʼ) and the lack of Desmond Child on any other credits, because
everything written with Child was released on the spot (okay, not really, but
whatever Child-cowritten outtakes they had were already issued on the 2004 boxset).
This is also a gallant explanation for why almost everything on here is so
shitty, and why you needn't even be aware of this album's existence unless you
are forty-three years old and still remember that fateful day when your elder
sister took you along to your first...
...okay, never mind. In terms of upbeatness and
catchiness, there are two songs here with so-so hooks — the already mentioned
ʽSaturday Nightʼ (disco meets alt-rock and fuses with it to become
arena-era Taylor Swift as sung by Jon Bon Jovi; I don't think you'll meet a
more precise description of this anywhere)
and ʽI'm Your Manʼ, because falsetto woo-woos are a terrible weapon
even in the wrong hands. The title track, an acoustic-and-accordeon dance
number, is a rather rude goodbye to Mercury Records, but since it does not
mention Mercury Records by name, they apparently had no choice but to let it
go. It's at least mildly amusing if you know the context.
Everything else is mainly just power ballads,
with the usual Bon Jovi aplomb and pretense — soulfulness, echoes, power
chords, some more fresh bleeding from a heart that's been punctured so much,
it's hard to believe it could not be made out of plastic. Largely awful
production, too, with synthetic guitars, heavily processed vocal harmonies, and
lifeless percussion, particularly on the single ʽWe Don't Runʼ.
ʽA Teardrop To The Seaʼ is at least slightly redeemed with an unusually
noisy, distorted, hystrionic guitar solo (played by producer John Shanks?), but
later on the scales are tipped to the other side with the awful «blues de-luxe»
soloing à la late Gary Moore
on ʽFingerprintsʼ (remember ʽStill Got The Bluesʼ? that's what I'm talking about, the
pathetic gypsy-blues style for people who have no feeling for the real blues). But yes, on the whole, it's
all in quintessential Bon Jovi style, so if you're a fan, Burning Bridges will not disappoint. If you're not a fan, though,
join me in my thumbs
down, and don't forget to send a congratulations card to Mercury
Records. Better late than never — and now they can finally reassign some of their
budget to promoting Iggy Azalea.
THIS HOUSE IS NOT FOR SALE (2016)
1) This House Is Not For Sale;
2) Living With The Ghost; 3) Knockout; 4) Labor Of Love; 5) Born Again
Tomorrow; 6) Roller Coaster; 7) New Year's Day; 8) The Devil's In The Temple; 9)
Scars On This Guitar; 10) God Bless This Mess; 11) Reunion; 12) Come On Up To
Our House; 13*) Real Love; 14*) All Hail The King; 15*) We Don't Run; 16*) I
Will Drive You Home; 17*) Goodnight New York; 18*) Touch Of Grey.
And by "this house", I am assuming,
they mean "our safe New Jersey home", because on this first proper
post-Sambora album, Bon Jovi move closer to Bruce Springsteen than they ever
did before — and considering how Bruce Springsteen, on his past few albums,
also moved somewhat uncomfortably close to Bon Jovi, I would not be surprised
to eventually hear a joint statement from the two, especially in this upcoming
Trumpian universe of ours. The problem is, there is exactly one area in which
Jon Bon Jovi's skills might sometimes stand up to the Boss's - the concoction
of anthemic, powerful, memorable vocal hooks. Everything else, be it lyrical
sophistication, or the ability to sound like a man possessed and infect the
listener with a quasi-religious drive, or the massive, multi-layered, super-tight
sound of the E Street Band, remains an unattainable standard of quality. So who
is it that you would allow yourself to be enlightened by: a former hair metal
icon who used to have the looks or a street poet who used to have a bandana?
Tough choice for 2016.
Nevertheless, This House Is Not For Sale is Bon Jovi's best album since at least Crush. It's not a good record at all — there is nothing particularly fresh or
unusually appealing about it — but it is smart enough to concentrate on the
band's strongest aspect, the one I already mentioned. For the most part
avoiding over-sentimentalized power ballads and rootsy country-rock excursions,
and also, perhaps, striving to show that Bon Jovi's music was not all about Richie Sambora (who has not
returned, and now Phil X is taking over his place on a permanent basis), Jon
and the remaining company write a set of tight, catchy, and, dare I say it,
occasionally inspired pop-rock songs: traditional, musically conservative, and
with an attempt at introspection rather than arena-rock swagger. Could be
awful, but it's... tolerable. At the very least, in terms of class they are now
fully comparable with contemporary U2 (not that big of a compliment, because it
says more about U2's decline than Bon Jovi's ascent — still, ever imagine me
putting Slippery When Wet and The Joshua Tree on the same shelf? By
the way, speaking of U2, one of the songs here is called ʽNew Year's
Dayʼ, and no, it is not a cover,
but it does look like a tribute because the guitar parts are quite... edgy, if you know what I mean).
Most of the songs have a philosophical slant...
most? Heck, all of them: even
ʽLabor Of Loveʼ, the record's only patented love song, puts a
poor-boy-Wagnerian slant on boy-girl relations — although leave it to Jon Bon
Jovi to dig his own grave with awful lines like "if I need some sugar,
I'll get it from your lips" (is it really such a long way to the local
store, or does his partner suffer from sugar cravings?) and vocal modulation
that places too much emphasis on his high register, by now creaky, croaky, and
irritating. Apart from that song, though, it's all about coming to terms with
whatever there is to come to terms with: modern times, politics,
disillusionment, personal mistakes, or changing hairstyles.
The sound... well, if you happened to hear the
title track, you've heard it all. The big rhythm guitar crunch is back, as is
the thunderous «split-that-log-in-one-blow» drum sound of Tico Torres. New lead
guitarist mostly plays short, reserved, traditional solos, possibly not wishing
to compete with the departed Sambora, so the point is that you should headbang
to these songs (drummer boy helps you out with this) and sing along. Like:
"I'm coming ho-o-o-ome! Coming ho-o-o-o-ome!" Because you want to
come home. Or: "I ain't living with the ghost! No future living in the
past!" Because you... uh... don't
want to come home. Or: "Here comes the knockout! My time is right now! I'm
throwing down!" Because whether you want to come home or not, you gotta
fight for the right to come home. Or not to come home. Or: "God bless this
mess, this mess is mine!" Because your home actually looks like shit, but
it's your shit, and if you can't be proud of your shit, then
who can?
I don't think it would make sense to discuss
any of these songs seriously: the more I do, the more cringeworthy it all
becomes, so, fair moment, linger awhile and don't let me give this record a
thumbs down when I actually had some fun listening to it. In fact, I will say something
cringeworthy myself: as Bon Jovi inevitably mutate into the category of «elder
statesmen», Jon's output begins to show some deeply human qualities that
transcend the simplicity, cheesiness, and conservatism of the band's musical
values. This here is a survivor's record, and behind the shallow catchiness,
there's a glimpse of determination and power that I cannot help admiring, if
only a little. I have no reason to doubt the man's sincerity, and sometimes
even a simple cliché may not be so boring if it is delivered with full
force. So when the man finishes the record with a formally bland gospel waltz
(ʽCome On Up To Our Houseʼ — again, nothing in common with the Tom
Waits song of nearly-the-same-name), I cannot not acknowledge the real emotion behind it; I do not know if
"all are welcome at our table" indeed, but it does not bother me —
let alone the fact that I'd never volunteer to sit at Bon Jovi's table in the
first place, the real issue is why he
is singing that? I'm pretty sure the man is on a good will spree this time, and
that the whole record is a noble try to offer some musical consolation in a
very shaky, uncertain, insecure period of our being (yes, even if the album was
released several days before the
presidential elections).
Anyway, if, to you, the pop and the power
aspects of Bon Jovi had ever had some significance, do not be afraid to pick
this one up (you can even go for the deluxe edition, which adds six extra
songs, all in the same style). But if you've never cared about the band even
one bit, and would rather accept ghost writing for Ann Coulter than having to
hear ʽLiving On A Prayerʼ just one more time, then this house is very
much for sale: there is absolutely no sense in getting it unless you are
somewhat familiar with the band's history and are able to evaluate it in
context.
THE BOOMTOWN RATS (1977)
1) Lookin' After No. 1; 2)
Mary Of The 4th Form; 3) Close As You'll Ever Be; 4) Neon Heart; 5) Joey's On
The Streets Again; 6) I Can Make It If You Can; 7) Never Bite The Hand That
Feeds; 8) (She's Gonna) Do You In; 9) Kicks; 10*) Doin' It Right; 11*) My Blues
Away; 12*) A Second Time; 13*) Fanzine Hero; 14*) Barefootin'.
For a very long time now, most people have
remembered Bob Geldof as the «Give Me As Much Of Your Money As I Can Stare Out
Of You» («So That Some Bureaucrats And African Dictators Can Get Richer»)
person who also starred as Pink in The
Wall and did at least some good by getting the authentic Pink Floyd back
together for one last performance. (Okay, seriously enough, much of that money
did go to good causes, but it's always healthy to temper free-flowing idealism
with a sharp cynical pinch). Between all that, his original musical career
together with a bunch of ragged Irish punks under the name of «The Boomtown
Rats» has pretty much faded out of view, other than an occasional vague
reminiscence of ʽI Don't Like Mondaysʼ on the airwaves. There are
logical reasons for that, of course — for one thing, it makes much more sense
to remember Bob Geldof as the driving force behind Live Aid than, say, George
Harrison as «the guy who organised that Bangla Desh concert» — but still, this
is not entirely just.
Although The Boomtown Rats are commonly lumped
in together with the «punk» and «New Wave» movements, much of their musical
career stood closer to the typical «rock and roll» sound of the
early-to-mid-Seventies. On their debut album, notable influences include fellow
Irishmen Thin Lizzy (same aura of «working class street toughness» and similar
frontman sensitivity, although the Rats never had Thin Lizzy's playing chops);
American «proto-punkers» and «glam-rockers» like the MC5 and the New York
Dolls; Bruce Springsteen (ʽJoey's On The Streets Againʼ); and even
Steppenwolf (ʽMary Of The 4th Formʼ directly lifts the gruff biker
melody from the verse part of ʽBorn To Be Wildʼ).
As a result, The Boomtown Rats almost seems a bit sonically obsolete for the
standards of 1977, and one has to keep in mind that Geldof had already written
many of these songs a year or two earlier, when few had heard of The Ramones
and nobody had yet heard of The Clash or The Sex Pistols. Not that this would
have changed anything — Geldof may have been a «street punk» in the spirit, but
not in form: classic rock'n'roll song structures and guitar tablatures suited
him all right, and the band's guitarists Garry Roberts and Gerry Cott clearly
saw themselves as Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders rather than
chainsaw-buzzers. (In fact, the very fact that there were two of them means they didn't think that much of the typical
punk-rock band format).
Nevertheless, despite this traditionalism, The Boomtown Rats is a pretty good
rock'n'roll record, and compares very favourably with the New York Dolls or
anyone like that. There is not a lot of originality in Geldof's songwriting —
only just enough so that you cannot directly accuse him of stealing (only «borrowing»
or «quoting», like that ʽBorn To Be Wildʼ riff) — but there is enough
charisma, energy, inspiration, and general swagger to make the songs work. We
need not pay much attention to the lyrics — right from the start, the lyrics
all pursue the all-too-familiar «don't want to be like you» agenda of your
typical punker, and Geldof's words, be they sung in a rock'n'roll song or
addressed at millions of people from TV screens, have rarely ascended above
self-understood banalities (not that millions of people aren't often in serious
need of self-understood banalities). What matters more are the guitar tones,
the drive, and the unsimulated passion in the young man's gruff, rather
generic, but intelligent and sincere voice — it is with these ingredients that
they sent ʽLookin' After No. 1ʼ, their first single, straight up the
UK charts (never did reach No. 1, though, despite the «lucky title»).
ʽMary Of The 4th Formʼ was less
typical, and showed a sleazier, more disturbing side of the band that would
subsequently decrease — you probably couldn't imagine Bob Geldof singing a song
about a teacher getting turned on by a sexy schoolgirl at Live Aid, could you?
Unlike The Police, though, who would later dress that concept up in an
innocently light New Wave-pop arrangement, the Rats make this one into a glammy
bravoura performance, with thick guitar riffs sublimating sexual tension and an
almost gleefully salivating chanting of the song title in the chorus. Well,
whaddaya want, this is an album made for teenage audiences, and teenage
audiences want to get laid as much as they want social justice and freedom from
authority. (In case you wondered, that last phrase was an intentional
idealistic understatement).
Although this is the only genuinely
«titillating» song on the record, The
Boomtown Rats is still, on the whole, a nasty-sounding piece of work.
Geldof wears his heart on his sleeve on only one loud rock ballad in the middle
of the album (the clearly Dylan-inspired ʽI Can Make It If You Canʼ),
and gets heroically sentimental only on the preceding ʽJoey's On The
Streets Againʼ, for which the grand jury of Phil Lynott and Bruce
Springsteen should have awarded him top prize at the local Street Anthem
competition. Both songs are significantly aided by the competent piano and
organ player of Johnnie Fingers, and the grand sax solo by guest player Albie
Donnelly mimicks Clarence Clemons so fine it ain't even funny.
Everything else is good old-fashioned
rock'n'roll, personal favorites including ʽ(She's Gonna) Do You Inʼ
which speeds up ʽMilkcow Calf Bluesʼ and makes it a little more
blunt, direct, and punky; and ʽKicksʼ, more in the power-pop
department but with an AC/DC-like tone in the rhythm guitar department
nevertheless. Also, be sure to get the remastered CD version, which throws on a
ton of early demos and live performances from 1975 that are even more rock'n'rollish (ʽFanzine
Heroʼ is the fastest of 'em all, and the cover of Robert Parker's
ʽBarefootin'ʼ is smouldering).
Of course, all these endless references make it
seem as if The Boomtown Rats is
merely a sum of all its influences, and in general, it probably is — and that
is, in fact, the reason why the band was never able to establish itself as an
«institution» (unlike Bob Geldof himself in his «Third World Mentat» emploi).
But even as just a combination of all these influences, it feels real enough,
and most importantly, it's got spirit — not necessarily «its own spirit», just spirit as such. At the very least, the
guys showed a good understanding of what it was that made this kind of music
great, instead of simply making us understand that they liked this kind of
music. To me, that's reason enough for sincere enjoyment — and a solid thumbs up
to go along with it.
A TONIC FOR THE TROOPS (1978)
1) Like Clockwork; 2) Blind
Date; 3) (I Never Loved) Eva Braun; 4) Living In An Island; 5) Don't Believe
What You Read; 6) She's So Modern; 7) Me And Howard Hughes; 8) Can't Stop; 9)
(Watch Out For) The Normal People; 10) Rat Trap.
Already — and not a moment too soon — they are
beginning to change, shifting their sound to adapt to some of the evolving
standards of New Wave, difficult as it is for a band that grew up and matured
in Thin Lizzy country. It is hard to tell whether Geldof was going against his
inner self on any of these songs, but in the end, it was good, because striving
for «quirkiness» in their music helps A
Tonic For The Troops exude enough irony, sarcasm, and playfulness to fully
compensate for Bob's «social seriousness». The entire album is loaded with
critical messages, but they are delivered in such a way that it is downright
impossible to call its overall tone «preachy». On the whole, it is a damn fun
listen.
Not that the musical offerings of the Boomtown
Rats interest most people who write about this album — usually, they are more
concerned with the storytelling aspect, and it is hard to blame them when one
of the songs is called ʽI Never Loved Eva Braunʼ and is sung from the
viewpoint of you-know-who, or when another of the songs is all concerned with
various suicide attempts (ʽLiving On An Islandʼ), or yet another
deals with euthanasia (ʽCan't Stopʼ). However, this is not «rock
theater» à la 10cc — Geldof
does not have the required vocal qualities (I mean, he doesn't even try to imitate a German accent on
ʽEva Braunʼ and thank God for that), and the band's musical training
is much too basic to turn any of these songs into mini-rock operas or anything.
What really
matters is Geldof's ability to come up with decent hooks, and the band's
ability to rock out with verve and imagination. ʽLike Clockworkʼ may
lyrically deal with the maddening impossibility of liberating yourself from
your biorhythm (or something like that), but more important is that the song does imitate clockwork, at least as far
as guitars, percussion, and backing vocals are concerned, and although it is
bouncy and energetic per se, there is a certain tragic «impossibility to
escape» planted in that mechanical bounce, at least not until the alarm clock
rings and stops you dead in its tracks. Or, if you do not pay much attention to
the lyrics of ʽEva Braunʼ (or if you do not know who Eva Braun was in
the first place), it is not the lyrical Hitlerisms of the track that will draw
you in, but its overall exuberant guitar-piano coordination and the catchy
"la-la-la"'s of the chorus — what else?
The punk chainsaw buzz, or at least a guitar
sound approximately close to that, is also introduced here on songs like
ʽShe's So Modernʼ, whose riff could be very easily converted to
ʽBlitzkrieg Bopʼ if needed — the difference being that The Boomtown
Rats are not consciously striving for barebones minimalism, and happily look
for countermelodies, piano overdubs, relatively more complex guitar solos, and
more complex vocal modulation. Ironically, the catchy singalong choruses are
still the most memorable ingredient in any Boomtown Rats song — in this respect
at least, they are not at all different from the Ramones.
The big one is waiting at the end: ʽRat
Trapʼ is the longest track on the LP and the most elaborate one, a
streetlife anthem that should be implicitly dedicated to Phil Lynott and Bruce
Springsteen, I think — what with Geldof relying on the vocal inflections of the
former and the sax player having copiously studied the sax solos on the albums
of the latter (as far as I understand, Bob does not play the sax himself; in a
famous incident on Top of the Pops, he shoved a candelabra in his mouth to
mimic a sax solo). But the song stands out on its own, with a fairly complex
arrangement (I really like the way in which the guitar and piano melodies are
interwoven with each other) and, of course, the unforgettable shotgun blast of
a chorus — "it's a rat trap... and you've been CAUGHT!" is a line
that should be much more tightly associated with Geldof forever and ever than
his professed dislike of a particular day of the week. Well, maybe it actually
is, I don't know — ʽRat Trapʼ was
No. 1, and they even got to tear up portraits of John Travolta and Olivia
Newton-John on Top of the Pops in a short moment of punkish triumph.
I cannot say that on the whole, Tonic For The Troops is an artistic improvement over the debut — it is a
sonic departure, yes, but these Irish rowdies seem such a typically «classic
rock band» at heart that it is hard for me to find a song on which they would
be more convincing than ʽMary Of The 4th Formʼ. Still, they are able
to accumulate these new sonic elements without sounding too imitative or
rip-offey (as compared to some of the more blatant Talking-Headisms on the next
album, for instance), and the best songs — ʽLike Clockworkʼ,
ʽRat Trapʼ, ʽEva Braunʼ, ʽShe's So Modernʼ — are
every bit as well-written and well performed, so that giving the record a
proper thumbs up
is fairly easy business. Come to think of it, I couldn't probably think of a
reason why a record like this should be less respected than, say, Elvis
Costello's This Year's Model — the
real big difference being that the Attractions used squeakier keyboards. Damn
these Londoners, always having the upper hand over the Irish.
THE FINE ART OF SURFACING (1979)
1) Someone's Looking At You;
2) Diamond Smiles; 3) Wind Chill Factor; 4) Having My Picture Taken; 5) Sleep
(Fingers' Lullaby); 6) I Don't Like Mondays; 7) Nothing Happened Today; 8) Keep
It Up; 9) Nice 'n' Neat; 10) When The Night Comes.
The Boomtown Rats' third album is often looked
at as the highest point in their career, but it seems fairly obvious that the
reputation is mainly due to the mega-success of ʽI Don't Like
Mondaysʼ — which isn't even Geldof's best song, really, but there is no
denying the nerve it must have hit in mid-1979, when the US and, apparently,
the Western world in general were still recuperating from the shock caused by
the Brenda Spencer shooting spree and, most importantly, her explanation of the
shootings (the song title).
Ironically, ʽI Don't Like Mondaysʼ is
as far from the original Rats sound as possible — a piano-and-strings-driven
pop song that stylistically belongs in a Broadway musical rather than in a
rock'n'roll album. It also gets a little creepy when you think about its
stadium-level popularity and how the entire world sang along to "tell me
why I don't like Mondays, I want to shoot the whole day down" during Live
Aid (I wonder whether the imprisoned Brenda Spencer had a chance to watch the
show from her cell?). But if you manage to disassociate the song from the
context, it is hard to deny that the sound is real good — usually, when you get
yourself a piano-and-strings arrangement, it results in a mushy ballad sound,
whereas ʽI Don't Like Mondaysʼ is really a very rowdy, dynamic thing,
an ironic-romantic explosion which is much more Springsteen in spirit than
Carole King or the Carpenters. In any case, it is at least certain that the
song's enduring popularity is due to much more than just its «shock» appeal.
Unfortunately, it also marks a certain turning
point beyond which Geldof would start taking things way too seriously — and both the Boomtown Rats' and his own solo
output would begin suffering from too little humor and too much anthemic pomp. Fortunately, this does not yet show up
so much on The Fine Art Of Surfacing,
whose problem lies elsewhere: in an attempt to catch up with the times, they
have stuffed way too many of these shrill Cars-type synthesizers at the expense
of rock'n'roll guitar. This is not good, because The Boomtown Rats are not The Cars, and they are even less
Talking Heads (whose sound they attempt to rip off head-on in ʽNothing Happened
Todayʼ, with Geldof going for an all-out David Byrne imitation). Their
hooks are best supported by rowdy classic rock posturing, not keyboard
experimentation and theatrical vocal parts — at least, this is how my gut
feeling explains it when the album is over and, other than ʽMondaysʼ,
I have a serious problem remembering any of the other songs.
From a rational point of view, they are still
being interestingly clever, though. ʽSomeone's Looking At Youʼ,
echoing both the glam and the Berlin
period of David Bowie, could be initially thought of as a picture of a
love-confused teen punk, but the lyrics make it clear that it is really a song
about Big Brother — it's just that it has been initially set up as a caressing,
tender number, with cozy mood-setting "na-na-na's" and the first line
going "on a night like this I deserve to get kissed at least once or
twice" and the background synthesizers serenading you with an optimistic
lead melody. Then, giving you no time to get over it, Geldof hits you over the
head — gently, gently! — with a song about a glamor girl's suicide
(ʽDiamond Eyesʼ), another New Wave rocker once again almost
completely driven by cheery keyboards.
Eventually, the model gets a bit predictable —
informing the listeners about the evils of the world we're living in through
the medium of the world's best-crafted and most widely reaching information
machine, the pop song. It all gets to the point where you start looking for a
rebellious message even in an innocent complaint against insomnia
(ʽSleepʼ) — I mean, no doubt about it, it must be the insane energy-sucking world of capitalist pressure that
drives the protagonist to "counting fences" and "jumping
sheep" and still to no avail. But on a purely emotional level, the song
does not succeed very well in constructing an atmosphere of insomnia / paranoia
/ depression / whatever, unlike, say, John Lennon's ʽI'm So Tiredʼ —
it's just a moderately catchy keyboard-driven pop rocker.
The only song that tries to recapture their
original rocking sound is ʽNice 'n' Neatʼ, a speedy number that
brings back full guitar throttle for three minutes — good, but a little too
late, and hardly supported by the closing ʽWhen The Night Comesʼ, one
of their most blatant Springsteen imitations that could have been easily
slipped inside Greetings From Asbury
Park without anyone noticing. Still, much to their credits, at least they
pull these imitations off convincingly — Geldof lacks the «technical
endowments» of The Boss (meaning that he is not as vocally powerful, of course — I have no further basis for a
physical comparison of the two), but he can set his soul on fire just as
directly and unflinchingly whenever the need arises.
On the whole, this is a good album —
ultimately, one can forget the criticism and just enjoy its still fairly
tasteful and energetic sound, and I should probably add that at least the vocal
harmonies on most of these here songs are the best on any given Rats album.
Make this their «pop masterpiece», if you will, as compared to the «rock
goodness» of the preceding two records, and think of it as a masterpiece indeed
— for a band that was not at all cut out for a good «pop» album in the first
place. Thumbs up.
MONDO BONGO (1981)
1) Mood Mambo; 2) Straight Up;
3) This Is My Room; 4) Another Piece Of Red; 5) Go Man Go; 6) Under Their
Thumb... Is Under My Thumb; 7) Please Don't Go; 8) The Elephants Graveyard; 9)
Banana Republic; 10) Don't Talk To Me; 11) Hurt Hurts; 12) Up All Night; 13)
Cheerio.
Somewhere along the line, the Boomtown Rats
just... lost it. The seams were showing already on The Fine Art Of Surfacing, but the big hit singles somehow wobbled
the perspective and made the seams seem fuzzy enough to allow us to think that
these were just temporary direction problems. Not so with Mondo Bongo, which shares all the problems of its predecessor, but
this time, without much compensation in the way of big hits: ʽBanana
Republicʼ did chart high enough, yet it is obviously no ʽI Don't Like
Mondaysʼ and definitely no ʽRat Trapʼ. In fact, it is a song
that might as well have been done by UB40 — or a couple dozen more New Wave
acts — and nobody would feel the difference.
Perhaps Geldof's sensitivity towards the world
at large finally prevailed over his musical instinct, but Mondo Bongo feels like a ferociously intentional attempt to completely distance oneself from the
«rock'n'roll mentality» that fueled the Rats' first couple of albums. Tribal
African rhythms and cod-reggae almost totally replace guitar-based rock
melodicity — and in those few spots where the band does not try to be «ethnic»,
this melodicity is replaced with trendy synth-pop. Most of it is done in good
taste and with plenty of energy, yet somehow, most of it simply does not click.
As a matter of fact, this album is just plain boring, I'm afraid.
Something like ʽMood Mamboʼ may seem
sympathetic if any white kid attempt
to sound like a bunch of nature-happy Africans seems sympathetic by definition
— but it is difficult for me to grasp any other motivation behind the song,
which just sounds like a bunch of congas and whoopees thrown together, and it
doesn't help, either, that in the context of 1981 comparisons with Remain In Light are inescapable and
clearly not in favor of Geldof and
his boys, who have no understanding of how a proper synthesis of «world beats»
and old-fashioned rock music should work. The results are neither too exciting,
nor too funny, nor emotionally relevant in any way. They don't even sound
«bongo crazy», those guys — just following a trend.
Songs like ʽStraight Upʼ are
generally more successful, but putting the guitar out of the picture is not a
good decision — the song is not catchy enough to be so completely governed by
pianos and synthesizers, and neither is ʽGo Man Goʼ or anything else.
There is a logical reason why history has been so much more benevolent to The
Cars when they were doing it than The Boomtown Rats, and that reason is simple
enough — The Cars paid more attention to the hooks and less attention to the
seriousness of the message, whereas Geldof always try to inject «Meaning», with
a capital M, into whatever he is doing. Fine and dandy, but these are goddamn pop songs, so where's the pop? (For the
record — I happen to have the same problem with David Bowie quite often, but
nowhere near this extent, for sure).
Case in point: Bob takes the Stones' classic
ʽUnder My Thumbʼ, rearranges it as a modernistic electro-ska number,
and replaces the song's original «misogynistic» lyrics with «social message»,
as the song becomes ʽUnder Their Thumbʼ and the «they» in question
are... well, you know who they are. "Under their thumb / Kicked and beaten
like an angry rabid dog". The reinvention is kinda fun, but also kinda
self-contradictory and confusing: too happy-sounding to justify the message,
too message-driven to justify the happy sound. By refusing to concentrate on
one aspect over the other, Mondo Bongo
becomes unsatisfactory either way.
The sole exception is the accidentally quite
catchy ʽElephants Graveyardʼ, which shares the stylistic makeup of
all its brethren (a fast-paced keyboard-based song, almost bordering on
ABBA-like Euro-pop — actually, more like Elvis Costello on the ABBA-influenced
ʽOliver's Armyʼ) but redeems itself with an emotionally tugging
chorus: the "you're guilty 'til proven guilty" line is surprisingly
efficient, where, for once, I feel like we're riding on the same wave. Perhaps
it is because of the plaintive-pleading intonation. Perhaps, come to think of
it, one of Mondo's biggest flaws is not having any of those big-open songs
where Geldof sings his heart out — everything is drowned in irony, but he does
not know how to be properly ironic.
On the other hand, I also prefer Bob Geldof in any of his aggressive moods
rather than romantic ones — but on the third hand, Mondo Bongo could hardly be called an aggressive album, either, due
to the already mentioned lack of a properly attuned guitar sound.
In the end, the sacred heart of Mondo Bongo probably lies in the short
piano piece ʽAnother Piece Of Redʼ, Geldof's passionate reflections
on the disintegration of the British Empire, triggered by the news of the
retirement of Rhodesia's Ian Smith. More of a leftist declaration than a «song»
as such, it shows clearly that striving for good over evil was far more
important for Bob than spending a lot of time in the world of notes, chords,
and harmonies. Strictly formally, Mondo
Bongo is a musical departure from — some might even say, an advance on —
the Rats' previous sound; substantially, though, nobody really gave a damn.
Which explains why the album could and should work, but does not.
V DEEP (1982)
1) He Watches It All; 2) Never
In A Million Years; 3) Talking In Code; 4) The Bitter End; 5) The Little Death;
6) A Storm Breaks; 7) Up All Night; 8) House On Fire; 9) Charmed Lives; 10)
Skin On Skin; 11) Say Hi To Mick; 12) No Hiding Place*.
There are at least three different versions of
this album: original UK release, original US release, and a new CD reissue from
2005 with a strange choice of track reshuffling — for instance, the original
opened with the bombastic, Phil Spector-ish ʽNever In A Million
Yearsʼ, but on the reissue, the first track is the more chamberish (at
least, in the first part, until the big drums kick in) ʽHe Watches It
Allʼ. Go figure. Also, the first letter of the title is the Roman number
five, not the letter V, alluding both to the fact of this being the band's
fifth album and the fact that they were now a five-piece, as the band's guitar
player Gerry Cott split off.
In the end, it looks like all these different
trivia about the album present more food for the reviewer than the music
itself, which continues Geldof's gradual slide into blandness, though without
exacerbating it. There is plenty to like on V Deep — just not much to rave about. In purely objective terms,
the album might even be preferable to its predecessor, because (a) the band
embraces an even larger number of styles, ranging all the way from lounge jazz
to synth-pop, but (b) the band does not engage in any particularly annoying embarrassments,
for instance, does not try to pass for a bunch of roving Africans as they did
on ʽMood Mamboʼ.
And yet, the overall impression is that they
continue to struggle in their attempts to grab our attention. It is hard to
understand why it is so — I mean, if you dissect the album's second single,
ʽHouse On Fireʼ, it is a pretty complex and (theoretically) catchy
reggae number. There's clicky percussion, quirky keyboards, jungle harmonies, a
merry brass riff in the bridge, some hidden menace in the descending melody of
the chorus — what's not to like? But something is clearly missing that could
take the song by the hand and lead it across the bridge that separates
«decently written» from «soul-inflaming». Perhaps that something is a general
sense of purpose: as it often is with
the Rats, I am not getting what they
want me to feel and how they want me
to go about it. And I do not mean the lyrics (you try and decipher what "she's cruel as a pig but we love
her like a house on fire" is supposed to signify), but more like the whole
thing put together. Is this an angry song? A sad song? An irony-drenched dance
number? With ʽMary Of The 4th Formʼ or with ʽRat Trapʼ or
with ʽI Don't Like Mondaysʼ, you wouldn't be asking these questions.
With ʽHouse On Fireʼ, there's certainly more questions than answers,
and I seriously doubt that even Geldof himself could answer most of these.
On the other hand, I still feel a bitter irony
that ʽHouse On Fireʼ, when it was released, charted higher (UK No.
24) than the previous single, ʽNever In A Million Yearsʼ (UK No. 62),
even though the latter is a far superior song — along with the catchier and
much more melodically dense, but less serious ʽDon't Answer Meʼ by
the Alan Parsons Project, it is one of the decade's better Phil Spector
imitations, driven by a tremendously passionate Geldof vocal as he uses all the
bombast to prop up his personal manifesto: "I know I'll never let / Those
self-defeating fears / Spoil those golden years / These days that pass us by so
slow". And even if the main keyboard melody of the song is fairly
simplistic, by concentrating on the solemnity of the oath and the stateliness
of the arrangements, they manage to pull it off fairly well. But you probably
wouldn't want to dance to it — and
singles are for wiggling your butt, not for standing upright and holding your
hand out in a respectful salute to your idol, so the fussy, but pointless
reggae bit won over the slow, ponderous, but meaningful wall-of-sound exercise.
Other than that, they are actually all over the
place: bass-heavy, fast-paced synth-pop (ʽTalking In Codeʼ),
acoustic-based, finger-poppin' light jazz entertainment (ʽLittle
Deathʼ), bombastic art-funk (ʽA Storm Breaksʼ), another Talking
Heads clone song (ʽCharmed Livesʼ) and so on. The only thing that
ties them all together is the same puzzling effect as the one on ʽHouse On
Fireʼ: it's all laid out to be good,
but somehow, it isn't. The darkness ain't dark enough, the madness ain't mad
enough, the humor ain't humorous enough, and all the musical parts, taken
separately or collectively, do not transform into grappling emotional hooks.
You can clearly see how much ʽCharmed Livesʼ owes to Remain In Light — but you do not sense
the same «grim determination» that made Remain
In Light such an epoch-defining masterpiece. Perhaps it is simply the
result of poor coordination within the band: where all the individual Heads
were clearly able to «get» Byrne's artistic intentions, here everybody seems to
be simply playing the notes, not much more. You kind of get the feeling that,
just like Gerry Cott who finally had had enough, all these guys would only be
too happy to go back to their «pub-rock» days of the mid-1970s and just bash
away with simple, but effective rock'n'roll. But they are not given the
permission.
In time — in a very long time — some of the
songs may grow on me, and if you throw in Geldof's ongoing search for new
feelings and occasionally irritating, but still frequently insightful lyrics, V Deep is certainly not a total
failure. But neither is it a misunderstood masterpiece, and on the whole, the
fact that the Boomtown Rats were rapidly losing in the great war of New Wave
Innovators is pretty hard to deny: their commercial decline was not due to the
fact that the music was much too complex or challenging for the general public,
but actually more due to the fact that the public ceased to feel the spark. And
now, more than thirty years later, I, too, have a certain difficulty locating
that spark.
IN THE LONG GRASS (1984)
1) Dave; 2) Over And Over; 3)
Drag Me Down; 4) A Hold Of Me; 5) Another Sad Story; 6) Tonight; 7) Hard Times;
8) Lucky; 9) An Icicle In The Sun; 10) Up Or Down.
And here comes the forgotten, disgraceful final
chapter. Granted, Geldof's chief interest by that time had completely shifted
from his veteran band to fresher and more exciting stuff — such as singing for
Christmas and organising Live Aid. But what if it wouldn't? Does that mean that
The Rats would then have been able to produce a record on the level of A Tonic For The Troops? Obviously not —
they were way too far gone from the
days when Thin Lizzy and Bruce Springsteen were their shining stars. In this
misguided urge to fit in the times, having tried out almost everything, they
finally became a social-message-oriented copy of Duran Duran: a mix of guitar
and synth pop, with some futuristic flair but almost completely without hooks,
not to mention total atrophy of a sense of humor. Well, of course it is hard to
retain your sense of humor when you are worrying over Ethiopian famine, but
maybe in this context a more wise decision would have been to simply pack up
and return to the studio some other day, or not return at all.
Here's ʽDaveʼ — a song inspired by a
friend's nervous breakdown over the death of his girlfriend from overdosing. I
hope the «Dave» in question was touched and maybe even relieved, and it is
difficult not to feel real emotion in Geldof's voice (although, frankly
speaking, by now Geldof was almost always
singing in this «choking-on-tears-on-a-regular-basis» register, so you get used
to it fairly quickly). But musically, the song feels like a trivial toss-off,
its main «hook» being a moody jazz-fusion-esque bassline which is commonly
equated today with cheap adult contemporary — do not expect catharsis on a
ʽComfortably Numbʼ level. (Ironically, the industry people had Geldof
rewrite the song's lyrics and release it as ʽRainʼ rather than
ʽDaveʼ for the American market — guess they weren't all that moved
with the story, either).
Here's ʽDrag Me Downʼ, also released
as a single and containing some unmistakeable harmony nods to the Beach Boys,
both in the choral «dee-dee-dee-dee»'s and on the SMiLe-style "like a ship that's going under..." part. You
couldn't argue that this song is
completely empty of hooks. But you could argue that its attempt to build up to
high heavens does not work — the electronic keyboards are too flat and corny,
the overall arrangement is too muddy, and most importantly, Geldof as the
singing preacher-poet just does not engage attention as much as Geldof the
rowdy street punk. He's too whiny here to be Springsteen, and too range-limited
and weak-voiced to be Bono. His rock poetry is probably the best aspect of
these songs — at least, it is the only aspect which consistently turns out to
be much less predictable than you'd expect from someone who could already be
defined as «social activist» first, and «musician» second.
Here's... but no, I already feel depressed
simply considering the fact that I'd have to try and waste time explaining why
all these songs, though probably recorded with the best of intentions, have
absolutely no appeal. The reasons are really the same all over. No outstanding
guitar parts (most of the melodies are loaded with electronic effects, but they
cannot even harness them properly, like King Crimson). Generic synthesized
keyboards. Robotic, lifeless rhythm sections. Everything converted to tragic
romance, care of Geldof's patented "I CARE!" vocals. Perfect material
for an irate, disgruntled thumbs down.
Ironically, the more he CAREs, the more we get
the impression that he really doesn't — not about the music, that is. At the very, very least it is clear that In The Long Grass is a solo album; there is absolutely nothing
here to suggest the presence, or the necessity of an actual «rock band».
Perhaps the Live Aid business was clouding Geldof's mind at the time — but with
the whole affair finally over, the most sensible thing left to do was to
officially let go of the band and go solo. (Actually, I think it was the last
remaining members that got fed up with the thing and told Bob to go about his
own business — sensible lads).
BOSTON (1976)
1) More Than A Feeling; 2)
Peace Of Mind; 3) Foreplay / Long Time; 4) Rock & Roll Band; 5) Smokin'; 6)
Hitch A Ride; 7) Something About You; 8) Let Me Take You Home Tonight.
«Good taste» rarely agrees with rock'n'roll
when it becomes too bombastic, and even more rarely when it becomes happily, rather than tragically,
bombastic. In choosing between Boston's debut record and, say, George
Harrison's All Things Must Pass, the
latter will win unequivocally on the grounds of good taste, since, in essence,
it is a deeply personal, troubled, heartfelt collection of fervent prayers,
where the bombastic arrangements merely serve as catalysts, pulling the audience
inside the spiritual world of the artist rather than bombarding them with
thunderous awesomeness from above. The sound of Boston, in comparison,
represents superficial bombast, like a carefully orchestrated shiny parade —
grand, complex, and breathtaking upon first sight, but shallow and trivial in
the afterthought.
In other words, the music of Boston deserves
our negative response if we find too many people looking to it for spiritual
guidance. But if we do not, or if we manage to close our eyes on the issue, the
music of Boston deserves plenty of respect and admiration. Like anything by
Queen released in those years, their self-titled album represents a certain
peak in the evolution of the «symphonic rock guitar sound», and even if the
moods and individual impressions generated by these songs give little ground to
judge them as «progressive», the sound that Tom Scholz and his pals engineered
here had not had any direct precedent in the earlier history of prog-rock.
ʽMore Than A Feelingʼ is one of the
most deceptive hits in history — beginning as a rather ordinary acoustic
ballad in the California singer-songwriter vein, thirty seconds into the song
it sends out this double guitar blast, almost literally lightning-and-thunder, as first comes the high-pitched
melodic line, and then comes the grumbly distorted power-pop riff, and
«arena-rock» as a separate genre is almost singlehandedly invented in a flash,
or, at least, the ultimate formula for it appears before our eyes: loud guitar
riffage in major keys, grand harmonies, catchy choruses for the entire stadium
to sing along to, the perfect blend of bombast and simplicity. But not too simple — the colorful blend of
«thunder» and «lightning», improved by Scholz's constant experimentation with
guitar tone, ensures that Boston sounded like nobody else at the time. (Brian
May would be the closest analogy, and
May is a much more inventive and technically endowed musician than Scholz could
ever hope to be, but the self-educated Scholz still has plenty of pedal-related
and mixing tricks of his own — let us not forget that he holds a master's
degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT itself. Then again, Brian May is a
frickin' astrophysicist. Is it a
coincidence that they both invented their own «cosmic guitar» styles?).
Anyway, there are two big deals with Boston. First, it is a record filled to
the brim with catchy, unforgettable pop songs. Second, it is a record that has
some of the juiciest electric guitar sounds to come out of the Seventies as a
whole. If we have to take this in tandem with hokum lyrics, an annoying
pseudo-operatic lead vocalist (Brad Delp), and a total lack of emotional depth,
then so be it — but if we want to go further in our despisal and draw a
straight line from here to Bon Jovi or the like, I would deem that formally
impossible, because Boston's brand of arena-rock surmises that complex craft
comes first, and bombast comes second, or, rather, that bombast should not be
pushed onto the public unless it is carefully and complexly crafted. Scholz
holds personal responsibility for every single note played on this album —
ensuring that even the longer tracks never get boring, with all the different
guitar dialogs and trialogs and quadrilogs. Boston's favorite formula consists
of three parts — base acoustic rhythm, overlying low-pitched distorted electric
riff, soaring high-pitched soloing — and although these three ingredients
exhaust almost all of the songs (keyboards being almost always secondary), they
are combined in such different ways that all these anthems continuously hold my
interest.
All the big hits are on Side A, and they are
probably more interesting from a hook-based point of view, but even songs like
ʽRock & Roll Bandʼ and ʽSmokin'ʼ, which seem to rely on
traditional rock'n'roll clichés rather than original ideas, still sound
exciting because of Boston's unique sound base — without inventing a single new
chord combination (I think), Scholz shows a grasp of technological trickery for
which most of the glam-rockers of the early 1970s would have killed. It only
falters on the last track, ʽLet Me Take You Home Tonightʼ, which is mostly a sentimental acoustic ballad and
shows how trite the band really is without its electric makeup — but then, Boston is supposed to be just that, a triumphal celebration of man's
victory over electricity. What would that electric jellofish spaceship on the
front cover be about, otherwise?
It is also ironic that, although today it is
all to convenient to think of Boston
as one of the turning events in the history of «corporate rock», due to its
huge commercial success, influence on mainstream rock, and annexation of a
huge segment of the radio waves on classic rock stations — in reality, the
entire album was recorded in Scholz's homemade basement studio, not to mention
the band spending about two years running around and offering demo tapes to
disinterested music industry businessmen before finally striking a deal with Epic.
ʽPeace Of Mindʼ says it all about their stance — "I understand
about indecision / I don't care if I get behind / People livin' in competition
/ All I want is to have my peace of mind". Of course, this does not mean
that we should be praising the band for stark humility, but it makes sense to
view the album in this particular context all the same.
All in all, a strong thumbs up here along the same lines
of intuition and reasoning as in the case of ABBA or any other successful act
that can be suspected of vying for «cheap mass appeal». All that is left is
shed a single tear over Boston's subsequent inability not only to top this
record, but even to properly «advance» in creativity — which only goes to show
that one must not place one's trust exclusively
in the sphere of technology. After all, technology, unlike art, is limited, and
even a degree from MIT can only help you get that far in revolutionizing musical standards.
DON'T LOOK BACK (1978)
1) Don't Look Back; 2) The
Journey; 3) It's Easy; 4) A Man I'll Never Be; 5) Feelin' Satisfied; 6) Party;
7) Used To Bad News; 8) Don't Be Afraid.
A man like Tom Scholz I'll never be, because it
is really hard to understand what all the fuss was about — Scholz lashed out at
Epic Records for pressing him into releasing the next album too soon, way
before he was fully ready to amaze the world for a second time, but listening
to Don't Look Back gives nary a hint
of any idea of how it was supposed to be anything but a slightly inferior carbon copy of Boston. Of course, there is nothing wrong with repeating a winning
formula if it works, but other than some additional feats of technical
ingenuity, most of these songs really sound as if they were written at exactly
the same time as the stuff on Boston,
and left out in the sun to dry, waiting for another day.
Or maybe not, because there is exactly one
important difference: Don't Look Back
is an album produced by accomplished arena-rock superstars. Most of the songs
on Boston featured huge, bombastic
arrangements, but at heart they were relatively personal tunes — love serenades
or personal confessions. You were invited to sing along and join in the
emotional turbulence all right, but they weren't really written with the
collective you, our lovely stadium
audience, in mind. By the time it was time to put out a sequel, the band's
status had changed, and now Scholz was making songs «for the people». Again,
there is nothing wrong with this in principle, but a mindset like that can sometimes result in extra
seriousness at the expense of melodicity.
It is hardly coincidental that the record
begins and ends with prohibitive invocations — at the start, we are told not to
look back, and for the finish, we are invited not to be afraid. It is definitely
not coincidental that ʽFeelin'
Satisfiedʼ informs us that "the time has come to get together"
and begs us to "come on, put your hands together" and "take a
chance on rock'n'roll" (as if any Boston concert goer had not already
taken a chance — probably much more than one — on rock'n'roll). Throughout, the
choruses get louder and louder and more repetitive, and even the most introspective
song of them all, ʽA Man I'll Never Beʼ, has its last chorus line
specially singled out so that the entire stadium could brace itself for it.
These are the little details that pick up my
attention. As to the actual musical advances, well, I should say that Scholz's
musical perfectionism refers more to the sphere of subtle overtones and
frequencies than finding new sources of inspiration for his melody-making. Like
Boston, this record, too, features a
brief instrumental interlude (ʽThe Journeyʼ) that merges elements of
folk and cosmic psychedelia, but other than that, Boston's flying saucer shows
no signs of wanting to preserve its outer space identity — being perfectly happy
to churn out one power-pop anthem after another for the earthly entertainment
of Earthlings. Epic Records say — assimilate or perish, oh you strange aliens
from the faraway planet of Boston.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with most of
these power pop anthems. The title track has a cool funky riff (later stolen by
Michael Jackson for ʽBlack And Whiteʼ, as I have only just realized)
that somehow agrees well enough with the song's straightforward 4/4 beat.
ʽIt's Easyʼ, ʽFeelin' Satisfiedʼ, ʽPartyʼ, and
ʽUsed To Bad Newsʼ are all catchy and fun pop-rockers, although
rather non-descript in impressionistic terms. And although I used to seriously
dislike the power balladry of ʽA Man I'll Never Beʼ, I have grown
accustomed to its clever trickery of successively piling up one layer of
guitars upon another until, with one triumphant thunderclash, it turns into
something on a truly Gargantuan scale. (And do not miss or misjudge the piano
quote from Paul McCartney's ʽMaybe I'm Amazedʼ, the wise mother of
all such power ballads).
With all these considerations in mind and
impressions in the heart, there is no reason to condemn Don't Look Back — it earns its thumbs up by not letting down our expectations if
we wanted more of the same. If we didn't — if we expected this band to top Boston
and push its musical boundaries further forward — Don't Look Back could only be described as disappointing, as it
neither pushes forward nor takes any «sideward» risks (like, for instance,
Fleetwood Mac did with Tusk around
the same time). But why should we
have expected anything like that? Tom Scholz has his own vision of a perfect
brand of pop-rock, and he is not interested in straying too far away from it.
If only his head weren't so turned with his own and the band's own «bigness», Don't Look Back could probably have
been as much fun as its predecessor. As it is, it is slightly less fun and a
little more stadium-preachy, but only a tad so. And the staidum audiences did
bite, sending the album to the top of the charts and certifying it seven times
platinum. It is, however, rather
telling that ʽDon't Look Backʼ never managed to earn itself such an
assured place on classic rock radio as ʽMore Than A Feelingʼ — no
accident, I'd say.
THIRD STAGE (1986)
1) Amanda; 2) We're Ready; 3)
The Launch; 4) Cool The Engines; 5) My Destination; 6) A New World; 7) To Be A
Man; 8) I Think I Like It; 9) Can'tcha Say / Still In Love; 10) Hollyann.
With all his perfectionism, delayism,
disrespect for deadlines, and contempt for record labels, Tom Scholz ended up
waiting for the most uncomfortable
time to release Boston's third album — 1986, the Doom Year for Classic Rockers
(just to remind you, Alice Cooper's Constrictor
and Chicago 18 came out in the exact
same month). Not that this should have derailed Scholz, who rarely trusted
anybody's nose but his own: yes, you can sense that the Eighties are upon us
from the production, but Scholz himself was responsible for the production in
many ways, not the least of which was his own self-designed Rockman guitar
processor.
So the bad news about Third Stage is not really its year of release, but rather the
stylistic choice of its maker. As some of the old guys, such as second
guitarist Barry Goudreau and bass player Fran Sheehan, eventually quit because
they couldn't take the waiting any more, Scholz began sliding further and
further into lyricism and sentimentality — the typical song on Third Stage is not a revved-up
power-pop-rocker, but rather a heartfelt ballad, power or no power. In the
place of ʽMore Than A Feelingʼ and ʽDon't Look Backʼ, songs
that had an aura of cheapness but could still be a great way to kick-start your
day, we now have ʽAmandaʼ — a song that must have permanently ruined
the life of every single Amanda on US soil. Just imagine yourself being a
12-year or so old girl called Amanda in 1986 and having to walk to school while
all the radio stations for miles around blast "I'm gonna take you by
surprise and make you realize, Amanda..."... oh, the horror. Hope they all
hid in the basements while the heat was on.
Not only ʽAmandaʼ, though, but just
about every other of these ballads is almost unbelievably lame — without the
thunderous riff-blasts of his rockers, Scholz is reduced on the spot to pompous
schlock where even the trademark Boston guitar tones do not redeem the material
that rides on exhausted balladeering clichés all the way through.
ʽMy Destinationʼ, ʽTo Be A Manʼ, ʽHollyannʼ — I
am not even sure I can properly distinguish one from the other. The only good
thing about them is the band's stubborn reluctance to use synthesizers or
strings, which does give them a Boston-exclusive flavor. But the contrast
between the primitively uninventive melodies and the immense atmospheric pomp
is just too much to bear.
Unfortunately, the few rockers on the record do
not redeem the situation. The album's loudest and brawniest track, ʽCool
The Enginesʼ (formally the last part of a space-related trilogy), is a
glam extravaganza, with Brad Delp screaming his head off and Scholz getting to
play Zeus the Thunderer. Is it my fault, though, that the final result sounds
stylistically similar to Aerosmith's ʽLove In An Elevatorʼ? With the
same overloud, sleazy guitar assault as everything gets driven to eleven?
Hilariously, even if Scholz never wanted to make a pop-metal anthem, he
unintentionally produced one along the same stylistic lines as Aerosmith or Bon
Jovi in their big hair days. I admit that it is catchy — but it is also rather
silly, adding this «macho» edge to their cosmic music (yes, I know that
«cooling the engines» is just a metaphor, but I don't even want to remember
explicitly what for). At least ʽI Think I Like Itʼ manages to combine
the album's lyrical sensitivity with a strong, but delicate pop-rock rhythm,
and arguably comes out as the best track and the only one that I can currently
imagine myself wanting to revisit.
Bottomline: tech savviness is one thing,
understanding of how to juice up an already catchy hook is another thing, and a
good sense of taste and measure is the little devil whose absence can mess you
up even if you got the other two quite right. With Third Stage, Scholz shows us one and one thing only — namely, that
he himself does not seem to quite understand what it is that used to make him
so good. Yes, there are quite a few things in common between ʽMore Than A
Feelingʼ and ʽAmandaʼ, but there is also a wide gap. For Scholz,
what really matters is what they have in common. For myself — and I hope to be
speaking for quite a few other people, too — what really matters is the gap,
and I hate this particular gap. Thumbs down
with a vengeance, even if, on the whole, this is quite far from the worst
record of 1986.
WALK ON (1994)
1) I Need Your Love; 2)
Surrender To Me; 3) Livin' For You; 4) Walkin' At Night; 5) Walk On; 6) Get
Organ-ized; 7) Walk On (Some More); 8) What's Your Name; 9) Magdalene; 10) We
Can Make It.
The temporary replacement of Brad Delp with
Fran Cosmo (who, ironically enough, started out as a vocalist on Barry
Goudreau's debut solo album in 1980) should not be much of a worry. Brad Delp
is a deep-lung screamer, Fran Cosmo is a deep-lung screamer, the two are pretty
much interchangeable, and Boston have never been much about vocals anyway —
powerful, but personality-deprived arena-rock singers have never been a rarity
ever since arena-rock came into existence, no matter where and when you locate
this moment in time.
What is
worrying is the lack of good songs. As usual, Walk On is a collection of brawny arena-rockers and equally brawny
power ballads; not as usual, I
believe that this time around, not a single song has managed to stick in my
mind, a fairly amazing feat for a record that's been eight years in the making.
I mean, it's as if the fine art of songwriting never existed in the first
place. Look at the title track — it is just a common, generic piece of ʽLa
Grangeʼ-ian fast boogie. If ZZ Top played this, though, at least they'd do
it with humor and snappiness: Scholz, however, with his «bigger than everybody
else» attitude, just drowns it in his Gargantuan ambitions.
For the single, they chose a song with a truly
brilliant title — ʽI Need Your Loveʼ — and an operatic riff that
sounds surprisingly muddy when it cuts through your speakers around 0:38,
certainly a far cry from the immediately captivating riffage of ʽMore
Than A Feelingʼ and very surprising
in light of Scholz's usual perfectionism. The song in general is just a very
basic power ballad, not as «intimate» as ʽAmandaʼ but even less
memorable, apart from the rather annoyingly dumb chorus ("I NEED YOUR
LOVE! I WANT YOU EVERY WAY!" — I don't even want to know what that last exhortation is supposed to mean). Most
importantly, it was simply not the
kind of sound to make any headlines in 1994, so the single stuck at No. 51, and
for once, I guess, the public was right: 51 is a good number in this context.
Not that there is anything on the album that
could have made a better choice. The riff of ʽSurrender To Meʼ
sounds like mediocre Judas Priest with Scholz production. ʽLivin' For
Youʼ is a sentimental ballad that is actually driven by electronic keyboards — so much for the
old resistance against synthesizers — and sounds like any other generic adult
contemporary ballad ever written. The lengthy ʽWalk Onʼ suite has a
few moments, such as Scholz's «guitar Godzilla» experiment on ʽWalkin' At
Nightʼ and bits of Emerson-ian organ hooliganry on ʽGet
Organ-izedʼ, but overall, it is just too lumbering and ponderous for its
own good. And there is nothing I could say about the last three songs that I
have not already said about the first four.
The only thing to admire about Walk On is Scholz's stubborn decision
to follow his own personal muse, completely oblivious to everything that goes
on around, which is why this «1990s» album sounds not at all different from the
band's «1980s» album, despite a completely changed musical atmosphere. And I am
saying this without a hint of irony — ignoring trends and fads is always a
noble quality; however, it works so much better when you actually have
something interesting to say in your fossilized style — and I am quite
surprised to see this man completely concentrating on the style and forgetting
that, if you're dabbling in hard rock and all, you're kinda supposed to bring
along at least a handful of good riffs. Thumbs down.
CORPORATE AMERICA (2002)
1) I Had A Good Time; 2) Stare
Out Your Window; 3) Corporate America; 4) With You; 5) Someone; 6) Turn It Off;
7) Cryin'; 8) Didn't Mean To Fall In Love; 9) You Gave Up On Love; 10) Livin'
For You [live].
Everything was well with Boston at the turn of
the century, so it seems. Scholz took his usual time in between albums, by
which time Brad Delp had returned to the band — and not simply returned, but
actually consented to a polygamous relationship with Fran Cosmo, who not only
did not quit, but brought in his own son, Anthony Cosmo, as rhythm guitar
player. Another addition is lady Kimberley Dahme, who used to play in a Boston
cover band (yes, apparently there is,
or at least was, such a thing as a
Boston cover band — and I guess that any respectable Boston cover band has to
play ʽMore Than A Feelingʼ ten times each show, for authenticity's
sake), and now gets to play acoustic guitar and sing on her own tune ʽWith
Youʼ, which does not sound like Boston at all, but hey, fresh blood.
And the big boys of arena rock are back at it
again, tossing off a hairball of big love anthems, sappy love ballads, and just
a couple of rock sermons for good measure — the grandest of 'em being the title
track, which Scholz originally posted online under a pseudonym, to see how well
it fit with «the younger demographics». As could be already inferred from
everything we know about the band's history, it is an angry diatribe against
the evils of «globalization», «maximization», and «de-evolution of the human
race», clothed in a generic techno arrangement that could only have come out of
the depths of Corporate America. Technophile #1 Tom Scholz ranting against
technology, aided with the latest and trendiest of technology — if this ain't
self-irony, it's stupidity, and if this is
self-irony, it is hard to distinguish from stupidity. (Okay, okay, so they are
only ranting against excessive abuse of technology, but still, shouldn't they
have rather tried recording the song on wax cylinders, sitting with acoustic
guitars around a campfire, than fiddling about with digital technologies? For
the sake of credibility and all?).
With the possible exception of ʽI Had A
Good Timeʼ — the opening rocker that at least tries to recapture some of
the arena-power-pop excitement of the old days — there do not seem to be any
good songs here. Sentimentality has by now completely donned the garments of
adult contemporary, with stiff, lifeless arrangements and mannequin vocals
(ʽSomeoneʼ, ʽYou Gave Up On Loveʼ, etc.), and when the band
tries to go for tragic-apocalyptic (ʽTurn It Offʼ), the production is
so unusually muddy for Scholz's usual level of quality that it is hard to judge
it as anything other than a complete failure in trying to tackle a style/mood
with which the band was previously unfamiliar. No, the best thing about Boston
had always been their crackling, lightning-bolt-style, positive, life-asserting
riffs — this attempt to be «eerie» crumbles under its own weight, with a
formulaic, no longer impressive metal riff and lots and lots of noise pinning
it to the ground. Bad production decisions for a non-original tune that
pretends to a prophetic message — what else
could go wrong with a tune like this?
Throw in the Kimberley Dahme song which sounds
exactly like 100,000 acoustic folk-country ballads written by big-hearted
folk-country stars in the 2000s alone, and you do get Corporate America
in all its glory — big, well-oiled, formally efficient, but just a little bit
tiresome, to say the least. I wholeheartedly concur with Tom Scholz when he
gives his «corporate America» an angry thumbs down — and reciprocate by giving his Corporate
America an angry thumbs down. On second thought, strike
«angry». Who the heck ever gets angry
about a 21st century Boston record? Might as well get angry about Sir Walter
Raleigh, who was such a stupid git.
LIFE, LOVE & HOPE (2013)
1) Heaven On Earth; 2) Didn't
Mean To Fall In Love; 3) Last Day Of School; 4) Sail Away; 5) Life, Love &
Hope; 6) If You Were In Love; 7) Someday; 8) Love Got Away; 9) Someone; 10) You
Gave Up On Love; 11) The Way You Look Tonight.
I suppose that the main, if not only, purpose
of this album is to serve as a respectful memento
mori for Brad Delp, who committed suicide on March 9, 2007, apparently in a
serious state of mental depression — certainly not something you'd associate
with the guy's vivaciousness on Boston's classic records, but certainly not the
first time, either, when the old «beneath this mask I am wearing a frown»
quotation hits home way too hard.
Although, as usual, Scholz took quite a bit of
time getting there, so that the tribute came six years after his companion's
demise, there is a lot of Brad Delp on this record — three out of ten tracks
feature him singing, although all of them are re-recordings or re-masters of
songs from Corporate America. But
before we go shooting off our mouths about what sort of idiot would want to
hear musical dreck like ʽDidn't Mean To Fall In Loveʼ all over again,
let us simply remember that these songs are here again for a special
commemorative purpose. (And even if they are not, we will all play gallant, right, and still assume that they
are, okay?).
That said, it is kinda useless to pretend that,
as a whole, this album does not suck. With the last vestiges of songwriting instinct
having slipped away from Scholz on Corporate
America, there was hardly any hope of the good fairy revisiting him for the
next installment in the Boston saga, and Life,
Love & Hope does not disappoint: it sounds exactly like Corporate America, only worse. This
time, the man has not even bothered to hire a real drummer — apparently, all
the beats have been programmed to sound like «real drums», but «real» they
ain't, much like everything else about this extremely stiff, plastic,
unengaging record.
If you want a very quick, but efficient checkup
on what Tom Scholz's musical qualification looks like these days, the
two-minute instrumental ʽLast Day Of Schoolʼ will probably do the job
— there you have the programmed drums, and the traditional Brian May-like
«orchestral guitars», and the familiar «ka-boom!» guitar thunderbolts sewing the
verse/refrain parts together, and the entire «been there, done that» feeling,
as the song's formally anthemic sound is so familiar, yet so predictably
uninteresting. And this is arguably the best track on the entire album —
everything else will be drowned in inadequate levels of pomp and
sentimentality, one big bad ballad after another until you are totally ready to «give up on love» and
go for good old BDSM instead.
The amazing thing is that there are something
like eight different lead vocalists
employed by Scholz throughout — and yet I cannot tell one from the other, with
the obvious exception of Kimberley Dahme on ʽIf You Were In Loveʼ.
And the atmosphere of all the songs is so similar and monotonous that... well,
I never thought I'd be able to wish for another nasty rant against «corporate
America» on Scholz's part, but a couple of these would at least battle for my
attention for a few minutes. As it is, the album is so smooth, it will probably
slither through your bowels and come out whole without you even noticing. And
who needs great guitar riffs anyway, when all that really matters is being able to state «all you need is love» in a
dozen near-identical ways?
Actually, the really amazing thing is that this sorry carcass of an album still
managed to rise to No. 37 on the US charts, which is even a little higher than Corporate America — given that the
album came out six years after Brad Delp's death, we probably could not ascribe
this to the sensation factor, but rather to the fact that as long as «the army
of classic rock fans» still exists, any single record issued under the name of
«Boston» will always have a chance of selling. Who's got the nerve to pull
ʽMore Than A Feelingʼ off the airwaves, anyway? So my thumbs down
will not make too much of a difference. But still, there you go — you wanted to
make sure that Tom Scholz's music still sucks in the 2010s? Check. It still sucks.
With luck, it'll still suck in the 2020s. There's really nothing like good old
stability and tenacity when it comes to Art.
FEELS GOOD TO ME (1977)
1) Beelzebub; 2) Back To The
Beginning; 3) Seems Like A Lifetime Ago (part 1); 4) Seems Like A Lifetime Ago
(part 2); 5) Sample And Hold; 6) Feels Good To Me; 7) Either End Of August; 8)
If You Can't Stand The Heat; 9) Springtime In Siberia; 10) Adios A La Pasada.
Be it Ringo Starr, Keith Moon, or even Phil
"How The Hell Did I End Up Behind A Drum Kit When I'd Always Wanted To Be
The Beatles?" Collins, you do not usually
hold high expectations for a drummer's solo career, no matter how many bonus
points he gets in the agility department. Drummers do not tend to make good
songwriters, are usually terrible at singing (a few exceptions like Levon Helm
just proving the rule), and have an inferiority complex because they never get
laid as much as the front man or the lead guitarist. For that reason, the world
did not exactly hold its breath when, after the next demise of King Crimson,
the newly freed Bill Bruford announced that, after all those years of loyal
servitude to Yes and Robert Fripp, he would finally start up a band of his own
— simply called «Bruford» for short.
The good news was that he'd managed to assemble
a somewhat spectacular lineup: Dave Stewart (of Canterbury's Hatfield and the
North and National Health fame) on keyboards, Allan Holdsworth (of Soft
Machine fame, although he only played there for a short time) on lead guitar,
and former violinist Jeff Berlin on bass; additional guests on the band's first
album included Brand X's John Goodsall on rhythm guitar, jazz pro Kenny Wheeler
on flugelhorn, and dreamy-eccentric-avantgarde artist Annette Peacock on
vocals. All the compositions were credited either to Bruford alone or to the
Bruford/Stewart team — but it goes without saying that composition is not the
most important aspect on most of these tracks.
The best thing that can be said about the
record is that, although it is technically
a «fusion» album, it is by no means a generic, predictable one. It does share
certain similarities with Brand X's Unorthodox
Behaviour, released a year earlier — jazz-fusion at the core, yet with
numerous melodic overtones that reflect the drummers' earlier symphonic-prog
experience. But it goes even further than Brand X, because the addition of
Annette Peacock to this lineup gives the music an extra
romantic-philosophical-mystical dimension: the lengthy tracks on which she is
given enough freedom (ʽBack To The Beginningʼ and especially the
closing ʽAdios A La Pasadaʼ, which she co-wrote) are easily the best
on the record. On ʽBack To The Beginningʼ, she is placed unusually
high in the mix (so much so that you can easily get a jump when the vocals
burst out of the speakers), and her avantgarde jazz singing is actually the
least normal thing on the track — the sheer contrast between the free
modulation of her voice and the strict fusion groove of the music should count
as a psychedelic experience.
On ʽAdios A La Pasadaʼ, most of the
time she does not even sing, but just delivers a half-spoken monologue, while
Stewart and Holdsworth are trying to give the album a suitably grand-epic
conclusion, the former emulating a symphonic orchestra and the latter trying to
combine speedy technique with an expression of total joy at the perspective of
riding into the unknown, if you know what I mean. However, without those
vocals, this would still largely be
just a tight fusion jam with symphonic overtones — Peacock's performance gives
it more soul than anything else. Likewise, the first (ballad) part of
ʽSeems Like A Lifetime Agoʼ, where her singing is reminiscent of
Joni Mitchell, is clearly more memorable and evocative than the second one,
where the vocals go away and we are just left with the fusionists having their
fusionist fun.
Not that it is impossible to have your fun
along with them: after all, these are
musicians of the highest caliber, and the rhythm section of Bruford and Berlin
alone will occasionally tear you off the ground (check out, for instance, the
coda of ʽIf You Can't Stand The Heatʼ, when Stewart and Berlin are
playing a complex riff in unison and Bruford is gently, but firmly supporting
them with a tricky time signature — it's playful, but dazzling). Also,
ʽSpringtime In Siberiaʼ is largely just a melancholic jazz ballad,
completely given over to the piano and the flugelhorn, sounding like something
off an early Coltrane record (and yes, springtime can be a particularly lovely
time in Siberia indeed, although it depends). But it is difficult for me to
qualify this as an «average» or an «excellent» fusion record on the whole, as I
tend to get lost in this genre a little — it always goes for «technique» and
«feel» over «meaningful melody», and my bet is usually on meaningful melodies,
which, unsurprisingly, here largely coincide with the presence of the lady
singer.
The title track, I must say, feels a wee bit
corny rather than good, almost as if they were trying to make a catchy,
clap-along «fusion-pop» ditty here, with a silly-cheerful synth tone and with
the rhythmic pattern occasionally lapsing into ska. This might irritate veteran
fusion fans and prog aficionados alike, or maybe even bring to mind unnecessary
associations with early Eighties' Genesis (of the Duke variety). However, the tune is not at all representative of
either the real fusion or the real progressive parts of the record, and can be
taken or left at will.
The general verdict should be positive — no,
the album does not exactly shatter the anti-solo-drummer prejudice, but as a
tasteful divertissement with a twist,
Feels Good To Me is probably much
better than it could have been, had Bruford assembled a less talented team or
had he decided to completely subjugate himself to the fusion formula.
Ironically, though, despite uniting the drummer from two of the decade's most
innovative bands and the keyboardist from two of the decade's most crazyass innovative bands, the album
feels totally conservative compared to all of those — then again, it was 1977, and most of the people who
were on the cutting edge in the early Seventies had already blunted their
powers, at the speed they were moving at. Regardless, a well-deserved thumbs up
for the effort is perfectly in order.
ONE OF A KIND (1979)
1) Hell's Bells; 2) One Of A
Kind (part 1); 3) One Of A Kind (part 2); 4) Travels With Myself – And Someone
Else; 5) Fainting In Coils; 6) Five G; 7) The Abingdon Casp; 8) Forever Until
Sunday; 9) The Sahara Of Snow (part 1); 10) The Sahara Of Snow (part 2).
In between Bruford's first and second album
came Bill's brief participation in UK, where he was reunited with his former
King Crimson pal John Wetton. However, according to the most common version,
that participation ended abruptly when Wetton and Eddie Jobson decided to fire
Alan Holdsworth from the band — and since Bruford was the one to bring him in,
in gentlemanly fashion, for queen and country and all that, he decided to leave
as well. And so both of them once again found themselves in... Bruford. Back
with Dave Stewart and Jeff Berlin, too, who were only too happy to oblige and
throw their talents back on the wagon.
Unfortunately, despite some glowing accounts of
this second album, this one leaves me completely and utterly cold. Where Feels Good To Me was a curious blend of
fusion and romantic prog-rock, courtesy of Annette Peacock and an overall
desire for innovation, One Of A Kind
is anything but one of a kind.
Basically, it is just a generic fusion album — a high quality fusion album, to
be sure, with top-notch standards and all, but completely indistinguishable in
character from the average pool of similar albums produced in the mid- to
late-Seventies. If you are a qualified pro here, one who «knows» exactly which
albums from that time by Weather Report, Chick Corea, Soft Machine, Brand X,
etc., bottle that spirit and which ones are simply coasting, you will be able
to form a definite judgement here as well. If, like myself, you largely find
them all interchangeable... okay, so this is probably not going to be a long
review.
Like I said, the standards are high, and one
major plus of the record is that Jeff Berlin continues to churn out speedy,
complex basslines that suck up most of my attention. On the downside, Stewart's
keyboards and Holdsworth's guitars seem to simply revel here in all possible
clichés of the genre — stuffy synth tones, soulless speed runs, or (on
the «ballad-type» numbers) romantic Santana-esque soloing with a bit of the
roaming gypsy spirit. And Bruford himself? Although credited as primary
songwriter on most of these tracks, he is, after all, just the drummer, and how
can a drummer make a composition interesting if everything else about it is
boring?
The only brief departure from the formula is
ʽForever Until Sundayʼ, a track originally performed by UK on their
1978 tour and still retaining here a nice, refreshing violin solo from Eddie
Jobson (not exactly Oistrakh quality, you understand, but still a great relief
to hear after all the unending guitar noodling). ʽFainting In Coilsʼ
is also unusual in that it features a mock-theatrical staging of a small bit
from Alice In Wonderland at the
beginning (with Anthea Norman Taylor, later to become the spouse of Brian Eno,
taking on the role of Alice — and the title itself is taken from the Mock
Turtle's story), but what the rest of the tune actually has to do with the idea
of "fainting in coils" is way beyond me; sounds just like one more
forgettable fusion tune to me.
Maybe the worst thing, after all, are those
awful keyboard tones: I mean, I could imagine a setting in which the main theme
of something like ʽHell's Bellsʼ would be totally realized in its
life-asserting optimism (notwithstanding the totally incongruent song title),
but with these retro-futuristic fanfare synths blasting it out like a security
system alarm gone mad, it's just no good — so thank you, AC/DC, for stealing
the title of the song and putting it to much
more adequate use the very next year (in a song that actually had some real bells in it, and kicked this
record's stale intellectualism all over the place).
Or maybe the worst thing is that all these
songs sound the same — not all of them are written in the same key, but all of
them set exactly the same mood: not too hot, not too cold, not too sappy, not
too harsh — perfect for elevators and mid-level restaurants with a poshy
attitude. Anyway, as I said, major fusion fans might not want to take this
seriously, but the only honest thing I can do here is award this stuff a thumbs down
— what else can be done with a record where not even one tune is endowed with
«staying power»?
THE BRUFORD TAPES (1979)
1) Hell's Bells; 2) Sample And
Hold; 3) Fainting In Coils; 4) Travels With Myself — And Someone Else; 5) Beelzebub;
6) The Sahara Of Snow (part 1); 7) The Sahara Of Snow (part 2); 8) One Of A
Kind (part 2); 9) Five G.
Two studio albums into their career and these
guys are already gunning for a live release — granted, a limited release, for
some reason restricted to the American, Canadian, and Japanese markets, even
though you'd think a band like Bruford could probably have fared somewhat
better on the European market. Recorded on July 12, 1979, in a New York club,
this performance marked the playing debut of John Clark, a student of
Holdsworth who was recommended by Allan as his replacement once he'd finally
had enough — and, honestly, I cannot easily tell the difference, though this is
probably just due to my indifference
to much of this material.
As you can see from the track list, they cover One Of A Kind almost in its entirety here, while the much better debut album only
gets two songs (well, actually, ʽFainting In Coilsʼ incorporates a
chunk from ʽBack To The Beginningʼ, so three, technically) — and
while it is rather obvious that they could hardly count on Annette Peacock to
tour with them, there seems to have never been any thought about carrying their
«symph-prog» side over to the live circuit. Instead, all of this here is a
strictly fusion affair, and, as you can guess, everything is smooth,
professional, and mostly sounds the same as the studio originals, with a few
extended jamming parts here and there and enthusiastic crowd noise (yes, those
batty New Yorkers do love their
fusion). If this makes you feel any better, the sound quality is quite
excellent for a low-key club date recording, but then could you expect anything
less from the former (and future) drummer of King Crimson?
The obvious bottomline is that if you do not
enjoy One Of A Kind, you can hardly
expect to be turned around by The Bruford
Tapes; and if you do enjoy One Of A Kind, you have to be a true
«fusion nutso» to want to appreciate the little additional nuances that the
band brings to the tables of this little New York get-together. In both cases,
this is most likely a thumbs down — despite the self-understandable
skill and tightness of the musicians.
GRADUALLY GOING TORNADO (1980)
1) Age Of Information; 2)
Gothic 17; 3) Joe Frazier; 4) Q.E.D.; 5) The Sliding Floor; 6) Palewell Park;
7) Plans For J.D.; 8) Land's End.
More like Gradually
Going Tormato, if you know what I mean. The current version of the Wikipedia
page states that "this album is considered among one of the best albums in
the progressive rock/fusion genre", with a reference to a review in the
All-Music Guide by a certain Leo Bloom, who probably knows his fusion from a
fuse and his prog from a frog, but as much as I'd like to agree that Bill
Bruford deserves more exposure and promotion, I'd also like to emphasize that
fusion is not always nearly as boring
as this record. Really, honestly, there are some truly exciting fusion albums
out there — this one just does not happen to be one of them.
If you take One Of A Kind as the band's typically generic fusion album, then Gradually Going Tornado differs from it
in three respects. First, it's got a less prominent guitarist than Alan Holdsworth
(John Clark, who did well enough reproducing Alan's parts live on stage, but
who certainly has problems coming up with similar parts on his own). Second, it
toys around with the pop scene, including a few cheerful, bouncy,
near-danceable fusion-pop hybrids like ʽAge Of Informationʼ. Third,
they probably thought that if they'd add vocals they'd be able to sell more
copies, and so their bass player Jeff Berlin begins singing — and he is every
bit as awful a vocalist as he is awesome as a bass player (and is it just me,
or is he unintentionally singing in the wrong key on some of these songs?).
So it's like... generic fusion, only worse.
Yes, the dated late 1970s synthesizer tones are still all over the place (and
pardon me for the hyperbole when I say that it is these synthesizer tones that
may have «killed» progressive rock far more efficiently than any amount of punk
attitude), the directionless jamming is still very much in action, and few, if
any, of the tunes are memorable or, in fact, meaningful. The «pop» songs are
either dreadful quasi-optimistic anthems with synthesized fanfares (ʽAge
Of Informationʼ, like the Buggles with more technique, but fewer hooks and
no sense of humor), or strange «angry rockers» like ʽGothic 17ʼ,
where hard rock, pop, and jazz are mixed in more or less equal dosage and you
have no way of understanding what sort of reaction the song is supposed to
elicit in the first place. The more «progressive» stuff is less embarrassing,
but even less memorable, so you don't have much of a choice.
The only thing about this album that I still
find cool is Berlin's bass playing — the man is totally killing it even on the
worst tracks, so every time I found the experience close to unbearable, I just
had to twist my ear channels so that they blocked out everything except the
basslines: fast and fluent like Jon Entwistle's, but also betraying
professional jazz training (Berklee College of Music, to be accurate). Could
you, please, delete everything else on the tracks and just leave that bass? I
am not even impressed by Bruford's drum tracks — next to that fabulous bass,
they're just... drums. But why did the guy have to ruin it all by singing over
those basslines?
In short, while it is probably possible to gradually convince yourself that the record
has its merits, I would suggest disspelling the illusion with a quick listen to
Bruford's very next project — the revamped King Crimson would release Discipline just one year later, and
show the world what a really inspired
and innovative progressive album could sound like in the early 1980s. Compared
to other run-of-the-mill fusion records, this one might be «okay», but compared
to the best of Yes and King Crimson — two bands, after all, which should be the
closest in kin spirit to Bruford — this is a thumbs down all the way.
THE AGE OF PLASTIC (1980)
1) Living In The Plastic Age;
2) Video Killed The Radio Star; 3) Kid Dynamo; 4) I Love You (Miss Robot); 5)
Clean, Clean; 6) Elstree; 7) Astroboy (And The Proles On Parade); 8) Johnny On
The Monorail.
The very name «Buggles» should probably
indicate that you are getting into something quirky at best, and stupidly
irritating at worst. «The Bugs», as Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes originally
wanted to call themselves, is bad enough, but Buggles? Wouldn't that kinda
sorta suggest a general trajectory where pop music begins with the Beatles and
ends, that is, reaches its triumphant culmination with ʽVideo Killed The
Radio Starʼ?
Well, in a way, it does.
The Buggles were arguably the first successful pop band that achieved its
success by refusing to be a band, and preferring to be a techno-mechanical unit
instead. Trevor Horn, who took on the responsibilities of producing the album,
took his major inspiration from Kraftwerk: total de-personalisation of the
proceedings, a «robotic» attitude in all respects, beginning with
instrumentation and ending with the lyrics and the personal image, but at the
same time, with a far more poppy sound than Kraftwerk — the melodies here are
inspired by ska, disco, Foreigner, and ABBA rather than stern Teutonic
minimalism.
To say that The Age Of
Plastic is «kitschy» or «gimmicky» does not even begin to do justice to
these songs, which anyone with a mouth trashier than mine would most likely
describe with the infamous appellation «faggy». They are so absurdly over the
top, so reckless with their hooks and so arrogant with their production that
Lady Gaga these days has nothing on these guys (well, at least if you adjust
the comparison basis for the standards of 1980). Reviews of the album, both
contemporary and retrospective, were about as split as the press used to be on
Black Sabbath — some loved them openly, some hated them in public but stashed
copies away in the basement anyway, until the time came when not loving
Sabbath became poor taste. Yes, The Age Of Plastic leads you indeed
into double temptation — on an intellectual level, it is tempting to trash it
as an exercise in flashy stupidity, but on that damn gut level, it is just as
tempting to put it on again... and again... and again...
Okay, the facts are
simple: the eight songs that constitute this album represent some of the decade's
catchiest pop music — all of them, not a single exception. Upon first
listen, you're hooked even if you are disgusted. Upon second listen, you are
entranced by the choruses. Third listen, and you pretty much got all these
songs by heart. This does not mean that Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes are
natural-born geniuses: the tunes were slowly and meticulously crafted over a
period of several years, and never again would these guys approach this level
of pop craft — neither in Yes, nor on their second album, nor in their
subsequent projects (like Art of Noise or Asia). But then again, the ideology
of the Buggles supposes that there are no «Trevor Horn» or «Geoff
Downes»: there's only the music, and whoever is standing behind it is totally
insignificant.
Not that this «whoever» is
totally dehumanized — yet. Like Kraftwerk, Horn and Downes are fascinated with
the conflict between technology and human spirit, and much, if not most, of the
album relates to this idea one way or another. This is one of these self-ironic
recordings where the musicians use the latest and trendiest technologies to
complain about the relentless onslaught of technology: "Could this be the
plastic age?", Horn asks us in desperation on the title track while at the
same time ensuring, with his production, that this verily and truly be
the plastic age. But where Ralf and Florian spooked people away by almost
literally turning into robots, the Buggles still retain their human side — and
thus give the layman a better chance to identify with their issues, seducing
him with their hooks and ensuring a good source of revenue in the process.
And the hooks are
unbeatable. Let's face it, we don't care that much about the saga of merciless
human progress — we just love those happy-sad female vocals chanting
"video killed the radio star, video killed the radio star" to that
tight-as-heck bass-drum pattern that could just as well have been lifted off a
Ramones song and adapted to the new realities of the synth-pop era. And does
anyone realize that in between ʽEchoesʼ and Phantom Of The Opera
there was ʽKid Dynamoʼ, which uses the same descending-ascending pattern
to create an atmosphere of tension and paranoia? Or that ʽI Love You (Miss
Robot)ʼ already writes the book on a large part of what would later
constitute the bulk of the Art of Noise legend — the techno-funk sound, the
treated vocals, the multi-tracked vocal harmonies, the «cloudy» synthesizers?
However, in my opinion,
the album does not properly begin to hit its stride until the second side, when
the satirical and even snappy side of the Buggles starts to show up.
ʽClean Cleanʼ, rocking out like a technofied version of Elton John's
ʽSaturday Night's Alrightʼ, is actually a serious anti-violence
statement, and the synthesizers on it sound as alive, angry, and punkish as any
aggressive guitar part on any contemporary punk (even hardcore punk) record.
ʽElstreeʼ, using the idea of starring in B movies as an allegory for
an originally meaningless life made even more meaningless, is the album's
saddest track — Ray Davies in the robot age. ʽAstroboy (And The Proles On
Parade)ʼ is hard to decode, but seems fairly misanthropic to me — I would
imagine that some people might want to slap Horn in the face for his sneering
intonation on the "let them be lonely and say you don't care" line,
and who exactly are "the proles on the parade", I wonder? Even so,
the intonation change from "romantic" to "sneery" on that
bridge is priceless.
The best is saved for
last: if you thought you knew everything about the Buggles after watching the
ʽVideo Killed The Radio Starʼ video, think again after hearing
ʽJohnny On The Monorailʼ, a song that combines nervous tension with a
fast pulse, a slight touch of country-western, some melancholic romanticism,
and a general feel of being pulled somewhere from where there is no return, as
Tina Charles plays the part of «the siren of doom» with her haunting background
vocals and the song stubbornly defies a straightforward explanation, all for
the better. Amazingly, you begin to understand that by the end of the album,
the Buggles have broken out of the «kitsch» mode and put a more serious face on
their collective robot — then again, maybe Side A was the robot in his
childhood, but even plastic matures with age, and sometimes becomes aware of
the dark side on its own, without outside help.
Ultimately, repeated
listens to The Age Of Plastic do not make its material seem any more
catchy than first time around — but they might help one understand that the
integration of Horn and Downes into Yes, which took place right after they
released this, was not such a thoroughly absurd move as one could think of it
just by being exposed to ʽVideo Killed The Radio Starʼ. Of course,
the idea was that Horn and Downes could help the failing band regain
commercial success, but they weren't hired just because they were catchy pop
hitmakers — behind the flashy imagery and the production gimmicks there is a
complete and largely original artistic vision, and plenty of intelligence and
feeling. As of today, some of the gimmicks have become dated — in particular,
Horn's passion for silly-sounding vocal overdubs (like the who-oh-oh's on
ʽElstreeʼ or the chipmunkish uh-ohs on ʽVideoʼ that you
usually get these days on messenger software) — but who knows, maybe I'm the
only one to worry about that in the first place. In any case, a big thumbs up and a request: do not miss the
perfectly human soul in this album. When I say «catchy hooks», I mean real
catchy hooks here, big emotional ones. It's easy to misinterpret them or fail
to grasp their meaning, but it's there alright.
ADVENTURES IN MODERN RECORDING (1981)
1) Adventures In Modern
Recording; 2) Beatnik; 3) Vermillion Sands; 4) I Am A Camera; 5) On TV; 6)
Inner City; 7) Lenny; 8) Rainbow Warrior; 9) Adventures In Modern Recording
(reprise).
This one's okay, but it ain't Age Of Plastic.
Yes, those nasty boys of prog rock, blew up The Buggles before they had a real
chance to conquer the world, and sucked them inside the band to replace Jon
Anderson — like I already said, if you listen to Age Of Plastic long
enough, you will begin to see that this wasn't the most random-decided decision
on earth, but fact of the matter is, Horn and Downes were no longer The
Buggles, but hired gunmen to guide a bunch of old out-of-touch proggers into
the new realities of a rapidly changing world (including hairstyles). And once
it didn't work out... well, the biorhythms were broken, and they just couldn't
really go back to being The Buggles like nothing happened. A broken family is a
broken family.
In the end, Geoff Downes
just defected away to Asia — trading the coolness, the irony, and the
snarkiness of a Buggle for the stiffness, seriousness, and pomposity of an
«Asian» — before the sessions for the new album had even started properly,
leaving behind only some of his keyboard playing on some of the demos. So
Trevor Horn cursed him all the way to adult contemporary hell and beyond, and
set out to complete the record on his own, with a little help from such friends
as Simon Darlow (keyboards), John Sinclair (drum programming and co-producing),
and even a keyboard part from Anne Dudley on ʽBeatnikʼ (who then
joined Horn for many of his projects, including The Art Of Noise).
The resulting album is
understandably much more morose and depressed than Age Of Plastic, and
this decreases its value — as long as the Buggles were happy, snappy, and
punchy, the magic worked, but in this noticeably more pensive, melancholic,
«downer» mood, quite a few songs tend to drag, if not suck. Case in point:
ʽLennyʼ. It may or it may not refer to Lenny Bruce, and there's
nothing wrong with either possibility — but its melody progresses from somewhat
moronic to simply boring, just lots of poorly expressive synthesizers and a
semi-decent vocal track which still has Horn in his «I am Jon Anderson» mode,
trying to make us believe he is trying to make some sort of important point,
but really just wasting three minutes of our time. And this is not the only
misfire on this record.
Thankfully, some of that
old snarkiness is still in action on about half of the record.
ʽBeatnikʼ is a hilarious reinvention of the rockabilly genre for the
technopop era — and graced with more Yes-style harmonies and lyrics ("all
will be revealed before the next move!") on top of it all. The title
track, in prime Buggles fashion, pokes fun at whatever the Buggles themselves
are doing: "they're not playing, they're just having adventures in modern
recording!", and it is light, sprightly, self-ironic, tends to change keys
and tempos — basically, the kind of stuff that 10cc might have been doing in
1981, had they survived up to 1981 in a less crappy format than they did. And
even the lengthy romantic epic ʽVermilion Sandsʼ ends in a bit of
«Vegas» fun, also rearranged for the electronic age, proving that humor has not
been abandoned.
Elsewhere, Horn tends to
get too serious — apparently, even one year with Yes can rearrange your liver
to such solid mental grace that the next thing you know, you're writing sci-fi
mythological ballads with references to rainbow warriors or allusions to J. G.
Ballard. Actually, both ʽVermilion Sandsʼ and ʽRainbow
Warriorʼ seem like decent compositions, but this whole «art-synth-pop»
business... I just don't know. Too simple and silly to really compete with the
proggers — too complex and artistically pretentious to be plain kinky fun.
There's no denying some creativity and intelligence here, but ʽJohnny On
The Monorailʼ has all this stuff beat in a jiffy — that one just had plain
old hooks, these ones seem to demand from you to acknowledge their depth, and I
am not sure if they have any.
There's also a remake of
ʽI Am A Cameraʼ (formerly ʽInto The Lensʼ) here, done
Buggles-style rather than Yes-style, but I've never been a big fan of that song
in the first place, so let's not get any ideas. Actually, one point is clear —
both Downes and Horn underwent a «maturation» process while they were in Yes,
so that Downes eventually got serious enough for Asia (!) and Horn got serious
enough for turning Buggles into BuggYes. If this latter idea intrigues and
fascinates you, go for this album at once — if you are a big fan of Drama,
it is impossible that you will not find something here to please your
synth-prog lover's heart. If, however, it sounds unattractive in theory, I do
not believe you will find it any different in practice. Nevertheless, I do
appreciate the «quirky» songs and I respect the craft of the «serious» songs,
so the overall rating is still a thumbs up
— them Buggles don't have more than two albums out anyway, so they might just
as well get an extra pointer for that (including an advance for not
releasing a Buggles album anywhere near 1986, which would probably have been
fatal). Also, Trevor Horn is just a good guy with a strong artistic vision, and
even some of his relative failures are still interesting.
BUTTHOLE SURFERS (1983)
1) The Shah Sleeps In Lee
Harvey's Grave; 2) Hey; 3) Something; 4) Bar-B-Q Pope; 5) Wichita Cathedral; 6)
Suicide; 7) The Revenge Of Anus Presley.
Like Kurt Cobain, you just gotta respect any band that calls itself «Butthole Surfers». On one
hand, the name is more «irreverently amusing» than flat-out gross (like Anal
Cunt, something that requires even more imagination than the idea of a butthole
surfer but ends up being disgusting in any case). On the other hand, the name
totally and utterly precludes such a potential embarrassment as «commercial
success». Let's face it, fame and fortune are for losers — real men find
satisfaction in anything but fame and
fortune, and what better means are there to get them completely and permanently
out of your way than calling yourself «Butthole Surfers»?
This debut EP was originally released in 1983
on the Dead Kennedys' label, Alternative Tentacles; apparently, Jello Biafra
was so overwhelmed by the guys that he promised to release their stuff, provided
they could find somebody to lend them some studio time — which they did,
proving that truly nothing is impossible. The band's lineup at the time
included Gibby Haynes on lead vocals and saxophone; Paul Leary on guitar and
occasional lead vocals; Bill Jolly on bass; and a whole set of different
drummers, some of whom they probably even forgot to mention on the credits.
And who'd want to look at the credits, with that
album art, anyway?
The music... okay, this is music. Basically, Butthole Surfers play «punk rock», but not
«regular» or «hardcore» punk rock — rather something like absurdist or dadaist
punk rock. Unlike unionized punkers, these guys have little concern for the
evil grin of The System, or the everyday sweat of The Working Man: what they
are more concerned about is testing the limits of the punk idiom, whether it
can incorporate humor, purely artistic offensiveness, raffinated craziness, and
just about anything else you'd like to insert, at random, inside the idiom. For
instance, you might want to play a bit of college-style folk-rock with psychedelic
guitar overdubs (ʽHeyʼ), or some repetitive one-chord blues vamps
(ʽSomethingʼ), and they'll all fit in with the more overtly punkish
material like ʽThe Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey's Graveʼ (does he
really?).
It may all seem silly, but the band gets by on
the sheer strength of its imagination — their musical and cultural knowledge
are undeniable, and they mix small pinches of everything in such incredibly
unimaginable combinations that it never feels like the only purpose of making
this EP was to gross out the audience. So there's a lot of predictable
offensiveness thrown at religion, the Pope in person (ʽBar-B-Q Popeʼ
— does there exist a Sinead O'Connor cover of this anywhere?), pop icons like
Hendrix and Elvis, and dead parents, but it's all funny, and some of it is even
catchy: simplistic vamp or not, that "something she said to me last
night" bit from ʽSomethingʼ really sticks in the brain. And
speaking of surfing, there is a
little bit of surf guitar on ʽWichita Cathedralʼ, as if they were actually
influenced by Agent Orange.
In addition, Paul Leary is quite an inventive
guitarist who likes to introduce just a wee bit of dissonance in his overall
smooth lead guitar playing — not a lot, like Greg Ginn, but just a bit to throw
you off balance. That's on the less messy songs, like ʽWichita Cathedralʼ,
but then there are also intentionally messy trips — like ʽSuicideʼ,
an unlikely marriage between old school rock'n'roll and free-form avantgarde
music where, I suppose, rock'n'roll symbolizes "the walls of my life"
and free-form avantgarde suggests suicide. Or there's just total hooliganry,
like ʽThe Revenge Of Anus Presleyʼ, as full of obscenities as if it
were the band's take on an underground rap ritual, while the guitars spiral
around you in a psychopathic, but humorous manner. Like a comical, lighthearted
take on Stooges-style madness.
In January 2003, the album was re-released on
CD together with its follow-up EP, Live
PCPPEP, recorded live (indeed) in a club in San Antonio and originally released
in the fall of 1984. A separate review for this EP would be rather
superfluous, especially since it mostly just reproduces Butthole Surfers in its entirety, although the show does start off
with a ravenously insane take on ʽCowboy Bobʼ which is a preview of
the version on their next studio album. There are a couple bonuses on the CD
release, though, such as the previously unreleased blues-punk-rocker ʽGary
Floydʼ, and a bass-heavy post-punk rocker ʽSinister Crayonʼ
which, fairly speaking, sounds rather dull and un-ironic next to the obscene
hilariousness of the trailblazing EP, and was probably left off for a good
reason — this kind of stuff would rather suit, say, Pere Ubu. Oh, and if your
ears are sharp enough to penetrate into the stage banter, you do need this by
all means — Haynes is constantly spouting insults to the public, at one point
even remarking that they have managed to clear out most of the audience, as if it were a good thing...
In any case, both the original EP and the new, much expanded release get a
thumbs up
rating — it might be safe to say that in 1983, nobody took punk as un-seriously
as these guys, and that is quite a refreshing thing to remember. Of course, as
far as irreverent songwriting is concerned, this is not Ween-level quality, but
these guys are Ween's spiritual
ancestors, and we at least have to respect this, even if we don't necessarily
have to enjoy all the jokes or be amazed at all the little experiments.
PSYCHIC... POWERLESS... ANOTHER MAN'S SAC (1984)
1) Concubine; 2) Eye Of The
Chicken; 3) Dum Dum; 4) Woly Boly; 5) Negro Observer; 6) Butthole Surfer; 7)
Lady Sniff; 8) Cherub; 9) Mexican Caravan; 10) Cowboy Bob; 11) Gary Floyd.
The process of creative unfurling from «probe
EP» to «full-blown LP» level is always nice to watch, provided we are dealing
with real, not faked, creativity — and in 1984, Butthole Surfers were on a
roll, inspired and encouraged by the realisation that they were able to allow themselves
just about anything. Punk attitude,
offensive demeanor, dirty humor, psychedelic arrangements, and limitless
intrusion into the territory of any randomly picked musical genre — these guys
had the advantage of taking nothing
so seriously that it would impose any unbreakable rules of musical conduct on
their career.
Commercial success not being even a distant
objective, they were, nevertheless, not properly «avantgarde» — most of the
melodies on this album respect regular blues conventions, and could be
characterized as pop rock, blues rock, hard rock, punk rock, maybe a little
heavy metal on the side, anyway, nothing particularly out of the ordinary; in
any case, the band members did not have the chops to play something trickier
than that (and how many bands did, anyway?). However, it is not the core
melodies, but the irreverent attitude towards these melodies that counts: the
band prepares a package of hilarious shock value, inspired grossness, and
unpredictable musical seasoning for each song, and have themselves a jolly good
time as each package goes off like a shitbomb in the listeners' faces.
Actually, when I say «hilarious», I need to
correct myself. The stuff that the Surfers do here is neither very intelligent
nor very funny, and if you are even a little bit stuck up or hung up, it will
be very easy to dismiss all these songs as pointless hooliganry. I mean,
ʽLady Sniffʼ? Okay, somebody will be sure defend the song as a nasty
parody on the redneck and/or white trash stereotype, replete with grunts,
farts, expectorations, and verbal wonders like "lady walk that greasy
gravy!", but somebody else will just as easily say that the whole thing is
just a sorry excuse for finally
putting some fart noises on tape, something so often used as a threatening
allegory by us reviewers but, actually, so rarely encountered in real life. And
here it is!
The hilariousness lies not in the
offensiveness, though, and not in any alleged attempts at joking: the main
strength is in the synthesis of various influences, or in the emotional
inversion (corruption!) of musical styles. For instance, ʽDum Dumʼ
is really a spoof on Black Sabbath's ʽChildren Of The Graveʼ,
borrowing the song's rhythm section and crossing it with trebly-wobbly,
«clucky» lead guitar that sounds like a cross between Duane Eddy and Adrian
Belew. ʽWoly Bolyʼ lifts the distorted descending guitar intro off
some garage classic whose name escapes me at present (no, it is not ʽWooly Bullyʼ, as one
might probably suggest) and reworks it into the general melody of the song, but
that general melody tends to «melt» and become splattered against the wall,
only to pick itself up and then be smashed again every now and then
(fortunately, the rhythm section is tight enough to allow Leary to do whatever
he wants). And ʽButthole Surferʼ is indeed like surf-punk, only much
dirtier than your average Agent Orange.
If you get offended easily, the first song to
be checked here is certainly not ʽLady Sniffʼ, but the six-minute
plus workout ʽCherubʼ, which alternates between power-chord based
sludge-metal sections and odd «astral» passages where one guitar sounds like a
spaceship, plotting a complex course in an asteroid field, and the other
guitars crash and bust around it like those particular asteroids, collision
with which was inavoidable. And at certain intervals they even play a chord
that makes you expect they will rip into Hendrix's ʽThird Stone From The
Sunʼ at any moment, but they're just teasing you. This is really the kind of hilariousness I am referring to,
certainly not the fact that they use the word "negro" in a song title
or anything.
But the quintessential BS song on this album is
probably ʽCowboy Bobʼ, which was already made available earlier in
the live version on Live PCPPEP;
here, the production is cleaner, but Haynes is delivering his lyrics through a
bullhorn, so you can take your personal pick — anyway, the song has it all:
silly irreverential title that has nothing to do with the lyrics or melody, a
nasty, repetitive, droning hard rock bassline à la Budgie's ʽBreadfanʼ, supported with a
saxophone part for contrast, wild screaming in the background (and sometimes in
the foreground), psychedelic guitar soloing, and schizophrenic lyrics
("I've always got a knife in my back!", which could be a good tagline
for the band's entire career). This is what you get, basically, when you cross
Iggy Pop with Keith Moon — yes, that's the very essence of Butthole Surfers.
To call this record an overall «classic» would
be an insult to the band itself, I believe: they are not here to amaze you or
make you rethink your life, they are here to introduce a bit of creativity and
imagination into the old art of grossing-out. But in the somewhat parallel
(and sometimes a wee bit perpendicular) universe of flippy-freaky, it is a classic, unquestionably deserving
its own flippy-freaky thumbs up; I am still trying to imagine how that
would look on brown paper, but perhaps I have not had my proper fill of
ʽCherubʼ and ʽCowboy Billʼ just yet to understand that.
REMBRANDT PUSSYHORSE (1986)
1) Creep In The Cellar; 2) Sea
Ferring; 3) American Woman; 4) Waiting For Jimmy To Kick; 5) Strangers Die
Everyday; 6) Perry; 7) Whirling Hall Of Knives; 8) Mark Says Alright; 9) In
The Cellar; 10) Moving To Florida*; 11) Comb*; 12) To Parter*; 13) Tornadoes*.
On here, the Surfers are attempting to get a
little more serious, though you certainly would not know it from the album
title — which not even the real Rembrandt would have appreciated, I think, no
matter how iconoclastic a picture is being painted of him in various urban
legends. But then I guess, if you put the word «Rembrandt» in your album title,
there's no getting away from at least trying
to do something important. Even if it is followed by the word «pussyhorse».
Okay, not that important, perhaps.
Most of these tracks rise high above basic
street hooliganry, though not always above the level of parody — some sound
like an absurdist take on Joy Division (ʽWhirling Hall Of Knivesʼ) or
Nick Cave (ʽSea Ferringʼ), and some are noisy, irreverent
deconstructions of classics (the Guess Who's ʽAmerican Womanʼ). The
true name of the game, though, is «experimentalism», and the band tries on
everything that works and some things that don't, with spontaneity and
unpredictability as their chief guides.
One of the legends states, for instance, that
they were recording ʽCreep In The Cellarʼ on a used 16-track tape
without having previously erased a country-western fiddle track from one of the
channels — which played something completely different, but they liked it and
left it in, so here we have ourselves some dark piano pop with a merry fiddle
«underdub» playing something almost straight out of the Beatles' ʽDon't Pass
Me Byʼ. Does it work? Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't. More important
is the fact that such was Fate's decree, and if you call yourselves The
Butthole Surfers, you just don't muck around with Fate.
Everything here is weird, largely because the
Surfers have finally gotten used to the possibilities of the recording studio,
and are using the whole power of effects, overdubs, loops, and samples to their
benefit, if that might indeed be the right word for it. Some basic knowledge of
American pop culture, as usual, wouldn't hurt to appreciate the record deep
enough, but is hardly necessary: perhaps knowing that ʽMark Says
Alrightʼ utilizes the growl of a pitbull named Mark Farner, in «honor» of
the leader of Grand Funk Railroad (a band that could hardly be further away
from the Butthole Surfers' ideal than any other — but then, at least secretly,
deep down inside everybody really loves GFR), makes the track a little more
hilarious — but its real charm lies in how it combines elements of musical
suspense with musical clowning, starting off with surf guitar trills and then
melting them into a sea of chiming noises and wobbly interlocking soundwaves.
What's Mark Farner got to do with that, anyway?
But essentially, this is a record about
madness, not as heavy and frightening as, say, The Birthday Party, yet every
bit as deranged — already ʽCreep In The Cellarʼ begins with the line
"there's a hole in his brain where his mind should have been", an appropriate
tag for everything that goes on here. If there is a problem, it lies in the
fact that almost as many albums had been recorded about madness by 1986 as
there had been about breakups, and the Surfers aren't giving us any previously
uncovered angle, although it helps that they are not being too serious about it: for instance, a surreptitious slice of social
criticism is heavily disguised in ʽPerryʼ, an adaptation of the Perry Mason theme for organ,
schizophrenic guitar, and distorted, barely identifiable vocals. A zombie
mutant Vegas anthem, words, music, and meaning all corroded.
I would not go as far as to fall in love with
the record, though. Like many experimental «try anything for kicks» records,
this one has some brilliant musical ideas (like the flanger effect on
ʽWhirling Hall Of Knivesʼ, drilling a nice see-through hole in your
skull in four and a half minutes), some odd stuff that overstays its welcome
(did the electro-tribal drumming on ʽAmerican Womanʼ really have to
occupy five and a half minutes of space?), and some completely pointless tracks
— for instance, the "church organ" + "bubbles" +
"distant vocal noise" combination of ʽStrangers Die
Everydayʼ simply does nothing other than undermining the solemnity of the
church organ with the silliness of the bubbles. So what was that all about
again?..
The CD issue of the album increases its length
drastically by throwing on the EP Cream
Corn From The Socket Of Davis (from the previous year) as a bonus, adding
three more tracks in the same (lack of) style and one, ʽMoving To
Floridaʼ that would have been a better fit for Psychic..., what with its vocal lambasting of the redneck
stereotype. However, I am not certain that forty nine minutes is a good span
for an album like this — what with the songs tending to drag so much and the
sonic weirdness of it all not always coinciding with sonic amazement, so to
speak. Of course, in the overall context of 1986 («the worst year for music»,
as I like to call it, although mostly in reference to the major label
commercial stuff), Pussyhorse is a
marvel of human ingenuity. But in the overall context of human ingenuity as
such, I would refrain from a thumbs up judgement: there is not much here that I
openly enjoy, be it with a giggle or with a shiver, and too many tracks that
are too boring to respect.
LOCUST ABORTION TECHNICIAN (1987)
1) Sweat Loaf; 2) Pittsburg To
Lebanon; 3) Weber; 4) Hay; 5) Human Cannonball; 6) U.S.S.A; 7) The O-Men; 8)
Kuntz; 9) Graveyard; 10) 22 Going On 23.
Okay, this time they're really just taking random words out of a dictionary. In fact,
they're taking random stuff out of everywhere, and piling it all up as long as
it sounds heavy, dark, weird, disturbing, and humorous at the same time. Now
do not get me wrong: if something sounds heavy, dark, weird, disturbing, and
humorous at the same time, that does not necessarily mean that it's good — which should be kind of obvious
to anybody who ever tried emptying the entire contents of a fully stocked
refrigerator into one big bowl and tasting on the contents. In fact, I am still
trying to understand whether this album has any artistic merits, and it is even
harder than with Rembrandt Pussyhorse,
because on there, they at least tried to hook us with verbal content. On Locust Abortion Technician, there is
not a lot of words in the first place, and what little there is does not even
make surrealist sense.
«Bad acid trip» is a typical description when
it comes to discussing this record, but so many pieces of music have been
described as sonic equivalents of «bad acid trips», it's hardly distinctive
any more — as well as most likely meaningless to those of us who have never had bad acid trips. «Evil clown music»
is more like it, especially when you take the album sleeve into consideration
— or, perhaps, «Zen music», if you take «Zen» not in its meditative interpretation,
but in its aspect of «revelation through shock». Almost any of these compositions
/ sonic collages could theoretically awaken one of the many beasts inside you,
as the Surfers cleverly choose «tasty» soundbites and stack them on top of each
other or twirl them around each other and then invite you to step into the
unknown and tell them what it is that you feel, as they deconstruct and distort
musical reality.
I wonder what Tony Iommi would say about
ʽSweet Loafʼ, a six-minute «tribute» not just to the main riff of
Sabbath's ʽSweet Leafʼ, but to the basic construction principle of Master Of Reality in general —
brutal-heavy parts being divided by soft acoustic interludes for the sake of
sharper contrast. Silly it may be, but it definitely sounds more «trippy» than
the original — which, if you remember, was actually an anthem to marijuana, and
so, in a sense, you could say that the Surfers stay more true to the original
spirit of the song than Sabbath themselves. And what would the original heavy
electric bluesmen from Beck to Page say about ʽPittsburg To Lebanonʼ,
an exercise in distorting the 12-bar structure to the fuzziest extremes of
1987? And what would the original masters of psychedelic guitar say to
ʽWeberʼ, thirty seconds of craziest, shrilliest lead guitar overdubs
ever that make Cream, Hendrix, and even the Stooges seem like studio wimps?
Okay, they'd all probably just laugh it off,
and they'd have their reasons. But even on the least well structured numbers
here, the Surfers do their best to exacerbate everything, and they do it on a
highly professional level: this is not just a bunch of kids giggling with the
recording controls, these are experts that crank up to 11 whatever it is that
they are cranking. In fact, the album's only track that does superficially
resemble a «song», the speedy rocker ʽHuman Cannonballʼ, might be the
weakest link — it just sounds way too normal for this record. It could have
been recorded by, I dunno, Bad Religion, for instance. Whereas something like
ʽKuntzʼ — a totally bizarre mix of East European and Southeast Asian
motives (including a vocal track that they dragged off some Thai pop song) — as
deranged as it is, could only come from the inexhaustible trickster mind of
Gibby Haynes. And Leary's guitar work on ʽGraveyardʼ showcases his
serious chops as a blues guitarist (that solo would be well respected on any
classic blues-rock record), but it is more important how every once in a while
he dissolves the notes in a puddle of hysterical noise, while Haynes is
mumbling black magic incantations or something in the background.
It helps that the album is short (barely half
an hour in length) and yet its contents are so diverse; it also helps that
there is practically no toilet humor (or if there is, it's probably in Thai);
and it certainly helps that, deep down inside, these guys are really just good
old fans of the classics — had they been worshippers of avantgarde icons like
Henry Cow, this would have been «weirdness squared», but when you take Sabbath
and Zeppelin as your points of entry, well, from a certain cynical point of
view, these guys are just begging to
be deconstructed to some such effect. Not that Locust Abortion Technician cannot be enj... uh, assimilated on its own, without any knowledge
of its derivational base. But I don't believe that Haynes himself ever wanted
you to do something like that — most likely, he'd tell you to go do your
psychedelic, metallic, and punkish homework first, and then get back to him
later. In any case, my thumbs up here should only be relevant if one does
not regard the record as a
stand-alone thing, but sees it as a crooked mirror projection of its
predecessors. As a stand-alone thing, I would not be qualified to judge it
anyway. Besides, it's not 1987 any more — these days, what are the chances of
anyone hearing ʽSweet Loafʼ before
ʽSweet Leafʼ, rather than after? (Unless, of course, the anyone in
question is a 12-year old with a particularly sick mind, surfing for buttholes
on the Internet).
HAIRWAY TO STEVEN (1988)
1) Jimi; 2) Ricky; 3) I Saw An
X-Ray Of A Girl Passing Gas; 4) John E. Smoke; 5) Rocky; 6) Julio Iglesias; 7)
Backass; 8) Fast.
A lot of people swear by this as the last great
Butthole Surfers album, but... I'm not all that sure. I'm not even sure about
the title, which is a kinky spoonerism worthy of a Mark Prindle review, but on
the whole, seems just «silly» rather than «absurd» — and not even all that
offensive, either, if you want to make a key point on the Butthole Surfers'
importance as the ultimate Sacred Cow Irritant to be unleashed on a stuck-up
world.
But outside of the title, the record seems like
an attempt at relatively tame, even normal
— for the Surfers, that is — psychedelic rock, with a heavy nod to their
predecessors. It may well be so that, like many sensible people do, Gibby and
Paul got tired of merely fooling around and decided to finally «make progress»,
«mature», or something like that (this rational assumption is almost destroyed to smithereens if you
take the lyrics of ʽJulio Iglesiasʼ into consideration, but this
screaming exception just proves the general rule). And this is not such a
perfect idea, because the "songwriting" here is essentially centered
around lengthy and/or repetitive grooves — almost jam-like
grooves, and as much as I respect Paul Leary as a guitarist, jamming is not
what this band is truly about. Although, in a pinch, some Butthole Surfers
jamming may be good (and, shh, don't tell anyone, but it is definitely more fun than the Grateful Dead anyway).
Unlike Hairway
To Steven, ʽJimiʼ is a good title — this opening 12-minute epic
is clearly dedicated to Hendrix, which is reflected both in Leary's guitar
style and in the band's heavy playing around with speeding up and slowing down
their vocals; together with all the astral noises and guitar meltdowns, this is
highly reminiscent of the opening «alien sketch» on Axis: Bold As Love. But ʽEXPʼ was over in a couple
minutes, whereas this one goes on long after it has revealed all its
potential, and even if you built up a case that Paul Leary is a much better
Hendrix interpreter than Stevie Ray Vaughan (totally possible, if you value the
«psycho» aspects of Jimi's playing more than his «blues» aspects), this is
cool, but not jaw-droppingly amazing/original guitar playing by the standards
of 1988. The unexpected transition into acoustic folk-rock jamming with
chirping birds and crying babies all around during the last five minutes is
kinda cool, but also most definitely overlong. Take five minutes off the first
part and three off the second, and you have something nice and adequate going
there.
Once we get to the shorter songs, we experience
the problem of what it is when the Surfers sound «normal». Found face to face
with a psycho-folk backing (e. g. on ʽRickyʼ and ʽRockyʼ),
Gibby Haines begins sounding suspiciously close to Marty Balin, whereas Leary,
when he is not paying tribute to Hendrix, seems to be surreptitiously tearing
pages out of the Syd Barrett riffbook (ʽRickyʼ, I believe, uses some
chord progressions from ʽInterstellar Overdriveʼ at least). That
wouldn't be too bad if they used these influences to good effect — but much too
often, it just sounds like humble tributes to their betters. I mean, it's
probably good that the songs sound so timeless; remembering the sound fashions
of 1988, it is nice not to see them reflected here in any way. But timelessness
also comes at a price, and the price here is that this brand of groove-based,
relatively humor-free psychedelia just does not seem to make a lot of
self-autonomous sense.
The problem is, you either have great melodies
or you have impressive atmosphere (if you're really lucky, you can have both),
but these melodies aren't too great
(at best, they're passable variations on stuff we already know), and the
atmosphere is confusing. ʽI Saw An X-Ray Of A Girl Passing Gasʼ — is
this supposed to be a parody, or is this the Butthole Surfers' twisted way of a
lyrical and musical interpretation of what seems to be a routine visit to a
local clinic? It's too twisted for
the former, but too crude and offensive to be taken seriously. And if you pay
no attention to the lyrics (or even the vocals), it is just another syncopated
rocker with a predictable acoustic rhythm pattern — although when Leary gets to
the solo, he has a nice way of taking it high up into the stratosphere, I'll
admit. But then, if we're heading into the stratosphere, we are no longer in
the local clinic, so count me confused.
And, naturally, with tunes like ʽJulio
Iglesiasʼ, where Gibby lambasts poor Julio ("Julio he had a mole /
Went to the doctor with a fiery pole / Saw the nurse what did he see / Loved to
watch his sister pee") to a frantic neo-rockabilly beat; or with tunes
like ʽJohn E. Smokeʼ, a lengthy pseudo-live send-up of the
country-western tell-tale subgenre, it is
hard to take the album seriously. In the end, it's just a little frustrating:
the record tries to be everything at once, and in doing so, fails rather than
succeeds as a whole. Individually, there's plenty of good moments to be had —
and the short coda ʽFastʼ, featuring the band packing a tight punch
and Leary excelling both on rhythm and heavily processed lead guitar, might be
one of their best songs ever. But as a cohesive (or even as an intentionally
dis-cohesive) LP, Hairway To Steven
is a first misstep that would ultimately lead to the band's losing it
altogether.
DOUBLE LIVE (1989)
1) Too Parter; 2) Psychedelic
Jam; 3) Ricky; 4) Rocky; 5) Gary Floyd; 6) Florida; 7) John E. Smoke; 8)
Tornadoes; 9) Pittsburg To Lebanon; 10) The One I Love; 11) Hey; 12) Dum Dum;
13) No Rule; 14) U.S.S.A.; 15) Comb; 16) Graveyard; 17) Sweetloaf; 18) Backass;
19) Paranoid; 20) Fast; 21) I Saw An X-Ray Of A Girl Passing Gas; 22)
Strawberry; 23) Jimi; 24) Lou Reed; 25) Kuntz; 26) 22 Going On 23; 27) Creep In
The Cellar; 28) Suicide; 29) Something.
Double
Live? What is this — the
Butthole Surfers tribute to the Golden Age of Progressive Rock? By all means,
the length of this monster (130 minutes, give or take a few), which has since
1990 been available as a double live CD, not LP set, actually gives ELP and Yes
with their triple albums a good run
for their money. And in a better world, this record might be all the Butthole
Surfers your record collection needs — a massive run through most of their
highlights, a few of their lowlights, some on-the-spot stage craziness and
stage sickness, and even an R.E.M. cover and a Grand Funk Railroad cover
totally out of the blue (okay, so we already new Gibby was a Mark Farner «fan»,
but Gibby playing Michael Stipe is something else altogether). Unfortunately,
the harsh reality is so harsh that I have a hard time not letting my tongue
slip about how this album totally s... okay, we are not being objective here,
so stop it, tongue.
Fact of the matter is, what they say is that Double Live was released primarily as
an anti-bootlegging measure: since the Surfers weren't making a whole lot of
cash from their studio albums (gee, I wonder why?), yet somehow the tapes of
their crazyass live performances were in regular demand, they decided they
would finally take advantage of that — by going all the way and releasing what
really seems like their complete repertoire on this double CD monster. The only
problem was, there was not a single tape in sight on which the Surfers would be
professionally recorded: most of the tracks here are only very slightly above bootleg
quality, and a few are quite solidly below
bootleg quality. Not to mention that this is arguably the most awfully
sequenced live record I've ever heard (granted, I'm not a big expert on
underground live releases) — fade outs, fade ins, ugly sonic seams from track
to track as if they were just cutting and splicing the tapes with glue and scissors.
But the sequencing is really just a minor nuisance next to the consistently
awful sound to which you are going to be subjected for over two hours.
Of course, seasoned fans of the lo-fi sonic
crimes of the 1980's underground scene will not bother about such minor
nuisances as the drums sounding like tin cans and the guitars sounding as if
from under a thick slab of concrete — who knows, maybe some of them might
actually feel that it adds to the experience, although I am not sure that Paul
Leary himself, with his good ear for crazy guitar sounds, would agree. Too bad,
because a track like ʽPsychedelic Jamʼ, which used to be a staple of
the band's live show, features some awesome «guitar weaving» between Haynes and
Leary, with the two occasionally flying off into space with more flash than the
Grateful Dead and more fun than Cream, yet the recording does not properly
capture the overtones to turn this into a truly blissful headphone experience.
Even worse, the mind-blowing sonic textures of
the last two studio records, already seriously weakened due to the band's
inability to reproduce them onstage (as far as I understand, they rely on
backing tapes, particularly for all the distorted sound effects on the vocals),
are further damaged by the sound quality, making this version of
ʽJimiʼ nigh near unlistenable (in the bad sense of the word; not to
mention that ʽLou Reedʼ, into which it promptly segues, seems to be a
messy tribute to Metal Machine Music,
nine minutes of dirty, crunchy, abrasive chaos that might have sounded cool
back in 1975, or even way back in 1970 when the Stooges did it on ʽLA
Bluesʼ, but hardly by the standards of 1989). ʽSweatloafʼ gains
nothing by having its «regret» spoken bit replaced by a creative dirty
rewriting of Morrison's soliloquy in ʽThe Endʼ, and loses almost
everything by not even having the riff played distinctly, let alone everything
else.
To cut a long story short — inevitably so,
because I've only managed to sit through this once and have no wish to repeat
the experience — if you want a shadow of some proper appreciation of the Surfers as a live band, please refer to Live PCPPEP, which was much shorter,
much better recorded, gave a more distinct portrait of Gibby Haynes as
frontman, and is available as a freebie with their first EP anyway. Double Live, on the other hand, has
them dealing with the problem of reproducing all that crazyass studio
experimentation on the stage, and bad sound quality does not alleviate that
problem. As much as I like about half of these songs (and have little against
most of the other half), the record gets a thumbs down — I am certainly not spending the next several years
trying to get myself to like this attempt to convert carefully crafted studio
surrealism into thin, muffled, wobbly psychedelic spontaneity.
PIOUHGD (1990)
1) Revolution Part 1; 2)
Revolution Part 2; 3) Lonesome Bulldog; 4) Lonesome Bulldog II; 5) The Hurdy
Gurdy Man; 6) Golden Showers; 7) Lonesome Bulldog III; 8) Blindman; 9) No, I'm
Iron Man; 10) Something; 11) P.S.Y.; 12) Lonesome Bulldog IV; 13*) Barking Dogs.
Although a lot of critics seem to think that Piouhgd (on some releases, the title is
spelt Pioughd, but I seriously doubt
there is a «correct» way of spelling this) shows the beginning of the decline
for the Surfers, I would disagree — in fact, I'd say that, in terms of being
true to the spirit of the band, this is a major imporvement over Hairway To Steven. Where the latter was
almost way too normal — and, consequently, boring — here they return to all
sorts of banshee excesses that may be silly, meaningless, irritating, but give
this band an actual reason to exist.
The opening bluesy jam of
ʽRevolutionʼ may seem to start this off on the same note as
ʽJimiʼ, but where ʽJimiʼ was meandering and murky and
eventually just dissolved in an interminable yawn-inducing acoustic coda, this stuff is faster, punchier, and has
a bite. The first part is all about Leary's fuzzy riff, a distant descendant of
ʽFoxy Ladyʼ, losing some of that ancestral crunch but retaining all
of its mind-melting psyche-delish-ness; and during the second part, it is
slightly pushed aside to make way for a simpler, folksier rhythmic pattern and
some arrogant vocals, as if they were switching from Hendrix mood into
Jefferson Airplane mood — then the overdubs begin to pile up, and we get
synthesizers, radio static, twenty layers of screaming, moaning, and
blabbering, ringing telephones, wailing sirens, and all sorts of things to
suggest a ʽRevolution 9ʼ type of chaos, only everything remains steadily
underpinned with a rhythmic melody. In short, seems to be much more crazy stuff
going on here than there ever was on ʽJimiʼ.
Other highlights here include ʽGolden
Showersʼ, whose cheerful Farfisa organ and distorted sax, combined with
the somewhat uncomfortable lyrical topic, would probably make this track eligible
for a Bonzo Dog Band cover; ʽNo, I'm Iron Manʼ — another in a
never-ending line of Black Sabbath deconstructions, although this one, I
think, only borrows the opening chord of the riff (it is the cavernously
distorted vocals that actually make you think of ʽIron Manʼ, rather
than the melody); and the hilarious remake of their old chestnut
ʽSomethingʼ in the style of Jesus And Mary Chain, for no other
reason, I guess, than to show how versatile the band's powers are.
There are relative lowlights, too — nobody
seems to think much of their country send-up ʽLonesome Bulldogʼ, but
I actually think that the silly song itself is merely a pretext for three more
«variations», where they play the waltz theme with three different guitar
tones/styles (my guess is inspired by Brian May first time around, by Lou Reed
second time around, and... uh... is that Sabbath once again they are imitating
in Part IV? Downtuning the guitar and
bass at the same time? Could be, couldn' it?); which counts as funny in my book. The only real lowlight is probably the «cover» of Donovan's ʽHurdy
Gurdy Manʼ, where the main gimmick is a wobbly tremolo effect on the
vocals that will probably make you puke if your head is not too well balanced.
But that's okay, we can take it.
I am not a major fan of the lengthy jam
ʽP.S.Y.ʼ, because, once again, too much of it sounds like an homage
to the psychedelic jam bands of old, from the Grateful Dead to Can:
ass-kicking, yes, jaw-dropping — no. What is
totally jaw-dropping, though, is the last track, which was only made available
on the 1992 reissue of the album by Capitol Records: ʽBarking Dogsʼ
is one of the greatest sonic nightmares that this, or, for that matter, any band has ever produced. Pinned
against an unnerving pseudo-cello electronic pattern, you get banshee-howling
guitars, blasts of white noise, agitated and/or screaming vocals, occasional
bursts of gunfire, and, yes, barking dogs that crop up with the frightening
regularity of enemies in some particularly creepy and bloody arcade game. This is actually their answer to
ʽRevolution 9ʼ, and, frankly speaking, it's better, because the
various samples and overdubs are much more thoughtfully put together — so that
you get a very realistic picture of making a crazy nighttime run through the
streets of a city gone mad with ravaging, burning, and killing. Technically, it
should probably be called an «industrial» composition, but emotionally, it
goes way beyond «industrial» and into the realm of «apocalyptic».
If the album only had ʽBarking Dogsʼ on it, it would still be worth a thumbs up;
fortunately, uneven as it is, and not breaking any radically new ground, its
share of minor crazy-awesome ideas is still higher than its share of silly
misfires and its share of
"this-is-kinda-boring-when-will-this-ever-end" moments. A pretty damn
good, unjustly overlooked album in their wobbly, perverted catalog.
INDEPENDENT WORM SALOON (1993)
1) Who Was In My Room Last
Night?; 2) The Wooden Song; 3) Tongue; 4) Chewin' George Lucas' Chocolate; 5)
Goofy's Concern; 6) Alcohol; 7) Dog Inside Your Body; 8) Strawberry; 9) Some
Dispute Over T-Shirts Sales; 10) Dancing Fool; 11) You Don't Know Me; 12) The
Annoying Song; 13) Dust Devil; 14) Leave Me Alone; 15) Edgar; 16) The Ballad Of
Naked Man; 17) Clean It Up; 18) Ghandi*.
Lookee here, Butthole Surfers go «mainstream»,
and all it took was the overnight success of one Kurt Cobain, which, for a
strange brief moment in time, convinced major labels that people would buy all sorts of artistically
independent weird shit from them, rather than just the carefully calculated and
marketed crap — even stuff from a band called Butthole Surfers, who not only
did not see it fit to rename themselves for their debut on Capitol, but
actually insisted on the name being splattered in bright, shiny, ugly letters
all over the album cover. And, considering that this is probably the friendly
smiling face of a large tapeworm that we see framed by the name, now we actually know who might be the
proverbial «butthole surfer».
But it's not as if the switch to a major label
did not change the band one bit — on the contrary, Independent Worm Saloon is Haynes and Co.'s most normal,
straightforward, accessible album to date, and could easily be regarded as a
sellout by hardcore veterans. Produced by none other than Led Zeppelin's own
John Paul Jones, this is a record of relatively conventional blues rock, hard
rock, dark folk, and occasionally industrial-metal songs that may have some
shocking power and may be somewhat offensive, but are in no way baffling to the
mind. This is simply Butthole Surfers doing good old rock music — and seemingly
enjoying it.
And I enjoy it, too, as it fits my observations
— the best things in life often come out when we have weirdos acting normal,
rather than weirdos acting weird (or normals acting normal, for that matter). The
instrumental tones, the riffage, the little bits of studio overdubbing, the
song titles and lyrics, the diversity of approach, the passion of delivery, the
way the band so totally and recklessly gets into everything it does — I buy
this approach completely, even if most of the riffs here are just minor
variations on old hard rock, punk, and metal patterns (and what isn't?). Simply
put, this is one of the most kickass albums of 1993, ladies and gentlemen.
Most of the songs are short, but when they're
long, they frickin' deserve to be
long — like ʽDust Devilʼ, which is like a rougher, crunchier, more
psychedelic take on the ZZ Top rock sound, with a bit of Judas Priest thrown
in, but really all of this is just an inspirational basis for Leary's love
affair with the multiple avatars of his guitar, which start off simply enough,
but then gradually build up — at near-top speed! — to a near-apocalyptic
explosion, capitalising on the promise that was hinted at on ʽBarking
Dogsʼ. On headphones, this does evil things to your brain, although even
Jimi would probably suggest that the man is going over the top with this. But
hey, if somebody is supposed to go over the top, let it rather be Paul Leary
than, say, Joe Satriani.
Each and every one of the heavy, fast,
«industrialized» rockers on this album rules to one degree or another —
starting from the first one, ʽWho Was In My Room Last Night?ʼ, which
takes an old riff from the fast part of Led Zeppelin's ʽDazed And
Confusedʼ (no coincidence that John Paul was in the studio, right?) and
gruffs it up to the point where you almost begin to believe that these boys actually
mean business, and that meeting them in a dark alley would not be good for your
health. The more punk-style ʽGoofy's Concernʼ is not nearly as
serious, but it features the grumbliest guitar tone from Leary ever, and
ʽDancing Foolʼ is the punchiest indictment of dance-oriented music
ever written, with Haynes impersonating "a dancin' fool" and
"the disco king" to merry
martial rhythms that actually have their roots in ʽThe Immigrant Songʼ
rather than anything even remotely connected with disco, while Leary
counteracts with a guitar riff that seems copped from some baroque chamber
music suite. Yes, really. I know what it means, but I can't explain.
The more quiet tunes on the album are not as
immediately striking, but eventually ʽThe Ballad Of Naked Manʼ, with
its relentless acoustic guitar and banjo strumming, begins to come across as
some sort of program statement — where the "naked man" in question is
taken to be a symbol of Truth and Reality, scorned and shunned by the
truth-fearing population ("so get the hell away from me, you goddamn naked
man, go the fuck away from me back to Naked land!") — and Haynes is seen
as the ragged travelin' minstrel, preaching folksy simplicity to the crowds.
The problem is that the quality of the Surfers' music usually depends on the
extent to which Leary's talents have been taxed, and he frankly doesn't have
much to do on ʽNaked Manʼ, so I'd rather go with ʽThe Wooden
Songʼ, where he does get a chance to crash through the monotonousness of
its slow country waltzing with a scratchy, squiggly, quasi-atonal guitar solo.
But heck, I even have to confess that I love
ʽThe Annoying Songʼ, despite the fact that it was almost certainly
recorded to annoy — what else are those «chipmunk» vocals for? Yet somehow,
when used in the context of this novelty hard rock song, especially at the
climactic screaming outbursts at the end of each verse, they sound...
hilarious.
Of course, the Surfers are still patented
jesters, and none of this should be taken too seriously, even with the vocals
erased. But then, in a way, all rock
music — heck, maybe all music in general — is sort of an absurd enterprise,
and here the Surfers are just taking some aspects of it and driving them
towards a logical height of absurdity. They do it more self-consciously than, say,
AC/DC, which means that Independent Worm
Saloon could never hope to achieve popularity among the masses, for whom it
would still be way too weird; but I could easily see how it could be some
stuffy intellectual's favorite rock'n'roll record of all time. Hell, maybe it's
on the way to becoming my favorite
rock'n'roll record — at least, ʽDust Devilʼ would most unquestionably
land in a personal Top 1000 rock'n'roll songs or so. Thumbs up, totally.
ELECTRICLARRYLAND (1996)
1) Birds; 2) Cough Syrup; 3)
Pepper; 4) Thermador; 5) Ulcer Breakout; 6) Jingle Of A Dog's Collar; 7) TV
Star; 8) My Brother's Wife; 9) Ah Ha; 10) The Lord Is A Monkey; 11) Let's Talk
About Cars; 12) LA; 13) Space.
Okay, so we are not going to play it hip here
and declare that the Butthole Surfers' brightest moment of commercial glory
was a proverbial pile of shit — but let us also face the inevitable: despite
the gory album cover and the Hendrix pun of the title, Electriclarryland is simply not even close to Independent Worm Saloon when it comes to good music. It may have
been the toning down of the ferociousness of their sound that was responsible
for the album climbing up the charts, or it may have been the factor of
prolonged exposure and publicity, or perhaps the world at large was a little
more adventurous in 1996 before Britney Spears swept it all away, but the fact
is, Electriclarryland is decent, but
not very good.
With Jeff Pinkus out of the group and Leary
taking over bass duties (occasionally shared with Andrew Weiss of the Rollins
Band), the Surfers make one more step towards «being normal», and this time, they
overstep it, because in the place of aggressive snarling rock'n'roll, fueled by
Leary's guitar-god performance, what we get is a bunch of mid-tempo «alt-rock»
songs, heavily dependent on lyrics and vocals rather than captivating
instrumental work and also influenced by some of the more modern developments
in music, such as trip-hop. It seems that the band, either of its own will or,
perhaps, pushed by outside provocators, is trying to adapt to contemporary
trends — big, big mistake, since for all their revolutionary mind-blowing
prowess, the Butthole Surfers were always at their best when guided by their past, not present influences (note: this judgement certainly does not apply
to any artist, but it seems oh so
true for these guys).
The result is stuff like ʽPepperʼ, a
song that got them into the Top 40 on the singles market — a miraculous feat, I
guess, but the irony of the situation is that ʽPepperʼ, at most, is
just listenable when it comes to
separating the band's great stuff from the band's passable stuff. Leary still
does his best to get a good psychedelic lead tone going on this slow trip-hoppy
cruise, but the solo seems strictly confined to a single melodic pattern, the
vocals, whether it's the rapped verses or the sung chorus, are somnambulant in
a prison courtyard, and the gruesome story told through the lyrics only seems
there to somehow introduce an element of belated shock into the commercially
intended performance. No, actually, the groove is still worthwhile — closing
your eyes to it and settling into a slow rhythmic wobble can be relaxing — but
in the end, this... well, sounds more like the Brian Jonestown Massacre than
the Butthole Surfers. And how on Earth this
got into the Top 40 in 1996, I'll never know. Did people confuse this with a new
Tricky single or what?
Echoes of Worm
Saloon's rocky explosions are still felt throughout — even the album opener
ʽBirdsʼ has a fast-'n'-furious rock'n'roll punch, although it adds
little to the vibe already explored on ʽWho Was In My Room?ʼ and
ʽDust Devilʼ. Another fast tempo number, ʽAh Haʼ, prefers
to replace distorted hard rock guitars with jangly folk rock guitars, so that
they sound like a homeless, toothless version of R.E.M.; and there is at least
one bona fide hardcore punk number, ʽUlcer Breakoutʼ, with the good
old chainsaw and dog bark and racecar drumming. But either it is the overall
context in which they are lodged, or the lack of their own individuality, yet
none of these songs suffice to turn the tide in favor of the record.
Oddly enough, when you look at all this with
just a formal look, the album remains pretty weird. There is ʽJingle Of A
Dog's Collarʼ, a dark folk-pop ballad that seems to have been written from
the perspective of a canine character (and ends with some genuine sniffing).
There's the risqué ʽMy
Brother's Wifeʼ, with heavy use of vocal sampling, loads of white noise,
and extra overdubs to reflect the psychosexual commotion of the title
character. There's ʽThe Lord Is A Monkeyʼ, a technically successful
stab at psychedelic hip-hop with cartoonishly evil rapped vocals and ruthless
wah-wah solos. There's ʽLet's Talk About Carsʼ, featuring a classy
pop riff over which people seductively speak French for a few minutes. In
short, there's all it usually takes to get a classy, involving, unpredictable
pop album.
But somehow, in the end, it just doesn't want
to click. Where the mix between «normalcy» and «madness» on Worm Saloon seemed just perfect, here
it is as if «normal» and «weird» keep segregated to two different channels and
do not mix at all. So I keep getting torn between the total sensual puzzle of
ʽLet's Talk About Carsʼ — and the total openness and even genericity
of something like ʽTV Starʼ (a ballad whose chorus goes
"Christina, la-la-la, I love you so", if you can believe it). None of
the individual songs are awful, but together, they do not amount to an
impressive performance. Not that I would imply that «mainstream involvement»
ended up eating away the band's essence — rather, they just tried to do
something different here, and could not play up to their usual strengths in the
process. The record is still well worth a look, but it not only seems weak and
lagging next to the band's high standards of quality, it also seems kind of
dated to its time period, and Butthole Surfers feel so much greater when they
are not attached to any particular time period — not so blatantly, at least.
WEIRD REVOLUTION (2001)
1) The Weird Revolution; 2)
The Shame Of Life; 3) Dracula From Houston; 4) Venus; 5) Shit Like That; 6)
Mexico; 7) Intelligent Guy; 8) Get Down; 9) Jet Fighter; 10) The Last
Astronaut; 11) Yentel; 12) They Came In.
Apparently, the Butthole Surfers' little
romance with mainstream popularity did not last long. Despite the relative
success of ʽPepperʼ, already their next album, After The Astronaut, fully recorded and ready for pressing, did not
pass the Capitol quality test and was rejected, which ultimately cost them
their contract and a lot of nerves. The band did not resurface again until
2001, with a new bass player (Nathan Calhoun), a new manager, a new (smaller)
contract, and a totally new musical
face — and I am not too sure about how exciting that face was.
Essentially, Butthole Surfers' last ever
completed LP is an «alternative hip hop» album, whatever that means. And do get
this right: it is not a «Butthole Surfers album with elements of hip hop»,
which might have been an interesting thing to witness — it is simply as if
Haynes and Leary became so fascinated with hip-hop culture that they agreed to
subject themselves to its rules, where earlier they accepted no rules
whatsoever, and trade most of their identity for some collective fetish. Sure,
not all of the album is hip- or
trip-hop, but much, if not most, is, and those songs that do not accept the
trappings of hip-hop sound like generic alt-rock, which is even worse.
Actually, the really worst thing is the unapologetically solemn tone that the
album assumes from the very beginning — with that spoken-word announcement
dubbed over a boring beat: "On behalf of Dr. Timothy Leary, in
association with the legions of illuminated social rejects..." Timothy
Leary? Timothy Leary's dead, as Ray
Thomas told us long before Timothy Leary's physical death, and this whole
look-at-me-I'm-so-unbearably-regally-psychedelic stylistics last made sense
maybe on some Parliament/Funkadelic records in the mid-1970s. This is just
bullshit, as if they are trying to stupefy us with a 30-year old circus program.
And no, just because they are trying to hybridize psychedelia with hip-hop does
not make this any more forgivable.
As if that weren't enough, the first actual
song here, ʽThe Shame Of Lifeʼ, is a collaboration with Kid Rock,
which is sufficient reason for criminal prosecution in some well-advanced
countries. The lyrics are reasonably intelligent — this is basically a
reflection on the hedonistic-excessive nature of hip-hop and its imminent
arisal out of the state we're all in ("my shallow mind is just a sign of
your game of life") — but the music is limited to a simplistic heavy rock
riff and some sound effects scattered around for creepiness' sake. If I didn't
know this was a Butthole Surfers composition, I'd never have paid it any mind
in the first place. It doesn't help, either, that ʽDracula From
Houstonʼ, combining rapped verses with a garage rock riff that had already
been used approximately 50,000 times in the past three decades (and that's
just the verse — the chorus rips off ʽSmells Like Teen Spiritʼ, if
you can believe), is possibly the worst song these guys ever committed to
tape. What's up with this commercial pop-punk shit?
All right, I will admit that it does get better
as it goes on — ʽGet Downʼ, for instance, is funky as hell, catchy as
heck, and funny: its angle comes
across as parodic, and at the same time Leary gets to lay across some nice
riffs and astral phased-out solos. ʽMexicoʼ, which has nothing to do
with Mexico, draws some Eastern melodic overtones across a predominantly electronic
arrangement, and makes fun of most of the world's major religions, past and
present, in the process. A couple other tracks mix the weird and the normal in
acceptable, though not necessarily mind-blowing, proportions. But for every
track like that there's a ʽJet Fighterʼ, a surprisingly
sincere-sounding piece of anti-war satire with a bland folk-rock arrangement,
or a ʽLast Astronautʼ, which is barely listenable because of awful
production (the main gimmick is a set of vocal overdubs that were apparently
captured from space, and, predictably, they sound like shit).
The main point is: this is not «Butthole Surfers». Bands do change and evolve, sometimes
turning into something you could never ever have suspected from them in the
beginning — but it's all right as long as the original spirit remains alive. If
there is a spirit in Weird Revolution, it is buried so deep
under the ice of the synthetic, stiffening production that, for all intents and
purposes, it may as well be dead. Not only does the record take itself way too seriously (I mean, what the
heck? Just because they have embraced hip hop, they think that they now need to
tiptoe through the tulips?), but it blocks their individual talents, especially
Leary's, and asserts way too much discipline over a world whose main value used
to lie in its undisciplined attitude. Maybe it's not awful — but it's a very,
very, very disappointing
metamorphosis.
And even if the band never officially disbanded
(in fact, as a touring outfit, the Surfers were periodically quite active
throughout the 2000s), the very fact that Weird
Revolution was not followed by anything else is telling — I'm pretty sure
that the band understood that it lost its way, creatively, and that under these
conditions it would be more prudent to honestly rebrand themselves as a
nostalgia act than to continue this frustrating «modernisation». Come to think
of it, the Surfers always were a
nostalgic act, from the very beginning — they were always successfully busy
carving out the future by peering into the past, and it is only when they began
consciously peering into the future that success began to evade them.
ADDENDA
HUMPTY DUMPTY LSD (1982-1994; 2002)
1) Night Of The Day; 2) One
Hundred Million People Dead; 3) I Love You Peggy; 4) Space I; 5) Perry Intro;
6) Day Of The Dying Alive; 7) Eindhoven Chicken Masque; 8) Just A Boy; 9)
Sinister Crayon; 10) Hetero Skeleton; 11) Earthquake; 12) Ghandi; 13) I Hate My
Job; 14) Space II; 15) Concubine Solo; 16) All Day; 17) Dadgad.
Although the Surfers never disbanded officially
and, in fact, continued to exist as a touring outfit throughout the first
decade of the 21st century, the release of this odds-and-ends compilation in
2002 was telling — it's like a shadowy retrospective of the band's entire career,
where, for one last time, you can quickly browse through all their life stages
and remind yourself what exactly it was that they brought to the table. That
said, I must admit that there is pretty little here to go ga-ga over; mostly,
it's just stuff for the loyal zealots and the historians, and much of it
presented here in awful «home recording» sound quality, too.
Of minor interest are such tracks as the Rembrandt Pussyhorse outtake ʽI
Love You Peggyʼ, whose title may be a not-too-subtle reference to Buddy
Holly (Gibby does begin singing it in a slightly Buddy-ish hiccupy voice, but
then the vocal overdubs quickly head into the realm of total insanity, and
Leary's shrill folk-pop riff is the only thing that allows the song to preserve
some structure); the instrumental ʽEindhoven Chicken Masqueʼ from the
same sessions, with a lively mariachi brass fanfare section and a blazing
guitar break from Paul; two outtakes from the Butthole Surfers sessions, ʽJust A Boyʼ and ʽI Hate
My Jobʼ, reminding you of how this band actually started out as an
aggressive punk rock outfit — this stuff just sounds like frickin' Black Flag;
and, all of a sudden, a cover of the 13th Floor Elevators'
ʽEarthquakeʼ from the Hairway
To Steven sessions — where you realize the uncanny resemblance of Gibby's
voice to Roky Erickson's — but, although Leary adds some excellent psychedelic
guitar solos, I also find myself strangely missing the electric jug of the
original.
The rest of these songs are even less memorable
— some poor-quality demo recordings where the low frequencies drown out all the
high ones; some chaotic noise tracks that sound just like any other chaotic
noise track (ʽHetero Skeletonʼ; ʽSpace IIʼ); and some brief
throwaways like an out of place thick fuzzy bass solo (ʽConcubine
Soloʼ) or a «bonus track» that says hello to Napalm Death by being only
six seconds long (no vocals, though). A keen musical ear may extract the
beginnings of a few nifty ideas here and there, but it's all raw and
unfinished. And they probably shouldn't have screwed up the sequencing — as I
said, historically-minded people are more likely to be interested in these
outtakes than those who are too lazy to care about what came after what, and
this means that you'll have to re-assemble it all back together in
chronological order. On the other side, you can say that Butthole Surfers never
wrote music for lazy people — or, for that matter, that they never wrote music
for organized people. A mess is a
mess is a mess, whichever way you'd like to look at it, so here's one more
chunk of mess for you.
ANOTHER MUSIC IN A DIFFERENT KITCHEN (1978)
1) Fast Cars; 2) No Reply; 3)
You Tear Me Up; 4) Get On Our Own; 5) Love Battery; 6) Sixteen; 7) I Don't
Mind; 8) Fiction Romance; 9) Autonomy; 10) I Need; 11) Moving Away From The
Pulsebeat.
By the time the Buzzcocks got around to
releasing their first LP, they'd already played together for two years, and
even had time to go through a serious lineup change, dropping their original
vocalist Howard Devoto (whom one still has a chance to hear on the Spiral Scratch EP — the Buzzcocks at
their punkiest, one might think) and relegating vocal duties to guitarist Peter
Shelley. And even if they began as friends of the Sex Pistols, Another Music In A Different Kitchen
shows that, ultimately, they'd rather settle on becoming the British equivalent
of the Ramones — exchanging, perhaps, some of their Queens-based brethren's
primal minimalism for a slightly higher level of musical complexity and
intellectualism, but worshipping, above and beyond everything else, the (silly)
pop catchiness of the music.
Steve Diggle's rhythm guitar playing may be
fast, distorted, and superficially aggressive, but the music is not triggering
a «pissed-off» reaction — it's basically teenage fun, with a Manchester twist.
Shelley's vocals have that slightly haughty, but friendly nasal twang that is
so common of British glam rockers, and the band has a passion for melodic vocal
harmony that shows up on most of the songs — sung songs, not merely recited or screamed over a harsh beat.
Likewise, his solos, while not too complex, seem carefully constructed and well
rehearsed, albeit still played with maximum feeling. And the tightness of the
band's rhythm section once again exposes the myth of punk rock as «non-musician
music» for all it's worth — I mean, either the Buzzcocks are not punk rock at
all (an open terminological possibility), or this here is some of the tightest,
best played, diligently produced rock music of the late 1970s.
While the Buzzcocks are usually judged by their
singles, these early albums are by no means dismissable — the debut almost
completely consists of well-written highlights, further aided by hilariously
insightful lyrics: ʽFast Carsʼ, dominated throughout by its genius
two-note guitar solo (catchy and
reasonably evocative of a police siren at the same time!), is probably the
first well known anti-car song in
history, showing that this pop-punk band may have inherited the love for the
simple rock'n'roll values of the early 1960s, but not the love for all those other values that went along with it —
"they're so depressing, going around and around" makes this the
ideological antipod of ʽI Get Aroundʼ. And although this is the only
song about cars on the album, it does allow it to proudly fall in the «Nothing
but girls and cars!» category — because, well, most, if not all, the other
songs are about girls. No coal miners or soup kitchens anywhere on the horizon.
Honestly, though, it does not matter much what
Pete Shelley thinks about girls as long as he writes these wonderful hooks
about them, both vocal and instrumental. The band succeeds both with the speedy
chainsaw-buzz three-chord rockers (ʽLove Batteryʼ), the slightly
slower, more old-fashioned glam-rockish tunes (ʽGet On Our Ownʼ), and
the sharper, moodier, artsier compositions (ʽFiction Romanceʼ),
showing great understanding of what it is that separates a striking riff from a
meaningless one — the riff of the ʽAutonomyʼ chorus may only have two
chords to it, but it cuts through to the heart in one bar, a nagging,
insistent, desperate drone that fully supports Shelley's claim that "I, I
want you, autonomy!" Indeed, this is nowhere near «unique» music, but it
does come across as completely autonomous, sounding just like any other punk
rock band and yet, at the same time, totally belonging to these guys and nobody
else — probably no other punk band in Britain at the same time showed such
attention to melodic detail (certainly not the Pistols or the Clash, to whom
melody was only one of several factors that mattered, and probably not the most
important one).
In fact, Another
Music could have been quite valuable as an instrumental album, and it is no
surprise that the last track, ʽMoving Away From The Pulsebeatʼ, based
on a modernized version of the Bo Diddley beat, actually ends with several
minutes of instrumental jamming — guitar solo (somewhat reminiscent of Joy
Division's fabulous solo on ʽShadowplayʼ, which appeared later and, for all we know, may have
been influenced by the Buzzcocks style), brief drum solo (drum solo on a punk
album!), and, finally, the return of the original crunchy riff to bring it down
to a grand conclusion. Shelley's solos, loyally following the rhythm rather
than playing against it, are always a joy to listen to — in the end, the only
song that I am not fond of is the anthem ʽ16ʼ, whose slow,
repetitive, bolero-style melody and especially the little bit of chaotic
free-form noise sort of disrupt the record's near-perfect flow. That said, the
song does emphasize the band's experimental and slightly surrealist side which
was essential for them — it's just that it does not feel nearly as natural here
as the follow-up, ʽI Don't Mindʼ, which is simple as a doornail but
is also one of the finest pop songs the early Kinks never wrote.
The slightness of the album prevented it from
ever featuring highly in the critical ratings when it came to assessing the
legacy of the British punk movement, but I think that the moment one decides
that «punk», in order to be «good» or «great», does not necessarily have to
make a grand social statement (and the artistic value of these statements, per
se, has rarely been high anyway), Another
Music will immediately rise up to the top of the roster, being the exact
(but idiosyncratic) British equivalent of Ramones — and who cares now
that it came out two years late? The important thing is that the music sounds
catchy, invigorating, and fresh even today. And has there been a «punk» band in
the 2000s, anyway, that managed to produce something as innocent, memorable,
and endearing as ʽI Needʼ? This is like Sha Na Na with distorted
guitars and a real, not
fake-vaudevillian, sense of humor. Thumbs up, of course.
LOVE BITES (1978)
1) Real World; 2) Ever Fallen
In Love; 3) Operators Manual; 4) Nostalgia; 5) Just Lust; 6) Sixteen Again; 7)
Walking Distance; 8) Love Is Lies; 9) Nothing Left; 10) E.S.P.; 11) Late For
The Train.
This quickie follow-up to Another Music sounds slightly disappointing to me, not because it
was rushed or anything, but because the band went for a somewhat less humorous,
more serious approach here, and when the Buzzcocks are weighted down with too
much seriousness, they seem to lose touch with their genius. However, moving
one step away from perfection is not much of a crime, particularly when you are
still capable of crafting first-rate pop-punk hooks by the dozen; and if you are
not obsessed with the idea of drawing boundaries between Album A and Album B in
the first place, you might not even understand what I'm talking about here.
"I'm in love with the real world / It's
mutual or so it seems / 'Cos only in the real world / Do things happen like
they do in my dreams", Shelley tells us in the opening manifesto of
ʽReal Worldʼ — and you could interpret that first line either as the
epitome of the punk revolution (music that has to do with "the real
world", instead of progressive rock's fantasy universes), or, more likely,
as just a statement of personal humility — and peacefulness, which sets the
Buzzcocks so far apart from the bellicose stylistics of their working class
brethren. Indeed, all of the songs here are love songs — some are, in fact,
romantic love songs, as ʽLove Is Liesʼ, written and sung by Steve
Diggle, begins as an acoustic ballad, and by the time we get to the chorus, we
are knee-deep in ʽSugar And Spiceʼ territory: "Love is lies,
love is eyes, love is everything that's nice" (okay, so you can sort of
see why Diggle is not trusted with writing more songs, but if you disregard
that creepy "love is eyes" equation, it's actually a pretty folk-pop
tune, well deserving of being professionally covered with Searchers-style vocal
harmonies).
Then there's ʽEver Fallen In Love (With
Someone You Shouldn't've)ʼ, often quoted as the most notable song on the
album, if not the signature tune of
the Buzzcocks — indeed, it is a skilful synthesis of the speedy punk song and
the bitter love-lost ballad, although, with a little irony, one might suggest
that the Ramones did beat them to the punch with ʽTexas Chainsaw
Massacreʼ. However, it is not the instrumental melody and its clever use
of minor chords, but rather the vocal hook that produces the deepest impression
— Shelley has this fine talent to take an unwieldy string of prose, loop it,
and convert it to a gracious musical serpent that sounds like it was born to
the realm of rhythm and melody. Who else could craft such a twisted, yet
natural chorus with the phrase "have you ever fallen in love with someone
you shouldn't've fallen in love with?" I bet the guy was a tongue-twister
champion in elementary school.
On the other hand, the Buzzcocks are also
trying to prove that they are, first and foremost, a musical band — by
including two instrumentals: the short one, ʽWalking Distanceʼ, was
written by the bassist and features a nice set of speedy interlocking pop
riffs, and the long one, ʽLate For The Trainʼ, is again recorded bolero-style, this time
with such an insistent drumbeat, though, that poor John Maher must have ended
up with even worse blisters on his fingers than Ringo ever did. The problem is,
it does not have enough musical ideas for five and a half minutes: it seems
like it is desperately looking for a crescendo, but finally gives up on that
and just lets the drums take over completely for the coda.
Definitely not a work of genius, that one, and
shows that the Buzzcocks are not universal masters of everything —
unsurprisingly, it is the short three-minute pop-punk tunes like the cocky,
heroic ʽNostalgiaʼ or the sexopathological statemenr ʽJust
Lustʼ that take home first, second and all the other prizes. Or even a
tune like ʽE.S.P.ʼ, which takes pride in taking one ten-note riff as
the basis for all of its five minutes
— and somehow it works, because normally you'd expect a riff like that to be
used as the intro to the song and then go away, and the fact that it stays
forever and ever makes it minimalistically funny. Blatantly annoying, yes, but funny.
All in all, still a satisfactory thumbs up
here, despite the occasional misfires and the fact that lightweight funny
Kinks-influenced ditties have largely been replaced with heavier and a bit more
moralistic rockers. They did want to make a point that Love Bites, want it or not, and they made it all right — after all,
partner relationships have every right to cause as much punkish frustration as
social oppression does, and where your life has space for Give 'Em Enough Rope, there should be some extra space right next
to it with Love Bites.
SINGLES GOING STEADY (1979)
1) Orgasm Addict; 2) What Do I
Get; 3) I Don't Mind; 4) Love You More; 5) Ever Fallen In Love; 6) Promises; 7)
Everybody's Happy Nowadays; 8) Harmony In My Head; 9*) You Say You Don't Love
Me; 10*) Are Everything; 11*) Strange Thing; 12*) Running Free; 13) What Ever
Happened To; 14) Oh Shit!; 15) Autonomy; 16) Noise Annoys; 17) Just Lust; 18)
Lipstick; 19) Why Can't I Touch It; 20) Something's Gone Wrong Again; 21*)
Raison D'Etre; 22*) Why She's The Girl From The Chainstore; 23*) Airwaves
Dream; 24*) What Do You Know.
This compilation of singles was America's
(rather belated, as it often happens) introduction to the noisy pop magic of
the Buzzcocks, and it has since acquired such a legendary status that I can
hardly add any interesting thoughts or observations to what you all already
know — other than, perhaps, the curious note that I arrived at this chronologically, and this means that on a subconscious
level, the Buzzcocks are as much an «album band» for me as they are a «singles
band»: in any case, it is certainly not true that all of their singles are pop genius, or that all of their albums are stuffed with thoughtless filler.
For one thing, the band's first single, ʽOrgasm Addictʼ, once its oh-so-shocking
nature quickly wore down, is a really stupid song whose only point seems to be
«telling it as it is», rather than coyly hiding behind innuendos, and hardly
has any instrumental or vocal appeal — it just intends to strike a common
chords with, you know, those of us who do
have the problem upon reaching puberty. Which is, well, probably most of us,
you know, but even if you never grow out of the problem, you will eventually grow out of the song at
least, as it's really no great shakes. In fact, its B-side, ʽWhat Ever
Happened To...ʼ, with its first appearance of the band's pop harmonies and
its ironic-nostalgic mood, reminding you of the Kinks (think ʽWhere Have
All The Good Times Gone?ʼ), is already vastly superior.
Already the second single, ʽWhat Do I
Get?ʼ, however, establishes a largely unbreakable pattern: the Buzzocks
are a loud pop band rather than a punk band, with a knack for simple, instantly
efficient hooks, second to none but the Ramones — nobody could that effectively wedge a slice of weepy
sadness ("what do I get, whoah-whoah, what do I get?", with that
inimitably plaintive accent on I)
into a fast-moving, chainsaw-buzz-driven tune. Also, this time, they are
smarter and they place the «offensive» track in B-side position: I have no idea
if ʽOh Shitʼ marked the first ever appearance of the word
"shit" in a song title, but it certainly must have held the local
record for the number of times the word was pronounced, and yes, it does serve as the song's primary hook,
which is inventive, but eventually gets a little tiresome.
Some of the songs inevitably overlap with
tracks that were already included on previous LPs (remember, though, that the
Americans hadn't heard any of those, so this was probably their first meeting
with gems like ʽI Don't Mindʼ or ʽEver Fallen In Loveʼ),
but considering the overall wealth of material, that is no big tragedy, and all
these songs certainly deserve additional listens. That said, in terms of
diversity of approach and subtlety of hooks I would say that the Buzzcocks do
not become true «monsters of sound» until 1979 comes along, by which time
excellent songs just roll off the conveyer belt, but each one in its individual
packaging.
ʽEverybody's Happy Nowadaysʼ combines
a cozy folksy verse melody (amusingly similar to the one on Dylan's
ʽBuckets Of Rainʼ: compare "life is sad, life is a bust"
and "life's an illusion, love is a dream") with a tongue-in-cheek
falsetto chorus and a ringing four-note riff that give the song an aura of frailty
and fluffiness, clashing with Shelley's sly glam-vocal delivery of the verse.
And then you have its B-side, ʽWhy Can't I Touch Itʼ (non-spoiler:
you never get to really understand what the "it" is in question, and
no, it's not the "it"
you're probably thinking of at the moment), stretched out to more than six
minutes despite really only having one verse and an embryonic bit of a chorus —
but they probably understood that they hit upon such a fine groove, with two
guitars and a persistent bassline conversing with each other, that they were
reluctant to let it go, and it just keeps on pulsating like some enigmatic
mantra — I can't properly explain the appeal, but there is definitely something
trance-inducing here.
Finally, the Diggle-written and Diggle-sung ʽHarmony
In My Headʼ happens to be Henry Rollins' favorite Buzzcocks song —
probably not because it has the audacity to substitute the required guitar solo
for a revised version of Black Sabbath's ʽParanoidʼ riff, but because
of Diggle's «visionary» lyrics and the song's paradoxical nature, where the
lyrical and musical confusion of the verses are stated to be the equivalent of
the softly sung, melodically played "harmony in my head" bit of the
chorus. Normally, you'd expect the chorus to explode after the already
explosive verse — instead, it calms and softens things down, implying that
noise is silence, confusion is stability, chaos is order, and the Buzzcocks are
really the ghost of Nick Drake in disguise. But no, in reality they still take
queues from the Stooges, as you can see from the B-side, ʽSomething's Gone
Wrong Againʼ: doesn't that nagging one-note piano line remind you of John
Cale's minimalistic addition to ʽI Wanna Be Your Dogʼ ten years ago?
They should have dedicated this one to the Stooges and the Velvets, particularly since I can so imagine Lou Reed grumbling "Tried to find my sock, no good
it's lost, something's gone wrong again" on any of the 1967-69 albums.
The 2001 CD reissue of the record has
significantly expanded it, trying to preserve the original principle (A-sides
on side A, B-sides on side B) by adding one more contemporary single (to no
special purpose, since both of its sides would be included on A Different Kind Of Tension) and six
more A- and B-sides from their last
three singles from the early 1980s, which were originally made available on the
EP Parts 1, 2, 3 already in 1981.
Unfortunately, those six songs are clearly inferior — not only was the band
already disintegrating, suffering from a lack of focus and a surplus of heroin,
but they were also piss-poorly produced, with an awfully tinny drum sound, plastic
guitars, and occasional cheesy synth overdubs. There are still some hooks
(ʽWhat Do You Knowʼ) and some humor (ʽWhy, She's The Girl From
The Chainstoreʼ is worth it for the title alone), but overall, I'd at
least suggest re-programming the album in such a way that these tracks do not
rupture the near-perfect flow of the original. (You could also try to reprogram
the original, for that matter, so that each A-side is paired with its B-side,
but that is not crucial, you just get two chronological channels instead of
one).
So, is this the best possible Buzzcocks album?
in other words, were they a proverbial «singles band»? Honestly, I don't know —
their LPs weren't all that «conceptual» in the first place, either. Singles Going Steady does have the
benefit of being a compilation, even if nobody selected the material for them, and
the B-sides are important, because stuff like ʽWhy Can't I Touch Itʼ
and ʽSomething's Gone Wrong Againʼ goes beyond the standard pop-punk
formula. Who really cares, though? Those early albums and singles all reflected the same musical philosophy, and all of
this stuff is indispensable not just for those interested in the punk fashions
of late 1970s Britain, but for all those interested in good music, period. Thumbs up
even if you're no longer a sexually frustrated teenager, because there's no
better way for even a 70-year old veteran to feel like a sexually frustrated
teenager than to dig in to some of these Buzzcock singles.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF TENSION (1979)
1) Paradise; 2) Sitting Round
At Home; 3) You Say You Don't Love Me; 4) You Know You Can't Help It; 5) Mad
Mad Judy; 6) Raison D'Etre; 7) I Don't Know What To Do With My Life; 8) Money;
9) Hollow Inside; 10) A Different Kind Of Tension; 11) I Believe; 12) Radio
Nine.
Not too
different, though — same band, same label, same producer, and it's not as if
the Seventies were past us, anyway. On both of their previous LPs, the
Buzzcocks tried to be a little more than just a «punk» or a «pop» band, and
here they continue in the same vein, alternating between short, catchy, flashy
statements and extended workouts that thrive on glorious monotonousness. Not
everything is equally effective, but, hell, nothing can be on a record like this.
Indeed, the opening track,
ʽParadiseʼ, despite its declarative anthemic nature, is their least
remarkable lead-in number so far — no serious vocal hook, recycled riffage,
and a minimalistic instrumental break that just consists of moving the same
riff up and down the scale a bit, exactly the kind of stuff that used to
seriously turn me off of classic era punk rock. You might think they're
beginning to run out of ideas, but no, this is not the case: already the second
song, ʽSitting Round At Homeʼ, runs a few small, but nice experiments
with rapid tempo changes, where the slow parts are correlated with the grumbly
nagging mantra "sitting round at home, sitting round at home, watching the
pictures go" and the fast breaks probably correspond to the fast'n'furious
brain activity of the title character. Nothing great, but fun.
The band's experiments with minimalism continue
with ʽMad Mad Judyʼ, shot off at a breakneck tempo and, once the
barking lyrics are over, left with nothing but its fast, simple bass riff for a
couple minutes; they become somewhat excessive with ʽHollow Insideʼ,
which is arguably their most «Goth» sounding number so far, but completely
tongue-in-cheek — slow it down and get Robert Smith to sing it, and you got
yourself a suicidal mantra, but at this tempo it is clearly parodic, more like
a mocking test of how much time you can stand Shelley repeating "hollow
inside, I was hollow inside". I must say that my own patience got
exhausted by the second listen.
But honestly, the record really hits gold only
with the last two tracks. The title song, with its quasi-martial use of power
chords and endless list of robotically delivered nouns and imperatives, has a
certain prophetic je ne sais quoi —
it sounds neither too humorous nor too serious, but is easily the most insistent track in the band's catalog,
knocking on your door like a merciless police raid; they also put electronic
effects on some of the vocals, acknowledging the arrival of New Wave and the
robotic nature of The System at the same time. And then there's ʽI
Believeʼ, whose seven-minute length is justified by several different
sections and an inherent contradiction — on one hand, "I believe in the
workers' revolution / And I believe in
the final solution", sung in a cheerful and optimistic manner, on the
other, "There is no love in this world any more", screamed out over
and over like a slogan to a solitary aching chord.
In between all these mini- and
maxi-experiments, there are some good old-timey pop-punk ditties about good
love and bad love, but we're not going to talk about them because they're on
the level of the «just okay» segment of Singles
Going Steady, not the «really frickin' great» segment. Instead, I'll just
conclude, with a modest thumbs up for accompaniment, that the album fairly
strictly follows the Buzzcocks formula — and it's already getting a wee bit
tiresome on the whole and a wee bit irksome in particular places, but they
still have fun ideas and have not had time to descend into self-parody. Which,
of course, implies that breaking up instead of finalizing their fourth album
was the perfectly reasonable thing to do at the time. Ever heard Pete Shelley's
Sky Yen? Had that been released as a Buzzcocks album, that'd be one hell of a
change, like an entire Beatles record with nothing but ʽRevolution No.
9ʼ clones on it. But it wouldn't get a thumbs up from me, nosiree, uh-uh.
TRADE TEST TRANSMISSIONS (1993)
1) Do It; 2) Innocent; 3) T T
T; 4) Isolation; 5) Smile; 6) Last To Know; 7) When Love Turns Around; 8) Never
Gonna Give It Up; 9) Energy; 10) Palm Of Your Hand; 11) Alive Tonight; 12)
Who'll Help Me Forget; 13) Unthinkable; 14) Crystal Night; 15) 369; 16*) All
Over You; 17*) Inside.
That the Buzzcocks split up in 1981 is totally
appropriate — this way, they did not have to smear their name with ten years'
worth of (most likely) subpar material. That they reappeared with another
album in 1993, soon after the «grunge revolution» once again changed the face
of popular music and removed some of the Eighties' excess, was, consequently,
quite appropriate as well. However, as usual, this 2.0 version of the band is
yet another example of how, when something gets broken, the cracks and seams
will show even if you try very hard
to repair it.
These new «Buzzcocks» are really just Shelley
and Diggle, with a couple extra new guys named Barber and Barker (no, really,
that's their names) in the rhythm section — but it's not as if it was Barber
and Barker's fault that the sound of the album is... not all that satisfactory.
Namely, the guitar melodies are almost always reduced to the same gray, sludgy,
grumbly tone that is heavier and more aggressive than the old «chainsaw buzz»
of the Seventies, and tends to lump all the melodies together. I mean, from a
certain dialectical point of view «all Buzzcocks sound the same», but when you
get down to earth, their early classic albums don't — the individual melodies
are rising out resplendently from the surface. Trade Test Transmissions just speed before your eyes and ears
without bothering to shift tempo, tonality, mood, or perspective.
It's not particularly annoying, and we've all
heard much worse: at least this guitar sound «makes sense» — fast, furious, but
pop-styled songs about sex, love, and more sex, dominated by catchy choruses,
go along better with this style than if they tried to go all heavy metal on
their listeners (like some of the hardcore punk people did). Listen to any one of these songs at random and there
will be no reason to get mad. But there's fifteen of them here, and they all sound alike — a far, far cry from
those times when, if you still remember, Shelley and Diggle tried out various
approaches. You could complain about ʽLate For The Trainʼ being
overlong, but you couldn't say that it sounded just like all those other songs.
Those guys were actually bringing ideas,
plural, into the studio, not just one basic Idea of how you're supposed to plug
in, take off, race through, sign out, and then repeat procedure 15 times in a
row.
Unfortunately, I cannot recommend even a single
song; unless you begin to pick them apart by paying attention to the lyrics
(and you shouldn't, because ʽPalm Of Your Handʼ is, indeed, exactly
about what you're probably thinking about at the moment), it's all just one
punk-pop song with fifteen variations. A happy song, with a thick distorted
buzzing rhythm track and melodic lead lines, but that does not excuse it from
taking such a large chunk of time out of your life. ʽT T Tʼ (the
abbreviated title track, actually) is a bit grimmer than the rest, with a
tough-guy AC/DC-style chord change, but you might not even notice without
special warning (I certainly did not before I caught note of Mark Prindle's
observation on how the song stands out a bit, and I agree).
So, was this reunion a complete waste of time?
Well... at least it's not like they really plopped the Buzzcocks' brand into
the dirt here or anything. If you are a big fan, even if you too happen to be
disappointed, with time you will begin to trace the little nuances between
different songs and get happier. They're silly songs, much of the time, but the
Buzzcocks never took themselves too seriously anyway, so if Shelley sings
about himself as a sexual giant on ʽDo Itʼ, you can be sure he is still being quite the tongue-in-cheek hoochie
coochie man about it. I can see where time could help warm up to the songs —
unfortunately, I don't have that time, and much as I like and respect the early
Buzzcocks, this is not because I feel some sort of psychic connection with
Shelley and Diggle, but just because those hooks jump out at me so effectively.
It's an entirely different thing when you have to go hunting for the hooks yourself, and Trade Test Transmissions wants you to do all its dirty work on your
own — no, thank you very much.
ALL SET (1996)
1) Totally From The Heart; 2)
Without You; 3) Give It To Me; 4) Your Love; 5) Point Of No Return; 6) Hold Me
Close; 7) Kiss 'n' Tell; 8) What Am I Supposed To Do; 9) Some Kinda Wonderful;
10) What You Mean To Me; 11) Playing For Time; 12) Pariah; 13) Back With You.
They went to Green Day's producer for this one
— not particularly auspicious, but, fortunately, this was more of a nice
gesture than a humiliating desire to start learning from their own disciples.
Essentially, All Set is just Trade Test Transmissions Vol. 2, but a
wee bit better on most accounts: songwriting, production, diversity — as if
The Buzzcocks 2.0 were slowly, but surely coming into their own and learning to
adapt and to remember what it used to
be like in this much more modern world of the mid-Nineties.
The main problem still remains: most of the
songs have the same style and the same topic — with just a few exceptions, it's
all rather sterotypical power pop about love, with a very very tiny punk angle
blinking red from time to time. I mean, just look at the song titles — how much
lower can you get than when you go from ʽSome Kinda Wonderfulʼ to
ʽWhat You Mean To Meʼ? I want some anger, goddammit! Has it really been that long since they last thought of all the women on Earth as
scurvy treacherous bitches? Have they mellowed out so much that even Big
Brother and The System are no longer regarded as even a minor threat? For God's
sake, the album ends with a pseudo-orchestrated love anthem that's... more Styx than the Buzzcocks (ʽBack With
Youʼ)! This is 1996 — who needs all these good vibrations when Y2K is
approaching?
Just kidding, of course, but again, the serious
implication is that, while the album
as such has a certain face, few of the individual songs have one. They do have
hooks — ʽTotally From The Heartʼ opens the proceedings on a very
positive note, funnier, sweeter, and less openly stupid than ʽDo Itʼ
did last time around: nice conclusive resolution with the title and all, as the
song's romantic chivalry is delivered at top speed over that good old chainsaw
buzz. Problem is, way too many tunes that follow are based on the same chords,
moods, and subjects. They deviate from the trodden path on ʽPoint Of No
Returnʼ, with metaphysical lyrics that can have multiple interpretations
and a less-than-usual journey from threatening verses to anthemic chorus; on
the I-can't-find-my-way-home complaint of ʽWhat Am I Supposed To Doʼ;
and on ʽPariahʼ, which is a musical return to one of their favorite
musical patterns (the bolero, this time, however, somewhat mashed together with
the Bo Diddley beat), although sounds kinda ugly to me.
And it is a big
problem — you could throw the individual hooks of these songs' choruses in my
face all day long and I'd never notice when something different hit me. The
thing is, no, they don't really need to go for musical diversity, but at least a little more thematic diversity would be nice, since it might have automatically
led them to musical diversity as well. At their best, the Buzzcocks could shoot
off in all sorts of directions — good love, bad love, no love, sexual frustration,
social disappointment, and sometimes even plain absurdity. Here, they just
continue to push in one direction, flogging that horse until it's black and
blue all over. It begins okay, but eventually becomes tedious — so, perhaps, it
would just be best to take this stuff one song at a time, the «time» in
question being the short gap that is sufficient to make you forget the previous
song ever existed. (And that, of course, applies to so much more than late era
Buzzcocks).
MODERN (1999)
1) Soul On A Rock; 2)
Rendezvous; 3) Speed Of Life; 4) Thunder Of Hearts; 5) Why Compromise; 6) Don't
Let The Car Crash; 7) Runaround; 8) Doesn't Mean Anything; 9) Phone; 10) Under
The Sun; 11) Turn Of The Screw; 12) Sneaky; 13) Stranger In Your Town; 14)
Choices.
No, it isn't very modern, to tell the truth.
Yes, it begins with an electronic loop, which makes it, I guess, about as
modern as 1978 or 1979, when those things came into popular prominence — so now
what, the Buzzcocks are trying to catch up with twenty-year old New Wave
fashions? Is this irony or stupidity, or one trying to masquerade as the other?
I am not saying that the addition of synthesizers specifically makes this music
worse than it would be otherwise; actually, it just... makes no difference
whatsoever.
Third time in a row, the new-look Buzzcocks
come out with a perfectly listenable, reasonable record that is thoroughly and
utterly lacking in excitement — even if they seem to be doing everything in
their power to rectify the situation. The songs get more diverse, the melodies
are being carefully and meticulously designed with attention to hooks, the
choruses are supposed to be catchy, but the album as a whole is a yawnfest. I
wish I could single out even one song and surround it with a paragraph of
humble praise, but this stuff is so slick, every single tune just slides out of
my graps like a piece of wet soap.
I'll take a negative example instead: ʽWhy
Compromise?ʼ, a song that is supposed to pack some anger and frustration,
but its stiff production — the mechanic, compressed guitar sound, the stupid
electronic percussion, the nasty robotic vocals — deprives it of any signs of
life, leaving a worthless corpse of a song. With the happy tunes here, the situation is not much different either: they
all sound dead on arrival. As if this weren't a true Buzzcocks album, but
rather an album programmed by automatons who have been machine-taught to
formally imitate the Buzzcocks. Even the fast tempos no longer help. Nothing
helps. Nothing!
Okay, so maybe the actual problem is with the
vocal hooks. They just do not have the appeal of old. When Shelley howls
"My soul on a rock, I know what I feel, my soul on a rock, it hurts cause
it's real", he is simply being inadequate — there is no actual hurt felt in that chorus, and I am
totally not sure that he really knows what he feels. At least, he has no way of
letting me know what he feels. Just
remember something like "what do I get? oh-whoah, what do I get?",
now that was a chorus that had real
emotion, and you could feel a jolt of hurt and disappointment from that simple,
well-executed line. These lines have
no emotional content; nor do the riffs. It's amazing, really, how fleeting this
old thing called «inspiration» can be.
Afraid am I that, where its two predecessors at
least had a few hints at former greatness, Modern
is the firzt Buzzcocks album that simply deserves a plain old thumbs down.
They tried throwing in additional sonic textures, some genre diversity, and
they just ended up with no memorable or meaningful songs whatsoever.
BUZZCOCKS (2003)
1) Jerk; 2) Keep On; 3) Wake
Up Call; 4) Friends; 5) Driving You Insane; 6) Morning After; 7) Sick City
Sometimes; 8) Stars; 9) Certain Move; 10) Lester Sands; 11) Up For The Crack;
12) Useless; 13) Don't Come Back; 14) Not Gonna Take It.
At this point, very few people should actually
care already, but for formality's sake, let us admit that this is somewhat different. Entering the 21st
century with a self-titled record (usually a symbol of «artistic rebooting»),
Buzzcocks seem clearly influenced by the «neo-garage» Strokes-led explosion,
and this prompts a serious change of style — harsher, louder, dirtier, angrier,
and without a single trace of whatever made Modern so irritating for hardcore veterans (like the cautious and
largely useless toying around with electronic instruments). There's a higher
level of social awareness here, too, and far fewer happy pop choruses than
there used to be.
If that alone doesn't sound like good news
already... nothing else will, I'm afraid. These new songs really aren't much
better written than whatever there was on the past three albums. If anything,
the good news are also the bad news: there are some powerful, impressive bits
of riffage here, but it's mostly second- and third-hand riffage borrowed from
hard rock, metal, and punk legacy of the previous two decades. And I don't just
mean routine stuff like the ʽBlitzkrieg Bopʼ chord sequence:
ʽDriving You Insaneʼ, for instance, rips off Deep Purple's
ʽHighway Starʼ rather blatantly, while a few other songs sneak inside
Lemmy's backyard.
That said, original (and good) melodies on 21st
century rock albums are scarcer than hen's teeth anyway, so the question about
whether Buzzcocks is of any value
should be rephrased thus — are they capable of breathing any sort of new /
exciting / modern life into these old melodies? Of this, I am not sure. As an
example, take ʽMorning Afterʼ. Its chorus is catchy, especially if
you hear it one too many times (not a difficult task: "wake up, and face
the morning after" is hammered in your brain at a very steady rate). But
its emotional impact is less clear — is it anger? Is it an exhortation? Is it
humor? So it's a song about... a hangover. How exactly does a furious punk-rock
tempo and an anthemic refrain connect to the idea of a hangover? Normally, when
somebody shouts at you to "wake up!" in a loud rock song, it's about
changing the world, feeding starving African children, booting Republicans out
of the office, or at least buying the collected works of William Blake and a
pair of leather pants. What sort of a jerk would do that to you if you were the
victim of a "switch to double brandies"? Something does not add up
here.
And that's just one of the many examples —
these songs, by all means, should get
me all riled up, but they do not, because it is hard to believe that the guys
really believe in this stuff themselves. The album gets caught in a deadly gap
between seriousness and parody, and there's nothing I can do about that: the
songs are perfectly listenable, but boring. Maybe they're angrier, but they
don't seem to have any genuine reasons for being angry. Which is why I'd rather
dump this and recommend you some Art Brut instead — at least those guys never pretended not to be
tongue-in-cheek post-modernists. Or, if you want a really old punk band that
still has it (or had it), take the Adolescents — their anger had never abated,
and resulted in a series of late period albums that weren't too great, but far
more empathetic than this stuff. Bottomline: if you want to toughen it up,
that's fine by me, but first you gotta find out why exactly you're toughening it up. I mean, find a goddamn
reason, like the Iraq War or Britney Spears or something. Complaining about
hangovers? Gee, you guys must really
be getting old.
FLAT-PACK PHILOSOPHY (2006)
1) Flat-Pack Philosophy; 2)
Wish I Never Loved You; 3) Sell You Everything; 4) Reconciliation; 5) I Don't
Exist; 6) Soul Survivor; 7) God, What Have I Done; 8) Credit; 9) Big Brother
Wheels; 10) Dreamin'; 11) Sound Of A Gun; 12) Look At You Now; 13) I've Had
Enough; 14) Between Heaven And Hell.
Can't we just say that this is another late period
Buzzcocks album and leave it at that? Please? I'm not even stating that it sucks or anything — it probably sounds
as good as it can possibly sound, given Diggle's and Shelley's self-imposed
limitations. I just can't think of anything interesting to say. Okay, let's try
ramble-scramble mode for a bit, see where it gets us:
— ʽCreditʼ begins with an automated
voice system instructing you to spend your virtual financial resources in the
correct manner, and soon transforms into an old geezer's rant about
"videophones with all the latest ringtones" that cause a "pile
of debts" for nothing, because "wish I could get something I really
need". Well thanks, guys, for warning us about the 2008 crisis and all two
years in advance. Who knows, maybe if you had made the underlying melody more
interesting, people would take heed and all trouble might have been avoided...
nah;
— ʽSound Of A Gunʼ: hey, this is one
song I really like and would not, in fact, mind taking home with me. The riff's
only advantage is one single chord change, but it makes a big nasty difference,
and I am not sure I've ever heard it before, simple as it is. It's probably
about gun violence, or it takes gun violence as a metaphor for other kinds of
violence, or it takes other kinds of violence as a metaphor for non-violence,
whatever. The point is, it's short, it's tough, it's nasty, it's catchy, I wish
there were more songs here like this one, but life's a bitch;
— ʽBetween Heaven And Hellʼ: ends the
album with atmospheric electronic noises (apparently, they hold regular
synthesizer sales in limbo, to make time pass quicker) and a moody vocal harmony
session where the title is being bounced around from lower to higher harmonies.
This way, nobody can say that Flat-Pack
Philosophy has no art-pop elements, and the Buzzcocks become eligible for
The Beach Boy Hall Of Fame and The Brian Eno Hall Of Fame at the same time. If
only for a few seconds, that is.
Then there are eleven other songs on the album,
but fuck 'em. They all sound the same anyway. My biggest problem, however? I still have no idea what «flat-pack
philosophy» is supposed to mean, even after re-reading the lyrics to the title
track several times. If it's a hint that modern era Buzzcocks music is
assembled from pre-packaged pieces, I'm in. But somehow I doubt that.
THE WAY (2014)
1) Keep On Believing; 2)
People Are Strang Machines; 3) The Way; 4) In The Back; 5) Virtually Real; 6)
Third Dimension; 7) Out Of The Blue; 8) Chasing Rainbows Modern Times; 9) It's
Not You; 10) Saving Yourself; 11*) Disappointment; 12*) Generation Suicide;
13*) Happen; 14*) Dream On Baby.
Look out, the cocks are buzzing once more (or
should that be «the buzzes are cocking»?)! After an 8-year long break, Shelley
and Diggle are back with a brand new rhythm section (Chris Remmington on bass,
Danny Farrant on drums), a brand new producer (David M. Allen, known best of
all for producing a string of records for The Cure in the 1980s), and a brand
new way of releasing their stuff — via the PledgeMusic system, which runs on
direct fan support. Apparently, the band wanted to find out if it still had any fans left — enough to finance
the recording and release of yet another LP — and guess what, either there are
still enough people around to want to hear a brand new Buzzcocks album, or
studio fees are going down at the same rate as oil prices. In any case, all
these nasty generous people have essentially stripped me of the right to begin this
review with the proverbial «who the heck needs the Buzzcocks in the 21st
century?» rhetoric question. They have not stripped me of the God-given right
to say bad things about the Buzzcocks, though, so brace yourselves.
On second thought, though... the funny thing
is, The Way does not really sound
all that bad. In fact, compared to the last one, two, three... five Buzzcocks albums, it sounds
downright involving! First and
foremost, it has the absolute best production values on a late-period Buzzcocks
record, hands down. Perhaps they went easy on sound compression or something,
but the guitars have a sharper, brighter, crisper sheen even when they are
sticking to chainsaw buzz — and sound even better when they go for cleaner
riffs or a less distorted sound in general. Maybe we have the producer to
thank for that (after all, he did work on Disintegration,
one of the most magnificently produced albums of all times)... who knows? all I know is that this sound comes in far
more colors than the fifty shades of grey on all their records from the 1990s
and the 2000s.
Second, it's got a handful of really enticing
songs. ʽPeople Are Strang Machinesʼ, for instance, has nostalgically
playful oh-oh-oh-oh backing vocals à
la David Bowie, nice lead lines and a moody chorus — not that the song
title tells us anything we didn't know before, but they tell it with plenty of
conviction this time. ʽOut Of The Blueʼ expertly plays with
stop-and-start structure and throws in a simple, efficient, and not totally
stolen garage-rock riff. ʽChaising Rainbows Modern Timesʼ often gets
mentioned as the one song on here that comes most close to emulating
classic-era Buzzcocks, and it does, except that I am not too happy about the
main rhythm melody sticking way too close to the ʽBlitzkrieg Bopʼ
pattern. And ʽSaving Yourselfʼ is probably the darkest, most
uncomfortable finale to a Buzzcocks album ever
— in fact, this whole record, in light of everything that we know about the
band, might be their darkest ever, with way too few songs about boys and girls
and way too many about surviving in a strange new world.
I know what you're thinking, and quite a few
people out of the few people who noticed and discussed the record said the
same things — the Buzzcocks sound old
here, older, more grizzled and tired than ever before, and like all old and
tired people, they now feel more at ease whining at the horrors of «virtual
reality» and all that other crap than doing what they used to do best (debating
about the fifty ways to leave your lover, that is). The tiredness is indeed
reflected in the tempos (slower than usual), the vocals (Shelley's range and
energy has gone down), and the lyrical themes. But if we are to nitpick about
nuances and subtleties, this is compensated for by the improvement in texture
and melodicity, and by the very
simple fact that finally, the Buzzcocks are coming to terms with their age and
acting like it — like any other veteran on the field, they have earned their
right to complain about the younger generation and its values, even if the
younger generation has a legal right to ignore every single word of it. (One of
the bonus tracks is actually called ʽGeneration Suicideʼ, so there!).
I almost thought about giving the album a
thumbs up, in fact, before I pinched myself back to reality (I mean, will I
ever get the urge to listen to at least one of these songs again? Hardly!).
However, and I do mean that honestly, this was, indeed, the only post-reunion
Buzzcocks album that did not actively annoy me — an album that sounded like
they really wanted to make it because something in their hearts urged them to,
rather than simply a mechanical requirement like «well, we're musicians, we're
supposed to make records, so let's go make another record, even if we know
beforehand we're not making any serious money on it». Nothing here makes me yearn
for a follow-up, but it's still nice to add another bunch of aging punkers to
the small collection of punkers who know how to do it well (like the
Adolescents, who, today, are anything but, yet still manage to preserve their
integrity).
Part 6. The New School (1989-1997)
808 STATE
NEWBUILD (1988)
1) Sync-Swim; 2) Flow Coma; 3)
Dr. Lowfruit; 4) Headhunters; 5) Narcossa; 6) E Talk; 7) Compulsion.
J. S. Bach, in writing and arranging his music,
had a great benefit in that most, if
not necessarily all, of the classical
instrument inventory had, by the XVIIIth century, reached the ideal form. Cellos,
violas, violins, woodwinds — with the exception of keyboards, not much has
changed for any of those things, because nobody wants to tamper with perfection.
No such benefit, sadly, is available for early
pioneers of artsy electronic dance music. There used to be a time when Newbuild could be considered the
ultimate in freaky shit stuff, and there have been rumors (actively supported
by 808 State themselves) that the album was a huge influence on none other than
Mr. Richard D. James. But look for user reviews these days, and many of them
will express disappointment. «It's almost as if I camped out in a Casio
forest», a guy complains on Amazon, and he's far from the only unlucky camper.
In retrospect, Grand Historians of Electronica usually throw out the required
five-star patches, but the rest of the crowds have simply moved on, discarding
the past in favor of more «relevant», instantly gratifying pleasures.
But somehow, it makes me a little sad, even if
I am by no means a fan of machine loop music, and, normally, the slightest talk
about «Acid House», which 808 State allegedly helped bring around into European
public consciousness or both, makes me scream in terror and run to my Bessie
Smith recordings. Because, loops and rhythms and obsolete recording technology
aside, Newbuild is really an
excellent musical album. And, furthermore, I do not quite understand what all the fuss is about: to my untrained ears, Newbuild still sounds sufficiently
modern. I've certainly heard Aphex Twin tracks that were far crappier from a straightforward sonic point of view.
What these three merry guys from Manchester
(Graham Massey, Martin Price and Gerald Simpson) are doing here is making
house music from an alien standpoint, borrowing the basics, crossing them with
an artistic mindset that is influenced both by the astral dreams of Tangerine
Dream and the industrial nightmares of Nurse With Wound, and coming up with
enough individual ideas to make nearly each track a stand-out. Sure, they
would probably work best as top-level soundtracks for arcade games — but if
you find that demeaning, you can choose «sonic equivalents of looking out the
window in a spaceship flying close to light speed». That's acid house for you
all right, if you are really in need of labeling.
The album never relents or slows down: it is forty
minutes of pounding grooves, seven different landscapes that shift form and
color, but never speed, lest you lose the proper momentum. And what they lack
in the ability to program a real tricky rhythm or polyrhythm, they gain in the
pure art of invention. 'Sync/Swim' is all based around the bizarre interaction
between the funky (but also quite heavy-metallic) bassline and the cute (but
dangerous!) synthy double-note chomp-chomp that may represent little alien
battleships speeding past that window of yours in regular formation — or, in a
microcosmic manner, batches of viruses speeding up and down your arteries.
'Flow Coma' is less heavy, but equally mind-blowing, a real delight to see
these synth patterns flow into and out of one another, weaving harmoniously melodic psychedelic patterns. And so on.
The only thing I am not sold on are the vocal loop overdubs — their presence
on 'Dr. Lowfruit' and especially 'Compulsion' is grating and distracting.
The fact that the production is sort of
shallow, and the ambience has nowhere near the «depth» of feeling from later
IDM masters, bothers me about as much as the production on Chuck Berry records
next to rhythm and blues British Invasion-style ten years later: a few minutes
of getting into the groove, and if the groove is smart and stylish enough, you
start forgetting about these differences. In a review such as this, they
might spring up as a factual statement, but they really have no bearing on the
intensity of the kaleidoscopic mind pictures you can get while listening to
this stuff. They are so much fun that even the cheesy drum machine sound is
forgivable (not to mention that, like all sorts of Eighties' cheesiness, that
particular sound is guaranteed to make regular stylistic comebacks all through
the 21st century). In brief — thumbs up; I'd even like to say that this is the
sort of electronic dance music album that deserves hall-of-faming, but who am I
to argue if the genre sees itself as a Saturn, bearing children only to feed
on them for further activity.
90 (1989)
1) Magical Dream; 2) Ancodia;
3) Cobra Bora; 4) Pacific 202; 5) Donkey Doctor; 6) 808080808; 7) Sunrise; 8)
The Fat Shadow (Pointy Head Mix).
Compared to Newbuild, 90 is truly an
album for sissies. Just look at the title of the first track: 'Magical Dream'?
Isn't this the kind of title much better suited for the likes of Uriah Heep?
And its primary attraction — faraway, hazy vocal overdubs from Vanessa Daou?
Where in the world is that whole alien culture thing?
In many ways, 90 is quite similar to Newbuild
— similar rhythms, similar equipment, similar dance orientation that preserve
the project's chosen niche — but the band's second album also made it clear
that these guys were not going to stick to any set formula. If Newbuild looked confidentially to the
future, 90 makes some concessions to
the past. For instance, the main «chiming» hook of 'Magical Dream' is fairly
conventional, and the entire song is
a magical dream, ensconced in a club setting, but more «psychedelic» than
«sci-fi».
Likewise, the major hit, 'Pacific State' (here
under the 12" mix title 'Pacific 202'), relies on pseudo-strings and, most
noticeably, an almost jazzy, brass-imitating melody for its groove; there is
certainly some alien-like mechanical chirping in the background, but basically
it is sort of an infusion of relaxed lounge atmosphere into the usually
arch-busy world of industrial electronics. 'Ancodia' is quite human-sounding,
too, sampling Thelma Houston and programming in loops that could have been
inspired by 1970s fusion.
Eventually we are shoved back into the future
on much more mechanical monsters like 'Donkey Doctor' and '808080808', but even
there the keyboard arrangements are generally more complex and move in more
movements than on Newbuild. The
sound just keeps on getting denser and denser — out of the sparsely populated
astral suburbs we are now moving right into the heart of the intergalactic
metropolis. Coolest illustration is perhaps 'Cobra Bora', starting out simple
and unclustered, but somewhere around 1:10 turning into the soundtrack for Law & Order In A Galaxy Far, Far Away.
In fact, most of the tracks are so well worked
out as structured compositions that the closing 'Sunrise' is immediately
noticeable as a monotonous, quasi-ambient piece, supposed to close the album on
a different, «prolonged» note — on Newbuild,
it would have simply been one of the regular boys. So, is this «progress»? It
is fairly hard to tell with electronic masterminds. Borrowing from
«conventional» musical approaches may confuse the hardcore house goer, but also
may make it easier for some to «get» acid house as real music, not just a
trendy soundtrack to self-destructive teenage activities. Thumbs up for all the smart mixing.
EX:EL (1991)
1) San Francisco; 2) Spanish
Heart; 3) Leo Leo; 4) Qmart; 5) Nephatiti; 6) Lift; 7) Ooops; 8) Empire; 9) In
Yer Face; 10) Cubik; 11) Lambrusco Cowboy; 12) Techno Bell; 13) Olympic.
Although many swear by this as the ultimate 808
State experience, I am not so sure. It is certainly different, and has enough
evidence of the band still willing to evolve and experiment to satisfy the Supreme
Court, but the direction of that evolution on Ex:El points to hardcore techno, and this means appealing to
electronic music fans alone, instead of continuing to show us skeptically
minded people how Electronica could be «Art» in the good old understanding of
the word.
The idea of bringing in guest vocalists — star vocalists — to turn some of their
compositions into near-pop songs was, as far as I understand, rather novel for
1991, and earned Massey and Co. extra points for innovation. But 'Spanish Heart',
with Joy Division/New Order veteran Bernard Sumner at the wheel, is simply not
a very interesting composition, just some hollow dance rhythms fed with
keyboards that click very much à
la Eighties' synth-pop. 'Qmart' and 'Ooops' have plenty of historical
interest: they feature a fairly young and fresh Björk, still working her
way up in the Sugarcubes, but already in full control of her powers —
vocalizations on both of these tracks are wild and complex enough to fit in on
any of her latter day excesses. Yet again, though, the musical grooves
themselves are soundtrackish and not very interesting.
Additional historical interest requires every
reviewer to mention that 'Nephatiti' features the first usage of the Willy Wonka sample "We are the
music makers..." in electronic practice. Uh... okay. Whatever. I am
actually more amused by the male/female voices trading enunciations of
"Nephatiti" / "Nefertiti" as if over the course of a
phonetics lesson. And by the grooves, too, which are a bit more explorative
this time around.
The album's centerpiece is a nine-minute
monster called 'Cubik', a gritty techno-funk thing that at least kicks some
butt, rather than just sitting there and noodling for atmosphere. It is the
most spaced out, alien-ish composition on the album, and it deserves its
running time completely (actually, I believe the nine-minute long mix is only
present on the US release; get it by all means instead of the brief
three-minute teaser on the UK version). Ironically, it is also the most minimalistic
of all the tracks on here — no atmospheric synth veils in the background, every
ounce of strength poured into the warp drive of its principal groove, but play
it loud enough and it will blow your mind all the same.
The other tracks, somehow, just fail to
impress. Much of this stuff is calmly pretty, but 808 State are at their best
when they are able to conjure little green bugs zipping through space outside
your illuminators, and 'Cubik' is the only track here that freely provides that
pleasure. Sure, credit has to be given for everything, including toying around
with hip-hop on 'San Francisco' and adult contemporary on one or two other
tracks, but giving credit is one thing, and finding words that would be kind
and meaningful at the same time is quite a different one.
GORGEOUS (1993)
1) Plan 9; 2) Moses; 3)
Contrique; 4) 10 x 10; 5) One In Ten; 6) Europa; 7) Orbit; 8) Black Morpheus;
9) Southern Cross; 10) Nimbus; 11) Colony; 12) Timebomb; 13) Stormin Norman;
14) Sexy Dancer; 15) Sexy Synthesizer.
Buyer beware — despite the self-aggrandizing
title (or, perhaps, because of the
title) this record is frequently given the finger even by serious fans of the
band. Me, I fail to see what exactly it is that makes it so much less thrilling
than Ex:El, but I am no electronics
wiz, and my standard judgement criterion is very simple — I just mentally rate
these records by counting approximately how many times a quirky, remarkable
sprite jumps out at me from the general electronic buzz. That is, if the records
pretend to any sort of dynamic character. If they pretend to ambience, I mentally
rate them by counting how many times a quirky, remarkable sprite does not jump out at me, docking points for
each apparition.
Here, the sprite appears from the very first
second, as 'Plan 9' greets you with the first appearance of acoustic guitar on
an 808 State album. This sort of betrays the sacred formula, but gives the band
extra room to variegate and diversify — not that the little Spanish melody is
particularly complex or unforgettable, but it does give 'Plan 9' a new, fresh
face as it plays out alongside the beats, bass lines, and keyboard loops.
Besides, it is pretty much the only offense against the high art of digital
technologies that Massey and Co. are committing here.
The habit of inviting non-electronic artists
for collaboration continues with 'Moses', an electro-pop tune sung by Ian
McCulloch (of Echo & the Bunnymen), a newly remixed version of UB40's 'One
In Ten', and fellow Manchestrian Rachel McFarlane guesting on '10 x 10'. None
of these tracks are all that good, even if 'Moses' begins with a nicely
entangled web of keyboard rhythms that is almost King Crimson-ian in origin
(thirty seconds later, McCulloch and the boys simply turn it into some sort of
boring danceable adult contemporary).
One barely noticeable gem among this sea of
mediocre collaborations is 'Europa', with some utterly outstanding vocal work
from Caroline Seaman — the minute I heard it, I had «Cocteau Twins!» springing
in my head, and, sure enough, Caroline Seaman is a little-known performer who
was, at some point, connected with Ivo Watts-Russell's This Mortal Coil,
singing on the Filigree & Shadow
album in 1986. For 808 State, she brought some of 4AD's original fairy dust
with her, and the band integrates it quite subtly into their swirling roller
coaster. For 'Europa' alone and its charming wonderland attitude, the album
justifies its title.
The guests say goodbye after track six, though,
and from then on it's all in the hands of technology. 'Black Morpheus', with
little sax passages scattered along the road, is like an attempt to recreate
the vibe of 'Pacific State', but the melodic bits are not as
attention-demanding here. 'Colony' and 'Timebomb' once again play with
jarring industrial noise, particularly the latter, one of 808 States' most
«brutal» inventions, even though a little cartoonish. And, just in case you've
been wondering, 'Sexy Dancer' and 'Sexy Synthesizer' are two entirely different
groove patchworks, and, although their titles are looped over the music, there
is nothing particularly sexy about either. (Caroline Seaman's vocal parts, on
the other hand...).
Overall, I do not really get what's not to like
on here if electronic chowder is your kind of thing. There is plenty of
diversity, some new ideas and approaches, and all of the tracks show just about
the same level of care and complexity as 808 State have always upheld. Perhaps
the world just got tired of the band, eventually, or perhaps such was the
world's unfavorable reaction to the departure of one of the formative members,
Martin Price, a year before the album was recorded — but, as far as I know,
Price had never been the major driving force behind the music. Anyway, since
nothing on here is really annoying, and since 'Europa' is simply my favorite
808 State number of all time, I'm giving it a thumbs up. (Then I'm cheatingly
adding 'Europa' to my «Best-of-4AD» compilation and never listening to this
album again, but let us not dwell on the negative).
DON SOLARIS (1996)
1) Intro; 2) Bond; 3) Bird; 4)
Azura; 5) Black Dartangnon; 6) Joyrider; 7) Lopez; 8) Balboa; 9) Kohoutek; 10)
Mooz; 11) Jerusahat; 12) Banacheq.
Eight years into their recording career, 808
State are already the elder statesmen of a world-swamping market, completely
stripped of their ability to blaze any more trails — not because of a lack of
talent, simply due to the exponential growth of competition. At least Newbuild has the benefit of a textbook
entry: nothing the band did after Ex:El
will ever have the fortune to raise above the status of a discography blip.
But if I were pressed into choosing one
favourite from this «just doing our regular thing» kind of period, Don Solaris would probably be it. Why?
Beats me if I know. Most likely, there are just a few more tunes than usual
that hit the pleasure spot. Or, to be precise, more «momentous ideas» that hit
the pleasure spot. 'Banacheq', for instance — now here is a great composition.
The main hook sounds like a revolving sonic effect discharged out of a magic
wand, the bassline adds a strain of heavy funk, and the final crescendo is of a
kind that one normally encounters in rock, not electronic music, with the whole
thing becoming crazier and crazier until the inevitable fizzling out. Like a wild,
wild fusion rave acted out on digital machinery.
That one is at the very end; in the beginning, we
have an equally excellent 'Bond', nothing to do with James (although some of
the industrial passages do have a spy movie atmosphere to them), but rather with
some real bonds, beginning with
atomic and ending with sexual. Yes, as you have correctly guessed, there are
lyrics to this song, delivered by Mike Doughty of Soul Coughing, but they are
insignificant next to the relentless drive of the tune, which seems to drag the
listener through a complex machinery-producing factory, with one grim robotic
contraption after the other beating out its own rhythm. Evocative, if not
particularly innovative.
Other guests carrying on the tradition of
humanizing 808 State albums include fellow Mancunian Lou Rhodes of Lamb on
'Azura' (not very exciting, since she seems to be imitating Björk wherever
possible, without having the same potential); James Bradfield of the Manic
Street Preachers on 'Lopez', also not a highlight — a song that tries mighty
strong to be sunny and optimistic and ends up kinda boring; and another Icelandic lady, Ragnhildur
Gísladóttir a.k.a. "Ragga", on the also non-exciting
atmospheric Björkism of 'Mooz' (although some bits of her vocalization at
the end of the track have a mildly mesmerizing effect).
But overall, it is the non-guest stuff on Don Solaris that elevates the spirit,
from the aforementioned 'Banacheq' to the band's continuing love affair with
brass overdubs on 'Black Dartangnon' (sic),
the catchy and vividly kaleidoscopic dance groove of 'Jerusahat' and the funny
vocal loops on 'Bird'. At this point, all that Massey and Co. can really do is
try to ensure a separate identity for each of the tracks — and they succeed at
least halfway, which is more than enough for a thumbs up.
OUTPOST TRANSMISSION (2002)
1) 606; 2) Chopsumwong; 3)
Wheatstraw; 4) Boogieman; 5) Roundbum Mary; 6) Lemonsoul; 7) Suntower; 8) Dissadis;
9) Bent; 10) Souflex; 11) Crossword; 12) Lungfoo; 13) Slowboat; 14) YoYo.
808 State's only original offering in the 21st
century is... well, either it simply states that the team said it all in the
20th, or, on a more global level, states that, on his 2000th birthday, the Lord
Jesus Christ declared that human art has exhausted its spiritual filling and
we should all start packing and getting ready for that trumpet call. It's your
choice.
I have nothing inspiring to say about Outpost Transmission. It is just
another set of electronic grooves, not bad per se, but not provoking any deep
thoughts or emotional reactions. Even the vocal guest spots are bland. '606'
is a collaboration with Simian, another electronic bunch of fellow Mancunians, with
a «choral boy-band» arrangement over a synth-pop riff that does nothing for me.
'Lemonsoul', with hushed atmospheric vocals from Guy Garvey, is slightly
better, but it aims at beautiful-gorgeous and then sort of misses the mark by
several inches — an aging Robin Hood can invoke pity, but can he instigate
admiration? Even 'Crossword', with Rob Spragg growling over dark industrial
passages, feels like a feeble, steam-less copy of what this band used to produce
in the industrial vein years ago.
Entering highly subjective mode, my senses, for
some reason, start radar-blipping towards the end of the record — the grooves on the last three tracks seem to at
least evoke something. 'Lungfoo' has
that psychedelic wobbly chiming sound that conjures various magic associations
(take out the techno percussion and it's well usable in a Harry Potter soundtrack); 'Slowboat' features tons of interesting
variations on another simple, but catchy magical-mysterious keyboard riff; and
'YoYo' brings things to a close on a delicately paranoid note, with visions of
Big Brother emerging out of its troubled notes.
Or maybe not, and it's all just a matter of
extra-clicking on random tracks in order to squeeze out a few more meaningless
words. Whatever. Fact is, not even the fans seem to like this record much; and
the other fact — namely, that, despite still hanging together, 808 State have
not come up with a proper follow-up to Transmission
in a whoppin' ten years — implies that, perhaps, Massey and Co. simply got
tired of pretending to be as smart and creative as everybody used to think they
were. So, thumbs
down, although still a must for completists and tireless studiosos
of positive-negative charge fluctuations in processor chips.
AGE AIN'T NOTHING BUT A NUMBER (1994)
1) Intro; 2) Throw Your Hands
Up; 3) Back And Forth;
4) Age Ain’t Nothing But A
Number; 5) Down With The Clique; 6) At Your Best (You Are Love); 7) No One
Knows How To Love Me Quite Like You Do; 8) I’m So Into You; 9) Street Thing;
10) Young Nation; 11) Old School; 12) I’m Down; 13) Back And Forth (Mr. Lee And
R Kelly Mix).
Bland, musician-deprived R'n'B was certainly
not invented by Aaliyah, but she did have the unlucky fate of being born,
bred, and schooled right into the middle of it. It is not clear to me how much
creative control she had in the studio when recording her three albums — since
she is almost never credited for writing or arranging anything on her own, the
answer is probably evident — but even the admirers usually acknowledge that her
legend was, at all times, mostly in the hands of her «seconds». In this
particular case, the second in question is producer/songwriter R. Kelly, and
consequently, the record does not so much tell the story of «Aaliyah, The Struggling
Artist» as they simply tell you what used to be considered «hot» in 1990's R'n'B.
The title of the album is a thinly veiled hint
at Aaliyah's (14 at the time the songs were recorded) flirt (and even a
short-lived illegal marriage) with R. Kelly himself, and, while I might
somewhat cautiously agree with the statement in general — (then again, so might
pedophiles all over the world, so let us not press things here) — in the case
of Aaliyah, her age was definitely more
than just a number: it ensured that she, an obviously gifted vocalist, would be
exactly whatever her current mentor would want her to be. And her current
mentor did not want all that much. For the most part, he just encouraged her to
rap like Mary J. Blige, to sing sappy ballads like Whitney Houston, and to
sport a professionally manufactured «street image».
Now I am not much of a Whitney Houston fan, but
let me tell you this: Aaliyah seems much more convincing as a romantic balladeer
than as a seasoned practitioner of street-wise funky grooves. Maybe it is
because she never really had as much «street culture» inside her as her image
makers would have us believe — she was, after all, strictly middle-class rather
than «black trash», and «tough» numbers, such as ʽThrow Your Hands Upʼ
just do not cut the mustard here. R. Kelly must have realized that early on:
once the misguided album opener is over, he mostly keeps the «tough» stuff to
himself, and, on a few numbers, plays the hip-hop counterpart to Aaliyah's more
«sensitive» personality. Most of the time it sounds very stupid, but at least
his parts help break up the monotonousness of the balladry.
The «music» here is best left in peace — if you
have heard one formulaic mid-1990's
R'n'B album, you have heard enough — but some of the vocal melodies have been
polished to a marginally more pleasing state than the rest. And if there is
one thing to redeem the music, it is, not surprisingly, Aaliyah's singing.
Highly seductive, but without having to resort to strained cooing; melismatic
to an extent, but never going
overboard with the gimmick; and all of that – with an innocent, fresh flair
that immediately puts her over so many wound-up automatons. At 14 years of age,
she was able to bring a slight touch of class
to this yawny material; and if she managed to make it a little interesting for me, who normally avoids contemporary
R'n'B like the swine flu, one can only imagine how interesting she made it for
those who were free of such allergies.
As it often happens, the best tracks are not
the album's main singles (ʽBack And Forthʼ, a mediocre dance groove, brandishing tired
old Stevie Wonder-esque chromatic harmonica flourishes that were already beaten
into the ground long ago by Stevie himself; an over-sugared cover of the Isley
Brothers' ballad ʽ(At Your Best) You Are Loveʼ). Rather, they include
the shadowy, morally ambiguous title track; ʽStreet Thingʼ, also
with harmonica, but this time, managing to capture an actual bit of real
Stevie Wonder spirit as well; and ʽYoung Nationʼ, the closest thing
to an anthemic track on here, but in a smooth and subtle way. Did I say Mary J.
Blige and Whitney Houston? ʽStreet Thingʼ and ʽYoung
Nationʼ are actually atmospheric in a soft-jazz Sade-style manner, and
kudos to R. Kelly for trying out that approach on his protegée — it fits
her more than any other one. (And it isn't nearly as irritating.)
So what is the resolution? An album strictly
for the heart (and far from everyone's heart), not for the brain (unless you
want to spend some time researching the sociological roots of lines like "young
nation under a groove, keeping it smooth with a jazz attitude"), but in my
case, even the heart orders a general thumbs down
— for consistent inconsistency, occasional phoney-ness, and concealed
propaganda of sex with minors (because want it or not, that's what it really
all boils down to). Cynical as it may be, lovely voices are a dime a dozen
these days, and when your lovely voice comes bundled with R. Kelly's
mentorship, I'd prefer to spare the dime.
ONE IN A MILLION (1996)
1) Beats 4 Da Streets (Intro);
2) Hot Like Fire; 3) One
In A Million; 4) A Girl Like You; 5) If Your Girl Only Knew;
6) Choosey Lover; 7) Got To Give It Up; 8) 4 Page Letter; 9)
Everything's Gonna Be Alright; 10) Giving You More; 11) I Gotcha Back; 12)
Never Givin' Up; 13) Heartbroken; 14) Never Comin' Back; 15) Ladies In Da
House; 16) The One I Gave
My Heart To; 17) Came To Give Love (Outro).
Like so many albums around it, One In A
Million suffers from ceedeetis: it pastes its limited amount of attractions
over such a vast surface that, by the end of it, I feel a strange sort of satisfaction,
as if having just returned from the task of gathering the remains of a
shipwreck scattered all over the beaches of a desert island.
But if you do gather the best tracks together
and trim them down to, say, half their length (actually, length of the
individual songs is not a problem per se; they usually do not seriously run
over four minutes, with the exception of 'Choosey Lover', which is really two
songs in one), anyway, if you do this, it becomes easier to appreciate One
In A Million as a high-class R'n'B album whose creators were sincerely
interested in developing a new kind of groove sound rather than merely making
an extra pile of bucks on the existing trends.
I say 'creators' because, again, it is unclear
just how much Aaliyah herself was involved in all this except for just building
up the required feeling. Some of the songs, in fact, are completely dominated
by Timbaland's production, e. g. 'Hot Like Fire', where he straightjackets
Aaliyah into a futuristic-robotic vocal part complementing his tricky choice of
synth tones — I'm not complaining, because the effect is clever and inspiring,
but whether Aaliyah's presence is necessary here, I have no idea about that.
Could just as well be Margaret Thatcher.
Likewise, 'If Your Girl Only Knew' is mostly
memorable for its hypnotic "post-disco" bassline, lovingly wrapped in
a web of funky guitar and even electric organ (!). However, on the softer,
balladeering stuff Timbaland does allow to let the girl loose, and if you are
fond of her singing style, 'Heartbroken', '4 Page Letter', and the title track
can all be lovely; singalong choruses and moderately tasteful arrangements
don't hurt, either.
The best news is that there is not a single
track on the record that feels really strained or 'image-carving': the forced
street vibe of 'Throw Your Hands Up' has been purged completely, and pretty
much every single track gives you a sentimental, fragile Aaliyah — very soft,
very smooth (she used to be a big Sade fan, and it shows), ultimately, boring,
but true to the soul, at least.
The non-Timbaland tracks are generally weaker,
because there's no experiment (many of them just sound like standard Whitney
Houston fare), but, odd enough, the one song that stands above everything else
is a V. H. Herbert production: a terrific cover of Marvin Gaye's 'Got To Give
It Up'. When Marvin recorded it in 1979, he sang it in falsetto, for
understandable reasons; Aaliyah gives a very faithful rendition, down to the
individual intonations of the syllables, but she sings it in her natural voice,
and the effect is even more believable and seductive than on the original (one
could do without the extraneous rap sections, though). They also slow down the
tempo just a bit, and enhance the power of the rhythm section, so it doesn't at
all sound like a retro-disco sound, but, on the contrary, looks appropriately
modern.
Things don't work so well on the 'Old
School/New School' version of the Isleys' 'Choosey Lover', because, frankly
speaking, the 'old school' part, graced with hair-metal guitar, sounds very
much like mainstream Eighties school (bad, bad, bad!), and the 'new school'
part was not produced by Timbaland and is therefore rather generic. The only
saving grace of this and every other so-so track on here is the singing. It's
hard not to like the singing.
One In A Million has received tremendous critical praise, with
people calling it one of the most epoch-defining R'n'B albums of the time and
suchlike. I wouldn't know, and I wouldn't care much if it really had the kind
of historical influence as is sometimes assigned to it — whether that would be
a good thing is debatable. But it deserves to be heard, at least the better
half of it, for combining some exciting approaches to the genre with the
talents of one of the best singers in the genre, so my heart feels fine about
it, surreptitiously giving the record a fast thumbs
up while the brain is still collecting itself, trying to come up
with some nasty cynical statement. We'll hastily leave it in this state and
move on to the next one.
AALIYAH (2001)
1) We Need A Resolution; 2)
Loose Rap; 3) Rock The
Boat; 4) More Than A
Woman; 5) Never No More; 6) I Care 4 U; 7) Extra Smooth; 8) Read Between The
Lines; 9) U Got Nerve; 10) I Refuse; 11) It's Whatever; 12) I Can Be; 13) Those
Were The Days; 14) What If.
Five years in the waiting and the final result
just goes to show that in a genre like R'n'B, waiting isn't gonna do you much
good. Maybe One In A Million showed some flashes of a new type of sound,
but this third and, alas, last effort doesn't. It doesn't even show a lot of
"maturation" — how, in fact, can one ever become more
"mature" if all the artistry is placed into other people's hands? She
just looks older on the album cover, that's all.
Maybe we needed more Missy Elliott/Timbaland
cooperation on the record. It is their stuff, after all, that made One In A
Million ultimately stand above competition, and it's no surprise that their
only joint product on Aaliyah is easily its best track, and, in fact,
easily the best thing Aaliyah was ever given in her life. She must have known
that, and her vocal delivery on 'I Care 4 U' literally makes my hair stand on
end. It's got a smokey, sultry, dimmed-lights Seventies retro sheen to it,
something in the Isaac Hayes ballpark, and although the lyrics, basically just
about wanting to comfort someone who's just been dumped by his lover, are
trite, the sheer effect of them is anything but. It's the best mainstream R'n'B
ballad of the decade I've known so far.
As for the more lightweight material, some of
these dance numbers are cute enough to merit a smile, but the groove isn't
really all that tight or trance-like to justify the repetitiveness: 'Rock The
Boat', after a short while, begins to look like an audio sex manual ('stroke it
for me, stroke it for me, change position, change position'), and 'More Than A
Woman', after showing initial promise with its odd Eastern rhythm, doesn't show
anything else (not to mention that its title inavoidably brings on comparisons
with the far superior, although, of course, entirely different, Bee Gees song).
The best of these 'bouncy' numbers is arguably 'Extra Smooth', with its weird
'descending' loop that hearkens back to the days of disco and, from there, even
music-hall.
I don't really know, though, why one should
bother describing these songs. I don't get the feeling they meant a lot to
Aaliyah or even those who saddled her with them. It's pretty obvious that she
really only felt at home with the ballads: 'I Care 4 U' is the top number, for
sure, but 'Never No More' and 'I Refuse', although far less memorable, at least
give me a bit of ground to empathize with the singer. Nothing else does: she
just doesn't connect. The album closer, 'What If', is a weird mess of electronic
bleeps and hard riffs, maybe the "heaviest" number in her catalog,
but the vocals could as well have been synthesized. Maybe they were, who knows.
There is a minor critical tendency to describe Aaliyah
as a masterpiece, most likely influenced by her tragic death within a few
months of its release. But, like I said, I see no progress, in fact, quite the
contrary, I again see a talented girl fall under the supervision of hacks who'd
most likely just go on sabotaging her career for the next decade. So both the
heart and the brain give this a big fat thumbs down
rating, not before Superman comes and rescues 'I Care 4 U', though.
I CARE 4 U (2002)
1) Back And Forth; 2) Are You That Somebody; 3)
One In A Million; 4) I Care 4 U; 5) More Than A Woman; 6) Don't Know What To
Tell Ya; 7) Try Again; 8) All I Need; 9) Miss You; 10) Don't Worry;
11) Come Over; 12) Erica Kane; 13) At Your Best; 14) Got To Give It Up
(remix).
One thing the Blackground label did right was
to name this compilation after Aaliyah's best song. One thing it did wrong,
wrong, wrong, was to follow the hideous principle of 'best-and-lost', mixing
well-known hits for neophytes with rarities and previously unreleased material
for the fans. As a result, I don't see the neophyte falling head over heels in
love with the late singer, and I see the fan in a thoroughly unsatisfied set of
mind, yelling for more, more, more of these obscurities and less of the hits
that everyone already knows by heart.
Altogether, there are about five or six songs
from Aaliyah's latest sessions that may or may not have constituted the bulk of
her next album had she remained alive, a couple more B-sides and soundtrack
tunes (from her starring vehicle Romeo Must Die and Dr. Dolittle),
and then the hits. The hits are okay, except for 'Back And Forth' which never
really suited her personality, but the new material is definitely as shoddy as
the shoddiest stuff on Aaliyah.
Some of it is just bizarre, like the unexpected
tribute to soap opera hero Erica Kane (!) which very quickly devolves into a
trance-like chanting of the name and is oddly lifeless for a song supposed to
express admiration for a character, even a soap opera one. Some is just dull in
an adult contemporary kind of way ('Come Over'). And some just seems to catch
her uninspired, e. g. 'Miss You', which is supposed to sound about as desperate
as 'I Care 4 U' but comes out very plastic, all empty, by-the-book melisma and
no real feeling behind it. These auras are very hard to judge, of course, but
if you play 'Miss You' back-to-back with 'I Care 4 U', you might understand my
reaction better.
In the end, the only moderately interesting
tracks are two oldies that involved the participation of Timbaland: 'Are You
That Somebody?' and 'Try Again'. With Timbaland's trademark
"futuristic" production, incorporating non-trivial bits of electronica,
and repetitive, but not generic vocal hooks, they are two cool grooves that
deserve attention. Too bad they really don't require Aaliyah's participation
to make them interesting.
To make things worse, the compilation ends on a
completely unnecessary and, I'd even say, ugly remix of 'Got To Give It Up',
"toughening" up the original by inserting lots of extra clinketing
noises that do nothing except take one's attention away from Aaliyah's sexy
performance. (At least it's shorter than the original.) In short, I Care 4 U
— much as I hate to admit it — is really just a cheap cash-in on the girl's
tragedy, assembled hastily, without due respect or consideration, and
presenting a far less adequate view of her achievements and talents than could
have been possible. Perhaps today, several years after the fact, saying this
won't be considered sacrilegious, especially since there are now much better
Aaliyah compilations on the market, whereas the bulk of the "new"
stuff on I Care 4 U is best relegated to history.
Thumbs down from all possible points of view, although let
this final note on this final "album" not deter anyone from checking
out her better stuff. Her death may have made her a legend far quicker and
somewhat less deservedly than needed, but she obviously was a sweet,
intelligent, even "classy" artist with a mild knack for innovation,
and anybody with that pedigree deserves to be remembered, live or dead.
BIG TOP HALLOWEEN (1988)
1) Here Comes Jesus; 2) In My
Town; 3) Priscilla's Wedding Day; 4) Push; 5) Scream; 6) But Listen; 7) Big Top
Halloween; 8) Life In A Day; 9) Sammy; 10) Doughball; 11) Back O' The Line;
12) Greek Is Extra.
The best thing that may be said about the
Afghan Whigs' debut is that, for an album released in 1988, it sounds
unexpectedly awful damn good. From the very beginning, the Whigs wrote, sang
and played from the heart, without giving a flying fuck about joining any
single musical camp. The music they play is heavy, but it is not heavy metal;
punk-spirited, but is not punk; influenced by the old school of hard rock, but
is not old school hard rock. It is... well, it's as if you took a listen to
everything there is, then picked up a guitar, shut off your brain, and just
started playing. Then one of your riffs just might happen to come out like
Johnny Ramone, one might happen to be like Tony Iommi, and another one might
even be Dave Davies circa 1966. Cool tools!
For 1988, when, in a blink of an eye, you could
be sucked into generic hardcore or into hair metal, this was a tremendous
level of freedom, and although The Afghan Whigs, in that particular respect,
did nothing that The Replacements did not do before them, one could argue that
it was much easier for a band like The Replacements to materialize and find an
audience in the early Eighties than for a band like The Afghan Whigs to repeat
the feat in the late Eighties, when the big musical revolutions were over and
pigeonholing was the unavoidable word of day.
Unfortunately, just as it took The Replacements
a bit of time to find their voice, so it took The Afghan Whigs an even longer
time to find theirs. Big Top Halloween,
released on the band's own label Ultrasuede, was so non-impressive that the
album was never reissued in any format, and can only be found (with a bit of
sweat) as an occasional scratchy rip of the original LP. Not to bother unless
you're a completist — there is not a single song on here that I would ever want
to return to, and, frankly speaking, there is no reason for anyone to hold a
second opinion here.
Lots of frenzied rockers here, with one
sentimental guitar-and-piano ballad in the middle ('But Listen', distinguished
by being the only sentimental ballad in the world to include the line "you
can kiss me on my lips, or you can kiss me on my ass, it really doesn't
matter"); but the arrangements are trivial, the riffs are either stolen
or not fleshed out with articulate emotional content at all, and lead vocalist
Greg Dulli is expressive, but... dull. 'Priscilla's Wedding', with its swirling
descent into wah-wah madness in the chorus, and the title track, with a really
driving, but definitely recycled melody, are minor highlights. The rest is
just one lump of passionate, sincere, aggressive, yawn-inducing noise.
Thus, as «brave» as the Whigs were to follow
their own destiny already in 1988, it is pretty obvious that they were far
from alone in this endeavour — the difference is that they got luckier than the
rest, oh, yes, and it didn't hurt that for the next stretch of several albums,
they just kept getting better and better. If not for Gentlemen, no one in the world would give the damnedest bit of a
damn about Big Top Halloween; thumbs down
with a guarantee.
UP IN IT (1990)
1) Retarded; 2) White Trash
Party; 3) Hated; 4) Southpaw; 5) Amphetamines And Coffee; 6)
Hey Cuz; 7) You My Flower; 8) Son Of The South; 9) I Know Your
Little Secret; 10) Big Top Halloween; 11) Sammy; 12) In My Town; 13)
I Am The Sticks.
Although the Whigs had nothing to do with
Seattle as such, in 1989 they were signed to the Sub Pop label the same year
that Nirvana released Bleach on it.
Apparently, what they were doing more or less fell in with the consolidating
grunge formula: hate yourself a lot, add rumbling metallic doom to your
average punk playing, and Seattle, the artistic shithole of the USA, welcomes
you with open... oh never mind.
Of course, neither Greg Dulli, nor anyone else
in the band ever hated themselves to the suicidal point. Even on their loudest
songs they always stop one or two steps before the abyss: compare, for
instance, 'White Trash Party' with Nirvana's 'Negative Creep' — the former is a
sincere fit of rage to which any one of us may be susceptible, the latter is
clearly performed by a deranged person who has no more than five years left to
live. And they cannot truly be categorized as «grunge», either, since the punk
quotient in their music still seriously outweighs the metallic qualities, not
to mention the band's penchant for a little old school soul and R'n'B.
For a band that gives such a big damn about not
giving any big damn when it comes to choosing one's genre camp — as long as
it's loud, raw, and serious — it is a shame that they so rarely come up with
interesting melodies. Up In It shows
some progress from the utterly forgettable debut, but still not enough to
justify the Whigs' existence (it does not help, either, that the CD edition of
the album throws on a whole bunch of tracks from Big Top Halloween to beef up space).
The sound is
loud, raw, and serious, and the guitar duo of Dulli and McCollum are playing
much more than the average three chords, borrowing lots-a-licks from both the
funk/R'n'B and the old school hard rock/garage repertoire, but somehow it never
manages to come together. Either it is just the production (or, rather, the
lack of it) that sucks, or the fact that Dulli's growling and screaming on top
of it all has so little to do with the actual music — sometimes, rather than
the well-known comparisons with Dinosaur Jr. and The Replacements, I tend to
think of Birthday Party analogies, with one crucial difference: when Nick Cave
and Rowland S. Howard were raising bloody hell, they took care to pull all the stops, and the Afghan Whigs don't. Up In It is, after all, an album of
songs, not musical terrorist acts.
'Retarded' and 'White Trash Party' start things
off well, but the rest of the album is very much just a series of inferior
re-runs on the same musical and lyrical topics. The lyrics, by the way, fit the
sloppiness of the melodies — mostly just series of impressionistic
non-sequiturs that blindly poke at the rotten nature of everything in sight.
The tightest they get is on something like "Jane had a bottle of pills she
kept beside her bed / She took a couple when the sky came falling down"
and then we're off some place different. Dulli's vocals also make a very feeble
impression: at this point, he has mastered a professional scream and an
authentic rasp, but who on Earth did not
have that in 1990?
All in all, Up In It is a step up indeed, but the band is still not in IT by any means, wherever the IT
is supposed to be. Thumbs down.
CONGREGATION (1992)
1) Her Against Me; 2) I'm Her
Slave; 3) Turn On The Water; 4) Conjure Me; 5) Kiss The Floor; 6) Congregation;
7) This Is My Confession; 8) Dedicate It; 9) The Temple; 10) Let Me Lie To You;
11) Tonight; 12) Miles Iz Dead.
This is the record that supposedly initiates
the Whigs' «classic» period, critically acclaimed for the just-right ratio of
grunge to R'n'B to troubled singer-songwriter content. True, it is a clear step up from the previous
album, but the way I see it, the Whigs' creative growth was almost painfully
slow — and furthermore, do not even begin
to try and compare Congregation, in
terms of intensity and poisonous flames, to same era records from Nirvana or
Alice In Chains, because any such comparison will immediately strip the album
of any good reasons it might have to exist.
Having now fully asserted his role as the
band's major creative force, Greg Dulli still has not learned to write
interesting songs; there are many different riff parts on here, but not a
single one I'd like to take to heaven or hell with me. Except 'The Temple', of
course, but that's because 'The Temple' is a cover of a track from Jesus Christ Superstar — the album's
most surprising move, open to various interpretations. It is a rather lame
cover, but the question, of course, is not how good or bad it is, but whatever
made Dulli put it there...
...which, logically, leads to the next
question: what the hell is Congregation
actually about? The album is clearly conceptual. It has a naked black woman
hugging a naked white baby on the cover (which some interpret as a reflection
of Dulli's subconscious frustration at not being born black, and others as a
brief synopsis of the racial history of humanity). It has a pretentious forty second
male-female introduction that begins with such lines as "Eat my
imagination, taste my imaginary friend". Throughout, it features
stream-of-consciousness lyrics that keep switching from male-female to
individual-society relationships, with «male» and «individual» predictably
featured in a more positive light than «female» and «society».
But none of the
points are ever made explicit. Instead, there is simply a general feeling of
something wrong going on in an environment where everything should be supposed
to be going right. Does that have something to do with the fact that a black woman is holding a white child? What, exactly, is the problem here? Why is Greg Dulli
singing 'The Temple' to us? Is it just because he loved that melody so much
that he'd waited ten or more years of his life to put it on his own record, or
is there a deeper conceptual dig to it?
Considering that the album's best song, a
depressed jangly dirge to Miles Davis, was thrown on as an afterthought, after
one of Dulli's friends, setting up a party, left the message "Miles is
dead. Don't forget the alcohol" on Greg's answering machine — there are no
particular deep conceptual digs on
most of the songs. In that sense, Congregation
works much better if you just take it as one mid-sized blob of whirlwinding
guitars and grumbly scream-singing that seems like the ideal average of a
kick-ass attack and a tired, languid fit of depression.
It all comes perfectly together on the album's
second best song, 'Tonight', which sees Dulli perform his sociophysiological
functions ("follow me down to the bushes, dear, no one will know, we'll
disappear") with such utter disgust ("our private little trip to
hell") as if he were thinking of himself as one of Plato's immaculate
ideas, for some stupid reason, trapped inside an atrocious human body. If there
is one little moment for which I am bound to remember Congregation, it is the fact I have never heard no one, ever
before, say the clichéd phrase "Can I walk you home tonight?"
with such visible contempt for both its object and subject.
Other than those last two songs, though, and
very occasional blips of interest on the rest of the record (well, want it or
not, you don't get to hear Andrew Lloyd Webber covers on alt-rock artists'
albums every other day), Congregation
still does not manage to justify the Whigs' descent on our planet. You do have
to admit, though, that the combination of black and white flesh looks quite
classy against a red background. Too bad the music is nowhere near that
colorful.
GENTLEMEN (1993)
1) If I Were Going; 2) Gentlemen; 3) Be Sweet;
4) Debonair; 5) When
We Two Parted; 6) Fountain And Fairfax; 7) What Jail Is Like; 8) My Curse; 9) Now You
Know; 10) I Keep Coming Back; 11) Brother Woodrow/Closing Prayer.
Let an average band hang around long enough for
the stars to form a lucky configuration, and sooner or later it will justify
its existence, finally plopping out that near-masterpiece that, according to
the occasional benevolent critic, it «always had in it», but was «biding its time».
For The Afghan Whigs, a group grand on intentions but petty on realisations, Gentlemen was their finest hour. In all
honesty, it is a record that must have come about by accident. But come about
it did, and ensured them their proper place in the 1990s.
There is nothing particularly new or striking
here conceptually; the difference is simply in that, somehow, the band pulled
their act together and, for once, released a collection of musically interesting pieces. The general taste and smell of the
band — that was well-known by 1993,
and had no intention of changing. Loud, rough, screechy, confessional, obscure,
not easily accessible: for an average Joe in the world of pop-art (like me, for
instance), it was certainly easier to empathize with Kurt Cobain than Greg
Dulli, who always seemed to leave the most important and direct things
unexpressed. As in, try to guess the meaning of the album sleeve this time — is this a
cheap-thrill-inviting allusion to underage sex, or just an allegory concerning
the hard problem of stratifying gender roles in our modern world?
No matter. What is important is that some of
the songs are good. Maybe it was a condition of the band's being picked up by a
major label (Elektra Records), in the wake of industry bosses' realization of
how much all grunge-related people could sell — that the band's got great sound
and all, but they also need to learn to write,
if you know what I mean. Whatever it was, it worked.
The band tries out some new, interesting
approaches, such as a tricky «syncopated grunge» style on the title track, or a
moody, echoey, almost «artsy» atmosphere on 'When We Two Parted'. The band
comes up with a couple memorable riff parts, such as the hard rock droning on
'Now You Know' (reminds of Hawkwind) and the psychedelic-mystical melody of 'Be
Sweet'. And the band allows for sonic diversions — such as inviting Marcy Mays
of Scrawl to take over the lead vocals on 'My Curse' (a real nice change from
Dulli, who wears out the eardrums fairly quick), or closing the record with
yet another instrumental drone that the Velvet Underground would certainly
appreciate — with guest star Happy Chichester contributing a spaced-out
Mellotron part, no less.
All of this combined makes Gentlemen into a record worth revisiting, and, perhaps, even worth
trying to understand and «assimilate». Not because of any insights it may give
one into the world of male/female relationship — at the turn of the century, a
mediocre band like the Whigs can hardly expect to publish any important breakthroughs
in that sphere, no, and I am not at all interested in quoting their lyrics, or
admiring the subtle ways in which they turn the sentimental ballad formula on
its head. But when I listen to the band really burning it up on 'Now You Know'
or 'Debonair', I feel as if am that
close to «getting it» — «it» being the admirable way in which the band leader's
frustration is finally converted into a sound that's got direction and purpose
in addition to crunch and volume. It is tough to explain, but then I'm not
alone in this — pretty sure that the boy sitting on the bed out there is having
a much tougher time than me in figuring what's going on, for some reason. So, a
curious, unexplainable thumbs up it is.
P.S. But is it just me, or is 'My Curse', with its
main melody and acoustic guitar/piano arrangement, subconsciously influenced
by Clapton's acoustic reworking of 'Layla' on Unplugged (chronologically, quite apt, since the latter came out
one year earlier)? Because that is
sure a bizarre way for the subconscious to behave itself.
BLACK LOVE (1996)
1) Crime Scene, Part One; 2) My
Enemy; 3) Double Day; 4) Blame, Etc.; 5) Step Into The Light; 6) Going To Town;
7) Honky's Ladder; 8) Night By Candlelight; 9) Bulletproof; 10) Summer's Kiss;
11) Faded.
It looks like Greg Dulli eventually decided
that Congregation and Gentlemen were too melodic, on the verge of conventionally commercial; hence, Black Love's retread into more familiar
territory — the more I listen to it, the less I can remember about the individual
songs. But yeah, artistic integrity and coherence and all. There are people
out there who honestly consider this to be The Afghan Whigs' masterpiece, and
they have their point.
Of course, it is impossible to «just» go back.
In 1996, unlike 1991, the Whigs were a critically acclaimed, moderately
popular, wisened-up outfit with a style, an agenda, and years of touring and
recording expertise behind them. Thus, Black
Love is a well-planned, well-calculated record on which Dulli knows fairly
well where he's going. Instead of a patchy and clumsy guitar sound, the band
offers a steel-wheel disciplined wall of grunge/R'n'B, one that even dares to
throw such instruments as clavinets and cellos into the mix; and, likewise, the
lyrics have morphed from pure adolescent stream-of-consciousness into a sort
of «rock poetry» professionally targeted at people with severe OCD problems.
Unfortunately, Black Love is selling to you that style and mood alone, and it is
not that unique or even
individualistic to be able to convert too many people. The Whigs have gotten
bigger, louder, more brutal, more invasive, but Black Love does that at the total expense of musical ideas. Apart
from one or two «ballads», not a single one of which has the instrumental
subtlety of 'When We Two Parted' from the last record, the whole thing is just
one big blast, and it all comes down to whether you feel like identifying with
it or not. I don't. Too many blasts have gone by since the dawning of the rock
age for me to want to identify with them just because they happen to be blasting.
Gimme tunes, goddammit — particularly
now, when, based on the experience of
Gentlemen, I know for sure that this
is not an utterly impossible request.
Ironically, it seems that even the blasting is not done all that well. The
one song that does stand out a little, the one where the band really exerts
itself to the utmost, is 'Bulletproof': the guitars become almost impossibly
loud, even the piano accompaniment goes for overkill, and Dulli's screaming
goes to 11. This is noticeable even
against a dozen similar-sounding numbers — meaning that normally they still restrain themselves. So it's a mood-oriented
record on which the mood has not been worked out to perfection.
The long epic 'Faded', coming in at the last
moment, almost tries to patch things up by cutting the formless blob of noise
dead in its tracks and supporting its anthemic pretensions with an excellent
slide guitar part, just about the only musical bit on the entire album that I
could find worthy. Turns out that Dulli is musically more meaningful when he is
in an apologetic mood ("You can believe in me, baby, can I believe in
you?") than when he is in one of his fits. Unfortunately, we get to
realize it way too late, when there is no time already to switch from the thumbs down
position. Yes, Black Love is
meaningful and sincere, but then, so are we all. And some of us, I'm not afraid
to say, suffer quite comparably to Greg Dulli — and some might even suffer in
more interesting ways for the general public.
1965 (1998)
1) Somethin' Hot; 2) Crazy;
3) Uptown Again; 4) Sweet Son Of A Bitch; 5) 66; 6) Citi Soleil; 7) John The
Baptist; 8) The Slide Song; 9) Neglekted; 10) Omertà; 11) The Vampire
Lanois.
At the time it was released, 1965 was not at all intended to serve
as the band's swan song. On the contrary, it could have been thought of as a
new beginning: after a three year break, the Whigs were picked up by one of the
biggest players in the business — Columbia Records — and, as if to honor that
event, Dulli and Co. made drastic changes to their sound, opening a new page in
their musical history. As it turned out, the new book was to begin and end on the same page. But now this
gives us a great excuse to finish it all off by saying — yes, at the end of
their collective musical journey the Whigs finally
did turn in that one-of-a-kind record that justifies their entire career and
sets up a special place for them in the alt-rock scene of the 1990s.
In my personal rating, 1965 is locked in a never-ending battle with Gentlemen as the Whigs' finest hour. It represents a change, almost a transformation into a
seriously different kind of band, which makes Gentlemen the more obvious choice to learn the essence of their
usual sound. And in terms of memorable songs, both arguably contain comparable
amounts of effort. But only on 1965
does Greg Dulli suddenly seem to wake up and actually start thinking about the sonic side of the
business. And all of a sudden, there's an intrigue that never used to be there
before.
As 'Somethin' Hot' bursts through your
speakers, the first thing to notice is the syncopated «angular» riff that
brings to mind the best tracks on Gentlemen
— an impressive, if not jaw-dropping, chord sequence instead of fully generic
grunge/funk backgrounds on Black Love.
By the time it gets to the chorus, it becomes something else: with a mix of
grunge guitar, R'n'B drumming, soul-infused background female vocals, and
Dulli's "I wanna getcha high!" owing as much to white trash
lust-as-love-as-lust sentiments as it does to Sly & The Family Stone, the
Whigs have finally earned their reputation as genre-mergers.
Not only that, but Dulli's own personality also
undergoes repairs. Instead of — always unsuccessfully — exorcising his demons,
he has accepted them as an
inevitable, but not particularly detrimental evil. Jason Ankeny of the
All-Music Guide has remarked that Dulli's "I got the devil in me,
girl" in 'John The Baptist' is delivered almost as a pickup line, and I
couldn't agree more. The song is wild and lustful, with one of three legs each
in modern alt-rock, R'n'B, and 1970s glam, and not a single sign of self-hatred
or desperate frustration in sight.
'John The Baptist' is one of the culminating
moments, but the «epic» component is specially saved by the band for the
closing two tracks (really just one large song with a lengthy instrumental
coda). 'Omertà' takes the appropriate time to unfurl, with funky bass,
snowy organ, and unusually silk and sexy vocals from Dulli (did I mention yet
that 1965 is the album to prove his worthiness as a singer?) leading into the
storm of the chorus. But, although memories of "I got the devil" are
still strong and Dulli's overdriven pleas of "surrender to me" are
delivered like Voodoo spells, there is nothing particularly demonic or
threatening to this storm. It's just that there are bright and shiny
declarations of love, and then there are the dark and disturbed ones.
'Omertà' falls into the latter, much smaller and rarer, category.
Other than that, 1965 is just fun to listen to — for its out-of-nowhere Miles
Davis-style trumpet solos, its moody background vocal arrangements, its
stronger-than-usual emphasis on lyrical lead guitar lines. In a way, compared
to all the rage that preceded it, it might be perceived as «shallow» — after
all, what good is an artistic statement if the artist does not bleed? That's
the low art of comedy, not the high one of tragedy. But, on the other hand,
I'll always take competently realized comedy over inadequately puffed up
tragedy. And for a guy who still has not blown his brains out or overdosed on a
toilet seat, and, let us hope, has no plans of doing that in the nearest
future, Dulli seems much more at home with the sentiments shown on 1965 than on any of those earlier
records.
Then again, perhaps it is true that 1965, with
its sonic evolution, is more of a Greg Dulli project than a bona fide Afghan
Whigs record — and why it was the band's swan song, after all, upon which Dulli
switched to a solo career (as well as a side one with The Twilight Singers,
where he has far more commanding power than he had in his original band). But,
to me, that would only mean that the classic Afghan Whigs period was just a
first, far from the most important, step in Dulli's journey to rock adulthood.
In any case, it hardly matters who gets the thumbs up — the band as a whole or
the mastermind behind it.
DO TO THE BEAST (2014)
1) Parked Outside; 2)
Metamoros; 3) It Kills; 4) Algiers; 5) Lost In The Woods; 6) The Lottery; 7)
Can Rova; 8) Royal Cream; 9) I Am Fire; 10) These Sticks.
So how many people still remember Greg Dulli
these days? Didn't the guy pass into predictable oblivion with the passing of
the 1990s? Or wait, did he shoot himself? No, wait, that was Kurt. No, no, I
think he ended up overdosing or something... oh no, silly me, that was Layne
Staley. Then there used to be all these well-meaning, but impossibly boring
people, you know, like Billy Corgan and Eddie Vedder and it seems they're still
around, like a bunch of walking fossils from the smoky faraway era of
self-loathing musical sludge, but does anyone still listen to them, other than
the occasional out-of-luck rock critic? «Will review the latest Smashing
Pumpkins album for food» and all that.
The point is, the Afghan Whigs were so Nineties that when, out of the blue,
Greg Dulli reemerged after a fifteen-year gap with a brand new album, I'd
almost be tempted to pre-laugh it off. It's not as if self-loathing and distorted
depression have by now vanished off the surface of the earth (with the
abundance of musical people today in search of an identity, practically nothing
vanishes off the surface these days), but that whole attitude that the Whigs,
in their heyday, shared with other grunge and «alt-rock» acts, seems to have
largely melted away. So many demons were exorcised back then, it seems, that
few were left for the 21st century.
And now, in strides Greg Dulli, back from the
cold... and proceeds to exorcise yet another bunch, as if those fifteen years
never frickin' happened. No, really, and I do mean it: Do To The Beast does not sound like a 2014 album — it sounds like a
direct successor to Black Love and 1965, as if it were recorded the very
next day, then refrigerated and stored for 500 years. Somehow, something went
wrong, the freon leaked out, and they simply had no choice but to release it to
customers, or else it would have simply gone rotten on Dulli's ass.
This described scenario seems perfectly
logical, yet, surprisingly, completely wrong: Do To The Beast is really a new album, prepared by Dulli, veteran
bass player John Curley, and an expanded set of lead guitarists to replace Rick
McCollum (who did play some gigs with the band around 2012, but later opted
out). And you don't have to love it, but you gotta admire the fact that the record
ignores everything that happened ever
since — and does it in a completely natural manner. Greg Dulli's musical
character remains completely unaltered. He still sounds, essentially, as if
he's doing cold turkey on a twenty-four-hour per day basis, and loving every
moment of it.
"If
time can incinerate what I was to you / Allow me to illustrate how the hand
becomes the fuse". Throw in a heavy sludge riff pattern, sing this as if
the fuse were stuck up your butt rather than placed in your hand, keep the
tension sharp, nauseating, and unresolved for four and a half minutes, and you
not only got yourself another minor «post-grunge» classic, but end up proving,
right here and there, that you can produce thick, heavy, flaming soul of a far
higher quality than any of them 21st century youngsters who really have no idea
of what it really means to break down
and cry. Don't be afraid to listen, Uncle Greg here is willing to teach you,
though he probably does not expect you to learn anything.
The funky
ʽMatamorosʼ opens with a bass groove not unlike the one that Andrew
Lloyd Webber used almost half a century ago to open ʽHeaven On Their
Mindsʼ — the same kind of distant-sounding, incoming and outgoing «bass
probe» whose alarm signal gives a clear indication of «something's probably not
quite right here». Soon enough, the song puts on a psychedelic cloak, with
muffled falsetto harmonies, droning lead guitar riffs, even some treated
strings for overall density; but this is fairly draggy, depressing psychedelia,
more suitable for an opium den than an innocent love-in. It is also fabulously
creative — possibly the album's best track, just for the sheer number of
interesting little details taking place.
After these two
songs, I was almost afraid that the natural course of events would be for me to
conclude that Do To The Beast might
be the best Afghan Whigs album, period. «Fortunately», as we go along, the
songs generally become less and less memorable (also sort of a traditional
trademark of Dulli's), so, on a song-by-song basis, it does not properly
compare with Gentlemen or 1965. But there might not actually be
any need to judge it on a song-by-song basis — it is set upon generating,
preserving, and gradually dissipating a specific atmosphere, and if
ʽParked Outsideʼ has already managed to get you by the balls, the
sustained moodiness of songs like ʽAlgiersʼ, ʽLost In The
Woodsʼ, and ʽCan Rovaʼ (dark acoustic folk!) will not let you
go.
The real good news
is that Dulli does not press the «distorted guitars issue» too heavily: few
songs are as brutally crackling as ʽParkedʼ, and there are plenty of
acoustic parts, slide phrases, piano flourishes, and even an occasional
orchestrated part to keep up the mood. This might be a direct sequence of
McCollum being out of the band, or perhaps it is a sign of old age, or a small
concession to the new age of music making, but whatever be the case, it works:
Do To The Beast goes for depression,
boredom, and beauty at the same time
— and illustrates that on a grandiose scale in its last track, ʽThese
Sticksʼ, which is repetitive, draggy, pessimistic, but still somehow rises
to a fascinating crescendo, then gradually calms down — presumably, as the
protagonist is bashing the last pieces of brain from his ex-lover, lying on the
floor. "You thought me easy / You thought me prey / I've come to meet you
/ I've come to make you pay". If you think about it that way, it's pretty
scary, too. Beautiful, depressing, boring, and
scary — what a combo.
Who knows, maybe
it is the best Afghan Whigs album,
after all; at any rate, it deserves an unquestionable thumbs up — if, after a fifteen-year break,
this guy is still capable of making you feel the same psychological discomfort
and more, what else can you do? And note that the lyrics, as usual, are almost
undecipherable, have nothing to do with the social situation or politics whatsoever
(most fall under the broad «me and you, dear» category, which you are then free
to regard as a metaphor for God knows what) — but the lyrics really do not
matter as much as the general «psychologism» of the whole thing. Suddenly, it
looks like Greg Dulli is just the guy these days to give us a perfect
demonstration of the real Beast
Within, not some cheap post-modern facsimile. At the very least, it's weird,
and enough to recommend that the record be not forgotten.
WHATEVER (1993)
1) I Should've Known; 2)
Fifty Years After The Fair; 3) 4th Of July; 4) Could've
Been Anyone; 5) Put Me On Top; 6) Stupid Thing; 7) Say Anything; 8) Jacob Marley's Chain; 9)
Mr. Harris; 10) I Could Hurt You Now; 11) I Know There's A Word; 12) I've Had
It; 13) Way Back When.
You have to truly admire a person who can take
one particular experience in his/her life, no matter how traumatic, and turn
it into a subject matter for a zillion artistic statements. For Aimee Mann, the
ex-cofounder of 'Til Tuesday, this subject matter was her breakup with fellow
artist Jules Shear. (Granted, prior to that, she had a breakup with fellow
artist Michael Hausman, but let us presume that that particular breakup
served as her subject matter for 'Til Tuesday).
What this means is that I am not qualified, in
any major capacity, to review Whatever. It is an album about breaking
up, from top to bottom, and should have born the sticker PARTICULARLY
RECOMMENDED FOR BROKEN HEARTS ALL OVER THE WORLD both on initial and subsequent
releases. Fate has so far guided me kindly, preventing my heart from breaking,
and so I am tempted to sneer at the album's emotional monotonousness rather
than identify with it. But then it also makes you wonder — just how stuck up
one must be to spend all of one's creative energy lamenting a three-year old
breakup?
Occasionally, Mann herself acknowledges that
her mind may be bent on this one problem to a somewhat sharper angle than it
should: 'It's one of my faults that I can't quell my past - I ought to have
gotten it gone' ('4th Of July'). But the thing that irritates me most of all is
the absolute self-righteousness of it all: song after song, it is the
ex-partner who carries one hundred, no, one thousand percent of the
blame. Just look at this: 'This is for the one who was false, who taught me
about building walls' ('I Could Hurt You Now'); 'Oh you stupid thing, it wasn't
me that you outsmarted' ('Stupid Thing'); 'I should've known you would betray
me but without the kiss' ('I Should've Known'); 'Someday you'll wake up and
say... now she's got the river down which I sold her' ('4th Of July'). Makes
Bob Dylan and Lindsey Buckingham look like little lollipop kids. The most
ironic thing of it all, of course, is that the more she tries to convince
herself and the audience that 'I got rid of that ghost', the clearer you
understand that 'that ghost' hardly leaves her in the shower, let alone in a
recording studio.
Now comes the good news. In the hands of a
non-talent — and the world, these days, is all but ruled by breakup-harboring
non-talents armed with noisy guitars and unloved pianos — these so-so lyrics
would have been set to equally so-so music, with the album relegated to the
trash heap immediately upon release. But if Aimee doesn't have a world vision
fit for a great artist, she certainly knows how to compose solid pop melodies.
Most of these songs are memorable, with a well-found combination of early
Nineties production techniques and Sixties jangle-pop values (it's no
coincidence that Roger McGuinn himself guest stars on 'Fifty Years After The
Fair'). If Mann's work in 'Til Tuesday today sounds somewhat dated (it was an
Eighties band, after all), then Whatever, released to a world that had
learned to appreciate the values of grunge, still manages to sound fresh and
alive, with lovely acoustic work, colourful electric tones, and various small
surprises along the way (e. g., the 'marching band' emulation on 'Jacob
Marley's Chain').
It is these melodies and arrangements that save
Whatever from drowning in its self-pity — because it is very easy to
distance yourself from the lyrics and just enjoy the record for its strengths.
The interlocking guitars on 'Fifty Years After The Fair' epitomize the
Nineties' capacity of creating sheer sonical loveliness; 'Could've Been
Anyone' slyly quotes the opening chords from the Byrds' 'Mr. Tambourine Man'
(you have to look for it, though), and wisely opts for intelligent, complex
combinations of 12-string and electric guitars instead of the three-chord slash
that, say, an Avril Lavigne of today would have plopped onto it; 'Way Back
When' is Kinks-derived Brit pop that borrows, not steals, from cheery
vaudeville and adds but a slice of graceful melancholia; and so on, and so on.
In short - Miss Mann's lyrics may leave a lot
to be desired (in terms of variety, at least), but her musical tastes are
impeccable and her musical skills undeniable. And so, even if, like I said, I still
don't feel qualified to pronounce judgement on this, I can easily relate to the
music with my heart — and let it whisk the negative judgement from the brain
and turn it into a positive one. Thumbs up,
most definitely.
I'M WITH STUPID (1995)
1) Long Shot; 2) Choice In The Matter; 3)
Sugarcoated; 4) You Could
Make A Killing; 5) Superball; 6) Amateur; 7) All Over Now; 8) Par For The
Course; 9) You're With Stupid Now; 10) That's Just What You Are; 11)
Frankenstein; 12) Ray; 13) It's Not Safe.
I think lyrically, this album is a step forward
because this time around there are two main lyrical themes rather than one:
"I'm So Pissed Off At My Boyfriend Of Long Ago" occasionally alternates
with "I'm So Pissed Off At My Record Label Of Not So Long Ago". Not
for one second do I believe that these particular subjects worry or should
worry you, the reader, so let us treat them the way they should be treated:
hollow pretexts to make moody music that has an equal probability chance of
being inspiring or being fucked up. Incidentally, almost every review of this
album that I've seen makes a big point of the album's first lyrical line going
'you fucked it up', but it's hard to understand what the fuss is about: this is
1995, not 1965. Maybe it's the sweet little girl aura of Aimee's and the tender
tone in which it is being pronounced that befuddles the writers.
Overall, I'm With Stupid is Whatever
Vol. 2, but with most of the sissy twelve-string jangle extricated and
replaced with grungier guitars and power-enhanced chords — to sound more
"modern", I guess. The poor duped Roger McGuinn makes no more guest
appearances, and it shows. When this album is at its worst — which,
fortunately, is very rare — it's hard to distinguish the proceedings from
zillions of results by billions of female artists with broken hearts and broken
electric guitars wasting away taxpayers' money. Maybe no one would say that in
1995, but 'fifteen years after the fair' it shows rather painfully, I'm
afraid.
On the other hand, billions of female artists
still don't got what Aimee's got, and that's an ability to write a
soul-catching melody. After I've distanced myself from the lyrics of
'Sugarcoated' and managed to imagine the song in a more interesting
arrangement, I am overwhelmed by its power and melodicity, reminiscent of
Lennon's later-years style. 'Ray' is even better, its sweet melancholia
finding perfect support from the electric piano in the background (yes, despite
all the modernistic trappings, it is the sharp ringing of that piano that
stands out as the most memorable sonic moment on the entire album). 'You're
With Stupid Now' is a rare gem of an acoustic ballad here, and also a rare case
when you can detach the chorus — 'what you want, you don't know, you're with
stupid now, so on with the show' — from its surroundings, provide it with your
own meaning, however deep you want to make it, and find it all the more beautiful.
Besides, my quibbles mostly lie with the
rhythmic backbones of the songs: lead guitar work on most of them is as
powerful as ever, with colorful solos planned and laid out just as expressively
as the vocal melodies. (Sometimes they take on a slightly atonal, avantgarde
manner, but only when the song might beg for it, as in the intentionally
bizarre 'Frankenstein' — a metaphoric tune, of course, but ending in a truly
Frankensteinish near-cacophony of street organ music crossed with free jazz at
the end). I do not like the opening of 'Superball' at all, but once it unfurls
all of its banners, I end caught up in the fun.
Who knows, maybe some day Aimee will want to
re-record the album, or at least parts of it, using an approach that panders
less to current trends on the market (even if those trends weren't all that
bad in 1995). Then again, everything should probably stand as a document of its
time; if we can enjoy those early Duran Duran records, there's no reason why
simplistic grungy guitars should cause our conscience to lump a gifted
songwriter like Mann with all the inferior substitutes. Thumbs up, thumbs up, by all means. The picky
brain is always hard to please, but, fortunately, the sappy heart always takes precedence over
the sucker.
MAGNOLIA SOUNDTRACK (1999)
1) One; 2) Momentum; 3) Build
That Wall; 4) Deathly; 5) Driving Sideways; 6) You Do; 7) Nothing Is Good
Enough; 8) Wise Up; 9) Save
Me; 12) Dreams [by Gabrielle]; 13) Magnolia [by Jon Brion].
This is that rare example of a movie soundtrack
that stands well on its own terms — a fairly appropriate instance, too, since
the battalions of admirers and haters of Magnolia the movie and Magnolia
the soundtrack intersect, but do not overlap. I feel very fortunate, therefore,
that I can safely state: I admire the movie — one of the bravest and quite
hard-hitting in its bravery epic creations of the 1990's — and I think
its soundtrack fits its atmosphere perfectly. Not only that, but the movie's
wide-reaching goals almost certainly help Aimee overcome her own artistic limitations
and finally match her exciting, moving music to broader themes than
relationships fucked up for no apparent reason other than that relationships have
to be fucked up, or else what sort of fucking relationships are they?
Maybe the four-year break in recording helped,
too: the eight originals, plus Aimee's cover of Harry Nilsson's 'One', are all
stunning — not a single melody fails to stir up feelings (one semi-exception is
the instrumental 'Nothing Is Good Enough', which works much better with vocals
on Bachelor No. 2 — not that the slow, hypnotic
keyboard-and-strings-driven waltz isn't delightful on its own, but she must
sing!).
Few things are more tragic to savour in the
soul than one's own loneliness, and unless our genes somehow fail to elevate us
to the level of Homo sapiens sapiens, we all feel this sometimes. That's what
the movie was about; and this is why, not coincidentally, the soundtrack album
opens with 'One' — for all I know, One could have been the title of the
album. Inability to be understood is an integral part of a broken relationship
(the other integral part of it is, of course, inability to cope with
the inability of being understood), so it is quite a smooth and unbroken
current that carries you from superficial whining about your messed up life
into the deep sea of realizing there must be more serious, and more scary,
reasons that underlie this mess. So, if Whatever and I'm With Stupid
were basically bitter, but still shiny, pop, this soundtrack is gloomy and
hopeless from the beginning to the end (even more hopeless than the movie,
which still offered some sort of redemption from the nightmare — but that was
actually its weakest part).
'One' is a cover that achieves perfection — it
is somewhat over-arranged compared to Nilsson's intentionally minimalistic
performance, but even its over-arranged details preserve the spirit of the
original. 'Wise Up', reflecting a climactic moment in the movie, is one of the
bitterest, most heart-breaking songs of the decade, where both the lyrics and
the music basically just tell you that the only way out of your misery is to
accept it as something natural and inescapable: 'it's not going to stop, it's
not going to stop till you wise up... so just give up'. But it isn't presented
as an optimistic conclusion — right on its heels comes 'Save Me', where Aimee
implores to 'save me, save me from the ranks of the freaks who suspect they can
never love anyone'. Uh?
Musically, the songs here completely drop the
grungy wall-of-sound of the last album and are much more accessible to the
"general pop audiences", which is perhaps natural since such was the
intention of the movie as well, but I do not see that as a problem as long as
the melodies are wonderful, and they are. Most are propelled by pianos rather
than guitars, but there's still room for the usual highly melodic guitar solo
on songs like 'Deathly' and 'Driving Sideways', and 'Momentum' nibbles a bit at
free-form jazz before settling into normalness.
The only weakness of the record is that it is,
after all, a soundtrack, and so, as a completely unnecessary bonus, we get two
well-known Supertramp tunes, Jon Brion's instrumental 'Magnolia' theme (yawn),
and Gabrielle's 'Dreams', a song that plays an important role in the movie but
is otherwise a cheap dance-pop throwaway. Also, four out of nine songs were
later reused by Aimee on her next solo album, which might make the buyer loath
to own both records — but that is rather a weakness of Bachelor No. 2
than its predecessor. The predecessor hits so hard that it would be
unimaginable it could fail to make Aimee Mann a household name, and, of course,
it did, and quite deservedly so. Thumbs up
for one of the most perfect combinations of artistic growth and commercial
success in recent — and generally quite pitiful — history.
BACHELOR NO. 2 (2000)
1) How Am I Different; 2)
Nothing Is Good Enough; 3) Red
Vines; 4) The Fall Of The World's Own Optimist; 5) Satellite; 6) Deathly;
7) Ghost World; 8) Calling It Quits; 9)
Driving Sideways; 10) Just Like Anyone; 11) Susan; 12) It Takes All Kinds; 13)
You Do.
Subtitled The Last Remains Of The Dodo,
whatever that may symbolize apart from showing the lady's knowledge of
paleontology and Alice In Wonderland. She may be right, too, though, if
by "Dodo" she means "songwriting that incorporates melodicity,
intelligence, and self-restraint", because that's what Bachelor No. 2
is all about. It may or may not be her best record, but it's the one I find
hardest of all to criticize.
Back on the ground from the God-substituting
creationism of Magnolia, Aimee returns to her self-righteous manhating
business, but she has obviously "wised up", and it would be stubborn
and shallow to insist she's still writing about her breakups (or breakdowns,
for that matter). So, yes, it's the easiest interpretation for lines like 'what
was started out with such excitement now I'd gladly end with relief', but it's
not the only one possible — the lyrics become open for more than one way of
interpretation, and I can't recall any laughable moments, either. She may not
be striving for the heights of the great poets, but she's at least on the
level of an Elvis Costello — not coincidentally, the latter is credited for
co-writing 'The Fall Of The World's Own Optimist'.
I'm not sure if it was really necessary to
include three songs from the Magnolia soundtrack, but, considering that
the fourth one ('Nothing Is Good Enough') is a vocal version of the
instrumental tune on the soundtrack, I guess they weren't really written
specifically for the film, but were rather just temporarily
"donated" from Aimee's main project, so this cannot serve as even a
technical criticism. As for the main project, its retail release was
significantly delayed because, apparently, Aimee's record label did not deem
it commercially viable and ordered her to come up with more hit singles
(probably something along the lines of 'Baby One More Time', which was riding
up the charts at the time?), leading her to buy out the publishing rights and
distributing the record through her web site (apparently, she managed to ship 25,000
copies all by herself!). Which is all the more ridiculous particularly since Bachelor
No. 2 is one of Aimee's most accessible records — certainly far more so
than the bleak follow-up Lost In Space — and that just about any
song on it could easily function as a single, being far more memorable and
enjoyable than ninety percent of today's MTV garbage.
Musically, she continues to tone down the grungy
guitar slash of I'm With Stupid and continues in the Magnolia
vein — acoustic and piano-driven stuff, backed up with electric sound a-plenty,
but also strings, accordeons, brass, and anything that can be shaped into a
solid wall of sound whenever she feels like it. The mood is bitter throughout,
but not suicidal or anything: she's not doing this for the sinister purposes of
Paul Thomas Anderson, but for her own needs, and she may be pissed at the
world, but that doesn't prevent her from enjoying being there; the result is a
bright, but angry, inquisitive, but self-assured, record that, third or fourth
time around, proves definitely that Aimee is no fluke, but rather one of the
most treasurable songwriters of our times.
She is also making some of the prettiest use of
her voice you'll ever hear — for instance, on the radically brief snippet 'Just
Like Anyone'. She doesn't have a particularly strong voice, and her range isn't
particularly wide, and she doesn't know much in the way of "vocal
gymnastics", but, like a female Paul McCartney, she knows what it takes to
get one trapped in the beauty of the human voice. Or maybe, to use a closer
comparison, rather like Suzanne Vega, whose musical style she sometimes
approaches on the quieter songs here — especially on the track that is, incidentally,
titled 'Susan' (any relation?..).
It is joyful to realize there are still
writers/performers in this world who can dress their anger into complex
colorful forms — for all the fury packed in the lyrics of 'Calling It Quits',
preaching against the corporate greed of record companies, it has one
gloriously uplifting melody, punctuated by marching style brass flourishes;
and the middle eight section on 'How Am I Different' flows like a luscious
honey stream, but the words are, in fact, 'just a question before I pack — when
you fuck it up later, do I get my money back?'
It is just as joyful to witness the brilliance
of the God-given talent for songwriting so close up front, like on 'Red Vines',
a song which could have been utterly generic pap but where, instead, the vocal
melodies in both the verses and the chorus take unpredictable, but delightful
and completely smooth twists. If the tune is familiar to you, observe this
twist on the ascending 'everyone loves you...' after the first two 'regular'
lines, or how the 'cigarettes and Red Vines' chorus is not immediately followed
by the rhyming 'I'll be on the sidelines', which would be decent for a so-so
songwriter, but by the 'contrapunctus' of 'baby you never do know' — and how normal
this sounds, original, but normal. It's all relatively simple, but something
tells me it should all be your average musicologist's delight.
If, like me, you tend to be frequently annoyed
by singer-songwriters — which is only natural, because most of the time most
singer-songwriters strive to be annoying — I can only state for myself that Bachelor
No. 2 is one of the least annoying annoying singer-songwriter albums I've
ever had the pleasure to listen to, and this sentence alone sets it up in a class
of its own. And this, in turn, guarantees a rock-hard thumbs up from the brain, whereas the heart,
already accustomed to being seduced by Ms. Mann's charms, follows suit.
LOST IN SPACE (2002)
1) Humpty Dumpty; 2) High On
Sunday 51; 3) Lost In Space; 4) This Is How It Goes; 5) Guys Like Me; 6) Pavlov's Bell; 7) Real
Bad News; 8) Invisible Ink; 9) Today's The Day; 10) The Moth; 11) It's Not.
The lyrics get really dense on this
album. The subjects are the same, but she's learned to present the message
under a thick layer of metaphors, allusions, allegories, and red herrings —
perhaps that's an inevitable result of working together with the likes of Costello.
Like all of us, she is human, of course, and so cannot escape an occasionally
painful cliché ( 'The moth don't care when he sees the flame, he might
get burned, but he's in the game' makes for a nice rhyme, but isn't it
inexcusable to still go on writing about moths and flames in the XXIst
century?), but most of the time, she steers her verbal ship with an ever
increasing level of self-confidence.
But I will do Lost In Space an injustice
if I concentrate on its lyrics. When you have a record that is heavy on the
words and subtle on melody, it's a very natural temptation — but it has to be
avoided, since it gives a distorted picture of one's true impressions. Many
people have commented on the album's 'maturity', not always taking it for a
good sign; many have acknowledged that, as Aimee gets more and more skilled at
poetry (or in 'verbosity', if you want to see it that way), she is neglecting
melody — where 'melody' is understood as 'energy'. That was also my own
original impression: Lost In Space took somewhat more time to sink in
than anything that preceded it. Chances are this will be your impression, too.
Well, fight it. Give it another chance. It isn't a fast-going record, and
unless you're in a major hurry to get somewhere, you should lower your own
speed so as not to get too far ahead of it where you can no longer discern its
beauty.
It's just that Aimee Mann is a total introvert,
and as she gets older and left with less and less to prove, her introvert
nature takes major hold of her. You'd think that the settling of her legal and
personal problems would eventually cause her to brighten and lighten up, but
guess again: Lost In Space is even more somber and dreary in tone than
the Magnolia soundtrack. There are no bright, shiny pop-rockers
whatsoever on this album; most, if not all, of the songs are in a minor key, many
feature lonesome, depressed acoustic passages, the guitar solo breaks range
from ominous to creepy, and the only reason the whole thing does not want to
make you kill yourself on the spot is that it's never intended to: for all of
Aimee's bitterness and disillusionment (or, rather, "un-illusionment"
— "dis-" would imply that she once had illusions, but I've always
thought she had already experienced her first nervous breakdown in the womb),
she's never suicidal about it.
Therefore, do not dive into this expecting
crunchy power-pop riffs and youthful ecstasy. After all, she's almost 40 here,
and no one ever saw her give the AC/DC pledge of eternal youth. Lost In Space
is experienced best of all in a situation where you're really lost in space, so
if you're stepping out of your shuttle suspended on a fragile string, don't
forget to pack an Ipod with this record — wonderful way to enjoy your last
half-hour of living. However, in the likely event of your not being able to
either reproduce or simulate this situation, a decent alternative is to save it
up for a quiet evening after a whole day of nerve-wrecking problems. I happened
to catch this particular situation exactly, and in the process it made me a
better man, or at least I'd like to think so.
Now, I promised I'd be talking about the music
rather than the lyrics, but it's also pretty hard. As usual, Aimee does not
shower you with hooks; she has this strict ratio of one hook per good song and
two hooks per masterpiece, which makes all the songs seem slightly overlong
(five minutes for 'Invisible Ink'? what is this — Emerson, Lake & Palmer?),
but also helps her, I think, to stay so impressively consistent over decades.
That said, she does strictly adhere to this rule, and each song on the album
has something to say, and I find no truly weak spots.
But even more impressive than the hooks are
the arrangements and the moods they create. 'Humpty Dumpty' is warm autumn,
with its growling electric guitars and acoustic jangle; the title track is
winterish, with falling-snow electric organ and the deep gritty grumble of the
chorus; and 'The Moth', true to its trite, but fun lyrics, gives you deep night
with candles... and the rest are perhaps just different shades of the same
autumnal, winterish, and nocturnal landscapes. Even the laziest songs are all
soaked in this somber vision so much they're at least evocative — 'Today's The
Day', for instance, has a quasi-musical box-style chiming guitar arrangement
that gives it the required mystery aura.
Above all, you do get this feeling of being
completely stranded: Lost In Space completes the process of converting
a lively, still very much out-of-this-world Aimee Mann into somebody from a
faraway planet, unable to understand or to be understood. If you find this
offensive for the tastes of humanity, feel free to draw the line. I find this
honest, and far more sincere, mature, and hard-hitting than ninety nine percent
of "depressing" shit-music that is being made today by younger and
simpler minds. And what began as an intellectual delight for the brain ends up
being, if not the heart's favourite, then at least the heart's special
Aimee Mann album. Thumbs up for all the
beautiful melodies — and more thumbs up for all the darkness.
PS. If you can get it, the expanded 2-CD deluxe
edition is highly recommendable; not so much for the bunch of live performances
(Aimee's limitations as a live performer will be discussed in the next review)
as for four B-sides and outtakes that are just as good as any of the eleven
songs on the album proper, especially the baroque harpsichord-and-strings
gorgeousness of 'Nightmare Girl' and the pop-rocker 'Observatory' — the latter
adds a wee bit of fresh, upbeat liveliness to the rigid solemnity of it all.
LIVE AT ST. ANN'S WAREHOUSE (2004)
1) The Moth; 2)
Sugarcoated; 3) Going Through The Motions; 4) Amateur; 5) Wise Up; 6) Save Me; 7) Stupid Thing;
8) That's Just What You Are; 9) Pavlov's Bell; 10) Long Shot; 11) 4th Of July;
12) King Of The Jailhouse; 13) Deathly.
From the few extra snippets I've seen on
Youtube and other God-blessed sources, Aimee is not a "great" live
performer. Her simple, realistic (or, to be more precise and more obscure,
"post-neo-realistic") take on things ensures that in her live show,
she carefully avoids all the elements of an actual "show". In her
'Til Tuesday and early solo days, she at least used to wiggle her behind a bit
— then realized it wasn't such a pretty sight and became a major competitor for
Dylan as "The Most Frozen Celebrity Onstage".
Not that the fans should mind — for all we
know, the world is suffering from a surplus of lively stage performers, and the
"frozen" attitude is arguably the best attitude for the kind
of music Aimee is writing these days. More disturbing is the fact that the
audio aspect of the live performance adds next to nothing to the studio
experience; Mann doesn't care much for jamming, improvising, or even slightly
rearranging her old songs. Out of the thirteen songs on here, only 'Long Shot'
is clearly different in that a lengthy (and good) guitar solo concludes the
performance; every other difference is microscopic at best.
Of course, if you do not set yourself a
specific major goal of capturing extra fans with your live performance, that's
all you need to do: just go out there, stand like a statue with your eyes
closed, and concentrate exclusively on delivering the goods in a faithful
manner. So what's the point of releasing a joint DVD-CD edition of this
experience? Make money? But it's supposed to be understood that Aimee doesn't
care much for money, money can't buy her... never mind. Satisfying fan demand?
She doesn't seem to be that much of a fan-loving person either.
Let's just settle temporarily on the idea that
she wanted to have this herself, as a little souvenir of the glory days
to nostalgize to twenty or thirty years on. She does look great — so
thoroughly uncool in her rigid suit and tie that it makes her the coolest
being on Earth. And she sounds great — not a note out of place,
actually, maybe even a wee bit more confident on oldies like 'Stupid Thing' and
'Sugarcoated' than a decade earlier. The setlist is predictably skewed in
favour of the then-currently promoted Lost In Space... not, with
only two songs on the CD and an extra 'Humpty Dumpty' on the DVD; instead, the
setlist is relatively evenly scattered through all of her solo output, so much
that some recommend this as a decent substitute for a best-of package — I
really don't know about that, since she's so frustratingly consistent you'd
have to buy all the albums anyway. As an added bonus, she also "previews"
two of the best songs from her next record, The Forgotten Arm.
That's about all there is to say, really. The
CD, I think, is expendable, a pleasant trinket to peruse once all the other
records have been played a million times; the DVD, however, is well worth
putting on if you, like me, are fascinated by this idea of "humble
intelligent beauty", equally unburdened with MTV-style trappings and
militant anti-commercial supercool behaviour. It also gives you one more excuse
to whine and wonder about how in the world this kind of music — so catchy, so
easily accessible, so fun, and so heart-rending at the same time — could ever
lose out in the public conscience to the likes of Shakira or Beyoncé.
Well, don't tell me, I do know the answer: it's pretty hard to have a nipple
slip from under that suit and tie thing.
THE FORGOTTEN ARM (2005)
1) Dear John; 2) King Of The
Jailhouse; 3) Goodbye Caroline; 4) Going Through The Motions; 5) I Can't Get My
Head Around It; 6) She
Really Wants You; 7) Video; 8) Little Bombs; 9) That's How I Knew This
Story Would Break My Heart; 10) I Can't Help You Anymore; 11) I Was Thinking I
Could Clean Up for Christmas; 12) Beautiful.
Every serious artist deserves a concept album,
and who's more serious than Aimee Mann? The Forgotten Arm is a
mini-musical (it's a bit too fragile and tender to be called a "rock
opera") built around an imaginative story of an alcoholic boxer teaming up
with a "white trash" girl and their futile attempts to battle their
problems. The subject matter reflects Aimee's private fetishism (she's known
for her own addiction to boxing), but, more importantly, it presents her as some
sort of a female Bruce Springsteen, injecting herself into "other people's
lives" and functioning as a self-appointed spokesman for the lower depths.
Whether this elevates her art or, on the
contrary, makes it more cheap and superficial, is a useless question to
discuss. The main problem, as far as I can see, is one that almost inevitably
crops up on most concept albums: there's somewhat too much of the concept and
somewhat less of creative songwriting. Of course, on the "positive"
side, The Forgotten Arm is a more energetic album than Lost In Space:
the tempos are generally faster, the guitars more prominent and crunchy, the morose
depression reserved for just a few of the tunes, while the others are busy
building up other kinds of atmosphere relevant to the story.
But on the "negative" side, too many
of the songs do not register on my scale even after quite a few listens, and
this is coming from someone who "got" Lost In Space not
earlier than the fourth time around. This time, though, the subtleties just
refuse to come out. It's mostly decent folk-rock — decent, but hardly magical.
Aimee sings like she really means it — and, of course, she does mean it; it's
her story, her message, her impersonations — but it is hard to get rid of the
nagging feeling that the story comes first and the melody comes next. It is
also not insignificant that in some recent interviews she'd also stated that
the idea was to intentionally emulate the atmosphere of an early 1970s
roots-rock album, to make something in the vein of The Band or Tumbleweed
Connection; if so, she'd clearly paid more attention to the arrangements
and "vibe" of it all than to the soul power of the notes themselves.
The irony, of course, is that without great melodies, roots-rock arrangements
only make the whole experience blander.
A typical example is 'Beautiful', the closing
number that is supposed to wind things up on a generally optimistic note after
the characters had been royally messing up their lives for the previous eleven
tracks. Its chorus, as far as composition goes, is lazy: Aimee does change to
her falsetto on the line 'why does it hurt me to feel so much tenderness?',
but, as much as I adore her falsetto, the enchantment just doesn't work; the
notes are clumsily strung together, there's no adequately harmonic effect, and
nothing ends up registering in my head. Maybe it's not laziness; maybe it was
an intentional wish to write something so discoherent (Carole King, who also
had a song with the same title, not coincidentally used to write in the same
manner, but somehow generally came out with better results). Yet this is pop
music, after all, not opera, and I don't think we were supposed to judge The
Forgotten Arm according to the criteria of Madame Butterfly in the
first place.
Even the good choruses are lazy: 'That's
How I Knew This Story Would Break My Heart', 'I Can't Help You Anymore' and 'I
Was Thinking I Could Clean Up For Christmas' essentially make their points —
three songs in a row! — by having their titles chanted over and over again.
That's charming chanting, to be sure, but that's not enough for Aimee; I'm
perfectly certain she could charm anyone by walking down the street and
chanting random storefront signs if she wished to.
In the end, my favourite songs turn out to be
exactly those two that had already been previewed on the live album: 'Going
Through The Motions', since it's the power-poppiest number on the record, and
'King Of The Jailhouse', its direct opposite — a slow, lumbering piano ballad,
densely saturated with fantastic vocal flourishes, maybe Aimee's greatest ever
vocal performance that locks tenderness and desperation into a single tiny
capsule and wedges it in the ear forever; the transition from the disturbed,
panicky confession of 'Baby there's something wrong with me!..' to the quiet,
submissive, but still achingly painful desperation of '...that I can't see...'
literally takes my breath away every time I hear it (and it is repeated way more
than just a few times, believe me). There's nothing on the album that reaches
the same emotional heights even remotely. It is not excluded that these two
songs were, in fact, the first that were written (given that they'd already
appeared a year earlier) and the rest of the story "grew" around
them in a progressively declining fashion.
Worst of all, I don't even "get" the
story. I do not feel that Aimee succeeds in making these characters come
alive. For all she's worth, she is still being Aimee Mann, and Aimee Mann is a
person as much removed from an alcoholic boxer and his drugged-out girlfriend
as she is from an Afghani shepherd. Am I wrong? If so, she is not trying too
hard to change my opinion. It may even be an interesting story — in someone
else's hands — but what I see is a smart, way too serious, way too sentimental,
intelligent woman who'd rather be reading about the misfortunes of alcoholic
boxers in the latest paperback than being able to live them out herself. In the
end, I prefer to forget altogether that there is supposed to be some
sort of story here — the whole thing comes across easier when you discard the
conceptual trappings wholesale.
So, in the end, it is not easy to consider The
Forgotten Arm a great success; it is easy to believe that Aimee has
overreached a bit. Not that it spoils her reputation in any way, and it is
still one of the sincerest and most impressive artistic statements of 2005 — or
maybe even of the entire decade, which has been relatively scarce on honest,
simple statements from intelligent people, and for that reason, thumbs up are guaranteed. But as far as rock
operas/musicals go, it's certainly no Quadrophenia. And it is perhaps
not a coincidence that Aimee, despite a certain amount of critical praise, has
so far not ventured to repeat the attempt.
ONE MORE DRIFTER IN THE SNOW (2006)
1) Whatever Happened To
Christmas; 2) The Christmas Song; 3) Christmastime; 4) I'll Be Home For
Christmas; 5) You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch; 6) Winter Wonderland; 7) Have
Yourself A Merry Little Christmas; 8) God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen; 9) White
Christmas; 10) Calling On
Mary.
This should be as good a place as any to
expound the Teleology Theory of the Christmas Album. This constantly self-regenerating
beast has a nasty tendency to produce a population explosion around the end of
each upcoming year, but the motivation behind the explosion is quite different
from procreator to procreator. Christmas Albums fall into the following
categories:
—
the
money album, the idea behind
which is for the starving artist to make a couple quick bucks from the fans
(hard to blame—don't you need a new Lamborghini for Christmas?);
—
the
dedication album, the idea
behind which is the artist's firm conviction that there is no better gift for the
fans than another Christmas album — surely, all the previous ten billion
Christmas albums must become irrelevant and outdated the minute The Artist
enters the studio to record a new one;
—
the
money-dedication album, the
idea behind which is to make a money album, but to state in every subsequent
interview that the idea really was to make a dedication album. This is arguably
the most common category.
Every now and then, however, there appears a
fourth category: the intelligent Christmas Album, an extremely rare
breed since it requires a complicated combination of parameters. Chief among
those is the requirement that it be an album that is more about the artist than
about Christmas, because, after all, there is only one Christmas and we know
all about it, whereas the same cannot be said about artists.
Of course, fans of any particular artist will
always want to argue that it is this particular artist's Christmas Album that
is the most intelligent of all, even when we're very clearly dealing with a
money album, but it is possible to be a bit colder and more objective about
these things, especially if the default emotion is to detest Christmas albums.
In the light of this, I'm happy to say that I don't find anything detestable
about Aimee Mann's Christmas album, One More Drifter In The Snow,
because, totally true to her identity, on this record she invents (or, at
least, strongly upholds) a new sub-genre: Christmas music for loners.
In other words, it would be completely useless,
maybe even ridiculous, to throw it on at a lively Christmas party, or, in fact,
any Christmas party. It is, however, a very cool record to put on if, by
any chance, you happen to be spending Christmas alone (at the most — with your
other, but not too heavy on the champagne). Certainly this is not a depressed
album — Aimee is not that weird — but it is an album to be played at a
quiet volume in a small darkened room. Aimee herself quotes the Dean Martin and
Frank Sinatra Christmas albums as chief inspiration, records that weren't
specifically targeted towards the party spirit either, but we've come a long
musical way from there, and One More Drifter dispenses with the
commercialism and superficiality in an even rougher way than Frank or Dean
could ever imagine way back then.
There are chimes, and strings, but the
arrangements are chamber-like, never symphonic, and on most of the standards —
'White Christmas', 'Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas', 'God Rest Ye Merry
Gentlemen', etc. — Aimee's morose singing rises way up high above the mix,
suggesting you're having a serious little conversation with the artist rather
than merely having yourself another merry little Christmas. Strong surprises
are few: 'You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch' from the Dr. Seuss legacy, and two
originals — Michael Penn's 'Christmastime' and Aimee's own 'Calling On Mary';
the former is sort of bland, but the latter is quite strong, sounding very much
like an outtake from the Forgotten Arm sessions (same rootsy style) and
embodying all that is significant about the album: an odd mix of happiness and
loneliness, contention and desperation.
Aimee's intentions are, in fact, immediately
clear: the song that opens the album is not 'Jingle Bells', but rather Jimmy
Webb's somewhat grim 'Whatever Happened To Christmas', so that the album is
established as a protest against the cheapening and the commercialization of
the holiday (or, in fact, of everything). Given that the album failed to
chart on the Billboard at all, I suppose it matched its purpose fairly well. If
you happen to be somehow torn between the idea of hating Christmas albums and the
necessity to own one, One More Drifter In The Snow may be just what you
need. If you're an admirer of Aimee's charisma, One More Drifter In The Snow
is quite a must-have rather than a slight footnote. Either way, it's a thumbs up, and a good excuse to throw all your
friends out on Christmas' Eve and just get drunk in the good old-fashioned way.
@#%&*! SMILERS (2008)
1) Freeway; 2) Stranger Into
Starman; 3) Looking For Nothing; 4) Phoenix; 5) Borrowing Time; 6) It’s
Over; 7) 31 Today; 8) The
Great Beyond; 9) Medicine Wheel; 10) Columbus Avenue; 11) Little Tornado; 12) True
Believer; 13) Ballantines.
The «conceptual» framework is gone, but the
problems, unfortunately, remain. Everything on here is fairly lightweight,
starting with the ironic title (apparently copped by Aimee from an Internet
board reflecting some guy's frustration over other people's abuse of the smiley
signs) and ending with the fact that the record is entirely free of electric
guitars. This is Aimee Mann unplugged, if you don't count the cheap
synthesizer sound on ʽFreewayʼ and other tracks.
That in itself might not be difficult to take
if not for the fact that the melodies are hard to be bowled over. A large part
of the magic of Lost In Space, for instance, were its numerous clever
ideas on how to create and dissipate atmosphere — where electric guitars were
as necessary and useful as chimes and background vocals and strings and noises
and subtle mix dislocations — and I'm not sure the spell would have eventually
worked if it were just Aimee and her acoustic. But on Smilers, time and
time over again, that's just how it goes. The only track where there's a little
«sonic mystery» present is ʽThe Great Beyondʼ, whose "go, honey,
go into the ocean" really manages to convey a bit of «going into the ocean»,
and it feels out of place.
And then you start noticing how there's really
a lot of recycling and how — oh my goodness — maybe she really doesn't
have anything more to say? What is there in the slow, dreary waltzing of ʽIt's
Overʼ, for instance, that wasn't already present in the slow, dreary
waltzing of ʽNothing Is Good Enoughʼ? And, to boot, that song also
had a catchy chorus which this song lacks entirely. At least give us one of
your trademark brethtaking falsetto lines, then. What? Still no dice?
The promoted track was ʽFreewayʼ, a
lively pop tune that, on the surface, is about as good as any lively pop tune
from Aimee, but the wailing synthesizer waves that prop up Mann's rhythm track
can be passed off as cheesy, and the whole effort seems just a tad lazy to
properly guarantee the song's status of Main Attraction Center. Perhaps a false
impression, but it hasn't worn off; isn't that particular circular structure a
bit too familiar in pop songwriting? Lazy. Lazy.
At this point, however, let us step back a bit
and consider the circumstances. There's a song on here called ʽ31 Todayʼ
(actually, it may be the best song on the album, with beautiful vocal dynamics,
although once again we could all live without the crappy synth pattern), one of
Aimee's usual odes to depression, but don't let it consciously fool you — she
isn't «31 today», as she was born in 1960, and, although her amazingly good
looks could still fool plenty of innocents, what we have here, in 2008, is a
perfectly well established singer-songwriter with nothing whatsoever left to
prove. Even her usual moroseness doesn't hit nowhere near as hard because,
really, she's got nothing left to be morose about — she has a family, a decent
income source, she's quite content about her small, but steady fanbase, and she
has already ensured herself a firm place in the halls of fame — the real ones,
well away from Cleveland.
And in that respect, Smilers is a
lazy, pacifying, derivative album because, logically, it could hardly be
understood how it could be anything else. Maybe if she were politically
conscious, but she never was; she is a one hundred percent introvert who
wouldn't want to pretend that she's got, oh, I dunno, environmental
concerns, if she really hasn't got them. The only extrovert tune on the album
is ʽBorrowing Timeʼ, which one could interpret as a heartfelt call to
action — "the kings of yesterday falling, but you'll come when destiny's
calling, get up, get up, you're borrowing time" — but, as she herself has
explained many a time in interviews and onstage, it was a song originally
written for Shrek 3 — and it didn't even manage to make it into the
movie!
So I guess it wouldn't be either wrong or
particularly painful to admit that with Smilers, Aimee finally outlives
her prime. Which doesn't mean she won't be able to churn out more of these
pleasant, but relatively mediocre collections in years to come, and more power
to her, because I can totally see how the dedicated fan would still praise this
to heaven. Heck, I am no dedicated fan, and I still give this a thumbs up, just don't make it your first purchase.
CHARMER (2012)
1) Charmer; 2) Disappeared; 3)
Labrador; 4) Crazytown; 5) Soon Enough; 6) Living A Lie; 7) Slip And Roll; 8)
Gumby; 9) Gamma Ray; 10) Barfly; 11) Red Flag Diver.
Okay, I happily admit to having been wrong.
This is by no means an innovative or unpredictable record, but it definitely
soars above «mediocre». Essentially, this is Smilers done right. Same laid back atmosphere, same laziness, same
meditative vocals, same silly synthesizers, same humbleness — but with more
electric guitars, deeper production, and, most importantly, with better written
songs. This is at least as consistent as Forgotten
Arm, maybe more so, and it has a couple instant classics for all future
gold compilations.
Since the themes of the record do not differ
much from Aimee's usual bag — mainly character assassinations, varying only in
degrees of abstraction — it is gracefully short, curtseying out of sight some
time before the forty-minute barrier is over, and for most people, there will
probably be a couple pieces of moody, but insubstantial filler, making its
charms even shorter (me, I do not care for the dreary-slow waltz of ʽSlip
And Rollʼ). And that is good: humble albums have to have humble lengths,
even if a three year period might seem like a long enough term to write up a CD
all the way to its limits.
Cut to the chase: ʽCharmerʼ (the
title track) kicks in with a ridiculously catchy «kazoo synth» melody,
attenuated by some friendly vocal humming companionship, and this makes it into
the most irresistible album opener since ʽHumpty Dumptyʼ — ten years,
give or take. The lyrical matter (a sarcastic jab at the quintessential
charismatic leader, cleverly set for election year) does not really matter —
all that matters is that silly-sweet synth pattern, drifting in and out of
Aimee's free-flowing, intelligent singing. Which is what makes Aimee into a
first-rate artist: she could just as well be singing about tying her bootlaces,
and the song would still produce the same impression — but the lyrics are
quite clever anyway.
That strange passion for synthesizers that got
rekindled with Smilers is still with
her — and, apparently, cooks her up a good name with today's critics, some of
which nostalgize quite heavily about their long-gone days of listening to 'Til
Tuesday. Not that anything on Smilers
or here really sounds like anything that Aimee did in her 'Til Tuesday days —
that was in a different world — but it is
a possibility that Aimee herself regards this new passion as a rejuvenating
move. More power to her, anyway, if it helps her write songs as fine as
ʽCrazytownʼ, where the synth line acts as a sorrowful counterpart to
her conspicuously «light» vocals. "The girl lives in crazy town / Where
craziness gets handed down / Whoever's gonna volunteer / Will only end up
living here" is fairly bleek, but her intonations introduce the picture as
amusing rather than tragic — and that's good old Aimee for you, always throwing
on a cloak of ironic intellectualism over simple emotions, just the way we like
it.
The best number on the album, however, is
neither ʽCharmerʼ nor ʽCrazytownʼ. It is ʽSoon
Enoughʼ, a noble epic in the vein of old warhorses like
ʽDeathlyʼ — in fact, I could easily see it making its way onto the Magnolia soundtrack, provided P. T.
Anderson still had some spare footage in the vaults for a «new director's cut»
or something. It is undescribable — it's all in the vocal hooks this time, and
the hooks are mostly intonational and could only come from Aimee — but it is
the perfect combination of a little melancholy, a little irony, and a little
desperation on top of a bombastic arrangement (capped off with a screechy
guitar solo). It's just the kind of song that Smilers so desperately needed to get to the appropriate level.
Other good ones include ʽLabradorʼ
(sounds like a Forgotten Arm outtake
with all these «tired» harmonies, but an unjustly lost one), the harder-rocking
ʽGamma Rayʼ (with a sci-fi battle between the «cosmic» synthesizer
and the psycho guitar, as would befit the title), and the rootsy ʽBarflyʼ,
whose guitar hook and nonchalant attitude could almost reflect a J. J. Cale
influence. But honestly, most of them
are good.
In the end, it was all well worth the wait and
the non-forgetting. Aimee is not young anymore (although I do have to say that
she generally sounds younger here than on Smilers
— maybe it's because the singing is «clearer», not as much loaded with deep
nasal twang as it was), and her recession into black holes, dark corners,
introspection and humility will bar her from making a Bachelor No. 3 or a Found In
Space, but she still has her head on, she still rocks when she wants to,
and if she can still write one great song per year on the average, that is
actually more than is needed to keep
her on a steady payroll. At this time, we probably couldn't expect any better
— count this as a fully satisfied thumbs up, and one of 2012's best.
THE BOTH (w. Ted Leo) (2014)
1) The Gambler; 2) Milwaukee;
3) No Sir; 4) Volunteers Of America; 5) Pay For It; 6) You Can't Help Me Now;
7) The Prisoner; 8) Hummingbird; 9) Honesty Is No Excuse; 10) Bedtime Stories;
11) The Inevitable Shove.
Although, technically, this is not at all an
«Aimee Mann» album, exactly one half of it does belong to Aimee Mann, and the
Aimee Mann spirit is so pervasive throughout that the record begs being
reviewed in this section — especially because it is not highly likely that I
will ever get around to writing about its second creative force, the indie
rocker Ted Leo, formerly of Citizens Arrest, Chisel, The Sin-Eaters, The
Spinanes, The Pharmacists, and The Whatchamacallit (a.k.a. «Gee, I've Been In
So Many Bands Now, I Couldn't Remember Their Fucking Names, What Am I, Fucking
Bob Dylan Or Something»)?
Anyway, «The Both» is indeed a 50-50
collaborative project between Aimee and Mr. Leo, who had begun with a joint
concert tour in 2012, and eventually ended up in the recording studio with each
other, pooling their respective talents to generate forty minutes of previously
non-existent musical vibes. And I do mean pooling: both artists worked together
on every bit of the material, rather than just doing it Abbey Road-style, right down to singing together on each song (in
complete unison or, more frequently, in lead / backup mode). And it shows:
while I am not too familiar with Ted Leo's usual style, there is definitely an
Aimee Mann musical presence inside each of the tracks. Even in the unexpected
choice of ʽHonesty Is No Excuseʼ, an obscure track from Thin Lizzy's
self-titled debut of 1971, as the album's only cover version.
Ted Leo's main role, as it seems, is in making The Both Aimee's «rockiest» album since
God knows when — maybe since the days of her early solo albums, before Magnolia forever locked her in a state
of introspective maturity. The arrangements are classic «indie rock» — crunchy,
distorted, but not particularly heavy electric guitars playing time-honored
folk-rock chord sequences, with practically nothing standing between them, the
vocals, and the rhythm section. The result is a little monotonous, but those
fans of Aimee who'd spent the last fifteen years complaining about her losing
power might think of it as one big ball of compensation for all those years.
The songs, unfortunately, are far from
spectacularly written or innovative. Emotionally, all is drenched in Aimee's
usual intellectual-melancholic juices, which Leo is only too happy to share —
whenever he joins her in a duet or a slice of harmony, it's like two old lovers
grumbling about whether their past was any good and whether they still have a
future to live out. If anything, The
Both is really close in spirit to The
Forgotten Arm, which, if you remember, told the story of two unhappy
people, but was sung only by one of them — now that mistake has been corrected,
and Leo is the out-of-luck boxer, and Aimee is his girlfriend. Something like ʽNo
Sirʼ even borrows some of the chords and much of the atmosphere from
ʽKing Of The Jailhouseʼ, although the final result is much more timid
and less openly cathartic. And a song title like ʽYou Can't Help Me
Nowʼ — well, remember ʽI Can't Help You Anymoreʼ? Quiet
desperation is no longer just the English way. The bitch has spread over to the
States, and is catching quickly.
Only one moment stands out for me:
ʽHummingbirdʼ, a song that mostly sticks true to its title, leisurely
humming its one-phrase way through the time passages, culminates in an
ear-splitting psychedelic chord right after the final refrain ("I got a
message from the hummingbird...") that suddenly, for a brief moment,
pushes the song into breathtaking «astral» mode. But then it ends — instead of
exploring that move further, following the hummingbird to the stars, they just
sort of let it out of their hands, gone in a flash: a great moody idea cut too
short for comfort.
Other than that, it's just a decent enough
album for fans of Aimee (no idea how enjoyable it would be for fans of the
other guy). We could simply admit that she is old and spent, but Charmer had just shown that this was
far from the case. More likely, it is simply that these two people are not a
particularly good match for each other, and each of them should probably do
his/her own schtick, without trying to work out some sort of compromised
average. In my case, I'd like to hear more Aimee and less Leo (who sounds
absolutely colorless as a singer to me, though I'm sure he is a good pal and a
sentient human being, if the two took up together so well); others might wish
for the opposite. I'd also like to have elegant melodic resolutions instead of
choruses that simply run themselves into the ground to make way for memorability
(ʽInevitable Shoveʼ, ʽPay For Itʼ, etc.). I do give the
album a weak thumbs
up, since it is honest and it was fun to hear Aimee pick up the
basic dirty rock'n'roll guitar after such a long break. But it certainly isn't
even close to «essential Aimee Mann» — way too lazy songwriting.
MENTAL ILLNESS (2017)
1) Goose Snow Cone; 2) Stuck
In The Past; 3) You Never Loved Me; 4) Rollercoasters; 5) Lies Of Summer; 6)
Patient Zero; 7) Good For Me; 8) Knock It Off; 9) Philly Sinks; 10) Simple Fix;
11) Poor Judge.
Bad omen #1: Aimee Mann's new album is going to
be called Mental Illness. Given that
Aimee Mann had pretty much been singing about various kinds of mental illness
since at least her first solo album, and maybe even before that, it is not a
good sign when, more than twenty years into her solo career on the whole, she
puts out a record called Mental Illness.
It's like The Rolling Stones putting out an album called We Like To Rock, or KISS putting out an album called Made Up Again, or The Pogues putting
out an album called For Those Who Like
To Drink. It does not spell tragedy, but it brings on inescapable
associations with a lack of ideas.
Bad omen #2: the new album is going to be
almost entirely acoustic-based. While in her live performances, Aimee had drifted
towards quieter, less and less amplified sounds for the entire past decade, on
most of her studio output the sound of the electric guitar, be it played by
herself or additional members of the band, was very crucial: she always had a
great ear for tone, and always knew how to make that electric guitar pick on,
amplify, and send deep into space all that emotional tension that began in her
singing. A completely unplugged performance from her can never have that kind
of strength — it suggests whining without anger, light depression without a
vortex to pull in the listener.
Unfortunately, all these premonitions come true
when you actually put on the record and give it a loyal spin — or two spins, or
three and four spins; it will not take long, since the eleven songs clock in at
under forty minutes. Mental Illness,
Aimee's first proper solo album in five years, is a nice-sounding record
consisting of earnestly written and carefully performed material, but it never
amounts to anything more than a pleasant background listen if you're in the
mood for a slice of lazy, intelligent, introspective, unobtrusive melancholy.
The songs simply do not stick around this time: while such highlights from Charmer as the title track, ʽSoon
Enoughʼ, and ʽLabradorʼ, still keep me going and I find myself
returning to them on a very regular basis, here there is never a feeling that
you receive some fresh insight — for the most part, everything feels like an
inferior retread of past glories.
Now, perhaps, it's just me. If you have never
been a major admirer of Aimee and just find her stuff to be modestly pleasant,
listenable, routine singer-songwriter product, then Mental Illness is just more of the same old crap, interchangeable
with everything else she's done. If, however, you agree with me that she has
been one of the most talented, melodic, intelligent, insightful songwriters of
the 1990s and the 2000s — probably in
the top five or so singer-songwriter spots from that period — then you cannot
help holding unreasonably high expectations, and experiencing sharp
disappointment when they are not realized. I mean, after all, she is getting on in years, older than the
Stones in their Bridges To Babylon
phase and McCartney in his Flaming Pie
era, so it is unwise and ungenerous to expect her musical genius to keep
re-flaring over and over. But then, in order to re-flare, the genius has to
receive favorable conditions; and this idea of going all quiet and acoustic is
not a favorable condition.
If you have heard the first song and the first
single of the album, ʽGoose Snow Coneʼ (the name actually refers to
the facial expression of an Instagram cat called Goose — see, she wastes her
time on Internet kitties, too!), you know exactly what is in store for you:
simple, quiet, tender, melancholic folksy melodies without any melodic
adventurousness. The chords all stay close to each other, the vocal modulation
is kept to a minimum, and there is basically just one melodic phrase sung
throughout the entire song, with minor variations. Tasteful arrangement —
acoustic guitar, a bit of chimes, a bit of a chamber effect with added strings,
nice harmonic interplay with the backing vocalists — but nothing whatsoever to
remind you of the fire that once used
to burn bright and angry underneath all the melancholic coating.
It would be too easy, perhaps, to deride an
artist for being ʽStuck In The Pastʼ, as she admits on the second
track in a mixture of self-aggrandizement and self-derogation ("Guess I'm
the last / I live in memory of vapor"), but there is nothing wrong with
grass-was-greener nostalgia for old veterans as long as you got that proverbial
fire heating it up; this song, however, offers very little except a lulling
slow waltz tempo and a few examples of Aimee's aging, but still lovely falsetto
on the chorus — even as she keeps falling back on the same old chord changes that
she'd already explored many times. Rinse and repeat: this easy-flowing,
insufferably-even, pleasantly forgettable current will carry you on for forty
minutes before safely and carefully depositing you on some sandy bank without a
single bruise or tear in your pants. It is not a matter of being different: on the contrary, it is a
matter of not being able to make a proper difference, coming up with a pack of
tunes that, atmosphere-wise, sound like raw demo versions for the same old
classics.
On the adulatory side of things, she is still
going very strong as a lyricist — this is, in fact, her first album where I'd
definitely insist that her poetic talents took serious precedence over her
musicianship, and even though the major themes of her poetry remain the same,
she is capable of finding new ways to express them, ranging from simple clever
lines like "falling for you was always falling up" (ʽPoor
Judgeʼ) to morose character portraits like ʽPhilly Sinksʼ (if
you don't listen carefully, it's about a broken guy, and if you do, it's about
a conniving womanizer). And repeated listens slowly, very slowly bring out some subtly nuanced hooks, like on the chorus
of the aforementioned ʽPhilly Sinksʼ, or on the
accept-your-miserable-fate refrain of ʽLies Of Summerʼ — except
that, at best, each of these hooks still sounds like a weak shadow of some of
her classic hooks, and no matter how I coax myself into it, the magic never
comes.
It is still nice, and each new release from
Aimee is a bit of a present anyway, but at this point, after the mediocre work
with Ted Leo (who, by the way, is still here, contributing background vocals), it looks like she might never again
rebound the way she did with Charmer
— granted, it is not impossible that all she needs to do is pick up that
electric guitar again, but it really seems as if her spirit might have mellowed
up to the point of no return. Which is not a tragedy, because we still have all
the old records, but... sad.
AIR
1) La Femme D'Argent; 2) Sexy
Boy; 3) All I Need; 4)
Kelly Watch The Stars; 5) Talisman; 6) Remember; 7) You Make It Easy; 8) Ce
Matin-La; 9) New Star In The Sky; 10) Le Voyage De Penelope.
In 2008, Moon Safari was given the royal
treatment of coming out as a 3-CD 10th anniversary edition. This should be
interpreted as a fact that today, it is tacitly acknowledged as a history-confirmed
classic of its genre, whatever its genre may be. But there is something
uncomfortable about this — namely, the alarming speed with which the record
becomes likable, and the nagging suspicion that, perhaps, this is a bit too
fluffy to have gained "classic" status so quickly? Aren't you
supposed to "get into" the classics?
Usually, Moon Safari gets pinned under
either the broad category of "Electronica" or, somewhat narrower but
no less vague, under the "Chillout" moniker. The latter definition, I
like; Moon Safari is indeed a great album to "chill out" to, regardless
of whether you're doing it properly, after a laborious dance floor workout, or
simply after a hard day's work. But stocking it in the "Electronica"
department wouldn't do it proper justice, because both before and after its
release, the typical associations to go along with the word are quite far
removed from what you're going to hear on this particular record.
It is, of course, dominated by
electronic gadgets, although regular guitars, pianos, strings and even brass
instruments regularly complement the picture. But it's wildly retro in its use
of said gadgets; totally "anti-Kraftwerk", in the sense that we're
going back from the image of Electronica as this totally different,
futuristic, technophilic, sci-fi oriented wave, to the earlier role of synthesizers
as assistants in capturing various special shades of classic harmony — the way
they were treated by early art-rockers, from Pete Townshend to Mike Oldfield.
Yet at the same time it's different, because it makes use of all the experience
in between. The early art-rockers were spacemen-to-be, testing their vehicles
on Earth; AIR are spacemen-that-were, still singing their song on the same
planet, but only after they'd gone and come back.
So, Moon Safari is really an
"art-pop" album in the Oldfield tradition, but burdened with some of
the newer electronic conventions (such as sampling). As such, it brings nothing
new to the table except for a set of nice melodies, ranging from "simply
cool" to "far out", especially if you're into mushrooms on the
side. Two of the songs, featuring guest vocals from singer-songwriter Beth
Hirsch, are straightforward sentimental ballads, one of which ('All I Need')
they even managed to turn into a hit. The rest are cute, inoffensive,
moderately complex and almost always emotionally charged sonic panoramas, each
of which would make for an unforgettable accompaniment to some pretentious
modern art exhibition (threatening to divert all attention to the music).
Perhaps the most fascinating thing about these
gradually unfurling paysages is how technically immaculate all of them
sound. There isn't a tremendous amount of detail, but what there is is glossed
to perfection. Obviously, it is hard to expect instrumental virtuosity from a
French electronic duo, but even if the bass line on 'La Femme D'Argent' isn't
the most complex and fluid bass line on Earth, it gives as much beauty, power,
and funky coolness to the track as its more prominently melodic keyboard
overdubs. And even if the main theme on 'Ce Matin-La' is literally heralded by
a soft, friendly trumpet tone, its acoustic guitars, quietly ringing in the
background, are strummed with precise attention to each note. This resplending
gloss — stunning, but never annoying — almost made me think that this, perhaps,
is what Steely Dan could have produced were they to ever venture out into the
fields of "chillout" (well, come to think of it, late period Steely
Dan are the perfect "chillout" outfit).
On the other hand, gloss is nothing when it
gets you nowhere, and these guys certainly have a vision that can get you
somewhere, if not anywhere. Apart from the obvious album title itself, only the
last track has a "travel" tag ('Le Voyage De Penelope', having
nothing to do with Ulysses' wife but rather with some obscure French TV show of
the same name), but, really, most of the record has a "travel" mood
to it, taking you from the astral plane ('Kelly Watch The Stars') to romantic
rooftops ('Remember', intelligently driving along to the sampled rhythm from
the Beach Boys' 'Do It Again') to sunrise-lit prairies ('Ce Matin-La') to
creepy nighttime forests ('Talisman') to unexplored sea depths ('Penelope');
and the most fun thing of all is that you don't need to take my word for it,
but are welcome to construct a little fantasy galaxy of your own. I didn't even
mention the big hit that made the boys into superstars ('Sexy Boy'), but,
truth is, I find it just one ordinary part of the album's overall charm, and
maybe not even one of the best ones.
So, to return to my original question — no, I
don't think the lush 3-CD edition was completely undeserved (although I have
no idea whether the additional material is worth looking for). Moon Safari
is not a trashy Katy Perry-class attention grabber; it is a piece of light, but
serious, art with a lot of soul and an even bigger lot of work invested into
it, and, despite having been produced at the height of the post-modern era, it
hearkens back to idealistic values of yore, and being so cleverly placed at the
intersection of the two, it's got that special something which I, for instance,
have never managed to find in any Autechre album. It is impossible to deny,
however, that, compared to Autechre and the like, Moon Safari is
definitely "easy listening", and that it is unlikely to expect the
elitist parts of the audience to worship at its altar.
PREMIERS SYMPTÔMES (1999)
1) Modular Mix; 2) Casanova 70;
3) Les Professionnels; 4) J'Ai Dormi Sous L'Eau; 5) Le Soleil Est Près De
Moi; 6) Californie; 7) Brakes On.
From a strictly chronological perspective, this
disc should have been placed first, since it's basically a collection of AIR's
first singles (starting with 1995's 'Modular Mix' and then all the way up to
1998). But this particular edition, reinforced with a couple newer outtakes,
dates from 1999, and besides, Moon Safari is such a more comfortable
opportunity to start off with, that I am ready to forgive myself this little
chronological discrepancy.
The five large, dense mood pieces on here do, indeed,
sound like very natural precursors to the pleasures of Safari. They are,
however, even more "ambient" than the material from 1998: fewer
jarring sounds and tones, softer rhythms, almost no vocals, and thorough
stylistic unity. There is no guarantee that you'll seriously love this even if
you are a fan of Safari. If the latter was an adventurous journey,
where you had to overcome obstacles and alternate periods of tempest and turmoil
with periods of rest and repose, then Premiers Symptômes is rather
like the "First Stage" of that journey — you know, the first five or
six chapters from your average XVIIIth century travelog where nothing much
happens and you are simply supposed to get in the mood.
It does call for repeated listens, though,
because eventually the hypnotic elevator ambience may dissipate and through it
you'll see shades of heavenly loveliness, particularly on the somber, majestic
'Le Soleil Est Près De Moi' and the... uh... somber, majestic 'J'Ai
Dormi Sous L'Eau'. It doesn't hurt that they use plenty of different synth
tones and non-synth instruments — the warm, gentle chivalry of the French horn
on 'Soleil' and the schizo friendliness of the sitar on 'L'Eau' being just a
few of the more memorable items.
I am not sure if the whole experience deserves
its own album — maybe adding it as five "prelude-like" bonus tracks
to Moon Safari would work better — but that does not prevent me from
giving it a thumbs up all the same. If
all elevator music sounded like this, we'd all be spending much more time in
elevators. Not that I'm sure it's such a good idea.
THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (2000)
1) Playground Love; 2) Clouds
Up; 3) Bathroom Girl; 4) Cemetary Party; 5) Dark Messages; 6) The Word
'Hurricane'; 7) Dirty Trip; 8) Highschool Lover; 9) Afternoon Sister; 10) Ghost
Song; 11) Empty House; 12) Dead Bodies; 13) Suicide Underground.
The Virgin Suicides, if the reader is in need of a reminder, was
Sofia Coppola's first film and today is more of a "cult" favourite
among movie buffs in comparison to her major success with Lost In
Translation — which, the way I see it, was a much better film, but, since
its success was "major", and also since it did not concentrate on hot
teenage girls, is perhaps less fondly mentioned among the hipster crowds. (OK,
so Scarlett Johansson was a hot teenage girl, but in Virgin Suicides
you had five of them, including Kirsten Dunst, and it was all about
wanting and being unable to get laid anyway).
Still, the movie was good enough to go and get
depressed to, and a major part of that had to do with the soundtrack. Now it is
important to remember that there are two soundtracks, both called The
Virgin Suicides: one faithfully reflecting the actual music from the movie,
with extra Heart and Todd Rundgren and other inclusions, and one entirely
consisting of AIR's contributions, with expanded versions of many themes that
are only there in tidbit form in the actual movie. Since Heart and Todd
Rundgren are pretty deserving artists on their own, I'd say getting the former
version makes little sense. The latter, however, can easily qualify as not
just a mere soundtrack, but as a proper AIR album in its own rights — dressed
up as a concept one, at that.
It is more monotonous than Moon Safari;
most of the tracks follow the same unhurried, rigid mid-tempo beat which, when
well-fed with synthesizers and arrays of other instruments, again gives the
impression of traveling — but if on Moon Safari you were given the right
to visit all kinds of places, with Virgin Suicides you are hopelessly
stuck on an endless Journey Through Dark Forest. The soundscapes are dim and
dreary, the keys are minor, and the general mix of smokey-loungey-sax, mystical
chimes, Gregorian chanting, and mid-Seventies prog rock à la Pink Floyd
and/or Genesis is a great way to lower one's spirits as you understand that you
will, in fact, never ever find your way through the forest. Just forget it.
Only one track has vocals: the opener
'Playground Love', sung (or, rather, breathily croaked) by 'Gordon Tracks'
(actually — Thomas Mars from the French band Phoenix) in a semi-progressive,
semi-"alternative" manner. But it might as well have none — the album
needs no vocals, and even the odd bit of voiceover from the movie that pops up
every now and then feels distracting from the overall experience. Individually,
not all the tracks work, but at least each second one is driven by some
fantastic melodic idea, and that idea may be completely unpredictable — it may
be a huge electronic Eno-like swoop on 'Dirty Trip', or a McCartney-like piano
melody on 'Highschool Lover' (a minimalistic instrumental reworking of
'Playground Love'), or a sad funebral organ pattern on 'Empty House'. Speaking
of which, it doesn't much feel like an Electronica album: live instruments
occupy at least as much space as the synthesizers, and some of the tracks
feature sharp, expressive, vivacious drum patterns that are as far removed from
the "sci-fi" sheen of the genre as possible.
The Virgin Suicides, in all listings of AIR albums, is never set
aside into a special "soundtrack" category, and I applaud this
decision. It may be less diverse than Moon Safari, and the nagging
voiceovers may remind us that, want it or not, it is a soundtrack, but
upon all counts it is simply another excellent impressionistic invention that
should please everyone who loves good music by talented artists and the idea of
young girls taking their lives so that talented artists can make some good
music. Thumbs up without a doubt — along
with Magnolia, this is the hardest-hitting "non-soundtrack
soundtrack" of the decade.
10,000 HZ LEGEND (2001)
1) Electronic Performers; 2)
How Does It Make You Feel?; 3) Radio #1; 4) The Vagabond; 5) Radian; 6) Lucky And
Unhappy; 7) Sex Born Poison; 8) People In The City; 9) Wonder Milky Bitch; 10)
Don't Be Light; 11) Caramel Prisoner.
AIR's first proper album of new material since Moon
Safari pretty much bombed in the face of the critics. All of a sudden,
people were realizing that these French guys weren't really breaking a hell of
a lot of new ground — and, in addition to that, they were sort of getting all
serious and pretentious, with a progressive attitude on which modern
progressive criticism has signed the exclusive lease to Radiohead. And AIR,
after all, are no Radiohead. They're French!
However, putting aside the odd neurobiological
impulses of modern day criticism, it is still necessary to admit that 10,000
Hz Legend is a different album. It is no longer structured like a
journey; it is relatively monolithic, saddled with many more vocal tracks,
and, overall, much darker and, in fact, more Electronica-like than Moon
Safari. There is still plenty of real instrumental diversity, but more of
the tracks are openly driven by the power of electronic impulses, and echoes of
Kraftwerk and their robots keep ringing in the head even in the ensuing
silence. It's as if the band suddenly remembered which particular hole they
were pigeoned into and decided to play submissive, bringing along the whip and
collar.
But it's good clean fun all the same. With a
whole squad of guiding angels — everybody from Pink Floyd to Depeche Mode to,
yes, Radiohead — behind their backs, AIR still deliver nice moo-sic (-zak?). Since
keeping hip is an essential ingredient, they also recruit individual
angels-in-the-flesh to spice things up: Jason Falkner, Japanese rockers Buffalo
Daughter (!), and even Beck himself all make guest appearances on vocals, and a
couple of members of Beck's becking, sorry, backing band offer further support
on bass and keyboards.
Results? Nothing groundbreaking, nor do the
proceedings sound as lush and dreamy as they used to be. We are moving away
from pastures, forests, and oceans to the gloomier and murkier depths of the
subconscious, although that move does not truly occur until track five,
'Radian', with its creepy game of hide-and-seek unfurling before our eyes
between the electronic loops and the ghostly vocal echoes. Before that, things
are unquestionably lighter: we have the Floydian 'How Does It Make You Feel?', acoustic,
minimalistic, and quite effective (although I, for one, was quite happy when
its annoying breathy vocals were so properly lampooned in its totally
unexpected final lines — nice to learn the duo have plenty of self-irony), the
album's only "pop-rocker" 'Radio #1', and 'The Vagabond' — a
harmonica-led bluesy number which really truly is as much Beck as AIR, and
maybe even more Beck than AIR.
Then, with 'Radian', we make the descent... no,
not into Hell — Godin and Dunckel are too wimpy to earn the right to build up
their own private Hell — but rather into the waiting room where you suffer more
from your own insecurities about the future than whatever actual torment may
await you in a matter of hours. These other compositions tend to merge in one
large lump — one large, highly creative, if not thoroughly highly exciting
lump.
Come to think of it, it is easy to understand
all the disappointment: people may have been expecting AIR to break down one
more wall in the back of their minds, and, instead, got one reinstated, as the
band made a conscious decision to fall back on already explored ways of
music-making. The basic question, however, is: whatever made people expect
that AIR could have done something like that? There was nothing particularly
groundbreaking about Moon Safari either — except for, perhaps, just the
basic shock of seeing an electronic band bring out acoustic guitars and real
strings from time to time. But then they also do it here. There's just a bit
more bleeping. I can't say all of it drives my imagination to new, ever more
glorious heights, but thumbs up all the
same, says the heart, while the brain takes a break.
TALKIE WALKIE (2004)
1) Venus; 2) Cherry Blossom Girl; 3)
Run; 4) Universal Traveler; 5) Mike Mills; 6) Surfing On A Rocket; 7) Another Day; 8) Alpha
Beta Gaga; 9) Biological; 10) Alone In Kyoto.
Talkie Walkie. The title itself suggests a certain aura of cuteness, even if its
diminutive suffixes no longer serve a primarily diminutive purpose. But the
contents match the title: indeed, this is a lighter, happier record than 10,000
Hz Legend, and it helped restore the duo's critical reputation at a time
when they were all set to join the back rows of faceless losers. A bit of help
should also be credited to producer Nigel Godrich, who always brings a bar of
Refined Musical Taste with him into every studio he visits.
One widespread opinion, with which I mostly
agree, is that the album is somewhat of a compromise between the
"symphonic ambience" of Moon Safari and the grim electronic
bleeps of Legend. There's quite a bit of singing, mostly by guest
vocalists I do not know anything about; there's quite a bit of sonic
experimentation that could throw off the casual listener, yet not a single
track goes overboard with it (e. g. 'Run' is occasionally derailed by the
looped electronic pulse of 'run run run run', but is otherwise
10cc-type-chorus-adorned "adult contemporary"); and, sometimes,
paranoia and carelessness are joined neck-to-neck under an oxymoronous yoke, as
in 'Alpha Beta Gaga', which starts out as a vivid representation of a panic
attack, but then, with just one little bit of whistling, is transformed into a
catchy kiddie-like wordless singalong ditty.
The two singles were 'Cherry Blossom Girl' and
'Surfing On A Rocket'. The former could be seen as a belated paired response to
'Sexy Boy', another evocative acoustic-electronic mantra that is, predictably,
gentler and more romantic than its predecessor (however, just as memorable,
even if the airy chorus is a bit too close to the clichéd
"look-at-me-I'm-so-sexy" style of Mylène Farmer, France's
national pride and shame). 'Surfing On A Rocket', meanwhile, is a pretty
energetic (for AIR) chunk of dream-pop whose jumpy electronic riff in the
chorus gives an odd idea of what the process of 'surfing on a rocket' could
really look like, but any track that gets me thinking about what it's like to
surf on a rocket is OK by me, anyway.
If the record has a flaw, it may be extra
smoothness; Legend at least had a few vigorous "jerk-ups",
whereas Talkie Walkie runs at more or less the same volume and
adrenaline level throughout, so much so that it's very easy to miss the
special "minimalistic complexity" and non-triviality of the closing
mini-suite 'Alone In Kyoto' (specially written by the duo for the soundtrack to
Lost In Translation, along the lines of their continuing friendship with
Sofia Coppola, an addicted sucker for Eurotrash if there ever was one). Don't
do it; the track alone is worth owning the record, yet the record may take a
few extra listens to ascend from the initial impression of relaxed, lazy
elevator pap to the next level of artistic integrity. Thumbs up, heart-wise first, brain-wise slowly
catching up.
POCKET SYMPHONY (2007)
1) Space Maker; 2) Once Upon A Time; 3) One
Hell Of A Party; 4) Napalm Love; 5) Mayfair Song; 6) Left Bank; 7) Photograph;
8) Mer Du Japon; 9) Lost Message; 10) Somewhere Between Waking And Sleeping;
11) Redhead Girl; 12) Night Sight.
AIR never really made two albums that sound the
same; but they certainly made quite a few albums that sound like they sound
the same. Pocket Symphony, in particular, is anything but a series of
remakes of Talkie Walkie songs, yet I have a very poor idea of how to
write about it. It does not exactly help that, no matter how many times I
listen to this record, I rest enthralled by its icy beauty, yet each time that
it is over, I cannot remember a single doggone tune.
Pocket Symphony is very AIR-y, even for AIR. Like a
prima ballerina that, while dancing, mostly floats above the ground, taking
your breath away, it eventually reaches a stage when you start secretly wishing
for her/it to plummet to the ground, for once, for a change. Zephyresque synthesizers,
heavenly chimes, dreamful vocals, swooshing asteroid percussion, Japanese folk
instruments out of some faraway Mizoguchi movie — my feet are soaking wet for
spending too much time walking in the clouds. Don't get me wrong: these are songs,
with melodies and even musical development, real small little parts that truly
cling together in, I guess, some sort of 'symphony' — but they're all wrapped
up in such dense layers of musical cotton candy that, in the end, it hardly
matters whether there is any sort of development or not.
Not even the fabulous guest stars inflict any
significant deviations. Jarvis Cocker of Pulp contributes lyrics and vocals
to 'One Hell Of A Party', sounding more like a highly drunk, deeply depressed
Mark Knopfler than Jarvis Cocker; and Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy contributes
lyrics and vocals to 'Somewhere Between Waking And Sleeping', sounding more
like a deeply drunk, highly depressed Nick Drake than Neil Hannon. Both songs
are pretty and elegant, but neither one has managed to stay with me the way 'Le
Voyage De Penelope' or 'Playground Love' still does. Oh well, maybe 10,000 more
listens will do the trick — it's high time I changed my ringtone anyway.
Giving this kind of record a "thumbs
down" assessment will, however, not do, because within its own limits,
it's admirable. Of course, admitting that it's admirable imminently leads to
admitting that, for instance, Alan Parsons, whose music frequently sounds the
same way, is also admirable, and to admit, in the XXIst century, that Alan
Parsons is "admirable" immediately brands one as a soul hopelessly
lost in irreality. But as a soul hopelessly lost in irreality, and speaking out
to other souls hopelessly lost in irreality, I am fond of Pocket Symphony,
somewhere deep down inside that is, and when the new ringtones work, my thumbs up will be fully validated.
LOVE 2 (2009)
1) Do The Joy; 2) Love; 3) So
Light Is Her Footfall; 4) Be A Bee; 5) Missing The Light Of The Day; 6) Tropical
Disease; 7) Heaven's Light; 8) Night Hunter; 9) Sing Sang Sung; 10) Eat My Beat;
11) You Can Tell It To Everybody; 12) African Velvet.
Well, this is just another AIR album, and the
difficulty of writing about each following one grows almost exponentially. If
the reader is already familiar with it, there won't be anything enlightening in
my review — not in the smallest degree. If not, here's just a brief listing of
a few small out-of-the-ordinary impulses that I have managed to log:
— the unexpectedly heavy opening, as 'Do The
Joy' fades in over a gruff, distorted bass line and sci-fi synthesizer whooshes
that suggest Hawkwind nostalgia;
— the almost surf-rock style (although leaning
towards the "ominous" effect) of 'Be A Bee'; I can just imagine its
guitar parts played by the likes of Link Wray or Nokie Edwards;
— the innocent happiness of 'Heaven's Light'
and 'Sing Sang Sung', two of the duo's best dream-pop contributions so far;
'Sing Sang Sung', released as the single, got quite a serious amount of flack
for pushing the "fluffy" side of the duo too far, but the way I see
it, as long as we have true creativity, no fluffiness can be excessive enough
to kill off the work of art — and, besides, the "fluffiness" is quite
self-ironic, as can be easily noticed by anyone who has also noticed that Dunckel
chants 'thing thang thung' in the chorus.
Other than that, I noticed nothing and I
noticed everything. Love 2 is no better and no worse, no different from
and not the same as any other AIR album ever released. We can hate this
approach if we want to, but we must keep it alive, if only for the reason that
not too many bands in our days keep using the same number of instruments on
their records — and still end up with their records in the
"Electronic" bin. Thumbs up,
even though I'm not entirely sure why.
LE VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE (2012)
1) Astronomic Club; 2) Seven
Stars; 3) Retour Sur Terre; 4) Parade; 5) Moon Fever; 6) Sonic Armada; 7) Who
Am I Now?; 8) Décollage; 9) Cosmic Trip; 10) Homme Lune; 11) Lava.
It is interesting, come to think of it, that
none of AIR's albums, up to this point, were straightforwardly «conceptual»
(discounting the S. Coppola soundtrack), even if their whole musical strategy
seems to have been expressly designed for harboring «concepts». If the decision
was intentional on their part, then 2012 is when they finally give in to
temptation. Technically, the record was also proclaimed to be a «soundtrack» —
but to a movie that was made 110 years ago: George Méliès'
landmark A Trip To The Moon, recently
brushed off and remastered to the delight of cinephiles around the world. In
addition, while the movie itself runs for about 14 minutes in total, the
«soundtrack» is more than twice its length — which certainly makes it an
independent project (or a serious challenge for all those who want to splice
the two works of art together on their own — another brilliant way to kill
time).
Comparisons with Moon Safari are inevitable, if only due to the similarity of the
ideas expressed in the titles; but the two records are really quite different. Moon Safari just used the title as an
exotic mental stimulus, since most of the compositions contained psychedelic,
but not necessarily «sci-fi» elements and associations. Le Voyage Dans La Lune is a much more straightforward conceptual
recording, and each of its tracks loyally serves the function of illustrating
one part of a space journey. The vocals, as it usually happens on old-time AIR
albums, are few, mostly consisting of announcements or wordless harmonies;
only ʽSeven Starsʼ and ʽWho Am I Nowʼ have vocal melodies,
the former delivered by Victoria Legrand of Beach House, the latter by the
girls from Au Revoir Simone (an electronic dream-pop trio from Brooklyn) — both
of them good, suitable choices, even if the songs themselves are not
particularly staggering.
At this point, nobody expects any sort of
musical revolution from Dunckel and Godin, but within the limits of their
personal fantasy world, Le Voyage
might be said to occupy its own particular little corner due to its
well-planned coherence. Of the individual tracks, I could single out
ʽAstronomic Clubʼ, whose major hook is a buzzing guitar riff with
ominous overtones; and ʽMoon Feverʼ, which melds a piano sonata
approach with ambient and psychedelic elements (think a joint Beethoven /
Brian Eno collaboration with both of them on acid). ʽSeven Starsʼ
does sound a lot like prototypical Beach House (that is, indescribable on the
individual level once you have described the general manner in which Beach
House work), and possibly the otherworldly, cold and detached ʽWho Am I
Nowʼ sounds a lot like Au Revoir Simone, even though I have never heard
them (yet).
The point, though, is to take all this stuff
collectively — not a big deal, since, even with twice the running length of the
movie, it still clocks in at just over thirty minutes — and admit that it is
all quite imaginative and «moon-worthy». Long-time fans of AIR, in particular,
will not be disappointed; on the contrary, those who might have feared the
band had «sold out» with its constant movement towards poppier song structures
and trendier guest vocalists will be reassured that the band has returned to a
slightly more «hardcore» approach, with trippy sound effects, dark electronic
grooves, Floydian melancholy, tricky time signatures, and unpredictable
collocations (for instance, just what exactly is that absent-minded banjo
doing, lost in the middle of the shrill and stern ʽLavaʼ?).
I, personally, would have preferred a balance
tipped just a little bit to the side of «hooks» — had they done that, who
knows, perhaps this fresh way of conceptual thinking would prompt them into
producing another equal of Moon Safari.
But even without that, Le Voyage Dans La
Lune is a more ambitious project than anything the band has done since
working for Coppola, and there is still plenty of inspiration left — thanks,
perhaps, to the magical influence of Méliès — to justify that
ambition. Hence, thumbs up. Next on the list: a new score for The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, perhaps?
That one runs for seventy minutes.
PS. The album is available both on its own and
as a CD/DVD combo, the latter part containing the restored colorized version of
the movie (not to panick here: colorized after Méliès' own
initial design, as he is said to have originally hand-painted each frame
himself) accompanied with AIR's soundtrack elements. I do not necessarily
recommend going for that version — the movie is well worth watching, of course,
but the idea of combining old silent films with modern scores has never
thrilled me all that much (with some notable exceptions when the scores
incorporate motives and elements appropriate for the time or situation — such
as Richard Einhorn's oratorio that accompanies Dreyer's Passion Of Joan Of Arc). Still, it's only three dollars more or
something — and you probably get to own a collectible.
ALANIS (1991)
1) Feel Your Love; 2) Too Hot; 3) Plastic; 4) Walk Away; 5) On My Own;
6) Superman; 7) Jealous; 8) Human Touch; 9) Oh Yeah; 10) Pretty Boy.
Oh boy. It's one of THOSE albums — ones that
you'd never give one thought about if they represented the artist at his/her
most essential. But it so happened that Alanis Morrisette, the mainstream
goddess of Nineties' commer-fessional singer-songwriting, started out as a
Canadian wannabe Janet Jackson, and, for the sake of formality, I have to
mention her first two albums — even though many of her fans remain happily
unaware of their existence.
Technically, there could be a copout here: both
of these records bill her as "Alanis" (apparently, the family name
was judged way too complex for the target audience, which, as allegedly pointed
out by the marketing survey team, tends to have big problems with first grade
spelling bees), so, from a certain point of view, we are speaking of a
different artist here. It is also important to understand that, having barely
turned 16 (although they try to make her look 30 in the accompanying videos,
taking all the clues from Tracy Lords, I guess), in no way was she in control
of the proceedings, letting some run-of-the-mill synth-pop hacks write and
arrange the music and mold her image. She is credited as co-writer on
most of the tracks, to be frank, but let us not hold it against her; supposedly
the hacks had a little bit of humanity left in them and decided it would be
good to let her have some extra dough.
Of course, if she does assume songwriting
responsibility for this tripe, that's not good. All of this is generic
Eighties' dance music, with one or two corny Diane Warren-style ballads thrown
in for the hankies' sake. The "hits" 'Feel Your Love' and 'Too Hot'
have catchy choruses, like some of the other stuff, but in more or less the
same manner that you'd expect from your aerobics workout videotape: to help you
better train your butt reflexes. Vocals are decent — good dance moves and a
strong throat were, after all, two sine qua non conditions that got you
within the world of latex and frizzed hair at the time — but there's hardly any
threat to Debbie Gibson or Paula Abdul.
I suppose a few of the tunes offer at least lyrical
glimpses at the future Alanis — e. g., the "social critique" of
'Human Touch' ('I'm tired of people sellin' their sex appeal', she declares,
and then instantly proceeds to do just that in her videos), or the self-defense
in 'On My Own'. But these aren't very convincing lyrical glimpses, and besides,
they only work if one is actually a worshipper of the future Alanis. On the
other hand, I can imagine where someone who hates the A. M. of Jagged Little
Pill could love this album as a guilty pleasure — very, very guilty
pleasure, on par with watching an old man's sex with minors. I had a bit of fun
listening to it as a curious historical memento, recollecting all the worst
blows that the Eighties had dealt us. Then nausea started setting in, and I had
no choice but to scuttle off. Thumbs down,
quite predictably.
NOW IS THE TIME (1992)
1) (Change Is) Never A Waste
Of Time; 2) An Emotion Away; 3) Big Bad Love; 4) Can't Deny; 5) Give What You
Got; 6) No Apologies; 7) Rain; 8) Real World; 9) The Time
Of Your Life; 10) When We Meet Again.
Essentially Alanis Vol. 2 — there does
exist a school of thought (if the term "school of thought" is
applicable to generic Eighties-style dance-pop in the first place) that sees a
teensy-weensy bit of evolution, but I am completely blind on this occasion.
Same style, same marketing trends, same level of songwriting.
In terms of individual songs, there are some
really ugly low points — 'Can't Deny', for instance, is the cheapest brand of
pop music imaginable; you know, the one that goes 'place one finger on the
keyboard and off we go', the one I thought was invented specially for East
European and Russian pop consumption, but apparently Canadians enjoyed
crawling under that plank, too. On the other hand, 'Real World' does have a
little bite to it, and it is also the first location where you will encounter
the trademark Alanis Banshee Wail, guranteed to freeze you cold (and, depending
on your musical tastes, make or not make your ears fall off in the process).
Sample lyric: 'I'm having dreams in the night
of you baby / And Sigmund Freud would have thought I was crazy / I wonder why
you've become an obsession / All I know is that I need to have your big bad
love'. Personally, I think it's great — how come the Beatles never thought of
namedropping intellectual celebrities to raise the bar on their early lyrics?
Just think: 'Now you're mine, and Sigmund Freud still makes me cry / And in
time, Arthur Janov'll understand the reason why / If I cry, it's not because
I'm sad / It's just because Carl Jung's the greatest guy I've ever read / Ask
me how / I'll say Gestalt therapy is always waiting for you'. Doesn't it make
you want to go out immediately and buy an extra copy of Please Please
Me for each of your friends and neighbours?..
Sorry, just couldn't resist. Thumbs down.
JAGGED LITTLE PILL (1995)
1) All I Really Want; 2) You Oughta Know; 3) Perfect; 4) Hand In My Pocket; 5) Right Through You; 6) Forgiven; 7) You Learn; 8) Head Over Feet; 9) Mary Jane; 10) Ironic; 11) Not The Doctor; 12) Wake Up.
As of 2009, thirty-three million people worldwide
have purchased this album (I'm assuming, of course, that nobody bought it twice
or thrice). This figure means that hype and trend alone cannot be responsible
for its success; that its formula had what it takes to capture the mindset of
the average music consumer in 1995 and, apparently, has not quite lost its
potency even today; and that, whether we want it or not, Alanis Morissette will
feature on the pages of "alternative rock" history forever, no
matter how many anti-Alanis crusades we may call for.
And I, of course, am seriously tempted to join
an old one or call for a new one. Jagged Little Pill is one of those
records that is not awful per se — merely unremarkable — but whose thoroughly
inadequate reception makes it into an awful mass conscience phenomenon. To
illustrate, let me quote a user review from RateYourMusic which dubs Pill
a "Great, Important, Revolutionary Album": «When Alanis
Morissette emerged... in 1995, the world quickly sat up and took notice. This
was the pre-Lilith Fair era, when women weren't supposed to make a scene in
music. And then there was Alanis — combining harmonicas, catchy melodies, and
nearly screaming lyrics that we couldn't get out of our heads.»
PRE — FUCKING — LILITH FAIR ERA? I can only
hope this statement is not altogether typical of the thirty-three million
people who bought Jagged Little Pill, but if it is and the "female
musical scene" is commonly associated with Lilith Fair in the popular
mind, feminism should truly pack it in, because nothing whatsoever has shifted
in the dominant male perspective over the last fifty years. But forget Lilith
Fair, let us ponder a more serious question: what the heck made the world
"quickly sit up and take notice" of Alanis and her "near
screaming lyrics" in 1995, when, for instance, just two years ago the
world could have just as quickly sat up and taken notice of — to quote but one
of the many possible examples — Aimee Mann's Whatever, an album that objectively
rocked harder, had unquestionably better lyrics, and far more depth than
all of Alanis' efforts put together?
Actually, it is not difficult to explain. When
Alanis Morissette decided, after a long period of internal and external
struggle, to make the transition from third-rate dance-pop chick to honest singer-songwriter
— a decision that, by itself, can only be welcome — she did not have a clue
about two things. First, although endowed by poetic aspiration, she hardly knew
how to write complex, multi-layered lyrics that would be "on the
level", let alone over it. Second, she may be responsible for
(some of) the basic melodies, but she has let her collaborator Glen Ballard
come up with the arrangements, and he gives it all the most normal,
predictable, unimaginative musical backing that you could expect in 1995 — yucky
compressed guitar sound, danceable, mechanistic percussion,
post-adult-contemporary keyboard sheen etc. etc.
These two flaws — corny lyrics and bland sonics
— have forever banned Morissette from the predilections of sophisticated music
consumers, but, of course, it is exactly these two flaws that, from the
perspective of the music buyer en large, represent her greatest
advantages. It does not take much effort on the part of the average Joe/Jane to
get what she is singing about, and it does not take much time on his/her part
to get how "modern" and "contemporary" she is, either, what
with the entire production style screaming '1995!' into the ear of the time
machine constructor.
And, just so that there could always be some
space left to argue, every now and then the average Joe will fall upon a
mystical line or two — for instance, 'I'm consumed by the chill of solitary,
I'm like Estella, I like to reel it in and then spit it out' — and come running
and shaking his fist at critics: 'You think you're cool, man, talking all that
trash about Alanis, let me tell you now, she really knows her classics, that
gal, if not for her, I'd hardly ever guess what that South Park episode
no. 62 was all about!' Or: 'Before Alanis came along, I'd have to google for
Webster each time someone said 'ironic'. Now I have finally memorized that
'ironic' is like rain on my wedding day, or a free ride when I've already paid!
Sure I'm too dumb to ever have a wedding day or a free ride offered to me by
anybody, but at least I know what that word means now! Stop bashing Alanis, go
and fuckin' sell thirty million records yourself and then we'll see!'
Not to mention the harmonicas. How cool is
having the album open with a folksy harmonica note — washed away in less than a
second by a generic power chord — harmonica battling grunge guitar — say,
isn't that what true art is all about?
In short, Jagged Little Pill unsettles
and depresses me, but not for the reasons that are supposed by its creators to
unsettle and depress me — rather for its gruesome inadequacy and unjustified
pretense. It is far removed, musically and lyrically, from Alanis' dance-pop
efforts, but not far enough to lose any connections whatsoever: just like those
two, it attempts to bite off much more than it can chew, and would have ended
up being unintentionally funny, if only the number of copies it managed to sell
didn't make it all so unintentionally sad.
But now that I got it off my chest like I am
supposed to, I must approach it from a different angle and say that, taken out
of its social context, Jagged Little Pill isn't all that bad. One simply
has to disregard the trite lyrics and run-of-the-mill arrangements and
concentrate on its positive sides, not the least of which is Alanis' melodic
gift — yes, she does have a gift for melody, and this is one of the, if
not the only one, good reason why the record shipped so many clones. The
hits are catchy — 'You Oughta Know', 'Ironic', 'You Learn', etc. all
have fine catchy choruses that contain some emotional essence, and although few
lines can be more banal than 'You live, you learn, you love, you learn, you
cry, you learn, you lose, you learn', I have not the least doubt that they are
delivered with unfaked passion by someone who truly believes that she is making
a big, important, personal point here. I just close my eyes and imagine she is
singing in Kiswahili instead, and it brings me some odd brand of internal
happiness — and it's not hard to do.
Alanis' singing is a major point of contention.
Some have accused her of masking her lack of singing talent or vocal power
with yelling and screeching; this is pure libel — please refer to her dance-pop
era to ascertain that she does have a great set of pipes and that she is well
able to stay on key whenever she wants to. The style she chooses on Pill,
where many of the emphatic moments are, indeed, characterized by excessive
paranoid whining and yelling, is intentional and works on a take-it-or-leave-it
basis, the same way one gets around Kate Bush's horny kittycat intonations on
The Kick Inside. I take it, and, in fact, think of it as the record's
major asset; at least this is its only working element that won't ever allow
you to confuse Alanis Morissette with anyone else. If only that yelling were
set to better lyrics than 'Is she perverted like me, would she go down on you
in a theatre, does she speak eloquently and would she have your baby?', I'd
have even fewer problems with it.
Even the music, although generally boring, is
rarely disgusting. Were it oversaturated with synthesizers, or capitalizing on
three-chord grunge riffs, like a proto-Avril Lavigne, I would have screamed
bloody hell; but it is simply unremarkable rather than awful — some semi-decent
riffs, lots of simple, but un-annoying folksy acoustic playing, some electric
12-string stuff, none of it has dated as badly as the synth-pop arrangements of
Alanis and Now Is The Time. No revelations — no unexpected
bathroom calls, either.
In the end, I am quite unsure about any final
judgement. A thumbs down rating would mainly be me decrying the sad fate of
mainstream music and expressing pity for thirty-three million people who hardly
have any business taking it from me. A thumbs up rating, on the other hand,
would compromise any remains of integrity I still might be preserving
somewhere. I guess it is just one of those albums where any fence-straddling
type of rating would never satisfy anyone.
So, instead, I will leave you baited with a
little bit of funny Internet trivia I have indulged in. Apparently, the Great
Mystery of Alanis does not even begin with her music, it begins with the way
you spell her family name. Quick, close your eyes and reply: How many R's, S's,
and T's are there in the name Mor(r)is(s)et(t)e?
Now open your eyes and check the statistics in
the next review to find out whether you form part of the intellectual Google
majority and have won your prize — a lifelong supply of jagged little pills and
a used copy of Great Expectations.
SUPPOSED FORMER INFATUATION JUNKIE (1998)
1) Front Row; 2) Baba; 3) Thank U; 4) Are You Still Mad; 5)
Sympathetic Character; 6) That
I Would Be Good; 7) The Couch; 8) Can't Not; 9) UR; 10) I Was Hoping; 11) One;
12) Would Not Come; 13) Unsent; 14) So Pure; 15) Joining You; 16) Heart Of The House; 17)
Your Congratulations.
So, before we proceed to discussion, here are
the Google statistics as of December 12, 2009: [1] the correct way — Morissette:
1,560,000 results; [2] Morisette: 367,000; [3] Morrisette:
263,000; [4] Morrissette: 109,000; [5] Morissete: 52,000; [6] Morrisete:
29,000; [7] Morrissete: 11,200; [8] Morisete: 19,600. (Of
course, many of these are just bot copy results, but it is the relative
statistics that matters, not the absolute numbers).
The conclusion is that about a third of people
writing about A. M. do not even know how to spell her name properly. Of course,
it is a rather hard name to spell (trickier even than Mississippi, where
one just has to remember the «two of each» rule), but still, you'd expect a bit
more attention paid to such a household item. Or, perhaps, it is just the name
— misspelt — that is a household item, and not the music? How many people have
written about A. M. without actually listening to her (as opposed to
without hearing her, which is more or less impossible)?
I cannot say that Morissette's follow-up to her
major commercial success is a "great" album. I cannot say that I love
it, or that I will ever have a big desire to return and explore it some more.
But it was Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, not Jagged Little Pill,
that finally convinced me that there is artistic merit to this girl's
work. For all its flaws, Pill was not a hollow forgery — but this is
best evident only after listening to the next in line. It is no coincidence
that Alanis never managed to surpass the "triumph" of Pill:
not only are her subsequent records sounding more and more "out of
date", but they are actually sounding less and less market-oriented.
Junkie is a tremendously long, horrendously brooding, and emphatically
personal record that, first and foremost, is dedicated to growing up. Once you
spot the ugly horse grin on the cover, the first thought is that you will
probably be subjected to even more screeching and caterwauling than last time,
but the intention is rather... 'Ironic': in fact, Alanis is much more
restrained and much more oriented towards a conventional understanding of
'singing' here (from time to time, with a little Indian flavor she somehow
picked up over the last three years — uh, possibly as a result of her visit to
India?).
More importantly, she overcomes her major
weakness — inane lyrics. It is still easy to sneer at all the different, yet
equally obvious ways in which she blows up her rather simple emotions; it is
more difficult to admit that she has at least advanced to the stage at which
she is implicit rather than explicit about it. The encription is not very
difficult, but it needs to be broken; certainly a chorus like 'Thank you India,
thank you terror, thank you disillusionment, thank you frailty, thank you
consequence...' is more deserving of notice than 'I've got one hand in my
pocket and the other one is giving a high five'. Or so it would seem.
The music is a more difficult matter. Brushing
away occasionally silly critical raves ('Wow, she is writing pop songs without
choruses, whoever heard of that?'), we are left with a gloomy mix of
"alternative rock" with "adult contemporary", thick on
atmosphere and personality, but generally thin on hooks. There are even Goth
overtones on some of the numbers: Alanis is certainly intent on letting us know
either that success has not gone to her head and that she has no desire to impersonate
a pop-rock diva, or, perhaps, more cynically, that the very success she has
earned was entirely due to her neuroses, so next time around, she is happy to
heap even more of those on the listener. You want trouble? You got it.
Just like before, the main problems are with
the basics of the arrangements. Same boring funky beats, same lack of detail,
same moribund guitar backing — a few of the riffs are good, but for the most
part, they are just grumbling away in the background. Add to this the
seventy-plus minute length, and it becomes a real chore to sit through all of
this, especially since midway through you clearly begin to understand that no,
you are not getting much of anything else. For a long time, this effect
prevented me from seeing 'Joining You' as the catchiest song on the album, or
'Heart Of The House' as the song with the best strings arrangement. Alas, she
is still letting Glen Ballard have control of the situation, and these are the
results: she has unquestionably grown up, but he has, most
definitely, nowhere left to grow.
All the same, I think that 'Baba', even with
all the pretentiousness and with all the grungeness, is a powerful tune; that
'That I Would Be Good' is the best Diane Warren song that Diane Warren,
fortunately, never wrote (or else I would have to reluctantly pray that her
approved billion years on the frying pan be reduced by a few months); that the
lyrical concept of 'Unsent' is pretty clever; and that I fully understand why
Robert Christgau gave this record an A- as opposed to Jagged Little Pill's
B+, but have no idea why he gave Aimee Mann's Lost In Space — an album
that is thematically not that far removed from Junkie, but musically
surpasses it in every way known to mankind — a C+.
My own verdict would be that the whole thing is
monotonous but mildly intelligent; musically poor but perfectly honest; conventional
but desperately trying to overcome conventionality, and for all these
counterpoints, first time in this section, I would deal it out a cautious
emotional-rational thumbs up. But
prepare to be bored stiff.
UNPLUGGED (1999)
1) You Learn; 2) Joining You; 3) No Pressure Over Cappuccino;
4) That I Would Be Good;
5) Head Over Feet; 6) Princes Familiar; 7) I Was Hoping; 8) Ironic; 9) These R The
Thoughts; 10) King Of Pain;
11) You Oughta Know;
12) Uninvited.
It is theoretically likeable, this
session. Alas, it does not improve much on the biggest thing it could improve
upon. Considering that Morissette's full-band rock arrangements are one of the
weakest spots on her studio albums, one could hope that getting rid of dreary,
boring «alt-rock» guitars and dehumanized, depressing percussion would make
her material more fresh and exciting. It does not.
If anything, the only reason why Unplugged
could merit consideration is Alanis' curious restraint and even a bit of «delicacy»
that she gives her listeners by not overscreaming, not even on such screamfests
as 'You Oughta Know'. It may not always be evident that she is an excellent
singer when her bratty attitude overshadows her vocal talent, but on Unplugged,
there is no bratty attitude whatsoever. Of course, for some fans that would
only make things more boring.
To comment on the musical aspects of this
session would be missing the point — Morissette's music was never about any
sort of instrumental melodies in the first place, and here, her band is only to
provide a properly atmospheric setting for her seriously self-sustained seance
of soul survival. She only serves a small helping of hits from Pill (I
could easily live without 'Ironic', but three cheers for changing the vocal
melody of the formerly grating chorus), goes heavier on Junkie
material, and introduces three entirely new songs that have passed me by
completely, although 'Princes Familiar' is supposed to be a very important
tune on a personal level.
It's all okay, going by gently and with
relatively little pretense, but in order to really enjoy this, you have to
adore Alanis Morissette as an extraordinary individual with a deeply
idiosyncratic vision rather than a pop performer (for the latter purpose,
studio records will suffice completely). And it is very hard for some of us to
do just that — certainly not with moves so blatantly obvious as choosing, for
your obligatory tribute to your influences, Sting's 'King Of Pain', and
even redoing the hookline as 'I'll
always be queen of pain'. She is so admirably «honest» about everything
she does, I think I'm going to be sick.
First-rate singing, second-rate playing,
thoughtful song selection, moderate hooks on every corner, tortured soul in
abundance, all of this comes together in a depressing thumbs down that the brain had only just time
enough to signal to the heart before lapsing in a coma. I envy you if you have
a greater tolerance level for such sanitized atmosphere.
UNDER RUG SWEPT (2002)
1) 21 Things I Want In A Lover;
2) Narcissus; 3) Hands Clean; 4) Flinch; 5) So Unsexy; 6) Precious Illusions; 7) That Particular Time; 8) A Man; 9) You Owe Me
Nothing In Return; 10) Surrendering;
11) Utopia.
There is A LOT of different words on this
album. Each and every single song, from top to bottom, filled with endless,
endless, endless verbosity, prolixity, garrulity, loquacity. And it is not over
after the last sounds have died down, because there is about half a billion
additional interviews, grandly flashing «Alanis Morissette Talks About Songs
From Under Rug Swept!» at you.
Do not, therefore, make the big mistake of
judging this album based on its lyrics, or even of discussing its lyrics, no
matter how this unbelievable logorrhea goads you into committing it. Confucius
say, «Little man be guided by deep meaning in Alanis Morissette songs, big man
jack off in bathroom instead». I am not saying that all the words here are
necessarily awful; as a third-rate poet, Morissette is improving with each
year, and by now, she can at least make sure that her words will never spoil
the cumulative effect. It is just that their overall quantity and density —
sometimes she almost borders on rapping, so much there is that she needs to
tell you in five seconds' time — may, and will, hide the real value of the
album.
This is her first record without Ballard's
involvement, and, although I was not sure at first, after a few listens I am
convinced that it works better. The arrangements still define «bland», but
there are no conscious attempts at «toughening» the sound by overloading it
with generic «alt-rock» trappings. It looks like she cares about the melodies,
but does not give a damn about dressing them up, relying on any spontaneous
combination of lead instruments and rhythm section that happens to materialize
at any given moment. For a great artist, this would be suicide, but for an
openly mediocre one, this is a very wise decision — one should never
tell a mediocre artist that song so-and-so needs more cowbell. That is one sure
way to spell disaster.
So the electric guitars still sound like shit,
and the rhythm section still sounds like she downloaded most of these tracks
from a South Korean musical site for $0.11 each, but the melodies — in general
— are nice. '21 Things I Want In A Lover' (yes, she lists all of them)
and 'You Owe Me Nothing In Return' are two of the catchiest pop-rockers she
ever put up for us. 'Flinch' is her prettiest acoustic «ditty» so far. 'That
Particular Time' is the kind of pompous, but deeply emotional ballad that Diane
Warren might have written, were she a real human being instead of a devastating
biological weapon that somehow slipped past the Geneva convention. And her
near-falsetto singing on 'Utopia' closes the record on an almost Enya-like note,
awaking the romantic in those of us who are not yet completely jaded and,
perhaps, not even making him regret the awakening.
Of course, the lead single from the album had
to be one of its least impressive tracks — 'Hands Clean', probably because it
has the highest density of words per second (but nothing like a truly catchy
chorus). Maybe some of the critics were impressed, because it gave them so many
points to latch on to, but the public clearly was not, and, anyway, with Under
Rug Swept it became obvious that Alanis' days as a big pop star were
clearly past her: the record made a very brief stay at No. 1, and, up to this
day, has only been certified platinum once (compared to thrice for Junkie
and sixteen times — sic! — for Jagged Little Pill).
I do not think, though, that the reaction came
as a shock or disappointment to Alanis, and it is quite likely that the
results, for her, were quite predictable. There was no huge marketing campaign,
no conscious attempt to «rejuvenate» or «modernize» her image for the masses, not
even a nationwide broadcast duet with Christina Aguilera. This is certainly
mainstream, generic, and accessible stuff, but it does not scream «buy me, I'm
cool!» at the average market-goer, and most people probably bought it because the
memories were still relatively fresh. But fade out the context, and you may
end up like me, thinking of the album as Alanis' strongest mediocre offering to
date and easily giving it a thumbs up,
even despite the sadistic stream of consciousness.
FEAST ON SCRAPS (2002)
1) Fear Of Bliss; 2) Bent For You; 3) Sorry To
Myself; 4) Sister Blister;
5) Offer; 6) Unprodigal Daughter; 7) Simple Together; 8) Purgatorying; 9) Hands
Clean (acoustic).
This is a very short album-addendum; actually,
a bonus EP (yes, today 40 minutes worth of music is supposed to represent the
length of an EP — so much to say, so little to learn) that accompanies Alanis'
live DVD of a performance in Rotterdam from her latest tour. It may be
available separately, but if you are a fan, you will want the DVD anyway, and
if you are not a fan, you will want to donate to the poor instead.
As the title explicitly states, these are
«scraps» — outtakes — from the Under Rug Swept sessions, and this
pretty much says it all. The songs mostly sound the same, convey the same feelings,
press forward the same points, yet are generally worse written. Overall, a
little bleaker, with a bit more emphasis on Alanis' Eastern fetish, bringing
back dots of memories of Junkie, which is not always a bad thing (the
tricky polyphonic arrangements on 'Purgatorying', for insstance, are just
about the most musically complex thing you will ever encounter on an Alanis
album, for instance).
But out of the eight new songs (the ninth one
is an acoustic version of 'Hands Clean'), I have only latched on to 'Sister
Blister', whose catchy chorus slightly transcends the clichés of
alt-rock — only slightly — and 'Offer', a pretty country-pop ballad that could
have been a delicate lowlight on a James Taylor album, or a smash hit on American
Idol if the accompanying tits and ass were of sympathetic shape. But Alanis
is no James Taylor, and as for T&A, those were out of the picture since
1992, so let dogs lie.
I have not watched the DVD myself — it must be
a good treat for the fans, with a decent selection of hits and rarities from
the good years. Without the DVD, the «EP» on its own predictably gets a thumbs down — bear with me, fans and neighbors,
no good man is entitled to deriving joy out of an album of outtakes by Alanis
Morissette, and songs like 'Sorry To Myself' elevate her logorrhoea problem to
brand new snow-covered heights of oxygen deprivation.
SO-CALLED CHAOS (2004)
1) Eight Easy Steps; 2) Out Is
Through; 3) Excuses; 4) Doth I Protest Too Much; 5) Knees Of My Bees; 6)
So-Called Chaos; 7) Not All Me; 8) This Grudge; 9) Spineless; 10) Everything.
This is only slightly weaker than Under Rug
Swept, running out of hooks somewhere around the middle, but, otherwise, it
is exactly what we have now come to expect from the Queen of generic alt-rock:
boring arrangements, honest verbosity, and non-annoyingly catchy choruses.
However, before we proceed, I must, from a transparently philological point of
view, object to the title of song number four.
Dear Alanis: it is very nice that you know your
Shakespeare, but, for your information, 'doth I protest' is seriously
ungrammatical, since 'doth' is, by all means, third person singular, never
first. And if you are actually aware of that, then you are either insulting the
intelligence of your audiences, or presuming that your basic audiences are
unintelligent in the first place. In the latter case, you could have considered
using your songs as «edutainment». How about singing something like 'Do I
protest too much? Say 'doth I' and be out of touch with classic English grammar
as such!' Surely this would have been very progressive and refreshing compared
with inviting your audiences to take one more traditional walk in the depths of
your soul.
Now that I have gotten that off my chest, 'Doth
I Protest Too Much' is a nice song (I like how she starts relying more and more
on Byrdsey guitar jangle), and so are the loud rockers 'Eight Easy Steps',
'Excuses', and 'Knees Of My Bees', particularly the latter, continuing to
combine grunge guitars with Eastern influences, but in a more upbeat manner
than previously.
Later on, the album starts sagging under the
weight of unfocused ballads, and the rockers start repeating the same
atmospheres and even melodies — e. g., 'Spineless' does not say anything that
'Excuses' have not already said. It is also very hard to understand why the
album's worst song ('Everything') had been selected as the lead-off single. The
singing is passionate, the guitars shine and glisten, the atmosphere is
suitably anthemic and confessional at the same time, and, presumably, the song
meant a lot to Morissette, but it has no commercial value whatsoever (and the
melody is weak, so it may have little artistic value either). 'Excuses' and
'Knees Of My Bees' would have worked far more convincingly.
It does put a stop to criticisms about Alanis'
«selling out» that were occasionally voiced by mainstream reviewers, just
because, on the whole, So-Called Chaos is «lighter» and «livelier» and
«happier» than its predecessors — at least, that is what people used to call
it, seeing as how Alanis had finally overcome her personal problems and
settled into a (relatively) quiet family life. I am not sure. I do not see how
it is at all possible for Alanis to «sell out» — unless she reverts to being the
Alanis of 1992 — and I did not see that much darkness on Under Rug Swept,
either. Besides, what do we care whether she releases a «dark» or a «light» album?
She is just not all that interesting as a person to make me involved in her yin
and yang. She does write catchy melodies, and she seems like a nice, honest,
moderately intelligent little lady. What else is in it for me? Nothing.
Thumbs up, unless you insist on analyzing her lyrics —
but I have made a solemn oath not to pay attention to what exactly she is going
to teach me «in eight easy steps». I do like the line 'I could be an asshole of
the grandest kind', though. That's one perfect way to initiate your lead-off
single.
FLAVORS OF ENTANGLEMENT (2008)
1) Citizen Of The Planet; 2)
Underneath; 3) Straitjacket; 4) Versions Of Violence; 5) Not As We; 6) In
Praise Of The Vulnerable Man; 7) Moratorium; 8) Torch; 9) Giggling Again For No
Reason; 10) Tapes; 11) Incomplete; 12*) Orchid; 13*) The Guy Who Leaves; 14*)
Madness; 15*) Limbo No More; 16*) On The Tequila.
After a four-year, relatively secluded, break,
only interrupted by the release of Jagged Little Pill Acoustic in 2005
(which is more or less what it is, an unplugged revision of her fading moment
of glory, and hardly deserves a special review), Alanis has returned to the
studio in an attempt to update and polish her image. With an entirely new team
of musicians, led by producer Guy Sigsworth and «programmer guitarist» Andy
Page, she is ready to strive for hipness once again.
Her team's understanding of hipness, however,
means basically one thing: make the album a technophile's dream. Half, if not
more, of the songs are stuffed with «look at us, we are so sci-fi» electronic
farts, and some are driven by mid-tempo techno beats — all of a sudden, Alanis
declares that she actually loves to dance (yes, we know, Ms. Morissette, we
did see you in those compromising videos from 1992) and that no dance fan will
be disappointed with her new record.
On paper, a combination of pretentious lyrics,
confessional attitude, and techno beats coming from the likes of Alanis sounds
like the proverbial recipé for disaster. Think Madonna's Ray Of Light
or something in the neighbourhood. Surprise: it is perfectly okay, no
better and no worse than the average A. M. offering of the past ten years. The
synthesized farts and programmed loops never detract from her standard hooks,
in fact, they are somewhat refreshing after the uniform, monotonous
production style of Under Rug Swept and So-Called Chaos.
In fact, the ugliest moment on the record is
not even one centered on Electronica: it is ʽ(Bring) On The Tequilaʼ,
a dreadfully silly, campy attempt to write a song in the «party pop» genre of
the latest brand of idiot teen idols (Miley Cyrus, etc.) — I hope the
intention was primarily parodic, but you can never tell with artists of
Morissette's level, prone to chronic lapses of taste. Fortunately, it is only
available as the final track on the «deluxe» 2-disc edition of the album, and
need not infuriate the tastes of the average enlightened listener.
As for the techno-pop, ʽStraitjacketʼ
does suffer from being way too overtly commercial, but the electronification of
her raga tendencies works better on ʽCitizen Of The Planetʼ, and even
gets close to the level of intimidation on ʽVersions Of Violenceʼ (which
I always keep hearing as ʽVirgins Of Violenceʼ — a great title for a
cutting-edge animé series, I think, and the song would do great as the
title track). Her gift for vocal hooks has not gone anywhere, and the
production team never tries to shadow them, no matter how many side effects
they cram in the mix.
Note, though, that once again the singles from
the album were some of the least commercial tracks. ʽUnderneathʼ does
have a danceable chorus, but its trendiness is strictly limited to ornamental
electronic flourishes (that, moreover, seem to be played on an old Moog synth —
trendy my ass!); ʽIn Praise Of The Vulnerable Manʼ is a catchy
mid-tempo folk-rocker that failed to chart completely, maybe because of the
awful title and lyrics (no man would buy a single with such a title ever,
no woman who's got a man would buy such a single under the risk of losing the
man, and no woman who hasn't got a man would buy it — because what's the
fucking point?); and ʽNot As Weʼ is a piano ballad, and not a very
good one at that (try as she might, Alanis will never become a Tori Amos, so
why even bother?).
This is odd: even as we see Alanis trying to
break back into the stream of public conscience, she is at the same time
intentionally sabotaging her commercial fortunes. It is non-trivial, and, from
a certain point of view, respectable; but my taste-o-meter still goes low on
the mercury level, indicating that Ms. Morissette's ambitions are still the
same — to be perceived as a Soul-Baring Serious Artist rather than the
averagely pleasing pop songwriter that she really is. I cannot even reach a
judgement, what with the brain and heart departments locked in a stalemate over
the thumbs' position. In any case, if you are a committed fan, you will love Flavors
Of Entanglement; if you are not, the album probably only deserves a «curio
listen».
HAVOC AND BRIGHT LIGHTS (2012)
1) Guardian; 2) Woman Down; 3)
'Til You; 4) Celebrity; 5) Empathy; 6) Lens; 7) Spiral; 8) Numb; 9) Havoc; 10)
Win And Win; 11) Receive; 12) Edge Of Evolution; 13*) Big Sur; 14*) Guru; 15*)
Permission.
We all usually prefer to snobbishly dismiss
sales figures as irrelevant to what we like and what we hate, but «irrelevant»
is not quite the same as «meaningless». Look at Alanis and the curve of her US
sales, for instance: Jagged Little Pill
— over 14 mln. copies sold; Junkie —
less than 3 mln.; Under Rug Swept —
around 1 mln.; So-Called Chaos —
less than 500,000; Flavors Of
Entanglement — approximately 230,000; Havoc
And Bright Lights — 54,000 copies so far. Look up «exponential behavior» in
any mathematical encyclopaedia, and you will probably see a picture of Alanis
grinning at you in one of her trademark toothy styles.
What is really funny, though, is that I
actually relistened to Jagged Little
Pill right before taking a plunge into Alanis' latest «commercial dwarf»,
just for a quick memory refresh, and God help me, I just can't hear the crucial difference. Yes, a lot of anger,
tension, paranoia has been lost, dissipated, scattered over the years, which is
only natural after seventeen years. But come now, haven't all those fans from
1995 — people for whom Jagged Little
Pill mattered so much, all these 14 million Americans and 20 more million
people worldwide? — haven't they, too, grown older, so that they
could follow their teenage idol through all of her phases and stages, breaking
down when she breaks down, straightening up when she straightens up? What's up
with loyalty and fidelity these days, anyway?
Not only that, but Havoc And Bright Lights mostly received disparaging critical reviews
— seems even worse than Flavors Of
Entanglement — with people complaining about almost everything. Too
hookless, too happy, too overproduced, too archaic, too boring, something that
I just don't get — it's as if «she used to be fine and now she sucks», when in
reality there has never been any insurmountable gap between any of her albums.
Screw the whole Zeitgeist thing: Alanis is not a very good artist, but she is an artist, want it or not, not just
some helpless carrier of the supernatural spirit of 1995, randomly selected in
some heavenly lottery.
And there are some good songs on this album, no
more and no less than on the previous one. To be honest, the production does
not bother me at all. She retains her producer from Flavors (Guy Sigsworth), but they go a little bit easier on the
electronics and a little heavier on the guitars this time, and although the
album doth suffer from overcompression, the sonic textures are at least varied
— some of the arrangements lean towards traditional grungy alt-rock, some have
ringing folk-rock patterns, some are electronically processed, some are
acoustic, basically, I just don't mind: in any case, the instrumental
backdrops, as usual, only serve as backgrounds for Alanis' vocal hooks, and
these particular ones, at the very least, aren't annoying.
And what about these hooks? Well, I don't see
why long-time fans of Alanis should turn away from them. Something like
ʽGuardianʼ is very much Alanis — quiet soulful beginning, exploding
into loud ecstasy as the chorus is being hammered into your brain, only this
time, it is a little confusing because there is no hateful madness attached:
now, screaming "I'll be your keeper for life as your guardian", she
is just giving a lively oath of faith, not cursing the hell out of us all. Yes,
this might disappoint those who'd rather see her rail and rant. But it's a good
chorus all the same, or maybe I'm just growing old.
In fact, the tendency seems to be this: the
more she tries to whip herself up into an aggressive posture, the more
embarrassing it looks, and vice versa. ʽWoman Downʼ positions itself
as a feminist anthem, but not only does it have some of the silliest
«feminist» lyrics ever committed to tape by, er, a formerly major artist
("calling all woman haters, we've lowered the bar on the behavior that we
will take" — what's that
supposed to mean?), it is also set to an equally silly, jumpy pattern
punctuated by merry synth whoops, in a befuddling nod to those early dance pop
days when "I wanna feel your love!" was about as deep as this lady
would go. Lesson not learned: you don't
combine serious (if clumsily stated) messaging with this kind of music.
Another flat pancake is ʽCelebrityʼ,
where the lyrics are a bit more coherent and, perhaps, could even — in theory —
touch the senses of all the "tattooed sexy dancing monkeys" to whom
it is addressed, but the spark is just not there: try as she might, she cannot
reach the proper level of hatred or derision for all the "wheels, heels
and vintage Gucci"... which might, after all, have something to do with
the fact that the lady is not above a vintage Gucci herself (just google «Alanis
Morrissette and Gucci» and look at all the nice, fine images). Hmm, hmm.
Anyway, cut to the chase: when she is being who
she is on this record — a settled down family lady with a small kid and a happy
home in Los Angeles — there are no big problems. ʽTil Youʼ is an
old-school adult contemporary ballad with pretty voice modulation, soulfulness,
and humility; it had me even thinking of late-period ABBA for a moment out
there, which may not be a coincidence because, for instance, the
double-tracked vocals on the chorus of ʽLensʼ also sound suspiciously
Swedish in origin. ʽSpiralʼ is speedy, optimistic and catchy, even if
its ringing guitars and swirling synths sort of cancel out each other in an
overcompression bout — but after a couple of listens, the chorus gets
head-stuck anyway.
And on and on and on, these songs are
surprisingly even — there are very few of her «Eastern Darkness» trademarks
(although ʽNumbʼ, with some of that modality and an atmospheric
violin part to boot, is at least as good as anything on Junkie), for the most part it's this very even, not too pretentious
semi-alt-, semi-folk-pop with stable emotions, credible sentimentality and occasional
hooks. Not too clever — remember who we are dealing with — not too dumb. Little
to love, but absolutely nothing to hate. Plus, her voice seems to be improving in clarity and range as the
years go by — some of the notes hit on ʽTil Youʼ are downright
gorgeous.
After some consideration, I go with a thumbs up,
as I'd go with any not-untalented person being relatively honest with herself
and her listeners (we'll agree to overlook the Gucci fiasco for once).
Essentially, these days Alanis Morissette just sounds more basically human, so
who the heck cares about a stale old Zeitgeist from almost two decades ago,
anyway? Good for you, 54,000 loyal fans who bought this album — it is hardly
likely that I will ever want to revisit it, but I certainly don't regret the
time spent on trying to understand why I never got around to hating it, or to
getting bored out of my skull with it.
FACELIFT (1990)
1) We Die Young; 2) Man In The Box; 3) Sea Of
Sorrow; 4) Bleed The Freak; 5) I Can't Remember; 6) Love, Hate, Love; 7) It
Ain't Like That; 8) Sunshine; 9) Put You Down; 10) Confusion; 11) I Know
Somethin' ('Bout You); 12) Real Thing.
On beginner level, one could define grunge as
«pop melodies, punk attitude, Black Sabbath tone» and mostly hit it right. But
Alice In Chains, despite embracing this aesthetics wholesale, actually had
roots in Eighties' metal and funk — roots that went back at least four or five
years — and this gave them a mature, professional edge over most competition.
Vocalist Layne Staley and guitarist Jerry Cantrell were just as pissed-off and
fucked-up as Kurt Cobain, just as talented, but they also knew how to throw
around their skills so as to consistently come out with some of the scariest
music to ever come out of the pop music scene.
Facelift, the band's stunning debut, is as much death metal as it is grunge — in
fact, Cantrell has always stated that the band was primarily metal — but
certainly not «fantasy-death» metal, not a corny dramatization of some
semi-deranged artist's brain damage, rather a faithful depiction of whatever
was going around, from Staley's personal drug experiences to observations on
true life atrocities ('We Die Young', for instance, is said to reflect
Cantrell's impressions of ten-year old drug pushers on the streets of Seattle).
So what happened, exactly? Nothing much. One
fine day, hair metal woke up with a strange desire to take an honest peek
behind its made-to-order screen of hedonism and irony — to look at the other
side of all those carnal and spiritual pleasures it had been celebrating for so
long now, it even forgot when it all started. That auspicious day, hair metal
became Alice In Chains.
Facelift gives no respite: one heavy rocker after another, sometimes moving on
slow and painful, like junkies crawling on the floor during their last moments
of consciousness, sometimes relentlessly, steadily mid-tempo, like the hand of
Death reaching over the junkies — not too slow, not too fast, but just right —
and inavoidably. Sometimes Cantrell softens the proceedings with lighter,
acoustic-based passages, but this never changes the general depressing
atmosphere. As for Staley, he only knows two moods: The Growl, which will send
little kids straight under their beds, and The Moan, which will send the
neighbors dialing the drug squad number. Do we want more? What for? They would
not be honest, and honesty is Facelift's banner.
With several years of previous collective
experience, a fresh, original vibe, and songwriting, singing, and playing
talent a-plenty, it would be surprising if Facelift had plenty of bad
songs to go along with it, and it does not. The three major stunners, all of
which were hit singles, are tacked at the beginning — 'We Die Young', embodying
all the basics of worldly evil in a compact 2:30 package; 'Man In The Box',
the song that Cantrell acknowledges as the first «true Alice In Chains» song
the band wrote, and which also has the most achingly overwhelming invocation of
the Lord's name I have ever heard in pop; and 'Sea Of Sorrow', whose point is
essentially to proclaim that there is no stronger thing in the world than total
suicidal desperation. 'I live tomorrow / You I will not follow / As you wallow
/ In a sea of sorrow' — strange that the song has never played a part in high
school shoot-outs. Probably too smart for that.
If you have the strength to sit out everything,
you will later on be treated to Cantrell's acoustic capacities ('I Can't
Remember'), a couple tracks that sit closer to their hair metal beginnings
('Sunshine'), and some funky numbers that are almost danceable ('Put You
Down', 'I Know Somethin'), if you like dancing with ghosts, that is. The
«sleeper» of the album is its longest number, the dramatic aria of 'Love, Hate,
Love', a death metal ballad with Staley giving it his all (and he is a pretty
powerful singer); at first, it may be somewhat tiresome to watch it draw its
weighty, poisonous bulk over your living room (I should certainly know — I
trashed it in my original review. Silly silly), but eventually the fumes will
sink in, and, for safety reasons, I would certainly recommend them over their
real-world equivalent (a 24-hour stay in an opium den or something to the same
power).
Heavy with a flair, honest with an
intelligence, Facelift is one of Seattle's finest hours, and will always
remain a thumbs up record as long as
there are enough thumbs to go with it. It is nothing less than amazing that
they actually managed to top it with their next offering.
DIRT (1992)
1) Them Bones; 2) Dam That
River; 3) Rain When I Die; 4) Down In A Hole; 5) Sickman; 6) Rooster; 7) Junkhead; 8) Dirt; 9) God
Smack; 10) Untitled (Iron Gland); 11) Hate To Feel; 12) Angry Chair; 13) Would?
Intellect, as soon as we acquire it to a
sufficient degree, tells us that the ultimate form of «scary» is «subtle»; that
properly done «suspense» is far more nerve-wrecking than in-yer-face horror and
brutality; and that this works for all sorts of art, from literature to movies
to music. Exceptions to this rule are few and in between — particularly in the
world of rock'n'roll, where one oddball album by madman Syd Barrett can easily
outscare the entire output of any death metal band. But exceptions do occur,
and, whenever I think of them, Dirt by Alice In Chains is the one
example that springs to mind quicker than any other one.
Digging deep under the surface of Facelift,
you could still smell traces of the lightweight hedonism of Eighties' metal,
especially in its funkier numbers. On Dirt, Cantrell and Staley wipe
these out to the last tiny spot. If there is one second of «light» on this
record, it is a small forty-second long interlude that now goes under the title
'Iron Gland' (it used to be altogether anonymous) — a collage of heavy riffs,
shouts, and noises that sort of pays tribute to/mocks Black Sabbath's 'Iron
Man'. Equally as heavy and brutal as the rest of the record, it is
intentionally silly. And nothing else on Dirt is silly.
At the forefront of Dirt lies the drug
problem: around half of the songs deal with it explicitly or implicitly, with
Cantrell contributing the gloomy melodies and Staley describing his addiction
with lyrics that may not be great poetry, but nor do they need to be great
poetry when placed in their particular context. For instance, 'what in God's
name have you done — stick your arm for some real fun!' has little poetic might
all by itself, but is deeply empowered through Layne's delivery — somehow you
know he is not singing about somebody else — and Cantrell's nightmarish,
«wobbly» wah-wah riff, the perfect musical impersonation of all that horrid
muck circulating through your blood.
The most evil irony lies in how catchy all this
stuff is. Twelve songs with excellent rock melodies — memorable riffs, catchy
choruses, suitable song length, moderate amount of complexity. If only those
were run through a different framework, Brill Building might have been glad to
keep some of those. My only minor complaint is that, the farther we proceed, the
more obvious is the band's way too heavy reliance on Black Sabbath and Zeppelin:
the title track, for instance, borrows parts of its melody from 'Electric
Funeral', and Staley's 'Hate To Feel' reworks the famous descending riff from
'Dazed And Confused'. Nevertheless, these are really reworkings rather than
straightforward rip-offs, and what can there be against a little variation on a
good theme?
Launching straight into battle with another
short, compact (2:30) single, cheerfully entitled 'Them Bones' where Staley
impressively plays the Hamlet of the grunge generation, the band proceeds to
box the listener into the corner with one brutal punch after another. 'Dam That
River', written by Cantrell after getting into a fight with drummer Sean
Kinney, is essentially about venting one's frustration, but I would certainly
hate someone venting his frustration over me with the kind of force contained
in the song's riffs — this is some of the meanest, leanest, earth-rattling-est
riffage ever put on record by anyone. The wah-wah riff of 'Rain When I Die' is
the purest distillation of evil, and 'Sickman' was the result of Staley asking
Cantrell to write him 'the sickest tune he could write' — personally, I think
'Rain When I Die' is sicker, but that is just a matter of opinion.
The album does have its moments of silence and
subtlety that also work beautifully: 'Rooster', beginning with mildly
psychedelic phasing on the acoustic guitars and falsetto harmonies, only gradually
develops into a disturbed, terrifying picture of Vietnamese hell. Not that one
requires to know that Cantrell wrote the song about his father's wartime
experiences; it could as well refer to Staley himself, because, as he wails
'here comes The Rooster — you know he ain't gonna die!' through your speakers, it
is possible to get the feeling that, perhaps, despite all the nightmarish atmosphere,
there may be hope ahead. Is he, or ain't he? But then the very next song
is 'Junkhead': 'What's my drug of choice? — Well, what have you got?' No, he
probably ain't.
Dirt may be «metal» or «grunge», but, first and foremost, it is simply one
of the Nineties' greatest works of pure art, a straightforward depiction of
inner torture and helplessness, an attempt at a screaming public confession
that sends modesty and subtlety packing — with no regrets. Not everyone is
going to like it. Some will shy away from its brutality under the pretext of
disliking heavy metal in general. Others will want to denounce its honesty as
banal self-pitying. Some may say that it serves a purely pragmatic purpose of
turning people off drugs; others may say that people are just as likely to be
turned onto drugs, seduced by Staley's romantic torture. And they are
all welcome to say it: Dirt is a record to be talked about, to be discussed
for as long as possible, and the more controversy it stirs, the better it is.
And yes, a big thumbs up from the very
bottom of my conscience, which has never had any problems with drugs but which
has been forced to relate through the sheer unprecedented power of the album.
JAR OF FLIES (1994)
1) Rotten Apple; 2) Nutshell;
3) I Stay Away; 4) No Excuses; 5) Whale & Wasp; 6) Don't Follow; 7) Swing
On This.
As early as the fall of 1991, the band
demonstrated their flexibility by recording an EP called Sap that contained
five acoustic songs — originally intended as demos for subsequent
metallization, but then deemed self-sufficient as they were. (Technically, they
were not entirely acoustic, with at least some electric guitar overdubs, but
all the backbones remained acoustic). After Dirt, they decided to
return to this practice, and the next EP, Jar Of Flies, already had
seven songs, some of them lengthy enough to guarantee a running length over
thirty minutes. For some reason, although this would seem an utterly natural
thing to do, Sap and Jar Of Flies have yet to see a single-CD
re-release, which would most likely prompt the curious music lover into adding
it to his collection and gaining a new type appreciation for the band.
None of the songs are as immediately striking
as the blitzkrieg of Dirt, but there is no reason why they should be.
This is, finally, the moment when one should put some subtlety back into the
proceedings, replace nervous breakdown with melancholia, follow the terrifying
epileptic fit of Dirt with the quiet recuperative depression of Jar
Of Flies. Not that things will get any easier; not a chance, as the very
first track, suitably called 'Rotten Apple', tells you that 'Innocence is over,
ignorance is spoken, confidence is broken, sustenance is stolen, arrogance is
potent'. They will just get... subtler. Think of the difference between putting
a bullet through your brain and lazily and hazily gazing as the blood drips
from your freshly opened veins. Whichever scenario looks more pacifying and
relaxing to you?
Now, to bring you back from these unsettling
thoughts, Jar Of Flies may be the best spot to check out Jerry
Cantrell's amazing musical versatility. Some of this sounds a hell of a lot
like James Taylor (!), e. g. the soft Fido-on-the-porchstep country-western
rumination of 'Don't Follow' (actually sung by Jerry himself instead of Layne,
giving the song extra accessibility). Some sounds like lounge jazz, e. g.
'Swing On This', propelled by new bassist Mike Inez's traditionalist rhythmics
— before it starts justifying the title and mutates from 'swing' to nasty hard
rock in its mid-section. And some sounds like mid-Seventies British progressive
rock à la Camel and the like, e. g. the instrumental 'Whale &
Wasp' with its deep, painful guitar moaning.
'Rotten Apple', occupying more space than
anything else on here and, thus, intuitively understood as the album's major
piece, is itself enhanced with a talkbox effect — which is, fortunately, just
as creepy as it is on Pink Floyd records and not at all as silly as it is on
Peter Frampton ones — and represents the perfect example of creative
collaboration between Inez, responsible for the song's morose bassline pivot,
Cantrell, fleshing it out with the ugly, but eerie talkbox, dark folk acoustic
rhythms, and a set of other warped electric effects, and Staley, who somehow
comes up with the perfect lyrics for it all: 'Eat of the apple, so young / I'm
crawling back to start'. Come to think of it, not that we know how old Adam was
himself when he tasted the fruit, so perhaps it is a bit too presumptious for
Layne to equate his sins with those of the forefather — but it is not as if he
sounded unocnvincing or something.
Jar Of Flies sold pretty well upon release, but, partly due to its shortness, partly
due to its «atypical» portrayal of the band, has not managed to accumulate the
same classic status as Facelift and Dirt. No surprise: in between
the flashy and the subtle, we always tend to drift towards the flashy — at
first, at least. But each and every fan of good music should check it out, not
to mention that many people who cannot stand heavy brutal rock because of
blood group incompatibility will find Jar Of Flies a much more natural
way to appreciate and enjoy the greatness of Alice in Chains. Thumbs up from every direction — what a brave,
scary, talented band.
ALICE IN CHAINS (1995)
1) Grind; 2) Brush Away; 3)
Sludge Factory; 4) Heaven Beside You; 5) Head Creeps; 6) Again; 7) Shame In
You; 8) God Am; 9) So Close; 10) Nothin' Song; 11) Frogs; 12) Over Now.
Sometimes lovingly called Tripod by the
fans due to its cheerful album cover, depicting a world-weary dog with three
legs on the front cover. For that matter, there is also a man with three
legs on the back, but most people prefer to pay attention to the dog — probably
since the dog fits in so well with the overall mood of the record, whereas the
three-legged man only adds confusion.
And that mood cannot even be called
«depressing». «Depression», after all, is a sort of human condition, an
emotional state that can be transmitted from one person to another or, in
exceptional cases, transmutated into an art form. The songs on Alice In
Chains, on the other hand, go way beyond this, in that they are purged
of emotion, kind of like the actors in a Robert Bresson movie had been purged
of acting by their director. If Facelift and particularly Dirt
represented the agonizing stage, the victim lashing and thrashing in
meaningless, but terrifying, fury, Tripod is the paralysis stage — there
is still some occasional limb twitching, but mostly the victim just stares into
space with beady eyes, hardly capable of caring about anything any longer.
Genre-wise, the record has frequently been
categorized as a form of «sludge
metal», an association that is
hard to bypass considering that one of the songs is even called 'Sludge
Factory'. I am nowhere near close to being an expert on sludge metal, but
certainly Tripod bears only a superficial resemblance to the likes of
Eyehategod and their brethren, due to Cantrell trading in the metallic crunch
of his essentially pop riffs for a more complex, less accessible mix of
crackling, noisy rhythm tracks and downer vibratos. But the proverbial sludge
metal I have heard, ranging from truly impressive to utterly corny, makes you
want to thrash, break, and kill (in the best of cases — the very jerks who are
playing it). Tripod, however, makes you want to be thrashed,
broken, and killed, and the sooner the better.
I cannot bring myself to memorize most of the songs,
even though some are quite long ('Sludge Factory' clocks in at 7:12, and
'Frogs' overdoes it by one more minute). Yet I cannot forget the overall
effect. In terms of absolute heaviness, these melodies do not manage to beat Dirt;
but the length, and the «droning» effect of most of them, can wreck the
listener's nerves far quicker. And if the songs proper do not do their job
well, the extended codas will quickly mop up whatever traces of life are still
preserved. The creepiest of these is the doom-drenched ending of 'Frogs', replete
with calm, creepy, ad-libbed delirium from Staley: '...off the wall I
scraped... you... I gotta wake... it comes this way... to drown this ache...
hate... never gonna fuck with me again... man's own clean slate... don't fuck
with me again... makes your eyes dilate... makes you shake...'
Actually, Layne does not even sing all that
much; most of the time he just recites the lyrics, and when he does sing, he
usually goes for the simplest notes and patterns, or sings in unison with
Cantrell. But it is not as if he were disinvolved: on the contrary, he wrote
most of the lyrics, and plays just as central a part on the record as before.
He simply plays himself — the Layne Staley of this record is probably very much
like the real Layne Staley who was, at the same time, entering the last phase
of his living nightmare. Even the few songs where he tries to raise his voice,
such as the powerful 'Again', it is like witnessing the helpless anger of
somebody bound hand and foot, unable to make a single movement and simply going
crazy in the head.
Few people will want to listen to this record
frequently. To be able to use it as background music, one would have to be an
experienced neurosurgeon, and as for concentrated listening, once is enough to
understand its power and significance, twice is enough to prove to yourself that
your nervous system is working fine, but thrice will be pushing it. It does
have a few «breathers» placed in strategic points. The ballad 'Heaven Beside
You', continuing the softer line of Cantrell's art as seen before on Jar Of
Flies, is beautiful, and the album does not close with the death rattle of
'Frogs', but rather with the light, catchy pop-rock of 'Over Now', with Staley
offering a half-hearted consolation to the listener: 'Yeah, it's over now, but
I can breathe somehow... Guess it's over now, but I seem alive somehow'. Not
for long, Layne, not for long.
Tripod does not, and should not, exist on its own; it is a fitting conclusion
for the trilogy that began with the battle between life and death on Facelift,
continued with death triumphant on Dirt, and now suitably ends with a
detailed gloating over the coffins. But each part of the trilogy performed its
duties as best as it could, and even if Tripod is not the most alluring
part of it — how could it even hope to be? — it is the perfect conclusion, and
the heart of the listener can grieve over it with the same passion with which
the brain is able to rejoice at its marvelous conception and execution. Thumbs up, no question about it.
UNPLUGGED (1996)
1) Nutshell; 2) Brother; 3) No Excuses; 4) Sludge Factory; 5) Down In A Hole; 6) Angry Chair; 7) Rooster; 8) Got Me Wrong; 9) Heaven Beside You; 10) Would; 11) Frogs; 12) Over Now; 13) Killer Is Me.
The popular music scene presents you with
plenty of opportunities to hear and watch dead people perform, but Alice In
Chains' Unplugged probably takes the cake. It is a recording worth
owning, but it does not produce nearly as strong an impression without the
image of Layne Staley's blood-shot eyes blankly staring into space. Emotions
still run wild deep within him, and his voice is as powerful at expressing them
as before, but he has no ability whatsoever to display them visually, singing
from within a sealed sarcophagus. That, my friends, is truly scary.
It is not too clear why the band agreed to do
the MTV ritual in the first place. They held no tour to support Tripod —
Layne was clearly indisposed — and the idea was probably that if Nirvana could
have gotten away with something like that, why not Alice? Particularly since
the band was no foe to acoustic music, having already released two almost
completely acoustic EPs. They do, in fact, play two songs from Sap and
two from Jar Of Flies — but then it would have been boring and
predictable had they simply decided to stick to their original acoustic
material, so they try to be more creative by rearranging some heavy numbers as
well.
It all works. The songs may lose their crunch,
but not a single one loses its point. One could guess the sludge metal of Tripod
would be impossible to reforge in a distortion-free manner — one would be
wrong, because 'Sludge Factory' and 'Frogs' trudge along with the same sense of
doom (the only problem with the former is that Layne forgets some of the lyrics
and they have to end it about three minutes too early), just not as heavy on
the ear. Which, by the way, makes Unplugged the perfect choice to
introduce Alice In Chains to people with zero tolerance for heavy metal — not
sure if it is possible to make them perform the transition to Dirt from
then on, but it is at least one more opportunity to spread the word about the
genius of this band.
The centerpoint, both chronologically and
metaphorically, is, I think, the inspired performance of 'Rooster'. For the
most part, they stay away from their most aggressive rockers — no 'Them Bones'
or 'We Die Young' or 'Godsmack'; 'Rooster' is the closest they get to their
standard heights of fury, and Layne's opening 'Ain't found a way to kill me
yet...' tingles my spine every time I hear it. There goes something big and
pretentious, something formally non-related to the singer's problems, but if we
did not have the correct information that the song was written about Jerry
Cantrell's dad's Vietnam experience, would there be a single chance of us not
associating it with Layne's own plight? In fact, even now that we have
the information, does it not sound like it is all about Staley? 'Seems every
path leads me to nowhere'? Vietnam my ass. Watch the video, look at this guy
taking it. There's death in his voice, death in his eyes — his own
death. It's terrifying, and yet there is something diabolically seductive about
all this. Maybe no one would like to go like Layne Staley — decomposing
from overdosing — but quite a few people would subconsciously want to be
like Layne Staley on that stage, hypnotically drilling the lines of 'Rooster'
into the ears of a (sometimes visibly shaken) audience.
Correcting the balance a little, let us not
forget that Staley is not the only stage presence. Cantrell plays excellent
guitar throughout, with the additional help of second guitarist Scott Olson,
and Mike Inez lays down strong basslines as well as injects a little humor in
the proceedings: the video shows the inscription 'Friends Don't Let Friends Get
Friends Haircuts' on his bass, most probably an amicable stab at Metallica,
and he also plays the intro to 'Enter Sandman' at one point — for no particular
reason.
This may not be essential Alice In Chains
listening, but its importance is not merely historical (as in, «the last Alice
In Chains album with Staley still alive», etc.); it builds up their acoustic
legacy and it gives you the band on a more intimate level, which, in the light
of Staley's condition, turns into a strange twist on a spiritual séance.
A deranged thumbs up.
BLACK GIVES WAY TO BLUE (2009)
1) All Secrets Known; 2) Check My Brain; 3) Last
Of My Kind; 4) Your Decision; 5) A Looking In View; 6) When The Sun Rose Again;
7) Acid Bubble; 8) Lesson
Learned; 9) Take Her Out; 10) Private Hell; 11) Black Gives Way To Blue.
Staley's tragic, but more or less predictable
drug-related demise in 2002 seemed to have sealed Alice In Chains' future. Not
that they really needed one: with Tripod, they had pretty much said all
they had to say — and, besides, Layne had already been properly dead ever since
that album's release, as can be easily seen on the video for Unplugged.
Accordingly, Cantrell, still very much alive and musically active, concentrated
on his own solo career. For a while.
A few years after Layne's death, however, it somehow
turned out that the remaining band members sort of missed each other, and this
led to a series of reunion concerts with various friends invited as temporary
lead vocalists. One of these turned out to be William DuVall, singer and guitarist
of Comes With The Fall, a minor hard rock outfit from Atlanta — and, seeing as
how he was able to invoke Staley's spirit better than the rest, one thing led
to another, until, at the tail end of the decade, the reformed band
unexpectedly found itself in the studio releasing new material under the name
of Alice of Chains.
Formally, I suppose, they have a right to do
that. After all, Cantrell was not only one of the founding members, but he
wrote ninety percent of the music and a good share of the lyrics, not to mention
being responsible for most of the band's musical evolution. So, if Black
Gives Way To Blue does not sound anything like Dirt or Tripod,
this does not imply that the first thing to do is run to the office and change
the name. Besides, it does sound closer to Dirt than Sgt. Pepper
sounds to Please Please Me.
But we all have our rights, don't we? They
have a right to keep calling themselves Alice In Chains — and I have a right to
proclaim that this album is a pile of dreck. Add to this your, the reader's,
right to follow this up by saying that I am an idiot that should go back to his
Barry Manilow collection, and we have all done a great job of asserting our
individual freedom and making the world a happy, progressive place.
In all honesty, Black Gives Way To Blue
is a fine, subtle title, but I'd rather prefer it didn't. The band does do
everything possible to ensure that the record is not simply an exercise
in nostalgia, nor is it a commercial trap or a dishonest cash-in on the
respectable band name. The music is brutally heavy; from a technical point —
heavier than Dirt, and undoubtedly much louder. If seen from that point
of view, progression is obvious. Yet the musical structures themselves are unfocused,
going for atmosphere rather than original melodicity. Where Jerry comes up with
a really good riff, he rams it into the ground for about five or six minutes,
until you start breathing it out like tobacco smoke; and where the songs are
shorter, he usually does not come up with a really good riff, no matter
how hard I try to convince myself that he does.
I think we need not go much further than the
first track to have this understood. The three chords that open the song, you
are going to hear a lot of them — they do not go away until the song clocks in
at 4:42, and, although there is more stuff happening melodically in between,
the backbone of the performance is more boring than any single
Alice In Chains song from the band's glory days. A fine way to start your new
album where you are going to have something to prove!
If Tripod could be, with reservations,
pigeonholed as «sludge metal», Black Gives Way To Blue is probably
closer to «stoner rock» — hypnotic, mid-tempo songs that roll along in a loud,
aggressive musical haze, all deep heavy drones and wave-like power chords.
That's all right, as long as the haze has a face, that is, can be distinguished
from a million other similar hazes. But somehow, somewhere, Cantrell just seems
to have lost it. There are occasional flashes of the old genius, but most of
them have to do with punch rather than atmosphere: for instance, at 2:43 into
'Acid Bubble', when that chugging, crushing riff emerges from under the rubble
and gives you a serious jolt — only to disappear back into the rubble a few
seconds later.
The greatest, most active disappointment,
however, one that I believe may be trigerring the rest of them, is the singing.
To put it bluntly, there is no singing on the record. None whatsoever.
None of the songs are instrumentals, and yet it would perhaps have been better,
had they all been instrumentals. Lead vocals are handled mainly by Cantrell
himself, sometimes singing in unison with DuVall, but they just have zero
presence. Zero. They hit the notes, get across their boring, insignificant
lyrical points, and disappear with no emotional response at all. What are they
singing about? Pain? Hatred? Disillusionment? Desperation? I have no idea, nor
do I strive to get one. I only wonder if this all happens because they
are so overshadowed by the loudness of the guitars — or if they intentionally hide
behind that loudness to mask this emotional hollowness.
Maybe it differs on different songs. For 'Check
My Brain', for instance, Cantrell manages to invent a killer riff, probably
the best on the album, trickily warped and bent so as to disorient and confuse
the mind, yet utterly and immediately memorable. It is a riff that deserves a
great vocal melody to go along with it, but do they have one? Nope, it's as if
they have not even looked for it. That is most definitely not how it
used to be. On the other hand, nothing could have saved a song like 'Private
Hell', the very definition of generic, formulaic grunge where loudness is
pretty much the only thing that matters. We've all lived through this a
thousand times already — why go on wasting our time?
Personally, I propose that Jerry Cantrell (a)
say goodbye to this DuVall guy — no hard feelings, but the two do not
really need each other; (b) go back to his solo career and, if possible, forget
about things like distortion and volume, because if there are any tunes on here
that have given me honest, simple pleasure, it is the bits of acoustic
material: 'When The Sun Rose Again' and the title track (with no less than
Elton John guest-starring on piano!) are touching melancholic bits in the vein
of Jerry's «lighter» tunes on Jar Of Flies. Even the folk-rocker 'Your
Decision', plumper and more saturated with instrumentation, packs the right
atmosphere into the right container.
This is ground for optimism — Cantrell has not
really run out of ideas, he has merely enslaved them under the supervision of
the overall concept, namely, that this new band somehow has to live up to its
old fame. The day he understands that he is, in fact, not obliged to prove anything,
is the day when we will really see a nice true follow-up to the original
Alice In Chains legacy. This record, unfortunately, is just a misguided dud.
It's heavy all right, but so was Jon Brower Minnoch, and I am afraid the album
will have an even shorter lifespan than he did. Thumbs
down, except for the acoustic songs and that killer riff from 'Check
My Brain'. Steal it, someone!
THE DEVIL PUT DINOSAURS HERE (2013)
1) Hollow; 2) Pretty Done; 3)
Stone; 4) Voices; 5) The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here; 6) Lab Monkey; 7) Low
Ceiling; 8) Breath On A Window; 9) Scalpel; 10) Phantom Limb; 11) Hung On A
Hook; 12) Choke.
Well, so much for naïve optimism. Maybe if
more critics were more critical, and more fanatics less fanatical, Cantrell
would take heed and correct the formalistic mistake of the band's last album —
as it happens, not only is nothing corrected, but everything is worsened to the point of nauseating.
Where Black Gives Way To Blue was a
misstep, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here
is an unfunny joke. It might have been a modestly funny joke, if it weren't so
goddamn long, but at over sixty minutes, the whole damn thing is just
excruciating.
You see, once upon a time, there was a
star-struck alliance between two people — a searcher and a sufferer. The
searcher was totally sincere and dedicated in his search for new types of
sounds, acoustic and electric; the sufferer was equally sincere about his
suffering and had a knack for credibly conveying that suffering to the people
around him. The alliance produced some of the finest music of the 1990s, still
every bit as impressive and resonating today, if not more so. Then the sufferer
finally had his suffering cut short, and with this, it's almost as if the
searcher totally lost the stimulus for continuing with his search. Honestly,
the closest analogy to this situation that comes to mind is The Doors
continuing without Jim Morrison. Remember Other
Voices? No? Good. Most likely, you won't be remembering The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here in a
couple yea... uh, weeks from now on,
either.
There are twelve new songs on this album,
running for about five-six minutes on the average. Each of the songs features a
brand new Jerry Cantrell riff, usually one of the grumbly, distorted,
lower-than-low ones. Each of the songs is sung by lead singer William DuVall,
very frequently in dual harmony with Cantrell (actually, I think Cantrell may
have some lead parts as well, but at this point, their singing tones are almost
impossible to tell apart). Each of the songs sets the exact same «brooding» mood
— very dark, very unhappy, very misanthropic. And not a single song has got a
distinct personality of its own. The whole damn package could just as well have
been computer-generated. Brutal intro, stiff verse, stiff chorus, repeat, solo,
long repetitive outro, next. Sixty minutes on, when the music is finally over,
you feel like you have just emerged from under a pile of rock sediments.
Hopefully, the sun is shining.
Now none of this would be quite as painful if
it weren't for two facts. First, this «give the people what they want»
principle has completely ruined Cantrell as a riff-writer. Every once in a
while, through a happy accident, he is still able to fall upon an auspicious
note/tone combination — like the riff of ʽStoneʼ, where there is a
strategically placed Iommi-style bend that gives the whole thing a
«giant-from-under-the-mountain» feel. But most of the time, we have to tolerate
meaningless strings of heavy notes that are neither emotionally loaded nor
technically complex (ʽPhantom Limbʼ, ʽPretty Doneʼ, title
track, you name it). If you feel like disagreeing, just put this back to back
with ʽRain When I Dieʼ or ʽRoosterʼ to remind yourself how
low the once mighty has fallen. And the reason? Simple enough, I think — the man
goes to work with the set goal of «writing yet another Alice In Chains song».
The most assured way to ruin potentially good art. Just ask The Rolling Stones
for confirmation.
Second — sorry, but this DuVall person is a
complete sham. The man sings every
bit of this material as if he were a pre-programmed robot. Layne may have been
a somewhat «typical» singer for the grunge era, but he actually sang like a
human being. A permanently depressed human being, sure, but still one capable
of emotional range, quiet, loud, brooding, angry, sentimental, offensive,
whatever. The vocals on this album
are totally blurry. Just some random guy mumbling «dark» stuff, sometimes
raising or lowering his voice when the algorithm tells him to. No personality
whatsoever. We may be happy for him that he doesn't do drugs (well, at least I think he doesn't), but he pretty much
relates to Staley like an authentic Gucci bag or something like that relates to
a cheap counterfeit. I feel really baffled when reading anonymous Internet
assessments like: «...William DuVall's vocals don't
necessarily deliver the same sort of pained, shuddering punch that Staley's
were able to give, but he continues to prove himself as a worthy successor as
the band's new singer...» ...what? And who the heck needs this self-conscious attempt to synthesize another Alice In
Chains album without the «pained, shuddering punch»? I want the «pained, shuddering punch», goddammit. If you cannot
deliver — get the hell out of here.
Or, alternately,
deliver something else and don't call yourself Alice In Chains. Because,
frankly, if we forget all about the prehistory of this particular band, The Devil has even fewer reasons to
exist. When twelve draggy, overlong, gray-toned, poorly-riffed, emotionally
monotonous compositions irritate your senses instead of penetrating them, nor
is there a single bit of innovative thinking anywhere in sight, just droning
sludge for the sake of being sludgy, what in the world could motivate you to
defend this music other than nostalgic fandom? All right, if Cantrell manages
to make a profit on this sludge, I'm happy for him — for his immense
contribution to the world of music, he deserves everything he can get — but
that does not make the record any less of a cheap rip-off. There's just too
much of a «big lie» aura around it — they make this «formally depressing» music
without actually feeling depressed. A fake, phoney album, and it makes me sad
that quite a few people still ended up mistaking it for the real thing. Out of
love and respect for «classic era» Alice In Chains, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here gets as low a thumbs down as it can possibly
get, and here's hoping the guys just stick to touring from now on.
ADDENDA:
LIVE (1990-1996; 2000)
1) Bleed The Freak; 2) Queen
Of The Rodeo; 3) Angry Chair; 4) Man In The Box; 5) Love, Hate, Love; 6)
Rooster; 7) Would?; 8) Junkhead; 9) Dirt; 10) Them Bones; 11) God Am; 12)
Again; 13) A Little Bitter; 14) Dam That River.
During the long waiting period that followed Tripod
— the period when Columbia Records expected Layne Staley to pull himself
together, yet he pulled a fast one on them and pulled himself apart instead — slaves
were put to the hard task of searching the vaults for more Alice In Chains
stuff to satisfy the presumably hungry public. Results consisted of a large
boxset, Music Bank, which I do not give a special review because the
content of previously unavailable material was quite low (and also for adhering
to sinful compiling practices, such as including Dirt in its entirety but
replacing the final recording of 'Junkhead' with a demo version so that the
true fan would have to buy the album separately); and this live album, with
recordings culled from a variety of shows, including five songs from their very
last two gigs with Staley.
Unlike Music Bank, the live album is
well worth your money if you love the band; it is nice, after all, to
have a proper document of their live show that is not Unplugged — it
certainly feels weird to have one of the loudest and crunchiest bands of the
decades represented exclusively through their acoustic output when it
comes to live shows. Live corrects that problem; technically, its
existence is a necessity.
Two things dampen the joy, though. First, the
sound quality is very much so-so; not bootleg level, but something tells me
these recordings were not originally intended for commercial release. Vocals
are captured poorly, guitars are not properly separated from crowd noises, and
drums can sometimes be very tinny. In comparison with the band's tight-as-hell
production standards in the studio, Live almost feels... limp? Which
brings us to the second problem: the songs were so perfect in the first place
— brutal, ass-kicking, and simultaneously polished to the highest level of
catchiness and expressivity — that improving upon them in a live setting is
virtually impossible. Face it: your guitar sound will be sloppier, your
vocalist will imminently miss some notes, all the cool tricks you used in the
studio to spice up the atmosphere will be irreproductible, and what do you get
in return? The mystical, untappable live feel?..
Track-wise, there are only a couple minor
surprises: one of the band's two contributions to the soundtrack of Last
Action Hero, 'A Little Bitter' (decent, but unspectacular funk-rocker), and
probably the oddest song the band ever did but never released in a studio
version: 'Queen Of The Rodeo', an explosive mix of country-rock and thrash
metal (!) that sends up both genres as roughly as possible (particularly the
former, with telling lines like 'I ain't no queer, go fuck a steer'). If you have
to know what Alice In Chains' understanding of humour amounts to, you will have
to get acquainted with the record.
As for the regular material, not a single song
opens itself up from any unexpected sides; it is generally just a question of
how well they can reproduce the power of the originals on stage. Props have to
be given to Layne, who, despite all the reputed assholishness of his character,
works really hard to give the people what they want. But, let's admit it, he
is still better in the studio. There is no improvisation, either, or surprising
rearrangements of any of the songs — which is understandable, since most of
them are performed here within months or so of the studio release. All in all, Live
is certainly truer to the true face of Alice In Chains than Unplugged
ever hoped to be — yet, out of the two, Unplugged is certainly the more
interesting project.
ANGELS CRY (1993)
1) Unfinished Allegro; 2)
Carry On; 3) Time; 4) Angels Cry; 5) Stand Away; 6) Never Understand; 7)
Wuthering Heights; 8) Streets Of Tomorrow; 9) Evil Warning; 10) Lasting Child.
Getting into symphonic metal is comparable to
adopting a ferret: there is little doubt that it can be done, but what exactly
is to be gained, except for a vague feel of self-importance, and wouldn't you
be easier off with a pussycat? Likewise, we are cool when it comes to symphonic
music, and we are hot when it comes to metal, but can we be sure that putting
them together will not throw the temperature off balance, for good?
Brazilian band Angra were only one out of a
thousand groups formed with the purpose of proving the worth of this synthesis
— but they succeeded better than most, and came pretty close to making «power
metal» sound inspiring instead of ridiculous. At the very least, their debut
album, Angels Cry, is a textbook example on how this thing should be
done; I cannot imagine a power metal fan not being overwhelmed by its music,
and, conversely, if you do not dig it, classically influenced heavy
metal music will never be your spoonful of tea.
First, Angra's music is not emotionally heavy;
no matter how fast, metallic, and crunchy their guitar riffs may seem, these
guys are hopeless romantics, and it shows on every track. Their classical cues
are taken from Beethoven rather than Bach or Wagner (spot the 9th Symphony
echoes at the start of 'Evil Warning') — and what proper metal band
would be bizarre enough to cover Kate Bush's 'Wuthering Heights' on its debut
album? Add to this the endless catchy power pop melodies in the chorus, and «metal»
will only remain as the rhythmic guitar/bass backbone to the proceedings.
After all, the album's title is Angels Cry, not Demons Howl.
Second, at this stage — first and best in the
band's career — the driving force is Andre Coelho Matos, who is responsible for
more than half of the songwriting, for the band's keyboard sound, and for the
singing. The guy's talents are not to be denied: he is a solid songwriter, an
accomplished, if not virtuoso, pianist, and a highly competitive screamer with
a good range. At the same time, he gets equally professional help from
guitarist Raphael Bettencourt, supporting the occasionally corny lyrics (well,
if you are such a straight-faced romantic, you have no choice but to tolerate
that epithet) with complex ass-kicking riffs that dissolve wordy banality
whenever the need arises. Finally, Bettencourt, with his classical training (he
even has a degree in conducting), is perfectly complemented by the more
rock-oriented Kiko Loureiro on second guitar. (Yes, they do know how to play
all these things in Brazil.)
In short, all conditions are met for proving
the validity of symphonic metal. Technically, the only complaint is that, on
quite a few of these tracks, Matos' synthesizers sound somewhat cheap, and the
songs could definitely benefit from some real strings rather than tinny
imitations — but, I guess, due to budget limitations that was out of the
question at the time. Another nagging problem is that the songs tend to blend
with each other; but this is really only a problem if you consider them from a
«pop» perspective — in reality, Angels Cry is structured more like a
true symphony, consisting of several different, but similar movements, and
from that perspective, when 'Wuthering Heights' comes along, it does not so
much bring in an element of refreshing diversity as oddly disrupts the general
flow of the album. (Not to mention that there will always be something
ridiculous about the idea of a guy singing 'Heathcliff, it's me,
Kathy!', regardless of how high his pitch manages to be).
And, what is that flow? Essentially, it is
fifty-five minutes of energetic prayer to some sort of supernatural
force (no specific presence of the Christian god, rather a vague shamanistic
spiritual vibe instead that would be increased tenfold on the next album).
Sometimes it speeds up, with Matos delivering as many baroque flourishes on his
keyboards as the guitarists are offering speed metal solos (the album, by the
way, is not a finger-flashing solo-fest: such passages are highly restricted);
sometimes it slows down, with acoustic interludes and power ballad simulations;
but it never bogs down in sleepy melancholia. By the time the last song comes
along, the listener may be exhausted, not just from the heaviness (which, as I
said, is only technical and superficial), but from the never-ending punchiness
of it all, as in «don't these guys ever feel the need to relax for a small
moment?» They do not — relax and you will lose the link to the Supernatural.
Once you have started, you have to go all the way.
Catchy pop choruses grace speedfreak songs such
as 'Carry On' and 'Evil Warning', as well as multipart creations such as
'Streets Of Tomorrow' and the title track (which also gives you a little
Paganini in the middle). But it is not the kind of choruses that one is likely
to hum in the shower; in the general context of the album, they hide behind the
puffed-up atmosphere. The atmosphere is worth describing and analyzing; the
individual hooks are not.
It is hard for me to imagine people loving
Angra's music to the point of tear-shedding; I cannot help but regard symphonic
metal as a musical curio, entertaining and thought-provoking at best, pompous
and moronic at worst. But Angels Cry is certainly one of the staunchest
examples of «at best» I have ever witnessed from the genre. And if its
romantically-spiritual aspect does not «get to» me, its kick-ass aspect most
certainly does. Pure mathematical interest in how they go around constructing
this vibe + sincere toe-tapping reaction = thumbs up.
HOLY LAND (1996)
1) Crossing; 2) Nothing To
Say; 3) Silence And Distance; 4) Carolina IV; 5) Holy Land; 6) The Shaman; 7)
Make Believe; 8) Z.I.T.O.; 9) Deep Blue; 10) Lullaby For Lucifer.
Angra's masterpiece — the album they are going
to be remembered by if they are to be remembered at all — Holy Land is
a conceptual creation, dedicated to the lives and fates of people in the Holy
Land (which, for these Brazilian guys, has nothing to do with the one in the
Torah) before the latter became defiled by European invaders; think Neil
Young's 'Cortez The Killer' expanded to the form of a symphonic metal opera.
Actually, my description is somewhat off,
influenced by what is usually written about the album. Upon close inspection,
it turns out that the record is not so much about the native people of
America as it is about the people arriving there — dealing with their own
dreams, hopes, impressions and conclusions. This also explains why the Indian
folk motives, whose incorporation into the record has been so much lauded by
critics, are, in practice, limited to at most a couple songs, most notably the
«tribal drumming» of 'Carolina IV': what else should one expect from an album
about Europeans? After all, there is a reason why it does not begin with an
Indian folk chant, but rather with a rearrangement of one of Palestrina's mass
pieces ('Crossing' — quite likely, something that a bunch of conquistadores
may have actually been listening to on the eve of their journey). It is not
about Indians.
Nor is it about cruel, heartless, racist
European guys slaughtering innocent, peaceful Children of Nature. That side of
the business is altogether left alone. Instead, we have a dense musical landscape
trying to accompany, if not represent the mixed, bewildered feelings one
experiences when clashing with a new, unpredictable, virginal world. This can
be done in many different ways, and from an apriori position, I would
think that power metal is hardly the best one. When you try to convey a complex,
constantly shifting emotional state through speedy distorted guitars and a strong-throated
guy permanently screaming his lungs off, results are almost certainly bound to
be catastrophic. Yet Holy Land somehow manages to make it.
On their own, the individual songs are decent;
just as before, some of the riffs are memorable, some of the choruses are easy
to sing along, and there is plenty of punch as the guitarists and the vocalist
compete for your attention. But it is the concept that strings them together
and brings a unifying meaning to the thrash patterns and ear-bursting wailing;
the pathos and ecstasy are given a good reason, and the medieval and baroque
classical influences are no longer there just because someone happened to like
baroque music. A mystical journey, but grounded in reality, and justified by
well-handled musical planning.
The centerpiece is 'Carolina IV', a ten-minute
epic illustrating the ships' majestic sailing through uncharted waters and
their eventual arrival (or, perhaps, imaginary arrival; or, perhaps, no
arrival, since there are also vague references to shipwreck throughout). In
condensed form, it has it all: folk-influenced percussion beats, gorgeous
dreamy vocal parts (the "So, won't you come with me my friend?.." bit
is, as far as I can tell, the most beautiful moment in the band's entire
catalog), the insane speed-metal part with catchy choruses, the
keyboard-orchestral interlude, a finger-flashing solo that takes the dexterity
of Iron Maiden for granted and proceeds to improve upon it, and a long pompous
coda. One can hate each, or all, of these moments, but I feel a vision here — a
brave, pretentious message from people who truly have something original to
say.
In the overall context of the album, even songs
that I would otherwise hate — the «power ballads» 'Make Believe' and 'Deep
Blue' — play an integral part, and contribute to the overtly tragic feeling of
it all. Why tragic? Because Matos leaves no space whatsoever for joy. There is frustration
caused by a beautiful dream gone horrendously wrong ('Nothing To Say'); there
is quiet amazement, mixed with fear and uncertainty, at realizing one's own
role in changing history ('Holy Land'); there is spiritual confusion brought
on by an encounter with pagan religion ('The Shaman') — but no joy. The
closest thing to joy is the speed-rocker 'Z.I.T.O.', because the chorus says
"Mother nature brings to me in fantastic purity everything I need... like
a teenage discovery what's more delightful than this?", but coming as it
does towards the end of the album, and loaded with hard-to-decipher ironic
subtexts, it is not enough to shift the mood upwards.
In many ways, Holy Land is still a
puzzle, which is terrific since there are few things more boring and less
adequate than «easily read» art-metal conceptual albums. It helps to swallow it
together with its concept, but even if we knew nothing about the subject idea
behind it, its somber travelog style could still come through. A perfectly
constructed masterpiece of 1990s metal, and the only Angra album with the
capacity of inflaming my usually metalproof heart — thumbs
up by any possible account.
HOLY LIVE (1997)
1) Crossing; 2) Nothing To
Say; 3) Z.I.T.O.; 4) Carolina IV; 5) Unfinished Allegro; 6) Carry On.
Live, recorded at some Paris venue in 1996 —
easy to tell if you know enough French to at least understand Matos' exploding
"BONSOIR PARIS!" in between tracks. His French is not entirely
accent-free, by the way, but quite extraordinary for the average level of a
foreign musical performer; if there is anything that may bug a sensitive ear,
it is the arena-rock intonations of his stage banter that, in my opinion, do
not fit the elegance of Angra's music. Yes, it is heavy, but it is still «progressive»
rather than «party» music, and Angra's anthems do not need any additional goading
to drive the listeners crazy.
Other than that, Holy Live is an
excellent snap of Angra at their peak, and a very fortunate one considering
just how short that peak turned out to be. The songs are not at all different
from their studio incarnations, but the band members still manage to insert
just a wee touch of extra live power that makes the experience individually worthwhile.
Thus, they have no way of replicating all the complex percussion parts of the
«tribal» part of 'Carolina IV', but they compensate for it by making the
underlying guitar riffage more loud and crunchy (and hats off to Matos for
carrying over the chill-sending effect of "So, won't you come with me my
friend..." to perfection).
We can only regret that the album is so
shamefully short — it is, in fact, in EP format, barely running over 35
minutes, and, in all honesty, containing only four actual songs ('Crossing' and
'Unfinished Allegro' are intros rather than full-bodied independent entities).
Apparently, there were certain technical difficulties in recording more
material, and these precious shards are all we're left with (at least the sound
quality is untouchable). The band would remedy this five years later, with Rebirth
World Tour, but, alas, by that time its creative engine would already be
spent.
FIREWORKS (1998)
1) Wings Of Reality; 2)
Petrified Eyes; 3) Lisbon; 4) Metal Icarus; 5) Paradise; 6) Mystery Machine; 7)
Fireworks; 8) Extreme Dream; 9) Gentle Change; 10) Speed; 11*) Rainy Nights.
Anyone who hears Fireworks directly
after Holy Land is bound to be disappointed — it is quite clearly a
regressive album, abandoning the conceptual and extraneous elements in favour
of a more straightforward all-out metal attack. No one has ever been able to
explain why this happened: no sooner had these guys opened up the doors of
power metal to outside influences than some mystical force made them step back
inside and bar the gates once and for all. Why?..
Once the initial disappointment fades away,
though, it becomes possible to set out a different perspective. So Holy
Land seemed progressive and, on the limited scale of heavy metal, revolutionary,
but it was mainly because of occasional sprinklings of elements that we do not
expect to meet in heavy metal — such as the «tribal pecussion» of 'Carolina IV'
— not because this was some radically groundbreaking synthesis of hugely
different styles. Take these occasional sprinklings out, and the distance from
Holy Land to Fireworks is easily crossed.
And Fireworks isn't a bad metal album.
Yes, the band does feel a bit stalled and confused, but definitely not washed
up, and not giving up on their artistic influences, either. The opening thunder
of 'Wings Of Reality' cannot compete with the memorability of 'Carry On', but
its symphonic vibe, with a nod or two to Beethoven, is still believable, and
capable of taking the listener to all the required heights. The anthemic chorus
of 'Lisbon' ("Oh, skies are falling down...") possesses the
quintessential Angra stateliness; the seven-minute epic 'Paradise' could have
used a little trimming, but otherwise its evilly distorted guitars and Matos'
ironic delivery make up for a delightful Alice Cooper-ish sendup of fake
morality.
It is also fun to find out that the fastest
song on the album is, in fact, called 'Speed', and that its lyrics justify the
use of speed of searching for enlightenment, because "faster than light we
will find a way out of the conscience" — so now we know the
precious secret of speed metal, and why these guys are so fond of it. Play fast
enough, and, in time, this will get you places you've never even suspected of
existing. Of course, in this particular case, the insanely velocious 'Speed' only
gets you to the end of the record (is that irony?), but who knows what you're
getting next time?
I do believe that Fireworks deserves a thumbs up on the rational plane, and may even
become a metal favourite on repeated listens — although, unlike Holy Land,
it is hard to recommend it to anyone suspicious of power metal. It is
unfortunate that it became the swan song of the original band, ending their
union in a downward rather than upward movement; but, in the end, it is sort of
nice to know it exists, because it is not a total waste of effort.
REBIRTH (2001)
1) In Excelsis; 2) Nova Era;
3) Millennium Sun; 4) Acid Rain; 5) Heroes Of Sand; 6) Unholy Wars; 7) Rebirth;
8) Judgement Day; 9) Running Alone; 10) Visions Prelude.
Conflicts of egos suck, but where there are
egos, eventually unavoidable. And it so turned out that the ego of frontman,
vocalist, and keyboardist André Matos lost to the egos of guitar players
Rafael Bittencourt and Kiko Loureiro. The rhythm section, apparently, sided
with Matos, since they jumped ship together to form Shaaman; but three
non-guitarists are a poor match for two guitarists, and the name of Angra
remained with Rafael and Kiko.
Quickly recruiting a batch of new members —
Felipe Andreoli on bass, Aquiles Priester on drums, and Eduardo Falaschi on
vocals (whose principal prior claim to fame was that he almost became
Iron Maiden's lead singer in 1994) — the mighty guitarists finally achieved
their goal: transforming the once adventurous and experimental band into a
thoroughly generic, stereotypical power metal outfit. Hooray for living by the
rules.
As a generic power metal album, Rebirth
would probably be decent enough if it did not call itself Rebirth.
Struck by the Three-Zeroes-Curse, the band decided that they were, in fact,
among the chosen ones to whom God has personally entrusted the musical
celebration of the upcoming new era; and thus, while there is no easily-defined
«concept» to the album, its main vibe is a consecrative one. Metal fans all
over the world are invited to join Angra in a metal mass for the well-being of
humanity. The basic idea is easily understood just by glancing at the song
titles.
Usually, generic power metal consists of
ripping off classical melodies, translating them into the language of metal
guitars, and passing them for your own, only occasionally crediting the
source in order for the average fan to accumulate some respect. Rebirth
behaves suspiciously close to this model: 'Visions Prelude' is acknowledged to
be «adapted from Chopin's Op. 24 in C minor» (actually, Chopin's Op. 24 is a
set of mazurkas; what is meant is probably Prelude No. 20 in C minor, of the 24
Preludes), but God only knows how many of these other melodies have been
pilfered from Beethoven or Brahms or whatever lesser composer these guys must
have studied. Regardless, some of these melodies might sound pleasant in a
true symphonic arrangement — but set to an endless barrage of machine-gun
chords and same-tone-using solo guitars, they make no impression whatsoever.
The new vocalist, unfortunately, fares even
worse. Falaschi belongs to the old school of hard rock belters — his idols must
have, at best, been Lou Gramm and Graham Bonnet, at worst, David Coverdale or
Glenn Hughes. Or maybe not, but his vocal range and manner of using it falls in
the same camp. Where Matos' shrill, thin, vulnerable, and at the same time loud
and piercing delivery had lots of individual character, Falaschi is just big,
fat, and flat. He does not particularly spoil the tunes he is assigned,
but he could never hope to salvage a bad or mediocre tune by adding his own
parts to it.
Predictably loud, thoroughly professional,
inadequately pompous, Rebirth does not have one single song that I could
write something useful about. If you like the simple waves of power metal,
if you like them the same way that someone likes the vibes of classic symphonic
music without being able to keep its themes in his head afterwards, Rebirth
is for you. But if we insist that power metal, like any other metal or pop music
in general, has its share of standouts and its share of flops, then Rebirth
is, by all means, a flop. Thumbs down,
says the brain; and I haven't even mentioned the lyrics — flatter than the
flattest offerings from Matos. "New day shines, fallen angels will arise,
Nova Era brings the ashes back to life; all over now, all the pain and awful
lies, angels will arise back to life!" I am pretty sure I have even heard
characters from Heroes Of Might And Magic speak lines with less
clichéd wordings.
TEMPLE OF SHADOWS (2004)
1) Deus Le Volt!; 2) Spread
Your Fire; 3) Angels And Demons; 4) Waiting Silence; 5) Wishing Well; 6) The
Temple Of Hate; 7) The Shadow Hunter; 8) No Pain For The Dead; 9) Winds Of
Destination; 10) Sprouts Of Time; 11) Morning Star; 12) Late Redemption; 13)
Gate XIII.
Sometimes the simple bigness of the banality
can transcend its flaws and turn certified crap into dubitable art. Of course,
it is hard to imagine that the Falaschi-led Angra ever understood its own
production as certified crap — but not at all hard to hypothesize that they
were not too satisfied with their Rebirth, and thought that, just like Holy
Land, with its pretense and mighty sway, was able to blow away the mild
results of Angels Cry, so would the «rebirth» only be complete with yet another
pretentious, monumental concept album.
All I can say, however, is that the concept
blows — completely — and, by blowing, places Temple Of Shadows squarely
into the group of medieval-crazed metal albums that continues to feed the
genre's poor reputation. I will not waste space on a detailed description,
easily attainable elsewhere; instead, here is just a list of keywords. Spot
the odd one out.
Crusades. Crusaders. Catholic Church.
Atrocities. Genocide. Jerusalem. The Dead Sea. The Temple of Solomon. Lost
scrolls of wisdom. Jews. Muslims. Tits. Past, present, and future. Body and
soul. Redemption. The Morning Star (not the newspaper). The Angel of Death.
The protagonist, notably, is called «The Shadow
Hunter», which, along with all the references to the Temple of Solomon,
seriously makes me wonder whether someone in the Angra camp had been previously
indulging in Gabriel Knight 3: Blood Of The Sacred, Blood Of The Damned.
But, regardless of whether this is just a coincidence, for me as a listener the
concept goes nowhere, because, in order to figure out if it goes anywhere, I'd
have to spend time analyzing it, and I have lots of better things to do.
As for the music, again, it is probably okay as
far as generic power metal goes. They inject a little diversity — apart from
the obligatory classical influences, there is some flamenco guitar (e. g. on
'Sprouts Of Time') and some mainstreamish balladeering ('Wishing Well'). There
is plenty of the expected violent thrashing, and quite a few multi-part epics.
But never once could I get rid of the feeling that all of this has been made on
order. The fans want loud guitars, screeching singers, pathos, fist-pumping,
mystical medieval imagery, and long songs that create the illusion of serious
art. That is exactly what they get. You a fan? You'll love this. I prefer to
replay my Gabriel Knight — at least that experience allows for
immersion, whereas the gates of Temple Of Shadows do not even give a
hint of the possibility of opening. Thumbs
(yawn) down.
AURORA CONSURGENS (2006)
1) The Course Of Nature; 2)
The Voice Commanding You; 4) Ego Painted Grey; 5) Breaking Ties; 6) Salvation
Suicide; 7) Window To Nowhere; 8) So Near So Far; 9) Passing By; 10) Scream
Your Heart Out; 11) Abandoned Fate; 12*) Out Of This World.
One encouraging thing about all those Angra
albums is that the further they go, the more esoteric subjects they choose for
the underlying concept — right to the point that it becomes far more interesting
and productive to talk about the genesis of those albums than it is to
actually talk about the music they contain.
Aurora Consurgens, in particular, draws its title from a late
Medieval alchemical treatise, preserved in the form of an illuminated
manuscript with all sorts of bizarre, proto-Bosch, pre-proto-psychedelic
watercolour miniatures. But it goes somewhat beyond the predictable obsession
that metal bands have with mystical medieval subjects — here, the middleman
between the treatise and the album is Carl Jung, one of whose interests was
finding the relations between alchemy and psychology; among other things, he
used the imagery of Aurora to explore the «dreams : mental states»
connection. And it is really Herr Jung to whom the album owes its existence,
rather than the «pseudo-Aquinas» responsible for the original writing.
I have to admit the boys pulled a sly one on us
here: without sacrificing the medievalistic candy-wrapper (album title and
sleeve), they still managed to put out a record whose lyrics and general
atmosphere cannot at all be called «laughable». The cliché-ridden,
chaotic, fantasy-land concept of Temple Of Shadows does not really
invite the jaded listener to scrutinize its inner depths; in the case of Aurora,
however, I was at least intrigued enough to take a look at the lyrics — and,
what do you know, they are quite tolerable.
As is much of the music, actually. Third album
in a row shows this band will never surpass the level of Holy Land
(unless a miracle brings Matos back), but, regardless, there is at least an
ever so slight increase in the quality of brutal riffs on the rocking numbers
and vocal hooks on the power ballads. Perhaps this has something to do with
the fact that they are exploring more understandable and more relatable
topics: as exciting as it may have been to record a whole album about the
mysterious «Shadow Hunter», did Falaschi, Loureiro, and Bittencourt actually feel
their character, or was he just another cardboard figurine? But here, on
'Salvation Suicide', as they sing about a real guy contemplating this
particular measure as a possible solution to all his problems, they definitely
hit closer to home.
Some fans view Aurora as some sort of a
minor sell-out after the stark conceptuality of Temple, quoting, among
other things, a «softer» approach — there are, overall, more ballads and
acoustic parts — and little things like the sudden outburst of completely
non-metallic flamenco in the middle of 'So Near So Far'. I would view this,
instead, as signs of hope, showing that the band at least give some
thought, occasionally, to the idea of overthrowing the formula, even if, at
this point, it has enslaved them on Ancient Rome level. This is still a thumbs down; but at least it is an album whose
initial premise may prompt the non-hardcore metal fan to give it a second
listen, and who knows what may happen then. Plus, I now know something
about Aurora Consurgens — so far be it from me to say that Angra have no
educational value. Do check out those miniatures, by the way; Frank Miller
sure got nothing on them.
AQUA (2010)
1) Viderunt Te Aquae; 2)
Arising Thunder; 3) Awake From Darkness; 4) Lease Of Life; 5) The Rage Of The
Waters; 6) Spirit Of The Air; 7) Hollow; 8) A Monster In Her Eyes; 9) Weakness
Of A Man; 10) Ashes; 11*) Lease Of Life (remixed version).
Hmm. Either I am finally getting used to this,
or Aqua is an improvement over the band's last trio of power slabs — or, at
least, reflects some changes that appeal to me, the non-power-metalhead who,
nevertheless, has managed to enjoy large parts of the record.
So let us see what's new and what's old. The
fact that Angra have adopted the Asia-style gimmick of naming their albums is
new (unless you disregard the word Consurgens
from their previous offering) — but certainly not encouraging. More encouraging
is having their old drummer, Ricardo Confessori, make his prodigal son return
after his co-project with Matos, Shaaman, had pretty much burnt down to the
ground.
But the absolute best thing that has happened
to this band on an objective scale is, I think, their saying goodbye to Dennis
Ward, the producer behind all of their 2001-2006 output. Why? Just make
yourself a random playlist from these three albums, throw in Aqua, and admire the difference. In
comparison, the old sound is simply awful. The drums are drowned in hiss, the
guitar riffs glue the notes together in a noisy roar, and the singer is almost
reduced to the painful task of outshouting both. For Aqua, the band, instead of the hotly credited Ward, turned to
lesser names (I have no idea who Branden Duffy and Adriano Daga are) and
co-produced themselves — and the result is their best sound in ages, maybe ever (even Holy Land had
its production problems, which were, of course, compensated by the amazing
quality of the material).
Case in point: 'Arising Thunder', which bursts
out of your speakers much like the title suggests, with a magnificent, juicy
guitar sound in which the heavy rhythm work never overshadows the
finger-flashing melodic scale playing, the insanely fast drums feel refreshingly
humanoid, and Falaschi's pompous singing feels like singing, not shouting. It
kicks ass, it's melodic, it's complex, and it never for once ruins the ears —
what more is there to ask?
So the band, conceptually, is still deeply
mired in their mystical shit. This particular concept is centered around —
three guesses! — water and its, uh, general influence on the life of man. Not
in the issue of sewer maintenance, of course, but rather the way it is hinted
at in Shakespeare's Tempest, which,
so we are told, forms the loose (very
loose) basis of the album. Simply put, Aqua
tells you that Water Is Important — in more ways than you normally imagine it
to be. If you got that, we can now move on to the music.
Much of which is fine, although I still cannot always
tell whether it is merely due to a combination of their refined production and
my improved imagination, or if the band really sat down with a firm decision to
write a bunch of better power metal tunes than usual. But I'll be damned if
that opening one-two punch of 'Arising Thunder' and 'Awake From Darkness' is
not recognized as the band's killing-est consecutive blast since the good old
days of 'Nothing To Say'. Even when, midway through 'Awake', they cut out the
metal and indulge in a brief piano-and-strings mid-section, it feels like an
interesting gesture rather than a conventional gimmick. And I even get a chance
to be amazed at some particular riffs — such as the awesome descending
bumble-bee thing that cuts in around 2:32 into the song.
Third good song in a row, the piano epic 'Lease
Of Life' threatens to become a rotten power ballad from time to time, but never
capitalizes on that promise — instead, they just bring in denser layers of
sound, such as dreamy female background vocals, diversify it with a rocking
mid-section, and, overall, go for a more progressive stance of things than
cheap-operatic. It works! Not on any tear-jerking level, of course, but there
is a feel of overall solidity that never goes away.
For sure, once you get past the mid-album mark,
they cannot help but start repeating themselves — the same speed-metal and
prog-metal elements cast in only slightly changing ways. But with this crystal
clear production and refined sense of taste, this is not a big problem. Even
Falaschi's singing is not such a big bother: he is, after all, merely
respecting the genre's conventions, and it is always easy to pass him by and
just concentrate on the guitar melodies, or even on the monster rhythm section
if you feel more like it.
As tempting as it would be to end this on a
«Welcome back, Angra!» note, I would still refrain from too much excitement.
For one thing, this constant insistance on Big Concept Statements is not a wise
thing — it just keeps on interfering with concentrating on writing the riffs.
For another thing, if the band's sound depends so much on the guy behind the
mixing controls, it puts them into a state of constant jeopardy. For a third
thing, it's frickin' power metal —
Wagner for the 21st Century Lunkhead Man. Nevertheless, my internal lunkhead is still influential enough to lobby out a
secure thumbs up
for Aqua. Is yours influential enough to join in the fun?
SECRET GARDEN (2014)
1) Newborn Me; 2) Black
Hearted Soul; 3) Final Light; 4) Storm Of Emotions; 5) Violet Sky; 6) Secret
Garden; 7) Upper Levels; 8) Crushing Room; 9) Perfect Symmetry; 10) Silent Call.
Another four years, another «Angra» album, and
again, the only remaining original members are the guitar duo of Loureiro and
Bettencourt, and now they have even gone as far as to change the lead vocalist again — instead of Edu Falaschi, welcome
Fabio Lione, a native of the fair town of Pisa who now shares lead vocalist
duties in no less than three
different prog-metal bands, including the Italian outfits Rhapsody Of Fire and
Vision Divine, though, of course, Angra must be his biggest gambit so far. The
guy must be in serious demand — frankly, however, I do not notice any crucial
difference between his and Falaschi's singing. His pitch is a little shriller
and higher, perhaps bringing the style a bit closer to the original Matos
«lyricism», but do not take this as a nostalgic sing — Secret Garden ain't no Holy
Land and never will be.
Instead, it continues the modest revival of Aqua, drifting a bit closer to
«symphonic» and «progressive» metal, as is evident by the band's choice of
producer (Jens Bogren, who has previously worked with everyone from Opeth to
Symphony X) and additional guest vocalists. Excellent production values,
inspired playing, serious care for melody and harmony, an emphasis on sheer power,
as every second riff strives to imitate a minor earthquake — technically, Secret Garden is beyond reproach. Substantially, I have long since given
up on Angra's possibility to amaze and delight anyone outside the regular heavy
metal legion of fans, but as long as they keep up this level of energy and this
high quality of sound, it will not make any sense whatsoever to condemn this
music.
Once again, it seems as if there exists some
sort of concept here — perhaps having to do with «the other world» and the
passing from one plane of existence into the other, judging by the song titles
and some of the lyrics — but do not waste your time trying to ascertain the
details, it's not as if Bittencourt, who wrote most of the songs, could really
enlighten you in this respect with any fascinating new insights. (The bonus
track on some of the editions, by the way, is the band's cover of
ʽSynchronicity IIʼ, which sort of upholds this idea of different
worlds). More important is the fact that the heavy metal core of the album is
now heavily interspersed with everything from flamenco to dark folk to
progressive balladry (the title track, written by Finnish keyboardist Maria
Ilmoniemi, is here sung by guest vocalist Simone Simons, normally with Dutch
symph-metal band Epica — and it is sort of pretty, actually).
There is a jazzy touch every now and then, too
— for instance, ʽUpper Levelsʼ starts out with some heavily busy
basslines and scattered piano improvisations, before eventually gorging itself
on these sounds so as to grow up into another power metal outing, and then,
midway through, some of the guitar solos are played in a decidedly «fusion»
manner, invoking memories of John McLaughlin and Allan Holdsworth more than any
regular power metal stylistics. In brief, when Loureiro said that the new album
«would be different», he wasn't merely bullshitting us like they all tend to do
— they are really trying to explore different side alleys, though without
losing the classic Angra flavor, of course.
I give the album a thumbs up without any second
thoughts. Angra's attempts at scaring the daylights out of us with horrific
sonic pictures (ʽCrushing Roomʼ, with Doro Pesch of Warlock featured
as yet another guest star) or at inspiring me with optimistic power choruses
(ʽStorm Of Emotionsʼ) do not work too well, relying as they do on
well-tested musical methods, but they are handled with enough restraint,
technicality, and respectable work ethics that even at its worst, Secret Garden may be tolerated, and at
its best, shows that the pool of power metal ideas, even if you can now clearly
see all the way to the bottom, is not yet completely exhausted. Well,
something like that. Big thank you to producer Jens Bogren, too, for bringing
out the best in these guys' guitar sound.
ANI DIFRANCO (1990)
1) Both Hands; 2) Talk To Me
Now; 3) The Slant; 4) Work Your Way Out; 5) Dog Coffee; 6) Lost Woman Song; 7)
Pale Purple; 8) Rush Hour; 9) Fire Door; 10) The Story; 11) Every Angle; 12)
Out Of Habit; 13) Letting The Telephone Ring.
Ani DiFranco is a poet. This is not surprising:
few people in the state of New York aren't. It would be far more surprising if
she were a stunningly original poet, a lyrical innovator capable of turning the
entire decade upside down. At least, normally, when you release an
entire album of original songs, heavy on the lyrics and light on
instrumentation — nothing but her and her acoustic guitar all the way through
— you'd have to be stunningly original if you wished for one reason for
such an album to be remembered one month after being released.
However, there is nothing stunningly original
about Ani DiFranco's poetry. It is a fairly expectable product of its times: an
unpresuming offshoot of the beat genre that, at its best, adds little to the
legacy of Suzanne Vega (which, in itself, was no gold mine) and, at its worst,
is just... well, bad poetry. Most of the songs are about relationships, delivered
from the obvious viewpoint — «the fact that I am a woman does not mean my inner
world is in any way poorer than yours» — and dedicated to offering as many
different proofs of this single fact as possible. Which means that reading the
lyrics is sort of fun for the first song, sort of disappointing for the second
song, sort of irritating for the third song, and sort of completely pointless from
then on.
Which is entirely unrelated, by the way, to the
fact that you do meet interesting concatenations of lexemes from time to time,
such as 'I opened the fire door to four lips, none of which were mine', or
'Perpetrating counter-culture she is walking through the park', or 'It's not
important to be defined, it's only important to use your time well' — here is a
fine line for high school students to use as an epigraph for their generic
essays — or 'I wonder what you look like under your T-shirt'... uh, okay,
forget that last one. Although Ani's army of fans will probably rally with much
more fervor around the doctrinal lines, such as 'I'm not going to sacrifice my
freedom of choice' (about her abortion, of course) or 'When I'm approached in a
dark alley, I don't lift my skirt' ('Talk To Me Now', the album's feminist
anthem par excellence).
Nevertheless, if all there was to Ani
DiFranco's debut record, self-released on her aptly titled «Righteous Babe»
label, was mediocre poetry and by-the-book feminism, I would hardly bother to
write about it. The real reason to listen to her records, even fully acoustic
like this one, is the music. The songs, as «songs» in a traditional sense, do
not really exist — they are bits of poetry that she does not so much sing as
recite — but they are set to truly brilliant playing. This is not pop and not
blues and not folk, but rather a weird, unpredictable amalgam of all kinds of
styles, showing off a mindset unhampered by formulae, barriers, or conventions.
Well, probably the two big forces behind
this are free-form jazz and dark folk, with a heavy penchant for staccato (to
communicate the idea of this woman's «toughness», I guess), but, since they are
both tamed into forming a light, rhythmic background for her recitals, they
never come across as self-conscious genre exercises. Everything flows sort of
naturally and unpretentiously, despite the use of «pretentious chords». And
much of this is gracile and beautiful, like the thin, vulnerable line that
drives 'Talk To Me Now' (in strange contrast to the anthemic lyrics), or the
nervous, ominous picking of 'Lost Woman Song'. Come to think of it, these two
songs represent the two main patterns: light, pretty, nonchalant ('Pale
Purple', 'Fire Door', 'Every Angle', 'Out Of Habit') and dark, paranoid,
depressing ('Work Your Way Out', 'Letting The Telephone Ring'). But the actual
melodies are different enough to count all these entities as different songs,
and the overall result is so pleasing to the ear that it does not take long
before you simply forget that the words she pronounces are supposed to make
sense and just get carried away by the song waves. If you are into all that
singer-songwriting-acoustic-playing shit at all, of course.
The only track that has to be pulped into
oblivion is 'The Slant' — a recital that has no music at all. It is encountered
at a very wrong moment, just as the ear settles down into the appropriate mode
of converting the human voice into a musical instrument with all the semantics
stripped away, yet 'The Slant' demands to get the semantics back, and, unless
you are a fan of «serious modern poetry» in general and DiFranco's in
particular, I would recommend throwing it out of the playlist at the insistence
of The Committee To Prevent Unhealthy Disruption Effects. If you are a
fan, of course, this one's for you, and, moreover, you are likely to get twice
as much spiritual ecstasy from listening to Ani DiFranco as I am.
Besides, I guess it's not such bad poetry, after all. Maybe it is just the lack
of six-syllable words that bugs me. Thumbs up
for the music, anyway.
NOT SO SOFT (1991)
1) Anticipate; 2) Rockabye; 3)
She Says; 4) Make Me Stay; 5) On Every Corner; 6) Small World; 7) Not So Soft;
8) Roll With It; 9) Itch; 10) Gratitude; 11) The Whole Night; 12) The Next Big
Thing; 13) Brief Bus Stop; 14) Looking For The Holes.
Perhaps this is just my problem, but, for as
long as I can remember, I have always felt a strong alergy towards those brands
of art that place agenda and propaganda above the force and style of
artistic expression. (Growing up in the Soviet Union did not exactly help
relieve that alergy, too). There is nothing inherently wrong about the mere presence
of agenda in one's art, because, well, if you strongly believe in something,
you'd have to be a superhuman not to share those beliefs with non-believers in
your art. But if the agenda starts overwhelming you, you're in trouble.
Not So Soft is different from Ani DiFranco in two crucial respects. First:
the music, at least the way I seem to discern it, is generally simpler,
folkier, and more predictable than it used to be. Second: the lyrics are about
five or six times as socially charged as we heard them last time. On Ani
DiFranco, the artist concocted hypnotizing sonic waves, occasionally
stuffing them with thin slices of «fight-for-your-right» that performed their
job on an almost subconscious level. Not So Soft is totally true to its
title: the stuffing has burst through the skin and corrupted the sonic waves
to the point where I, for one, cannot possibly enjoy them at all.
Some day, when all of humanity has reached some
sort of advanced, StarTrek-ian conscience level, people will look back
at this and wonder what it was all about. «So», they will say, «this woman
wanted men to treat her like a human being instead of a sexual object. So she
liked to insist upon her right to freedom of creative expression. So she
dropped direct hints about there being nothing wrong whatsoever about being
bisexual. So why not just put up a memorial plaque on the street where she
lived, and go listen to some Ted Nugent instead? Hey, at least that guy kicked
some solid ass back in those days! And he was FUNNY, too!»
I totally solidarize with Ani's feelings, and
admit that the songs on Not So Soft work pretty damn good as ballsy
feminist propaganda. The words cut, the voice bursts out of the chest, the
guitar strings twist, ring and creak as if they were needles driven with full
force under the fingernails of the lady's male adversaries. For instance, on
'Itch', she squeezes the line 'I am scratching at my consciousness like a
bitch with fleas' from between her teeth as if she were a bitch with
fleas, and the admirable touch of imitating real scratching with a little
percussion effect as she chants the refrain 'Yours was the hardest itch to
relieve' throws even more fuel on the fire.
But why must I discuss this stuff, and what
should I say? «Uh, yeah, nice work asserting that bisexuality on 'The Whole
Night' — quite a slap in the face of them bigots and chauvinists». I am far
more worried about the fact that the music behind this only exists to give her
a rhythmic background, nothing else. In fact, there is only one song here that
I would consider «musically interesting» — 'Anticipate', boldly rolling along
on a strong bluesy loop. The rest are, at best, retreads of chord structures
already explored the previous year, and, at worst, a waste of finger tissue.
Oh, it is true, as William Ruhlmann of the
All-Music Guide reminds us, that some things are new, like the (overdubbed)
vocal harmonies on some choruses and «the occasional bit of percussion» (wow,
that is some musical growth). He also says that Ani «plays her guitar
more fluidly»; I am not sure what this means, but «fluidly» is a nice word,
and, evidently, a serious artist is supposed to be playing his/her guitar more
and more «fluidly» with each new album, at least until he/she has finally
jumped the shark and lost the ability to receive more than two stars from the
All-Music Guide. Maybe, in this particular case, «fluidly» is supposed to mean
that she makes much less use of the stop-and-start broken structure that was so
frequent on Ani DiFranco, and does not rely as heavily on her nervous,
jagged, staccato style. Well, goddammit, I liked that style. Most of the
songs on here sound like boring folk demos instead.
That's just me, and just my thumbs down, of course. Perhaps it is simply the
sudden outgrowth of the FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT schtick that got me down and hid
Ani's true musical advances from my ears. But it is also not excluded that, for
some people, it is exactly that schtick that counts as a true musical advance.
I don't know about that. Next thing you know, she's a great musician because
she got a tattoo on her breastplate. That's gotta count for something, too,
right?
IMPERFECTLY (1992)
1) What If No One's Watching;
2) Fixing Her Hair; 3) In Or Out; 4) Every State Line; 5) Circle Of Light; 6)
If It Isn't Her; 7) Good, Bad, Ugly; 8) I'm No Heroine; 9) Coming Up; 10) Make
Them Apologize; 11) The Waiting Song; 12) Served Faithfully; 13) Imperfectly.
She has done it this time. Third time
around, here is an album that is completely and absolutely impossible to
discuss in terms of any other subjects but lyrics. Technically, the sound is a
little fuller here, due to the addition of occasional bass and percussion
('Make Them Apologize'), occasional mandolin ('Fixing Her Hair'), occasional
backing harmonies, even mock-operatic ones ('I'm No Heroine'), and even
occasional jazz trombone ('Circle Of Light'), but the extra touches never ever
take the central attention from her vocals and acoustic guitar anyway, so no
reason to think of them as indicative of some major style shift.
Meanwhile, the melodies, once again, do not
stand up to the freshness and innovative punch of the self-titled debut: the
formula gets old pretty fast. And so, all that's left is just stand there and
think — do these songs reflect creative and intellectual growth, or do they
simply reflect the ideology of «don't-stop-'til-you-drop»? Do they continue to
teach us new brands of ethical considerations or is it merely the same old
song and dance? Is this woman a constantly expanding genius or just a
predictable feminist hack?
Frankly, I do not have the time or desire to
find it out with this kind of material. I have tried one possible shortcut —
make an attempt at locating the album's centerpiece and try to inject it several
times in a row. That centerpiece, supposedly located in the center (where
else?), to me, seems to be 'I'm No Heroine', where the lady makes a hardly
predictable twist by trying to make us believe she is not really as tough as
we want to imagine her: "You think I'm usually wearing the pants just
'cause I rarely wear a dress... you think I stand so firm, you think I sit so
high on my trusty steed, let me tell you — I'm usually face down on the ground
when there's a stampede; I'm no heroine, at least, not last time I checked, I'm
too easy to roll over, I'm too easy to wreck..."
Nice try, Ms. DiFranco, but no dice. If you are
no heroine indeed, show us, for once, your truly vulnerable side. Or,
actually, «for once» would be no good, because everyone can fake somebody else
pretty successfully at least once in their life; preferably, I'd like to have
both sides of the story living side by side on each record. But if you really
are "too easy to wreck", how come for the rest of the album you are
mostly singing about how you and your sisters should get on with your anti-male
crusades ('Make Them Apologize'), or how the system only cares about your ass
('The Waiting Song'), or about girl-girl and girl-boy relations in which you
never, ever back down (almost everything else)?
It is this weird, disconcerting paradox — 'I'm
heroically fighting to defend my right to be no hero' — so typical of so many
liberal artistic statements, that is initially frustrating, later annoying,
and, in the end, merely curious as a culturally dependent psychological trend,
but not really translating so much to great art as it is to post-Freudian study
material. These are intelligent lyrics, sung in a refined and, for what it's
worth, perfectly sincere manner, but she is an unconscious slave of a
particular paradigm, an agenda that is no less limiting than «sex and drugs and
rock'n'roll». What else can I say about a record the most memorable thing about
which is supposed to be the lethal voltage of a "fuck you very much"
sung acappella ('Every State Line')? Just count me shocked to death, then, and
unable to twirl my thumbs in any direction. (Although, for the record, I
never ever put the question "baby, do you like to fool around" to
anyone; and if neither have you, Mr. Average Male Reader, you will, most
likely, be a piss-poor conductor for this kind of electricity).
PUDDLE DIVE (1993)
1) Names And Dates And Times;
2) Anyday; 3) 4th Of July; 4) Willing To Fight; 5) Egos Like Hairdos; 6) Back
Around; 7) Blood In The Boardroom; 8) Born A Lion; 9) My IQ; 10) Used To You;
11) Pick Yer Nose; 12) God's Country.
Perfectly Imperfectly Vol. 2: same approach
to melody, same approach to using words as bullets, looking more and more like
they are coming off one and the same endless ammunition belt, same approach to
arrangements — mostly acoustic, with a bit of this and a bit of that to keep
down the boredom factor. Granted, the bits are numerous: she expands her
acceptance of outside help, and the songs are now continuously embellished by
violins ('4th Of July'), harmonicas ('Egos Like Hairdos', 'God's Country'), and
bluesy pianos ('Back Around').
As far as I am concerned, however, Puddle
Dive is Ani's lowest point at this stage in her career. Embellishments are
fine, but she had pushed the formula as far as it could go already on her first
album, and this is yet another retread, with nary a single song that would make
a really fresh impression. Not a single account of the album that I have seen
focuses on the music; the writers have little choice but to accept her
channelling them into discussing her lyrical provocations, e. g. «wow, she
sings about menstruation, not once, but twice!» She also sings about the
freedom to pick one's nose (I'm a born nose-picker, myself, so I'm with her on
that one, too), and, oh, yes, about the freedom to pick as many male (or
female) partners as she wants, which is, by and large, the exact same thing, I
guess.
There is also a lot of singing about life on
the road and, consequently, about the inevitability of change and
flash-in-the-pan impressions, and this all fits in well with the herky-jerky
mood she creates by ripping into her guitar, but, unfortunately, it does not
detract from the feeling that all of these songs were written just as
herky-jerkily, on the spur of the moment, sometimes on a rather silly spur (e.
g. the lullaby-style "na-na-na" chorus of 'Egos'). If you can catch
that wave, or if you like songs about menstrual blood, or if you love her
lambasting of the IQ test ("they taught me different is wrong") in
one of her spoken-word pieces, or if you simply cannot get enough of rousing
feminist/human rights anthems and need a new one each morning at breakfast, Puddle
Dive will satisfy; but the way I see this chronological stretch, it was
a genuine puddle dive, and she would only start recovering on the next album. Thumbs down.
OUT OF RANGE (1994)
1) Buildings And Bridges; 2)
Out Of Range (acoustic); 3) Letter To A John; 4) Hell Yeah; 5) How Have You
Been; 6) Overlap; 7) Face Up And Sing; 8) Failing Is Like This; 9) Out Of Range
(electric); 10) You Had Time; 11) If He Tries Anything; 12) Diner.
I did not notice any new lyrical subjects of
any significance on this record; this would mean that either there are none
indeed or that one needs to be a professional Francoist to prove this wrong.
However, on the musical plane Out Of Range is a little more diversified
than Puddle Dive, bringing back occasional rhythm sections, occasional
brass and accordeon, occasional piano, and, first time ever, even an electric
guitar arrangement — on the title track, which was deemed important enough to
state its point twice, acoustic first, electric later.
Since we get to compare, it is funny how the
electric track is, expectedly, punchier than the acoustic one, but how it also
downplays Ani's technique — the fast-picked notes, very distinct and edgy and
evocative (think tiny little brain impulses flashing on and off) at the
unplugged stage, all mingle together in one jangly blur when amplified, pretty
much throwing the listener's attention off the melody altogether. Which does
not mean that the electric version is superfluous or cheap — it has its own
goals of an anthemic nature.
On a couple of tracks, she goes for a smokier,
jazzier atmosphere ('How Have You Been', 'Diner'), and it works out fine; her
playing and singing styles are, after all, very much jazz in nature, and
mixing them with suitable arrangements is quite stylish. But the backbone of
the album is still acoustic balladeering, which is, at this point, really only
for the dedicated Francoist; there is nothing I have to say about these songs
that do not move me in the least because each one is so goddamn predictable.
Oh, I said there are no new lyrical subjects —
actually, I was a little off there, because, with 'Diner', I think that Ani
has written her first song in which she has actually confessed to — get this — liking
a human being of the opposite sex. In her own inimitable way, of course
("I think you're the least fucked up person I've ever met, and that may be
as close to the real thing as I'm ever gonna get"), and with her usually
bleeding honest — a.k.a. «physiologically obsessed» — style of complimenting
("I miss listening to you in the bathroom, flushing the toilet, blowing
your nose"), but still, a positive reference to a son of Adam that
almost made me see some hope for myself at the end of the tunnel. Then the song
ended on the cheerful note of "Is that a dick in your pocket or are you
trying to record me?", and the ray of light was gone. But still, it was
nice while it lasted.
It seems like the «classic» number from the
record is 'Buildings And Bridges', most frequently played in concert and making
it to compilations. It does sound, along with the title track, like it is
making a grand sweeping statement, but the message is absolutely the same as in
'I'm No Heroine': "What doesn't bend, breaks". Well... if it is all
about bending, where is the big MTV video hit, Ms. DiFranco? Rings as hollow to
me as everything else on the same subject. When you build yourself up to this
tough self-assertive personality status, no one is going to believe in your
vulnerability. Just have your pie and be done with it. Thumbs down, except for the funky-jazzy stuff,
which suffices to beat Puddle Dive, but is too scarce to «bend» the
impression nevertheless.
NOT A PRETTY GIRL (1995)
1) Worthy; 2) Tip Toe; 3)
Cradle And All; 4) Shy; 5) Sorry I Am; 6) Light Of Some Kind; 7) Not A Pretty
Girl; 8) The Million You Never Made; 8) Hour Follows Hour; 9) 32 Flavors; 10)
Asking Too Much; 11) This Bouquet; 12) Crime For Crime; 13) Coming Up.
Let us remark, in passing, that Not A Pretty
Girl was DiFranco's sixth album in six years. Those were not the 1960s, and
extremely few artists would dare to keep their productivity at such a level and
for a good reason: fresh musical ideas were much harder to come by. No better
proof for this than a cursory look at Ani's conveyor belt: one or two
significantly attractive songs per album, surrounded by a sea of regurgitated
ideas whose only strong point is the spiritual voltage with which they are
delivered. Is that a real bonus, though? A chunk of snot launched from one's
nosdril with bullet speed hardly paints a more exciting picture than the same
chunk stuck to your coat sleeve. (A brutal metaphor, I admit, but well in touch
with Ani's own lyrical style. Read 'Tip Toe' and your breakfast will make its
reappearance much faster).
This time, she is back to the minimalistic
idiom again: herself, her acoustic, and a lonesome Andy Stochansky on
percussion (sometimes). It is not as bad as it sounds; at least, this way our
chances of hearing her inimitable playing style are realized far more
frequently — except that, of course, by 1995 her inimitable playing style was
as much yesterday's news as her image. But approach Not A Pretty Girl
from a newcomer's point of view and you will find as much joy in it as the weathered
follower used to find in Ani DiFranco.
It is
extremely easy to miss an important turn here, though: the album is genuinely
less geared towards her usual agenda than its title would suggest. In fact, to
provide a good impression, it only really needs to discard two obligatorily
ugly pieces of shit stuck in the middle of the record — the title track, a
collection of bland banalities for the braindead segment of the feminist crowd
("I am a patriot, I have been fighting the good fight" and all that
crap), and the immediately following 'The Million You Never Made', another
empty rant at the ghosts of the record industry ("I wouldn't work for
you no matter what you paid, but I could be the million that you never
made" — gee, no wonder the big bosses at UMG and EMI have been losing so
much sleep these last fifteen years. What's illegal downloading next to the
total catastrophe of being unable to sign up Ani DiFranco?).
But on most of the other songs she seems to
intentionally step away from her preferred subjects — "I am a strong (shit
fuck piss) sexless citizen of the world" and "I am an emotionally imbalanced
(cunt dick tits) human who needs as much love, care, and respect as any strong
(shit fuck piss) sexless citizen of the world" — and broaden the range by
singing about... well, by simply floating on the wind and let her own brand of
impressionism carry her away. Some of the lyrics might even need decoding, and
some may not mean much, or anything, at all; for Ani, this is as huge a level
of progress as she could ever aspire to.
On 'Sorry I Am', she simply sings a moderately
pretty song of apology to a deserted lover. Yes, we can finish the picture in our
minds and understand that this is the kind of song that a man usually
addresses to a woman ("I guess I never loved you quite as well as
the way you loved me"), so, in reversing the roles, DiFranco still creates
a vehicle for her social ideology, but the big difference is, she does not say
this — you can imply it, but the song itself is no more a boring representative
of «acute feminist position» than, say, 'Go Your Own Way' is a philosophical
justification of shameless male chauvinism. It is just a pretty sad
confessional lost love song, albeit not a very good one (not a surprise,
because there are no very good ones altogether).
'Cradle And All' is the most uppity creation on
here, fast and bouncy in a free-ride, freedom-obsessed Greenwich Village way,
using the bleak old lullaby as a setup for telling tales of swinging from one
place and relation to another with no backthoughts. The point, if there is one,
is once again implied rather than spelt out letter by letter. The technically
demanding 'Light Of Some Kind', with its dry, choking guitar scrape seems
to be Ani making some sort of excuse to her boyfriend for not hiding her
bisexuality — well, at least she openly admits that some things make some
people uncomfortable, which is refreshing.
Overall, Not A Pretty Girl just makes a
damn good job at presenting the lady's human side — not a perfect job,
because a perfect job would require at least a lobotomy, but sufficient to make
one relax and listen to this as a piece of music rather than sit at one's desk
with a textbook on third-wave feminism and seek out all the links and
paraphrases. My only problem with the album is that she must have thought up
all the melodies the day before walking into the studio. So, it is
thought-provoking music rather than just thought-provoking, but most of the
provoked thoughts were awful anyway. Thumbs down.
DILATE (1996)
1) Untouchable Face; 2) Outta
Me Onto You; 3) Superhero; 4) Dilate; 5) Amazing Grace; 6) Napoleon; 7) Shameless;
8) Done Wrong; 9) Going Down; 10) Adam And Eve; 11) Joyful Girl.
Dilate put Ani on the mainstream charts, the low-to-mid ranges of which she
has never left since, but just how much of her own merit went into this is
debatable; the main reason for this increased popularity is, I believe, that
she simply fell in with the wave of interest towards the «Angry Young Female
Singer-Songwriter» crowds popularized by Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little
Pill just a few months before Dilate hit the stores. In fact, quite
a few people have gone on record comparing Ani's confessional blurts on here
with Alanis' style — "isn't it ironic" (to quote Alanis herself),
considering that DiFranco had been doing that schtick for half a decade already?
It helps that Dilate, again, returns to
a fuller sound, with Ani herself handling electric guitar duties, and also
adding bass, synthesizers, and organs where she sees fit. This makes her
'Napoleon' sound a little bit Neil Young-ish (the dry guitar crackle is not
unlike the one that sets up the mood for 'Down By The River'), and her 'Going
Down' a little bit psychedelic — the lyrics may suggest that it is merely
a song about being dumped by yet another male chauvinist pig, but the carefully
measured effects do really create an aura of slowly descending into a
bottomless shaft, and the more you listen to it, the more you are prone to
creeping yourself out.
So, either it is the reentrance of variegated
arrangements, or there are some real improvements on the melody side (with Ani,
it is always hard to tell), but, in my view, Dilate brings back some
confidence in her use as an artist, much as this view is opposite to those that
think DiFranco is always at her best when it's just her, her guitar, and the
latest version of her agenda. Her interpretation of 'Amazing Grace',
contrasting the actual singing with somebody reciting the verses in a dull,
disinterested manner over the phone, is fresh and thought-provoking, despite
being horrendously drawn out (not even the President of the United States could
stand seven minutes of it, let alone the mere mortals). Her singing on 'Done
Wrong' nears beautiful. And her trademark "fuck you" on 'Untouchable
Face' must have taken quite a bit of polishing during rehearsals — it perfectly
captures the presupposition of «I used to be patient with you, but even the
strongest kind of patience has its limits, so I have no choice but to take a
shortcut here» that one witnesses quite often in movies, but, for some strange
reason, almost never in music.
To make things even brighter, Dilate
heavily cuts down both on anthemic statements and shocking verbal imagery —
certainly not because she is selling out to the Alanis Morissette crowd (for
that matter, Jagged Little Pill was all about anthemic statements
and ugly impressions), but because she is... growing up? Note that, with the
understandable exception of 'Amazing Grace', each song on the album has a «YOU»,
and that «YOU» is mostly in the singular; as much as I feel uncomfortable
about spying on other people's relationships, I'd rather prefer to be let in on
these secrets of the soul than listen to yet another not-a-pretty-girl kind of
rallying. Besides, these responseless dialogs become less and less annoying
with each new album — and the lyrics for something like 'Adam And Eve' are
downright complex and open for quite a variety of interpretations, e. g.
such lines as "I just happen to like apples / And I am not afraid of
snakes" put a new twist on the Genesis morals that is well worth
considering.
As per custom, from about one third to one half
of the album is fillerish, but if we «stoop to her level», like the anti-hero
of 'Adam And Eve', the fresh, interesting part still guarantees a thumbs up. Serious critics may, and will, sneer at
the general public that only opened its eyes to DiFranco after having been
goaded by the inferior presence of Alanis, but at least Dilate proudly
deserves each and every one of its 480,000 sold copies, which I could hardly
say about Pill's 33 million.
LIVING IN CLIP (1997)
1) Whatever; 2) Wherever; 3)
Gravel; 4) Shy; 5) Joyful Girl; 6) Hide And Seek; 7) Napoleon; 8) I’m No
Heroine; 9) Amazing Grace; 10) Anticipate; 11) Tiptoe; 12) Sorry I Am; 13) The
Diner/The Slant; 14) 32 Flavors; 15) Out Of Range; 16) Untouchable Face; 17)
Shameless; 18) Distracted; 19) Adam And Eve; 20) Firedoor; 21) Both Hands; 22)
Out Of Habit; 23) Every State Line; 24) Not So Soft; 25) Travel Tips; 26) Wrong
With Me; 27) In Or Out; 28) We’re All Gonna Blow; 29) Letter To A John; 30)
Overlap.
Ani’s prolific nature easily spreads over to
the live setting: she has a never-ending «Official Bootleg» series second in
scope only to Pearl Jam (and third only to the Grateful Dead) — artistic
commitment at its most maddening for completists. Non-completists, though, will
most likely only want one sample of the lady’s stage creativity, and Living
In Clip, essentially a 1990-96 career retrospective masking as a live 2-CD
set, will do nicely.
Despite the unsettling length of this thing,
its selection of songs, going heavy on recent material from Dilate but
not really ignoring any of her other albums, is a great reminder of the fact that
Ani DiFranco is, in fact, an accomplished songwriter (not to mention a fabulous
picker) — one that she has an ugly knack of making us forget through massive
overproduction. And since she honestly works her ass off in concert, playing
with the same level of complexity that she shows in the studio, this passes off
quite easily for a legit best-of compilation.
Most of the tracks feature her flexible power
trio — herself, percussionist extraordinaire Andy Stochansky and Sara Lee on
bass; ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Both Hands’, however, get unexpected symphonic
arrangements from the Buffalo Philharmonic (which sort of happened to turn up
at the right time in the right place) that work brilliantly in the case of the
former, which gets a sort of Ravel-style bravado sheen, and not so brilliantly
in the case of the latter, which gets a sort of Ennio Morricone-style heroic
intro and outro for no particular reason.
Discussing all the subtle changes that are
supposed to justify separate ownership of the album would make me look like an
Ani fan, so let us skip directly to the nasty part. There is almost absolutely
nothing seriously wrong with the record bar one thing: the banter. Stage
banter is an art (at least when you bother to include it on live albums), and
Ani is, honestly, one of the clumsiest banterers that ever ventured out under
the spotlight. Simply put, her «stage persona», to me at least, sounds
exaggerated and artificial. All over the place, she drops tons of giggling,
silly jokes and puns, life-on-the-road anecdotes and casual blabbering with
Stochansky — stuff that would sound totally okay when shared with a bunch of
friends at a local barbecue, but is extremely contrived during a live
show. I know, it is supposed to signify Friendship With The Audience, but these
people in the audience are not her friends, and it all gives off some
strange effect, as if she were saying, «hey I’m as human as all you guys out
there, so I’ll laugh till you drop and tell jokes till you cry because how else
are you gonna believe it?»
In short, it would have been far more effective
if she’d bothered to insert her «humor» in the actual songs rather than in
between them; as it is, this occasional transformation into Jerry Seinfeld’s
sister only detracts from the power of her strongest numbers. Fortunately,
some of the longer bits are segregated into separate tracks (‘Travel Tips’,
etc.) that can be easily programmed out. With that little bit of personal
alteration behind us, Living In Clip is another easy thumbs up for the lady, and an excellent,
definitive full-stop to the first part of her career. Bring on the next one.
LITTLE PLASTIC CASTLE (1998)
1) Little Plastic Castles; 2)
Fuel; 3) Gravel; 4) As Is; 5) Two Little Girls; 6) Deep Dish; 7) Loom; 8)
Pixie; 9) Swan Dive; 10) Glass House; 11) Independence Day; 12) Pulse.
Welcome to the world of soft jazz. It is almost
frightening how consistently mellow this album is — almost bordering on «adult
contemporary» in a few spots, and completely jettisoning the indie-rock
flourishes of Dilate as if they never existed. Maybe she was feeling
«trapped» in that aesthetics, or perhaps everything is much simpler: a couple
friendly drinks at the bar with a few local jazz musicians and presto, all of
a sudden your affection for the trombone has grown three hundred percent
overnight.
Regardless, for Ani's level, this is her «easy
listening» album. Unfortunately, in the light of her modest songwriting
talents, it translates as «possessing very little staying power». Dilate
was good when it was flashing out its sharp edges, song after song; Plastic
Castle patiently smoothes out all these edges until the whole environment
becomes thoroughly child-safe — and unpalatable to those with more capricious
tastes.
The album's major piece is, of course, 'Pulse'.
Starts off as a tender, caring ballad (one of those rare displays of pure human
emotion untainted by feminist reasoning), then, several minutes later, becomes
a late-night jazz jam / lullaby with guest star Jon Hassell contributing a
lengthy trombone solo. The music sits firmly three feet away from the line
that separates «pretty» from «gorgeous», but there is a modestly introspective
quality about it that would immediately brand anyone who'd try to dismiss the
whole thing with the seal of cynicism. Technically, Ani's band does a great job
on the piece, so much so that they almost threaten to turn her into but one
of the essential components of the whole thing. (Not that I would mind).
As for the actual songs — there is the faraway
nastiness of the acoustic riff on 'Pixie', and the zydeco flourishes on the
title track are pleasant when they arrive to drag this ballad out of its languishing
mediocrity, and the studio version of 'Gravel' is as sharply staccato-driven as
the live version; but, of course, her Grammy Award nomination came for 'Glass
House', the album's fullest-sounding song and also one of the blandest, a
generic indie-rock angst number. (Guess it was at least loud enough for the
Grammy people to notice). Really, what's to discuss? This is just Ani, a little
calmer than usual. But still coming up with the regular verbal bliss: "May
their souls rest easy now that lynching has been frowned upon / And we've moved
to the electric chair".
Feel free to give it a thumbs up if you are one
of those late-night wine-glass candle-light soft-porn types, with 'Pulse' right
up your alley, of if you are one of those types who think that guitar distortion
is nothing but pretentious uglification and that the sax-and-brushes thing is
really where it's at. From my own point of view, I'd rather abstain.
UP UP UP UP UP UP (1999)
1) 'Tis Of Thee; 2) Virtue; 3)
Come Away From It; 4) Jukebox; 5) Angel Food; 6) Angry Any More; 7) Everest; 8)
Up Up Up Up Up Up; 9) Know Now Then; 10) Trickle Down; 11) Hat Shaped Hat.
"I'm not angry any more", she says,
"we learn like the trees how to bend". The song, 'Angry Any More', is
a fairly important piece — if it is not tricking us, then it allows us to take
a peek at where all of the aggression and suffering come from. (Freud, of
course, would have a field day). But even more significantly, it has to be
taken as a sort of manifesto, that the uncontrolled angst and rage have been
gotten over and from now on we are going to see intelligence tempering hot emotions
instead of being yoked by them. At least, that's what we are promised; it would
be unreasonable to expect someone like Ani to keep those promises, though.
Musically, this is not much different from Little
Plastic Castle: partly soft acoustic stuff, partly quiet jazz stuff that
veers between lounge and avantgarde without bothering to spell out the difference
in a distinct way. The soft acoustic stuff is predictably elegant, sometimes
begging to be nominated for the category of "cathartic", like
'Everest', a delicate midnight waltz with DiFranco's guitar and new band member
Jason Mercer's bass swaying round each other like old-fashioned dance partners
— but the overall sound is a bit too stifled and, at the same time, too roughly
underproduced to really qualify as a masterpiece.
And pretty much the same words apply to
everything else. My fond feeling for the album is not because of jaw-dropping
melodies or terrific playing, but because it drives us into unexpectedly sadder
territory — many of the songs sound like laments that, indeed, contain no
anger, but only pure sorrow and a touch of bitterness. Eight minutes of 'Come
Away From It' may seem way too much on paper, but they have a point: it is
eight minutes of begging that, in effect, symbolize eight hundred, eight
thousand, eight million minutes of begging, as much as it takes to get the
point of your begging across. What is she begging for, though? "What makes
you so lavish that you can afford to spend every sober moment feeling angry and
bored?... Are you trying to tell me this world just isn't beautiful
enough?.." One could say that the song's antagonist is Ani herself — the
Ani of Not So Soft and Not A Pretty Girl — rather than some
unnamed lover that we honestly don't give two shits about.
With each new album, the percentage of
enigmatic songs is steadily increasing — I don't know if this can be
interpreted as squeezing out the Buffalonian and soaking in the New Yorker, but
it definitely makes it harder and harder to dismiss the tunes as simplistic
and generic. The soft dark growl of 'Angel Food', for instance, with its funky
waves and out-of-nowhere aboriginal hunt calls and its pre-post-beatnik lyrics,
is a purely impressionistic matter. So is 'Know Now Then', whose lyrics vaguely
refer to some other sort of girl-girl relationship but whose «astral jazz» textures
almost might suggest the relationship is taking place on Mars. And Mars is
actually referred to during the thirteen minutes of 'Hat-Shaped Hat', a whacky
funky jam decidedly about nothing — actually, the weakest spot on the record,
because Ani's outfit does not possess true jam power, and this time around,
there are no atmospheric currents to hold the listener's attention, so if this
is not a «space-padder» par excellence, I do not know what is.
Oh, I would really have liked to give the
record a thumbs up, but now that I remember the album title, it seems
impossible to do so — it would feel like I were being manipulated into the
rating. On the other hand, the converse rating would also be wrong; as much as
tracks like 'Hat-Shaped Hat' suggest that the lady should try getting into
needlework, and as much as I miss her awesome guitar chops that are, for the
most part, concealed either due to an outgrowth of modesty or an outgrowth of
blisters, they are not enough to neutralize the honestly good moments of the
record. Partly pointless, partly pretty, and we harbor enough liberal guilt to
let it go with a word of kindness.
TO THE TEETH (1999)
1) To The Teeth; 2) Soft
Shoulder; 3) Wish I May; 4) Freakshow; 5) Going Once; 6) Hello Birmingham; 7)
Back Back Back; 8) Swing; 9) Carry You Around; 10) Cloud Blood; 11) The
Arrivals Gate; 12) Providence; 13) I Know This Bar.
God, this is horrible. One certainly does not
expect an intelligent folk-rock masterpiece from an album that is the artist's
second-within-the-year to overflow the sixty-minute mark (actually, this one
runs over seventy), but a few decent numbers here and there from someone of
DiFranco's caliber could still be welcome.
Instead, To The Teeth gives us seventy
minutes of plodding, insanely boring, unimaginably underwritten mid-tempo
rhythms that sound like they were conceived in a disfocused, debilitated
cannabis haze. I would venture a guess that no one but the deepest, dangerous, society-threatening
fanatic, whose wildest dream is to open a tattoo parlor next to Ani DiFranco's
place of residence, could willingly listen to this more than one time.
For one thing, not a single of these songs
should be legally allowed to run more than three minutes, yet many of them
cross the six or seven minute mark as if each aspired to be a frickin' 'Desolation
Row' or something. In a few cases, this could be understood if she were intent
on driving her little backing jazz-funk band into jam mode; but whoever these
guys are and whatever their talents may be, they are strictly prohibited from
displaying band. It could also be pardoned had she remembered how to play those
cool choppy rhythms like she used to when she had no band at all; but there is
not a single song all across these seventy minutes on which the guitar playing
would rise above rudimentary (at least, by her own standards).
Then there are the politics. She returns to the
battleground fully armed — «to the teeth», indeed — and, from the first
minutes, engages in a ghost battle with shadows of MTV, NBC, CBS, NRA and tells
us to «open fire on each weapon manufacturer while he's giving head to some
republican senator». Apparently, the song — and, most likely, the entire album
as such — was inspired by the Columbine massacre, but righteous anger is no
excuse for writing lame lyrics, setting them to non-existent melodies and
letting the blood drip for eight awful minutes. Further down the line, Woody
Guthrie and Martin Luther King have guest appearances as well; Angela Davis
might have been on the list of invitations, too, but the catch is, she's not
dead yet.
Then there are the awful embarrassments.
'Freakshow' sounds one, nay, two hundred percent like an Alanis Morissette
outtake from the Little Pill era; Ani goes as far as to modulate her
singing according to the Morisette pattern — what the hell? The main reason we
may be interested in her in the first place is that she presents an embraceable
alternative to Alanis, and now this? Then there is 'Swing', on which she
acknowledges her respect for hip-hop culture by sharing the spotlight with
Corey Parker, improvising a little rap about her. The effect will probably seem
pitiful even to supporters of the culture, let alone the doomed bigots who
prefer real music.
Then there is the overall rating. Need I even spell
it out? Even Robert Christgau hated the record, and no other prominent critic
raved more about DiFranco than the enigmatic old goat.
REVELLING / RECKONING (2001)
CD I: 1) Ain't That The Way;
2) O.K.; 3) Garden Of Simple; 4) Tamburitza Lingua; 5) Marrow; 6) Heartbreak
Even; 7) Harvest; 8) Kazoointoit; 9) Whatall Is Nice; 10) What How When Where;
11) Fierce Flawless; 12) Rock Paper Scissors; 13) Beautiful Night; CD II: 1)
Your Next Bold Move; 2) This Box Contains; 3) Reckoning; 4) So What; 5) Prison
Prism; 6) Imagine That; 7) Flood Waters; 8) Grey; 9) Subdivision; 10) Old Old
Song; 11) Sick Of Me; 12) Don't Nobody Know; 13) School Night; 14) That Was My
Love; 15) Revelling; 16) In Here.
No one understood why Ani forgot to release a
new studio album in 2000. An intentional refusal to join the happy crowds of
artists cashing in on the «turn-of-the-millennium» chance? Or just one of
nature's unpredictable errors? Fortunately, already the next year gave a clear
answer: she was simply hoarding up material for a double release. Revelling/Reckoning
is one hundred and twenty minutes of prime time Ani DiFranco, give or take a
few.
The two parts are neatly divided into the Revelling
and Reckoning parts (although, for some reason, both title tracks are
asymmetrically placed in the second half). We'll get to the Revelling
part a little later; afore everything, it needs to be said that your love and
admiration for DiFranco will be put to the sorest, grizzliest test ever with Reckoning
— one hour of arch-lazy, rambling, unmemorable acoustic tunes that aren't even
so much tunes as raw mood pieces, envelopping endless streams of the lady's
poetry.
It is time to confess here that I am not much
of a poetry fan, with my own admiration strictly reserved to a handful of
well-known greats; but I do concede that sometimes clever poetry, set to
rudimentary muzak, can strike a deep chord — e. g., Leonard Cohen. Yet even
Cohen allowed himself to stoop to the level of us mortals by molding his poetry
in a pop music format, which never ever hurt it, but, instead, made it more
poignant. And, occasionally, so did DiFranco. But not here. Play 'Both Hands'
next to any of these musical embryos — embryos? nay, blastulae rather —
and if this is «maturation» or «artistic progression», I renounce «art»
forever.
"How sick of me must you be by now?"
asks she the provocative question midway through the acoustic bog. Of course,
it's a personal, one-to-one song about relationships rather than a taunt to
potential or disenchanted fans, but we are all in this game, and, personally, Reckoning
makes me pretty sick. «You have to be in the proper mood for it», the fans say
in their reviews, but I cannot envision a mood in which I'd ever want to put on
this record instead of Ani's magnificent — in comparison — debut album, let
alone miriads of more passionate, more cleverly designed, more musical acoustic
experiences from singer-songwriters all over the globe. Balderdash.
The first half of the album is, however,
a different story. It is much more fleshed out, less minimalistic, and
continues more in the vein of unpretentious folk-jazz-fusion of Little
Plastic Castle than the formulaic «liberal gung-ho» trash of To The
Teeth. There is even a mildly funny musical joke number ('What How When
Where'), whose funny looping of every monosyllabic question word found in the
English language may make you smile and whose friendly acoustic / brass
interplay will reassure you that she still knows how to write real
songs, even though the liberal arts devil is permanently swaying her off the
right track.
Upbeat constructions like 'Ain't That The Way',
'O.K.', and 'Fierce Flawless' are nothing to write home about, but nice and
listenable; mood pieces like 'Tamburitza Lingua' are much better developed
than any of the mood pieces on Reckoning (as simple as its acoustic
melody is, it's a frickin' melody, well assisted by creepy sci-fi whoooosh!
blasts in the background); and only a few of the numbers match the yawn power
of Reckoning ('Marrow', 'Garden Of Simple'). In short, Revelling
gives the impression of a real, if somewhat stagnated, album, while Reckoning
gives the impression of an afterthought... «oh, wait a minute guys, I still got
those two poetry-filled notebooks, if I don't do something with them right
now, the world's spiritual heritage may not be deemed complete by the next
generation... how much studio time have we got left, anyway?»
Plus, I intentionally refuse to comment on any
of the lyrics on here — if only for the reason that, for every subject
and statement, you can already find an earlier one that is at least equally
well, if not better, expressed. Political and social statements; psychological
one-sided conversations with boyfriends and girlfriends; random life
observations converted into cosmic metaphors, you know the drift. At this
point, I am no longer able to take all that verbosity seriously.
To sum up, if Little Plastic Castle
showed some musical promise, what with all the cautious jazz-funk experimentation
and stuff, Revelling, at best, runs on inertia, and, at worst, drives
into a wall; whereas Reckoning is easily the least rewarding DiFranco
listening experience up to this point — at least To The Teeth has its
pragmatic use at propaganda rallies. Overall, a predictable thumbs down, although 'What How When Where' is
one of her funnest creations. (And if you are an admirer, determined to scorn
me for choosing this lengthy album's one joke tune as the best song on it, hey,
that's hardly my fault. Blame the author, I say).
SO MUCH SHOUTING, SO MUCH LAUGHTER (2002)
CD I: 1) Swan Dive; 2) Letter
To A John / Tambouritza Lingua; 3) Grey; 4) Cradle And All; 5) Whatall Is Nice;
6) What How When Where; 7) To The Teeth; 8) Revelling; 9) Napoleon; 10) Shrug;
11) Welcome To; CD II: 1) Comes A Time; 2) Ain't That The Way; 3) Dilate; 4)
Gratitude; 5) 32 Flavors; 6) Loom / Pulse; 7) Not A Pretty Girl; 8) Self
Evident; 9) Reckoning; 10) My IQ; 11) Jukebox; 12) You Had Time; 13) Rock Paper
Scissors.
To summarize the lacklustre fizzle-out of the
second stage of Ani's career, up comes a fittingly lacklustre live album whose
main purpose is to show that the lady has learned to be just as obnoxious and
boring onstage as she is in the studio — even if she herself has always said
that she felt far more comfortable playing live than recording.
"I don't know why the fuck I play acoustic
guitar, I hate that acoustic guitar sound", she greets us on the very
first track, producing a louder-than-necessary first chord. A funny, innocent
joke, but gruesomely symbolic: many people, no doubt, will want to ask the same
question upon comparing the bland minimalist acoustic blabber of her XXIst
century sound with the awesome style that she used to have years ago and that
is still, in bits and pieces, evident on Living In Clip. The setlist for
this particular show conveniently drops everything prior to 1994 (with
the lonesome exception of 'Gratitude' from Not So Soft, only proving
the rule), and focuses intently upon her last three albums, with the top share
of the cake going to Reckoning / Revelling.
Ani's little jazz-funk band does a faithful job
of keeping up, and they may even be enjoying the proceedings, but it is hard to
guess, because the emphasis is on staying fairly close to the quiet, restrained
arrangements on the originals, with next to no jamming or improvisation pieces
at all. Actually, it doesn't look like she is in great need of the band at all.
Most of the songs from the latest album, for instance, come from the Revelling
part, i. e. introspective underwritten acoustic ballads that find little use
for the talents of Ravi Best, trumpet, Shane Endsley, trumpet, Todd Horton,
trumpet, Daren Hahn, drums, Jason Mercer, bass, Hans Teuber, clarinet, Julie
Wolf, keyboards, vocals. (Ani's interaction with Julie is supposed to form some
integral artistic part in the structuring of the second CD, subtitled Girls'
Singing Night, but the whole thing never really goys far beyond a little
dueting, a trifle backing vocals, and some mildly humorous banter).
To put it bluntly, the good tunes have
nothing more to say than they did in the confines of the studio, and sometimes
less ('Napoleon' and 'What How When Where', in particular, suffer greatly from
the lack of studio gimmickry that used to make one pay any attention to them in
the first place). Then there are the bad tunes, of which there are many;
I find the setlist quite depressing, to be honest — and previewing some numbers
off the upcoming Evolve is hardly a profitable business, either, given
the ever-continuing nosedive on that album as well.
But none of this sucks as much as the decision
to dedicate a large chunk of the record to nauseating political propaganda. It
is not enough that she recreates the seven-and-a-half minute torture of 'To The
Teeth' in its entirety; one of the new numbers ('Self Evident') is a
nine-minute rant on the evils of American politics, spewed off in a
quasi-improvised (actually, quite carefully rehearsed, I think) manner to a
boring lounge jazz background.
Let us get this straight: I am aware, and
everyone should be, that the lady's schtick is to combine music with social
work, and that, if, like Alice Cooper, you believe music and politics should never
mingle, you should stay away from artists like Ani altogether. I do not share
that belief; I have no problem with John Lennon singing 'Power To The People'
or with people like John Fogerty or Robert Smith or Neil Young writing
anti-Bush diatribes and setting them to music. After all, music is feelings,
and, if you make good music, why should you be confining your feelings to
girls, cars, and transcendental meditation instead of expressing your position
on relevant issues?
But it is a different thing altogether if you
sacrifice music in favor of political propaganda. If the lady believes her true
mission is to go out there on stage and enflame people's hearts against the NRA
and George W. Bush and the whored-out media etc. etc., that's fine; declare
this a political rally and leave your guitar at home. 'Self Evident' is not
even poetry — it starts out innocently enough ("Us people are just poems,
we are 90% metaphor..."), but pretty soon derails into a series of
platitudes with the legions of supporters howling in unison in all the
appropriate stops. I will admit, though, that some of the lines, e. g.
"Take away our playstations and we are a third world nation", are
brilliant. That is the most I can admit.
In toto, re: the album title, there is, indeed, plenty of shouting — on behalf
of all the hardcore Democrats in the audience that merely dropped in to check
if the sun were still shining, or whether DiFranco was still going strong
against the NRA, which is approximately the same thing — and there is plenty of
laughter, too, mostly on behalf of Ani herself, who is occasionally trying to
deflate the sermon aspect of it all by giggling like the quintessential
schoolgirl (I find the contrast cringeworthy, but that's just me). What is
seriously lacking in between all the shouting and all the laughter is any sort
of viable reason why the heck this woman is still being defined as a «singer,
guitarist, and songwriter», when she is doing her best to effectively sabotage
all three of these aspects. Thumbs down,
egads. At this stage, apparently even Robert Christgau gave up on her (formerly
a major fan, he hasn't written one single review of any of her albums since
2002).
EVOLVE (2003)
1) Promised Land; 2) In The
Way; 3) Icarus; 4) Slide; 5) O My My; 6) Evolve; 7) Shrug; 8) Phase; 9) Here
For Now; 10) Second Intermission; 11) Serpentine; 12) Welcome To.
The album won Ani DiFranco a Grammy Award in
2004... for Best Recording Package. Reading this official information on
Wikipedia or in any other source after you have heard the album gives a clear
impression of bitter irony, if not indirect insult. First, it is hard to
imagine somebody as righteous as Ani to care one second about the Grammy
people in the first place. Second, it is even harder to imagine the Grammy
people actually taking the time to listen to an Ani DiFranco album. Third, in
spite of both the first and the second, this Grammy decision summarizes my
feelings about Evolve to near-perfection.
Since it can be easily shown that Ms. DiFranco
knows how to create interesting melodies, the obvious reasoning is that, by the
time Reckoning and Revelling came along, she had developed the
notion that «interesting melodies» are an insult to honest artistry and
intellectual audiences. Thus, her newly-established motto can be briefly
summarized as «Hooks are for NRA members». In the place of hooks, we proceed to
get Messages and Free Jazz, DiFranco-style.
Granted, after the «time-suspended» illusion of
Revelling, Evolve has more rhythm to it, and some of the ideas
are moderately interesting. 'In The Way', in particular, gets a quirky little
funky riff with hypnotizing potential not unlike the one exploited to the max
by James Brown on 'Sex Machine' — except that, of course, Ani is no James
Brown, and even when she tries to get into overdrive, she cannot sustain the
tension for five minutes, meaning that the riff is essentially wasted. Another
classy, sardonic riff, acoustic this time, is lost on the title track, which
has nothing else to go for it.
The whole thing just screams out «lazy, lazy,
lazy...» louder than almost any other DiFranco album up to that point. The
only song on the entire album that is anywhere close to «completeness» is 'Here
For Now', which takes half a minute to find its groove, introduces said groove
as a quiet little Latin dance number, variegates it with a quiet, arythmic
chorus, and locks the door behind it in an economic three minutes time —
whereas most of the raw, blurry, impressionistic numbers overstay their welcome
for at least four or five.
The nadir, quite predictably, is 'Serpentine',
a ten-minute rant on civil liberties and other related shit that is the
younger, but even more obnoxious, brother of 'Self Evident' from the last
record. "The difference between you and me, baby, is I get fucked up when
I'm alone", she states midway through; yep, she must have been
particularly lonesome when recording this album.
One thing that is not quite clear to me is why
anyone would really want to bother falling for Ani's amateurish experimentation
in the realm of modern jazz. Considering just how many superior jazz musicians,
ancient and modern, there are in each and every aspect of the genre, Evolve
could only hope to work if she'd found a decent way of integrating the new
influences into her old style, for instance, start playing the guitar the way
she did on her first album, while all the brass players and percussionists
around her supplied the external arrangements. Instead, she somehow convinced
herself that once you set up some thin, bland, unevocative groove, all you have
left to do is support it with another meandering poem sung from the bottom of
the heart.
Not recommended for anyone except the
staunchest Ani adepts, with the possible exception of 'Here For Now'; in fact,
a track like 'Serpentine', unless you happen to be an innate serial killer mascherading
as a braindead ultra-liberal activist, can turn sane people off the dame
forever. To be honest, there is quite a bit of decent poetry on here, too
('Icarus', 'Second Intermission') — my wild guess is that she only writes stuff
like 'Serpentine' and 'Self Evident' when she's having her period or something.
Thumbs down, all the same; good poetry
is Pulitzer Prize stuff — without a half-decent melody to accompany it, all you
can hope for is a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package.
EDUCATED GUESS (2004)
1) Platforms; 2) Swim; 3)
Educated Guess; 4) Origami; 5) Bliss Like This; 6) The True Story Of What Was;
7) Bodily; 8) You Each Time; 9) Animal; 10) Grand Canyon; 11) Company; 12)
Rain Check; 13) Akimbo; 14) Bubble.
One may easily deduce whether this here
reviewer was enthralled or not by Educated Guess, socially conscious
singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco 3,456th studio album, from the fact that it took
him three listens and a couple read-ups on other people's reviews and
descriptions to understand that it is, in fact, hugely different from her
previous release, Evolve, in that it completely drops her soft-jazz band
and, once again, reverts the artist to fully acoustic, fully individual mode.
Honestly, I did not even notice that. And as
far as I am concerned, this only means that it makes no goddamn difference any
more. Just fifty more minutes of time wasted on melodies, words, and feelings
that bring nothing new — or nothing good, for that matter — to the
table. In fact, that statement is pretty much definitive: there is not a single
track here that could even begin to be described as a «highlight».
«Lowlights», yes, not the least of them her usually flat beatnik rant 'Grand
Canyon' where she proclaims that "People, we are standing at ground zero
of the feminist revolution... coolest F-word ever deserves a fucking shout! I
mean, why can't all decent men and women call themselves feminists, out of
respect for those who fought for this?" Gimme a fuckin' break there, lady.
The saddest realization of all is, of course,
that by now she has completely resigned to preaching to the choir. Long-term
fans cannot go wrong with this or anything else, but how can you expect to make
new converts if all you're offering them is a bunch of on-the-spot constructed,
sloppy, dissonant chord sequences worthy of just about every guitar player on
this planet with two or three years of playing experience? How do you expect
intelligent people to follow you if each of your songs places such dreadful
importance on the lyrics (more spoken than sung), yet, for all we know, there
are only two topics concerned: «Treat me like a human being instead of like a
fuckhole, and then we'll go on talking» and «Fight the machine, fight the machine».
Do butterflies and coloured rainbows even exist for this woman? Thumbs down. At this point, the only remedy that
can be prescribed for the patient is an album of surf rock covers.
KNUCKLE DOWN (2005)
1) Knuckle Down; 2) Studying
Stones; 3) Manhole; 4) Sunday Morning; 5) Modulation; 6) Seeing Eye Dog; 7) Lag
Time; 8) Parameters; 9) Callous; 10) Paradigm; 11) Minerva; 12) Recoil.
For some reason, Ani has reverted back to writing
songs instead of creating them, if you get my meaning. Formally, the only
change is that she has amply shared production duties with fellow
singer-songwriter Joe Henry, and that a bunch of new hands are guesting on the
album, not the least among them violin maestro Andrew Bird in person.
Informally, this is simply her best effort since... let's see... gosh, how far
do we have to scroll up?... since Up Up Up Up Up, definitely, or even
since Dilate, not so definitely.
For one thing, it is hard to remember the last
time she recorded something as tender and poignant as 'Studying Stones' — not
only are the lyrics, advertising restraint and calm, suggesting that she may
be trying to exorcise the deamon of cheap social activism, but she sings it
real pretty, and meshes well with Bird's trademark morose violin part. Then, a
few steps down the block comes 'Modulation', combining a steady rhythm, a
gloomy production, and a catchy vocal melody — and a mention of death to
boot. For the record, she almost never mentioned death before — in fact, it is
rather hard to imagine a more life-oriented singer-songwriter than DiFranco.
Coincidentally — or not? — in between Educated Guess and this record,
she did suffer the demise of her father, and this may be the explanation
between quite a few humane and moving twists that you will encounter on Knuckle
Down.
Of course, there is still the obligatory piece
of spoken poetry to sit through ('Parameters'), but even that one is possible
to forgive, since (a) it is set to a slightly hypnotizing piece of mind-blowing
ambient sonics, sort of a cross between Brian Eno and Lou Reed, and (b) it is
not politically oriented. Also, as usual, this is a long record, and, sooner or
later, the expected amorphous acoustic patches of deep-sounding nothing start
to accumulate and gnaw on the brain. But everything is spread out quite
evenly, and it does make sense to sit through the whole thing since the very
last track, 'Recoil', is the third best on the album. Slide guitars and violins
rule the day, and at the very end, she admits that "I'm just sitting here
in this sty, strewn with half written songs, taking one breath at a time —
nothing much going on". Ten years at least have we been waiting for this
sort of confession; how ironic that she actually pronounces it within one of
her few songs that is, by contrast, written to near-perfection.
Some have expressly called Knuckle Down
one of her most accessible records, and, no doubt, some of the more fanatical activists
would even brand it a folk-pop sellout after the brave soul-baring that were Evolve
and Educated Guess. Well, I'll bite: I prefer to have my soul-baring
coupled with an interesting riff or chorus, and I'll take the «accessible»
DiFranco over the «inaccessible» DiFranco (or, rather, over the «pathetically
boring» DiFranco, since there is really nothing particularly «inaccessible»
about her «inaccessible» records) any time of day.
On a sidenote, I happened to come across an interesting conference talk
title the other day. The session was American Studies, the speaker was,
of course, a lady (student), and the title was: «Why Do Men Hate Ani
DiFranco? The Connection Between Women Rock Musicians and the Image of Feminism».
This made me wonder, so I Googled «I hate Ani DiFranco» — and, what do you
know, it looks like there is hardly what you could call a correlation between
masculine sex and hatred for Ani DiFranco. (Of course, I could also mention
that the absolute majority of male posters hate Ani DiFranco because she is
boring and obnoxious, not because she has any connection to the image of
feminism, but then we all know they're lying, don't we? Men hate Ani DiFranco
because she is a woman. Women hate Ani DiFranco because... uh, because she is
bisexual. Or because she got pregnant. Or something like that. Nobody hates
anybody because their music is shitty. That'd be so uncool).
Anyway, I do not hate Ani DiFranco, but I do hate the fact that for
every good record, she puts out three piles of nasal acoustic wasteland. Knuckle
Down is a fairly good one, though. Thumbs up,
for a change.
REPRIEVE (2006)
1) Hypnotized; 2)
Subconscious; 3) In The Margins; 4) Nicotine; 5) Decree; 6) 78% H20; 7) Millennium Theater; 8) Half-Assed; 9) Reprieve;
10) A Spade; 11) Unrequited; 12) Shroud; 13) Reprise.
If, for some reason, your subconscious decrees
to be hypnotized by Reprieve, a half-assed performance
of Ani DiFranco's millennium theater that is 78% H20
and 22% shroud of nicotine, then it is well in the
margins of remaining unrequited. That sentence takes care of all the
songs on this album, with the exception of 'A Spade' which is exactly what this
album is. A spade.
Since I am no longer capable of taking the lead
while talking about Ani albums, let me restrict myself to a few personal,
subjective, and — I confess — vindictive comments on this not-so-much
informative as panegyric description from the site of Righteous Babe Records
(who says Ani and her associates have not stooped to studying the tactics of
The Enemy?):
"Every new album from
singer/songwriter/guitarist Ani DiFranco gives listeners a reason to get excited
about music all over again (well, I certainly AM excited about the number of
times one single artist can fuck things up — G. S.), and Reprieve is certainly no exception.
Across 12 tracks, DiFranco ignites more of her signature blend of poetry,
politics and musicianship. (Yep, she ignites it all right, but how can
anything that drenched with repetition, predictability, and lack of invention
ever burn? — G. S.).
"Ani and touring bassist Todd Sickafoose (the
guy's name is almost begging for some lame pun, but let us refrain from
cheapness — G. S.) are the only two players on the new album — something
you'd never guess from its rich and detailed sound (almost an understatement
in regards to a record on which about half of the songs feature nothing but
acoustic guitar and vocals — G. S.). In addition to the usual array of
acoustic and electric guitars for which she is justly noted, Ani can be heard
on keyboards, drums, and other instruments ('can be heard' is right — you
really have to work for it; I did spot some piano keys lightly pressed on a
couple introductions, but I'm still looking for those goddamn drums — G.
S.), while Todd contributes not only bass but wurlitzer, pump organ, piano and
"fakey-bakey" trumpet and strings (Yes, I DID wonder about whose idea
it was to embellish the signature acoustic boredom with all sorts of
"fakey-bakey" toilet noises. Maybe the puns SHOULD start coming,
after all — G. S.).
"The album was tracked in her New Orleans
studio in early 2005 during a break in her usually heavy touring schedule.
Forced to leave the master recordings behind when she evacuated before
Hurricane Katrina, she drove back into the city to retrieve them just three
days after the levees broke. (In a self-sacrificial act of political
bravery, no doubt. Goddammit, here is ONE good thing that could have come out
from Hurricane Katrina and — obviously, the pun mood is upon me — she just blew
it — G. S.). From there she headed back to overdub in her hometown of Buffalo
with whatever instruments happened to be on hand. Chief among them a vintage
omnichord and a modern "cheesy synthesizer" which entailed
"trying to use uncool sounds in cool ways," as she puts it (Come
now, Ms. DiFranco, why don't you leave "cheesy synthesizers" and
"vintage omnichords" to the likes of Animal Collective. You generally
have big trouble using cool sounds in cool ways, as you have showed time and
time over again with your jazz career; what makes you think 'uncool' sounds
will fare any better? — G. S.).
"Between the forced evacuation and the
time off on the road, Ani found herself concentrating on the process of
recording to a degree she had never done before, and the resulting album is the
clearest demonstration yet of her talents as a producer (Who the heck had
the nerve to write this crap? Her "talents as a producer" — are you
kidding me? Since when does overdubbing a few electronic farts over an acoustic
melody count as "producing"? — G. S.). Unconstrained by the
pressures of touring, she was able to take her time with the record, and the
end result is an overall sound that is as clear and succinct as her lyrics have
always been (I like the "unconstrained" bit — as if somebody were
actually constraining the lady into touring. She is her own boss, isn't she?
And I seriously doubt that even a vintage fan will clearly perceive Reprieve
as 'that particular record that she, like, REALLY took her time with' — G.
S.).
"While not intended to be taken as a
concept album in any way, the songs on Reprieve
do provide a cohesive picture of what’s been on Ani’s mind lately during
turbulent times on the personal, cultural, and global front (With Ani,
times are always turbulent, and usually turbulent in the exact same ways; this
sentence easily applies to any given album in her career — G. S.).
From the opening encounter of “Hypnotized” to the call to action against
patriarchy in the spoken-word title track to the conflict between “the house of
conformity” and the ability to make art in the final song, “Shroud,” this is
classic Ani territory (Indeed, and she sticks to it faithfully. I do realize
that the question 'how many more calls to action against patriarchy does one
person need from another one?' provokes the obligatory answer 'as many as it
takes to finally goad one into action', but surely something is not working too
well if so many calls to action have provoked so little response? Maybe it's
the wrong playground? Maybe she ought to have a run at the Senate, already?
— G. S.). It’s a place where individual songs can’t be easily separated into
“personal” and “political” categories, because those concerns inevitably
overlap in complex and nuanced ways (Obviously, if you let politics into
your personal life, the two will overlap. But it usually makes for rather bad
art, not to mention increasing the risk of psychiatric problems — G. S.).
"Ani describes Reprieve as rooted in the Crescent
City (This woman really works in strange and mysterious ways. But maybe she
meant Crescent City, Illinois? According to the latest census, it has 631
inhabitants, and, since this must be just about the total number of people that
would love this album, a connection is possible — G. S.), and it so happens
that there’s a single direct reference to that town in the album’s
centerpiece, “Millennium Theater.” The line “New Orleans bides her time” in
the middle of this scathing critique of the current Republican regime might
sound like a response to Hurricane Katrina, but in fact the song was written
well before the disaster that has devastated the city, about a crisis that took
no one but the presidential administration by surprise (How fortunate, a
cute little coincidence that gives one something to write about when there is
nothing to write about. 'The album's centerpiece'? I honestly thought it
was one of the blandest throwaways — G. S.). Like just about everything
else on Reprieve,
“Millennium Theater” finds Ani speaking her mind, singing from her heart, and
playing music like her life — like all of our lives — depended on it (Look,
I have nothing against Ani speaking her mind, singing from her heart, and
playing like her life depended on it, but leave ME out of this, won't you? If
my life depended on an album like this, I'd have to be committed — G. S.).
Well, at least you, the reader, cannot complain
now: you've heard it from both sides. Make your choice now or forever hold your
peace. Mine, of course, is a decisive thumbs down.
In fact, against my rules, I honestly could not stand more than two listens.
Somebody sign this woman to Hollywood Records, please. Make Diane Warren write
her songs for her.
RED LETTER YEAR (2008)
1) Red Letter Year; 2) Alla
This; 3) Present/Infant; 4) Smiling Underneath; 5) Way Tight; 6) Emancipated
Minor; 7) Good Luck; 8) The Atom; 9) Round A Pole; 10) Landing Gear; 11) Star
Matter; 12) Red Letter Year Reprise.
2008 may have been a red letter year for Ani's
country, which is what the album title is «subtly» trying to tell us, but for
Ani herself that year was 2007, when she had her first baby. With less free
time on her hands than usual, yet still not willing to forsake the
one-album-per-year routine (God knows what this world will come to if it
forgets about her existence for three hundred and sixty five days), she released
her first official retrospective package, titled Canon and picturing a
cannon (puns! puns! puns!). Despite some predictably lame selections mixed in
with the classics, on the general art plane it must have been a good move — not
only did the world get to remember what Ms. DiFranco used to be in the good
old days, when she would still stoop to using the guitar as an instrument
rather than a sonic prop, but it also gave her some breathing space to put a
little more work than usual in the next record.
Meaning that Red Letter Year, although
not quite reaching up to the pleasantly-mediocre level of Knuckle Down,
is at least less generally irritating than Reprieve. With mother cares
at hand, she does not have that good an opportunity to focus on her political
anger; and with a full band in the studio once again, chances are that not every
song is centered around an uninspired, meaningless pummelling of her acoustic
six-string. This is not to say that I honestly liked any of the songs. But at
least I was honestly indifferent to them rather than honestly desiring to shove
them down the songwriter's throat.
The most prominent political curses come at the
beginning, but the predictable anti-Bush jabs and troop condolences lose much
of their potential obnoxiousness by hiding behind dense arrangements: reverb,
echo, chimes, and New Age effects on the title track, U2-ish rebounding guitars
on 'Alla This'. After that, the band sincerely tries to introduce teensy bits
of diversity on each new track; they never succeed properly, but they do take
away Ani's ability to torture the listener. The best song is probably 'The
Atom', if you listen to it long enough to appreciate the professionalism of the
build-up from minimalistic acoustic mantra to psychedelic freakout — somebody
must have been a good fan of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
For me, the best thing about it all is 'Red
Letter Year Reprise', which is not so much a reprise as a friendly, loose jazz
jam between all concerned. In general, it's just six minutes of poorly coordinated
free-form horn noise, but it contains a paradox — it just feels so much more
liberating in essence than any single word-containing song on this album,
recorded by an artist that is supposed to be the biggest liberator of them
all. For this nice, unexpected touch Red Letter Year deserves a hateless
thumbs down rather than a hateful one.
Also, amazingly, the entire year of 2009 went on by without a new DiFranco
album, suggesting that perhaps her newly-found family life is steering
her into the right direction, after all.
¿WHICH SIDE ARE
YOU ON? (2012)
1) Life Boat; 2) Unworry; 3)
¿Which Side Are You On?; 4) Splinter; 5) Promiscuity; 6) Albacore; 7) J;
8) If YR Not; 9) Hearse; 10) Mariachi; 11) Amendment; 12) Zoo.
A four-year gap in productivity is not
something we have come to expect from Ani DiFranco. But kids are kids, and even
the icon-est icon of feminism is ironically bound to get stuck with being a
mother once she actually becomes a mother — apparently, the long delay was
caused by the lady having to dedicate more time to family matters (family? ooh, what a disgustingly
obsolete concept for the genuinely progressive mind).
The consequences of this are both positive and
negative. Positive, because this means more time to flesh out the compositions
— for a thoroughly non-genius songwriter, it is a serious advantage, and,
although there is not a single song on here that managed to genuinely strike a
chord with me, some of the tunes seemed more notable than just about anything
off her previous two records. But negative, because the delay seems to have
made her lose her biters — or, at least, dull them to the point where I find it
hard to believe that even a single intelligent person on Earth would want to be
moved by her sociopolitical stance.
Want it or not, Ani DiFranco used to be a poet — good poet, bad poet, innovative
poet, banal poet, whatever, the subject is up for discussion. Even when she
used to mix liberal preaching with poetry, she usually took care to preserve some sort of balance between the two.
But now we have stuff like ʽAmendmentʼ, which begins as follows:
"Wouldn't it be nice if we had an amendment to give civil rights to women,
to once and for all just really lay it down from a point of view of women..."
and goes on more or less the same way for six and a half minutes. ("It's a
song that's got a lot of those words in it that are hard to sing", our
protagonist says in one of the filmed introductions to her performing the song
live, and yeah, I concur: it is fairly hard to put the Communist Party Manifesto to music as well, no matter how much time
Friedrich Engels would spend trying to find the right guitar chords to Karl
Marx' lyrics).
The saddest thing of all is, she does not even
sound convincing when she delivers
this stuff — nor when she delivers the «hit of the season» in the guise of the
title track, an old chestnut by fellow feminist icon Florence Reece, with a new
set of updated lyrics and a ninety-year old Pete Seeger himself accompanying the
recording on banjo and backup vocals. It is supposed to be big, powerful,
inspirational, and anthemic, but it sounds a little tired to me; tired,
monotonous, and particularly ineffective from the point of view of the current
situation. The lyrics themselves are caught in contradictions — first admitting
that "now there’s folks in Washington that
care what’s on our minds", then going off in all directions: Reaganomics,
consumerism, poverty, starving Africa, patriarchy, environmentalism, you name
the rest.
Risking further curses from
the (rapidly decreasing, I am afraid) legions of Ani fans, I would dare to
suggest: the fact that these lyrics look ever less and less like poetry and
ever more and more like a particularly trivial brand of leftist propaganda must
mean that the lady herself is not altogether
interested any more. That old flame, which could at least occasionally take
on curious shapes and reach scorching temperatures, has shrunk to yer good old
predictable quiet crackle of a log in the living-room fireplace.
It is even more evident if we
consider the simplest rule of this album: the more personal and quiet any
particular song is, the less annoying and silly it stands out to the senses.
ʽIf Yr Notʼ is built around a technically dark, distorted bluesy
riff, but the message is: "If you're not getting happier as you get older,
then you're fucking up", and even if she sings it in her trademark «grim»
manner, there is not so much irony here as stern, solid truth. On ʽLife
Boatʼ, she almost seems to be apologizing to her fans: "...and I didn’t really
want a baby, and I guess that I had a choice, but I just let it grow inside me, that persistent little voice..."
— and the song is not very memorable, but it has a nice ring and attitude to
it. And then there is
ʽAlbacoreʼ, which is just a simple love song, minimalistic, sweet,
and quite hard-to-hate.
Musically, Which
Side Are You On is, of course, an ongoing disaster — most of it is
acoustic, without a single trace of what an individualistic and even inimitable
player Ani used to be a couple of decades ago. But at
least there is no more pretending of being a «serious jazz-pop artist»: despite
a plethora of backing musicians, most of the backing is either in the
background or used primarily for «side effect» purposes (only the title track,
in accordance with anthem requirements, is given a near-symphonic arrangement,
with a full children's choir and an entire New Orleans student brass band
involved). The sound, overall, is quite unpretentious and decent; it's just
that there are no interesting melodies. But we have already come to expect
that.
What we did not come to expect is this spiritual transformation — one that she herself may not be fully aware of, but, hopefully, as time goes by, things will be getting more and more introspective and less and less concerned with politics. Do not get me wrong: politically-inclined art is a necessity of life, and it can be and sometimes is great, but there is no more powder left in this particular keg. You have paid your patriotic dues more than anyone else, Ms. DiFranco — time to pass the baton, listen to your heart, and sing about your family, because, so it seems to me, that seems to be your chief concern these days. Leave the protest songs to the younger generation — people like Pete Seeger, for instance.
ALLERGIC TO
WATER (2014)
1) Dithering; 2) See See See
See; 3) Woe Be Gone; 4) Careless Words; 5) Allergic To Water; 6) Harder Than It
Needs To Be; 7) Genie; 8) Happy All The Time; 9) Yeah Yr Right; 10) TR'W; 11)
Still My Heart; 12) Rainy Parade.
Sometimes I feel as if the two different sides
of Ani DiFranco — the «musician» side and the «make a statement» side — are two
mortal enemies: they can never reach a compromise or establish any neutral
balance, but in the case of each particular record, one simply has to win over the other. Most of the
time, the «statement» side has the upper hand, and we have to tolerate her
rudimentary acoustic squibbling while getting educated on social, political,
and gender issues. But every once in a while, the «musician» shines through a
little, and the better the music gets, the less emphasis there is on the lyrics.
Not that the words do not matter much on Allergic To Water: as you can probably
guess from the title, this is an album whose subjects deal with displeasures,
premonitions, imbalances, and inadequacies — sort of a natural with Ms.
DiFranco, and even peaceful family life could not remedy the issue completely
— but, unlike the previous record, this one is nowhere near as belligerent,
and comes across as a much more natural, credible, and
«pessimistically-peaceful» offering that, for once, gives her the occasion to
express her moods and fears more through music than through words.
ʽDitheringʼ opens the record with a
few playfully quirky jazzy chords, then quickly turns into a dark acoustic
funky groove — a dense, slightly creepy arrangement that recalls her best compositions
from about two decades ago. It does not blow the roof off or anything: just a
solid groove that perfectly conveys a worried, if not desperate, state of mind,
and it sets a perfect tone for the rest of the album: troubled, concerned with
the now and the future, tightly focused, but not hysterical or hyperactive.
Mature enough, but not too lazy or too rambling — the perfect state in which I
am ready not only to tolerate DiFranco, but sometimes even to embrace her
(figuratively, of course: a literal embrace would probably get you a kick in
the groin from the lady).
Although she will probably never again return
to the technically complex acoustic playing of her debut album, Allergic To Water has plenty of
pleasant little acoustic melodies — ʽSee See See Seeʼ hops along to
another simple, but endearing jazzy sequence; later on, ʽYeah Yr
Rightʼ has some flashy fingerpicking, and the concluding ʽRainy
Paradeʼ bids goodbye with a magical tone (well attenuated by the
accompanying chimes). Furthermore, there are some vocal hooks here and there — ʽYeah
Yr Rightʼ has an excellent harmony arrangement, and each verse of
ʽCareless Wordsʼ ends in a touch of implied tragedy that she paints
in a surprisingly believable manner.
Lyrics-wise, the one track that will probably
stick out is ʽHappy All The Timeʼ, because its minimalistic
arrangement (just guitar and some friendly, but ghostly harmonies in the background)
helps concentrate on the chorus — which one has to take ironically, because one
thing Allergic To Water is
definitely not is an album about a
happy person. Normally, I hate these songs, but since it is the only such track
on the entire record, it gets salvaged by its context, and I can appreciate
the message, provided I get it right (the illusionary «safety» of the modern
cuddled person next to half-mythical tales of heroic suffering).
All in all, believe it or not, this is
DiFranco's best album since at least Knuckle
Down, and, truth be told, maybe even her best since Dilate — in eighteen years, that is, which just goes to show how
much of a pleasant surprise the experience has been. See, in those eighteen
years, her biggest know-how was irritation: lyrical irritation, melodic (or
«anti-melodic» irritation), atmospheric irritation, all sorts of things that
had me (and many others, I'm sure) going «why the heck am I wasting time on
this crap?» But on Allergic To Water,
she shows that she has not completely forgotten how to be musically inventive
and lyrically intelligent without
being irritating (in the bad sense of that word, not the artistically relevant
one). There's a meaningful moodiness here, and just enough personal restraint
and humility to earn my trust; I would never have believed it, but yes, here I
am in 2014 issuing a thumbs up for an Ani DiFranco album. Next on the
list: start believing in world peace and spiritual progress once more.
ADVENTURES IN FOAM (1996)
1) Adventures In Foam Intro;
2) Cat People; 3) Northstar; 4) Fat Ass Joint; 5) Ol' Bunkhouse; 6) Paris /
Streatham; 7) A Vida; 8) Traffic; 9) Reffs Edge (Interval); 10) The Sighting;
11) Break Charmer; 12) The Method; 13) On The Track; 14) Cruzer.
The full-length debut album of the artist
currently known under the noble Númenorean name of Amon Tobin was his
only one to be released under the routine Portuguese name of Cujo (meaning «whose?» — in my opinion,
quite a fine path to travel: you hide behind a no-name when you are a nobody,
and you change it to a mega-name once you are everything). Actually, «Númenorean»
is a happy coincidence: the man's real name is Amon Adonai Santos de
Araújo Tobin, he is of Brazilian descent, his childhood since 2 was
spent moving from one cool West European city to another, and he makes drum 'n'
bass records. A hell of a real cool cat for his time.
So, what's up with Adventures In Foam? First of all, everyone you meet will tell you
it's one of those records for which the term «revolutionary» may almost be used without having to look
back over your shoulder. I am not a big fan of free-form jazz, and an even
lesser one of drum'n'bass, but even I have to admit that synthesizing the two
was a terrific idea. Take a music form that has long since lost its actuality
(let us admit it, by 1996 Miles Davis-style jazz was practically as much a
thing «of the past» as academic classical music), take another, brand new, but
comparatively poor — at the very least, because of its prescribed minimalism —
musical form, and hoopla, here is extra development potential for both.
Second, it is delightful that this «marriage»
gives you an opportunity to view the record in several entirely different
lights. You can go like, «Hey, this guy loves
electronic percussion craziness, but he clearly hates the boredom aspects of
it, so he keeps looking for pepper and spice». Or you can go, «I know, he's a
professional deconstructor, he makes fun of snub-nosed elitist jazz music by
setting it to silly hipster club rhythms». Or it's along the lines of, «He's a
professional educator! He wants to intellectualize the masses! Adventures In Foam today, Eric Dolphy
tomorrow — he's like the Vanessa Mae of post-bop jazz without the Vanessa Mae
trashiness». Just do not try to think of him from all these perspectives at the same time — if you do, he's just
another dull post-modernist type trying to confuse your traditionalist senses
just as the doctor ordered.
To be more precise, Adventures In Foam has its own diversity profile. Drum machines and
synthesized bass lines are everywhere, with varying degrees of complexity, but
the accompanying tracks range from pure ambient «whale-sigh»-type atmospherics
('The Light') to more clearly spelled out electronic loops ('The Sighting') to
minimalist jazz-fusion ('Fat Ass Joint') to brass-led soft jazz ('Break
Charmer') to proverbial dissonant freak-out piano rolls ('The Sequel') to
moody vague-Eastern patterns ('Northstar'), and these are only my first
impressions of less than half of the tracks — the absolute majority differ from
each other in texture and mood.
My own current favourites are 'Cat People',
with a killer bass groove draped in sexy loungishness, and the closing
'Cruzer', for which the sub-title "Music Inspired By Deep Purple's 'Space
Truckin'" would work real great, except it would not be the truth (but
who cares). This may change tomorrow or the day after, though, so it is nowhere
near as important as the general fact that, behind all the revolutionizing, if
there ever was any revolutionizing, lies an elegantly atmospheric record that
transcends the technical trappings of all of its genres and can simply be
enjoyed as cool music. Or, rather, kool
muzak, but that works well, too. Thumbs up.
P.S. For the record, I must confess that my
copy is the «unapproved» US release on Shadow Records from 1997 (hastily put
out already after the man had gained international stardom as Amon Tobin), with
differing artwork and, more importantly, an alternate track order with several
of the compositions mistitled (e. g., 'The Sequel' is really 'Clockwork',
etc.). In any case, that old edition is currently out of print, so you only need worry if you go hunting
for the album in used bins — and these days, you probably won't.
BRICOLAGE (1997)
1) Stoney Street; 2) Easy
Muffin; 3) Yasawas; 4) Creatures; 5) Chomp Samba; 6) The New York Editor; 7)
Defocus; 8) The Nasty; 9) Bitter & Twisted; 10) Wires & Snakes; 11) One
Day In My Garden; 12) Dream Sequence; 13) One Small Step; 14) Mission.
Released under his own name this time, and on a
proper independent electronic label (Ninja Tune) — with Adventures In Foam amassing positive reviews and cult followings,
there were no more reasons to conceal a direct descent from Aragorn (sorry,
couldn't resist).
If there have
been any groundbreaking changes from Foam
to Bricolage, I am hardly the right
person to point them out, because, to my ears, the main point is still the
same: merge together jazz and electronics, collect royalties on results. The
difference is in quantity, not in quality: Bricolage
straightens out the balance in favor of more jazz, less -tronics — especially
on the early tracks, with jungle rhythms and synth backgrounds becoming more
and more prominent as the record progresses. Basically, you begin with
«electronic jazz» and end with «jazz-tinged drum 'n' bass».
As tightly crafted and inventive as it all
sounds, the first few tracks do not involve me all that much. 'Stoney Street'
has next to no «electronic flavor» whatsoever, merely adding some keyboard
flourishes to its soft lounge jazz pitter-patter, and the next two tracks are
minor atmospheric paintings, hardly worth a second visit.
It isn't until 'Creatures' that a sense of
actual purpose, and some genuine interest, finally starts emerging. The
rhythmless intro consists of multiple «chiming» overdubs, making you feel
inside some sort of giant clock; and then, after a short while, the clock is
set in rapid movement, with a fast bop rhythm section that completely blurs the
distinction between jazz drumming and pre-programmed jungle beats, and
occasional piano runs that pay tribute to the likes of Art Tatum. This sort of thing is more than just
«atmosphere» — it's a bizarre, unique concoction that really brings together
the best of both worlds, spinning a traditional hot groove out of new
ingredients.
From there and onwards, bizarre concoctions
spring on at least every second track. On 'Chomp Samba', Tobin programs a grim
tribal dance-style beat: this is exactly the kind of music we'd end up with,
had the white slave traders been placating African chiefs with samplers instead
of guns and firewater. 'The Nasty' is spicy, sleazy acid jazz taken to the max,
with each played or simulated instrument eating deep within your brain — don't
forget to rinse the inside with an alkaline solution every five seconds.
'Bitter & Twisted' is based on a sample that first sounds like an annoying
fly that got inside your ear, then like an Middle Eastern melody. 'One Day In
My Garden' drives into ska and bossanova territory, only to fall out in total
percussion chaos and then pick it up again and end the proceedings with the
same soft guitar chuckle on which it had started. And so on.
Essentially, the album title is right. You buy
and enjoy Bricolage not just because
it fuses jazz and jungle, but because it is
a «bricolage» — like Aphex Twin, this guy is searching for inspiration
everywhere, and if it does not always work, he is not to blame, because that is
what experimentation is all about. (One could object that, if it does not
work, it should not be released — but on an experimental jazz-jungle record,
who's to know what really works and what doesn't? I can hardly imagine even two people agreeing on all the
highlights and lowlights of this record. If you ever see them, report them to
the nearest genetics lab, they're treasurable research material). I could never
love something like this, but I
certainly respect it a lot. Normally, taking a jazz melody and putting an
electronic spin on it would result in something cheap and repulsing; the fact
that Tobin knows how to make it sound intelligent, even «intellectual»,
instead, is alone worth a solid place in the annals of electronic music. Thumbs up.
PERMUTATION (1998)
1) Like Regular Chickens; 2) Bridge;
3) Reanimator; 4) Sordid; 5) Nightlife; 6) Escape; 7) Switch; 8) People Like
Frank; 9) Sultan Drops; 10) Fast Eddie; 11) Toys; 12) Nova.
You really need a jazz expert to explain
everything that gets permutated on Permutation.
Me, I suck pretty bad even when playing the hated game of «guess that sample»
for electronic tracks that feed off well-known pop hits; what could you expect
from samples drawn from the vast backlog of jazz, particularly when the
backlogging guy clearly has no problem about drawing upon any sorts of influences. There may be Coltrane, and there may be
Miles Davis here, and there may be some Arstrong — hey, I would not be
surprised to discover The Original Dixieland Jass Band hiding in Mr. Tobin's
closet overnight.
My only consolation is that the absolute
majority of people, including hardcore fans of the guy, cannot identify the
exact sources either (at least, I have not been able to come across any such
identifications), with the sole exception of 'People Like Frank', where some
recognize the bass line as being taken out of the soundtrack to Blue Velvet — obviously, through the
title association, or no one would ever have guessed. Yet, does it bother
anybody? Hardly, since Tobin's talent is to get people to admit that this
gluing together of jazz samples, bits of original melodies, and jungle beats is
well worth emotionally taking on its own, not just being treated as an
intellectual puzzle. You may know shit about Miles Davis — and still get
happily lost in the record.
There are no major breakthroughs here:
essentially, it is just an attempt to repeat the success of Bricolage. If one makes an effort to
synthesize a «collective» feeling here, Permutation
may come across as a generally heavier album, and, at the same time, generally
even more «retro-ish» than its predecessor. The heaviness effect is achieved by
traditional means — put some extra distortion on the bass, and make your drums
occasionally bash, crash, and roll over John Bonham-style, rather than simply
reproduce the thin, wimpy chucka-chucka patterns of «generic» drum'n'bass
recordings. Hear 'Sordid' to know what I'm talking about — now here's a drum
groove that even a hardened rocker would have no problem to headbang to.
On the other hand, 'Nightlife' starts out as an
innocent lounge tune from, say, the 1930s, and ends up the same way, with a
bold transition to modern style in the middle. And 'Switch' is just classic
swingers' swing from top to bottom, if you don't mind the screeching electric
drill that opens the tune and sometimes returns to haunt you several more
times. And 'Nova' ends the record with a soft Brazilian farewell that could
even break its way into luxury penthouses. And the hypnotic chimes on 'Like
Regular Chickens'... well, that's actually fairly modern-sounding (I bet
Patricia Barber would love that track).
Pleasant, intriguing, and clever as always,
yet, perhaps, also a bit boring around the edges if you intend on paying lots
of attention to the music, instead of using it as a soundtrack to the process
of writing a fantasy novel or seducing a progressive-minded chick. (In the
latter case, be sure to program out at least 'Reanimator' and 'Fast Eddie' —
neither the music nor the titles might work to your mutual benefit). Thus, the thumbs up
which a predictable brain reaction forces me to give out to the album is still
somewhat perfunctory.
SUPERMODIFIED (2000)
1) Get Your Snack On; 2) Four
Ton Mantis; 3) Slowly; 4) Marine Machines; 5) Golfer Vrs Boxer; 6) Deo; 7) Precursor
(feat. Quadraceptor);
8) Saboteur; 9) Chocolate Lovely; 10) Rhino Jockey; 11) Keepin' It Steel (The
Anvil Track); 12) Natureland.
This is the best Amon Tobin there is. To me,
the pricky conservative, the best praise that can be given to an electronic
album is that, for once, the album makes me forget
about its electronic nature and just enjoy it as music — atmospheric, static,
whatever. From the very start, it was cool to hear Tobin blend jazz with
jungle, but that's what it was: cool,
not stunning. Cool records come and
go, and these days, can be heaped on the racks a dime a dozen (actually, skip
the dime), but a stun is a stun — it is bound to leave an impression.
So what do we have up here? Some of the critics
have called Supermodified Tobin's
most accessible album, which, in these days, often translates to «the crappy
one» (a.k.a. «the one with guest contributions from Lenny Kravitz and Mary J.
Blige»), but, fortunately, this does not apply here. It's accessible because
it's (a) heavier than before, (b) catchier than before, (c) more diverse than
before, (d) whatever. Oh, wait. It's fun.
Where do we begin? The main message has not
changed much. We are still living in our own private lounge with velvet curtains
and hi-tech drape runners, a sort of David Lynch-ian paradise if I might say
so. But it is now getting rougher and darker (apparently, BOB is in the
building?), as 'Get Your Snack On' announces the new record on a gruffer note
than ever before. Big crashing drums, a nagging minimalistic riff that almost
sounds sampled from some old John Lee Hooker tune, lush gospel organ and
vocals brewing a 'Gimmie Shelter'-type apocalypse in the background, paranoid
funk guitars scratching their way in and out, it's one heck of a tune.
From there on, just about every tune is
hook-based. 'Four Ton Mantis' might sound appropriate for a real four ton
mantis: even though the basic melody stomps along at a generic blues-rock pace,
the drums and bass soon start pummeling the pavement, and the
typewriter-mannered keyboards clatter along like some parasitic retinue to the
beast. It doesn't get too way out of itself, but if played at top volume, it's
quite an impressive «anti-utopian» chunk of atmosphere.
After the first two heavy hammers, the
atmosphere becomes subtler – kick-ass panoramas begin to alternate with sexier
/ sleazier stuff, with an occasional touch of romance ('Slowly' is Tobin's most
perfect attempt at conjuring a femme
fatale vision) or, vice versa, of industrial doom ('Marine Machines',
which manages to combine the rhythmic robotic clanging of a power plant with
vague bits of Eastern melodicity — as in, Genie, I want to run a Panzer tank
factory). Skipping far ahead, there's a really rough space journey on 'Rhino
Jockey', which will make you earn far more bumps and blisters than any Aphex
Twin trip; and a smooth, well-planned slide-off, first with the upbeat, catchy,
almost singalong-able Latin beat of 'Keepin' It Steel', and then the dim
cabaret lights of 'Natureland' — that last ballad which you can allow yourself
because all the rough ones are already under the tables, or kicked out.
Truly, Supermodified
is one album that deserves its title — this is where it all comes together and
you really see that all that blending on the previous records wasn't done for
nothing. Here, it's not simply something like «okay, let's see what happens
when we put some Miles Davis over some of those drum'n'bass tracks» (although
even that, per se, could be amusing). They sometimes use the word decadent to describe this sound, but I'm
not sure it fits: real decadence has
to be pessimistic, get some end-of-the-world Bryan-Ferry-sobbing thing going
for it, whereas Supermodified is
quite content to be threatening, ominous, and seductive without having to feel
sorry for itself. But, on the other hand, there is a fair amount of the
Devil's work going on here, that's for certain. And since we're all closet
Satanists here way back from the days of Robert Johnson, how could this not
deserve a thumbs
up?
OUT FROM OUT WHERE (2002)
1) Back From Space; 2) Verbal;
3) Chronic Tronic; 4) Searchers; 5) Hey Blondie; 6) Rosies; 7) Cosmo Retro
Intro Outro; 8) Triple Science; 9) El Wraith; 10) Proper Hoodidge; 11) Mighty
Micro People.
For his next release, Tobin rather drastically
cut down on all the «retro» influences. You still get them, but you have to
look for them, and if you didn't know about this guy as the jazz-jungle mix whiz of his generation, you probably wouldn't
even know where to begin looking. This must be the reason why some people claim
that Out From Out Where works better
as a tightly focused, single-purpose, ultra-coherent record. Maybe it does, but
to me, that's hardly good news.
The energy and occasional ferocity of Supermodified is still here: the
programmed beats continue to impress as a musical equivalent of 32 kinds of
Chinese torture involving bamboo sticks, iron bars, and a vast array of other
long hard objects. (Check out the innocently titled 'Rosies' for an «Anti-Utopian
Industrial Factory, Advanced Level 3» kind of feeling). But the diversity is
all but gone. The few «live» samples that are still distinguishable are
straightforwardly treated as nothing but
samples, subjugated to the jungle rhythms and additional electronic loops; and
the whole record is his most mechanized, industrialized bunch of compositions so
far.
«Notable» points would include the «novelty»
number 'Verbal (Featuring MC Decimal R.)', an odd (possibly ironic) take on
hip-hop, in which a chipmunkified «electronic DJ» raps incomprehensibly over
acoustic guitar, industrial beats, and stoned pseudo-Eastern backing vocals;
'Triple Science', an attempt to beat Aphex Twin at Star Force by shooting fifty instead of five enemies per second (warning: never play this loud in
headphones unless you're the «you haven't lived until you have tried out
everything» type); and the grand epic number 'Searchers', which, at times,
sounds like The Moody Blues gone completely electronic — intergalactic star
travel with string-imitating synth tones that sometimes swoop up into the sky
like they used to do it way back when, with the aid of a Mellotron.
Out of the «non-notable» points, 'Hey Blondie'
is sort of OK, an electronic equivalent of a gloomy blues dirge, sometimes
breaking out in minor key piano sonata convulsions; 'Proper Hoodidge' is the
younger, slightly more inane brother of 'Marine Machines', whose main hook is a
repetitive whale-style moan; and 'Mighty Micro People' closes off the entire
experience with a whiny guitar sample, to emphasize the hopelessness of it all.
In fact, a thorough lack of optimism and complete cheerlessness are the
record's major characteristics. Not that Tobin was ever known for making happy
music, but on here he may be crossing the line from «creepy» to «depressing»,
and not just because the compositions are getting worse.
It isn't a «thumbs» down as such, but I would
say it's definitely a «step» down. Hardcore fans will not notice it, though,
because whoever has been granted the ability to happily lose oneself in the generic world of repetitive samples and
trickily programmed percussion, will find plenty of stuff to enjoy. Me, I can
only really appreciate this stuff when I smell special, and it grieves me to
have found such a strong decline of «special» on Out From Out Where from Supermodified.
RECORDED LIVE (2004)
1) Intro; 2) Chronic Tronic / Dark
Lady (DJ Food); 3) Twister (Tipper); 4) Verbal; 5) Remix By AFX (AFX); 6)
Got Numb (Mob Nation); 7) Pressure Cooker (Cherrystones); 8) Soul
Soul Soul (As One); 9) Science Fu Part 1 (Danny Breaks); 10) Marine
Machines; 11) You's A Jaco Pastorious Looking Motherfucker; 12)
Schmalla (Facs & Scythe); 13) Couger Merkin; 14) Higher Rates (Silent
Witness & Break); 15) Cuba (Original) (T Power); 16) Moon Palace (Icarus);
17) Reactionary (Controller 7); 18) Nakatali (Topogigio); 19)
Yasawas / Night Life / Fear; 20) Escape / Deep Impact (Future
Prophecies); 21) Spanner In The Worx (Exile); 22) Allergic (Deep
Roots); 23) Completely Real (Suspicious Circumstance); 24) Total
Recall (Silent Witness & Break); 25) Sittin Here (Dizzee Rascal);
26) Proper Hoodidge; 27) Four Ton Mantis / Hey Blondie; 28) Venus In Furs
(The Velvet Underground).
I will try to be brief on this one. The full
name is actually Solid Steel Presents:
Amon Tobin Recorded Live, and those who are not already «in» with the
electronic people will need to know that «Solid Steel» refers to a set of DJ
mixes assembled and released by a bunch of guys from the Ninja Tune label (formerly
beginning as a radio show, then invading the CD market with a series of albums
from around 2001 to around 2007). Since Amon Tobin was signed to Ninja Tune himself,
and since DJ mixing was one of his hobbies, it was only a matter of time before
he would get a chance to have an album like that all to himself.
This one was indeed recorded «live», with the
aid of a nifty piece of software called Final Scratch that is basically a
digital emulator of the vinyl turntable (that is to say, you still play vinyl
records on a turntable, but all the encoded and decoded signals are digital),
somewhere in Melbourne on Tobin's Australian tour in 2003. The hour-long mix
itself consists of just a few Tobin originals (mainly from the last two albums)
interspersed with much, much, much
stuff from all sorts of big and small names in the world of breakbeats and IDM,
most of them from various hip sub-scenes in London and other posh British
places.
The record might actually do some good if you
want to get a decent, representative sample of who is who in that particular
corner of today's market: comparison with the originals shows that Tobin does
not tamper too much with the mixes.
But if you really need to do that, you are probably like myself — an
electronic ignoramus, familiar only with the tip of the iceberg — and then you
will probably remain unmoved by most of this rucus. If, on the other side, you
are a pro in the business, I really
have no idea why you would need to own this in your collection when you would
be much happier with the originals.
Essentially, the idea of a «live DJ mix» is
stupid. It's one thing to be an actual participant in a club environment, and a
whole other thing to want to experience that participation on record. What is
it, exactly, that makes this «live» experience in any way different from a regular mix? Muffled crowd cheers in
between the brief breaks? Elements of inspired improvisation in the use of the
Final Scratch software? Innovative mixing practices that require an actual club
environment to reach full effect? Whatever.
For that matter, I wouldn't give a major damn
even about studio-recorded DJ mixes, unless they really are highly creative re-mixes (as in Aphex Twin's 26 Mixes For Cash, sort of a true
classic of the art). Most of these
particular tracks are fairly generic and boring, with all of the «covers»
feeling pale and wimpy in the presence of such mighty high originals as 'Four
Ton Mantis' and 'Marine Machines'. But there is no need to enjoy the originals
anywhere other than the respective original LPs. 'Nuff said.
The album's only joke-type surprise comes at
the tail end, with a heavily industrialized reworking of the Velvet
Underground's 'Venus In Furs'. Unfortunately, the surprise is unimpressive and
unfunny. As is this entire album, completely incompatible with whatever values
this particular reviewer thinks of as valuable — thumbs down.
CHAOS THEORY (2005)
1) The Lighthouse; 2) Ruthless;
3) Theme From Battery; 4) Kokubo Sosho Stealth; 5) El Cargo; 6) Displaced; 7) Ruthless
(Reprise); 8) Kokubo Sosho Battle (adapted from Cougar Merkin); 9) Hokkaido;
10) The Clean Up.
Sometimes I wish I could say something good
about this record — or, at least, something useful — but then the very next
moment I wish I didn't wish that. Basically, this is just a soundtrack to a
«stealth» video game (Tom Clancy's
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory), and, as such, already a rather, er,
suspicious entry in the artist's discography. However, lest the review turn
into an angry rant about the abysmal effect of the Xbox on our generation, I
must honestly state that Chaos Theory
does work on its own as a «fully
autonomous» electronic album, and that there is no obligatory need to waste
hours / days / weeks of your precious life on generic virtual reality in order
to fully assess its musical merits.
Which, honestly, do not seem at all comparable
to me with the merits of Tobin's classic stuff. This is ten tracks worth of
rather routine grooving, weaving the same sci-fi-meets-industrial atmosphere
that Out From Out Where gave us
three years before, but with a slight drop down in creativity. On an individual
level, each track is crafted with Tobin's trademark professionalism, and almost
everything is multi-part, either in «build-up» mode or going through several
distinct rhythmic sections. Collectively, though, it's all a big bore.
'Kokubo Sosho Stealth' has some moody bits
ranging on true eeriness, and is the only piece on here that could, perhaps,
count as «electronic simulation of fusion» (Miles Davis might have appreciated
the percussion). 'El Cargo', with its astral guitar riff and choral vocals, has
an impressive beginning, but halfway through is overwhelmed by the obligatory
percussion onslaught. And that's about all my brain is capable of coming up with
in terms of individual track assessment: pathetic, but we could just blame the
Xbox on that. Thumbs
down, and the moral of this story is — if you are commissioned to
write a video game soundtrack, just get the damn money, do not insist on
having it included in your official discography.
FOLEY ROOM (2007)
1) Bloodstone; 2) Esther's; 3)
Keep Your Distance; 4) The Killer's Vanilla; 5) Kitchen Sink; 6) Horsefish; 7) Foley
Room; 8) Big Furry Head; 9) Ever Falling; 10) Always; 11) Straight Psyche; 12) At
The End Of The Day.
And now for something not completely, but
significantly different. Dispensing with the practice of sampling old vinyl
(and not a moment too soon), Tobin shifts his attention to «field recordings».
While Foley Room is by no means
revolutionary in that regard — electronic artists had been venturing into the
streets to capture live sounds of lively life for quite a long time — it may be
the first, or among the first, albums to make a religion out of the principle.
Just about every track includes «real-life» sound samples, used either for the
rhythmic basis itself or as special effects-«flourishes» (sometimes as both).
Includes, yes, but is not confined to them. I have seen some complaints as to how, with Foley Room, Tobin crossed over into the
world of the avantagarde and all but betrayed his original purpose of
existence. This is not really just. Even at this stage of his career, Tobin is
not strictly an «avantgarde» music maker, because Foley Room does not exactly rebel against the commonly observed
principles of melody and harmony; at the very least, not against those
principles that the guy used to follow on his earlier records.
After all, in a symbolic gesture, the very
first track here does not sample motorbikes or kitchen sinks: it samples the
Kronos Quartet, whom Tobin actually recorded live in his «foley room». I
understand that «commonly observed principles of melody and harmony» are
expected to go to hell when we deal with someone as reckless as the Kronos
Quartet, but, in actuality, 'Bloodstone' is a fairly normal composition: a
little ominous, a little terrifying, with all of its Schnittke influences
firmly in place, but completely accessible.
The same goes for most of the other tracks.
Naturally, there are no «memorable melodies»: the effect is purely
atmospheric. And that effect, more often than not, is rather dry. The patterns
that Tobin constructs in between his field recordings and the overlays of
percussion and synthesizers have more to do with complex mathematics than intuitive
spirit work. But we would be fooling ourselves if we started to argue about how
A.T. used to be such an overwhelming spiritual messiah of the electronic world
in the past, and how he has so unpleasantly shifted to soulless experimental
textures — like, «jungle-jazz» is so cathartic, and «jungle-kitchen sink» is so
technical. It really does not work that way.
Because the overall effect of Foley Room is not that far removed from
the effect of Tobin's previous efforts. This is still the same old dark,
otherworldly music, coming from some post-apocalyptic world in which green
grass has been completely replaced by robo-factories and wannabe Darth Vaders
stand in lines for the soup kitchen. This world has its brighter spots (e. g.
on 'Horsefish', constructed along a pretty harp melody played by Sarah Page;
'Always', the «poppiest» track on here, including several disjointed guitar
parts drawn from folk-rock, post-punk, and what-not, along with psychedelic
female vocals), but, as it always goes, they are in a minority, merely offering
brief respite from the harshness of this brand of virtual life.
It is just that this harshness, when all the
field recordings are thrown in, becomes overtly «experimental». 'Big Furry
Head', for instance, sounds very similar to some of his earlier «sickening
shuffles», but, instead of going «wow, this is really heavy, makes my stomach churn», the listener is supposed
to go «wow, he stuck the sounds of a roaring tiger on here, how cool is that?»
(and most of the critics did go that way). Not that it really means anything,
or that anybody could actually explain what is so particularly exciting about a
sampled tiger roar. But it's an experiment. It could work — and then again, it
could not work. You are supposed to
find that out for yourself.
I respect experiment, especially when the
experiment in question involves performing lots of hard work (and on Foley Room, with its miriads of samples
interconnected in miriads of ways, Tobin seems to have done more hard work than
ever before), and, on a sheerly intellectual level, the album is a
mega-achievement, worth all the thumbs up that it can get. Unfortunately, on an
emotional level, it, at best, gives that «same old same old» feeling, and, at
worst, whispers that the feeling used to be stronger and sharper in the past.
Thus, technically, the experiment succeeds; but
it looks like we are still a long way from reaching that stage when «sounds of
the street» will become so naturally integrated in music-making that we'd start
thinking of all the earlier music as hopelessly outdated. And I am all for
replacing guitars, violins, and pianos with kitchen sinks and tiger roars —
provided they can assume all of the functions of guitars, violins, and pianos,
without losing their own. Until then, albums like Foley Room will always be «interesting», never «cathartic».
ISAM (2011)
1) Journeyman; 2) Piece Of
Paper; 3) Goto 10; 4) Surge; 5) Lost & Found; 6) Wooden Toy; 7)
Mass & Spring; 8) Calculate; 9) Kitty Cat; 10) Bedtime
Stories; 11) Night Swim; 12) Dropped From The Sky.
«Off the deep end» is, of course, a very
relative notion — many people will find even the most «accessible» albums in
Tobin's backpack to be bizarre and frightening mind-bending concoctions — but,
on the artist's own scale, I would say that ISAM is clearly the
breaking point, at which even some of the man's staunchest fans will be
presented with a take-it-or-leave-it dilemma.
Even Foley
Room was, with certain reservations, a musically-oriented record. Its
followup, although it formally continues to build upon that foundation, makes
a firm transition into the sonically-oriented
field. Most of the tracks still have some sort of rhythmic basis, but
essentially they are collages, stuck together from a variety of field
recordings, tiny musical beats, and electronic treatments. Cujo himself called
this a «sound sculpture» — who are we to contradict him?
Unfortunately, the sculpture is mostly
undescribable. A detailed listing of all the sounds that constitute a track like
'Journeyman', accompanied by an evaluation of all the transition effects, would
take hours, if not days, to put together — and the payoff? my guess it would
simply look dumb. All that remains in the reviewer's power is simply to state
that yes, it is an electronically based rhythmic sound collage, and, once you
have taken the time to listen to it, you may or may not agree with the
reviewer's position: it is curious,
but emotionally vague, like so many
other experimental sound collages going all the way back to the days of
'Revolution #9'.
On the positive side, there are some
interesting links between «song» titles and the «music», particularly on the
second half of the album. 'Bedtime Stories', for instance, starts out with
kiddie chimes that usually prepare the listener for some soothing Christmas
experience, but then turns into a heavy bass / deep fuzz / treated vocal
extravaganza — the sort of «bedtime story» that will, perhaps, be narrated by
Mother Robot to her kids once humanity is finally wiped out by artifical
intelligence. 'Night Swim', dominated by slightly dissonant harp strumming and
Milky-Way-ish synthesizer swirls, likewise, creates an atmosphere that is
associable with the title.
There are a few vocal tracks here, too, on
which it seems that Tobin may be taking some cues from the Animal Collective
(only, as befits the gentleman, his songs are always darker): 'Kitty Cat', for
instance, which, at a certain point, threatens to go upbeat Brit-pop on us,
with a bouncy music-hall rhythm, while still retaining its kaleidoscopic
electronic skin and warped psychedelic voices; or 'Wooden Toy', which actually
sounds like a possible outtake from one of Animal Collective's earlier albums.
However, these concise, somewhat song-like creations, are more of an exception
than the rule here.
As questionable as it may sound, I would still
go ahead and say this: the more «experimental» this guy keeps getting, the less
«innovative» and «interesting» his art actually becomes. By 2011, the world has
already had its multi-ton share of sonic collages of all sorts, shapes, and
flavors. So what exactly is it that could make ISAM into a new musical sensation? Just the fact that this is,
let's say, «Amon Tobin mixed with Autechre»? The adventurous spirit is
admirable, but we are long, long past the time when it was simply sufficient
for the spirit to be adventurous in order to gain critical respect and a cult
following. As far as my ears and brain neurons are concerned, ISAM has neither meaning nor direct emotional
impact. On the other hand, it still has a certain aura of «coolness», and
it was a sort of abstract «fun» to listen to it for the first time. But I still
hope, very much so, that one of these days Mr. Cujo will decide to go back to
«simplistic» music-making. Otherwise, he will simply drown in the same old sea
corner whose «deep end» has already attracted so many other talented people.
THE KARELIAN ISTHMUS (1992)
1) Karelia; 2) The Gathering;
3) Grail's Mysteries; 4) Warriors Trial; 5) Black Embrace; 6) The Exile Of The
Sons Of Uisliu; 7) The Lost Name Of God; 8) The Pilgrimage; 9) Misery Path; 10)
Sign From The North Side; 11*) Vulgar Necrolatry.
Let us get this out of the way first: I do not
«get» the appeal of death metal vocals at
all. I admire people who are capable of firing up their larynxes that way without having to be rushed to the hospital
fifteen minutes into one of their shows or recording sessions, and I even admit
that an occasional usage — in
particularly appropriate spots, like on 'Boris The Spider' — of the death metal
growl may be warranted. But, for all I know, death metal vocalists growl the entire way through their LPs simply out
of sheer embarrassment that someone might, like, actually make out the lyrics —
because, let us admit it, if there is one
thing in death metal that may easily compete with the silliness of the
ubiquitous chorus of "HHHRRRWWWAAAARRRGHH", it can only be the texts
that go along with it.
Of course, Amorphis must be given some leeway
in the matter, considering that they come from Finland, where the snow falls
heavy and the language belongs to a different family (not that Norwegian death
metal poems are any better, though, and Norwegians have no linguistic excuse).
At the heart of the band is rhythm guitarist/vocalist Tomi Koivusaari, who also
writes much of the music, and lead guitarist Esa Holopainen, who writes the
rest of the music and bears primary responsibility for the lyrics. Then
there's a rhythm section that will remain nameless — and, at this time in their
life, there is no keyboard player in the band.
Which, basically, ensures that The Karelian Isthmus is as generic a
death metal record as they come. Forty-five seconds of medieval acoustic intro,
followed by ten virtually indistinguishable slabs of metallic doom. (By
«virtually» I mean that pretty much every song begins with the same type of crushing
power chord — experienced fans, later on, will obviously pick out the differences).
The band's style relies primarily on riffage: solo passages are scarce and
brief compared to meticulously calculated rhythmic figures, which always come
under one of two sauces — «brutal low» and «melodic high», with each song
usually sharing at least one sub-section of each. The other typical convention
of death metal — alternating between slow/ominous and fast/apocalyptic — is
also well respected throughout.
The album frequently provokes opinion battles:
regular death metal fans may swear by it as Amorphis' finest moment, angry at
the band for an early betrayal of the strict form, whereas prog-metal admirers
tend to think of it as little other than an early initiation ritual, upon the
performance of which Koivusaari and Holopainen were free to expand their
vision. All I can say here is that
death metal, ridiculous vocals and teen fantasy lyrics aside, is a fairly
difficult thing to master, and it is somewhat of a dim pleasure to watch the
band wind its way through the complex mazes of their riffage regardless of any other considerations.
But, for one thing, it's impossible to convey or justify this pleasure in a
simple, hastily slapped together review; for another, I wouldn't feel like doing it even if I could do it.
Oh yes, if you are really interested, this is also one Amorphis album that deals
slightly less with the band's cherished Finnish legacy and slightly more with
Celtic and Germanic motives (which may explain the more conventional whiff of
their music-making as well; and don't expect me to quote any of the lyrics).
And it also gets a thumbs down — respect for the riffage
notwithstanding, I think I'll still be going along with the prog-metalheads on
this one. Generic death metal just ain't my cup of tea — and, for that matter,
it is rather Lady Gaga that is the officially anointed prophet of the Apocalypse,
than any death metal band in existence.
TALES FROM THE THOUSAND LAKES (1993)
1) Thousand Lakes; 2) Into
Hiding; 3) The Castaway; 4) First Doom; 5) Black Winter Day; 6) Drowned Maid;
7) In The Beginning; 8) Forgotten Sunrise; 9) To Father's Cabin; 10) Magic And
Mayhem; 11*) Folk Of The North; 12*) Moon And Sun; 13*) Moon And Sun Part II;
14*) Light My Fire.
On this record, the Finns made a bet for
something bigger — going from generic death metal to something that could, in
all honesty, be called «progressive death metal». But have no fear! This does
not, by any means, imply that they simply started omitting breaks between
compositions. On the contrary — the emphasis is on making the whole thing
slightly more palatable to general audiences by smoothing out the excesses of
the «death» approach, and adding diversity.
Formally, the changes are embodied in the
addition of a new member, Kasper Mårtenson on keyboards, whose presence
influences almost every song and who also contributes one of the band's
trustiest live standards ('Black Winter Day'). Another shift is reflected in
the credits: primary growler Tomi Koivusaari has all but withdrawn from
compositional work, leaving most of the songwriting to lead guitarist Esa
Holopainen — resulting in a much more melodic sound overall. Finally, the band
even adds a bit of clean vocals (delivered by guest star Ville Tuomi), although
clearly as an «experiment» (what do you know, they told us there is this
bizarre thing called «singing» and we just wanted to try it out — no idea if
it will catch on — probably just a passing fad, but who knows...).
It all works. Suddenly, the riffs start
becoming memorable and even impressive! 'Magic And Mayhem', for instance,
begins like a progressive anthem, with a romantic lead guitar line backed by
snowy organ — then pushes into Sabbath territory with a monster riff that
sounds as if it came straight off Sabotage
— then, two minutes into the song, shifts gears once again into a more thrashy
direction, and then, before it all ends, still has enough space to insert a
bizarre synth solo that almost seems to be coming from the acid house planet.
Neither there nor anywhere else do Mårtenson's
keyboards ever become aggressively annoying — a usual misstep with metal
keyboardists, who tend to spoil the fun by either engaging in boring and
lifeless solos or dissolving the heavy guitar crunch in a chemical atmosphere
of Yamaha Magic and Mystery. Kasper uses his instruments to lay down concise,
melodic lines, and he always knows when to fade away into the deep background
or even completely shut down to let the guitars take over. Check out 'The
Castaway', for instance, where, once the
main riff sets in, the keyboards are buried deep, adding an extra dimension but
never overwhelming everything.
If anything, the difference is felt if you simply
play the first five seconds of each song — where every song used to begin with
a crashing power chord, the band now adds melodic guitar intros ('Castaway'),
melodic twin piano/synth intros ('Black Winter Day'), or just plunges
straightahead into «chugging» riffage ('To Father's Cabin'). The result is a
record which, while still heavily monotonous in tone, has no intention of
passing itself off as an overlong musical joke, so typical of over-the-top
genres of which death metal is clearly one. Whether it really suits the spirit
of the Kalevala, from whose stories
most of the lyrics are drawn, is for everyone to decide, although it is likely
that most of Amorphis' fans outside of Finland have no idea of what the Kalevala even is — here is a great
chance to find out. Thumbs up.
The CD edition also adds four bonus tracks from
the Black Winter Day EP which came
out two years later: the two-part 'Moon And Sun' is an okay epic, much in the
vein of the album itself, but the real clinker is, of course, the death metal
version of the Doors' 'Light My Fire', growling vocals included. I must say,
though, that, other than the vocals, the song lends itself pretty well to death
metal interpretation.
ELEGY (1996)
1) Better Unborn; 2) Against
Widows; 3) The Orphan; 4) On Rich And Poor; 5) My Kantele; 6) Cares; 7) Song Of
The Troubled One; 8) Weeper On The Shore; 9) Elegy; 10) Relief; 11) My Kantele
(acoustic version).
More line-up changes. The old keyboard player
is out, replaced by Kim Rantala (on piano and... accordion?); and a new «clean» vocalist, Pasi Koskinen, is admitted
as a permanent member. Koivusaari's growling is not out, however; «romantic
hero» and «Cookie Monster» type vocals are shared in a 50-50 ratio (and,
frankly, I wouldn't be too hasty to claim that Pasi's epic vocalizing style is
always and necessarily a relief after Tomi's growls).
It is not just the usual band member rotation,
though, but the entire spirit that keeps evolving. If Tales was still essentially a «death metal» album with
artsy/progressive inclinations, then Elegy
is almost completely «prog-metal», with very few reminiscences (other than the
growling) of how it once used to be. In fact, even the «metal» aspect is
sometimes downplayed, with acoustic guitars, synthesizers, and unpredictable
excursions into alien territory diversifying the playground.
No song embodies all the change better than
'Better Unborn', with its Eastern overtones and fake sitar bits setting the
scene and then, a minute into the song, the album's hugest and most memorable
riff taking over, as if the band wanted to create their equivalent of Led Zep's
'Kashmir'. The song rides a bombastic, but believable apocalyptic groove,
within which even the growling, alternating with Pasi's «normal» vocals, has
its proper place. You can grovel before its power, or you can just go down the
road whistling out the tune — a notable rarity for prog-metal anthems.
Or, perhaps, the most memorable (if not so
«huge») riff is, after all, to be found in the middle of 'On Rich And Poor' —
the terrific melody that starts around 1:43 into the song, then gets double
tracked and sticks in your head the same way a certain classical theme could do
it (and there must have been lots of
classical theme influences behind this album). Melodicity is also at the heart
of 'My Kantele', on which old-fashioned Moog-ish synthesizers rule the day, and
on 'Song Of The Troubled One', where the wall of sound thinly veils something
like an old Celtic dance tune.
The riskiest track on the entire album is
'Cares'. Starting out innocently, in the fashion of a good old thrash number
(but still embellished by keyboards), and proceeding through a couple signature
changes, it suddenly breaks into what, by all accounts, sounds like several
bars of Cossack dancing, accompanied by Hawaiian guitars (!) — then goes back
to «normal» — then segues into another interlude, this time built on a hardcore
techno beat, synth loops and all, and some pseudo-industrial-electronic
scraping that may or may not be simulated on one of the guitars. The most
bizarre thing about this crazyass synthesis is that, somehow, it does not feel
like total kitsch — the first break
is just too weird for the listener to
determine whether it fits in or not, and the second one is gradually shifted
from total techno to a bit of techno-funk and then back into the regular
metallic fold, so that you don't really get the impression of a hostile radio
station having just tuned in on you for a couple dozen seconds.
'Cares' is reason enough for the curious music
lover to pay attention to Elegy,
but, honestly, there is not a single bad track on here: if anything, the album
could be lovingly dedicated to the great progressive rock heroes of the early 1970s
— of course, it does not have nearly as many innovative or downright exciting
ideas, but it's got the benefit of the «death metal experience», meaning these
guys know how to get a big sound with
plenty of crunch and edge. For the record, this time around most of the lyrical
subjects and atmospheric inspiration are drawn from the Kanteletar, the chief Finnish competitor to Kalevala, but that certainly does not mean that anyone has to go
through a crash course in the literary reinvention of Finnish mythology in
order to gain a deeper, more spiritually adequate understanding of how Elegy works. Just pretend it's all
about dungeons & dragons, even if that's not really true. Nothing is wrong
with dungeons & dragons, anyway, if they are being personified with such an
intelligent balance of melodicity and headbanging. Clearly a thumbs up
here from all points of view.
TUONELA (1999)
1) The Way; 2) Morning Star;
3) Nightfall; 4) Tuonela; 5) Greed; 6) Divinity; 7) Shining; 8) Withered; 9)
Rusty Moon; 10) Summer's End.
Once again, no regular keyboard player here,
although guest musician Santeri Kallio does contribute a limited amount of
synths and what-not. This indicates another change of style, but the band
definitely does not plan upon
returning to its death metal past. Only one song ('Greed') still employs
growling vocals, and, as an exception in a particularly evil-tinged
composition, they feel very much in place. And the music moves closer to noise-
and stoner-metal this time, with carefully carved out riffs often replaced by
oceans of metallic jangle.
Which indicates that they really wanted to make
Tuonela a «mood» album. The word
itself is the Finnish equivalent of the Underworld, literally «death place» —
and Finnish ideas on that place do not differ that much from
Germanic-Scandinavian representations (in fact, the very word tuoni 'death' is ultimately of
Scandinavian origin) — and that begs for one hell of a grim mood, which the
band tries to conjure with the power of multiple overdubs and droning guitar
melodies. The latter aren't particularly original, but they do yield the proper
atmosphere.
Nothing better than 'The Way', though. Quite
unexpectedly, it starts off in bursts of New Wave-style funky licks that bring
to mind King Crimson or U2 rather than any metal or old-school prog band —
then, although a metallic rhythm track is added for crunch, eventually delves
into classic rock mode, adding ecstatic 1970s-style solos, while Koskinen seems
to sing with increased confidence: he is now loud, proud, epic, but has that
acid-angry strain in his voice whose presence always separates cool-sounding
metal dudes from dorky-sounding ones (think someone like Ronnie James Dio,
even though Koskinen has nowhere near the sonic power). The lyrics are corny — "since the stars have
shone, the devil has shown me way" is just a tad too obvious — but that's
the only thing that prevents 'The Way' from becoming a total musical masterpiece; I find no other complaints about any
other part of the song. They even bring in scorching wah-wah guitars to kick
the flames ever higher. That's right — what sort of an album about Hell could
do without a well-placed wah-wah growl from time to time?
I cannot say that any individual tracks after
that one rope me in with as much security, but I really like the overall sound
the guys got here. Second track, 'Morning Star', comes across as basic stoner
noise upon first listen, but after a while, its melodic groove sets in firmly,
and then there's also simple respect for how masterfully the aural effect has
been set up — with all these overdubs, subtle tension build-ups, and an
inspired, teeth-clenched drive to the very end, it all sounds damn serious. The
only great, Sabbath-worthy riff is on 'Greed', but the record is not really
about riffage. It wants to bury you under it, which is reasonable considering
it's all about a journey to Hades, and I can at least vouch for myself that I
did spend some time climbing from under it.
It could become a tad too monotonous,
eventually, despite only running for 46 minutes, but the band does not forget
about little diversifying touches — the Mid-Eastern motives in 'Nightfall', the
sax and piano coda in the title track, the electric organ solo on 'Divinity',
the odd garage-like stop-and-start structure of 'Shining', the flute (!)
arrangements on 'Rusty Moon'... hmm, until now I never realized myself there
were so many of these flourishes on the record. But there they are. So it's not
their best «metal» album, and far from their best «progressive» outfit
(certainly not as daring as Elegy),
but it serves its purpose. Welcome to our local branch of the Underworld — you
don't have to buy anything if you don't want to, but a thumbs up would be nice.
AM UNIVERSUM (2001)
1) Alone; 2) Goddess (Of The
Sad Man); 3) The Night Is Over; 4) Shatters Within; 5) Crimson Wave; 6) Drifting
Memories; 7) Forever More; 8) Veil Of Sin; 9) Captured State; 10) Grieve
Stricken Heart.
Not only is this no longer «death metal», it is
no longer «metal» at all, period. The new sound developed on Tuonela stuck, and Am Universum adopts it for almost all of its tunes. Gone completely
are the death metal vocals, along with those deep hewn, pitch black riffs that
could sometimes challenge Tony Iommi, replaced throughout with Koskinen's
sharp-edged singing and riffage that mixes New Wave-style echo-based phrasing
with the alt-rock drone. And that's how it is, song after song after song.
Two things save Am Universum from sucking. First, although the guitar tones are
extremely similar, the band varies the arrangements by bringing in saxophones
(contributed by Sakari Kukko on about half of the tracks), diverse types of
keyboards (the keyboardist spot is once again occupied by a new arrival,
Santeri Kallio), and even a musical saw on one of the songs. Repeated listens
bring out these nuances fair well enough.
Second, the progressive melodies are still
okay. Somehow, almost without noticing, as the band progressed from growling to
singing, they became quite good at writing catchy vocal parts. Try to
deconstruct the sonic layers of 'Alone', and behind all the roar lies a fairly
decent prog-pop song with dark overtones (well, the day Amorphis start writing
songs with light overtones is
probably the day they start growing bananas in Finland). So it may begin a bit
too uncomfortably close to Pink Floyd's 'Run Like Hell', but then it meets up
with the heavy guitars and with the power chorus and with the psychedelic
guitar solo and... well, it's not
really as dull as the first paragraph of this review could possibly hint.
I am also a big fan of 'The Night Is Over',
where it is not even clear which of the two is more responsible for the song's
deadly snarl — the overdriven wah-wah guitars or the apocalyptic organ. The
heart-crushing shifts between the more «romantic» middle eights, replete with
dreamy slide guitars and stuff, and the crashing power chords of the main
verse/chorus melody have a charming retro spirit to them, as in several guys
getting together and deciding to simply put out a good old art-rock song in the
old, time-tested way. Cute!
Now that I keep relistening to bits and pieces
of this for the sake of nurturing extra ideas, I keep liking the songs more and
more, almost to my amazement, considering how much I normally detest generic
alt-rock lashing, of which there is so much on this album. It's just that every
song has tons of layers in it. So I never paid any attention to 'Captured
State' first or second time around — just seemed like a so-so mid-tempo piece
of rock ballast to me. But in reality, even at its most deafening, the song has
at least one or two extra melodic
lead parts tucked away in the speakers. And the keyboard accompaniment is a
Hammond organ (or something), so far removed from the usual cold-blooded
synthesizers. And it is still easily
the weakest, or one of the weakest, contributions on the entire album.
I just like
this groove the band has developed — it does not work wonders for catchy
melodies, but it's perfectly adequate, and the album grows and grows in stature
with each new listen. Oh, and its subject themes? Uh, lost love, loved loss,
failed memories, memorized failures, whatever. It's dark, but too melodic and
dynamic to be significantly depressing. Angry, wrathful, epic, romantic, but
never foolish enough to pester you with its overbearingly fake emotions. Good
stuff — a step down from Tuonela,
perhaps, but with so much experience and success behind their backs, Amorphis
could allow themselves a few steps down before hitting dirt.
FAR FROM THE SUN (2003)
1) Day Of Your Beliefs; 2)
Planetary Misfortune; 3) Evil Inside; 4) Mourning Soil; 5) Far From The Sun; 6)
Etheral Solitude; 7) Killing Goodness; 8) God Of Deception; 9) Higher Ground;
10) Smithereens.
But as much as the combination of ingredients
worked out for Tuonela and Am Universum managed to work out,
there has to be an end somewhere.
Even as a musical genius, you cannot go on forever at the same routine settings
without blanding out, and the guys behind Amorphis had always been serious working
men, rarely, if ever, attested in the state of flying towards sources of divine
inspiration.
Basically I'm just trying to set up a stage
here for explaining why Am Universum
might just be a goddamn fine record, where its successor sucked so bad that I
almost literally had to wash the sludge out of my ears after each new listen
(and I did manage several — I so paid
my dues to Finland in full, these guys can no longer lay proper claim to the
Karelian Isthmus) — even if, upon first sight, there does not seem to have been
a lot of change from one to another.
And yet, that's just it. Far From The Sun catches the band in a relaxed, lazier-than-usual,
transition state, as they simply venture into the studio, crank out another
bunch of tunes in the already familiar alt-rock/metal style... then forget, completely, to make this bunch
interesting. In fact, they seem to have forgotten everything, right down to
waking up the sound engineer: Far From
The Sun is atrociously recorded, as if all the instruments and vocals were
processed through one channel. Just as Pasi finally earned his «Prog-Metal
Vocalist That Is Relatively Tough To Make Fun Of» diploma (one of the top
distinctions in the genre) for the last couple of albums, they put his voice
behind a radioactive metal curtain — you can hear it all right, but there is no
way you can enjoy it without opening your ears to fatal dosage.
Occasional praise could be heard on the part of
those who were happy that the band
had dropped much of its artsy pretentiousness, along with the retro keyboards
and saxes and flutes and what-not, and went back to its metal roots.
Unfortunate fools! Even if that were somehow a good thing per se, Far From The Sun still sounds nothing like Thousand Lakes — instead of clear-cut black metal riffs, you are
still getting alt-metal sludge. Only this time there is no delicious frosting
on the cake to compensate for the dull taste of the dough — just sludge. One
thick layer after another, ten songs in a row. Turn it on at any random second,
chances are you will be getting the exact same grumble-grumble all over the
place. And who the heck needs it these days, now that we have And You Will Know
Us By The Trail Of Dead offering the same approach on a 24/7 basis?
If the entire album consisted of its opening
number, 'Day Of Your Beliefs', we could count ourselves happy. It's got a
marginally bigger hook, a marginally doomier atmosphere, and a marginally
catchier chorus. At least five or six of the other songs sound like marginal
variations on the same topic, only duller. The sludge recedes only once — on 'Etheral Solitude', driven
forward by what sounds like reggae chords (!), but still not a particularly
good song. Some numbers start out promisingly, like the distorted martial punch
of the opening to 'Killing Goodness', only to get engulfed in even more sludge
as time goes by.
I cannot blame Pasi for quitting the band after
this album. Probably, this had less to do with its overall quality, or with the
fact that just about any singer,
including a tonedeaf one, could have performed on it with pretty much the same
effect, than with personal reasons of a non-musical nature — as it always
happens. But he could also sense that, with the band continuing to go — or,
rather, to limp — in this direction, he had no creative future in it
whatsoever. «Far from the sun» indeed: a firm, stern thumbs down.
ECLIPSE (2006)
1) Two Moons; 2) House Of
Sleep; 3) Leaves Scar; 4) Born From Fire; 5) Under A Soil And Black Stone; 6) Perkele
(The God Of Fire); 7) The Smoke; 8) Same Flesh; 9) Brother Moon; 10) Empty
Opening.
Unquestionably a jump back to better form here.
For some reason, with Koskinen's departure, the music is once again credited to
individual members of the band rather than the collective «Amorphis» — with
the lion's share distributed between Holopainen and keyboardist Santeri Kallio.
The lyrics, once again returning us to motives from the Kalevala, are all properly credited to new vocalist Tomi Joutsen,
on whose issue I am undecided. The trick is that his normal singing voice is not very interesting, lacking the sharpness
and perkiness of Koskinen; but he also does some growling, and does it damn
well — he actually manages to sing
while growling, with real vocal modulation. Besides, he switches to growling
only in the appropriate spots, justifying the practice as a normal artistic
trick rather than a silly obligatory trademark.
Musically, Eclipse
tries to reintroduce progressive elements that had been so completely squandered
on Far From The Sun in favor of
noise, noise, and more noise. Unfortunately, «tries» is an appropriate
description, because the final result is still very far removed from the level
of adventurousness that characterized Elegy
and even Tuonela. Those albums had
nothing approaching the flatness of such numbers as 'Born From Fire', which
just drags on like a dead weight — until, at the very end, the boys get a
bright idea to overdub a folk dance-style lead part on top of the boring rhythm
chords. Which is something like thirty seconds out of a four-minute tune. And
this pretty much summarizes my entire feelings about the record.
Essentially, the quieter these songs are, the
better they work: my favorite is 'The Smoke', built around a simple, but
impressive seven-note piano riff from Kallio — but it remains exciting only as
long as the guitars are kept low enough to let you hear the riff, or the song degenerates into boring noise. 'Leaves
Scar' has a fine, poetic intro, then steps into martial noise territory, of
which there is simply too much on the song for me to lump it into the «high
creativity» category. And so on and on: change is very much welcome, but way
too much sludge remains for the change to bear significant importance.
Worst of all, Eclipse does not have either a convincing beginning or a convincing ending. 'Two Moons' may
be carried by one of the most complex riff patterns on the entire record, but
it is neither as memorable or as properly epic as 'Day Of Your Beliefs'. And
the sadness and despair of 'Empty Opening' is way too mild — it is simply not
enough to choose a minor tonality and then decide that your instruments will do
all the work on their own. What's up with all that bland phrasing? What's up
with all the slushy power chords? We know
this band is capable of perfectly well strung note sequences — is it just a
matter of well strung note sequences not sounding loud enough? What about that search for identity?
Thus, at its best, Eclipse seems like an honest attempt to pull themselves out of the
rut, successful in spots but, overall, a disappointment. The change of vocalist
gives only a marginally fresh angle (at least, it could have been worse), and
none of the individual songs reach classic status (well, maybe with the lone
exception of the album's most aggressive tune — 'Perkele', on which they manage
to hit upon a winning combination of growling vocals and ultra-black guitar).
The only ray of light comes from realizing that they haven't given up on trying
to recapture the magic — although, the way I see it, an obvious first step
would be to start writing riff-based rather than sludge- and drone-based music
again. Thumbs
down. Keep in mind, however, that many fans regard Eclipse as an awesome master-comeback,
something I don't hear at all — but that's just me, your local promoter of American Idol.
SILENT WATERS (2007)
1) Weaving The Incantation; 2)
A Servant; 3) Silent Waters; 4) Towards And Against; 5) I Of Crimson Blood; 6) Her
Alone; 7) Enigma; 8) Shaman; 9) The White Swan; 10) Black River; 11*) Sign.
Here is what I think happened. The mainstream
metal press liked the direction that Amorphis took with Eclipse and spewed forth lots of positive reviews. The band members
liked the direction that the mainstream metal press took with their reviews,
and spewed forth Eclipse Vol. 2,
without changing a doggone thing. For only the second time in their career, the
band gave us two albums that sounded completely identical. But at least Tuonela and Ad Universum had all their little musical flourishes that made each
album enjoyable.
Silent
Waters, on the other hand,
shares all the flaws of Eclipse
without ever trying to improve on
them. Yes, lovers of Finnish folklore may be interested in following the songs,
because, once again, they draw their atmospheric and textual inspiration from
the Kalevala, this time writing a
song cycle centered around the story of the death and resurrection of
Lemminkäinen, the big Hercules-type hero of the epic poem. It's a fine
story in its own rights, but one that, the way I see it, deserves to be set to
much more interesting music.
I admit, however, that it may not so much be
the actual melodies here that I
dislike so much as the overall setting. Several of the songs still feature
well-crafted riffs; but they are all encrusted into this awful noise setting
which is supposed to add power, but,
in my case at least, adds nothing but distraction — and an occasional headache.
Somehow, in the past, these guys were able to get by on riffpower alone; what the heck made them think
every goddamn song must have this interminable bland «roaring» at its
foundation?
Also, as much as Kallio tries to help by adding
classical piano passages to songs, it does not work, because the piano only
very rarely acts as an integral component of the song. At best, e. g. on the
title track, we start out with a nice minor key intro, then, with the guitars
breaking their way in, the piano recedes into the background and becomes just a
moody echo effect to all the roaring. At worst, you just cannot hear the piano at all, even when it's actually there.
And are there any other keyboards
played? If there were, I don't remember.
A few songs sort of «stand out» by employing
user-friendlier production techniques. On 'Towards Ang Against', for instance,
the band toys with electronics and danceable drum beats, but the effect is, to
put it mildly, rather questionable. Not sure if these things work so well with
the song's dark riff and growling vocals. For some reason, «Rob Zombie» and
similar silly commercialized crap comes to mind. Not the most correct
association, perhaps, but there it is, and it is not welcome. 'Enigma' is the
only song on the album to be carried throughout on a folksy acoustic pattern,
but for some reason it also bores the hell out of me — maybe it's because I've
heard that pattern a thousand times already?
Thumbs down. At this
juncture, it almost looks like Amorphis have just passed the point of no
return: a band that, at one time, almost invented an entirely new type of
music, now content themselves with recycling a dull, predictable formula. If
anything, it belies and belittles their own frickin' name. I'd suggest a
rechristening as Cacomorphis, and
choosing Captain Hook as their mascot, but it's not as if I'm getting paid for
this, so whatever.
P.S. If you are a metalhead, don't take my word
on the album by any means — apparently, most fans just love the record. Perhaps years of listening to heavy music result
in one's ears naturally developing some sort of sludge filter. Me, I'm still
in training.
SKYFORGER (2009)
1) Sampo; 2) Silver Bride; 3) From
The Heaven Of My Heart; 4) Sky Is Mine; 5) Majestic Beast; 6) My Sun; 7) Highest
Star; 8) Skyforger; 9) Course Of Fate; 10) From Earth I Rose.
This third volume of Eclipse is marginally more interesting — because the level of
sludge has been slightly lowered in favor of slightly more distinguishable
melodicity. In fact, 'Sampo' begins the record with a serious promise. A
spiraling piano riff, a sharp guitar tone doubling the melody, and suddenly even
the obligatory crackling of the thunderstormy metallic accompaniment becomes
more tolerable, although I could still live without it.
From there and onwards, though, there are no
surprises. Except, perhaps, a more significant emphasis on growling vocals —
which is unfortunate, because, at this point, Tomi Joutsen does not merely
sound like our friend the Cookie Monster: he sounds like Cookie Monster with
acute larynx inflammation, and, considering that these vocal parts usually
arrive at «climactic» (heaviest) moments of each given song, the effect is
unintentionally hilarious. (As much as I have trained myself to accept death
metal vocals as part of the game, the training is still only effective when [a] the music is not deadly boring and [b] the
death metal vocals really tend to
sound like death, completely pitchless. Skyforger
offers no such deal).
At one point, I intentionally embarked upon the quest to find something worth
writing about — my prize was discovering a little bit of flute melody on 'Highest
Star', like a pale shadow of what it used to be on 'Rusty Moon' from Tuonela, because this time it sounds
fairly wimpy even during the quiet parts, and fades out completely on the
loud, sludgy ones. Nothing else. There is nothing
else to write about. Yes, there are some good riffs, but the godawful
production simply massacres them. If this is metal, I expect at least one or two songs that kick butt like it
used to be with 'Better Unborn', without the muffling noise. If this is progressive stuff, bring back the flutes
and the Mellotrons and the whatnot, give me some frickin' diversity.
Unfortunately, at this point, what with the
small, but surprisingly loyal, bunch of Tomi Joutsen's fans, throwing their
thumbs up every time Amorphis gets loud, it already looks like the formula
stuck pretty hard: the band that, for a brief moment, was on the front line of
merging extreme forms of metal with prog, has opted to retreat to a safer
place, one in which all the songs are freely interchangeable, but which is
cozy enough to offer the necessary protection. If you loved Silent Waters, you will love Skyforger (good luck telling the songs
apart, though); otherwise, do not even begin to bother. Thumbs down.
THE BEGINNING OF TIMES (2011)
1) Battle For Light; 2) Mermaid;
3) My Enemy; 4) You I Need; 5) Song Of The Sage; 6) Three Words; 7) Reformation;
8) Soothsayer; 9) On A Stranded Shore; 10) Escape; 11) Crack In A Stone; 12) Beginning
Of Time.
This fourth volume of Eclipse is marginally more interesting than Skyforger (mumbled the uncomfortable reviewer, as much in need of
new words as he was in need of new emotions), for the following two reasons:
(1) approximately one minute into ʽSong Of
The Sageʼ, the good old sludge is cut down, and in its place we see a
nice little flute-driven passage, one that is not so much influenced by classic
Jethro Tull as it is directly or almost directly lifted from some Tull song —
but it still sounds nice enough on its own, next to all the growling vocals and
shit;
(2) ʽThree Wordsʼ, I think, is as
close to a really good song as this band ever got to in the last ten years of
its existence. The stop-and-start structure of the melody, with its thumping
(«earth-burrowing») riff, is attractive, as is the modestly catchy, singalong
chorus, even though the latter may sound a bit too commercial and slick to the demanding listener.
Other than that, I am still not able to warm up
to the band's post-Ad Universum
sound. All I can say is that, with each new album since 2003, they have been trying to improve upon the
melodicity of the content, so that, with The
Beginning Of Times, I am beginning to think I could almost end up liking
some of it, had they bothered to return their production values to what they
used to be around the times of Elegy.
No dice. A big thank you to Iikka Kahri for providing occasional flute and sax
support, and to Netta Dahlberg for adding female vocal harmonies in a few
spots, but this just isn't enough.
So let me simply pass the mike over to an
anonymous reviewer at Amazon, whose admiration for the album was so
uncontainable, it had to spill over in poetic form: "Skyforger blew me away / I can listen to it all day / But it was
time for something new / The Beginning Of Times is Skyforger Part 2". The innocence
and, at the same time, inevitability of the oxymoron in the last two lines, I
must say, «blew me away» far more than anything on this record. Still, it did
not suffice to save the album from the usual thumbs down. Bring on more
flute!
CIRCLE (2013)
1) Shades Of Gray; 2) Mission;
3) The Wanderer; 4) Narrow Path; 5) Hopeless Days; 6) Nightbird's Song; 7) Into
The Abyss; 8) Enchanted By The Moon; 9) A New Day; 10*) Dead Man's Dream.
Apparently, Amorphis work around the clock now
— their internal algorithm is programmed to print out the results every two
years, and thus, here is yet another set of melodic death metal anthems that
sounds every bit as loud, proud, and doom-laden as every other set of melodic
death metal anthems they had released since... well, you know.
One thing that I have noticed is that, by this
time, even some of the veteran fans on Internet message boards started to sort
of fiddle around and grumble about how preciously few new sensations they were
offered. This may have to do with an
important change in style, which might not be noticeable immediately, but whose
surreptitious effects may be harming the listener's system from the very start
— the album is extremely hot on guitars and quite modest on keyboards. Most of
the songs drop the «wimpy» keyboard intros that were quite prominent, for
instance, on The Beginning Of Times,
and dive straight into battle. Santeri Kallio is still there alright, but he is
intentionally pushed into the background, as if Amorphis decided to make a
«hardcore» album all of a sudden.
But the decision does not do much good.
Essentially, all the songs simply sound even more like each other now than they
did before — dissipate your attention a bit and you will never know which one
is which. Granted, some of the riffs are more memorable than others... and some
are less memorable than others... and... and... okay, the flute is back in
ʽNarrow Pathʼ, so prominently, in fact, that one could take the song
for a Jethro Tull circa Songs From The
Wood outtake, redone in a grinding heavy metal arrangement. (There is even
more flute — in fact, a whole delirious Ian Anderson-style solo — in the middle
of ʽNightbird's Songʼ as well).
Other than that, as usual, the album is
undescribable in non-technical terms, because each single riff aims more or
less at the same emotional goals that Amorphis have pursued since the dawn of
time. Mind you, they aren't bad riffs: on the whole, this is not the dullest Amorphis album ever — Skyforger is probably worse — but if
the band's concept of rethinking their sound is really confined to ideas like «let's cut down on the keyboards a
little bit», this is not even funny, and just goes to show how deep the rut is.
I actually wish more of the tracks here were
like the bonus inclusion: ʽDead Man's Dreamʼ breaks in with a
top-notch death metal riff, growling vocals, and speed — something that is completely lacking on the main body of
the album (which is probably why they relegated it to bonus status, so as not
to disrupt the conceptuality). ʽNarrow Pathʼ, with its Celtic dance
focus, and this thing, with its speedy thump, are pretty much the only
mood-breakers on the record. But yeah, at least these guys can still play, that
is for certain.
An interesting technical note is that this is
pretty much the band's first album (in a long time, at least) not to draw its lyrical inspiration
directly from Kalevala — this time,
there is some sort of «original» concept about a struggling loser empowered by
a spiritual guide and, well, whatever. In reality, this makes about as much
difference as the downtoning of the keyboards — big-time fans will take notice,
and as for the rest of us, who really cares these days? The good thing is, with
these guys still steering the ship with firm hands and iron vocal cords, good
old Finland probably has nothing to fear but fear itself.
UNDER THE RED CLOUD (2015)
1) Under The Red Cloud; 2) The
Four Wise Ones; 3) Bad Blood; 4) The Skull; 5) Death Of A King; 6) Sacrifice;
7) Dark Path; 8) Enemy At The Gates; 9) Tree Of Ages; 10) White Night; 11*)
Come The Spring; 12*) Winter's Sleep.
Yes, the clock is still ticking! It's 2015 now,
and here is another Amorphis album that sounds like any other Amorphis album.
And you know what? I'm kind of tired to issuing one thumbs down after another
rating to all these records — on one hand, blue color is expensive, and on the
other, there's something to be said about sheer tenacity. When we are gone,
every last bit of us, and even Keith Richards finally bites the dust, there'll
still be a two-year waiting period for the next Amorphis album. Finland
forever! Uralic peoples rule.
To keep matters short, here's a brief splotch
of information. Under The Red Cloud
was produced by «legendary» producer Jens Bogren, who used to work with all
sorts of progressive and fantasy metal bands, from Opeth to Amon Amarth and
beyond. The record places a little more emphasis on growling death metal vocals
than the previous few, but still features plenty of clean singing, including
even a guest contribution from female guest performer Aleah Stanbridge on the
last track. There is one hybrid between melodic death metal and flute-led
Celtic dance track (ʽTree Of Agesʼ), one mid-East-influenced song
(ʽEnemy At The Gatesʼ), one song dominated by a piano melody behind
all the guitar distortion and growling (ʽDark Pathʼ), and one Taylor
Swift cover (ʽBad Bloodʼ). Okay, that last bit is not really true.
And I'm not even sure if it were fun if it were
true, but I'm really desperate here.
Very likely, there are some «new» riffs here,
but to me, it just feels like I've already heard each of these songs about a
dozen times, and even the little specific details singled out above are not
particularly impressive — it's just that all the other songs are even less
distinctive. Get this if your admiration for Circle matches your adulation of The Beginning Of Times and your adoration of Skyforger. To me, it's all equally interchangeable and forgettable,
a pathetic overblown formula that ran out of sense already in the previous
century.
SERENADES (1993)
1) Lovelorn Rhapsody; 2) Sweet
Tears; 3) J'Ai Fait Une Promesse; 4) They (Will Always) Die; 5) Sleepless; 6)
Sleep In Sanity; 7) Scars Of The Old Stream; 8) Under A Veil (Of Black Lace);
9) Where Shadows Dance; 10) Dreaming: The Romance.
Unless you always take your morning coffee with
three new lumps of doom metal, there is not much to praise about the debut
album of Anathema. The songs are slow, sluggish, monotonous, and topped off
with the growling vocals of lead singer Darren White — who, much too often,
sounds like the victim of a really bad throat virus rather than a professional
demon from Hell (granted, such is the fate of about 80% of «growlers», but it is possible for a really good growler to
send shivers down one's spine: all it takes is make yourself sound genuinely
aggressive and pissed-off, which is not something this guy White is capable
of).
Nevertheless, brothers Vincent and Danny
Cavanagh, handling guitar duties, are already showing some signs of being more
interested in a «sensitive», progressive sound rather than simply composing
the soundtrack for a routine zombie apocalypse. The most heavily promoted
track, ʽSweet Tearsʼ, apart from being driven by a curiously «curved»
riff, is accompanied throughout with a melodic lead line that occasionally
bursts apart in some psychedelic overdubbed fireworks, not to mention the
quiet, bass-driven bridge with clean, prayer-like vocals giving you a break
from the growl. None of that makes it a great song, because the growling kills
one part of the excitement and the repetitiveness finishes off the other, but
it does give a hint that these guys really know how to use their guitars, and
that all it takes for them to embark on the road for greatness is to get rid of
the most annoying clichés of the genre.
There is
one song here among the thick pools of sludge that sounds completely different:
ʽSleeplessʼ, strange enough, begins like a genuine early Eighties
New Wave track, with Cure-like guitars introducing a cold, melancholic mood
(and even the tempo being slightly sped up to shake off any doom metal
associations), before true metal guitars and growling enter the picture for
stylistic correction (and even then they keep moving in and out to keep things
interesting). (There is also a short accappella track, sung in French by a
female guest vocalist, that introduces an appropriate «dark folk» overtone,
but it is too short and interlude-like to be of any serious interest).
Everything else, however, is fairly stereotypical and, after a while, just
blurs together in a mess that is neither too threatening nor too emotionally
resonant — certainly nowhere near as emotionally resonant as the lyrics, all
of which deal with loss, tragedy, death, coffins, mourning, endless dreams,
etc., would seem to suggest. Not that you could make any of them out with those
vocals.
The biggest surprise comes last: pinned to the
end of the record is ʽDreaming: The Romanceʼ, a 23-minute long
ambient soundscape that sounds like it grew out of the final chord of ʽA
Day In The Lifeʼ — just a minimalistic keyboard melody super-slowly
unveiling against an oscillating hum in the background. I have no idea why they
wanted to go in that direction and play God, that is, Brian Eno after
exhausting their current pool of metal riffs, but that's the way it is. Maybe
some people do need 23 minutes of New Age sonic textures to relax after 42 minutes
of jarring doom metal, except most of them probably do not know it.
All in all, a rather inauspicious start, but I
guess they had to start somewhere:
Peaceville Records had just picked them up on the strength of their doom metal
demos, and they did have to pander to a stereotypical audience for a while. I'm
sure a fan of «classic» Anathema could learn to live with Serenades or even love it, but even in a genre as formula-dominated
as doom metal there may be standouts, and this one definitely is not, so a thumbs down
it is.
THE SILENT ENIGMA (1995)
1) Restless Oblivion; 2)
Shroud Of Frost; 3) ...Alone; 4) Sunset Of The Age; 5) Nocturnal Emission; 6)
Cerulean Twilight; 7) The Silent Enigma; 8) A Dying Wish; 9) Black Orchid.
And here we have it — a big step forward, as
the band gets rid of its lead vocalist and opts for a less clichéd, more
ambitious sound. Technically, The Silent
Enigma may still be labeled as doom metal, but now it has a significant
soft component as well; and guitarist Vincent Cavanagh, taking over the vocal
duties, largely dumps the cartoonish guttural growling (possibly just because
he was not able to master the technique, but thank God for that anyway) and
sings in a variety of tones that range from stone-cold, half-spoken recitals
to snarling screaming: still theatrically exaggerated, but at least somewhat
relatable, if you make a strong effort to believe that here before you stands a
demonically possessed lyrical hero from the Middle Ages.
Not that I am advocating to take this album too
seriously: like almost any doom metal, what we have here is an elaborately
staged «black mass» performance whose formal aspects (guitar tones, melodic
structure, production, overdubbed effects, etc.) are far more alluring than any
direct emotional impact. But this particularity only has to be stated once and
then discarded as something self-evident — if an album like this truly «rocks
your world» and makes you empathize with the protagonist, all I can say is take
it easy, brother, we're not quite on the threshold of the Apocalypse yet, and
life goes on even after your beautiful long-haired bride, to whom you were
going to get married on a lovely, jasmine-scented Sunday morning, expired from
bubonic plague while still wearing her wedding dress, and left you forever
cursing God's name because that's what everybody does in a situation like this.
"My paralysed heart is bleeding", "condemned to misery, restless
oblivion forever", "lost deity betrayed my faith", you know the
drill.
We'll just push all of that right out of the
way and try and concentrate on the music (because, honestly, the album would
have worked much better in fully instrumental form). This is where the
Cavanaghs begin to develop and exploit some really enticing ideas —
ʽRestless Oblivionʼ, for instance, begins with a minute-long soft
exposition (a modest and lovely folk-pop guitar melody dominating the waves),
then smoothly, but firmly slips into a crushing «ninth-wave-style» metal riff,
and then, adopting a weird time signature, begins riding a curious
double-tracked guitar sinusoid that has a certain hypnotic quality to it. With
all the interludes and all the alternations between melodic and metallic bits,
it's a fairly solid piece of music, with only the silly lyrics and the
«possessed» vocals presenting them spoiling the picture (frankly, I'd say that
the music on its own does not even properly convey the feeling of bleek despair
that the words keep talking about — the melody is disturbing, tempestuous, but
not dirge-like, and I'd rather have it left open for free interpretation rather
than follow the words directly).
Since the intended mood is quite uniform for
all the tracks here, they largely fall into two (and even then, somewhat
overlapping) categories — «rowdier» numbers, based on more precisely
fleshed-out guitar and bass riffs, and «moodier» numbers, relying more on the
atmospherics of multiple sustained notes than on headbanging tricks. Thus,
ʽShroud Of Frostʼ is basically just one prolonged guitar wail, with
minimal melody and protracted notes that sometimes seem to go on until the
amplifier runs out of battery support; unfortunately, since the basic chord
sequence is not exactly an emotional rollercoaster, I find the whole thing
rather tedious to sit through, and would rather prefer ʽA Dying
Wishʼ, which moves along at a higher speed and features a solid chugging
riff at its heart (a rather generic one, though, I'm afraid). On the other
hand, ʽNocturnal Emissionʼ combines the two aspects well — there's a
mournful and menacing bass riff at its core, which is good enough for them to
leave it on constant repeat for the last minute of the song as it slowly fades
away, but it's not a headbanging riff, more like a hand-of-doom riff.
But on the whole, instrumental and stylistic
difference between the various songs is still kept to a minimum, and such
little touches of extra color as female dark folk vocals on
ʽ...Aloneʼ (the Dear Departed was relieved from post-mortem duty for
a bit to make one last phone call to the protagoinst), or a
bass/synth-dominated wordless funeral march on the closing ʽBlack
Orchidʼ, do little to change the fact that The Silent Enigma still has tremendous potential to bore you stiff
unless you're really really really into the my-dying-bride thing. Consequently,
I refrain from giving the record a thumbs up, despite all the good words about
certain individual riffs and textures; let us simply agree to call this the
band's «teenage» phase, legitimately succeeding its «childhood» phase on Serenades, and then see where it leads
to in the future.
ETERNITY (1996)
1) Sentient; 2) Angelica; 3)
The Beloved; 4) Eternity Part I; 5) Eternity Part II; 6) Hope; 7) Suicide Veil;
8) Radiance; 9) Far Away; 10) Eternity Part III; 11) Cries On The Wind; 12)
Ascension.
«Inspired» (is this the right word here?) by
the illness and death of the Cavanaghs' mother, Eternity is the first Anathema album that is quite hard to
technically classify as heavy metal at all, even if I wouldn't go as far as to
label it «progressive rock» instead. Rather, they preserve and amplify all the
soft elements that may be typical of artistically inclined metal bands — the
dark folk atmospheres, the acoustic guitars, the mournful vocals, the quiet
gloom — while at the same time downplaying the deep-black distorted rumble of
the metal guitars, in the place of which you will here frequently find a guitar
sound much closer to grunge and alt-rock. So it's more like «de-metallized
metal» than a 180-degree transition to some other genre — and, of course, the
one thing that stays completely the same is the band's total commitment to the
bleakness and depression of their vision. The mark of Cain is not to be washed
off that easy.
This is not necessarily bad — imagine, say,
Black Sabbath releasing an entire LP of ʽPlanet Caravansʼ,
ʽSolitudesʼ, and ʽLaguna Sunrisesʼ with just a couple of
ʽWheels Of Confusionʼ in between — but on their first try, Anathema
do not seem to be doing a very good job with it. In terms of pure atmosphere, Eternity is indeed a major step
forward, and the lack of growling vocals makes it possible to put it on in the
neghbors' presence without excessive blushing. But as far as memorable themes
or unique personality is concerned, the album is fairly boring. The textures
are easily comprehensible — some minor bass chords, some dark acoustic strum,
some overdubs with wailing-weeping electric guitars and some distorted feedback
for background canvas — but the songs, subsequently, are largely indistinguishable
from each other.
The only exception is ʽHopeʼ,
sounding more like a righteous prayer than a depressed lament and having the
good sense to arm itself with some cool riffs, including a shrill siren-like
four-note electric sequence that provides the song with a stronger,
calcium-enriched skeleton. Ironically, this is the only song not written by the band — it's a Roy
Harper cover, with Harper himself appearing as a guest star with some spoken narration
in the intro, which pretty much tells us all we want to know. And speaking of
the Harper / Pink Floyd connection (ʽHopeʼ itself was co-written by
Harper with Gilmour), yes, Eternity
is the first of many Anathema albums where Floyd influence becomes very clearly
visible, but it is one thing to be influenced by your predecessors, and quite
another thing to show that you yourself are worthy of being influenced by them.
As it is, I have not found any particular musical touches on this record that
would even begin to approach the melodic genius of Floyd.
They do have the best of intentions, but
neither brother Vince's vocals (too dusky and mid-rangey to compete with a
Robert Smith, too autumnal and sentimental to have the grip of a Roger Waters)
nor brother Danny's guitars (too often relying on metal / alt-rock /
ambient-prog clichés) are stunning on their own, and multiplying one
so-so by another in this world violates the laws of math: instead of so-so
squared, you get the square root of so-so squared. Except in specific cases
like the truly awful ʽSuicide Veilʼ, where you put brother Vince
totally upfront, so that for most of the time, he just bleeds out of your
speakers on a pallet of hushed symph-synths and minimalistic bass — here we
have the square root of so-so, period,
and a desire to rush him off to the ER as fast as you can, before his veins run
empty due to theatrical overcalculation. Elsewhere, he at least operates under
a more respectable musical cover (over-emoting on your guitar, for some reason,
is always less of a crime than over-emoting on your vocal pipes), but still,
that does not make any of these songs easier to describe and identify as
specific meaningful entities. The good news is, they would learn to do better
in the future; the bad news is, in between their brief wobble on the stepping
stone of Silent Enigma and their
landing on the relatively safe coast of Alternative
4, they had to make the plunge, and Eternity
is it — thumbs
down, unless you just happen to be an instant fan of every song that propagates some form of
suicide.
P.S. Oh, and, by the way, the producer on this
album was Tony Platt — incidentally, the very same guy who was responsible for
producing Cheap Trick's The Doctor
back in 1986. Coincidence? Not what I'd like to believe, no.
ALTERNATIVE 4 (1998)
1) Shroud Of False; 2) Fragile
Dreams; 3) Empty; 4) Lost Control; 5) Re-connect; 6) Inner Silence; 7)
Alternative 4; 8) Regret; 9) Feel; 10) Destiny.
ʽShroud Of Falseʼ — a pretty good
name not just for the short introduction to Anathema's fourth album, but maybe
for the album as a whole, or even for the entire band, for that matter. As deep
and solemn as this whole thing pretends to be, it is thoroughly impossible for
me to take the record that seriously.
That piano intro, for instance. It aspires to a sort of bluesified Chopin, but
the way the melody slowly unfolds and gains in blunt power, you'd almost expect
Bruce Springsteen to be joining Roy Bittan any time now and crashing into
ʽThunder Roadʼ. Then the vocals come in, and the illusion is gone,
but these words? "We are just a moment in time, a blink of an eye, a dream
for the blind, visions from a dying brain" — hello, ʽDust In The
Windʼ. I can still try and imagine them with the grinning sneer of a Roger
Waters, and it'd be okay; but irony, sarcasm, and humor of any sort, even the blackest one, is as strictly prohibited in
Anathema records as catching Pokemons is in Russian churches. One laugh and you're
fired.
This is why, even if, as far as I'm concerned, Alternative 4 is a pretty good record
and probably the best Anathema that can be bought for your money (and if you
want Anathema for free, prepare to be excommunicated, heh, heh), even so, I
can never see myself or those who take their progressive rock seriously to be swamped by it. It is not
even that the album remains chock full of «goth» clichés — it is that
the band lacks the power to either subvert these clichés or, on the contrary,
drown in them so utterly and devotedly that their mere fanatical devotion would
bring on involuntary respect. Their work is clean, elegant, and polite, and
that's not the kind of approach that gives the best results when applied to a
clichéd formula. To become real classy and commanding prog rock
artists, they lack qualification; to become masters of the theatrical approach,
they lack sincerity — and, to top it all, their melodies remain questionable at
best.
Nevertheless, having said all that, I am amazed
at how good Alternative 4 still
turns out to be. The leap of quality from Eternity
is astonishing — in terms of hooks, almost every song has something to offer, so
that, if it does not succeed in subduing my soul, it at least baits my curiosity.
The very first song, ʽFragile Dreamsʼ, opening with a gentle guitar
strum, is then joined by a slightly gypsy-esque violin line (from guest
musician George Rucci), and finally settles on the album's best riff — simple,
insistent, nagging, hard to forget, and, coolest of all, actually introduced
by that violin. The first two minutes of the song, completely instrumental, are
the best musical sequence on the record; once the vocals come in, we are in
Cure-lite territory once again ("countless times I trusted you, I let you
back in..." — don't tell me Robert Smith did not actually write these lyrics for them), but it's
okay, it's not too problematic, and eventually the cool riff will be back,
leading the song to its over-the-cliff suicide. Yes, they could probably do
more with the instrumental part than just playing the riff over and over, but
Anathema don't do mad soloing, it's disrespectful towards their target audience
(the dead, that is).
ʽEmptyʼ starts out with half-spoken
vocals backed with lonely, «black» synthesizer chords — you know it's just a
premonition for something louder to come, and when the rhythm section and the
main melody kicks in, lo and behold, you have another cool riff, and even the
melodramatic singing is easier to stand, as it comes equipped with a very
humane-sounding snarl (still no sense of irony, but when he goes "I abhor
you, I condemn you...", I have to say, that's dangerously close to
sounding like a very realistic curse). Unfortunately, ʽLost Controlʼ
then reminds us of how terribly clichéd this band is, after all —
somewhere deep inside the song hides itself a real cool groove with a
surprisingly funky bassline and some neat acoustic picking, but on the whole it
is way too derivative of the spirit of The
Wall to ring true. Just one more of those «funeral marches for myself»,
albeit nicely arranged. The key moment is when the melody dies down to let the
singer ask the principal question, "Have I really lost control?" If,
at that moment, your heart feels wrought with pity and your eyes swell with
tears... welcome to the club where I am not welcome. If not, congratulations
for knowing the exquisite difference between Vincent Cavanagh and Peter
Hammill. But even I have to admit that there is something to be said about the
dynamic shifts on that tune, and that not a lot of goth-themed metal bands
would be ready to work on such a fine balance between heavy distorted guitars,
pianos, and acoustic guitars.
Actually, at this point Anathema cannot even be
defined as a metal band — there's no more «metal» here than there is on a
classic Rush album (or, to make a somewhat more accurate analogy in terms of
cheese-to-substance correlation, Eloy). They're doing stone-faced goth theater,
and if this needs a metal riff inserted at some point, so be it; but even on
the most doom-laden tracks, such as the title one, the pitches are higher than
on your average doom metal composition. It might have helped if there was less
emphasis on the vocals altogether: speaking of the title track, the album's one
truly cringeworthy moment is when the singer suddenly adopts a
Tiny-Tim-meets-Shakesperian-artist intonation to deliver the "I'll dance
with the angels to celebrate the Holocaust" verse (ooh, shocking!). On the other hand, no vocals
at all would make the album more boring, because the «progressive» melodies
lack sufficient complexity, and are more about creating an overall atmosphere
than taking the listener through dazzling shifts of time signatures, tonalities,
moods, and messages.
All in all, I give the record a thumbs up
— not because it supports and consoles me in my hour of desperation, but
because I am willing to recognize the creativity and talent, and adjust to the
theatrical conventions of the record. I mean, maybe somewhere deep down inside there's a second bottom to it —
they did name it after Alternative 3,
after all, which was a classic UK conspiracy theory hoax — but even if you
stick to this deadly seriousness all the way, Alternative 4 is much more fun than the average doom-and-gloom
concoction from gazillions of pretentious mediocrities all over the world.
JUDGEMENT (1999)
1) Deep; 2) Pitiless; 3)
Forgotten Hopes; 4) Destiny Is Dead; 5) Make It Right (F.F.S.); 6) One Last
Goodbye; 7) Parisienne Moonlight; 8) Judgement; 9) Don't Look Too Far; 10)
Emotional Winter; 11) Wings Of God; 12) Anyone, Anywhere; 13) 2000 & Gone;
14) Transacoustic*.
Okay, this one's no fun at all. The band's
original bass player and one of its chief songwriters, Duncan Patterson, is out
of the band to focus on his personal projects (the latest of which, ironically,
takes its name from Patterson's finest moment with Anathema — Alternative 4);
and his replacement, Dave Pybus, is just a bass player, albeit a pretty good
one, with a flair for Gothic vaudevillian lines (the one that drives the short
instrumental ʽDestiny Is Deadʼ almost sounds like a tribute to Alice
Cooper's ʽWelcome To My Nightmareʼ). This leaves Danny Cavanagh as
principal songwriter, and he takes the band into even less metallic territory
that they covered on Alternative 4
— if the latter could still be called «heavy progressive rock» with some metal
influences, Judgement is more like
«dark Goth-folk» with occasional moments of heaviness.
Unfortunately, in the process most of the sharp
edges have been smoothed out, and the theatrical suspense that made Alternative 4, at the very least, curious,
has all but disappeared. In its place is a hazy, light, stable atmosphere of
soft postmortem depression, largely generated by medievalistic folk acoustic
guitars, wrapped in thin cloaks of synthesizer textures — and hardly spoiled
whenever they decide to pump in a little adrenaline by turning into a more or
less generic alt-rock band and churning out those faceless three-chord
distorted riffs, because this is just a temporary trick for them now; all these
chuggin'-heavy interludes are only there so that the album wouldn't all blur together in one huge cloud of
dark-folk.
There's enough good taste retained for none of
this to sound too irritating. Brother Vincent, now singing with clean vocals
exclusively, prefers to be quiet and mournful rather than try to scale operatic
heights. Synthesizers are used sparingly and almost never overshadow the
«natural» flow of acoustic and electric guitars (and even when they do, it is
only to offer a memorable musical theme — ʽMake It Rightʼ). The Pink
Floyd influence continues to grow (ʽWings Of Godʼ), but is never
strong enough to push the brothers off their own path. And yet, not even a
single one of the tracks manages to come close to the intensity of
ʽFragile Dreamsʼ.
One track that does stand out from the rest is
ʽParisienne Moonlightʼ, continuing their tradition of inserting a bit
of womanly sorrow and gentleness into their sagas of male grief — here, Danny
Cavanagh sings a brief piano-backed duet with Lee Douglas that does have a bit
of French flair to it, but mostly, you know, since all of their albums are
about the living male grieving about the loss of his female companion, they
need to hold at least one seance with the participation of the dearly departed
female companion, and Lee Douglas makes a cool ghostly apparition for two
minutes, really getting into the act. "You cried with me, you would die
for me", she soothingly consoles our hero, but he'd not, really, he'd much
rather sing for her until the end of the world.
Maybe the title track, which comes right after,
should be considered another standout — it begins like almost everything else,
another acoustic dirge, but eventually there's a crescendo of sorts, the song
picks up a faster tempo and, two minutes into the song, we get a fast,
agitated, rocking part with almost punkish energy. Problem, though: it is a
mind-numbingly repetitive part, with the same rhythm pattern flogged on and on
and on for more than two minutes. Not even a solo! Not even an unpredictable
key change! Just on and on and on — and that,
perhaps, is what bugs me the most about this music in general: it is far too
unadventurous and far too «ambient-oriented» to involve my attention rather
than involuntarily shut it off at about one minute into each and every one of
these songs.
In the end, Judgement is what it is: a poor man's Pink Floyd as seen through
the eyes of a formal doom metal band, just deprived of (possibly) its most
inventive creative member. Totally listenable, but the music neither manages
to properly daze and confuse me nor shatter my emotions, and I have no choice
but to consider it a serious step down after the ear-bitter-candy elements of Alternative 4. But I do admit that,
conceptually, it is quite loyally executed and certainly has a lot of appeal
for those who take this style really seriously. The very fact that you can
record an hour-long album channelling the spirits of all the Gothic pulp novel
writers who ever lived and get away with it without too much embarrassment
confirms that there just might be something there — it's just not a kind of
something that's strong enough to stir anything within me.
A FINE DAY TO EXIT (2001)
1) Pressure; 2) Release; 3)
Looking Outside Inside; 4) Leave No Trace; 5) Underworld; 6) (Breaking Over
The) Barriers; 7) Panic; 8) A Fine Day To Exit; 9) Temporary Peace.
Normally, an album titled A Fine Day To Exit would probably be expected from a band that decides
to call it a day — but we are dealing with Anathema here, a band for whom
calling it a day is pretty much a profession, except they're calling it a day
for humanity as a whole, rather than just their own sorry asses. So no, they
are not disbanding: this is merely the next installation in the ongoing series
of «numb and number», and, unfortunately, not an improvement on the flaws of Judgement, but rather an exacerbation
of said flows.
By this time, it seems like they might be
taking their clues from Radiohead rather than Pink Floyd, with most of the
songs showing a quiet, tired, enfeebled type of depression and disillusionment,
as conveyed by weighted-down vocals, morose piano lines, and atmospheric use of
electronics, although not enough of the latter to suggest interference with Kid A: rather, it is the alt-rock Bends version and the art-rock OK Computer version of Radiohead that
serve as primary cue-setters. Slow, atmospheric, depressing songs, only
occasionally livened up by faster tempos that still preserve the same
atmosphere (ʽPanicʼ) and always suggesting being trapped without any
hope of escape in the deep, dark well of one's own subconscious, except that,
unlike Radiohead, lyrics-wise they are still unable to escape the «always
talking with the ghost of my brutally mutilated lover» cliché.
That cliché is, however, far from the
worst problem of the album — the worst problem is that most of the songs are
honestly no good. Like that Radiohead atmosphere or not, it was always
supported by radical, challenging, or at least instantly memorable musical
ideas. Here, though, as the Cavanagh brothers are assisted by drummer John
Douglas in their songwriting duties, I fail to find anything that would sound
genuinely unusual or memorable. The songs take too much time to do too few
interesting things. The pianos and acoustic guitars sound nice, but do not take
any serious chances outside of the predictably comfortable zones of adult-pop
balladeering and dark (or not too dark) folk strumming. And the electric
guitars, when they do come in, largely sound like any average alt-rock band
would sound — basic grungy patterns that even Radiohead had largely left behind
by 1995.
The very first song on the album,
ʽPressureʼ, which was also released as a single, begins in full-out
ʽKarma Policeʼ mode, jamming your ears in between big echoey drums
and forcefully hit piano chords, but this all just seems like a moody setup for
the vocal melody, and the vocal melody seems like just a setup for the chorus,
with all the stakes placed on the culmination of "I don't care where you
go, you won't get away from me", and, frankly, it's not much of a culmination
— the singer sounds so bored with himself, these words resonate like an empty
threat. If there is any pressure,
it's hardly above permissible levels. I can understand why the vocals never
shoot past the murmur level, or why there is no shrill guitar solo to juice up
the crescendo, but see, these are fairly ordinary musical moves that they use
to create the atmosphere, and if you're making an ordinary song, you are at
least entitled to juice it up with ordinary, but efficient musical
clichés. «Tastelessly exciting» takes preference over «tastefully
boring», and it's not even all that tasteful to begin with (though it cannot be
said that they are embarrassing themselves with this attitude, either, like
they often did on the early albums).
And if that's ʽPressureʼ for us, then
what about ʽReleaseʼ? Surely this title should be concealing some
climactic denouement of its predecessor? Reveal a shattering musical explosion?
It begins promising enough — a thin, sharp acoustic guitar tone, lightly attenuated
with a simmering electronic pattern; eventually, more and more synth overdubs
start piling up in anticipation of the climax... and that climax? A weak,
monotonous texture of funky electric guitar overdubs merging in a generic
alt-rock grind. Well... like "pressure", like "release".
The record continues in the same mediocre
manner, alternating heavier and lighter moments in such a smooth and polite
manner that you hardly ever notice the transitions, and offering us vocal parts
that are so gentlemanly refined that I almost begin to wonder — couldn't it
have been more effective for them to go back to growling vocals? Probably not,
but this is just way too soporific
for my aural nerves. And almost as if they wanted to really rub it in, the last track (ʽTemporary Peaceʼ)
seems like a bad parody on a conceptual post-rock suite: a moody, hookless
Gothic ballad part, followed by a couple minutes of seawaves crashing upon the
shore (wait, did I say "crashing?"... nothing on this album is
"crashing"... more like "swishing"...), followed by a
couple more minutes of gravel-crushing footsteps on the shore and disjoint
pieces of recorded conversation, followed by a few minutes of total silence,
and then followed with a two-chord acoustic ditty with seemingly improvised
«comical» lyrics ("Morten Harket's brand new go cart / Foul mouthed and
smelling of onions"). Actually, the acoustic ditty might be the best part
of the album because it is at least the only thing about it that is not so
totally safe and predictable.
So, unfortunately, a thumbs down — even if this is
not a stereotypically «bad» record, this is one of those cases where I'd rather
sit through Aerosmith's Pump or
Britney Spears' In The Zone, because
those records, bad as they are, at least give you food for thought and
impressions to keep. A Fine Day To Exit,
on the contrary, shows that the boys mean
good (they are actually trying to find some serious justification for being so
depressed), but they don't really have the means, such as brilliant songwriting
and inventive arrangements, to do
good.
A NATURAL DISASTER (2003)
1) Harmonium; 2) Balance; 3)
Closer; 4) Are You There?; 5) Childhood Dream; 6) Pulled Under At 2000 Metres A
Second; 7) A Natural Disaster; 8) Flying; 9) Electricity; 10) Violence.
This is the first Anathema album to feature three Cavanaghs at the same time:
Vincent and Danny are joined by third brother Jamie on bass — who, as it turns
out, did play with them in the earliest incarnation of the band, but left it
prior to any serious recording engagements. Now this is so much of a family
affair that drummer John Douglas humbly retreats back to his drums, leaving the
songwriting almost completely in the hands of the brothers; actually, Danny
takes almost exclusive credits for everything. (Which is all the more odd,
considering that he briefly left the band in 2002, joining Antimatter — and
then returned and became its dictatorial songwriter).
With Douglas out of the creative picture, the
songs begin leaving somewhat more of an impression; yet, at the same time, the
band really mellows out now — even
when the guitars are technically heavy, they are still tuned high as hell, and
cold, soft, static atmospheres, driven by acoustic guitars and electronics, now
serve as the default weapon at Anathema's disposal, with heavy passages only
introduced as quasi-climactic red lights, occasionally. Vincent's vocals also
continue to mellow out — by this time, memories of those days when he tried to
sound like a bleeding demon kid, pushed into a corner by squads of angels, are
worn pretty thin, and most of the time he just oozes eternal sadness without
any traces of anger or menace.
The good news is that they remember to try and
keep things spiced up. Thus, ʽBalance / Closerʼ (two separate tracks,
but united by a common theme) sees them taking lessons from Kid A, with multiple vocal overdubs and
samples that create a complex mosaic out of falsettos and breathy murmurs, and
plenty of electronics to place it in the middle of a cold, robotic atmosphere.
ʽChildhood Dreamʼ is a half-ambient, half-Gothic interlude with
echoes of babies rising out of a deep memory well. ʽPulled Under At 2000
Metres A Secondʼ is a speedy disaster-rocker, bringing in a brief respite
from all the slow psychological moodiness — and, not surprisingly, sounding a
hell of a lot like Pink Floyd's ʽSheepʼ in the process. The title
track is a doom-laden waltz sung by guest star Anna Livingstone — and, with her
high-pitched, trembling, fear-stricken vocals and a particularly depressing set
of keyboard and wah-wah guitar overdubs, not surprisingly, sounding quite a bit
like classic Portishead.
Finally, by the time we reach the end — a
ten-minute suite called ʽViolenceʼ whose only real bit of (musical)
violence is a relatively brief and loud rocking passage in the middle — we are
out of art-rock and deep into post-rock territory, heck, we might even be in
frickin' Angelo Badalamenti territory, considering how much that romantic piano
melody in the final movement reminds me of the Twin Peaks theme. It's not at all bad, though, and, in all honesty,
at this point I am far more glad to get a «heavenly» finale, where peace and
graceful optimism is mixed with only a faint trace of sadness, from these guys,
rather than yet another reminder of how life sucks and how the very fact of
one's being here on Earth should already be regarded as punishment. Actually,
you could very well interpret ʽViolenceʼ as representing a bit of
Armageddon, after which everybody relaxes and enjoys eternal heavenly bliss,
but that's okay, too — in this case, they are at least willing to look into the
eternally blissful future, rather than remain forever cursed in the present,
like a bunch of Wandering Jews or something.
As a whole, the record has quite a decent feel
to it — all the stylistic twists and imitations of various styles at least seem
to guarantee that you probably will not be bored. That said, there is no
bypassing the usual limitation: every single one of these twists happens to
have already had far superior antecedents, and I do not see myself revisiting
this stuff much in the future as long as I still have access to all those
Floyd, Radiohead, and Portishead albums (or as long as I can still watch Twin Peaks, for that matter). The
problem with sadness and tragedy is that they only really work if they are
capable of pulling you way, way deep under the surface, but this here is more
like A Really Lightweight Disaster —
all the songs are so smooth, restrained, inobtrusive, carefully shorn of any
brusque rises or falls, that I cannot imagine the album working on any other
level than a simple sonic background. On the other hand, I guess if you are
holding a wake or something like that, it might make for a decent soundtrack:
not particularly cheesy and not particularly involving.
HINDSIGHT (2008)
1) Fragile Dreams; 2) Leave No
Trace; 3) Inner Silence; 4) One Last Goodbye; 5) Are You There?; 6) Angelica;
7) A Natural Disaster; 8) Temporary Peace; 9) Flying; 10) Unchained (Tales Of
The Unexpected).
After the release of A Natural Disaster, Anathema took a long break from releasing new
LPs, but this seems to have been largely caused by technical reasons — such as
the closing down of their record label, Music For Nations, upon which they
found it hard to negotiate another contract, seeing as how their albums had
always had only a minor cult following, and even all that gloomy
Floyd/Radiohead vibe did not manage to attract a sufficient number of Thom
Yorke devotees. (Should have known better than to establish their initial
reputation as a death metal band — it's like a porn actor's struggle to start a
new life in mainstream cinema). They even had to resort to Internet publishing
at one time, recording and promoting occasional songs on a minor basis, but
eventually managed to capture the attention of Kscope, a small label originally
established by Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree and largely used to promote
«neo-prog» artists, a role for which the new weep-and-moan-based Anathema fully
qualified.
Their first project for the new label was,
however, quite tentative: a compilation of re-recorded older «classics» in de-electrified
versions — acoustic guitars, pianos, strings (including heavy participation of
the band's friend Dave Wesling on cello). A symbolic move on their part, it was
clearly supposed to confirm and strengthen their conversion to symph-prog
values, focusing all our attention on the Ethereal Beauty of the world-weary
melodies instead of the power roar of the metal guitars — sure it was highly
restricted on the past two or three records already, but this is the first time
that they have completely eliminated anything that could even vaguely remind us
of their metallic past. Here, you are simply expected to sit back, relax,
wallow in the sorrow, and appreciate them for the tragic romantic melodicists
that they are.
Unfortunately, I cannot say that the
elimination of electric distortion has resulted in making their songs better or
worse, with one exception — I am fairly certain that I would have thought much
less of ʽFragile Dreamsʼ, had I first heard it in this toothless
arrangement. Wesling captures the spirit of the original riff just fine on his
cello, but it was the power onslaught of guitars and drums that truly made it
work, and this pensive, indecisive reimagination of the theme just guts it out:
when we begin working in «piano trio» mode or something like that, you expect
far more depth and melodic complexity, and that is hardly Anathema's forte.
Everything else, despite all the rearrangement
work, is just about as good or bad as its former electric counterparts — I
cannot say that Wesling's cello or anything else brings out any particularly
subtle / hidden nuances in the tracks. Actually, it is puzzling why they
decided to concentrate on relatively recent material from the past two albums,
what with its being «soft» in the first place: this version of ʽA Natural
Disasterʼ, for instance, is practically indistinguishable from the
original, and the fact that ʽAre You There?ʼ now has a prominent
acoustic guitar part replacing cloudy synthesizers changes nothing about the
basic emotional perception of the ballad. It would have been far more fun if
they'd returned all the way back to Serenades,
and offered us some recreations of their heaviest melodies — but the earliest
reinvented song here is ʽAngelicaʼ from Eternity, which already heralded their transformation.
As is usual in such cases, the album does
feature exactly one new song, to give a bit of an incentive for veteran fans —
ʽUnchainedʼ is another acoustic guitar / piano / cello ballad with an
overall pretty sound, but hardly worth getting particularly excited about. And
speaking in general, I am not really disappointed, because everything is
executed in Anathema's usual good taste. Clever mixing, giving each instrument
its own voice; restrained, pleasant lead vocals with a touch of nobility and no
signs of crude emotional manipulation; excellent string parts — all in all,
this is yet another high-quality mood soundtrack to that never ending funeral
party. It's just that, plugged or unplugged, Anathema have always been and will
probably forever be a band that is way too trapped by formula and way too
unencumbered by artistic imagination.
WE’RE HERE BECAUSE WE’RE HERE (2010)
1) Thin Air; 2) Summernight
Horizon; 3) Dreaming Light; 4) Everything; 5) Angels Walk Among Us; 6)
Presence; 7) A Simple Mistake; 8) Get Off, Get Out; 9) Universal; 10) Hindsight.
Seven years, apparently, is what it takes to
come back to the light — a spiritual journey undertaken in order to finally
find an answer to the question that had been bugging the Cavanaghs ever since
they began to think of themselves as artists: «what the hell are we doing here
at all?» And now, in 2010, that answer is staring right at you from the front
cover. No, they did not exactly find Jesus (although that, too, could be
suspected because of the walking-on-water image), but at least they found
Steven Wilson, who is a much better mixer than Jesus ever was, and who could
steer them in the blessed direction more efficiently than any religious guru.
I gotta say, I can't help admiring these guys
for making the transition. Nothing is easier these days than cling to an
established formula to the death, and there will always be a market for new and
new albums about disillusionment, desperation, and dead brides as long as there
remains a market for anything musical at all. But somehow, upon completing A Natural Disaster, the Cavanaghs
decided that it was time to break the circle, and begin looking for positive
answers, no matter how deeply entrenched they'd become in transcendental
misery. The prevailing mood still retains a tinge of sadness, but now it comes
mixed with a «glorious» feel that begins with the album's title, song names
like ʽAngels Walk Among Usʼ, and music that borrows more from the
post-rock idiom of Godspeed You! Black Emperor than the dark musings of Floyd
and Radiohead, albeit still very much dependent on vocal work (especially now
that drummer John Douglas' sister, Lee Douglas, joins the band as a permanent
new member — more often double-tracking or backing up Vincent's vocals for
extra angelic effect rather than singing lead).
Steven Wilson, who was already beginning to
make headlines as the remixing wonder of the century (producing remixes of
classic Caravan, King Crimson, and Jethro Tull albums, among other things),
operates in George Martin capacity for this record — his mix ensures that none
of the instruments, including plenty of acoustic and electric guitar overdubs
as well as grand pianos and electronic strings, merge together in one big sonic
glop, which is a fairly common bane for many neo-prog artists. The underlying
idea was to make a record that, through sheer sonic bliss, would remind one of
the Eternal Bliss, and, technically speaking, that goal was achieved. On the
very first track, ʽThin Airʼ, the band presents an impressive cobweb
of sound, or, should I rather say, a mighty racetrack of sound, with guitars,
keyboards, and vocals all racing parallel to each other, gradually rising in a
powerful crescendo — and the song's lyrics complete the rebirth-in-death of the
Anathema protagonist, who is now only too happy to join his beloved in death
under «a promise of heaven».
So much for the good stuff: We're Here represents a brave new
beginning, and its concept is immaculately planned and executed. The problem is
that, unfortunately, not even Steven Wilson is capable of turning the Cavanaghs
into exciting and/or inspiring songwriters. The keys and moods may have
changed, but the basic premise remains the same: each of the songs is built
around one (sometimes two, if the track is long enough to allow for a key
change midway through) base chord sequence, which is then milked for trance-inducing
emotional splendor, usually by having it played by three or four instruments at
once. These songs are quite lengthy (5 to 7 minutes on average), and the only
dynamic development that one usually gets out of them is the crescendo effect
(on about half of the songs, but reaching a proverbial climax on
ʽUniversalʼ). Ironically, though, once again they sound in this like
a poorboy equivalent of somebody else — for instance, the above-mentioned
GY!BE, who must have undoubtedly been one of the crucial influences on the
album (even in its purely ambient-atmospheric interludes with spoken philosophical
overdubs, like ʽPresenceʼ, featuring a metaphysical lesson from Stan
Ambrose).
I understand what it is they are trying to do,
and, once again, can bring myself to respect it (especially because they do
not stoop to, say, generic Christian rock), but not a single one of these songs
is capable of actually moving me the way that, say, George Harrison's All Things Must Pass can — in fact,
whenever I try to stay focused on any of this stuff, I get proverbially bored,
just because each new song becomes fully predictable in a matter of seconds. At
least GY!BE had a knack for seeking out truly excellent chord sequences and
then giving them the full royal treatment: the Cavanaghs, in comparison, settle
for palliatives (that Chopinesque piano riff on ʽUniversalʼ sounds
nice, but it never really goes anywhere or resolves itself into anything worthy
of attention) and make blissful muzak that never reaches the epic heights of
GY!BE and is even less capable of competing with classic prog.
I realize that such is their schtick, and that,
having spent all their previous career building up largely static sound
panoramas, they have no reason to change that approach to something more
dynamic even now that they have seen the light. But that does not mean that we really
have to settle for anything less than the best there is, and the only thing
that is truly «best» about this new "life is eternal!" approach of
theirs is Steven Wilson's mix. It also goes without saying that this whole new
metaphysical twist is every bit as unoriginal and clichéd as their
«dying bride»-era creations. Last spoken lines of the album: "And if you
could love enough, you would be the happiest and most powerful person in the
world" — excuse me?.. Okay, okay, so they have this «you can never say too
much about the need for love» agenda now, but couldn't they at least say it in
a slightly more elaborate musical language?
FALLING DEEPER (2011)
1) Crestfallen; 2) Sleep In
Sanity; 3) Kingdom; 4) They Die; 5) Everwake; 6) J'Ai Fait Une Promesse; 7)
Alone; 8) We The Gods; 9) Sunset Of Age.
Another attempt at re-writing their legacy (as
if somebody really cared), this
relatively short album finally finds Anathema doing exactly the kind of thing
they should have done much earlier: going all the way back to their beginnings
as a doom metal band and reinventing those old black tunes in the vein of their
new neo-symph-prog image. And although Steven Wilson is no longer with them to
lend a helping hand directly, they retain the affiliation with the Kscope
label; also, their new engineer is Andrea Wright, who'd had a long history of
work with everybody from Black Sabbath to Marillion to Clinic to Coldplay, and
could certainly get the job done well on an album that places its entire trust
in atmosphere.
To complete the picture, the band secures the
services of veteran progger Dave Stewart, formerly of Egg, Hatfield & The
North, National Health, and Bruford fame — the man used to play keyboards for
some of the most twisted and adventurous prog bands in the Golden Age, but the
21st century largely sees him as a strings arranger for various neo-prog
outfits, including, of course, Porcupine Tree and Steven Wilson, from whom he
was «passed down» to Anathema. Actually, he'd already worked for them on We're Here, but on that album, the
strings were nowhere near as prominent as they are on these remakes — you might
as well credit the record to «Anathema Feat. Dave Stewart», or you might even
reverse that order.
The result... well, the result could have been
great if the songs we are talking about were great songs in the first place,
but they weren't, so it couldn't. Atmospheric background remains atmospheric
background, no matter whether you are constructing it with heavy metal guitars
or pianos and strings, and I cannot say that, having been transferred to a new
medium, they managed to uncover previously concealed plains of spirituality or
valleys of bliss. (For the record, only a few of the tunes come from LPs like Serenades or The Silent Enigma; most are taken over from even more obscure early
EPs that I have not talked about or even heard, so it is perfectly possible
that some of the songs began life as
embarrassing trash heaps, before they were all recast in this single mold. I
doubt it, though).
It's not as if these are lazy recreations or
anything: no, the songs are completely reworked, and the new arrangements are
often more complex and sprawling than they used to be — ʽJ'Ai Fait Une
Promesseʼ, for instance, which used to be a brief non-metal acoustic
interlude, is stripped of its original vocal (by one of the band's lady friends
called Ruth) and recast as a pseudo-baroque chamber orchestra performance; and
ʽAloneʼ from The Silent Enigma
gains at least a couple extra levels of sonic depth, even if you only consider
the resplendent, deeply resonant production on the acoustic guitar sound alone
— not to mention all the rich overlays. Next to these recreations, the
originals sound like pale sketches, and then, on top of the cake, you get the
heavenly vocals of Anneke van Giersbergen (fresh out of The Gathering and ready
to grace some former fellow competitors with her cordial presence) on two of
the tracks.
This should all be very rich and rewarding,
yet, as it happens with Anathema so much more often than I'd like to, it still
ends up plain and «pretty» from a textbookish point of view, enough to make for
some tasteful background muzak, but never memorable in the least, since
everything flows so smoothly. The only track where I am ready to accept that
they did a stellar job is the album closer, ʽSunset Of Ageʼ,
extracted from its original metal sheen and recast as a slightly
Eastern-influenced mix of turbulent strings and wildly unleashed colorful
electric guitars: the coda is a supercool bit of sturm-und-drang that will at
least perform the good deed of kicking you awake from the slumber in which you
have most likely been finding yourself for the previous half hour. Nothing else
even begins to approach this performance's intensity.
One curious feeling I have noticed is that the
songs have largely been remade in keeping with the band's new-found spirit of
calm, sad optimism — even tracks like ʽCrestfallenʼ, beginning with
telling lyrics such as "I cry a tear of hope but it is lost in
helplessness, the darkness eats away at the very embers of my blah blah
blah", use tonalities and timbres that suggest a streak of light ahead, and
the formerly growling vocals have been replaced by high-pitched «whisper
vocals» (reminiscent of recent post-blackgaze artists like Alcest) that clearly
suggest a change of scenery: used to be Mordor, now it's more like Lothlorien.
Problem is, your everyday routine in Lothlorien is hardly more of an adventure
than said routine in Mordor — you just do your whining and complaining in a
more gallant manner, but who ever said that a melancholic elf is more of a
show-maker by definition than a pissed-off goblin? In a contest of mediocre
songwriting, I'd probably find myself pining for the goblin anyway.
WEATHER SYSTEMS (2012)
1) Untouchable, Part 1; 2)
Untouchable, Part 2; 3) The Gathering Of The Clouds; 4) Lightning Song; 5)
Sunlight; 6) The Storm Before The Calm; 7) The Beginning And The End; 8) The
Lost Child; 9) Internal Landscapes.
We got the point last
time, but perhaps we were not fully convinced, so here are the born-again
Cavanaghs with yet another heavenly oratorio on your front lawn — and this time
they unleash the full force of the Light upon your unholy skeptical ass. From
beginning to end, Weather Systems is
as straightforward an album about the temporary nature of earthly life and the
immanent nature of heavenly existence as they come: and if you needed
scientific proof of that, they even enlist Joe Geraci, an original survivor
with a near-death experience, for a brief recital on the last track. It's a
more or less routine story of experiencing white light and transcendental
beauty before being brought back to life, and the only thing it does is to
reinforce the impression that the Cavanaghs are no longer content with
constructing the musical equivalent of Eternal Bliss, but that they actively
believe in it and want you to believe
in it, too.
The problem is, it
would be easier for me to get manipulated into this if it weren't for that
subtle, but pervasive aspect of cheapness
that has always accompanied every single Anathema album, from the early doom
metal days all the way to this «let the light eternal chase away the darkness
supreme!» transformation. In their zealous verve to make us all fall on our
knees and pray to the Great White, even if its name is Nameless rather than
Jesus, they forgot — or, rather, they probably did not even begin to remember
— that the best recruiters are those that work over their prey in indirect
ways, rather than going for one frontal assault after another. Thus, although
they still take plenty of cues from the post-rock movement and they might be
technically getting better at this with each new record, I still find far more
genuine spirituality in the ambiguous soundscapes of Sigur Rós or Godspeed
You! Black Emperor than in Anathema's pompous chorales ("Love is the life
breath of all I see / Love is true life inside of me").
Musically, we are
still on the same level — largely static compositions, revolving around one
endlessly repeated phrase, often with a crescendo effect achieved in the same
manner as GY!BE do this, but with less diverse instrumentation. This time, the
emphasis seems to be more firmly placed on swift, perfectly picked acoustic
arpeggiated chords, starting with the very first track (ʽUntouchable, Part
1ʼ) and reappearing quite frequently: a good sound, but neither innovative
in any manner nor responsible for any particularly memorable themes.
Piano-based songs (ʽThe Beginning And The Endʼ) are more rare, but
that does not in any way improve their quality (all the piano playing is
extremely simplistic and, more than usual, seems to be getting in our face:
«see? we're playing piano! not any of
these darn Casios! accept no substitutes for classically-approved heavenly
beauty!»).
I count precisely one track whose musical features managed
to attract my attention: ʽThe Storm Before The Calmʼ, allegedly an
allegory of the death experience, after a tense, cold introduction transforms
into an instrumental jam with a cool use of electronics, as the main
piano/bass/drums track is enhanced with buzzing electro-static tones and
wind-imitating white noise. Midway into the song, it goes away and is replaced
with the usual boring attempt at an orgasmic crescendo, but that three-minute
part in the middle is arguably more sonically inventive than any other piece of
music created by Anathema in the I-saw-the-light period: as a musical analogy
of a «storm», it is quite original, making you feel trapped in an electric
field that just went crazy on you.
Other than that, it's
just spiritual business as usual. Interestingly, they let Lee Douglas take more
lead vocals than usual: she even takes solo lead vocal on ʽLightning
Songʼ, and is generally more audible on tracks where she duets with
Vincent — strange that they did not do this before, since her vocal tone
certainly correlates better with «heavenly» than Vincent's (she is no Sandy
Denny, though, and she usually stays in a lower range that is perfect for
folk-rock, but probably not for Heavenly Exaltation). This, and the increased
function of acoustic picking, and the occasionally inventive use of electronics
all suggest that the band is still searching, which is a good thing: I do
retain the right to be generally unimpressed by their methods of search, or the
territory to which the search is confined — but I also have to admit that, by
their own standards, Weather Systems
is a small step forward rather than a clear-cut case of creative stagnation, so
if you are already a fan, and if textbookish images of Paradise™ suit your
feelings just fine, this record will be as indispensable to you as, say, Time Out Of Mind would be to a Dylan
fan.
UNIVERSAL (2013)
1) Untouchable, Part 1; 2)
Untouchable, Part 2; 3) Thin Air; 4) Dreaming Light; 5) Lightning Song; 6) The
Storm Before The Calm; 7) Everything; 8) A Simple Mistake; 9) The Beginning And
The End; 10) Universal; 11) Closer; 12) A Natural Disaster; 13) Deep; 14) One
Last Goodbye; 15) Flying; 16) Fragile Dreams; 17) Panic; 18) Emotional Winter /
Wings Of God; 19) Internal Landscapes; 20) Fragile Dreams 2.
The title and track
listing for Anathema's first live album may be a little confusing. Apparently,
it was first released under the title Untouchable,
on four sides of vinyl, with 12 tracks in all. Later, the entire concert,
recorded at the Theatre of Philippopolis in Plovdiv, Bulgaria (don't ask me
why, but I guess it has something to do with traditional Eastern European and
Soviet enthusiasm for mass-marketed Crunchy Spiritual Rock), was released on
DVD and Blu-ray under the title of Universal
— and some of the video editions also
featured the entire audio of the concert, which comes up to a whoppin' two
hours and sixteen minutes of Anathema bliss. This is the edition I will be
talking about: I couldn't bear watch
the entire show (spirituality overload!), but I did listen to the entire
concert, though, frankly, I'm not sure why.
Because even with the
Plovdiv Philharmonic Orchestra accompanying these guys, their live shows (at
this point, at least — I have no idea about the early doom metal days) merely
recreate the studio originals, as close as possible, which is still not close enough
if you remember that they have no Steven Wilson with them on stage. Some of the
trickiest studio overdubs cannot be recreated at all (for instance, the
«electric storm» in ʽThe Storm Before The Calmʼ, here pretty much
shorn of the electronics that made that instrumental interlude so great), and those
that can... well, since this is not about improvisation, or about toughening up
the original sound, or about giving the songs additional dimensions, all you
can say is, "gee, well, at least here's proof that somebody actually loves Anathema!" Because the
audience does go wild.
At the very least,
they could have arranged an interesting setlist — seeing as how Anathema's entire
career gradually and logically went from «pitch black» to «moody dark» to
«light angelic», it would have been a great idea to arrange the whole show in
precisely that order: start off with some early metal, then gradually lighten
up and land the show with ʽUniversalʼ or any of those other anthemic
we-saw-the-light tracks. Instead, they do exactly the opposite: the first half of the show consists of
almost nothing but songs from the last two albums, and the second half consists of a bunch of earlier hits, so that you start out with hope and finish with
despair — how rational is that, given that the band's current agenda is to give
hope rather than take it away? I admit that there are no reasons whatsoever to
expect particularly intelligent decisions about musical logistics from a band
as naively idealistic as Anathema, but come on guys — do not undermine your own
artistic ideology at least.
No comments on
individual songs whatsoever, but I am
glad that the album is an official acknowledgement of the fact that
ʽFragile Dreamsʼ is this band's quintessential signature song for all
times: not only do they finish the show with it, but they play two versions of it (first the reworked
soft one and then the original hard one). Allegedly the fans were quite happy about
it. Everything was nice, the vibes were great, the band members were very
polite and friendly, we all went to Heaven and back, and the degree of
spiritual enlightenment in the country of Bulgaria temporarily went through
the roof, even though the ancient Theatre of Philippopolis probably does not
have a roof, which makes things even easier. Bottomline: you probably had to be
there to make the experience worthwhile, but then why on Earth should anyone
bother going to an Anathema concert? They don't even provide space for a mosh
pit or anything.
DISTANT SATELLITES (2014)
1) The Lost Song, Pt. 1; 2)
The Lost Song, Pt. 2; 3) Dusk (Dark Is Descending); 4) Ariel; 5) The Lost Song,
Pt. 3; 6) Anathema; 7) You're Not Alone; 8) Firelight; 9) Distant Satellites;
10) Take Shelter.
From the band's own statement on their latest
studio offering: "Distant
Satellites is the culmination of everything Anathema has been working up to
so far in our musical path. It contains almost every conceivable element of the
heartbeat of Anathema music that it is possible to have. There is beauty,
intensity, drama, quietude, and extra musical dimensions that the band have
previously only hinted at".
Do you smell bullshit? I'm pretty sure I smell bullshit. While I do admit that
Anathema's journey from black doom prophets to harbingers of heavenly bliss has
its elements of uniqueness, «extra musical dimensions» is really not the kind
of phrase that I would ever allow myself to use in order to describe their
music. And considering that Weather
Systems was, after all, mostly treading the same path that they had already
chosen with We're Here, I have very
grave prior doubts that they might have seriously expanded on that atmosphere
and musical message, unless they'd once again decided upon changing it to
something completely different.
They did not, though, and basically, Distant Satellites is just an echo of Weather Systems — and a fairly boring
one at that. I mean, how could it not be, if even its title has the same
structure and associations (aren't «distant satellites» used to monitor
«weather systems»?), and its first song comes in two parts (okay, three, but the third one is far
removed), and the first part is all loud and epic and the second part is all
romantic and sentimental? The only reason to make a record like this is if,
somehow, you were dissatisfied with its predecessor — and wanted to correct its
mistakes. But I did not notice much correction going on here; on the contrary,
this time they managed to make an album completely
devoid of any particularly interesting moments. The whole thing is
«mature-Anathema-by-numbers», completely safe and predictable.
There may be a bit more electronic elements
here than usual, particularly in the second half of the album (ʽYou're Not
Aloneʼ, title track), implying that they are still being spiritually
dominated by Radiohead — Kid A and In Rainbows both come strongly to mind.
But the digital sounds are neither used in an innovative manner nor do they
make any obvious artistic sense, other than to confirm that this band does live
in the 21st century and that God has not, as of yet, indicated his opposition
to the use of integrated circuits to sing His glory. And the rest is the rest —
romantic piano, lush powerful strings, exalted vocals from the Cavanaghs and
lyrical vocals from Lee Douglas, and praise of Love Eternal that has no choice
but to shine through the darkness, especially if you've been living on Prozac
for the past ten years or so.
Now I know that fans of the band could easily accuse
me of being unfairly biased here — after all, even if the record lacks
innovation, that does not mean that the Cavanaghs have not written a new set of
melodies, completed a new set of arrangements for them, and, after all, if I
can give high ratings to three same-sounding AC/DC records in a row, or three
same-sounding power-pop albums in a row, what is so wrong about Anathema doing the same thing? The answer, my
friends, is wobbling in the wind: Anathema is a band that pursues far more
lofty ideals and demands for far deeper emotional reactions than AC/DC or
Cheap Trick or The Bats — every single Anathema album is supposed to either plunge in you the depths of utmost despair, or
to raise you up to the heights of spiritual catharsis and bliss. And when you
see lofty goals like these pursued with blatantly lazy, unchanging, predictable
means, album after album after album, the result is anything but a series of profound epiphanies —
more like having to go to confession and enduring yet another predictable
session with your local priest, who keeps asking you the same questions and
giving you the same answers. It ain't fun, it ain't useful, all in all, it's
just another brick in the wall.
Unfortunately, from the looks of it, this seems
like a formula which Anathema have found addictive — with the band already
past twenty years of existence, and most of its members way past 40, I would be
extremely surprised to see them turn away and explore a genuinely new direction any time soon (especially considering that,
in all fairness, they have already come a very long way from where they
started). Those who have honestly admired and loved this new style will have
plenty more delightful fruits to reap in the coming years, but I give the album
a thumbs
down and will give any following album that sounds like this a
thumbs down as well — I sort of see the two opposing musical poles of religious
ectasy as represented by St Matthew
Passion and All Things Must Pass,
respectively, and records that try to sound like a hybrid between the two
usually end up compromising and embarrassing the ideals of either, so no more,
thank you.
HYBRIS (1992)
1) Jordrök; 2) Vandringar
I Vilsenhet; 3) Ifrån Klarhet Til Klarhet; 4) Kung Bore; 5*)
Gånglåt Från Knapptible.
Progressive rock. Wise men say that the thing
died sometime around 1976 or 1977; that the thing was no real good even while
being at the peak of its reputation; and that the thing enjoyed some sort of
semi-intelligent rebirth, its arrogant ambitions tempered by humility and
common sense, with the arrival of bands like Radiohead. All the same, a stark
collection of unabashed veterans will be ever so ready to insist that prog
never died, but continued to develop steadily from the late Seventies up to the
present time — simply going underground, out of the reach of both popular taste
and critical anger.
Technically, they are correct. Bands like
Gentle Giant, Yes, and King Crimson either petered out like the first, joined
the oldies circuit like the second, or adapted to newer times like the third.
Then there was the «neo-prog» thing of the 1980s, with bands like Marillion
trying to put a more modern sheen on old values, attracting some old guard prog
fans and repulsing others. But then there were also people who, quite honestly,
did not understand what the hell was so wrong with the classic prog sound in
the first place. So the critics trampled upon Tales From Topographic Oceans — big deal. If there is at least a
couple dozen thousand fans all over the world who like it, where the heck is
the sequel? What's keeping 'em up?
Then the Eighties began to dissipate, with
frizzed coiffures and synth guitars and electronic drums outwearing their
novelty-based attractiveness, and some began to realize that — you know what? —
music in the 1970s might have actually been a whole lot better than ninety percent of the radio crap from the big hair
decade. And, for all we know, it might not have been a total matter of sheer
coincidence that Änglagård, a bunch of young, aspiring Swedish
musicians, released their debut LP, honoring the legacy of 1970's prog masters,
not long after Nirvana released Nevermind,
symbolizing, likewise, a conscious retread to older musical values.
In stark contrast with the likes of Marillion
and IQ, Änglagård play «retro-prog», not «neo-prog». Having
listened to Hybris from first to
last second, it is, of course, possible to suspect that the LP was not recorded in 1976, but hardly
possible to understand when it was recorded as such. Listen to small chunks one
at a time, though, and, unless you are a historical expert on the giants of
prog, you will think that you are
hearing obscure outtakes from Genesis, Jethro Tull, and Caravan records. Not
only do these Swedes trustily re-enact ye olde melodic structures, they also
brush the dust off ye olde guitar pedals, Moogs and Mellotrons, boosting the
local pawn shop business and bringing to orgasm all the old fogeys who'd
renounced all hope of ever getting it up again at least ten years prior to the
fact.
The LP consists of four (five, counting the
bonus track on the CD re-issue) eight-to-twelve minute multi-part suites,
mostly instrumental (they do sing, but none of the band members were vocally
endowed, so, wisely, they keep it to a minimum) and generally not too heavy on
hooks, as would befit a proper progressive composition. The mood, overall, is
the same: mysterious, medievalistic, dark, and foreboding — think of Genesis'
'Supper's Ready' as the chief inspiration (but withhold all of Peter Gabriel's
flowerish tomfoolery; these guys do
not really believe that humor belongs in music, not in their music, anyway). The idea is to cram in as many different
instruments and melodies as a ten-minute length will allow; all of the players
are professionals (a point that must be particularly stressed in the light of
the players' young age; Mattias Olsson, the percussionist, was 17 at the
time!), but none are solo virtuosos, and they far prefer the art of smooth
collective playing to individual showmanship.
What this kind of music clearly offers over
uninspired third- and fourth-degree prog exercises à la Kansas is a complete lack of cheap pathos; the sonic
landscapes that these guys create are all out there for you, the listener, to accommodate to your own dreams and values,
not for some pretentious idiot singer to tell you that his music must make you
sympathize with the plight of the Indians or ponder upon the vanity of your
existence. (It does not hurt, either, that the few lyrics there are are all in
Swedish — might have been even better if they were in Kobaian or Klingon).
What this kind of music does not offer is a real valid point, other
than «we love, love, love what these
awesome British guys were doing twenty years ago, and we wanna be just like
them». Quite a few people whose opinions on this album you can check out on the
Web state that Änglagård have their own, unique take on prog, being
more than the sum of their influences — no one I ever saw being able to explain
or even hint what that take is. Of course, they think of their own melodies
(at least, I think they try to; noticing and putting down mutual rip-offs
between prog bands is a special art that should be taught in post-graduate
studies), and they combine their influences in complex ways, so that a suite
might begin like King Crimson, go on like Gentle Giant, and end up like Tull;
but surely true «individuality» must mean more than that.
Obviously, Hybris
is a must-listen for any self-respecting fan
of the classic progressive style, if only because (a) all such fans are always
clamoring for more and (b) it is at least interesting and instructive to see
how such an honest and, essentially, working replica could have been made in
1992. For those who are quite happy with their Foxtrot and Red, though,
Hybris will probably not be
necessary. As a serious, loving tribute to them good old days, though, it is an
experiment that works 100%, and for that, deserves a thumbs up; I, for one, enjoyed it
all the way through. But now that it's over, I want my MTV, uh, I mean, my Tarkus.
EPILOG (1994)
1) Prolog; 2) Höstsejd;
3) Rosten; 4) Skogsranden; 5) Sista Somrar; 6) Saknadens Fullhet.
Perhaps if Änglagård continued to
carry on well unto the 21st century, even their biggest fans would eventually
get bored, leaving them to preserve the purity of their progressive spirit in
local progressive strip bars. But they were smart enough to go their own ways
upon recording their second LP, which they unambiguously titled Epilog — and thus, ensure at least
minor legendary status. «Remember those mysterious Swedish guys going against
the grain in the early Nineties? They're, like, so cult, you just got to
know them! Prog Annals sacrifice to their memory on a regular basis! Sure the
music is derivative and crappy, but just listen to that name — Änglagård!
Any idea on how to read that funny circle above the third a? Funny chaps, those Swedes!»
Strictly speaking, the music is good, though.
In fact, Epilog is objectively
better than Hybris at least in one
respect: nobody sings — which is a major advantage, since nobody in the band can sing (guitarist Tord Lindman's
several attempts at mimicking the trade almost killed off the potential of at
least two of Hybris' best numbers).
The three lengthy suites that comprise the bulk of the record (the rest are
just brief minimalistic links) are completely instrumental and focus exclusively
on band interplay, which is this band's major — and only — claim to fame.
This and a few other factors contribute to Epilog's slightly more somber mood,
although «somber» by no means implies «heavy»: the electric guitar is here
more than ever subdued to the impact of keyboards (Hammonds and Mellotrons,
mostly) and especially Anna Holmgren's flute playing, very prominent on all
three compositions (those at least as perceptive as myself will easily spot
the variation on Peter Gabriel's 'Firth Of Fifth' flute solo in 'Sista Somrar',
and those who are more perceptive will probably name several other variations
that I have not been able to detect). With a few notably aggressive passages
cut out, the whole record would form the perfect soundtrack for a funeral
service — solemn and sad, but never depressing and desperate.
The bad news is that, just like Hybris, this is all too manneristic.
The three suites are located as three separate tracks under three separate
titles, but they do not correspond to three different individualities or
purposes — you can easily cut a large chunk out of 'Sista Somrar' and paste it
into the middle of 'Höstsejd' and nobody will give a damn, since each of
the three is a bunch of copy-pastes
in the first place. Build-ups, fade-outs, tender interludes, stormy jams are
interspersed with each other almost at random; perhaps a dedicated fan could
find perfect Apollonic harmony in all this stuff, but most, I fear, will lack
this capacity. Professionalism, intelligence, and sincere dedication combine
to make it all perfectly listenable and respectable, but there is no high
purpose to Epilog, whatever such a
purpose might have surmised.
As a «low-purpose» record, though, it deserves
its thumbs up:
I mean, it is named Epilog, after all, and it certainly sounds like an epilog — what more can
one ask for? Curiously, it is probably the only record in the world named Epilog whose first track is named
'Prolog'. So if you hate its guts, you might still want to own it as a cult and curio piece.
BURIED ALIVE (1996)
1) Prolog; 2) Jordrök; 3)
Höstsejd; 4) Ifrån
Klarhet Til Klarhet; 5) Vandringar I Vilsenhet; 6) Sista Somrar; 7) Kung
Bore.
A prog band just ain't a true prog band without
an eighty-minute live LP under its belt; and even if Buried Alive was released as an afterthought, with the band already
defunct for two years (the actual performance is from 1994's Progfest in Los
Angeles), that does not make it any less of a «destiny fulfilled» symbol for
the Swedish revivalists.
The track list is unmercifully stern: they
reproduce all of Hybris, most of Epilog, and none of the cover tunes from their idols they occasionally allowed
themselves to perform live (such as Genesis' 'Musical Box', for instance)
— come to think of it, that must have been a wise decision, because the band's
singing sucks even worse live than it does in the studio (this particular
version of 'Klarhet' features some of the lamest off-key notes I've ever heard
on any prog rock record, period), and
the sooner the world forgets about Tord Lindman's impersonation of Peter
Gabriel, the better. Buried Alive
sticks to its own guns, and let it stay that way.
Of course, it also means that, like all
traditional prog bands leaning over to the symphonic rather than free-style
ideology, the sole point of Buried Alive
as an album is to prove that Änglagård's complexity can be and has
been reproduced in a live setting with the exact same precision as it showed in
the studio. The sound quality, I believe, could be slightly better — volume
levels are not always properly adjusted, some instruments sometimes come out
muffled, etc. — but overall, the quibbling is minor, so if your CD copy of Hybris ever rots down, rest assured
that Buried Alive will still give
you the same satisfaction.
On a sidenote, it is hard to refrain from
noting that the «Progfest» in question, judging from the volume of the
applause, must have been delighting an immense army of music lovers — no less
than twenty, I'd say, and perhaps even all of a whoppin' fifty. Considering
that, according to publicity descriptions, the LA Progfest draws progressive
rock lovers from all over the world, I would guess that, be it «neo-prog»,
«retro-prog», or «prog-o'-the-prog», all of these new-fangled bands put
together still would not match the popularity of a single classic Yes, Genesis,
or Jethro Tull album — that most music lovers today would rather relisten to
their stiff, preserved copies of Fragiles
and Foxtrots than pay money to
witness the living, breathing sounds of Echolyn, Anekdoten, and Minimum Vital.
Which, as far as I'm concerned, should not make anyone sad — on the contrary,
the more it stays this way, the more it helps ensure the status of Fragiles and Foxtrots as the stone cold classics they are, and I, for one, am a
hopeless sucker for stone cold classics. And what about Änglagård?
They're all right, for about sixty minutes per year.
VILJANS ÖGA (2012)
1) Ur Vilande; 2) Sorgmantel;
3) Snårdom; 4) Längtans Klocka.
«The Return of Änglagård» does not
exactly bear the same stunning force as «The Return of The Beatles» (or «The
Return of Jimi», for that matter), but for those in the know it will be a
pleasant surprise nonetheless. Furthermore, there would be little sense for the
original lineup to get together in order to try out something completely
different — whatever little fan support this band had in the first place was
all due to the «Änglagård brand», and now, eighteen years after
their second and last studio LP, the retro-oriented Swedes come back together
to prove to the fans that the brand is still in place.
If anything, Viljans Öga (Eye Of The
Will) is not just mere proof that Mattias Olsson, Anna Holmgren, and the
rest of them «have not lost it» — it is an almost mathematically accurate
proof. Play this back-to-back with Epilog
and there will not be a single seam: the album is a direct time machine back to
1994 (and, considering that the band's original albums were almost like a time
machine back to 1973 or something, we are now battling chronospace with even
more verve and efficacy than before). And, in a certain way, the very
appearance of such an album in 2012 is even more of a «miracle» than it was
back then. At least the early Nineties were sort of an age of musical turmoil,
with both the mainstream and the underground currents at a crossroads — in that
context, even the conservative / «unhip» retro-proggism of Änglagård
somehow had its place. But in 2012, with most of the musical directions either
stiff and rigid, or fragmented to minuscule bits, it must require even more
bravery to put out this kind of record.
Four tracks, running from twelve to sixteen
minutes each. No singing (for Änglagård, we already know that is a
plus). No English titles (good reason to brush up on your Swedish). A symphonic
structure, overall — the tracks definitely feel like four separate, but
atmospherically unified movements of one hour-long whole. Medieval folk
acoustic guitars, processed psychedelic electric guitars, faraway Mellotrons,
and pastoral flutes as dominant forces. Tricky time signatures. Key and tempo
changes every minute. Moody autumnal main themes. Yup, this is
Änglagård all right. And they have not been influenced by Radiohead
or The Flaming Lips or The Animal Collective in the meantime. In fact, it
certainly looks like they haven't even heard of any of these guys. In fact, it
looks as if they spent those eighteen years safely resting in their coffins.
(Come to think of it, some of these parts could have made a great soundtrack to
a movie on aging vampires and their existentialist problems).
Some of the reviews I have read (and there have
been very few reviews, apart from prog-specific resources) were highly critical
of it all — what is the very point of a «progressive» band with no «progress»,
they said? Naturally, they had a point, but, come to think of it,
Änglagård were always a «regressive»
band rather than a «progressive» one.
They loved their King Crimson, their Yes, and their Genesis, and wanted to keep
that old spirit alive in their own vessel. They offered no genuine «innovation»
— they wrote their own melodies, but strictly according to the old recipes,
and they never had any inclination to come up with something radically new. They did it rather well,
too, and in these circumstances, there is something admirable about this
iron-will obstinacy. Something three-hundred-Spartanic, if you know what I
mean.
A different problem is whether Viljans Öga is altogether more «boring» or more «academically stiff»
than its predecessors. The fact that all of its four parts are roughly the same
length, roughly feature the same instrumentation (with minor variations, such
as the presence of a guest cello on one or two tracks, etc.), and roughly
follow similar symphonic patterns — alternating quiet and loud parts, climactic
build-ups and fall-downs, etc. — might, indeed, suggest unnecessary rigidity.
At least Epilog had those little
interludes that varied the flow. On the other
side, lack of self-discipline and the entire «break-all-the-rules» routine,
which has been the norm for intellectually oriented pop music for so long, is
so all-pervasive anyway that, from time to time, it is actually interesting to
see musicians lock themselves into a pre-set ball-and-chain structural pattern,
especially when nobody actually forces them to do it. (I would say that the
only occasion here on which they break out of the formula is the «mad» coda to
the album — where, once the main theme has been played out, some free-form
noise is followed by an eerie circus music part. Open to creative
interpretation for everyone!)
Hence, Viljans
Öga is not so much the «Eye Of
The Will» as it is the «Triumph Of The Will» — a severe, ultra-academic,
disciplined, somber tour-de-force. But it is not entirely mechanistic or manneristic
— Änglagård is a band born out of sincere love for certain forms of
music, and their skill at creating musical landscapes of morose, melancholic
autumnal beauty, alternating with «battlescapes» inspired by ʽLarks'
Tongues In Aspicʼ or ʽThe Gates Of Deliriumʼ, is... well, I
wouldn't dare to say «unmatched», not being all that familiar with the neo-prog
scene of the last twenty years, but let's just say that, even without a serious
effort, Viljans Öga can easily
induce visions, and that is what separates «progressive» music that lives and
functions from «progressive» music that, impressively constructed as it is,
seems to lack the «power on» button.
None of which is to say that this is «great»
music. The main themes are imbued with epic stateliness (ʽLängtans
Klockaʼ), or repetitive melancholy (ʽSorgmantelʼ), or both
(ʽUr Vilandeʼ), but the melodies are not sharp, shrill, or «deep»
enough to arouse any emotions above «pleasant» — exactly the same way it has
always been with Änglagård, so no big surprise here, either. But, on
the other hand, this is where undefendable subjectivism comes in — so you might
just want to skip this part where I award the album a «mild» thumbs up,
approximately three-fourths respect and one-fourth heart's content, and just
look it up for yourself, particularly if somber, stubborn, slightly
somnambulous, but sympathetic Swedes soothe your senses and sweeten your spice.
SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS 85-92 (1992)
1) Xtal; 2) Tha; 3)
Pulsewidth; 4) Ageispolis; 5) I; 6) Green Calx; 7) Heliosphan; 8) We Are The
Music Makers; 9) Schottkey 7th Path; 10) Ptolemy; 11) Hedphelym; 12) Delphium;
13) Actium.
Musical genre names do not get much sillier
than «IDM». Where does one draw the
line between «intelligence» and its opposite (say, «dumbness») in dance music?
So let us assume that the average nameless techno rave at your local club,
say, three or four notes looped ad infinitum with a minimum of pitch and tone
mutations counting as «development» is «dumb dance music», as opposed to the
«intelligent» works of Richard D. James. But just where exactly do we draw the
line? And what about history? How come we apply the moniker of IDM to Nineties'
electronica? Isn't Prince supposed to be IDM? The early Beatles? Chuck Berry? Johann
Strauss, Sr.?..
Pangaeian
reverence does not get much stranger than the pedestal established for Aphex
Twin and, in particular, this album, critically acknowledged as his masterwork.
If anything, it mostly goes to show how deep in the ground all the talentless
people had managed to bury the classic achievements of Kraftwerk, Tangerine
Dream, Brian Eno, and Klaus Schulze by the end of the Eighties that it took
somebody like Richard D. James to dig 'em up, give 'em a good dusting, modernize
them with techno beats and, in the process, become a worshipped trendsetter.
Now
it has to be made clear that, by any possible standard established in the vast
jungle world of Electronica, Selected
Ambient Works 85-92 is a damn good album. The title seems a bit suspicious,
not just for the well-noted fact that, if «85-92» is to be believed, James must
have recorded some of these tracks when he was 13 years old (he is not trumping
W. A. Mozart in any
case), but also for the fact that the whole record does not at all sound like a
collection of disjointed outtakes — on the contrary, it has a conceptual
solidity, meaning that he either had the whole idea already fleshed out in
1985, or just hoaxed us all. (It is also very notably different from his first
EP, Digeridoo, released only a year
before and focusing far more on hardcore techno and synth fart noises — not
recommendable unless you're one of those hopeless electronica freaks who
regards electric guitars on the same plane with stone choppers).
The
«melodies» of Aphex Twin are by no means as «intelligent» as the odd label of
IDM would suggest. Take a minimalistic keyboard pattern, along the lines of one
of Brian Eno's typical ambient records, add a few equally minimalistic «noisy»
synth backgrounds, and you've got it made; the only thing that remains is to
make it rhythmic (and here, actually, James has to be given credit: his
percussion textures, even if mostly following the four-on-the-floor principle,
are pretty diverse, with no two tracks given the exact same rhythm contour). Selected Ambient Works is not a
«deceptively simple» album: it is a simple album, period. By the standards of Klaus
Schulze, this guy would be like a three-year-old trying to bang out
'Chopsticks' on a piano.
But
these are, after all, selected ambient works, not a sprawling electronic symphony
honouring King Ludwig of Bavaria. «Ambient» works if and only if it is truly
ambient, that is, manages to set up an ambience. And that's one task for which
Aphex Twin is quite qualified. From the warm opening sound waves and
mysterious, faintly heard shadows of human voices that ride them on 'Xtal', and
right down to the ridiculously simple, but captivating interaction of the
nine-note keyboard riff and the stern funky bassline on 'Actium', these tracks
establish, build up, and substantialize an individual — not to abuse the term
«unique» — universe. You can fantasize about it on the macrocosmic level
(asteroids bopping around in space, galaxies forming etc. etc.), or on the
microcosmic level (hemoglobin cells traveling through the organism and shit),
or on any level you like, it's all open to and well tunable for all
interpretations.
Even
so, to my ears, James' seventy minutes of techno/house-filtered ambience is
just another fine addition to the already huge canon of minimalist music. Its
huge influence on the house scene is not something I could be informed enough
on to contend, the talent of its maker not something I could be arrogant
enough to deny. But the immenseness of its popularity seems to at least have as
much to do with the intangible «Zeitgeist» as with its own context-free value.
If one were, for instance, to play all of Tangerine Dream's hundred-plus album
discography in chronological order, surreptitiously inserting Select Ambient Works around 1992, would
it still be able to produce a shock effect on the listener? In other words,
just how many people have hailed it as a classic simply because it, along with
several other «seminal» works in the same genre, managed to «reboot» the electronica
franchise in the early Nineties, serving as a gateway into that particular
world for impatient listeners who refused to trust anyone over thirty?
"Selected Ambient Works 85-92", writes a glowing David M. Pecoraro from
Pitchfork, "...was the very
first electronic music I ever bought, and certainly the first I ever heard
over and over again... back then, Aphex Twin was making music like nothing I'd
ever heard before... What's become apparent since is that I probably wasn't the
only one affected." Then he proceeds to give it a 9.4/10 rating. Sure
enough, if you compare it to Nirvana or MTV-era Aerosmith, it definitely sounds
like nothing you'd heard before. But if... (see above)?
These
are questions that, for some reason, no one ever seems to pose when raving, or
not raving, about the album; everybody wants to discuss it on its own, probably because for so many people
Aphex Twin was indeed their introduction to the world of electronic music, or,
better still, to the world of intelligent electronic music. But I have a
nagging feeling that eventually, in between all the major electronic pioneers
of the Seventies and all the gradual advances that have been made in the genre
ever since, the importance of Selected
Ambient Works will fade away, exposing it for what it is: a pleasant otherworldly
mood-setter to brighten your evening, no better and no worse than any other
pleasant otherworldly mood-setter.
Then
again, it should also be noted that Selected
Ambient Works need not necessarily be taken as the album that defines Aphex
Twin; by no means does it cover all of Richard D. James' versatility,
importance, and all-around awesomeness. After all, he may have been 13 years old
when he created these tracks — and if you can do likewise when you are 13 years old,
congratulations, you fall under the same category of dementia.
SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS VOLUME II (1994)
1-12, 14-24) Untitled; 13)
Blue Calx.
Now this
is what I call ambient — or, more strictly, this is exactly the kind of m...
sonic production for which Brian Eno had coined the term «ambient» once he had
felt himself self-assured enough to coin terms. Prior to this, most of Richard
D. James' output was grounded in rhythm: not just 85-92, but also the EPs, including the ones recorded under the alias
of AFX. His second «proper» long-playing album, then, came off as a big
surprise: texture, texture, and again texture way above rhythm, in fact, you
might forget about rhythm altogether. According to the genius in his own words,
«It's like standing in a power station on acid». Too true. Way too true. (He
also claimed that the tracks came to him as lucid dreams, which is harder to
believe — just how often does the man have
lucid dreams?).
Altogether, there is over 150 minutes of sound
on these two CDs, and, like all proper ambient albums, this is music to dig
into on rare occasions and crash out to on frequent ones. To pretend that I
love it would be ridiculous, and to pretend that I solemnly revere it as Art
would be... well, pretentious. But it definitely has its own face within the
way-often-blurry world of ambient: despite most of the tracks leisurely taking
their allotted time of six to ten minutes, there's so many of them that the
album gets a surprising amount of diversity. Not every «composition» has its
own individual tale to tell, but the moods vary greatly, from stately-heavenly
to industrially-growly to sci-fi-asteroidly. If this is a power station, it's
definitely a futuristic one, with power produced in many different ways from
many different materials.
Let's illustrate. The first track (by the way,
none of the tracks bar 'Blue Calx' are named; each one is simply accompanied
by an image, later transformed conventionally into a spoken/written name by fan
consensus; first track is 'Cliffs') would not be out of place on a (decent)
soundtrack to a (bad) Steven King movie — lightweight, but still
menace-containing loops with an odd «child babble» accompaniment. From there,
we move to 'Radiator', with monotonous torturous chimes recorded over
pssht-pssht noises. Bleeding and infuriating. 'Rhubarb' is J. S. Bach meeting
Brian Eno and Richard D. James attempting to decipher stuff from their
wastebasket. 'Hankie' is industrial pre-catastrophe stuff. Then 'Grass'
welcomes you with the first hints of percussion and a general feeling of
walking through the empty streets of a post-nuclear city.
As you see, it does not all come together very
well, but none of it feels too disjointed, either; as diverse as the moods are,
the «ambient» promise is fulfilled — not once does Aphex Twin break out the
techno beats. The decision for you as a record buyer is really very easy: if
Electronica, for you, is music to move
to, this is the most expendable item in the Twin's catalog, but if you appreciate
it for its power of static ambience, this is the one album to go for.
It is sort of funny to realize that, about a
year from then, Richard D. James would have a mediated opinion exchange with
Stockhausen; the latter was asked to listen to an Aphex Twin tape and complained
about «post-African repetitions», urging the man to «look for changing tempi
and rhythms», upon which the respectable Twin retorted that «he should listen
to a couple of tracks of mine, then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns
you can't dance to». Obviously, what Karlheinz was sent was not an excerpt from Ambient Works Volume II — an album that has plenty of repetitions
which are, nevertheless, anything but
«post-African». Not that the 67-year old composer would be capable of
«getting» this new generation of machine-prodding whippersnappers, but one
thing is for certain: this album puts
Mr. James as close to the «old school» of the electronic masters as possible.
So close, in fact, that quite a few fans still
view it as an arrogant joke, along the ideological (if not sonic) lines of Metal Machine Music. I don't think it
was a joke — more like a conscious, maybe even narcissistic, attempt at
decidedly singling oneself out of the crowds. Like, how many techno and house
artists have ever released a 150-minute collection of rhythmless bleeps and
bloops? The staggering audacity of the move by itself is guaranteed to generate
extra spice — and then there is always the remote possibility that someone will
see God shooting craps within some of these tracks. Or, if not, at least use it
as a practical sleeping device.
...I CARE BECAUSE YOU DO (1995)
1) Acrid Avid Jam Shred; 2)
The Waxen Pith; 3) Wax The Nip; 4) Icct Hedral (edit); 5) Ventolin (video
version); 6) Come On You Slags!; 7) Start As You Mean To Go On; 8) Wet Tip Hen
Ax; 9) Mookid; 10) Alberto Balsalm; 11) Cow Cud Is A Twin; 12) Next Heap With.
I don't really know if I care, but even I can
tell that Richard D. James' third full album feels like the man is finally breaking
through the sea of conventions, and trying to take the world of electronic
music some place it has rarely, if ever, seen before. This is no longer music
you should, or, in fact, could dance
to, nor does it humbly follow the well-established standards of the ambient genre.
This is where the Aphex starts to reach the apex.
Most of the rhythm loops are complex here,
ranging from funky trip-hop beats to fairly extreme avantgarde patterns; and on
almost every track, the «percussion» sounds different, reflecting Richard's obsessed
love for the phenomenon of sound per se. But the main purpose of this complexity
still seems technical, aimed at disorienting the crowds looking for dance
fodder and providing an intelligent background for the music, which is no
longer fully «backgroundish», but rather just formally minimalist.
At the arguable exception of 'Ventolin', a
track destined strictly for the strong of hearing (with its ultra-sonic shrill
beeping frequency, the tune is rendered well near unlistenable), ...I Care is very «normal», an album
that might even endear the artist to the art-rock crowd. With a little effort,
you can even separate the tunes into «rockers» and «ballads», choosing your
favourites and skipping the «filler». On some tracks, keyboards are being
augmented by (real?) orchestration; on others, they are made to sound like
medieval church music; and occasionally, they even play themes that show
melodic development, rendering it impossible to treat the compositions like we
are supposed to treat ambient (i. e. every given snippet of the track is the
equivalent of the whole).
If you are a fan of the «disturbing» aspect of
electronic music — creepy underworldly sounds with a claim to predicting the
apocalypse — I recommend 'Icct Hedral' ('ICCt' is short for either
International Catamaran Challenge Trophy or International Criminal Court,
whichever you prefer, but the music does not remind me much of catamarans) and
particularly the last track, 'Next Heap With...', where James' cloudy synths
are periodically torn apart by orchestral strings and horns that at once seem
to announce some sort of new day dawning and make you, the listener, afraid to
face it. If, however, you prefer just to be becalmed, 'Alberto Balsalm' is one
of the Twin's most touching minimalist melodies, and deserves full imersion.
To summarize, it's almost as if ...I Care were a synthesis of the
energy of Ambient Works I with the
calm of Ambient Works II — two
opposites working against each other and somehow fusing into something with a
non-zero charge all the same. Not all such mixes work, but this one seems to
have succeeded; at the very least, it is an individualistic and uniquely
imaginative piece of sh... uh, work of art. Obviously, it would be insulting on
the part of the brain to refrain from issuing it a thumbs up — the whole thing is almost
scientifically targeted at hitting each of its individual neurons, rather than
some collective abstract «rational conscience».
RICHARD D. JAMES ALBUM (1996)
1) 4; 2) Cornish Acid; 3) Peek
824545201; 4) Fingerbib; 5) Carn Marth; 6) To Cure A Weakling Child; 7) Goon
Gumpas; 8) Yellow Calx; 9) Girl/Boy Song; 10) Logon Rock Witch.
Scientists are prejudiced. Due to certain
outdated social conventions and academic pressure, their musical interests
normally revolve around classical forms, maybe with a few «world music» elements
thrown in here and there for diversity's sake. In reality, of course, there is
nothing like a good helping of «intellectual» electronic music to accompany
the work of a true scientist, be it experimental or theoretical.
Let me put it this way. Every time I try to
approach the output of Richard D. James from a «basic human perspective», the
result is a total fail. «This stuff kicks ass», «these sounds are gorgeous»,
«this is damn catchy music», «this tune almost makes me cry» etc. are
clichéd definitions that are about as applicable to the output of Aphex
Twin as to the output of a seashell when you press it against your ear and
start wiggling it around a bit. But once I get to thinkin' things like «Hey,
this shit sounds not unlike something you'd expect from coronary flow in the
subendocardial vessels during contraction of the ventricular myocardium!», or,
«this is just the kind of soundtrack
we'd want for that documentary on two non-zero mass neutrino double-beta decay,
to drive home the point that the Majorana fermion is its own anti-particle!»,
it all clicks beautifully.
The thing is, Richard D. James does not care
all that much for your soul. It is too superficial for him. He goes straight to
the elementary particles, and there is no better conductor for that artistic
research than the art of music programming, which is, after all, in itself
based on a harnessing of particle power. And on the Richard D. James Album, a surprisingly short, parsimonious venture,
he has arguably reached the highest point of that harnessing.
The record is frequently classified as
"drum 'n' bass", which, in the world of James, means only that the
percussion programming has gone real
crazy: the beats on 'Carn Marth' and 'To Cure A Weakling Child' are not just
complex, they take pride in constantly shifting, reaching a culmination in the
middle of the latter track where they can, indeed, only be described in terms
of sub-atomic bombardment. On 'Yellow Calx', percussion ceases to be a rhythm
basis altogether and alternates between a wild alien animal breaking out of
its confinement, and a creaky iron bridge trembling against the wind,
threatening to fall apart at any minute. And on 'Peek', the percussion plays
the part of a master gamer blasting packs of spaceships from his vantage point.
If anything, this kind of raging creativity begs to forget about labels like "drum 'n' bass" rather than
remember them, in a vain attempt to pigeonhole the record.
Still, behind the sci-fi percussion, Aphex Twin
still manages to imply the existence of spiritual currents. 'Goon Gumpas', for
instance, has no beat at all, just a positive synth-harp melody and heavenly
strings — there may even be a concealed nod to the Beach Boys' 'Wouldn't It Be
Nice'. 'Girl/Boy Song' indicates that there might be elements of romance
involved, and, indeed, more harps and chimes drive the song forward, along with
such amusing touches as a single flute note, followed by a single bassoon note,
never ever to reappear. There's your girl, there's your boy. The rest is deeply
buried under twisted beats.
Despite a half-hour running length, the record
packs more ideas than all of Selected
Ambient Works put together. The creaky iron bridge of 'Yellow Calx', the
spooky kiddie talk loops on 'Weakling Child', the whistles / spring bounce /
church organ combo of 'Logon Rock Witch', the violin sentimentality of '4',
things very rarely get boring. At the same time, it is also quite accessible,
without any offensive experiments with ultrasounds, and with no elements of
hardcore techno that could turn off those not entirely in awe of any forms of
electronica. Still, the best way to enjoy it is on the sub-cellular level: you
will know that the music has worked only once you have felt the atoms inside
your brain ionized by these sounds.
Timidly hoping that the process does not cause
carcinogenesis, my own brain says it is a thumbs up, even though the heart is predictably
unaffected — despite moments that do approach conventional «beauty» on '4' and
'Goon Gumpas'. Probably, though, Richard would have been offended if we started
pressing him for conventional beauty. We'll always have Cher for that.
COME TO DADDY (1997)
1) Come To Daddy, Pappy Mix;
2) Flim; 3) Come To Daddy, Little Lord Fauntleroy Mix; 4) Bucephalus Bouncing
Ball; 5) To Cure A Weakling Child, Contour Regard; 6) Funny Little Man; 7) Come
To Daddy, Mummy Mix; 8) IZ-US.
This would be a fine place to mention that, in
addition to his relatively small number of long-playing records, Richard D.
James has had immense streaks of EPs and singles released over the past twenty
years, describing all of which individually would take forever — yet it would
not always be a waste of time, since much of the man's tastiest meat is to be
found on these petty pieces of product. All I can say in general is that they
are generally worth checking out, and, as an exception, say a few words about
one of his lengthiest EPs: Come To Daddy
runs over thirty minutes and, therefore, almost qualifies as a full album
(actually, Richard D. James Album
only exceeded it by about five minutes, completely blurring the distinction
between album types — which, come to think of it, is only natural considering
that these days they all come on the same pieces of plastic with the same
diameter).
Come
To Daddy is likely to qualify
as Aphex Twin's eclectic peak; with a little bit of everything and more
contained inside, I might even recommend it as a most useful introduction to
the character in general. If you want to see where exactly one talented artist
stands on beauty, evil, fun, absurdism, and musical geometry, each single track
on this release will answer at least one of these questions, and sometimes
more. Plus, together with Album,
this is the finest proof available of the idea that Richard D. James is not
merely making music with electronic equipment; he has, in fact, become one
undetachable whole with his electronic equipment — much like for Jimi Hendrix
it could be seen that the guitar was just another, extremely vital, organ of
his body, here it seems that sounds like these could only have come from an
operative cyborg.
'Come To Daddy (Pappy Mix)' is the most famous
number here, mostly due to the promo video, from which the world got tricked
into thinking that Richard D. James is, in fact, a mutant hell-raising demon
born out of an old TV set inseminated with dog pee. Musically, however, the
track is one of the simplest and least interesting numbers on the EP, a jarring
industrial techno parody on all sorts of «evil music», from Ministry to Prodigy
to death metal, that is rather one-dimensional, unless you want to throw on
some points for the mock-creepy «demon vocal» overdubs of "Come to Daddy,
come to Daddy!" and "I WILL EAT YOUR SOUL!"
But the big general plus of the EP is that it
is intended to be more than a sum of its parts, and the hyperbolic evil of
'Pappy Mix' does not reach its full effect until, one track later, you reach
the 'Little Lord Faulteroy Mix', whose only common link with the 'Pappy Mix' is
the main title — in all other respects, it is an entirely different experience,
with underwaterish chimes and little green man vocals taking the place of metallic
grind and Lucifer roar. And then, still later, there is the 'Mummy Mix',
which is even less similar — mostly percussion-driven with a few ambient tones
in the background and next to no vocals at all (just a little high-pitched
screaming).
Why are they all 'Come To Daddy'? Probably just
to reflect the man's provocative spirit. The unsettling titles, the evil grin
staring out of the dog-pee-stained TV set in the video, the unusually high
percentage of warped vocal overdubs, all of this has the stamp of the
«man-machine» over it, as if all these long years of tampering with the spirit
armies of chips and transistors finally did transform the man into the
«Analord», as he would, in a few years, start christening a whole series of
his new records. Scary — but certainly exciting.
Tucked inside the three «mixes» are lesser
known tracks that are, however, no less deserving. 'Flim' represents one of his
most pleasant minimalistic melodies, a rhytmic melange of almost jazzy synth
patterns, completely devoid of any ironic aspects. 'Bucephalus Bouncing Ball'
starts out as a crazy, superhuman break-dance track before completely chucking
rhythm out the window and concentrating instead on tracing the virtual
trajectory of a virtual set of bouncing balls: imagine a bunch of Olympic gods
setting up a pinball championship and you'll end up somewhere in the vicinity
(I cannot even begin to imagine the work it took to program all that). And
'Funny Little Man', the more I listen to it, the more it comes across as some gruesomely
politically incorrect musical joke, which is fabulous, because who the heck
wants to see a world stripped of the art of intelligent provocation?
Where Come
To Daddy can seem a step below the Richard
D. James Album is in the «melody» department — without any strings
arrangements or Beach Boys influences, but with bouncing balls and goofy vocal
tricks, it is more about «sonics» as a whole than about traditionally valued
note sequences. But the inclusion of tracks like 'Flim' clearly shows that,
like every talented electronica / avantgarde composer, James simply views
«traditionally valued note sequences» as but one of the important ways to realize his maniacal sonic drive, and
the good news is, he is fully capable of realizing it in ways that are complex,
exciting, and impressionistic, which sets him apart from armies of poseurs. If
nothing else, Come To Daddy is
simply one of those magnificent treatments for the tympanic membrane that
builds up one's sense of perception, general experience, and, well, character.
Thumbs up.
DRUKQS (2001)
1) Jynweythek; 2) Vordhosbn; 3)
Kladfvgbung Micshk; 4) Omgyjya-Switch; 5) Strotha Tynhe; 6) Gwely Mernans; 7) Bbydhyonchord;
8) Cock/Ver-10; 9) Avril 14th; 10) Mt Saint Michel + Saint Michaels Mount; 11) Gwarek
2; 12) Orban Eq Trx 4; 13) Aussois; 14) Hy A Scullyas Lyf A Dhagrow; 15) Kesson
Dalef; 16) Cymru Beats; 17) Btoum-Roumada; 18) Lornaderek; 19) QKthr; 20) Meltphace
6; 21) Bit 4; 22) Prep Gwarlek 36; 23) Father; 24) Taking Control; 25) Petiatil
Cx Htdui; 26) Ruglen Holon; 27) Afx 237 V.7; 28) Ziggomatic; 29) Beskhu3epnm;
30) Nanou 2.
This goddamn thing is just too long, which is
not so much a complaint as a lament: even if there are any bright new spots here that suffice to advance Richard D.
James to the next level, three or four listens are not going to get you to
follow him there. Really, for a guy much of whose reputation was based around
short, up-to-the-point EPs and singles — such as, e. g., the famous 'Windowlicker'
from 1999 — to throw out one hundred minutes of continuous electronic noise on
the market sort of understates the meaning of «overkill».
There have been cautious, sceptical, and even
overtly negative reviews of DrukQs,
which is understandable since even serious admirers of Aphex Twin might not
want to spend their time sorting the wheat out of the chaff; and since Aphex
Twin is merely God in disguise, and His knowledge of the Universe does not go
much further than a detailed understanding of superstring theory, which He
invented, and the Big Bang, which He supervised — it is obvious that the 2 CDs
of DrukQs are going to contain crappy filler, like it or not.
In all honesty, I would call this a «coasting»
experience, and an intentional one at that; DrukQs is a big, sprawling summary of most, if not all, of James'
interests in the world of sound. The tracks meticulously alternate between (a)
techno / drum'n'bass dance numbers with psycho-futuristic melodic underbellies,
along the lines of Ambient Works 85-92;
(b) rhythm-less, minimalistic, mostly minor key piano or string compositions,
along the lines of Ambient Works II;
(c) stern industrial clots of noise, such as can be found on his mid-Nineties
albums; (d) brief musical or non-musical jokes (e. g. a phone message from his
parents congratulating him on his birthday). There is no «hard techno» à la 'Come To Daddy', and no
orchestrated arrangements, but other than that, it is all fairly
representative.
And fairly ehh: not a single track truly stands
out. Despite all the superficial diversity, they blend into each other much
like their unpronounceable, unmemorizable titles (which range from complete
orthographic gibberish to long words or short phrases in Cornish, certainly indistinguishable
from said gibberish for any layman without a Celtic fetish). The
melody-carrying synths behind the frantic beats never burst into magic, and
the beats themselves, in all honesty, are far less innovative and unusual than
they used to be. It's all rather yawn-inducing even from the scientific point
of view. Were elementary particles truly flashing around the way they are
pictured in 'Taking Control', or geological fluctuations accompanied by the
sounds of 'Gwely Mermans', natural science would be nothing but a chore.
It is not unimaginable, of course, that there
is much subtle charm here that the critics missed for obvious reasons — such as
its pretentious length and lack of transparently evident innovation — but,
after all, it is just as easy to nosedive in electronic music as it is in, say,
guitar-based music, and maybe even easier. Even when you have computers on your
side to assist you with finding fresh types and combinations of sounds, your
power is still limited; what is a computer, after all, but a bunch of
alternating ones and zeros? And on DrukQs,
these alternations simply happen to be more coarse-grained than elsewhere. Thumbs down.
26 MIXES FOR CASH (2003)
CD I: 1) Time To Find Me [AFX
Fast Mix]; 2) Raising The Titanic [Big Drum Mix]; 3) Journey [Aphex Twin Care
Mix]; 4) Triachus [Mix by Aphex Twin]; 5) Heroes [Aphex Twin Remix]; 6) In The
Glitter Part 2 [Aphex Twin Mix]; 7) Zeros And Ones [Aphex Twin Reconstruction
#2]; 8) Ziggy [Aphex Twin Mix #1]; 9) Your Head My Voice [Voix Revirement]; 10)
Change [Aphex Twin Mix #2]; 11) Une Femme N'Est Pas Un Homme [Aphex Twin Mix];
12) The Beauty Of Being Numb Section B [Created by Aphex Twin]; 13) Let My Fish
Loose [Aphex Twin Remix]; CD II: 1) Krieger [Aphex Twin Baldhu Mix]; 2) Deep In
Velvet [Aphex Twin Turnips Mix]; 3) Falling Free [Aphex Twin Remix]; 4) We Have
Arrived [Aphex Twin QQT Mix]; 5) At The Heart Of It All [Created by Aphex
Twin]; 6) Flow Coma [Remix by AFX]; 7) Windowlicker [Acid Edit]; 8) Normal
[Helston Flora Remix by AFX]; 9) SAW2 CD1 TRK2 [Original Mix]; 10) Mindstream [The
Aphex Twin Remix]; 11) You Can't Hide Your Love [Hidden Love Mix]; 12)
Spotlight [Aphex Twin Mix]; 13) Debase [Soft Palate].
Strictly speaking, I have every «legal» right
to skip this 140-minute monster, since it is not a «proper» Aphex Twin or AFX
album. Not only is this a compilation, with mixing dates running the entire
length of James' official career, but only two of the tracks (the remixes of
'Windowlicker' and 'SAW2') begin and end with Aphex Twin himself. The rest are
exactly as advertised: remixes of works by other artists — for cash. (I'm
assuming RDJ doesn't accept checks).
However, it doesn't take a serious expert to
understand that an Aphex Twin remix is not just
a remix. «Just a remix», at best, gives you a longer version of your favourite
single with more opportunities to shake it up, and, at worst, serves as money
bait for frustrated completists, spending their time hunting for rare Japanese
12" releases when they could have been researching stem cells instead. For
Richard D. James, remixing is a major way of making a living, not so much in
the financial sense as in the biological one. Like an evil parasite, he
attaches himself to the original product, sucks out its organic matter and
injects his own venom. Or larvae. Listening to this album, especially if you
are familiar with the original tracks, is the musical equivalent of walking
through a parasitological museum (there actually is one in Tokyo, believe it or
not).
I am not familiar with all of the originals,
nor even with all of the artists, which range from real biggies like Nine Inch
Nails and Meat Beat Manifesto to local celebrities like Nobukazu Takemura to
all sorts of techno and trip-hop bands and DJs that may or may not have been
great in their heyday (actually, if you start penetrating the world of 1990s
electronic music through the big names, 26
Mixes is some serious publicity for the smaller ones). The album may — and, at a certain point, should — be enjoyed on its own,
independent, terms, but, of course, comparisons with the raw material will also
help unfurl the secrets of Aphex Twin's creative spirit. So it's 140 minutes
of offbeat pleasure per se, and then, if you want, 140 ⋅ 2
minutes of instructive similization for the sake of intelligence, coolness, and
merciless timekilling.
The Twin's basic approach is «reconstruction»
rather than «deconstruction». It is as if he took one or two listens to each
selection, found one or two elements of it that he liked — a beat, a bassline,
maybe even a vocal part — dissolved the rest in acid, then built his own dream
castle around the salvaged bits. Just one example: Takemura's 'Let My Fish
Loose', a dreamy ethno-jazzo-electronic «ballad», used to be a multi-layered
recording, awash in tricky time signatures and flutes and funky keyboards and
bits of Spanish guitar. Of all these things, James falls in love with one: the
bassline, which is indeed a very groovy jazz bassline. So he makes it loud as
hell, and everything else quietly hiding behind its back — but the annoying
kiddie vocals he apparently hates, so he ends up distorting them, stretching,
compressing, and dehumanizing at will. It's brilliant, since it is at the same
time an exhortation of the track's strong points and a mean parody of its weak
ones. (At least, that's how I see it at present — but I think it's an
understanding that ties in well with the common idea of «Aphex Twin = The Evil
Clown of Electronica»).
Some of the tracks can only be qualified as
cruel (but deserving) jokes. Both David Bowie and Philip Glass, for instance,
take a severe beating on the remix of the Glass-orchestrated version of
'Heroes', on top of which he dubs David's original vocals — as if asking us the
question, «What the hell do these two people have to do with each other?»
Clearly, nothing, as the abysmal audio effect will have you realize. 'You Can't
Hide Your Love', a simplistic, sterile dance track from DMX Crew is sped up,
stripped of the boring overlays that conceal its worthlessness, and turned into
a dance fool's paradise.
Most of the time, though, the source material
is simply used as a bare foundation to create more of that typically-Aphex
music. Mescalinum United's 'We Have Arrived', as the name tells you, used to
announce alien presence: a fast-paced, pompous «astral» march with huge beats
and swooping keyboard waves to reflect macrocosmic proportions. All of that
hugeness is being ripped out, and the tune is reinvented as a jarring, almost
insufferable industrial slam, with alien beats now sounding as megaton
sledgehammers and galactic waves replaced by the poisonous hiss of
acid-corroded metal. Like I already noted, Aphex Twin's electronics normally
dislikes stars, galaxies, and other faraway places; he is more concerned about
fractals, atoms, and quarks, whose worlds are really just as limitless in
themselves as those of the stars and galaxies, and there is no better way to
see this than to compare the original 'We Have Arrived' with his reworking.
Occasionally, the remixes serve to remind you
that the man's own music is not entirely sourceless, either, and that there is
no inseparable rift between the electronic revolution and whatever used to
exist prior to that. The second track, for instance, sounds like a decent
outtake from Ambient Works II with a
loud drum rhythm attached — in reality, it is his reconstruction of Gavin
Bryars' 'Sinking Of The Titanic' theme from 1969 (conveniently renamed 'Raising
The Titanic'). And the album ends on an almost hippiesque note with a remix of
'Debase' from the Mike Flowers Pops, a retro band mostly known for an Oasis
cover and contributing to the Austin Powers soundtrack.
It would be cheating — and somewhat unfair — to
call 26 Mixes the Twin's «best»
album, but one thing is certain: the diversity of approach and abundance of
ideas make this the easiest 140 minutes in a row of his music that I have ever
sat through. Think of it this way: no matter how prodigious the man is, it is
pretty hard for one talented person to keep on releasing double CDs full of
consistently successful music (especially
electronic music); DrukQs
demonstrated this in all clarity. On 26
Mixes, it is as if he enlisted the help of 26 friends — imagine it as a
shot in the arm on the part of talented corporate songwriters — to aid with the
basic skeletons. The result is simply one of those, I am not afraid to say,
seminal albums that give Electronica a good name, helping to convert the
skeptically minded who think that intelligence, diversity, and entertainment
could not, in theory, peacefully co-exist on an electronic album. Thumbs up.
CHOSEN LORDS (2006)
1) Fenix Funk 5; 2) Reunion 2;
3) Pitcard; 4) Crying In Your Face; 5) Klopjob; 6) Boxing Day; 7) Batline Acid;
8) Cilonen; 9) PWSteal.Ldpinch.D; 10) XMD 5a.
In 2005, Richard D. Twin continued his
unpredictability spree by releasing, under his alternate moniker of AFX, a
series of eleven vinyl-only EPs that he called Analord and numbered almost
in successive order: first came No. 10, then Nos. 1 through 11. (Don't ask me
what particular brand of algebra this represents). Those of us who are of the
more common stock and do not bother so much about the vinyl vs. CD controversy,
right down to not even owning a turntable any longer, may only enjoy the
results through illegal (and, in the eyes of the Twin, most probably
distasteful) digital rips — or through this particular compilation from 2006,
which did get a CD release and, supposedly, was almost forced on the man by his
management.
The latter — the fact that Chosen Lords were a half-hearted release — means that there is no
guarantee that you really get the best stuff. Knowing the evil mind of «Daddy
Windowlicker», you might, in fact, get the worst,
and may that be a punishment to you for disrespecting the power of vinyl and
the holy obsession of the completist. (At least, that is exactly what most of
the completists say — unless they are simply pissed off that it was them and not you spending all that time and money on scooping up the entire
series). But with this kind of music, it is not easy distinguishing between
best and worst in the first place. And there is certainly very little sense to
reviewing all of the series and
trying to find significant progressive difference between Analord 5 and Analord 11.
For our purposes, Chosen Lords will
do fine.
There is a retro scent to this music —
naturally, since, true to its name, the Analord
series made significant use of old analog equipment, although computer equipment
was also present. Some have called it a conscious return to the good old days
of «acid techno» and drew analogies with Ambient
Works 85-92. Others, conversely, highlighted its innovative qualities
(merging the old ways with new creative approaches etc.). Both parties are
probably right. However, in my own eyes, this does not make Analord any less of a «coasting»
experience than DrukQs, no matter
how different the technologies involved in their preparation.
The overall sound is simply too dry and
shallow. The best of Ambient Works
were impressive sonic vortices, spurring on all of those cellular / atomic
level analogies and making the listener want to reach within oneself and find
echoes of these strange sounds in his/her own blood. On Analord, or, at least, on these particular selections, James mostly
sticks to complex, but un-moody robotic patterns that took much work to
create, but not a lot of inspiration, I believe. For all of the innovation, I
cannot hear any new types of sonic sensations that had not been discovered before,
and none of the tracks are sharp, rough, or aggressive enough to attract extra
interest. Worst of all, way too often I catch myself understanding that this is
hardly distinguishable from background Web muzak or arcade shooter
accompaniment ('Fenix Funk 5' might have been terrific in «Mario Bros. In Outer
Space», but hardly anywhere else).
In such a situation, the most effective tracks
are those where, at least, you have a
lot of things happening, so it may not mean much, but it keeps you too occupied
to be bored. Which means that the winner by far is 'XMD 5a' (perhaps not
coincidentally, one of the two tracks on here actually credited to «Aphex
Twin» rather than the non-aphex evil twin «AFX»), a real oddball composition
that begins with rhythmically tolling bells, continues as a little convoluted
acid dance track dubbed over an ambient-minimalist piano track, grows into a
percussion-heavy funk number, dissolves in the ambience of the piano, comes
back in a poisonous pool of Moog-ish atmospherics, and finally bursts in an
evil biley bubble. Nothing sensational, but still — a sonic adventure that
contrasts rather sharply with the comparatively static nature of most other
tracks.
The bottomline is, in the hands of a beginner
this kind of stuff would command reverence, but for James, this is starting to
raise the question of whether his explorations had really reached the end of
the map by the year 2000. The fact that some people actually paid attention to
— and almost applauded — the fact
that 'PWSteal.Ldpinch.D' introduces a regular 4/4 beat, might somehow hint at
the possibility that things are coming back full circle. Who knows, maybe ten
years from now the Twin will be gracing us with digital deconstructions of
Sinatra standards. For now, my review should serve as a cautious warning: there
is no big reason to hear this stuff unless you are already a vintage Aphex nut.
At least — repeat repeat — I see nothing here that makes it any better than DrukQs.
SYRO (2014)
1) Minipops
67 (Source Field mix); 2) XMAS_EVET10 (Thanaton3 mix); 3) Produk 29; 4) 4 Bit
9d Api+e+6; 5) 180db_; 6) CIRCLONT6A (Syrobonkus mix); 7) Fz Pseudotimestretch+e+3;
8) CIRCLONT14 (Shrymoming mix); 9) Syro U473t8+e (Piezoluminescence mix); 10)
PAPAT4 (Pineal mix); 11) S950tx16wasr10 (Earth Portal mix); 12) Aisatsana.
Let us meet a few conditions. First, you are
Richard D. James, a.k.a. Aphex Twin. Second, you have not had a «proper» new
long-playing album out in thirteen years. Third, your latest album features you
not dicking around without a head on your shoulders, but actually diligently
doing your thing. Fourth, you put a receipt that details the complete
production costs of your album on its front cover. With all these conditions
met, how could SYRO be released to anything other than universal acclaim on
the part of critics and veteran fans alike?
However, since this here site is known to
operate under a strict «no-bull» policy, I would like to try and assess the
values and virtues of this record as if that thirteen-year gap never existed.
If you remember, Richard's last proper LP, DrukQs,
was met with a relatively lukewarm reception — sometimes branded as too long,
sometimes as too monotonous, sometimes as too unjustly focused on electronic
percussion, overall, not one of his better efforts. Now what would have been
the reception for SYRO, had it come
out in 2002 instead of 2014? If we didn't all have to wait that long, begging
The Master to please please please come back, and show us the way?
I had to actually go back and refresh some of
the «classic» Aphex Twin numbers, from ʽGreen Calxʼ all the way down
to ʽCome To Daddyʼ, in order to understand why my senses could only
perceive SYRO as one large,
unterminable, irritating bore. It is
better than DrukQs, for sure, if
only because the emphasis has been shifted away from fussy funky percussion and
put back on tonal sounds — Richard D. James may be a master of his own groove,
but his best work had always had a positively melodic side to it. However,
calling SYRO a «melodic» album would
clash way too hard with my naïve world view, and I won't do it.
Where some of Richard's work used to be
awesomely otherworldly, and some of his other work used to be hilariously
nightmarish, and some of his other
work just made you stop right there and think «I have no idea what this
ʽmeansʼ, but it sounds so different
and so cool, why hasn't anybody else
thought of that before?», SYRO does
none of these things to me. Predictably, it is complex (and made even more
complex by the frequent use of processed vocal overdubs), it is «intelligently
danceable», and it even makes an effort to be diverse, but (a) there is really nothing here the likes of which
we hadn't heard before, be it from Richard himself or from a gazillion of his
electronic followers, and (b) more importantly, these tracks do a fairly poor
job of converting themselves into lasting impressions, or even short-lived
impressions, for that matter.
Perhaps it is the fault of the production,
which fails to give these tunes the required depth: just as it was on DrukQs, it all just sounds like an
extended soundtrack to a generic video game, and even good headphones do not
particularly help out to perceive anything breathtaking about these loops and
ambient flourishes. But a much more likely solution is that the man is simply
no longer driven by the fresh excitement of exploring uncharted waters, which
was there in the 1980s and in the 1990s. «Exploration» is now reduced to
«desperation», that is to say, silly gimmicks that serve as mental bookmarks
rather than anything else — «ʽCIRCLONT14ʼ?
Oh, you mean the one where they wispily chant no-so-chkeeee, no-so-chkeeee,
no-so-chkeeee all the way through?»
(For the record, nosochki literally
means ʽlittle socksʼ in Russian, and this is hardly a phonetic
coincidence, since there are other Russian phrases occasionally scattered in
the mixes as well — a 25th-frame-type trick, no doubt about that; Her Majesty's
Secret Service should probably start investigating whether the man has been put
on Putin's secret payroll).
Naturally, it would
be illogical to expect the man — not just after such a long break per se, but
after a long break during which his electronic feats and wonders, once upon a
time a jawdropping force like no other, have become a normal part of our
collective conscious — it would be illogical to expect him to have the power to
stun the world once more. Electronic wonders are as much of a rarity these days
as any other type of wonders, and adventurousness and artistic flexibility do tend to decrease with age even if
we're talking of geniuses. Yet, on the other hand, after such a long break,
neither did I quite expect this former Napoleon to meet his musical Waterloo,
no matter how many important critics will try their best to convince you that
it is really his musical Austerlitz. Not «revolutionary», no, but gimme some emotion/impression/revelation,
whatever. And no, nosochki does not
count. And I don't play any video games these days, either.
One hour into this
mess comes ʽAisatsanaʼ, the quiet ambient conclusion — a five-note
piano phrase repeated over and over, sometimes with minor variations,
pretending to long to be resolved until it finally is resolved with a couple extra chords at the end. Somehow, it
seems to me to be symbolic of this entire album — a lengthy search for
self-expression, pretending to be carried out on several different paths but
really mainly following the same unoriginal, tired direction, and finally
pretending to have reached its goal, but there never really was a goal. The whole thing is just
boring, meaningless, and tedious, and if it took Mr. James thirteen years to
come up with that, well, he might
just spend the rest of his days growing vegetables as far as I'm concerned.
Seeing as how so
many people give out radiant-glowing reviews to SYRO — even though I have not been able to find even a single one
that would illuminate me on what exactly I have missed here — I do feel a
responsibility to warn you not to take my rather vicious thumbs down at face value, and
go and check it out for yourselves. Nevertheless, most of this review was
written in a cool-calm-collected state and reflects my genuine feelings (or,
rather, lack thereof) towards the album, so I am not just trying out a
contrarian approach or anything. In the end, I guess we'll just have to wait
until the Heroic Aureole wears off our hero a little bit, and see where SYRO is going to stand, say, in twenty
or thirty years time, provided the world will last that long.
CHEETAH (2016)
1) CHEETAHT2 [LD Spectrum]; 2)
CHEETAHT7b; 3) CHEETA1b ms800; 4) CHEETA2 ms800; 5) CIRKLON3 [Êîëõîçíàÿ mix]; 6) CIRKLON 1; 7)
2X202-ST5.
It is absurd, I know, and probably a
coincidence, but why is it that when an Aphex Twin release only claims to be inspired by a retro device, it still
turns out to be the most interesting and engaging release from the artist in
more than a decade? The Cheetah MS800 was a digital synthesizer developed and
briefly marketed by UK's Cheetah Marketing in the 1980s, and is typically
called one of the worst-sounding and
most complex and befuddling synths to ever exist — hence the reference,
although, if I am correct, Richard D. James never goes as far as to actually
haul out one of those old relics and give it a try, he just brings up the name
so that every single reviewer in existence, myself included, could go, «oh, how
appropriate, a title referring to one of the most bizarre electronic devices
for one of the most bizarre electronic artists».
But somehow, really, CHEETAH is fun! An EP, technically, though still more than half an
hour in length, it is radically different from the cluttered, over-spasmodic,
blurry stuff we'd had from Mr. D. lately (yeah, looking at you, SYRO) — here, the man goes for a tight,
tense, and minimalistic approach instead, concentrating on the drum-'n'-bass
rhythm first and adding a few extra flourishes at the last moment. The result
is that much of this does indeed sound a bit like an old arcade soundtrack, but
a thoughtful one, where the music is expressly written to mimic the action on
screen; and by making the beats relatively simple and the bass lines loud and
deep, he allows the brain to focus tighter on what's going on and, perhaps,
even to store a part of it.
The very first track... by the way, I'm not
going to retype these titles, thank you very much; I've had enough of that crap
with Autechre releases — my only question, which nobody seems to have an answer
for, is what the hell is meant by "Êîëõîçíàÿ mix" (track 5)? "Êîëõîçíàÿ" is the correct Cyrillic spelling for Kolkhoznaya,
the name of several streets / stations in various Russian cities (derived from kolkhoz, of course), but I
have no info on any electronic teams, studios, art-projects, DJs, etc., that
would go by that name. Did the guy just select a random Cyrillic word from a
random text or what?.. Anyway, the very first track (which is not the Êîëõîçíàÿ mix, but something else with a lot of letters
and numbers) begins by establishing a good old ominous groove — relentless
percussion, grim bass punches, cloud-gathering synths deep in the background —
against which a simple lead melody keeps making a threatening descending
dive-bomb, and somehow it is immediately
more effective than if he'd stuff the opening with a dozen beep-and-bleep
overdubs and a mega-poly-rhythmic set of beats that only a ten-headed alien
could easily identify and empathize with.
The second track almost sounds like some good
old-fashioned electro-pop (give it to Quincy Jones for a few moments and you
can have yourself a solid rhythm track, awaiting the reincarnation of Michael
Jackson), eventually adding a mystery component with harpsichord-like «secret
chamber tones» and funny tapping runs from percussive bass / bass percussion.
There's an odd soothing, rather than irritating, feel about this music,
probably because of the muffled, glossed-over effect on all the parts that internalizes
the feeling rather than externalizes it — I really love what he's doing with
the production, creating music that is much more fit for taking in at home, in
an enclosed space, rather than in some action-packed dance club.
Later on, ideas (or at least approaches) begin
repeating themselves, but the record does not overstay its welcome — it gives
you two more very short interludes (one sounds like your on-screen sprite is
trying to zig-zag his way through a perilous swamp and the other finds him walking
into cloudy dreamland) and three more IDM tracks, all of which have their
enjoyable moments: the funky bass groove on ʽÊîëõîçíàÿ mixʼ, the quasi-jazzy «piano» «improvisations» on the next one, and
yet another superb bass groove on the last track — my only wish is to hear some
of these, some day, played by real jazzmen on real instruments, which would
have been even more awesome (no, I mean, really, just close your eyes and
imagine that last track handled by a couple of real jazz-fusion pros on drums
and bass... eh?). But then, what do I know, electronic music is still the
future and all that. At the very least, I do know that the old windowlicker is
not quite out of ideas yet, and that this latest attempt to go for a
stripped-down sound is a much welcome change, well worth an honest thumbs up,
despite the brevity.
SOLI DEO GLORIA (1993)
1) Like Blood From The Beloved
(part 1); 2) Bitch; 3) Burnin' Heretic; 4) Stitch; 5) Walk With Me; 6)
Backdraft; 7) ARP (808 Edit); 8) Spiritual Reality; 9) Skyscraping; 10) All
Tomorrow's Parties; 11) The Sentinel; 12) Ashes To Ashes '93; 13) Like Blood
From The Beloved (part 2).
It is no big secret that your average goth
still preserves just enough human spirit to possess a need to dance. Neither
forefathers like the Cure, nor more straightforwardly Gothic acts like Bauhaus
avoided dance rhythms — as long as you could paint them dark black and pass
them off as some sort of scary ritualistic trance thing. After all, one can
always take advantage of the fact that none of us are properly informed about
the nightly activities of Count Dracula.
From a different corner of the market comes
EBM, «electronic body music», a term introduced by Kraftwerk and, allegedly,
rather confusing — despite the phrasing, it does not refer to any electronic dance music, but only
to those types that introduce «industrial» elements. In other words, take
something like the nerve-wrecking chaotic, dissonant hammer-clanging of Einstürzende
Neubauten, straighten it out into an easier-going rhythmic pattern, and you
got yourself some EBM. (How the hell you are supposed to remember the
difference between EBM and IDM is a question that no popular music theoretician
will ever answer, because choosing the right words for their terminology has
never been a conscience-bothering issue with these people).
Finally, there's Apoptygma Berzerk, basically a
one-man project (formally a group, though, with permanent supporting member
rotation) from the sick brain of Danish-Norwegian Stephan Groth who happened to
fall upon the rich idea of combining Goth-dance with EBM and acquire the studio
means of carrying it out. The original idea might have been as random as the
artistic name he chose for it (Apoptygma
means 'fold of dress' in Greek, and Berzerk is Groth's middle name... nah, too
much honor), but the delivery had plenty of gusto anyway.
Had I the misfortune to hear Soli Deo Gloria back in its own time, I
would have probably lasted about fifteen minutes. Even today, there is a
temptation to simply dismiss this as awful shit and move on to better things.
But why yield? Just because of its techno-pop overtones? Let us just wrap them
up in one brief disclaimer: those of us who have an innate animosity towards
techno-pop will never love Apoptygma
Berzerk (or, at least, their early formative period), but love is one thing,
and curiosity is another. And surely Soli
Deo Gloria is a curious album.
Imagine a Gregorian choir trading in their
church organ for a bunch of sequencers and you have just begun to understand
the gist of Groth's output. The «songs», interspersed with brief atmospheric
links, are dark rhythmic grooves with heavy emphasis on life-and-death matters.
Groth's vocals, alternating between «doom-laden» and «scary-evil», combine very
well with the cruel-sounding electronic pulses, and most of the choruses are
catchy enough to convince you that there has
been some traditionally-oriented songwriting involved here. Bad news is, the
traditionally-oriented songwriting way too frequently sounds like second-rate
Depeche Mode: if there is anything striking about a number like 'Bitch', it is
not Groth's vocal melody, but rather the constantly angle-shifting showers of
electronic effects that bombard it.
The real meat is to be found on longer, even
more adventurous tracks like 'Skyscraping', ones that can switch in between
several different rhythmic patterns and noise sections. Groth's imagination
runs wild on these things, even if he has a long way to go to catch up with the
big names in the electronic business; for one thing, he never lets a single
groove overstay its welcome, insisting that these are all particular movements
of complex art pieces, not just dark ambient plains to cross while shooting up
zombies and Neo-Nazis.
But the main issue is always the same: will you
or won't you take this guy and his darkness seriously? Like a Jim Morrison
gone techno? (Provided you take Jim Morrison seriously, but that's a different
question). Will you agree that his recasting of The Velvet Underground's 'All
Tomorrow's Parties' honors the spirit of the original rather than mocks or
profanates it?
I vote a mild 'yes'. Mild, because Groth's
rather obvious commercial inclinations prevent him from casting it all in a
truly EVIL mold (à la
Ministry). Gloomy, but not creepy; dark, but not abysmal. Always stopping at
that threshold that separates the cautious worker from the brave kamikaze.
But, on the other hand, how is it polite to say 'no' to a record that does
something unique in spirit, accumulates lots of effort, and is at least
marginally memorable? Besides, this is just the beginning of Groth's bizarre
musical wanderings, released at the age of 22. It needn't have done much of
anything other than just showing promise. And not every record needs to show
knockout potential to merit a thumbs up, anyway.
7 (1996)
1) Love Never Dies (part 1);
2) Mourn; 3) Non-Stop Violence; 4) 25 Cromwell St.; 5) Rebel; 6) Deep Red; 7)
Nearer; 8) Half Asleep; 9) Love Never Dies (part 2); 10*) Mourn; 11*)
Electricity.
On 7,
the early «Gothic» stage of Apoptygma Berzerk reaches its peak. It gets more
and more difficult to stay indifferent to this sound: the temptation to
dismiss Groth's techno-doom for representing «Apocalypse Dance Music for
Silly, but Pretentious Teens» is likely to be as strong in some people as the
temptation to find within it the ultimate answer to the problem of life and
death will be in others.
My own perception will always be biased: I have
a deep internal dislike for «futurepop» (the very name itself is absurdly
arrogant, not to mention contradictory by nature — and if the message is that in the future all of pop music will look like this,
I'd rather have silence), I don't care much for sampling (apparently, 7 goes very heavy on the stuff, quoting
everyone from the Shadows to Kurt Cobain to Red House Painters to Carmina Burana), and I cannot even find
anything particularly laudable or original about Groth's lyrical skills: same
old tales of sexual repression and complaints about human cruelty.
Even I, however, cannot deny that 7 is a one-of-a-kind synthesis of
influences, much more than just a plain old generic techno record. Opening with
a stern church organ recital; having a tribute to the passing of Kurt, sampling
the riff to 'The Man Who Sold The World', as its key track; featuring songs
about sadistic maniacs set to cheerful synth-pop riffs on the back of gloomy
synth bass patterns; ending it all with a starry-eyed female-sung romantic
ballad hearkening back to the days when art-rock ruled the world — well, even
if one wants to assert that Groth has essentially failed at making it all work
properly, you can never say that he didn't try real hard.
Techno lovers are definitely welcome to embrace
'Non-Stop Violence' and 'Half Asleep', rough, gritty tracks that easily hold
their own against the likes of Prodigy — judging by their own terms, they are
quite adequate as, respectively, a martial-style protest against zombification
of the nation, and a musical recreation
of a maniacal nightmare. 'Deep Red', in which the maniac actually gets a chance
to act (against some angelic back-vocal harmonies, no less), is also a
«highlight» of sorts, perhaps.
I will, however, confine myself to 'Mourn',
whose main synth loop I am always trying to cut out in my mind in order to get
a really pretty, sensitive tribute to a fallen hero; 'Rebel', an industrial
(or would that be «post-industrial»?) collage that seems to be dedicated to the
passing of Jesus (yes, we're that
serious) and gets along on the strength of sheer weirdness; and that last ballad,
not very memorable (except for the fact that it features the only bit of
acoustic guitar on the entire album) but a cute conclusion all the same. A
fairly small payoff for all of the album's immense ambition, but at the very
least, getting to know this sort of approach is always instructive, and
sometimes interesting.
WELCOME TO EARTH (2000)
1) Everything We Know Is
Wrong; 2) Starsign; 3) Eclipse; 4) Help Me; 5) Kathy's Song (Come Lie Next To
Me); 6) Untitled 3; 7) Moment Of Tranquility; 8) Fade To Black; 9) 64K; 10)
Paranoia; 11) Soultaker; 12) LNDP3; 13) Time To Move On.
Big surprise for the fans: Groth's third major
release sends a 90-degree push in the direction of the «atmosphere pump». All
of a sudden, the sinister, blood-thirsty overtones are gone, replaced by a
mellower, much more transcendental sort of vibe. Now our main focus is on the
extraterrestrial — aliens, astral forces, all sorts of paranormal crap for
people who prefer to get excited on the level of the Milky Way rather than the
amazing structure of the blood cell.
For a variety of reasons, not excluding
commercial ones, these new ambitions are clad from head to toe in generic
techno — almost omnipresent this time, as compared to the much more rhythmically
diverse 7. This would not be such a
big problem if the emphasis were on experimentation; unfortunately, it is not.
Barring the briefer links, all based on samples and collages, there are nine
full-length songs on here that behave
like songs, and what you are supposed to do is dance and sing along, not clutch
your head in amazement, bewildered by the vast array of tones, effects, and
tricky modality changes. This is pop music, not Richard D. James.
As pathetically predictable as it could be, my
two favourites here — and, in fact, the only two songs I don't mind hearing
once again — are the ones that shy away the most from the dum-dum rhythms.
'Moment Of Tranquility' shamelessly steals the main bassline from the Twin Peaks theme (acknowledging this
indirectly by quoting a bit of dialog at the beginning), then gradually becomes
a «heavenly» synth-pop ballad in the vein of A-Ha, with decent vocal hooks.
'LNDP3' is even better, with a soul-piercing part sung by guest vocalist Nan
Pettersen; ironically, it is the only song on the album not written or even co-written by Groth, but rather by part-time
partner Vegard Blomberg.
Incorrect, actually: the other non-Groth song
is 'Fade To Black', initiating Apoptygma's most famous gimmick — EBM
rearrangements of unpredictably chosen classics. (Technically, 'All Tomorrow's
Parties' came much earlier, but that was way before Groth's transformation into
a real Eurostar). Other than the buildup on the ominous bubbling intro,
however, this particular experience is nothing to write home about, and it certainly
does not uncover any hitherto undisclosed depth to the Metallica song (and it
wasn't even that much of a Ride The
Lightning highlight in the first place — but then, perhaps it's a good
thing Groth didn't settle on 'For Whom The Bell Tolls' instead).
The album's biggest hit was 'Kathy's Song' —
nothing to do with Simon & Garfunkel, and I have no idea who Kathy is
(Groth's girlfriend?), but anyway, the song is fairly typical of the rest of
the album: simple, unassuming keyboard loops and easily memorable tender
harmonies on the endlessly repeated chorus ("Come lie next to
me...") that, in and out of themselves, do not make the song all that
different from your average Euro-synth-pop with machine-generated «hits». It
does not really require a giant leap to go from here to the horror of Modern
Talking.
It is hard to call the record a «sell-out»,
because Groth was never above aiming for mainstream success, and there is
really nothing on here that he hadn't already tried — but the sad truth is that
the previous two records were far more innovative and adventurous; I would not
take it upon myself to convince anyone of the band's worthiness based on Welcome To Earth per se (let alone
playing only the hit singles, without 'LNDP3' which is truly this record's
saving grace), and I suppose that even without
the anti-techno bias, this is all still somewhat flaccid. Thumbs down.
APBL 2000 (2001)
1) Intro; 2) Starsign; 3)
Stitch; 4) Paranoia; 5) Eclipse; 6) Deep Red; 7) Soultaker; 8) Kathy's Song; 9)
Non Stop Violence; 10) Fade To Black; 11) Mourn; 12) Beatbox; 13) Bitch.
This is actually Apoptygma Berzerk's (or
«Apop»'s, as the band is lovingly abbreviated by fans) second live album: two
years before this one, Groth released APBL98,
usually castigated for horrendous sound quality. Well, for this second one,
sound quality is certainly not a problem.
The problem is whether there actually is a need
for an APBL experience in the first place. It is true that, when going on tour,
Groth takes along some real musicians: here, we have two extra keyboard
players, one extra real guitarist, and one extra live drummer. It is even
possible to hear the live drumming.
But does it even matter, if there is no real drive to transform Groth's studio
creations into true «live music» on the stage?
If there is any drive at all, it is solely to
wipe out any last traces of «art» there might have been left and transform all
of it into a non-stop club rave where pauses between tracks are intended to
give you a chance to catch your breath and nothing else. For his setlist, Groth
selects only the fast techno numbers, and those few old hits that didn't used
to be fast techno numbers are transformed therein ('Mourn', which I used to
somewhat like before he sped it up and sucked all the gloom out of it, leaving
only the danceability).
The only thing we may concede is that the guy
does have stage presence: not only is he completely up to the task of singing
his parts well over all the noise, he also manages to cast a certain aura of
creepiness during the announcements as well — the only case in history I know
where the «Goth vibe» may be felt more acutely in between the performances than during them. Also, the live guitar playing on some of the tracks
may make it easier for the non-electronica-weaned listener to get into them.
But why should such a listener pay any attention to «Apop» in the first place?
Nope. Go see the show if you like getting your kicks this way — skip the
record. Thumbs
down — not that I expected much, but it is still disappointing to
see inventiveness completely sacrificed in favor of the generic party spirit.
HARMONIZER (2002)
1) More Serotonin... Please;
2) Suffer In Silence; 3) Unicorn (duet version); 4) Until The End Of The World;
5) Rollergirl; 6) OK Amp, Let Me Out; 7) Pikachu; 8) Spindizzy; 9) Detroit
Tickets; 10) Photoshop Sucks; 11) Something I Should Know; 12) Unicorn
(original version); 13) Untitled 5.
There is an odd curve about this record, which
starts out as Apop's technopoppiest offering ever, then slowly slowly digs into more experimental territory,
with the emphasis shifted from primitive synth hooks to industrial-ambient
grooves. The first half is, in fact, so simplistic that Groth was accused of
«selling out» — a meaningless complaint, because no one really knows what exactly
constitutes selling out or selling in to this guy. On the other hand, it is
also claimed that the album is loaded with deeply personal songs, concerning
his recent divorce and stuff.
Whatever be, I have no idea how to really enjoy
songs like 'Suffer In Silence' or 'Until The End Of The World' (the latter, by
the way, begins with a wicked synth riff totally swindled off 'Ob-La-Di
Ob-La-Da', making the song cool for about five seconds). Their lyrics are
tragic, but the melodies sound almost happy, and the silly techno beat rules
over everything, confusing the senses. To be fair, there is an awful lot of
sonic stuff going on in 'Suffer' — but who is going to be noticing that? Goth
ravers?
Things start improving once the hit single part
of the album is over. 'OK Amp, Let Me Out' is a pretty cool title, under which
hides a ten-minute near-completely instrumental trance composition, melodically
even simpler than the hits, but, unlike the hits, it has some specific appeal,
very hard to describe or pinpoint. Maybe it's just the overall «coldness» of
the electronic patterns and the doom vibes — Groth's music works best when it's
completely robotic, and it fits in well with the idea of an evil spirit oozing
out of an amplifier. A grinning prank almost worthy of a Richard D. James
treatment, although the latter would probably find much more space for many
more gimmicks over these ten minutes (then again, maybe not).
Typical of the frustration that I experience
with Apoptygma is the fact that a fun title like 'OK Amp, Let Me Out' would be
found right next to a song called 'Pikachu' (!) which — I am not joking — is
technically a «dark love ballad». Okay, so it's dedicated to his daughter, and
it may be really a play on words ("It's 4 A.M., I watch you sleep" —
'Pik-ach-oo', got it?), but references to the silliest excesses of Japanese pop
culture in general are not OK when
you are aspiring to «art»; trend-sucking, yes, but not OK. The song, too, is
nothing to write home about.
By the time the album takes you through a few
more odd industrial twists ('Detroit Tickets') and is finally back where we
started with the final pop spin of 'Something I Should Know', this frustrated
feeling makes the record anything but
a true Harmonizer. The oddities are
more like a way of apologizing before the old fans of the band — «look at us,
we can still do this weird dark thing that you can ritualistically dance to,
but for the most part, we will just do the stupid dance thing 'cause that's
what the kids really like». At least Welcome To Earth, from that point of
view, was more honest about its nature. Thumbs down.
YOU AND ME AGAINST THE WORLD (2005)
1) Tuning In Again; 2) In This Together; 3) Love To Blame; 4) You
Keep Me From Breaking Apart; 5) Cambodia; 6) Back On
Track; 7) Tuning In To The Frequency Of Your Soul; 8) Mercy Kill; 9) Lost In
Translation; 10) Maze; 11) Into The Unknown; 12*) Shine On; 13*) Is
Electronic Love To Blame?
And here comes change: an album that no one
expected from Apoptygma Berzerk except for those wise few who might have
suspected it — make Groth drop his techno addiction, if only for once, and
he'll finally realize that dark pop masterpiece he had stuck inside himself all
this time. Of course, Groth's real
fans felt betrayed, because who wants to be forced to start learning new dance
steps right in the middle of getting in the groove? But then who cares about a
bunch of close-minded ravers anyway? Technically, they were right: You And Me was a sellout, because it sold more than any other Apop record —
but all this proved was that the market for «traditional rhythms» is still
larger than the market for electronic dance music, and that's juicy good news
for all of us nasty conservatives.
Anyway, You
And Me is not really a «masterpiece» as such, but rather simply a
collection of generally good, catchy, atmospheric pop-rock songs that mix
electric guitar and keyboard sounds in well-balanced proportions. Complaints
that Groth had sacrificed his vision / originality / idiosyncrasy in favor of
a generic «alternative electropop» (or whatever) sound are possible, but it's
not as if the sounds of Welcome To Earth
or Harmonizer were all that
individualistic either. It would be a problem if all the songs had been
faceless, but they aren't.
Some, in fact, have a new face sewn on. Kim
Wilde's 1980s hit 'Cambodia' was not a totally bad song per se, but very 1980s
— marrying a simplistic, ultra-repetitive hook to simplistic, cheesy keyboards.
Groth and Co. took the song, enlivened and tightened up the rhythms, overlaid
extra guitar and keyboard tracks, sang the whole thing with verve, and somehow
made it timeless. The same applies to 'Shine On', which used to be a hit single
for The House Of Love, but no more: Groth now owns the song, raising its status
from, say, a measly B- to a far more assured B+, fattening up the sound and
acting as if this were really some sort of artsy-message song. Which begs the
question — why the hell bother writing original material in the first place if
the best songs are complex remakes of raw Eighties' material anyway? Where's
Bananarama?
The answer is that now Groth writes stuff which
sounds exactly that-a-way: dance-pop, Eighties style, but with years of
professional experience replacing the fresh aura of kitsch and self-bewilderment
at those out-of-nowhere goofy synth tones that could seduce people back in 1985
but now just sound annoyingly dated, for the most part. 'Cambodia' feels right
at home next to 'You Keep Me From Breaking Apart' (a synth-rocker influenced by
A-Ha, so it seems, with the guitar-heavy bridge particularly reminiscent of
'Manhattan Skyline') and 'Love To Blame', the album's third single — written in
the same manner.
In fact, if there is any real basis for
complaint, it's that the formula is almost identical for all the songs:
describe one, then copy and paste. But that's how it often goes with pop-rock,
and these hooks really work, as if Groth and his new bandmates were honestly inspired with the idea of reviving
generic Eighties music in a better, more meaningful setting, not just using it
as a gimmick invented on the spot. And trust me, in these troubled days filled
to the brim with Eighties nostalgia, we've all heard much, much worse than You And Me Against The World. If
anything, this musical philosophy may weaken a string or two in one's
strung-out hate for the golden age of synth pop. Thumbs up. Oh yes, and some of the
videos for the hit singles are worth watching. Groth is quite good at
out-emo-ing the youngsters without ever really subscribing to proper «emo»
trappings.
ROCKET SCIENCE (2009)
1) Weight Of The World; 2)
Apollo (Live On Your TV); 3) Asleep Or Awake; 4) Incompatible; 5) United States
Of Credit; 6) Shadow; 7) Green Queen; 8) Butterfly Defect; 9) The State Of Your
Heart; 10) Rocket Calculator; 11) →; 12) Pitch Black / Heat Death; 13)
Black Vs. White; 14) Trash.
Looking back on these reviews, I almost feel
sorry for not giving Apop enough credit — because at least this one thing is
for certain: Groth sure knows how to change
without any of us being able, in any way whatsoever, to predict the nearest
future. He clearly started out as a commercial act, but there was so much
cling-clanging, bizarre organ-grinding, and rhythmic irregularities in his
music that no one really knew where this would take him. Then it brought him to
techno (er, sorry, «future-pop» in the band's language) — then, when he'd
seemingly settled in with two albums in one distinct style, along comes You And Me Against The World. We may
hate, love, despise or respect all or any of these albums, but the guy's
chameleonistic behaviour is in a class of its own, enough to make history that
is utterly independent of our tastes.
Now Rocket
Science. Again, accompanied by many fans' claims that this is Apop at their
weakest etc. etc.; fourth time in a
row, the band is seen accused of selling out and yet, somehow, manages to fill
up concert halls across Europe and remain in a niche all its own, away from the
glamorous environment. Again, oddity upon oddity. Technically, Rocket Science is a bit of a compromise
between the recent and the old — a step back from the dynamic, but monotonous
electropop of You And Me, but at
the same time nowhere near a real retread towards the glossy technopop of Harmonizer. The album itself does not seem
to fully understand what it is, and this makes it even harder for the reviewer
to come out with a judgement.
The bad news is that the songs hardly provoke
positive comments. The hooks are scantier than on You And Me, and it is no surprise that the fattest of them are
buried on 'Trash' — a Suede cover, proving one more time that Groth is much more
adept at interpreting other people's material than writing his own. Even when
he succeeds in finding an interesting groove (the metallic droning riff of 'Incompatible'),
he either lets it run for far too long or spoils it with silly drum machines
and synth tones that, in his hands, have not changed much in ten years' time.
Probably, though, my biggest beef with Rocket Science is that it seems
emotionally stuck somewhere in the neutral zone — neither dark and melancholic
nor bright and optimistic, not to mention trying to build up an emotional axis
all its own, like some visionaries, from Amon Düül II to Björk
and whoever else is written with an umlaut are capable of. You And Me was sufficiently well rooted in the dark side, but here
Groth has downplayed his personality and, much too often, dissolved his singing
(and he is a very good singer when he
feels like letting you know about it) in a sea of guitar-and-synth noise. I am
afraid he does not appeal to me that-a-way, and possibly this is also the real
reason for all the negative reviews — because in terms of pure melodic
structure, the songwriting does not seem particularly primitive compared to
what it used to be.
Somehow, it's all very, very boring, though.
One would do much better to just skip this release and replace it with 2006's Sonic Diary, a 2-CD compilation of
remixes and various cover versions,
including non-album rarities, that Apoptygma had cloned through the years — a
much stronger proof of the fact that God didn't just play a stupid joke on us
on that fateful day of August 10, 1971. Then again, considering that
Apoptygma's latest DVD carries the name Imagine
There's No Lennon, maybe he did, after all. Thumbs down to Rocket Science, but the overall verdict
on this oddly twisted product of the turn-of-the-century crisis has to be
postponed.
FUN TRICK NOISEMAKER (1995)
1) The Narrator; 2) Tidal Wave; 3) High Tide;
4) Green Machine; 5) Winter Must Be Cold; 6) She's Just Like Me / Taking Time;
7) Glowworm; 8) Dots 1-2-3; 9) Lucky Charm; 10) Innerspace; 11) Show The World;
12) Love You Alice / D; 13) Pine Away.
If we roughen it up real rough, and reduce it
all to the two basic oppositions — Happy / Sad and Stupid / Smart — we can,
sort of, get four possible combinations. Somehow, though, in the world of art,
or popular music, at least, the attractive forces between «Sad» and «Smart», on
one hand, and «Happy» and «Stupid», on the other, generally overpower the other
two combinations. No surprise there: the same connection may be observable if
you deal with people themselves, not just the art they create.
By the mid-Nineties, however, the grunge
explosion became so infectious that «Sad» (in all of its varieties, such as
«Angry», «Suicidal», «Anti-Social», etc.) became too huge to mate exclusively
with «Smart». People like Courtney Love heralded the «Stupid-Sad» connection
and launched it into vegetative reproduction mode. Happy music had little
choice but to retreat to the most pathetic of the intelligence-free corners (Paula Abdul!). So perhaps
it was inevitable that, sooner or later, a «Happy-Smart» antidote would
eventually resurface and vitaminize us all over again.
Such is the general scheme of things that some
pop music experts force on us. Like each general scheme, it has its vulnerable
spots and inconsistencies, but it does give one a better understanding of the
importance of bands like The Apples In Stereo when they emerged in the
mid-Nineties with their sunshine-heavy, neo-psychedelic brand of power pop. It
also commands respect and admiration for their debut album, Fun Trick Noisemaker — even though it
sucks.
The recipé for an Apples song is
relatively simple, and hasn't changed that much over the centuries. A colorful
folk-pop riff, distorted just enough to give it a rough garage sheen, but never
far enough to push it into «hard rock», let alone «metal» territory; lots of
overdubs to commemorate Phil Spector and drive your mind into fuzzy-wuzzy
frenzy at the same time; slurrily murmured, but expertly harmonized vocals to
bring back memories of the Beach Boys without pretending to achieve the same
kind of glossy perfection; a few vintage synth effects to emphasize the psychedelic
effect — and then play it all on repeat for 30-40 minutes.
That such a brilliantly calculated, analytical
mind as that of band leader Robert Schneider's (in his spare time, he
researches analytic number theory, which does not surprise me in the least)
could have failed in setting up that
kind of sound is unthinkable. That it could have resulted in lots and lots and
lots of perfectly sounding songs that mean absolutely nothing and leave a
listener cold as ice, on the other hand, is quite thinkable, and I know at
least one such listener (me). I love colourful, life-asserting power-pop as
much as the next guy, yet I am still completely bedazzled how, even after five
consecutive listens to Noisemaker, not a single one of these songs has
managed to leave the slightest trace of impression in my head. This is not
Gentle Giant or Ornette Coleman; this is simple pop music — it's supposed to
make an impression now. Or never.
Granted, while it's playing, Fun Trick Noisemaker is fabulous. Or,
at least, «cool»: just a very very awesome sound to have blasting out of your
speakers as you contentedly explain to all the riff-raff around you that this
music was, in fact, written and recorded in 1995, not in 1965. The one thing
that does give it away is the formulaic monotonousness: even the worst garage
bands in the Sixties were much more bent on trying out different kinds of
sound, but the Apples cling on to that recipé described above as if they
simply knew nothing about any other types of sounds. (One reason why calling
this music «Beatlesque», like many people on the Web do, is misleading: not
only did the Beatles never sound in such a uniform manner, they never really
had this particular type of sound on any of their songs at all — even if
they'd wanted to, George Martin probably wouldn't let them, considering it too
«dirty» for his ears).
But I have no problem with the monotonousness.
This is the kind of sound Schneider and his pals dig, and it's all right; who
am I to complain if they want to be the AC/DC of psycho-garage pop? The only
problem I find is that these riffs, these vocal melodies, these arrangements do
not speak to me. The Beach Boys do, the Kinks do, even Love's Arthur Lee, with
all his flaws, still has something to say. The Apples In Stereo tell me only
one thing: they love cool-sounding happy pop music, and are ready to kill for
their right to worship it. Fine! I respect them for it. Now hire a decent
songwriter, won't you?
I don't know, maybe it's the vocals —
Schneider's murmur is supposed to have some sort of mesmerizing effect, but
not on me, I love me some good clean singing if it's pop music. Or maybe it's
the intentional lo-fi production values — for all their love for Brian Wilson,
the latter would probably prefer to fall back on his drug habit than to
sanction his production stamp on this mess.
But in the end, I still guess that it's mainly
the songwriting. One hint: the only
song on here that I honestly loved upon first (okay, second) listen was 'Winter
Must Be Cold', written and sung by drummer Hilarie Sidney rather than
Schneider. There is something to the mildly epic riff of that song that I don't
find on the other tracks, and, by all means, Sidney is a much better vocalist
than Schneider (I do not say «singer» because, in order to appreciate someone
as a singer, you need to hear them clearly, and the basic approach on Noisemaker is that all the vocals must
sound as if recorded through a set of three heavy pillows).
The only other thing I remember is the main
riff to 'Tidal Wave', the album opener, although I am pretty sure it was just a
slight variation on one of the Nuggets
classics (don't remember which one exactly). To me, that's telling — alas, it
only further confirms those deep suspicions that say that the best kind of pop songs are written by
«street trash» who don't give a damn, rather than deep-thinking, analytically
minded college kids who want to materialize their picture-perfect visions of
what that Ideal Pop Art Object should look / sound like.
It is very easy to be seduced and lulled by the
sound, though, which may explain all the rave impressions. And obviously, a
«thumbs down» rating would be out of the question — not only because the band
evetually got somewhat better, but
also because the infuriated brain would never allow the disappointed heart to
take precedence in the case of an album so smartly crafted, so respectful of
first-rate influences, and so revolutionary and influential in its approach. It
should be kept in mind that the «Elephant Six» brand of music and related
artists, who did produce their fair share of contemporary classics, certainly
do not end with The Apples In Stereo — but they did begin with The Apples In Stereo. And there is every reason to
insist that you do hear Fun Trick Noisemaker, if you haven't
already done so — not just out of historical importance, but because it really
sounds fine while it's on. Who knows, perhaps it will still make your list of
all-time classics, provided you do not make the mistake of giving it a second
thought, or trying to replay these songs in your mind once the record is over.
TONE SOUL EVOLUTION (1997)
1) Seems So; 2) What’s The #;
3) About Your Fame; 4) Shine A Light; 5) Silver Chain; 6) Get There Fine; 7)
The Silvery Light Of A Dream; 8) The Silvery Light Of A Dream (Part Two); 9)
We’ll Come To Be; 10) Tin Pan Alley; 11) You Said That Last Night; 12) Try To
Remember; 13) Find Our Way; 14) Coda.
Well, the good news is they are at least
evolving. The second album sounds everything and nothing like the first —
everything, because they are still The Apples, not The Oranges, and nothing,
because they have changed (a) the production — the crackly, fuzzy lo-fi has
been replaced by a cleaner, more discernible sound that actually evokes the
band’s favourite music more faithfully (the original Beach Boys would have
series of non-stop individual fits listening to the castrated guitar of Noisemaker);
(b) the vocals — now we all know that Robert Schneider can really produce
a cool, mildly nasal, mildly raspy, ultimately sweet tone somewhere in between
Ray Davies and John Lennon; (c) the attitude — this is now much more jangly pop
than trippy psycho, with synthesizer effects, overall, discarded for lack of
need, and guitars colored in far yellower and oranger tones than they used to
be.
Most importantly, Schneider took the time to
finally deliver some good songs. Filler still abounds, but now it takes on the
form of multiple graciously pleasant fall-offs of tangible peaks. Thus, ‘Shine
A Light’ will never bring a tear to my eye the way the Rolling Stones can
subdue me with their ‘Shine A Light’ (yes, I know, there is no comparing
the two, but the blame falls on Schneider — nobody forced him to name the song
the way he did), but it opens up with a terrific, inspiring power pop riff, and
the vocal melody successfully catches that inspiration and runs along with it,
making it the band’s finest effort in life assertion. Then there is ‘Tin Pan
Alley’, combining a happy ‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’ ska punch with Birds-like jangle
and another catchy bit of singing — also a fav, well deserving of its name this
time around (the real Tin Pan Alley guys might not have refused to take in that
one... then again, it’s not really TPA style, but who cares).
Some of the songs, like ‘Try To Remember’ and
‘We’ll Come To Be’, this time around, truly make a bite at capturing the
Beatles'’spirit circa Revolver time — they are not so well written, and
do not linger long, but they are better at pure jangly pop than psycho;
this is passable. The rule of thumb, though, is that generally, the happier
they sound, the more rainbow-ish their riffs are, the more chances they stand
at making this music last longer than a day. Conversely, when they begin the
song with a hard-rock riff — ‘What’s The #’ is the earliest and the blandest example
of that — they sound like a bunch of diabetics trying to replicate ‘Louie
Louie’ at the local karaoke bar. Their acoustic stuff is hardly better: ‘About
Your Fame’, a flabby two-minute acoustic and accordeon ballad, only starts
getting cool with the introduction of that electric slide one minute into the
song (meaning one minute of waiting for goodness and one minute of actual
goodness).
So, in the end, this is still hardly Hall of
Fame material, but it did show two important things: (a) The Apples were
willing to learn, evolve, progress, and grow fins or wings depending on the
situation; (b) their chief songwriter did have a certain amount of talent to
burn in addition to all that impeccable taste in influences. It still didn’t
quite show why they had to drag along that «In Stereo» tag, but that would eventually
be explained, too. In the meantime, a very modest thumbs
up for all the extra seductive sounds without a solid substance.
HER WALLPAPER REVERIE (1999)
1) I. Her Room Is A Rainy
Garden; 2) II. Morning Breaks (And Roosters Complain); 3) The Shiney Sea; 4)
III. The Significance Of A Floral Print; 5) Strawberryfire; 6) IV. From
Outside, In Floats A Musical Box; 7) Ruby; 8) V. She Looks Through Empty
Windows; 9) Questions And Answers; 10) VI. Drifting Patterns; 11) Y2K; 12) VII.
Les Amants; 13) Benefits Of Lying (With Your Friend); 14) Ruby, Tell Me; 15)
VIII. Together They Dream Into The Evening.
Once again, a sharp turn onto the psychedelic
lane, as the special effects make a grand return, and along with them comes the
idea of having lots of brief (and one long) interludes that sort of make you
believe the actual songs are breaking their way out of an enchanted musical
box. You see, there is a she, and she has apparently glued her wallpaper
onto her wall with the aid of a sticky hallucinogenic substance, and when the
visual effect of the wallpaper, the olfactory reaction of the substance, and
the aural factor of musical box come together...
...what you get is about twenty minutes of
decent psychedelic songs and about seven more minutes of «links» whose names
take more time to type than their sounds take time to roll through your
channels. To judge them is easy enough: if The Apples In Stereo, as a
supernatural concept, blow your mind and send its smithereens to outer space,
you will adore these bits, ranging from minimalistic musical box tinkle-winkles
to little bursts of free-form jazz to primitive electronic drones ('Drifting
Patterns'), because we have to respect our gods for whatever they send us, no
matter how understandable the «whatever» is. If, however, you like them more
for either their melodies or those particular ways they trick you into loving
the sound of these melodies, the links are totally unnecessary and skippable.
Of the actual songs, 'Ruby' is a modern pop
classic, easily as good as one of those shiny bright Hollies hits like 'Bus
Stop' or 'Sorry Suzanne' (much more poorly produced, though, as if they were
still afraid that hi-fi values might somehow compromise their vision), and
'Y2K' combines Kinks-style music-hall with the turn-of-the-century problem in a
way that's novel, funny, and smile-inducing. Once they get off the bouncy-boppy
rhythms, though, they start losing attention again — 'Strawberryfire', for
instance, is only memorable for its obvious allusion, both lyrical and musical,
to 'Strawberry Fields Forever', and 'Benefits Of Lying' is so busy turning each
separate instrument and each vocal overdub into a cute little pink cloud that
eventually, nothing is left but The Big Pink — and this isn't even music from
it, if you get my meaning.
The album is over in such a ridiculously short
while that I don't even have time to position the thumbs — probably, they're
stuck somewhere in between high and low, because, even if The Apples cannot
produce a bad album almost by definition (unless they start covering Bon Jovi or
something like that), this whole thing smells like a quick throwaway, a
mini-stylization to keep the fans happy while the band sorts out its image
problems. But it did goad them into putting out 'Ruby', fattening classic
Brit-pop with at least one more first-rate melody.
THE DISCOVERY OF A WORLD INSIDE THE MOONE (2000)
1) Go; 2) The Rainbow; 3)
Stream Running Over; 4) 20 Cases Suggestive Of...; 5) Look Away; 6) What
Happened Then; 7) I Can't Believe; 8) Submarine Dream; 9) Allright / Not Quite;
10) The Bird That You Can't See; 11) Stay Gold; 12) The Afternoon.
At this point, it might seem as if the Apples'
career were obeying some invisible sine wave: psycho album — pop album —
psycho album — pop album, and so on. The title of the LP is borrowed from the
title of the first book written by the Rev. John Wilkins (1614-1672, published
1638, when he was 24 years old, the age of Robert Schneider at the release of
the Apples' first LP: funny coincidence, isn't it?), and, although it might
read as psychedelic to the fresh eye, there is hardly any more trippiness here
than in the works of Wilkins himself, a strictly scientific mind according to
XVIIth century standards.
Instead, The
Discovery is the band's party-time album. 'Go' sets the tone, a brawny,
carnivalesque mix of happy guitars, trombones, and piccolos, crowned with the
happiest of all messages: "You're such a pretty pretty little girl /
Let's blow this ugly ugly little world". The fat trombone riff adorning
the refrain is a marvelous touch, making this one of the band's most memorable
tunes and creating a friendly circus atmosphere. Like, when they say
"blow", you don't get visions of T.N.T. or Arnold Schwarzenegger —
you get visions of balloon packs.
Since a «party» is a more intimate affair than
a «teenage symphony» à la Beach Boys or Phil Spector, on Discovery Schneider relies less on
overdubs (guitar overdubs, at least; there is quite a bit of instrumental
diversity throughout) and more on hooks, with immediately successful results —
songs like 'The Rainbow' and 'Stream Running Over' take far less time to unlock
my doors of perception than just about anything on the first album, even if,
technically, they may be less adventurous. But they're solid power pop
compositions with happy pop hooks.
The psychedelic dreamworld still breaks through
every now and then, most blatantly, perhaps, on 'Submarine Dream', where it
looks like the band is preoccupied with the idea of making every instrument
sound in waves — guitars, chimes, phasing and wah-wah effects a-plenty, so be
careful or you'll feel like your own conscience, too, has been transformed into
an FM wave (there's a grumbly distorted guitar line that comes in midway
through and makes things easier, though). But for the most part, it is just pop
hook after pop hook, interspersed with one or two formulaically gorgeous
acoustic ballads for the sake of catching your breath.
Very nice album. 'Go' almost that the band has
almost begun to find its own face; 'The Bird That You Can't See' shows that it
has almost mastered the art of creating the
perfect pop structure; and 'The Afternoon' shows that it has almost learned how
to sound spiritually touching. The factor of the songs willingly evacuating
your mind after the music's over still remains, but I find it intuitively
obvious that five years of honing their craft have not gone unrewarded — also,
they should be using those brass instruments more often, for some reason, their
trombone riffs ('Go', 'Look Away') sound more emotional than their guitar ones.
Thumbs up.
VELOCITY OF SOUND (2002)
1) Please; 2) Rainfall; 3)
That's Something I Do; 4) Do You Understand; 5) Where We Meet; 6) Yore Days; 7)
Better Days; 8) I Want; 9) Mystery; 10) Baroque; 11*) She's Telling Lies.
Uh-oh. Things do not bode well here. All of a
sudden, Schneider has decided to dropkick psychedelia in favour of lots and
lots of fat distorted guitars. Perhaps he just secretly envied the success of
the Strokes, but the trouble is, with his rose-coloured vision of the world,
the final result of toughening up his sound could only have sounded like
Weezer. And, what do you know — it does
sound like Weezer. And there is no good reason to completely dismiss Weezer,
but who needs two Weezers when we could have one Weezer and one Apples In
Stereo instead?
The pain really
kicks in when it starts dawning on you that some of these songs are
well-written pop numbers, and that in terms of melodies and hooks they are
easily on the level of World Inside The
Moone. 'Baroque', for instance, is a tenderly gorgeous Brit-pop anthem that
should be encapsulated and flung backwards in time to be recorded by the Kinks
circa 1966-67. How on Earth did they decide that, to reach perfection, it
needed to be drenched in a dirty, deafening wall of garage-rock sound? Did they
think it gave them extra «artistic credibility», or some other crap like that?
Mind you, we are actually talking here about a band that, eight years before,
surprised the world by renouncing
heavy guitar arrangements as an obligatory way of acquiring intellectual
respect. Now, out of the blue, they are bringing them back for seemingly no
other purpose than to «fit in», with whom or what — I'm not exactly sure.
As on almost every Apples album, lucky findings
are heavily interspersed here with passable filler: Sidney's 'Rainfall' is a charming,
romantic, fast-moving pop rocker for which they invented a catchy guitar line, while
'Where We Meet' is another uninspired, languid attempt at imitating the spirit
of Lennon's 'Rain', but both are given the exact same crackling, grumbling
coat, and it is technically easier to just dismiss both before giving them each
a fair chance.
Five or six listens into the record, I can
safely say that I also like 'Better Days' (that galloping pace is one of the
best things to come out of 1960s Britain, and the more songs are done like
that, the better) and the fun chorus to 'That's Something I Do', where
Schneider tells us that "your friends hate my guts... 'cause I don't have
a pedigree" — nice acting, sir, but you don't really fool us, your
pedigree is better than most — and then, perhaps, something else might come up
once I declog my ears from all the sludge. But for the moment, despite
individual hooks, the album deserves a strict thumbs down. If, for some
reason, you get extra kicks looking at an old Flemish masterpiece after it's
been heavily sprinkled with sulfuric acid — for instance, under the pretext
that it leaves more space for imagination — then Velocity Of Sound is for you. Me, I'd rather wait until they
eventually release the demo versions.
NEW MAGNETIC WONDER (2007)
1) Can You Feel It?; 2)
Skyway; 3) Mellotron 1; 4) Energy;
5) Same Old Drag; 6)
Joanie Don't U Worry; 7) Sunndal Song; 8) Droplet; 9) Play Tough; 10) Sun Is
Out; 11) Non-Pythagorean Composition 1; 12) Hello Lola; 13) 7 Stars; 14)
Mellotron 2; 15) Sunday Sounds; 16) Open Eyes; 17) Crimson; 18) Pre-Crimson;
19) Vocoder Ba Ba; 20) Radiation; 21) Beautiful Machine Parts 1-2; 22)
Beautiful Machine Parts 3-4; 23) My Pretend; 24) Non-Pythagorean Composition 3.
After the embarrassing failure of Velocity Of Sound, the Apples promptly
disappeared from the studio for about four years, only serving to further
confirm how much of an embarrassing failure that album really was. In the
interim, Schneider diverted himself by applying his immense mathematical
skills to the creation of a brand new «Non-Pythagorean» musical scale based on
natural logarithms, resulting in a whoppin' eighty seconds of truly
revolutionary keyboard tones demonstrated on the album under review
(apparently, this should mean that Pythagoras is not in any immediate danger);
and Hilarie Sydney, the band's second biggest talent that was never given a proper
chance to become its first, finally decided that to bear the tyranny of a bald
man in glasses is a perverted form of self-humiliation, and announced her
departure from the band. Fortunately, not before she got to bang more of those
drums on New Magnetic Wonder, as
well as contribute two of the best songs (or, frankly speaking, one, because 'Sunndal Song' and 'Sunday
Sounds' are pretty much the exact same tune).
More importantly, they had enough time to
correct the silly mistake they made on Velocity
— accidentally mutating into a generic alternative rock band, even if that was
never the intention — and, this time, reinvent their sound in a way that is
much more deserving of the Apples In Stereotypical ideology. Sunny pop and
psychedelia are back, in a big way, and now they are more technological and
futuristic than ever before. More than ten years, after all, have passed since
their humble beginnings, and it is only too reasonable, chronologically, that they
no longer salivate and slobber over Revolver,
but rather over Electric Light Orchestra's A
New World Record: the harmonies, the melodic moves, the big wall of sound,
the sweet atmosphere of the Mellotrons and slide guitars, all of these things
now treasure the Jeff Lynn legacy rather than John Lennon's.
It's a smart and seductive move, and it works.
In conjunction with Schneider's songwriting skills that only seem to mature
with age, it makes Magnetic Wonder
one of the most instantly likeable Apples albums. Of course, nothing is
perfect: for egotistic reasons, Schneider still had to fill it up with a set of
brief «interludes», ranging from the already mentioned experiments in whuppin'
Pythagoras' ass to little bits of electronically encoded vocalizing and
littler bits of dissonant piano playing. The result is a huge massive of 24
tracks, spread across two discs (even though the total running length is only
slightly above 50 minutes), masking a group of tall-growing, healthy, but
scattered trees under the guise of a dense, overwhelming forest.
Once you take out the scissors, though, and
circumcise Schneider's big ego by throwing out all the fancy-wancy «artsiness»,
nothing is to detract you from just enjoying the music. The answer to 'Can You
Feel It?' is by all means positive — the band opens the album with a frantic
battle summon to "turn up your stereo", and even though the song
still lets you feel the unpleasant echoes of Velocity with its primitive grungy rhythm track, its melodic
wah-wah lines and Schneider's insanely supplicating vocal melody more than
compensate for it.
From then on, songs — as opposed to links
— rarely let down. 'Energy' promises that "we're gonna see sunlight"
and, with but one verse repeated over and over again, is like a power pop
mantra whose message could be annoying because of its repetitiveness if it
weren't so goddamn true, not to mention catchy-friendly. 'Play Tough' finally
gets it right about combining romantic atmosphere with memorable melodic lines
— here is a song that is played, sung, and
arranged in such a way that it could have fit in perfectly on the Kinks' Something Else (it even seems to borrow
a few melodic moves from Ray Davies, including the descending scale of 'Sunday
Afternoon'). Finally, the line "you gotta get back to the place that you
know you're gonna see your friends again" ('Radiation') gets my vote for
«highest correlation of beauty and underratedness» in the band's entire
catalog, if you know what I mean.
On a funny, but probably coincidental note, it
is the band's most explicit Jeff Lynne imitation — 'Beautiful Machine, Parts
3-4' — that leaves me the coldest: injecting a lot of effort into the construction
of an ELOesque sound wall, over which a distinct, shrill, Lynnesque nasal twang
lays the vocals, they forget to add a pinch of feeling, and the song feels as
hollow as their early Beatles tributes, making the «Grande finale» a bit of a
letdown after such a good set overall. But, heck, this is simply to remind us
one more time, lest we forget, that The Apples In Stereo are not the Beatles,
not the Kinks, and not even the new
Electric Light Orchestra. Were they all of these things combined, would we have
any incentive at all to go back to dusty «irrelevant» oldies? As it is, the
pleasure is all mine to say it one more time: «Yes, Robert Schneider is a
brilliant guy, in his own way, but if you like The Apples, all the more reason
for you to take a true time machine, rather than a first-rate simulation». An
honest thumbs up
all the same, though, because, after all, real time machines work both ways.
TRAVELLERS IN SPACE AND TIME (2010)
1) The Code; 2) Dream About
The Future; 3) Hey Elevator; 4) Strange Solar System; 5) Dance Floor; 6) C.P.U.;
7) No One In The World; 8) Dignified Dignitary; 9) No Vacation; 10) Told You
Once; 11) It's All Right; 12) Next Year At About The Same Time; 13) Floating In
Space; 14) Nobody But You; 15) Wings Away; 16) Time Pilot.
Three years and a couple of new band members
later, the transformation into Xanadu-era
ELO is finally complete. If, in the late Seventies, or from a late Seventies
perspective, you hated Jeff Lynne for selling out the idea of «Beatles on
strings», chances are you will also hate Robert Schneider for selling out the
idea of Jeff Lynne selling out the idea of «Beatles on strings» — at least,
that's the first meta-critical idea that staggers inside the critical head.
It is also, I think, a downright wrong idea. I
am a stark supporter of ELO through all the ages (excluding the self-castrated
Part II era), and even then, have to take a deep breath before introducing
anyone to the guilty pleasures of 'Sweet Talking Woman' — because, in those few
nervous seconds it takes people to tell this kind of music from the Bay City
Rollers, my life and reputation may be in serious danger. With Travellers In Space And Time, there is
no such fear. It is clearly a record that has been recorded in our space and time, and the first
reaction of people submitted to Schneider's newest experiment will be amusement
rather than indignation.
Amusement, that is, at how niftily he borrows
all the starry-eyed elements of that epoch's «sci-fi pop» — the synthesizer
bleeps, the electronically encoded vocals, the sub-moronic disco rhythms, the
nagging, repetitive hooks, the irritating naïve sentimentality, the
disproportionate bombast — and converts them into a hilariously
post-modernistic format, in which a «hook» ceases to be a magnet for your
emotions and becomes a ridiculously absolute triumph of empty form.
"Before we begin our lessons, I would like
to speak to you briefly on what you should know about how to learn the
code", someone tells us a few seconds before we begin hearing the music. No
question about it: The Apples have definitely mastered "The Code",
whatever it is. Of the twelve or so fully fledged songs on the album, I count zero as «filler». Schneider's pop
structures have reached their zenith, not least because he is now concentrating
only on the things he does best: rhythmic, relatively fast-moving pop-rockers
with complex vocal harmonies. No noise, no nonsense, and no languid folk
balladry. Nothing in which soul has
to be an essential component.
This is not to be taken as a complaint. Singing
these here songs with soul could only
have spoilt them — could only make people turn away from them as they were
liable to turn away from ELO records, because Jeff Lynne, the old bastard,
seemed to be trying to convince you that his silly odes to imaginary worlds and
idealized females, like, had meaning.
What does Schneider say, though? "Elevator, take me straight to your bed,
when I look around, it distracts me", he tells us, in one of the album's
most memorable killer hooks. Not really a Lynn line, if you ask me, although
the melody, sure as hell, could have
been written by ELO; yet they would neither arrange it nor sing it quite that
way.
If it looks like I'm talking bullshit, we can
always go another way: for instance, say that the general message of Travellers In Space And Time is that
there is no message, or, at least,
you can never figure out the message because things keep changing back and
forth, sort of like the Apples' own musical predilections. The album's first
single, "Dance Floor", sort of implies that ("The dance floor
isn't there no more, but my body's still movin' / Tell me, do you know, where
are we to go, when our world is so confusing?"), plus, it provides
Schneider with a great excuse to shake his big bulk and wave his professorial
beard before the mike in the song's video, like a neighborhood karaoke bar
impersonator of Barry Gibb — this kind of nihilistic musical philosophy is probably
the only way to let the man get away
with embarrassments like these. (For the record, Elijah Baggins is in the
video because the band is actually signed to his label, so I guess if he ain't
able to make money on them, at least they're a good sport to hang around while
goofing off).
Altogether, this is a derivative, absurd, and
ultra-rationally hyper-irrational album. Highlights include everything — every song has an attractive structure, although
my current favourites are probably the ones that seem like they've been stolen
directly out of the wastebaskets of Jeff Lynne ('Nobody But You', beginning
like a clone of 'Showdown' and then piling up the cellos and sweet background
vocals with such faithfulness they almost seem to be inviting a lawsuit) and
Roy Wood ('No Vacation', which sounds like some old Wizzard tune I forgot the
name of).
With Schneider's concept of total relativity
afloat all of the time, the whole thing is frustratingly waterproof: what good
is there to complain that 'No One In The World' is musically simplistic and
lyrically primitive? It states its point, doesn't it? It simply got itself
allocated its own stance in space and time. Actually, the album does offer the
best two lines of text in the Apples' entire history: "You know you feel
blue / When you're out of sync with your CPU", Schneider tells us among a
sea of melodic bleeps and beeps (quite Pythagorean in scale, I'd say) on 'CPU',
the album's least retro-ish track (or, perhaps, most retro-ish, if you trace its origins to the likes of the Silver
Apples and USA and their electronic hooliganry).
The only downside is that, as it still happens
with the Apples even after all this time, lack of honest emotionality
undermines both memorability and attractive force: once the album is over for
the fifth time or so, I still do not
find myself remembering most songs, or, which is even worse, feeling a strong
desire to return to the ones I do remember (like 'Hey Elevator' or the ridiculously
outer-space-cheerful 'Told You Once'). Maybe, when all has been said and done
and then re-said and re-done again, pot-bellied, bald, and bearded nerd
intellectuals should still stick to advanced Linux programming, and leave pop
music to young street trash. Or maybe I'm just spewing filthy
discriminationalist talk here, but at least don't blame me before you've
watched the 'Dance Floor' video on your own. Thumbs up, though, regardless of any
worries.
ADDENDA:
SCIENCE FAIRE (1993-1995; 1996)
1) Tidal Wave; 2) Motorcar; 3)
Turncoat Indian; 4) Haley; 5) Not The Same; 6) Stop Along The Way; 7) Running In
Circles; 8) Hypnotic Suggestion; 9) Touch The Water; 10) Glowworm; 11) To Love
The Vibration Of The Bulb; 12) Time For Bed/I Know You'll Do Well; 13) Rocket
Pad.
Prior to firmly proving their worthiness with Fun Trick Noisemaker, the Apples (not
yet In Stereo) entered the market with two EPs, Tidal Wave (1993) and Hypnotic
Suggestion (1994), neither of which caused any big fuss. Two years later,
out of an obsessive impulse to tidy up (I can relate), they re-released both on
one CD, adding three more rarities from various sources to complete the
picture. The result is Science Faire,
an informative, but otherwise useless memento of the band's early days that I
mention and discuss out of principle rather than admiration.
If, like mine, your main problem with Fun Trick Noisemaker was the lack of
emotion-brewing hooks behind the thick, juicy, happy «applish» guitar sound of
the songs, then on these early EPs the problem is squared: the hooks are just
as lacking, but the sound is disappointing as well. Not a single whiff of sweet
psychedelia, apart from maybe a small bunch of «woman-tone»-based solos; it's
all generic distorted indie rock, grovelling before the D.I.Y. altar — and what
has that to do with the Apples' consummate professionalism, the only real reason
to listen to them?
It is a good thing they only re-recorded two of
these songs for the LP, because if all
of the songs sounded like tin can demo versions, even the hardcore Apples fan
would have to feel cheated. As it is, you can at least concentrate on the
modestly interesting process of watching the band grow and mature, from the
very lumpy, crude brute-riffs of Tidal
Wave to the slightly more exquisite melody shaping and sci-fi touches on Hypnotic Suggestion. The previously
unreleased instrumental 'To Love The Vibration Of The Bulb' is even more
interesting — imagine a garage band's first (failed) take on 'King Of The
Mountain Hall' or 'Astronomy Domine' with a chunk of 'Misirlou' inside: I
mean, even spirits and aliens must
enjoy surfing, mustn't they? And then, finally, one big slab of full-blown
psychedelia on the two-part 'Time For Bed', which sounds exactly like one of
those lovely multi-part McCartney kiddie-psycho-suites circa 1973, except
without even a tenth part of McCartney's musical genius. Never mind, they were
still learning.
Without trying to concentrate on the
spot-the-changes year-by-year game, though, Science Faire is plain old boring. Maybe the EPs needed more input
from original bassist Jim McIntyre, whose 'Touch The Water' is the lightest bit
of nostalgic psycho-folk on the album, going easier on the sludge than most
other songs (McIntyre is also credited for 'Vibration Of The Bulb'; he split before
the band started making it big in order to rule over his own, much less famous,
Elephant 6 project Von Hemmling). Or, perhaps, not. But at least it is nice to
know that The Apples In Stereo have always
been «shiny happy people», even if it took them some time to realize that, if
you really want to come across as shiny and happy, it doesn't help much if you
borrow your guitars from the Meat Puppets. Thumbs down.
ELECTRONIC PROJECTS FOR MUSICIANS (1995-2008; 2008)
1) Shine (In Your Mind); 2)
Thank You Very Much; 3) Onto Something; 4) Man You Gotta Get Up; 5) The Golden
Flower; 6) Avril En Mai; 7) Hold On To This Day; 8) The Oasis; 9) On Your Own;
10) Other; 11) So Far Away; 12) The Apples Theme Song; 13) Stephen Stephen; 14)
Dreams.
This, however, is an entirely different matter.
Even more than Science Faire, this
is a typical collection of «odds and sods» — bonus tracks from Japanese
editions, promos, B-sides, soundtracks, etc. — but the major advantage is that
all of these songs were recorded
already after The Apples In Stereo
started to «click» as a real band with a voice of its own, and so, Electronic Projects For Musicians (a
name that, out of all cheerful pop outfit leaders, only Schneider could have
come up with) is a credible addition to any fan collection.
Frankly speaking, though, any fan would do
better to take the album apart, throw out the 1/3 or so ridiculous filler, and
distribute the rest of the tracks as bonuses to their respective LPs: any
collection like this is an insult to the art of coherence. The first two
tracks are sufficient proof. 'Shine (In Your Mind)' is a gorgeous psycho-rocker
that has a better chance of making you see the stars than almost anything on Fun Trick Noisemaker — polyphonic harmonies,
chimes, acid slide guitar, the works. So what can be more awesome than
following it up with one minute of thanking their Japanese fans for buying
their records, backed by a piano lesson for a three-year old?
Additional embarrassments include 'The Apples
Theme Song', said to be the introductory song for the band's official website —
sufficient pretext, I believe, to justify a strict boycott. At least 'The
Monkees Theme' was, like, a real song;
this particular jingle is not even funny. And if 'Stephen Stephen', an ode to Stephen
Colbert of The Colbert Report, is to
be understood as an attempt on Schneider's part to one-up Brian Wilson and his
'Johnny Carson'... well, the attempt is botched, to say the least. A big part
of the problem is that The Apples In Stereo are sort of... unfunny. There are many things to like about Schneider — but not
his sense of humor. (That's what you get, probably, for spending the first six
years of your life in Cape Town).
As for the actual songs, well, for the most
part, they agree in quality with the time periods in which they were recorded. Tone Soul Evolution add-ons are trippy-pretty,
but forgettable; Discovery Of A World
outtakes are a couple of attractive ballads, particularly the freak-folkish '
Oasis'; the Velocity Of Sound
outtake is predictably overloud and ugly; and 'So Far Away' is an attempt at
an anthemic psycho-drone that is interesting — some will inarguably find the
marriage of its guitar jangle with a cute pastoral phrase played over and over
on a recorder (I think?) trance inducing, although I just go for «atmospheric».
There may be no great shakes on here, but the
same could, with occasional reservations, be said about the Apples' career in
general. No problem issuing a thumbs up here — beware, though, lest you actually
mistake this for a serious LP of new material or something, particularly since
the title is so utterly misleading.
THE WEEK NEVER STARTS ROUND HERE (1996)
1) Coming Down; 2) The
Clearing; 3) Driving; 4) Gourmet; 5) I Work In A Saloon; 6) Wasting; 7) General
Plea To A Girlfriend; 8) The First Big Weekend; 9) Kate Moss; 10) Little Girls;
11) Phone Me Tonight; 12) Blood; 13) Deeper.
Nor does anything else, for that matter. Arab
Strap, a couple of wasted twenty-three year olds from Falkirk, Scotland (Aidan
Moffet on vocals and occasional keyboards, Malcolm Middleton on everything else),
certainly did not have any such specific thing as «songwriting» on their minds
when, still under the influence of another nasty hangover, I'd warrant, they
left the tapes rolling and recorded their unintentionally uninhibited
masterpiece (at least, that's more or less what Middleton himself has later
said about this record).
The sound of Arab Strap is frequently described
as «depressing». Because, you know, the songs are melodically dark and
minor-keyed and droney and the si... uh, the wordist keeps talking about all the girls that he has fucked in so
many ways and how goddamn unhappy it makes him. (See, told you, sex isn't everything). But it is really no fun to
just separate all «negative atmosphere» music into «aggressive» and
«depressive». Surely the human spirit is much more complicated than that. To
me, The Cure and Portishead sound depressive; Nick Drake and Lou Reed don't
(or, at least, very rarely do). Put them all in the same category and it's as
if you invite people to view them as interchangeable, but are they?
Anyway, «depression» in music, to me, is a very
conscious state of affairs; it almost necessarily involves a little philosophic
activity. Jim Morrison and Robert Smith seem to have decided, in choosing
between several possibilities, that the world is a rotten place, and their
musical goal is to join spirits with the faithful and convince the doubtful.
Arab Strap do not create that atmosphere — they just leave the tapes rolling,
and everything else is a stunned, hazey, drugged-out stupor. It's as if someone
blackjacked both of them real good, exactly two seconds prior to the recording,
or, from a less violent standpoint, mesmerized the two, dissipating a large
part of their humanity. One thing's for certain: if either of them walked into their
local bar in the kind of state they display here, only the cruellest of
bartenders would refrain from calling an ambulance.
Melodies: mostly generic «dark folk» chord
sequences, played on acoustic guitars (cellos, pianos, etc., sometimes beef up
the sound, but not all that often, and always in the same muddy lo-fi manner).
Very, Very, Very heavy on bass: be
careful about setting up your amps, or stuff like 'Coming Down' will induce
permanent damage of the eardrums — or, at least, the flooring. (This is not
exactly «depressing» — but quite representative of a real tough hangover).
Drumming is mostly done by machines, just to show how little a fuck they give
about «good sound». But this, at least, is sort of a generic indie thing.
Lyrics: ranging from "Don't try and tell
me Kate Moss ain't pretty" to "Phone me tomorrow when you're
sober" to the totally erotocalyptic "I lick her slit, as it tightens
its grip". Overall message is something like: «Trapped between drinking
and fucking, trying hard to get the transcendental significance of both of
these things, but too much of a stoned brainless moron to succeed».
Vocals: No idea if Moffat cannot sing, because he honestly never even tries (with the
exception of 'General Plea To A Girlfriend', on which the vocals are atrocious,
but there is every reason to believe this is intentional, what with the «song»
recorded in worse sonic quality than an early Paramount recording of Blind
Blake pissed on by a pack of wild dogs). But this isn't required. On most of the
songs, he just tells these stories — getting soaked, meeting a chick,
proceeding to the habitual, making some sarcastic or self-deprecating or
others-deprecating comments about it, then play on repeat. 'Deeper' goes on for
seven and a half minutes that way, and it's just a story about skinny-dipping
with a 19-year old (not even underage, boo).
So what exactly is the artistic merit of Arab
Strap's debut? Well, the themes and tricks are nothing new for 1996, but the
combinations, as usual, are somewhat novel, Moffat's wasted Scottish accent by
far not the least of them. If this is
about depression and misery, after all, then Arab Strap are the first band to
approach that theme from a perspective at once trashy and humble: there are no
attempts here to make the whole experience grandiose or epic or prophetic, to
stroke egos in a «look at us, we've figured out the rotten core of the world
better than all those blind men around us» kind of way. But, repeating myself,
I don't see the «depression», at least not in the music itself. I see an
adequate transmission of how one feels after having drunk and fucked too much,
with a vague realization, perhaps, that there may be other sides to this life but without any clear idea what
they might really be. In that way, the album works for me — despite the fact
that talking about it as «music» makes about as much sense as talking about Metal Machine Music as such.
PHILOPHOBIA (1998)
1) Packs Of Three; 2)
(Afternoon) Soaps; 3) Here We Go; 4) New Birds; 5) One Day, After School; 6)
Islands; 7) The Night Before The Funeral; 8) Not Quite A Yes; 9) Piglet; 10)
Afterwards; 11) My Favourite Muse; 12) I Would've Liked Me A Lot; 13) The First
Time You're Unfaithful.
There is a giant, if stealthy, leap from Arab
Strap's first album to the «sophomore» follow-up. What began as a vague,
flimsily executed gimmick, unsure of its future, managed to get nursed and
nurtured into a full-blown musical philosophy. Which, funny enough, has the
same first Greek root as Philophobia
— funny, but not entirely a coincidence, because the album title is clearly an
intentional indication that Moffat and Middleton demand to be taken seriously.
This is a distinct possibility, especially now
that they have taken a small step away from the temptations of the lo-fi
approach, enough to make us clearly see that they are certainly making music, not just ambient noise as a
backdrop for stoned memories of booze and sex. In fact, Philophobia can pretty well be enjoyed even without knowing that
there is anything in there about booze and sex — although that's pretty hard
considering how much Moffat's lyrics are always in your face (the first lines
of the first song were specially designed to be quoted in every review of the
album, and so they were; I'll be different for difference sake and not play
along, you'll just have to hear 'Packs Of Three' for yourself).
It's not as if the words are consistently poor,
they just become predictable after a while, with almost each song structured
along the same formula: «Now I'll be very introspective and romantic and
spiritual / And now I'll gross the nice ladies out with some awfully blunt
dirty remark / And then I'll get all deep and psychological on you again /
Yeah, I watched one too many Bergman films at the local arthouse venue, you
have a problem with that?» As thirteen well-polished chapters for the Book of
Arab Strap of the Old Testament for Hipsters, it's all fine, but getting
through all of them in one sitting is a bit like trying to swallow up Leviticus
in a similar way.
Anyway, the music
itself, without the vocals spewing out their niceties and their turds in
regular turn, has grown into something idiosyncratic. Now they are taking their
cues from the likes of Joy Division, more precisely, stuff like 'Eternal' —
slow, lazy, but rhythmic songs with deep, echoey overdubs gnawing away at your
subconscious while in the forefront, there is something innocently generic
going on, most often, one of their derivative folksy acoustic chord sequences.
Only occasionally the roles are reversed, as on 'I Would've Liked Me A Lot', a
seven-minute dirge driven by a minimal piano melody while the background is
occupied with creaky guitars and sound effects. Real moody melody, too.
What's more important, neither that melody nor any
of the others really feel overlong, because, frankly speaking, the idea of time sort of feels ridiculous with
these guys. Space and time normally merge when you are under the influence of
substances, but Arab Strap test that particular idiom when you don't even need
substances to get rid of those contexts. They have turned into professional
mesmerizers, and this time, not even something like 'General Plea To A
Girlfriend' can get around to rip you out of this numbed state — tune after
tune just slithers up to you like one more coil of a constrictor snake. Crappy,
but creepy.
Technically, it is hard to accuse Philophobia of absolute sameness: there
is a wide range of instruments tested out, from brass to organs to cellos,
there is even a girl vocalist guest starring on 'Afterwards' (Adele Bethel,
soon-to-be of Sons And Daughters, another indie act from the Glasgow scene),
but if the overall sound has proved
its independence and individuality, the songs
certainly have not and do not deserve to be discussed on their own. The
important question is: does the album invoke
real «philophobia», or is it a cure for one? Or is it, perhaps, supposed to
reflect the troubled feelings of our confused generation that keeps looking for
love but only finds cheap sex instead? (Probably not, or else the album would
have gone platinum faster than one could pronounce the word
"philophobia"). Until the answers are found, I'd rather not even rate
this sort of music. It simply refuses to react with my thumbs.
MAD FOR SADNESS (1999)
1) Intro/My Favourite Muse; 2)
Packs Of Three; 3) New Birds; 4) Toy Fights; 5) Here We Go; 6) Phone Me Tomorrow;
7) Girls Of Summer; 8) Piglet; 9) Blood; 10) Afterwards.
«Arab Strap Live» is somewhat of an oxymoron;
having made a point of always sounding dead in the studio, it is a priori
unclear what sort of nice change a transfer to the live setting could make. Nor
does it seem like a good sign when you look upon the track listing — with six
songs out of ten reprising freshly released material from Philophobia with more or less the same time length for each of the
numbers (the actual show was recorded September 21st, 1998, at the Queen Elizabeth
Hall in London).
Confusingly, Mad For Sadness is Arab Strap's best album from the «formative»
period. Which is not to say it is generally accessible or shows you any of the
band's sides you are not already familiar with. But if a magician were given a
copy of Philophobia and told, «Do
whatever is in your power to improve upon the convincing force and coolness
factor of this stuff without making it sound like somebody else», Mad For Sadness would be the eventual
result, no doubt.
First, their live sound is recorded better than
its studio equivalent. Maybe it's the added bonus of the Queen Elizabeth Hall,
but somehow the instruments start reclaiming territory that, in the studio,
used to be dominated exclusively by Moffat's incessant grumbling. From the very
start, check out Middleton's guitar work on 'My Favourite Muse'. The instrument
plays, resonates, rings, echoes, generates mood and tension, whereas in the
studio all that really got through was the goddamn bass. Sure, it's not a
Jimmy Page-type landscape or even The Edge-style we're talking here, but not
before taking a good sniff of this record would you believe that these guys
have any sort of use for the guitar other than providing monotonous old
tradition-grounded accompaniment.
Second, out of no other feeling, I believe,
than pity for the audiences they vary the volume levels a bit. 'New Birds', as
it turns out, had a jarring grunge-like section on the original release as
well, but I didn't even remember this
when the transition hit me rock-hard on Sadness
— because they did hit it harder, and, again, where the original was mostly
just deafening bass and power chords, here there is an extra psychedelic guitar
melody played in the background (not sure how they manage two guitars, but a
fellow named Gary Miller is credited as responsible for bass and David Gow for
drums). All of a sudden... they rock!
Oddly attractive.
This sudden embracing of dynamics reaches its
peak with the eight-minute reworking of an old EP-only track, 'Girls Of
Summer', which starts out as a morose stoner jam, but then suddenly gets
transformed into a Cure-style dance-of-death thing, going from ringing echoey
loops to grunge and back, then eventually picking up speed and metamorphosing
into an almost techno style — and Moffat's «singing» lasts only for the first
two minutes.
In addition, the setlist is about as strong as
it could ever be (concentrating on stuff like 'Here We Go', whose lonely piano
drip-drip-drips at the end are a classic Arab Strap-style hook), Adele Bethel
reprises her guest vocal spot on 'Afterwards', and the live drumming is a real
heart-warmer after the intellectually annoying drum machines of the studio
recordings (although even during the live show they occasionally turn on the
tapes). All of this adds up to the first unequivocal thumbs up in this band's history —
not a big big deal, but if they really have transcended generic indie values in
this setting, and I think they have, a bigger one than most of us would think.
ELEPHANT SHOE (1999)
1) Cherubs; 2) One Four Seven
One; 3) Pyjamas; 4) Autumnal; 5) Leave The Day Free; 6) Direction Of Strong
Man; 7) Tanned; 8) Aries The Ram; 9) The Drinking Eye; 10) Pro-(Your) Life; 11)
Hello Daylight.
This is where the formula starts to get
seriously annoying; not coincidentally, Elephant
Shoe is occasionally hailed as Arab Strap's masterpiece, because one man's
serious inflammation of all points of annoyance is another man's acute
stimulation of all points of exuberance. People from all sorts of circles were
more than happy to rave about the record simply because, from an ideological
point, it was such an attractive hipster's paradise.
In other words, if your standard model of
behaviour involves permanently getting sloshed at the local pub (nightclub /
bar / gay bar / subway station, depending on areal circumstances), coming home
no earlier than 4 a.m., conducting all other-sex relationships from a purely physiological
point of view (fuck love anyway, since love demands kindness and to be kind is
uncool), and limiting your human functions to poorly articulated blabber that
tries to mold together some sort of «soul» out of sheer animal instinct — then Elephant Shoe is the next chapter in
your personal Bible. Different from the previous one only in that there is just
a wee bit less brutal sexual imagery and just a wee bit more vague thoughts
about the future (e. g. 'Autumnal', on which Moffat's /anti-/hero even
considers having children — "we've already named the seeds I'll be
sowing" — but then again no, what with 'Pro-(Your) Life' certifying that
"the time's not right" and that "you just have to accept
mistakes happen". Which is all too well: I shudder to think of the poor
fate that would befall the anti-hero's children... not that it ain't happening
in real life all too often).
I cannot state that this attitude is not
conveyed well enough. It must be, since it has captivated so many people who
can relate to it, or, rather, who wish
they could relate to it. But it is not conveyed well enough to convert me the
way, for instance, a 'My Sweet Lord' is able to awaken my inner churchgoer
(sure he goes back to sleep right after the song is over, but while it's on,
it's a doggone wonderful feeling all the same). And from this I assume that
either I really, really, really passionately hate this attitude with a
vengy-vengeance — or that Elephant Shoe's
side effect of boredom is simply too overwhelming to help that other little guy
come awake.
Because, back in the studio again, Moffat and
Middleton are back to their old tricks. Five, six, seven-minute long songs
basically run on one, at best two, looped musical ideas with not even a single
atmospheric build-up in sight. And they aren't even beautiful musical ideas, like, for instance, the coda to the
Beatles' 'I Want You' whose chords puncture my depression centers all the time.
They're... okay musical ideas.
Ambient, dreamy, but not genius. Besides, I think that even the Beatles, had
they suddenly come up with the bizarre idea of recording a whole LP of 'I Want
You'-like songs, would not manage to sustain anybody's interest for one whole
hour.
The best I can say about Elephant Shoe is it ain't too frustrating if you just take it as
background accompaniment. Quiet, relaxing, inobtrusive sonic stuff that sets a
good mood for killing some time while surfing on the Internet or playing
Minesweeper or even working. And that's also what helps you to miss out on all
of its stoned cultural philosophy — and consider all those Pitchfork and AMG
reviews as manifestations of pretentious idiocy — and, eventually, contribute
towards building a bright new world for all tomorrow's children. Delighted to
give this a thumbs
down.
THE RED THREAD (2001)
1) Amor Veneris; 2) Last
Orders; 3) Scenery; 4) The Devil-Tips; 5) The Long Sea; 6) Love Detective; 7)
Infrared; 8) Screaming In The Trees; 9) Haunt Me; 10) Turbulence.
It is always inspiring to find a juicy bit of
somebody else's phrasing to pick and tear at the start of a critical review,
and damn corporate ethics to hell. So this time I will unscrupulously pick on an
old fellow reviewer, who once praised The
Red Thread as follows: «...only those with working hearts will appreciate
or understand this awesome mix of emotion, disenchantment, and melody».
Despite all the respect that said reviewer
usually commands on my part, my guess here is that, perhaps, a working heart is
a necessary but not sufficient condition to appreciate or
understand this... whatever he said, anyway. At least, certainly not sufficient
if you view The Red Thread in
context rather than on its own. On its own, Arab Strap's usual unusualness may
paralyze you the way it must have paralyzed latecomers in 2001; in context,
it's just more of the same old same old from Scotland's famous propagators of
the dazed and confused.
Except it's even worse than the already
overrated Elephant Shoe. If you do
not approach it as purely background muzak — and why should you? if you want
background muzak, just throw on some Tangerine Dream — it is simply
excruciatingly long. Each song, on the average, occupies around five or six
minutes of sonic space so as to implant exactly one (1) musical idea (usually, not a very awesome one) in your
brain.
'Screaming In The Trees', for instance, opens
with a moderately complex guitar phrase à
la Lou Reed that must have taken approximately as much time to write as it
took to strum it out for the first time. That is, about seven seconds. After
that, nothing else happens except for
a few murky «lost-in-the-woods» keyboard whooshes and hushes... for six minutes. Hypnotic? Mesmerizing?
Spellbinding? My goodness, and to think that in my innocent teenage days I used
to think of 'The End' as «boring». Jim Morrison's ramblings, next to this
exercise in bland minimalism, have all the strength of a titanic Wagner finale.
Perhaps if each and every song on here were cut
in half (and the really long ones cropped by one third), I would be more
sympathetic. Middleton's musical creativity is never stunning, but it is rarely
altogether worthless. 'Turbulence', for the first couple of minutes, is
convincingly moody — an odd splicing of a near-techno rhythm with dark, misanthropic
bass and a quirky use of scratch
instead of a real guitar melody. Any working heart could appreciate that. But
for eight minutes? With nothing but another batch of speeding ghost keyboard
overdubs for extra entertainment? Do they really think that only that sort of length makes the whole
thing artistic? Is it supposed to help those who long to prolong a special sort
of trance? If it is supposed to be
trance-inducing, why do they bother to come up with lyrics in the first
place?..
Speaking of lyrics, as usual, Moffat comes up
with another ingenious bunch of drink-fueled imagery, but, just like the
music, the words, too, are getting old. The poet cuts down a bit on crudeness
and sheer shock value, which is laudable, but this does not mean that the Holy
Duality of Booze and Sex is in danger of being replaced by any other central
themes. 'Love Detective' is the one people quote the most, only because it sort
of tells an almost explicit story about rummaging through your loved one's
diaries and learning about her secret affairs. But, uh, so what? The song
itself is as mind-numbing as everything else on here.
In short, The
Red Thread is simply the epitome of everything that can go wrong with a
mood-oriented album even when it's
run by a couple of not-untalented musicians. As much as I am disgusted by Arab
Strap's general philosophy, I concede that it can be done skilfully, and has been done by them skilfully both
before and after this record. This,
however, I cannot even accept as background music; with each and every good
idea on the record degenerating into crap less than midway through, it's easily
the firmest thumbs
down I could ever show these guys.
MONDAY AT THE HUG & PINT (2003)
1) The Shy Retirer; 2)
Meanwhile, At The Bar, A Drunkard Muses; 3) Fucking Little Bastards; 4)
Peep-Peep; 5) Flirt; 6) Who Named The Days; 7) Loch Leven Intro; 8) Loch Leven;
9) Glue; 10) Act Of War; 11) Serenade; 12) The Week Never Starts Around Here;
13) Pica Luna.
If there is one album from Arab Strap that I
could see myself willingly returning to in the future, it is Mad For Sadness. If there is one album
from Arab Strap that I could see myself unwillingly
returning to in the future — for instance, being held at gunpoint by one of the
band's homicidal fans — it will be Monday
At The Hug & Pint. Not because I could ever see it as a potential
masterpiece; it just sort of sets the wheels in motion where most of their
other records clog them into eternal peace.
A couple years off and a couple side solo
projects later, as the static duo comes back together, there is a slight change
in style and attitude that makes the next batch of results easier to bear and a
bit more captivating. Nothing revolutionary, of course, but it is a bit ironic that the album title, so
perfectly suitable to describe all of their early years, feels a bit obsolete
when it is wrapping up their new material. Because there is a very vague sense
of growing up here, of moving beyond
the primitive barstool philosophy and the monotonous musical exploration of one
single emotional state. Not «diversity» as such, you understand, but a bit of
branching out.
Almost everybody's favourite from the record is
'The Shy Retirer', and I agree: it is as perfect an opener for an Arab Strap
record as could ever be hoped for, setting a light, modestly active, and very musical tone for the entire record. The
pseudo-techno dance rhythm is not the main point (in the past, Arab Strap had
many times proved that they could be dead boring at any chosen tempo); the main
point is the handsome chamber pop arrangement, with guitar and strings locked
onto each other in an almost soaring
(for Arab Strap's standards, that is) embrace — and it does not hurt that the
lyrics, for once, drop all the shock value and simply concentrate on the
feelings — and there is, what, optimism
in the air?
No, it is not as if Moffat and Middleton, all
of a sudden, decided to let go of the darkness: it rears its wings already on
the third track, blatantly called 'Fucking Little Bastards' and jarring the environment
with distortion, feedback, and fragile violins lost in a white noise tsunami.
But there is more balance between dark and light here than ever before, and
that may indicate that they are finally on their way to renounce caveman
teenage excess in favour of something more reasonable... for instance, a tacit
recognition of the fact that life as such is not reducible to side effects of one's ingrained booze and sex
program?
It is for these little rays of light that some
hardcore fans anathemized the album and ran back to their old scratched copies
of The Red Thread. In the process,
they missed the obvious (to me, at least) fact that Moffat and Middleton have
become more interested in writing music. 'Flirt', for instance, whose main
acoustic riff + spooky slide overtones is a terrific combination. The gorgeous
violin solo on 'Who Named The Days'. A sudden decision to embrace their
Scottish legacy with the bagpipe intro to 'Loch Leven'. The oddly Dylan-esque
flavour of 'The Week Never Starts Around Here'. There is plenty to enjoy on
here in a sober mood — unfortunately, most people had already acquired a Pavlov
reflex that associates the first note on an Arab Strap album with the uncorking
of a bottle of brandy. Not that it's anybody's fault but Arab Strap's own, of
course.
And not that Monday At The Hug & Pint is all that great an album, either:
the second half in particular revolves almost entirely around slow-tempo tunes
heavily dominated by pretty, but very similar violin patterns. 'Who Named The
Days' seems particularly inspired to me, but the rest gets fairly lost against
its superiority and, once again, eventually settles into background muzak.
Still, it has its share of surprises, which is particularly surprising for such
a totally surpriseless band as Arab Strap used to be; and the lyrics, for once,
are well worth studying ("sex without love is a good ride worth trying,
but love without sex is second only to dying" should probably make it into
history books). Thumbs
up. Honest.
THE LAST ROMANCE (2005)
1) Stink; 2) (If There's) No
Hope For Us; 3) Chat In Amsterdam, Winter 2003; 4) Don't Ask Me To Dance; 5) Confessions
Of A Big Brother; 6) Come Round And Love Me; 7) Speed-Date; 8) Dream Sequence;
9) Fine Tuning; 10) There Is No Ending; 11*) El Paso Song; 12*) Go Back To The
Sea.
Arab Strap may not have been the best band in
the world, or even the best band in Scotland, but the general outlook of their
output is bizarre enough to guarantee them a free ride on the musical history
train all by itself. For instance, how does one really explain the fact that it
took them ten years of essentially re-writing the same old dirge in order to
get around to an album significantly
different from the rest — and then disband, as if that were their ultimate goal,
and now that the goal has been achieved, we can all happily go home?
No drum machines — at all. Plenty of fast,
driving tempos to break up the funeral procession style every time it threatens
to annul the differences between songs. Aidan Moffat's occasional attempts to
modulate his voice into a sonic flow that, with a bit of a stretch, could be
called «singing» (and generally on-key at that). Even some sort of moderately
optimistic vibe, most clearly evident on the fanfare-driven album closer 'There
Is No Ending'. And yet, at the same time, the original spirit of Arab Strap is
fully preserved: any accusations of «falling in with the alt-rock crowd» would
be completely ridiculous, because the trademarks — mantra-folk acoustic riffs,
somber violin counter-melodies, dark lyrical topics revolving around alcohol
intake and animalistic copulation, etc. — are all there.
More importantly, after a few listens, the
album does come across as the final
stage of a journey through various stages of one's self-consciousness. As
boring as it may be for some of the young 'uns, a thing called responsibility enters the picture:
responsibility both from a musical point of view, as the album is made more
generally accessible without sacrificing artistic integrity, and a
general-artistic point of view as well. To put it simply, the point of The Last Romance is to show that Moffat
and Middleton nowadays do give a fuck
about what's going on, contrary to all those early years when they not only
didn't, but considered it cool to let all their fans love them exactly for the
fact that they didn't.
Hence, 'Confessions Of A Big Brother', which,
in a way, may be the duo's masterpiece: a cleanly, near-gorgeously recorded
acoustic ballad, with Moffat's lines occasionally echoed by a «baroque» cello
part — beginning with the line "I used to be so proud of thinking I was
such a liar", but ending with the realization that "I don't want to
spoil your fun, but you don't have to hurt someone". And somehow it makes
you feel that, perhaps, from time to time, there does arise a need to spurt out
a morally positive truism instead of a morally neutral, or shock-value morally
negative, genius-quality innovative string of words.
'Dream Sequence', despite the need to
incorporate some obligatory dirty imagery (even pure romantic love for these
guys is undetachable from golden showers), is essentially a sentimental lyrical
anthem, whose main piano melody line is stately rather than sad, uplifting
rather than depressing. On 'Fine Tuning', another pleasant acoustic ballad,
Moffat openly admits that "You're useless at drinking, but these days I've
been thinking I doubt we're going to need it" — abstinence detected! And
then, as the guitars, organs, and mighty brass of 'There Is No Ending' weave
out a near-symphonic melody, each few bars of which descend into a satisfyingly
conclusive mood, what we hear is: "Not everything must end, not every
romance must descend, not every lover's pact decays, not every sad mistake
replays". Now that's even more
optimistic than what the late George Harrison used to tell us about all the
things that must pass, and the late George Harrison, in the long run, was a
fairly optimistic kind of fellow.
Whether it is Arab Strap's friendship with
Mogwai (whose keyboard player Barry Burns actually guests on the album), or
just the basic process of growing up that is responsible for this change of
attitude is nowhere near as important as the fact that The Last Romance does
work terribly well as a swan song, and that even some of the band's most
unbearable albums, conceptually, gain from its existence — with this last
thread, they are all joined together in one meaningful whole. But do not take
this as an advice to begin your
acquaintance with these guys with this record: no matter how accessible it is,
it really only makes sense within the overall context. In order to like The Last Romance, I had first to hate The Red Thread.
Of course, if you happen to like The Red Thread, you will have to wait
your turn to grow up to like The Last
Romance — otherwise, it will be too sissy-pissy for your hipster tastes.
But as for me, I happily award a thumbs up both to the record, and, with it, to the
entire career of these two awful Scots. And, for the record, since their
parting ways, both have had solo careers, of which Malcolm Middleton's seems
not only to have been the more productive, but also the more worthy in general:
his solo albums pick up quite well from the «freshly grown-up» stage of The Last Romance and proceed from
there — highly recommended, although I have no idea if these here reviews will
ever get around to them.
BLACK EARTH (1996)
1) Bury Me An Angel; 2) Dark
Insanity; 3) Eureka; 4) Idolatress; 5) Cosmic Retribution; 6) Demoniality; 7) Transmigration
Macabre; 8) Time Capsule; 9) Fields Of Desolation.
Death is really quite a brawny fellow — it
likes to kick ass all over the place. This is the basic message of Arch Enemy,
the AC/DC of death metal, Sweden's pride and joy. Slow, moody, «artsy»,
creepy-crawly atmospheric suites are not for these guys. Brothers Michael and
Christopher Amott, bass player Johan Liiva, and drummer Daniel Erlandsson are
here to punch your eardrums into oblivion and race your heart to total
exhaustion, if you are ready to accept their faith.
However, despite the fact that most of the
players already came with established pedigrees (Michael Amott, in particular,
played with «goregrind» pioneers Carcass), so that Arch Enemy was dubbed a
«supergroup» upon formation, this debut album is not particularly impressive.
(Sure it got rave reviews in metal-oriented press, but the day I start rating
metal albums by the standards of dedicated metal fans is the day I stop rating
any non-metal albums by any
standards). It is not laughable, and that is already a compliment; but this
here section is definitely not
granted to Arch Enemy because of Black
Earth.
Basically, this is rather standard-fare
«melodic» death metal — with rather rotten melodies, for that matter. Lots of
fast demonic riff-driven rockers, but the riffs themselves are only so-so, and
even when they are slightly over so-so, drummer Daniel Erlandsson hits his
skins so hard that the twin guitar attack is almost completely muffled. Fast,
loud, aggressive, monotonous, and, for the most part, utterly unmemorable. It
does not help matters much that one (1) of the songs has a brief genre-allowed
acoustic interlude ('Cosmic Retribution'), and that two (2) of the tracks represent
brief instrumental overludes (one brutal-metallic and one other acoustic). None
of these are particularly interesting either.
All the vocals are handled exclusively by
bassist Johan Liiva, and this is both good and bad. Bad, because his «growling»
is not very distinctive: he can handle it, but nothing more. Good, because his
weak growls tend to get lost among all the rucus, without distracting the
listener from the music — provided the listener does not want to be distracted. Basically, I just treat Liiva's growling as
a slightly annoying background noise that can be overlooked. A lamentable side
effect.
Still, what cannot
be overlooked is the fact Black Earth
is just a seriously professional, yet utterly generic record. It would take
some time for Arch Enemy to find their own voice. But we are not quite there
yet; thumbs
down for the moment. (PS: The re-issue version has a bunch of bonus
tracks, including a cover of Iron Maiden's 'Aces High' — nice gesture,
respectable homage, but nothing particularly eyebrow-raising either).
STIGMATA (1998)
1) Beast Of Man; 2) Stigmata;
3) Sinister Mephisto; 4) Dark Of The Sun; 5) Let The Killing Begin; 6) Black
Earth; 7) Tears Of The Dead; 8) Vox Stellarum; 9) Bridge Of Destiny.
Everyone agrees that the band's sophomore
effort, Stigmata, essentially sounds
the same as the debut. From there, people fall into two camps — those who think
it sounds better, and those that think the opposite. I do not think the
opposite. In fact, strange as it may seem, I liked it in most of the same «places» in which I actively disliked Black Earth.
I may be mistaken, but if you play the openers
('Bury Me An Angel' and 'Beast Of Man', respectively) back to back, it seems
that the tag «melodic death metal» clings much firmer to the latter. Black Earth had too much generic
hardcore/thrash influence in it: all low notes and careless brutality. 'Beast
Of Man' is far more interesting, alternating speedy thrash runs with genuinely
melodic lines, with a clever mix that allows the «melodic» lead guitar and the
thrash riffs to complement each other rather than mesh into one turgid mess.
The same is true of at least three or four
other monster rockers on the album. The production throughout is much clearer, showing that the
Sabbath/Metallica influences were not wasted, after all (particularly on
'Sinister Mephisto' and the title track). Instead of generic acoustic
interludes, we now get a stranger, more curious trick of inserting brief
«not-belonging» bits of a totally different melody in between the «regular»
bars — e. g. on 'Let The Killing Begin', whose second part, as a result,
acquires a «progressive» sheen, to good effect. And the brief instrumental
links themselves are either pleasantly symphonic in scope (the title track) or
arena-rockish in a fairly tasteful manner ('Vox Stellarum').
Unlike Black
Earth, Stigmata is worth
additional listens — behind the predictably and expectedly monotonous
approach, there is some very strong songwriting here, as no single song moves
through fewer than three or four different alternating sections, and the Amott
brothers show themselves well worthy of their twin guitar teachers from Iron
Maiden. And, on a final note, 'Bridge Of Destiny' ends with a moody «epic»
instrumental section that will be greeted heartily by any classic rock fan, no
matter what his attitude towards death metal might be.
The weak point is still the vocalist, but,
frankly, I do not even hear Liiva's voice all that much: it's just some
disconcerting grumble somewhere in the back part of the speaker, and it doesn't
even manage to disconcert all that much — so I'd love to say something like,
«this would have worked out so much better as a completely instrumental album»,
but the fact is that my ears themselves already
perceive it as a completely instrumental album. Also, for the record, most of
the drum parts here were recorded not by the band's regular player, Daniel
Erlandsson, but by session guy Peter Wildoer (don't ask why); and new member
Martin Bengtsson relieves Liiva from his bass playing duties so that he can now
concentrate on the singing (money wasted on the wind, if you ask me). Also,
it's a modest thumbs
up — modest, because we're
not quite there yet.
BURNING BRIDGES (1999)
1) The Immortal; 2) Dead
Inside; 3) Pilgrim; 4) Silverwing; 5) Demonic Science; 6) Seed Of Hate; 7)
Angelclaw; 8) Burning Bridges; 9) Diva Satanica; 10) Hydra.
The final album with Liiva on vocals –
surprisingly, this is the turning
point where Arch Enemy becomes an unstoppable machine for the production of
some of the catchiest musical brutality ever offered to human ears.
Substance-wise, there is no big difference from Stigmata; the difference is in the details — the riffs become more
complex, more interesting, and there's, like, two or three of them within the
average song on Burning Bridges.
Since I am quite far removed from a metalhead,
it took me several listens to «get» the greatness of this stuff. You still have
to ignore the vocals (Liiva can hardly even «growl» on here at all; most of the
time, the «singing» just degenerates into tuneless hardcore screeching), and
get used to the fact that these guys are not
going to lead you astray by arranging a meeting with the spirits of Art, Depth,
and Intellectual Relevance. But in the end, most of these tunes are artsy,
deep, and even «intellectually relevant» in their own crazy way.
The best thing about Bridges is the absolute lack of slack. Seven out of eight songs
originally included on the album push forward at either simply fast, or
ultra-fast tempos; only the title track ends the record on a «monstruously
slow» note, with a long «operatic» coda that is its only direct nod to
classical influences — the album ends on nothing less than a
piano-and-Mellotron (!) driven passage which is, I guess, supposed to hint at
the existence (somewhere really far away) of Paradise, in addition to the
all-pervading Hell. (For the record, the keyboards are played by guest musician
Per Wiberg, who would go on to play with the band on their next albums, as well
as spend six years with Opeth as full-time member).
But, like I said, that is a tiny exception. As
for the loud, fast, riff-heavy rockers, it is useless to discuss them
individually. After a while, the individuality of the tracks does begin to step
out of the general din, and I would say that the best riffs are on 'Seed Of
Hate' (I like the Entwistl-ian «gurgling» descending bass/guitar runs competing
with the lead riff), 'The Immortal' (still plenty of thrash influence, but even
the trash riffs are easily discernible note-for-note here), and 'Silverwing' (that
opening riff must have been ripped off some classical piece) — and you could
say that these are the worst riffs, and pick 'Pilgrim' or 'Angelclaw' instead,
and I wouldn't give a damn.
Simply put, it's a kick-ass metalfest all the
way, and that's the way it should be — if you are intent on maintaining one
very limited style over forty minutes, you might as well grind it up to the
max; and I am always ready to take off my hat before anyone who is able to grind it up to the max, regardless of mood,
attitude, or genre. From that point of view, Burning Bridges is a flawless masterpiece of «melodic
death-thrash-metal». From other points of view, it may be samey, boring, and
lyrically / substantially idiotic. But, as it just happens, these are not
included in my thumbs
up.
BURNING JAPAN LIVE (2000)
1) The Immortal; 2) Dark
Insanity; 3) Dead Inside; 4) Diva Satanica; 5) Pilgrim; 6) Silverwing; 7) Beast
Of Man; 8) Bass Intro/Tears Of The Dead; 9) Bridge Of Destiny; 10)
Transmigration Macabre; 11) Angelclaw.
It's a lucky thing I have to review this on New
Year's Eve — too many things to wrap up, too little energy to spend on music
writing, and here comes a live album that is absolutely impossible to write
about in long, scrutinizing detail anyway.
So, briefly and up to the point. These
recordings were made in October/November 1999, during several shows in Tokyo.
The line-up is the same as on Burning
Bridges, meaning that this is the officially last album to feature Liiva as
vocalist. The setlist is predictably heavily tilted towards Burning Bridges, with Stigmata only represented by three
songs and Black Earth by two. The
performances are practically indistinguishable from the studio originals. And
the audience is absolutely inaudible, except in between tracks. Happy New
Year!
PS. Liiva's vocals are actually far more
«shiver-inducing» during his stage announcements than when he is singing. So
shiver-inducing, in fact, that I am embarrassed to play this album in front of
any person of any level of intelligence without first submitting the person in
question to a long lecture about artistic conventionalities, traditions,
customs, and rituals. Want to increase your tolerance levels? Try death metal.
Beats modern art and bestiality all
to hell.
PPS. No, but seriously, it is a good album, if
only you take your expectations off the «live» register (it is admirable that
they can play with such speed and complexity on stage, but, presumably, much of
their studio output was recorded «live in the studio» as well, so no
outstanding feats of originality here). Excellent production — certainly better
than on Black Earth, which is why
'Dark Insanity' is more of a success here than it was over there — and a strong
setlist. And yet, completely unnecessary for non-fans.
WAGES OF SIN (2001)
1) Enemy Within; 2) Burning
Angel; 3) Heart Of Darkness; 4) Ravenous; 5) Savage Messiah; 6) Dead Bury Their
Dead; 7) Web Of Lies; 8) The First Deadly Sin; 9) Behind The Smile; 10) Snow
Bound; 11) Shadows And Dust.
«Commercial death metal» may sound like an odd
oxymoron, but if there ever was such a thing in the first place, Wages Of Sin would be the perfect
candidate for the top spot. Apparently, the band changed their standard tuning
for the record, switching to the key of C, and this (or something else; I'm no
musicologist) resulted in a slightly less grueling, perhaps even «poppier»
sound — the darkness and brutality remains, but the insane aggression is
somewhat tamed; and the lead guitar lines acquire a more classically-influenced
sheen, as if someone were secretly throwing in transcriptions of XIXth century
symphonic phrasing, from time to time. (A usual thing for «power metal», but
one which true death-grinders tend to avoid, lest they be perceived as way too
incongruously happy, for their own good).
But obviously, the most «commercial» trick they
have played on us all here is replacing Johan Liiva with a new female vocalist — the «blonde bombshell
of metal», Angela Nathalie Gossow. Now I have no idea how widespread death
metal growling is among women these
days, once the role model has been set up, but fact is, in 2001 the Cookie
Monster could hardly boast any significant amount of female offspring. Gossow
might not have been there first, but she was clearly the best, and this could
not help but bump up general interest in the band.
Without a doubt, Gossow is fabulous; the only
argument that fans of Liiva might have against her is that she has the audacity
of pulling the listener's attention too far away from the actual music onto
herself, whereas Liiva never did. So she clearly has much more of an ego, and
there is nothing wrong with that: the lady deserves all that attention. Unlike
Liiva, she actually manages to tune
her growling, and come the closest to «singing» in that voice that I have ever
heard from any other growler. Obviously, the singing range is limited by
definition by those registers, but it still makes her sound like a «natural» —
usually, the effect from «death vocals» is simply comical; Gossow sounds like
she was born that way, and I actually
had to calm myself down by locating a couple interviews with the dame in which
she speaks with her normal voice, just to make certain that Rosemary's Baby truly is a piece of fiction.
What about the songs, then? This is where one may find the heart of
discontent. They are generally not as impressive or memorable as the ones on Burning Bridges. The only riff that
stayed home with me after three listens was 'Dead Bury Their Dead', due to an
odd resemblance to the main theme of 'The 39 Lashes' from Jesus Christ Superstar (! — yes, stranger things have happened). The syncopated passages
on 'Ravenous' were also impressive, but the main melody there seems to be
merely a variation on the earlier 'Diva Satanica'. And there is a terrific
«growling» guitar lick woven into the texture of 'Behind The Smile', lifted
from the intro to Black Sabbath's 'Iron Man', but that's hardly enough to raise
the song to five-star status.
One could also mention some minor details — the
album opens with an icy, echoey piano intro, the only moment of relative
tenderness, but still ominous from the very first second; 'Savage Messiah' is
the only song to feature some sort of a «build-up», steadily growing from a
menacing guitar-and-harmonica intro to the usual all-out fury; and 'Snow Bound'
is a brief power-metal style instrumental. The rest is Jackhammer Incarnate. Thumbs up:
even if individual songs may be disappointing, Gossow's presence glues them all
together in one unforgettable Satanic feast. Not for the faint of heart, though
— and do not try this at home, unless
you intend to make Twitter your only means of communication to the end of your
days.
ANTHEMS OF REBELLION (2003)
1) Tear Down The Walls; 2) Silent
Wars; 3) We Will Rise; 4) Dead Eyes See No Future; 5) Instinct; 6) Leader Of The
Rats; 7) Exist To Exit; 8) Marching On A Dead End Road; 9) Despicable Heroes;
10) End Of The Line; 11) Dehumanization; 12) Anthems; 13) Saints And Sinners.
At this point, Arch Enemy's albums become more
or less interchangeable. With Gossow perfectly filling up the last gap in the
puzzle, the formula was completed, and the Amott brothers adopted the «AC/DC
mentality». As long as their fingers could keep up the speed, their brains –
supply a steady stream of new riffs, and the blonde lady's larynx – serve as
Lucifer's personal megaphone, why change anything?
Just keep the fan happy.
Thus, whether a particular post-Wages Of Sin record sounds good or bad
essentially depends on how many memorable riffs it yields — a fairly old story,
that one — unless one just digs their established groove all by itself, in
which case every record since Wages Of
Sin is an inevitable must-hear. I am impressed by the groove — the
guitarists and the devil-girl mesh together in a generic, but still somewhat
unique manner — yet, of course, I'd also like me a memorable riff or two, or
else I'd rather just keep relistening to the same Back In Black.
Fortunately, Anthems Of Rebellion has just enough of these to keep the customer
satisfied. Although the title is constructed as the same kind of noun phrase
as Wages Of Sin, it does a good job
of reminding us that these guys are not so much your run-of-the-mill
scary-satanists as they are (ohmygod whodathunkthat) Anti-Establishment and
Anti-Conformism, and, other than the album title, they have a fairly good song
here to remind us of it — 'We Will Rise' is certainly an anthem, and of the good kind at that, preferring to kick
ass rather than strew pathos.
It does not hurt that the way Angela growls out
"we will rise" brings on images of zombies rising from graves – even
if, formally, the lyrics simply deal with rebelling against stereotypes. It
does not hurt, either, that the trill-based anthemic melody of the chorus
alternates well with the lean metallic riffage of the verses and an excellent
buildup on the solos. It is, in fact, such a good song I could almost forget
that I never take «growling numbers» seriously — besides, it is hard to imagine
it sung with «clean» vocals.
Other than that, cool riffs may be found in the
intro to 'Dead Eyes See No Future', in the chorus to 'Instinct', and on the
bridge of 'Leader Of The Rats'. (None of these songs seems to be a complete
masterpiece, though). 'Despicable Heroes' opens with an earth-shaking roar and
plays out at the good old breakneck speed. On 'End Of The Line', one of the
Amotts establishes a counterpoint to Gossow by chanting the chorus using clean
vocals – strange, but it does produce a curiously moody effort (or does it
strike me simply by being so unusual?). And the final riff of 'Saints And Sinners'
is so nice in its warped evilness that the brothers cannot even resist the
temptation to spin it for a few more bars, fading it out after all the other
instruments have already finished playing.
In short, Anthems
Of Rebellion has its modest supply of catchy goodies for those who were not
disappointed in Wages Of Sin. Just
ignore the laughable stream of lyrical clichés (although «rebellious»
lyrical clichés are still a good notch ahead of totally corny «satanic»
clichés), which is not that hard to do anyway, unless your brain has a
pre-installed «growl-to-English» translator chip; and who knows, this might
even fall into the «seriously impressive» category, as opposed to the «amusing
metallic weirdos» section. On the whole, though, the ratio of good-to-mediocre
riffage is ever so slightly lower than on Wages
Of Sin; yet this should not be taken as a sign of the band's decline — with
situations like these, it's always a game of chance.
DOOMSDAY MACHINE (2005)
1) Enter The Machine; 2) Taking
Back My Soul; 3) Nemesis; 4) My Apocalypse; 5) Carry The Cross; 6) I Am Legend
/ Out For Blood; 7) Skeleton Dance; 8) Hybrids Of Steel; 9) Mechanic God
Creation; 10) Machtkampf; 11) Slaves Of Yesterday.
No changes in the formula whatsoever, but the
band is still going strong — at least, in the early sections of the record. We
kick off with a somewhat false start: the instrumental 'Enter The Machine'
should, by all means, be setting up a suitably ominous atmosphere, but the lead
lines played over the ironclad rhythm sequences are inexplicably set in a
«stadium rock» pattern — reduce the heaviness a little bit and you could
safely use the result to start off an Asia concert. Seems like someone took
the «melodic» of «melodic death metal» a bit too literally this time.
The situation is immediately corrected on the
next three tracks, which pretty much tell us everything we need to know about
the then-current state of the band. First, 'Taking Back My Soul' prepares the
stage with a nice rollicking art-metal melody. Then it's time for adrenaline
spraying — 'Nemesis' is one of the band's fastest and, at the same time,
tightest-controlled speed-metal runs, sort of the obligatory 'Highway Star' in
the band's catalog. The nasty thing does try to transform itself into a
sing-along martial anthem in the chorus, but at least the thrash-influenced
verses return often enough to forget the bits of pomp.
The centerpiece of the album, however, is track
number four, to my surprise, relatively rarely praised by metalheads — but I
think 'My Apocalypse' is the clear standout on the album and, in fact, the
band's entire catalog. The thunderous, well-sequenced intro recalls Metallica
at their best (and I love the spooky «whooo»-shing ghost-like noises introducing
some of the bars, although I have no idea what they are); and the verses rely
on an oddly math-rock-style syncopated melody that is a Black Sabbath-y
devilish wobble for one second and a King Crimson-ian choppy pattern the very
next. Against this stop-and-start background, Gossow's growling is ever more
potent, and by the time it all culminates in the chorus — "my apocalypse
is near!" — the song becomes one of those very few Arch Enemy tunes whose
«doomsday» aura is possible to take seriously. A genuine breakthrough here, I
would say.
Unfortunately, the band seems to have missed
that impression themselves: after 'My Apocalypse', the album takes a steady
turn for the predictable and the mediocre. The songs are too slow (with the
exception of 'Out For Blood', the only other thrashy piece on the record), too
soft ('Carry The Cross', with its echoey guitar jangle, is almost wimpy by this
band's standards), and too anticlimactic (the decision to fade out the last
track, 'Slaves Of Yesterday', rather than end it with a bang, was clearly a
mistake). Repeated listens bring out craft, but not invention — and even a
rigidly formulaic band needs to invent, or else it will degenerate into endless
re-proving of their point, which has already been proven too many times.
Still, on the strength of those opening numbers
and on the lack of any awful failures, Doomsday
Machine holds up as a decent achievement of the melodic death genre, and
deserves its thumbs
up. I just wish that, as a whole, the LP lived up more to its title
— as it is, only 'My Apocalypse' forms the perfect gift to all fans of December
2012.
RISE OF THE TYRANT (2007)
1) Blood On Your Hands; 2) The
Last Enemy; 3) I Will Live Again; 4) In This Shallow Grave; 5) Revolution
Begins; 6) Rise Of The Tyrant; 7) The Day You Died; 8) Intermezzo
Liberté; 9) Night Falls Fast; 10) The Great Darkness; 11) Vultures.
If I am not mistaken, the average metal-fan
response to Rise Of The Tyrant was
generally more positive than to Doomsday
Machine. The album does pack quite a punch, going ever and ever heavier on
brutality. «Artsy» touches are reduced to an absolute minimum — this time,
'Blood On Your Hands' opens the session without any atmospheric buildups,
getting straight to the point in about five seconds. Acoustic interludes have
been flushed out of existence, and the tempos are very steadily balanced
between «fast» and «lightning fast».
In addition, there is no more double-tracking
on Gossow's vocal parts: all of the growling is recorded «live», in an attempt
to match the unmediated onslaught of a genuine Arch Enemy show. I am not sure
if that was a good decision, though — the double-tracking gave that awesome
growl a surrealistic sheen, as if actual demons were genuinely swooshing around
the room, whereas the «pure» growling on Tyrant,
especially when it rises high above the instrumental din (or during the brief
accappella moments, e.g. "REMEMBER!" on 'Blood On Your Hands'), is
thinner, and thus, more ghost-like; besides, you get to hear better what the
woman is really doing to her throat,
and that makes me a little nervous.
Finally, more than ever before, the lyrics and
moods have focused on issues of freedom-fighting and stuff. The title track is
introduced with a rather lengthy quotation of dialog from Caligula (the scene in which McDowell demands that the Senate
proclaim him God) — and the entire album is permeated with the hyperbolic feeling
of an impending threat of you-know-what. Occasionally, Gossow turns to
«lyrical» subjects ('The Day You Died', a simple goth tale), and at least one
song could be qualified as «straightforwardly suicidal» ('I Will Live Again'),
but overall, it's the same old story: the tyrant rise, the meek shall fall,
revolution is imminent, and, of course, plenty of blood and guts to go 'round.
Same old story, whipped to swirling frenzy.
The only thing that seems to be completely
missing from Rise Of The Tyrant is
interesting songwriting. The basic formula works in the old way, but only
'Blood On Your Hands', I think, has a decent structure and melodic, evocative
lead lines. Everything else is just supertight generic speed runs that merge
with one another in a manner so irritating I do not think I have ever been so
much irritated since listening to Black
Earth. There is nothing here even remotely approaching the creep-of-doom of
'My Apocalypse': as I said, «atmosphere» has been flushed out, and so have
atmospheric riffs, replaced by finger-flashing. Even on tracks like 'The Great
Darkness', mildly enlivened with bits of «medieval» Latin chanting, the guitar
melodies fail to grab.
I mean, for God's sake, if this is called
«melodic death metal», we are at least entitled to hearing some new melodies on each ensuing album,
right or wrong? Up until Doomsday
Machine, such was the case, but here, it isn't even that there is no
«progression» – it seems to be one of those cases in which a formerly
inventive band suddenly gets this ridiculous urge to «get back to basics», and
produce a very «basic» – and a very boring – piece, whose only achievement is
in showing us listeners that it is really hopeless to go against the flow, and
hinder your own development. Well, it is my free right to disrespect this
attitude, and so, in a state of total disrespect, a thumbs down for Rise Of The Tyrant. It doesn't help,
either, that I do not know of any actual tyrants having risen in 2007. Unless
they somehow mean the release of the last Harry Potter book.
TYRANTS OF THE RISING SUN (2008)
1) Intro / Blood On Your Hands;
2) Ravenous; 3) Taking Back My Soul; 4) Dead Eyes See No Future; 5) Dark Insanity;
6) The Day You Died; 7) Christopher Solo; 8) Silverwing; 9) Night Falls Fast;
10) Daniel Solo; 11) Burning Angel; 12) Michael Solo; 13) Dead Bury Their
Dead; 14) Vultures; 15) Enemy Within; 16) Snowbound; 17) Shadows And Dust;
18) Nemesis; 19) We Will Rise; 20) Fields Of Desolation / Outro.
If there is anything the world really needs in
a time of economic crisis and universal depression, it is another live album from a formulaic heavy metal band, recorded in Japan.
For Arch Enemy, it was already the second one, but this time, the scope was
different — two CDs fully matched with a DVD, making it easier to headbang to
the tunes in all the proper places, and making you wonder at the cultural
significance of Ms. Gossow's makeup.
Although Rise
Of The Tyrant gave them a «punny» clue about how to title this new
recording, it is somewhat unfortunate that they did not release it an album
earlier — this way, the setlist is predictably tilted towards their latest
promoted effort, and I would much rather have them play 'My Apocalypse' and
'Out For Blood' than 'Night Falls Fast' and 'Vultures'. But what the heck, at
the bottom of it all, Arch Enemy always play the same way, so it's either
complaining about the total futility of the record — or just enjoying it for
its power, precision, and dedication (the latter especially: even at their most
boring and predictable, Arch Enemy are so dedicated to their craft that this
can sometimes help overlook the lack of hooks).
What you do get to hear is a little bit of
Angela's «natural» voice — yes, she does have one — as the frontlady is
responsible for most of the banter. Whether you would like to hear her sing in that voice is a different matter
— after all, that would make her sound no different from anyone. You also get to hear Michael and Christopher Amott with
solo improvisations (brother Chris, playing in an echo-laden, Gilmour-style
manner, gets my preference over brother Michael and his power metal pathos),
and the drummer guy gets a nice brief rhythmic turn as well.
Highlights would include the opening number
('Blood On Your Hands' actually gains extra power by Angela letting the
audience chant the "REMEMBER!" bit); the show-closing double punch of
'Nemesis' and 'We Will Rise'; and the old Liiva-era material, like
'Silverwing', that Gossow predictably delivers with as much confidence as she
handles everything else. But apart from that, there is little, if anything, to
tell. None of the live versions fall flat next to studio performances, but the
setlist is questionable, which is why the album will probably not work as a
reliable introduction to all the strong sides of the band. Bloodthirsty fans,
though, will not want to miss it.
THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL (2009)
1) The Root Of All Evil
(Intro); 2) Beast Of Man; 3) The Immortal; 4) Diva Satanica; 5) Demonic Science;
6) Bury Me An Angel; 7) Dead Inside; 8) Dark Insanity; 9) Pilgrim; 10) Demoniality;
11) Transmigration Macabre; 12) Silverwing; 13) Bridge Of Destiny.
Uh… well, this certainly does not sound bad,
but the point of this record must have either been to simply buy some time in
preparation for «bigger things», or to show the world, once and for all, just
how much they really care about their old vocalist. Apart from the short
atmospheric intro, all of the tracks are re-recordings from the Liiva era,
naturally, with Angela on vocals instead; an idea possibly triggered by the
successful inclusion of Liiva-era material on the band’s latest live album as
well, where, under Angela’s command, it sounded well in harmony with the rest.
Predictably, all of the songs are very well
played (seasoned fans will tell the minute differences, but my own taste buds
have not been so finely developed for the likes of death metal), the track selection
is strong (concentrating on Burning
Bridges for obvious reasons), the production is far cleaner and clearer
than whatever they used to achieve ten years before, and Gossow does all the
songs justice in her gossowian way.
Still, the idea strikes me as somewhat
unethical. I never cared much for Liiva as a vocalist, and thus, have no reason
to be on the same level of ire as «hardcore» fans who think Arch Enemy «sold
out» when they «hired that chick», but these songs were as much his as they are
of the Amotts (and much more his than
Angela’s). It is one thing to go on singing them in concert — that’s what the
fans want, after all — it is quite another to re-record them in the studio, a
gesture that could easily be interpreted as an invitation to throw the band’s
pre-Angela past out of the window, leaving a few echos as souvenirs. Forget
about Greedo shooting first — this is like a new edition of Star Wars in which
all of Alec Guinness’ scenes have been completely replaced by re-shot sequences
with a much-aged Ewan McGregor, «for the sakes of coherence, continuity, and
credibility throughout the series».
Of course, the analogy is poor if you agree
with me that Gossow is a much more interesting vocalist than Liiva could ever
have hoped to be; so did they really need to rub it in the noses of the fans,
instead of letting bygones be bygones? I do not think I get the point of this
album, and if I do, then it might indeed be «the root of all evil», and, in any
case, I give it a perfect thumbs down — for moral reasons, probably the
first time ever in a heavy metal band review. Let’s just pretend it never
existed and move on.
KHAOS LEGIONS (2011)
1) Khaos Overture; 2) Yesterday
Is Dead And Gone; 3) Bloodstained Cross; 4) Under Black Flags We March; 5) No
Gods, No Masters; 6) City Of The Dead; 7) Through The Eyes Of A Raven; 8) Cruelty
Without Beauty; 9) We Are A Godless Entity; 10) Cult Of Chaos; 11) Thorns In My
Flesh; 12) Turn To Dust; 13) Vengeance Is Mine; 14) Secrets.
Each formula can only live for so long before
its manufacturers run out of oxygen. Technically, Khaos Legions finds Arch Enemy at their ballsiest — loud, brutal,
evil — but no matter where I look, there does not seem to be a single new idea,
and that does not just concern the lack of experimental moments: much worse
than that, there is not one single
riff on here that would seem as if I have never heard it before. And even if I
acknowledge some of these riffs as variations on past successes — after all,
each composer is entitled to variations on his own compositions — they are
dull, un-evocative variations.
One direction in which they could have headed at this time, with a
small bit of hope of getting out of the rut, is «moody». ʽNo Gods, No
Mastersʼ, with its stern mid-tempo and genuinely melodic guitar and
keyboard lead lines, actually ends up more memorable than the «thrashy» anthems
on here. The Amott brothers are talented enough to master «subtle» if they
really feel the need for it, and I am fairly sure that Angela could accommodate
her by-now all-too-familiar growling style to fit that subtleness. But, by and
large, this does not happen on Khaos
Legions.
Instead, what we get is lots and lots of fast
tracks, normally a plus for hard-rocking albums, but in this case they just
merge into one lumpy blur, with nothing to distinguish ʽYesterday Is Dead
And Goneʼ (album opener) from ʽSecretsʼ (album closer). In the
end, the most successful track is probably ʽWe're A Godless Entityʼ,
due to the provocative title and some nice ominous minimalistic bass plinking
from Sharlee D'Angelo. That's just one and a half minutes, though.
In short, this is a serious step down even from
the level of Rise Of The Tyrant, and
that record was no great shakes, either; but at least it had one stone cold death metal classic
(ʽBlood On Your Handsʼ), whereas this
album will, most probably, just go down stone cold; I cannot imagine any of its
songs surviving for long even in the heads of the most devoted metal forgers. Curiously,
the album is said to have sold more copies (in the US at least) than any
previous Arch Enemy record; but I will put that down to the band's general
workhorse attitude — keep it up for long enough, and eventually you'll get
what's coming to you. Besides, who would mind the guys finally making a little
bit of money after all these years of finger-tearing and throat-wearing?
In any case, my thumbs down will hardly make a
difference: hardcore fans will thrive on this stuff as usual, and bypassers do
not need to hear more than one or two albums by this band anyway. Just out of
curiosity, I actually browsed through a half-dozen reviews of Khaos Legions on various metal-related
sites — just to let you know that we probably are in trouble when the review in question (and most of those were
like it) simply gives you some back story («this is the first album of original
material in five years...»), a list of the players and producers, something
along the lines of «to all those who think they lost it, well, they still kick
ass», and a heavy splattering of terms like «sharp riffs», «clear sound»,
«melodic shredding», and «power growl». Yeah, it's all here, I guarantee you
that. For some reason, though, none of these reviewers ever ask themselves the
obvious question: «And what next?».
WAR ETERNAL (2014)
1) Tempore Nihil Sanat; 2)
Never Forgive, Never Forget; 3) War Eternal; 4) As The Pages Burn; 5) No More
Regrets; 6) You Will Know My Name; 7) Graveyard Of Dreams; 8) Stolen Life; 9)
Time Is Black; 10) On And On; 11) Avalanche; 12) Down To Nothing; 13) Not Long
For This World.
As our favorite pop pranksters, the Mael
brothers of Sparks, once said, "Just like everything else in this world,
time wreaks havoc on every girl. What do you do? Throw her away and get a new
one!" Now I have no idea whether Michael Amott is a big Sparks fan, but he
took the Maels' advice quite seriously. In the light of Arch Enemy's continuing
descent into stagnation, Angela Gossow announced her departure from the band
(apparently, an amicable one, as she stayed on as their business manager), and welcomed
her replacement — Alissa White-Gluz (what a name!), former lead vocalist of The
Agonist, up to now Canada's chief competition for Arch Enemy, but apparently no
longer so.
With all due respect to Ms. Gossow and her
decade with the band, this was a good
decision, and not simply for reasons of physical health (growling does take its
toll even among professionals), but also because, well, no offense intended,
growling only takes you that far in
your life: Wages Of Sin was a fun
ride, but we'd learned everything we needed to know about Angela Gossow on that
album and we really haven't learned anything new ever since — at a certain
point, in this sort of genre, the singer ceases to be a personality and becomes
a generic, predictable piece of paraphernalia, merely accompanying the
different riffs and solos.
The catch is that the replacement would have to
be worthy of the predecessor, and it is not every day that a growler of Angela
Gossow caliber comes along. But as much as I am skeptical of the profession in
the first place (and who wouldn't be?), White-Gluz turns out to be God's
unexpectedly generous gift to this band. Where Gossow's growling was almost
genuinely scary in its cartoonish cackling taken to the extremest of extremes,
this Alissa gal approaches the task in a similar, but different manner — I'd
probably define her growling voice as just a tad «sharper» than Gossow's, and
more distinct, to the point where you can occasionally even make out some of
the actual words she is «singing». She seems to have a drop of the punk spirit
in her, too (not surprisingly, she is said to be in a relationship with Doyle
of The Misfits), and there is a «pissed-off / violent» flavor to her growling,
rather than the «infernal / doomsday» attitude of Gossow, which can help take
it more seriously than usual.
Most importantly, though, the introduction of
White-Gluz helps rekindle the band's collective spirit as well. I certainly
cannot vouch that with War Eternal,
Amott and Co. have given us the finest collection of riffs and
classically-influenced melodic passages in 5, 7, or 10 years, since the melodic
basis behind Arch Enemy's work has always been so similar (to say the least).
But every once in a while, you'd have yourself an album that sounded «fresher»
— Wages Of Sin being the most
obvious example — and War Eternal,
despite having the same superficial features as any Arch Enemy album, also has
that «new-beginning» look to it, and not just because of a new singer, but
also because the new singer triggers a new desire to excel in what they do.
That desire does not translate (at least, not
upon my initial attempts to discover them) into writing any exceptional,
«where-the-hell-have-you-been-all-my-life» bits of riffage, but the band's overall
melodic drive seems to have improved, with a large number of symphonic themes
interwoven among the brutal sledgehammering, including no less than three
atmospheric interludes, the last of which, ʽNot Long For This Worldʼ,
provides the album's most memorable and stylishly «heavy requiem»-like theme,
building up crescendo-style and then fading out with a ghostly piano coda that,
gratifyingly, leaves no hope whatsoever for the doomed humanity. The
synthesizer tone responsible for those symphonic elements is certainly
cheesier than if they'd thought of adding real strings (ʽAvalancheʼ
is a good example), but at least it supplies some variety.
Still, the band is really at the top of their
game only when they are at their speediest, their angriest here — which is
where Alissa's infuriated vocals really connect, and you get not too memorable
melodically, but quite impressive stylistically tunes like ʽNever Forgive,
Never Forgetʼ (give it a better set of riffs and it would not be out of
place on an Iron Maiden album) or ʽAs The Pages Burnʼ. When they slow
down, the whole thing occasionally starts dragging, but even there you have
things like the title track, which is like... like a Foreigner arena-rocker
derailed and turned into a death metal anthem. Yes, it's actually hilarious
when you think about it this way.
Fans of White-Gluz' past karma have dared to
complain that she is not given an opportunity to use her clean vocals on the
record (other than a tiny bit of background overdubs on ʽAvalancheʼ),
but this may not have necessarily been due to the band's stubborn conservatism,
but rather to the fact that much, if not most, of the songs were written with a
«growling» delivery in mind before the lineup change — a hypothesis that will be
tested once the band returns to the studio once again. In the meantime, I am
about as heavily excited by War Eternal
as I could find myself excited about a present-day «melodic death metal» album
written and executed in strict accordance with the genre's Procrustean
formula. And that translates to a mild thumbs up, even though far be it from me to
recommend spending too much time on a
record like this, or on modern heavy metal in general, for that matter.
ICKY METTLE (1993)
1) Web In Front; 2) Last Word;
3) Wrong; 4) You And Me; 5) Might; 6) Hate Paste; 7) Fat; 8) Plumb Line; 9) Learo,
You're A Hole; 10) Sickfile; 11) Toast; 12) Backwash; 13) Slow Worm.
«What makes this sound so compelling is the
way it explores the full spectrum of guitar-centric rock, pulling together the
blunt and abrasive with the thoughtful in the musical equivalent of a shotgun
wedding with the bride and groom doing everything in their power to hold it
together while the family is watching in uneasy silence». -- Gregory Heaney, All-Music Guide.
Damn, I wish I
could write that way — it takes so much time to realize how entirely devoid of
sense this phrase is that no one will probably even bother, leaving the page in
a dazed, confused, and, perhaps, even mystified state of mind. On the other
hand, I could not say that this band's
lyrics — or even the title of their debut album — or even their own name, for that matter — do a good job of
surpassing Mr. Heaney in terms of
clarity. "All I ever wanted was to be your spine / Lost your friction and
you slid for a mile" (ʽWeb In Frontʼ) is a fairly diagnostic
couple of lines, and almost each song yields more of the same stuff.
Anyway, Archers Of Loaf stem from Chapel Hill,
NC, and, in true indie-rock fashion, consist of 2 guitars, 1 bass, 1 set of
drums, and 1 soulful, but rangeless vocal coupled with one of the guitars (Eric
Bachmann, no relation to Randy Bachman whatsoever, not to mention the extra n). Since they formed in the year of Nevermind, there is some temptation to
pigeonhole them as «grungers», which they are not if, by «grunge», we mean the
narrow spectrum from Nirvana to Alice In Chains to Pearl Jam and the like. The
three differences are in that Archers Of Loaf are:
— nowhere near as heavy: they like low notes
and power chords as much as the next guy, but it is clear that Black Sabbath is
not a big influence. Sonic Youth, perhaps, but not Sabbath;
— absolutely not «depressed» or «depressing». Most of the music is energetic and
angry, but there is no suicidal or end-of-the-world-ish ring in Bachmann's
voice at all. Only once does he attempt to descend into autistic melancholy
(ʽYou And Meʼ), but, set against all the other songs, it almost feels
like a theatrical gesture for diversity's sake. Spiritual darkness as an essential component of grunge is
completely lacking here;
— simply put, a «post-modern» band: much like
Pavement and the Pixies, they inject their tunes with absurdism, irony, and
nihilism, although the music is never as experimental as that of Pavement, and
the band is also affected by a near-complete lack of sense of humor, which
makes their post-modernism very, very strange (since we usually sense po-mo the
best through the artist's ability to laugh off and ridicule all of the
cultural conventions of the past).
All of this puts an individual spin on Icky Mettle, which is a great
advantage, considering that the actual songs kinda suck. Well, not «suck»,
perhaps, but whoever claims that Bachmann and the other guitarist, Eric
Johnson, are accomplished riffmeisters must be fairly new to this whole «rock»
idea: fifty percent of the time at least, the chord sequences are generic indie
fare that you can just as easily encounter on an Avril Lavigne record. The
other fifty percent show a little bit more inventiveness: ʽWrongʼ,
for instance, opens with a simple, but fresh «scratchy» pattern (for some
reason, complemented by an odd «cuckoo» tone from the second guitar — absurdism
on the prawl!); ʽLearo, You're A Holeʼ comes replete with a
head-splitting overdub of several droning parts that paint the air in
aggressively psychedelic colours; and the beginning of ʽToastʼ is
like a lo-fi take on the mysterious otherwordliness of The Cure, before the
proceedings calm down to give us a nice contrast between a thin, friendly,
fun-sounding riff and an all-out scream-fest ("There's something wrong
with my toast!" — go figure).
Repeated listens bring out the small details
that should, perhaps, be the Archers' major claim to fame. For instance, the
main guitar line of ʽWeb In Frontʼ is loud, but totally uninteresting
— just a standard «chugga-chugga» recorded for the millionth time. Listen
closely and you will notice a thin, almost harp-like, «ethereal» guitar playing
a much more complicated role in the adjacent speaker, growing a bit more
audacious by the end of the song but still not competitive enough to properly
grab your attention until you've listened to this for a second time... and a
third one... and a fourth one... by then, the main riff will finally fade away
and the nice ringing guitar-harp will be all over your ears. (Stupid question:
why not get rid of the main riff altogether?).
ʽPlumb Lineʼ is the slyest of the
lot, giving Bachmann enough microphone space to deliver the catch phrase
"She's an indie rocker / And nothing's gonna stop her / Her fashion
fits" loud and distinct, over a proverbial indie-rock melody if there ever
was one — and thus, ensure the band a firm position on college radio and in
certain critical minds. But the idea of Icky
Mettle is not to glorify indie rock, or propagate teenage rebellion, or
even vent one's frustration over failed relationships — there is a little
bit of everything, which all melds together in one big fat nothing, and that is the idea of Icky Mettle: to make a modern rock album about nothing. Of course,
it would have helped, if, like Seinfeld, these guys at least had a sense of
humor to compensate. In its place, they put loudness, brawn, and elements of
weirdness, still rather random on this record (but they would grow in numbers
by the time they got around to the follow-up).
Today, in knowledgeable circles, Icky Mettle is deemed as sort of a
minor classic of the decade. I am not sure if it will hold up as well as the
best grunge, indie, and pop-rock records from its era, because the songwriting
seems fairly mediocre to me, even if the songs gain a lot through extra touches
and flourishes once they are realized on tape. (Same problems as with the
Afghan Whigs — another band vastly overrated by connoisseurs and reasonably
forgotten by the masses). But there is certainly an enigmatic aura about the
album — after all, not every piece of music will prompt the reviewer to
describe it with the sort of quotation that I used to preview my own text.
Trying it out will not hurt, and, want it or not, these Chapel Hill fellas were an integral part of the indie
movement back in the day — gotta know our history.
VEE VEE (1995)
1) Step Into The Light; 2)
Harnessed In Slums; 3) Nevermind The Enemy; 4) Greatest Of All Times; 5)
Underdogs Of Nipomo; 6) Floating Friends; 7) 1985; 8) Fabricoh; 9) Nostalgia;
10) Let The Loser Melt; 11) Death In The Park; 12) The Worst Has Yet To Come;
13) Underachievers March And Fight Song.
Although Icky
Mettle usually gets all the hoopla, I personally find the follow-up, Vee Vee, to be far more interesting. As
it often happens, the sophomore effort is a little less aggressive, a little
more experimental, a touch more oriented at subtleties and a touch less at
basic punch. But if The Archers Of Loaf were to find their own place in the
already huge and still growing world of indie rock, they had to rely more on subtleties and less on punch — because, want it
or not, we generally punch more or less in the same way, whereas our
subtleties are all vastly individual.
The subtle side of Eric Bachmann, in
particular, led him to exploring the capacities of the drone, the trill, and
the jangle. There is a lot of exciting dual guitar playing here, and a lot less
boring generic noise than on Icky Mettle.
Check out ʽUnderdogs Of Nipomoʼ, where one low-pitched guitar begins
playing the song like a jerky mid-tempo blues-rocker, then a different,
higher-pitched, one joins it in a weeping psychedelic manner and prevents the
song from being «just another» alt-rocker. And that happens all over the place
on this album.
Additionally, there is a little more emphasis
placed on the accessibility of the lyrics — the surrealism is still there, but
the «key phrases», like root notes, are more firmly accentuated to set certain
moods for certain songs. Thus, "all of my friends have floated away",
sung in a croaking, almost breaking voice, immediately sets a lament-like sort
of mood for ʽFloating Friendsʼ, and even if the rest of the lyrics
seem to insist that the phrase be taken literally
(because "they clog up the valley and drift up to outer space"), you
know that's not really it. It's just a sad song, if not a particularly great
one in terms of melody.
In terms of melody, most of the really cool
stuff happens early on. ʽStep Into The Lightʼ is a swirling
kaleidoscope of droning and jangling guitars, much more early Velvet
Underground in style than Nirvana or even Pavement. So is ʽHarnessed In
Slumsʼ, except it is much faster: if you really let yourself go, the
contrast between the masculine and feminine guitars spinning round and round
will suck you right inside the circle. Yet it isn't a happy psychedelic
merry-go-round — it is a grim circle, maybe more like an inescapable vortex,
not overtly pessimistic and suicidal like The Cure, but with a strong whiff of
negativity all the same. If it looks like I am babbling, it is simply the
result of having to listen to these songs too many times in order to get their
appeal.
Words, intonations, notes, overdubs,
structures, everything seems to come together here in a general message that
is perhaps best summed up in the next to last song, ʽDeath In The
Parkʼ: "It's always the same people / Pissing the same people
off". The surrealism and psychedelia with which Bachmann and Johnson are
toying around is just a mild attempt to break the circle of depressing boredom
and routine, predictable happenings of life. The grim guitar drone symbolizes
the boredom, and the high whining guitar... the pain? Whatever. Anyway, it is
not about the single ingredients, it's about the whole package — it works, although it also takes quite a
bit of time to sink in. But concentrate on understanding that these two guys
swirl their guitars like few other couples of guys ever swirled them, and that
is the first step towards feeling the
coolness of Vee Vee rather than just
stating it.
Ironically, the record ends on a completely
unpredictable note: after the depression reaches a climax of sorts on the aptly
titled ʽThe Worst Has Yes To Comeʼ, the band launches into an almost
carnivalesque «ditty», replete with kiddie-style whistling, simplistic banjo
strum, and stupid horns — ʽUnderachievers March And Fight Songʼ,
indeed. "Underachievers / Total domination / Kill a billion years / Of
total frustration" — hey there hordes of people all over the world, The
Archers Of Loaf have written the perfect anthem for you to wake up to every
morning, and most of you probably don't even know about it. Oh well, here's one
little thumbs up
to help with the promotion, even if it's coming about fifteen years too late.
ALL THE NATIONS AIRPORTS (1996)
1) Strangled By The Stereo
Wire; 2) All The Nations Airports; 3) Scenic Pastures; 4) Worst Defense; 5) Attack
Of The Killer Bees; 6) Rental Sting; 7) Assassination On X-mas Eve; 8) Chumming
The Ocean; 9) Vocal Shrapnel; 10) Bones Of Her Hands; 11) Bumpo; 12) Form And File;
13) Acromegaly; 14) Distance Comes In Droves; 15) Bombs Away.
For their third release, the Archers got picked
up by a major label — Elektra — but the fact produced far more fuss in the
press than change in the sound. Not that there isn't any change in the sound from Vee Vee to All The Nations
Airports. There is. But it has nothing to do with labels. And yes, it is a
sucky sort of change.
Essentially, to me this sort of change suggests
that Vee Vee, after all, was a
fluke. Somehow, on that album, the band managed to align their mutual
configuration in the only possible, and very subtle way, that could make them
stand out. They probably did not pay too much attention to this lucky turn of
events — and, when it was time to reconvene for the third album, fell back on
the old configuration of Icky Mettle.
Only now they lack even that initial punch of freshness which can sometimes
elevate mediocrity to illusionary heights. Results? Boring. Dull as hell.
Instead of good music, Bachmann now
concentrates almost exclusively on the lyrics, which get increasingly «serious»
and «messagy», without telling us explicitly what it is about them that could
make Bachmann an individual presence on the «rock poet» scene. "Rental
sting / The customer is king / Waste your life, waste your life / Little
things can cost you everything" — here is a particularly telling example
of what it's all about. If it clicks with you on paper, it will click with you
on your stereo. If it does not click
on paper, I have a hard time imagining how All
The Nations Airports could ever occupy a special place in your heart.
That the individual guitar parts are rather
dull is no surprise; the surprise is that they seem to have lost the ability to
turn their twin guitar interplay into something larger than the sum of its
parts. It is most evident on such lumbering instrumental monsters as
ʽAttack Of The Killer Beesʼ, which, by all means, should have been
titled ʽAttack Of The Killer Slothsʼ instead — one of the guitars
does produce a bee-like buzz all the way through (wailing like crazy on one
note while your ears are slowly and painfully being electrocuted), but the
others are just droning stoner grunge chords over and over again in an
«atmospheric» manner that is neither pleasant, nor even novel.
They are still capable of occasionally coming
across mildly interesting themes, when they get off their main saddle horse:
ʽBumpoʼ is a fun instrumental, built upon a dark psycho-folk theme
that is half-Jefferson Airplane, half-James Bond theme (although even
ʽBumpoʼ gets less attractive and more generic once the volume levels
are pushed up and the minimalistic folk guitar becomes drone-oriented). And
there are tiny bits and pieces that suggest ways of greatness — for instance,
the way the self-titled track begins, with its siren-like bass notes and pick
scraping frenzy, before it embarrassingly turns into just another Bachmann
sermon.
But tiny bits are one thing, and preaching,
lying at the heart of 75% of the songs on here, is another. ʽAssassination
On X-mas Eveʼ, for instance, simply continues the theme of ʽDeath In
The Parkʼ — «bad shit is going on, and nobody genuinely gives a damn».
There is no harm in flogging that old horse to death, particularly since the
horse is immortal, but wouldn't it be nice if the accompanying music were even
the least bit memorable? Or, at least, exciting?
Come on now, this shit is just excruciatingly
dull. I can't even hear that second «feminine» guitar all that well, bring it
higher up in the mix or something (not that it looks as if it were doing
anything even remotely approaching the occasional explosiveness on Vee Vee).
As ʽBombs Awayʼ, a minimalistic
two-finger piano instrumental, closes the record, I cannot help but wonder how
these things happen exactly — what are the factors that determine such jumps in
quality between albums that are essentially based on the same styles and
values. The number of cups of coffee drunk before the morning sessions? Toothaches?
Undetected radioactivity exposure? Talent drain, where «talent» = an
objectively measurable internal fluid? Whatever. Regardless of the answer, All The Nations Airports is a
significant departure from Vee Vee, and,
in my head, the vector is strictly downwards, so thumbs down accordingly.
WHITE TRASH HEROES (1998)
1) Fashion Bleeds; 2) Dead Red
Eyes; 3) I.N.S.; 4) Perfect Time; 5) Slick Tricks And Bright Lights; 6) One
Slight Wrong Move; 7) Banging On A Dead Drum; 8) Smokers In Love; 9) After The
Last Laugh; 10) White Trash Heroes.
Reportedly, the Archers Of Loaf found
themselves artistically blocked after touring in support of Airports, and I easily believe that — I
mean, who wouldn't, after having to play songs from the dullest record of one's
career over and over again? Eventually, it was decided that, if the band were
to go on, it would have to change. The heavy fate of the Artist who did not,
from the outset, list «stability of sound» as one of the major goals in his
career: either you change, or you lose the right to that capital A, not to
mention an A+ in Robert Christgau’s next blurb.
The exact change from Airports to White Trash
Heroes is not easy to describe, though. Everyone acknowledges it, and the
band actually lost some of the fan support because of it, but nobody can really
summarize it in one or two sentences. It's not as if they brought in a host of
guest musicians or a symphonic orchestra, started writing twenty-minute long
suites, or covering Frank Sinatra on authentic XVIIth century instruments.
Individually, many of the songs are not that
different from the classic Archers sound. But altogether, White Trash Heroes definitely constitutes one of their finest
offerings, and I'd probably rate it second in my personal ranking for today.
What do you do when you understand your own
mediocrity as a God-sent troubadour, yet cannot resist the temptation of making, in the simple hope that you’ll
maybe get lucky next time? Easy — you turn upon yourself in all your wretched
mediocrity, and intensify the only thing you're sure of. (I realize I have by
now offended every devoted Archers fan on the planet, but, as a fairly
mediocre writer myself, I somehow feel a bond between myself and the band, to
be honored by admitting it). Who are the «White
Trash Heroes»? Take a wild guess.
The seven-minute long title track is structured
as a long, repetitive, part-time Bob Dylan, part-time Lou Reed visionary epic,
pinned to the simplest of hooks for heavier effect. It drags on slowly and
drearily, on the wings of a simple synth line and a sea of anthemic feedback,
until the voice finally fades out and all that is left is the murky electric
guitar pushing the theme forward for an extra two minutes. It is the most
perfect conclusion to the Archers' career that could ever be desired: a song
that declares the ugliness of it all through a long series of half-baked, humorless
poetic metaphors, being ugly as hell, but somewhat mesmerizing, in itself.
Even before you get to it, though, you have to
endure a sea of industrial bleakness. ʽFashion Bleedsʼ would be just
another grungy slab of grunge, if not for the annoying, ear-piercing electronic
bleep sub-melody that eventually generates itself out of the muck, claiming
your attention so that it can tamper with your digestion system. On ʽDead
Red Eyesʼ, all singing is done in a whiny, high-pitched manner,
reminiscent of Neil Young and his endless complaints about life's miseries. On
ʽPerfect Timeʼ, the lead guitar line is set to «dirge mode» almost
continuously — now we can finally understand the fans, who were waiting for
some punch-the-wall attitude and got some lie-down-and-die attitude instead.
ʽOne Slight Wrong Moveʼ justifies the «industrial» tag explicitly: it
starts off with factory-style banging and clanging, and culminates in the
electronically encoded refrain ("a hundred million could be wrong")
that, again, could serve as an irritant in the eyes of all the admirers of
Archers as a «live» band, but is actually well in line with the overall moods
and temperatures on the record.
In the middle of it all, it is easy to lose
trace of ʽSmokers In Loveʼ, a brief instrumental track that should
actually be counted among their finest creations — a bit of melodic
«art-grunge» which shows excellent teamwork and expression. Your best chance of
remembering it is probably through the fat distorted opening riff, but the
guitar- and even basswork on the main section are noticeable as well. By now,
the Archers can not only «weave» their trademark double/triple-guitar patterns,
they can do this with a stern, robotic air (must have been listening to lots of
Krautrock), making the same kind of progress here that one usually sees in the
evolution from «punk» to «post-punk». It's not entirely new, but with these
guys, it works.
Overall, White
Trash Heroes could really signify a transition to something more...
purposeful, I guess, than the early Archers albums. It is that close to turning Bachmann into one of those «generation
spokesmen» — with all the debt that the title track owes to previous generation
spokesmen, it belongs in the 1990s, a decade that did not really have its own
Bob Dylan or Neil Young or Lou Reed, except for the original old ones. But
maybe it was exactly this «looking back» thing that did not work out, I don't
know. In any case, even if White Trash
Heroes was an artistic dead end — and the band did not survive it — it
still remains a curious and touching artistic dead end to revisit, and the
title track is as good a «self-destructive goodbye note» as any. Thumbs up.
SECONDS BEFORE THE ACCIDENT (2000)
1) Dead Red Eyes; 2) Fabricoh;
3) Vocal Shrapnel; 4) Web In Front; 5) Let The Loser Melt; 6) Strangled By The
Stereo Wire; 7) Fashion Bleeds; 8) You And Me; 9) Might; 10) Revenge; 11) South
Carolina; 12) Lowest Part Is Free; 13) Plumbline; 14) Wrong; 15) White Trash
Heroes; 16) Chumming The Oceans.
A last-minute souvenir from the Archers' final
tour, this was all recorded in November 1998 at some small joint in Chapel
Hill. This was not the band's first live recording: an EP called Vitus Tinnitus had already appeared in
1997, but it was rather short and went out of print fairly quickly. This one,
on the other hand, is much longer, and, rather democratically, includes
comparable shares of selections from all of the band's four studio albums (as
well as two tracks from a rare studio EP released in 1994) — a decent,
deserving live retrospective that should be in every serious fan collection.
There are, however, serious problems as well,
that go way beyond track selection (which I personally could live with, even
if I like the Archers' evens far more than their odds). First, the studio
arrangements on the original albums were often interesting in terms of
overdubs, with three- or four-part guitar melodies contributing to the sound;
obviously, when playing live, these complex textures are reduced to barer
basics, and, since sometimes these overdubs were almost like the main selling
point of the song, the effect is predictable. Second, even those instruments
that are played on stage are recorded
atrociously. Play any single one of them next to the studio original and see
the difference at once. The «melodic» guitar that is supposed to whine, chirp,
and jangle next to the grungy chord guitar bears the heaviest brunt —
definitely out there, but barely audible most of the time. But even the heavy
guitar is unpleasantly muffled.
With these obvious and rather glaring defects,
are there any compensating benefits? Certainly not from a surplus of energy:
it's been a long, long time since well-behaved rock bands restrained their
passion in the studio, only unleashing the full fury onstage. Chapel Hill did
not get it that much louder or more dynamic than the recording studios did. Nor
are there any interesting changes (other than simplified arrangements) to any
of the songs. Nor do the band members
show a particularly clever or original sense of humor (such bits of banter as
"we have an alien on stage" or "if I have an aneurysm tonight,
it's out of gratitude" are more or less their peak). Nor does the audience help lighten up the spirits — the crowd must
have consisted of long-term fans, some of whom seem to have already sung all
the lyrics to ʽYou And Meʼ way before its lengthy, ear-killer bass
intro gives way to the vocals, but the Archers' music is not arena-rock and has
very little to do with crowd-pleasing in general.
Come to think of it, it really beats me why I
am tempted to give the album a thumbs up, despite there being nothing objectively
redeemable about it. Maybe it is because the most important element of White Trash Heroes managed to blow over
here more or less untouched: its autumnal sadness and a certain sense of «when
the music's over, turn off the light... and go back to your boring
function-fulfilling in this world, whatever it may be». Even the earlier songs
from Icky Mettle and Vee Vee seem to have been slightly
irradiated with this quiet, unassuming depression. I almost think I might be
giving this positive judgement out of sheer pity, regardless of whether anyone
needs it — here's to a band that tried to make it, and then spent their last
two years coming to terms with their own doom. And, maybe, the world's as
well.
ADDENDA:
THE SPEED OF CATTLE (1996)
1) Wrong; 2) South Carolina;
3) Web In Front; 4) Bathroom; 5) Tatyana; 6) What Did You Expect?; 7) Ethel
Merman; 8) Funnelhead; 9) Quinn Beast; 10) Telepathic Traffic; 11) Don't
Believe The Good News; 12) Smokin' Pot In The Hot City; 13) Mutes In The
Steeple; 14) Revenge; 15) Bacteria; 16) Freezing Point; 17) Powerwalker; 18) Backwash.
I would never say that Archers Of Loaf are the
great lost gem of the mid-Nineties, much more deserving of the attention of
every self-respecting Homo sapiens than the publicity-puffed Nirvana.
Nevertheless, they certainly deserve to at least be placed in the «lost and
found» locker, and their career has been consistent enough to make me want to
try out, as a postscriptum of sorts, this early collection of odds and ends,
originally released in between the success of Vee Vee and the relative creative stagnation of Airports.
For all the good fans, this is an essential
purchase, since there are no overlaps with the band's regular studio albums.
Instead, Speed Of Cattle collects a
bunch of early singles (including single versions of ʽWrongʼ and
ʽWeb In Frontʼ, different from LP versions), two tracks from the rare
EP Vs. The Greatest Of All Time, and
some studio outtakes that cannot be found anywhere else. The question is — does
anybody other than the truly devoted fan need it?
Frankly, I don't think so. One thing is
certain: Speed Of Cattle will not
open your eyes on any aspect of the Archers that you do not already know about.
All of the songs are in the band's usual style, but very few of them accentuate
the famous «guitar weaving» style. For instance, ʽSouth Carolinaʼ is
occasionally considered somewhat of a lost semi-classic, but all I hear is generic,
bombastic alt-rock, thoroughly boring for three out of three and a half minutes
(a «woman tone» guitar enters the stage towards the end and makes things a
little more colorful, but I am just mentioning this for honesty's sake).
Special cases include ʽBathroomʼ, one
of the band's fastest tunes, probably the closest they ever came to «hardcore»,
but with a nifty psychedelic guitar break; ʽQuinn Beastʼ, where the
second guitar somehow falls under a Duane Eddy influence, playing surf-like
chords against the usual sea of distortion; and the instrumental ʽSmokin'
Pot In The Hot Cityʼ, which begins with a cozy little country-rock riff
and then goes on being relatively gentle and melodic throughout.
Everything else sticks together in the same
sort of mush as All The Nation's
Airports: sometimes a bit slower, sometimes a bit faster, sometimes
yelly-screamy, sometimes quiet-melancholic-like. Listening to this record, in
fact, gives away the Archers Of Loaf's fatal mistake — they should never have
stuck to this image of «hard rocking» people, because they are too pensive for
that. I can tolerate sixty minutes of leaden, by-the-book distorted «rock» chords
from the Ramones (even late-period Ramones), because it is their lifeblood.
But nobody will convince me that these chords are the lifeblood of Eric
Bachmann and Eric Johnson, because they could never rock as hard as Nirvana or
Alice In Chains — and when you cannot rock out as hard as your competition, it
is better not to rock out at all. Otherwise, you'll just be moving along at the
«speed of cattle», and why should anyone want that? Thumbs down.
TRAILER (1994)
1) Season; 2) Jack Names The
Planets; 3) Intense Thing; 4) Uncle Pat; 5) Get Out; 6) Petrol; 7) Obscure
Thing; 8*) Hulk Hogan Bubblebath; 9*) Different Today; 10*) Punk Boy.
Apparently, before recruiting drummer Rick
McMurray and settling upon «Ash» as a suitable name for their future
«best-rock'n'roll-band-in-the-world (to ever come from Ireland, since you are
all sick of U2 by now anyway)», guitarist Tim Wheeler and bassist Mark Hamilton
had done time in an Iron Maiden cover band, no less. Traces of this can be
heard quite distinctly in their early sound (ʽHulk Hogan Bubblebathʼ
starts out as sheer heavy metal, before melting down into zombie-flavored
stoner rock), but it is most probable that they sucked at this venture —
Wheeler is a good guitar player, but hardly on the level of Iron Maiden's axe
gods, unless technique and complexity were intentionally sacrificed once the new
band rerouted its interests into the direction of «alternative rock».
Trailer, their first EP/mini-LP, was built around ʽJack Names The Planetsʼ, the band's first single of any popular importance, and originally contained just seven songs (a few more were thrown on later for comprehensiveness' sake). None of them are very good, but one fine aspect of Ash already on display is that their guitar-based sound is just a tad different from the generic «punk sloppiness meets pop toothlessness» manner of the alt-rock crowds of the mid-Nineties. Maybe it is the Iron Maiden tribute period that we have to thank, but, in any case, Wheeler's guitars usually have a lower grumble and a fuzzier crunch to them than the genre prescribes, and the lead parts feature a variety of tones, from high-pitched to wah-wah, and are consistently more melodic and less predictable than one would expect.
That does come in handy when you realize that
there is not a single melody to die for on Trailer.
ʽJack Names The Planetsʼ is sort of likeable, with its fast tempos,
Wheeler's friendly, non-screamy vocals, and a brave attempt at marrying punk,
hard rock, and Brit-pop, but the melodic flow is extremely even, and the hooks
are non-existent — what, did they really think that simply repeating the track
title three times in a row is enough to make a respectable pop single? The second
attempt, ʽPetrolʼ, essentially following the same songwriting
formula, managed to be a little better — at least this time, there is an
attention-drawing climactic burst at the end of each verse as Wheeler's echoey
scream kicks off an extra layer of distortion and sets the song's main melodic
riff in action. Not that it's a lot, either — any professional songwriter would
have chuckled at how little is really done to gain the listener's trust.
I hardly remember anything about the other
songs, except for ʽUncle Patʼ, where the tempos are slowed down a wee
bit, and the whole song, replete with Wheeler's friendly vocal overtones, ends
up sounding somewhat like (very) late period Kinks (Think Visual or something like that). On the ultra-short ʽGet
Outʼ, the band tries to go for a «polished metalcore» type of sound — very
fast, aggressive, but also quite technical — but the melody is too brutal to be
melodic, yet too restrained to win points just for the hardcore smell of it
all.
In the end, the most memorable tune on the
album is... the band's cover of Helen Love's ʽPunk Boyʼ, quite a
telling fact all by itself. (Even more
telling is the recommendation to listen to the original instead — Helen Love
have quite an odd, if very silly-sounding, approach to bubblegum-pop that
sounded far more original in the mid-1990s than Ash's approach to Helen Love
material). The good news is that the bubblegum pop influence may have helped
these guys to lighten up — and become a little bit better in the future. With
Iron Maiden and Helen Love playing dice in your subconscious, chances of your
musical output amounting to pure, undiluted crap can be expected to decrease
rather sharply. It does take time, though, and for the moment, Trailer gets a thumbs down, if only for not
being diagnostic of the subsequent movie that it allegedly advertises.
1977 (1996)
1) Lose Control; 2) Goldfinger;
3) Girl From Mars; 4) I'd Give You Anything; 5) Gone The Dream; 6) Kung Fu; 7)
Oh Yeah; 8) Let It Flow; 9) Innocent Smile; 10) Angel Interceptor; 11) Lost In
You; 12) Darkside Lightside.
Listening to «alt-rock» almost always produces
a poisonous effect on me — there is something innately sick about that sludgy sound, something very, very uncomfortable.
When all is said and done, pop is pop, and metal is metal: you cannot assure a
healthy, stable marriage between the two (which makes me all the more admire
those few lucky bastards, like Kurt, who did manage a temporary union; on the
other hand, he did that at an expense that might be too heavy for the rest of
us). Ash, even at their very best, never strived to be the exception from the
rule. Therefore, all of the music that Ash ever produced makes me sick, period.
But a more interesting subject to discuss would
be the reason why 1977, the band's
first proper LP, propelled them into the limelight like crazy — by 1996, the
album was hot enough to push Jagged
Little Pill off from the top spot on the charts, and, although both records
certainly qualify as «alt-rock» to whoever uses «alt-rock» as a bad word, they
are certainly different enough to acknowledge that 1977 gained its popularity somewhat on its own, not just because it
was the trendy thing to do (even if it was).
One thing is for certain: 1977 is more than just a
«three guys play tinny rawk» album. Certainly Tim Wheeler is not the easiest
person in the world to pigeonhole. The songs here blast off a whole wide
variety of influences — of which classic Ramones/Clash-era punk, heralded by
the album title, is but one, and not necessarily the strongest (in fact, it is
claimed that the title simply refers to the birth year of two of the band
members, and is also a subtle Star Wars
reference — ʽDarkside Lightsideʼ ring a bell?). But there is also
regular Oasis/Blur-derived Britpop, gruff retro-1970s metal,
Springsteen-muscle-powered «urban rock», shades of Hawkwind psychedelia, and...
you fill in the rest, I'm sure I've missed something along the way.
It is too bad that Wheeler's imagination is
blocked on subsequent steps — he seems to be doing his best to take all these
various ingredients and reduce them to the same formula, compressing chords,
tones, and moods into one big headbang-fest. 1977 may have been God's gift to modern rock radio stations — here
was something you could disseminate at top volume from your creaky car stereo
without spooking off the environment — but we will never know why he chose as
his mediator this particularly odd guy, taking off on a major highway and then
ending up on a one-track dirt road. It doesn't help that he can't sing, either.
One genuinely bugging aspect of 1977
is that nearly all of the vocals are... murmured?
Still, even with all the aspects of this record
that one could detest, 1977 is
likeable, to a degree. It has a mild sense of humor and hipness — not everybody
could have come up with the idea of using a Ramones-inspired (with an explicit
lyrical reference to «teenage lobotomy») two-minute pop-punk tongue-in-cheek
anthem to ʽKung Fuʼ as the lead-off single. In fact, had the Ramones
recorded the song themselves, it could have been a minor classic — as it is,
Wheeler's muffled guitar sound and boring vocals (that try to simulate
excitement but fail) make it more of a bark than a bite. A pleasant bark,
nonetheless — cheap swipes at pop culture will never die.
The other big single, ʽGirl From
Marsʼ, rolls along on what seems like the laziest chord set in the world,
but is somewhat redeemed by Wheeler's attempt to channel the spirit of Ray
Davies, even attempting to trade the whiny murmur in for a higher-pitched,
naïve-romantic delivery (which certainly works better for him than any
attempts to raise the aggression bar). The melodic wah-wah solo in the middle
is also attention-worthy: in fact, Wheeler's lead playing is quite superb
throughout the record — crisp, fluent, technical, and with plenty of love for
various pedals and stuff. What this band really
needed was a fourth member, one that could take away his rhythm playing and
especially singing duties.
Some of the stuff is quite below par, though. The
lumpy, leaden take on 1970s metal, ʽI'd Give You Anythingʼ, really
plays out like an inferior variation on Black Sabbath's ʽN.I.B.ʼ with
all the cool Satanism taken out and replaced by... never mind, it's impossible
to make out anything from that murmur anyway. ʽGoldfingerʼ somehow
became the single that truly put them on the map for the world to see, but it
is the weakest of 'em all — a rather transparent take on the basic Oasis style,
yet without a mighty hook to boot. But that's probably the exact reason why
people were buying it at the time. Does anybody even remember it any more these
days, though?
Overall, 1977
is a firm chunk of 1990's musical history now, and should probably be listened
to by all those who are interested in learning more about the «spirit of 1996» —
and also by everyone who wants to know how a melting pot of superior
influences should not be brewed. But
hey, these guys just didn't want to stick to the underground — they wanted to
make it big, and in 1996, if you wanted to make it big, you didn't invent the rules, you stuck to them. They even had to go to
Oasis' producer for this album, for God's sake. Sorrowful, but understandable.
NU-CLEAR SOUNDS (1998)
1) Projects; 2) Low Ebb; 3) Jesus
Says; 4) Wildsurf; 5) Death Trip; 6) Folk Song; 7) Numbskull; 8) Burn Out; 9)
Aphrodite; 10) Fortune Teller; 11) I'm Gonna Fall.
Girl presence detected! Or not detected,
because new band member Charlotte Hatherley had been hired primarily for her
guitar playing skills, thickening the sound during live performances and saving
time for extra overdubs in the studio. She does add some backing vocals as
well, but as far as I can tell, she does not get to sing lead at all (unless
she can pose as Wheeler's double).
Nor does the lineup expansion result in any
mind-blowing stylistic turn-arounds. Nu-Clear
Sounds (a really awful title, if I might add; nothing that begins with
«nu-» has ever proven to be good) starts off horrendously, with a bunch of
songs that go, «Hey! We bring you the excitement of power pop baked in grunge
guitar tones! Uncumbered with original chord changes — no more danger of
getting sidetracked by silly inventions like ʽmelodyʼ! Go with the
flow, and the Force will always be with you!» The fast-kicking «rock» of
ʽProjectsʼ, the slow-moving «meditative rhythmic balladry» of
ʽLow Ebbʼ, and the third-rate Iggy Poppisms of ʽJesus Saysʼ
are the kind of total garbage past which so many of the critics simply couldn't
make it — which explains the overall cold reception in comparison with 1977. Dark, morose, nasty, and boring: an unbeatable combination
for anyone desiring to sully the good name of rock'n'roll.
It does get somewhat better from there on.
ʽWild Surfʼ is another in Ash's series of Ramones-inspired bubblegum
anthems, and even though it should have been played twice as fast for optimal
effect, at least it has a friendly, funny, catchy chorus that slightly deflates
the deadly, exaggerated seriousness of the first three numbers. Then they step
back, regroup, take a deep breath, and let rip with ʽDeath Trip 21ʼ,
which is probably the closest this album really gets to nu-metal, but at least
it's faster, sharper, and flashier than ʽProjectsʼ.
But, as curious as it could be, Nu-Clear Sounds is at its best when
Wheeler quiets the band down in order to inject some sentimentalism. The basic
guitar picking of ʽFolk Songʼ, supported by a bunch of pseudo-strings
in the background, is no more outstanding than anything else here, but, all of
a sudden, Wheeler puts together a soft, cozy, naturally-sweet sounding vocal
and applies it to a catchy chorus — his "springtime slipping away, my
love, springtime slipping away" is just about the only moment on the album
that has pledged to stay with me at least until the next morning. Two tracks
later, the trick is repeated with ʽAphroditeʼ, and it almost works,
except that this time, they resort to the usual trick of «make that chorus
louder! It's the CHORUS, goddammit!», and spoil much of the effect of the
"all I know 'bout is desire baby" refrain with the same power chords
that we have already had the chance to chew up, swallow, shit out, scoop up,
repeat process etc. so many times.
In between these and other ballads, however, we
still keep getting regurgitated trash like ʽFortune Tellerʼ, which
has no instrumental melody that I am aware of, borrows its verse vocal melody
from some other song that I am fairly sure I have heard many times before, and
is not ashamed to actually quote from the other,
much better known, ʽFortune Tellerʼ (Benny Spellman / Rolling Stones
/ Who, etc.) in the first line of its chorus vocal melody. I mean — come on,
really, that is not how one is
supposed to come up with new rock'n'roll songs, even if they have an explicit
retro orientation. Really!
Clearly a thumbs down here overall: for a band that gets
most of its acclaim for distorted guitar-driven rock thunderstorms, Nu-Clear Sounds produces a way too
suspicious impression of an album written by an aspiring folk songwriter, a
wannabe 1990s Donovan, cruelly mishandled by Fate and thrown into the lion den
of rock'n'rollers with a stern order to prove yourself or die trying. And
that's me attempting to put it in an interesting
framework — when, really, the album is so dead boring that I am frankly amazed
at my own self with that phrasing.
FREE ALL ANGELS (2001)
1) Walking Barefoot; 2)
Shining Light; 3) Burn Baby Burn; 4) Candy; 5) Cherry Bomb; 6) Submission; 7)
Someday; 8) Pacific Palisades; 9) Shark; 10) Sometimes; 11) Nicole; 12) There's
A Star; 13) World Domination.
Lighter, faster, less folksy, but more actively
rock'n'rollish than Nu-Clear Sounds
— I have almost taken a liking to this album, despite the obvious fact that
this is still very much an Ash album, and that Tim Wheeler is not the Pete
Townshend of his generation and will never be. However, each time that his
inner «Heavy Lead Monster» goes to sleep and the «Light Magnesium Elf» takes
over the watch, the sickness wanes and the music becomes listenable — and, in
places, even highly enjoyable. This is one of the better samples.
The early parts are not particularly promising.
ʽWalking Barefootʼ starts things off on a happy pop-punk note — fast,
frivolously romantic, but generally hookless and flat; and the five-minute long
ʽShining Lightʼ is optimistic enough not to get condemned as generic
depressed alt-rock crap, but just as flat and predictable («now we are
relatively quiet... now we SUDDENLY become loud as heck... what else do you
need to get it shoved down your throat?»).
However, already the third track, ʽBurn
Baby Burnʼ, lights up a little candle. A nice picking pattern, a fast
rumbling bass line, a «choppier», livelier rhythm, a slightly less trivial
chorus, a classy trill-based solo — is this an attempt to put the fun back
where it belongs, or what? ʽSubmissionʼ builds up a hot funky groove
whose principal hook (an electronically treated "you turn me on...")
may irritate you, but that wouldn't make it any less of a hook. ʽPacific
Palisadesʼ is the next entry in the ongoing series of Beach Boys / Ramones
tributes, and arguably the best one so far —lyrics like "I lie with
candles by my bed / Brian Wilson in my head" may be a bit too obvious, but
the chorus resolution is still tremendously uplifting. ʽSharkʼ brings
back the aggression in the form of a deep guitar tone, pitch-torturing effects,
and vocals pressed into an ugly sneer on the "violent mind, violent
mind" chorus. And so on.
The sentimental domain of the album generally
comes in the form of loud, but not particularly «power-loud» ballads, usually acoustic
or joint acoustic-electric in form and more often than not backed up with a
thick layer of fake strings — sometimes emulating actual strings and sometimes
bringing back Mellotron memories (ʽCandyʼ). I cannot see any great
discoveries, but, considering that ballads are a dangerous thing altogether,
Wheeler gets off all right this time. The "was it a dream I had..."
bit on ʽSomedayʼ even manages to have a special ring to it.
ʽSometimesʼ sounds like Blur on a cloudy day, which isn't necessarily
a bad thing.
A decent affair altogether, and it succeeds in
lifting a small corner of the «alt-rock curse» which lay heavily all over Ash
all through the 1990s: on more than one song here, they let in a little bit of
sunshine, and do not seem so genuinely eager to honor the limited array of distorted
rock guitar clichés of the genre.
Of course, it also has to do with all sorts of other honorings: from the Beach Boys to the Jesus and Mary Chain,
almost every one of these songs could be deciphered as a sum of several
influences. But if you ask me, it's better to be inspired by the Beach Boys
than the Stone Temple Pilots, regardless of who you are and where you stand.
A touch of experimentation, a drop of
diversity, a smudge of lightness and poppy optimism, and Free All Angels may even be a better album than 1977, if not as historically important
— but then again, is there anything about Ash that will seriously look «historically
important» ten years from now? Thumbs up, in the meantime.
MELTDOWN (2005)
1) Meltdown; 2) Orpheus; 3)
Evil Eye; 4) Clones; 5) Star-Crossed; 6) Out Of The Blue; 7) Renegade Cavalcade;
8) Detonator; 9) On A Wave; 10) Won't Be Saved; 11) Vampire Love; 12*)
Shockwave; 13*) Solace; 14*) Cool It Down.
Wrong move. Some stupid jerk must have
complained that Free All Angels was
way too «happy» and «sissy» to match the honor of the proud sons of Ireland,
and incidentally shamed Wheeler into returning to the tough standards of Nu-Clear Sounds. The title alone says
it all: after «nuclear sounds», comes the «meltdown». An exaggeration, for
sure, but it does feel like the sickening radiation effects of the 1998 album
are back. Be sure to check your hairs after listening, or, better still, wrap
yourself in aluminium foil before
listening.
Something like nine out of eleven tracks on
here are moderately fast heavy rockers, most of them in such idioms as «pop-punk»,
«electro-funk», «slam-dunk», and «stinky-skunk». Their emotional pattern is
formally «aggressive», but with a heavy mix of sarcasm: as the title track
breaks in with "revolution, we're the solution, we're gonna take it to the
overload", Wheeler's sneer makes it clear that the aggression is as much
directed at the simplistic system-bashers as it is at the system itself. That's
fine by me — intelligence and sarcasm are always welcome in pop music.
What is not
fine is that the music has once again dissolved in a sea of well-coordinated,
but deadly boring noise. Guitar parts on ʽMeltdownʼ grumble, but
never crunch, or form a distinctive, individual riff. Repeat same phrase nine
times, substituting other track names, and you get an overall portrait of the
album. The vocal parts are slightly better, but still lazy — "I think my
head is gonna explode, I think my head is gonna overload" is a tense, but
all too familiar angsty trick, and it lacks gusto.
If the mood occasionally lightens up, it is
still not enough to pierce through the lazy haze. ʽOrpheusʼ, for
instance, goes from a gruff metallic verse to a «sunnier» power-pop chorus, but
it's a generic alt-rock chorus all the same — no particular inspiration
detected. ʽStarcrossedʼ is a particular shameful affair: the album's
only slow-paced ballad, sternly deprived of Wheeler's soft folksy hooks and
turned into a bland «power» show-off.
I wish I could concentrate more effectively on
some of these rockers and sort out the «hookless» and the «weakly-hooked» ones,
but it would just waste everybody's time, so let's just go straight to the
bottomline: Meltdown sacrifices
diversity and melodicity for a «kick-ass» approach, and the results can be
predicted accurately, because Tim Wheeler is about as good at kicking ass as
Meat Loaf is at singing opera. As in «it can be done, but why?...». Thumbs down.
P.S. Acquaintance with alternate reviews shows
that ʽClonesʼ is regularly being extolled as a particularly vengeful,
raucous highlight, if not even one of the best songs in the Ash repertoire. I
beg to differ. Flat lyrics like "Shame, that everyone's the same / I
thought you stood alone / We're different from the clones" are primitively
bad on their own, but it hurts twice as bad when they are set to a pedestrian
funk metal melody, further weakened by a muffled, overcompressed guitar tone.
(Even the Red Hot Chili Peppers could have given the song more liveliness). Take
a hint, people: if you want to write a song about loss of individuality, either
drown your lyrical content in Dylanisms or at least bother writing a melody
which only a ruthless troll could put down as a boring copy-paste affair.
TWILIGHT OF THE INNOCENTS (2007)
1) I Started A Fire; 2) You
Can't Have It All; 3) Blacklisted; 4) Polaris; 5) Palace Of Excess; 6) End Of The
World; 7) Ritual; 8) Shadows; 9) Princess Six; 10) Dark And Stormy; 11) Shattered
Glass; 12) Twilight Of The Innocents.
In my highly subjective, one-in-a-billion,
opinion, completely irrelevant in the face of the universe and its struggle
for perfection, peace, and justice — Twilight
Of The Innocents, presumably the last ever LP-format release in Ash
history, is a pile of bland, instantly forgettable, proverbially generic,
emotionally disappointing, intellectually insulting, historically
insignificant, culturally repugnant airwave stimulants, with a passable
superficial similarity to a certain style of art they used to call «music».
To soften the blow, I hasten to confirm that
the exact same definition could be slapped on a million other records,
including complete discographies of certain artists we could (but won't) name —
and also express a certain amount of satisfaction. For more than a decade, Ash
seemed like the perfect band to release a primetime suckjob of an album, but
something always stopped them at the last moment: a cool vocal hook or two, a passable
funky groove, a well-thought out guitar solo, a heartfully delivered folksy
melody, something like that. Now, with Charlotte Hatherley once again out of
the band, the classic trio finally feels free to fire their worst shot.
Apparently, the intention here was to play it
more «raw», less «polished» – a statement that, coming from the mouths of most
modern bands, is usually translatable to «run for the hills», because, nine
times out of ten, dropping the «polish» also means abandoning any attempts at
writing non-trivial melodies. Which is really logical: «raw», «unpolished»,
«with a live feel to it» is frequently understood as «go into the studio and
hammer out anything that just blunders into your head. Don't worry, you're a
pro, you're bound to sweat out some inspiration».
None of these guys happens to be Thelonious
Monk or Keith Jarrett, though, and even if these songs were all written on the
spur of the moment, that does not excuse their existence (and if they weren't,
that's even worse). Everything here is written in the genre of... «rock music»
(shudder), where one guy plays the drums, another one plucks the bass, and a
third one picks distorted notes on the electric guitar. Ever heard of that? Oh
yes, they do it rhythmically, so you can punch a couple of holes in the floor
if you got spikes on your shoes.
There is not a single memorable riff here,
nowhere in sight. There are claims at catchy choruses that rarely go beyond
shouting the same line over and over again (ʽYou Can't Have It Allʼ).
There is one slightly more than hopeless, but still quite pathetic attempt at
coming up with an anthemic, «soulful» Brit-pop ballad (ʽEnd Of The
Worldʼ), a last humiliating lick at the lollipop already consumed by the
likes of Oasis – how does it taste licking a wooden stick? There are a few attempts
at guitar jangle-laden power pop that don't even manage to step outside the
door, because the jangle is compressed into sonic muck (ʽShadowsʼ) .
There is an «epic» conclusion (title track) laced with falsetto and a bunch of
strings rolling over Beethoven. None of it works. There may be craft, but there
is no sign of genius.
It is true that there is less noise here than
on Meltdown — the nu-metal legacy is
almost out, replaced by nostalgia for the «1990s nostalgizing for the 1970s».
But this is neither good nor bad in itself. And Twilight does not even feel like a sweeping nostalgic gesture: it
does everything in half-terms, and ends up sagging rather than bulging in
between its countdown points. Goshdarn it, there are only two things that Tim
Wheeler can sometimes do really well — bash out sunny-happy Ramones rip-offs
and sing sentimental folksy ballads — and this record just goes on to prove it
by featuring neither. Thumbs down, violently.
A-Z VOL. 1 (2010)
1) Return Of White Rabbit; 2) True
Love 1980; 3) Joy Kicks Darkness; 4) Arcadia; 5) Tracers; 6) The Dead Disciples;
7) Pripyat; 8) Ichiban; 9) Space Shot; 10) Neon; 11) Command; 12) Song Of Your
Desire; 13) Dionysian Urge; 14) War With Me; 15) Coming Around Again; 16) The
Creeps; 17) CTRL-ALT-DEL; 18) Do You Feel It?; 19*) Kamakura.
Apparently, Wheeler himself quoted two main
reasons for the band abandoning the LP format after Twilight Of The Innocents. Reason number one: disappointment with
the record label that allegedly did nothing to promote an album that cost them
so much time and effort. Reason number two: «LPs are on their way out» due to
the spread of digital downloads that have once again taken the emphasis off
lengthy, coherent musical statements and put it on individual songs. Roll over Sgt. Pepper, we're back to good old Sun Sessions days.
I am not sure either of these considerations
stands criticism, though. For one thing, Twilight
Of The Innocents was a miserable piece of shit; no responsible record
executive should have considered releasing it on the market in the first
place, let alone wasting time trying to promote it. For another, the rise of
digital downloads still has not eliminated the need for LPs: few, if any, bands
have followed the example of Ash, provided they have a record contract and a
serious distributor in the first place. It is far more likely that the decision
to switch to singles format was just a gimmick — a last minute trick to draw
some press attention and, perhaps, re-carve a unique niche for the band. If
they could not retain musical individuality, they could at least take pride in
an individuality of format.
Ironically, Father Time has already judged
that, if any of these singles are
going to be listened to in the future, they will be downloaded as collections,
particularly because Ash themselves eventually succumbed to the temptation and
released the A-Z series of singles
in two volumes as early as 2010. The title itself, where each single is
assigned an individual letter and an individual color, is another gimmick (Tim
Wheeler swears to God that he really sees each of these songs in a different
color, but we won't know for sure until he donates his body to Science). So was
there ever a point in making a big fuss of it in the first place?
In terms of a «greater good» or
«innovativeness» — definitely not. But, amusingly, in terms of Ash's own
musical integrity and career, definitely yes.
The songs assembled on A-Z Vol. 1
are, overall, a huge improvement over the monumental boredom of Ash's last
several studio albums. Releasing a new song every two weeks really helped them
concentrate on the material: there is no issue of «filler», since every track
is its own focus, and there may be more pop hooks here altogether than there
have been over the entire course of the band's career, bar one or two better records
like Free All Angels.
There are no attempts at serious musical
change, except for a slight occasional nod to electronics (most evidently
visible in the opening track, ʽReturn Of White Rabbitʼ), but all
these singles are mostly just power pop — you don't need much except catchy
hooks and a little bit of emotion to make this stuff work. And much of this
stuff does work — as incredible as it
may seem to those who, like me, have been so thoroughly disappointed in Ash's
last couple of albums at least, if not their entire career and meaning of
existence.
For instance, ʽReturn Of White
Rabbitʼ is really a fun track. The synth loops that bubble beneath the
surface are only really there for wall-of-sound purposes; the song in general
hangs upon its R'n'B-ish bassline and catchy-as-hell chorus ("is this the
end of the line my friend..."). There is even a little bit of paranoid
atmosphere to match the lyrics ("I followed the rabbit and now I am lost
and alone... locked in a nightmare that's all closing in on me") — not a
lot, but enough to complete the hooklines and turn the whole thing into one of
the more respectable «mainstream-oriented» hits of 2009. Nasty critics whined
about the band transforming into a clone of Franz Ferdinand with this release,
but at this point, nobody should really give a damn: Ash are now only as good
as their pop hooks are, and these pop hooks may be in anybody's style, be it
Franz Ferdinand, the Bay City Rollers, or Johann Strauss Jr.
I cannot admit to falling in real love with any
of these numbers, but I could
possibly see myself doing that, had I been a pathological fan of derivative
power-pop, ready to listen to the whole thing thirty rather than the required
three times in a row. Let's see... examples? All right. ʽArcadiaʼ,
with its clouds-oriented chorus of uplifting piano chords and high-pitched
whoah-whoah harmonies, is an attempt to write something in Arcade Fire style:
shallower, but vivacious and friendly enough for us to look past that.
ʽIchibanʼ is more of a classic Cheap Trick send-up, built on the same
basic rhythms as ʽI Want You To Want Meʼ, but more anthemic.
ʽWar With Meʼ is a tasteful mix of simple piano riffs, simple piano
flourishes, and simple vocal harmonies that is almost impossible to resist.
ʽThe Creepsʼ is funny pop-punk that manages to be accessible, inoffensive,
and sincere-sounding at the same time. And so on.
Very few of the songs are in ballad mode, which
is understandable, because you do not usually put out ballads as singles; the
ones that veer towards balladry mode through slower tempos and increased
sentimentality are usually my least favorite ones (ʽPripyatʼ,
ʽSong Of Your Desireʼ), but they are not awful or anything — they
just do not exploit Wheeler's strong sides, and should have been done as less
heavily arranged folksy ditties instead. But most of these eighteen tracks are
in fully dynamic mode.
In the end, the gimmick worked — not because of
the gimmickry itself, but because it gave the guys a chance to clear their
heads and get rid of the «filler bug». It is not very interesting to write
about these individual tracks, whose only strength lies in a careful selection
of chords, but that is a typical reviewer problem when it comes to simple,
unpretentious pop rock. What is truly important is that there has been a
genuine rebound, and with these songs Ash have propped up their, still highly
dubious, body of work on extremely solid support. They haven't been that good
for almost a decade — and these singles have legitimately established a point
at which no artist can any longer be considered a «fluke». Maybe it ain't
genius, but it's durable craftsmanship, and durable craftsmanship always gets a
thumbs up
from me.
A-Z VOL. 2 (2010)
1) Dare To Dream; 2) Mind
Control; 3) Insects; 4) Binary; 5) Physical World; 6) Spheres; 7) Instinct;
8) Summer Snow; 9) Carnal Love; 10) Embers; 11) Change Your Name; 12) Sky
Burial; 13) There Is Hope Again; 14) Teenage Wildlife; 15) Spellbound; 16) Nightfall.
The second volume in the series seems slightly
less engaging than the first. There is a little bit more electronics, a little
bit less hooks, and a nagging feeling that this formula simply cannot go on forever, or, at least, that
the English alphabet simply has too many letters in it to adequately fit Tim
Wheeler's purposes. But overall, if you already own — and like — the first half of the series, there is no reason not to own
and like the second half.
The review will be brief, because most of the
general remarks have already been made for Vol.
1, and specific remarks are hard to come by — this is Ash, after all, not
the Beach Boys or the Beatles, there is not a lot to latch onto. Catchiest
tunes so far are ʽPhysical Worldʼ, one of their trademark fast-paced
pop-punk ravers with a message we can all identify with: ("Come back to
the physical world, you're lost in the digital world" — tell me about it);
ʽInstinctʼ, whose lyrics ("I'm animal, I'm not machine")
strangely contrast with heavy use of Cold Synth Harbor; and the anthemic
six-minute performance of ʽTeenage Wildlifeʼ, a great, inspiring tune
if there ever was one... oh wait, it's a David Bowie song. Bummer.
I have to admit that even the electronic dance
stuff is sometimes linked to vocal hooks the likes of which this band rarely,
if ever, knew before. There is nothing surprising or particularly likeable
about the likes of ʽBinaryʼ, but the chorus truly sounds amazing,
with a set of "alright, alright"s in the background that can even
remedy a sinking mood — try it out. On the other hand, their attempts at
mimicking the Arcade Fire sound do not work so well: ʽDare To Dreamʼ
builds up a wall of sound all right, but Arcade Fire, at their best, make the
song sound big/sprawling/anthemic and personal/confessional at the same time. Wheeler, on the other hand,
manages the sprawling thing well enough, but there's nothing intimate about
it.
Arguably the best thing on the entire record,
however, is ʽSky Burialʼ — in fact, it might just be the most daring
thing Ash ever attempted in their lifetime, and they get away with it: a
ten-minute long, almost «progressive», instrumental whose purpose it is to take
you to the skies (don't really know about the burial, though — there is nothing
funebral here whatsoever). A ten-minute «jam» like that from a band known for
its generic alt-rock inclinations should be awful, but this isn't really a jam:
it's a well-structured, progressively developing composition, moving along at a
brisk, energetic pace (apart from a slowed down, minimalistic-atmospheric
midsection), alternating riffs, trills, pretty slide guitar trips, bombastic
power sections, wailing blues-rock solos, and a big wah-wah fury in the final
section.
The whole thing arrives completely unexpected:
you don't normally expect a lack of vocals or a ten-minute length on a single,
and Ash are not usually known for taking these sorts of risks. I am not even
sure that I really like it so much on its own, not simply for the reason that it
stands out so much. But more likely, it just confirms the old suspicion once
again: in a different age, Tim Wheeler would not have been saddled with bland
mainstream «rock» conventions of his era, and could be continuously doing stuff
like that — painting complex semi-psychedelic pictures that begin in Allman
Brothers territory and end up on Hawkwind turf. It would have been derivative
and not always amazing, but it could have been consistently entertaining. In
any case, I am glad that this whole «singles» idea worked, and that, somehow,
it gave the band a chance to stretch out and do stuff beyond their usual image.
Thumbs up,
and it would be curious to know where they will be headed from here in the
future: for the next two years, Wheeler kept a fairly low profile.
KABLAMMO! (2015)
1) Cocoon; 2) Let's Ride; 3)
Machinery; 4) Free; 5) Go! Fight! Win!; 6) Moondust; 7) Evil Knievel; 8)
Hedonism; 9) Dispatch; 10) Shutdown; 11) For Eternity; 12) Bring Back The
Summer.
Well, it looks as if the LP is here to stay,
after all: after all these years of rationalizing about how the format has
outlived itself, and how they are going to stick to the single-song routine
from now on, Tim Wheeler surreptitiously returns to the tried and true — a
monolithic collection of twelve new songs, tied together with a
comic-book-derived title that suggests... huge impact? Well, you wish.
According to the world at large, Ash had had their three-five-ten seconds of
fame twenty years ago, and you might just as well be listening to Gilles
Binchois these days — in fact, I am fairly certain that early medieval
composers have a more loyal fanbase today than slowly aging alt-rockers from
the 1990s. Had they had the most wittily composed and memorable melodies in a
decade, even then this record would hardly cause a ripple. Yes, if you
accumulate enough impulse, like the Stones or Madonna, you're pretty much set
for life — but if you just had a small bunch of alt-rock radio hits twenty
years ago, who gives a damn? You're not even yesterday's news, pal, you're more
like an unknown quantum state.
Why am I bitching about this? Because, believe
it or not, I get the feeling that with Kablammo!,
Wheeler and Co. have produced their finest album in... oh wait... maybe, like, ever. It was curious how that A-Z run of
singles actually helped Wheeler pay more attention to his melodies and avoid
too much filler, but it seems as if the long-term effects, too, have been
beneficial, and these days, Ash just go on writing good songs — not great, earth-shattering,
innovative songs, but just regular power-pop and art-pop songs that sound...
nice. No big pretense, no attempts to change the world, just half an hour of
emotionally charged music.
The lead single and the opening track is
ʽCocoonʼ, and you will not fail to notice that it consists almost
exclusively of clichés — opening with the ʽHard Day's Nightʼ
power chord, then launching into the introduction with some powerhouse
Blondie-style drumming, then superimposing simple falsetto chorus harmonies
over chainsaw guitar riffage (Ramones or My Bloody Valentine?), but it all
works out, and there is even an uplifting, high-pitched power-pop lead line popping
up from time to time if you needed an extra hook. The lyrics? They have no
significance, it's just fun to sing along with "cocoo-oo-waa-oon,
cocoo-oo-waa-oon", especially if you have no problem hitting the falsetto
range. Cool song, me likey.
Then comes song number two, which wasn't even a
single: ʽLet's Rideʼ. Guitar fanfare for the announcement, drum bash,
a jagged glam-style guitar riff... the chorus could perhaps use less reliance
on grumbly power chords, but then they rectify things with an added hard rock
melody for the bridge (that's what, two
different riffs in a 2015 pop song? what a reckless waste of material!) and an
ecstatic blubbering solo. No complaining from me.
Okay, that's a little too much Smiths influence
at the beginning of track three, ʽMachineryʼ. But then the Smiths
usually favored slower tempos, and anyway, Wheeler is neither a master of true
guitar jangle nor a fan of theatrical vocal deliveries, so by the time they
rise to the top of that chorus, everything is forgiven. Again, good song. But
now comes the big quest — a ballad! With ʽFreeʼ, you still have a
relatively fast rhythm, echoey psychedelic guitar tones, and another catchy
chorus, quietly burning with longing, yearning, whatever it takes to justify the
song title, and then towards the end you get a restrained, but focused
intrusion from some strings and cellos: another nice touch that was completely
unnecessary, but it feels so good to have it here.
And now comes the really odd part: it's all more or less like that right to the very
end. Nicely constructed, pleasantly executed songs of love, hope, frustration,
and a little nostalgia, one after another. Nothing is particularly
awe-inspiring, but nothing is particularly stupid, either. The two big
orchestrated ballads (ʽMoondustʼ and ʽFor Eternityʼ) echo
John Lennon, Elton John, and ELO rather than Eighties' and post-Eighties power
ballads, with more emphasis on cellos and acoustic guitars than violins and
electric guitars (that's always a good sign); the instrumental ʽEvil Knievelʼ
is like a joint tribute to James Bond themes, spaghetti-western overtures, and
Ritchie Blackmore at the same time; and ʽBring Back The Summerʼ
finishes the album on a Beach Boyish note, so endearing that we can even forget
them the inscrutable decision to use a drum machine. Maybe drum machines are
well known for their ability to bring back the summer.
To put an unnecessarily long story short, Kablammo! keeps it short, simple, but
smart, and I suppose that might just be the only way to go about it in an era
where 99% of conscious attempts to «innovate» just pathetically end up
reinventing the wheel. At any rate, I wouldn't be surprised if it ultimately
turned out to be one of the best rock albums of 2015 — at least, I certainly
wouldn't object to this becoming a reality. Congratulations, Mr. Wheeler, all
you really had to do was open your mind to as many clichés as possible —
not just Nineties clichés, but all the way to the Seventies and Sixties
— and then your mind was able to reshuffle and recombine them in such a
surprisingly refreshing manner. If this is mediocrity, well, gimme more; for
now, just a very grateful thumbs up, because it is albums like these that
show how my obsession with complete discographies is not always a total
OCD-related waste.
ACROBATIC TENEMENT (1996)
1) Star Slight; 2) Schaffino;
3) Ebroglio; 4) Initiation; 5) Communication Drive-In; 6) Skips On The Record;
7) Paid Vacation Time; 8) Ticklish; 9) Blue Tag; 10) Coating Of Arms; 11) Porfirio
Diaz.
«Early Texan post-hardcore». Don't you just
love it when it's that easy to
pigeonhole? It's really the next step that is far more difficult to take. For
instance, what is post-hardcore? If
it really is something, is there any real need for it? Are there any generic
traits of Texan post-hardcore that distinguish it from LA post-hardcore? Is
this band good, or what?
So, instead of answering all these questions
and drowning the review in terminology debates, let me just try to explain what
the whole thing is like. Two
interlocking guitars playing drones and jazz-influenced lead lines — an
approach that reminds one of Television, only these guys are predictably
louder and wilder. A lead vocalist with a heavy nasal twang who considers
singing an affront to good taste, but is not strong enough for proper barking.
Songs that are utterly unmemorable and often indistinguishable from each
other, but still have invigorating potential. Impressionistic lyrics that
never make the slightest sense, but still spit out the collective unconscious.
And — poor, but not awful, production values (not bad for $600, I'd say).
Such is Acrobatic
Tenement, an album that is usually said to capture At The Drive-In still in
their formative phase. But since they eventually spent more time in the
formative phase than in the fully formed one, we might just as well consider it
their first «masterpiece», as far as this particular style of making music is
concerned.
The problem with reviewing this style is that
it does nothing for me. Except for the slower, bass-heavier, moodier «ballad»
ʽInitiationʼ, where Bixler's vocals occasionally try to turn to
falsetto, everything else sticks together in a shapeless mess. It is not a noisy mess: the guitars favor the drone
over the chainsaw buzz, and the collective effect frequently lands in the same
ballpark with Velvet Underground jams or even avantgarde jazz stuff. But there
is nothing particularly fresh, startling, or interesting about this drone. The
guitars don't play anything that you haven't already heard from the Velvets,
Television, Sonic Youth, Fugazi, or some other bunch of smelly jerks; and
Bixler seems capable of one single vocal intonation, which sounds invigorating
on the first track, familiar on the second, predictable on the third, annoying
on the fourth, irritating on the fifth, and from then on it's just KILL KILL
KILL.
If you want a good sampling of what these guys
can do best when they are «weaving» their guitars, check out ʽSkips On
The Recordʼ with its mix of drones and wobbles; or ʽTicklishʼ,
which has some nice speedy picking there — but only if you already have a propensity for this kind of music,
because if you are not already genetically engineered to adore «post-hardcore»,
Acrobatic Tenement will probably
not convince you. If you want to see these guys at their most obviously
«heartfelt», check out ʽEbroglioʼ, dedicated to a close friend who
committed suicide that year: perhaps Jim Ward's and Adam Amparan's guitars will
inflict catharsis, and Bixler's singing will make the stars shine bright on a
cloudy day.
But if you do not want anything by yourself, I
am certainly not going to insist that you rush out and hear the album at all.
At best, it is better than a lot of noisy, flash-in-the-pan hardcore that it
grew out of. Can that be a compliment? Nope. In reality, At The Drive-In only
recorded one good LP in their brief lifetime, and this one's not it. Thumbs down.
IN/CASINO/OUT (1998)
1) Alpha Centauri; 2) Chanbara;
3) Hulahoop Wounds; 4) Napoleon Solo; 5) Pickpocket; 6) For Now... We Toast; 7)
A Devil Among The Tailors; 8) Shaking Hand Incision; 9) Lopsided; 10) Hourglass;
11) Transatlantic Foe.
Big lineup changes here: former bassist Omar
Rodríguez switches to second guitar, with Paul Hinojos taking his place,
and drummer Ryan Sawyer is replaced by Tony Hajjar. Are these shuffles
responsible for a change in sound? No idea, but there is a change in sound, and not necessarily a good one, as far as my
ears can tell.
The album was issued under a rather standard
ideological sauce: «we want to come close to reproducing our live sound in the
studio». This idea never worked for the Who, who pretty much abandoned it after
several unsuccessful attempts; why it should have worked for At The Drive-In is
never made clear. What it all comes down to is sacrificing the basic studio sound
of Acrobatic Tenement — a sort of «Television
updated for the 1990s» — and plunging deep into the world of loudness,
distortion, power chords, screaming, and other charming attributes of noise-rock.
At this point, Cedric Bixler certainly sounds
like one of the illegitimate sons of Captain Beefheart: the songs never
distinguish properly between verse and chorus, the lyrics are an endless stream
of consciousness that never makes literal sense but sometimes creates a «mood»,
the vocals are literally «on the edge», and the music is intentionally ugly
and non-catchy. The only problem is, In/
Casino/Out is no Trout Mask Replica.
The lyrics have too few intriguing lines, and the words are mostly indiscernible
anyway; Bixler's screaming is no better or worse than the acoustic waves sent
out by millions of punk guys across the world; and the music...
...well, a few
songs are genuinely interesting in one way or another. ʽPickpocketʼ
is fast, concise, collected, and riding on a set of wobbly, quasi-psychedelic
guitar lines that are at least amusing, and at best, inspirational. That is an
example of an actual song with an idea behind it. Then comes ʽFor Now...
We Toastʼ, where the same type of wobbly line makes an occasional
appearance — but most of the time the musical background remains just a
background, loud, but bland.
Many of the songs use a broken, stop-and-start
structure (ʽA Devil Among The Tailorsʼ), pretending to some sort of
«avantgarde» structure — and despite the band's loyalty to the usual
soft-verse-vs.-loud-chorus trick (except, as I said, there is no verse/chorus
distinction here, unless the «getting louder» part always counts as the
chorus), anyway, despite that, yes, quite a few chord and rhythm changes here
are relatively unpredictable. The only problem is, this group is smart, but
taken together, they aren't exactly the Mothers of Invention or the Magic Band.
They handle their instruments on the same level as any modestly capable punk
band, no more and no less. And when you do not play your instruments in a
particularly complex or unusual way, «experimentation» is usually a dead
end.
To be fair, the album finds quite a warm
reception in certain circles; I have seen terms like «amazing songwriting» and
«unparalleled musicianship» applied to such songs as ʽAlpha Centauriʼ
and ʽLopsidedʼ far more often than I'd like or even expect to.
Therefore, I have a diplomatic duty to acknowledge that, perhaps, I am not
«getting» something here. As far as musicianship goes, there is, at best, a bit
of «nice» jangly / drony interplay between the two guitars (far less interesting
than, for instance, the Bachmann/Johnson duets on Archers of Loaf albums), and
the songwriting never advances beyond well-trodden paths of proto-punk and
post-punk artists.
But my biggest concern is probably with Bixler,
who is simply unbearable here — a naturally whiny guy trying to scream his
lungs out is far more annoying than just a natural-born screamer. Eleven songs
in a row try to convey a sharp personal tragedy of desperation and
disillusionment, spat out in a schizophrenic stream of non sequiturs, and all I
can discern is a sociopathic guy in bad need of professional help. (Side note
for those who understand: while At The Drive-In could be seen as sort of a
«Birthday Party» prequel to the «Bad Seeds» of The Mars Volta, the comparison
would never be secure, since Bixler never really «found himself» with his first
band, whereas Nick Cave was already perfectly well within his element on the
first Birthday Party albums).
Bottomline: if you like your N-O-I-S-E clumsily
stuffed into a relatively conventional song format, and your punky music
dressed with «modern improvisational poetry», In/Casino/Out may well be for you. But not for me — I think that,
unlike the first and third LP from this band, this one has almost nothing
redeemable about its thumbs down.
VAYA (1999)
1) Rascuache; 2) Proxima
Centauri; 3) Ursa Minor; 4) Heliotrope; 5) Metronome Arthritis; 6) 300 MHz; 7) 198d.
Not the first, but the longest EP released by
these guys, it deserves its own brief review because it is generally considered
to be an important transitional step — sort of a threshold where they finally
stopped seeing their noisy schtick as a thing-in-itself, and started using it
as a foundation upon which something bigger could eventually be built up. What would be built up is another
matter, and I am still not sure that either Vaya or its lumpier full-length successor are «awesome» records in
the way that they are revered by the fans, but...
...there's a change in the air, and it is a change for the good. Vaya cuts down on the straightforward
noisemaking of In/Casino/Out, brings
back some of the twisted guitar geometry of Acrobatic Tenement, and throws in a few new ingredients, mainly, a
huge emphasis on «dirge-like» bass and guitar chords. As a result, Vaya gels together as a sort of
twenty-minute long punk requiem —
appropriate enough for a record whose last song is said to be dedicated to the
drummer's grandmother, buried in a mass grave in Lebanon (Tony Hajjar's family
actually fled to the States from the Civil War in the 1970s).
It is, in fact, only when I started looking at Vaya this way that something clicked
(and I tried relistening to the earlier albums this way, too, and it did not
help). This is a carefully — much more carefully than before — constructed
projection of human madness and its consequences, pretending to far more
importance than you'd initially assume it to. The lyrics still flow in
seemingly random streams of conscience, but as the music that backs them
becomes loaded with a sense of purpose, the words no longer irritate at random
— important signals are let out at regular intervals: "mastadon infantry
radiate this frequency"... "civilization tastes so good, Nero has
conquered the stars..." "they will come and get you tonight, so I
guess this is goodnight..." "it's as if someone raised the price of
dying to maximum vend again..." "what if forensics finds the answers,
what if they stole my fingerprints?.." "amnesia proletariat, coughing
up the coffins..." "you speak in tongues, tremors that warn us of
ourselves..." ...see, it's starting to come together somehow.
As for the music, it is still anything but memorable,
but now they know how to make atmosphere — by putting more fuzz on the bass and
letting it roam along the premises louder and prouder than they used to, by
alternating quiet and loud sections with more suspense than they were capable
of mustering, by bringing back the «guitar-weaving» techniques, by toying
around with echoes and bits of electronics, by... well, I don't want to create
the impression that these songs are very «diverse», because they are not, but
the end result is a complex, intelligent, and, of course, hard-rocking grimness
that warrants repeated listens until something
sinks in.
Because this is so short, there are no high- or
lowlights. ʽHeliotropeʼ is one of their fastest and craziest numbers;
ʽMetronome Arthritisʼ is an attempt at «dark soul» that culminates in
the "what if forensics..." line, the grandest gesture of paranoia in
the band's career; ʽ300 Mhzʼ is the album's humble simulation of a
worldwide nuclear meltdown; and ʽ198dʼ sometimes quietly, sometimes
all-out loudly wails over the consequences. They do not really work apart from
each other, and it takes a few listens and a bit of an effort to even make them
work together, but once the effort is
made, it is hard not to acknowledge that, finally,
At The Drive-In managed to transform their «educated brutality» into a form
of, ho hum, modern art. Thumbs up, right?
RELATIONSHIP OF COMMAND (2000)
1) Arcarsenal; 2) Pattern
Against User; 3) One Armed Scissor; 4) Sleepwalk Capsules; 5) Invalid Litter
Dept.; 6) Mannequin Republic; 7) Enfilade; 8) Rolodex Propaganda; 9) Quarantined;
10) Cosmonaut; 11) Non-Zero Possibility; 12*) Catacombs.
Vaya on a larger scale — this is the record that
finally made the band into a household name (at least, in that kind of households), entered all sorts of critical shortlists
and rock textbooks, and gave them a chance to turn the ensuing break-up (or,
rather, «indefinite hiatus») into an act of sense and purpose. Meaning that,
rather than breaking up in disappointment and going back to the plough, they
could break up with satisfaction and go on to become The Mars Volta.
Once again, I am not going to lie about how
deeply I love and feel for the album. There is really nothing that can be done
with this problem: hysterical leftism, hidden under walls of improvisational
lyrical metaphors and half-punk, half-math-rock-ish musical constructions, just
does not happen to be one of my personal cups of tea. But on the other hand —
hey, it took me at least 15 words connected in an unusual manner to attempt to
describe what the band is doing here, and this means that Relationship Of Command is hardly a record that you should allow
yourself to just shake off your shoulders and be done with it.
Parts of this album are still «post-hardcore»,
burning on mad percussion and fast guitar noise, with the artsy overdubs and
convoluted, if not convulsive lyrics providing the «post» part of the deal. But
there is just too much atmosphere, vocal harmonies, and sometimes even
melodicity for us to simply tag Relationship
Of Command as «post-hardcore» and be done with it. What has ʽInvalid
Litter Dept.ʼ to do with «hardcore» at all? The backbone of the verse melody
is «geometric rock» à la
1980's King Crimson, but humanized through the intervention of piano flourishes,
heavenly slide guitars, and mournful angels chanting about "dancing on the
corpses' ashes" (the song is said to be dedicated to the memory of the
infamous Juárez murder victims). Hint: subtlety frequently, maybe even
almost always, works better than straightforward anger — ʽInvalid Litter
Dept.ʼ is angry enough, but it is the soft flourishes that emphasize the
eerie effect, not the "nails broke and fell into the wishing well"
chorus, thrown out by Cedric in his usual manner.
And there are lots of these neat little touches
on Relationship Of Command — the
band here is clearly in a state where «formula», no matter how strict or
trendy, does not satisfy them any longer. On ʽEnfiladeʼ, for
instance, guest star Iggy Pop opens the song with a hushed kidnapper phone
monolog — immortalizing the line "Hello, mother leopard. I have your
cub!"; the vocals are run through an «underwater» effect; no less than
three guitars are interweaving different melodies (a distorted heavy psychedelic pattern, a
shrill set of light psychedelic trills, and I'm pretty sure there's a third
part there, buried so low in the mix that I can't quite lay my finger on it);
and the mid-section breaks into a... lambada? Whatever.
This is just what I'm talking about. These
melodies still aren't all that memorable, but the album as a whole leaves a
great aftertaste — you might not fully understand what you have just sat through, but the creativity, the wish to
expand their musical world to make this confused, apocalyptic vision of the
universe even more evocative, it's all there. Guitar World put the record as No. 94 on its list of 100 most
influential guitar albums of all time — I certainly cannot verify the «influential»
tag, and I would definitely rate it lower on my personal list, but I do admit
that there is a huge, huge, huge mélange of guitar stuff here: pop,
punk, New Wave, prog, metal, everything is mixed, and frequently at the same
time (ʽOne Armed Scissorʼ shuffles power chords, jazz, acid rock
wah-wah soloing and God knows what else). Maybe none of these ingredients are
all that innovative, interesting, or inspiring on their own, but taken
together — in the year 2000 — for a kid who never had the chance to learn the
history of rock guitar — even for some grown-ups who did — this approach is a
real blast of fury.
And it all ends with the band's successful
attempt at a sort of a «noise requiem»: ʽNon-Zero Possibilityʼ, the
last song on their last LP, might be their masterpiece. "Contusion is
hungry / They still eat their young / Proto-culture null and void" might
be too blunt and hyperbolic, but the song's mix of mournful electric pianos,
guitar-produced «bee stings», and noisy electronics in the background, is
neither. This is already not so much «classic At The Drive-In» as it is «early
proto-Mars Volta», announcing a radical shift in perspective, but who cares
about the tags? Here they take our world troubles and put a unique dress on
them. It may not be the most stunning dress in the world, but it is still a
hell of a way to participate in the end-of-the-century «We Are Still A Very Evil Planet» festival. And
a fine way to end a highly uneven, questionable, but ultimately self-redeeming
career — thumbs
up by way of listening and reasoning, if not necessarily so by way
of hearing and feeling.
PIECE OF TIME (1989)
1) Piece Of Time; 2) Unholy
War; 3) Room With A View; 4) On They Slay; 5) Beyond; 6) I Deny; 7) Why
Bother?; 8) Life; 9) No Truth.
«Technical death metal» is a subgenre forever
trapped in its «sub» aspect. What does one really get by combining breakneck
speed / ultraheavy riffage / growling vocals / mock-Satanic lyrics with complex
time signatures / unpredictable song structures / elements of free-form jazz
and atonality? Instead of attracting a joint herd of metalheads and prog nuts,
bridging the gaps between the two, this kind of music is more likely to
alienate both — prog nuts will either be terrified of the death metal
clichés or tend to laugh them off, while metalheads will find it a bit difficult
to move around the mosh pit when that rhythmic pattern is prone to
metamorphosing at unpredictable intervals. (Not that there are any genuine
limits to the power of moshing for the well-seasoned mosher). Which basically
explains why Slayer and Rush are superstars while Atheist, whose idea was to
combine the virtues of both, are not.
But not for lack of trying, of course. On the technical
side, these guys are fairly hard to criticize. Lead vocalist Kelly Shaefer does
not so much «growl» as he «snaps» and «barks», bringing the style a bit closer
to hardcore punk than to regular death metal. Guitar work, shared between Kelly
and Rand Burkey, is up to the highest standards of the genre (not much of a
surprise, though: if you’re into death metal, your technique is either superb
or you’re not into death metal);
bassist Roger Patterson takes his cues from Chris Squire rather than Cliff Burton,
and drummer Steve Flynn is a big lover of polyrhythms, hands and feet flying in
every direction in a state of brotherly democracy for each limb.
In addition, Atheist, as prime representatives
of the intellectual pride of Florida, are not content with the usual formulaic
guts-and-gore lyricism: in interviews, Schaefer remembers the lyrics of early
stuff like ʽLifeʼ (“If chainsaws are your fantasy, I’ll cut your body
into three”) with horrified embarrassment. It’s not as if they are divine
masters of the word — they simply come up with a plain agenda of promoting
freedom, individualism, «brainism», and, of course, atheism that is no better
or worse than anyone else’s, and, again, this brings them closer to the
«hardcore» spirit than the cheese-stained Breath Of The Apocalypse. Of course,
in this setting, the regular bowel-cleansing «wwweeeeaaaaarrrgggh!» that
Shaefer lets out in between all the preaching do come across as somewhat
unnecessary. Maybe they are supposed to represent the protagonist regurgitating
all the religious shit crammed in his bowels by a three-thousand year old
tradition.
This is as far as I can go with the appraisal,
though. Problems start at the usual point of entry: when you realize that it is
all but impossible to tell one song from the other. Not even the slow-to-fast
ratio of the tempos is any good indication — Atheist are too smart to let you
catch them like that, and almost every tune includes transitions from slow to
fast and back again, the «fast» usually in the more faithful speed metal
pattern, the «slower» going heavy on the polyrhythms and syncopation and jazzy
jumping (but always with the same metallic guitar tones).
The riffs are way too speedy and too complex
anyway to allow individual notes and chords to trace an emotional pattern; the
vocals create atmosphere, but not hooks; and the finger-flashing metal solos
are the least interesting element of the lot — they sound like any other speed
metal solo ever played. The overall sound is
highly unusual, for sure, but this unusualness comes at the expense of
completely forsaking individuality of the tracks, apart from the fact that one
or two of them open with «moody» little bits of doom-laden electronic effects.
Not that this is so much different for many of the serious jazz albums from
which Shaefer and the boys drew parts of their inspiration — but at least the
best of those albums always knew how to introduce a memorable theme before
veering off into a world of shapeless improvisation. These boys riff and riff
like there was no tomorrow on their anti-religious propaganda pieces, yet they
might just as well have left out the in-between song breaks. One continuous
forty-minute long «progressive death metal symphony» would seem more honest in
this context.
As it is, I can only talk about the overall
sound of this thing: technically mind-blowing, emotionally rousing if you like
to headbang to weird time signatures, and, most importantly, hard to laugh off,
except over those brief intervals where Shaefer is getting electrocuted by his
own vomit all over the microphone. But «hard to laugh off» does not
automatically mean «spiritually overwhelming». On their next album, the band
would move a little further away from the strict regulations of the genre; Piece Of Time is, however, very rigid
in its metal guitar-metal bass-monster drums-growler pipes formula. I give it
an «intellectual» thumbs up for recognizing the effort to lift the
genre into another dimension, but I am not going to jump for joy just because
somebody, somehow, out of nowhere, invented «metal-fusion» one day — I’d like
to see a good reason for that invention, which Piece Of Time does not really offer.
UNQUESTIONABLE PRESENCE (1991)
1) Mother Man; 2)
Unquestionable Presence; 3) Retribution; 4) Enthralled In Essence; 5) An
Incarnation's Dream; 6) The Formative Years; 7) Brains; 8) And The Psychic Saw.
This follow-up to Piece Of Time is usually hailed as the «ultimate» Atheist
experience, despite (or, perhaps, due to?) being only thirty minutes long, and
also despite having been recorded in the wake of the tragic death of the band's
bass player Roger Patterson in a touring van accident; those who really care
can always check out the demo versions of the songs, which make up for the entire
second half of the current CD and feature Patterson's playing. His replacement,
Tony Choy, is competent enough to handle his lines, although my brief
impression is that, as a result, the album is not as heavy on the bass as its
predecessor (at the very least, there aren't quite as many bass solo passages
this time).
The reason why Unquestionable Presence gets all the acclaim is that the band moves
even farther away from the death metal formula and ever closer to the
intricacies of hard bop and free-form jazz. Of course, to fully understand
this, you have to replace the metal guitars in your mind with pianos and saxes,
and then, perhaps, a distorted vision of Eric Dolphy will fly by in a transcendental
haze. If the vision remains inconjurable, just think of it as really, really
fucked-up death metal. Well — if death itself is a major fuck-up, why shouldn't
death metal be one?
Unfortunately, I still have a hard time telling
one song from the other. But at least this time around, there are occasional
interludes that go somewhat beyond fifteen seconds of atmospheric synthesizer
fiddling. ʽMother Manʼ, for instance, incorporates a few lyrical bits
of bass / melodic guitar interplay, sprinkled with chirping birds to remind us
of the beauty of nature, so hopelessly spoiled by industrialization, pollution,
and detrimental sonic waves generated by death metal guitars that dominate the
other parts of the song. ʽAn Incarnation's Dreamʼ starts off with a
folksy acoustic passage (this can be seen as a humble tribute to «regular» metal).
And most of the other tracks, this way or another, incorporate extra melodic
guitar bits, albeit usually short ones, wedged somewhere in the thin cracks of
the stop-and-start passages; of the fully incorporated solos, the one that
begins at around 2:00 on ʽRetributionʼ is of particular note — if
only it were attached to a more memorable riff!...
Lyrically, it's the same old shit all over
again ("man prepares to meet his destiny", as Ozzy once sang and
since then ninety percent of death metal bands have been doing nothing but
commenting on the issue), but vocally, it seems like Shaefer has given up on
trying to «growl» and comfortably settled in the «snapping» mode, which is
good, since it allows us to take stuff more seriously — especially since its
combination of breakneck speed with mind-bending chord changes is itself more
in the «post-hardcore» ballpark than in the death metal one. But overall, there
is no trying to pretend that any of these songs have different identities: even
their structures are generally similar, with a regular alternation of «funky»,
«signature-mocking», and «speed metal» parts — one could try and build a
working model for this shit, if one cared enough.
Hence, another «intellectualized thumbs up»
coming on here, but really, writing a useful review for such an album would be
a feat of the mind comparable to writing a good review for an Ornette Coleman
record, and I have never read one. Where riffs trigger particular emotions or
paint particular impressions, talking about them is easy. Where they just
produce a «wow, that's, uh, clever»
feeling, you need a good musicologist, and most of them are busy dissecting
Glenn Gould rather than Atheist anyway.
ELEMENTS (1993)
1) Green; 2) Water; 3) Samba
Briza; 4) Air; 5) Displacement; 6) Animal; 7) Mineral; 8) Fire; 9) Fractal
Point; 10) Earth; 11) See You Again; 12) Elements.
According to some sources, we owe the existence
of Elements only to the band's
contractual obligations: having disbanded in 1992, Atheist came together one
last time (or so it seemed at the moment) only to put this album together so
that they could get out of their contract with Metal Blade records without a
serious headache. In addition, Kelly Shaefer had developed carpal tunnel
syndrome and was unable to play lead guitar, so the band had to recruit a third
guitarist, Frank Emmi, to take over fifty percent of lead playing duties.
Hence, conditions for creativity flow were definitely less than ideal.
That said, Elements
sounds quite far removed from a generic, disinterested contractual obligation.
As may be noticed by just glancing at the song titles, it is a concept album —
other than songs dedicated to each element in particular and all of them at
once, the band throws the notions of «animal» and «mineral» into the mix, and
starts things out with a general eco-anthem (ʽGreenʼ), although,
actually, the majority of the songs here have an ecological undercurrent: it
would be fairly hard to find someone representing the interests of Greenpeace
more accurately than this bunch of death metal warriors. One notch scored for
dedication.
Second, of the three «classic era» Atheist
albums, Elements represents the
biggest departure from the formula — a disappointment for those stark fans
who'd want more of the same, but a bit of a relief for the reviewer, who
finally has to withdraw the most troublesome criticism: that of all the songs
merging together into one big, unsegmentable lump. This problem is now overcome
in a simple, but working way: many of the songs are separated by small
interludes that show the band branching out in different directions — ʽSamba
Brizaʼ features the band's dexterous rhythm section backed by guest
pianist David Smadbeck; ʽDisplacementʼ and ʽFractal Pointʼ
present a couple of deeply-distorted, but lyrical slow guitar solos; and
ʽSee You Againʼ has some pretty, echo-laden acoustic picking.
Nothing too amazing, but yes, we do need these delimiters.
As for the songs themselves, most of the
textbook thrash attitude has by now dissipated completely. Where, in the past,
they would alternate jazzy time signatures with breakneck chugga-chugga
passages, they now consistently keep the odd signatures throughout the pieces —
never a dull moment for the drummer boy. «Catchiness» still hardly appears on
the menu, and, for that reason, the new approach is not necessarily better than
the old one: the themes are still quite hard to memorize, and the emotional
effect is completely uniform regardless of whether they are singing about
water, air, fire, or earth — this is probably the biggest conceptual mistake of
this conceptual album. Then again, they are not singing of the nice spiritual
properties of these elements, but rather of various catastrophes, man-made or
natural, associated with them, and catastrophes are always catastrophes, be
they floods, quakes, or fires, so that could be one possible cop-out.
We do have more individual markers placed on
the songs than we used to. The Latin acoustic part in ʽWaterʼ, for
instance, which does not so much replace the metal basis of the song as it
flows in and out of it (flows, hear
that?). The odd little guitar-led merry-go-round in the bridge section of
ʽWindʼ, whirling around the speakers (whirling, mind you). The «siren»-mode guitar playing on
ʽFireʼ; the monkey laugh guitar imitation on ʽAnimalʼ —
these are all mostly just minor flourishes, but they are at least worth a
mention. The best guitar leads, by the way, are on ʽMineralʼ, where
each solo is introduced by a gorgeously ominous set of trills that I'm only too
happy to add to my very small collection of «finger-flashing bits with genuine
evocative power». Granted, I am not too sure what it is exactly that they
evoke, but does it really matter? That's why we have the word «evocative» in
the lexicon in the first place.
It is hardly a big surprise that, overall, Elements tends to be rated poorer than
its predecessors, but that is just because it is a little harder to headbang to
it — you have to learn quite specific headbanging moves, and it can take a long
time. The band members, judging by the live backlog they would perform upon the
later reunion, never thought all that much of it, either — perhaps they, too,
were sorry about going so far in the «Latin / jazz» direction that the «thrash»
sign all but disappeared from the horizon. But on the large scale of things,
these arguments seem rather petty — after all, just because the speed rates are
slightly lower and the drum parts slightly more syncopated does not mean that Elements does not rock just as hard. I
give it the same thumbs up as everything else, and I appreciate the will to
change, particularly when it is manifested on an album they did not even
intend to make in the first place.
UNQUESTIONABLE PRESENCE: LIVE AT WACKEN (2009)
1) Unquestionable Presence; 2)
On They Slay; 3) Unholy War; 4) Your Life's Retribution; 5) An Incarnation's
Dream; 6) Mother Man; 7) And The Psychic Saw; 8) Piece Of Time.
Thirteen years passed in a flash and finally
Atheist are back! Well, sort of. This lineup, assembled for some rejuvenating
touring in 2006, includes Kelly Schaefer (vocals and rhythm guitar only, still
suffering from the carpal tunnel thing), old time drummer Steve Flynn — the
band's major source of pride and joy, bassist Tony Choy, and two more
completely new guitarists coming from Gnostic (there should be a clever pun on
the importance of going from «Gnostic» to «Atheist», but I don't have the time
to come up with one).
To commemorate the glorious fact of the reunion
and gain extra time while trying to assemble a new studio album, Schaefer and
the kids released this «experience», which is really a 2-CD package: the first
CD records a complete live performance at Wacken Open Air in 2006, and the second
CD is just a «best-of» compilation, in case the veteran fans already wore out
their old albums a decade ago and the new crowds need a quick introduction to
the art of merging the unmergeable (death metal and avantgarde jazz) in an age
when heavy players usually preferred to merge the mergeable (blues metal and
mainstream pop).
Anyway, the result is an obvious rip-off: the
compilation does not have any outtakes or rarities, and the concert CD is just
eight songs that clock in under a measly 35 minutes. Considering that Atheist
never released an official live album in their prime, one might think it
initially useful. However, it is largely superseded now by the bonus tracks
attached to the CD edition of Elements
— a set of six songs recorded for a radio broadcast in 1992, in very good
quality and, funny enough, featuring a relatively shy and quiet style of
introducing the tracks, instead of the predictable stadium-geared roar on Live At Wacken. (Probably the only good
argument in favor of live radio broadcasts over «proper» live albums).
The entire setlist is based on the first two
albums, completely ignoring Elements,
although this may be due to the fact that Steve Flynn, the drummer, did not
play on that one and did not want to learn the parts of his replacement, rather
than a general «denial» of its existence. But that is not really a problem.
What might be a problem is that the
new guitarists do not have quite the same set of tones that made the original
records so crisp. Here, the guitar sound veers towards extra distortion,
coming at the expense of brutal heaviness, and the results kick plenty of ass,
but much less of the brain, if you know what I mean. (Actually, this is a
rather typical flaw of live metal albums — for some reason, either metal
guitarists do not bother to reproduce their «perfect» studio tones live or this
is just a technical impossibility — but some situations are worse than others,
and Live At Wacken falls into the
«some» rather than the «others» category).
On the other hand, you do have Steve Flynn,
whose technique and energy have not changed one bit in the fifteen years that
he had not played with Atheist — and you have all these songs that still carry
the same badass attitude, so why complain? If you are already an Atheist fan and can get this stuff cheap enough, go
ahead. But if you are not yet convinced, don't let this be your introduction. You
need those old-time guitar tones if
you are determined to develop a taste for this band. Although, on the other
hand, getting the whole package also makes sense — most people will probably
prefer an Atheist compilation over the entire three albums.
JUPITER (2010)
1) Second To Sun; 2)
Fictitious Glide; 3) Fraudulent Cloth; 4) Live And Live Again; 5) Faux King
Christ; 6) Tortoise The Titan; 7) When The Beast; 8) Third Person.
Honestly, I am not quite sure that what the
world needed most in 2010 was another Atheist album. The relatively small
fanbase that these guys had in their prime had almost certainly dissipated, and
a seventeen-year break between studio recordings could only mean two things:
either this would be a formally nostalgic venture, or they would try to
«modernize» the old sound by taking hints from the modern metal scene. Neither
of the two perspectives sounds particularly thrilling, especially when you're
talking about a «tech death metal» band whose old bag of tricks used a million
different ways to always puncture the exact same emotional nerve and no other.
Additionally, even on a formal level this is
quite a different band from the old Atheist. The only constant link holding
most of the discography (bar Elements)
together is drummer Steve Flynn, whose style and enthusiasm have not shifted a
bit: fills, rolls, and punches still keep flying in all directions, capable of
shifting from thrash to progressive polyrhythms and back in the blink of an
eye. Shaefer, on the other hand, is no longer playing even rhythm guitar; his
participation is limited to songwriting and «singing», and the «singing»
suffers quite a bit from the demands of modern production — it is less echoey
and much more upfront now, so it rather feels like a rabid guy is just spitting
directly in your face, without a single whiff of «demonic presence» or whatever
it is that textbook death metal vocals are supposed to convey.
With two completely new guys handling guitar
and bass duties, Jupiter has its
Atheist credentials somewhat diluted from the very beginning. Of course, there
can be little doubt about the basics: it is going to be a heavy, brutal, loud,
professionally played and recorded metal album, although, curiously, quite
short at that (running just over half an hour; not that «classic» Atheist albums
were much longer, but one could expect a shift here, considering that the
record was almost five years in the making — or, at least, in the planning).
But take one step beyond the basics, and disappointment might set in pretty
soon.
First and foremost, there is no bass on this thing. Well, technically
speaking, there is, but, apparently, Jonathan Thompson was so busy laying on
additional layers of guitars over the regular guitar guy (Chris Baker) that he
all but forgot about his primary duties. For a band whose basslines were
always just as important as the regular guitar parts — it was always the rhythm
section, after all, that provided most of the jazz links — this is a staggering
setback; if this was some sort of deliberate move (to make the album sound
«different»?), it was a stupid one.
Second, the guitar sound also suffers from
«purified» modern production. Where the guitars once used to be hellishly low
and deep (not a unique trait of Atheist, of course, but a solid trademark of ye
goode olde metal), now the pitch is higher and the sound waves seem shallower, never
enough to drag you down to the depths of Hell with them. And Baker and Thompson
represent this rather typical breed of modern guitar players: each note played
to utter perfection, all the fast and complex parts performed to the
unanimous-jury grade of 10.0, but without any inborn ability to create
meaningful atmosphere.
Add to this a complete lack of diversity — not
only is the album completely devoid of any stylistic twists (acoustic
interludes, keyboard flourishes, etc.), but almost each song follows exactly
the same pattern: double-tracked guitars hammering out some complex,
unmemorable riff, eventually drifting away into generic thrash territory, then
going through one or two time signature changes just to remind us of the band's
legacy. In short, more or less the same they were doing in 1989 on Piece Of Time, but with the «benefits»
of sanitized production, bass elimination, and an even more annoying vocal
presence.
Basically, there is just no need for this album
these days, not when the «intellectually-oriented» crowds have all the comforts
of heavy math-rock like BATS, and the easier-going metalheads have... uh, I
won't even be starting on that list. The not-so-sad truth, the way I see it, is
that Atheist had their brief three seconds of glory in the early 1990s, but
now it's just too late — for Jupiter
to be credible, respectable, or enjoyable in an above-the-ordinary way, we'd
have to have a miracle on display, and heavy metal bands are generally slow on
miracles once they have already established their thang. Thumbs down — although, if
«tech-thrash metal» is the one wavelength that truly sets you spinning, feel
free to disagree with that rating, because, in the end, it just reflects my
opinion that Jupiter has no soul to
it, and how could we ever prove that?
INCUNABULA (1993)
1) Kalpol Introl; 2) Bike; 3)
Autriche; 4) Bronchus 2; 5) Basscadet; 6) Eggshell; 7) Doctrine; 8) Maetl; 9)
Windwind; 10) Lowride; 11) 444.
Welcome to the world of Rob Brown and Sean
Booth, two adventurous Mancunians that, in the late 1980s, joined the sturdy
Mancunian army of Electronic Dancing Soldiers, and quickly advanced to the
rank of generals, pushing borders, expanding limits, setting records, and
pulverizing stereotypes. They call themselves Autechre and no one has learned
yet how to pronounce that properly, but that is not the biggest problem about
reviewing their output.
The biggest problem is that I have always hated
«technical» descriptions of electronic music albums targeted at the general
(that is, not really techno-savvy) public. What do phrases like "a sharp blend
of minimal but effective beats and bass combined with a variety of keyboard
textures and understated melodies" (from the All-Music Guide review of Incunabula) really tell you about ʽKalpol Introlʼ or any other track
on the album? Millions of electronic tracks have «minimal beats» (whether they
are «effective» or not depends, of course, on your subjective judgement), and most of them are combined with a
«variety of keyboard textures» (unless there is just one keyboard texture, in
which case the whole track is minimalist); and what does «understated melodies»
really mean? If you put three muffled
synth notes deep in the background and loop them to infinity, is that an
«understated melody»? Or a waste of prepaid studio time?
The fact is, in a
world oversaturated several times over with electronic music, it is simply
impossible, at least for somebody whose main (if not only) area of expertise
is electronic music, to tell what really makes the sonic world of Autechre, or,
more specifically, the sonic world of Autechre's early efforts, stand out from
the rest. Especially time has done
these guys a great disservice — in 1993, these techno experiments were still
relatively fresh and curious, but today they have pretty much dissolved in a
sea of similar-sounding experiments, or so it seems.
So it's probably
best, when writing about Incunabula,
to just toss out the context and try to judge it on... no, not on its own
terms, which are unclear, but rather on a subjective answer to the question:
«Is there a self-sufficient, autonomous little universe in here, or is this
just a bunch of technophile bleeps, whooshes, and beats?»
Let's begin by
mentioning that Autechre are sometimes associated with IDM («Intelligent Dance
Music»), yet, although there are plenty of rhythmic, danceable beats on Incunabula, it can hardly qualify as
typical club music. For that purpose, it would at least need to be louder, not
quite as icy cold, and focused more on the beats. Instead, Autechre create an
ambience that essentially sounds like Brian Eno crossed with industrial music —
stern minimalistic chord sequences and patterns locked in metallic cages of
clanging, banging, puffing, huffing, bursting, and exploding.
The actual chord
sequences range from dark and foreboding (ʽAutricheʼ) to
sprinkly-fussy (ʽBikeʼ) to emotionless-robotic
(ʽBasscadetʼ) to a mixture of mystery-and-beauty
(ʽEggshellʼ) to nearly epic minimalist-symphony parts
(ʽWindwindʼ, which sort of overstays its welcome at over eleven
minutes, but then there are no time rules when it comes to any kinds of ambient
music, right?): maybe the best thing that can be mentioned is that no two
tracks produce a completely identical emotional effect (provided one feels any
emotional effect at all from such music).
People sometimes
point out the lack of integrity and coherence, deducing this from knowing that
Incunabula was really a compilation
of stuff that the duo recorded over several years. But I think that the album is quite coherent — yes, it might have
used a more effective closer than ʽ444ʼ, which neither contains the
most solid «hooks» on the album nor creates any super-epic panorama to let the
curtains fall in a grand manner. But other than that, my overall
characteristics of the sound of the album applies to all of its tracks, and
they do form a single impressive entity — like walking through some large
underground sci-fi factory, dazzling the viewer with its white, clinical
sterility and yet at the same time pumping out hi-tech product for world
domination.
Like many other
electronic albums, it takes full advantage of CD size, clocking in at over
seventy eight minutes, although, predictably, most of the compositions fully
state their point by the time they reach one-third of their actual length —
chalk that up to club requirements and feel free to trim them down with your
own scissors, if you wish, but that's the basic paradox of ambient: the fewer
notes you play, the longer you have to make your composition last. The major question is — how about that
universe, is it there, in place, or is it not? And if it is, can you give it a
name? Well, how about «ice factory»? And a frozen thumbs up?
AMBER (1994)
1) Foil; 2) Montreal; 3)
Silverside; 4) Slip; 5) Glitch; 6) Piezo; 7) Nine; 8) Further; 9) Yulquen; 10)
Nil; 11) Teartear.
This is Autechre's first «real» album, written
and recorded coherently over a period of six months — and there are two ways to
think about it. First, if you are obsessed with tracing the artistic evolution
of Autechre, and with the concept that «no Autechre album sounds like any other
Autechre album», you can follow the line of the All-Music Guide review.
Essentially, it states that on Amber
Autechre are beginning to drift away from «IDM» and into the realms of the
unknown, unexplored, unpredictable, and, perhaps, even unpalatable — for those
who prefer their electronic music to soothe the body rather than the soul.
But if you are not that adamant about finding ten major differences between Incunabula and Amber, you might end up not finding even one. From a sheer
statistical point of view, the tracks on Amber
do seem to rely a little less on loud rhythmic beats than those on Incunabula — once you have bothered
with an actual countdown, that is. But in general, the album's «aura» does not
seem to have changed at all: the same all-pervading mood of the «ice factory»
is still the major attraction, and, at the same time, there are only about two
or three tracks on the entire album that are not «danceable» from a purely
technical point of view.
If there is
a difference, the way I see it, it is mostly in that the keyboard parts for Amber seem to be generally more
«non-descript» than those on Incunabula
— reflecting, perhaps, the relative hastiness, with which the album was made,
or maybe a conscious desire to move one step closer to pure «ambient».
ʽSilversideʼ, with its synth-strings playing out like a soundtrack to
a voyage in deep space, is probably the best example; but many other tracks
really behave in the same way, except that the soft and static atmospheric
waves of the synths clash with hard layers of electronic percussion
(ʽFurtherʼ — ten minutes of mild techno beats over a shallow sea of hums,
whooshes, and whispers); unfortunately, these waves are simply not evocative
enough to stimulate creative writing. It does not help, either, that, much too
often, Brown and Booth seem to be stuck in an overtly happy mood: tracks like
ʽSlipʼ and ʽNineʼ prompt you to simply jump into a state of
trouble-free coma and stay there frozen for all of their duration. It's a funny
feeling, but not without a side effect of silly boredom.
For me personally, Amber never manages to build up on the strength of the opening
number. ʽFoilʼ is all based around one simple trick — the recurrent
raising and lowering of the pitch of «tuned percussion» — and it is one of
those great effects that really makes you feel inside a giant sci-fi factory,
helpless, miserable, and overwhelmed by the industrial might. (Actually, it is
the sort of factory where most of the action is hidden from direct view — only
the repetitive percussive noises make you aware of the billions of operations
per second that are going on). Although it is one of the most minimalistic
tracks on the album, it is the only one that has an atmosphere of «cold &
cruel» grandiosity; everything else is quite playful, even «cute» in
comparison.
Instinctively, I feel compelled to label Amber as a quick, not very interesting
toss-off, not offering much in terms of either innovation or emotionality that
the assembled tracks on Incunabula
did not already have. It really comes very close to being «just boring» a lot
of times — a problem that weighs much more heavily on electronic music than on
«live» music — and, overall, it just seems like a space-filler, in no way
predicting the radical twists that Autechre would undertake already on the next
record. Maybe not exactly a «sophomore slump», as they say (is that terminology
even applicable for IDM releases?), but a thumbs down all the same.
TRI REPETAE (1995)
1) Dael; 2) Clipper; 3)
Leterel; 4) Rotar; 5) Stud; 6) Eutow; 7) C/Pach; 8) Gnit; 9) Overand; 10) Rsdio.
This is where it all changes. Love Tri Repetae or hate Tri Repetae, this is where Autechre becomes
a thing-in-itself, so that comparisons with Aphex Twin and other electronic
greats become shallow and meaningless. Not that Tri Repetae cannot be derived from Amber. It can. You just have to subtract «minimal keyboard melody»
from the equation and replace it with... say, «amplified transistor noises and
radiowaves». Yeah, that could do the job.
Moody keyboard sounds have survived the
slaughter in a few patches here and there, but not without mutating themselves
— ʽEutowʼ begins with an onslaught of looped synth strings that recalls
the old times, but once the percussive rhythms join the fray, the strings are
deconstructed, with each loop ending in a «nervous meltdown» that kicks your
ears off the path they'd like to follow. And on ʽOverandʼ,
frequencies of the notes are manipulated in such a way that the effect goes way
past regular «ambient» — listening to this in headphones might yield the
feeling that these waves are emitted directly by your own brain.
But neither of these two tracks is typical of
the album's overall sound, the major inspiration between which seems to have
been hours of happy listening to hoarse radio static — which Booth and Brown
decided to tame, subdue, and control in about the same way that Jimi Hendrix
once decided to tame, subdue, and control guitar feedback. The process reaches
its culmination in the ten minutes of the last track — whose
pseudo-accidentally misspelled title leaves little space for doubt — but
really, the whole record is permeated with the idea. Hiss, pop, crackle, and
some subatomic-level bleep-and-whistle for good measure rule the day on Tri Repetae. Yet this is not sheer
«noise» for the sake of noise — this is rhythmic noise, patterned noise, and,
occasionally, even «melodic» noise, although it takes a little risk and bravery
to arrive at that conclusion.
The ice factory is all but gone; to get that
effect, Autechre would require a bit more banging and clanging, not to mention
all the freezy keyboard parts. The percussive rhythms still lock together
according to the laws of industrial music, but now they seem to belong to the
world of microchips and miniaturization, not that of giant synthetic structures
rising miles high into the sky. Getting some sort of «emotional high» from this
experience is, most likely, out of the question; rather, one should try
combining it with reading a Stephen Hawking book — who knows, it might better
attune the brain to grasping the essence of the universe or something.
The microchips do exhibit different ways of
behavior, though. On ʽDaelʼ, they fuss and grumble, imitating busy
activity. On ʽLeterelʼ, they slowly hiss and punch, in a state of
relative relaxation. On ʽStudʼ, they hustle and bustle almost in some
sort of state of electronic tenderness. On ʽGnitʼ, they communicate
with each other; and on ʽRsdioʼ, they sound dying — tossed in a
garbage heap, gradually losing their last bits of charge. A sad story, really,
if you agree to look at it that way; and I cannot think of any other way if I
am to hope that an album like Tri
Repetae can actually pique somebody's interest.
Of course, the greatest irony is that, in our
completely electronified age, Tri
Repetae should have been its major anthemic soundtrack — yet the same
people who can no longer imagine their life without electronic devices would
rarely agree to make their daily soundtrack include any of this «nano-music»:
even the regular listeners of «electronica» will generally prefer something
more straightforward — in the world of rave, techno, and IDM, Tri Repetae occupies the place of
Jackson Pollock in the world of painting art. But, just like Pollock's
paintings, the album is here mostly so that we could ask interesting questions,
and then select from a range of equally unsatisfying answers for as long a
period of time as we have available to kill.
CHIASTIC SLIDE (1997)
1) Cipater; 2) Rettic AC; 3)
Tewe; 4) Cichli; 5) Hub; 6) Calibruc; 7) Recury; 8) Pule; 9) Nuane.
If you think about it, a «chiastic slide»
cannot really be a true slide, because anything chiastic in nature would have
to revert to its original position in the end. If you slide down, you have to
slide back up by means of a counterforce. That's an odd idea, to be sure, but
what exactly does it have to do with Autechre's fourth LP? Unfortunately,
nothing. It all makes about as much sense as the track titles which, by now,
have completely lost connection with linguistic reality.
Critical opinion tends to veer towards
disappointment for this one, probably for a simple reason: Chiastic Slide offers no advances over Tri Repetae, and, in some ways, sounds like a slightly less
inspired copy of its predecessor, sometimes even seemingly retreating — parts
of it are conventionally more «ambient-melodic», so that it cannot be considered
a true sequel to «One Day In The Life Of A Curious Microchip». Worse, the long
tracks sometimes sound disturbingly repetitive — something like
ʽRecuryʼ goes on for ages without any tiny fluctuating subtleties
that made the band's earlier attention-probers full of intrigue.
Of course, it is very much up to your
imagination how forgiving you will be in the end. For instance, having
listened to some of the tracks from both albums back-to-back, I was sort of set
on imagining that Tri Repetae was
all about a perfectly balanced world of friendly elementary particles, whereas
Chiastic Slide is about perfect
patterns being broken down and severely jostled into a state of partial
disfunctionality. As evidenced most transparently on the static hiss blasts in
ʽRettic ACʼ, the crazy percussion rhythms on ʽCichliʼ, the
crackles and sparking off of dead equipment on ʽHubʼ, and the
mini-explosions on ʽCalibrucʼ.
But then this scheme totally breaks down on
tracks like ʽCipaterʼ, where the cogs grind in good harmony and the
faraway melancholic synthesizers beep and bleep in solemn dirge mode, or
ʽPuleʼ, where the percussion dissipates completely and all that is
left is a large cloud of foggy chimes interlocking with each other at
predictable intervals. Here the personal concept for which you have wrecked
your brain for so long explodes, and you are left with the sad truth: Chiastic Slide is just a random
collection of «some more of our shit». Not much better and not much worse — but
with Tri Repetae, Autechre
effectively locked themselves into «The Innovator's Trap»: every new album of
theirs is expected to break new ground, and when it doesn't, your friendly
synthesizer dies from a broken heart.
In the end, I feel like joining with those
critics that gave the album a thumbs down, rather than those hardcore fans
who seek religious epiphanies in each hiss and crackle ever hissed and crackled
by Booth and Brown. None of the individual tracks honestly stand out — nor does
the entire album cling well together as a single concentrated assault on the
senses. And almost each of these tracks could be twice as short without losing
its point. And are those three minutes of pure static at the end of
ʽNuaneʼ really necessary?..
LP5 (1998)
1) Acroyear2; 2) 777; 3) Rae;
4) Melve; 5) Vose In; 6) Fold4, Wrap5; 7) Under BOAC; 8) Corc; 9) Caliper
Remote; 10) Arch Carrier; 11) Drane2.
If you do not greet the next Autechre album
with the question «So, what's new?», let me know your microchip family name so
that I can address you with the correct title — yes, people who listen to
Autechre because they enjoy their music emotionally
freak me out that much. (Fortunately, I have yet to meet one in person). But
if, like me, you have successfully rerouted your brain wires for the
«surprise-processing» center whenever you listen to Autechre, LP5 is probably going to be a blast
after the bleak mopiness of Chiastic
Slide.
At this point, it feels like these guys are almost ready to leave the very concept
of a «musical note» behind them, and concentrate on the amazing diversity of
thumping, clomping, stomping, exploding, hissing, boiling, and bubbling
patterns that illustrate the average day in the life of an electronic entity.
They are not quite there yet — total
percussion nirvana wouldn't arrive until Confield
— but they are getting extremely close. At the very least, it would take quite
a serious amount of substances to be able to dance one's head off to the merry
sounds of The Electronic Shaman emanating from ʽ777ʼ or the busy
quarks playing table tennis with each other throughout ʽUnder BOACʼ.
On the other hand, the faint little shades of
«melody» that still remain can be more evocative than the fuller sound of Chiastic Slide — ʽRaeʼ, for
instance, has a melancholic, dungeon-like attitude, as if the sad, drawn out
synth notes were luckless prisoners held inside the force field of the pulsating
percussion beats, hopelessly pleading to get out. And on ʽDrane2ʼ,
the notes twinkle, roll over, and fizzle out spasmodically as if some sort of
semi-intelligent robot were trying to imitate elements of an Indian droning
raga, without much success but with quite a bit of persistence.
That said, I cannot help but feel that all of this is not quite as breathtaking
as it is implied to be. The tracks have cautiously been trimmed down to
reasonable length, are dutifully provided with individual identities, and
officially represent a «step forward», no doubt. But the record still does not
quite live up to the first two tracks: ʽAcroyear2ʼ and
ʽ777ʼ push this percussion-heavy thing almost to its limits, almost
as if the idea were to make you feel stuck in the middle of the Hadron
Collider, and then the intensity recedes and everything else feels sort of
anticlimactic. Say what you will, but at least ʽVose Inʼ and
ʽFold4ʼ can qualify as «filler», and probably other tracks as well.
Not every idea of the Booth and Brown
brothers is supposed to work, you know.
One interesting idea I have encountered several
times is that albums like LP5 may be
supposed to make the listener feel pity
for the machines — actually, this is quite close to the feeling I got myself
when listening to ʽRaeʼ. I am not sure if Booth and Brown themselves
go that far; I do not think they have any strong personal philosophy attached
to their fingers when they are pushing the buttons. But they certainly are inventors of a machine-centered
sonic language, which they may not quite well understand themselves, and if so,
the first two tracks and a few others on LP5
are like the perfect introductory units in that language's textbook for
beginners. As silly as that analogy might be, at least it earns the album a thumbs up,
and never mind the filler. Since each Autechre album, on average, runs for
about seventy minutes, you can easily subtract thirty minutes of whatever you
think fillerish from each — and that'll be just enough, since who can take in
seventy minutes of Autechre without interruption, anyway? Nobody here but us,
slaves of the mercyless record reviewing industry.
PS: The real question, of course, is this: did
the Malevich family have to sue the creative duo for copyright infringement?
The album cover comes in black or
white, for that matter, depending on the edition.
EP7 (1999)
1) Rpeg; 2) Ccec; 3) Squeller;
4) Left Blank; 5) Outpt; 6) Dropp; 7) Liccflii; 8) Maphive 6.1; 9) Zeiss
Contarex; 10) Netlon Sentinel; 11) Pir.
As you may have noticed, I generally leave
Autechre's EPs unreviewed — most of them can be viewed as little satellites of
the accompanying LPs, and dedicating separate space to them would be a waste of
time more often than not — but this particular release is actually a
combination of two EPs, released separately as EP1 and EP2, and, in
between them, running for about an hour. Since there is no principal thematic
difference between the two anyway, it is easier to simply think about the whole
thing as one more large opus, and tackle it that way.
Not that there is any grand new world to tackle
here. Both EPs seem like temporary stopgaps to me, continuing the generally
stable Autechre pattern: «one conceptual breakthrough» — «one well-crafted, but
lazy follow-up, fed by the old formulae». The only curious thing about EP7, in that respect, is that it is the
first (or at least the first large-size) Autechre release to feature a limited
amount of vocal samples (on ʽCoecʼ and ʽZeiss Contarexʼ).
If there is any effect to it, it's most likely to be «disorientation» — all the
vocals are garbled and run through Booth and Brown's precious waves of static,
so that you get impressions of degraded biopatterns stuck in Star Trek
transporters or something like that.
Static, by the way, heavily dominates these
EPs, even if, altogether, there may again be more traces of ambient-ish
melodicity here than on LP5. The
seven minutes of the appropriately titled ʽLeft Blankʼ, for instance,
is simply all static mixed with PC
speaker bleeps, plinks, and plonks that remind me of old arcade games circa
1985 or so. On ʽOutptʼ, they try to tune that static and maybe even
make it rock — good idea, because every microprocessor with the tiniest bit of
self-respect needs to learn to rock'n'roll sooner or later. On
ʽLiccfliiʼ, they seem to be giving the static a lesson in hip-hop,
but the way I see it, static waves are just too stubborn to assimilate that
much learning over such a brief time period.
The only track that seemed relatively
unpredictable to me here was ʽMaphive 6.1ʼ, where both the static and
the «microchip percussion» suddenly disappeared, replaced by a mesh of keyboard
patterns (some pseudo-electric pianos, some pseudo-organs, some
pseudo-harpsichords, some pseudo-chimes, even some pseudo-glass harps and
vibraphones, whatever) and «normal» electronic percussion that comes and goes
at will. Not only does the whole thing create a mood that is almost critically
«non-Autechre», but its overall degree of complexity seems staggeringly high
for these guys, who usually prefer minimalistic layering. On the other hand, I
am not really sure what exactly it is doing here, locked in a cage of static
waves and clicks on all sides.
The most individualistic thing I can say about EP7 is that much of it does a damn good
job of dispensing with «tone» as some sort of prerequisite in music. Just turn
on your radio and choose whichever configuration of static agrees the most with
your biorhythms. Yes, ʽMaphive 6.1ʼ seems to go against that idea,
but that's the trick with Autechre — they never hit you in the face with their
philosophies. There's always a red herring in the woodpile, if you know what I
mean. But then, if not for that track, I would not have hesitated about a
thumbs down, probably.
CONFIELD (2001)
1) VI Scose Poise; 2) Cfern;
3) Pen Expers; 4) Sim Gishel; 5) Parhelic Triangle; 6) Bine; 7) Eidetic Casein;
8) Uviol; 9) Lentic Catachresis.
«An album, to respect, not to enjoy», quoth the
All-Music Guide. Well, according to my personal philosophy, Autechre is
altogether an artistic unit to respect rather than enjoy — remembering this all
the time helps me warm up to their output like nothing else. And Confield is nothing but an expectable,
if not to say predictable, apex of this «respectability»: after spending years
on making music that seemed to be generated by artificial intelligence, Booth
and Brown finally put out an album that actually was generated by artificial intelligence.
Well, sort of, that is. In preparing Confield, the robotic duo relied
heavily on Max software, with the basis for most tracks electronically
generated from input clues. This does not mean that the input clues were
completely random, or that the results did not undergo heavy selection and were
not seriously doctored, pampered, and trussed up before release. But overall,
this is, indeed, as close as Autechre
ever got to letting the machines take over; and this time, even the heroes had
to admit that, perhaps, this music was not quite
suitable for a club environment.
Do the results bode well for a new age of
machine-generated music? Well... supposedly we still need time to understand
that, even now that a whole decade has elapsed since Confield made the headlines. The machines certainly prefer
percussive sound waves to playing with tones and the pitches, that is for
certain; and oh the variety! ʽVI Scose Poiseʼ sounds like a spinning
top launched in the bottom of a metal tub, travelling all over the perimeter
at varying angles and speeds. ʽCfernʼ is a spike-heeled mosquito
tap-dancing atop a malfunctioning jackhammer. ʽPen Expersʼ is
Commander Data rehearsing a Jackie Chan routine, receiving his instructions
from a sped-up movie projection. ʽSim Gishelʼ is a Geiger counter on
overload, and so on (there's only so many metaphoric descriptions one can
generate for an Autechre review without overheating).
The tonal stuff is much less interesting, to be
frank. There are actual notes on all the tracks, but on some of them they are
barely noticeable (ʽPen Expersʼ), and most of the time, they
represent rather unassuming minimalistic patterns that mainly act as ear
tampons, or otherwise the percussion dynamo could eventually cause
irreversible damage. «Music» gets a bit louder on ʽEidetic Caseinʼ,
where discordant, chaotic, ominous cascades of violin-organ-esque notes
competes for attention with the crackling rhythms on an almost equal basis.
Everywhere else it simply provides a static background to the active pulsating
life of the rhythms.
As a self-certified human being (I hope!), one
of those billions of ultra-complex sets of machinery evolved over the past
several billion years, I find it even harder to attune my senses to these waves
than with any preceding Autechre record. I can survive, temporarily, on a bit
of percussion if it's an actual, well-improvised drum solo, but for hour-long
stretches of time I need more than that, no matter how weird or witty all the
clicks, cracks, and clangs may be sounding. But as a particularly bold
intellectual experiment, the meaning of Confield,
I suppose, is just to set you a-thinking. For instance, how close — even if
only by accident — could they have come to tapping into the emotional instincts
of... err... insects? Or tapeworms? Or single-cellular organisms?
Maybe, without knowing it, they have recreated some of the favorite dance
tunes of Micronuclearia podoventralis,
to name just one potentially grateful listener in my tummy. It might take us
years, or ages, to find out, of course, but we'll get there eventually.
From this or any similar point of view, Confield is a delight. From most
others, it is a nightmare, and even many of the critics halted in befuddlement
before spitting out a rating and a judgement. My original instinct was to give
in to hate and ramble about how people who do this should be dragged out into
the square and publicly, and humiliatingly de-artistified. But, honestly,
justifying this hatred requires a lengthy, elaborate philosophy of art and a
lengthy, elaborate pamphlet on why we could only live happily ever after once
we have all subscribed to that philosophy. To hell with it. I don't really like Confield, I don't hate Confield, I don't want to listen to any
more Confield, but I do feel as if
the actual experience extended some of the mind borders. Plus, I have serious
doubts about the album ever making it onto the «golden masterpieces» shelf, but
it could, in theory, point the way to
something entirely different... coming up in about five hundred years or so.
With an emotionally-driven thumbs down and an intellectually-fueled thumbs up
cancelling out each other, welcome to the big question mark that is Autechre's
most openly audacious, soul-challenging release ever.
DRAFT 7.30 (2003)
1) Xylin Room; 2) IV VV IV VV
VIII; 3) 6IE.CR; 4) TAPR; 5) Surripere; 6) Theme Of Sudden Roundabout; 7) VL AL
5; 8) P.:NTIL; 9) V-PROC; 10) Reniform Puls.
The most revolutionary thing about Autechre's
seventh LP is probably the song titles. Where they used to read like ordinary
words garbled through electronic malfunctioning, these already look more like random strings extracted from
sequences of machine code. And yet, at the same time, lo and behold, one of the titles is a noun phrase in ye
good old plain Aenglisc, even though the sonics behind it sound no different
from everything else. Ah, say what you will, but this duo simply refuses to be
pigeonholed. Predictable stereotypes? Leave them for unimaginative suckers like
the Beatles or Frank Zappa.
Other than the letters, though, Draft 7.30 should not come across as a
major revelation to those who already know the whole story. It regresses a bit
from the standards of Confield —
once again, notes, tones, and hums get louder and fussier, drawing attention
slightly away from the beats, as if they'd realized themselves that with the
percussion paradise of Confield,
they let their boldness carry them a bit too
far. But in doing that, they are really
«going back», losing their grip on the art of radical innovation. Scramble
these tracks and the ones from LP5,
and the only immediately felt difference is that Draft 7.30, like Confield, is «hoarser» and «hissier», generating
a strictly «computer» ambience rather than trying to expand into outer space.
And I am afraid that difference no longer plays
into the hands of Booth and Brown. There is only so much whooshing, scraping,
dialing, ringing, pinging, and plinging that one can eat up before the
inevitable question — «and...?» If Confield
could have got you a-thinking about whether or not this could be the music of
tomorrow in an alternate, post-Heat Death reality, Draft 7.30 will only get you a-thinking once more about what you
have already a-thought before, presumably more than once. Where are the new
sensations? Bring on the new sensations already! Why should it take us more
than a decade to study this sub-atomic zoo?
In all honesty, this album is neither
emotionally seductive nor intellectually provocative: it is simply boring.
Yes, the rhythms are still complex and diverse, but you'd think that, with the
kind of creative experience these guys have accumulated, they'd be able to come
up with a bunch of those in a matter of several hours or so. Worst thing about
it, the individual tracks no longer have any individuality — lower your
attention a bit, and you won't be able to tell where one stops and the next one
begins, except for maybe a jarring change of rhythmics from time to time. They
all just sort of roll along, at the same tempos, with the same gloomy attitude.
Ever been a fan of standing in front of a large anthill and stubbornly watching
them ants run along in all directions? Well, just replace the ants with
electrons, and you have yourself your Draft
7.30.
Not that there is anything criminal about that
— it was fairly clear that it would be tremendously hard to follow Confield with something equally
puzzling or provoking. As usual, long-term fans with appropriately wired brains
and a good deal of loyal patience will find plenty of opportunities here. But
for those of us who would rather like to nibble on different pebbles of the
musical kaleidoscope, Draft 7.30
might be easy to skip. Thumbs down for a lack of imaginativeness,
which, I think, is the most offensive accusation one can throw at Autechre (I
tried!).
UNTILTED (2005)
1) LCC; 2) Ipacial Section; 3)
Pro Radii; 4) Augmatic Disport; 5) Iera; 6) Fermium; 7) The Trees; 8) Sublimit.
No news may be good news, but not for the
unhappy reviewer. How am I supposed to stress this record's individuality over
that of Draft 7.30? Am I really supposed to make good friends
with these beats, measure their individual pulses, check their individual
temperatures, and tuck each one inside his individual bed of a one-two phrase
description? This is definitely not
something I remember myself signing for on that unhappy day when I broke my «no
electronics!» vow by acquiring the entire Tangerine Dream catalog.
All I can really
say is that Untilted is, once again,
closer in spirit to Confield: with Draft 7.30, it might have looked like
Booth and Brown were taking one step back and reintegrating some minimalistic
melodicity into the package, but now the domain of the computer blip has won
this next battle, so prepare yourself for seventy more minutes from the life of
the microchip. And it does not even look like the microchip is leading an
interesting life these days. No, just the same old routine — get up at 7:00 AM,
a bath, a shave, some quick breakfast with the wife, commute to work, get
installed, operate, calculate, lunch break, back to work again... everything
happening in a rather fussy way, of course, but it's all normal, predictable,
everyday fuss.
On second thought, some of these beats are
indeed programmed in almost ridiculously complex ways. Something like
ʽIpacial Sectionʼ or ʽAugmatic Disportʼ could never even
remotely be approached by a human being — the same way no human being could
ever beat the machine at counting out chess move combinations. But this does
raise the question of whether electronic music that may not be replicated or
interpreted by a human being can actually be enjoyed by one. These robotic pulsations neither follow our natural
rhythms (be it any standard pattern of the 4/4 or 3/4 types), nor do they
provide sick deviations to which, after a bit of training, we can attune our
rhythms (in a Captain Beefheart fashion). They are simply too much for the
nervous system to handle — and end up as «curious intellectual achievements»
with no purpose other than showing off one's professionalism.
The only track here which barely hints at a
human touch is ʽFermiumʼ, where the beats suddenly become less
complex and a little more «trance-inducing» in the good old sense of the word
(although it still gets way too messy towards the end). And I only write this
because, once its cycles started rolling in, it was the only moment on the
album that actually made a brief swipe at my attention center. Everything else
was just totally non-descript. What used to be «magical» is now perfunctory and
boring; what used to be «curious» is now predictable.
Hence, one more thumbs down. I used to wonder
how the heck these kinds of albums mostly get 5-star ratings and rave reviews
on Amazon and other such sites — before realizing, of course, that nobody will
ever get interested in a new Autechre album outside of the duo's hardened, devoted,
but very, very small handful of admirers, those who have done a fine job of
rewiring their brains towards «The Future» or «The Alternate Reality», as they
see it. For me, though, the biggest problem is that this alternate reality,
once you have already broken through, unpacked your tent, and are now beginning
to hang your family's portraits on the wall, is pretty damn hard to keep
yourself excited about.
QUARISTICE (2008)
1) Altibzz; 2) The Plc; 3) IO;
4) plyPhon; 5) Perlence; 6) SonDEremawe; 7) Simmm; 8) paralel Suns; 9) Steels;
10) Tankakern; 11) rale; 12) Fol3; 13) fwzE; 14) 90101-5l-l; 15) bnc Castl; 16)
Theswere; 17) WNSN; 18) chenc9; 19) Notwo; 20) Outh9X.
Finally, time for some change... cosmetic
change, that is. Quaristice is said
to have grown out of a lengthy, spontaneous «jam session» by Booth and Brown,
over which they managed to overload their fantasies and create innumerable
sequences of sequences. Consequently the sequences were sequenced into somewhat
inconsequential subsequences, so that Quaristice
consists of a record-setting twenty tracks, few of them running over four
minutes — rather a rude violation of Autechre's normal work philosophy, I'd
say.
Those who are particularly disturbed by this
rudeness will probably want to own the limited edition 2-CD version of the
album; the second CD consisted of several alternate versions, presented closer
to their original incarnations and our usual expectations of Autechre.
Basically, you not only get to see the idea as such — you get to see its birth,
growth, maturation, gradual and painful realization of its utter
meaninglessness / uselessness, and, finally, its slow death from natural causes
or a quickly staged suicide.
The main LP generally focuses on the idea
itself — one of Autechre's usual grooves, reduced to mini-size. Supposedly,
this should give Quaristice a more
dynamic aspect: instead of just chillin' out to long patches of ambient waves
or sweetly purring microchips, you get to see rapid changes of texture that may
or may not form a musical story. Who knows, you might even start making
predictions about what's it's gonna be like five minutes from now — a situation
formerly unthinkable with Autechre (because the most likely outcome is — «five
minutes from now, it's going to be exactly
as it is right now, plus a jackhammer»).
Problem is, apart from shorter track lengths,
the only shift is backwards: they are continuing the subtle regression to the
«icy» atmosphere of their early albums. Most of the percussion parts are
heavier, once again with an industrial flavor, and the accompanying
minimalistic keyboard parts speak either of the hand of doom or of the face of
eternity. The opening track is so deceptively serene you'd think they were
covering a Brian Eno sonic painting — but once ʽThe Plcʼ breaks
through with its jiggly beats, paranoid pseudo-record-scratching noises and
cold blasts of MIDI winds, it's back to old school again. Very old, as a matter of fact.
On the other hand, I fully admit that
«atmospherics» is back here, in a big, big way. The whole thing should be
played loud, in headphones, preferably in a dark room, and eventually these sonic
waves will flush you out in outer space, rather than cram you inside your dusty
computer processor. But the «individual» tracks, short or long, do not really
work as individual tracks — at best, they work as one more soundtrack to the
art of running along the streets of an alien world. Each street has a finite
length, yet few, if any, have an unforgettable face of their own.
Cutting a long digression in half, Quaristice is a fairly «normal» record
compared to everything post- and including Confield,
and it will probably stimulate an easier and clearer emotional response than
the pretentious conundrums of its predecessors. There is nothing too radically
innovative about it, though, and the emotional response itself smells a little
moldy, so you will just have to decide for yourselves. Nothing unlistenable
here, but still recommended only for absolute beginners or total experts.
OVERSTEPS (2010)
1) r ess; 2) ilanders; 3)
known(1); 4) pt2ph8; 5) qplay; 6) see on see; 7) Treale; 8) os veix3; 9) O=0;
10) d-sho qub; 11) st epreo; 12) redfall; 13) krYlon; 14) Yuop.
Finally, a real change of pace — overcoming the
«Confield block» once and for all,
Autechre release their freshest release in a decade. Some have suggested a
return to the icy ambience of Amber,
but in reality this is more like a democratic synthesis of Amber and Confield,
almost to the point where you'd think they were dubbing a 1994-flavored track
over a 2000-flavored one and then smoothing away the rough edges.
Actually, the whole «return to Amber» thing was probably invented by
people who never got further than the first track: ʽr essʼ (oh God,
those hideous titles...) is, indeed, one of those freezing cold synthesizer
whirlwinds the art of which these guys had mastered ages ago. Atmospheric and
not overtly exciting, but a surprising start nevertheless — no beats! no
microchips! no static! just the good old icy stateliness.
But over the next few tracks, gradually, yet
knowingly, they are once again building something new. The beats, the chips,
and the static will be making frequent visits, for sure, but the primary
emphasis is on synthesizing «old-fashioned» sounds: harpsichord hammers,
xylophones, little bells and musical boxes, so that more than half of the
compositions weave the pattern of a giant, tremendously complex electronic
clock — one that you have accidentally locked yourself within. The music does
not so much «resonate» here as it simply «scatters» all around, in one large
sea of ringing, springing, tinkling, dazzling, whatever.
The actual selected chords are never happy — as
we all know, musical boxes help create cuddly magical worlds for little boys
and girls, but these ones, like everything else Autechre does, are just
completely emotionally neutral, yet still vibrant and active «signs of life».
After all, a musical box, or a giant clock, or a primitive (or not so
primitive) life-form is emotionally
neutral by definition — you can get totally amazed at the complex internal
structure of all these things, but it's not as if they would be infecting you
with their own amazement, which they
do not have. And so, just sit back and enjoy another... umm, documentary by Booth and Brown, this
time one from the life of large mechanical concoctions punching each other and
exploding in miriads of ringtones, cadences, and dissonances.
Individual highlights are practically
non-existent: the only difference is between the «major chimers» (ʽknown(1)ʼ,
ʽpt2ph8ʼ, ʽsee on seeʼ, etc.) and the more old-fashioned
beats-and-bleeps that could have belonged on Draft 7.30 or any other of all those «Confield clones for dummies» (ʽilandersʼ,
ʽqplayʼ, etc.). The album does get nicely bookmarked — with retro-brushed
ambience of ʽr essʼ at the beginning, and then the same ambience
criss-crossed with the kaleidoscopic chimes on the last track
ʽYuopʼ. Actually, ʽYuopʼ is a bit different in that all of its «sprinkly» sound seems to be
radiating into outer space, resonating at us from far, far away (or maybe it's
the other way around — cosmic rays breaking through the atmosphere? whatever),
so it's an appropriately «universalist» coda for the whole album.
Altogether, the approach is simple in theory
and not too awesome in the sheer number of new ideas involved, but with the
gazillions of electronic albums out on the market in 2010, even one new idea,
consistently implemented in lots of different ways, is not to be taken too
lightly. And I have yet to see an electronic (or a non-electronic, for that
matter) album that could serve as a better textbook on all the tricks and
treats of The Big Chime — I'm still picking echoes out of my buzzing ears, a
tedious, but not wholly unpleasant procedure. Thumbs up.
MOVE OF TEN (2010)
1) Etchogon-S;
2) y7; 3) pce freeze 2.8i; 4) rew(1); 5) nth
Dafuseder.b; 6) iris was a pupil; 7) no border; 8) M62; 9) ylm0; 10) Cep puiqMX.
Okay, the good news is that, even if Oversteps and Move Of Ten were released within months of each other (technically,
the latter is counted as an EP, because it «only» runs for... forty-seven
minutes? yeah, fairly short, only the size of two average early Beach Boys
LPs), they sound fairly different, and each one is impressive in its own way.
The people at Pitchfork preferred to define the difference quite formally —
pointing out that Oversteps is more
ambience-oriented, whereas Move Of Ten
is more sharply beat-focused. That may be so, but it does not really capture
the difference in sensations.
I would rather say that Move Of Ten is a «spooky» counterpart to the Big Unnerving Clock of
Oversteps. We are not just back to
the beats, we are back to the icy, snapping beats, the frosty synths, the
freezing white noise — the old sights of the Autechre factory working at below zero
temperatures, where each movement of the robot begins with breaking the thin
crust of ice that re-forms every five seconds. Only this time the sound is
mastered in a way that places you, the listener, somewhere above that factory — as if it were completely ensconced in some
underground cavern, and you were trying to dig your way in from the top.
The exact technical means to ensure this
echoey, cavernous sound are a mystery to me (ask a technician), but they were
hardly accessible to Autechre in the 1990s — whoever claims that all Autechre
sounds the same (not an unreasonable claim, but depends on the coarseness of
your grain, of course) should go back to Tri
Repetae and see how far they have progressed in that respect. Whether
there is any substantial difference in the structure of the beats and the
texture of the melodic patterns is another matter.
There does seem to be an evil, aggressive side
to Move Of Ten that you do not often
encounter on Autechre albums — for instance, ʽrew(1)ʼ is almost funky
in its progression, with twisted, distorted bleeps snapping at you from under
cover, making it one of the «nastiest» tunes in the entire repertoire of the
duo. On stuff like ʽiris was a pupilʼ (hey, some real words!) the
dark side is more subdued, reduced to several overdubs of murmuring wave
patterns expressing situational discontent with each other. But the evil
presence is felt everywhere, as if, finally, all of Autechre's microchips were
learning their basic emotions.
Which might be timely enough — if the idea here
is to start elevating the consciousness of the musical AI these guys had been
developed for twenty years now, I'm all for it, not only because it provides
them with a bit of reason for further existence, but also because it might
eventually convince me and other sceptics that electronic music has not gone
the way of rock'n'roll, but still holds the key to the future. The important
thing is to keep on bridging the gap between the human and the robot, and that
might take some time. As for now, thumbs up for this one more tiny step for mankind,
giant leap for monolithic integrated circuit.
EXAI (2013)
1) FLeure; 2) irlite (get 0);
3) prac-f; 4) jatevee C; 5) T ess xi; 6) vekoS; 7) Flep; 8) tuinorizn; 9)
bladelores; 10) 1 1 is; 11) nodezsh; 12) runrepik; 13) spl9; 14) cloudline; 15)
deco Loc; 16) recks on; 17) YJY UX.
The old popular saying goes that «more Autechre
is better Autechre», because the only thing to beat five blows of an electronic
jackhammer is fifty blows of an electronic jackhammer, and the only thing to
beat fifty blows... well, you get it. From this point of view, what could be
better than, finally, to have ourselves a double
CD of brand new Autechre material — one hundred and twenty minutes of
slaughtered prime time in total? And, come to think of it, how come it happened
that it is only now, in 2013, twenty years into their illustrious career, that
Booth and Brown have finally decided to go all
the way?
Unfortunately, at the moment (I have only sat
through twice through the whole thing — maybe a third listen could clinch it,
but then you'd have to pay me), my answer is crude, simple, impolite, and
nasty. All too often, one is tempted to mask the poor quality of one's creative
ideas with sheer quantity. A turd is just a turd — a mausoleum of turds piled
atop each other is a work of art if you manage to mold it into an imposing
shape. And no, I am not going as far as to suggest that most of the tracks on Exai are «electronic turds», because I
wouldn't even know what that is, much less what would one look like coming from
Autechre's guts. But I am going to
suggest that there is nothing of interest to look forward to on Exai, and that is that.
Formally, this is a retreat back from the
curious synthesis of «melody», «humming tone», and «jarring noise» on Oversteps into the safer, tried and
true territory of their post-Confield
recordings. Once again, it is the confused-and-confusing sub-atomic beats that
rule the day — and it is true that Booth and Brown have a seemingly infinite
amount of combinations to try out, but this would be more of interest to an
expert in combinatorics than a simple listener who cannot remember ever
pledging to decipher, catalog, and analyze every percussive pattern generated
by the two geniuses. In other words, it no longer stimulates me even on a
purely detached, «intellectual» level — no more than a tenth generation video
game targeted at the same old market.
Even worse, much too often it looks as if they
are not trying at all. The longest track on the album (ʽbladeloresʼ)
runs for twelve minutes on what seems like one and only one musical idea — a
leisurely revolving «warped» noise wave, twirling mysteriously in the
background while the usual jackhammers are put in «relaxed» autopilot mode in
the foreground. There is nothing innovative about this, and from an
atmospheric point of view, it seems so boring that I wouldn't even be able to
be lulled to sleep by whatever is happening. The second largest track (ʽcloudlineʼ) is a bit more dynamic,
but overall, I must say that I get more excited when pressing my ear real close
to the back panel of my computer — I mean, why bother listening to the faked life of microchips when you could
just as well enjoy the real thing?
I wish I could produce a slightly less clueless
impression here, but, in all honesty, I have nothing interesting, insightful,
or pleasant to say about a single one of these tracks. As far as I am concerned,
Autechre have simply returned to the bland, uninspired «craft» of their Draft 7.30 stage, and this album, huge
as it is, can only be a donation to the staunchest of fans — personally, I am
not going to be bowled over by the sheer hugeness of this offering. Bottomline:
if Confield is all of your life and
the village green beyond it, Exai
will add an extra 120 minutes of happiness — otherwise, spare yourself the
misery of trying to «get it»: just think, instead of one listen to Exai you
could have spent the same time on five
Beach Boys albums! Just this one thought is quite sufficient to solidify the thumbs down.
ELSEQ 1 (2016)
1) feed1; 2) c16 deep tread;
3) 13x0 step; 4) pendulu hv moda; 5) curvcaten.
Admit it, the last thing you want in your life
is to be left without a new Autechre experience every few years — because what
would be the meaning of that life? How else could you even begin to penetrate
the deepest mysteries of the universe? One good listen to a new Autechre album
— isn't that pretty much the equivalent of reading the complete works of all
major figures in existentialist philosophy, or at least the equivalent of a master's degree from MIT? Could modern
art truly survive without being exposed to the latest and greatest in abstract
electronic noise from two geniuses who keep revolutionizing the scene every few
years in ways so deep and subtle, most people don't even notice it?... If that
is your way of thinking, too, then to you, 2016 will be the awesomest milestone
in Autechre history, as Booth and Brown assault and overload our senses with
not one, not two, not three, but five
albums released on the same day: 247 minutes of brand new Autechre product,
enough to keep one away from Selena Gomez and Lukas Graham for at least... uh,
well, for as long as it takes for the next Autechre album to come out.
Technically, Elseq 1-5 is really just one album, counting as such in typical
discographies and not even analyzeable in terms of separate discs, since it was
only made available as a digital download (CD format is way beneath these
guys' level now, and a vinyl release would go against the digital fetish); but
even for a guy like me, who is not used at all to detailed dissections of
electronic epics and prefers condensed and superficial assessments, 247 minutes
is a bit too much to sit through in one go without going mental (if I listen to
it on headphones) or driving everybody around mental (if I go for the
speakers). And regardless of whether we hate it or love it, we have to admit
the mammoth nature of the enterprise, so I suppose it does merit several
reviews after all — let alone the fact that at least some of the 1-5 volumes do
have their own specific features, and counting them separately wouldn't hurt.
Elseq
1, in particular, feels like
the heaviest and most aggressive volume of the lot, mainly due to the opening
blast of ʽfeed1ʼ: eleven minutes of what sounds like strong electric
current run through a large set of interconnected and savagely slashed cables —
sparks blasting in all directions, and any organic being that dares penetrate
even the remote periphery of the field created by this mess getting fried
instantaneously. A simple, brutal, and strangely effective track, probably
their «angriest» in years and years, and, of course, barely listenable to
everybody with inborn aversion to digital feedback. However, the second lengthy
epic, ʽc16 deep threadʼ, seems more interesting — not least because
it is driven by a very cool rhythmic pattern, one that sounds stuck somewhere
in between a huge dripping faucet, two giants playing table tennis, and a
railroad man driving spikes in an underwater section of the tracks. Everything
else that goes on at the same time is a mix of radio static and iron-soldering
noises, rather typical of Autechre, but it is really the cool percussion tone
that deserves special attention.
The other three tracks are marginally more
melodic: thus, behind the slightly trip-hoppy rhythms of ʽ13x0 stepʼ
you will find sonic patterns that sound like alien melodies, transmitted from
the distance of several thousand light years and re-converted into music to the
best ability of the signal-capturing device — some frequencies lost and some
implied by the brain rather than actually heard; ʽpendulu hv modaʼ
sounds like some Brian Eno ambient track that keeps getting interrupted through
poor transmission, as you twist, bend, and re-direct the poor antenna to get to
hear at least something; and only ʽcurvcatenʼ returns us fully to
drum-'n'-bass territory in order to end things in the same ballpark where
they'd started, only on a slightly more quiet note.
On the whole, the energy and loudness of this
stuff does make it seem like an improvement on Exai at least — and I'd be the first to admit that there are a few
nifty sonic ideas here, though whether they actually «work» on some
metaphysical level or if my mind just clings to them because of the sheer
novelty factor is unclear. And let's not even get started on whether these few
nifty sonic ideas deserve to be framed in 52 minutes of running time,
especially since we've only just begun with the grand experience.
ELSEQ 2 (2016)
1) elyc6 0nset; 2) chimer
1-5-1; 3) c7b2.
Okay, most of this second volume (just three
tracks in total) is like one gigantic game of Pong, or, rather, two or three
games of Pong played at the same time. The first track is 27 minutes long, and
the only point of that is to start out fully fleshed out and then gradually
shed them sound layers one by one, so that at the end of this sonic striptease
we just have a bunch of waves of noise: the balls are gone, but their force
fields still remain, and the ripples swing over one another long after their
original cause is no longer visible. I think they did this stuff many times
before, and it is merely the length of it that is new here — if you derive
mystical pleasure from multiple bings, plings, psshts, burps, twirps, clicks,
and clucks, be their guest.
On the up side, the first track sounds
positively nice, cozy, and melodic when compared to the third track — twice as
short, fortunately, but five times as irritating: think all the noisiness of
the first volume, but without its sonic power: thirteen minutes of what sounds
like a cross between radio static and somebody trying to bore through a
concrete wall with a badly dulled and poorly powered electric drill. Some
people actually pay money to be tortured by this stuff for no reason whatsoever
(most likely, people who have way too much happiness in their everyday life and
are looking forward to reduce it by any means possible). Bad news is, there's
nothing even remotely innovative about these sounds in 2016, and without the
shock factor, this is just dull in every possible manner — emotional or
intellectual. And by «dull», I mean «dull as if being slowly cut apart with a
very dull blade», that kind of dull.
In between the two, there's a short five minute
interlude that arguably provides most of the entertainment — a percussion
track that sounds as if somebody were furiously bashing his drumsticks on the
surface of a thick, boggy marsh, and, appropriately, a synth pattern emulating
the incessant croaking of little froggies, hiding somewhere near the surface
(although, allegedly, froggies cannot really croak under the water, but I guess everything is possible in the alien
worlds of Autechre). This at least sounds like decent material, idea-wise, for
a better developed conceptual track (perhaps they should send it to Björk
or something), but little good does it do, sitting crammed there between two
silly sonic monsters.
I think I almost like the way that the
Pitchfork people tried to describe this volume: "If you ever wondered what
it would really mean for Autechre to take an uninhibited plunge into the weirdo
void, now you have your answer", they said. Most of the stuff people write
about Autechre (and especially people over at Pitchfork) is meaningless and
clichéd anyway (and that's not to be taken as an offense — writing
something not meaningless about
Autechre is almost as hard as explaining the Kamasutra to a Mennonite), but I
like the "weirdo void" reference. A void is usually supposed to be
just a void — there can be no difference between «straight void» and «weirdo
void» by definition. Somehow, though, Autechre have often managed, and now they
manage it again, to produce a sonic void (in the sense that there's really
nothing going on) and justify its existence by the mere fact that they're
weirdos. Honestly, this is mostly
just annoying filler that is the electronic world's equivalent of Kenny G. Get
that? Weirdo void! I am certainly not buying into it just because it's weird
(and, actually, it's not even that weird any more — it's simply produced by
weirdos, which is a weirdly different weirdness).
ELSEQ 3 (2016)
1) eastre; 2) TBM2; 3) mesh
cinereaL.
I think this one's the longest of them all,
even though it also only has three tracks. For the third installation in the
series, I guess we're kind of going ambient — except for the second and shortest
track, whose function is to function as Mr. Rhythm, briefly entertaining you in
between Mr. Atmosphere and Mr. Chaos. That said, I am not quite in the clear as
to why Mr. Rhythm had to sample the «Boom-Boom-Thwack!» pattern from ʽWe
Will Rock Youʼ, and why the idea of listening to seven minutes of
boom-boom-thwack (everything else comes in the form of nearly inaudible rhythm
tracks and occasional fuse bursts) should be realized in the «breathing space»
between two sonic mega-monsters.
The first of which basically just sounds like
the wind howling in naked electric wires (for 22 minutes) — there's about three
chords there, endlessly repeated over a sustained hum, and while I'm all for
slowing down and taking your time to enjoy nuances in this madly rushing world
of ours, this seems to be taking the idea too far. At least when Brian Eno does
these never-changing soundscapes, they can be used for background accompaniment
because they're pretty; using this
track for background accompaniment is impossible unless you also happen to
casually drink castor oil and eat skunk droppings for breakfast, and make no
distinction whatsoever between Van Der Graaf Generator and Britney Spears,
because they're all «pop slop» to you.
The third track is at least nicely chaotic:
this is «Pong meets Art Rock», as the geometric-sounding patterns are rendered
less percussive and more melodic. Again, though, the problem is that at no
point (other than a weird fade-out and a quick build-up back to basics in the
middle) does the track offer any development, at least not the kind that could
be observed by the naked ear over a couple of casual listens. Worse still, even
a short, economic sample of ʽmesh cinereaLʼ triggers no image in my
head — I can't even say that this is a decent industrial soundscape, because it
does not have the grimey grittiness, the merciless grind that goes along with
good industrial. It's just the sound of several electric currents interacting
with each other. Hello, I'm Current #1, nice to meet you. Hi, I'm Current #2,
let's get married and have a short circuit. That's the story of our lives in a
nutshell, and we're going to be telling it to you for 25 minutes.
Of course, we should be reminded that these
three tracks are not standalone entities — but then again, what kind of
superman would want to listen to all five Elseq
volumes in a row? That's even more of a challenge than trying to read all of Ulysses in one day. The only reason why
these tracks are so lengthy is that they really want you to pay attention — to
understand how serious these sonic textures are, because if they weren't serious, what kind of moron
would the artist have to be to stretch them out for so long? If it's big, it's
important. And if it's important, it's your fault and nobody else's if you
refuse to see that importance. So prepare yourself to open your mind to the
transcendental artistic significance of the feedback hum of the naked electric
cord, and after ten consecutive listens you will have outgrown the proletarian
concept of melody and ready to face the world of music from a completely alien
perspective. Or — who knows — maybe God-like perspective?..
ELSEQ 4 (2016)
1) acdwn2; 2) foldfree casual;
3) latentcall; 4) artov chain; 5) 7th slip.
After two highly disappointing volumes, it
would be near impossible for the next one to continue the same trend — and
indeed, we have a return to shorter tracks, more dynamic flows, and less
arrogant minimalism here. I think that this one is the archetypal «glitch»
entry in the series, since most of the tracks are dominated by various types of
glitching... but I'd rather take endless glitching over 20-minute long
crackle-and-hum sequences anyway.
Only one of these numbers, ʽfoldfree
casualʼ, runs on softer fuel, largely free of harsh percussion (except for
one brief section in the middle) and dependent on «electronic church music»
sustained synth textures in the background, arguably as close as Autechre are
willing to come to conventional understanding of «beauty» in this entire
project. But it lies between ʽacdwn2ʼ and ʽlatentcallʼ,
both of which thrive on crazyass percussion loops and glitches a-plenty, and
also allow for some build-up elements (which essentially means gradually adding
extra synth overdubs in the background, as if we were slowly zooming out into
space). I cannot say that anything here surprises or astounds me in any way,
but at least the tracks are structured like glitchy mini-suites, with introductions,
themes, bridges, and codas, rather than a single musical idea stretched out to
20 minutes because we're the first artists who ever had the artistic thought of
stretching a single musical idea out to 20 minutes (not really).
The last two tracks are the most technically
unlistenable ones, but they are also mercifully short: ʽartov chainʼ
briefly returns you to the «whistling down the wire» sonic patterns of the
previous record, and ʽ7th slipʼ is the ultimate in tape manipulation
(sounds like somebody recorded something, sped it up ten times, then slowed it
down fifty times, then put it on vinyl, played it with shaky hands, and there
you go — a direct line to God for six and a half minutes). That last track sure
is a fresh sonic experience for me, but whether this should be cause for celebration
remains a big question. But at least you cannot accuse them of being boring.
Even with all the «energy» here, though, it is
still hard to get rid of the feeling that, somehow, there is neither any true
joy of creativity behind these tracks, nor any particular meaning — it's just
one of those many «woke up with a lazy desire to engage in some glitching»
days. It used to be so that this music, to me, brought on images of hardworking
nanites running about their business in an electronic nano-anthill; the
nanites of ʽacdwn2ʼ and ʽlatentcallʼ, however, seem rather
tired of life and are continuing to run about their business just because they
have nothing else to do — had they had a choice, they'd much rather sit by the
fireplace and read Moby Dick, but no,
they are still being put to work by relentless slavedrivers. Viewed in that
light, Elseq 4 might even be
hilarious — Dad-Electronica! — but to do that, you'd need to listen to all of
Autechre in chronological order again, and the human life span cannot come to
terms with that.
ELSEQ 5 (2016)
1) pendulu casual; 2) spTh; 3)
spaces how V; 4) freulaeux; 5) oneum.
I wish I could say that Autechre have saved the
best for last, but this sort of implies that I have an idea of what is best for Autechre, and I do not. I
am, however, almost ready to say that they saved the most diverse bunch of
tracks for us — on this fifth volume, there is no single overriding theme,
rather a little bit of everything, in a final recapitulation of all the sides
of their musical philosophy that matter. Or pretend to matter.
So, the first track is more wind whistling down
the naked electric wire, along with some more wind fluttering in the electronic
sails of a ship that takes nine minutes to get nowhere in particular, with
each of the nine minutes completely equivalent to any other one. Then,
ʽspThʼ kicks in with some rhythm, and the sonic snaps and blasts take
on a slightly more melodic quality, if you can take «resonance»,
«reverberation», and «echo» as synonyms for «melody», that is. ʽSpaces how
Vʼ, accidentally true to a part of its title, does throw you out in space,
with an astral perspective represented by the usual means (canvas synth hum +
quasi-randomized bleeps and beeps of passing unidentified flying objects).
ʽFreulauexʼ is the liveliest track of them all, with a deconstructed
techno rhythm that still remains marginally danceable, while in the background
somebody seems to be conducting research on dynamite at a distance of about
fifty miles away.
Finally, ʽoneumʼ could be called the
«grand finale» — not only of the fifth volume, but of the entire project in
general, as it is the most sonically fleshed out, loud, grand, and ominous
track of them all, with a high-pitched, disturbing, but solemn electronic
pattern running uninterrupted in the background and auxiliary broken up
mini-patterns quickly rising to the surface and extinguishing themselves in
the foreground. Does this make it sound grand? It's not that grand, really. It's the kind of track that they could probably
knock off in a couple of hours these days, given their overall expertise and
stuff. But it has a familiar emotional ring, unlike so many of these Elseq sequences that have no emotional
ring whatsoever.
All of which leads us to the final question —
so was this project really worth it?
Five CDs worth of new material, was this some sort of big, ambitious,
rejuvenating musical statement to shatter the bounds and coils of modern
electronica? Well, don't take my words at face value, given that my electronic
expertise still remains limited, but I dare say bull. There are some moments on this mammoth (most of them
contained on the promising, but disappointing first volume) that could rank up
there with Autechre's best, but on the whole, this is simply the hugest
demonstration that Confield brought
the duo to a dead end — as off-putting and puzzling as that release was, not a
single Autechre album since that time has truly built up on its reputation and
promise, and this is just the latest and greatest in a series of attempts to
jump over their own heads. A futile enterprise, that, considering that they lost their heads with Confield. At least in 2001, this was
exciting. In 2016, for the most part, this is boring — and bland. They are not pushing any boundaries forward; they are
still working within a set formula, except we are still sometimes trapped by
the illusion that there's some sort of revolution going on when there isn't. Of
course, if you are one of the few for whom listening to Confield is as normal and ordinary a practice as to others it is
listening to Mozart, or the Beatles, or even Miley Cyrus, that gives you an
entirely different perspective; but that's a highly specialized thing, and I
hate getting into that sort of nuances. I just hope they won't take five more years
and come out with a 20-volume album — if this «more Autechre is better
Autechre» shit ain't stopping any time soon, I'm definitely not going to
bother.
NEW WAVE (1993)
1) Showgirl; 2) Bailed Out; 3)
American Guitars; 4) Junk Shop Clothes; 5) Don't Trust The Stars; 6)
Starstruck; 7) How Could I Be Wrong; 8) Housebreaker; 9) Valet Parking; 10)
Idiot Brother; 11) Early Years; 12) Home Again.
If the name of the band is «The Auteurs», and
the name of the band's debut album is New
Wave, it would be only logical if the first song title were ʽAnna
Karinaʼ. As strongly as I have to congratulate myself for coming close to the truth (since one of the
songs on the band's second album is actually titled ʽNew French
Girlfriendʼ), all of these trappings — including the fuck-this-world
black-and-white imagery on the band's early photos — only suggest a pool of
reverence for the intellectual rebel attitude of early Sixties' Europe; the
music, however, generally scoops up inspiration from completely different
waterbasins.
The Auteurs were really little more than a
pretext for Luke Haines — the man behind, before, in the middle of, and all
around the band — to adorn himself with a cool moniker. The rest of the band
consisted of bass player Alice Readman, since she already was Luke's girlfriend
anyway; a rotating set of not particularly outstanding drummers (Glen Collins
on this particular record); and James Banbury as the band's resident cellist —
probably the only distinctive element of The Auteurs' sound and style that is
not Luke Haines. That said, he does not play on every track, and the cello
always stays in the background: first time I listened to New Wave in a somewhat distracted state, I did not even notice that some of the songs had a
cello padding to them.
With these details out of the way, let us talk
about the early, barely-post-pre-pubescent years of Luke Haines as bandleader,
songwriter, arranger, musician, and spiritual vessel (setting aside the tacky
issue of Luke Haines as a human being, commonly reported to be rather juicy,
but should not really concern all of us who strive for civility).
Every once in a while, The Auteurs are reported
as one of the first, if not the first
band to symbolize «Britpop», preceding by a very brief margin all of those people
like Blur, Oasis, etc. — a rather confusing pigeonholing, actually, because (a)
«Britpop» itself is an awful word in its current usage (if The Kinks weren't
the first real Britpop band, then
who the heck was?..); (b) The Auteurs sound nothing like either Blur or Oasis; (c) The Auteurs do not, in
fact, sound tremendously «British» at all — neither does Haines sport a
particularly «trademark British» singing accent, nor are the lyrical subject
matters particularly UK-related, and what else is there for the music to
qualify as «Britpop»? A heavy Gilbert & Sullivan influence?..
In reality, the very name of «The Auteurs»
surmises that Luke Haines would like, if at all possible, to avoid
pigeonholing. He is simply a singer-songwriter who happened to see it fit, at
the time, to indulge his singer-songwriting impulses in a «rock band» format,
no more, no less. Music-wise, he is not a particularly pretentious or
ambitious singer-songwriter, seeking for direct self-expression rather than for
new and surprising formats. His melodic gift is obvious, but not tremendous,
and quite conventionally realized: The Kinks may have been just as much of an
influence here as Love, or R.E.M., or any band, American, British, or
world-wide, that could grow its own identity out of a fairly «normal»
understanding of melody in folk, pop, and rock'n'roll traditions. Nothing
particularly eyebrow-raising here, unless you think that regular use of melodic
cello overdubs in pop-rock songs was a particular stunner for 1993 (and why should
it be, when Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne were merrily engaging in it twenty-five
years earlier?). Nor does New Wave
flash around in an eye-attracting retro parade: Haines goes just as easy on heavily
distorted, lo-fi grunge / alt-rock guitars as he does on the acoustic strum or
on the «colorful» electric pop-rock
tones — New Wave is quite clearly a
product of the post-Nirvana world, despite its allegiance to the pre-Nirvana
one.
The old and new schools go for a merry merge
already on the first song — ʽShowgirlʼ combines a dreamy, ethereal
vocal part, almost straight off some obscure psychedelic nugget from the late
1960s, with a simple, feedback-drenched guitar buzz in the chorus that was all
the rage in 1993. The trick worked, though: once they'd released this
melancholic, self-deprecating tale of a guy disillusioned in being married to a
showgirl, it effectively clicked with the critics and eventually led to a serious
recording contract. And how does it sound today? Well... it isn't particularly
awesome, but you do get to take a bit of a liking to Haines' artistic persona,
and supposedly, that is all that's really required of the first song. Because
«a bit of a liking» is quite likely to grow into a serious attraction, over
time.
The «liking» that I'm talking about is hardly a
kind of «I really like this guy» liking, though; it's more of a «I really like
how this guy is manipulating my attention» liking. Luke Haines is a semi-decent
rock lyricist, deftly hiding his childhood traumas and adolescent
disillusionment under metaphors, allegories, and impressionistic chaff so thick
that very quickly, you lose all hopes or wishes to decipher the message — you have
to simply remain contented with the fact that he is smart, ironic, and romantic, while you, most likely, are dumb, straightforward, and deadly dull.
More importantly, he can also come up with some
fine vocal hooks and occasionally resonant pop guitar riffs — such as the
nagging dental drill driving ʽIdiot Brotherʼ, or the mean little
pissed-off chord sequence at the end of each chorus to ʽEarly Yearsʼ.
None of these riffs will probably ever make it to the Great Textbook, but over
the course of the record, they support each other in building a coherent
impression: there is really not a single «useless» song on the album, each
offers at least a little something to add to the general pool of depression,
hatred, disenchantment, disillusionment, self-deprecation, social anguish,
explicit and implicit envy...
...you'd think I'd be talking Alice In Chains
here or something, but probably the one big advantage of Luke Haines is that
he is expressing all that stuff without
having to resort to clichés — such as brutal heavy riffs, jarring power
chords, or hateful screaming at the top of one's lungs. Instead, he does it all
through hushed, dreamy vocal hooks: lines like "bailed out, this skin is
shed / bailed out, this thing is dead" or "downtown, you're burning
down / I'm sick of parking cars" are delivered almost lovingly, the way
others would sing of a love interest lost or found.
If forced to choose one song, I'd probably go
along with ʽStarstruckʼ, whose lyrics cleverly walk the line between
the two different meanings of the word — maybe for no other reason simply than
the way he articulates the phrase "I was always starstruck" that
resolves the verse-chorus build-up. Idealism and cynicism are attitudes that
are pretty hard to combine within the confines of a single vessel — like matter
and anti-matter, you'd expect them to cancel out each other, but Haines has the
skill it takes to override the laws of the universe: this and many of the other
songs are delivered from the perspective of somebody who obviously believes in
something grander, yet hardly ever admits that it is reachable.
Overall, running slightly ahead of the events
to come, I find New Wave to be The
Auteurs' finest moment — Luke Haines' image and style is already fully fleshed
out, the individual songs are all written at the top of his abilities, and the
balance between the Sixties, the Eighties, and the Nineties in the
arrangements and atmospheres is dang near perfect. And yes, the album is
anything but flashy, and quite prone to disappearing in the cracks of the
floorboards of time, so all the more reason to join me in a big juicy thumbs up
here.
NOW I'M A COWBOY (1994)
1) Lenny Valentino; 2)
Brainchild; 3) I'm A Rich Man's Toy; 4) New French Girlfriend; 5) The Upper
Classes; 6) Chinese Bakery; 7) A Sister Like You; 8) Underground Movies; 9)
Life Classes/Life Model; 10) Modern History; 11) Daughter Of A Child.
With a title like that, some might think The Auteurs
would be quitting the cool Euro flavors of New
Wave and embracing country-western and other rootsy directions. Others,
already accustomed to the idea that Luke Haines' album titles have
intentionally little to do with album content, might not think that — and the
latter would be more correct than the former, since the only song on here that
has a vaguely country-western sheen to it is the slow-waltzing
ʽBrainchildʼ (whose lyrics actually include the word «cowboy», but
something makes me suspect that these lyrics would hardly be welcome in
Nashville anyway).
Altogether, Now I'm A Cowboy is a bit heavier and going for a more
«rock-oriented» sound than New Wave
— fewer acoustic pieces and more loud instrumental passages (such as the codas
to ʽUpper Classesʼ and ʽModern Historyʼ). Cutting down on
subtlety also leads to cutting down on variety and on charisma: the result is
an album that is ever so slightly more crude and generic than its predecessor.
But, after all, Luke Haines did want to be in a rock band, and build himself up
a steady fanbase — and you can't just do that with a «brainy» sound,
downplaying the «brawny» component. «Brainy» + «brawny» = «musical brownie»,
which would be a good definition for this record: tough, rich in calories, but
sometimes way too heavy on the stomach.
Haines' lyrics have already reached that stage
where objective interpretations do not exist: all that remains is just a
general sarcastic feel of rejection, sometimes targeted at the well-to-do
(ʽI'm A Rich Man's Toyʼ, ʽThe Upper Classesʼ), sometimes at
the pseudo-intellectual elites (ʽNew French Girlfriendʼ), sometimes
at celebrities (ʽLenny Valentinoʼ), and sometimes just rejection per
se (ʽA Sister Like Youʼ — very sad-sounding, but nobody knows why).
Fortunately, the lyrics are still nowhere near the focal point of the album,
perfectly enjoyable and sympathetic even if one does not know one word of
English (and even if one does, I doubt it would help much).
I have no personal preferences here — maybe
ʽNew French Girlfriendʼ sticks out a little, with active help from
James Banbury: his cello «swoops» in the intro set such a vividly sneering atmosphere
that the song gets an initial kick-start like no other. ʽChinese
Bakeryʼ is a good proposition for lovers of well-rounded Britpop vocal
hooks. ʽA Sister Like Youʼ is a good proposition for Kinks fans (the
fact that the song deals with the mystical trials of «two sisters» can hardly
be a total coincidence; melodically, there is little resemblance, but
atmosphere-wise, the song dispenses the same soft, lyrical melancholy as Ray
Davies' ʽTwo Sistersʼ). ʽBrainchildʼ is interesting because
it really takes a country vibe and translates it into the language of
jangle-pop: where you'd normally expect slide guitars and fiddles, you get
regular electric twang and cello, not to mention those hushed post-punk vocals.
The larger, «epic» compositions are
questionable. Personally, I like ʽThe Upper Classesʼ, with its
lightly-depressing mantraic coda (and its little guessable nod to The Beatles'
ʽI Want Youʼ, or am I seeing things?), but don't care a lot about
ʽModern Historyʼ, which, despite lacking a clearly fleshed out
melodic line, repeats the same coda trick once again (with an even better
guessable nod to the same source, even including some windy white noise for
fatness' sake). It seems like, generally, if Haines does not manage to say
something in three minutes, he won't be able to say anything in five or six —
and the arrangements on Auteurs' albums still remain too sparse and simple (but
tasteful) to hold your attention for all that time by themselves. Basically,
they just ain't big enough for big songs.
Still, the people, always great suckers for
loudness and bigness, went for it and pushed Now I'm A Cowboy higher up the charts than its predecessor — and
ʽLenny Valentinoʼ made enough of a splash to have an entire dream-pop
band from Poland named after it four years later (even if the song itself is
anything but dream-pop; only Haines'
hushed vocals could be said to have a dreamy atmosphere to them — the rest is
loud, dark, punchy power-pop. By the way, most
of the vocals on the album are «hushed», which sometimes gets annoying — we do
know that Haines can be a proper singer, but it is almost as if he is too embarrassed to sing properly).
This probably makes the album sort of an
«objective peak» for the band, but the way I see it, the public just didn't
catch up to their quality soon enough — as it often happens, the debut album
had to sink in and simmer for a while, with the prize for its awesomeness going
to the inferior sophomore effort. But that's alright: like I said, the quality
fluctuations are quite subtle anyway. Most of the songs here are still smart,
catchy, stylish, and haven't at all lost their resonance in the modern world,
as long as it still flaunts its «Lennies» and «Valentinos». Thumbs up.
AFTER MURDER PARK (1996)
1) Light Aircraft On Fire; 2)
Child Brides; 3) Land Lovers; 4) New Brat In Town; 5) Everything You Say Will
Destroy You; 6) Unsolved Child Murder; 7) Married To A Lazy Lover; 8) Buddha;
9) Tombstone; 10) Fear Of Flying; 11) Dead Sea Navigators; 12) After Murder
Park.
Supposedly this here is the station where the
successfully converted adepts of Luke Haines continue their merry train
voyage, whereas everybody else, tired of unceasing harrassment on the part of
the conductor, gets off with a feel of relief — justifying their choice by
pointing out that, whatever Haines really
had to say, he said on his first two records, and this... this is just After Murder Park. I mean, what else is
there to «get» once you've already been murdered?
The record does feature at least one intriguing
contrast — on one hand, it was recorded at Abbey Road Studios, the textbook
symbol of clean, perfectionist production; on the other hand, the band worked
with Steve Albini, the notorious guru of American lo-fi indie, as producer.
That said, the contrast intrigues more on paper than through the audio
channels, because there is not a whole lot of big sonic difference between what
they used to have and what they have now — the whole «ringing guitars coming
from a mudhole» schtick was already favored by Haines from the very beginning,
and calling in Albini mainly just re-states the old fact rather than generates
a new kind of sound. Beauty through dirt, dirt through beauty, you know the
drift.
The choice one has to make is very much
triggered by «The Auteurs»' continuing slide into total monotonousness. For the
most part, these songs chiefly differ only in the mix balance between acoustic
and electric instruments — some are louder, grungier and screechier, others a
bit more soft and subtle, with Luke singing more or less in the same
«poisonous» breathy snarl all over the record. But the obscurely-depressing «dark
folk vibe» is at the heart of each and every song, and how does that warrant
individual comments on any of them?..
«Flashiness» only comes through in one or two
tracks, most notably ʽBuddhaʼ — because, admit it, one does not
usually concern oneself with Buddha's birthday unless one is properly Buddhist,
and none of us probably ever heard Buddha congratulated on his birthday in such
a sneering, ironic tone over a musical pause, followed by an ominous organ
swirl that is probably supposed to accompany Buddha's being pushed over a cliff
with a sack over his head ("I hope your absence is made clear",
Haines remarks, either bitterly hinting at the universal betrayal of Buddhist —
or Christian, or Confucian, you name it — ideals all over the world, or just
conducting a random session of shock therapy). Notable, but is it a good song?
— I am still quite unsure. Too overtly gimmicky to convince my senses of the
realness of this anger.
Everything else is rather non-descript. The
lyrics continue to flow in barely controlled streams of subconscious metaphors,
sometimes decipherable (ʽLand Loversʼ seems to be about Israeli occupation;
ʽTombstoneʼ mentions the Baader-Meinhof group, later to be adopted as
a moniker for a Haines side project of «musical terrorism»), more often not —
but generally still revolving around dark thoughts of murders, suicides,
crashes, and other equally delightful subjects. (You don't even need anyone to
tell you that — just look at the titles.) The instrumental melodies revel in
mediocrity, and only get by through the usual Auteurs' atmosphere. The best
part of it all are Haines' vocal twists and twirls, which still remain
inventive — but, like I said, you'd have to be seriously in love with Haines to
be bowled over by any of them.
It is the vocal hooks, actually, that still
betray a connection to Brit-pop: for instance, the Kinksy slip into falsetto on
the "everybody's gonna get it, yeah... in tombstone" line in
ʽTombstoneʼ, or the lazy languid modulation on "I have no fear
of dying at all" in ʽFear Of Flyingʼ, or the slides and ascents
on the «romantic» chorus to ʽChild Bridesʼ. My personal opinion,
though, is that all these excellent inventions — those which are the only
advocates for After Murder Park's
qualifying as a «musical achievement» — deserve a different production style.
There's indie lo-fi, and then there is melodic Brit-pop. Sometimes it is
interesting to splice them together, but more often than not it's like putting
sugar and salt in the same cup of coffee. If you ask me, I'd rather hear these
songs recorded by Ray Davies — except that Ray would never agree to record
them: the bitterness and cynicism in these words and moods is way too much even
for Ray's permanently disillusioned and embittered (but still quite romantic
and idealistic) old ass.
In conclusion, I will just say that my favorite
song here is probably ʽMarried To A Lazy Loverʼ — not because of its
great vocal hooks (there aren't any specific ones), but because it injects a
little less venom than usual, replacing it with an opium-den-like atmosphere of
stupefied tranquillity: slow, a little hazy and dreamy, a little desperate and
resentful, and somehow managing to state its «there is no way out» message
without too much of that self-righteous anger that, ever so often, is likely to
trigger a «who the hell do you think you are?» response rather than simple admiration.
It would probably be a surprising choice for the fans — who seem to usually go
after more uptempo stuff like ʽLight Aircraft On Fireʼ — but without
it, I would probably have to refrain from the expected thumbs up. Even then, it's sort of
an intermediate decision, and definitely not a love gesture: anyway, Luke
Haines doesn't ask to be loved — he is far more of a «negative creep», really,
than Kurt Cobain ever managed to pass himself for. (Real «negative creeps» do not shoot themselves, anyway — they
gleefully watch others shooting themselves).
HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE THE BOOTBOYS (1999)
1) The Rubettes; 2) 1967; 3)
How I Learned To Love The Bootboys; 4) Your Gang, Our Gang; 5) Some Changes; 6)
School; 7) Johnny And The Hurricanes; 8) The South Will Rise Again; 9) Asti
Spumante; 10) Sick Of Hari Krisna; 11) Lights Out; 12) Future Generation; 13)
Breaking Up; 14) Getting Wrecked At Home.
Somebody ought to probably do a study on all
the «turn of the millennium» albums released at the turn of the millennium,
explaining why they all sucked. (Or, at least, why we do not heartily remember
any of them as «that record that
marked our transition into another epoch»). In any case, one of the most
self-consciously «generational» records of that kind certainly must have belonged
to Luke Haines — for that purpose, he reassembled The Auteurs, previously put
on hold while Luke was working on his «Baader Meinhof» project, and together
they made their last record, which may not be the best in their catalog, but
definitely seems to make more sense than After
Murder Park and almost as much as
New Wave.
This is a concept album of sorts, a fuzzy look
back at the past century in its numerous delights and disillusionments — with
every delight a disillusionment, and vice versa. Luke Haines is too much in
love with his own brain to ever let you know properly how he feels about the
things he is singing about (and sometimes, simply what the hell he is singing
about), but, like the proverbial early hipster, he always takes good care to
pick out the least predictable topics and drape them in the most controversial
moods. «Nostalgia» would be too simple, and misguided, a term to apply to these
songs. Nobody could seriously be «nostalgic» about The Rubettes, an idiotic
mid-1970s band that tried to merge posh Motown style with glam entourage — and
even if Haines' seductive "hang up your jeans, put out your school
clothes, tune in for the top ten" at the beginning of the album,
multiplied by sweet soft chimes, begins with a message not unlike Lou Reed's
classic "her life was saved by rock'n'roll", very soon the irony
starts to creep in. Nobody's life, after all, was saved by "sugar baby
love" (here, Luke is directly quoting The Rubettes' biggest hit), and
against all the chimes and angelic backing vocals, his sneering vocals are what
rules the stage: "the future's made of coal, the past is made of gold...
you developed late, weren't the Nineties great?" (The correct answer is:
"no, they weren't, at least not for The Rubettes").
So, basically, this is not «nostalgia» — this
is «post-nostalgia», where you still look with the usual longing at the past,
but simultaneously realize that most of it, all those «little things» you used
to be fond of, are just as ridiculous as whatever you have in the present or
expect from the future. Maybe even «anti-nostalgia», in a way — just look at
these titles: ʽThe South Will Rise Againʼ (scarecrowish!), ʽSick
Of Hari Krisnaʼ (no sucking up to George Harrison, that's for sure),
ʽHow I Learned To Love The Bootboysʼ (the «bootboys» were an
anti-hippie skinhead variety, and this title alone might have cost Luke the
loyalty of quite a few potential fans), and even ʽAsti Spumanteʼ does
not really look much like a positive
title, if you ask me.
ʽ1967ʼ is not about going to San
Francisco or tripping in an underground club in London: more in line with one
of Luke's primary idols — The Kinks — it is sort of a snazzy-spazzy retort that
simply states: for the average Joe, it does not matter much if it is 1967 or
1999 behind that window, because in both cases, there is "no pop in our
record collection", because "we are bedazzled, we're ordering
cocktails, we act like peasants". It is actually quite funny how many
people in this world, if properly explained the meaning of the song, would
probably want to strangle Haines with their bare hands — but in reality, he is
quite safe behind the protective wall of ellyptic and metaphorical language,
not to mention the consciously chosen lack of public notoriety.
Musically, the album is a hodge-podge, and you should expect one if the idea of the
album is to turn the past hundred (okay, more like fifty) years into an
enormous Monopoly playboard and drop the dice in fourteen random spots. For
instance, the title track looks back to the dark depths of post-punk, with an
almost danceable «electro-pop» rhythm section peppered with space synths and
echoes — but no suicidal or generally depressed notes, rather a mysteriously
threatening atmosphere here (one that is probably better suited for the likes
of the «bootboys», even though I seriously doubt that the average «bootboy»
would ever be flattered by the song).
ʽYour Gang, Our Gangʼ is distorted,
screamy and barky, just as the title suggests; ʽSome Changesʼ is
power-pop with psychedelic keyboard overtones; ʽThe South Will Rise
Againʼ, on the other hand, has no true Southern overtones, but is rather
«dark psych-folk» — medieval acoustic
guitar merged with electronic effects; and ʽJohnny And The
Hurricanesʼ is simply non-descript — a progressive epic, deeply submerged
in chimes, strings, pianos, and fuzz, the last thing you'd probably expect from
a song written about Johnny and the Hurricanes. Except it was not written about
Johnny and the Hurricanes — rather, it is dedicated to everyone and everything
that is "born on a Monday, dead within a year", and from that point
of view, its threatening strings and fuzzy rumble are perfectly appropriate for
such a general eulogy.
Lyrically and atmospherically, really, this is
a very complex album — way too complex to be properly
understood in a world where we want our rock music to speak to us as fast as it
can, because otherwise, it will be mercilessly trampled down by all those
standing next in line. And, as I said, it might have been all for the best:
because How I Learned To Love The
Bootboys is not a «depressing» record — it is a ruthless killer, and the
deeper you dig into it, the better you understand all the specific
peculiarities of Luke Haines' genetic material: all I can say is — thank God
the man was not born with any political ambitions in mind. Three / four listens
may be enough to understand that this is quite an unusual album, and appreciate
some of the subtle hooks and melodic moves, but they will probably not be
enough to understand all the incredible nastiness
of the spirit behind this whole
thing.
If you ask me, it is no wonder Alice Readman
quit The Auteurs even before they officially disbanded, leaving them without a
stable bass player for the subsequent tour. It may have been one thing to
record these songs in the studio, but quite a different one to sing them before
live audiences — people as much indicted by this «hippie killer» album as their
fathers and mothers. Not to mention ʽFuture Generationʼ, where Haines
pompously — but, of course, with tongue firmly in cheek — asserts that
"future generations will catch my falling star" and that "I put
a pox on the seventies" (just as he put it on every other decade). Well, I
suppose that this kind of bravery certainly warrants a thumbs up here — melodically, these
songs are anything but trivial, yet it is not really the chord changes, but the
arrogance and audacity, subtly hidden under a thin cover of verbal enigmas,
that make Bootboys so special for
that kind of «turn of the century» albums I was talking about. Some people
complain about degradation, others look forward with optimism to the future —
Luke Haines is the only one to tell us that all is vanity, and that numbers are
just numbers. ʽSome Changesʼ, yeah, right.
THE FINAL EXPERIMENT (1995)
1) Prologue; 2) The Awareness;
3) Eyes Of Time; 4) The Banishment; 5) Ye Courtyard Minstrel Boy; 6) Sail Away
To Avalon; 7) Nature's Dance; 8) Computer-Reign (Game Over); 9) Waracle; 10)
Listen To The Waves; 11) Magic Ride; 12) Merlin's Will; 13) The Charm Of The
Seer; 14) Swan Song; 15) Ayreon's Fate.
Everybody get out your cheese forks, the fondue
is steaming hot and waiting for you. Meet Arjen Anthony Lucassen, «Aryon» for
short, a long-haired, mind-twisted Dutch guy who spent so much time reading
Ursula Le Guin, playing Dungeons & Dragons, and listening to Eloy and
Hawkwind that one actually wonders how in the world did he have any left to
learn to play his instruments, or compose his mega-epics.
Actually, before going solo, he'd spent a whole
decade playing in a metal band called Vengeance, which never managed to achieve
success, but gave him time to hone his chops and understand that heaviness for
heaviness' sake was simply not his thing. His
thing, apparently, was to explore the corny side of progressive rock — finish
the dubious task of merging symphonic rock with pocketbook fantasy, something that
early Uriah Heep and early Rush were so deep into, but eventually decided to
advance to a more «serious» level. Fuck them pretentious, obscurantist creeps,
Arjen Anthony Lucassen said: I am
getting into this the right way, and I am never
getting out of this once I'm in. Pledging complete allegiance and loyalty to
wizards, unicorns, and damsels fair.
The
Final Experiment, recorded in
1995 with approximately a dozen guest vocalists and a dozen session players
(mostly little-known Dutch musicians), was formally credited to «Arjen Lucassen»:
«Ayreon» was the name of the rock opera's protagonist, with whom Lucassen
empathized so much he ended up borrowing his name for the rest of his life. The
album was rejected by several record labels — «unicorn bands are on their way
out», so they said — but Ayreon persisted in a most medieval way, eventually
got what he wanted, and the world has never been the same ever since. Now let
me quote:
This
is the voice of Merlin. Listen well, for it concerns you. This chronicle
commences in the year 2084 A.D. Mankind has virtually destroyed itself. Its
survival depends on The Final Experiment. Scientists from the 21st century
have developed a new computer program called ʽTime Telepathyʼ. By
using this technique they have sent visions of humanity's decline back in time.
These transmissions have been received by the mind of a blind minstrel who
lives in 6th century Great Britain. His name is Ayreon... It shall be Ayreon's
quest to sing of these visions and thus warn the world of its impending
downfall in order to change its future into a long and prosperous one...
...okay, you get the drift already. Now the
important thing here is neither make
the mistake of trying to take it too seriously nor immediately laughing it off without giving it a decent chance.
The concept itself, per se, is neither good nor bad; it is frequently dragged
down by primitive lyrics (Merlin: "Ayreon, you are an evil stranger /
Ayreon, you have become a danger / Your words are all but a lie / I vow that ye
shall die"), but the lyrics are entirely secondary here: Lucassen is
primarily a composer. It could have
helped, probably, if he'd spent some of the money wasted on guest stars to hire
a proper English librettist.
The music, though, is surprisingly not bad. The
emphasis is on a rich, diverse, fully fleshed-out sound — well, as fully
fleshed-out as it can be when your budget is sort of stretched and you cannot
allow yourself a decent orchestra. But in addition to synthesizers, where
Lucassen comes across as a diligent, if not particularly gifted, disciple of
Wakeman, there are acoustic and electric guitars, pianos, cellos, flutes,
woodwinds — definitely a far cry from the monotonous «art metal» sound of bands
like Queensryche. And, most importantly, the guy knows how to use them for
proper atmospheric purposes.
All the melodies are strictly traditional.
There is the expected medieval folk (ʽThe Awarenessʼ; ʽYe
Courtyard Minstrel Boyʼ — sheesh!); the ʽKashmirʼ-ian
mid-Eastern vibe (ʽEyes Of Timeʼ); the synthesized horn-dominated
progressive anthem (ʽSail Away To Avalonʼ); the melodramatic rock
opera flash with guitar pyrotechnics (ʽWaracleʼ); even a multi-part
prog-rock suite going from soft acoustic to fast'n'furious rocking bits (ʽThe
Banishmentʼ) — Lucassen is being quite honest with you: he is not pushing
forward any boundaries or making any bold statements, just trying to put his
own stamp on a whole musical direction that he clearly adores. Even the «pompous»
message seems more like an honorary tribute to Rush than a genuine attempt on
the part of «Ayreon» to warn his listeners of the impending doom.
And some of these melodies are quite good,
really: at the very least, any fan of the whole «neo-prog» schtick should try
this out — they are not nearly as complex as, say, anything by Änglagård,
but they are generally catchier, and they all make sense within the story, as
silly as the story might be. Nothing on an Ayreon album can be emotionally
«gripping» for me (I can be moved by parts of Lord of the Rings, for sure, but it takes a certified Professor of
English Language And Literature to achieve that effect; Arjen Lucassen is
nowhere near as well-trained), but much can be curious and intriguing. It is
all a bunch of high-quality B-level trashy fun. Some of the singers, including
«Ayreon» himself, tend to oversing, but we are not dealing with
twenty-four-hour-a-day operatic bombast here — the vocal parts are as diverse
as the melodies.
The production is far from ideal: there is too much echo, too many
electronic effects on the drums (sometimes drum machines are used altogether),
and the synth-strings and synth-horns are way too strongly associated with
washed-up art-rock dinosaurs so as not to sound seriously dated today. But
there was probably no alternative to this anyway, certainly not in the
mid-Nineties when «Ayreon» was still a relative nobody. Besides, not even the
best studio, or the best session players, or the use of the finest symphonic
orchestra in the country could have removed the inevitable campy flavor. I
refrain from giving the record any sort of judgement — its philosophical flaws
and emotional stiffness are beyond doubt, but so is the musical boldness and
professionalism that it took to put the record out. And then there is always
sheer curiosity. After all, want it or not, this whole project is a weird one.
ACTUAL FANTASY (1996)
1) Actual Fantasy; 2) Abbey Of
Synn; 3) The Stranger From Within; 4) Computer Eyes; 5) Beyond The Last Horizon;
6) Farside Of The World; 7) Back On Planet Earth; 8) Forevermore; 9) The Dawn
Of Man*.
Lucassen's sophomore release is probably his
least known of all, since it is highly atypical of the man's usual formula. It
is not a single-concept «rock opera», but a conglomeration of separate songs,
only loosely tied up with a general conceptual framework of the past, present,
and future mysteries of the universe. It is much more heavily based on
electronics than the rest of his albums (and a new, completely re-recorded
version, called Actual Fantasy Revisited
and released in 2004, continued and deepened that trend). And it only features
the barest minimum of guest stars: two or three vocalists, a lonesome violin
player (Floortje Schilt), a couple stray keyboardists, and Ayreon himself
providing most of the instrumentation. And, in its original form, it only runs
for about 55 minutes — ridiculously short for a guy who would, since then,
strictly follow the law: «If it ain't on 2 CDs, it ain't worth a green goblin's
crap».
That said, when it comes down to the actual
content, the album is no less fun than its predecessor, and in some ways is
actually a huge improvement — particularly in the songwriting department.
Without being constrained by the needs of operatic storytelling, Lucassen can
afford to invest more effort into the search for hard-hitting, if not exactly
stunning, musical themes, and present them in a less campy manner (not a
«non-campy» manner, mind you, but the lyrics are generally less inane and the
vocal deliveries refrain from extra pomposity).
ʽThe Stranger From Withinʼ, in
particular, is a fine and dandy piece of lite prog-metal: rhythmic, catchy,
with a good balance between the electronic effects and the electric and
acoustic guitar soup, and gradually building up towards a surprisingly ferocious
climax, where a quasi-Metallica «terror riff» pops out of the ground at 6:18
into the song and very soon blows it up from within. (For some reason, the coda
was not made part of the shortened single version — that's the best part of the song, you silly Dutch
minstrel!).
Length is generally a problem, of course:
Arjen-Ayreon presumably deems it an insult both to his understanding of Art
and to his slowly growing squad of fans to record anything under six minutes.
On the other hand, these are prog epics,
and they need to take the time to slowly come together out of the blue, get
fleshed out, develop some dynamics... so I wouldn't really presume to use the
term «padded» without reservations. It isn't always done well, but that is a
different problem — whether we are ready to accept the derivative nature of
these works or not.
As I said, the basic themes of the songs are
strong foundations, guaranteeing memorability and, perhaps, even a little bit
of emotion from repeated listenings — be it the spirit-raising synth fanfares
of ʽAbbey Of Synnʼ, the robotic funk-metal riffage of ʽComputer
Eyesʼ, the folk-rock chorus melody of ʽBeyond The Last Horizonʼ
(that one brings to mind Mike Oldfield in his «pop» days), or the looped
Vivaldian violin-led coda of ʽForevermoreʼ. Structurally, however,
all of these bits are rather plain and straightforward — I would hardly expect
anything but contempt here on the part of hardcore prog fans, and would
certainly refrain from praising them as marvels of contemporary songwriting.
But compared to tons of other «neo-prog» records that try to battle lack of
genius with studious intelligence, Actual
Fantasy is, at the very least, not as overtly boring, and the hooks grow
hookier with each new listen.
In the end, I give the album a thumbs up.
It is honest (the «real thing» for Lucassen himself, at the very least), far
from monotonous (the balance between electronics, metal, folk, classical, and
psychedelia is very even, almost calculated, I'd say), and does not really
contain one single moment worthy of
the proverbial cringe reaction (mainly because the vocalists are so wonderfully
restrained most of the time, and even for pathetic climaxes, prefer the simple
«folk» mode to «mock-opera»). And the arrangements are certainly far from
trivial: I believe that the way in which all the electronics are integrated
with live instruments commands respect, regardless of how crude one might or
might not find the major musical themes. But yeah, this is still fantasy-based
neo-prog, and much of it still sounds silly, so it's not as if I didn't warn
you.
INTO THE ELECTRIC CASTLE (1998)
1) Welcome To The New
Dimension; 2) Isis And Osiris; 3) Amazing Flight; 4) Time Beyond Time; 5) The
Decision Tree (We're Alive); 6) Tunnel Of Light; 7) Across The Rainbow Bridge;
8) Garden Of Emotions; 9) Valley Of The Queens; 10) The Castle Hall; 11) Tower
Of Hope; 12) Cosmic Fusion; 13) The Mirror Haze; 14) Evil Devolution; 15) The
Two Gates; 16) Forever Of The Stars; 17) Another Time, Another Space.
Despite — or, perhaps, because of — a slight
trimming that Ayreon gave his lush campy spirit on Actual Fantasy, the album did not sell at all well. Allegedly, this
prompted a gamble — on his next
album, Lucassen vowed, he would virtually pull all the stops, and if this did
not work, he would put the Ayreon brand under glass, once and for all.
Considering that this is far from the last review of Ayreon here, we have to
assume that the gamble worked — I do not have the sales figures on hand, but
they must have at least compensated for the impressive budget spent on the
album: with no less than ten guest vocalists and about as many session
musicians teaming up for the project, Arjen must have pawned his entire
collection of D&D editions.
Into
The Electric Castle finalizes
and stabilizes the Magic Ayreon Formula, which has so far remained unchanged: a
double-CD, approximately two-hour-long, album in the form of a «prog rock
opera», featuring multiple role-playing vocalists and a cohesive sci-fi
storyline, primarily influenced by trashy B-movies and pulp, but not without
an occasionally surprising lyrical insight. Here, the storyline is that eight
different heroes from various times and social environments have to undertake a
challenging and perilous journey to... well, you can always rely on good old
Wikipedia for these things; suffice it to say, there have been worse storylines, and, not being an expert on sci-fi /
fantasy and not even dreaming of ever becoming one, I cannot really give a good
judgement from within the confines of the genre. From without these confines, it is exceedingly silly, but then, what isn't?
What about the music, then? Despite the
impressive diversity of approaches — as with every self-respecting neo-prog
album, the influences range from classical to medieval folk to psychedelic pop
to heavy metal to electronica to whatever else I've forgotten — the music does
not leave a particularly lasting impression. Once you start poking around in
the textures of any given track, short or long, monotonous or multi-part, none
of these textures will probably impress you with original solutions, or jolt
your emotions if you are already well-versed in classic prog.
On the other hand, one need not necessarily
expect scattered individual wonders of intellectual creativity and emotional
resonance from a two-hour prog rock opera — yes, a few of them would be nice,
but the most important question is whether this mammoth is «valid» as a whole.
And to this, my answer is — I'm not sure, which, in almost any prog-related
situation, translates to «give it time and it will either stay the same or grow
better».
Here are the benefits. Into The Electric Castle mostly manages to avoid boredom — there
are no lengthy, flashy, self-indulgent jams or solos; the melodic patterns and
moods alternate with each other on a regular basis; the instrumentation is
diverse enough to avoid immediate pigeonholing — and certainly, so is the
singing, with all the guest vocalists representing personalities widely removed
from each other, so that you have «metal-opera» guy Damian Wilson contrasted
with folkie lady Sharon den Adel, or with ex-Marillion frontman Fish playing a
«Highlander», or with Lucassen himself impersonating a 1960s hippie (not very
credible, but amusing).
Into
The Electric Castle manages to
avoid or minimize direct rip-offs — you can see tributes and homages pulsating
all over the place, but there has really been a lot of serious hard work thrust
into Lucassen's composing here. A single six- or seven-minute track will always
lead you through several sections — each of which, on its own, will seem like
you've already heard it somewhere else (you just can never tell where), but
together they will be woven in a seamless, unforced manner. Can Sixties'
psychedelic pop, Seventies' jazz-fusion and Eighties' hair-metal coinhabit the
same song without mortal injury to each other? Check something like
ʽGarden Of Emotionsʼ and see for yourself.
Finally, Into
The Electric Castle manages to avoid ploughing the depths of bad taste — it
is not exactly «tongue-in-cheek», but most of the time, it stays within a
strict «B-movie» pattern, working on cheap thrills without pumping out
moralizing pathos. Maybe I am wrong and Lucassen is dumb enough to think that a record like that is supposed to
trigger spiritual cleansing and emotional catharsis, but that is not what my
intuition suggests — there is no deep «philosophy» behind this music, this
ain't Yes or even Rush, this stuff calls for popcorn and a large Coke, and
Arjen is simply happy to deliver the goods.
For a moment out there on ʽThe Mirror
Hazeʼ, I almost jumped as, at one point, the man veered straight into the
main theme of Phantom Of The Opera —
then quickly pulled out before it would be too late — but, in a way, this is Phantom
Of The Opera: pulp entertainment where it really only matters how
unexpectedly and how often the creator manipulates the fabric of events, and
how professionally it is all done. In other words, there has to be a course of
intrigue, and there have to be grounds for respect. 'Sall.
Into
The Electric Castle satisfies
on both counts. You know more or less what to expect from the man, but you
never know exactly — he may drag out
a sitar player to play a little raga, or get a little flower-powerish for no
apparent reason, or fall upon a cool metal riff that happens to have been
underused, if not exactly genius, or go for some growling vocals when the
script demands it. Yes, much of the time is dedicated to playing rather tired
old Celtic / Anglo-Saxon folk scales, but this is still much better than the
pompous adult contemporary motives that sometimes pass for (bad) «neo-prog» —
and at least we know for sure that Lucassen is generally more inspired by Led Zep III / IV than by Journey and
Styx. All in all, I can't remember a damn thing about this album — other than
it was goofy fun, and if one hundred minutes of a prog rock opera can be «goofy
fun», it's a thumbs
up for sure.
UNIVERSAL MIGRATOR (2000)
Part I – The Dream Sequencer: 1) The Dream Sequencer; 2) My House On Mars; 3)
2084; 4) One Small Step; 5) The Shooting Company Of Captain Frans B. Cocq; 6)
Dragon On The Sea; 7) Temple Of The Cat; 8) Carried By The Wind; 9) And The
Druids Turn To Stone; 10) The First Man On Earth; 11) The Dream Sequencer
(reprise);
Part II – Flight Of The Migrator: 1) Chaos; 2) Dawn Of A Million Souls; 3) Journey On
The Waves Of Time; 4) To The Quasar; 5) Into The Black Hole; 6) Through The
Wormhole; 7) Out Of The White Hole; 8) To The Solar System; 9) The New
Migrator.
Technically, these are two albums: breaking slightly with Ayreon's standard pattern of
releasing 2-CD packages, Lucassen decided to split his «prog» and «metal»
sides, releasing the first half of Universal
Migrator as a special treat for the «artsy types» and the second half for
the «metalheads». Consequently, on a formal basis Part I: The Dream Sequencer and Part II: Flight Of The Migrator count as separate entries in the
discographies and tend to earn separate reviews. However, I see no reason to
follow this tradition, since: (a) a 2-CD deal is a 2-CD deal, and no renegading
will be tolerated; (b) the concept and storyline are sort of continuous, after
all; (c) although Arjen does formally enforce the musical boundaries, what
with the first album all ruled by electronic textures and acoustic guitars, and
the second completely dominated by heavy electric riffage and soloing, the
«B-movie spirit» that guides the man is always the same anyway. Plus, above and
beyond all that, I am not sure if I have enough impressions to carry me through
two different reviews here.
Although, on second thought, I could have, because, once you get to at
least partially assimilate the expected sprawl, The Universal Migrator is no less fun than Into The Electric Castle — in fact, it is more fun, because this time, the underlying story, while still a
story, functions more like a flimsy framework for a set of autonomous musical
landscapes. Formally, it is a sequel / prequel / interquel / whatever (with
time travel in the picture, you never know) to The Final Experiment, describing the hallucinations of the last man
left alive after humanity's extinction — in The Dream Sequencer, he travels through several different
historical epochs, and in Flight Of The
Migrator, takes stuff to a whole different level by heading straight for
the Big Bang... and never coming back, so it seems, but enough of that.
For the first CD, the basic inspiration was
clearly Pink Floyd — the instrumental introduction brings to mind both Wish You Were Here and The Wall at the same time, and then there
is this idea of musically capturing a patch of bleak desperation and
loneliness, puffed up to universalist levels... ring a bell? No, it is not
expressed with comparable ferocity — maybe because there is no autobiographic
value in these compositions — but there is
a pretty nifty fanfare theme nestled in the depths of ʽMy House On
Marsʼ (although it would probably have been more effective if played with
real fanfares rather than Arjen's well-worn synthesizer equipment).
What really
won me over in the course of Disc 1 was ʽThe Shooting Company Of Captain
Frans B. Cocqʼ — not only is the song named for the «authentic» title of
the painting we usually know as The Night
Watch, but it is actually an attempt at a «musical translation» of
Rembrandt's masterpiece, trying to recreate with electronic textures, dark
guitar solos, and psychedelic, phased vocals straight out of 1967 (courtesy of
Tuesday Child's Mouse) that shadowy mystique of van Rijn's trademark style.
Maybe it does not succeed, or maybe it does, but the point is — the idea itself
is fairly extravagant, and totally unconventional, for a guy usually perceived
as a sci-fi / D&D / B-movie freak. Besides, regardless of the context, the
song simply has a catchy chorus and an impressive guitar theme to it.
Dancing out from that starting point, there's
more — ʽDragon On The Seaʼ, with lyrical references to the fleet of
Queen Elizabeth, is an exuberant folk-prog epic, overdubbing bleeping electronic
patterns over folksy acoustic strum and making it work; ʽTemple Of The
Catʼ features a lovely vocal part from Jacqueline Govaert and samples
from a Maya festival; and ʽThe First Man On Earthʼ, with vocals from
Spock's Beard's Neal Morse, is a fairly friendly and upbeat song for a subject
as grim as the first appearance of Homo
sapiens on the planet. Diversity is the key — as the hero moves from locus
to locus, the music incorporates more and more influences; the only bad news is
that the instrumentation lacks the appropriate diversity — guitars and
keyboards express most of the moods, where sometimes mandolins or pan pipes
would be more welcome. Oh well — budget is budget.
The second part, Flight Of The Migrator, was almost universally panned by reviewers
when compared to the first part, and for a good reason: the idea to filter out
the metal from Dream Sequencer and
tightly pack an entire sixty-five minute disc with it really did not work. For
it to work, Arjen would need to at least be a first-rate metal-riff writer —
but most of the riffs hardly strike me as being original or inspiring. Where Dream Sequencer is an imaginative
neo-prog record, Migrator is,
overall, rather pedestrian power metal.
Lucassen's personal charm did help him to
engage a whole swarm of notorious metal singers — Bruce Dickinson himself, for
instance, pulls ʽInto The Black Holeʼ out of the black hole of unmemorable
melodies, and then there are guys from Stratovarius, Primal Fear, Helloween,
Threshold... pretty impressive heap, unfortunately, saddled with mediocre and
monotonous material (and where the monotonousness is broken, it is broken with
the same synthesizer fanfares, as in ʽDawn Of A Million Sunsʼ, of
which we'd already had our full share on Sequencer).
Only once does this rather boring journey to
the beginnings of the Universe break out of its set pattern: as the hero goes
ʽThrough The Wormholeʼ, the tempo picks up — they aren't, after all,
called «wormholes» because you're supposed to move through them like a worm —
and a merry jackhammer-ish thrash-boogie rips your speakers in half, reminding
of the old trickster school running from Van Halen to Extreme. Aaaaah,
kick-ass! Unfortunately, it is one of the shortest tracks on the album — a
measly six minutes.
Still, if you are a really big fan of power
metal, I guess the guest vocalists alone, who all seem to be quite seriously
into this stuff, will provide sufficient reason to own the album. And by combining
the two parts of Universal Migrator,
I have cunningly gotten rid of the necessity to award Ayreon with another
thumbs down — the first half is an unquestionable thumbs up, and the second half
is... well, think of it as a really large bonus for the metalheads. Oh yes, and
the hero dies at the end, but his soul manages to merge with the Universal in
the process, restarting the cycle of life from the beginning, so, theoretically,
you will be able to listen to this record an infinitesimal number of times —
might as well try to enjoy it, for lack of a better alternative.
THE HUMAN EQUATION (2004)
1) Day One: Vigil; 2) Day Two:
Isolation; 3) Day Three: Pain; 4) Day Four: Mystery; 5) Day Five: Voices; 6)
Day Six: Childhood; 7) Day Seven: Hope; 8) Day Eight: School; 9) Day Nine:
Playground; 10) Day Ten: Memories; 11) Day Eleven: Love; 12) Day Twelve:
Trauma; 13) Day Thirteen: Sign; 14) Day Fourteen: Pride; 15) Day Fifteen: Betrayal;
16) Day Sixteen: Loser; 17) Day Seventeen: Accident?; 18) Day Eighteen:
Realization; 19) Day Nineteen: Disclosure; 20) Day Twenty: Confrontation.
By now, we all should know: Arjen Lucassen is
really «The Flying Dutchman», that is, he is actually trying to officially
enshrine himself as the Wagner of rock music: writing nothing but operas,
using fantastic settings to reflect universalist messages, and ensuring that
only the strongest, with the biggest attention spans and the most time to burn,
will survive. Unfortunately, the comparison is hard to elaborate — unlike
Wagner's librettos, Lucassen's lyrics are not only pretentious but, for the
most part, childishly crafted, and he has yet to find his own Tristan chord.
The main problem of Wagner's music
is, however, shared with fidelity — each of the «operas» is horrendously padded
out. Music of such ambitious stature cannot deserve being spread across less
than two CDs, after all. Yeah, there used to be a time when the Beatles could
sum up the state of the world within the five minutes of ʽA Day In The
Lifeʼ, but they were just summarizing — Ayreon is here to present you with
a detailed account balance. Or, at least, such might well be Arjen Lucassen's personal philosophy.
What is interesting about The Human Equation is that, for once, Lucassen decided to break up
the series of fantasy tales in favor of something more «mature» — a bizarre
Freudian opera about psychic convalescence through a twenty-day-long period of re-experiencing
one's accumulated traumas in a comatose state, or something like that. In fact,
this is nothing less than Ayreon's own personal version of The Wall: here, too, you will find abusive schoolteachers, carefree
parents, abandoned lovers, and a climactic scene of «disclosure» where...
anyway, I am not going to pretend that I am unwilling to spoil the plot for
you, given as how I am not sure I got it all right in the first place (and I
never really bothered much about the second one).
Does it help make the music any better?
Absolutely not. Arjen Lucassen knows not the meaning of the word «subtlety»,
and has never heard the expression «less is more», or, if he has, he must have
understood it the other way around — this is why no Ayreon album is ever going
to threaten the shelf status of The Wall,
even relative to modern kids who practice the «never trust anybody any
art piece over thirty» ideology. Frankly speaking, you'd only understand the
deep substantial difference between Universal
Migrator and Human Equation if
you started checking on them armed with a lyrics sheet — and I wouldn't advise
you to do that. "It's time to leave your sheltered cage / Face your
deepest fears / The world is against you / You're fighting back the tears"
is about as profound as it ever gets. Oh well, could be worse.
Lucassen did get some top-notch vocal talent
for this Psychodramatic Masterpiece, though. The protagonist («Me») is voiced
by Dream Theater's own James LaBrie, one of the major antagonists («Fear») —
by Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth, and another
one («Rage») — by Devin Townsend of Strapping Young Lad: again, not much ground
for practicing «subtlety» with these steel-throat war machines, but oh the
masculinity of it all! And, matching the good old Aryan, uh, I mean, Ayreon
manpower are the ladies — lead singerines from the little-known bands
Elfonía (Marcela Bovio) and Mostly Autumn (Heather Findlay), the latter
of which, playing «Love», can go from a Sandy Denny lament to a Kate Bush purr
whenever she wants to. Nifty, if not exactly breathtaking.
But interesting musical ideas have decidedly
given way to being a bit too much focused on the operatic components. Although
Lucassen is no longer segregating his «progressive» and «metal» sides — meaning
that there will be no fifty-minute long unbroken stretch of bland power metal —
the re-blending is sorta sour, with way too many tracks simply fusing together
the grumbly chugga-chugga and the strings-supplying synthesizers (see
ʽSchoolʼ, for instance): so many, in fact, that the good bits have to
be fished out like dumplings from a broth, over the course of repeated
listens. This means work, and who likes being driven to work by pretentious
long-haired Dutch potheads? There you are.
Cutting to the chase, here are some tasters
that might — or might not — convince you that The Human Equation is not utterly worthless. Actually, all of them
were cleverly released as singles. ʽDay Seven: Hopeʼ, re-titled for
single release as ʽCome Back To Meʼ, is a somewhat touching,
well-written art-pop song, carried by a catchy organ pattern. ʽDay Eleven:
Loveʼ has a somewhat annoying power metal chorus, but the main melody is a
surprisingly sexy waltz (the major attraction here are Heather Findlay's
alluring Kate Bush-isms).
Weirdest of all is ʽDay Sixteen:
Loserʼ, which might be the first track I know of to combine the sound of
an Australian didgeridoo (played by Jeroen Goossens) with that of an Irish jig
— and then lay some mammoth metal riffage over both. If that is not enough for you, try waiting until the end of the song
for a ridiculously over-the-top death metal rap to put the cherry on top. Oh,
and how could I forget the added bonus for Uriah Heep fans? Ken Hensley himself
wanders into the studio to play an old-style ʽGypsyʼ-like psychic
organ solo. The oddest thing of all, it seems to work — the song is so utterly
baffling that, at some point, it transcends «hilarious» and starts sending out schizophrenic
waves all over the room.
Other than the singles, Equation has quite a respectable finale — ʽDay Twenty:
Confrontationʼ builds up genuinely spooky atmospherics with cleverly piled
up loads of phased and echoey guitars, processed organ, and «metal slide»
riffs saved for the chorus. With all the vocalists coming together and the song
eventually speeding up, it does seem to be headed for some sort of Wagnerian
finale — unfortunately, the abrupt ending is sort of anti-climactic, but I
guess Ayreon just had to ensure himself some continuity with the rest of his
oeuvres, which explains the superfluous reference to the «Dream Sequencer».
None of this should conceal the fact that a
large, large, large chunk of the
material is quite non-descript (and the problem would only get worse with the
next release), and can only appeal to big fans of power metal vocalization. But
then, come to think of it, such is the fate of 90% of operas ever written — not
only is it impossible to keep the genius afloat for two or three hours on end,
but you are not even really supposed to try. What is really bothersome is that so many of the tracks stretch out past
acceptable limits, and that so many of the themes are rather monotonous
variations on each other — not just «boring», but «boring in the same boring
way». On the other hand, this might simply be an invitation to make your own Human
Equation: I'm sure that most of us could trim this down to about forty
minutes of interesting and even inspiring music. Start off with the singles, then
think about whether you need the rest. The singles are good.
01011001 (2008)
1) Age Of Shadows; 2)
Comatose; 3) Liquid Eternity; 4) Connect The Dots; 5) Beneath The Waves; 6)
Newborn Race; 7) Ride The Comet; 8) Web Of Lies; 9) The Fifth Extinction; 10)
Waking Dreams; 11) The Truth Is In Here; 12) Unnatural Selection; 13) River Of
Time; 14) E = mc2; 15) The Sixth Extinction.
I am ashamed to say that, this time around, I
did not even bother looking up the basic contours of the story. It seems to be something of a cross between
the, ahem, «realism» of Human Equation
and the sci-fantasy of Universal
Migrator, all having to do with machines overtaking man, when everybody
starts thinking and acting binary (or, at best, hexadecimal), and somehow
conceptually tied in to every other Ayreon album ever released — you gotta give
Lucassen some credit, his megalomania never got in the way of accurately tying
together all the little loose ends.
The problem is, this time around the music
never really stimulated me into looking up any details. If the first half of Universal Migrator worked moderately
well as a «musical picture gallery» of sorts, and Human Equation, de-padded and properly filtered, had a
psycho-thriller sheen to it, then this follow-up, being every bit as large and
pompous, hardly offers a single fresh idea. Seventeen
singers in total show up for the project — at this point, it seems that
contributing to an Ayreon prog-metal-opera turns into an obligatory clause in
every power / symph / doom-metal band frontperson's contract, and they are all
standing in line on his front porch on a daily basis. (Gotthard, Blind
Guardian, and King's X are among the more notorious acts this time). And they
all blow it on this mastodont, quite mediocre even for Ayreon's usually
questionable standards.
Of course, there is no questioning the
technical side of it all. Every note is in place, all the acoustic, electric,
and electronic overdubs meticulously tested and adjusted to each other, each
singer and singerine wined, dined, coached and poached to perfection. We could
hardly expect anything less of a guy who has never sullied a single one of his
fantasies with overt sloppiness. Extract it from its context, forget about
every other Ayreon record ever released (better still, forget about every other
record ever released, period), and 01011001 will be a monumental
achievement in its own rights. As it is, it is about as exciting as the
sequence of zeroes and ones that constitutes its true title (the letter
ʽYʼ, short for either YAKETY-YAK or YARDBIRD YAWN, depending on your
current state of mind).
In utter frustration, I cannot think of a
single track here worth a specific mention. It seems as if Lucassen was so
overwhelmed by the sheer number of people he got to act in his next play that
he subconsciously fell back on his old musical stock, recycling all of his
«meat-and-potato» ideas (folk, metal, electronic) without bothering to find any
new combinations. Even the presence of one or two ʽLosersʼ or
ʽShooting Companiesʼ could have already made a big difference, but
no, these hundred minutes run on without a single ripple on the surface.
Obviously, this criticism makes little sense if
we are simply supposed to like Ayreon as a musical phenomenon. One does not
criticize something like, say, Haydn's symphonies for (frequently) sounding
indistinguishable from one another, so why should this be different with
Lucassen? Yet, first of all, it does not hurt to remember that 01011001 is Lucassen's first, and only,
musical offering in four years (how many symphonies could Haydn have come up
with in the same interim?), and even a hardcore fan could be entitled to
something that did not sound exactly
like a rearranged/restructured medley of past successes (and failures).
And second — this is where personal taste comes
in — Ayreon's music has always been cheesy,
humorless, padded, bloated, and emotionally monotonous. It was only during
those select, happy, cherished moments where Lucassen was able to break through
these walls that I felt like there was something to gain (and there really
was). «Generic» Ayreon material has no reason to exist in my world («poor man's
Rush» could be a good description), and I wouldn't want to recommend it for
anybody else's, either. Hence, decidedly a thumbs down here, and here's hoping that the
next Ayreon release will be more creative and let us learn something that we
didn't already know, and wished we never knew in the first place.
THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING (2013)
CD
I: Phase I: Singularity: 1) Prologue:
The Black Board; 2) The Theory Of Everything, Part 1; 3) Patterns; 4) The Prodigy's
World; 5) The Teacher's Discovery; 6) Love And Envy; 7) Progressive Waves; 8)
The Gift; 9) The Eleventh Dimension; 10) Inertia; 11) The Theory Of Everything;
Phase II: Symmetry: 12) The
Consultation; 13) Diagnosis; 14) The Argument; 15) The Rival's Dilemma; 16)
Surface Tension; 17) A Reason To Live; 18) Potential; 19) Quantum Chaos; 20)
Dark Medicine; 21) Alive!; 22) The Prediction.
CD
II: Phase III: Entanglement: 1)
Fluctuations; 2) Transformation; 3) Collision; 4) Side Effects; 5) Frequency Modulation;
6) Magnetism; 7) Quid Pro Quo; 8) String Theory; 9) Fortune?; Phase IV: Unification: 10) Mirror Of Dreams;
11) The Lighthouse; 12) The Argument; 13) The Parting; 14) The Visitation; 15)
The Breakthrough; 16) The Note; 17) The Uncertainty Principle; 18) Dark Energy;
19) The Theory Of Everything, Part 3; 20) The Blackboard (Reprise).
Well, I guess that if it was inevitable for a
concept album about «the theory of everything» to be produced in the first
place, it might have also been inevitable that Arjen Lucassen would have to be
the mastermind behind it. Let's face it, after all the Universal Migrators and Human
Equations there was simply nowhere left to run but to the very top of the
tower. This is the album to end all
albums, the ultimate in the ultimate, Ayreon's Lifehouse, Topographic
Oceans, and Mahler's 9th all rolled in one. A single listen to all four
sides in a row will give you the intellect of a Stephen Hawking, two listens
will empower you to rule the world, and a final third run will, beyond all
reasonable doubt, allow you to reweave the fabric of the universe at your whim.
But remember — only supreme, absolute concentration will get you anywhere with
this, and it takes intellectual skill, psychological training, and a really high degree of tolerance for
kindergarten-level sci-fi anecdotes to immerse yourself, freely and lovingly,
in the world of Ayreon.
I must say, though, that I honestly admire how
high the man has managed to raise the stakes. The very fact of The Theory Of Everything being yet
another double-CD rock opera is not surprising, but this may be the most
cohesive, story-dependent, and ideologically ambitious project in Ayreon
history so far, and among the usual horde of guests to help the artist bring it
to fruition, there are no less than four
prog veterans: Rick Wakeman plays piano throughout and has an «old school»
synth solo on ʽSurface Tensionʼ, Keith Emerson has an astral Moog
solo on ʽProgressive Wavesʼ, Steve Hackett adds a guitar solo on
ʽThe Partingʼ, and John Wetton sings the important part of The
Psychiatrist. Not to mention, of course, all the innumerable singers and players
from newer, somewhat less legendary prog and metal outfits (Dream Theater,
Nightwish, Lacuna Coil etc.) — ol' man Lucassen has lost none of his
supernatural gravitational charisma.
The story itself needs no retelling and can be
partially deduced from simply glancing at the song titles — speaking of which,
the «songs» themselves are really just small individual parts of four lengthy
suites («Singularity», «Symmetry», «Entanglement», «Unification»), with track
separation engineered the way it is usually done with classical operas in the
CD age. The story seems to be drawing its inspiration as much from A Beautiful Mind as it does from Tommy, and has all the complexity,
originality, and general appeal of a second-rate comic book. The lyrics are
best left alone, and I mean it, really. Let me just give you a couple
samples: "(Prodigy:) A grand design in all its majesty / Vibrating
strings, quantum gravity / Why was I chosen? / What does it mean to me? / Tell
me why!" Or this: "(Rival:) One day I'll show them / I am the genius
/ One day the whole world will know / One day I'll show them / Who he really is
/ One day they'll know". Personally, I think there'd have been no harm in
jettisoning a few of the guest musicians and using the money to hire a good
librettist instead. But it's really all about the music, right?
Well, here comes the nasty part. The music
behind all this is... sort of a very typical, very smooth, very predictable
Ayreon sound. Not particularly heavy, although some tracks are well within the
limits of «power metal» stylistics; highly influenced by Celtic and other folk
traditions; well stocked up on electronics, since a proper, well-behaved
«theory of everything» should be able to look both to the past and to the
future; professionally-impeccably played and sung. But, just like on the
previous Ayreon album, there are no
musical ideas here that would justify the «progressive» tag — some of the
riffs may be «new» from a purely technical point, yet the ideology behind them
is strictly conservative. If there is any
bar at all to be raised on The Theory Of
Everything, it is only the self-satisfaction bar. It may well be so that,
listening back to those tapes, Lucassen finally said to himself — «here is the album I've always aspired to
make, where everything is in its right place and all the ingredients are mixed
in just the right proportions». So now you, the listener, can simply chuck all
the previous Ayreon albums out the window and satisfy yourself with this one.
Heck, maybe you can chuck all your albums out the window, period — this is The Theory
Of Everything, after all, isn't it?
My biggest problem is with the «rock opera»
approach: all the pieces being so short, it is hard to get focused on any
particular one. In the classical paradigm, even the most story-dependent,
plot-driven operas usually have their individual overtures, arias, and
interludes that stand out like particularly bright brushstrokes on a
monotonous canvas. Here, apart from one or two recurrent themes (like the
Jethro Tull-style guitar/flute title theme), the trivial plot overshadows
everything, and, since it is downright impossible to empathize with the grossly
cartoonish «characters» that would probably be rejected even by Japan's
cheesiest anime studios, the «extra-melodic» factors do not compensate for the
auxiliary nature of the music. Which is a pity, because somehow I feel that at
the core of this sprawl, lies a potentially decent 40-minute instrumental
album, with friendly guest contributions from Wakeman, Emerson, and Hackett, a
few memorable themes, and relatively tasteful arrangements that combine
impressive playing technique with moral restraint, not letting the whole thing
run into an Yngwie Malmsteen flying circus extravaganza. But the «rock opera to
end all rock operas» fetish just does not let me verify this.
It must be said, however, that finally we have a musical composition
named ʽString Theoryʼ that is entirely dependent on... guess what?
Yes, that's right, the entire world of science has spent half a century
wondering when exactly the essence of the theory would finally be encapsulated
in a ninety-second string quartet retelling. Two problems, though: (a) the
track also relies on synthesizers, ruining the purity of the experiment; (b)
where the hell is ʽSuperstring Theoryʼ, with all the guest musicians
pulling out their violins and finally delivering that «lost chord» which Pete
Townshend himself was unable to find?
Granted, I even feel a little sorry that such
an ambitious project, upon completion, has largely remained limited to
specialized audiences and publicity sources — even the All-Music Guide has
failed to provide an appropriate review, and the record has mostly been picked
up on by various metal-oriented magazines, which is not justified at all, since
it is not at all a metal album. Then again, there is no use pretending, either,
that a rock album called The Theory Of
Everything can be perceived as anything other than (a) intentionally
humorous or (b) unintentionally ridiculous, and since Ayreon is very rarely
(a), that this here is most likely a case of solid (b). The only thing that,
from my point of view, excuses Lucassen is that the man combines the qualities
of a fanatical whacko and a hard-working professional. And, from that angle, The Theory Of Everything is one of the whackiest and the most professional records he
ever made. The kind of crap that you just don't come across on a daily basis —
like a white rhino's, or something like that.
SPANKING MACHINE (1990)
1) Swamp Pussy; 2) He's My
Thing; 3) Vomit Heart; 4) Never; 5) Boto(w)rap; 6) Dogg; 7) Pain In My Heart;
8) Lashes; 9) You're Right; 10) Dust Cake Boy; 11) Fork Down Throat.
Technically speaking, Babes In Toyland are not
directly related to the «Riot Grrrl» thing — even though Kat Bjelland was originally from Oregon (what's up
with those Northwestern states and dirt-rock anyway? is that simply the
farthest corner where the wind ends up blowing all the «white trash», or
what?). But the band itself started up in Minneapolis, around 1987, deeply upsetting
the local frigid Scandinavian population — so, eventually, they just had to move to Seattle — and, more
importantly, they did not have much of a political agenda. Which is not a bad
thing, perhaps, when you are playing this particular kind of music.
In terms of popularity, they ended up losing to
their chief competition — Hole (much to the leery delight of Courtney Love, I
suppose, as she had actually been a «Babe In Toyland» herself in 1987, playing
bass for a few weeks before being kicked out by Kat). The loss, however, was
clearly the result of Courtney's scandalous publicity rather than the music:
in most of the areas where the basic sounds of Hole and Babes In Toyland
actually differ, despite all the similarities, the latter win out, hands down.
The band is essentially the brainchild of Kat
Bjelland — drummer Lori Barbero and bassist Michelle Leon are faithful
henchgirls, combining sincere energy with enough technical ability to not let
it all fall apart — and Bjelland's religious dedication to punk aesthetics
prevents her from becoming too much of a musician, even though it occasionally
does seem to matter to her which particular chord should be chosen next. Their
instrumental limitations do not allow to properly qualify the music as «grunge»
à la Nirvana — they cannot
generate the necessary density and heaviness, and come across more like an
untrained, undisciplined, wilder version of Sonic Youth: their trashy, heavily
drunk younger sisters or something. (Thurston Moore actually appreciated the
unexpected kinship and had the band tour together with Sonic Youth in 1990).
Nevertheless, Bjelland herself has a certain
rough, murderous charm (as opposed to the rather sick, poisonous charm of
Courtney Love). In public, that charm was mainly due to the contrast between
the «kinderwhore» image and the ferocious-hysterical vocals, making her one of
the top contenders for «best wild screamer» of the decade. But even on record,
without the fancy dresses and the bleached hairlocks (or is that natural
blonde? who cares, though?), she comes out exactly the way she is supposed to come
up — midway in between «tough street punk kid» and «rotten spoiled princess
brat». Which means that the listener's emotions may easily roll between scared
admiration and annoyed irritation, and the latter is a much stronger emotion
than sheer boredom and indifference, which would be the worst outcome.
Most of the songs sound more or less the same —
mid-tempo aggregations of post-punk distorted chords that cluster in rhythmic
phrases as if against their will, and use every chance they get to dissolve in
puddles of noise. But the guitar tones are genuinely nasty, and even if most of their song titles are quite
suggestive, the honor of living up to the 100-point mark unquestionably belongs
to ʽSwamp Pussyʼ, because the song totally sounds like a «swamp pussy» — the guitar provides the
swamp, and the vocals provide the... well, you know. (Allegedly, the whole album
was to be titled Swamp Pussy, but
apparently somebody chickened out at the last moment — never mind, though, Spanking Machine is fairly indicative
as well). The first 25 seconds of the song, opening the album, are so
indicative of everything that follows that it might be all the time you need to
decide if you include falling in love with this band in your immediate plans,
or postpone it until your nearest lobotomy.
Kat Bjelland cannot sing — she makes Patti
Smith look like Maria Callas in comparison — but she can conjure a mean little
devil, and, more importantly, get him under her total control: she is a highly
expressive and technical screamer, knowing full well where to rise and where to
fall, and how to even make it sound natural. That opening "why do you make
me feel so bad? why do you bother to act so sad?" is a classic example of
«primal scream» — something deeply repressed for a long, long time finally
coming out — and, furthermore, as much as I hate to admit it, it is sexy, perhaps even to orgasmic
heights.
Most of the songs, as can be easily told, are
about girl-guy relationships, where males are sometimes objectified
("he's my thing, stay away from my thing, get your own one around!"),
sometimes humiliated ("why did you leave me when I was still inside of
you?" — somebody needs anatomy lessons, Kat), sometimes adored and
despised at the same time ("I do hate you, vomit my heart, pull my legs
apart... but I still love you, my brain's a carnival all aflame"). But if
you do not pay much attention to the lyrics, there is no impression that this
exorcism is really directed at anybody or any group in particular. This is just
an exercise in blunt frustration-venting with an implied sexual motivation —
and it succeeds.
Actually, after a couple listens, driven mainly
by intrigue, you start to discern patches of melody and musical creativity —
for instance, the band's first single, ʽDust Cake Boyʼ, is initially
memorable only because of the way Kat screams out the retriplicated last
syllable of each verse line, but then you might get to like the «galloping»
punch of the rhythm section and how it keeps dipping in and out of the power
chord mess that attenuates Kat's screaming. Or that ʽHe's My Thingʼ
is actually not a bad example of primitive, but catchy garage-rock composing.
(Come to think of it, one totally obvious influence I have not mentioned is the
Stooges' Fun House — very similar in
a miriad of ways, even if there is really no way these well-meaning babes could
match the intensity of Iggy's hell flames. But on both albums, the scorched,
smelly stumps of good melodies require taking some time to stand out through
the smoke).
The album falters only once, but rather badly:
for the slow-tempo, dirge-like ʽDoggʼ, the «honor» of singing lead
vocals is ceded to drummer Lori Barbero — and she has this nasal, whiny tone
that does not fit the general atmosphere at all. Just like Kat, she cannot sing
properly, but neither can she scream — the result is a rather dreary, totally
un-fun-like interlude, and, furthermore, the album's sequencing really sucks in
the middle, with ʽDoggʼ being immediately followed by the equally
slow ʽPain In My Heartʼ, a song that should have rather been given to
Hole because it needs that extra rotting-corpse graveyard-punch which Courtney
could have provided far more ffectively than the down-to-earth Bjelland.
But despite the occasional setbacks, Spanking Machine is still somewhat of a
pervert masterpiece of the genre, whatever that genre might be. It's loud,
it's fun, it's angry, it's occasionally orgasmic, it doesn't give much of a
damn whether it «succeeds» or not, it looks dumb but really isn't, it threatens
to be boring but you'd have to be pretty boring yourself to honestly find it
boring — in short, just a happy thumbs up and be done with it.
TO MOTHER (1991)
1) Catatonic; 2) Mad Pilot; 3)
Primus; 4) Laugh My Head Off; 5) Spit To See The Shine; 6) Ripe; 7) The Quiet
Room.
A 22-minute long EP here, worth a brief
separate review not only because it is almost as long as an early Beach Boys
album, but also because it is a relatively important «evolutionary step» from Spanking Machine to Fontanelle. The songs are allegedly all
outtakes from the Spanking Machine
sessions, but they were re-recorded in the wake of the Babes' joint European
tour with Sonic Youth, and some additional influence might be discernible — not
a very good influence, I'm afraid,
but one that guides the band into a denser jungle of subconscious libidinous
metaphors and into exploring distorted noise from an «artsy» standpoint rather
than just using it as a direct reflection of being pissed off.
Which is all right for Sonic Youth, I guess —
these guys started out with just such an agenda, and gradually got better and
better at it — but a little out of the league of Kat Bjelland and her assistants.
Maybe she can write lyrics that are on par with Sonic Youth (it doesn't take a
rocket scientist to master that style), but trying to put a
«depth-and-subtlety» sheen over the one and only thing that Babes In Toyland do
real good — waging post-pubescent hysteria — is an inadequate decision, to say
the least. Particularly if it translates into the presence of boring
arpeggiated instrumentals (ʽThe Quiet Roomʼ, sounding like a
mediocre San Franciscan band transplanted into the 1990s), or into letting the
drummer girl take another abysmal lead vocal (ʽPrimusʼ) even after
the misfortune of ʽDoggʼ clearly showed the insanity of the idea.
There are two songs here still firmly rooted in
the «old» style — loud, aggressive, demonic, hysterical. ʽMad Pilotʼ
is somewhat spoiled by excessive reverb on some of the vocals, but the main
brutal, simplistic riff makes up for it, and the overdubbed guitar noises
actually make sense, imitating an airplane out of control, a fairly suitable
image for the band. Even more «traditional» is ʽRipeʼ, with (almost)
no overdubs, great screechy vocals and total delirium all around.
On the other hand, ʽCatatonicʼ is
already erasing the distinctions between early Babes and early Hole,
introducing elements of «doom-and-gloom» that may not be totally healthy — in
fact, let the virus spread a bit and watch a normal person transform into a
Lizard King. To look at it from a different side, when the opening lines to
your album go "I know the sugar plum fairy / Her name is Mary / She's
halfway inside my arm / Half way does great harm", this is a notably different
story from "Why do you make me feel so bad? / Why do you bother to act so
sad?". And the difference in the music is quite comparable as well — minor
tonalities, somber dirge moods, zombie atmospherics. I don't really want this from Bjelland.
That said, this is only the beginning of the
change. Even ʽCatatonicʼ eventually picks up steam, and ʽLaugh
My Head Offʼ gallops along to a hilarious chorus (with echoes of Siouxsie
& The Banshees rather than Sonic Youth this time), so the only genuine
turds on the EP are the two tracks mentioned at the beginning — the major
problem is the length, making it a rather resource-ineffective proposition to
go hunting for the EP.
FONTANELLE (1992)
1) Bruise Violet; 2) Right
Now; 3) Bluebell; 4) Handsome & Gretel; 5) Blood; 6) Magick Flute; 7) Won't
Tell; 8) Quiet Room; 9) Spun; 10) Short Song; 11) Jungle Train; 12) Pearl; 13)
Real Eyes; 14) Mother; 15) Gone.
In general, this is To Mother expanded to full-LP status. Despite an important lineup
change — important, because any change in a three-person lineup will be
important, even if the third person is confined to dancing and tambourines —
namely, the replacement of bassist Michelle Leon with Maureen Herman, Fontanelle continues the band's
«Journey Into The Depths of Your Sexual Subconscious», under the ongoing mentorship
of Sonic Youth (whose own Lee Ranaldo co-produced the album with Bjelland).
Somehow the album managed to become their
commercial peak — most likely, due to (a) heavy promotion on the part of Sonic
Youth and on the part of themselves, with the band's wild, but novel stage act
steadily gaining in prominence; (b) most importantly, the overall grunge craze
— in the wake of Nevermind, this
sound was bound to succeed, especially considering that Bjelland's guitar tones
are now even fatter, crunchier, and dirtier than they were two years before.
That «swamp pussy» sound of Spanking
Machine is all but gone, replaced by the punk-o-metal doom growl that Kurt
commanded us to love — and we (the people) loved it so much we ended up buying
220,000 copies of Fontanelle in the
United States alone.
And what now, in retrospect? Well, naturally,
the seams are showing — whatever emotional effect the album may produce on us,
the reasons for that effect are immediately obvious, canceling out the
desirable «creepy» vibe. Even a brief comparison of the album sleeves between
1990 and 1992 shows the unhealthy difference: from a stylish, subtly defiant
photo they switched to a rather dubious «Chucky-meets-Alice-Cooper» trashy
aesthetics. Then there is the same thing within
the album sleeve: confused quasi-Freudian imagery in the lyrics + dark,
quasi-gothic guitar tones with more emphasis on how the chords are played
rather than on which chords are
played = a thoroughly unnecessary pretense to «intellectualism» where, earlier,
there was just some simple, brutal, basic, gut-level exorcism.
However, that does not mean that Fontanelle is bad — it is a firm step
in a wrong direction, as far as I am concerned, but it retains enough primal
punch to be consistently listenable for those who respect primal punch punched
by professional primal punchers. For sure, it was wrong of them to re-record
the instrumental ʽQuiet Roomʼ from To Mother (its three minutes should, at best, have been reduced to
a twenty-second mood-setting intro to some other song); and the final
ʽGoneʼ, with its slow tempos, feedback walls, and «atmospheric» or
«symbolic» overdubs of breaking glass at the beginning, is understandable as a
choice for the lead-out track, but pretty much unbearable on its own (once again
— such experiments should better be left for Sonic Youth; it's not that they do
them a whole lot better, but at least «it's their life», whereas Bjelland is
just an uncomfortable stranger to this land).
And yet, when Fontanelle rocks, it really rocks. The sonic textures may be even
more monotonous than they used to, the melodic hooks may be completely
disregarded (intentionally disregarded
— since the melodies here are influenced by avantgarde rather than
minimalistic, but catchy garage-rock), but they still get by on the strength of
Bjelland's personality. One of my favorite numbers here, ʽHandsome &
Gretelʼ, managed to become a favorite simply because of the hilarious
vocal modulation, which includes everything from deep-throat roar to
mock-falsetto irony — if anything, that is at least serious theatrical skill.
ʽBruise Violetʼ is a great album opener, jackhammering the song's
maligned victim (some suggested that the victim in question was Courtney Love,
which Bjelland naturally denied in public, in the light of lines like "you
fucking bitch I hope your insides rot", etc.) into oblivion, with a few
well-placed echoey calls of «liar, liar, liar!» diversifying the mood — now
you're playful, now you're vengeful, and now you're downright psychotic. This is something that needs a Kat
Bjelland for comfort; nobody in Sonic Youth possessed that sort of back alley
devil inside them.
In short, to sum it all up in a transparent
hyperbolic manner, you probably haven't lived your life to the fullest if you
never heard Kat scream out "YOU'RE DEAD MEAT MOTHERFUCKER YOU DON'T TRY TO
RAPE A GODDESS" at the top of her lungs during the climax to ʽBluebellʼ
— this ain't «music», really, more like «spiritual history», but it's the
little things like that which make Fontanelle
an important, and quite exciting, document of its epoch. Even the obligatory
Lori Barbero vocal spotlight this time is tolerable, as the lady is playing
Patti Smith's little sister on the tempo-varying ʽMagick Fluteʼ.
Additionally, I refrain from making any definitive comments on the actual music
content here, because this would require more trained and attentive ears — I
don't «get» these melodies as distinct entities in their own rights, but
somebody else might: this is not generic hardcore or poorly masked formulaic
blues-rock, with at least some of the guitar / bass interplay quite carefully
constructed and occasionally steered in the «punk jazz» department of Primus
and the like. Not that the girls are seriously / notably growing as technically
skilled players or anything — the only point is that there may be more to this music than what immediately meets, and
blackens, the naked eye. From that point of view, my thumbs up come both as overdue
payment for Bjelland's fiery spirit — and possible advance payment for
potential future revelations.
PAINKILLERS (1993)
1) He's My Thing; 2) Laredo;
3) Istigkeit; 4) Ragweed; 5) Angel Hair; 6) Fontanellette.
The album cover explicitly suggests some trashy
immediate link to Fontanelle, which
there is: nominally, this is an EP consisting of outtakes from the Fontanelle sessions (so the two relate
to each other just like Spanking Machine
related To Mother, pardon the
involuntary rhyming), except that they also tack on a mini-live session —
ʽFontanelletteʼ, recorded at CBGB's in April 1992, contains ten
selections from Fontanelle squeezed
inside one 34-minute track on the CD. Altogether, that makes up for a 50-minute
listening experience, so the real meaning of the «EP» tag in this particular
case is «Extra Pay» (for something quite superfluous).
The «original outtakes» are a rather confused
bunch. There is a re-recording of ʽHe's My Thingʼ with somewhat
better production than on the original, and with the same wildness level, but
without any particularly reasonable point. There is ʽLaredoʼ, a
fairly punchy riff-rocker with a fun «surf-grunge» lead line throughout; it
could have made a good addition to Fontanelle,
replacing one of its slower, more boring numbers. ʽIstigkeitʼ,
however, is one of those slow, boring
numbers, whose ethereal falsetto harmonies are just enough out of tune to
confirm that Bjelland should firmly stick to roaring, never «cooing».
ʽAngel Hairʼ is a bunch of unmemorable noise, as uninspired and
generic as they come.
Biggest surprise of the bunch is the obligatory
Lori Barbero vocal spotlight — as usual, I was prepared for the worst, but
ʽRagweedʼ is actually a surprise: alternating broken strings of notes
and percussion blasts, over which Barbero, beatnik-style, flings brief recited
sequences of words, followed by a fast-paced psychedelic section with buzzing
intertwined guitars and a femme-fatale
style, icy chorus. Throughout, Lori does not even try to sing, and it works —
her spoken-word «dominatrix» tone is
far more convincing that way. Consequently, ʽRagweedʼ vies for
attention with ʽLaredoʼ, first time in Barbero history.
The live performance boasts decent-quality
recording and, since the songs are all fresh, genuine excitement at being able
to donate the vibe to a small, hip New York crowd. But since the Babes never
really hold it off in the studio, there is not much hope to see them get even
wilder live — and meticulous comparison of the studio Fontanelle with the live ʽFontanelletteʼ is a sport that
should be restricted only for the most loyal admirers of Kat Bjelland. At least
they have the good sense not to play ʽQuiet Roomʼ — the live set
omits most of the «moody» numbers, concentrating on rip-roar. And considering
that the Babes would never have that much rip-roar again, it might seem nice to
have this extra souvenir.
NEMESISTERS (1995)
1) Hello; 2) Oh Yeah!; 3)
Drivin'; 4) Sweet '69; 5) Surd; 6) 22; 7) Ariel; 8) Killer On The Road; 9)
Middle Man; 10) Memory; 11) S.F.W.; 12) All By Myself; 13) Deep Song; 14) We
Are Family.
By 1995, Babes In Toyland had nothing much left
to say — which should come as no surprise for those who think they had nothing
to say in the first place, and as a piece of sad news for those who think the
band did have growth potential. But
in what direction? They never wrote great melodies, they were sloppy
instrumentalists, and their inventiveness in the studio never took them beyond
simple echo effects and extra fuzz. So where to now, St. Peter?
To a slow, boring, painfully drawn out failure,
that's where. The album title is a funny haplology, the album cover looks like
something right out of the hair metal years (Ozzy must have loved it), but the
music, for the most part, is as dull as the opening track — ʽHelloʼ
is an uneducated Sonic Youth parody, and any respect I have for the scenic
image of Kat Bjelland is severely undercut by her trying to introduce
«atmospherics», «subtlety», and «modern rock intellectualism» into the picture.
What she can do is rev us up by
screaming and roaring at the top of her lungs while chugging out simple,
fast-moving grunge riffs. And on Nemesisters,
the longest of all Babes albums, there are only two songs that move in that
direction — ʽOh Yeah!ʼ and ʽSweet '69ʼ — and only
ʽSweet '69ʼ moves far enough, with a Stooges-derived riff as generic
as they come, but it is the crunch that matters, not the chords.
Most of the other songs just drone along —
sometimes with a psychedelic effect (ʽSurdʼ), sometimes bordering on
stoner metal (ʽDrivin'ʼ, essentially a repetitive instrumental with a
«subliminal message» in the background), sometimes trying to experiment with
tricky time signatures (Lori Barbero goes for some unusual polyrhythms on
ʽMemoryʼ — not that it matters much), but these are nuances: the band
is so inexperienced in all these matters anyway that it all merges together in
one big bowl of tiresome slop.
If the bulk of the album does not spell out
«f-a-i-l-u-r-e» clearly enough for you, the final three tracks will have to do the job: three
«deconstructivist» covers of songs that one might only associate with the
usual likes of Babes In Toyland in a nightmare: Eric Carmen's sentimental
ballad ʽAll By Myselfʼ, the old vocal jazz chestnut ʽDeep
Songʼ (Billie Holiday, etc.), and the old Sister Sledge disco anthem
ʽWe Are Familyʼ. The ballad, drowned in a sea of fuzzy power chords
and deep-throaty roar, is unlistenable (not that it was all that listenable in
its original version, but this rendition does not even have the stark novelty
value of a Sid Vicious doing ʽMy Wayʼ). The jazz number is sung by
Lori Barbero (who cannot sing) a cappella (so that you wouldn't have the slightest
doubt that she cannot sing); I will refrain from describing the aural
consequences.
Only the Sister Sledge cover, with a funny
electric piano part distilling the guitar noise, manages to be modestly
entertaining — ironic as it is to hear them all joining in a chorus of "we
are family, I got all my sisters with me", considering how much time was
left for the band to live — but it may simply sound refreshing and relaxing
after the aural horrors we have just had to experience. Besides, it is
impossible to get the point of having it here without knowing about the
original — and if you care at all for the original (which was, after all, one
of the high points of «B-level disco» back in the day), there is no reason to
care about the «deconstruction».
Basically, you can almost see the album talk
back at the ladies — telling them to pack it in and call it a day, because they
have ran out of gas to create another Spanking
Machine, and the tank ain't strong enough to hold higher quality fuel. For
instructive purposes, Nemesisters
may be worth a listen, but it is more likely that Kat Bjelland will go down in
history as the breathtaking, hysterical, aggressive little blonde banshee of
ʽHe's My Thingʼ than as the scruffy, capricious, annoying ghostly
zombie of ʽHelloʼ or ʽSurdʼ. Not to mention that she is a
heck of a lot more entertaining and amusing as the former than as the latter. Thumbs down —
as the Babes say their goodbyes to Toyland and move out to Adult Droneland, I'd
rather prefer to stay behind.
MINNEAPOLISM (2001)
1) Bruise Violet; 2) Swamp
Pussy; 3) Vomit Heart; 4) Oh Yeah!; 5) Handsome And Gretel; 6) Won't Tell; 7)
Drivin'; 8) Ripe; 9) Dust Cake Boy; 10) Ariel; 11) Bluebell; 12) He's My Thing;
13) Middle Man; 14) Memory; 15) Spun; 16) Spit To See The Shine; 17) Sweet '69.
This is not one of the many archive live
releases from the vaults of the Toyland, but actually a contemporary memento of
the Babes' last ever public appearance, after a few years of disintegrating,
reconfiguring, patching up, and breaking down again, the Babes finally played
their last show, with Bjelland, Barbero, and new bass player Jessie Farmer (who
had actually replaced Maureen Herman in 1997). Details are obscure: reprinted
sources claim that the show took place on November 21, 2001, yet at the same
time the release date for the album is usually given as May 2001, so either we have some time travel involved here or some
anonymous son of a bitch is falsifying history. Not that this particular
history is of any tremendous importance, but accuracy is important even when dealing with a band as chaotic as the Babes.
Anyway, even though Minneapolism is primarily a historical document, it could have
plenty of potential to become a great live record and, come to think of it, a
much better farewell than the stupefied Nemesisters.
Alas, nobody happened to care about sound quality — the whole thing honestly
sounds like an audience-quality bootleg, albeit recorded from the first row, so
all the drunken guffawing and hullabalooing mainly come through during the
breaks between songs. Audiophiles will put this down ten seconds into the album
and never pick it up again; lo-fi enthusiasts and Kat Bjelland suitors are the
only ones likely enough to want to keep it.
Too bad, because the show was really good. The
new bass girl handles all of Michelle Leon's and Maureen Herman's tough parts
fairly well, and Bjelland, despite occasional faltering and not always being
able to sustain the heat, still has enough spirit to whip herself up into the
usual frenzy (something that you do not always expect out of «last concerts»).
She seems a little out of breath on ʽHandsome And Gretelʼ (even
letting the audience sing a couple of the "handsooooome!"s instead
of herself), and misses a few of the «scream-shots» on ʽDust Cake
Boyʼ — but apparently, there had always been slips like these whenever the
Babes performed live, so there is no need to tie the occasional mistakes in
with disillusionment, tiredness, or lack of enthusiasm.
The setlist, on the other hand, is near-perfect
— all the classic numbers are here, with a nice fat selection from Spanking Machine, all the big «hits»
from Fontanelle, and a slightly
higher than necessary, but not fatal selection from Nemesisters (the weirdest inclusion is ʽDrivin'ʼ, on
which Barbero is forced to chant her mantra of "where were you, I thought
that I knew" for three minutes without any echo or reverb on her voice —
not a pleasant experience, particularly to hear her get so totally out of
breath towards the end). Main focus is on kicking ass — the «moody» numbers are
reduced to a minimum and act as occasional breathers (ʽWon't Tellʼ,
ʽMiddle Manʼ), helping Bjelland to regain some stamina for the next
monster rocker. Altogether, I think the audiences got what they wanted — if
only somebody had bothered setting up a proper recording console, us future
listeners could get what we want, too, but no dice.
Consequently, do not hunt for this without
extra necessity; ʽFontanelletteʼ on Painkillers is a sharper illustration of the girls' club power,
although, of course, it is exclusively limited to promoting Fontanelle, and The Peel Sessions have far better sound quality, although they are
not genuinely «live» (not before a genuinely vibrant club audience, that is)
and are also represented by a somewhat questionable setlist. Which, in the end,
leaves us still wishing and hoping for that one perfect Babes In Toyland live
experience where it would all come
together — the clarity of the mix, the enthusiasm, the song quality — and it
looks like that particular wish just ain't coming true, unless the ladies give
it one more try one of these days.
ADDENDA:
THE BBC JOHN PEEL SESSIONS 1990-1992 (2001)
1) Catatonic; 2) Ripe; 3)
Primus; 4) Spit To See The Shine; 5) Pearl; 6) Dogg; 7) Laugh My Head Off; 8)
Mad Pilot; 9) Handsome & Gretel; 10) Blood; 11) Mother; 12) Dirty; 13)
Jungle Train; 14) Right Now; 15) Sometimes; 16) Magick Flute.
For a band that only lasted for half a decade,
releasing but three spotty LPs and leaving behind a rather ambiguous
reputation, Babes In Toyland have a rather inadequate slew of «posthumous»
archive releases and compilations — including, among other things, a trilogy of live compilations creatively
called Devil, Lived, and Viled,
published in 2000 by some obscure indie label or other. (Only mentioning these
because there is no way I am ever going to review that many live albums from
this kind of band — I can only guess that one of the label executives simply
had a major crush on Kat Bjelland, which may be understood).
In any case, only a small part of this backlog
is easily available these days. One of the earliest and most important is this
set of live performances recorded for John Peel, who was a major fan of Spanking Machine and did much to
promote the band in the early stages of their career. In fact, the original Peel Sessions, a brief EP with only eight tracks, was released as
early as 1992; this here edition from 2001 is an expanded version that adds
material from a couple of later sessions, the last one already with Maureen
Herman replacing Michelle Leon on bass. Given John Peel's popularity and
importance, this is quite likely the way that many European audiences heard
the band in the first place — so, at the very least, The Peel Sessions have some historical importance. And at most,
they are kinda fun.
Could have actually been much more fun, though,
if not for the questionable track list: apparently, the idea behind this BBC
exposure was primarily to promote the latest and freshest, and this means that
(a) there is virtually no material from their first and best, Spanking Machine, except, of course,
for the one worst song on that album (ʽDoggʼ); (b) the performances
of songs from To Mother and Fontanelle are, in general, quite close
to the studio originals, with no time to rehearse any variations. In fact, the
track lengths are so eerily close to the respective lengths for the studio
versions that I had to doublecheck whether this could be some sort of ruse —
but no, these are indeed alternate takes. In fact, for those who dislike their
Babes wrapped in studio echo, these versions might seem preferable — guitars
and vocals slap you in the face on an «immediate» level, without having to
break through any further mixing conventions.
Only two songs out of sixteen are unavailable
elsewhere: ʽDirtyʼ, memorable for being based on the riff of
ʽHey Bulldogʼ transposed for grunge guitar (no great fun in any other
respect), and ʽSometimesʼ, built on a swift descending pattern
similar to ʽRipeʼ, but disappointingly sagging in the slowed-down
bridge parts. Both qualify as standard-fare, listenable Fontanelle-era songs, but not as trademark solid examples of the
«Bjelland hysterics».
One must keep in mind that 99% of whatever the
Babes recorded live, they recorded in shoddy lo-fi quality, be it a local club
gig or a major festival appearance, so if you are really interested in
assessing their tightness as a live unit, this is your best bet, and they were pretty tight whenever they paid
attention to it — the fifteen-second intro to ʽSometimesʼ, for
instance, should alone be sufficient to dispel any rumors of Bjelland's
unprofessionalism and anti-musicality: I'm sure Pete Townshend would have loved
that chuggy descending riff and the subtle chord variations on each bar. The downside
to this fine sound quality is that you also get to hear Lori Barbero's vocals
on ʽDoggʼ in all of their unbridled ugliness, but nothing comes
without a price, I guess.
BUFO ALVARIUS, AMEN 29:15 (1995)
1) Adhesive; 2) Back Porch; 3)
On A Side Street; 4) Capillary River; 5) No Time To Waste; 6) Absence; 7) Vent;
8) Amen.
Philadelphia-based Bardo Pond do not write
songs — they create ambience. That is the first thing one needs to understand
and acknowledge about them. Naturally, they are way, way far from the first
band to use loud rock instrumentation to create ambience. Before them, there
was stoner rock, and then there was shoegazing, and then there were Sonic
Youth, and then there was Metal Machine
Music, and then there was Faust, and then, and then... and then along came
Jones, and the rest is never-ending history. Still, they did take noise-rock in
a direction all their own, at least, as long as you are willing to accept that
a Bardo Pond album has to be over
seventy minutes long to be a true Bardo Pond album — and include no more than
three or four well-discernible rhythmic phrases over the course of its
duration.
Bufo
Alvarius, the band's debut,
satisfies these conditions. It is named after the psychoactive Colorado River
toad (the second part of the title simply refers to the running length of the
last track), and it does sound like whoever recorded it had previously spent
some time cruising on 5-Me-O-DMT. Chief inhalers include brothers John and
Michael Gibbons on space rock guitars (one of them is usually monotonously
droning away on a riff, while the other one weaves sonic rings around); Clint
Takeda on equally stoned bass; drummer Joe Culver, who, due to the songs'
lethargic tempos, is the band's weakest link by definition; and Isobel
Sollenberger on highly occasional flute and slightly more frequent vocals
(although her «singing» is, in reality, at best just a modest sound effect,
particularly since she, too, generally sounds stoned out of her mind).
All of this is very straightforward — you want psychedelia? you get its very
essence, in pure molecular form, no capsules or sweetening shit — and it is
not so much «not for everyone» as it is «not for any time»: Bufo Alvarius does not work well as
background music (because whatever you are doing to the sounds of it, you run a
heavy risk of doing it backwards in a short time), nor, obviously, does it work
if you are simply planning to «have a good time». However, it has the potential
to carry you away into outer space if you feel like... well, like taking a trip
that does not require any effort on
your part whatsoever (like headbanging to Hawkwind's brand of space rock, for
instance).
ʽAmenʼ, the huge half-hour drone that
closes the album, is where they take this idea to its extreme. The actual
length need not bother, since it can be turned off at any time (and the
remainder of the album would still constitute a full-length LP, so it is
possible to think of it as one enormous bonus track) — but if it happens to
entrance you over the first five or six minutes, then the next twenty-four may
well turn out to be blissful. The lead guitar weaves a distorted, buzzing /
ringing / wah-wah-ing raga pattern throughout, while the rhythm guitar plays an
echoey chiming pattern, and it is clearly the express purpose of the two to
place you under hypnosis; worked in my case — at the very least, I got
disfocused enough so as to forget where exactly it was that the lead guitar
player started going in circles.
The «shorter» compositions are bookmarked by
two not particularly effective slabs of grumbly noise-rock
(ʽAdhesiveʼ and ʽVentʼ), but in between them there are
actually some bits of stylistic variety — from the deep, heavy blues-riffage of
ʽBack Porchʼ (which could have just as well be an influence on The
Black Keys) to the retro-metal of ʽAbsenceʼ (which has the most
memorable and almost Sabbath-worthy riff on the entire album) and the almost
swamp-rock sound of ʽNo Time To Wasteʼ, with its distorted, sleazy
slide guitar reminiscent of Led Zeppelin circa Physical Graffiti. (Not reminiscent enough to drag you out of the
trance, though — once these guys place you into a fixed state, there is no
going back, and even if ʽNo Time To Wasteʼ is just a tad faster than
the rest of them, it hardly feels that way when the song remains in its
context).
Overall, I believe I should have hated this
album for the paucity of ideas and the bluntness of approach — but it must
have gotten to me through the sheer size
of it. Remember, kids: one track like this on an album otherwise filled with
catchy pop-rock is boring filler — a whole
album of such tracks is a mind-melting experience. Probably the best thing
about it is that the Gibbonses have such tasty combinations of guitar tones —
such as a «mooing» distorted acid metal in one channel, and a high-pitched
«astral» psycho siren in another: a combination that goes easier on my ears
than many others (for instance, And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead and
other newer bands prefer a combination of «buzz-noise» and «jangle» that is not
nearly as effective on the senses unless it is shaped into a really strong
melodic pattern).
On the other hand, it is also clear why Bardo
Pond never transcended their cult status — they really have no interest in adhering to strict self-discipline. Even
the five-minute «songs» on here are mood pieces and nothing more. This has its
formal pluses — not only does this approach allow you to record new material
at extra speed, but it also helps you gain an «uncompromising» reputation and a
small, but steady, ultra-loyal following. Its formal minuses are too obvious to
be even worth mentioning — but not sufficient to prevent me from an enthusiastic
thumbs up,
provided the word «enthusiastic» is compatible with this stuff in the first
place: an «intoxicated» thumbs up might be a better way of putting it. Bring on
the mushrooms — and don't forget the Colorado River toad, of course.
AMANITA (1996)
1) Limerick; 2) Sentence; 3)
Tantric Porno; 4) Wank; 5) The High Frequency; 6) Sometimes Words; 7) Yellow
Turban; 8) Rumination; 9) Be A Fish; 10) Tapir Song; 11) RM.
Regardless of whether the actual formula of Bufo Alvarius was a «winner» or a «crapfest»,
one thing is clear: whatever be, they shouldn't have changed it — this way, at the very least you can say that they
«definitely got something», but
suppose a shift from monotonous, half-improvised psychedelic jamming to
standard-length pop songs took place? would they have survived it? what if
nobody in the band had a knack for pop hooks? what if they'd only end up
embarrassing themselves? selling out for nothing?.. Nah, just ain't worth it.
So all the formal changes are strictly
cosmetic. The album title now refers to mushrooms rather than toads
(fortunately, there is still a huge generic stock of toxic organisms in store
for the future — and remember, this is not
an invitation to start munching on death caps); the tracks no longer include
any half-hour incantations, spreading their moods more equally throughout the
album (which does not mean a shorter running time, though); most importantly,
production values have risen, with the band sounding a little more «clean» when
they want to sound more clean, and with a better control on reverb, echo, and
other effects.
In other words, Amanita is a minor technical improvement on Bufo Alvarius, and for quite a few of the fans, remains the definitive Bardo Pond statement. I
have no idea — choosing one B.P. album over another requires unwrapping one too
many cerebral DNA strands — but, obviously, this is anything but a letdown. The Bardos' formula is
simple, does not pretend to much, and will not be loved by many, but they care
about it, and sometimes it works even for me.
One thing that does not always agree well with
these guys is noise and distortion. For my tastes, ʽLimerickʼ,
opening the album in this scratchy/hoarse mode, should have fulfilled the
quotas on distortion — for five minutes, they are capable of upholding a steady
crescendo, with two guitar parts, the rhythm section, and Isobel's incomprehensible,
echo-laden vocals gradually piled up on top of each other; later still, a third
guitar enters the picture with high-pitched «ambient soloing» to announce the
beginning of the completion of the circle. It is a hell of a disturbing
introduction, but it already makes the second song, ʽSentenceʼ, seem
rather anti-climactic — another ode to distortion whose planning and execution
seem like a mere shadow of their predecessor.
As before, Bardo Pond are really at their
finest when they set up a dumb, behemothic hook — it always helps to have some
solid Arbor Mundi tree-trunk to lean upon when drifting around in psychedelic
haze. For instance, ʽWankʼ (yes, that is the title — self-irony? unbelievable!) has one of those reliable
riffs, shaped like the sonic wave from a skull drill, eating into your brain so
ferociously that I found myself actually grappling my cranium at some point.
When it's just noise, it never works
so well — the brain circuits have to be irritated with subtlety, or they simply
shut themselves down and the game is lost altogether.
But the major winner is probably
ʽRuminationʼ, where the noise dissipates altogether and the entire
song is dominated by echoing slide guitars — the kind of thing that Dave
Gilmour probably pionerred, yet here it is taken to one of the possible
extremes. The first minute, with the reverberating / wobbling bass intro
chords, the shy acoustic guitar coyly joining in, and then the first airborne
slide notes, has that simplistic, homebrewed, and still unfathomable mysticism
to it that bad / generic bands are usually unable to conjure. Later on, the
slide guitar will go crazy (watch out for it), but in the end, loyally obeying
the formula, things will calm down again and get to where it all started to
«let you down easy».
Only one track out of eleven has a relatively
«song-ly» form — ʽBe A Fishʼ, not a particular highlight but still
more than simply a generic alt-rock composition (at the very least, Isobel's
multi-tracked mantra of "I'd like to smell like a fish / When I go
swimming in the soupy mix" is evocative, you'll have to admit that).
Everything else represents either typical «Bardo Pond rock» (noisy, angry,
stoned, super-slow) or, more rarely, «Bardo Pond balladry» (quiet, moody,
stoned, super-slow — apart from ʽRuminationʼ, ʽTantric
Pornoʼ also falls in that category), and further attempts at description
are futile.
Thumbs up for raising
the bar a little bit on perfection (something of the caliber of
ʽRuminationʼ was still impossible on Bufo), but, naturally, do keep in mind that, according to my humble
opinion, seventy minutes of this stuff are only
listenable either in «background mode» (to what sort of activities — that one
you will have to decide for yourself), or on one of those trips suggested by
the album title. Serious intellectual analysis of the differences between
ʽSentenceʼ, ʽYellow Turbanʼ, and ʽTapir Songʼ
should be reserved for neural scientists — or neuro patients.
LAPSED (1997)
1) Tommy Gun Angel; 2) Pick My
Brain; 3) Flux; 4) Anandamide; 5) Green Man; 6) Straw Dog; 7) Aldrin.
Forty-seven
minutes? You must be joking. A
proper Bardo Pond album never lasts less than eight billion hours — forty-seven
minutes is not even long enough to overcome the initial boredom stage, let
alone the ensuing unbearable hatred stage, the languid fatigue stage, the dizzy
trance stage, and the total brain shutdown coma stage. And since, roughly
approximated, all Bardo Pond albums always sound the same, the drastic
reduction in length is more or less the main difference between Amanita and Lapsed — a difference that many will be able to tolerate and some
will even welcome, but a difference that is not quite loyal to the band's
essence.
Actually, there is one more catch: there is a
bit too much sludge and noise here for my liking — for all their love of
distortion, Bardo Pond are really at their best when they tone down the tide
and rock you to unconsciousness with slow, echoey,
transcendental-meditation-type patterns. On Lapsed, there is only one such number — ʽAldrinʼ comes in
last and does the right thing for the longest time (14:19), with a single
«delayed» bass line providing the foundation and subsequent layers of Isobel's
somnambulant voice and psycho guitars slowly... very slowly transform it from a threatening rumble to all-out roar.
The crescendo is handled perfectly: it is only once the peak level has been
attained that the tune runs out of further things to say — it should have been
cut off somewhere around the twelve minutes mark, I'd say, in an ʽI Want
Youʼ-type manner, but then again, what do I really know about the regulations of modern day musical
shamanism...
As for the other tracks, well, this time around
we may perceive a little extra emphasis on distorted slide guitars — they enter
the picture on track two, ʽPick My Brainʼ, in delightfully
«poisonous» mode (think Allman Brothers who suddenly decided to do something in
Black Sabbath style), and then reappear on ʽStraw Dogʼ where they are
further overloaded with a wah-wah effect. Both of these slide patterns, as
predictably repetitive as they are, work far more efficiently on my brain than
the simpler, cruder Neil Young-ish sludge of ʽTommy Gun Angelʼ and
ʽFluxʼ, or the deeply mixed space-rock ambience of ʽGreen Manʼ
— see, these guys are really quite diverse, but somehow their
«pseudo-roots-rock jamming» seems more interesting here than their psychedelic
drones and sheer noise excursions.
Nevertheless, passing individual judgements on
this stuff makes about as much sense as trying to memorize all fourteen minutes
of ʽAldrinʼ and then hum them to your friends. You either hate Bardo
Pond as an institution, or you respect them and own exactly one of their albums
(in which case Lapsed, being so
short, is not it), or you love them
and then they can do no wrong — even if with music like this, they could have
very easily pushed out fifteen LPs per year (like their somewhat ideologically
similar Japanese colleagues, Acid Mothers' Temple). Then again, with this
«shortened» approach they might really be trying to tell us that they do care about each single second, and
that the point is that you should
engulf yourself in all the tiny intricacies — so pardon me in advance if I am
in too much of a hustle-bustle here, missing all the expected epiphanies and the
final enlightenment.
SET AND SETTING (1999)
1) Walking Stick Man; 2) This
Time (So Fucked); 3) Datura; 4) Again; 5) Lull; 6) Cross Current; 7) Crawl
Away; 8) #3.
Listen to all the Bardo Pond albums in a row
and you will know more about chemical lore than you ever bothered to ask — in
this case, for instance, I was not even aware that «set and setting» was an
actual Timothy Leary term for the conditions of substance intake. Somewhere
along the way the band lost Joe Culver («lapsed», eh?), and now the drums are
handled by John Gibbons — no big deal: considering the essence of their sound,
Bardo Pond could easily do without drums altogether and no one might even
notice. Still, this is not a good omen, nor is their stubborn insistence on
preserving the short running length (49 minutes — what a shameful piddle).
The production seems to shift a bit from
«interstellar» environments in the direction of your bedroom: ʽWalking
Stick Manʼ is an 11 minute-long drone that puts the fuzz straight in your
ears without burdening it with echoes, reverb, or any other «distancing»
effects. It also seems to lack any sort of development — once the thing is
established, one minute into the song, it just keeps going in circles, like a
classic-period Aerosmith «sleaze riff» stuck in mid-note. Later on,
ʽAgainʼ does the same thing grunge-style, with six and a half minutes
of speedy nuclear fallout without intermissions or relaxations; and then
ʽCrawl Awayʼ generates nine minutes of high-pitched feedback that
never move away from the initially set point. And, naturally, Isobel and her
sleep-walking mumbling are all over these and more.
The point, apparently, is not just to remind us that «Bardo Pond» and
«allegedly meaningful monotonousness» are freely replaceable synonyms, but to
prove this equation beyond any sort of reasonable doubt — fast-forward to any
random spot on any of the longer tracks and you will hear the exact same thing.
Some of the fans were actually worried over this, and I share the worry,
because one of the major attractions of this band at its best was its subtle
ability to build up the atmosphere, adding more and more layers to the sound
until the rainy pitter-patter became a thunderstorm. This subtlety is
completely omitted here, most likely on purpose, just to see what happens, but
— at least for somebody who is not
planning to use the album as a soundtrack for an actual trip — it might well be
so that nothing will actually happen,
period.
The most unusual track is ʽCross
Currentʼ, which eschews the band's usual guitars for psychedelic violins
(the sludge guitars do come in later, so you could say at least one track has
some development) — good enough for a change, not good enough as a classic
Bardo Pond number, since they end up sounding like a slightly less aggressive
Jimmy Page with a bow, and if you are fucking up your violins, at least do
that aggressively, so that you do not end up fucking them up for nothing.
Speaking of fucking, the best track is probably ʽThis Time (So
Fucked)ʼ, not because its title is so true to the album's content, but
because it is built on one of those classic simple B.P. wah-wah patterns that
rock the mind boat so well — and, of the short tracks, the two-minute interlude
ʽLullʼ has a rockabye-baby beauty of its own (mmm, echoey slide
guitars).
Nevertheless, as a whole, the album is a
disappointment. It does not try to do «more» for the band, nor does it try to
go someplace «different»: it tries to up the stakes on «minimalism», but
instead, simply gives the appearance of being lazy. And even when you have Bufo Alvarius sitting on your right and Amanita sprouting on your left, this
«setting» is a poor excuse for laziness. They used to get really high, and now
they are just getting stoned. Thumbs down.
DILATE (2001)
1) Two Planes; 2) Sunrise; 3)
Inside; 4) Aphasia; 5) Favorite Uncle; 6) Swig; 7) Despite The Roar; 8) LB.; 9)
Hum; 10) Ganges.
Course correction: as the tires hit the gravel
on Set And Setting, somebody had enough sense to swerve the
steering wheel back to where it belongs. Not only are we back to the proper
running length (seventy minutes, just enough for the trip to be fruitful!), but
the echoey, multi-layered production is also back, returning us to those
intersecting seas of feedback that are Bardo Pond's prime reason for existence.
For starters, ʽTwo Planesʼ is
probably the most atmospheric thing they have done since Amanita. The rhythm guitar / lead guitar / violin trio represents
the ultimate in psychedelic chemistry — as the atonal, discordant violins tear
into your brain like tiny scalpels, the chiming wah-wah lead phrase acts like
some sort of pain-neutralizing mystical balm, while the chugging rhythm chords
gradually gain in heaviness, culminating in a nightmarish acid rain — then
dissipating back into the initial quiet. The whole thing has a somber autumnal
mood and should probably best be heard on one of those gray, depressing days —
better still if it happens to take place on a distant planet.
Another impressive example of the band's
ever-increasing skill at building stuff up and then bringing it down is
ʽInsideʼ — starts out as your average upbeat, rhythmic indie
pop-rocker, with acoustic and electric guitars playing snippets of
cuddly-cutesy melodies off each other for a few minutes before growing, slowly
and gradually, into a psychonightmare. Technically, there is nothing new here
when you take it in context, but the contrast between the «innocent» beginnings
and the hellish developments is even more radical than it used to be, and the
tempo at which this is taken is also rather unusual for the band.
More questionable is the album's heavy
dependence on quiet acoustic patterns — most of the songs incorporate acoustic
rhythms, and some, alarmingly, never get beyond these rhythms (ʽFavorite
Uncleʼ sounds like James Taylor on elephant tranquilizers;
ʽSwigʼ is «formally» redeemed by incorporating raga elements,
complete with tabla playing and all, but how many Western artists playing bits
of Indian ragas have we already had to endure in these past forty years?). As
usual, Isobel is all over the place, and now that we have so many quiet,
unplugged parts to sit through, it is very much a matter of how charmed you
generally are by her vocalizations — personally, I happen to think that Bardo
Pond's neuro-stimulation could work more acutely if some of these songs
concentrated exclusively on guitar string and electronic resonance.
Still, these are all minor problems compared to
what happens when we get to the real heavy stuff: ʽLB.ʼ is built upon
sludgy Sabbath-y riffs, while ʽGangesʼ flows on with such creaking
and screeching pain that its eleven minutes are just enough to make you
eco-conscious — the song's clashing guitar and violin lines are just about as
dirty as the great river itself. No huge surprises from either of these tracks,
but both of them manipulate the listener's brain just as effectively as any
given highlight on any given B.P. album.
In short, minor twists and defects aside, the
band returns to the tried and true, puts the cherry of ʽTwo Planesʼ
on top, and earns its regular thumbs up for the atmospherics, the craftsmanship,
and the dedication. Oh, and superb album art, too, quite in the grand old
psychedelic tradition, but with a nice modern-day scientific twist.
ON THE ELLIPSE (2003)
1) JD; 2) Every Man; 3) Dom's
Lament; 4) Test; 5) Walking Clouds; 6) Night Of Frogs.
Six tracks? Even though the largest clocks in
at 12:56, and the smallest is nearly seven minutes in length, that still brings
us down to under an hour, and I still say, for a band like Bardo Pond, that's
no good. We need at least twenty minutes to get on that boat, twenty more to
pump our stomachs and be done with the seasickness, and then, just as you are
finally ready to go with the flow... the journey's over. Psychobummer.
On the other hand, On The Ellipse may be just the kind of Bardo Pond album that we wouldn't want to go on forever, because
this is where the band undergoes a shift of attitude. Suddenly, the psychedelic
netherworld tones down its usual primordial soup bubbling, and out comes... soul. Or some psychedelic netherworld
equivalent of soul, at least — the whole album is permeated with wailing,
moaning, groaning, sighing, and grumbling: this is definitely one unhappy soul
out there, cloaking the lava surface of the planet in universal sorrow.
ʽJDʼ opens the proceedings with an
almost minute-long flat wave of high-pitched feedback — just enough time to
clear a couple square miles around from all living souls — before adding a
morose acoustic rhythm and Isobel's never-changing ghost vocals. The formula
itself remains fairly standard, right down to the gradual intensification of
the sea of electric noise, but the way they use this «clean feedback» on the
track is new to Bardo Pond's manner of thinking, and may produce a serious
depressive-demolishing effect on the brain if allowed to go on for all of its
seven minutes.
From there, the dirgey atmosphere only keeps
deepening: ʽEvery Manʼ could almost just as well be recorded by the
likes of the atmospheric doom metal band Agalloch, with its interchange of
melancholic acoustics and minimalistic heavy riffage (plus a safety pillow of
floating flutes), and ʽDom's Lamentʼ is built upon just one sad
skeletal flute / guitar mantra that nevertheless has enough depth to somehow
warrant seven minutes of repetition.
Of the remaining three tracks, ʽWalking
Cloudsʼ is the only one to completely side away from heaviness and just
work on the strength of multiple echoey acoustic and vocal overdubs — and yet,
somehow, the whole thing never feels as «heavy», in the technical sense, as Amanita or any other classic BP album.
It has a different kind of heaviness — a heavy darkness. Bardo Pond were never
a particularly «fun» band, but it wasn't until Dilate's ʽTwo Planesʼ that they started experimenting
with textures that would be targeted at the listener's emotional rather than
physiological nerve centers, and apparently, they found the idea quite
promising.
So here we are — a whole record of typical
BP-style lethargic languidness, but this time dedicated to the ruins of their
imaginary world, after a good old bombardment has wiped out most of the organic
and inorganic activity. ʽNight Of Frogsʼ indeed (and the track opens
with an appropriately croaky wah-wah explosion). Is it a good thing? I am not
sure — almost every track does have at least one interesting and resonant idea,
but the construction mechanics, by now, is so utterly predictable (start out
quiet, build up sea of noise, cool it down before the end) that I feel confused
— if they are trying to pick at my soul now, why do it the same way they were
picking away at my cerebral cortex before? Yes, overall, On The Ellipse has its moments, but I dare say that Bardo Pond were
better when they were hot, and here,
they are not just simply cold, they are intentionally locking themselves up in
a freezer — and for what it's worth, Isobel Sollenberger is a respectable lady,
but she ain't no Nico.
TICKET CRYSTALS (2006)
1) Destroying Angel; 2) Isle;
3) Lost Word; 4) Cry Baby Cry; 5) Fc II; 6) Moonshine; 7) Endurance; 8) Montana
Sacra II.
Most of the reviews of this album that I have
seen went the predictable way about it — pretending to forget about everything
that Bardo Pond did since Amanita,
and comparing it directly with their earliest records. Because this at least
gives you an opportunity to fill the space up with something, e. g. «it is interesting to note that the heavy
psychedelic guitars take a step back in order to make more room for Isobel
Sollenberger's flute», even though the flute presence here is not really any
more overwhelming than it was on their previous two records. But we do have to find progress in everything
that we listen to, right?..
Well, forget it. The only thing there is on Ticket Crystals that constitutes a
genuine surprise is a cover of the Beatles' ʽCry Baby Cryʼ —
apparently, recorded for a John Lennon tribute album (commemorating the 25th
anniversary of the murder) and placed here for fear of being wasted. It is
actually quite a decent, minimalistic cover for the first three minutes:
acoustic guitar, percussion, and vocals that are very loyal to the original
phrasing and intonation. Then, once the main body is done, the number finally
turns into real Bardo Pond, as waves of feedback finally hit the shore, and
that which was pretty singing just a few moments ago is now blurred mumbling —
«The Beatles according to Bardo Pond» indeed.
Everything else remains steadfast and true. The
funereal atmosphere of Ellipse is
lightened up a bit, rolled back to earlier standards: the acoustic chords and
ambient flutes of ʽIsleʼ are a little melancholic, but «relaxing»
rather than «depressing» (and feature unusually «clean» vocals from Isobel, so
that not only can one finally decipher a few of the words she is singing — not
that there is any need to — but also understand that getting in key is a really difficult job for her, even if
she has a nice folksy soprano tone). The heavy fuzz-and-grumble is back with a
vengeance on ʽDestroying Angelʼ and ʽFc IIʼ. And the band
seems to have developed a real taste for backward vocals —
ʽMoonshineʼ and ʽLost Wordʼ, in particular, play around
with tape direction as if it were 1966 all over again.
That said, on any evaluation scale that takes
Bardo Pond for a curve rather than straight line, Ticket Crystals is a bit of a disappointment. The heavy stuff is
not nearly as heavy as it used to be, and the light stuff is not nearly as
moody. It's not that they aren't doing anything «new», it's just that doing the
«old» no longer seems to arm them with excitement. Some of these drones, particularly
the closing ʽMontana Sacra IIʼ, already seem to confuse «atmosphere»
with «sheer tedium». For the newly grown fan, unaware of Amanita, this can still be enchanting; but I see no reason for the
seasoned veteran to award Ticket
Crystals any more points than one would, for instance, award to the Rolling
Stones' Black And Blue over Let It Bleed. Essentially, this is the
sound of a mood-oriented band past its moody prime, tenaciously clinging to the
old formula, but hardly deriving any further happiness from it — even for their
own selves, let alone the listeners. Hence, I do hereby give the album a thumbs down,
despite a Bardo Pond-perfect running length of seventy-seven minutes... wasted length, because the mind, already
addicted to Amanita-level psychedelia,
needs seriously stronger stuff than this to start reeling.
BARDO POND (2010)
1) Just Once; 2) Don't Know
About You; 3) Sleeping; 4) Undone; 5) Cracker Wrist; 6) The Stars Behind; 7)
Wayne's Tune.
An eponymous album released late in an artist's
career usually indicates some sort of «reboot», but in this case... actually,
it isn't «eponymous»: judging by the album cover, it's «untitled», so let us
look for analogies with Led Zeppelin rather than the Beatles. But if Led
Zeppelin were releasing their
untitled album as an experiment, just to see if it'd sell fewer copies without
the artist's name on it (and, of course, it didn't), with Bardo Pond, it is
rather obvious that their devoted fan
army is of a highly stable, yet utterly tiny nature, and it is probably futile
to expect it to double just because some Bright Eyes fans might look at the
sleeve picture and get the wrong idea.
In any case, Bardo Pond simply picks up from where Ticket Crystals left off — or, rather, «dragged off»; as usual, it
is best appreciated if you forget everything you knew about Bardo Pond before
listening to it. If at all possible, they seem even slower, dronier, more
lethargic here than they used to: this is seventy minute of very draggy, very nerve-wrecking stoner rock. And unfortunately, the more they
seem determined to tighten the grip on the old formula, and squeeze any traces
of compromising out of the system, the more boring it all eventually gets. At
21 minutes, ʽUndoneʼ is their longest opus so far after
ʽAmenʼ, but seems to completely lack the «world-building» enthusiasm
of its predecessor — its only interest is in testing the «backwards effect» on
its lead guitar lines for about 12 minutes, before the predictable noisy
build-up and explosion puts the track on the downward slope for the next 8
minutes.
One of the shorter tracks almost claims to
«real song» status, but it isn't a particularly good song: ʽDon't Know
About Youʼ sounds like standard fare alt-rock, drowning in sludge guitars,
even if it is rendered somewhat seductive by its memorable opening lines
(Isobel's "Jesus is coming, but I'm willing to wait" isn't exactly on
the level of "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine", but it is the first verbal line on a Bardo Pond
song, in twenty years, that commands attention).
Of the rest, in between the heavy psychedelic
boredom of ʽUndoneʼ and the light aethereal (ʽSleepingʼ)
or swampy (ʽWayne's Tuneʼ) panoramas of acoustic / slide guitars and
flutes, only one track stands out as a worthy addition to the catalog:
ʽThe Stars Behindʼ has the good sense to present itself as a pompous,
crashing anthem, played in waltz time and sung by Isobel as if it were some
highlanders' drinking song, rearranged for a more courtly presentation. This is
a fresh approach, fully deserving of receiving the standard Bardo Pond treatment
(that is, with the Big Freakout Guitar Build-Up and all that goes with it).
Unfortunately, its freshness is rather easy to overlook, seeing as how it is
the next to last track on the album.
In short, a four-year break in regular album
output might just as well never have happened — these guys are fantastically
tenacious in clinging to their Vatican-size fanbase (a whoppin' two reviews for this 2010 album on
Amazon just goes to show you who still really cares), and, if anything, you
gotta have some admiration for this obstinacy. But at this point, they are in
their «late period AC/DC» stage — doing the same thing that they used to on
auto-pilot, generating second- and third-generation impressions that preserve
the form but dissipate the spirit, with an occasional inspired exception every
now and then.
Allegedly, it is possible that I have missed
out on some fantastic experiences by neglecting the remainder of Bardo Pond's
«semi-official» catalog: throughout the 2000s, the band has produced around
12-15 «fan-only» releases (as if anything else they do is not strictly
«fan-oriented» as well) that usually contain lengthy improvised psycho jams,
recorded before a live audience or in the studio (the first six, from 2000 to
2005, are simply entitled Vol. 1 ... 6,
and from there on, sport individual titles). The few bits and pieces I've heard
sound like Bardo Pond alright — should we really expect Duke Ellington? — but
hardly as if they were saving their absolute best for improv time, so dip in at
your own risk if your reverence towards this band exceeds mine.
I can only conclude here that Bardo Pond seem
to have outlived their time — they are very much a «1990s» band, and had they
simply faded away after Dilate, the
world would not have become a lonelier place. But on the other hand, fifty
years from now, time will compress itself, and those who come after us will
probably look at this stuff from an entirely different angle — for them, the
entire «Bardo Pond Collected Works» may simply be one large fifty-hour piece,
split into several hundred sections like a set of preludes and fugues. Who
knows?
PEACE ON VENUS (2013)
1) Kali Yuga Blues; 2) Taste;
3) Fir; 4) Chance; 5) Before The Moon.
«Anyone interested in the future of rock and
roll should run out right now and
listen to this album», a hyper-excited David Maine tells us in his review of
this album on PopMatters. The future of
rock and roll? Just in case this information slipped through the cracks,
these guys have been working on this same schtick for almost twenty frickin' years now — unless, of
course, by «future» we mean «well-forgotten past». Naturally, this should not
be taken as a nasty swig at the band: Bardo Pond are in a very well-defined
line of business, and have every right to stay in that line until tinnitus gets
the best of them. Nor is it any crime to get your first blast of Bardo Pond
excitement from their ninth studio album rather than their first. But I do
wonder whether reviewers in, say, 1990 were able to come up with excited
judgements like «anyone interested in the future of rock and roll should run
out right now and listen to AC/DC's The Razor's Edge!» — which, for that
matter, was a really really good rock'n'roll record indeed.
Perhaps the future of rock'n'roll is in
brevity: the one most unusual thing about Peace
On Venus is that it is the shortest Bardo Pond LP released so far — 5
tracks, 39 minutes. As I said many times before, brevity usually works against
these guys, since their voodoo needs time to brew in order to permeate your senses,
and this album is no exception: it, too, lacks the truly epic grandeur of an Amanita or a Dilate, leaving fewer chances for the evolution of initial
skepticism into final mesmerism. Worse still, even though at the point of
writing this review most memories of individual Bardo Pond highlights have
already fled my mind, I feel quite certain that the band's gallery of musical
images has not been significantly replenished with these five extra compositions.
In fact, what with the band's experience and all, Peace On Venus sounds like it could have been composed and recorded
in a single autopilot session, stretched over a couple of days at best. At any
rate, it certainly does not sound
like an album that had a proper 3-year gestation period.
The best tracks, this time, are arguably the
shortest ones, where lady Isobel's flute and vocals are featured most
prominently: ʽTasteʼ offers a good slice of Bardo Pond's trademark
contrast between the idyllic pastoral beauty on top and the deeply rumbling
earth core at the bottom, whereas on ʽFirʼ the vocals are already
directed high up in the sky, adding an «astral» dimension to the proceedings
(so you could treat the crackling feedback as burning rocket fuel rather than
streams of molten lava). Not a great deal of overdubs here, meaning it all sort
of sounds like «Björk meets Crazy Horse» — which would have been one hell
of a great meeting, come to think of it.
As for the longer tracks, their melodic
qualities are fairly negligible — ʽKali Yuga Bluesʼ has Isobel
murmuring instead of singing, ʽChanceʼ is completely instrumental,
ʽBefore The Moonʼ only has a few traces of psychedelic vocal
somnambulism, and all three are pinned to leaden, lethargic blues-rock riffs
that keep predictably unfurling into guitar-effect-crazy explosions and then
furling back to minimal states of existence, usually several times over the
duration of one track. We've all heard that before, sometimes worse, often
better; expecting any sort of «progress» here is futile, and the only way to prefer
this to Amanita would be by
dismissing all music made prior to 2010 as «irrelevant» to the present day
consumer (not that there aren't a lot of people who do behave that way).
I will refrain from a thumbs down this time,
since ʽTasteʼ is really well done, and the short running time, while
it does prevent the album from «grand» status, also prevents it from becoming
unbearable. But when the compositions start getting so predictable (and you have to remember that the underlying
melodies are excruciatingly simple and derivative; it all depends on the force
of the crescendos), it gets really hard to become excited about a record like
this unless you really throw out every single memory of what preceded it — like
David Maine apparently has.
REFULGO (2014)
1) Die Easy; 2) Apple Eye; 3)
Dragonfly; 4) Blues Tune; 5) Trip Fuck; 6) Hummingbird Mountain; 7) New Drunks;
8) Affa; 9) Tests For New Swords; 10) Good Friday; 11) Jungle Tune; 12) Sangh
Seriatim.
Ninety minutes of Bardo Pond! That's just about
the right length for these guys, I'd think — the proper way to experience a
Bardo Pond song is to be bored silly with it for the first ten minutes, only to
find out that for the second ten minutes
of it your body has been disintegrated and your mind has melded with the
furniture. But even for a full-length album from the world's toughest pack of
volcanic psychedelic jammers, ninety minutes would be too much, and indeed, Refulgo is not a brand new Brado Pond
record, but rather a cleaned-up, remastered version of several of their
singles, EP-only tracks and rarities from circa 1994-96. Released, for the
pleasure of the truly delicate audiophile, exclusively on four sides of 140
gram Dutch vinyl — these guys take their vibes damn seriously, even if there is
nothing to prevent certain filthy sonic perverts from converting the vibes'
sensual beauty into soulless MP3.
In any case, whatever be the format or bitrate,
Refulgo still feels like a cohesive
album — back in 1994-96, Bardo Pond weren't exactly the epitome of diversity,
and these tracks, like Amanita or
any other masterpiece from that era, all sound the same way. If you are very careful, there does seem to emerge
some sort of evolutionary pattern, though: some of the earliest tracks have a
distinct blues sheen — ʽDie Easyʼ is a Bardo Pond-style variation on
ʽIn My Time Of Dyingʼ, and one of the tracks, for the lack of a
better idea, is simply called ʽBlues Tuneʼ. By the time we get to
ʽTrip Fuckʼ and ʽNew Drunksʼ, however, the band has already
lost conscious touch with any influences and simply lets itself gets carried
away on waves of noise and hallucinatory images wherever their subconscious
takes them.
Offering newly worded descriptions for
individual tracks is impossible due to severe limitations on my verbal abilities
and power of imagination — better just check out my previous review of Amanita once again — but I must repeat that a 20-minute length for
ʽSangh Seriatimʼ is completely justified, because listening to that
song is like being a participant in an accelerated terraforming process, where
the Gibbons brothers play Supernatural Building Team, transforming their guitars
into excavators, drills, and welding machines, and Isobel Sollenberger plays
the Mother Earth Spirit breathing life into creation. There's a magnificent
droning riff ruling over most of these 20 minutes, against which everything is
taking place, and once the psychedelics grab hold of you, time pretty much
ceases to exist anyway.
Although I am not usually in the mood of
handling out limitless thumbs up to series of albums that sound the same,
Bardo Pond circa 1994-96 were such an unstoppable force of alien nature that
just about everything they did in those years is equally treasurable (like Can
circa 1969-72), before they started running out of «natural» ideas and
shortening their records for no reason. Oh, and, for the record, ʽBlues
Tuneʼ pretty much sets up the blueprint for the entire career of that
Black Mountain band — big fat heavy stoner blues-rock with a nod to the 1970s,
but revved up to production heights of the 1990s and beyond.
UNDER THE PINES (2017)
1) Crossover; 2) Out Of Reach;
3) My Eyes Out; 4) Moment To Moment; 5) Under The Pines; 6) Effigy.
You don't have to take my word for it, but does
it look like these guys are getting... old?
Or, at least, kind of mellowing out in their own Bardo Pond kind of way. After
all, they are past their 25th year of functioning as a band; if anything, they
should be having a mid-life crisis these days, or, at least, doing whatever it
is one has to do when one's formula has essentially stayed the same for over
twenty-five years and it's time to make yourself vulnerable to critical
assaults. The good news is, most of these critics weren't exactly spending their last twenty years relistening to Amanita every night; the bad news is,
most of them have zero interest picking up an old-fashioned psychedelic album
by a band that still pleads allegiance to the Nineties.
My impression is colored by two observations.
One, that even on the longest tracks of this overall short album Bardo Pond
sound somewhat less dense and even more «shallow» than they used to. Two, that
all the tracks except for the last one are completely dominated by Isobel
Sollenberger's vocals (and, to a lesser extent, her flute playing) — she very
rarely abandons her vocalizing, giving the whole thing a far more peaceful and
meditative sheen than usual. Indeed, the very title suggests the idea of
meditative relaxation deep in the forest, and somehow, the textures of the
album largely agree with that idea. Distortion, feedback, reverb, sludge, heavy
tones, multiple overdubs, everything that makes Bardo Pond sound like
themselves is still here, but instead of the feeling of a psychedelic storm,
this all helps create a feeling of psychedelic calm now. I guess it mostly has
to do with their selection of tones now, and with the guitarists' careful
avoidance of «sharp» chord changes and chaotic sound peaks.
In fact, if you strip some of these jams down
to the bare essentials, what you might get is... a nice little folk-and-country
record! There's a thin, but very well noticeable acoustic melody underlying
ʽMoment To Momentʼ which is nothing if not straightahead country-pop
— along the lines of, say, mid-Seventies Dylan of the Pat Garrett variety, or Willie Nelson, if you like. Do not be
fooled by the distorted woman-tone of the guitar, or all the echo layers, or
how shamanistic Isobel gets towards the end of the track, it's really just an
old country piece here, psychedelized for those who still prefer listening to
music under chemical influence. And then the title track actually begins with acoustic chords, before
moving into the usual territory of cross-locking distorted guitars; and even
then, Isobel's voice rises quite distinctly above the din rather than being
buried in it — as if they actually wanted you to make out the words, about how
she's so happy to be lying down under the pines and other meditative stuff.
The bottomline is that, even though Bardo Pond
can live about as much time without sludgy distortion and heavy sustain as the
average human can live without oxygen, Under
The Pines is still one of their mellowest offerings to date, and I guess
it's kinda cool: it properly reflects their real moods and states of mind as
they gradually age. They do not want to raise the ruckus and bring down the
roof any longer, just to show their tiny handful of fans that they can still
kick ass the same way they did it in the mid-Nineties. Instead, they use their
old bag of tricks and their accumulated experience to create a subtly
different atmosphere — and it is pretty much irrelevant how well you, the listener, can relate to that
atmosphere, because it is unlikely that they are creating this music for
anybody but themselves, really. Personally, I enjoyed the experience, and
happily accept the fact that tomorrow I will forget that this record ever existed
— but there's nothing whatsoever to blame the band for, as it remains more than
adequate to itself.
GORDON (1992)
1) Hello City; 2) Enid; 3)
Grade 9; 4) Brian Wilson; 5) Be My Yoko Ono; 6) Wrap Your Arms Around Me; 7)
What A Good Boy; 8) The King Of Bedside Manor; 9) Box Set; 10) I Love You; 11)
New Kid (On The Block); 12) Blame It On Me; 13) The Flag; 14) If I Had
$1000000; 15) Crazy.
Leave it to a bunch of ugly-looking Canadian
nerds (some of them of a predictably Jewish origin, too) to form a band called
«Barenaked Ladies» — surely you would not expect a bunch of real barenaked ladies to call themselves
that? No, of course not; the name should inevitably prepare us for a meeting
with Steven Jay Page, a plump, curly-haired, bespectacled chump that generally
looks like your local math professor; and Lloyd Edward Elwyn Robertson, a
rough-built, highly masculine figure that generally looks like your local
football coach. For some reason, instead of heeding nature's call, both guys sing
and play guitar, keyboards, and cowbell — and write songs, some of which are
funny and some of which aren't, but all of which ultimately sound like... like they might be giants, but they prefer to be barenaked ladies.
In other words, please welcome the
quintessential «college rock for pop culture buffs» band of the 1990s. Although
Page and Robertson had already released a couple of «semi-official» tapes prior
to Gordon (starting with Buck Naked as early as 1989), most of
the good stuff from these recordings was redone once they landed a proper
contract with Sire Records — and since they had been honing their skills for
about four years already, Gordon
runs for almost an hour with a surprisingly scarce amount of filler (that is,
for those who do not consider everything
that Barenaked Ladies ever did the encyclopaedic equivalent of filler — a
position that has its fair share of defendants and one which I acknowledge, but
respectfully disagree with).
The rest of the band formally includes brothers
Jim and Andy Creeggan, on bass and keyboards respectively, and drummer Tyler
Stewart, but there is a whole host of friends, relatives, sycophants, and
innocent bystanders credited on the album as well — a little surprising,
actually, because Gordon never aims
at a wall-of-sound impression; on the contrary, most of the songs show a
singer-songwriterish nature, with acoustic guitars as the primary sound-carrier
(sometimes in the guise of a small jazz combo) and the singers (more often
Page, less often Robertson) tenderly hugging the mikes so you can assess all
the minor imperfections in their work while at the same time forming a
subconscious friendly bond with the guys.
For formal technical reasons, Barenaked Ladies
have always been classified as «indie», yet the sound of Gordon owes very little, if anything, to classic «indie» influences
— the main inspiration for Page and Robertson comes from the direction of
light jazz, bossa nova, music hall, and, only very occasionally, from barebones
indie pillars like Nick Drake or John
Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. That is, they make one more retro-step compared to
the already past-oriented style of They Might Be Giants, and by digging deep
into hilariously «irrelevant» brands of music, only endear themselves further
to roaming bands of overweight slaves of used vinyl, bright-colored T-shirts,
Star Trek, and pizza stains on the desktop keyboard.
The actual songs are, of course, lovable for
their subject matter, atmosphere, spirit, humor, and sonic texture rather than
for any awesome melodic insights — similar to Randy Newman, who must have been
the real big idol for these guys, even though his music was never that closely
tied to the high school / college circuit. Page and Robertson certainly know
what a catchy pop hook is, and work on their choruses as carefully as they are
capable of, but this here is a case where words really matter, if one wants to understand what all the fuss is
about, and not get too irritated at the «look-at-us we're-so-stylishly-retro»
attitude.
Separating the songs into highlights and «the
rest» is pretty difficult, because the mind tends to make into «highlights»
those songs that have the biggest verbal shock quotient. ʽHello
Cityʼ, for instance, opens the album with an unexpected chorus of
"hello city, you've found an enemy in me" even as one realizes that
Barenaked Ladies are the quintessential city band, and would just quickly lay
down and die in any other environment. ʽBrian Wilsonʼ and ʽBe My
Yoko Onoʼ are placed back-to-back in an unforgettable duo of pop icon
analyses — Brian Wilson himself actually liked his song, enough to include it
in his own setlist (you can hear a brief snippet on the Live At The Roxy album), but I am not so sure about Yoko; she might
have had a tougher time appreciating a chorus like "You can be my Yoko
Ono, you can follow me wherever I go".
Then there's ʽBox Setʼ, to the Latin
rhythms of which you can shake your proverbial ass while admiring the cruel
lambasting of the average mediocre artist receiving unwarranted promotion
("disc six — a dance remix, so I can catch the latest trend, and it'll
make you scratch your head and wonder where my taste went"); and the
ska-influenced ʽGrade 9ʼ, a potential personal anthem for way more
people than we know ("I went out for the football team to prove that I'm a
man / I guess I shouldn't tell them that I like Duran Duran"). And, of
course, the band's calling card — the soft folksy roll of ʽIf I Had A
Million Dollarsʼ, culminating in a most unpredictable lyrical apodosis
that only matters after four and a half minutes' waiting time.
Every once and while, though, the songwriters
get more serious and soulful, saving on humor and trying on the Big Thinker's
hat — for instance, ʽWhat A Good Boyʼ comments on the art of social
hypocrisy; ʽBlame It On Meʼ comments on the art of getting out of
strained relationships (but even here, they cannot avoid the temptation of
throwing on smarty-punny lines like ʽI wax poetic as you're waxing your
legsʼ); and ʽThe Flagʼ tries to shift the mood from comedy to
morose melancholia, with a melody vaguely reminiscent of ʽWorking Class
Heroʼ and lyrics that could have just as well be influenced by watching
Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage
rather than the more predictable Wrath Of
Khan (as mentioned in ʽGrade 9ʼ).
These tunes really put people on different sides of
the fence — should Barenaked Ladies, with their general fluffiness, limited
instrumental skills, and college humor, be allowed to make serious social
statements, or should they just stick to their Seinfeldian schtick? Personally,
I would not grieve much if the «darker» sides of the Ladies were removed from Gordon, but then, on the other hand, I
cannot deny that Page and Robertson have more talent than it usually takes to
keep alive a «novelty band», and that even the novelty numbers, once the
instantaneous laughs are over, actually offer genuine — and quite serious —
insights into many of the factors that dominated youth culture in the early
1990s (and still dominate much of it today).
So, overall, I would be ready to accept the
album as a whole — and give it an unflinching thumbs up. There is certainly much
more going on here than just goofing off, in the good old tradition that goes
all the way back to Sparks, and it all sounds
just fine: the instrumental melodies may be nothing to write home about
(although some of the acoustic guitar solos are impressively speedy, and fun,
too), but the light, tasteful backing does just exactly what it is supposed to
do: provide a mood-wise compatible «so-out-of-style» cocoon for the
«so-out-of-style» protagonists of the band's lyrics. The real bad news is that
it is all going to sound tremendously dated ten years from now (some of it
already sounds quite dated as of 2013, when I am writing this assessment), but
then I guess that even ten years from now, there will be out-of-time nerds feasting on Wrath Of Khan and dusting off old vinyl preserves of Milli Vanilli
— so who'd be willing to openly claim, under pain of death, that with Gordon, Barenaked Ladies have not created a sarcastic, intellectual,
deep-penetrating masterpiece for ages to come? Think twice before you do.
MAYBE YOU SHOULD DRIVE (1994)
1) Jane; 2) Intermittently; 3)
These Apples; 4) You Will Be Waiting; 5) A; 6) Everything Old Is New Again; 7)
Alternative Girlfriend; 8) Am I The Only One?; 9) Little Tiny Song; 10) Life,
In A Nutshell; 11) The Wrong Man Was Convicted; 12) Great Provider.
I cannot imagine the Barenaked Ladies' second
album not being a relative
disappointment for everybody who was, one way or other, bowled over by their
first one. But apparently, at this point the band was worried about its image —
neither Page nor Robertson wanted to be regarded as a one-dimensional goofy
comic act, and agreed upon not just toning down, but almost completely freezing
their sense of college humor. Consequently, Maybe You Should Drive is still a relatively lightweight, but
completely serious chapter in Barenaked Ladies history... in which the protagonists
demand to be recognized as insightful singer-songwriters, providing useful
spiritual guidelines for the restless youth masses of 1994.
The changes actually go beyond simply saying
temporary goodbye to the lyrical and musical jokes. There is also a strict
limit imposed on the innumerable pop culture references of yesterday, and,
worse of all, there is a clear increase of «alt-rock» elements — more electric
guitar, more Pearl Jam rhythmics at the expense of vaudeville, in short, a more
generally-accessible and altogether-predictable type of sound that moves one
step closer to «selling out», or, at least, finding an audience outside of the
smarmy college rock circuit that is generally in on the joke. The gamble paid
off somewhat well, putting them on the lower ranges of the US charts without
compromising any integrity. But the question of «what exactly is it that these
guys have to offer?», which would sound rather silly and condescending when
applied to Gordon, seems to become
far more valid upon the first listens to Drive.
After all, the Barenaked Ladies do not set any
particularly high standards for either singing, playing, or writing any fabulous melodies. It is only the combination of all
these ingredients — plus the humorous
and intelligent atmosphere — that elevates them to something of a less
instantaneously forgettable status. And although the intelligence is still
there, it is not exactly clear why we really need another record chockfull of
songs about various types of male-female relationships (usually tense, flawed,
or unsuccessful, since these guys are not about to get accused of sissyism:
ʽI Want To Hold Your Handʼ is definitely not in the Barenaked Ladies'
idiom).
Several listens into the album, provided one
does have the time and patience, the cohesiveness starts to come out and the
atmosphere slowly begins to work out some charm. The songs may not be all that
involving or innovative, but they are inoffensive, clever, and mildly catchy,
reflecting a certain «average brainy Joe» spirit — no pretense at universal
importance, no pomp, no self-indulgence or narcissism, just one little
life-sketch after another. Yes, just one of those little records made for a
(quoting Bob) "when you're tired of yourself and all of your
creations" kind of scenario — in between the loudness and ecstasy of
Brit-pop and Seattle-grunge, there might be a brief moment for the humble
social commentary of Page and Robertson.
The record does not really get much better or
more attention-pulling than on ʽJaneʼ — opening the album with a
folksy acoustic flourish, a steady toe-tapping tempo, and some melancholy pop
harmonies. The subject matter? Uh... trying to date the girl at the local
beauty parlor (without success, naturally). The hook? Nothing, really, but the
strange «naturalness» of the song — the way it might seduce the listener by
having nothing in particular to its name. A pleasant trifle that, with its very
existence, reminds us that about half of our life consists of such pleasant
trifles. This is the secret of the Barenaked Ladies that all mediocre
songwriters should keep in mind — if you have nothing to write about, write about
nothing, and you might just have something.
Elsewhere, the boys subconsciously invoke the
classic old spirit of the Great American Songbook and how, at its best (and
there have been plenty instances of the worst), it used to exude this nonchalant
elegance, made outstanding with extra verbosity. ʽIntermittentlyʼ is
one such case ("someone somewhere has unglued our epoxy / and now I'm
kissing you by proxy" may be one of the most bizarre ways to express the
idea of separation used in a pop song) — feather-light gigolo confession
transplanted to a new age: "when immeasurably / turns to intermittently /
there's no use in going on / except for fear of being wrong". Continuing a
tradition initiated on the previous album, the band is said to have recorded
this one naked in the studio — if this somehow means that
ʽIntermittentlyʼ is their most personal statement on the album, they
must be fairly nasty people in real life. Then again, most people seem to be, so...
Of course, even once you have grown accustomed
to the album, it can still get fairly monotonous as the endless who's-sorry-now
types of songs replace each other — and I am not sure, for instance, if the
idea of sequencing them so that ʽThe Wrong Man Was Convictedʼ, the
longest, slowest, bluest, dreariest number is placed almost at the end, even if
the song itself is hardly guilty of anything, being written neither better nor
worse than anything else on here.
If you are only interested in the bouncy,
happy, catchy side of the Ladies, this album would only work as a short EP —
consisting of, let's say, ʽThese Applesʼ (Robertson's falsetto that
caps off each chorus is kinda cute), ʽAʼ (fabulous lyrics about the
incidentally first letter of the alphabet, but not a particularly interesting
melodic structure), ʽEverything Old Is New Againʼ (Ray Davies could
have appreciated that one and its lazy-friendly punch), and ʽLife In A
Nutshellʼ, the only more or less fast number on the album with scandalous
lyrics ("when she was three, her Barbies always did it on the first
date" — where are you, Tipper?). However, even these four may be singled
out simply for possessing more sheer energy than the others — not for being
extra funny or extra melodic or extra anything else.
In the end, although the review has surprisingly
turned out more positive than I originally thought it would be, I cannot really
dispense a thumbs up. The songs are nice and clever, but in the end, the album
simply tries way too hard to convey the message of «hey guys, we can do so much
more than Gordon showed us capable
of», and I am still not too sure that this message is a correct one. If I do
ever get sure, watch out for those thumbs. But as it is now — maybe you shouldn't drive, after all, because this
record is just a bit too sober for my
tastes.
BORN ON A PIRATE SHIP (1996)
1) Stomach Vs. Heart; 2) Straw
Hat And Old Dirty Hank; 3) I Know; 4) This Is Where It Ends; 5) When I Fall; 6)
I Live With It Every Day; 7) The Old Apartment; 8) Call Me Calmly; 9) Break
Your Heart; 10) Spider In My Room; 11) Same Thing; 12) Just A Toy; 13) In The
Drink; 14) Shoe Box.
Third time around, and it's sort of a bummer. A
little weakened, perhaps, by the departure of Andy Creeggan, but also seemingly
a little strengthened by Page and Robertson deciding to collaborate more
tightly in the songwriting process, Born
On A Pirate Ship makes the fatal mistake of being way too dark and serious way
too much of the time. This state is simply not natural for these guys — they
may be funny, or sarcastic, or smart, or witty, or poignant, or snobby, but
singing songs of spiritual torment does not agree with these other states; most
importantly, they lack the musical talent to provide the appropriate sonic
backing.
Amusingly, it does not start out that way —
ʽStomach Vs. Heartʼ, with its uppity martial punch and ironic subject
matter («the material against the spiritual» and all that), even if it is not a
particularly great song, almost restores confidence in these guys, or, at
least, seems to promise that the record is going to be a respectable sequel to Maybe You Should Drive. But then
something odd happens, and the boys launch into an odd series of rather
pedestrian murder ballads (ʽStraw Hat And Old Dirty Hankʼ),
forcefully angry anti-bigotry rants (ʽI Knowʼ), suicidal pleads
(ʽThis Is Where It Endsʼ, ʽWhen I Fallʼ), and various other
raids on classic singer-songwriter territory, almost always with rather
lackluster results.
What they now most frequently sound like is
early R.E.M. with much less memorable melodies and blander, far less mysterious
atmosphere — in other words, highly generic «college rock». They do work on
their lyrics, and still find occasionally interesting ways of expressing the
same millennia-old feelings, but it is not clear why anybody, outside of the
regular 18-year old college rock audience spinning contemporary product in
their dormitories way back in 1996, should care about these ways today. I mean,
I can easily see how a song like ʽBreak Your Heartʼ could form a very
intimate relationship with a young boy's spirit at the dawn of the great girl
problem age, but when the not-so-young boy looks back on it fifteen years
later... it's not as if they really wrote
something here other than the lyrics, what with the song growing out of the
standard Fifties' progression, borrowing a bit of its vocal melody from
McCartney's ʽLet Me Roll Itʼ, and going for a «blue-eyed soul»
atmosphere that is way beyond Page's vocal capacities.
Alas, similar observations could be made on
almost every other song on here, regardless of its genre, mood, tempo, or
tonality. ʽShoe Boxʼ, featured on Friends,
is sort of okay, as it is the most Gordon-style
of all these songs (catchy, friendly-sarcastic, and lightweight; naturally, this had to be the song that almost did
not make it onto the final print of the album) — together with ʽStomach
Vs. Heartʼ, they at least provide a credible framework for the record. The
«big hit», which brought them some U.S. notoriety, was ʽThe Old
Apartmentʼ, but it moves me about as much as, say, a Taylor Swift song
could have — there is not a single musically interesting thing going on, and
its nostalgic vibe, so firmly expressed in the lyrics, would never be evident
to anybody not fluent in the language. Generic acoustic alt-rock, blah.
Thumbs down for this
total failure of a record. Even the sleeve photo is (intentionally) ugly, not
to mention its complete lack of ties to the inside contents. Although, come to
think of it, when you do remember the underlying prank (that is, pronounce the
title of the album making the same face that the boy is pulling on the cover),
you do get the appropriately correct
title for this pile of... oh well, never mind. Bottom line is: feel free to
disagree with the judgement if you're mainly here for the words, but if you insist that the underlying music and atmosphere
even begin to match their wittiness, well, «this is where it ends» for you and
me.
STUNT (1998)
1) One Week; 2) It's All Been
Done; 3) Light Up My Room; 4) I'll Be That Girl; 5) Leave; 6) Alcohol; 7) Call
And Answer; 8) In The Car; 9) Never Is Enough; 10) Who Needs Sleep?; 11) Told
You So; 12) Some Fantastic; 13) When You Dream.
Stunt indeed — with the surprising success of
ʽOne Weekʼ as the album's lead single, Barenaked Ladies managed to
pull the stunt of becoming major celebrities almost overnight. Apparently, all
it had to take was for Robertson to start rapping: channelling the band's
trademark loquacity and humor into a hip-hop riverbed proved to be the key,
even if the actual music never strays away from the regular pop-rock format.
The song's subject matter (an ironic look at stupid breakups over nothing)
probably did not matter as much as the rapid stream of cultural references —
everything from Snickers to Sailor Moon to Harrison Ford to Kurosawa — but
overall, the whole thing just sounds funny.
Heck, it is funny — reinstating the
band's «smart college clowns» image on a more sophisticated level than that of
ʽBe My Yoko Onoʼ.
The rest of the album, fortunately, drops the
rap angle (one stab is okay, more than one could be interpreted as too much
groveling before the altar of the Beastie Boys and such), but continues to
unfurl the general approach. The tempos are faster, the moods are lighter, the
lyrical matters are quirkier, the hooks are sharper — the somber mood that
permeated the previous two albums is all but gone, so that even the slowest and
most sentimental number (ʽCall And Answerʼ) is an optimistic song of
future reconcilement instead of a bleak account of separation. And although,
from time to time, they do walk that fine line that separates clever satire
from gimmicky novelty tunes (I still cannot quite make up my mind about
ʽOne Weekʼ, for that matter), Stunt
on the whole does not produce the impression of a «clownish» album.
For instance, already the second single,
ʽIt's All Been Doneʼ, is just
a well-written power-pop song, with jangly folk-rock guitars, Beatlesque ooh
la-la-las and whoah-whoahs, and lyrics that complain about the repetitive
nature of intimate relationships without any particularly smartass verbal
flourishes. If it weren't for the vocals — one more pretext to repeat that Page
and Robertson always needed a much more accomplished and versatile vocalist in
the band — it might have been a late masterpiece of the genre.
On the other hand, the third single,
ʽAlcoholʼ, does derive much of its charm from the lyrics, which
certainly paint a much more likable portrait of the substance than the Kinks
song with the same title. What used to be «demon Alcohol» now becomes
"alcohol, your songs resolve like my life never will" and, despite
the clearly tongue-in-cheek attitude, could have easily been picked up by some
promotional campaign (maybe even has?). If the song's basic melody leaves
something to be desired, they compensate for it by loading the track with
pianos, violins, and electronics — to demonstrate, no doubt, the sheer amount
of sights and colors that alcohol brings into one's life. One can only guess at
the popularity ranking of the song on the college circuit when it came out.
Genre diversity is displayed throughout:
ʽIn The Carʼ appropriates an old surf-rock pattern; ʽNever Is
Enoughʼ has an organ part that almost sounds lifted from an old Bob Dylan
number; ʽTold You Soʼ carries on the country-pop vibe with a whiff of
R.E.M. dreaminess (not one of my favourites, it does sound a bit like an
outtake from the Pirate Ship
sessions); ʽSome Fantasticʼ swerves into bossa nova territory. As
usual, though, the album does not feel
diverse, because the personality of the Ladies remains the same throughout — it
just helps avoid the impression of «one long song separated by pauses».
It all does make me, wonder, though: why does
my personal favourite song on here happen to be the least typical of the album?
ʽWhen You Dreamʼ is formally placed at the end as a good night
lullaby, to smoothe out the edges, but even though I generally do not care much
for the heart-on-sleeve side of the Ladies, this particular tender waltz (in
which one can hear distant echoes of John Sebastian and the Lovin' Spoonful,
among other things) strikes such a fine balance between sentimentality and
intelligence that I would place it right next to John Lennon's ʽBeautiful
Boyʼ in a personal rating of «toddler tunes». At the very least, it is
hard to imagine it not finding the proper resonance in the heart of each and
every inexperienced parent, provided that parent is advanced enough to own a
copy of Stunt.
In other words, ʽWhen You Dreamʼ
symbolizes the ultimate victory of emotion over reason, but that does not annul
the effects of the other songs — on the whole, this is not quite the return to
the level of Gordon that one might
have hoped for, but it is a certified «return to making sense», with the band
completely in their element. Lively, fun, smart, diverse within reasonable
limits — not genius, just rock-solid quality, liberally sprinkled with
charisma. Thumbs
up.
MAROON (2000)
1) Too Little Too Late; 2) Never
Do Anything; 3) Pinch Me; 4) Go Home; 5) Falling For The First Time; 6) Conventioneers;
7) Sell, Sell, Sell; 8) Humor Of The Situation; 9) Baby Seat; 10) Off The Hook;
11) Helicopters; 12) Tonight Is The Night I Fell Asleep At The Wheel.
Maroon is like A
Day At The Races to Stunt's A Night At The Opera: a twin companion
that makes a point of not offering
anything radically new, but is simply there so that the previous record would
not feel too lonely — and there have been no countries so far that made it a
capital crime to milk the same formula twice, especially since, every now and
then, second time around the results may be even stronger (experience and all).
In this particular case, I would not say that Maroon «improves» on Stunt — the two are so similar in
style and so consistent in content that it is a matter of some very fine
distinctions in taste. The important thing is that the band has lost none of
the sharpness and none of the inspiration; also, the proceedings may have been
influenced by keyboard player Kevin Hearn's recuperation from leukemia, as this
is altogether arguably the merriest,
most uplifting record by these guys ever since Gordon established them as the trendiest college clowns on the
block. Except that Maroon has no
«joke» songs on it whatsoever: «uplifting» does not equal «hilarious».
There is
one big unresolved problem that is getting bigger and bigger: as per «the world
according to the Barenaked Ladies» at this moment, it (the world) revolves
almost entirely and exclusively around the issue of broken relationships and
how to fix them. Now this is, most
definitively, one of the most important problems for the average college
student stumbling through life and learning to learn on his / her mistakes —
and is therefore guaranteed to provide fame and admiration to whoever tackles
it with intelligence and originality, as the Ladies do. But still, the amount
of «he vs. she»-themed songs, already huge on Stunt, begins to feel irritating. With a couple of exceptions that
aim at more global themes (ʽSell, Sell, Sellʼ — no need to comment;
the anti-war lament of ʽHelicoptersʼ), Maroon is all about Mr. Page on the couch and Dr. Robertson in the
armchair, or vice versa, and this gives a fairly monotonous coating to all of
the songs, no matter how many different tempos, tonalities, styles, or tributes
they are based on.
Technically, most of the songs are fine,
concentrating once more on the aesthetics of classic power pop, but also with
some «alt-rock» elements thrown in every now and then (the jiggly, syncopated
ʽNever Do Anythingʼ could just as easily be done by the likes of
Avril Lavigne, even if her version probably could not have contained lines like
"let's play tic tac toe, I'll play X, you can be the O"). Those who
love the Ladies primarily for their ability to merge old-style electric pop
riffs with contemporary sentiments will particularly enjoy ʽToo Little Too
Lateʼ with its swirling merry-go-round pattern; ʽGo Homeʼ,
reminiscent of the «dance-folk» vibe espoused by some of the Nuggets-era bands; ʽHumor Of The
Situationʼ, where the band plays at top volume, aiming for a musical
explosion (which, unfortunately, never really comes, due to the innate
limitations of their skills as vocalists and arrangers); and the catchy, but somewhat
lumbering ʽBaby Seatʼ.
For some reason, none of these songs were
chosen for the honor of lead single — the honor went to ʽPinch Meʼ,
maybe because they thought it had a more contemporary sound, with the drum
loop, a rap in the chorus, and harmonies that suspiciously sound as if they
were influenced by boy bands. Similarity with ʽOne Weekʼ is rather
glaring, and if the song was deliberately written as a commercial follow-up,
this explains where it fundamentally fails where its predecessor fundamentally
succeeded — through happy songwriter accident.
However, I am not going to pretend that Maroon is not a great album simply
because it makes such serious concessions to trends and fads. The Barenaked
Ladies are much too well aware of their own strengths and weaknesses to
understand that «selling out» would be the death of them, anyway — who would
they be going to compete with, the Backstreet Boys? Maroon is a very good, but not a great album not because there are
too few songs here like ʽToo Little Too Lateʼ, but because there are
too many of them: well-done and
well-meaning, but not quite hitting
the spot, if you know what I mean. Probably just because the music, the lyrics,
and the vocals do not find the perfect way to gel — as «shallow» as it is, one
ʽI Should Have Known Betterʼ is still worth an entire Maroon to me.
But let me tell you where it does gel a bit. It does gel when, on
ʽHelicoptersʼ, they go for a grander subject and strengthen the
effects with a simple, but powerful theme (doubled on violin and something
else, I think). And, amazingly, it does gel at the very end — there is a hidden
track here called ʽHidden Sunʼ, written and sung by the miraculously
cured Kevin Hearn, and it is a gorgeously atmospheric dream-pop piano ballad
that I will take over anything else on this album, since there is nothing about
its sweet sentimentality that rubs me the wrong way, and even Hearn's shaky,
unassured vocal is more credible than Page's.
That said, we must not forget about the mind,
either, and on a purely rational basis, Maroon
deserves its rightful thumbs up — the lyrics are hard to assail, as are
the band's musical tastes and creative decisions. And, for that matter,
ʽTonight Is The Night I Fell Asleep At The Wheelʼ is probably the
silliest send-up of those country sounds since the days of the Stones'
ʽDear Doctorʼ and ʽFar Away Eyesʼ, and a fine enough
conclusion to the main (unhidden) body of the album to wrestle out a positive
decision at the end of the day. Anyway, it's all really a matter of owning the
key to this particular aesthetics — I seem to have lost mine somewhere along
the way, or maybe I never had one in the first place, but you, the reader, are always welcome to try. (But it does seriously
help if you're 19 years old and enrolled in Berkeley or something).
EVERYTHING TO EVERYONE (2003)
1) Celebrity; 2) Maybe Katie;
3) Another Postcard; 4) Next Time; 5) For You; 6) Shopping; 7) Testing 1, 2, 3;
8) Upside Down; 9) War On Drugs; 10) Aluminum; 11) Unfinished; 12) Second Best;
13) Take It Outside; 14) Have You Seen My Love?
If Stunt
established the formula and Maroon
consolidated it, then Everything To
Everyone represents the logical slide into boredom once everything that
could actually be said to everyone had already been said. The biggest
difference is that the album was recorded in a post-9/11 world, and,
apparently, The Barenaked Ladies thought the time had come to become more serious,
mature, and responsible. Well, on one hand, it does significantly reduce the
number of «him vs. her» psycho-studies that made Maroon seem so repetitive. But on the other hand, I am not sure
that I would like to adopt these guys as my spiritual gurus — and pardon them
this decreased attention towards hooks, even when compensated with a more
profound social perspective.
Not that one could ever guess anything about
profundity when presented with the album's lead single: ʽAnother
Postcardʼ does feature a rappy vocal that makes it obvious the guys were
trying to repeat the formula of ʽOne Weekʼ one more time, but on the
whole, it is a repetitive and, I am not afraid to say, somewhat
cretinous-sounding tale of... an anonymous admirer sending the protagonist an
endless series of postcards of chimpanzees. «Cretinous» does not refer nearly
as much to the storyline, though, as it does to the music — the idea may have
been to indulge in a little bit of silly whimsy, but it isn't even funny, just repetitive and stupid.
The second single, ʽTesting 1, 2, 3ʼ,
is not that much better, but at least it does not set out to irritate — being
merely a forgettable soft-alt-rock tune; and the third single, ʽFor
Youʼ, is an equally forgettable country-pop composition, not much different
from millions of similar tunes flooding the airwaves. All of which is
incredibly surprising, because neither of these songs even pretends to being
«outstanding» in any way: it is almost as if the band was consciously
discrediting itself as a singles act (come to think of it, that may have been the truth — I cannot
fathom an intelligent human being having just written something like
ʽAnother Postcardʼ and going «oh, this is going to be our next hit
single, boy are those kids gonna love it! I mean, it's just gotta be a hit if it's about
chimpanzees, right? Everybody loves a good song about chimps!»).
Anyway, the highlights section of Everything To Everyone, as far as I am
concerned, have nothing to do with these songs. ʽCelebrityʼ has the
album's juiciest piano hook, decent fame-condemning lyrics, and a cute
combination of ELO-ish strings and Beatlesque harmonies in the arrangement.
ʽMaybe Katieʼ is stomping power-pop in classic Weezer / Fountains Of
Wayne fashion and an unforgettable tagline ("what's so maybe about
Katie?" is more of a fun line than "another postcard with
chimpanzees", after all).
ʽShoppingʼ sounds like late period
Apples In Stereo, combining elements of techno with old-style kiddie pop, and
even though it is recorded in an even more openly puerile fashion than
ʽAnother Postcardʼ, it clearly presents itself as a lightweight
parody, ridiculing both the concept of shopping spree and certain musical
trends at the same time, so it is openly funny.
Finally, ʽUnfinishedʼ (which, if you listen closely, begins with more
than a direct homage to the Beatles' ʽGetting Betterʼ) and
ʽSecond Bestʼ have a good amount of energy, if not necessarily a
barrel-load of hooks, and would have both made better singles than the band's
actual choices.
I am not at all sure, though, about the most
serious songs on the album — such as ʽWar On Drugsʼ and ʽNext
Timeʼ, used as vehicles to express the Ladies' concern with the state of
humanity at large. ʽWar On Drugsʼ in particular, expanded to five and
a half minutes in a clear bid for the status of the album's magnum opus, hearkens back to the
tedious languidness of Born Under A
Pirate Ship, and no amount of string quartets, pianos, and bombastic
buildups can hide the fact that the song is essentially just a formulaic folk
ballad, mostly consisting of attitude, and even the attitude is mediocre
(considering the ordinariness of Page's vocals).
Curiously, most of the songs I find emotionally
acceptable on here have Kevin Hearn credited as co-writer along with Page and
Robertson (or Jim Creeggan, on ʽMaybe Katieʼ), which leads to
uncomfortable suggestions that will not be voiced openly. Whatever might have
been the case, it seems abundantly clear to me that, once again, The Barenaked
Ladies have committed the mistake of overloading their boat — with stuff they
neither know how to handle nor have any serious need of, in the first place.
Not a «thumbs down» as such, since the good material manages to outbalance the
bad one, but really nothing to get excited about: just another college rock
record that is not very likely to make musical history, no matter how
arrogantly grandiose its title, or even its front sleeve, have been designed to
look.
BARENAKED FOR THE HOLIDAYS (2004)
1) Jingle Bells; 2) Green
Christmas; 3) I Saw Three Ships; 4) Hanukkah Blessings; 5) O Holy Night; 6)
Elf's Lament; 7) Snowman; 8) Do They Know It's Christmas; 9) Hanukkah Oh
Hanukkah; 10) God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen; 11) Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer;
12) Carol Of The Bells; 13) Footprints; 14) Deck The Stills; 15) Christmastime
(Oh Yeah); 16) Sleigh Ride; 17) Christmas Pics; 18) I Have A Little Dreidel; 19)
Wonderful Christmastime; 20) Auld Lang Syne.
I reserve the usual right to keep reviews of
Christmas albums as short as possible, but the farther we get on with this
practice, the more this traditional Christmas album format tends to be subjected
to various alchemic practices and postmodern deconstructions — and despite all
their attempts at being judged as a «normal» band, it would never make sense
for the Barenaked Ladies to release a «normal» Christmas album. So this one has
a few points of interest that might be worth listing for those who think that
the «Christmas album» is just a kind of discography varmint, to be
exterminated or at least boycotted wherever possible.
First, about a third of these songs are
original compositions — ranging from fluffy ditties about having to celebrate
Christmas in the wrong part of the world (ʽGreen Christmasʼ, the
Ladies' conscious addition to the stock of ʽWhite Christmasesʼ and
ʽBlue Christmasesʼ) to Page's merry Brit-pop celebration of his
Jewish heritage (ʽHanukkah Blessingsʼ) to some really weird stuff (ʽElf's Lamentʼ — lyrically, I mean)
to another heartfelt ballad from Kevin Hearn (ʽChristmastimeʼ, with
nary a hint at any irony behind the sentimentalism). Naturally, the
restrictiveness of the topic is an obstacle to any of these songs being
masterpieces, but there is plenty of
original songwriting, enough for all the regular fans to sit up and take
notice.
Second, the choice of covers is certainly not
all that predictable. There is not a lot of traditional Christmas chestnuts,
and those that they do feel obliged to include are usually turned on their
heads: ʽJingle Bellsʼ, for instance, consists of a hyper-slow «introspective»
part and an absurdly sped-up «village idiot» section. Themes for ʽO Holy
Nightʼ and ʽRudolphʼ are given over to organs and drum machines,
stripped of vocals and made to run exactly one minute each. And ʽCarol Of
The Bellsʼ features a spooky electronic chimes arrangement that could just
as well be suited for the needs of Walpurgis Night, if necessary.
In addition, there are also takes on more
recent Christmasy material — for instance, yet another one-minute instrumental
electronic deconstruction deals with Paul McCartney's ʽWonderful
Christmastimeʼ (serves it well, since it is arguably one of the worst
songs the man has ever written), and then they run through a
superficially-passionate take on Bob Geldof's Live AID monster, ʽDo They
Know It's Christmas?ʼ — actually, the song sounds much better without all
the Band Aid pathos of the original. Well, seems natural: if we are going to
continue the lovely tradition of releasing Christmas albums long after the
whole world has converted to Islam, atheism, or pastafarianism, it does make
sense to update the classic repertoire of ʽI'll Be Home For
Christmasʼ, ʽHave Yourself A Merry Little Christmasʼ, etc., from
time to time, even if we have to do it with bad McCartney tunes and Live Aid
anthems.
In order to further commemorate their own
legacy and assure the fans of Judaeic faith equal rights and privileges, the
Ladies also quickly run through several jiggly Hanukkah tunes (ʽI Have A
Little Dreidelʼ is worth getting to know if you never had any earlier
pretext to get to know it — as a cultural bonus, you get to learn what a
dreidel is), and, along the way, martyrize ʽDeck The Hallsʼ as
ʽDeck The Stillsʼ by chanting ʽCrosby Stills Nash &
Young!ʼ instead of the original words (it's funny for the first time, and
then I just skip the track on subsequent listens).
The whole ravage ends with a straightface,
no-bull finale of ʽAuld Lang Syneʼ, left holy and intact either
because they have no courage to desecrate this one, or because something had to be left intact just for
the sake of adding more colors to the record. Well, it's... ʽAuld Lang
Syneʼ, it's hard to spoil it anyway. In short, this is a curious, often
bizarre twist on yer average Christmas album, which is sort of what we'd expect
in general from the Ladies. Whether it helps or not to add a special twist on
your actual Christmas (or Hanukkah, for that matter) is up to you to decide —
personally, I have never once in my life wilfully listened to a «Christmas
album» on an actual Christmas or New Year, so I have no opinion on this
situation.
For the record, it must be added that Page
would later pretty much disown the record; that not a single track here was
recorded by the band naked in the studio; and that ʽGreen Christmasʼ
was originally recorded way back in 2000 for Dr. Seuss' How The Grinch Stole Christmas, a movie starring Jim
Carrey who also sang ʽYou're A Mean One, Mr. Grinchʼ, a song covered
by many artists including Aimee Mann, who put it on her own Christmas album
that would be recorded two years after Barenaked
After The Holidays and would be a better album because Aimee Mann is (in my
humble opinion) a better artist. See, that's why I hate trivia — when they're all piled up and disconnected, they look
dumb, but once you try to chain them together, you find out that it's almost
impossible to stop.
BARENAKED LADIES ARE ME (2006)
1) Adrift; 2) Bank Job; 3)
Sound Of Your Voice; 4) Easy; 5) Home; 6) Bull In A China Shop; 7) Everything
Had Changed; 8) Peterborough And The Kavarthas; 9) Maybe You're Right; 10) Take
It Back; 11) Vanishing; 12) Rule The World With Love; 13) Wind It Up.
Every once in a while, the world needs to be
reminded of that old adage — «quantity does not equal quality» (said the
Turkish sultan, ordering his ninety-nine brothers to be put to death). For that
very reason, the Barenaked Ladies held a historical recording session in early
2005, where they came up with no fewer than 30 original compositions — an
impressive pile that took a further year and a half to finalize, sort out, and
release in several variants, eventually settling upon the «white album» and
«whiter album» recipe that The Beatles never followed: Barenaked Ladies Are Me, with 13 songs on it, came out in September
2006, and Barenaked Ladies Are Men,
containing the rest, followed half a year later.
Had these guys been songwriting geniuses, the
story would be truly intriguing. Had these guys displayed their trademark
«quirky» behavior and sarcasm, there would be some hope. What happened instead
can only be called a blundering catastrophe: apparently, they went into the
studio with the solemn goal of writing a shitpile of deadly serious,
«thinking-man-introspective-singer-songwriter» pop songs, almost completely bereft
of any sense of humor or lightness of approach — or clever hooks, for that
matter.
It is not even a question of monotonousness:
formally, Barenaked Ladies Are Me is
fairly diverse, mixing acoustic folk-pop, electric power-pop, art-pop,
alt-rock, bits of electronica, bluegrass, etc., in other words, touching upon
all sorts of familiar ground that the Ladies had already covered previously,
but wouldn't mind shuffling together one more time. And yet, simultaneously, it
all sounds thoroughly tedious, mind-numbing, and sort of gooey, taking the
stagnation of Everything To Everyone
to a whole new level.
The few songs that are pinned to loud electric
riffage can be seen as relieving exceptions. The best of the lot is probably
ʽWind It Upʼ — why it happens to close the album rather than opening
it with its bulgy, almost Townshend-ian punch, is way beyond my limited
comprehension. Of course, it does not have much to recommend it other than that
swirling riff (as well as a monster psychedelic guitar solo from guest star Kim
Mitchell), but a good riff and a good solo is
the bare minimum required from a decent power-pop tune. Another good one is
Kevin Hearn's ʽSound Of Your Voiceʼ, whose garage-influenced lead
melody spends most of the time battling against the slower, blues-shuffle-style
rhythm section.
And both of these songs were singles, all
right, but for some reason, the lead
single was ʽEasyʼ — a song that stands much closer in spirit to the
somnambulistic bulk of the album. Like many of the Ladies' songs, it is a potentially good number — but in this
case, it would have probably realized its potential much better, had it been
handed over to U2. Listen to it, then try to imagine the Edge's echoey style
instead of the wimpy acoustic foundation used over here, and Bono wailing
"make it easy, make it easy" instead of Robertson. Now that could have been something; this version, compared with the
imaginary ideal, sounds like a first-stage demo.
And the same applies to more than half of these
songs. The ballads are smooth and mushy (ʽAdriftʼ, ʽHomeʼ),
the electronics are underdeveloped (ʽBank Jobʼ starts out with bleeps
and beeps that still end up chewed up and swallowed by generic alt-rock
guitars), and even some of the fast, supposedly energetic pop-rock numbers are
thoroughly devoid of creative ideas (ʽBull In A China Shopʼ —
ʽBottle Of Diet Poisonʼ would have been a better title, if they
really needed a suitable «tired old metaphor» to pick from the song's lyrics).
Worst of the lot might be Creeggan's ambitiously titled ʽPeterborough And
The Kawarthasʼ — a neo-folk concoction that has no dynamics whatsoever; I
would have trouble recommending it as elevator muzak.
In short, we are «reborn on a pirate ship» here
— once again, the Ladies are offering us serious intellectual pop music,
forgetting that even serious intellectual pop music has to address the emotional
centers in order to succeed. Besides, it's not even all that intellectual: a
song like ʽMaybe You're Rightʼ, with its supposedly «deep» chorus of
"shall I take back everything I've ever said / and live my whole life in
silence instead?", hardly suffices to make the Ladies into respectable
social spokesmen for their, or any other, generation.
Had this been a «simple pop» album, it would
have been just mediocre. But it is not — the Ladies' acute desire to release everything they came up with, in two
subsequent installments; and their equally acute desire to be judged as Serious
Singer-Songwriters rather than monkee entertainers intentionally push the
plank higher than necessary. And since, the way I see it, nothing makes me hate
an album more than «inadequacy of intention», Barenaked Ladies Are Me is a certified thumbs down. One more time in its
stubbornly frustrating career, the band simply tries to bite off more than it
can chew — or, to be more precise, bites off something that is genetically
incompatible with its digestive system.
BARENAKED LADIES ARE MEN (2007)
1) Serendipity; 2) Something
You'll Never Find; 3) One And Only; 4) Angry People; 5) Down To Earth; 6)
Beautiful; 7) Running Out Of Ink; 8) Half A Heart; 9) Maybe Not; 10) I Can, I
Will, I Do; 11) Fun & Games; 12) The New Sad; 13) Quality; 14) Another
Spin; 15) What A Letdown.
The Ladies gave the green light to the release
of the rest of the songs they had recorded during the 2005-2006 sessions so
quickly that it was quite clear — the two records do not relate to each other
in a «main product / outtakes & leftovers» kind of way, but are actually
two equal-rights parts of one whole. Which is, really, the only way to explain
that Are Men is a significant improvement
over Are Me, much to the consolation
of those (like me) who were expecting to hear something even more dreadfully
dull and languid than the first part.
The general difference is that Are Me focuses on the slower,
«rootsier», more intimate / sentimental part of The Ladies' joint personality,
whereas Are Men concentrates on the
quirkier, more upbeat power-pop part. This is not an unbreakable law — there
are exceptions to the rule on both sides — but hardly a coincidence, either:
faced with the perspective of sorting their large pile into two smaller piles,
Page and Robertson must have settled on a «thematic» approach. Which, upon
first sight, means that Are Men has
a priori better chances to succeed, given that the Ladies have always tended to
thrive in power-pop, not roots-rock environments.
And it does, but not quite — some of these
songs do actually manage to reach the heights of Stunt / Maroon-era
material, yet on the whole the album still carries the stamp of the «quantity
over quality» department. For instance, sentimental acoustic soft-rock like
ʽBeautifulʼ and ʽHalf A Heartʼ is the kind of generic indie
material you so often hear in pretending-to-be-cool family entertainment movies
that wish to ask serious questions and then answer them with cheap soapy
melodrama — uninteresting melodies spiced up with «authentic» arrangements and
«intelligent» vocals. Again, the vocals are the weakest parts: sentimental
music cannot be effective without actual sentiments, something that neither
Page nor Robertson can properly provide — you'd at least need a Paul McCartney
to make this stuff work.
The upbeat material is altogether on another
plane. Sometimes it almost feels as if they try too hard: ʽAngry Peopleʼ, with its falsetto woo-hoos,
martial beats, and happy harp à la
Stevie Wonder, strictly follows an old patented recipe for pop catchiness —
but it is, after all, a song about correcting angry people by surrounding them
with happy ones, so the form suits the message to a tee, and it would be silly
to get irritated instead of just getting into the fun groove. As Robertson
sings in ʽDown To Earthʼ (another one of those quirky Apples In
Stereo-style pop-rockers that thrives on combining guitars with sci-fi synths),
"some people are just all show / well, I don't mind that if the show's
worth watching" — well, the Ladies themselves operate better when they are
mostly show, or, at least, when their sincere attitude is covered with plenty
of makeup.
For some strange reason, Are Men yielded no singles, even though at least a good third of
these songs would be top-notch single material for the band. Page's
ʽRunning Out Of Inkʼ would be a prime candidate, in particular — it's
fast, quirky, catchy, funny, and structurally diverse, as Page goes from a
comically paranoid delivery into a comically operatic mid-section and back
again. ʽQualityʼ would inevitably be a hit with college audiences, as
it combines the steady romantic pulse of ʽEvery Breath You Takeʼ with
lyrics that subtly send up the know-it-all attitude ("my quality, biology
enhanced with high technology"): the Ladies have always tended to strictly
observe the balance between the college punk and the college nerd, and they do
have that talent for coming across as seriously educated guys without any
particular showing off.
Yet another time, two of the best songs are
contributed by Kevin Hearn: ʽSerendipityʼ has serious woo-potential
in its echoey riff and, especially, clever vocal modulation — since he
possesses the softest and sweetest voice in the entire band, Hearn is able to
work some subtle magic with it that neither Page nor Robertson can conjure, and
it is almost as if they recognize and respect that, by letting
ʽSerendipityʼ open the album. Good move, or «Hearn the softie» could
have been lost in the 16-song ocean: it certainly takes extra time and effort
to uncover the similar charms of ʽAnother Spinʼ, where he keeps
looking for his girl in different places (including Afghanistan, if only
because it dissonantly rhymes with the song title) without any hope to find the
right one, but in a state of complete vocal and instrumental serenity
nevertheless.
I will not attempt individual descriptions /
comments on all the songs — there is nothing truly original or vehemently
thought-provoking about most of them — but on the whole, this is a good listen,
and although I have encountered opinions that value the first record over the
second, I really have no interest in
mulling and sussing and mulling and sussing over the Ladies' introspective
side until it finally «gets to me». They have good, natural pop instincts, and
they are well demonstrated — again — on Barenaked
Ladies Are Men, and that is why it deserves a thumbs up, albeit a slightly less
excited one than in the case of Stunt
/ Maroon. If anything, splitting
their personalities in two just ended up as a transparent demonstration — which
of the personalities it would be more fun to hang out with, and which one
would do better if it never showed its nose out of the dormitory, not ever
again.
SNACKTIME! (2008)
1) 7 8 9; 2) The Ninjas; 3)
Pollywog In A Bog; 4) Raisins; 5) Eraser; 6) I Can Sing; 7) Louis Loon; 8) Food
Party; 9) The Canadian Snacktime Trilogy: 1. Snacktime; 10) The Canadian
Snacktime Trilogy: 2. Popcorn; 11) The Canadian Snacktime Trilogy: 3. Vegetable
Town; 12) Drawing; 13) Humungous Tree; 14) My Big Sister; 15) Allergies; 16) I
Don't Like; 17) What A Wild Tune; 18) Bad Day; 19) Things; 20) Curious; 21) A
Word For That; 22) Wishing; 23) Crazy ABC's; 24) Here Come The Geese.
«Children's albums» recorded by adult artists
more often than not turn out to be fakes — a good excuse for the artist to
engage in fluffy silliness while at the same time churning out a product that
most children would be, well, too child-like to properly understand and enjoy.
In this respect, the Barenaked Ladies are no exception: while I do know
personally a small handful of children that would probably enjoy Snacktime! and maybe even get addicted
to it, most would probably find half of the record too boring, and the other
half too befuddling (not to mention that there are a bit too many references to
the Ladies' own childhood — I mean, Grease 2? Come on!). Adult fans of the
Ladies, on the other hand, may react to the record just the way a Beatles fan
reacts to ʽAll Together Nowʼ, ʽHer Majestyʼ, and ʽWild
Honey Pieʼ — with a mix of mild external condescension and subtle internal
amusement / excitement.
The idea of making a record specially for the
children came from Kevin Hearn, who is responsible not only for an unusually
huge percentage of the songs, but also for the artwork in the companion book.
Robertson was in on the idea, but Page was not — he is credited for only five
out of twenty-four numbers, and has since admitted that he was simply «along
for the ride»; supposedly, his alienation from the affair was one of the
factors that influenced his subsequent departure. It is interesting that one of
the most «serious» numbers on the record — ʽBad Dayʼ, an
introspective acoustic ballad that would have easily fit on any of their
«adult» albums — is credited exclusively to Page. Apparently, that was his
little act of sabotage for the concept.
That said, as an adult who can still channel
certain childhood memories and feelings, I find myself along for the ride,
too. The quirky, goofy side of the Ladies is not just activated with this project
— it is put in overdrive, almost as if everything that they were holding back
ever since it was decided that they should be «serious artists», not a comic
act, suddenly broke through the wall and exploded it, as in the finale of a
Roger Waters show. The twenty-four tracks in question run slightly less than an
hour, with ideas bounced off each other in momentary splashes, and almost
everything works — hilarious lyrics, replete with puns, sarcastic jabs at
popular culture, and occasional edutainment value, set to simple, but catchy
kiddie pop melodies.
The base reference point here is «wordplay» —
already the opening number, ʽ7 8 9ʼ, illustrates that well enough
("why seven ate nine, nobody knows"), but the peak is reached on one
of the last numbers: ʽCrazy ABC'sʼ pokes Bernard Shaw-esque fun at
the peculiarities of English spelling and, along the way, introduces the
listener, young and old, to words like ʽbdelliumʼ, ʽfohnʼ,
and ʽqatʼ, knowledge of which is essential for survival in the
Barenaked Ladies' world. (ʽZʼ is, of course, for ʽZed Zed
Topʼ, whose music is also briefly referenced in the tune).
Other topics involve ninjas ("they speak
Japanese, they do whatever they please and sometimes they vacation in
Ireland"), raisins ("raisins come from grapes, I come from apes"
— nice subtle anti-creationism indoctrination for the kiddies out there), food
(ʽThe Canadian Snacktime Trilogyʼ has a host of musicians, including
Geddy Lee and Gordon Lightfoot, and their children listing their favorite
snacks), pencils, allergies, curiosities, wishes, in short, pretty much every
single topic that an adult would like his kid to be interested in when his kid
is only interested in smartphones and video games — predictably enough, these are the exact subjects that never
crop up in Snacktime!, being way too
vulgar to fit in the perspective of Hearn's and Robertson's creative fantasy,
stuck somewhere midway in between Lewis Carroll and Alan Milne.
Musically, Snacktime!
mostly sounds like a typical pop-oriented Ladies album — lively acoustic strum
(ʽNinjasʼ), thick power-pop riffs (ʽWishingʼ), with
occasional smidgeons of synth-pop (ʽDrawingʼ), music hall
(ʽPollywog In A Bogʼ), and country-western (ʽI Can Singʼ):
again, this diversity is more likely to appeal to grown-ups than kids,
accustomed to the monotonousness of teen-pop, but then again, we're hardly
talking here about competing with the likes of the Mouseketeers — most likely,
the only toddlers to be exposed to Snacktime!
must have been the little children of old-time Barenaked Ladies fans.
In any case, goofy and silly as these songs
are, they are not altogether insightless, and definitely not uninventive:
whatever be, I'd rather listen to this stuff, where Robertson and Hearn are completely
in their element, than to Barenaked
Ladies Are Me, for instance. With so many ideas to test and produce, not
everything here works (I am particularly disappointed by the sentimentally
anthemic album closer: ʽHere Come The Geeseʼ is too plain and
repetitive to qualify for a true «grand finale», as it was probably thought
of), but if everything here worked, the album would have been a downright
masterpiece. As it is, it is just a very friendly thumbs up type of album.
ALL IN GOOD TIME (2010)
1) You Run Away; 2)
Summertime; 3) Another Heartbreak; 4) Four Seconds; 5) On The Lookout; 6)
Ordinary; 7) I Have Learned; 8) Every Subway Car; 9) Jerome; 10) How Long; 11)
Golden Boy; 12) I Saw It; 13) The Love We're In; 14) Watching The Northern
Lights.
Did the departure of Steven Page make any
difference? Frankly speaking, Page and Robertson seem to have always been very
much alike in form and spirit — nothing like a John/Paul or a Mick/Keith
dichotomy here, which was really a weakness for The Ladies: you had to be a
serious fan to understand the difference in seasoning that each of the two
brought to the table. If anything, it was Kevin Hearn who used to be
responsible for a differently colored streak, that of instantly likeable
innocent sentimentality, and he was the one that didn't quit.
In short, the loss of Page could be expected to
bring about a slight drop in quality control, at worst. Instead, it brought
about the worst that could ever have
happened — «MATURITY», as some of the critics called it, almost happy to notice that, finally, the
Barenaked Ladies have shed off their goofy, oddball image, stopped pranking
around like overgrown kids, and started writing and recording really serious, responsible,
intelligent material that would probably help their fanbase mature and become
serious and responsible as well.
Unfortunately, critics tend to have short
memories — and it's hard to blame them, given the ever-growing waves of new
artistic material engulfing them every day — so their basis for comparison must
have been (a) the latest of the Ladies' oeuvres, which was Snacktime!; (b) ʽOne Weekʼ; and (c) maybe some of the
earliest goof-off songs like ʽBe My Yoko Onoʼ, because the first cut
is the deepest and suchlike. What they did not
remember, as it seems, is that the Ladies' first concentrated attempt at
achieving serious maturity was already on their very second album, and that,
since then, the general tendency was rather predictable: the more serious they
got, the more tedious and generic their records tended to sound (Born On A Pirate Ship? Barenaked Ladies Are Me?) — the more
they indulged in their prankish side, the more smart and sympathetic they
managed to come out (Stunt / Maroon, Barenaked Ladies Are Men).
My confession is as follows: as I reached the
middle of ʽYou Run Awayʼ, I was almost ready to cry — not because the
song was so emotionally moving, but because it was already more or less obvious
how miserable my next fifty minutes would become. The song is not particularly awful
or anti-melodic or anything: it simply bears the thickest, densest stamp of
«generic indie» to ever come from these guys. It sounds like a perfect
soundtrack element to a Nora Ephron movie — echoey, soul-probing pianos,
confessional, slightly trembling vocals, gradual build-up towards a rock guitar
explosion, the works. It is something that would be completely natural for a
proverbially mediocre outfit like the Dave Matthews Band. It is something I
have no interest whatsoever in hearing from The Barenaked Ladies, and do not,
for the life of me, understand why should anybody else. And this is only just
the beginning.
In Robertson's defense, I must say that the heavy
riff-rockers on the album do not usually produce the same feeling of hollowness
and fakeness. ʽSummertimeʼ starts out unimpressively, but gets better
as the power-pop elements start coming through; the pissed-off rant ʽI
Have Learnedʼ is acceptable alt-rock, stuck somewhere in between Pearl Jam
and Alanis Morissette in spirit, but with classier production (and in the
Ladies' case, «classier» always means «closer in form to the band's garage /
glam sources of inspiration»). The fake-o-meter usually starts convulsing on
the balladeering front — ʽOrdinaryʼ, ʽThe Love We're Inʼ,
all that stuff. But this does not mean that the heavy riff-rockers will want to
continue to keep you company once the album is over — the riffs themselves
don't have anything particularly unusual or stunning about them.
In disasters like these, you can usually count
on Kevin Hearn to come in with something idiosyncratic, but not this time.
ʽAnother Heartbreakʼ has a pretty vocal part (I continue to insist
that Kevin has always been the most expressive vocalist of the bunch), but the
song quickly descends into clichéd distorted indie-rock.
ʽJeromeʼ is a somewhat visionary landscape, a melancholy tribute to
the departed Old West that somehow ends up cluttered with too much percussion.
And ʽWatching The Northern Lightsʼ is an atmospheric conclusion to
the album that matches its title rather well — the repetitive,
reverb-delay-filled arrangement and trance-inducing vocals really create the
impression of lying on one's back and watching them Northern Lights. But, once
again, this sort of lazy ambience is simply not what one expects from this kind
of band. They will not be stealing any bread off of Enya's plate, anyway, so
why bother?
In the middle of all this, there is exactly 1 (one) «goof-off» number on the entire
record: ʽFour Secondsʼ is an absurdist vaudeville number that sounds
like Tom Waits adapted for toddlers (an outtake from Snacktime!, perhaps?). Its uniqueness works well in terms of
memorability, but it can hardly hope to turn the tide, surrounded by all that
run-of-the-mill alt-rock stuff — in fact, it only makes matters worse,
reminding of the true call of the Ladies. That true call is to play the smart,
sarcastic, snappy fool, not to try and turn into a «guitar rock band with
soul», a market niche where competition is hot and the Ladies are not welcome
at all. Thumbs
down.
GRINNING STREAK (2013)
1) Limits; 2) Boomerang; 3)
Off His Head; 4) Gonna Walk; 5) Odds Are; 6) Keepin' It Real; 7) Give It Back
To You; 8) Best Damn Friend; 9) Did I Say That Out Loud?; 10) Daydreamin'; 11)
Smile; 12) Crawl.
With another heavy sigh, I have to admit that
The Barenaked Ladies' second post-Page album of original material generates
more or less the same impressions as its sleeve photo. To be more precise, it
has the very distinct feel of music conceived and executed by a bunch of
morose, stern-looking, grayish-haired (var.: bald), suit-and-tie-clad office
workers, blankly staring in no particular direction, trying to express something that must have accumulated in
their shirt-stuffed breasts and finding themselves completely unable to do it
in the least interesting manner.
In other words, Grinning Streak — the title is the best thing here, since it so
aptly summarizes their latest developments — proudly wrestles the laurels away
from All In Good Time, offering
twelve more indie-rock compositions that come and go without creating as much
as a ripple. The marginal victory is possibly due to Ed Robertson now writing
almost the entirety of the album — only one song goes to Kevin Hearn, and three
more are co-credited to Robertson and Better Than Ezra's frontman Kevin
Griffin.
On the other hand, Hearn's
ʽDaydreamin'ʼ is far from his best: a bouncy soft-rock ditty with
faint echoes of techno and psychedelia at the same time, it goes on for far too
long on too little fuel, and fails to make proper use of Hearn's best side —
tender, honest-sounding sentimentality. The idea here is probably to generate a
credible «daydreaming» atmosphere, with a mix of laziness, nonchalance,
fantasy, and repetitiveness, but there are no hooks to go along with this mix,
and the heavy effects on Hearn's voice make it stupidly robotic rather than
wistfully magical. In short, Hearn's minimal presence here is as disappointing as
his maximal absence, so we probably should not lay all the blame on Robertson
alone...
...as tempting as that is, because he just
keeps sinking further and further into the abyss of «genericity» — something
like ʽBoomerangʼ, with its syncopated percussion and quiet-to-loud
dynamics, just sounds like bad Oasis or any other old Brit-pop band who would
follow the old Ben Franklin maxim of «those who try to sacrifice memorable
riffs for singalong catchy choruses deserve neither». That it happened to be
the first single released from the album just goes to show how utterly
directionless the band has become. (For comparison, try ABBA's song of the same
name if you really need a fun,
energetic pop song).
Of the three numbers co-written with Griffin,
only ʽGonna Walkʼ stands out a little bit by being poppier and
cutesier than the rest, with a mild martial punch, singalong harmonies, and a
jovial atmosphere that provides some respite from the many shades of gray that
dominate the record. ʽKeepin' It Realʼ is an exercise in blues-rock
grittiness, a somewhat different twist for the Ladies and handled
professionally, but, like everything else on here, in a sterile manner —
including the «blazing» guitar solo at the end. Particularly awful is the album
closer: ʽCrawlʼ is overstretched, overcooked, over-emoted adult
contemporary, and you'd probably have to be Ed Robertson's wife, parent, or
offspring (or you'd have to want to
be any of these) to enjoy the song.
Perhaps if the reviews for All In Good Time had not been all that glowing — praising the band
for finally trading in their clown outfits for «mature» suits and ties —
Robertson might have had second thoughts about going even further in this
«introspective» direction. There is nothing offensive or unintelligent, per
se, in these songs about complicated relationships and personality crises: it
is just one of those cases where you almost wish something were offensive or openly dumb — anything at all to break this
languid, go-nowhere crust of mediocrity. Unfortunately, at this point, with Grinning Streak getting even more positive reviews from critics who
seem to be completely forgetting what it used to mean to be «fun» in rock
music, it does not seem likely that
Robertson will be swerving from this steady, unadventurous,
concrete-laden path any time soon, so here is another thumbs down in a series that,
probably, has not yet run its course.
SILVERBALL (2015)
1) Get Back Up; 2) Here
Before; 3) Matter Of Time; 4) Duct Tape Heart; 5) Say What You Want; 6) Passcode;
7) Hold My Hand; 8) Narrow Streets; 9) Toe To Toe; 10) Piece Of Cake; 11)
Globetrot; 12) Silverball; 13) Tired Of Fighting With You.
Honestly, by the time the Pageless Barenaked
Ladies released their third album, I have forgotten everything about every
single note off the previous two — so either I have become a softie over the
last two years, or Silverball is
actually a slight improvement, because this time around, I would not describe
the record as a «languid, go-nowhere crust of mediocrity». It is a bit languid,
sure, and it is somewhat mediocre,
but it also seems as if Robertson finally got his head out of that «maturity
oven» and started paying a little attention to hooks — which, really, should be
your first concern if what you are making is an album of pop songs, and Silverball sure as heck ain't cosmic
psychedelia or ambitious symph-rock.
I have no idea why they decided to kick-start
the record with a Blue Öyster Cult-style hard rock riff, when in reality
ʽGet Back Upʼ is just a mainstream pop-rock song in the style of
pre-slutty era Miley Cyrus — a program song, in which Robertson asserts his
right to solid mediocrity ("not everything is sink or swim") while at
the same time, perhaps, admitting that things had indeed taken a turn for the
worse over the previous years ("I'm a little bit worse for wear").
Well, okay, if a tepidly produced hard rock bridge section helps you get back
up, so be it — the question is, can the rest of the album actually satisfy the
pledge?
Well, if you accept that for the Ladies, «up»
really means «rocking back and forth in a cozy rocking chair by the fireplace»,
then it does. Most of these songs are predictably cuddly, but they are also
bouncy, fast-paced, and focused on catchy choruses — a type of unassuming
domesticity that I could see as successful, sort of like a tribute album to
ʽWhen I'm Sixty Fourʼ, even if none of the band members are even
close to that age border at the moment. Regardless of whether the song in
question is electric power-pop with an anthemic refrain (ʽHere
Beforeʼ), soft toe-tappy country-pop with a cute electronic lining
(ʽMatter Of Timeʼ), or a nostalgic throwback to Eighties synth-pop à la ABC or Duran Duran
(ʽDuct Tape Heartʼ), they all share two things — soft introspective
sentimentality-vulnerability and a genuinely singalong chorus, sometimes
supported with strategically placed harmonies (like the woo-woos on ʽDuct
Tape Heartʼ).
This does not cure the music of its main
illness — complete lack of teeth, particularly deep biters that could tear a
serious hole in your soul. This is indie on the level of, say, Badly Drawn Boy,
more appropriate for a second-rate Pixar movie soundtrack or some other family
entertainment franchise than for anyone who wants to experience the true power
of music. But, surprisingly, song after song they succeed in populating the
melodies with hooks — either a fun keyboard line, or a nice vocal twist, or an
odd retro move (like that flourish at the start of ʽPiece Of Cakeʼ
that seems to have been borrowed out of some ambitious disco piece circa 1978),
and as they accumulate, it slowly leads me to the inevitable conclusion: Silverball is an album that at least
has a right and reason to exist, unlike its two predecessors. As George
Harrison once wrote — "When your teeth drop out / You'll get by even
without taking a bite", a perfect sentence to be used as a tagline for
this album and this stage of the band's career in general.
And the best song on the album? As much as
Kevin Hearn's ʽDaydreamin'ʼ was a bore, ʽTired Of Fighting With
Youʼ is a touch of humble beauty; it helps to know that the song was
written during his latest bout with the freshly returned leukemia, but even
without that knowledge the vocals, the lyrics, the gently descending waves of
melody cut straight to the heart this time. The title of the song and the way
it is stretched over the chorus might trigger faraway associations with the
Kinks' ʽTired Of Waiting For Youʼ, with which the tune also shares
its aura of tender melancholy, but not its subject matter — actually, I guess
this might be one of the tenderest songs about a lethal illness ever written.
Anyway, I would like to advance the record its thumbs up: even if there is very little here that
would make me want to return to the album now, I do feel like I could easily
return here as I advance in age — the whole thing is so homely and cuddly and
insists on tackling serious problems and issues in the softest, politest,
gentlest ways possible that it would make the perfect soundtrack for nursing
homes. And many of us will eventually end up in nursing homes, so it's always
wise to stack up a little something for future use.
ADDENDA:
STOP US IF YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE! (2012)
1) I Don't Get It Anymore; 2)
Yes! Yes!! Yes!!!; 3) Half A Heart; 4) Old Apartment; 5) Shake Your Rump; 6)
Same Thing; 7) One Week; 8) Teenage Wasteland; 9) Long While; 10) Second Best;
11) I Can, I Will, I Do; 12) Adrift.
Considering how productive Page and Robertson
had shown themselves to be over the centuries, one would think it reasonable to
suggest they might have a shitload more of stuff in the vaults — enough to fill
out a boxset or two, and delight the fans, especially those that admire the
band's «serious» side as sincerely as their «quirky» side. Moreover, some
dedicated and knowledgeable fans occasionally confirm that suspicion — which
makes it all the more surprising why the heck is the band's only archival CD, containing a modest
46-minutes worth amount of music, focused almost exclusively on alternate
versions of already well-known tracks, always inferior ones and sometimes
differing only in regard to the mix.
The official explanation is that the record was
originally planned as a «companion» to a proper best-of package (Hits From Yesterday & The Days Before),
but something went awry, the two projects could not be properly synchronized,
and eventually the rarities package got delayed and was released as a separate
entity one year later. Regardless, it's a fairly pointless entity. The only
track that is worth some interest is the previously available single B-side
ʽYes! Yes!! Yes!!!ʼ, a fun, catchy power-popster co-written by Hearn
and containing one of the fuzziest riffs in Barenaked Ladies history
(although, might I add that the cheesy synthesizer line that comes in to double
the riff adds a suspicious whiff of a teen-oriented summer-themed video game).
Maybe it is also possible to throw together some excitement for the unfinished
electric demo of ʽLong Whileʼ, but there is nothing special about it.
Technically, there is also some live stuff here
that could be useful for fans — early performances of ʽSame Thingʼ
and some pointless bore that is arrogantly titled ʽTeenage Wastelandʼ,
preceded by silly jokes on the art of performing in the German language and
eventually transforming itself into a subsconscious, but flaccid, tribute to
Otis Redding's cover of ʽSatisfactionʼ. Yes, there is also a live run
through a Beastie Boys song (ʽShake Your Rumpʼ), but I see no point
in the Barenaked Ladies covering the Beastie Boys other than informing their
audience that they do, in fact, love the Beastie Boys, which we already know
because of ʽOne Nightʼ etc.
Everything else is just demos and alternate
mixes of songs that weren't that good to begin with (ʽI Can, I Will, I
Doʼ), or, on the contrary, songs that were already perfect (ʽOne
Nightʼ) and needed no further undisclosed variations. In short, this whole
package is more for the historiographer of the Barenaked Ladies than even the
loyal fan; maybe someday Robertson might learn how to get it right, but until
then, you might want to trust my thumbs down on this.
HEX (1994)
1) The Loom; 2) A Street
Scene; 3) Absent Friend; 4) Big Shot; 5) Eyes & Smiles; 6) Fingerspit; 7)
Pendulum Man.
Even if I hated this record and this band, it
would still be worth reviewing for two things alone. First, Bark Psychosis were
originally formed in 1986 as — get this — a Napalm
Death cover band. Second, eight years later, when their full-length debut
finally came out, their music was dubbed «post-rock» in Mojo magazine, and this
is where the term, now much more commonly associated with better known acts
such as GY!BE and Sigur Rós, allegedly had its true beginnings. To go
from «grindcore» to «post-rock» in less than a decade, and not for any sort of
commercial or fashionist decision, but simply obeying the tug of one's heart —
well, this is definitely something that merits respect.
The band itself was largely the brainchild of
Graham Sutton, a smart and sensitive kid from Hackney, and Hex was far from his first offering to the world — before that, the
band had produced several singles and EPs, including the 21-minute long track
ʽScumʼ, which gained appraisal in 1992: this really was their first
attempt at a musical «post-rock manifesto» of sorts, and the ideas invested in
that track found further development in Hex,
a collection of lengthy, meandering, and sometimes almost purringly soft...
songs? jams? textures? soundscapes? whatever. «Post-rock» was
originally defined as «non-rock music played using rock instrumentation», but
that is a vague definition — and although, in retrospect, the roots of
«post-rock» are usually seen in the classic albums of Talk Talk, Bark Psychosis
really sound nothing like Mark Hollis and the gang. They sound closer to Hollis and the gang than to
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, that is for sure. But not close enough.
The big reason why an album like Hex is revered in certain critical
circles, yet has never managed to become as popular as those Talk Talk
records, is most probably because it is unassuming.
Listening to Spirit Of Eden, you get
a very clear sense of being involved in something grand, like the early stages
of some terraforming process — the compositions are wholesome, slowly unveiling
before your eyes and aspiring to tremendous seriousness (you could argue
whether or not they actually get where they're going, but Mark Hollis' stature
as a musical prophet remains undiminished by these arguments). Sutton, on the
other hand, has no such aspirations: his music is almost always subdued, its
ambience is never betrayed by crescendos or climaxes, and if the listener needs
to be shaken up a little, well, the harshest that Hex can get is by means of some crunchy jolt from a distorted jazzy
bassline — quite a long distance, isn't it, from your everyday Napalm Death
standards?
In all, the musical genre that Hex comes closest to, outside of
«rock», is arguably lounge jazz — with slight touches of R&B, chamber/dream
pop, and New Age. It is one of those works-better-at-night records that
requires getting into a certain lazy, hazy, dreamy mood which can carry you
away; anything other than that and most of the compositions will look extremely
boring, since, you know, this is not Talk Talk; this is a record that focuses
on abstract beauty without getting too emotional or overworked about it.
«Musical hooks» do not exist in this place — all hints at sharpness of sound
have been meticulously eradicated, replaced by smoothness and fluidity that
work at a strictly subconscious level, provided they work at all. And yet, at
the same time this is not just a collection of trance-inducing grooves: as a
rule, these are multi-part, dynamic compositions that know how to shift
melodies and tempos. For instance, ʽThe Loomʼ begins as a romantic
piano-and-strings ballad, then adds polyrhythmic percussion, then adds ambient
keyboards, then drops pianos and strings, then adds a noisy coda that may or
may not resemble the actual sounds produced by a power loom. ʽA Street
Sceneʼ begins like a soft jazz piece with energetic percussion, adult contemporary
synths in the background and noisy feedback in the middle ground — but it ends
almost without any percussion at all (just a few cymbal clicks), as a minimalistic
guitar piece with some keyboard ruffles around the edges. And this is totally
typical of the rest of the album as well.
I must confess to a primitive sort of reaction:
everything on Hex sounds «tepid» to
me, too much going on for me to treat it as a quintessential ambient record,
but way too little to get me genuinely involved and moved. Had Sutton and his
backing band displayed just a tad less creativity, we could all just agree that
they tried to make a generic smooth jazz album with guitars and electronics,
and the results were predictably yawn-inducing. But the internal dynamics of
the compositions is so utterly undeniable that I almost feel bad for not
«feeling» this all the way through; the concept of the album, in fact, sounds
much more exciting on paper than when you listen to this stuff in real time. In
all, this is tons more creative than Sade, but if you were to make a desert
island choice, you'd have to go along
with ʽSmooth Operatorʼ, because Hex
is just no soundtrack for survival on a desert island.
Nevertheless, judging from a sheerly
intellectual side, the record is an undeniable thumbs up all the way through — in
fact, if you have not developed sufficient respect for it by the third listen,
I would advise coming back to it over and over again, just because it is so
full of nuances. I mean, who knows, it might actually be one of the biggest
musical riddles of the decade — in terms of how many different genres it
borrows from and in terms of the final meaning of this synthesis. It is rock,
it is prog, it is jazz, it is ambient, and it is also none of these, so what is
it? And what exactly could, or should, it trigger in our minds once the spell
finally begins to work? Count me genuinely befuddled, and I usually give out
thumbs up when I'm befuddled, just to be on the safe side. Unless I prefer to
abstain, but that usually happens with records that defy the notion of melody,
whereas Bark Psychosis have the highest respect for melody.
CODENAME: DUSTSUCKER (2004)
1) From What Is Said To When
It's Read; 2) The Black Meat; 3) Miss Abuse; 4) 400 Winters; 5) Dr. Innocuous /
Retarded; 6) Burning The City; 7) Inqb8tr; 8) Shapeshifting; 9) Rose.
Although Graham Sutton has always been the
hands, brains, guts, and sprites behind Bark Psychosis, «the band» and «the
man» are not complete synonyms. Soon after the release of Hex and a companion EP (Blue),
the band was dissolved, and Sutton moved on to other things for which the name
«Bark Psychosis» was deemed inappropriate (such as the drum-and-bass project
Boymerang with former B.P. member Daniel Gish, or the experimental combo
.O.rang, where he worked with several of the former members of Talk Talk).
However, beginning in approximately 1999, Sutton once again started recording
music «Bark Psychosis-style» — realizing, perhaps, that this sort of abstract
atmospheric soundscapes came to him more natural than anything else. Or maybe
he just wanted another change, and why not a nostalgic one?
In any case, Codename: Dustsucker (I omit the three slashes that come with the
title because they're ugly), named after Sutton's own studio called DustSucker
Sound, does pick up more or less from the same spot where Hex left off, or, rather, from the same wispy cloud where Hex left off, because any memories of
that album are just bound to be very, very hazy. And when it comes to haziness,
Dustsucker does not disappoint,
either: any attempt to «lay a finger» on even one of these tracks has been
futile for me. Arranging this album on the shelves of one's brain is a little
like trying to cut through jelly — it's all there, and it might even be quite
tasty, but good luck dissecting it and trying to differentiate between
different parts.
Technically, the album reflects Sutton's
musical education over the previous decade, and its use of electronics and
sampling makes it «modern» enough, I suppose, to make it at least palatable, if
not necessarily attractive, to all those normally skeptical of «artistic
comebacks» by people whose association with the previous decade had already
destroyed their credibility in this one. But the truth of the matter is, Sutton
seems much less concerned with following trends and proving his «relevance» to anybody
than he is with simply pursuing his elusive, twisted muse. Just like Hex, this record, too, is destined for
critical respect rather than popularity — in another attempt to create an
emotional masterpiece, Sutton has instead created an intellectual conundrum
that some will hate, a few will love, some will pretend to love, and a few more
— like yours truly — will simply be baffled about.
The song structures are this time, if at all
possible, even more dense and complicated, and yet at the same time there is a
distinct intuitive feeling that nothing whatsoever is really going on — that
it's all just an endless series of variations on the «wind in the willows»
theme. For instance, in the middle of the opening track, ʽFrom What Is
Said To When It's Readʼ, which begins as a soothing New Age-style lullaby,
all magical-enchanted droning guitars and elfish backing vocals, there comes a
jarring feedback crash, as if some explosive container has just burst open, and
suddenly everything is covered in the dusty ashes of rumbly distortion. But
has anything really changed? No. It's
not the way it sometimes happens on black-folk-metal albums — "now we're
all jangly and quiet and medieval and mystical", "and now we have
POWEEEEER!" Even the explosion is handled cautiously and quietly. You
might not even notice that it took place. But it did, and the effect is
rather... strange.
Another such «now you see it, now you don't»
type of change is observable, for instance, on ʽMiss Abuseʼ. For the
first minute and a half, it just stealthily creeps along on a diet of soft
brushed percussion, some overlapping chiming rhythms, and dark hushed
half-sung, half-spoken vocals. Then a menacing fuzzy bassline claims part of
the territory, striking up some suspense. Then, after a brief, somewhat
free-form, interlude, we seem to
return to the same basic melodies, but a grumbly electronic pulse has set in,
and for a few more minutes we have been locked in a groove that is,
atmosphere-wise, completely different: distant and winterishly cold, rather
than intimate and autumnally melancholic, where we began. Again, nothing has
changed — and yet, at the same time, everything
has changed.
This formula is not applied everywhere:
sometimes tunes are allowed to end more or less the same way they started — in
particular, on ʽInqb8trʼ, the album's longest and most monotonous
track, where this lack of change is its main weakness: as it is, it just sounds
like a rather generic exercise in smooth jazz jamming, and I have a very hard time convincing myself of its
magical powers, because, you know, repetitive percussion loops and husky vocals
per se are not quite sufficient in
these days of real heavy competition between the many magicians of smooth jazz.
But most of the time, we are indeed witnessing the process of
ʽShapeshiftingʼ, as more and more tunes undergo odd transformations —
on ʽShapeshiftingʼ itself, the funky shoegazing drone and the weepy
vocals of guest star Rachel Dreyer eventually give way to a howling,
screeching, post-Neil Young-ish burst of soloing, after which the song is
stripped of melody and becomes a percussive stroll through a jungle of creepy
electronic effects. Shapeshifting? You bet.
The meaning and the implied effects of all this
are not altogether obvious to me; you will have to decide for yourself whether
the album «works» or if it is merely «strange» (and even that only if you
listen to it attentively enough — otherwise, mistaking it for a run-of-the-mill
New Age offering is easycakes). In any case, there is no reason to be inconsistent
and not give it the same kind of
respectful, but suspicious thumbs up that I already gave Hex: despite the ten years that lie between the two, there is no
feel of any such uncomfortable time gap. Nothing strange about that, either —
Bark Psychosis is one band that seems to exist completely in its own
user-defined dimensions; the concept of «time» is hardly applicable here at
all. Oh, and, just for the record, I also think this is just the kind of
soundtrack that goes perfectly well with reading A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu; certainly Sutton and Proust have a
thing or two in common.
ADDENDA:
INDEPENDENCY (1989-1992; 1994)
1) I Know; 2) Nothing Feels;
3) All Different Things; 4) By Blow; 5) Manman; 6) Blood Rush; 7) Tooled Up; 8)
Scum.
For the serious patient of Bark Psychosis, this
is an indispensable addition to the two full LPs. Independency is a compilation, released in 1994 (the same year as Hex) and collecting, in roughly
chronological order, most of the stuff from their several singles and EPs from
1989 to 1992, altogether more than an hour of post-rock bliss in a state of
growth — starting off with the early «naïve» singles (that's what Sutton
called them himself) and culminating in the 21-minute ʽScumʼ, the
track that literally put Bark Psychosis on the map and paved the ground for the
less monumental, but even more elaborate compositions of Hex.
Indeed, the band's first single often feels as
if they were just so excited with the possibility to lay down some trippy
sounds in a professional studio — ʽAll Different Thingsʼ is really
all about the miracle of phased guitar effects, looped and echoed off each
other during the fussy free-form coda, and ʽBy Blowʼ, true to its
name, explores the idea of how cool it can be when a soft, smooth, lulling New
Age soundscape is gradually transformed into a messy nightmare "by
blow" of the reverberating power chord, gradually gaining in intensity and
frequency, until the Talk Talk-ish air is ripped apart by almost John Zorn-ian
sound bombers. But it doesn't sound particularly professional or grappling —
in fact, Sutton later admitted that they distorted the tapes in the process and
didn't even notice it until it was too late. (Not that you'd ever guess that
the wobbly sound of the track came by accident, rather than artistic decision).
Pending their second single (ʽNothing
Feelsʼ / ʽI Knowʼ, for some reason placed here before the first
one), the really interesting stuff starts with the Manman EP — the heavily rhythmic title track shows a clear techno
influence, but is still imbued with Sutton's usual melancholy and some astral
psychedelics: the guitar-dominated parts are similar to The Cure, but then they
get swapped for keyboards, and it sounds like somebody wanted to record a
completely digital track, but ended up recording the synthesizer parts manually
— in other words, an oddly «homebrewed» version of whatever the real pros in
the techno genre were doing, but also somewhat endearing because of that
factor. The most curious track of the three, though, is ʽTooled Upʼ —
also rhythmic, funky, and it seems as if they sampled the bassline from Talking
Heads' ʽCrosseyed And Painlessʼ for this! Hardly a coincidence, even
if there is hardly anything else in
common between Bark Psychosis and Talking Heads.
As for ʽScumʼ, this is indeed like a
20-minute preview of whatever Hex
would soon be, and as such, somewhat superfluous — there is no serious reason
for it to go over 20 minutes. In fact, there would be no serious reason for any Bark Psychosis track to go over 20
minutes, unless you accept that the nature of their music is totally static (which is not true) and
you just have to treat it as background musical incense. But historically, one
can easily see how this was a sort of milestone for «post-rock»: the freedom
of a psychedelic jam combined with the vague influence of the classical
symphonic form and, in the case of Sutton, also with a strong jazz vibe.
There's a little bit of everything in this track, and they make an adorable job
of reducing it all to Nothing (with a capital N, which means respect, if not
adulation).
Altogether, this is not a particularly
tremendous line of evolution — one would hope for one of those early Napalm
Death covers, but no dice! — but it does reveal several somewhat different
incarnations of the band before they settle into their classic image, and, most
importantly, there is absolutely no telling whether any of these tracks might
strike a hidden chord in you: I'd say there's a big chance of a random music
lover connecting with at least one, which sort of justifies paying one buck for
this compilation if you happen to find it for such a price. But if you're one
of those rare Suttonites who think that Bark Psychosis combined breathtaking
beauty and deep intellectualism like no other Nineties' band, Independency is the required third
shard to complete the Holy Grail of Proto-Post-Rock.
PS. And yes, that's not a bootleg
cover - apparently, the band's name was in Cyrillic letters on the cover of the
original compilation. It does look suspiciously like a Russian bootleg: I
wonder if the band members had access to any of those, or were they simply
influenced so much by Paul McCartney's so-called Choba B CCCP?
GOLDEN FEELINGS (1993)
1) The Fucked Up Blues; 2)
Special People; 3) Magic Station Wagon; 4) No Money No Honey; 5) Trouble All My
Days; 6) Bad Energy; 7) Schmoozer (Feeling Hurter); 8) Heartland Feeling; 9)
Unknown; 10) Super Golden Black Sunchild; 11) Soul Sucked Dry; 12) Unknown; 13)
Feelings; 14) Gettin' Home; 15) Will I Be Ignored By The Lord; 16) Bogus Soul;
17) Totally Confused; 18) Mutherfucker; 19) People Gettin' Busy.
All right, as far as I know, Beck himself has
sort of disowned this album, especially after it was re-released by the Sonic
Enemy label on CD in 1999 — so there is hardly any need to really hold its
existence against him. But there is hardly any need, either, to get acquainted
with it, other than out of sheer curiosity or biographic interest. Strictly
speaking, this isn't even a proper case of «you got to listen to this to know
that even great artists may start out with real shitty records», because it
only really works when you know for sure that the soon-to-be-great artist is unintentionally starting out with a
shit record. Golden Feelings,
however, seems to have been very much an intentionally
shitty record (cassette, to be precise).
Basically, in 1992-93 Beck was hanging out in
L.A., fresh from a folk / anti-folk scene experience in NYC, stuck with a
boring dayjob at a video store (he could
have, perhaps, become the next Tarantino, but what is it, really, that decides
whether your brain gets hung up on music or on film?) and playing really rotten
folk gigs at nightclubs where nobody would be listening to him anyway. In this
kind of context, it is only to easy to make the transition from «folk» to
«anti-folk» (a.k.a. «music you regurgitate back at folk audiences when they
don't like you»), and from there, to sheer musical hooliganry of the ugliest
kind.
The best thing that can be said about Golden Feelings (and I feel fairly sure
the title is really a variation on «golden showers», even if I know I can't
prove it) is that it does display a sick sense of humor. Beck takes it out on
everybody — the straightahead folker, the starry-eyed Donovan kind of folker,
the weathered old bluesman, the Southern country rocker, the passionate soul
man, and even Bruce Springsteen. The «Beck treatment circa 1992-93» means your
style being reproduced on a battered, out-of-tune guitar, sung in a battered,
out-of-tune vocal, with parodic or, in the worst of cases, dumbly repetitive
lyrics — all of it done so passionately that the maliciousness overwhelms the
talent, and only the most congenial intuition could probably spot tiny signs of
the «Beck genius» in any of these tunes.
Nevertheless, far be it from me to deny that
some of this stuff is quite damn funny. The accappella recitation of
ʽSpecial Peopleʼ, for instance, is a hilarious send-up of the «list
principle» in rock lyrics, where almost every second line neutralizes the first
one ("special people create belief, special people steal some beef...
special people are so sincere, special people got special beer") — simple,
stupid, and satisfactory. ʽTrouble All My Daysʼ is something that Tom
Waits could have recorded, had he been hit real hard with a hammer on the
studio threshold. ʽBogus Soulʼ bills itself exactly right, except
that one doesn't even need to squint hard to see how bogus it is (which kinda
takes the sense out of bogus, if you get my meaning). And
ʽMutherfukerʼ sounds so much like a good old Ween tune that it would
be hard for me to believe that Beck never got the Boognish fever while
drifting around the East Coast. Not impossible, but hard.
Probably the best of the bunch — and also one
of the few numbers here that might approach the status of a «real song» — is
ʽHeartland Feelingʼ, starting out as a spoken recommendation to write
songs in the style of John Cougar Mellencamp ("music of a heartland
quality, just powerful straightforward music") and then turning into a
playful folk rumination on losers and their lives: "He's only a person /
Who doesn't know shit / Nothin' happenin' / That's about it", which is probably
a chorus that John Cougar Mellencamp couldn't ever afford — but, in a way, is
better than every John Cougar Mellencamp chorus ever created.
Other «songs» on Golden Feelings may be counted
on one's fingers, and, besides, they would soon be re-recorded in more polished
versions on Beck's next album. ʽGettin' Homeʼ is a nice little
country blues shuffle, running about three out of four minutes too long, but
with a moody enough, if not too original, chord change. ʽTotally
Confusedʼ also seems to take itself a pinch more seriously than the
average track on here — at the very least, it could be deemed «personal»,
seeing as how Beck must have been totally
confused at the time.
The guy's interest in things other than «folk»
and «anti-folk» is already evident: some of the shorter tracks contain muffled
samples, some experiment with noise (rather boringly, I'd say), but it is
interesting that Beck preferred not to include the one tune that would
eventually propel him into the limelight — the sarcastic hip-hop anthem
ʽLoserʼ, with Beck rapping over a sampled slide guitar melody —
apparently he thought of that one as totally unsuitable for the overall mood of
Golden Feelings. Which could,
altogether, be described as «hangover folk muzak, fresh from the toilet seat».
But do help yourself if you feel like it.
A WESTERN HARVEST FIELD BY MOONLIGHT (1994)
1) Totally Confused; 2)
Mayonaise Salad; 3) Gettin' Home; 4) Blackfire Choked Our Death; 5) Feel Like A
Piece Of Shit (Mind Control); 6) She Is All (Gimme Something To Eat); 7)
Pinefresh; 8) Lampshade; 9) Feel Like A Piece Of Shit (Crossover Potential);
10) Mango (Vader Rocks!); 11) Feel Like A Piece Of Shit (Cheetos Time!); 12)
Styrofoam Chicken (Quality Time).
A bit too long for a proper EP, seriously too
short for a proper LP, this release probably deserves only a brief mention,
mostly for housing Beck's first ever decently produced composition — a new version
of ʽTotally Confusedʼ, with proper acoustic guitar, bass, percussion,
and even some moody (but seemingly uncredited) female backup vocals for the
sake of extra richness of experience. It was already one of the most
meaningful tracks on Golden Feelings,
and here its lazy loser vibe is expanded with a helpful wave of tenderness.
Other than that, this humble EP, limited to 7,000 copies upon initial release
(but each with its own unique finger-painting!), consists of the following
audio elements:
— two more acoustic folk songs: ʽGettin'
Homeʼ is the exact same version as the one on Golden Feelings, and ʽLampshadeʼ is a newly written
guitar-and-harmonica ode to killing time that all the Jeff Lebowskis in the
world would find very easy to identify with;
— three versions of the same, slightly
disturbing, electronic loop (ʽFeel Like A Piece Of Shitʼ) taken at
different speeds in order to illustrate the differences between different
feelings of different types of pieces of shit (my personal interpretation; I'm
pretty sure there might be others, but who in his right mind would really
bother?);
— several short pieces of randomized stuffing,
including what sounds like absent-minded tuning prior to launching into a
Spanish serenade (ʽPinefreshʼ), what sounds like a one-minute tribute
to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music
(ʽMayonaise Saladʼ), what sounds like an attempt at acoustic-based
psychedelic folk mood piece (ʽMangoʼ), and what sounds like a
never-ending noise loop (on the vinyl version) reminding you to switch off your
turntable (ʽStyrofoam Chickenʼ).
In other words, it's just one of those
«freedom-asserting» indie releases whose only function is of a reputational
nature. It takes the guy exactly twenty minutes to let us know that (a) he will
not be pigeonholed; (b) he will neither shy away from recording fart noises if
his individuality requires such an act, nor from trying to sell them to us; (c)
he does have talent, but it is entirely up to him if he wants or does not want
to make use of it at any particular time. I get the message all right, but this
time, I wouldn't let it fool me into declining a thumbs down reaction, even if it
means lapsing back into old boring predictability. Serious Beck aficionados
will need this to complete their collections — psychiatrists might need this as promising research
material — the rest of us hardly need think of it even in terms of bare
curiosity.
STEREOPATHETIC SOULMANURE (1994)
1) Pink Noise (Rock Me
Amadeus); 2) Rowboat; 3) Thunder Peel; 4) Waitin' For A Train; 5) The Spirit
Moves Me; 6) Crystal Clear (Beer); 7) No Money No Honey; 8) 8.6.82; 9) Total
Soul Future (Eat It); 10) One Foot In The Grave; 11) Aphid Manure Heist; 12)
Today Has Been A Fucked Up Day; 13) Cut 1/2 Blues; 14) Jagermeister Pie; 15)
Ozzy; 16) Dead Wild Cat; 17) Satan Gave Me A Taco; 18) 8.4.82; 19) Tasergun;
20) Modesto; 21) Ken; 22) Bonus Noise.
Apparently, this was released on the
independent Flipside label just one week prior to Mellow Gold — reflecting Beck's strange fluctuation between his
«accessible» and «batshit» sides that kept going all through 1994. The most
brilliant thing about the record is its title, which more or less adequately
reflects its contents — however, this is also the perfect album to get for those who are curious about Beck's
darker side, but are reluctant to engage in completism. At the very least, this
piece of product is a little better structured, and certainly much better
produced, than Golden Feelings. I
could even understand somebody actually liking
it, rather than shrugging shoulders and asking, «...is this really what we were fighting the rock'n'roll revolution
for?..»...
...which is not to say that I like it, not in the least. The huge
number of tracks is justified by their unpredictable diversity — we have
everything here, from acoustic blues to country to garage rock to electronica
to samples running wild, but, as usual, everything is so utterly experimental
that failures, by far, outweigh successes. There is a lot of ideas — and a
brave, but fatal refusal to elaborate on any of them. As in, something like
ʽOzzyʼ will start out as a moody acoustic rock piece, built around a
sarcastic lambasting of the title character (yes, I suppose it is that Ozzy: one can hardly err, with
lines like "there's mascara bleeding out of your eyes" and
"there's a giant chicken claw above your head"), but ultimately
consists of a basic strum, an echoey "Ozzy, Ozzy, Ozzy", and a
mumbled, seemingly improvised recital. There is a tiny seed of ironic greatness
somewhere in here, but it is not given any time to grow.
More or less finalized pieces here include two
plaintive country ballads (ʽRowboatʼ, ʽModestoʼ) that sound
a little like Neil Young parodies (and we could always use a good Neil Young
parody, that's for sure); the Sonic Youth-style noise-rock-fest ʽTasergunʼ,
rather pointless if you already know and love Sonic Youth; the pseudo-Piedmont
blues of ʽCrystal Clear (Beer)ʼ; and probably the album opener,
ʽPink Noiseʼ, which has really nothing in common with ʽRock Me
Amadeusʼ, despite being subtitled that way, and once again plunges us into
noise territory, this time arguably reminiscent more of the original Velvet
Underground with its drunk guitar swoops. But even all of these «accomplished»
pieces wobble between «parody», «homage», and «drunken hooliganry» rather than
making some autonomous point of their own. They do sound sharper and clearer
than they used to before, enhancing the illusion of «accomplishment».
Wrapped around these pieces are interminable
snippets of acoustic (anti-)folk, harmonica and violin drones, warped vocals
imitating either Tom Waits or a blind pre-war blueswailer, chainsaws, news
reports, and assorted freakouts — if you really force yourself to pay
attention, one or two of these bits may come across as funny, but that's just
me being overtly optimistic. Furthermore, as if all this random crap (or,
Beckademically-speaking, «soulmanure») over the main body of the album weren't
enough, there are 16 more minutes of «hidden» ʽBonus Noiseʼ tacked to
the end — enjoy, and have a nice day.
MELLOW GOLD (1994)
1) Loser; 2) Pay No Mind
(Snoozer); 3) Fuckin With My Head (Mountain Dew Rock); 4) Whiskeyclone, Hotel
City 1997; 5) Soul Suckin Jerk; 6) Truckdrivin Neighbors Downstairs (Yellow
Sweat); 7) Sweet Sunshine; 8) Beercan; 9) Steal My Body Home; 10) Nitemare
Hippy Girl; 11) Mutherfuker; 12) Blackhole.
One theory that explains the surprising
commercial success of Mellow Gold is
simply that its attitude appealed so much to the new generation of slackers all
over the US and worldwide, they went ahead and made it into their personal
Bible of 1994. There is, however, a big hole in that theory — namely, where did
all those slackers get the money to buy the album? Naturally, there are a
hundred thousand different ways for a slacker to solve his financial problems,
but then... would not being able to
afford Mellow Gold really count as a
genuine financial problem, in need of an immediate solution? Who knows, really.
There is another theory, though — one that also
acknowledges the purely musical merits of Mellow
Gold, and states that Beck's meticulous fusion of the archaic and the
contemporary, achieved here in a most understandable and accessible manner, was
so unprecedented and intriguing that there was simply no way it could not transform the guy into the hottest
new thing around town. Let's face it: even though, once we get to the bottom of
it, country blues and hip-hop ultimately stem from pretty much the same source
(lower class Afro-American layer, that is), it isn't every day that somebody
proposes to knock 'em back together in a single package — all the more surprising
that it took a hunk of «pseudo-white trash» to carry out that operation.
Allegedly, Beck himself was of no high opinion
of ʽLoserʼ, which he only reluctantly submitted to release as a
single — to him, this was a mediocre experiment like many others, maybe just a
little more elaborate than the majority of his «stereopathetic soulmanure»
products. But he was wrong — unlike most of these products, ʽLoserʼ
had the golden touch for everybody. Critics loved the unholy union of slide
guitars (roots!), sitars (psycho!), and hip-hop rhythms / vocals (modern
cool!), and simple fans were awestruck with the chorus: "I'm a loser baby,
so why don't you kill me?" was so poignant... and «sing-along-able»: readymade national anthem for a small army
at least, or maybe, who knows, even a large one.
As ʽLoserʼ deservedly jump-started
the process of turning Beck from street rat to major star, he must have warmed
up to its nature — because, frankly speaking, ideology-wise most of Mellow Gold, his proper major label
(Geffen) debut, sounds like variations on the same topic: combining elements of
roots-rock music, psychedelia, and «modern street rhythmics» to form a
soundtrack for losers, outcasts, and downshifters the world over. «Slacker
music», come to think of it, is not a very good term — Beck himself has always
hated it, rightfully pointing out that he was never a «slacker» as such. «Urban
loser music» is more like it, although we would also need to throw in Beck's
little fetish of mysophilia as well: few records have more mentions of toilets,
manure, scum, puke, etc. per square inch than Mellow Gold allows itself in forty-five minutes. Urban losers come
in different sorts and sizes; Beck's version is a particularly smelly one.
Not that any of us should mind, since, on the
whole, Mellow Gold's basic intention
is never one of grossing you out — that can happen, sometimes, as an
unintentional, or desirable, side effect, like it does in Pulp Fiction (to which Mellow
Gold, from certain angles, relates like its musical twin from the same
year), but above everything else, it is a musically interesting construction,
stylistically uniform and variegated at the same time. Hip-hop rhythms,
rapping, and sampling frequently make part of it, but they do not lie in the
foundation — which is strictly occupied with chord sequences learned, borrowed,
or based on Beck's knowledge of the rustic tradition; so, in a way, he is doing
here much the same thing as Dylan was doing back in 1965, rebooting the old
franchise in a manner fit for the moods and airs of thirty years forward.
In terms of immediate memorability, it is the
loud, obnoxious numbers that steal the show — ʽLoserʼ is an
impeccable opener, but then there is also ʽSoul Suckin' Jerkʼ
(continuing with the analogy, "I ain't gonna work for no soul suckin'
jerk, I'm gonna take it all back and I ain't sayin' jack" is the 1994
equivalent of "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more") — great
combo of swampy acoustic guitar and harmonica with rudely distorted fuzz bass
on that one; ʽSweet Sunshineʼ, which fits its title very well if one
interprets «sunshine» as «nuclear explosion flash» (the instrumental part is
like a very bad, very perverse acid trip); and a new, improved, beefed up version
of ʽMutherfukerʼ that now sounds very much like stoner rock with a
screwdriver up its ass, as spontaneously as that simile is generated.
Then, over time, one also gets warmed to the
quieter, subtler stuff — the «anti-depressed» (so called because they should be
expected to sound depressing, but in reality sound like the singer has already
transcended that silly, pesky emotion) acoustic ballads like ʽPay No
Mindʼ, ʽNitemare Hippy Girlʼ, ʽWhiskeycloneʼ, or the
solemn, quasi-Eastern album closer ʽBlackholeʼ. There is no
compositional genius here, but the hooks and moods are quite efficient, without
any traces of taking themselves too seriously or exercising any self-pity, but
still aspiring to some importance. ʽBlackholeʼ, in particular, almost
invites you to meditate to its rhythmic waves of guitars and strings, and then
you realize that a large segment of the album is, indeed, meditative in nature,
even some of the heavier numbers — because, after all, what is a sla... er, urban loser supposed to
do other than just drift away into the depths of his subconscious and hope that
he might find peace of mind is waiting there, to quote another famous
«slacker»?
All in all, Mellow Gold is one of those records that do provoke different
reactions depending on the number of times you have listened to them, the
context in which you heard them, the mood in which you find yourself at the
moment, and, of course, the ability to judge avantgarde artistic statements
both on their own terms and on common
grounds — good news for me is that I actually happen to like the record not
just because it is «weird» or «innovative», but because it shows a streak of
very individualistic, very unusual wisdom. As a collection of great individual
songs, it may not be Beck's finest hour; but as one of the most important
cohesive albums of the decade, it
just might be. At the very least, it more than deserves its exalted thumbs up.
ONE FOOT IN THE GRAVE (1994)
1) He's A Mighty Good Leader;
2) Sleeping Bag; 3) I Get Lonesome; 4) Burnt Orange Peel; 5) Cyanide Breath
Mint; 6) See Water; 7) Ziplock Bag; 8) Hollow Log; 9) Forcefield; 10) Fourteen
Rivers Fourteen Floods; 11) Asshole; 12) I've Seen The Land Beyond; 13)
Outcome; 14) Girl Dreams; 15) Painted Eyelids; 16) Atmospheric Conditions; 17)
It's All In Your Mind; 18) Feather In Your Cap; 19) Whiskey Can Can.
Beck's last original release on an indie label
is arguably the most accessible of his «experimental snippet» collections —
where one can spot talent and intelligence without too much irritation. Or, to
put it differently, where Beck's pissed-off «anti-folk» hooliganry, generated
by one too many downers, slightly abates in favor of pensiveness and
seriousness. Not to mention that it is also the best produced record in the
whole group: no more of that «bedroom aura» which, in retrospect, feels so
unnecessarily pretentious.
Which is not to say that the album is a «must
hear» — this is the kind of stuff that helps you put Beck in a larger context
and understand where it all comes from, but certainly not the kind of stuff
that could help put the guy in any «rock'n'roll hall of fame», officially or
informally. Just sixteen more snippets, ranging from acoustic blues and folk to
rowdy noisefests — carrying on with the post-modern take on Neil Young. The
material was recorded before the
release of Mellow Gold, so it does
not yet bear the seal of an emerging superstar, but it is quite possible that,
at this point, Beck was still testing out several roads to follow, and, had Mellow Gold not proven to be such an
overwhelming success, we could have
yet witnessed the guy burying his samplers and going on to pursue this strange
path of trying to update ye olde Americana for the 1990s, rather than simply
get inspired by some of it.
The guy with the somewhat vacant stare to the
left of Beck on the album sleeve is hardly one of the nobodys: Calvin Johnson,
one of the seminal figures in American underground, father of Beat Happening,
Go Team, Dub Narcotic Sound System, and other projects, who acted as producer
for this album, provided his own label's services to release it (K Records) and
also co-wrote and co-sang the final track (ʽAtmospheric Conditionsʼ)
in his trademark bass drone. This is probably an important «legacy link», but
on the whole, the album certainly does not look like an equal parts
collaboration — it's the Hansen show all along.
I am not sure how much actual composing was
involved here: quite a few of the songs are nothing but traditional old tunes,
set to new lyrics — ʽFourteen Rivers Fourteen Floodsʼ, for instance,
is based on the old ʽSittin' On Top Of The Worldʼ / ʽYou Gotta
Moveʼ set of chords, sliding and vibrating in deliciously authentic
Thirties fashion; ʽI've Seen The Land Beyondʼ is a guessable
variation on the Woody Guthrie style; ʽPainted Eyelidsʼ never goes
beyond a standard up-and-down rockin'-horse country rhythm, and so on. In any
case, the deal is not really about finding new sounds — it's all about
relocating Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, and Jimmy Rodgers away from crossroads,
plantations, and railway stations to the big modern city, without improving the
conditions. ʽPainted Eyelidsʼ, in typical Beck fashion, continues to
tell us about trash bags, sewer drains, chemicals, and debris — only this time,
with clean sound, well-tuned acoustic guitars and pleasant, dreamy singing
styles.
Some of the tunes eventually forget about their
pre-war commitments and veer off into grim indie pop territory — sometimes,
with pretty cool results, as it happens on ʽAssholeʼ, a particularly
good one because it has what I call the «Lennon effect»: a seemingly trivial
melody that is nevertheless delivered with a subtle intensity and then
resolved into some sense-shocking hook, like a discharge of slowly accumulating
electricity, in this case, Beck's subliminal "she'll do anything, she'll
do anything..." turning round and slapping you in the face with
"...to make you feel like an asshole". These turns of events are
quite common on Lennon's acoustic material, and here, Beck lets us know that he
can have the same touch if he just keeps focused on it.
The screechy / noisy numbers on the album are,
in comparison, rather scant — ʽBurnt Orange Peelʼ is a fuzzy
comic-rocker à la Pixies,
ʽZiplock Bagʼ is ugly noise-blues with harmonica blown through
Lucifer's own sonic filter... and that's about it, actually, unless we also
throw in a few dissonant overdubs on ʽAtmospheric Conditionsʼ. They
seem mostly to have been placed here for diversity's sake, so that the album
couldn't be that easily pigeonholed.
But no worry: even without the electric numbers, it is not easy to place it
into any one particular category.
Despite all the obvious shortcomings (or, at
least, all of its obvious aspects that could be easily called «shortcomings» by those who think that the real Beck begins
with Mellow Gold and continues
straight on with Odelay), I think
the record deserves a thumbs up. At the very least, it could, and maybe
even should, be taken seriously. Stereopathetic
Soulmanure was still «punk» in spirit — and, consequently, quite
contradictory, because Beck Hansen's guts aren't really punk. This stuff, on the contrary, does seem
to stem directly from the guts. Sure, it is more about an individual artist's
guts than about shaking up the musical world of the mid-Nineties, but it should
usually be an interesting venture — peek into the guts of an artist who dared
to try and shake up the musical world all around him.
PS: Additionally, the idea that the album must
have meant much more to Beck than Golden
Feelings or Soulmanure is
indirectly confirmed by its having been re-released in 2009 in the form of a
«deluxe» edition, with an overwhelming sixteen
extra tracks from the same sessions — I have not heard them, and I do not
really believe they could significantly swerve one's judgement into either
direction, but the very fact that Beck took such good care of this part of his
legacy is well worth noting.
ODELAY (1996)
1) Devil's Haircut; 2) Hotwax;
3) Lord Only Knows; 4) The New Pollution; 5) Derelict; 6) Novacane; 7)
Jack-Ass; 8) Where It's At; 9) Minus; 10) Sissyneck; 11) Readymade; 12) High 5
(Rock The Catskills); 13) Ramshackle; 14*) Computer Rock.
Looking back on the huge amount of lavish
praise that Odelay had garnered upon
release — for many a critic, the album was almost like a super-symbol of the
mid-1990s — the record seems to have taken more of a beating recently, still
standing the test of time, but not without bloodstains and lacerations. Judging
by various «amateur» opinions on the Web, what seemed trendy, audacious,
boundary-melting, and just plain «hip» at the time slowly comes to be regarded
as a temporary, and somewhat silly, triumph of cool form over thin substance.
As a new wave of artists, inspired by Beck's genre mish-mashing, made people
get over the initial excitement, more and more of them began to realize that...
yeah, cool is cool, but does Odelay
really have all that replay value? Is there, like, a message in there? How has it really enriched humanity and all?
Admittedly, there is nothing shameful or
unethical in the want to take Odelay
down a peg or two. It captured one of those rogue «Zeitgeists» which one never
really knows how to treat properly — by appeasing them or flogging them away —
but it does not really have the kind of emotional depth that is usually
required for a de-luxe pedestal: if there ever was the slightest chance of Beck
wearing the «Most Important Artist of the Decade» crown, the release of OK Computer the next year would bury it
forever, branding him as one of the industry's leading tricksters instead. And
now, way too often, the actual tricks seem dated and not even particularly
curious.
But it is also unwise to go all the way to the other side of the pole — whatever be the
case, Odelay is not just an
experimental hackjob carried out by a no-goodnik with too much free time on his
hands. It is a logical follow-up to Mellow
Gold, carrying Beck's penchant for genre-fusing to its culmination, and it
certainly does not lack emotional
content — it merely conceals the troubled singer-songwriter behind a thick
wall of overdubs, and it may be a little difficult to extract him from behind
that wall if one is not familiar with Beck's history of trouble and toil. If
anything, this is the proper use of
Beck's early indie albums: they may be technically flawed on their own level,
but simply being aware of them helps gain a deeper affection for Odelay.
And beyond all that bullshit, the album is just
a fairly solid collection of inventive songs. Already ʽDevil's
Haircutʼ establishes the basic standard — take an old songwriting
technique, merge it with a modern beat and sampling style, throw in a pinch of
Beck's own «murderous depression» image, and you got yourself a readymade
contemporary classic. It does not matter that the song is way too repetitive
(you don't usually put it to all those hip-hop tunes that Beck draws his
influences from, so how could he be
guilty?) — all it takes is a jarring fuzz riff, some haughty, murmured vocals
transplanted all the way from psychedelic 1967, and a final surprising touch of
swampy harmonica. Or perhaps the final touch are the lyrics. "Everywhere I
look there's a dead end waiting" — if this were Robert Smith, the
accompanying music would be suicidal, but Beck is simply way too cool, calm,
and collected to let his music lead
you into depression. ʽDevil's Haircutʼ is loud, noisy, screamy, and
impossibly urbanistic — the accompanying video, with Beck strolling through
various locations in NYC with a boombox under his arm, matches the atmosphere
of the tune to perfection.
What gradually emerges from the next few songs
is... well, I'd say, a brave stab at a «new Dylan» for his generation.
ʽLord Only Knowsʼ, whose mysterious final chant gave the album its
title, starts off with a hoarse scream, some feedback, a false start (already a
bit of Dylanish nonchalance), then turns into upbeat country-rock, set to some
angry, accusing, but generally meaningless lyrics directed at everyone in
general and no one in particular. Unfortunately, Beck is nowhere near Dylan in
terms of vocal performance — most of his deliveries are fairly monotonous and
by-the-book, as he treats each following word exactly like the one that
preceded it. Most of the work is going into spicing things up — for instance,
with a little bit of Steve Vai-style guitar arpeggios instead of a «normal»
bridge, and suchlike. It's unpredictable enough to keep your attention in a
steady hold, but for the first listen only: later on, there is a chance that many
of the «intrusions» will become obnoxious, being so out of place and all.
Still, the basic structures are consistently
fun, no matter how derivative they are — ʽThe New Polutionʼ revives
the old ʽTaxmanʼ / ʽStart!ʼ progression with an added
«astral» flavor (Eastern organ, Mellotron, acid sax licks, you name it);
ʽDerelictʼ is like a flat-out musical opium den, with smelly smoke
rising from the speakers; ʽJack-Assʼ begins as a tough'n'tender
ballad in Lou Reed style, then ends with some atonal guitar and genuine jackass
noises; ʽSissyneckʼ is just simple, catchy country-rock with a
hyperdriven rhythm section and a pop chorus that is every bit as unforgettable
as it is bizarre ("I'm writing my will on a three dollar bill in the
evening time"? he must know that
a "three dollar bill" is, among other things, a euphemism for a
flaming homosexual, right?); and so on.
I do not find as much joy in the more openly
hip-hoppish numbers on the album — ʽHigh 5 (Rock The Catskills)ʼ and
ʽWhere It's Atʼ, both of them surprisingly «normal» celebratory odes
to the joys of DJing, might appeal to Beastie Boy fans, but on the whole, they
seem to have more to do with The Dust Brothers (who co-produced the album with
Beck) than with the musical and atmospheric personality of Mr. Hansen. I
certainly prefer him when his passion for beats, samples, and rapping plays second fiddle to his passion for «Ye
Olde Urbana Americana», rather than when it is thrown into the limelight — and
it isn't even my anti-hip-hop bias speaking, it's just that
ʽSissyneckʼ and ʽWhere It's Atʼ aren't really destined for
necking on the same album.
But this is just a minor personal quibble,
which can be easily disregarded. The major quibble is that Odelay may not be one of the greatest albums ever made — which is a
quibble with the critical world rather than Beck himself, who cannot be blamed
for the headlines. It's just high quality hipster music that will be forever
representative of its own time and space: which wasn't the best of times and
spaces, perhaps, but definitely not the worst, either. It may not deserve all
of its reputation, but it certainly deserves its thumbs up, no reservations applied.
MUTATIONS (1998)
1) Cold Brains; 2) Nobody's
Fault But My Own; 3) Lazy Flies; 4) Canceled Check; 5) We Live Again; 6)
Tropicalia; 7) Dead Melodies; 8) Bottle Of Blues; 9) O Maria; 10) Sing It
Again; 11) Static; 12) Diamond Bollocks; 13) Runners Dial Zero.
This album marks a serious turning point.
Before the rise to major superstardom, Beck would fluctuate between «lo-fi
anti-folk» and «hi-fi sample madness», lending his post-modernist deconstruction
talents to the idea of commercial success, and his depressed garbageman side to
indie labels, so as not to lose his standing in the underground. Thus, for
every Mellow Gold you had yourself a
Golden Feelings, for every Odelay — a Foot In The Grave.
Mutations was originally thought of, I suppose, as more
of a follow-up to the latter than the former: the next installment in Beck's
ongoing series of «reinventing the roots», but without the samples and hip-hop
beats. To that end, Beck even had an agreement with Geffen that the record, as
an experimental project with no commercial appeal, would be released on an
indie label. However, everything changed as Radiohead took the world by storm
with OK Computer. Suddenly,
post-modernistic irony was out of vogue again... suddenly, there was once more
a certain demand on sullen, introspective singer-songwriters... and, suddenly,
Beck found himself working with Nigel Godrich, Radiohead's producer — which,
for better or worse, meant that coming up with another Golden Feelings was out of the question, unless the covert idea was
to make Godrich die of a heart attack and quash the competition.
Whatever those circumstances were, the end
result of this collaboration between the «intellectual garbageman» and the
«master of technophilic melancholia» is an excellent album — and a great
introduction to Beck for those who may be too put off by his experimental side
to notice the true talent behind the «glitzy» and the «trashy» aspects of his
work alike. Mutations is a very
«nor-mal»-sounding, but a complex, diverse, intelligent, emotionally rich
record — and, best of all, the actual songs are nowhere near as boring as that
description might suggest. Just blame it on the inadequacy of the language, or
the language user.
Predictably, Beck and Godrich still settle on
old-timey blues/folk lamentation as the departing point — and even when the
melodic backbone is more akin to post-war singer-songwriters than to pre-war
blueswailers, Beck still finds the time to name the song ʽNobody's Fault
But My Ownʼ, with a transparent throwback to Blind Willie Johnson (and not
Led Zeppelin, of course). But now, other than being different through the
application of Beck's lyrics and Beck's quite-modern personality, they are
also different through Godrich's atmospheric production ideas — and the man
adds layers of surprising depth that was hitherto inaccessible for Mr. «Feel
Like A Piece Of Shit» Hansen, but now somehow feels quite native to his vision.
The «Radiohead touch» is immediately observable
from the first seconds of ʽCold Brainsʼ, a song that, with a little
extra tweaking, could have easily fit on The
Bends. Wobbly wah-wahs, subliminal distorted riffs, astral noises burbling
in the background — without all these embellishments, the song would have been
just another acoustic guitar / harmonica-driven folk meditation, a «poor man's
Neil Young» offering. Instead, we get a sensory feast of a «space-folk»
panorama that belies the song's lyrics: "Cold brains / Unmoved / Untouched
/ Unglued / Alone at last / No thoughts / No mind / To rot / Behind / A trail
of disasters...", but, apparently, even in that unmoved, untouched,
unglued state there is a hell of a lot of different stuff going on within those
«cold brains» — if the song is not a melodic masterpiece, it should at least be
the object of every producer's wet dream.
For ʽNobody's Fault But My Ownʼ,
Godrich invites Warren Klein, who used to play for the Stooges in the early
1970s and then moved on to studying Indian music, to contribute sitar overdubs
— and, once more, turns a potentially pedestrian composition into a psychedelic
«sea of droning» that illustrates the protagonist's «floating» state of mind so
much more vividly than it would have with just an acoustic guitar and Beck's
tired, reprehensive vocals. ʽLazy Fliesʼ takes the idea of an
«intellectual country waltz» and throws so much in the pot — big bass drums,
harpsichords, wah-wahs, Theremin imitations, fuzzy leads, whatever — that by
the time you get down to the actual chords and find out that they are quite
easy, you will have already gained enough respect for the song to be properly
disappointed.
And so on, and on — this Godrich touch ensures
that something at least can be said
about each song regardless of whether it strikes you on a personal level or
not: a classic bait for critical praise (and the critics did not disappoint).
So as not to fall in this trap of spending too
much time on an album that, after all, may not quite deserve it, I will limit myself to just a small handful of
additional mentions: ʽTropicaliaʼ is a terrific mix of Latin rhythms
and ominous jazz chords (although most people will probably remember it for
the sneering grin of the cuíca,
tortured by percussionist Smokey Hormel); ʽO Mariaʼ would have been
perfectly at home as part of a soundtrack where a grizzled Beck is playing
honky tonk piano in a smoky intergalactic space bar; and ʽDiamond
Bollocksʼ (included as a hidden track on some of the album's editions) is Mutations' blistering nod to hip-cool
mid-1960s Revolver-ish rock'n'roll,
but only as if Syd Barrett came to guest star on one of the tracks.
These are just a few examples, but even though
some of the songs take a little more time to get into than others, I can find
no serious individual flaws — nor do I have any problems with the concept of
the album in general. Of course, Beck never took himself as seriously as Thom
Yorke, so there was no chance that Mutations
could ever be hailed as «the Album of
its generation», but on the positive side, Mutations,
unlike Radiohead, does have a sense of humor. But above and beyond everything
else, this is one of Nigel's finest hours — his work on Mutations really goes to show that a truly great producer is always a great producer, no matter what
sort of artist he works with (as long as the artist is generally talented, of
course). Despite living in the same age, Beck and Radiohead are very different
— yet Godrich was able to adapt essentially the same style of production to the
essence of each of them without running into serious problems. (Seven years
later, he would once again work a similar, but different kind of magic on Paul
McCartney's Chaos And Creation In The
Backyard).
Do keep in mind that the «Beck/Godrich» way of
working is very different from the
«Beck/Dust Brothers» way of working — for practical purposes, these are almost
two different Becks, where it is fairly easy to rave over one and get bored
with the other, or to be enchanted by the latter and disgusted by the former,
depending on whether you came here from Beastie Boys Wasteland or Radiohead
Sanitarium. Then again, whatever be the situation, there is always a Blind
Willie Johnson, blindly peeking out from behind the backs of both — and a dark
alley with a smelly garbage can. This one, however, is located somewhere on
Aldebaran, which is all the more reason to give it a thumbs up, and hope someone out
there has a telescope capable of detecting it.
MIDNITE VULTURES (1999)
1) Sexx Laws; 2) Nicotine
& Gravy; 3) Mixed Bizness; 4) Get Real Paid; 5) Hollywood Freaks; 6)
Peaches And Cream; 7) Broken Train; 8) Milk And Honey; 9) Beautiful Way; 10)
Pressure Zone; 11) Debra.
With the dark brooding of Mutations out of the way, it's back to swing time again. A spin of
the wheel, and Nigel Godrich disappears in smoke — don't worry, he will be back — as The Dust Brothers make
a triumphant re-entry. This time, Beck's ambition is to make the party album to outparty all the
other party albums. The samples are back, in a modest way, but for the most
part, it's all about the beats, the hooks, and the arrogant, cynical,
super-cool party spirit: Midnite Vultures
is flashy, hot, and ultimately meaningless — but, like the best of those party
albums, it's got enough witty, funny cynicism to it so as not to repulse the
demanding listener.
Pretty much every song on here is fun in one way or another. They may not
be deeply impressive (few «party albums» are deeply impressive in the first
place, for obvious reasons), but Beck is not aiming for that — he claims to
have perfectly mastered the art of, let's call it, «expensive cheap thrills»,
puncturing the listener's senses on a primal level without offending the brain.
It's all a bunch of musical sexual acts, but, as he states himself on the very
first track, "I want to defy the logic of all sex laws — let the handcuffs
slip off your wrists". Midnite
Vultures does have its logic, but it is its own logic indeed, not anybody else's.
I honestly have no idea of how many elements on
the album come from Beck's own head, and how many have been taken from other
places (but still reshuffled and re-glued in Beck's own head all the same).
Direct influences that everyone mentions range from Prince to Grandmaster Flash
to David Bowie to Kraftwerk to the Velvet Underground, and that is not
mentioning minor touches like echoes of Elton John on the coda of
ʽDebraʼ, or the occasional Beatlisms, or the occasional country touch
here and there. In addition, some of the songs show that Beck had developed a
fairly impressive falsetto technique — and that, whenever he sings falsetto, he
sounds eerily similar to Mick Jagger (just compare ʽDebraʼ with,
let's say, ʽWorried About Youʼ). But none of that is ever a problem,
because the important thing is to know how
to steal, what to steal, and when to steal, and if Odelay could still be accused of an
occasional abuse of power here and there, Midnite
Vultures is a perfectly woven tapestry. If anything, one could perhaps shed
a lonely tear for the pre-war blues strain — hopelessly lost in the fray this
time. But at least the word "garbage" is still prominently featured
in the lyrics (ʽPeaches And Creamʼ forms a delicious rhyme with
"you make a garbage man steam", don't you think?).
On a song-by-song level, there are no
highlights or lowlights, but, on a whim, I would particularly mention
ʽMixed Biznessʼ as the «the
shit» element of the album —
certainly this sort of groove, democratically generated by guitars, brass, and
vocals jumping from speaker to speaker, is as good as anything Prince ever had
to offer, not to mention just as «mock-dangerous» ("I'm mixing business
with leather", Beck tells us from the outset, even though the music itself
contains no hints at a BDSM attitude — cybersex, perhaps, given the huge amount
of electronic bleeps, but nothing that would suggest any glorification of
physical pain). Then again, ʽGet Real Paidʼ might be even more fun —
an almost completely electronic brouhaha that might sound like a dialog between
two androgynous robots in heat at first ("Teletubbies going
electric", Beck used to say himself), before you understand that the
lyrics are also poking fun at la dolce
vita à la 1990s ("we
like to ride on executive planes, we like to sit around and get real
paid").
As the album moves on, though, the tracks get a
little less beat-oriented and become ever more interesting in terms of melody
and musical effects — for instance, the insane slides and bends on
ʽPeaches And Creamʼ that make the song seem like Animal Farm Gone
Berserk; or the psychedelic vocal modulation ("we're out of
controo-ool...") on ʽBroken Trainʼ, once again reviving the
spirit of 1966; or the entirety of ʽBeautiful Wayʼ, reportedly
inspired by The Velvet Underground and certainly consistent with the spirit of Loaded — slow-moving, steady, the only
track on the album that moves away from head-spinning electrofunk, trip-hop,
etc., but am I ever glad it's there even despite not fitting into the general
atmosphere.
By the time we get to the «sentimental» coda of
ʽDebraʼ, Vultures have
already been long since balancing on the edge of parody, but ʽDebraʼ
is probably the only time on the album where Beck officially makes that move —
the absurdly exaggerated falsetto, the lyrics ("I met you at JC Penny, I
think your nametag said Jenny..."), the exuberant brass arrangement,
always happy to oblige with a mock-build-up, all of it reads like a final
gesture: «Oh, by the way, if any of you here were going to take any of this
stuff seriously, here's a final firm
reminder to drop it». But as a good-natured parody on classic soul material,
ʽDebraʼ is hilarious anyway, and a memorable and atmospheric conclusion, carefully wrapping up a non-stop-rave
experience with some sit-back-and-relax laughter.
Of all of Beck's major label records, Midnite Vultures is probably the most
«trashy», but even its title forewarns you of that — what else is to be
expected from an album about «vultures»? For the most part, it's all about
form, not substance, but this here is Beck at the peak of his «formal»
abilities, so much so that the songs, despite being so steeply soaked in
late-1990s technologies, sound as exciting and baffling in the next millennium.
They really do make a garbage man steam, not to mention, more prosaically, thumbs up
all the way.
SEA CHANGE (2002)
1) Golden Age; 2) Paper Tiger;
3) Guess I'm Doing Fine; 4) Lonesome Tears; 5) Lost Cause; 6) End Of The Day;
7) It's All In Your Mind; 8) Round The Bend; 9) Already Dead; 10) Sunday Sun;
11) Little One; 12) Side Of The Road.
«The Breakup Album». Where would we be without
the concept? No Blood On The Tracks,
no Rumours, no Adele, no Aimee
Mann... no Tunnel Of Love or Jagged Little Pill, either, but the
overall number of «efficient» breakup albums that immediately spring to mind is
still larger than the amount of breakup albums with an unlucky correlation of
substance and form. (Even Jagged Little
Pill could have been so much
better with a different musical philosophy). Even today, when it is normal for
breakups to come at a dime a dozen, they may be traumatic enough to stimulate
great art — so keep on breaking up, all you great artists, and go on behaving
like male chauvinist pigs (if you're male) or like victims of male chauvinist
pigs (if you're female).
Much to Beck's honour, though, his breakup album is fairly chivalrous.
Legend has it that he caught his fiancée cheating on him with another
musician, and if so, it was fairly lucky for her that her fiancé was not a Bob Dylan or a Lindsey Buckingham:
Beck's «breakup album» does not put any explicit or implicit blame on anybody.
In fact, for a breakup album, there are surprisingly few oppositions of «me»
and «you» — most of the time it's just about «me» and the state of total misery
that the «me» is experiencing. One has to watch the lyrics very closely to even
understand that this is an actual breakup album. Actually, «misery» is not even
the right word — «emotional numbness» is more like it, or maybe «deep-frozen
soul»: Beck's intent here is to convey the feeling of confused stun and sensual
paralysis that he must have undergone, and, as far as my own sensory receptors
tell me, the intent is carried out fine.
For hardcore fans of Beck's «party face», the
release of Sea Change, his bleakest,
moodiest, and most genuinely serious record to that point, must have been like
a bucket of ice-cold water, coming right on the heels of the non-stop-rave of Midnite Vultures. That did not prevent
the album from selling almost as well — and, of course, the critical press had
a gala feast, because there's nothing like a Serious Breakup Album to give the
professionally paid reviewer an easy subject to knock off a few paragraphs or
pages. There were also murmurs, though, in some circles, that Beck had exceeded
his artistic limitations — that «Beck the goof» was a far more valid proposition
altogether than «Beck the introspective singer-songwriter», that he lacked the
proper clout, talent, lyrical gift, melodic feel, etc., for this side of the
business. Both of these schools of thought still persist to the current day —
so whose side should we be on?
My answer would be fairly simple. The songs, as such, that Beck wrote for the
occasion, seem relatively pedestrian to me. Had they been issued as a
collection of acoustic demos (the way they actually were recorded by Beck originally), Sea Change would probably end up deadly dull and ultimately quite
inadequate to its purpose. However, the collective weight of Beck's output to
that point showed well enough that putting together basic chord sequences was never a forte of Mr. Hansen — he usually
preferred to «borrow» these sequences from somewhere else and then focus
exclusively on the form in which they
were presented, together with one or more other people whose presence in the
studio was vital. So why would Sea
Change be an exception?
The plain truth is that Sea Change is not an album by Beck Hansen, the aspiring «anti-folk»
artist. It is an album by «Beck», a revolving-door-style conglomeration that,
for the occasion, consisted of such primary members as Beck Hansen — the
songwriter and vocalist; Nigel Godrich — the engineer, mixer, and producer; and
David Campbell — string arranger and conductor, whose credits run the
unbelievable gamut from Carole King's Tapestry
to Aerosmith's ʽI Don't Want To Miss A Thingʼ (people who can cause
either great good or great evil on a whim are so fascinating, don't you
agree?). Oh, and, for that matter, David Campbell is also Beck Hansen's father,
but we will try to ignore that fact, lest unhealthy suspicions of nepotism
darken our feelings.
Let us now take a closer look at one of the
album's best numbers — ʽPaper Tigerʼ. As an «original song», it does
not even begin to make the grade, resting on standard blues patterns (you can
probably name half a dozen songs from J. J. Cale alone that ride the same
chords). Where it does make the grade
is its dynamics — the awesome tension build-up that begins from the very first
second. The song starts out with Beck's dark-shaded singing, accompanied by the
rhythm section only, with a very prominent bass walk. At 0:29, the electric
guitar marks its grand entry with a jarring siren wail, and ten seconds later,
it is joined by incoming strings. From then on, nothing really matters — not
the basic sequence, not the monotonous rhythm, not even Beck's grumble, all the
way to the final "there's no road back to you" — nothing but the
incredible «organized freedom» with which Smokey Hormel's guitar and Campbell's
strings roam all over that territory. This ain't Hollywood, this ain't the
Chicago Blues Festival. This is free-feeling, unpredictable, but also
completely accessible instrumental
work that makes me jaw drop, and then pick up again with each new swoop of
those strings.
Godrich's and Campbell's ideas for the use of
orchestration on this album have been frequently compared to Paul Buckmaster's
work for classic era Elton John, and there are some clear parallels, but on
ʽPaper Tigerʼ and several other works the influences go deeper — all
the way to 1967, I'd say, and the psychedelic use of strings on Beatles albums:
ʽWithin You Without Youʼ, in particular, and ʽI Am The
Walrusʼ (in fact, I'd be very much surprised if the rising string pattern
in the coda of ʽLonesome Tearsʼ were not a direct carryover from the
ʽWalrusʼ coda — only on ʽWalrusʼ, the strings were being
used to blow your mind, while here
they are rather used to overwhelm
your mind, and yes, there is a real difference). Other analogies are possible
as well, but the common invariant is always the same — these are anything but «generic» arrangements. These here
strings have living voices, and they want you to hear them. I think I do.
And it's not all about the strings, either.
ʽGolden Ageʼ, opening the album, has no strings — only guitars and
keyboards. But Godrich puts them at such a distance from Beck's voice, and uses
such effects, that it genuinely sounds as if the man is singing to you out of a
huge dungeon pit, where he has placed himself in his desperation: the voice
being picked up by the wind, thrown and thrashed about the pit walls, and
finally reaching the listener at the intersection of several different air
currents. Radiohead fans forgive me — but I have never once experienced this
sort of effect while listening to OK
Computer, not even at top volume on headphones. And consequently, Beck's
"these days I barely get by, I don't even try", which, under
different circumstances, might have sounded self-pitying and pretentious,
achieves maximum effect — not so much self-pity as mere constatation of the
fact, cast to the thousand winds, giving us a man overwhelmed by fate, feeling
like a bit player, caught up against his will in some impossible-to-understand
scenario and not finding the strength to fight it.
This is just two songs, but everything on here works, one way or
another. Even the most monotonous, static, near-ambient tracks like
ʽRound The Bendʼ — where Beck's mode of singing is (probably quite
intentionally) emulating the late Nick Drake — are redeemed by powerful «deep sea»
orchestration, with waves of violins and cellos carrying, rather than drowning
out, Beck and his minimalistic acoustic picking. But ʽRound The
Bendʼ is not typical of the record: most of the songs are actual «songs» rather than sonic panoramas — it's just that
their dynamics usually takes time to unwrap. ʽSunday Sunʼ, for
instance, starts out as a keyboard-and-sitar-driven art-pop song, then finishes
with a noisy crash for a coda — the loudest, most abrazing moment on the entire
album, yet such is its overall effect that you might not even notice all the
rucus, so smoothly it is integrated in the overall calm melancholic grandeur of
the song and the entire record.
If Sea
Change is not Beck's «masterpiece», it is only because there are too many
different Becks out there to choose just one, not to mention all the different
«Beck configurations» (on this one here, the honor belongs to Godrich and Beck
Sr. as much as Beck Jr.). But as far as breakup albums go — and just imagine
how many of them there have been in
the last fifty years — this one not only sets out a unique goal to be
conquered, but also does conquer it.
Did the man really feel that sort of
emotional numbness upon being dumped? Is he that
sensitive? Could he really have written "I'm mixing business with leather,
Christmas with Heather" one day and then "these days I barely get
by..." the next one? None of that, of course, is important. What is important is how the music makes you feel — and, on my part, Sea Change makes me feel... well, let's
call it «cold and drunk», or something like that. But not drunk enough to be
unable to hold those thumbs up for one of the decade's greatest
artistic successes.
GUERO (2005)
1) E-Pro; 2) Qué Onda
Guero; 3) Girl; 4) Missing; 5) Black Tambourine; 6) Earthquake Weather; 7) Hell
Yes; 8) Broken Drum; 9) Scarecrow; 10) Go It Alone; 11) Farewell Ride; 12)
Rental Car; 13) Emergency; 14*) Send A Message To Her; 15*) Chain Reaction;
16*) Crap Hands.
Having exorcised the irritating breakup demon
fair and square, Beck had also honored the alternation formula («one for the
body, one for the mind»), and now it was time to get back to the hot stuff. Out
with Godrich, in with The Dust Brothers: the man was becoming predictable like
clockwork. Fortunately for us, the predictability only extended to the overall
choice of producer and musical direction — in everything else, the man's brain
was still popping out new exciting ideas like crazy. In fact, he hit his
commercial peak with Guero: not a
mean feat for a guy with more than ten years of an established musical career
behind his back, and something that most of today's artists, even the «real»
ones, could only hope for.
Some have described Guero as sort of a synthesis — another record in the wild,
reckless, trendy party style of Midnite
Vultures, but tempered off and sombered up with some of the moodiness and
broodiness of Sea Change. This is
not quite the case. Of all the songs on here, only ʽBroken Drumʼ,
with its slow tempo, sad piano chords, and farewell lyrics, could have easily
fit on Sea Change — but on Guero, it is more of an intruder, a
«breather» providing some respite from the energetic beats and waves upon waves
of noisy overdubs on the «dance» tracks. It is
true that, in general, Guero goes
heavier on distorted guitar riffs, grumbly vocals, and disturbing lyrics than Midnite Vultures. But none of these
things demand to be taken too seriously. We really are back here to the world
of «expensive cheap thrills», «trash-muzak» of the highest quality imaginable,
although, in some cases, still somewhat intellectually stimulating.
To be sure, ʽE-Proʼ is far more of an
aggressive, clenched-teeth opener than ʽSexx Lawsʼ ever was, with its
funky drive and merry brass fanfare. Here, Smokey Hormel immediately kicks in
with the heaviest guitar riff on the album, hearkening back to the «brawny»
1970s early metal scene, and Beck's arrogant "see me comin' to town with
my soul... see me kickin' the door with my boots..." tongue-lashers almost
reach out like an "I'm back in the saddle again!" sort of message,
though, naturally, the man's lyrics in general never once begin to make literal
or figurative sense, and it is only the choice of words that matters:
"devil", "garbage" (of course! Mr. Hansen's favorite word
in the English language), "rubbish", "snakes and bones",
"poison", "wolves", well, you must have guessed already
that giving candy to strangers with a smile on your face isn't exactly what the
song is about. But on the other hand, it is also doggone catchy, in a happy pop
sort of way, with all the "na na na na"'s providing the giggle factor
— and, while we're at it, there is quite a bit of "na-na-nah-ing" and
"la-la-lah-ing" on this, allegedly dark and broody, record (ʽGo
It Aloneʼ, ʽRental Carʼ, etc.).
ʽGirlʼ and ʽHell Yesʼ were
the other two singles, and they are quite dissimilar. ʽGirlʼ is
essentially a Sixties' style sunshine pop nugget with modern production — some
drum machines, some electronic bleeps, soon choked with traditional slide
guitars — that cannot refrain from the temptation of a mildly shocking refrain
("hey, my cyanide girl", which could easily be misheard as "hey,
my summer girl" or "hey, my sunny girl", but this is exactly
what the lyrics sheet is for). ʽHell Yesʼ, on the other hand,
represents the Dust Brothers in full flight, supplying cool hip-hop beats and
samples while Beck is rapping about the delights of being serviced by a bunch
of Japanese robots and guest star Christina Ricci is providing the occasional
"please enjoy" and "sumimasen". Yes, we have come quite a
long way from Kraftwerk and The Man
Machine — this sort of robotics
now feels quite comfortable and housebroken. Sexy, in fact. Plus, it's always
the little things — like the ability to make a working hook out of the
expression "hell yes".
Once again, Beck's monster-like ear for
intrigue and excitement ensures that there is virtually no filler on the album
— everything has at least something
to it, but my personal favoritism extends mainly to ʽScarecrowʼ (the
ʽMixed Biznessʼ of this album, I'd say, with delicious disco bass of
instantaneous toe-tapping value, and the chorus line about how
"scarecrow's only scaring himself" has become inexplicably wedged
inside my brain for some reason); the aforementioned ʽBroken Drumʼ, a
celebration of stately, but troubled serenity that might as well have served as
the blueprint for Beach House's entire career; and ʽRental Carʼ,
which is just a good fun driving song. Along the way, Beck also plunders Bo
Diddley (ʽBlack Tambourineʼ), old gospel blues (ʽFarewell
Rideʼ), and offers a friendly tribute to his Mexican friends
(ʽQué Onda Gueroʼ), even if there is hardly anything Spanish,
other than a big chunk of the lyrics, to this cool-struttin' chunk of
new-school-white-bread R&B.
From a detached, historical point of view, Guero could count as a relative
disappointment — it does not add anything «major» to Beck's legacy, just
another large heap of small ideas on how to synthesize this and that and
generate another squad of creepy, disfigured, but perversely attractive musical
monsters, according to the practice already perfected on Midnite Vultures. But even if this is not necessarily «going up»,
neither it is, by any means, a downwards slide. Everything about Guero is honestly enjoyable, and the
tiny added pinch of darkness also makes it less decadent and superficially silly
than Vultures — quite in line with
the general demands of the mid-2000s hipster crowds (and most of their young
idols would kill for an album of such quality, anyway). Hence, the usual — a thumbs up
with all due joy and reverence; and do look for the UK issue, which adds
several bonus tracks that kick up even more rucus (ʽChain Reactionʼ
is as crazy as the man ever got with that style, and more).
THE INFORMATION (2006)
1) Elevator Music; 2) Think
I'm In Love; 3) Cellphone's Dead; 4) Strange Apparition; 5) Soldier Jane; 6)
Nausea; 7) New Round; 8) Dark Star; 9) We Dance Alone; 10) No Complaints; 11)
1000bpm; 12) Motorcade; 13) The Information; 14) Movie Theme; 15) The Horrible
Fanfare / Landslide / Exoskeleton.
Imagine yourself having lived through several
years of your life, regularly exchanging a pair of bright yellow socks with
blue stripes and a pair of bright red socks with white stripes to work. At
first it's a shock, then it's a news item, then it becomes a running gag, and
finally everyone calms down and get bored. What is the next logical step to
take? Right-o — one fine day, you come to work, one foot clad in a yellow sock
with blue stripes and the other one, nicely contrasting with the former, in a
red sock with white stripes. All of a sudden, life has taken an interesting
turn — struck out an exciting chord once again.
The analogy may be crudely generated and even
more crudely stated, but it does convey my first impressions of The Information, an album that Beck, in
accordance with the schedule, had himself produced by Nigel Godrich, but which
also, completely out of schedule,
sounds like it really should have been produced by The Dust Brothers. For those
of us who find it fun to derail the karmic wheel from time to time, this should
sound exciting from the get-go — for those who think that some combinations should rather be left alone, The Information may become one of the most serious disappointments
in Beck's career.
Personally, I think it works in more ways in
which it fails. First, it is not to be taken too seriously — how, in fact, can
you take seriously an album whose very first track is already called
ʽElevator Musicʼ? And if that is not enough, how about a direct clue
from Mr. B. in person: "Put the elevator music on / Put me back where I
belong". Of course, most of his lyrics are nonsense, but every once in a
while there is a hidden instruction out there, and it is our job to find it.
Besides, the track does sound a
little like elevator music — or, rather, like the musical imitation of an
elevator in flight, with cogs grinding, ropes pulling, and little bells and
whistles ringing and clanging as the floors swoosh past you in a typically
Godrich-esque cosmic buzz.
The psychedelic strings, once again arranged by
Dad, are back with a vengeance on ʽThink I'm In Loveʼ, but other than
that, the song has nothing to do with Sea
Change — it is fast, tight, poppy, pinned to a loud, swirling blues
bassline (think Bob Dylan's ʽAs I Went Out One Morningʼ, if you need
an earlier analogy), and dedicated to all the confused mindsets out there:
"I think I'm in love / But it makes me kinda nervous to say so" is
just another generation's way of saying "I think it's love, but I can't
explain", right? They just got a little more sophisticated about it, but plus ça change... well, it's just
a thought, not a criticism, the song is fun.
From then on, it all falls together in a
synthesis that really combines the
madness of Midnite Vultures with
the dark sultriness of Sea Change in
a way that Guero never attempted to.
Tracks like ʽCellphone's Deadʼ, ʽNauseaʼ, and
ʽ1000bpmʼ are formally «dance-oriented» (or just call it «body muzak»
or something), but their emotional spectrum runs from philosophical gloominess
to cynical anger — in fact, ʽNauseaʼ starts out with a stern acoustic
bass rhythm that used to be a typical fixture of that highly underrated band,
Morphine, and they were pretty much
the epitome of late night gloominess in the 1990s. Yes, you may use this stuff
as club fodder, but unless the rhythm is the only thing your ears pick up,
pretty soon you will start scratching your head and wondering just what the
heck is up — the party spirit is getting fucked over.
Of course, Beck has never been a particularly
happy guy, but still, remember ʽDevil's Haircutʼ? Triumphant brass
fanfares and all? Forget it. Every single song on here is morose, every single
song captures that turn-of-the-century depression spirit, every single song is
about some sort of bad shit or other, explicitly or implicitly, and Godrich has
his hands full procuring the shit in question and stuffing it in all the empty
slots between the beats (that's why it's «bad cosmic shit», not simple «bad
shit»). ʽDark Starʼ, for instance, whose hip-hop essence is honestly
hung out in space — Beck plays the space cowboy with some harmonica blowing as
well, but it is the phased strings and keyboard arrangements that give the song
its final flavor.
One possible problem with The Information is that it is overlong. This especially concerns
its last track, a medley of melodies that run through a hip-hop section,
another one that almost approaches Aphex Twin-style IDM, and a final ambient
piece — but even without this somewhat bloated and not too memorable ten-minute
monster, the tunes share the issue of Sea
Change (too much «sameyness» of the mood) without sharing its redemption
factor — depth and power of raw emotion. On Sea Change, there was a feeling the man wasn't just dicking around,
but was actually saying something he needed to say and wanted us to hear; The Information never really seems to
know whether it is making a point or is merely using a valid point (such as
«this world is really coming to a
sticky end») to provide Beck with a pretext for messing around.
In other words, ʽDark Starʼ is
formally dark, but is it, say, ʽGimme Shelterʼ-dark? Cool — yes, by all means. The band, and
Godrich in person, do a damn fine job fleshing out all the beats and all the
beeps and bloops and gimmicks, and Beck consistently finds the right vocal
hooks for most of the songs (just getting a little tired, so it seems, towards
the end, or maybe it's just me
getting tired). It's just that, unlike Sea
Change, The Information does not
have me convinced that the darkness actually expands beyond the theatrical. But
that's all right. It doesn't necessarily have to. Besides, look at Radiohead — their darkness seemingly expands beyond
the theatrical, and has it made a goddamn difference? Nah. Thumbs up, of course — if only for
the simple, but effective producer-swapping trick that had us all fooled, and
helped keep up the freshness of approach for an extra while. Oh, and good
songs, too.
MODERN GUILT (2008)
1) Orphans; 2) Gamma Ray; 3)
Chemtrails; 4) Modern Guilt; 5) Youthless; 6) Walls; 7) Replica; 8) Soul Of A
Man; 9) Profanity Prayers; 10) Volcano.
Well, even the best of us eventually get
themselves cornered. After Midnite
Vultures and Sea Change, Beck
had nothing left to prove; after Guero
and The Information, he had nothing
left to recombine and resynthesize. It does not seem too surprising to me that,
once Modern Guilt came out, he took
his lengthiest break from new solo projects so far — five years without a fresh
Beck album is definitely not something that the man's fans were looking up to.
But the man is smart, and knows when to give himself a much-deserved break,
letting that heavily exploited soil rest in peace and restore its nutrient
potential.
Modern
Guilt is quite short; not at
all flashy or «assuming»; and basically gives us a faint picture of a guy at a
crossroads. I mean, what else would it be, if the very first line of the very
first song goes "think I'm stranded but I don't know where"? If there
is at all an overriding point to this record, it is simple enough — been there,
done that, now what? Then this message just keeps on going: "modern guilt,
I'm stranded with nothing" (title track), "beat my bones against the
wall, staring down an empty hall" (ʽSoul Of A Manʼ), "been
walking on these streets so long, I don't know where they're gonna lead
anymore" (ʽVolcanoʼ). Nor is this dead-end problem limited to
the singer alone: "down by the sea, swallowed by evil, we've already
drowned" (ʽChemtrailsʼ), "there's a bottomless pit that
we've been climbing from" (ʽYouthlessʼ), "what are you
gonna do when those walls are falling down on you?" (ʽWallsʼ),
and the list is only just beginning.
The music itself isn't quite as gloomy as the
lyrical message, even if most of it is in minor keys. For variety's sake, the
album was produced by Danger Mouse, instead of one of Beck's regulars, and so
it neither has the kaleidoscopic urban fuss of the Dust Brothers, nor the
strange cosmic vibe of Godrich. Instead, it is cast very much in a mid-Sixties
art-pop style, which had always been one of Beck's favorites, but he generally
used to bury those influences way deep under a coating of techno beats and
synth loops. Here, only a few tracks (ʽYouthlessʼ,
ʽReplicaʼ) are dominated by modernistic percussion — most, with just
a few tricks of the trade, would have fit in perfectly on old school garage-pop
albums, or Pink Floyd ones.
Which is also the root of the problem: when
Beck gets «stripped down», his retro-melodies are nice enough to the ear, but
do not seem to be infused with just enough melodic genius to «matter» all by
themselves, without the helping hand of a master producer, and Danger Mouse is
either not able or not willing to provide that helping hand: his style of work,
from what I have heard on the other albums produced by him, is to leave it to
the artist — and Beck is exactly the kind of artist that should not be left alone in the studio at all,
and definitely not left alone when he
wishes to issue a serious statement about how all of us are going to a place
that is far more dull and boring than hell or purgatory could ever hope to be.
While the album is on, it's really on, though.
ʽOrphansʼ has just a light, sweet touch of the baroque, and of the
psycho-mystical (somehow, I don't know how, the start of the "if I wake up
and see my maker coming..." chorus, simple as it is, manages to trigger
that mode). The orchestrated «chamber-music-hall» coda to the title track
gives a good shot of romantic melancholia, ʽYour Mother Should
Knowʼ-style. The flute-and-fiddle dialog on ʽWallsʼ gives
another, but different, shot of the same — and maybe it does make sense that
the emotion of the song is not blown all the way up to high heaven, as some other guys singing about walls have been
known to treat the subject. The harder-rocking stuff gives you some nifty
basslines (ʽSoul Of A Manʼ) or fuzzy guitar riffs (ʽProfanity
Prayersʼ), and the keyboards/strings combo of ʽChemtrailsʼ is
quality tripping material. Honestly, I cannot find any filler here (and with
the album's total running length of 33 minutes, I'd be really surprised to).
Compared, however, to the majority of Beck's
major label albums, the songs on Modern
Guilt have less staying power — the grooves, the hooks, the moods are too,
shall we say, «restrained», and additional listens do not show much additional
depth to them (as it happened, in my experience, with Sea Change, where each re-run of the tracks brought to mind at
least several other minor wonders of Godrich's imagination). And, most
important of all, you'd think that any album entitled Modern Guilt should leave you in the end... well, feeling a little
guilty, perhaps? That is the kind of sentiment that an album like Arcade Fire's
Funeral, if we are talking Beck's
contemporaries, easily provokes in me, but this
album, in comparison, feels lacking. Instead of making me want to go out there
and help make the world a better place, it just makes me want to give the guy a
hug and tell him to maybe eat more vitamins every once in a while. Oh, I guess
that last sentence automatically translates to a thumbs up, anyway, but possibly this
is not the correct type of thumbs up that Beck Hansen might want from a
reviewer. Still, what the heck — this is another good Beck album, making it an almost record-breaking (for this
period) nine positive ratings in a row, and let us not forget about that.
MORNING PHASE (2014)
1) Cycle; 2) Morning; 3) Heart
Is A Drum; 4) Say Goodbye; 5) Blue Moon; 6) Unforgiven; 7) Wave; 8) Don't Let
It Go; 9) Blackbird Chain; 10) Phase; 11) Turn Away; 12) Country Down; 13)
Waking Light.
A pox upon this whole goddamn «sequel» idea.
Time and time again, artists keep falling into this ridiculous temptation —
«hey, that masterpiece of mine was so great, I wonder if I can do another one
just like it?» — and it's not even necessarily for the money. No, more likely
it is because you happen to run out of ideas, and start looking for inspiration
in your own past, sort of an incestuous affair with your own body and soul.
What good can come out of it? Was there ever a self-conscious musical «sequel»
(excluding multi-volume issues that were initially planned as such) that
managed to equal, let alone surpass, the original?
It took Beck more than five years to give us Morning Phase, and when he did, he
advertised it as a «companion piece» to Sea
Change. But that album needs no companion piece. It is an album about loneliness, for Christ's sake; how can
an album about loneliness require a «companion»? And even though Beck's
previous records showed some signs of stagnation, not a single one was directly
billed as, or emotionally felt like a straightforward attempt to repeat the
moods, textures, and effects of any of its predecessors. So is this a
confession that Beck is finally spent, and that from now on he will be
specializing in inferior re-writes of his past glories?
And here are the general reasons why you could
suspect inferiority even before putting on the album. First, remember that Sea Change was actually written and
recorded under the shadow of internal struggle and strife — an authentic
«breakup album» where the songs were fueled by real feelings. That dark fire
may have been artificially fed up, but its basis was real, and you could feel
it. Fast forward twelve years, though, and the only internal struggle and
strife that we see is from an artist who used to be on the edge of musical
progress, and now feels himself somewhat left out, without a proper
understanding of how he could be in the lead once again — mixed-up and
confused. That could be an emotional
basis for something, but why confuse it with the «disillusioned recluse» image
of Sea Change, then?
Second, for some reason, Beck decided that the
album would be self-produced — even though, last time I checked, Nigel Godrich
was still alive and well, and even more, this was his regular turn in the «every second album» cycle. Beck did get some
of the Sea Change musicians to play
on the record, and, once again, entrusted the orchestration business to his
father, but Godrich was absolutely crucial to the sound of Sea Change, dressing those songs up in ways that Beck's mind could
never have come up with — and yes, he is very sorely missed on Morning Phase, which feels stripped and
underworked without the Godrich touch.
Now here is the first revelation when you
actually put the album on: it shares a lot of things in common with Sea Change, but in general, it feels
nothing like Sea Change. The first
and probably best song, ʽMorningʼ, does not strike you with a bleak,
secluded view of the world that ʽGolden Ageʼ proclaimed so solemnly.
Its lyrical message is completely different: "Can we start it all over
again? / This morning / I've lost all my defences / This morning / Won't you
show me the way it used to be? / I've gone all around / 'Til there's nothing
left to say / We've worn it all down / Into something that couldn't be
said". Yes, you could try and interpret it as part of a dialog with a
relationship partner, but in this whole context, wouldn't you say that it's
basically a song about, er, uhm... impotence? Spiritual, I mean, of course.
A thin whiff of melancholy emanates from the
song, but no desperation — Beck is being tender (falsetto in the verses) and
submissive (chorus), not particularly happy, but generally coming to terms with
his lot, «letting down his defences» indeed. There might even be some sort of
early pre-nirvana calm contained in the tune, what with its angelic harmonies
and soothing piano chords bringing on a bit of a «New Age flavor», musically.
This will be a serious blow for people who expect strong emotions or
body-bending impulses from the man all the time, but if you are prepared to
give the man a chance, ʽMorningʼ, as an anthem of calming down,
humility and submission, actually has a real point to make.
The bad news is that most of the following
songs struggle to make a real point —
or, more precisely, they do not struggle to make a real point. ʽHeart Is
A Drumʼ picks up the tempo a little bit to become a simple, unassuming
folk-pop ditty whose hushed vocals, obscure lyrics, and ghostly background
vocals presume a dig at «depth», but I do not sense any real depth — just a guy murmuring some barely coherent nonsense to
the mellow sound of acoustic guitars and pianos. No hooks to speak of, no
musical textures to be astounded at, and what is it exactly that you are trying
to get across to me, Mr. Hansen? What I see is just some grayish ambience, as
if you wanted to capture some light and some darkness in the same bottle and
give me both, but then you accidentally shook 'em up, and now it's sort of
undrinkable. No taste.
This is pretty much the same reaction I get
from everything else: a total feel of «middle of the road» where you really
keep wishing he'd stuck to this side or that. On ʽBlue Moonʼ, the
first single from the album, he sings that "I'm so tired of being
alone", but there is no musical indication in the song that he is alone, and if he is tired, it is more
like he is tired of finding great ideas for songs rather than anything else.
And song after song, we get the same unmemorable acoustic patterns, the same
walls covered by simplistic synthesized or orchestral carpeting, the same
mock-transcendental «woo-hoos» and «aaa-haas» from the backup singers, and,
guess what, not even a single example
of great usage of the bass guitar (dark bass grooves were an integral part of Sea Change, but not here).
Oh, it all sounds suitably nice, and it may
even all sound suitably adequate to Beck's current state of mind, but it makes
me sad and disappointed to see him in this state of mind. Even when he opts for
a «grand» closure (ʽWaking Lightʼ), the crescendo effects seem boring
and predictable, and, most importantly, devoid of real tension and energy — and
this is the first Beck album in my experience where, after three listens in a
row, I was unable to memorize any of the songs (with ʽMorningʼ as the
only exception, and even that mainly because I really love that use of falsetto
on the verses). Is it the kind of album that could be expected to subtly grow
on you after a miriad of listens? But we are not living in an epoch where one
would have time for that. And even if we were, this is Beck Hansen we are
talking about, the guy who used to be the fastest gunslinger in the West. Sure,
even the fastest gunslingers eventually grow old, but I was sort of unprepared
that the aging process would be so quick.
If we judge the record on its own merits,
removed from any possible context, it is inoffensive and generally pretty. But
as a part of the curve, it is a catastrophe — a pretentious statement about
having nothing to say that comes from a washed-up artist who really has nothing left to say, and
knows not how to say it properly. Okay, «washed-up» is a harsh and undeserved
word; maybe it is just a temporary blunder, and no sooner than Beck renounces
this stupid idea of a «sequel» and starts bringing back in his usual batch of
wonder producers, he may be able to get back on the right track. But the signs
are not at all auspicious — when an album is as empty of meaning and feeling as
Morning Phase seems to be, one can't
help fearing that this particular thumbs down, the first one I've ever had the
mispleasure of giving Beck, will be far from the last.
TIGERMILK (1996)
1) The State I Am In; 2)
Expectations; 3) She's Losing It; 4) You're Just A Baby; 5) Electronic
Renaissance; 6) I Could Be Dreaming; 7) We Rule The School; 8) My Wandering
Days Are Over; 9) I Don't Love Anyone; 10) Mary Jo.
Of course, Stuart Murdoch is just the kind of
«frail lonely indie kid» that gets regularly parodied by all the sarcastic
wiseguys in the world. A little nerdy, a little sissy, sometimes bitter, sometimes
tender, a champion of the little guy and of the underdog, and what could you expect from someone who spent
seven years suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, and then served several
more years as a caretaker for a church hall in his spare time? Here be the
proverbial musical recluse who always takes brain over brawn, beauty over
beast, and bells over balls — a position that has been profanated over and over
again since the days of Nick Drake, who could at least justify it by also being
a real musician (yes, knowing how to play your instrument better than your
neighbor with just a few years of musical school behind him actually helps).
But it is also true that some of those sad indie kids have more credibility than others,
and, fortunately, Murdoch falls within that category. If he and his music may
occasionally fall prey to certain stereotypes, then, for the sake of justice,
it should also be mentioned that they also break
stereotypes — for instance, the stereotype that every rock band from Scotland
should be fronted by a permanently drunk ex-coal miner with an iron throat, and
that its music should be the perfect
soundtrack to having a good barf at the local pub. Try as I might, I just
cannot imagine anybody barfing to the sweet, sensitive sounds of Belle and
Sebastian, a band that was, after all, named after a children's book and TV
series.
Besides, Murdoch chooses a near-perfect
attitude for his songs, one that goes back directly to the aforementioned Nick
Drake and maybe even further back to Ray Davies — frailty and tenderness
without either excessive sentimentality or excessive «see me suffer, see me
suffocate» type of self-pity. It's all light, breezy, «twee» (as they say
today) folk-pop that at its best — when the band falls upon a fortunate vocal
or melodic hook — sounds charming, and at its worst — when they drift on the
waves of style and attitude alone — still sounds nice. Acoustic or jangly
electric guitars, occasional cellos, violins, and trumpets, pretty vocals,
intelligent lyrics, everything with plenty of throwbacks to old-school
pre-Hendrix Brit-pop, what's not to like?
Like most B&S albums, Tigermilk does suffer from its rather limited stylistics. There is
fairly little on the record that is not already contained in its opening
number, ʽThe State I Am Inʼ — if you are in a big hurry, the song
pretty much tells you everything about Belle and Sebastian that you must know
in order to check off that little square. Simple (accessible), acoustic
(immediate), upbeat (unpretentious), tells an allegorical story that should not
be taken too literally but is easily decodable figuratively — "I gave
myself to sin / I gave myself to Providence / And I've been there and back
again / The state that I am in". Internal conflict, personality disorder,
adolescent angst, maturity crisis — for those who do not like these themes
accompanied by barking vocals, chainsaw guitars and death-challenging volume
levels.
As a «poet», Murdoch is certainly operating at
a more advanced level than Ray Davies (who was fairly old-fashioned even by
Sixties' standards himself), but that is more or less to be expected from an
indie kid. As a melody writer, unfortunately, he does not even begin to come
close: most of these songs float by like fluffy clouds — five listens into the
record, only ʽShe's Losing Itʼ managed to cling on to a piece of my
mind's driftwood (its bouncy chorus is the most «kiddie» element on the entire
album, and I am afraid that must be exactly why it is so memorable), and, of
course, ʽI Could Be Dreamingʼ — probably the album's true major
highlight, with its tremolo effect on the electric guitar hook, its
quasi-Theremin countermelody, and the odd Isobel Campell recital of «Rip Van
Winkle» in the outro section.
But the songs still warrant repeated listens,
because there is more to them than sheer melodic context, and I am willing to listen to Murdoch and his
little under-the-bed performances. On very rare occasions, he cooks up
completely unpredictable surprises — for instance, ʽElectronic Renaissanceʼ
uses shitloads of synthesizers and drum machines to... express contempt and disgust for the digital clubland revolution that was taking place
in the mid-Nineties, without mincing words: "Monochrome in the 1990's /
You go disco and I'll go my way", and, sure enough, although they do
sparingly use synthesizers on some of the other tracks, all of them are quite
«monochrome» in comparison.
However, that is more or less the only
straightforward piece of social criticism. Most of the time, Murdoch takes it
out on himself — for instance, on ʽI Don't Love Anyoneʼ, which is
probably the sweetest song about not loving anyone ever recorded: "if
there's one thing that I learned when I was still a child it's to take a hiding",
although the man is really so nice that he can't help adding a few disclaimers:
"I don't love anyone... well, maybe my sister... maybe my baby brother
too..." — doesn't he know that, once you've opened that door just a little
bit, it doesn't take too long for the opening to widen? Most likely, he does,
which is exactly why he sings about it.
Or he takes it out on himself and everyone else
of his own caliber — ʽWe Rule The Schoolʼ ends with a lightly
enigmatic "You know the world was made for men / Not us", as the
accompanying romantic pianos and cellos bring to mind... well, I was almost
going to say Dennis Wilson and Pacific
Ocean Blues, but Dennis Wilson, a «man» in every sense of the word, would
probably never have penned that line, even when composing in a thoroughly
broken-hearted state. (Actually, the best thing about the song is its understated
woodwind solo bit — a beautiful little bit of phrasing there, making me wish
they'd inserted more of those short solos throughout, but an indie kid's worst
nightmare is always to come across as «indulgent», a risk somehow perceived in
even a few bars of soloing — or, perhaps, the average indie kid is simply
afraid to show off his relative incompetence, or, most likely, both at the
same time).
In any case, Tigermilk is one of those debut albums that promise a long,
respectable, successful career where the highest point would never get out of
sight of the lowest one — if you do not climb all that high, you should have no
fear of falling. And it does have its own spirit, so that even long after
Stuart Murdoch ceases to be a contemporary role model for Glaswegian adolescents,
young people all around the world can still use the album in order to deduce
the difference between a Nick Drake in 1972 and a «Nick Drake» in 1996. A
well-pleased, if not quite as overawed as some of the attested reviews, thumbs up
here.
IF YOU'RE FEELING SINISTER (1996)
1) The Stars Of Track And
Field; 2) Seeing Other People; 3) Me And The Major; 4) Like Dylan In The
Movies; 5) The Fox In The Snow; 6) Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying; 7) If
You're Feeling Sinister; 8) Mayfly; 9) The Boy Done Wrong Again; 10) Judy And
The Dream Of Horses.
Out of all the homogeneous richness of the
Belle & Sebastian catalog, it was If
You're Feeling Sinister that was somehow singled out for «cult» status —
perhaps on the strength of the initial acclaim given to it by the
then-freshly-rising Pitchforkmedia. The truth, I think, is that Murdoch, like
most of his indie friends, operates on an «IV bag principle», yielding the
required content on a steady, consistent, but slow and parsimonious basis, and
this automatically prevents his band from having something like a «best ever»
record, so it's all very much a question of putting something in the right
place at the right time.
There is no denying, though, that If You're Feeling Sinister itself is consistent,
intelligent, and extremely pleasant. If possible, it is even more mellow and fragile than Tigermilk, almost completely acoustic
or, at least, with an almost completely acoustic feel to it, and Stuart makes
no attempts whatsoever to distance himself from his preferred «vulnerable
sissy kid» image. But then, why should he? All of his tough bully classmates
were already probably busy unloading crates in Glasgow Harbour, while he, the
back seat loner, was busy reaping fame, if not necessarily fortune to go along
with it.
The ten songs recorded here are very even,
melody-wise, and never seriously stray from the recipés bequested by Rubber Soul-era Beatles, Joni Mitchell,
Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, and their peers. All of them, as could be expected, generate
pretty much the same mood, although Murdoch himself is not able to put a finger
on it in his lyrics. The chorus of ʽThe Boy Done Wrong Againʼ tries to summarize the mood — "All
I wanted was to sing the saddest song / And if you would sing along / I will be
happy now" — but «sadness» is not the permeating state on the album: the
melodies are too lively for that, and the vocals too bright. «Phlegmatic
tenderness» is more like it: the protagonist of If You're Feeling Sinister is essentially that shy, socially inept,
but ultimately kind and affectionate kid in the class who says "I wanna be
friends with you" to his object of affection and hands her a flower,
instead of trying to take a peek under the skirt or something. Oh he's all
grown up now, but he hasn't changed much.
He does see himself fit for a major statement
or two. The title track is not only the longest song on here, taking nearly a
minute of fast-paced strum and piano tuning to get to the first verse and
adding playground noises to the background for importance' sake, but it is also
the most moralistic one — an anti-religious rant, essentially, where the man
not only takes up arms against the Catholic Church, but goes as far as to
describe a girl as being "into S&M and Bible studies / Not everyone's
cup of tea, she would admit to me". The rant is fairly blunt, culminating
in the «offensive» final refrain ("If you are feeling sinister / Go off
and see a minister / Chances are you'll probably feel better / If you stayed
and played with yourself") which Murdoch mumbles rather incoherently (what
if a priest were passing by?) — but if you are not paying too much attention to
the lyrics, you will probably not even get the «ranting» in the first place, so
innocent and fleeting and cuddly is this perky little folk dance.
The overall similarity of the moods and the
melodies almost seems to drive the reviewer like a cattle prod into
concentrating on the lyrics — but the lyrics mostly just serve the moods
anyway, except for a misguided line on two (ʽLike Dylan In The
Moviesʼ is a particularly unlucky title: the refrain goes "If they
follow you, don't look back / Like Dylan in the movies", but although it
is nice to know that Murdoch is well educated on certain elements of Sixties'
pop culture, there is nothing else that would be «Dylanish» about this song, or
this musical approach in general — now Donovan,
that might have been a much better connection, not to mention that Donovan was
also captured in Don't Look Back, so
why not just sing "like Donovan in the movies" instead? Oh well,
never mind). Okay, here is one more example: "At the final moment, I cried
/ I always cry at endings". Satisfied? Moving on now.
Actually, there is nowhere left to move:
individual descriptions of these songs would make no sense, because their
melodic underbelly is quite traditional and their atmospheric value is so uniform.
But even if you do not easily memorize the melodies, it would be hard to ignore
the seductiveness — with its tasteful, humble, sensual combination of acoustic
guitars, pianos, and strings, Murdoch's «chamber folk-pop», having filtered out
those few «rockier» elements the boys were uncomfortable with on Tigermilk, reaches its highest level of
perfection here. Later albums could be just as strong, or even contain better
songs every once in a while, but this is where the formula sets in place, so I
guess we shouldn't be too angry at Pitchfork reviewers or anybody else for making
their pick — after all, if you only want to get one Belle & Sebastian
album, you might just as well follow my thumbs up, too, and get this one, and if you want
to get more than one Belle &
Sebastian album, you probably read Byron and Shelley in the evenings by
candlelight, and have no further need for these reviews (especially since,
sooner or later, they are inevitably bound to get more and more sarcastic).
THE BOY WITH THE ARAB STRAP (1998)
1) It Could Have Been A
Brilliant Career; 2) Sleep The Clock Around; 3) Is It Wicked Not To Care?; 4)
Ease Your Feet In The Sea; 5) A Summer Wasting; 6) Seymour Stein; 7) A Space
Boy Dream; 8) Dirty Dream Number Two; 9) The Boy With The Arab Strap; 10)
Chickfactor; 11) Simple Things; 12) The Rollercoaster Ride.
The biggest change here is that our «Sebastian»
has finally promoted cellist Isobel Campbell to the official status of «Belle»
— not only does she sing more background vocals here than ever before, she even
gets a lead one (ʽIs It Wicked Not To Care?ʼ), and, although her
frail girlish singing is nowhere near unique in the huge world of broken indie
hearts, it still provides a perfect counterpart for Murdoch's tales of tender
sorrow. Basically, this means that the «wimpiness quotient» has been raised
one more level, so if you felt even a little uncomfortable about flinging the
heartgates wide open for Feeling
Sinister, you would be well advised to steer clear of the sequel, as it is
even more of a celebration of universal sadness-lite.
The music largely remains the same, a healthy,
but generally unimpressive mix of nick-drakisms, paul-simonisms, and an
occasional ray-daviesism or two, with hardly a single particularly memorable
guitar, cello, or organ line despite those three instruments being present on
almost every track. Volume levels are equally steady, although ʽDirty
Dream Number Twoʼ unexpectedly kicks in with a firm punch midway through —
lively drums, staccato electric chords, soaring rather than crawling strings,
anthemic brass, almost as if a Phil Spector had surreptitiously replaced Tony
Doogan in the producer chair for a bit. But that's just one song, most likely
stuck in the middle with the aim of waking you up for the second half in case
your nervous system happened to be firmly lulled by the first seven tunes.
Meanwhile, Murdoch's lyrics are getting more
and more sophisticated: from masochistic self-analysis he now ventures forward
into painting abstractionist pictures of various real and imaginary members of
Glasgow society, all of them eventually reduced to a single denominator at the
end of the show: "Hey people, looking out the window at the city below /
Hey people, looking out the window, you'll be gone tomorrow" (ʽThe
Rollercoaster Rideʼ). The texts are not at all hateful, and the singing is
always pretty, but there really is a lot
of misanthropy here — leave it to the shushed, shunned, bullied
«not-like-everybody-else» kid to be really
preoccupied with the vanity and the uselessness and the transience of it all.
The only reason why the kid does not commit or even propagate suicide is
because it's just as vain and useless as everything else.
ʽIt Could Have Been A Brilliant
Careerʼ greets us with the cheery accappella line "he had a stroke at
the age of 24", as Murdoch launches into a strange tale of phoney artists
and fake identities. ʽSleep The Clock Aroundʼ introduces
quasi-psychedelic «electronic chimes» — I have no idea what for, maybe to
stress the lack of importance of one's personal hustle-bustle in the face of
eternity or something like that: in any case, the basic message of the song is
"look at yourself, you're not much use to anyone". ʽEase Your
Feet In The Seaʼ is a perfect story of a romance from which the romancer
derives no pleasure whatsoever — there ain't no «love» here as such, only
"trouble that we've used to know" which "will stay with us till
we get old, will stay with us till somebody decides to go". (This is where
one is usually supposed to make jokes about 30-year old virgins, but I couldn't
think of a good one, and bad jokes about virgins tend to be really bad). And it goes on like that
until the very end.
The only weird thing here that deserves further
comment is the album's title — first and foremost, a reference to Arab Strap,
Murdoch's Scottish competition led by Aidan Moffat, a band that had all the
atmospherics and depression of Belle & Sebastian without their pop sensibilities,
but then also, of course, a figurative reference to the sexual device after
which that band was named. The song itself is Murdoch at his «Kinksiest»,
engineering the album's most upbeat, quasi-martial melody and cramming in the
largest amount of social comment, not forgetting even the Asian minicab driver
"with his racist clientele", but he keeps coming back, over and over
again, to the «arab strap» idea (rumor has it that Moffat felt quite
uncomfortable about the song, as one of its interpretations is that the
protagonist actually needs an arab
strap to... oh, never mind). In any case, it is one of those enigmas that is
just about equally likely to contain a whole lot of deep sense or not to have any sense at all. Maybe
it's just one of those Freudian things that manifest themselves so frequently
in artistic work done by shushed, bullied, and reclusive kids.
Anyway, just like the first two albums, The Boy With The Arab Strap is very
pleasant listening, but falls short on great melodies and is much better
appreciated as just another radiation outburst of Murdoch's sensitive-sensible
personality. Had it leaned just a tad more in the «whiny» direction, I would
have hated it, but, fortunately, Murdoch still keeps light on his feet and
refuses to take those troubles too seriously — the message is not just a boring
«life sucks», but rather a more philosophical «life sucks, but so what? you
don't want to say you expected something else, did you? just relax and enjoy
all the sucking». Come to think of it, maybe that's what the «arab strap» is an
allegory of, in the end. A mild thumbs up overall, but only for those who love the
very idea of a «whole being larger than the sum of its parts», because, well,
the «parts» are really not all that
impressive — in particular, Murdoch's steadfast refusal to grow as a musician
begins to get a little irritating; it is exactly this attitude that breeds
hundreds of little Conor Obersts all around the world and, ultimately, might
spell out a death sentence for art as we know it.
FOLD YOUR HANDS
CHILD, YOU WALK LIKE A PEASANT (2000)
1) I Fought In A War; 2) The
Model; 3) Beyond The Sunrise; 4) Waiting For The Moon To Rise; 5) Don't Leave
The Light On Baby; 6) The Wrong Girl; 7) The Chalet Lines; 8) Nice Day For A
Sulk; 9) Women's Realm; 10) Family Tree; 11) There's Too Much Love.
If the title «music in a doll's house» hadn't
already been occupied by Family thirty years earlier, it would have suited
Belle and Sebastian's fourth studio LP much better than this overlong and rather
politically incorrect moniker. Because if you thought that the band's earliest
records were the very definition of the term «mellow», you'd be downright
wrong, or, at least, seriously off the mark. In a strong effort to beat their
own record, the band has doubled the stakes, and now you are listening to music
of such tender frailty that you feel like being inside a cleanroom.
The effect is achieved not only by giving ever
more and more vocal parts to the ladies of the band (Sarah Martin is now singing
lead along with Isobel Campbell), but also by giving more and more space to
instruments other than the guitar — harpsichords, pianos, flutes, strings,
anything that works towards putting the «chamber» back in «chamber pop».
Everything is laid on in very thin layers, though, usually with one dominant
instrument playing some hyper-tender melody with a «nursery» or pastoral flair
and the others gradually rallying behind the leader to add some wispy angelic
atmosphere. In other words, everything so lovely you could almost puke, that
is, if you ever decided to take a look at this «from the outside» — in reality,
unless you are a heavy rocker who got here through some traumatic accident, you
will most probably be caught up in the autistic trance and cuddling your inner
child within minutes.
Even when Isobel Campbell sings that "I'd
rather be fat than be confused / Than be me in a cage / With a bottle of rage /
And a family like the mafia" (ʽFamily Treeʼ), she seems to be
doing so within the confines of some alternate universe where personal
conflicts are conducted in whispers and teen angst is always internalized
rather than flashed at innocent bystanders. From a song like that — piano,
flute, and softer-than-silk, cuddly-hushy little girl vocals — you'd rather
expect an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of message than one of disappointment,
disillusionment, and angry self-seclusion. When she adds that "they threw
me out of school / 'Cause I swore at all the teachers", well, this has to
be heard to be disbelieved.
Overall, the songs are at the same level of
consistency as they used to be — maybe even with a slight increase in the
overall number of hooks, because their exploration of the possibilities of
various instruments seems like a big step up from the primarily acoustic guitar-based
nature of what used to be. I really enjoy the harpsichord/piano/strings
combination on ʽThe Modelʼ; the eerie electric piano of ʽDon't
Leave The Light On, Babyʼ (a little reminiscent of Joni Mitchell's
ʽWoodstockʼ and other such tunes by Murdoch's singer-songwriting
idols — nothing like a tremoloed Wurlitzer to convey a feeling of bottomless
depth); the minimalistic piano/cello duet on ʽThe Chalet Linesʼ; the
pretty pop violin melody of ʽWomen's Realmʼ, and other little things
that give each of the songs here plenty of individuality.
That said, it won't be much of an
understatement to say that, even if they have found some moderately new ways
to express their feelings, the feelings themselves stay absolutely the same —
the song title ʽNice Day For A Sulkʼ summarizing them perfectly, as
the song itself is a «nice» piece of piano art-pop that does little other than sulk,
sulk, sulk. It borrows a few of its musical moves from Kinks songs such as
ʽAutumn Almanacʼ, but Ray Davies could never have written anything
like this — melancholia is one thing, but this whole «dazed and stupefied»
attitude would have been too much for ol' Ray. Sooner or later, you'd expect that
guy to snap and throw out a ʽDead End Streetʼ or a
ʽBrainwashedʼ, whereas Murdoch seems to have that particular pathway amputated at birth. Ironically, the last
song begins with the words "I could hang about and burn my fingers / I've
been hanging out there waiting for something to start" — hey, so have we,
and from an overall point of view, we have spent forty minutes waiting in vain.
(Not that we haven't been warned or anything.)
The most energetic song here is ʽI Fought
In A Warʼ: a little faster than the rest, slightly anthemic and even
«pretentious» (inasmuch as Murdoch did not actually fight in no wars, so don't
pass this around to actual veterans unless they have a good ear for creative
metaphor), but, unfortunately, it does not move me all that much — maybe
because, being arranged as a rhythm-heavy, dynamically built-up «folk-rock»
song, it is still too cuddly, and lacks a crucial something, whatever that
crucial something might be. Maybe a different vocal approach, a stronger
singer? An electric guitar solo? The possibility to go an octave higher in the
climax? I know what a «musical dream» is, and I have some understanding of
anthems, but the song never seems to make up its mind whether it wants to be a
dream or an anthem, and a «dreamy anthem», want it or not, is an oxymoron. Or,
rather, as the song shows, you can try to make one, but it has every chance to
fall on deaf ears (mine) that would rather go for something more
straightforward.
That was just a single example of many tiny
problems that constantly seem to accompany Murdoch's music, along with equally
tiny victories. They shouldn't prevent me from issuing another thumbs up
in a never-ending series, though, because as long as the formula is being
faithfully preserved, it has about as many chances of failure as an AC/DC
album.
STORYTELLING (2002)
1) Fiction; 2) Freak; 3)
Dialogue: Conan, Early Letterman; 4) Fuck This Shit; 5) Night Walk; 6)
Dialogue: Jersey's Where It's At; 7) Black And White Unite; 8) Consuelo; 9)
Dialogue: Toby; 10) Storytelling; 11) Dialogue: Class Rank; 12) I Don't Want To
Play Football; 13) Consuelo Leaving; 14) Wandering Alone; 15) Dialogue:
Mandingo Cliche; 16) Scooby Driver; 17) Fiction Reprise; 18) Big John Shaft.
Although this album is essentially a side
project, it does have its own importance in the Belle & Sebastian story.
Formally, this is a soundtrack for a movie of the same name by US indie
director Todd Solondz — not at all an unexpected development, as indie cinema
and indie pop are so naturally tied in together with the ubiquitous «outcast
loser» mentality. However, due to various issues of personal communication as
well as forced edits to the final version of the movie, most of the actual
music composed for the project was never heard in the theater. So, big deal,
Murdoch and Co. just went ahead and released all of it as a separate album,
together with isolated fragments of movie dialog for «authenticity».
The occasional advantage of such an album is that
soundtracks tend to be partially or mostly instrumental, and this makes it
easier to assess the «musicality» of the artist without it getting too obscured
by the frontman's personality. No matter how talented, or untalented, the
members of Belle & Sebastian may be in the composing department, most of
the songs were completely dominated by Murdoch's personal charisma. Here, the
singing is kept to a minimum, and it helps answer the question — is the «Belle
& Sebastian» brand actually viable when stripped of its sentimental tales
of highland loneliness?
And the answer is an immediate «yes», on the
strength of the album's opening track: the piano theme to ʽFictionʼ,
simple and unassuming as it is, is instantaneously charming, memorable, and
completely true to the Belle & Sebastian ethical code without a single
spoken word — fragile, delicate, tasteful, and friendly. For admirers, other
than the reprise at the end of the album, there is also a special «night
version» of the same theme (ʽNight Walkʼ), played at higher octaves
and sending out a sharper contrast with the dark bassline. It may not be a
phenomenal composing feat, but, well, at least it is a more complex bit of
piano phrasing than most of Paul McCartney's feats, and every bit as catchy.
The ʽFictionʼ theme may be the best
there is on the record (it ain't repeated thrice for nothing), but most of the
other melodies have their own charm as well. ʽFreakʼ is an attractive
shadowy mix of minimalist acoustic guitar, piano, Mellotron, and «ghost
vocals»; ʽFuck This Shitʼ, defying its title, is a little romantic
harmonica-driven ditty (the harmonica does keep repeating a three-note sequence
that intonationally mimicks the title, though); and ʽConsueloʼ
cleverly synthesizes Spanish-style trumpet with «Celtic» harp.
Of the vocal numbers, ʽScooby Driverʼ
finds the band in quite an unusual mood — playing a fast, almost raunchy
Sixties-style pop-rocker, invading the turf of The Apples In Stereo or some
other such band in full confidence (too bad it's only a minute-long snippet);
but the title track is also upbeat, alternating friendly male / female vocals,
pianos, flutes, and trombones in a Kinks-derived way that was only hinted at
on Fold Your Hands, but never became
the norm for that album; and ʽI Don't Want To Play Footballʼ is a
brief solo Murdoch-and-the-piano piece that is so intentionally «wimpy» it
could just as well be upgraded to the state of the National Belle-And-Sebastian
Fan Club Anthem: "I'd rather play a different sort of game / The girls are
just as good as boys at playing". (One can only imagine how the poor boy must have suffered in
school — this is a fifty-seven second snippet of his nerdy revenge).
The only full-length, fully-fledged vocal tune
on the entire album is ʽBig John Shaftʼ, and it, too, shows a
departure from the usual stylistics by being built around a funk-pop electric
rhythm — which the band still dresses up in Christmasy pianos and strings, so
as, God forbid, not to invite any accusations of a «transition to a roughness
of sound». And yet, everything shows that there is some sort of transition on here — that they took up the offer,
among other things, in order to get try and get themselves out of the
self-imposed stylistic rut. And on here at least, the transition works: short
and snippety as the record is, it is pleasantly diverse and dynamic without
having to sacrifice any part of the band's artistic credo. Thumbs up, and for those in doubt,
the only negative side effects of the album's «soundtrack» status are (a) its
shortness (some of the snippets could have easily been promoted to full-length
songs) and (b) the tiny bits of dialog that are incomprehensible without the
movie and do not really make that much of a difference. Without them, the
album's even shorter — but still a worthy addition to the catalog.
DEAR CATASTROPHE
WAITRESS (2003)
1) Step Into My Office, Baby;
2) Dear Catastrophe Waitress; 3) If She Wants Me; 4) Piazza, New York Catcher;
5) Asleep On A Sun Beam; 6) I'm A Cuckoo; 7) You Don't Send Me; 8) Wrapped Up;
9) Lord Anthony; 10) If You Find Yourself Caught In Love; 11) Roy Walker; 12)
Stay Loose.
Finally, Murdoch must have realized that the
whole «acoustic-sulk-in-the-corner» formula had been pushed as pushingly pushy
as it could be pushed — one inch more and Belle And Sebastian would have
crossed the border into self-parody, or, at least, «the eternal stereotype». So
what's a poor indie boy to do in such an occasion? Call Trevor Horn to the rescue,
and let him produce a different album
for you — one that would not only revert the band to their upbeat pop roots of Tigermilk, but raise a whole new tree
out of them.
Essentially, Dear Catastrophe Waitress serves as a «reboot» for the B&S
franchise. From the opening martial punch, rousing flutes and trumpets of
ʽStep Into My Officeʼ, you know that this time, Murdoch is not just going to repeat himself, and by the
time the screechy, tortured twin electric guitars of ʽStay Looseʼ,
reminiscent of a Neil Young circa 1969, finally fade away into the background,
the new face of the band is fully fleshed out, and it's a cool new face. I only
wish the melodies were a little stronger, because the utterly wonderful sound that they have going on here
certainly deserves to be matched with a Ray Davies or Paul McCartney composing
genius. Then again, Murdoch may not hit those kinds of highs, but at least he
is always reliable.
The spiritual essence, of course, remains the
same: really, we are still dealing with the same little boy sulking in the
corner, except that he is now bored with standing, and does a little tap-dance
or even a little rock'n'roll from time to time. He is also willing to share his
love of «young and innocent days» with us more than any time before — for
instance, ʽIf She Wants Meʼ, with its funky ringing guitars and
tender-joyful falsettos, is pretty much an homage to Smokey Robinson, sounding
like a long-lost Miracles outtake. But most of the other songs, no matter how
much I listen to them, sound heavily influenced by all sorts of pop, folk, and
blues bands of the past rather than simply ripping them off, much to Murdoch's
honor.
Unbelievable, I know, but «diversity» is the
word of the day: even though the band completely avoids «heavy» guitar tones
and atmospheres, and does not strive to get too far from folk / pop / R&B
territory (e. g. into free-form jazz or Indian music or Balkan dancing), the
overall combinations of tempos, instruments, dynamic developments far surpass
anything they had previously offered us. The «classic» Belle & Sebastian sound
and style of the previous albums is not abandoned completely: in particular,
ʽLord Anthonyʼ (about a bullied school transvestite, what else?) is a
traditionally sparsely arranged morose affair. But now it is only one in a
diverse gallery of all sorts of different affairs.
One of the key lyrical messages may be found on
the cute jazz-pop ditty ʽYou Send Meʼ, which begins with Murdoch
non-grieving over yet another broken relationship and then proceeds to state
that "every sound is tame, every group the bleedin' same / It would make
you mad / What happened to the sounds that left you lying on the floor /
Laughing, crying, jumping, singing / Listen honey, there is nothing you can say
to astound me / Listen honey, there is nothing you can do to offend me / You
don't send me anymore". A fairly fitting judgement for the 2000s, and almost
curiously clashing with the attempt to generate so many different sounds on
this album — but maybe it does mean that Murdoch is desperately trying to
restore the brilliant idealism of old, and, in bringing back all those values
of the Beatles / Kinks / Motown / Big Star era, lend a helping hand in
triggering some sort of creative Renaissance. Who knows? Behind that soft, unpretentious
facade there is certainly a huge load of ambition.
On the other hand, it is also a case of being
too smart for his own good — something that rarely, if ever, happened to the
innocent young fools back in the Sixties. ʽIf You Find Yourself Caught In
Loveʼ is a wonderfully arranged upbeat tune, pianos, electric guitars,
orchestration and all — but it is more of a brain-teasing philosophical
treatise than a heart-tugging pop tune; most of the song's duration is really
spent trying to figure out whether Stuart is being serious when he goes
"If you find yourself caught in love / Say a prayer to the man above"
or if it is simply a send-up of cheap religious advisers (the latter is more
likely, given that Belle & Sebastian had never yet been suspected of deep
religious feelings, but then it's never too late, really, to be born again, and
besides, this is symbolic poetry — «the man above» could be The Highlander for
all we know). No chorus, no meticulously concocted melodic hook — as pretty as
the sound is, it is not highly likely to «leave you lying on the floor».
On the whole, not giving the record a thumbs up
would be a doggone shame — it has such a perfect flow, with all the instruments
played in such loving and affecting ways, that the charm is bound to hold from
first to last second. If the melodies refuse to stay with you (which may not be
the case — might just be a problem of my own perception), the warm memories
most likely will, a good enough cause to return to the album later and try
again. And Murdoch's singer-songwriter-outcast-loner-idealist personality is on
top of it all, unsullied by Trevor Horn's production one bit — which should
placate most of those who suspect a «sellout», as well as irritate those who
like their nostalgic pop bereft of too much personal sentiment. (For the
record, female lead vocals this time around are restricted to just one Sarah
Martin lead on ʽAsleep On A Sun Beamʼ — apparently, the girls were
given the directive to remain silent as part of the overall plan to demolish
the flimsy-cozy «doll's house» of Fold
Your Hands. Not that Murdoch ever was a particularly «masculine» singer,
but at least he has the ability to sing with a tougher-than-china voice).
THE LIFE PURSUIT
(2006)
1) Act Of The Apostle; 2)
Another Sunny Day; 3) White Collar Boy; 4) The Blues Are Still Blue; 5) Dress
Up In You; 6) Sukie In The Graveyard; 7) We Are The Sleepyheads; 8) Song For
Sunshine; 9) Funny Little Frog; 10) To Be Myself Completely; 11) Act Of The
Apostle II; 12) For The Price Of A Cup Of Tea; 13) Mornington Crescent.
Dear
Catastrophe Waitress was so
unexpectedly fresh, attractive, and intelligent, that it was only too natural
to try the same formula at least one more time. For production, Murdoch turned
from Trevor Horn to Tony Hoffer, previously known for producing Supergrass and
working as mixing engineer on several of Beck's records — but the particular
choice probably does not matter as much as the fact that Trevor Horn's shadow
still lurks behind, encouraging Murdoch to add more colors and rhythmic drive
to the songs.
To the melodies, that is, but not to the
lyrics. Murdoch's agenda is now perfectly clear: his worldview has not changed
a single bit, but now he is delivering his bitter lambasting of random stereotypes
to «happy» melodies rather than «sad» ones, and, whaddaya know, this turns out
to be even more effective, or, at least, less predictable and therefore more
impressive than it used to. Begin with the beginning: The Life Pursuit — great title for an optimistic, hope-inspiring,
life-asserting record. Then it turns out that the three faces on the album
sleeve look a little suspicious: lack of smiles and an overall worried /
puzzled facial expression from all three does not exactly agree with the idea
of «pursuing life».
Then you hear the songs, and waves of
bright-pop joyfulness start splashing all around, and sure enough, this is the mellow, but energetic sound of a
genuine life pursuit. How could anyone feel anything but warmth and happiness when the Kinks-style riffage of ʽThe
Blues Will Be Blueʼ invades the room, and your foot starts a-tappin' and
your lips start a-chantin'? Then,
after a while, only after you have already fallen in love with the song's
lilting melody, you actually start a-thinkin' about what it is that you're
chanting — and what you're chanting is a song about how everybody that
surrounds you is either a poseur, a hypocrite, or an idiot, how the realization
of this simple truth succeeds in driving you crazy, and how the only thing that
is permanent is a sense of deep shit. Happy singalong, brother.
Naturally, Murdoch did not invent this style of
doing business and, in fact, the Kinks connection is now stronger than ever in this respect as well: I do not know how
well acquainted Ray Davies is with the oeuvres of Belle & Sebastian, but I
am fairly sure that The Life Pursuit
is the one album in their catalog with which he might feel a special bond.
Nevertheless, Murdoch is doing this in a manner that is fairly appropriate for
2006, much as Ray sang his happy songs about misery in a manner that was all
the rage in 1966, and, most importantly, he is doing this better than anybody else in 2006. Years of experience wear
out some artists, but Stuart's microgenius has aged well, and now he is cutting
cool tune after cool tune — ʽThe Bluesʼ is an obvious highlight
("I left my lady in the launderette..." might just be this band's
catchiest single chorus ever), but so is the funky, organ / fuzz bass-driven
ʽSukie In The Graveyardʼ, or the lightly psychedelic, cloud-hopping
ʽWe Are The Sleepyheadsʼ with its echoey «child angel choir»
harmonies, or the brass-heavy ʽFunny Little Frogʼ, a sarcastic sendup
of unconditional love whose main hook consists of wondering how the hell can
Stuart forcefully make "know it", "poet",
"court", and "throat" rhyme with each other, all four of
them, and get away with it.
The most «anthemic» song is saved for
next-to-last: ʽFor The Price Of A Cup Of Teaʼ has a murkier, less
easily decodable, but just as worriesome message as the rest of them, and it is
an absolute blast of syncopated pop perfection — the contrast between the
choral declamation of the first line and Murdoch's thin, subtle counterstrike
of the second does not just stick in the head, it is almost inspirational,
despite the fact that what you are actually getting for the price of a cup of
tea is "a line of coke", and that's just the beginning of the story.
But it does not finish off the album: the softer, longer, more pensive
ʽMornington Crescentʼ does, a mildly haunting ballad that ends with
faintly pronounced words that are all too easy to neglect but are, in fact,
horrifying: "The possibilities suggest themselves to me... we're a little too free". Bingo,
the kid finally hits upon the correct diagnosis. No wonder this music is so
damn good — when you know what the problem is, it's all too easy to convert it
into solid art.
I have not mentioned neither the ballads nor
the hard rockers so far, of which there are several (ʽAct Of The
Apostleʼ and ʽWhite Collar Boyʼ respectively illustrating both
categories), but this is not where its major musical muscle seems to reside —
the major muscle are the upbeat pop songs, since it is them that provide the maximum contrast between the words and the
music, and where there's more contrast, there's more strife, more thrill, more
Life Pursuit. Is this an improvement over Dear
Catastrophe Waitress? Not necessarily: although the high points may be a
little bit higher, the overall consistency is about the same level. But it
seems to show more confidence and self-assurance, and, above all, understanding
of the fact that when you whine through laughter, it is sometimes liable to
produce more effect than when you whine through whining. In any case, this is
clearly yet another thumbs up; and particular kudos for the boldness
with which Stuart comes out to say what he has to say, much of which would be
ideologically unacceptable for the average indie kid — which just goes to show
that Murdoch, of all people, has managed to outgrow the indie kid complex, and
step into a more exquisite, if also provocative, pair of shoes.
WRITE ABOUT LOVE
(2010)
1) I Didn't See It Coming; 2)
Come On Sister; 3) Calculating Bimbo; 4) I Want The World To Stop; 5) Little
Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John; 6) Write About Love; 7) I'm Not Living In The
Real World; 8) The Ghost Of Rockschool; 9) Read The Blessed Pages; 10) I Can
See Your Future; 11) Sunday's Pretty Icons.
Like all Belle & Sebastian albums, and especially like those Belle &
Sebastian albums where Murdoch's melancholic personality is not so overreaching
that it eventually gets on your nerves, Write
About Love is immediately likeable; so likeable that most people have
probably formed their comfy opinions about it just by looking at the by-now
traditional color palette and typescript of the album sleeve. In terms of
general curve, though, I find this a relative disappointment after the double
sunshine-through-tears pop shot of Dear
Catastrophe Waitress and The Life Pursuit.
It is just as easy to like, yes, but not as easy to get into on a deeper level,
and, unlike its predecessors, Write
About Love seems to suffer quite a bit from indie clichés.
The band has once again enlisted Tony Hoffer as
producer, but this time production values are notably different — Murdoch
retains the fully-arranged pop gloss of the previous records, yet strives to
bring it up to date with more «contemporary» standards. Already the first
twenty seconds of ʽI Didn't See It Comingʼ arouse suspicion: a wispy
electronic cloud of noise, expectable, perhaps, from any neo-psychedelic
artist, but since when have Belle & Sebastian ever expressed a penchant for
trippy electronics? The electronics are then joined by some decidedly
modernistic beats (I'd almost say they were pre-programmed, but maybe Colburn
had finally graduated from the Human Metronome school); a distant, echoey lead
vocal by Sarah Martin; and, eventually, a series of synth loops and solos that
have no function, as far as I can tell, other than stating: "No, no, you
don't get it — there's nothing we
actually have against being hip with today's kids, we just wanted to put it off
until everybody were back in the
synthesizer business!"
Like Apples In Stereo, for instance. The
difference is, somehow, that Apples In Stereo, with the release of New Magnetic Wonder, managed to make
their music more interesting by
incorporating electronic elements, as this allowed them a sort of «sprawl»
they could never afford before. Murdoch, unfortunately, has incorporated those
elements without accompanying them by any significant musical shifts. It used
to be Belle & Sebastian, now it's «Belle & Sebastian with synths». The
retro vibe is canceled (unless, like some critics, you prefer to think of it as
a replacement of the Seventies' retro vibe by the Eighties' retro vibe), and,
more importantly and painfully, much of the Belle & Sebastian vibe has been
canceled, too. If ever you need to show to some friend what it is that makes
Murdoch such a standout artist, please do not even think about enticing the
victim with Write About Love — it is
about as indicative of Murdoch's personality as Tunnel Of Love is of Bruce Springsteen's, to quote a random
example.
Which is not to say the songs are bad or
anything. Most of them are okay, the kind of sweet, smooth, edgeless indie pop
you hear in mainstream music stores or youth cafés. They have vocal
hooks, sometimes they have sympathetic instrumental passages as well. But the
essence of the album is exemplified by the ballad ʽLittle Lou, Ugly Jack,
Prophet Jonesʼ, a duet between Murdoch and invited guest star Norah
Jones: tender, bitter, lite-ly depressed, gallantly dressed in acoustic and
electric guitars and several layers of keyboards (organs rather than synths) —
and sleepwalking all the way, right down to the final "what a waste, I
could've been your friend", delivered with all the obligatory husky
aspiration ("...your frie-HH-ee-HH-ee-HH-ee-HHnd-HH!") you'd expect
not just from Norah Jones, but from any song in this particular style. For more
of the same, check ʽCalculating Bimboʼ, equally tender and equally
yawny.
You know something's wrong when the «standout»
track on the album turns out to be something as atypical as a Stevie Jackson
lead vocal on ʽI'm Not Living In The Real Worldʼ, which sounds like a
tribute to Manfred Mann with its harmonies, singalong choruses, and general
exuberance. And even so, it is hardly one of the better tracks on the album — whether it stands out for good or for
bad is quite debatable. Then again, I have no idea what those «better» tracks
would actually be. ʽI Want The World To Stopʼ? Catchy, but too
A-Ha-ish. I'd rather take Morten Harket in person than an unintentional
Scottish copy. ʽI Can See Your Futureʼ? Those trombones have too much
of a generic mariachi flavor, Sarah Martin does a fairly cringeworthy arranging
job. Call me too picky, but with the possible exception of that first track,
whose chorus hook ("but we don't have the money...") I cannot help
but find stirring, there is not a single song on here I'd vote for when it
comes to assembling the Golden Fund.
So, if taken on its own, Write About Love is nice enough, but in the overall context, it is
nothing short of an embarrassing disaster. Of course, change is always risky.
When Murdoch decided it was time for a change on Dear Catastrophe Waitress, he took a gamble and hit the jackpot —
the combination of bitter-sneery lyrics with sunshine pop riffs and rhythms
worked like a charm. Now the bell of change has struck again, and by deciding
to «modernize», the man has simply capsized the ship, drowning the message and
blandifying the music to nothingness. As of 2010, this is the last album of
original Belle & Sebastian material released so far; we may only hope that
the bell of change will ring again for Murdoch before the decade is out. In the
meantime, let us hope this thumbs down exerts its rightful voodoo effect
on the man.
GIRLS IN
PEACETIME WANT TO DANCE (2015)
1) Nobody's Empire; 2) Allie;
3) The Party Line; 4) The Power Of Three; 5) The Cat With The Cream; 6) Enter
Sylvia Plath; 7) The Everlasting Muse; 8) Perfect Couples; 9) Ever Had A Little
Faith; 10) Play For Today; 11) The Book Of You; 12) Today.
The waiting period between Write About Love and its follow-up has been the longest so far in
the history of Belle & Sebastian — not surprisingly, since slowing down
with age is a natural thing on the pop/rock scene; but you might actually wish
that those five years had been more beneficial to the evolution of the Belle
& Sebastian sound. As it is, Girls
In Peacetime is not a renouncement of the things that went wrong on Write About Love, but rather their
smooth, logical continuation, as we see Murdoch sink deeper and deeper into
the world of electronics, dance beats, and harmless, friendly blandness.
Okay, that sounds a little too harsh — after
all, harmlessness and friendliness have always been the band's primary
trademark, and few tasks are more daunting than determining which particular
Belle & Sebastian song is «bland» and which one is «surreptitiously
haunting». But let us deal with the electronics first. As I listen to formally
«club-oriented» tracks like ʽThe Party Lineʼ, ʽEnter Sylvia
Plathʼ, or ʽPlay For Todayʼ (the latter two stretched out to
seven minutes each, like all well-behaving disco numbers should), I have no
idea what this approach is supposed to mean. Is it, perhaps, some sort of
tricky self-centered psychotherapy? Had somebody recommended to Stuart that he
make his music more «dance-friendly» in order to cure himself of introvert
shyness? Is it symbolic — an implicit sign to his audience that the man cannot
be pigeonholed, and that there are no specific musical forms to which his
world-weary melancholy must be
closely tied at all costs? Is it trendy — «Radiohead commanded us all to do
electronics long ago, because guitar-based music is on its way out (again)?»
Whatever it is, it don't work. It didn't work with Arcade Fire when they did Reflektor, and it don't work here.
The weird thing about it is, ʽThe Party
Lineʼ is one of the catchiest songs Murdoch has written in a long, long
time. It is so not him, from a
technical standpoint, but it is well crafted, one of those disco tunes so full
of self-irony that people will be forced into body language communication
whether or not they realize that the lyrics are making fun of them. He should
have donated it to Franz Ferdinand, though, or to Madonna if she would have it.
ʽEnter Sylvia Plathʼ, as the title suggests, is a song about suicide
set to a Pet Shop Boys-style rhythm track — seven minutes of planting nasty
subliminal messages into the head of an unsuspecting dance victim; the only
saving grace is that this one seems to lack any traces of a catchy chorus
whatsoever, so not much will hopefully be imprinted.
Best of the lot are Dum Dum Girl Dee Dee
Penny's vocals on ʽPlay For Todayʼ — for a moment out there, they made
me forget about the dull electronic backup. The lyrics are just a tad too pretentiously
clichéd for Murdoch's usually respectable level ("life is a rope,
death is a myth, love is a fraud, it's misunderstood" — come on now, there
must be more interesting words left in the English language, right?), but when
it's Dee Dee's turn, she gets to coo this out in such a «sexy angel» tone as I
have yet to hear on any of her Dum Dum Girls songs I've heard. Well, at least
it is good to know that a shy guy like Murdoch can bring out the best in some people.
Electronics aside, there's quite a few
«traditional» B&S songs here as well — in fact, the album is almost
uncomfortably long, mainly due to the endless stretching out of the disco
tunes, but also, I guess, because even if you do not put out an album in five
years, you still write songs, and a mediocre songwriter like Murdoch does not
have to worry too much about sifting the exciting from the bland. Thus, strong
tunes like the opening ʽNobody's Empireʼ, the Paul Simon-esque
ʽAllieʼ, and the consolatory ʽEver Had A Little Faithʼ are
mixed with moodily pleasant waves of sentimentality (ʽThe Everlasting
Museʼ) and semi-successful attempts at some sort of New Age-y effect
(ʽThe Cat With The Creamʼ). Or, perhaps, with a little work of the
mind you could turn these judgements inside out and come out with the exactly
opposite impressions — it doesn't really matter. «Take some, leave some» will
probably be the prevailing opinion here.
On the whole, now that I am making this
decision at the last moment, it would be silly to deny the album a thumbs up
just because of its electronic
coating. I have nothing against «dark dance music» (or I'd have to hate Depeche
Mode and the like) — I just happen to think it should be left to professionals,
not amateurs for whom it had never previously worked as a point of reference.
On the other hand, this album does a better job of integrating the beats with
Murdoch's personality — the worst moments on Write About Love were accompanied with the thought of «this is not
Belle & Sebastian I'm listening to here, this is a different entity — and these guys, of all people, have no
artistic right to change into a different entity, so why am I even listening to
this?» No such situation here: even ʽParty Lineʼ, as clumsy as it is,
is yer trusty old Belle & Sebastian, forcing themselves to jump through a
burning hoop for no clear reason. So, maybe their glory days are over and out,
but as long as Murdoch has enough strength and personality left to press that
«It's ME again!» button, let the
music flow for all I care.
ADDENDA:
PUSH BARMAN TO OPEN OLD WOUNDS (1997-2001/2005)
CD I: 1) Dog On Wheels; 2) The
State I Am In; 3) String Bean Jean; 4) Belle & Sebastian; 5) Lazy Line
Painter Jane; 6) You Made Me Forget My Dreams; 7) A Century Of Elvis; 8) Photo
Jenny; 9) A Century Of Fakers; 10) Le Pastie De La Bourgeoisie; 11) Beautiful;
12) Put The Book Back On The Shelf/Songs For Children.
CD II: 1) This Is Just A
Modern Rock Song; 2) I Know Where The Summer Goes; 3) The Gate; 4) Slow
Graffiti; 5) Legal Man; 6) Judy Is A Dick Slap; 7) Winter Wooskie; 8) Jonathan
David; 9) Take Your Carriage Clock And Shove It; 10) The Loneliness Of A Middle
Distance Runner; 11) I'm Waking Up To Us; 12) I Love My Car; 13) Marx And
Engels.
From an inevitably Beatlish perspective, this
lengthy 2-CD retrospective is Belle & Sebastian's Past Masters Vol. 1: a compilation that does not add much to one's
understanding of the band's essence if you already got all the regular LPs, but
a quintessential artefact all the same if you are enough of a fan to want to
own everything «important». The discs neatly and meticulously collect almost
everything that Murdoch and Co. released in between the regular LPs: four EPs
recorded and published in 1997-98 and three singles released in 2000-2001. In
other words, the album elegantly reflects the first period of the band's
existence — the «introspective folk-pop years», stopping right before the
transition to the louder, more colorful pop-rock sound of Dear Catastrophe Waitress and Life
Pursuit.
To own such a well-assembled collection is
always pleasant for a reviewer, providing the opportunity to avoid reviewing
each little EP under its own title or ignoring them altogether — but it also
makes life tough at the same time, since there is so much material here that
picking out the highlights and striving not to forget to pat the «hidden gems»
on the back can be a real headache. The problem is, Murdoch took as much care
of and pride in his EPs and singles as everything else, and none of these songs
could be described as «filler»: everything shows the same attention to detail,
focus on taste, and lyrical insight as the best songs on Tigermilk and whatever followed. And just as well, at the same
time, everything sounds «the same» — permeated with the mellow-morose vibe,
pretty, smart, and relatively hookless.
So as not to get lost myself and not to lose
anybody else in the process, I will offer a brief-rundown — listing each of
the individual components of the retrospective and highlighting what looks like
one potential highlight off each one. First on our list is Dog On Wheels, a four-song EP from May 1997, thematically linked to
Tigermilk (both records even have
the same Joanne Kenney on the photo, this time with a toy animal instead of a
real one). The title track, with its unusually (for Murdoch) bluesy acoustic
melody appeals to me on a special level, but «objectively» the EP is more
notable for containing a song that is actually titled ʽBelle & Sebastianʼ — its lyrics finally
providing the curious fans with an artistic motivation behind the choice of the
band's name, rather than just the dry technical facts. Other than Murdoch
singing about an octave higher than his normal range allows him without
straining, it is quite a touching experience.
Next, we have Lazy Line Painter Jane, another 4-song EP where the highlight is
clearly the title track, recorded in a church hall (too bad the organ employed
is clearly not the church organ) as a duet between Murdoch and guest vocalist
Monica Queen — a dense, fully arranged number making good use of the echoey
acoustics when it comes to the climactic crescendo, and sarcastically
assassinating a «sexually liberated» protagonist along the way. The lyrics may
be just a little too silly and a little too vile, but musically, the song is
one of their more interesting productions of 1997, before the sonic ambitions
were toned down once again.
Following this up with 3.. 6.. 9 Seconds Of Light, another EP where I was initially
seduced by the fast-moving, wildly agitated ʽLe Pastie De La
Bourgeoisieʼ, but eventually decided that it is trumped by
ʽBeautifulʼ, which rolls along at a slower pace, leisurely takes its
time to build up, and eventually unfurls into a majestic, but incredibly sad
allegoric anthem to all the silly people, deluded by society and themselves,
with strings, brass, organ, and vocal harmonies gracefully assembled together
in one polyphonic lament. Again, this sort of arrangement is not at all typical
of the band's early studio LPs, showing that Murdoch regarded LP expression and
EP expression as two significantly different kinds of activity.
The fourth EP, This Is Just A Modern Rock Song, released late in 1998, does not
particularly impress me with anything. Its title track drags on for seven
minutes and mainly depends on its autobiographical flavor — beginning with an
account of some of Stuart's girl relations and then going on to comment on the
entire band ("we're four boys in corduroys, we're not terrific but we're
competent"), name-dropping Dostoyevsky and ending with self-irony ("I
count three, four and then we start to slow, because a song has got to stop
somewhere"), but really, melodically the whole thing is too bit of a drag.
Murdoch is a man of many talents, but it is not in his power to come up with
his own ʽDesolation Rowʼ — his metabolism rate is too slow for that.
The second disc is almost completely devoted to
the single format, and the songs there progressively keep sliding into
smoother, more lethargic territory, although ʽLegal Manʼ is a
psychedelic dance number, on the surface — retro-oriented at recapturing the
«sunshine» of hippie happiness, under the surface — most likely, an ironic look
at the ongoing revivalism of Sixties idealism, with its fairy chants of
"L-O-V-E love, it's coming back, it's coming back" and appeals to the
listener to "get out of the city and into the sunshine". I do not
think the song works at all — it is too dazed and melancholic to imitate stark
raving happiness, and too stark ravingly happy to match the usual melancholic
standards. Stuck somewhere in the middle with no particular place to go, and
I'd rather listen to ʽJudy Is A Dick Slapʼ, which (thank God!) is
actually an instrumental driven by what sounds like a Moog solo (in the 2000s?
Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson ahoy!).
Still, some of the B-sides have their little
pings and clinks: ʽThe Loneliness Of A Middle Distance Runnerʼ has a
cool flanging effect on the guitar solo, and ʽI Love My Carʼ is quite
a hilarious martial-pop Kinkophile dream that also finds space to accommodate
the Beach Boys, as "I love my car" eventually becomes "I love my
Carl" and the verse is
tolerantly concluded with the line "...I could even find it in my head to
love Mike Love". Okay, so I admit that I always try to measure my feelings
for Murdoch art without taking lyrics
into consideration, but I also have to admit that the man has a good feel for
phonetics, allowing sound similarity to lead him in all sorts of unpredictable
directions — good bribery material for any writer with a linguistic background,
that. On this note, I have no choice but to give the compilation a thumbs up
and state that its first disc at
least is a strong pretender to «best B&S album of the 20th century»,
whereas the second one, dispensing its highs and lows with a little less
energy, still has its fair share of pleasures for the experienced fan. And yes,
these are «old wounds» indeed, but enough of them have a significantly unusual
shape for the experienced sadomasochist not to get bored.
THE BBC SESSIONS
(1996-2001/2008)
CD I: 1) The State I Am In; 2)
Like Dylan In The Movies; 3) Judy And The Dream Of Horses; 4) The Stars Of
Track And Field; 5) I Could Be Dreaming; 6) Seymour Stein; 7) Lazy Jane; 8)
Sleep The Clock Around; 9) Slow Graffitti; 10) Wrong Love; 11) Shoot The Sexual
Athlete; 12) The Magic Of A Kind Word; 13) Nothing In The Silence; 14) (My
Girl's Got) Miraculous Technique.
CD II: 1) Here Comes The Sun;
2) There's Too Much Love; 3) The Magic Of A Kind Word; 4) Me And The Major; 5)
Wandering Alone; 6) The Model; 7) I'm Waiting For The Man; 8) The Boy With The
Arab Strap; 9) The Wrong Girl; 10) Dirty Dream #2; 11) Boys Are Back In Town;
12) Legal Man.
Since Belle & Sebastian are a studio band,
above and beyond everything else, hunting for their live albums is not a
particularly rewarding challenge, and they are well aware of it: throughout
their entire career, their only single-venue live experience release was a live
re-recording of If You're Feeling
Sinister, carried out in 2005 at the Barbican Centre in London, and
available only in a limited digital format (through iTunes and other such
sources) — explained by Murdoch as a necessity, since he was never pleased with
the production on the original studio record and wanted to remedy that illness
without sacrilegiously tampering with the old tapes.
As for these BBC Sessions, I have no idea how much input Murdoch himself had in
the album, but the double-disc version (there is also a single CD version)
seemingly contains all the live Belle & Sebastian material you'll ever need
and more. The first disc puts together several radio sessions ranging from 1996
to 2001, including a John Peel session with four songs that have remained unreleased
on any studio album (enough of an incentive for the fans); the second disc
comes from a single show, recorded in Belfast, December 2001, and gives a very
good idea of what an actual Belle & Sebastian concert really is — much of
the idea being easily predictable, but with a few surprising bits and pieces to
show off the band's general smartness.
On Disc 1, most of the performances, while
carried out without any problem, come across as cosmetic variations on the
originals, so I leave it up to the big fans to spot the differences and make
the choices. (A major exception is ʽLazy Janeʼ, an early version of
ʽLazy Line Painter Janeʼ that accentuates the folksy nature of the
song rather than the studio finalization that added an early Sixties
rhythm-and-blues flavor). As to the four new tracks, they are all good, but the
only one that strikes me as rising above the everyday quality bar is
ʽNothing In The Silenceʼ, with Isobel Campbell lending her «little
girl hush-hush» voice to a haunting arrangement that arguably features the
best use of harmonica on a Belle & Sebastian track ever, not to mention its
interplay with the chimes and violins. It is all the more notable because
Murdoch and Co. do not frequently come across as masters of the «solitary inner
paradise» genre, reserved for the likes of Broadcast — this is one of their few
songs that manages to combine the usual sadness with a sort of inner peace and
tranquility, perhaps even a special kind of happiness.
Meanwhile, the Belfast concert is mostly interesting
for its choice of covers, balanced around a selection of tunes from Arab Strap, Fold Your Hands, and the band's recent EPs. The show is opened with
ʽHere Comes The Sunʼ, eventually proceeds to include the Velvet
Underground's ʽWaiting For My Manʼ, and ends with an exaltated
version of Thin Lizzy's ʽThe Boys Are Back In Townʼ. Now, clearly,
the last choice was triggered by the show's location (a big Irish hit for a big
Irish crowd), but surely they wouldn't have done the song if they didn't like
it, and it does sound very weird to hear a thick distorted guitar tone, be it
even a pop tone, on a Murdoch-led album — and the Velvets' tune, likewise, is
another thing with which one would not normally associate a band like this.
All the covers are done quite lovingly, even if it is relatively clear that the
spirit of these songs does not fully coincide with Murdoch's own spirit. Even
ʽHere Comes The Sunʼ comes across as a tune whose nature and purpose
they understand, but cannot appropriate for themselves — if only because
Murdoch is too much of a bitter cynic to fully embrace its open-hearted
idealism. He can love it, and he can simulate it, but he does not believe in
it, and I can certainly understand that.
But anyway, regardless of whether you will be
able to find a new kind of love for these performances or just file them under
the «somewhat superfluous» tag, one does
have to admit that, whatever the time period we are talking about, Belle &
Sebastian make a very good job of sounding tight and professional when playing
live — not a very easy job for an art-pop band that relies on
multi-instrumentalism and polyphony as their primary mode of existence. The
brass parts, the violin parts, the harmonies — every once in a while, you will
find yourself wondering if you are really listening to a live performance or if
they just dupe you into believing. Inspiration, feeling, and spontaneity are
irreplaceable qualities, but all too often, indie bands tend to forget that
they also have to work hard for their money, and listening to Murdoch and his
friends sweat it out for the BBC proves their industriousness even more
efficiently than their carefully overdubbed and mixed studio efforts. From that
point of view, they sure deserve their place in the radio archives, not to
mention yet another thumbs up.
THE THIRD EYE
CENTRE (2004-2010/2013)
1) I'm A Cuckoo (Avalanches
remix); 2) Suicide Girl; 3) Love On The March; 4) Last Trip; 5) Your Secrets;
6) Your Cover's Blown (Miaoux Miaoux remix); 7) I Took A Long Hard Look; 8)
Heaven In The Afternoon; 9) Long Black Scarf; 10) The Eighth Station Of The
Cross Kebab House; 11) I Didn't See It Coming (Richard X mix); 12) (I Believe
In) Travelin' Light; 13) Stop, Look And Listen; 14) Passion Fruit; 15)
Desperation Made A Fool Of Me; 16) Blue Eyes Of A Millionaire; 17) Mr. Richard;
18) Meat And Potatoes; 19) The Life Pursuit.
Much to the fans' delight, Murdoch is quite
compulsive-obsessive about his legacy. Less than a decade after Push Barman liberated them from the
necessity of hunting for old, cobweb-covered EPs, The Third Eye Centre accurately dredges up most of the leftovers
from the band's «upbeat pop» decade — B-sides, occasional remixes, and the EP Books from 2004. Obstinate observers
did notice that the latter EP was represented only partially, and that several
other rarities (mostly covers and additional remixes) were not present, either,
but these are particularities, and Murdoch and Co. had his reasons. Like Barman, this album was clearly made to
be listened to for enjoyment purposes, not just as a historical document. But
is it enjoyable?
Well, no more and no less than the «average»
B&S record. Actually, maybe just a little less, because most of the
remixes, curious as they are, have more to do with the tastes and habits of the
mixers than with B&S. You want a bona fide techno mix of ʽI Didn't See
It Comingʼ? You got it, but you might just as well enjoy the
techno-Vivaldi of Vanessa Mae. The Avalanches emerge from their long-term sleep
to offer their own take on ʽI'm A Cuckooʼ, replete with flutes, accordeons,
and African tribal dancing: very much what we'd expect from the Avalanches and
their passion for collage, but whether this collage makes any sense is
debatable. ʽYour Cover's Blownʼ, from The Books EP, is also given here in an oddly sown electro-pop coat
that makes all the «modernization» of the Belle & Sebastian sound on Write About Love microscopically unnoticeable
in comparison. But do they really need all those spaceship noises?
Of the «proper» songs, none turn out to be
revelations, which is a little sad, because I did hope for at least a few
monster pop hooks of ʽThe Blues Are Still Blueʼ caliber; but these are B-sides, after all, carefully
crafted and hardworkingly produced, just not inspired enough, or else they'd
been A-sides, I guess. ʽTravellin' Lightʼ, for instance, was cut from
Dear Catastrophe Waitress — maybe
because they thought it was too light:
pretty, folksy, cloudy, charming, but a little too smooth in its flow to
capture the required attention. ʽStop, Look And Listenʼ is a speedy
country-rocker with echoes of Ray Davies and Gram Parsons — nice, but not
exactly stirring up any hitherto unknown emotions.
There is a fair share of humorous oddities on
the album as well, such as ʽMeat And Potatoesʼ, a generic
quasi-doo-wop song with S&M-oriented lyrics, or ʽMr. Richardʼ, a
lyrical tribute to Keith Richard in the form of a rock'n'roll arrangement of a
Jamaican folk melody (I think). Yes, these guys do have a sense of musical humor, and it is understandable that
they prefer their B-sides to be its primary carrier. ʽThe Eighth Station
Of The Cross Kebab Houseʼ is also an oddity, but this time, somewhat
darker in tone — a brief account of love on the occupied territories, based on
the band's trip to the Holy Land, but, for some reason, set to a ska melody.
Overall, this is another essential compilation
for the fans, but if you were not head over heels in love with Barman, Third Eye Centre will be even more of a disappointment —
particularly compared to the flash and dazzle of the two major LPs that cover
its decade (not to mention all the Write
About Love outtakes, which couldn't be too good by definition). Still, in
case you get this wrong, I give it a thumbs up, because, other than the remixes, I
enjoyed every minute of it. A-sides or B-sides, hooks or no hooks, who cares,
as long as the band goes on loving their precious instruments with that much love, it is impossible to
condemn their recordings. However, they do
need to stay as far away from any sorts of electronics as possible.
BEN FOLDS FIVE (1995)
1) Jackson Cannery; 2)
Philosophy; 3) Julianne; 4) Where's Summer B.; 5) Alice Childress; 6)
Underground; 7) Sports & Wine; 8) Uncle Walter; 9) Best Imitation Of
Myself; 10) Video; 11) The Last Polka; 12) Boxing.
It is usually said about Ben Folds that, during
the young innocent days of his North Carolina childhood, he was teaching
himself the piano by learning Elton John and Billy Joel songs. Fast forward
approximately twenty years into the future, and although the man himself bears
a rather uncanny facial resemblance to a young Elton John, his musical style
certainly veers closer to Billy Joel: think either of a subconscious patriotic
tug, or maybe of Ben being a light, playful kind of guy, not particularly
hungry for Elton's sweeping old school ambitions.
However, «closer» by no means signifies
«identical». The first album by Ben Folds Five was released in 1995, the
middle of the «smart/ass/ decade» where emulating the relative intellectual
simplicity of Billy Joel, no matter how much you liked him in the first place,
would neither be a promising commercial move, nor a respectable artistic
decision. Besides, Ben's interests and preferences did extend to genres other
than early 1970s piano pop — these songs show an equally strong influence of
Sixties' pop, garage rock, and psychedelia, and it is no total coincidence that
the album came out in the same year as the debut of The Apples In Stereo: both
reflect the same demand for intelligent retro-pop with a modernistic update
that seemed to emerge at the time as a healthy underground antidote to... well,
whatever it was that irked and annoyed you about music in the early Nineties, I
guess, be it Michael Jackson, Nirvana, or Mariah Carey.
«Ben Folds Five» is actually a trio (with
Darren Jessee on drums and Robert Sledge on bass), although if you throw in
the guest musicians (Ted Ehrhard on violin, Chris Eubank on cello), you can
technically squeeze out a «five» all right, but the real reason is, Ben simply
thought that «Folds Five» sounded more harmoniously than «Folds Three».
Besides, when you fold, you do usually fold five, unless you're playing three
card poker, but that's beyond the point. And the point is, there is no guitar whatsoever
on the album — just piano, bass, and drums, with some extra strings every now
and then. This does not mean, however, that Ben Folds Five know not how to rock
out — Sledge's distorted roaring bass, Jessee's maniacal pummeling, and Ben's
aggressive punching of the keys occasionally come together in garagey barrages
of rock noise that were quite unthinkable in the days of early Elton John, when
he, too, still favored the piano/bass/drums «power trio» format, with optional
orchestration.
Ben's individual talents, pulled out one by one
and stretched out for all to see, are hardly jaw-dropping. As a piano player,
he seems to be about as good as a self-taught hard-worker gets; as a singer,
he's competent in mid-range but frequently gets off-key when climbing higher,
with an irritating indie knack of despising perfectionism; as a composer, he
knows how to craft hooks but just as frequently leaves them frustratingly
undercooked; as a lyricist, he is astute and always finds a way to get his
ideas through, but not always a properly impressive literary way with words to
express these ideas. But throw in a little bit of everything, and it is not
difficult to understand how the man quickly got himself a reliable fanbase.
Actually, my biggest beef with the record is
none of that, but rather the fact that the piano / bass / drums formula gets
routine and predictable rather quickly. The piano melodies, regardless of
whether they come from a music hall, torch ballad, or garage-rock mindset, do
not have too great a range, and, anyway, the piano is really only there for Ben
to provide a general backing for the voice — he does not solo all that much,
and quite a few of the songs are introduced with accapella singing, which
immediately takes your attention off the instruments, or simply bury the piano
under a vicious rhythm section onslaught altogether. In the end, while this is formally «piano pop», I did not get
the impression of a love connection between Ben and his instrument — not
something you could accuse either Elton or Billy of, regardless of your
feelings for them.
But despite this, it is hard to dislike the
album once you've gotten the hang of it. First, when the trio is on, they're
on: the fast-flowing pop hooks of such songs as ʽJulianneʼ,
ʽSports & Wineʼ, ʽUndergroundʼ are unbeatable, not to
mention the intelligence. ʽUndergroundʼ has always been singled out
in particular, with its derision of subcultures and stereotypes — "who's
got the looks? who's got the brains? who's got everything? I've got this pain in
my heart, that's all" is one of the simplest and truest send-ups of the
«indie mentality» in the history of indie rock, adequately set to a completely
«traditionalist», un-gimmicky melody. But a sucker for a sweet catchy chorus
like me will probably put ʽJulianneʼ with its funny, catchy falsetto
over its upbeat, fast tempo ahead of socially relevant thematics.
One thing Ben will try to seduce you with is
his honesty-simplicity value complex. He bares it all already on the second
track, called ʽPhilosophyʼ: "I see that there is evil / And I
know that there is good / And the inbetweens I never understood / Won't you
look at me, I'm crazy / But I get the job done". (Then, as if to prove
that he does get the job done, he throws in a textbook Gershwin quotation in
the outro). Although this is just an extract ripped from a denser, more
ambiguous and allegorical context, this feeling of being relatively uncluttered
by excessive, trumped-up complexity of feel and thought permeates the album —
the songs are all either about personal relations with girls, friends, and the
rest of the world, or little character portraits well in the old Brit-pop vein
(ʽUncle Walterʼ; ʽBoxingʼ, a ballad written from the
perspective of an aging Muhammad Ali that forms a surprisingly touching
conclusion to the record). They are all coherent, ensuring that the album is
more than just a sum of its parts, and make it easier to overlook particular
problems with «undercooking» of the melodies or occasional bum notes that Ben
refuses to correct.
Anyway, the album does strive for a philosophy, and every time a new artist like that
arrives, the correct question to ask is, «is this guy for real? should he be
taken seriously?». And, well, it is difficult for me to imagine Ben Folds
tugging at anybody's heart strings with the skill of a Ray Davies, or blowing
anybody's mind with the weapon arsenal of a Todd Rundgren, but at least he is
definitely for real, and making the best, and most graciously coordinated, use
of all his talents that an «average smart Joe from North Carolina» could ever
make. Quite a natural-coming thumbs up here — and, on a technical trivia note,
this is probably the best ever pop debut
album to be released at the not-so-tender age of twenty-nine. In a different
age, the artist would only have room for one more before he'd be written off as
irrelevant — that's one social disease that the Nineties, and the aging of rock
music in general, have cured us from.
WHATEVER AND EVER AMEN (1997)
1) One Angry Dwarf And 200
Solemn Faces; 2) Fair; 3) Brick; 4) Song For The Dumped; 5) Selfless, Cold, And
Composed; 6) Kate; 7) Smoke; 8) Cigarette; 9) Steven's Last Night In Town; 10)
Battle Of Who Could Care Less; 11) Missing The War; 12) Evaporated.
Ben Folds Five's second album does not do much
except tightening the screws on an already well-built formula, but who's
complaining? The songs make a little more sense, the choruses are a little
catchier, the atmosphere occasionally gets a little wilder, and, above
everything else, the first album never contained any hidden promises of future
self-reinvention. As long as Ben Folds can come up with another bunch of
lightly melancholic or lightly humorous vignettes and keep on recombining those
music hall and rock'n'roll chords, he should be okay by any standards.
The fourth single from the album
(ʽBrickʼ) actually caused some controversy: it broke the band into
the charts, getting plenty of airplay and almost elevating them to «mainstream»
status, which naturally upset their «underground» fanbase, jealous of losing
the monopoly on the merry piano man and his companions. The fanbase had its own
truth, of course, since ʽBrickʼ is really one of the weakest numbers
on here — its piano melody is scattered and generic, its mood predictably sentimental,
and only the vocal structure of the chorus merits special attention. But, as
Ben said himself, it is an honest, well-meaning song (about waiting for his
girlfriend while she is having an abortion), and the honesty, along with its
mass-audience-palatable «alt-pop» arrangement, helped sell the song and gain
the band some extra notability.
The real meat'n'potatoes of the record are the
fast-moving numbers, regardless of whether they are based on pre-war dance
rhythms (ʽSteve's Last Night In Townʼ), post-war jazz grooves
(ʽOne Angry Dwarf And 200 Solemn Facesʼ), or rock'n'roll variations
(ʽKateʼ, which borrows its rhythmic skeleton from Bo Diddley's
ʽRoadrunnerʼ). This stuff is expectedly eccentric, hilarious, and
exciting — ʽOne Angry Dwarfʼ is a frenetic psychodrama where Ben's
piano parts, mostly jazz chords played with punkish energy, accompany a bitter
story of one man's petty revenge against his childhood traumas (loosely
referring to an artistic career but could just as easily be applied to some
political figures we know all too well); ʽKateʼ is the only love song
I know where the protagonist wants to become
his love interest rather than mate with her, and setting this idea to the
formerly ultra-macho melody of ʽRoadrunnerʼ is a super-ironic
gesture; and ʽSteven's Last Night In Townʼ simply has a great
clarinet part, giving it some nice hot speakeasy attitude as Ben pokes friendly
fun at one of his friends for excessive socializing.
It helps to pay attention to the lyrics,
because the average Ben Folds song is almost always a little concrete vignette,
not exactly or necessarily plot-oriented, but representing a particular point
of view or recounting a particular moment of experience — ʽMissing The
Warʼ, which is not about a real war but rather about a turbulent
relationship; ʽCigaretteʼ, a brief chamber-pop piece on a guy
divorcing his wife because she had cancer; ʽSong For The Dumpedʼ,
where the protagonist rails at his ex for leaving him penniless, etc. etc. It's
not as if the album provides any radically new insights into the human
relations area, but Ben has a modestly good way with words and always finds the
right music to go along with them.
There are occasional dubious decisions — for
instance, continuous bass feedback on the first half of ʽFairʼ that
gives me a headache and frankly does not do much good to the unfurling of the
story, before it finally gets some rhythm and becomes a straightforward catchy
power pop tune. ʽSelfless, Cold And Composedʼ is a moody old-style
jazz waltz that is a bit offset with some offkey singing and runs about two
minutes longer than it should. The silly parody on the «hidden track» gimmick
is also... silly. But worth waiting for just once, just to see how silly one
can get. Anyway, it's all just minor nitpicking. A major nitpick is that there
may be a slight overdose of ballads — and it's not just about
ʽBrickʼ, it's about the fact that Ben has a bit of a trouble with his
«heartbroken» avatar, so that a potentially beautiful chorus like the one on
ʽEvaporatedʼ comes out shakey, and a potentially devastating
"God, what have I done!.." generates some tepid sympathy and that's
about it. Subjective judgement, of course, but there is no denying that Ben's
voice simply does not live up to the demands of the tricky vocal melodies he
comes up with. Although the same cannot be said about the trio's vocal harmonies
— on ʽFairʼ, for instance, they revel in falsetto like the next
incarnation of classic ELO.
On the whole, though, the record is an
unquestionable success: no doubts about a thumbs up, and a big load of exuberant enjoyment
is freely guaranteed. The special CD edition adds a bunch of bonus tracks,
including clever reinventions of the Buggles' ʽVideo Killed The Radio
Starʼ and the Flaming Lips' ʽShe Don't Use Jellyʼ, and is also
recommendable.
THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY OF REINHOLD MESSNER (1999)
1) Narcolepsy; 2) Don't Change
Your Plans; 3) Mess; 4) Magic; 5) Hospital Song; 6) Army; 7) Your Redneck Past;
8) Your Most Valuable Possession; 9) Regrets; 10) Jane; 11) Lullabye.
I think that one glance at the album title
would be enough to understand that, third time around, the boys decided on
something more overtly ambitious, experimental, perhaps even «progressive» in
scope. But first things first: if you are unaware of the true identity of
Reinhold Messner, and, like myself, run to Wikipedia for a quick factual check,
then it is useful to know that so were the Ben Folds Five — who simply
concocted a bogus name, drawn from their drummer's memories of fake IDs he
used to generate while still a teenager (for whatever purposes, I don't even
wanna know). Of course, for every fake name there will always be a genuine
user, and the real Reinhold Messner, a famous mountaineer who was the first to
climb Mount Everest without supplementary oxygen, was delighted, so it is
said, to have such an album written in his name. Not to mention all the wealth
of post-factum analogies to be drawn from the incident — you could just as well
say that yes, in a way, Ben Folds is climbing his own Mount Everest with these forty minutes of pretentious music,
and the lack of guitar might be compared to the lack of supplementary oxygen,
and... but never mind, these reviews shouldn't be bullshitting you too much.
There is really no overarching lyrical or
ideological concept to this collection — only some sort of semi-conscious
desire to stretch out, dig in, and emerge as something more than «that cute
nerdy guy and his friends making cute pop songs for college entertainment».
There is no certified idea of what that «more» should consist of. Anything
goes. For instance, you can write a song on your emotional turmoil, associate
it with ʽNarcolepsyʼ, and populate it with grandiose string arrangements,
tidal melodic dynamics, and a piano melody that seems to owe more to mid-19th
century romantics than popular vaudeville. A beautiful piano melody, by the
way, and the whole song goes from one state to another just the way you'd
expect a narcoleptic to jump back and forth from reality into one crazy dream
after another. There's a ballad in there, some noise, some doo-wop, some
Queen-worthy anthemics, and other things I've forgotten, and they all hang together
quite well — this isn't just some crude pasting of random snippets.
There is a general feeling of sadness
permeating the entire album that isn't tremendously different from the band's
usual style, but Ben's decision to «aggrandize» things means that the feeling
is far more acute and permeating. Sometimes it hits you right in the face —
ʽRegretsʼ, for instance, is a moody fusion-style piece with nostalgic
lyrics and a soft melodic hint at tragedy that eventually gets resolved in a
bombastic tempo/tonality change in the finale (with Sledge unleashing the Great
Distorted Bass Serpent on our asses). ʽMessʼ is even more grim:
fast-moving chamber pop that leaves no hope for the protagonist as he extorts
your sympathy with a whiny, mumbly performance that Michael Stipe would have
approved (it's not exactly a ʽLosing My Religionʼ, but it shares the
same message).
Only once, for a brief while, does the album
emerge from this moody cocoon — ʽYour Redneck Pastʼ, combining sci-fi
electronic noises with an old-fashioned pop melody (and somewhat presaging the
innovations of Wilco's Yankee Hotel
Foxtrot in the process), ditches personal issues and concentrates instead
on lambasting the American stereotype. However, the song might just as well be
taken in a personal manner — you could, for instance, try and interpret it in
the context of Ben Folds' own impossibility to escape his "roots! the
funny limbs that grow underground", and then it falls quite niftily in
place. You thought he's trying to come up with new creative ways of expanding
musical boundaries and conveying psychological turbulence with sonic ideas that
bridge pop, jazz, and classical? Nope. That's just one of the "hundred
ways to cover your redneck past". Goddamn frickin' North Carolina legacy.
Further highlights, too technically-grounded to
discuss in details, include ʽDon't Change Your Plansʼ (particularly
recommended for lovers of Ben's falsetto); ʽJaneʼ, yet another great
classic era Bee Gees song that was never written by a Bee Gee (but the chorus
line of "you're worried there might not be anything at all inside" is
prime Barry, really); and ʽLullabyeʼ, which builds up towards a grand
orchestrated jazz-classical finale that totally discredits its title, but
provides the listener with a little optimistic flash of hope for the future
well-being of Reinhold Messer.
A few bits of filler, a few songs that end up
setting the same mood, and a relative lack of straightforward hooks compared
to the album's predecessor could theoretically drag the rating of Messer down for some people, but it
does not take these risks needlessly — the gamble pays off, making the record
one of the most credible and impressively crafted «musical character studies»
in the history of 1990s pop. Folds himself has said that Messer is his favorite record, and I have no problem believing
this — he has pretty much drained himself in all possible senses here, going as
deep in his self-analysis and as wide in his melodic explorations as his
constitution allows him to. Unquestionably a thumbs up, and the album deserved
much wider recognition than it got, despite impressive sales and a solid pop single
to back them up (ʽArmyʼ, a fairly upbeat way to narrate Ben's
experience of nearly failing college and considering enlisting as an
alternative). Well, it's never too late to give an underrated classic another
pat on the back, I guess.
ROCKIN' THE SUBURBS (2001)
1) Annie Waits; 2) Zak And
Sara; 3) Still Fighting It; 4) Gone; 5) Fred Jones, Pt. 2; 6) The Ascent Of
Stan; 7) Losing Lisa; 8) Carrying Cathy; 9) Not The Same; 10) Rockin' The
Suburbs; 11) Fired; 12) The Luckiest.
Alas, it cannot be denied: solo Ben Folds is not the same thing as the Ben Folds
Five. Right away, this is made evident on the twenty-sixth second of
ʽAnnie Waitsʼ, as a silly «piston-style» drum machine starts counting
out time, instead of the trusty frantic rolls of Darren Jessee. Later on, a
real rhythm section kicks in, with all parts provided by Ben himself — but he
is neither as aggressive or inventive a drummer as Darren, nor does he have
the same knowledge of / love for the bass guitar as Robert Sledge. Bass-wise,
he sometimes goes for a Paul McCartney approach (independent melodicity of the
instrument that does not require astute technique) — ʽLosing Lisaʼ,
for instance, has a bass-piano combo not unlike the one on ʽWith A Little
Help From My Friendsʼ — but his drumming is also similar to McCartney's
rather than Ringo's, and that pretty much says everything about why solo Ben
Folds is inferior to Ben Folds and his good friends.
Formally, Rockin'
The Suburbs is not a «one-man project» of the Paul McCartney, Roy Wood, or
Adrian Belew variety. A couple of friends help Ben out on guitars (and he
himself plays some guitar as well, breaking the solemn vow of long ago), some
cellos and background vocals are also contributed by outsiders, but the general
idea is that Ben Folds, indeed, is planning on rockin' those suburbs on his
very own. Which he does, on the title track, introduced by a distorted syncopated
pop-metal riff (said to imitate Korn and Rage Against The Machine, but I'm sure
it would also get the Noel Gallagher seal of approvement), a silly whistling
synth tone to compensate for the macho guitar tone, and appropriate lyrics:
"Let me tell y'all what it's like / Being male, middle class and
white".
The song itself is an obvious parody, from the
lyrics ("just like Bon Jovi did / I'm rocking the suburbs / Except that he
was talented..."; "you better look out because I'm gonna say
fuck") to all the «threatening» guitar tones, and while it did help push
Ben farther into the limelight, becoming his biggest solo hit, it also might have
sealed his fate — stereotyping him in the same camp as The Barenaked Ladies and
other «smarty-clowns» of the era. (For that matter, the Ladies were
stereotyped, too, but in their case, I actually believe that their
«smarty-clown» material was always better than their attempts at being taken
seriously; not the case for Ben Folds). The rest of the album, however, sounds
nothing like the title track.
Instead, it sounds... well, fairly traditional.
Sentimental ballads and happy-sad piano pop songs growing around various real
and imagined life stories. Sometimes around life stories that claim to be real
but look so hyperbolically weird that the brain refuses to acknowledge them as
such (ʽNot The Sameʼ is supposedly about a friend who got drunk,
climbed up a Christmas tree, and the next day climbed down a born-again
Christian). Sometimes with a whiff of kid-friendly psychedelia (ʽZak And
Saraʼ, with airy vocal harmonies and astral electronic effects spicing up
the old music hall), sometimes with just a slight trace of light techno
(ʽThe Ascent Of Stanʼ), and sometimes with an unintentional rip-off
of something emotionally similar — the soul-twisting lonesome-heart ballad
ʽFred Jones, Pt. 2ʼ takes a large chunk of its melody from Dylan's
ʽLonesome Death Of Hattie Carrollʼ, doesn't it? Those are some
emotionally tough chords out there.
The bad news is that some of the songs are
boring, or, at least, you don't really need a Ben Folds to lay them upon you.
ʽStill Fighting Itʼ, for instance, has fun lyrics, but the simple
melody dressed in existentialist sauce could just as well come from Alanis
Morissette. ʽGoneʼ is a homebrewed power ballad for which Ben does
not have enough power — not even enough power to bring it down to a
satisfactory melodic resolution. ʽCarrying Cathyʼ, ʽThe
Luckiestʼ — all these confessional ballads somehow fail to bring home the
bacon. Maybe the presence of a Robert Sledge could have helped, but standing as
he is here on his own, Ben just doesn't have the strength to pull it off on a
consistent basis.
The charisma is still there big time, and I
couldn't actively «dislike» the album even if I forced myself to do it. But
let's put it this way: no matter how talented and likeable, Ben Folds is no Elton
John, and not even Elton John ever tried to do without anybody else's help on
any of his albums. Rockin' The Suburbs
is an honest and partially successful try, but as for that other part, its success must have been doomed from the very
beginning.
BEN FOLDS LIVE (2002)
1) One Angry Dwarf And 200
Solemn Faces; 2) Zak And Sara; 3) Silver Street; 4) Best Imitation Of Myself;
5) Not The Same; 6) Jane; 7) One Down; 8) Fred Jones, Pt. 2; 9) Brick; 10)
Narcolepsy; 11) Army; 12) The Last Polka; 13) Tiny Dancer; 14) Rock This Bitch;
15) Philosophy; 16) The Luckiest; 17) Emaline.
Given the good reputation of Ben Folds Five as
a live performing unit, it seems a wee bit strange that Ben procrastinated so
long with an official live album — long enough for the band to disperse. On
the other hand, putting out a predictable live album is sort of a routine
affair; Ben Folds Live opts for the
harsher scenario, presenting Ben Folds as a very literally solo artist — just
the man and his piano. With the exception of John McCrea stepping out on the
stage for a sec to sing the additional vocal part on ʽFred Jonesʼ
(reprising his role on the studio album), Ben and only Ben is here to hold your
attention for about seventy minutes.
The related question seems obvious, and if you
can answer it in the positive, this alone justifies the existence of the album.
Few pop artists dare to venture out in the cold with nothing but their piano
(even Carole King prefers to have at least a bass player and an acoustic
guitarist at her side), seeing as how their audiences prefer to get a little
something extra as well for their money. And, after all, Ben Folds is no
Horowitz when it comes to making piano magic, so the potential for boredom
could be quite high even if he only concentrated on the hooky highlights.
It does
get a bit boring from time to time, for sure; the good news is that Ben's
studio charisma freely spills over onto the stage, and he does his best to
provide intelligent entertainment, mixed with enough friendliness and humor to
make it all seem like a house party — one where the invited piano player quite
unexpectedly turned out to be so much
better you'd think he'd be, he immediately becomes the focus of attention for
the entire evening. Not only does he play and sing every bit as good as on the
studio records (no slacking allowed whatsoever), but he finds time and strength
to improvise, to tell stories, to lead the audience in rather non-trivial
singalongs, to pay tribute to some of his idols, and even to torture his piano
a little bit (fortunately, not on the brutal level of Keith Emerson, but in a
more overtly melodic manner).
When necessary, he can rock his piano hard
enough for us to forget the lack of extra stage hands — ʽOne Angry
Dwarfʼ goes off like a hot set of firecrackers, and so does
ʽArmyʼ in the middle of the set. But he can also be less-than-serious
about it: ʽRock This Bitchʼ is a one-minute long improvisation,
taking as its base the possibly-drunk yelling of one of the fans — you can
either take it as a silly, failed joke, or as a thinly veiled hint at what Ben
Folds really thinks about the stereotypical
«rock'n'roll mentality». Since the joke stuck (Ben went on to improvies various
versions of ʽRock This Bitchʼ on subsequent tours), he probably
thought it was coolly ironic, although, much to his honor, he eventually got
bored with having to go through the same stupid ritual over and over again.
Other non-standard points of interest include:
(a) Ben leading the people in some fairly complex sing-along activities on
ʽArmyʼ, where he does need someone to fill in for the brass section;
(b) Ben covering Elton John's ʽTiny Dancerʼ — great song, faithful
and inspired performance, but, unfortunately, it also reminds very acutely of
what it is that separates a fabulous singer from a merely competent one
(referring, of course, to Elton's original
singing voice); (c) Ben adding a lengthy improvised section to
ʽPhilosophyʼ, including using the piano as a percussive instrument,
playing the piano strings directly, throwing in a bit of ʽMisirlouʼ,
and culminating with a touch of ʽRhapsody In Blueʼ; (d) Ben finishing
the show with ʽEmalineʼ, an obscure — but, frankly speaking, not too
memorable — tune from his early songwriting days as the leader of «Majosha», a
short-lived band from 1988-89 that only managed one short album.
In between, you get a solid share of Ben Folds
Five classics, interspersed with songs from Rockin' The Suburbs, a couple rarities, and a few anecdotes dealing
with the origins of ʽNot The Sameʼ, ʽBrickʼ, and others. If
you are real lucky, you can also end up with the limited edition that comes
with a small DVD — where you can see for yourself that Ben Folds wears a bowler
hat, plays a Baldwin, and does
somewhat resemble a young Elton John (the latter point makes me a little uneasy
about the future, but at least the man seems to lead a healthier lifestyle).
All in all, it's not a must-have or anything, but the general quality is quite
high, and there are enough of those little extra touches that guarantee a
little intrigue. Thumbs up.
SUPERSUNNYSPEEDGRAPHIC (2003-2004; 2006)
[Speed Graphic]: 1) In Between Days; 2) Give Judy My Notice; 3)
Protection; 4) Dog; 5) Wandering; [Sunny
16]: 1) There's Always Someone Cooler Than You; 2) Learn To Live With What
You Are; 3) All U Can Eat; 4) Rockstar; 5) Songs Of Love; [Super D]: 1) Get Your Hands Off My Woman; 2) Kalamazoo; 3)
Adelaide; 4) Rent A Cop; 5) Them That Got (live); [The LP]: 1*) Bitches Ain't Shit; 2*) Bruised; 3*) Still.
This is really a trick review. Instead of
talking about Supersunnyspeedgraphic,
The LP, released in 2006, I would rather talk about the three individual
EPs that provide the bulk of material for this album. Some of the tracks were
remixed and even received new instrumental parts, but many were lopped off in
the process, and three extra tracks that were not part of the original EP
series were introduced. As a result, the poor fans had to scoop up everything in order to keep track of
things — but we will hang on to the original EPs and nonchalantly dismiss the
«LP» as superfluous self-indulgence. It does add Ben's (in)famous cover of Dr.
Dre's foul-mouthed ʽBitches Ain't Shitʼ, redone as a sentimental
piano ballad, but if you've heard it once, I have no idea why you'd want to
hear it again. (Admittedly, quite a few fans liked it so much that Ben had to
do it for years onstage before making a man's decision to retire the gimmick —
just goes to show that popularity ain't shit).
Anyway, the three EPs (Speed Graphic, Sunny 16,
Super D) were originally planned as
such because the majority of the tunes were «throwaways» — covers of old and
contemporary artists; collaborations with pals; completed versions of old
(sometimes very old) demos; or, vice versa, incomplete demos that would later
resurface in more polished versions (ʽGive Judy My Noticeʼ). Only a
few songs do not fit in any of these categories, making it impossible to
generate something self-consciously important out of this mix. And perhaps for
the better, because at this point in his solo career, Ben tended to drift a bit
too close to «adult contemporary» standards when in the mood for something very
serious. These three EPs, on the contrary, are relatively light, have a high
share of simple-fun moments, and generally qualify.
Speed
Graphic opens with a spirited
cover of The Cure's ʽIn Between Daysʼ, a perfect Cure song to get
re-interpreted by Ben (it's one of those rare romantic moments from Robert
Smith, like ʽFriday I'm In Loveʼ, rather than his usual Goth gloom);
includes ʽDogʼ, built on a fast spiralling piano riff that is at the
very least one of Ben's flashiest, if not necessarily his best; and ends with
ʽWanderingʼ, which takes itself very seriously and, like I just said,
subsequently runs the risk of sounding too boringly self-important, but somehow
he seems to get the ice-cold melancholia mood just right on that one — or maybe
it's simply that the song's relaxed piano walk, fished out of the same chord
can as ʽLet It Beʼ, agrees so well with the word
"wandering".
Sunny
16, true to its title,
generally sounds even more relaxed and party-oriented. The songs are fairly
moralistic, but upbeat and «sunny» — ʽThere's Always Someone Cooler Than
Youʼ and ʽYou've Got To Learn To Live With What You Gotʼ give
their message away in the title, hammer it inside your head with the catchy
chorus, but never for once let their moralizing get the best of the artist, who
presents the songs as fun piano pop rockers rather than parables. Incidentally,
the latter tune bears a remote resemblance to Nicky Hopkins' piano on the
Stones' ʽSalt Of The Earthʼ — I wonder just how coincidental this
was, especially since a couple other «rocking» passages here also bring to mind
Nicky's classic style. For that matter, the melody of ʽRock Starʼ
seems to quote a bit from George Harrison's ʽI Me Mineʼ (the
"...baby the truth is, you need their approval..." bit), one
coincidence too many. That's what you get by being raised on Sixties classics,
subconscious inserts a-plenty.
The third EP is the slightest of all, with a
hilariously hysterical cover of The Darkness' ʽGet Your Hands Off My
Womanʼ, a polite two-minute live tribute to Ray Charles (ʽThem That
Gotʼ), a surprisingly vicious anti-police rant (ʽRent A Copʼ —
now Ben only has to pray that the next cop to write him out a speeding ticket
has never listened to Super D), and
what could possibly be the best song on this whole mix if I ever get around to
listening to it another couple hundred times: ʽKalamazooʼ has a
highly non-trivial, fairly «progressive», structure, with jazz chords,
stops-and-starts, tempo changes, psychedelic orchestral breaks, whatever.
(Allegedly, the man wrote it at the tender age of 19, but it must have acquired some additional
layers since then).
Because of all this diversity, the resulting
package, though much longer than Rockin'
The Suburbs, is surprisingly easier to sit through. It also helps that Ben
hired some real drummers to help with the recordings (bass duties seem to have
been mostly handled by himself), so much of this stuff regains the liveliness
and fussiness of the Ben Folds Five days, even if we could always use some more
fat distorted bass on the rockers. All in all, I would well advise to
concentrate on the original EPs rather than the «best-of» single album version
— particularly since the bonus songs there aren't particularly great (the
six-minute epic ʽStillʼ, taken from the soundtrack to the cartoon Over The Hedge, is really just an
orchestrated bore); consider these here thumbs up as a recommendation for
ʽWanderingʼ and ʽKalamazooʼ, which were inexplicably left
off the LP, over ʽBitches Ain't Shitʼ, which is really not that
funny, once you've had your fun.
SONGS FOR SILVERMAN (2005)
1) Bastard; 2) You To Thank;
3) Jesusland; 4) Landed; 5) Gracie; 6) Trusted; 7) Give Judy My Notice; 8)
Late; 9) Sentimental Guy; 10) Time; 11) Prison Food.
The album sleeve photo is so outrageously
generic-hipster here that there are only three choices from the outset: either
the music is going to be suitably generic boring trash, or it is going to be a masterpiece of self-parody, or it is simply going to be a
masterpiece, because there's really no way that album sleeve photo could be
anything but a sarcastic ruse. The third choice seems like the unlikeliest of
the three — but give Songs For Silverman
a few attentive listens, and you just might start veering towards No. 3 all the
same.
My own first listen was a complete disaster:
the only thing I understood was that the album consisted exclusively of sentimental / melancholic ballads, nary a bouncy,
rhythmic pop hook in sight, let alone any possibilities of «rocking out», and
that kind of monotonousness would be hard to take even from a certified genius
like Paul (even before he stopped eating meat) or Elton (even before he sold
all his costumes). There were no new attitudes or approaches, either, though it
did look as if he took a few extra singing lessons; and the instrumentation,
once again, was completely dominated by solo piano, with sparsely scattered
guitar or string overdubs passing by unnoticed unless you were really paying attention.
The situation only changed by the third time,
when the music sank in a little bit and started dissolving the major prejudice
— namely, the one that Ben Folds is a good pop hook provider and a funny maniac
on stage, but a generally rotten troubadour. The particular song that did it to
me was ʽLandedʼ (and a good choice for first single from the album it
was, too, even though it did not manage to get too high on the charts).
Relatively simple lyrical message of transgression and redemption — but what a
terrific musical build-up, from the quavering vocal of the verse aided in
becoming decisive by the sharp piano chords, and right up to the "bye-bye
goodbye" hook of the chorus: a well-placed falsetto note or two can work
wonders, but only if it is
well-placed, and I think this one deserves an A+ for well-placing.
Then there was ʽTimeʼ — normally, I'd
suggest that artists that still go on
writing songs named ʽTimeʼ should be lined up against the wall, but
this one actually happens to deserve its own place of honor somewhat below, but
not light-years-far-from Pink Floyd's, Bowie's, or Alan Parsons', and again,
much of this has to do with the unbeatable falsetto hook, indeed delivered by
Ben Folds himself, even if he is being vocally assisted on the song by none
other than Weird Al Yankovic, for some reason. Not that there's anything weird
about the song itself — it is just a mid-tempo adult contemporary ballad with
complexly layered backing vocals, but the drama is so masterfully executed,
mainly through the contrast between "in time I will fade away, in time I won't
hear what you say, in time..." (strong, self-assured bit) and "...but
time takes time you know" — this
time, the falsetto actually means "PANIC!".
These two songs served as the anchor for
testing a hypothesis — what if Songs For
Silverman is actually a confessional masterpiece, Ben's own Plastic Ono Band, or Blue, or Blood On The Tracks, any of those things? For that matter, he would
only divorce his third wife, Frally Hynes, in November 2006, but it is quite
likely that things were flying out of control much earlier already, and
considering how many ladies ultimately failed to satisfy the man (he seems to
be taking his cue here from big idol Billy Joel), it might be argued that Ben
Folds marries and divorces mainly for the sake of getting fresh inspiration for
his material. And indeed, other than the first track and ʽJesuslandʼ,
just about everything here is about
being alone once again and trying to find different ways to deal with the
trauma, either by remembering, or by forgetting. But that is not important per
se — the really important thing is, should we
care?
I think that songs like ʽLandedʼ and
ʽTimeʼ provide ample evidence that we should. Yes, he may be building
here on the same territory that had already refused to yield to him several
times earlier, but he's either been taking songwriting lessons (next to
singing ones) or perhaps the feelings just got sharper, so that much — far from all, but much of the album — really cuts hard,
and should be well recommendable for all non-suicidal loners who want to heal
rather than hurt, or, at least, use the hurt for healing purposes.
It's really a brief conceptual travelog here.
We begin with some general morals ("why you gotta act like you know when
you don't know?") as a basic framework (ʽBastardʼ), start off at
the far away beginning when things were good and connecting (ʽYou To
Thankʼ, although the song is already permeated with sadness, so you know
it's not going to be all that happy from now on), take a sideways stroll to
think about the futility of religion (ʽJesuslandʼ), patch up our
first batch of differences (ʽLandedʼ), and raise our little kid
(ʽGracieʼ — quite a charming little ballad to Ben's daughter). That's
the «still-okay» part of the business.
As we go to Side B, we discover that she's been
reading our secret diary (ʽTrustedʼ), declare that "I won't be
your bitch anymore" (ʽGive Judy My Noticeʼ), take another
sideways stroll to say a few words in memory of the recently departed Elliott
Smith (ʽLateʼ — but thematically, with its mournful farewell mood,
the song fits in perfectly), share a few last thoughts on how we used to be so
similar, but the different has won out all the same (ʽSentimental
Guyʼ), make the transition to spiteful bitterness in relations
(ʽTimeʼ), and wrap it up with a grand finale (ʽPrison
Foodʼ) where Ben's quiet wailing ("alone, alone again!") is
enveloped in frantically thrown layers of percussion, piano, and steel guitar,
as if the idea was to create something on the scale of ʽLove Reign O'er
Meʼ. Of course, that sort of
scale is quite out of reach, but a humble approximation is quite possible, and
if ʽPrison Foodʼ will not be able to make you feel sorry for the man,
then you are probably immune to Ben Folds as an organic character in general.
Some of these songs are worse than others, but
the fact that it all ties up so nicely kind of levels everything up: the
highlights never cease to be highlights, and the lowlights, whatever they be,
are still moody enough to fit the concept. The only thing that does not fit is
the title of the album — which, for that matter, was going to be dedicated to
Ben's representative at Sony (Ben Goldman), but, for reasons of
confidentiality, «Goldman» ultimately got split into «Silverman» and «Goldfish»
(for the accompanying live record). That, like the album photo, should be
regarded as a proverbial red herring, because the personal experiences of Ben
Goldman have nothing to do with the personal experiences of Ben Folds, or with
the status of this album as the ultimate breakup record of... well, let's say,
of the year 2005, since, after all, breaking up seems to be the quintessential Significant Artistic
Topic of the 21st century, families not being what they used to be and all
that. Anyway, a hefty thumbs up, of course.
SONGS FOR GOLDFISH (2005)
1) In Between Days; 2) Gone;
3) Hiro's Song; 4) You To Thank; 5) Weather Channel Music; 6) Evaporated; 7)
There's Always Someone Cooler Than You; 8) Rockin' The Suburbs; 9) Radio
Jingles For Tokyo's Inter-FM; 10) Side Of The Road.
Since this album was originally released as a
bonus disc to go along with Songs For
Silverman, it does not deserve a detailed review, but is still worth a
quick mention — being the only official live Ben Folds release where he is (a)
actually backed by a band and (b) the band is not the Ben Folds Five, but a different trio, where Jared Reynolds
replaces Robert Sledge, and Lindsay Jamieson replaces Darren Jessee, and both
try to play as close to the Five's rhythm section as possible, right down to
putting all that brawny distortion on the bass for extra rock power. They do make a good job of it, for that
matter, but I guess Ben wouldn't have hired them otherwise, not to mention
putting the results on the public market.
The collection is a little rag-taggy, with the
first five tracks taken from a 2005 show in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, two
«rocking» tracks recorded at an L.A. show one year earlier, and an oldie leftover
from the «real solo» days for complect (a piano-only run through
ʽEvaporatedʼ from a 2002 NYC show). Rounding up the relatively short
selection are a couple of cute, but ultimately worthless radio jingles, and a
forgettable studio outtake — a cover of Lucinda Williams' ʽSide Of The Roadʼ,
which is only slightly less boring than the original, and anyway, I think it
must be hard to be a deep-level fan of Ben Folds and Lucinda Williams at the
same time.
Of the live selections, two are particularly
notable: ʽWeather Channel Musicʼ is a four-minute piece of jazzy
improv that starts out as an «anti-reaction» to ʽRock This Bitchʼ
("I've personally done about fifty different styles of ʽRock This
Bitchʼ, there's no more styles left!") and then, much to the satisfaction
of all the sane fans (rather than the
ones that keep bawling "rock this bitch!" in an honestly scary
manner), moves into the world of scat singing and flashy piano rolls. And the
live take on ʽRockin' The Suburbsʼ, rearranged now as a piano trio,
pokes even more vicious fun at the
«rock mentality», extended as it is to six and a half minutes of hullabaloo, musical
and verbal hooliganry ("you better watch out cuz I'm gonna say
fuck!!!" — and he does) — a respectable companion to the more restrained
studio original.
And that's about it, actually. It's a little
strange that only ʽYou To Thankʼ is carried over from Songs For Silverman itself, but
supposedly Ben wanted this, too, to look like a little retrospective (if you
throw in ʽEvaporatedʼ, the album covers most of the phases of his
career from 1997 to 2005), and this is as representative as he could make it,
given the short time length. All in all, nothing essential, but a nice bonus
chunk for the deeply admiring and the casual fan alike if you can get it for
free or close to it. Besides, you have
to have it if you wanna complete the puzzle of the genuine album title — Goldfish and Silverman can't do without each other.
WAY TO NORMAL (2008)
1) Hiroshima (B B B Benny Hit
His Head); 2) Dr Yang; 3) The Frown Song; 4) You Don't Know Me; 5) Before
Cologne; 6) Cologne; 7) Errant Dog; 8) Free Coffee; 9) Bitch Went Nuts; 10)
Brainwascht; 11) Effington; 12) Kylie From Connecticut.
Really bad album title here. The lack of a
second ʽoʼ in ʽtooʼ would never deter the skeptics from
sneering «You don't say!», which they really do in their two-star and C+
reviews. But it's even worse if you prefer not to notice the pun — because who
of us would want a «normal» Ben Folds? Any more «normal» and he'd be Vanessa
Carlton. An immediate turn-off, and a particularly ridiculous one, considering
that it is also deceptive: Way To Normal
is not really any more or less «normal» than any other Ben Folds record. In
fact, considering its overall lightweight nature and the abundance of openly
clownish moments, it might even be less
normal than usual. Maybe he should have come up with that title earlier — I
think that Rockin' The Suburbs is
more deserving of it than this particular batch of tunes.
There is nothing surprising about the fact that
Way To Normal was greeted with
relative coldness, and the reasons behind this probably go deeper than a
simple «oh no, not another forty minutes of this guy bitching about his
problems» gut reaction. One of them is that thirty-five years earlier, a
bespectacled eccentric called Reginald Kenneth Dwight recorded ʽBennie And
The Jetsʼ, a stomping, fireworks-laden, piano-on-parade glam rocker that
became one of the most symbolic and unforgettable anthems of its era — a giddy
celebration of excess, decadence, and showbiz razzle-dazzle, spiced with
self-irony that you could savor or ignore at your whim. Now, thirty-five years later, Ben Folds, a successful, but
still somewhat aspiring singer-songwriter, opens his new album with an
intentional tribute to that particular song, subtitled ʽB B B Benny Hit
His Headʼ just so there would be no
way whatsoever you could leave that fact unnoticed — and the song is about...
falling on his head off the stage at the start of a Japanese show. "Oh oh
oh, they're watching me fall", goes the chorus. Does that make you happy
or what?
Oh, it's not a bad song at all — the chorus is suitably anthemic and catchy, and Ben
pounds the keys with no less physical energy than Elton. It's a funny parody,
except it came out about thirty years too late for us to properly get the joke,
and, worse than that, it is one more reminder — as if we really needed one! — of why Elton John is Elton John, and Ben
Folds, all pros and cons considered, is still only Ben Folds. And I am not
even raising the issue of how convenient it is to get this sort of song under
the title ʽHiroshimaʼ, which would normally have us expect something
completely different. (Then again, it might be a politically incorrect plus
rather than minus — fuck atomic bombs, let's just sing about falling on our
heads instead).
A very similar piano-punching pattern
constitutes the spine of the album's lead-off single and best-known track,
ʽYou Don't Know Meʼ, for which Ben enlists the help of a chamber
string section and Regina Spektor, who had only just graduated from Soviet
kitsch to Begin To Hope, and whose
whimsical style was in perfect agreement with this song, written by Ben as a
mutually accusing dialog between the bastard and one of his bitches (and yes, most of the imaginary or not so imaginary
protagonists on this album come across as certified bastards and bitches). The
perceptive effect of ʽYou Don't Know Meʼ, however, is different from
ʽHiroshimaʼ — the whole song, both instrumentally and vocally, is
built on brief stop-and-start bits of melody, which gives it a robotic feel;
Ben's and Regina's vocal interaction on all the "you-don't-know-me"s,
in particular, sounds so intentionally rigid and mechanical as if it were
computer-generated. But both singers are so «wimpy» that, in the end, they
sound like baby robots having a baby battle of the wits, and while the effect
is genuinely hard to forget, you do feel like you're sitting in the middle of a
cutesy cartoon while it's on.
«Fluffy» moments like these abound on the
record. ʽDr Yangʼ, ʽThe Frown Songʼ, ʽFree
Coffeeʼ, and, of course, the infamously titled ʽBitch Went Nutsʼ
— all of them giddy, lightweight, ironic, sometimes parodic pop-rockers; some
of them are melodically impressive (ʽDr Yangʼ is a head-spinning
piece of piano-based rock'n'roll with one of Ben's best piano tones ever
captured on the instrumental solo part), but some do not seem to be making much
of a point, or, worse still, are making a debatable point — the lyrics of
ʽBitch Went Nutsʼ carry the «strained relationship» topic a little
too far, right into the sphere of personal meanness, and the breakneck tempo of
the piano melody does not allow Ben to redeem himself through efficient
composition.
All the more surprising is the fact that,
sandwiched in between these numerous samples of «storms in teacups», we do find
some of Ben's most soulful ballads in ages — ʽCologneʼ and
ʽKylie From Connecticutʼ both work on the most basic gut level, the
former with its melancholic desperation (featuring the loneliest way to say the
words "my hotel room" since Ray Davies), and the latter with its
desperate melancholia, if you get the difference between the two. Both are far
more emotionally loaded than ʽBrickʼ, even if their respective
choruses are nowhere near that loud — apparently, as time (and more divorces)
go by, it becomes easier for Folds to wallow in his misery and convert the
results to heart-tugging vocal lines.
Overall, this is frankly a mess — but then
again, so was a heavy chunk of, say, Paul McCartney's solo catalog (an analogy
that probably came to my mind because both artists like to write silly songs
about dogs — check ʽ3 Legsʼ against ʽErrant Dogʼ!). So, for
consistency's sake, I couldn't dare condemn Way To Normal based on any «ideological» grounds, if the individual
songs range from cutesy-funny to subtly-heart-wrenching. Diverse, creative,
funny, and, as usual, honestly fulfilling Ben Folds' destiny — converting his
life experience into friendly musical anecdotes. If, this time around, the
results seem «fluffy», I guess it also merely reflects a particular piece of
life experience. No problems with a thumbs up here.
On a side note, one year later Ben actually
re-released the album as Stems And Seeds,
changing the running order, adding some extra overdubs (notably additional
orchestrated parts for ʽCologneʼ), and, most importantly, remixing
all the tracks with less compression — acting on fan complaints about the poor
sound quality of Way To Normal, as
he explained before other fans who
complained about the rip-off effect. I have heard both versions, and testify
that Stems does sound a wee bit
fresher and «ringier», so certified audiophiles might want to go along with the
new version; but on the other hand, it is not as if they were so significantly
different that you could get bored with the old one and then get redeemed with
the new one. However, it is worth noting that, in the authentic tradition of
the «nutty artist», the actual song ʽWay To Normalʼ only makes its
appearance on Stems And Seeds, but
not on Way To Normal itself.
Fortunately for us all, it's not a particularly good song.
LONELY AVENUE (2010)
1) A Working Day; 2) Picture
Window; 3) Levi Johnston's Blues; 4) Doc Pomus; 5) Your Dogs; 6) Practical
Amanda; 7) Claire's Ninth; 8) Password; 9) From Above; 10) Saskia Hamilton; 11)
Belinda.
"Some guy on the net thinks I suck and he
should know / He's got his own blog". Do you happen to have an idea whom
he is referring to? I mean, surely guys with blogs have so much more important
things to write about than whether or not Ben Folds sucks... oh wait a minute.
Actually, I really hate how he put that line in
the very first song on the album, because now I am confused and I do not
properly understand whether this album sucks because it sucks, or whether it
sucks because he just happened to piss off the reviewer right away. Well, okay,
maybe not «sucks» as such, but as Ben Folds grows older, it seems to be taking
more and more and more time to warm up to every next album, and time has just
went up from gold to platinum these days, so I will just say this: Lonely Avenue, the result of Ben's
productive collaboration with novelist Nick Hornby, is strictly one for the
fans, rather than for guys with blogs.
First of all, the idea of pulling the author of
About A Boy into the world of Ben
Folds seems about as strange an idea as, say, Bob Dylan's collaboration with
Jacques Levy on Desire — Folds may
not be an undeniably super-great lyricist, but there was never anything
particularly wrong with his lyrical expression, either, and if you weren't
informed, or an analytical expert on Folds' syntactic preferences, you might
not detect an «outsider»'s lyrical presence on here in the first place — we
still get the same old slices of everyday life dragged through the same
impressionist / existentialist poetic filters. So it is really Nick Hornby
complaining about the anonymous blogger, but it could have easily been Ben
himself. So it is Nick who pokes fun at the name ʽSaskia Hamiltonʼ (I
wonder if the real Saskia Hamilton,
who had only just won the Guggenheim Fellowship, took any offense?), but how
would an idea like that not be
capable of being generated in the already corrupt, degenerate, and deeply
offensive brain of Ben Folds?..
Although the point of this collaboration is
sort of obscure, in itself, this is certainly not a problem. The problem is
that the music seems to be lacking; even more than that, it seems to be
somewhat lifeless. Maybe, having agreed to write the music to a different
person's words, Ben was simply unable to find the right match. Maybe he wanted
to have himself an «Elton and Bernie» kind of an affair that was a long time
coming, but if so, he forgot that Elton never had any lyrical talent from the
very beginning, and that the whole «Elton and Bernie» thing started off and
developed as a coherent two-headed hybrid. Here, it's more like, «oh, another
batch of words, let me quickly generate some backing for it and get into
character».
Naturally, the overall sound is quintessential
Ben Folds — the poppy piano, the soft vocals, the harmony overdubs, the
occasional orchestration (and as if they needed yet another argument for my
«Elton and Bernie» theory, no less than Paul Buckmaster himself, Elton's old
orchestral guru, is credited for conducting and arranging strings). But most of
this stuff is very by-the-book Ben Folds — sentimental ballads that range from
weakly dynamic (ʽPicture Windowʼ, where string crescendos do help out
some) to utterly generic and forgettable (ʽClaire's Ninthʼ — generic
hookless indie pap whose dynamics, in contrast, only help it get more mushy). Sometimes it even borders
on atmospheric adult contemporary (ʽPasswordʼ, whose words, or,
rather, spellings sound more
interesting than the lazy music).
In the end, the only two good things on the
record are Buckmaster's orchestrations, which, amazingly, still sound inspiring after all those years (the album closer
ʽBelindaʼ almost justifies its personal-epic pretense because of
those), and ʽDoc Pomusʼ, a touching tribute to the man, one of whose
songs gave name to the entire album — although I would much rather hear Ben do
a cover of ʽLonely Avenueʼ than sing about half of these romantic
puddles. In its defense, I can only bring up the obvious — apart from the
spoiled-brat pissed-off opener, Lonely
Avenue is a kind, humanistic, introspective, caressing work that will
please the underdog and may offer some light additional psychotherapy to fans
of Badly Drawn Boy and the like. Unfortunately, I happen to be pinching myself from falling asleep — which, in this
case, is sufficient reason for a thumbs down, since it never happened before
with any other Ben Folds album so
far.
THE SOUND OF THE LIFE OF THE MIND (2012)
1) Erase Me; 2) Michael
Praytor, Five Years Later; 3) Sky High; 4) The Sound Of The Life Of The Mind;
5) On Being Frank; 6) Draw A Crowd; 7) Do It Anyway; 8) Hold That Thought; 9)
Away When You Were Here; 10) Thank You For Breaking My Heart.
Another awful, awful disappointment. You'd
think that getting back together with «The Five» would be just the right shot
in the arm for Ben after his last album showed him moving ever closer in the
direction of limp and lifeless balladry, stuck in the middle between mainstream
adult contemporary and equally boring «alternative» indie snoozefest stuff.
Surely, one of the loudest, whackiest, and most creative rhythm sections of the
past two decades in pop music should have put the man back on the right track?
Well, they do — at least on the right lead-in
track: ʽErase Meʼ opens with a thunderblast, as Sledge's volcanic
bassline immediately latches on to Ben's opening power chord and leads into one
of the heaviest numbers in Ben Folds 21st century history. Technically, it is
still a ballad, but the "erase me, so you don't have to face me" chorus
almost glows with self-righteous anger, and nobody could have helped Ben in
this more than his old drums 'n' bass pals. It does seem a little suspicious
that the new Ben Folds Five album opens up with something «deeply
psychological» rather than «head-spinningly playful», but the heaviness and
energy more than make up for the lack of humor. So maybe, you think, Ben Folds
has «matured» to the point of leaving fun stuff behind — is that really so bad
when his old friends are back to keep him company, and use their gargantuan
sound to convey the inner battles of the soul, rather than external
frustration?
The problem is, the gargantuan sound is all but
gone right after the first track is over. Once it's done, the remainder of the
album, with maybe one or two exceptions at best, is given over to the same
flaccid piano ballads or lightweight piano pop rockers that populated Lonely Avenue — and neither Sledge nor
Jessee are able, or willing to, tighten the bolts on them. The energy level
drops down, the hooks are feeble, and even after four extra listens, I have not
the slightest remembrance of how the other songs go. In fact, the only thing
I remember is that ʽOn Being Frankʼ is built right on the chords of
ʽThe Long And Winding Roadʼ, but wastes them in the context of a
nominally pretty, but essentially insubstantial song.
What irritates me most of all is that it does
not even look like he's trying. With
his level of experience, it seems as if each of these songs should have taken
about five minutes to write (lyrics excluded), and then he was just secretly
hoping that the other guys would spice it up for him, but they did not.
Whenever Ben does pick up the tempo, the others seem to become interested: on
ʽDo It Anywayʼ Sledge eventually gets into it so much he even delivers
one of his trademark «bass lead» solos, just like in the good old days. But
elsewhere, they are mostly sidemen, and could just as well have traded seats
with Ben's previous rhythm sections on his solo albums.
As they finally drag the record to its conclusion,
the crawling, weepy, yawn-inducingly sentimental ʽThank You For Breaking
My Heartʼ, the process of listening becomes unbearable. Anything for a mood change, an unusual
production idea, a treated Mellotron solo, a reggae variation on ʽRock
This Bitchʼ, a fart noise — anything but
this never-ending and ever-worsening series of «introspective» ballads that do
nothing except rehash the same old «Ben Folds and his women» topic. At this
point in his life, Ben Folds simply has nothing left to say, and it is not at
all clear to me why he had to involve his friends from the era of when he did have something to say in this
artistic self-humiliation. Thumbs down for one of the most pointless
reunions in recent rock history — for what it's worth, they should have just
put out ʽErase Meʼ and maybe ʽDo It Anywayʼ on a single,
and leave the rest in the dustbin for future generations to explore.
LIVE (2013)
1) Jackson Cannery; 2) Erase
Me; 3) Selfless, Cold And Composed; 4) Uncle Walter; 5) Landed; 6) Sky High; 7)
One Chord Blues/Billie's Bounce; 8) Do It Anyway/Overture/Heaven On Their
Minds; 9) Brick; 10) Draw A Crowd; 11) Narcolepsy; 12) Underground; 13) Tom And
Mary; 14) One Angry Dwarf And 200 Solemn Faces; 15) Song For The Dumped.
Considering that the Five never got around to
releasing a live album in their «classic years», maybe it is not too late to
capture them in their full glory during their reunion period? After all, it's
not as if Ben, Robert, and Darren were decrepit 70-year olds with burnt-out vocal
cords and arthritic fingers — and it isn't that they are doing this only for
the money, either, since there is not a heck of a lot of money to be made these
days by being part of The Ben Folds Five. No matter how twisted the collective
and individual histories of these guys may have been, when they play together,
they are clearly in it for the magic chemistry.
Just how magical it is, however, is not
altogether clear from this live album. First, it does not represent a complete
show, but is rather assembled from bits of shows played all over the world
during the band's 2012-13 tour (US, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan all
represented). This is a bit suspicious already — could that mean they rarely
had the energy to sustain a complete show? And if it is merely a consequence of
Ben's perfectionism, then who needs perfectionism, rather than sheer spirit, on
a live rock'n'roll album?
Second, perfectionism or not, I do not feel
that Live gives us the very best of
Ben Folds as a singer. He sounds okay for the most part, but rarely better
than okay, and quite often, he seems to wobble and flutter on the high notes
(the falsetto on ʽErase Meʼ is almost unbearable at times). It is
true that Ben has never been a technically awesome singer, and truer still that
it is not at all easy to sing and play the piano at the same time, but he did
sound better on Ben Folds Live and Songs For Goldfish, despite that. It is
not a huge complaint, since some numbers are done better than others, and only
a few songs' success completely hangs upon vocal modulation anyway, yet when
you are in the market for a piano pop-based live record, every little thing
counts.
On the positive side, the rhythm section is
impeccable, particularly Sledge and his bass grooves; the crowd goes wild whenever
he gets a chance to show off his distorted mini-solos (like on the closing
ʽSong For The Dumpedʼ), and we finally get to hear ʽOne Angry
Dwarfʼ in all of its explosive glory, as opposed to Ben's solo piano live
version on Ben Folds Live — reason
enough to add the album to your collection if you are one of those people who
identifies profoundly with the song and its message.
The setlist predictably concentrates on old Ben
Folds Five classics — it is hardly coincidental that they chose ʽJackson
Canneryʼ, the first song off their first album, as the lead-in track — as
well as throws in a few numbers from their latest and not-at-all-greatest, but,
fortunately, only a few, and usually the best and most energetic ones
(ʽErase Meʼ, ʽDo It Anywayʼ), since none of the ballads
from The Sound... can really match
the poignancy of ʽBrickʼ or ʽNarcolepsyʼ. Ben gets to sneak
in one number at least from his solo career (ʽLandedʼ), a couple of
obscure rarities (ʽTom & Maryʼ), and some novelty stuff — ʽOne
Chord Bluesʼ represents his trademark improvisation routine (including a
resuscitated blues-style ʽRock This Bitchʼ somewhere within its
depths), and ʽDo It Anywayʼ forms a medley with, of all things,
ʽHeaven On Their Mindsʼ from Jesus
Christ Superstar (!). Ben Folds as Judas? Don't really think so, but if you
want to start looking for hidden symbolism, go ahead, by all means.
(Personally, I'd guess that he simply spent the previous day accidentally
listening to some Andrew Lloyd Webber).
Bottomline: listenable and enjoyable — yes, but
complete satisfaction is not guaranteed. Too many of those little things — weak
vocals, questionable parts of the setlist, and, most importantly, the rag-taggy
track sequencing, which would rather be expectable of some big-shot heavy-weight
arena-rock hero, striving for towering heights («Bruce Springsteen Rocks The
World Over!»), but hardly of our little bespectacled friend who has, perhaps,
always dreamed of becoming the next
Elton John, but who has always had too much taste, too much intelligence, too
much depth, and too little musical genius to allow himself to become the next
Elton John. I'd much, much rather
hear this band do a short, tight, coherent set in a single small club setting
than have them presented in disjointed snippets as some sort of arena heroes —
in fact, for what it's worth, it is possible to do just that by getting the old
video recording Complete Sessions At West
54th, dating from 1998 and satisfying just about every need that Ben Folds Five Live may not satisfy. That
was the real deal; this album, while not half-bad, is a questionable facsimile
in comparison.
SO THERE (2015)
1) Capable Of Anything; 2) Not
A Fan; 3) So There; 4) Long Way To Go; 5) Phone In A Pool; 6) Yes Man; 7)
F10-D-A; 8) I'm Not The Man; 9-11) Concerto For Piano And Orchestra.
Back to solo format, or, more accurately,
orchestral format — Ben Folds' latest project combines his composing, playing,
and singing talents with those of the so-called «yMusic Ensemble» for a total
of eight chamber pop songs, plus a bona fide piano concerto with the Nashville
Symphony, probably not the hottest symphonic orchestra on the planet but a
fairly qualified one, and quite proficient in playing and recording American
composers from Ives and Gershwin all the way to Leonard Bernstein, which is
precisely the tradition, I believe, to which Ben subscribes, combining
old-school academic values with an element of lightweight (sometimes even
slightly tacky) popular entertainment. But we will come back to this a little
later.
Substantially, nothing much has changed since
last we saw Ben Folds as a solo artist: this is still our old friend, the
little nerdy-wimpy everyday life philosopher who is to singer-songwriting what
Jerry Seinfeld is to comedy, and he still writes and sings these light, fragile
pop tunes about broken hearts, hurt feelings, and society pressure that could
be very depressing if only they showed any pressure at all, which they do not.
But the chosen format, where the man completely frees himself from the
conventions of a pop-rock combo, seems to have triggered some hidden reserves
in his spirit, and the eight songs that form the bulk of the record are, on the
whole, his finest effort in quite some time. At the very least, it was much
more delightful to listen to this stuff than either the Ben Folds Five reunion,
or that draggy Nick Hornby collaboration.
These are pop songs, for sure, not baroque
chamber music imitations, and it's not as if the format were anything new
(Fiona Apple? Regina Spektor? Sufjan Stevens?), but somehow Ben gets us exactly
in the right mood with the first thirty seconds of ʽCapable Of
Anythingʼ, when the piano, the violin, and the soft underlying percussion
start hopping at a merry tempo, and an even cuter little woodwind flourish
links the bars together. That's a delicious slice of pop catchiness there,
along with hope, good humor, and just a tiny pinch of melancholia to tone down
the extra sweetness. The arrangement shoots off colors in many directions,
with cellos, trumpets, and occasional explosive sound effects added at will,
and ultimately it seems to not matter much what the man is singing about — in
fact, it does not seem to matter if he's singing at all, because the vocal hooks are easily the least attractive
part of the whole bouillon.
Another big highlight is the title track, which
starts out with a promising, suspenseful set of violin and cello lines, again
played at a relatively fast tempo — then quickly progresses towards a china cup
thunderstorm of romantic piano and violin waves gently lashing against each
other... and what is the song about?
"I will not forget you / There is nothing to forget". Uhh... okay,
this is another fairly good moment to state how little one could care about Ben
Folds' personal problems as long as he keeps composing decent music, because
those problems don't have to have anything to do with the music. In fact, even without the ambitiousness of the
Concerto, these songs are all about musical experimentation with the chamber
orchestra format — a background against which Ben's «little man issues» seem
trite and insignificant.
This is why the least impressive tracks here
are the slow ballads that place Ben's vocals at the center of attention —
ʽNot A Fanʼ has too much of that just-a-man-and-his-piano aura that
made so much of his solo work so tedious, and, in a way, seems to have been
written with the sole purpose of ad-libbing a barely audible "...so fuck
you!" in the final bar; ʽYes Manʼ has a much more sophisticated
vocal melody, but its multi-tracked vocals ultimately do it a disservice,
drawing attention away from the music and onto the vocals. Much more charming
is such a little novelty number as ʽF10-D-Aʼ — two minutes of a song
about writing a song, with Ben spelling out the various notes of the
tune-under-construction as it goes by; it is charmingly theatrical and also
surprisingly efficient (you'd never think that a wholesome new song can be
built like that, but somehow, it is
almost a wholesome new song).
The last twenty minutes of the album are given
over to the aforementioned Concerto, and it sounds... cool. It's not great
innovative classical music — it's an experiment in the old-fashioned way,
combining elements of Western classical, jazz, ragtime, vaudeville, and maybe
showing just the tiniest bits of modern influences; for all I know, something
like this could have been written by the likes of Copland as early as the 1920s,
but then I don't know that much about
Copland or any other classical American composer, so I don't exactly feel
qualified to judge Ben's work here as a respectable homage or a pathetic joke.
All I know is, all three movements sound interesting, and Ben's piano playing,
wisely not straining for virtuosity,
is constantly varied and engaging (and I am still trying to understand what
exactly it is that he does at the beginning of the third movement — is that a
prepared piano? is he picking at the hammers directly? whatever). The orchestra
seems well engaged in the process, too, although for such a grand classical
opening, the final movement ends in a somewhat disappointing wisp.
What ultimately wins me over is the humbleness of all this stuff. Symphonic
and chamber arrangements in pop music often — in fact, the more recent, the
more often — tend to come with a lot of pomp and self-aggrandizing, or
extra-musical baggage that makes it all seem twice as deep as it really is (oh
yes, I'm looking at you, Sufjan Stevens!);
here, there is no extra-musical baggage whatsoever, just a guy who is really
interested in wringing out a new set of emotions by combining his piano pop
experience with adventurous combinations of string instruments. Adventurous,
but also strictly traditional — not a move that might bring on wide-scale
critical recognition, but certainly a move that is quite true to the man's
artistic essence. In short, I'm perfectly happy about this, and not even a few
mediocre slow ballads can prevent a thumbs up. Definitely a record that should reserve
itself a nice place in the annals of «chamber pop» history.
SUPERPINKYMANDY (1993)
1) Don't Wanna Know 'Bout
Evil; 2) Yesterday's Gone; 3) When You Wake; 4) City Blue; 5) Where Do You Go?;
6) Faith Will Carry; 7) She Cries Your Name; 8) Roll The Dice; 9) The Prisoner;
10) Release Me.
Although Beth Orton herself has always stated
that her first «proper» album was Trailerpark,
and almost went as far as to disown the first stage of her recording career
altogether, there is no getting away from the facts that SuperPinkyMandy was (a) a complete LP, (b) a complete LP officially
released on a Japanese record label, (c) a complete LP officially released on a
record label and credited to Beth Orton, along with the authorship of most of
the songs. Additionally, there is no getting away from my opinion that SuperPinkyMandy, despite being
completely different from the «stereotypical» Beth Orton LP, is at least as
good as the very best of those LPs, and, in some ways, maybe even better. Not a
«masterpiece», perhaps, but certainly an album that deserves much larger
exposure than recommended by its very author.
Elizabeth Caroline Orton, a former Pizza Hut
waitress, caterer, and amateur actor, got her first musical break when she
teamed up with William Orbit, at that time still a relatively unknown
man-of-the-arts who would eventually get his biggest break producing Madonna's Ray Of Light — but, frankly, his
collaboration with Orton, free from the obligation to follow «strictly commercial»
rules, was a far superior effort, despite largely following the same line of
work: putting relatively straightforward and traditional pop melodies in a
supah-cool, trendy, futuristic electronic casing. Amazingly, the combination
works to near-perfection.
SuperPinkyMandy does not try to mask its strict adherence to
«formula». With a few minor exceptions, each track here gradually or quickly
sets up a danceable «trip-hoppy» groove, sometimes faster, sometimes slower,
against which the singer positions her vocals, usually echoey and ghostly, and
almost always resolving into a repetitive, mantraic chorus. Around this chorus,
even more ghostly backing vocals and various electronic or non-electronic
effects cluster in unpredictable combinations, working towards a dizzifying
neo-psychedelic feel. In this context, the role of the singer is reduced (lead
vocal being only one equal part of everything else), and that is good — Beth Orton is credible, but she's
nowhere near as uniquely interesting, personality-wise, as Beth Gibbons, for
instance (just to name another Beth from the same era), and when she allows
herself to be just a part of the scenery, «less» becomes «more».
Orton and Orbit first tested the water with a
cover version — taking John Martyn's acoustic sentimentality ʽDon't Wanna
Know 'Bout Evilʼ ("only wanna know 'bout love") and giving it
the «Orbit touch». The result, with about four or five different keyboard
parts, analog and digital alike,
piled on top of the rhythmic groove, and Beth adding her «icy numb» vocals —
suggesting that here is a woman that already has learned everything possible
about evil, but nothing so far about love — is either inoffensively boring, or
mildly mesmerizing, depending on the nature of your own senses, but at least
the combination of ingredients is unique enough to allow for some intrigue, and
then build it up from there.
Encouraged by the results, they then applied
this formula to a bunch of self-written tracks, with Orbit taking care of the
grooves and Beth supplying the mantras. Stylistically, the grooves contain
enough diversity to last you all the way through. ʽYesterday's Goneʼ
is hard, harsh, funky, and moves in the direction of hardcore techno, while
Beth is singing the vocal part of Atropos the Moira, sternly warning us about
"blind chances of destiny". ʽWhen You Wakeʼ buzzes and
drones on with two guitars weaving around each other, like a Velvet Underground
imitation. ʽFaith Will Carryʼ sounds the closest to a proto-Ray Of Light techno-pop number, but
with a nice ringing guitar part helping it come across as more natural.
ʽShe Cries Your Nameʼ, which would later be re-recorded for Trailerpark (in a much less impressive
fashion, if you ask me), is almost bluesy, but still spiced up with suitably
astral noises to add coldness and distance. And so on, with just about every
song having something to offer.
If there is anything to criticize, it might be
the rhythmic base of the grooves, which is nowhere near as experimental or just
plain inventive as the layers of overdubs, or even the basslines, laid down
with love and care. Most of the beat patterns are averagely funky, or mildly
techno, but in the end, the similarity of the signatures of tempos may trick
you into feeling that all these songs are the same, when they really aren't.
Perhaps, in the end, it was the percussion that annoyed Beth so much that she'd
swore she'd never want to work like this
again — too bad, because, having split up with Orbit, she not only lost the
beats, but also the man's talent at setting up the proper musical atmosphere
for her icy melancholy. And maybe even more than that, because her ballads on
the «regular» albums often sound boring, whereas a thing like ʽWhere Do
You Go?ʼ, losing the beat and adding pianos and strings, is totally
charming: the chorus ("where do you go when the wind doesn't blow?")
contains one of her finest folksy vocal flourishes that I have not encountered
that frequently in her subsequent career.
Naturally, you won't like SuperPinkyMandy if you do not have a thing for «mood music», nor
does it even begin to compare with the pinnacles of that genre, where «mood»
borders on destructive implosion (like Dummy).
But if you do have a thing for «getting in the mood», and do not mind lowering
your expectations a bit, you will be more than rewarded by the surprisingly
unexpected creativity of the album. And
its uniqueness, provided your casual acquaintance with Beth Orton began with Trailerpark. Fortunately, these days it
is much easier to get access to a long out-of-print album than it used to in
the good old «print days», so you will probably have little trouble locating
the tunes, so you can join me in my sincere thumbs up.
TRAILER PARK (1996)
1) She Cries Your Name; 2)
Tangent; 3) Don't Need A Reason; 4) Live As You Dream; 5) Sugar Boy; 6) Touch
Me With Your Love; 7) Whenever; 8) How Fair; 9) Someone's Daughter; 10) I Wish
I Never Saw The Sunshine; 11) Galaxy Of Emptiness.
The «official authorized» debut album. After
her stint with Orbit, followed by a collaboration with The Chemical Brothers on
Exit Planet Dust, Beth Orton decides
that, after all, she is a
singer-songwriter first, and a publicity agent for modern electronic sounds
only second. Let all those other guys
come up with their silly club rhythms — Beth Orton is an artist, and you need
to sit down and listen to her artistry. Blowing your mind is a nobler option
than sweeping you off your feet. Besides, with all those Orbit-style noises and
echoes, she was miscast way too strongly as the «mystery lady», when in reality
she is so open and sentimental.
The new album, produced by Victor Van Vugt (formerly
responsible for several Nick Cave LPs) and DJ-cum-remixer Andrew Weatherall, is
not at all free from modern rhythms — it is seriously funky and, in places,
trip-hoppy. It did, in fact, earn Beth's music the tag of «folktronica», although
it must be acknowledged that there is a lot more «folk» here than «-tronica»
where it used to be vice versa during Beth's stint with Orbit. But the basic
idea, a combination of folk motives, singer-songwriter imagery, and
contemporary production, could work very well, if...
...if, well, the major problem of all of Beth's
post-PinkyMandy output weren't so
irritatingly simple: it is, for lack of a more original word, boring. Sometimes more, sometimes less,
but ultimately, Beth Orton's musical and general artistic image from now on
would lack «that one special ingredient» (or those several special
ingredients) that is necessary for an artist with his or her own say in this
world. The music has a little bit of everything — respectable songwriting
ideas, acceptable lyrical agenda, enjoyable singing voice, understandable taste
in arrangements — but unless you make a conscious effort, the songs do not
really stick. There is nothing offensive about them (as in, say, an
aggressively-feminist Ani di Franco way of constructing songs from knives instead of hooks and pretending
to call it «music»), but if we're talking of ways to translate human and
artistic personality into musical form, I think that, off the top of my head,
Suzanne Vega, for instance, comes across sounding way more «deep» and
«interesting».
The main problem, I guess, is that Orton's songs
sound as if her chief influence were someone like Emmylou Harris — gallantly
embroidered country-folk-pop with individual sensitivity — but without the true
rootsy depth required to make the songs sound alive and natural. Something like
ʽWheneverʼ, which completely eschews modern rhythms and relies
entirely on acoustic guitars and vocal harmonies to achieve its goals — a song
that could have been written by just about anybody circa 1971-72 and anytime
later, pleasant and professional, but instantly forgettable. Or ʽDon't
Need A Reasonʼ, quietly waltzing along to an unassuming lead fiddle and
then to an equally unassuming orchestrated background. Nice, life-asserting,
and about as dull as its basic message: "So I've been calling angels down
to Earth / Because I believe we need them". If I were an angel, I'd
certainly think twice before responding to such a call.
The basic rule of thumb about Trailer Park, as well as most of the
rest of Beth's catalog, is this: the less she concentrates on «soul»,
«message», and «humanism» and the more she concentrates on «technicalities», be
it melodic hooks or sonic tapestry, the better she gets. Case in point: the new
version of ʽShe Cries Your Nameʼ, completely recast from its early
«cosmic trip-hop» image with Orbit into a slightly Eastern-tinged psycho-folk
shape, where acoustic rhythms are complemented with a droning, sliding strings
arrangement that, at times, sounds almost like a tribute to George Harrison's
ʽWithin You Without Youʼ. I am afraid I still prefer the original and
all of its hauntingly bubbling keyboard inventions, but the reinvention is no
slouch, either, and it managed to crack the singles market and put the lady on
the scene, after all.
The «meat» of the album clings to the ribs of
the longer tracks — ʽTangentʼ, ʽTouch Me With Your Loveʼ,
ʽGalaxy Of Emptinessʼ, stretched out grooves with dark bass lines
whose melodies are just as influenced by country-pop as anything else on here,
but whose atmospherics sort of offers an «easier» alternative to the disturbing
soundscapes of Portishead, replacing «suicidal bleek» with «tolerably
melancholic». The bass melodies at least fulfill the function of solid anchors
to root the song to a channel in your mind, and the electronic embellishments,
though nowhere near as wild as Orbit's, are still more inventive than the
acoustic guitar work on the more traditionally-oriented material.
Other than that, Beth's little penchant for
upbeat pop pays off on ʽLive As You Dreamʼ, which is probably,
vocal-wise, the catchiest number here, and on ʽSomeone's Daughterʼ —
the combination of vocal hooks with friendly funky rhythms works well enough;
surprisingly, Beth's «sunny» side can actually be more impressive than her
melancholic side. She also does a nice cover of the Ronettes' ʽI Wish I
Never Saw The Sunshineʼ, backed by just her acoustic playing, and... well,
at least she is not able to spoil an already good song.
So, all in all, I cannot imagine how it would
be possible to fall in love with Trailer
Park, but it would also be impossible to deny it its own face. The material
is unquestionably diverse, the songwriting is not without its moments, and the
merger of several genres into one is definitely an ongoing thing. As for the
lack of «sharpness» and «spiciness», well, I can also understand how some would
consider it a good thing — the
humbleness, the reluctance to be too gimmicky, the honest refusal of
exaggerating and artifically condensing one's feelings. In any case, one
thing's for certain: there is no «adult contemporary» as such in the vicinity
of Trailer Park, and the fact that
she's avoided that pitfall while circling so dangerously close to the pit alone
is well worth a respectable thumbs up. In short — a good record to savor after
you've exhausted the «flashy» mood masterpieces of the 1990s.
CENTRAL RESERVATION (1999)
1) Stolen Car; 2) Sweetest
Decline; 3) Couldn't Cause Me Harm; 4) So Much More; 5) Pass In Time; 6)
Central Reservation; 7) Stars All Seem To Weep; 8) Love Like Laughter; 9)
Blood Red River; 10) Devil Song; 11) Feel To Believe; 12) Central Reservation
(the Then Again version).
This is probably Beth's critical, if not
commercial, peak, as the album mostly got rave reviews and ended up on several
popular best-of lists. But this seems more a matter of conjecture and opportunity
than anything else — Beth was in good form, but she'd also worked on her public
appeal and musical world connections, and by the time the record came out,
there was an intellectual fanbase that was ready to sit up and take note.
Well, I guess you just have to get
some compensation for touring with Lilith Fair, after all.
The album as a whole is typical «mature» Beth
Orton: boring as heck the first few times you listen to it, and then, depending
on your Zodiac sign or diet peculiarities, it either just goes on being boring,
or it «sinks in» and you begin to appreciate the subtle magic of the vocals or
the intricate, if inobtrusive, details of the arrangements. You can also begin
to appreciate the artistic personality of Beth Orton, but this may be the
hardest task of all — she is quite elusive, and her joys and sorrows may
pretend to more depth than they actually have (which, when proven, is the worst
possible crime of all, but the jury is divided on that one).
If you feel like you'd want to enjoy this
album, but can't imagine how, here's two possible lines of advice. First, this
is one Beth Orton record where she managed to put together quite a few notorious
guest stars, and every once in a while, they help out in spicing up her
songwriting craft. On ʽStolen Carʼ, the lead-in track and first
single off the album, Ben Harper contributes an eerie lead guitar part with
something like a backward echo effect — it fulfills more or less the same function
as the strings on ʽShe Cries Your Nameʼ, which opened Trailer Park, turning a regular
singer-songwriting effort into an «art song». Then, on the lengthy soft waltz
ʽSweetest Declineʼ, which is nothing much to write home about by
itself, Dr. John sits in on piano and gives it some of his nonchalantly
brilliant New Orleanian atmosphere. Then there's quite a badass bass line on
the trip-hoppy groove of ʽCouldn't Cause Me Harmʼ — maybe not much else
of autonomous interest, but the coolness of the bassline rubs off a little on
the guitars, strings, and chimes, making it all sound a little classy. And so
on, and on: most of the songs have these «little things» that will stand out in
time, provided time is given.
Second, this time, some of the songs that are
built strictly around Beth and her acoustic guitar are actually quite good — me
referring in particular to ʽBlood Red Riverʼ and ʽDevil
Songʼ, whose bleakness, depression, and pathos (and preachiness, in case of
the former) I do not find in the least irritating, because the former has a
cunningly catchy verse melody and the latter, an equally cunningly catchy
chorus melody. Atmosphere-wise, they are both sung from the point of view of
some present-day Mary Magdalene, and this makes you feel uneasy — I mean, God
only knows what that woman is wishing
to confess by saying "Devil was my angel, now I'm just not sure / To
travel as my angel there's always my whore". But I can buy it, musically and lyrically, and I can believe she's got
some demons of her own to exorcise, so whatever.
Some of this stuff never clicks with me, like
the lengthy centerpiece ʽPass In Timeʼ, allegedly written in memory
of her late mother — not particularly clichéd, and certainly not
overblown, but too musically close to generic «alt-country», and perhaps in
need of a more nuanced singing voice to make an impression (and definitely without any need to arrange
it as a duet with Terry Callier, whose voice adds nothing but extra blandness
to the song); or the title track, which has no melodic backbone whatsoever and
consists of a New Age-y mish-mash of keyboards, guitars, and strings without
any progressive development or discernible hook (a typical Enya song would feel
like a Beatles single next to this).
But on the whole, the record is hardly any
worse than Trailer Park, and
although it certainly has no business being on the list of 1001 Albums To Hear Before You Die, as Wikipedia informs me in one
of its «stay objective» mood swings, there is no reason to deprive it of a thumbs up,
either. Essentially, what Beth Orton has managed to do here is take a
proverbially uninteresting protagonist — and use a combination of mediocre
songwriting skills, inventive producers, and sympathetic guest stars to
breathe some new life into her, and I appreciate that. What I don't appreciate is that the album's
last song, ʽFeel To Believeʼ expropriates the basic hook of Paul
McCartney's ʽFor No Oneʼ to build a thoroughly inferior song on top
of it — "hey, that's no way to say goodbye", as Leonard Cohen would
have said. But then again, she might just be an innocent victim of the «great
Beatles curse» as we know it.
DAYBREAKER (2002)
1) Paris Train; 2) Concrete
Sky; 3) Mount Washington; 4) Anywhere; 5) Daybreaker; 6) Carmella; 7) God Song;
8) This One's Gonna Bruise; 9) Ted's Waltz; 10) Thinking About Tomorrow.
Oh, Daybreaker.
Well, you know, I'd never in the world claim that it kicks as much prime time
ass as The Razor's Edge, but still,
I feel it is a little underrated over these years. The murderous riffage on
ʽHail Caesarʼ, the maniacal apocalyptic feel of ʽBurnin'
Aliveʼ, the triumphant anthemic ascent of the wannabe-alltime-American
classic ʽHard As A Rockʼ... oh wait a minute, that was Ballbreaker,
seems like we're in the wrong sort of story here.
Well, anyway, Ballbreaker was no timeless classic and Daybreaker is no awful embarrassment, but still, intelligence and
depth aside, I know which of the two I would choose. (I almost wanted to write
"artistic symbolism aside", but then realized that AC/DC music is
really full of artistic symbolism to a degree that Beth Orton could only hope
for. It's not very decent artistic symbolism, of course, but whoever said art
has to be polite?). The thing is, on Daybreaker
Beth sets aside such values as (a) musical innovation, (b) sonic energy, and
(c) melodic hooks, and goes all the way in the «singer-songwriter with
atmosphere and attitude» department. In other words, she takes herself more
seriously than ever before, and you have to take it or leave it.
One good listen to ʽParis Trainʼ, the
album opener, will probably be enough for you to know whether to bother with
the rest, because most of the album sounds in a similar manner. Slow-moving,
moody, melodically predictable folk-pop with «proverbially deep» lyrics that
hint at never-healing personal traumas. There is even some dynamics, as the
orchestral layers gradually creep up on you like gathering clouds, bursting out
in a thunderstorm midway through. There is even some class to it, and nothing
specifically irritating about the whole thing. But it is all so bland, so limp,
so middle-of-the-road in everything, that eventually I'd almost prefer to be irritated than to have to
be wasting time searching for a single dent in this impeccable smoothness.
Song after song, we get these densely arranged,
multi-layered soundscapes — I think she might have set out to rival The Cure in
their famous bid for membership in Monty Python's «Royal Society For Putting
Things On Top Of Other Things» — that are all so dense and stately and noble
and epic and... nothing. ʽMount
Washingtonʼ, true to its name, spends six and a half minutes climbing up,
and up, and up, and six and a half minutes later, we're still climbing and we
still do not know where or why, we just do it. I'd like to love this song, but for some reason, it does not work at
all. One possible thought is that it is fairly hard to be humble and bombastic
at the same time — Pete Townshend could somehow manage that, but Beth Orton
does not have comparable talent, and so a song like ʽMount Washingtonʼ
is way too loud and over-the-top to be truly humble, yet not loud or intense or
emotional enough to be truly bombastic. Like everything else on here, it gets
stuck in between — and fades out of memory as soon as it is over.
It might have been better if she'd just drop it
and made the entire album into a solo acoustic performance: I think that the
most quiet songs here, like ʽThis One's Gonna Bruiseʼ with its lonesome
cello backup (co-written with Ryan Adams), and the fussy country-pop of
ʽCarmellaʼ, are the easiest ones to take with you on a reminiscence
trip. Instead, they are brief interludes, as the lady sets out to convince us
that she can mesmerize audiences
without much use of the electronic devices, but I am not sure about that. The
songs all deal with her personal tragedies, traumas, treasons, and
tribulations, yet they do not convey a sense of too much suffering — in fact,
sometimes the conveyed feeling borders on exaggerated self-pitying, which is
probably the worst thing we'd expect from an «authentic» singer-songwriter.
For the sake of extra trivia, ʽConcrete
Skyʼ is co-written with Johnny Marr, and, perhaps not coincidentally, it
is the most upbeat and even catchy folk-pop song on here, so you might wanna
check it out if you happen to collect everything Smiths-related. But it is
certainly not enough to rescue the album from a disappointed thumbs down
— a classic case of «biting off more than one can chew», as far as my opinion
is concerned. Naturally, as far as singer-songwriters go, this is still a million
times better than, say, a phenomenon like Vanessa Carlton (whose debut album
came out that same year, as I still remember with a shudder), but what we have
here is a real singer-songwriter that
has charisma, intelligence, and talent to burn, and it makes the lifelessness
of Daybreaker all the more
lamentable.
THE OTHER SIDE OF DAYBREAK (2003)
1) Ooh Child; 2) Thinking
About Tomorrow (PG Dub); 3) Ali's Waltz; 4) Daybreaker (Four Tet remix); 5)
Bobby Gentry; 6) Carmella (Four Tet remix); 7) Beautiful World; 8) Concrete Sky
(acoustic); 9) Daybreaker (Roots Manuva remix); 10) Anywhere (Two Lone
Swordsmen remix vocal).
It is not often that an album of outtakes,
remixes, and rarities outshines the mothership to which it is appended as an
afterthought / bonus-for-the-fans, but, depending on how you feel about Daybreaker, this might just be the
proverbial case. There is no question, at the very least, that The Other Side is a much more diverse
and much less predictable compilation; so if you thought, like me, that the
monotonous moodiness of Daybreaker
was somewhat limp and lifeless rather than mesmerizing, welcome to the other
side. It is less ambitious and completely dis-conceptual, but at least it does
not make you want to go to sleep and never wake up.
The series of remixes offered here
significantly raises the bar on the -tronica
segment of «folktronica», which is good — ʽAnywhereʼ, for instance,
is transformed from a boring jazz-pop standard (bordering on adult
contemporary) into something livelier, darker, and notably more psychedelic
than it used to be, and the same goes for ʽThinking About Tomorrowʼ,
which is now all awash in astral noises and more reminiscent of Massive Atack
than confessional singer-songwriting. The most radical transformation,
however, happened to ʽCarmellaʼ, which used to be a three-minute
country-pop single and now is an 11-minute long extravaganza, a huge sonic soup
in which Four Tet, the remixer, crams every sort of digital and analog noise
imaginable (the three-minute coda should be subtitled «The Amazing Life of
Giant Robot Insects», and who cares that it is completely unrelated to the
original song?).
The electronic remixes are interspersed with a
couple of really good originals — ʽBobby Gentryʼ, on which Beth
lowers her voice so much that she almost sings like a modern day Nico in
places, combines acoustic folk backing with pseudo-mid-Eastern string
arrangements, giving the song some majesty, mystique, and a pinch of roughness
that was nowhere near in sight on Daybreaker;
and the tender acoustic rendition of the old soul hit ʽOoh Childʼ by
The Five Stairsteps brings on that criminal thought that maybe the lady should do more covers and less originals, at least
when she cannot bring the originals to boil. Finally, there is a very good
acoustic rendition of ʽConcrete Skyʼ that sounds not only more
intimate, but every bit as catchy as the fully arranged original — that Johnny
Marr guy writes some rock-solid material, doesn't he?
All in all, there is not all that much to say here,
as usual, but that shouldn't stop you from searching out this album if you care
at all about the artist, or, for that matter, the various artists from the
electronica scene that helped her produce it. If it was intended as an
intentional «antithesis» to the weightier, more «serious» and «personal» Daybreaker, it should count as an integral
part of Orton's discography, because «serious» and «personal» is not really
what she does best; it is the inexhaustible bag of tricks that she gradually
exploits with her various partners that matters, breaking barriers between
tradition and futurism like some sort of female Beck. Ah, if only she also had
Beck's sense of humor as well — but I guess that would be asking for too much.
Anyway, an unexpected thumbs up here, as much as I expected to hate this
album.
COMFORT OF STRANGERS (2005)
1) Worms; 2) Countenance; 3)
Heartland Truckstop; 4) Rectify; 5) Comfort Of Strangers; 6) Shadow Of A Doubt;
7) Conceived; 8) Absinthe; 9) A Place Inside; 10) Safe In Your Arms; 11)
Shopping Trolley; 12) Feral Children; 13) Heart Of Soul; 14) Pieces Of Sky.
Good God, is this ever boring. On her fourth
(actually, fifth, if you count SuperPinkyMandy,
and you should) album, Orton goes for an even more stripped-down approach —
most of the songs are in trio format, with Jim O'Rourke handling bass duties
and Tim Barnes on percussion, while Beth is doing her latest best to impress us
as a singer, songwriter, guitar player, artistic soul, and gracious human
being. Unfortunately, of all these categories, I can only recommend «gracious
human being» to your attention. If you are in need of a randomly chosen
gracious human being this evening, Beth Orton is as good as any, and maybe even
better than most.
The one major saving grace of these fourteen
songs is that they are all short — only one crosses the four-minute mark, and
some barely go over two. This means that at least your ears will not have
enough time to shrivel, wither, and fall off in protest as the lady moves from
one traditional folk chord sequence to another. She does try to write her own
vocal melodies for the songs, but she still has not mastered the art of the
hook — at best, her «hooks» are softly shouted slogans (ʽHeart Of
Soulʼ), and at worst, she just adds a little touch of singing to her
poetry.
Lyrically, as you could guess, there is a lot of suffering going on, completely
inadequate to the lite-melancholic, lulling music that surrounds the vocal
delivery — and the vocal delivery itself is as tepid as usual. The words are
hit-and-miss — some of the imagery is thought-provoking, although it is hard to
lyrically justify an album whose opening lines go "Worms don't dance /
They haven't got the balls" — but in the end, they are about as
uninteresting as the music. Whole songwriting factories have put out billions
of songs on the side effects of the love business, and there is no way Comfort Of Strangers could stand
competition with the best of 'em.
I count exactly one track here where an interesting musical move was suggested —
ʽRectifyʼ has a sort of non-trivial transition from the fast gallop
of the verses to the slow shuffle of the "if you take a drop of water from
a bucket..." chorus. Both parts in themselves are pretty standard fare
country-pop, but the way they alternate with each other is novel and even fun,
especially compared to the utter facelessness of the rest.
It is quite possible — indeed, almost a
certainty — that some of these songs could have been saved by means of more
imaginative arrangements (bring back Orbit!). Not even Beth Orton's biggest
fans could probably claim that she is an outstanding guitar or piano player, or
endowed with some sort of idiosyncratic playing technique that puts her in her
own niche. The «folktronica» thing was the only
thing that gave her music an edge; take away the «-tronica» and you are left
with nothing. There is no sense in wasting time analyzing these songs one by
one. They are not «awful bad» per se, but I'd rather they be awful bad, because
this demonstration of by-the-book «tasteful sensitive grace» is as
head-splittingly dull as watching a Nora Ephron movie, sorry. Thumbs down.
SUGARING SEASON (2012)
1) Magpie; 2) Dawn Chorus; 3)
Candles; 4) Something More Beautiful; 5) Call Me The Breeze; 6) Poison Tree; 7)
See Through Blue; 8) Last Leaves Of Autumn; 9) State Of Grace; 10) Mystery.
Beth Orton's first new album in seven years, and seven years without an
album is no laughing matter: if anything, it makes you predisposed to the idea
that maybe the artist really has something
to say, if it took him/her seven years to say it. On the other hand, everything
that we already knew about Beth Orton sort of predisposed us to the idea that
it would be rash to expect a good album from somebody who'd consciously ditched
her chief know-how in favor of a third-rate singer-songwriter career. All in
all, an intriguing situation — at least until you tear your gaze from the
pretty / intelligent profile on the sleeve cover and start playing the actual
music.
The best thing I can say about the music is
that it is at least significantly more involving than Comfort Of Strangers. The folksy arrangements are not as lethargic
or minimalistic this time around; there is a decent rhythm section that can
keep it steady or get in a little swing mode if necessary, there are some
dynamic string arrangements, and she seems to have spent more time working out
the hooks. In other words, the songs at least try to flutter and thrash around
rather than just sink to the bottom in one go. Unfortunately, about half of
them now end up sounding like uninventive imitations of early Joni Mitchell —
and once again, I have trouble understanding what exactly about them belongs to
Beth Orton, the Artist of Her Own Persuasion.
A whole three singles (as opposed to a maximum
of two) were culled from the album, so let us try and concentrate on these.
ʽSomething More Beautifulʼ is one of the slowest and «downiest»
numbers on the record — a transparent sign that «commercialism» is farther from
the artist's mind than ever before. Unfortunately, it is simply bad. Oversung
(drenched in breathy glottal stops — "in what you belee-hh-eeve" — so
we do not make a dreadful mistake thinking that the song was not recorded soon after a hysterical
crying fit), overpunctuated by Pathetic String Bursts at the start of each
chorus, and yet lacking anything resembling a proper hook, it's 100% atmosphere,
pumped up after a traditional, predictable recipé.
ʽMagpieʼ, which was used to open the
album, is a straightforward attempt at writing in the old folk style, musically
and lyrically, and since it does not pretend to the status of «grand tragedy»,
like ʽSomething More Beautifulʼ does, it is far easier to enjoy, with
a nice «depressed-but-not-suicidal» flavor to the vocals. The major hookline
("what a lie, what a lie...") sounds like it's been lifted from The
Cranberries (in fact, as the years go by, Beth sounds more and more like a
technically weaker counterpart of Dolores O'Riordan), but when we are talking
folksy singer-songwriting, such observations can never be spoken in an
accusative tone anyway.
The third, and best, single was ʽCall Me
The Breezeʼ — not a J. J. Cale
cover (as fun as it would be for Beth to cover J. J. Cale), but an original
composition, something of a humble pantheistic anthem ("call me the earth,
call me the stars...") set to a lively folk-pop rhythm and peppered with
light, ghostly, but friendly vocals. Maybe if there were more songs like this
on the album, its diagnostic facial features would have finally begun to emerge
— it is like a soft «country rondeau» with a cool combination of guitars,
percussion, and electric organ and without any self-aggrandizing pathos to turn
off the seasoned listener.
Alas, such is not the case: the overall
proportions of bad to mediocre to nice on Sugaring
Season are more or less the same as in the singles subarray, and there is
no incentive for me to talk about the rest. Essentially, we are dealing here
with just another out of the miriad «neo-folk» records, which would have
probably sunk like a stone if not for the artist's enduring reputation that was
earned with far more interesting work — think Eric Clapton, if you wish, the
difference being that the latter could at least always offer redemption for his
tepid studio output on the stage, while Beth has pretty much disowned her
entire «folktronica» legacy and is now insisting on persisting as a second-rate
neo-folkie. Of course, seasoned lovers of this style will always find ten
thousand subtle reasons why Sugaring
Season has its own charm, quite different from that of Joni, Sandy, or
Emmylou — but I honestly see no sense in wrecking my brain over what any of
those reasons could be. As far as I'm concerned, she is simply not cut out for
this line of work.
KIDSTICKS (2016)
1) Snow; 2) Moon; 3) Petals;
4) 1973; 5) Wave; 6) Dawnstar; 7) Falling; 8) Corduroy Legs; 9) Flesh And
Blood; 10) Kidsticks.
Finally, some good sense. Realizing, perhaps,
that continuing in the same neo-folk vein will never again even begin to make
her work stand out, Beth Orton comes full circle and is back where she started
— this is «folktronica» all over again, with electronic arrangements from top
to bottom and her old trip-hop and house influences resurfacing again. This
almost automatically would mean that Kidsticks
is her best record in at least a decade — and, granted, since Beth Orton was
never a genius artist to begin with, that ain't saying that much, but at least «unendurable boredom» is no longer the
first association that comes to mind when listening.
The album is short, concise, and owes much of
its flavor to Beth's collaboration with Andrew Hung of Bristol's Fuck Buttons
fame — not that, at this point, turning to a digital wizard who made his claim
to fame eight years ago would automatically imply that she is trying to
«trend», but that is really only for the better: there's no question of trends
or fashions, merely of generating a new kind of sound for her, one that would
best suit her romantic, naturalistic, and cosmic inclinations. Oh, there is no
real conceptuality on the album, but she does seem to be on an environmental
kick, with song titles that constantly refer to celestial and natural objects
and lyrics that constantly tie these objects to her mood swings and emotions.
(Ironically, the biggest public splash that the album made was when she went
out into the desert to make a video and accidentally — or intentionally, who
really knows? she now says she thought it was dead, but who knows?... —
spray-painted an old Joshua tree, getting so much flack from enviornmentalists
that she eventually had to remove the video and apologize. Ted Nugent she's
not, evidently). And, at long last, there is some goddamn energy on the album
to account for that.
For one thing, it's playful. The very first
track, ʽSnowʼ, aims for a light psychedelic effect, with an almost
chaotic mess of quasi-tribal drumming, quasi-tribal chanting, flanged guitars
snapping at each other from different speakers, and tons and tons of vocal
overdubs — starting with the opening line, "I'll astrally project myself
into the life of someone else", which seems like a mission statement for
the entire record, and ending with the repeated chant of "I'm getting
high, getting high off your star". It's an odd, but strangely friendly
synthesis, and it suggests that, for the rest of the album, Orton would rather
prefer to explore the «bright» than the «dark» potential of electronica — and
that, on the whole, she is in an agreeable mood this time of year.
Even when the music does get a little darker,
it's a natural rather than evil darkness — ʽMoonʼ, after all, is a
song about moonlit nights, so a deep dark bassline and echoey ambient keyboard
wobbles in the background are in the works; but on the whole, it is a friendly
techno number that just makes you want to dance, all the while wondering what
the lyrics are about (limits of human cognition? all is one under the /moon
and/ sun? whatever). However, the fact that the songs vary between straightforward
bouncy light pop (ʽ1973ʼ, which kind of sounds like an old Cars
outtake) and darker, deeper, more soulful material (ʽWaveʼ, with a
heavier, almost sedated vocal performance from Beth that brings Patti Smith to
mind) do much in terms of procuring diversity and keeping your attention from
straying too far away. Bottomline is, this is a record with a positive, even
sentimental message, but it really tries to deliver the message in many
different ways.
A few of the tunes might even stick around in
memory for a while, like the slightly jazzy ballad ʽFallingʼ (with a
really pretty "I'm falling backwards, I'm falling sidewards from your
arms" bit that's so tender and tragic at the same time), or the final epic
ʽFlesh And Bloodʼ, also jazzy in essence and featuring a wonderfully
engineered double-tracked falsetto chorus part. The bad news is that you'd have
to strive for that — as pretty as Kidsticks is on the whole, neither the
vocals nor the instrumental melodies ever dare to cut deep, mostly presenting
you with nice, but superficial naturalistic-emotional soundscapes. And
sometimes the complex arrangements almost seem wasted — cue
ʽDawnstarʼ with its painstakingly built-up crescendo of harmonies,
guitars, pianos, synthesizers, but since there is no single overriding mega-theme,
the whole song ends up unsatisfactory and unmemorable.
On the whole, this is damn pleasant, but as far
as Beth's synthesis of pop, folk, and electronica is concerned in general, this
ain't no SuperPinkyMandy, and
considering that very few people, as of 2016, even remember what Trailer Park was all about (most of the
reviews of the new album I've read had to dedicate at least a couple of
original paragraphs to a detailed answer to the popular question «Beth Orton?
Who the fuck is Beth Orton?»), nobody except for Beth's veteran fans should
probably bother with the record anyway — chances are that if you do not see
yourself rejoicing at the idea of Beth Orton going back from her folksy
innovations to her electronic roots (does sound like an unusual idea, doesn't
it?), and do not evaluate Kidsticks
in the context of her overall work, the album won't probably even make much of
a blip on your radar. Still, at least if she continues making records like these, and not like Sugaring Season, for the rest of her 21st century days, I'll be
glad to give them a spin every now and then.
PALOMINE (1992)
1) Leg; 2) Palomine; 3) Kid's
Alright; 4) Brain-Tag; 5) Tom Boy; 6) Under The Surface; 7) Balentine; 8) This
Thing Nowhere; 9) Healthy Sick; 10) Sundazed To The Core; 11) Palomine (Small).
First things first: this band used to be quite
heavily overrated by the indie community, since indie people tend to value
bands for their fire, ferocity, and frustration rather than for their
Pythagorean qualities, so to speak — and Bettie Serveert is a prime example of
that. Nowadays, as the band's fire seems to have died down a bit, and as so
many competitors with even less talent have occupied the same turf, that
reverence has largely dissipated, yet in the early 1990s these intrepid Dutch
pseudo-pioneers of post-grunge indie-rock were really hot stuff. But any band that chooses, of its own free will,
at a certain point in their career to cover a Bright Eyes song (ʽLover I Don't Have To Loveʼ, in 2004),
would already seem suspicious. And yes, one listen to their acclaimed debut is
enough to make you understand — while the band is nowhere near as vile as the
artistic persona of Conor Oberst, in theory, they are capable of empathizing with that artistic persona.
Bettie Serveert formed in Holland, although
their lead singer and chief songwriter Carol van Dijk originally came from a
Dutch family in Canada, hence her total lack of a Dutch accent (it is said, in
fact, that she never managed to learn Dutch as a «second native» language after
relocating to the Netherlands at the age of seven), nor are there any
detectable «Hollandisms» in the lyrics or the music (and if there are, I
probably wouldn't know what they would be, unless you start considering
«Indorock» people like Andy Tielman). The only Dutchism is contained in the
band's name: «Betty serves» refers to Dutch tennis player Betty Stöve, who
wrote a book with that title about her career. Apparently, judging by her
record, she served all right, but won mostly in doubles — a hint at the band
members' complete mutual interdependence? Nah, they probably just happened to
fall upon the book title while trying to come up with a name.
Anyway, what is detectable is an almost slavish adoration of dirty distorted
«avant-garage» rock — the three major pillars upon which Bettie Serveert try to
erect their own little outpost are The Velvet Underground; Neil Young in his
Crazy Horse incarnation; and, from a more recent era, Sonic Youth. The lineup
is simple and traditional. The rhythm section (Herman Bunskoeke on bass and
Berend Dubbe on drums) is competent, but nothing special. The basic song
structures are shaped by Carol herself, playing rhythmic patterns that she probably
learned while listening to her idols — nothing special, either. The only member
of the band who tries to be just a tad more creative is lead guitarist Peter
Visser: his lead parts are thoroughly derivative of Lou Reed, Neil Young, and
the Sonic Youth people in terms of style, but his is the responsibility for the
melodic content of the songs, and every once in a while he comes up with some
original ideas — thank God, or the whole thing would be a total drag.
Now what is it that made people actually fall
in love with this bunch of slow / mid-tempo, rather sloppy, thoroughly uncatchy
mixes of grungy grumble with hookless folksy chord sequences? As talented as
Peter Visser is, the bulk of the band's charisma is generated by Carol — it is
she, after all, who writes and delivers the lyrics, and classic-era Bettie
Serveert is not a «pop» or a «hard rock» band; it is, first and foremost, a
«singer-songwriter» outfit. Each song is a short (sometimes long) personal
rant, usually of the «me and you» variety, full of obscure psychologism and
veiled complexes — so thickly veiled, in fact, that it can be fairly hard to
decode what the hell is that girl really
singing about. However, my biggest problem with Carol is not her lyrics, but
her personality, which has so far failed to make me a convert. Her voice is
fairly normal — neither too
sweet-sappy-sentimental nor too arrogant-barking-punkish, just sort of a
regular mezzo-soprano with a lot of mezzo
and not so much soprano, if you get my drift. Her modulations and mood shifts
are subtle and hard to notice, and even harder to interpret, much like the
lyrics. But at the same time, there is also none of that crawl-under-your-skin
mystique that sometimes infects you when listening to certain superficially
unassuming vocalists.
At her worst (usually when she begins to rise
up the scale in «climactic» emotional outsbursts, e.g. the "have I ever
laid my hands on you before?" bit on ʽBrain-Tagʼ), she can be
seriously annoying. At her best, like when she gets into dreamy, subtly
romantic mode on the title track, she can be mildly pleasant and listenable.
But none of this, to me, seems like either great singing or even great
«personality demonstration». Perhaps it just so happened that there was this
acute demand for strong, intelligent female personalities emerging from behind
walls of guitar distortion in the early 1990s, and Carol van Dijk happened to
catch that wave — but I am willing to go on record saying that she's got
nothing on Aimee Mann, and, totally sacrilegious as it may sound, I'd even say
that Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little
Pill has more of that «intense female personality» than Palomine, not to mention catchier songs
(admittedly far stupider lyrics, though — then again, since I do not understand
most of van Dijk's lyrics, I have no way of telling exactly how stupid or
intelligent they could appear to be).
Anyway, like I said, if it weren't for Visser, Palomine would be one of the draggiest
albums I've ever heard. But already on the first track — ʽLegʼ,
beginning as a rambling, directionless, irritatingly impressionist folk-rocker
— he gradually manages to pull my attention away from Carol's ranting about
"reflections in puddles and rain on the faces" and into his own world
of trippy rock soloing that quotes freely from both Neil Young's and Robert
Fripp's bag of tricks and eventually scales those heights of sonic ecstasy that
Carol, on her own, would have no chance at even noticing from afar, making it
well worth your while to sit through all of the song's six minutes rather than
yawning off after the first couple of minutes.
This makes it easy for me to segregate the
remaining songs — the more lead guitar they have, the better chance of
survival. ʽKid's Allrightʼ is a fast rocker where even van Dijk pumps
up a spoonful of anger, and Visser throws on lead lines and solos that are
quite worthy of the annual Sonic Youth prize. ʽBalentineʼ sounds like
a lost outtake from Neil Young's Ragged
Glory (with a balance of idealistic romance and furious anger that recalls
ʽLove And Only Loveʼ); and on ʽThis Thing Nowhereʼ, Visser
thrusts his lead axe right under Carol's nose almost all the way through, and
even if she has quite a pretty nose, guess who wins. On the other hand, the
seven-minute epic ʽSundazed To The Coreʼ, most of it an unholy mess
of distracted jangle, noise, and repetitive, hazy, half-hearted screeching, is
so unbearable that I tend to end my listening experience with ʽHealthy
Sickʼ (an equally sloppy noisefest, but only lasts for two minutes).
In short, you can see the reaction is pretty
mixed here, but there is definitely no way that I could agree with the
assessment of Palomine as a
masterpiece of Nineties' indie-rock, or even as the band's own masterpiece. I
could see where, like so many other albums, it could be embraced by
«alternative»-minded college teens in search of a generational support that
wouldn't be too trendy or too gimmicky, but, like most of these albums, I'd be
surprised if it managed to stand the test of time. The funniest thing about
this band, however, is that, the more musical they got, the less critical
respect they would earn for that — as if being even a pale copy of Sonic Youth was
more of an achievement than trying to excel at, you know, actual songwriting.
But all in due time.
LAMPREY (1995)
1) Keepsake; 2) Ray Ray Rain;
3) D. Feathers; 4) Re-Feel-It; 5) 21 Days; 6) Cybor *D; 7) Tell Me, Sad; 8)
Crutches; 9) Something So Wild; 10) Totally Freaked Out; 11) Silent Spring.
Now this album, I am afraid to say, does not
seem to have stood even a short time test at all. Positively viewed upon
release and still occasionally riding on the coattails of that first
reputational burst, now it seems like a prime example of «generic mid-1990s
indie» — lots of bravura, heroic posturing, volume, distortion, and angry,
self-righteous vocals, behind all of which there is no musical substance
whatsoever. Reusing, perusing, and abusing musical baggage accumulated by their
betters without putting their own distinct spin on it — Lamprey is the sort of album which you'd imagine a band like Sonic
Youth capable of writing and recording on-the-spot, except they'd be too
embarrassed to release it (and, for that matter, there is very little in this
world that Sonic Youth would be embarrassed of releasing).
What is so much worse, through all of it Carol
van Dijk wails, rants, and splutters as if she really had something to say, but
all she really says is the same old
"I can't explain", only dressed up in pseudo-metaphors and allegories
whose sound is clumsy and whose meaning is zilch. Example: "Go down inside
of me / There's still a part that sees the first time / You've opened up my
eyes / Completely self absorbed / What are we waiting for / Ferociously, you
never know just why" (ʽ21 Daysʼ). Feel free to correct me, but I
happen to think that these are some really bad lyrics out there, don't you
think? And there's more... so much more...
Unfortunately, this time around even Peter
Visser does not help out, because way
too much space is given over to verbal raving and ranting; most of the time he
is just weaving his jangle or minimalistic lead lines in and out of Carol's
rhythm playing. There is an inspired guitar break at the end of ʽD.
Feathersʼ, a song for which they also drag out the Mellotron (or, at
least, something that imitates the Mellotron), so that its coda becomes
sonically similar to early King Crimson, and a few other tracks as well feature
maniacal leads from the man, so that the process of listening eventually
becomes the process of impatiently waiting around for whether or not Visser is
given a chance to solo at the end — offering a chance at redemption — or not —
condemning the song to immediate death at the stake.
ʽRay Ray Rainʼ is the only track here
that indirectly points to a brighter and snappier future for the band: poorly
produced (the vocals are muffled and strangled in between the guitar parts),
but upbeat, poppy, and shiny in a cool mid-1960s fashion, as if somebody took a
whiff on inspiration from Revolver
in addition to all the Velvet Undergroundisms. I am also somewhat partial to
the album closer ʽSilent Springʼ which is at least different — after
a long string of those crunchy, but meaningless rock grinders its acoustic
guitars and echoey vocals are a nice change of pace. It is also the only track
on the album on which Carol actually sings
in a traditional understanding of the term, and does so admirably well.
Everything else is pretty much awful, with the
major culprits being ʽCrutchesʼ (the "let me down, let it bubble
all around me!" part could succeed if the rest of the song actually worked towards that anguished emotional
release, but it doesn't, and the protagonist just comes across as a phony,
capricious whiner) and the interminable ʽTell Me, Sadʼ, which takes
its cue from a not-so-obscure Beatles reference ("rocking horse people out on a limb..."), never really figures
out what to do with it, and burdens our conscience with some sort of problem
("tell me, Sad, what's wrong with that...") whose very existence is
never confirmed — five minutes of almost literally trying to produce a
meaningful something out of virtually nothing.
A more detailed scrutiny might be able to
extract bits and pieces — a decent bassline here and there, a minor vocal hook
somewhere on the periphery — but on the whole, Lamprey is just a waste of talent, and I have a really hard time
thinking why anybody over 18 years old would ever want to listen to it once
more. Then again, judging by the seemingly fading memories of it, nobody
really does these days. Thumbs down.
DUST BUNNIES (1997)
1) Geek; 2) Link; 3) Musher;
4) Dust Bunny; 5) What Friends; 6) Misery Galore; 7) Story In A Nutshell; 8)
Sugar The Pill; 9) Rudder; 10) Pork And Beans; 11) Fallen Foster; 12)
Co-Coward; 13) Heaven.
Who's got the floor? The Rev. Stephen Th.
Erlewine from the All-Music Guide has got the floor: «Instead of developing or
refining their sound», says the Reverend in his brief, but stern assessment of
Dust Bunnies, «Bettie Serveert stay
within their self-imposed boundaries, crafting small, simple jangle-pop songs
that never rock too hard or sound too soft». And hear this: «Dust Bunnies... doesn't necessarily
return the band to the heights of Palomine.
Musically, Dust Bunnies is no
different than its two predecessors, and the group's lack of development is a
little bit eerie...» Am I the only one to be a little bit confused here? One
one hand, we have «the heights of Palomine»,
implying that the band's third album is a «low» in comparison, but on the other
hand, musically, it is no different than Palomine.
Hmm. Given my own experience as a review writer, I'd say these hard-to-resolve
self-contradictions usually get written when the writer has nothing to say
whatsoever. But if it is a band like Bettie Serveert we're talking about, I
would think it's only natural. Let us not judge the Reverend too harshly. He
probably had approximately 50,000 reviews scheduled for that day anyway.
In any case, I only mentioned this since my own
reaction turns out to be surprisingly different: Dust Bunnies is the very first Bettie Serveert album that I can sit
through without being consistently bored out of my skull. Indeed, it is
«lighter», and also «tighter», than its two predecessors, as if the band had
finally embarked on a definite journey to becoming a normal pop-rock band,
rather than retaining their carefully styled «indie kids» image. What this
means in objective terms: (a) the songs become shorter, so that they are now
able to cram 13 of them into 41 minutes, rather than 11 into 49 minutes, as it
used to be; (b) the songs frequently pick up the tempo, meaning that even if
you can't memorize one, you can at least tap your foot to it (and it is psychologically important, no matter
what the serious introspective types tell you with scorn); (c) some of the
songs actually have distinctive power-pop riffs — not amazingly great riffs,
but actual melodic lines that, you know, explore
harmonic space rather than simply exist
in it.
So it is not at all in the musical sphere where there has been no change; rather it is in the artistic sphere, since all the songs are
still subjugated to the idea that Bettie Serveert is, above everything else, a
platform for Carol van Dijk to materialize her endless rants about everything
that's wrong in the world today — mainly guys behaving like dumbasses,
dickheads, or chickenshits, but every once in a while she also takes on the
music industry (ʽRudderʼ). Unfortunately, she still makes no effort
to introduce even a little character-defining personality to her singing, but
since the basic approach is to be tighter than usual, at least some of the
songs now feature marginally catchy chorus hooks (ʽWhat Friends?ʼ,
which also has one of the album's best riffs and could therefore qualify for
the «best song» competition).
Other quality choices include ʽSugar The
Pillʼ, written and performed in Lou Reed style, a percussion-free «urban
ballad» with a laid-back, but bitter atmosphere, and probably Carol's only
exceptional bit of vocal artistry on this record; ʽPork And Beansʼ, a
jangly rocker à la Pretenders
that seems to be about the unhealthy
relationships between highbrow stars and lowlife admirers, but we've come a
long way from Ray Davies to allow ourself to be so unambiguous in our understanding;
and, continuing the already established tradition, ʽHeavenʼ, the
album's last track, is a softer, moodier ballad that shows Carol's «vulnerable»
side (or «childish» side, if you will) and is somehow more charming than all
the rest of the album put together.
In between these songs, there is still plenty
of tunes that are completely non-descript (I mean, the draggy sound of
something like ʽMusherʼ fully justifies its title), but regardless of
that, this is a big musical step forward for the band. If critics at the time,
like the Reverend quoted above, tended to shoot 'em down, it could have really
been triggered by overrating them right from the start: Palomine pretended to more depth and «authenticity of feeling», and
felt right at home with the indie aesthetics, but ultimately, it was unoriginal,
confused, and boring, and the realization of that must have caught up with the
critics right by the time of Dust
Bunnies — an album that is much less boring, yet the critical mass imagined
it as more boring, go figure. Anyway,
a mild thumbs up
here, although the band is still growing up and only beginning to cut its teeth
in the standard «art-pop» format.
PRIVATE SUIT (2000)
1) Unsound; 2) Satisfied; 3)
Private Suit; 4) Mariachi Souls; 5) ReCall; 6) Auf Wiedersehen; 7) Sower And
Seeds; 8) White Tales; 9) John Darmy; 10) My Fallen Words; 11) Healer.
Finally, upon their fourth try, they manage to
get it nearly right — or, at least, as right as possible for a band deprived of
original vision or melodic genius. Private
Suit is the first Bettie album that I would gladly recommend to anyone,
regardless of one's general attitude towards the «indie spirit» of the 1990s.
And not just for the sexy album cover, either, even though the sexy album cover
is already a good hint at some changes to come.
They went to PJ Harvey's producer with this
one, and whether or not this was what made the difference, the sound of Private Suit is a radical departure
from the old style. Suddenly, the songs begin to come together rather than fall
apart; the sound becomes softer and glossier, more «pop» than «rock», but in a
pleasant, tasteful way; new instruments, like lotsa keyboards, make a welcome
entrance to cheer up the sound. But most importantly — this is the album on
which Carol van Dijk finally learns to sing, or, at least, decides to learn to
sing. Or, even more accurately, this is an album on which she adopts a
slightly more feminine image (check the album cover again for immediate visual
reference!) and engages in a little smooth acting, instead of simply spitting
it all out like a Riot Grrrl aficionado.
Already the first song, ʽUnsoundʼ,
shows signs of all these changes, and it would be hard to believe that we are
listening to the same Bettie Serveert. Lively tempo, swirling organs, guitars
that sound more like R.E.M. than Pavement, and a singing voice that is probably
an octave lower than Carol's usual style — the "it's good to be unsound,
uh-uh" chorus sounds like Lou Reed. No screeching or drowning the listener
in pools of distortion, but still plenty of energy and conviction, even if the
actual hooks as such are still rather weak (but the shrill Visser guitar solo
at the end, rising above the general level of the song and unexpectedly pulling
it straight up into the stratosphere, is top-notch).
For ʽSatisfiedʼ, they choose a
different strategy — more psychedelic, with droning guitars, multiple layers
of mood-setting keyboards, melancholic cellos, and a vocal delivery that aims
straight for the subconscious (the «nasal-somnambulant» type, with overdubs
that have Carol engaging in a dialog with herself in the chorus); again, not a
«great» song, perhaps, but surely an intriguing one, worth revisiting at least to make sure exactly how much
you have missed — a sentiment that was consistently lacking for the first three
albums.
Only the third track (title one) finally sounds
like good old Bettie: ragged-nervous strumming, quavery, shaking, arrogant
voice, and noise-a-plenty in the outro section. In other words, the usual
under-written borefest, albeit even that one is still given extra support from
a string section. But guess what — it is the only trace of good old Bettie on the entire album. Everything that
follows once again obeys the new laws, which demand clear production,
well-rehearsed singing, and musical diversity, from the acoustic folk balladry
of ʽMariachi Soulsʼ to the Cure-like mope-pop of ʽReCallʼ
to the music hall piano waltzing of ʽMy Fallen Wordsʼ to the ultimate
conclusion of ʽHealerʼ, which has a little bit of everything (some
post-punk, some rhythm & blues, some art rock) and, for once, makes «Bettie
Serveert-style depression» a reality.
But the best song of all is ʽSower And
Seedsʼ, where the lead singer even tries on a bit of world-weary falsetto
for good measure, and the combination of guitar distortion, organ, and that
oddly drugged-out voice comes very close to striking out some real magic.
Perhaps they were going for a Portishead emulation or something — anyway, it's
not tremendously original, but it sounds convincingly tragic. The puzzle of it all,
of course, is that songs like ʽSatisfiedʼ, ʽSower And
Seedsʼ, and ʽHealerʼ all give us a completely new artistic
philosophy — Bettie does not really serve any more, but goes into depressed,
deeply wounded seclusion instead, and somehow it becomes her more than when she
was all raving and ranting on us. Of course, that might simply be my ugly male
chauvinist side speaking up — but then again, I've never pretended liking
female rock acts merely for the fact of their lead characters showing «strong
personalities», since «strong» by itself never guarantees «emotionally or
intellectually interesting». Private
Suit, on the other hand, is Bettie Serveert's most emotionally and intellectually interesting album up
to that particular moment, and it guarantees the band a far more assured and
probably un-retractable thumbs up than Dust Bunnies.
LOG 22 (2003)
1) Wide Eyed Fools; 2) Smack;
3) Have A Heart; 4) Captain Of Maybe; 5) De Diva; 6) Given; 7) Not Coming Down;
8) Cut 'n' Dried; 9) Log 22; 10) White Dogs; 11) Certainlie; 12) The Ocean, My
Floor; 13) The Love-In.
After Private
Suit had changed their image, but failed to make them superstars, Bettie
Serveert took a two-year break — only to return with an album that sounded almost like a retreat to their original
image. Almost, because Dollo's law says that you cannot really go back to the exact same state as you were, so Log 22 is still notoriously «artsier»
than Palomine, and for Bettie, this
means «probably better». Its major problem may be excessive length — a whole
hour — but on the other hand, some of its better songs are its longer pieces, where the real juicy pieces of musical meat
are to be found in the jam sections, so...
But all in due time. In reality, the band
explores quite a few different styles here. The first song is technically one
of those stream-of-consciousness rants from Carol that used to be pretty
boring, but now they have mastered the art of funky rhythmics and economical,
broken-up strings of notes as riffs (somebody must have been on a Television
kick recently), which makes the song's verse melody more interesting than the
far more generic alt-rock all-out-loud chorus (that one could just as well be
produced by the likes of Avril Lavigne). Then the second song is the brief,
two-minute-long explosive punch of ʽSmackʼ — distorted guitars, pop
hooks, whistling, and a Weezer attitude that we'd never heard from this band
so far. Then the third song is... well, looks like a good old draggy B.S.
shuffle, but this time, all smothered in horns, in search for some sort of Van
Morrison-style epicness. Not particularly inspiring, but interesting.
All of which means that the extended holiday
period got them prepped up for «search» mode, and that is at least better than
wallow in the original formula, which was boring from the start and would only
get more boring when put on endless repeat. The album still sags in the middle,
with ʽDe Divaʼ being particularly irritating — going from jangle to
distortion and back while Carol delivers a lengthy pretentious rant on herself
as "a walking inconsistency". The song wants to be a confessional,
but in reality it is self-aggrandizing for no good reason, and I get no extra
respect for Carol just from learning that she is supposed to be "De Diva
in denial", even presuming that I have
guessed correctly what is meant by that (and if I haven't, it's not my fault).
But somewhere around the title track, which
manages to transcend generic alt-rock with some clever guitar tricks from
Peter, things begin to get better, and the album arguably reaches its peak with
the two jam-extended epics — ʽWhite Dogsʼ and ʽThe Ocean, My
Floorʼ. The former is one of the band's most obvious tributes to the
Velvet Underground (Carol once again sings in her best Lou Reed impression and
plays all the right rhythm chords from the Lou Reed songbook), but it honestly
sounds like the band is having good clean fun, and Visser plays his heart out
on the extended section, totally getting in the groove as if the spirit of Lou
himself, or of Robert Quine, at the least, had suddenly descended on him.
As for ʽThe Oceanʼ, its final section
is also an extended jam, but carried out from a completely different angle —
psychedelic rather than avantgarde, with a complex pattern of overdubs that
speeds past you like a multi-colored mushroom field. This is the band's first
serious experiment with «trippy» music, and while it is completely unoriginal,
it works surprisingly well, showing a level of hi-tech sophistication that the
early albums did not even hint at. For about four minutes, the mushrooms
explode and the acid flows over our heads like crazy. This could have been a
fine coda to the album — but then, in a ʽHer Majestyʼ-style paroxysm
of self-deflating, they prefer to round things up with a self-consciously silly
retro-disco throwaway that they title ʽThe Love-Inʼ: two and a half
minutes of «body muzak» for the nostalgic proto-hipster.
Consequently, the album deserves a thumbs up
despite its more than obvious flaws — upon first listen, I hated it for the
excessive length and also because it seemed to turn them back in the direction
of Dust Bunnies. But it is more like
a synthesis of Private Suit with Dust Bunnies and a whole lot of
additional approaches. It is not cohesive, it makes relatively little sense and
is not at all innovative, but there's also something to be said about general
smartness, unpredictability, and professionalism — particularly
professionalism, which seems to have properly arrived at the band's disposal on
Private Suit and is not really going
anywhere, unless they all go on a heroin binge or start touring in support of
local politicians.
ATTAGIRL (2004)
1) Dreamaniacs; 2) Attagirl;
3) Don't Touch That Dial!; 4) Greyhound Song; 5) You've Changed; 6) Versace; 7)
1 Off Deal; 8) Hands Off; 9) Staying Kind; 10) Lover I Don't Have To Love.
An irresponsible reviewer like myself should
have found a very easy way to shrug off an album like this — simply by saying
that no album that features a Bright Eyes cover deserves a review, period, let
alone a positive review. But for the sake of self-improvement, let us assume
that I am not myself today, so, in a far more responsible manner, I have to point out that ʽLover I
Don't Have To Loveʼ was one of the few listenable numbers on Lifted, and that any Conor Oberst song
would automatically sound better anyway if done by Carol van Dijk. Because
Carol can at least play it intricately, mystery-woman-style, whereas Conor
Oberst is simply a guy that deserves being put out of his misery on the spot,
whenever he opens his mouth. (Okay, make it «the artistic reflection of Conor
Oberst», to avoid unrequired ambiguities).
In any case, regardless of how artistically
embarrassing it is for a band much older, better, and at least more experienced
than Bright Eyes to cover Bright Eyes, that is only one last track on an album
that is quite uneven, but occasionally still charming and/or catchy. Shorter
and less ambitious than Log 22, it
is another mix of «classic indie-rock» Bettie Serveert with their Private Suit incarnation, so it's got a
little for everyone, but not a lot for anyone, unless you adore their guitar
posturing stuff and their moody escapades equally.
I will probably settle for the moody escapades:
ʽDreamaniacsʼ is a successful art-pop creation where bouncy
rhythmics, meteor showers of electronic bleeps, and ambient strings mesh well
with Carol's lyrical message — "though my feet are on the ground, my head
is on a cloud", as she pleads with her imaginary lover to take it easy on
her ("don't give up on me, dreamaniacs don't aim to please"). The
title track is even better, with its smoky lounge atmosphere and a streak of
weepiness culminating in the bitter-ironic hook of "attagirl!" We
never get the details, but Carol's "it's you and me and the Devil makes
three" is an uneasy line all the same, and the arrangement of the song
makes it work, although arguably it works even better when totally stripped, on
an acoustic demo version that is appended as a bonus to some of the CD
editions.
The third highlight of the album is ʽVersaceʼ,
where the band falls for the latest indie trends and explores the risky world
of electronic dance-pop, but with surprisingly effective results — the bass
groove and various keyboard overdubs set a ghostly melancholic mood, while
Carol adopts her most seductive tone (the one which allows breaking into
falsetto when necessary). However, the irony and need for self-deflation are
not forgotten, either: on their own, the lyrics would be just a trite
collection of «broken heart» clichés, but the repetitive mantra
"Versace... Versace... Versace" consolidating the hookline, the song
becomes more of a self-conscious parody on the «ennui syndrome of the rich and
prosperous». Pretty cool, considering that it was their first experiment with
this kind of style.
With the addition of a couple more inventive
mixes (e.g. «swampy» slide guitars with «Eastern» strings on ʽGrehound
Song), Attagirl is, at the very
least, entertainingly diverse, even if it has its share of forgettable
throwaways as well (ʽHands Offʼ — fast,
look-at-me-I'm-so-full-of-energy pop-rocker whose main purpose seems to be to
remind us that they are still a «rock» band and can kick ass any time they want
to; but I don't think it's really true). Since nobody really gave a damn about
a bunch of aging rockers from Holland by 2004, the album got almost no press,
and what little it got was fairly cruel — but I suppose such was the inevitable
cost of being originally overrated and overpraised: few things in this world
can be as pitiable as a formerly overappreciated indie-rock band still trying
to raise sand in a dog-eat-dog environment. But honestly, even without any
pity or condescension, Attagirl
deserves a modest thumbs up on the whole, and we will try to
overlook the Bright Eyes incident because, well, everybody is entitled to a
tasteless blunder every now and then. Just don't do it again.
BARE STRIPPED NAKED (2006)
1) Roadmovies; 2) Hell = Other
People; 3) Love & Learn; 4) Brain-Tag; 5) Storm; 6) The Rope; 7) All The
Other Fish; 8) What They Call Love; 9) Painted Word; 10) 2nd Time; 11) Hell =
Other People (alt. version); 12) Certainlie.
I doubt that this severely ungrammatical title
(should have at least put a couple commas in there to make it look like a
thesaurus excerpt) brought Bettie Serveert any extra incidental popularity from
porn surfers; nor does Carol's huge, decidedly non-porn face on the album
sleeve count as an adequately sexy reflection of the title. Actually, I think
that by this time it must have been clear to the band that nothing whatsoever
would bring them extra incidental popularity from any target group. So they
simply resigned their fates into Carol's hands — for all I know, Bare Stripped Naked is more like a
Carol van Dyk solo album with occasional guest spots from Bettie Serveert
members rather than a «proper» BS product.
Other than the last track,
ʽCertainlieʼ, a slow indie rocker in classic Neil Young style, all
the songs here are indeed «stripped naked», with little or no electric guitar,
putting Carol, her singing and acoustic playing up front. Right from the start,
Bettie Serveert had always vied for the title of «most introspective and
psychologically oriented» indie band on the planet (or, at least, in Holland),
but on Bare Stripped Naked, melody
and harmony are officially relegated to background support — there is no way
one can like the record without being a focused devotee of Carol van Dyke and her
«bride of Lou Reed» femme fatale fling.
Actually, scrap the «Lou Reed» association;
most of these songs do not sound much like Lou in any of his periods. They
sound like... like some amateur's sorry attempt to make a bunch of art Lieder in the indie rock idiom, or
something. Peter Hammill used to get away with this due to his poetic gift and
powerful vocal presence, but Carol van Dyk is not even close to that league in
any of those respects. She is not even in a particularly decent vocal form here
— croaking and bleeting her way in a completely anti-Private Suit manner, maybe in an attempt to introduce some
«spontaneity» and «naturalness», but let us not forget that shitting one's
pants is also an act that is both spontaneous and natural, and yet we do not
usually think of such qualities of that particular act as possessing a
redeeming value.
At most, I could comment on one of these songs,
so let us make it ʽHell = Other Peopleʼ — clearly, it was of
particular importance to Carol, since it is presented here in no less than two
different versions, just like George Harrison's ʽIsn't It A Pityʼ on All Things Must Pass. Melodically, it
is trite and unmemorable, and the vocal melody for the verses is taken straight
from Dylan's ʽYou're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Goʼ (took me a
while to extract that link from the back of my mind, but back of one's mind is
where it must have come from — it's
perfectly plausible that Carol would be spinning Blood On The Tracks a million times to get in the mood for this
album, and you don't play jokes with your subconscious). Lyrically, it wants to
enlighten us on the issue of Carol's relationship with somebody who is "a
5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, sharper than a broken nail", but ends up
sounding like a moron, and the singer ends up sounding like a double moron for
taking up with him in the first place. And the two different arrangements vary
in that the second one is... more fully produced, with harder percussion,
glossier vocal mix, and more piano. Something like that. Sounds exciting? It's
the best there is.
I cannot bring myself to hate any of the Bettie
Serveert albums, because I've always respected Carol's willingness to keep it
all under control and not go over the top with barf-inducing histryonics à la Conor Oberst. However, Bare Stripped Naked is such a
thoroughly misguided idea that I have
come quite close to a state of hatred. There is nothing wrong in stripping
naked if there is something worth showing underneath; but this record, in
reality, is just as much of a stylistic put-on as any other of their albums.
Take the difference between ʽLucy In The Sky With Diamondsʼ and John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, and there
you have the real meaning of the
«stripped naked» metaphor. Here, all we have is Peter Visser only getting to
play a wailing electric solo on the last track, when it's much too late and
your mood has been hopelessly spoiled by wasting so much time on a failed
effort. Thumbs
down.
PS. For the sake of trivia, there is an
acoustic remake of ʽBrain Tagʼ from Palomine, which only makes me sicker still because are we supposed
to think that track was some sort of «classic» in its own right to deserve this
Subtle Artistic Treatment? Goddammit, people, you have to earn the right to go «unplugged», unless you were unplugged right
from the start. Acoustic versions of bad electric songs? Only in a hellish indie
nightmare.
PHARMACY OF LOVE (2010)
1) Deny All; 2) Semaphore; 3)
Love Lee; 4) Mossie; 5) The Pharmacy; 6) Souls Travel; 7) Calling; 8)
Change4Me; 9) What They Call Love.
Say what you will, but it can be nice to admire
the tightness of artistic bonds — absolutely nobody needs Bettie Serveert to
stick around for another decade, yet on they plough, with the Visser / van Dyk
partnership stronger than ever; for all we know, they'll still be around by 2050, and that is when they will finally take
their revenge on the musical community. In the meantime, Pharmacy Of Love at least remedies the flaw of their previous
album — no more of that philosophical acoustic shit, we are back to
full-dressed electric arrangements, and not only that, but we've also pumped up
the tempos quite a bit: Pharmacy Of Love
is the band's fastest, loudest, angriest record since... ever? Maybe since
ever.
The difference goes beyond the tempos, though,
or maybe it is the tempos that are responsible for compressing the band into a
much tighter format. Many of the songs, instead of relying on relatively free
jangle-folk-pop strumming, are now either riff-based or follow punk / post-punk
rhythm patterns that leave no space for rhythmic variation — I guess, from a
certain point of view, you could call this «selling out», since ultimately Pharmacy Of Love has quite a few things
in common with commercially oriented «pop punk» forms, groping for tightness,
catchiness, and even some production gloss. (In fact, I think some fans did accuse the band of selling out,
despite the fact that the album couldn't have sold more than a couple hundred
copies).
But the issue of «selling out» is usually
unrelated to the issue of actual quality, and I must say that some of the songs
here seem unusually well-written for this band. The lead-in track, ʽDeny
Allʼ, is a powerfully desperate rocker with expressive lead guitar work
(particularly Visser's little «siren lines» in between the verses); but Peter
gets to shine even better on ʽSemaphoreʼ and the title track,
combining and merging all sorts of styles, from power-pop to dream-pop to acid
psychedelia, whatever the moment calls for.
It is true that getting rid of the «endless
imitator» status is a difficult task. It took me only a couple listens, for instance,
to understand the heavy debt that ʽMossieʼ owes to ʽI Want You
(She's So Heavy)ʼ, or that the "blame it on yourself, blame it on the
state you're in..." part of ʽChange4Meʼ is fundamentally ripped
off Radiohead's ʽBlack Starʼ ("blame it on the black star, blame
it on the falling sky...") — and I
am quite convinced that a couple more equally meticulous listens would bring
out more and more of these derivations. But the important thing is not that
these songs continue to lack originality — the important thing is that they
sound like crafted pop songs, not like spontaneous indie rock rants; and since
Carol van Dyk is not Joni Mitchell and Peter Visser is not Van Morrison, I'd
rather take crafted pop songs from them, any time of day, than raw, bleeding,
boring confessions.
The album's centerpiece is the lengthy
ʽCallingʼ, which alone occupies more than a quarter of this fairly
short LP — with lengthy setups, effect-laden guitar drones, and slowest tempos
all around, it wants to be some sort of anthemic-psychedelic masterpiece in the
style of The Bends (which,
incidentally, I have already mentioned in connection with ʽBlack
Starʼ — somebody must have been on an early Radiohead kick), but there's
no way Bettie Serveert would have been able to pull off a nine-minute track
convincingly: Visser is their only instrumentalist to whom you might want to
pay attention, and his function on this vessel, slowly sailing through the
marmalade skies and tangerine oceans, is largely atmospheric.
Nevertheless, despite all the flaws, The Pharmacy Of Love still gets a thumbs up
from me. The band's transition from «indie-ramblers» to «pop-rockers» has been
carried out with style and intelligence, and has managed to bring down the
«boredom» and «pretense» parameters to tolerable levels. No, it probably will
not earn Carol van Dyk any extra respect and admiration from you if you have
not been able to generate that admiration earlier — but you know, if an indie
rock album produced in 2010 does not cause irritation, it is already quite an
achievement all by itself. And if an indie rocker makes his/her influences so
utterly transparent, and it still
does not cause any irritation... well, that sort of makes the album a
masterpiece in its own way.
OH, MAYHEM! (2013)
1) Shake-Her; 2) Mayhem; 3)
Sad Dog; 4) Had2BYou; 5) Tuf Skin; 6) Monogamous; 7) Receiver; 8) LoserTrack;
9) iPromise; 10) D.I.Y.
Oh, bother. All of a sudden and out of the
blue, Bettie Serveert come out with yet another LP that gets a whoppin' three
reviews on RYM and a mind-blowing four
reviews on Amazon (as compared to, say, 523 for Rihanna's latest). And guess
what? They have released their best record ever,
and nobody gives a shit. That's what justice is all about.
So what's the secret, and what's the deal?
Nothing could be simpler: Oh, Mayhem!
is the first album in Bettie Serveert's catalog that is completely, from top to
bottom, written according to the principle «pop music first, indie philosophy
later». It's not that the lyrics are dumbed down or anything — it's just that
guitar hooks, symmetric melodic resolutions, and carefully thought out vocal
modulation consistently takes precedence over the «message», so that not even
the faintest grasp of English is required to fully enjoy this stuff. The
Beatles and Blondie have ushered out Lou Reed and Neil Young as primary
inspiration, and while this may have pissed off some of the old guard, yearning
for another Palomine, I actually
view this as a self-imposed challenge: can we, after all these years, carve out
a solid, non-nonsense «power pop» album or can't we?
One listen to ʽShake-Herʼ should be
enough to inspire confidence. Visser's slightly surf-inspired fuzz riff,
Carol's intentionally de-personalized vocals, locked in a carefully
overproduced desperate groove, that "yada-yada-yada" resolution, and
the economic length — all of this makes the track a serious contender for best
pure pop song of the year, all the more amazing considering they never really
did anything like it before: too smooth, too well-rounded, and, most importantly,
too unpretentious — Carol's cherished personality seems to have been splattered
against the melody, a gesture which I, personally, applaud very loudly, since
I've always thought that if anything ever prevented this band from getting
real good, it was that goddamn ego.
That ego is not completely erased (already on
the second track, ʽMayhemʼ, it perks up a bit), but even at its
perkiest here it is still subjected to obeying musical purposes.
ʽMayhemʼ flaunts its trivial, power chord-based riff louder and prouder
than Carol flaunts her voice, which is soon drowned in the soft, subdued, folky
arpeggios of the bridge — and then joins Visser's guitar in all of its
intonations on the loud chorus: that "oh no, not me, oh mayhem, oh
mayhem!" bit is a pretty damn good imitation of a panic attack during a
sleepless night. In recognition, Visser ends the song with a totally kick-ass
overdriven solo (and it ain't the only one).
Amazingly, almost every song out of ten has something going for it, so I will only
name some major highlights. ʽHad2BYouʼ, despite the awful spelling,
has some lovely Beatlesque guitar / vocal moves. ʽMonogamousʼ
interrupts the formulaic pop flow of the album for a quasi-mystical chant,
adorned with roaring waves of feedback and various guitar effects, sort of a «Sinead
O'Connor meets Led Zeppelin» impression. ʽReceiverʼ, in terms of fury
and loudness, is probably the closest they come to the old Bettie sound, but
even here a catchy chorus is in order, and the necessity to rise over the din
of the rhythm spurs Visser on to deliver another set of ecstatic, punch-drunk
solos. And ʽD.I.Y.ʼ closes the album with the best display of lead
guitar technique on the entire album — there is a tricky break there around
2:10 where the rhythm shifts from funky to bluesy without disrupting the flow
of the song, but giving it some extra dynamics.
In all honesty, I never expected this. It
actually takes a lot of talent these
days to deliver a no-frills power pop album and get away with it, without all
or most of the songs sounding like weak, unmemorable, copycat creations. But Oh, Mayhem! delivers the goods in form and in spirit — it's loud, it's crunchy,
it's filled with sympathetic, life-asserting guitar moves, it's brimming with
life and energy, so what's not to like? The fact that it is not quite clear
what they actually want to say and where exactly they are going with this?
Maybe — but on a record as bubbling with life as this one, you don't really
need any straight answers. Might as well just enjoy the ride, and admire all the
shiny saddle ornaments. Thumbs up.
HANDSOME WESTERN STATES (1998)
1) Maroon Bible; 2) Lay Low
For The Letdown; 3) Disco: The Secretaries Blues; 4) The Rise And Fall Or Our
Hero's Reward; 5) I Love John, She Loves Paul; 6) Slo-Mo For The Masses; 7)
I've Been Broken (I've Been Fixed); 8) Queen Of The Populists; 9) Shotgun
Dedication; 10) Rust With Me; 11) Delta; 12) Dig The Subatomic Holdout #2.
Miles Kurosky and Bill Swan worked together in
an office in a San Francisco security firm. Then they decided that they would
start a band, because they both loved music. Then they wrote some songs, caught
the attention of Rob Schneider from The Apples In Stereo, and got signed to The
Elephant 6. Then they released an EP, and then they released an LP. Sounds
simple enough when you look at this sequence of events, but look how many
things had to turn out right for it — the office. The partnership. The
audacity. The Schneider interest. (The elbow grease?). From this heap of
accidents and incidents rose Beulah and smote the world.
Well, actually, their first LP smote no one. In
relation to what would come afterwards, it feels like their Please Please Me — a record full of
«beginner's spirit»: lively, energetic, exuberant, but showing no particular
depth of insight or breadth of coverage, and only the first signs of a burgeoning
songwriting talent. Of course, when the Beatles did it in 1963, it was only
natural; when Beulah did it in the Nineties, a decade when artists were
generally expected to blow the roof off with their first album, it threatened
to put a «shallow» tag on them once and for all, no matter how many gimmicky
titles they would assign to their songs.
The best thing about early Beulah is their
sound, and even that is not all that unique — just a regular «Elephant 6» kind
of sound, that is, sunny pop music with loud, but colorful, distorted guitars;
vocal harmonies that owe it all to the Beach Boys; and a tight, upbeat rhythm
section that keeps the band from going mushy. Well, The Apples In Stereo
themselves sound that way, and many others, too. Maybe Beulah are a little more
hard-rocking. Or maybe they position themselves as a «wittier» counterpart of
their protectors — with even crazier song titles and stuffier lyrics: the very
first track already mentions Gideon's Bible, Ecclesiastes, astronauts on TV,
and Jack the Ripper over the span of two verses and a bridge.
And they do come across as a bit too smart for
their own good, because the songs have no clear purpose — yet they do not come
across as dazzling musical enigmas, either. The means at the band's disposal
are fairly well known and traditional, but it is not well understood what
exactly do they use them for. Tenderness and romance emerge only occasionally
(like on ʽDeltaʼ, which shifts from McCartney-like acoustic ballad
mode to fiddle-driven roots-rock and back), but usually they just hide around
the corner, as the band tends to sing about relationships from a more cynical
point of view.
A quintessential early Beulah song would be
something like ʽI Love John, She Loves Paulʼ — the title uses the
two-headed image of a long-gone pop band to illustrate why the singer is good
and why his love interest is bad; the distorted, but still melodic rhythm
guitar and the vocals, masked with some reverb for extra hip-cool effect,
suggest the usual nostalgic throwback to sunny, irreverent 1966; the lyrics
are full of smartypants references to various idols, some of which I get
("hey, oh, let's go" clearly invokes the Ramones, and the sneery,
drawn-out "so long, so long" may be invoking the Pixies' ʽHere
Comes Your Manʼ) and most of which I probably don't. No guitar solo,
because guitar solos aren't cool for indie kids (who spend too much time soaking
in their cultural legacy to learn how to play guitar anyway), but some moody
army trumpet accompaniment throughout from Bill Swan (who likes this
instrument about as much as the late John Entwistle used to like the French
horn, but seems to have spent even less time practising). If it weren't for the
mild catchiness of the chorus and, most importantly, the band's sense of light
humor and irony, I'd probably hate the song — and the album.
But this sense of light humor and irony,
coupled with the tastefulness of the unprofessional arrangements, is what
makes Handsome Western States, in
the end, so handsome. When the music is too slow, it tends to drag, but when
they pick up a cheery tempo, as in ʽI've Been Brokenʼ or the album
closer ʽDig The Subatomic Holdout #2ʼ, everything is forgiven,
including the unintentional toe-tapping and air guitar playing, simplistic as
these rhythms and chords may be. In addition, one aspect they really paid
serious attention to is the vocal harmonies — some are three-part, amounting to
a lightly head-spinning psychedelic effect (ʽShotgun Dedicationʼ). So
«unprofessional», in this understanding, does not necessarily mean «not
hard-working».
Still, despite all of its positive qualities, I
do not think the album is worth an active «thumbs up» — it is way too
«manneristic» and emotionally empty, or, if you wish, «emotionally masked»
(which, to me, is pretty much the same thing) for me to click with on a sensory
level, and too derivative and half-baked to be admired from a technical point
of view. Reasonably well made, sure, but definitely not one of those amazing
debuts that immediately justifies the sponsor's trust in the sponsored. Let's
just say that, at this point in time, they were still «finding themselves»,
with occasional glimpses of the findings to come.
WHEN YOUR HEARTSTRINGS BREAK (1999)
1) Score From Augusta; 2)
Sunday Under Glass; 3) Matter Vs. Space; 4) Emma Blowgun's Last Stand; 5) Calm
Go The Wild Seas; 6) Ballad Of The Lonely Argonaut; 7) Comrade's Twenty-Sixth;
8) The Aristocratic Swells; 9) Silverado Days; 10) Warmer; 11) If We Can Land A
Man On The Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart.
The worst thing about this album is its title.
Or, wait, maybe the best thing about
this album is its title — depending on your brain's first reaction to it. If it
strains you into expecting a sensitive, sentimental, depressed, or melancholic
set of songs (under the «cure your own heartbreak with our own heartbreak» principle), you will be sorely disappointed.
But if it is «when your heartstrings break... try something light and
uplifting, like our second album», then that's a different matter. On the other
hand, it is still a little difficult to see what exactly this kind of music has
to do with «heartstrings» in any sort of traditional understanding.
Glancing at the song titles, you might suspect
that Beulah are growing up, and trying to shed at least a little bit of that
show-off-ey indie kid aesthetics where it is much more important to put
yourself and your music on a different plane of existence than to write good
songs. The music, meanwhile, has been aggrandized, with 18 different session
musicians used in the recording process and Bill Evans on keyboards added to
the band's «stable» lineup. Nobody, least of all the band leaders themselves,
would dream of wasting all that pool of talent on an ordinary «gimmicky»
record, right? But then the question is: what
sort of record is this, then?
My best guess is that both here and on
subsequent trys, Beulah's ambition was to create their own version of SMiLE for the raging Nineties. The
whimsical attitude, where spiritual yearning and grand emotional tugs peep out
every now and then from superficially «fluffy» musical structures, they already
had, as well as an absurdist lyrical streak and an experimental mindset. All
that was left was to broaden their technical base — and by bringing in all
those extra players with their instruments, they were free to try out a more
symphonic approach. There'd be as much ambition as on a Radiohead record, only
it would be sunny, poppy, and a tad silly. And if they got too tired of
emulating the Beach Boys, they could always go back to emulating the Kinks.
In fact, melody-wise, the rhythmic skeletons of
these songs are consistently closer to the Kinks than to the baroque
fluctuations of Brian Wilson — but the overall atmosphere of romantic absurdity
is not something that Ray Davies, who'd always refused to get his head too high
up in the clouds, would have appreciated. And it lays open the possibilities
for a fruitful, exciting synthesis, which works so well, technically, that with
this album, Beulah ensured some serious popularity with seasoned fans of
everything Sixties-related (particularly those people who, you know, thought
that music died circa 1969, and that it took The Dukes of Stratosphear to
revive it).
Like most of these projects, though (and I am not excluding XTC, either), synthesizing
various strains of the Sixties in the Nineties still has that smarmy
post-modernist ring to it, and ends up being more of a quirky tribute than an
album showing off an autonomous and mind-blowing artistic vision. The problem
is always the same: Kurosky and Swan are so intent on making music «in the same
vein as» their idols that they forget to concentrate on the essentials of
proper pop songwriting. Something like ʽScore From Augustaʼ has a
cool retro sound to it, with a tasteful and energetic mix of live instruments
and vocal harmonies, but the whole mix seems to be galloping forward on one
note, and the most melodically inventive thing about the song is Swan's trumpet
part — which is really very simple, but catchy, but repetitive, but memorable,
but could be seriously annoying, should your brain suggest that this
mariachi-like style of trumpet playing is incompatible with Sixties retro-pop.
Then ʽSunday Under Glassʼ, all awash
in brass, flute, and string overdubs, comes along to drag you away into a
psychedelic paradise to the sounds of a nasal vocal melody which somehow
reminds me of Mike Love. It is a song that has everything... except for a
decent hook, that is. Too much of everything, in fact, quickly floating before
your eyes and ears like a multi-colored cloud whose various hues are too
dazzling for the senses to leave a lasting impression. Actually, it's one of
those songs where there seems to be too much and too little going on at the same time — too much in terms of
various overdubs, too little in terms of actual melodic dynamics.
That said, the band seems to fare significantly
better, «heartstrings-wise», when they try to evoke tender sentiments rather
than tickle our fancies with psycho colors. Already ʽCalm Go The Wild
Seasʼ has a properly baroque aura to it, one of sincere gallantry and
delicacy; but the album's emotional peak is reached on ʽSilverado
Daysʼ, whose mercilessly encoded lyrics seemingly invoke a nostalgic feel
("I was a kid and you were my hero..."), finely matched with the
piano ballad melody whose chords remind of McCartney but whose vocals remind
more of Lennon. In fact, I think the album gets better as it progresses,
reaching its humble peak of sorts on the final numbers: ʽWarmerʼ
shows signs of adorable whimsical tenderness, and ʽIf You Can Land A Man
On The Moon...ʼ is redeemed through its little baroque piano passages
which could just as well have been played on harpsichord for the sake of extra
authenticity.
As difficult as it is for me to «fall in love»
with an album like this — it makes too little sense for me to do that — I can
easily understand how others would, and also how such records prepared the ground
for the Beach Boys-inspired indie art-pop explosion of the 21st century in a
way that few other bands at the time were capable of. At any rate, the only
reason to give it a thumbs down would be active hatred for the band and their
«phony», «manneristic» attempts at recreating the form, but not the spirit of
pop music's greatest decade. But even if there is something stiff and artificial about the way they are doing it,
there is no need to doubt the purity and nobleness of the motive, or the
earnestness of the work effort that went into it. One thing that I lack most of
all, apart from the lack of hooks, is a more sharply pronounced sense of humor
— then I catch myself understanding that if you add hooks and humor to this
band, it will turn into Ween, and we already have ourselves a Ween. So just a
basic respectful thumbs up as it is would suffice.
THE COAST IS NEVER CLEAR (2001)
1) Hello Resolven; 2) A Good
Man Is Easy To Kill; 3) What Will You Do When Your Suntan Fades?; 4) Gene
Autry; 5) Silver Lining; 6) Popular Mechanics For Lovers; 7) Gravity's Bringing
Us Down; 8) Hey Brother; 9) I'll Be Your Lampshade; 10) Cruel Minor Change; 11)
Burned By The Sun; 12) Night Is The Day Turned Inside Out.
If this line of thinking applies to a band as
intellectually twisted as Beulah at all, then this album should probably count
as their masterpiece. You can almost feel their brain cells writhe, sizzle, and
burn up in flames, as they attempt to come up with «the perfect pop formula».
Instrumentation, production, hooks, moods, vocal modulations that reflect
careful study of what there was before with a pinch of trying to look into what
will come after — the Amazing Songwriting Laboratory of Dr. Kurosky at its
functional peak, colored smoke rising out of the chimneys and bizarre fragrance
smelled for miles around.
But the more they try, the more they baffle
listeners such as myself (and I have also encountered the same reaction among
quite a few music lovers on the Web). Every single song on The Coast sounds lovely, classy, and inspiring... while it's on. No sooner than the album
is over, nothing remains in my brain
— not a single goddamn note of it. And subsequent listens do not rectify the
situation. This is their best album, clearly and expressly filled with pop hooks
almost to the brim, but at the end of the day, they just skedaddle. Vamoose.
Melt in the air like a mirage. Every single song on here has more
«intelligence» and «depth» to it than ʽLucy In The Sky With Diamondsʼ,
but Lucy is still here with us, and Beulah are not. What the hell?..
Let us take one single song and scrutinize it,
to try and understand what's so wrong here. After the brief mood-setting intro,
the first complete, self-sufficient, and technically impeccable number is
ʽA Good Man Is Easy To Killʼ, whose lyrics deal with a car crash that
involved Kurosky's father and prompted him to explore the proverbial father/son
relationship in his art — so put this up as a plus (personal matter, adds to
the song's level of sincerity and emotional involvement, etc.). The song begins
with a loud, nasty fuzz riff, then expands with an agitated, Tull-style flute
part and vocal harmonies, then calms down and slows down to the «baroque» verse
section with strings, brass, and a pop vocal part straight out of the Beatles
textbook. Short sparkling piano bridge to the chorus — a humble plea of
"give up, give up your love / I promise it's not gonna kill ya" — and
then back to the fuzz riff / flute / vocal harmony trio again. Repeat a couple
of times, then cut to the fadeout where the brass and flutes get a little
crazier and start threatening to punch each other out before the fadeout washes
them all away.
Seems like a clever, sensible song, but something's just not fuckin' right about
it. Maybe it is the disparity between the vocal and instrumental parts — the
tenderness of the verse/chorus is in sharp conflict with the agitated nature of
the fuzz riff bits, and the two give a «phoney» feel of being spliced for no
particular reason whatsoever; there is no sense
in the song fluctuating between these two states, nor does the music hint at
any transition. Maybe it is the vocals — Kurosky cannot help it, of course, but
his singing voice, devoid of solid range or any sort of individual flavor, is
bland, and does not do justice to the potential of the vocal melody. Or maybe
it is the melody itself — take the fuzz riff, for instance, and try to compare
it with a great fuzz riff, like
ʽSatisfactionʼ, or, heck, ʽIn-A-Gadda-Da-Vidaʼ. Those ones
had a bite and menace to them, but Beulah's riff just sounds thick and dumb to
me. Same with the flute — if you are going to evoke Tull associations, why not learn
more than just two different phrases on the instrument?
It would be all too simple to say that the song
does not work properly just because Beulah are bad songwriters, but that would
be wrong. Kurosky is a pretty good songwriter — his mistake is in that he is
very far from a genius songwriter,
yet he makes music that, want it or not, intrudes directly on the turf of at
least half a dozen genius songwriters of the 1960s. Consequently, Beulah's
masterpiece is their completion of the «triumph of form over substance»
attitude — all the more ironic considering that the songs have their meanings, and reveal them to anybody who is willing to
look for them. But there are meanings and meanings, and The Coast Is Clear, being full of «literal» meanings (as in,
«ʽA Good Manʼ reflects the complex feelings that the author experienced
while his father was battling death...», etc.), has never once managed to hit
me in my soft emotional spots — from which I conclude that it has no «musical»
meaning, as such, as subjective as that harsh judgement may sound.
Still, due admiration must be expressed for all
the doggone hard work that went into making the record so diverse and
inventive. As long as I am writing this at the same time as the sweet sounds
flow out from the speakers, ʽGene Autryʼ is a dang fine pop-rocker
about the disparity between fantasy and reality (good hook — the pessimistic
conclusion of "everybody drowns, sad and lonely alright" laid out on
the listener in an optimistic manner); ʽPopular Mechanics For Loversʼ
bops along with a clever mix of joyfulness and melancholia (and the "just
because he loves you too / he would never take a bullet for you" bit might be the catchiest move on the
album); ʽI'll Be Your Lampshadeʼ, whose title is probably a subtle
reference to ʽI'll Be Your Mirrorʼ, mixes country and vaudeville in a
very odd fashion; and they save their most ambitious and anthemic brass riffs
for the album closer ʽNight Is The Day Turned Inside Outʼ to provide
a suitably loud, mock-heroic, ride-out-in-the-sunset conclusion. It's all good.
But now the album is over, and... how did it go
again? Damn, it's really irritating.
No wonder, after all, that these guys were never able to find a mass market, or
that retro-oriented art-pop in general stays so tightly glued to the indie
community. Maybe it's just that the likeliest candidate to write the best
Beatles song never written would probably be a person who's never listened to
the Beatles in the first place. Or maybe it's all much simpler, and they should
have found themselves a better vocalist. In any case, I give the album one of
those «intellectually-driven» thumbs up — for inventiveness, imagination, and
hard labor. For everything else, please refer yourself to this band's many
influences instead.
YOKO (2003)
1) A Man Like Me; 2) Landslide
Baby; 3) You're Only King Once; 4) My Side Of The City; 5) Hovering; 6) Me And
Jesus Don't Talk Anymore; 7) Fooled With The Wrong Guy; 8) Your Mother Loves
You Son; 9) Don't Forget To Breathe; 10) Wipe Those Prints And Run.
Allegedly, Beulah openly threatened that if
their next record did not reach gold status, they would split up — quite a
heavy threat for a year in which the top-selling acts were 50 Cent, Linkin
Park, Christina Aguilera, and Beyoncé, to name a few. But most
importantly, who in his right mind would name an album Yoko if he really wanted it to sell a significant amount of copies?
Above everything else, didn't they realize that most people probably thought
that «Beulah» was the name of the album,
and that «Yoko» was the artist? (Unless that was the plan all along, of course,
but in that case, why Yoko and not Lennon? Ain't no copyright on the word
«Lennon», either).
More importantly, there ain't one single reason
in the world why Yoko should have
sold more than The Coast Is Clear in
the first place. The previous record, at least, was Beulah's diverse and sunny
masterpiece. Yoko, in comparison, is
gloomier, bitter-er, full of depressed, melancholic, sometimes near-suicidal
messages, endless references to broken hearts, losing sides, stars refusing
to shine, and all sorts of diagnostic lights indicating that Mike Kurosky is,
like, totally becoming a cheerless whiner, and is, in fact, all set to take
his musical cues from Pink Floyd now rather than the Beatles and the Beach
Boys. And he wants this to sell? In 2003? No fuckin' way. Not even a little.
Besides, despite this «refreshing» change of
face, the general Beulah problem remains the same: many, if not most, of these
songs still suffer from a lack of
solid hooks and fail to convey the desired effect. Basically, the record is
gloomy, but not that gloomy. The
first lines of ʽDon't Forget To Breatheʼ are delivered with a «tender
sneer» that reminds of Roger Waters (listen to Mike bouncing those "land-MINES hide in your LINES..." nasal bombs off the wall), but there is no burning
fire, no genuine intensity to that delivery, and the entire song, with all of
its carefully thought out overlays, is still painfully «lite». Nice, but
underworked and unconvincing — and the same predictably applies to everything
else.
If you take Beulah as «intellectual musical
theater», some of the compositions are still interesting to follow while they
are on — something like ʽMe And Jesus Don't Talk Anymoreʼ can
probably serve as the basis for an entire Ph.D. thesis as you pick out all the
lyrical and musical references and try to understand how it's all tied
together. There's some Tin Pan Alley, some New Orleans, some Nashville here,
some odd mood swings from anger to optimism to some sort of nonchalant
acceptance of the fact that "you're going nowhere", and then there's
the song title that is not referred to at all in the lyrics. A bizarre
potboil.
But the very few songs that actually make a
lasting impression are those that, somehow, most likely, accidentally, capture
some nerve-tingling wisps — the world-weary banjo riff of ʽFooled With The
Wrong Guyʼ; the honestly catchy chorus of ʽYour Mother Loves You
Sonʼ (the "last night's a loaded gun..." bit); and, most
importantly, the epic finale of ʽWipe Those Prints And Runʼ, where
they give it their all and manage to generate some desperate stateliness in the
face of all odds. These bits and pieces seem to work all right. Yet that is
what they are — bits and pieces. Not a lot to feel good about when the first
five songs do not register in my mind at
all.
Given all these feelings and impressions, I
must admit that I do not lament over the passing of Beulah. «All form and no
substance» would be much too arrogant and unfounded a final judgement, but
while there can be no question about Beulah mastering and owning a certain kind
of «form», the «substance», most of the time, has eluded me — like so many of
these other nostalgizing bands, Beulah, to me, seem like they were so afraid
of being judged as «simplistic» that they hid their emotional side behind a
veil of metaphors, similes, understatements, deconstructions, and heavy
overdubs. A veil heavy enough to give you the right to doubt whether they did have an emotional side in the first
place. It is almost symbolic, then, that Yoko,
announcing the band's end, came out in September 2003 — approximately at the
same time that Arcade Fire were beginning the sessions for Funeral, an album next to which the entire «Elephant 6» scene would
look like a bunch of pathetic phonies. (Not really meant as an insult, of
course, just to stress how much I personally prefer «substance» over «form»;
and the lack of «substance» is one general characteristic that applies to any
of the Elephant 6 acts, Neutral Milk Hotel included).
THE CD VERSION OF THE FIRST TWO RECORDS (1992; 1994)
1) Double Dare Ya; 2) Liar; 3)
Carnival; 4) Suck My Left One; 5) Feels Blind; 6) Thurston Hearts The Who; 7)
White Boy; 8) This Is Not A Test; 9) Don't Need You; 10) Jigsaw Youth; 11)
Resist Psychic Death; 12) Rebel Girl; 13) Outta Me.
«Bikini Kill are activists, not musicians», as
a passionate, but somewhat ambiguously disposed female person tells us, among
other impressions of the band, in the spoken overdub on ʽThurston Hearts
The Whoʼ, and, frankly speaking, I was not even sure whether it was worth
tackling this band in the first place — because, well, it is pretty hard to
deny that Kathleen Hanna and her band of Amazon warriors use music primarily,
if not exclusively, as a «sociopolitical tool», trying as hard as possible not
to stoop to thinking about it as a value in itself. But then, what the heck?
They only have had a few albums out, and some of the songs are fun, and when
you deal with punk music, it takes a real brain surgeon to understand where
«music» ends and «activism» begins. And besides, in my collection they are
probably the closest thing to Pussy Riot, a «band» that has even less musical
substance (at least Bikini Kill have a vague understanding of how to play their
instruments) but for which I have actually gotten review requests — so, since I
am never ever going to review Pussy Riot, why not say a few words on Bikini
Kill instead?
So, in a nutshell: Bikini Kill are the
spearheaders of the «Riot Grrrl» movement (that's three r's, right? don't forget to check your spelling every time),
an aggressive (thankfully, non-lethal so far) punk-feminist current in music
and performance art which many people have heard of, but few can identify by
any names of its representatives — in fact, some of the less politically
minded, but more commercially popular or critically applauded bands (such as
Hole or Babes In Toyland) have also been dubbed «Riot Grrrl» by the
unsuspecting, deeply confused masses. Well, finally, here are Bikini Kill, and
they are the real thing.
Describing the band's sound is not particularly
difficult, since they never worked hard at putting any unique stamp on it. A
standard 4-piece band with a rhythm section, one guitar player, and one
vocalist. The guitar player (Billy Karren) is surprisingly male (it is not
known if the other girls ever referred to him as «our bitch») and may have been
hired as a political gesture (to show that «radical feminism» does not imply
cessation of interaction with the other sex), or, more likely, because, deep
down in their hearts, they all secretly admit that girls are pussies and that
no girl can ever play a real mean PUNK RAWK guitar. (There was no Avril Lavigne
back in those days, you understand). Anyway, it's not as if Billy himself were
all that great — he has mastered the Ramones and the Dead Kennedys bag of
guitar tricks all right, but there is really nothing here, musically, that you
wouldn't find on a bunch of classic punk and hardcore punk records from the
previous decade and a half.
The vocalist is a whole other thing, but
enjoying her vocals is certainly an acquired taste if there ever was one —
Kathleen Hanna has one of those battle cries you'd expect to hear from a particularly
nasty old harpy: sharp, high-pitched, nasal, nails-on-chalkboard type that rips
the living flesh right out of your ears. Her real voice, as you hear it in
interviews, is kind of grating, too, but she intentionally makes it sound even
nastier on record, so that it resonates with extreme «bratty» nastiness. Not a
bawl or a banshee wail or a masculine epic-warrior thing, just this really ugly
«nyah-nyah-nyah» soundwave to which you have to get yourself attuned real
quick, or you will be climbing up the wall in no time. But Hanna's voice is the essence of Bikini Kill — in a
way, that voice is the message, not
to mention that you will most likely not be able to get the verbal message
anyway, not without a lyrics sheet.
The album in question, true to the name, puts
together some of the first samples of Bikini Kill's recorded output — the EP Bikini Kill and the first side of a
split LP that they shared with Huggy Bear (a «para-riot-grrrl» band from the UK),
both originally released in 1992. The sound, as is easy to guess, is
delightfully / disgustingly lo-fi, with one exception: ʽRebel Girlʼ,
the loudest, «cleanest», and arguably best-known Bikini Kill song of all time,
not just because it is so easily identifiable as an anthem, but also because it
is their catchiest and poppiest, where their female-Neanderthal approach takes
a little grooming and the whole thing sounds like a tribute to The Troggs. As
crude as the lyrics are ("they say she's a dyke, but I know she is my best
friend" —what's that «but» supposed to mean???), the tune is a fun one,
and at least the guitars are raw enough to count it as «the real thing». It may
be silly-punk, but it ain't faux-punk.
As for everything else, well, if you are big on
recycled, but honest, punk aesthetics, you might like most of this — Billy has
a good grip on that old legacy, pilfering from punk greats for all they're
worth on tracks like ʽLiarʼ and ʽResist Psychic Deathʼ, but
much of the time he's just providing an information-free wall of chainsaw buzz
(ʽSuck My Left Oneʼ, ʽDon't Need Youʼ), which leaves us
with little to do other than concentrate on Hanna and her little fits of
girl-power rage. Sometimes she really goes over the top ("eat meat, hate
blacks, beat your fuckin' wife — it's all connected" — not a highly
scientific viewpoint, if you ask me), but at least the sincerity of her actions
cannot be denied, even if the crudeness and banality of her denouncements can
be a turnoff (ʽWhite Boyʼ — a point-blank range hit at sexism that,
for some reason, also implicates the race issue, but how is raping a «slut
rocker bitch walking down the street» an offense particularly typical of a
«white boy»? Isn't that confusing the issues a little? Then again, there has rarely
been a band on Earth more confused than Bikini Kill. Maybe they are musicians after all).
A few of the tracks are just sonic hooliganry
with a sneer, such as ʽThurston Hearts The Whoʼ, where the already
mentioned spoken overdub is superimposed over a noisy, mock-avantgarde track —
the primary message here being: "if you think Sonic Youth is cool and you
think that they think that you're not that cool, does that mean everything to
you?" Ridiculing Sonic Youth is a respectable position, the problem being
that it's not as if they were offering a hell of a lot in exchange. But at
least it is good to know that aggressive feminism is not the only thing that Hanna and her sisters
are interested in.
If only at least a couple more songs here were
like ʽRebel Girlʼ, I might even have gone ahead with a thumbs up. As
it is, the compilation is an important cultural artefact, and an acknowledged
influence on «rebel girls» around the world, but too much of it is boring, and
too much of it is grating on the nerves, to call it a consistently «fun»
listening experience. If you find yourself in need of a spiritual awakening, be
their guest. If, however, you are not one of those «white boys» casually
referring to «slut rocker bitches» in your everyday life, you might want to
listen to something more musically oriented instead.
PUSSY WHIPPED (1993)
1) Blood One; 2) Alien She; 3)
Magnet; 4) Speed Heart; 5) Lil Red; 6) Tell Me So; 7) Sugar; 8) Star Bellied
Boy; 9) Hamster Baby; 10) Rebel Girl; 11) Star Fish; 12) For Tammy Rae.
Since this is the band's first, loudest, and
most straightforward full-fledged LP, it has become the classic point of first reference for Bikini Kill — but it is
not easy to say something about it that has not already been said in the
context of discussing the first EPs. In fact, Pussy Whipped plays off the idea that nobody has probably heard
those EPs, because they go to the trouble of re-recording ʽRebel
Girlʼ — in an inferior version, I might add, with noticeably lower
fidelity and with a surprisingly tamer guitar tone from Billy.
Of course, the band in general is anything but
tame: Hanna's screeching has only got wilder, to the extent that it is nigh
impossible to decipher the sound waves battering against the poor microphone.
Maybe it's all for the better — it is hard not to cringe at all the «radical
feminist» dribble that is delivered non-stop without the slightest hint of
humor or irony ("your alphabet is spilled with my blood", "all
you do is destroy", etc.). Then again, I would be lying if I said that
every song on here qualifies as a straightforwardly dumb anthem; and I would
also be lying if I said that songs like ʽStar Bellied Boyʼ or
ʽSugarʼ, decrying brutal sexist attitudes of guys who treat girls
like fuckmeat, had nothing to do with reality — for justice' sake, it would
constitute a good balance to have ʽStar Bellied Boyʼ sitting next to,
say, the Rolling Stones' ʽStupid Girlʼ as a call-and-answer thing on
ridiculing stereotypes.
Anyway, the real
bad news is that the music is still being treated like a bitch. All the riffs
have been pilfered, as usual, from the band's favorite recordings by the
Troggs, the Ramones, and the Sex Pistols, so that the record rides exclusively
on attitude — and the attitude never varies from song to song, depending only
on whether Hanna plays it completely straight or gets a little theatrical (on
ʽSugarʼ, she spends some time mocking and parodying the «pornstar
approach» towards guys, before cutting the crap and asking it straight —
"why can't I ever get my sugar?"; right next to it, ʽStar
Bellied Boyʼ culminates in a frantic "I can't, I can't, I can't, I
can't cum!" that really shows
all that dumbass guy how much of a pathetic «hero» he really is).
To those listeners who think that only the
spirit matters, these forty minutes may seem like a single, super-concentrated
energy punch, a nuclear warhead of an album that takes the feminist revolution
in art to a whole new level. Myself, I don't see the principal progress over
Patti Smith, who was a better poet, had a more professional musical backing, occasionally
authored catchy songs, and was at least as ballsy as Hanna. But yeah, Bikini
Kill make more noise, and all their riffs are thick, crunchy, and distorted to
the max.
Oh, I forgot: the last song here breaks the
trend — it is nothing less than a ballad,
dedicated to Tammy Rae Carland, a lesbian artist friend of theirs who also
designed the album cover. Its compositional genius could probably be matched
by a five-year old Paul McCartney, its catchiness factor drops well below zero,
but the artistic statement of finishing this hyper-aggressive package with a
sweet-but-not-too-sentimental confession of love (for that one person who might probably be able to finally make
Kathleen cum!) cannot be beat.
As a final disclaimer, I have to say, of
course, that I only feel somewhat qualified to dismiss Pussy Whipped as a «musical» non-entity — as to what concerns its
power and authenticity as a social performance act, well, I guess that guys
have about as much business discussing this stuff as propagating their views on
abortion. In a way, it might be so that Hanna and her friends are simply doing
here the kind of thing that should have been done a long time ago — that, as a
girl band, they are simply «ideologically catching up» with the hardcore punk
aesthetics. It is true that, even if musically Bikini Kill are not doing
anything in 1993 that could not have already been done in 1983, or even in
1977-79, for that matter, there was no
band quite like Bikini Kill (music, lyrics, image combined) circa 1977-79 or
1983, and that should get you a-thinkin'. Maybe if all these songs had been
written in 1977, I would not be tempted to snicker at them so much.
Nevertheless, I am here primarily to opinionate
on the music, not on the ideology, and from that point of view, if you come
here searching for music, I have no right to recommend Pussy Whipped, an album whose chief target audience, so I'd think,
would consist of sexually oppressed mid-to-low-class young females in need of a
psychological crash course on how to defend yourself (nothing to laugh about,
actually — far be it from me to deny the grave seriousness of this issue!). So
remember this, ladies: next time you find yourself sexually harassed by your
male chauvinist pig employer / colleague / high school «admirer», just put up
ʽBlood Oneʼ or ʽStar Bellied Boyʼ as your ringtone, and
watch his allegedly mighty tool wither on the spot.
REJECT ALL AMERICAN (1996)
1) Statement Of Vindication;
2) Capri Pants; 3) Jet Ski; 4) Distinct Complicity; 5) False Start; 6) R.I.P.;
7) No Backrub; 8) Bloody Ice Cream; 9) For Only; 10) Tony Randall; 11) Reject
All American; 12) Finale.
This is the first Bikini Kill album for which
the band finally decided to try writing and performing some music, as opposed to «distortion-enhanced
social activity» — and, incidentally, the last one as well, because the effort
proved to be too much for the band, and it imploded from internal conflict.
Also, most people hated the album, because nobody wanted Bikini Kill to try to
grow and mature — Pussy Whipped had
listeners falling on their knees and surrendering to the sheer wrath of the
«songs», but Reject All American had
ballads. BALLADS! How are you
supposed to make a bikini kill with a frickin' ballad?
Logically, I suppose that we should be going
along with critical opinion. Bikini Kill are not musicians, but activists. They
cannot write songs, they cannot (or will not) play, they don't know how to
sing, and all they got going for them is their animal passion and feminist
ideals. So if they start cutting down on the animal passion without
significantly compensating on other levels, who needs them? Better a doggone
awful band that can't play at all than a boring mediocre band that pretends to
be playing well.
But wait, not so fast. First of all, it is not
really true that Hanna and her gang got «softened up» on this record. The very
fact that their guitarist is playing a few more notes than usual, and that the
barking and nagging is occasionally shaping up in the form of a vocal melody
does not necessarily mean that they
lost anything in terms of energy. What may have been really disappointing to some of the fans is that lyrically, Reject All American transcends the
level of primitive, gut-level «riot grrrrl» slogans — in fact, there is not one
single direct reference here to the evils of sexual objectification, although many of the songs deal with the
evils of objectification as such, period, and sometimes in almost surprisingly
smart ways.
The title track, even if it is superficially
poppier and even «girlier» than ʽRebel Girlʼ, is arguably Bikini
Kill's finest two and a half minutes — Hanna concocts a well-modulated mantra
of «social activity clichés» ("regimented, designated, mass
acceptance, overrated, lip synch, teen anthem, lip synch, obligation...")
that her co-workers are happy to throw on the bonfire ("reject! all
american! reject! all american!") with catchy glee and generic, but
tasteful pop-punk riffage. Primal chaos, it is true, has been replaced by a
tighter, better controlled, more disciplined (and clearer articulated, might I
add) way of presenting the message — but why not, if Billy Karren is capable of playing in the style of,
say, Lenny Kaye?
None of the other songs try so hard to imprint
themselves in the listener's mind, but the overall sound — provided you have
finally gotten used to Hanna's nasal wail — is still an improvement over Pussy Whipped. There is a certain
immediacy and minimalism to the songs that was previously lacking: most of the
rockers start and finish abruptly, without any «moody» introductions (on Pussy Whipped, about half of the songs
had some sort of amateurish bass intro to them), and, surprisingly, at least
three or four finish abruptly twice —
for some reason, the band had developed a consistent taste for false endings,
which creates the illusion that there are far more songs here than there really
are (a nod to Wire's Pink Flag?).
The two «ballads», sung by Kathi and Tobi
rather than Hanna, are forgettable but not particularly corny — they may have
been written with somebody like Blondie in mind, with a mix of tenderness and
inner strength that is certainly incompatible with the idea of a «girlie
sellout», and, after all, there is nothing wrong about showing a little
tenderness, is there? I even think that the ironically titled ʽFalse
Startʼ has all the makings of a good song — pretty vocal melody and cute
combination of gruff electric riffage with tinkling chimes. Just lacks that
special something to put it over the top, but on the whole, it is their
ʽSunday Morningʼ and ʽDreamingʼ all rolled in one, even if
the result is ultimately quite amateurish.
In any case, my logic is simple: Reject All American is the most
«musical» album these girls ever made, and ideologically, it does not betray
their agenda, but extends and deepens it. With a few years more work, they
might very well have matured into decent songwriters and competent players —
sadly, the male chauvinist Olympic gods were all against this, and the band
split up less than two years after they decided to reject all American (then
again, logically, Bikini Kill is also very much American, so they had no choice
but to reject themselves). Which leaves me with no choice but to award this
album a very low thumbs up — for (a) not being irritating, and (b) honoring the
«growth curve» and showing promise for the future. So it never came to pass,
but really, what matters is the dynamics of the action, not the result.
THE SINGLES (1998)
1) New Radio; 2) Rebel Girl;
3) In Accordance To Natural Law; 4) Strawberry Julius; 5) Anti-Pleasure
Dissertation; 6) Rah! Rah! Replica; 7) I Like Fucking; 8) I Hate Danger; 9)
Demirep.
For the sake of extra accuracy, I suppose this
very short compilation, consisting of several A- and B-sides, as well as a
four-song EP from 1995, deserves a brief mention. ʽRebel Girlʼ has
already been discussed several times above, and without that song the entire
compilation is around 17 minutes long — nevertheless, it still contains songs
that are absolutely essential for any fan of the band.
In a way, ʽNew Radioʼ, the original
A-side of ʽRebel Girlʼ, is much more ferocious and disturbing — not
only does it feature the scariest Kathleen Hanna screeching on record (she
almost literally spews her lungs out in little pieces), but its lyrics,
suggesting something uncomfortable, unspeakable, and almost certainly illegal,
are a very far cry from the anthemic swagger of ʽRebel Girlʼ that
sounds dang near comical in comparison.
The EP Anti-Pleasure
Dissertation, released in 1995, already shows the beginning of the transition
to the «softer» sounds of Reject All
American — the title track has certain melodic traces both in the guitar
playing and in the singing, although the ideology remains the same (as usual,
the song is directed against the sterotypical macho boyfriend looking for
sexual conquests — "did you win that race, did you score that
point?.."). But even sad stories like that do not prevent Hanna from
proclaiming that ʽI Like Fuckingʼ — "I believe in the radical
possibilities of pleasure, babe!", she states at the end of the song (if
you can call it a song, that is).
Musically, the best song is probably ʽI
Hate Dangerʼ; its melody sounds like a slightly de-syncopated variation
on AC/DC's ʽDirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheapʼ, but that particular
dangerous, growling sound suits Bikini Kill to a tee — in a different world, I
could easily see them as the female equivalent of AC/DC, counterattacking that
band's aggressive machismo with their equally fiery brand of aggressive
feminism (now if only they learned how to play those instruments...). On the
other hand, their recording of the ʽMary Macʼ clapping game at the
beginning of ʽDemiRepʼ is a rather silly novelty whose symbolism I am
not able to decode, probably because there isn't any, they just felt like
letting out ther inner child for a while.
To conclude these reviews, I just want to state
that, although I am not and will never be a big fan of Bikini Kill, I do think
that, had they managed to stay together, there were some actual chances of
their gradual evolution into a band that might be taken seriously even outside
of ideologically charged discussions. Fire and passion in art always deserve
respect, regardless of whether they are used to express radical social ideology
or not, and all they needed to learn was how to control and direct that fire —
something that they had almost mastered by the time of ʽI Hate Dangerʼ
and Reject All American. But then,
of course, it became clear that the «Bikini Kill» brand was all about ideology
first and musical impression second, so that any musical growth was a direct
mortal threat to the band's existence. Too bad about that. But you can always
check out Hanna in Le Tigre, her subsequent and much more «musical» project in
the «electroclash» genre, rather naturally evolved from Bikini Kill and
certainly easier on the ears of the average music lover — the wilder they
start, the softer they get, eventually.
BJÖRK (1977)
1) Arabadrengurinn;
2) Búkolla; 3) Alta Mira; 4) Jóhannes Kjarval; 5) Fúsi Hreindýr;
6) Himnaför; 7) Óliver; 8)
Álfur Út Úr Hól; 9) Músastiginn; 10)
Bænin.
12-year old Björk
Guðmundsdóttir is calmly, but warily gazing at us from the album
cover, wrapped up in silks and surrounded by a background that seems to be
coming straight out of somebody's not-too-imaginative visual idea of 1001 Nights. As you turn on the music,
the quiet sounds of crickets and night birds are soon joined by mysterious
sitars and sarods, almost like at the beginning of George Harrison's ʽLove
You Toʼ. «Oh that sweet enchantress Björk», you think to yourself,
«such an idealistic visionary already at such a tender age... sure this is
manneristic and derivative, but to dabble in Indian and Near Eastern influences
while most of her schoolmates were probably up to their necks in the Osmonds or
ABBA...» And then it actually begins.
Not a lot of people have even heard of this album, let alone heard the actual
music (for obvious reasons, it has never been officially released on CD), and
they have not missed much. It was recorded almost by accident: some people at
a local Icelandic record label heard the girl singing Tina Charles' ʽI
Love To Loveʼ on the radio and offered her a contract for a children's
album. With the aid of her stepfather and a bunch of local musicians, they
scrambled together a bunch of pop songs, translated them into Icelandic, so
that even local kids who didn't excel
at their English lessons could get into the groove, and put them out on a
market targeted at... honestly, I have no
idea who the people in that market are, and I would probably be afraid and
embarrassed to socialize with any of them, anyway.
Nevertheless, all great artists eventually make
people interested in checking out their history, and even if it is completely
worthless on its own, Björk
offers some educational value. The key aspect is the singing, of course. As
these ten songs show, Björk is a perfect natural: her range and tone here
are already as strong as on her «mature» albums (they didn't offer her that
contract just for cuteness' sake, after all), and all that is missing is the
result of training — the punk attitude had not caught up with the girl yet, nor
did the avantgarde jazz stylistics, so she is simply copying the note patterns
of her favorite singers and sifting them through her childish, wildish, not particularly
well-disciplined soprano. Subtlety does not exist as of yet, as you can most
clearly see in her take on ʽThe Fool On The Hillʼ (ʽÁlfur
Út Úr Hólʼ), done technically well, but «oversung»:
the girl simply has a bigger voice than she can properly handle at the moment,
and the cover suffers from superfluous screechiness.
Musically, the
arrangements are all over the place, but with a permanent emphasis on cuteness:
«kiddie disco», «kiddie ska», «kiddie jazz-pop», «kiddie bossa nova», etc. The
lyrics are not always direct translations: for instance,
ʽBúkollaʼ, despite being based on Stevie Wonder's ʽYour
Kiss Is Sweetʼ, has been turned into an ode to... a magic cow ("I took a hair from your tail...." and,
apparently, mixed it with a good dose of Icelandic volcanic mushrooms). The
vocal deliveries generally have that annoying «giddy-up» drive to them which
is a typical attribute of most «children's albums» — which makes it all the
more amazing and exciting that, in a way, Björk has managed to retain it
in her «mature» years.
In fact, there is no
way that we could ever assess Björk the same way as the average
Icelandic buyer could assess it back in 1977 — for us, hearing her lively
«get-up-and-jump» notes on ʽAlta Miraʼ or ʽOliverʼ will
always trigger associations with, at the very least, the Björk of
ʽThere's More To Life Than Thisʼ or ʽIt's Oh So Quietʼ or
any of those hell-raising romps of the early part of her adult career. Even
though, other than the voice itself, the only thing that her adult career has
in common with this tripe is diversity and unpredictability.
Speaking of which,
the album also has two instrumental compositions, one of which (ʽJohannes
Kjarvalʼ), dedicated to an Icelandic painter, is a simple, but effective
flute-led folk ditty with a fast waltz bridge, with Björk herself playing
the flute — deserving, I would imagine, an admiring pat on the head from Ray
Thomas, whose Moody Blues style of playing could easily serve as a source of
inspiration (probably not, but then there is no reason why Björk should
not have had access to classic Moody Blues records); the second one,
ʽMúsastiginnʼ, is also dominated by the flute but a little bit
more «martial» and Brit-poppy. Both unquestionably show the beginnings of a
serious composing talent, although their chief virtue is that of providing
brief respites from the girlscout vocal model.
Ultimately, the best
thing that can probably be said about the album is that, after it actually
managed to sell some copies in Iceland, Björk found the inner strength to
refuse the proposal to record a second one in the same vein — instead, she used
the money to get herself a piano and begin to study on a more serious level.
Although it does make one wonder how the girl would have fared if they'd
managed to mold her into an early Icelandic role model for Britney Spears...
GLING-GLÓ (1990)
1) Gling Gló; 2) Luktar-Gvendur; 3) Kata Rokkar;
4) Pabbi Minn; 5) Brestir Og Brak; 6) Ástartröfrar; 7) Bella Símamær;
8) Litli Tónlistarmaðurinn; 9) Það Sést Ekki Sætari
Mey; 10) Bílavísur; 11) Tondeleyo; 12) Ég Veit Ei Hvað
Skal Segja; 13) Í Dansi Með Þér; 14) Börnin Við
Tjörnina; 15) Ruby Baby; 16) I Can't Help Loving That Man.
Although this album is usually regarded as a
historic oddity, it deserves more than just a passing mention — and stimulates
some curious thoughts, too. It was recorded by Björk somewhat «en passant», in the later stage of her
serving as a member of The Sugarcubes, together with a local Icelandic jazz
combo, Tríó Guðmundar Ingólfssonar, and is technically
defined as a collaboration, but, naturally, 99.9% of the population were only
aware of this album's existence in retrospect. I mean, as solid as the local
Icelandic jazz scene might be, it is not highly likely that an international
audience might develop a strong taste for it. But Björk singing jazz? Now that actually sounds like a promising
idea.
And indeed, this «historical curio» is a
wonderful listen in its own way. Traditional jazz vocalizing had always been
a big influence on Björk's style (although not nearly as direct as «avantgarde»
vocalizing à la Tim Buckley),
so it is quite refreshing to hear some of the oldies getting the quintessential
«Björk treatment». All the material is actually being sung in Icelandic
(except for two bonus tracks, taken from the rehearsal sessions and tacked on
to the end), but even so, most of it is either translated from English, or is
presented as «original» compositions that really just sound like variations on
ye olde pre-war or early post-war material.
My simple and unoriginal stance on the «Great
American Songbook» and its offshoots has always been that it does not matter as
much whether the «song» is great in and out of itself (written by the same
professional gang of songwriters, the sheet music tends to be of generally
comparable quality); what matters is who sings the stuff — Billie Holiday or
Barbra Streisand, that kind of thing. Now if you know Björk's classic material,
you can make a pretty good guess that there is going to be a lot of breathiness, screeching, roaring,
dissonant modulation, and, most importantly, high-pitched «childish»
intonations. And in the context of a traditional vocal jazz setting, it all
makes the material come alive like never before. «Vocal jazz» is being
transformed into «vocal punk-jazz» before your very eyes.
The musicianship of the trio I am not prepared
to judge. The pianist, whose name also labelled the entire combo, seems quite
fluent and sensitive (eerily, he seems to have died just one year after the
album's release), and the rhythm section swings just like the doctor ordered,
but they all seem quite conservative in approach — which is good, because it
allows us to fully focus on the contrast between predictable arrangements and
Björk's thoroughly unorthodox behavior. There is no jamming whatsoever — a
few solos here and there, but none of that usual attitude where the singer is
being viewed as just one more lead instrument, and gets the same amount of time
as the saxophone, or the piano, or even the bass: all the songs are relatively
brief, and Björk is the shining star on each and every one of them.
Searching for individual highlights is futile.
More likely, some people will be more attracted to the slow, sensual ballads,
some will fall for the kiddie Christmasy stuff like the title track; and the
majority will hold on to the fast, swingin' tracks on which the little lady
likes to practice her lionine roar. A couple of the songs may be too cute (like the final Icelandic
number, driven by harmonica and shaped like a nursery rhyme for very small children), but that is not a
big problem in the light of how vivacious, brimming with positive energy,
optimism, and tasty traces of iconoclasm this whole thing is. In a way, I
almost feel sad that Björk did not release something like this after achieving her «diva» status — a
lightweight, unabashedly fun record like this would be a perfectly placed
«breather» in between some of her heavier outings (imagine following Homogenic, let alone Medulla, up with such a hooliganish
Irving Berlin tribute!). But certainly good or bad timing will never affect the
ultimate thumbs
up rating.
DEBUT (1993)
1) Human Behaviour; 2) Crying; 3) Venus As A Boy; 4)
There's More To Life Than This; 5) Like Someone In Love; 6) Big Time
Sensuality; 7) One Day; 8) Aeroplane; 9) Come To Me; 10) Violently Happy; 11)
The Anchor Song; 12*) Play Dead.
"If you ever get close to a human / And
human behaviour / Be ready to get confused". These lines open the properly
certified solo career of Björk, honorable daughter of Guðmund, and
therein pretty much lies the key to understanding her secret. You see, she may
formally present herself to us as the daughter of Guðmund all right, all
flesh and blood, but no true human would write lyrics like that — or make that
kind of music, or engage in that kind of vocalizing. Debut establishes her very firmly as an ambassador from a distant
planet, sent here as either a part of a spy network or a member of an
undercover cultural exchange program.
And it is almost hilarious (or creepy) how many
different arguments in support of that theory one can find — almost as many, in
fact, as it takes to convincingly prove that Paul is dead or that Klaatu were the Beatles, after all. I am not
going to bother with specificities, but sometimes it feels as if the sole
nature of Debut was educational: the
little alien from far away is getting busy, learning and practicing the musical
fashions of the early 1990s and adapting them to her (his? its? what do we know
of alien gender, anyway?) own little alien musical techniques — or vice versa.
And so, while on one hand, "there's definitely no logic to human
behavior", from our side, we
might not see any apparent logic to the creative decisions of the little alien.
Why, for instance, does ʽHuman
Behaviourʼ, which begins in romantically wild African jungle style
(something that the late Les Baxter might have approved), see fit to conclude
with a jarring, distorted, «evil» electronic solo that is closer to an
«industrial» style in nature, something more fit for a Nine Inch Nails or a
Ministry? Is it to reinforce one's idea of human behaviour as leading to
inescapable demonstrations of evil in the end? Or is it simply a random
demonstration of the little alien's preferences for matinee music? It's an odd
combination in any case, but it also works, so that the song mixes elements of
playfulness and creepiness in a completely unique manner.
A short time after that, ʽVenus As A
Boyʼ blows up to smithereens our conventional understanding of «sexuality
in music» — not that this would look like a particularly great song to make
(non-alien) love to: the rhythmic base is suitable, as are the erotic lyrics
(sometimes bordering on trashy romance novel clichés — "he's
exploring the taste of her arousal"? ooh, gross!), but Björk's
untamed passion for dissonant screaming is liable to throwing you off base at
any time, so it is probably more prudent to adopt a rational approach and
filter the unconventional beauty of the song, together with its half-Eastern,
half-Western orchestration, through the mind as... well, as sort of an
alternative to conventional beauty. It is
a song of love and sex, and it is a song
of real passion, not just a show of unusual technique, but one has to get used
to that.
If you are looking for some tenderness and
sentimentality from the little alien, check out ʽCome To Meʼ, which
is how the aliens console and caress their loved ones while at the same time
zipping through lonely space, busy string parts and minimalistic lonesome
keyboard chords passing by. Or, every once in a while, the little alien might
bypass rhythm completely and offer its personal interpretation of a vocal jazz
oldie: I'm certain that Bing Crosby would have appreciated this take on
ʽLike Someone In Loveʼ — eventually — but he'd have to spend some
time first coming to terms with this child-like, «stumbling» delivery, ever so
discordant with the conventionally gorgeous harp playing from jazz
professional Corky Hale.
But on the whole, for the moment the little
alien is still content enough to lose itself in the happy dance rhythms of the
newly emerged European house / trip hop scene, all the rage in London where Björk
had relocated to catch up with the latest and trendiest in musical fashion. Mind
you, by no means does she enslave
herself to this fashion — in fact, ʽThere's More To Life Than Thisʼ,
part of which was allegedly recorded in the toilet (!) of a trendy night club,
very clearly makes fun of the nightclubbing lifestyle: the wilder the
hilariously lo-fi four-on-the-floor beat, the more random are the lady's
requests to her reluctant partner to "sneak out of this party",
because "we could go down to the harbour" and "see the sun come
up", yeah right. (A question for the street savants out there: why in the
world does she pronounce ghetto blaster
as jetto blaster? That h does not just stand there for nothing,
now does it?).
But elsewhere — ʽCryingʼ,
ʽViolently Happyʼ, etc. — the dance beats are taken more seriously,
and sometimes they are accompanying dark electronic grooves (ʽViolently
Happyʼ) that could have easily come out of the Aphex Twin pocketbook. Are
they necessary? Don't they make Debut
a bit too derivative and chained to its epoch and surroundings? I'm pretty sure
that is what Björk meant herself when she would later reject Debut from the top list of her
favorites. It may seem, indeed, that
she is relying a bit too much on the musical opinions of others, and not
relying fully on her own inner voice. Then again, this is one of those solid
compromises between creativity, accessibility, and commercialism that allows
for the production of masterpieces without getting carried too far away — in
fact, it is still a toss-up for me between Debut
and Post as my personal favorite
Björk LP. Post would probably
win due to higher highs — but there is not a single bad track on Debut, either: each song has something
to say, vocally and musically, and
we'd be here all day if I started focusing on everything individually.
Since we do not want to be here all day, I'll
just say this: Debut is a perfect
compromise between «cosmic alien logic» and the human mind, and the perfect way
to get into Björk if you are not one of those pier divers into ice water.
(If you are, just skip all this
commercial crap and head straight for Medulla).
And while I cannot say that I always easily «connect» with her emotionally (not
having any alien blood and all), this particular thumbs up comes straight from the
heart, because the songs, meticulously thought out and calculated as they are,
still strive to convey understandable, organic feelings, rather than just some
sort of abstract pantheistic drive, the first signs of which would not really
appear until Homogenic. In other
words, she is not only using her head, but also keeping it, which is a good thing to do when you are blessed with
one of the most unusual vocal techniques in the world.
POST (1995)
1) Army Of Me; 2) Hyper-Ballad; 3) The Modern Things;
4) It's Oh So Quiet; 5) Enjoy; 6) You've Been Flirting Again; 7) Isobel; 8)
Possibly Maybe; 9) I Miss You; 10) Cover Me; 11) Headphones.
Listening to ʽArmy Of Meʼ, I was once
again reminded why I generally feel cold about most instrumental electronic
music, but have nothing in general against the use of electronics in an «art
pop» song, context, among other things. Electronic melodies / loops / samples
on their own have this «inorganic» feel; they can paint a vivid, realistic
picture (usually having something to do with robots, astral space, or
nanotechnologies), but they cannot serve as a proper reflection of the human
soul (when was the last time you actually cried
to something by Aphex Twin?). However, when electronic elements are combined with human soul elements, the
result can be staggeringly great — like a confrontation between the organic and
the inorganic, where it does not even matter who wins (based on the outcome,
the piece can qualify as comedy or tragedy).
ʽArmy Of Meʼ samples John Bonham (the
drum part from ʽWhen The Levee Breaksʼ), throws in an almost
industrial bassline, and adds swooshing synth effects — but this cold, heavy,
sensually unpleasant atmosphere would just be atmosphere if not for the vocals,
which seem to be fighting against the onslaught. The question is — is the music
supportive of the threatening
"and if you complain once more, you'll meet an army of me" chorus, or
is the chorus fighting the music? I like to fondle the latter choice — that the
brave little Björk is arrogantly bluffing against unsurmountable odds,
singing as she is against that
bassline than in tune with it. The electronic arrangement can then be regarded
as a battleground: with the aid of Nellee Hooper, Björk meticulously puts
up these impressive, but lifeless paysages, and then hops across from one end
of the frame to another, not to «breathe life into them», but to grace them
with her own life, so to say. This song, as well as several others on this
album, represents one of the finest syntheses of electronic music and «living
spirit» I've ever heard.
If I had to choose just one album to represent
«the true Björk», Post would be
it. It is all over the place, it is in constant search of itself, it is
relatively accessible, and, most importantly, it does not show an artist losing
her head over the unexpected immensity of her talent. In fact, no better description
can there be of the big difference between Post
and Homogenic than simply a request
to compare the album covers. On Post,
you see a human exploring a psychedelic world. On Homogenic, you see a psychedelic pseudo-human exploring one of its
artificial creations (a faux-Japanese environment). Both albums are fabulous,
but when it comes to really loving my Björk, I prefer a human avatar, not
a distant idol.
For one thing, that human avatar gets us such
delights as ʽIt's Oh So Quietʼ (a cover of an old Horst Winter tune,
best known for the 1951 Betty Hutton version) — goofy theatrical jazz with an
immense joy-punch packed in; or the quiet chamber music piece ʽYou've Been
Flirting Againʼ, which shows how a cello can be a girl's best friend in a
psychologically difficult situation; or ʽPossibly Maybeʼ, a song that
I'm sure Billie Holiday would love to have covered, given the right
circumstances — such frail, elegant melancholy, perfectly integrated with the
icy electronic keyboards. They are all weird, eccentric compositions, but they
are also all deeply human and very easy to relate to, though not all at once
(due to the great mood diversity).
Even when she does drift off into fantasy land, like on the «mythological»
ʽIsobelʼ, a portrait of a mysterious being stuck somewhere between
Sleeping Beauty and Shelob, the required effect is achieved with a catchy
chorus, a lush orchestral arrangement, and vocal harmonies with just a tiny
trace of dissonance. Plus, there is always this «childish» approach, so that
when she sings ʽmy name Isobel, married to myselfʼ, you get a clear
vision of an imaginative kid living out a complex fantasy, dancing it all the
way to school to those merry trip-hop rhythms.
She can
be cold and distant, of course, as early as on ʽEnjoyʼ, a song that
rocks heavier and breathier than anything else here, while Björk's vocal
inflections and the occasional brass notes make the atmosphere comparable to
Portishead's second album. But it is not really typical of this particular
album. Much more typical is something like ʽHyper-Balladʼ, whose
lyrics pack all the important ingredients: "living on a mountain"
(where else?), "little things like car-parts, bottles and cutlery"
(no great artist can get by without paying homage to the little things),
"I go through all this before you wake up" (because there's
definitely gotta be a me and there's definitely gotta be a you), and "I
imagine what my body would sound like slamming against those rocks" (because
nothing helps as much to get beyond your cumbersome ego as hypothetically
contemplating suicide every once in a while). All of this delivered in the
usual childlike voice and set in an electronic soup that eventually goes
techno-beat-ish on us (without a particularly good reason, I'd say, but
somebody must have thought it added «development»).
Anyway, the really big difference between Debut and Post is that the latter sheds some of the former's kiddie joy and
adds some morose maturity, but it is a kind of depth that does not come (yet)
at the expense of accessibility. Words like «depressed» or «somber» do not do
justice to this music — Björk is still quite a party animal, it's just
that she's got her own party, to which we are all invited only if we learn and
accept her wacko rules. An «intraverted extravert», or something like that.
When she sings "My headphones / They saved my life / Your tape / It lulled
me to sleep", it looks like she really means it — basically, life begins
when you put on your headphones, not blast it all out across the street. Or
maybe that's just what I'd like to think. Regardless, a big thumbs up
to this colorful, meaningful, deeply creative and unusual musical world. And,
most importantly, so personal and human — I'd love to love, say, the
Animal Collective for their electronic wizardry with the same strength, but ultimately
they just produce these heartless abstractions, so, as Ray Davies said,
"you keep all your smart modern freak folks, give me Björk
Guðmundsdóttir". Or something to that end, anyway.
TELEGRAM (1996)
1) Possibly Maybe (Lucy mix); 2) Hyperballad (Brodsky
Quartet version); 3) Enjoy (Further Over The Edge mix); 4) My Spine; 5) I Miss
You (Dobie Rub Part One, Sunshine mix); 6) Isobel (Deodato mix); 7) You've Been
Flirting Again (Flirt Is A Promise mix); 8) Cover Me (Dillinja mix); 9) Army Of
Me (Masseymix); 10) Headphones (Ø
Remix).
Remixing is a special type of artistic
expression — unless we're simply talking body-oriented stuff («special dance
mix» that goes on for 12 minutes until you're ready to smash your head against
a brick wall, etc.), formal symbolism usually matters more than any emotional
reaction: you just take a song and have your own imaginative way with it,
playing the part of a crooked mirror. It must be tremendous fun for the
remixer, but it should rarely be much more than a curio for the listener.
Nevertheless, Björk has always had a special thing for remixes: in fact,
back in 1994 she'd already given the green light to an EP of remixes from Debut, with Black Dog, Sabres Of
Paradise, and other artists contributing, and now, in 1996, along comes Telegram — a full-length follow-up to Post containing remixes of all but two
songs from that album.
To be accurate, Björk herself has stated
that it is not so much a «remix» album as an experiment in «deconstruction»,
pulling the songs apart, extracting the «core» and exaggerating it to an almost
absurdist effect. A fair enough description, but it does not work for
everything. It certainly covers something like the Graham Massey «remix» of
ʽArmy Of Meʼ, which essentially drops out everything except for the
grumbly bassline, then samples a tiny bit of the vocals, grinds them down in a
Vocoder-like environment, and mixes the results in an electronic jungle
generator. But it does not work, for instance, in the case of
ʽHyperballadʼ, where the original electronic instrumentation is
replaced by an entirely new modern classical arrangement, provided by The
Brodsky Quartet — not a «deconstruction», not a «remix», but rather just an
entirely new vision for the song, with lots of classical dissonance that might
actually be a better sonic fit for Björk's heroical-hysterical delivery of
the tune.
These two extremes demonstrate the major virtue
of Telegram — diversity and
unpredictability. Naturally, the «remixes» lean towards dance-oriented or
trance-oriented electronic rhythms, but the remixers have been carefully
selected to reflect a variety of musical styles and atmospheric approaches, and
the «Björk seal of approval» is certainly not given out at random:
everything has to combine in a way that would deepen and sharpen the
«Björk enigma», make those Post
songs that were never all that trivial in the first place pose far more
questions than there could be answers. Of course, when you ask more questions
than you give answers, you run the risk of making it all seem like one grand
put-on. Why do LFO think that the vocals in ʽPossibly Maybeʼ have to
sound like the female equivalent of Stephen Hawking? Why is ʽEnjoyʼ
being put in hardcore industrial mode, with factory machine noises as the only
counterpart to the vocals? Why does ʽCover Meʼ get a fussy drum and
bass arrangement, not to mention being three times as long as the original? Why
do we have to listen to all this as an official Björk LP release?..
All these questions can have from one to
infinity answers, so I am not even going to bother. Instead, let me just
mention that the only totally new track here is ʽMy Spineʼ,
originally the B-side to ʽIt's Oh So Quietʼ, featuring fabled
Scottish virtuoso deaf percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie on a magnificent
vibraphone part (where each bar, apparently, is symbolic of one of the
vertebrae in Björk's vertebral column). It's a beautiful duet whose
exclusion from Post was regrettable,
but at least it has not disappeared into thin air completely.
Ultimately, is Telegram a Björk album at all? Seeing as how she is not
responsible for all the arrangement
ideas on the original Post anyway,
and that all of the songs are hers, composition-wise, and the vocals are hers,
and the track selection is hers, it probably should be. «Those songs can work this way, too», she tells us, and we
have the right to respect or to trash that artistic decision, whichever way we
feel. Personally, I've always felt intrigued and even a little thrilled by
these remixes, even though I've never been able to say that I «get» them, or
the concept of the album in general. That said, Telegram is supposed to work faster than Post, so this means we probably shouldn't tarry too much on the issue. It's just a
speedy curio, here today, gone tomorrow. But it does work, sort of, as an
album, so do not make the mistake of ignoring it if you're really into Björk
at all; have my slightly puzzled thumbs up as an extra endorsement, if need be.
HOMOGENIC (1997)
1) Hunter; 2) Jóga; 3) Unravel; 4)
Bachelorette; 5) All Neon Like; 6) 5 Years; 7) Immature; 8) Alarm Call; 9)
Pluto; 10) All Is Full Of Love.
Doctor, we're losing her. If you want to call Homogenic the pinnacle / zenith /
Olympus of all things Björk-related, you can make a great case for this,
but even you will have to admit that
the lady is getting a little... distant,
perhaps? The cunning little sprite of Debut
and Post has matured into a
full-blown Lady of the Mountain, who no longer wishes to be playful and
innocent, or is no longer capable of it. These songs are still gorgeous, and,
to some extent, still accessible, but the production, the lyrics, the singing
style, everything has evolved to the state that you are not supposed to
«enjoy» these songs — you're supposed to kowtow. I mean, how is it even
possible to look at that Alexander McQueen-designed sleeve photo and not kowtow? That sure ain't no frickin'
Cio-Cio San staring you down from the front cover.
Still, I guess it had to be done, because no
other album in the world sounds quite like Homogenic
— and besides, if we're talking pretentiousness justified by atmosphere, I'd
rate this over OK Computer in a
jiffy, my usual predilection towards guitar music over electronic music notwithstanding.
It is usually said that the album was mostly a tribute from Björk to her
native Iceland, but it certainly goes well beyond that, and not just because of
the extra Japanese motifs on the album sleeve. The soundscapes throughout are
«icy» indeed, but due to the constant pressure of electronic texture, this «iciness»
is more of a sci-fi, astral nature, so when you take your first listen to
ʽHunterʼ, you might get a glimpse of the singer zipping through
space, or, rather, as it happens, freezing space and time all around her so
that it might be easier for her to go out hunting. There is a local reference
in there as well ("I thought I could organize freedom / How Scandinavian
of me"), but it is of no crucial importance, nor are the lyrics in general
of any crucial importance — if you try and go for a more or less literal
interpretation (transformation into a hunter = gaining of personal independence
and self-sufficiency), it becomes way too boring.
What is not
boring at all is admiring all the overlays — the overdriven martial pummelling
of the programmed drums, the silky psychedelic cobwebs of the electronics, the
strings adding a mid-Eastern vibe, the ghostly harmonies — this is a soundtrack
to something completely different, the invention of an alternate world with
alternate musical (and God knows what other) values, over which Björk has
crowned herself freedom-organizing queen. You probably don't want to live there
unless you're seriously deranged — too cold, too spooky, too unpredictable —
but you are given the option to take a look from afar, and that's plenty
already.
The Amazing Exploding Percussion on
ʽJógaʼ (don't forget the accent sign, since the song has
nothing to do with yoga, being named after one of Björk's personal
friends) is said to be a tribute to Icelandic volcanic activity, but, once
again, nobody is forcing anybody to narrow down the vision: she is singing
about "emotional landscapes", after all, not "geographical"
ones, and the famous chorus — "state of emergency, is where I want to
be" — can hardly be related to Iceland, a country where people are said to
be rather rarely found in a state of emergency (unless one of the volcanoes
does erupt, I guess). What matters is the cathartic height of that voice, the
soaring strings, and the electronic base all combining in an anthemic chorus
that speaks this bizarre language, combining familiar sounds in such unusual
ways. «Strange beauty» indeed, a fitting spiritual anthem for the era of the
quark and the quantum.
The epicness reaches its peak on
ʽBacheloretteʼ, a song that begs
for you to envision Björk on the top of a tall, narrow cliff rising into
the epicenter of a snow storm, but maybe that imagery was deemed too pretentious to be incorporated in
the accompanying video. It is a damn risky song, taking so many chances that it
teeters on the brink of crashing under its own weight, and, in fact, every time
I see Björk doing it live, I can't get rid of a funny thought like
"what's a little girl like this doing, singing a huge song like
that?" But it works — it chooses all the right notes, tones, and overlays
to show that the ʽIsobelʼ of Post
has finally transformed from some potentially dangerous, but rather amusing
and cuddly entity into a demonic, tragic, and presumably lethal creature — or,
at least, inaccessible. Who'd want to connect or relate to "a fountain of
blood in the shape of a girl", or a "path of cinders burning under
your feet"? The strings wail with such desperation, and the bass keys
rumble with such a sense of doom that there are only two ways to go — hate this
crap as an overblown theatrical put-on, or kowtow. For now, I'm kowtowing.
These three big singles are probably the pivots
around which we launch the smaller satellites, but the album is definitely
consistent. Some of the more personal, intimate moments are to be found within
its folds — ʽUnravelʼ is a song of longing and yearning, an emotional
state so tailor-made for Björk's voice that one wonders why it is not
generated more often; ʽ5 Yearsʼ boards us back on the train of «I
hate indecision and indecisive people!», with arguably the best bit of roaring
on the entire record (at least, roaring that is not electronically enhanced, as
it is on ʽPlutoʼ); ʽImmatureʼ is a self-reprisal for a
moment of weakness in which — fancy that! — the protagonist makes the awful
mistake of relying upon somebody else, with a masterful vocalization on the
chorus, each syllable of it getting its own flourish (no melismata, though,
thank God).
But the coda, calming us and smoothly bringing
it all back home after the wild sonic ravage of ʽPlutoʼ, is still an
anthem — the Beatles had ʽAll You Need Is Loveʼ, implying a certain
shortage of the stuff, and Björk has ʽAll Is Full Of Loveʼ,
implying, in a rather pantheistic twist, that one only has to know where to
look. The problem is, she is not being very convincing, because so far, she's
given us everything except for the understanding of whether she actually has a
clue about what love really is. Is there at all a thing like a «Björk love
song»? Whatever be the case, her idea of «love» and how to express it in music
is so far from conventional, you'd think it wasn't really love she was talking
about. The music of ʽAll Is Full Of Loveʼ is meditative, soothing,
and hypnotizing, but putting the listener in a transcendental state is not
quite the same as conveying a sense of pleasure or interpersonal affection.
Then again, you wouldn't really expect Ms. Isobel-Bachelorette to share the
average person's layman interpretation of love, would you? All I am saying is
that ʽAll Is Full Of Loveʼ will probably not leave you feeling warm and cuddly all over, but it might
manipulate you into realizing that all is full of Björk (or, if you are of
the cynical persuasion, that Björk is full of... never mind).
A great, epic album, but also a tragic one,
since it is always sad to see a human being cease being a human being and begin
being an alien entity of questionable organic constitution — the album title
being a good indication of this: Homogenic,
not Human. From here on,
Björk's further career can almost be predicted, with all of its highs and
lows, as her conscience set out on a journey all its own, rarely crossing paths
with basic human nature. But in the long run, it was worth it — anybody can
choose a cut-off point in following any particular artist, and even if one were
to argue that Homogenic destroyed
Björk (which is not quite true, but looks good on paper), it would still
be one of the awesomest self-destructions in the history of popular music. You
are basically witnessing the nirvanization of a person, as she melts into
little streaks of particles and vibrations right before your eyes on the
ʽAll Is Full Of Loveʼ finale. When she returns back from the other
side, she'll never be the same again. A thumbs up rating does not even begin to do this
weird pantheistic record proper justice.
SELMASONGS (2000)
1) Overture; 2) Cvalda; 3) I've Seen It All; 4)
Scatterheart; 5) In The Musicals; 6) 107 Steps; 7) New World.
First and foremost, this review offers a great
pretext for giving a good smacking to Lars von Trier, whom I have always
admired for his talent and his audacity, and have always hated for all the
wrong directions in which he has applied both. Dancer In The Dark, even more so than Breaking The Waves, and just about the same as Dogville, was a ridiculously staged study in personal manipulation
— whose most unconventional and
groundbreaking facet was its utter ridiculousness. I like the story about how,
allegedly, Björk would begin her filming every day by saying "I
despise you, Mr. von Trier", and spitting at the gent, which is probably
what every intelligent person should have done in her place, were he/she under
an obligation of some sort. The only question, of course, being «what the hell
was she thinking in the first
place?», and a possible answer being that, in the first place, she didn't think
about anything, and in the second place, it was too late to back out already.
Not that the movie is bad in all respects: technically speaking, it's
fine... other than the disgusting storyline (sort of like «Charles Dickens
meets modern anti-American stereotypes») and, subsequently, the corny,
incredibly artificial over- or under-acting of everyone involved. If you are
into movies for different reasons (camera work, lighting, editing, etc.), Dancer In The Dark deserves to be seen.
But mostly it just deserves to be seen in order to get a better context for Selma Songs, its accompanying
soundtrack — a mini-album whose quality stands miles above the movie, so never make the mistake of bypassing it
in your exploration of Björk's discography. This small bunch of songs is
the finest thing to have come out of the entire project.
If anything, Selma Songs serves as a wonderful antidote for the distant and
over-reaching effect of Homogenic —
for a short time, it gives us back our Björk as a human being. Warped,
crazy, totally idiosyncratic, but a human being nevertheless. The movie
character, «Selma» — a helpless immigrant mother matching near-complete
blindness with a Dostoyevsky heart — may look caricaturesque in the movie (at
least, the script does its best to present her as a caricature), but when it
comes to painting that image with musical colors, von Trier is out of the
picture and Björk is allowed complete creative freedom, and things like
these are right up her alley, so she sort of transforms herself into the Who's
Tommy and proceeds from there.
Actually, the Tommy connection can be extended: ʽOvertureʼ opens the
small set with its musical theme played on the same French horn that was one of
the key instruments on Tommy,
courtesy of John Entwistle, setting much the same «epic / longago-and-faraway»
rock-opera mood. There the superficial similarities end, and we proceed to join
«Selma» in her amazing musifications of the sounds of the outside world. Selma,
unlike Tommy, does not play pinball, but she likes to dance, and she constructs
herself dance soundtracks out of the noises of the factory where she works
(ʽCvaldaʼ), of the sounds of trains that pass her by on her way home
(ʽI've Seen It Allʼ), of her personal tribulations
(ʽScatterheartʼ, ʽIn The Musicalsʼ), and even out of her final
moments on Earth (ʽNew Worldʼ). Most importantly, while it makes
sense to be aware of the movie to understand what's going on, it all works
much better as a song-set, without any visuals.
The «factory» and «train» arrangements actually
happen to be some of the most reasonable and impressive justifications of the
«industrial» style that I have ever heard — far more accessible than your
average Einstürzende Neubauten and, for that reason, far more difficult to
get right: anyone can base a musical composition upon «factory clanging», but
not anyone can get the clanging to form a properly danceable skeleton, on top
of which Selma's imagination then throws chimes, brass, strings, and whatever
else comes into her head. And Björk's vocal style, the whole «little girl
with a lion's roar and avantgarde ambitions» schtick, is perfect for the
character — «little girl» agreeing with its helplessness, «lion's roar»
agreeing with its determination, and «avantgarde ambitions» agreeing with its
sensory uniqueness.
Since the movie had to be seen by, like,
ordinary people (some of these still occasionally watched von Trier movies in
2000), the avantgarde ambitions are not quite so avantgarde as to completely
neglect catchiness — and Björk's duet with long-time fan Thom Yorke on
ʽI've Seen It Allʼ guarantees additional popularity, to which should
be added the good news that Thom actually sings like a human being on the
track, rather than in his «subterranean homesick alien» voice that he'd
invented on OK Computer and which I
honestly cannot stand one bit: consequently, their mournful dialog generates
strange beauty and is a great illustration of «passion in the dark», expressing
strong feelings in muffled, semi-implied ways. ʽIn The Musicalsʼ is
truly what you get when you cross Björk-style songwriting with the old
cliché of «bright lights, big city gone to my baby's head» — orchestral
excitement crossed with truly wild sequencing and capped off with a brilliant
lyrical/vocal hook ("...and you were always there to catch me... when I'd
fall").
The brief crescendo of ʽ107 Stepsʼ
could be thought of as an unintentional answer to the ʽ39 Lashesʼ of Jesus Christ Superstar — the
protagonist cruelly wound-up towards martyrdom — but, rather than being
something self-sufficient, works more like an appetizing introduction to
ʽNew Worldʼ, which finally realizes the theme previewed in
ʽOvertureʼ and is one of the stateliest anthems to «death as
liberation» in existence, and — get this — it is totally warm, friendly, and
presents the «New World» as a much more familiar and cozy place than any of the
«Icelandic» soundscapes of Homogenic.
So if you ever needed an excuse to say "I'd rather die than go to
Iceland", there you have it, clear as daylight.
In the end, I guess, Lars von Trier does
deserve our gratitude for offering his lead such a perfect opportunity. Who
knows, maybe he should have also let her handle the script — and the cast — and
the directing — and the editing — and we might
have a really good movie to go along with all the great music. Of course, most
of the user reviews of Dancer In The Dark
that I have read wrong the movie for all the wrong reasons ("such a
potentially great movie about human wickedness and injustice, but why cast
this loonie imp in the title role?"), so this could never happen, and
Björk herself has said that acting is not one of her forte's, and that she
only did this for the money because it was a matter of special interest.
But whatever — the important thing is that we do have the soundtrack album, and that it is perfectly legitimate
to simply treat it as a mini-rock opera, and give it a thumbs up, and be happily done with
it.
VESPERTINE (2001)
1) Hidden Place; 2) Cocoon; 3) It's Not Up To You; 4)
Undo; 5) Pagan Poetry; 6) Frosti; 7) Aurora; 8) An Echo, A Stain; 9) Sun In My
Mouth; 10) Heirloom; 11) Harm Of Will; 12) Unison.
A paradox here — I am in the camp that
generally thinks Björk was at her best as long as she still maintained
some touch with reality, and that it all started
going downhill with Homogenic. And
yet, every once in a while I cannot get rid of the feeling that Vespertine might be her greatest album,
because it captures her quintessence so damn well. It is vastly experimental,
it has nothing resembling a «pop single», it has its serious detractors who
correlate the album with the «swan dress» appearance and dismiss it as written
at a time when the lady had already went completely gaga — but I totally «get
it», and love it, despite any potential flaws.
One thing is for certain: Vespertine is an ideological anti-thesis to Homogenic. Where that album went on a cosmic sprawl, its sonic
panoramas extended deep and wide, and its protagonist almost equating herself
with The Universal Mother or something, Vespertine
should have really borne the title reserved for its second track:
ʽCocoonʼ. Or for its first track, for that matter: ʽHidden
Placeʼ. No, it does not matter that the album still has plenty of swooping
orchestral passages, or that the entire St. Paul's Cathedral Choir is engaged
to add support to the grand finale of ʽUnisonʼ. Even these elements
all fall in with the artist's masterplan: now that she's emulated the
macrospirit, it is the turn of the microspirit.
If Homogenic was her tribute to the
Big Bang, then Vespertine is her
tribute to the Miracle of the Womb.
"Through the warmthest cord of care your
love was sent to me" — ʽHidden Placeʼ begins fairly
unambiguously, accompanied by electronic heartbeat-imitating pulsation and a
swarm of overdubs, all of them mimicking the «bio-music» as could be perceived
by an embryo (provided an embryo can perceive any of it... but hey, this is
art, not Autechre). You could call this «pretentious» or «silly», but the
thing is, it works for Björk, and it really works for her much better than
the Homogenic approach. In fact,
there are obvious links to Selmasongs
as well: «cocoons», «hiding», «isolation», «beauty in solitude and seclusion»,
«idiosyncrasies of one's inner world» — all of this fits in much more naturally
with Björk's vocal style and twisted fairy-tale hero image than her
attempts to embrace the whole universe with her little hands. As wrong as I
might be, I think Vespertine is the album that she'd been waiting for a
chance to produce all of her life; and if we have von Trier to thank for this
(not very likely, but possible), well, thank you.
The potential downside is that the record is
much less scattered and diverse than it used to be — Björk's first
proverbially «conceptual» album, if you wish, and, as it usually happens with
proper conceptual albums, every now and then you have to accept hooks being
sacrificed for atmosphere and «ideology». But this is not to say that Vespertine is a hookless record.
Gripping choruses are present on several songs like ʽHidden Placeʼ,
ʽIt's Not Up To Youʼ, and ʽUnisonʼ — arguably the most
immediately accessible pieces on the album. The rest run on hypnotic fuel that
takes a bit of time to sink in. Texture, ambience, intonation — a song like
ʽCocoonʼ has nothing in addition to these components, but doesn't it
actually sound like a «musical
cocoon» of sorts, where the soft electronic keyboards play the part of silk
threads, subtly wrapping around the singer's voice as she equates physical
romance with the «art of shutting in»? Special mention should be made of the
quivering falsetto — so fragile and so determined at the same time. I wouldn't
go as far as choosing the simple way and calling it «vulnerable», because
Björk is not vulnerable — when she gets hurt, she just retreats back in
her shell, leaving an ink jet behind — more like the content equivalent of a
cat purr after a good mouse hunt, but unforgettable, really, regardless of
whatever interpretation you'd care to offer.
Further on down the line, there is
ʽUndoʼ, which is probably the closest to her own ʽSong Of The
Sirenʼ that she ever got: "It's not meant to be a strife / It's not
meant to be a struggle uphill" is another cat purr that injects itself
surreptitiously under your skin, until you fall under its spell or, if you're a
strong one, realize that it's meant
to be a spell and, like Ulysses, start desperately searching for some wax to
plug your ears. With its multiple vocal overdubs and wild dissonances,
ʽUndoʼ is sort of like a blueprint for Björk's entire next
album, but since it actually has a point ("I'm praying to be in a generous
mode", she says, and that is exactly what the song is about), it is more
captivating than all of Medúlla
put together.
One of the most beautiful, and slightly
overlooked, things on here is ʽAuroraʼ, featuring some of
Björk's loveliest vocal moves ever — you could argue against my point,
saying that here she actually breaks out of the «cocoon» to sing a solemn
prayer to the goddess of the dawn, but it is a quiet, intimate prayer all the
same, propped up by soft keyboards and a harp melody (speaking of which, the
harp is consistently the most
prominent instrument on all these songs, as if it represented the delicate
internal humming of the silken cocoon support — the harp and chimes, that is,
which play an equally delicate role on ʽSun In My Mouthʼ, ʽHarm
Of Willʼ, and elsewhere). No sprawl, no bombast, just humble beauty,
delicacy, and intimacy.
On the other hand, Vespertine is not a hymn to isolation and narcissism: as Carole
King once said, "there's room enough for two in the cocoon" (or
something like that, anyway), and quite a few of these tunes are essentially
love songs — including the solemn coda of ʽUnisonʼ, where she states
directly that "I thrive best hermit style / With a beard and a pipe / But
now I can't do this without you", and urges her counterpart to "let's
unite tonight, we shouldn't fight". I mean, all of that description could
make Vespertine sound like one of
those depressed, masochistic odes to loneliness, which it isn't in the
slightest — it is a very happy, life-asserting, even extravert album, it just shows that all of this is equally possible
to achieve inside a closed space. There is no bombastic "tear down the
wall!", uh, I mean "cocoon", conclusion to this record because
it does not need one. ʽHidden Placeʼ may start out with a tinge of
insecurity, even paranoia perhaps, but by the time we get to
ʽUnisonʼ, everything is just handy-dandy.
If you consciously seek a good turn to jump off
the Björk train, do not make the mistake of doing it too early and
dismissing Vespertine. Even if you
believe that it puts the concept before the music, you will be smart enough to
understand that it is one hell of a concept, and later on, that the music isn't
too bad, either. Most importantly, this is the perfect compromise between «symbolist
artistry» and «human behavior» that you will ever hear on a Björk record.
Smarter-than-thou she may be here, but she ain't holier-than-thou, and it is
arguably the last time that she's sounded so alive, all these vocal parts so befitting a human being rather than
an android. An unquestionable artistic peak, a respectful thumbs up, and heavily recommended
for professional silkworm breeders worldwide.
MEDÚLLA (2004)
1) Pleasure Is All Mine; 2) Show Me Forgiveness; 3)
Where Is The Line?; 4) Vökuró; 5) Öll Birtan; 6) Who Is It; 7)
Submarine; 8) Desired Constellation; 9) Oceania; 10) Sonnets/Unrealities XI;
11) Ancestors; 12) Mouth's Cradle; 13) Miðvikudags; 14) Triumph Of A Heart.
Can you say «I am a huge Björk fan, but I
hate this album» without running into an oxymoron? Very very clearly, Medúlla is exactly the kind of album she wanted to make in 2004, an album over
which (like over everything else) she had full creative control, and an album
that nobody could not call «bold» and
«adventurous». So how could a huge Björk fan hate this album? Would it not
be like saying «I'm a good Catholic, but I really
hate Holy Communion?»...
To get a serious answer, let us think of it
this way. There is no doubt that Björk's greatest and most unique asset is
her immediately recognizable voice and the way she uses it — love it, hate it,
but you will not confound it with anything else in the world: people who are
only familiar with the artist on a, let's say, vaguely tangential level will
always remember her as «that amazing / annoying singer» first and foremost. But
this tends to overshadow her other strengths — namely, that she is also a
gifted songwriter and arranger, and that she is an extremely talented «advocate
of beauty», being one of the very few people in the 1990s who managed to find a
completely fresh, mind-opening way to convey the sense of beauty. Mind-opening,
yes, but also generally accessible — once you manage to overcome the first
shock, getting to like records like Post,
Homogenic, or even Vespertine is really not that hard.
The biggest mistake of Medúlla, I think, is in that Björk oversetimated her
own talents, and deliberately threw herself off balance. As unique as that
voice is, it is a big, big question whether anybody really wants, or needs, to
listen to a whole album of Björk singing close to accappella — or, in
extreme cases, listen to an album of a million billion chopped-up Björks
interacting with each other like a flock of drunken birds on a wire. The experience
is about as weird as the cover of the album, and seems more like a deliberate
provocation than a sincere experiment.
There is no doubt that a lot of work went into
the album. Each of the tracks is very carefully put together, with multiple
samples arranged in rhythmic, often symmetric patterns, while the primary
vocal melodies still explore relations between harmony and dissonance like they
did when she was still a part of The Sugarcubes. The problem is that this is
the first time in Björk history where it gets really hard to discern any substance beyond the form. The album may
be brave enough to invent its own sub-genre (call it «math-vocalize» if you
wish), but inventing a vital genre
does amount to a little something extra than just the classic manner of
«putting things on top of other things». And I struggle in vain to find that
extra — and while I struggle, the vocals just grow more and more and more
irritating, until we're almost in Yokoland.
Some of the comparatively more «normal» songs
clearly indicate that talent has not abandoned the lady: ʽWho Is Itʼ,
for instance, would not be out of place on Vespertine:
deceptively released as the album's lead single, it is one of those intimate
love songs, with a little bit of accompanying paranoia, that could well be
taken with you inside the «cocoon». But most of the time is being spent bending
that talent out of shape: melodies are distorted, twisted, superimposed in
brutal ways that require a complete reevaluation of your musical
preconceptions. Are you ready to come
out with such a reevaluation, or are you not?
Something like ʽAncestorsʼ, one of
the key tracks on the record (because Björk herself said that the album
title should represent the «5,000 year-old blood that's inside us all»), may be
taken as the ultimately diagnostic element. «Loving» it is hardly possible, or
at least, natural — taking it as a sonically symbolic representation of the
various biological and cultural strains hidden out there in our DNA and our
brain tissue is possible, but if so, Medúlla becomes a «performance
act», a purely brain-oriented venture that, frankly speaking, reeks of
gimmickry and self-indulgence. As far as I am concerned, all these guttural
noises and dissonant notes only serve to irritate the senses — for a genuine
summoning of the «beast within», you're on far more secure territory with Iggy
Pop and the Stooges than these ridiculously scattered quacks, roars, and wails
(for that matter, ʽColdsweatʼ by The Sugarcubes did far more to
remind me of the «5,000 year-old blood» than any of these tracks).
The ultimate downside is that, for all of its
«boldness», Medúlla gives
nothing essentially new. If you took
any of the classic Björk albums, stripped them naked of their instrumental
melodies, and then hacked up and interspersed the vocal harmonies, that'd be Medúlla in a nutshell — the only
difference being that it is Björk herself here, deconstructing her own
music. Yes, I admire her iron will and her decision not to stagnate / grow old
/ fade away at any cost, but you know, behind the superficially groundbreaking
textures of Medúlla there
might actually lurk a subconscious fear of not having anything more to say.
Alas, the more I listen to the record, the more
I am becoming convinced of this scenario: Medúlla
is a certain Björk-specific way of refusing to age gracefully — her
personal equivalent of the Rolling Stones' Undercover,
as formally different as those albums are. On the other hand, this also makes
me feel relieved: if this album only pretends
to be «bold» and «adventurous», I can still call myself a huge fan of Björk
in some respect — a huge fan of her «before-jumping-the-shark» period, that is,
whereas Medúlla is clearly on
the other side of the shark, and
receives a certified thumbs down rating from me.
VOLTA (2007)
1) Earth Intruders; 2) Wanderlust; 3) The Dull Flame
Of Desire; 4) Innocence; 5) I See Who You Are; 6) Vertebrae By Vertebrae; 7)
Pneumonia; 8) Hope; 9) Declare Independence; 10) My Juvenile.
The higher you rise, the lower you get to fall
— unless you happen to die young, this rule knows very few exceptions. Coming
from a nobody, Volta would be a
great success; coming from Björk, it is her first album to be known as a
major disappointment, sometimes even for big fans, since it clearly shows signs
of stagnation. Up until Vespertine,
each new album was a leap forward in some respect; Medúlla took that leaping to near-absurd heights — and in
the process of leaping, it seems as if the genius finally cracked her spine.
If you do
come to terms with the fact that Volta
reveals no new amazing details about the artistic world of Björk, the
record will be easier to deal with. Stepping a few steps back from the wild,
unbridled experimentalism of Medúlla,
she returns to the world of musical instruments and programmed beats, once
again with the aid of her regular producer Mark Bell, but also enlisting
hip-hop/R&B producer Timbaland to add some computerized African rhythmics
to the songs. Various collaborations, such as with the pipa player Min Xiao-fen
on ʽI See Who You Areʼ, or the two vocal duets with Antony Hegarty,
add color and diversity, and then there's ʽDeclare Independenceʼ,
her first big venture into the world of musical politics, whose performance in
China, dedicated to Tibet, helped stir up controversy and shit. So far, so
good.
What is hopelessly, despairingly bad is that Volta just goes nowhere. On her previous albums, Björk had showed
herself to be a master of catchy hooks and
a master of atmospherics — you could hum these songs till your humming machine
ran out of fuel, and you could be carried away into a parallel (or
perpendicular) world by almost any of them. The melodies of Volta, however, retain the influence of
the experimentalism of Medúlla
— with maybe just a couple of exceptions, Björk is now only interested in
continuing the same «free-form» approach of singing, delivering her lines as if
they came from a Shostakovich opera (or, at least, anything post-Wagnerian, to
broaden the scope of comparison). The vocal melodies continue to be carefully
designed, not improvised, but the endless dissonances and lack of resolutions
eventually begin to irritate — not to mention that there is really nothing new
or fresh about this approach.
As far as atmosphere is concerned, Volta is strikingly minimalistic. In a
way, so were large parts of Vespertine,
but there the minimalism was essential to the album's «cocoon» image; Volta has a well-defined extrovert
character, and could benefit from some more of those grandiose, imaginative
orchestrations, as on Homogenic.
Instead, you get beats, beats, and more beats — sometimes just beats,
sometimes beats mixed with a single lead instrument, usually an exotic one (the
pipa on ʽI See Who You Areʼ, or Toumani Diabaté's kora on
ʽHopeʼ). The beats are relatively complex, but hardly ever defying
imagination — and the lead instruments are nice, but, as it so often happens
with «world music», usually devoid of individual identity. That identity should
be provided by the singer — and this is exactly what does not happen.
Of the two «rocking» tracks, ʽEarth
Intrudersʼ is arguably the better one: with a singalong chorus and a bit
of cosmic humor attached, it is as good an introduction to the album as could
probably have been thought of. Still, compared to ʽHunterʼ, it ends
up looking like a novelty number — kiddie carnival music, incapable of
burrowing deep into your subconscience, because the electronic textures all
concentrate on tribal beats rather than psychedelic synthesizer tapestries. As
for ʽDeclare Independenceʼ, it is simply not the kind of approach I
could ever associate with Björk: the song is about as naturally flowing as
Paul McCartney's ʽFreedomʼ, and even if you happen to share those
bluntly stated sentiments ("raise your flag! start your own
currency!"), the song still
sounds rather dumb. Just leave the big social statements to Bono, will ya?
The two duets with Hegarty are disappointing: I
do share the required-acquired-taste to enjoy Antony and The Johnsons, but on
ʽThe Dull Flame Of Desireʼ, Antony is used more like a convenient
lackey for Björk's own purposes, which are not far removed from those of Medúlla — create a
multi-layered, dissonant, confusing vocal tapestry and see where that takes
you. I find the results pretentious («get two
highly idiosyncratic, uniquely expressive singers for the price of one!») and
superfluous — the singers do not manage to find perfect balance (contrary to,
say, the duet with Thom Yorke on ʽI've Seen It Allʼ, where there was
actual dialog and mutual understanding between the protagonists), and, at
worst, the song just spills over into ear-splitting dissonance that cancels
out their mutual strength. ʽMy Juvenileʼ is a little better, but,
again, I could easily do with just Björk's "down the corridor I send
warmth...", discarding Antony's "intentions were pure..." bit
altogether.
Everything else just sort of blurs together
into a chaotic, generally senseless mix of beats, pipas, and songs that seem
like pale shadows of something bigger and better (ʽVertebrae By
Vertebraeʼ, for instance, strives to convey the sense of constant search
and struggle, but the musical backing is so bland and the main vocal melody so
unmemorable that it simply has no reason to exist next to something like, say,
ʽHyper-Balladʼ). This is just Björk on autopilot — relying on
all too familiar Björkisms for lack of anything more interesting. And
while the lack of radically new ideas, per se, should not bother me (not even
the greatest genius can generate radically new ideas for unlimited amounts of
time), the lack of memorable tracks and impressive atmospherics most definitely
does. There is not a single song on here that managed to truly woo me over, and
for that, the album gets a thumbs down. Oh, and the album cover is quite
ridiculous, too. More fit for some J-pop record or something.
BIOPHILIA (2011)
1) Moon; 2) Thunderbolt; 3) Crystalline; 4) Cosmogony;
5) Dark Matter; 6) Hollow; 7) Virus; 8) Sacrifice; 9) Mutual Core; 10) Solstice.
I think that the title of the album is somewhat
misleading. Biophilia is a
(relatively simple and, when you come to think of it, rather self-obvious) idea
of life being attracted to life — a natural inborn empathy towards organic
entities, which is why, by default, we happen to like kittens and hippos better
than rocks. (Not sure if the theory also works on the Ebola virus, though).
This project of Björk's, however, pursues an even loftier goal, professing
love and metaphoric exploitation towards just about every corner of the
universe, from sub-atomic particles to planet movement and natural electrical
phenomena — so, for the sake of accuracy, she would probably have been more justified
to call it Cosmophilia. Then again,
she probably wants to treat everything in the universe as a living thing. How
artistic-pantheistic of her, again.
One thing you really have to respect the lady
for is how she is still managing to keep in touch with the modern world:
relatively few artists manage to escape «fossilization» and condescending
rejection of modern values by the time they hit 45 — yet Biophilia is, in every respect, a record that just screams «the 2010s are upon us!». Not
only was most of the music, according to Björk's own statement, composed
on a tablet computer, but the album itself is not just an album: it is a sprawling, arch-trendy multimedia project,
accompanied with visuals, educational applications, specialized live
performance, and, on the whole, first billed as a «3-D scientific musical» and
then as the first ever «app album», so now it can compete with Lady Gaga and Angry Birds at the exact same time: how
smart is that?
Very smart, but, I am afraid to say, not very
engaging. Personally, I am not very much interested in «multimedia artistry»,
and I am definitely not interested in
watching somebody who used to be a terrific musical artist try and make a
transition to a state where music ceases to be the major attraction and becomes
«just one side of the story». From a certain point of view, this falls under
the definition of «sellout» — in order to fit in better with the times, you
sacrifice some of your strengths in favor of «what the market demands». These
days, the market demands dazzling interactive visuals, so we play a game of
«construct your own universe from elementary particle scratch» or «build a drum
machine from a combination enzymes» (no kidding, this is exactly what the app
associated with ʽHollowʼ is supposed to do). Yay, nice and cute and a
good way to kill time for scientifically-oriented kids who hate reading books,
but there is a downside to that: the more effort you spend on these things, the
less effort remains for music.
And the music on Biophilia is disappointing — in fact, it is so disappointing that
it just does not work as a self-standing album at all. Where Volta, for a while, returned Björk
to the world of «art-pop», Biophilia
takes us back to the wild experimentalism of Medúlla, only using electronic textures in the place of that
record's multiple vocal overdubs — and using them to paint almost completely
static pictures, with very few hooks and no musical development whatsoever. The
typical recipé for a Biophilia
song is — set a programmed groove and let the singer rave and rant against it
for three to five minutes. Considering that the grooves are not of jaw-dropping
quality, and that the singer's raving and ranting is simply all too familiar,
what's a poor boy to do but inescapably turn his attention to the accompanying
apps? At least pushing some buttons and learning to be the Master of the
Universe will keep you from getting bored.
Ironically, reading about the album shows that
the particular songs on here contain the largest doses of meaningful musical
symbolism so far present on any single Björk record. The musical cycles on
ʽMoonʼ echo the shifting of lunar phases; the electronic arpeggios on
ʽThunderboltʼ symbolize lightning; ʽSolsticeʼ relies on
pendulums; the fussy chimes on ʽVirusʼ represent viral activities
within the cell, and so on. Disentangling all these combinations of ideas is
truly a nerd's paradise — and here, indeed, is a «math-rock» album where
«getting» the actual math is a real possibility, rather than an exercise in
frustration.
Oh, if only the record would have a small pinch
of emotional content in it — but
alas, neither within its «applicational» context nor without it can I assess it
as anything other than a purely formal, rationalized, carefully crafted, but
ultimately soulless piece of work. Yes, there are lyrical themes here that tap
into the personal, and any major Björk fan will see that, if we restrict
ourselves to the words, she is actually using all that «scientific» imagery as
simple metaphors for relations and feelings — like ʽVirusʼ, for
instance, is really just a plain love song: "Like a virus needs a body /
As soft tissue feeds on blood / Someday I'll find you, the urge is here".
But the music that she writes is not
indicative of any of those feelings. The music
is more in the vein of Autechre — technologically-oriented «nano-grooves» that
are much better rationalized and intellectually admired than intuitively enjoyed.
And this even concerns the acoustic tracks like ʽMoonʼ and
ʽSolsticeʼ, where Björk's beloved harps replace the electronics,
or ʽCrystallineʼ, for which she invents a new instrument,
«gameleste», a cross between a gamelan and a celesta. It's a cool, «crystal»
sound, for that matter, but the instrument is used for sheer symbolic
atmospherics, not for any sort of breathtaking melody that you could cherish in
your heart forever, like the more traditional, but oh so much better resonating
strings of ʽBacheloretteʼ, for instance.
I respect the work that went into the album and
all its surrounding hoopla, and I recommend hearing it — it was one of the major artistic events of
2011, after all — but I also give it a thumbs down, because, like Medúlla, I consider it a failed
experiment that preserves the formal principles of a «Björk record»
without offering any genuine substance. As an accompanying piece to some
fancy-pants Apple or Microsoft or TED multi-media presentation (of the «what a
wonderful world...!» variety), it will work great. As a worthy follow-up to the
grandiose/subtle beauty and joy of Debut,
Post, Homogenic, and Vespertine,
Biophilia does not stand a single
chance — not in my book, at least. Next to these triumphs, there is nothing too
new here, nothing too memorable, nothing too heartbreaking or heartwarming;
and, worst of all, it sort of seems like the cheap designer thrills of the 21st
century have finally gotten the better of a formerly unique and independent
artist. Then again, there's nothing too unpredictable about this, either.
VULNICURA (2015)
1) Stonemilker; 2) Lionsong; 3) History Of Touches; 4)
Black Lake; 5) Family; 6) Notget; 7) Atom Dance; 8) Mouth Mantra; 9) Quicksand.
In recent years, I have adopted a very harsh
rating strategy towards «breakup albums» that seem to be more than simply «all the rage» in the modern world — no, really,
these days, whatever passes for a «serious» work of popular art almost
necessarily has to be about The Magnificent Art Of Breaking Up. People come together,
so it seems, merely for the sake of falling apart and then chronicling their
suffering in their own, highly individual way. I mean, goddammit, what about
starving children in Africa? The evils of offshore drilling? The questions of
our purpose on this planet? The verification of the Big Bang Theory? Does it all have to be judged through the prism
of «me and him/her, we're no longer together and boy does it hurt»?
Additionally, if it does hurt, why
the heck did you have to break up in the first place? Couldn't it be, you know,
just because you're both arrogant idiots who value personality clashes and
«turf battles» over compromises? And now you're using this as a pretext to
paint awesome vagina-shaped wounds on your chests? Gimme a fuckin' break, already.
To be fair, there is no reason even in 2015 why
a breakup should not be painful, or
why it should not be possible to
write a heartbreaking song or even an entire album about a breakup. But with
breakup stories now coming at a dime a dozen (almost literally so), I am
finding myself, for instance, more and more desensitized towards these works
unless they happen to contain some truly stunning melodic inventions (Adele's 21, for instance, counts as a happy
exception from the rule). And it is hardly a coincidence that Björk's
personal breakup album just happens to be her least musically interesting album
in ages. Where Medúlla was at
least arrogantly adventurous, Volta
was at least moderately catchy, and Biophilia
was at least a curious exercise in «scientific music-making», Vulnicura is simply «Björk's
breakup album», no more, no less.
With nine tracks stretched out to a whole
hour's length, the lady is busy here telling us her story, using a standard
form of Old Literary Björkese: lush, brooding, slightly dissonant string
arrangements, fussy-fuzzy electronic beats, and her own trademark «operatic»
singing that eschews conventional verse/chorus structures and removes any
structural limitations on rhythm, rhyme, and harmonic coordination — a style
that originally emerged on Homogenic
but arguably reached its apex with Medúlla
and, since then, pretty much became the «default» form of Björkese, a
respectable establishment that no longer holds any major surprises.
Mood-wise, the only thing that differentiates
these tracks from each other are (a) the length and (b) the occasional gimmick,
such as the use of Björk's old musical friend, a vocally chopped-up Antony
Hegarty, on ʽAtom Danceʼ. People have called this album «dark» and
«depressing» and «brutally honest» and all sorts of other nice clichés,
almost as if implying that here, first time in years if not ever, we finally get to see The Real
Björk (who, as it incidentally turns out, just happens to be
vagina-chested as a genetic birth defect), but this is just bullshit: first,
all of these songs taken together do not have a tenth part of the darkness of
ʽHunterʼ or ʽBacheloretteʼ, and second, how is this «the real Björk» when this is
so stylistically indistinguishable from her earlier work? Compare ʽCome
Togetherʼ with ʽWorking Class Heroʼ and see «the real Lennon»,
or ʽJust Like Tom Thumb's Bluesʼ and ʽSimple Twist Of Fateʼ
and see «the real Dylan» — these comparisons could at least be understandable.
Vulnicura is just as much of a grand
symbolist spectacle as anything else the Icelandic national heroine ever put
out. The question is not whether she is being «real» or not (oh, but come on
now, it's a breakup album, how can a breakup album not be real, have a frickin'
heart, Mr. Reviewer!): the question is — how attractive, how seductive, how
captivating, how breathtaking can that spectacle be, regardless of how «real»
it is?
For many people, so it seems, including miriads
of slobbering reviewers and admiring fans, it can be all of these things and
more — pages after pages of glowing discussions are dedicated to descriptions of
how dissonant strings and electronics can so perfectly convey the process of
«emotional healing». Maybe all these people have recently gone through breakups
as well, and are able to better empathize than myself. Maybe I have really been
too desensitized and biased to let the magic of musical healing flow through my
own veins. But the fact of the matter is that, at best, I perceive this all as
a monotonous atmospheric current of tolerable, occasionally pleasant (for those
ears that had already become accustomed to Björkese), but completely
unmemorable and, worse, unimpressive
music, without dynamics, but with lots of pseudo-subtle subtleties that may
create an illusion of «depth» and «complexity» that is really not there at all.
For those reasons, I will not be talking about
any individual tracks. Formally, their melodies are different, their tempos
have a certain range (usually from «slow» to «very slow»), their instrumentation
has some variety, but I know few words to describe these nuances, and my senses
are not sharp enough to immediately and actively pick up on these varieties
once they arise. You may, if you happen to «love» this album rather than just
«like» it, criticize me for being too shallow and stubbornly refusing to give
it a chance, but I think I know what I am talking about here — the difference
between Vulnicura and, say, Homogenic for me symbolizes all the
difference between «quality music» in the 1990s, when intelligence,
complexity, and subtlety could still carry real intellectual and emotional
meaning, and «quality music» in the 2010s, where «form», as a rule, replaces
«substance», and all we get are hollow, formalistic re-runs of past grandeur.
Ironically, I cannot even say that Björk
fails here because she is now an «old fart», or because she has lost her
genius, ran out of creative steam etc. etc. On the contrary, Vulnicura reflects her amazing capacity
to adapt — like Madonna for the world of «cheap entertainment», Björk is
very well aware of the changing surroundings, and almost every new product of
hers (Volta might be a bit of an
exception) is totally en vogue. No,
she fails exactly because she is doing here what she is expected to be doing in 2015, as mannerisms and lack of substance
are supposed to be taking the place
of genuinely deep, sharp-cutting music. And everything here counts as
mannerism, right down to the unforgettable "every single fuck we had
together" on ʽHistory Of Touchesʼ — a sensual exhortation that
is really as hollow and meaningless as everything else on here.
Naturally, this is all my personal opinion, and
naturally, I cannot exclude that sometime in the future, something on this record will click — as it happens now, each
subsequent listen only ended up irritating me more and more. How did that one
go? "I've seen what I was and I know what I'll be, I've seen it all, there
is no more to see...". Total thumbs down — I have no time, interest, or
patience for such generic, by-the-book Björkese.
ADDENDA:
DEBUT LIVE (1994; 2003)
1) Human Behaviour; 2) One
Day; 3) Venus As A Boy; 4) Come To Me; 5) Big Time Sensuality; 6) Aeroplane; 7)
Like Someone In Love; 8) Crying; 9) Anchor Song; 10) Violently Happy.
In 2003, with pregnancy keeping her away from
active creative duties, Björk diverted herself by rummaging through a ton
of recorded tapes, left over from a decade of touring, and discovering enough
of interest to put out a whole big chunk, modestly titled Live Box, with each of four CDs representing selections from the
four tours focusing on her first (and best) four albums. Originally, the box
was only available as a whole, but already the next year it was chopped up and
the four live albums became available separately (for a limited while).
Since Björk is first and foremost a studio
artist, and second, a visual entertainer, it is natural to be somewhat wary of
the product — and, since it never seems to be an integral part of her discography,
to forget it altogether. But once you do get access to the recordings, it
becomes obvious upon the very first listen that this is a mistaken attitude. In
her «violently happy» prime, Björk's seeker instincts were buzzing
everywhere, in respect to everything, and live presentation of her songs gave
her a great pretext to go on experimenting with them even further. Unlike so
many famous «art rock» acts, a good «Björk live» experience is never
construed along the lines of «how faithfully can I reproduce my music on
stage?» — it is much more in line with the old Bob Dylan vibe of «how can I
give my songs a second life on stage?». For that reason, while I would not go
as far as to coerce anybody into collecting live bootlegs, the four discs of Live Box are really a terrific add-on,
worth every penny.
And the first of these discs is perhaps the
best illustration of what I am saying. All of the tracks on it, except for
ʽVenus As A Boyʼ, are actually taken from Björk's little yellow
dress performance on MTV
Unplugged in 1994 — in other words, a setting that demanded, by definition, that performers rethink and re-sensify
their material, and thus, almost no electronic instruments or effects are
brought to the table. Instead, songs from Debut
are rearranged as a curious eclectic mix of... well, whatever is found at hand.
For ʽHuman Behaviourʼ, for instance, at
hand is found a harpsichord, which loyally takes care of not just the basic
melody, but also the growling electronic solo at the end of the track — which
gets you a-thinkin' that the harpsichord, come to think of it, has a pretty
«electronic» sound all by itself, compared to pianos and organs. ʽOne
Dayʼ is transformed into a fumbly extravaganza of tablas and chimes,
completely dominated by percussion and giving the illusion of Björk performing
in the middle of a busting sonic jungle. ʽCome To Meʼ suffers without
the tragic orchestration of the original, but the homely mix of tablas,
harpsichords, and flutes is still an interesting alternate take on things. And
so on — I think that of all the songs, only ʽLike Someone In Loveʼ
does not differ too much, because it was
a beatless harp-driven song in the first place.
I would never say that the rearrangements
«improve» on the originals: Debut
was one of the most thoughtfully and sensibly produced and arranged records in
1990s art-pop, and it is unlikely that Björk would have spent as much time
coming up with this plastic surgery for a one-time MTV performance as she spent
creating the songs in the first place. So, ʽOne Dayʼ will sound less
poignant and desperate here, and ʽViolently Happyʼ will have less
psycho-menace, and ʽCome To Meʼ will not possess as much of that
dark-forest mystery, and the list goes on. But we are really supposed to think
the other way here — how, even with
the relatively short time elapsed between the release of Debut and this performance, she already had the ability to present
the material in such a completely new light — perfectly adapted to the «cozy»
setting of a concert in the Unplugged
series. Of course, some major credit has to go to her partners as well,
particularly the percussionist Talvin Singh (who would eventually go on to
become a superstar in the «Asian Underground» movement), the keyboard player
Leila Arab, and the other keyboard player Guy Sigsworth — they do some great
teamwork here, loyally following the black-haired lady wherever she wishes to
go and getting into all the grooves with just the right amount of soul.
In a certain way, Debut Live may be the best album of the four — especially if, like
me, you also consider Debut to be
not just a «debut», but an album totally on par with everything Björk has
done ever since. Here we still have a fresh young artist, not too spoiled by
stardom, not yet having gone over the top, drunk with her own genius, and
seeming more content to just enjoy her own muse rather than becoming The Great
Mother of the Revolution of the Mind. Already bursting with creativity, but
not yet overflowing with narcissism. How is this anything other than an
unbearably nostalgic thumbs up?
POST LIVE (1995-97; 2003)
1) Headphones; 2) Army Of Me;
3) One Day; 4) The Modern Things; 5) Isobel; 6) Possibly Maybe; 7) Hyperballad;
8) I Go Humble; 9) Big Time Sensuality; 10) Enjoy; 11) I Miss You; 12) It's Oh
So Quiet; 13) Anchor Song.
This one was mostly recorded at Shepherds Bush
on February 27, 1997, not too far away from the release of Homogenic, meaning that all these Post songs had plenty of time to stew and settle down in the
repertoire. The only exceptions are ʽPossibly Maybeʼ and
ʽHyperballadʼ, recorded more than a year earlier on the Jools Holland
show. As you can see, the album is indeed covered almost in its entirety, with
the exception of ʽYou've Been Flirting Againʼ and ʽCover
Meʼ, for unknown reasons (perhaps they didn't have a harp on tour, without
which ʽCover Meʼ would be hard to imagine); in their place we have
the obscure B-side ʽI Go Humbleʼ and a re-run through three tunes
from Debut (ʽOne Dayʼ,
ʽBig Time Sensualityʼ, and ʽAnchor Songʼ).
Frankly speaking, there isn't much to say here:
the spectacle, at this point, still seems to have been relatively low key, and
unlike the «unplugged» version of Debut,
here the dame generally sticks to the original arrangements — and what changes
there are do not necessarily work for the best, like way too much accordeon (or
accordeon-like synthesizer, whatever). The Michel Legrand Orchestra is brought
out for ʽIt's Oh So Quietʼ, which is every bit as fun as the studio
arrangement, but this is just one of those cases of «gee, isn't it wonderful
how they really managed to save all the complexities and subtleties of this
song for the audience, so cool and all, and now I think I'll forget all about
it and go back to my studio version».
Amusingly, it is the old chestnuts ʽOne
Dayʼ and ʽBig Time Sensualityʼ that are given the most
transformational treatment. The former, stripped of almost everything but
electronic percussion, it becomes a «tribal-industrial» blend against which
Björk is fighting rather than singing. I cannot call this a great idea,
but at least they also had the good sense to make it twice as short as it used
to be — six minutes of this clanging would have been overkill. ʽBig Time
Sensualityʼ is slowed down, seriously tampered with in terms of electronic
percussions and «astral» overlays, and is pinned to a nagging
not-seen-there-before five-note riff that is more repetitive than awesome. As
for ʽI Go Humbleʼ, it's got a quirky time signature that I'd call
«limping-funk», but other than that, it's not a highlight of the show.
On the whole, I find myself agreeing, much to
my discontent, with the Pitchforkmedia reviewer who singled this one out as the
least interesting set of the four. Well-played, well-produced, engaging if you
want to, but skippable on the whole. Which is just a little sad, since Post is one of my favorite Björk
albums — then again, maybe she just didn't have the gall to mess around with
perfection. Who knows.
HOMOGENIC LIVE (1997-98; 2003)
1) Vísur Vatnsenda
Rósu; 2) Hunter; 3) You've Been Flirting Again; 4) Isobel; 5) All Neon
Like; 6) Possibly Maybe; 7) 5 Years; 8) Come To Me; 9) Immature; 10) I Go
Humble; 11) Bachelorette; 12) Human Behaviour; 13) Pluto; 14) Jóga; 15)
So Broken; 16) Anchor Song.
With the Homogenic
project all set to promote Björk as The Great Mother of All, it was
obvious that the live show had to make the appropriate adjustments — and so she
did, and I don't just mean a bigger light show and more costume changes, but
also the musical backing. The Icelandic String Octet followed her on the tour
whenever she went, and although I have no idea if the Icelandic String Octet
is a real octet (I mean, of the kind
that can do Schubert's D.803 and stuff), it is real enough to work out the
appropriately grand chamber backing (bordering on symphonic) to songs that
were, in the studio, largely dependent on electronics.
This is a terrific move, and although the
perfect balance between electronics, strings, and Icelandic pixie voice would
not really be reached until Vespertine
(both studio and live), it can be argued that the Homogenic songs do not need such perfection in the first place.
They are loud, brash, violent songs, after all, where energy and pathos are
more important than subtle finesse. And it works: look, for instance, how well
the slightly discordant strings compensate for the lack of Vocoder on
Björk's «roaring» part in ʽPlutoʼ. There's no roar at all, but
the climactic part of the song blows your mind anyway, largely due to the
strings.
The actual performances here are culled from
numerous shows, geographically stretching from Washington to Prague, and once
again covering the Jools Holland show on their way, including a version of
ʽJogaʼ with only strings
(no beats) that, believe it or not, is every bit as powerful as the studio
version — with little to detract you from the monster voice singing about how
beautiful it is to be in this state of emergency. The same performance also
gives us the rarity ʽSo Brokenʼ, originally the B-side to
ʽJogaʼ, where instead of strings we have flamenco guitar — it's
probably the closest thing to a wild Spanish ballad that the Icelandic lady has
ever produced in her career, not a masterpiece, but a fun curio to hear if you
ever wondered how Björk would function in «gypsy mode».
Even the older songs benefit from new touring
conditions — for instance, ʽIsobelʼ works much better with strings than with the rather silly accordeon on
the preceding tour, and ʽPossibly Maybeʼ has an almost magical
sound, just because the cellos add an extra psychedelic dimension to the already
enchanting «musical-box» keyboards. ʽCome To Meʼ opens with a solo
violin part in the style of 19th century romanticism, which would be cheesy in
anybody else's hands, but not in Björk's, who knows very well how to
combine «banal» elements with «controversial» ones; as long as she still sings
that way, she can quote from Mendelssohn underneath her vocals, beats, and
loops as long as she considers necessary.
Overall, this is a total success — most of the songs are at least slightly different from the studio versions, just enough to warrant an extra listen, and on top of that, Björk herself is in peak vocal form, screaming, howling, roaring, crooning, and praying her way through without a single glitch (okay, so these selections were handpicked from a vast number of tapes, so I have no idea how good she could be throughout the entire show — also, her voice does occasionally crack on ʽSo Brokenʼ, but I guess it's a predictable part of the program, given the song's title). There's an occasional touch of humor, too (check out the endearing "tsk-tsk-tsk" ending to the "silly girl, so silly" coda of ʽImmatureʼ), and then there's the final note she takes on the still-obligatory show closer ʽAnchor Songʼ — something utterly inhuman, causing a near-riot in the audience. A natural thumbs up — this is some prime quality live Björk at the peak of her powers.
VESPERTINE LIVE (2001; 2003)
1) Frosti; 2) Overture; 3) All
Is Full Of Love; 4) Cocoon; 5) Aurora; 6) Undo; 7) Unravel; 8) I've Seen It
All; 9) An Echo, A Stain; 10) Generous Palmstroke; 11) Hidden Place; 12) Pagan
Poetry; 13) Harm Of Will; 14) It's Not Up To You; 15) Unison; 16) It's In Our
Hands.
The only reason not to own this album is if you
own the Live At The Royal Opera House
video from 2001 instead. Although these particular performances were taken from
different locations on the 2001 tour, and there are some discrepancies in the
setlist (somewhat expectedly, the audio album focuses more on new material,
whereas the video includes a solid selection of older hits at the end), they
are more or less the same thing — and this time around, the emphasis was placed
more on accurate reproduction, accompanied with some gorgeous staging, so it
really really makes a lot of sense to see the show rather than just hear it.
Because Vespertine
was, indeed, a very special album for Björk, and the accompanying tour was
a very special tour. In two years time, the lady would be completely going off
her rocker, trying out fifty different shades of craziness all at once and, as
far as my opinion is concerned, severely crossing the line that separates
meaningful art from silly, pompous kitsch. But Vespertine was a deep, thoughtful, far-reaching album, and the
accompanying shows somehow managed to be glitzy and «cozy-homely» at the same
time. You get just one change of
clothing — Björk in a simple white virginal dress for the first half of
the show, Björk in a blood-red dress for the second half — a nice chamber
orchestra, a couple guys handling the electronics, and an entire female choir
from Greenland, in arguably the biggest bout of promotion for lovely Inuit
ladies that the world of pop music has ever seen. Then again, it doesn't take
much to travel from Iceland to Greenland, so perhaps it was more a question of
rehearsal logistics than of generous support for minorities, or of an artistic
choice of a group of people from the coldest regions on Earth.
The setlist on the album includes most of Vespertine (all but two tracks) and
also makes us remember Selmasongs
(the orchestra introduces the show with ʽOvertureʼ, and later on you
get a solo Björk performance of ʽI've Seen It Allʼ — something
of a bonus for those of us who find it harder to cope with the vocal philosophy
of Thom Yorke than with that of Guthmund's daughter), plus a couple of
rarities: ʽGenerous Palmstrokeʼ is a lovely B-side in the form of a
heated dialog between Björk and the harp, and ʽIt's In Our
Handsʼ was a special new song recorded as a bonus track for Greatest Hits — not all that great in
itself, but heavily experimental, with some of the most turbulent and dense
layers of electronics on any given Björk song, and it probably belongs in
the collection of any serious «glitch music» lover, provided love for «glitch
music» can really be called a «serious thing» (really).
The rarities, however, are not as important as
the entire experience: both on the video and on the live album, the sound is
engineered so as to maximally preserve the «cocoon-like» atmosphere of Vespertine. This was probably not an
easy task, but it was accomplished perfectly — and for once, I am not
complaining that the live performances are more often than not
indistinguishable from studio versions, because the biggest surprise, perhaps,
is that you completely forget that
these are live ones, until they die down and the stunned audience bursts into
applause. For a near-perfect record like Vespertine,
this live perfectionism is perhaps the only way to do it justice. In fact,
sometimes the live versions are even more perfect — for instance,
ʽUnisonʼ, with additional crystal-clear harp parts and more prominent
background vocals, sounds as if the necessary final touches to the song were
only added in concert.
I mean, it would be one thing if the original
arrangements were a piece of easy cake, but they were actually more complex
than anything prior to that point — and it is amazing how everything was taken to the stage and even slightly improved upon; and
I do understand that only the best live takes were hand-picked from the tour,
as far as Björk's own vocals go, but the fact of the matter is that she
was consistently in peak form on the video as well. Hardest working lady in the
business? In addition to being the
most talented? I guess you could say,
yes, that 2000-2001 belonged to Björk, and the current thumbs up
will refer not just to the textbook perfection of this live album, but to this
album as a symbol of her creative triumph. Too bad the strain was so heavy on
her that she went gaga in two years' time, and was never the same after that.
THE MUSIC FROM DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 (2005)
1) Gratitude; 2) Pearl; 3)
Ambergris March; 4) Bath; 5) Hunter Vessel; 6) Shimenawa; 7) Vessel Shimenawa;
8) Storm; 9) Holographic Entrypoint; 10) Cetacea; 11) Antarctic Return.
Although this project is quite commonly
featured in Björk discographies, it should still probably count as more of
a partnership-collaboration between Björk and her (unofficial) husband Matthew
Barney; more than anything else, the failure
of the project has probably more to do with Barney than with Björk, which
is why it also makes sense to put this brief review in the footnotes section.
It is indeed a soundtrack that Björk fashioned and adapted to Barney's
experimental film of the same name — sub-indexed 9 because it was actually part of 16 art objects that included shorter videos, drawings, and
sculptures, and were all called Drawing
Restraint.
Since the film is on Youtube, I had the
opportunity to skimp through some of it, and mostly it was what I expected — a
surrealist-absurdist collage, loosely based around a story of whale hunting
and pearl diving while heavily milking all sorts of Japanese imagery in the
process; in other words, a rather typical «love-it-or-hate-it» product of the
modern art era. Here, now, are a few select sonic pillars with which Björk
thought it appropriate to prop up the visuals.
Number one: Björk's own singing voice,
still quite fresh from the Medúlla
experience and ready to contribute some more of the same discordant polyphony
for anyone who asks. Best tasted on the tracks ʽBathʼ and
ʽStormʼ, to a lesser extent on ʽCetaceaʼ; on the whole,
though, much of the soundtrack is instrumental or features other people's
voices, since obviously Björk did not want the movie to become exclusively
associated with her own personality. If you loved Medúlla, you'll love these ones, too; personally, I find
ʽBathʼ too ugly, but on ʽStormʼ I do admit that she gets to
totally impersonate a mythological siren, so that you might find yourself
plugging your ears with wax in no time (and not necessarily for the same reason
that Ulysses' companions did).
Number two: lots and lots of shō playing, usually quite
high-pitched, because the desired effect is not for your ears to droop and
wither, but to bleed and explode. Relax — you're still better off than the
hunted whales or the pearl divers. Best tasted on ʽPearlʼ (where you
get a whole lot of excited sighs and whoopees, produced by supernatural little
furry creatures, to go along), ʽShimenawaʼ and the closing
ʽAntarctic Returnʼ. Not sure if these tracks have any value outside of the movie — not
even sure if they have much value inside
the movie. Then again, they are
played by Mayumi Miyata, acknowledged as the world's greatest shō player and the one to
successfully compose and perform contemporary classical music on it; I guess
that should count as publicity. An acquired taste, nonetheless. A very
stringent instrument. (The Chinese sheng,
from which it is derived, actually has a slightly softer sound, but hey, we
accept nothing but the extreme).
Number three: additional Japanese motives and
wholesale Japanese music inclusions, best represented by ʽHolographic
Entrypointʼ, which is basically just ten minutes of Japanese Noh singing
as delivered by guest performer Shiro Nomura. Not sure again why you need to
hear this — if you want Noh, go watch some real stuff, or, at least, train
yourself to sonically difficult Japanese singing through samurai movies. I
mean, Björk is a «weird» artist
by Western measures, but there is nothing weird about Noh by Japanese
measures, so this juxtaposition is just silly.
Other than that, Will Oldham (a.k.a. «Bonnie
ʽPrinceʼ Billy») makes a guest appearance on ʽGratitudeʼ,
singing in Beginner Level Björkese, and there is an interesting use of
brass on several tracks (ʽHunter Vesselʼ) that recalls various
similar experiments in modern and totally-modern classical music. These are
just minor flourishes, though, whose main function is to raise the level of
diversity on the album — after all, the movie is probably supposed to be about
everything at the same time, so why should the soundtrack fall short of the
visuals?
As you may have already guessed, the verdict is
hardly likely to be anything other than a thumbs down. ʽBathʼ and
ʽStormʼ could pass for acceptable Medúlla outtakes if you like Medúlla, but everything else feels either too
un-Björkish or too toss-off-ish. If the point of the album was to raise
awareness of the wonders of Japanese culture in among Björk's active fans
(«Björk endorses Noh!», «Björk says listening to solo shō music is good for your mind!»),
then this is just a publicity stunt in the first place; if the point was
something else, I am not sure why I should be forcing myself to see it, instead
of spending time on something more valuable (like watching an old Mizoguchi
movie, for instance). But then again, I am totally open to the idea that one
listen to Drawing Restraint 9 —
better still, one sitting through the movie — may be enough for a veteran whale
hunter to swear off his murderous trade for ever. If sociological research
confirms this, I am totally ready to change that rating: as a responsible
citizen of the world, I love and respect whales, and believe that every whale
killer should be forced to sit and listen to hours and hours of Noh singing
until the very idea of killing a whale no longer rests in his purified mind.
VOLTAÏC (2009)
CD I: 1) Wanderlust; 2)
Hunter; 3) Pleasure Is All Mine; 4) Innocence; 5) Army Of Me; 6) I Miss You; 7)
Earth Intruders; 8) All Is Full Of Love; 9) Pagan Poetry; 10) Vertebrae By
Vertebrae; 11) Declare Independence.
CD II: 1) Earth
Intruders (XXXChange Remix); 2) Innocence (Simian Mobile Disco Remix); 3)
Declare Independence (Matthew Herbert Remix); 4) Wanderlust (Ratatat Remix);
5) The Dull Flame Of Desire (Modeselektor Remix for Girls); 6) Earth Intruders
(Lexx Remix); 7) Innocence (Graeme Sinden Remix); 8) Declare Independence
(Ghostigital Remix); 9) The Dull Flame Of Desire (Modeselektor Remix for Boys);
10) Innocence (Alva Noto Unitxt Remodel); 11) Declare Independence (Black Pus
Remix); 12) Innocence (Simian Mobile Disco Dub Remix).
I would not bother with this one, honestly. Volta was not Björk at her very
best, and neither is this accompanying piece, or, rather, multi-set of
accompanying pieces. In its shortest incarnation, Voltaïc is just one CD, capturing a live performance recorded
without a live audience at the Olympic Studios. In its longest incarnation, the
set also includes a live DVD (recorded with
live audiences in Paris and Reykjavik), a DVD of musical videos, and a separate
CD of multiple remixes of Volta
songs, similarly to the Telegram
album but perhaps a little less conceptual and autonomous in execution. Plus
artwork, of course, and all sorts of various goodies for people to argue about
(crass commercialism or heartfelt gift for the fans?).
This brief and somewhat displeased review will
discuss only the CDs. The first one, of all the wealth of live material
released by the singer, is probably the least useful. It sounds like an experiment
— would it be possible to completely trick the listener into thinking that he
is dealing with a polished studio re-recording rather than a «spontaneous» live
performance? Yes, it would. Now what? The Volta
songs all sound almost exactly the same as their studio counterparts, and the
others, even if they do modify the arrangements (for instance, using horns
instead of strings on ʽHunterʼ and ʽAll Is Full Of Loveʼ),
still allow for no real spontaneity. Of interest only for hardcore fans who
thrive on each and every nuance.
The second CD, the remixes, is at least
formally much more creative than the first one, but still, it ain't no Telegram. Because Telegram was an artsy experience — all sorts of people who were,
you could say, on the cutting edge of «technological art» back then, gathered
together to pool their vision with Björk's in a variegated and stimulating
mind meld. The Volta Mixes, on the
other hand, seem to pursue a much more pragmatic goal — this is a strictly
club-oriented dance album, going along well with some MDMA, a light show, and a
vague realization that you are being stimulated by a 44-year old pretender and
you don't bloody care.
Most of the remixes belong to fashionable DJs
(XXXChange) or electronic experimentators (Matthew Herbert) or other people,
information on whom is not even available on Wikipedia, but the results are
always the same — psychedelic body muzak with chopped-up, spliced and treated
fragments of Björk's spirit floating in and out more like a symbolic
guide-and-protector than with any serious purpose. Honestly, it would make more
sense to write about all these artists than pretend that The Volta Mixes represent different views on how to show Björk
songs from some unexpected side. I am not saying that the mixes «suck» —
they're fairly imaginative, and different versions of the same song often
sound nothing alike — but where Telegram
was like a long line of fashion designers, each dressing the girl in his/her
own haute couture, The Volta Mixes produces no such
impression. All they do is just sample the tracks to fit their own visions,
which often have nothing whatsoever to do with the Volta vision.
For fairness' sake, I must say that the live
DVD, of which I have caught some glimpses, is far more entertaining than the
rest of this stuff — the Paris show is particularly crazy, colorful, and
energetic, even if it often comes close to vulgar kitsch (not something I could
ever say of the Vespertine shows).
But whether you will want to splurge on the whole package will ultimately
depend on whether you agree with me that post-Vespertine Björk is a messy, confused, and generally
dissatisfactory experience, or prefer to think that the lady has simply become
«different», but her music still makes sense, shows depth, and/or sets trends.
As far as my opinion is concerned, Voltaïc
is simply the perfectly adequate companion to Volta — mediocre (downright bad in places) album, suitably mediocre
paraphernalia. No big surprise there.
ENGLAND MADE ME (1998)
1) Girl Singing In The
Wreckage; 2) England Made Me; 3) New Baby Boom; 4) It's Only The End Of The
World; 5) Ideal Home; 6) Child Psychology; 7) I. C. One Female; 8) Up Town Top
Ranking; 9) Swinging; 10) Kidnapping An Heiress; 11) Hated Sunday.
One hell of a fun ride would be playing this
album back-to-back with Springsteen's Born
In The USA — another album that describes the uneasy relationship between
the protagonist and his home country, but in a diametrically opposite manner.
As someone born in the USA, the Boss is rowdy, hot, dynamic, willing to go to
extremes in any given emotional state. As someone made by England, Sarah Nixey
is... frozen. Black Box Recorder?
More like Ice Box Recorder, if you ask me. With cockle shells and silver bells
to boot.
Interestingly enough, the Black Box Recorder
project was started up by Luke Haines before
his main band, The Auteurs, folded its wings and went to sleep. In its deepest
essence, the project pursued the same goals — a cynical, melancholic
deconstruction of any life-asserting values that the surrounding society and
culture might contain — but the execution was very different. All the songs
were co-written by Haines with John Moore, formerly the drummer and guitarist
for The Jesus And Mary Chain, and all the lead vocals were female, handled by
the abovementioned Sarah Nixey, formerly a nobody, but as a member of Black Box
Recorder — one of the most haunting figures in British indie pop. Consequently,
Black Box Recorder explored a «softer», subtler, less rock-based approach than
The Auteurs, and its combination of ingredients, even if it is not necessarily
«better» than The Auteurs, seems much more unique.
The key ingredient of England Made Me are the vocal melodies that Luke and John are
feeding to Sarah — and her interpretation of these melodies. Unlike, say, Beth
Gibbons of Portishead, who typically sings out of a bathtub with razor blades
fastened to her wrists, Sarah never lets her slightly childlike voice quiver
with extreme emotion. Instead, she delivers those lyrics, usually full of
gruesome, morbid, or cynically bittersweet imagery (the most often quoted line
is the chorus to ʽChild Psychologyʼ — "life is unfair, kill
yourself or get over it"), like a formerly sweet and delicate person that,
after some particularly dreadful trauma, has pretty much lost all feeling, or
fallen in an entranced state. Pinned to a background of quietly plucked
guitars, inobtrusive backing vocals, occasional chimes and synthesizer strings,
it makes for a great combination: simple, immediately hitting all the right
nerve centers, and with no direct analogies.
The price to pay for this is monotonousness:
the level of variation in between these 11 tunes is fairly low. But the tunes
themselves are short, and each one has a little something going on to hook your
attention, be it the decisiveness with which Sarah states that "my 18th
birthday, I'll die of boredom" (ʽGirl Singing In The Wreckageʼ),
or the gruesome conclusiveness of her "the kid is gone, he's not my
son" (ʽNew Baby Boomʼ), or the freezing, ironically consolating
tone of her "it's only the end of the world..." (meaning that the
worst is yet to come, after all), or the depressing blues picking on
ʽKidnapping An Heiressʼ, which leaves no hope for humanity even
before the first bit of lyrics comes along.
The true wonder of England Made Me, though, is that it is one of those albums that
does not really make you want to kill
yourself — but rather to get over it. It wears its mourning clothes quite
casually and stoically, neither commanding the listener to fight this gloom
(because it cannot be fought against) nor, like Robert Smith or the
aforementioned Beth Gibbons, inviting you to masochistically gloat over it.
It's only the end of the world — get it? It's not that serious. It just happens. One of the key songs, ʽIdeal
Homeʼ, presents you with this mystical claustrophobic perfection ("in
an ideal home, everything's safe... in an ideal home, nothing you do can go
wrong..."), contrasting it with "miserable songs from the house next
door, perhaps they're planning to end it all" — you can take it as a
blunt allegory of social segregation, of course, but you can also view it as a
hymn to spiritual isolationism: the «ideal home» is a metaphor for simply
locking out all feeling and barricading yourself from all the evils,
disappointments, and different degrees of shit going on all over the world — an
urge that may not be completely alien to quite a few of us, right? Especially
when the ʽIdeal Homeʼ is set to such lovely music.
This is, of course, the quintessence of Luke
Haines, the most cool-headed guy ever to write and sing about the world's
evils, but Sarah here is a more perfect vehicle for his ideas than he himself
ever was, and England Made Me,
despite — or due to — painting a rather unsavory picture of England as a place
where people trap spiders underneath glass and kill strangers at railway stations
just because people love a good murder mystery, is one of his finest
contributions to the world of intelligent pop music. A humble masterpiece that
deserves to be much better known, so here's hoping that this enthusiastic thumbs up
might help it some.
THE FACTS OF LIFE (2000)
1) The Art Of Driving; 2)
Weekend; 3) The English Motorway System; 4) May Queen; 5) Sex Life; 6) French
Rock'n'Roll; 7) The Facts Of Life; 8) Straight Life; 9) Gift Horse; 10) The
Deverell Twins; 11) Goodnight Kiss.
This is like a carbon copy of England Made Me, except this time
everything is different. Well, musically
the only big difference is that the band relies more on electronics —
creatively programmed drums and digital keyboards threaten to push the guitar
sound out completely on the first few tracks, although acoustic and electric
guitars still find a way to creep in through the back door, eventually. But if
you thought this change in texture would make the band sound colder (as a transition to a more
electronic sound often does), you couldn't be more wrong.
In comparison with England Made Me, The Facts
Of Life is a downright optimistic, positively charged album. Not because England was such an epitome of
depression, and certainly not because the band now offers anything like a
«happy» view of the world — no, they still sound like the same bunch of
resigned shut-ins, with no intention whatsoever to come out into the sun and
play the usual game of life. The difference is that, faced with the choice of
"kill yourself or get over it", The
Facts Of Life makes a clear decision in the direction of "getting over
it" (I could not even exclude the possibility that the decision was
consciously chosen so as to avoid the tag of «suicide propagandists» that some
media sources were only too happy to attach to the band).
In a way, the differences are subtle — and how
could they not be, when this is, after all, the same band, with the same
distinctive, individualistic vocalist and the same idea that music should be an
honest reflection of life itself? But sometimes a spade is just a spade, and
when, on the tenebrous ballad ʽStraight Lifeʼ, Sarah coos "it's
a beautiful morning, it's a beautiful day", it is unreasonable to look
for any hidden irony. Instead, this is a quiet, self-contained celebration of
the «dream home» — separation from all the irritants ("away from
alternative culture, transient people coming in and out of our lives...")
and chilling out in the safeness and cuddliness of your densely woven cocoon.
Irony? More like utopian escapism, if you ask me. Some people actually like to "live in a tin on top of
the wardrobe", especially those that are convinced that living anywhere
else exposes you to misery and suffering.
If there is one song that I feel reminded of
while listening to this album, it is... Bob Dylan's ʽLay Lady Layʼ —
the synthesized strings that open ʽThe Art Of Drivingʼ kind of echo
those Nashville steel guitars that provide the soft, springy foundation for
Dylan's love ballad. I daresay it is just a coincidence, but in reality, the
two songs share more than just a couple of chords — both are soft, gallant
pleas to the imaginary listener, begging him/her to give in, seducing and
becalming the listener. From that point of view, a "stay lady stay, stay
while the night is still ahead" is not that different from a "you've
been driving way too fast, you've been taking things too far". The entire
album is just that — a big old "slow down" message. Slow down, drop out,
tuck in, get off, and stay under. There's actual beauty to be contemplated in
all this.
To make things more convincing, Nixey shifts
her singing technique, melting a few blocks of ice and transforming them to
breathy steam — songs like ʽWeekendʼ are purringly sexy, even if the
singer immediately issues a warning ("careful not to touch, we've drunk
enough"), and few other people could make a repeated line like
"Friday night, Saturday morning" sound so mysterious — is it longing?
yearning? boredom? hypnotism? whatever it is, it's darkly enchanting, as is
ʽThe English Motorway Systemʼ, a Buddhist anthem to the art of
existing and surviving on the highway — especially efficient if you play it
back to back with Deep Purple's ʽHighway Starʼ, as an effective
illustration of how the exact same object can trigger such different visions.
And even if "the English motorway system is an accident waiting to
happen", this is not a horrific realisation, but rather just one more of
those "facts of life" that you learn in the course of "detached
observing". It's a highway anthem all right, yet at the same time it's a
song that could have just as well be done by any qualified master of «ambient
pop», like Brian Eno.
So as not to fall completely into the trap of
discussing lyrics rather than music (and there is a lot to discuss here, believe me), I will just state what seems
obvious — the chief musical instrument here is Nixey's voice, through and
through; otherwise, ʽMay Queenʼ would be a mere rip-off of the
Beatles' ʽDear Prudenceʼ (whose guitar chords it is quite unashamed
to pilfer), and ʽGift Horseʼ would merely be a pretty instrumental,
stuck somewhere in between New Age, adult contemporary, and baroque pop — it is
the singing that transforms them into gorgeous fantasies of romantic escapism.
Most beautiful of the lot, though, is saved for last: for ʽGoodnight
Kissʼ, Sarah packs so much tenderness that by this time, I believe, every
single listener should be subscribing to the Church of Black Box Recorder,
buying all their records, stocking up on cereals, water, and toilet paper, and
boarding up all doors and windows. "Use your imagination, we can go
anywhere" — it's all in the mind, you know.
Of course, if I were hard pressed to only
choose one, I'd still go with England
Made Me, for all the extra darkness and frost. But The Facts Of Life really dwells in the same darkness and frost: all
it does is shine a little light inside the darkness and get a bit of a fire
going in the midst of the frost, because, well, you know, otherwise it's
"kill yourself" and we don't wanna do that. So essentially they just
constitute a solid premise and a logical sequel, and the «choice» is a fickle
idea anyway — let us just simplify things and go with another thumbs up.
THE WORST OF BLACK BOX RECORDER (2001)
1) Seasons In The Sun; 2)
Watch The Angel Not The Wire; 3) Jackie Sixty; 4) Start As You Mean To Go On;
5) The Facts Of Life (remix); 6) Lord Lucan Is Missing; 7) Wonderful Life; 8)
Uptown Top Ranking; 9) Brutality; 10) Factory Radio; 11) Soul Boy; 12)
Rock'n'Roll Suicide.
Much of this album has been made redundant upon
being converted into bonus tracks to the new CD editions of England Made Me and Facts Of Life — no big surprise, since
most of the songs were originally B-sides on singles taken from those albums.
That said, this compilation still merits a separate review, since every single
song on it, and that goes beyond the B-sides, rules to high heaven, and plus,
only a band like Black Box Recorder could dare to slap the semi-ironic,
semi-bombastic title of The Worst on
a record that so clearly contains some of the best. Because for Luke Haines,
the best is the worst — in the sense
that, the more uncomfortable you feel about any of his songs, the better they
probably are.
Since this is
a compilation, thinking conceptual thoughts about the record would be rather
pointless, but it does open up a few extra edges and links to BBR that would
otherwise be missed. For instance: David Bowie liked Jacques Brel, enough to
cover his songs, and on this album, BBR cover both Brel and Bowie — as long as the songs have something to do with quiet
desperation and impending demise (ʽSeasons In The Sunʼ and
ʽRock'n'Roll Suicideʼ both qualify). The arrangements and
particularly Sarah's vocal adaptations are almost enough to make me cherish the
covers over the originals (at the very least, ʽSeasons In The Sunʼ is
definitely a morbid improvement over the hit version by Terry Jacks — might
have been even better if the band reverted to Brel's original French lyrics of
ʽLe Moribondʼ, but Nixey's French might not have been good enough for
that, especially since her little phonetic peculiarities are an integral part
of the band's magic, and they could have suffered in the transition to a
non-native language).
Still another cover is ʽUptown Top
Rankingʼ, formerly a visiting card for the one-hit reggae wonder Althea
& Donna — the original was a slightly ironic, slightly defying piece of
«normcore propaganda», as they'd say nowadays ("no pop no style, I strictly
roots"); BBR extract it from their nostalgic attic, dust it off, freeze it
up, and prove that they can put a little whiff of genuine Black Box Recorder™
spirit into anything. The main difference is that the old version had life and
humor in it; the new version has bleakness and claustrophobia in it, but the
basic message of "no pop no style" remains the same. Consequently, it
is more interesting to compare these two versions than, say, the two versions
of ʽRock'n'Roll Suicideʼ, where they basically preserve Bowie's
original emotions, merely cutting down the bombastic dramaticism.
As for the originals, well, they are
instructive. For instance, I never knew anything about «Jackie 60», which was
apparently one of the hottest and kinkiest New York party events in the 1990s,
sort of a symbol of complete freedom of sexual identity — and here is Luke
Haines writing a song about it in non-too flattering terms: ʽSave me, save
me from Jackie Sixty, take me, take me to the top of the worldʼ, Sarah
coos in her trademark frigid-seductive manner, as the incredibly catchy pop
song, with acid political incorrectness, attacks the allegedly phoney «world of
Jackie 60»: "This isn't mother nature boy / Stripped naked and frightened
/ The only reason that you're here / Is because you've been invited".
Spelled out wicked and strong, and nobody could even use the words as a pretext
for accusations of homophobia.
Other highlights include the short and
unusually hard-rocking ʽLord Lucan Is Missingʼ (another good reason
to catch up on celebrity history — apparently Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of
Lucan, was quite a colorful figure, well worth immortalizing in 1:49 worth of
stern hard rock riffage and funereal intonations); ʽStart As You Mean To
Go Onʼ, which not only has one of the catchiest basslines on the album,
but should also be made required listening for all the hipster youth of today
(sometimes being torn to shreds right in your face may serve as helpful shock
therapy, although most people probably wouldn't get the message of lines like
"topshop, doves and Glastonbury, learned to be a secretary" and
"cut our losses, screw our bosses, get out while we're still young");
and ʽBrutalityʼ, a song so unnerving and so ambiguous that it alone
could have made Black Box Recorder the biggest anti-hip turn-off ever since the
Kinks chose to make themselves deliberately uncool in the eyes of the young
generation with Village Green.
Please remember, though, that although the
lyrics to at least half of these songs simply beg to become the chief focus of attention (we could quote and
analyze till morning, easily enough), they are never delivered at the expense of hooks — verses, choruses, little
guitar figures, everything fitting the general mood. You certainly do not need
to understand one word in order to cherish the gorgeous melancholy of
ʽWonderful Lifeʼ, whose lead vocals, harmonies, guitars, wintery
keyboards, and music-box chimes are arguably this record's finest musical
synthesis, and whose chorus mentions a "wonderful life" in the most
sadly ironic manner possible.
Overall, no question about the rating — thumbs up
a-plenty — except that I generally agree with the idea of eventually disbanding
the record, as long as nothing on it ever gets lost, and fattening up the
running lengths of the two «proper» albums: even despite the monotonousness of
the mood, this is songwriting and performing of such high quality that I'd have
no problem whatsoever with, say, a 60-minute running length for England Made Me (well, that's pretty
much how it goes on the new CD edition).
PASSIONOIA (2003)
1) The School Song; 2) GSOH
Q.E.D.; 3) British Racing Green; 4) Being Number One; 5) The New Diana; 6)
These Are The Things; 7) Andrew Ridgley; 8) When Britain Refused To Sing; 9)
Girls Guide For The Modern Diva; 10) I Ran All The Way Home.
Apparently, this was never meant to be the
final BBR LP — the band members were just supposed to take a break in order to
pursue solo ventures, from which, however, they never truly recovered. Sad,
because out of their three «proper» LPs, Passionoia
is clearly the weakest one. It is not at all bad — in fact, it's intriguing as
hell, and not any less intelligent and biting, and I'm all for having it and
savoring it, it's just that it would look much better sitting in the middle of
their discography rather than playing the part of an accidental swan song.
The thing is, on Passionoia Haines and Co. decided that it was time to frame their
satire and maddening ambiguity in an «electro-pop» setting, highly derivative
of Eighties' synthpop and, in some way, quietly heralding the soon-to-come
trend of rock bands embracing vintage synthesizers and hopping into the 21st
century on the shoulders of that weird, tech-crazed, decade's electronic
wizards. But Luke Haines really plays nobody's game but his own, and, as usual,
it is not easy to tell whether he actually likes these dance rhythms or if he
just uses them to lure in the unsuspecting listener — dance, dance, dance,
before you know what really hit you.
What I do
know is that the pounding electropop beats disturb and confuse the subtlety, so
important for the total success of any given Black Box Recorder song. You can't
beat those lyrics, or those pop hooks, or the usual deadly loveliness of Sarah
Nixey's voice, but you can corrode them a little if you go too far, and
contaminate the atmosphere. Certainly songs like ʽGSOH Q.E.D.ʼ or
ʽAndrew Ridgeleyʼ (a veritable tongue-in-cheek ode to synthpop,
choosing Wham! as its symbolic start-off point) should not be used as a
natural introduction to the world of Black Box Recorder: we wouldn't want
anybody to think of them as a «dance band», even if you have to be really stupid to take ʽAndrew
Ridgeleyʼ at face value.
That said, in the overall context of BBR's
career, the point is taken: Passionoia
is not so much this band's lesson in nostalgia as it is a lesson in history.
Haines and Moore, using Sarah as their instrument of choice, go back to their
childhood days (actually, one could say they go back to her childhood days, since Sarah is the youngest member of the three
and it is only her teens that were properly soaked in the Eighties) and,
basically, ruminate on what it was that made Black Box Recorder what it is
today. Of all three records, Passionoia
is the most extraverted one — there are endless references to Britain, British
history, British culture, British celebrities, British education, and even
though all of them are still made from within the safe frozen confines of BBR's
glass house, this time around, BBR's beady eye is staring out, not in.
As usual, the songs are mostly great, despite
the fact that this transition to electronic rhythms way too often prompts Nixey
to trade in her nuanced singing for ice-cold spoken parts or robotic choruses
(which she still delivers seductively). ʽThe School Songʼ takes ye
olde tradition of lambasting the cold and cruel educational practices of The
System and makes Black Box Recorder a «proud» part of it — whoever takes the
time to listen to this anthem to the end, gets "a grade A from the Black
Box Recorder School of Song"; along the way, Sarah successfully plays the
part of the monster teacher (although, frankly speaking, I wouldn't mind
getting a double detention from the likes of her!) and instructs you to "destroy your record collection,
it's for your own protection", which is fairly sound advice, I'd say.
The major highlight and, not coincidentally,
the least dance-oriented tune on the album is ʽBritish Racing
Greenʼ, probably one of the creepiest pieces in the BBR catalog: the
lovelier the tone in which Sarah is describing our conservative ideal ("a
little cottage by the sea, a glass of gin, a box of chocolate"), the more
disturbing is that post-chorus distorted guitar riff, and the very idea of
"British racing green", ending each chorus with gravity and suspense,
is used as a threatening symbol of... isolation? containment? self-sufficiency?
whatever. Where a Ray Davies would have probably turned the same song into a
hypnotic ad for his country, Black Box Recorder have this perfect balance
between paradise and nightmare — just like on the album cover, where blissful
poolside relaxation is contrasted with some poor slob floating face downwards
in the same pool (a visual metaphor that is almost too blatant by BBR's own standards).
The same song also introduces the band's big
problem with Lady Di ("Now I'm living in a chatroom with the Diana fan
club / They sent a virus to my dream"), more fully explored in the vicious
electronic-acoustic ballad ʽNew Dianaʼ — so vicious, in fact, that it
would automatically preclude Black Box Recorder from turning into the nation's
favorite band, had they ever nurtured such a thought. Although, frankly
speaking, it is not a very good song: musically simplistic and vocally relying
on a single repetitive hook ("I want to be the new Diana!"), it has
less replay value than the similarly-themed, but not name-dropping ʽGirls
Guide For The Modern Divaʼ, with a trickier vocal arrangement.
The sarcastic mask stays on the face all
through the album, until the very last number: ʽI Ran All The Way
Homeʼ, nearly free of any electronic coatings, states that "The
novelty has worn off / We are not amused any more / If you really love me /
You'll let me go home". Go home where, exactly? It does feel like an
escapist anthem, but the way Haines, Moore, and Nixey built up their
philosophy, it does not exactly leave them any particular room for escape. Then
again, probably what they are talking about is still that same "home"
of ʽIdeal Homeʼ, the cocoon-capsule, the «black box» that shelters
the protagonist from the perversities of unprotected life — the whole song is
just one more metaphor for a panicky existence in the real world, into which
they'd briefly ventured out with their dance rhythms and pulsating
synthesizers, and which they now abhor even more completely than before. At
least, that's one possible hell of an interpretation.
Despite its particular and general flaws, there
is still no way that Passionoia
could be deprived of a thumbs up, and if you were taken in by the first
two records, it will, at worst, let you down only slightly (at best, if you are
a synthpop / techno lover, its computerized tissue will only be a further
stimulus). As I said, the only reason for sadness is that with this record,
Black Box Recorder bid us all farewell without anyone knowing it. They did
come together several years later, with two more songs written and released as
a single circa 2009, but no album followed, and the band officially split in
2010. Of course, it may simply have been that they felt there was nothing more
to say, and I get them: pursuing the same musical and ideological agenda, album
after album, must be tedious for Luke Haines, and as great as the Black Box
Recorder project has been, it has
been really a «one-trick pony» type of project — I mean, Sarah Nixey is a
perfect type of singer for this attitude, but she is rather one-dimensional, like so many femme fatales (Nico etc.), and if Black Box Recorder carried on for
too long, they would have run the risk of stepping into the realm of
self-parody. The only thing we can hope for now is that these three records do
not fade away into total obscurity — they may be closely linked to a particular
time and a particular place, but that time and that place are really so
symbolic and so extendable to other situations that they will always find a
grateful audience, like so many other «dated» artefacts of quintessentially
British culture.
SHAKE YOUR MONEY MAKER (1990)
1) Twice As Hard; 2) Jealous
Again; 3) Sister Luck; 4) Could I've Been So Blind; 5) Seeing Things; 6) Hard
To Handle; 7) Thick 'n' Thin; 8) She Talks To Angels; 9) Struttin' Blues; 10)
Stare It Cold; 11*) Don't Wake Me; 12*) She Talks To Angels (acoustic); 13)
Mercy, Sweet Moan.
I am pretty sure that in a matter of several
decades the world will have forgotten about The Black Crowes entirely, because,
let's face it: the only reason that Shake Your Money Maker turned them into
an American sensation almost overnight was a world of hungry teenagers who
needed their own Led Zeppelin /
Aerosmith combo, and maybe a smaller world of conservative old dietitians
operating on the principle «if it ain't rockin' like it used to, it ain't worth
shit».
The best thing about the Georgia-born Robinson
brothers (singer Chris and guitar player Rich) is that they had always been
perfectly honest with themselves. What they wanted to play was none of that
overproduced pop-metal crap — just yer old, time-honored, in-yer-face
rock'n'roll, preferably with a bit of a rustic flavor and, of course, soul
a-plenty. Never mind that the old time-honored rock'n'roll was out of fashion
(then again, deep down in Georgia it probably never was), or, even worse, that
zillions of 1970s bands had seemingly mined its resources down to the last
speck of gold dust. The important thing is that we had a problem: «rock and
roll» on the charts around 1989 consisted of Poison, Warrant, and Bon Jovi, and
someone had to put an end to that.
Of course, in the grand scheme of things the
band was not very successful, but both the LP and some of its singles did chart
highly, and, most importantly, Shake
Your Money Maker was really a blessing for those who wanted something
fresh, raw, ballsy, and not «over-glammed» or too overtly hedonistic or too
utterly stupid, like so many of those hair metal hits. From a certain point of
view, the album was an instant remedy for those who'd written off the new-look
Aerosmith after Permanent Vacation
and Pump — these Robinson guys
clearly took their lesson from Rocks
and Draw The Line instead, with
songs like ʽJealous Againʼ and ʽDon't Wake Meʼ (the latter
is only included as a bonus track on a later CD edition) sounding like carbon
copies of the 'Smiths in their prime.
The bad news is that The Black Crowes were a
(literally) family-oriented band, and what the brothers had in terms of
conviction and raw energy, they never had in any other terms — like
songwriting, or performing distinctiveness. Chris Robinson is a strong,
competent vocalist, and his brother is a knowledgeable rhythm player, and their
early pal Jeff Cease is a reliable supplier of wailing blues-rock solos — and
that's about it: collectively or individually, all of their assets are firmly
«middle of the road». Nothing awful, but nothing really above winning first
prize on the National Rock'n'Roll Competition every once in a while, where you
are judged objectively based on how much you have practiced, not on how much
talent God, or your genes, gave you and how much of it you have been able to
exploit the right way.
All of these ten pieces — blues-rock,
boogie-rock, and balladry alike — are passable and enjoyable if you care at
all for that specific sound. Swampy slide guitars, huge booming drums (but naturally booming, with none of those
electronic enhancements), honky tonk piano blasting from under the guitar
layers, and a rough, but friendly guy who's obviously got nothing to hide
wailing on top of it all about the simple highs and lows of healthy country
life. What's not to like, unless you take pride in being all stuck up and shit?
Nothing. It's when you try to rewind these songs in the back of your mind, once
the record is over, that the trouble starts — none of the melodies are
memorable, which is only natural, since I have trouble identifying one single
melody that was actually, you know, «written» specifically for this album.
Maybe a few of the choruses that Chris sings across the guitar lines are
technically «new», but the accompanying music is so thoroughly devoid of
invention that this never really remedies the situation.
The not-so-subtle reference to Elmore James in
the LP title may be understood both as an allegorical way of commercial
stimulation or, more likely, as an allegorical way of saying «we make
blues-rock with slide guitars and we don't give a damn about being original»
— further confirmed by the fact that
the band's breakout single was a cover of Otis Redding's ʽHard To
Handleʼ, a song previously very much associated with the Grateful Dead but
getting a new lease on life here as the Black Crowes, essentially, play it as
if it were Aerosmith's ʽWalk This Wayʼ: dirtier, gruffier, scruffier
— as badboyishly as they can, which is still not badboyish enough when compared
with classic Aerosmith, though.
Other hits from the album included: ʽShe
Talks To Angelsʼ, a sprawling country-rock ballad that seems to try to
emulate the Stones circa Exile On Main
Street — and fails, because the guitar work is just meandering, and the
vocals lack Jagger's classic ability to strike fire out of thin air like he did
on, say, ʽLoving Cupʼ; ʽJealous Againʼ, which is just
barroom bravado, too politely inoffensive to be gloriously offensive; and the
opening track, ʽTwice As Hardʼ, which is very loud indeed, but still
seems like somebody imitating drunken fervor than actually being drunk.
All in all, I should probably hate the album and the band, but somehow the Crows
manage to be smart enough to avoid any major irritants — such as direct melodic
rip-offs of classics (usually imitating general style rather than particular
bits of substance) or getting all pompous and ceremonial about what they do
(«sacrificing to the great spirit of rock'n'roll» and all that). And since,
unlike quite a few people, I do not at all think that Shake Your Money Maker has to be that particular benchmark
according to which the band should be judged once and for all, we could
probably let them off the hook by sticking the «formative» label on top. They
would never get too different — their creative, or, rather, anti-creative ego
was established here from the start — but they would get a little more challenging and «hard to handle» later on.
THE SOUTHERN HARMONY AND MUSICAL COMPANION (1992)
1) Sting Me; 2) Remedy; 3)
Thorn In My Pride; 4) Bad Luck Blue Eyes Goodbye; 5) Sometimes Salvation; 6)
Hotel Illness; 7) Black Moon Creeping; 8) No Speak No Slave; 9) My Morning
Song; 10) Time Will Tell.
It is hard to argue with an album that shot four singles into the #1 «mainstream
rock» chart position, and made it all the way to the top of the charts in 1992
despite neither being a hair metal album, nor a grunge album, nor a Whitney
Houston album. It must be a
masterpiece, right? One of those traditional rock'n'roll records that's really
got it made, breathing new life into the old form and proving that rock'n'roll
always smells, but never dies?
All right then, let's start from the beginning.
ʽSting Meʼ opens the show with a nasty distorted riff, soon joined by
keyboards, lead guitar (from new member Marc Ford), and a supporting female
choir for extra gospel power. It's crunchy, powerful rock'n'roll, right? Well,
I don't know, but no matter how many times I try to get my heart a-goin' to
this song, I feel like there is some key element that is totally missing. It's
odd, really — there's a riff, the lead vocalist is singing his heart out, the
lead guitarist is blueswailing like crazy, the guitar tones are excellent, and
yet the song still drifts by without touching a single nerve. How could that
be?
Let's move on to ʽRemedyʼ. This
little monster was an even huger hit, and it rocks with the same energy and
conviction as ʽSting Meʼ, but throws in a funkier groove, so all the
cool black people can join in the fun. But no dice — all I feel is that it is every
bit as musically impotent as its predecessor. It's got all the formal
qualifications, but it doesn't come alive. What the heck?..
My best guess is that over those two years, the
Robinson brothers have evolved as arrangers and maybe even as performers, but
they're still fucking shitty songwriters as far as I can see. That riff which
opens ʽSting Meʼ — it seems technically all right, but it doesn't
communicate any particular feeling. I mean, compare it with, say, Keith
Richards' riff that opens ʽCan't You Hear Me Knockin'ʼ: that one immediately gave an idea of «don't you
mess with me» — free as a bird, dirty, and dangerous. The riff of ʽSting
Meʼ, in the meantime, does not suggest anything except «hey, we've
actually managed to come up with a riff that nobody did before» (and for a good
reason). Besides, once the vocals kick in, it sinks into the background, and
the average listener probably ceases paying attention to the musical elements
of the song at that point.
Basically, this is the kind of gut reaction I
get from every song on here. The
rockers all sound technically great, with expert guitar playing and tasteful
production. The ballads are all formally soulful, loud, screechy, but never
submitting to the disgraceful «power ballad» format (power chords, strings,
pompous attitude, all that shit). It should all be good, but there isn't a
single «really good» song on here. I have no problems with using it as a
background accompaniment, but all the songs ultimately just stick in one big
greasy ball of loud distorted guitars and a guy who wails and yells his way
through the songs like he's really
got something to say, but he just ain't gonna get my attention that way.
A couple of times they come close: if pressed
hard to choose one favorite tune, I'd probably go with ʽBlack Moon
Creepingʼ, if only because the main distorted metal riff, the accompanying
talkbox lead part, and the swampy harmonica generate a unique-sounding trio.
But if the goal here was to conjure some sort of voodooistic atmosphere, what with
much of the lyrics referring to black magic and stuff, it is as much of a
failure as everything else. Maybe it's just the singer's fault: Chris Robinson
always tends to sound like a really irritating next door neighbor, his basic
emotional range limited to one (1) effect — annoy the living daylights out of
you (ʽSometimes Salvationʼ is the worst culprit, a tremendously
draggy ballad if there ever was one).
Although this album is usually regarded by fans
as one of the highest points of the Crowes' career, I cannot and will not share
the respect — I give it a thumbs down and state that, in my humble
opinion, this is one of the phoniest, draggiest, most boring «rock and roll»
albums I have ever heard in my life from a critically acclaimed
«not-too-mainstream» artist (by which I just mean that the Black Crowes, like
them or not, belong in an entirely different category from the likes of Bon
Jovi). And the best song on the album is the closing anthem ʽTime Will
Tellʼ, because it was written by Bob Marley, who, unlike the Robinson
brothers, actually knew how to stuff his soul into formally captivating pieces.
The rest of these tunes I really
don't care if I never get to hear again. Some guy with a similar mindset to
mine called them «truck driver material», but I think that by generalizing, he
really offended the truck driver elite — the really cool guys that prefer to
blast ʽHighway To Hellʼ, which is a better song than all of this
drivel put together.
AMORICA (1994)
1) Gone; 2) A Conspiracy; 3)
High Head Blues; 4) Cursed Diamond; 5) Nonfiction; 6) She Gave Good Sunflower;
7) P. 25 London; 8) Ballad In Urgency; 9) Wiser Time; 10) Downtown Money
Waster; 11) Descending.
The front sleeve photo, taken from a 1976 issue
of Hustler, would honestly have been
a better fit for one of those late-period Aerosmith albums, or some
particularly sleazy hair metal band — The Black Crowes probably have nothing
against pussy or patriotism, but their music pretends to be much more about
«soul» than about «flesh»: the only exception here is ʽShe Gave Good Sunflowerʼ,
brimming with lyrics like "I feel warm in your blizzard / And your flood I
crave", but even those are delivered in a ballad-like context. The Robinson
brothers are chivalrous Southern gentlemen, see, and they would rather sing and
play their hearts out to the ladies than grope for those panties straight away.
If only they knew how to sing and play their
hearts out in the context of a well-written song, though, Amorica could have been one hell of an album, because the band has
accumulated confidence, experience, and is now expanding its stylistic
horizons by learning how to be funky and add some life-loving swing to their
day. All it'd take would be one gentle push in the proper direction of making
these grooves more interesting — but, unfortunately, their new producer, Jack
Joseph Puig, whose credentials have since then also included No Doubt, Vanessa
Carlton, John Mayer, and The Pussycat Dolls (that should give you some idea)
was not the right guy to administer that push.
Again, let us just take a couple of songs and
try and see what's so wrong about them. ʽGoneʼ, opening with some
cowbells and Latin percussion in the style of Steely Dan's ʽDo It
Againʼ, quickly develops a decent groove in the style of The James Gang's
ʽFunk #49ʼ. But «decent» does not mean «breathtaking»: really, almost
anybody can master those scratch guitar patterns, and what is really needed here is development —
which is thoroughly lacking, as the band just jams around a single chord,
getting some lumpy volume up for the chorus and leaving it at that. For five
minutes, their funky jet attempts to get off the ground, but never manages to
do much except waste fuel. The sound is thick and dense, with several
low-pitched guitar parts drowning each other out, and the drummer really tries
to bash his drum kit into the ground, meticulously and monotonously, but that
might just be where the root of the problem lies — they are trying to be very
funky and quite heavy at the same
time, like a... lead zeppelin? Well, unlike the first one, which somehow
managed the trick, these ones are definitely going down.
A song like ʽP. 25 Londonʼ, with its
blues-rock chords neatly arranged in a pop hook, faintly hints that the Crowes could be proper hookmeisters had they
really put their hearts to it, but in general, each new song steadfastly
demonstrates, over and over again, that they are perfectly happy to stick to
their usual guns as long as the public is content to love them for their style.
The biggest hit from the album was ʽA Conspiracyʼ, a song whose verse
melody is one of the lamest exercises in syncopation I've ever heard and whose
chorus melody is practically non-existent — so how the heck did it ever manage
to slide up the charts without a half-inch of grease? ʽWiser Timeʼ,
the other single, sounds like contemporary Lynyrd Skynyrd — meandering
slide-based country-rock with faux dramatics — and only ʽHigh Head
Bluesʼ, the third single, features anything resembling a memorable riff,
but, as usual, wastes it in a sea of sludge.
Once again, reading all the positive reviews
and fan paeans for this album, I have to shake my head and ask myself — what
exactly about this record am I not
getting, when I so sincerely like most of its influences, even the Southern
rock ones, everything from the Allmans to early classic Skynyrd? Why does it
all seem so much like a lifeless, electrocuted corpse of genuine rock'n'roll music, which so many people are so eagerly
ready to accept for a living body? Is it just because these guys emerged in the
early 1990s, rather than in the 1970s, and this automatically makes me
prejudiced? No, I don't really believe that. More likely, a record like Amorica will appeal to a «genrist»
person — such as a blues-rock aficionado, content to admire anything as long as
it competently satisfies the basic rules of the genre — or to somebody who
caught the Crowes bug while in his teens, without prior exposure to the musical
fathers of Americana. Either that, or I am really
not getting something about this seemingly bland, turgid vibe.
Come to think of it, judging by a reader
comment on Mark Prindle's site about how "P. 25 London is universally
regarded as the suckiest song on this album" (I personally find it at
least the most memorable song here, which might as well mean «best»), me and
the world really wouldn't see eye to eye on these guys. I give Amorica a thumbs down just like its
predecessor, and, with a sigh of temporary relief, unlock this tedious ball and
chain from my leg for a while — that is, till the next album.
THREE SNAKES AND ONE CHARM (1996)
1) Under A Mountain; 2) Good
Friday; 3) Nebakanezer; 4) One Mirror Too Many; 5) Blackberry; 6) Girl From A
Pawnshop; 7) (Only) Halfway To Everywhere; 8) Bring On, Bring On; 9) How Much
For Your Wings?; 10) Let Me Share The Ride; 11) Better When You're Not Alone;
12) Evil Eye.
Hey, hey, it is only natural that the first
album on which The Black Crowes start showing the first signs of getting into a
real focused groove and — horrors! — learning how to shape their chord-picking
into vaguely memorable forms, should get the cold shoulder from fans and
critics. A surprisingly large number of them seem to love the first two
albums, be sympathetic or ecstatic towards Amorica,
and treat Three Snakes And One Charm
as «the beginning of the decline». Decline? Where? In order to «decline», you
actually have to shift your position — I mean, it's not as if the Crowes went
techno here, or doom metal, or drum and bass (much as I'd love to see them try
out any of these things). Or you could start writing worse songs, but from that
point of view, it doesn't get much worse than Amorica, really.
Honestly, the first song, ʽUnder A
Mountainʼ, is such a traditional mess of power chords, slide guitars, and
lumpy mid-tempo drum pummelling, that I was
expecting the album to be a carbon copy of its predecessor. But lo and behold,
there are some signs of life,
beginning circa track three: ʽNebakanezerʼ (what is this, a
specifically Southern realization of Nebuchadnezzar?) subjects itself to the
implantation of a distinct, important riff (even though its authorship hardly
belongs to the Crowes — it's a rather common chord sequence for
roots-rockers), and, at the very least, becomes nicely fleshed out as a heavy
country-rock song with a poppy chorus.
Maybe this is exactly what the fans are holding
against the band — that it is trying to «sell out» by writing songs that one
can, you know, whistle, as opposed to simply «dig that sound». Fortunately for
the fans, the band is only succeeding at this task part-time: about half of the
album consists of the usual drab mush. But ʽOne Mirror Too Manyʼ,
ʽLet Me Share The Rideʼ, ʽEvil Eyeʼ, and particularly my
favorite — ʽBlackberryʼ, these are songs that are, like... songs. Well, maybe not all of them.
Maybe some. Maybe just one or two. Still, that's, like, progress.
They are even trying to be weird on occasion:
ʽHalfway To Everywhereʼ, opening with a nice wah-wah lead, tries to
bridge the gap between funk and boogie and has the Robinson brothers mess
around with their vocals, making funny noises that I hope is not their take on
scat singing, but is just a way of monkeying around to break up the pattern of
endless boredom. It's not much, but it's much
more than it ever used to be.
That said, my money is still riding on that
silly cock rock anthem ʽBlackberryʼ (of course, these days it would
rather be perceived as an anthem to a wireless handheld device, making the line
"Hey Blackberry, look at my bumblebee" somewhat incomprehensible). It
is short, tight, crunchy, safely pinned to a distinct riff, makes good use of
stop-and-starts, employs the organ as a «tease» device, and does not begin to
overload our ears until the proper climactic part, so it's even got some
development to it. Formerly, some of the songs could have one or two of these
elements, but not all of them at once.
All in all, I'd say that the somewhat cooler
ratings and reviews for the album were triggered by the world's getting tired
of the Crowes — the slight change in sound may have been used as a pretext,
when in reality they were only trying to get away from the «vibe-based»
approach to the «hook-based» approach, if only occasionally so. The usual
problems all remain, including the bland vocals of brother Chris and the total
lack of genuine inspiration on softer numbers (ʽGirl From A Pawnshopʼ
is a Van Morrison-worthy title, but the song wouldn't have been saved even if
they got Van to sing on it — it's simply one more big fat nothing). But the
good news is that, regardless of whether they keep on loving their mush or not
(and I guess they do), they are not content to stay soaking in it forever, and every attempt at modifying and
diversifying the formula on the part of these guys is okay with me in advance.
BY YOUR SIDE (1999)
1) Go Faster; 2) Kicking My
Heart Around; 3) By Your Side; 4) Horsehead; 5) Only A Fool; 6) Heavy; 7)
Welcome To The Goodtimes; 8) Go Tell The Congregation; 9) Diamond Ring; 10)
Then She Said My Name; 11) Virtue And Vice.
This is the first ever Black Crowes album that I can enjoy through and through. One
of the critical viewpoints has somehow managed to brand it as a «return to
roots», successfully recapturing the vibe of the band's first two records after
the temporary slump of Three Snakes
— an opinion much dissipated through the critical community, but one that could
have only come by traditional
rock'n'roll analogy. I mean, every band has got to have something like an early
peak, a mid-term slump, a «comeback», and all sorts of dynamics that create the
illusion of an adventurous and intriguing career. And no shit: prior to
recording By Your Side, the band
actually fired their second guitarist, Marc Ford, and for what? Heroin addiction! It's like the
mid-Seventies all over again. Juicy stuff for rock tabloids and all.
As far as my own, fairly insignificant in
comparison, opinion is concerned, most of those differences are fairly
cosmetic anyway. A small extra brass part in here, a bit of extra production
gloss in there — really, any sort of «progress» or «development» from one
Crowes album to another is negligible even in comparison to classic Aerosmith,
let alone someone bigger. But while the overall style is always comparable, the substance
and energy level may vary enough to
make some of the songs kick ass where others simply scratch balls. So who
knows, maybe those lineup changes, with a new second guitarist and a new bass
player (Sven Pipien), had their beneficial effect after all? Even if the new
guitarist did not play a single note on the album?..
Whatever be the case, By Your Side somewhat reduces the band's usual obsession with
mega-over-dubbing and sonic messiness. Instead, what we have is the Crowes'
most barroom-rock-oriented collection of songs to-date — with Stones,
Aerosmith, and Faces/Rod Stewart influence all over the place, but strengthened
up with some really thick, sticky,
crunchy guitar tones; if you throw a wah-wah effect on top
(ʽHorseheadʼ), the macho aura of the song becomes strong enough to
melt down windows and pulverize doors. Silly, but lovable. The overall emphasis
is on crunch, crunch, crunch, with repetitive chorus lines to generate some
catchiness and brother Chris wailing so loud that he even manages to overcome
the usual blandness of his vocal tone: still no match for Steven Tyler, but at
least now he actually sounds authentically drunk, which is already something —
prior to this, the Crowes almost always sounded like they were faking it, and
there is nothing worse than pretending to be drunk when you've barely touched
the stuff at all.
One of the band's main mottos now is stated
right in the title of the first song — ʽGo Fasterʼ — and this is what
they do on several other songs as well: ʽKicking My Heart Aroundʼ
propels that anthemic slide riff forward at a respectable tempo, instead of
spreading it all over the timeline, while ʽGo Tell The Congregationʼ
adds moderate speed to a funky foundation, and suddenly the band's usual
lumpiness fades away and out pops a really tight, but fluent outfit that allows
the music to fly — not just sink into the ground. But even when they remain
strictly mid-tempo, the vibe is good. The title track begins like a variational
tribute to the Stones' ʽTumbling Diceʼ, but then quickly moves into
Faces territory instead and does the right thing: the extra crudeness and the
sheer force with which they punch, pummel, and tear at the instruments
compensates for the lack of anything instantaneously memorable in melodic
terms.
In other words, it ain't so much the
songwriting (although there are a couple more riffs around the place worth
collecting) as the focus that has improved. I may be wrong, but I think that a
song like ʽHeavyʼ would have been unthinkable on any of the earlier
records — its leaden swing would have been coated with slide guitars and
keyboards, dissipated and wasted. Here, though, as unspectacular as the melodies
might be, the songs are allowed to capitalize on their potential strength; and,
for the record, it also helps that balladry is kept to a minimum — in fact,
there are no ballads whatsoever in the conventional sense, just a couple of
these soulful R&B numbers that all gravitate towards pop-rock anyway, like
ʽOnly A Foolʼ and ʽDiamond Ringʼ.
The wah-wah ruckus on ʽHorseheadʼ
might sound like they're grossly overloading it, but that is just the point —
this band only begins to make sense when they go for overload, because they
sure as hell can't get break through with subtlety. This is why
ʽHorseheadʼ is my favorite song off the album, a massive headbanger,
tongue hanging out and saliva dripping all over the place, the musical
equivalent of the thickest, most calory-choked burger on Earth — and there are
other songs here that go in the same direction, too, the more, the better. To
put it bluntly, the Black Crowes almost
manage to be as sleazy as they are usually advertised on this record, and for
this reason and no other, I give it a big greasy thumbs up, and take the liberty of
saying that the band never ever got any better — or sicker, or filthier, etc. —
than this. Never.
LIONS (2001)
1) Midnight From The Inside
Out; 2) Lickin'; 3) Come On; 4) No Use Lying; 5) Losing My Mind; 6) Ozone Mama;
7) Greasy Grass River; 8) Soul Singing; 9) Miracle To Me; 10) Young Man, Old
Man; 11) Cosmic Friend; 12) Cypress Tree; 13) Lay It All On Me.
By
Your Side was good enough to
try out a sequel, but still not robust enough to inspire the Crowes for a
sequel that would be just as good. It
looks like they learned a few things — how to be more tight and snappy, how to
give more care to hooklines, how to cultivate a macho image without being too disgusting — but it doesn't look
like they had a particularly strong memory for any of them. If the album title
is supposed to refer to the Robinsons themselves, well, this is a fairly
sluggish pair of lions that we have here for observation.
Trouble begins almost immediately, as the major
attractive force of ʽMidnight From The Inside Outʼ is concentrated in
its guitar tone — fat, nasty, poisonously distorted — but little else. Slow,
cumbersome, tied to a really irksome, meaningless blues-rock riff and not even
remotely as «dangerous» as its production should lead you to believe, it is,
well, everything that the previous album opener (ʽGo Fasterʼ) was
not. And with a stylistically limited band like the Black Crowes, your initial
impression of the first song usually colors your impression of everything
else.
Granted, the second song and the album's first
single, unscrupulously called ʽLickin'ʼ, is an improvement: a little
faster, a little lower, a little sharper, with a guitar tone that almost
borders on «industrial» this time — oh, if only brother Chris didn't sound like
an ugly moron on the chorus! But he does, and he does it, exercising his
capacity for free will (because he can
sing normally — he just consciously wants to sound «nasty», like an authentic
rock'n'roll hero). As a result, the song sounds gross, stupid, and unfunny.
With some good riffage wasted.
Amazingly, as much as I thought I'd never have
to say this, Lions is the first
Crowes album where the ballads are better than the rockers. ʽMiracle To
Meʼ, borrowing some of its acoustic chords from both ʽStairway To
Heavenʼ (intro) and ʽWish
You Were Hereʼ (main melody), gradually builds up to a sensitive,
sentimental chorus whose "be my lover, be my friend, be a miracle to
me" seems to work better on a gut level than any of their previous
efforts, ʽShe Talks To Angelsʼ included. Even better is the album
closer ʽLay It All On Meʼ, whose "come on down crooked
man..." finally manages to
approach the lazy, post-suffering, seen-it-all, friendly power of the Stones'
ballads from 1971-72 — not that it'd seriously stand competition with
ʽMoonlight Mileʼ, but perhaps it could stand a few rounds. Chris
modulates his voice so that it really gives the impression of a comforting
shoulder, and the piano/orchestral backing multiplies the impact and provides
the necessary «epic» flavor.
The rockers, in comparison, all tend to lose
face once again. Too slow, too generically written, and too fussy — perhaps
some of the blame lies with producer Don Was, to whom they may have sucked up
after he'd restored the Rolling Stones to their former glory with Voodoo Lounge and Bridges To Babylon. Apparently, though, what worked for the Stones
did not work so well for their followers. On By Your Side, the guitar sound was more upfront and more raw; here,
the guitars are usually too smooth, too polite, and too overshadowed by the
band's unimpressive vocal harmonies and the band's equally unimpressive rhythm
section. Only on ʽLickin'ʼ does brother Rich's guitar immediately
assault your senses — elsewhere, it tends to limp and hobble rather than
directly put the meat in your fridge, if you know what I mean.
I would not call the album «really bad», since the
ballads work all right and the songwriting does show that a lot of work went
into it (if it didn't, most of this review could be spent mentioning the titles
of old blues-rock numbers that the brothers are ripping off, and it wasn't),
but ultimately, Lions is
unrewarding, and once again makes me forget why it is exactly that somebody
could still be interested in hearing the Black Crowes play as late as the 21st
century. Oh, and, for that matter, one thing I really hate — other than Chris' singing on the chorus of
ʽLickin'ʼ — is the fly buzzing on ʽCosmic Friendʼ: not only
is it really annoying (what else would you expect from a buzzing fly?), but it
is also gratuitously unnecessary. Come to think of it, «gratuitously
unnecessary» is as much of a pleonastic description as the Black Crowes are a
pleonastic band.
LIVE (2002)
1) Midnight From The Inside
Out; 2) Sting Me; 3) Thick 'n' Thin; 4) Greasy Grass River; 5) Sometimes
Salvation; 6) Cursed Diamond; 7) Miracle To Me; 8) Wiser Time; 9) Girl From A
Pawnshop; 10) Cosmic Friend; 11) Black Moon Creeping; 12) High Head Blues; 13)
Title Song; 14) She Talks To Angels; 15) Twice As Hard; 16) Lickin'; 17) Soul
Singing; 18) Hard To Handle; 19) Remedy.
Upon first thought, the Black Crowes look like
a band ideally suited for robust live performance. Upon second thought, it can
be predicted with a high degree of reliability that their live albums will
probably suck harder than their studio ones. Clumsy, cumbersome, all rock and
very little roll in the presence of recording equipment and mixing consoles,
there is no good reason why they should suddenly turn into a flexible, agile,
perfectly oiled, high-rolling musical machine in the presence of an army of
loyal fans.
Live, their first official full-fledged LP
(actually, double CD) of concert performances (not counting Live At The Greek that they did two
years before with Jimmy Page, playing Led Zeppelin songs all night long),
confirms the suspicion. The Black Crowes in concert sound just like The Black
Crowes in the studio. The only difference is that brother Rich tends to add
more distortion to his six-string, because surely this is the shortest and
most reliable way to bring down the roof without having to wreck your brain in
search of a more complex solution. However, it just makes the band noisier,
rather than more aggressive.
Then there is the setlist. The album was
recorded on October 30-31, 2001, at the Orpheum in Boston, so, naturally, there
is a lot of tracks from Lions, which
the brothers were promoting at the time. But other than that, the setlist is almost completely dominated by songs
from their first two (the most commercially and critically successful) records.
The other three are, at best, represented by one or two tracks — and at worst,
not represented at all: By Your Side,
which I personally insist to be one of their best, simply does not exist.
Instead, we get track after track of their slowest, sludgiest, mind-numbing-est
material (ʽSometimes Salvationʼ? ʽTitle Songʼ? you gotta be
kidding me!), which they play with total conviction, as if it were real hot
stuff, but it only makes matters worse in the long run. I mean, maybe if I saw
that they were as disinterested in this material as it is uninteresting, that
would at least count for something.
But what makes matters worse is the stage
banter — the boys (I'm assuming that it is brother Chris who does most of the
talking?) alternate between platitudes, nonsense, and bad jokes as if this was
as much a part of their job as the playing and singing. Example: "this is
a song about the cosmos... I wanted to write a song about drag racing, but I
don't know anything about it, so I wrote a song about the cosmos instead!"
That's about as profound as it gets — and then, of course, they go and play ʽCosmic
Friendʼ, which does contain verbal references to the cosmos, but has less
to do with it musically than any given five seconds from Jimi's Electric Ladyland, just to name an
off-the-top-of-my-head example of a genuine «cosmic» product.
Technically, the band is in fine form, with
everybody doing as much as possible with this rotten material, and the
recording quality is also perfectly adequate, yet I am still forced to issue a
disappointed thumbs
down, because for the life of me I cannot understand why even a big fan
of the band would want to listen to these versions — there is nothing
spontaneous going on here, just louder, slightly cruder recreations of the
band's studio act, represented by inferior selections.
FREAK 'N' ROLL... INTO THE FOG (2006)
1) (Only) Halfway To
Everything; 2) Sting Me; 3) No Speak No Slave; 4) Soul Singing; 5) Welcome To
The Goodtimes; 6) Jealous Again; 7) Space Captain; 8) My Morning Song; 9)
Sunday Night Buttermilk Waltz; 10) Cursed Diamond; 11) She Talks To Angels; 12)
Wiser Time; 13) Nonfiction; 14) Seeing Things; 15) Hard To Handle; 16) Let Me
Share The Ride; 17) Mellow Down Easy; 18) Remedy; 19) The Night They Drove Ol'
Dixie Down.
Two live albums in a row is usually either a
sign of arrogant overkill or a sign of old age, but in this particular case the
situation is different: the Crowes had pretty much fallen apart in 2001, with
the Robinson brothers embarking on solo careers, and it took about half a
decade for them to properly get back together, also bringing back Marc Ford on second
guitar and founding member Steve Gorman on drums. To commemorate this most
exciting reunion, a video and audio
were released at the same time, capturing a complete performance from San
Francisco's Fillmore auditorium in 2005 — more than two hours of red-hot
Crowes, and this is not actually counting several «official bootlegs» in the Instant Live series, also made
available throughout 2005.
One thing I do have to say is that Freak'n'Roll is a significant
improvement over Live in just about
every aspect I can think of. First, stage banter is kept to a reasonable
minimum, cutting down on both the platitudes and the lame jokes. Second, the setlist is more representative and
less predictable, dragging out some forgotten highlights and including covers
of classics such as ʽSpace Captainʼ and ʽThe Night They Drove
Ol' Dixie Downʼ. Third, they bring in a brass section (The Left Coast
Horns) to thicken the sound on some of the songs, and offer some rejuvenations and reincarnations — ʽCursed
Diamondʼ, for instance, works a little better in an unplugged version than
it used to (because the only thing worse than a slow, draggy, repetitive ballad
is a slow, draggy, repetitive ballad drowned in sludge and distortion).
An obvious criticism of the performance would be
the length of the songs — the average length of each track is around 7 minutes,
with ʽMy Morning Songʼ taking the big prize (almost 14 minutes!) and
ʽNonfictionʼ seconding it at the ten-minute mark. However, this
extension is not completely «empty»: the idea is indeed to add some «freakout»
spirit to the proceedings, and so ʽNonfictionʼ is transformed from a
relatively simple country ballad into a trippy voyage, with psychedelic
guitars and keyboards leading the way and avantgarde jazz brass parts joining
them halfway through. Maybe this is not as inspired as your average Grateful
Dead show, but it is at least an attempt to capture a more elusive, less
instantaneously obvious vibe, and it shows a new side to the comeback-Crowes
that was not present (or, at least, not so evident) in their early career.
Other songs are extended mostly for the purpose
of throwing in some extra solos and jamming around, but there is no crime in
that. I cannot call the guitar duet between Rich and Marc at the end of
ʽHard To Handleʼ particularly evocative or emotional, but yes, it is
better than simply having them reproduce the original parts — they are trying
to show that the Black Crowes can make history happen here and now, not simply
repeat history, and even if that history is not all that exciting, I still
applaud the decision to explore uncharted waters. ʽLet Me Share The
Rideʼ extended with six extra minutes of jamming, as the Left Coast Horns
add big-band jazz support to accompany the slide guitar madness? ʽSoul
Singingʼ adorned with a huge wah-wah solo, turning its middle section into
Hendrix-ey space-rock? None of that may be new for music listeners in 2006, but
it is great to see a band as formerly limited as the Crowes to blindly push
forward in all these directions, and sometimes, if not always, striking out the
right sparks.
Even the cover versions fit the mood and are
done with total understanding of the source material: of course, brother Chris
could never outdo Joe Cocker with the "learning to live together..."
bit from ʽSpace Captainʼ, but the song was most likely selected as a
symbol of the band's reunion, and feels totally at home. The decision to put
ʽOl' Dixieʼ at the end is a bit more questionable, since the song's anthemic
nature and straightforward lyrics seems to pigeonhole the Crowes as generic
«Southern Rock», but they totally nail its emotional complexity, and even
Chris's vocal delivery is technically and spiritually every bit as good as
Levon Helm's.
Keeping all this in mind, I believe the record
deserves a respectful thumbs up, and would probably recommend it as the
best official introduction to the Crowes' live sound, or, more accurately, to
what the Crowes are capable of as a live band. Despite the two-hour-plus
running length, despite the obligatory inclusion of bad hits like ʽShe
Talks To Angelsʼ, despite the occasional loss of direction, the bottomline
is that the five-year break actually did the guys some good — in this
particular here and now, they sound looser and freer on stage than they ever
did.
WARPAINT (2008)
1) Goodbye Daughters Of The
Revolution; 2) Walk Believer Walk; 3) Oh Josephine; 4) Evergreen; 5) We Who See
The Deep; 6) Locust Street; 7) Movin' On Down The Line; 8) Wounded Bird; 9) God's
Got It; 10) There's Gold In Them Hills; 11) Whoa Mule.
The internal construction of the word warpaint seems to suggest that when you
put on this kind of paint, you are expected to go to war. Consequently, when
you begin to play an album called Warpaint,
you might expect to hear something
that could be associated with war-like emotions. You know — aggression,
bravado, ferociousness, that sort of thing. And even if you are not a big fan
of The Black Crowes, you just know
that they are a band well capable of all those emotions. And, in fact, once
every few years or so they are even capable of hanging them on a powerful hook,
which is where they are at their very best. It's not much, but it's something.
Alas, we have some bad news, folks. Warpaint is not a war-like album — it
ain't even a proper rock'n'roll album. Instead, it's a big ol' full-o'-soul
album of «Americana» — a melting pot of blues, country, and various forms of
hillbilly music, played Black Crowes-style, but without the arrogant cockiness
of old. Yes, it's been seven years since their previous studio experience — and
in that time, the Robinson brothers have Discovered Wisdom. Now, instead of
churning out overloud headbang fodder, they offer you golden bales of hay
straight from the meadows and fields — lying in one of which, with not a care
in the world and a pair of headphones around your head, would probably be the
perfect setting for enjoying an album like Warpaint.
That is, if there actually were
anything to enjoy.
The band had suffered further lineup changes
along the way, so that by the time they came around to recording this, the
newest members were relatively young musicians — children of the Seventies,
younger than the Robinson brothers by about a decade: Adam MacDougall on keyboards
and Luther Dickinson (of the North Mississippi Allstars) on guitar. Obviously,
both are professionals, and the Robinsons went out of their way to praise
Dickinson's skills to high heavens; problem is, to my ears he just sounds like
a faithful disciple of the old school, doing his country-western schtick
honestly, but without an ounce of inventiveness. Considering that brother Rich
is also no great genius when it comes to composing guitar melodies, it is no
big surprise that a large chunk of this album... well, perhaps it does not
exactly sound like Garth Brooks, but
it feels every bit as tedious and worthless as your average country-pop album.
Every chord sequence tried out here is tired
and old. Every vocal melody begs for the single question — why am I wasting
time on this? Is there at least one new emotional touch generated here, at
least one fresh feeling, rather than just fifty minutes of recycled cud? Neil
Young, Little Feat, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Allmans, Emmylou Harris, The Band, Gram
Parsons — is Warpaint adding anything worthwhile to that legacy? Am I
supposed to worship at the sight of Chris Robinson's beard just because he's
aged a little bit, calmed down a bit, found his peace with the world and
drowned in earthy sentimentality — or, perhaps, should that require a little
more effort in the songwriting department?
I guess that, from a certain point of view, Warpaint could invite comparisons with Exile On Main St.: it seems to trigger
the same half-lazy, right-to-the-ways-of-the-world atmosphere. But the
difference is that the Stones were actually recording their album on the brink
of self-destruction, and its music is permeated with that feeling. Warpaint, in comparison, plays it
completely safe and sound. The Black Crowes, as pictured on this record, are a
generally happy, healthy, self-sufficient band of individuals who know just
what it takes to make the «right» music. "Let's take it easy to avoid any
snags", states the opening song, called ʽGoodbye Daughters Of The Revolutionʼ,
and in between that line, that title, and the fact that the rhythm and lead
lines of the song are all great in tone and poor in expression, this tells you
all you should really know about the album, unless you need your everyday fill
of bland Americana like a high fiber diet.
If you are looking for something that «rocks»,
you won't find a proper choice until track 9, ʽGod's Got Itʼ, and
even that one is a fairly repetitive «Christian blues-rock» number (with a
touch of irony, I hope), riding on boring muffled rhythm crunch and conventional
slide licks. (For that matter, I think that Paul Stacey's production style is
at least partially responsible for sucking the life out of these tracks — a
different mix, bringing Dickinson's slide guitar higher up, might have somewhat
improved the impression). If you are looking for a real soulful, broken-voiced,
salt-of-the-earth ballad, check out ʽThere's Gold In Them Hillsʼ. It
does not touch my soul one bit, but
who knows, it might touch yours. I think it's all a bunch of unimaginative
clichés, and I don't think Chris Robinson sounds too convincing when
complaining that "all I have left is this grey in my beard" (not that
that ain't much — have you seen the size
of that beard?), but wasting time on looking for scientific proof of that is
not a good idea, so let's just assume I may be wrong.
Anyway, three listens into the album, and
nothing ever stuck, which is why I suppose that the songs on Warpaint are fairly worthless unless
they are your first exposition to the world of dusty, age-sanctified
roots-rock. Then again, I also suppose this is predictable — if The Black
Crowes as a young band were third-rate imitators of kick-ass
Stones/Aerosmith/Led Zeppelin, then why should The Black Crowes as an old band be anything but third-rate
imitators of their rootsy predecessors? It all fits. No big surprise here, and
a friendly, light-hearted thumbs down all the way down Chris Robinson's
beard.
WARPAINT LIVE (2009)
1) Goodbye Daughters Of The
Revolution; 2) Walk Believer Walk; 3) Oh Josephine; 4) Evergreen; 5) We Who See
The Deep; 6) Locust Street; 7) Movin' On Down The Line; 8) Wounded Bird; 9)
God's Got It; 10) There's Gold In Them Hills; 11) Whoa Mule; 12) Poor Elijah –
Tribute To Johnson; 13) Darling Of The Underground Press; 14) Bad Luck Blue
Eyes Goodbye; 15) Don't Know Why; 16) Torn And Frayed; 17) Hey Grandma.
Oh, this is just too good to be true. But it is true — so, what is the next logical move once you have just released the worst
(okay, one of the worst) albums in your career, passing it off as a «mature»
product? Why, simple: release a live version of it — performed in its entirety. I mean, I could at
least understand it if they did this trick for Shake Your Moneymaker or Southern
Harmony: at least those albums have had enough time to pass into some sort of legend. But Warpaint, really? Has it instantaneously
become such a «modern classic» that the world would say a big thank you to a
second version?
So apparently, the Crowes had some kind of deal
with Eagle Rock Entertainment, one of the biggest rock video labels out there,
to provide a concert recording for them — and, apparently, the idea was that,
since they already had several live albums out, this one was to be in some way
«special». Maybe they all bought the critical hype, or maybe they just thought
that this additional promotion would help sell a few extra copies of the real Warpaint — whatever. The sore reality is that there is this extra
live package now, DVD and CD versions
of it, and, apparently, it begs for its own, independent, unbiased, and
open-minded assessment.
Ultimately, I guess, it is impossible to make a
bad thing good, but it is possible to make it a little more tolerable, and from
that point of view, if I ever had to, in the future, I would prefer listening
to Warpaint Live than to Warpaint Dead. The brothers add on a
little grit in these performances, putting a tad more distortion on the line,
and occasionally extending the songs to include longer and ever more fluent
solos from Luther Dickinson — for instance, he goes completely romantically
berserk on the slide guitar at the end of ʽMovin' On Down The Lineʼ,
where his wild runs proudly stand competition with Derek Trucks. The overall sound of Warpaint was good — the overall sound of it played live is, in
fact, even better. But there is nothing to be done about the songs. At heart, they were boring, and
they still stay boring. Nothing to do with that.
It gets better and worse, though, on the second disc. Better — because, as a large
appended bonus, the Crowes end their performance with a bunch of covers by
famous «roots rock» artists, such as Clapton in his «Delaney & Bonnie»
period of 1970 (ʽPoor Elijahʼ and ʽDon't Know Whyʼ), the
Stones in their Exile period
(ʽTorn And Frayedʼ), and Moby Grape (ʽHey Grandmaʼ). They
still sneak in a couple of their own songs (including a really long, really
tedious version of ʽBad Luck Blue Eyes Goodbyeʼ), but overall it's
like a respectful celebration of past glories — and this is also what makes it
a little offensive. It's as if they were saying, "Hey, all the great guys had
their roots-rock phase, see? We too have one!" — which would be justified
if they had at least one song as
emotionally resonant as ʽTorn And Frayedʼ, which is not the case.
They do a good enough job on the covers, and Dickinson once again goes into
full-out astral mode on the slide at the end of the Stones' song, playing
things of such complexity that Mick Taylor would not have been able to
reproduce — except that ʽTorn And Frayedʼ is really all about the
original vocals, and brother Chris' one-dimensional delivery totally fails to
recapture or play upon the smiling irony of the Stones' approach.
In short, if you are a fan of the modern slide,
do get this record for some totally stellar examples (it is a little uncanny, though, just how much this Dickinson dude and
Derek Trucks sound alike, which begs for the question — do all these young guitar virtuosos tend to blend together or am I
just being unnecessarily grumpy?). If you are a fan of Chris Robinson's beard,
get the video — the camera loves it. And if you are a fan of neither, but are
still reading this review, you're as crazy a reader as the reviewer is a
writer.
BEFORE THE FROST... UNTIL THE FREEZE (2009)
CD I: 1) Good Morning Captain;
2) Been A Long Time; 3) Appaloosa; 4) A Train Still Makes A Lonely Sound; 5) I
Ain't Hiding; 6) Kept My Soul; 7) What Is Home; 8) Houston Don't Dream About
Me; 9) Make Glad; 10) And The Band Played On; 11) Last Place That Love Lives;
CD II: 1) Aimless Peacock; 2)
Shady Grove; 3) Garden Gate; 4) Greenhorn; 5) Shine Along; 6) Roll Old
Jeremiah; 7) Lady Of Avenue A; 8) So Many Times; 9) Fork In The River.
This is where the band's «maturity» starts
overflowing, as they grow themselves more roots than a five hundred year old
oak tree, and you can almost smell the overpowering scent of freshly turned
earth and steaming piles of dung on the ground. These twenty new songs weren't
just put down anyway, anyhow, anywhere — all of them were recorded
honest-to-goodness live before a small, but attentively respectful audience at
«The Barn», Levon Helm's personal studio in Woodstock, NY, the next best thing
to The Basement, I guess.
Supposedly the band wrote so many new songs for
this happy event that they were afraid to let go of all of them at once — the
original album, Before The Frost,
only contained the first 11, while the remaining 9 were made available
separately as Until The Freeze, a
free download from the band's website provided you bought the CD and had your
personal access code. They could actually count as two different albums for
stylistic reasons — the former is rowdier and more electric, the second one is
a little hillbillier and more acoustic — but they do form a conceptual unity,
after all, so it probably makes more sense to discuss the whole package in one
go.
Which is a bit intimidating — so many songs,
for one thing, and for another, the album is a tougher nut to crack than Warpaint. Warpaint was just derivative boring. Before The Frost, on first sight, goes in the same direction —
simply with more sprawl, spreading those proverbial roots across a larger chunk
of territory. The principal criticism stays the same: the band may have
mastered very well the standard lingo of «roots-rock», but whether they have added to that lingo, let alone started
their own dialect of it, is quite debatable. However, on their respective
individual levels the songs seem a little stronger, and, more importantly, less
predictable.
What I mean is, we'd never dream of being
pleasantly surprised by a disco song on any «classic» Crowes album — but a
sudden encounter with ʽI Ain't Hidingʼ, with its sci-fi keyboards,
funky guitars, and hopping bass, here turns out to be a revelation: a damn
clever synthesis of blues-rock with old-fashioned disco, not to mention the
daring nature of the move in general — accept disco as an integral, if
peripheral, part of «Americana». Another surprising and effective attempt at
synthesis comes near the end of the first album, as ʽAnd The Band Played
Onʼ effortlessly veers between Britpoppy music hall ("let's all
gather round the grand piano...") and slide-based country-blues, as the
Robinsons celebrate a «homecoming» — well, I suppose the entire album is really
just one big celebration.
Big, bombastic rock and roll makes a welcome
return on ʽBeen A Long Timeʼ, with those thick, juicy riffs we hadn't
heard in a long time, and with a long coda that gives all the soloists plenty
of opportunities to stretch out and flex those playing muscles — the bad news
is, that's just one track out of twenty, and on the whole, there is no indication
whatsoever that The Crowes are still willing to rock out on a consistent basis.
A couple others, like ʽGood Morning Captainʼ and ʽMake
Gladʼ, are loud enough, but are either too slow or too shapeless to count
as legitimate «rockers» — in fact, ʽCaptainʼ is more like a very
conscious attempt to suck up to Levon Helm and write a bona fide Band
imitation. I could easily picture the late Levon singing it himself, but the
question is, would he want to? The melody is nowhere near the average level of
Robbie Robertson's songwriting, and Chris Robinson is a very «bland» singer
compared to Levon in his prime, even if it is not his fault that nature endowed
him with such a dull singing tone.
Surprisingly, I must say that on the whole, I
think that I got hit a little harder by the «hillbilly» part of the album — Until The Freeze has a higher
percentage of memorable and emotional songs, such as ʽRoll On
Jeremiahʼ (friendly-sad country-western travelog with a beautiful duet
between piano and slide guitar), ʽLady Of Avenue Aʼ (a nod to James
Taylor-era folk-pop with a convincing bitterness to Chris' delivery, even if
some of the chords bring on unnecessary associations with ʽDisney
Girlsʼ), and, most importantly, ʽAimless Peacockʼ — another of
these crazy syntheses, sort of a psychedelic country romp, with harmonica and
fiddle on one side and sitar and Eastern vocal harmonies on the other, as the
band spends almost seven minutes in a cloudy haze. No discernible melody to
speak of, but a distinctly unusual sound combination that works, particularly
if you are in a hazy mood yourself and want to align yourself better with the
world around you. Experimentation has never hurt the Crowes, no really.
Yet at the same time, I cannot join in the
happy chorus of people who not only think that this is a big improvement over Warpaint, but even that it is a
downright late-period masterpiece, and opens up a whole new world before the
band and their fans. For every good song and for every interesting idea here,
there are at least two mediocre bores, completely
devoid of original ideas. But then again, how could it be any different? Rock
bands are not supposed to reach enlightenment and release their hitherto
hidden genius after twenty years of existence. I wouldn't altogether discount
the possibility of a miracle, but there ain't no miracle here — just a big pile
of diligently performed homework, and a few technical inventions to alleviate
the charges.
I am almost tempted to give the album a thumbs
up for its sheer scope, out of respect for all the good work, but only its
second part really gives a bit of a taste of the «salt of the earth», and why
should I be recommending a record that I do not properly enjoy, nor am I
finding any serious intrigue in it? As far as contemporary roots-rock goes, I
suppose you won't find many records better than Before The Frost — but then again, you probably won't find many
contemporary good roots-rock records,
period, what with 21st century people either not giving a damn about «roots» in
the first place or not being able to find a proper way to access them, so that ain't
much of an argument. And as far as the songs on here being, well, just good
songs — take a good listen to Wilco's Being
There instead. Now that was an
album of good songs, period, cutting deep and hard. The Crowes here merely
brush across the surface.
CROWEOLOGY (2010)
1) Jealous Again; 2) Share The
Ride; 3) Remedy; 4) Non-Fiction; 5) Hotel Illness; 6) Soul Singing; 7) Ballad
In Urgency; 8) Wiser Time; 9) Cold Boy Smile; 10) Under A Mountain; 11) She
Talks To Angels; 12) Morning Song; 13) Downtown Money Waster; 14) Good Friday;
15) Thorn In My Pride; 16) Welcome To The Good Times; 17) Girl From A Pawnshop;
18) Sister Luck; 19) She; 20) Bad Luck Blue Eyes Goodbye.
With an album title like that, I should have
known better — but noooo, I just had to sit down and subject myself to
it, out of professional-amateurish courtesy. Twice. Those four hours of my life
I am never getting back, and since it is not highly likely that any of the
Robinson brothers are offering me an apology any time soon (well, it's not like
I bought the record or anything),
please excuse me if the following several paragraphs sound rather bitter.
First, the objective facts. Croweology is the name of an album by
The Black Crowes, spread over two CDs and, with the exception of one cover
(ʽSheʼ from Gram Parsons' G. P.),
featuring re-recordings of their older songs, mainly in «unplugged» acoustic
versions, although some electric lead parts are occasionally present. All the
tracks seem to have been produced «live in the studio», with a bit of audience
participation at times (at least, there are a couple of small bursts of scattered
applause on the first disc), but formally, the album is not «live» as such. And
the track list concentrates most heavily on the 1990-96 period, with only 2-3 tracks
from later times and nothing at all from the Warpaint/Before The Frost era.
This segregation and reinvention brings a
certain conceptual purpose to Croweology
— seeing as how the band is now «mature» and «wisened up» and has been goin' up
the country for several years with the speed of a groundhog fleeing from a
tractor, it is only logical that they would decide to bring their old material
«up to date». How do you make your peace with the world of corn fields and
grass meadows and go on being
ʽJealous Againʼ and needing your ʽRemedyʼ at the same time?
You just dump the distortion and the loud bashing drums and you start looking
for a way that would preserve the spirit and the energy of the original but
would also introduce more subtlety and nuance into the performance. You begin
rocking out in humble style. I mean, if Keith Richards in his prime could rock
out with acoustic riffs, why not The Black Crowes in their mature, respectable
years?
As clearly as (I think) I understand the
purpose, its realisation predictably leaves a lot to be desired. Most of these
songs weren't that good in the first place, and most of the changes introduced
to convert them to this acoustic setting are in no hurry to make them any
better. In brief, if you are already a fan, there is some chance that you will enjoy these reinventions, but if you
«tolerated» rather than «enjoyed» the originals, you are most likely going to
hate, hate, hate the way they handled them here. And that is concerning the
rockers — when they start doing ballads,
and they insist on dragging them out to seven, eight, nine-minute length,
you'll be climbing up the frickin' walls, begging for mercy.
Yes, if you waste enough time on this,
eventually you will begin noticing the little things they do here and there
(like, for instance, making ʽGood Fridayʼ sound totally like Pink Floyd's ʽBreatheʼ in the intro part),
and maybe even getting impressed by then. But why should you? Why should
anybody? There is so much implicit pathetic self-aggrandizing on Croweology that it actually makes me
sick. For some reason, it's as if these guys have ceremonially anointed
themselves «the keepers of the flame», and each and every one of these tracks
is even more self-consciously performed in the «All Hail The Grand Old Southern
Rock Tradition Whose High Priests Are We» than their original versions. Not a
shred of the slightly naughty, slightly ironic irreverence here that used to
characterize even Lynyrd Skynyrd at their peak, let alone any of the better
roots-rock bands out there. Not the tiniest modicum of a sense of humor.
If, for some reason, this happens to be the
last of the band's studio LPs — a possibility, since they have not gone back
into the studio in between 2010 and 2013, and have once again gone on hiatus since
that period — fans will probably be pleased to treasure it as a nostalgic
recapitulation or a musical testament. But to these skeptical ears, it is just
one more unpleasant reminder of why The Black Crowes, at their very best, were
only a «passable» band, and at their very worst, were so dreadfully boring and
annoying that I'd rather listen to MTV-era Aerosmith instead: I mean, power
ballads like ʽCryin'ʼ and ʽCrazyʼ are compositionally no
worse than ʽShe Talks To Angelsʼ or ʽBad Luck Blue Eyesʼ,
and their humble goal of describing Steve Tyler's unsatiable sex drive for hot
young chicks, including his own daughter, is quite forgivable next to the
unjustifiedly bloated spiritual ambitions of the Crowes. Maybe they just had the misfortune of being born into this world
ten or fifteen years later than they should have, missing the right wave.
Maybe. But that doesn't mean we have to go on listening to them out of
chronological mercy, or that I would have to shift my thumbs down rating for this
album to anything better just because this is the sound of a veteran
professional band using — think of that! — acoustic guitars all the way.
SHADOW OF THE MOON (1997)
1) Shadow Of The Moon; 2) The
Clock Ticks On; 3) Be Mine Tonight; 4) Play Minstrel Play; 5) Ocean Gypsy; 6)
Minstrel Hall; 7) Magical World; 8) Writing On The Wall; 9) Renaissance Fair;
10) Memmingen; 11) No Second Chance; 12) Mond Tanz; 13) Spirit Of The Sea; 14)
Greensleeves; 15) Wish You Were Here.
Ritchie Blackmore. Most people will remember
him for early Deep Purple, some will for early Dio-era Rainbow, still others —
shudder — for the later «hit era» Rainbow, but you know what? Listening to this
album, the first in a new career and a new life, makes me absolutely convinced
that it was not until this transformation from a blazing rock god into a humble
minstrel that he had really found his true heart's content. And in the overall
context of his life and his deeds, this finding makes me genuinely feel good
for him.
Normally, this «neo-medieval» stylistics, the
roots of which probably go all the way back to bands like Amazing Blondel in
the early 1970s and maybe even further back to God knows where, is about as
cringeworthy as a tacky mansion in «medieval» style, erected somewhere on the
property by some tasteless nouveau riche. The melodies are stiff and
manneristic, the arrangements tepidly polite, the lyrics overloaded with
clichés that betray only a superficial acquaintance with the verbal art
of Chaucer's, let alone King Alfred's, times. All of these flaws are vividly
present on the first album by Blackmore's Night, and more — obviously produced
on a modest budget, the record keeps substituting electronic replacements for
genuine instruments. Synthesized trumpets? Works wonders in the authenticity
department, you know.
But then again, who are we kidding? Shadow Of The Moon has nothing to do
with authenticity, and if you box Ritchie into a corner, or maybe even if you
don't, he will probably admit that himself. Shadow Of The Moon is simply part of his fantasy, which began with
his encounter with Candice Night (Candice Lauren Isralow, to be precise), a
young fan born in the year of Fireball,
in 1989 — and ended with the formation of this duet, in which Blackmore plays
the part of a traveling minstrel (always with his trusty boots on!) and Candice
plays the part of his romantic fantasy, whichever it happens to be at the
moment (empress, princess, lady in waiting, innocent peasant girl, witchy
woman, gypsy, fortune teller, fairy queen — anything, as long as it has nothing
to do with the real world).
Ever since they seriously hooked up, I think,
they were living this fantasy in real life to some extent, so it was only
natural that, eventually, something like this would come out. Fans were
expectedly devastated: a Blackmore album without a single Blackmore electric
solo? In fact, an album where his role was essentially reduced to that of
songwriter and basic accompanist? Him, Ritchie Blackmore of the Huge Ego, which
we all had to accept and cherish? Unbelievable, and sacrilegious. Was this
Candice Night gal his Yoko Ono, putting him under her spell and making a humble
slave out of the world's fiercest electric guitar hero?..
Not quite. There are two kinds of people who
always punish Shadow Of The Moon
with one-star ratings. The first kind simply wants Blackmore to go on being a
guitar god — that's the silly kind, because if you don't want to be a guitar god no more, it's useless to force yourself.
The second kind just cringes and calls the music tacky — which it certainly is.
Except they are forgetting that every band in which Ritchie has done time has
always been tacky, right from the earliest days of Deep Purple. Remember their
cover of the Beatles' ʽHelp!ʼ on the debut album? Now if that ain't tacky, I don't know what is.
Yes, like most of this faux-Renaissance muzak,
the songs, taken at face value, are stiff, boring, and corny, and not at all
redeemed by the technical aspects of their execution — Blackmore's guitar
playing (mostly acoustic, although he does not completely shun the electric
sound) is intentionally very modest, whereas Night's vocals are pleasantly
passable: she is no new Annie Haslam in terms of range or power, and no new
Sandy Denny in terms of expression and spirituality, she just sings in a nice
tone. Not particularly irritating or
memorable. Not much to hate, not a lot to love. Fine wardrobe, though.
Where this album, and most of its follow-ups,
really succeeds is in making you understand just how much the both of them dig
doing it. Forget the rock god image — this
is what Blackmore has really been waiting for all his life: a fair lady
companion to allow him to drown his ego in a world of dark shadows, green
meadows, magic spells, crystal balls, greensleeves, and mandolins. Despite the
technically unimpressive arrangements, it is clear that they spent a shitload
of time working out all the little twists on these songs. ʽMagical
Worldʼ, in the middle of the record, is their personal statement of
purpose: "...In our hearts / We share the same dream / Feelings so strong
/ We just must carry on / On to our magical world". Trivial, but true: the
dedication with which they approach the construction of this «magical world» is
worth admiration.
Most of the songs are Blackmore originals (with
occasional lyrics from Candice), with two exceptions: ʽOcean Gypsyʼ
is a cover of an old Renaissance tune (a predictable choice), while the closing
ʽWish You Were Hereʼ is a cover of... no, not Pink Floyd and
certainly not Badfinger, but a 1995 single by the Swedish band Rednex, whose
members were neither rednecks nor neo-medievalists, but somehow this lonesome
ballad got stuck with Blackmore's Night anyway. But on the whole, listing
individual highlights is a pointless endeavour — the «originals», employing
mostly traditional folk phrasing, smoothly roll on without much stylistic
change or musical development. You'd have to be a serious fan of baroque music
to spot the differences — and then, if you were a serious fan of baroque music,
you'd probably have no reason whatsoever to entertain yourself with an album
like this, when you could be listening to Lully or Telemann instead.
None other than Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson in
person makes a welcome guest appearance on ʽPlay Minstrel Playʼ,
cheering up the stage with some rousing flute solos; and none other than Pyotr
Ilyich Tchaikovsky in person has a cameo on ʽWriting On The Wallʼ,
the corniest number on the entire record — for some reason, not only did they
have the strange idea to begin it with a synthesizer quotation from Swan Lake, but they also decided to deck
the rest of the ballad with a speedy disco arrangement, about as appropriate in
the context of the album as a skyscraper in the middle of a Papuan village.
Maybe at the last moment somebody had the bright idea that it would be wrong
for the artists to stay completely
out of touch with modern reality, so they threw on «one for the nightclubs» at
the last moment. Not good for the vibe, and the vibe is pretty much the only
reason one could care about the record in the first place.
Additionally, the album is just too damn long —
over an hour, with most of the songs sharing the same magical-mystical mood; as
happy as they must have been making it, it is not certain that the average
listener would necessarily subscribe to this «let the magic never stop!»
ideology. Trimming the record at the expense of some of its «samey» numbers
might have made me pay more attention to its individual components — as it is,
I'm forced to treat it as yer average fairywood mushroom muzak. I totally get
this escapist vibe, and I like how it is presented with reserve and humility,
but recommending this album for somebody who is not fascinated with the spirit
of Ritchie Blackmore would be an impossibility. I guess Candice Night could be
called «kinda hot» in recompense, but when it comes to witchy women and
gypsies, I guess I'm more of a sucker for Stevie Nicks in the end. Candice just
looks way too healthy for my tastes.
UNDER A VIOLET MOON (1999)
1) Under A Violet Moon; 2)
Castles And Dreams; 3) Past Time With Good Company; 4) Morning Star; 5) Avalon;
6) Possum Goes To Prague; 7) Wind In The Willows; 8) Gone With The Wind; 9)
Beyond The Sunset; 10) March The Heroes Home; 11) Spanish Nights (I Remember It
Well); 12) Catherine Howard's Fate; 13) Fool's Gold; 14) Durch Den Wald Zum
Bach Haus; 15) Now And Then; 16) Self Portrait.
For some reason, Ritchie likes to make these
records rather long — around an hour in duration, sometimes more, taking full
advantage of the CD format at a time when other performers were already getting
past that stage, and slowly realizing that you don't have to stretch your record out to 70 minutes just because you can
fit that much length on your current medium of choice. Because of that, all of
these Blackmore's Night recordings necessarily have monotonous streaks to them
even if it would be wrong to say that Blackmore always purposefully sounds the
same.
On the contrary, if you put it all together, an
album like Under A Violet Moon
(several points off, though, for two LPs in a row with the word «moon» in the
title) features plenty of diversity. There's some medieval English music, some
medieval German music, some medieval Spanish music, an acoustic reinvention of
an old Rainbow song, and even a bit of Russian folk music, which, upon closer
inspection, turns out to be pseudo-folk music (ʽGone With The Windʼ
incorporates the melody of Polyushko-polye,
Lev Knipper's most famous contribution to his country, written in 1934), but who's
supposed to know?
In some ways, this is a serious improvement:
the production, featuring many more «authentic» instruments than before (with
twice as many musicians credited in the liner notes), is fairly well cleaned
from that feeling of «cheapness» — and there are no downright embarrassments
like the disco pandering of ʽWriting On The Wallʼ. That's on the
traditional-conservative side, but on the «fusion» side, Blackmore's fans will
also like the fact that he is playing more electric guitar, including a
trademark flashy solo during the coda of ʽGone With The Windʼ (very
clean, though: no distortion or whammy bar hooliganry) — and that Rainbow
cover, too, is a nice enough gesture, showing that Ritchie has not completely
disavowed his past, but is rather willing to rethink it. After all, some of
those songs did have good melodies, and ʽSelf Portraitʼ works fine in
an acoustic setting.
Unfortunately, nothing will help Candice Night
to become a more interesting singer than her inborn gift allows her to, and no
matter how they try, all of these songs are, at best, «pretty» rather than
«beautiful». When they come up with catchy vocal hooks, as they do on the title
track, they are worth relistening — but even then, the magic that they
sincerely try to work on that song is rather trite. Pretty girl singing,
«mystical» echoey male harmonies flanking, gradual quickening of the tempo to
turn the whole thing into a magical dance ritual, we've pretty much sat through
all that in high school already: can you show us something we don't know? Okay,
even if you can, you just don't want to. It's your fantasy, and you don't care
just how original or individualistic it is. Fair enough. "Past time with
good company / I love, and shall until I die" — what serious objection
could there be against ol' King Henry VIII and his still-actual credo?
Seriously, none at all, and there is not a
single track on this album that would not be at least tepidly likable. Some
have said that the album is more «poppy» where its predecessor was more
«folky», but this is a matter of personal impression, I guess, especially if by
«poppy» one means «catchier and/or happier tunes», which are more or less
equally interspersed here with darker stuff — and it is interesting that the
bleak ʽSelf Portraitʼ, with its "going down, down, down, down,
down" chorus was chosen as the coda, leading the album from the collective
ritualistic happiness of the opening to the personal depressed gloom of the closing.
Other than that, I guess ʽGone With The Windʼ with its Russian folk
backing harmonies is the most «outstanding» number here, but there is something hokey about crossing fake
Russian mouzhiks with passionate
Blackmore electric soloing, so there is hardly anything cathartic about the
song.
I'd give the album a thumbs up and recommend it to
Blackmore's fans as a suitable introduction into his world, populated with
idealistic projections of King Henry VIIIth, Michael Praetorius, and J. S.
Bach, as they all join hands and dance around the fire under a violet moon
shining over a Spanish night somewhere in Avalon. But remember that,
essentially, this is just a musical form of cosplay, so, instead of expecting
Fairport Convention quality, just bring along your Robin Hood garments and a
longbow, and on that level, it will be fairly easy to connect with the old grey
minstrel and his golden-locked protegée.
FIRES AT MIDNIGHT (2001)
1) Written In The Stars; 2)
The Times They Are A-Changin'; 3) I Still Remember; 4) Home Again; 5) Crowning
Of The King; 6) Fayre Thee Well; 7) Fires At Midnight; 8) Hanging Tree; 9) The
Storm; 10) Mid-Winter's Night; 11) All Because Of You; 12) Waiting Just For
You; 13) Praetorius (Courante); 14) Benzai-Ten; 15) Village On The Sand; 16)
Again Someday.
This is probably as good as it gets — or, at
least, as diagnostic as it gets, so if you want to give Lord R. and Lady C. one
lucky chance, Fires At Midnight
might be your best bet. Not only is it as stylistically diverse as the duo
would ever get, but it also achieves a stable balance between the «folk» and
the «rock» visions of Blackmore as applied to his dabblings in past times with
good companies. Which, simply speaking, translates to «it's still cheesy, but
not as boringly cheesy as it used to
be». There's even some bark-and-snap to it now.
Most importantly, Blackmore seems to have
finally adapted the art of writing faux-medieval ballads to his trademark fiery
style: almost as if he were a little tired of the exaggerated courteous
gallantry of his previous two efforts, quite a few of these new compositions
put their trust (and their thrust) in «power». ʽWritten In The Starsʼ
opens the album deceptively, with some nearly accappella singing from Candice —
but that is just the intro: at 1:05 into the song, the electric guitar kicks in
with some heraldic chords, the martial drums and horns join in the attack, and
the whole thing becomes a darkly romantic gallop, highlighted by ecstatic
electric leads. No huge surprises on the whole, but this hint at «hidden
menace», tragedy, and toughness is definitely something that neither
ʽShadow Of The Moonʼ nor ʽUnder A Violet Moonʼ possessed.
Where royalty was earlier represented by
Britain (Henry VIII), we now turn to Spain: the title track is credited as a
reworking of a composition originally by Alfonso X of Castile, although we may
safely assume that the guy was not quite as skilled at the electric guitar as
Mr. Blackmore, his disciple, who turns most of the song's second part into a
polygon for unleashing some long-missed amplified pyrotechnics at the listener.
I am also quite unsure if Alfonso el
Sabio actually made a provision for shawms in his original composition, but
whatever be the case, they fit in well with this rather paganistic pandemonium.
As simple and repetitive as the main melody is (which is not very surprising
for a 13th century dance melody), they handle the build-up pretty well, and it
does inspire Blackmore to go fairly wild on the guitar, though, of course, not
full-out wild — even in a moment of ecstasy, the medieval minstrel should never
forget that he does not have proper
access to the whammy bar, since it has not been invented yet.
Other medieval heroes honored on the record include
the obscure Dutch legend Tielman Susato, honored with renditions of the lyrical
dance ballad ʽI Still Rememberʼ and the ceremonial, horns-driven
ʽCrowning Of The Kingʼ (a little too pastoral, atmosphere-wise, but
then again, we're talking 16th century here, when «pastoral» and «court» were
not always that far removed); Jeremiah Clarke, whose famous ʽPrince Of
Denmark's Marchʼ is adapted for a more lyrical purpose as ʽWaiting
Just For Youʼ; the already previously honored Michael Praetorius, whose
ʽCouranteʼ is played by Ritchie on basic acoustic guitar; and the
long-forgotten medieval Jewish klezmer
Hrodebert Zimbarman, whose woodwind-heavy gallant dance melody ʽDie
Zeiten, Sie Ändern Sichʼ is usually better known to modern audiences
through a corrupted neo-folk performance by one of his immigrant descendants;
fortunately, we have Lord R. and Lady C. to thank for restoring the courteous
authenticity of this fine, fine composition.
That said, unless you dig deep into the
credits, it is quite impossible to distinguish the «authentic» material from
the Blackmore/Night «originals» — the former pieces are always rearranged for
the duo's usual style, and the latter are probably only «original» in the sense
that they do not directly transpose the chord structures of the old musical
pieces they are based upon... then again, considering that Blackmore's
collection is said to consist of about 2000 CDs of Renaissance music, I think
that the man himself would not be able to tell whether a particular «original»
of his has been directly lifted from somebody or influenced. So, for instance,
the up-on-your-feet and dance-in-joy ʽHome Againʼ, containing either
the catchiest or simply the most repetitive refrain melody on the album, is
marked as a «Blackmore/Night» composition, but I couldn't believe for one
moment that that melody was invented
by Ritchie — it just sounds like a melody that must have been in good use in
village dance traditions for at least half a millennium or so.
Anyway, this is not the point. The point is
that, despite some inevitable filler (again, it runs over an hour, when some of
the more same-sounding tracks could have been trimmed), Fires At Midnight crackle with more enthusiasm than the previous
two records, and some of that enthusiasm even rubs off on Lady C. — she sounds
positively glowing on the weird Anglo-Japanese hybrid ʽBenzai-Tenʼ,
an ode to a Buddhist goddess sung with Sherwood Forest harmonies (I count this
as Blackmore's personal revenge on the world of J-Pop). While it would be too much
to talk of stylistic revolutions or uncovered musico-semantic depths, Fires At Midnight finally fulfills the
original promise, and honestly, professionally, and creatively delivers «Ersatz
Entertainment», an embarrassingly guilty pleasure if there ever was one. Thumbs up
and an overall recommendation — but do
promise to at least check out Gryphon as a proper antidote for the cheap
thrills offered by our little travelin' minstrel show.
PAST TIMES WITH GOOD COMPANY (2001)
1) Shadow Of The Moon; 2) Play
Minstrel Play; 3) Minstrel Hall; 4) Past Times With Good Company; 5) Fires At
Midnight; 6) Under A Violet Moon; 7) Soldier Of Fortune; 8) 16th Century
Greensleeves; 9) Beyond The Sunset; 10) Morning Star; 11) Home Again; 12)
Renaissance Faire; 13) I Still Remember; 14) Durch Den Wald Zum Bachhaus; 15)
Writing On The Wall.
I do not have much to say about this live
album, recorded at a May 2002 show in Groningen, except this: the only real reason for Blackmore's Night to
exist is in its live incarnation. It's not as if their live performances were
much less stiff than studio ones — it is simply that this particular type of
music, all these medieval dances and feel-good ballads, are «party music» by
definition. This shouldn't even be played in clubs or concert halls: this
should be played in pubs, next to those long wooden tables, creaking and
groaning from the weight of roast pigs, stuffed rabbits, fresh fruit, wine
bottles, and whatever else there can be found on your average Brueghel
painting. And nobody should be listening, of course, leaving it to the minstrel
to command attention by singing it ever so loud, proud, and with boundless
energy...
Somehow this only struck me when listening to
these live renditions of songs from the duo's first three albums — performed
quite faithfully to the originals, but in an even more «pseudo-authentic»
setting, as Blackmore very rarely uses the electric guitar (even the outro solo
on ʽFires At Midnightʼ is replaced with acoustic passages), and the
listeners' attention is frequently focused on violin improvisations from one of
the band's members. There is an implicit (sometimes explicit) call for
everyone to join in — the clapping and stomping starts with the very first
performance and is then renewed on every second or third song. This is not
«Folk Music» as a carrier of the Sacred Heart, or of Sanctified Traditional
Wisdom, or even of Pure Beauty, as folk revivalists sometimes envision it. This
is simple, robust, healthy entertainment to help that mug of ale go down easier
and that leg of lamb digest with extra juice.
All the more respect to the band for really
putting some work in this, especially Candice: she may not be a great singer,
and her stage image may be too forcedly cartoonish, but what she is capable of
doing, she is totally giving out 100% — no bum notes, no trying to sing outside
of her range, and a very hearteningly welcome, unpretentious attitude that
should disarm any criticism. As a side bonus, Ritchie re-arranges two golden
oldies for her, the Deep Purple ballad ʽSoldier Of Fortuneʼ (where
she is very welcome in the place of David Coverdale) and the Rainbow rocker
ʽ16th Century Greensleevesʼ (where nobody can replace Ronnie James
Dio, but she does not even try to compete with him on the song's ferocious "we
will dance around the FIRE!" coda — although it is fun to see her add a
little bit of snarl every now and then, so contrary to her regular image).
Additionally, on ʽGreensleevesʼ Ritchie even agrees to brandish the
old axe: the main melody has been funkified, and its original riff deleted
(quoted just once for the song's coda, to be precise), but at least he can
still deliver these maniacal leads like few others can.
No wonder, then, that it all culminates in
ʽHome Againʼ, performed here with a far greater sense of purpose than
in the studio version — even if you do not like this stylistics in general, it
is hard not to get caught up in the overall merriment, so contagious is the
laughter in Candice's voice. Yes, there is also a small share of «intimate»
performances (ʽI Still Rememberʼ), but usually they function as
«breathers» (along with several instrumentals showcasing The Master), allowing
the audience to get some rest before getting them back up on their feet again.
And then the show is over with a rip-roaring version of ʽWriting On The
Wallʼ, stripped of its rather unsettlingly modernistic production,
although the disco bassline is still naggingly hanging out there.
Bottomline: if you have no interest in a
detailed assessment of the ups and downs of the first stage of Blackmore's
Night, Past Times With Good Company
is your best bet. The setlist contains almost all the relevant highlights,
performed at least as well as in the studio and sometimes better. The band and
the audience connect totally in their little medieval fantasy game. The sound
quality is perfect. And if you enjoy it with a roast leg of wild boar and a keg
of mead on a pleasant European evening, the experience is so complete, you'll
never want to get back to the 21st century again. Thumbs up.
GHOST OF A ROSE (2003)
1) Way To Mandalay; 2) Three
Black Crows; 3) Diamonds And Rust; 4) Cartouche; 5) Queen For A Day (part 1);
6) Queen For A Day (part 2); 7) Ivory Tower; 8) Nur Eine Minute; 9) Ghost Of A
Rose; 10) Mr. Peagram's Morris And Sword; 11) Loreley; 12) Where Are We Going
From Here; 13) Rainbow Blues; 14) All For One; 15) Dandelion Wine.
These are the wond'rous and enchanting
surprises that await ye on the fourth studio album by Ritchard, Lord of
Blackmore, and his Lady Candice of Hauppauge.
Number one: two of the tracks are credited
solely to Lady Candice, which is a first in Blackmore's Night history, and
either reveals a drastic increase in self-confidence on the part of the lady,
or a drastic increase in self-sacrifice on the part of the lord. Not that it
makes any big difference, because she used to write the lyrics anyway, and the
melodies of both ʽThree Black Crowesʼ and ʽIvory Towerʼ are
completely in the traditional ballpark — no serious compositional input here to
speak of.
Number two: the album is being «modernized» by
featuring cover versions that are, this time, credited not to old-time kings
and baroque composers, but to Joan Baez (ʽDiamonds And Rustʼ) and Ian
Anderson (ʽRainbow Bluesʼ). The former is a misstep, because it would
take a bit more than Candice Night to outsing Joan Baez — and the original was
so personal anyways that if we have
to hear a cover version, it should rather be one of those wild wild stylistic
reinventions, like the Judas Priest rendition. The latter is okay:
ʽRainbow Bluesʼ was a minor folk-pop ditty for Jethro Tull in the Warchild era, and this straightforward
interpretation with wailing electric leads might even trump the original in
terms of energy.
Number three: ʽAll For Oneʼ is a tightened-up,
watered-down English-language rendition of the traditional Breton drinking song
ʽSon Ar Chistrʼ, which you can easily hear in a more authentic form,
for instance, on the debut album of Alan Stivell (Reflêts). The shawms and electric solos help clear up some of
the repetitiveness, and the tightened, «normalized» rhythmics helps make the
song more catchy, although, of course, purists will want to drown the
performers in their own vomit — but then again, what true purist would last
long enough to still want to listen to Blackmore's Night as late as 2003?
Number four: ʽWhere Are We Going From
Hereʼ is a lonely, stately, plaintive ballad on which Lady Night asks the
title question as if she wanted you
to provide her with the answer. Funny thing: here we thought that the two
protagonists had found their coveted happiness, by being financially and
spiritually free to dress up as Robin Hood and Lady Marian and revel in their
idealized reality, yet here they are complaining that "some things don't
go as they're planned" and that "silence answers our cries".
Unless this merely reflects a case of Blackmore's personal cobbler having
messed up with the lord's favorite pair of boots, you could almost swear they
were trying to make a serious social statement here.
Number five: the longest, grandest, and most
pompous song here is ʽWay To Mandalayʼ, which was maybe inspired by Candice reading
herself some Rudyard Kipling (I seriously doubt the option of Blackmore's Night
ever touring in Burma), although these lyrics sure ain't no Kipling, and this
melody sure don't seem particularly influenced by traditional Burmese music.
Like everything else here, it is a very straightforward piece, and goes down
best as inoffensive, quickly forgettable background music.
This just about concludes the list of possible
things to say about Ghost Of A Rose.
As for a general assessment, all I can say is that it is a very smooth and
formulaic product — taking very few chances even compared with the previous
albums. Each song is pinned to exactly one, sometimes two musical ideas; guitar
solos are used sparingly, and repetition is no more simply the word of the day,
but it is now quite aggressively the
word of the day.
If Ritchie had himself a time machine and could
transport back to the 16th century with all of his band and all of his amplifiers,
he'd be a smash success in the little villages and the working suburbs with
this stuff. As it is, «demanding» listeners will skip this «cheapness» in
favor of sterner and more challenging folk exercises, and «simple» listeners
won't give it a chance because it has no technobeats. (For some strange reason,
the only place where the record charted higher than Fires At Midnight was Switzerland — even though, as far as I
remember, there was no yodeling anywhere in sight. Perhaps it was just an
accidental matter of a really hot night in Zurich or something.)
THE VILLAGE LANTERNE (2006)
1) 25 Years; 2) Old Village
Lanterne; 3) I Guess It Doesn't Matter Anymore; 4) The Messenger; 5) World Of
Stone; 6) Faerie Queen; 7) St. Theresa; 8) Village Dance; 9) Mond Tanz / Child
In Time; 10) Streets Of London; 11) Just Call My Name; 12) Olde Mill Inn; 13)
Windmills; 14) Street Of Dreams; 15*) Once In A Garden.
It is reasonable to accelerate a bit with these
reviews, since Ritchie and Candice are so admirably steady in their approach
that stylistic divergences between Ghost
Of A Rose and The Village Lanterne
(yes, with a final orthographic -e
all right, although it may be worth noting that, in contrast, the
presence/absence of the article the
is oddly fluctuating between various releases) are kept to a barely
distinguishable minimum. Perhaps the most curious addition to the lineup here
is Anton Fig on percussion, the drummer from David Letterman's house band. This
really gives the drums a more fluent, African style (lots of bongos, among
other things), which only goes to show how much Ritchie really cares about «authenticity», but it is useful to be reminded every once in a while that this whole
project is a multi-colored «fantasy», not some scientific recreation of stark
medieval realities. Betcha didn't know Ritchie's boots are really made in
China, did you?
Cover material this time around includes Ralph
McTell's ʽStreets Of Londonʼ (a little oversaturated with woodwinds,
but we will assume they are just trying to make it more baroque: Candice does
a good job conveying the friendly melancholy of the original), and Joan
Osborne's ʽSt. Teresaʼ, here transformed into an electric rocker with
a much faster tempo, and adorned with one of the album's most blazing (though
fairly unexceptional for Blackmore) solos. The most controversial cover, of
course, will be Deep Purple's own ʽChild In Timeʼ — not only does
Ritchie dare to integrate it into one whole with his own merry instrumental
dance number (ʽMond Tanzʼ), but he desecrates the holy of holies by
actually letting Candice assume the duties of Ian Gillan, which she is unable
to do due to the natural weakness of her voice, so, wisely, she does not even
try to «scream» the scream-chorus, but instead, just lets all the aah-aahs and
ooh-oohs flow calmly and naturally. Even so, there is nothing particularly
interesting or newly inspiring about this rearrangement — and legions of
outraged fans, even now as you are reading this, are pouring out their vitriol
at its live performances on Youtube, joining the ranks of the freshly formed
«Protect The Ian Gillan Legacy From Green-Clothed Ladies With Ample Bosoms»
society.
Oh yes, there is also a cover of Rainbow's
ʽStreet Of Dreamsʼ here — actually, two covers: one of the bonus tracks is an alternate version with
Joe Lynn Turner himself contributing guest (host?) vocals — and this one might
even be an improvement on the original, stripping it from the excesses of
Eighties' production. Besides, while I'd never take Candice over classic-era
Gillan, taking Candice over the cheap bathos of Joe Lynn Turner is a far more
seductive proposition. In fact, re-recording the entire post-Dio Rainbow
catalog with Blackmore's Night would, on the whole, be much more useful than
doing the same with the old Deep Purple catalog.
As for the originals, there are a few catchy
folk-rock creations here like the galloping ʽI Guess It Doesn't Matter
Anymoreʼ and ʽJust Call My Nameʼ; a couple nicely harmonized
ballads like the opening ʽ25 Yearsʼ and ʽFaerie Queenʼ, the
latter with a special dance coda; a stupid-sounding drinking song (ʽOlde
Mill Innʼ — where ʽAll For Oneʼ was about drinking, fighting,
and dying, this one is just about drinking, drinking, and drinking some more);
and some more of those pretty and thoroughly interchangeable acoustic Blackmore
instrumentals. For those who have been waiting, the goods have been honestly
delivered as expected. For those who have not, no reason to begin now, unless
you have a fever, and the only prescription is more shawm.
WINTER CAROLS (2006)
1) Hark The Herald Angels
Sing/Come All Ye Faithful; 2) I Saw Three Ships; 3) Winter (Basse Dance); 4)
Ding Dong Merrily On High; 5) Ma-O-Tzur; 6) Good King Wenceslas; 7) Lord Of The
Dance/Simple Gifts; 8) We Three Kings; 9) Wish You Were Here; 10) Emmanuel; 11)
Christmas Eve; 12) We Wish You A Merry Christmas.
A Christmas album from Blackmore's Night, come
to think of it, was inevitably happening, so the only relevant question in
expecting its imminent forthcoming would be: «Will they or will they not be
featuring a new version of ʽHighway Starʼ, with Candice Night
singing, ʽNobody's gonna take my sleigh, I'm gonna race it to the North
Poleʼ?»
Apparently not, and this here is a rather
loyal, no-shock-value-whatsoever, and courteously brief collection of
hymns, carols, covers, and just a couple
original numbers, in keeping with the 21st century understanding of the
«Christmas album» (adding one's own individual twists rather than just keep recording
new versions of ʽRudolphʼ and ʽWe Three Kingsʼ 'til
eternity). So it pretty much sounds like you'd expect it to sound — Ritchie's
medievalistic guitar, Candice's friendly, unexceptional vocals, and lots of
baroque overdubs.
You do get to hear the lady sing in Hebrew,
with the band paying tolerant tribute to Hanukkah (ʽMa-O-Tzurʼ — sic, instead of the required
ʽMaʽoz-Tzurʼ, but Lord Blackmore ain't the one to be stopped by
trifling orthography problems), but other than the lady's struggle with
pronunciation, arrangement-wise, this is not one iota different from the rest
(well, actually, the old hymn itself was written in the German rather than Near
Eastern tradition, so that is hardly surprising). You also get to hear Sydney
Carter's ʽLord Of The Danceʼ, which I, shamefully enough, only originally
knew from the cuddly Donovan cover — even though Donovan actually transformed
the song from its hymnal incarnation into an endearing kiddie tune, whereas
Blackmore and Night stick to the solemn choral interpretation.
To fill up empty space, they also include
ʽWish You Were Hereʼ from Shadow
Of The Moon (not a «re-recording», as some sources incorrectly state, but
the exact same version), and repeat each chorus on each song a couple dozen
extra times — ʽLord Of The Danceʼ, ʽChristmas Eveʼ and others
are all plagued by repetitiveness, and the short closing number ʽWe Wish
You A Merry Christmasʼ is nothing but exactly that, really. And if you
ever tried to insinuate that the old standard ʽDing Dong Merrily On
Highʼ is really a song about sex (ding dong), drugs (on high), and
rock'n'roll (merrily), well, there's nothing to confirm this in the actual
execution.
By all means, the record is eminently
skippable, but it does fill its own niche, because whoever actually bought the
whole thing and, in his or her mind, had already been dwelling in Sherwood
Forest and/or Nottingham Castle with Kevin Costner and/or Alan Rickman for
almost a decade, now finally gets to
spend Christmas in the perfect way possible — playing Winter Carols from dawn till dusk until the herald angels stop
singing. For everybody else, the record will be pointless, but Blackmore's
Night is not an ensemble that panders
to the hoi polloi: in terms of primal
enjoyment and accessibility, its intended audience is only the entire Christian
(and, this time around, Jewish) world, former
Christians who celebrate Christmas without believing in Christ included — just
a few billion people or so, most of whom ended up not buying this record by
sheer accident of providence, or so we will have to assume.
SECRET VOYAGE (2008)
1) God Save The Keg; 2) Locked
Within The Crystal Ball; 3) Gilded Cage; 4) Toast To Tomorrow; 5) Prince Waldeck's
Galliard; 6) Rainbow Eyes; 7) The Circle; 8) Sister Gypsy; 9) Can't Help
Falling In Love; 10) Peasant's Promise; 11) Far Far Away; 12) Empty Words.
The only principal difference here stands out
in the credits: where in the past we had at least half or more of the songs
starkly credited to «Blackmore, Night», here the same convention is observed
only on a small handful of tracks. The rest are either listed as straightahead
covers, or preceded with a
«traditional» disclaimer, as if, after all these years, conscience had finally
caught up with Ritchie and he decided to openly admit that he did not, in fact, write all these melodies.
Most people knew that already, of course — that he is much more of an arranger
and «adapter» than an independent composer in his own rights — but it is nice
to see him coming out with this newfound humility as the years go by. Now how
about going all the way and including Vince Wallace in the author list for
ʽChild In Timeʼ?..
Alas, humility and entertainment do not always
go hand in hand, and at this juncture, Blackmore's Night seems to be running
out of the last puffs of steam. The best song on the album, and the only one
fit for repeated listening, as far as I am concerned, is ʽLocked Within
The Crystal Ballʼ, a modernized take on the old medieval song ʽStella
Splendensʼ from the 14th century «Libre Vermelle de Montserrat», one of
the earliest surviving manuscripts of folk-styled hymns. Yes, people could
really write awesome songs back then, and Ritchie and Candice are quite
inspired by the experience of re-inventing this golden oldie for modern times —
giving it a stern galloping tempo and extra vocal hooks: Candice's
"...locked within the crystal ball" is a fine case of matching the
«doom» of the lyrics with the «doom» of the vocal melody (although the «doom»
is anything but tragic — serious, inescapable, but not catastrophic), and Ritchie's
extended guitar duet with Candice has an honestly hypnotic quality to it. I
only wish they'd left the song keyboard-free, because all this synthesizer crap
only enhances the cheese effect — why not a good old Hammond organ instead, at
the very least?
Nothing else on the record even comes close in
terms of power. The straightforward covers are rotten — the old Rainbow ballad
ʽRainbow Eyesʼ is grossly overproduced, and hardly works at all,
devoid of the intimate setting of the original; and they do yet another
gallop-tempo rendition, this time of ʽCan't Help Falling In Loveʼ —
inventive, for sure, but there is a goddamn reason why this song used to be
slow: the rushed tempo and bombastic onslaught of the melody make it look like
a case of «love on saddleback». What's up with all the hurry? Courting is
supposed to be a delicate process, and here all that's missing is the crack of
the whip.
Except for another fast-paced Russian folk
dance (ʽToast To Tomorrowʼ) that really does not fit in with
Candice's vocal style, the rest of the songs just sort of diffuse in one
another — ballad upon ballad, atmosphere over hooks without any unpredictable
twists. This is a background against which even a corny mutilation of
ʽCan't Help Falling In Loveʼ will begin to look attractive, and a
clear sign that the dynamic duo finally ran out of dynamics. Only the
staunchest fans, seduced to the death by Candice's faux-medieval sexiness
and/or willing to waste a lifetime dissecting every Blackmore lick ever
played, will embrace Secret Voyage
as thoroughly as the duo's first three or four albums — the rest really need
not bother beyond a brief acquaintance with ʽCrystal Ballʼ. There is
almost nothing here but self-repetition and atmospherics, and I do not
understand why in the world I would need to listen to Ritchie repeating
himself, or to praise a record for the kind of atmosphere that I «tolerate»
rather than «enjoy». Sure, they may have produced enough tracks to supply the
complete alternative soundtrack to Game
Of Thrones, but in the end, quantity decisively won over quality, so a thumbs down
it is.
AUTUMN SKY (2010)
1) Highland; 2) Vagabond; 3)
Journeyman; 4) Believe In Me; 5) Sake Of The Song; 6) Song And Dance; 7) Celluloid
Heroes; 8) Keeper Of The Flame; 9) Night At Eggersberg; 10) Strawberry Girl;
11) All The Fun Of The Fayre; 12) Darkness; 13) Dance Of The Darkness; 14)
Health To The Company; 15) Barbara Allen.
It looks as if Blackmore's Night are running
out of inspiration for their album titles even faster than they are running out
of songwriting ideas. Autumn Sky?
What next, Winter Snow? Summer Rain? Springtime For Hitler? Hmm, come to think of it, it might only be a
matter of years before we hear a tenderheart Candice Night cover of
ʽTomorrow Belongs To Meʼ — isn't that just the sort material that'd seem tailor-made for the lyrical duo?
Okay, that first paragraph was a bit
nonsensical and maybe even in bad taste, but it is only because I keep on
running out of meaningful things to say about these records. And Autumn Sky is the very first LP by
Blackmore's Night that does not feature even one distinguishable highlight. Of the endlessly interchangeable
series of medievalesque ballads and baroque instrumentals, only
ʽJourneymanʼ stands out, but in a bad way: it is a cover of a song by
a Swedish folk-pop band, Nordman, borrowing their campy trick of merging a village
dance melody with an electronic beat to a thoroughly embarrassing effect,
almost as cringeworthy as ʽWriting On The Wallʼ on the first album.
Next time we gather round the campfire, ladies and gentlemen, don't forget to
bring along your trusty sampler — we don't want to give out the impression that
we're still living in the Dark Ages,
do we? Just imagine if Robin Hood's merry band had access to electronic
drums...
There is yet another cover of another
Swedish folk-pop band here — ʽHighlandʼ by One More Time, not as
distinctively slap-in-your-face and somehow managing to evoke a bit of ABBA and
a bit of stern Viking metal at the same time (the former mainly through
Candice's vocal stylizations, and the latter through its anthemic, solemn
pacing), but still fairly flat and dull, never quite fulfilling the promise of
taking you up into those highlands. I suppose we should be grateful to Ritchie
for digging out these obscure bands for us to deepen our knowledge, but the
songs do not truly make me want to rush out and immerse myself in the
contemporary Swedish folk-pop scene, or in any
contemporary folk-pop scene, for that matter.
Even more disturbing, though, is the presence
of a bunch of ballads like ʽBelieve In Meʼ, apparently self-written
and rather modestly arranged — but their melodic foundation is that of a
generic power ballad, meaning that the songs could have just as well been
written by Diane Warren, and I could just
see them delivered wild-and-loud on stage by a leotard-clad Cher, with smoke,
fireworks, and ecstatic audience members setting each other on fire with their
lighters and putting the fires out with rivers of tears. A power ballad like
that is usually nauseating; but take the power out of the power ballad and what
you're left with is just Dullsville.
Likewise, there is no doubt in my mind that
Ritchie and Candice love Ray Davies' ʽCelluloid Heroesʼ — but
goshdarnit, the song was never anything special as a piece of musical
composition: what made it unforgettable was Ray's delivery, that hard-to-catch
naïve tenderness in his voice as he managed to profoundly convey «a kid's
affection» for each of the listed Hollywood heroes. Candice is friendly, too,
but she just sings the words like a standard pro, and there is no special
charisma here, none of that «little-man-comments-on-shadows-of-heroes» idea
that made the song into one of the last Kinks classics.
Returning to the opening paragraph, I will let you in on a thoroughly unkept
secret: they actually named the album after their daughter, Autumn Esmerelda
Blackmore, born that same year and receiving her first musical gift from her
happy parents three months later. That might actually explain things a bit — it
is perfectly understandable that making good music was not the Blackmore's first priority in 2010 — but it does not
explain why they did not slap on an honest disclaimer sticker, saying «for our
adorable little offspring» and saving the common folks from yet another
inevitable disappointment. Thumbs down.
A KNIGHT IN YORK (2012)
1) Locked Within The Crystal
Ball; 2) Gilded Cage; 3) The Circle; 4) Journeyman; 5) World Of Stone; 6) The
Peasant's Promise; 7) Toast To Tomorrow; 8) Fires At Midnight; 9) Barbara
Allen; 10) Darkness; 11) Dance Of The Darkness; 12) Dandelion Wine; 13) All The
Fun Of The Fayre; 14) First Of May.
Another live album, and about as exciting as
the pun they chose for the title (not very funny even if we forget that Ritchie
is, stereotypically, a «traveling minstrel» rather than a «knight»). The
difference this time is that, for some reason, Ritchie and Candice seem to
believe that their new stuff is of
just as high a quality and in just as much demand as the old stuff. The second
belief may be indirectly supported by the warm welcome that they receive from
their York audience (the show was recorded in 2011 at the Opera House there),
but the first belief had always been questionable, and these live renditions of
selections from Secret Voyage and Autumn Sky do not really make a serious
effort to confirm it. On the whole, there are just four things I'd like to say
about the album, and then we'll make no effort to forget it.
First, there is such a thing as «too much friendliness», and the sheer amount of
honey and sugar dripping off the lady's tongue and diffusing out of all the
rest of her pores as she cuddles and pampers the audience quickly becomes
unbearable. Perhaps they intentionally set it up in sharp contrast with
Ritchie's classic image of a brutal, antisocial beast, but in that case, it
would have been more fun if he periodically whacked some poor slob in the front
row over the head with his mandolin, or at least put that pair of boots to good
use. As it is, all we get is one end of the story, and occasionally it begins
to sound as if this were your loving, caring, understanding mother talking to
you from the stage rather than a performing maiden. (To be fair, Candice was a mother, and talking about her
little daughter makes up for a large portion of the banter, but I'd rather
prefer to congratulate her on the occasion in a separate story).
Second, ʽLocked Within The Crystal
Ballʼ remains a great song, and so does ʽFires At Midnightʼ, the
only nod to their more-than-recent past on the album that glaringly dwarves all
of its surroundings. I understand that they did not want to duplicate and
triplicate their live catalog, but still, two or three more classic oldies like
ʽHome Againʼ couldn't hurt.
Third, ʽToast To Tomorrowʼ, the
Russian dance tune from Secret Voyage,
is unpredictably merged with a section off Lady GaGa's ʽBad Romanceʼ,
as Candice announces that they have a «special guest from another universe»
with them tonight. No, Lady GaGa does not
make an actual appearance (not her caliber, apparently), and the joke seems
like a silly attempt to either cash in on a modern trend or to send up a modern
trend (not funny, considering how much Blackmore's Night themselves are in
need of being sent up), but it does remind you that at the heart of ʽBad
Romanceʼ lies a rather generic gypsy dance melody, and that, in a way,
everything is connected, and nothing is really new under the sun, and from
that point of view, it even makes sense to listen to a Blackmore's Night album
every once in a while.
Fourth, the show is concluded with a cover of
the Bee Gees' ʽFirst Of Mayʼ that, if this is at all possible, is
made to sound even slower, sweeter, sappier, and more sacramental than the
original (and the original was one of
the sappiest Bee Gees songs from their early classic period). I have no witty
comment on this point — think of one yourself — but it does make me wonder if
this is not some sort of veiled pass at Barry Gibb. Everything right in the
family, Candice? No marital problems? Please to remember that Barry is not
available at the moment, since Linda Gibb seems to be doing all right...
...anyway, A
Knight In York is a good proposition for anybody who sees no distinction
whatsoever between any random studio record by Blackmore's Night (and I can
see where that could be possible), but it is so far removed from my ideal
vision of a live album that I have to express it formally: thumbs down, that is.
DANCER AND THE MOON (2013)
1) I Think It's Going To Rain
Today; 2) Troika; 3) The Last Leaf; 4) Lady In Black; 5) Minstrels In The Hall;
6) The Temple Of The King; 7) Dancer And The Moon; 8) Galliard; 9) The
Ashgrove; 10) Somewhere Over The Sea; 11) The Moon Is Shining; 12) The
Spinner's Tale; 13) Carry On... Jon.
The truth is slowly oozing out: Blackmore's
Night are going to keep on releasing albums until they have rearranged and re-recorded
every single Rainbow song. And since they only do one old Rainbow song per
album, on the average, their program seems to be fully set up until 2050, by
which time Ritchie will be one hundred and five years old and little children
will be calling him Gandalf. Candice Night, of course, will stay young and
pretty forever, and be revered as yer average local elf-maiden: beautiful,
stately, and boring.
In the meantime, Dancer And The Moon is fifty-three more minutes of treated
medievalistic schmaltz, completely obedient to the formula. Just check the song
titles — all the keywords are in place: "dance", "moon",
"sea", "minstrel", "lady", and even
"troika", continuing Ritchie's and Candice's love with a
pedestrian-legendary vision of Russia, as thoroughly fake and corny if you even
begin to mistake it for «the real thing» as everything else about this duo.
"Where the snow lies so deep you can't even see the sun, run, my troika,
run". Yeah right. When they incorporated elements of "Polyushko-pole" in their compositions,
it was at least imaginative — this
approach, however, warrants a giggle at best.
Victims of plunder now include Randy Newman
(ʽI Think It's Going To Rain Todayʼ, replete with plastic synth
riffage) and Uriah Heep (ʽLady In Blackʼ) — my attitude towards those
guys is well known, so I don't mind them using material that was quite corny in
the first place, but still, «tell me your choice in covers and I'll tell who
you are». There is also a final moody «Euro-blues» instrumental called
ʽCarry On... Jonʼ, whose title looks suspiciously similar to Bob Dylan's
ʽRoll On Johnʼ from the previous year's Tempest — although this particular instrumental, melody-wise,
sounds not so much as a potential tribute to John Lennon as, rather, like a
potential tribute to the much more recently departed Gary Moore. And it
probably goes to show just how stale Ritchie has become in his choice of chords
that I find myself far more interested in the brief grumbly organ solo than in
Blackmore's guitar work.
Ultimately, the focus here is on the title
track — another anthemic gypsy-dance number in the vein of ʽHome Againʼ,
modestly catchy, but very
clichéd with its hey-hey-heys and perusal of the same
light-up-your-senses cuddle that has long since lost all taste — and on
ʽSomewhere Over The Seaʼ, taken first as a slow, gallantly waltzing
ballad and then immediately redone as an electronic dance number (ʽThe
Moon Is Shiningʼ), so as to please grandfathers and grandchildren alike:
another cheap, tasteless move on the part of a duo that seems to be losing the
last shreds of decency and credibility.
Perhaps these paragraphs have given you the
impression that Dancer And The Moon
is a total embarrassing disaster next to the relative success of Shadow Of The Moon and other early
records — well, not really, because that impression is much exacerbated if you
listen to them all in chronological order. Taken on their own, all these albums
follow more or less the same musical / artistic philosophy: ultimately, they
pander to the «novice attitude» of the pseudo-seeker who pretends, perhaps
subconsciously, to be interested in «roots» and «history» and «world culture»,
but whose ideal understanding of such things is the movie 300. It used to be that, as long as we understood this, Blackmore's Night could occasionally be fun. But
now it comes to the point that they have worn out their image, thinned out
their ideas, and give us far more of this cheap ersatz than actual hooks,
emotions, or viable syntheses of different traditions. The approach was
questionable from the start, but it could work — and now it no longer can.
Perhaps it is time to pack it in, and as an appropriate remedy, I suggest that
Ritchie Blackmore become the resident guitar player for Lady Gaga, whereas
Candice Night can earn an honest living singing backup vocals for the likes of
Lana del Rey. In the meantime, this album gets a thumbs down — and, most likely,
the same will apply to everything that comes next.
ALL OUR YESTERDAYS (2015)
1) All Our Yesterdays; 2)
Allan Yn N Fan; 3) Darker Shade Of Black; 4) Long Long Time; 5) Moonlight
Shadow; 6) I Got You Babe; 7) The Other Side; 8) Queen's Lament; 9) Where Are
We Going From Here; 10) Will O' The Wisp; 11) Earth Wind And Sky; 12) Coming
Home.
One thing you cannot take away from these guys
— they sure are tenacious. Ritchie is pushing 70, and even Lady Candice is way
past 45 now, making it a bit harder to impersonate The Bonnie Lass O'Fyvie, yet
still they plough on at a steady pace, and without even the slightest inkling
to step away from the formula. Most of their fans have probably already been
hanged for poaching by the Sheriff's men, but still they have enough left to
tickle the lower ranges of the pop charts (this one barely scraped the Top 100
in the UK), and you just got to admire that unbending will to keep Sherwood
Forest green for as long as they live.
As for the music... who really cares? Once
again, we have some odd cover choices: a sterile version of Mike Oldfield's
ʽMoonlight Shadowʼ (Blackmore's flourish-heavy solo is nice, but no
match for Mike's shrill aggression on the original, and is it worth commenting
on whether it would be Candice Night or Maggie Reilly to win in a head-on
competition?), and a thoroughly misguided take on Sonny & Cher's ʽI
Got You Babeʼ — at least, if handled properly, this would give us a nice
chance to finally hear The Man sing, but somehow the quirky detail that the
song only truly makes sense as a duet passed them by (Candice is double-tracked
on the chorus, or maybe there's some other lady singing harmony, but in any
case it ain't quite the same thing).
Somehow they also seem to have run out of
suitable Rainbow and Deep Purple songs to cover, so now they're doing the next
best thing — covering... Blackmore's Night! Yes, there is an upbeat, dance-pop
cover of ʽWhere Are We Going From Hereʼ from Ghost Of A Rose. No more slow country waltzing, we're rushing
forward on the wings of synth loops now. No, it doesn't sound that awful (violins and Ritchie's usual
baroque bits of electric guitar soloing rule the song more than elements of
trendy production), but «pathetic» is probably a good word to use.
As for the new material, the only thing that
caught my attention was the title of the instrumental ʽDarker Shade Of
Blackʼ — the reference to ʽWhiter Shade Of Paleʼ being way too
obvious to miss, and, indeed, this is
a slow, stately tune with a prominent organ part that bears a passing resemblance
to the Procol Harum song without copying it directly. Not too memorable,
impressive, or stylistically unusual, but at least a brief deviation from the
usual fare — unlike everything else, with its standard yawny mix of Russian
folk dancing (ʽAll Our Yesterdaysʼ), Celtic jigs (ʽAllan Yn N
Fanʼ), acoustic ballads (ʽLong Long Timeʼ), and more of the same
later on. As there's virtually nothing I could add to what has already been
said about Dancer And The Moon, the
only thing left to do is give the record the same rating — thumbs down. But do keep on
rockin', you guys, on and on and on, till the night is gone and all that.
LEISURE (1991)
1) She's So High; 2) Bang; 3)
Slow Down; 4) Repetition; 5) Bad Day; 6) Sing; 7) There's No Other Way; 8)
Fool; 9) Come Together; 10) High Cool; 11) Birthday; 12) Wear Me Down.
Blur's debut seems to have been firmly written
down in history as one of those «early disaster» type records — like David
Bowie's self-titled debut, or Genesis' From
Genesis To Revelation: collections of tentative writings that «show promise»,
but are so utterly derivative in comparison with later, more self-assured and
individualistic creations, that nobody except the most forgiving or the most
analytical fans should really bother.
Indeed, Leisure
is quite derivative, no objections here. The young London band «Seymour»,
formed in the late 1980s, naturally admired the latest in hip developments —
primarily the «Madchester» scene and the «shoegazing» movement, anything that
could combine intelligence, psychedelia, and
dancing (replete with funky syncopation if possible) in the same package. As of
1991, they had no serious inclination to become special flag-bearers for their
home country — in fact, Leisure
sounds as if all they wanted to do was to become the latest incarnation of The
Stone Roses, in slightly poppier and more immediately accessible clothing. With
a small pinch of My Bloody Valentine added, if possible, for extra-artsy
flavor. Something like that.
Given such a setting, it is no wonder that
Damon Albarn himself had more or less disowned Leisure, and most fans and critics alike consider Modern Life Is Rubbish to have been the
«proper» debut for Blur. The two singles, ʽShe's So Highʼ and
ʽThere's No Other Wayʼ, are often excused from this anathema, since
they were recorded earlier than the album, while the album sessions were fussy,
hurried, and left no time for Albarn to properly care about the lyrics. But on
a grand scale, there is nothing stylistically special about these songs that
separates them from the overall mood of the LP — ʽShe's So Highʼ is
the accurate son of Shoegaze, ʽThere's No Other Wayʼ is the pretty
daughter of Madchester, and then there's all the rest.
Nevertheless, I have always been a moderate fan
of Leisure, because even with all of
its «second hand» nature (and who, really, is to say that all of the ensuing
«Brit-pop» was not second hand, when
you have all that lengthy line of predecessors, from the Kinks to the Jam,
stretched over the previous three decades?), even with all of that, the album
is already doing a good job at showcasing Blur's greatest skill: pop hooks.
Call me crazy, but in terms of instant memorability, I actually count more hooklines on Leisure than on The Stone
Roses — that doesn't necessarily make it the greater album, but I sure
wouldn't mind if Ian Brown and his lads had included at least a couple of
short, tight, snappy, catchy tunes like ʽBangʼ or ʽHigh
Coolʼ on that record.
Not only that, but the individual trademarks of
Blur's two most prominent members are also well on display: Damon Albarn's
snubby-sounding, velar-inclined Luhnduhn style vocal delivery, and guitarist
Graham Coxon's penchant for playing it rough and dirty, but very precise and
distinct at the same time, with a terrific balance between «tone» and «melody»
that the generic alt-rocker would always topple in favor of «tone». A great
example is the funk-pop riff that opens and controls the majority of
ʽThere's No Other Wayʼ — just the right amount of crackly distortion
to add some «masculinity», but playful and colorful on the whole. Or that song
that nobody ever talks about, ʽRepetitionʼ (maybe because the song
title instantaneously puts everybody off) — there's some fantastic guitar work
there, even if it is, indeed, repetitive, but that wailing, strained riff that
goes from a viciously sustained note to a series of desperately shortened ones,
is a perfect companion for Albarn's "all things remain the same, so why
try again? try, try, try again" chorus (or vice versa, if the melody was
written before the lyrics).
Already ʽShe's So Highʼ shows that
Blur are perfectly natural when it comes to keeping it simple and stupid — a
couple distorted guitar overdubs, an echo effect on double-tracked vocals
singing "she's so high, she's so high, I want to crawl all over her",
and suddenly you get yourself a bona fide contemporary psychedelic classic. You
don't even need that mid-section break with Beatlesy backward solos and
cloud-riding harmonies — that chorus alone is worth the ride. It is a little
unusual to hear Albarn so utterly «spaced out», as if he were under chemical
influences when recording his part, but that is the attitude that the song needs. He's just being spaced out by
this girl, you see. She's so high, he wants to crawl all over her. Let's hope
it doesn't work in real life.
There is
filler, sure enough. ʽSlow Downʼ, for instance, has some really
boring, uninspired grunge guitar work, a song that must have taken three
minutes to write. The same goes for ʽFoolʼ and ʽCome
Togetherʼ which sound like raw demos for My Bloody Valentine's Loveless without any of the atmospheric
arrangement components that made that record so special. But for a 50-minute
record, three or four filler tunes are nothing to be afraid of. It would have
been worse if the longest track on the album were also filler — however,
ʽSingʼ is anything but; instead, it is a beautifully morose, hypnotic
mantra, one of the most expressive songs based on a one-note pattern ever
written, like a dirge for one's mind, frozen numb and incapable of activity. Maybe
it's their impression of the sort of music that must be playing on constant
repeat in the cerebrum of comatose patients — anyway, it's better than most
shoegaze I have heard.
By the time the album winds down with
ʽWear Me Downʼ, another track whose title is perfectly suited to its
leaden guitar riff and «stone tired» vocals, Leisure has done a fine job introducing Blur as a band that, while
not being terribly original (yet), feels perfectly at home with currently
cutting-edge pop styles — their Please Please
Me, if you wish, a record that nobody has any reason to be ashamed of,
fully deserving an assured thumbs up. As far as I'm concerned, easily the
worst thing about it is the front sleeve. If I were a paid musical critic and
had to endure looking at that tacky bathing cap, I'd probably feel forced to
shoot it down, too.
MODERN LIFE IS RUBBISH (1993)
1) For Tomorrow; 2) Advert; 3)
Colin Zeal; 4) Pressure On Julian; 5) Star Shaped; 6) Blue Jeans; 7) Chemical
World; 8) Sunday Sunday; 9) Oily Water; 10) Miss America; 11) Villa Rosie; 12)
Coping; 13) Turn It Up; 14) Resigned; 15*) Young And Lovely; 16*) Popscene.
"He's a twentieth century boy / With his
hands on the rails / Trying not to be sick again / And holding on for
tomorrow". Compare this with Ray Davies' "I'm a twentieth century
man, but I don't want to be here", and this makes it obvious what the big
difference is between the Kinks and Blur — Ray Davies, sick of today, stares
back into the past, whereas Damon Albarn, perhaps equally sick, is still
determined to peek ahead into the future. Without this difference, Blur would
never have become superstars in the 1990s: «anglophiles» they may be all right,
yet their love-and-hate story with
England is that of today and tomorrow, not today and yesterday.
Modern
Life Is Rubbish came to be
seen as the «true beginning» of Blur and one of the first proper «Britpop»
records, although I sure as heck wish they'd at least called it «neo-Britpop»
or something, because what are we going to do with the Kinks and the Small
Faces otherwise? As far as the term itself is concerned, the key change would
be seen as lyrical: Albarn borrows the patented Ray Davies trademark of writing
small character portraits and impressions of everyday life in contemporary
Great Britain, «localizing» his visions of boy-girl and protagonist-environment
relationships and, paradoxically, making it easier to empathize for anyone,
British or non-British. But there are changes in the music, too, since the
album only preserves a few scattered traces of the Madchester / baggy /
shoegazing style of Leisure — as a
rule, though, the band returns to a much more conventional pop-rock sound:
traditional structures with improved production, so that the music can now
appeal to their contemporaries and their parents alike.
The decision to «go quintessentially British»
was brilliant: suddenly it became obvious that Blur had both the songwriting
talent and a way to use it for some
meaningful purpose. This is what makes ʽFor Tomorrowʼ one of the
greatest songs of the decade — the combination of an unforgettable melodic
hook, a certain nonchalant British cool, and a message with which so many
people could identify: "...says modern life is rubbish, I'm holding on for
tomorrow". Rummaging around in my mind right now, I cannot come up with
any immediate examples of songs that would strike such a fine balance between
present-day disillusionment and latter-day optimism. And that la-la-la chorus —
simplistic as hell, but so invigorating, doesn't it actually make you want to
get off your ass and go do something?
The only problem of Modern Life is that, at this stage, Blur are only beginning to get
into that image, and they wouldn't really start to feel completely at home with
it until the next album. To put it bluntly, Modern Life is just too damn long:
even without any bonus tracks, it runs close to an hour, when records like
these should not ever run over 45 minutes. I am almost certain that even some
major fans might feel the same way — the difference being in what to cut out to
reduce the factor of occasional boredom. Personally, I would suggest ripping
out the three-song streak of ʽOily Waterʼ, ʽMiss Americaʼ,
and ʽVilla Rosieʼ if we had to go that way — but perhaps even better
still would be to simply reduce some of the songs' running lengths. (One trace
of their shoegaze legacy is that they still preserve these lengthy, tedious,
«atmospheric» instrumental passages — ʽOily Waterʼ and
ʽResignedʼ are the major culprits).
Once you have mentally condensed the record
into less of a sprawl and more of a focused, economically painted landscape,
the result commands total respect. The loud rockers with distorted guitars
carry vicious fun — ʽAdvertʼ with its snappy "say something, say
something else!" chorus (be sure to match the context and listen to it on
headphones in the middle of an underground station, with a bunch of idiotic
adverts staring you in the face from the other end of the platform);
ʽChemical Worldʼ, its ironically swirling harsh riff, and anthemic
chorus about "putting the holes in" that you gleefully sing along
without the least understarding of what it is supposed to mean;
ʽCopingʼ commits a little copyright crime by stealing the major hook
from Argent's ʽHold Your Head Upʼ, but does that in good spirit — the
hook was rather stern and gloomy for Argent's positive message, and here Blur
are using that riff for their psychotic purposes rather than cheer you up, so
it's okay. Besides, who in 1993 remembered anything about Argent anyway?
Elsewhere, they go for direct imitations of the
old Kinks/Small Faces style — ʽSunday Sundayʼ is essentially Ray
Davies with crunchier guitars (but the same brass section), and the tender
balladeering style of ʽBlue Jeansʼ, while melodically different
from the usual Kinks patterns, still seems to hearken back to Ray's
«child-like» musings. But just because Albarn and Coxon are both naturals,
these songs never turn into copycat exercises: it's not as if Coxon spent hours
and hours trying to decode the style of Dave Davies, and it's not as if Albarn
mutated his voice to shift from his own natural pitch to Ray's much higher one.
Maybe Ray Davies could have written the lyrics to ʽColin Zealʼ,
which, after all, simply expands on the subject of ʽA Well Respected
Manʼ (I am not so sure about the line "He's a modern retard, he's
terminal lard", though), but he would have been more condescending and
maybe even merciful to his assassinated character than these young
whippersnappers. Fresh blood, you know.
Some of the expanded editions of the album add
ʽPopsceneʼ as a bonus track — the band's single from March 1992 that
basically announced the arrival of the «new Blur», but flopped and only came to
be seen as historically significant in retrospect. I must say, though, that I
have never understood what was the big deal with that song, other than it being
fast and furious and a little teasing, but the chorus ("hey, hey, come out
tonight, popscene, all right") is just plain stupid. In fact, I'd say
there is nothing like that song on the album proper (even its tight rockers
like ʽAdvertʼ and ʽCopingʼ make more sense), and all the
better for it, so there.
Ultimately, the record certainly deserves a thumbs up,
but they are still educating themselves, and there is too much of an
inspirational gap between ʽFor Tomorrowʼ and the rest of these songs
to make it feel as smoothly accomplished as some of its follow-ups. A
«stylistic leap», yes, but not nearly as much a «quantum leap in quality» in
between the underrated Leisure and Modern Life Is Rubbish as people often
make it out to be, I'd say. Still, the title alone is priceless, isn't it? Such
a great discovery for all ages, and yet, seemingly, only been used once so far.
I guess if the year 1993 had a legal representative, it'd probably sue Blur for
libel.
PARKLIFE (1994)
1) Girls And Boys; 2) Tracy
Jacks; 3) End Of A Century; 4) Parklife; 5) Bank Holiday; 6) Badhead; 7) The
Debt Collector; 8) Far Out; 9) To The End; 10) London Loves; 11) Trouble In The
Message Centre; 12) Clover Over Dover; 13) Magic America; 14) Jubilee; 15) This
Is A Low; 16) Lot 105.
Probably the closest thing to a «definitive
Britpop manifesto» to have gone down in history as such — although one wonders
just how much that reputation is due to the now-classic image of the two
greyhounds on the front sleeve. Speaking strictly in melodic terms, Parklife offers little progress beyond
the earlier established style: the band takes most of its structural cues from
the Beatles and the Kinks circa 1966-67, slightly bending them to reflect some
echoes of the punk and New Wave era, improving upon the production and taking
serious care that the lyrics conform to modern, not retro, values. But the
good news is that the killer hooks keep coming — and that the band itself
thinks that they have something important to say with these hooks.
«Keep it simple, but not stupid» is the
now-established motto, and there ain't a single Blur track on which it would
work better than on ʽGirls And Boysʼ — probably the definitive Blur song in that it will be impossible to forget it
once you've heard it, just once. The nagging two-note synth pattern which
completely dominates the song is a perfect sense irritator, as is the robotic
chorus (for better effect, all of it should be sung in one breath, which is
quite a feat, and in perfect Mockney, without which it would lose much of the
effect): part of your brain will tend to dismiss the song as an exercise in
idiocy, part of it will bend towards its inherent catchiness, and still another
part will perceive the thinly veiled irony, as Blur declare themselves supreme
rulers of the hip young crowds of London and
send up so many of these crowds' values at the same time, most importantly, the
whole concept of sexual freedom in the New Age of Man.
Then the cynicism gets even hotter on the title
track, whose melody goes around in simple, steady, repetitive circles, just
like the figurative park stroller whose casual life is described by the (mostly
spoken, provided by actor Phil Daniels) lyrics — note that not a single phrase
or word directly condemns or ridicules «parklife», but Daniels' rather comical,
puffed-up attitude, and the song's musical impersonation of «simplistic
arrogance» make it hard to perceive ʽParklifeʼ as some sort of
positive anthem. Rather, it is one of those «deceitful» songs where you make a
chorus so catchy, it is impossible for your stadium audience not to sing it as
an anthem: "all the people, so many people, they all go hand in hand
through their parklife" — nice words, right? But there is
not-so-deeply-hidden contempt here, in that chorus, going all the way back to
the jolly old tradition of character assassination by Ray Davies
(ʽDedicated Follower Of Fashionʼ, etc.).
This formula — a simple, effective guitar
melody based on «toughly-popped» chords, spiced up with some sprinkly
electronics and an imminent vocal hook in the chorus, and paired with sarcastic
situation-observing lyrics — describes approximately half of the songs on the
album; to the two big hit singles above add also ʽTracy Jacksʼ,
ʽLondon Lovesʼ, ʽMagic Americaʼ (the latter pokes fun at
Americaphilia rather than America itself), ʽJubileeʼ, and even the
instrumental ʽDebt Collectorʼ, whose bourgeois-gallant waltzing gets
a wholly unusual interpretation when you view it in the context of its title.
In each of these songs, behind the «modern English cool» façade there is
thoughtful, insightful content — and the musical arrangements are complex
enough to prevent the possibility of boredom (keyboards, vocal harmonies,
special effects): this is electric guitar-based pop rock, yes, but Blur sell
their songs as complete multi-layered packages, not as bare-bones ideas fueled
only by sheer enthusiasm and arrogance.
However, the songs that carefully lead Parklife over the threshold that
separates «simply cool» records from «great» ones are those that add a slight
lyrical touch — most importantly, ʽEnd Of A Centuryʼ, ʽTo The
Endʼ, and ʽThis Is A Lowʼ, situated respectively near the
beginning, middle, and end of the album and giving it three major «pivots»
around which revolves all the snappy coolness. ʽEnd Of A Centuryʼ, in
particular, is one of my absolute favorites — the greatest, probably, of all
of Blur's «compassionate» songs, an ode to all the bored and lonely people that
once again honors the Kinks with its ʽWaterloo Sunsetʼ-ish harmonies
and melancholic horn solos, and really cuts all the way down to the heart.
ʽTo The Endʼ, on the contrary, dips into the influence pool of French
pop (the band even involves Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab to sing in her native
language), sounding not unlike something out of the soundtrack of Un homme et une femme, although still
infected a bit too much with Blur's usual energy.
Finally, ʽThis Is A Lowʼ ends the
album on a note that is as far removed from the opening sneer of ʽGirls
And Boysʼ as possible — here, Blur plunge into full-scale psychedelic
mode, yielding something deep, multi-layered, loud and screechy one moment and
soothing the next moment, a song that is more Pink Floyd than Beatles or Kinks;
a good example of a situation where «The British» and «The Astral» merge
together in one cohesive whole, reminiscent indeed of Syd Barrett, but with its
own Nineties' face.
There is no need to religiously adore Parklife or overrate it as the
harbinger of the «Britpop revolution» — at its core, it is really very
unpretentious, just a humble tribute to the original
Britpop, but paid by a bunch of really talented guys who, somehow, while
essentially wishing to follow, must
have found out, to their own surprise, that they were now in the lead. Which is, really, a pretty damn
good situation in terms of creativity, and especially in terms of how well
these records stand over time. In 1994, it was unclear whether Parklife would just represent a fad,
but twenty years later, it sounds as fun and as fresh as if it were released
only yesterday. In fact, I'd bet you anything that at least two or three
records like Parklife were probably released yesterday (and the day before
yesterday, and the day before that...), because Parklife has not lost its appeal or relevance in the least, and
everything that has not lost its appeal or relevance gets cloned on a
continuous basis these days, doesn't it? Major thumbs up.
THE GREAT ESCAPE (1995)
1) Stereotypes; 2) Country
House; 3) Best Days; 4) Charmless Man; 5) Fade Away; 6) Top Man; 7) The
Universal; 8) Mr. Robinson's Quango; 9) He Thought Of Cars; 10) It Could Be
You; 11) Ernold Same; 12) Globe Alone; 13) Dan Abnormal; 14) Entertain Me; 15)
Yuko & Hiro.
Sometimes Englishmen blame themselves a bit too
much for being Englishmen, which might look downright odd to an outsider. In early
1967, Mick Jagger made Between The
Buttons, an album largely influenced by the Kinks, delving into pure pop,
music hall, and stereotypical portrayals of London society — of which, in less
than two years, he deeply repented, and shifted his focus once again to faraway
American influences, with good, but very different, results. No matter how
many Stones fans keep demonstrating their love for that record, he still won't budge about performing its
songs live. He really be ol' Delta bluesman, see.
Fast forward almost twenty years, and Blur
hammers out The Great Escape, their
most quintessentially «English-esque» album to-date. Unlike the Rolling
Stones, Blur already had been tightly
associated with the Britpop revival, so you'd probably expect the band to be
deeply satisfied with the results. But no — Damon Albarn told everybody that
it was «messy», and in less than two years, Blur would shift their focus to...
faraway American influences. No matter how many Blur fans kept demonstrating
their love for that record, Albarn still
won't budge about performing its songs live (except maybe ʽThe
Universalʼ). He really be hip-cool American indie rocker, see. Not to be
stereotyped, no.
Of course, the band has some tough memories to
shed about the record — released at the climax of the ridiculous «battle of the
bands» between Oasis and Blur, which was really little more than a clever
marketing strategy, designed to heat up interest in both groups, but some of
the punches were real, and when The
Great Escape lost in popularity and recognition to Oasis' Morning Glory (which does not mean that
it was not popular on its own — it broke all the way to the top of the charts,
and Blur still won the «singles battle» with ʽCountry Houseʼ), the
band emerged from this somewhat depressed and feeling the need for a big
change.
But really, we do not need to know all that
history, do we? Twenty years on, The
Great Escape, cleansed from its silly marketologist context, re-emerges
simply as another fine collection of oh-so-British songs, engineered by a bunch
of snub-nosed, delightfully evil, er, I mean, ironic kids with a great knack
for powerful hooks, if not necessarily for masterful psychological insights.
Let's face it, for all of Albarn's lyrical trickery, the words of songs like
ʽCharmless Manʼ or ʽStereotypesʼ sound a bit silly — he is
portraying caricatures, not real people — then again, that is the way of artistic licence, all the way from Charles Dickens to
Ray Davies and then way beyond the British Isles, too. Anyway, we are not here
for the words.
Instead, we are here to admire the sheer
craftsmanship in a song like ʽStereotypesʼ, which, to my ears,
contains the most kick-ass intro on a Blur record ever (and Blur are quite the
masters of the kick-ass intro) — Coxon's opening two-chord bang is like a stone
smashing through your living-room window, soon followed by a steady hail of
similar ones as the rest of the band joins in, and Albarn's even-intoned
"the suburbs they are dreaming they're a twinkle in her eye..."
sounds even more arrogantly poised than his opening lines on ʽGirls &
Boysʼ. The entire song, guitars, keyboards, vocals, drums even, is just
one big friggin' sneer at people who believe that "there must be more to
life than stereotypes" (or at people who do not believe that, whatever), and although there are, of course,
musically far more heavy songs in the Blur catalog, few match the sheer
vitriolity of ʽStereotypesʼ, which might explain, of course, why the
band, in their stadium age, has preferred not to perform it any more.
A few tracks down the line, they almost repeat
the same formula with ʽCharmless Manʼ. By now, Blur know their
la-la-las and na-na-nas well enough to know how much they matter in tying a
certain song to your brain, but I think that the biggest melodic accomplishment
of the song is still its rather tricky chorus, with the necessity of switching
to and back from falsetto in one-syllable turns, and the climactic buildup
towards the resolution, which then cascades away into the na-na-nas. The message
here is utterly insignificant in light of the form — this is really pop mastery
of the highest order, far higher, in my opinion, than anything Oasis ever had
to offer. And then there is that same cockiness, of course, and all those
mockney diphthongs employed in the pronunciation of the word «Beaujolais» —
irritating to some, perversely charming to others.
There's lots more stuff like that on The Great Escape, even if most of the
other «character-driven» songs do not seem to quite reach the same level of
sharpness. ʽCountry Houseʼ, the big hit single, is, of course,
immaculate, with its slightly off-beat, drunken, carnivalesque attitude.
ʽTop Manʼ has those deep gravelly backing vocals (as if a bunch of
Tibetan monks suddenly opted for British citizenship), and the echoes and the
whistles and the mock-paranoia. Somewhat worse, ʽDan Abnormalʼ,
describing either a random victim of the TV virus or Damon Albarn himself (the
title is an anagram), or Damon Albarn himself as a random victim, is written in the psycho-cool electric pop
style of Revolver, and once again
channels our attention through (somewhat less distinctive) na-na-nahs. Even
more worsier, ʽMr. Robinson's Quangoʼ condemns big bosses in a rather
mish-mashy, non-descript manner, with lots of punch but little in the way of
actual hooks (with its rapid melodic changes, trumpets and jazzy keyboard
parts, it seems more influenced by Zappa than the Kinks or the Beatles, but why
should this band be influenced by Zappa in the first place?).
Thus we smoothly make the transition from
admiration into the gray zone — truth of the matter is, The Great Escape, like most Blur albums, is just too damn long, and
could easily have four or five songs hacked off for integrity's sake. I will
not publish my ideal track list and/or sequencing here, but will simply note
that the album, on the whole, gets more and more boring as it progresses, with
a particularly sharp quality drop-off after ʽThe Universalʼ. Blame it
on the 1990s and their drive for «CD-length» records, but it's not as if these
records can shed off the extra weight all by themselves in the iCloud era — you
will still have to do the trimming on your own.
Fortunately, there is still some stylistic
diversity. ʽBest Daysʼ is a beautiful melancholic ballad, with a
slightly late-night jazzy feel at first, later resolving into the album's most
emotionally complex chorus (love, pity, and irony all meshed in one as Albarn
warns that "other people wouldn't like to hear you if you said that these
are the best days of our lives"). ʽThe Universalʼ, not really a
personal favorite of mine, is still rightfully admired for its epic character —
this is Blur at their most «progressive», with symphonic orchestration,
glorious choirs, far-reaching lyrics, and a grand climax that, once it is over,
gives the impression of having just resolved all the most important problems
of the universe, so it is a little weird that there are eight more songs after
that. It should have certainly replaced ʽYuko & Hiroʼ as the last
track, or, at least, should have been placed right before ʽYuko &
Hiroʼ — the latter, with its humble homebrewed pseudo-Japanese charm,
would then have functioned as a complementary «piccolo finale» after the «gran
finale», like a ʽHer Majestyʼ or something.
In any case, I can never really decide about
which Blur album is better than others, because they all have their great
moments and their share of filler, obligatory by some unwritten Blur law, so in
the end, this is just another big thumbs up with certain reservations. People
sometimes oppose Parklife as «the
happy, upbeat Britpop album» to Great
Escape as «the vitriolic, disconsolate Britpop album», but this is a gross
simplification: Blur are not a «radiant» band by definition, and even their
happiest songs are infused with gall, if you peer sharply enough. Okay, so I
guess there are more songs here about loneliness than on Parklife, but that's all relative.
Perhaps the barbs are a little sharper and a
little more poisonous here — this is merely a matter of nuance; anyway, I am
not really interested in Albarn and Coxon so much for their skills at social
comment as I am interested in their songwriting, and from that point of view, The Great Escape is every bit as
consistent (and every bit as sometimes inconsistent) as Parklife in peppering you with cool, stimulating «Britpop hooks»,
whatever that might ever mean in musical terms. Only the album title is
incomprehensible — where is the
escape in question? Who is escaping, and whatever from? If we are to take the
«loneliness album» judgement at face value, No Escape would have made more sense.
BLUR (1997)
1) Beetlebum; 2) Song 2; 3)
Country Sad Ballad Man; 4) M.O.R.; 5) On Your Own; 6) Theme From Retro; 7)
You're So Great; 8) Death Of A Party; 9) Chinese Bombs; 10) I'm Just A Killer
For Your Love; 11) Look Inside America; 12) Strange News From Another Star; 13)
Movin' On; 14) Essex Dogs.
An album called Blur, released (seemingly) by a band named Blur and featuring
(obviously) an authentic «blur» on the front sleeve, could be easily perceived
as a debut — and, indeed, for Coxon and Albarn alike this was a career reboot.
Having lost the popularity battle to Oasis, they cooled down towards «Britpop»,
and instead, decided to pursue what seemed like a more adventurous road at the
time, taking their new cues from contemporary American indie / lo-fi / avantgarde
rock scene, with Sonic Youth and particularly Pavement usually namechecked as
Coxon's primary influences at the time.
Since that whole scene has become a bit more
jaded with the passing of time, and, I'd guess, far more praised by
conservative critics than listened to by current audiences, this fact alone can
cause plenty of skepticism. I mean, substituting Ray Davies for Stephen Malkmus
as your chief musical guru? Not necessarily the wisest of choices and all.
However, Blur do have two advantages on their hands. First, they are a pop band, and, regardless of whoever
they choose to be their guiding light, be it Mantovani or Throbbing Gristle,
they have no intention to stop being a pop band. Second, they are a good pop band — with a knack for catchy
and meaningful pop melodies, so, regardless of what sort of tone, effect, or
feedback they soak them in, the album is not
going to be «over-the-top» experimental. (Check: Nothing against boldness,
experimentation, and innovation — unless they are exclusively for boldness'
and experimentation's own sake, which is a defect I have frequently associated
with Pavement).
Anyway, few things in the Blur catalog are as
awesomely cool as the beginning of ʽBeetlebumʼ, where Graham's guitar
plays the part of a weird car engine, stalling at first, then revving up at a
steady tempo. But whoever that
«CHUNK-chook-chook-chook-CHUNK-chook-chook-chook» pattern was pilfered from,
Albarn's vocal parts are pure Lennon — in one of his lazy-sleepy, yet wittily
perceptive moods. The lyrics refer to sex, drugs, and not all that much
rock'n'roll, as the arrangement eventually becomes more and more psychedelic
and the song finally sort of explodes in a sonic kaleidoscope. The funny thing
is, all of this is not as far removed from the values of Parklife and Great Escape
as the album's descriptions so often make it seem — there is still something
very much «British» about it all, not just Damon's vocals.
The story of ʽSong 2ʼ is well known:
a brief musical joke that intended to parody the «grunge / alt-rock craze» of
the 1990s, but was lost on most listeners, who embraced it seriously and turned
it into Blur's signature song — «that ʽwoo-hoo!ʼ tune». In defense of
the listeners', I am also always tempted to embrace it seriously, because it is
one of the few examples of «happy grunge» that I know of. I mean, moshing along
to ʽSmells Like Teen Spiritʼ is sort of a downer, when you really get
down to it — being blown about the room as Albarn screams "WHEN I FEEL
HEAVY METAL!..." is a completely different sensation. It's as if they were
Ramonifying the genre, making this heavy music as friendly as possible, and
the feeling is contagious.
It is only after this opening one-two punch
that Blur truly begins to intrude
into some «weird» territory: ʽCountry Sad Ballad Manʼ is a fairly
straightforward blues-pop tune in essence, but its production is lo-fi (making
Albarn sound like a wretched bum from outer space) and its lead guitar parts
are crooked and twisted, as Coxon tries to free himself from conventional chord
sequences and wants to become somebody like Marc Ribot, playing minimalistic
dissonant bursts of notes that would
seem normal for a wretched bum from outer space. It's not the epitome of catchiness,
but it makes sense — an impressionistic musical portrait of an individual
battered about by life one too many times.
From there on, they may go in any direction as
long as there is something crooked and twisted about the chosen path. Some of
the tracks rock out loud (ʽM.O.R.ʼ, ʽChinese Bombsʼ,
ʽMovin' Onʼ), some reach out for the stars in a new coming of Syd
Barrett (ʽTheme From Retroʼ, ʽStrange News From Another
Starʼ), some continue the Lennon vibe (ʽYou're So Greatʼ sounds
every bit like one of those heavily bootlegged «home tapes» that feature John
strumming his guitar and trying out some freshly generated, raw-as-heck
melody), some invoke a woozy drugged-out party spirit (ʽOn Your Ownʼ
— hilariously, the drugged-out party is waved goodbye three tracks down the
line, with ʽDeath Of A Partyʼ), some put on dark glasses, black
leather, and descend into a smelly basement somewhere close to St. Marks'
Place, in order to be tougher-than-tough and cooler-than-cool (ʽI'm Just A
Killer For Your Loveʼ — doesn't that title alone make you shake in your
boots?). There are no great melodic breakthroughs here, but on the whole, this
is a classy way to refresh and reload the old Blur vibe.
The biggest uncertainty lies with the final
track, ʽEssex Dogsʼ, an eight-minute piece of genuine avantgarde —
ostensibly this record's ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ (or, rather, a condensed,
slightly more melodic, version of Metal
Machine Music), prudently tacked on to the end so that even if you dismiss
it as a pretentious piece of unlistenable shit, you are still left with a
perfectly legit, uninterrupted 48-minute album. Actually, I like some of the
stuff that Coxon does with his guitar, particularly that opening riff which
once again sounds like a vehicle winding up and down, stubbornly refusing to
start up properly — but on the whole, eight minutes of this stuff does look
like overkill, especially coming from a band that had never properly
specialized in the legacy of Lou Reed and John Cale. On the other hand, I guess
that if something like ʽSong 2ʼ makes you a big star, you gotta have a nifty antidote like
ʽEssex Dogsʼ on hand — play it for thirty minutes uninterrupted at
your stadium shows and nobody is going to confuse you with the Stone Temple
Pilots any more. It's a dog-eat-dog world, you gotta be prepared for anything.
Honestly, I think this is a pretty damn good
album poised for greatness, and that it still holds up very well after all
those years — in fact, it might even hold up better than some of its
influences, because, just like the Beatles, Blur have the capacity of «taming»
those influences and adapting them to accessible purposes without compromising
them. On Parklife and Great Escape, they sang catchy songs
about the underbelly of society; on Blur,
they make us sense that underbelly through the «ugly» musical moves,
dissonance, and well-orchestrated chaos rather than the lyrics (which are often
transformed into Joycian stream-of-consciousness rants) or the singing (which is
often intentionally «downgraded» with lo-fi production). The shift was a gamble
that could have very well failed, but it did not fail, and still deserves its
strong thumbs up.
13 (1999)
1) Tender; 2) Bugman; 3)
Coffee & TV; 4) Swamp Song; 4) B.L.U.R.E.M.I.; 5) Battle; 6) Mellow Song;
7) Trailerpark; 8) Caramel; 9) Trimm Trabb; 10) No Distance Left To Run; 11)
Optigan 1.
It feels strange to me that the band did not
simply disintegrate into little pieces after recording 13, and that, apparently, truly serious bickering between Albarn
and Coxon did not begin until the beginning of the sessions for their next
record — because in certain important ways, 13 has a very much Abbey
Road-like aura to it. It is undeniably a Blur album by signature, but a
weird, unsettling, aurally distant Blur album, one that seems to dictate its
own terms and generate its own warped universe around it. It hasn't got any
«normal» pop songs, or, more accurately, all of its «normal» pop songs are
uniformly «de-normalized», but this time, they do not take their cues from
Pavement or Sonic Youth. They take them from any instinctive wave that has
subconsciously rattled their brain — in the process, creating their strange
psychedelic masterpiece.
Actually, just for the pleasure of contradicting
myself, I think that the beginning of ʽTenderʼ owes a little
something to Floyd's ʽWish You Were Hereʼ — the same croaky, creaky,
hideously lo-fi guitar sound announcing the beginning of the song «from the
back entrance», before the band kicks in properly, with all the right recording
equipment. But then the song itself, of course, is more like Blur's ʽHey
Judeʼ... or is it? ʽHey Judeʼ is an anthem of consolation and
encouragement; ʽTenderʼ is more like a layer-by-layer buildup of
positive energy that desperately seeks to be spent but finds no relief.
"Come on, come on, come on, get through it... I'm waiting for that feeling,
waiting for that feeling to come... Oh my baby, oh my baby, oh why, oh
my..." — now that I am looking at those lyrics, I think I am beginning to
know what the song is about (hint: medical advice may be sought in situations
like these).
Subsequently, ʽTenderʼ is (a) tender,
(b) powerful, (c) catchy, (d) hilarious, (e) unusually complex for a Blur pop
song, with no less than four distinct vocal melodies, on top of which we also
have gospel-styled vocal harmonies (another first for the band). It is a song
without any obvious genre characteristics, and its length, stately tempo, and
penchant for seductive pomposity (particularly when Damon, in full preacher
mode, grandly intones "love's the greatest thing that we have")
suggest that on 13, Blur are finally
positioning themselves as «rock royalty», scaling epic heights and dwarving
competition and listeners alike.
But nothing could be farther from the truth, as
ʽTenderʼ turns out to be the most — in fact, the only — «normal» tune on the album. Perhaps it was essentially an
Albarn creation or something, because with ʽBugmanʼ, Coxon and his
guitar take over and rarely let go again. Industrial guitar tones, colorful
feedback, dissonant notes, polyphonic overdubs — 13 is a «weird guitar lover»'s paradise, and one of the best
examples of what could be creatively done with the instrument at the turn of
the century, especially when you have a brain every bit as creative as, say,
Adrian Belew's, but have not been blessed with equal technical chops.
Not that Graham isn't a tender-hearted pop
lover himself, deep inside his soul — ʽCoffee & TVʼ, which is
personally his to the point of getting a solo vocal spot, has one of Blur's
simplest, poppiest melodies and an unbeatable falsetto hook in the chorus (or,
rather, the hook comes from the clever «falsetto explosion» of the tension
accumulated in the several previous bars). The humbly murmured melody agrees
well with his declaration of introversion ("Sociability is hard enough for
me / Take me away from this big bad world and agree to marry me" — as far
as I know, nobody has properly agreed so far), but then he still has to add a set of agonizing,
vibrato-rattled, distorted guitar solos with elements of atonality to this
perfectly nice and poppy melody, just to remind us that nothing is, or should
be, as simple as it looks.
ʽTenderʼ and ʽCoffee &
TVʼ are the two songs that stick in your mind easiest of all, due to their
pop hooks, but liking them is not equal to liking 13 as an album. To do that, one has to develop a feel for material
like ʽBattleʼ and ʽCaramelʼ — long, meandering, spaced out
vamps that are anything but boring: Coxon and Albarn have never been masters
of the drawn-out crescendo (like all them «post-rock» heros) — instead of that,
they just wait for one idea to exhaust itself and then freshen things up with
additional electronic effects, countermelodies, guitar freakouts, tempo
changes, whatever comes into their whacky heads. On ʽCaramelʼ in
particular, you get to hear echoes of not only Pink Floyd, but also Can and
other «Krautrock» pioneers — but still there's a pop heart beating somewhere
very deep inside, a melancholic, nearly-dying pop heart this time, as the
vibrating guitar riff sings "caramel, caramel" and Albarn is brooding
on the implicit issue of yet another breakup. Yes, better to brood than to eat
your vitamins if it results in mindblowing music like this — Syd Barrett would
be proud of his disciples.
As usual, the album is a little longer than it
probably ought to be, and sometimes prompts confusing flashbacks — for
instance, the basic melody of ʽ1992ʼ rides the same two-chord pattern
as ʽSingʼ from their debut album, and could be said to represent a
technical update of ʽSingʼ for the upcoming millennium; but sound-wise,
it is much more advanced than ʽSingʼ anyway, so the real reason to
complain is that it might be one lengthy psychedelic adventure too many for an
album that also has ʽBattleʼ, ʽCaramelʼ, and ʽTrimm
Trabbʼ on it. But 13 also has
shorter, more energetic, yet equally bizarre highlights for you:
ʽTrailerparkʼ, for instance, an exercise in moody trip-hop that
creates a vaguely menacing nocturnal atmosphere with its «moonlight keyboards»,
but the lyrics go "I'm a country boy, I got no soul, I lost my girl to the
Rolling Stones" — uh? come again? Unless Albarn's girl's name happens to
be Lisa Fischer, we are going to have to assume a metaphoric interpretation for
this catchy passage. Naturally, the entire album is in sort of a confused-depressed
mode of existence, but somehow this little jab at the Stones in the context of
those phantasmagorical keyboards feels particularly perplexing.
One major disappointment of mine has not
managed to dissipate over the years: I have never liked ʽNo Distance Left
To Runʼ and I do not feel any big change coming on here. It features one
more brief return to «normal» mode at the end of the album, but it is really a
rather clumsy and melodically uninteresting alt-rock ballad that seems to
sacrifice «artistry» in favor of puffed-up «honesty» — Damon Albarn with his
heart bleeding on his sleeve. Conceptually, it might work — after a series of
brutal nightmares, the protagonist wakes up and summarizes his feelings in a
final decisive aria — but on its own, the song is not at all representative of
Blur's compositional genius, and broken hearts, might I add, come a dozen a
dollar this time of the season: cynical as it might sound, nobody is interested
in Albarn's breakups, we are only interested in how that affects his musical
output. ʽCaramelʼ and ʽTrailerparkʼ — now we're talking
here. ʽNo Distance Left To Runʼ — I'd rather have Beth Gibbons or
Elliott Smith enlightening me on the issue of broken hearts, depression, and
disillusionment, and prefer the album end on a more impressionistic note.
ʽCaramelʼ as the last track would have been great, for instance.
Still, this is Blur, and Blur are never
perfect, end of story. But 13 is as close
as they have ever come to overriding all clichés and harnessing, rather
than worshipping, all their influences. If Leisure
subscribed to the adjoining cults of «Madchester» and «shoegaze», and the next
three albums were all adepts of the Holy Church of Britpop, and Blur cowered before the Great and
Terrible American Indie scene, then 13
simply refuses to follow any organized religion. It goes deep, gets mad, stays
dark, and probably should not be played under the influence of chemical
substances to avoid a really nasty trip. All in all, yet another winner, and a
perfectly satisfactory conclusion to a slightly flawed, but altogether
tremendously consistent career (and let us pretend, for just a brief moment,
that Think Tank never existed) — a
hearty thumbs up
here.
THINK TANK (2003)
1) Ambulance; 2) Out Of Time;
3) Crazy Beat; 4) Good Song; 5) On The Way To The Club; 6) Brothers And
Sisters; 7) Caravan; 8) We've Got A File On You; 9) Moroccan Peoples
Revolutionary Bowls Club; 10) Sweet Song; 11) Jets; 12) Gene By Gene; 13)
Battery In Your Leg.
Put it this way: Blur without Graham Coxon is
like The Rolling Stones without Keith Richards. You wouldn't totally want to deny Mick Jagger the
right to create good music without his druggy-dreary pal (and he did create
some good music on his own), but it wouldn't be Rolling Stones music unless
he'd manage to dig out Keith Richards' identical twin on guitar. As for Damon
Albarn — not only did he not bother at all about digging out Graham Coxon's
identical twin, but he pretty much decided that Blur's next album would be all
right with no guitar at all, or, at
least, as little of it as possible. Who ever laid down the law about each new
Blur album having to be guitar-based, anyway? Nothing about that in the
recording contract, for sure.
The real problem with Think Tank, however, is not that it is not a «proper Blur album»:
the real problem is that it is simply not a very good album, period. The
Albarn/Coxon relationship was, in fact, very similar to the Jagger/Richards one
in that the former partner brought in the «coolness» and the latter brought in
the meat'n'potatoes. Now that there is no more meat'n'potatoes, it turns out,
somehow, that «coolness», on its own, results in much more confusion than
admiration. Think Tank may very well
have been designed in a think tank indeed — it sizzles and bursts with
creativity-a-plenty, nary a single track following in the shoes of any
preceding one — but as «creative» as these compositions are, most of them are
fairly meaningless, designed just for the purpose of sitting there and looking
cool.
Interestingly, two out of three singles culled
from the album had some of its least experimental and «tamest» songs as
A-sides: ʽOut Of Timeʼ and ʽGood Songʼ are soft rhythmic
ballads, showcasing Damon's tender-and-gentle side and even featuring a
romantic Spanish guitar solo passage on the former. Actually, ʽOut Of
Timeʼ has become one of the few songs here to endure, later to be
incorporated into the regular Blur setlist with Graham returning — still I am
not impressed, what with the rather primitive melody and Damon's inability to
forge out a proper hook (even if the "you haven't found the time... to
open up your mind" bit seems like an explicit melodic quotation from
ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ). It is curious, though, that with all the
«crazy» ideas explored on the album, the maximum promotion was allocated for
its easily-accessible, sentimental bits: apparently, Albarn cares a lot about
the «crooner» side of his image.
The second single, however, was ʽCrazy
Beatʼ, and it is horrible. I used to think the guttural-electronic
"crazy beat, crazy beat, crazy beat yeah yeah yeah" bits were a
parody on Crazy Frog, but apparently, the infantile Crazy Frog phenomenon only
arose about half a year after Think Tank hit the stores, so we will
have to assume it was Albarn's own folly. The song borrows the
cool-arrogant-bastard attitude of Parklife
and wastes it in a setting punctuated with hyper-moronic embellishments
(intentionally ugly harmonies, guitars, and electronics) — I mean, at least
ʽSong 2ʼ was honestly funny, and straightforwardly parodic, but
ʽCrazy Beatʼ just has this "let's go CRAAAZY!" vibe,
unfunny, mean, and manipulative. Without knowing for sure, I bet it must have
been a real big hit in the clubs, but that does not make it any less stupid,
only more harmful.
Most of the other tracks follow in the «crazy»
footsteps of ʽCrazy Beatʼ, though, thankfully, few reach that level
of annoyance. For ultra-extra-hipness, Albarn drove the band to Marrakesh,
where they hooked up with local musicians to add a pinch of «world music» —
something I have barely noticed upon first listen, to be honest, because it
just does not feel as if all the elements of Britpop, electronica, and Eastern
music mesh in naturally. Maybe it's all about the poorness of the mix, where
frequently there is a lot of stuff happening in the background, but it all
sounds like noisy garbage, or, at best, like distant echoes. Instead of
«colorful», the entire record has this dirty-gray feel of the album cover,
irritating and alienating rather than intriguing and mystifying. Some critics
have called Think Tank «warm» and
«inviting» — personally, I feel it's about as warm and inviting as a sheetmetal
factory, but hey, some people like to
be invited to sheetmetal factories. Get a taste of real life and all that.
Some of the grooves are nicely somber, like the
R&B exercise of ʽBrothers And Sistersʼ (still spoiled by
completely gratuitous electronic trickery), and some of the combinations work,
like the lo-fi kiddie melody of ʽJetsʼ exchanging phrasing with its
overweight, grumbly, distorted bassline (but why six minutes? why the
out-of-nowhere sax solo?). In fact, as I said, almost every song has at least
some creative idea in its favor, which is why I cannot bring myself to
condemning the record. But on the whole, it is an absolute triumph of form over
substance — as if with the departure of Coxon, the band pretty much lost its
soul. They retained the will to experiment — in fact, they have developed a
crazier drive for experimentation than ever — but they forgot that
experimentation has to have a purpose, and even more so in the 21st century,
when «crazy stuff for the sake of sheer craziness» has pretty much become a boring
cliché. As time goes by, I feel less and less interested in Think Tank, when all the previous Blur
albums still retain their freshness and vitality to a certain degree. So much
for «hipness» in all its glory.
LIVE IN HYDE PARK (2009)
1) She's So High; 2) Girls And
Boys; 3) Tracy Jacks; 4) There's No Other Way; 5) Jubilee; 6) Badhead; 7)
Beetlebum; 8) Out Of Time; 9) Trimm Trabb; 10) Coffee And TV; 11) Tender; 12)
Country House; 13) Oily Water; 14) Chemical World; 15) Sunday Sunday; 16)
Parklife; 17) End Of A Century; 18) To The End; 19) This Is A Low; 20)
Popscene; 21) Advert; 22) Song 2; 23) Death Of A Party; 24) For Tomorrow; 25)
The Universal.
In their heyday, Blur never got around to
releasing a live album, except for a highly limited issue of a Live At Budokan thing that has since
become a discographic rarity. Once, however, the rift between Albarn and Coxon
got partially remedied and the reunited band started delighting fans with
occasional gigs at the end of the 2000s, a whole series of live albums ensued —
most of them, surprisingly or not, recorded in the exact same spot: Hyde Park, London.
Granted, this is probably the hipper
one of the two centers of the world (the other one being Madison Square Garden,
but that be Bruce Springsteen's and Billy Joel's royal domain, after all), but
still, kind of weird to see not one, but two
live albums from Hyde Park appear in mid-2009 (the July 2 and July 3 shows,
respectively), and then Parklive
follow up on them in 2012; the first two albums have completely identical
setlists, and the one on Parklive is
only slightly different.
I have the slightly easier available July 3
show available, and have also seen the Parklive
DVD, which probably empowers me not to separate this text into three different
reviews. Most importantly, Blur ain't no Rolling Stones or Grateful Dead when
it comes to live shows — in fact, I am that
close to saying that they pretty much suck as a live band, or at least as a
provider of live albums. For starters, I think they make very poor choices in
mixing engineers, or perhaps this is just the inevitable curse of a huge open
venue like Hyde Park: the sound is godawful on both the older audio and the
newer video album. The guitar is too noisy, and the voice is drowning in the
noise — what used to be brilliantly produced and packaged pop-rock songs is
regularly reduced to unappealing, sloppy noise-rock, with all the hooks covered
in sonic rubble, and the crowd noises placed way too high in the mix. Being one with the crowd is great and all,
but I kinda sorta would like to hear my ʽGirls And Boysʼ and
ʽTenderʼ from the mouth of their creator rather than 500,000 ecstatic
English people.
On the other hand, it's not as if the mouth of
their creator worked so efficiently in a live setting. Albarn does not look
like a perfect natural when it comes to singing — in the studio, it seems as if
he had to work hard to combine the necessary degree of emotionality with
technique, and when he does not have that opportunity, things are not good. He
can get off key, flub some key lines, and, most importantly, he can lose that
cool-as-heck London sneer and replace it with a punkish power brawl, making the
songs sound far more ordinary and boring than they really are. Coxon does a
much better job, very loyally reproducing most of the guitar melodies and
effects, but since he hardly ever tries to explore new possibilities, it all
ultimately comes down to «how well has he nailed that?», and it's always well enough, but not perfect enough.
In the end, it all simply becomes a massive
celebration of The Realm of Blur: we are supposed to kowtow and acknowledge their
historic mission and spiritual value for dozens of thousands of people in the
UK. I kowtow, and I acknowledge, and I am happy for everybody at Hyde Park in
2009 and in 2012, but the fact remains that there is not a single song here
that I would either (a) enjoy more than the original studio version or (b)
start perceiving from a slightly different angle from the original. Had this
been my introduction to Blur, I would have remained totally unimpressed, no
matter how spectacular the setlist might look on paper. And speaking of the
setlist, The Great Escape gets
mighty snubbed once again. That is not
cool: I want to hear live versions of ʽCharmless Manʼ and
ʽStereotypesʼ, even if they will probably suck like everything else.
In addition, there are such issues as tremendously long pauses at the end of
the show (usually edited out on non-bootlegs, but apparently they needed to
justify two CDs), silly audience baits (when they get them to woo-hoo during
the extended drum intro to ʽSong 2ʼ — I mean, seeing as how it has
become their signature song and all, it'd at least be fun to see them turn it
live into an extended jam polygon or something, like the Who did with ʽMy
Generationʼ, but no dice), and an occasional enigmatic bit of Albarn
banter: apparently, "Vote Dave! Vote Dave!" refers not to David
Cameron (thank God!), but to Dave Rowntree, the drummer, who was trying to run
for Parliament at the time (and no, it didn't help).
To sum it up: Blur are a great pop-rock band,
but only a passable live band. Live playing is not one of their major strengths
(not that the same criticism doesn't apply to the vast majority of pop-rock
bands from the last two decades, of course), and since, up to this point, their
half-hearted reunions have only resulted in live albums, there has not really
been a lot of sense in that reunion, other than heat Hyde Park up a couple
degrees on a nice summer day. No thumbs down (there's so many great songs here,
and they manage not to murder at least half of them), but no serious excitement,
either. See them if you ever have the chance — a legend is a legend, after all
— but for the ideal moving picture, choose a set of lip-synced videos instead.
THE MAGIC WHIP (2015)
1) Lonesome Street; 2) New
World Towers; 3) Go Out; 4) Ice Cream Man; 5) Thought I Was A Spaceman; 6) I
Broadcast; 7) My Terracotta Heart; 8) There Are Too Many Of Us; 9) Ghost Ship;
10) Pyongyang; 11) Ong Ong; 12) Mirrorball.
Okay. Hold your breath no longer. Blur have
come back — with a «comeback» album. Who said miracles are bound to happen?
They aren't. Most comeback albums are just that — «comeback albums», defined as
«collections of songs produced when former bandmates come together for the sake
of old times, fans, and money, without anything particularly fresh to say».
This does not necessarily mean that the music is bad — it only means that the
music does not let you discover anything new about the musicians, and that
there was no reason whatsoever to wait for this to happen with one's fingers
crossed.
At least Think
Tank was Damon Albarn's noble-treacherous attempts to turn «Blur» into «The
Trendy Damon Albarn Experience». Failing that, Damon Albarn went on to churn
out trendy experiences all by himself. Now that he got a bit bored with that,
too, Blur come together once more, in all the glory of their classic lineup —
but no, they do not continue their journey from the stage where we last saw
them with 13. That journey was long
since terminated. Instead, what we see them do is deliver a «Certified Blur
Album». Along the well-known lines of: «If you loved Modern Life Is Rubbish / Parklife / Great Escape / Blur, you'll
like this». And if you do not, how can you call yourself a Blur fan, you silly
person you?
I mean, just listen to that opening of
ʽLonesome Streetʼ. Street noises, okay. Brief jazz guitar intro,
okay. A rollickin' acoustic arpeggio, all right. But as soon as the entire band
kicks in at 0:15 into the song, there's absolutely no mistaking that this is the Blur — the Blur of the early classic Brit-pop era. Gosh, those chords, I
mean, you could feed the songs off Modern
Life Is Rubbish inside a computer and it would spit out ʽLonesome
Streetʼ for you. The only difference is that, unfortunately, ʽLonesome
Streetʼ is completely uncatchy, which raises my suspicions even further —
maybe they have been working on Blur-software all this time?
Admittedly, the opening number is not
indicative of the entire album. And
truth be told, The Magic Whip on the
whole does not produce the impression that it was simply written as «yet
another Blur album». No and no — on the contrary, the main flaw of this record is that it tries too hard (and ultimately
fails, I'd say) to make a big statement, one that goes way beyond pure music
and, because of that, does not pay that much attention to music. The record is
well produced and, on the surface, looks complex and carefully detailed, but
that is mainly technological: for instance, there is a lot of electronic
overdubs, reflecting Albarn's digital fetish of the past fifteen years, yet
somehow, they all feel a little... «autopilotish», if you get my drift.
Instead of writing awesome songs, what Albarn
tries to do here is write songs that make big claims. Songs with titles like
ʽThere Are Too Many Of Usʼ — that one, I think, would be particularly
embarrassing to perform in public, yet they do it and the public does not care,
even if lines like "There are too many of us / That's plain to see / And
we all believe in praying / For our immortality" could easily be
construed as offensive to seven billion people, even if they may be somewhat true (but isn't truth
offensive?). Songs about lonesome loneliness of the lonely loner:
ʽLonesome Streetʼ, ʽThought I Was A Spacemanʼ. Songs about
alienation, songs about love lost, songs of disillusionment, songs of
misanthropy, and even a song called ʽPyongyangʼ, and guess what, it ain't a celebratory anthem in honor of
The Great Leader. Rather, it is a song sung from the point of view of the deceased Great Leaders, and... they're
lonely too, in a way.
All in all, you know now: The Magic Whip, from top to bottom, is an album about loneliness.
Okay, so that could be a continuation
of 13, much of which was about
loneliness, too. But 13 was a much more
psychedelic, and a much less serious experience — Whip, in comparison, is like a musical thesis from a mature
half-poet, half-sociologist. And, by the way, where is Coxon in all of that? I
have no idea. The songs are all credited to all the members of the band, in a
fit of democratic generosity, but Graham almost never sings, except a couple
co-lead vocal parts, and his playing is very restricted: guitar solos are now
presumably considered tasteless, and guitar riffs way too often seem to be
there only to ensure that «Blur sound».
And so that's that: on one hand, the album is a
«mature» musical treatise on how uncomfortable it feels to be alive in 2015,
and on the other hand — it is an unconscious throwback to the hip and cocky
days of 1993-99. ʽLonesome Streetʼ, ʽGo Outʼ, and ʽOng
Ongʼ sound like they belong on Parklife;
ʽNew World Towersʼ and ʽMy Terracotta Heartʼ are
melancholic darknesses that sound like they belong on Great Escape; ʽI Broadcastʼ is a noisefest that could
belong on Blur; and ʽThought I
Was A Spacemanʼ and ʽPyongyangʼ are ghostly whisps that could be
on 13. Well, something like that.
But when you put them all together and extract the common invariant, it's all
about the good man feeling bad and wanting to be somewhere else, or with
someone else. It might be too much, perhaps, to state that Albarn is feeling
like Kim Il-sun in his glass coffin, but hey, it's not my fault if he makes that kind of music.
The good
news is that eventually, slowly, very slowly the songs might begin to pull you
in. They are serious and they are intelligent, and if a band that was among the
best of their ilk in the 1990s comes back together fifteen years later and
decides to make a serious, intelligent album, well, it is not very likely that
they will create a complete dump. The gloomy atmosphere is real, the lyrics are
good, and there's plenty of juicy
little details — well, like that little morose riff that Graham is playing in
between the verses of ʽNew World Towersʼ, or like the funereal
approach to surf guitar on the closing ʽMirrorballʼ.
The bad
news is that, well, I dunno about you, but there are certain types of albums I
wouldn't want to expect from certain types of bands, and as much as I
acknowledge Blur's right to sound somber and pessimistic every now and then, I
don't want a Blur album that just sounds like one big dirge, because Damon
Albarn ain't no frickin' Robert Smith, much less a goddamn Nick Cave. The same
guy who literally spent decades
partying in and out of every trendy party in the UK and worldwide is now
teaching us all a lesson in loneliness, reclusiveness, and misanthropy? Come on
now, this just doesn't feel right. Ten minutes into the album, I just get this
urge to tell the guy to cheer up, already — this all begins bordering on emo,
if not Goth, and this is not what we needed Blur to reunite for. It ain't bad,
but it doesn't quite sound right, either.
I do give the album a thumbs up. It is a slow grower, and
it will eventually grow some more on me, I guess, though not that much more. And compared to some
other «comebacks», this one at least tries to make some points, rather than just sound like an inefficient imitation
of past glories. But ultimately, it is
an inefficient imitation of past glories, and that casts an unlucky shadow on
all the points it tries to make, and this is why I seriously doubt that The Magic Whip will ever be in many
people's «top five», let alone «top three» Blur albums.
And oh yeah, by the way, what's up with the
Chinese title? I know they recorded most of it in Hong Kong, but it's not as if
there was any Chinese influence in the songs themselves — are we supposed to
pat the Damon on the back for letting us know about his adoration of
traditional Chinese characters? Or are they trying to boost sales in China? Oh
well, at least now everybody knows that Blur is Mohu in Chinese. They probably used Google Translate anyway. It's
not as if it were an album that offered particularly complex solutions to
complex problems.
TWOISM (1995)
1) Sixtyniner; 2) Oirectine;
3) Iced Cooly; 4) Basefree; 5) Twoism; 6) Seeya Later; 7) Melissa Juice; 8)
Smokes Quantity.
The full, unabridged discography for Boards Of
Canada begins at least as early as Catalog
3, a tape-only recording produced circa 1987; Twoism, an EP released on tape and vinyl in 1995, is usually
counted as the beginning of a «proper» recording career, since it was the only
one of these early releases to have been later reissued in CD format. In any
case, there's hardly any need to seek out those early rarities unless one is a
seriously specialized fan of Michael Sandison and his slightly younger brother
Marcus Eoin Sandison, and I am not, so...
Anyway, here is the deal. Melodically, Twoism is Brian Eno: minimalist
electronic music with a deeply conservative harmonic structure — deconstructed
Bach on transistors. The melodies are pretty, moody, and may create a feeling
(perhaps illusionary) of serious depth with very limited means. However, the
more precise genre is «chill-out», since on top of these ambient melodies we
get dance beats, indicating practical club and party usage. (One of the tracks
even bears the title of ʽIced Coolyʼ, as if they were inviting us to
pigeonhole them). Subsequently, there are several possible responses: (a)
ignore the beats and enjoy the atmospheric melodies; (b) ignore the atmospheric
melodies and kick in to the beats; (c) try to kick in to the beats and enjoy the atmospheric melodies at
the same time; (d) kill somebody because you find options (a) and (b) mutually
exclusive and totally ruining your day.
Perhaps I am not all that qualified to make a
comprehensive judgement here, but, honestly, I find myself closer to category
(d) than the other three ones. I do not enjoy, nor really «get» the idea to
combine music whose essence is so static and contemplative with programmed
robotic beats whose essence is thoroughly dynamic and energetic. Contrasts and
oppositions can be cool as heck in all forms of art, but this particular one I
find irritating. Every once in a while, the beats disappear for a short spell,
and I get to enjoy the duo's pretty (though, at this stage at least, not
particularly innovative) iceberg-cold textures on their own, but very quickly,
they reappear — and for a guy who has relatively little interest in dancing,
well...
Sometimes they get a dark trip-hop groove going
on, reminiscent of Portishead (ʽSeeya Laterʼ), with a deeply serious
bassline giving more substance to the beat, but in those cases, the electronic
canvas itself becomes a little more agitated, as the synthesizer loops are
arranged in mini-crescendos and you can imagine the two background parts
representing a calm sea with a host of screeching seabirds hovering over it.
(Then the rhythm section could be your boat, calmly, but sternly crossing the
waters). That's okay, but most of the
time (ʽSixtyninerʼ, ʽOirectineʼ, etc.) the beats add
nothing and detract from everything.
My favorite track on the entire record is the
ultra-short ʽMelissa Juiceʼ — not only are the beats there reduced to
a small, barely noticeable rhythmic tap, but it also features a quirky little
pseudo-recorder melody with an empathetic, «whiny» twist that somehow feels
very warm and humane next to all the cold-beauty-stateliness of the general
melodic content. This should not be viewed as a reproach to the rest of the
album, though — a drop of whiny warmth is exactly the correct amount that is
needed to put the final touch on the album, like a tiny spot of yang in a huge swirl of yin. The beats are a reproach, though — and, I mean, it's not even as if they were
any sort of special beats. Just your
run-of-the-mill drum machine stuff that's been superimposed over the ambience
at the last moment. If you are one of those chill-out types, though, you will
probably enjoy it; me, I don't get it, and at this point in my life, I probably
never will.
HI SCORES (1996)
1) Hi Scores; 2) Turquoise
Hexagon Sun; 3) Nlogax; 4) June 9th; 5) Seeya Later; 6) Everything You Do Is A
Balloon.
I'd like to say that Hi Scores is not «simply more of the same» as Twoism, but then I could probably create the distorted impression
that Hi Scores is not simply more of
the same as Twoism, and since I do
not work in the field of electronica, I am not used to creating distorted impressions.
On the factual plain, however, Hi Scores
is definitely distinct because it was the duo's first release on a real music
label (Skam Records) — and from that point of view, we can most certainly
excuse them for not advancing significantly, given that most people had never
heard Twoism, or any of their other
limited-edition releases, anyway. In fact, most of the compositions here were
not particularly «new»: ʽSeeya Laterʼ is taken directly from Twoism, and others were featured on
homemade records with titles like Boc
Maxima prior to the label shift.
Even so, a thorough comparison with Twoism does show some subtle shifts.
Although Hi Scores is bookmarked by
some of the duo's most «becalmed» numbers in existence, the mid-part, in
contrast, is harsher: ʽNlogaxʼ and ʽJune 9thʼ constitute a
fairly gritty sequence, the former with its hard, harsh, metronomic beat,
thumping bass, and schizophrenic vocal overdubs, and the latter with its fussy,
space-objects-alert arrangement. This is not necessarily a good thing, because
moving away from that calm ambient atmosphere puts them in danger of losing
their identity: if you played me ʽJune 9thʼ without a warning, for
instance, I'd have said «Aphex Twin?» without blinking. On the other hand, if
you don't feel like gently falling asleep to your electronica, Hi Scores is less «lulling» in that
aspect than Twoism.
And even so, I have very little to say about
the compositions in general. The two first ones have the same ideology as most
of Twoism (ambient textures pinned
to dance beats, or is that dance beats pinned to ambient textures?), then
there's the two dynamic and flurry ones, and then there's ʽSeeya
Laterʼ. And then, at the end, there's what probably counts as the magnum opus here, ʽEverything You
Do Is A Balloonʼ, if only because it is longer than everything else, it has
got a special two-minute beatless introduction, and it shows some melodic
development as an additional «lead» melody gradually creeps up on us from out
of the shadows. If you want me to admit that the tune may give an impressionist's impression of a balloon gracefully
soaring in mid-air, well, it can, but usually for those occasions I tend to
pull out my AIR albums instead.
On the whole, this is a nice enough
demonstration of creativity, but these days, it is not easy to understand how
come Boards of Canada managed to earn the trust of a real record label with
this stuff — you'd have to remember that back in the mid-1990s, not a lot of
people engaged in these activities, and I guess every label dealing with
electronica was more than happy to have their own young, local, and gifted
equivalent of Richard D. James on hand. Unfortunately, some of the «formative»
stage records tend to date quicker than others, so if you want to understand
the continuing reverence for BoC, I would not recommend these early EPs as a
starting point; we are really not even properly beginning to get where we're
going at this stage. Probably still works as random chillout fodder, though.
MUSIC HAS THE RIGHT TO CHILDREN (1998)
1) Wildlife
Analysis; 2) An Eagle In Your Mind; 3) The Color Of The Fire; 4) Telephasic
Workshop; 5) Triangles & Rhombuses; 6) Sixtyten; 7) Turquoise Hexagon Sun;
8) Kaini Industries; 9) Bocuma; 10) Roygbiv; 11) Rue The Whirl; 12) Aquarius;
13) Olson; 14) Pete Standing Alone; 15) Smokes Quantity; 16) Open The Light;
17) One Very Important Thought.
The title of Boards Of Canada's first
full-length LP, finally released on a major label and soon made famous around
the world, is not just a clever twist of phrase, as is the case with so many
«experimental» releases — indeed, this is an electronic concept album,
revolving around the idea of childhood and even actual children, plenty of
whom are captured here in field recordings and exploited for sinister Scottish
purposes. Ambient synthesizers + soft dance grooves + kid vocal samples = Major
Breakthrough in Modern Art, or something of that sort, as most fans and critics
will be happy to tell you.
Unfortunately, not everyone is able to share
the exuberant joy (of which there is much — I have seen plenty of reactions
from people who declare Music... or
its follow-up to be the best electronic album ever recorded, or, at least,
their absolute personal favorite). The problems that were already evident with Twoism remain here exactly the way they
were — spicing the grooves up with field samples does little in the way of
making them more meaningful or aurally impressive. The landscape is still
dominated by soft, inobtrusive, repetitive loops, sometimes reasonably short
but often going on for 5-6 minutes without much in the way of development — and
they aren't even «beautiful» loops, they seem more like «trance-inducing»
loops, but most of the time they just put me to sleep (if I try to concentrate
on them) or flush by unnoticed (if I do not).
In terms of musical innovation, I have not been
able to spot anything that would make
the record seem «progressive» compared to Aphex Twin or Autechre or
late-period Eno — sure, the brothers make their own loops and mix in their own
samples, and sometimes they are pretty, but other than this vaguely original idea of making «static,
paysage-ly ambient music that you can
dance to» (and not all ideas of this kind are necessarily supposed to work —
just look at Vanessa Mae putting technobeats on Vivaldi), the «theoretical»
achievements of Boards of Canada are nothing much to write home about.
In terms of the «who cares for innovation when
the music's so great?» line of thought, I just do not find the music so great.
It is uniformly pleasant and almost never irritating (already a big plus for an
experimental electronic release), but Michael and Marcus are not minimalist
geniuses like Eno, and even when they declare open season on «beauty», with
tracks like ʽOpen The Lightʼ whose several keyboard layers strive to
create an «angelic» atmosphere, it still sounds more like a brain-manipulator
gadget than a thing of sheer sensual purity.
On the other hand, we must also admit the
possibility that it is that very quality — the fact that the band rejects
«excesses», «build-ups», «prominent hooks», «cathartic moments» — which gives Music... its own advantage. If their
aim was to construct a maximally relastic soundscape, they may well have
fulfilled it to the max. Let's face it, if you find yourself walking through a
snowy forest at night, or crossing some cooled-off desert sands, or floating on
an iceberg through the Arctic ocean, most
of the time (when you are not pursued by hailstorms, getting bitten by unexpectedly
awakened rattlesnakes, or drowning in a storm) things are going to be fairly
calm, uneventful, boring, and not particularly cathartic or epiphanic, despite
all of nature's beauty. Same stuff here — ʽAn Eagle In Your Mindʼ
simply moves from one icy synth tone to another, as the beats snort and scuffle
around like a pack of busy rodents. As one reviewer wrote about the track's basic
emotion, it's "somewhere on the border between anxiety, happiness,
control, and evil" — even if I were to agree, it is precisely this border thing that makes it a little bit
of everything, but not enough of anything. If this is a conscious artistic stance,
I can understand it, but I cannot understand how it can make for great art. Not
this way, at least.
I do like some of their sampling ideas —
probably the most memorable track on the entire album for me was ʽThe
Color Of The Fireʼ, where they take what seems to be a sample of a little
kid diligently trying to spell out the phrase "I love you" and
distort it in psychedelic fashion, while a set of chiming overdubs further
enhances the «magic» aura of the proceedings. For some reason, this turns out
to be quite charming and endearing: some have found the experience disturbing
and frightening (because the treated voices sound like ghosts?), but I think it
takes an intellectual leap to come to that conclusion — no matter how much you
distort an originally natural vocal, it won't really sound frightening unless its intent was to frighten you in
the first place. In any case, it is a pity that only a very small portion of
the record is given over to that sort of experimentation, although, of course, much more of that would turn it into a
pure performance act rather than a musical offering.
I have most likely missed out on some of the
intended meanings behind these tracks — it's always easy to catch up on these
by reading interviews with the brothers — but it is unlikely that any
«explanation» will influence anybody's amount of love for the record. Likewise,
it is easy to recognize the sheer amount of work that went into its
construction (for instance, the tricky rhythms of ʽTelephasic
Workshopʼ, combined from all sorts of natural sounds, including
finger-poppin' and voice bits), but if the work does not translate into an
instinctive marvel-for-the-senses effect, that work is simply wasted, period.
My final judgement is that it's all okay,
but the «special» status that this record is endowed with among so many fans
remains incomprehensible; give me some Massive Attack over this stuff any time
of day.
GEOGADDI (2002)
1) Ready Lets Go; 2) Music Is
Math; 3) Beware The Friendly Stranger; 4) Gyroscope; 5) Dandelion; 6) Sunshine
Recorder; 7) In The Annexe; 8) Julie And Candy; 9) The Smallest Weird Number;
10) 1969; 11) Energy Warning; 12) The Beach At Redpoint; 13) Opening The Mouth;
14) Alpha And Omega; 15) I Saw Drones; 16) The Devil Is In The Details; 17) A
Is To B As B Is To C; 18) Over The Horizon Radar; 19) Dawn Chorus; 20) Diving
Station; 21) You Could Feel The Sky; 22) Corsair; 23) Magic Window; 24) From
One Source All Things Depend.
Most of the reviews here went like, "so
yeah, they made an album that sounds almost exactly like Music Has The Right To Children, but who really cares to complain
if it's so good?" A basic agreement with the first half of this statement
on my part, then, would automatically presume disagreement with the
presupposition of its second one. Once again, Boards Of Canada offer us a
Modern Art Soundscape that will tremendously appeal to all those who have
properly disclosed their minds towards Modern Art, as well as to many of those
who like stuff just because it is Modern with a capital M (well, properly
speaking, as of 2014 this is no longer a truly
capital M, but new electronic records like these keep cropping up so often that
Geogaddi might just as well have
been released today and nobody would have noticed).
This here cranky old stubborn reviewer, though,
still feels himself relatively immune to the seductive charms of the Lovin'
Hums of Boards of Canada and their «ice-cold tones imbued with childish
spirit(s)» ideology, no matter how many glowing counter-opinions he encounters.
And this happens even despite a little more emphasis on the atmosphere here
than on the beats — there are still plenty of beats, but they do not feel
nearly as integral to the sound, perhaps because of numerous small beatless
linking tracks, many of which sound like teenagers having fun with some
decrepit, million-times-broken church organ in the ruins of a bombed church.
Even so, this does not automatically move the record onto the «awesome» shelf.
Straining and overloading my brains, I could
probably visualize the world Geogaddi
as some sort of purgatory for dead children — a tense and nervous waiting room
where nothing much happens except for waiting, although the room is divided
into separate sections with their own acoustics and furnishings and
micro-climates, and we lazily drift from one room to another for sixty-six
minutes and six seconds (a running length suggested to the duo by Warp Records
president Steve Beckett as a joke — although, in order to realize it, they had
to include a 1:46 track of utter silence ʽMagic Windowʼ,
inadvertently, but shamelessly ripping off John Cage in the process). Such a
visualization helps tolerate the length and makes the process slightly more
amusing, yet it is still not enough to elevate it any higher. I mean, what's
the real big difference between
watching real paint dry on the walls of your house, or watching imaginary paint
dry on the imaginary walls of the purgatory office for dead children? Perhaps
in the first few minutes, yes, but then the distinction begins to fade away
anyway.
Maybe it has something to do with how «buzzy»
their mourning droning is. The tones they choose are always sad, and their
repetitiveness brings on associations with inescapable doom, but there is
hardly any depth to this sound at
all. Just to remind myself that I have not become totally insensitive to this
stylistics, I put on Brian Eno's ʽSpider And Iʼ — an electronic
composition written very much in that same ice-cold stylistics twenty-five
years back, and, thank God, was immediately
emotionally smitten and overwhelmed exactly the same way that I was smitten
when I'd first heard it. In comparison, something like ʽSunshine
Recorderʼ or ʽ1969ʼ here sounds bottomless, baseless,
feather-light and instantly forgettable. Is it just a difference in technology?
Is it related to the fact that the old electronic guys, with their massive
circuit boards and «stone age electronics», were by the very nature of their
equipment capable of wringing more depth out of it than modern electronic
wizards with their triumphantly miniaturized arsenals? Or does it simply mean
that Brian Eno was a genius, while Michael and Marcus are merely inventive
craftsmen?
I have no answer to these questions, but I do
know for sure that there is not a single track here that inspires me to write anything about it, substantial or not. I
acknowledge the craft, I admit the inventiveness, and I am vaguely touched by
the kids on the bonus track ʽFrom One Source...ʼ (where they overdub
various snippets of children reciting prayers or describing God — far more
emotionally endearing than the actual music, I'd say), but that's about it. No
thumbs down, but no promotion of this piece as an «electronic masterpiece» or
anything by no means, either: the ambitions and pretense of Geogaddi (which begin already with its
undecipherable title) rise much higher than what seems to be its genuine
musical value. At the very least, do not rush to conclusions until you are
well soaked in the electronic legacy of «The Old Masters» — against whose
background Geogaddi, I am afraid,
feels relatively conservative and shallow, despite all the hoopla.
THE CAMPFIRE HEADPHASE (2005)
1) Into The Rainbow Vein; 2)
Chromakey Dreamcoat; 3) Satellite Anthem Icarus; 4) Peacock Tail; 5) Dayvan
Cowboy; 6) A Moment Of Clarity; 7) '84 Pontiac Dream; 8) Sherbet Head; 9) Oscar
See Through Red Eye; 10) Ataronchronon; 11) Hey Saturday Sun; 12) Constants Are
Changing; 13) Slow This Bird Down; 14) Tears From The Compound Eye; 15)
Farewell Fire.
By this time you must probably have realized
that I am not exactly head over heels in love with Boards Of Canada — and yet
this is one of those cases when assessing an artist in strict chronological
order turns out to have its benefits, too. After the previous two albums, the
«masterpiece» legend of which I cannot agree with at all, their third full official release does sound like a genuine
masterpiece in comparison. It may be too late for me, of course, to recognize
the duo's genius, but it is never too late to tell that you have enjoyed
something, and I did enjoy this.
The title of the album contains the word
«campfire», which may bring on thoughts of folk music played on acoustic
guitars, and the word «headphase», which may bring on thoughts of... well,
whatever has a head phase — like a tone generator or something. Incidentally,
The Animal Collective came out two years earlier with Campfire Songs, one of their brave attempts to fuse avantgarde,
acoustic guitars, and DIY digital technology, but these guys are older and more
experienced, way past their crude lo-fi stage and maybe, you know, having a
better idea of where it is that they may be actually going.
The idea involves becoming a little more
«conventional» in their music-making. The old tripartite formula («ambient
keyboards» + «IDM beats» + «field overdubs») is not going anywhere as such, but
the keyboards are made livelier, sometimes moving from «ambient» to «agitated»,
the beats are downplayed in importance, and the «field overdubs» (all those
«ghostly children» of the past) are moved aside to make way for new elements —
such as acoustic guitars: processed, of course, and looped and twisted, but
still a breath of fresh air when compared to the rigorous reliance on purely
digital sonics of the previous records («field overdubs» notwithstanding).
Thus, after a brief mood-setting intro,
ʽChromakey Dreamcoatʼ opens with a little acoustic riff in the old
style of Donovan's folk ballads and/or ʽDear Prudenceʼ, which soon
begins to serve as the center of attraction for various electronic tissues —
indeed, «folksy» and «spacey» at the same time. The nagging, repetitive, but
not unattractive guitar chords prevent the composition from trickling all over
your brain like melted jello, and the layers of overdubs give the guitar melody
an extra aura of elevated mystery — not an «amazing» combo, and certainly not a
revolutionary one or anything, but it works. Then, for the coda, the rhythm
disappears completely, leaving us with just a kaleidoscopic-chromatic flurry of
colorful sounds, fussier and livelier than just about anything the duo had
recorded up to date.
Even slower and statelier, ʽSatellite
Anthem Icarusʼ plays out the same trick — an acoustic guitar basis for an
overall «cosmic» soundscape which is anything but minimalistic: in comparison with ʽDreamcoatʼ, it is
as if they allowed you to zoom in on the outside surroundings, so you get to
examine the wonders of alien life floating past you at slower speeds and in
greater details. The acoustic rhythm, amusingly, sounds as if it could have
been the accompaniment for some moody singer-songwriter ballad à la Elliot Smith — simple,
«deep», «introspective» — yet instead, the singer-songwriter shuts up and just
stares in bewilderment at all the giant space amoebas busily wiggling their
tails through the continuum. (I'm sure there's a potentially endless discussion
on the combinatory and revelatory possibilities of Art lodged in here
somewhere, but that's about as far as I'm willing to progress at this
particular moment.)
Arguably, the «climactic peak» of the new
formula comes with ʽDayvan Cowboyʼ, for which the duo had even
prepared a specially atmospheric-oceanic music video (which, in turn, led to
the hilarious definition of a «dayvan cowboy» in the web-based Urban Dictionary
as «an individual who boldly parachutes from the stratosphere down onto a
surfboard in the ocean» — !!!). Here, they switch from acoustic guitar to
distorted electric, beginning with a heavy load of feedback and then changing
to strummed open chords, Link Wray-style. It also helps, I must say, that the
beats to all these songs are shaped more «traditionally», with elements of
playful syncopation, expressive fills and rolls, etc., instead of pure
mechanical robotism — it all helps to transform the duo's art from «ambient
techno» into «picturesque electronic rock music».
As we progress further, we occasionally begin
meeting purely electronic tracks once again (ʽ'84 Pontiac Dreamʼ,
ʽTears From The Compound Eyeʼ, etc.), but this is not such a big
problem now that the first positive impression has been made — and eventually,
the record even gains the right to «slow-burn out» on a majorly minimalistic
note: the stately church-organ-like phrasing of ʽFarewell Fireʼ is an
exercise in the art of fading out, beginning to lose volume after the
three-minute mark but evaporating completely only after the eight-minute mark.
I guess this is an innovative move, technically speaking, but most
importantly, it feels like a rather natural conclusion to a Boards Of Canada
product — they drive you ever so gently through the main bulk of the album, and
then they disorient you as to exactly when and how the album is supposed to
end, what could be gentler than that?
Although this is the first BoC record to which
I'd give a modest thumbs up, this does not automatically mean that
I consider it «better» — it is pretty damn hard to talk of music like this in
terms of «good» or «bad»; rather, there are just two parameters — does the
music trigger some special reaction in your senses? and, does the music allow
itself to be visualised in your brain? On both these counts, the music of Right To Children and Geogaddi did not amount to much: the
sounds were familiar and not particularly interesting, and the sound combos
were mutually disruptive and not very well adaptable to visualisation. Campfire Headphase is markedly progressive
on both counts — with a real good balance between «the mundane» and «the
astral», colorful, occasionally beautiful, and even if the formula starts
getting predictable after the first couple of tracks, it is a good enough
formula to keep you going for about an hour.
TRANS CANADA HIGHWAY (2006)
1) Dayvan Cowboy; 2) Left Side
Drive; 3) Heard From Telegraph Lines; 4) Skyliner; 5) Under The Coke Sign; 6)
Dayvan Cowboy (Odd Nosdam remix).
Originally, I managed to mistake this for an
actual album, even though it is really a stop-gap EP (or «maxi-single»,
whatever): 28 minutes, 5 of which is ʽDayvan Cowboyʼ (already
included in Campfire Headphase and
discussed above), 5 more of which is a remix of ʽDayvan Cowboyʼ by
trendy producer Odd Nosdam, and only about 15 minutes of which actually
consists of material unavailable elsewhere. Nevertheless, on the whole it is
still pretty long, and a brief comment may be in order (besides, Twoism and Hi Scores were EPs, too, formally speaking).
The remix of ʽCowboyʼ seems like a
crapola exercise to me: the major point was to take the composition's sonic
subtleties and convert them to jarring, distorted noise, so that the «Link Wray
guitar» parts of it now sound more like «Sonic Youth guitar» parts. Artistic
license is always welcome, but Boards Of Canada have never been a
«noise»-oriented band, and I do not see the point in trying to reinvent their
art as some sort of «neo-shoegazing» project. That said, there's no accounting
for taste, really — any combinations, reinventions, or deconstructions in this
densely populated world of ours will always find some audience.
The two new large tracks, ʽLeft Side
Driveʼ and ʽSkylinerʼ, seem to pre-announce the duo's transition
to the next stage of their career, to be fully explored on Tomorrow's Harvest several years later — a return to a completely
electronic sound (no acoustic guitars or any other «folk» accoutrements), but
more dynamic and multi-layered than the early style: chill-out muzak for people
who just want to be chilled out, rather than «symbolically stimulated». The
former employs digital tones that I'd call «cloudy», the latter relies on
tones I'd name «steamy», but the overriding ideology is pretty much the same,
and so is the general effect (lazy psychedelia — light trance — breezy
hallucinations — don't drink and
drive — that sort of thing). Okay, but nothing special whatsoever.
Finally, the short tracks are just atmospheric
humming interludes: ʽHeard From Telegraph Linesʼ (and subsequently
amplified, bottled, and sold) pretty much describes the essence of this
minute-long bit in a nutshell, and if ʽUnder The Coke Signʼ genuinely
describes whatever is happening down there, I'm pretty sure the owner is not
doing a good business at all. Or maybe they just mean a billboard along some
lonely highway — the Trans Canada
Highway, that is. Arguably the best way to assess this EP is simply to take
the highway and plop this in your stereo. Be warned, though — according to
Wikipedia, the highway is approximately 4,860 miles long, so you'll have a lot of replaying to do. But if there's
anything we can learn from Boards Of Canada at all, it's that the world need be
in no hurry, and that slow and repetitive digestion beats fussy and varied
digestion on all counts.
TOMORROW'S HARVEST (2013)
1) Gemini; 2) Reach For The
Dead; 3) White Cyclosa; 4) Jacquard Causeway; 5) Telepath; 6) Cold Earth; 7)
Transmisiones Ferox; 8) Sick Times; 9) Collapse; 10) Palace Posy; 11) Split
Your Infinities; 12) Uritual; 13) Nothing Is Real; 14) Sundown; 15) New Seeds;
16) Come To Dust; 17) Semena Mertvykh.
The first full-length album from Boards Of
Canada in eight years — no wonder the
electronic world went almost as crazy for this one as it would do for Aphex
Twin's Syro a year later. Overrated
or not, Boards Of Canada are «official giants» from the Radiohead era, and just
like Radiohead, even if they go on releasing dull crap for the rest of their
lives, the hype machine has been set in such major action that the important
question of «what it is, exactly, that separates great art from dull crap,
particularly in the 21st century?» will seem irrelevant to the majority.
Alas, I remain in the minority that does give a damn, and I have to confess
that I find Tomorrow's Harvest to
be the duo's least impressive and most overreaching offering to date. Not that
I have ever been a major fan, but at least in the past, these guys would look
for odd targets to shoot at, and you could spend more time pondering over the
meaning of the target than over whether they managed to hit it or not. This time, however, the target is pretty
clear — as is, to me, the understanding that they missed it completely. In
fact, they missed it so completely
that I am even beginning to wonder if these guys really had any genuine talent
to begin with.
The album's title, the song titles, the general
atmospherics, even the hazy, ominous silhouette of Manhattan on the front cover
all speak of dangerous premonitions. From the sounds of childhood and
campfires, Boards Of Canada advance to the state where they, too, want to make
their «post-apocalyptic» soundscape of coldness, devastation, loneliness, and
organic degradation. Which is perfectly alright: almost every electronic artist
wishes to make one sooner or later. The only question is — will mine work
better than yours?
My answer is that this is one of the least
convincing, most instantly forgettable post-apocalyptic albums I have ever had
the displeasure of hearing. It builds up the atmosphere based on careful
selection of tones, yes, so that the sound is very consistent (and many of the
tracks virtually indistinguishable from each other), but that's about it. Just like before, the duo does not
care about causing any sharp sensations: everything is smooth and glossy —
elevator muzak for the last working elevator in the world left after the last
World War. There is not a single track here, not one, for which I could offer
any meaningful comment, because I have a distinct feeling I'd heard it all
before, in better versions, worse versions, equally dull versions — not a
single emotional response above the usual «well, I guess I'd rather hear this in an elevator/supermarket than
Katy Perry, but then, on second thought...».
If we can have a specific point of
counter-reference, the theme and mood of the album reminded me of certain
tracks on the instrumental sides of David Bowie's Low and Heroes — stuff
like ʽWarszawaʼ, ʽSubterraneansʼ, ʽSense Of
Doubtʼ, compositions that used similar (even if comparatively «antique»)
techniques to create a feeling of lonely cockroach-style survival among the
devastation and dreariness, but actually employed some brilliant minimalistic
melodic moves to enhance and really drive home that feeling. And I no longer
buy the whole «well, with Boards Of Canada it's all about continuous
atmosphere, not about melodic potential» stuff — because Bowie and Eno somehow
managed to have both, and now that I
know that you can have atmosphere and
melody at the same time, why should I settle for anything less?
All I can say is this: if an album like Tomorrow's Harvest, with its grand
critical reception and all, is considered by anyone to represent the
«state-of-the-art» of electronic music in the early 2010s, then «Electronica»
must be as creatively dead as «Rock» or any other such labels, and this
particular thumbs
down that I am vehemently issuing for this
«oh-no-not-another-dust-and-cockroaches-art-piece» of an album turns out to be
something far more serious than just a thumbs down. I do hope that is not the
case here, though, and what we are really dealing with is a stereotypical case
of self-bullshitting due to somebody's legendary status.
ICHABOD AND I (1990)
1) Eleanor Everything; 2)
Bodenheim Jr.; 3) Catweazle; 4) Sweet Salad Birth; 5) Hip Clown Rag; 6) Walking
5th Carnival; 7) Kaleidoscope; 8) Happens To Us All.
Listening to and looking at the Boo Radleys'
not-too-promising debut album — shorter than half an hour and only ever
released in LP format — one can hardly get rid of the feeling that these well-meaning
English lads are far more literate than they are talented. Quite possibly, some
kid, or maybe several kids, may have looked at the album cover and asked
themselves the question: «What is a
Boo Radley?» and «What the heck is an ichabod?» and consequently discover
Harper Lee and Washington Irving. (Nothing wrong about a little idealistic
dreaming! and I am not being condescending here — hell, I should probably
confess that I had no idea who was Bodenheim before stumbling upon the second
track here, either).
The songs, however, do not offer much of
interest, and the band themselves have tagged these 28 minutes as a purely
formative stage, way too much influenced by contemporary noise and grunge bands
to have anything close to its own identity. Lo-fi, overloud, and looking as if
most of the melodies were thrown together in about two minutes each, Ichabod And I simply does not stand a
chance against... well, anything, but
most importantly, it explores the same territory that was already thoroughly
explored by My Bloody Valentine on their debut and would be explored even more thoroughly on Loveless next year — namely, the idea of marrying «dirt» with
«beauty» and turning them into an unseparable Holy Duality where one does not
exist without the other.
The idea of combining tenderly lyrical «flower
power» vocals of Sice Rowbottom with the jarring, crushing guitar drone of
Martin Carr is not at all original, but it could
work — provided they had discovered how to make the experience memorable, or at
least engineered the right balance between these two extremes in the studio.
The latter task is tremendously hard (and constitutes, for instance, my biggest
issue with the already mentioned Loveless),
but it doesn't seem as if they even began worrying about it. The guitars simply
stomp in, killing everything that moves (ʽEleanor Everythingʼ and
ʽHappens To Us Allʼ, bookmarking the record, are extreme examples of
this approach), and the vocals are buried so deep that, by the time you have
finally dug them out, your shovels will be dented and your interest dissipated.
It does not help that the guitars do not play any interesting melodies and are,
at best, sloppified variations on classic Black Sabbath riffs (e.g.
ʽBodenheim Jr.ʼ = ʽAfter Foreverʼ, much tortured and disfigured).
Even if the song starts out with a nice little
Sixties-style jangle-pop riff (ʽCatweazleʼ), within a matter of
seconds it gets drowned in sludge; only ʽWalking 5th Carnivalʼ
escapes this cruel fate by reaching a compromise — there will be a nasty-sounding,
but distinctive wah-wah riff here, as well as several acoustic-based sections,
apart from the regular distorted stuff; ironically, it is also the song with
the most boring vocal part on the album...
To put it bluntly, Ichabod And I largely sucks, and the band's decision to bury it
right there in Sleepy Hollow is understandable. Now that the era of the Holy
Download is upon us, it is not a big problem to bring back the ghost, but there
is really no need to hunt for this
obscurity unless you happen to be a really big fan of the band and have a
scientific interest in their roots. Well, this is one of those «roots-obsessed»
high school-level debuts that deserves all the severity of a thumbs down;
fortunately, the band's CD-era output would soon prove that the Boo Radleys
were ready to work hard on their image, until that whole «scary on the outside
/ beautiful on the inside» thing actually became real.
EVERYTHING'S ALRIGHT FOREVER (1992)
1) Spaniard; 2) Towards The
Light; 3) Losing It; 4) Memory Babe; 5) Skyscraper; 6) I Feel Nothing; 7) Room
At The Top; 8) Does This Hurt; 9) Sparrow; 10) Smile Fades Fast; 11) Firesky;
12) Song For The Morning To Sing; 13) Lazy Day; 14) Paradise.
If I understand my terminology correctly, The
Boo Radleys' second album should not be properly categorized as «shoegaze»,
something that presupposes very static, droney, (preferably) hypnotic /
trance-inducing music-making. The Boos are no enemies to the drone ideology,
and Sice's lulling vocals may certainly be hypnotic, but in the end, Everything's Alright is primarily a pop
record — noise-pop, psycho-pop, whatever, but the songs have verses, choruses,
different melodies, even colorful guitar solos that rise above the din to
provide some climactic heights, none of which really ties in with the
«atmosphere-above-all-else» guideline of generic «shoegaze».
The problem is different: these verses and
choruses are insufficiently engaging for me to state that the album survives on
its melodic potential rather than its atmospherics. Either, at this point,
Carr's songwriting was still in its infancy, or perhaps the atmospherics
clashes with the melodies, but very few individual moments stand out — not a
good sign for a pop album. Even when stuff is quite objectively different, like ʽSpaniardʼ, an acoustic
ballad that eventually explodes with a merry Castilian brass section, it still
feels merely like a slightly nuanced part of one big dreamy continuum. And
this, in turn, brings back the «shoegazing» associations.
The band's experimentation in the area of «loud
vs. quiet» is unsatisfactory: the marriage between abrasive feedback and
acoustic jazz chords on ʽI Feel Nothingʼ is conducted very crudely —
now we're playing these soft swingin' notes and now we go BOOM! and it's My
Bloody Valentine all over the floor again; anyone could do that, really.
ʽMemory Babeʼ, where the build-up from all-out acoustic to
buzzy-electric and then to a huge psychedelic crescendo is handled more
efficiently, is better, but still has nothing in particular to recommend it —
no single special touch that would make us easily understand what it was,
exactly, that the band was bringing to the table.
Nothing remains, eventually, but to lower our
expectations and understand that The Boo Radleys simply wanted to generously
contribute their own share to the world of noise-pop, without taking any
particular care about putting a «special» stamp on that share. Once
expectations are lowered to that
level, songs like ʽFireskyʼ and ʽParadiseʼ will appeal to
all those who yearn for another Loveless
or at least an inferior copy, as long as it shares similar textures.
Prospectively, too, with Sice's capacity for «angelic» singing, we could say
that Everything's Alright
(especially on such moody-mournful compositions as ʽSmile Fades Fastʼ)
predicts Radiohead, at least in their early, pre-OK Computer stage.
Arguably the best, most evocative and
memorable, track is ʽSong For The Morning To Singʼ, where they
finally come up with a solid, no-nonsense, lyrical, old-school melody, George
Harrison-style, but produced through a lo-fi psychedelic filter. In addition
to the blow-your-mind attitude, this one just seems to hold a big sackful of
pure love, rendering both the singer and the lead guitar player more humane and
vulnerable than everything else put together. But precisely because of this,
the song, short and barely noticeable in its second-to-last position on the
album, is an exception to the rule — it does point the way to the band's future
progress, yet nobody could really tell this back in 1992. Ultimately, Everything's Alright Forever is just a
diligent exercise in studying, copying, and honing production skills.
LEARNING TO WALK (1993)
1) Kaleidoscope; 2) How I
Feel; 3) Aldous; 4) Swansong; 5) The Finest Kiss; 6) Tortoiseshell; 7)
Bluebird; 8) Naomi; 9) Alone Again Or; 10) Everybird; 11) Sometime Soon She
Said; 12) Foster's Van; 13) Song For Up!; 14) Boo! Faith.
Formally this is a compilation, but it feels
logical to discuss it right after Everything's
Alright Forever, since it neatly summarizes and closes the door on the
first part of the Boo Radleys' career. This one puts together three separate
EPs that the band put out in 1990 and 1991: Kaleidoscope, Every Heaven,
and Boo! Up, and throws in two
covers for good measure — a Boo Radleys-style transformation of Love's classic
ʽAlone Again Orʼ, and a similar re-construction of New Order's
ʽTrue Faithʼ (whose title is mutated to ʽBoo! Faithʼ).
The first track, ʽKaleidoscopeʼ, is
somewhat symbolic — it is a re-recording of one of the tracks from the
unfortunate Ichabod, longer, denser,
and in much better sound quality,
showing how much the band really cared about «going professional» in those
early days. Not only is more and better emphasis placed on Sice's «tragic hero»
vocals, but the guitars are brighter and janglier as well, with several «noise
patterns» intersecting with each other and genuinely attempting to create a
kaleidoscopic feeling.
However, after that there is really very little
development: most of the songs on these three EPs sound very much alike, and
all the standard complaints about their brand of noise-pop apply here in equal
measure, even if repeated listens eventually bring out the occasional flash of
psychedelic beauty in the vocal hooks of ʽSwansongʼ or
ʽBluebirdʼ. And even so, they make a big mistake by following those two early EPs up with the cover of
ʽAlone Again Orʼ — this is one of Arthur Lee's best songs ever, and
the tearful gorgeousness of its romantic vocal melody immediately exposes the
Boos as incapable mediocrities in comparison. The cover is actually quite good
— the noise-pop arrangement still preserves the original's melodicity, and
Sice's style is ideally suited to imitating and recreating Lee's «plaintive»
attitudes. But when the cover is so much better than the originals... well, you
know.
A few first seeds of upcoming changes can be
spotted on the third EP, Boo! Up.
ʽEverybirdʼ places its bets not so much on the predictable noise
sections as it does on the quieter, acoustic parts where they sound not unlike
Pink Floyd in their post-Barrett / pre-Dark
Side days; ʽSometime Soon She Saidʼ has their tightest rhythm
section up to date, with drummer Rob Cieka kicking those skins so loudly and
precisely that he just might steal your audio-attention away from all the
feedback; and ʽSong For Up!ʼ has a quirky instrumental section where
the band's patented noisy jam schtick gradually
emerges from a softer, dronier, maybe even jazzier passage. In other words,
they are beginning to build up on their original foundation, cautiously testing
different possible outlets — still only very cautiously, though.
On the whole, thanks to its chronologically
diverse nature, Learning To Walk is
a less difficult record to assimilate than Everything's
Alright Forever, and it may give a slightly more favorable impression of
the band — on the other hand, it still does not prepare you for the artistic
transformation that they would very soon go through, and I can only heartily
recommend it for all those who love their pop standards to be burnt to a crisp
in carcinogenic feedback, and decline to take 'em any other way.
GIANT STEPS (1993)
1) I Hang Suspended; 2) Upon
9th And Fairchild; 3) Wish I Was Skinny; 4) Leaves And Sand; 5) Butterfly
McQueen; 6) Rodney King (Song For Lenny Bruce); 7) Thinking Of Ways; 8) Barney
(...And Me); 9) Spun Around; 10) If You Want It, Take It; 11) Best Lose The
Fear; 12) Take The Time Around; 13) Lazarus; 14) One Is For; 15) Run My Way
Runway; 16) I've Lost The Reason; 17) The White Noise Revisited.
A little presumptuous, wouldn't you think, to
name your LP «in honor» of a genuinely trailblazing record by one of your
predecessors, especially one whose vision, professionalism, and artistic depth
you have very little hope of matching. All the more strange since the music of
The Boo Radleys owes fairly little to John Coltrane, at least not in any direct
way. Of course, if you wanted, you could always trace a credible line of
development from Coltrane-era modal and free jazz to the shoegaze movement,
but, ironically, Giant Steps is The
Boo Radleys' first venture well away
from the canons of shoegazing and into the territory of more dynamic, concisely
structured, catchy psychedelic pop. A giant step for the Boos, perhaps — a
fairly tiny blip for mankind, though, I'm afraid.
Technically speaking, Giant Steps satisfies all the conditions for establishing an
intelligent pop lover's paradise. Lovely vocal harmonies, a clever balance
between acoustic and electric guitars, an even more clever balance between
«melodic» and «noise» components, a delirious mishmash of Sixties, Seventies,
and Eighties' influences, enough creativity to fill more than one whole hour of
music, and a nice cosmopolitan flavour — no traces of the embryonic «Britpop»
with its arrogant accents and hip cockiness. How could this not be recommended? You'd have to be
tasteless, heartless, and illiterate not to recommend it.
Yet at the same time, even as Martin Carr and
Sice move deeper and deeper into the spicefield of vocal and instrumental
hooks, I have a nasty impression that they have relatively little talent for
these hooks. Giant Steps sounds
good, but the songs do not hang around for long, and it is not really a matter
of the album's excessive length (though some have complained) as it seems to be
their inability to come up with something that would really truly be «the Boo
Radleys sound» and nobody else's. A song like ʽWish I Was Skinnyʼ
sounds lovely, with its wooing fusion of acoustic rhythm, «tinkling» electric
lead, atmospheric brass and organ doubling and tripling of the rhythm, Sice's
seductive crooning, and a busy, steady tempo — but that's about it: «lovely»,
without getting under the skin by means of some truly striking device.
I almost feel ashamed writing this, because I
really want to love Giant Steps: the
lack of «theoretical» innovation should not bother us at all, as long as the
songs properly hit the proper emotional centers. But they do only twice, at
the very beginning and then again right at the end. ʽI Hang
Suspendedʼ, lyrically conceived as some sort of answer to some sort of
antagonist ("ain't that just you know the facts, but you haven't got a
clue about me or my life") and instrumentally presented as an energetic
funk-pop rocker, is quite a rousing introduction — and ʽThe White Noise
Revisitedʼ, closing the album on a gentle farewell note, has a sentimental
mantra for a coda ("hey! what's that noise? do you remember?"),
lushly arranged and making for a stately conclusion, although you eventually
begin to wonder if its stateliness does not come exclusively from its
repetitiveness... well, hopefully not.
The basic agenda of The Boo Radleys, now that
the noise clouds have dissipated a bit, is clear: they are dreamers, escapists,
big fans of Sgt. Pepper, and, like
all those Elephant 6 bands on the other side of the ocean, they want to restore
its original fifth-dimensional colours to pop music. Their basic failure is
also exactly the same as in the case of most such bands — they love their
influences so much, they want to make that
kind of music, but everything that comes out is spiritually, if not
technically or intellectually, inferior. As an experiment, I have listened to
the song ʽBest Lose The Fearʼ, which seemed like a worthy candidate,
three times in a row — all I hear is half-hearted McCartnyisms without any real understanding of how it should
really work. For one thing, Sice has a beautiful vocal tone, but he doesn't do anything with it — generally staying
on the exact same «pretty» frequency, almost as if such a thing as «vocal
modulation» never existed. For another thing, the accompanying colorfully
distorted lead guitar part never seems to pretend to anything but colorful
accompaniment — the humble Martin Carr never lets it develop into a proper solo
or even into a particularly flashy, noticeable riff. It's simply there for the
color. It's a nice color, but the real nicety of the color always reveals
itself when it's organized into a shape.
The big single from the album was
ʽLazarusʼ, a densely arranged, epic track into which they really must
have put a lot of work — but behind all the overwhelming layers of electronic
noise, solemn brass, and roaring guitars, lies a very simple and not
specifically attractive or innovative folk-pop melody from God knows back when.
They put enough makeup on it to make it into a cosmic anthem, and sometimes,
this might work, but for me, ʽLazarusʼ does not work. It seems to be
trying to make some big point, and it comes out sounding as heavy psycho muzak.
Despite all these criticisms, I respect sincere
craft as much as I worship authentic genius, and because of that, Giant Steps gets a thumbs up. At the very least, it
gives us a band that has managed to go beyond the obvious trends and fads of
its time and either decide to boldly pursue some eclectic ambitions, or
discover its own true colors — or both. In my opinion, The Boo Radleys are
mediocre songwriters and unimpressive visionaries, but that does not prevent
them from developing a potentially
great, colorful, friendly sound, which must have sounded even greater,
friendlier, more colorful back in 1993 than it does today, and which still
remains well worth revisiting for every serious lover of «psycho-pop».
WAKE UP! (1995)
1) Wake Up Boo!; 2) Fairfax
Scene; 3) It's Lulu; 4) Joel; 5) Find The Answer Within; 6) Reaching Out From
Here; 7) Martin, Doom! It's Seven O'Clock; 8) Stuck On Amber; 9) Charles
Bukowski Is Dead; 10) 4AM Conversation; 11) Twinside; 12) Wilder.
The commercial success of this album was
largely associated with the rise of «Britpop», even though Carr had gone on
record many times claiming that The Boo Radleys had nothing to do with
«Britpop» and never tried to jump on anybody's wagon at all. As far as the early Boo Radleys sound is concerned,
he would be deluding himself and the public, but Wake Up!, indeed, has very little to do with either Blur or Oasis.
Instead, it has everything to do with the Beatles: this is as close as the band
has ever come to a fanatical show of worship, and even if the results are, as
usual, much less than spectacular, the strength of the drive is so ferocious
that... well, imagine if the real
Beatles would have put out something in 1995... come to think of it, they did, didn't they? well, ʽFree As A
Birdʼ got to No. 2 on the UK charts, and ʽWake Up Boo!ʼ got to
No. 9, and that's sort of about right, numerically and aesthetically.
For this record, almost every trace of the
band's shoegazing past has been carefully removed. While some of the tracks
still feature noisy distorted guitars, they are almost never at the center of
attention — it is merely to let us know that the band does not have a special
intention of «going soft», and besides, it's not as if the Beatles hadn't used
any noisy distorted guitars in their life, you know. But the true ambition of
these guys is indeed to make you Wake
Up! — to offer an album full of beautiful, optimistic, idealistic,
life-asserting psychedelic pop songs, recapturing the warm colorful vibe of the
1966-69 period, when it was vibrating all the way from Revolver to Abbey Road
(the latter album is even structurally alluded to, either intentionally or
subconsciously, on the last track, which cuts away as unexpectedly as ʽI
Want Youʼ and is then quickly followed up by an unpredictable-unrelated
closing acoustic snippet like ʽHer Majestyʼ).
Like every single attempt to directly «cop the
Beatles» that I have ever heard, be it XTC or Adrian Belew or Apples In
Stereo, Wake Up! is ultimately a
failure — predictedly and expectedly a failure, I'd add, for reasons of
personal and collective psychology. But like most of these attempts, that does
not render the «copies» completely useless or unenjoyable or lacking a
sub-identity of their own. Nor am I saying that the «copies» actually rip off
any of the Beatles' melodies — that would be much too much of an
oversimplification (although there certainly are some direct quotations, e. g.
the piano chords of ʽThe Long And Winding Roadʼ on
ʽWilderʼ). No, the Boos are certainly capable of writing their own
songs — and that is where the problem lies: their schooling in songwriting does
not agree too well with the Sixties' vibe, or, at the very least, they often
have trouble finding the right bits of that vibe to insert in their
compositions.
Case in point: ʽFind The Answer
Withinʼ is a pretty good upbeat pop song, but for some reason, they find
it a good idea to load the last minute and a half with overdubs of
backward-recorded vocals. You can almost imagine the studio reasoning: «hey,
great tune we get going here, but not enough of that Sixties' flavor!» — «But
we've already borrowed everything!» —
«Well, you can never borrow everything,
really, just give another spin to your copy of Past Masters!» — «Say! What about those backward vocals on
ʽRainʼ, did we ever have that?»
Honestly, there is no need whatsoever for such a gimmick on this track, not
after its encouraging message of "The world is at your feet / Try and make
something happen", but no, they had to go out and do it.
Beatlisms are kept to a relative miminum on the
album's most commercially successful single, ʽWake Up Boo!ʼ, where
they opted for a rousing, almost Eurodance-like, rhythm and a large brass
section to complement the impetus of "wake up it's a beautiful morning,
the sun shining for your eyes". However, its romantic joy and innocence
feels a little too contrived and calculated for me — even despite being
lyrically tempered with the less immediately obvious verbal conclusion of
"wake up it's so beautiful, for what could be the very last time",
it's really a rather silly song, you know, at least for 1995; I feel unable to
give in to its mechanical happiness, even if it is very hard to explain why,
for instance, ʽGood Day Sunshineʼ feels so natural and easy-going,
while this sunny day anthem feels so
contrived.
I much prefer ʽMartin, Doom! It's Seven
O'Clockʼ, which also stimulates its protagonist to "get out of
bed", "the world is waiting just for you", etc., but does that
at a slower, more thoughtful tempo and without hammering the repetitive hook
into your head. It's a gradual six-minute build-up that could have been better
arranged (for one thing, the fake synthesized horns and strings at the end
really deserved to be real — as it is, the wall-of-sound approach seems
misplaced), but on the symbolic level at least it does a really good job of
representing a person's gradual awakening (in all senses of the word), and if
any track on the album ever approaches «epic» status, it would be
ʽMartinʼ. Also because it is uncluttered with vocal gimmicks: so many
tracks here place their complete faith in aah-aah and ooh-ooh overdubs (some of
them multi-layered, some of them phased, some of them reversed etc.) that
eventually it just becomes boring.
Where they really
get their stuff together is the very last song, and even then, not from the beginning: for the first
few minutes, ʽWilderʼ just rides on a quasi-McCartney piano melody
that mimics the form but misses the spirit. However, at around 3:30 into the
song, it is transformed into a calm, unhurried, «introspective» jam that
unexpectedly reveals a major talent in bassist Tim Brown — ironically, if there
is one good thing here that they truly managed to snatch out of the Beatles'
backpack and develop further, it is McCartney's bass melodicity, which Brown understands
perfectly well and capitalizes upon. Technically and emotionally, the jam is
reminiscent of what the Beatles did on ʽDon't Let Me Downʼ — a
thoughtful, seriously-playful bass groove against which the guitars and
keyboards lay down some stately, economic lines, creating a feel of some sort
of «mature serenity» — but here, despite being so derivative, they are also
being highly successful.
It is rather weird to talk about an album's
existence being essentially justified by its three-minute coda, but that's just
the way it is; at least it is a major argument in support of a thumbs up,
because otherwise we could get seriously irritated by the inadequacy of the
«wake up!» ideology of the album. I mean, it pretends to be giving you a major ʽHey Judeʼ-an kick in
the butt, but it just doesn't have enough calories to make it feel like a kick,
if you know what I mean. Real admirable intention, though, no questions about
it.
C'MON KIDS (1996)
1) C'mon Kids; 2) Meltin's
Worm; 3) Melodies For The Deaf (Colours For The Blind); 4) Get On The Bus; 5)
Everything Is Sorrow; 6) Bullfrog Green; 7) What's In The Box (See Whatcha
Got); 8) Four Saints; 9) New Brighton Promenade; 10) Fortunate Sons; 11)
Shelter; 12) Ride The Tiger; 13) One Last Hurrah.
Browsing through the reviews and reactions on
the Boo Radleys in the mid-1990's, I was more than a little amused to see that Wake Up! was constantly seen as the
band's «commercial / accessible» album and the follow-up was seen as their
«experimental / adventurous» release — some even suggested that it was an
intentionally «anti-commercial» record, meant to dissipate the concept of the
Boos as sell-outs. I mean, for God's sake, this is a band that has always stuck to its own thang, at least
as soon as they shook off the shoegaze spell, and even then, they weren't
really doing it for the money or for the whole bandwagon thing — they were just
going with the flow for a while, nursing their chops and looking for the real
Boo Radleys.
If ʽWake Up Boo!ʼ was a commercial
success, it was so accidentally: the stars just happened to align in a way that
the band's rousing gust of pseudo-optimism was understood as modernistic, well
in line with all the Britpop anthems of the day. It was a misunderstanding — in
reality, Wake Up! (as an album) was
merely the band's way of answering the question «what would the Beatles do if
they were the Boo Radleys today?», and any good attempt to answer this question
has a pretty decent chance of running into some commercial success, be it 1977,
1997, or 2137. Then, quite logically, C'mon
Kids was merely the band's way of answering the question «what would the
Beatles do next once they'd had released an album like Wake Up?» Well, they would have probably experimented some more,
right? Messing around with song structures, trying out different genres and
combos, taking risks, making sure the sum would be more impressive than the
parts, without forgetting about the parts, right? That's what it is all about; putting it all in «commercial» terms
does not make much sense. This is not the life story of Bon Jovi, or even of
older bands like Heart or Genesis, that we are concerned about here.
C'Mon
Kids is The Boo Radleys at
their most ambitious, daring, and diverse, testing their skills and strengths
to the limit — which, I guess, makes it their best album, because it is still
hard to acknowledge them as anything other than «craftsmen», but «craftsmen»
have one big advantage over «geniuses»: unlike genius, craft can be honed and
perfected, and if you hone and perfect it long enough, you might find yourself
just one small step short of genius, and this is exactly the case of C'mon Kids. There is little about the
album that I love, but I admire how they really stretched out on it, with the
sincerest of intentions and complete unpredictability.
The title track greets you with some party
sounds, some radio waves, a distorted alt-rock riff, and a new Sice who yells his lyrics out rather than croons
them. But the message? "C'mon kids, don't do yourself down, throw out your
arms for a new sound, pretty face it don't mean a thing if you look so same as
your crowd" — in other words, that alt-rock riffage and shouting is not meant by the band as conformism: it
just so happened that... well, coincidences happen. Not to worry — already the
second song, ʽMeltin's Wormʼ, is in a completely different style, or,
rather, it merges elements of completely different styles. I'd call it
«grunge-prog», but that's just me, and I even have no idea whatsoever of what
the song is about.
It would be quite tempting to describe the
album on a song-by-song basis, because it is such a treasure trove for the
«classic rock fan» — almost every track has at least two or three different
throwbacks, with some of the most bizarre combinations you will ever encounter.
For instance, ʽGet On The Busʼ begins with an acoustic line copped
from John Lennon's ʽWorking Class Heroʼ, but then quickly becomes a
feedback-drenched psychedelic rocker with insane banshee-wailing guitars that
could rival the Stooges, then goes back to acoustic mode, but in waltz time,
echoes and organs included for haunting effect. ʽFour Saintsʼ is two
quarters rowdy trip-hop, one quarter distorted rock and one quarter psychedelic
folk-rock. ʽWhat's In The Boxʼ is like the Bee Gees' ʽIn My Own
Timeʼ crossed with... well, something much more rough than that.
Weirdest of 'em all is ʽNew Brighton
Promenadeʼ — this one starts out as a perfect impersonation of Simon
& Garfunkel (I daresay that if Sice replaced Art on one of those reunion
tours, nobody would have noticed — or, rather, everybody would have noticed,
because Art has long since lost his voice completely, so Sice is basically the
new Art now), then becomes sunny pop-rock, then throws on some distortion on
both guitar and vocals, and finally erupts in an aggressively friendly wah-wah
solo — take that, Mr. Simon!
Still, I will refrain from namechecking the
rest of the tracks: you already get the drift, and then there's the downside —
these combos are creative and diverse, but they do not feel perfectly natural
to me: I do not understand why these
particular songs have to be sewn together in such incongruous ways, other than
acting out of a general «try anything once» principle. The album has its share
of actively rocking moments and its share of beautiful moments, for sure, but
as a whole, it is ultimately less
than the sum of its parts — somewhat of a mess, really. Problem is, The Boo
Radleys are a band who always need to work hard to prove to us the necessity
for their existence, and this whirling kaleidoscope does not help — at least
when they were still shoegazing, the typical Boo Radley song shared a certain
definitive atmosphere, good or bad, whereas here, atmospheres come and go in
the blink of an eye. What does it all mean? What does it all want to make me
feel? It's like they try to hit all the buttons at once, and get it all wrong.
On the other hand, the album has growth
potential — with so many different things happening, it may well be that a lot
of listens are required before the initial confusion starts crystallizing into
something more symmetrical and elegant. Criticisms aside, the craft alone
demands a strong thumbs up: for an «indie» album circa 1996, C'mon Kids reveals a staggering amount
of work, way beyond anything one could have expected from listening to the
band's early albums. And I can only imagine, for instance, the reactions of
some young teenager for whom this could be one of the earliest exposures to the
whole art-pop-rock thing, before he started exploring all those realms from
which Carr and Spice loot their influences. At the very least, I guess this is
an essential record to get to know for anyone with a «systemic» interest in
the 1990's pop scene — and whether or not you will want to keep it under your
pillow is a different matter.
KINGSIZE (1998)
1) Blue Room In Archway; 2)
The Old Newsstand At Hamilton Square; 3) Free Huey; 4) Monuments For A Dead
Century; 5) Heaven's At The Bottom Of This Glass; 6) Kingsize; 7) High As
Monkeys; 8) Eurostar; 9) Adieu Clo Clo; 10) Jimmy Webb Is God; 11) She Is
Everywhere; 12) Comb Your Hair; 13) Song From The Blueroom; 14) The Future Is
Now.
The very last album by The Boo Radleys was
recorded under tense conditions — Sice was already disenchanted with the band
and all set to leave as soon as the chance presented itself, and very soon
after Kingsize came out, Carr phoned
him himself and said he was pulling the plug. Nor was the reception for the
album particularly welcome. People called, and continue to call it, overlong,
lacking focus, and/or just plain boring and uninspired. «Official» reviewers
give it as few stars as they can allocate a formerly respectable band, and
regular users complain about the lack of big hit singles to serve as anchors.
I would have joined the crowd upon first listen
— the most disappointing thing for me, other than the unwarranted length, was
too much reliance on mechanical funk beats that seemed to be present in every
second song and reduce the record to an unwanted-unwarranted tribute to the
Stone Roses or something like that. The hooks were not immediately jumping out,
either, and it seemed all too easy to join the condemning crowds. Then I
remembered that, after all, the Boo Radleys always had their way through craft,
not genius, and craft may require more time to be appreciated, so I prepared
myself for a couple more excruciating listens...
...and you know what — second and particularly
third time around, it clicked, or, rather, snapped in place. The critics are
damn wrong about this one, and the fans — well, the fans need to have some
patience. Kingsize is long, and
sometimes slow, and sometimes a little lazy, but I find this now to be easily the single most inspired and convincingly crafted collection of songs
in the band's entire catalog. In fact, there is nary a clunker to be found
here, and for once, it all works reasonably and logically — the songs are not
clumsily collated from uncollatable ideas, as they often were on C'mon Kids, but follow their own
natural paths of development and, well, develop
into sometimes stunningly beautiful art-pop flowers.
ʽMonuments For A Dead Centuryʼ is the
title of one of the songs, and it could, perhaps, have been a good title for
the whole album. I have not paid much attention to Carr's lyrics, as usual, and
maybe I am wrong about that, but I seriously doubt that detailed analysis of
the words could have added to the general emotional impression — an impression
of a melancholic farewell to a dream that once seemed so real, yet has always
remained out of reach. Throughout the album, they are constantly saying goodbye
(ʽAdieu Clo Cloʼ), nostalgizing, drowning their troubles in drink
(the wonderfully titled ʽHeaven's At The Bottom Of This Glassʼ), and
utilizing a whole array of instrumental techniques, from the usual distorted
guitars to lush orchestral arrangements, to create their personal gallery of
monuments for a dead century.
There are no highlights or lowlights, so I will
just give a few random taps as examples. ʽComb Your Hairʼ is the
band's tribute to Phil Spector, starting out like a good Ronettes anthem
should, all echoes and big drums — pretty soon, however, we get a distorted
guitar rhythm track that would never be seen on a Phil Spector record, and a
chorus that throbs with lonesomeness and desperation, with a gorgeous vocal
melody that is quite on the level of either the Beach Boys or ABBA. ʽHigh
As Monkeysʼ is a psychedelic dance-pop track that gradually builds up
tension to «implode» in a near-perfect harpsichord-and-strings chorus from
which a dense cello melody smoothly leads it back upwards into the psycho-dance
rave. ʽShe Is Everywhereʼ starts out as a quitely subdued rhythmic
ballad with jazzy guitar, then somehow manages to become loud, noisy, melodic,
and romantic all at once in the chorus (always a good idea to have a melodic
guitar part outbalancing your gruff noise). And ʽHeaven's At The Bottom Of
This Glassʼ is, simply put, the catchiest song they ever wrote, period.
Maybe not the best — but if, by the second time it comes around to say hello to
your brain, you refuse to sing along with the tagline, your only excuse is if
you've just returned from an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
For some reason, they chose ʽFree
Hueyʼ as the lead single for the album. It is not a bad song at all, but
it is highly atypical of the record — one of its most aggressively rocking funk
numbers, with heavily treated, nasty-sounding guitars, Sice screaming most of
the lyrics instead of singing, and very little changing dynamics throughout the
song. Either they did not give a damn, or perhaps they thought that the lead
single needs to have that kick-ass quality — whatever be, this might have
contributed to the general sour disposition. ʽHigh As Monkeysʼ could
have made a much better choice, or at least the title track, which only was the
second single, and whose "how would you like to share, how would you like
to share it all with me" chorus could have made a much more warm,
endearing first impression. Or perhaps they should have tried it with ʽThe
Old Newsstand At Hamilton Squareʼ and its nervous, spooky, James Bond-like
horns and strings? Or with the affectionate tribute to Jimmy Webb (ʽJimmy
Webb Is Godʼ), which climaxes with yet another magnificently engineered
piano-and-orchestra arrangement, conjuring up echoes of that old Paul
Buckmaster grandeur? See, just about everything
here really works.
It is frustratingly ironic that the little
mischievous supernatural being finally visited them in their studio hours so
late in their career — but apparently, it is
possible for the sleeping genius to awaken if you probe it long enough. The
thing is, they really went out on a limb here with all the extra overdubs and
orchestration, and suddenly, it sort of seems that this is just the way they
should have been working from the beginning, and that Carr is much better at
overseeing violins, cellos, and harpsichords than noisy guitars (and there are
quite a few noisy guitars here, but they almost always take second or third place
in the mix). This makes it into some sort of Abbey Road experience — if you know this is probably going to be
your last, summon all the spirits so that they can help you make it into your
best. Admittedly, I may just be going crazy, but one thing I am not being with you is dishonest — so
there must be some rational explanation to why Kingsize, alone out of all Boo Radleys records, ended up affecting
my emotional centers so consistently, song after song after song. Thumbs up
with lots of enthusiasm, although do be warned that the record may well take a
couple of intense listens to warm up to — not that this ain't the case with
quite a few art-pop masterpieces.
ABSOLUTEGO (1996)
1) Absolutego.
Western musical culture sure has sown some
mighty bizarre seeds on Japanese soil (I'm sure every one of us has some
favorite, particularly kinky, example), and it is perhaps no accident that some
of the best recognized names in the «noise» and «drone» categories, like
Merzbow (Masami Akita), come from the Land of the Hallucinatory Rising Sun,
where East and West meet like crazy and produce mindblowing fusion reactions.
Whether you like it, hate it, admire it, or despise it, there is no denying
the uniqueness of it, which might spring upon you in unpredictable ways — and
even damage your senses beyond repair, so let's be careful here.
The relative uniqueness of the first album by
Boris, a three-part musical (sort of) monster who may or may not take their
name from that of Russia's first president, lies first and foremost in the
ratio of its sheer musical content to its length. The total number of chords
«played» by the band probably does not exceed three or four, while the album's
single, unbroken track clocks in around the 60 minute mark (and, apparently,
they thought it too brief, so that the next CD release, called Absolutego+, dragged it up to 65 — by
artificially slowing down the already
superslow piece). Take that length away and you have nothing: just a bit of
heavy, feedback-drenched droning which, like all kinds of heavy,
feedback-drenched droning, owes its existence to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, the mother-drone,
without proving that the offspring has anything to add to what the mother
already stated quite «expressively».
But oh, the length.
When you have sixty minutes to set yourself up, blow it all to hell, and then
step back and let the electricity run out on its own, you have no reason to
compromise, do you? First, you have yourself three minutes of pure feedback — no hands, ma. Then you have
your buildup: from one guitar, plucked only long enough to generate another
mini-wave of feedback, to adding a second guitar that sounds like an electric
box on the verge of exploding, to scattered percussion effects — the drums
proper do not kick in until the twenty-fourth minute or so, where they are also
joined by a little bit of mock-death metal screaming. The central part
constitutes about twenty minutes of sonic whirlwinding, and finally, as the
drums and one of the guitars gradually die out, we are left with about fifteen
minutes of high-pitched looping feedback that cut off abruptly — if you have
the strength to endure it, there's no better way for you to learn to appreciate
the blessed gift of Silence.
I have to admit that this uncompromisingly
Gargantuan approach does give the album a certain «pull». Play one chord and
suck in the feedback it generates for ten seconds, and it will be cool. Do the
same thing for one minute and it will get boring. Do the same thing for three
minutes and it will get very boring.
Do the same thing for five minutes and it will become excruciating, torturous,
insufferable. Do it for nine minutes and you have lost touch with surrounding
reality: you now exist on a different plane, where there is just you, Boris,
and a bunch of busy frequencies in between. Suddenly you realize that you are
now living and breathing them, and you dimly realize that some sort of world exists somewhere far away, where the Beatles
sing ob-la-di-bla-da and people talk in natural languages, but you no longer
know if you will be capable of re-adapting once you get back there, and perhaps
it is not safe to get back there at
all... but luckily, we are still only on the eleventh minute, and there's fifty
more to go, and you feed yourself on feedback like the Man From Mars who eats
guitars, cars, and bars, and the howling drones are your life, and the
high-pitched sheetmetal feedback is your oxygen, and then it gets cut off... NOOOOOO!
In other words, Absolutego is a dangerous experiment that may forever change your
life if you are willing to go all the way, so do be careful. But if you are not
willing to go all the way, alas, nothing will change the fact that (a) there is
very little that actually gets done
here, (b) most of it, if not all of it, has already been done before, and (c)
electric guitar feedback simply is not
the most pleasant sound ever invented by man, and unless it is properly
harnessed, it can be almost as painful as a badly played violin. Not that I am
saying that the chaps in Boris do not know how to harness feedback — but they
ride it like a wild mustang, hanging on for sixty desperate minutes before it
finally shakes them off.
That said, this is also only the very first
album by Boris, and, like many experimental bands around the world, they, too,
share the approach of making their earliest records look like hooliganish
pranks before moving on to somewhat more complex projects — many of which would
look totally conventional and mainstream next to the big brown splat of Absolutego. In the meantime, though,
here we are with what might look like the sonic equivalent of a sixty-minute
long earthquake — which is kind of a gruesome analogy, now that I think of it,
considering how the album was released less than a year after the Kobe
earthquake. Fortunately, this one is nowhere near as lethal — it will simply
melt down your ears, and those can always be reforged.
AMPLIFIER WORSHIP (1998)
1) Huge; 2) Ganbou-Ki; 3)
Hama; 4) Kuruimizu; 5) Vomitself.
Well, the band's second album is like an ocean
of diversity compared to their first — which, of course, does not say much and
could even be construed as a direct insult, because diversity is the last thing
which Boris care about. Do not worry too much, though: the very first track (ʽHugeʼ),
going on for nine minutes, basically sounds like a small handful of samples
taken from the first albums of Black Sabbath and looped into an endless
serpent-monster of a «composition». Ever wished, enchanted by Tony Iommi's
tone, that any of the songs on Master Of
Reality could go on forever and ever and ever, just pummeling and pummeling
your senses with that merciless hellish roar? Your wish has been granted.
Somewhere around the middle of the second
track, though, the band sort of wakes up and begins crawling out of its shell —
the tempo picks up, the drums gain in complexity of pattern, and the guitar
gains in color, adding some light to darkness and switching from a
«psycho-metal» mood into «astral» mood, eventually quieting down and beginning
to explore the benefits of subtlety. In fact, by the time we get to
ʽKuruimizuʼ, Wata's multi-tracked guitars have been realigned to a
«peaceful», «becalmed» way of droning, a lullaby-like mode of functioning where
the listener is gently rocked to and fro in a cradle of softly gurgling
guitars, suspended on a friendly, reliable bassline. Do not make the mistake of
going to sleep, though, or the suitably titled ʽVomitselfʼ will wake
you up with quite a bit of a nasty shock — the 17-minute «grand finale» that
completes everything that ʽHugeʼ left promised, but unfulfilled, and
does indeed sound like 17 minutes of a guitar that tries to «vomit itself». Not
a pleasant experience, but if you let your ears get adjusted to this, the wildest of Jimi Hendrix
improvisations will sound like Johann Strauss Jr. in comparison. Always leave
some space for heavy aural exercise, and you'll be war-trained in no time,
ready to take on the sonics of the world like a real man.
Musically speaking, there is nothing whatsoever
going on here that deserves specific attention: most of these feedback tricks
and minimalistic guitar riffs had been in active use since the early 1970s. But
since we're talking musical minimalism here, this is not relevant — what
matters is that they take these little bits of Black Sabbath and Hawkwind and
God knows who else, put them under the microscope, dissect them, recombine
them, and stretch them out for miles and miles, assuming that it is only like that that one can really assess their
true potential. Take ʽSweet Leafʼ, chop out everything but its main
riff, slow it down a bit, then loop it for 15 minutes, and what you get is
Boris. (Oh, they also have some screamed vocals here, but they are totally unnecessary
— every track here would work better without voices). Yes, I can actually see
where it could make a certain sense.
On the positive side, there is a little less
high-pitched metallic feedback here — only the last two minutes or so make my
ears bleed, compared with about 15 minutes at the end of Absolutego, so you could say they are now taking it less heavy on
the listeners. On the negative side, any attempt to compromise, even the
slightest one, threatens to turn Boris from a bunch of weirdo iconoclasts into
a bunch of boring wankers (who they are,
deep down in essence, but the aggressively minimalistic approach helps take
the focus away from that fact). I have no idea which choice suits me better,
but since I can hardly expect any particularly elevated emotional response to
this band's brand of elastic psychedelia altogether, I am not exactly losing
sleep over the issue.
FLOOD (2000)
1) Flood I; 2) Flood II; 3)
Flood III; 4) Flood IV.
Guess they couldn't do it like that in the old days of shellac, could
they? Flood goes on for 70 minutes,
pretty much the equivalent of two complete old school LPs, yet its four tracks
are nothing like the four sides of, say, Tales
From Topographic Oceans — Yes probably have more chord changes in five
minutes of any single one of those tracks than Wata and his associates have on
the entire album. Incidentally, both albums refer in their titles to huge
masses of water, but there the similarity ends and the difference begins: Yes
explore the shimmering variety of life forms and chemical compounds that
constitute the ocean, whereas Boris are more interested in the uniform mass of
the flood, regardless of whether the listener is observing the flood from a
safe distance or is being dragged down to the bottom.
The major departure from earlier Boris is that
on Flood, the band's monotonousness
is expanded in range, and now, in addition to the already familiar tsunami
waves of monster feedback, they offer us a softer, more hypnotic side of
themselves. In fact, the distorted feedback does not even make a proper
appearance until well into the third part of the suite — and is then almost
fully absent from the fourth. This could be surprising given the album's
title, but if you really want to treat it as a concept album about a literal or
an allegorical «flood», you will just have to admit that the «flood» is taken
in context. There's the prelude to the deluge (parts 1 and 2), the catastrophe
itself (part 3), and the aftermath (part 4).
Both parts of the prelude, I must say, sound
suspiciously Crimsonian: ʽFlood Iʼ, which consists mostly of one
guitar riff, looped, delayed, and echoed for fourteen minutes, evokes memories
of Discipline-era experimentation,
while ʽFlood IIʼ, with its slow, atmospheric droning and free-form
soloing based on high-pitched sustained notes all around, could have easily fit
on Red, although even Robert Fripp
would probably not dare subject his listeners to thirteen minutes of such
rigid, rigorous minimalism (for one thing, it would not be consistent with his
guitar-playing ego). Neither of the two movements triggers any specific «water»
associations all by itself, but there is definitely some sense of impending
doom at the end of ʽFlood Iʼ, when Atsuo comes in with an echo-laden,
ear-shattering war drum onslaught — and throughout ʽFlood IIʼ, much
of which flows by in a melancholic mood, eventually resolving into a rather
tragic-sounding solo, just like the ones old Uncle Robert used to churn out.
Traditional territory is revisited on the third
part — this is where, after a brief folksy drone intro (further decorated with
a soothing Japanese vocal part from Takeshi), the distorted feedback (aka «the
flood» in question) slowly begins to catch up with the listener: I actually
like how it appears completely out of nowhere around the five minute mark,
grows in power, takes about a couple of minutes to completely drown out the
quiet melody — then unexpectedly disappears to let the folksy part gracefully
flow to an end, and then finally takes over in one dramatic crescendo. The rest
of the third part is given over to violence and destruction, as a trademark
«Iommi Was Here» Wata riff swallows up everything to be swallowed. And I almost
literally mean everything: the final
part, ʽFlood IVʼ, basically consists of a faded bass «echo» of the
main riff for its first six or seven minutes, while the rest is just a series
of «swoosh - swoosh» patterns, symbolizing that nothing remains except for some
giant water vortex, one that would be happy to suck in anything that moves and
drag it into the depths, except there's nothing more left to suck in.
In other words, as a conceptual minimalistic
suite, Flood makes more sense than
anything Boris had released prior to that. But as an album to be enjoyed
sensually, bypassing the old ratio?
Well, one thing I can definitely vouch for is that Flood is their first record to deliberately avoid any moments of
sheer sonic torture — there is no scraping-bleeding «metallic feedback» here,
and even the loudest and growliest part of the album has a strangely melodic
aura to it. Also, all four parts pursue different physiological purposes —
ʽFlood Iʼ makes you dizzy, ʽFlood IIʼ rocks you to wary
sleep, ʽFlood IIIʼ sends you down and under, and ʽFlood IVʼ
gives you twenty minutes to recuperate and recover.
Are these immense lengths justified? I guess
the only way to really find out would be to condense them manually and see what
happens. As usual, sometimes for a repetitive groove to have the proper effect,
said groove must be repeated fifty times in a row, and with Boris, you either
take this repetitiveness for granted or you just leave the band alone as it is.
It is not the repetitiveness of the music that bugs me — it is the overall
Nipponic «grotesquery» of the band as such. But within that grotesque world of
theirs, Flood occupies a position of
honor. Not only must it have taken them more than five minutes to come up with
the basic structure and melodic content of the album (as opposed to the two
preceding and quite a few succeeding records), but for the first time here,
they have demonstrated that they are more than a one-trick pony, and perhaps
deserve to be taken somewhat seriously by the community at large. Thumbs up.
HEAVY ROCKS (2002)
1) Heavy Friends; 2) Korosu;
3) Dyna-Soar; 4) Wareruraido; 5) Soft Edge; 6) Rattlesnake; 7) Death Valley; 8)
Koei; 9) Kane – The Bell Tower Of A Sign; 10) 1970.
For this album, Boris tried out a different
approach — the tracks are significantly shorter than they used to be, and they
are really separate compositions, not
just movements in a single suite. You could probably say that this is their
first «song-based» album, except the word «song» has to find itself a separate
meaning in the dictionary when you use it in the same noun phrase as «Boris».
Something like «mini-eruption» would probably be a better term anyway.
Many people will find this change refreshing,
and the album as a whole easier to tolerate; however, I cannot get rid of the
feeling that by temporarily sacrificing their major gimmick, the band has
pretty much traded away their identity. The awesome guitar tones remain, but
Boris did not invent these tones; what they did
invent, or at least promote with more ardor than most, was that crushing slowness — the meticulously planned and
executed, gradullay unveiling, but relentless and brutal sonic onslaught. Here,
not only are these tracks short, but they are also frequently taken at fast
tempos (not exactly speed metal tempos, but, well, compared to Absolutego, every other heavy composition is speed metal in comparison).
And it does not work too well. The band's
rhythmic base is solid as usual, and Wata's technique is commendable, but way
too often, it sounds now... well, just like heavy metal (or «stoner rock»,
whatever the label is). The Black Sabbath influence is inescapable even on the
compositional level (ʽDeath Valleyʼ, for instance, directly quotes
from the opening riff of ʽParanoidʼ), and even those tracks that do
not sound explicitly like Sabbath tributes still sound like a couple dozen
other heavy bands from the 1970s or from the «stoner» 1990s. That would not be
too much trouble, of course, provided the band members demonstrated their
capacity of putting out great riffs. Which capacity is quite debatable.
Regardless of the tempo or tonality, all these
sludgy vamps leave behind is... a trail of sludge, all right. The feeling of
heaviness is admirable, yet beyond this feeling lies nothing of particular
interest or value beyond the same old retro-blues-rock chord changes, loyally
downtuned and fattened with extra feedback, bashing drums, and screechy
Japanese vocals from Takeshi, Atsuo, and a few wandering guests — not much,
really, that wasn't already well explored by Sabbath, Mountain, Budgie, Rush,
or Queen a quarter century ago. Not a single riff that would sound fresh and
exciting to these jaded ears.
There is exactly one track here that I would
not mind hearing again — the eight-minute quasi-epic ʽKaneʼ
(ʽBellʼ). There are no actual bells on the track, and, in fact, it
starts out in the same lacklustre manner as everything else (that is, sounding
like a set of sub-Sabbath variations), but somewhere around the fourth minute
they hit upon a mind-numbingly repetitive «cosmic» groove, just banging out a
basic three-note bass riff while adjacent guitars are imitating the sounds of
planetary spins. It is short, but it is only during these moments that I remind
myself that Boris, above all else, are a «psychedelic» band, and that their
main goal is to do something weird and kinky to your mind, not to prove to the
world that they can come up with a better riff than Tony Iommi at his worst
(which they cannot anyway).
Although I like solid heavy metal as much as
the next solid heavy metal fan, and I like the general sound of the record —
that's not nearly enough for a recommendation. If these are songs, they need to
be better shaped and more original — I think I'd rather take even such
flamboyantly open imitators as Black Mountain over this any day. If they are
«mood pieces», they take too little time to set any particular mood. And if
they are «tributes» (as the Sabbath quotations and titles like ʽ1970ʼ
might suggest), then Heavy Rocks
should simply count as a «tribute album», not pretending or amounting to much
by its very definition.
AKUMA-NO UTA (2003)
1) Introduction; 2) Ibitsu; 3)
Furi; 4) Naki Kyoku; 5) Ano Onna-no Onryu; 6) Akuma-no Uta.
So, may you ask, what may be the hidden meaning
behind making the album's front sleeve into a transparent imitation of Nick
Drake's Bryter Layter, with Takeshi
and his double-neck replacing Nick and his acoustic? My guess is that not only
is there no hidden meaning, but there is simply no meaning, period. They just liked the cover, and wanted to have
one just like it. Alternately, you might think that the symbolism of the action
is precisely in the fact that it is hard to think of two more dissimilar albums, in just about everything, than Nick Drake's
Bryter Layter and Boris' Akuma-no Uta. So you have the full
spectrum of possibilities where you have one at the utmost left end of the axis
and the other at the utmost right, and they come around full circle and one
opposite becomes the other in a symbolic visual merger...
...nah, they probably just loved the shoes.
(Although I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere deep in this mess they actually
hid some brief musical quotation from Nick's textbook, transposed to sludgy
electric guitar — you never can tell with these whackos). Also, for that matter
the original album cover was different: white surface with a minimalistically
sketched silly four-legged bug in the top right angle. Not that any of this
matters in the least, but such is the price of weirdness: make yourself too
weird and your listeners will never really know what does matter and what
absolutely does not.
Anyway, finally arriving at the music, the two
obvious — in my understanding — virtues of the album is that it is short, and
that it has a good balance of slowness and speed. Conspiring against them are
the two equally obvious shortcomings: the album does not reveal any progression
over Heavy Rocks, and the album's
melodies are on the expected usual level of boredom. Once again, other than
Wata's bonecrushing guitar tones, almost everything sounds like a hastily
produced amalgamation of elements from Sabbath, Rush, and, this time around,
perhaps also Can — the longest track on the record, ʽNaki Kyokuʼ, in
certain parts sounds heavily influenced by the classic jam style of Can
(which, after all, is only natural if one remembers the Japanese origins of
Can's most classic vocalist). It is not so much the vocals, though, on that
track that sound uncannily-Cannily, but rather the drums — Atsuo's complex,
steady, unflinchingly executed drum pattern is eerily reminiscent of Jaki
Liebezeit. Not that it helps all that much.
The title track, which closes the album, is
probably supposed to represent the climax of its Ominous Evilishness — it
ain't called The Demon's Song for
nothing, right? (Amusingly, the word Akuma
ʽevil demonʼ, when re-transcribed to its modern day Chinese
equivalent, will be latinized as Emo
— not that I have any idea why I mentioned that). But in reality, it is simply
four minutes of sludge taken at two different tempos. For the first two minutes,
you tread through the sludge, cursing everything in your path, and then for the
next two minutes the sludge treads over you,
so that you never get the idea to badmouth sludge again. This particular demon
is sure a messy, dirty, drippy one, but not in the least scary — more like a
local trickster, perfectly content to merely fling its own faeces at you from
behind a tree.
Uh... what else to say? No idea, really. Last
time I checked Pitchforkmedia to get an alternate informed opinion on the
album, all I got was «charging, smoke-filled, and raw» (you betcha), «fuzzy
riffs and heavy rhythms» (you don't say!), «deployed in long, shivering drones
or fiery, chugging blasts» (too true, too true, except that I wouldn't describe
any of these drones as «shivering» — how can something so thick and so deep be
«shivering»?). Aye, this is Boris, all right, but is this specifically Akuma-no Uta? These descriptions are
applicable to the vast majority of this band's output. This album's specificity seems to be stored largely in its front
sleeve. At best, ʽNaki Kyokuʼ, with its soft, arpeggiated (but rather
typically doom-metal) intro and Can-style beats, might have half a face of its
own. At worst, all is forgiven if you are a major fan of the Boris crunch — then
you'll be only too happy to swallow whatever it is they have just crunched for
your enjoyment.
BORIS AT LAST: FEEDBACKER (2003)
1) Feedbacker I; 2) Feedbacker
II; 3) Feedbacker III; 4) Feedbacker IV; 5) Feedbacker V.
I do not understand what «at last» is supposed
to mean here. «At last» an album truly worthy of Boris? «At last» an album on
which Boris have properly mastered the art of feedback? «At last» an album with
Wata on the front sleeve? And, for that matter, what is the symbolic meaning of
the «pool of blood» in which she is reclining? Getting you to confess that yes
indeed, one does occasionally get the
urge to shoot the guitarist through the head in the middle of a Boris album,
but if she already did that herself, so much for the better?..
Anyway, this is actually Boris' third continuous «suite», and their
second one where the body is split in several parts, corresponding to
feed-phonic «movements» that illustrate several different stages of... uh,
feedback. Or something. Actually, not all of Feedbacker consists exclusively of feedback — there's some
«feedfront», too, particularly in the second part which is almost melodic by Boris standards, and in the
fifth part, which is basically just a brief reprise of the second. Oh, and in
the third part, much of which sounds like an outtake from Heavy Rocks. But do not expect any of these parts to be a
celebration of traditional harmonic values: whatever happens, Boris stick to
their well-oiled guns, or they wouldn't be able to release two or three albums
per year.
Anyway, Part I is really all feedback, wave
upon wave of it, stylistically reminiscent of what Neil Young did on Dead Man — get the blast going, then
step back and experience it seeping away from your body like a tidal wave while
waiting in apprehension for the next one. Cool tone, but I always felt Neil's
feedback solos had more thought behind them than this «ooh, I so love what I can do with electricity»
schtick. Besides, if you asked me how this one is different from anything on Absolutego or Amplifier Worship... hmm...
Part II is probably the main reason this album
exists — it is a slow «ambient blues», gradually strolling through your living
room for about eight minutes, after which a massive wah-wah solo takes over and
the composition reaches a «drony climax». Aside from the solo, any melodic content
here is purely minimalistic, and the tempo eventually gets very irritating when combined with the minimalism of the melody.
Clearly, if there is a heart in this LP, it is somewhere in the middle of this
15-minute brew, but on the whole I'd say that somebody like Bardo Pond are much more impressive with this kind of
heavy moody melancholia. Perhaps somebody would like to argue that Wata's
gauze-like «countermelodies», little droplets of electric guitar finely
sprinkled over the repetitive rhythm chords, express impressionistic beauty
like a modern day Debussy or something, but I don't feel much subtlety in
these droplets. Besides, the album is called Feedbacker, so there is no sense pretending that anything here that
doesn't have anything to do with
feedback will be the album's main achievement, really.
So we're not really after the heart, we're
after the brawn, and most of the brawn can be found in Parts I and IV — IV
being the most abrasive and vomit-inducing part of the experience, with the
listener tied up to a malfunctioning electric chair for about ten minutes. If
you feel like you haven't lived without being tied up to a malfunctioning
electric chair for about ten minutes, then Boris
At Last: Feedbacker will correct that omission for you. If you feel like
you could pass, Feedbacker is
probably not the best starting place to get into Boris. Unless you're seriously
into guro and just want to scoop this
up for the album cover.
THE THING WHICH SOLOMON OVERLOOKED (2004)
1) Scene 2; 2) A Bao A Qu; 3)
The Dead Angle Which It Continues Showing.
I guess I have to give props to these guys for
releasing their most unlistenable
records as «limited editions» — this one originally came out as 500 copies of
colored vinyl, and probably cost a fortune, so that 500 lucky souls could reach
their own personal Nirvana by subjecting themselves to forty minutes of jarring
feedback, and everybody else could just happily ignore this artistic statement,
left behind in a state of immature unworthiness. Unfortunately, the digital era
came along pretty soon and messed up all the clever configuration.
Not being aware of the exact circumstances
surrounding the title of the album, I, like everybody else, assume that
«Solomon» here refers to King Shlomo (970-931 B.C.), known mostly for his
wisdom and his large number of wives and concubines, and that, consequently,
the title prompts us to give a thought as to what exactly was that one thing, that one tiny little thing that the King managed
to overlook in his only slightly less than infinite, God-given wisdom. More
than enough reason here, I guess, to force yourself to sit patiently through
the entire forty minutes of the record — I mean, who knows, maybe the answer
is waiting right there in the end, and once it's all over, just think about it,
you might actually be wiser than Solomon himself. Who wouldn't wilfully give
up a pair of ears to gain access to a secret that may have been unknown to the
wisest man on Earth?..
Too bad I have to spoil this for you, but then,
every once in a while this blog finds itself obliged to go out on a salvation
mission. The title is just one big hoax — there is really nothing but a huge,
endless sea of feedback here. The first and last track merely feed you crude,
primal sludge, a ten-minute cauldron for starters and a twenty-minute barrel
for the main course. Faint hints of a droning melody can still excuse
ʽScene 2ʼ, but ʽThe Dead Angleʼ is probably the most extreme thing these guys came
out with so far, beating out Absolutego
and everything else — basically just one bass note that takes its time to burn
up and fizzle out, only to be replaced by the same thing again, and again, and
again.
In this context, ʽA Bao A Quʼ (named
after one of J. L. Borges' pseudo-mythical creatures) separates the two sludge
monsters like a symphonic phoenix — at least there's some development here, as
the track moves from high-pitched guitar whine to hellishly overloud,
overdriven howls and roars. Even so, the title is pitifully wasted this time
around (fortunately, it would be reused later on for something much more
distinctly musical).
In short, this one is «not for everybody», and
by «everybody» I mean «everybody who is already a Boris admirer». It does get
me to wonder, though — what if Boris did not
have access to technology, or even electricity, and still wanted to make this
kind of «music»? What would they have done? Rubbed on a double bass with a live
crocodile? Raped a tiger with a loosely tuned cello? Set the entire town on
fire and walked around playing on a deliberately unstrung guitar? Actually,
each of these ideas, now that I think of it, seems more exciting and innovative
than what we have just heard here, and I hate
being cruel to animals. Thumbs down, unless you're a big fan of
limited editions on colored vinyl — they can be so cool to show off to friends,
just do not forget that you won't have that many friends if you ever decide to
play this for them.
DRONEVIL (2005)
1) Giddiness Throne; 2)
Interference Demon; 3) Evil Wave Form; 4) The Evil One Which Sobs.
Okay, so apparently this is one of those fairly
rare Zaireeka-type albums where you
are supposed to plop in two CDs at a time and listen to them interfere. Sounds
logical, since the first one is all «drone» and the second one is all «evil»,
er, «sludge», really. ʽGiddiness Throneʼ constructs a background that
sounds like twenty minutes of deep cavernous echo; ʽInterference
Demonʼ gives you twenty minutes of what sounds like an annoying siren
hacked at mid-point and stuck in a single, barely changing tone; ʽEvil
Wave Formʼ offers some dynamics in totally familiar shape, with Wata's
usual monster guitar tones interrupted for a few minutes with calm, echoey
ambience; and ʽThe Evil One Which Sobsʼ is sixteen more minutes of
the same.
I have to confess that I have not tried
juxtaposing the two, and am therefore not qualified to make opinions about the
resulting sound. I freely admit that it would not have been difficult, even on
a computer — just stash two media players on top of each other — but something
inside me just told me no. In the
back of my mind, I can see where the combination of the deep rumble of
ʽGiddiness Throneʼ and the gigantic metal waves of ʽEvil Wave
Formʼ would certainly make far more sense than listening to them
separately, but I have no desire to waste my time on that.
Allegedly, as claimed by some adepts of this
album, quite a bit of work did go into the synchronizing of the tracks, so
that the «lows» and the «highs» of individual tracks correlate with each other,
but you will just have to check it for yourself — a lot of one's opinions on
Boris actually depends on one's preconceptions of Boris. I am afraid, though,
that since ʽEvil Wave Formʼ does nothing for me on its own, it will
probably not do much more when nutritioned further by the «deep», but simplistic
texture of the «drone-ambient» track. It's all just a lot of boring sludgy
bullshit, and clearly, the «success» of Dronevil
depends on nothing but the gimmick. Give it a chance if you want, spare me the
trouble — if I am really in the mood for modern day doom metal (which is rare),
I'll go get me some Agalloch instead.
SOUNDTRACK FROM FILM MABUTA-NO URA (2005)
1) Theme; 2) The Middle Of The
Stairs; 3) A Bao A Qu; 4) The Slow Ripple Of A Puddle; 5) Your Name; 6) White
Warmth; 7) Melting Guitar; 8) Yesterday Morning; 9) Amber Bazaar; 10) Smoke
Sequence; 11) Space Behind Me, Part 2; 12) The Picture Of The Wind; 13) It
Touches.
«Imaginary film», the title should read,
because no film with the title of Mabuta-no
Ura («Under the Eyelids») actually exists — Boris simply stated that they
imagined this film in their minds, and then wrote the soundtrack to their
imagination. Now — if that ain't art,
then what is? How much more artistic, spiritual, transcendental does one get
than writing music to accompany visuals that appear under your eyelids,
triggered by the mystical force of imagination?
But there's some bad news, too. As awesome as
the mystical force of imagination really is, the sobering reality is that most of the time, the force makes you
imagine all sorts of random crap (I bet you can agree with me on that one).
Consequently, once you try writing music to imagined random crap, you are quite
likely to end up consciously writing crappy music to accompany the subconscious
results of your imagination. And since Boris have no songwriting talents whatsoever
(there, I've said it), and their main appeal lies in their «tones» and
«minimalistic attitude», it is only logical that the final result is an
absolutely pointless bore.
«At least the tracks are short this time», you
could say, and you'd be wrong, because with long
tracks, the band at least has a point — debatable, but a point nonetheless.
These short bits, though, are simply meaningless. With ʽThemeʼ, you
think you could possibly expect a «theme», but what you really get is a
two-minute long droning alarm call in a tunnel, or so it seems.
Impressionistic? Symbolic? Psychedelic? Whatever. ʽThe Middle Of The
Stairsʼ follows it up with two minutes of slow acoustic/electric strumming
where we are probably supposed to luxuriate in the combining humming overtones
of the two instruments — hey, if you thought you knew how to appreciate the
guitar sound before hearing Boris, hear Boris and think again.
Following up on that, the soundtrack gets more
and more diverse, but that is exactly the most terrifying thing about that: no
matter what they do, it all sounds derivative, meaningless, and dull. ʽThe
Slow Ripple Of A Puddleʼ — yes, about as exciting to listen to as the slow
ripple of a puddle, and I cannot even defend it on the grounds of «minimalist
philosophy», because the little guitar loop that they use here has no deep
emotional power of its own to warrant becoming the focus of the track.
ʽYour Nameʼ features the band playing a rudimentary hard blues tune:
three and a half minutes of what sounds like a 12-year old Neil Young
practicing his first scales. ʽMelting Guitarʼ — okay, with a title
like that you'd expect a massive sludge metal eruption or something, instead,
it is simply a little more meandering free-form droning, sort of like what you
get in the mid-section of King Crimson's ʽMoonchildʼ, only much more
aimless.
Anyway, to cut a long unnecessary story
mercifully short, the only track here that merits the slightest consideration
is ʽIt Touchesʼ. Closing out the album, it runs longer than the rest
and has a rather cool, even hypnotic, bass/drums groove, against which all of
Wata's little guitar tricks may be perceived as colorful flourishes rather than
just pointless doodling. Nothing particularly great, that is, but pretty much a
musical masterpiece compared to all the other small bits. Then again, the best solution is to cut the bullshit
and simply ignore the album altogether. Total thumbs down — I'm so desperate,
I'd rather even have me some John Frusciante than this.
PINK (2005)
1) Ketsubetsu; 2) Pink; 3)
Sukuriin-no Onna; 4) Betsu-ni Nan Demo Nai; 5) Burakku Auto; 6) Electric; 7)
Nise Bureddo; 8) Nurui Honoo; 9) Roku-o Mitsu; 10) My Machine; 11) Ore-o
Sute-ta Tokoro.
Let us list all the references to other artists
that veteran reviewer Thom Jurek has made in his review of Pink, Boris' first venture into the «accessible» territory of
post-rock composition: Ride, My Bloody Valentine, Isis, Sigur Rós,
Nadja, Jesu, Mono (we go to Japan now), Guitar Wolf, Iggy Pop (we go back into
the past now), MC5, Sunn O)))) (okay, back to the present), and Acid Mothers
Temple. That's 12. Okay, now the Pitchfork review by Brandon Stosuy, who do we
have here? Sigur Rós, Isis, Jesu, Melvins, Motörhead, Olivia Tremor
Control, Unwound, Drive Like Jehu... oh no, that's just 8, not counting
additional historical references.
The question is, now that Boris have moved into
this «normal» territory, cutting tracks that begin to resemble «songs» every
once in a while, are they still Boris, or are they merely a potpourri of all
these influences, contemporary and archaic alike? Do they have an agenda, or
are they just selling out? Unfortunately, as much as I would like to like Pink, if only for the usual awesomeness
of Wata's guitar tones, not even repeated listens can convince me that the
record ever once rises above the level of kitsch. If this is ironic music, it is too boring to sink
in deep. If it is dead serious music, it is just plain awful.
There's always that third possibility, of
course — that this is simply fun
music. Starting with the title track, it is music that bluntly invites you to
headbang, and at least on one occasion it even invites you to dance (ʽElectricʼ, though, as
if acknowledging the embarrassing nature of the proposition, the track clocks
in at a measly 1:45). Sludgy guitar tones, punkish tempos, screamed vocals —
song after song is a mosher's paradise. Then they slow down and become your
usual Black Sabbath... oh wait, I am falling into the namedropping trap myself.
Well then, here be the problems. First, there
are more vocals here than ever before. They all seem to be delivered by
Takeshi, and frankly, he is awful.
His constant screeching sounds neither angry nor crazy — it is just irritating,
like the nagging of a loudmouthed peddler on the street corner or something.
(Actually, I believe that drummer Atsuo also has sing... er, vocalizing duties, and carries them out
with approximately the same effect). Had all these songs been joined into a
single track with all the vocals wiped off for good, that would have been a big
plus.
Second, the introduction of short compositions
does not mean the introduction of good riffs. Well, not entirely true. The
machine-gun riff of ʽPinkʼ (belonging in what I call the
ʽBreadfanʼ category for lack of a better term) is sort of mildly
interesting. When you combine Wata's tone with speedy finger-flashing playing
the results are fun, it would be
useful to deny something as obvious. But apart from that, 99% of the riffs still sound as if they have an efficient
software piece that deconstructs old Sabbath riffs and puts them back
together, with predictably worse results because the software has no idea of
the kind of chord sequences that really
gets your goat. I mean, listen to ʽElectricʼ — it's like a cross
between ʽSupernautʼ and ʽN.I.B.ʼ and... something else.
Esnes on sekam ti tub looc sdnuos ti. If you know what I mean.
Supposedly the most important compositions on
the album are the two longest numbers — ʽKetsubetsuʼ, a «regal» drone
piece that really does conjure all
these references in Jurek's review (yes, even Sigur Rós, with its choral
harmonies and ringing rainbow-y guitar dubs over all the noise), and the
closing ten-minute gallop piece which I would probably mistake for a lost And
You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead composition if not for the annoying
Japanese vocals. On second thought, though, I probably wouldn't, because those
guys would have chickened out when it came to basing a ten-minute track on
exactly two musical ideas. In any case, both tracks are deadly dull —
unfortunately, I cannot share the enthusiasm, so common among reviewers, over
the mad fury of the opening minutes of ʽOre-o Sute...ʼ because it is
hard for me to endorse something just because it is mad and furious. If it went
on for sixty minutes, that would at least be an artistic statement. Since it
only goes on for ten (I think there's also an extended version that throws on
eight more minutes of feedback), it's just a bore.
On the whole, a drastic thumbs down and a radical
disagreement here with tons of glowing reviews on RYM and other sites that
often extol this as Boris' finest hour — much of which probably has to do with
the fact that it was the band's first widely distributed US album. In this
humble reviewer's opinion, Pink
simply shows that Boris are spiritually incapable of producing genuine
«rock»-type material. One of the few dissonant reviews on RYM put it short and
sweet: «Stick to drone guys». Couldn't agree more.
THE THING WHICH SOLOMON OVERLOOKED 2 (2006)
1) No Ones Grieve Part 2; 2)
Dual Effusion; 3) Merciless; 4) An Another After Image.
The title of this and the next album should be
enough to warn you that this is another experi... no, actually, let us not
abuse the term, because this particular kind of art has long since ceased to be
any more «experimental» than your average teen pop album. Rather, this is a
warning that this is another collection of harsh, monotonous, repetitive, and
not particularly ambitious noise tracks that should really be experienced under
their proper Japanese titles, because the English translations probably come
from Wata herself (who is a notoriously bad English speaker).
That said, there may be something to like about
ʽNo Ones Grieve Part 2ʼ: unlike everything else here, it's got some
dynamics — after a ninety second pure feedback intro, the drums kick in and the
music becomes a fast, wild, rip-it-to-shreds blast of psycho-metal-punk, like
the Stooges' ʽL.A. Droneʼ, sped up and integrated with a weeping
minor key folk guitar part on top. As hard as it is to endure the thing for six
minutes, there is at least something here worth enduring. You could even
visualize this as the equivalent of a funeral ritual by an alien civilization,
as friends and relatives of the deceased roll around on the ground in
hyperbolic despair, tearing their hair out, ripping their clothes, and howling
in artificially induced anguish. Kinda cool.
ʽDual Effusionʼ and
ʽMercilessʼ, unfortunately, are not
cool — the former is a rather unimaginative (for 2006) space drone that does
nothing that has not already been done by the likes of classic Hawkwind, and
ʽMercilessʼ is like ʽNo Ones Grievesʼ stripped to its
feedback core, without the cool-sounding rock/folk guitar overdubs and the
maniacal drumming, and, of course, it has
to be the longest track here. Fourteen minutes of crunch for those who love
nibbling the charcoal-burned tips off their French fries because if it ain't really cancerogenic, it ain't worth it.
Anyone for fourteen more minutes of crispy, crunchy feedback? Help yourself,
and you get a bonus reward — three minutes of lightly humming guitar ambience
to patch up your ears with ʽAn Another After Imageʼ. One thing you can't
say about these guys is that they're cruel to their listeners — on the
contrary, they are always willing to offer you some silence as an antidote.
Let's face it, they could have their CDs manufactured so that they get forever stuck in your player on tracks
like ʽMercilessʼ — once you've popped it in, you might just as well
start looking for another piece of hardware. This is the Land of the Rising
Sun, goddammit, you gotta be ready for everything. But they're not really
merciless, they just pretend to be. They're really more concerned about
cleaning the mess up after Solomon. Unfortunately, they don't do a very good
job here, so another thumbs down.
THE THING WHICH SOLOMON OVERLOOKED 3 (2006)
1) Leviathan; 2) Dimly Tale;
3) No Ones Grieve Part 1; 4) Sola Stone.
Uh.. okay. Once again, I am probably not
qualified to discuss this because I listened to it in MP3 format when you're
totally supposed to consume it on vinyl. Moreover, if you think you're getting
away easily by consuming it on orange vinyl, having laid your hands on one of
the exclusive 700 label-distributed copies, think again — there is also an exclusive exclusive light blue vinyl
pressing, of which there were only 300 copies and they were distributed by the
band themselves while on tour. And maybe there's a lock of Wata's hair included
in that one exclusively exclusive exclusive copy that is currently owned by
the luckiest Boris fan in the world, but don't spread the word around too much
or you'll stir up the bounty hunters.
Naturally, the included «music» is Satan's
shite incarnate (or, rather, «immerdate», to be on the safe side of the
linguistic business), but did I even need to tell you that? This is, after all,
the third installation of stuff that
Solomon overlooked, and this time the list of said stuff includes: (a) 17
minutes of bubbly lo-fi guitar/electronic ambience with an eventual droning
crescendo that still sounds unbearably lazy (ʽLeviathanʼ); (b) two
and a half minutes of surprisingly clean, but not very informative bass feedback
(ʽDimly Taleʼ); (c) seven minutes of very dirty, almost grimy feedback (ʽNo Ones Grieve Part
1ʼ — of course, ʽPart 2ʼ was on the previous album, because
since when were numbers meant to mean exactly what some stupid Indian jerks
assigned to them thousands of years ago?); (d) thirteen minutes of equally
dirty feedback, but this time overwhelmed by almost as many minutes of mad
drumming (ʽSola Stoneʼ) — if this was actually a live jam, poor Atsuo
probably had to collapse at the end (and no, I am not going to express any empathy here, even though I had to
collapse as well).
Anyway, this is all such an apparent toss-off
that I am not even going to compare it to Bardo Pond this time — this stuff
suffers even in comparison to Boris themselves. ʽLeviathanʼ and
ʽSola Stoneʼ probably have some potential, but the dynamics are so
trivial that I'm guessing they probably just concocted them on the spot, when
in reality this kind of music requires very careful and meticulous planning
(think post-Barrett, pre-Dark Side
Pink Floyd, for instance). But yeah, by all means, feel free to join the
exciting hunt for blue vinyl — if this is Wata's way of telling you that this
is art, what choice remains to us other than kowtow and acknowledge? It's not
as if my thumbs
down is going to get Japan thrown out of the League of Nations
again, anyway.
VEIN (2006)
1) Untitled (part 1); 2)
Untitled (part 2).
Noise.
More noise.
A Russian quote from Stalker.
Even more noise.
Drums and noise.
Sixty-three minutes.
Sucks.
Thumbs down.
Blessed silence.
SMILE (2008)
1) Messeeji; 2) Buzz-In; 3)
Hanate!; 4) Hana, Taiyou, Ame; 5) Tonari-no Sataan; 6) Kare Hateta Saki; 7)
Kimi-wa Kasa-o Sashiteita; 8) Untitled.
As usual, there are about a million different
versions of this album — Japanese, American, European, CD versions, vinyl
versions, orange vinyl versions, yellow vinyl versions, limited edition
gift-packed 8-track polka-dot versions with sugar on top, in short, just about
anything possible to emphasize the creative freedom, psychedelic spirit, and
unique individuality of the music and the artistic process behind it. As far as
I understand, the American editions, distributed by the Southern Lord label,
are significantly different in terms of tracks, running lengths, and mixes from
the Japanese Diwphalanx editions. But guess what? I'm wasting enough time
already on one version (Diwphalanx);
I have no desire whatsoever to learn whether the Southern Lord version improves
on it in any way, or, at least, I have a certain premonition that is much
stronger than any such desire.
This is where Boris kinda sorta «go pop», in
that they use drum machines, samples, and, most importantly, sing on every track — and while Wata's
guitars are still very much recognizable, the focus is never so much on noise
and drone as it is on melody, or, at least, painful attempts to create
something by way of melody. The band members themselves called it their
«sell-out album» and went on to tell everybody how it is supposed to be taken
ironically, because, well, if you name one of your tracks ʽMy Neighbor
Satanʼ and everybody starts thinking of it seriously, you might get in some trouble, at least once
you set foot outside Japan, where cajoling around with demons is not looked
upon with as much prejudice as in Christian territories.
Unfortunately, the «irony» is largely confined
to the lyrics, which are in Japanese, and are largely devoted to in-jokes, such
as describing the contents of an old live concert video by the Melvins
(ʽBuzz-Inʼ). Outside of any specific context, Smile just sounds like an odd mix of styles (electro-pop, hardcore
punk, industrial metal, atmospheric post-rock), all of which, in one way or
other, had already been tasted by Boris before, and now they are back with this
strange attempt to put it all together and make something comprehensive,
cohesive, and ambitious.
The result is a meandering, directionless, and
utterly useless mess that fails this particular reviewer's «bullshit test» on
just about any count imaginable. The only track that makes any sense is
ʽMessageʼ (ʽStatementʼ) that opens the album — its
combination of a «huge typewriter»-type drum machine, a scary bassline, and
ʽSympathy For The Devilʼ-style falsetto ooh-oohs sets up a tense
anticipation for Wata's shrieking wah-wah leads, and even though the track is
still spoiled with bad singing, it takes up seven genuinely nightmarish minutes
and it could point the way to something even more nightmarish, but...
...this is where the mess starts for real.
ʽBuzz-Inʼ is two and a half minutes of boring metalcore.
ʽHanate!ʼ is four minutes of ear-destructive industrial metal,
followed by one minute of boring acoustic psycho-folk. ʽFlower, Sun,
Rainʼ is a «beautiful» ballad that seems to be an attempt to write something
in the old San Francisco vein, with phased acoustic power chords and Big
Brother & The Holding Company-style passionately ugly feedback solos — all of
it sounding like some particularly stupid pastiche. ʽMy Neighbor
Satanʼ tries to cross Sigur Rós vocals with noise and psychedelic
rock, but the singer sounds like an American Idol loser and the music sounds
like all the individual instrument parts were randomly pulled out from a
samples library and superimposed over each other without any plan whatsoever.
And then, as the tracks get longer and longer (culminating in the 20-minute
untitled finale), the «post-rock adoration syndrome» gets wilder and wilder as
they relocate from Japan to Iceland — only to find out that a tourist is still
a tourist, and that Takeshi's chances at becoming Jónsi are slim at
best.
Most importantly, it just seems to me much of
the time that these guys have totally no idea of what it is that they do, what it is that they want, and what it is that they can. Quite possibly, that is the idea: get in the spirit (at
least, formally) of styles and artists they like, and then just get carried
away by the moment. But liking
industrial music, or ambient-style post-rock, or hardcore punk, is not quite
the same as understanding it, so that
you can then add something of your own to it, and these guys, so it seems,
understand nothing. This is not the way it's all supposed to be sung, or be
played, or be combined together — it's like taking a coherent book and
rearranging all the words so they no longer form grammatically correct, or at
least stylistically engaging sentences. Be it intended as serious or ironic,
an album like Smile ultimately has
no meaning, and trying to «relate» to it is like trying to adapt to a useless
genetic mutation. Thumbs down, of course.
NEW ALBUM (2011)
1) Flare; 2) Hope; 3) Party
Boy; 4) Black Original; 5) Pardon; 6) Spoon; 7) Jackson Head; 8) Dark Guitar;
9) Tu, La La; 10) Looprider.
A band like Boris is not programmed to sell
out, but it is programmed to shock, and what could be more shocking than
selling out? There's a paradox for you. For almost three years, the formerly
prolific band kept quiet in the shadows, then blasted back into existence with
a vengeance — three records in a row — and the first one of those was... a
J-Pop album.
Okay, so it's a Boris-style J-Pop album, which
means that it will be noisier and heavier than the average product on the
market. But all the ingredients are there — energetic dance rhythms, electronic
robot loops, simplistic and repetitive earworm-type chord sequences, and
over-excited, over-exuberant vocals, including, for the first time ever (or, at
least, for the first time in such prominent lead quality), Wata herself
providing the lead on several songs. Yes they can. In fact, they prove they can
even come up with a few nagging vocal hooks, though, as in all such cases, the
emotional meaning of these hooks is so dubious that eventually you begin to
suspect that their only grappling power comes from being repeated so many
times.
Seeing as how I already hate J-pop and K-pop
with a vengeance (it's a long story on which we shall dwell in more detail
somewhere else some day), and how my tolerance level for Boris is already quite
low, the first reaction to New Album
on my part was abysmal — a band with a very specific, very limited sort of
talent intentionally going in the direction of utmost dreck? It's, like,
drilling your thumbs down all the way into the floor or something. Later on, it
dawned on me that the album may, and probably should, be taken as a cute
musical joke — that the very idea of an underground psychodrone band switching
to a near-degenerate style cannot be anything but a diligent exercise in
post-modern synthesis. That made things easier, but still, there's only so much
distance one can cover with sardonic «joining of the unjoinable» without
annoying the crap out of the listener. At least, the listener who has not yet
become an adept of the Temple of Kawaii.
Speaking of earworms, ʽParty Boyʼ,
pre-released before the album, most definitely has a catchy techno chorus;
shows that Wata has a nice, soft singing voice; and has a very interesting and
totally unpredictable instrumental break, where, all of a sudden, they decide
to play a slightly dissonant piano melody, clashing against the chugging beat.
Alas, this is insufficient for me to be able to call it a «good song» — any
good song has to have some sense of purpose, and ʽParty Boyʼ just
baffles me. Other than being danceable, is it a love song? Is it a parody? Is
it a psychedelic experience? Is it sad? Is it joyful? Is it sarcastic? Is it
earthly? Otherworldly? The lyrics, referring to «strobe lights», «mysterious
nights», and «riding on the stardust», seem to suggest a club atmosphere that
is metamorphing into some transcendental experience, but the melody and
arrangement are way too sparse and formulaic to truly blow you away — after
all, Boris are not known for being experienced masters of electronic
arrangements.
The «darker» tunes here, like ʽBlack
Originalʼ, work better, with cold, distorted electronic vocals that mesh
aggressively with guitar and keyboard overdubs in what sounds like an endless
sea of police sirens and warning signs. But they are relatively few. More
often, we get odd tributes to old school synth-pop (ʽJackson Headʼ),
straightahead fast pop (ʽFlareʼ) or dream-pop (ʽHopeʼ)
songs, and something that probably owes its existence to classic shoegaze
(ʽSpoonʼ), only sped up to a tempo that no legitimate shoegazer would
probably endorse. All of them feel decidedly secondary, unsure of themselves,
unclear as to their purpose, too dance-oriented to feel magical, yet too
self-consciously artsy to pass for pure dance fodder. And even despite the
relative loveliness of Wata's tone, the other
singer is still crappy, and Wata herself conveys no sense of depth beyond the
glam-artificial tenderness.
Finding myself completely disinterested in
coming up with things to say about these songs, I'll just say that it is
probably sort of a «fun» page in Boris history, and it will certainly leave the
average Boris fan thinking about a thing or two — yet I will still take
regular straight-faced techno, shoegaze, or electro-pop over this incoherent
mess, and I have a hard time realizing why somebody with a good knowledge of
these genres would want to give New
Album more than one passing listen with a smirk on his face. Or perhaps
this is simply a case of me being completely out of touch with modern
übercoolness.
HEAVY ROCKS (2011)
1) Riot Sugar; 2) Leak (Truth,
yesnoyesnoyes); 3) GALAXIANS; 4) Jackson Head; 5) Missing Pieces; 6) Key; 7)
Windows Shopping; 8) Tu, La La; 9) Aileron; 10) Czechoslovakia.
How many bands do you know that have released two
different albums with exactly the same
title, and that title was not the
band's name? I honestly cannot think of a single one at present, though I am
almost sure that it's just my mind playing a trick on me or something. But if
not, then Boris have this dubious honor of revolutionizing the musical world
yet another time — and giving their already brain-ravaged fans an even harder
time. Even the album covers, by the way, are completely the same, except for
the color: the first one was orange and this one is purple. Then again, Boris
are well known for often releasing the exact same record with different sleeve
colors, so essentially they're just trying to fuck us up here. Completely.
The largest irony of all, though, is that this
new Heavy Rocks is... pretty dang
good! In fact, it is really the closest thing to a «good» non-noise Boris album
since... uh... scrolling... scrolling... scrolling... oh wait, we are already
in the Boo Radleys... back... back... okay, never mind. This is a pretty dang
good Boris album, period.
So, apparently, at the same time that they were
working on their ridiculous «J-Pop» homage, they were also producing a much more hard rock/metal-oriented album, with
shades of punk, industrial, and psychedelia, that ended up sounding more fun,
more aggressive, more catchy, and making much better use of the band's biggest
strength (guitar tones). It is still not possible to say if they are being
serious, ironic, or clueless, but at least they are definitely being less
irritating, and at no times does this record begin to seem openly «stupid»,
which was my largest beef with New Album
and its pervy vibes.
ʽRiot Sugarʼ opens the record with a
bona fide Metallica riff, immediately followed by the shrill, multi-tracked,
echoey wail of the lead guitar that is more reminiscent of old-school
psychedelics, and then followed by
vocals that do not openly suck — maybe because they are also echo-laden and
multi-tracked, or maybe because they actually belong to Ian Astbury of The
Cult, guest starring on this particular track. There are quite a few other
guest vocalists on the album, by the way, including Aaron Turner of Isis and
some Japanese people I am not familiar with, and this in itself is a good sign,
perhaps indicative of the band actually willing to go out on a limb and produce
something good in all respects... for a change.
The album is refreshingly diverse, too.
ʽLeakʼ combines psychedelic falsetto choruses with dissonant lead
guitar parts that remind you of the old Frisco scene, although the main body of
the song is more reminiscent of some early New Wave act like Television.
ʽGALAXIANSʼ gallops ahead with the speed and energy of a professional
hardcore act, but the guitar tones and accompanying «revving-up» electronic
noises give it more of an industrial feel. The alternate version of
ʽJackson Headʼ, with guitar instead of electronica, is a great
reminder to me why I so much prefer guitar-based rock to electronica when we
are talking energetic/aggressive music — Wata's choppy guitar chords, backed
with Atsuo's kick-heavy percussion, give the song a sharp edge that it sorely
lacked in its techno mix. The difference between the two versions of ʽTu,
La Laʼ is not as easily noticeable, but I also prefer this more
guitar-oriented rendition to the synthesized strings of New Album, which made it kinda corny.
The feelings get more mixed when we get around
to the two extended, atmospheric «post-rock» workouts. ʽMissing
Piecesʼ seems like an attempt to outdo Godspeed You! Black Emperor, gradually
building up from a mere trickle into an ocean of sound, with legions of
trilling guitars and torrents of feedback eventually bursting through the dam;
ʽAileronʼ sounds like some wailing sinner, calling to you out of the
depths of hell while Wata's fried power chords and high-pitched guitar howls
imitate underground volcanic activity. But both tracks go on for much too long
and must have taken the band much less time to prepare than a typical GY!BE
mini-symphony — as I already said, in «expanded» mode Boris have to be
minimalist Nazis: anything more than «pure» feedback blasts and you begin to
sense some deficiencies in their music-making.
Still, whether by accident or not, on the whole
these «purple» Heavy Rocks nail it
just right. There is no deep meaning to this album, no special social value or
sharp emotional resonance — but whenever possible, it kicks ass, and it manages
to do so without sounding too ridiculous, too overstated, or too overtly
«shocking». I am genuinely surprised at how decent this one turned out: easily
deserving of a thumbs
up and recommendable to the community at large without any special
reservations.
ATTENTION PLEASE (2011)
1) Attention Please; 2) Hope;
3) Party Boy; 4) See You Next Week; 5) Tokyo Wonder Land; 6) You; 7) Aileron;
8) Les Paul Custom '86; 9) Spoon; 10) Hand In Hand.
The point of this third album released
in the same year (in fact, on the same day as Heavy Rocks) sort of
escapes me. New Album was their attempt to prove themselves in the J-pop
sphere, and Heavy Rocks was a reminder that production is only skin
deep, and the substantial difference between J-pop and heavy metal may be much
less than one thinks. In comparison, Attention Please is more scattered
and less explicit — although I guess that, with a little effort, it could be
categorized as their «shoegaze album», or, at least, their «dark, moody,
brooding art-pop album». It is much less heavy than Heavy Rocks, much
less nipponistically irritating than New Album, but, on the whole, less
striking than either of those two.
Like Rocks, this one also shares several
(three) remixed songs with New Album, but this time, the differences are
mainly cosmetic — ʽHopeʼ, ʽParty Boyʼ, and
ʽSpoonʼ are all stripped of some of their electronic layers and
receive additional noisy guitar overdubs, bringing them closer to «shoegaze»
territory, but not necessarily making them any better. Amusingly, the new fuzzy
bassline that they gave ʽParty Boyʼ has made the song rhythmically
similar to Arcade Fire's ʽRebellion (Lies)ʼ; however, it still
largely feels like a deconstructed version of the original, only open to true
appreciation if you are already a fan of its ancestral technostate. The new
versions of ʽHopeʼ and ʽSpoonʼ are even less different.
There are some decent new experiences here,
though, if you are still interested. The title track is an imaginative piece of
«psycho-disco», if you can get past the heavy Japanese accent on the
mystically, but clumsily, chanted "attention puh-rease" — the
sprinkly electronics and the slow fireplace crackle of «woman tone-guitar» in
the background create some suspense, and could even be called «haunting» if you
let yourself get carried away. ʽTokyo Wonder Landʼ (as if we didn't
know already) has some cool industrial-propulsive percussion and a nicely
thought out «chimes / funky guitar» combination running in the background for
most of its time. And ʽAileronʼ, sharing its title, but not its
instrumentation or mood with the huge post-rock epic from the last record, is
actually a pretty, if not outstanding, acoustic folk instrumental.
However, one other area where Boris probably
have nothing to pick up is «dream-pop»: tracks like ʽYouʼ and
ʽHand In Handʼ show that Wata is getting more and more
self-confidence as a singer, but I am not sure if this is deserved — she is not
a strong singer technically, her voice is not high enough to work proper «dream
magic», and the very fact that she is singing in the beautiful Japanese
language is hardly sufficient these days to make anybody melt in
overexcitement. As a result, both these tracks also produce the impression of
«failed imitations», and a failure to imitate always comes across as much more
embarrassing than a failure to innovate.
Summing up... well, three albums per year is a
little too much, especially when coming from a former noise-band who could
easily fill up fifty albums of noise per year if it wanted to, but for
some reason decided to prove itself in a wide variety of genres all at once.
What they should probably have done instead would be one, and no more than
one, regular heavy metal album with touches of psychedelia — a Heavy Rocks
purged of its «post-rock ambitions». As it is, this filler is in some ways
instructive (in the «don't do that, kids» manner) and sometimes amusing
for one listen, but I honestly hope not a lot of people will want to mistake it
for «art».
PRÄPARAT (2013)
1) December; 2) Elegy; 3) Evil
Stack 3; 4) Monologue; 5) Method Of Error; 6) Bataille Sucre; 7) Perforated
Line; 8) Castle In The Air; 9) Mirano; 10) Canvas; 11) Maeve.
I do not know why Boris decided to give this
album a German title, considering that it was only released on vinyl in Japan.
Maybe they wanted to raise their fellow countrymen's awareness of the
peculiarities of German orthography — a rather superfluous task, given how most
Japanese were already fans of Motörhead (oh well, at least Präparat
is actually a real German word, unlike most of the orthographic perversities
of the metal bands). Maybe it was a hidden tribute to their country's allies in
World War II, and we should actually sue the band for hitherto undisclosed
Nazi sympathies. But most likely, it was simply one more typically Boris act,
completely devoid of any meaning other than a random blast of wind could blow
into it.
A brief runthrough. ʽDecemberʼ is a
quiet, barely noticeable «post-rock» instrumental, supposedly mood-setting,
but it's hard to hear anything in the first place. ʽElegyʼ is like a
bad And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Boris noise track, plenty of feedback,
mad drumming, and hushed psychedelic vocals that never take any distinctive
shape. ʽEvil Stack 3ʼ is one minute of feedback from Jimi Boris,
overdubbed with aeroplane noises or something. ʽMonologueʼ (which is
anything but, featuring quite a bit of polyphony) is Godspeed You! Black Boris
rolling out a slow, steady crescendo that ultimately fails because the dominant
theme contains no interesting musical ideas. ʽMethod Of Errorʼ is
Boris Vai and it is actually cool for the first fifteen seconds — they did not
invent that particular metallic tone, but they know how to use it to swallow
you whole. Problem is, they swallow you for seven minutes, and always in the
same way.
Side two opens with ʽBataille Sucreʼ,
Boris Sabbath finally pummelling out a monster metal riff that I cannot
«visualise» — it does not display a whole lot of invention, though I guess the
whole thing is not half bad as far as second-hand art-metal goes, and is
probably the best of this entire lot. ʽPerforated Lineʼ is forty
seconds of My Bloody Boris churning out melodic noise rock that appears out of
nowhere and goes to about the same place. ʽCastle In The Airʼ is two
and a half minutes of Badly Drawn Boris playing a distorted waltz on pump
organs, digitalizing it, corrupting the sound track with a virus and
symbolically infecting your mind as well. ʽMiranoʼ is five minutes of
Radioboris where Takeshi is trying to convey the sadness, misery, and ennui of
the world with an OK Computer-style delivery, and I honestly do not
recommend exposing yourself to this. ʽCanvasʼ is five minutes of Lou
Boris paying tribute to Metal Machine Music — certainly not for the
first time. And finally, ʽMaeveʼ ends the album on a brief Kraftboris
note, with electronic pulses, wind blasts, and an overall feeling that maybe
these guys would like to advance the coming of the final doom in some
way, but fortunately they just don't know how.
In other words, we're back to thumbs down territory here: even if the album
is pretty diverse, most of this diversity once again downplays Boris' greatest
strength (noise control) and yet still tries to be in the «artsy» /
«experimental» ballpark rather than continue their semi-successful toyings with
«accessible» pop and hard rock structures that made the 2011 albums tolerable.
Mostly just bland, derivative, boring, and useless — «unlistenable» only when
Takeshi begins to sing like Thom Yorke, but at this point, I'd rather expose
myself to «unlistenable» Boris than boring Boris, because at least nasty
failures give you something to talk about.
NOISE (2014)
1) Melody; 2) Vanilla; 3)
Ghost Of Romance; 4) Heavy Rain; 5) Taiyo-no Baka; 6) Angel; 7) Quicksilver; 8)
Siesta.
Press release information: «Their most all-encompassing effort to
date. It is an amplification of Boris’ endless pursuit of musical extremes
while moving aggressive, intense rock into new territories. Here, the band
masterfully intermingles sludge-rock, blistering crust punk, shimmering
shoegaze, epic thunderous doom, psychedelic melodies and just about everything
else they’ve ever done. In
writing Noise, BORIS was intent upon
condensing all that the band had explored over the years, in order to create
something more bold, streamlined and powerful. And, upon completion, the band
considers Noise its most defining effort.»
As you can already tell, the omens are not
good. Usually, when a band itself declares that album so-and-so is its «most
defining effort», this means a desperate PR effort to predetermine the listener's
attitude — surely, if the band members themselves say so, it must be
right. Fortunately, I only discovered the press release after subjecting myself
to several listens, throughout which I only found the record boring; had I
known about these superlatives early on, I might have thought of it as hideous.
To state that Noise is «moving aggressive, intense rock into new
territories» makes even less sense than stating that America was discovered by
Bob Dylan in his 115th dream. This is standard late-period Boris — the band
that has long since moved away from its semi-original sound and is now largely
making its living with a synthesis of metal, shoegaze, noise, and ambient
psychedelia, nothing whatsoever about which could be considered a «new
direction». On the contrary, if anything, Boris are getting more and more
«retro» with each new outing.
And this outing, unfortunately, is far
from their best one: I have not been able to discern even one interesting track
anywhere on here. As usual, there are good guitar tones, plenty of energy, and,
indeed, quite a bit of stylistic variety, but nothing is done here that
could even vaguely pique my interest. Take ʽQuicksilverʼ, for
instance, the first track off the album to be freely streamed: seven minutes of
«speedcore» whose only value is... speed. Awful singing, dull riffage, flashy
soulless soloing — this music is not evil, or scary, or angry, it is just...
speedy. Or ʽHeavy Rainʼ, sung much better by Wata, but utilizing such
predictable «doom-laden» chords that not even the extra heaviness can save the
song from... okay, I'm repeating myself.
This is really unbearable because I'd actually
like to like this — they are obviously trying to be artsy and accessible at the
same time, but this post-rock vibe is just killing them: the 18-minute
ʽAngelʼ is such a blatant (and incompetent) rip-off of some Godspeed
You! Black Emperor epic that it makes me want to scream out loud — for
Amaterasu's sake, guys, you've been going at this for almost twenty years now,
how come with each new album you are becoming less and less original? You had
that thing about feedback which was more or less your own schtick — now you
have completely abandoned it to focus on these third-rate imitations?
Everything here is just one large exercise in
soulless, hookless mannerism, so it's pretty sad news (but predictable perhaps)
that they would consider this their «defining effort». Naturally, you do not
have to take my word for it, but please do not listen to this album
without being able to place it in its proper context — you owe that much to
people like GY!BE, or My Bloody Valentine, or even Radiohead (did I mention the
heavy debt that ʽGhost Of Romanceʼ owes to OK Computer?) who
actually defined how «artsy» music would sound in the modern age before Boris
came along and decided, for some reason, that they could do just as well, and
that they could be justified in not writing good melodies as long as they could
combine all this into one melting pot, where you mix pickles with apple jam and
goat cheese with dark chocolate. And don't even trust the album title — because
this album is not Noise. It's just Nonsense, and the rating is a
certified thumbs down.
URBAN DANCE (2015)
1) Un, Deux, Trois; 2)
Surrender; 3) Choreographer; 4) Endless; 5) Game Of Death.
On May 2, 2015, a nice spring day on which both
Maya Plisetskaya and Ruth Rendell left this pathetic world, Boris released three albums at once — the best thing
about which was that neither of the two ladies would have even the slightest
possibility of ever being exposed to them during their lifetimes. Chalk up
another personal record for Boris, but at this time I do not even have to
mention that «the gesture» must have inevitably taken place at the expense of
such nice things in life as listenability, originality, and emotional impact.
If you have any doubts, let us give a brief run through the tracks on the first
one of these, Urban Dance — it won't
take long, as there are only five tracks in total.
ʽUn, Deux, Troisʼ is 4:30 minutes of
feedback crackle, largely resembling static waves from your car radio, with the
volume pushed all the way up for some masochist reason. ʽSurrenderʼ
is yet another of this band's failed attempts to make their own post-rock
statement — failed, because this time they seem to think that a good way to add
impressive dynamics to their atmospheric soundscape is to... incorporate some
MORE radio static right in the middle of the track! That's like wow, a symbolic
marriage of organised beauty and freaky chaos. ʽChoreographerʼ is
8:45 minutes of... you guessed it, more
radio static, except now the bass knob is also turned all the way up and you
got some spooky post-Fripp whooshing guitar lines flying in the background from
time to time to turn your experience into a truly volcanic one.
ʽEndlessʼ only actually goes on for 9:43 minutes, over which it also
tries to mesmerize you with several layers of feedback, electronic hum, loud
percussion, and very deeply buried harmony vocals, but this time it does not
even begin to meet the «post-rock challenge» because everything it does, it
does during its first seconds (no attempts at building anything up
whatsoever).
Finally, at 11:18, ʽGame Of Deathʼ is
not only the longest track on the album, but also the one with the most
justified title — it does sound like the soundtrack to some particularly
violent, brutally industrialized shooter, where you not only have to splatter
as many brains of your enemies as possible, but you also have to do it working
under extreme sonic conditions: nothing but feedback, industrial grind,
explosions, and machine-gun rattle to lead you to that final 100% kills victory.
Remember, though — if you survive this at top volume just once, you render
yourself immune against Islamic State torture, the Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse, and Justin Bieber ft. Nicki Minaj music videos. Sure beats cold
showers anyway.
Summarizing: 1 attempt at an actual music piece
(not highly competitive), 1 attempt at an ambient conscience manipulation
(does not work on me at all), 3 pieces of crap that might have worked a little
better if they were all joined together — in Absolutego fashion — because one huge piece of crap is always more
impressive by definition than several small pieces of crap. I mean, what would
impress you more — a pile of dinosaur dung or scattered rabbit droppings over a
dust road? To me, Absolutego was the musical equivalent of that
dinosaur dung. Rabbit droppings, though, are a bit of a turndown in
comparison, which is why Urban Dance,
an album that, unsurprisingly, has nothing whatsoever to do with any sort of
urban dancing, gets an assured thumbs down.
WARPATH (2015)
1) Midgard Schlange; 2) Dreamy
Eyed Panjandrum; 3) Behind The Owl; 4) Voo-Vah.
ʽMidgard Schlangeʼ: 11 minutes that
probably depict the daily activities of Jörmungandr, the World Serpent.
Since the Twilight of the Gods has not yet arrived, these activities seem
limited to breathing, snoring, and farting, all of which are depicted in a
bravely monotonous form by Boris who are well-known for their stern realism in
portraying the daily activities of supernatural beings. If you do not lose
your patience midway through, there's actually a semi-cool crescendo of
electronic noises that begins around the sixth minute — hey, you could imagine
yourself crawling deeper and deeper into the primordial cave as you trail the
serpent's length. I hate to say it, but it is far from the worst spooky,
tension-building track they've ever produced.
ʽDreamy Eyed Panjandrumʼ: I do admit,
freely and of my own will, that I had no idea of what the word
"panjandrum" meant prior to hearing this track. Now that I do know, I seriously doubt that anybody
in Boris knows, either, because this track is eight minutes of evenly annoying
static against which somebody is playing some antiquated version of Arkanoid.
That ain't my idea of a panjandrum,
and that ain't my idea of spending quality time, either. Awful, not to mention
meaningless, unless one likes handing out meanings as if they were snot balls.
ʽBehind The Owlʼ: What owl? What is
behind the owl? Why can't I hear anything? Is it some sort of racist (actually,
ornithist) hint at the alleged deafness of owls? Well, we might as well turn
the volume all the way up, and guess what... more static and wind in the wires.
«Psychedelic» does not even begin to describe this. Oh well, I'll just pretend
that these were nine minutes of silence, so they were just covering Cage or
something. Move on.
ʽVoo-Vahʼ: Who knows, maybe this is
the first thing that Jörmungandr says when he wakes up and decides it's
time to trash the world. Problem is, before he begins, he has to thrash his
tail fifty times and give twenty deep yawns. That takes him ten and a half
minutes, and by the time he's ready to really
kick ass... hey, the record's over. Too bad, I was just getting in the mood.
I have no idea why they are doing this. It's
not even like they were behaving like little children, discovering the joys of
the studio for the first time in their life — there's nothing here that has not
been done earlier, by themselves or by millions of other artists. The first
track at least shows some signs of work — the other three might just as well
have been recorded by the instruments without any input on the musicians' part.
Yes I know, it's all «limited edition for hardcore fans only», but really, how
hard does your core have to be to
allow them to dick around with you to such an extreme? And even if they're just
dicking around, it's not that original, either: nobody beats Lou Reed at that
game. Thumbs
down, obviously.
ASIA (2015)
1) Terracotta Warrior; 2) Ant
Hill; 3) Talkative Lord Vs. Silence Master.
And here comes the third and, fortunately, last
installment of the trilogy, of which the less said, the better, so here is a
quick runthrough. ʽTerracotta Warriorʼ is a twenty-minute long noise
homage to the deeply buried unknown soldier of China's first emperor,
beginning in the form of the whistling wind in the deep underground chamber and
gradually layering feedback that probably represents the modern day excavators
trying to get through. ʽAnt Hillʼ is ten minutes of crackling
electronic pulse (how may times have we heard that already?), an allegory for the ant hill which is itself an
allegory for the endless run of silly humans around their daily tasks.
ʽTalkative Lord Vs. Silence Masterʼ is ten more minutes of feedback
crackle, radio static-style.
That's all, folks. No, really. I am packing my
bags now and embarking on the quest to find seven people who actually «enjoy»
and «get» this album. Together, we will find a way to break the laws of gravity
and quantum mechanics and advance humanity to the... next state of advancement,
whatever that is. Watch out for the latest news from The Boris Samurai — until
then, thumbs
down, but I promise you, once we finally rule the world, that is
bound to change.
SMACK BUNNY BABY (1993)
1) I, Fuzzbot; 2) Ride; 3)
Smack Bunny Baby; 4) Martian Dance Invasion; 5) Cultural Zero; 6) Brat Girl; 7)
Hurting Me; 8) I Could Own You; 9) Anesthesize; 10) Draag; 11) Get Away.
All right, so despite their name, Brainiac
weren't exactly the most original
band to come out of the whole underground-indie-alternative bouillon of the
early 1990s. There may be a good reason, or even more than one, why their three
albums have been relegated to the «connaisseur» shelf, pardon my French again,
and why the memory of Sonic Youth, Pixies, Nirvana, and Radiohead will linger
long after the last real brainiac has
emptied his recycle bin containing Smack
Bunny Baby, Bonsai Superstar,
and Hissing Prigs In Static Couture.
After all, not everybody can be so lucky — wherever that bus is going, the
number of seats is always limited.
But none of that prevents me from actually liking these guys: I think their records
are fun, and their creative angle is actually quite unique, even if it does not
make a lot of sense. Basically, they were surrealistically aggressive punkers
with an electronic coating — but a retro
electronic coating at that, with the band's leader Tim Taylor playing a Moog as
his instrument of choice. Now, quickly, off the top of your head, how many punk
bands with Moog synths can you name? (I mean, other than Emerson, Lake &
Palmer, of course?) Not too many — even though, come to think of it, the Moog
can be as in-yer-face punk as any stringed electric instrument.
So, as the album kicks out the door, for the
first twenty-five seconds you feel like you're listening to a Pixies clone — a
little introductory noise and a droney guitar riff played at full throttle. But
as the vocals make their appearance, they are accompanied with a series of
fussy electronic noises that sound as if they've been taken from some arcade
experience — hilariously deconstructing any «authentic» anger and aggression
that may have been placed in the song. ʽI, Fuzzbotʼ could have worked
even without these quasi-Pacman bleeps and bloops, but its frantic "GET
OUT OF MY MIND!" chorus just sounds way
too much like Black Francis for the band to escape being branded as copycats.
Add some of these ridiculous electronics, though, and you get something
seriously different — and bizarrely intriguing.
Most of the songs here work at the intersection
of energetic and inspired, but utterly unoriginal alt-rock guitar riffage; Tim
Taylor's vocal hooks in the choruses, which can be catchy, but do not differ
that much from any other repetitive, screamy choruses in punk history; and the
use of electronics, formally «superfluous», never truly essential to the
songs' basic structures, but always serving as their main identificator — after
a brief period of initiation, you will never mistake a Brainiac song for
anything else, because the bleeping, howling, wheezing, wailing Moogs give them
away at a moment's notice.
Lyrically, Brainiac are also not too different from
the usual punk/alt-rock territories — their songs are mostly about pain,
confusion, insanity, lack/loss of self-identity, most of the topics revolving
somewhere in between the dangerous anguish of Kurt Cobain and the surrealist
paranoia of Black Francis. But since the tempos are consistently fast, the
guitars are consistently loud, and the vocals consistently rise to a scream,
you probably won't be able to make out most of the lyrics anyway, and why
should you? This band is all about finding out how cool a punk-rock guitar can
sound in a formerly alien context — sort of a «Mini-Sonatas for Pissed-Off
Electric Guitar and Moog Synth» experiment, and quite a successful one, in my
opinion, even if most of the songs seem so similar, if you discount occasional
individualistic vocal gimmicks (like the creative use of the "nah-nah nah
nah-nah-nah" teaser in ʽCultural Zeroʼ or the horrorific
voice-and-synth sonic meld in ʽDraagʼ which gives me awful visions of
a person mutating into a synthesizer — quite a productive idea for a musical
video, I'd say).
Other than Tim Taylor, the band does not have
any creative quasi-geniuses at this point, but guitarist Michelle Bodine ain't
half-bad (since Taylor is also credited for guitar playing, I have no idea how
many of the riffs are actually played by her, but she must have been the primary guitar player during the band's live
shows anyway) and she has a strong Riot Grrrl-type voice as well — too bad they
only let her sing lead on one track (the aptly titled ʽMartian Dance
Invasionʼ, since nobody would be surprised if the Martians chose Brainiac
as their favorite dance music). On the whole, definitely not bad for a first
try for someone hailing from Dayton, Ohio — they may not be bursting with
creativity, but their one fresh idea works well enough for 36 minutes (and do thank
God that they respect the punk aesthetics enough not to let it run for 70,
despite living in an age when the new CD format was poisoning everybody's
brains). Thumbs
up for sure.
BONSAI SUPERSTAR (1994)
1) Hot Metal Dobermans; 2)
Hands Of The Genius; 3) Fucking With The Altimiter; 4) Radio Apeshot; 5) Transmissions
After Zero; 6) Juicy (On A Cadillac); 7) Flypaper; 8) Sexual Frustration; 9) To
The Baby-Counter; 10) You Wrecked My Hair; 11) Meathook Manicure; 12) Status:
Choke; 13) Collide.
With the arrival of guitarist John Schmersal in
the place of Michelle Bodine, the classic Brainiac lineup falls into place...
wait, no, actually, I am not sure I would have noticed the replacement without
additional info. Sure there are no female vocals now, and sure no two musicians
play their instrument in the exact same way, but on the whole, this is still
Tim Taylor running the whole show and others are playing what they are being
told, or at least the way they are
being told to play. The main difference is not in the change of style, but
rather in its tightening up, so much so that guitars and electronics fuse even
more seamlessly, and it gets harder and harder to simply view Brainiac as a
«guitar rock band with Moogs».
For one thing, they get more heavily involved
with sampling, and pretty creatively: ʽFucking With The Altimeterʼ
builds a rhythmic pattern out of spooky whispered vocals, and in several other
places they play around with radio static, using it as a greasy paste from
which one can mold just about anything, given patience and time. For another
thing, guitars and keyboards now often either play the same melody or play
small, splintered melodic bits that are tightly interwoven around each other.
Throw in Taylor's now-permanent operation in the mode of «total musical
madness», and here's a sound that's pretty damn hard to confuse with anything.
The bad news is that, the more they solidify
around this thing they do best, the more one-dimensional they become. Although
some of these songs are fast and some are slow, some are punkier and some are
bluesier, some are lighter and some are heavier, the basic message of each tune
is more or less the same — «the modern world and modern technology has made us
nutty as hell, and we love love love it!». This is, indeed, like one particular
angle borrowed from the Pixies and magnified to the proportions of a grand
hall, but this is also why Brainiac could never hope to achieve the kind of
recognition and popularity that the Pixies have: too focused on one single theme,
too radical in their exploration of it. I really like the record, yet I cannot
even write a proper review, because the songs leave few possibilities for
individual analysis.
I will simply state, then, that Bonsai Superstar is one of the most
credible «mad albums» of the post-punk epoch that would not be done from a
sociopathic standpoint, but rather from a «harmless» angle. One big mistake
that so many «mad» artists make is that, for some reason, they usually think
that «madness» always has to be aggressive — which it does not. Here, even when
Taylor drives himself up the wall and the guitars and keyboards begin locking
into a paranoid, dissonant howling (ʽYou Wrecked My Hairʼ), the
feeling is that the anger is mostly internalised, that the singer is trying to
knock out his demons without expectorating them. More often, though, he is
simply just being playful — like on the hilarious ʽJuicy (On A
Cadillac)ʼ, a basic rock'n'roll number offset by hiccupy «rubbed-glass»
noises that might equally well be synthesizer tones or treated samplings of
scratched records, but, regardless of this, add a touch of «dynamic idiocy» to
whatever is going on. Or he is being explicitly androgynous, as on
ʽFlypaperʼ, where his near-falsetto vocals are driven so high up in
the mix, it's as if he were making a pass at you or something. Okay, that might be dangerous... but nah, not
really.
One thing to add is that, from a technical
angle, I think that lovers of guitar experimentation will find plenty of
interesting stuff going on here — Schmersal's passages often presage
«math-rock» as we know it in the 21st century, though, of course, they are
nowhere near as technically accomplished as the average «math-rock» product
these days. But they do not need to be, since the melody, as such, is always
subdued here to atmosphere and energy, by definition. Had they had a Robert
Fripp in the band, he would surely have introduced a tighter level of
«discipline»; but then, I suppose that any band that would have Robert Fripp
and Tim Taylor in it at the same time would have decayed faster than a
mendelevium isotope. So let us be content with what we have here, a maniacal
celebration of electronic insanity without any harmful repercussions for
progressive humanity. In other words, a thumbs up.
HISSING PRIGS IN STATIC COUTURE (1996)
1) Indian Poker (part 3); 2)
Pussyfootin'; 3) Vincent Come On Down; 4) This Little Piggy; 5) Strung; 6) Hot
Seat Can't Sit Down; 7) The Vulgar Trade; 8) Beekeepers Maxim; 9) Kiss Me, U
Jacked Up Jerk; 10) 70 Kg Man; 11) Indian Poker (part 2); 12) Nothing Ever
Changes; 13) I Am A Cracked Machine.
I seriously dislike the title of this album —
sounds like four unrelated words joined together through random selection. If
anything, it should have been named after one of its tracks — ʽHot Seat
Can't Sit Downʼ is a near-perfect description for its overall sound. Which
has not changed all that much since Bonsai
Superstar — but now it is even wilder, faster, uglier, and crazier, so if
you liked Superstar for all these reasons,
you are almost legally bound to develop an even higher appreciation for Hissing Prigs.
Unless you already are an experienced consumer
of various sorts of noise, some of the small arch-experimental links may be
hard to fathom — if the industrially distorted «pan-fried» electric guitar duo
on ʽIndian Poker (part 3)ʼ does not kill you on the spot, just wait
until you get to the high-pitched electronic sirens on ʽIndian Poker (part
2)ʼ (boy, am I glad they declined to end the album with ʽIndian Poker
(part 1)ʼ — that would probably have been the sonic torture to outshame
all other sorts of sonic torture). Even before that, the already major crazy ʽ70 Kg Manʼ, running along at top
speed to the sound of fizzed-out punk guitars and dissonant overdubbed vocal
harmonies of the chorus, is interrupted midway through by a «bridge» of
electronically treated barking hounds — let me tell you, there's absolutely no fun in hearing this at top volume in
headphones, and oh, my name is Peter Townshend, by the way.
But do not make the mistake that it's all about
ugliness, either. Brainiac's chief influences are still the same — main cues
taken from the Pixies and, through them, from the Ramones and other punkers who
value fun, catchiness, and entertainment at least as much as they value
rebelliousness, schizophrenia, and social message. Once the initiation of
ʽIndian Pokerʼ has diligently driven out all the «wusses» and
«pussies», ʽPussyfootinʼ really turns out to be quite a conservative
rock track, oddly adorned only with Tim Taylor's inimitably screechy vocal
style and a series of slightly deranged babbling interludes. And no amount of
hysterical electronic effects can disguise the fact that ʽVincent Come On
Downʼ is essentially just a solid slice of classic punk-rock, with nothing
particularly «avantgarde» about its basic chord structure.
But do not make the mistake that it's really
all so simplistic. The above-mentioned ʽHot Seatʼ, for instance,
starts off with quite a tricky guitar riff and an even trickier time signature,
well worthy of King Crimson — matters get simplified once Tim starts to sing,
but the song switches gears several times and is, on the whole, far more
complex than anything ever produced by, say, Nirvana (not that it
automatically makes it better — I am
merely making a case here for Brainiac as a «musician's band» rather than a
«general public band»). And the guitar melodies on ʽThis Little
Piggyʼ, despite the relative simplicity of each, remain ever so slightly,
but steadily and intentionally out of sync with each other, which means they are taking their clues from the
avantgarde artists, after all. There's nothing like mapping craziness through
intelligence.
But do not make the mistake that it's really
all so esoteric. Once most of this stuff has properly sunken in, the
professional headbanger will headbang to it all the way through to
ʽNothing Ever Changesʼ, whose combination of galloping rock rhythm
with catchy electronic pulse could make it into a ʽRock Lobsterʼ for
the 1990s, and the closing ʽI Am A Cracked Machineʼ, which is also a
damn good title — the whole song, heck, the whole album, dammit, this whole band has made a career out of portraying
the daily routine events in the life of a «cracked machine», one that might be
expected to churn out «normal» electronic music, but, due to its being cracked,
turns out everything but normal —
and loves every moment of it.
Even if your mind will not get attached to
specific songs, it would be hard not to get involved in Brainiac's rusty
robotic carnival as a whole. I hold no illusions for Brainiac's future — there
is no guarantee that, had Tim Taylor not perished in an unfortunate auto
accident a year later, they would have retained their edginess and freshness.
The several songs they still had time to record and put out as an EP (Electro-Shock For President) show that
the plan for the next stage was to relinquish guitars altogether and go
completely electronic for a while — not the best idea, perhaps, because the
songs became completely depersonalized and were unable to capitalize on Tim's
eccentric individuality. Still, that's hardly a polite pretext to say that
nobody will miss Tim Taylor — over those brief, but eventful several years, he
did help out to make the decade a little more colorful and crazy, and Hissing Prigs is arguably the highest
point of that color-add-on, so it gets yet another thumbs up from me, and with that,
the story of Brainiac is over.
POD (1990)
1) Glorious; 2) Doe; 3)
Happiness Is A Warm Gun; 4) Oh!; 5) Hellbound; 6) When I Was A Painter; 7)
Fortunately Gone; 8) Iris; 9) Opened; 10) Only In 3's; 11) Lime House; 12)
Metal Man.
You know, there might actually be a good reason
why Black Francis rarely, if ever, let Kim Deal contribute her own tunes to
Pixies' albums — she just ain't that good a songwriter. Perfect bass playing
for that band, awesome vocal sidekick to Frank, charismatic personage all
around, but no matter how much I listen to Pod,
I just can't remember any of the goddamn songs. They sound totally awesome, for
sure, but that's not really «songwriting», the way I see it, it's more like...
like... like sleepwalking with a well-tuned bass in one's hands.
But yeah, songwriting ain't everything, and I
guess an album like Pod just had to be made, because it's not just «Pixies without the hooks». It's
more like The Breeders were a younger brother of The Pixies — you know, the
kind of small kid who has not yet had any time to match the achievements of his
successful elder brother, but has that ring of endearing promising charm around
him. Except that Kim Deal seems to go backwards
rather than forward from the Pixies: there is a certain narrowing down of the
vision here, a certain amount of deconstruction and focus on the backbone,
which, I guess, is sort of natural to expect from a bass player — even if Kim
actually doesn't play much bass on this album, so it seems.
Anyway, in 1990, The Breeders, in addition to
Kim, were: Tanya Donelly, formerly of Throwing Muses, on guitar and vocals;
Josephine Wiggs, on bass and vocals; Britt Walford of Slint on drums, recording
under the pseudonym of Shannon Doughton; and Carrie Bradley on violin. Steve
Albini, who had already produced Surfer
Rosa for Pixies, was brought in to lend his usual stern helping hand — and
indeed, Pod sounds closer in style
to Surfer Rosa than to Doolittle, because Albini does not like
a lot of overdubs, and the ones he does like are either brutally sharp or even
more brutally noisy. Here, there is definitely more sharpness than noise.
As you know, the Beatles have a symbolic song
for everybody, and the Breeders are no exception: the sole lonesome cover here
is Lennon's ʽHappiness Is A Warm Gunʼ, because it symbolizes Kim's
major preferences: (a) nonsensical, but evocative (under pressure) lyrics; (b)
indifference towards the usual verse-chorus approach to a pop song; (c) gloomy
minor keys that may or may not make the jump to major, depending on how pissed
you are; (d) an overall impression of stark psychological depth though you have
no way whatsoever to explain what exactly is so deep about chanting
"Mother Superior jump the gun" like a mantra. Anyway, with Albini
onboard this sounds all too much like a Big Black interpretation of the
Beatles, and they kind of lop off and subjugate the «optimistic» conclusion of
the song, stripped all the way down to broken shards of guitar, among which Kim
Deal is absentmindedly strolling barefoot, humming "happiness is a warm
gun" like a recently shell-shocked individual. Hmm.
Now, about Kim's own songs... well, Kurt Cobain
apparently found them a great inspiration, but unlike Kurt, Kim Deal is not
prone to uncontrollable fits of anger or self-pitying with which it would be so
easy for the average record-buying teen to associate. Instead, Kim just creates
herself a droning wave, straddles it and rides it anywhere it turns out to take
her: ʽGloriousʼ, opening the album, sets its general tone fairly
well. You get your chug-chug-chugging bass, your one- or two-chord guitar riff,
a noisy lead drone, and these weird «stuck-in-adolescence» vocals whose progenitor
was Maureen Tucker of The Velvet Underground — one of the first ladies of rock
who turned the skill of not knowing how to sing into a form of high art.
Of course, the Breeders have much more in
common with the Velvets than just the voice: their propensity for droning,
their ability to induce a state of «optimistic depression» without spending too
much effort, or even Bradley's John Cale-imitating violin passages on
ʽOh!ʼ. In terms of repetitiveness, they sometimes go beyond their
mentors — for instance, having fallen upon a really cool-sounding bassline at
the end of the upbeat ʽWhen I Was A Painterʼ, instead of trying to
build up, they build down: first,
there's a fuzzy guitar riff going along, then the guitar just disappears and we
get forty seconds of pure bass-drums groove. Somebody else would have employed
that as an intro for a gritty rocker — they have it as an outro, because
expectations are to be challenged and interpretations are to be sought after.
Then somewhere in the middle of all this
befuddlement comes ʽFortunately Goneʼ, the closest thing they have
here to a sweet, innocent twee-pop song — probably mighty influential, too,
since you could think of it as the blueprint for all these intelligent girl-led
pop bands like Allo Darlin'. It also gives away the whole concept of the album,
perhaps, with its first line: "I wait for you in heaven / On this perfect
string of love". Everything else makes no sense, but this "wait for
you in heaven" is quite telling — you see, Kim Deal really plays this part
of disembodied spirit, a solitary ghost accidentally lost somewhere in the back
alleys of heavenly space, and this explains why commonplace layman emotions
like «love», «anger», «sadness», or «happiness» do not really belong with The
Breeders. (Nor did they belong with the Pixies, for that matter, but the Pixies
were still far more «grounded» than this band.)
Actually, some of the common interpretations
for their songs imply that there are
fairly mundane subjects covered here, including some rather horrendous ones —
ʽHellboundʼ is frequently referred to as a song about a living
abortion, allegedly acknowledged as such by Kim herself, but you would never
know that without the commentary, and every time I hear that song, I prefer to
interpret the "it" that "lives in folds of red and steamy
air" not as an undelivered foetus but rather as... well... IT. IT lives,
and IT is hellbound. To the grittiest and gloomiest guitar melody on the entire
album, though even that one is not too
gritty or gloomy. As the girls roll their eyes and go "hellbound hellbound
hellbound hellbound hellbound", all you get is the inescapability of hell,
but whether hell is such a bad place to be — well, ever since Bon Scott the
question remains debatable, and one thing you are not ever going to get from
the Breeders is answers. Answers are traps set by real artists for losers.
Although I have to confess from the start that
I find myself much more personally attracted to the band's second album than
their first one, its overall sound alone, just the way all the ingredients are
combined and processed, guarantees a thumbs up from me. It also helps that it is merely
thirty minutes long and that all the songs are so short — any more pretense and
it would be in danger of becoming a Sonic Youth rip-off with sparser production
and poorer playing.
LAST SPLASH (1993)
1) New Year; 2) Cannonball; 3)
Invisible Man; 4) No Aloha; 5) Roi; 6) Do You Love Me Now?; 7) Flipside; 8) I
Just Wanna Get Along; 9) Mad Lucas; 10) Divine Hammer; 11) S.O.S.; 12) Hag; 13)
Saints; 14) Drivin' On 9; 15) Roi (reprise).
Sorry if this breaks any conventions, but this, not Pod, should be the Breeders' primary claim to fame. Yes, so Pod is a bit more lo-fi, off-the-cuff,
stream-of-conscious-to-record kind of a thing, whereas Last Splash is rather «stereotypical indie rock» in comparison —
not to mention being far closer to the regular Pixies style. But who really
cares, if the songs are that good?..
For this album, the Breeders were: Kim Deal on
vocals, guitars, and keyboards; Josephine Wiggs on bass; Jim MacPherson on
drums; and, most interestingly, Kim's own twin sister Kelley Deal on second
guitar, even though, prior to joining the Breeders, she did not know how to
play at all (nice boost to all of you non-playing, but aspiring suckers out
there). It's not as if it took a lot of skill to play anything on this record, but the Breeders are not about skill —
they're your friends, the lovely gruff cavemen (actually, cavewomen mostly)
with a knack for converting gruffness into romanticism with simple, but
efficient melodic twists.
Well, at least they are now. Most of these songs are short, concise, catchy, and likeable.
"We have come for light", Kim announces at the very beginning, before
the tempo speeds up and over a heavy psychedelic gallop we are being told that
"I am the rain, I am the new year, I am the sun". Silly people might
call this approach «pretentious», but in the warped world of the Pixies and the
Breeders, nothing ever gets taken too
seriously. They are just having fun, opening the season with a brief
shamanistic ritual for the electric guitar. Good groove.
The actual hooks start coming with
ʽCannonballʼ, whose frolicking bassline and wobbling lead guitar
flourishes form a perfect combination with the vocals, which also wobble (her "spitting in a
wishing well" is adorable, the way those hushed vowels weave around the
guitar) and then come together in a perfectly sunny — and totally minimalistic
— chorus of "in the shade, in the shade". Here, the mystical appeal
of the Pixies — as in, when you know for
sure that these songs are great but you have no idea why — reappears in all
its glory: I totally fail to understand why this song moves me so much or even how it moves me, but it does.
As does ʽInvisible Manʼ, which is
already a little less mysterious — if you cleaned it up a bit from all the
dirty feedback and brought the vocals a little upfront, it'd be, like, totally a song from The Velvet Underground & Nico, on the Nico side of things, of
course. Kim sings it in her low register, quite similar to the way Nico told us
once to beware of the femme fatale — here, though, we are told to beware of The
Invisible Man, which is pretty much the same thing in a different gender role.
Beautiful, evocative vocal part, nice ʽWalrusʼ-style string
arrangements.
It's not just the vocals, though —
ʽRoiʼ, which is pretty much an instrumental, is one of the best Sonic
Youth songs never written by Sonic Youth, even if one of the guitarists never
knew how to play guitar. A bit of dark ambience, a bit of pure noise, a clever
build-up towards a rocking climax, even a little quotation from the
ʽWhole Lotta Loveʼ riff... well, technically it's not much to speak
of, but I like how it is structured like a four-minute multi-part suite that
pretty much summarizes everything cool that was invented by DIY indie people —
before it all became regurgitated and plagiarized so often that the DIY spirit
became a parody of its former self.
Just two more highlights, and I'll shut up:
ʽDivine Hammerʼ is a wonderfully optimistic and determined track —
"I'm just looking for one divine hammer" is one phrase that is really
tough to get out of your head, especially because of the pitch jump on
"hammer" (later on, echoed by the lead line), and then, you also
never know if she is being semi-serious or totally ironic (you probably
wouldn't think that Kim Deal is being serious when she sings "I'm just
looking for a faith, waiting to be followed" — then again, what do we really know about Kim Deal? And what do
we really know about the word
«faith»?).
And, of course, there's the obligatory «Moe
Tucker-style conclusion»: ʽDrivin' On 9ʼ is a gorgeous little ditty,
fiddle and all, a perfect mixture of indie rock and country that is indeed a
perfect, though much too short, soundtrack for a slow late night cruise, and
nobody could sing it as sweetly as Kim does in her overgrown child voice. A
peaceful, traditionalist, yet totally not
tacky tune for us all to take a load off.
See, this is what happens when you just make a
teensy-weensy effort to support your already burgeoning charisma. Really, the
numbers on Pod were these little
unfocused bursts of charismatic energy — with Last Splash, we get something that is more conventional, but
nothing can really be too conventional with these eccentric ladies. If you only
go for «innovation», pure and simple (yes, and eat something new for breakfast
every day, too), you might get bored. If you prefer your innovation mixed with
old-fashioned pop sensibility, well... thumbs up, and let's get on with it.
TITLE TK (2002)
1) Little Fury; 2) London
Song; 3) Off You; 4) The She; 5) Too Alive; 6) Son Of Three; 7) Put On A Side;
8) Full On Idle; 9) Sinister Foxx; 10) Forced To Drive; 11) T And T; 12) Huffer.
Almost ten years separate this one from the
last Breeders LP — ten years in which lots and lots of things happened to
alt-rock and indie-rock, and over which both the Pixies and the Breeders had
sort of become living, but somewhat outdated legends, and not even Kurt was
alive any more to give Kim and Kelley's next offering the proper praise, though
I'm fairly sure he would have loved Title
TK to yet another death, had he had the chance.
Anyway, these
Breeders have everything and nothing in common with those Breeders. Everything, because this is very much a Breeders
record in design and execution; nothing, because the Deal sisters are the only
Breeders left around — neither Richard Presley (guitar), nor Mando Lopez (bass,
guitar), nor Jose Medeles (drums) had anything to do with Pod or Last Splash (in
fact, the former two players were recruited by Kim from the then-current lineup
of L.A. hardcore punk band Fear). But you know what? For all of this record's
sparseness, it might as well have been recorded by the Deal sisters alone — that is, as long as old friend
Steve Albini stayed behind the engineering console. After all, Kim is credited
here for «guitar, organ, drums, bass, vocals», and it's not as if you're gonna
hear any flutes or harpsichords — and, if you'll pardon me this one more pun,
it's Kim and only Kim that is the right deal for the Breeders.
In a way, Title
TK was Kim's «protest album». Technically, it is sort of a cross between
the less accessible Pod and the more
«poppy» Last Splash — the ascetic,
bare-bones nature of the songs hearkens back to Pod, but the heavy infusion of the songs with hard-to-forget pop
hooks shows that mystical spontaneity was far from the only force driving the
songs. What is also important, though, is that Kim insisted on analog-only
recording techniques — no, this is not lo-fi here (thankfully), but this is
still as raw as it gets, flubs and accidents included. Had the songs been poor
at the core, this approach could be judged as unnecessarily pretentious; but
with such strong hooks, the occasional «what-the-heck-was-that?» reaction only
spices up the proceedings.
And what are these strong hooks, may you ask?
Well, they usually come in the form of very brief, but strongly emphasized
«clippings» — vocal or instrumental.
Considering how hard it has been to come
up with short, punchy, resonant hooks ever since half of the world's population
enlisted in rock and roll bands, I feel half-amused, half-amazed at how many
cool phrasings there are in these short blasts. Sometimes you have to wait for
them, of course: ʽLittle Furyʼ opens the album with a generic
mid-tempo beat and some expectedly somnambulant, nonsensical vocals, distributed
between the Deal sisters in a rather chaotic pattern... it is not until 2:08
that the nasty, teasing little four-note riff starts up, and it goes away after
just a few bars, but that little is enough to get the back of your mind
thinking — what was that? was that
really necessary? was it really a tease, or a threat, or a warning? does it
have any relation to the tender chorus admonition of "hold what you've got"?..
well — "it's a living thing", as Jeff Lynne would say.
ʽLondon Songʼ, on the other hand, is
totally vocal-dependent — dependent, in fact, on one word: as devoid of direct
interpretation as "slipping through the states to find the static, yeah
there's something to believe" is, using the word "believe" for
the final resolution of the chorus is a brilliant move, because it turns the
entire song into a sort of intimate, camouflaged «I'm holding on» anthem. But
this vocal dependency becomes even more explicit on ʽOff Youʼ, which
is a ballad (I think — with this approach, the difference between tender ballad
and angry rocker seems to be blurred) that totally rides on Deal's personal
charisma as filtered through her vocal cord modulation. The dry overtones, the
ability to conjure some detached innocence and «infantile wisdom» through
potentially over-pompous lines like ʽI am the autumn in the scarlet / I am
the make-up on your eyesʼ, the stern, but tender conclusion of each chorus
with a laconic "yeah we're movin' — yeah, we're movin'" (don't forget
the rising rather than falling intonation on the second movin'), it's all ascetically beautiful in a way that's doggone
hard to explain.
Most of the album sounds «broken» — short vocal
lines consisting of incomplete sentences (often put together through phonetic
associations rather than any logically meaningful purpose), short guitar
bursts, lots of jagged, stop-and-start sequences. An uncomfortable flow, but
you get used to it eventually — a good example is ʽThe Sheʼ, one of
the verses of which goes "It's my death / My rhythm / My arithmetic / I
got used to / Nobody ridin' in the back", so just don't ride in the back
and you'll be okay with the song's clumsy, but effective funk beat, distorted
growling organ, and more of those «nasty teaser» guitar mini-riffs that are so
popular this season. When the song does
have an uninterrupted flow, it might happen with the aid of a loudly mixed,
simple, repetitive, eerie bassline — ʽPut On A Sideʼ does just that
out of one simple note and one bit of glissando — or with the aid of a sped-up
tempo, like the closing ʽHufferʼ, which says goodbye with a
much-needed merry nursing rhyme: "Torn, toiled and troubled... toil toil
toil till I get sick, I try reverse but I'm not that quick".
Not every song is great — in fact, I would
hesitate to call any of these songs
«great», because they simply do not trigger that kind of verbal association —
but leave it to Ms. Deal and her ghostly shadow of a sister to come up with an
indie-rock album that does not leave even the slightest tinge of a «oh no, not
another indie-rock album» reaction. Not too
catchy, not too friendly, not too enigmatic, but a perfect balance of
all three to give you entertainment, enjoyment, and intrigue. And let us not
forget to thank Mr. Albini one more time — after all, he is still one of the
few people around to know how not to
strip indie-rock electric guitar of its ability to thrill and hypnotize. In
short, an all-around excellent comeback for the Breeders, but pardon me if I
just end this with a regular thumbs up instead of a detailed amateur Freudian
analysis, which I am sure it deserves from somebody who is much more qualified.
MOUNTAIN BATTLES (2008)
1) Overglazed; 2) Bang On; 3)
Night Of Joy; 4) We're Gonna Rise; 5) German Studies; 6) Spark; 7) Istanbul; 8)
Walk It Off; 9) Regalame Esta Noche; 10) Here No More; 11) No Way; 12) It's The
Love; 13) Mountain Battles.
Well... no mistake about it, this is yet another Breeders album, and it
still got that old Pod vibe. But it
is also hard to get rid of the feeling that the Deal sisters sound either a
little tired, or a little uninspired. The only more or less upbeat song has to
be a cover (ʽIt's The Loveʼ by the Tasties), and the rest drag — not
in the curse sense of the word, but literally so. Lots of slow dirges, crawling,
stuttering, bleeding guitars, and vocals that already go beyond «somnambulant»
and move into «deadly wounded» category. Really, it makes me depressed just to
have to review this stuff, let alone listen to it one more time.
Not that the Deal sisters themselves would
agree with me, and plenty of reviewers probably wouldn't, either: they just
wrote something along the lines of «this is the best Breeders album since
[insert random Breeders album here]» and told us lots of things about how the
Breeders usually play and record their songs, which was of no use for Breeders
fans and of little help for Breeders neophytes, because one million indie-rock
bands that came since the Breeders played and recorded their songs like the
Breeders did. Anyway, I may be
totally confused here, but I sense pain, depression, and tiredness all over
these songs — never mind that they were allegedly recorded over a period of
five years, at different studios and with varying band lineups.
Do not be deceived by titles like ʽNight
Of Joyʼ and ʽWe're Gonna Riseʼ. The former rides upon a quietly
threatening bass line and is actually about a night of sorrow, with vocals that stop two steps short of weeping; and
ʽWe're Gonna Riseʼ is so slow and plaintive, you kind of get the
feeling that it will take a lot of
calories (and time, and toil, and trouble) for «us» to rise, whoever «we» are
(the Deal sisters, the Breeders, all the good people in general, all the bad
people in general, etc.).
The title track is really something — an
exercise in «gutter music» if there ever was one, most of it spent by Kim
excreting loosely joined phrases that give the illusion of being completely
free-form, over an array of electronic pulses and feedback blasts (yes, Steve
Albini is at the production wheel again, and how did you guess that?). It's
another impressive way to close an album, but it ain't nothing like the
humorous-vivacious ʽHufferʼ or the pretty-dreamy ʽDrivin' On
9ʼ — this one just bleeds internally, with high fever, delirium, and
everything that comes along. Nothing too
overtly shocking (Kim Deal is no Courtney Love, and even her juvenile phase as
Kim Deal is long gone), but certainly not a pretty experience.
The problem is, while I can certainly respect
the vibe, Mountain Battles has a bit
too much in the drab, drag, limp, and stutter department about it to be treated
on par with the previous two albums, or even with Pod. This can have its positive effects — it may well be one of
those records that grows and grows on you, biding its time and waiting for you
to get sick, old, depres-sed, confused, broody, whatever, to appreciate its
subtle anti-charms, and at the present time, I am not quite there yet, though
I'm getting close. But then again, even this growth requires that the songs be
able to work like a lens, gathering your vibes and focusing them with the music
— and this doesn't really work with songs like ʽSparkʼ, which just
meander between mindless strumming and short shrieking guitar blasts and sound
like first-stage demos for classic Portishead («first stage» meaning just that
— the stage where you have only just begun visualizing what your song will
eventually sound like).
Sometimes Kim is just being cute without a
well-understood reason, for instance, when out of the blue she covers a Mexican
song (Roberto Cristobal's ʽRegalame Esta Nocheʼ), or creates a
generic country tune in her sleepwalking stylistics (ʽHere No Moreʼ).
Sometimes the sisters show off their knowledge — ʽIstanbulʼ, for
instance, is a «novelty» number that will please lovers of popular etymology
(if it so happens that you do not get the "where you're going?" -
"to the city!" call-and-response hook of the song, look up the
ʽIstanbulʼ page on Wikipedia). Most of the time, though, the
experience just consists of the sisters morbidly trading stern chunks of dark
vocal pop to equally morbid guitar phrasing (ʽGerman Studiesʼ,
ʽSparkʼ, etc.), and you really
have to get in the mood to «get» the attitude, or, rather, the necessity of
getting the attitude.
I am positively sure that some people will want
to defend Mountain Battles as an
essential Breeders album — perhaps even go as far as to claim that this one has
the deepest mystery of 'em all. And they may be right, but under one condition:
that one regards the Breeders themselves as an essential band, worth exploring
from their humble «Pixies offshoot» beginning and all the way down to that
as-of-yet-to-come age when an 80-year old Kim Deal and a 110-year old Bob Dylan
record a duet album of Cole Porter songs. I am not quite sure that Kim Deal is that important a character — I'll take
her when she rocks and invents whacko pop hooks, but when she's sulking like
this, demanding that we spend too much time on all her whims (including
crooning in Spanish), it's a little different.
Thumbs up all the same
— far be it from me to put down an etymologically relevant record — but if
this is going to be the last full-length Breeders LP (which is far from
certain, as the Deals tend to really enjoy their long breaks), it's definitely
a low-key exit that offers no true resolution to the saga of the Breeders. Then
again, maybe that is the best
resolution.
SPACEGIRL AND OTHER FAVORITES (1993)
1) Crushed; 2) That Girl
Suicide; 3) Deep In The Devil's Eye & You; 4) Kid's Garden; 5) When I Was
Yesterday; 6) Spacegirl; 7) Spacegirl (Revisited); 8) After The Fall; 9)
Thoughts Of You; 10) Hide And Seek; 11) Never Ever!; 12) Ashtray; 13) Fire Song.
Was there anything in the early classic period
of the Rolling Stones that would make them the logical predecessors of
«shoegazing»? Not much, I guess, though perhaps some of their longer, «dronier»
tracks like ʽI'm Going Homeʼ and especially ʽSing This All
Together (See What Happens)ʼ could be said to be very tangentially
related to the genre. However, not even ʽSing This All Togetherʼ
thrived on monochrome monotonousness — even at their most daring and far out,
the Stones never pretended to «minimalist artsiness». Too highbrow for those
consummate hitmakers, who could afford to be weird, but couldn't afford to be
«inaccessible».
In the light of this, it is odd to see how The
Brian Jonestown Massacre, a band (actually, a band-like vehicle for supporting
the songwriting, singing, and playing talents of Anton Newcombe, a deeply
troubled geek from sunny California) whose veneration of pre-Beggar's Banquet era Stones is as
visible from the title as their predilection for the macabre (Jonestown
Massacre), began life as a bona fide shoegazing outfit, albeit with a knack
for chord sequences and guitar tones that have a lot to do with the
mid-Sixties. Later on, Newcombe would make his Stones fanboyism much more
evident, but here, it takes time to realize that, yes indeed, quite a bit of
BJM's twangy guitar sound comes from the era of Aftermath. And given the album's overall quality, you might not
want to waste all that time on something so inessential.
In fact, Newcombe himself has pretty much
disowned this record, dismissing it as a tentative collection of early
youthful experiments — which, it must be noted, did not prevent him from
re-releasing it on CD anyway: the original vinyl-only release had but seven
tracks, with six more added as bonuses on the 2003 edition. (No contradiction,
though — it's just that this guy takes his own history seriously, as do most of us silly people). The record is sometimes
labeled as a «compilation», which is not altogether accurate: the recordings
do date from several different sessions, but none of them were previously
released, and if there is one argument for why this really shouldn't be judged as a proper debut album, it is that, according
to some sources, The Brian Jonestown Massacre as a band are not even properly
represented here — instead, what you are witnessing is a set of lo-fi demos
where Newcombe plays all the instruments himself, including (most of the time)
programmed drums.
You can already see the talent behind the
shoegazing muck: once the first minute of howling feedback is over,
ʽCrushedʼ becomes a well-coordinated twin current of one crunchy and
one melodic guitar, with the melodic guitar playing a rather engaging raga
line. Newcombe's vocals, however, should rather be placed somewhere in between
Robert Smith and Thom Yorke here than have anything to do with Mick Jagger's
sneer — and all the way through to the very end, he is playing this reclusive
romantic who prefers to fantasize about transcendental love rather than just go
out and get some. Which is perfectly in agreement with the ideology of your
average shoegazer, but does not present Newcombe as a particularly interesting
personality type in his own rights. In fact, his sticky, droning, pleading
invocation of "just let me lo-o-o-o-ve you, just let me lo-o-o-o-ve you"
is sort of annoying in an imbecile-teenager sort of way. Would any type of female, spacegirl or not,
want to fall for this whiner?
That said, on the whole ʽSpacegirlʼ
is an interesting experiment — five minutes into the song, the vocals disappear
altogether and become replaced with a solemn, stately, marching drone, full of
acoustic guitars and synthesized strings and horns that fills up your living
room for eight more minutes, then fades away and then fades back in to give you
five minutes more of the same. Atmospherically, it is quite similar to the
final «jam» part of George Harrison's ʽIt's All Too Muchʼ: you get
the feeling of being caught in the middle of some important religious ritual,
an offering to the Great Sun or something like that. My only quibble is that
the production is so weak, you do not get to properly savor all the small
intricate details — the jam is not as monotonous as it seems, because the
«strings» are actually playing a dynamic melody, but they are intentionally
shoved behind the unchanging rhythmic growl. Why? Silly shoegazing ideology.
Speaking of the shorter tracks, many, if not
most of these, would later be re-recorded in superior versions, so it makes
little sense to discuss them here; and those that would not are so badly marred
by the low quality of the recording that only a diehard lo-fi lover would want
to revisit them on a regular basis — something like ʽWhen I Was
Yesterdayʼ, for instance, could be an excellent tribute to mid-Sixties
psychedelic garage-rock, but the fuzzy rhythm guitar, the bluesy lead guitar,
and the snappy vocals all sound like
shit. Somebody be a good sport, please, and cover this one in pristine sound
quality. Leave the lo-fi to the lo-fi era, please.
What is important, though, is that Spacegirl's limitations are primarily
of a technical nature. Even through the shittiest sound, you can sense that
Newcombe has a good ear for melody, a good knack for complex arrangements, and
a good sense of taste, allowing him to «update» the Sixties for the Nineties
without coming across as just a kitschy nostalgia act — which, in a way, may
count as a genuine artistic vision. But yes, the relation of Spacegirl to «proper» BJM albums is
much like the relation of the Beatles' Decca audition tape to the first recordings
of the George Martin era. At the very least, if you are in a hurry, do not make
the mistake of letting this record be your introduction to the band. And you
don't even have to take my word for
it — take Anton's. Seventy-plus minutes of lo-fi «Brian Jones drowned, forms
shoegazing band in Heaven on tight budget» stuff can really turn you off very
quickly, with no hopes of redemption.
METHODRONE (1995)
1) Evergreen; 2) Wisdom; 3)
Crushed; 4) That Girl Suicide; 5) Wasted; 6) Everyone Says; 7) She Made Me; 8)
Hyperventilation; 9) Records; 10) I Love You; 11) End Of The Day; 12) Outback;
13) She's Gone; 14) Methodrone.
«Not to be confused with mephedrone or methedrone»,
the current edition of the Wikipedia article prudently warns us, and you'd
better heed that warning when you walk into any of the music stores that still
remain in your neighborhood unless you have nothing against accidentally
getting the heat on you. Actually, the album title is very smart — because
formally, all you can say is that it is a combination of "method" and
"drone", without any direct allusions to any heavy chemical
substances. And indeed, there's lots of droning here, and there most certainly
is a method: Anton Newcombe is one of those dangerous guys with conceptual
ideas in their heads who often force you to «respect» them even if you are
emotionally inclined to hate them and everything they stand for.
My major beef with Newcombe's ideology,
however, is not the way he conceives or plays his songs, but his insistence on
having us endure so many of them.
Almost all of these early BJM albums are insufferably long — of course, they
were made at the height of the CD era, when many people seriously thought that
LPs now should run up to 70 minutes by default just because their main physical
medium allows them to, but in Newcombe's case, I believe, we also have to deal
with additional egomania. (Oh, technically the songs are credited to the band
as a whole, and apparently Matt Hollywood, the bass player and occasional
vocalist, was also very much involved in the creative process, but not quite
enough to offer a distinct second identity.)
Methodrone, the BJM's proper official debut LP, is a
perfect illustration: 71 minutes of music that should have been pared down to
at most 40. Newcombe's formula is mostly the same for all these songs — slow,
repetitive, melodically minimalistic, trance-oriented guitar grooves — and this
makes the better realized ones get dissolved and camouflaged in the context of
the inferior material, so much so that even after three or four listens, I
still have memories of Methodrone as
a «collective substance», a species of musical earpaste, rather than a set of
songs where I could value the musical merits of each separate one. Which is not
necessarily bad, but I would probably prefer a 40-minute tube of earpaste than
this Jumbo package. Not being an elephant and all.
The departure from Spacegirl is felt here largely through improved production (as the
band was now affiliated with a real indie record label, Bomp! Records, and had
a couple of real producers working with them) and the lack of particularly
childish material like that "let me love you" bit from
ʽSpacegirlʼ itself. Other than that, the album is still answering the
same question: "What would have happened if Brian Jones had lived right
into the era of the Stone Roses and the early shoegazers?" Wait, scratch
that. Not «Brian Jones», really, who wasn't much of a composer or musical
ideologue, but «Roky Erickson» — if we have to choose one single figure that could
be defined as the grandaddy of the BJM sound circa 1995, that'd be The 13th
Floor Elevators with their garage-drone approach to exploding your
subconscious. Take one listen to the ten swirling minutes of
ʽHyperventilationʼ and you will find all the ingredients, with the
notable exception of the electric jug, perhaps, but that would make it just too obvious.
The best song here is probably still
ʽCrushedʼ, re-recorded in a much cleaner version and featuring an
even more suicidal, Robert Smith-influenced vocal from Newcombe. (ʽThat
Girl Suicideʼ also makes a repeat
appearance, but, despite the title, it sounds much less suicidal than
ʽCrushedʼ: the rotating-girating Stonesy pop riff and the falsetto
ooh-oohs give it the aura of a confused psychedelic carnival). As for the new
songs, they should probably be categorized depending on whether they lean more
to the funky Madchester side (not often here, but ʽWisdomʼ is
probably at least one such song) or to the «folk drone» side (the majority of the
tracks) or to the «random noise» side (like ʽRecordsʼ, which just
sounds like a lot of different tape shit slowed down and played backwards). The
«folk drones», in turn, can be spooky, or romantic, or spooky and romantic — Anton Newcombe is
probably not a guy you'd want to go out with (at least, not without the cover
of an entire drug squad not further than fifty feet away) — but what ties them
all together is that each song is basically one idea, exposed to you right away
and luring you with the promise of a mighty crescendo that rarely, if ever,
comes to pass.
For instance, ʽI Love Youʼ is just
about as straightforward as its title — two chords, one vocal line, steady
percussion, light magical chimes, four minutes of monotonous serenading. Were
this written circa 1966, the basic sequence might have been used by any band as
a brief intro to a real song. Thirty
years later, we are being implicitly told that the key to real (or, at least,
modern) psychedelia is repetition,
and that two chords repeated for four minutes have a better chance of putting
you into a spiritual trance than five chords repeated for three minutes with a
different bridge section. That may be so, but then, of course, it depends very
much on which particular two chords you choose and how you present them.
And there you have BJM's main weakness: Newcombe
is not a melodic genius and he is not
a master-commander of all sorts of sounds. Despite all the pretense, the BJM
are just a guitar-bass-drums band, and although this rigorous approach gives
them a certain sort of integrity (no synthesizers!), the sound may quickly
become tedious. And the chances of its becoming tedious actually increase
faster than they should, because eventually the songs start becoming larger,
and ʽHyperventilationʼ with ʽShe's Goneʼ (10 and 7 minutes
respectively) are quite likely to try your patience. Think your life moves
slowly enough to waste 10 minutes of it on one riff, against which some
dickhead keeps informing you that he's "sniffing glue" (as if anybody
ever doubted that)? Have so few problems that you can happily drift away to the
little brass loop of ʽShe's Goneʼ, losing yourself in the ether until
the song abruptly ends with the man telling you that "In my life, I've
seen it all"? Take a dose of Methodrone
and you get just what you want.
Ultimately, I think it is still reasonable to
view Methodrone as sort of a «boot
camp» for the band, which would go on to undeniably higher heights — yet it is
already an excellent illustration of their synthetic strengths and modernistic
weaknesses, and you can draw upon it to both understand why certain
underground minorities hailed Newcombe as their hero, while others failed to
notice him to such an extent that the BJM did not even properly manage to
become the torch-bearer for Sixties' revivalism.
TAKE IT FROM THE MAN! (1996)
1) Vacuum Boots; 2) Who?; 3)
Oh Lord; 4) Caress; 5) (David Bowie I Love You) Since I Was Six; 6) Straight Up
And Down; 7) Monster; 8) Take It From The Man; 9) B.S.A.; 10) Mary, Please; 11)
Monkey Puzzle; 12) Fucker; 13) Dawn; 14) Cabin Fever; 15) In My Life; 16) The
Be Song; 17) My Man Syd; 18) Straight Up And Down.
In 1996 alone, The Brian Jonestown Massacre
released three LPs — one in May, one
in June, and one in October. Avantgarde schizos and jazz wankers aside, the
last time I can remember a thing like that was Creedence Clearwater Revival in
1969, and even then the albums were shorter and the intervals were longer. So
does this mean that Anton Newcombe is the Miracle Man and the Creative
Superboss of the decade?
Well... see, the trick is that the man takes
really good care of each musical idea he comes up with. Where a «traditional»
pop-rock songwriter, were he diligent enough, would make three-minute long
songs where he would have to have at least one melody for the verse/chorus and
one for the bridge section, Newcombe makes four-minute long songs that have one
melody for everything, then slightly tweaks it around to create two or three more melodies out of it, which are then
reused for three or four other songs. As for the lengths, it is usually no
problem to take care of these since the typical tempo for Brian Jonestown
Massacre is «slow trot», almost literally so because the rhythm guitars are
strummed over one or two chords, giving you the feel of a leisurely carriage
ride through some endless English valley. Optionally — with Brian Jones himself
in his fur coat riding in the back.
The album itself is as much influenced by the
Stones as it is by the Beatles, or the Byrds, or any other mid-Sixties band
with a penchant for folk, drone, jangle, and psychedelia. Produced by Larry
Thrasher of Psychic TV and featuring now no less than four different guitar players, it completely dispenses with the
funky dance influences of Methodrone
and almost completely dispenses with
the band's shoegazing past, leaving only the «repetitiveness» principle as a
key stratagem to follow. In the meantime, Newcombe is trying to develop a
garage sneer for his singing voice, which is somewhat hard for him to do — he
does not look like a natural barker, snarler, or screamer, just a regular smart
guy who is either incapable of or afraid of «pushing too hard».
The one song from here that many people may be
aware of without knowing it is ʽStraight Up And Downʼ, which was
chosen by Terence Winter as the main theme track for Boardwalk Empire — cutting out the vocal part and just retaining
the intro, the guitar solo, and the coda. As far as patterns go, it is
tremendously typical of the classic BJM sound — the jangle, the drone, the slow
trot, the sparseness of ideas, the Sixties-style guitar tones, the little
feedback howl that puts an end to the tune. But, as most of the classic BJM
tunes, it is not particularly mind-blowing: just a nice, slightly manneristic,
exercise in jangling that does not seem to demand any strong emotional
reaction — or if it does, I'm not sure which one to choose.
If I were to choose one verse that summarizes
the spirit of the album, I'd currently go with this one: "I know the
difference between right and wrong / I pooled them all together and I made this
song / I know the difference between night and day / Doesn't really matter what
I think or say" (ʽCaressʼ). Incidentally, ʽCaressʼ is
the fastest song (the only fast song)
on the album, with a nervous tempo and freak-out blues guitar solos that
remind one of Dylan's early electric sound circa Bringing It All Back Home, and the lyrics and music convey well
enough the chief mood of Newcombe and BJM — confusion
in the face of an alien world that is impossible to understand, decipher, or
adapt to. There may be yet another link with Brian Jones here, regarding Newcombe's
own history of drug intake, but where drugs had destroyed Brian's originally
strong (if not entirely sane) mind, in Anton's case, they seem to be just sort
of a natural friend to an already deranged, or at least disoriented and heavily
warped conscience.
Three themes, or, rather, three questions are
running rampant through the record — (a) "Who the fuck am I?", (b)
"What the heck have they done to me?", and (c) "gee, you're like
beautiful or something, but aren't we both too batshit crazy to behave like two
normal people in love?". Each of the songs addresses at least one of these
questions, but sometimes two or even all three at the same time. You will very
quickly get used to that and judge the songs not by their message, but by
whether they have a cherry on top, in the form of a distinguishable hook — like
the rather ridiculous, but memorable falsetto holler of the title of
ʽWho?ʼ, maybe the best song the actual Who never wrote, though it
does ask the same question that they did. Or the gruff twangy resolution of
ʽCaressʼ. Or the swampy blues vamp of the title track — which is
probably the single most convincingly Stonesiest song on the album.
The not-so-sly references to additional heroes,
usually wedged in the titles rather than the lyrics, may be an additional bait
for reviewers, but do not think too much of them — ʽMy Man Sydʼ does
have a few vocal lines that are reminiscent of Barrett, yet the song is way too
«normal» for a genuine Barrett tribute, and ʽ(David Bowie I Love You)
Since I Was Sixʼ does borrow the verse melody from ʽSpace
Oddityʼ ("does she love you, you suppose..." = "ground
control to Major Tom..."), but that's about all it does, in toto (remember about the sparseness
of ideas — having two different chord sequences in the same song to Newcombe is
the epitome of extravagance). It is, however, important to be able to call out
all these spirits from the past, since both Bowie in his Major Tom days and
Barrett in his fruitcake days are like natural brothers to Mr. Newcombe.
Likewise, there is no better way to prove his
"pool them all together" approach in action than to offer a coda for
the second, much longer and much limper version of ʽStraight Up And
Downʼ, in which the man superimposes the "whoo-hoo's!" of
ʽSympathy For The Devilʼ on top of the "da, da, da-da da-da
da's" of ʽHey Judeʼ. Outside of context, this makes no sense,
but as a symbolic gesture, it's kinda cool — a forceful, but rational merger of
«good» and «evil» where one may not properly exist without the other (as well
as, perhaps, an ironic answer to the stupid «Beatles or Stones?» debate in
popular culture).
Like all BJM albums, this one, too, may have
been more efficient, had it been sensibly trimmed down — after a while, the
songs start to get way too repetitive not only in mood, but also in melody (I
originally mistook ʽThe Be Songʼ for yet another take on
ʽStraight Up And Downʼ, for instance, and it does not help that the
laid-back, druggy-hazy tempos of the songs make your brains a little mushy
after the first thirty or forty minutes). But taken on the level of «wholesome
experience» rather than individual songs, it succeeds in letting you in on this
ragged, confused vision; most importantly, no matter how transparent all the
influences are, it is clearly seen that Newcombe is his own master, and that he
merely uses «ancient» forms to express his own problems — ultimately, they may
be the same problems that Brian Jones used to have, but the trick is that Brian
Jones never had the time or the capacity to express them himself. In any case,
Brian Jones is more like a «spearhead» figure here, a tribal mascot, a lost
twin soul, rather than a source for meaningless copy-cat activity, and this
adds enough extra intrigue and suspense to a flawed, but interesting record to
guarantee a thumbs
up.
PS. I do have to add this, though: style-wise,
this and the following two albums have some of the most ugly, cringeworthy
covers I have ever had the misfortune of seeing — largely because of the
Godawful ugly font work. I mean, what the heck is this, Microsoft Office '95 or
something? Was Bomp! Records so utterly broke they couldn't hire these guys a
half-decent artist?
THEIR SATANIC MAJESTIES' SECOND REQUEST (1996)
1) All Around You (intro); 2)
Cold To The Touch; 3) Donovan Said; 4) In India You; 5) No Come Down; 6)
(Around You) Everywhere; 7) Jesus; 8) Before You; 9) Miss June '75; 10)
Anemone; 11) Baby (Prepraise); 12) Feelers; 13) Bad Baby; 14) Cause, I Lover;
15) (Baby) Love Of My Life; 16) Slowdown (Fuck Tomorrow)/Here It Comes; 17) All
Around You (outro).
Well, they asked
for it. It always takes a concentrated effort to discuss BJM music on its own
merits, without necessarily looking back on Newcombe's idols and dragging in
the comparative aspect — but with an album title like this, ignoring the
comparative aspect is like ignoring a public slap in the face. Clearly, this
is a legacy claim. I actually know a few people whose favorite Stones album is Their Satanic Majesties' Request, just
because they find the combination of the band's usual sneery/rebellious
arrogance with cosmic/psychedelic ambience so decidedly one-of-a-kind, and it
seems that Newcombe is one of these
people — he likes his transcendental inspiration to come along with some snap,
or vice versa. And here we are being told that it is this particular vibe that he wants to cherish and develop. Well, I
guess we already knew that before, but we weren't told about it so explicitly.
The problem is, I am neither at all sure that
that particular vibe could be
developed further, nor that Anton Newcombe, Matt Hollywood, and their temporary
partners are the perfect team to try out this development. That the album, once
again, is insanely long is only part of the problem — after all, if it works,
it works, and if it succeeds in unlocking your cosmic conscience, it no longer
matters how long it is because «time» as a concept becomes relative and all
that. A much bigger part of the problem is that this particular mojo doesn't seem to work on me, and if I succeed in explaining why, it might become obvious
that it also wouldn't work on many other people.
First and foremost, the record only remotely sounds like Satanic, and its differences are
usually of the negative kind. It is rich in instrumentation, yes, with lots of
Indian sitars and percussion, and some odd old-fashioned keyboards, but it is
nowhere near as rich in melodic ideas. The majority of these seventy-two
minutes are almost literally spent crawling
— monotonous acoustic drones, on top of which Newcombe and friends pile up all
the overdubs and effects. Not even ʽSing This All Togetherʼ or
ʽGomperʼ were that slow,
and underneath all of its trippiness Satanic
was really just a very strong pop/rock album — with great riffs
(ʽCitadelʼ), stern basslines (ʽ2000 Light Years From
Homeʼ), beautiful piano melodies (ʽShe's A Rainbowʼ), inventive
structural shifts (ʽ2000 Manʼ), and widely varying atmospheres for
different songs. In comparison — yes, in obligatory,
self-triggered comparison — this «second» Request
is just one dreary drone after another, where one melody usually suffices per
song. If you ever wondered how in the world Newcombe could pull three albums in
one year — well, I can offer a few unpleasant suggestions on where exactly he
pulled them from.
If there is one proper way to enjoy this album,
it must probably be handled on a very, very
hot summer day somewhere out in the country, when your brain is already half
turned to mush through climatic conditions, and you can do nothing whatsoever
except suck on ice cubes and wander around or lie around in a near-vegetative
state. (Alternately, there's artificial substances, but I'm hardly an expert on
those). Under these conditions, the limp stroll of these tunes, one by one, one
by one, might perfectly fit the environment, and help your struggling brain
readapt to the circumstances, or just forget about them altogether. But do NOT
make the mistake — like I did — of listening to this in a perfectly brisk and
vigorous state, because it will drag you down mercilessly, and not in a good, depressing sort of manner, either:
it will just mush you up all over.
To understand what I am talking about, it is
perfectly sufficient to listen to the first track: ʽAll Around Youʼ
greets you with a slo-o-o-o-w jangle-drone, group harmonies that sound like
dazed mantras, and a spoken lead vocal part where Newcombe basically just
welcomes you to chill out and enjoy the experience (thus, a song that pays
tribute to the opening ʽSing This All Togetherʼ and the closing ʽOn With The Showʼ at the same time,
except BJM take special care to purge out any
possible traces of «energy»). Gradually, there will be more guitars, keyboards,
and back vocals piling up on you, but the energy level will be constantly kept
at near-zero, and this is all you are
going to get not just from this song — from the entire album. Nothing here, not
a single song, sounds significantly different from the opener.
As it happens, despite the title, the Stones
are not really the major influence on
the album — I would probably have to say that Donovan is a bigger presence
(ʽDonovan Saidʼ is actually a rewrite of ʽThe Fat Angelʼ),
his not-too-catchy summer psycho-folk vibe reflected here as precisely as
anything; as for the melodies, Newcombe draws on the Beatles at least as much
as he does on the Stones (the short acoustic ballad ʽLove Of My Lifeʼ
borrows the chord progression from the beginning of ʽI'm Looking Through
Youʼ, and also has a Kinks vibe to it, I think), but since most of these
melodies are taken at such ridiculously slow tempos, they do not so much feel
as «melodies» as they do as «mind-melting note sequences», and since they melt
my mind rather than stick to it, how could I even begin describing this stuff?
I do admit there is some «songly» potential at
least in those tracks where Newcombe turns to the little devil inside him, and
succumbs to his blasphemous instigations — ʽJesusʼ is a desperate
Jobian plea because "I gave you my love but you tore me to pieces, have
mercy please Jesus", and ʽAnemoneʼ puts the blame on his girl
because "you should be picking me up, instead you're dragging me
down", and both are steadily and very lightly simmering with anxiety and
paranoia, but neither of the two dares bring up the tempo or kick it up
otherwise in the energy department, because, well, you know, it might just
spoil that hot summer mood. Everything has to be slow, quiet, implied rather
than felt directly, or it won't fit the rules of the game. Don't believe me?
The next-to-last track is called
ʽSlowdown (Fuck Tomorrow)ʼ, and it sounds like Syd Barrett had a twin
brother who was even more
incapacitated.
Despite all this, no thumbs down from me. I
understand that the record has a certain purpose and a certain style, and that
there are certain people and certain circumstances for which it could be much
more useful than the first Satanic Majesties' Request. I do
believe that the grooves could be made more interesting and less derivative,
but this is, after all, an album that openly celebrates the idea of «laziness»,
and such an album should consist of
nothing but «lazy» melodies with «lazy» arrangements, to which lazy people
would listen on lazy days, hanging out their lazy tongues and staring at static
skies with lazy eyes. That purpose is
definitely fulfilled to some extent, and so, from an objective stance, I
couldn't honestly say this is a «bad» record. I could honestly say, though, that it relates to the original Satanic Majesties — as well as most of
its other influences — much like Psycho
II relates to the original Psycho,
so do not fall for that type of legacy-claiming arrogance.
THANK GOD FOR MENTAL ILLNESS (1996)
1) Spanish Bee; 2) It Girl; 3)
13; 4) Ballad Of Jim Jones; 5) Those Memories; 6) Stars; 7) Free And Easy, Take
2; 8) Down; 9) Cause I Love Her; 10) Too Crazy To Care; 11) Talk - Action =
Shit; 12) True Love; 13) Sound Of Confusion.
Okay, this one is actually more like a friendly
post-scriptum to the two biggies from the same year. The first twelve tracks
are mostly acoustic or acoustic-based, feature an absolute minimum of
songwriting, and rarely go over three minutes — truly a record that could have
been planned, written, recorded and released by someone like Anton in a matter
of three days. The last track, included, I believe, mainly in accordance with
the «leave no space unfilled» strategy, is a lengthy collage that features
several minutes of street noises (cars, more cars, and still more cars), and
then a bunch of lo-fi recordings that mostly constitute alternate versions of old
songs from Spacegirl and Methodrone. So yeah, just like that.
Actually, the first half is rather nice. At
least it moves around at a larger variety of tempos than Second Request, and the short song lengths are also quite welcome.
There are no highlights or lowlights — the point is largely to imitate various
shades of acoustic pop and folk-rock circa 1965-66 which, at different times,
will remind you of the Beatles in their Rubber
Soul period, the Stones in their Aftermath
period, the Kinks in their Face To Face
period, the Easybeats in their ʽFriday On My Mindʼ period, Dylan in
either his Another Side or his Blonde On Blonde period, and of...
uh... ʽYou Are My Sunshineʼ as sung by Peter, Paul, and Mary
(ʽThose Memoriesʼ). The only catch is that these are all Newcombe
songs, and he predictably injects them with large dosages of his own bleak,
romance-without-answer personality.
Arguably the least predictable track is the
first one, ʽSpanish Beeʼ, where, to the sound of Spanish guitars and
castanets, over which additional guitars drone in morose tones, Newcombe states
that "This hopeless century, I've lived all alone" and that "I
could have died, because of your greed". Whose greed is not exactly clear — but what is clear is that the
dark Spanish style agrees with the BJM just as well as dark Anglo-Saxon folk or
Afro-American blues motives. Another thing that certainly separates these
acoustic tunes from all their influences is the endless pessimism and
skepticism which they are soaked in — even within these thirty minutes, there
is a general feel of total hopelessness that, in the Sixties, you couldn't even
get from such kings of «mope rock» as The Doors (who played it on a grand
theatrical level rather than on the «ordinary routine» level of Newcombe).
Besides, even the Doors had some simple love songs — with Newcombe, the idea of
a simple love song is always accompanied with the presupposition of «want her,
need her, can never get her, not in a million years». In a philosophical sense,
too — where «getting her» means much more than just a sexual liaison, and is
essentially impossible in a Kantian sense.
One thing that seriously bugs me, though, is
that once again it all smells of a self-conscious approach. The LP title — Thank God For Mental Illness — seems
awfully clever and uncomfortably true (considering how closely for comfort
great art is often tied in with mental illness), but we do not regularly see
actual madmen in art psychoanalyzing themselves (I mean, the abovementioned
Jim Morrison was definitely deranged, but could you see The Doors naming one of
their albums this way?). This casts a shadow of self-absorption and maybe even
unwarranted narcissism on the songs — like, who really is this Newcombe guy to appropriate songwriting and
emotion-wrenching techniques from all these giants of the Sixties for his own
egotistical purposes? Rewriting the classics is, after all, an act of
arrogance, and if the arrogance is unjustified, the ship goes down fairly
quickly. Oh, okay, at least the guy actually does drugs, so that's some sort of
consolation-justification, I guess. He's legit... not really, no.
But if you don't take it too seriously, the record offers some quirky fun that is at least
much easier to sit through than the endless slow drones of Second Request. I find it hard (if not useless) to discuss the
individual songs — unless in terms of how they rearrange, reroute, and rewire
the classics — but I found it easy fun listening to them, and in the light of
this, I can disregard the awful (as usual) album cover and give the record a
very lightweight thumbs up. And you can just detach and destroy the ʽSound
Of Confusionʼ part — it works much better as just a thirty minute long
album.
GIVE IT BACK! (1997)
1) Super-Sonic; 2) This Is Why
You Love Me; 3) Satellite; 4) Malela; 5) Salaam; 6) Whoever You Are; 7) Sue; 8)
(You Better Love Me) Before I Am Gone; 9) Not If You Were The Last Dandy On
Earth; 10) #1 Hit Jam; 11) Servo; 12) The Devil May Care (Mom & Dad Don't);
13) Their Satanic Majesties' Second Request.
It's too bad there are but 365 days in a year,
because Give It Back! sounds so very much like those preceding three
albums, it might just as well have been written and recorded by Newcombe in a
matter of just a few more days, and then The Brian Jonestown Massacre would
have four records released within one year and set a personal high that
even Frank Zappa would find rather hard to beat. There are some new band
members here, including guitarist Peter Hayes who stayed with the band but
briefly and then went on to form the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, but let that
not bother you, because Newcombe is the Ian Anderson of this band and he ain't
never letting its identity slip away or be usurped by an intruder, no matter
how many different brands of hard drugs he is on at any given particular
moment.
Some fans actually regard this as a special
high point in BJM history, swearing by Give It Back! as a masterpiece or
the culmination of everything that made this band so great — a sentiment I find
hard to share, because the word «culmination» indicates some sort of growth or
at least some sort of «still haven't found (var.: finally have found) what I'm
looking for» idea, whereas Newcombe's Sixties-fueled, drug-powered brain does
not really function all that much in «search» mode — it simply has its own
steady rate of predetermined metabolism. I could not even begin to describe in
general what separates Give It Back! from the 1996 albums — so let
us just talk a bit about the individual songs instead.
ʽSuper-Sonicʼ has a cool groove going
on, with a bluesy bassline, funky percussion, Indian sitars, and noisy
shoegaze-style lead guitars in the background — a freaky, typically BJM
combination of ingredients, over which Anton pours out his usual
vegetative-state mumbly philosophizing about living alone and how it's alright
for him and not alright for her. As predictable as the song's strengths are,
its flaws are equally easy to guess — it is a bit hard to sit through a
five-minute song where everything that could have happened did so over the
introduction and the first few bars of the main theme. But this complaint, as
usual, applies to everything here that runs over three minutes and irritates
people whose attention span for this kind of music qualifies as «short» (like myself,
who'd rather waste my time on something a little more energetic and dynamic
than the BJM — like Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon).
Most of the other songs, if they are good,
display this goodness in the same way: one nice melody looped in static mode.
If they are not very good... they have one boring melody looped in static mode,
like ʽSatelliteʼ, which simply takes the old ʽGreen Onionsʼ
theme, modifies it very slightly, piles up additional acoustic and electric
guitars, but does not care about making it snappy and aggressive — the whole
thing limps, and if you're gonna limp all the way, at least do it in a more
moody fashion. ʽSueʼ, the longest track on the album, is much better,
especially in headphones where you have one folk-style lead guitar part
serenading in your left ear and one heavy wah-wah blues-rock part blaring away
in your right ear, but both mixed in at low volumes so as not to drown out the
basic rhythm track — or else, God forbid, you might want to play air guitar or
something instead of just bobbing your head up and down and sideways at the
trance-inducing sound waves. But yeah, that wah-wah solo is actually quite
frantic when you focus on it.
Of special note might be the brief jangle-rock
tune ʽThis Is Why You Love Meʼ, which cannot really be anything other
than a loving tribute to Gene Clark's ʽI'll Feel A Whole Lot Betterʼ
— the difference being that, for some reason, the BJM track is neither played,
nor sung, nor produced as nice-and-tight as any of the early Byrds material (go
figure). And on the fast-paced ʽMalelaʼ, they try to play the sitar
as if it were a banjo (well, sitars and banjos do have similar timbres, don't
they?), even borrowing a few note sequences from ʽPaint It Blackʼ,
but the end result is mildly funny rather than depressing.
The song ʽNot If You Were The Last Dandy
On Earthʼ caused some controversy — formally, it was an obvious answer to
The Dandy Warhols' ʽNot If You Were The Last Junkie On Earthʼ:
apparently, the Warhols' song was a friendly reprimand of the BJM for sticking
to drugs in an age when drugs are already so passé, to which
Newcombe replies with a reprimand of the Warhols for sticking to «dandyism»
when dandyism is already so passé, well, you know the rest. At
least it helps Anton get a little angry and play some pissed-off distorted
leads on a true garage rocker, although I would not describe it as a
particularly good song — they just thought it necessary to hit back (not very
successfully, because the Warhols' track was a commercial hit on the UK charts,
whereas the BJM never charted at all).
The album also continues the age-honored
tradition of putting your album title in one place and your song title in another
— the lead-out track is ʽTheir Satanic Majesties' Second Requestʼ, a
rather boring sonic collage whose only distinctive point is the sound of heavy
snoring, looped all over the track and possibly sampled from the Stones'
ʽIn Another Landʼ, or, at least, paying tribute to that song and
Bill Wyman's massive lung activity. Not that the song title has anything to do
with the collage, or Newcombe has anything to do with Bill Wyman, or anything
has got to do with anything — all of this is on a simple take-it-or-leave-it
level. I take some of it, but, as usual, I'd rather distill this album down to
about 15 minutes of music rather than accept it as 55.
STRUNG OUT IN HEAVEN (1998)
1) Going To Hell; 2) Let's
Pretend That It's Summer; 3) Wasting Away; 4) Jennifer; 5) Got My Eye On You;
6) Nothing To Lose; 7) Love; 8) Maybe Tomorrow; 9) Spun; 10) I've Been Waiting;
11) Dawn; 12) Lantern; 13) Wisdom.
This was the band's only release on a «major
minor label», as they temporarily switched from Bomp! Records to the larger TVT
Records, whose biggest claim to fame up till then were the Nine Inch Nails —
hardly the closest band to BJM in terms of style and attitude, but somehow the
TVT people thought Newcombe and his pals had a bright commercial future before
them, and signed them to a multi-record deal. The deal lasted for just one
album — this one — and when it flunked, the band got dropped again, with an
ever lessening chance to be one day picked up by Warner Bros. or Sony Music
Entertainment.
Since Newcombe's dependency on heroin by this
time was said to be near-complete, allegedly much of the work fell on the
shoulders of Matt Hollywood, and this may be the reason why the record
is slightly shorter than usual, and more dynamic — and also even more retro —
than usual: although the tempos are still slow rather than fast, there are very
few mind-numbing drones, and for the most part the band here just concentrates
on a modest, unpretentious pop-rock and folk-rock sound, so that the absolute
majority of the songs here sound like inferior imitations of mid-Sixties
masterpieces. Okay, so there's nothing essentially new in this statement — it
just needs to be stressed that this is the first BJM album that does not even
begin to try to build upon the legacy of the elders; instead, it merely
imitates that legacy.
Probably the most blatant imitation for those
in the know will come with the second song, ʽLet's Pretend That It's
Summerʼ, whose ominously melancholic beginning is transparently
reminiscent of The Kinks, particularly ʽDead End Streetʼ and similar
songs. Ah, but if only Newcombe and Hollywood were really endowed with
the genius of a Ray Davies! As it happens, the ominousness of the verses is
completely wasted on the limp, disappointing chorus — the "let's laugh,
have fun..." part, suddenly changing tempo and tonality and borrowing its
bassline from the Beatles' ʽRevolution 1ʼ (yes indeed!), dissipates,
rather than explodes, the tension build-up of the verse, and, in my opinion, is
a first-rate example of how not to write a pop song if you truly want to
hook your listener. And since these examples could be easily multiplied, it is
no wonder that even a larger label was unable to properly promote the BJM — the
Sixties' stylistics might have been «classy» all right, but class without
catchiness is a poor contributor to album sales.
ʽWasting Awayʼ is another strange
creation, with generational lyrics that seem to have been intentionally written
from a Sixties' perspective: "The kids today / They got nothing to say /
Because they taught them that way" — and the accompanying sad harmonica
solo brings Neil Young to mind (was there ever a Neil Young reference in a BJM
review prior to this? If no, we're making progress). Nice sound, right message,
but is this an interesting song? The harmonica solo is probably the best part
about it. The rest — well, the song is just too limp and lazy to properly match
the aggressive accusations of the lyrics. If I were an angry young man and I
heard Anton Newcombe telling me that I'm wasting my life away in this sort of
relaxed, nonchalant fashion, I would probably just tell him to go fuck himself
— and it just ain't clear who of us exactly would be wasting his life away,
anyway.
Or a love song like ʽJenniferʼ —
there's, like, one jangly guitar line holding the entire song together,
and normally you expect a line like this to serve as a building block for
something bigger, but this is just nonsense: it's like coming to a fancy
restaurant, getting a nice bread basket for starters and then, much to your
surprise, finding out that you are going to get nothing other than nice bread
baskets until the end of the day. Come on, guys! Do something! Add an
extra frickin' chord, for Chrissake! This is a tribute to Sixties pop — not
even Gerry and The Pacemakers would tolerate such arrogantly lazy songwriting!
To cut a long story short, or, rather, to
excuse myself for being unable to come up with a long story, Strung Out In
Heaven has a very pleasant sound that will be doubly pleasant to all those
who like old school folk rock, but do not like monotonous psychedelia. It even
has a few oldies re-recorded here to match their then-current understanding of
an ideal sound (ʽWisdomʼ from Methodrone, which most people
must have forgotten completely by 1998). There is not a single bad song — but
there is not one single song here I'd ever love to hear again, either, because
the melodies are derivative, the hooks are not well developed, and the
production, devoid of BJM's usual layers of multi-everything, is boring. Not
coincidentally, almost every other review of this record I've seen usually
avoids, intentionally or not, talking about the individual songs — because,
well, there's just nothing to say. Good acoustic guitar tones. Not so good
singing. Whatever.
BRAVERY, REPETITION AND NOISE (2001)
1) Just For Today; 2) Telegram;
3) Stolen; 4) Open Heart Surgery; 5) Nevertheless; 6) Sailor; 7) You Have Been
Disconnected; 8) Leave Nothing For Sancho; 9) Let Me Stand Next To Your Flower;
10) If I Love You?; 11) (I Love You) Always; 12) If I Love You? (New European
Gold Standard Secret Babylonian Brotherhood Cinema Mix).
Repetition — by all means. Noise — not all that
much, compared to what commonly passes for «noise» in 2001. Bravery — well, I
would guess that if Anton Newcombe were capable of writing better songs than
these, then preferring to release this album instead would require some
bravery. As it is, I don't see much bravery here. Certainly dismissing
long-time partner Matt Hollywood from the band after some onstage argument does
not count as «bravery». Maybe the stubborn way of sticking to the same
dronified formula counts as «bravery», from some point of view. But is there
any other formula to which Newcombe could switch over without saying goodbye
to Brian Jonestown? Did he even have a choice at that point?..
The album feels like a rather natural follow-up
to Strung Out In Heaven, largely
avoiding lengthy spaced-out jams in favor of shorter pop tunes — and, as
already predicted by the model, they are typically slow, folksy, dependent on
monotonously strummed chords, and go easier than easy on the hooks. The mood is
almost completely fixed in place: no fast rockers, no psychedelic freakouts,
just one slow, drowsy, dark-folk shuffle after another. The three chords that
open the album (ʽJust For Todayʼ) perfectly capture the bleakness and
somberness of everything that follows, but the song itself never goes anywhere
once its main rhythm line is established, and that droning pattern on its own
offers little redemption — and not only is Newcombe's singing mumbled as usual,
but it is also awfully mixed-in this time, as if he were trying to correlate
his troubled state of mind with the shittiest possible way his troubled voice
could reach your troubled ears out of the troubled speakers. In short, we're in
trouble.
I like the song ʽYou Have Been
Disconnectedʼ. Once the obligatory jangly pattern has set in, the band
adds a nice, memorable organ riff to it — nothing too phenomenal, but just the
right touch on the way of transforming the proceedings into solid pop music,
where even Newcombe's ghostly singing seems well aligned with the
phantasmagoric organ tone. The organ on ʽOpen Heart Surgeryʼ,
another relative success, also sharpens and enhances the mood, and the song
itself is largely free from droning, being totally focused on that organ and a
gloomy bass riff. It is one of the few times, also, that Anton tries to
overclock himself, which led to some reviewers happily comparing the track's
style to The Cure — the big difference, of course, being that Robert Smith would
probably have somebody's head on a platter for that sort of arrangement and
sloppy production, and he would just keep on layering instrument after
instrument so that the depth of the tragedy would be increased every several
bars. But Newcombe — you know that guy, he says it all right from the start:
«building up» is for pussies.
There is one cover here, of a predictably
obscure oldie (ʽSailorʼ by The Cryan' Shames), a good song in its own
right but completely lost in this general context — leave it to Anton to
transform potential gorgeousness into stoned-out-of-your-mind monotonousness.
ʽLet Me Stand Next To Your Flowerʼ may be a pun on the Hendrix line,
but the song has nothing to do with Jimi — it is just another monotonous,
martial-style pop tune that fundamentally sounds like the Beatles' ʽGood
Day Sunshineʼ with all the joy (and sunshine) surgically removed and
replaced with drugged-out numbness. Same goes for ʽIf I Love You?ʼ in
both its versions (a stripped-down acoustic rendition) and then a much
lengthier, «epic» rendition at the end of the album — a song delivered in such
a frozen tone, at such a somnambulant pace, that the answer to the rhetorical
question cannot be anything other than "please define love first, and we'll talk later".
Not that any of these tunes are artistically
insincere: as usual, they seem to reflect Newcombe's proper state of mind at
the time really well. The problem is that we have already known that state of
mind for quite some years now, and it is hardly the most fascinating or
stimulating state of mind in the world. Nor does it make much sense to woo us
over by focusing on the dark shades of Jim Jarmusch (yes, that is him) on the
front cover — just the mere fact that (one of) the world's trendiest arthouse
directors thus endorses the creativity of the BJM should only make matters
worse: in reality, the BJM rise above the usual «hipster boy» level, and hardly
need to emphasize their coolness in such additional ways. (Jarmusch did use one
of their songs in the soundtrack to Broken
Flowers, but was there any real need to «return the favor»?).
On the whole, the record is like a compromise
between the «trance» and the «retro pop» aspects of the band — pop music with
detached pop hooks, converted into «trance» by the somewhat dehumanized spirit
of its creator. Since it achieves its goals, has a few nice songs, and features
the usual classy retro sound that we always expect from Anton and his team, it
would be impolite to give it a thumbs down. But will I ever listen to it again?
Meaningless question — in Newcombe's world, time stands perfectly still, and
there is no such thing as «again», I guess.
...AND THIS IS OUR MUSIC (2003)
1) The
Wrong Way; 2) Introesque; 3) Starcleaner; 4) Here To Go; 5) When Jokers Attack;
6) Prozac Vs. Heroin; 7) Geezers; 8) Maryanne; 9) You Look Great When I'm
Fucked Up; 10) Here It Comes; 11) What Did You Say?; 12) Prozac Vs. Herion
Revisited; 13) A New Low In Getting High; 14) Some Things Go Without Saying;
15) Tschusse; 16) The Pregnancy Test; 17) The Right Way.
I almost feel sorry for this, you know, but the
further on we advance along the Newcombe trail, the more it starts to resemble
some lonely Arizona highway where a solitary cactus causes as much excitement
as Khufu's Pyramid. No, it is not true that all of his albums sound alike. This
one, for instance, sees the (re-)introduction of electronic instruments that
make it seem more like a traditional/modern hybrid than any of the preceding
three or four records. But to what end, if the basic approach to music making
remains completely the same?
Probably the most innovative and amusing touch
here are the intro and outro — ʽThe Wrong Wayʼ captures one of
Anton's girlfriends on the answering machine, furiously complaining about how
much of an asshole he has been, and ʽThe Right Wayʼ finishes off the
album with another of his lady friends (Sarah Jane from The Out Crowd) with a
far more friendly message. Even those tracks, however, were apparently used by
Anton without explicit permission from either of the girls (so the «asshole»
component actually finds confirmation), and had to be deleted from some of the
later digital versions of the album — and even if they are left in, this is as
much a sign of artistic invention as it is of pointless egotism.
When it comes to the music, though, nothing
helps. You would think that at least a song titled as magnificently as
ʽProzac Vs. Heroinʼ could turn out to be a musical masterpiece —
instead, it is just another two-chord acoustic drone lazily adorned with
minimal electric guitar solos and wispy strings, as Newcombe sings in his usual
«I'm-too-stoned-to-order-my-brain-to-switch-to-a-different-note» fashion. You
come here expecting some sort of musical battle, between the dark (heroin?)
and the light (prozac?) or something, and all you find is this numb droning.
Pleasant enough and tastefully produced as usual, but about as exciting as your
average anesthetic. And then, once it's over, you get ʽGeezersʼ which
is basically five minutes more of the same.
Electronics do not help. On
ʽStarcleanerʼ, you have digital keyboards and drum machines, but it
is still just two and a half minutes of sleepy droning. «Astral noises» on
ʽYou Look Great When You're Fucked Upʼ cannot mask the fact that it
is basically just the same mind-numbing acoustic guitar pattern over and over
again, and the noises themselves are as lazy in coming as the rhythm track —
ʽInterstellar Overdriveʼ would come across as Slayer in terms of
madness and energy when compared to this yawnfest.
The only way to somehow enjoy this record is to completely clean your head from any
possible associations — just forget that music existed prior to 2003, period.
Woe is me! I cannot do that, and am forever doomed to this one reaction when I
hear the beginning of ʽA New Low In Getting Highʼ: «Put Neil Young in
the studio, tie a 50-pound weight to each of his limbs, inject him with a pound
of laxatives, make him play ʽLove And Only Loveʼ, and this is what
you get». Or to this one when I force myself to become sensitive to the Grand
Tragic Finale of ʽTschusseʼ: «Put Robert Smith in the studio, tie a
50-pound weight to...», okay, sorry for repeating myself, but so does this guy,
and at least he gets paid for this.
Well, occasionally, at least.
Because of all these associations, my mind may
be clouded, but this time, there is not a single song here for which my brain
would voluntarily agree to allocate even a single memory cell, other than
within a negative force field (as in, ʽHere It Comesʼ brings on sweet
memories of Neil Young's ʽOh Lonesome Meʼ, so hey, a nice pretext to
go put on After The Gold Rush one more
time). Is that a sign of stubborn close-mindedness? At this moment, I don't
really think I care any more — so, with a sigh of relief, as Sarah Jane says
her sweet goodbyes to Anton for the third time, we leave them with a thumbs down
in their hazy padded cell. And God knows I'm a big fan of padded cells in
general — they're great when you can let your imagination run wild and just use
the walls as a canvas. But when you're just sitting there looking at your own
spit slowly dribbling from the wall down to the floor... well, not quite so
exciting, I'd say.
MY BLOODY UNDERGROUND (2008)
1) Bring Me The Head Of Paul
McCartney On Heather Mill's Wooden Peg (Dropping Bombs On The White House); 2)
Infinite Wisdom Tooth / My Last Night In Bed With You; 3) Who's Fucking Pissed
In My Well?; 4) We Are The Niggers Of The World; 5) Who Cares Why; 6) Yeah
Yeah; 7) Golden Frost; 8) Just Like Kicking Jesus; 9) Ljósmyndir; 10)
Auto-Matic-Faggot For The People; 11) Dark-Wave-Driver / Big Drill Car; 12)
Monkey Powder; 13) Black Hole Symphony.
Finally, a significant detour — it took almost
five years to complete it, but this is probably the most major stylistic shift
for Newcombe ever since he'd abandoned shoegaze and contemporary dance rhythms
in favor of recreating the hypothetical mindset of post-pool era Brian Jones.
The album title itself is indicative of the change: My Bloody Valentine were a
larger influence on the BJM circa Methodrone
rather than in the past decade, and The Velvet Underground were always a huge
influence, but more formally than substantially — «drone» being a major link
and all, yet up to now Newcombe had largely bypassed the Velvets' penchant for
reckless, abrazive experimentation, «ugliness», and «nastiness».
Time for rethinking that abstinence. For years
now, Newcombe has had his own record label, titled The Committee To Keep Music
Evil, and yet neither of his previous two albums seemed like they were
perfectly in touch with that name. Now, armed with some particularly hard drugs
and additional stipulations (like no talking whatsoever in the studio),
Newcombe seems bent on finally bringing his music in line with that name — or
at least, the song titles, the first one of which alone could have earned him a
wanted poster from millions of Beatle fans, had he at least a one thousandth
share of recognition of Heather Mills' husband. Not that the song title has anything
to do with the song's lyrics or the song's music — it's just a gratuitous
swipe, you know, to keep the music evil.
Of course, the basic BJM principles have not
really changed. The main modus operandi
remains as simple as it used to be: one midtempo musical idea per song, looped
and whipped mercilessly unto self-extinction. But now the focus is on making
these ideas nasty and funky, rather than limp and somnambulant. Suddenly the
junkie flips a switch, and his vibes are no longer wasted and dissipated
somewhere in outer space, but sharpened, poisoned, and directed right at you. This still does not excuse the
album's awful length (almost 80 minutes in total), but somehow it makes it
easier to sit through it without swallowing your tongue or locking your eyelids
than through quite a few of BJM's much shorter records.
The «meat» of the album lies in its dark,
distorted, grumbly, repetitive epics: ʽWho Cares Whyʼ,
ʽAuto-Matic-Faggot For The Peopleʼ (oh, that title), ʽDark Wave
Driverʼ, and especially ʽMonkey Powderʼ with its particularly
eerie rising-and-falling bass groove. If you think they sound like a cross
between classic Hawkwind and classic Sonic Youth, you are most likely right:
and unlike either of these bands, Newcombe is perfectly willing to disallow
even minor bits of variation as the
groove grooves along, what with his well-known aversion to «musical
development» within any given musical track. Yet somehow, this «dark ambience»
seems more tolerable and even more sensible than the «limp ambience» of past
albums — maybe because of the relative freshness of the approach, or maybe
because the deep bass riffs of the grooves make deeper impressions and make
you feel like you're walking along a treacherous, creepy, but vaguely exciting
path, rather than just making your way through an endless irritating field of
hemp.
Naturally, even this does not last forever: the
album has its fair share of obvious missteps, such as the solo piano piece
ʽWe Are The Niggers Of The Worldʼ, whose fairly strong title should
at least suggest depths of sorrow or heights of anger — instead, it sounds like
somebody trying to ape one of Keith Jarrett's improvisation styles (and not
doing a complete suckjob, actually, but something tells me this piece was far
from improvised, which makes all the difference). And while the concluding
piece, ʽBlack Hole Symphonyʼ, shows that Newcombe has progressed far
enough in his mastery of electronics to be able to produce at least one awesome
sonic loop that does remind you of black holes, looping it for ten minutes
really means that he is aware that you can shut it off any second. And the
funniest thing is, regardless of the outcome, Newcombe wins — if you shut it
off prematurely, he has manipulated you into getting angry, and if you do not,
he has manipulated you into getting stupid.
But I am still closing my eyes on this and
giving the album a thumbs up, if only for one of the most genuinely
weird tracks produced in the decade — by accident, no doubt, yet even so
ʽLjósmyndirʼ (ʽPhotographsʼ in Icelandic) is as
simple as it is baffling: a minimalistic soundscape of cold ambient
synthesizers, over which are scattered echoey pieces of Icelandic babble. It
does look silly on paper, yet for some reason I find it strangely more
enchanting than your average BJM limp-groove, and if it is some sort of
Newcombe-tribute to the magic island that gave us Björk, Sigur Rós,
and Eyjafjallajökull, the man has captured its essence in one stroke.
Which only makes it so much more frustrating to realize how much of that
natural talent he has wasted over intellectual conceptualization and, let us be
frank, conceptual castration of his ideas. Yes, the man got talent to burn —
but then most of it gets burned over drugs or over intentional creative laziness
that gets presented as the next step in artistic vision. Go figure.
WHO KILLED SGT. PEPPER? (2010)
1) Tempo 116.7 (Reaching For
Dangerous Levels Of Sobriety); 2) Þungur Hnífur; 3) Let's Go
Fucking Mental; 4) White Music; 5) This Is The First Of Your Last Warnings; 6) This
Is The One Thing We Did Not Want To Have Happen; 7) The One; 8) Someplace Else
Unknown; 9) Detka! Detka! Detka!; 10) Super Fucked; 11) Our Time; 12) Feel It
(Of Course We Fucking Do); 13) Felt Tipped-Pen Pictures Of UFOs.
Judging by the album cover, one might conclude
that it was either Jesus who killed Sgt. Pepper, perhaps in retaliation for
John Lennon's blasphemy, or, even more shockingly, that Jesus was Sgt. Pepper, in which case lines
like "Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play" would take on a whole new
light — in fact, the whole Sgt. Pepper
would be actually a concept album about the life of Jesus, who'd love to turn
you on with a little help from his friends (St. Peter, St. James, etc.),
especially since it's getting better all the time, and she's leaving home to
meet a man from the motor trade (shouldn't that be carpenter trade?), and ʽWhen I'm Sixty Fourʼ is, of
course, about The Last Temptation Of
Christ, and...
...sorry, well, at least that's one fine
direction of thought that came from this BJM album without me hearing even one
note of it. However, I am sad to say that this direction of thought has nothing
whatsoever to do with the album itself — which, incidentally, happens to be the
weirdest offering from Newcombe in almost twenty years, and even if it rarely
works on gut level (you'd have to have your guts made out of nylon for that),
the very fact of its existence is somewhat of a consolation, since psychedelic
musical surprises come so rarely these days.
We will proceed from the basic assumption that
this album is total crap, which will make things easier for us. As usual,
Newcombe dispenses his ideas with extreme frugality — hardly more than one per
track — and, as usual, the album runs over seventy minutes. As usual, he
appropriates and assimilates rather than invents. And he seems to have almost
completely finalized the shift from «song-based» to «jam-based» music: the
absolute majority of these tracks are just vamps, and if there are any words,
they are repetitive mantras (as in, "let's go fuckin' mental, let's go fuckin'
mental, la la la la, la la la la...") rather than verse-chorus
constructions. And it probably took half an hour to figure out most of the
album's melodic moves.
But the album lives, further expanding and
polishing the new style of My Bloody
Underground, now with twenty percent extra black venom as deep-cutting bass
lines, metalic fuzz, and hard-whacking drum machines completely take over and
turn the album into an endless journey through a series of harmless, but
intimidating musical black holes. The band that once epitomized sonic
narcolepsy has truly awoken — or, rather, entered a period of hyperactivity
while still in a somnambulant state, like a narcoleptic on heavy amphetamines. And
I find myself as puzzled as anybody, but much of the time it works.
The main part of the ride begins with the
second track (the one with the Icelandic title), which is the closest Anton
ever got to reproducing the classic Hawkwind vibe — a dark, brutal
psycho-boogie with all sorts of astral effects, cymbal-heavy percussion, and an
ugly nasal-vocal accompaniment that we could all do without. ʽLet's Go
Fucking Mentalʼ is designed as some sort of a trippy carousel ride around
a dirty-sounding R'n'B guitar-and-harmonica groove with a nasty,
not-give-a-damn attitude, rather than any intentions of having a good time, to
it. ʽThis Is The First...ʼ has probably the best bass line on the
album, emphasized with foamy-bubbly electronic effects and ridiculously
pseudo-passionate Icelandic vocals, all the while chugging along at a
relatively fast, very much danceable tempo — post-disco meets post-rock, or at
least catches a brief envying glimpse of it from a distance.
The real attraction of the record, though, is
that it actually gets weirder and weirder as time goes by. ʽThis Is The
One Thingʼ is a collage of two Joy Division songs (the "we were
strangers" chorus from ʽI Remember Nothingʼ and the rhythm
section of ʽShe's Lost Controlʼ), with additional lyrics and guitar
grooves from Anton himself — the resulting atmosphere is nothing like the
intimate bleakness of Joy Division, but it borrows nicely from that bleakness
to add to the general «self-induced angry madness» of the album. Joy Division
influence blips one more time later, on ʽSomeplace Else Unknownʼ
(whose vocal melody and lyrics borrow from ʽInterzoneʼ), but the peak
of the weirdness is reached on ʽDetka! Detka!ʼ (ʽBaby,
Babyʼ) — an odd ska groove here with the entire song delivered in Russian, apparently by some guy from
the completely unknown Russian band «Amazing Electronic Talking Cave».
Absolutely no idea how they got in touch with Newcombe or why he thought that a
little bit of Russian rock infusion would be a meaningful addition to his
legacy, but there it is — for the record, the repetitive bridge section
literally translates from Russian as "I will love you only after I
die", which is a very Russian thing to mention in the context of a pop
song, but few will ever know about that... and now you're one of those happy
few who do know.
The final track here is neither a song nor even
a groove — it is a simple ambient piece with just one soothing keyboard phrase,
over which Newcombe first overdubs John Lennon's famous interview in which he
apologizes for the "Beatles are bigger than Jesus" thing, and then
some British girl's lengthy, raving, and frantic denouncement of Lennon as a
phony. This is, the way I gather, not so much a musical piece as another one of
Newcombe's naughty keep-music-evil statements — as much as he clearly loves the
Beatles (and who doesn't?), he finds it his duty
to treat them as at least whippable, if not slayable, sacred cows, because, you
know, otherwise he'll look like a fanboy rather than a respectable artist, and
what will remain of The Brian Jonestown Massacre if they stop looking like
respectable artists? Just monotonous grooves without a cause. The Committee To
Keep Music Evil cannot allow that. Besides, if there is one single track on
this album that can really drop you a clue as to who actually killed Sgt.
Pepper, it is surely this one.
Despite some of these rather easily disclosed
and predictable moves, on the whole I think that the album deserves its thumbs up
— I mean, it nurtures and develops the curious direction of My Bloody Underground with extra care,
so how could it be different? Maybe it is not half as «evil» as it positions
itself to be, but that is still twice as «evil» as, say, your average
cartoonish death metal album or whatever else passes for «evil» these days. Driven
by a general unified purpose, monotonous in structure, but diverse and
unpredictable in ideas, and, above all, kicking some ass in terms of sheer execution
— that is at least something that should be encouraged, so let us be forgiving
in details and encouraging on the general scale.
AUFHEBEN (2012)
1) Panic In Babylon; 2)
Viholliseni Maalla; 3) Gaz Hilarant; 4) Illuminomi; 5) I Want To Hold Your
Other Hand; 6) Face Down On The Moon; 7) The Clouds Are Lies; 8) Stairway To
The Best Party In The Universe; 9) Seven Kinds Of Wonderful; 10) Waking Up To
Hand Grenades; 11) Blue Order / New Monday.
According to Hegelian dialectics, Aufheben («picking up» or «canceling»)
is the process that takes place when a thesis is confronted with an anti-thesis
— presumably followed by synthesis. This either invites a dialectical approach
towards understanding this album by The Brian Jonestown Massacre, or it could
mean that Anton Newcombe once took a German dictionary off the shelf, opened it
on a random page, and let Fate decide to guide him through to a connection with
Hegel — because, let's face it, Hegel was a fairly psychedelic guy, despite all
the formal-logical trappings. And yes, you guessed it — Hegel could be just as
boring as The Brian Jonestown Massacre, and he could be just as proud of it,
too.
If I think really, really hard, I could
actually lead myself towards understanding Aufheben
(the album) as a synthesis of sorts — it is, indeed, a cross between the dark
groovery of the band's last two albums and
their earlier, softer, limper homage to Sixties' psychedelia. A song like
ʽI Want To Hold Your Other Handʼ, for instance, would be totally out
of place on My Bloody Underground,
and even though its association with the Beatles ends with its name (in the time
that it takes Anton to get his point across, John Lennon would have had the
time to hold your hand, hold your other hand, hold your legs, hold all the
other parts of your body, and dump you for Yoko Ono), it does bring us back the
old personality of Anton Newcombe, one that we'd almost forgotten with all
that po-mo weirdness of killing Sgt. Pepper with Russian lyrics.
The album starts out with a couple dark, but
not too bass-heavy grooves: ʽPanic In Babylonʼ is set to a cool,
steady rock beat with Near Eastern woodwind overtones (a little reminiscent of
old Hawkwind experiments in such mergers), and ʽViholliseni Maallaʼ
has a Finnish title because the lead vocals are gallantly ceded over to Eliza
Karmasalo, who must be Finnish (I suppose) and who lends the track a certain
clichéd coldness, while in the background the band is entertaining us
with chiming guitar leads, and occasionally a Robert Smith-style melancholic,
echoey guitar line will break through the clearing as well and send you on a
gloomy trip down memory lane. Both tracks sound fine, but... lightweight — like Air or some of those
other atmospheric, psycho-adult-contemporary entertainers that understand
beauty, but do not strive for the whole depth of it. But that's okay, we can
take it. We have long since given up on the idea that Anton Newcombe could lead
us into the promised land anyway.
From there on, we just keep drifting between
these steady rock beat grooves and throwbacks to 1966 (sometimes very harsh
throwbacks — ʽStairway To The Best Party In The Universeʼ, despite
the title, steals its sitar riff from the Stones' ʽPaint It Blackʼ
rather than from Led Zeppelin... ah crap, I'm getting really tired of jotting down all these combinations), but on the
whole, the record does not shoot for the same kind of thoroughly unpredictable
weirdness as its predecessor. There are some leisurely, «retro-progressive» (hey,
nice word) flute-and-sitar instrumentals like ʽFace Down On The
Moonʼ; some pastoral themes with swooping strings to disorient your brain
(ʽThe Clouds Are Liesʼ); and some tracks that are seriously messed up
with vocal overdubs (ʽSeven Kinds Of Wonderfulʼ, where they seem to
be singing in French, but it is really hard to tell because the polyphony is
so overwhelming).
I like the way it all sounds — even if the
weirdness and the heaviness have been toned down, the album only rarely reminds
me of the irritating laziness of past BJM «masterpieces», and at least all of
the grooves have their legitimate emotional interpretations, if you care enough
to wait for them to come to you. But in the process, it kind of seems as if The
Committee To Keep Music Evil once again started lagging behind on its primary
purpose, and that the momentum gained by Newcombe with his «snarling» approach
began to dissipate once more. All the same, I would like to extend a thumbs up
to the album — certainly not because of its gimmicky aspects (which are
negligible, anyway, compared to Who
Killed Sgt. Pepper?), but... well, just because. I think I have the same
type of reaction to late 1970s Hawkwind: pleasant, inoffensive, toe-tappy,
mildly catchy, mildly mysterious stuff. Goes easy on the ears.
REVELATION (2014)
1) Vad Hände Med Dem?; 2)
What You Isn't; 3) Unknown; 4) Memory Camp; 5) Days, Weeks And Moths; 6) Duck
And Cover; 7) Food For Clouds; 8) Second Sighting; 9) Memorymix; 10) Fist Full
Of Bees; 11) Nightbird; 12) Xibalba; 13) Goodbye (Butterfly).
The problem with a «good formula for
psychedelic music» is that, like most formulae, even this one begins to run dry
after a while. Yes, the BJM did enter a new period of creativity and inspiration
with My Bloody Underground, and
managed to keep music evil for a little while — but with their fourth record
from the same streak, they are beginning to repeat themselves... no, wait,
scratch that, because repetition has always been a key element of the BJM
ideology in the first place. They are beginning to sound like their own shadow
— that would be more precise.
Again, Revelation
is an album of repetitive psychedelic grooves, with each track usually harboring
one riff and one draggy vocal melody. These may be smart or dumb, emotional or
bland, complex or simplistic, but what really
sucks is that they are very close to each other in tone and spirit. Even Aufheben, calm and quiet as it was
compared to Who Killed Sgt. Pepper?,
seemed more diverse and less predictable than this collection of largely
mid-tempo stomps with echoey bluesy riffs. I actually like some of these riffs,
I really do: ʽFood For Cloudsʼ has an especially nice one,
minor-melancholy-poppy in Robert Smith style, and the little bluesy flourish at
the end of each verse in ʽMemory Campʼ is doggone nasty. But does it really all have to be
so... even? The tracks just blend into each other, and with Newcombe's mumbly
mutterings in the place of normal singing all the time, you just have no hope
to carve out separate identities for the tracks. Song after song after song, it's
just the same old drag.
The only attempts at something relatively
different come in the guise of a few «rhythmically modern» tunes, such as the
funky ʽDuck & Coverʼ and the trancey-clubby
ʽMemorymixʼ. They do not feel like obnoxious intruders, but their
moods are the same — all these songs
sound like the product of somebody for whom taking hard drugs is seen as an
artistic obligation, rather than a source of pleasure or enlightenment. He
doesn't want to, see, but he has to,
or else he won't be able to churn out these tired, dusty, mentally
uncomfortable grooves.
In the end, I just do not see the point. If I
want an album of lean, mean, nasty, and unpredictably crazy BJM grooves, I will
just try one more stab at Who Killed
Sgt. Pepper?. If I want their deconstruction of 1960s aesthetics, I will
rewind the thread all the way back to 1996. Revelation, however, is just a typical going-through-the-motions
effort: tasteful and cool-sounding as always, but adding nothing whatsoever to
the band's legacy. Other than reminding us, perhaps, that as of 2014. Anton
Newcombe is still alive and well. Relatively
well, that is — I guess he's still sulking that nobody brought him Paul
McCartney's head on Heather Mills' wooden peg, after all, and that may have
taken a bite out of his stamina.
MUSIQUE DE FILM IMAGINE (2015)
1) Après Le Vin; 2)
Philadelphie Story; 3) La Dispute; 4) L'Enfer; 5) Elle S'Echappe; 6) Le Cadeau;
7) Le Sacré Du Printemps; 8) Le Souvenir; 9) Les Trois Cloches; 10)
Bonbon; 11) L'Ennui; 12) Bonbon Deux; 13) La Question; 14) Au Sommet.
One thing I have to say about Anton Newcombe:
for a guy who largely built his reputation on a series of mind-numbingly
repetitive psycho-drones, he sure comes up with the wildest of original ideas
every once in a while. Forever and ever, he continues to be inspired with the
Sixties — to him, probably representing the peak of the human spirit in the
20th century, or even beyond that (and he's not alone!) — yet he always manages
to insert a bit of the 21st century in every tribute to that decade, with a
maddening mix of slavish derivativeness and stunning originality.
This record, now, is also all about the Sixties
(and a little Fifties), but suddenly he turns his attention away from the
Beatles and the Stones and guides it over the English channel, to focus on
French filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague, for a change: since, apparently, the
movies of Godard and Truffaut meant the same to film as the Beatles, Stones,
and Velvets meant to music, it was only a matter of time before mad man
Newcombe found a way to somehow incorporate that
in his creativity. The only thing he forgot to make was a movie — but he did
write the soundtrack to it, and he claims to have actually seen the movie in
his head, although I doubt that he'd ever be willing to commit it to camera,
even if Warner Bros. approaches him with a million dollar deal. (And, let's
face it, it would most likely be awful anyway).
Technically, much of the soundtrack sounds
fairly traditionally for BJM: slow or, at best, mid-tempo instrumental grooves with
lots of sustained notes formed into solemn guitar-based or brass-based
melodies. However, most of the important tracks, written in minor keys, wrapped
in serious echo, and often adorned by half-sung, quarter-spoken, and
quarter-whispered vocals, have a much more romantic and doom-laden feel than
Newcombe's previous work, bringing to mind both the recent French shoegazing
scene (like Alcest) and, for sure,
some of the sonic atmosphere of the old French New Wave — not so much Godard,
though, whose movies were much too bizarre and turbulent for this, as somebody
like Alain Resnais (Last Year At
Marienbad could sure profit from some of these sounds) or even, goodness
gracious, Claude Lelouche (some of the atmospheres are right up A Man And A Woman's alley).
To assist him in this uneasy, but intriguing
task is a small selection of some authentic French and Italian modern talent —
Stéphanie Sokolinski, better known as SoKo (since the combination of
French and Slavic elements in that name is much too much for the average person
to bear), musical performer and actress with pop-Goth overtones, takes the
lead vocal on ʽPhiladelphie Storyʼ (yes, that is the messed-up title, even if the original title of Cukor's movie
in the French version was Indiscrétions);
and Asia Argento, who also stars in movies and sings on LPs, although I am not
sure if I have ever heard or seen anything from her (I know she's supposed to
be in 1994's La Reine Margot, but
that one was so terrible, I couldn't stand more than twenty minutes)... anyway,
Asia Argento is featured on ʽLe Sacré Du Printempsʼ, which, as
you have probably already guessed, has nothing whatsoever to do with
Stravinsky. Is Stravinsky ever regarded as a forefather of The French New Wave?
Not sure, but it's not really up to me to question Anton Newcombe's erudition —
he obviously did some homework on this issue and I did not.
In any case, the important thing is that Musique seems to work even outside of
all those connections — it is perfectly possible to enjoy it and even to be
stimulated by it if you do not know a single thing about old French movies.
Most of the grooves make sense. They can be quite minimalistic, almost ambient
(ʽBonbonʼ sounds like a digital projection of a meditative glass
harmonica solo; ʽL'Ennuiʼ opens and closes with a simple musical box
melody, over which a cello, a flute, and a Mellotron play a set of mournful
chords), and they can be quite loud and bombastic (ʽL'Enferʼ,
presenting a stern, but melancholic rather than terrifying picture of Hell —
you know, the kind of Hell where demons keep asking themselves «to be or not to
be?» before pouring boiling oil over your head), but they are all united by a
sense of being stuck somewhere in limbo, as the old world has already been lost
and the new one has not yet been gained — a sense that they do indeed share
with some of those old movies.
The two sung tracks are no exception: «SoKo»
sings with passion and energy on ʽPhiladelphie Storyʼ, but, true to
her artistic persona, it is the passion and energy of a ghoul — "Hallelujah, chantez ma resurrection!"
is the epic climax to each verse, upon which you dutifully expect a bite to the
neck. And ʽLe Sacré Du Printempsʼ is kind of, like, you know,
when they were all gathered to perform The Rite of Spring, but the weather
turned out twenty degrees colder than expected, so they just all huddled up in their
wintercoats and stayed home instead, staring out the windows and thinking real
cold thoughts on the fate of the universe.
So, as you see, for me at least it does work,
atmosphere-wise. This is the stiffest, most minimalistic and frozen Brian
Jonestown Massacre release yet, more like a Dead Can Dance impersonating Brian
Jonestown Massacre impersonating Alain Resnais with a little Antonioni DNA
thrown in. It's not that good — the
market has been flooded with half-ambient, winterish soundscapes like these for
years anyway — but it feels solid and intriguing at least as yet another
chapter in the odd journey of Anton Newcombe, which, considering his passion
for chemical substances and his usual sloth-like approach to music, should have
ended or, at least, transformed into a predictable straight line a long time
ago. It does not, however, and for that reason alone I am happy to support the
record with a thumbs
up and say that in a perfect world, it should have sold more copies
than Adele's 25; but then again, in
a perfect world like that 80% of the people would rather go watch a re-run of Last Year At Marienbad than the latest
episode of Star Wars, and when you
think about this real hard, the consequences can be rather scary.
MINI ALBUM THINGY WINGY (2015)
1) Pish; 2) Prší
Prší; 3) Get Some; 4) Dust; 5) Leave It Alone; 6) Mandrake
Handshake; 7) Here Comes The Waiting For The Sun.
Yes, apparently this is the correct title of Newcombe's second artistic outburst of
2015 — not ʽPishʼ, as a fairly securely stoned Brian Jones seems to
be telling you from his vantage position on the front sleeve. ʽPishʼ
itself is only the name of the first track, which opens with a
soaked-in-Sixties echoey blues-pop riff and quickly becomes a slow, monotonous,
psychedelic vamp that takes you all the way back... no, not really into 1967,
but rather into 1995-1996, back to Newcombe's own roots. Pretty much all of
the unpredictable, bizarrely mashed-up experimentation of the band's «second
golden age» that began with My Bloody
Underground has been thrown out of the window — so who knows what happened?
My best guess is that Anton, once again, switched his drug of preference choice.
The results are not too bad, especially because
of the wise choice to keep this restoration of traditional Brian Jones family
values short and sweet — 34 minutes is indeed a «mini-album», albeit far from
Newcombe's first attempt at brevity, and he does manage to drag us through some
cool ideas and textures in the meantime. The problem is... all the old problems
are back, too: each of the tracks exhausts its load of ideas in about one
minute, and then it all depends on whether that one minute was enough to cast
its trance over you or not. Take the longest piece for an example: ʽLeave
It Aloneʼ quickly sets up a tough threatening mood, constructing a
double-barrel musical machine out of one fuzzy, sustained chord and a dirty
one-string vamp around it (think Jorma Kaukonen trying out Neil Young's style),
and it's cool, but that's all it does for six minutes, and I cannot even say
that the lead guitar kicks sufficient ass to endure this. (A real Neil Young probably could, but a
real Neil Young would probably refuse to play like he was stoned out of his
mind, and with BJM this is almost always an obligatory condition).
On the slightly odder side of things,
ʽPrší Pršíʼ does continue the recently
established tradition of odd collaborations — this time, with Vladimir Nosal,
allegedly the frontman of an indie band from Slovakia named Queer Jane (judging
by what little I've heard from then on Youtube, they specialize in Beatlesque
pop). Curiously, even though most of Queer Jane's material is sung in English, this track is sung in Slovak, because
what can be more psychedelic than the usage of a Slavic language on an American
retro-psychedelic album? However, if Slavic languages do not, by their very
existence, already mystify and befuddle you, the track will hardly be more than
just another pleasant, quickly forgettable psychedelic pastiche.
Elsewhere, you find a passable, but useless
cover of a bona fide psychedelic classic (ʽDustʼ by the 13th Floor
Elevators, with a lovingly recreated sound of that band's infamous electric
jug); another slow, pleasant, predictable vamp that seems to be here just so
that Anton can use a cool title like ʽMandrake Handshakeʼ; and,
corniest of all, ʽHere Comes The Waiting For The Sunʼ, which, sounds
absolutely nothing like either ʽHere Comes The Sunʼ or ʽWaiting
For The Sunʼ, but rather, as some reviewers have already noted, like
Donovan's ʽHurdy Gurdy Manʼ. Not that good old Donovan hasn't done
his fair share of waiting for the sun back in the day, but enough with the
pseudo-post-modern titles already, eh?
Anyway, no criticism whatsoever about the
sound of it all, Newcombe still understands the art of classic psychedelic
guitar (and throw in a bit of sitar and Mellotron where appropriate) better
than anybody else in this world. It's just that he has once again given up on
the idea to advance that art, and
remains perfectly content just to fiddle around with it, in his usual
«glorified lazy» mode. And putting your trusted mascot, for the first time
ever, right up front on that album sleeve (did he even secure the rights for
the photo?), is not going to mask the fact that Mini Album Thingy Wingy does seem like an attempt to wing it, and
if so, then why does it even exist? We can always pull off Their Satanic Majesties' Second Request
off the shelf if we're in this kind of mood — there's no big need for a third
one.
THIRD WORLD PYRAMID (2016)
1) Good Mourning; 2)
Government Beard; 3) Don't Get Lost; 4) Assignment Song; 5) Oh Bother; 6) Third
World Pyramid; 7) Like Describing Colors To A Blind Man On Acid; 8) Lunar Surf
Graveyard; 9) The Sun Ship.
The fourth
Brian Jonestown Massacre album in three years? What, is this 1966 all over
again or is this merely the compensatory energy-outburst result of coming
clean? I almost feel like advising Anton Newcombe to slow down, if only that
did not sound so comical when addressed to a man whose favorite musical tempo
has always been «hallucinating adagio». At least he seems to be sticking to the
short form: this new record is only a few minutes longer than Mini Album Thingy Wingy, so that both
could probably fit on a single CD if necessary — but instead of melting down
our brains with one huge close-to-eighty-minutes platter, the man has
mercifully agreed on two small platters instead.
And I don't just mean a technical gesture — the
compositions on Third World Pyramid
are conceived and executed in the exact same vein as those on Mini Album, despite having been
recorded at different sessions (and even with different guest stars). This here
is just another batch of psychedelic drones, with exactly one musical idea per
song, because, you know, having two
ideas in one song is not such a prudent thing to do — I mean, what if they
contradict each other? What if they start to fight? What if the second one
makes you forget about the first — then the first one would be, like, wasted? What if the second one is not as
good as the first? What if it spoils your concentration, or breaks the hypnotic
spell? What if somebody says, "I like how they are so influenced by
Sixties' bands, but you know, they have way too many key changes in their
songs, that's no longer influence — that's slavish plagiarism!"
So have no fear, Third World Pyramid is not going to swamp you with a dazzling
kaleidoscope of sounds and textures. Especially now that Anton seems to have
found a new muse — a young Canadian psycho-artist called Tess Parks, specializing
in pretty much the same kind of music (dark, starry-eyed drones with
stoned-enchanted vocals at the bottom); they ended up touring together for a
while, and on this record she is handling some of the vocal duties. In between
the two, they double their efforts at retrieving the atmosphere of
soul-searching French movies from the 1950s/1960s, joining it with the essence
of mind-opening music from London's UFO club, and presenting the results for
21st century audiences who are so desperate for something new that they will
agree to revive anything old if it
helps.
Unfortunately, the results suffer from the same
problems as Mini Album. Newcombe,
now a consummate professional in this business, gets a great sound going — the
acoustic guitars, the Mellotrons, the woodwinds, the brass fanfares — but
remains unable to push this anywhere beyond simply having a «great sound». All
the core melodies are based on the same blues-rock and folk-pop chord sequences
that we have heard a million times, and it hurts particularly bad when the song
length is extended for no reason — ʽAssignment Songʼ drags on for
nine minutes, an interminable tribute to the likes of Donovan, survivable only
if you get yourself in the mood soon enough. The second half, once the vocals
have died down, is awfully mushy: no single instrumental part stands out at
the expense of others, and the result is a spineless psychedelic mess, equally
polyphonous and cacophonous. (For comparison, remember the stylistically close
anthemic coda to something like George Harrison's ʽIt's All Too
Muchʼ — where all the multiple overdubs were clustered around a very tight
melodic spine that chained you to the song's rhythm while at the same time
blowing your mind with all the kaleidoscopic effects).
On some very rare occasions, like the title
track, they increase the tempo, but it does not help much, because the bass
remains barely audible, and the truly important functions are left to the
humming electronics and the mystery ghost vocals. Slow or fast, the difference
between these tracks and their spiritual predecessors always remains the same:
Newcombe writes atmospheric mood pieces rather than songs, and that is his
stated schtick that you can take or leave. As long as I have to listen to the
record to give it a brief assessment, I can take it — but I am unsure why, ten
years or even ten days from now, I would still want to prefer this secondary,
derivative, monotonous material to a classic album by, say, The 13th Floor
Elevators, where I can get moods and
hooks and genuine original
excitement. I mean, I might be on the same wavelength with Newcombe — we both
acknowledge the psychedelic Sixties as one of the greatest eras of music and a
guiding light for one's musical tastes and hopes — but that does not imply
agreeing on how we should be dealing with this musical legacy in 2016.
DON'T GET LOST (2017)
1) Open Minds Now Close; 2)
Melody's Actual Echo Chamber; 3) Resist Much Obey Little; 4) Charmed I'm Sure;
5) Groove Is In The Heart; 6) One Slow Breath; 7) Throbbing Gristle; 8) Fact
67; 9) Dropping Bombs On The Sun; 10) UFO Paycheck; 11) Geldenes Herz Menz; 12)
Acid 2 Me Is No Worse Than War; 13) Nothing New To Trash Like You; 14) Ich Bin
Klang.
At this point, I am beginning to question
myself whether or not this recent explosion of BJM albums might be due to Anton
Newcombe misunderstanding the meaning of the classic Latin recommendation of Festina lente. Where most people would
understand it sort of figuratively, as a call to focused and efficient action
tempered by prudence and accuracy, Newcombe seems to take it more literally —
as an appeal to release as many new records in the upcoming years as possible,
containing as many slow-moving, hyper-draggy songs as possible.
At least the previous three albums were all
short; Don't Get Lost clocks in at
approximately 72 minutes — admittedly, not a record length for Newcombe, who
used to be famous for slowly and meticulously bleeding out his grooves until
the CD begged for mercy; but the last time he did that was in the era of the
band's artistic «rebirth» with My Bloody
Underground and Who Killed Sgt.
Pepper, almost a decade ago. Since then, Newcombe experienced no new
rebirths, largely returning to the original style of BJM, occasionally
diversified by stylistic references to groove styles past 1967, and Don't Get Lost is no exception to the
rule: the fourteen tracks captured here will give you no new insights
whatsoever.
And me, too, I find myself at a loss once
again. Clearly, the only way this sloth-like guy could churn out such a huge
record about four months after his previous one was by quickly working out a
few grooves and sticking to them — indeed, the opening track, ʽOpen Minds
Now Closeʼ, rides on for eight minutes without a single deviation from its
established formula. It's like a metronomic, unnerving groove by Can, but
simplified to the core and with absolutely no room left for improvisation:
elevator muzak for dark psychedelic types. Naturally, with this approach it is
the easiest thing in the world to stretch a potentially 30-minute long record
to 70 minutes. But then again, I reserve harsh judgement, because BJM always
goes best with mushrooms (this is an objective fact, scientifically verified by
the band's leader), and I'm not much of a mushroom man, so I cannot verify if
the textures of Newcombe are truly a perfect psychological fit with chemically
altered brain activity or not.
In the sphere of ideology, Anton is still
pretending that some of his songs should function as manifestos, hence such titles
as ʽResist Much Obey Littleʼ (a bit paradoxical, since the steady,
cyclical, descending-ascending acoustic rhythm pattern of the song is so
mind-numbing that it only makes you want to resist little and obey much, at
best) and ʽAcid 2 Me Is No Worse Than Warʼ, one of the album's few
excursions into soft techno, drum machines, sampled vocals, and siren-themed
synthesizers. ʽDropping Bombs On The Sunʼ is another title that might
trigger political associations, and yet again, the track is a slow, totally
stoned groove, ruled by minimalistic brass-imitating tones and lead vocals from
Tess Parks, who still retains the status of Anton's muse by managing to sound
twice as stoned as he does. («And far sexier», I wanted to add before realizing
that having sex with Tess Parks, judging from the perspective of her musical
output, would probably only be efficient in an alternate universe where one
minute of their time equals one hour of ours. «Slow down, you move too fast» is
definitely not about these guys).
In his struggle to retain his cool, Newcombe
does things that I hardly understand at all — for instance, calling one of the
tracks ʽThrobbing Gristleʼ, even though Throbbing Gristle themselves
would probably have regarded the entire brand of BJM production as a cheap
profanation of the genuine avantgarde aesthetics (the track itself is just
another monotonous psychedelic groove with Parks yawning and groaning all over
the place). The next-to-last track, ʽNothing New To Trash Like Youʼ,
is surprisingly faster than the rest — pretty much a generic rockabilly number
buried under the generic layers of BJM production, and still somehow managing
to sound as lethargic as everything else. One other track, ʽGeldenes Herz
Menzʼ, sounds like modern lounge jazz put through the same motions — fussy
jazzy drumming and tons of soft sax overdubs, hardly a subgenre where the man
might make much of an impression.
Overall, just another year, just another album:
nothing too bad, nothing too revelatory. And brace yourselves, because the guy
is not about to stop — he's gonna crawl on and on and on, because the number of
same-sounding draggy grooves with tons of wobbly overdubs that he can theoretically
produce is infinity.
ULTIMATE ALTERNATIVE WAVERS (1993)
1) The First Song; 2) Three
Years Ago Today; 3) Revolution; 4) Shameful Dread; 5) Nowhere Nothin' Fuckup;
6) Get A Life; 7) Built To Spill; 8) Lie For A Lie; 9) Hazy; 10) Built Too Long
(parts 1, 2 & 3).
The classic associations that usually spring up
in any account of the story of Built To Spill are Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr.
— two of the major «ugly-guitar-sound» combos of the Eighties, both of which
transparently influenced Built To Spill, the former in terms of freedom of
sound and experimental approach, the latter in terms of «dirty jamming» which,
in turn, goes all the way back to Neil Young, Pete Townshend and the like
(echoes of whom are also sometimes heard in the music — ironically, one of the
kick-ass riffs upon which they stumble in the ʽBuilt Too Longʼ jam
happens to be the riff that Pete often played live in the jam section of
ʽMy Generationʼ).
Curiously, though, my first association with these guys concerned neither Sonic Youth
nor Dinosaur Jr., but rather a somewhat more distant and less frequently
quoted relative — Television! If anything, Built To Spill for the 1990s (and
this is especially obvious on this
first, and still very much derivative, album) were exactly what Television were
for the 1970s: a small-format, but large-ambition band, with a vision expressed
through a haughty, sternly determined manner of singing and all sorts of
challenging guitar interplay, combining elements of folk, punk, drone, blues
improvisation, and noise. In other words, grand prog-rock deconstructed to fit the
limitations of a small guitar-based combo — something that must probably
require a lot of clout and a lot of skill to do right.
Television did it perfectly all right; as to
Built To Spill, while my respect for them even in this early incarnation is enormous,
I am not too sure if Ultimate
Alternative Wavers, a rather boldly self-aggrandizing title as it is, truly
constitutes «great» music. There is no denying the feats of imagination that
went into the construction of these songs: this is not «math-rock» as such, since
the music does not demand perfect rhythmic precision at each nanosecond, and it
is definitely not the «nuts-rock» of Primus, either, but the song structures
are quite complex and challenging all the same. The band core, consisting of
Doug Martsch on guitar/vocals and Brett Netson on second guitar and/or bass,
like to go from folk to rock to funk to noise and back within the same song —
this is why the songs usually take quite a bit of time to develop, but this is
definitely not wasted time: the only
track on which the band members could be accused of a little self-indulgence
is the closing jam ʽBuilt Too Longʼ, whose title is already
self-ironic, but even there we have a distinct three-way partition that
indicates... well, composition.
On the other hand, the same approach also
reveals the major weakness of Built To Spill: a lack of obvious purpose to this music. Sure you could
address this criticism to the likes of King Crimson as well, but, first of all,
Built To Spill do not rock as hard as King Crimson, second, they do not have as
many impressive riffs as King Crimson, and third and perhaps most important,
their level of technical mastery, though easily comparable to Television,
hardly even begins approaching the Fripp/Belew standards, so you do not have
this extra bonus of being totally dazzled
by the performances, though you might be amused or intrigued by them. These
are interesting songs, sure enough,
but I have a hard time «feeling» them.
As an example, take the first song, conveniently
titled ʽThe First Songʼ because, indeed, it is not easy to come up
with a better title. It seems to be a poetic complaint about the hardships of
living in a world in which the protagonist does not really belong: "How
can I not believe in things that everybody else sees?" The music does seem
to be tailored accordingly, with minor key folksy strumming à la Led Zep, woman-tone-heavy
electric wailings, and brooding psychedelic solos weeping over each other from
two or three different guitars — yet somehow none of this translates into
conventional desperation that could break your heart. I don't know, maybe it's
something to do with Doug's voice, which I find rather bland and «just
decent», or maybe it is the lack of a well-defined core theme for the song
(they seem to just be happy to move from Led Zep to Hendrix to Television to
The Cure and shove in more, more, more without being afraid of disorienting
the listener — which is exactly, I believe, what is happening), or maybe they
don't get the best possible production... anyway, something just doesn't click,
as formally cool as the entire experience could be called.
When they wind up the tempo and crank up the
volume, like on ʽRevolutionʼ or ʽGet A Lifeʼ, songs whose
titles, lyrics and moods «call to action», the overall effect is the same: the
music is more complex than on your average Neil Young song, but the cumulative
reaction is nowhere near as violent — when Neil really gets into it, it makes
you want to kill (with love, of course — what else?), but when Doug and Brett
get into it (like on the aggressive solo section of ʽGet A Lifeʼ), it
makes you go... «wow, cool sonic overlays, dudes». Like when they solo on
ʽLie For A Lieʼ, in these short little «telephonic» bursts of bubbly
melody: cute and weird, but not quite as meaningful as, for instance, when
Talking Heads do so on Remain In Light
songs.
Arguably the most conventional song on the
album, a leisurely ballad with a grand lead guitar melody, is ʽHazyʼ,
and perhaps not surprisingly, it also has the most soulful and relatable vocal
performance from Doug: "Hazy / Just because sometimes you make me
crazy" actually gives us a vulnerable human being, and serves as the
emotional hub of the album — too bad that it comes almost at the very end, as
if they were actually ashamed of having an accessible song like that sitting
next to all those feats of imaginative overdubbing.
Do not get me wrong: even without
ʽHazyʼ, the album would still get an unquestionable thumbs up
from me — just because few of the songs work instantaneously on a «gut level»
does not mean that the album as a whole does not work on some other level of
conscience. At the very least, in the most formal way it is a real wonder what
these three guys have managed to concoct with just the most basic of
instrumentation, in an age where «alt-rock» was already beginning to feel a
little like a dirty word; no wonder that a cult was rather quickly formed
around the band, praising them for salvaging the underground in an era when
R.E.M. and Nirvana were perceived as a threat to the underground's very
existence as an «underground». To do so, however, they had to produce music
that was denser, less easily accessible, and less emotionally devastating — had
they done otherwise, you know, they risked selling as many copies as Nirvana,
and that would have been the end of small club elitism. Or maybe Doug Martsch
could end up killing himself, so thank God for them small record labels.
THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH LOVE (1994)
1) In The Morning; 2) Reasons;
3) Big Dipper; 4) Car; 5) Fling; 6) Cleo; 7) The Source; 8) Twin Falls; 9)
Some; 10) Distopian Dream Girl; 11) Israel's Song; 12) Stab; 13) Preview.
Perhaps I am not getting something, but I
actually hear this record as a notable, if not blatantly notable regression from the band's debut. Naturally,
there's nothing wrong with love, but there is
something wrong about starting out as a small, instrumentally traditional, but
decidedly experimental combo and then, once you have laid out a claim,
retreating into safer, much better known and exploited territory. In other
words, Built To Spill's sophomore effort is a more accessible, more easily
understandable, more emotionally predictable, and more intellectually boring
record than their debut — and it really needn't have been that way.
The songs, for the most part, are indeed about
love, although I couldn't vouch for everything — to do that, I'd have to check
the texts, and, unfortunately, Martsch's sneery, slightly Lennon-esque (but
much less sharp) vocals just do not inspire me into a detailed investigation of
what's under the hood. In any case, there isn't a single ballad here with the
emotional grip of ʽHazyʼ — as a matter of fact, the album does not
distinguish well enough between rockers and ballads anyway. It's all just an
interminable hookless mess of bland syncopated alt-rock riffage; thank God that
they do not at least go overboard with the grungy distortion schtick, because
with just a little push they could have become an early predecessor to
Nickelback.
I mean, the song ʽCarʼ was a goddamn single here. Speaking of singles, is
there a single reason why that song should command our special attention? It
has no hooklines whatsoever, the singing is completely expressionless, and the
use of cello is pretty much wasted since it just blends together with the
bassline. Rotten dynamics, too: both of the solos are mixed in way too low, so
it all feels more like obligatory bits of jamming rather than elements of
development. Nor does the melody change throughout — just riffing on that same
chord. If this is the single, how could you expect the album to be any better?
It isn't. It's all a letdown.
Arguably, Martsch's big mistake here was to
make a «soulful» record, something like a cross between a set of John Lennon
bedroom guitar demos and sentimental Californian singer-songwriting, combining
the harshness and directness of the former with the vulnerability and sweetness
of the latter. Perhaps I am messing up the real influences here, but no matter:
the important thing is that, in the process, the songs all got more simple,
poppy, and samey, which is just not good, because Buit To Spill are not masters of the pop hook. A few
nicely placed vocal lines on ʽReasonsʼ and maybe ʽBig
Dipperʼ are still offset by the overall grayness of the arrangements, and
I remember absolutely nothing about any of the other songs, not even after
three or four listens.
Actually, I do
remember one of the lines on ʽStabʼ — "I wrote a song, it was
slow and long". Not all the
songs here are slow and long, but most of them feel slow and long, largely
because they are based on such familiar and uninteresting rhythm and lead
patterns. But if it is not the innovative guitar work, what could it be then
that could make this album work in return? The singing? Bland, if at least not
over-dramatized. The arrangements? They're all the same: guitar-based, too
restrained to kick your rock'n'roll ass and too brutal to have subtlety. The
bare fact that this does not sound like Pearl Jam or Smashing Pumpkins? Well,
it does not. In fact, it all still sounds more «wise» than your average (or
even your average famous) alt-rock band, precisely because of Martsch's
restrained approach — but what can I do with myself if all this «wisdom» just
deteriorates into blandness and boredom at the blink of an eye?
The least boring track on the album is the
final joke — ʽPreviewʼ, a spoof on bonus tracks that gives us a
glimpse of the «upcoming» album by the band, with brief snippets of several
«songs» (parodies on punk and power ballads) that actually sound more exciting
than the album itself. Even if a few tunes have potential, they would still
need to be rewritten and re-recorded to realize it fully (ʽReasonsʼ,
that's the one I am especially looking at — I wonder what somebody like John
Lennon could have made out of it, had it fallen into his hands? It's definitely
got a «Lennon-type chord change» to it around the 1:02 mark, and later). As it
is, I can only view the record as yet another of the many mid-1990s failures to
bring intelligent guitar-based singer-songwriter rock back to its former
standards, and sorrowfully award it a thumbs down.
PERFECT FROM NOW ON (1997)
1) Randy Described Eternity;
2) I Would Hurt A Fly; 3) Stop The Show; 4) Made-Up Dreams; 5) Velvet Waltz; 6)
Out Of Site; 7) Kicked It In The Sun; 8) Untrustable/Part 2 (About Someone
Else).
By the time Built To Spill's third and
allegedly best album comes along, I think I understand what my major problem
with Doug Martsch is. Simply put, the man is just not as much of a «guitar
sound magician» as he tries to make us believe. Yes, there is quite a bit of
experimentation with song structures, overdubs, guitar tones, and chord
progressions going on, but all of it is still strictly written in «rock
language», and when you look at all the separate parts one by one, they are
rarely all that special. The melodies are far too complex to trigger immediate
gut reaction à la Nirvana (I
think Doug Martsch would have died of shame if he ever got caught with an
ʽIn Bloomʼ-type riff on one of his songs), yet not
«where-the-hell-did-this-come-from?»-sort of complex enough to amaze and astound
you.
That said, Martsch at least tries to live up to
the album's rashly presumptuous title — especially considering that somehow
along the line he managed to secure his band a contract with nothing less than
Warner Bros., while at the same time retaining the right to creative freedom.
So here was an actual challenge to produce something that could be commercially
viable and artistically meaningful at the same time, and, fortunately, the
man's ambitions burst through the bland indie-rock shell that so thickly
enveloped There's Nothing Wrong With
Love and carried him towards anthemic, psychedelic, and noise-rich
heights. This is very clearly an album that wants,
oh so desperately, to be the Grandest Serious Record of the decade, and Martsch
invests so much of himself in the effort that I fully understand people who
like to swear by this record, particularly if they were in their world-sniffing
teens at the time, and Doug Martsch was their Pete Townshend, taken to the next
advanced level of conscience.
The songs here are lengthy — indeed, way too lengthy for a potentially
commercial album released on a major label — and almost always drift from one
melody into a completely different one, even if the key will probably remain
the same. It's not as if they really needed to do that, because the permeating
mood is consistently philosophical and almost meditative, rather than adventurous:
Martsch states that in the very first song, dealing with the concept of
eternity and its relation with the fleeting individual, and then never really
lets go until the last minute. These are not cosmic voyages into some flowery
parallel universe — they are trips inside the depth of your mind, sometimes
guided by rationality, sometimes just going off the deep end without bothering
too much where the stream will end up taking you. They often promise genuine
depth and occasionally hint at real beauty, although, alas, the hint usually
remains just a hint for me.
One problem is that, although the album is
still essentially a «pop» album, Martsch's singing abilities remain
unsatisfactory. Not only does he have this really limited, annoying vocal
range, but his vocals are usually mixed «below» the instruments rather than
«above» them, which means that your attention is supposed to be focused on the
guitars (or even on the accompanying cello, deftly played by guest musician
John McMahon on about half of the tracks) rather than on the singing — but that
is just plain silly, considering that the biggest hooks are sometimes planted
right in the vocal, not instrumental, bits (like the chorus to ʽI Would
Hurt A Flyʼ, or the "and it never will, no it never will" bit on
ʽMade-Up Dreamsʼ). Honestly, the man should have taken Pete
Townshend's example and arm himself with a more suitable vocalist. I am fairly
sure that both John Lennon and Tom Verlaine must be among Doug's chief
influences when it comes to both songwriting and singing, but he simply isn't
big enough to fill the britches of either one, period. I mean, if he were and
if he knew it, why hide your voice behind a wall of sound?
Another problem is that — so sue me — much too
often, I still have not the faintest
idea what the songs are supposed to be about, or even what my own gut feeling
should suggest to me about them. Naturally, I am not talking about
straightforward lyrical interpretations — but, you know, something like
ʽOut Of Siteʼ is just overflowing with grandeur, starting out like
Pink Floyd and ending a bit like ʽStairway To Heavenʼ, yet I have no
idea to what exactly this grandeur is being applied. There's a lot of raging
interlocking guitars that switch almost at random from playful funky pop to
psychedelic rock, but I do not have any emotional rapprochement with the material. It's all very clever, but it rings
hollow. Or, sometimes, maybe too derivative — that funky, swampy groove that
constitutes the bulk of ʽI Would Hurt A Flyʼ offers a respectable
variation on the formula, what with the grinning wah-wah guitar licks and the
cello complementing each other in a novel manner, yet the overall effect is
still not enough to stop me from smirking, «oh, gee, Funkadelic meets Electric
Light Orchestra», almost against my will.
One thing I will admit: this is not «bullshit
rock», by any means — not just another «deep» album whose creator just wants to
come across as a serious artist, without any emotional or intellectual
capacities to back up the ambitions. Rather, Perfect From Now On is that «semi-successful» attempt to justify
these ambitions which has something like a 50/50 chance to irritate or amaze,
depending on one's DNA peculiarities or the particular context in which this
album has been heard. I have listed the primary flaws which render it impotent
for me — the vocals, the emotional confusion, the emphasis on length and complexity
of the structures rather than the individual good parts — but all of this, to a
large degree, just reflects personal taste. Objectively, this is still a huge
step forward from the genericity of There's
Nothing Wrong With Love and, in terms of scale and ambition, from the
technical experimentalism of the band's debut album, so there is no way we
could leave this without a thumbs up, be it ever more «brainy» than
«heartfelt».
KEEP IT LIKE A SECRET (1999)
1) The Plan; 2) Center Of The
Universe; 3) Carry The Zero; 4) Sidewalk; 5) Bad Light; 6) Time Trap; 7) Else;
8) You Were Right; 9) Temporarily Blind; 10) Broken Chairs.
Okay, so this time the songs are shorter. But
not that shorter — instead of eight,
there's ten, and shortening them does not necessarily mean that they become
less complex in structure or more immediately accessible. It does seem that the
record is not so hotly bent on making a sweeping musical statement as its
predecessor — rather, this time around it is again just a collection of pop-rock
songs on various topics, all characterized by Doug Martsch's guitar-and-vocal
trademarks but without letting us know that Built To Spill intend to conquer
the world in the next 7 hours.
But ambition or no, once again I have to say
that Martsch is an efficient generator of ideas in harsh need of a second
partner to bring them up to speed. Case in point: the best song on the album
is arguably ʽElseʼ, an allegro pop-rocker with romantic vocals,
psychedelic guitars, and convoluted lyrics that seem to concern the
protagonist's inability to cope with his love urges, but might as well be about
physical illness — anyway, its spiralling lead guitar line and arching vocal
modulations bear the stamp of beauty, nay, gorgeousness
even, but neither of the two is given a strong enough presence to stand out.
The vocals are buried, the lead line is never louder than the unremarkable
rhythm pattern, and although the music actually develops along the way (there's
a lengthy coda where Martsch tries out several guitar tricks and effects), it
does not really feel as if it
developed — everything is so smooth. Bluntly speaking, the guy came up with
potentially sharp hooks, and then spent his time in the studio dulling them up.
Other than this little detail (namely, that all
the songs here kinda suck), all the songs on this album are excellent. Smart
guitar melodies, smart lyrics, smartly engineered seams between the different
parts — and when I say «smart», I don't just mean «specializing in innovative,
but emotionally meaningless chord changes»: I mean really evocative,
emotionally charged melodies that transfer a whole variety of vibes, most of
them positive and uplifting, even if the lyrics usually deal with various
personal problems. Only the lengthy album closer ʽBroken Chairsʼ,
slowing down to a relative crawl and awash in agonizingly distorted solos,
breaks this sequence with the obvious intention of depressing you in the end —
not entirely successful, because as Doug goes over the top about piling one
psycho-bluesy solo on top of another during the final jam, the whole thing
becomes «trippy» rather than «depressing», and you will probably emerge from
the experience with your eyes rolled back and your tongue hanging out, rather
than with the bitter knowledge that there is no hope whatsoever for the human
race. But did you know, really, that crows are "mirrors of apprehension in
the fallen sun"? I didn't. The lyrics sure as hell don't add much to that
depressing effect.
Additional highlights — ʽCenter Of The
Universeʼ, whose opening riff creates a musical vortex of sorts (yes,
Martsch is really good at «bends and wobbles», as Robert Fripp would call
them); ʽTemporarily Blindʼ, whose cobweb of ringing, sighing,
sirening, and grinning guitars will confuse your ears before suddenly merging
into one single power riff, then exploding once again into a miriad of
kaleidoscopic sounds; and the song that most people talk about when they
mention this record, because it is so much easier to talk about words than
notes — ʽYou Were Rightʼ, in which Martsch collects as many classic
rock negative clichés as possible ("all we are is dust in the
wind", "we're all just bricks in the wall", "it's a hard
rain's gonna fall", "this is the end") and acknowledges their truthfulness
over a tired, stuttering tempo, ending the song by repeatedly asking the
question "do you ever think about it?". Stupid rocker, if we never
thought about it, would we even be coming up with all these trite phrases in
the first place?
Anyway, here comes another thumbs up to another album that
commands unambiguous respect, but hardly ever gives me any emotional thrills. I
have no idea what it would take to make these songs really work — additional instruments beside guitars? a different
vocalist? a better mix? a less impressionistic verbal style? atmospheric
voiceovers from a resurrected Vincent Price? whatever. I'd still take the
simple, «trivial», but so highly efficient guitar sound of Nirvana over this by
default — however, whenever you are in the mood for something that's very
Nineties, very pop-rock, very far removed from the avantgarde spirit, but also
somehow quite challenging and inventive, well... just Keep It Like A Secret, and we'll be able to carry the Built To
Spill legacy, untarnished and unspoiled by excessive popularity, through the
coming years.
ANCIENT MELODIES OF THE FUTURE (2001)
1) Strange; 2) The Host; 3) In
Your Mind; 4) Alarmed; 5) Trimmed; 6) Happiness; 7) Don't Try; 8) You Are; 9)
Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss; 10) The Weather.
Oh no! «The magic is gone!», a lot of fans seem
to complain about this record, implying that the new millennium's cosmic rays
have somehow managed to break through the skull of Doug Martsch, of all people,
corrode his genius, and destabilize his vision so now Built To Spill sound like
«any other generic indie-rock band». Such a shame. I do have an alternate
opinion, though, seeing as how I was always dubious of that genius in the first
place — maybe it's not so much the music
that has changed, but simply the people,
who were once listening to Built To Spill in their easily impressionable,
character-forming teen years, happened to grow up... and suddenly find out that
Doug Martsch never did?
Because, honestly, if there is one big flaw to Ancient Melodies Of The Future, it is
simply that the band refuses to evolve. We have largely the same formula here —
dreamy, philosophical pop songs with dense layers of guitar overdubs and
monotonous vocals that have little hope of clambering into the open from under
that thick mesh of competing guitars. In this context, how could you even begin
to answer the question of which songs are «better» — the ones here or the ones
on the preceding «golden trio» of BtS records? Okay, so these ones are shorter,
with fewer melody changes along the way than there used to be, and maybe the
overall number of complex riffs has somewhat decreased, but probably not
because Martsch has run out of them (a guy like Martsch can never really run
out of complex riffs), but because he may have wanted a slightly more
straightforward, in-yer-face approach.
Personally, I have never witnessed any magic on
any Built To Spill album — intellectual attempts at credibly modeling magic,
yes, but not real magic, and in that
respect, I see no difference between the old shit and the new shit. A song
like ʽAlarmedʼ, for instance: any true Martsch fan should just love
everything about it, from the grand opening with the swooping strings whistling
over your head like bombers, to the equally grand lyrics ("I'm alarmed and
I can't help from / Crashing onto this island we've become") to the way it
gradually segues into the noisy coda, where Martsch's knightly challenge of
"did you make it all wrong, so wrong?" is drowned in a sea of ominous
strings and nastily dissonant keyboards. I am unable to love it, for all the already known reasons (bad singing, messy
production, inability to make the best melodic elements of the song take heavy
precedence over the average elements, etc.), but how could anybody who does not
view these reasons as a problem not love it? Beats me.
Or a song like ʽHappinessʼ. Slide
guitar opening with an almost Sleepy John Estes sound to it! Then it kinda
sorta becomes closer to the Black Crowes, but who could blame them for wanting
to try and combine slide with distortion? "Happiness will only happen when
it can" — yet another of those simple philosophical maxims from Mr.
Martsch, no better and no worse than any such statement made previously. What's
not to like? Or ʽIn Your Mindʼ — backward solos, mysterious
Eastern-flavored mellotrons, a sludgy fuzzy guitar interlude, and a psychedelic
climactic puncture in the chorus ("no one can see in your
MIIIIND!..." — a simple truth, delivered not for the sake of providing
hitherto unknown knowledge, but for the sake of letting you know that the music
of Built To Spill serves to hypothetically reflect the black box activities
that take place under your skull, and is thus historically and spiritually
linked to... okay, did I ever mention that Doug Martsch might be seriously
influenced by John Lennon circa 1966? Just in case I didn't, ʽShe Said She
Saidʼ is, like, the thickest root supporting the BtS trunk).
But do not get me wrong: for me at least, the
album was just as unmemorable as almost everything that preceded it. And the
reason why, this time around, I wouldn't want to give it a thumbs up is not
because the music is «bad» (Doug Martsch came to me in my dreams one of these
nights and told me confidentially that he never once wrote a bad song, so I
have no reason to disbelieve him if he went to all this trouble to show up),
but because it has become fixed and locked in «autopilot» mode. The songs still
feature plenty of the band's instrumental trickery (I did not yet mention the
multi-guitar storm attack on ʽTrimmed And Burningʼ, which is one of
the most impressive musical moments on the entire record) — they just refuse
to take one step beyond that trickery, or even expand the bag of already
explored tricks. The formula works, but now it thrusts itself in your face —
«look, we can still write new songs in the same old ways!» But what works for
intelligently anti-intellectual bands like AC/DC, can hardly be said to work
for arrogantly philosophical bands like Built To Spill; a philosopher, after
all, can never be satisfied with his current findings, but has to constantly
dig deeper and cast wider in order to even preserve, let alone expand, his
reputation. Therefore, yes, somewhat
of a disappointment — but only because I was never a big fan of this band in
the first place. If you were, save
yourself the worry: the classic Built To Spill sound remains completely intact
on this short, tight, self-assured, and «creatively» constructed album (where
the quotation marks refer to the modern, somewhat mechanistic and, I would say,
rather boring understanding of the term).
YOU IN REVERSE (2006)
1) Goin' Against Your Mind; 2)
Traces; 3) Liar; 4) Saturday; 5) Wherever You Go; 6) Conventional Wisdom; 7)
Gone; 8) Mess With Time; 9) Just A Habit; 10) The Wait.
Can I come out and say that You In Reverse is the best ever Built
To Spill album? No, that would be illogical and arbitrary. Besides, how can I
even begin to pronounce those kinds of judgement on a band that I do not
properly «get», whose music I have no deep feel for? And besides, how can a
band that is more than ten years into its musical career release a «best»
album? Surely that is downright impossible.
But let us just see what we can see about this,
on a track-by-track basis, just for the first several numbers. First,
ʽGoin' Against Your Mindʼ is fast.
I think it's faster than anything they played before, and it helps the sound —
you know, «alt-rock» in general, with its preference of mid- and slow tempos,
tends to wear you down, and this is oh so true of all preceding Built To Spill
records. So the song is almost nine minutes long, but who cares? It's an
impressive speed train, quieting down in the middle to let the drummer catch a
breath, only to explode into even more aggressive action towards the end. New
guitarist Jim Roth, turning the trio into a quartet, probably helps out, but
it is unclear if his presence is all that essential — Martsch is a master of
overdubbing, and the only reason to bring in an extra guitarist would be to
lend a more «live» aura to the proceedings. Hmm, maybe it actually works.
The second track, ʽTracesʼ, slows
down the tempo, although not quite to the standard creepy-crawly level of their
classic albums — more disturbing is the fact that it never changes the basic
rhythm or melodic pattern from start to finish, reflecting a «less challenging»
attitude towards songwriting on this record. But if it works, why not? Here,
the band establishes an unbreaking, monotonously pulsating melancholic vibe,
out of which eventually spirals a moody guitar solo that logically and
unavoidably winds itself up to hysterical heights without ever straying away
from the rhythmic restrictions of the main melody — simple, evocative, and
efficient. Nowhere near as intellectually challenging as ʽRandy Described
Eternityʼ, for sure. But somehow, a bit more human, the way I perceive it.
The basic formula will persist: song after song
after song, it is usually just one melody per unit (with the notable exception
of ʽMess With Timeʼ, which begins like an Oriental-influenced lite
metal number and ends like a hard-rock-meets-ska hybrid), and they consistently
try to make it simpler, more accessible, maybe even more commercial, but still
with enough taste and creativity, and with sufficiently convoluted lyrics that
still seem to deal with the meaning of life in their own twisted ways, so as
not to disappoint the demanding fan or the casual listener. Some of these
songs, like ʽConventional Wisdomʼ with its swirling colorful lead
guitar, charging tempo, and merry attitude, are fairly atypical for the band.
Others, like the slow, jangly, psycho-dreamy ʽJust A Habitʼ, are more
predictable, but the one thing that unites them all is this relative
simplicity.
Oh, and another thing might be better
production: for some reason, now that they are no longer handled by Phil Ek in
the studio, Martsch's vocals suddenly become more upfront, and the songs in
general become much more influenced by their soulful, tender,
contemplative-Proustian vocalist; even if I am hardly his biggest fan, I must
say that now that he is no longer hidden behind the wall of guitars, but given
an equal voice with all of them, one major factor of irritation is gone, and
the album is generally easier to listen to. It has even got occasional moments
of conventional beauty (to which Built To Spill were never complete strangers —
remember ʽHazyʼ from the debut album? — but which was rarely a priority):
ʽThe Waitʼ, in particular, is a stately, somewhat angelic choice for
the album closer, with heavenly slide guitars, echoes, dreamy harmonies, and
lyrics that... well, apparently they imply that your entire life consists of
nothing but waiting. Yes, in a certain way I can see that. I can also see how
it would agree with Built To Spill's overall musical philosophy and its
somewhat Taoist overtones.
Although the qualitative gaps between all these
albums are really small, to the
extent that you will probably either love everything by the band, hate
everything by the band, or (like myself) respect everything by the band without
getting infected by it, I kinda sorta think of You In Reverse as a major turn. Better bands would lose out by
simplifying and streamlining their sound, but for Martsch and his pals it might
actually be a better bet to stay away from too much experimentalism and
esotericism, and concentrate on these «single-shot» songs that lock onto a
groove and ultimately, sooner or later, make it work, no matter how trivial or
boring it may have sounded during its first minute. A thumbs up, then, although do keep in
mind that for a band like this, it is much better to just apply one single
judgement to all the albums at the same time.
THERE IS NO ENEMY (2009)
1) Aisle 13; 2) Hindsight; 3)
Nowhere Lullaby; 4) Good Ol' Boredom; 5) Life's A Dream; 6) Oh Yeah; 7) Pat; 8)
Done; 9) Plating Seeds; 10) Things Fall Apart; 11) Tomorrow.
God, how tedious. Somehow, on their seventh LP
Built To Spill preserve the relative simplicity and accessibility of You In Reverse, but lose that album's
momentum. No more fast rockers, no more colorful power-pop, no more tense
pulsating melancholic vibes like there were in ʽTracesʼ. Instead, we
get another set of largely interchangeable, monotonous mid-tempo alt-rock
tunes, everything about which is predictable — if there is yet another leaf unturned in the personal logbook of Doug
Martsch, There Is No Emeny ain't in
no hurry to turn it over.
Maybe that's what Doug Martsch thinks, too,
because what else would lead him to naming one of the songs ʽGood Ol'
Boredomʼ? Yes, indeed, "it's nice but it's not that exciting",
as he sings after the lead guitar line, curiously reminiscent of the fanfare
riff in Yes' ʽAnd You And Iʼ, has been silenced to let in our
friendly, slightly effeminate singer. And as if in support of that, he returns
to his old favorite way of mumbling the vocals, while all the guitars are
equally muted, with this irritating «muffled» mix that isn't exactly lo-fi, yet
still creates the illusion of a thick screen between yourself and the music,
which is never a good thing, really.
But it is hardly the worsened production that
is the record's biggest problem — no, it is the lazy, paralyzed songwriting,
where you get track after track of generic folk-rock chord progressions and
weakly Beatlesque vocal harmonies (ʽLife's A Dreamʼ) that feel deeply
derivative, totally familiar, and mining those mines that are already
completely depleted. In fact, at least half of these tracks, I am sure, exist
only as sonic pads for the next in a series of Doug Martsch's Really Important
Metaphysical Thoughts, such as: "And if God does exist / I am sure he will
forgive / Me for doubting him / For he'd see / How unlikely he / Made himself
seem". I once said something like that at dinner, too, but I never
thought about making it into a song — who knows, maybe I'd have been able to
come up with something better than ʽOh Yeahʼ, a lumbering dinosaur
strolling along a path of power chords.
What's even
worse, this record drags on for almost an hour: eleven songs, stretched out to
what seems like infinity, and all of them so similar to each other that it is
no wonder most reviews of the album I've seen concentrate on the lyrics, trying
to decode Martsch's cryptic messages to the world. Or maybe not so cryptic — I
mean, there's nothing too cryptic about "The more you have to live for /
The more you love your life / The harder it will be for you to die / And we all
want dying easy". Uh, yeah, sure, whatever. I actually preferred him when
he sang pure nonsense — that way, you could just not bother at all, but here,
Pitchforkers all over the world just slobbered over these bits-o'-banalities (Pitchfork:
"For the first time in almost 10 years, it seems that Martsch
might actually have something he wants to say" — if so, maybe he shouldn't be saying
anything), and forgot to think about whether the music here actually means anything.
I have no way of explaining what exactly went
wrong in between You In Reverse and
its utterly uninspired follow-up — the players are essentially the same,
co-producer Dave Trumfio has a decent reputation, and according to various
interviews, Martsch was in high spirits when entering the recording studio. Of
course, once again do remember that essentially all Built To Spill albums sound
the same, and the qualitative difference between any of their two records is
negligible in the grand scheme of things. But every once in a while, they put
out an album that seems to suggest there is yet some hope for the old gray
school of Nineties' alt-rock — like You
In Reverse — and then they put out an album that almost makes me swear off
guitar-based rock music and go wash my ears out with a piano concerto or,
pending that, with some Eurodisco. Anything but
another eight-minute mid-tempo post-grunge psychosermon from Doug Martsch. This
one, I think, deserves a thumbs down all the way.
UNTETHERED MOON (2015)
1) All Our Songs; 2) Living
Zoo; 3) On The Way; 4) Some Other Song; 5) Never Be The Same; 6) C.R.E.B.; 7)
Another Day; 8) Horizon To Cliff; 9) So; 10) When I'm Blind.
Six years is a long time for youngsters, but
not so much for aging rockers — and anyway, the world's demand for new Built To
Spill albums had been fairly low even when they were in their prime, so we can
certainly excuse Doug Martsch for taking six years off to think whether he
still has anything worth saying. We can also excuse him for «spilling» all of
the band members and finally recording this new album with an entirely new team
— because, let's face it, who but the most dedicated veterans even remember the
names of the guys in the rhythm section? (Okay, I remember Scott Plouf, because
«Plouf» is hilariously phonosymbolic).
Anyway, if you hoped that a six year break
would transform Doug Martsch into some completely different musical entity —
that he would take that time to learn to rap or to play in Miley Cyrus' backing
band or, at least, to enroll in a Juilliard cello class — Untethered Moon will very quickly quash those hopes. The good news is that it is at least a major
improvement on There Is No Enemy,
with most of the songs showing an energy level that is quite close to You In Reverse, and a few of them even
being memorable, or genuinely epic, or epic and
memorable. Most importantly, Martsch is starting to remember how to combine
intellectualism with ass-kicking, and even with hook-making every once in a
while.
Take a song like ʽC.R.E.B.ʼ — whose
title, I suppose, is short for ʽcAMP Response Element-Building
Proteinʼ, and shows that Doug Martsch has a molecular biology textbook at
his disposal and is not afraid to use it. The lyrics are about long term
memory and our dependence on it, but there is a memorable (at least in the short term) riff attached to the song as
well, and a strange one at that — a sort of reggae-jazz-pop mix, echoey and
sharp, laying the foundation for a pretty hard-hitting track on the whole; and
it's a good thing when you cannot bring yourself to decide what is more
impressive — that the song is a massive ode to "your hippocampus" or
that it features plenty of moody, captivating guitar tricks.
The fast tempos are also back, starting right off
the bat with ʽAll Our Songsʼ, an explosive six-minute romp with
Martsch not afraid to let his hair down and let loose with a generic, but transfixing
rock'n'roll solo towards the end (a bit too short, unfortunately; however, the
middle set of overdubs, where several guitars or guitar tones engage in a
mutually offensive dia- or quadrilog, is equally impressive in its own way).
Eventually, the record comes full circle when ʽWhen I'm Blindʼ brings
the fast tempo back for the closing explosion — and this time, with a very lengthy and very drone-influenced lead guitar passage, almost as if in tribute
to ʽSister Rayʼ, except this one is probably not all that improvised.
But no matter, it's still one of the best series of passionate guitar trills
I've heard in a long, long time.
Ultimately, the best thing about Untethered Moon is not the melodies and
not the invitation to decode more of Doug Martsch's philosophical messages — it
is the understanding that the man is back in his experimental mood, on the
search for all sorts of new sounds that he can extract from the six-string. Or,
rather, contextually bound sounds — there is a lot of that here, as, for
instance, in the last two lines of ʽLiving Zooʼ, where he sings
"cause we're lions in our cages / And tigers in tiny spaces" and the
guitar gives out a ferociously distorted wah-wah growl right after the word
"tigers" — notice that? It's hard not to notice. It's all about these
minor touches of creativity these days, rather than grand breakthroughs — but
God bless him for these, really.
Some of the songs are still fillerish, for
sure, but even those that do not properly register can still be saved by one
touch or other — ʽSoʼ, for instance, seems to be fairly uninspired,
but the Neil Young-like hyper-distorted guitar tone makes it bone-crunching at
top volume; and ʽOn The Wayʼ, a song about overpopulation as a reason
for space colonization, has this odd music-hall mid-section, where Doug and his
backup echoes chant "Maltesian riot, Maltesian riot" as if they were
the Kinks in the middle of a devastating sociological discovery; it's a bit
hilarious, but it redeems the tune which is rather lackluster otherwise.
So, overall, this should probably be considered
an upward turn of the curve — again, with the usual disclaimer that «all Built
To Spill albums sound the same» taken into account, but proving that it is too
early to write Doug Martsch off as yet another spent/useless residue of the
Nineties alt-rock era; at the very least, Untethered
Moon is no less generally enjoyable than any «hot» new release by any
aspiring young whippersnapper. Not that anybody should hold out much hope:
based on the pattern established by Doug in the past 15 years, his next record
should be about as exciting as contemporary Smashing Pumpkins. But that might
take another decade or so to produce, and in the meantime, here's a thumbs up
for this particular presentation of one man's musically enhanced views on the
sorry state and uncertain perspectives of humanity.
ADDENDA:
THE NORMAL YEARS (1993-1995; 1996)
1) So & So So & So
From Wherever Wherever; 2) Shortcut; 3) Car; 4) Some Things Last A Long Time;
5) Girl; 6) Joyride; 7) Some; 8) Sick & Wrong; 9) Still Flat; 10)
Terrible/Perfect.
I will keep this very brief. Most likely, had this compilation not appeared way back
in 1996, when the band was still young and fresh and a few steps away from Big
Critical Recognition, it would not have appeared today — too slight, way too
slight. This one really just mops up some singles, outtakes, and alternate
versions of tracks from the first couple of albums, most of them being merely
of historical interest. The only general argument in favor of the album might
be that the sound is more «raw» and lo-fi on the whole, which is hardly
surprising but also hardly intentional: these are, indeed, unpolished versions,
but mainly because the band did not yet have the time or the skills to polish
them.
Actually, I guess the only two songs worth
specific mention are the two non-LP A-sides. ʽJoyrideʼ is an
unusually speedy folk-rocker in the vein of Tom Petty's ʽAmerican
Girlʼ, with some nicely crunchy distorted guitar howling high above the
folksy rhythm strum, a few cute stop-and-start moments, and a hilarious buzz of
overdubbed lead parts in the outro — probably the closest they came in those
early years (or ever, for that matter) to simplistic innocent rock'n'roll. And
the oddly titled ʽSo & So So...ʼ is a good example of Martsch's
experimental spirit ("so, instead of just taking this two-chord riff and
recording a punk song, we will add a droning serpentine melody on top of it
and record an art rock song"), although the gray, drab chorus with the
usual "vocals coming out of the guitar's ass" principle is still a
disappointment.
As a curio, there is a cover of a tune by
madman extraordinaire Daniel Jonston (ʽSome Things Last A Long
Timeʼ), where the key point is that midway through, this slow, leisurely,
contemplative ballad is ripped apart by a tornado-like lead guitar part, yet
the tempo, the general arrangement, and the vocals do not shift one bit, and
eventually the «tornado» just whooshes away and disappears — you may take this
as a symbolic reminder that "some things last a long time" indeed,
but a tornado is not one of them. There's also a track called
ʽShortcutʼ that runs for just a minute and a half (which probably
earned it its name) — a most unusual thing for Martsch, who was always
brevity's worst enemy.
Overall, this one's truly only for big fans and
completists. It does wrap all the odds and ends up nicely, reflecting Built To
Spill's passion for meticulousness — so many indie bands are so careless, after
all, about leaving their singles and EPs out of print — but accuracy per se is
not enough for me to hand out a certified thumbs up here.
Part 7. Recent Developments
(1998-2016)
THIS IS THE ALBUM OF A BAND CALLED ADEBISI SHANK (2008)
1) You Me; 2) Dodr; 3) Colin
Skehan; 4) Shunk; 5) Mini Rockers; 6) Agassi Shank; 7) I Answer To Doc; 8)
Snakehips.
There is one thing that
bugs me about the debut album of this band called Adebisi Shank, titled This Is The Album Of A Band Called Adebisi
Shank, as well as the slightly earlier 4-song EP by the same band, called This Is The EP Of A Band Called Adebisi
Shank (it makes sense to treat the two within the same review, considering
that both are executed in the same style, and that the «Album» runs only
slightly over 20 minutes anyway). The thing that bugs me is that the individual
titles, breaking the established idiom, are not listed as ʽThis Is The
First Composition On The Album Of A Band Called Adebisi Shankʼ,
ʽThis Is The Second Composition....ʼ and so on. Instead, they
inexplicably adopt the old pretentious jazz tradition of assigning random combinations
of words and non-words to their instrumentals. This does not seem consistent.
Then again, the very name of the band is essentially a meaningless word
combination («Adebisi» is the name of a character from the Oz TV show, chosen rather randomly), so the inconsistency goes even
farther than that...
Nevertheless, this is as
far as I can go about seriously criticizing the record, because in all other
respects Adebisi Shank, a power trio from Wexford, Ireland, created out of the
ashes of an earlier «post-rock» project, Terrordactyl, build up one of the
strongest cases for «math rock» that I have ever witnessed (although be sure to
take my words with a grain of salt, since I am anything but a solid expert on
these hip new genres). Their older peers, like Don Caballero, and their
contemporaries like Battles may have collected more fame under their belts, but
this is mainly due to different marketing strategies — Battles go for a more
public image, whereas Adebisi Shank mainly keep to themselves and let their
music do all the talking, and I do mean all:
there is no singing whatsoever, other than a few electronically processed and
looped vocal bits from time to time, nor do they waste their times on music
videos (although their live shows have gained an exceptionally high
reputation).
Now, in general, «math
rock» is a dubious enterprise. In their hyper-rationalistic efforts to find the
«perfectly complex» combination of beats, chords, and effects even the best
representatives of the genre (and it is hard to tell who the worst ones are,
since math rock, by its essence, requires a mega-level of intellect, technique,
and creativity) may drive themselves into the quagmire of purposelessness
(well, then again, real
mathematicians sometimes do that, too). So when I first heard about these guys
and decided to give them a first try, I was certainly skeptical — especially
since my latest math-rock experience had been with BATS, where the first three
or four songs are usually awesome, and then the headaches begin.
But Adebisi Shank ain't anything like BATS and their «heavy
metal trigonometry», or even like Battles and their chipmunk robot fantasies.
The difference is that, while all those bands do the kind of «robot rock» you'd
expect a robot to produce if the robot were pressed into inventing rock music,
Adebisi Shank do the kind of «robot rock» you'd expect a robot to produce if
the robot wanted to create his own impression of a previously experienced and
«assimilated» wild rock'n'roll band, let's say, with a slice of Celtic heritage
(be it AC/DC, Slade, Thin Lizzy, or U2, echoes of all of whom — and many more —
may be heard throughout the album).
Most of the
instrumentals are taken at fast, pouncing tempos. The rhythm section is almost
completely dependent on the powers of drummer Mick Roe, who isn't much about
tricky, off-beat polyrhythms à la
Bill Bruford, but sometimes sounds like a finally disciplined and harnessed
avatar of Keith Moon — filling up as much space as possible with his loud and
surprisingly melodic bashing, but all of it according to a strictly
pre-planned and perfectly realized strategy. Bass guy Vinny McCreith (whose
stage gimmick consists of always wearing a mask while playing — he says it's
all about having the audience concentrate just on the music, but maybe he's
just an IRA veteran on the run) usually provides the main riffs and melodic
developments throughout the show: the bass is laid on in such thick, distorted
swabs, that most of the time you will probably be playing air bass to these
tracks than air six-string.
Not that any of this
means depriving guitar guy Larry Kaye from what is rightfully his: there is
plenty of guitar riffage as well (usually doubling the bass), and when he gets
around to soloing, the two-handed tapping technique, long associated with the
self-indulgence of pointless «guitar wankery», displays a fuck-'em-all spirit
set against the relentless jackhammer punch of the drums and the brutal bass
onslaught. Larry also seems like the only player out of the three who is sometimes
allowed to improvise, and when he does, the guitar bursts out in splatters of
punkish anger, showing that our robot has probably even spent some time in the
company of the Stooges.
Individual tunes, be it
on the EP or the LP, are all but useless to name — they are about as different
as individual tunes on an AC/DC album (actually, the guitar tone and snappy
chords of the main riff to ʽMini Rockersʼ might have made Angus and
Malcolm very happy): if you are truly impressed by one of these compositions,
you will probably want the enchantment to last to the very end, and if you are
not, you probably just don't have enough robot blood floating in your veins. I
will tentatively single out ʽColin Skehanʼ as a personal favourite
(mainly for the ultra-cool stop-and-start false coda), and ʽYou Meʼ
as the album's deviating tune (it's got the only vocals on here, even if they
only consist of the song title, distorted and looped as befits a robot
freshman, recently initiated into the wonders of kick-ass rock'n'roll).
If you are interested,
be sure not to miss the EP as well — compared to the longplay, it is even
heavier, although, fortunately, that heaviness is of the neo-garage type rather
than the death metal type. (ʽJump Cutʼ, with its choppy chords, is
particularly telling, although the song eventually switches over to a somewhat
romantic mood, becoming a suitable background for a never written Bruce
Springsteen epic; they do not go for that kind of sentimentality on the LP). Limitations
of their chosen genre, and its inborn deficiencies (such as the very hard task of imbuing this stuff
with «soul», although the band really works wonders within the formula),
obviously prevent it from the status of an all-time classic, but not from a
solidly guaranteed thumbs up.
THIS IS THE SECOND ALBUM OF A BAND CALLED ADEBISI SHANK (2010)
1) International Dreambeat; 2)
Masa; 3) Genki Shank; 4) Micromachines; 5) (-_-); 6) Logdrum; 7) Bones; 8)
Frunk; 9) Europa; 10) Century City.
They did not change the
principle of (not) naming their albums, but they did change the running length:
second time around is almost twice as long as first time around, and this means
these guys better had something important to say, or else this would be just
another case of somebody technically overstaying their welcome. Fortunately,
this is not such a case.
The Second Album, on
the whole, is somewhat more quiet, (sometimes) a little slower, and a little
more diverse than its predecessor — a rather typical evolution for any sort of
rock band: announce your presence with a bang, then realize that you won't get
far by repeatedly «banging» your audience and try going somewhere else. The
question is, where?
Well, the first track,
ʽInternational Dreambeatʼ (not a typo, although there is nothing
particularly dreamy about the music), already gives sort of an answer. Opening
with electronic bleeps which then quickly organize themselves around a busy loop,
it places its trust neither in the excessive complexity of playing nor in the
plain blunt energy, but rather in structure and development — alternating quiet
electronic pulsation with pompous power chord blasts, and finally ending in a
grand quasi-symphonic finale.
This sets the tone for
the rest of the album: the compositions seem to have sacrificed much of the
original recklessness in favor of a more thoughtful and calculated approach —
as if the math in the band's math-rock formula has gone up a step or two, so
that now they are doing calculus where it just used to be quadratic equations.
But it is not the actual complexity of the individual parts that has increased:
rather, it is the sheer number of these parts, as well as the number of the
various guitar tones used by pedal god Larry Kaye, and the number of various
styles of music that the «Adebisi Shank Robot» is now supposed to assimilate
and interpret.
If ʽMasaʼ is
still very much in league with the fast, punkish stuff on the first album, then
ʽGenki Shankʼ is already memorable for its broken, jagged riff themes
rather than the headspinning precision and speed of their previous «rockers».
ʽ(-_-)ʼ (named after a Japanese emoticon) is a soft, almost
«balladeering» interlude with echoey «surf-folk» guitar; ʽLogdrumʼ
puts the guitar in «swooping» psychedelic mode for much of the time; and on
ʽBonesʼ, it seems as if Larry is experimenting with slide playing (or
at least a «sliding» effect), creating a robot-folk dance pattern that every
respectable old Celtic android might find likeable.
In terms of influence,
it also seems that the band is now relying a little less on the garage / punk /
pop prototypes from the 1960s and 1970s and a little more on the New Wave
stylistics of the late 1970s and early 1980s. You find stuff reminiscent of U2,
Television, the Heads, Discipline-era
King Crimson, etc., although even here the old-fashioned hooliganry sometimes
comes through: for instance, although the main theme of ʽCentury
Cityʼ is a ringing echoey guitar line that sounds straight out of 1980,
the mid-section is still given over to some spluttery garage soloing.
This is, after all, the
key to Adebisi Shank's continuing success — «mathematicians» as they are, these
guys just can't help being driven by an ultimately rock'n'roll heart, and
although I would generally say that totally obsessed calculation and wild
rock'n'roll drive are two diametrically opposed things, Adebisi Shank somehow
manage to combine the two, even within a moderately softer and «artsier»
setting than their debut album. Unquestionably a thumbs up.
THIS IS THE THIRD ALBUM OF A BAND CALLED ADEBISI SHANK (2014)
1) World In Harmony; 2) Big
Unit; 3) Turnaround; 4) Mazel Tov; 5) Thundertruth; 6) Sensation; 7) Chaos
Emeralds; 8) Voodoo Vision; 9) (Trio Always).
The third and the last,
apparently — only one month after the record's release, Adebisi Shank announced
they'd be splitting up, what with Larry Kaye being involved in several other
bands at the same time (possibly as a more authoritarian bandleader, I have no
idea). Perhaps the split will not be for eternity, or maybe some new phoenix
will rise out of the older's ashes — all the more desirable since this third
record clearly shows that they may have run out of money, or of love for each
other, but definitely not out of creative ideas.
The album begins with a
clearly intentional «band-as-orchestra» quotation of the main riff from
ʽLet It Beʼ — match it with the title ʽWorld In Harmonyʼ
and Lady Irony is upon us, because ten seconds into the song, Adebisi Shank are
back to their usual tricks, piecing together disparate melodic strings that
borrow almost chaotically from every musical genre imaginable. ʽWorld In
Harmonyʼ alone is classical, pop, blues-rock, country-western, and speed
metal, sometimes at the same time, as the guitar lays hard rock chords over a
Beethovenish synth pattern.
Most importantly,
though, the third album establishes its own face by going for the grand style.
The overdubs get denser, more bombastic and anthemic than ever before — this is
Adebisi Shank getting out of the heat of the small club and well into the open
air, delivering their schizophrenically deconstructed Odes to Joy to the
entire world. There is also less emphasis on guitar virtuosity and much more
on composition, development, and, so to speak, «angularity» of the particular
tracks — I guess that, technically, this makes Third even more of a «math-rock» record than First and Second, but,
strangely enough, it does not feel
that way. Maybe because the songs are catchier and the themes seem to make more
emotional sense.
With nearly all the
songs striving for this «bigness», and with the band's clever selection of the
appropriate major chords, the album is segmentable into similar-themed
movements rather than distinct songs, and the whole thing is like one big
symphony: I did not namedrop Beethoven for nothing, and wouldn't be surprised
to find him among these guys' influences — ʽVoodoo Visionʼ, the
album's grand closing, may begin with what rather suspiciously sounds like
Windows' standard speaker test, but soon enough it will move into a grandiose,
life-asserting theme that cannot even be spoiled by the silly electronically-encoded
vocals (that, too, is part of the schtick, because what's a proper futuristic
21st century symphonic piece without electronic encoding?).
ʽBig Unitʼ is
a little more personal and close-by, sounding like a big friendly monster
slowly, but accurately moving through the city as crowds of observers cheer in
admiration and wave the flags. ʽMazel Tovʼ adds an R&B-influenced
brass component and a funky bassline for about four minutes of a soundtrack to
a happy, if a bit too sternly regulated, party. Only ʽSensationʼ,
with its accelerated tempo and hyper-bubbling synth patterns, sounds a bit too
frenzied and nervous for the album's overall vibe, but it would still be a
stretch to call the song «dark» or «aggressive» — rather, it is just a
temporary detour from the anthemic happiness, a «breather» of sorts.
I would like to go for a
little controversy here and say that, as long as we're talking about «weird»,
«innovative», and «meaningful» all in one, I actually prefer Third to any single album by The Animal
Collective — not that this band ever had, or will have, any hopes of
approaching the fame of the authors of Merriweather
Post Pavillion, because they have no vocals (beyond those few instances of
electronic grunts) and because their main influences seem to be outside the
stereotypical hipster range (Beach Boys, etc.). But don't let that stop you
from enjoying them — the one thing they do
have is focus, and a respectable ambition to adapt their skills to the basic
needs of humanity. I mean, exactly how many «math-rock» albums could you label
as «uplifting»? Probably none, mainly because you'd have a hard time trying to
label them as anything (except for
«aggressively kick-ass» if the math is steeped in metal).
All the more irony,
then, that the band may have exploded just as they'd reached, or came close to
reaching, their peak — but perhaps that is what you get as punishment when you
begin your record with a musical quote from ʽLet It Beʼ (in fact, we
should all be happy that they did not begin it with a musical quote from
ʽHighway To Hellʼ instead, or some poor guy would have already be
choking upon his vomit). Then again, it is a bit hard to understand where else
they could have been headed from here — if this is their Ninth Symphony in a
nutshell, there isn't supposed to be
a completed Tenth. I only hope this reverential thumbs up will offer at least a
little help, so that the memory of Adebisi Shank does not evaporate with the
passing of the band itself, under a rather natural scenario for the majority of
today's artists.
19 (2008)
1) Daydreamer; 2) Best For
Last; 3) Chasing Pavements;
4) Cold Shoulder; 5) Crazy For You; 6) Melt My Heart To Stone;
7) First Love; 8) Right As Rain; 9) Make You Feel My Love;
10) My Same; 11) Tired; 12) Hometown
Glory.
In 2009, Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was one of
the freshest arrivals in an interminable series of young, gifted girls living
in prosperous Western society and suffering from acute psychic imbalance that
forces them into a life of songwriting. Nine times out of ten, there is no
middle ground with these ladies: one portion of the population, large or small,
falls madly in love with them, and the other one just hates them for being
boring, pretentious, and basically expendable, thinking — not without reason —
that the world has been oversaturated with their «soulfulness» to such a degree
that the very word «soul» has become completely devalued.
Another reason for cool people to hate Adele is
her commercial success. Which, and it is a stone cold fact, was almost
mathematically calculated: the album's singles, 'Chasing Pavements' and 'Cold
Shoulder', are just the kind of relatively simple, but catchy adult pop that UK
charts seem to have developed a particular attraction for. (Arguably, it's
these two particular songs that also sound the closest to Amy Winehouse, to
whom people keep comparing Adele — generally unjustly, as she's got a much more
folksy vibe to her than Amy). Of course, UK charts these days are somewhat more
tolerant about decent music than US ones, but still, soulful female
singer-songwriters that sell lots of records are by definition a suspicious
lot.
I do not find the slightest reason to believe
that this dame, or her music, is a fake, though. Her weak points are the
lyrics, which she probably thinks original and some probably find inspirational
— but it's just that there's a point at which trying to express the same old
same old feelings in new «deep» ways becomes a cliché in itself. Today,
whenever I hear a song begin with lines like "Daydreamer, sitting on the
sea, soaking up the sun, he is a real lover, of making up the past and feeling
up his girl like he's never felt her figure before", I can't help asking
myself: «Say, what happened to the old "when I feel that something, I
wanna hold your hand" routine?» Lyrically, she doesn't have anything to
say that you don't already know, unless you belong to the younger generation
that refuses to trust anyone over 30, much less over 64 like Paul McCartney.
But in terms of pure meaningless (or, at least,
verbal meaning-less) sound, she's a different matter. She's got a great voice —
strong, just a tad raspy, stuck somewhere in between folk and jazz style — and
an excellent sense of phrasing. And she doesn't merely rely on it, but makes it
an integral part of her musical world, which is truly a musical world, not just
some sensitive hack banging away at a grand piano (the Soft stereotype) or
slashing out the same old grunge chords on a cheap electric guitar (the Hard
stereotype). She writes interesting vocal, and occasionally instrumental,
melodies, and arranges them in miriads of ways: starting out on solo acoustic,
then shifting to retro-jazzier territory, then going all-out modern pop on the
hit singles, then leaving out all but a set of chimes... the piano really
arrives only on the last track, 'Hometown Glory', but, to tell the truth, the
song could use any kind of arrangement as long as the vocal hooks stay.
So I find myself in an odd position. I
honestly, sincerely do not care for Adele's inner torment. I do not care for it
one instant because for a girl who is only 19 — and who insists on your knowing
it — this kind of inner torment is gruesomely inadequate. 19-year old girls
should, at best, be singing "come on babe, come see about me", just
like 19-year old boys should be singing about wanting to hold your hand. Maybe
I've grown insensitive, but blame it on the legions of Adeles, all of which strive
to achieve Shakespeare-tragedy level on their debut album because these days,
you've got to be «mature» to be taken seriously.
Yet I cannot not acknowledge the talent — the
hit singles, 'Hometown Glory', 'Tired', 'Crazy For You' and some other tunes
have made an impression on me, and if the heaviness of their lyrics and the
self-importance were cut back to match the delightful airiness and inventiveness
of their melodies, I might have warmed up to the record immediately rather than
after a handful of listens it took me to go beyond the initial «oh no, not that
whiny 2000-teenager crap again». So here's hoping this girl, like Benjamin
Button, will be growing backwards on her next albums — because otherwise,
failing to become the next Joni Mitchell, she faces the imminent threat of
becoming the next, ugh, Vanessa Carlton.
And so, in the heart vs. brain thing, the
sympathetic heart tells the indignant brain to shut off for a minute and wins
the battle with a solid, if not overwhelming, thumbs
up. Will the brain eventually have the upper hand? Let’s wait for
the next record.
21 (2011)
1) Rolling In The Deep; 2)
Rumor Has It; 3) Turning Tables; 4) Don't You Remember; 5) Set Fire To The Rain; 6)
He Won't Go; 7) Take It All; 8) I'll Be Waiting; 9) One And Only; 10) Lovesong;
11) Someone Like You;
12*) If It Hadn't Been For Love; 13*) Hiding My Heart; 14*) I Found A Boy.
Captain Obvious suggests that 21 can refer to two more years of
growth and experience for Adele after her debut with 19; Captain Irony, however, argues that it really reflects the
number of male human beings that managed to break Adele's heart and dump her
body in the interim — the best available explanation for the fact that
profanated, betrayed, and simply lost love is just about the only lyrical and
emotional subject of the record. (Unless, of course, "We could have had it
all, rolling in the deep" is really supposed to be sung from the
perspective of Dick Cheney — or, closer to home, Gordon Brown — but that's
pushing philological analysis a bit too far).
Anyway, "rumor has it" that there has
really only been one painful
break-up, but she capitalized on it quickly and richly enough. Considering that
approximately 99% of music that tries to combine «commercial orientation» with
«seriousness» is about broken hearts — the only serious topic that is
considered safe enough for our fragile brains — it would be impossible to
approach 21 without prejudice. But
on the other hand, in Adele's case it does
represent a little bit of that «growing backwards» thing I mentioned in my
review of 19: cutting down on the
over-acted romantic mysticism in favour of a little more grit and, well,
honesty, pardon the expression.
So? On its own terms — a proverbial blue-eyed
soul album about emotional pain — 21
is a masterpiece, definite proof that 19
was no fluke and that, together, the two records will make musical history even
if they are not followed by 23, 25... 99. Yes, occasionally she still has this unsettling tendency to
slip into faceless formula: 'Turning Tables', while not bad, is that kind of
«sensitive girl wailing by the piano» thing that is generated by the likes of
Vanessa Carlton and cloned incessantly on an almost daily basis; and 'He Won't
Go' leans dangerously close to conventional modern R'n'B, particularly the
verse melody which could as well have come from Beyoncé. Well, she can't
do it on her own, after all, and since this is not indie music we're speaking
of, there are bound to be some concessions to the crappy standards.
All of them are, however, in an absolute
minority next to her own songwriting and singing. It is goddamn hard to make a
soul tune memorable — there is always the temptation to just hang it all on the
«soul» itself, as if the very fact that you let, or pretend to let, a
supernatural force possess you behind the microphone should be enough for
claiming a Classic Moment in Pop Music. She does not: the songs are cleverly
written, with hooks, interesting melodic twists, sometimes, exciting
arrangement decisions ('Rumor Has It', because of the booming percussion, has
an almost Tom Waits-ish Bone Machine-like
quality to it), captivating build-ups and fade-outs — stuff that you rarely, if
ever, expect to find in an album like this.
I dare anyone to challenge the technical
perfection, for instance, with which the drama unfolds in 'Rolling In The
Deep', a song that is like the musical equivalent of a series of uniformly accelerating
snowballs rolling downhill — and all of it achieved through a relatively
minimal arrangement (guitar, piano, drums, and backing vocals arriving on the
scene one after the other in a subtle manner). Or 'Set Fire To The Rain', with
the finest chorus on the album — this time, she does it on a grand scale, but a
fully adequate one; the song is anthemic and pretentious, and to justify it,
she taxes her voice to the max, and hits the jackpot.
The album is often described as a «retro»
experience — most of the time, I did not really get that feeling, unless we
automatically consider any album that stays away from electronics to be «retro».
That said, some of the songs are
built on soul and R'n'B rhythms popular around the 1970s: 'Don't You Remember',
'I'll Be Waiting', 'One And Only', and, just like the best songs from that
decade, each is based around a singularly impressive chorus. Ah, that good old
fashioned way of naming your song after its major vocal hook — one glance at
the title and you can remember how it goes in an instant.
It's not as if she has invented a new way of
looking at breakups, of course, and it's not very likely that one will always
enjoy all the songs equally (my disfavourites include 'He Won't Go', the slightly
Celine Dion-ish 'Take It All', and the overlong Latinized take on The Cure's
'Lovesong', although it's sort of okay for the first two minutes), but the
bottomline is: if you already loved 19,
you can't go wrong with the next odd number, and if you were skeptical, 21 is liable to significantly exceed
your expectations the way it exceeded mine.
Thumbs up — now you
have one more reason to watch the videos and vent your dark impulses by
commenting on the size of her cheeks along with the regular low-life forms that
inhabit YouTube. For that matter, if you happen to disagree with my subjective
assessment, here is an alternative review of 'Rolling In The Deep' for your
pleasure taken from that particular source (whoever said that evolution rarely,
if ever, works backwards?):
LOL
this song is abslolute fucking SHIT! i thought this fat slag had fucked off and
what do u know, shes back fatter and shitter than ever! fuck adele and all her shit cunt followers fuck off CUNTS!
LIVE AT THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL (2011)
1) Hometown Glory; 2) I'll Be
Waiting; 3) Don't You Remember; 4) Turning Tables; 5) Set Fire To The Rain; 6)
If It Hadn't Been For Love; 7) My Same; 8) Take It All; 9) Rumour Has It; 10)
Right As Rain; 11) One And Only; 12) Lovesong; 13) Chasing Pavements; 14) I
Can't Make You Love Me; 15) Make You Feel My Love; 16) Someone Like You; 17)
Rolling In The Deep.
Not a lot of people, I would guess, get to play
the Albert Hall upon releasing only two albums. To the skeptics, this would
probably mean a gruesomely played out PR campaign — and to the idealists, it
would be a confirmation that here we finally have something really great,
really otherworldly, so phenomenally talented that even the tightassed music
industry bosses have to kowtow before this unbelievable power of a 21-year old
upstart who doesn't even have the sex appeal of a Taylor Swift. And in a way,
both the skeptic and the idealist would be right.
The album, actually, is not a «proper» CD
release: the entire concert was predictably captured on video, and comes in DVD
format with all the tracks duplicated on an audio CD. However, I do feel, upon
both watching and listening, that this is an important release in «The
Extraordinary Story Of Adele A.», deserving of its own brief review — not to
mention that it did sell around 3 million copies worldwide, and hit No. 2 on
the UK charts as well, which is fairly impressive for a live album these days.
First of all, the setlist is a little
discomforting — with only two albums behind her back, she reproduces 21 almost in its entirety, with less
than half of 19 getting an honorable
mention; surely at least such highlights as ʽDaydreamʼ or ʽCold
Shoulderʼ deserved, well, more than a cold shoulder. Some of the reasons
could be technical — for instance, much of the material on 19 was rather sparsely arranged, leaving out many members of her
current touring band (which, for this particular occasion, also includes a
small orchestra), or perhaps she already thought of some of those early songs
as tentative or even «dated». But it wouldn't have hurt, then, to compensate
maybe with some obscurities or covers, considering how she has the same knack
for doing Bob Dylan or The Cure as she has for her own songs.
Second, the lady has an obvious stage problem —
not so evident on the audio CD, which generously cuts out all the banter, but very irritating on the DVD, where almost
every song is introduced with around two to five minutes of narrative on life
experience told in prime quality Tottenham dialect. Frankly speaking, the few
bits I did manage to understand were
neither too insightful nor particularly funny, and overall, the impression was
very much the same I get from listening to Ani DiFranco live albums: the artist
is trying way too hard to come across
as a «real human being» — in a sense, this really comes across as a
condescending gesture: trying to get the audience to relax and shed its
tenseness and confusion in the presence of The Great Artist, who is really The
Average Everyday Person in artistic disguise. (Also agrees with the swearing —
heavy use of the F-word is one of the true features of the AEP, and so, in the
good old tradition of Pete Townshend and Co., there is plenty of that there.
One might ask why the heck isn't there any actual swearing in the songs, then — oh, right, to avoid radio
censorship.)
Fortunately, this talkative attitude does not
seep in much into the music, other than a few evil cackles every now and then
that she inserts at the end of the songs to beat down the pathos level (see
ʽRumour Has Itʼ, for instance). The music is flawless — since she is no R&B queen and does not feel
the need to flutter around the stage, this allows her to fully concentrate on
the singing, and every single tune is done at least as well as on the original
version, and occasionally maybe even better. (She does not play any instruments
here, although she used to in the early days of 19 — but now that she can afford as many backup players as she
needs, why bother?). The only disappointment is ʽRollin' In The
Deepʼ, where a large chunk of the chorus vocals is given over to the
audience — when the first "we could have had it all..." comes along
and Adele is not in it at all, that's
sort of a bummer. But I guess it must have felt different back there: audience participation feels
like a total gas until you get to hear it reproduced on an audio recording.
Anyway, returning to the beginning of the
review, Live At The Royal Albert Hall
really does show that the Adele phenomenon owes its success to about fifty
percent genius and fifty percent meticulous image calculation — which is
alright by me, since that's the way it's been since the Beatles, heck, since
Mozart and Liszt, I guess. By all means, the DVD is epochal and a must-have,
capturing all the strengths and
weaknesses of the artist at the same time: in fact, despite the generally
negative feel I have about this wound-up stage image, the contrast between how she looks and sounds when chattering away and
when singing one of her soulful ballads or rhythmic stompers is strong enough
to make you appreciate «Adele the artist» even more than you did before you got
the chance to «know» a little bit of her as «Adele the commoner». Thumbs up.
25 (2015)
1) Hello; 2) Send My Love (To
Your New Lover); 3) I Miss You; 4) When We Were Young; 5) Remedy; 6) Water
Under The Bridge; 7) River Lea; 8) Love In The Dark; 9) Million Years Ago; 10)
All I Ask; 11) Sweetest Devotion.
"Hello. It's me. I was wondering if after
all these years you'd like to meet, to go over everything". Kind of a
humble start for a mega-star whose millions of fans have been dying for years to see just where
Adele's journey of spiritual growth would take her next. And if press release
stuff and Wikipedia rumors have anything to them, this journey was actually in
danger of coming to a premature end — she had expressed a desire for early
retirement, either due to pressures of family life or because she had an
inclination that, perhaps, 21 had
her at the top of her game and that it would have been so much cooler to go out
on top.
And yes, it would. Most good stories in the
21st century tend to have crappy sequels, and with 25, our little fairy tale, too, seems to have exhausted the limits
of good taste and creativity and turn into its own crooked mirror image.
Honestly, I was not expecting that any follow-up to 21 could match the cohesive greatness of that record — but neither
was I expecting such a direct, express jet trip to Crapsville. And what makes
matters so much worse is that 21,
like it or not, had a great educational
value: through those songs, millions of people had access to solid melodies,
real soul, and genuine instrumentation, not to mention a chance to get
interested in Time Out Of Mind and Disintegration. For a brief moment out
there, it seemed like here was a really strong-willed, independent woman artist
that could lead the masses — or even, with a stroke of luck, dictate her own
terms to the corporate music industry.
But no dice. Enter 25, a thoroughly disappointing, bland, formulaic record of big «adult contemporary» ballads, produced by no
less than eleven different producers,
co-written by Adele with no less than the same number of different songwriters,
and featuring no real spiritual
growth whatsoever. The only new emotional strand is that of nostalgia and
forgiveness — the Adele of 21 seemed
preoccupied with her current troubles, the Adele of 25 seems to be looking for artistic inspiration largely in past
troubles ("they say that time's supposed to heal you, but I ain't done
much healing"); no wonder, since it does not look like she'd had a lot of
troubles for the previous four years. A happy marriage, a son, a well-secured
financial present and future, plenty of charity work — no wonder that now, in
order to keep up the broken-hearted image, she has to turn her mind back on the
past.
And it does not work. We could, of course, put
most of the blame on the producers, who did their best to dress all of these
melodies in the most generic rhythms and sonic textures; but I believe that no
one is more to blame than Adele herself, who just so clearly did not need to
put out this album — it is so utterly unnatural, so strenuously pushed into
unnecessary existence, that the only frickin' question is: WHY? Goddammit, if you are so obviously content with your life, why do you consider yourself obligated
to put out a collection of dark, morose, monotonous ballads with conventional
frameworks and clichéd hooks (or «non-hooks»)? Just because you are
«Adele, the Queen of the Dark Heart-Tug?» and people would not buy your records
if you preferred to cover ʽBanana Boat Songʼ instead?
The opening piano chords of ʽHelloʼ
may aspire to genius simplicity, but I wonder just how many by-the-book
balladeers have already made my ears insensitive to their effect — and the
«depth» that opens up when the powerhouse chorus hits you is phoney, a
well-rehearsed production trick more than a genuine reflection of one's state
of mind. By the time the song kicks into full gear, electronic hums and drum
machines and cavernous echoes dominating the waves, you don't seem to remember
the difference between Adele and Celine Dion any more. Is this it, then? That «maturity» by the age of 25 means completing
your transformation into a generic «Diva»?
It does not get much better when the songs get
upbeat, though. ʽSend My Loveʼ starts out with a quiet, but
well-audible "just the guitar!" instruction, which turns out to be a
ruse — fairly soon, we get a trip-hop backing track of the teenybopper variety,
aerobic backing vocals à la Beyonce, and an annoying synthetic chorus —
"we gotta let go of all of our ghosts, we both know we ain't kids no
more", on a track that has the most kiddyish arrangement of 'em all. No
wonder, that, since it was co-written with Max «I Fucked 'Em All, Figuratively
Speaking» Martin, the man to whom you turn when Mephistopheles is unable to
hold up his end of the bargain.
There is only one song on the entire album, as
far as I'm concerned, that strives to break out of the plastic carcass — the
gospel-influenced ʽRiver Leaʼ, produced by and co-written with Danger
Mouse; although the arrangement is still spoiled by a robotic rhythm section,
the organ adds a nice touch, the chorus is catchy, and the main hook is
wond'rously found, with Adele hitting a compassionate note on the "blame
it on the River Lea, the River Lea..." passage. Which makes me wonder if,
at this point, she couldn't have made a fine 21st century Mahalia Jackson — at
least singing about going back to the river seems to bring out the human in her
far more effectively than trying to rile herself over some forgotten past
lovers.
Alas, one such bit of success does nothing to
alleviate the «dull aching pain» from listening to one forgettable ballad after
another — sometimes exacerbated when the song in question is ʽMillion
Years Agoʼ, a truly awful acoustic «tear-jerker» that sounds as if it's
been pulled directly from one of those whip-out-yer-hanky Euro musicals like Notre Dame De Paris: listening to Adele
crooning "I miss the air, I miss my friends, I miss my mother, I miss it
when life was a party to be thrown..." just makes me cringe in its
absolutely cheap corniness.
How the heck did this happen? How and when and
why did the master songwriter and performer of 21 turn into this replaceable Kelly Clarkson-meets-Vanessa Carlton
type plastic doll? Sure, we still have «The Voice», but it's obviously not just
the voice that made 21 such an
outstanding achievement. My natural guess is simply that the artist... has
nothing more to say. That's just it. She said what she had to say — she made a
wise decision that she would not be saying any more — she was forced to come back because she has no
other profession, because the fans and the record executives cry for more, she
placed herself in the hands of studio pros, she wrote those songs without
properly feeling them, she delivered them because that was what she was
expected to do. Oh, and she even got plenty of rave reviews — «style instead of
substance» is all the rage nowadays, and when you're a big star with a properly
run publicity campaign, naturally there'll be plenty of people falling over
your lyrical clichés and thrice rehashed Serious Chords. But hey, you
can always rely on good old Only Solitaire to cut the crap.
In other words, here is one more case of an
artist metamorphosing into a pseudo-artistic machine. If your reaction is,
"well, she was never all that good anyway", I respectfully disagree: 19 was nice and human, warts and all,
and 21 was as close to a genuine,
sincere masterpiece as commercially-oriented «serious pop music» ever gets.
But this — this is as good a pretext as any to change that old adage of «never
trust anybody over thirty» to «never trust anybody over twenty five», as more
and more artists these days flash by like the one-album wonders (two-album wonders
at best) they are. Oh sure, there's always some fickle hope that the next album
(31, if that particular arithmetic
progression continues to be respected?) will make things right, but who wants
to spend the next six years in fickle hopes? Thumbs down, case closed.
PALE FOLKLORE (1999)
1) She Painted Fire Across The
Skyline, Pt. 1; 2) She Painted Fire Across The Skyline, Pt. 2; 3) She Painted
Fire Across The Skyline, Pt. 3; 4) The Misshapen Steed; 5) Hallways Of
Enchanted Ebony; 6) Dead Winter Days; 7) As Embers Dress The Sky; 8) The
Melancholy Spirit.
Since The United States Of Jazz, Blues, and
Country had never been a major player on the «extreme fantasy metal» scene —
one area almost totally monopolized by Scandinavian countries — it is not
difficult to understand the sometimes too heavy aura of promotion that
surrounds Agalloch, a band hailing from Portland, Oregon. These guys have
dared to challenge none other than Finland's Amorphis, Norway's Ulver, and
Sweden's mighty Opeth — and the very fact that they can do it without thoroughly embarrassing themselves almost
automatically makes them critical darlings (for the metal press, at least).
There still may be a big difference, though. Pale Folklore, Agalloch's full-length
debut (preceded only by some demo tapes that are said to be far more
derivative), is unquestionably influenced by and constantly evokes Scandinavian
metal schools, but if most of those bands perform dark metal with elements of
folk, Pale Folklore is dark folk
with elements of metal. Or, rather, it is what a black minstrel with laryngeal
cancer would sound like if someone tuned down his lute and ran it through a
distortion pedal.
For one thing, the guitarists, John Haughm and
Don Anderson, almost never solo. This may be due to technical limitations (must
be hard to get a proper Swedish guitar teacher in Oregon), or may be a
conscious, self-restraining decision, but the fact is that Agalloch's music is
riff-based something like 95% of the time (and the rest of it mainly consists
of howling winds or tolling bells, or, sometimes, brief piano interludes). This
can get tiresome, since the riffage is usually of the «drone» variety, and
unless you pay lots and lots of attention, all of these drones tend to merge
together in one huge mega-drone. In this respect, Agalloch may have more in
common with noise rock bands like ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead
than with their Viking brothers-in-arms.
But if it doesn't exactly pay off in terms of
memorability and even «discernibility», it works fine in the atmosphere
department. Carefully avoiding most of the cheesy aspects of Nordic music
(militant paganism, church-burning, horned helmets, Valhalla awaits us, all
that nonsense that keeps Wagner permanently rotating in his grave), they
concentrate on themes of world-weariness and round-the-corner death, the ones
that go down so well with a bit of grey cloudy skies, snow-covered pine
forests, and icy wind blasts. Obviously, an icy wind blast opens the record as
such — what else? And the strange bagpipe-imitating drone that eventually
morphs into an even stranger «scratchy» pattern immediately sets the right atmosphere.
Except for a relatively brief, equally
winterish, instrumental 'The Misshapen Steed', a rapidly shifting palette of
sorrowful piano melodies, weeping woodwinds, mystical harps, and funebral orchestration,
all of the songs are heavy riff-fests, usually with one guitar providing the
thick, stern drone and another laying a more distinctive, note-based melody.
They are all extremely similar, but different enough to leave a folk metal fan
further interested in sorting them out and ascribing tiny mood swings to each
successive track. Tempos range from mid- to moderately fast, and the rhythm
section cooks well: stuff like 'Hallways Of Enchanted Ebony' has serious headbanging
potential. Of course, we are occasionally sidetracked into acoustic interludes
(many of them combining sharp precision with sincere loveliness), and there are
a few completely unexpected surprises — U2-ish scratch-delay-patterns on 'The
Melancholy Spirit', for instance — but diversity was hardly a major goal here.
Unfortunately, adopting various superficial
trappings of their predecessors also means that most of the lyrics are
delivered in a generic black metal growl; on one hand, this may be an advantage
since we do not get to discern the spoken words (the album opens with "Oh
dismal mourning, I open my weary eyes once again, my life has been left hollow
and ashes have filled the gorge of my within" and the rest never strays
too far away from that tragic realization), but, on the other hand, this is the major obstacle that can prevent one
from taking this whole stuff seriously. It is one thing if the entire work of
art transparently adopts Dungeons & Dragons as its ideal, but Agalloch
seem serious about creating a darkly beautiful musical landscape, so why should
it be spoilt rotten with this «Cookie Monster caught a rhinovirus» sonic
idiocy? (The other vocal trapping —
little bits of female opera vocals on climactic bits of some of the tracks —
works perfectly fine, in comparison).
Apart from that, and the fact that, from each
new outburst of US critic adoration you have to subtract the unseen, but
suspected bit of national pride bias, Pale
Folklore is a pretty damn good record to play. Especially if all of your relatives have died (preferably, in
horrible accidents or after long and painful struggles with incurable
illnesses), if life has no meaning whatsoever, and if you are financially fit
to go on an Alpine vacation. Don't forget to bring Pale Folklore along. The line "From which of this oak shall I
hang myself?" sounds especially delicious in such a context, provided you
can make it out from the growls. Thumbs up.
THE MANTLE (2002)
1) A Celebration For The Death
Of Man...; 2) In The Shadow Of Our Pale Companion; 3) Odal; 4) I Am The Wooden
Doors; 5) The Lodge; 6) You Were But A Ghost In My Arms; 7) The Hawthorne
Passage; 8) ...And The Great Cold Death Of The Earth; 9) A Desolation Song.
I take it as no coincidence that it is today,
right on the very day that I set out to write about Agalloch's most acclaimed
album, that we got our first serious winter snowfall, and it is still falling
out of the murky grey skies right as I type out these words. Now all we need to
do is replace the boring urban window view with pine forests on mid-size hills,
populate them with a bunch of world-weary, disgruntled ghosts, and then the
picture and the sound will be as one.
The
Mantle is Agalloch at their
very best simply because it is the
one album, so far, in their career that has them doing their thing and their
thing only. Death metal clichés are reduced to an absolute minimum, in
fact, it may not even be correct to call this thing «metal» at all — very few
songs have the required crunchy heavy riffs, being driven instead by loud
acoustic strum, stern and morose, but still somewhat colorful electric leads,
and, occasionally, pianos, accordeons, even mandolins. The growling vocals are
still there, sometimes, but much more often give way to clean-sung lines or are
presented as ominous, mood-setting whispering rather than the usual «hey, who
let Ronnie James Dio gobble ten pounds of ice cream on a cold winter day?»
variety.
One element of the band's schtick has by now
crystallized to perfection, and it may not be to everyone's tastes: they
display a strong passion for LAM(B?) — Long, Atmospheric, Monotonous (and
Boring?). If an Agalloch composition crawls on for 10 or 15 minutes, do not
expect an Abbey Road-style
multi-part suite. There will be some key changes along the way, some alternations
between quiet and loud, some traces of fade-outs and crescendos, but overall,
what you get in the beginning is not too different from what you get in the
middle, and almost absolutely the same as what you get in the end. This is an
ambient approach, and you have to cope with it.
Not that it's unexpected. This is, after all,
music for people who like taking long walks in snow-covered forests, and how is
a snow-covered forest that much different at the start of your walk from the
snow-covered forest at the end of it?
(Unless you're lucky enough to end up swallowed by a grizzly bear, of course,
which, I suspect, is like that particular ideal ending insinuated by Agalloch
on each of their records, but always remaining unrealized at the end). It is
one thing when a seventy-minute long album takes that much time only in order
to mask the paucity of its ideas — but Agalloch found a great way out of it:
sure, they do not have a lot of different ideas, but the ideas they do have are the ones that, by their very
nature, require a lot of running time.
'In The Shadow Of Our Pale Companion' is
arguably the perfect Agalloch number,
conveying the band's essence so damn well that everything else almost ends up
sounding like last-minute variations on the magnum opus. There is a metallic
roar running through its main melody, but it does not initiate the melody,
which consists of a mournful electric drone, a simple acoustic accompaniment,
and a minimalistic medieval mandolin pattern, woven together so carefully that
Mother Nature could hardly wish for a more suitable mourning anthem for itself.
Vocals come as growls, as dark quasi-Gregorian harmonies, as underground demon
recitative, as half-spoken bardic poetry, whatever suits the moment best.
Guitar solos start coming in no earlier than the tenth or eleventh minute, in
the usual minimalist form. Harmonies are overdubbed with so much craft that it
is hard to believe it is the same band that, just a few years ago, engaged in
little vocal work other than just vomiting the words out into the microphone.
It's not all pure «fantasy world», either —
like most of the album's tunes, the song is ecologically minded. On The Mantle, Agalloch seem to exert more
care in making us believe this whole musical and lyrical approach is not just the result of reading too many
third-rate fantasy novels and yearning for the innocence of an era in which you
could fall upon your sword in the middle of a dark forest and have a beautiful
ballad written about it. They want to merge that imagery and those values into
the present. Think King Arthur, Siegfried, and Beowulf transported in a time
machine into the 21st century — then, in the words of Jim Morrison, our first
eco-minded bard, «look what they've done to the Earth, look what they've done
to our fair sister» etc. etc.
That's one aspect that doesn't really work, but
it makes great fodder for the press, who now has a legitimate reason for
respecting the band and tolerating the intolerable, that is, the arrogant duration
and similarity of their atmospheric pieces. Obviously, I cannot discuss them
individually. If you yearn for a more openly metallic sound, 'I Am The Wooden
Doors' and 'You Were But A Ghost In My Arms' will provide the heavy riffage you
need, but the last twenty-five minutes are all solidly folk-based, particularly
'The Great Cold Death' with its near-gorgeous vocal part and 'A Desolation
Song' with its accordeon-and-mandolin-led melody.
But then, honestly, it does not matter;
Agalloch make a point of blurring the line between folk and metal, right down
to where, at some point, you no longer feel like you are having a «folk» or
«metal» experience at all, but are simply listening to some extreme form of a
Requiem Mass — "Celebration For The Death Of Man", indeed. I am not going
to pretend to being in some perverse love relation with The Mantle, or even to «getting» it the way we're supposed to get
it. I am not going to say it fully justifies its length (had they cut out, for
instance, the eleven minutes of 'Hawthorne Passage', the album would still
retain its full potential). I certainly do not insist that it cannot be accused
of cheesiness — some of the lyrics are generically cringeworthy, and some of
the darkness, as befits this genre, feels artificially bloated. And it is
rather obvious that if you fall upon this from a purely metal background, the
technical accomplishment of John Haughm and company will seem puny next to
their Scandinavian forefathers.
But The
Mantle, much more so than Folklore,
makes that somewhat primitive bluntness of the band's approach into their chief
advantage. Many people can run up and down all sorts of scales; how many have
thought of concentrating, instead, on enveloping your living quarters in an
impenetrable atmosphere of folk-metallic ambience? 'In The Shadow...' is
supposed to leave you mesmerized rather than aggressively overwhelmed, and I
believe that it achieves its goal, along with most of the other songs on here.
Well, it looks like it's finally stopped snowing, so I may as well just issue
the expected thumbs
up and let us move on from here.
ASHES AGAINST THE GRAIN (2006)
1) Limbs; 2) Falling Snow; 3)
This White Mountain On Which You Will Die; 4) Fire Above, Ice Below; 5) Not Unlike
The Waves; 6) Our Fortress Is Burning... I; 7) Our Fortress Is Burning... II.
Bloodbirds; 8) Our Fortress Is Burning... III. The Grain; 9*) Scars Of The
Shattered Sky (Our Fortress Has Burned To The Ground).
Somewhat of a step down here; four years of
studio non-presence, apart from a handful of not very diagnostic EPs, do not
seem to have done much good for the proud Oregon disciples of Scandinavian
thunder and ice wizards. Not only has there been very little progress in their
musical education, but Ashes even
seems to trade back some of the achievements of The Mantle, and for what? Essentially, for a return to a much more
hardcore-metallic sound — almost as if they were afraid listening to The Mantle might make some of us forget
the band's true pedigree.
The results of their cutting down on acoustic
compositions and interludes, as well as clean vocals, are obvious: most of the
songs sound totally alike. The basic range now is not from dark folk to heavy
folk-metal, but rather from heavy folk-metal to songs that dangerously border
on «old school metal»: the main riff of 'Not Unlike The Waves', for instance,
is near-genuine Metallica. Haughm, in an interview, called that number
"the perfect representation of Agalloch in 2006"; if that is truly
so, I am not overjoyed. As for the first four tracks, I simply cannot find any
new words to describe them — it suffices to conclude, from what I have just
stated, that this is generally the same Agalloch as before, but rendered slightly
less atmospheric due to more emphasis on the heaviness and less on the
subtlety.
For me, the album does not even begin properly
until the final suite, the three-part 'Our Fortress Is Burning' — where 'Our
Fortress' is, of course, the predictable medieval allegory for 'Our Homeworld' the burning of which we are invited to
contemplate through folk-metallic eyeglasses. Most of the atmospheric
highlights are concentrated in these three parts, from the gently minimalistic
piano intro to the weeping drone of the first guitar-based part to the
epic-romantic solo of 'Bloodbirds' to the avantgarde representation of the
world's collapse in 'The Grain', where Haughm's guitar strives to achieve an
effect comparable to that of Hendrix's on 'Star Spangled Banner' — saddle the
capacities of the electric sound to make them represent man's (or, in this
case, nature's) eternal suffering. Unlike the preceding tracks, this suite
strives for something more grandiose, and with Agalloch's overall
qualifications, it's quite successful. It might also be useful to check out the
limited expanded edition of the album, which adds a twenty-minute long coda
that sounds like one of those chilly soundtracks to action games that take
place in post-nuclear environments: a demolished, lonesome world whose only
sounds are the ones left to us by shards of human civilization swaying in the
cold wind.
In short, strange as it may seem, it is the
non-melodic parts of this album that seem to constitute its biggest attraction,
speaking out louder, more overtly, and with more meaning than the straightforwardly
metallic parts. Hardly a thrilling realisation for the typical metal fans
(Haughm said that many of them considered 'The Grain' part of 'Fortress' as
filler, whereas in reality the whole suite had been built around that part),
but a saving grace for those who prefer the art side of the band. On 'Fortress',
Agalloch really press forward, switching from a mostly «white and gray» panorama
of The Mantle to a «gray and black»
one — charred, crackling, and smoking. In the process, they retain their crown
as America's kings of impending doom, but only barely. Altogether, the presence
of 'Fortress' still guarantees a thumbs up, yet, in my opinion, the often-heard
victorious wails of «another Agalloch masterpiece!» are exaggerated all the
same.
THE WHITE (2008)
1) The Isle Of Summer; 2)
Birch Black; 3) Hollow Stone; 4) Pantheist; 5) Birch White; 6) Sowilo Rune; 7)
Summerisle Reprise.
This ends up looking like an appendix, an
antidote of sorts to the overdose of heaviness on Ashes: a thirty-minute
EP of mostly acoustic-based compositions completely bent on atmosphere rather than
crunch. (Technically, it is a «companion» to the band’s earlier The Gray
EP, but that was basically just a throwaway, consisting of lengthy
«deconstructed» remakes of ‘The Lodge’ and ‘Odal’, the former unnecessary and
the latter awful — transformed into a wall of metal machine muzak noise. The
White, on the other hand, honestly functions as a fully realized offering).
The opening kiddie
chant (“We carry death out of the village!”), as well as bits of dialog in the
end and the ‘Isle Of Summer’ motive, all stem from the band’s fascination with
1973’s cult horror classic, The Wicker Man. Watching the movie, with
its cartoonish nigtmarification of «Celtic» pagan practices, may help make The
White more impressive, but this is not a soundtrack — the movie is pretty
violent, but this here music is simply deep and dark without explicit
aggression.
Since there is
virtually nothing to headbang to, this is Agalloch’s most ambient-sounding
creation so far; the only tune that seems to have been written with development
and sonic travel in mind is ‘Sowilo Rune’, which incorporates some shrill,
ecstatic electric guitar work and thick keyboard backgrounds to illustrate all
the dangers of the letter S, from overestimating the power of the Sun God to, perhaps,
its shiny representation on the uniform of a Schutzstaffel officer? Who knows. The
other tracks just range from relatively simple acoustic meditations (‘Isle Of
Summer’), sometimes also modestly electrified in the middle (‘Birch Black’) to
keyboard-generated howling winds and shrieking ghosts (‘Hollow Stone’) to
minimalist piano (‘Summerisle Reprise’): pleasant, but nothing we hadn’t
already experienced before.
In the end,
what remains the most memorable aspect of the album is the incorporation of the
Wicker Man bits — up until now, Agalloch have always behaved in a
medievalistic manner, but this time around, they really push the impression
that they dedicate their art to the idea of resurrecting the old beliefs, or,
perhaps, the idea that this resurrection is just round the corner and that it
goes hand in hand with the Apocalypse. God is dead, man is a rotten
slaughterer, that sort of thing. The idea is about as old as the Christian
church itself, but here they have chosen a subtle, unintrusive, «indirect» way
of expressing it, and it almost works — and even if Christopher Lee’s
dialog samples are as embarrassingly worded as every bit of Christopher Lee’s
dialog in any of his B-movies, it is still frickin’ Christopher Lee. Thumbs up.
MARROW OF THE SPIRIT (2010)
1) They Escaped The Weight Of
Darkness; 2) Into The Painted Grey; 3) The Watcher's Monolith; 4) Black Lake Niðstång;
5) Ghosts Of The Midwinter Fires; 6) To Drown.
We have cello. Why didn't we have cello before?
Cello goes down real easy with Agalloch, and suits their moods just as fine as
acoustic guitars and harps. Cello can be lots of things, but it is typically
somber / evening / winter-autumn style, and that's Agalloch for you. The
relatively brief intro is nearly all cello, and then it reappears again on the
last track, the one that informs you that "They escaped the weight of
darkness to drown in another".
Unfortunately, apart from the cello use, there
is no real progress. We just fall back on more of the same black metal and folk
metal compositions, five huge epic tracks in a row without any breathing
space. Fortunately, these epic tracks
do not show any drop-off in quality, either: loyal Agalloch fans have no serious
reasons for disappointment. Only loyal Agalloch reviewers may have those
reasons, since, clearly, it is very hard to write anything other than «Hey,
cool, these guys are still going strong!» about Marrow Of The Spirit.
So I will be brief, concentrating only on the
fact that 'Black Lake Niðstång' is currently the longest track in
the band's catalog (beaten only by 'Our Fortress Has Burned To The Ground', but
that was a special case that don't count), and this would most likely mean that
it is their strongest candidate for «That single Agalloch masterpiece to trump
all other Agalloch masterpieces». I do not see it as being nearly as successful
in covering all of the band's strong points as 'In The Shadow Of Our Pale
Companion', though — for one thing, most of the vocals are in the death metal
vein, for another, there is little, if any, evidence of their mastery of the
acoustic sound. Instead, there is a lot of keyboards here, from bells and
chimes to distorted organs and sci-fi synths — which they put to good
atmospheric use, but it's still not quite the same thing.
The most concise and successful thing on the
album, in my opinion, is its shortest song (bar the intro), 'Ghosts Of The
Midwinter Fires', which starts out similar to a suicidal Cure anthem, then
gradually morphs into generic black metal mode, and finally makes the simple
transition to a shrill-ecstatic prog-rock anthem with blazing guitar solos.
It's nothing particularly special or even pretentious (by Agalloch standards),
just a well-produced, well-meaning song that I have singled out, perhaps,
exactly for the reason that there is so little to single out within it. Yet I
certainly prefer its finely-tailored sound to, for instance, the sonic chaos
that opens 'Into The Painted Grey'. Maybe it's a good thing these guys don't
beat around the bush so much. In this land of eternal winter that they have
created, any attempt to thaw their glaciers will mean nothing but senseless,
devastating deluge.
THE SERPENT & THE SPHERE (2014)
1) Birth And Death Of The
Pillars Of Creation; 2) (Serpens Caput); 3) The Astral Dialogue; 4) Dark Matter
Gods; 5) Celestial Effigy; 6) Cor Serpentis; 7) Vales Beyond Dimension; 8)
Plateau Of The Ages; 9) (Serpens Cauda).
After a four-year pause, briefly interrupted
only once with the one-track EP Faustian
Echoes (on which they tried combining music with an actual Goethe recital
and film soundtrack samples, to no major success), Agalloch are finally back to
deliver, as you might have guessed, another very much Agalloch album. This time
the vague concept behind the songs is even grander than before, switching from
issues of decay and extinction of the human race to the birth and death of the
Universe itself, apparently imagined in the shape of the Great World Serpent,
so if regular cosmology is too boring or difficult for you, feel free to take a
sixty-minute crash course on the basic model of the universe from these guys.
The problem is, if you raise the conceptual
stakes so high, you should probably be prepared to extract the adequate high
cards from your sleeve — and yet, so it seems, this band is still not willing
to go far beyond the deuce, if you know what I mean. Four massive LPs into
their career, we are now perfectly aware of all the regular trademarks of
Agalloch, and The Serpent & The
Sphere adds nothing whatsoever to their usual bag of tricks. On the
contrary, it subtracts: for instance, there are no more traces of clean vocals
(have they gotten death threats from serious fans or what?), the
instrumentation is very basic (no strings and very few keyboards), and the song
tempos, which used to range from «very slow» to «mid-tempo», all tend to drift
towards «mid-tempo» now, leaving less room for the subtle, gradual unfurling of
the atmospheric canvas.
When you contrast this mysterious
self-limitation with a bombastic song title like ʽBirth And Death Of The
Pillars Of Creationʼ, this sort of blows out a brain circuit. True,
Agalloch never positioned themselves as a major experimental outfit, preferring
to test the possibilities of a set formula rather than blow the formula itself
to smithereens. Even Marrow Of The
Spirit, disappointing as it was in general, had itself a bit of testing
(the cello intro alone was an unusual move by any accounts). But The Serpent & The Sphere, despite
its lyrical ambition, after a few listens remains the first Agalloch album
that gives a sharp impression of «regress» rather than «progress», even
according to Agalloch's own limited standard.
The bulk of the album is given over to these
burly mid-tempo romps that we all know very well by now — two or three guitars
woven together in droning / folksy-jangly manners, driven forward by a huge
drum sound and occasionally accompanied by John Haughm's whispered or growled
(more often, whispered and growled)
vocals. Describing them is impossible and useless (they tried doing it over at
Pitchfork and came out with descriptions like «flickering
notes stabbing at distended riffs and pristine tones countering sheets of
distortion», which, if you stare at them long enough, could equally well apply to,
say, the Rolling Stones, for example). All I can ask myself is — does any of
these riffs and tones exceed the average expectations? And the answer is a
strict no all the way.
The longest and
probably «crucial» number on the album, the twelve-minute instrumental
ʽPlateau Of The Agesʼ, only matches its title, I think, if there was
nothing much happening on that particular plateau throughout the ages (which,
come to think of it, might very well be the actual fate of most plateaus). A completely predictable, safely played set of
crescendos, mainly based on a series of ascending trills the likes of which
have been produced a miriad times already — just compare this to something like
ʽIn The Shadow Of Our Pale Companionʼ, with its memorable main theme,
a series of melodic jumps that were impossible to preview, and a certain sense
of exuberance from an ambitious young band that had just picked up the scent of
something not completely, but noticeably different. ʽPlateau Of The
Agesʼ — and everything else on here — is the same band going through the
motions, seemingly bent more on creating a «metaphysical installation» than
music that would continue to be interesting. No steam.
The songs are linked
together with three short instrumentals, whose Latin titles refer to the head,
heart, and tail of the Serpent — three chrono-spatial parts of the Universe? —
but here, too, the curious conceptual idea is realized with three boring
acoustic interludes, consisting of the same types of scales and arpeggios that
Agalloch themselves and everybody else have already explored many times in the
past. Come on now, wouldn't we expect just a little extra thrill from the consecutive appearance of the head,
heart, and tail of the Serpent? How about at least using three different
instruments, or something?
Probably some songs are slightly more creative than
others, but, honestly, I do not have the strength to drag them all under the
analytical microscope. Long-term fans of the band have indeed praised the
album, and, since it swears such stark loyalty to the formula, if you really
love Agalloch for the atmosphere, you will not be disappointed. If you love
Agalloch for the riffs and memorable melodies, you might be a little
disappointed (I didn't manage to memorize anything, but maybe it's just me).
But if you love Agalloch for pushing boundaries of the genre, stay away. The
only thing that will be pushed here is your patience; and mine has been pushed
hard enough to get all pissed off and leave here with a mean thumbs down.
Will be seeing you 'round about three years on, gentlemen, and please don't
forget to bring back the cello at least.
PHILHARMONICS (2010)
1) Falling, Catching; 2)
Riverside; 3) Brother Sparrow; 4) Just So; 5) Beast; 6) Louretta; 7) Avenue; 8)
Philharmonics; 9) Close Watch; 10) Wallflower; 11) Over The Hill; 12) On
Powdered Ground.
Say what you will about the coming of the
electronic age, but still, no wonders of electronic programming can beat the
smooth-but-strong ripple of a real piano, particularly when the player shows
both heart and experience. The first track on this album is just a short and
humble instrumental, written (like much of the album) under the huge influence
of the old impressionists (particularly Satie), but there is something about
the tone, about the sharp staccato playing, about the composition — starting
somewhere in the middle of the keyboard and then gradually, gracefully sloping
away to the high-pitched right — that has a certain immediate appeal. Piano
introductions by themselves are not rare at all, but this is not the kind of
generic «ooh, I like piano! Elton's
my favorite!» introduction you'd hear on, say, an Alicia Keys record.
Agnes Obel is different — a quiet, enigmatic
performer from Denmark (with an excellent command of English, though) who
seems to know very well just how far you can push your enigma in order to
remain «artsy» without becoming irritatingly cheap. Of course, these days the
market is overstocked with Femme Fatales and Mystery Women of all varieties,
some of them with a very good idea of which particular brands of Mystery
Lipstick and Fatalistic Drapery are better converted into YouTube views and MTV
Awards (Lana Del Rey, here's looking at you). Agnes Obel is not entirely free
from the «sin» of calculating her own image, either — but her calculations,
based on a mix of minimalism, humility, aural and visual nostalgia, and
exquisite attention to minor subtle detail, are... well, simply put, these are my kinds of calculation.
She is quiet, moody, melancholic, somewhat (but
not painfully) monotonous, and does not awaken any hitherto unknown emotions —
from Joni Mitchell to Kate Bush to Sinead O'Connor to tons of other female
performers I could come up with, we've already felt these emotions. But she has
her own style of minimalistic chamber pop, more classically inspired than
anybody I know, and at the same time, a good ear for pop hooks: if, upon first
listen, none of these songs strike you as catchy, this will probably be due to
the barebones arrangements that do not vary too much from song to song. In
fact, many customer reviews I've seen for this one essentially treat Philharmonics as a pleasant
background-listening ambient album — but it's not; each of these songs is a
carefully crafted composition in its own right, you just have to warm up to
them a bit, like you might have to warm up to Debussy's preludes if your
previous ideal of classical solo piano was Chopin's mazurkas.
Perhaps the first single from the album,
ʽRiversideʼ, was not fully indicative of the album's charm. It is,
after all, a fairly simple folk-waltz, with nothing but a simple piano line and
some multi-tracked vocal harmonies to keep you occupied; even so, it still
manages to sound nothing like your average indie-folkie-singer-songwriter
churning out generic heartbreaker stuff (to be used in the soundtrack to your
average indie-director melodramas about uninteresting problems in the lives of
everyday boring people). There's melancholy here, but no moping or whining, no
self-aggrandizing and no artificial struggle to show you great, great depth —
it's very light, simple, tasteful, unassuming, and unavoidably endearing just
on the strength of what it is not,
rather than of what it is (okay, that probably sounds dumb, but not while the
actual song is playing).
But it actually gets better. On ʽBrother
Sparrowʼ, we have a piano/guitar duet, with the two instruments
gracefully completing each other, and Obel's vocals mimicking the piano line
all the way to a logical and satisfying melodic resolution — there's a sort of
frosty-friendly beauty here, as if she were writing the soundtrack to the
everyday life of a real flesh-and-blood Cinderella with free access to her late
mother's old collection of Satie records. On ʽJust Soʼ, which I can
very well imagine as a triumphant power pop anthem (here deconstructed right
down to its knickers), there's a piano-and-what-sounds-like-plucked-violin duet
instead, with the former gradually drowning out the latter.
On ʽBeastʼ, I don't even understand
what the instrumentation is — in concert, she performs it as a piano/cello
duet, but here the first instrument sounds more like a harp, so I guess it's
more of a piano/harp duet, with one instrument blending in with the other
seamlessly, until the cello comes midway through and cuts right between them;
also, I'd never have guessed that a refrain with lines like "let's go
tonight, let the beast run a mile" could sound haunting, but here it is
delivered so coldly and casually that it is
haunting. ʽAvenueʼ, another old-fashioned waltz, has a tinge of the
musical box to it, but only a faint one, to better attenuate the sad chord
change on the "nothing more you need to know, nothing more you need to
show" refrain; then the title track is another
waltz, but with an entirely different feel to it — a sad, but not
broken-hearted obituary to "the only God of mine" who "died last
night in grey stockings, in all might", whoever she is singing about (an
old lover or an unrealized ideal).
For an artist who composes most of the material
on her/his own, the choice of occasional covers can also be important — Obel
chooses ʽClose Watchʼ, a song from John Cale's Music For A New Society, which, amusingly, she actually makes a bit
more musically complex than it was in the original version, adding a tighter
rhythm, some percussion, vocal overdubs, and echo: the result is tightly
controlled chamber-pop perfection, compared to the looser, more rambling performance
from John — not sure if he'd like this or not, but, anyway, it's telling that
of all members of The Velvet Underground, she prefers Cale and not Lou Reed
(and not even Nico, despite being a bit of a frigid Scandinavian goddess
herself).
If the album has any sort of internal logic of
development, it is best seen on the final track: ʽOn Powdered Groundʼ
is just a touch grander and fuller than everything else, with a very
distinctive, pleading cello track and a final bequest to all of us —
"don't break your back on the track", she keeps repeating, as if she
were some deeply caring Mother-of-all wishing us a safe journey through life.
Indeed, the whole album gives a somewhat Taoist impression of a recluse in the
middle of the forest, struggling to live in peace with the universe despite the
universe threatening to shatter that peace if you ever let him. It's a perfect
little album for all those who just want to stop for a while, break the vicious
circle of eternal karma, lose themselves in an atmosphere of quietude and
immanent beauty — okay, so a Brian Eno ambient album may be the best solution
here, but if you are really not the
meditative type, Philharmonics might
do a great job of serving as the next best substitute. Oh, and she's got great
taste in clothes, too. Thumbs up.
AVENTINE (2013)
1) Chord Left; 2) Fuel To
Fire; 3) Dorian; 4) Aventine; 5) Run Cried The Crawling; 6) Tokka; 7) The
Curse; 8) Pass Them By; 9) Words Are Dead; 10) Fivefold; 11) Smoke &
Mirrors.
Unfortunately, Obel's second album firmly
places her in the never-ending list of artists who may have said everything they had to say with their first shot, and
then simply go on to say it again and again and again, for all those who love
it when they are being told the same thing over and over as long as the speaker
actually opens his/her mouth and produces fresh sound waves, instead of relying
on this new-fangled «preserve it for posterity» recording technique. In other
words, Aventine follows the same
formula as Philharmonics, but with
predictably diminished results.
Or, perhaps, not really «predictably»? Perhaps
there are problems here that could
have been avoided? For me, these problems start with the very first track. On Philharmonics, the brief
impressionistic piano piece ʽFalling, Catchingʼ sounded wonderful — a
perfectly captured piano tone and an engaging, subtle dynamics as the little
piano riff smoothly wound its way upwards. In contrast, the opening piano
instrumental on Aventine
(ʽChord Leftʼ) seems to make more use of the sustain pedal, is
slower, more emphatically sadder, and, on the whole, belongs far more efficiently
on the soundtrack of some commercial melodrama than on an album vying for
«piece of art» status (I wanted to write «high art», but let's keep this
populist and democratic).
It is still okay, but it is quite reflective of the overall quality of the album, with
generally less memorable and less musically interesting songwriting. Whether or
not you loved ʽRiversideʼ, its waltzy structure and folksy vocal
melody were at least catchy and well adapted to each other. On Aventine, the first song is ʽFuel
To Fireʼ, a pure mood piece set to a two-chord piano riff and not varying at all for five minutes — still
retaining the overall tastefulness, but absolutely amorphous as a composition
that you'd want to possibly cherish and preserve in your head. And when it is
immediately followed by ʽDorianʼ, another five-minute song that is
essentially more of the same (gracefully mumbled, hookless singing set to a
piano melody that even certain minimalist composers would probably have
rejected)... you know something's
gotta be wrong about that.
And these songs were the singles culled from this album — although the first one was
ʽThe Curseʼ, a slightly better waltz piece (for some reason, the
waltz tempo always seems to work better for Agnes) played by a bass / cello /
piano trio and sung with some haunting vocal modulations; with its allegorical
lyrics about a pseudo-mythical situation, it is the closest thing to a «chamber
epic» on Aventine. Still, as far as
songs salvageable for compilations go, I would not dwell too much on ʽThe
Curseʼ — rather sticking up for the title track (another waltz, this time
harp-based, with a very pretty cello / harp texture) and, perhaps, ʽRun
Cried The Crawlingʼ (with a very Andrew Bird-like violin, probably played
by Canadian Mika Posen, generally credited for violin on the album). And that's
about it — everything else is pleasant at best, mind-numbing and somnambulant
at worst.
What is really incredible about this is that
the disappointment in no way rubs off on the positive impression I had of Philharmonics — I keep playing bits and
snippets of songs from both albums back to back and I can't help but be
somewhat bewildered at how her piano melodies that used to incorporate
emotionally brilliant flourishes have so seriously melted into flat muzak, and
at how her vocals, that used to find such a good balance between husky-dusky
and subtle sharpness, are now almost always
just husky-dusky (with the exception of a few relative highlights). Again, perhaps
some people will think that naming your album after one of the seven hills of
Rome and dedicating one of the songs to an Oscar Wilde character should suffice
to redeem every other sin — I respectfully disagree. I do not give the album a
thumbs down, because, all criticism aside, I still like the overall sound of
it, which does not bother or offend me one bit; but where Philharmonics was a «subtly active» record, whose emotional charge
gradually disclosed itself upon repeated listens, Aventine is a soporifically passive one. Any final recommendations?
Well... to quote yet another ambitious singer-songwriter of our times who's had
her ups and downs, "You better work bitch!"
CITIZEN OF GLASS (2016)
1) Stretch Your Eyes; 2)
Familiar; 3) Red Virgin Soil; 4) It's Happening Again; 5) Stone; 6) Trojan
Horses; 7) Citizen Of Glass; 8) Golden Green; 9) Grasshopper; 10) Mary.
At the very least, she deserves some credit
here for finally deciding to branch out and diversify the formula. No major changes, that is, but at least
this time around, it gets harder to confuse her with the average sentimental
piano balladeer — if only because there's less piano around and more strings,
as well as more variegated keyboards, a mix of acoustic (vibraphones, etc.) and
old-fashioned electric stuff like the Mellotron and even the Trautonium, a real
electronic relic hauled straight out of the 1930s. Apparently, this is the
first instrument to be heard here, producing the odd siren wail in the intro to
ʽStretch Your Eyesʼ and immediately setting an atmosphere of distant
alarm — always distant, of course, because the protagonist of all of Obel's
songs lives in a perfectly shielded bunker; as long as she confines herself to
that place, she's perfectly safe from all the troubles above.
The title of the album apparently translates
the German term gläserner
bürger, and is used to define a (human) object of mass surveillance,
but do not think that the lady goes into politics here, or into morbid
ruminations on humanity's dystopian future (unless you really want to interpret
a line like "we took a walk to the summit at night, you and I" as a
documentary description of an imaginary meeting between Russian and American
presidents). It is more of a hint at herself, I believe, and how she's got
nothing to hide, a predictably irritating paradox in the light of the fact that
she is still hiding everything that is possible to hide, because a
straightforward interpretation of any of these songs remains out of the
question.
The songs do get more complex in structure, and
it gets harder to shoo any of them away as just another melancholic waltz — in
fact, I suspect that somebody must have told her to lay off the waltzing,
because the time signatures here tend to get less and less trivial; not challenging
enough to approach avantgarde levels, but diverse and unpredictable enough to
lay off any accusations of laziness. She is clearly interested in exploring the
possibilities of classical and «retro-modern» instrumentation in the modern
studio, and I respect that. I only wish that the songs had been as memorable as
they were on Philharmonics, which is
still not the case, alas.
Atmosphere-wise, ʽStretch Your Eyesʼ
is clearly an improvement over most of Aventine.
The combination of whale-like synthesizer sounds with the quietly, but firmly
plucked strings and bowed cellos really gives it a sort of «walking under
water» feel, a perfect backdrop for an equally glorious performance... but this
is where the song falls short, because other than her usual «frozen lady of the
lake» tone, Agnes does not reward the instrumental mix with any outstanding
moments of vocal magic; actually, she's no better and no worse than Lana Del
Rey now in this department, although I'd still take her instrumental
compositions over Lana's in a whiff.
On ʽFamiliarʼ, she makes an awful
mistake by having the chorus sung by an uncredited male performer who sounds
like Antony Hegarty (oh, sorry, Anohni) with a particularly sore throat,
turning the song from something that was distinctly Agnes Obel into something
else that is even more distinctly not.
I know it's supposed to be a you-and-I duet and all, but in her own singing,
even when it is hookless, she manages to avoid theatrical mannerisms and come
across as a real human being — so why is she taking a walk to the summit at
night with a guy who sounds as if he wouldn't really be interested in girls in the first place? Also, the music
here is getting way too dangerously close to New Age values, even for my
tastes.
Still, I cannot get truly angry at most of
these songs. The title track, for instance, has something Eno-like about it in
its soothing piano and vocal harmony ambience. ʽStoneʼ does the same
with acoustic guitar (and actually adds a strange vocal hook, which always sounded
like "stone canopy, stone canopy" to me until I learned that it was
really the artist asking herself whether she can be of stone — do not worry, Frøken Obel, you are
of stone, in way... or should that be fiberglass? Citizen Of Fiberglass, yes, that would be a good title).
Anyway, without
going into too much detail on the rest of this stuff: she is still getting a
good sound of all these instruments, and, technically, she remains an
above-average composer, but the new twists and expansions do not change my base
impression that she has already made her single most important statement, and
that she is going to spend the rest of her life just bathing us in the somewhat
shapeless beauty of her impressionistic approach. Which is nice and all, but as
long as she is incapable of finding any particularly heart-tugging soundwave
configurations, I do not find myself interested in trying to decode her
enigmatic messages, or defining the types of persons to whom her sorrowful and
subtle music would appeal the most. Perhaps she should try coming out of that
bunker? Or at least, exchange it for a less soft-padded one?..
AKRON/FAMILY (2005)
1) Before And Again; 2)
Suchness; 3) Part Of Corey; 4) Italy; 5) I'll Be On The Water; 6) Running,
Returning; 7) Afford; 8) Interlude: Ak Ak Was The Boat They Sailed In On; 9)
Sorrow Boy; 10) Shoes; 11) Lumen; 12) How Do I Know; 13) Franny/You're Human.
When our distinguished ancestor, the caveman,
first invented folk music, he must have been using whatever objects were the nearest
at hand in order to surround his singing with atmosphere. Rocks, sticks, reeds,
animal bones, you name it: total freedom of expression. It is only thousands of
years later that his distinguished descendant — let us call him «the farming
settler» for a challenge — decided to «codify» folk music and started
progressively limiting it to a given set of specially designed instruments
that produced similarly structured, regularized musical patterns. And,
eventually, this self-limitation reached its apotheosis... somewhere around
Greenwich Village.
Guess what: Akron/Family, a rag-taggy band
stemming from various «rural» parts of the United States, are here to reverse
the march of time. Like the caveman, they cherish the campfire; only their equivalent of rocks, sticks, and
reeds is the laptop computer — nothing wrong with that, either; surely a
caveman would have made proper use of its sonic capacities had he been lucky
to have access to it as early as fifty thousand years ago. This band's aim,
more or less, is to immerse us in that kind of situation.
Akron/Family are generally pigeonholed as
«psych folk» or «freak folk», but neither of the two labels is sufficient,
because, really, both merely mean «folk music that is not played according to
common standards» or, more precisely, «folk music that makes Pete Seeger go for
the axe». Certainly they are nothing like, for instance, the Animal Collective
— the latter are a form of psychedelic electronic carnival with folk
influences, whereas Akron/Family are far more engulfed in the old-school folk
idiom, which they distort in subtler, lighter ways.
If anything, the major influences on this
self-titled debut are the psych-folk veterans of the Sixties, such as the Fugs
and, most importantly, The Incredible String Band. But Akron/Family intentionally
drop the quasi-drunk braggard attitudes of those bands; their sounds, even
though they may be equally strange, are more frequently cast in the somber,
introspective mood of Nick Drake, so that many times over, you catch yourself
thinking «wait a minute, didn't they just try to pick my heart with that
deep-reaching bit of sound?» rather than «oh no, not another ugly-sounding cacophonization of a perfectly fine folk
tune to show that music's not dead!».
Which does not mean that the record does not
have its fair share of ugliness. Every once in a while, the penchant for chaos
takes over the predilection for melody, and you get stuff like 'Part Of Corey',
where it takes a hundred seconds of white noise and blank synth tones to get to
a brief acoustic part, or 'Ak Ak', two and a half minutes of sea, seagull, and
seaboat noises. Lead singer Seth Olinsky has a String Band-inherited tendency
to sing off-key — obviously, he does this as an art form, but he is not even the
pioneer in this department, so it is very hard for me to appreciate tunes like
'Running, Returning' either on the emotional or purely intellectual level.
However, once we choose to treat these parts as
the standard «audience-alienating» gimmick (imagine the horror if a record like this started to sell! this is simply the
band's common way to prevent this from ever happening), the «normal»-sounding
parts eventually start pulling together in a pleasant atmosphere of folksy
phlegmacy. 'Before And Again' opens things up with a pretty riff and a set of deep-set
sighs that could trap you into expecting some stern Gothic delivery — but there
is nothing of the sort. The album never ever slips into sappiness, but it is
not «dark» and «doomy», either. The best songs rather aim at some sort of
neo-buddhist peacefulness, with quiet, relaxed vocal deliveries, echoey steel
guitars, and nature-based sound effects ('Afford').
Yes, but what about the laptops? Here comes the
truly bizarre part: some of the songs are «embellished» with rather primitive bleeps,
beeps, and ch-ponks that seem to have been borrowed out of the early days of PC
speaker existence. More often than not, they simply seem to be there in order
to lure the critics into pondering their importance. What is the deep meaning
of the click sound on 'Afford'? Why is it so necessary for the high-pitched speaker
tone to be there on 'Before And Again'? The correct answers are: «none» and «no
reason», but, on the other hand, a couple hundred people may have profited from this chance to fill their empty lives with
vigorous mental activity. And I have written a whole extra paragraph. And who,
other than Akron/Family, has ever had a song out like 'Before And Again'?
Nobody. End of story.
In any case, the only extra noise on my
personal favorite tune here are the seagulls, and they fit in perfectly with the message: "If you have to stay /
I'll be on the water / Catching the next wave /
You can meet me where it breaks" ('I'll Be On The Water'). This is just a
traditionally-oriented, becalming, sympathetic, and merely a trifle cruel folk
ballad, arranged for guitar and background electronic ambient soundscapes. And
about a half of this album behaves the same way — and that is, of course, my
favorite half. The other half — the
white noise, the chaos, the off-key singing, the pseudo-party atmosphere on
'Italy' — ranges from amusing to annoying, but it is also possible that,
against its background, the well-constructed phlegmatic ballads shine out ever
stronger.
All in all, this is a strange experience;
perhaps not nearly as innovative as it might pretend (what is innovative in 2005, really?), but ultimately moving. Surely
there must have been something in the
band if the mighty Michael Gira, of Swans / Angels Of Light fame, took them
under his wing himself and signed them to his label (Young God Records) — not
that the band sounds a bit like Swans, mind you; if you're looking for
something nicely suicidal, this is definitely the wrong place. If you're not
the suicidal type, though, join me in my thumbs up.
AKRON/FAMILY & ANGELS OF LIGHT (2005)
1) Awake; 2) Moment; 3) We All
Will; 4) Future Myth; 5) Dylan Part II; 6) Oceanside; 7) Raising The Sparks; 8)
I Pity The Poor Immigrant; 9) The Provider; 10) One For Hope; 11) Mother/Father;
12) Come For My Woman.
Technically, this is one of those «split
albums» that usually get recorded out of cash deficit and, just as usually,
pair two worthless artists in a desperate effort to multiply zero by zero and
get a non-zero result. This particular situation, however, is slightly
different, because «Angels Of Light» is just a moniker for Michael Gira and
whoever comes along to back him up on his next studio session. On this studio session, he happens to be
backed up by members of Akron/Family, at the chronological peak of their
symbiosis. So, all in all, this is a legitimate Akron/Family release, with the
first seven songs representing «pure» Akron/Family and the last five
representing Akron/Family playing five cover tunes — with Gira as special guest
on vocals.
It does matter a lot to count it as legitimate,
actually, since some of A/F's best material is to be found here. Stretching out
in all directions and frequently bursting out of the solitude-embracing shell
of their self-titled debut, the band finally shows that it may really be nice
to have them hanging around — even though no one's still sure exactly why.
They certainly go out of their way to prove
they are different. Admit it: not a lot of people would open a record with a
song which is called 'Awake' — and which, during all of its running time, does
its best to try and put you, the listener, to sound, healthy sleep with a
sound, healthy, monotonous acoustic folk guitar line and sound, healthy,
droning vocal harmonies. Only to wake you up, after all, with a crash-boom-bang
as the second track, 'Moment', opens
into a wall of free-form noise that may be intended to make Eric Dolphy crawl
out of his grave.
Upon first listen, it is these bits of shock
power that you will probably remember the most: the insanely prolonged
"aaaaaah" chant on 'Moment', the ritualistic, out-of-control scream
orgy on 'Raising The Sparks', the massive mock-tragic buildup on 'Dylan Part
II' (where is Part I, and what does this all have to do with Dylan anyway?).
Later on, though, melodies start to emerge on the more quiet numbers, such as
the minimalistic 'Oceanside' and the first, acoustic, half of the 'Dylan'
thing. And in the final run, the expert will appreciate all the overdubs and
psycho-layers of sound on the superficially blunt, straightforward folk romps
('Future Myth', which has enough stuff going on to warrant a dozen listens
before one gets used to it).
The good news is, they are still being
interesting, and they get better at it by throwing even more ingredients into
the pot — if free-form atonal craziness is not enough for you, there is also
shrill, hysterical prog-rock guitar soloing ('Dylan' again), ballsy (and
catchy!) rock'n'roll-ifying of village dances ('Raising The Sparks'), and, just
generally so, a complete lack of understanding where their train is going to
stop in a few seconds from now. The bad news is — I still don't quite get it. Not only does this constant
experimentation lack any explicit point, but all of its originality feels
forced, and all of its non-originality feels... well, non-original.
In this respect, the Angels Of Light side of
the story is actually better. Veteran guy Michael Gira used to be even crazier
than any of these people while being a Swan, but his craziness seemed far more
legitimate to me. And now he is not so much a crazy guy any longer as simply an
intelligent human being who loves to... cover Bob Dylan: the band's rendition
of 'I Pity The Poor Immigrant' is not only faithful to the original, it is also
wonderfully well sung. The other four songs are dark folk originals, slow
growers that make a simple, but lovably melancholic antithesis to Akron/Family's
emotional canvas — more complex, perhaps, but also more prone to suspicions of
fakeness. Twist it too tight, and people may lose interest in disentangling it.
Still, I view this as an improvement. The ugly
off-key singing is gone, the diversity level has gone up, the band shows some
teeth and muscle in their playing, proves that it is capable of creating
decent melodic hooks, and, overall, restores the reputation of «freak folk» as
a musical movement that would really like to expand the limits of «folk»
rather than just serve as a pretext for pretentious goofing. And in a couple
dozen years from now, we might actually come to understand what these guys
were about — after all, there are some people out there who give Trout Mask Replica a fair chance, too. Thumbs up,
on lend-lease.
MEEK WARRIOR (2006)
1) Blessing Force; 2) Gone
Beyond; 3) Meek Warrior; 4) No Space In This Realm; 5) The Lightning Bolt Of
Compassion; 6) The Rider (Dolphin Song); 7) Love And Space.
Third time around and these guys still haven't
properly explained the nature of their mission on this planet. However, the
transition from second album to third is already less jarring than the one
before that. By now we know fairly well that Akron/Family like folk music,
free-form jazz, and psychedelic sounds, and that the combination of all three
of these elements in unpredictable ways is what sets them apart from potential
competition. So, Meek Warrior is the
first record that we can safely call «generic Akron/Family» and view as a
stabilization of sorts.
The record is a collaboration with jazz
percussionist Hamid Drake, whose skill is supposedly much admired by the band,
and this prompts them to rise to the instrumental and artistic challenge:
'Blessing Force', opening the album, is a colorful nine-minute melange of
everything that could ever matter, from wild tribal drumming to wilder tribal
chanting to blues-rock jamming to raga to, finally, total chaos and more
Dolphy-style catastrophic dissonance. Unfortunately, there is simply not enough
motivation. The trick, as usual, is in how well and for what purpose these
individual parts shift into one another — and if the «how well» part is nothing
to fear about, the «for what purpose» part rests unanswered. Much the same
applies to the record's second lengthy track as well ('The Rider').
Annoying and frustrating — behind all these
gimmicks, all of the time, there hides a perfectly decent folk-rock outfit
with potential, prowess, and feeling. They prefer to realize this potential
through repetitive mantras, but when they are not being repetitive for the sake
of shocking (e. g. a looped acappella chanting of "love and space, love
and space"), these are good, sensitive mantras — 'Gone Beyond', which
slowly and steadily does weave out a feeling of "going completely beyond";
'The Lightning Bolt Of Compassion', sung dreamily and romantically in a pseudo-language
probably made up on the spot; 'Love And Space', almost insulting to the
«typical A/F fan» in its gospel-folk straightforwardness, that is, until that
silly acappella loop begins.
In fact, even if that would have technically
been just another gimmick, not to mention adding a serious threat of dying from
monotonosis, I would have preferred an entire album of such mantras instead of
these alternations with dissonant jazz and tribal howling. Akron/Family seem to
be at their best when they're quietly picking the acoustic and humming along,
not when they're trying to show some muscle — «Meek Warriors» indeed; sure wish
that title would have been more justified. As it is, the album is uneven. A
bunch of well-meaning, not-untalented lads caught up in the pointless
progressive drives of the XXIst century. A sad, but avoidable, fate.
LOVE IS SIMPLE (2007)
1) Love, Love, Love
(Everyone); 2) Ed Is A
Portal; 3) Don't Be
Afraid, You're Already Dead; 4) I've Got Some Friends; 5) Lake Song / New
Ceremonial Music For Moms; 6) There's So Many Colours; 7) Crickets; 8)
Phenomena; 9) Pony's O.G.; 10) Of All The Things; 11)
Love, Love, Love (reprise).
One marvelous description of this album by a
user on RateYourMusic stated that it sounds «like Wilco on speed playing
guitar-based cover versions of Animal Collective songs» — so completely up to
the point that I find it hard to add anything worth adding. But let us at least
try to put it in the context of Akron/Family's previous releases. Maturity?
Development? Stagnation? Identity crisis? Artistic breakthrough? Where's that
curve heading to?
I am not going to say that we are finally
beginning to see the light; but there are some welcome signs on this album that
make it, if not more accessible, then at least a bit more understandable than
its predecessors. For the first time, Akron/Family seem to be getting a wee bit
bored with experimentation for experimentation's sake, and seek to adapt their
weirdness to one of many available musical/artistic philosophies. With all of
their influences still influencing, no wonder the chosen model of action is the
one that demands to get together and love one another right now. The fact that
all of its components are filtered through Akron's madness is insignificant in
comparison. The good news is, we are finally getting somewhere.
The first minute and a half, which the band
spends normally playing their
acoustic and electric guitars and normally
singing about how "every precious human being's been a precious parent to
you... what can be done? what can we do? go out and love everyone", truly
sets a Crosby, Stills & Nash-like framework for the rest. All right, so the
very next song is called 'Ed Is A Portal', and consists of several meandering
sections that incorporate folksy banjo drones, tribal chants, psycho jangles,
and echo-drenched neo-Californian vocal stylizations, so you can see not that much has really changed. But 'Love,
Love, Love' has given us a vector, and in this light, everything feels a bit
different.
The lyrics to 'Ed Is A Portal' seem like
schizophrenic pseudo-scientific babble, but the guys simply try to bring
together all the loose ways of human existence, from the primordially primitive
(hence all the campfire shamanisms) to the hallucinative to those based on (at
least, superficially) more rational approaches to the space and time continuum
theories. On 'Phenomena', one of the album's few fully-fleshed out folk-rock
songs, they explain what they mean: "Things are not what they seem to be —
nor are they otherwise". Another stylistically varied suite begins with a
minute-and-a-half long acappella chanting of "There's so many colours —
without the dirty windows". C'mon people, all those clues and we're still not getting this band?
It's not like their sudden urge to become more
friendly, cuddly, and transparent automatically makes Love Is Simple into a masterpiece. Songs like 'Crickets' and
'Phenomena' still only manage to be «pretty» rather than «gorgeous» (for all
the aptness of the quoted description, they still have a long way to go to
reach the melodic sensitivity of Jeff Tweedy), and each of the long meandering
chants / ragas / ambient improvs / madhouse celebrations, on its own, has just
about the same overwhelming potential as their earlier attempts. It's just that
now, armed with a masterplan, the good bits seem better than similarly good
bits used to sound before. You can even allow yourself to wonder at the meaning
of the line "Don't be afraid, you're already dead" in the context of
"Don't be afraid, it's only love — love is simple".
In short, John Lennon circa 1967 would probably
have loved this stuff, much of which manages to pay tribute to 'All You Need Is
Love' and 'I Am The Walrus' at the exact same time. It does not so much
entertain as stimulate, of course, but it is arguably the first time that
Akron/Family try to assault us on the heart front in addition to the mind —
rather crudely hinted at by the organ's juicy depiction on the album sleeve.
Correspondingly, it is the first time that my
heart agrees, if still a bit reulctantly, to join in the thumbs up ritual together with the
mind. Love Is Simple may be anything
but truly simple, but, at the very least, it is now seductive.
SET 'EM WILD, SET 'EM FREE (2009)
1) Everyone Is Guilty; 2)
River; 3) Creatures; 4) The Alps & Their Orange Evergreen; 5) Set 'Em Free
Pt. 1; 6) Gravelly Mountains Of The Moon; 7) Many Ghosts; 8) MBF; 9) They Will
Appear; 10) Sun Will Shine; 11) Last Year.
Lead vocalist Ryan Vanderhoof quit Akron/Family
soon after the release of Love Is Simple,
leaving the rest of the band as a trio. Solution? Why, simple: just hire a
supporting team of nine extra studio musicians — and release your
biggest-sounding album up to date!
Of course, saying that Akron/Family are trying
to «branch out» on this record sounds odd, as if there ever was a time when these
guys were content to strictly adhere to one rigid formula. And yet, branching
out they surely are... again. If Love Is
Simple took its cues from The Beta Band and The Animal Collective, this
time they seem to be digging deeper, soaking in influences from the classic
prog-rock scene(s): Yes, King Crimson, and particularly the Canterbury acts. In
fact, already the opening track, 'Everyone Is Guilty', jumps in with the jazzy
feel of a 'Roundabout', moves through a hard-rocking section technically worthy
of a 'Red', and has just about the same number of signature changes per minute
as yer average National Health composition.
But leave it to Akron/Family to stun the
listener and make already the second
track sound like it belonged on a kiddie album by They Might Be Giants — a
bouncy, catchy, and supremely nerdy attempt at crossing liberal college
student with sentimental hillbilly ('River'); a song that, certainly, neither
Yes nor King Crimson nor any Canterbury-related musician would ever think of
writing — except, perhaps, as a lame one-time joke. Akron/Family, however, are
not joking, or at least one never knows where the joke starts and where it ends.
Still, Set
'Em Wild, as far as it seems to me, hits the target further away from its
center than Love Is Simple did. On
that record, the balance between wildness, boldness, and tenderness was just
about right. Here, they gravitate away from the sentimental hippie attitudes.
Dug deep into the middle of the record are songs like 'Set 'Em Free Pt. 1' and
'The Alps & Their Orange Evergreen', lovely hippie-folk ballads with
nothing particularly «freakish» about them; and the album ends with the big and
moving anthemics of 'Sun Will Shine', very impressive until the final carnival
noise section needlessly cuts in to deflate the atmosphere.
But the rest, once again, reverts us to the art
of dicking around with no particular place to go. Heaps of free-form noise on
'Gravelly Mountains Of The Moon', wild industrial screaming on 'MBF', sort of a
New Wave-influenced folk-jazz thang on 'Creatures', replete with tricky programming
of the drum machine — I fail to see how exactly these performances tie in with
the more «heartfelt» parts of the album. And even per se, they are not all that
interesting. So much weirdness for weirdness' sake, from all periods, epochs,
and genres has already been synthesized, and Akron/Family still haven't found a proper way to make a new kind of weirdness,
all their own.
As a result, I probably like this record for
all the wrong reasons: the band's new portfolio of interests should be Set 'Em Wild's major selling point, but
its best songs are still the ones that could easily have been written for their
self-titled debut. Misguided Moment No. 1: 'Last Year', on which the band,
simulating inspiration and determination, chants "Last year was a hard
year for such a long time, this year's gonna be ours" against some minimal
piano backing. I know they are just trying to cheer themselves up after the
loss of a key member, but it is hard to get rid of the feeling that with Love Is Simple, they pulled themselves
up by the hair as high as possible, and now it is really back-to-the-swamp
time.
S/T II: THE COSMIC BIRTH AND JOURNEY OF SHINJU (2011)
1) Silly Bears; 2) Island; 3)
A AAA O A WAY; 4) So It Goes; 5) Another Sky; 6) Light Emerges; 7) Cast A Net;
8) Tatsuya Neon Purple Walkby; 9) Fuji I; 10) Say What You Want To; 11) Fuji
II; 12) Canopy; 13) Creator.
Okay, this is no longer tolerable. According to
hearsay, this album, in its entirety, was composed near a live volcano in a cabin on Hokkaido (see front cover).
Apparently the next attempt to revitalize and revolutionize modern music will
consist of composing and arranging an entire album while suspended on a cable
from a helicopter circumflying a New Guinean jungle valley. This is the kind of
approach that is bound to breed 21st century Mozarts and McCartneys.
Amazing feeling — it is not as if the
Akron/Family approach here has changed much, yet I sense more irritation brewed
by this record than by all of their previous catalog put together. Doubtless,
chronology is part of the reason behind this feel. For a debut album from a
freshly strung experimental band, S/T
II would have been a respectable promenade — show off one's chops, eclecticity
and open-mindedness. For a band that, after groping in the dark for several
years, had somehow begun to finally justify its existence, it is a total
disaster.
What does it all sound and seem like, this
time? Imagine The Animal Collective, only without
their unique electronic kaleidoscope and without
their — honestly amazing — ability to create otherworldly vocal harmony waves.
But with their, often pointless, mix
of lazy folk vibes with tribal droning, avantgarde dissonance, and nonsensical
lyrics. Now hang on; I am not saying that this is the first time ever that we
are getting this stuff from A/F. But even on their least interesting records,
they used to at least balance the pointless stuff with pure, unspoiled moments
of beauty. I never liked Meek Warrior,
but it had 'Gone Beyond' on it, reminding me of the fact that there were real
people with actual human hearts out there, and one could, with relative ease,
try and establish a wi-fi link to them. S/T
II is a closed network in itself.
There is plenty of energy. 'Silly Bears' jump
around like crazy to a life-asserting buzz of electronic equipment and choral
vocals, and 'Another Sky' scatters neo-psychedelic happiness all over the
place. But already Seth Olinsky's quiet mumbling into his sweater undermines
all the joy, and, what's worse, not a single of these sonic overlays strikes
any soul chords — everything is too sterile, too stuffy, too over-thought and
over-calculated.
And what once used to be prettiness has mutated
into by-the-book minimalism with zero impact,
e. g. the concluding duo of 'Canopy' and 'Creator', on which
introspective acoustic, angelic slide and tender, fragile singing try to combine in heavenly beauty and
end up sounding like a lame parody on The Flaming Lips' Soft Bulletin, masterminded by a bunch of robots. I don't know —
was Ryan Vanderhoof really the heart
and soul of this band, confined to making this plastic kind of sound from now
on, or is it simply a case of inhaling too much volcanic ash, with subsequent
clogging of one's spiritual channels? Regardless of the answer — a vicious thumbs down
to the most technically complex and
the most excruciatingly boring Akron/Family album as of yet.
SUB VERSES (2013)
1) No-Room; 2) Way Up; 3)
Until The Morning; 4) Sand Talk; 5) Sometimes I; 6) Holy Boredom; 7) Sand Time;
8) Whole World Is Watching; 9) When I Was Young; 10) Samurai.
All right, who called for another order of
Animal Collective? On their sixth LP, Akron/Family step away from some of their
wildest, most experimental maneuvres, and record a set of songs that would
probably sound best next to an Ewokan campfire. Not that Sub Verses aren't wild and experimental — but the album seems to
have more discipline, and behave in a more predictable manner than its
predecessor. Nor was it recorded in a cabin on Hokkaido: the band moved to
Seattle and El Paso for the sessions, which must have produced a healthy effect
on their overall sense of reality.
As usual, the band has been praised for its
diversity — the songs, in typical Akron/Family fashion, cover plenty of rootsy,
artsy, and psycho ground, yet the record does not have a diverse feel, because,
by now, we know what a stereotypical Akron/Family treatment is: heavy tribal
percussion, instrumental loops, and choral harmony chanting characterize almost
all of these songs, be they «bluesy», «folksy», or «baroque» in essence. This
time around, however, the shamanistic ritual that they practice seems to have
been thought and carried out with more precision and, dare I say it, a larger sense
of purpose than usual.
ʽNo-Roomʼ opens the proceedings with
an almost math-rock arrangement of busy drum fills and guitar flourishes, while
the vocals chant gruff quasi-Tibetan mantras about the difficulties of seeing
and breathing. The song's roll is a bit monotonous, but it actually helps that
not as much is going on at the same time as is these guys' usual penchant; this
is still not enough to convince the skeptic of any «serious intentions» that
the song might have, but at least this makes it «quirky» rather than «confusing».
The gloomy accappella part with the "we held on fast, we held on
strong" vocals is, in fact, a bit shivery, an excellent achievement
considering how rarely these guys manage to stir up a genuine emotional
response.
Next comes ʽWay Upʼ — with its dialog
between percussion explosions and vocal outbursts pseudo-randomly popping up
from different channels, this song probably the
Animal Collective rip-off on this album, but Akron/Family come from a different
background: they are a rock band, after all, and their willingness to learn
from their furry electronic brothers does not go all the way — the sounds of these tribal campfire anthems are, on
the whole, crunchier than those of AC.
Next comes everything else: as usual, Akron/Family
care little about catchiness (although there are so many looped choruses here
that, by and large, something is bound to catch on), but the real reason why
individual songs are not worth individual commentary is that they are all part
of the same lengthy ritual, and each separate part of it, taken on its own, is
meaningless outside of the general context. Towards the end, they seem to get a
little more sentimental on tracks like ʽWhen I Was Youngʼ and
ʽSamuraiʼ (even a little nostalgic,
I'd say), but that, too, sort of feels like a natural conclusion of the ritual
after the «heavy» parts.
And some of the parts, mind you, are quite
heavy — ʽSand Talkʼ, ʽSand Timeʼ, and particularly
ʽHoly Boredomʼ are often drowned in deep fuzz and flattened out with
percussive sledgehammers. The heaviness itself is nothing new for Akron/Family
at this time, but it does not seem gratuitously arbitrary (like the heavy
riffage on ʽSo It Goesʼ from the preceding album) — it just
highlights the energy-demanding parts of the campfire ritual.
None of what I have just said means that this
is a «good album». Like most of the Akron/Family records, I do not properly
«get» it — nothing will ever resolve this band's problem with sounding natural,
not to mention «relevant» in any way. But somehow, this time around they really
arranged their ingredients in a way that can be intriguing and stimulating for
whoever needs a little extra intrigue and stimulation these days. I'd like to
say that ʽHoly Boredomʼ is a good title to describe the entire album,
but in reality, it's more like ʽUnholy Non-Boredomʼ — a focused, concentrated
effort to make spirits ride that ends up a fascinating misfire, where their
Hokkaido experience was just a pretentious mess of a misfire. At least, such
is my initial impression: watch me return to this record in about three hundred
years, and change this opinion.
BOYS & GIRLS (2012)
1) Hold On; 2) I Found You; 3)
Hang Loose; 4) Rise To The Sun; 5) You Ain't Alone; 6) Goin' To The Party; 7) Heartbreaker;
8) Boys & Girls; 9) Be Mine; 10) I Ain't The Same; 11) On Your Way; 12*)
Heavy Chevy.
I am not sure of how «band-like» the Alabama
Shakes really are. There is no doubting the competence (if not virtuosity) of
bass player Zac Cockrell, drummer Steve Johnson, and guitarist Heath Fogg, but
nobody doubts that the band is primarily the brainchild of Brittany Howard, who
writes the songs, sings them, plays rhythm and occasionally lead guitar, and
determines just about everything that makes the band worthy of our attention.
(Yet another reason here for all the
comparisons with Janis Joplin, who, too, spent the most significant years of
her career hiding behind the shoulders of «Big Brother»).
That said, unlike «Big Brother & The Holding
Co.», «Alabama Shakes» makes far more sense. «The Shakes», which was the band's
original name, obeys the same retro-vibe that, a decade earlier, gave us the
Strokes, the Vines, and the Hives, but comes closer to symbolizing the band's
musical essence — they are rather
shakey, come to think of it; and «Alabama», added later in order to give them
some extra differentiation, is even more symbolic. Few places get less hip
these days (or any days, for that
matter) than the state of Alabama, and this only adds extra spice to the game —
blatantly advertising your totally unhip roots in the process of becoming one
of the most hip things on the scene.
The actual music written and arranged by the
Shakes is no great shakes, pardon the
pun. It is the kind of a mix of heavy-handed roots-rock and R&B that you
are likely to encounter on dozens, if not hundreds, of albums released in
between 1968 and, say, 1972-73 by various «B-level» American and,
occasionally, British acts that embraced the roots-rock revolution. Individual
songs are based on chord sequences and guitar tones that remind one of
everybody from the aforementioned Big Brother to Van Morrison to Creedence
(at one point, I almost took the melody of ʽHold Onʼ to be a deconstructed
version of ʽDown On The Cornerʼ) to, say, Stone The Crows, or
Affinity, or other such bands fronted by loudmouthed females (or, sometimes,
loudmouthed males). Revival of that stylistics in the early 2010s is not at all
surprising — considering that just about everything else from the same years
has already been revived — but it would take some really strong musical personalities to make it in any way
interesting.
Fortunately, Brittany Howard is that personality. Onstage, like the
state of Alabama, she looks so decidedly unhip that, through shifting
opposites, this makes her hipper than the hipsterest hipster. Slightly clumsy,
dressed in grandma's gown, looking like a provincial primary school teacher,
she cannot even begin to aspire to any of the «glamor» that is still required,
at least in a modest amount, from modern critically loved R&B stars like
Adele or the late Amy Winehouse. She almost looks like she got on that stage
through some technical managereal mistake. But I do hereby acknowledge that she
is the real thing. Where Amy had her soul focused on decadence and
self-destruction, and Adele has hers focused on heaven, this dame is all about «salt of the earth», and goes all the way
down to the very tips of those roots.
The lead single, ʽHold Onʼ, is by
definition the best song on this relatively short debut album (its shortness,
by the way, works very much to its benefit, since the band's sound is
ultimately quite monotonous). Brittany's "didn't think I'd make it to 22
years old" line does not ring very true — despite all the comparisons with
Janis, she certainly does not share her self-destructive life philosophy, and
would be a complete idiot if she did — but we probably should not be taking it
too literally: the overall message is one of making your life worth the while
despite all odds (such as being born and reared in Athens, Alabama?), and it is
perfectly symbolized by her drawing out the "hooooooooooold on"
chorus in several different inflections, or by the way she belts out "I
don't wanna WAIT!" to the power chord crash in the bridge section.
Out of political correctness, perhaps,
Brittany's mixed heritage (half-black, half-white) is rarely, if ever, brought
up in Alabama Shakes discussions, but it definitely matters, because, curious
as it is, she does sound almost
exactly midway in between the traditional gospel-soul belter à la Aretha or Tina Turner, from
whom she gets the power and «spiritual freedom» aspects, and the more introspective,
fine-nuanced white singer-songwriter of the Carole King variety. The
generalization is a bit rough / broad, perhaps, but it is important to get the
idea — Brittany's voice and the way she uses it are special (if they aren't, there's no point in listening to the
band in the first place). So the first thing everybody notices on this less-than-model-quality
girl is the awesome set of pipes — then, after a while, it also makes sense to
notice how she modulates it to convey such a wide variety of emotions.
The funny thing is that many of these emotions
seem thoroughly antiquated by today's standards — but that's the very charm of
it. Naturally, I am not implying that they have not heard of any significant
musical and cultural developments in the last forty years in the state of
Alabama — that would be taking the stereotypical condescendence a bit too far — yet it is hardly a coincidence,
after all, that Boys & Girls, an
album that does make me feel like no other record that these forty years never
really took place, ultimately stems from somewhere near the Muscle Shoals
headquarters. (The actual recording sessions, as it turns out, happened
somewhere in Nashville... but that ain't too
far, and besides, there is nothing even remotely Nashvillian about the album's
sound, especially since the band did not rely on session players).
In terms of individual highlights, Boys & Girls is hard to discuss.
All of its music is heavily derivative, and the band is probably at its least
interesting when it falls back on the generic Fifties' progression and Brittany
starts channelling the spirit of Otis (ʽYou Ain't Aloneʼ; title
track). They are far more exciting when they start to rock out (ʽHang
Looseʼ; the ecstatic bonus track ʽHeavy Chevyʼ), or when they
establish a happy, life-asserting Motownish groove (ʽRise To The
Sunʼ), or when things quiet down to a slow, hushed dialog of a jazzy
rhythm guitar with an echoey surf lead (ʽGoin' To A Partyʼ, which
sounds nothing like its actual title).
There are, indeed, some curious bits of musical
synthesis happening every now and then, and some funny Southern-legacy incidents
that one is bound to recognize (for instance, at the climactic musical
crescendo end of ʽOn Your Wayʼ, when the heated-up lead guitarist
breaks into the speed solo of Skynyrd's ʽFreebirdʼ for a few bars).
But the biggest musical merit of Boys
& Girls is not in individual musical ideas. It works as the promised
land for those of us who thought it was no longer technically possible to
revive the styles and ideals of roots-rock's Golden Age without slipping into
technical boredom or, worse, suffering from utter phoneyniness. Boys & Girls may not be a
masterpiece — in fact, even the most enthusiastic supporters of the band should
not delude themselves with bright visions of an even grander future for
Brittany Howard — but it is definitely not
boring and, most importantly, not
phoney. How the hell they manage to uphold and promote that vintage old-time
«earthiness» without coming across as cheap third-rate imitators, loaded with
trivial clichés, is not a question that can be easily answered. And any
record that poses questions that cannot be easily answered deserves a thumbs up
almost by definition. The songs may not be all that great, but the vibe, man —
don't miss that vibe, particularly if you happen to be in your teens and think
it way below your dignity to listen to your parents' record collections.
SOUND & COLOR (2015)
1) Sound & Color; 2) Don't
Wanna Fight; 3) Dunes; 4) Future People; 5) Gimme All Your Love; 6) This
Feeling; 7) Guess Who; 8) The Greatest; 9) Shoegaze; 10) Miss You; 11) Gemini;
12) Over My Head.
On their second album, the Alabama Shakes seem
to find themselves facing a choice — cast the net wider or drill deeper? (The
option of «staying exactly the same» probably not being regarded seriously by
anyone). While some reviewers have allegedly implied that they went for the
former, I would rather say that they went for the latter. The record sounds
differently from Boys & Girls,
for sure, but not because they have seriously embraced any new styles — more
because Brittany Howard seems more self-assured than ever, and has seriously
prepared herself to embrace the regular responsibilities of «Soul Mama #1».
I mean, look at the lady — she's big, decidedly
unglamorous, wears grandmother's dresses, and seems ready to crash the party at
will (like they did in 2013 with a terrific cover of ʽAdam Raised A
Cainʼ at the MusiCares tribute to the Boss — blowing most of the others
off the stage, not the least due to their choice of the darkest-dreariest song
in the man's catalog). She plays «grandmother's music», too, even if it cannot
help reflecting the spirit of the indie-rock era, and that sure ain't gonna
help her none in the era of Taylor Swift's crossover. She does look, though,
like the kind of person who takes those «Be Yourself!» slogans seriously — not in the usual sense of
«Be like any of our leading brands of the day that we have laid out for you!»,
but literally. And the good news is — she still has talent to burn, too.
Subsequently, Sound & Color is filled with slow, bluesy tunes, often creating
the illusion of depth with chiming, reverberating keyboards, loud bass, and
echoey vocals — arranged in such a way that the emphasis is almost always on
call-and-response interplay. Yes, we are intentionally entering this «deep
soul» territory, as if Boys & Girls
were this innocent brand of Southern rock played on your front porch, and now
we are moving into a church hall — or, at least, into a subterranean cave,
since much of the album does sound as if it were recorded in one. But «deep
soul» requires a perfect balance between brawn and subtlety, since it is more
character-based than hook-based, and the question is... well, you know.
If you want to know whether you need to bother
at all, check out the fourth track, ʽFuture Peopleʼ. Opening with a
brash, heavily syncopated funky riff, it paves the road to what might be the single most soulful delivery I have
heard in a long time — the way she starts out shirll and high, gradually
falling down to lower octaves and then rebounding back at the end of the verse
(without resorting to melismatics or anything) is just piercing to the skin.
Some might find it annoying, of course, but let them go back to their
Beyoncés and Rihannas: this is
the real deal, and it's got some pretty decent lyrics to go along with as well,
though nothing particularly special in that department — it's just cool that a
«futuristic anthem» should be delivered this way, with a howl that you'd think
more suitable for a gospel-drenched ceremony at a funeral.
The first single from the album was ʽGimme
All Your Loveʼ, melodically recognizable as.. well, as something that
could have potentially been recorded by Otis Redding, although slightly Led
Zeppelin-ized (big drums and heavy power chords included in spots), but again,
it is Howard's «from-a-whisper-to-a-scream» vocals that take the place of
melodic hooks, and she does sound like she means it at both ends. The second
single was ʽDon't Wanna Fightʼ, which is not an anti-war song but might as well be one, what with the
ambiguous nature of the lyrics — no, really, it is more of a lament over having
to constantly battle for territory with her other one, with a repetitive
falsetto chorus that does not bring
on disco associations, because it's more like paranoid hysterical falsetto
than tender loving falsetto.
Sometimes they still let their hair down —
ʽThe Greatestʼ sounds more like the Velvet Underground
(ʽWaiting For The Manʼ, to be precise) than Otis, with a fast,
churning, dirty garage sound and lots of hooliganish overdubs; and
ʽShoegazeʼ is titled ʽShoegazeʼ, even though it has little
to do with real shoegaze, but it is a power pop offering that tends to
veer off into twin guitar drone territory from time to time. These two tracks,
lodged as they are close to each other, turn the album towards loud, upbeat
rock'n'roll territory for a while, but they are exceptions, two brief dynamic
explosions in an album that should rather be listened to under torchlight.
Like I said, though, they are a modern band. Few people in the era of classic deep soul would
have dreamed, after one of the songs has slowly, stately, gracefully, and
somewhat mysteriously strolled over your living room for four minutes, to
introduce a guitar solo that would constitute of little other than howling
feedback, bleeding over your carpet for over a minute. Well, maybe Big Brother
& Holding Company could, since their lead guitarists were poorly trained
punks and had to compensate for lack of training with a lot of noise (and what
a great noise that could be, too): but Howard and Heath Fogg are certainly
doing that out of conceptual reasons. (That said, I could stand the presence of a few regular guitar solos every now
and then — apparently, they're not big fans of those, both because the
soul/R'n'B tradition was not that hot on them, either, and because guitar solos are out of fashion these days as well. Ah
well, never mind).
So, am I saying that Sound & Color is a great collection of songs? Nope. Without
Howard's presence, most of these songs would be just old-fashioned vamps. With her presence, though, it gives us
one more glimpse at a genuinely lovable character. Maybe they could write «better songs», but they
seem to be afraid to do it at the expense of losing that ol' feeling, which
they express so well through her alterations of powerhouse / arch-subtle vocals
and through their jagged, broken-up, bleeding tune structures. And that's
perfectly okay by me — in fact, I certainly was not expecting this particular
direction, believing that they would either stagnate (49.5% probability) or
commercialize (another 49.5%). However, they chose the thin remaining path between
the two obvious roads, and preferred to become only what might be the leading
soul band in today's music. Not bad, I'd say — certainly deserving of a thumbs up.
SOUVENIRS D'UN AUTRE MONDE (2007)
1) Printemps Emeraude; 2)
Souvenirs D'Un Autre Monde; 3) Les Iris; 4) Ciel Errant; 5) Sur L'Autre Rive Je
T'Attendrai; 6) Tir Nan Og.
From an «everyday basis» point of view, the
only shoegazing band the regular Joe really needs to hear, if only to
understand what all the fuss is really about, is probably My Bloody Valentine.
But even the most limited formula in the world can always opt for some
freshness and individuality if you succeed in coming up with the right extra ingredients.
And particularly in the 21st century, where we constantly suffer from lack of
freshness, this odd need for «synthesizing the unsynthesizable» has revived
pretty much every musical genre and sub-direction ever thought of by man,
woman, quadrupede, or mineral — shoegazing included.
«Alcest», essentially a one-man project by
French musician Stéphane Paut, better known under the code name «Neige»
(«Snow»), has its roots neither in pop nor in psychedelia, but in black metal:
Neige's pedigree begins with Peste Noire, a leading French black metal outfit
heavily influenced by the likes of Cannibal Corpse — their discography
includes such telling titles as Aryan
Supremacy (an early demo where Neige was still playing drums rather than
guitar) and Folkfuck Folie, among
other things. If this worries you, do not be worried as far as Alcest is
concerned: Neige has gone on record stating that, for him, his career in Peste
Noire merely satisfied an «urge of animal and primitive regression», and we
all have our demons to exorcise.
Neige's black metal history does somehow
influence his shaping of Alcest — no wonder this style of music is sometimes
called «blackgazing» — but there is nothing particularly ugly, vile, racist, or
shock-oriented about that influence. The blackness, created by the distortion
and feedback of the rhythm guitar, is only there to provide an important
counterpoint for the «shoegazing» lead parts, which, on their part, are always
set up in «melancholic beauty» mode. The sound is therefore reminiscent, at the
same time, of such contemporaries as And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead
(although those guys are far more noisy and «rock»-oriented) and Agalloch
(although those guys always hunt for a doom-laden effect, which is not the
purpose of Alcest).
But Neige has one more card up his sleeve — the
vocal parts, usually handled by himself, but occasionally by Audrey Silvain,
his partner in his third project, Amesoeurs. And this is where the Frenchness
comes through: strip away the thick distorted guitars, replace the shoegazing
drone with some light jazz muzak, and you will have yourself a sentimental /
melancholic / atmospheric French intelli-pop record circa the mid-Seventies or
so. The effect that this particular synthesis has on the feelings may not, in
fact, probably will not be immediate, but eventually, it does let itself be
known — the triple combination of «earthiness» (black distorted fire),
«transcendence» (shoegazing trills and drones), and «lonesome beauty» (distant,
echoey vocal parts that always seem to be coming from somewhere under the
ground) makes for some tasty escapism.
Alcest's stated musical philosophy is that he
does not create, but re-creates the
sonic and visual images of a Fairy Land that he claims to have come in contact
with in his childhood (and I do not necessarily disbelieve him — it all depends
on what exact kinds of fairy tales he might have read instead of doing his sums
and playing football in the yard). Naturally, the musical invention of another
world is not his personal know-how — from Sgt.
Pepper to Amon Düül II to Cocteau Twins and whoever else, people
in pop music have been doing that ever since pop music became an art. But Neige
makes an explicit point of it: the album title is literally translated from
French as Memories Of Another World,
and, if anything, it lets you know that this is not just some sort of
unpredictable experiment, but that the man really knows what it is that he is
doing.
That world of his is not particularly diverse.
The music may get softer or louder, switch from acoustic to electric and back,
shift between male and female vocals, or even show some mild Celtic influence
in ʽTir Nan Ogʼ, but the mood on all the six tracks is essentially
the same. The lead parts conjure sadness, the vocals conjure elfishness, and
the rhythm compensates for the elfishness with earthy heaviness (although,
contrary to some reviews, there is nothing truly dark, sinister, or
threatening about any of these compositions). I do, however, wish that there were
more of those pretty acoustic folksy interludes — the patterns that Neige plays
are anything but complex, but each of these repetitive acoustic tapestries that
he weaves is generally more memorable than the metal/shoegaze duets, which can
get way too samey even with lowered expectations.
The repetitiveness itself is not a problem,
though: the title track states that "d'où je viens le temps
n'existe pas, les secondes deviennent des heures" ("where I come from time does not exist, seconds
become hours"), and the whole point of the album, indeed, is to make
you lose track of the time — including subtle variations on previously played
themes that make you wonder if you have not accidentally pressed the rewind
button. The key thing here is that if, for you, at least fifteen or twenty
seconds of this album work fine, the whole album will work fine, since its primary
purpose is to put you in a specific trance-like frame of mind. If you are well
experienced, however, in the art of shoegazing, the trick may not work, and then you will probably be able to take no more
than the aforementioned twenty seconds of it, in toto.
Of course, even being fond of Souvenirs D'Un Autre Monde does not
equal finding it a truly «magic» experience: Neige, to me, is less of a genius
than a master craftsman, painstakingly learning his trade so as to be able to
express his childhood dreams, much like a master pilot is diligently working on
perfecting his skills so as to be able to do that fabulous loop he imagined
himself doing when he was six years old. But as a first significant attempt at
catching that dream, it is highly impressive — especially if you keep in mind
that this is a one-man band project, with Neige himself responsible for most of
the overdubs. Therefore, a certified thumbs up here, even if I cannot claim to have
ever been to the same place as Neige in my
own childhood. (For that matter, I'm more of an ʽI Am The Walrusʼ
type of guy, myself...)
ECAILLES DE LUNE (2010)
1) Ecailles De Lune (Pt. 1);
2) Ecailles De Lune (pt. 2); 3) Percées De Lumière; 4) Abysses;
5) Solar Song; 6) Sur L'Océan Couleur De Fer.
On their second album, Alcest are almost a
band: Neige is still credited for most of the work, but there is also a
separate drummer (going under the name of «Winterhalter», which, I would say,
is a rather gross intrusion of the Germanic element into Alcest's French
conceptualism), and multi-instrumentalist Fursy Teyssier also contributes a
brief atmospheric interlude (ʽAbyssesʼ) that mainly consists of the
heaves and ho's of a huge electronic bellows, but still provides some merry
company to Neige's soliloquy existence.
But none of this really matters if you are not
into that whole trivia-seeking enterprise, because in general, Ecailles De Lune (Scales Of The Moon for those unfamiliar with Anglo-Norman) is not
at all different from its predecessor. Actually, I would say that it is a
little worse. Worried, perhaps, that his black metal roots were altogether
neglected and eclipsed by the melancholia and sentimentalism of Souvenirs, Neige now takes steps to
ensure that the sound be a tad heavier and gruffer, even going as far as to use
growling vocals on a couple of the tracks — and in the process, something
important is lost.
The two-part, 18-minute-long title suite that
opens the album should suffice to illustrate that point. It works at the
intersection of two guitar tones — a ringing, echoey, «lunar» tone for
melancholia and psychedelia, and a noisy, distorted, «earthy» tone for
martiality and aggression — and two vocal styles (clean / romantic in the first
part, growling / apocalyptic in the second). By shifting around the dominance
of one tone / style over the other, and by alternating loud and quiet parts,
Neige gives the whole thing some dynamics and development. But the actual
musical themes are not very interesting, and the vocal melodies are unmemorable
— and overall, the impression of being transplanted into an «autre monde», this time around, is not
nearly as strong as when you first put on ʽPrintemps Emeraudeʼ. And I
blame the superfluous «metallization» for that: there is only so much distance
you can cover, speeding along the black metal trail, before your imagery ceases
to be evocative and becomes, at best, boring, and at worst, self-parodic.
It gets better as we move along, though:
ʽSolar Songʼ tones down the metal aspects in order to make way for an
inspired vocal part that sounds, indeed, like some sort of ritualistic
invocation of the supernatural — with the vocals themselves «felt» from behind
the thick curtains of droning guitar overdubs rather than properly heard, which
is only natural, since the layman is not supposed to be let inside the Holy of Holies, right? But
the best track is still the last one: ʽSur L'Océan Couleur De
Ferʼ completely jettisons the metal element, being built almost entirely
around one repetitive, plaintive guitar figure, to which Neige then adds layer
after layer of extra acoustic rhythms, electric flourishes, synthesizers,
faraway percussion bursts, and New Age vocalises. The lyrics, formally
interpreted, speak of massive deaths in the ocean waves — Titanic? Lusitania?
whatever — but the music is unnaturally calm and quiet for such a subject, more
like a small-scale requiem mass rather than a direct depiction of some gruesome
tragedy.
On the whole, this is not bad stuff, but it
does seem as if Neige had mostly emptied his bag of subconscious reminiscences
on the first Alcest album, and is now forcing himself to come up with new
impressions on the spot — not exactly a «sophomore slump», because it is very
hard to distinguish efficient from inefficient in the case of such static,
atmospheric music; but still a relative disappointment. Perhaps it could have
been better, if more of the tracks were similar in form and spirit to the
album's subtle, lamentative coda — then again, this would have rendered it even
more monotonous than it is, so let us refrain from guesswork. In any case, what
with so many artists today giving their best shot on their first album and then
fizzling and fading away over the course of ten more, it would probably require
a miracle for Alcest to best his own Souvenirs,
so just lower your expectations and be done with it.
LES VOYAGES DE L'AME (2012)
1) Autre Temps; 2) Là
Ou Naissent Les Couleurs Nouvelles; 3) Les Voyages De L'Ame; 4) Nous Sommes
L'Emeraude; 5) Beings Of Light; 6) Faiseurs De Mondes; 7) Havens; 8) Summer's
Glory.
If we (or, at least, those of us who know
either French or Google Translate) concentrate on the album and song titles
long enough, the first and, for now, only three records of Alcest may seem like
a trilogy: Fairy Tale, Space Journey, and now, with Les Voyages De L'Ame (Soul
Journeys) comes Transcendental / Religious Experience. Naturally, this is
but a subjective interpretation, but it helps — when it comes to tracing the
subtle differences that justify Neige's productivity.
In a way, the third album takes a step back:
compared with its immediate predecessor, it is noticeably less «metal» in
nature, with growling vocals making only a brief appearance in ʽFaiseurs
Des Mondesʼ and heavy guitar tones used sparingly and almost always as a
backdrop for light-ringing melodic passages. On the other hand, far more
attention is paid to vocal arrangements — ʽBeings Of Lightʼ is almost
completely wordless, and the focus is on New Age-style angelic choral
harmonies; other songs generally tend to veer closer to the French pop-inspired
melodicity of Souvenirs D'Un Autre Monde.
In other words, Neige has mellowed out once more, and the territory through
which the composer's (or the listener's?) soul is supposed to journey seems
pretty safe for it — light, bliss, beauty, the works.
At this point, one thing I'd like to
specifically praise about the album is the drum work by the mysterious
«Winterhalter» (going by the real name of Jean Deflandre). Take my advice — if
you happen to listen to this stuff and get bored after a while because of all
the shoegazing repetition, switch your attention to the drummer guy for a bit,
since he is really doing an amazing job out there: nothing particularly
complex, but he goes way beyond simply keeping the beat, as you'd expect from
an «ambient»-oriented record. There are all sorts of rolls, flips, tricky
syncopes, build-ups and releases that do not really corrupt or sway the planned
atmosphere, but make the whole experience more fun — the guy just happens to be
one of those swell drummers, like Blondie's Clem Burke, who refuses to conform
to limitations of the formula and keeps inventing new and new figures out of
his head. It is double fun on those rare occasions when Neige agrees to speed
up the tempo, at least a little bit, like on the final section of
ʽLà Ou Naissent Les Couleursʼ.
As for the melodies themselves, they present no
surprises: once again, the craft is not so much in the base melodic figures
(most of which show elegant geometric precision, but do not seem to carry a lot
of emotional load) as in Neige's trademark crescendos, and he has not mastered
any new tricks in that department — even the guitar tones mostly remain the
same. ʽBeings Of Lightʼ is arguably the most atypical of these
compositions, and even that one perfectly fits inside the formula.
ʽSummer's Gloryʼ, respecting the title, is made to look like an
unusually uplifting anthem, and its vocals owe the most to the old school
French «mood song».
But albums like these are usually remembered by
their longest tracks, and the longest track here,
ʽLà Ou Naissent Les Couleurs Nouvellesʼ, consisting of a
slower and faster part linked through some psychedelic jangle, is not
particularly impressive, other than Winterhalter's terrific drum contributions,
even if the fast section is, indeed, the closest that Alcest has ever
approached to «rocking» (not that «rocking» was ever on the project's
pre-planned agenda). This and similar tracks only further confirm that the
Alcest formula cannot be improved upon, at least not by Neige himself. The guy
is an admirable master of form, but unless he begins coming up with truly
stunning musical phrases or steps
away from the self-imposed «drone and repetition only» constraint, his fanbase
is not likely to expand.
SHELTER (2014)
1) Wings; 2) Opale; 3) La Nuit
Marche Avec Moi; 4) Voix Sereine; 5) L'Eveil Des Muses; 6) Shelter; 7) Away; 8)
Délivrance.
And now we finally know the truth: Neige's
preoccupation with «black metal» was really but an accident, a result of an
unlucky psychic derailment. It took the guy about ten years to sort that out,
but he did manage to reconnect with his own true self at last: Shelter erases the last, already barely
visible traces of heavy music from Alcest's palette, and replaces them with
heavenly lushness, as Neige and Winterhalter place themselves in the
self-assured hands of Birgir Jón Birgisson, the producer of Sigur
Rós — who, in his turn, teams them up with Amiina, the Icelandic chamber
music / electronic ensemble, well known for working together with Sigur
Rós on quite a few occasions. Well, if you think about it, it was
probably bound to happen, sooner or later.
The decision was clearly a gamble, and it is
not yet clear how much it cost Neige in terms of mass quantities of admiration
— so far, I have read many an old fan's grumble on how the band lost its unique
identity by sacrificing the «black» in favor of the «lush». Now, they say, all
we have is an inferior, unnecessary, pale shadow of Sigur Rós,
technically pretty, but boring and devoid of its own vision. Trying to progress
and develop is all very fine, they say, but not at the expense of dissolving
yourself in the ocean of imitation. This point of view is totally acceptable if
you really thought that Souvenirs D'Un
Autre Monde was some sort of groundbreaking achievement, a fabulous
milestone in the development of «blackgaze»; but if you just thought, «hmm,
nice dark droning music, whatever», then it is not excluded that Shelter will please you more.
In any case, complaints of «selling out» are
entirely missing the point, because, composition-wise, Shelter is as much a proper brainchild of Neige as everything else.
Shimmery, jangly guitars instead of thick distorted tones and clean,
pretty-melancholic vocals instead of deathly growling are simply a different
kind of coating, and it's not even as if they weren't already in Neige's
inventory from the very beginning, either. As for the strings of Amiina, they
are mostly relegated to the background for ambience, so, in the end, it all
still sounds more like old-school Alcest than classic Sigur Rós, with
Neige's guitar playing at the center of everything.
So let us just ask ourselves two consecutive
questions, the only ones, in my opinion, that make sense in the context of an
album like Shelter: (a) does Shelter work as enjoyable, tasteful
background music? and (b) does Shelter
contain any moments or periods of «heavenly beauty» that would rise it above
the status of background music?
The first question I answer in the positive,
and, in fact, with the jarring «black» moments out of the picture, Shelter is unquestionably the finest
«background muzak» album to come from Alcest so far. Some of the songs feature
subtle dynamic build-ups (most notably the huge ten-minute grand-finale track),
but they are so subtle indeed that they probably won't be able to rip you out
of the process of doing whatever you're doing while listening to it. On the
other hand, the general mix of the thing, where the guitars usually sound like
they are lightly wobbling in space, the strings hover behind them like
perfectly normal particle vibrations, and Neige is trying to mesmerize you with
the latest in French lullaby craft, is a perfect soundtrack for doing
something... like, oh I dunno, writing this here review, for instance.
The second question is trickier. It does not
seem to me as if Neige were stringing together chords that weren't already well
explored previously — but there are
some individual moments that are sufficiently simple, yet at the same time
quite deep-reaching. I am speaking particularly of the second half of
ʽVoix Sereineʼ (a series of three-chord "nah nah nah"'s
that gradually blossoms into an ecstatic merry-go-round); of the delay/echo
effect on the guitar strings in ʽL'Eveil Des Musesʼ, which does evoke
a bit of a «muse-centered» feeling; and the huge finale of
ʽDelivranceʼ, whose build-up is
sufficiently grand to stir up the soul... I think.
Still, «I think» is not quite the same as «I am
sure». In reality, my feelings are quite torn between realizing that this is
indeed the kind of music that Neige must be hearing in his heart even when
sleeping — and then realizing that most of its effectiveness comes from clever
exploitation of modern recording and mixing technology. And a song like
ʽDélivranceʼ, with its ten minutes of powerful building-up and
meticulous winding down, lays claim to overwhelming your emotions and flooding
your senses (otherwise, it would have no reason to exist), but is there any
actual magic to that overwhelming,
or is this just a guaranteed-to-work recipé that could be generated by a
computer, with just a few parameters fed in? I really have no idea, and this
shadow of doubt that refuses to go away prevents me from properly falling under
the spell of Shelter, and once you
have refused to fall under that spell, you can really only use it as background
muzak.
But it's good enough to at least deserve an
honest thumbs up
— sufficiently different from Neige's previous work to warrant an autonomous
listen, never ugly or, in fact, anything less than «pretty», and it makes you
want to ask unanswerable questions, so I guess we should count that as a
success story, and the idea to bring in the Sigur Rós people was
relatively fruitful. Coming up: an equally productive collaboration with
Godspeed You! Black Emperor? The modern world of music may be running out of
creative steam for all we know, but at least the combinatory potential is on a
constant rise.
KODAMA (2016)
1) Kodama; 2) Eclosion; 3) Je
Suis D'Ailleurs; 4) Untouched; 5) Oiseaux De Proie; 6) Onyx; 7) Notre Sang Et
Nos Pensées*.
Kodama means ʽtree-spiritʼ in Japanese,
with the concept going back to prehistoric times, but it does not take a
Japanologist to understand that Neige learned about it not from reading
Japanese folklore, but rather from watching Princess
Mononoke, since 99% of people get their 99% of information on traditional
Japanese culture from Miyazaki-san. That's OK, though, it's not like Alcest
have switched to playing traditional Japanese music or anything — in fact, we
could all probably see it coming: sooner or later, any blackgazer is going to
have to confess that he was inspired and influenced by Japanese mixes of beauty
and horror anyway, because blackgaze is all about mixing beauty with horror,
and who does that better than the Japanese — Ivanka Trump?..
Anyway, I was quick enough in my review of Shelter to suggest that Alcest's
genuinely blackgazing days are over — here, as if shaking off one type of
slumber to immediately jump into another, Neige makes a focused effort to
return to his «roots», and make another album straight in the vein of his first
two. The downside is that you may have to go back to the first two in order to
check if there's any significant differences, and even I am a little lazy to do
that. The upside is that a shift of mood/vibe is almost always a good thing
anyway for somebody who works in the «static» section of the musical business,
and there does seem to be a little extra spark in Kodama that you sometimes observe in those types of comebacks that
are not made exclusively for the money. Yet it is all subtle and subjective —
and on the rougher side of the equation, what you have here is simply six more
(seven more, if you count the extra track on the deluxe edition) cold, dark,
snowy, statically beautiful sonic panoramas from the French master of texture.
Once again, as the title track kicks into gear,
we find ourselves treading through heavy, but soft and un-treacherous snow,
covering a dense (but not too dense) forest of pine trees on a moonlit (but not
too moonlit) night — without any idea of why we are here, where are we going,
and whether the forest has an end or the journey has a purpose. We do know
that the forest is enchanted, as the kodamas
are sending us haunted signals with their haunted vocals, ringing in unison
with the jangly and the distorted guitars, but it's not like they really care
about you — you're nothing but an impartial observer, and even when the
distorted guitars take over for a while and start a power chord bombarding,
there is still no impression that something is, you know, happening. Maybe just a stronger wind.
There's four additional tracks on here, but the
vibe on each and every one of them is exactly the same — occasionally, you get
some growling vocals (ʽEclosionʼ), for old times' sake, but they are
neither scary nor apocalyptic. (Maybe one of the kodamas just got thirsty.) Only
the last track, ʽOnyxʼ, is different, and not necessarily for the
better — it's just one long drone, recorded in lo-fi for the sake of amusement
and working as a «one last breath» outro that you will probably want to skip
even if you happen to be sufficiently enchanted by the rest of them.
Honestly, I am not quite sure what to do here,
but in the end, I will probably have to leave it with a modest thumbs up,
because (a) I really like the vocal melodic hook on ʽKodamaʼ (closest
the album gets to being genuinely haunting), (b) I think that the album shows some progress in the art of working with
overdubs (Souvenirs sounds a little
crude and un-subtle in comparison), (c) I've always had a soft spot for French
impressionist artists influenced by Japanese culture — so, roll over Pissarro,
tell Debussy the news, or something to that effect. None of which will probably
ward off the inevitable — that in a few months (weeks) Kodama will be robustly wiped out of my memory, and then Neige can
start it all over again without any serious risk of being accused of
self-plagiarism in the future.
SONGS IN A MINOR (2001)
1) Piano & I (intro); 2) Girlfriend; 3) How Come You Don't Call Me;
4) Fallin'; 5) Troubles; 6) Rock Wit U;
7) A Woman's
Worth; 8) Jane Doe; 9) Goodbye; 10) The Life; 11) Mr. Man (duet with Jimmy
Cozier); 12) Never Felt This Way (Interlude); 13) Butterflyz; 14) Why Do I Feel
So Sad; 15) Caged Bird (outro); 16) Lovin' U [unlisted track].
Artists who write their own material deserve
respect. Before engaging in a predictable trashing of young, aspiring, sexy,
thoughtful Alicia Keys' debut album, ask yourself the question: what have you
actually written? Have you ever recorded a sixty-minute long album of
your own songs, not to mention sung and played piano on it? If no, shut up and
listen; if yes, you should probably know how hard it is in the first place.
If you keep repeating this mantra over and over
again while listening to Songs In A Minor, chances are you'll approach
it with an unbiased mind and spot the few drops of goodness that are contained
therein. That Alicia Keys wasn't just a nobody who turned up in a recording
studio by chance, to me, is obvious. Even disregarding her delightfully
marketable appearance, she, like fellow soulster Mariah Carey, was selling much
more than the body (not that there's anything wrong with the body): she can
sing, she can play, and she can write songs, and she probably does all three
better than your average Joe from the next corner, so why not make a record?
The bad news: "better" does not equal
"really well". Armies of MTV divas have this kind of pipe set; her
piano playing is efficient but she's not even on an Elton John level and she
probably knows it; and writing songs? well, it doesn't take a tremendous lot of
talent to write generic R'n'B tunes, especially with a little help from one's
friends in the studio. So the only hope here is to get by on a combination of
all three, which is truly not something that is frequently encountered in the
world of contemporary R'n'B.
Alas, although mainstream critics predictably
fell over this combination, and although the very sound of it doesn't drive me
bonkers, Songs In A Minor falls victim to the commonest crime in the
world: it is very, very boring. Dull, easy grooves; dull, unconvincing hooks
(if any); dull, cheap sentiments; dull everything. Maybe this is, in large
part, due to the fact that R'n'B in the last decade has been even deader than
rock, and that the stinky, stagnating chains of its conventions chew through
every ounce of talent. But it is more likely still that Alicia just doesn't
have the right quantity of ounces, if you know what I mean.
Two songs that give me pleasure come right
after each other in the middle: they are 'Rock Wit U', an excellent tribute to
70s R'n'B right down to all the syncopation tricks and wah-wah guitars
(unfortunately, it only makes me yearn for going back to 70s R'n'B instead),
and 'A Woman's Worth', where, once you discard the lecturing feminist lyrics,
the chorus comes through as dense, tense, and deliciously neurotic (and
catchy).
No other songs give me pleasure, with the
possible — and frightening! — exception of the electric piano-and-vocal album
closer 'Caged Bird', which should scare people away (teenage girls usually sing
stuff like that auditioning for American Idol) but, in my case at least,
skilfully tugs at some particularly misplaced nerve and makes me emotional.
(Please don't tell me that 'she's so rare and beautiful' is in the least
autobiographical, please).
The big hit single was 'Fallin'; it didn't
register with me at all, but I do remember that the vocals were overdubbed in
an interesting way. (Connections with 'It's A Man's Man's Man's World' have
been spotted by knowledgeable people as well; not sure it's a good thing). On
the "hidden" track 'Lovin' U', she (kinda sorta) tries to be like
60s-era Aretha Franklin, but the only reason you have to listen to her being
Aretha Franklin is if you think Aretha Franklin is only worth listening to
when she's young and available for autographs next door. Me, I have no problem
putting on some old album from 1970 instead, because, let's face it, Alicia's
decibels just don't register on Aretha's scale.
So turn this over to Mr. Brain, who refuses to
recognize "artistic integrity" in all this shenanigan (and actually
threatens to sue on account of bad taste and banal "artistic"
decisions, like kicking things off with a reference to 'Moonlight Sonata', of
all things! where's Beethoven and where's Alicia Keys?), and then to Mr. Heart,
who has just recovered from a nice nap in the corner, as both of them give the
record a crunchy thumbs down. There
might have been some semi-good reason to listen to this in 2001; today, any
such reason has to be recovered from deep down the drain.
THE DIARY OF ALICIA KEYS (2003)
1) Harlem's Nocturne; 2) Karma; 3) Heartburn; 4) If I Was
Your Woman / Walk On By; 5) You Don't Know My Name; 6) If I Ain't Got You; 7) Diary; 8) Dragon Days; 9)
Wake Up; 10) So Simple; 11) When You Really Love Someone; 12) Feeling U,
Feeling Me; 13) Slow Down; 14) Samsonite Man; 15) Nobody Not Really.
I'm getting unusually soft: I kind of like this
album. It's certainly longer than a professional executioner's torture rack,
and it shares all the flaws of its predecessor, as well as all the flaws of
R'n'B and all the flaws that the 21st century took over and carefully nurtured
from the 20th one, but it turned out to be likeable anyway. I guess the reason
is that in two years, Alicia Keys simply became a better songwriter than
Providence should have let her become. Although I admit that reason is
completely unexplainable.
Let me just make a brief list of songs that
have solid melodic hooks: 'Karma', 'Heartburn', 'If I Ain't Got You', 'Dragon
Days', 'Wake Up', 'When You Really Love Someone', 'Samsonite Man' — that's
almost half of the album there. Never mind that some of this is self-consciously
retro and some self-consciously Whitney Houston; her singing gets me
(okay, Whitney's singing also gets me sometimes, but then she didn't
sell these zillions of records just for nothing).
The trick is that I had to sit through this
more than once. Upon first listen, Diary is even more excruciatingly
boring, generic, and "soulless" than A Minor. But then
something starts clicking, and from under all the slickness and corporate gloss
you start picking out bits and pieces of an aspiring artist who at least understands
the basic principles that underly the power of music, even if she is rarely
able to properly apply them. That you not only have to have glossy
arrangements, that you also got to have hooks; that hooks cannot exist without
true emotional force powering them up; and that true emotional force comes not
necessarily from living out your songs, but at least from feeling them as
meaningful creations. Does she have that understanding? Many will say nay, but
I will say yeah.
I really love 'Dragon Days'. As a funky 70-s
sendup, it works even better than 'Rock Wit U', ditzy and sexy and catchy, good
piano/guitar interplay, good harmonies — if you feel the need to drag this down
with some highbrow comment on how this material makes Isaac Hayes turn over in
his grave, leave me out of this. I also really love 'Wake Up': it's a strong,
well-written, uplifting ballad — if all mainstream balladry were like this,
humanity's chances for survival would be a notch higher than they are today.
Overall, it ain't worth taking a lot of time
describing the rest, but at least my understanding of why the
"standard" critical press took such a liking to Alicia has managed to
increase a bit after I'd caught myself unexpectedly enjoying 'Dragon Days'. She's
a smartie, both music-wise and image-wise, and she gives out these small bits
of "class" that people, who still remember the good old days when
artists used to give out large chunks of "class", are hungry to lap
up.
But I also understand what might be the single biggest
annoying factor in her music: to quote fellow reviewers Wilson & Alroy,
her "fatal weakness as a soul singer" is that she has "no
vulnerability". Song after song after song, her toughness just starts to
get on one's nerves. Feminism and the 'strong woman' concept are okay by me,
but soul is about feeling pain and letting others in on it, and there's
absolutely no pain whatsoever here, anywhere in sight. 'If I Ain't Got You' is
tense and almost epic, but that's an irrealistic "if" out there: it's
perfectly obvious that she got you, and the tenseness is simply there so
you should understand she ain't never gonna let you go, that egotistic bitch.
:) And on 'You Don't Even Know My Name', she plays the part of a waitress (!)
who actually initiates the call to a guy who'd been ogling her in the
restaurant — it's all a matter of proper initiative, baby. Of course, maybe
she's just perfectly honest about it: maybe she really doesn't feel much pain,
and if you can't feel pain, better not simulate feeling it. But then it's also
a much nastier accusation to fling at someone — not being able to feel pain
makes you much less of a human than not letting others feel your pain in your
art, after all.
That was probably a twistier argument than any
of the melodies on Diary Of Alicia Keys, but my heart doesn't really
care too much for twisty melodies, and those that are there prompt it to give
out a cautious thumbs up, while the
brain, of course, has permanently shut itself off on the subject of
recognizing the artistic genius of Alicia, and I can't blame it for that.
UNPLUGGED (2005)
1) Intro: Alicia's Prayer; 2)
Karma; 3) Heartburn; 4) A Woman's Worth; 5) Unbreakable; 6) How Come
You Don't Call Me; 7) If I Was Your Woman; 8) If I Ain't Got You; 9) Every
Little Bit Hurts; 10) Streets Of New York (City Life); 11) Wild Horses; 12)
Diary; 13) You Don't Know Me; 14) Stolen Moments; 15) Fallin'; 16) Love It Or
Leave It Alone/Welcome To Jamrock.
It was a surprise — apparently, they're still
doing these MTV Unplugged sessions long after the format has completely
discredited itself. And after this album, one doesn't even need further proof.
Please pardon me the offensive pun, but it's hard to help it: 'If this is Alicia
Keys Unplugged, for God's sake, somebody plug her!'
Simply put, Unplugged is Keys' first
live album, and it is very, very bad; if this is really what her average live
show sounds like, my worst fears are coming true. Forget the
"unplugged", actually: the lack of electric guitar is but a
formality, since electric guitar only played a serious role on her retroish,
funkier tunes, and she's not doing these here anyway. Other than that, you
still have piano, horns, strings, electric bass, an Invincible Armada of backup
singers and guests — a small, intimate session this is not. So I guess it must
be quite close to her regular show.
So why bad? Stephen Thomas Erlewine of the
All-Music Guide probably caught it best when he wrote: "This, more than
either Songs In A Minor or The Diary, illustrates why Alicia Keys
fits into the post-hip-hop soul world: she places groove and feel above the
song'. I insist that she is not a genius songwriter, but a talented one — but
you wouldn't really guess it from this never ending vamp-fest. Instead of
making you feel the melody, she makes you feel the 'oohs' and 'aahs' and 'yeah,
yeahs', often relegating the melody itself to backup singers.
And that wouldn't be so awful, perhaps, if,
after submitting yourself to the studio albums, you didn't feel that this is
all so terribly contrived. This whole performance is about letting people (or
should we step over the chains of correctness and say "brainwashed MTV
idiots"?) know just how awesomely cool you are, not about letting them in
on your inner artist or even about promoting your material. This coolness is
nurtured by a few "trendy" guests, e. g. a flaccid, sleep-inducing
duet with Adam Levine from Maroon 5 on 'Wild Horses' and a truly hideous coda
with DJs Mos Def and Common rapping about Alicia's charms to still more 'unh unhs'
and 'yeah yeahs' on the latter's side, but even her own older, better standards
are reduced to ugly Towers of Toughness. The one new song, 'Unbreakable', has
likeable piano runs and great chorus hooks — but guess what, most of these
hooks are delivered by the backup singers!
Perhaps the worst offender of all comes in the
middle, in the shape of a Free Form Jazz / Impromptu Neo-Beatnik Poetry
creation 'Streets Of New York (City Life)'. It stands very much at odds with
all the other, fairly conventional, material, and is supposed to elevate
Alicia's coolness to an entirely different level, but I just ask the question:
'If this is so hip and cool, why does everything else on here sound so bland
and generic?' This pose of throwing a sonic bone to the 'musical intellectuals'
and then going on to entertain the 'masses' is irritating to no end. Either you
are a mainstream artist, or an avantgarde one, or you consistently propagate
the compatibility of both approaches, but the idea of 'hey, I can be
sophisticated every once in a while, too' stinks to high heaven of first-rate
hypocrisy. And besides, some things are just NOT compatible. You cannot
honestly hope to convince people when you present yourself as a tough hip-hop
kid AND as an impressionistic neo-beatnik on the very same record. It's like a
liberal arts professor from Berkeley voting Republican.
Or perhaps the worst offender of all is that
one line in 'Wild Horses' where she changed the lyrics. The original, the way
the Stones did it, goes 'Let's do some living after we die'. The silly
girl doesn't get it; she sings 'let's do some living before we die'.
Just goes to show — the Stones will most definitely do some living after they
die (well, Keith at least has obviously been dead for about twenty years now
and still looks fine), but I have serious doubts about Alicia Keys in that
respect. Sorry.
I don't even have to mention that this is a
mighty thumbs down all the way, bar the
minor enjoyability of 'Unbreakable' and the fact that 'Karma' and 'Heartburn'
start things off in a generally good, rocking way before bringing the plane
down in the swamp with a toothless rendition of 'Woman's Worth' and even lower
from there. Unfortunately, it also kills off most hopes for Keys' artistic
integrity: like so many promising, but spineless divas before her, she seems so
happy with her newly established MTV-trash status that it is unlikely she is
going to relinquish it any time soon.
AS I AM (2007)
1) As I Am [Intro]; 2) Go
Ahead; 3) Superwoman;
4) No One; 5) Like
You'll Never See Me Again; 6) Lesson Learned; 6) Wreckless Love; 7) The Thing
About Love; 8) Teenage Love Affair; 9) I Need You; 10) Where Do We Go From Here;
11) Prelude To A Kiss; 12) Tell You Something (Nana's Reprise); 13) Sure Looks Good To Me.
Is it just funny old me, or does she always
put one or two best songs at the start, only to lure us into her misty,
treacherous swamp of mediocrity? Or is it just some sort of tricky aural
hallucination caused by certain psychological expectations?
Regardless, As I Am is Alicia's weakest
album so far and a dangerous indication that, instead of honing and refining
her skills, she is completely succumbing to trends and fashions and the bland
nothingness of the '00s. It rarely, if ever, sounds awful, but it's
curiously flat — for instance, she seems to be playing more piano than she did
on Diary (subjective impression), but it's buried so deep in the mix
that it practically doesn't matter (objective fact). She mostly eschews
electronica in favour of real instruments, but the players are so utterly
generic and uninspired that it doesn't matter much, either. Several reviewers
stated that on As I Am, her goal is to make a 'soul-pop' album, finding
a balance between groove and catchy melody, but I only see that the grooves
fail to be incendiary, and the melodies aren't any catchier than they used to
be.
This approach does work well on the album
opener 'Go Ahead', one of the most cutely hateful tunes she ever did (the
chorus, with its descending strings of no-no-no's, is an excellent, evocative creation);
and I am almost ashamed for liking the single 'Superwoman' — despite thinking
that it is in extremely bad taste to claim that you're 'Super-'anything in any
of your creations, no matter how ironic or metaphorical you think you are
being. (As far as I can remember, only Ringo Starr managed to get away with
this when singing 'I'm The Greatest').
But 'Superwoman' wasn't the lead-off
single. The lead-off single was the sentimental Celine Dion send-up 'No One';
and its immediate follow-up was the even more pathetic 'Like You'll Never See
Me Again'; and its follow-up was the thoroughly generic dance-pop number
'Teenage Love Affair', all of them songs that fit well within the MTV schedule
but are destined for about half an hour of shelf life at most.
It is hard for me to understand that — unless
it is true that radio-aired singles these days are selected based on
unremarkability (as in, people mostly listen to the radio when driving along
the highway, and they don't really need to be distracted by anything unusual
under these circumstances, because non-trivial chords and arrangements
increase the danger of accident). It's the only explanation I can offer for
why, for instance, 'Wreckless Love', unquestionably the most interestingly
written song on the album's second half, wasn't considered for single release.
This tune shows that Keys hasn't yet forgotten the power of emotion-charged
vocal twists (watch out for the echoey, acappella bridge sections), but she is
willing to sacrifice it... for what? She is a star already, she can
allow herself to concentrate on her creative side rather than her submissive
side. 'Superwoman' can surely do better than this.
For now, alas, I only see one more instance of
how a definitely talented person is slowly being devoured by the MTV-licensed
lawnmower — instead of trying to shape herself into a brick that would crush
its slicers, she has become invalidated by the machine herself. Maybe it's not
too late, but I doubt it; few people come out alive once they've spent a few
years under the gadget, and I don't sense the necessary amount of artistic
stability in Keys to be able to overcome it. Too bad, because we really need an
inside agent in that machine to stall it, and this means that the search for
such an agent has to be begun from scratch. Thumbs
down, down, down, down.
THE ELEMENT OF FREEDOM (2009)
1) Element Of Freedom (Intro);
2) Love Is Blind; 3) Doesn't Mean Anything; 4) Try Sleeping With A Broken
Heart; 5) Wait 'Til You See My Smile; 6) That's How Strong My Love Is; 7)
Un-thinkable (I'm Ready); 8) Love Is My Disease; 9) Like The Sea; 10) Put It
In A Love Song; 11) This Bed; 12) Distance And Time; 13) How It Feels To Fly;
14) Empire State Of Mind (Part II) Broken Down; 15) Stolen Moments; 16)
Heaven's Door; 17*) Through It All; 18*) Pray For Forgiveness.
"And the day came when the risk it took to
remain tightly closed in the butt was more painful than the risk it took to
bloom. This is the element of freedom".
Honestly, I thought this was one of the most
innovative opening lines in existence — until I checked the lyrics sheet and it
clearly said 'bud', not 'butt'. Too bad, said I, there goes a great metaphor:
looking at personal freedom through the viewpoint of anal sex. Most likely, the
rest of the record will end up equally disappointing.
Of course, it did. First of all, if you ever
decide to give it a try, by all means disregard the hype basted around it by
Alicia herself, as well as those promoters, agents, and critics that she has on
her payroll. Here is but one quote from the lady, and there are hundreds more:
«The way that the songs progress are gonna take you on a natural high. I just
want you to feel a sense of freedom, I want you to feel out-of-the-box, feel
inspired, you're definitely going to be taken on a trip, I know you're going to
be shocked.»
This is what happens when your first three
albums all debut at #1 on the Billboard: a malicious ego tumor. It is one thing
to release a mildly pleasant, generic collection of emotionally overdriven American
Idol-style ballads and electronic dance-pop; it is an entirely different
thing to promote it as a grand, once-in-a-lifetime burst of spiritual
enlightenment and liberation, especially when there is not a single vocal move
on the record that we have not already heard before, and not a single lyrical
line that rises above decades-old clichés.
Hollow pretentiousness is particularly on the
rampage with 'Empire State Of Mind' (what an awful title already), where Keys
returns to her New York obsession, this time in the form of a power ballad. I
love the city as much as anyone, but just how many second- and third-hand love
confessions does it need? The fact that she was born and raised in Brooklyn
should not, I repeat not, be accepted as an excuse to avoid punishment
for describing the city with phrases like 'concrete jungle' (say, haven't I
heard that somewhere before?) and 'such a melting pot' (does she get her inspiration
from American English manuals for beginners?).
All that said, I still think The Element Of
Freedom is a slight improvement over As I Am. If we strip it of the
surrounding pomp, eliminate the worst moments and take out the most obnoxious
filler (along with 'Empire State Of Mind', I vote for the artificially cute
duet with Beyoncé, which basically wastes the talents of both), the rest
of the songs are all tolerable. Again, the best material is at the very
beginning: 'Love Is Blind' is suitably sharp and angry (Alicia's most generally
successful mood), and 'Doesn't Mean Anything', despite being so repetitive, has
the best pure vocal hook on the album.
The general style of The Element Of Freedom
has been compared to Prince: there are, indeed, some transparent parallels, e.
g. on 'This Bed', with Princeish rhythms and Princeish falsetto vocals. But
the record is mostly about ballads, not dance-pop, and, besides, in real life
Prince's pomposity and ego level may make Keys reveal herself as the little
baby she really is, but on his records, there is always irony and plenty of
tongue-in-cheek atmosphere (which, in the end, is what makes it possible for us
to like him); The Element Of Freedom is deadly serious, from top to
bottom. If Prince was one of the primary influences, then, sorry to say,
she just does not get Prince. Or maybe I have overrated Prince.
I do have to acknowledge one thing: if As I
Am sounded like someone seriously wanted to process Alicia in MTV's meat
grinder the regular, time-honoured way, The Element Of Freedom does
honestly seem to sound the way she herself wants it to sound. Nobody is forcing
her artistic hand on this one. It is Alicia Keys, the freedom rider, who,
consciously and of her own free will, is responsible for all the bland
arrangements, lyrical clichés, unsubstantiated pretentiousness, and
tolerable melodies that do not, however, progress anywhere beyond the levels
she had already displayed eight years ago. So which one is actually better —
slavery or freedom? I'd say Ms. Keys has built up quite a strong case for the
former. Thumbs down.
GIRL ON FIRE (2012)
1) De Novo Adagio (intro); 2)
Brand New Me; 3) When It's All Over; 4) Listen To Your Heart; 5) New Day; 6)
Girl On Fire; 7) Fire We Make; 8) Tears Always Win; 9) Not Even The King; 10)
That's When I Knew; 11) Limitedless; 12) One Thing; 13) 101.
Wow. It has actually been a long time since I
last subjected myself to an album that
bad, and it almost sort of slipped my mind just
how bad a «Diva»-style R&B album can get — and, honestly, it does not get
much worse than this. It's almost as if Alicia's major goal here was to
specifically shatter every last ray of hope one could ever have held — because,
honestly, it all began in a different way: the girl had a small, but
significant stash of talent, training, intelligence, and character to break out
of the muck. But instead of progressing in the right direction, she ended up
wasting it all — regardless of how bad her subsequent output will be, Girl On Fire puts a certified final
stop on the idea of Alicia Keys as «a serious force in R&B to be reckoned
with».
There are just so many potshots to be taken
here that I do not even know where to begin. Perhaps one could start with the
album title and the front sleeve photo — that ain't a real human being out there, is it? Maybe if the record were a
cyborg-based post-apocalyptic anti-utopian rock opera or something, it would
have made more sense. But then, once the minute-long piano intro (rather ordinary,
but probably the best thing about the whole album) is over, we do get to hear
the lady say "Don't be mad / It's just a brand new kind of me / Can't be
bad / I found a brand new kind of free", and it looks like she means what
she says. Not just brand-new —
factory-made, shrink-wrapped, registered with a certified trademark, and ready
to go.
The «music» is not worth a serious mention: on
most of the songs, it just consists of tepid electronic patterns, non-descript
acoustic backing tracks, and boring drum machines. Alicia's piano skills have
completely receded into the background — except for those two or three times when
it is decided that the listener needs an extra shot of soul in the form of a
weepy minimalistic ballad (at this point the piano is dragged out and we get a
lazy atmospheric run through some scales). I think the only moment of «real
life» on the entire album is at the end of ʽFire We Makeʼ, where
guest star Gary Clark Jr. tries to somehow
justify the title and strike out some actual sparks with his jazz-rock guitar
solo. It ain't exactly Jeff Beck or John McLaughlin, but on a record so utterly
devoid of life, it is that much-needed glob of oxygen that allowed me to catch
my breath and actually sit this out (thrice!) until the end.
Still worse is the singing, because, for some
reason, Ms. Keys seems to have been told that 2012's requirements for «soulful»
are limited to one strict formula: «breathy voice let out through the nose».
Maybe that is exactly what they all do on American Idol today, but that does
not make the effect any different — she honestly sounds as if under some heavy
drug influence the entire time. This isn't «soul», not to mention «freedom»:
this is simply conforming to the adopted formula. Again, she was never a
particularly great or individualistic singer, but the frame inside which she
locks herself here is downright pathetic.
And it is all the more pathetic given how much
— even compared to the previous albums, which all revolved around this idea as
well — she is extolling her «self-established» nature on here. The lyrics speak
for themselves: "It took a long, long time to get here / It took a brave,
brave girl to try" (ʽBrand New Meʼ) — «brave» is definitely the
last word that comes to mind when thinking about this record; "She's on
top of the world / Hottest of the hottest girls" (title track) — resorting
to the third person is a nifty trick that can always bring down formal
accusations, but we are not that easily fooled; and the mightiest of them all —
"Money / Some people so poor all that they got is money... I don't care
what they're offering / How much gold they bring / They can't afford what we
got / Not even the king" (ʽNot Even The Kingʼ), which should be
an official contender for 2012's corniest lyrical bit competition.
Almost everything here ranks from, at best,
unmemorable and conventional (e. g. the elevator muzak of ʽWhen It's All
Overʼ) to, at worst, hokey and pseudo-tough (the obligatory rap bit on the
title track; the strange last-minute brush with «psychedelic» vocals and
guitars on ʽLimitedlessʼ; the «powerhouse» synth-gospel finale of
the hidden last track, where she belts out hallelujahs as if begging
forgiveness for what she just put us all through). But what should you expect? When you have a
well-polished android like that greeting you on the front sleeve, there are but
three possible outcomes: (a) this will be a spooky Kraftwerk album, (b) this
will be a decadent Roxy Music album, (c) this will be a really, really shitty
modern R&B album. And since the credits are right there on the sleeve as
well, options (a) and (b) are out of the question.
Naturally, being a responsible reviewer and
all, I must emphasize that this is
all a matter of subjective opinion. For instance, it definitely does not
co-represent the position of «Rolling Stone» editor Jody Rosen, who called Girl On Fire «her catchiest and
subtlest album yet — and one of the best R&B records of 2012» and awarded
it 4 stars out of 5. (For the record, the same Jody Rosen gave Aimee Mann's Charmer, which I consider to be one of the best records of 2012, period, 2.5
stars out of 5, complaining about lyrics that were «sagging under the weight of
mixed metaphors». Yeah right, no question here — lyrics like "party people
say, ah it's a new day, while they getting ready for a new day, celebrate and
say ay-ay-ay-ay" definitely don't have all that much to sag under, that is for sure). So who am I to throw
in my two thumbs
down? Do I get my records
produced by Babyface, Swizz Beats, Jeff Bhasker, Antonio Dixon, Dr. Dre, James
Ho, Darkchild, @Oakwood, @PopWansel, Salaam Remi, and Jamie Smith all at the
same time? Not even in my worst nightmares, I don't.
HERE (2016)
1) The Beginning (Interlude);
2) The Gospel; 3) Pawn It All; 4) Elaine Brown (interlude); 5) Kill Your Mama;
6) She Don't Really Care / 1 Luv; 7) Elevate (interlude); 8) Illusion Of Bliss;
9) Blended Family (What You Do For Love); 10) Work On It; 11) Cocoa Butter
(Cross & Pic interlude); 12) Girl Can't Be Herself; 13) You Glow
(interlude); 14) More Than We Know; 15) Where Do We Begin Now; 16) Holy War;
17*) Hallelujah; 18*) In Common.
Well now, talk about a radical image overhaul —
observable as early on as your first look at the album cover, a sharp contrast
with the heavily made-up fembot image of Girl
On Fire (more like Gynoid On Battery
Power, if you ask me). Not only is the lady not wearing any makeup, but
just in case you were distracted by the huge Afro, she even sings a song about
it (ʽGirl Can't Be Herselfʼ). And that is far from the only socially
relevant topic being covered: Here
is her most politicized and overall «tough» album ever, driven by a strong
desire to break out of the «pop» stereotype and assert a stronger artistic
personality than...
...hey, wait a minute, we are talking about
Alicia freakin' Keys, so before we go on, let us bring up all the precious
biases. She is a not half-bad pianist, but pretty much squandered that talent
on pop clichés, because she wanted too much (or, if we are going to be
kind, because all the other mean dudes wanted her) to become a soul diva. She's
got songwriting talent, but has more often than not wasted it on fluffy,
insubstantial material. She's never been a leader, always a follower; and she's
always relied much stronger on her good looks than should be appropriate for a
major artist. She always presented herself as energetic and exciting, but
usually came out as your average mainstream, plodding, boring, third-rate
artist. With all that in mind, can she actually pull it together to make an
intelligent, provoking, stimulating record?
Personal opinion with bias: she cannot.
Personal opinion with relaxed bias: she cannot, but she comes fairly close.
There is no question in my mind that she is once again being a follower rather
than a leader — riding on the relative creative explosion of Afro-American
artists in the last two years, and clearly with Beyoncé as a role model
(it is hardly surprising that a period of about six months separates Here from Lemonade), although there's plenty of indications that she'd been
hung up on Kendrick Lamar as well. Her creativity level, unsurprisingly, has
not gone up: even though she writes or at least co-writes all the material
herself, the melodies remain simplistic and / or too dependent on piano pop
clichés, and the lyrics suffer from predictable moralistic straightforwardness
or common places ("when a girl can't be herself no more / I just wanna
cry, I just wanna cry" is a fairly typical one) — and the «nifty touches»
can be overbearing and reeking of cheap symbolism. I mean, does she really have to sample the Wu-Tang Clan
in order to be accepted into the Street Tough League? Gimme a break. And yet...
...and yet, strangely enough, once she is done
with the pompous intro ("I'm Nina Simone in the park and Harlem in the
dark" — I know she is impersonating the spirit of the turntable, but still
it must be so cool for Alicia Keys to be able to say that she is Nina Simone,
right?), anyway, once she is done with that and starts her
piano-and-strings-based rap on ʽThe Gospelʼ, there is something authentic in there. I'm not
sure that there really are any truly painful memories here, given Alicia's
relatively safe and cozy upbringing in downtown Manhattan, but perhaps there's
something in the blood — the piano and
the voice sound more genuinely «on fire» than anything on Girl On Fire. No, she is not the ideal candidate for a truly tough,
dangerous, keep-your-fuckin'-distance asserter of Black Woman Freedom (although
she now knows how to use the F-word, too), but she does not come across as a
total embarrassment, either.
Perhaps part of the reason for this is the
record's decent production style — very sparse on the whole, usually just a
hip-hop/R&B beat with some keyboards (usually acoustic piano, but sometimes
electric piano or even something a bit more exotic, like the vibraphone), maybe
a little acoustic guitar on the side; no plastic synthesizer textures, no fake
orchestration, no huge walls of sound to mask the lack of musical ideas. In a
setting like this (perhaps also influenced by Wu-Tang Clan?) even mediocre
melodies can be easily tolerated, and some actually transcend mediocre — for
instance, I'm quite partial to the «blues-hop» of ʽPawn It Allʼ, where
Alicia sings (and plays) in her lowest register to convince you that she is really ready to pawn all these gold and
diamond rings "just so I could start my life over again". (So brace
yourselves, pawn shop owners all over Manhattan!). And she enlists some first-rate
talent to help her out, too — for instance, ʽShe Don't Really Careʼ
features vibraphone playing from no less than Roy Ayers, the guru of the
instrument, himself.
I do have to state, however, that if you have
only heard the two singles from the album, then you do not know what it is
about. Both ʽIn Commonʼ and ʽBlended Familyʼ (the latter a
collaboration with rapper ASAP Rocky), stylistically, are still very much in
the Girl On Fire vein — ʽIn Commonʼ
is an attempt at creating a robotic-digital equivalent of a Latin groove, with
stupid bubbly keyboards and a limp beat (gotta feed that robot on something
more calorific!), and ʽBlended Familyʼ is a fairly stereotypical love
ballad with a beat and a predictable rap interlude. This is only too indicative
of the general half-assed nature of the record: apparently, Alicia's «rougher»
material must have been deemed too controversial (!) and non-commercial (!) for
her established sector of the market. So
just skip the singles and go straight to something like ʽIllusion Of
Blissʼ, a dark sinner-soul, Ray Charles-inspired, confession of an
imaginary drug addict for the decent stuff; or, failing that, at least go for
her totally stripped-down, acoustic guitar-based, performance on ʽKill
Your Mamaʼ (reminiscent of Beyoncé's work on ʽDaddy
Lessonsʼ — again, though, where Beyoncé's odd excursion into
country is ambiguous and provoking, Alicia's song is merely a folksified
traditional plea for universal salvation).
Bottomline is: when compared against the
obvious outside competition, Here
does not stand much of a chance — but when compared against Keys' own pedigree,
it is probably her second strongest album on the whole since The Diary, an impressive comeback after
more than ten years of utter blandness; and from a technical standpoint, it is
arguably her finest album ever, and
if we have Beyoncé to thank for that, well, thank you Beyoncé. Perhaps
this is not so much of a great news piece for Alicia herself as it is a nice
symbol of the spread of a healthy tendency in modern day black music — when
even second-to-third-rate artists like Alicia can pull themselves together for
a record of this quality, what does that say about first rate artists? Then again, healthy musical tendencies, like
everything healthy, tend to come and go, so enjoy it while it lasts: for all we
know, next season might bring on some vicious catastrophe of taste, and we'll
be stuck with remembering Here as
the last good album in the great Afro-American tradition. In the meantime,
here's a modest thumbs
up to freeze this moment in time.
ALLO DARLIN' (2010)
1) Dreaming; 2) The Polaroid Song; 3)
Silver Dollars; 4) Kiss
Your Lips; 5) Heartbeat Chilli; 6) If Loneliness Was Art; 7) Woody Allen; 8) Let's Go
Swimming; 9) My Heart Is A
Drummer; 10) What Will Be Will Be.
Approximately thirty years before this day, the
timeless American pop band Blondie released Eat To The Beat, one of their finest collections, not the least
because it started off with 'Dreaming', a totally stunning combination of
appropriately dreamy gorgeousness with a kick-ass rhythmic section. Now, in
2010, a British twee pop band, playing music about as light and quirky as
Blondie used to be, and also
consisting of a female frontwoman and several smarty-pants male instrumentalists,
releases its self-titled debut LP whose first song is also called 'Dreaming'.
Coincidence? Symbolic gesture/tribute? Or a subconsciously orchestrated trick
from God's naughty brain?
«Twee pop», I gotta tell you this, is a strange
phenomenon, somewhat akin to a bunch of grown-up mommys and daddys secretly
sneaking in the kid's nursery and perusing his electric trains and tin soldiers
while he's sleeping (not that there's anything wrong with that). In other
words, it mimics the naïveté and innocence of days long gone by,
when you know for a fact that no sane
(or even insane) person in our modern world can truly share those feelings — all
the really naïve human beings
just latch on to Miley Cyrus or take Rebecca Black's 'Friday' for serious.
Allo Darlin' are no exception. Australia-born
Elizabeth Morris is the principal mastermind here behind all the songs, and
she is at once overwhelmingly charismatic and
utterly frustrating — for every simple, unadorned discharge of sexuality there
must be a self-consciously intellectual flourish, for every "I'm here
because I love you" or "Come over, give your heart to me" there
must either be a reference to Wild
Strawberries (but then, if she
doesn't popularize Maestro Bergman, who will?) or a sly quotation from Johnny
Cash (and God only knows what else I've missed).
On the other hand, intellectuals need to get
laid, too, and they certainly won't be doing it to the soundtracks of American Idol. And if anything, Allo
Darlin's take on the traditional love song genre (ten takes, I mean) is not without its own individual merits.
The grandest of which, actually, is that these
ten songs are good pop songs — not
simply retroish nothings clad in professional retro arrangements (although all
the arrangements are in extremely good taste, and none of that lo-fi crap),
but, like, real songs with interesting melodies and lots of emphasis on the
instrumental side. As a vocalist, Morris is not very capable; she has this husky
hushy sexy thing going on, which she can sometimes elevate to a happy childish
yell ('Kiss Your Lips'), nothing else, and, perhaps because of this, her vocal
melodies seem poorly thought out — no truly catchy choruses or anything (in
fact, many of the lyrics are just a bunch of prose impressionism rudely and
unconvincingly stuffed inside the song's rhythmic structure). But she and the
rest of the band keep coming up with pretty pop riffs — time after time after
time, the songs hook you right from the very first seconds.
Certainly this band's 'Dreaming' will never
replace that other band's 'Dreaming',
but there is still something utterly fresh and juicy about that chugging guitar
line and how it is then underpinned by the ukulele rhythm and electric dream-poppy
overdubs. The jumping Beatles For Sale-ish
jangle of 'The Polaroid Song', the opening bassline of 'Silver Dollars', the
droning style of 'Kiss Your Lips', all great starts, and although most songs
never progress far beyond the greatness of the opening five or so seconds,
well... you could complain likewise about Beatles
For Sale, for that matter. It's only pop music, for God's sake.
As they find out themselves that the main
choruses aren't doing their job as fine as they should be, the band isn't even
afraid to throw in a few really cheap thrills — such as the
"sha-la-las" on 'If Loneliness Was Art', which still plays to their
advantage because it's so, you know, RETRO: who the heck wants to attract
attention these days by singing "sha-la-la"? From the other side, no
hip person will bypass an album with a song called 'Woody Allen' on it (yes,
the one that namedrops both Annie Hall and Manhattan, and throws in the Bergman references as a bonus — all in
the same innocent kiddie tone that makes matters so befuddling).
Still, every album like this, in order to gain
its thumbs up,
has to have at least one magic moment during which it is clear (to me, the
thumbs-upper) that the band has IT, and the way I see it, that particular
moment which makes me yearn for more from these guys arrives no earlier than at
1:40 into the next-to-last number, 'My Heart Is A Drummer' — a simple, but
description-defying patch of musical bliss.
From here on, Elizabeth Morris and the boys may
go on to bigger things (Allo Darlin'
is as perfectly humble, although not entirely «unpretentious», beginning to a
modern career in pop as can be thought of), or they may stick to the same
formula for decades, or they may burst and blow away next Saturday, like so
many twee pop bands before them (they don't call it «twee» for nothing, you
know), but I only know that I'm perfectly sure to return to this album some day
in the future, which is probably the awesomest compliment I could ever give a
21st century record.
EUROPE (2012)
1) Neil Armstrong; 2)
Capricornia; 3) Europe; 4) Some People Say; 5) Northern Lights; 6) Wonderland;
7) Tallulah; 8) The Letter; 9) Still Young; 10) My Sweet Friend.
Damn you, Elizabeth Morris. I really, really
like you. You seem like a fun person to hang out with for somebody who hates
hanging out with people – with just the perfect mix of sarcasm and idealism to
pass for «the real thing». Smart, but not condescending. Stylish, but not
garish. Pretty, but not beautiful. Childish, but never infantile. Hipsterish, but
never over-the-top outrageous. A fine, upstanding example for any 21st century
girl who might be looking for one.
So why then did you have to go and make your
second album... no, not a «carbon copy» of the first one, more like an endless
set of variations on one particular style? Essentially, if you have already
heard ʽThe Polaroid Songʼ, you have heard most of Europe. If ʽThe Polaroid
Songʼ is your life, afterlife, and post-Apocalypse rolled in one, Europe will bring utter satisfaction.
And hey, I like it too. But when your entire LP consists of upbeat, monotonous
twee-pop, stubbornly based around jangle, jangle, and even more jangle, you
just get to thinking: «hey, wait a minute, I kind of thought ʽsunshine
popʼ was more than just that?!..»
The basic sound of Allo Darlin' remains as
delicious as it ever was. The jangle is vivacious and friendly, and Morris'
voice is a master weapon: as long as she keeps it that way, no song released by
the band will ever be utterly worthless. But that's just it: the sound. The
sound totally triumphs over the songs, all of which are interchangeable. The
individual bits of magic, such as the heart–breaking guitar riff on ʽMy
Heart Is A Drummerʼ, are nowhere in sight. God knows I've tried looking —
a miserable failure every time. Just one pretty, generic jangle pattern after
another. Enough, in the end, to make you crave for some AC/DC.
The only exception from the formula is
ʽTallulahʼ, which is just Liz and her ukulele. Feather-light,
touching, pretty — problem is, the rhythmic pattern is just about the same as
the one in ʽHeartbeat Chilliʼ, and the vocal melody is hookless.
It's as if she's just expressively reading a little bit of her diary,
accompanied by a little strumming. Is that
the way you save the world? And don't tell me that Allo Darlin' aren't here to save the world. They are.
They just need to stop sucking their lollipops, 'sall.
ʽNeil Armstrongʼ and
ʽCapricorniaʼ start things off with probably the strongest jangle
patterns of 'em all. In about five seconds' time, you are already acquainted
with the major charms of the former (a little folk-rock riff, reminding of
Dylan's ʽI Don't Believe Youʼ), but you will have to wait about fifty
seconds for ʽCapricorniaʼ to hit its full stride and become a full-fledged
Byrds-approved extravaganza from mid-1965 — all that's missing is invite ol'
man Crosby to sing backup.
I refuse to name any more names, with the
possible exception of ʽThe Letterʼ, which does actually try to recreate
a little of the echoey magic of ʽMy Heartʼ. It would force me to be
more critical, and I don't want to
be any more critical. I like the sound, I like the band, I'd like to replicate
millions of clones of Elizabeth Morris to replace the millions of clones of
Rebecca Black, but I just cannot, for the life of me, remember any of these
songs. Somebody get Sir Paul McCartney to join this goddamn band. Something should be done. A thumbs down
is just not right here, yet a thumbs down is still all I have for this
disaster. Don't they teach songwriting in Australia?..
WE COME FROM THE SAME PLACE (2014)
1) Heartbeat; 2) Kings And
Queens; 3) We Come From The Same Place; 4) Angela; 5) Bright Eyes; 6) History
Lessons; 7) Half Heart Necklace; 8) Romance And Adventure; 9) Crickets In The
Rain; 10) Santa Maria Novella; 11) Another Year.
Monoideism. 1. Focusing of attention on a single thing,
especially as a result of hypnosis; term invented by James Braid, one of the
first genuine hypnotherapists of the 19th century. 2. Major cause of everything
that goes wrong with music (and not just music) today, well illustrated by the
example of British/Australian twee pop band Allo Darlin'.
Going back to their debut album in my mind, I
can still distinctly remember the cute little brilliant melodies of
ʽDreamingʼ and ʽMy Heart Is A Drummerʼ, and the
sweet-subtle excitement of thinking, «wow, this is so promising, there is
really a lot they could achieve from here». With the release of the band's
third album comes the ultimate realization: they are not even trying to go anywhere else because they
never had any such plans from the very beginning. We cannot even accuse
Elizabeth Morris of turning out so much less talented than we thought her to be
— because she has not the slightest intention to move her talents away from
the little green lawn that was carefully prepared, irrigated, and fenced on Allo Darlin'. J'y suis, j'y reste.
If you are already head over heels in love with
the well-educated Australian girl who cuts her hair relatively short, plays the
ukulele, and combines hip intellectual lyrical imagery with a streak of
quasi-childish idealism, and if you already wanted to sue me for all the bile
spilled over Europe, this third
record of theirs will be an epiphany. To be fair, I think the melodies are a
wee bit stronger than on Europe, but
it may be an illusion — the band is certainly not studying any new chord
progressions here and not moving one step away from the twee-pop formula, so
any observable differences are limited to nuances, well perceivable and
significant only for major fans whose eyes turn into magnifying glasses and
ears into stethoscopes at the first note of the uke.
No surprise that almost every review of the
album that I have seen immediately turns to the only aspect of the record that
is relatively easy to discuss — the lyrics and their realization. No surprise,
indeed, because now we know that Allo Darlin', the pop band, is really nothing
but a front for Elizabeth Morris, Singer-Songwriter (Extra)-Ordinaire, and that
their soft, lyrical, gentle, but rhythmic and tightly focused melodies are just
a mood-enhancing accompaniment for the world philosophy of Ms. Morris.
The problem is, that philosophy hasn't changed
much, either, and is getting a bit wearisome third time around. There is
nothing wrong with hazy-eyed romantic
«can-I-really-really-make-this-sound-intelligent-rather-than-clichéd?»
confessions as such, but if they turn out to be your regular way of making a
living rather than a phase that you go through in life, there's something
unspeakably wrong with that — I mean, Kate Bush's The Kick Inside has always been one of my personal favorites
indeed, but I would not be happy at
all if the rest of her career all consisted of innumerable clones of that
album.
And this is the way the title track begins:
"First snow's melting on the ground / And I can see my breath / In your
silhouette / And I remember what it felt like to be warm / And to be safe in
love". Uhh... okay. All right,
so maybe I was wrong here — maybe the
lyrics do not really matter, maybe this whole album is just Elizabeth's way of
saying "I want to hold your hand" on a slightly (very slightly)
advanced level of technicality. Maybe we should forget all about that
singer-songwriter business. But in this case, where are the great pop
melodies? If the words do not matter, give me great pop melodies, not just this
unmemorable jingle-jangle.
A tune like ʽSanta Maria Novellaʼ
(the name of one of the most principal basilicas in Florence) helps uncover
some of life's realities — namely, that the band, or at least its principal
member, has relocated to Italy where, according to her interviews, she teaches
English for a living because the band has no way of making any serious money.
Strange as it is, though, you could not guess that from the music, which bears
no traces of Italian influence (perhaps for the best, because I am not sure how
Allo Darlin' would have coped with a whiff of canzone Napoletana) — yet knowing something about their struggles
at least confirms the single positive thing about We've Come From The Same Place: as predictably monotonous as it is,
Morris and her pals are being true to themselves, and, unlike so many poseurs,
only agree to record stuff that is imbued with reflections of real feelings,
sifted as they are through an intentionally intellectual "and you read
your Emily Dickinson and I my Robert Frost"-type verbal sieve. (Not quite
as much here as on the previous two records, though — even in a song called
ʽHistory Lessonsʼ, the only namechecked piece of historical reality
turns out to be... the Lion King!).
Probably the only song here that could have
some limited radio potential is ʽBright Eyesʼ, a duet between Morris
and one of the boys where she asks him "do you believe in fun? do you
believe in love?" in a thrilled exorcising voice and he calls back "I
surely do, I do if you ask me to" in the voice of a happy willing victim,
fully conquered through hypnotism (James Braid strikes again!). Additionally,
this is one out of only two or three songs where they allow their guitars to
develop a touch of distorted laryngitis (along with ʽHalf Heart
Necklaceʼ), and Paul Rains plays a nice guitar solo. Who knows, maybe what
this music really suffers from is the lack of sufficient contributions from
the band's other members.
In the glowing AMG review — glowing, because
Morris does have this knack of melting the hearts of cruel guys with keyboards
— Tim Sendra called the album a collection of "intimate and true songs
about love, life and how to deal with each", and implied that only
somebody tired of hearing such songs could be dissatisfied with the record.
Well, strange enough, because (a) I do agree with the definition in general and
(b) I am in no way tired of hearing such songs, and am not prepared to ever get
tired of hearing them, and yet I am still dissatisfied. Mostly, I am dissatisfied
because, no matter how «intimate and true» these songs may be, the truth and
intimacy have turned into a predictable formula, like minor variations on the
exact same sermon that, for some reason, you have to attend every Sunday.
How do we mend this? I have not the faintest
idea, even if I am sympathetic enough
to the band to keep on hoping and wishing that it eventually gets mended.
Perhaps the first thing to do would be to write a song that tries to deal with
something other than the basic theme
of «me and you». How about «me against the world?» Nah, too pretentious for a
girl with a ukulele. Perhaps «me and my evil twin». On second thought, there's
no evidence so far that she even has
an evil twin. Maybe «me and my traumatic childhood experiences»? But I guess if
she had any, she'd have let the cat out of the bag a long time ago. Ah, forget
it. Just brace yourself for about fifty-six more Allo Darlin' twee albums that
will tweely explore the twee-sted relations between the protagonist and the
antagonist from all geometrically possible perspectives — under the Tower of
Pisa, on top of Notre-Dame, and, ultimately, at the bottom of Niagara Falls. As
the already mentioned Paul Simon also said, "there must be 50000 ways to
say weird crap about your lover".
AN AWESOME WAVE (2012)
1) Intro; 2) ❦ (The Ripe & Ruin); 3) Tessellate; 4)
Breezeblocks; 5) ❦ (Guitar); 6) Something Good; 7) Dissolve Me; 8) Matilda; 9) Ms; 10)
Fitzpleasure; 11) ❦ (Piano); 12) Bloodflood; 13) Taro.
Let us begin with this: the front sleeve of the
album features a radar image of the Ganges delta. Delta, see? That is the actual name of this band — the Δ
symbol, indicating mathematical difference. Difference, see? This is because this band wants to make a
difference. So why are they regularly called alt-J, then? Because apparently
this is how you type out the delta on a Mac keyboard. They use Macs, see? Or,
rather, their immediate target group is Mac users. Because they want to make a
difference. They all went to Leeds University, where they started up this band
around 2009, and, allegedly, developed their unusual sound because the use of
bass guitars and drums was prohibited in student halls. Ironic, isn't it — what
with the name of «Leeds» being most closely associated for millions of people
with Live At Leeds, one of the most
deafeningly loud concert albums ever... but that's sort of beyond the point,
since the Who are just about the least probable choice to be associated with
Δ.
If I am going to make a point here, it has to
be made rudely: I can find no better description for the overall sound of alt-J
as a sound produced by a bunch of cerebral palsy survivors. (Not 100% removed
from the truth, considering that at least the band's drummer, Thom Green, is
reportedly 80 percent deaf because of a case of Alport syndrome). Their
harmonies, their propensity for minor tonalities, the complexity of the
material all push towards categorizing them as «rock» rather than «pop» — but
it is a sort of decalcified rock, or, perhaps, a sort of «breezeblock rock», to
borrow the name of the album's most successful single. The rhythm section of
the band does keep very quiet most of the time, with the drummer sounding as if
he were confined to a tiny junior set (sometimes I get the impression of a drum
machine, when in reality it is Green tick-tocking on his quasi-cardboard
percussion devices). The guitar is mostly playing standard folk or blues
patterns, with an occasional surf-rock or post-punk chord thrown in. The
keyboard player, Gus Unger-Hamilton, is arguably the most musically inventive
member of the band, but even he ends up sounding like he's renting an apartment
in a dollhouse most of the time.
And then there are the vocals, most of them
courtesy of Joe Newman, who is also the main guitarist and (allegedly) the
principal songwriter in the band. These belong to the «take it or break it»
category: Alt-J fans naturally love his style, whereas for most other people
they may be the single most repulsive element here — easily understandable,
because in normal life you'd only hear this kind of tone from somebody with a
chronic and incurable disease. Unnaturally high-pitched, shaky, wobbly, quiet,
and making a point to apply as little pressure on the articulatory organs as
possible — it's as if this guy was saving his voice for after marriage or
something. Yet it is hard to deny that this vocal style is, on the whole, very
well suited to the overall style of the music: Newman is simply doing with his
voice the exact same things that all the other band members are doing with
their instruments. This isn't even «effeminate rock», a term rendered
near-useless in the era of Katy Perry empowerment — more like «anti-rock», if
we normally associate rock music with power, energy, aggression, burning flames
etc. It's the evil twin of Angus Young staring at him from the other side of
the mirror; the miscarried bastard son of Thom Yorke's Radiohead propping his
crutches against his father's fallen tombstone.
Before I get carried too far away with this
metaphors, though, I must say that I am absolutely not sure that An Awesome Wave is really all that
awesome. Released in 2012, it was sure different (though maybe not at all
unexpected), and we are all quite hungry for difference (for Δ, that is!)
in the 2010s, so it is easy to understand all the critical praise. Raised in
the think-different environment of an elite art school, these guys seem very
much driven by a strong desire to innovate, and from a purely formal viewpoint,
they do a really good job with it. Although the overall sound of the album is
atmospherically monotonous, it is, by nature, quite eclectic: you will hear
echoes of everything from Eighties' synth-pop to Seventies' prog-rock (some of
their most complex vocal parts make me think of Gentle Giant) to Nineties'
R&B to 21st century hip-hop and various styles of electronic music. Basic
structures and arrangements are anything but predictable: any song may shift
its signature and tempo at any given minute, or be interrupted by a cute
accappella section, or have Unger-Hamilton switch from synthesizer to
vibraphone and back, blurring the lines between acoustic and electronic just as
Newman sometimes blurs the lines between rapping and singing, because true art
has nothing to do with lines, you know.
Whether it all works, though, is another
matter. Obviously, for those with whom this sound clicks, Alt-J will be a solid
pretender for the best band of the 2010s — not only do they innovate like
crazy, but they are truly awesome!
Those with whom it does not click, though, will find themselves asking — so
what exactly is the point? This music is not all that emotionally resonant,
which is actually a good point, I think: one of the seductive sides of Alt-J, to me, is that they are not here for my
tears, like certain bearded guys in log cabins. This is odd music, for sure,
but I would not call it tragic or even melancholic: tired, perhaps, and
meditative, but not trying to wrench out spasms of pity and empathy or
emotionally manipulate you in any other way. But if it ain't about power, and
if it ain't about pity, then... what is
it about? Is it just about making a difference without dropping us even a
single hint?
The lyrics do not offer much help — even
provided you can make out whatever Newman is mumbling (I cannot, but they have
all the words conveniently printed out), the only easily understandable idea
is that most of the songs are love songs, hidden under a ton of symbolist
metaphorical makeup. At their densest, they go something like: "In your
snatch Fitzpleasure, broom-shaped pleasure, deep greedy and googling every
corner... steepled fingers, ring leaders, queue jumpers, rock fist paper
scissors, lingered fluffers, they choir ʽin your hoof lies the
heartlandʼ"... well, you get the drift. Again, I am not angered at
this: the lyrics fit into the puzzle exactly the same way as everything else.
This might be a good opportunity to name another possible influence on these
guys — Captain Beefheart, of course — but perhaps this would be too much of an
honor, because it is unlikely that the sound of Alt-J will have as much of a
revolutionary impact on the future of pop music as the Captain did in his own
time.
Discussing the songs on an individual level is
a fruitless endeavor. Some are a little louder or a little faster; a few
feature slightly more distinct hooks (the sharp "la la la la" counterpoints
on ʽBreezeblocksʼ, for instance, or the stop-and-start structure of
ʽFitzpleasureʼ whose distorted electronic bassline actually adds a
sense of alien menace); a few are distinctly more soulful, like ʽBloodfloodʼ
with its pretty harmonies, gentle surf guitars and Newman's friendly suggestion
to "breathe in, exhale" that might appeal to certain broken-hearted
categories of people. But no matter how many times I listen to the whole thing,
in the end it stays with me in that precise manner — as a single, holistic experience;
an intriguing, complex, but possibly quite meaningless statement. That said,
it's also not that weird: it never
challenges the good old concept of harmony, the guitars and keyboards sound nice,
and most of the weirdness really comes from their mash-up approach to pop
music's legacy and the above-mentioned «lack of calcium» in the playing. It
will definitely go down in history as an album that tried to say something new
in the musically stale climate of 2012; whether that new saying was really
worth anything, though, is a matter that still remains to be cleared up.
Pending that, I give it an honest thumbs up for the effort.
FRANK (2003)
1) Intro/Stronger Than Me; 2) You Sent Me Flying/Cherry;
3) Know You Now; 4) Fuck Me Pumps; 5) I Heard Love Is Blind; 6)
Moody's Mood For Love/Teo Licks; 7) (There Is No) Greater Love;
8) In My Bed; 9) Take The Box; 10) October Song; 11) What Is
It About Men; 12) Help Yourself; 13) Amy Amy Amy/Outro.
I do not feel any great inner love for the
voice of Amy Winehouse — an absolute prerequisite for being able to consider
Amy Winehouse a (the?) Great Artist of Our Times. White people with black
voices have always confused me: much too often, you get the impression that
admirers rave about their singing simply because they happen to be white people
with black voices. What about black people with black voices — what do they
get out of it? Just because nature gave Amy Winehouse (or her equally famous,
but far less interesting American "diva" counterpart, Anastasia)
this weird mutated mix of skin color and vocal cords, we're supposed to go
crazy?
Obviously, most critics will say that's not it,
or not just it, and they will mean it, or they will pretend that they mean it.
Of course not! Amy Winehouse doesn't just sing "in blackface". She's
mixing old jazz and vaudeville with modern sounds. She writes catchy songs.
She's an introspective lyricist. She is, well, an interesting person — just
look at her drug and her health and her personal life problems. She's a
sensation in so many respects you don't know where to begin.
Maybe so. I think I do hear a new type of sound
of Frank. It isn't necessarily a good type of sound, though. It's the
sound of a young girl brought up in a jazz musicians' environment, soaking in
the traditional jazz culture, and then selling it out to trendy dealers in
modern sounds and production values. You could argue that Winehouse does to
Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday much the same things that Vanessa Mae used to
do (still does?) to giants of classical music. And there is, of course, no
consensus on the validity, morality, or overall value of this approach.
The big difference is, Amy writes her own songs
(or, at least, her own lyrics, with lots of help on the music from friends in
the trade). Are they good on their own? To my liking, very uneven. Some of the
numbers are almost offensively simplistic and catchy on the nursery rhyme level
— these are, obviously, the commercial singles, such as 'Fuck Me Pumps', a song
that I like to instinctively tap my toes to but which, on the conscious level,
only brings up negative thoughts. Mainly because of the lyrics. In the song,
she is pouring venom on Paris Hilton-like (or, more precisely, Paris
Hilton-wannabe-like) characters — she might as well skip the whole thing and go
straight to shooting fish in a barrel. "Character assassination"
songs are a tricky genre; just like there's a big difference between knifing
someone in a drunken street brawl and an intricate Agatha Christie-style
murder, so is there an equally big difference between "character
assassination" à la Bob Dylan or Lou Reed, on one hand, and
bazaar-squandering style lyrics such as featured on 'Pumps'. It doesn't help
matters either that today, Amy Winehouse's main "claim to fame" is
hardly her songwriting or recording, but rather all the tabloid stories. And
besides, frankly speaking, I do not even know what looks more ridiculous — the
combination of "fuck me pumps" and Gucci bags or the combination of
Mountain Girl-style hair and The World's Guide To Exotic Art in tattoos.
But enough of that, because 'Fuck Me Pumps' is,
after all, just one piece of questionable commercial bait. The album compensates
for this lapse of taste in many ways, really. 'Stronger Than Me' is enjoyable
R'n'B with Amy picking on her lyrical hero for not being stronger than her (now
that I can believe); 'You Sent Me Flying' has an excellent combination
of minimalistic piano and angelic beauty in the chorus, and also gives us a
very rare glimpse of Amy's falsetto, which I believe she should show us more
often; 'What Is It About Men', with its lazy mid-tempo, gloomy wah-wahs, and
depressive lyrics, refreshens my memories of Portishead; and I am totally
delighted by the self-ironic, half-serious, half-joking album closer 'Amy Amy
Amy' ('where's my moral parallel?' she asks rhetorically). For every highlight
or two, there is a piece of boring jazz muzak filler, but the high points prove
that there is much substance, and better substance, beyond the singles and the
videos.
Finally, about the sincerity of it all.
Apparently one of Amy's major idols is Billie Holiday — someone who's gone
through more suffering in her pre-success years than Amy is guaranteed to go
through in all her life. It is therefore obvious that, no matter how much the
latter is willing to mold her life and art in the image of Billie, it
will always be fake to a certain degree. After all, the main trouble of artists
that emerge today (Western, at least) is that they're all well-fed,
well-dressed, have roofs over their heads, and are fully literate, and have
been that way since the day of their birth. That doesn't count as a healthy
presupposition to making great art.
So, just as one has to resort to
"artificial" working out in order to compensate for the modern
sedentary lifestyle, so does today's artist resort to finding out different
ways to suffer in order to produce fuel for his/her art. Of course, one shouldn't
go too far: for instance, giving away all your property to the poor wouldn't
work, because it would take away your resources for marketing your music (and
besides, shouldn't you get at least a little something in return for all the
suffering?). Therefore, there are but two easy ways to suffer. One is to
sculpt yourself a dramatic love history, at a rate of about one breakup per
year to keep thoughts fresh and feelings sharp. The other, of course, is to
destroy your body through various unhealthy lifestyles. This may seriously
endanger the longevity of your career, of course, but what with the medicine of
today making such great strides and all, this risk is considerably lower than
it used to be.
This should have served as a prelude for
writing Amy Winehouse off as a fake like so many others, but now that I have
seriously listened to Frank, I don't believe I'm in a position to do
that. There really isn't that much suffering on the album, certainly not
as much as an appalled Pitchfork review of this album would have you
believe. She is, after all, no Tori Amos. There's plenty of simple, unassuming
love songs; there's a ton of extra- rather than introverted material, as if she
were speaking to you, the listener, of your problems, rather than her own; and
there really is not a single song that would straightforwardly fall under the
definition of "self-pitying" — even 'Amy Amy Amy', like I said, is
more humorous than depressive.
So there's no point to getting turned off by Frank.
It's an interesting record by a young girl who likes jazz and her jazz idols
and is happy to try her hand at it without sounding too retro. It's not a
masterpiece, and I don't believe it will endure (Back To Black has a
better chance), but by my third listen, I managed to pacify my brain about it,
and get my heart enlivened by some of it, and if there's anything more to be
expected out of it, I don't know what it is and I don't really need to know. As
for the thumbs, they prefer to remain in a strictly horizontal position.
P.S. For the record, there are two hidden
tracks after 'Outro' (no great shakes, although 'Mr. Magic' is kind of cute),
and there is also a "deluxe" edition of the album with a second CD of
demos, outtakes, and live versions that is strictly fan-recommended.
BACK TO BLACK (2007)
1) Rehab; 2) You Know I'm No Good; 3) Me & Mr. Jones; 4) Just Friends; 5) Back To Black; 6) Love Is A Losing Game; 7)
Tears Dry On Their Own;
8) Wake Up Alone; 9) Some Unholy War; 10) He Can Only Hold Her; 11)
Addicted; 12) Valerie.
Impressive! The overall style hasn't changed
(unless you count the visual transformation — by this time, covered with a mix
of tattoos and heroin marks and enriched with a hairstyle that would topple the
3rd Marine Division, Amy had begun to look like the Bride of Sauron), but
almost all the flaws that made Frank tedious have been remedied. For one
thing, the album is much shorter, at the expense of cutting down on the songs'
average length — a marvelous decision, if you ask me; this way, they
really feel like concise, laconic songs rather than space-taking boring grooves
that stretch out like bad toffee just because everyone else is doing this.
For another thing, she is no longer setting
herself up as a 21st century reincarnation of Billie Holiday (except for,
perhaps, the nice trifle of 'Love Is A Losing Game'). This is a strongly jazz
and R'n'B influenced pop album that follows no one particular idol and no one
particular style. It does not sound self-consciously retro (it acknowledges all
its influences, but does not make an effort to sound exactly like any of them),
and it does not sound self-consciously modernistic; it's already got the
potential to endure because it's so wonderfully timeless.
Also, it may be just a crazy thought, but it
seems like she is reducing the flashiness of her voice, as if intentionally
driving home the idea that the main selling point of Back To Black
should be the songs and not the "Vocal Diva" visiting card. When the
song requires her to stretch out, she stretches out, but there is
practically no scatting, no wailing in between verses, no trying to reach out
for the harder ranges — even though her voice is still not a favourite of mine,
she is quite consistently listenable throughout.
Finally, no one could any longer accuse Amy of
cultivating self-pity. The album rode on the success of the 'Rehab' single, an
autobiographical tale of personal problems, but it is quite obviously ironic,
and its melody, borrowing some bouncy energy from the classic Motown style, is
downright cheerful — lead singles have to be cheerful, after all. Much
darker is the title track, but it is also more detached; after all, not all sad
songs are supposed to reflect the artist's own personality, and Amy's jazzy
imploration — 'you go on back to her, and I'll go back to black' — could be
about me and you if we wanted it to be so. Wonderful arrangement, as well, with
these trebly guitars and strings and bells and whatever.
Or take 'You Know I'm No Good', a song that's
even more radio-friendly than 'Rehab' (if only for having the tightest rhythm
section on the album). This, too, may be deeply personal, but she sings it
closer in style to the jazz queens of old, never overemoting so that there be
space left for the mystery of it — just how close is the relationship between
the lyrics and the singer? It's a cold and faraway sound, but also catchy, and
when the horns come in to announce the bridge, they catch that mystery virus
from the singer and end up sounding just as puzzling. It is quite ever so
refreshing to see a "mainstream" tune bring back the old intrigue.
The album is not a hundred percent consistent —
I sense a minor drop of quality towards the second half — but there's really
nothing bad on it; even the songs that are not memorable still manage to sound
nice. The happiness of it all is in realizing that after an album like Frank,
most artists would have gone soft and trendy, but this particular artist
quite obviously knows what she likes and she's going to do it no matter what —
and she's got such a strong personality that she can actually make the majority
pander to her will instead of vice versa. And this means that, as long as we
have people like Amy — which, given her drug problems, may unfortunately not be
too long — there is still a whiff of hope for the mainstream, and a drop of
good taste.
So, major thumbs up
from the intellectual department and minor same from the heart (major same
would never come from the heart because that's not the kind of voice the heart
can be truly happy about). Sidenote: Back To Black sometimes comes in a
"deluxe" version that adds a second CD worth of demos and covers of
Amy's old favs like 'Cupid' and 'To Know Him Is To Love Him'. Only for serious
fans, and only on the condition no one of them will be foolish enough to say
that 'Amy blows Sam Cooke away' or some other crazy thing like that.
LIONESS: HIDDEN TREASURES (2011)
1) Our Day Will Come; 2) Between
The Cheats; 3) Tears Dry; 4) Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?; 5) Like Smoke;
6) Valerie; 7) Girl From Ipanema; 8) Half Time; 9) Wake Up Alone; 10) Best Friends,
Right?; 11) Body And Soul; 12) A Song For You.
Well, the third album never came — with Amy
joining the «27 Club» on July 23, 2011,
we can only guess how things would turn out. Not that it was reasonable
to expect any spectacular developments, but, clearly, the resurrection of healthy mainstream R&B suffered a
major setback in the process. (On the other hand, this brings to a close the
rather silly Amy / Adele competition, imagined and fueled by the media).
Although the lady's self-destruction process
was utterly stupid and irresponsible (neither the times that she was living in
nor the level of her personal troubles could justify it in any way), and the
numerous scandals (such as the infamous June 2011 Belgrade performance) made it
seem that she was «finished» creatively
at least a few months prior to the accidental demise, this collection of
outtakes — the first in what will probably become a steady stream of posthumous
releases — clearly shows that, in the studio at least, the spirit was still there.
That is the only thing that Lioness
shows: it is not a coherent model of the «third album», only two songs for
which had been completed (ʽBetween The Cheatsʼ and ʽLike
Smokeʼ), and the relative lack of well-written originals stamps this as
a «fan-only» release. But it is definitely not a waste of plastic.
ʽLike Smokeʼ is definitely a
highlight here, despite my predictable dislike for rapping (I'd much rather hear an extended
instrumental passage than witnessing a guy called Nas attempting to steal the
tune from Amy — sorry, hip-hop fans): Amy genuinely sounds «like smoke» on the
number, and the little echo that producer Salaam Remi puts on her voice
emphasizes that feeling. ʽBest Friends, Right?ʼ and ʽHalf
Timeʼ also have their moments. That said, the majority of Lioness is given away to covers, and
overall, it is much more interesting to watch Amy's take on other people's
material here than fish out her own compositions, which do not generally hold a
candle to her self-penned «proper» hits.
The covers are all respectable and have a wide range
— from Carole King to Leon Russell to Ruby & The Romantics. Their problem
is the usual one: the covers may have
a wide range, but Amy herself does not, singing all of them in more or less the
same (her usual) manner. But that is exactly what makes the result interesting
— not everyone can sing ʽThe Girl From Ipanemaʼ (remember Astrud
Gilberto?) and ʽBody And Soulʼ (remember Billie Holiday?) in the
exact same emotional framework, and get away with it.
I would claim that Amy can, although it is a hard
job trying to characterize that manner. Somehow, it melds together elements of
toughness (overall low and razor-sharp voice), insecurity and frailty
(reflected in the occasionally «swallowed» phrasing and intentional crackling),
and habitual jazzy «nonchalance». Or something like that. Fact is, the cover
versions of Lioness, like everything
else she did, further confirm that the girl was never «just another diva», that
she had her own style to which she could easily convert «foreign» material as
well as her own. The style may easily seem annoying to some, or monotonous and
predictable to others, but we could just as well state the same about Billie
Holiday or many other people.
The worst, and most misleading, thing about the
album is probably its title. Not only is the majority of these tracks
completely undeserving of the name «hidden treasures» («unwrapped cookies»
might have been a more telling expression), but «Lioness»? What's that supposed to mean? Okay, so it is
actually the name of the record label she set up herself in 2009; but using it
for an album title is not only unimaginative, it is plain wrong — the word
suggests something like a combination of beauty, brawn, and aggression, which
is not her style at all. Leave that crap for, I dunno, Courtney Love.
Anyway, that is just a minor complaint — on the
whole, the album does not seem to have any flaws except for the most obvious
one (not being an actual album). It goes without saying that if you have been
overwhelmed by Back To Black, you
need to hear this; but it is also clear that Lioness on its own will not attract any new fans to the legend,
certainly not on the same level that the legend's death has attracted. A
modest, perfunctory thumbs up here.
AT THE BBC (2012)
1) Know You Now; 2) Fuck Me
Pumps; 3) In My Bed; 4) October Song; 5) Rehab; 6) You Know I'm No Good; 7)
Just Friends; 8) Love Is A Losing Game; 9) Tears Dry On Their Own; 10) Best
Friends, Right?; 11) I Should Care; 12) Lullaby Of Birdland; 13) Valerie; 14)
To Know Him Is To Love Him.
More often than not, the barrel-scraping
process these days involves the BBC and their obsession to press the «Record»
button every time somebody crosses the threshold into one of their studios.
More often than not, the results are only of serious interest for hardcore fans
of the somebody in question. With Amy Winehouse, this is somewhat different:
she never had the time to release an official live album in her lifetime — and,
moreover, her reputation of a live artist was seriously soiled by all the
scandalous reports on drunk performances and embarrassed walk-outs towards the
tragic end of her career. Essentially, we have next to no reminders of what it
really was that launched that career — her inspired and creative performances
in small London jazz clubs.
Hence, this rag-taggy collection of live
recordings from various local gigs, taped by the BBC (At The BBC is a somewhat misleading title: most of the tracks come
from festivals such as «T in the Park» or TV shows such as Jools Holland, so The BBC Presents would have been more
appropriate), anyway, this collection is an essential purchase for everybody
who has no problem with recognizing Amy as a major artist of her generation.
The package consists of a small DVD with six performances from a small
church-held gig in 2006, and a CD with material scattered from 2004 to 2009 —
the «golden age», during which Amy's rule over British R&B remained uncontested.
Hits and classics are interspersed with little-known obscurities and covers,
bits of stage banter and radio host dialogs are included for authenticity, and
the recording quality is predictably flawless — this is the BBC, after all.
Like every seasoned R&B performer, Amy
always comes across as loose and free-flowing when performing live, sometimes
coming so close to «chaos» that you almost start wondering just how influential
booze and other substances must have been in that particular moment. But apparently they weren't: on each and
every one of these recordings, she is actually in complete control, always
picking herself up and shooting back into space just as she seems almost ready
to hit the ground. Take a listen to ʽRehabʼ, for instance — her
phrasing on this live performance takes far more risks than the studio
original, with surprising modulation decisions and an idiosyncratic «stutter»
that sounds amusing rather than annoying. Of course, she is really working
based on the pattern of the average great jazz vocalist, searching for a
one-in-a-million vocal style that would walk a tight balance between «natural»
and «ohmigosh, what is that?», but
many people do not succeed in that
register, coming out with laughable results — with Amy, it is always her that
gets the last laugh, no matter how much fun one might poke at her
«heroin-addicted toothless old hag» impersonation.
Most of the tracks performed come from the
first two albums (and are not limited to major hit singles — ʽOctober
Songʼ and ʽJust Friendsʼ are two very welcome inclusions), but
towards the end you also have the lady sharpening her teeth on old pop
standards (ʽI Should Careʼ, ʽLullaby Of Birdlandʼ) and on
Phil Spector (ʽTo Know Him Is To Love Himʼ), all of which sound
predictable, but pleasant in «Amy Winehouse mode». Still, nothing beats
ʽRehabʼ and ʽYou Know I'm No Goodʼ (the latter gives me one
more pretext to lament the misuse of that wonderful bluesy bassline in the
intro — how come its kickass potential was wasted after the first couple of
beats?): it would be strange if Amy were less emotional and convincing on her
own personal stuff than an old Phil Spector love ballad.
Possibly, a full-fledged live album
representing a single event would have been a better choice for release, and I
have no doubt that a whole bunch of these will be coming up — plenty of stuff
has already been released on DVD or showed up on YouTube, and Amy's nimble
backing band is always a delight to hear — but this particular assortment,
without necessarily turning into a cheap «greatest hits live», shows the
overall scope, and could even work as a perfect introduction to Amy's values
for the uninitiated (a «classier» introduction, in fact, than any best-of
collection). Thus, although I am no big fan of oversaturating the market with
archival residue, so far, everything seems pretty reasonable; big delighted thumbs up
here.
AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF
DEAD
...AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD (1998)
1) Richter Scale Madness; 2)
Novena Without Faith; 3) Fake Fake Eyes; 4) Half Of What; 5) Gargoyle Waiting; 6)
Prince With A Thousand Enemies; 7) Ounce Of Prevention; 8) When We Begin To
Steal.
I cannot judge this record on its own terms.
That would require a deep and long familiarity with the "noise" style
in all of its genres — punk, post-punk, industrial, prog metal, thrash,
"stoner rock", etc. etc. I do not have that familiarity, nor do I
ever intend to gain one because I'm somewhat afraid for my ears — they're a
nice part of myself, and I'd hate to lose them to the nefarious artefacts of
Throbbing Gristle or Minor Threat (and no, I'm well aware they don't have much
in common). I'm certainly willing to sacrifice my time and tastes for many
things, but bleeding noise isn't one of them; if its purposes do not get to me
soon enough, I see no reason for me to start getting through to them.
This is, by and large, also my basic reaction
to the debut album of these Austin guys (which is what I am going to call them,
instead of referring to the band's full name all of the time or, God help me,
the unwieldy abbreviation AYWKUBTTOD; technically, none of the guys are from
Austin, but the band was formed in Austin). It is clear that, already
on their self-titled debut, they are trying to step forward and do something
individual in the "noise" vein. They don't take too much cues from
metal, because they're all lousy instrumentalists (in the sense that any normal
metal guy would call them lousy), but they are quite obviously looking up to
all the other noisy genres — hardcore punk may very well be in the middle of
it, yet the album's goals are far more artsy, even apocalyptic at times. Wait,
"at times"? That's not right — it's about the end of the world from
the very beginning, as the ground shakes from the wild blasts of 'Richter Scale
Madness', to the very end.
The average "song" on here has a
blunt mid-tempo, a chainsaw guitar slashing out power chords in one channel, a
ringing guitar ringing out the same chords in another channel, a thunderous
rhythm section, and, oh yes, a mumbling or screeching guy somewhere in the back
yard, hopelessly lost among all the noise but still trying to sound like he's
important. It's not cacophonous: the actual playing is quite melodic and conservative,
it's just the way it's all arranged and loaded with feedback that makes the
proceedings close to unlistenable. Sometimes they lose the rhythm section, and
then it all begins to sound like Neil Young practicing feedback on the
soundtrack to Dead Man, but with a far more narrow vision at that.
Sometimes the band starts out quiet enough for
the listener to be able to make more sense of what is going on — like on
'Novena Without Faith', the first song on the record to do so and, arguably
because of this, the one most frequently quoted by listeners. That never goes
on for too long, however: everything quiet on this record merely serves as a
prelude to something much louder. Other than that, the songs have no
individuality, at least, no individuality that I could establish based on three
or four listens: it's all a never-ending glop of musical sludge, although, by
all means, produced with care and attention.
So, if you're into musical sludge, "this
note's for you", to quote the title of a minor, but still far superior to
this, Neil Young album. If you're not, this probably isn't a bad example of
the genre to ever forbid yourself the proper acquaintance with. Predictably, all
I can offer is a thumbs down, but don't
take my word on it — I feel a little like Captain Cook around the Austronesians
about it.
MADONNA (1999)
1) And You Will Know Them By
The Trail Of Dead; 2) Mistakes & Regrets; 3) Totally Natural; 4)
Blight Takes All; 5) Clair De Lune; 6) Flood Of Red; 7) Children Of The Hydra's
Teeth; 8) Mark David Chapman; 9) Up From Redemption; 10) Aged Dolls; 11) The
Day The Air Turned Blue; 12) A Perfect Teenhood; 13) Sigh Your Children.
The band's second album feels like it was
recorded during the same session as the first one — maybe this explains the
minimal gap in time between the two. Amazingly, I have encountered opinions
that state it represents "a huge leap in quality" over the
self-titled debut; my brain is unable to fathom this, as I do not hear a
single serious difference. Same low quality production, same reliance on a
juxtaposition of chainsaw buzz and jangle as the main musical backbone, same —
already almost annoyingly — predictable alternation between slow/moody and
fast/hardcore, same punk guy shouting instead of singing. The only technical
difference is that the songs are generally shorter — but, on the other hand,
there's more of them, and I have a hard time telling when one is over and the
next is on anyway.
I can sense a deep desire to shock and impress,
and I am happy for those who are shocked and impressed; but I myself
can only shrug my shoulders. I was never a big fan of the Cranberries' 'I Just
Shot John Lennon', but it was an interesting and coherent statement all the
same, after which naming one of your songs 'Mark David Chapman' and leading it
off with lines like 'We pierced the side of the idol / With the sharpened neck
of an electric guitar' seems sort of... expendable, to put it mildly.
Especially when the song has nothing interesting to say in terms of melody.
Yes, it is fairly certain by now that this band
is trying out something new — the Austin guys are always compared to Sonic
Youth, whose brand of avantgarde experimentation they are so bravely trying to
sew unto the regular hardcore spine. For the attempt, they deserve respect. In
the eyes of those who think it works, they deserve love. I stand on the other
side of the fence, hand in hand with those who think it does not work — not one
second of the time. That there are no memorable melodies should be taken for
granted, but neither is the atmosphere captivating, since most of this racket
is just pointless noisemaking. Maybe we can all upgrade our level of smartness
and say that, well, the point of the record is pointless noisemaking, so
that it quite wonderfully achieves all its goals. Maybe — but I am well behind
that level of abstraction.
Since I cannot think of anything good to say
about the record, let me just quickly give it an expected thumbs down and turn this over to an anonymous
fan reviewer on a well-known Internet site. Excerpt:
«A song such as 'A Perfect Teenhood', morphing
elegantly out of the unstintingly gothic and funereal piano interlude 'The Day
the Air Turned Blue', embodies the spirit. It's an oscillating storm of
sibilant melody and breakneck punk riffage.When a sudden landslide of drums and
vitreous chords halt the pellmell first movement, there's a moment to catch
your breath in the shimmering, seesawing euphonies, but not for long. Tommy gun! bloodlust! a
perfect teenhood! chants
Keely, before declaring, perhaps unsurprisingly given the title, "Fuck
you!" He bawls the evergreen mantra of youth about fifty times in the
climax, his vocals pitching like a trawler on the ocean amid the clarion chords
and, in fact, the sound mixer fades him out after a bit as if he's embarrassed
at the sudden outburst of earthy language, then fades him back in a moment
later as if to say to the listener, "Yep, sorry guys, still at it, be
right with you..." before fading him out again in the enharmonic gloaming.
Fucking ace.»
Amazing, isn't it? "The evergreen mantra
of youth" is priceless all by itself, but to characterize the usual
punkish bawl ('fuck you, fuck you, fuck you...') as "vocals pitching like
a trawler on the ocean amid the clarion chords" is something else. It
agrees splendidly with the fact that no third opinion exists on Madonna:
one is either seduced by its kickass power, or is left as cold by it as the
Kali image on the front cover (I take it that Kali is supposed to be
this band's Madonna, by the way). Maybe it is my own serious problem that I
remain impenetrable to the first opinion. But seeing as how I have also seen it
expressed in the following way — "this is the best hard rock since Led
Zeppelin!" — I may have a right to wonder whether at least part of the
admiration for the Austin guys cannot be attributed to serious gaps in musical
knowledge on the part of some of the admirers. Best hard rock since Led
Zeppelin? You must be kidding, sir. Ever heard of Napalm Death?..
SOURCE TAGS & CODES (2002)
1) It Was There That I Saw You;
2) Another Morning Stoner;
3) Baudelaire; 4)
Homage; 5) How Near How
Far; 6) Heart In The Hand Of The Matter; 7) Monsoon; 8) Days Of Being Wild;
9) Relative Ways; 10)
After The Laughter; 11) Source Tags & Codes.
I do not like to believe, nor would I recommend
anyone to believe, in miraculous musical revolutions. It's not that musical
talent should necessarily show up on the genetic level — one's skills can be
honed through time as well — but situations when artists release a 10-star
album right after a 2-star album and then go back to a 3-star album before
reemerging with a 9-star album have always looked highly suspicious to me, and,
upon careful consideration, unsupported. As far as I'm concerned, there's no irrational
basis for this, unless rational factors like too much grass, too much booze, or
one too many replacements of the band's drummer are involved.
With the release of the Austin lads' third
album, their first on a major label (Interscope-Geffen), one could think that
the age of the miracle is finally upon us. Although Madonna received
enough critical praise to warrant that label transfer, it was Source Tags
& Codes that finally put the band in the limelight by threatening, two
years into the decade, to become the album of the decade (and the threat
is still on as the decade is on its way out). An absolutely glowing review at Pitchforkmedia
was interpreted by the indie kids as a rallying signal, and the world of
Independent Lovers Of Serious Music has quite independently voted for Source
Tags & Codes as one of its key symbols. It has made history already,
regardless of whether you, the individual listener, are prepared to ejaculate
or vomit upon listening to it.
It is hardly pleasant for me to badmouth albums
that, this way or the other, have made history, as I am quite a history buff
myself. But, happily, I don't feel any need to. No, nothing miraculous on the
horizon: Source Tags & Codes is not a giant step in any
unpredictable direction. The band's views on what constitutes cool music
haven't changed much, their basic musical schtick still consists of interaction
between the jangle anode and the noise cathode, and the vocals are as ugly as
usual. There is, however, one important change that seems to trigger all the
other ones: the band has grown up.
Maybe it was their realization that they're
recording for a bigger label, or, vice versa, the bigger label picked them up
only once they started the maturation process, or something else, but all of
the songs end up sounding more accessible — in fact, I'm positively sure some
of the old fans could have called the record a crappy sellout after the
uncompromising explosions of the self-titled debut and Madonna (in a way
that one could also call London Calling a sellout after The Clash
— or a miriad other similar situations).
Not a great deal more: upon first listen, I
remained just as uninvolved as usual. But eventually, this stuff clicks. Of
course, a tremendous amount of help comes from improved production: with a
bigger and better studio at their disposal, the guys end up with sharper and
clearer guitar separation, making it possible for the melodies to come through.
They also bring in additional touches, like, for instance, strings arrangements
on some of the tracks — they aren't so much heard as felt, according to the
Phil Spector principle, but it sometimes adds a real aura of grandness to the
tune as compared to the faked aura of grandness on Madonna. The songs
still sound similar, but they no longer blend into each other so frustratingly.
However, the melodies themselves are
improving — it is now possible to connect with some of them on an emotional
level that transcends generic headbanging. As far as I'm concerned, for instance,
there is nothing even remotely close to the exhilarating power of the opening
riff for 'Baudelaire', or the stately grandeur of the mid-tempo melody of the
title track, which is quite worthy of a Neil Young, for instance. The dark
chords of 'Monsoon' rumble around you like dark clouds; the chiming chords of
'Relative Ways' weave an epic pattern of unexpected optimism; and most other
tracks, which I wouldn't count as highlights, have melodies or atmospheres with
either explicit meanings or concealed ones that are well worth decoding.
I don't think this should necessarily mean that
I've been seriously misunderstanding Madonna; I'd rather see this as a
successful attempt of imbuing their already well-oiled musical machine with
certain classical values. Source Tags & Codes washes away much, if
not most, of the "punk" attitude of its predecessors — the necessary
condition of including a fast thrashy section in each of the songs is no longer
necessary, the lyrics are generally less provocative, the screaming less
pronounced. The freed-up space is then occupied by a diversity of feelings,
from the angry to the contemplative, but mostly, with the epic. You may not
know what exactly they're trying to tell you — and analyzing their lyrics won't
tell you much except what you already know — but, finally, they have the means
to tell it to you with a flair.
The proverbial Pitchfork review from
Matt LeMay put it this way: "Source Tags and Codes will take you
in, rip you to shreds, piece you together, lick your wounds clean, and send you
back into the world with a concurrent sense of loss and hope". I fully
concur with the 'sense of loss and hope' thing — tragedy and optimism are both
expressed very clearly on this album, sometimes on the very same track. The
rest, of course, is a starry-eyed exaggeration; the band is sailing the same
old angst-and-depression caravel that was freshly rigged and painted in the
days of Quadrophenia, and if it honestly 'rips you to shreds, pieces you
together, licks your wounds clean', I can't help but picture you as an ecstatic
Pacific island native hailing said worn-out caravel into his harbour.
Source Tags & Codes is quite an emotional roller coaster, but I
don't recall it putting me into any kind of emotional state I hadn't
experienced a million times before, not to mention it took quite a while for it
to put me into those states. If it does turn out to be "the album of the
decade", it only goes to show how much that decade had to offer humanity.
But if it doesn't (and I'd rather it didn't), it has a much better chance to go
down in history as simply one more clever, honest, spiritually satisfying album
that, so far, no decade has really lacked. With all that in mind, I'm happy to
give it a thumbs up and warn
similar-minded people that, unlike Madonna, it does warrant repeated
listenings even if your initial conviction that you're still forcing yourself
to swallow the same old shit happens to be stronger than mine.
WORLDS APART (2005)
1) Ode To Isis; 2) Will You Smile Again?; 3)
Worlds Apart; 4) The Summer Of '91; 5) The Rest Will Follow; 6) Caterwaul; 7) A Classic Arts Showcase;
8) Let It Dive; 9) To Russia My Homeland; 10) All White; 11) The Best; 12) The
Lost City Of Refuge.
The higher they drag you, the lower they'll
sink you. Critical minds, perhaps already in a state of pre-confusion from
having hoisted too much incomprehensible praise — for incomprehensible reasons
— on the incomprehensible chaos of Source Tags & Codes, were eagerly
anticipating the follow-up, maybe believing, deep down in their souls, that it
would be the follow-up that would, in the end, make things a little more
comprehensible.
Unfortunately, Worlds Apart was — still
is — even more confusing. It goes in so many different directions and
makes so many unpredictable moves that it's impossible to even categorize it,
let alone explain it. It is puzzling, and while trying to sort out the puzzle,
some of the critics had the misfortune to sniff out, within its twisted
corridors, the next worst thing to wife-beating and neo-Nazism: PROGRESSIVE
ROCK!
I swear that in one place at least, I saw an
ELP reference (!) in the review of the album, and that's just the beginning.
Immediately the ratings plummeted (Pitchfork gives this a 4.0 right on
the heels of Source Tags' 10.0), the insults heaped up, and yesterday's
critical darlings became, for the most part, outcasts. For the most part — due
to little more than the painfully hypocritical state of «mainstream alternative»
rock journalism in the States.
Worlds Apart may not necessarily be "better" than Source Tags, but
it is very clearly the band's Tusk after their Rumours. They are evidently
in the "artistic growth" regime, still leaving plenty of space for
the punkish loudness but reaching out to other approaches for help as well.
Pianos, strings, classic rock melodicity, a little bit of Russian
music-inspired waltzing, a Wagnerian opening number (!) — yes, there's plenty
of pomp and pretense, but it's not the pomp and pretense that's new here; pomp
and pretense have followed the Austin guys since day one. What's new is that
they decided to take a look back and bring in some fresh new influences from
stale old sources, and I, for one, think this resulted in expanding their
musical vision and, most important, making the record interesting to
listen to.
For instance, they now have a different set of
policies concerning the 'loud-and-quiet' dynamics, best illustrated on the
example of 'Will You Smile Again?'. It begins in the traditional way, an
all-out assault on the senses with mammoth drumming, chainsaw and jangle, but
then, instead of giving way to the "sonic muck" of incomprehensible
mumble against a background of sleepy guitars and pianos, it transforms into a
stripped-down martial blues-rock tune that is completely different in dynamics
from the opening part. Nothing brilliant about the songwriting, but quite good
in the way of attention-grabbing — before it reverts to the ocean of chainsaw
and jangle.
They also continue writing songs —
occasionally, at least — that I understand on an emotional level. 'Let It
Dive', for instance, fully justifies its epic ambitions with its loud, yet at
the same time weirdly pacifying chorus of 'let it dive, let it die, let it fade
out of sight'; the song gives the effect of an oddly grungy U2, and, in fact,
I'd be highly interested in seeing it covered by Bono just to know if this
gives it a sharper edge. 'All White', with its minor chords, dramatism, and
operatic backup vocals has been compared to Ziggy-era Bowie — an apt
comparison, and that's probably why I like the song so much (even Keely's whiny
voice fits it great). 'The Lost City Of Refuge' finishes the album on a lovely,
graceful, shadowy note with an elegant guitar arrangement that's more intricate
that everything they'd done on their first two albums put together.
Lyrically, they also continue to mature; the
texts are getting more coherent, and some of the songs now have implicit or
even explicit subject matters — 'Will You Smile', for instance, is about
self-imposed blocks on creating grand, sweeping artistic statements (something
that the band obviously has no problem with — or, at least, no longer
has a problem with, given their preoccupation with the subject). The title
track has caused some controversy; a very distinctly pronounced statement
against modern day cultural decline ('look at those cunts on MTV with their
cars and cribs and rings and shit'), it has been accused itself of being
a fairly generic alt-rock product of its age — a point that works against the song,
perhaps, which has obviously been written as merely a vehicle to get it out of
their system, but certainly not against the album, which is as far
removed from MTV values as could be possible today. Many of the other songs
have interesting, intelligent lyrical insights as well — perhaps this is why
Reece and Keely take the pains to generally sing in a more distinctive manner,
and also turn down the loudness during many of the verses. Not that the voices
have improved, but at least they're giving it a try.
One shouldn't also get the impression that this
is so, so, so much different from Source Tags & Codes. Despite all
the experimentation, the band's backbone and primary values stay the same. It
may be the inclusion of overtly pompous bits, like 'Ode To Isis', or the
Russian waltz, or the loss of the wall of sound on some of the songs,
that irritated most of the critics and some of the listeners, but overall, I
am fairly certain that if history chooses to preserve And You Will Know Us By
The Trail Of Dead in its memory as an important cultural phenomenon, there is
no way Worlds Apart can be seen as the point where the rot set in and
the shark was jumped. In fact, this is exactly the kind of album I was secretly
hoping they'd get along to doing one day if they had any real talent within
them, and I am certainly not dissatisfied — and I invite everyone to look at
this with an open mind. Thumbs up from
the brain for all the experimentation, and partially likewise from the heart
that gladly connected with at least three or four songs on here (a major record
for this particular band). Yes, and don't forget there's nothing substantially
wrong with ELP either, regardless of the fact that nothing on Worlds Apart
sounds even remotely like ELP. (The day someone in the band starts playing
piano like Keith Emerson is the day that the last person on Earth who still
remembers anything about Keith Emerson goes to his grave).
SO DIVIDED (2006)
1) Intro: A Song Of Fire And
Wine; 2) Stand In Silence;
3) Wasted State Of Mind; 4) Naked Sun; 5) Gold Heart Mountain Top Queen
Directory; 6) So Divided; 7) Life; 8) Eight Day Hell; 9) Witches Web; 10)
Segue: In The Realms Of The Unreal; 11) Sunken Dreams.
One can sense confusion as the main point of
this album: perhaps befuddled by the critical and commercial backlash against Worlds
Apart — one that I, for one, could not have predicted either, were I the
one in charge of the band's creativity, since Worlds Apart was a smooth
and logical expansion of the journey started with Source Tags — Keely
and Reece are all but dancing without a floor, trying out all sorts of ideas
and ending up with perhaps their most incoherent album ever, a mess of shards
that just can't seem to stick together.
For this, they got slapped once again; few
people loved the album as a whole — most firefighters from the music review
industry slapped on their gear, dashed into the burning house, saved a few precious
items and condemned the rest of the building. The band was accused of
meandering, philandering, pandering, and rendering their former rock sound
soft, lazy, and unbearable. Even the infamous Matt LeMay from Pitchfork joined
in the fray.
I guess, however, that it all boils down to
one's expectations. Discoherence and being "all over the place" are
not welcome much in the XXIst century; had The White Album been recorded
and released today, chances are the leading critics of our generation would
have swept it away, complaining that "its complexity seems inorganic
and clumsy, revealing the weakness of the source material rather than elevating
and enhancing it... even when the dizzyingly disparate pieces of the album do
fall into place, it seems like the work of some external hand; the band
achieves crystalline structural vistas, but it's never quite clear how they got
there, or why" (a direct quote from the Pitchfork review of So
Divided — but isn't this a word-perfect description of The Beatles
as well?).
And So Divided is this band's White
Album (proportionately, of course): the product of a band that,
subconsciously at least, understands that it has already reached its highest
peak and can now allow itself whatever curious and puzzling moves it can think
of at any given moment, even at the expense of "clumsily" sounding
like a parody on someone else. Even without being fully and completely versed
in all the musical styles of the past fifty years, I can't help but spot
influence after influence on the musical world of the album.
There is only one straightforward cover: Guided
By Voices' 'Gold Heart Mountain Top Queen Directory' (with a more lush and
polished arrangement than the original, but also with a vocal delivery that is
indistinguishable from R.E.M's Michael Stipe, for some reason), but nods to
giants are all over the place: 'Eight Day Hell' borrows its piano-and-drums
intro from 'Good Day Sunshine' and then sounds like a generic late Sixties
psychedelic anthem à la early Bee Gees or Status Quo; 'Sunken
Dreams' is a spot-on imitation of The Cure, from its title to its grim echoey
production to Robert Smith-like vocals; 'Stand In Silence' is the kind of
pop-punk that stems from The Jam and extends to... oh, whatever; 'Witches Web'
may be Pink Floyd-influenced (although I've also seen it compared to the Kinks'
style on Muswell Hillbillies, if you can believe that); and at least one
or two songs have massive codas that bring to mind Yes' 'Starship Trooper'.
Bizarre as it seems, even the non-essential intro to the album has made me
think of Blur's 'Tender'!
So, if anything, the easiest accusation against
the Austin guys here could be that they no longer sound like the Austin guys,
but rather like a bunch of imitations of other guys. The title track is
arguably the only song on here that still preserves traces of the old band;
elsewhere, even the songs that rock no longer rock the way they used to rock —
'Naked Sun', for instance, has blues-rock overtones and even refuses to utilize
the chainsaw-and-jangle wall of sound for most of its duration. Worst offense
of all: on half of the tracks at least, the vocalists are actually trying to sing
rather than shout. Sometimes, they even succeed. Sometimes, when they can't and
don't, they bring in female voices: the avantgarde artist Amanda Palmer on
'Witches Web' and Lily Courtney on a few other tracks. Just how "And You
Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead"-like is this?
But I like most of these songs; I like the
vocal melodies, I like the refined arrangements, and I like how they did manage
to re-capture the artistic essence of their influences (I defy you to play the
beginning of 'Sunken Dreams' to your unsuspecting neighbour and not have him
identify it as The Cure). Their lyrics are getting better and better with each
new album as well — although it's hard not to make a jab at lines like 'I had a
band, had a song, had a vision, where's my vision gone?', they go along very
well with the energetic riffage of 'Stand In Silence'. In fact, quite a few of
the texts are all about confusion, loss of direction, disillusionment, and
other nice elements that goad sharp-tongued critics into action, but at least
they're being honest, and let's face it: if a band that doesn't know what it is
that it is doing does it so well, doesn't this mean that the band is essentially
good? For all it's worth, it may be So Divided that ultimately
convinces me the Austin lads have talent, certainly not Madonna — and,
perhaps, it ends up convincing me even more masterfully than Source Tags,
although it may not be the better album of the two.
So thumbs up
for a record that I will, by all means, be wanting to eventually revisit — not
because it simply "sounds like all these other great bands", but
because I have yet to figure out all the subtleties of how these other great
bands merge with Reece and Kelly's own musical and spiritual past and present.
THE CENTURY OF SELF (2009)
1) Giants Causeway; 2) Far Pavilions; 3) Isis Unveiled; 4) Halcyon
Days; 5) Bells Of Creation;
6) Fields Of Coal; 7) Inland Sea; 8) Luna Park; 9) Insatiable
(one); 10) Pictures Of An Only Child; 11) Ascending; 12) An August Theme; 13)
Insatiable (two).
For some reason — maybe critical
indifference/hatred finally got to them — the experimentation is over, and the
lads shift back to the monolithic kind of sound that characterized Source
Tags & Codes. The sound is more immediate, most of the songs rock hard,
and apparently there is a more "live" feel to the whole thing, as
they concentrate less on overdubbing and more on ass-kicking. Does that mean
that the framework of So Divided/Worlds Apart is renounced as a
temporary blunder? As sort of the band's Their Satanic Majesties' Request?
This I don't know, but it's not the kind of thing that I'd like to believe —
even if you're convinced that there's only one thing in the world that you do
real good, limiting yourself to that one thing is an unnecessary act of chickening
out. You aren't always your own best judge, you know.
Anyway, The Century Of Self did get
glowing reviews and restore the confidence of disappointed fans, and, while it
disappointed me a bit with its conscious refusal to explore new ground,
I can't deny that it is a strong effort, showing that they at least haven't
lost the inspiration or the dedication. If you have already cracked the
mystery of Source Tags, you'll probably like this as that album's
well-meaning little brother — there's a bit more filler, but all the sonic
textures are back and the production, despite the fact that the band has
returned to a minor label, remains crisp and clear, no ugly lo-fi in sight.
The key track on the album is 'Isis Unveiled'
(they really have a fascination with the goddess, don't they?), whose main
theme will inarguably remain as one of their strongest "epic" moments
in history, the aural equivalent of an unstoppable fantasyland cavalry charge.
Again, I can't help but be reminded of how the Who used to create a Wagnerian
orchestral feel with but a basic guitar/bass/drum set, and, although the
Austin guys use two guitars and two drum sets, they're almost up to competing
here, generating a wave of symph-rock majesty out of so little. Nothing else on
the album comes close to reaching that emotional height, but perhaps nothing
should.
Elsewhere, once the material started growing on
me, all the old reactions fell into place. 'Bells Of Creation' and 'Inland Sea'
move slowly, utilizing the help of stately piano chords to get
heaven-on-earthly grandeur, while 'Far Pavillions' and 'Ascending' invent a
couple more enjoyable pop-punk hooks. Also, they aren't entirely done
with the imitations of the preceding album: 'Luna Park' is busy exorcising the
collective Bono from their midst, and 'Insatiable One' borrows the melody from
the Doors' 'Spanish Caravan', but in a modest and respectable way.
There is no huge statement I can make about any
of this, nor do I wish to use the album as a pretext for further dissecting
what I perceive as their musical philosophy. There is no big news for me here.
This could serve as a basis for dismissing the record — this is a
"pretentious" band, after all, and a "pretentious" band
that does not manage to up the stakes each and every time normally deserves a
public whipping. But this would have been the past decision, back when my brain
was the only part of me that allowed for positive judgement of their music;
since then, I have managed to accommodate certain living quarters for it in
the heart as well, and this means that, listening to 'Isis Unveiled', I can go
"wow, how high that thing goes!" rather than "just a minute, let
me check all the melodies on Source Tags & Codes that this thing
borrows ideas from". Therefore, thumbs up,
and I'm sure no fan of the band will be disappointed.
TAO OF THE DEAD (2011)
1) Introduction: Let's
Experiment; 2) Pure Radio Cosplay; 3) Summer Of All Dead Souls; 4) Cover The
Days Like A Tidal Wave; 5) Fall Of The Empire; 6) The Wasteland; 7) The Spiral
Jetty; 8) Weight Of The Sun; 9) Pure Radio Cosplay (reprise); 10) Ebb Away; 11)
The Fairlight Pendant; 12) Strange News From Another Planet (Know Your Honor /
Rule By Being Just / The Ship Impossible / Strange Epiphany / Racing And
Hunting).
Since the title of the album makes no sense
whatsoever (an on-the-spot concatenation of Tao
Te Ching with the Book Of The Dead,
I suppose), I am going to assume that neither do the lyrics, and if I am
mistaken, I couldn't care less. If I really
want someone to teach me the latest trends in crossing metaphysics with
mysticism, I'll go to Jon Anderson, still alive and kicking.
My duty, the way I see it, is to honestly state
that Tao Of The Dead is this band's
worst album in ten years. Way, way back in the former millennium And You Will
Know Us By The Trail Of Dead used to be a formative, aspiring noise-rock band
whose only talent consisted of being able to paint their own unique landscape
of Roar-and-Ring. Which they did — on every single track, without much
afterthought. Then, somehow, they managed to make a great leap forward by cutting
out melodic pathways through that landscape — pathways that sometimes even led them away from their
preferred wasteland of musical rock, dust, and ash. The entire stretch from Source Tags & Codes right to The Century Of Self was strewn with
these unpredictable diversions and escapades. Critics loved some of these and
hated others, but here was a band eager to learn and develop — and I'd almost
managed to forget all about their first two albums.
Now along comes this mess. Recorded in ten days, with a stripped-down lineup of
just the four core band members, with complete emphasis on guitars. Suspicious.
All of the songs are crammed in two lengthy multi-part suites — even more
disturbing. And after five honest listens, I still cannot tell one song from
another. I hear nothing, feel nothing, like nothing, remember nothing. The
whole record is one big nothing. Loud-sounding, pompous, bulging, bursting-out
nothing.
In fact, especially after reading some of the
absolutely glowing reviews, I had to make sure for myself whether a part of my
brain had not been misplaced in the interim between 2009 and 2011. So I took
down The Century Of Self and
refreshed it. 'Isis Unveiled' — still as fabulous as ever, nothing will make me
forget its epic stomp. 'Halcyon Days', 'Fields Of Coal', 'Bells Of Creation' —
strong, interesting creations, each with a little bit of its own face. Tao Of The Dead? Dead indeed,
completely dead in comparison.
First of all, apart from the ambition (a track
that runs over sixteen minutes, MY GOD!!..), there are no new developments
whatsoever. Conrad Keely has not learned to sing like Robin Gibb, Jason Reece
does not attempt to master the technique of Ginger Baker, the guitars roar and
ring like they always do, and the alternations between loud, guitar-dominated
and quiet, bass-led parts of songs are completely recognizable. How can this be
loved? Only if there are plenty of hooks to compensate. If you listen to the
Austin lads simply for the fact that they come from Austin, Tao Of The Dead will make you happy. If
you want good songs...
...listen to this: «...'Pure Radio Cosplay', a
sweaty rocker with an almost Stonesy underpinning that laments the death of
rock radio...». From the Pitchfork
review. You want to know more about the «Stonesy underpinning»? I will tell you
more. «Underpinning» is a nice way to convey the fact that the main melody of
the song is an instantly recognizable variation on 'Jumpin' Jack Flash', except
that the first nine notes of the looping riff have been muddled around a bit.
And, on my own part, I will have to admit that this is the only musical bit I still have in my head after the already
mentioned five listens. So much for frickin' hooks.
Nothing could be lamer than this: at once a
«return-to-basics/roots» approach (my stance has always been that the farther
away the Austin lads are from their roots, the better) and a «fuck it all, let's be ambitious and progressive» motto: all
across his recent interviews, Keely was namedropping Pink Floyd, Rush, and
even Yes as the chief inspirations behind the album's concept and philosophy.
Turns out that he played this well: guilt-ridden with having earlier ridiculed
and disgraced progressive rock values, the «cool» musical press of today has
been rapidly reversing the trend, so that in 2010 artists who fondly remember
how they used to play in the sandpits with their copies of Close To The Edge may safely reap the benefits.
Except Tao
Of The Dead is not this band's Close To The Edge — it is their Topographic Oceans, minus the
diversity, freshness of approach, and technical perfection of that deeply
flawed album that is still somehow admirable in its boldness. I can only
repeat that I find nothing to admire here. In fact, I insist that the band's next album rather be a collection of
Sinatra covers — or that it be not,
not in my lifetime at least. Ugh. Thumbs down.
LOST SONGS (2012)
1) Open Doors; 2) Pinhole
Cameras; 3) Up To Infinity; 4) Opera Obscura; 5) Lost Songs; 6) Flower Card
Games; 7) A Place To Rest; 8) Heart Of Wires; 9) Catatonic; 10) Awestruck; 11)
Bright Young Things; 12) Time And Again.
With an album title like that, most people
would probably think that this is a barrel-scraping outtake collection —
coming fresh and hot off the trail of Tao
Of The Dead, too, since you do not usually expect bands to put out bunches
of new original product each year these days. I have no idea if this was a
conscious exercise in self-humiliation, or if somebody just wanted to stamp on
the nicely fashionable word «LOST» in there somewhere, but the important
statement is: Lost Songs is a damn
fine record, and a great return to form. Looks like I was a bit too hasty to
write these guys off last time around.
Conventional opinion seems to have solidified
around something like this: Lost Songs
is a retro-oriented record, with a somewhat more blunt, punkish approach, and
its lo-fi production values hint at the desire to recapture the impact of the
band's earliest records (such as Madonna).
To me, this seems both true and untrue. True, in that the «artsy» excesses of Tao Of The Dead — which, I insist, were
really excesses, because nobody cuts an art-rock record in ten days — have
mostly been drop-kicked in favor of simpler, cruder, but much more effective
melodies. The trademark wall of sound stays firmly in place, and now it comes
in huge, but properly delineated blocks, rather than one unbearable monolith
with tricky subtleties hidden well beneath the surface.
But false, in that I do not feel much in common
between Lost Songs and the early
days — other than, indeed, a somewhat slackier approach to production, so that
Keely's vocals are once again buried deep in the mix, reaching out to you from
under all the guitar layers like a drowning man's last call. Which is
surprising, actually, considering the record's agenda: Lost Songs was supposed to directly address many of today's social
and political issues (such as the war in Syria, to which ʽUp To
Infinityʼ was supposedly dedicated; later on, the band «re-dedicated» the
song to Pussy Riot, and the list may be far from over) — so it is a little
strange that none of that can really be guessed without taking a close look at
the lyrics sheet. Isn't it clear that, if the world is truly so fucked up these
days, the kids might lack the appropriate reading skills?
Anyway, the big deal is that many of these melodies
hit the senses very effectively — bracing myself for the worst after all the
frustration with Tao, I was all but
amazed at how many emotionally impressive hooks there are. They may be too simple, yes, for listeners who are
already used to judging the Austin lads according to the twistedly esoteric
standards of «progressive rock», but I keep on insisting that that is a mistake
— loud barrages of relatively generic heavy rock chords are usually ineffective
when used as the basic foundation in «progressive» purposes. In other words, on
Lost Songs they are locked in a
perfect union with their reason for existence, whereas on Tao the connection was rather... uh... perverted.
There is very little that is actually new about
the overall sound. A few of the tracks are notably faster than usual —
including the already mentioned ʽUp To Infinityʼ, but especially
ʽCatatonicʼ, propelled forward by a simple, but very distinctive
blues-rock riff, one of those nasty little bastards that you feel you have
already known for your entire life, yet can never pinpoint the exact source.
The final track (ʽTime And Againʼ) is also unusual, in that it rests
upon an acoustic bedrock, while at the same time running along at a good tempo
and featuring plenty of electric overdubs — with a specific folk-rock vibe, to
soothe the nerves and provide a slightly relaxing finale to the thunderstorm,
this time, stormier than ever.
Not everything is equally memorable, but the
songs do have their individualities. ʽOpen Doorsʼ is like a heroic Lieder-style opener — Keely's vocal
parts match the instrumental chords to give you a fine opportunity to
aggrandize your spirit while singing about how "this world is lost in
suffering" and "we survive behind the times, we walk through blood
to save the world" (okay, so these lyrics could have used fewer clichés, but remember, «bluntness» and
«accessibility» was the main motto in the creation of the album). ʽOpera
Obscuraʼ is all built on a ferocious tribal/martial drum pattern (war,
baby, war) that very reluctantly fades away even after the song is over. The
title track is unexpectedly poppy, with a thin, New Wave-era style riff winding
its way through the thick drumming and getting intertwined with the catchy
vocal chorus. The cool point of ʽFlower Card Gamesʼ is how its very
simple, deep bassline and its very simple looped guitar riff complement each
other — with a strong emission of ominousness in the process — and so on.
Yet I have to say that my favorite track here
is still the one that comes closest to a «power ballad» status:
ʽAwestruckʼ may have the most awe-striking instrumental mid-section
these guys ever had the inspiration to come up with. Perfectly calculated,
meticulously planned, the guitar melody, beginning as a weeping,
quasi-countrified, slide solo, then turns into a series of rising and falling trills
that epitomize beauty — like the ringing dreaminess of Cocteau Twins multiplied
by the piercing loudness of The Edge. Not that the Austin lads never had this
particular kind of sound before, but somehow, this is the first time it hit me that hard. Beautiful sequence — I almost
wish the song were completely instrumental, since Keely's nasality can hardly
do it justice.
Overall, it seems like this impulse to «get
back to reality», crawl out of their fantasy worlds and find inspiration for
their music directly from all the mountains of crap that surround us on all
sides, if we only cared to look — seems like it worked for these guys. (For the
record, it does not work for everyone:
you are still supposed to have some real talent to burn before you start writing
songs about the Arab Spring and global warming). So, here's hoping that
complete and total paradise on Earth does not arrive before they plan on
making their next record, and a healthy thumbs up in the meantime.
IX (2014)
1) The Doomsday Book; 2) Jaded
Apostles; 3) A Million Random Digits; 4) Lie Without A Liar; 5) The Ghost
Within; 6) The Dragonfly Queen; 7) How To Avoid Huge Ships; 8) Lost In The
Grand Scheme; 9) Bus Lines; 10) Like Summer Tempests Came His Tears; 11) Sound
Of The Silk.
I think it is rather safe to assume that by the
end of 2014, very few people give any particularly radiant kind of damn about
...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead. Times have changed, competition
has become brutal, and the trail has become so overgrown that even the stench
of rotting flesh has a hard time pushing its way through the legions of new and
upcoming indie artists. IX, the
band's newest and, apparently, ninth — for those who still remember their Roman
numerals — studio album has not, in two months' time, managed to earn itself a
separate page on Wikipedia, much less become the focus of attention anywhere
where it could matter, or register on any kinds of charts at least in the form
of a minor blip. Looks like it is pretty much the end of the trail for these
guys, unless they start backing Nicki Minaj or something.
Unfortunately, I wish I could say how unjust
this is in the light of such great music that they continue to make — but once
again, IX is a relative
disappointment. The few people that did comment on the record usually pointed
out its similarity to Tao Of The Dead,
and I agree, but the problem is, I hated
Tao Of The Dead, and looked at Lost Songs as a comeback of sort, in
which the protagonists agreed to concentrate less on the noise and the muck,
and more on actually making some melodic sense. On IX, the muck is back, and the melodic sense once again recedes in
the background — not killed off completely, but made to suffer.
As in the worst of times, it takes but one
track now to get the general gist of the album: ʽThe Doomsday Bookʼ
has huge, brawny, half-tribal, half-Keith-Moon drumming; thick, noisy, funky
guitars offering several models of walls of sound; a heavy bass foundation
where the player sounds as if he's just holding one really huge note throughout the whole song; and vocals that rise
over the din in mock-Bono fashion, trying to tell you something important that
you still cannot make out, because of the nasal arrogance of the singer. Maybe
I am using a couple of fresh words here, but the bottomline is, this is pretty
much how the average generic Trail Of Dead song has always sounded, give or
take a few. So if you like the style, here is a set of eleven extra mood pieces
for you that reproduce the formula exactly.
An even more telling example is the mid-album
instrumental ʽHow To Avoid Huge Shipsʼ, essentially just one lengthy
crescendo that rides on one single, simple chord sequence for five minutes — a
textbook exercise in «maxi-minimalism» where you take one basic idea and dress
it up in so many clothes that the very process may eventually begin to
enthrall. Guitars, keyboards, drums, cellos, violins, piled up in gazillions of
layers, but reflecting a minimal amount of compositional work. They are such
impeccable masters of the wall of sound, of course, that it is still tempting
to give in, but the thing is, right from the start it is all utterly
predictable. Only if you are fully new to the band will IX be able to amaze you in any novel manner.
They do have one other instrumental piece
(ʽLike Summer Tempest Came His Tearsʼ) that is far more enjoyable — a
dirge-like symphonic composition, with prominent piano and string parts backed
by the usual wall of sound, and genuinely emotional, mainly because the huge
musical backing is not made to swallow and dissolve the parts of the individual
instruments, making this the analogy of a «rock-orchestrated sonata for violin
and piano», alternating between mourning and militaristic segments. Thank God
they included at least one such track, reminding me that they can be serious composers. Perhaps they
should re-orient themselves as a neo-classical outfit and ditch them heavy
guitars altogether.
All in all, this is still a little better than Tao Of The Dead — bits of attractive
melodies jump out on a few of the tracks here and there, and, importantly, it
is a little bit less ambitious, meaning that the music can work as a background
soundtrack without irritating the senses. For these vague reasons, I dare not
assault it with an indignant thumbs down, but not in a thousand years will this
stuff get a thumbs up from me, either. Evolve, dammit, or die already; how many
more of these formulaic transcendental-apocalyptic soundscapes do you still
have in store for us?..
MUSIC OF HAIR (1996)
1) Nuthinduan Waltz; 2)
Ambivalence Waltz; 3) Oh So Insistent; 4) Rhodeaoh; 5) Two Sisters; 6) St.
Francis Reel; 7) Ratitat/Peter's Wolf/Oblivious; 8) The Greenhorn/Exile Of
Erin/Glasgow Reel; 9) Pathetique; 10) Song Of Foot; 11) Minor Beatrice; 12) Oh
So Sad.
Technically, the date of 1996 makes Andrew Bird
an «earlier» artist than the ones tackled in this section. However, Music Of
Hair is not really a proper «album» — it is an early self-released effort,
belonging in a regular discography because and only because, in our ever
progressing world, the phenomenon of «raw early demos», recorded by young
inexperienced artists and quickly shelved, only to be released decades later
as curios — and only if the artist in question had become big enough to warrant
some commercial demand for them — this phenomenon has mutated into one of
«early self-released tape / CD», in which the artist decides for himself
whether he wants or not to have a wider world listen to his very first
plinkings and plunkings in the studio (or, even more frequently, in his own
bedroom or basement).
This has its good and bad sides, with most
people brushing away the bad with the sacral maxim of «If you don't like, don't
listen». But it is hard for me to imagine anyone who would seriously like
Andrew Bird's Music Of Hair — which really only works as a set of
rehearsals / tunings for the first real stage of his career, with Bowl Of Fire.
A professionally trained violinist, Andrew Bird
got his bachelor's degree from Northwestern University in 1996 and immediately
proceeded to demonstrate that the money was not poorly spent by recording an
album full to the brim with violin music — or, should I say «fiddle music» because
there is not a lot of Paganini influence to be discerned. Much of this stuff is
just Bird exercising solo, occasionally — but rarely — singing as well,
although on a few tracks he is joined by fellow musicians, including members of
Squirrel Nut Zippers.
There is no denying that, already on this patch
of demos, Andrew does give the impression of a rare Bird indeed. As long as one
does not venture too far outside the first two or three tracks, this is relatively
traditional folk, mostly Celtic waltzes and ballads played in a rather grating
manner, sometimes adorned with Bird's own lyrics that are this music's only
hard link to modern times. But the further down we go, the more adventurous the
guy becomes, gradually integrating free-form jazz, modern classical, old-style
cabaret, and even raga motives into the mix until the only element that ties it
all together remains the idea of the violin as lead instrument.
I have to acknowledge that my major reaction
from all this is a splitting headache; it is very hard for me to stomach fifty
five minutes of violin when the violinist is anything less than David Oistrakh,
and Andrew Bird sure has a long way to go to get there. Competent,
unquestionably yes; inventive, most assuredly so; and the album as such has a
good synthetic reason to exist — but for about thirty-five out of fifty-five
minutes, all it does to me is destroy my ears in a way that only people like Yoko
Ono may be able to understand.
So I will take the predictable and conventional
route: Music Of Hair establishes Mr. Bird as a guy who can make music,
and its release served the good purpose of getting him signed to a real label,
but leave it to the MoMA crowds to call it a serious work of art; I call it a
curious introduction to the real Andrew Bird.
THRILLS (1998)
1) Minor Stab; 2) Ides Of
Swing; 3) Glass Figurine; 4) Pathetique; 5) Depression/Passillo; 6) 50 Pieces;
7) A Woman's Life And Love; 8) Swedish Wedding March; 9) Eugene; 10)
Gris-Gris; 11) Cock O' The Walk; 12) Nuthinduan Waltz; 13) Some Of These
Days/Chinatown, My Chinatown.
«Andrew Bird's Bowl Of Fire» is hardly the best
name for a band recording this kind of music. «Bowl of Fire» suggests «Ball Of
Fire», and «Ball Of Fire» suggests either Deep Purple, or that corny, but funny
movie of Billy Wilder's where Gene Krupa and Barbara Stanwyck collectively
explode over a version of 'Drum Boogie'. If there is a fire somewhere on Thrills,
Bird's first serious contribution to the outside world, it is a highly
metaphorical one.
Surrounding himself with fellow Chicago
musicians, as well as guests from the Squirrel Nut Zippers, Bird pays his
personal homage to pre-war popular music. Delta blues, small combo jazz, a
little swing, a little Charleston, and lots of Kurt Weill. If you are too young
to care about them old times, think Tom Waits without all the experimentation
and with a sweet croon instead of the toilet rasp. Beyond that, some older folk
influences are carried over from Music Of Hair: there are two and a half
minutes of a 'Swedish Wedding March' (apparently, the Swedes make little
distinction between a wedding and a funeral), and a new, fuller, and slightly
less grating version of 'Nuthinduan Waltz' from the previous album.
The listing says «all songs written and
composed by Andrew Bird», with but a couple exceptions; this is obviously
untrue, since on most of them, the only true original writing concerns the
lyrics — Bird's end-of-the-century verbal updating of the
beginning-of-the-century subjects is astute and funny: even Brecht would have
had trouble coming up with stuff like 'Studies have shown that we, like sheep,
are prone to sure fatal doses of malcontent through osmosis; but don't be
sympathetic, just pass the anaesthetic, 'cuz sheep are benign and on the young
we will dine' ('Eugene'). The melodies, on the contrary, are fully in the traditional
vein, and this means, in mild terms, «appropriated» — 'Cock O' The Walk', for
instance, is no more composed by Andrew Bird than 'Amazing Grace' (for some
nice competition on that melody, how about checking out Robert Johnson's
'They're Red Hot'?). I have no idea why the tune is credited to Bird when, at
the same time, 'Some Of These Days' is credited to Charley Patton (not that
Charley Patton actually wrote 'Some Of These Days', either, but I suppose that
Andrew just wanted to namedrop the man, which is a cool gesture. If you
happen to be the lucky winner who has learned about Charley Patton through
Andrew Bird's Bowl Of Fire, contact me and we'll make history together).
There is not much to tell about individual
tunes: a tribute is a tribute, a stylization a stylization, and all of this has
a solid post-modern flair that justifies the album's existence in the first
place. Bird and his musicians love their influences, they have a real good time
doing what they are doing, and yet, Thrills is still not really as
thrilling as Andrew's further evolution; at this time, he has made the
transition from homebrewed experimentator and self-teacher to a likeable and
intelligent entertainer, but he is still doing his homework. Thumbs up for the homework, and I will reserve
more writing space for things to come.
OH! THE GRANDEUR (1999)
1) Candy Shop; 2) Tea And
Thorazine; 3) Wishing For Contentment; 4) Wait; 5) The Idiot's Genius; 6)
Vidalia; 7) Beware; 8) Dora Goes To Town; 9) Feetlips; 10) And So...; 11) Coney
Island Shuffle; 12) Respiration; 13) (What's Your) Angle; 14) The Confession;
15) Beware (reprise).
All right; this sounds almost exactly like Thrills,
but it no longer sounds like homework. There was a little bit of Andrew Bird
already present on Music Of Hair, but it is his third LP where the
Andrew Bird part becomes seriously comparable in size to the «Andrew Bird
influences» part. Most of this has to do with the lyrics, ever more entangled,
personal, and mixing hip modern ways of thinking about life with traditional
ways of expressing these thoughts. At least, such is my tentative explanation
of why Oh! The Grandeur is the first FUN Andrew Bird album. Or, as
Andrew admits himself, "I've got a new-found fangled fandango tango angle
— and it keeps things curious, and it makes folks furious; it takes two part
tango and a little tingle tangle, and two orangutans like me and you"
('What's Your Angle').
Bird's biggest achievement here, perhaps, is
that he has managed to make that old time music feel relevant once again, and
maybe even disclose some potential depth that we rarely, or never, perceive
when listening to Kurt Weill or Fats Waller, not because they were not «deep»,
but because, in creating all these new sounds, they never bothered to explore them
right down to the core. By adding new levels of technical precision, combining
rarely combined instruments, juxtaposing rarely juxtaposed sub-styles, and
filling them up with present-day realities, the guy gives the old carnival
thing a second breath — and does this with more subtlety and personality than
the Squirrel Nut Zippers themselves, who also tried to revive the form but did
not truly succeed in filling it up with the proper spirit.
On 'Candy Shop', which opens the record on a
fast, brawny, danceable note, Bird promises that he is "goin' to set fire
to your glamour", but the song is a cunning deception: it merely sounds
like a fast outtake from Thrills, another bit of well-polished tribute
but with little chance of being selected for preservation in the National
Archives. But then 'Tea And Thorazine' takes off at a much slower, in some
ways, even creepier pace as Bird sings memoirs of his autistic brother, and
from then on, it is a strange journey into the world of gypsy fiddles and
jump-blues guitars and voodoo percussion that, at times, evokes images of an
early morning dreamy hangover after a long night at the local speakeasy.
The record's centerpiece is, I believe, to be
faithfully found right in the center: 'Beware', moving from its regular violin
intro to the lazy shuffle mood and then, without warning, into the sphere of
drunken ominousness: with huge vocal, violin, and piano crescendos, Bird gives
us a warning against... uh, I actually have no idea what he is talking about, but
I do like the idea of using that old-fashioned cabaret sound to sing about some
sort of impending apocalypse. In fact, all through the record there is a vague
sense of danger at the end of town, but what kind of danger — that is not so
interesting for Andrew to specify.
Of course, I may be reading too much into an
album that, even with all the darker themes, keeps debasing itself with
cheerful lightweight SquirrelNuttish throwaways like 'Dora Goes To Town', but
bear with me: Andrew Bird is too smart a guy to be restricted by the tag of
«lightweight entertainer», and there is no other way to let him escape this
restriction than to keep talking about his non-trivial artistic conceptions.
And, above all, you cannot accuse him of insincerity or inadequacy: if his goal
truly is to «keep things curious» and «make folks furious», these are two
things that Oh! The Grandeur does splendidly. At the very least, it made
my brain cells furious enough and my heart strings curious enough to guarantee
this the first truly solid thumbs up
in Andrew Bird history.
THE SWIMMING HOUR (2001)
1) Two Way Action; 2) Core And
Rind; 3) Why?; 4) 11:11; 5) Case In Point; 6) Too Long; 7) Way Out West; 8)
Waiting To Talk; 9) Fatal Flower Garden; 10) Satisfied; 11) Headsoak; 12) How
Indiscreet; 13) Dear Old Greenland.
The best Bowl of Fire album ever — or, perhaps,
simply the most accessible? Well, if diversity and unpredictability count as
sins, probably the latter. But, regardless, this review will be written from
the point of view of an incorrigible sinner. Besides, it's not like we are
talking teen pop or anything like that. This is a guy who could stand his own
with Yo-Yo Ma.
The Swimming Hour takes us ever further away from the
limitations of «neo-swing», as they like to call it, and into new old realms
like power pop, psychedelia, blues rock, and rumba, among others. It has
already been likened to The White Album and similar genre-hopping encyclopaedic
albums, and for good reason, even though, occasionally, Andrew seems to plod
through these genres rather than hop through them. Perhaps this explains the
title — to swim, after all, takes more effort than to fly for those who can do
both.
Some complain that Bird is hard to understand,
and the points he makes are hard to get. Well, obviously, because he does not
really make any points. He goes for moods and melodies, and he sets them
to the kind of lyrics that are in no danger of spoiling said moods and
melodies: rooted in the old pop-poetry clichés, either twisted to the
point of intelligent-looking absurdity or adjusted to reflect a well-acted
theatrical situation that does not cut through to the heart, but is still
exciting, all the same. The lyrics are decent, but it's not like they really
matter.
What does matter? Many things. Like when
the crunchy violin riff emerges out of the sonic chaos of the first 40 seconds
of 'Two Way Action', and we perceive it as a driving power pop anthem, well
worthy of the Big Star legacy except that the strings are bowed rather than
plucked. Or when the baroque flourishes on '11:11' bring together the
twenty-first and the eighteenth centuries by way of the psychedelic Sixties. Or
when the screeching guitar solo emerges out of nowhere on the quiet waltz of
'Fatal Flower Garden', giving it a nice rock flavor. Or when Bird starts
whistling on 'Headsoak', giving us a first taste of his tremendous talents in
that department. Or the wild rock'n'roll things he does with the violin on 'How
Indiscreet', spiritually reminiscent of the British R'n'B rave-ups from around
1964.
In short, The Swimming Hour is simply a
very melodic, and a very expertly constructed, piece of non-revolutionary
modern art. Its intelligence is even reflected in the extremely correct manner
in which Bird treats all the styles: thus, when it is power pop, a direction
that nurtures originality in the juxtaposition of chords, he actually writes
melodies of his own, but when it is the same old swing, we find the same old
age-weathered progressions (as in, most notably, his cover of The Mississippi
Sheiks' 'Too Long'), and this should bother us no more than it did on the man's
previous couple of records — you don't mess up with an already winning
formula, you only polish it for the modern listener's hearing criteria.
One of the simplest and most effective examples
is 'Why?', a thrilling chunk of «blues de luxe» that Bird arranges in the form
of a non-trivial drama (he is a no-good fucker, she sees no
problem in tolerating his no-goodness, he only gets more pissed-off as a
result — not such a rare situation when you think of it, but, for some reason,
generally neglected in the long tradition of refining personal relations into
high art). As the bluesy violin scrapes the soul with the efficacy of a trademark
B. B. King solo, and the vocals effortlessly switch from exasperated falsetto
to drunk, reckless wailing on the middle-eight, you know that the guy has
created something — a character, a performance, a symbol, whatever, that
you just might want to keep with you.
At this point in his career, Bird starts taking
on the characteristics of an Adrian Belew for his generation — that is, a
properly schizoid guy, raised and reared as a tenant of the ivory tower but not
above regularly holding a carnival for the local peasants right in front of the
moat. No crucial importance for either the current times or the times to come,
no clear reason for this kind of activity, no possibility of understanding why
we are all gathered here on this day, but the sensation of a significant
positive charge is undeniable all the same. It's not post-modern smirk, and it
isn't faithful generic tribute. It's groping in the dark with two loving hands,
never mind any potentially salacious connotations.
I guess that's pretty much the same kind of
feeling about which he sings in 'Dear Old Greenland'. There is no reason
whatsoever for the protagonist to go to Greenland, but something out there
makes him quite certain that this is just the right place to find the necessary
peace of mind. Well, I could never quite get my own motivation for being so
strongly drawn to The Swimming Hour, but I can definitely confirm that
this particular hour of swimming contributed to my own peace of mind. Let
science deal with this some other day. The heart acknowledges the presence of a
strong magnetic field here, and concedes a thumbs up.
FINGERLINGS (2002)
1) Action/Adventure; 2)
Trimmed And Burning; 3) Gotholympians; 4) Richmond Woman; 5) Sweetbreads; 6)
Why; 7) Headsoak; 8) How Indiscreet; 9) T'N'T.
Pretty much impossible to find these days — the
original was limited to something like 250 copies — but, nevertheless, totally
essential. Much of Bird's studio recording has a live feel to it all by itself,
but to «get» this guy, it is necessary to experience him on stage, at least
converted to audio (or video). It is there, as he is standing half-plucking,
half-bowing his violin, that it is the easiest to convince yourself he really does
have the required «mystery component» and cannot be simply written off as just
another readily trashable post-modern clown.
Fingerlings have been assembled from various performances, but structured in a very
coherent manner, reminiscent of the original sequencing of Talking Heads' Stop
Making Sense: the protagonist is alone at first, then slowly joined, one by
one, by the trusty backup. And this gives an extra reason for comparing Bird
with Byrne (beyond the obvious graphic and phonetic similarities in their
names, that is) — both artists have been guilty of cultivating a unique mix of
craziness and intelligence so as to make an impression, and both make it hard
for the average listener to discern the average human soul beyond the
formalistic trappings; hard, but possible, and richly rewarding in the long
run.
Bird's solo sound is quite unique. The simultaneous
plucking and bowing gives him a great angle — the plucked violin acquires a
mandolin-like sound, and this takes care of both rhythm and melody. But his
real trademark is the use of a special gadget, based on the loop pedal
principle, that actually records parts of what he is playing and then
plays it back while he is going on to the next part, having just created a
temporary «phonogram» for the next several bars. Cynics will deride this as a
crude financial solution (no need to pay the rhythm player), but admirers will
point out the tremendous technical difficulty it takes to measure out something
like that in live performance — we know of plenty users of the loop pedal, but
this is a very demanding extreme.
It could also be qualified as a silly show-off,
but with Bird, it works; it might, in fact, be just what is needed, as, over
and over again, he wraps himself in his own freshly-generated sounds like a
protective cocoon. The first three songs on Fingerlings are strictly
solo, solemn and sorrowful, and the traditional 'Keep Your Lamps Trimmed And
Burning' perfectly fits in with two of his own compositions. But it is not any
kind of sorrowfulness you are easily familiar with; it is a very quiet,
introspective kind, a chamber piece for the initiated few, perhaps bringing to
mind the old melancholy of Nick Drake, except Bird's blood quietly boils where
Nick's used to quietly freeze, if you'll pardon the clumsy metaphor.
Things slowly start picking up and shedding
some of the moroseness once Bird is joined by Nora O'Connor on guitar and
backing vocals for the next three numbers, including a completely reinterpreted
'Why' from The Swimming Hour. These bring on a more traditional folksy
attitude (although, lyrics-wise, the extremely bizarre 'Sweetbreads' is
anything but traditional); and then, finally, the entire Bowl Of Fire comes
forward, first in a stately and graceful manner on a stripped-down version of
'Headsoak', then totally letting their hair down and having a rowdy ball on the
last two numbers.
And then, as you cast a retro-eye on what you
have just heard, it turns out you have been taken on one man's journey through
three (if not more) different stages. There's the being alone part, there's
the being together part, and then there's the big company part. Three modes of
existence, three ways of conduct, three emotional stages — solitary sadness,
thoughtful dialog, and reckless partying, each one equally engaging and
convincing. Throw in the idiosyncratic playing technique, the note-perfect singing
(not forgetting his beautiful whistling), and the general strength of the
selections, and the 250 copies will look like a fuckin' joke. A billion thumbs up if that is what it takes to bring this
back in print.
WEATHER SYSTEMS (2003)
1) First Song; 2) I; 3)
Lull; 4) Action/Adventure; 5) →; 6) Skin; 7) Weather Systems; 8) Don't Be
Scared; 9) ←.
This one is perhaps easier to understand,
forgive, and take a liking to if one accepts Bird's explanation of it as a
«side project» tossed off during the several years it took him to perfect his
first «proper» solo album (The Mysterious Production Of Eggs). A short,
monotonous, lazy, near-ambient slice of chamber-dream-pop, Weather Systems
has nevertheless been hailed as a hidden masterpiece by quite a few critics — charmed
either by witnessing the final stages of Bird's evolution from swinging
folkster into raffinated baroque artist or by the channelling of the spirit of
the late Jeff Buckley, always a good boost for those critics who get paid by
the word.
In spirit and in technique, Weather Systems
does not add much to the first half of Fingerlings, one of whose songs
it even reproduces in a studio arrangement ('Action/Adventure'). Again, the
basic message here is that of «intelligent melancholia» — Andrew Bird as the
lonesome minstrel, watching the vanity of the world from his favorite cliff
high up in the clouds and polishing his lyre (violin). It's all there on 'I',
running along a simple plucked rhythm and a morose distorted bassline and a
mantraic refrain that sets the tone for the whole record: "...hear a voice
that says we're basically alone, says we're basically alone...". (The
track would later become the rockier-arranged 'Imitosis' and one of Bird's
primary visit cards, but I must say that it is much more effective in its
stripped down state. Alone is alone, after all).
After a while, it gets louder and denser,
acquiring a decidedly psychedelic flavour by the time of the last two or three
tracks. 'Don't Be Scared', a cover of a little-known tune by a little-known
alt-country outfit (The Handsome Family), has plenty of cloudy gorgeousness —
in a way, you could think of it as the blueprint for most of the creations of
Beach House. And the title track, although quite unmemorable by itself, does
that on purpose, merging the ambient values of late XXth century with a good
mixture of XVIIIth century chamber music.
It is funny, come to think of it, that I have
used the word «baroque», probably tricked, in an impressionistic way, by too
much violin — because the skeleton of the record still reflects Bird's
fascination with folk, bluegrass, and various ethnic styles. For all I know,
the beginning of 'First Song' could just as well be James Taylor. But, through
the art of cloning that violin and hybridizing the clones in different ways,
Bird comes a bit close to providing us with the answer to the rarely asked, but
all the more intriguing question: «What would we get if we had the likes of Tartini
or Paganini interested in learning and assimilating the British/American folk
idiom?» Obviously, a direct comparison would be ridiculous, since Bird is no
virtuoso (each time he gets hailed as one by any of his professional admirers,
it makes me wonder if they actually took the time to get acquainted with his classical
influences), yet the basic idea is comprehensible, and nowhere is it expressed
as fluidly as on that hard-to-nail title track.
I suppose that, once Bird's career has finally
been laid to rest, this will be viewed as his equivalent of the Beach Boys' Friends:
an emphatically hushed, introspective lull (hey, one of the tracks is
named 'Lull!') in between bigger, louder, more «public» statements; and today
already Weather Systems is a serious candidate for the best A. B. album
in the eyes of emphatically hushed, introspective listeners. Thumbs up — there is no significant criticism I
can hurl at any of these songs. How could I, when I slept through most of them?
(Oops).
FINGERLINGS 2 (2004)
1) First Song; 2) Skin Is, My;
3) Master Fade; 4) Banking On A Myth; 5) MX Missiles; 6) Spanish For Monsters;
7) Sovay; 8) Way Out West; 9) Depression Pasillo; 10) Happy Day.
Having decided to make the Fingerlings
project recurrent, Bird did not exactly give it his all to make the second
volume as self-contained as one could perceive the first one. More properly,
it's like one of those middle-of-the-road movie sequels which are still ruled by
the original creator, but only by a chunk of his heart rather than the full
load. «The original was great, let's do another one, not for the money, really,
it just sucks to let this idea wither without exploring it down to its roots
and seeing how far we can go with it».
Well, first of all, the album is almost
completely redundant. Five out of ten songs are essentially preview versions of
tracks on next year's Production Of Eggs, and, as excellent a live
performer as Bird is, his reliance on synchronic loop-recording techniques
chains him to the machine much the same way Pink Floyd used to be chained to
their stage arrangements, meaning that there will be no great difference
between live and studio playing aside from the understandably more sparse sound
in the live setting. 'First Song' is from Weather Systems; 'Way Out
West' and 'Depression Pasillo' hearken back to the Bowl of Fire days; and only
two songs are unavailable elsewhere. Of these two, however, 'Spanish For
Monsters' is a must-hear for all Bird fans, a bizarre hybridization of gypsy
music with traditional blues.
He does try to adhere to the same build-up
principle, starting off solo, then adding Norah O'Connor on two tracks, then
joined by My Morning Jacket on one more, then rummaging in the archives to
extract two more dusty Bowl Of Fire recordings, and then bringing it all back
down with a soft, humble, friendly solo performance of a traditional folk tune.
Somehow, though, the magic does not scintillate as brilliantly second time
around — even though this is definitely not the material's fault. Maybe
it's just a disgustingly sobering realization, somewhere in the back of the
mind, that Fingerlings was, after all, a breakthrough in form and
substance, but Fingerlings 2 makes it into formula, and no sequel
faithfully regenerating the original can be completely worth the original.
On a pure heart level, this is the usual beauty
coming from the usual Bird; but all the other system registers clearly indicate
that its primary purpose is to stop the gap in awaiting the next true
manifestation of Mr. Bird. No year without a new LP! And who's to stop you if
you're almost guaranteed additional positive reviews in any case?
ANDREW BIRD &
THE MYSTERIOUS PRODUCTION OF EGGS (2005)
1) √; 2) Sovay; 3) A Nervous Tic
Motion Of The Head To The Left; 4) Fake Palindromes; 5) Measuring Cups; 6)
Banking On A Myth; 7) Masterfade; 8) Opposite Day; 9) Skin Is, My; 10) The
Naming Of Things; 11) MX Missiles; 12) ~; 13) Tables And Chairs; 14) The Happy
Birthday Song.
I freely admit that an album that is called Mysterious
Production Of Eggs, sports a picture of a green-tinged zombie goat (sheep?)
on the sleeve, and borrows the sign of a square root for the title of its first
composition, is a little hard to take seriously. But do we really know all the
intricacies of the mechanism of egg production? Do we understand all the
peculiarities of the colouring of domestic bovids? Have we thoroughly explored
all of the properties of the square root function? And if not, what right have
we to ridicule Andrew Bird's symbolism, which may just as much be the result of
a stunning spiritual revelation as it may be a load of baloney?
Regardless — my working hypothesis is that all
of this is a load of baloney. The percentage rate of wheat to chaff in
Andrew's lyrics this time hovers around 1:9, according to my intuition, and the
words matter only inasmuch as they have an intonation attached. Intonations include
a lot of questions and just as many plaintive notes, once again confirming
Bird's «nerdy whiner» status; but now he has pushed his brand of dream-pop even
further, expanding the number of used instruments (in particular, there is
much more acoustic and electric guitar playing on here than ever before) and
making the background arrangements ever more complex, and this creates a very
strange final impression. If Weather Systems was his
high-up-in-the-clouds cozy little ivory tower, one in which he could lock
himself with his small dedicated audience and shun the corrosion of the rest of
the world, then on Production Of Eggs he seems intent on somewhat
augmenting the property. Still behind barbed wire, but the stakes have moved:
now he is not so much defending his claim to intellectual paranoia as he is
propagating it.
In other words, Production Of Eggs is
still «dreamy», but it isn't nearly as «chamber»-like as its predecessor. 'Fake
Palindromes', for instance, is a huge-soundin' mother, with a sweeping
power-pop violin assault that we have not heard since Swimming Hour;
'Skin Is, My' is a fully vocalized re-recording of 'Skin' with a much denser
sound that almost approaches pop-punk on the "what a lovely sound"
chorus; and 'The Naming Of Things' is a stately anthem on which the man throws
in a pinch of Old Testament fervor (not that anyone would ever get the message
— presuming one existed in the first place).
All three of these songs will appeal immensely,
I am sure, to the average pop fan who likes his music loud and crunchy. But the
true soul of the record probably still lies in tracks like 'Sovay' and
'Masterfade', gentile, vulnerable ballads that are as much soaked in the
Elizabethan spirit as they are genuine creations of the XXIst century. Their
sweet, melodic, melancholic vibe is completely at odds with lyrics like
"Then you realize that you're riding on a para-success of a heavyhanded
metaphor" (much as the latter is true for Mr. Bird), but only if you make
the mistake of trying to decipher them in some sort of literal way.
Or maybe the album's true soul lies in
'Opposite Day', a song that moves from Beach Boys-like choral harmonies to
Beatles-like psychedelia to Nick Drake-like hush-folk in several crudely joined
movements — and deals with the issue of turning into a cephalopod as "laws
of physics lose their sway" and "those who can't quite function in
society at large got to wake up on this morning to find that they're in
charge". Because over the course of these fifty-plus minutes, it is indeed
Andrew Bird who is in charge over your senses, and is there any doubt about his
own ability to "function in society at large"? Like I said — the man
is trying to expand his corner of the market, quite deliberately so.
And, actually, he succeeded: it was Production
Of Eggs that, after almost a decade of shadowy existence, put him on some
more widely distributed musical maps. The album got positive responses from
sources as distant from each other as Pitchforkmedia and Robert Christgau, and
pretty much ensured that the next album would even make a Billboard presence.
The fact that he achieved this without sacrificing a single shred of artistic
credibility — only a total musical idiot would dare brand Eggs a «sellout»
— is a small sign of hope.
Interesting trivia bit: Production Of Eggs
was released on Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe label, which puts to rest the
formerly rhetoric-idiotic question of «What does an introvert violin hackman
from Chicago and the head banner of East Coast feminism have in common?» (Other
than this, of course).
Thumbs up as usual, although beware: if Weather
Systems puts you to sleep (in a bad way), Production Of Eggs is not
at all guaranteed to wake you up (in a good way).
FINGERLINGS 3 (2006)
1) Grinnin'; 2) Dark Matter;
3) The Water Jet Cilice; 4) Measuring Cups; 5) The Happy Birthday Song; 6) A
Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head To The Left; 7) Scythian Empire; 8) Dear Dirty;
9) Tin Foil; 10) Ethiobirds.
The third and, so far, last volume of Fingerlings
hardly deserves a lot of words. It is slightly longer than the other two,
mainly at the expense of featuring a couple extra non-live (or «live in the
studio») tracks that sort of spoil the principle, but you'd never guess it
without additional research anyway. Chief among these is the ten-minute suite
'Ethiobirds', an unusually ambitious piece that I could only describe as
«elevator muzak for paradise», with Bird's regular synthesis of folk rhythmics,
Eastern melodies, and classical sonics stretched out to cover all the time it
requires to make that elevator trip from Earth to Heaven, with the rhythm
gradually fading out to make way for cloudy cloudy cloudy.
Casual Bird fans will want 3 primarily
for that particular piece; without it, it is essentially more of the same —
slightly altered twists on older songs ('Nervous Tic Motion', for instance, is
springier and livelier in the live setting and showcases his seriously underrated
whistling talents far more effectively) interspersed with «previews» of newer
songs from the upcoming Armchair Apocrypha ('Dark Matter', 'Scythian
Empire'). 'Dear Dirty' is also an original that, as far as I know, has not yet
showed up on any other record — a gloomy piece with blues overtones, unusual
for its thumbful of bitter bile that Andrew, normally such a nice fella who
prefers to mourn over bad things in life rather than to hate them, empties into
the mix. 'Tin Foil' is yet another Happy Family cover that is a nice addition
to anyone's collection of Happy Family covers. What else is there to say?
Nothing. Maybe Andrew thinks so, too, seeing as how the series has been
essentially discontinued since 2006.
ARMCHAIR
APOCRYPHA (2007)
1) Fiery Crash; 2) Imitosis;
3) Heretics; 4) Dark Matter; 5) Plasticities; 6) Armchairs; 7) Simple X; 8) The
Supine; 9) Cataracts; 10) Scythian Empire; 11) Spare-Ohs; 12) Yawny At The
Apocalypse.
The title has a very nice ring to it, and it is
well certified that both the title and the album itself stem from Bird's
fervent passion for armchairs. How could such a passion remain undetected when
there is a budgerigar on the album cover? If you do not immediately spot the
connection between common pet parakeets and armchairs, you are unlikely to be
eligible for the fan club.
But it does not take a true fan to understand
that Apocrypha continues the trend: Bird is making himself look bigger.
The record is louder and jumpier, and the first noticeable thing about it is
how much more guitar- (particularly, electric guitar-)based most of the songs
are; on this record, the violin is degraded from the status of ruthless
monopolist to that of a valued, but contractually restricted partner. One
explanation is the everlasting quest for new sounds and sensations; the other
is that record buyers generally fall for guitar-based music easier than they do
for violin-based one, what with the people still rolling over Beethoven
and telling Tchaikowsky the news after all these years, and, true enough, the
record became Andrew's biggest seller to that point (meaning that it actually
sold something).
Grim facts, however, indicate that the changes
are but superficial. Quite symbolic of everything that this album is is
'Imitosis', essentially a rewrite of 'I' from Weather Systems, with the
same main hook of "we're basically alone", but with the addition of
booming electronic drums, guitars, chimes, background vocals, and cosmic sound
effects. Oh, and a surrealistic video to boot. But as imaginative as the
rearranging is, does it truly add up to the original feeling of the song? Not
the way I see it, at least.
I judge, therefore, that if you do not think an
artist like Bird deserving of spending your patience upon his earlier, less
accessible, records, Armchair Apocrypha is a good introduction to what
he is, always was, and, most likely, forever will be. Long-time fans, however,
may be disappointed if they were expecting some sort of spiritual growth or
development. On the other hand, long-time fans who think of Bird as a nice lad
with a good ear for melody rather than the 21st century Buddha of pop music
will find plenty to dig.
Because, for instance, 'Heretics' is just a
great optimistic pop song with a luvverly strings arrangement; when the chorus
goes "No, we don't want to hear the sound of a draw", then, provided
you are a human being with the capacity of crying rather than a walking brick
wall, I predict that, after one or two listens at most, you will be perfectly
willing to agree that you really don't want to hear the sound of a draw,
regardless of what that sound might sound like. (I'm pretty sure some people
will say it's an anti-Bush song, but I do not even want to conduct any research
on that). So is 'Plasticities', a cheerful song about fighting for music halls
and dying cities driven by a sort of simplistic retro-style Brit-pop guitar
riff in the chorus, and 'Dark Matter', which is nowhere near as dark as the
actual matter, and...
...well, now that I think of it, the attitude has
shifted: more drums and guitars mean less brooding melancholia, which, along
with the violin, is now confined to select entities ('Armchairs'; 'Scythian
Empire', probably the only song in existence to unite Scythians, Achaens,
Thracians, and Haliburton under one roof; the short instrumental 'Supine', of
obvious superficial appeal to linguists but, unfortunately, devoid of lyrics,
so we never get to know just how well Andrew has studied his Latin grammar).
So it's up to everyone to decide what is more
precious for history — a cloudy, gloomy Andrew Bird, or a loudy, boomy Andrew
Bird. My own verdict is, of course, a thumbs up,
but mixed in with a little disappointment. It's wonderful to know the man can
find a major enough popular appeal to combine artistic integrity with
financial stability, but a little sad to know that he has, most likely, reached
the summit of his artistic mountain and that there's nowhere to go from here
but in the direction of gravity's pull. Fortunately for us all, he's such a
light fellow that gravity does not affect him all that much.
SOLDIER ON (2007)
1) The Trees Were Mistaken; 2)
Sic Of Elephants; 3) The Water Jet Cilice; 4) Plasticities; 5) Heretics; 6)
Sectionate City; 7) How You Gonna Keep 'Em Down On The Farm; 8) Oh Sister.
A mid-size, near-LP-length EP that Bird put out
because... because all respectable artists are supposed to release an EP every
once in a while? Let us think logically. This EP features: (a) one remix of a
previously released tune ('Plasticities'); (b) a demo version of a previously
released tune ('Heretics'); (c) a Bob Dylan cover (guess which); (d) a short
psycho-Eastern instrumental ('Sectionate City'); (e) a lightly fleshed-out
vocal version of an earlier instrumental ('The Water Jet Cilice'); (f) a song
that had already been released as a bonus track on the iTunes edition of Armchair
Apocrypha ('Sic Of Elephants'); (g) a regularly melancholic reading of the
old afterwar tune 'How You Gonna Keep 'Em Down' from 1918; (h) exactly one
fully-fledged, seriously developed new song (the first one).
Ergo, this probably means that he had this song about mistaken trees either
as a leftover from the Apocrypha sessions or recorded afresh, and then
hastily assembled some local trash around it to justify immediate release. It
is to Andrew's honor, of course, that he can hastily assemble thirty minutes
worth of outtakes and throwaways that still provide a nice listen.
'The Trees Are Mistaken' are a magnificent
creation, to be sure. The drum loops are somewhat generic, but the violin loops
are anything but, and, taken together with the whistling, create a uniquely
Birdian aura of gentlemanly paranoia. Possible interpretations rank in the
millions, especially when concentrating on the lyrics, but the basic
impression from the song's primary gimmick — those nagging, droning violins
slowly sawing through your brain — will be the same for most people, I think,
provided they can stand a little brain-sawing.
'Sic Of Elephants', on the other hand, lacks a
distinct hook, unless the worldplay between 'elephants' and 'sycophants' can
be considered as such. Along with 'Cilice', its strength is in mood and
atmosphere, so that it is all the more pleasing that the alternate versions for
earlier songs are chosen from two of the catchiest tunes on Apocrypha —
'Heretics', in particular, works almost as well in its stripped-down form as it
does with the strings-induced bombast.
Still, obviously, this is one more for the
fans; the average Joe on the street will not gain an extra pass to Heaven by
listening to Andrew Bird covering one of the more morally ambiguous songs of
Bob Dylan's career ('Oh Sister' is a Biblical stylization about incest, if you
have not noticed; granted, what with Andrew's sweet, sweet arrangement and
singing, it would be hard for his sister to refuse his yearnings, I
think).
NOBLE BEAST (2008)
1) Oh No; 2) Masterswarm; 3)
Fitz & Dizzyspells; 4) Effigy; 5) Tenuousness; 6) Nomenclature; 7) Ouo; 8)
Not A Robot, But A Ghost; 9) Unfolding Fans; 10) Anonanimal; 11) Natural
Disaster; 12) The Privateers; 13) Souverian; 14) On Ho!
Scary — but the well seems to be running dry.
From the beginning, Bird has chosen the honorable, but risky path of trying to
say something new with each album: staying true to his own unflinching
personality, yes, but still travelling the long exciting road from «neo-swing»
to neo-whatever, adding influence upon influence and new trick upon new trick.
With Armchair Apocrypha, he'd molded his sound closer to indie-rock
aesthetics, ensuring himself a steady commercial base among those who like
their pop as pop, not as atonal brain-teasers, but still won't come
within a mile's radius of MTV presence. It worked. What next?
Noble Beast is the first Andrew Bird album where I am exceedingly hard pressed to
find even a remote trace of progress. (Apart from a couple lame moves, like the
electronica elements and techno beats on 'Not A Robot' which do not agree with
his style at all, I'm afraid). It's just another chunk of
guitar-and-violin-driven pop, tied to another chunk of enigmatic, occasionally
nerdy lyrics (he even makes a reference to «proto-Sanskrit Minoans» at one
point, which may delight the initiated, but should probably turn off history
and linguistics buffs who actually know the meaning of these words). It's all
pleasant, and a few of the songs are emotionally wondralicious — but totally
surprising in its total lack of surprises.
But if, for one moment, we admit that our
expectations are skewed — that, perhaps, Andrew has simply found the kind of
sound that gives him complete sexual self-satisfaction — then what remains is
simply to listen to the album over and over again until it clicks like the
rest. Then, eventually, 'Oh No' wins over as one of his delightfullest, most
aethereal odes to spiritual liberation (provided this is how we have to
interpret the lament about "calcium mines deep in our chest"), with
one of his friendliest whistling patterns to boot. 'Fitz & Dizzyspells' is
uplifting power pop that ranks up there with 'Heretics' (and also continues to
display what I perceive as his serious interest in the Arcade Fire anthem
style). And the start of 'The Privateers' is his most polished alloy of medieval
balladry and post-modern sheen to date, upon which it builds up layer after
layer of grandiosity and then finally explodes in a bunch of electronic noise
shambles.
For those who like their Andrew all sky-like
and pastoral, 'Souverian' will do the job nicely. No one knows who 'Souverian'
is; Bird himself was caught mentioning something about this being a French
word, but, unless he happened to fall upon a mistyped variant of souverain,
or decided by himself that the word would look nicer if disguised as an
Armenian family name, he probably did not know what he was talking about (no
big surprise here). Regardless, it forms a nice near homophone with 'so very
young', and that's all it took to build up a genteel, manneristic mini-suite
that does a great job extracting you from the world of Miley Cyrus for about
seven minutes.
But keep in mind that if, like me, you get
acquainted with Bird in chronological order, you'd better be prepared for a
tinge of boredom and tiredness. His obvious professionalism and mannered
intelligence prevent, and, I think, will always prevent him from releasing a
non-respectable record, yet there is only so much hyper-intellectual
parallel-universe-building that one's mind will accept from the mind of
another. And for Bird, it looks like his particular parallel universe has
reached the end of its carefully planned construction — now all that remains is
to understand how to spend the rest of the allocated budget. Repave the roads,
perhaps?
BREAK IT YOURSELF
(2012)
1) Desperation Breeds...; 2) Polynation;
3) Danse Caribe; 4) Give It Away; 5) Eyeoneye; 6) Lazy Projector; 7) Near Death
Experience Experience; 8) Behind The Barn; 9) Lusitania; 10) Orpheo Looks Back;
11) Sifters; 12) Fatal Shore; 13) Hole In The Ocean Floor; 14) Belles.
Well... this is another Andrew Bird album, make
no mistake about it. In fact, it is so much an Andrew Bird album that I caught
myself with a déjà vu feeling on just about every song, even if
none of the melodies can be identified as direct carbon copies of past material
(I think). Strange enough, though, this looked like a problem on Noble Beast, but not here. It does
confirm my conclusions, stated for that previous album: Andrew Bird is no
longer interested in searching,
having found exactly what he was looking for. But, on the other hand, any
formula, no matter for how long you have been sticking to it, may always be
perfected. And my own intuition, for reasons I am still trying to understand,
whispers that Break It Yourself is a
minor rebound upwards from the minor «sagging» of Noble Beast.
The album is padded. It runs for sixty minutes,
and a significant chunk of them are donated to sheer atmospherics. To be
honest, I think that ʽFatal Shoreʼ works rather well as a natural
conclusion to the album, and that the lazy eight minutes of «chamber ambience»
that constitute ʽHole In The Ocean Floorʼ, as well as the even more
minimalistic chimes-and-crickets outro of ʽBellesʼ, are a useless
waste of everything that can be wasted. Nor is the «bulk» of the album free
from moments when Bird's subtle tension slips into subtle languidness —
inavoidable, perhaps, when you place quiet introspective melancholia and soft,
inobtrusive acoustic guitar and violin patterns at the heart of your sound.
But overall, Break It Yourself still does it right by focusing most heavily on
Bird's vocals — the atmosphere is closer to «minimalistic» than it was on Noble Beast; the instrumental melodies
are fairly simple and predictable; and the hooks are generally tighter, darker,
and hit closer to the heart. The word «desperation» is already locked in the
title of the first song; and while Bird is never «desperate» in the generic
sense of the word, I wouldn't be surprised to ever find out that he was intentionally planning here to
deliver the saddest album in his career. More than half of the songs are dirges
— semi-obscure laments with lyrics so convoluted that they could be relatable
to lost love or the downfall of society with equal success. More importantly,
more than half of the dirges click like a good dirge is supposed to.
It is hard to pick out individual examples, but
ʽLusitaniaʼ is one of the more immediate heart-tuggers, a duet with
singer-songwriter St. Vincent, a.k.a. Annie Clark, for which Andrew has saved
up his best crooning intonations and a simple, but true conclusion — "we
don't study this war no more", with both singers joining in on "go
ahead, say something dumb boy, there's no shame". Not everyone will want
to interpret Break It Yourself as a
cry for humanity, but ʽLusitaniaʼ is one of the more explicit
numbers, and these moments of explicitness color the whole record.
Come to think of it, while few of the songs
reach the levels of complexity that Bird occasionally used to demonstrate, and
practically none of them show you something you have not already seen before,
they all manage to get by just on the strength of certain isolated lines or
phrases. ʽLazy Projectorʼ moves slow and shuffly, and is really all
about the subtly condescending "tell me how long till the paint starts to
peel". ʽDanse Carribeʼ is all about "here we go mistaking
clouds for mountains". ʽEyeoneyeʼ is all about how "no one
can break your heart, so you break it yourself". ʽNear Death
Experience Experienceʼ is totally
about how "we'll dance like cancer survivors, like we're grateful simply
to be alive". And so on. Through sheer groping around, he finds all these
little bits and turns them into steady bolts that fasten the whole
construction.
This, in turn, gives the whole album a certain
epic, ultra-serious feel; Break It
Yourself is neither lightweight/carnivalesque, nor
surrealistic/psychedelic, as most of Bird's earlier albums are. Once you
decipher the man's lyrics using whatever personal key you may find on your own,
the album may not turn out to be telling us lots of things that we do not
already know. But I do get the feeling that, having already established
himself as an unsurpassed master of a certain musical form, Bird is now finally trying to inject that form with substance, or, at least, a little bit of
philosophical realism that goes along very nicely with his particular brand of
music.
For those who will get their first taste of
Bird with Break It Yourself, the
record may well be a revelation. For those who have already thoroughly explored
his career and found it worthy without developing a fanatical attitude, it may
require a few additional listens — by the end of which you will probably get the feeling that these
days, Andrew Bird is treating himself with an extra dose of self-admiration
compared to the way it used to be. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing: to me,
it made Break It Yourself a more
interesting and challenging experience than Noble Beast, with a guaranteed thumbs up. On the other hand, this may also breed
trouble for the future. We'll just have to wait and see.
HANDS OF GLORY (2012)
1) Three White Horses; 2) When
That Helicopter Comes; 3) Spirograph; 4) Railroad Bill; 5) Something Biblical;
6) If I Needed You; 7) Orpheo; 8) Beyond The Valley Of The Three White Horses.
Two fully formed LPs over the course of one
year might be a bit too much even for a wonderboy of Andrew Bird's caliber, so
do not expect any big deals from Hands
Of Glory, which is basically just a little pony companion to the big white
steed of Break It Yourself. It is
sparse, minimalistically produced, very much country-oriented, not entirely
self-written, with a subset of covers ranging from traditional folk to Townes
Van Zandt — definitely not an attempt
to win over a new bunch of fans, rather just a small extra Thanksgiving gift
for the old ones.
Other than this humble statement of fact, I am not
even sure what to say. The textures, moods, vocals, instrumental techniques,
everything here has already been commented upon in preceding reviews. The
people at Pitchfork tried choosing a general «apocalyptic» angle, indicating that
many, if not most, of these songs deal with visions of the end of the world,
destruction, redemption, and resurrection, but with Andrew Bird, these themes
are actually always on the edge of
the knife — his trademark fin-du-siècle
melancholy has always been that of a morose guy with a fiddle, sitting on the
ravine's edge, waiting for the shit to hit the fan once he finally plays his
last note and puts down the instrument. Who cares if now, on a couple of songs,
he is adding some words on the same
subject to the music? The effect is still the same.
In a way, it almost looks like the first seven
songs have all been assembled here just to provide a «conventional» intro to
the album's longest, and only «experimental» number — ʽBeyond The Valley
Of The Three White Horsesʼ, with a «looped» reference to the album's
opening number, throws on some majorly stoned psychedelic thrills, starting off
as a completely innocent instrumental shuffle, then gradually burrowing its
way into a whirly-wobbly tunnel of sound as the violin backgrounds are phased,
inverted, mortified, and sucked out into space. The effect can be donwright
hallucinogenic in a proper context — problem is, in an unproper context, it can
be severely irritating instead, and who knows which context you will be hearing it in? For every person
for whom this «works», there will be another one who will accuse Andrew Bird of
«Going Gaga à la Björk»,
and the world will not have come one step closer to peace and love for all.
Still, the seven «normal» songs, including a
scaled-down remake of ʽOrpheo Looks Backʼ from the previous album; a
semi-hilarious, semi-sad cover of the traditional country tune ʽRailroad
Billʼ that might have been an outtake from Oh! The Grandeur for all I care; and an ominous feedback-meets-fiddle
take on The Handsome Family's ʽWhen That Helicopter Comesʼ — these
all constitute very pleasant, traditional, entertaining listening for those who
dig roots-rock in general and/or Bird's personal take on it in particular.
There is enough professionalism, intelligence, tact, and modest catchiness to
even warrant the usual thumbs up. It just happens to be a somewhat
disinterested thumbs up.
(Besides, it seems that, try as he might,
Andrew just won't be able to get the guitar out of business as pop music's
leading instrument — somehow, it seems easier to keep on writing interesting
guitar-based pop songs than violin-based ones. Maybe the problem is in that
these songs aren't really based on
the violin — it's fairly hard to get it to serve as a stable rhythmic
foundation for this kind of music — and end up being just a collection of
delicate lead lines hanging out of nowhere and fading back into nowhere, which
doesn't exactly work well for the memorability department. But never mind, just
a spontaneous speculation on my part here, really).
THINGS ARE REALLY
GREAT HERE, SORT OF (2014)
1) Cathedral In The Dell; 2)
Tin Foiled; 3) Giant Of Illinois; 4) So Much Wine, Merry Christmas; 5) My
Sister's Tiny Hands; 6) The Sad Milkman; 7) Don't Be Scared; 8) Frogs Singing;
9) Drunk By Noon; 10) Far From Any Road.
This is yet another «minor» release, perhaps
not worth a lengthy review, but well worth a few verbal niceties. Either
suffering from writer's block (and I certainly do not blame him for that at this
point in his career), or simply in search for something slightly different, our
friend Andrew here releases a short CD with ten covers of songs by The Handsome
Family — an alt-country duo from Chicago/Albuquerque, consisting of husband and
wife Brett and Rennie Sparks. I've listened to a few of these songs in their
original versions, and they sound more or less like an alt-country record is
supposed to sound: firmly rooted in the genre's basics, but bravely struggling
to avoid the genre's clichés and overall shallowness — lyrically
intelligent, musically competent, listenable, but not particularly inspiring.
The Andrew Bird touch, though, does these songs
some major good. Sparse, minimalistic arrangements (although he does employ
all of his band from the previous album) and especially Bird's familiar tenor
give them extra romantic vulnerability and extra emotional depth; he also makes
significant melodic changes to suit his own style — for instance, the original
ʽFar From Any Roadʼ had a bit of a spaghetti-western aura to it, with
an epic brass section and all, whereas Bird's guitar-and-eerie-violin-only
arrangement actually does a better job of conveying a wanderer's desert
experience with a lonely cactus.
One thing about the Sparks duo (no, not those Sparks — Brett and Rennie, I mean)
is that they write almost surprisingly decent lyrics, which frequently attract
more attention than the music and may actually explain Bird's interest in them.
Not every country outfit, not even every alt-country
outfit, would write a song about the Köln Cathedral, for instance, and
then go from there to a "fiberglass castle in Wisconsin"
(ʽCathedral In The Dellʼ) — but somehow Andrew Bird seems just like
the guy that you'd associate with singing a song that takes the Cathedral as
its central metaphor, maybe because everything about Bird is so «high», like
the Cathedral itself — the singing, the whistling, the violin playing, always
stuck somewhere high up in the clouds.
Then there's the mystical/religious metaphors,
like the one with the cactus in the desert, where it is hard to understand if
the metaphor is spiritual or amorous or both, but the desert imagery is used
cleverly all the same, and Bird's haunting arrangement does phenomenally well agree with New Mexican desert at sunset
(something I have had the pleasure of experiencing personally a few times, so I
know what I'm talking about here), making ʽFar From Any Roadʼ the
definitive highlight of this brief experience.
That said, do not expect any great songwriting
or innovative arrangements on the whole: the basic structures of the songs are
fairly traditional, the style is fairly well unified, and there are no attempts
to dazzle the listener (in fact, Bird's violin is kept strictly in check
throughout, and the acoustic guitar parts are not particularly interesting by
themselves). I would say that the most intriguing aspect of the album is simply
that we get to witness the process of taking a non-Bird song and effortlessly
transforming it into a Bird song — so it is instructive to listen to this stuff
back to back with the originals, see how this man's brain works «when given the
data». Without the originals, this is simply another small bunch of very
typical and predictable Andrew Bird, albeit with some new, different lyrical
angles. Short and sweet, I give it a usual thumbs up, but only because it is adequately low
on ambition — and offers us no clue as to whether this guy still has it in him
to properly amaze us, rather than give us what we already well know, sometime in
the near (or faraway) future.
ECHOLOCATIONS: CANYON (2015)
1) Sweep The Field; 2) Groping
The Dark; 3) Rising Water; 4) Antrozous; 5) The Return Of Yawny; 6) Before The
Germans Came; 7) The Canyon Wants To Hear C Sharp.
In 2015, Andrew Bird packed his violin and some
recording equipment, travelled all the way to the Coyote Gulch canyons in Utah,
and conducted a serious scientific experiment to answer the question: "If
one plays a violin inside a canyon, will there be an echo?" The results
would not only be self-sufficient on their own, but would also function as a
part of an installation (of course) presented at the Boston Institute of
Contemporary Art for three months, during which any Bostoner unable to scrape
up the money for a ticket to Utah could come visit and experience what it would
be like if you had to spend fifty minutes in a canyon, playing your violin.
Needless to say, we here at Only Solitaire
immediately had to alert the trusty Bullshit Patrol; but, either out of sheer
respect for the hitherto illustrious career of Mr. Bird, or for some deeper reason,
perhaps, the Patrol refused to make an arrest, stating that, although the album
is definitely experimental, it is (a) eminently listenable and (b)
experimental in the good sense of the word, as in, «somebody who is genuinely
searching for new sounds in hopes of tapping into some hitherto unexplored
corner of one's emotions». Nobody can insist that the tapping actually took
place, but the attempt is at least curious, and at most — pleasant.
Obviously, this is an ambient-minimalist
record, with Andrew Bird presenting himself as the Brian Eno of the violin,
using it as an impressionist tool while various nature sounds (wind and water,
mostly — apparently, there's nothing like an Andrew Bird violin melody to scare
all the actual coyotes away) are reverberating in the background. But it is not
particularly dissonant, and the things he plays are, in fact, quite diverse —
ranging from deconstructed elements of some baroque violin partita (ʽSweep
The Fieldʼ, which begins that way and then turns into more of a modern
classical piece for violin and whistle) to loops of pretty flourishes without a
cause (ʽGroping The Darkʼ) to attempts at emulating an Indian,
sitar-like sound with the violin (ʽAntrozousʼ). ʽBefore The
Germans Cameʼ, despite the title, sounds like the man's tribute to Bach;
and while I am not positively sure if ʽThe Canyon Wants To Hear C
Sharpʼ, not being in any way related to the canyon or anything, that last
composition gives the impression of somebody trying to play a serious blues jam
on solo violin, with more Eastern elements woven in for good measure.
Therefore, to avoid falling into the iron hands
of the Bullshit Patrol, you'd probably be better off forgetting about the
general setting of the recording — honestly, most of the time you'd have no
idea that this was not recorded in a
studio, and who really cares? — and just view this as a set of experimental
violin pieces played by somebody who actually understands what he's doing. As
an ambient record, the violin and particularly Bird's individualistic manner of
playing it make it a somewhat unique experience, and somehow it still manages
to remain permeated with his lonely, melancholic spirit. Well, as Jimi said,
"If the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art fell in the sea — let it be,
it ain't me, 'cos Andrew Bird got his own world to look through, and at least he
ain't gonna copy Vanessa Mae". And since I'm in no position to disagree
with Jimi, the worst I can do is not give this record a thumbs up, because I
honestly did not enjoy it that much — and besides, it's only the first one in
an announced series that promises to bring you even more of those «echolocations» before the industry runs out of
violin strings, so I'm saving up on thumbs in advance. But it's got
mood-setting potential, all right, and it is
Andrew Bird, after all: one of the few modern musicians with near-impeccable
taste, whether you hate it or love it.
ARE YOU SERIOUS (2016)
1) Capsized; 2) Roma Fade; 3)
Truth Lies Low; 4) Puma; 5) Chemical Switches; 6) Left Handed Kisses; 7) Are
You Serious; 8) Saints Preservus; 9) The New Saint Jude; 10) Valleys Of The
Young; 11) Bellevue; 12*) Shoulder Mountain; 13*) Pulaski.
Bird likes to be prolific in so many different
ways that the border between «basic» albums and «special» (live, ambient,
cover, etc.) projects in his career tends to become blurred; but, the way I see
it, Are You Serious is really his
first «basic» album in about four years, since at least Break It Yourself — comprised of bona fide art-pop songs and
nothing else. It appears that, after several years of fiddling about, the idea
here was to produce something normal and accessible, reflecting his new family
life and values, and, indeed, the songs are generally less cryptic lyrically
and less provocative musically than you'd typically expect from the man.
And that is perfectly all right with me, except
the record does little to shatter my belief that Andrew is about a decade past
his creative peak already (which is not a crime — not even the Beatles had
themselves the luxury of ten uninterrupted years of creative growth); then
again, an album that pursues intimately personal goals need not necessarily
strive for originality as well, and this one is just a bunch of family-oriented
songs from the most light-footed loner in modern pop music, and should be taken
as such, and enjoyed like a familiar, predictable, but still delicious gourmet
dinner.
Most of the songs combine sincerity with
catchiness and — how could we make without that? — a lyrical or musical
allegory or two. The very first song, ʽCapsizedʼ, will reassure us
that, happily settled family man or not, this is still the same old neurotic
Andrew Bird, and he still needs somebody by his side when he has to pull it
together, and there's just no telling how much worse things get when the
somebody in question goes missing: "another break up, this ship is
capsized", and we get archaic references to Jesus making our dying bed.
The accompanying music is like a cross between James Brown and Tom Waits,
borrowing the funkiness of the former and the hoarse, distorted approach to
instrumentation of the latter, with broken guitar riffs that could have come
from Marc Ribot (actually, they come from Blake Mills) — but unlike either of
them, Andrew never loses his cool, so that most of the drama is implicit,
reflected in the tense, suspenseful atmosphere but never breaking through to
the surface.
It's all about paranoia, really — a set of
songs written by somebody who allegedly feels confused and insecure around
other people, and then finally finds himself in that embarrassing position when
someone (even someone loved) is always
around. "And if she sees you, it changes you / Rearranges your
molecules", he sings on ʽRoma Fadeʼ to an oddly danceable and
bizarrely morose beat, continuing and appropriating the old tradition of
«love's a wonderfully dangerous and dangerously wonderful thing». It gets worse
on ʽPumaʼ: "She was radioactive for seven days / How I wanted to
be holding her anyways / But the doctors, they told me to stay away / Due to
flying neutrinos and the gamma rays" — no, this is not misogyny, this is
more like an inverted case of autophobia, with Bird's jerky, hopping staccato violin
rhythms reflecting his agitated state of mind and the seeming impossibility of
making the right choice.
Musically, the songs seem to draw upon all
sorts of local pop traditions, from Mexican to Caribbean to French to Celtic
to good old 1970s R&B, but all the influences are softly converted to
«Andrew Bird music», based on violins and jazzy guitars, and essentially it
feels like the man has no preferences whatsoever — as long as the whole thing
does not come close to stereotypical «rock» or «pop», and as long as he's
allowed to keep that guitar / violin setup, anything goes at any time. One of
the simpler, folksier songs is a duet with Fiona Apple (ʽLeft Handed
Kissesʼ), who, I guess, could in certain respects be viewed as the female
Andrew Bird, so the collaboration should come across as natural — yes and no,
because with these two certified loners, they have no chemistry whatsoever, and
even when they're singing at the same time, they're pretty much doing it
without noticing that the other guy is in the same room, so... (actually, most
of the time he's not even looking at her in the accompanying video, so even
visually it feels as if they're talking to each other and to the wall simultaneously). It's kinda cute, even if there's a
bit of pretentious artificialness to the performance.
In any case, the biggest deal here is that it's
easier to relate to a record like this than it is to relate to most of Andrew's
usual dialogs with his inner demons, where you really have to be one of the
demons in question to «get» everything that is going on. This, and the fact
that repeated listens will have the melodies to at least ʽCapsizedʼ,
the title track, and ʽPumaʼ stuck in your head for days, is what makes the record stand out a good bit
from the rest of Andrew's over-inflated latter day catalog, even if it does not
exactly promise a brighter future. Thumbs up, and a special recommendation for
highly sensitive boys with lotsa girl troubles, just to let you know that
you're not alone, and maybe you should pick up some violin lessons.
HALF WAY HOME (2012)
1) Acrobat; 2) The Waiting; 3)
Safe In The Womb; 4) Lonely Universe; 5) Can't Wait Until Tomorrow; 6) Always
Half Strange; 7) You Are Song; 8) Miranda; 9) The Sky Opened Up; 10) Free; 11)
Tiniest Seed.
Strange, strange times, these 2010s —
everything is alive, everything is dead, everything is in between, call it the
Schrödinger decade if you wish. Here is Angel Olsen, a fresh face
(although, as of 2017 when I am writing this text, she already has a six-year
solo career behind her back, a time span that was enough for the Beatles to
proceed from ʽLove Me Doʼ to ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ) who wants
to put her own spin on the genre of acoustic-folk-based singer-songwriting,
taking her cues from Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, and maybe all
these lesser known and more poorly remembered female heroes of the past like
Laura Nyro and Janis Ian. A genre whose heyday ended about four decades ago,
but hey, it's the 2010s, a time when anything goes, when a nostalgic revival
can no longer be called a nostalgic revival, because «nostalgic» presumes a
clear distinction between past, present, and future, and we no longer have one.
Future is past, past is future, and present is an ephemeral piece of nonsense.
Anyway, Angel Olsen. We do not know that much
about her yet, except that she comes from St. Louis, Missouri, she sang backup
vocals for Will Oldham for a short while, she released her first homebrewed
recordings on the short self-produced EP Strange
Cacti in 2011, and she got picked up by the tiny indie label Bathetic
Records in 2012. Half Way Home, her
proper LP debut, appeared one year later, and featured eleven songs that were
mostly written, performed, and recorded by Olsen on her own, with occasional help
from some of Oldham's musicians (Ben Boye on organ and Emmett Kelly, also the
leader of The Cairo Gang, on guitar). Being quite low-key, the record did not
make much of an impact other than on an occasional admirer-reviewer (Laura
Snapes wrote a gushing novel on the album at Pitchfork), but now that we all
have the opportunity to compare it with Olsen's most recent major success, I
think it's only fair to say that the lady comes out fully fleshed-out and
accomplished here — skipping the ʽLove Me Doʼ stage altogether and
aiming straight for a Rubber Soul
kind of result, if not higher.
Of the four possible aspects of the budding
singer-songwriter — musician, melodicist, lyricist, vocalist — I think it is
fairly safe to cross out the first two from the start. Olsen plays a nice
acoustic guitar, and has clearly excelled at her homework studying those Drake
and Mitchell chords, but, like 99% of indie kids these days, exploring
non-trivial, innovative ways of riding her instrument is clearly not a priority
(admittedly, it is not even clear what a «non-trivial, innovative way» of
playing folk-based acoustic guitar would sound like these days). Likewise, the
melodies aren't particularly interesting because most of these instrumental and
vocal patterns had been worn thin the aforementioned four decades ago; the only
point of curiosity is that, from time to time, she also tries to integrate a
retro pop sound in the tapestry, taking occasional cues from Roy Orbison
(especially in the vocal hook department) and from those British kids who were
all right back in the day (funny thing, every time she sings
"sometimes..." on ʽFreeʼ, I feel a strong urge to finish it
for her with "...I feel I gotta get away", though, of course, the
majority of Angel's young fans from today probably won't even recognize the
reference).
As a lyricist, she's okay. Technically, this is
an album of love songs; almost every single song is a soliloquy addressed to an
imaginary partner, and the real good news — maybe the one thing that makes me instantaneously biased in favor of the
record — is that, believe it or not, this is not one of the miriads of
«break-up albums» that singer-songwriters tend to be associated with these
days. The basic underlying concept here is that of love offering temporary
relief and respite from fear and darkness: the heroine was ʽSafe In The
Wombʼ before finding herself in this ʽLonely Universeʼ,
surrounded by strange and ugly things, and now she is searching for safety,
tranquility, and understanding that cannot be reached on one's own. Not an
entirely new concept, of course, but at least a fresher one than a ten
thousandth attempt at venting your frustration over an inexperienced teenage
love affair, and, most importantly, without annoyingly self-aggravating fits of
narcissism that tend to plague these attempts. "Who cares I'm not a
moralist / I'm just a lady with some time", she declares in the very first
track, and somehow I doubt we'll ever get a line like that from the likes of
either Adele or Joanna Newsom.
But the main point of attraction, and probably
the one and only that managed to so quickly endear her to the fanbase, is her
voice and manner — alternating between the serious schoolteacher tone to a
strangely fascinating pop vibrato à
la Roy Orbison, not necessarily limited to the poppier, rhythmic tunes like
ʽThe Waitingʼ and ʽFreeʼ. In a world that has probably seen
and heard it all, it's not a totally unique voice, but an interesting one:
thick, rich on low overtones, although it seems as if she is intentionally
trying to sing much lower than her natural range (like a soprano reaching for
contralto) — but it feels okay, symbolic of the idea of life dragging you down,
if you know what I mean. That said, I totally disagree with the frequently
expressed opinion about sadness
being the overwhelming emotion on these songs: on the contrary, Half Way Home feels like a pretty happy
album, except that happiness is something that the heroine is looking for and
striving to achieve, rather than an accomplished state.
The only proverbially «sad» song on the album
is its only epic-length track, ʽLonely Universeʼ, which drags on for
seven minutes and does indeed deal with loss and separation — no wonder it is
also the weakest track on the entire album, a slow, lethargic waltz where you
are supposed to empathize with a chorus that goes "goodbye, sweet Mother
Earth, without you now I'm a lonely universe". It is not melodically
stronger or weaker than anything else on here — it's just that its bleakness
sounds contrived and generic next to the far more mixed feelings on the other
tracks, and also that no Angel Olsen song deserves to be seven minutes long.
Give me something short and poppy like ʽFreeʼ instead — it might be a
100% Buddy Holly / Roy Orbison / Pete Townshend rip-off, but with Olsen's
voice behind it, the vibe gets a new reading that combines tenderness with
depth and maturity, or something like that.
And basically, that's it. If you want to wax
philosophical on the inner strength and magic of the album, go read the
Pitchfork review about how the main theme of this album is "a thoughtful,
never morbid belief in the finality of death" and how its greatest asset
is "its openness to what could be, to potential" (funny, I always
thought that the greatest song about "openness to what could be" was
McCartney's ʽWhy Don't We Do It In The Road?ʼ). I can only sum up by
saying that I enjoyed listening to this stuff — that, upon my third listen, I
remained un-irritated by most of it, and that, in itself, is already a big plus,
though hardly worth a well-deserved thumbs up: passable lyrics and a special
vocal timbre are not enough, after all, to cover for a total lack of original
songwriting or interesting musical arrangements. But sufficiently decent, I
guess, for the oh-so-vague standards of 2012.
BURN YOUR FIRE FOR NO WITNESS (2014)
1) Unfucktheworld; 2)
Forgiven/Forgotten; 3) Hi-Five; 4) White Fire; 5) High & Wild; 6) Lights
Out; 7) Stars; 8) Iota; 9) Dance Slow Decades; 10) Enemy; 11) Windows.
I hate to say it because it might seem
seriously unfair to some of my readers, but I have to say it anyway: in my
opinion, albums that focus exclusively on the artist's (real or imaginary)
relation with his/her other simply do not work in the 21st century any longer.
Unless this subject simply serves as a generic theme for some catchy pop hooks,
chances of the artist offering us some deeply original and consistently captivating soulful insights are simply close to
zero — even when the artist is as naturally gifted, as striving, and as
tasteful as Angel Olsen. She is all these things, yes, and they are disclosed
even better on her second album than they were on the first, and yet, even
after three or four listens, my reaction is still close to "I really can't
wait for this to end".
It's not as if she were intentionally running
some single idea into the ground — on the contrary, Burn Your Fire For No Witness is a formal expansion on already
conquered territory, with deeper production, stronger reliance on electric
instruments, an amalgamation of folk and country motives with psycho-pop and
experimental rock. Throw in that husky voice, wobbling between harshness and
tenderness, acceptance and rejection, vulnerability and whatever is the
opposite of vulnerability, and here's solid proof that women have won over men
these days, since the female equivalent of Bon Iver at least makes music that
does not make you want to sign the petition for an executive order banning the
use of log cabins all across America.
And still, there is a problem, and that problem
is: I do not believe this music.
Listening to this, to me, is like watching a magic show delivered by an
apprentice whose rubber bands and third arms show all over the place. I hear
echoes of all her influences (which remain largely the same as they used to
be), I hear commitment, but it's like the spells she tries to cast are totally
misplaced, or like the ingredients she uses for them are all made in Taiwan or
something.
Case in point: ʽWhite Fireʼ, the
longest and also one of the sparsest ballads on the album, sounds like a cover
of a lost Leonard Cohen song from the Songs
Of Love And Hate era — same Cohen-endorsed acoustic picking sequence, same
simple poetic verse structure, same mood of loneliness and desolation. But
where a real Cohen can (not always, but frequently) put me in a state of trance
with this simple trickery, Angel Olsen sounds like a poser in comparison. (I
stress the in comparison bit, because
in real life everything works in comparison, and if you happen to be a young
fan who admires Olsen but has not yet had a chance to seriously check out
Cohen, I wish you a long, happy, fruitful, and instructive life ahead). Is it
just because Leonard was first and she comes so very very next? Or is it
because Leonard's poetry was what it really was — serious poetry, continuing
and deepening an old, respectable, well-studied, and perfectly understood
tradition — whereas Olsen's lyrics sound like half-decent, uneducated,
unenlightened imitations? Is it because, even when you cannot suggest any
direct interpretation, Leonard still ends up sounding like he's really into something serious and deeply
troubling, whereas Olsen's soulful admonition of "if you've still got some
light in you then go before it's gone / burn your fire for no witness, it's the
only way it's done" seems to be addressed to nobody in particular and to
signify nothing in particular?
Or maybe I'm just a grumpy old guy, because on
YouTube, people behave in a far more simple manner — they just say "She
sounds like a female Leonard Cohen! How beautiful!" and leave it at that.
Well... something tells me that perhaps, fifty years from now, people will
still be listening to those old Cohen records without going "He sounds
like a male Angel Olsen! How charming!" At least if there was a shred of
something new to this second-hand magic of a monotonous mantra stretched over
seven minutes and two chords, that could help me out — but when a clear lack of
effort is being passed for artistic humility and «focus on the essential», it
just irritates me.
It's a bit easier when she embarks on her
journey to become the female Roy Orbison rather than Leonard Cohen — the songs
are shorter, less pretentious, a bit less monotonous, and incorporate a
toe-tapping element that always helps out when you're not a master charmer by
trade. So, with lots of psychedelically distorted guitars and happy-tragic
vocalizing, ʽHi-Fiveʼ is probably one of the better numbers on the record,
with an intentionally simplified, but not trivialized, approach to lyrics — the
lady is searching for somebody who'd agree to be her partner in loneliness.
Once again, she does not win me over: that "I feel so lonesome, I could
cry..." bit does not feel particularly lonesome. But at least it's
solidly within the pop tradition, and the whole thing ends up being moderately
catchy and somewhat fun.
More often, the songs end up between these two
extremes, though, and end up being too poppy to be serious and too serious to
be poppy. The opening title ʽUnfucktheworldʼ sounds like something
you'd expect to see on a hardcore punk record, but the song, like every other
song on here, is still about Me and You, and I take this to mean that the world
is fucked because Me and You cannot find an ideal understanding, and as soon as
that understanding is found, The World Becomes Unfucked, and the lion lies
down with the lamb. But for now, all that we have established is that "I
am the only one now", delivered in a semi-frightened cold murmur that
probably suggests an element of dehumanization. But who dehumanized her? How
did it happen? Was it serious? Was it inevitable? Is there a cure? Does Prozac
help? Can we help? Could we at least
suggest one extra chord in the musical backing?..
Her singing is perhaps most pretty, but also
most confusing, on the last track, ʽWindowsʼ. Just like ʽTiniest
Seedʼ on the previous record, this last track seems to offer an optimistic
way out — "won't you open a window sometime, what's so wrong with the
light?" — except it is not clear who she is addressing the question to:
the intangible Other or to her own self. "You" suggests the Other,
but it is around herself that she spent weaving a frail web of darkness and
loneliness for the previous ten songs, so perhaps Me and You simply got merged
in one (not too difficult to do considering a common base in loneliness). Or
maybe there's a third character in here somewhere, like a fairy of light and
hope floating down on two poor would-be lovers and poking them around:
"Why can't you see? Are you blind? Are you dead? Are you all right?"
Problem is, they're not all right but they're not all wrong, either. As a
tear-down-the-wall conclusion to an album that has just spent forty minutes
trying to convince us that there was
a wall in the first place (and failing to properly convince me, for one),
ʽWindowsʼ feels just a tad phony the same way the rest of the album
sounded just a tad phony.
I mean, I just can't help it, sorry, but when a
song like ʽStarsʼ proclaims that "I feel so much at once that I
could scream", and then proceeds to murmur and hum instead of, you know,
actually screaming, «phony» is really quite a mild word to express my
dissatisfaction with the final product. Sure, we can always find a cop-out —
like suggesting that the murmur and hum is a meaningful artistic sublimation
for loud emotional outburst (and God forbid that Angel Olsen would end up
pigeonholed as an emo kid, anyway), or that the entire song is really about
closing one's eyes and freezing on the spot — but whatever be the cop-out,
intuitively I still feel a mismatch between words, voice, and music, no matter
which of the tracks I turn to. Nice try, for sure, but with a communicative
breakdown like that, I will not pretend to pass this for a communicative
success — nor, for that matter, will I admit that a selection of rave reviews
for the album had me even for one second convinced that the reviewers in
question were more successful in their attempts at communication than poor
little me. But I will refrain from a thumbs down, if only because I still
respect this sort of effort, and because in this kind of business, it is very
easy to degrade yourself to the state of pretentious whiner (cue Justin Vernon
again), which is something that Olsen has securely safeguarded herself against.
MY WOMAN (2016)
1) Intern; 2) Never Be Mine;
3) Shut Up Kiss Me; 4) Give It Up; 5) Not Gonna Kill You; 6) Heart Shaped Face;
7) Sister; 8) Those Were The Days; 9) Woman; 10) Pops.
Third time's the charm, I guess... but then,
Olsen did try to pull all the stops in order to attract attention this time
around — on My Woman (and no, she's
not a lesbian, the title is supposed to read like «the woman in me» or
something like that), she dumps the log cabin for an abandoned palace, expanding
in style, ambition, and production values as if there was a Phil Spector behind
her back. Actually, not just Phil Spector: My Woman has a real hodge-podge of influences, ranging from
synth-pop to Sixties' girl groups to Stevie Nicks to Neil Young, yet all the
songs are still tied together conceptually with Olsen's lyrics and vocal
delivery that logically continue and develop what she'd begun on the first two
records. Now if only we could find the right words to define and describe what she'd begun on the first two
records...
I suppose it's really all about confusion, in
the end. Once again, some people will speak about the loneliness and depression
of the record, but I do believe it is mostly about finding the real me — the
very first song goes "doesn't matter who you are or what you've done /
still got to wake up and be someone" — and the stylistic mix agrees with
that, as Olsen jumps from one musical paradigm into another as if she were
trying out an endless wardrobe, lost in the dazzling array of fashions, sizes,
and colors. For her, this is way better (and probably more honest) than
assuming one particular image, glossing it up and sticking to it — this is why,
even if ʽInternʼ sounds a lot like Lana Del Rey, it is much better
than any Lana Del Rey song because it still feels more natural, humble, and
earthy than Lana's manipulative-theatrical cheapness.
The specific thematic particularities of these
songs — does she get her man? is she losing her man? is she mistreating her
man? is she being mistreated by her man? is she in favor or against free love?
is she gay? etc. etc. — do not fascinate me any more than did the themes of her
Cohen / Mitchell phase; honestly, you do not need Angel Olsen as your spiritual
guru through the world of personal relations. I simply prefer to interpret My Woman as a record that poses more
questions than it gives answers ("I dare you to understand what makes me
a woman", she belts out on the title track, but it is never clear that she
herself understands that), a brooding stream of consciousness that sometimes
clothes itself in pop hooks and sometimes just in sonic atmosphere, but at
least does so with a sufficient degree of energy, diversity, and good taste to
keep me involved: something that was barely possible on the previous two
albums.
According to Olsen herself, the album was
structured as a two-part LP: shorter, tighter, hookier pop songs on the first
side and longer, looser, more atmospheric rants and broodings on the second
one. Most likely, this was a move calculated to attract more listeners (no
wonder she did not choose to reverse the order — had ʽSisterʼ and
ʽWomanʼ been the first tracks, many would probably not have the
stimulus to keep on listening), but since this is a personality-driven record,
the difference between the two batches is not really that crucial. For instance, the cool thing about ʽShut Up Kiss
Meʼ is not that its melody echoes themes of the Ronettes and the Shirelles
— it is that these themes are given a solid reworking, as Olsen forces her love
on the other guy rather than pleads for it: the "shut up, kiss me, hold me
tight!" hook is delivered in such a nervously sped up manner as could
never have been considered proper for any of the classic girl groups. I am
still unsure of how sincere this stuff is, or if Angel herself understands
properly what it is she is trying to communicate, but it is a brave attempt at
taking a good old sound and adapting it for the purposes of the 21st century
woman, regardless of whether it succeeds or not.
The best song on the first half, as far as I'm
concerned, is ʽNot Gonna Kill Youʼ, which survives as an emotional
crescendo — melodically, it seems to borrow inspiration from The Who, with lots
of choppy chords and a nearly-mad percussion track, but vocally, it features a
gradual transformation of the singer into a disembodied ghost: the line "'til
I'm nothing else but the feeling" is followed by a realisation of that
promise, and it's cool — she soars, she echoes, she howls, she goes from bright
to dark, it's a pretty darn awesome performance, even a little scary, although
she does try to reassure us that "it's not gonna kill you, it's not gonna
break you, it's just gonna shake you", as if coaxing us into taking a
roller coaster ride. Does she sound possessed or what? Well, at this level she
probably still wouldn't be able to stand up to the levels of Janis or Patti
Smith, but she still passes the screamer test with flying colors.
Whether or not you will be ready to accept the
longer tracks is another matter. ʽSisterʼ clearly channels the spirit
of Tusk-era Stevie Nicks — she even
seems to sing with the same nasal rasp that Stevie had at the time, even
though, being cocaine-free, Angel probably has more of an actual nose — but her
guitar player ain't no Lindsey Buckingham, and the messy guitar jam at the end
of the song just adds confusion, rather than emotional uplift.
ʽWomanʼ is better, if you get through the first few minutes —
eventually, the vocals become anthemic and banshee-like, and the lead guitar
begins playing a grim, jagged, psycho-bluesy pattern that's somewhere in
between Neil Young and Bardo Pond, though, again, neither reaching the ecstatic
heights of the former nor plunging to the grimy, trance-inducing depths of the
latter. All in all, I'd say she tries to bite off far more than she can chew on
these «epics» — but at least she doesn't exactly fall flat on her face, which
is already a big plus.
Towards the end, she returns once more to her
beloved minimalism: ʽPopsʼ bobs up and down on two heavily sustained
piano chords and seems to tell us that it didn't work out after all — no wonder,
because if the real life Angel Olsen is at least half of her lyrical heroine, dating her would probably be a
nightmare even for Socrates — but then again, we're never ever even sure of what exactly it was that did not work
out. "I'll be the thing that lives in the dream when it's gone", she
concludes, which is probably exactly the way I'm going to remember her once
this review is over: clearly, there was
something here, but it's almost impossible to put your finger on it, or even to
tell if you felt sympathetic towards the artist or not.
I feel reasonably secure about giving the
record a thumbs
up, because here is a serious musical effort from an artist who has
mastered the art of making her personality override that of her many influences
— something that was still far from clear on the previous two records. Unfortunately,
I am still under the impression that this personality is overblown way out of
proportion: too many of her ideas on the musical/lyrical disclosure of «Love as
Transcendental Power Equally Capable of Creation and Destruction» seem to be
realized in a theatrical and exaggerated manner. Or, roughly speaking, if this
is art rock, then the compositional and musical side of it leaves a lot to be
desired — but if this is pop, it takes itself much too seriously. Still,
there's no denying that a bigger and brasher sound, as well as stylistic
diversity, helped her make the whole thing far more listenable, and it doesn't
hurt, either, that in her role of the Ice Queen she at least treated us to some
impressive blizzards here, rather than just sit and sulk motionless on her ice
throne. Now, do you think it would be too much to ask her for a creative
reinterpretation of the Ramones' ʽI Wanna Be Your Boyfriendʼ for her
next project?..
SPIRIT THEY'RE GONE, SPIRIT THEY'VE VANISHED (2000)
1) Spirit They've Vanished; 2)
April And The Phantom; 3) Untitled; 4) Penny Dreadfuls; 5) Chocolate Girl; 6) Everyone
Whistling; 7) La Rapet; 8) Bat You'll Fly; 9) Someday I'll Grow To Be As Tall As
The Giant; 10) Alvin Row.
The story of what we know today as the «Animal
Collective» formally begins with this homebrewed recording, featuring Avey Tare
(David Portner) on everything except percussion, on the latter featuring Panda
Bear (Noah Lennox). No need to be afraid of the «homebrewed» label: we have
come a long way since the dawn of technology, and it all sounds fantastically
good for something recorded directly in a living room. Well, actually, the
vocals sound like shit, but presumably that was the idea, or close to the
idea.
Since, for the first few years of the team's
recording career, Spirit was only available in a two-digit number of
copies (perhaps three, but given the world's overall population, that's hardly
a significant difference), "important people" only started admiring
its quality in retrospect, but the retrospect turned out to be fortunate: most
indie bands, no matter how respectable they become eventually, only wish their
initial, pre-big label, efforts got the same amount of admiration.
What is it that makes this recording important
in any way, or simply interesting? As much as I'm left indifferent by it, I
can't deny that I haven't heard anything like it before. The best way to describe
the genre in which it is cast — or, in fact, which it creates — is arguably
"Psychedelic Avantgarde For Kiddies", where "avantgarde"
stands for "weirdass unpredictable rhythms and chord changes",
"psychedelic" for "trippy effects furnished by the latest in
electronic gadgets", and "kiddies" for "an overall feeling
of almost overdone furry cuteness all over this thing".
Obviously, each of the three directions can be
found separately on any number of albums by any number of artists from the last
five decades, but to combine all three the way A. T. and P. B. have judged them
to be combinable — something fairly unique in here. Many people, even seasoned
listeners, will be left dazed and confused by these sounds, uncertain whether
this really means anything and whether music like that has any future. And
this, I think, is an excellent thing in itself, because these days, too few
things exist that can daze and confuse any more.
The magic does not work on me; I find that the
"cuteness" clashes with the "avantgardism" angle in a way
that sort of flattens both. I'd gather that all of these playful polyrhythms
saddled with fairish vocals, all of these innocent nature sounds interwoven
with jazz modulations, all of these 'Chocolate Girl' and 'April And The
Phantom' song titles mixed with ear-splitting sounds and mind-defying lyrics
pretty much kill off each other's effect. Kids won't like this unless they were
born and raised in nuthouses, and elitists may scoff at the cuteness aspect. To
truly "get into this", you probably have to be an archi-arrogant
hipster with a subconscious need to release and satisfy your inner child — a
category of people that must be about as rare as Jewish Neo-nazis (but since we
know for a fact that Jewish Neo-nazis exist, so should childlike
avantgardists).
Individual songs do not matter at all; it's probably
more correct to perceive all of the album's sixty minutes as one continuous
suite, written for the purposes of exploding your mind rather than ingraining
itself into it. Even after four listens I still haven't been able to decompose
these sixty minutes — not a single moment stands out as particularly inspiring,
particularly catchy, particularly ugly, or particularly out-of-place. It's as
if someone were evenly and meticulously shaking the same sonic kaleidoscope,
letting you in on an endlessly shifting array of glistening dots and bits but
never allowing you to focus in on any one single configuration; in the end,
you're dazzled with what you've just seen but you also find it hard to explain
what it is that you have just seen. In my case at least, you're also not quite
certain about whether the things you have just seen have any actual meaning,
and whether, in fact, there was any necessity in seeing them in the first
place.
One definite complaint I'd like to voice,
though, is that these sonic textures lack any sort of depth. I mentioned
that the recording does not suffer from the usual problems associated with
lo-fi, but nevertheless, all the tunes might have benefited from professional
studio production. In the past, bands like Amon Düül II or the
Cocteau Twins would drag you into their fantasy worlds because they really felt
like three-dimensional worlds; Avey Tare and Panda Bear do not really go
beyond the second dimension, and it feels like you're merely walking on the
pages of their book of fairy tales, not diving into it — and the primary
fault lies not with their composing skills or the strength of their
imagination, but with the poorness of their technical capacities. It is still
amazing how much they managed to accomplish within the four walls of their
living room, but it is not enough to turn this living room into a flying saucer
on chicken legs, if you know what I mean.
It is mostly because of this — implying that
this obstacle was at least somewhat overcome as the years went by — that the
record receives a thumbs down, following
a repulsive reaction from the heart that overrides the positive logical
argumentation of the brain. If this were the only Animal Collective album ever
recorded, some reconsideration might be in order, but this is, after
all, a living-room quality recording by two well-meaning, but still relatively
unexperienced whackos that went on to bigger and better things. And I don't
think this is the best place to start your acquaintance with them, unless you
just live for the challenge.
DANSE MANATEE (2001)
1) A Manatee Dance; 2) Penguin
Penguin; 3) Another White Singer (Little White Glove); 4) Essplode; 5) Meet The
Light Child; 6) Runnin The Round Ball; 6) Bad Crumbs; 7) The Living Toys; 8)
Throwin The Round Ball; 9) Ahhh Good Country; 10) Lablakely Dress; 11) In The
Singing Box.
On their second album, the future Animal
Collective are already a trio, adding "Geologist" (Brian Weitz) on
extra keyboards. Since Geologist has gone on record saying that Danse
Manatee is his favourite album from the team, I'm going to imply that the
shift in sound from Spirit to what we have here has a lot to do with his
honourable presence; but it isn't going to change my opinion on the record,
which isn't exactly sugar and spice.
Spirit — like all seriously notable records by the band, be they good or bad —
regardless of whether you like it or not, mixed fairy-tale fantasy with
avantgarde in a way that could be annoying and curious at the same time. But
the basic idea behind Manatee is different; it's not "let us filter
our child fancies through a net of electronic devices", but rather
"let us filter whatever comes into our heads at any given moment through a
net of electronic devices, utilizing the most astounding and unusual sounds we
can produce in our bedroom". And, since in the best of both worlds the
most astounding and unusual sounds are also, quite frequently, the most
unlistenable ones, the results are predictable. They're also more boring than
they used to be.
There's not even the tiniest ounce of melody;
worse, there's not even the tiniest ounce of captivating atmosphere. There's a
lot of pssh-pssh noises, and a lot of brrr-brrr noises, and a lot of
jing-whee-fjjjrr-kllllng-wshwshwsh-pooka-pooka noises, and, of course, plenty
of stuff to make your dog wish for stronger animal protection laws to be
enforced on its owner. Sometimes they try to sing over it, but it doesn't help
matters much, because they have these high frequencies all over the place that
make it feel like you're listening to painfully low-quality MP3 recordings,
and, instead of tuning in on the vocals, I just tune in to my subconscious
desire to rip all that torturous whistling and wheezing out of the track.
Granted, all of this is slightly more diverse
than Metal Machine Music, but it doesn't have a much larger point,
either, belonging to the same category of artistic statement. The only redeeming
quality is Panda Bear's percussion work, in the good old avantgarde tradition
of all the King Crimson drummers and suchlike; if not for that, there would
hardly be anything here that would distinguish the results from, I'm guessing,
millions of crazyass experimental recordings done by millions of kids in their
millions of bedrooms all over the world. Nevertheless, if you are into
extreme frequencies — for instance, if you believe that God abides in extreme
frequencies, and the only way to get close to God is to attune your ears to the
unattunable — Danse Manatee may be a revelation. But I rather prefer to
think that God abides in 'Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da', so, unsurprisingly, this one
gets a thumbs down without thinking
thrice.
HOLLINNDAGAIN (2002)
1) I See You Pan/Pride And
Fight; 2) Forest Gospel/There's An Arrow/Lablakely Dress.
This is a live album, credited originally to
Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and Geologist, and my take on it will be quite short.
There are people who live and die for this, and there are people that Nature
has rendered unable to get it. I belong to the latter group, and, therefore,
feel justified to exercise my freedom of speech and label this a bunch of
messy, ugly, unlistenable noise, far more «pretentious» in the direct sense of
the word than, say, Tales From Topographic Oceans — at least the old proggers
could play their instruments. (Well, truth be told, Panda Bear does know how to
drum. But this hardly makes me feel any better).
The only ray of light is that today, the world
knows the Animal Collective can do much better than this. But did the world
know it in 2002? In short, there ain't enough thumbs in the world to let you
know just how «down» I'm feeling about this record.
CAMPFIRE SONGS (2003)
1) Queen In My Pictures; 2)
Doggy; 3) Two Corvettes; 4) Moo Rah Rah Rain; 5) De Soto De Son.
One thing is absolutely impossible to deny
about the Animal Collective (by the way, on this album they are still
not the Animal Collective — in fact, here they have no name whatsoever): they
certainly know how to make the same authentic, organic crap in a whole lot of
different ways. Like its two predecessors, Campfire Songs is
proverbially unlistenable, but it's an entirely other style of
unlistenable. Which, for a brief while, even makes things exciting!
The players are Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and new
band member Deakin (Josh Dibb in the alternative universe of The
Establishment), whereas Geologist's talents are only used to operate the three
Sony MiniDisc players that were employed to record the album. The only
discernible instruments are acoustic guitars, around which the "Animals"
weave a complex web of dreamy, repetitive singing. The finishing touch is the
environment — all the recordings, done in one take, were
"authentically" made on a screen porch, with chunks of "nature
noises" also captured separately and then spliced together with the
playing and singing. "Campfire Songs" indeed.
From a technical viewpoint, the vocal harmonies
are the only thing worth praising. Already on the first album it was clear that
Avey Tare and Panda Bear have a serious thing for the Beach Boys, which they
like to combine with extra psychedelic punches. The fact that they're able to
construct such tight, on-key harmonies while sitting on a porch is admirable,
and, under different circumstances, I can imagine myself falling under this
type of spell — even despite the piss-poor instrumentation (boring guitar drone
that, at its best, somewhat recalls early Tyrannosaurus Rex, and, at its worst,
sounds like something a four-year old with half a musical ear could beat out if
he found a mysterious piece of hollowed out wood with six nylon strings
attached in the closet). In fact, I think the album is at its questionable best
when the guitar fades away completely and we are left with nothing but the
hypnotic acappella sounds.
Unfortunately, the lower-than-lo-fi production
completely kills it off for me. Spontaneity and authenticity is one thing, and
awful recording quality is another. If these mantras were given a solid
"brushing up", some part of them at least could have made a cute
psychedelic experience in the tradition of Skip Spence and Tim Buckley. But
when it all sounds like fortuitously captured transmissions from a World War
II-era receiver, that part of the mind which is responsible for relaxation and
tuning in to the Eternal enters into violent conflict with that other part of
the mind which is responsible for intellectual decoding of received signals and
separation of noise from information. Results are about as dreadful as
combining pills with alcohol.
Not that this wasn't the purpose, of course,
but it is hardly funny when talented people intentionally sacrifice their talents
for the sake of making it into the Guinness Book of Weirdness. It may be
respectable, especially considering that with each passing year, it becomes
ever and ever more hard to actually make it (and the Animal Collective are one
of the very few collectives that have a good chance); but it is not enjoyable
at all. From a rational point of view, Campfire Songs is yet another
album that sounds like nothing else, but in this matter, I'd rather cling to
the irrational, which suggests that it is, in fact, bull-de-luxe, and
since it so clearly begs for a thumbs down,
I'll bite and award it with one.
HERE COMES THE INDIAN (2003)
1) Native Belle; 2) Hey Light;
3) Infant Dressing Table; 4) Panic; 5) Two Sails On A Sound; 6) Slippi; 7) Too
Soon.
When trying to appreciate total freak-out
pieces of "music", the important thing is whether your mind is able
to attach any kind of coherent picture to any of them. The sound of the Animal
Collective can generally be described as "kaleidoscopic", but
kaleidoscopes eventually — in fact, pretty soon — become tremendously boring in
their predictable unpredictability, and instead of the usual chaotic glimmer
and glow you begin to yearn for more precise imagery.
Here Comes The Indian seems to be the first truly
"focused" album by the band, or, at least, the first after their
psycho-fairy style debut effort. Maybe it is no coincidence that it is also the
first record officially credited to "The Animal Collective" — as
opposed to earlier efforts which just listed the members by name, as if each
were doing his thing without giving a damn about whether it fit in with what
the others were churning out at the same time or not. Of course, from a
"melodic" or "harmonic" point of view, it is still utter
crap. But there are signs of change and, perhaps, even growing up without
killing off the child within.
Basically, Here Comes The Indian just
happens to match its title. In small parts, it even reminds me of such classic
"tribalistic" efforts as the Residents' Eskimo: filtering the
essence of native, shamanistic harmonies through the avantgarde minds of
thoroughly modern meta-artists. Except, of course, that the Animal Collective,
with their limited means of existence and, perhaps, a somewhat shallower view of
"authenticity", are not interested in mixing real Indian
motives with their electrononsense, but are fully content with their own take
on "The Indian". But that's OK, we can forgive them for that. There's
too much unnecessary "authenticity" in the world these days anyway —
why not replace it with fantasy from time to time?
All seven tracks represent "aggressively
ambient" sonic panoramas, captured in much better quality than Campfire
Songs (even though it still took them about three days in total to do
this), and most of them can indeed be viewed as representing various tribal
activities — war dances around the campfire, ritual chanting while harvesting
the crops, and even the sonic equivalent of a ferocious brave attack
('Panic'). Wedged in between are all sorts of nature panoramas — superficially
peaceful, but loaded with potential danger. Only one track, 'Slippi', might
even be called a "song", but it's short, overproduced, and so full of
tribalism like the others that it might take you a long time before you start
calling it that.
I felt more depth, diversity, and excitement in
this record than in all of the AC's previous efforts put together (yes,
including even Spirit), and not because there really is more
depth and diversity — primarily because there is a sense of purpose which lets
me through the veils to experience the depth and diversity. I cannot say I like
it, of course: it does nothing to sharpen my basic emotions. But there is
something formally grand about it; in fact, when you think all of its paintings
were recorded in three days, in all their complexity, it's hard not to harbour
any respect for the band. The intellectual part of me, therefore, calls for a
decisive thumbs up — first time! — even
as the heart still refuses to budge. But, let's face it, even if it is
shit, it's a kind of shit that at least deserves to be heard.
SUNG TONGS (2004)
1) Leaf House; 2) Who Could Win A Rabbit;
3) The Softest Voice; 4) Winters
Love; 5) Kids On Holiday; 6) Sweet Road; 7) Visiting Friends; 8) College;
9) We Tigers; 10)
Mouth Wooed Her; 11) Good Lovin' Outside; 12) Whaddit I Done.
Finally, the state of Grace has been attained. Sung
Tongs is, almost inarguably so, the Animal Collective at their most
accessible (which is still pretty darn inaccessible) — and, coincidentally, the
one album on which they finally demonstrate the purpose of their very existence.
Unlike Indian, it is not at all heavy on
special effects; many of the tracks are almost completely acoustic, with light,
bright melodies that hearken back to the psycho-folk of Spirit. One big
distinction is the production: despite the fact that, just as usual, all the songs
were recorded in, shall we say, clinically non-sterile conditions, the
"lo-fi feel" is completely missing, making me think that the filthy
sonic hooliganry of Campfire Songs was, in fact, perfectly intentional.
But, most importantly, the thing that really
matters is the singing. To appreciate this, I think one must forget the
gimmickry, the weirdness, the musical minimalism, and concentrate on the manner
in which Avey Tare and Panda Bear weave their waves — best exemplified on the
opening track, 'Leaf House'. This time, I know what this reminds me of: the
Incredible String Band, at their psycho peak in 1967-68. But the Animal
Collective have set themselves the brave task of outdoing their gurus, and in a
sense, a technical one at least, they succeed: the up and down and out of town
undulations of their speech signals are unlike anything I've ever heard.
They're neither heavenly, like with the Cocteau Twins, nor scary, like with
your average Siberian shaman; neither ugly, like with Yoko Ono, nor beautiful,
like with Tim Buckley. What are they?
I am not talking here about the album's low
points, mind you, which it still possesses. From time to time the duo seems to
be wanting to hypnotize us in the old way — blubbering and grumbling over an
endless repetition of two chords (twelve minutes worth of 'Visiting Friends'),
or simply letting what starts off as a cute moment of tenderness evolve into
seven minutes of boredom ('The Softest Voice' — indeed, and not necessarily a
bonus). But everything must be forgiven with 'Kids On Holiday', which plows on
ahead on the strength of the same two chords, yet within a vocal setting that
will twirl your head until it falls off.
In short, the old modus operandi —
combining the psychedelic with the child-like — has come back with a vengeance.
'You don't have to go to college', goes the lone lyrical line on 'College',
and, sure, why should you? Going to college requires killing off, or at
least restraining your inner child, and there's no liking Sung Tongs
without releasing the inner child. I cannot imagine anyone who does not have a
streak of Peter Pan within, or Tinker Bell at least, to get a kick out of all
the wah-wah-wahs on 'Whaddit I Done' (but I refuse to let the truth out about
whether I get a kick out of it or not).
Actually, at the risk of sounding completely
off my rocker, I'd say that the best possible audience for Sung Tongs would
be a kiddie one — that a three-year old, under the right circumstances, would
get more out of it than any adolescent or adult raised on "proper"
music. Some might want to extrapolate this over just about any
avantgarde piece of art, but I doubt if a typical three-year old could be
enticed with Ornette Coleman or Throbbing Gristle; Sung Tongs, to me,
sound like the perfect non-ordinary soundtrack for the non-ordinary mind of the
youngster whose speech mechanisms have not yet become fully separate from his
musical mechanisms. If you have a toddler, try it out. It can do no harm,
can it?
For all the lovely, unpredictable, and
amazingly complex vocal work, these Beach Boys on acid and lollipops get an
unquestionable thumbs up from the
terrified brain department. Obviously, the heart must keep quiet; not being a
three-year old, a mental patient, a ganja lover, or The Man Who Came To Earth,
I don't "love" this record and I never will. But some of us here on
Earth do happen to be Flying Spaghetti Monsters in denial, so I am not
rejecting the possibility of at least a certain amount of mature organic matter
dripping real feeling for Sung Tongs.
FEELS (2005)
1) Did You See The Words; 2) Grass; 3) Flesh Canoe; 4)
The Purple Bottle; 5)
Bees; 6) Banshee Beat; 7) Daffy Duck; 8) Loch Raven; 9) Turn Into Something.
Maybe if you only want one Animal Collective
album, Feels is the one to get. Maybe. Starting with Strawberry Jam,
they would begin to bury themselves under deep, deep layers of kaleidoscopic
sonic panzers, but on Feels you can still experience the band in plenty
of intimate ways (and I mean that in the decent sense of the expression) — and,
at the same time, still quite accessible and, might I suggest, even understandable.
Diehard fans of the band may think of 'Did You
See The Words' and 'Grass' as way too simplistic and mass-marketed, betraying
the unsigned agreement between Panda Bear, Avey Tare and those select few that
actually paid them money for their early releases. I prefer, on the other hand,
to view all of their earlier career as a preparatory stage for these quirky
psycho-pop masterpieces. What I see and feel here is real sunshine-soaked joy,
filtered through a crazy impressionistic mechanism but totally sincere in its
essence. The lyrics, as usual, make no sense, but once lines like 'there's
something living in these lines' and 'there's something starting, don't know
why' are delivered, there is an odd "brand new day" kind of feeling
— obviously, sharpened by the bright, upbeat melody, the steady rhythmic
build-up, and the glimmering production — that can fill you up with optimism if
you just lower the deflector shields for one moment.
But this is no longer whacko fairy-tale muzak
like they used to do early on. This is a different kind of "light",
not the kind I would recommend to play to kids: this is denser stuff, and more
bent on creating solid musical background than just goofing off on a vocal
basis. Certainly the singing is still the central point of attraction: songs
on which there are no solid vocal hooks are only half as good as those songs on
which they continue to invoke the spirit of Brian Wilson circa 1967. But even
when they're only half good, they still make sense — after the initial blast of
energy, the album gradually sinks into foggy trance, inviting you to trip
along, swooning hazily to the trills and chills of 'Bees' and 'Daffy Duck'.
Actually, the best comparison I can make of
this new ambient side of theirs is to the early Grateful Dead (around the Anthem
Of The Sun period), but they're better, because they sing better than the
Grateful Dead, and the sound is quite a bit richer than the Dead's (well, this
is the 21st century, after all). There is a great, respectable sense of balance
on these tracks — neither too minimalistic to become boring, nor too
overproduced to become disorienting. Some atmospheric keyboard background, some
gentle raga-like guitar strumming, and a general supernatural feel to the
proceedings that may have something to do with the odd tuning of all the
instruments (band members later confessed they tuned everything around some
original loops recorded from a «naturally de-tuned» old piano).
Feels is, indeed, one excellent title for the album, all consisting of a
bunch of "feels" — and at least one or two of them are probably
guaranteed to fall in line with your own. (I'm not speaking here of the upbeat
material, restricted to the first two songs and 'Purple Bottle'; this kind of
material, I'm sure, will be pleasing to everyone who has gotten, in his or her
life, past the stage of calling things "annoying"). For me, the best
of these "feels" is 'Bees', with its tender vocal cascades and deep
piano rumble and harp-like strumming. For you, may be anything else. Other
"feels" — most of the second half of the album, in fact — leave me in
a relatively cold state, but I am not complaining, at least, not the brain part
of me, which has, early on, claimed the right to declare a thumbs up state while the heart was still
undecisive. Yet, with the added support of the life-affirming beauty of 'Did
You See The Words' and 'Grass', the decision holds up pretty well, and the
album, along with Sung Tongs, means the peak of this band for me.
STRAWBERRY JAM (2007)
1) Peacebone; 2) Unsolved Mysteries; 3) Chores; 4) For Reverend Green; 5)
Fireworks; 6) #1; 7) Winter Wonder Land; 8) Cuckoo Cuckoo; 9) Derek.
You know you're in for a special treat when the
album you're listening to is known to draw its inspiration from a strawberry
jam packet included in a tray of airplane food — at least, according to Panda
Bear's account of it. So many thoughts spring up so immediately. For instance,
like any normal human being, I get the urge to throw up at the very idea of airplane
food, much more so at the idea of a music record inspired by airplane food. On
the other hand, I admit that strawberry jam is just about the most eatable
thing out of all the orcish variety of airplane food, and it's a big relief to
know that the album wasn't at least inspired by tasteless bread rolls or cashew
nuts. Nevertheless, the album cover does make me want to throw up.
Strawberry Jam is a big progression over Sung Tongs
and Feels — it is the first record on which the band really takes
advantage of sophisticated production values, adding so much depth and scope to
their sound that, in the eyes of "quality sound aficionados", it
might as well be the band's first proper album as such. They are also slowly,
but steadily drifting more and more into the realms of conventional songwriting
— oh, nothing to worry about, ye goofballs and whackos all over the world,
because they were so far away from it when they started out it will probably take
them at least a couple more decades to become Phil Collins. For now, this is a
pleasant "golden middle mix" of the experimental and the traditional.
With the addition of new sound layers and all,
the Collective's general aim — revival of the Brian Wilson spirit for the new
millennium — becomes even more obvious. How else can one explain these whirls
of falsetto vocals clinging to baroque-tinged tape loops and bright shiny
upbeat guitars? Almost every song on Strawberry Jam owes at least
something, here and there, to the SMiLE sessions, from the rousing power
pop opener 'Peacebone' to the hypnotizing "power folk" closer
'Derek'. This does not do much in the way of diversity — frankly speaking, even
the modest length of forty three minutes wears me out somewhat — but it does
generate a very consistent and convincing sonic kaleidoscope (sorry, could not
resist using the word again).
There is nothing truly "bad" I could
say about the album. It is respectful of tradition yet quite strikingly
original, it has songs that carefully avoid cheap catchiness but slowly end up
being interestingly memorable, it has HARD WORK AND SOLID CRAFT written in
invisible ink on every square inch of it, it has enough musical ideas and
twisted lyrics to merit deep philological and artistic analysis, and it has
justifiedly earned glowing reviews from most alternative sources and even a
few mainstream ones.
At the same time, I cannot bring myself to love
it. Feels worked better towards achieving that goal, and so, two years
later, would Merriweather Post Pavilion; but as for Strawberry Jam,
I cannot get rid of the feeling that the band's aim here was mostly to practice
the new form rather than go for further nurturing of the spirit. The hooks feel
hollow, the excitement feels forced, the whole experience has a decidedly
post-modernist flavour that either kills emotion off the cuff or makes emotion
physically indistinguishable from mock-emotion. And it is not contradictory
that I should be mentioning this so late in discussing the Collective's career:
if a record keeps continuously inviting comparisons with the Beach Boys, it is
only fit to mention why it cannot, and should not, really function as a
substitute for the Beach Boys.
'An obsession with the past is like a dead fly,
and just a few things are related to the old times', they say in 'Peacebone',
as if predicting the kind of reaction described in the previous paragraph — a
pretty strong statement, considering that most of the things they do
are, in fact, quite strongly related to the "old times". But, two
lines later, what they say then is 'It's not my words that you should follow,
it's your insides' — and here they are perfectly right. I follow my insides,
and my insides tell me that either Strawberry Jam has no soul, or, if it
has one, then I am way too old-timey and retarded to feel it.
And yet, in the final run, with all the
wonderful creativity flowing through the record, it would be at the very least
disrespectful to give it a thumbs down and, God forbid, maybe prevent some curious
seeker to test its charms on himself. Yes, at the very least, it is a total
triumph of form, and, on that level, thumbs up
are guaranteed. Let's face it: before these guys came along, nobody (at least,
no one we regular Joes are aware of) ever dreamed of combining Terry Riley with
Brian Wilson, and this means that new and exciting syntheses of ideas, if not
exactly new and exciting ideas themselves, are still possible as late in
humanity's development as The Pre-Apocalypse Period we happen to live in.
MERRIWEATHER POST
PAVILION (2009)
1) In The Flowers; 2) My Girls; 3) Also
Frightened; 4) Summertime
Clothes; 5) Daily
Routine; 6) Bluish; 7) Guys Eyes; 8) Taste; 9) Lion In A Coma; 10) No
More Runnin'; 11) Brother
Sport.
One decade of fooling around, and here is the
payoff: Merriweather Post Pavilion put the Animal Collective in the big
league, not only prompting rave reviews on the part of every respectable
penname, but even climbing surprisingly high up the charts, perhaps on the
strength of these reviews. Perhaps the most surprising element, though,
is how they managed to do it unaccompanied by irate cries of «sell out» from
their dedicated guard of honour.
There are some important technical differences
from Strawberry Jam. All of it was written and recorded in the absence
of Deakin, the band's primary guitarist, so that samplers are on the move again
and the album has much more of an «electronic symphony» feel to it than its
predecessor. On the other hand, the band continues to raise the bar on their
production values — this is, I think, the album on which the last traces of the
«homebrewed» atmosphere have been erased. Welcome to the professional world.
But then there is an even bigger break: Pavilion
also continues the trend of transforming the outfit from a pack of weird
fairytale goofballs into a team of super-serious Messengers, equipped with a
serious claim. What that claim is, I am not sure; perhaps it does not
even exist, because these days it is doggone hard to distinguish real
Messengers from phoney ones. However, even if they are phonies, they now know
how to do a pretty good job of faking it.
My biggest problem with Strawberry Jam
was the lack of soul; maybe their own problem was similar, because on Pavilion,
it looks like they are actively searching for it, even if they may not
necessarily have found it. Whatever the answer, their vision of «soul» includes
adding the following elements: (a) ever-increasing production depth — «soul»
implies an impression of being hid under a bunch of layers, and you get a
better chance of conveying «soul» if you sound like you're playing out of the
bottom of a well than if you're diddling on your listener's front porch; (b)
ever improving vocal arrangements — now they're openly quoting the Beach
Boys' moves (listen to the "then we could be dancing / no more missing you
while I'm gone" passage on the opening track... sound familiar?) and, even
when they are not, they still leave behind the scent of Brian Wilson's trail to
spiritual enlightenment; (c) including more and more «catchy» and «accessible»
melodic elements in many of their songs — the «hit number» 'My Girls' is
practically hummable, and the chorus to 'Bluish' ("Put on the dress that I
like...") is hummable and gorgeous; (d) injecting more sense — or,
at least, pretending to inject more sense — into the lyrics, so that
professional reviewers like Mark Richardson of Pitchforkmedia can come up with
ultra-meaningful conclusions like (I quote) "the words reinforce the
sense of vulnerability that cuts through the music, and wind up being an
essential component on an album that oozes confidence from every pore".
Personally, I have no idea how you can combine «vulnerability»
with «confidence» in the exact same spot, but then one thing has certainly not
changed for the Animal Collective: they still make it one of their major goals
to confuse their audiences, especially confuse them into writing assessments
of their music whose meaninglessness increases in direct proportion to their
assumed seriousness. So let us not hold it against Mark Richardson who is, I
am sure of that, writing from the very depths of his heart. It is just that
they have been confused, these depths.
In more simple terms, Merriweather Post
Pavilion has some beautiful pop melodies ('Bluish'), some inspiring martial
melodies ('Summertime Clothes'), some head-spinning atmospheric melodies ('No
More Runnin'), and some disturbingly pretentious statement songs ('My Girls')
that rail against 'fancy things' and 'social status', for the first time ever
establishing the band's socio-political creed and providing the indie
community with one of the decade's loudest anthems. If you can stand all the
tape loops and the relatively monotonous style of vocal arrangements, Pavilion
may even seem to be their most diverse record, although the quintessence behind
all the songs is really the same, and the effect of "kaleidoscopic
rainbow" is being generated more or less equally by all of its individual
tracks.
Whether that rainbow is a real one or made out
of plastic is something I have not been able to understand, even on my own
personal level — the album has grown much upon me since the first listen, but I
am still not ready to accept the same warmth I used to get from 'good, good,
good, good vibrations' from 'open up your, open up your, open up your throat'
('Brother Sport'), and it is not just the lyrics — it is still the same
nagging feeling that, for Panda Bear and Avey Tare, form comes first and
substance comes next, if it comes at all.
One thing is for certain: no matter how much
critical praise, or even commercial success, is awarded to Pavilion
today, it will never do the same thing for its generation that Pet Sounds
did for theirs — for one simple reason: only a small handful of people will be
able to sincerely react to it on the same level that a lot of people
were able to react to Brian Wilson's teenage symphonies half a century before.
And even if this small handful of people represents the sharpest and brightest
minds of their generation (how do we know, though?), this would only mean that
their elitist asses will be kicked into the dust pretty soon. And anyway, I do
not want to live in a world where the highest standard of "art" is
represented by Merriweather Post Pavilion any more than I want to live
in a world where Taylor Swift stays at the top of the charts for over a month.
In short, my intellect's response to the album
is a thumbs up, my heart's response is
predictably confused, and my overall feeling, upon re-reading the review,
seems somewhat suicidal. But I suspect that is exactly the kind of reaction
that the Animal Collective wanted to extract from me.
FALL BE KIND (2009)
1) Graze; 2) What Would I
Want? Sky; 3) Bleed; 4) On A Highway; 5) I Think I Can.
While not the first Animal Collective EP to
contain original material, Fall Be Kind was the first one to cross over
the 25-minute mark and cautiously approach LP length level, meaning that it
probably merits a few words of its own.
Strictly formally, this is not much of an
«advance» on their previous record. Now that they'd finally found the perfect
middle ground between psychedelia, hooliganry, and pop, they are sticking to
it, and my best guess is they will probably keep sticking to it,
provided they do not want to regress back to «cult phenomenon» status. But this
time around it truly looks as if they are running quite high on confidence, too
— there is a certain «now we do know what we are doing» whiff round all this.
'Graze' opens the proceedings with such an
intense celestial sound that it comes across as some sort of Heavenly Overture,
and the whole twenty-eight minute experience can be conveniently assigned to
the genre of «Electronic Oratorio» (as opposed to «Electronic Symphony» of the
previous outing — with the emphasis on religious connotations, of course).
"Let me begin", the vocals come in, "feels good 'cause it's
early, ease open my eyes and let light in". Who wrote these lyrics — Jon
Anderson? Indeed, there are quite a few lyrical and musical parallels with the
classic, idealistic prog-rock style that can be suggested. Condense Tales
From Topographic Oceans into one half-hour, cut out most of the soloing
wankery, replace most instruments with electronic gadgets, add a small chunk of
Beach Boys harmonies, a little tinge of the Frisco spirit (one of the songs
actually samples the Grateful Dead), and there you are.
Besides, we now know exactly what these
guys want — just refer to the title of track No. 2. We probably knew it at
least as far back as Sung Tongs, but it is possible that they did
not know it back then. The EP is an intentional statement of purpose: what used
to be groping around in the dark, testing the aural effects of each of the
miriad of new sonic waves they were able to synthesize, has finally paid off,
and now they are pushing forward this new brand of musical religion. Celestial
sound tones, trance-inducing rhythms, ever more complicated choir overdubs to
give you a definite feeling of floating in the stratosphere with them angels
swooping up and down and left and right all around you, and lyrics that make
about as much sense as they used to but are given a more and more «sanctified»
coating.
This brings us back to the old question of whether
these guys have, or if they did not have, whether they have managed to finally
find, «soul» — or, to put it differently, are they still putting us on with
this grand, but meaningless, spectacle or have the sounds that they are putting
out ended up converting them, too? If someone like myself is still
unable to fall under their spell — fully able to appreciate the complexity and
excitement of what they are doing, but unable to experience anything even
remotely close to a cathartic emotion — does that mean they are still doing
something wrong, or is it just me? Or could it be that the pointless
hooliganry of their early period has shut off my receptacles, so that even if
they become the Bach Collective in a few years, the whole thing will still ring
somewhat hollow and artificial?
Not clear. Whatever be, it is certain that Fall
Be Kind is one of their most accessible creations, and that if its loops,
rings, bells, chorals, and words do not exercise their magic on you, it is no
use even trying to bother working your way back through the catalog. Thumbs up out of sheer amazement at how firmly
they have established their own Church of Heaven, but I do not think I am quite
ready to subscribe as of yet.
ODDSAC (2010)
1) Mr. Fingers; 2) Kindle
Song; 3) Satin Orb Wash; 4) Green Beans; 5) Screens; 6) Urban Creme; 7)
Working; 8) Tantrum Barb; 9) Lady On The Lake; 10) Fried Camp; 11) Fried Vamp;
12) Mess Your House; 13) What Happened?
Technically, Animal Collective's next project
after Fall Be Kind was not a proper
«album» — it was a joint visual/audio product, with AC providing the music and
director Danny Perez providing the spectral hallucinations on the screen.
Since the whole thing was made in tandem, it might be reasonably asserted that
the music is no good here without the visuals, and that the visuals are
worthless without the music. However, anyone familiar with the whole story of
Animal Collective will immediately realize that the music is not that
different from typical AC so as not to work without the accompanying imagery —
and, personally, having watched several of the psychedelic sequences filmed by
Perez, I can safely state that this is indeed so. If we can listen to, enjoy,
and get inspired by ʽI Am The Walrusʼ and ʽFlyingʼ without
necessarily having to watch the Beatles running around in funny suits on the
former or delirious rainbow coloring of the sky on the latter, we can do the
same with ODDSAC (speaking of which,
I do have a suspicion that the experience of Magical Mystery Tour might have been one of the inspirations here).
So I'm just going to say a few words about ODDSAC (whatever that title deciphers
to — I propose Overblown Demented
Delirious Stories by the Animal
Collective) as a collection of new music, free from any sort of ties to any
sort of visuals. (Besides, with the aid of proper substances, anyone is
probably capable of conjuring one's own
visuals here — why should you feel chained to somebody else's artistic
vision?).
In a way, the whole project might have simply
been a clever ruse. With Merriweather
Post Pavillion and its alarming success that almost (but not quite) put the band on the brink of mainstream
acceptance, they must have felt an acute need to remind the world that they
were, first and foremost, a bunch of musical crazies, not a school of musical
gurus. Listen to ʽMy Girlsʼ and ʽNo More Runnin'ʼ long
enough and, who knows, you might start discerning the meaning of life in their
basic structures (just as your parents did with Pet Sounds a whole wide world ago). In other words, they got too
serious, and the emotionality in their music got way too similar to normal human emotionality. One step further and
you turn into Radiohead. Two steps, and you turn into Prodigy. Three steps, and
whoah, you're the Backstreet Boys...
...all right, that was really a joke, but the
idea is clear enough. Hence, a change in direction, slyly motivated by
technical reasons — being interested in adapting the music to a set of modern
post-post-post-impressionist visuals. This gives the AC a good pretext for
turning away from the «normalized» melodicity of Pavillion and for returning to their roots — chaotic psychedelia
with no limits or boundaries. More than half of ODDSAC is closer in spirit to AC's earliest albums, only with much
better production.
A few of the tracks are still made in their
trademark psycho-folk style — with acoustic guitars, sprinkly chimes,
falsettos, criss-crossed vocal harmonies, and a certain sentimental elegance; I
mainly refer to ʽScreensʼ and ʽWorkingʼ here; plus, Beach
Boys-like harmonies additionally crop up from time to time, for instance, on
the closing track (ʽWhat Happened?ʼ). Atmospheric and respecting the
legacy of Pavillion, but nowhere
near as memorable as the best stuff on their «mainstream masterpiece», they do
an important job — providing some relief from all the weirdness — but they are
not what ODDSAC is really about.
But what is
it about? Overcrowding, I guess. With all the jungly overdubs, all the
animalistic and totemistic vocalizing tracks, all the tribal beats and nature
sounds, ODDSAC is probably their
best attempt, so far, to emulate the living soul of a parallel universe. Not a
sci-fi universe, mind you, of the kind usually preferred by their colleagues in
the electronic department — quite an organic one, with busy street life
(ʽMr. Fingersʼ), ghosts spooking lonely wanderers in the woods
(ʽSatin Orb Washʼ), collective celebrations on feast days
(ʽTantrum Barbʼ), large swamps spewing out poisonous, hallucinogenic
fumes (ʽLady On The Lakeʼ), and whatever else you'd like to extract
from your own mind to substitute Danny Perez's unnecessary fantasies.
Even the album's lonesome attempt at emulating
an «industrial» mood (ʽUrban Cremeʼ) never attains the icy,
mercyless, robotic cold of, say, Autechre, as the busy, static sonics of
functioning equipment are still accompanied by «organic» sounds. Scary robotic
equipment can never be that scary
when it is humming, beeping, and clanging against a background of chirping
birds and croaking frogs. Or, to be more precise, of chirping-croaking
frogbirds, because the world of AC is full of non-trivial species whose
evolution path followed the same individual mutations as the brain cells of
Avey Tare and Panda Bear.
What makes this stuff better than, for
instance, Here Comes The Indian
(this early AC release is probably the closest in spirit to ODDSAC) is — apart from extra
complexity, improved production, and shorter length of the individual tracks,
all of which helps — the fact that in between the two, there was Merriweather Post Pavillion, a
demarcation line, having crossed which the band could never really be the same
again. Yes, they are making a different album here, but they are not fascistic
purists, and they retain all the gained experience, and this concerns not just
the lovely vocal harmonies, but also the use of «light» electronic tones —
chiming, jingling, sprinkling, such as the sonic kaleidoscope of ʽMess
Your Houseʼ, a track that is way too chaotic to fully match my tastes, but
still sounds bright and optimistic, even despite all the jarring explosions and
screams with which it is bombarded on a regular basis.
My only — minor, but real — disappointment is
that, to a large extent, all of this stuff is somehow «nostalgic». It's as if
they have grown up, matured, learned a lot, and now are returning back to base
to «do it all over again» from scratch, so that you can now throw away all of
their pre-Sung Tongs records and
replace them with ODDSAC. But then
again, who am I to complain?... seeing as how I am pretty much doing the same
thing with my own reviews. Thumbs up, that much at least is for certain.
CENTIPEDE HZ (2012)
1) Moonjock; 2) Today's
Supernatural; 3) Rosie Oh; 4) Applesauce; 5) Wide Eyed; 6) Father Time; 7) New
Town Burnout; 8) Monkey Riches; 9) Mercury Man; 10) Pulleys; 11) Amanita.
Having so cleverly blown off the top bubbles
from our further expectations with the ODDSAC
project, The Animal Collective were now free to generate the «proper» follow-up
to Merriweather Post Pavillion
without necessarily having to «live up» to it, because «living up» would probably
have meant stepping up on the seriousness pedal and making even further
concessions to the traditional understanding of «gorgeousness» compared to
those already made on Pavillion. But,
as we all know, this treacherous road can easily transform mysterious sonic
deities into ordinary musical mortals. As it is, The Animal Collective are
quite committed to sticking to that «animal» component in their names.
Centipede
Hz, marking the return of
Deakin from an extended break that excluded him from the fame of Pavillion, is titled like a
surrealistic radio station, and, indeed, right from the opening «this is the
news...», with its heavy reliance on the use of static, wave functions, and
annoying bits of pseudo-announcements and commercials scattered all over the
place, the album sounds like a semi-spontaneous extract from such a station.
However, that is not all. Building upon the progress of ODDSAC, the Collective now tax the recording tracks to the max —
the sound is so much cluttered with layers of overdubs that, most of the time,
the immediate impression is that you actually have two or more pieces of music
going on at once. Just the kind of thing you'd get from poor reception in a
heavy interference zone.
This is a risky approach — in the hands of
non-professionals, this could end up as unlistenable, irritating chaos. But ten
years into their recording career, the Animal Collective have worked out a
great feel for how to do it correctly. Any single moment in these songs, if you
just push the play button at a random spot, will sound like stupid noise. But
altogether, these moments add up to almost perfect mathematical order, not
forgetting build-ups, sustained tensions, climaxes, resolutions, and even
hooks (for the brave ones — even singalong
hooks!). Deconstruct the melodies, strip them of their excesses, and you will
have yourself some cuddly, unexceptional folk-pop skeletons — when it comes to
putting chords together, the band hasn't exactly progressed all that much from
the days of Feels (not that they
really should have). But the very point
of the whole thing is — how much denseness and heaviness is allowed before it
all crashes down?
Basically, as much as they want. On my favorite
tracks — such as ʽApplesauceʼ — flying saucers whoosh by, electronic
rivers of sampler sound trickle along, drums alternate between syncopated and
straight patterns, and I cannot properly tell how many different roads are
being taken by different instruments, but none of them detract from feeling
the little bit of kiddie happiness in the repetitive chorus of "...I'm
feeling like a little honey can roll". Nor do they prevent me from feeling
a little pinch of moodiness during the chorus reproach of "you got to
slide it off like mercury, can I play my parts like mercury?"
(ʽMercury Manʼ) — no, the lyrics, in the good old AC tradition,
steadily continue not to make any sense whatsoever, but that does not matter
one bit.
That said, there are almost no individual
standouts: every second is so crammed with aural delights, and most of the
delights in question are so enigmatic when it comes to describing the feelings
that they stir up, that I find myself at a total loss trying to single out
peculiar moments. Arguably the only «special» track here is at the very end:
ʽAmanitaʼ starts out in a very focused, collected manner — rather
than scattering themselves all over the place in yet another kaleidoscopic
roll, they open things with a catchy, anthemic synth riff that evokes
«progressive» memories. But the sternness of the approach pretty soon falters,
shatters, and gives way to the predictable sonic explosions.
Yes, the overloaded nature of all these
patterns can get monotonous. I
mentioned build-ups and resolutions, but it's not the kind of build-ups and
resolutions that go from «quiet» to «loud» — over the course of one song, The
Animal Collective will be happy to transport you from one part of their
surrealistic jungle to another, even denser one, but getting out of the thicket
onto the open plains is simply not an
option. If you are psychologically unprepared for fifty minutes of electronic
loops intertwined by twine champions, or all the synthetically processed
double-, triple-, and quadruple- tracked vocals, it might be better to take
these tracks slowly, one or two at a time.
Of course, listeners who got acquainted with
the band primarily through ʽMy Girlsʼ or ʽBluishʼ or any of
those other Brian Wilson-influenced little beauties, and expect more of the
same, will get a headache — the gritty reality being that, if one assesses the
AC as a whole, the world of Centipede
Hz is closer to the «true» AC than the baroque flourishes of Merriweather. I certainly miss the
baroque flourishes, and wouldn't mind them coming back; but I am also quite
amazed at how far they have come in making that same philosophy that irritated
me so much on their early records work so well on this one. Apparently, age
and experience got to count for something even when it comes to deviant
avantgarde mindsets. I don't know how well this thing will be holding up ten
years from now, but at least thumbs up will always be thumbs up, I suppose.
LIVE AT 9:30 (2015)
1) Amanita; 2) Did You See The
Words; 3) Honeycomb; 4) My Girls; 5) Moonjock; 6) New Town Burnout; 7) I Think
I Can; 8) Pulleys; 9) What Would I Want?; 10) Peacebone; 11) Monkey Riches; 12)
Brother Sport; 13) The Purple Bottle.
Technically, this is Animal Collective's third live album, but in a sense, it
could just as well be the first, because Hollinndagain
consisted exclusively of original material (and shit material at that), while
the limited edition Animal Crack Box
from 2009 was restricted to just a few vinyl copies. Continuing this trend, Live At 9:30 also comes specifically
for collectors, pressed on six sides of bright-colored psychovinyl, but at
least it is also distributed as digital files, making it more widely available
— and it is also officially released on the band's main label (Domino), whereas
Animal Crack Box was more of a homebrewed
affair.
Anyway, the big question is: are these
«post-fame» Animal Collective actually worthy of a live album, or is this just
a quick (but colorful) money grab at the expense of collectors? Well, I am
hardly the band's biggest fan, but my answer is a definitive yes to the first half of this question
(although it is also a slightly more doubtful yes to the second half — I mean, high art and money-grabbing are
not necessarily mutually exclusive, are they?). The thing is, once they get on
stage, these guys do not care so much for an exact reproduction of the spritely
pandemonium of their studio recordings as they do for creating spritely
pandemonium, period. And the longer
it lasts, the better — look at these track lengths: even though most of the
songs are taken from officially released records, the collective runtime is
almost twice as long as it takes to listen to the studio equivalents of the
live record. Time stretches out to indefinite limits at Animal Collective
shows, that one's for sure.
At this point, the band clearly refuses to rest
upon past successes: the largest number of tracks come from the most recent Centipede Hz, with only two coming from
Merryweather Post Pavilion (still
arguably the centerpiece of the band's modern day legend) and the rest
scattered evenly all the way up to Feels
(but no earlier). However, track selection really does not matter that much, because when they're up on
stage, Animal Collective present themselves as a «jam band», setting up one
mind-boggling groove after another (and accompanying them with an equally
mind-boggling light show that, unfortunately, stays out of the audio experience)
and animating, aggrandizing and accelerating them to ecstatic heights. In this
setting, anything can serve as a working theme, upon which they pile up their
arrays of keyboard effects, tribal drum patterns, and vocal harmonies that
ignite, shoot up, and burst apart like sets of fireworks.
The original compositions are not changed to
the point of being unrecognizable — no, the melodies and even the arrangement
details tend to be preserved, but the music gets longer expositions and the
repetitive ritualistic grooves get to become truly gigantic (an extreme example
is ʽPulleysʼ, stretched out almost Cream-style from an original
three and a half minute length to about 15 minutes). If you put all six sides
of vinyl together, there are definite signs of overkill; but if you take it
slow, about half an hour at a time, for instance, the result is a strong
psychedelic punch that really sounds
like nothing else. This is not «electronica» with its formulaic rigidity: these
are your past-and-future-merging 21st century SMiLing Beach Boys, where vocals
matter as much as instruments (sometimes more) and electronic sound production is
no more distant and alienating to the mind as, say, any special production
effects on Sgt. Pepper.
The usual complaint is that behind all the
kaleidoscopic richness of this approach lies a certain monotonousness — that
the entire 2-hour long show is just one huge celebration of an alternate
psychedelic reality, populated with bizarre, but generally friendly alternate
lifeforms that seem, however, all to belong to the same infraclass: not just an
«Animal Collective», that is, but rather a «Psychomarsupial Community» or
something like that, where each member is slightly different but common enough
so that eventually you just get lost in the all-too-similar diversity. With emphasis
on the «jam» parts, this inevitably downplays the memorable main themes of the
tunes and concentrates on the vibe,
and the vibe is pretty much the same throughout. If they happened to have their
own idiosyncratic equivalent of a ʽMidnight Ramblerʼ or at least a
ʽWillie The Pimpʼ on here for diversity's sake, their status would
have seriously increased at least in this reviewer's eyes — then again, they
probably know better than to sacrilegiously break up the spiritual ritual and
annihilate the mesmerizing effect on the audience, so forget it.
In any case, kudos to what it is they actually
manage to do on stage — it's one thing to generate all these multi-layered
arrangements in the cozy spacetime of the recording studio, and quite another
one to generate all the layers simultaneously in a live environment: with a
little help from the same digital technologies, no doubt, but the singing (with
all those intertwining harmonies), the drumming, and much of the keyboard work
are really live, and display consummate professionalism (to be expected,
perhaps, after 15 years of gelling together, but nonetheless amazing). Love 'em
or hate 'em, they are pretty much one
of the most obvious symbols of innovative musical culture in our little
«impoverished through too much enrichment» 21st century, so a guaranteed thumbs up
here in any situation.
PAINTING WITH (2016)
1) FloriDada; 2) Hocus Pocus;
3) Vertical; 4) Lying In The Grass; 5) The Burglars; 6) Natural Selection; 7) Bagels
In Kiev; 8) On Delay; 9) Spilling Guts; 10) Summing The Wretch; 11) Golden Gal;
12) Recycling.
After the overdubbing excesses of Centipede Hz, its follow-up Painting With almost sounds like an
exercise in stripping down to the basics — quieter, less cluttered with
bombastic overdubs, sort of an «Animal Collective-lite», back-to-roots version
of the transcendental-psychedelic AC of the past ten years. As far as I
understand, much of this has to do with the band dropping their reliance on the
reverb effect — and so, this time around, they bring the music right into your
living room instead of having it drop down on you from the skies, in a
benevolent gesture from the Olympian gods of candy-colored psychedelia.
Another change is that the songs are getting
shorter: the entire record is over in less than fourty minutes, with the
longest track clocking in at a measly 4:33 (which led them to jokingly calling
this «our Ramones album»). By throwing out lengthy build-ups and drones and
relying far more on the strength of vocal melodies than they used to, they are
indeed moving as close to the «pop» format as is possible for The Animal
Collective without ceasing to be The Animal Collective and beginning to be The
Sellout Collective. Not that anybody should be worried — the whole thing still
sounds totally insane — but this time we are presented with a lighter, fluffier
form of insanity, sort of a silly romp of elfish kids through Central Park
rather than a solemn ritual performed with the goal of breaking through into
another dimension. Or, perhaps, a more accurate analogy would be that, if Merryweather Post Pavillion is this
band's Pet Sounds and Centipede Hz is an attempt at its Smile, then Painting With is their Wild
Honey — a definite step backwards in terms of experimentation without
sacrificing too much of the essence.
Contrary to rumors, Painting With is quite a diverse record: capturing the songs in an
analytical web, anyone can see that ʽFloriDadaʼ is retro-sunshine
pop, ʽHocus Pocusʼ is folk-based progressive rock,
ʽVerticalʼ is contemporary R&B, ʽNatural Selectionʼ is
fast-tempo techno-pop, and there's quite a few other musical genres lurking in
the shadows, too — the problem being that, once they all go through the
prescribed Animal Collective filter, the substantial differences between them
are neutralised. Sure there's no more reverb, but the band's technique of
overdubbing psychedelic vocal harmonies and entrusting the melodic backbone to
humming-bubbling synthesizers remains quite stable, so every single song sets
almost precisely the same mood, and the inherent differences of all these musical
genres are not only not exploited, but diligently covered up by the production.
In the end, there's absolutely no reason for me to discuss what makes any two
of these tracks stand out from each other — who really cares about complex time
signatures or peculiarities of voice distribution over different sound channels
when no matter what you do, you come out with more or less the same result?
Repeated listens are essential for the record, because at first (and at second, and at
third...) it just sounds like a big jar of sweet sonic goo — short song lengths
not helping any, and vocal hooks all reduced to the same common psychedelic
denominator. Eventually, through the aid of some particularly outstanding vocal
lines (like the chorus to ʽFloriDadaʼ), the tracks come apart, but
just barely so, and I am still left wondering: it is one thing when we are
exposed to, say, a full album of same-mood ballads by Sinatra or Dusty
Springfield, but with a band as experimental as these guys, is it really right that it should take so much time
to separate one track from another? I guess you really have to love The Animal
Collective to death, and to «get» this kind of sound in your heart the way
other people «get» Willie Nelson or J. J. Cale, to give Painting With all the admiration it may deserve.
But there's the catch — I think that this
shorter-song, simpler-sound approach does them a disfavor in the end. At least
for me, much too often, the album ends up on the verge of being annoying: all
those hee-haw-hee-haw vocals, when they are not directly carried out into the
stratosphere, as they used to, eventually bring on associations with village
idiots and bad taste humorists. If the record's major purpose is to convey a
feeling of light-hearted joy, as I believe it is, then, as far as I am
concerned, it fails. Not that I envy the band's position: having clearly peaked
at the turn of the decade, they have nothing left to prove and (probably)
nothing left to blow our minds even one more time, so any further experimental
detour, be it even in the direction of «de-experimentalizing» themselves, is
potentially welcome. But one cannot also avoid asking oneself the horrid
question about jumping the shark — because, for all I know, the point of Painting With might be to state
"It's Only Psycho Pop, But I Like It, Yes I Do", and if so, who's
gonna be carrying the real banner of
psychedelia into the 2010s? Kanye West?..
UPROOTED (2006)
1) First Field; 2) Keys; 3)
Flash Floods Don't Retreat; 4) Nashua; 5) It Seems Easy; 6) Last Folk Song; 7)
Stonethrower; 8) Uprooted; 9) I'm Hibernating.
So this is 2006 and «The Antlers» is a
multiple-personality-disorder-sort-of-name for just one person, New York State
resident Peter Silberman, who, on this completely self-released album, plays
guitar, dabbles with a bitty-bit of electronic effects and drum machines,
sings, and weaves an atmosphere that, for some people (most of them probably
fellow New York State residents) will be beautiful, for others will be utterly
boring in the «oh no, not another indie dude with an ego» vein.
Uprooted is a very low-key affair, but it is also short
and up to the point: only the title track is a six-minute sprawl whose
carefully orchestrated build-up cannot quite compensate for being built on
exactly one musical phrase. The rest are shorter things that, in true indie
style, more frequently sound like raw demos than well-elaborated creations.
Melodically, there is nothing about these
light-feathered folkish tunes that we have not heard a million times, but Uprooted was never about instrumental
melody: Silberman's strength almost exclusively lies in his voice — take it
away and he won't stand a chance, not even against the Little Mermaid. Think
something like an Antony Hegarty, but without the operatic vibrato effect and
much, much quieter, only rising beyond «barely audible» during very scant
climactic moments; actually, there is more variation to Silberman's singing
than to Hegarty's, since Peter allows himself different modes, ranging from «generic
folkster» to «uniquely recognizable», when he launches into those silky-soft
falsetto vocalizations that must have played such a significant role in
endearing him with normally hard-hearted critics.
The artistic message that Silberman tries to convey
is simple enough — typical introvert, melancholic, pessimistic, you-name-it
fare — but the singing does the trick. Usually, that kind of singing voice is
reserved for tender ballads; Silberman uses it for chamber odes to his own
(real or simulated, I don't care which) depression. 'Keys' is basically a
mantra, most of it consisting of two elementary chants ("I can't sleep in
the waiting room... I can't stand on only one leg"), but I cannot really
remember anything that would sound quite
like this: it's not much of an intrigue, yet when you realize it's coming from
some out-of-nowhere dude who was recording it locked up in his bedroom in
Brooklyn or something like that, it's a little more.
Some of this stuff is predictably Paul
Simon-ish, but never totally, since
all of Silberman's songs have to utilize his vocal advantage, and once they do,
they're all his own. 'Stonethrower', for instance, begins like it could have
easily fit on Parsley, Sage, but the
falsetto choruses eventually lead you into an unpredictable direction. 'Flash
Floods Don't Retreat' cooks up a bit of magic once the words are over and all that's left is an almost psychedelic
woo-wooing (apparently, processed through some weird effect thing that makes it
seem like it's coming from inside your head rather than the speakers). And so
on. Nothing particularly memorable,
for sure, but how many people these days can set out with an individual style
already on their first release? Thus, thumbs up.
IN THE ATTIC OF THE UNIVERSE (2007)
1) In The Attic; 2) Look!; 3)
On The Roof; 4) Shh!; 5) The Universe Is Going To Catch You; 6) The Carrying
Arms; 7) In The Snow; 8) Stairs To The Attic.
With a 26-minute running length, one and only
one person to mind the writing, playing, and recording, and only three actual
songs floating in an atmosphere of lightweight ambience, you'd think the basic
conceptual idea behind this recording — an expression of admiration for the infinity-bound
vastness of the universe and recognizal of one person's insignificance in the
face of it — is a bit... eh... a bit too bulgy,
shall we say, for such an album's tight britches.
Fortunately, Peter Silberman has enough taste
and, shall we say, originality not to go about it in a corny 'Dust In The
Wind'-like manner. Few things are more stupid than assuming a grand prophetic
tone when you admit your own pettiness, and Silberman has intentionally chosen
a suitably petty approach. With but a few exceptions (such as the climactic
third minute of 'On The Roof'), In The
Attic Of The Universe is a very quiet record; like its predecessor, it
almost begs you to let it pass by
unnoticed, and, of course, the right thing to do is exactly the opposite.
Because the primary musical-and-vocal hook of
'In The Attic' (later reprised on electric guitar in 'Stairs To The Attic') is
a simple, but wonderful bit well worthy of a seasoned popmeister like Jeff
Lynne or folk-rockmeister like Neil Young (regularly sanctioned comparisons are
to Neutral Milk Hotel, but why not go straight ahead to the primary source?).
It fuses together melancholy and
beauty-admiration in just a few perfectly-strummed/sung notes so well that I'd
be tempted to call it a stroke of genius, except I must first deal with the
annoying feeling of déjà vu
that keeps nagging me — just a quick browse through my 10,000 hours-worth of
stored music and I'll be right back with you on that one.
An even better song, though — actual song rather than one great idea repeated
many times over — is 'The Universe Is Going To Catch You', with a chimes-and-falsetto
chorus that is totally unforgettable after you have played it at least once
with the proper volume levels. It may just be the lightest-sounding, most
flutteringly-butterflying song with such a ponderous name ever recorded — or,
at least, a worthy contender — and its presence on the record alone is
guaranteed to dissolve any possible accusations of pretense and pomp.
It is only too bad that most of the other
tracks constitute nothing but mildly pleasant atmospheric filler — brief instrumental
links ('Look!'; 'The Carrying Arms', a pointless exercise in backwards
tape-playing), amateurish fun with keyboard programming ('Shh!' — I can just
imagine someone giving a professional recitation of "Twinkle Twinkle
Little Star" over its first two minutes), or vocal numbers that are not
centered around any sort of actual composing ('In The Snow'). None of this gets
out of control for too long, or with too much arrogance, and it is quite
possible to convince yourself that it's all part of the overall charm, but...
well, to me, a more economical solution is just to think of it as an idealistic
20-year old amateur messing around with equipment. Talented, but way too idealistic.
Still, I see no reason not to encourage all of us with a thumbs up that this ultra-brief
record definitely deserves for the two abovementioned excellent songs and a
general atmosphere that is not at all off-putting, despite boasting every
prerogative to be so.
HOSPICE (2009)
1) Prologue; 2) Kettering; 3)
Sylvia; 4) Atrophy; 5) Bear; 6) Thirteen; 7) Two; 8) Shiva; 9) Wake; 10)
Epilogue.
The big breakthrough — a brave gamble on
Silberman's part that paid off quite nicely. Having proven to himself that he
had style and vision, Peter decided that, for all it's worth, it was high time
he interfered in the battle between the light and the dark. To do that, he
expanded «The Antlers» to real-life band size, recruiting Darby Cicci on
brass, keyboards and «bowed banjo», and Michael Lerner on drums — and
channelled his powers into the creation of a concept album. Two EPs were
released first, mostly consisting of soundbites, previews, and indie rock
covers; then the final result broke through in March 2009.
Hospice is generally described as a musical
description of an abusive emotional relationship in terms of a metaphor —
relations between a hospice-abiding dying bone cancer patient and her nurse.
The concept sounds pretty bleak on paper, conjuring up smoke-filled visions of
Lou Reedian blackness (everything from Berlin
to Magic & Loss), but if you
apply color vision to music, Silberman is always closer to white than to black,
so even if he wanted to make Hospice a «depressed» album in the
traditional sense, he wouldn't have the proper brain mechanism to do it.
Speaking of brain mechanisms, Hospice has also been called a major
tear-jerker. This is one aspect of it that I did not get AT ALL — and I am
definitely not above having a tear jerked out of me by a real pro jerk
(actually, a music reviewer who has never once shed a tear over a musical piece
should probably just get a job loading and unloading musical equipment, if, for
some reason, he so fanatically yearns for a music-related occupation).
Although the lyrics are, in a certain
manner, sung from the nurse's point of view, by no means does Hospice have anything to do with the
gritty realities of a true hospice, and, what's even more important, by no
means does the emotional content of the album have anything to do with the
actual emotions that one might be feeling towards a dying person — loved,
unloved, caring, frustrating, whatever.
To tell the truth, the mood set by Hospice is almost every bit the same as
was the mood set on Silberman's first two albums — and those albums had nothing
to do with bone cancer patients. It's almost as if the underlying logic here
was: «Hmm... don't I sound sad on
these records? As in, really really
fucking sad? Doesn't that, like, call for a really really sad theme? Say
there — a girl is dying from cancer, and a boy has only just fallen in love with
the girl, and they both know it's hopeless but they go along with it anyway...
how's that for sad?»
But you know what — it's not that sad. It is certainly very pretty, just
as pretty as Pete's previous musings. 'Bear' and, later, its reprise on 'Epilogue'
is a convincingly solitary piece of melancholic brooding. 'Kettering' and
'Shiva' are competent mood pieces. 'Two' helps you not to fall asleep with a
faster, more ironically upbeat melody. 'Sylvia' builds up to a nice climax.
Silberman's voice is always attractive (unless your ideal for male vocalization
is Lemmy), and his musical minimalism is never annoying, at least not to the
point where you start thinking «gee, would having just one more chord in this song really kill this guy?» and spoil yourself
all the fun.
It's all fine and dandy, but then: «The power of the album lies in the album's ability to destroy hope»,
a hype-stricken reviewer writes. Really? «A heartbreaking aural experience that
hits us on a deeper level», writes another. Oh God. What have I missed here?
See, there are two problems. First, the guy is
22 years old. Just as a simple matter of fact, Count Tolstoy, being 22 years of
age, had not yet written anything,
let alone those of his works that were truly committed to exploring
life-and-death issues. On a simpler scale of things, Mr. George Harrison, at 22
years of age, was mostly known for writing poetry along the lines of "You
don't realize how much I need you / Love you all the time, I'll never leave
you" rather than "Nothing in this life that I've been trying / Could
equal or surpass the art of dying".
Sorry, folks, but that's just the way it goes.
In various interviews, Silberman kept dropping hints that Hospice was specifically based on a particular «life-shaking»
incident in his own life — that's as fine as can be, terrible or terrifying
impressions can start haunting one from age three, but being able to transpose
them into high-reaching, philosophical, serious
conceptual art is a capacity that comes with experience. Biting off more than
one can chew is not a pretty sight.
Second, these songs are merely okay. Merely
OKAY. When a reviewer writes about the «flourishing acoustics» of 'Two', you'd
think this were some new kind of Nick Drake, freshly landed off the clouds. Well
— take a
listen and decide for yourself. The song's not bad — that primitive strum merely serves as background attenuation
for the vocals, which constitute the essential part — but in purely musical
terms, Hospice is almost sheer
nothing; it would, perhaps, have been more honest for Silberman to just come
out and sing everything completely a cappella. (Now that would be a novel approach).
I have also seen comparisons to Arcade Fire's Funeral — well, both bands begin with
an A, and both bands sing about death, and both bands are straightfaced and
pretentious, but that's where the similarities end, since, behind all of their
sky-high bombast, Arcade Fire actually set themselves much more modest goals
than Silberman pretends to here. Arcade Fire are, above all, a rock band, and they go for big, brawny,
blunt blows to the balls, creating catchy and memorable anthems for their
generation. This smart little guy
aspires towards much finer strokes and subtler sentiments — that's fine if it
works, but in the case of Hospice,
it doesn't work quite the way it is supposed to. Fail, fail, fail. Not one tear
shed for Sylvia.
As vitriolic as these comments may sound, I
would still invite everyone to make their own judgement — emotions are tricky
sons of bitches — and I'd still give the album a thumbs up, on the condition that I
can simply forget everything about the concept and the lyrics and just take it
as a natural, modest expansion on the sounds of The Antlers' two previous
records. After all, the guy is still a masterful singer, and there are two or
three nicely composed themes here, and the ambient arrangements weren't too bad. But, for proper punishment,
what I'd really like for this guy to
do is record a duet with Ke$ha. Come on, Mr. Silberman. One for the kids. You
know you can do it. You're a genius. Sky's the limit for geniuses.
BURST APART (2011)
1) I Don't Want Love; 2)
French Exit; 3) Parentheses;
4) No Windows; 5)
Rolled Together; 6) Every
Night My Teeth Are Falling Out; 7) Tiptoe; 8) Hounds; 9) Corsicana; 10) Putting The Dog To Sleep.
Perhaps the best thing about Hospice, when you think about it once
again, was that the album at least made the world sit up and notice the Antlers (or, rather, that part
of the world that is still capable of sitting up, let alone noticing anything
of real value). After all, how easy is it just to ignore a conceptual record about a nurse-patient relationship in a
hospice? With tense psychologism like that, centered around
life/death/moral/ethics questions, Hospice
fit right into the center of modern trends. Had the music been obviously,
grotesquely bad, that would have
given the reviewers a good pretext for killing these guys off; but the music
is... questionable, and in conjunction
with the controversial subject matter, here was a good chance to reap an
impressive bunch of five-star clusters falling from the sky.
What this means to me, in the department of «good news», is that this reception gave
an equally good chance to Silberman's next album — Burst Apart, as far as I'm concerned, is far superior to Hospice, but it probably would not have
generated half as much publicity if it were not
preceded by the intense red alert of Hospice's
album sleeve. Even despite having better songs divided by fewer ambitions. «You
do the math», to quote the Avett Brothers' favourite line of banter.
Perhaps having built up a little cash (and a
lot more self-confidence), Silberman now expands the Antlers' instrumentation,
adding mandolins, organs, and whatever else he may get his hands on; the
skeptical result is that it all still sounds just like his bedroom demos in the
end, only louder and bigger. But he also writes better songs. Granted, 'I Don't
Want Love' opens the album in a very Hospiceable
mood — another bitter-angelic declaration of broken dreams delivered from high
up in a puffy cloud, ungraspable by mere mortal: proverbially gorgeous,
frustratingly unmemorable. And it's not the only such composition here.
But elsewhere, Silberman gets a bit snappier,
capable of pricking your senses rather than just huffing and puffing at them. For
instance, 'Parentheses' incorporates a smoky, funky, trip-hop groove somewhat
reminiscent of classic Portishead, and is occasionally drowned in ominous alarm
siren effects — against this sort of background even Silberman's already
well-familiar falsetto gets sarcastic, disillusioned, even mocking overtones,
a fine contrast with his usual starry-eyed shtick. (And it is totally up to you
to decide if lines like "I'm a bad amputee, with no phantom memory / So
close up your knees, and I'll close your parentheses" constitute great
modern poetry or a clumsy, ugly, pretentious heap of words, but this is
definitely the first time I have
encountered the word "parentheses" in the context of a pop song, let
alone in its title).
The album's climax, however, is — without a
single doubt — 'Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out', one of this century's
finest «emo» tunes written by a non-emo artist. Or, actually, it is such a
terrific Cure send-up, I'm sure Robert Smith would kill (or, at least, consent
to gaining another fifty pounds of body mass) to add this little gem to his own
catalog. It is just a good old-fashioned mope-pop tune, bleak, desperate, but
moving fast and in a strongly-determined manner towards a brilliantly planned —
if not nearly as brilliantly executed, due to Silberman's lack of technical experience
— crescendo. Bottomline: don't try too
hard — respect the good old golden middle — you might just end up with a real, not fake tear-jerker in the end.
The musicianship, overall, is still not all
that impressive, but Silberman's friends are
slowly trying to turn the Antlers into a real band — Darby Cicci's strange
«jug-bass» work on 'French Exit' is worth paying attention, and, although Michael
Lerner leans way too heavy on the big
robot drums of his 1980s childhood, for the purposes of the Antlers this style
really works. It's like an «anti-commercial adult contemporary» thing, taking
many of the clichés of the past decades' soft entertainment and turning
them on their heads. It's okay. And on 'Every Night' he just drums like a fine
Brit-popper of the old school — perfectly suited to Silberman's retroish guitar
licks.
In short, not all of this journey is as smooth
as I'd like to, but by the time they get around to the grand finale of 'Putting
The Dog To Sleep', they get me. At
the risk of sounding way inconsistent, I am somehow far more moved by
Silberman's soulful singing from the point of view of an about-to-be-exterminated
animal than from that of a hospice worker (or patient). Maybe because this time
around we know it's just a little
allegory, a bit of rock theater, rather than a pretense at getting so close to
the point of ultimate understanding of life and death. Maybe it's something
else, but it's a good epic finale all the same.
Thumbs up on all levels
— this is still nowhere near a masterpiece, but they just might be getting close. And, above all, it is imperative that
Silberman try to branch out in as many directions as possible: stuff like
'Every Night...' shows that his gift is not confined to cloudbursting falsetto
arias, and since, by this point, he has most probably taken that type of aria
as high as it could go with him, he'd be an idiot not to try to understand the
scope of that gift. Of course, I do not mean branching off into hardcore punk
or anything like that, but... the less predictability from these guys, the
better.
FAMILIARS (2014)
1) Palace; 2) Doppelgänger;
3) Hotel; 4) Intruders; 5) Director; 6) Parade; 7) Surrender; 8) Refuge; 9)
Revisited.
Apparently, the effort that it took to record Burst Apart sucked whatever energy The
Antlers had right out of their marrows — and instead of spending the next three
years relaxing and recuperating some
of it, they decided that they would rather capitalize on the situation. Lesson
number one: if you have no energy to make an album, make an album with no
energy whatsoever and present it as your latest and greatest artistic
statement. And don't worry about bad publicity — you'll always have
Pitchforkmedia, as long as you stay within certain working limits.
There is an undeniable unity (easy to say
«monotonousness») to the seven lengthy pieces on Familiars, and an undeniable «ambience» that separates them from
the old indie-rock idiom and brings them closer to stuff that has been
gruesomely labeled as «post-rock» in the past — the oceanic soundscapes of
Sigur Rós and the like. In a way, the Antlers had always worked close to
that style, but Familiars pushes
them even further in the «music where nothing happens, or at least nothing
happens fast enough» direction. Now, everything, in any given track, at any
given moment, happens at the intersection of soft-as-silk late-night jazz
guitar; atmospheric, mood-setting digital and analog keyboards; calmly
funebral wailings of trumpets and trombones; and Peter Silberman's vocals, the
very same ones that we are well used to but even more reminiscent now of a
half-paralyzed person in the middle of a nervous breakdown.
In other words, Familiars is the soundtrack to a deeply internalized and restrained
personal tragedy. Think of it as the equivalent of a Cure album in a world
where musical hooks and dynamic playing are considered dangerous for the moral
health of the population and are strictly prohibited under pain of death,
lobotomy, or one year in the Lana del Rey correctional facility, so you have to
come up with a credible substitute that could somehow convey the same idea of
suffering, loneliness, and empathy, but without, you know, music in the most common sense of the word. It is hard to make this
work, but I think it can be done. The question is, whether it can be done by a
band like the Antlers.
My personal vote is «no»: I find Familiars to be at best boring, and at
worst, irritating. There is nothing wrong about using your instruments to
create a statically melancholic atmosphere, but there still has to be something
special about it. You might be a genius like Brian Eno, using two or three
chord changes, but finding just the right ones and just the perfect keyboard
tone and depth and warmth of sound for them. You might be the above-mentioned
Sigur Rós, trying out all sorts of combinations until you find the ones
that work. You might think about crescendos, quirky overdubs, subliminal
messages, whatever. For Familiars,
Silberman came up with exactly one (1) idea, and carried it out in several
variations for fifty minutes — and it wasn't even a totally undeniably
jaw-droppingly awesome idea in the first place.
This crude, but honest, explanation takes care
of the «boring» part. Where it gets «irritating» is in the department of
«adequacy»: like Bon Iver or any of his colleagues in the «dream-whatever»
department («dream-folk», «dream-pop», etc.), Silberman's latest creation
clearly strives to induce catharsis. All those «majestic» keyboards, «saintly
humble» guitars, and particularly Peter's broken-heartedly romantic deliveries
are integral parts of one big plot — to make your reaction towards Familiars a religious one. The preachy
lyrics are certainly religious (e.g., "to find the peace within the combat
where we're standing, we have to make our history less commanding" on
ʽSurrenderʼ, etc.), but the way they are sung and the way they are
surrounded by instruments and echoes gives the impression of one great big
Church of The Antlers, and the whole album is one big seven-part Mass that
you'd rather attend while standing on your feet (unless you actually get the
urge to fall on your knees). But why should
you? To subscribe to the Church of The Antlers makes about as much sense as
subscribing to any other Church just because it's nice and cool in the great
cathedral and the big organ up above looks really awesome.
For some reason, one thing that really irritates me about the lyrics is
Silberman's odd attraction to expletives this time around, be it the "fuck
now, I'm outta here tomorrow" refrain of ʽHotelʼ or the
embarrassingly crude "right when the blizzard ends, they throw a fucking
huge parade..." intro to ʽParadeʼ. I suppose that the idea is,
if we're building this new type of musical church, we might as well set up our
own rules, including the right to swear at Mass. But any word has its
preferable context, and the F-word, nothing as we have against it in general,
sounds gimmicky and stupid when sung in that exaggeratedly «beautiful» tone by
Mr. Silberman. He has the undeniable right to count it as part of his artistic
vision, I have the undeniable right to call it stupid, you have the undeniable right to see it your way, we'll all be
happy some day or in the afterlife.
Unfortunately, commenting on the individual
songs is an impossibility for me, since great care has been taken for all of
them to set the exact same mood, and my descriptions are all focused on moods,
not chords. If it were made more clear that this is strictly «elevator muzak»,
a background sort of hum to accompany your glass of whiskey at sundown, Familiars would be forgivable and
forgettable. But since the album sounds like it is making a Big Statement, yet
the band members all behave like refrigerated, defrosted, and microwaved
members of a post-Waters-era Pink Floyd, Familiars
ultimately becomes offensive — one more reminder of what the hell is so goddamn
wrong with «serious» music in the 21st century. Thumbs down.
ANTONY AND THE JOHNSONS (2000)
1) Twilight; 2) Cripple And
The Starfish; 3) Hitler In My Heart; 4) Atrocities; 5) River Of Sorrow; 6)
Rapture; 7) Deeper Than Love; 8) Divine; 9) Blue Angel.
Examine a non-provocative picture of Antony
Hegarty (say, one on which he does not paint his eyes or face or construct a
facial expression that presents him as Saint Anthony), and you will most likely
think of the average school nerd, well stocked up on comic books and donut
packs but severely suffering from lack of ladies' attention. But then it is
exactly that kind of life that develops the perfect Goth sensibilities,
doesn't it?
Listening to Antony And The Johnsons, an
album first released in 1998 on the small label of David Tibet (Current '93)
but prominently noticed only upon its more widespread release in 2000 on
Secretly Canadian, people usually laugh or cry. Some are touched and shaken down
to the very foundations of their soul. Others giggle, at best, or resort to
words like «bollocks» (as in either, «this is total bollocks», or «where are
this guy's bollocks?» — witness how the beauty of polysemy can result in the
same word acquiring opposite meanings).
To be fairly honest, my gut intention would be
to join the second camp. Hegarty's major asset is his voice — a high, fragile,
tear-filled vibrato that sounds thoroughly unique, out-of-nowhere to his young
generation fans, even though old-timers have already heard it all before on
those classic Roxy Music albums; indeed, the similarity to Bryan Ferry is so
transparent that one can't really help but wonder whether the old crooner had
not been fathering illegal offspring in his young and reckless days. The
similarity, and obvious debt to Roxy Music, already kills off part of the
excitement for me; but there's worse.
All of the songs are, generally speaking,
written in one key: somber, ominous piano-and-strings ballads whose only
purpose is to extol the enticing delights of suffering. «Gothic» certainly comes
to mind, but, to their credit, Antony and The Johnsons have never been dubbed
Goths: there is nothing apocalyptic, or infernal, or zombie-like, or Edgar
Allen Poe-ish, about this music, just pounds and pounds and pounds of broken
heart for consumption. And Hegarty is not being too cryptic about it, either:
"My heart is broken", he says (peace, brother), "here in the cup
of my hands — from between cracked fingers old blood spills".
The whole thing, with dark, funebral piano
chords, strings that tug at the soul as if urged on by a slavedriver's whip,
and Antony's tremolo hovering over it all, is a kind of musical theater that aspires
— not even to Classicism, but rather to Antiquity, with a bare hint at Far
Eastern tradition as well. It is ridiculous and grotesque, and seriously
off-putting, but I cannot even begin to imagine that a guy like Antony Hegarty
professes a serious belief in this act; no man alive who does such
things from the very bottom of his heart deserves a place in the art business.
But as an act, an artistic hyperbole in which
reason disguises as feeling and calculation poses as emotion, I can dig this,
and hold the opinion that it is the only way at all for the Johnsons to be dug
without the digger growing a dunce hat. Because, as a manneristic show, the
record is pretty much impeccable. The songs aren't particularly well written or
memorable; instead, they unfurl like some sort of modern opera, with but one
singer taking on all the parts, nine perfectly staged arias in a row. Their
individual merits hardly exist, except each has an individually sick lyrical
twist ('Cripple And The Starfish' is a chivalrous paean to masochism; 'Rapture'
and 'Deeper Than Love' feature the word "falling", pronounced so many
times that the mantra may eventually work, so be sure to have your feet firmly
on the ground while listening; 'Hitler In My Heart' says it all with its title,
really, etc.); but this cannot be held as an accusation, because it is not
really a collection of pop tunes from a band — it's a mono-spectacle from an
aspiring thespian.
It is thus that, out of deep, sincere respect
for such elaborate staging, such lifelike decorations, such dazzling costumes,
such a perfectly attuned lighting system, and such technical dedication on the
part of the performer, I eagerly raise my thumbs up.
But if you ever happen to meet someone who tells you that the debut album from
Antony and the Johnsons made a new man / woman out of him / her, you'd better
run like hell; like I said, Antony and the Johnsons do not make Gothic music,
but there's a fair chance your rotting corpse will be fucked all the same.
I AM A BIRD NOW (2005)
1) Hope There's Someone; 2) My
Lady Story; 3) For Today I Am A Boy; 4) Man Is The Baby; 5) You Are My Sister;
6) What Can I Do; 7) Fistful Of Love; 8) Spiralling; 9) Free At Last; 10) Bird
Gerhl; 11*) Find The Rhythm Of Your Love.
Here is the official proscription list of
people who love (to hurt) Antony Hegarty: (a) Lou Reed, founding father of the
Velvet Underground, punk rock hero and overall horrid guy; (b) Devendra
Banhart, singer-songwriter, visual artist, and an overall psychic type who
likely has no problem finding God under the rim of the toilet bowl; (c) Boy
George, founding father of Culture Club, quintessential icon of androgyny, and
an overall queer type; (d) Rufus Waynwright, singer-songwriter, an overall
morose introspective type with a penchant for classical influences; (e) Joan Wasser,
real hot chick successfully mascherading as an indie artist by playing violin.
There may be others, of course, but these are
the ones openly credited on various guest spots on Antony and the Johnsons'
sophomore record — by the vast-reaching range and even distribution of this
selection we must understand that everybody loves (to hurt) Antony
Hegarty, and those that don't merely don't count as everybody. Apparently,
loving (to hurt) Antony Hegarty was the ultimate artsy trend in 2005.
Does it help? Frankly, I did not even start to
notice until I took a look at the credits. Sure, at times Antony started
sounding a little strange — on 'Fistful Of Love', he'd start off with a deep
spoken part; on 'What Can I Do?' he'd switched from his usual falsetto to a
nasal tenor; on 'Spiralling', on the contrary, he'd pushed that falsetto even
further. But how is a regular guy to know it's not just Antony Hegarty playing
hypnotic tricks on us? How is he to know the exact limitations of this single
man's vocal powers? The man is, after all, a bird now, and still he promises
that "one day I'll grow up, I'll be a beautiful woman, one day I'll grow
up, I'll be a beautiful girl". But today he is a child, today he is a boy.
He may as well be Lou Reed, for all we know, or Devendra Banhart, or he might
be Candy Darling, whose deathbed photo adorns the album cover.
But seriously, I Am A Bird Now is a
terrific piece of work. There are no major stylistic or aesthetic departures
from the self-titled album, but the formula has been refined and polished, the
hooks tightened up, and the guest spots do help to alleviate the monotonousness
of it all. Some listeners have complained, stating that the album is
specifically geared towards gay audiences. This is bullshit. Obviously, if your
ideal of a musical hero is Eric Adams of Manowar, or Ted Nugent, you will most
likely take a ritual piss on this record and nail its shards to the doors of
the nearest gay bar. But any sensitive, emotional person, regardless of his /
her orientation, is equally liable to be entertained, and, perhaps, even moved
by at least some of the tracks.
If anything, it is the unflinching devotion to
masochism, not homosexuality, that continues to form the backbone of Antony's
whole image. It is easy to take 'Fistful Of Love' and laugh at it — either out
of condescension for the whole idea of enjoying love-induced pain, or because
of the specific way that Antony propagates it, from the «long-term club member»
point of view. But it is a fine, nicely constructed song all the same, with a
gripping crescendo whose pathos is either completely heartfelt or magnificently
simulated, and, in these circumstances, who really cares about lyrics like
"I feel the whip, I know it's out of love"? Besides, whoever prevents
one from seeing "the whip" as a metaphor — and plus, Lou Reed is here
speaking the intro, reminding us that, somehow, we have all somehow managed to
love the Velvet Underground's 'Venus In Furs', where the masochistic message
was far clearer pronounced. It just didn't use to have that elevated romantic
touch to it, but times change.
There is, actually, a ton of different things
to be said about each individual track on here. Lyrics, intonations, moods —
Freud would have a field day, and there'd still be plenty of survivors left for
Jung to mop them up. If anything, Hegarty shows you how easy it is to concoct a
tragedy out of nothing: all you have to do is locate your inner male (if you are
a male, it's not that hard), then find your inner female (a bit harder if you
are not a female, but still possible), and make them do battle with each other.
The energy of the ensuing conflict is inexhaustible, like the atom's power; and
it is especially effective if you have plenty to eat, a good roof above your
head, a host of loving and caring people around, and a steady dayjob — because
a human being needs suffering to stay a human being, and how do you suffer if
there's seemingly nothing to suffer for? Let Antony Hegarty show you how to rub
two sticks together.
I Am A Bird Now is definitely the man's best album that cannot
ever be bested. When you stick to that kind of schtick, memorable vocal
melodies, convenient guest spots, and a humble thirty-five minute running
length just can't be beat. All of the songs make pretty much the same point,
but all of them do it cleverly, and on the peaks — 'Hope There's Someone',
'Fistful Of Love', 'Spiraling' — the man's unbridled romanticism almost
transcends theater and makes one forget all about the conventions of the XXIst
century. Thumbs up, brain-wise and
partially heart-wise. (And yet, a sidenote: dear Mr. Antony, the line
"Forgive me, let live me" may just be the ugliest disruption of
English syntactic laws that I have ever encountered).
THE CRYING LIGHT (2009)
1) Her Eyes Are Underneath The
Ground; 2) Epilepsy Is Dancing; 3) One Dove; 4) Kiss My Name; 5) The Crying
Light; 6) Another World; 7) Daylight And The Sun; 8) Aeon; 9) Dust And Water;
10) Everglade.
With the release of The Crying Light,
preceded by the EP Another World a year earlier, we finally learn why
Antony Hegarty is so sad, and no, it is not because nobody wants to whip
him because he is fat and ugly. It is because we have misused our planet and
pretty soon we are all going to die — or, at least, mutate into legions of
emo-coiffured zombies, lurking by night among the ruins of civilization.
At least, such was the conclusion reached by a
number of prominent critics, who, upon listening to 'Another World', have
decided that Hegarty went eco-conscious, and since there are few things more
politically correct than a queer Greenpeace-friendly multiculturalist (the
latter side is emphasized by the sleeve cover, a photo of famous Japanese butoh
dancer Kazuo Ohno — now that you all know what butoh is, this is
practically edutainment!), The Crying Light shot all the way up to #1 on
the pan-European Billboard.
Nevertheless, it's not that bad. Nobody
really forces us to concentrate on the album's essence as a mix of butoh,
masochism, and environmentalism, i. e. one more example of an «artist» so desperate
for acceptance he'll try any combination of the uncombinable as long as each
individual element is currently en vogue. The Crying Light has
elements of it all, but they are not crucial. In fact, even the lyrics to
'Another World' need not necessarily be understood straightforwardly, in a
«look what they've done to our planet» sense. The guy is simply telling us that
he has no more hopes of happiness left for this world. Certainly many of us
feel the same way, don't we?
A bigger concern than «trendiness» for me is
that this third album, clearer than ever, shows that Antony has hit his
threshold and has nowhere else to go. We get the exact same formula: minor
chord piano ballads with tristesse-oriented strings and floating vocals. And
this time around, there are no guest stars to provide the spice of life: it is
Hegarty and his own griefs all the way through. Not that it is, in any way,
easy to understand where exactly the man could travel from here — he has
polished and fortified his niche to the major envy of all possible competitors,
but, having dug so deep in it, there is no more way out.
It is good, then, that at least Hegarty's
melodic talents have not abandoned him. About a half of the tunes are pure
atmosphere, but when he gives things a little rhythmic punch, hooks start to
materialize with ease. 'Kiss My Name' may be a fairly clumsy song title, but
since it actually refers to the idea of Antony's mother embracing his future
tombstone, it makes sense, and the violins that dance up and down around the
main rhythm create a beautiful fairy-tale impression, alleviating the darkness
of the lyrics. See, being dead is not all that bad.
'Another World' takes us in the opposite
direction — utter minimalism — but makes its point with plenty of stateliness,
reminiscent a bit of Brian Eno's faraway successes in the «ambient ballad»
genre. (On 'Dust And Water', however, I believe Antony is going way too far
with the minimalism — as efficient an instrument as his voice is, he is long
past that stage where it merely took him to open his mouth and properly direct
the air stream to make his point).
A few other tunes may deserve specific mention,
but it will take a really major fan to emphasize their individuality, so let me
just state this: no big admirer of Antony's inner world will be disappointed by
the way he extracts it on the outside over the forty minutes of Crying Light,
yet if you'd rather treat The Johnsons as a moderately delightful, but passable
curio born out of the necessities of the early 21st century, you need not go
beyond I Am A Bird Now. Thumbs up,
out of respect for the intelligent craft of the final product, but in the immediate
future, it would perhaps be better for all of us if Mr. Hegarty finally
switched to sepia-tinted visual installations.
SWANLIGHTS (2010)
1) Everything Is New; 2) The
Great White Ocean; 3) Ghost; 4) I'm In Love; 5) Violetta; 6) Swanlights; 7) The
Spirit Was Gone; 8) Thank You For Your Love; 9) Fletta; 10) Salt Silver Oxygen;
11) Christina's Farm.
He almost did
switch to visual installations: accompanying the album, Antony has also
produced a 144-page art book — beautiful, expressive, pretentious, and bound to
be forgotten as soon as the next Antony takes over the crown of this particular
fiefdom. But there is also the small matter of this fourth album, which does
exist, even if it is not quite clear if it is the music that is the supporting
companion to the visual arts or vice versa.
"Every everything, everything is
new", the man wobbles during the opening twenty seconds, enough to make
you understand that nothing is
actually new, and thus, present a jarring paradox from the very start. Once
again, morose piano ballads with either minimalistic, or lush strings-adorned
arrangements, are the word of the day; occasional acoustic guitar backing,
brass fanfares, and gentle woodwinds only reinforce the general rule. Trying
to assert some sort of individuality for Swanlights
is futile. All that is left is just to see if you can enjoy the music.
And I believe that it can be easily done,
indeed. Perhaps there is one good
general observation about Swanlights
that can be made: as to what concerns my personal experience, the album has
revealed itself to be much less «annoying» than its predecessors. No
intelligent person can have a problem with Antony Hegarty's disdain for the
ugly trashy world in which we all live, and for his deep-running desire to
escape it if he cannot change it; but lots of people, myself included, can have
a problem with the theatrical manner in which he expresses that desire — I
mean, does one really escape the
cynicism and cruelty of life by putting on layers of makeup?..
Swanlights, if only a little bit, but a little bit that I
seem to have felt, tones down that theatricality. As it often happens, the
toning down begins with the album sleeve: where we once saw creepy hallowed
figures and photos of near-alien Japanese artists, we now see a mortally
wounded polar bear (and 'Swanlights', for that matter, is his name). Pain,
suffering, isolation, empathy, and ecological concern — all in one, but with a
little bit of gritty reality thrown in, too. The same is with the music: a
little smoother, a little quieter, a little less overtly manneristic, yet never
ever betraying Antony's essential schtick.
The very idea of Antony doing a duet with
Björk, especially at this time in her career, when the «nutty» streak in
her brain seems to have infected most of the sane cells, could easily trigger a
bathroom response from those who have their feet firmly planted on the ground.
No reason to be alarmed: 'Flétta' ("lichen" in Icelandic) is a
restrained, humbly-pretty duet that will be appreciated not so much for its
melody (which is about as instantly memorable as, say, an average Liszt piano
prelude) as for the delicate weaving of two of the most individual singing styles
of the past two decades. The piano playing is Hegarty-style, the vocal
flourishes Björk-style, and the two mesh together real well without trying
to outdo each other in purely technical terms.
The title track is also a relative standout:
for about six minutes, the regular pianos disappear, replaced by a bleak
apocalyptic nightmare with Eastern/psychedelic overtones, as Hegarty vocalizes
on the pentatonic scale to jarring blasts of feedback and all sorts of analog
and digital noise. This is his first attempt at immersing himself into a
gentleness-free atmosphere, as if to show us what can happen when the lonesome
hero finds himself flung out of his little room at the top of his ivory tower
and thrust into the world. Is there any difference between the lights of
Broadway and the North Pole? Not for Mr. Hegarty, no.
Another highlight is 'Thank You For Your Love',
which can be seen as either an original twist on the modern romantic ballad, or
even as a cunning send-up; beginning quite generically, it eventually reaches
a point at which Hegarty locks himself up in a never-ending loop of "thank
you, thank you, thank you"s which, as some astute reviewer has noticed,
start sounding more like a "please please" — clearly, he is begging
for something he has not yet received rather than simply showing his gratitude
in such an obnoxious way. It is at least an intriguing development, and at
most, it's just plain funny, even if that may not have been the original
intention.
And overall, most of the time his minimalistic
melodies work. 'Everything Is New' and 'The Spirit Was Gone' are delicate piano
pieces; the strings, woodwinds, and chimes on 'Salt Silver Oxygen' interact in
a beautiful baroque-tinged manner; 'The Great White Ocean' is a near-gorgeous
folk ballad; and even though I am not quite sure why the laconic, Eno-ish piano
phrase of 'Christina's Farm' had to be prolonged for seven minutes, that does
not make it any less touching, per se.
One thing you definitely cannot blame on
Hegarty is lack of attention to detail and manner; some of these numbers will
pull your strings, others won't, but not a single one can be accused of not
having tried to the utmost. Maybe he is
a poseur, but he's definitely a worker, and Swanlights convinces me that, provided he goes on working as hard,
he might have a couple dozen more albums like this one in him. Thumbs up
for mope rock's upcoming AC/DC.
CUT THE WORLD (2012)
1) Cut The World; 2) Future
Feminism; 3) Cripple And The Starfish; 4) You Are My Sister; 5) Swanlights; 6)
Epilepsy Is Dancing; 7) Another World; 8) Kiss My Name; 9) I Fell In Love With
A Dead Boy; 10) Rapture; 11) The Crying Light; 12) Twilight.
Poseur or not, Antony Hegarty is enough of a
professional singer to merit hearing live; but even then, there must have been
some extra measures taken to ensure that a live album from Antony & The
Johnsons would make commercial and critical sense. The measure in question was
to hook up with The Danish National Chamber Orchestra, and rearrange the
setlist with the aid of a whole arsenal of classical tricks — in the grand old
tradition of Procol Harum. The addition of an orchestra would hardly raise the
bar on «pretentiousness» (this transcendental quality had already built its
nest in Hegarty's mouth quite some time ago), but could allow to explore some
additional opportunities. Besides, Antony and strings had been on friendly
terms from the start.
The setlist opens with one new song (title
track), a trademark Hegarty lament with relatively few lyrics and lots of swooping
orchestral atmospherics; includes ʽI Fell In Love With A Dead Boyʼ
from a rare EP (Alice Cooper would have definitely misinterpreted that title);
and, for the rest, concentrates mainly on selections from the band's
self-titled debut and The Crying Light
— I Am A Bird Now and Swanlights, for some reason, are
underrepresented, although the title track from Swanlights does get a major restructuring — the dark nightmare of
the original is replaced by regular pianos and strings, as if acknowledging
that the original went way too far in the «creepy» department, and that
there's always another chance to cut back.
I cannot say that the rearrangements open up a
new dimension in the music, or anything equally presumptuous. Like the absolute
majority of classical reworkings of pop songs, they have a glossy,
soundtrackish quality to them, and I believe that, in addition to all the
strings, pianos, and woodwinds, they could have definitely used more brass
(there is a small trombone blast at
the beginning of ʽCripple And The Starfishʼ, and brass plays a big
part in the crescendo at the end of ʽTwilightʼ, but otherwise it is
mostly flutes and recorders), but, understandably, they did not want to cut
down too much on the overall fragility and wimpiness of the proceedings —
Antony has so consistently cultivated this image of a living being made
entirely of pure glass, that a really strong brass blast could shatter him to
pieces right there in the concert hall.
That said, the arrangements do fit the music
and the voice — never detracting from the emotionality already present in the
songs; the best news is basically that I do not mind their presence, and it
makes for a good pretext to hear these songs once more, and since these are
mostly good songs, then what's the problem? In a way, it is fun to discover
that the effect that Antony Hegarty produces on your senses stays exactly the
same regardless of whether he is being backed with forty academic musicians or
just a lonesome string quartet (or trio, or duo) in the studio. Maybe that is
because he is a like a small chamber orchestra in himself.
The very fact that this is a live album,
though, is consciously downplayed: audience applause is only included in the
mix at the very end of the record, as if the ten songs in question were just
separate movements of one single suite (well, in a way you could say they are —
in a way, Antony's entire career seems to be), and the only chunk of stage
banter is a seven-minute speech that presages the suite and is included as a
separate track, called ʽFuture Feminismʼ. Now, in a way, the speech
is just a lot of post-New Age mystical bullshit, centered around Hegarty's
trans-gender issues and his ideas on the femininity in human nature. But there
is something about the way in which
he delivers it that commands sympathy — a sort of lightweight, humorous teenage
naiveté that makes you forget all the silliness because somehow it all
feels normal: just a little
fantasizing on issues of nature to help justify your perfectly normal inner
queer. Presumably, not all the people
with transgender mentality really seem like they feel at home with that
mentality. Antony Hegarty, over these seven minutes, gives convincing proof
that he does — and, as a bonus, throws in an intelligent crack at the Pope,
which is not something that everyone
in his profession does in an intelligent manner. Good speech.
Overall, this is certainly not an essential
purchase, and even the hardcore fans should take note — many will find the
orchestration excessive, if not generic or downright cheesy, compared to the
sparse, elegiac arrangements on the studio records. But even then, it might be
interesting to see how easily and comfortably Antony works in a live setting:
his songs are so paranoid and claustrophobic, after all, that it is almost
unimaginable to have him reproduce all that suffering and fear of the world
before a big bunch of real people — you'd rather imagine him as this total
recluse, recording in a self-made studio in some log cabin somewhere in Tibet.
Well now, at least we know that much — that he does venture as far out as
Copenhagen, and that he does not have an artist's block when working with a
large ensemble of classical musicians. Should we feel disappointment over
the lack of integrity, or relief over the physical and psychiatric sanity? Make
your buying choice, depending on the answer.
ARCADE FIRE (2003)
1) Old Flame; 2) I'm Sleeping
In A Submarine; 3) No Cars Go; 4) The Woodland National Anthem; 5) My Heart Is
An Apple; 6) Headlights Look Like Diamonds; 7) Vampire / Forest Fire.
NB: this review should properly be read AFTER
the reviews for Funeral and Neon Bible, since it was written as
an afterthought, in anticipation of Arcade Fire's third full-length LP, The
Suburbs.
There is very little on Arcade Fire's humbly
self-titled EP debut from 2003 to suggest that, in less than a year from then,
they would start topping critical lists and being regarded as the saviours of
their generation. And yet, at the same time, there already is everything: Win
Butler's paranoid, bullied-boy-takes-last-stand-in-the-corner vocals and Regine
Chassagne's naughty-excited-girl-defying-prescriptions «singing»;
multi-layered arrangements where each instrument plays something tremendously
simple, but like its player's life depended on it; and, of course, the overall
starry-eyed idealism within which it is considered sacrilegious to borrow from
one's ancestors in a post-modernistic manner (although it is permitted to
maintain one's sense of humor).
The difference is that these seven tracks are
very clearly tentative; the best way to ascertain this is to compare the
original version of 'No Cars Go' — easily the most memorable track — with its
masterful reworking on Neon Bible, where it is nevertheless only one of
several highlights. The lo-fi production (everything was recorded in some cheap
barn somewhere in Maine) is violently at odds with the band's ambitions, and
does not allow the senses to be properly overwhelmed. God only knows how many
of the other tracks could benefit this much from being re-recorded a few years
later; my serious bet is on 'Headlights Look Like Diamonds', Chassagne's
tour-de-force whose head-spinning harmony line deserves a whole lot more
vibrations out of one's speakers.
On the other hand, several of the songs,
sounding like un-fleshed and, possibly, un-fleshable demos, would hardly
convince the hardened skeptic about the capacities of indie rock in any
setting: 'The Woodland National Anthem' is more like 'The Ragged March Cat
Anthem' with the appropriate musical accompaniment from a band of drunken
hobos, and the closing seven-minute number works out the style, but not the
essence of true anthems-to-come like 'Power Out' and 'Rebellion'. This is
probably because most of the songs do not bother to find the proper
underpinning musical hook, or do not take enough care with the musical buildup,
or just do not hold that rhythm nearly as steadily as they would soon be able
to.
In short, Arcade Fire is not so much a
proper debut as a bit of a training camp, and, in retrospect, should not be
anybody's first point of acquaintance with the band; once Butler and his
friends get in the history books and stay there, everyone who cares about past
sounds will want to visit this departure locus (it is still, after all, a
matter of spending thirty minutes in a moderately pleasing way), yet it is not
deserving of much on its own, even if 'Headlights Look Like Diamonds' threatens
to become an unjustly overlooked power pop gem, and 'My Heart Is An Apple',
perhaps, an equally unjustly forgotten intimate tearjerker.
FUNERAL (2004)
1) Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels);
2) Neighborhood #2 (Laika);
3) Une Année Sans
Lumière; 4) Neighborhood
#3 (Power Out); 5) Neighborhood
#4 (7 Kettles); 6) Crown
Of Love; 7) Wake Up;
8) Haiti; 9) Rebellion (Lies); 10) In The Backseat.
The «noughties» have predictably brought back a
common interest in the Eighties, as new bands are springing up whose members
sacrificed their childhood to that decade. Theoretically, this is quite creepy:
what kind of music can we expect from people whose minds had been shaped by the
likes of Cyndi Lauper or Duran Duran? Or Mötley Crüe, for that
matter? How can one be influenced by plastic sound and end up not producing
recycled plastic sound?
But on practice, it's all in the mind. If
somebody can make David out of a spoiled block of marble, then some other body
can make great music out of a simple synth-pop theme. And if the members of
Arcade Fire had not properly absorbed their childhood influences, there is no
way they could have produced an album as flawless as Funeral. Even Cyndi
Lauper has its proper place on it — somewhere — maybe in the kiddie keyboard line
of 'Haiti' — maybe elsewhere.
Funeral was recorded in late 2003, in Montreal, by no less than fifteen musicians
who, collectively, call themselves Arcade Fire. All the tracks are credited to
«Arcade Fire» as such, but the leading force behind the wall-of-sound is the
nuclear family unit of Win Butler and Régine Chassagne; they are the
only two lead singers, play a good half of the instruments, and, arguably,
write the bulk of the melodies and the lyrics. These are the bare facts.
Another bare fact is that Funeral has been lauded by just about every
critic in existence (including even grumpy old codger Robert Christgau), so
that hipsters and indie snobs should find it their duty to hate it — or join
the herd. Then again, with the unbelievable degree of musical segregation that we
experience today, I am sure many people have not even heard of it in the
first place. So let's talk about it all the same.
Many critics have already dubbed it the best,
or one of the best, albums of the decade. I cannot, and do not want to, speak
in those terms, but I would certainly like to discuss it on its own terms, and that
way Funeral is no less than perfect. At its heart lies an honest
infatuation with the biggest-sounding, pomp-oriented bands of the Eighties —
primarily U2 and the Cure (influences which band members confess to quite
freely in their interviews), but I also detect whiffs of R.E.M. and New Order
and... well, this can go on for quite a bit. Yet, with fifteen members sharing
the rights and privileges of this democratic musical community, none of the
songs really sound like second-hand tributes; rather, this legacy serves as the
backbone around which they build up muscles from a whole heap of other
sources, resulting in a unique kind of synthesis.
Obviously, there are progressive elements, with
various classically derived subthemes weaving around the main melodies. There
is also a strong folk-rock tendency, especially on the record's quieter
numbers. The «baroque pop» genre of the Sixties leaves its imprint on songs
like '7 Kettles' and others. There is unity, for sure, but no strong sign of
driving themselves into one particular corner or niche — just as you think you
got them finally figured out, along comes some unexpected surprise that
crushes your attempts at pigeonholing them as «arena rock» or «mope rock» or «the
Cure with less reverb and a chick playing violin».
At the same time, they are very «commercial»,
very strongly pop. They know the drill: important thing number one is to
establish a basic hook, a simple riff, an unsophisticated, maybe even recycled
theme, but one that necessarily resonates in the soul. Once that has been done,
you hit on all the cylinders, draw on all the resources of your fifteen-strong
army to turn your «pop» into «art», and that's when the cat is firmly in the
bag.
This is what makes 'Wake Up', the album's
anthemic centerpiece, the potboiler that it is. I am all but sure I already
heard that riff, maybe with some minor changes, somewhere else. But whereever
it was, it was never used in such a powerful, tear-inducing setting. When Win
Butler sings 'Somethin' filled up my heart with nothin', someone told me not to
cry', you know that he is really inviting you to cry — not to mention
that his very voice inherently betrays a man constantly on the verge of breakdown — and when he goes on saying 'But
now that I'm older, my heart's colder, and I can see that it's a lie', I am
glad to accept that invitation. And when all the band members start chanting
the song's refrain in unison, how joyful it is to see the return of the good
old catharsis: truly, the song's purifying power is easily comparable to 'All
You Need Is Love' (and the chorus, quite obviously, is a direct reference to
'Hey Jude'), except it just comes about thirty years too late to exercise that
power all over the world.
'Wake Up' is the album's only anthem, but there
are quite a few other rock-out monsters: 'Rebellion (Lies)' with its
power-bass derived from the Joy Division school, but used in a far more optimistic
context; 'Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)', with Edge-style guitar playing over a
Robert Smith-style raging-sea sonic panorama; and the album's most
tongue-in-cheek tribute to post-modernism, 'Neighborhood #2 (Laika)',
combining New Wave arrangements with accordeons, drunk folksy choruses, and
lyrics about vampires and, well, Laikas.
Then there are the quiet moments, every bit as
stimulating — the folk drone of '7 Kettles', the gentle French mannerisms of
'Une Année Sans Lumière', and my favourite, the (perhaps slightly
overemoted) confession 'Crown Of Love'. In this quiet section, Butler cedes the
spotlight to Régine on two occasions: the lovely nostalgia of 'Haiti',
where she sings about her ethnic background, and the gorgeous conclusion of
'In The Backseat', a very autumnesque baroque ballad that somehow combines the
subjects of her aversion to driving and her grandmother's death.
Death is frequently mentioned, by the way, as
the main subject of the album — Captain Obvious will be happy to direct you to
its title, and a little research tells you that several band members had lost
their relatives around the time of its recording (properly speaking, though, most
of it was recorded after the death of only one person, Régine's
grandmother). But I do not get the impression that it is «about death», per
se; that would be too blunt, too Goth. Funeral is a very sad album,
indeed — much of it has to do with Butler's voice, which I could see as
over-annoyingly whiny for some people — but its atmosphere is not depressive or
«funebral».
I would rather describe it as ranging from «frightened»
to «confused», describing the fright and confusion that arise from living in
society — not «Society» en large, but just your immediate society, the
one that forms the central focus of the four parts of the 'Neighborhood' suite.
There are no truly grand social statements, which is where they part company
with U2 (but not with the Cure, though): Funeral does not deal with
Irish independence or poverty in the third world. But there is an idea of
discomfort and, perhaps, incomprehension — feelings that every mentally unchallenged
person in our society experiences from time to time. The wall of sound that the
fifteen members produce is mostly used in a claustrophobic manner — part of it
surrounds you with an actual, almost-real wall, and the other part represents
your inner demons that, having broken out but found no way to break on through
to the other side, only return to torment you more. And over all that din,
Butler's tearful voice resonates like the feeble, but stable blubbering of a
broken down patient in an asylum. It's not all that bad or inescapably
dangerous or apocalyptic, but it is all unsafe and uncomfortable, and only if
you 'Wake Up' can you ever regain some comfort.
This is the message I'm reading into Funeral,
and it may be all a lot of bull, but it is one of those classy records which
you can try to decode from multiple angles — or just enjoy mindlessly without
any decoding. It is big, sprawling, ambitious, and, in a rare instance, it deserves
to be just that. My undying respect goes to Butler and Chassagne for pulling it
all off. Thumbs up, and, most amazingly,
with the melting heart slowly in the lead. Sentimentalism is gonna be the death
of me one of these days.
NEON BIBLE (2007)
1) Black Mirror; 2) Keep The Car Running; 3) Neon Bible; 4) Intervention; 5) Black Wave/Bad Vibrations;
6) Ocean Of Noise; 7) The Well And The Lighthouse;
8) [Antichrist Television
Blues]; 9) Windowsill;
10) No Cars Go; 11) My Body Is A Cage.
To improve on Funeral is probably
impossible. Other bands take years, sometimes decades, to reach that magnitude
— or, perhaps, "used to" take years, because, in the age of constant
acceleration and violent competition that puts the best theoreticists of
social-Darwinism to shame, even minimalist solo artists can no longer allow
themselves a growth period, let alone an entity with a bulk as huge as Arcade
Fire's. We can only guess, but it is a fairly strong guess: had Funeral
not garnered all the rightful accolades, the ensemble would most likely
have disbanded by now.
Instead, they started their career with their
masterpiece. As much as I want to hail Neon Bible as another one, I am
unable to extract the same emotional response. It is a different record, but it
is inconsistent, and its message occasionally interferes with its musical
content. This is strongly linked to the impression that it is too heavily
dominated by Win Butler and his personal vision rather than the band's
collective one: not only is Régine all but eliminated from the
proceedings (nothing like 'Haiti' to lighten things up or 'In The Backseat' for
a helpful shot of gorgeousness), but there are also no anthemic tracks like
'Wake Up' to remind you that there is a strong brotherhood feeling behind the
music. If this goes on the same way, Arcade Fire as we know it may not have too
many years ahead of it.
Nevertheless, I have no major problems with Win
Butler and his personal vision, because I fully empathize. Having dealt with
his most personal demons on Funeral, he now makes the music more
extrovert, turning from family ("neighborhood") problems to more global
matters. Neon Bible was, for the most part, recorded in a local church
that the band bought, restored, and converted into a studio, and what kind of
an album can you record in a church, of all places? That's right: a record
about the end of the world.
If you just want to assess Neon Bible
from its purely musical side, you will likely be disappointed: the music per
se is not tremendously interesting, and it certainly adds nothing new to the
style already shown on Funeral. If your favourite band is The Arctic
Monkeys, riding an amphetamine-powered bulldozer to assert life and its
values, you will probably hate Neon Bible as boring, depressed shit
produced by prematurely geriatric imbeciles. ("How many more years do we
have to listen to stupid pretentious white guys singing about the
apocalypse?" some people ask on the Web — obviously, the answer is
"as many as it takes to reach the apocalypse", which, logically,
means fewer and fewer all the time). If, however, you think that the rate at
which the planet is sinking into a boiling cocktail of stupidity and cruelty
keeps accelerating, Win Butler and his friends will be happy to voice your
concerns for you.
What I really like, though, is that they will
do it in their own, powerful and relevant, way, and not be nearly as blunt
about it as some of their idols (I am thinking particularly of a well-known
band from Ireland). This is a Church album, see, and the Church relies heavily
on symbolism, so two of the most important symbols are established at the
beginning: 'Black Mirror' and 'Neon Bible'. The former gives Butler and Co. a
general vision of the state of the world; the latter represents the (a)moral
law according to which this world is living. The album is thus ruled by two
slogans: 'Mirror, mirror on the wall — show me where their bombs will fall' and
'Not much chance for survival, if the Neon Bible is right'. The former is
creepy, the latter is correct.
Musically, the first three songs also form a
perfect beginning: they make everything possible to make 'Black Mirror' as
bleak and apocalyptic as the lyrics suggest, and the fact that it is so catchy
(nursery-rhyme-level catchy, in fact) only makes it all the more scary. 'Keep
The Car Running' continues things in a manner that mixes uplifting and paranoid,
after which the title track quiets the atmosphere with its melancholy musings
upon the fate of mankind (which reminds me that it is the album's only stripped-down
number in a sea of raging rock power).
It is only then that Neon Bible starts
to somewhat lose me, featuring one mid-fast-tempo roots-rocker after another,
similarly arranged and with similar feeling. This is no way to compete for a
second masterpiece in a row. I like the grand pipe organ riff of
'Intervention', but it seems to be the only thing that the song is hanging
upon, and stuff like 'Ocean Of Noise' and 'The Well And The Lighthouse' do not
have even that (although Butler still manages to grab my attention with the
anthemic 'lions and the lambs ain't sleepin' yet!' chorus on the latter).
Worst offender is 'Antichrist Television
Blues', a clearly obvious Springsteen imitation that is just not Arcade
Fire. There is nothing wrong about wanting to sound grand and pompous, and
there is nothing wrong with liking or even admiring Springsteen, but the last
thing the world needs is for other people, especially talented people, to write
songs like Springsteen. It is not ugly or awful; there is just no need for its
existence. I liked them more when they were channelling the spirit of Bowie
than when they switched to Bruce (much as I liked watching their joint
performance with Bowie more than their joint performance with Bruce).
After that low point, however, the record
quickly recuperates with another blistering trio. 'Windowsill', a tight
protest song that contains the most straightforward lyrics on the record — 'I
don't wanna fight in a holy war, I don't want the salesman knocking at my door,
I don't wanna live in America no more'; many have emphasized the song's
"anti-war" and "anti-Bushist" stance, but it goes far
beyond that — 'MTV, what have you done to me? Save my soul, set me free — set
me free, what have you done to me? I can't breathe, I can't see... World War
III, when are you coming for me?' Blunt, but it hits harder than most punk
rock, and it perfectly captures the thoughts and feelings of everyone else who,
like Butler, 'don't wanna see it at my windowsill'. Too bad that there is
nothing whatsoever that we can do about it.
'No Cars Go' is actually a re-recording of one
of their earliest songs, and it shows: its colourful, religious escapism fits
into the general subject of the album, but is also way too cheerful and optimistic
to sit comfortably between two of its most depressed numbers: 'Windowsill' and
'My Body Is A Cage', the latter a grim, organ-driven, bleeding-hearted
confession revolving around the infinite mantra: 'My body is a cage that keeps
me from dancing with the one I love — but my mind holds the key'. It is a
surprisingly theistic conclusion to the album: 'the one I love' is clearly
someone or something more power-endowed than Butler's spouse, and his
passionate howls of 'set my spirit free, set my body free' as the song thunders
into its dark conclusion almost imply thoughts of intentional ending of one's
physical and spiritual suffering, if you know what I mean. The last time I
witnessed the notions of 'love' and 'death' so closely intertwined, I guess,
was while listening to the final aria of Quadrophenia — an album which
I am pretty sure must also have been a strong influence on the band as a whole
and Neon Bible in particular.
If Butler's conscious and primary goal was to
promote Arcade Fire to the status of 'Biggest Band of Our Time', he has
succeeded: critical reaction was sometimes even more positive than first
time around, and just look at the sales — No. 2 on the Billboard? But
"isn't it ironic", as Alanis Morissette would say, that the same year
has seen Britney Spears' Blackout rise to the same position, not to
mention both records receiving the exact same three-and-a-half-star rating from
Rolling Stone? If anything, this comparison should only drive Butler to
even greater heights of paranoia: does that not signify that most people
simply pay no attention to the nature of the art they happen to be consuming,
as long as they have something to consume? 'I know a time is coming, all words
will lose their meaning' — I guess that time is here already, eh?
Still I hope, in a fit of naïve optimism,
that many more people than just the critics will appreciate the record not
because it is a cool thing to do but because they can identify with its
philosophy, or, in fact, its religion. Which is enough for me to overlook the
monotonousness of its middle lump and concentrate on the beauty and power of
its beginning and its end, and to give it a collective thumbs up on the part of the overwhelmed intellect
and the subdued soul. I can only hope that Butler keeps his ego in control for
at least a few more albums; he would never get that far without the collective
input of his musicians, and he should realize that very clearly.
THE SUBURBS (2010)
1) The Suburbs; 2) Ready To Start; 3) Modern
Man; 4) Rococo; 5) Empty Room; 6) City With
No Children; 7) Half Light I; 8) Half Light II; 9) Suburban War; 10) Month Of
May; 11) Wasted Hours; 12) Deep Blue; 13) We Used To Wait; 14)
Sprawl (Flatland); 15) Sprawl
II (Mountains Beyond Mountains); 16) The Suburbs (continued).
Arcade Fire's third album seems to have
confused the world even more than Neon
Bible. Too many people probably expected them to learn their lesson, rebound
from the alleged «sophomore slump», and deliver another fine barrel of
catharsis. Now The Suburbs could be
called many things, good or bad, but one thing it does not do is overwhelm emotionally — at least, not immediately. And
with the stakes raised so high, what is there to do? Most of the «official»
reviews have been positive, because no self-respecting critic likes to come
across as a dumbass, writing about the same band as saviours of the world one
day and as pathetic losers the next. Many, if not most, of the unofficial ones
have been honestly hateful.
Perhaps the saddest thing about The Suburbs is this: Arcade Fire's
third record leaves little, if any doubt, as to the fact that this band will
never ever top Funeral as its finest
hour, and, on an even sadder scale, confirms my deep-running suspicion that no
band or artist of today has it in them to lay more than one definitive
masterpiece — with everything else essentially being «just for the fans». The Suburbs is not a bad album by any
means, nor does it show any significant deterioration of the band's
enthusiasm, but neither is there any discernible progress. Mostly they are
running on the spot, and it does not help matters much that they do this over a
running length of sixteen tracks and sixty three minutes, either.
Let us begin with the fact that this is a
record about... the suburbs. Not
exactly the least untapped subject in the world of American art. Not exactly
the least untapped subject in the world of Arcade Fire, either: suburbs and neighbourhoods belong together, don't they? It is not bad that they
decided to move away from the globalistic-apocalyptic ambitions of Neon Bible; it is not too good,
though, that they decided to retread back to the trodden paths of Funeral in order to stretch wide and
dig deep that which has already been stretched and dug quite sufficiently.
Of course, this particular weakness is easy to
override. Want it or not, lyrics and concepts in rock albums generally exist so
as to facilitate the job of the critic, who is supposed to entertain his readers
with pseudo-philological and mock-philosophical babble rather than dry descriptions
of scales, modulations, and tonalities. Burn the CD booklet, unlearn the
English language and forget the Latin alphabet, and you will never ever know
that Butler and Chassagne's songs are somehow supposed to deal with memories of
their suburban lives and reflections on how different those lives are from
those of suburban kids today. I have not been able to perform any of these
three tasks, yet even so I fail to see a deep connection between the words and
the music. I am certainly no expert on the suburbs of Texas, but my intuition
quite suggestively tells me that The
Suburbs is as much a proper reflection of that life as a hip-hop musical
would be reflective of the life and times of Leonardo da Vinci.
So let 'em. It may be about the suburbs, or it
may be about twelfth century alchemists, or about the secret lives of black
beetles — my focus is on the music rather than on homebrewed philosophy. And
the music, unfortunately, prolongs and, sometimes, even exacerbates the
problems already evident on Neon Bible.
First, there is the issue of monotonousness:
this whole friggin' thing sounds mostly the same. Not only that, it makes
little use of the band members' individual talents. I had to doublecheck, for
instance, whether Sarah Neufeld is still an official member: her violin, so
essential to the sound of Funeral,
is pretty much drowned out for good on most of the songs. Guitars have been
compressed and reduced to one- or two-note drones, or, at best, echoey
substitutes for white noise in the background. And even so, with
individualities spliced together in one monolith, the album still does not have even one truly
collective, boundary-shattering anthem à la 'Wake Up'. At times, it all
feels like a huge army of clones, blindly following general Butler's
directions.
Second, I join the angry chorus of those who
insist that the whole thing is just way too drawn out. All of us will have our
own choices of which songs are winners and losers, but most of us will probably
agree that at least four or five tracks
should have been left on the cutting floor (for the record, my immediate
choices for the shitter are 'City With No Children', 'Suburban War', 'Wasted
Hours' — indeed! — and maybe one or two other tracks from the way too saggy
middle). God had his reasons, you see, for deeming forty — forty-five minutes
as the ideal running length of an album, and if Arcade Fire are God's chosen
ones indeed, what's up with forgetting His covenant? Who are they aiming at —
Michael Jackson?
If there is one thing that still saves The Suburbs and still shows that Funeral was not an accidental fluke,
it is that Arcade Fire still understand the devastating power of the simple
vocal and instrumental hook. About half of these songs, when all the nasty
words have been spoken, are still great pop music, and they are still capable
of reminding us how so much can be done with so little — and then, how it takes
so much to make you believe in the power of so little. For instance, the title
track, opening the album — first time around — with no build-up at all, but
launching directly into battle, would have never worked without its trivial
honky tonk piano riff, but it also takes all the Cure/U2-precision-level
arrangements of keyboards, strings, and haunting vocals in the background to
make that honky tonk piano riff work.
The arrangements may be devoid of
individuality, but on the best songs their components are still perfectly
integrated together; the simple vocal hooks of 'Ready To Start' and 'We Used To
Wait' would probably have never worked without all the electronic and analog
backing. (On the other hand, 'Empty Room', with Chassagne's vocals brought
closer to the forefront, seems to work better live than in its overproduced
studio arrangement). And it still puzzles me why the final grand scale number,
'Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)', works as well as it does, despite
being all rooted in a simplistic, repetitive synth-pop riff that could have
come off some Kylie Minogue album, for all I know; most likely, due to Regine's
ongoing charm — she still sings the same way as usual, as if she'd just learned
the basic technique the previous evening, always on the verge of breaking down
but always careful enough not to take that treacherous last step.
If there is one totally unusual song on the
album, it must be 'Rococo', eerie and creepy in its total absurdism: to mix
together mantra-style chanting of the word 'rococo' (yeah, I like the way it
sounds, too) with music that has nothing to do with rococo and lyrics that have
even less to do with it is something somebody must have dreamt in a nightmare,
and that's the exact feeling I get. It may warm my heart to hear the lyrics
mercilessly lambasting the kids of today ("they seem wild but they are so
tame, they're moving towards you with their colors all the same" — that's
right, have at 'em, Will!), but, again, the music
itself is much weirder than that, a slow whirlwind of strings, keyboards, and
howls the exact likes of which I never heard before, as if the Cure, Cocteau
Twins, and Radiohead all joined forces on that one.
One thing is for sure: The Suburbs, like all other Arcade Fire albums, not only stands up
to, but definitely requires repeated listens. Do not try it out if you are one
of the few unlucky souls that remained untouched by the gruff majesty of Funeral; do not expect to be upgraded
to Level 3 with a solid bonus if your soul has
been lucky, either; try not to think of it in terms of «how seriously they
carry on with their world-saving mission» — and your reward will arrive soon
enough. Even though I do realize that for many people this reward will be
nothing compared with the bitter disillusionment: what do you know, Arcade
Fire are actually human beings, not infallible deities descended into human
forms in our desperate hour of need. Still, painful as it may be, thumbs up, gentlemen — there's something to be
said for imperfection. At least they've dropped most of the Springsteenisms of
the last album.
REFLEKTOR (2013)
1) Reflektor; 2) We Exist; 3)
Flashbulb Eyes; 4) Here Comes The Night Time; 5) Normal Person; 6) You Already
Know; 7) Joan Of Arc; 8) Here Comes The Night Time II; 9) Awful Sound (Oh
Eurydice); 10) It's Never Over (Oh Orpheus); 11) Porno; 12) Afterlife; 13)
Supersymmetry.
First and foremost, let us get this straight.
From my (current) perspective, Arcade Fire are the... no, not necessarily the
«greatest band of the 2000s», but simply the
band of the 2000s, par excellence. Well, either that or Franz Ferdinand, I
guess, but you can't really be the band
of any particular decade if you do not manage to rise above and beyond all the
given subcultures of that particular decade. Funeral was a great album, Neon
Bible and The Suburbs less so,
but all three had what it takes to convince me, and maybe you as well — there
is really something about these guys that says, summarizes, and wraps up it
all. Is there any other song released in those ten years that is more deserving
of a generational anthem status than ʽWake Upʼ? Is there a better
call-to-action epic than ʽWe Used To Waitʼ? Is there a better band
out there that could offer a more satisfactory set of «Happy/Sad» packages
where cynicism and idealism would be more elegantly and accurately settled next
to one another? Individual flaws, filler issues, technical problems be damned,
the 2000s belonged to Arcade Fire if they belonged to anyone at all.
But if there is one thing that I am almost
certain about, it is that, with Reflektor,
the 2010s no longer belong to Arcade Fire. This wouldn't be a big problem, of
course (no band has been lucky enough to claim two decades of domination under
its belt), if only we knew who exactly would claim the takeover — and if Arcade
Fire had not released but its meager share of three albums in their decade of
triumph, never landing another Funeral
in terms of sheer gut impact. As it is, the change in style that they
introduced here is quite likely to become permanent, and gradually transform
them into an elitist esoteric act, which is, of course, better than
transforming into a generic adult contemporary or New Age act (and, all things
considered, is still better than having them break up, which is also a
possibility), but...
If asked to come up with one quote from the
album to describe my current feelings about it, that would, of course, be the
refrain of the title track: "I thought I found the connector — it's just a
reflector". There are good songs on the record, and some bad ones, and
some that require a long time to decide, but one thing that it doesn't have is
even a single tune of genuinely
heartbreaking power, of which there were lots on Funeral, and at least two or three on each of its follow-ups. For
Arcade Fire, Reflektor is that
threshold which separates «meaningful accessibility» from «pretentious
obscurity» — and while there is nothing inherently wrong with the latter as
such, loving a record like this, for
me, is out of the question. Recognizing its complexity and symbolism, recommending
it for musicological study, sure. Shedding tears over its convoluted storylines
and abstract feelings — thank you very much, I'd rather leave it to arthouse
junkies.
On the formal musical side, Reflektor picks up right where
ʽSprawl IIʼ left us last time — in a tight electronic grip, with
synthesized loops, atmospheric backgrounds, and even drum machines prominently
featured throughout, giving the band a mock-futuristic feel where in the past they
would, on the contrary, bring out various antiquated instruments. This is
already not a good sign, because it shows a lack of immunity for the relatively
common «Eighties nostalgia» virus that has already infected scores of other
artists — and it is particularly strange to see it spread over to Arcade Fire,
a band with so many people playing so many different things. (No wonder Sarah
Neufeld has been «demoted» from full-time band member to «additional musician»
status — she simply does not have as much to do on the record as she used to;
synthesizers and violins do not usually need one another too badly).
On the formal «artistic» side, Reflektor is something much more
bizarre than just «Arcade Fire with synths». Its conceptuality is influenced by
Haitian rara music, Marcel Camus' Orfeu
Negro, Søren Kierkegaard, and other aesthetic objects and
personalities that are all tied up in the grand scheme of things, since, after
all, everything is made up of just a small bunch of elementary particles in
the final run. Topping it off is the band's presentation of a split-off part of
their personality as «The Reflektors», a masked alter ego that they invented
for themselves in September 2013 and exploited in a bunch of secret gigs and
video clips. Well — you might like the album or hate it, but a lazy affair it
certainly is not: quite on the contrary, it is the band's most ambitious,
pretentious, and (at least technically) complicated and multi-layered
enterprise so far. That is more or less an objective assessment. Subjective
assessment — this is one of those «off the deep end» albums where it never
feels certain that the band itself knows what the hell it is doing.
Butler confesses that the original idea was to
make a «short» album, so it is only natural that, in the end, it all turned
into an unprecedented sprawl, stretched over two CDs without an adequate
reason. The two parts, as many have noted, are stylistically filtered: Disc 1
is «rockier», concentrating more on dance-oriented, drums-'n'-bass-heavy
tracks, whereas Disc 2 enters the twilight zone of «atmosphere», slowing down
and getting in the mood — no wonder, since this is where the bulk of the
Orpheus/Eurydice storyline is concentrated. Consequently, the second part is
less immediately accessible, and will probably appeal more (in the long run) to
hardcore fans, while the first part will be more benevolent to newcomers; in
keeping with the spirit, the two singles from the album were
ʽReflektorʼ from Disc 1 and ʽAfterlifeʼ from Disc 2 (to be
fair, ʽAfterlifeʼ is also quite danceable, but still shares the same
shadowy shape with the rest of the disc).
Now far be it from me to deny the presence of
some really great Arcade Fire tracks on this album. ʽReflektorʼ
itself is a good way to start off, using the somewhat corny dance-pop settings
of the track as a background for human drama — after all, Black Orpheus, too, did pretty much the same with the somewhat
corny Rio carnival settings — and the cold, mechanical drive of the song suits
well its basic theme of the «inability to connect», with Win and Regine playing
quite skilfully against each other (greatest pair since Lindsey and Stevie, I
guess, except they really have to act it out, since nobody has reported on any
alienation issues between the two). However, even ʽReflektorʼ is not
entirely free from «what-the-hell-was-that?» musical ideas: the bubbly
synthesizer riff that comes in after each chorus, sounding like a memento of an
Eighties' video game, is either unintentionally awful, in which case they must
have been high when recording it, or intentionally awful, in which case it is a
Major Artistic Decision that we can Respect, Tolerate, or Despise, but never
Ignore. I choose «Despise», because I just can't help it, but fortunately, that
does not affect my general feeling towards the entire track.
Two other great songs on Disc 1 are
ʽNormal Personʼ and ʽJoan Of Arcʼ. The former arguably is
the most «conservative», old-school-Arcade-Fire number on the entire album, a
grizzly-grunt against common denominators with distorted guitars and dry saxes
from the long-gone era of glam rock and one of those dreamy, but witty
«multi-Regine» bridges that nobody really knows how to bake except for good old
Arcade Fire. And Win's excited "I've never really ever met a normal
person..." coda is a classic finale, though a bit too simple and
repetitive to send off real sparks. ʽJoan Of Arcʼ may be even better,
with a suitable martial punch and another cool exchange between Win and Regine
(for some reason, the call-and-response thing between the collective chorus of
"Joan of Arc!" and Regine's «correcting» "Jeanne d'Arc"
from the prompter's box is almost intensely cute) — that's the Arcade Fire we
know and love.
But then there are the questions. ʽHere
Comes The Night Timeʼ, for instance — is this really a good song? Is its
electronic arrangement with a few piano chords sprinkled around really a good
match for its poetry? Is the poetry itself worth your attention? "If
there's no music up in heaven, then what's it for?" This sounds almost
like a question I would like to re-address to the band: if there is no (well, almost no) music in this song, then
what's it for? The piano bits are probably the best part of the song, and the
noisy acceleration towards the end, which used to work so well on Funeral, does not work, because if the
main part of the song does not wreck your emotions, no use counting on a mad
frenetic coda for compensation. ʽYou Already Knowʼ reintroduces the
stupid synth tones, moves along at top speed like a generic filler track on Neon Bible or Suburbs, and, judging by the sampled «glitzy» announcement of the
band's entrance in the intro, should work as a piece of self-irony, but it
really doesn't. It's all just... odd.
However, my biggest disappointment still
concerns the second («moody») part. This is where the pretense takes over big
time, and the band starts thinking of itself as disciples of some abstract
Brian Eno — unfortunately, they never had Eno's musical genius, and while
ʽAwful Sound (Oh Eurydice)ʼ thankfully does not totally justify its
title, its electronic soundscapes are derivative and dull, and its attempts to
mount a gargantuan ʽHey Judeʼ-esque coda are uninspiring: where the
grand choral movement of ʽWake Upʼ came so naturally, this one sounds
too forced, too self-conscious — a failed attempt at grandioseness. Much
better is the counterpart, ʽIt's Never Over (Oh Orpheus)ʼ, driven by
a handsome U2-style bass riff and featuring an intriguing duet between Win as
Orpheus and Regine as Eurydice; this is easily my favorite number on the entire
disc.
But that's about it. Much as I hate to admit
it, I have no love for ʽAfterlifeʼ, a song quite true to its title
because it sounds so totally stiff in its electronic shell. Its basic message
has potential, and it could work both as a part of the Orpheus/Eurydice
oratorio and an independent
rumination on life after death in its own right — but if it is a frickin'
anthem, give me the full power of Arcade Fire, the band, instead of a bunch of
synthesizers rolling out the tired old tapestries of yesteryear (in fact, to
hell with yesteryear, it was all done decades ago and way better on Bowie's
Berlin trilogy, among other things). And if I have no love for
ʽAfterlifeʼ, there ain't no use even beginning to discuss inferior
tracks like ʽPornoʼ or ʽSupersymmetryʼ (except to mention
that the latter ends with six minutes of gratuitous electronic noise that
either represents the afterlife, or the perfect and imperfect symmetries, or
somebody's pet dog left in the studio by mistake after hours).
It would be too crude, of course, to say that Reflektor fails to be a great album
just because the band decided to rely on electronics (although that is part of the mis-deal). Most of all,
it fails to be a great album because this time, the band really decided to open its jaw much wider than usual, and ended up
twisting it all over the place. Too much Kierkegaard, not enough violin. Too
much Greek mythology, not enough Regine (there isn't a single song here where
she'd sing a clear, dominating lead vocal part). Too much general arthouse
attitude — we need more songs like ʽNormal Personʼ and ʽWe
Existʼ, and fewer songs like ʽAwful Soundʼ or ʽHere Comes
The Night Timeʼ (a title that sounds way
too close to the old Beach Boys disco disaster, by the way, to suspect sheer
coincidence). Too long, too beset with problems and issues, too full of itself,
too — pardon the bluntness — meaningless
(if they are able to explain the point of ʽSupersymmetryʼ, I'd prefer
rather not hear it) even though it pretends to be going deeper than ever before,
and that is what irritates me to no end.
I certainly would not want to nail the point
further by giving the album a thumbs down: ambitious projects carried out by
fabulous artists, even if they turn out to be grandiose failures, do not deserve
nasty slams. It was curious to hear this thing, and if I ever manage to get
over the flaccid reaction to ʽAfterlifeʼ, trimming all the pompo-fat
makes up for about thirty-five minutes of high quality late period (late
period? we'll see about that) Arcade Fire music. But on the whole, it was
simply wrong what they did here. If I
want Orpheus and Eurydice, I'll take Monteverdi — here, it feels I've pretty
much lost the connection. Much as I'd like to join the critical ooh la la, it'd
just be dishonest. Instead, here's hoping the next album will be a «back to
roots» revival, or else somebody is really
going to get pissed.
FINGERS CROSSED (2003)
1) One Heavy February; 2)
Souvenirs; 3) Imaginary Ordinary; 4) Scissor Paper Rock; 5) To And Fro; 6)
Spring 2008; 7) The Owls Go; 8) Fumble; 9) Kindling; 10) It's Almost A Trap;
11) Like A Call; 12) Where You've Been Hiding; 13) City Calm Down; 14)
Vanishing.
Can an Australian band that calls itself
«Architecture In Helsinki» be any good? It probably can, but it better be real good, then, since it takes an awful
lot of goodness to redeem the original sin of calling oneself «Architecture In
Helsinki» when not only do you not live
in Helsinki, but you live so far away from Helsinki, you might as well call
yourself «Architecture In Eldorado» and get away with it on a much firmer
basis. In other words, these guys are so ferociously «indie-indie» even before
you hear them play a single note, they have to work double hard to earn our
pardon, and triple hard to earn our admiration.
The good news is that they try, and the bad
news is that they do not try hard enough — in fact, their major purpose seems,
above all, to demonstrate their sworn allegiance to generic indie aesthetics.
There are five primary and three secondary members in the band, playing
everything from guitars to electronics to woodwinds and brass to melodica to
xylophone — and, of course, there is not a single professional, let alone
virtuoso, musician anywhere in sight. Vocals are democratically divided
between boys and girls — and, of course, there is not a single unique vocal
tone or style anywhere in sight, although everything sounds pleasant. The songs
are short (we don't want to seem too pretentious), the lyrics are
psychedelically introspective (we do
want to seem magical and mysterious), and the arrangements are multi-layered
(the more instruments we play at the same time, the less people will notice
that we cannot play any of them).
Did this sound like I just described Arcade Fire?
Well, not quite — Arcade Fire are not afraid of letting their songs run for
more than three minutes, they do have
relatively unique and easily recognizable vocal styles, and their lyrics
actually make sense and show plenty of aching relevance. Most importantly,
Arcade Fire are quite heavily grounded in reality, and these guys are twee-oriented,
riding on rose-colored clouds until the pants are soaking wet. (To make matters
worse, none of this cloud-riding has anything to do with architecture in Helsinki
— much of which is conceptually following Saint-Petersburg, and could, with
some reservations, be called «light», but not light enough to associate itself
with this kind of music).
Nevertheless, Fingers Crossed does manage to give us an interesting, not entirely
predictable kind of sound. The overall vibe is that of «little-angelish»
innocence, due to all the xylophones, glockenspiels, high-pitched electronics,
quasi-surf guitars, and pseudo-pre-pubescent vocals. This is not news in
itself, but it is made into news by an unusually equal-rights approach to all
the separate elements of the band's sound: retro-pop guitar, futuristic
electronics, marching band brass combos, street-player style wind-up
instruments, and folk-pop singing. With this particular brand of synthesis,
Architecture In Helsinki have no problem carving themselves out their own
identity — even if nobody needs it, you can't at least deny it's there
somewhere.
Alas, in the end it all fails for one simple —
and way too common — reason: not a single member of the eight-piece band
happens to be an accomplished, or even simply talented songwriter. This is not
avantagarde music: they do know how to put together strings of notes so that
they end up with traditional rhythmics, harmony and melody. Throw in the
rose-cloudy style of arrangement, and it's all nice and pretty and you sort of
begin to feel bad about criticizing this kind of music — as if you were taking
candy from a baby or something. But really and honestly, there is hardly a
single song on here that has anything
memorable about it. It's all atmosphere, from top to bottom, and on a record
that presumably consists of two-and-a-half-minute long pop songs, «pure atmosphere»
is like a humiliating rape of your expectations.
The only time where the band did strike a
sensitive nerve was on ʽThe Owls Goʼ, whose repetitive, childish
chorus, sung in feather-light mode by Kellie Sutherland (the band's resident
clarinet and God-knows-what-else player), accidentally embottles an ounce of
genuine protective tenderness (it also constitutes a terrific case of misheard
lyrics for me — until I looked it up, the line "finding a replacement with
a heart sedated" kept coming across as "finding a replacement for the
House of David", which, I guarantee it, would give the whole song an
entirely different, and far more profound, meaning). In contrast, the verses,
sung by one of the band's lead vocalists (probably Cameron Bird, the guitar
player), are completely blank and colorless.
Every now and then, something will faintly
register on the radar, like a much weaker, fluffier variant of Broadcast
(ʽScissor Paper Rockʼ, where it is clearly seen how Sutherland can
come across as a shallower copy of Trish Keenan), or a watered-down imitation,
perhaps a subconscious one, of the kaleidoscopic electronics of Animal
Collective (ʽImaginary Ordinaryʼ), or a Beirut-like use of the brass
section to generate a meekly East European flair (ʽTo And Froʼ).
Nothing in these attempts is offensive or even «pathetic», because it is all so
innocent and generally unpretentious: when, at the very beginning of the album,
the chorus asks us, "Have we missed an opportunity?"
(ʽSouvenirsʼ), you probably wouldn't even want to upset the kids with
a straightforwardly negative answer. But — shh, don't tell anybody in the
band, but this is exactly what it is about: a missed opportunity.
I know how it could have all worked: had the
band refrained from trying to write original songs and, instead, devoted itself
to covering superior material, recasting
it in this pretty, cloud-a-licious, modestly innovative mold, Fingers Crossed might have passed for a
charming and maybe even thought-stimulating curio. As it is, the album earned
mixed reviews from the very beginning, and although the band did manage to
achieve minor cult status among certain circles of twee-pop lovers, it seems
quite just that they never made it to the big leagues.
IN CASE WE DIE (2005)
1) Neverevereverdid; 2) It'5!;
3) Tiny Paintings; 4) Wishbone; 5) Maybe You Can Owe Me; 6) Do The Whirlwind;
7) In Case We Die; 8) The Cemetery; 9) Frenchy, I'm Faking; 10) Need To Shout;
11) Rendezvous: Potrero Hill; 12) What's In Store?
Maybe they did not follow the optimal strategy
(as in, «hire a responsible songwriter»), but there has been a strategic change
all the same, and a good one: push up the energy level. The creative, joyful,
intelligent kids of Fingers Crossed,
sitting in their living-rooms and making psychedelic paintings on wallpaper,
are now running out into the yards, so that they can take part in active games
and dispel the «lonesome nerd» tag that one could very easily have attached to
them just two years ago. In other words — In
Case We Die, we are going to leave behind a pretty lively trace of our
former existence.
All the basic ingredients remain the same:
Architecture In Helsinki are still an eight-piece band, with brass and string
instruments mattering as much as, if not more than, acoustic and electric
guitars, friendly electronics, and the male / female contrast between core
members (Cameron Bird and Kellie Sutherland). Just like before, they are
unwilling to learn to seriously play
those instruments, although they do try to attack the songwriting task with a
little more responsibility; just like before, they seem to regard their mission
as that of building a powerful kaleidoscope of colorful sounds, preferring to
quickly abandon any idea before it actually starts working, rather than stick
around it for too much time. Fairies dancing at the bottom of the garden,
right?
Even the bell chime that opens the album is
soft and kiddish — nothing like the deep, chilly toll of Lennon's
ʽMotherʼ or AC/DC's ʽHells Bellsʼ — and what it sets out to
announce is a small, cutesy «twee-symphony» (ʽNeverevereverdidʼ),
spreading its three parts (rhythmless atmospheric intro; slow, slightly
dissonant, march; fast, exuberant kiddie song) over five minutes and stating
all the important points in the process. The build-up, climax, and release are
quite thoughtfully controlled, and if I had been more in love with the
essential ideology of the band, ʽNeverevereverdidʼ would probably be
the perfect AiH composition for me.
«Yes for toddlers», perhaps. The major problem is that a real toddler would be unlikely to appreciate this twee-symphony,
and it is not clear whether it truly deserves to wake the internal toddler
lurking inside the grown-up listener, because all of this supposedly innocent,
free-flowing joy emanating from the song still feels a little forced and
artificial.
ʽIt'5!ʼ (sic), compressing its point to two rather than five minutes, is
also a perfect encapsulation of the band's pseudo-message. Minimalistic, very
loosely joined at all of its harmonic hips, with lyrics that make neither
literal nor coherent figurative sense, and a vocal hook that transforms indie
mumble into cheerleader scream — it will either lure you in with its absurdist
naïveness and baby innocence, or deeply offend you by not making artistic
sense. On the other hand, there is no use getting offended at a bunch of silly
prancing on the lawn, particularly since there is nothing to suggest that the
band regards its art as something more deep and meaningful than that.
What really does sadden me is that, with such a
vast amount of different people, instruments, and musical ideas at their
disposal, the mood and emotional impact are so similar on just about every
track — so much so that commenting on individual tracks seems essentially
useless, even if this does happen to be the band's best album. Admittedly,
ʽDo The Whirlwindʼ has a gruffer keyboard tone than usual, and is
almost on the verge of becoming a gutsy «electrofunk» number (I detect a little
bit of Prince influence here), but even that gets scrambled midway through, as
the vocals shift from stern to sissy, and chimes and cellos chase the dance
beat away. Everything else stays firmly within the confines of the exact same
fairyland playground. («Playful pop majesty» was the expression used by the
All-Music Guide reviewer, which I heartily disagree with — playful, definitely,
pop, most likely, but there is about as much «majesty» in this album as there
usually may be perceived in a typical infant).
Still, by speeding up the tempos (ʽThe
Cemeteryʼ), introducing a wee bit more screechy / croaky electric riffs
(ʽFrenchy, I'm Fakingʼ), and stirring up inevitable memories of SMiLE (to which this album relates like
a clumsy, inexperienced, but admiring and aspiring younger brother), In Case We Die manages to wrench out a thumbs up
— want it or not, it has its own face, and that face is curious to look upon, even
if it is so hard to decide whether you like it or not, or whether it is a
natural face or the result of one too many plastic surgeries. Perhaps if Frank
Zappa wanted to deconstruct Mother Goose, the end product would look something
like that — then again, knowing Frank, it probably wouldn't: In Case We Die is much too safe, too
clean, too sterile for the likes of real naughty music revolutionaries.
PLACES LIKE THIS (2007)
1) Red Turned White; 2) Heart
It Races; 3) Hold Music; 4) Feather In A Baseball Cap; 5) Underwater; 6) Like
It Or Not; 7) Debbie; 8) Lazy (Lazy); 9) Nothing's Wrong; 10) Same Old Innocence.
In 2006, Architecture In Helsinki parted ways
with two of their former members (Tara Shackell and Isobel Knowles),
drastically reducing their brass section — not a big problem, as the slots were
occupied by an even larger selection of session musicians as soon as the time
was ripe for the recording of their third album. A much bigger problem is that
the third album introduces serious change to their basic style — a change for
the worse, which, given AiH's already evident struggle to maintain their own
face, means a downright failure.
To put it bluntly, Cameron Bird had suddenly
decided that AiH need to start thinking of themselves as a rock band, thinking along the lines of
his (presumably) childhood idols from the pop-punk, New Wave, and electro-funk
departments — the accursed «1980s nostalgia», the great bane of the 2000s indie
movement, hits again with full devastating force. Consequently, ʽRed
Turned Whiteʼ is AiH working à
la Prince; ʽHold Musicʼ is AiH working à la Talking Heads; ʽLazyʼ is AiH working à la... UB40? Something like
that. ʽSame Old Innocenceʼ is a most deceptive title to finish off
the record with — for the most part, Places
Like This is busy chasing out the «same old innocence» of the band's first
two LPs, and replacing it with dance beats, fast grooves, and a drunk, mildly
surrealist, party atmosphere.
I am not saying that such a transformation
could not succeed in theory. But there are two huge, purely practical problems
that prevent that theory from working. First, as many other reviewers have
noted before, we have here a complete shift in singing style: not only do
Bird's vocals now occupy most of the space (largely ushering out the generally
far more agreeable leads from Sutherland), but he has also switched from psychedelic
hushes, murmurs, and whispers to screaming and barking, and there are few
things more irritating in this world than to have to listen to an unskilled
screamer and barker, unable to properly align his vocal noise with the general
atmosphere of the composition or the entire album. When David Byrne played the
«paranoid intellectual idiot» part on the early Heads records, he did it
credibly, both through his own singing and the perfect agreement with the music
that surrounded it. When Bird tries to do the same on ʽHold Musicʼ,
he seems to only respect the «idiot» part — there is nothing paranoid or intellectual about his effort. No
meaning at all, for that matter, just an empty form.
Second, this is still the same old Architecture
In Helsinki — in that they still
haven't figured out a proper way to come up with memorable songs. And now that
the original aura has dissipated, it is unclear what exactly should justify
listening to something like ʽRed Turned Whiteʼ. The openly annoying
vocals? The playful, but emotionless synth patterns? The lack of a clear
opposition between verse and chorus? The predictably incomprehensible lyrics?
Whatever they wanted to say with this song, it seems to me that they did not
manage to say it in a language I understand, either on the sensual or the
intellectual level. And the same goes for 90% of this album.
Here are the minimal bits and pieces that did
manage to speak out. Number one: the high-pitched, swirling, supernatural vocal
harmonies on ʽHeart It Racesʼ (slightly Arcade Fire-like in style).
Number two: some peculiarities of the arrangement on ʽUnderwaterʼ
that really manage to convey an «underwater» atmosphere (not that this is in
any way original in 2007) — the song in general is arguably the closest in
spirit to the «proper» AiH. Number three: cute pop guitar interplay at the end
of ʽLazyʼ. Number four: big relief when the whole thing is over — and
an even bigger thank you for the fact that it only barely runs over 30 minutes.
In all, this is one of the most displeasing
transitions from «mediocrity with a promise» to «embarrassment without
redemption». What is most offensive about the whole enterprise, of course, is
that the entire record still has a defiantly «artsy» feel — the band retains
their multi-instrumental kitsch, the complexity of compositions, the
inscrutability of the lyrics. But as far as my heart and mind conspire to tell
me, there is not an ounce of genuine substance or meaning in the whole thing.
One could, perhaps, see a bunch of college freshmen getting high to this kind
of thing, party spirit and all. However, they'd still have to be sorry about it
the morning after the party. A disgusted, rather than simply dazed and
confused, thumbs
down here.
MOMENT BENDS (2011)
1) Desert Island; 2) Escapee;
3) Contact High; 4) W.O.W.; 5) Yr Go To; 6) Sleep Talkin'; 7) I Know Deep Down;
8) That Beep; 9) Denial Style; 10) Everything's Blue; 11) B4 3D.
Architecture in Helsinki's fourth album does
revert some of the inauspicious
changes witnessed on Places Like This
— namely, it does not sound nearly as dumb and irritating, with significantly
less emphasis on dated dance beats and idiot vocals: my guess is that Bird did
pay attention to at least some of the original reviews, and understood that he
went a little too far in his search for a new face for the band. Alas, though,
neither is this a proper return to the potentially pleasant atmospherics of In Case We Die. Formally, it is more
like a meticulously calculated averaged value of both these albums —
multiplied by a continuous lack of interest in improving the overall level of
songwriting.
At least the early records told a tale of a
fairyland child playground, and Places
Like This told the tale of a dance floor for hopeless morons: you could see
the former as «cute», and the latter as «awful». Moment Bends merges these notions and thoroughly neutralizes them,
so that, for the first time in AiH history, I am utterly perplexed, as the
album leaves me with zero emotional
impressions, and I mean that seriously. I have no idea what the record is
trying to say, why it exists, how it should be interpreted, whether it should
be considered «art», etc., etc. My current opinion — subject to change,
perhaps, but only if I decide to continue exploring the album further, which is
not very likely — is that the band has simply lost its way, completely: having swerved from the
experimental, but promising path right into a dense thicket, for no reason
other than stupidity, they are now proceeding blindly, without the least idea
of what it is they are doing.
In some historical situations, perhaps, such
blind prancing can produce unexpectedly delightful results — but not if you are
Cameron Bird and his followers. Take the first track, ʽDesert
Islandʼ. It is put together as a ska-based number, but uses cold
electronic tones and an equally «icy» vocal style: that is, a rhythmic basis normally
used to express smily joy is overridden with stimulants of «cold beauty» — the
two successfully kill off each other, and I have not even yet mentioned the
general monotonousness and complete lack of attention-attracting melodic
twists.
Going on to track No. 2, ʽEscapeeʼ,
we find a simple, but «potentially efficient» rubber-springed synth-pop riff
that eats up everything else about the song (including a vivacious funky guitar
part that is only properly audible for about two bars), except for the
multi-tracked vocals which try, a bit,
to push you in the direction of escapist idealism, but hardly succeed — too
glossy and plastic is the processing, too expressionless the singing. And, once
again, it's just one repetitive idea bouncing up and down for the entire duration
of the song.
As usual, those tunes that are vocally
dominated by Sutherland are a trifle more accessible and enjoyable:
ʽW.O.W.ʼ (which is actually short for ʽWalking On Waterʼ)
sounds like Enya on amphetamines, and at least its icy romanticism passes the
«credible» mark. But even Sutherland ultimately embarrasses herself on the
«Prince-for-five-year-olds» bubbly dance groove of ʽThat Beepʼ and on
the robotic electro-funk of ʽDenial Styleʼ.
Actually, the phrase «significantly less
emphasis on the dance beats» that I used above by no means is supposed to say
that the dance beats have gone away — on the contrary, about 80% of the album
can still be formally qualified as «dance-pop». The difference is that the
beats are getting softer, and, most importantly, no longer stimulate the
singers into behaving like a bunch of overworked DJs with no sense of taste or
measure. But for some weird reason, they still insist on having a
«body-oriented» underbelly to most of these tunes — even if, whatever that
particular essence of Architecture In Helsinki could be, it is not in any way related to dance music.
It's as if, oh, I don't know, Bob Dylan got so infatuated with Italian opera
that he would try to imitate Pavarotti on every one of his records, ignoring
the critical horror and the dwindling record sales. Same type of silliness, if
on a smaller scale — quite a natural cause for a thumbs down.
NOW + 4EVA (2014)
1) In The Future; 2) When You
Walk In The Room; 3) I Might Survive; 4) Dream A Little Crazy; 5) (Boom) 4EVA;
6) U Tell Me; 7) Echo; 8) Born To Convince You; 9) 2 Time; 10) April; 11)
Before Tomorrow.
Okay, even I have to admit that the idea of
crossing indie twee-pop with Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez sounds «totally
batshit crazy» rather than «disgustingly commercial». But, in fact, this is
exactly what Architecture In Helsinki goes after on their fifth album. Almost any of its songs could have been
released by any of today's electropopping teen idols — the idea here being something
like, «say, what will happen if we take that glossy dance stuff and deconstruct
it a bit, with fewer effects and overdubs, maybe even an occasional touch of
lo-fi?..»
Consequently, guitars and non-electronic
instruments are almost completely left out of the picture (with but one or two
exceptions that I will touch upon later), but the vocal melodies are improved
upon — at the risk of losing it, I'd say that the record probably has a higher
percentage of catchy chorus hooks than any previous release by the band.
However, it is way too late for this circumstance to be of much help: these
songs are catchy in a «Britney» manner, i. e. silly, vapid hooks devoid of
humor, intelligence, or human emotion. On my third listen, I was already
distinctively getting the feeling of sitting in a sanitized playground designed
for little robot kids. If that was the band's intention, they succeeded
admirably, but then this is one of those cases where «total adequacy of intent
to realization» does not even begin to equal «good music».
Only two of the songs sound like they have
anything to do with organic flesh and blood. ʽDream A Little Crazyʼ
is an amusing party-oriented «drinking song», melodically a variation on
ʽLouie Louieʼ (!) but successfully adding a carnivalesque touch to
it. And the closing number ʽBefore Tomorrowʼ is a throwback to the
1970s funk-pop / disco scene that actually features ringing funky guitar riffs,
a few lively brass parts, and a credible romantic-optimistic atmosphere that
may suck you in without causing any permanent brain damage.
Everything else is... well... synthesizers,
drum machines, digital soul distilled to the most primitive algorithms, and
even Autotune-a-plenty. Everything in «homebrewed» indie mode, but that really don't make it «intertextual»,
«ironic», or «allegoric» unless you are a big, big friend of these guys and
feel yourself obliged to come up with some sort of complex justification.
ʽAprilʼ is easily one of the worst songs I have ever had the
mispleasure of listening to for reviewing purposes — at least on their regular
material they do not usually go beyond silly hopping, but this here is a
faux-ecstatic autotuned electro-ballad. If it is supposed to be a parody on faux-ecstatic autotuned
electro-ballads, they forgot to tell. Sounds pretty sincere to me, even coming
from a band still named «Architecture In Helsinki».
In short, this is just one more example — but
this time, one of the most obvious and outrageous — of «Eighties' nostalgia»
laid on thick on the already relatively barren musical scene of the 2010s. At
least when this kind of crappy dance-pop was made in the Eighties, it was
celebrating fresh breakthroughs in technology, production, and cultural style:
hicky, vapid, silly, but «progressive» in their own way. But nostalgizing for
idiocy? No thank you. Thumbs down. This is simply not fun any more,
no matter how much they pretend to be having it.
WHATEVER PEOPLE SAY I AM, THAT'S WHAT I'M NOT
(2006)
1) The View From The Afternoon;
2) I Bet You Look Good On
The Dancefloor; 3) Fake
Tales Of San Francisco; 4) Dancing Shoes; 5) You Probably Couldn't See For
The Lights But You Were Staring Straight At Me; 6) Still Take You Home; 7) Riot
Van; 8) Red Light
Indicates Doors Are Secure; 9) Mardy Bum; 10) When The Sun Goes Down;
11) From The Ritz To The
Rubble; 12) A Certain
Romance.
In January 2006, British audiences have once
again demonstrated that their average tastes are still more «rock-based» and less
eroded by the onslaught of crap marketing than the average American tastes —
by spinning all the way up to No. 1 the debut album of this, still relatively
little known, Sheffield band. Critical and commercial response, over a one-year
period, have pretty much transformed The Arctic Monkeys into The Jam of their
generation, and now it was up to the Monkeys to prove that they had something
to offer history that the Jam already had not — or, perhaps, not to
prove anything, but simply to fill in the old pair of shoes that, for every new
generation, needs to be filled in by a pair of young stinkless feet.
But I am in a little trouble here. I have never
liked The Jam all that much; I liked Blur and Oasis a little bit better, but
not enough to worship at their altar; and as for the band's more immediate
influences including The Strokes and The Libertines — the obvious question is,
what kind of space are these influences actually leaving this new band to stand
out on its own?
No space at all, except for the kind of
space that is inevitably provided by the passing of time. Alex Turner (lead
vocals, guitar, lyrics), Jamie Cook (guitar), Nick O'Malley (bass), and Matt
Helders (drums) are a bunch of kids who grew up in 1990s Britain, and are
obviously reflecting 1990s Britain (they are also quite obviously influenced by
older music, which they freely admit, but it is safe to assume they grew up on
Blur rather than Beatles). They are young, moderately intelligent — the
moderate way you'd expect from a bunch of middle-class Sheffield kids — and
very, very relevant. So relevant, in fact, that even Gordon Brown had to admit
to liking them (saying something along the lines of 'they really wake you up
in the morning' and sending the whole nation up in hysteria at the thought of
the Right Honourable MP hopping in the direction of the bathroom to the bright
sounds of 'I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor').
If it is still possible, today, to make
interesting music with bass, drums, and two electric guitars with no special
effects, then The Arctic Monkeys make interesting music, or at least honestly
try to. Their style is «punk pop», with an occasional outburst or two of
outside influences like ska, and they are constantly looking for unusual riffs,
time signature varieties even within two-minute long songs, and non-trivial
decisions for the vocal hooks. Of course, there is never any guarantee that
these riffs and hooks are completely fresh — any major connoisseur of punk and
pop will be able to trace these elements back thirty years — but, just like The
Jam thirty years back, they are seriously striving to create their own brand of
songwriting. And (no question about it) they rock; this is not some sort
of sanitized alternative bullshit, but a very live, angry, sharp sound.
Are the individual songs memorable? To their
young audiences, I can imagine, they will be very much so, but against the
background of fifty years of guitar-based rock records, they really look like,
well, just another guitar-based rock band. Strange enough, the thing that
lingered in my own brain longer than anything else was not their riffs, but rather
Turner and Co.'s crazy vocal explosions — such as 'I don't want to hear you...
KICK ME OUT, KICK ME OUT!' ('Fake Tales Of San Francisco'), or the immortal
line 'Get on your dancing shoes, you sexy little swine' (sic!!), which I
will treasure forever. These, at least, feel more 'immediate' than the melodies
— the melodies place too much emphasis on smartness, and in the end I am not
too sure if I am supposed to just bop and drop to those beats or to view them
in a post-modern light, or both.
But the saddest thing is that I just cannot
appreciate the atmosphere of it all. There is a big, ugly, smelly difference
between the whole goddamn aura of Whatever People Say I Am and, let's
say, Paul Weller's This Is The Modern World. In the late 1970's, British
youth — not all of it, but the smartest part of it — was breathing discontent,
and their spiritual leaders were singing and playing about getting out of this
fucked-up place. The Arctic Monkeys, children of a (mostly) satisfied and
content generation (in relative comparison, of course), are singing and playing
about the drugged charms of this fucked-up place. Their attitude may be ironic
— I hope it is ironic, at least in part; no, screw that, I know
it is ironic, they have too many different words in their lyrics and too many
notes in their melodies to be truly dumb — but if so, not many will see the irony,
and those that will might think twice about headbanging to this music, which,
controversially, is the most natural reaction to it.
Whatever People Say I Am is a loud, gruff record about the lives of
loud, gruff people living loud, gruff club-lives that tempt them into using
only one particular side of their brain, the one that is responsible for animal
pleasures. All of the album's twelve songs are like one big conceptual
ensemble of a 12-hour period in the life of a jaded clubber. Typical subjects:
[a] music, [b] dancing, [c] drinking, [d] necking / pulling / shagging, [e]
talking trash, [f] various other human-level manners of animalizing. Sung in a
brawny, disrespectful manner with a thick, almost intentionally amplified
Yorkshire accent. Accompanied by music that is technically and theoretically
«rock» but, once you start thinking about it, owes just as much to the
hedonistic synth-pop of Duran Duran (for those who doubt it, Turner has dropped
an extra lyrical cue in one of the lines on 'I Bet You Look Good') — and is a
perfect match for the lyrical subjects.
A perfect symbol of the album's ambiguity is
its cover, a photo of one of the band's friends (Chris McClure, frontman of The
Violet May) taking a cigarette puff in Liverpool's famous Korova bar in the
early morning hours. As a photo, it's an amazing piece of work — few images
convey the idea of feeling absolutely terrific and like total shit at
the exact same time. As food for thought, though, it's a serious downer. We
need not feed ourselves illusions: the majority of the album's audience will
simply use it for having a good party time, just like the majority of the Jam's
audience would use their music in 1977. However, the minority of
the Jam's audience would be likely to sit down, listen, and be prompted into
some kind of meaningful action. In the case of the Arctic Monkeys, though, I
have no idea what the minority of their audience would be prompted into. Going
out and simply hanging or shooting themselves is my best guess. 'Get on your dancing
shoes, there's one thing on your mind'.
I like the Arctic Monkeys, really, I do. They
are creative, intelligent, and when you see them playing onstage, they always
look like the kind of smug, self-assured pricks that think of the rest of the
world as undeserving crap — a very positive and healthy attitude. Even if I
forget every single song of theirs tomorrow, today I still give this album a thumbs up for all the stimulating it does. I simply
happen to hate the world that has produced the Arctic Monkeys. Clubbers, party
animals, hipsters, Korova bars, 'banging tunes and DJ sets', 'lad at the side
drinking a Smirnoff Ice came and paid for her Tropical Reef', 'classic Reeboks
or knackered Converse' — could we have a hydrogen bomb for all that stuff and
all the causes that cause that stuff and all the reasons underlying the causes
that cause that stuff, too? Pretty please.
FAVOURITE WORST NIGHTMARE (2007)
1) Brianstorm; 2) Teddy Picker; 3) D Is For Dangerous; 4) Balaclava; 5) Fluorescent Adolescent;
6) Only Ones Who Know;
7) Do Me A Favour; 8) This House Is A Circus;
9) If You Were There,
Beware; 10) The Bad Thing; 11) Old Yellow Bricks; 12) 505.
This review will not be lengthy, because I have
pretty much said it all before. On their sophomore effort, the boys continue
doing the same old thing — constructing brainy patterns of multi-riff
sequences, setting them to sharp, but convoluted lyrics, and recording them in
a Brit-pop-punk style with Jam/Blur as the backbone and randomized influences,
ranging from the Smiths to Duran Duran, as the muscle. Please support them
financially if you like this description.
Well, perhaps there is one difference:
instead of writing lyrics about deadend clublife, Alex Turner is now writing
lyrics just about everything, from flight experiences to character
assassinations to things that cannot be decoded at all. Unfortunately, there is
very little about this new, convention-free writing style that catches the
eye, except for an occasional Duran Duran quote ('I don't want your prayers,
save it for the morning after') or smarmy references to the Wizard of Oz.
Also, even though they are very intent on
putting together new sets of chords rather than recycling the old ones,
second time around they come up with an even lesser number of interesting
sets than before — these riffs are just too smart and «mathematical» to rock
out to, yet too simplistic to admire from a constructionist's point of view. Besides,
they, too, have their limits; I started out seriously liking the main theme of
'Teddy Picker' — before realizing that it is merely a minor twist on the main
theme of 'Fake Tales Of San Francisco'. So, intuition tells me that there is
probably a lot more lazy rewriting going on here than I suspect — if only I
could remember what the «original» melodies on Whatever sounded like.
The two other singles were 'Brianstorm' (sic,
about some guy named Brian — not Jones, just some random guy named
Brian), which does sound like a storm but completely passes by me every time I
put it on; and 'Fluorescent Adolescent', a very nice, but not jaw-dropping,
piece of hyper-British hypersarcasm ('you used to get it in your fishnets, now
you only get it in your night dress') that sounds like it could have been a
stolen outtake from Blur's Parklife.
The other songs — no idea if they really
deserve any special mention (e. g., many people rave about how clever it was to
take an Ennio Morricone organ sample and use it as the start to '505'. DUH?) A
very typical «sophomore slump», if you ask me, but perhaps you just shouldn't
ask. Thumbs down, say the brain and the
heart in a quintessentially Russian situation of «tandemocracy».
HUMBUG (2009)
1) My Propeller; 2) Crying Lightning; 3) Dangerous Animals; 4) Secret Door; 5) Potion Approaching; 6)
Fire And The Thud; 7) Cornerstone;
8) Dance Little Liar; 9) Pretty
Visitors; 10) The Jeweller's Hands.
Now the Monkeys have most certainly stepped on
the path of evolution, and should be dubbed the Arctic Paranthropi. Reports on Humbug
have varied accordingly, from insulted cries of betrayal to placated
admissions of growing up. But then Alex Turner and his buddies never took the
sacred AC/DC oath of forever staying true to one style, and, with their
implicit claims of intellectuality and twenty-first century smartness, it was
inevitable that sooner or later they would get bored with bare-bones
rock'n'roll, no matter how multiangular they made it.
It is, however, hard to define their new
direction. They slow down the tempos; bring in more of the old studio tricks
(echo, reverb, delay, etc.); variegate the instrumentation, throwing in organs
and a bit of old-fashioned synths and even some glockenspiel; and entrust
Turner with new algorithms to encrypt his lyrics, so that most of the time you
do not have the faintest idea what they are singing about. (Detailed analysis
shows they are still mostly singing about getting some, and if you listen
carefully, you will be rewarded with such great hookup lines as "Coax me
out, my love, and have a spin of my propeller" and "Yours is the only
ocean that I want to swing from, yours is the only ocean that I want to hang on
to". How the heck can you swing from an ocean?).
In the end, Humbug is decidedly darker
than its predecessors, who themselves were no joyfests either. Turner assumes a
sinister, impenetrable stance, sucking in a mix of Ian Curtis/Nick Cave
influences, and each second song is extremely bass-heavy, sometimes bordering
on metallic. (Not coincidentally, one of the bonus tracks on the Japanese
edition is a straightahead — and excellent — cover of Cave's 'Red Right Hand'.)
But it is all very much a matter of bluff: this kind of pretentious darkness
only works when there is substance behind it. Is there?
If there is, I have yet to sense it. For the
most part, it feels like a bunch of well-meaning mannerisms. The guitars howl,
the bass growls, the vocalist insinuates some eerie crap, the production is all
wobbly and echoey, but no matter how hard the magician's apprentice tries to
master the spell, the magic just isn't there. Some songs are more memorable
than others: I count stronger hooks on 'My Propeller', 'Crying Lightning',
'Potion Approaching' (the most energetic number on the album), and 'Dance
Little Liar', but even these could have been written by anyone. Not a single
riff on here manages to shake my foundations in the slightest way possible. Not
a single lyrical bit manages to convince me that they have something all their
own to tell me. They just love their old heroes and they want to be like them.
But they have no power to be like them.
Yes, sadly, it all means the simplest of
things: the Monkeys have brains and ambitions, but very little musical talent —
or, putting it more optimistically, their talents are still waiting to be shook
up and awakened. Nowhere is this more evident than on the final tune: 'The
Jeweller's Hands' has a long, atmospheric coda that is presumably supposed to
leave the listener in an overwhelmed state of «depressed beauty», but they lack
the power to pull it off properly, and all of their wailing guitars and
melancholy choruses just go to waste. There is no reason whatsoever for anyone
to voluntarily submit to their third-rate hypnosis. It is all too trivial. I
applaud the desire to change, the escape from the pigeonhole, the smartness,
the coolness. Now how about writing some good songs, guys? Thumbs down.
SUCK IT AND SEE (2011)
1) She's Thunderstorms; 2)
Black Treacle; 3) Brick By Brick; 4) The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala; 5) Don't
Sit Down 'Cause I've Moved Your Chair; 6) Library Pictures; 7) All My Own
Stunts; 8) Reckless Serenade; 9) Piledriver Waltz; 10) Love Is A Laserquest;
11) Suck It And See; 12) That's Where You're Wrong.
The band's fourth consecutive No. 1 album in
the UK continues to prove that The Arctic Monkeys are a brute force to be
reckoned with, but why that is is
still anybody's guess. Seems like everybody loves these guys anyway, so why in
the hell bother explaining what it is they set out to accomplish in the first
place? Just suck it, brother, and you'll see. (The title, by the way, comes
from a grafitti in Clockwork Orange,
and had the luck of getting censored over with a sticker in some corners of the
world, further increasing its popularity).
Musically, it is sort of a «return to roots»,
or, rather, a dialectical synthesis of the Monkeys' initial style with the
artsy-intellectual excesses of Humbug.
The songs are generally more immediate and, quantitatively, kick a larger
square area of ass than the previous time, but Turner's lyrics and ways of delivering
them are, if possible, even more convoluted and «mysterious»: gone for good are
the days of focusing on local nighttime hipster culture — the Humbug way of grimly delivering
pseudo-messages has so pleased the man that he has fixed it permanently.
To be fair, about half of these songs seem to
be love confessions, written on a perilous quest for the Ultimate Metaphor —
you know, the one that is sitting locked high up in the tower guarded by
fire-breathing Clichés and Embarrassments. For the most part, Turner
does well on the quest, contributing neat little touches that do not always
register upon first listen/consideration. Like, for instance, just how much
«neater» is the song title/chorus 'She's Thunderstorms' than 'She's Like A
Thunderstorm'? Or how often do you tell your partner that "your love is
like a studded leather headlock... you're rarer than a can of dandelion and
burdock"?
On the other hand, everyone is engaging in
original metaphors these days, stretching the abilities of language as far as
they can be stretched (and they still are
stretchable). But does it go hand-in-hand with great music? Not exactly. By
this time, the general style of the Monkeys is recognizable, but their ability
to come up with first-rate pop riffs is still close to zero: 'Brick By Brick',
a psycho-garage monster oozing «ringing brutality» with mathematical precision,
is the only song to have made a lasting musical impression on me. Vocal
melodies fare a little better, particularly on the more lyrical numbers like 'She's
Thunderstorms' and 'Reckless Serenade', but not enough to wring out tears or
anything.
The biggest ongoing problem with the Monkeys is
that it is still impossible to understand just how much real bite these guys
are threatening. A song like 'Don't Sit Down 'Cause I've Moved Your Chair'
sounds all mean and lean, with a grumbly metal-pop riff sitting it through and
Turner allowing you to "go into business with a grizzly bear" in the
snottiest, snarliest tone he can put together, but... is this for real? Who exactly is he flailing his
fist at? His girlfriend? His record company? His listeners? The Fifth Earl of
Chesterfield? What is really disturbing is that it's not just the lyrics that
are confusing, it is the whole way of doing it — all of the time, staying tight
in control, cool, calm, and collected. For a musicologist, dissecting Suck It And See may be fun, so close it
is to «math-rock» in some of its jagged angles. But everyone else just gets the
same old thing — an album that is too well-calculated to attract the genuine
spirit of rock'n'roll, yet too bluffy and obscure for obscurity's sake to be
revered on a «brainy» level.
'Brick By Brick' is fun, though. Certainly not
to be missed in a world where the art of fun keeps getting reduced to FUN FUN
FUN FUN FUN.
AM (2013)
1) Do I Wanna Know; 2) R U
Mine; 3) One For The Road; 4) Arabella; 5) I Want It All; 6) No. 1 Party
Anthem; 7) Mad Sounds; 8) Fireside; 9) Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High;
10) Snap Out Of It; 11) Knee Socks; 12) I Wanna Be Yours.
Either I am getting dangerously used to this
band, or this is not only the best Arctic Monkeys album ever, but the first real, authentic proof of why these guys
did need to get together in the first place, even if took them seven years to
finally whip it out. I have no idea what happened. Maybe they all sat down,
took a long time to think, ponder over the responsibility that undeservedly
gained fame and fortune piles upon the aspiring artist, then took a solemn vow
not to leave the studio until the «no-filler» principle reached a Beatlesque
level. Not that the songs are in any way Beatlesque as such. They are simply
all good, and it puzzles me.
Atmosphere-wise, AM once again cuts down on aggressive rock'n'roll and returns to
the moody darkness of Humbug (see
ʽMy Propellerʼ and all that follows), but this time, the darkness has
been shaped and beaten into a much more precise form — presuming memorable
riffs and evocative choruses, not to mention some very clever use of vocal
harmonies. As if to state that they no longer plant their trust in bashing the
hell out of everything, ʽDo I Wanna Know?ʼ opens the record with the
sound of a drum machine, which could just as easily have been a regular drum
part, but the song is not about drumming — it is about a dark night setting
where the protagonist, drunk, bitter, depressed, but still retaining some cool,
reflects on whether there is still a chance at reconnecting with his other
half, and it works astonishingly well, with the feeling perfectly expressed by
the melodic hard riffage and the contrast between Turner's irritated, sarcastic
solo parts in the verses and the group's choir harmonies on the "Crawling
back to you..." chorus.
Pretty much the same mood permeates the rest of
the tracks, so that the entire album shares this nocturnal mood — not a dreamy,
romantic, candle-lit night, but a bit of a werewolfish one, exacerbated by way
too many cups of coffee, cigarettes, and self-revving-up into a state of rather
inexplainable nervous tension. No other tune gets this more right than
ʽArabellaʼ. Starts out quietly, grim syncopated bassline against
lonesome guitar howls and hoots, then rapidly switches to «Sabbath» mode for a
threatening bridge where Turner's singing is performed in a call-and-response pattern
with the heavy guitar riff rather than in complete tandem with it, and this
helps make both sides more imposing. Technically, it's a love song, with Alex
serenading a mystical lady who "got a Seventies' head, but she's a modern
lover" — but arranged as a complex heavy rocker, giving a fairly brutal
edge to the romance.
Another excellent example — the aptly titled
ʽFiresideʼ, but, again, it's not about cuddling down by the fireside,
it's about how "Isn't it hard to make up your mind / When you're losing /
And your fuse is fireside?": a tense, paranoid rocker, driven mostly by acoustic guitar, which keeps ringing out
like an alarm system. The devil is in the tiny details — such as, for instance,
the extra alarm signal from the organ that gets turned on just as Alex switches
tonality on the third line of the verse. This sudden attention to subtle
detail, or, at least, to meaningful and immediately noticeable sudden detail,
is really a new turn for the Monkeys, as is a penchant for cleverer, ticklier
riffs — check out ʽKnee Socksʼ with its poppy melody, sounding a
little like Suzanne Vega with distortion, or the martial grunt of ʽI Want
It Allʼ, which echoes Sabbath's ʽChildren Of The Graveʼ, but with
a psychedelic twist instead of an apocalyptic one (with falsetto choruses and
colorfully tinged lead guitar melting your mind against the heavy riffage).
When they start sentimentalizing the mood and
slowing things down, nothing disastrous happens, either: ʽNo. 1 Party
Anthemʼ goes a bit too heavy on the "come on come on come on"
refrain, but the arrangement, the singing, and the vocal resolution of the
chorus all gamble on «grand» and end up winning the pot. On ʽMad Soundsʼ,
they try their hand at the good old R&B formula, and, astonishingly, it
also works — with a long, subtle buildup to the "ooh la la la"'s of
the chorus, which they ironically play upon in the lyrics: "...you just
can't figure out what went wrong / Then out of nowhere, somebodcy comes and
hits you with a... / Ooh la la la, ooh la la la...".
Of course, the Arctic Monkeys had been a
«midnight-oriented» band from the very start. And, of course, the Arctic
Monkeys never had, and still do not have, any grand, all-penetrating artistic
vision that could shake the foundations of one's existence. They started out as
relatively shallow hipsters, way too bent on proving their cool to have much
time left for anything else. But if AM
(their best album title so far, by the way), with its one-track orientation,
does not pretend to solving the problems of the universe any more than its
predecessors, there is at least nothing shallowly-hipsterish about it any
longer, or, at the very least, they have learned to make music that can be
enjoyed by a much wider audience than «cool people for the sake of coolness».
Jealous lovers, pissed-off losers, old-school power pop and hard rock fans, all
of those and other categories of listeners are bound to find something in
common with the spirit of these tunes.
Whether this enthusiastic thumbs up is going to be an
accidental exception or the start of a new, mature band cannot be predicted,
but I am fairly sure that this new «midnight rock» formula is viable and, with
the appropriate effort, could be advanced to even further heights. Another
album like this and I might be joining Gordon Brown on account of this band.
BANG BANG ROCK & ROLL (2005)
1) Formed A Band; 2) My Little
Brother; 3) Emily Kane; 4) Rusted Guns Of Milan; 5) Modern Art; 6) Good Weekend;
7) Bang Bang Rock And Roll; 8) Fight; 9) Moving To L. A.; 10) Bad Weekend; 11)
Stand Down; 12) 18,000 Lira.
If the lovable Gumbies from Monty Python's
Flying Circus decided to get together and play rock'n'roll, they would, most
likely, sound like Art Brut — not forgetting that behind the retarded
characters of the Gumbies hide the hyper-intellectual personalities of the
Pythonites, and that behind the carefully staged low-class dumbness of Art
Brut hide the personalities of... who are these guys anyway?
Obviously, garage- and punk-rock are still
alive and kicking, and will be so until there are no more honestly aggressive,
but smart young people left in the world (MTV is working hard on solving that
problem, but give it a bit more time to come up with the ultimate solution).
But it is not every day that a punk band with a fresh new twist comes along,
and this here is definitely a fresh new twist. Instead of joining the usual
crowd of deadly serious anti-social rockers who hardly know the difference
between a guitar and a Tommy gun, Art Brut play it with the utmost in irony
('it's not irony', lead singer Eddie Argos objects on one of the tracks, only
further convincing everyone for miles around that it is).
Whenever people start talking about Art Brut,
they cannot help from spurting out tons of lyrical quotes — understandably,
because this band is mainly about the lyrics. The music is
run-of-the-mill garage noise, a bit more complex than the Ramones and very
nicely retro-arranged, but nothing to write home about (and some of the riffs
are just irreverently copped from golden oldies, e. g. the intro to 'Good
Weekend' is 'Let's Dance' by the Monkees and suchlike). Lead vocalist Eddie
Argos, in age-honed punk fashion, never ever sings, but just speaks or shouts
out the words. Altogether, they synthesize a good drive, but good drive alone
hardly suffices to throw you over the threshold; you have to feed it with great
melodies or great attitude.
Well, they do have great attitude.
Normally, a single chorus line shouted over and over again is guaranteed to
stick in the brain, but the process is painful and even shameful if it is a
bland, banal, hyperseriously taken chorus line. However, how can you go wrong
with 'Formed a band! We formed a band! Look at us — we formed a band!' Or with
'My! Little! Brother! Just Discovered Rock And Roll! My! Little! Brother! Just
Discovered Rock And Roll! There's A Noise In His Head And He's Out Of Control!'
(Sung over a clone of the melody of The Clash's 'London Calling', no less). Or
with 'Modern Art! Makes Me! Want To Rock Out! Modern Art! Makes Me! Want To
Rock Out!' Or with 'I can't stand the sound of the — Velvet Underground!'
(Backing vocals go 'white light, white heat!' at the same time).
This is my dutiful share of the album's
lyrics, but believe me, there is much more than that. Not coincidentally, Art
Brut attracted the admiring attention of Pixies' founder Frank Black, who even
went on to produce one of their albums — their groove is wedged in the
tradition that covers the ground between the Stooges and the Ramones, but their
absurdism and irony far surpasses the basic level of the Ramones and is,
indeed, much better aligned with the post-modern excesses of the Pixies. Except
that Frank Black you could accuse of being «pretentious», while these
guys are completely unassailable from such an angle. At least in the narrow
sense of the term: if by «pretentious» we simply mean «claiming to have
something important to say», then Art Brut are, by all means, quite pretentious.
But they really do have something
important to say. They may seem like they are singing about themselves, yet, in
fact, they are singing about everybody else. Irony is their deadly weapon, with
which they exterminate their dim-witted competition: bands that do
suppose they are the shit just because they'd mustered the intelligence to get
together ('Formed A Band'), street gangs whose norm and ideal of significant
communicative expression is a good punch in the nose ('Fight'), braindead
sex-obsessed teens ('Good Weekend', which includes what is arguably the band's
most oft quoted line — 'I've seen her naked TWICE!'), and what is likely
Art Brut's primary target — the hipster crowd, which they hate with my own kind
of passion ('Modern Art'; 'Moving To LA', about 'drinking Hennessy with
Morrissey' etc.).
Certainly this is not a «masterpiece»: it is
way too dependent on its inspirations and way too limited in its goals to
advance the band to some sort of top rank. But its limited goals are
masterfully achieved, and its thirty minutes, particularly if you are paying
close attention to whatever Eddie has got to say to you, fly by almost
unnoticed. Many people have a soft spot for headbanging albums that make fun
of headbangers — this is possibly the best representative of the genre in the
«noughties», and it happens to perfectly fit in with my conception of good
humor, which automatically guarantees an intellectual-and-emotional thumbs up.
IT'S A BIT COMPLICATED (2007)
1) Pump Up The Volume; 2)
Direct Hit; 3) St. Pauli; 4) People In Love; 5) Late Sunday Evening; 6) I Will
Survive; 7) Post Soothing Out; 8) Blame It On The Trains; 9) Sound Of Summer;
10) Nag Nag Nag Nag; 11) Jealous Guy.
Second time around, the exact same groove will
obviously not sound as fresh. With the element of surprise and shock gone, and
nothing else taking its place, It's A Bit Complicated is a bit complicated
to adore the same way it was possible to adore Bang Bang. As clever as
Argos and company show themselves to be, too much cleverness can be dangerous;
and since these guys' main strength is in their lyrics rather than in their
loins, I mean, riffs — once the joke starts getting old, they are all over and
done with.
And the joke does start getting a little
old. At the very least, it starts getting less obvious and in your face,
meaning that I, for instance, have to strain myself somewhat to get it, and
what good is an Art Brut album where it is necessary to strain oneself to get
it? 'Formed a band, we formed a band!' and 'My little brother just discovered
rock'n'roll!' were ready-made slogans with near-universal appeal, immediately
forcing you to acknowledge the band's presence. On It's A Bit Complicated,
in contrast, nothing is ready-made, you have to cook it yourself. Thirty three
minutes, high temperature, constant survey and flipping required, results not
guaranteed.
Some riffs are good — the anthemic U2-ish line
that drives 'Nag Nag Nag Nag', the cute love theme of 'People In Love', the
brutal stomp of 'St. Pauli' — but the overall quality is certainly not enough
to make this any more stupendous musically than Bang Bang. As for the
lyrics, they seem way too frequently to drift into more intimate territory,
focused more on the grotesque sides of personal relationships than on the
absurdities of society ('Jealous Guy', 'Late Sunday Evening'), etc. — and it
does not help much that they continue strictly adhering to the principle of
repeating each chorus (and, sometimes, each verse) as many times as it takes to
get the Gumby effect. But it is not nearly as funny when the repeated chorus
sounds something like 'There's nothing that's been done that can't be undone /
You were sick, now you're better, there's work to be done' or 'People in love
lie around and get fat / I didn't want us to end up like that' (admittedly, the
latter is funny, but lots of things in life are funny).
Overall, this is not a good sign: the lyrics
are more boring, the melodies are not improving, and the groove has been carved
in stone. I do not want to officially tag this as a good or bad album, because,
although on the surface it is not very pleasant, the Art Brut vibe still sort
of transcends the line between good and evil — like one of their role models,
the Ramones, whose only album worth of sacred admiration is the first one, but
who never really ever made a truly bad record because you could not put down
or corrupt the vibe. But perhaps it's a bit too complicated, after all.
ART BRUT VS. SATAN (2009)
1) Alcoholics Unanimous; 2) DC
Comics And Chocolate Milkshake; 3) The Passenger; 4) Am I Normal?; 5) What A
Rush; 6) Demons Out!; 7) Slap Dash For No Cash; 8) The Replacements; 9) Twist
And Shout; 10) Summer Job; 11) Mysterious Bruises; 12*) Just Desserts; 13*)
Catch.
Finally, Art Brut and their idol/admirer Frank
Black get to work together. Come to think of it, it is not exactly clear why
this band would need a «producer» at all — as long as they can properly plug in
their instruments and get a part-time recording engineer assistant to keep the
tapes rolling, this is pretty much everything that an Art Brut album requires.
But, on the other hand, if we are simply talking about a chance to hang out and
exchange one or two creative ideas, then perhaps it was the presence of
Black Francis that freshened things up a bit.
«A bit» is the strongest measure of degree that
I can mention, because, as long as Art Brut hold on to their groove, it will
always hover somewhere just below the level of 'Formed A Band' and 'My Little
Brother'. But intuition does cautiously suggest that the melodies may be
a little more memorable, and that the lyrics may be back to the same
level of sharpness that we first saw from these guys; at the very least, this
time around very few songs are about relationships — boring, boring, boring! —
and many more are about mocking the average representative of the consumerist
society — fun, fun, fun.
Certainly It's A Bit Complicated had
nothing approaching the simplistic genius of 'The Replacements', a song whose
riff has fewer chords than the average Ramones song but which, for some reason,
I do not remember having heard on any Ramones record, and whose lyrics
adequately sum up the brainset of the intellectually challenged music fan,
spoilt to utter hopelessness by reading one too many bad reviews: 'So many
bands are just putting it on / Why can't they be the same as their songs?.. / I
can't believe I've only just discovered the Replacements / Some of them are
nearly as old as my parents!'
Nor did it have anything of the caliber of 'DC
Comics And Chocolate Milkshake' — a song that some reviewers have called the
ultimate anthem of arrested development, forgetting, out of modesty, to
mention that, with lyrics like 'DC comics and chocolate milkshake, some things
will always be great; DC comics and chocolate milkshake, even though I'm
twenty-eight', this is really the ultimate anthem of about half of the first
world's population. And finally, finally someone got the guts to come
out and ask the Artist's Most Important Questions: 'How can you sleep at night
when nobody likes the music we like? How am I supposed to sleep at night when
no one likes the music we write? Record buying public, we hate them — this is
Art Brut versus Satan!' ('Demons Out!'). So many times we heard people implying
these questions in cryptic, convoluted forms; it is so refreshing that these
guys at least do not beat around the bush like everyone else.
Whether the last song, 'Mysterious Bruises',
deserves its seven minute length — an obviously intentional and provocative
breach of the aesthetic norm — is debatable, given that it is essentially a
repetitive account of the protagonist's unhappy party experience ('I've had one
Zirtec, two Advil, with a drink that made me feel invincible'). But it did
manage to supply the album's second-most quoted paraphrase: 'I fought the
floor, and the floor won!' (The first-most is 'Cool your warm jets, Brian Eno!'
off 'Slap Dash For No Cash').
So Art Brut Vs. Satan is hardly a kind
of record one would use as a bait for new fans, but it works fine as a device
to re-encourage the old ones and earn the band a couple extra critical points.
If these guys need to go on, and if you need to hear more of
them, the album is a surefire thumbs up
album; and if they do not, and if you do not, either, you should have stopped
reading this a long time ago anyway.
BRILLIANT! TRAGIC! (2011)
1) Clever, Clever Jazz; 2)
Lost Weekend; 3) Bad Comedian; 4) Sexy; 5) Is Dog Eared; 6) Martin Kemp; 7) Axl
Rose; 8) I Am The Psychic; 9) Ice Hockey; 10) Sealand.
Eddie Argos has openly proclaimed this to be
Art Brut's best album so far, but I believe that's just marketing. After all,
if you are going to make your fourth record sound exactly like the previous
three, you have to point the
potential buyer's mind in the right direction. Now everyone who values Eddie
Argos' opinion will spend hours, days, weeks of their formerly precious time
trying to decode all the subtle differences and G-E-T what it is exactly that
makes Brilliant! Tragic! so
brilliant. Which, in the logical end, is somewhat tragic.
No cosmetic changes this time: the band is
still the same, and Frank Black remains in charge as producer. Bassist Freddy
Feedback's backup vocals and a few lines of actual singing from Eddie (mostly confined to the line "Goodbye, don't
cry" on 'Ice Hockey', hearing which makes it easy to understand the
reluctance to use his voice as a musical instrument earlier on) are by far the
only thing that makes a difference. That, and the near-total absence of fast
and furious rock'n'roll, as the band drowns itself in either alt-rock-sludgy or
indie-rock-fudgy mid-tempo.
'Ice Hockey' and 'Is Dog Eared', at five and a
half and six minutes respectively, are brave attempts to pull themselves out of
the trench they dug out for themselves with Bang Bang — brave, but ultimately useless, since neither gives any
clear indication of where exactly they could be heading. Uh... art rock? 'Ice
Hockey' is sort of like a tribute to David Bowie's space sagas, with multi-sectioning,
moody acoustic intros, heavy-psychedelic guitar tones, astral voice overdubs,
but it is way too crude and boring to be parody or kitsch, and way too
primitive (not to mention out of place) to be a source of real inspiration.
Maybe it was Mr. Black Francis pushing the band in that kind of territory, but
it is simply not the kind of
territory on which they will ever feel safe. They may be inspired by the
Pixies, yes, but they will never become the next Pixies.
Whatever be, they are still at their best when
they are just being good old Art Brut. The album's saving grace are Eddie's
seemingly infinite waves of wisecracking, never lost on the critics — critics,
being smart guys (or, more precisely, Smart Guys™) themselves, love other smart guys, and here are some
samples of smartness for you:
"Clever clever jazz, man — sorry that
doesn't sound like it's planned — we're working in a genre you don't
understand"; "He's a bad comedian, I don't know what you see in
him" (okay, that one doesn't really look all that smart outside of its
context); "I want to be played in the background / While a couple drinks
their wine / That would be a triumph, with a voice like mine"; "I
want to give the world the finger / With the exception of my favourite lead
singer... When the world's got you by the fucking throat / Who'd you want in
your corner? AXL ROSE!"; "People in love lie around and get fat — I
think I'm okay with that". Admit it, that's smart. And funny.
It is just that all this wicked sarcasm,
masquerading as post-modern sacrilege, sort of gets lost in the haze: most of
the lyrics aren't even discernible through the noise, and riff-wise, Brilliant! is the least satisfactory Art Brut album so far. Perhaps I need to
rephrase that: it is their most «Art», but their least «Brut» album so far, and
I have always preferred them for the latter rather than the former.
Furthermore, we cannot even understand if they really are a one-trick pony or if they are capable of other kinds
of goodness — because each and every attempt at broadening the palette so far has
been feeble and tentative, and the results were neither here nor there. Perhaps
it's high time Black Francis actually ditched them; his presence clearly does
not help.
FEEL IT BREAK (2011)
1) Darken Her Horse; 2) Lose
It; 3) The Future; 4) Beat And The Pulse; 5) Spellwork; 6) The Choke; 7) Hate
Crime; 8) The Villain; 9) Shoot The Water; 10) The Noise; 11) The Beast.
Here's even more proof that Canada might truly
be taking the lead in the artistic creativity race in the 21st century. You
might be a fan of Justin Bieber and Carly Rae Jepsen, or you might be more into
Arcade Fire and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but you're gonna have to serve
somebody... actually, there's a good chance that Toronto-based,
progressively-oriented Katie Stelmanis and her main musical project, Austra,
might appeal, for different reasons, to both audiences. She's into electronics,
she's into strong rhythm, she's into darkness and Freudism, she's into Debussy
and opera, everybody go take your pick.
Artsy synth-pop with stylistically monotonous
arrangements, high-pitched vocalizing, and lyrics that only make sense to the
singer and her personal deity of choice can be a real pain in the ass, if all
of this is not handled properly and is there only to make a point like «I like
music and they told me it only counts if you push forward boundaries, so I'm
pushing like crazy, really I am». In the worst case, you get somebody like Zola
Jesus, to whom Austra's music has frequently been compared (in fact, Austra's
music has frequently been compared to all
female-fronted, dark-overtoned synth-pop ensembles, because Big Brother
demands instantaneous reference points): lots of pretense, lots of stunning
visual images, and no truly interesting music behind it.
But in the best case, you get Austra, or at
least, this, dare I say it, genuinely brilliant debut album from Austra, to
whose brilliancy Austra, like so many other bands out there, will probably
never live up again. The difference? Most people will say Katie Stelmanis'
classically-trained voice, with its impressive range, perfectly held vibrato,
great capacities of modulation, and a strange aura of nervousness and
vulnerability, as if she's either impersonating a human on the verge of being
transformed into a robot, or a robot on the verge of being humanized. There's
great potential here to sound whiny, obnoxious, and irritating, but I sense a
healthy balance between technique, mannerism, and genuine feeling, enough to
earn my sympathy even if most of the time I have no idea what she is singing
about (and neither might she; we can only hope that lines like "I want
your blood, I want it in my hair" and "The morning I saw your face
again, I was made into a beast" are not deeply encoded hints at a criminal
past).
However, it is not Stelmanis' singing that
makes Feel It Break sound really
special. All the tracks are credited to Austra as a band, so we also have to
mention Katie's old colleague Maya Postepski on drums (yes, there are real
drums here, though electronically processed as per regulation) and Dorian Wolf
on bass — yet the melodies are probably Katie's general responsibility as well,
and as much as I am usually wary of synth-pop, there are some truly stellar
parts on here. So many people these days (or any days, actually), when making
electronic-based pop, take out the easy way, relying on simple stock phrasing
with the idea that music should simply provide the groove, while the main
melodic burden will be placed on vocal hooks, that it is nothing less but a
tremendous relief to hear a whole album of tracks where this ideology is
reversed.
Perhaps the best example of this approach is
ʽBeat And The Pulseʼ, a song where the vocals do not even enter in
the picture until the groove, with all of its counterpoints, has become fully
established at about 1:30 into the song. It does not take more than the
opening chords to understand that the author of the track is probably a big fan
of Beethoven's 5th, and even though it would take a bit more genius and a tad
more equipment to make an electronic tribute to Beethoven's 5th, ʽBeat And
The Pulseʼ succeeds at a different task — creating a cold, robotic sonic
environment that feels equally influenced by 19th century romanticism and 20th
century Kraftwerk. The way those two «waves» of synthesizer chords wash over
each other, and are then attenuated further by subtle bell toll and dripping
ah-ah vocal harmonies, creates an atmosphere of stern, but soft doom busily
spun right before your very eyes — really great texture here.
Elsewhere, the atmosphere is usually more
sensual and bitter-romantic, but the base principles of work remain the same.
ʽLose Itʼ, the second single, does largely get by on the strength of
the vocals — namely, the unforgettable falsetto vocalizing of the chorus,
reflecting Katie's former training as an opera singer — but the third single,
ʽSpellworkʼ, would have been equally great as a fully instrumental
piece: it produces a cool cavernous sound out of the juxtaposition of the deep
rumbling neo-disco bassline and the crystal-tinkling, water-dripping lead
overdubs. But then there are also such wonderful album-only tracks as ʽThe
Futureʼ, which begins with a simple baroque piano flourish and then takes
on a kaleidoscopic look with multiple small interlocking keyboard and vocal
parts; ʽHate Crimeʼ, where the kaleidoscope turns even more psychedelic
by means of adding extra sound effects like phasing; and ʽShoot The
Waterʼ which, with its boppy bouncing rhythmic structure and fairy wood
vocal harmonies, sounds like it could have easily fit onto Kate Bush's The Dreaming (think ʽThere Goes A
Tennerʼ, but with a darker mood).
With this much creativity going on, there's not
even a good reason to discuss what it is all about. Stelmanis' words generally
feel like they are there simply for allowing her to practice her vocal
gymnastics; if you try to invest too much meaning into all these choruses
("don't wanna sympathize with the darkness!", "shoot the water,
baby, I've been found!", "arise sweet demon and have your
say!"), you might find yourself wondering what the hell you have been
doing with your life one day. There may be a bit of politics here, but mostly
it's the same old me-and-you, with the singer not afraid of a little
provocation every once in a while ("I came so hard in your mouth" is
an actual line in ʽThe Futureʼ) — like sort of a dark reflection of
Beach House, with the warm magic vibe replaced by a cold sorcery one. And even
if all the songs share the same vibe, Katie's diligent attention to the melodic
side of the music perfectly justifies this.
Only on the last track, ʽThe Beastʼ,
does she switch over to a regular piano, and, strangely but perhaps
predictably, the results are not as interesting — the entire piece rests on two
chords and, as such, sounds suspiciously similar to Adele's ʽHometown
Gloryʼ. I still accept it as a suitable gesture of farewell that slips in
a little acoustic warmth next to all the electronic coldness, wrapping things
up in style — a style that, to me, sounds derivative, but still not deprived of
its own intriguing identity. At the very least, as far as 21st century
synth-pop goes, Feel It Break has to
qualify as a nice, fresh take on a thirty-year old style; and I'm sure Depeche
Mode would love to have added something as juicily doom-laden as ʽBeat And
The Pulseʼ to their own catalog. Thumbs up, of course.
OLYMPIA (2013)
1) What We Done?; 2) Forgive
Me; 3) Painful Like; 4) Sleep; 5) Home; 6) Fire; 7) I Don't Care (I'm A Man);
8) We Become; 9) Reconcile; 10) Annie (Oh Muse, You); 11) You Changed My Life;
12) Hurt Me Now.
Just as I feared, the talents of Kate «Still
Not Bush» Stelmanis are one-sided after all: sufficient to craft a well-working
formula, insufficient to avoid getting trapped by that formula. Even though she
and the rest of Austra had plenty of time to write and record the sophomore
follow-up, and even though she claimed to have taken even better care of the
production, and even if that album cover looks even more stylish (Bryan Ferry
would probably get all ecstatic about that choice of... umm, colors), Olympia remains nowhere near as
exciting as Feel It Break, at least,
as far as my formerly stunned ears are telling me at the moment.
The big difference is that the melodic base of
the songs has become less challenging. The general textures remain the same,
but the keyboard riffs are significantly simpler and more «backgroundish» —
not coincidentally, there is nothing here like the careful 90-second
instrumental build-up of ʽBeat And The Pulseʼ, because the emphasis
is always on the singing, almost never on the backing track. At least half of
the songs on Feel It Break could
have worked very well as instrumentals, simply letting you revel in the smooth,
gentle interplay between melodies and counter-melodies; the melodies of Olympia, once I succeed in focusing my
ears on synthesizers instead of Stelmanis' vocalizing, move dangerously close
to atmospheric mush. It's far from the worst atmospheric mush I've heard, but the
disappointment is inevitable: where Feel
It Break was a record of not-so-trivial electronic compositions, Olympia is a record about the trials
and tribulations of Katie Stelmanis, 21st Century Schizoid Woman.
Even her lyrics are beginning to sound less
nonsensical (which I almost regret) and, at times, start to approach the
dangerous levels of that olde break-up statement. Even the song titles read
like one — ʽWhat We Done?ʼ, then ʽForgive Meʼ, then
ʽPainful Likeʼ, then ʽReconcileʼ, then ʽHurt Me
Nowʼ (actually, "don't hurt
me now"). The combination of her unusual vocal style with retro-sounding
synth-pop flourishes still elevates it above the average break-up record, but
in a way, it's like a trivial explication of an enigma right before your eyes: Feel It Break was about making you feel
it break, regardless of the «it» in question, whereas Olympia is all about "how can I make you believe me?" and
about "can you hear me now? don't hurt me now!". Boring!
Okay, not boring as in really boring. At least these vocal melodies are still unusual and
enticing. On ʽWhat We Done?ʼ, the contrast between the ghostly group
harmonies and the shrill, strained, glass-cutting solo trills from Katie works
in quite an epic manner. On ʽPainful Likeʼ, the same ghostly chorus
of "who will carry?.." inadvertently brings back memories of Til
Tuesday's ʽVoices Carryʼ, as if hinting that the problem exposed
thirty years ago still remains unsolved. On ʽSleepʼ, the vocal
treatment of the simple question "could I feel more?", with each word
artificially divided into two syllables with the accent on the second one,
probably defines the idea of «frigid orgasm», whatever that one might be. And
the list goes on — I would never dare accuse the vocal parts on the album of
sharing the laziness of their instrumental counterparts. Problem is, you cannot
introduce that much emotional variety
in your vocal parts, and sooner or later, you are bound to begin repeating
yourself — right down to the verse melodies of ʽHomeʼ and
ʽReconcileʼ being pretty much identical, for instance.
Exactly once does the record try to break out
of the formula: ʽYou Changed My Lifeʼ is a curiously ironic piece,
beginning as a simple, soulful piano ballad of gratitude ("you changed my
life for the best"), and then, with an abrupt stop to the vocal bit,
re-fading in as a dark, bass-heavy, drum-crashing instrumental with glitchy
overdubs, implying that maybe the guy who changed her life for the best
actually turned her into a vampire or something like that. No great musical
ideas here, but at least a welcome element of surprise — had there been more
tracks like that, I would not have to deliberate so long before finally
agreeing on a thumbs
up. As it is, the thumbs up are essentially due to the voice, not
the instruments; in fact, at this point it does not even matter all that much
that Stilmanis nominally continues to function in the same synth-pop paradigm —
for all I know, she could have sung all those lines to a battered acoustic
guitar, and the effect, in most cases, would have remained the same.
FUTURE POLITICS (2017)
1) We Were Alive; 2) Future
Politics; 3) Utopia; 4) I'm A Monster; 5) I Love You More Than You Love
Yourself; 6) Angel In Your Eye; 7) Freepower; 8) Gaia; 9) Beyond A Mortal; 10)
Deep Thought; 11) 43.
First time I put this on, it absolutely sucked,
the verdict being simple: it took Stilmanis but two records to become so full
of herself that on the third one, she simply pushes forward her sociopolitical
agenda (which is not too different from your basic leftist values, just stated
in her own way) without caring too much about how good the music is. Sound
familiar? Yes, many people took that same road before, so why shouldn't she, as
a responsible Canadian citizen?
Fortunately, this did not turn me off to the
point of not allowing for further listens — and eventually, it became possible
to warm up to Future Politics. See,
it's still quite a decent pop album, with plenty of vocal hooks and a nice shot
of personality. It seems self-evident to me that at this point, the lady is
much less interested in the intricacies of musical textures than she is in stating
her beliefs, issues, and manifestos through the musical medium — but the one
thing that continues to separate her from much of the competition is that she
still has her own style, and that style is... well, suitable enough for the
expression of beliefs, issues, and manifestos without causing an irrepressible
urge to use a waterhose on the expressor (expressionist?).
The opening track, ʽWe Were Aliveʼ,
is proof enough of that. The entire synth palette here is restricted to about two
chords, plus a trip-hoppy percussion track that almost seems out of place
(Katie herself said she was inspired by Massive Attack, but if you smoothen out
the percussion and replace her vocals with something less shrill, you will
rather get Enya) — the emphasis is placed squarely on the chorus hook, where,
in the most plaintive tone imaginable, she asks you "what if we were
alive?", transparently suggesting that we are not, because "I believed in nothing before". This
immediately sets up a somewhat more realistic tone for the rest of the album,
even more realistic than on Olympia,
and opens up a more human dimension to her voice and general aura — not exactly
a «compensation» as such for the lack of musical depth, but at least something
to keep you respectfully distracted from the drop in pure musicality.
On the other end of the atmospheric pole, the
title track is a techno-stylized dance number with predictably, perhaps even
generically bubbling synth loops, but a catchy chorus ("I'm never coming
back here, there's only one way — future politics!" she chirps with the
accent placed on the last syllable of "politics" and the mood of a
little girl, innocently hopping from tussock to tussock), reflecting pretty
utopian beliefs in a kind world ruled by socialist technology. Again, this is
melodically simple, but it states its point in a non-obnoxious way, which,
paradoxically, might make you want to take it seriously — efficient, not
stupid, simplicity.
The rest of the album veers and wobbles between
these «balladeering» and «rocking» extremes: I do not see even a single song
here that would approach the unusual sonic overlays and interesting
classically-influenced chords of Feel It
Break, but even without that, most of the tracks have some emotional tug.
ʽUtopiaʼ is a broken-hearted-falsetto-laden obituary to the «old
Toronto» disappearing under the alleged onslaught of mindless urbanization;
ʽI'm A Monsterʼ has the line "I don't feel nothing,
anymore" delivered in a creepily believable manner; and ʽI Love You
More Than You Love Yourselfʼ is an excellent ballad whose troubled and
caring verse melodies make a cool contrast with the strangely grandiose
delivery of the chorus hook — reminds me of all that arch-deeply-felt Sinead
O'Connor dark romanticism, except this is better.
Without spending too much on this, let me just
summarize the main points. These songs are not at all musically challenging or
original. Most of them are also intentionally non-enigmatic, with lyrics that
could easily be decoded even by those who shun, detest, and close their minds
to any sort of symbolism. The system of beliefs and values behind the music is
quite standard: socialism, environmentalism, compassion, and a bit of New Age
to tone down the anger. But Stilmanis is a natural talent, if not exactly
genius, and when she asks me, "do you acknowledge what I'm saying?"
on the last track, I'm tempted to reply in the positive. I still like the
atmosphere, I admit she still uses her voice as a cool and experimental musical
instrument, and, aw shucks, I just think there's plenty of catchiness in these
choruses to merit a thumbs up. At the same time, I'm also pretty sure
that if she does not recapture proper composer's inspiration in the near
future, any subsequent albums are bound to get much worse — there's only so
long you can sustain public interest in a rigid formula if you just keep
simplifying it.
SINCE I LEFT YOU (2001)
1) Since I Left You; 2) Stay
Another Season; 3) Radio; 4) Two Hearts In 3/4 Time; 5) Avalanche Rock; 6)
Flight Tonight; 7) Close To You; 8) Diners Only; 9) A Different Feeling; 10)
Electricity; 11) Tonight; 12) Pablo's Cruise; 13) Frontier Psychiatrist; 14)
Etoh; 15) Summer Crane; 16) Little Journey; 17) Live At Dominoes; 18) Extra
Kings.
It is not difficult to understand the concept
of «plunderphonics»: all you have to do is to agree that, in art at least, the
total does not always equal the sum of its parts. If you take sample A from one
artist and sample B from another artist and put them together, you are not
performing a crude act of «stealing» as long as you acknowledge the sources —
you may be trying to generate a new meaning. As in — sample one of Hitler's
speeches over ʽStar Spangled Bannerʼ and you will definitely be generating a new meaning,
albeit one that might cause you some headache if thrown about in the public
sphere.
It is much more troublesome, though, to
understand if the very art of «plunderphonics» has, in itself, anything to do
with «music». The Avalanches themselves, a merry bunch of Australian DJs with a
heavy interest in old used vinyl, would, and have, understandably argued that
it does. After all, Since I Left You
— their debut, and, so far, their only
record — is not merely something that has to be perceived through one's ears,
it is also something that is targeted at provoking a rhythmic reaction from
your body: stuff that you should, and could, dance to, and it is fairly hard to
dance to anything other than music. Even architecture.
On the other side, it can hardly be argued that
Since I Left You is «just» a
dance-oriented pop album. Its composition — a super-complex kaleidoscope of
over 900 different samples — all by itself positions it as a work of art, to be
processed and analyzed through your mind just as well as it could be picked up
by the irrational nerve centers in your body. And this is where one begins to
have problems with viewing it as «music»: from this point of view, Since I Left You becomes an analogy of
something like a Duchamp readymade.
The hour-long album, all of it structured like
one long track, without a single break between the separate tracks, seamlessly
flowing in and out of each other, is mostly rooted in the groovy sounds of
generic 1970s R&B — so generic, in fact, that I confess to not recognizing any of the samples involved (supposedly,
there has to be a bit of Madonna's ʽHolidayʼ in here somewhere, but I
don't remember where exactly). Part of the band's preference for these obscure
funk / disco grooves probably stems from the understandable fear of getting
sued by the big gangstas of pop entertainment (they'd rather be sued by the
small ones), but part of it is symbolic — as some sort of adepts of the Andy
Warhol school of pop-art, they find their interest in dragging out long-forgotten
chunks of routine mediocrity and going the "it ain't art because it's
inherently fabulous, it's art because we
are inherently fabulous and we say
it's art" route with them.
On the outside layer, having chopped up,
remixed, and loop-de-looped those R&B grooves, they mix them with miriads
of sound effects, everything from neighing horses to movie soundtracks to
phaser blasts from crappy (or not so crappy) 1980s video games, and offer it
for our attention and appreciation. The overall effect, if there is an overall effect, could only be
described as «The Mad Hatter's Disco Ball» — an experimental, sprawling
panorama of sonic absurdity, completely open to analysis, interpretation,
admiration, derision, or the occasional flight of a rotten tomato. Unfortunately,
there is nothing «revolutionary» in this approach per se — «plunderphonics» as
a concept dates back to at least John Oswald's invention of the term in 1985,
or, to a smaller extent, to the works of The Art Of Noise in the early 1980s.
So one can only evaluate the merits of The Avalanches based on a question like
«so, what exactly are they doing here to convince us that the art of
plunderphonics deserves further existence?»
My brief personal answer to this would then be
something like «uhhh...». A longer answer would involve mumbling out phrases
like «well, I guess they can sound funny at times», «you know, it doesn't really sound all the same if you really
put your ear to it», and «hey, sometimes it is more productive to ask questions
than to give answers».
In all honesty, I do not «get» this album, and
have no reason to think that anyone does (at least, certainly not based on the
actual glowing reviews of it that I have read). I do remember myself, in early
childhood, playing two tapes on different tape recorders and recording the
results on a third one, just for pointless fun — the results could sometimes be
unpredictably hilarious. I have very
strong suspicions that this here is simply a case of several overgrown kids who
somehow remained stuck in the same mood, only with access to far superior
technologies and far larger data banks. Consequently, the results are
essentially the same: sometimes, through sheer chance, it works, sometimes it
doesn't, but what works and what doesn't work will most likely be completely
different and unpredictable for different people.
On one thing there may be no disagreement: a
heavy shitload of work went into the creation of this whole project — several
years of toil and trouble, in fact (and the real curious thing about The Avalanches
is that, while they are still alive and kicking, they have by now spent more
than a decade planning and recording
their follow-up record). Serious plunderphonics requires serious skills at
plundering — which may be one reason behind all the positive reviews: even if
these overdubs make little sense, they are all fitted together quite smoothly,
so that the album never ever becomes truly cacophonous. Crazy, but not
dissonant or chaotic. The horses are neighing in all the right spots — where
somebody else would have probably inserted a repetitive lead guitar lick or
synth loop. Even the video game phaser blasts on ʽA Different
Feelingʼ are all blasting out on time and in perfect harmony with the
disco beats.
In other words, I am quite ready to agree that Since I Left You is a triumph of form —
and an awesome soundtrack for a party that has to combine opportunities for
dancing, hip intellectualism, and an atmosphere of whacked out surrealism. But
on the other hand, I do not wish for a second to overestimate this stuff — for
instance, by trying to over-analyze and «interpret» any of these tracks (and,
given the complexity of their structure, treating even one of them in this
manner could take a long time and
make the writer look seriously
afflicted). You have your own perfect right, for instance, to regard the record
as a symbolic expression of pop culture's diversity, or as a symbolic
expression of pop culture's vanity and cheapness, or as a symbolic expression
of pop culture's trashy beauty and seductiveness, or as a brave statement
saying that nothing that goes into the wastebasket is guaranteed to forever
stay in the wastebasket...
...whatever. It's all puzzling, curious, and
intriguing, but there is also something disturbing in the fact that Since I Left You so often ends up on
people's lists of «best-of-the-decade» albums — a rather desperate, if not
depressing, decision, I'd say.
WILDFLOWER (2016)
1) The Leaves Were Falling; 2)
Because I'm Me; 3) Frankie Sinatra; 4) Subways; 5) Going Home; 6) If I Was A
Folkstar; 7) Colours; 8) Zap!; 9) The Noisy Eater; 10) Wildflower; 11) Harmony;
12) Live A Lifetime Love; 13) Park Music; 14) Livin' Underwater (Is Something
Wild); 15) The Wozard Of Iz; 16) Over The Turnstiles; 17) Sunshine; 18) Light
Up; 19) Kaleidoscope Lovers; 20) Stepkids; 21) Saturday Night Inside Out; 22)
Frankie Sinatra (extended mix).
Perhaps the weirdest thing about The
Avalanches' second album and the 15 (!) years that separate it from the first
one is realizing that The Avalanches did not, in fact, break up over any
significant time period in the interim. They'd always been a fairly loose
collective, and the only current members are the core duo of Robbie Chater and
Tony Di Blasi, while other people came and went, but there never really was a
specific timeframe in between 2001 and 2016 when The Avalanches officially
«did not exist» — so one cannot technically call Wildflower a «comeback», especially given the fact that some of its
tracks had been conceived as early as 2000.
So — fifteen frickin' falls, a period over
which most of the band's original adolescent fans graduated from college, got
themselves steady jobs, got married, settled down, grew some new or shaved off
some old facial hair, only to wake up one fine morning and learn that there was
also a parallel reality in which nothing has changed: Wildflower not only picks up from exactly where Since I Left You had, in fact, left us,
but it goes on to walk a crooked mile in order to leave us, one hour later, at
the exact same starting point once again. As if you needed one more argument to
show how little has changed in the world of music since the 21st century
introduced us to the concept of Artistic Deep Freeze, the Avalanches are here
to teach us a lesson in how «it takes all the running you can do to keep in the
same place», to quote a truly
immortal line.
To be fairly honest, if this reaction can be
called «enjoyment», then I «enjoyed» Wildflower
absolutely no less (and probably no more) than I did with Since I Left You — a reaction that
could hardly be said to agree with the overall critical and fan response to the
record, where most people said that it was sort of okay but no Since I Left You. The reason for that
seems to be on the surface: Since I
Left You struck a chord with its novelty factor — few, if any, people up to
that point made plunderphonics sound so fun, so light, so danceable, so
accessible, and yet so absolute in terms of focus and dedication. There was a
certain inspirational whiff to it that may even have led some people to
entertain odd thoughts about how this would be the future of music, etc. But now that fifteen years have passed
and, while sampling as such remains firmly embedded in our conscience as one of
the most heavily (ab)used modern musical means, plunderphonics remains on the
fringes of that conscience — and it kind of looks like it was a dead end after
all. A fun dead end to find oneself in every once in a while, but hardly one
where you can give a slight tap to the magical wall at the end and find yourself
in musical nirvana.
But perhaps this assessment — «nice, but
nothing particularly new or mind-blowing» — is unfair, and all it takes is a
few attentive listens to uncover progress? Well, they do seem to be a little
more open to integrating some new sounds in the patchy canopy of old: for
instance, rappers Danny Brown and Biz Markie came along for some of the
sessions to record vocal parts for several tracks, along with a few other less
familiar faces. Indeed, Wildflower
goes much heavier on the raps than its predecessor, though it hardly ever feels
like a hip-hop record because its «plunderbase» is so much more antiquated than
is typical of sampling in hip-hop. That's pretty much the only substantial
difference — other than that, Wildflower
offers you still the same dizzying kaleidoscope of instrumental and vocal
overdubs that find their sources in little-known old vinyl grooves. You will get educated, for sure, as they
revitalize long-forgotten niceties: ʽBecause I'm Meʼ, for instance,
is all based on loops from ʽWant Adsʼ by The Honey Cones, a cool
dance-soul number from the sunniest corner of 1969 (sold a million copies back
in the day, by the way, but who remembers that now? Well — The Avalanches do!),
while ʽFrankie Sinatraʼ exploits Wilmoth Houdini's ʽBobby Sox
Idolʼ and reminds you of how ironically fun classic calypso music could be
back in the day, with Danny Brown supplementing Houdini's trembling croak with
his own humorous take on the Frank Sinatra thing ("Like Frank Sinatra,
bitch, do this shit my way" — welcome to 2016, ladies and gentlemen).
On the really
obscure side, ʽSubwaysʼ will teach you about the 1980 EP by
"Chandra", a pre-teen artist who might be regarded as sort of
Eighties' equivalent to Rebecca Black (no, really, I mean it: the original ʽSubwaysʼ is such
an embarrassing piece of pseudo-New-Wave/disco-mash-up that it is almost amazing
how The Avalanches managed to take out a couple lines and make them sound
alarming and troubled); and on the «null void» side, ʽThe Noisy
Eaterʼ features a hilarious live recording of ʽCome Togetherʼ as
performed by the choir of Kew High School in the band's own native Melbourne,
mashed with a Biz Markie narrative about a «noisy eater», with language stuck
midway between British folklore and gangsta rap. Sounds intriguing, doesn't it?
Well, I can tell you that the surrealist absurdity of it all does come through,
and I'd be lying through my teeth if I said this wasn't at all entertaining.
Plus, there's always the game challenge — how many of these bits and pieces
will you recognize on your own? I totally suck at this, but I was at least proud of my Beatle-lore
when my ears perceived a snippet from the carnivalesque Lowrey organ of
ʽBeing For The Benefit Of Mr. Kiteʼ on ʽFrankie Sinatraʼ,
or the vocal harmony bit from Ram's
ʽUncle Albertʼ on ʽLiving Underwaterʼ (alas, Spirit's
ʽWater Womanʼ that constitutes the backbone of the track was stuffed
way too deep in my memory to resurface on its own).
So yes, it's all fun. They have a good ear for
«tasty bits», and if there's a lesson in here that even bad-to-mediocre
obscurities can have moments of impressive musical dynamics that might very
well work outside of the original context — count me in. The problem is, it
still does not work anywhere other than in its own post-modern frame, and
aren't we living in a post-post-modern frame already? (Or perhaps even
«post-post-post-modern», I've honestly lost count...). Fifteen years have not
taught these guys how to plunder their phonics in a way that would truly create
an alternate psychedelic reality to which I could, you know, relate or something. There's a lot of
fussiness here, for sure, and meta-melodicity, and even some atmospheric
warmth, considering how they usually concentrate on life-asserting
dance-oriented R&B and sunshine pop for their sources, yet none of this
makes the resulting collage properly meaningful on an emotional level, once
you've savored the joke.
To be honest, I cannot blame them for not
having made much progress because I fail to see how it is even possible to make any progress in this
direction — although, on the other hand, maybe if they had introduced some
jarring mood shifts (for instance, added a «dark side» to the bubbly
psychedelic frolicking by plundering, oh, I dunno, some death metal archives?),
this could help focus our attention? Whatever. In any case, I'd be very
surprised if somebody (Danny Brown fans excepted) honestly and flatly preferred
Wildflower to Since I Left You — ultimately, it just feels like a bonus hour for
those who thought that 2001's Australia summarized the highest points of
Western civilization as we knew them. For everybody else, it's mostly a good
way to remember Wilmoth Houdini — and Chandra.
THE AVETT BROTHERS (2000)
1) Kind Of In Love With You;
2) My Lady And The Mountain; 3) Those Green Eyes; 4) Feb. 20, 2000; 5) Let Myself
Live; 6) I Love You Still.
What happens, usually, when you take one guy with
a guitar and one guy with a banjo? The standard answer is that you just don't, because there is a very high
probability that they will start churning out terrible covers of old Bill
Monroe material; «Southern spirit» is already a dubious concept to begin with,
but «synthesized simulated Southern spirit» is something else. It must be a
very specific audience that consistently listens to modern bluegrass, and I am
not very much interested in understanding its specificity.
Brothers Seth and Scott Avett, however, are a
curious exception. Right from the very start (and, actually, they both began
playing in amateur college rock bands before going acoustic), they seem to have
set their sights on taking the essence of bluegrass and making it palatable for
the general customer as well. This short EP (just six songs), marking the
start of their rather laborious career, is merely a taste of things to come,
but the Avetts' mission is already transparent.
First, the bad points. The brothers are neither
great instrumentalists nor, to put it mildly, competent singers. Of course,
they know how to play their instruments, but probably they don't spend too much
time practicing them: banjo virtuosity can really be intoxicating in the right
hands, and these aren't the right hands. As for the vocals, they aren't
particularly strong or particularly soulful, and they strain seriously on the
prolonged notes (sometimes, when they are duetting, this comes across as quite
a painful experience). And, of course, if you lack virtuoso technique with the
guitar and the banjo, yet still insist on recording an album that has nothing but guitar and banjo (a little
primitive piano, occasionally), this also contributes to the risk.
The good
point is that the brothers place their bets on songwriting, and come up with
stuff that is interesting, if not
altogether fascinating. These are not simply traditional folkie melodies set to
new sets of lyrics (although the lyrics are
new). Almost each song incorporates an individualistic riff ('Kind Of In Love
With You' and 'Those Green Eyes' are the most noticeable), and even if they are
not doing much with the formula, they
tweak it just enough to convince me, and others, perhaps, that there might
still be a small pop-hook deposit within the bluegrass genre waiting to be
mined.
It also takes gall, I think, to set the sights
high and still come out so straight-faced about it: the Bros.' songs are
personal and sentimental with not a whiff of irony — in fact, when 'I Love You
Still' starts wrapping things up, its sound is downright pathetic (in the neutral sense of the word, not
derogatory). So it is for the better, perhaps, that the vocal technique leaves
a lot to be desired: patented Nashville singing would probably just elevate
Pathos to Bathos.
Overall, though, this first EP is just a first
EP, a self-released, long out-of-print, tentative step into the world of
creative songwriting. The Avett Bros. «musical philosophy» is all here already,
but the execution is flimsy; love 'em or hate 'em, this is not yet the proper
place to deposit one's bouquets of gardenias or bundles of dried bear scat.
COUNTRY WAS (2002)
1) Pretty Girl From Matthews;
2) Jenny And The Summer
Day; 3) A Lot Of Moving; 4) November Blue; 5) My Losing Bet; 6) Beside The
Yellow Line; 7) Old Wyom; 8) Closing Night.
Country
Was sounds not a wee bit
different from the Bros. self-titled water-testing, but is nevertheless a huge
improvement, as they keep pumping all of their resources into the songwriting.
As much as there is acoustic guitar, banjo, and Southern-style vocals on the
album, Country Was decidedly sounds
more like a pop sort of thing recorded by bluegrass-trained artists rather than
vice versa — the chord changes, the lyrics, the overall atmosphere all show
that this banjo sound is to the Avetts what the country-rock shift used to be
to the Byrds: an attempt to (a) be different and (b) merge the archaic and the
innovative in one big friendly synthesis.
Take 'Jenny And The Summer Day', for instance,
with its slightly Britpoppy electric piano backing (think Small Faces circa Ogden's Nut or something), slightly
psychedelic slow-down pauses at the end of each verse, and the strained, but
fun falsetto on the bridge. The rest of the instrumentation, as well as the
Bros.' still limited vocal skills,
may make you wish the song were donated to a more skillful arranging /
performing outfit, but then the extra skill could also make it lose its
individuality, and the Avetts do care about individuality. Either way, it's a
lovely, uplifting bit of music, well deserving of having a summer day reference
in the title.
'Pretty Girl From Matthews', initiating a
lengthy run of all those other Avett
Bros. songs about 'Pretty Girls', is decidedly more traditional-folk oriented,
but it still mixes together an old-timey melody for the verses and a
newer-timey melody for the chorus, just as it mixes lines like "I'll see
you on the good Lord's shores" with "My saviour lives in
telephones". If not a masterpiece per se, it is still a fine,
soft-ass-kicking lead-in number, and the Bros. still continue to use it as a
show-opener fairly often.
Speaking of lyrics, the Avetts' approach is
extremely intelligent — somehow, they manage to avoid both the temptation of
simply falling back on country/folk clichés and the post-modern curse of wedging late-20th-century
intellectual-impressionistic garbage inside old structures (an art that used to
be fun but then quickly degraded into lame posturing). They just sing lots and
lots of happy/sad love tunes as well as an occasional freedom-rider tune or two
— with simple messages, but succeeding in finding enough quirky twists and
turns of phrases to not come across as either banal revivalists or pretentious neo-beatniks.
No idea if Johnny Cash ever got wind of them before his death in 2003, but I'm
pretty sure the MIB would definitely appreciate.
Apart from a couple lesser tunes at the end,
just about everything is catchy and nice, the highlights being the first two
songs as well as the fast-moving 'November Blue' and the ballad 'My Losing
Bet'. Not that everything encompasses
a lot: with eight songs clocking in at under thirty minutes, the album's over
in a flash; but then again, there is only so much banjo pluckin' that a
non-Alabama-reared mind can stand, and, in a way, this is definitely preferable
over the longish records that the soon-to-be-confident Bros. would eventually
start churning out. Modesty, brevity, intelligence, nicety all win to yearn this
a thumbs up
despite the obvious anti-odds.
LIVE AT THE DOUBLE DOOR INN (2002)
1) A Lot Of Moving; 2) Diamond
Joe; 3) Sorry Man; 4) Will The Circle Be Unbroken; 5) Jenny And The Summer Day;
6) Pretty Girl From Matthews; 7) Avett Brothers Monologue; 8) I'll Fly Away; 9)
Let Myself Live; 10) November Blue; 11) My Losing Bet; 12) Gamblin' Man; 13)
Cripple Creek; 14) Kind Of In Love; 15) Beside The Yellow Line.
As the title suggests without much fuss, this
is the Avetts' first live album (out of, perhaps, somewhat too many), recorded
at some seedy joint that usually promotes itself as «The Oldest Live Music
Venue East of the Mississippi», even though its founding year is generally
listed as 1973 — go figure. Unless, of course, there's no land east of the Mississippi
other than Carolina, a viewpoint that would go down nicely with some people, I believe.
Since the Avetts had not yet mastered the true
art of studio polish, the live show is not altogether different from their
concurrent studio work. The setlist reproduces most of Country Was, cozily cutting down on the last two numbers which I,
too, thought were the weakest of the lot; throws on a couple extra numbers from
the debut EP; previews one track from Carolina
Jubilee; and, for collectors' sake, includes a few traditional numbers.
None of this is essential. The originals are
not going to present themselves in any sort of new light, and a few are marred
by flubbed notes and a bit of off-key singing as well; and the traditionals
are fun, but only a deranged diehard will take a serious interest in these
versions of 'Will The Circle Be Unbroken' and 'Cripple Creek' — decent ear
candy for the hard-working bar-goer who loves a bit of folk music to help him
wash down his Budweiser.
Occasionally, these things gain an additional
charm factor due to cute bits of banter, but the Avetts merely manage to come
across as friendly, easy-going chaps, able to work up the audience into an
acceptive state. Their understanding of humour does not get them much further
than the line "eight dollars, eight songs — you do the math", which
they then repeat after each third song or so (sometimes adding that "I
personally cannot do the math"). Okay then. All in all, a decent, steady
performance with a clearly expressed party spirit, but nothing essential.
A CAROLINA JUBILEE (2003)
1) The Traveling Song; 2) Love Like The Movies; 3)
Sorry Man; 4) Me And God; 5) Pretty Girl From Raleigh; 6) Do You Love
Him; 7) I Killed Sally's Lover; 8) Pretty Girl From Locust; 9)
My Last Song To Jenny; 10) Walking For You; 11) The D Bag
Rag; 12) Pretty Girl From Annapolis; 13) Smoke In Our
Lights; 14) Offering.
At fifty minutes (there is also an eight-minute
long bonus track that contains nothing but bits of poorly recorded dialog, and,
frankly, I have not sat through it even once), anyway, at fifty minutes the
Avett Brothers' proper record label debut (Ramseur Records) is about as
overlong as you'd expect from any
traditionally arranged bluegrass album, even if the banjoist were Yngwie Malmsteen
in disguise and the acoustic guitarist occasionally launched into Slayer riffs,
and both were songwriters on a pants-peeing level for Paul McCartney.
None of which should detract the honest listener
from the fact that the Avett Brothers did
come up with another bunch of fine, friendly, attractive, and not altogether
generic songs. There are no «structural» advances whatsoever since Country Was (unless we count the
delightful excursion into ragtime territory on the catchy kiddie instrumental
'D Bag Rag'), so that any additional deep thoughts on the album as a whole are
hard to come by and mostly present themselves as banalities or idiocies; even
those professional reviewers who openly liked
the Avett Brothers' first tentative step into mainstream territory usually
limited their support to «nice sound, man, worthy lyrics, oh God I'd rather
listen to something atrocious instead, I'm paid by the word».
Still, stuff like 'Love Like The Movies' and
'Me And God' are a subtle combination
of «nice sound» and «worthy lyrics», including some film projector effects and
a solid jab at the Church ("my God and I don't need a middle man").
All three of the album's 'Pretty Girls' are honoured well with their respective
melodies, particularly the one from 'Locust' because it's an electric piano
ballad, and, for some reason, the Avett's spirituality always shines out the
strongest on these things (or perhaps it is simply because the piano, per se,
is a more spiritual instrument than the guitar? now there's one interesting
thought for future consideration).
The brothers' intentional refusal to vary their
instrumentation, or, for that matter, to improve
on their instrumentation (the sound is as loose, wobbly, and seemingly
«amateurish» as before; record executives showed a surprising lack of control
here) continues to grate, especially now that they have gone from 25-minute to
50-minute albums. But who knows, maybe it's their only way to escape
mega-stardom: with additional hours of rehearsal, series of overdubs, and
overall polish some of these songs could be made into country-pop standards
that would uphold the genre's ruined reputation against the likes of Taylor
Swift — and what sort of a normal person would want to compete with Taylor
Swift? Thumbs up.
MIGNONETTE (2004)
1) Swept Away (sentimental
version); 2) Nothing Short Of Thankful; 3) The New Love Song; 4) At The Beach;
5) Signs; 6) Hard Worker; 7) Letter To A Pretty Girl; 8) Please Pardon
Yourself; 9) Pretty Girl At The Airport; 10) Pretty Girl From Cedar Lane; 11)
Causey Commentary; 12) One Line Wonder; 13) The Day That Marvin Gaye Died; 14)
SSS; 15) Swept Away; 16) A Gift For Melody Anne; 17) Complainte D'Un Matelot
Mourant; 18) Salvation Song; 19*) Signs; 20*) Laser Pants.
Fourteen guitar-and-banjo folkie romps at fifty
minutes not enough for you? Then take this: eighteen
guitar-and-banjo folkie romps that clock in at a near-record seventy minutes.
It is no longer merely a case of being «prolific» — it is an ever increasingly
arrogant gesture, because even if the Avett Brothers were your average mainstream-oriented Nashville act, they would
have kept it shorter; but since, five years into their career, they still haven't covered 'Orange Blossom
Special', their output continues to be oriented at adventurous people. And the
fact that an adventurous person will have to endure seventy minutes of banjo
music makes it one hell of an adventure.
Fortunately, and, in fact, unexpectedly, the
Brothers continue to excel at songwriting. In fact, they are excelling at it
more excellently than ever before. 'Swept Away', previously released on its own
EP and present here in two versions (the «sentimental» one differs from the
regular one by adding girlie backup vocals from the Avetts' sister Bonnie and,
ha ha ha, dropping the banjo — apparently, the banjo is not a sentimental instrument by the Bros.' reckoning, and I do
concur), is indeed a hauntingly beautiful folk ballad: you may easily think
you've heard it before, either on some Fairport Convention album or in one of
your previous lifetimes — chasing fair Saxon maidens in Sherwood Forest or
something — but trust me, you haven't.
'Signs' is another subtle tear-jerker,
particularly the quiet demo version included at the end, an intimate plea on
the part of an abused and misused lover that, for some reason, again works better without the banjo:
clearly, the way I see it, the instrument is simply incapable — or, not to make
any sweeping statements, the Avetts
are incapable of conveying gentle, soulful emotions with the instrument, making
good use of it only on fast-paced dunce numbers (such as the frantic 'Hard
Worker', on which they quite masterfully use the hoedown thing to convey the
protagonist's buzzing work atmosphere).
The boys get «conventionally adventurous» only
twice; once, during a chaotic, nearly free-form coda to 'One Line Wonder', then
on the atmospheric instrumental 'Complainte D'Un Matelot Mourant', on which a
grumbly banjo duets with a somber cello over sea waves and creaking masts for
five minutes (apparently related to the album title, which refers to the
sinking of the Mignonette in 1884).
If played over and over on headphones to a properly attuned brain, the composition
may eventually hypnotize; but overall, it shows that perhaps the Brothers' strenghiest strength still lies in their
catchy choruses rather than sonic experimentation.
Describing individual songs is useless as
always, and, although only 'Swept Away' truly swept me away, there is no filler involved — each composition is well
thought out and assigned at least one minor emotional punchline, sometimes
more. However, on the technical scale of things, nothing whatsoever has changed
since Carolina Jubilee, so do not
take my exhilarated thumbs up here as a hidden hint at Seth Avett's
having developed an extra octave.
LIVE, VOL. 2 (2005)
1) Pretty Girl From Annapolis;
2) Love Like The Movies; 3) Walking For You; 4) Do You Love Him; 5) I Killed
Sally's Lover; 6) Smoke In Our Lights; 7) A Lot Of Movin'; 8) November Blue; 9)
Wanted Man; 10) Old Joe Clark; 11) My Last Song To Jenny; 12) The Traveling
Song; 13) Offering; 14) A Gift For Melody Anne; 15) Complainte D'Un Matelot
Mourant; 16) Pretty Girl From Raleigh; 17) Please Pardon Yourself.
Let's see now: ten songs from A Carolina
Jubilee, three from Mignonette,
two from Country Was (and both were
already released on the previous live album), and an outside medley ('Wanted
Man' / 'Old Joe Clark'), for the first part of which the gallant gentlemen
actually asked permission from Doc Watson, even though they never needed to.
(It's not that I read about it — that's what they tell the audience, even
though it never asked them to).
If you really love A Carolina Jubilee, as in really really really, there is some sense
in hearing it played live in the usual club setting, but not before you run
through the test of putting on the middle of 'Smoke In Our Lights' and seeing
if you can stand Seth Avett tear down his voice during the climactic scream
bit. If yes, then you will also
pardon the mistakes and roughness in the other performances, concentrating on
the sheer energy and enthusiasm. If no,
the Avett Bros. live experience is not for you; stick to the studio records
(which aren't technically immaculate either, but at least it is one of the budget articles out
there).
Since the songs are good, the album is also
good, except for the last three songs, where it seems as if the Bros. ran out
of tape and completed the show from somebody's cell phone recorder (this is
particularly gruesome on 'Complainte D'Un Matelot', which is, per se, an
unsuccessful attempt at replacing the salty dog atmosphere of the original with
lots of head-splitting screaming, and the abysmal sound quality only adds to
the splitting). There is a little less stage banter, no more silly jokes about
doing the math, but overall, this is no Live
At Leeds: energy and stage presence are all right when you pay actual
admission — for a live record, we
need something extra.
FOUR THIEVES GONE: THE ROBBINSVILLE SESSIONS
(2006)
1) Talk On Indolence; 2)
Pretty Girl From Feltre; 3) Colorshow; 4) Distraction #74; 5) 16 In July; 6)
Left On Laura, Left On Lisa; 7) A Lover Like You; 8) Pretend Love; 9)
Matrimony; 10) The Lowering; 11) The Fall; 12) Dancing Daze; 13) Famous Flower
Of Manhattan; 14) 40 East; 15) Gimmeakiss; 16) Denouncing November Blue; 17)
Four Thieves Gone.
In my little world, this is officially the
Avett Brothers' masterpiece. Had this collection only been recorded in a «power
pop» environment, it might have rocked the indie world to its foundation,
except the indie world and bluegrass arrangements do not exactly get along, and
I do not blame them — over sixty minutes of banjo-driven tunes, how cool does
one need to be to stand that? On a theoretical level, the only thing worse is
probably sixty minutes of bagpipes. Or sixty minutes of water pipes (if your name is Blixa Bargeld).
There are some minor changes in sound that are
most welcome: pianos, with each new album, become more and more prominent, and
now they also break the taboo on electric instruments, introducing loud
amplified sound as a supporting means on some of the songs (e. g. the bombastic
distorted guitar solo at the end of 'Colorshow'). It also seems to me, though
this is a fully subjective sensation, that the playing is generally tighter and
the bits of off-key singing less noticeable and jarring than before (and
somehow you'd expect that from a musical outfit that's been on a non-stop
touring and recording schedule for six years).
But the most important piece of news is that
the brothers continue honing and refining their songwriting skills, and by the
time of Four Thieves, they have
clearly mutated into some of the most talented writers of their generation. The
ways they subtly bridge the unbridgeable are, well, subtle, but once you cut
through, you realize that the brothers, by now, are in a niche all their own, despite so superficially limited a
formula. Take 'Famous Flower Of Manhattan', for instance, which first came
across as a yawn-inducing, meandering ballad, then slowly sank in as a catchy,
original, cleverly phrased ballad, then, with the lyrics and the story behind
them consulted, emerged as a one-of-a-kind melancholic-to-optimistic ode to the
idea that everything belongs in its proper place (in this particular case, as
rumor has it, Regina Spektor, whom the brothers liked so much they almost
wanted to abduct her from NYC, but, fortunately, reconsidered). It is one of
the most interesting country vs. city clashes in recent musical history.
Filler still exists for these guys, but, unlike
the preceding albums, it is now so overwhelmed with idea-riddled songs that, in
any sort of review, is practically negligible. Why concentrate on boring
moments at all, when there is so much fun stuff around? 'Talk On Indolence'
starts off as a near-sacrilegious «bluegrass rap» before moving on to two or
three more, entirely different, sections. 'Colorshow', with its piano pounding,
starts out in an arrogantly minimalistic mode, the way a John Lennon or a Neil
Young could easily start one of their soul-baring anthems, before adding the
above-mentioned jarring guitar solo part. 'Left On Laura, Left On Lisa' slyly
borrows a lick from the Beatles' 'I'm Looking Through You', perhaps
unintentionally (both are written, after all, within the same folk pop idiom).
'Pretend Love', riding out of nowhere, is a frail, delicate Fifties-style waltz
that could have made a fine tearjerker for Elvis or, at least, Hank Williams.
'Matrimony' is the Avetts at the top of their «bluegrass punk» powers — fast,
driving, and quite funny: "My dog is loud and my dog is wild / We're too
young to have a child / Can you keep the dog next week? / I'll be gone the next
three".
Actually, the Bros.' sense of humor is at its
best when we get to the very end: 'Four Thieves Gone' is a funny twist on 'Ten
Little Indians', telling a gruesome lyrical tale of copyright infringement (so
it seems) to a nursery rhyme-style melody. Compared to the real highlights, it
is but a trifle, but an important one, blowing off some of the occasional bombast. Not that the bombast
is in any way bothersome. There is no concept here whatsoever, no particular
brand of musical philosophy, just a bunch of really open-minded Southern guys
with a knack for a good melody, a good lyric, and lotsa heart and soul. We can
only hope that some day some equally talented fan will want to re-record all of
this with less banjo and... more cowbell? Thumbs up.
EMOTIONALISM (2007)
1) Die Die Die; 2) Shame; 3)
Paranoia In B-Flat Major; 4) The Weight Of Lies; 5) Will You Return; 6) The
Ballad Of Love; 7) Salina; 8) Pretty Girl From Chile; 9) All My Mistakes; 10)
Living Of Love; 11) I Would Be Sad; 12) Pretty Girl From San Diego; 13) Go To
Sleep; 14) Hand-Me-Down Tune.
If I am right in thinking that the title is
supposed to imply that the brothers' next record is more about sentiment and
tenderness than about brawny entertainment, then Emotionalism quite closely matches its contents. Unfortunately,
it also means that the listener is entitled to nearly one hour of nearly
non-stop balladeering based on a nearly never-ending stream of guitar and banjo
melodies. And even if the brothers' songwriting talents still yield no sign of
waning, this makes the experience tough for those who have short attention
spans and seriously impaired tolerance levels for minimalistic «calm» music.
Which is all the more sad when you consider how
much ass is being kicked by the few exceptions from the rule. For instance,
'Pretty Girl From Chile' is not just another in the continuing series of pretty
girls from all over the globe songs, but a multi-part epic that moves quite
effortlessly from rootsy Band-sy stuff to a frenzied Latin-influenced section
to a loud noise-rock ending, all the while telling a coherent tale of a
remorseful protagonist who is not quite sure of whether he is or is not
unfaithful to the pretty girl in question — not exactly heartbreaking, but
curious stuff.
Other interesting tracks would include 'Will
You Return' with its transparent harmonic nods to the early Beatles (one of the
vocal parts quite closely reproduces the opening vocal line of 'There's A
Place', for instance); and the elegant harmony chanting on 'Die Die Die', which
I could easily see transformed into a mega-huge-power pop hit monster, were
someone like Todd Rundgren placed behind the production wheel. There is also
'Pretty Girl From San Diego', on which the Latin elements are even more
distinctly pronounced, with a hilarious samba bit inserted between verses.
Diversity, what ho.
But in between these occasional «diversions»,
the brothers are mainly busy with laying their heart and soul on the line,
highly polished and radiating for miles around. There is a song called 'The
Ballad Of Love And Hate', which almost plays out like a tribute to Leonard
Cohen: "Love writes a letter and sends it to hate, 'My vacation's ending,
I'm coming home late'". There is 'Living Of Love', on which the brothers
implore you to "say love, say for me love" (not unconvincingly, but
somewhat overlong-ly). There's a whole bunch of slowly bleeding, feebly
creeping confessional tunes — tunes that are oriented at the entire small bunch
of sincerity-loving idealists that still remain in this world, but even
sincerity-loving idealists, after ten such odes, may be coerced into putting on
some Franz Ferdinand for a change. Not to mention that, for all his talents,
Seth Avett is no Scott Walker, after all, or Van Morrison. This band's efficacy
closely depends on the quality of their writing, and little else. And slow,
lyrical, heartbreaking choruses cannot be a constant source of catharsis —
heck, even George Harrison knew that, and he was never above throwing on some
basic rock energy or rhythmic pop hooks whenever SOUL began to seem like a
threat to the integrity of the record rather than a blessing.
The bottom line is that Emotionalism is a good, but very wearisome record, better taken in
small doses than at once: too much emotionalism stiffens the actual emotions.
Still, with 'Pretty Girl From Chile' at least, the brothers do show some
development, and none of the songs are bad (in fact, only one or two ballads
are truly «hookless» in the proverbial sense), so, wearisome or not, there is
still enough strength to get the thumbs up.
THE GLEAM / THE SECOND GLEAM (2006 / 2008)
1) Sanguine; 2) When I Drink;
3) Yard Sale; 4) Backwards With Time; 5) If It’s The Beaches; 6) Find My Love;
7) Tear Down The House; 8) Murder In The City; 9) Bella Donna; 10) The Greatest
Sum; 11) St. Joseph’s; 12) Souls Like The Wheels.
These are but two short EPs, six songs long
each, and it would be rather luxurious to discuss each of them separately — not
to mention that the titles themselves indicate a sort of coherence, as Cap’n
Obvious whispers to me behind my shoulder. What is less obvious — at least,
until one has actually listened to both EPs — is that, stylistically, they fit
together as two pieces of a single puzzle; and what is even less obvious, but
steadily moving closer and closer to a stone-set opinion of mine, is that
they contain some of the brothers’ finest songwriting. In other words, do not,
by all means, bypass this stuff simply because it’s in EP format. (For what
it’s worth, I really prefer taking the Brothers in small doses rather than
in their sixty-minute escapades).
Stylistic coherence is ensured by the generally
stripped down atmosphere: yes, the Brothers are going UNPLUGGED, and by this I
mean unplugging the goddamn banjo out of their collective ass and relying
strictly on acoustic guitar. Well, there are some banjo parts on a
couple of the tracks, just as some others contain harmonicas and fiddles, but
for the most part, this is just a stern set of guitar-and-vocal songs, with
nothing else in between the listener, the bearded trend-fighters, and whoever
is there in charge of the musical duties in the extraterrestrial sphere.
And it is not always like this, but usually
the Brothers succeed when they just hang their heart out there to cry and dry,
and it works. ‘Sanguine’, opening the proceedings, may be snuffed at for being
such a Dylan rip-off (‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ certainly comes to mind),
but the seasoned listener should be wise enough to appreciate it as a
respectable variation rather than a blatant steal. The Brothers truly start to
weave their web of empathy starting with ‘When I Drink’, such an idealistic,
child-like ode to self-improvement that it is hardly possible not to want to
pat each of them on the shoulder once it’s over. ‘Backwards With Time’ is a
terrific folksy singalong that also finds the wisdom to ask the question “are
we losing the fight, are we growing backwards with time?” which must be
quite relevant for every remaining intelligent person on the planet (not that I
am implying that intelligent people should be obliged to love the song because
of that, it’s just that the song speaks to me on several levels at once).
Conversely, ‘If It’s The Beaches’ is low on (also Dylanesque) vocals, but
nicely incorporates both Spanish (guitar) and Jewish (fiddle) motives in its
main melody.
Perhaps the ultimate test result of whether you
are ready to enjoy The Gleam, or, in fact, acknowledge the Avetts at
all, depends on whether the near-crooning falsetto chorus of ‘Find My Love’
will be deemed «gorgeous» or «sickening». My bet’s on «homebrewed gorgeous» —
not the kind of aching beauty one finds in the work of sincere professionals, but
the kind of clumsy beauty one may find in the first attempts of a little kid
who really believes in beauty as such. In other words, not enough to
professionally squeeze out a tear, but definitely enough to want to play this
out loud to everyone in sight, without blushing.
The Second Gleam, recorded two years later, is the Brothers’
tender farewell to Ramseur Records, before moving on to bigger things. The
songs are slightly more complex, and thus, paradoxically (or not), slightly
less involving; still, the closing ‘Souls Like The Wheels’, on which Seth begs
the unknown to “let me go, let me go” with all the gallantry of a medieval
minstrel, is another pleasant, less «affected» variant of the same homebrewed
gorgeousness, and the other songs are at least modestly catchy.
Oh yes, continuing the analogies, ‘Murder In
The City’ quite distinctly shifts the veneration from Bob Dylan to Paul Simon.
It’s been a long, long time since two guys equipped with nothing but acoustic
guitars and voices last managed to make heavenly music... and that time is not
over yet, since, for all its worth, The Gleam(s) do not, and do not even
want to, compete with the depth and passion of its influences. But it manages
to build up on them, and, in a way, it’s got a much harder task to perform:
reaffirm the moral ideals that, today, seem so much more distant and, well, ideal
than they must have seemed to the affected fans of Dylan, Simon and company
fifty years ago. Way to go, Bros! Thumbs up
for all the honest work.
I AND LOVE AND YOU (2009)
1) I And Love And You; 2)
January Wedding; 3) Head Full Of Doubt / Road Full Of Promise; 4) And It Spread;
5) The Perfect Space; 6) Ten Thousand Words; 7) Kick Drum Heart; 8) Laundry
Room; 9) Ill With Want; 10) Tin Man; 11) Slight Figure Of Speech; 12) It Goes
On And On; 13) Incomplete And Insecure.
By the time the Avetts were ready to appear on
a major label, it was too late already: their best work had all been done. Or,
at least, it was just highly unlikely that they would surpass the early
consistency levels. Eight years in the business, four super-long LPs and a
hundred songs behind their belts, an established, ascertained style — what
could their transition to American Recordings have accomplished? What could
they gain from being assigned under the wing of the legendary Rick Rubin
himself?
Nothing, and Rick knew it well, so he just left
them alone, the same way he did with Johnny Cash fifteen years earlier. The
only thing he may have contributed was the same thing that I, too, have always
wished for: «More piano, less banjo». I
And Love And You softly, but steadily steers the brothers away from
bluegrass and more into the direction of «common» folk-based singer-songwriting,
further away from the Appalachians and ever closer to New York City, as the
brothers themselves unambiguously admit on the opening title track ("we
are headed north", they sing, "Brooklyn, Brooklyn, take me in" —
okay, not quite ready for Manhattan yet).
For some, that may indicate that the brothers
are surrendering their integrity; I have seen not a few indignant remarks that
accused the band of moving into a sort of Ben Folds direction that, depending
on the remarkee's position, either sucks per se or is simply not the kind of
direction that the brothers are qualified for. Well, it is true that the record
is a bit more «pop» than its predecessors; but, to tell the truth, there is
only one straightforward attempt here at coming up with a truly upbeat pop
tune, and it is a great attempt — 'Kick Drum Heart' is a song that certainly
ranks up there with Ben Folds at his best (provided one agrees that Ben Folds
is discussable in terms of best and worst; I certainly agree), and as simple as
it may be, the 'heart : drum' metaphor is pretty old, but the 'heart : kick drum' certainly isn't, particularly
not with the actual kick drum used creatively enough to justify the metaphor.
That and the title track, with its simple and
attractive anthemic character, are the obvious highlights for me.
Unfortunately, the other tunes fall somewhat short of the mark. Each sounds
nice while it's on, but the hooks are smothered and splattered — somehow, this
piano transition means that they are using the same, or very similar, generic
chord sequences on almost every track, and not
compensating them with original vocal melodies. It's all mid-tempo, steady,
sincere, comforting, occasionally heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking — but
now that, with Rubin's aid, they have polished out the early day roughness and
pretty much discarded all of the «punkier», iconoclastic elements that they
used to have, it's back to Boreville.
So much so, in fact, that I have almost forgotten
to write how touching 'Ill With Want' really is, with its "something has
me, something has me..." chorus (Aching Beauty™) — and its non-trivial
lyrical drive, with the protagonist accusing himself of «ugly greed» which
eventually just turns out to be an unstoppable, obsessive desire to achieve rather than a simple to own. It's a little confessional gem
that almost seems to have gotten lost among all those other similar songs
pretending to also be confessional gems, but not quite getting there.
So, overall, I And Love And You is satisfactory, but still disappointing. It's not okay to be wearing your heart on
your sleeve all the time: for one thing, the heart may get all dusty and
withered up and wrinkled, for another thing, sometimes you just get tired of
looking at the heart and would prefer taking a peek at the sleeve instead. And the art of pure songwriting craft suffers a
setback here. It's as if they intended to try and make a new 'Imagine' out of
every second song on here, but not even Lennon himself ever attempted any such
feat. So, while an assured thumbs up is still guaranteed, and the new «more
piano, less banjo» ideology is commendable, the Avetts have quite a long way to
go to make real good use of that piano.
LIVE, VOL. 3 (2010)
1) Pretty Girl From Matthews; 2)
Talk On Indolence; 3) Ballad False Start; 4) The Ballad Of Love And
Hate; 5) Colorshow; 6) I And Love And You; 7) Shame; 8) When I Drink; 9)
Murder In The City; 10) I Killed Sally’s Lover; 11) Head Full Of
Doubt / Road Full Of Promise; 12) The Perfect Space; 13) Paranoia In B-Flat
Major; 14) Distraction #74; 15) Kick Drum Heart; 16) Salvation Song.
While it is always nice to hear about the
Avetts' awesome live reputation, it may not always be nearly as nice to digest
the actual evidence on their live
CDs. With these guys, what really matters is the «vibe» and the «bond» factor,
and both can really only be profitable when you are in their actual audience.
As for the other factors — such as pure energy, precision in playing, and improvised
or semi-improvised variations on old songs — none of them, alas, are all that
much in action when you compare the live releases to the studio ones.
Vol.
3 marks the Brothers'
transition to the big time: instead of patchy clubs and seedy joints, this one
was recorded at Bojangles Coliseum in Charlotte, NC, a.k.a. «HOME», to which
they now return triumphantly as major label adepts and overall big time
heroes. Clearly, on CD this ruptures the «bond effect» even more, and they
have to resort to subtle tricks to hold your confidence — like, for instance, not cutting out the false start to
'Ballad Of Love And Hate', in which they somehow managed to forget the lyrics
(perhaps deliberately?).
It doesn't quite work; the atmosphere simply
cannot be all that «homely» with the guys surrendered by that many people. After all, arena-rock and the Avett Brothers are
fairly incompatible (although not entirely
incompatible, as the brawny, excited performance of 'Kick Drum Heart', one of
the show's major higlights, proves convincingly).
The setlist, rather evenly spread between the
last three albums (but they do start off with 'Pretty Girl From Matthews' and
end with 'Salvation Song' off Mignonette),
is excellent, but nothing strikes me as either particularly different from the
studio versions or so different as
being worth a special mention. A few more flubbed notes than usual, a little
bit more screaming, the works.
However, what Live Vol. 3 clearly shows is that in North Carolina, at least,
these guys have already been enshrined: the entire audience sings along to just
about every number, turning the
proceedings into some weird celebration of the Church of Neo-Bluegrass, which is
touching, but not quite the thing for which the Avetts, with their light
melancholy and deep introspection, have come into this world, if you ask me. On
the other hand, this permanent echo of several thousand voices at least gives Vol. 3 a special sonic flavor. If you
are interested in seeing how these songs work as sermons, go ahead. If you
prefer to ingest them as solitary prayers, better stay away.
THE CARPENTER (2012)
1) The Once And Future
Carpenter; 2) Live And Die; 3) Winter In My Heart; 4) Pretty Girl From
Michigan; 5) I Never Knew You; 6) February Seven; 7) Through My Prayers; 8)
Down With The Shine; 9) A Fathers First Spring; 10) Geraldine; 11) Paul Newman
Vs. The Demons; 12) Life.
For those who have already forgotten what I And Love And You sounded like, here
is the direct sequel, sounding every bit the same as its predecessor — not
surprisingly, once again produced by Rick Rubin. Permanent fans of the Avetts
need not worry: none of the atmospheres, philosophies, and stylizations have
been betrayed. And there is yet another ʽPretty Girlʼ song out there
— what else does one need for total orgiastic happiness?
It does seem as if they took one step back from
the «excessive» poppiness, cut down on the pianos a little bit, brought in
lots of guest players to put a little more emphasis on ensemble playing, and
only allowed themselves a heavy, distorted guitar sound on two or three of the
tracks so as to break up the monotonousness. In other words, The Carpenter is even more formulaic,
and it all depends on the sheer number of new hooks they may or may not have
brought into this world by writing all this new material.
Personally, I think the songs are generally
quite good, and that the B-level magic touch is still with the brothers. When
they go totally generic, they still remember to wind it up with a cozy slogan —
ʽThe Once And Future Carpenterʼ, for instance, is at first a
forever-on-the-road anthem worthy of a Neil Young country-folk album, cleverly
landing the last line of the refrain ("If I live the life I'm given, I
won't be scared to die") at the center of your attention. Then you sort of
realize that "once I was a carpenter..." makes this a little more
than just a forever-on-the-road anthem, and start nervously searching for a
Nazareth reference among all the Dallases and Detroits, but by the time you
realize that there isn't one and that you have been lyrically stupefied, the
song is already over and you just have
to go back one more time. Clever, eh?
Of the upbeat songs, the catchiest choruses and
vibes are on ʽLive And Dieʼ and ʽI Never Knew Youʼ, and the
best use of electric guitar is during the in-between verse interludes on
ʽPretty Girl From Michiganʼ — but, other than that, I am at a
complete loss trying to say something refreshing. Even these hooks, to tell
the truth, do not stay around for very long, maybe because the feelings they
generate are already so «Avettish» that they are unable to attach themselves to
any fresh brain cells. But I do like the vibe anyway, and they still write
lyrics that are just way too thought-provoking for the average country-western
standard (ʽFebruary Sevenʼ).
The solitary dark horse of the album is
ʽPaul Newman Vs. The Demonsʼ, a significantly darker (as already suggested
by the title), louder, and less predictable tune than the rest. It is hardly
anything like a Pink Floydian masterpiece of fear and paranoia (these guys
lack the proper studio wizardry to brew that sort of sonic magic), but it is
still a successful first foray into «darkness» by the Avetts, who usually
prefer to converse with their angels rather than demons. Gritty bass, shrieky
harmonies, guitar feedback, it all could have sounded like generic alt-rock in
the end, but it doesn't because all of these things are used sparingly. Not
that the song has much to do with Paul Newman, either, but nice of dear late
Paul to provide such useful incentives even four years after his demise.
A traditional thumbs up out of respect for all the
intelligence, professionalism, and sincerity, but that's about it:
unfortunately, in three years The Avett Brothers have neither learned anything
particularly interesting to enlighten us, nor whetted their songwriting
instincts to the point where their emotions would burst out, rather than be
distributed through the usual modest trickle. Or maybe I'm just too greedy —
after all, the way I'd want things done just isn't the way they usually get
done nowadays.
MAGPIE AND THE DANDELION (2013)
1) Open-Ended Life; 2) Morning
Song; 3) Never Been Alive; 4) Another Is Waiting; 5) Bring Your Love To Me; 6)
Good To You; 7) Part From Me; 8) Skin And Bones; 9) Souls Like The Wheels; 10)
Vanity; 11) The Clearness Is Gone.
Another album like this and the Avett Brothers
may as well apply for sainthood — Scott as St. Augustin and Timothy as St.
Francis, or vice versa. They have perfected their heartbreaking skills to
smoothly function like an unbreakable machine, churning song after song after
song that all produce the same vibe of immaculate brotherly love for all
humanity, tempered with immeasurable sadness at the current state of said
humanity. The only problem is, enjoying each of their subsequent albums with
the same strength of faith and will is now akin to meticulously going to church
every Sunday and melting in the verbal glow of your favorite preacher. You know
damn well that he's already exhausted all of his topics, ideas, and original
approaches to Scripture, but you just need
one more «fresh» swig of cathedral morality...
To be honest, all of the tracks for Magpie And The Dandelion were recorded
during the same sessions that already yielded The Carpenter — which explains why it only took them a year to
follow it up. However, these are not «inferior outtakes»: it turns out that the
Avetts simply decided against a double album (and I, for one, applaud that
decision), postponing official release of half their output to keep the fans
steady and satisfied. Unfortunately, it also complicates the life of the
profane reviewer: thinking of a specific individual character for any Avett Bros. album is already a
chore, and this particular one is just a Siamese twin to its predecessor. You'd
have to allow a decade of development at least to understand what makes one
Siamese twin distinct from the other, wouldn't you?
In terms of individual songs, everything here
rules (it's the Saint Avett Brothers!) and everything here sucks (it's the
fuckin' Saint Avett Brothers!). The very first song announces that "I was
taught to keep an open-ended life / And never trap myself in nothin'" —
one minute you are totally drawn into it, then the next minute you realize
that, at the very least, they have trapped themselves well enough in that
banjo sound, so how does this really work? The second song says that "even
though I know there's hope in every morning song, I have to find that melody
alone". Nicely stated, but how many distinct, original melodies have they
actually found on this record? The third song says that "money won't do
the trick" (okay) "but it will help to open the doors we need it to
help someone else" (if you say so) "still we won't need it to turn
things around" (somebody take a goddamn decision!) and then concludes that
"I've never been alive like I am now" to one of the most limp, slow-dragging
rhythms they could think of.
In short, the Avetts seem confused, and I
suppose this confusion is the most interesting thing on the whole record. The
brothers' usual humility saves them from becoming annoying, but their words are
often disconnected from their music, and the music presents no breakthroughs
since it is not supposed to. "I've got something to say / But it's all
vanity / I found a tune I could play / But it's all vanity" — summarizes
their attitude fairly well, since the inevitable conclusion is that it is
better to say and play nothing than something, and Magpie And The Dandelion is as close a substitute for that option
as it gets. (For that matter, ʽVanityʼ is actually the only song on
the album that somehow stands out — it has an odd, out-of-nowhere, bombastic,
quasi-progressive middle section with a heroic distorted guitar solo; maybe
this is supposed to be a musical allegory for «vanity», because the interlude
does sound vain. It also kicks ass, though).
«Vanity» also shows up with an unexpected live
rendition of ʽSouls Like The Wheelsʼ from The Second Gleam, performed before an ecstatic audience that goes
berserk every time one of the brothers starts a minimalistic solo — why else
would they bother including this live take if not to let us know how much their
fans care about them? But again, the song is so nice, the "let me go"
chorus is so touching, and even the minimalistic solos are so acoustically
pretty that it's no big problem to forget about the vanity aspect. Come to
think of it, St. Augustin and St. Francis must have been pretty vain, too, or
else we wouldn't be aware of their existence.
Anyway, chalk one more up for the dedicated
fans — the formula still works — but if you already know what the Avetts
sound like and this knowledge has not converted you, the only thing you need to
know is that Magpie And The Dandelion,
despite the exquisite fairy-tale-style title, sounds exactly like everything
else that these lovable, but occasionally nagging, bearded prophets of «alt-country»
have ever done. Personally, I enjoyed every minute of it, but it didn't exactly
help me come up with any insights on any of the songs; and in the end, I will
refrain from a special thumbs up as well — it might just as well simply share
the one I already gave to Carpenter.
TRUE SADNESS (2016)
1) Ain't No Man; 2) Mama, I
Don't Believe; 3) No Hard Feelings; 4) Smithsonian; 5) You Are Mine; 6) Satan
Pulls The Strings; 7) True Sadness; 8) I Wish I Was; 9) Fisher Road To
Hollywood; 10) Victims Of Life; 11) Divorce Separation Blues; 12) May It Last.
Sooner or later, the Flying Electronic Monster
catches up with all of us — there may be times when not using synthesizers for
your records is seen as a bold act of artistic defiance, and then there are
times when not having a synthesizer on board is like going out on the street
with no pants on. (Not that going out on the street without your pants on
cannot be seen as a bold act of artistic defiance, but then, how many people
around will really be able to tell if you intentionally left them at home or
just forgot to put them on? Same with the synthesizers). Anyway, while Seth
does use them sparingly, the very first track (ʽAin't No Manʼ) opens
with the we-wiil-rock-you sound of a drum machine, and then electronics are all
over ʽYou Are Mineʼ and all over ʽSatan Pulls The Stringsʼ
and... uh... wait a minute... well, actually, I guess that is all.
Admittedly, the electronics work — Rick Rubin does a good job
integrating them into the band's overall sound, and I can certainly understand
them trying out something a little different from the usual mope-country sound
(and there might be just a hint of jealousy here, at the relative success of
The Black Keys doing the same thing). All of these three songs are good.
ʽAin't No Manʼ is a catchy country-pop tune with a cute bassline,
getting by solely on the energy of the rhythm section and the gospel-style
backing vocals. ʽYou Are Mineʼ opens with a simple banjo line, but
then quickly becomes techno-psychedelic, with multiple electronic layers over
acoustic piano and vice versa — and some beautiful vocal harmonies,
McCartney-style. Finally, ʽSatan Pulls The Stringsʼ is an
experimental arrangement of a traditional tune, sort of a 50/50 merger between
a country-blues and an acid techno track, which works because they choose some
particularly evil-sounding synth tones, perfectly adequate for a robotic vision
of Satan pulling the strings, I guess.
But never worry, these are just minor brushes
across a canvas that largely stays the same — just because they dragged in a
few extra chips and cables changes nothing about the fact that Scott and Seth
Avett still behave as a pair of intelligent, heart-broken, world-weary farm
hands who'd rather mess up their lives so they can sing about it than
straighten these lives out because what fun is there with a straightened out
life? The album's single most memorable tune is ʽSmithsonianʼ, which
lays out their life philosophy as simply and straightforwardly as never before:
"Call the Smithsonian, I've made a discovery / Life ain't forever and
lunch isn't free / Loved ones will break your heart with or without you / Turns
out we don't get to know everything". Okay, so this really used to be
their creed all along, but sometimes it helps to set aside the metaphors for a
moment and just go for some blunt wording — and few people these days can spell
out basic (but true) banalities with the same pleasantly nonchalance as the
Avett Brothers.
Commenting on the soft acoustic ballads is an
impossibility (they just sound like any other soft acoustic ballad ever written
by these guys), but I was pleasantly surprised by the increased level of
diversity — apart from the electronics, we have some really complex
arrangements (on the title track, for instance, where choppy electric chords
mingle with jangly acoustic picking, organs and strings), some Latin bounce
(ʽVictims Of Lifeʼ with samba elements — should have invited Paul
Simon on that one, as it sounds not entirely unlike ʽMe And Julioʼ),
and a full-out Straussian waltz arrangement on the album closer ʽMay It
Lastʼ that flows in and out of a baroque-pop construction, making this
arguably their most complex studio creation up to date (a good structural
analogy would be something like Buffalo Springfield's ʽBroken
Arrowʼ); and the complexity is well deserved, since the song does end the
album on a friendly note — sadness and melancholia, yes, but mixed with a note
of support ("there is a sea, and I am your captain...").
On the whole, I could even call this
«progress», if the notion did not sound so ridiculous when applied to the
Avetts — who had always been perfectly happy to be the modern AC/DC of folk-
and country-rock as long as they still thought they had something to say. So
the sonic discoveries of True Sadness
are not really an indication of the band expanding its horizons — most likely,
they were just introduced so that they could not be accused of making a vain point out of sticking to the formula
(the way Angus Young proudly asserts
how they put out not 11, but 12 albums that sound the same). It's more like,
hey, a synthesizer? A drum machine? Sure, why not — who the hell are we to say no? It's not like God ever
told us to stick to guitar and banjo. It's an attitude that seems likeable, and
reason enough to give the record a thumbs up, even if I probably will treat it in the
future just like any other Avett Brothers album.
Oh, and, also for the record, I do like the
idea of calling it True Sadness —
few of these songs sound proverbially
sad (as in, emotionally overdone and making you feel like you're standing in a
salty puddle already), but they weave their little nets of personal
dissatisfaction and trouble in oblique ways: a well-placed lyric here, a single
chord change there, without wallowing in misery or throwing a fit. They can
even get sad on something technically upbeat (ʽVictims Of Lifeʼ), and
though they're far from the first artist to be able to do that, they just might
be the first ones to draw attention to this through the very title of the
album. Although in doing so, they bring back accusations of vanity — ain't it a
little presumptious to insist that it is your
record that represents «true sadness» and not, say, Conor Oberst's, or Bon
Iver's? That's Satan pulling the strings for you, brothers...
LET GO (2002)
1) Losing Grip; 2)
Complicated; 3) Sk8er Boi; 4) I'm With You; 5) Mobile; 6) Unwanted; 7)
Tomorrow; 8) Anything But Ordinary; 9) Things I'll Never Say; 10) My World; 11)
Nobody's Fool; 12) Too Much To Ask; 13) Naked; 14*) Why.
Question: AVRIL LAVIGNE? Why????? What's up
with, like, GOOD music?
Answer: Hey, wouldn't you be bored, too, if all
you ever had to review was good music?
Q: But it's not like you haven't written about
bad music altogether. What about those fifteen awful Aretha Franklin albums all
in a row?
A: Nah, that was just side effects of the
trade. «Know your enemy» is a fairly wise maxim, and Aretha sure as hell isn't
the enemy, no matter how much crap there is in her catalog.
Q: But Avril Lavigne? I mean, Avril Lavigne? Who
the heck is Avril Lavigne? Who the hell is going to be listening to Avril
Lavigne in five years' time? Hell, who on Earth is listening to Avril Lavigne right now? And how is it possible to
write anything insightful about Avril Lavigne? I mean, even the T&A factor
don't work properly this time!
A: Well, yeah, it's probably true that Avril,
per se, does not offer all that much insight. It is far more interesting to
take a look at the world in which a
person as completely gray and unremarkable as Avril Lavigne could sell 16
million copies of her debut album, Let
Go, earn the sucking-up of pretty much all mainstream press in existence,
and become one of MTV's lead darling girls of the entire decade.
Q: Come on now, surely there is nothing
particularly amazing or unpredictable about that. People are sheep and MTV
people are their fascist shepherds, and Avril is just one of their poster
girls. Nobody gives a damn about the actual music on Let Go being just a bunch of trivially rehashed pop-punk power
chords; all that matters is that Lavigne is (a) «one of us» and (b) «a
rebellious spirit». Nobody expects her dumb teenage audiences to sit and
scratch their heads and think stuff like «hmm, this music is sort of simple and
generic and unoriginal compared to Sigur Rós», and the dumb teenage
audiences predictably satisfy expectations. What else is there to say?
A: Well, maybe not much, but sometimes it takes
a good listen to an «awful» album like Let
Go to properly trigger the thinking process, rather than to a «decent»
recording. For instance, no one would probably insist that, in terms of
complexity of melodies and arrangements, Let
Go is in any way inferior to any «true» punk album ever released (the ones
that really go after the three-chord aesthetics, I mean).
Q: You know better than me that it's not the
complexity that counts, it's the catchiness and the energy and the spirit and
the relevance. Don't tell me you get a kick out of comparing Let Go with The Clash. The bitch calls herself «punk» and she'd never even
heard the Sex Pistols before crapping out this shitpile.
A: Well, at the risk of offending somebody who
cares, I'd say that Let Go got
catchiness — at least, some of the singles, like 'Complicated', are
instantaneously catchy, and some choruses eventually reach even my
subconscious on subsequent listens ('Anything But Ordinary', 'My World'). Energy?
Spirit? Look at her videos — she sure as hell is willing to invest quite a bit
of energy in those performances. Crashing guitars into windshields and all. I
mean, she certainly believes in the
things she plays. She believes that
the real-life opposition between «punk» and «ballet» is still relevant, and
that in this opposition, «punk» = «Good» and «ballet» = «Evil», to be
overthrown by the «cool people».
Obviously, we can be bitter about it and say
she's really as dumb as that, to believe in that shit, but to just call her a
«fake» and be done with it would be rather rash. How is she more «fake» than,
say, The Apples In Stereo, who have built their entire career on mimicry and we
still love them? Who is more «fake» — herself, clearly grounded in the
realities of her life, no matter how generic it might be, or Björk, who
has spent a lifetime constructing an alter ego as far removed from reality as
possible? And «relevance» — that's absurd; she's been relevant for millions of
people for almost a decade.
Q: Yeah, for millions of dumb people happy
enough to chew on MTV's cud. I give you it may not be her fault; she's just
another brainwashed victim herself, deeply believing that her music helps
people out to «break stereotypes», «be themselves», «live their own lives»,
that she's doing something honest and brave and artistic when in reality she's
just a helpless cog in the machine, and her pathetic underdeveloped brain lacks
the capacity to understand that. Really, what else is there to say? What next —
shall we, God forbid, start discussing her lyrics?
"He was a skater boy, she said see ya later boy, he wasn't good enough for
her"? Aren't we doing the bitch, and all of her croonies, way too much of
a favor even mentioning her existence?
A: I don't know, I've thought like that for a
long time, but I'm not exactly sure these days. We can always pretend to ignore
«artists» like Lavigne — the «we» in question meaning «elitist listeners who
have given up on humanity as a whole» — but perhaps, if «we» are at all
interested in not dwindling down eventually to something like 0,000001% of the
population (statistically nearing total non-existence), it would make sense
to at least try and spot the few good
things about the girl, if only to make certain that we actually care about the
rest of the world.
Sure, it's pretty damn grim to see what used to
be «The Beatles type» vs. «The Stones type» mutate into «Britney or Avril?»
these days. It's a tasty, juicy matter for sociologists, perhaps, but hardly
for raffinated music lovers. On the other hand, «we» keep seeing ourselves
falling into our own trap. «We» do not like to come across as too pretentious
and smarmy (or do we?), and «we» normally have no problem about enjoying simple
music, but «we» can never resist poking fun at the likes of Lavigne and her
fans, either. Maybe there's more to
be said about Lavigne than just a bunch of jokes about skater boys?
Q: Come on then, let's hear it! Any deep
intellectual considerations on Let Go
and its overall importance? Any provoking remarks on how to integrate its
values with those of the culturally advanced members of society?
A: Well...
....uh...
...Nah.
It's a pretty damn terrible record, to tell the
truth. But I'm still thinking.
UNDER MY SKIN (2004)
1) Take Me Away; 2) Together;
3) Don't Tell Me; 4) He Wasn't; 5) How Does It Feel; 6) My Happy Ending; 7) Nobody's
Home; 8) Forgotten; 9) Who Knows; 10) Fall To Pieces; 11) Freak Out; 12)
Slipped Away; 13*) I Always Get What I Want.
It actually takes a few listens to this album —
a feat that most sensible, reasonable people will feel no need to perform — to
understand that the noun phrases «Avril Lavigne» and «creative growth» are not
fully incompatible within a sentence. Yes,
the girl's career does follow a
curve, and there is a certain pinch of interest in following it.
Obviously, I am not talking about the much
discussed change of image: instead of the overdriven skater brat of Let Go, Under My Skin gives us a black-and-white, Deeply Tragic, goth-overtoned
Lavigne, all set on «maturation», a.k.a. inflating teenage tribulations to
cosmic proportions. It is quite telling that one of the hit songs, 'Nobody's
Home', was co-written with ex-Evanescence guitar player Ben Moody: the
influence of his band's skill at merchandising doom and gloom is all over this
record. (I will, however, refrain from deep discussions on whose metaphysical
conception of art — Lavigne's or Amy Lee's — has contributed more to our
spiritual development). The overall best thing I can say about this shift of
image, though, is that it doesn't make things any worse. If you are a poseur by nature, it doesn't really matter if
you are also a chameleon.
The real reason why Under My Skin is a tad more interesting is that Lavigne apparently
takes this songwriting business seriously, and that there is a significant jump
in song quality from the previous record. Maybe it is her new songwriting
partner, fellow Canadian Chantal Kreviazuk, pushing her on to new levels, or
perhaps professional obligations spurred her on to digest musical influences
other than Blink-182 and Matchbox 20, but, whatever be the case, most of the
songs on Under My Skin at least qualify as semi-decent
mainstream grunge / pop punk in which music, vocal melodies, and lyrics
generally serve one and the same purpose, and that purpose is a tiny bit
smarter than just «rock out, dude».
See, normally, an album like that should only
provoke teeth-grinding reactions. All of these songs with their exaggerated
darkness, tales of breakups, self-exile, PAIN PAIN PAIN — the fuckin' brat is
twenty years old, what does she know
about pain (and let us not start about the age of Juliet, whom we only know as
a Shakesperian projection anyway)? Yet the obligatory three listens went down
smoothly, in fact, each next one was smoother than the one before. How come the
barf bag is still empty?
Hooks and craft, baby. Kreviazuk (who, by the
way, is 10 years older than Lavigne and certainly qualifies better for writing
such an album) and whoever else she is working with really did a solid job of
providing her with well-written choruses — and Lavigne does an equally good job
at singing them. This is where her vocal skills really come in handy: nowhere
near diva-level, so the songs don't come across as blown tremendously out of
proportion, but still loud, strong, and expressive enough to minimize all the
damage from «posing».
Hilariously, the most memorable song on the
album is also its least typical — the vapid, girlish pop-punk anthem 'He
Wasn't', played at breakneck speed and winning us over with its ABBA-like
"uh huh"s. (Lavigne must have sensed it herself, or else it wouldn't
have served as the blueprint for just about all of The Best Damn Thing).
The only other song that is sort of a «stand out» is the already mentioned
'Nobody's Home', because it does, indeed, sound a bit like Evanescence lite,
with more complex vocal overdubs than usual, falsettos rising into screaming
and background guitars that actually seem to at least be wanting to shape their sound into some sort of complex melodic
figure (not that they could ever hope to — complex melodic figures are harmful
ballast for Avril's legions of fans).
The rest... well, actually, I would be
interested in seeing if someone could do something with this kind of material
if it were freed from the monotonous grasp of post-grunge guitars. Phasing?
Wah-wahs? A string quartet? A Mellotron? How about «Avril Lavigne and The
London Symphony Orchestra»? Or at least spicing it up with bits and pieces of
Eastern motives, à la Big Guru
Alanis? Until then, Under My Skin is
a curious anomaly — a predictable failure at an attempt to add «deep» and
«cool» to the list of keywords, yet, in spite of all odds, a thoroughly
listenable one. Plus, 'He Wasn't' is, indeed, one of the giggliest pop tunes of
the decade.
THE BEST DAMN THING (2007)
1) Girlfriend;
2) I Can Do Better; 3)
Runaway; 4) The Best Damn Thing; 5) When You're Gone; 6) Everything Back But You;
7) Hot;
8) Innocence; 9) I Don't Have To Try; 10) One Of Those Girls; 11) Contagious;
12) Keep Holding On.
Color me crazy, but the more I listen to it,
the more it does sound like the best
damn thing — by Avril's personal standards, of course. So it looks like the
whole wannabe-goth schtick didn't quite work out, despite professional help and
supportive sales and reviews. No big deal. Now she is back to glossy pop punk
basics.
What is quite seriously refreshing about
Avril's third album is that it is unassailable from any theoretical angle. It assumes nothing. It does not present her as anybody that she is really not. One could foam at the mouth for
hours in endless debates about whether she really identified with the «skate
culture» on Let Go or was just a
pathetic poseur (not to mention the even fatter, juicier question of whether
«skate culture» is actually «culture», etc.). The Best Damn Thing baits you into nothing. One may like it or be
indifferent to it, but hate it? Maybe
only for its hit singles occupying way too much TV and radio space, but, next
to most of the stuff that competed
with it in 2007, these songs are masterful masterpieces.
If you know 'Girlfriend' — and if you were more
than two years old in 2007 and were not living in Darfur or Eastern Highlands
of Papua, you could hardly not know 'Girlfriend' — you pretty much know the
rest of the album. Fast, flashy, pop-punk anthems with catchy choruses, all
about boy-girl relations, usually with strong emphasis on «girl». She even swears on a couple of tracks — ooh,
controversial! — but don't worry, there are «clean» versions available for
underage fans whose parents think that hearing 'I'm the motherfucking princess'
as 'I'm the m-m-m-m-m princess' must at least postpone the Doom of the Gods,
if not at all cancel it.
The main seductive part of the trick is that,
even if Lavigne is quite far removed from symbolizing intelligence in art,
these songs, for the most part, make her sound dumber than she really is, and that's excellent because it makes
way for irony. 'Girlfriend' is so grossly overdriven, in its music, its
frenzied backing vocals, its minimalistic lyrics (and its obvious tributes to
the equally minimalistic past, e. g. the Rubinoos' 1979 hit 'I Wanna Be Your
Boyfriend' which contains the exact same "hey-hey, you-you" bit),
that anyone who'd like to take it seriously — e. g., as an instruction for strong-willed
gals to take what they want when they see it — must be at the lower rungs of
the human adequacy scale.
All right, so from time to time she is overdoing it. "I'm the one, I'm
the one who wears the pants" ('I Don't Have To Try') sounds stupid rather
than dumb (there's a big difference) — if she's
the one who wears the pants, what the heck is he supposed to be wearing? "I hate it when a guy doesn't
understand why a certain time of month I don't want to hold his hand" —
ugh. (Okay, I admit this can be a
problem, but I don't want to hear about real problems on an album like this, I
want to hear nothing but completely
braindead stuff). Some of the lyrical and musical moments are cringeworthy,
although they will vary from taste to taste. But overall, the lightweight atmosphere
and the songwriting craft still win me over.
To this should be added that the record sounds just fine — Avril's backing band
has effectively made a transition from third- (fourth-?)generation grungey
blandness to upbeat retro-punk, taking their cues from the Ramones themselves
rather than from their far-removed descendants. And she herself finally comes
across as a self-confident and versatile singer. Anyone who doubts that needs
to check out the standards — for instance, compare any of these explosive
outbursts (say, 'Everything Back But You', gurgling with breakneck-speed
excitement) with the limp, lifeless likes of Miley Cyrus ("There's seven
things I hate about you!").
I even admit to liking one of the three power
ballads on here (unfortunately, these were most likely obligatory inclusions
so as not to displease entirely the new «serious» brand of fans she got herself
with Under My Skin) — 'When You're
Gone' is maddeningly well written and features a great showcase for the girl's
range during the bridge section. Move over, Celine Dion.
In short, I don't know how much of a «real
thing» this is, but I do know that this is an expertly crafted pop record, and
that there is no good reason to praise the world out of, say, the Pipettes, all
the while bashing The Best Damn Thing
— the only big difference being that the Pipettes want you to have fun by going
against the general flow of things,
whereas Lavigne is perfectly okay about going after the flow. Assuming that «to
everything there is a season», as Roger McGuinn once told us coming down from
Mount Sinai, The Best Damn Thing is
truly the best damn way, or, at least, one of the few best damn ways, to
integrate the snob and the masses, provided the snob can see the links with
the non-commercial stuff and the masses can see that there is a line that separates Lavigne from utterly monstruous glam-punk
constructions (Pink!), not to mention the ever lowering standards of teen pop.
A friendly thumbs up: there is little hope that she will
continue making music in the exact same manner (too much pressure from the
industry that will force her to start «growing up along with her audiences»),
but that does not take away from the pure aural-trash pleasure.
GOODBYE LULLABY (2011)
1) Black Star; 2) What The
Hell; 3) Push; 4) Wish You Were Here; 5) Smile; 6) Stop Standing There; 7) I
Love You; 8) Everybody Hurts; 9) Not Enough; 10) 4 Real; 11) Darlin'; 12)
Remember When; 13) Goodbye; 14*) Alice.
Does the title suggest, in any way, that
Canada's latest piece of candy from Pandora's box may be considering early retirement, especially if the album does
not sell well enough? (As of late March, it still hasn't reached the top of the
charts and it looks like the bus has already been missed). Because Goodbye Lullaby clearly proves one
thing: in ten years' time, the lady Lavigne has not been able to grow up, and since in another three years, when
she hits thirty, any attempt to recreate the burly success of The Best Damn Thing will seem
gruesomely inadequate, it is, perhaps, high time to seek another line of work.
At
least her attempts to sound
«serious» on her second album were painted in black overtones. It might not
have been «her», really, but it was a misguided attempt to try to move in the
generally right direction. Now the lightness and humor take a step back once
again, but the overtones are dazzlingly — and sickeningly — white (not
surprisingly, check out the album cover and contrast it with the photo on Under My Skin). Goodbye Lullaby is, simply put, an album of simplistic, tender, but
«seriously conceited» love songs. A little joy, a little pain, a little
happiness, a little suffering, the usual thing, nothing particularly
respectable or cutting edge, even from a sternly mainstream point of view.
The album starts off deceptively — doubly
deceptively, in fact, first with a little bit of a piano ballad ('Black Star')
setting one up for romance, then suddenly launching into 'What The Hell', an
obvious attempt to recreate the smash success of 'Girlfriend'. But if
'Girlfriend' truly had its guilty pleasure side, a head-spinning hyper-dumb
rock song that even the Ramones could have endorsed, 'What The Hell' is a lame
shadow, an overcompressed bore with no discernible guitar melody, a phenomenal
lack of concern for the lyrics (lines like "You say that I'm messing with
your head / Boy, I like messing in your bed" cannot be even unintentionally funny) coupled with a
strange message that does not fit at all with the rest of the album ("All
my life I've been good, but now, what the hell", she states and then
switches over to soppy, inoffensive ballads for the rest of the record), and
was that a whiff of auto-tuned vocals I sensed on the chorus? This is the kind
of stuff that is usually reserved for the likes of Miley Cyrus these days, and
I did think better of Avril.
After such a crappy start, one might even get a
stronger craving for soppy ballads, and I cannot say that everything here is
rotten. These are not power ballads;
they're teen-pop ballads, with upbeat rhythms and light choruses and acoustic
guitars coming through, with maybe a couple exceptions ('Remember When' rips
it up Diane Warren-style, even though the song is credited purely to Avril — who knows, maybe when she's retired from the
stage, she might try on Satan's crown for a while). 'Everybody Hurts' should be
docked a point for getting people to mention R.E.M. and Avril Lavigne in the
same sentence (see, she's done it again), but its chorus is believable, as is
the funky anguish in '4 Real' and even the desperation in 'Wish You Were Here'
(what's up with all these titles, anyway, has the English-speaking world
finally run out of new verb phrases? Or is this some sort of primitivist
defiance — in 2011, to call one of your songs 'I Love You'?).
In the end, there are two good sides to this.
One: Avril Lavigne is very far from being the worst singer-songwriter you ever
heard in your life. She knows what a pop hook is, and she can even craft some
that do not carry nauseous side effects. Two: Avril Lavigne is a fan of the
good old guitar-and-piano approach, understanding that a pop hook goes best
with a traditionally grounded pop arrangement. That's about it (okay, third
side: no matter how hard it is to look sexy in a white wedding dress, she does manage it on the front cover). Bad
sides: no single idea is explored here to its logical end. Hooks aren't sung
with the proper conviction, arrangements aren't given much thought beyond the
basic choice of instrument, and, worst of all, the whole thing is simply way
beyond her abilities. She wanted to turn this into some Solemn Celebration of
the Pure Force of Love, but can a one-armed swimmer win the Olympic 50-metre
freestyle?
Thumbs down — but, in
all honesty, it is nothing short of a miracle that Goodbye Lullaby comes across as «disappointing» rather than simply
Godawful (well, 'What The Hell' is
Godawful). Actually, it is possible that Lavigne's worst mistake was her production
team (including people like Max Martin, who has produced albums by just about
every horrible teen pop artist on the planet). Apparently, Nigel Godrich
couldn't be bought — or, more likely, she just doesn't know who he is in the
first place.
AVRIL LAVIGNE (2013)
1) Rock'n'Roll; 2) Here's To
Never Growing Up; 3) 17; 4) Bitchin' Summer; 5) Let Me Go; 6) Give You What You
Like; 7) Bad Girl; 8) Hello Kitty; 9) You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet; 10) Sippin'
On Sunshine; 11) Hello Heartache; 12) Falling Fast; 13) Hush Hush.
The «reboot-style» album title makes it seem
like a new potential star has just exploded on the scene — a sensible publicity
move, considering that (a) mainstream pop stars seem to have much shortened
shelf lives in the 21st century and (b) most people have probably already
forgotten all about Avril Lavigne in two years. However, the publicity move is
incomplete: the first single, ʽHere's To Never Growing Upʼ,
immediately betrays the artist's age and pedigree, and ends up putting her on
the right wavelength with her old
fans of ten years ago, but hardly with the new
fans who have no reason to identify with lines like "I'm like yeah
whatever, we're still living like
that". This ain't too good, Avril. An image slip-up.
For the critics rather than the fans, an even
bigger slip-up will be the words-to-image connection. ʽRock'n'Rollʼ
starts the record out on a punchy "I don't care about my makeup / I like
it better with my jeans all ripped up", but then you look at the dark mascara
thing around the eyes on the sleeve, and what the hell?.. This doesn't even
refer to the fact that ʽRock'n'Rollʼ is anything but rock'n'roll. More of a happy round-the-campfire girlscout
anthem, perhaps, dragged through the usual shit-filters of digital compression
and autotuning to strip it of all identifiable life signs. And who helped her
pen these lyrics? "I don't care if I'm misfit / I like it better than the
hipster bullshit" — perceiving A. L. as a «misfit in the hipster
reference frame» is a serious candidate for the Topsy-Turvy Award of the year
2013.
Anyway, the basic point is that Avril Lavigne continues to honor the
general commitment of alternating one lite-pop album with one attemptedly
«serious» album (be it the quasi-goth seriousness of Under My Skin or the quasi-sensual seriousness of Goodbye Lullaby). This one, yet again,
emphasizes the have-fun side of our beloved Canadian rebel, and you can tell it
from the song titles alone, without hearing one note of the record. She's
having herself a bitchin' summer, sippin' on sunshine like she's still 17, a
hello-kitty bad girl stealing her parents' liquor and going all «here's to
never growing up». But 17 is also post-pubescence, so behind that screen of
eternal fun — hello heartache, she's falling fast and is quite ready to give
you what you like, and if you don't like anything, let me go, you ain't seen
nothin' yet.
The actual music is hardly distinguishable from
the latest brand of teen-pop à la Miley Cyrus («harder» sections) or
Taylor Swift («softer» sections) — I was kind of hoping for at least a few
guitar-dependent catchy pop-punk tunes of the Best Damn Thing variety, but most prefer to follow the thoroughly
rote standard of ʽWhat The Hellʼ: ʽBad Girlʼ, with «Deep
Purple gone nu-metal» guitar parts and completely unexpected growling (!) vocals by Marylin Manson
himself (!) in the background, is sort of a pleasant exception to the rule.
Everything else is, at best, acoustic-based alt-pop that rarely even takes the
trouble of disguising itself as something «rebellious» — at worst, really embarrassing attempts at
modernizing one's image, such as ʽHello Kittyʼ, an attempt to
amalgamate Japanese pop culture gimmickry with a distinctly K-pop flavor (and
I'm assuming the Japanese clichés in the intro signify a defying
unwillingness not to confuse Korea
with Japan).
On the good side, we do have ourselves some
catchy vocal melodies, but somehow they all seem to be hiding in the «softer»
section — ʽGive You What You Likeʼ has an emotionally resonant series
of falsetto flourishes in the chorus, and the la-la-las of the childish, but
cute ʽHello Heartacheʼ also turn out to be surprisingly moody. The
same does not apply to boring power ballads like ʽLet Me Goʼ and
ʽHush Hushʼ, but it still seems to indicate that, perhaps, she made a
mistake by distancing from the vibes of Goodbye
Lullaby — that it is sentimental pop, riding on vocal nuances, which should
have been her weapon of choice, rather than a «rebellious rock» vibe. At least
in 2002, when it already sounded phoney, it was still fresh, and the related
marketology still incorporated a tiny bit of naïvete. By 2013, phoneyness
is the only thing that remains. So, Avril, thumbs down, and here's to finally growing up,
you know. Maybe your loyal fans haven't grown, I can admit that, but if they
haven't, it's simply because they're idiots. No need to follow a bad example.
You can't even play guitar like Angus Young — why keep on wearing his shorts?
THE HOUR OF BEWILDERBEAST (2000)
1) The Shining; 2) Everybody's
Stalking; 3) Bewilder; 4) Fall In A River; 5) Camping Next To Water; 6) Stone
On The Water; 7) Another Pearl; 8) Body Rap; 9) Once Around The Block; 10) This
Song; 11) Bewilderbeast; 12) Magic In The Air; 13) Cause A Rockslide; 14)
Pissing In The Wind; 15) Blistered Heart; 16) Disillusion; 17) Say It Again;
18) Epitaph.
I have an instinctive distrust for people who
wear woolly hats outside of Russian winter, and this means Damon Gough, a.k.a.
Badly Drawn Boy, is on the prime list of suspects, considering that, according
to rumours, he does not take his off
even in the shower. Seems like the «hip» people have that distrust, too, but not
so much because of the hat as because nobody really seems to understand what
to do about Badly Drawn Boy. Is he a genius? Is he a fraud? Is he a committed
promoter of the indie spirit before the hideous Mainstream Monster? Is he a
cunning sellout, molding his music in lightweight, inoffensive forms so as to
be able to reap praise from all sides? Above all — if you don't love his music
at first sight, is it worth trying to «get into it» at all, or is it really
just a waste of precious time, which you could use, for instance, to go out and
buy yourself a woolly hat all your own?
One thing upon which pretty much everyone agrees is that Damon Gough has
talent — the issue is whether he has managed or not to apply it to all the
right things. Another point of consensus is that Badly Drawn Boy's music is
very, very, very derivative (but then, whose isn't, these days?). Everyone from
the Beatles to Nick Drake to Elliot Smith to the Magnetic Fields and beyond inevitably
crops up in just about every review of The
Hour Of Bewilderbeast that's got enough space to cram in all these
references. After that, opinions start to differ.
My own two cents are as follows. Damon Gough
clearly loves music — including all of those namechecked artists and many more
— and understands the many different ways one can go around making music. But the three factors that
dominate his brand of music are not an ideal combination. First, he is nowhere
near a melodic genius: at his best, he can produce moderately catchy folk-pop,
yet nothing that would put him in a truly big league. Second, he goes for grand
purposes: in line with the early XXIst century tendency to return to
heart-on-the-sleeve idealism from the ubiquitous post-modern sarcasm of the
1990s, Badly Drawn Boy is always trying to break your heart, or, at least,
share his broken heart with you
because.
Third, he is decidedly avoiding the Arcade
Fire way — this is where the woolly hat makes its big entrance — going for the
quiet and subtle approach. He certainly sings his way through his songs, not
talks through them like some of the even humbler minimalists, but the listener
has to decode the emotion, rather than get it directly, in an uncompressed
format. And it is great when big-hearted feelings and ideas get conveyed
through a half-cloused mouth — but when the accompanying melodies are mostly
so-so, this undermines the effect. In all honesty, there were several times I
was all set to fall asleep during the record's sixty minutes — even on the
louder numbers.
And yet, I would say that The Hour Of Bewilderbeast, Gough's critically acclaimed debut that,
according to most critics, he has not been really able to surpass ever since,
does justify additional listening. If anything, it is fascinating just to see
him tackle so many different styles on the album — yes, they all relate to
Badly Drawn Boy's fragile, insecure, melancholy-and-tenderness-overflowing
heart, but at least he is never repeating himself on a formal level. And
although the hooks are just like his heart — fragile and tender — with the
passage of time, they tend to solidify. Finally, there is simply the basic
aspect of the sound itself. Gough
himself plays at least a couple dozen different instruments here, everything
from ancient harps to modern drum machine organs, and then, further on, he's
got about twenty or thirty (!) different people to assist him — including
members of fellow indie bands Alfie and Doves and the Northern New Orleans
Brass Band contributing horn arrangements. The miracle of the century is that,
with all that crowd behind his back, not a single song on the album ends up
having a wall-of-sound atmosphere to it. (Possibly it's all because of the hat
— one of those new-fangled models that absorb sound waves).
In any case, the cello and horns that announce
a brand new dawn on 'The Shining' is a cute touch, and once the guitar rolls in
and, together with Gough's explanation that he is only 'trying to put a little
sunshine in your life', threatens to turn this whole thing into «indie elevator
muzak», the cellos and horns give it a solid protective 1967-like sheen that
elevates the experience to at least a B+ level. On 'Fall In A River', a basic
folk shuffle is steered into «magic» direction with the wonderfully trippy
echoing chime-like sounds whose production mechanism I am unable to determine
(processed xylophones? multi-channeled acoustic guitars? whatever). The somber,
almost hard rocking (by Gough's sissy standards) 'Another Pearl' has a couple
of beautifully acid guitar solos.
Towards the end of the album, if you happen to
be tired from too much folk-pop, 'Disillusion' jumps at you with a completely
unexpected disco beat and classic funk guitar arrangement — except that,
somehow, it does not feel like a tribute to the late 1970s, an era towards
which Badly Drawn Boy shows fairly little interest. He just happened to borrow
a danceable rhythm from those times to provide a little diversity, that's all.
There really is a lot of good stuff to be said
about almost each of these songs (only the small sonic interludes, such as
'Body Rap', do not really work at all, because Gough is much better at
atmospherizing his actual songs than synthesizing bits of pure atmosphere), but
I will not do this intentionally — at the risk of creating the illusion that I
was somehow deeply moved by the record, and am now promoting the woolly hat
guy as the new Nick Drake / Elliot Smith / whatever. I was not, and am not:
like I said, Gough's obsessive clinging to the idea that he must never show you
how much of a damn he actually gives plays a bad trick on him — in response, I
just don't give a big damn about him
altogether. But The Hour Of
Bewilderbeast, with its nice, never annoying, vibe, miriads of instruments
and styles, and at least an ideal formal
understanding of how a classy pop record should sound (the guy's taste is
impeccable), still deserves a thumbs up. With a little patience, goodwill, and,
above all, renouncement of the historical perspective, I can easily see Bewilderbeast become one's personal
journey towards the proverbial enchanted forest — with the wood birds happily
chirping to your arrival on the album's closing track.
ABOUT A BOY (2002)
1) Exit Stage Right; 2) A Peak
You Reach; 3) Something To Talk About; 4) Dead Duck; 5) Above You, Below Me; 6)
I Love N.Y.E.; 7) Silent Sigh; 8) Wet, Wet, Wet; 9) River-Sea-Ocean; 10) S.P.A.T.;
11) Rachel's Flat; 12) Walking Out Of Stride; 13) File Me Away; 14) A Minor
Incident; 15) Delta (Little Boy Blues); 16) Donna & Blitzen.
I admit to having never read any of Nick
Hornby's novels, and, furthermore, I am nowhere near a major Hugh Grant fan
(according to my humble opinion, the man belongs to that unfortunate category
of talented actors who never get to play in worthwhile movies), but I did see About A Boy when it came out, and...
uh... well, it was one of those Hugh Grant movies. But, honestly, I was simply
too concerned trying to figure out whether the movie itself had any redeeming
qualities to it to notice the quality of the soundtrack. My bad — had I called
up some more brain cell reinforcements back then, I would have learned about
Badly Drawn Boy eight years earlier, when his career had not yet been spoiled
by years of torturous anti-reviews on Pitchforkmedia.
About
A Boy is just a soundtrack to
the movie, but apparently, Damon Gough was a major Nick Hornby fan (or Nick
Hornby was a big Damon Gough fan, I keep mixing these things up), and the
commission to write all of the music for the movie pronged him into releasing the
strongest collection of «sad sunshine pop» tunes he'd ever assembled for one
album. Leave out the brief instrumental links and there are 13 good-to-great
compositions here, simple, but vital, proving that at least as late as 2002
your average basic retro-pop recipé was still working.
Unlike Bewilderbeast,
which sort of rocked back and forth between all sorts of emotions, this one
here is a fairly happy affair — not «happy» as in «Prozac-happy», but
«intelligently happy», one of those records that purports to cheer you up in
the face of well-acknowledged and genuinely troublesome odds. 'A Peak You
Reach' opens the album on exactly that particular note: starting out all
worriesome, then slowly and softly rocking its way into an exciting mash of
acoustic and slide guitars and falsetto doo-doos that prop up the song's
message — "I'd like you to feel we've reached our peak" (and he has,
definitely).
Ensuing highlights include 'Something To Talk
About' (nice old music-hall-ish piano shuffle à la Small Faces or something like that); gorgeous piano-pop
on 'Silent Sigh', most of whose very
confused lyrics are delivered in an odd, post-psychedelic aspirated falsetto;
the overtly cutesy 'File Me Away', whose doo-doos and la-las could easily fit
into Sesame Street (but that has
never been a crime in and out of itself); and the bravely romantic finale of
'Donna And Blitzen', epic in scale and mostly cheese-free in the little
details. Some of the instrumentals are quite listenable on their own, too —
'Delta' and 'S.P.A.T.' both have cool beats and make good use of the brass section
(with a particularly splendid bass sax solo on the former).
If it's at all possible, About A Boy creates an even more
fragile and delicate world than Bewilderbeast,
one in which human relations seem to be made of thin porcelain, and emotional
life only exists within the confines of a specially constructed clean room. It
was, perhaps, inevitable that Hornby and Gough found each other — creators of
perfectly sanitized environments are rare enough these days, and they sure
must get lonely from time to time. If you believe that «grit» should be an
essential component of even soft pop music, the shiny, Platonic,
above-the-clouds atmosphere of About A
Boy will be irritating. But I'd rather take the perfect, removed-from-life
abstraction of the soundtrack than the accompanying movie, which, as I
remember it, was sort of insisting on its happening in real life, despite
essentially consisting of a fairy-tale dream. Me, I like my fairy-tales properly
disconnected from my immediate neighborhood, so it's a thumbs up for the soundtrack, and
let's pretend I forgot my thumbs at home when I rented the movie.
HAVE YOU FED THE FISH? (2002)
1) Coming In To Land; 2) Have
You Fed The Fish?; 3) Born Again; 4) 40 Days, 40 Fights; 5) All Possibilities;
6) I Was Wrong; 7) You Were Right; 8) Centre Peace; 9) How?; 10) The Further I
Slide; 11) Imaginary Lines; 12) Using Our Feet; 13) Tickets To What You Need;
14) What Is It Now?; 15) Bedside Story.
Trying to understand what the heck went wrong
here is like trying to solve a particularly infuriariting mathematical
problem. With sweat rolling down my back and brain tissue on the point of
self-ignition, I am still nowhere near close to an answer that I would like myself, let alone could hope it to be
appreciated by others. All I know is, the first two albums ruled, and this
third one... well, it doesn't suck,
as such, but The Force is no longer with Badly Drawn Boy. And the most puzzling
thing about it is — he didn't even remove
the hat. What the...?
It got to the point when I just had to add both
Have You Fed The Fish? and Bewilderbeast to my playlist, scramble
the running order, and concentrate on whatever it could be that triggered the like switch on one group of tracks and
left it untouched on another. Clearly, it was the worst (for any descriptive
purposes) kind of difference. There were solid memorable melodies on Bewilderbeast — and some sort of
smoothly-running, nicely-sounding, but almost completely emotion-free highway
on Fish. Why? Was it a rushed job?
Not necessarily, because some of the subsequent albums would get even worse in
that respect. Was it overproduced? Perhaps, a little bit, but it's not as if
Gough's previous records were all just about a whiny guy and his guitar — on
the contrary, the diverse and complex arrangements helped a lot. Was it «too
mainstream-oriented», as some reviewers have complained, was it a sell-out?
Not at all, it still sounds light years away from generic 2000s pop (thank
God). So?
Perhaps, and this is just a feeble guess, it has
something to do with Badly Drawn Boy shifting his allegiances. As loud as the
previous two albums could sometimes get, they were very much in the «chamber
pop» vein. Introspective, sometimes bordering on autistic, stuff, dominated by
folksy guitar or music-hallish piano melodies that Gough had a solid ear for.
Nick Drake and Elliott Smith listed among the chief influences. Lots of
innocent pseudo-kiddie mid-to-late-1960s kinds of vibes. Harry Nilsson, too.
You know the score.
With Have
You Fed The Fish?, however, he seems to be making a move into louder, much
more out-there, territory; you could almost say he's transferring himself from
1960s to 1970s style. And this is an area where his nose for melody is somehow
left behind. The title track, beginning with a solemn series of
strings-and-piano swoops, eventually becomes a cross between sub-standard Elton
John (that kind of Elton John which seems to value the sheer physical force
with which you press down the keys more than the actual sequence of keys, if
you get where I'm going with this) and sub-standard Wings (the first flying
guitar line almost seems to come out straight from 'Band On The Run', but,
alas, that's all there is to it). The song is as bombastic as Badly Drawn Boy's
powers can afford, but behind the bombast, there is not much memorability.
And the feeling lingers. 'Born Again'
experiments with hard rock grooves — unsuccessfully, because the rhythm guitar
work is boring, and the wild soloing pressed against it has no basis on which
to assert itself. 'All Possibilities' seems as if it just came off fresh from
the Xanadu soundtrack, with cheesy
string swoops and cheesier chorus vocals. The minor hit single, 'You Were
Right', could have been more convincing if it were placed in the hands of Lou
Reed — he'd have filtered out the unnecessary sound layers (strings, keyboards,
etc.), and, perhaps, even transformed it into a highlight on one of his softer
albums, like Coney Island Baby. Here,
too, the real version is indeed a highlight, but... against what background?
In the lyrics department, it also seems like
there's an unwarranted confusion. The words on Bewilderbeast could be naïve and technically laughable, but
they matched the overall naïveté of the music. Now the words are
becoming more obscure and complex, but they are not conveying any particular
message. Is the guy happy? Is he sad? Is he more concerned about the future of
the universe or about his dirty socks? Does the line "How can I give you
the answers you need when all I possess is a melody" make much sense to
you? Especially in the light of the evidence that there are next to no good melodies on the album, but lots
and lots and lots of words — many of which could
qualify as answers, were we smart enough to decipher them? And what's with this
odd sudden infatuation with bashing Madonna, a reference to whom ("I'm
turning Madonna down, I'm calling it my best move") crops up in not one,
but two of the songs? What's Madonna
got to have with all this in the first place? Is this meant to symbolize the
turning down of mainstream music values? Who does he think he is, then, being
so explicit about it — And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead?
In short, I don't like the melodies, I could
care less about the grumbly lyrics, and this shift just plainly does not work,
regardless of whether I have or have not managed to characterize it correctly.
'You Were Right' rocks straightforward enough; 'Bedside Story' is a moody
enough conclusion to the story with a credible acid vibe; but overall, this
record makes about as much sense to me as does its intro, in which a staged
airplane pilot voiceover announces that "if you look out of the right side
of the plane, you'll see a cloud that looks exactly like Badly Drawn Boy".
Uh... okay. Maybe that's where we are all supposed to laugh. Or just an
imminent omen of an impending thumbs down.
ONE PLUS ONE IS ONE (2004)
1) One Plus One Is One; 2) Easy
Love; 3) Summertime In Wintertime; 4) This Is That New Song; 5) Another Devil
Dies; 6) The Blossoms; 7) Year Of The Rat; 8) Four Leaf Clover; 9) Fewer Words;
10) Logic Of A Friend; 11) Stockport; 12) Life Turned Upside Down; 13) Takes The
Glory; 14) Holy Grail; 15*) Don't Ask Me, I'm Only The President; 16*) Plan B.
Perhaps one of the problems with listening to
Gough's increasingly frustrating output is that Badly Drawn Boy himself seems
to have taken in too many musical
influences. He is not the sum of all of these parts; he is their collector, and
once he gets all of them together in one circle and punches a hole in the
middle, he has too little energy left to properly inseminate the hole, if you
know what I mean.
Take the title track. As the simple guitar
chords and heart-on-sleeve vocals roll on out, it becomes clear that the man is
chasing a John Lennon vibe — something simple, punchy, honest, naïve, anthemic,
inspirational. As pianos, chimes, drums, strings, and brass progressively join
the picture, and Damon begs us to «give me some peace» (John used to ask for
some truth instead, but it's easy to
go from one to another without changing one's life philosophy), one could hope
for a bucket of tears, but... no click. Nothing. An empty stylization that
does not work; to my ears and mind, the clever arrangement is just completely
wasted.
Another case — 'Summertime In Wintertime', with
a hard rock groove and wild flute solos that openly remind of Jethro Tull. Why?
The main melody is rather dull, plain pop, and I do not get the idea why, in
the composer's mind, it had to be sewn together with a well-done, but pointless
imitation of Ian Anderson's madness. I could go on further and say, for
instance, that 'Four Leaf Clover' sounds exactly like one of those bad late
period Ray Davies songs that may sound all cuddly and friendly, but can never
be memorized, because it really has nothing but style to it. Or... but you get
where I'm going already.
It is sad, because One Plus One actually moves away from the mistakes of Have You Fed The Fish?: it is generally
more quiet, relying once again on chamber-pop rather than large-scale arrangements.
But something has been lost in transition, and that «something» is the ability
to come up with charming hooks, which were still in abundance on About A Boy, but have been since then
sacrificed for these bits of musical chameleonism — that may touch and impress someone, but I won't lie to you: I was
bored stiff throughout, several times over.
Amazingly, the one song that did stick with me
was 'Year Of The Rat', and it was the
one big piece of bombast on the album, mainly due to the anthemic chorus, on
which Damon is joined by a children's choir (sometimes the choir is left on its
own, as if this were a tribute to John and Yoko's 'Happy Xmas'... okay, I'll
shut up now). It's silly, it's stupid, it's derivative, it's overblown, and it
wasn't even anywhere close to the
true year of the Rat in 2004. But the chorus still packs an optimistic spirit
that feels like an optimistic spirit.
Same goes for the eight-minute epic closer 'Holy Grail', which is silly,
overblown, and also overlong and repetitive, and features the brilliant line
"you forgot you've got oxygen running through your veins" (the
natural question here is not «what makes you think so?», but rather «so
frickin' what?»). But there is something there in its grand idealism
that at least makes you want to take note. And it's got a cool speed-up thing
towards the end, as if it were paying homage to 'You Can't Always Get What You
Want'... high time somebody stopped me from this already.
Anyway, in a nutshell: I don't like most of
these songs, and it may have
something to do with the fact that Gough thought too much of others here, and
not enough of himself. His so-so streak would not, however, be over with this
record, so perhaps it was just one prolonged case of bad writer's block —
except writer's block usually prevents one from coming up with anything, and here we have our
out-of-steam God of Chamber-Pop disregard that and let us all see the contents
of his Chamber-Pot. (As rude as it may sound, I feel entitled to it after all
the hours I wasted trying to penetrate the hidden beauty — but try as I might,
I just cannot force myself to come to terms with the statement that one plus
one really is one). Thumbs down.
BORN IN THE U.K. (2006)
1) Swimming Pool; 2) Born In
The U.K.; 3) Degrees Of Separation; 4) Welcome To The Overground; 5) A Journey
From A To B; 6) Nothing's Gonna Change Your Mind; 7) Promises; 8) The Way
Things Used To Be; 9) Without A Kiss; 10) The Long Way Round; 11) Walk You Home
Tonight; 12) The Time Of Times; 13) One Last Dance.
Oh my dear God. Never as of yet has Badly Drawn Boy seemed so
earnestly eager to offer me his buzzing, pulsating, emotion-soaked,
passion-drenched heart on a lovingly crafted plate of piano-based melodies. It
almost breaks my own heart to admit
that, no matter how hard he tries, there is no way this big, colorful,
friendly, but thoroughly useless object could possibly be transplanted into my
own body. Sorry, Mr. Gough, maybe it's just me, or maybe it's just that your
fifth (sixth?) album is simply your worst up to date.
Associations invoked by the title, whether one
is reluctant to admit it or not, are clear enough. Yet it would sound strange,
saying that Damon Gough aspires to become the Bruce Springsteen for his own
generation / side of the Atlantic / whatever. He's shorter, probably cannot do
as many push-ups, draws his lyrical inspiration from Nick Drake rather than the
beat scene and Dylan, and is arguably the least
likely person in the UK to identify with the unspoken hopes and dreams of the
Average Joe. (In fact, one little smack from the Average Joe and you can hang
up that furry hat on the wall as a souvenir). On the other hand, no one can
prevent you from trying to become the spokesman for your little sub-tribe of
intellectual / artsy / idealistic wimps — and, if so, the title's association
with Born In The USA takes on a
subtly ironic nature. In a different age and context this could have been a
masterpiece of understatement.
Unfortunately, B.D.B. is trying way too hard. So hard, in fact, that he
has almost completely abandoned everything
that used to make his music sensually attractive, in favor of laying his soul
on the line. Most of the melodies here are completely flat, very much in the
1970s soft-rock vein once again (with a small touch on the artsy side, sort of
like a passable avatar of a Barclay James Harvest) — so that even when he comes
up with a bit of memorable phrasing (e. g. 'Nothing's Gonna Change Your Mind'),
the basic flash reaction is still «Does he really
need to emulate that kind of sound?
What, have all the other better retro influences been distributed already?»
It comes off worst of all when you realize that
the man is striving to make himself look big,
a stately figure capable of processing his emotions and relations through a
historical framework — the whole album is basically one large statement that
says «Yeah verily, the whole way I feel has been shaped by the strange times I
had to live through, and if you were born around the same time, you might as
well pay me for articulating it all out for you» — but this bigness is conveyed through dull,
predictable, and completely un-individual means. It's as if, say, John Lennon
decided to record Plastic Ono Band,
arranging all the songs as generic crooner music from the 1930s. But even that,
coming off from a guy as whacky as John, might have been taken for a hoot.
Badly Drawn Boy, on the contrary, just makes me yawn.
If there are any fans in the audience with
machine guns at the ready — I am not saying that Born In The U.K. is, in any way, just a fraud affair. Gough's
lyrics are touching, if never particularly original, and, at any rate, even
when he is so blatantly at his worst, the sentiments still feel real and honest
next to any average mainstream pop record of 2006. But this is good news only
for those who have to make the choice between Badly Drawn Boy and Taylor Swift;
in choosing between B.D.B. and his childhood influences, I'll still take the
childhood influences. Sorry for not talking a lot about individual songs — that
would just raise the hatred bar, and I really
would not like to talk in terms of hatred about this guy: for all I know, I could have been him had I, too, been born in the U.K. and learned to play a musical
instrument at an early age. Just a quick thumbs down, then, before we move on.
IS THERE NOTHING WE COULD DO? (2009)
1) Opening Theme; 2) Is There
Nothing We Could Do?; 3) A Gentle Touch; 4) All The Trimmings; 5) Welcome Me To
Your World; 6) Guitar Medley; 7) Is There Nothing We Could Do? (reprise); 8) Big
Brian Arrives; 9) Amy In The Garden; 10) Been There, Verified; 11) Just Look At
Us Now; 12) Wider Than A Smile; 13) Piano Theme; 14) The Letter; 15) I'll Carry
On.
Having disclosed his place of birth to all
those who don't know how to use Wikipedia, Badly Drawn Boy fell off the radar
for three years — because, after all, an intelligent singer-songwriter is
always expected to undergo occasional periods of withdrawal. But whether this
was intended to be a pose or not is irrelevant: the important thing is, it
helped. A little.
2009 saw Damon Gough return to the world of
soundtracks; this time, he contributed some backing music to the TV movie The Fattest Man In Britain, and later
on, created a whole LP around that
soundtrack: the album sleeve bears the inscription Music inspired by..., which is damn right, because, for the first
time in almost five years, the music does
sound inspired. Somehow it turns out that Badly Drawn Boy is at his best when
he tries to get under other people's skins, rather than explore the subcontents
of his own.
The record is very quiet, sternly sticking to
the chamber format, with very infrequent outbursts of strings and brass. This
is just a statement of fact, not a positive evaluation: Born In The U.K., much to my dismay, showed that this guy could be shy,
minimalistic, and subtle, and still ooze boredom from every pore. Worse, since
this is still a «semi-soundtrack», much of this quiet music is just tiny
snippets presenting half-baked ideas, moody but dismissable. ('A Gentle Touch'
sounds exactly like those twenty-five
seconds that you spend tuning and strumming up while getting comfortable on
your chair, before the real recording
session starts).
However, all of the principal songs that carry
the principal weight of the album — and whose musical themes, as befits a
soundtrack, are occasionally reprised throughout — are surprisingly moving. It
is a bit odd to imagine a guy in a woolly hat inflamed by compassion towards a
victim of obesity, but the title track, particularly its refrain of "ooh I
am sorry...", is the gentlest, most convincing expression of empathy in B.D.B.'s entire catalog:
somehow, this emotion feels real, not just a hollow, formalistic shape as it
used to be all over his last record.
Likewise, the man's fingers now seem to hit all
the right keys on the intro to
'Welcome Me To Your World', a piano ballad that finds a few gorgeously dusky
note combinations and skilfully uses a pompous, but «hushed» brass overdub to
build towards its climax. 'Just Look At Us Now' departs from a variation on the
familiar 'Imagine' chord sequence, but is eventually led into entirely
different territory, a cute mix of upbeat joy and melancholy. And 'I'll Carry
On' provides a perfectly optimistic conclusion for the whole grim matter.
So, if in order to get these nice songs, we have to wallow through a set of
disfocused guitar and piano ramblings, or a few unmemorable background muzak
themes with overdubbed patches of dialog from the movie, let it be so — it's
not an unreasonable cost to pay for Gough's re-emerging inspiration. The one
thing that really worries me, though,
is that even the good songs still sound somewhat too mature: play this back to back with About A Boy and see how enchantingly light and fluffy (in the good
sense of both words) B.D.B. started out, and how much gloomy weight he has put
on since then — not enough, perhaps, to earn him the title of The Fattest Man In British Music, but enough,
I guess, to get him interested in a movie dedicated to a similar problem.
From this point of view, Is There Nothing We Could Do? is not really a comeback — it is a
modestly successful creative re-christening, and it gives no guarantee that
Gough's future records would ever be as good again, at least, not if he tries
to retreat within his own eggshell. Here would be a moment as good as any for
all the filmmakers in the UK to start swarming the man with commissions, if we
allow ourselves a little fantasizing. A surefire thumbs up.
IT'S WHAT I'M THINKING (PART ONE) (2010)
1) In Safe Hands; 2) The Order
Of Things; 3) Too Many Miracles; 4) What Tomorrow Brings; 5) I Saw You Walk
Away; 6) It's What I'm Thinking; 7) You Lied; 8) A Pure Accident; 9) This Electric;
10) This Beautiful Idea.
Subtitled as Photographing Snowflakes, this is the first in a series of albums
that promise to tell us what exactly Badly Drawn Boy is thinking. There is,
however, I believe a problem with the title and the way it's spelled. Namely,
there's a preposition missing: is he thinking about photographing snowflakes, or is he thinking about something
else while photographing snowflakes?
Because the former merely applies to a good old dreamer, whereas the latter
indicates a potentially dangerous schizophrenic.
You have to wait until the third track, 'Too
Many Miracles', for an explanation — a lush, slightly Phil Spectorian ballad,
on which it becomes clear that the man is simply speaking in trusty old
metaphors and hyperboles. He is neither going mad, nor complaining about the
impossibilities of achieving the impossible. He is on a recuperative roll,
trying, I think, much more earnestly to be himself than he has been trying for
most of the '00s. And above everything else, he is trying to justify, at all
costs, the «chamber pop» tag that has been applied to him ever since Bewilderbeast and whose authenticity
he'd violated so much on Born In The UK
and other records.
Snowflakes is awash in hushed, echoey, reverb-drenched
vocals and similarly out-of-the-deep keyboards, acoustic guitars, and strings.
The only thing that bugs me are the drum machines — maybe they have been chosen
over real drums because Gough credits them with otherworldliness, well
connectible with the idea of letting the music speak directly from inside the
mind, but I do not agree. In my world, drum machines just don't belong in
«traditionally oriented» pop music; let them stay in the domain of Kraftwerk
and Aphex Twin.
But other than that little disagreement, it's a
good kind of sound for Badly Drawn Boy, and maybe that is why the songs work
some magic on me — I couldn't know for the life of me if they are really so
much better written than the ones on Born
In The UK, they simply succeed where those former ones have failed. Even if
there is still no return to his light youthful past, and all the songs are
rigidly covered with the same frost of moroseness.
My favorite tunes here are the ones with string
arrangements, which, I believe, he should do more often: the above-mentioned
'Too Many Miracles' and 'This Electric', whose main attractions are not at all
electric, but consist of optimistic 1970s-style string «swoops» that bring to
mind... uh, Al Green perhaps? Strings are also put to good use on 'I Saw You
Walk Away', which trots along at a faster pace than the average song on here
and has a slightly more nervous attitude that brings to mind... uh, Arthur Lee
perhaps? (Sorry — it's Badly Drawn Boy we're talking here. The guy wants his reviewers to namecheck his large
sack of influences, or else he wouldn't be so straightforward about it). The
attempt at falsetto on the chorus might be too much, but otherwise, it's a
good, memorable pop song with an angsty edge to it.
I am not implying that the record is any sort of
masterpiece. It brings on all the usual problems — lack of originality, lack of
individuality (this introspective persona that B.D.B. keeps pushing on us has
been invading our private space at least since the late 1960s), and very few
songs remain firmly wedged in my conscience even after several listens. Drum
machines suck, and so do a few odd individual decisions — for instance,
presenting the title track as a hyper-long, deadly slow, stompin'-folk-like
arranged ballad that should have been subtitled Step right up! see the artist with the furry hat pull out his brains
and dissect them in little pieces, patiently explaining the significance
behind each one in the process. I'd rather wait to hear the guy's
confession on his deathbed than in his prime. But that's just me.
Still, it is good to know that the album
continues the mildly upward trend that started with Is There Nothing We Could Do. Its best songs show that Gough's
melodic instincts still function properly — when properly triggered. And they
also show that he is returning to that tricky practice of combining an overall
quiet sound with multiple sonic layers, which worked so well on his early
records, before he went for more crunch and ruined it. It can only be hoped
that on his subsequent albums he will not attempt to turn into a one-man
Arcade Fire, traces of whose influence are quite visible here, too ('This
Beautiful Idea' could have easily
been written by Win Butler and friends). For now, a cautious thumbs up.
EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME (2006)
1) The First Song; 2) Wicked
Gil; 3) Our Swords; 4) The
Funeral; 5) Part One; 6) The Great Salt Lake; 7) Weed
Party; 8) I Go To The Barn Because I Like The; 9) Monsters; 10) St. Augustine.
Band Of Horses is basically the brainchild of
Ben Bridwell, a guy who formerly used to sell pizza in Tucson, Arizona, but,
over a period of ten years, went on to be selling loud indie-pop music to...
well, honestly, I have no idea who exactly is buying his albums, but
supposedly, there is very little overlap between his current customers and his
old ones.
In between these two extremes, he also played
drums and wrote some songs for a little-known «sadcore» outfit called Carissa's
Wierd (sic), hanging around Seattle;
once that institution (the band, not Seattle) collapsed, he learned to play
himself some guitar and, taking some old friends and some new discoveries along
for his own personal project, formed Band Of Horses. The lineup here, beyond
Bridwell himself, includes Mat Brooke on second guitar, Chris Early on bass,
and Tim Meinig on drums — simple to the indiest.
Although the band was formally inaugurated in
Seattle, Bridwell himself is an obstinate Caroliner, and one could expect the
final result to sound like a synthesis of Piedmont blues with grunge — which,
come to think of it, could be fun. In all actuality, the music sounds more like
a synthesis of... umm, let's say James Taylor, Brian Wilson, U2, and Wayne
Coyne's Flaming Lips. In other words, baroque arena-roots-rock with a decidedly
modernistic sensibility. Get that?
Let us begin with what prevents Band of Horses
from greatness. First, a common thing with the indie crowd — instrumental-wise,
the playing throughout is «accomplished», nothing more. Apparently, Bridwell
was learning to play guitar at the same time as he was assembling the band, and
although he did an impressive job in such a brief period, the man is certainly not the one to be revolutionizing this,
or any other, instrument any time soon. For that matter, the most professional
playing on the entire album comes from... the drummer, and even that may be
just an illusionary effect of his trying out more stylistic variety than the
others.
Second, all of the vocals are recorded with a
faraway echo effect. Now this may just be one of those Nashville-inflicted
things — them country singers like you to picture them as the
ride-out-of-the-sunset type — or it may be an artsy Bono-type thing — them
arena-rockers like you to perceive them as the as the stroll-out-of-the-clouds
type — but whatever be the true grounds behind this, it always creates at least
a small wall of alienation between the artist and the listener, and what sort
of artist (counting out Bono himself) should want to alienate his listeners on
his very first album? Not a good move.
Third, they chose 'The Funeral' as the lead
single, singing it on Letterman and then syndicating it to something like a couple
dozen movies and TV shows. Why? Just because it is the album's «grandest» and
most blatantly «tragic» song? Or because it was a subtle attempt to suck up to
Arcade Fire's success with the same word two years before? Beware: if you
happen to have heard the song and not
liked it, having passed out a «too simple + too pretentious = generic indie
crap» judgement, do not let it forever ruin your relationship with Band of
Horses. There are much better songs on Everything
All The Time than this so-so, in my opinion, attempt at self-aggrandizing
at the expense of genuinely interesting ideas.
In Ben's place, I would rather bet it all on
the aptly titled 'First Song' and its intricate wall of sound, constructed out
of mostly trivial guitar jangle and slide runs, but in a way that spells «anthemic»
without immediately reminding you of all the negative connotations of indie
aesthetics. The «pop» and «roots» elements of the tune cleverly complement each
other — the redneck and the hipster neutralize one another's yucky sides, and
the result is quite refreshing.
The other songs are usually less well balanced,
moving either too far in the pop-rock ('Wicked Gil') or in the country-rock
('Part One') department, but Bridwell has a good ear for hooks, and almost each
song has something going for it either in the instrumental or in the vocal
department. The thick guitar riff that opens 'The Great Salt Lake' almost
promises a pop masterpiece — unfortunately, the song eventually transforms
into 'The Funeral Part 2', i. e. a three-chord anthem, and is nearly ruined,
but for about two minutes out of five it sparkles. As do 'Wicked Gil', 'Our
Swords', and 'Weed Party'. The slow country waltzes and the James Taylor-ish
'St. Augustine' — not sure about these, but they do not offend or anything.
As long as you do not take the album's name too
literally — let us assume that this is what they want to be eventually happening, in the process of gathering
firewood for the machine to run — Everything
All The Time is a fine enough record with a face of its own, even if that
face is very transparently assembled from several mutilated face parts. But
them horses have not yet been given a proper ride: it's a thumbs up all right — from behind
the back.
CEASE TO BEGIN (2007)
1) Is There A Ghost; 2) Ode To
LRC; 3) No One's Gonna
Love You; 4) Detlef
Schrempf; 5) The
General Specific; 6) Lamb On The Lam (In The City); 7) Islands On The Coast;
8) Marry Song; 9) Cigarettes, Wedding Bands; 10) Window Blues.
The recording of this album was marked by huge
lineup changes — in fact, just about everyone simply quit, tacitly
acknowledging that «Band Of Horses» was the individual brainchild of Ben
Bridwell and that Ben Bridwell alone would be responsible for all the creative
activity under that moniker. To be fair, new band members Rob Hampton (bass and
second guitar) and Creighton Barrett (drums) are both co-credited as writers on
each of the album's tracks, but you will have to ask them yourself how much
they contributed to the fleshing out of the melodies.
By now, it is clear that Bridwell wants us all
to view him as an enigma, and he is in a fairly good position to do it, too,
because it does not happen every day that you meet such a transparently
roots-rock-sprung artist bent on bending the clichés and conventions of
his native genre into odd shapes that either do not make sense at all, or make
it in a parallel universe that you couldn't prove to have visited even if you
really have. The lyrics are mostly inscrutable (case in point — 'Detlef
Schrempf', named after a German basketball player but featuring no connection
between the guy and the actual words whatsoever). The melodies, in a way, are
too.
A few of the songs are fairly «normal»
mid-tempo country shuffles, softly brushed drums and steel guitars and what-not
('Marry Song'; 'Window Blues'). Just as often, they only use typically rootsy
chord changes and bits of rootsy arrangements within an indie-pop or alt-rock
aesthetics. This means marrying the unmarriable: the don't-give-a-damn,
come-what-may attitude characteristic of roots-rock with the sharp rebellious
desperation of the wanna-change-the-world (but
smart-enough-to-understand-the-futility) indie approach. This means it's all
interesting and shit, but uh what's the real deal? This guy may simply be too
smart for his own good.
When Rolling Stone selected 'Is There A Ghost'
as one of its top 100 songs of 2007, the reasoning behind the choice went «Southern rock goes shoegazing in this
atmospheric jam», which I, for one, thought was almost uncharacteristically
precise for the one magazine that all of us usually prefer to put down. But I
feel vindicated on the second part of
the description: «There are fewer than fifteen words in the lyrics, but
packed into Ben Bridwell’s vocals is a whole doctoral thesis on what it means
to be bummed out».
Bummed
out? The words, repeated over and over until you start wondering if they really mean something, are:
"I could sleep / When I lived alone / Is there a ghost in my house?" It
is the easiest thing in the world to surmise it's all about depression,
because most indie music is about depression, one way or another. But how do
we know it's true? That the effect, with all the jangling folk guitars and the
waves of echo around the vocals, is pretty and elegant, is undeniable; but is
there actual sadness here, or misery, or any other sort of discontent? That one
could write a doctoral thesis around the song is obvious (because one can
easily launch into a miriad different issues from here), but would the subject
of the thesis really be dedicated to the art of «bumming out»? I could just as
well argue that the song is about the miracle of discovering the unexpected —
and that its message is one of cautious optimism rather than bitter pessimism.
The
album's other single, 'No One's Gonna Love You', must have been specially
designed as a commercial antidote to the opaqueness of 'Is There A Ghost': not
only does it have the catchiest vocal melody on the album, but it is also the
least intriguing one — in fact, this is as close to generic «adult
contemporary» as Bridwell ever got; just replace the ringing guitar line with a
soft synth pattern and the man turns into Chris de Burgh. Even the lyrics are
transparent: it's all over for the both of us, but we still love each other
blah blah blah Wuthering Heights blah blah blah.
I
would rather urge you to check out such tunes as the above-mentioned 'Detlef
Schempf' (beautiful, McCartney-worthy vocal phrasing on the "when eyes
can't look at you any other way" chorus), 'The General Specific' (simple,
uplifting, anthemic, truck-driving music for all those who hate driving
trucks), and 'Islands On The Coast', which is exactly the way And You Will Know
Us By The Trail Of Dead (Aural Nerves) would sound if they only cut down on the
crappy noise level and let their sense of melody show through — a cool,
inspiring, catchy power pop song that also instructs you that "when
islands want to coast, they'll know how", and perhaps some day you will,
too, if you manage to convince yourself that Ben Bridwell knows more answers to
life's questions than you do.
Personally,
I don't: I think most of these lyrics are puffed-up nonsense. But I also think
that the melodic gift of Ben Bridwell is undeniable, and that the songwriting
on Cease To Begin is, in general, a
huge improvement over the first album. Not only is this guy getting harder and
harder to categorize and pigeonhole, but he also exercises better and better
care over his hooks. Now
all that is really missing is a little more diversity in the arrangements: the
lack of talented instrumentalists or seriously inventive «flourishes» will
make many people turn away from the record, declaring it «boring», and not
even my thumbs
up will make any of them give it a second chance. Which, I think, it
deserves regardless of the competition.
INFINITE ARMS (2010)
1) Factory; 2) Compliments;
3) Laredo; 4) Blue
Beard; 5) On My Way Back Home; 6) Infinite
Arms; 7) Dilly; 8) Evening Kitchen; 9) Older; 10) For Annabelle;
11) NW Apt.; 12) Neighbor.
For his third album, Bridwell decided a major
structural change couldn't hurt, and proclaimed that, from now on, Band Of
Horses would be a real, authentic
band. Changing one horse in midstream (Rob Hampton is out) for a whopping three
(former guest unit Tyler Ramsey is fixed in place, and multi-instrumentalists
Ryan Monroe and Bill Reynolds also join the fold), Ben has stated his intention
that that's the way it's gonna be, for some time at least. Friendship,
partnership, democracy, free flow and exchange of ideas, the works.
The fact that seven out of twelve songs here
are still exclusively credited to Bridwell, three more at least co-credit him,
and the only non-Ben lead vocal is by Monroe on ʽOlderʼ, somewhat
belies that statement — in the end, the stability of this new 5-piece ensemble
depends on the comparative weight of all these other guys' egos. But there is
no denying, for me at least, that Infinite
Arms is the best BoH record so far — it could easily remain as their
unbeatable top masterpiece — and if it has anything
to do with the merits of the new band members, then it's simply more fat food
for the argument that the best pop music of our time is usually done in
collaboration. Collectivism rules, as any respectable Bolshevik could tell
you.
Third time's the charm, in more than one way:
it took me three listens to be able to assert that, on his own third attempt, Bridwell nailed it. Jaded music lovers
probably won't be floored, grounded, or pinned against the wall by the massive
cathartic waves of the record, but there is really not a single bad or
completely uninteresting track on it. It is utterly traditionalist in its
approach to melody, texture, and emotion, yet still manages to scoop out a
killer bunch of rootsy hooks to prove that even in 2010, you can still be
traditionalist and get away with it.
The most frequent comparisons were to Neil
Young, but the five-piece BoH is anything but
a collective Neil Young-wannabe. Yes, the backbone of the music is still
American folk and country, and Bridwell's vocal tone is lightly similar to
Neil's (although far less whiny... and no Canadian accent, either), but it
will take you, at most, the opening fifteen seconds of ʽFactoryʼ to
understand that Infinite Arms is at
least as much fed by the indie-pop scene as it is by «Americana». If anything,
I'd rather say they were channelling the spirit of early Wilco here — this is
all somewhat close to what Jeff Tweedy used to sound like, before A-R-T got
the better of him and he could no longer appear before cowboy audiences with a
straight face.
ʽFactoryʼ is the album's «grandest»
number, with a strings-and-brass «wall of sound» breaking its way through your
living room. It is not at all complex, its major musical ideas are all over by
the time the intro is replaced with the verse melody, yet it feels very genuine
— uplifting in a ʽHey Judeʼ manner, despite the strangely depressed
accompanying lyrics. For that reason, it may well claim its place among the «Biggest»
compositions of 2010 (not that anybody really gives a damn, because the
«bigger» well-written songs get these days, the fewer their audiences).
Much of the album is just mid-tempo rock, with
hoarse guitars and generic tempos, but also with catchy choruses and passionate
solos, e. g. the lead single ʽComplimentsʼ, with its cryptic-apocalyptic
message; or ʽLaredoʼ, sounding like a gallant medieval ballad
re-written for bashing drums and feedback-drenched guitar; or ʽNW Apt.ʼ,
the album's fastest number, galloping along in post-punk mode. But I like them
even more when they drop all signs of the RAWK
attitude — this is where Bridwell's mastery of hooks becomes fully evident.
Thus, the vocal melody of ʽBlue Beardʼ
is sheer McCartney, always a nice thing to say, and you don't even get to
snicker at the banality of the accompanying lyrics (because these, as usual,
are inscrutable); and ʽOn My Way Back Homeʼ gives Brian Wilson a
gentle tap on the shoulder, since the way Ben sings the song title is an exact quotation of the line from ʽSloop
John Bʼ. (I wish I could take first credit for discovering that, but
obviously I cannot — google the idea and you'll see the whole Internet has been
buzzing about the resemblance ever since the album came out.)
From time to time, the band comes out with
great melodic lines as well — the slide guitar bits on ʽFor Annabelleʼ
(otherwise, a rather languid mellow ballad), that sharp tone and cool bends and
all, are unforgettable. Excursions into «light» sunshine pop (ʽDillyʼ),
acoustic romance (ʽEvening Kitchenʼ), and even formulaic
country-rock (Monroe's ʽOlderʼ, redeemed by one of the album's most
inviting sing-along choruses) all work as well.
In short, I just cannot find any grounds to
complain — except, perhaps, a bit of surprise at ʽNeighborʼ, the
album's least idea-packed song, serving as its coda. It seeks to give the
record as grand an exit as ʽFactoryʼ gave it an entry, but does not
qualify, certainly not when they go from quiet to loud and all you have for
the last three minutes are these silly crashing power chords, wave upon wave of
them. A little anti-climactic after all the subtlety; which will certainly not
prevent me from a raving variety of thumbs up as the final judgement. If Infinite Arms is to be taken as
Bridwell's claim for taking the current lead in the «Roots Meets Arts» movement,
I'd say he comes out as a fairly serious contender.
MIRAGE ROCK (2012)
1) Knock Knock; 2) How To
Live; 3) Slow Cruel Hands Of Time; 4) A Little Biblical; 5) Shut-In Tourist; 6)
Dumbster World; 7) Electric Music; 8) Everything's Gonna Be Undone; 9) Feud;
10) Long Vows; 11) Heartbreak On The 101; 12*) Mirage Rock; 13*) Irmo Bats;
14*) Reilly's Dream; 15*) Catalina; 16*) Bock.
Nothing lasts forever, and few things last
shorter than the fruitful periods of modern rock bands. Two years earlier, Band
Of Horses seemed to settle into a comfortable pattern of writing not particularly
original, but quite seemingly beautiful music. With Mirage Rock, they almost seem bent on proving to us that they do
not want to conform to patterns — and in order to do that, they are willing to
sacrifice beauty, depth, and quality for the sake of change.
First things first: if you have a sound rooted
in the roots, is it that necessary to
choose a moment for placing production duties in the hands of the man who
produced The Eagles? Glyn Johns does have an impressive, but a very uneven,
pedigree: this is also the man, after all, who went on from producing Who's Next to producing It's Hard, meaning a total lack of
guarantee. I have no idea if it is Johns' presence that determines the transition
from the fairly sophisticated sound layers of Infinite Arms to the much more sparse and simple arrangements on Mirage Rock — I suppose that Bridwell
must have wanted this shift in
approach — but it is Johns' presence
that orchestrates the whole deal, and the deal sure goes wrong.
Apparently, most of the album was recorded
«live in the studio», with lots of rehearsals required before the final takes.
Since none of the band members are really seasoned, notorious musicians,
clearly more energy must have been spent on «getting it all to work» rather
than on concentrating on the melody and texture side. Result? Mirage Rock sounds about as impressive
and memorable as anything done by the kids in your local art college band (just
enter your ZIP code to get the name) — maybe worth relaxing to while having a
beer or two after a hard day's work on a cold winter evening, then moving on
forever.
Nothing illustrates this point better than
ʽKnock Knockʼ, the lead-in track and the first single released from
the album. If there is only one classic example allowed of «impotence in
music», this here is a great fine candidate — the song opens up ringing,
banging, and whoo-whooing in anthem mode, and then you spend four minutes
looking for release without getting it. Verse number one... bridge... verse
number two... bridge... where's the frickin' chorus? Wait, what do you mean
that was the chorus? That was just
the bridge, wasn't it? You mean I'm supposed to sing along to "knockin' on
the door, knockin' on the door, knockin' on the door" as the highest
climactic point of the anthem? Can you imagine — oh, I don't know — a
ʽDead End Streetʼ that goes straight back to the verse melody after
"we are strictly second class, and we can't understand"? And this song doesn't even have that sort of
verse melody.
Most of the rest is equally disenchanting. All
sorts of by-the-book midtempo pop / country-rock grooves that barely ever rise
above the ground, and float out of memory as soon as they are over (quite
often, even way before they are
over). Everything is superficially melodic, soft, warm, never overproduced,
never irritating, but there is nothing in the world that would compel me to go
back to these songs after I have patiently endured the record four times from
top to bottom, and never even once did it manage to hit a nerve that wasn't already
worn down to insensitivity by way, way too many hits in the past. So to speak.
Poking half-blindly at the titles, ʽA
Little Biblicalʼ is not even the tiniest bit biblical, but it is almost a good, upbeat, well-rounded
power pop number — maybe The Alan Parsons Project could have emphasized its
stronger sides and polished it to the state of one of their unforgettable
ditties such as ʽSooner Or Laterʼ (particularly if they'd found a
less ordinary vocalist than Bridwell). ʽDumbster Worldʼ stylishly
toys with Neil Young-style folk-rock gloominess, but then crashes into Garbage
Planet when the mid-section starts «rocking out» in generic alt-rock fashion.
And that's about all there is, really. By the way, quiet country stuff like
ʽLong Vowsʼ does sound like
the early Eagles, and even though I am not a mortal enemy of the early Eagles,
what use do I have for a 21st century imitation of the early Eagles?..
One thing that does indirectly confirm that
Glyn Johns was indeed chiefly responsible for this failure is the bonus EP on
the deluxe edition, called Sonic Ranch
Sessions: this was apparently recorded by the band without Johns' participation,
and the five tracks on the EP are much more remarkable than the album itself.
For instance, ʽReilly's Dreamʼ is pinned to a hallucinatory oscillating
guitar line, turning it into homely dream-pop; ʽCatalinaʼ is saved
from immediate death by some amusing experiments with Beatlesque vocal
modulations; and ʽBockʼ has a better melancholic mix of piano,
organ, guitar, and vocals than any other track on the whole package. This is a
highly subjective feeling — it's not like we're talking heaven-and-earth scales
here anyway — but it did come from somewhere, so I'm noting it just in case.
But bonus tracks are bonus tracks, and the album per se gets an assured thumbs down
— if you can't do better than the
Eagles, why not just turn into an Eagles tribute band? More honest that way.
ACOUSTIC AT THE RYMAN (2014)
1) Marry Song; 2) Slow Cruel
Hands Of Time; 3) Detlef Schrempf; 4) Everything's Gonna Be Undone; 5) No One's
Gonna Love You; 6) Factory; 7) Older; 8) Wicked Gil; 9) The Funeral; 10)
Neighbor; 11*) Weed Party.
Acoustic? Aren't these guys always acoustic? Oh no, that's right,
they aren't — it's just my memory playing predictable tricks on me, because
that is the way you are going to
remember your bearded guys playing your usual «Americana» stuff. Anyway, this
here is indeed their version of Unplugged,
recorded over two nights in April 2013 at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and
released as their first and, so far, only official live album.
Band Of Horses are not the best band in the
world, and you are not going to be subjected to any big surprises. The songs,
handpicked in a more or less representative manner off each of the band's four
albums, are stripped down, but not significantly changed otherwise — you get to
hear them in a more «intimate» presentation, with more emphasis on the vocals
and, sometimes, extra piano parts that take the place of orchestral and other
overdubs, but mood-wise, everything stays the same. No reinventions, fresh
interludes, jamming, no in-between-song banter even, which may be a plus in the
context of an actual show, but a minus in the context of a live record.
An even harsher minus is that quite a few of
these songs worked well only because
they were lushly arranged in the first place. Infinite Arms, the band's best album, is only represented by two
songs, and the monumental orchestral grandeur of ʽFactoryʼ,
especially its coda, is hopelessly lost in transition to the live acoustic
environment — the «compensating» piano just does not cut it. It sounds like a
pleasant demo version. If you cut away grandeur without replacing it with some
well thought-out subtlety, what's to like? Bare bones are bare bones, and
should be left for undertakers and grave robbers.
One good thing I am ready to admit here is that
the vocals are beyond reproach: solo parts and harmonies all sound
exceptionally nice, and the material seems very well rehearsed. It is a pleasant
listen all right. But even the song selection is generally questionable (most
likely, they were picking the songs that seemed like the obvious candidates for
transfer to acoustic), so that I could not recommend the album even in the
status of a decent, representative intro to the band's catalog — on the
contrary, only some very serious fans of Ben Bridwell will find sufficient
reason to own it. Not to mention that, if you really want yourself some of that
heart-on-a-sleeve bearded-guy acoustic Americana, there's always The Avett
Bros., and frankly, in this kind of setting I could easily lose track of the
difference between the two. Thumbs down.
WHY ARE YOU OK (2016)
1) Dull Times/The Moon; 2)
Solemn Oath; 3) Hag; 4) Casual Party; 5) In A Drawer; 6) Hold On Gimme A Sec;
7) Lying Under Oak; 8) Throw My Mess; 9) Whatever, Wherever; 10) Country Teen;
11) Barrel House; 12) Even Still.
I must say that I have to take some offense at
the title. It is staring me right in the eye, silently implying that I am OK
when I shouldn't be — even though I am most definitely not OK, nor do I feel like a particularly careless bather who just
happened to climb out back on the beach, only to discover all of his/her
clothes pilfered by bad fortune. It is, in fact, somewhat presumptuous to
assume that the average buyer of your records is doing that because he/she
needs to be shaken up from happy bourgeois slumber and face the harsh realities
of a ruthless modern world. At least, last time Arcade Fire tried to do this
with Funeral, it did not work, so
how could it work with a band approximately ten times less talented?..
Fortunately, one listen to the album is enough
to dispel the prior impression. Ben Bridwell would never agree (not in public,
at least) with this assessment, but really, Why Are You OK works best if you not only drop your expectations
down a deep well, but, in fact, agree to interpret it as a veritable musical
anthem to inactivity, casualness, and even artistic impotence. It features some
of the slowest, simplest, most meditative and event-less music written by Ben
Bridwell, ever, and from time to time it even drops certain hints that this is
the only thing worth doing today. The very first track, for instance, greets
you with the cheerful "Listen close wherever you go / Dull times, let them
seep into your bones" — and musically, the combination of the tempo, the
droning guitar, and the lulling vocals suggest that Bridwell may have spent a
bit too much time recently listening to the entire catalog of Beach House.
Only where Beach House put their faith in the creation of a «magical»
atmosphere, here, while retaining the trance-like aura of the music, Band Of
Horses offer a more earthly, realistic vision.
This is neither too good... nor too bad. Just
like the last time around (with Mirage
Rock), I don't feel like any of these songs contain any staying power — but
unlike the last time around, it's not even a matter of them pretending to contain it. It's very much
an album of little, mundane things, enveloped in some humble, mundane sorrow:
Band Of Horses are caught in the middle of a debilitating vacuum, and since
2016 does look an awful lot like a debilitating vacuum on the whole, Why Are You OK is perhaps even more
symbolic of the void to me than it is to its creators. In all of these songs,
they either sing about meaningless trifles (ʽIn A Drawerʼ manages to
become the most memorable number on the album by featuring the repetitive hook
"Found it in the drawer, found it in the drawer, took a little time but I
found it in the drawer" — we're never told what the it actually is, but who really cares?), or ask pointless questions
whose only purpose is to undermine your self-confidence (ʽHagʼ:
"Are you truly in love? absolutely in love? you're happy enough, are you
fully in love?"), or produce anthemic invocations delivered in such cold
tones that you're sure they don't really mean it (ʽBarrel Houseʼ:
"bring some peace to this world and keep passin' it on"). In short,
this is an album about trying to make something out of nothing, because what
else is there to be made in the first
place?
Musically, there's not a lot of surprises here:
by now we know only too well that Band Of Horses like a soft-rock sound with
soaring production, and this time they made it even softer and more soaring
than before. The lead single, ʽCasual Partyʼ, accompanied by a fairly
bizarre video of the band members forced to play the song for a feast of
cartoonish aliens, is really atypical of the album — too fast and upbeat,
almost like a jangle-power-pop number, although the lyrical message is pretty
much the same and even more explicitly than ever ("since Ben got that,
he's a sociopath", they state without blinking). Most of the rest is far
slower and drearier, really — imagine a Beach House record played by rootsy
bearded guys. Occasionally, a simple sentimental note still slips by
(ʽWhatever, Whereverʼ is Bridwell's ʽBeautiful Boyʼ, but it
is too syrupy for my tastes), but really, the music as such does not feel
depressing: the point is not to depress, but rather to freeze, and it does have
a comatose effect — you might want to throw on some AC/DC once it's over, to
spring your muscles back to action.
No thumbs up, anyway; I am not sure that I will
remember how even one song goes on here in a week's time or so, but I might remember the strange overall
effect — and the fact that I did not really enjoy that effect, even if I felt
it. And I hope I'm interpreting all of this right, because if I'm not, then I'm
losing my last crumbs of interest in this band.
FIRST & SECOND (2004-2005)
1) Tower Falls; 2) Coeur; 3)
Rise; 4) Red Sky; 5) Son Of Sun; 6) Vision.
First of all, I have no clue as to why these
guys call themselves «Baroness» — it cannot be excluded that one or more of
them have those subconscious hots for Margaret Thatcher, but it sure as heck
wouldn't have much to do with the music, which blends the conservative
framework of heavy metal with the liberal framework of math-rock and is
consequently of a neutral nature. There does not seem to be any heavy excess of
barons or baronesses in Savannah, Georgia, either, so, ultimately, the name may
have simply been chosen in order to distance themselves from their surroundings
— the surroundings of yet another band from the Deep South that would do everything
in its power to avoid reminding us of their local roots.
Actually, in this way they only followed the
example of their direct predecessor, Mastodon (from Atlanta, Georgia), whose
slightly inferior copy version they are sometimes stated to be. Which is not
entirely true: although Baroness naturally owe a heavy debt to Mastodon, they
have plenty of ideas of their own, or, at the very least, they combine the
ideas plundered from Mastodon with ideas plundered from other artists (which
sounds like a slur, but in reality is merely a way of describing the working
manners of about 90% of the people reviewed here).
John Baizley's growling vocals excluded, the
music of Baroness really falls more in the «math-rock» than stereotypical heavy
metal category. Although each of the band's first two EPs, released in 2004
and 2005 and later packed together on a one-CD edition from 2008, formally consists
of three tracks, all three are seamlessly joined together and seem to represent
three different movements of a single «electric guitar symphony» rather than
separate entities. And the symphonies in question place more emphasis on
complexity, density, and unpredictability of their sound than on «heaviness» as
such: no matter how distorted the guitar tones get, or how closely Baizley's
vocals approach the mating calls of a stone troll, neither First nor (even less) Second
have a truly «metallic» feel to them. Altogether, in order to appreciate this
music, one has to appeal to that particular brain department which is
responsible for your chess skills, rather than the one that urges you to play
the Necromancer campaign in Heroes of
Might & Magic.
The lyrics, mostly coming in short, spasmodic,
frequently unfinished phrases, do have a slightly medieval / fantasy pull
rather than, for instance, the «science rock» flair of BATS: the very title of
the first track, ʽTower Fallsʼ, and its constant references to
burning, pressing soil into dust, and «nothing will ever return», shows the
expectable taste for dramatic flashiness. But the music itself shows nothing
of the kind: both Baizley and the second guitarist, Tim Loose, generally avoid
screechy, mock-cathartic tones, setting their axes to sludgy
«grumble-and-growl» moods, sometimes with an acid tone overhaul. This does not
work well for immediate memorability, but it also helps them avoid many of the
usual metal clichés — and convert those listeners who are initially
predisposed to appreciating «intelligent» rather than «heartfelt» heaviness.
The downside is that, for all of this
«intelligence», pretty much every song on here is played with the exact same
intellectual — and emotional — message. The different «movements» shuffle fast
and slow tempos without any clear guiding principles, but fast or slow, all the
sections have a similar feel of what I could describe as «light-gray
melancholia», inherited by these guys not so much from their metal ancestors as
from their indie-rock influences. Maybe the worst thing about these EPs is that
this kind of music is often salvageable by its inlaid sense of musical humor,
yet Baroness show no sense of humor whatsoever. The mission — to save
metal-based music from its corny conventions and make it more academically
respectable, so to speak — is indeed noble (although it is always a puzzle to
me why so many of these noble efforts are ultimately still spoiled by the
obstinate reliance on growling vocals), but the resulting music, technical
respect apart, is still way too samey and, in the end, too boring to generate
genuine excitement. And the fact that First
and Second, from the very outset,
present a well-formed, confident, professional sound means very little — these
days, most bands in these genres
start out with a well-formed, confident, professional sound, or else they do
not start out in the first place.
RED ALBUM (2007)
1) Rays On Pinion; 2) The
Birthing; 3) Isak; 4) Wailing Wintery Wind; 5) Cockroach En Fleur; 6)
Wanderlust; 7) Aleph; 8) Teeth Of A Cogwheel; 9) O'Appalachia; 10) Grad.
By the time the band got around to making the
transition from short EPs to long, expansive musical statements, Baizley and
friends seem to have undergone subtle, but important stylistic changes.The
principle of allowing no breaks between songs is still there, but the songs
themselves are a tad more diverse (including acoustic interludes, among other
things), and the entire atmosphere is a little less «math-rockish», but not that
much more «metallic»: the sound is still generally friendly, and it is now
hearkening back to ages both long past, such as the «idealistic» heavy rock of
Budgie and Rush, and recent ones, like the noise-rock of And You Will Know Us
By The Trail Of Dead (but with significant noise reduction).
And I think that these subtle changes are for
the best — they do not exactly help Baroness carve out a unique identity, but
they make them more accessible for those listeners (like myself), who are more
easily seduced by, let's say, «unoriginal accessible bands» than by «unoriginal
inaccessible bands». In other words, a little extra bit of melody goes a long
way in proving your worth, when your previous «musical chess parties» turn out
to already have been played by better players (or, at least, equally good /
comparable ones).
ʽRays On Pinionʼ, the multi-part
album opener, illustrates this point better than anything. The first four
minutes consist of a minimalistic intro and a bluesy, guitar-weaving jam, both
with a psychedelic tinge. Eventually, the band comes in full throttle with a
thick hard rock sound and Baizley's trademark warrior scream, then, at about
five minutes into the sound, launches a clean, melodic double-guitar riff in
the best tradition of the 1970s — carrying it on for only a few bars before
reverting to a heavier tone. But all the different parts fit together and paint
quite a dynamic and meaningful picture — a journey, a battle, a natural
phenomenon, whichever way you might like to interpret it. It's not a
masterpiece, but the riffs are creative enough, and show fairly well that
Baroness are at their best when they don't strive too much for sonic wizardry.
Subsequent tracks rarely diverge from the
formula, but there are enough changes in tempo, tonality, and riffage (the
latter seems to suck up to all sorts of heavy music from the previous four
decades, as long as they are formally disciplined and organized — thus, echoes
of Black Sabbath are more likely to be found than, say, echoes of Hendrix) to
keep us entertained for 45 minutes. I am particularly partial to ʽWailing
Wintery Windʼ, which, true to its name, goes for a less brutal, but more
cold and shivery atmosphere (the main melody is stylistically reminiscent of
ʽShe's So Heavyʼ from Abbey
Road, which is only natural, considering its own successful evocation of a
«wailing wintery wind»); to ʽTeeth Of A Cogwheelʼ, with a fun dialog
of «biting» guitar licks and ultra-busy percussion bursts; and to the merry
martial exuberance of ʽO'Appalachiaʼ. Less so partial, though, to
stuff like ʽWanderlustʼ and ʽAlephʼ, which have a bothering
tendency to skedaddle away into «soulless» math-rock territory, but maybe they
just require more intensive listening — in any case, they are all blood
relatives, these songs.
Altogether, Red Album (this does seem to be its official title, despite the
lack of any words on the sleeve; all of the artwork for Baroness albums is
painted by Baizley himself, by the way) certainly deserves a thumbs up
— despite occasional slips into meaninglessness, and despite Baizley's highly
limited caveman vocal style, which many people have complained about. Maybe the
best thing about it is how it manages to consistently stay in hard rock
territory without ever becoming vicious or aggressive: where heavy metal
usually qualifies as «demonic» music, these guys go for a «titanic» vibe
instead — big, brawny, powerful, but ultimately benevolent. And this approach
could very easily lead to boredom, but somehow it doesn't.
BLUE RECORD (2009)
1) Bullhead's Psalm; 2) The
Sweetest Curse; 3) Jake Leg; 4) Steel That Sleeps The Eye; 5) Swollen And Halo;
6) Ogeechee Hymnal; 7) A Horse Called Golgotha; 8) O'er Hell And Hide; 9) War,
Wisdom, And Rhyme; 10) Blackpowder Orchard; 11) The Gnashing; 12) Bullhead's
Lament.
Alert to lineup change: guitarist Brian Blickle
is out, leaving his brother Allen on drums, well, brotherless, and is replaced by Pete Adams. If I am not mistaken,
this does result in a slight increase of guitar soloing on the album — so
maybe they just wanted to procure the services of a flashier lead player. But
it isn't as if the replacement had led to a lot
of stylistic change: for the most part, the metal heart of Blue is genetically the same as the one on Red.
On second thought, though, I would probably
agree that it is a tad heavier, darker, and tougher than its predecessor —
which we'd expect, I guess, considering the transition from a «redder» to a
«bluer» hue. I have no idea what the band means by «Bullhead» (a fish? a town?
a movie? an undisclosed friend?), but both of the two short, «Bullhead»-inspired
bits that open and close the albums are dirge-like — grim minor key wailings
that purge the last bits of «math rock» from the band's legacy. And in between
are a lot of aggressive, war-like compositions, although, believe it or not,
the sound is still ultimately friendly: if it is battle and slaughter that the
band is singing about, then it's some sort of ancient epic
battle-and-slaughter, carried out with an honorable smile on one's face, with
none of that doom-and-gloom, «war-is-evil» bullshit invented by humanists to
spoil our old favorite game of head-gathering.
Thus, the album's centerpiece is probably
ʽA Horse Called Golgothaʼ, with the band firing away on all cylinders
as machine-gun riffage and frenzied soloing (much of which actually resembles a
neighing war horse!) assault your ears for five minutes straight. But it is
never a vicious assault: guitar tones remain brawny and bulgy, but never evil,
and although one would probably expect «a horse called Golgotha» to symbolize
something apocalyptic, this particular horse looks like it kills fascists (a
dime a dozen), rather than people of good will.
In fact, now that the band has gone even
farther retro, abandoning all pretenses to pushing the envelope forward, I know that old sound, echoes of which
they consciously or subconsciously reproduce here: the Randy Rhoads-era Ozzy
Osbourne records — the same lively, gristling-and-bristling, but never too
scary or depressing brand of metal that seeks acceptance from all sorts of
music fans, not just the «metalheads». Allegedly, there is nothing here that
even begins to approach the catchiness of Ozzy's records — because Baroness
are not a «pop» band, after all: they might like that kind of sound, but they
certainly wouldn't want you to merrily whistle it out, as it is easy to do with
the likes of ʽCrazy Trainʼ. But it's very much that kind of metal, shorn of its Eighties gloss and, perhaps, just
a little bit intellectualized.
Other tracks, apart from ʽHorseʼ,
that also invoke that analogy, include ʽThe Gnashingʼ (with yet
another series of choo-choo train riffs) and ʽJake Legʼ. ʽWar,
Wisdom, And Rhymeʼ tries to be more ominous, but mostly through the lyrics
— "we are grave, we are graves, we will die" is sung too often for
the song to retain a cheerful face, even if Baizley's grizzly-bear vocals still
remain the weak point of the band's sound, mainly because the man sounds
forever stuck in one mode of expression, regardless of the circumstances.
Whether he gets to bash somebody's head in, or whether it is his own head that gets bashed in, you
may be sure he will have the exact same howling intonation to inform you of
the results in both situations.
All in all, the bad news is that, once again, the collective atmosphere forged by
these songs, one after the other, is more interesting than the individual riffs
and solos, if you pull them apart and start comparing them to various hard rock
classics — try as they might (provided they actually do try, which I am not
sure of), Baroness are incapable of drawing an economic, concise, meaningful
sonic picture, compensating for this in «sprawl mode». (And I am not even
mentioning the occasional non-metal tunes like ʽSteel That Sleeps The
Eyeʼ, where the band harmonizes in a «poor man's Crosby, Stills &
Nash» fashion — very boring).
The good
news is that this «sprawl mode» works, and Blue
Record as a whole, with its brawny nature, relative variety, and
compositional bravoura, is definitely more than a mere sum of its parts. This
is not any sort of great praise — as
heard through this reviewer's ears, it signifies the victory of style over
substance, and that is always a disappointment in comparison to the opposite.
But at least, yep, Baroness have style, and that is already much more than can
be said about... oh, well, up to you to complete that sentence, if you are up
to it in the first place. So here we go with yet another modest thumbs up,
as blue turns out to be the new red and all.
YELLOW & GREEN (2012)
1) Yellow Theme; 2) Take My
Bones Away; 3) March To The Sea; 4) Little Things; 5) Twinkler; 6) Cocainium;
7) Back Where I Belong; 8) Sea Lungs; 9) Eula; 10) Green Theme; 11) Board Up
The House; 12) Foolsong; 13) Collapse; 14) Psalms Alive; 15) Stretchmarker;
16) The Line Between; 17) If I Forget Thee, Lowcountry.
First reaction: No, no, no! Change is good, but not all
change is good. This is not genuine heavy metal at all, this is not classic
hard rock, this is some kind of gloomy «alt-rock» thing. Limp riffs, sludgy
tones, gothic harmonies, medieval tonalities, metronomic beats, electronics...
where's the crunch, goddammit? Are we
actually supposed to sit back and «think» these songs over? Who do they think
they are — Smashing Pumpkins? Heavens be cursed, here is yet another band that
started out with a promise and turned to the usual dull crap in just a few
years' time.
A few more listens into this stuff, though (not
an easy challenge, as Yellow & Green
is essentially a double album, with its two «differently colored» parts
eventually clocking in at around seventy minutes), and I was already getting
into these grooves and — man, what was
I thinking? This is really interesting stuff, going way beyond their original
formula and... well, could actually be their best album so far. By the fourth time, I was all but convinced.
Somehow, it seems that after a few albums of
songs that had plenty of atmosphere, but tended to plod and meander, Baroness
have managed to grow into very
serious «melodicists». For one thing, they have grasped the meaning of the
«less is more» concept — listen to ʽGreen Themeʼ, at the heart of
which lies just a handful of tenderly arpeggiated chords, repeating themselves
over and over before spilling out in a frenzied Mike Oldfield-style distorted
folk guitar solo, then reverting back to quiet mode before spilling out again in a shrill psychedelic Floydian
solo. The effect is pretty majestic — intelligent, catchy, and, at times,
almost «beautiful», which is certainly a new high for Baroness, never yet
caught so far in one of those «spiritual» moods.
However, their heavy riffs are also growing
stronger — at the expense of «metal» elements, perhaps, as ʽTake My Bones
Awayʼ, opening the first part of the album, seems more of a personal,
confessional, soul-aching statement than a generalized «battle cry», the likes
of which populated most of Blue Record.
The main riff, processed through some wicked distortion filter, bellows with
its own pain this time around — as do Baizley's vocals, which might as well
come from a mortally wounded battle elephant, and then the frenetic guitar solo
completes the picture.
This song and most of the others have nothing
particularly experimental about them. This is just heavy (sometimes not so
heavy) music with a solid degree of introspection and soul-searching. The
spirit of Thin Lizzy is in here somewhere, as well as Rush, Metallica, U2, even
The Cure or Radiohead, perhaps, on the not-so-heavy, but skillfully overdubbed,
tracks. But nothing sounds like a tribute or a mindless exercise in plagiarism
— Baroness are experienced enough to create their own moods and, more
importantly, their own melodies.
The difference between the Yellow and the Green
parts is not crucial. On the whole, the former remains closer to a «metal»
sound and the latter moves more firmly in the direction of melancholic
art-pop, but the distinctions are blurred enough to not let you notice that
unless you pay attention to the album and song titles. Both halves, actually,
have their share of thoroughly non-metallic songs — ʽCocainiumʼ, in
the first section, is as much distinguished by its psychedelic bassline /
jangly rhythm dialog as ʽPsalms Aliveʼ, in the second section, is
distinguished by its «bubbly bass / gentle arpeggios» combo — and they all
sound surprisingly good.
Altogether, the point of both halves is the
same: Baroness have slipped into a mood of «quiet lament», developing a
sensitive side — those who'd like them move back into math-rock territory will
probably be disappointed, and I know I would have been, too, if all this stuff
really weren't so intelligently designed. Not to mention that this is the first
album where I did not have any regrets for Baizley as their lead singer:
having purged all «growling» from his voice, he suddenly becomes much more
efficient when replacing it with a tinge of desperation. And guess what, when
he is not screaming at the top of his lungs, his voice is actually quite nice
(ʽCocainiumʼ, ʽFoolsongʼ, etc.) — maybe he should try and
experiment more in this department.
Who knows, give him a few more years and maybe he'll turn into the next Thom
Yorke.
I suppose the word «masterpiece» would be
pushing it: the songs are not that
memorable or breathtaking — and if Baroness really intend to invade the
territory of Floyd, Cure, and Radiohead, they have a long road ahead of them
before they master all the production intricacies, necessary to catch our
souls in their web. But as a first, tentative raid in that territory, it
surpasses any possible predictions and expectations, showing both a strong will
to evolve and solid means to carry
that will out. Just do not expect for either Yellow or Green to hit
you all that hard upon first listen, particularly if you are a seasoned
listener — the moodiness, the stylishness, the individual hooks of these songs
require a little fermentation, so it seems to me. Thumbs up.
PURPLE (2015)
1) Morningstar; 2) Shock Me;
3) Try To Disappear; 4) Kerosene; 5) Fugue; 6) Chlorine & Wine; 7) The Iron
Bell; 8) Desperation Burns; 9) If I Have To Wake Up (Would You Stop The Rain);
10) Crossroads Of Infinity.
Apparently, less than one month after Yellow & Green came out, Baroness
were caught in a horrible accident when their bus fell from a viaduct somewhere
near Bath, England (touring is evil!); miraculously, everybody survived at the
cost of some broken limbs and fractured vertebrae, but the whole thing still
left the band shaken, debilitated for some time, and ultimately led to the
departure of the entire rhythm section, making Baizley the sole remaining
original member. They did return to touring at the end of 2013, but it wasn't
until early 2015 that they felt themselves properly refreshed and recovered to
return to the studio, with new members Nick Jost on bass and Sebastian Thomson
on drums (Pete Adams remains as second guitarist).
Of course, it is nice to see a band brave the
odds and overcome Fate by stubbornly clinging to its own self-designed destiny.
The problem, however, is that after the diversity and experimental nature of Yellow & Green, the accident seems
to have turned Baroness into testosteronic sentimentalists — Purple is not so much about the music
as it is about wailing and lamenting. "All of us tinderwood / Bound for
the fire", we are told in the very first track, and references to
"deep wells of despair", "desperation burns", "killing
the lights", nursemaids "cutting through my ribcage", and other
unappetizing events and abstractions are to be found just about everywhere.
You'd think they should be praising God for saving their flesh, but it's amost
as if they'd be feeling better if that bus crash had taken them directly to
God. Maybe I was right, and they are
turning into Radiohead after all?
Then again, if a band that once used to revel
in the still-infinite possibilities of riff-molding wants to make an album
centered around gloom and depression as a central topic, that should not constitute
a crime as such. The real downside is
that, by and large, this new music of theirs just sucks. "These are some
of the biggest, strongest songs that Baroness has written", states a reviewer
on Pitchfork, and many others join in the fray with equally adamant reactions.
What the heck? Am I alone, then, in thinking that about half of this album
sounds like friggin' Nickelback — loud, brash, monotonously distorted alt-rock
with the same dull, forgettable sheen throughout? And the other half... well,
sounds like someone trying not to
sound precisely like Nickelback, but not being very good at it?
The first song, ʽMorningstarʼ, opens
proceedings with a pleasant promise — a thick, sludgy metal riff, some
math-rockish guitar interplay in the bridge section, an anthemic chorus,
signature changes along the way, and a desperate, but clean caveman growl from
Baizley; strangely reminiscent of Amorphis or some other heavy metal band
wobbling between «melodic death metal» and «progressive metal». Fine enough,
yes, but when song after song is unwrapped before your eyes featuring exactly the same style — tempo, tone,
mood, vocal intonations — and when many of those songs, beginning with
ʽShock Meʼ, cannot even bother to arm themselves with strong riffage,
how are they even defensible?
Okay, if you thought the Nickelback comparison
was too humiliating, I apologize (after all, these guys are definitely better
equipped from a technical point of view, and there is no denying a certain
level of complexity required from most of these songs), but still, there's
absolutely nothing on Purple that
you cannot already find in much better quality on an Amorphis or, for that
matter, an Opeth album. I insist that it is impossible
in 2016 to simply put all your trust in a bunch of derivative heavy riffs and
one singer's «vulnerable Viking» vocal style and come out with a non-boring,
much less awe-inspiring album — which is precisely what they are trying to do
here. The only consolation is that at least they did not try to stretch it to
70 minutes.
Unfortunately, this safe, comfortable formula
is very easy to conform to (see my Amorphis reviews for reference), which might
well signify that Baroness are over for me as a potential point of attraction.
I am amazed at waves of reviewers who have awarded the usurped imperial clothes
of Purple with fairly high ratings —
all I can suggest is that they manage to do the impossible and view the songs
completely out of context, conveniently forgetting everything about Baroness'
own past, as well as the entire past of heavy metal as a genre. That is not
something I'd ever be able to do, as necessity drives me to give the album a thumbs down
rating — I mean, I'm sorry about the overturned bus incident and all, but then,
why should a personal tragedy necessarily lead to a public one? At least from
my perspective, this is bland, boring, derivative muzak that totally misplaces
the band's talents and never rises up to the task of properly moving the
listener; here's hoping that, once the trauma is finally overcome, they will
return to what they do best (kicking ass) instead of pushing this crappy pseudo-soulful
grunge-metal on us.
FUR AND GOLD (2006)
1) Horse And I; 2) Trophy;
3) Tahiti; 4) What's A
Girl To Do; 5) Sad Eyes; 6) The Wizard; 7) Prescilla; 8) Bat's
Mouth; 9) Seal Jubilee; 10) Sarah; 11) I Saw A Light.
Fur. Gold. Bats. Lashes. Wizards. Coats of
armor. A girl called Natasha Khan, born and raised in London, UK. Wearing
outfits that are one-third medieval Europe, one-third medieval Middle East, and
one-third Narnia. All I can say is — we've come a friggin' long way from the
world of elementary particles, or even prokaryotes.
Approaching this from another end, these days
it takes real skill and strength on the part of a young pretty girl to choose
her own way when so many not very good people are getting paid to choose it for her. It is obvious that Natasha Khan
is not marketed — no sane marketologist would ever want to market her that way — and it is nice to know that
this did not stop her from achieving not only critical, but also popular
success.
It is also reassuring that approximately 40% of
the people, upon listening to Fur And
Gold, dismiss or adore her for being a total Björk rip-off, and 40%
more condemn or praise her as the latest in a series of Kate Bush wannabes.
The remaining 20% draw comparisons to Tori Amos, Joanna Newsom, Sinead
O'Connor, Siouxsie Sioux, Imogen Heap, and Fiona Apple; to all of these ladies,
digging a little deeper, I could personally add a bit of Grace Slick and a lot
of Stevie Nicks. Bottomline: Miss Khan is an autonomous artist in her own right,
not capable of coming up with a completely unique,
«where-the-hell-did-this-shit-come-from» style — but, in 2006, who in the whole
wide world, really is? — but doing the next best thing: adding a drop of her
unrepeatable self into a big, boiling synthesis of influences that may reach
all the way down to Billie Holiday and Jim Morrison and then stretch all the
way up to Radiohead.
Fur
And Gold is an odd album, not
because it is so self-consciously «odd», but because it's odd that I don't hate
it when I'm really supposed to. Natasha can sing — but no better or worse than
many other girls, and there are no particularly stunning qualities to her voice.
She can play, presenting herself as a multi-instrumentalist — but no better or
worse than anyone with a musical school degree, and her melodies are competent,
but never too complex (she quotes Steve Reich as one of her influences, but
something tells me she chooses minimalist patterns for her compositions not purely as an artistic choice).
And her fetish? Somber surrealism. The first
lines you hear are "Got woken in the night / By a mystic golden
light", and it is not going to
get much better. The case defines «classic»: bright, introvert kid,
misunderstood and mistreated by peers (allegedly, she used to skip class all
the time because of racist issues connected with her Pakistani heritage),
retreating into fantasy worlds for comfort, and now, years later, opening these
fantasy worlds up for paying tourists. This is not exactly Dungeons &
Dragons, but technically, it's sort of close. Why should anyone be interested
in this, except for similar background people — say, teenage girls who want to
be «different» from the riff-raff that is perfectly content with Miley Cyrus
and Taylor Swift?
I don't really know. Possibly because, even
though Fur And Gold is almost
permanently teetering on the verge of Total Crappy Embarrassment, somehow none
of the songs ever really get there — there is always some peculiar interesting
touch that saves them at the last moment. Also, the lyrics should be totally
disregarded. Let us assume they are simply there for the sake of adding
another instrument, the human voice, and also that Natasha really sings in
Urdu, or Quenya, because the moment you start seriously wondering what it is that she is singing about,
you are gone, and no ER team is ever going to bring you back. If you really
insist, let's assume she is trying to remember some of the dreams she had when
she was 10 years old.
But, like I said, all, or most of these songs
have these neat little flourishes. 'Horse And I', the lead-in track that also
explains the album sleeve, in order to be put on record, may not have needed
that looping melody to be played on the harpsichord, or the stern martial drum
pattern à la Jefferson Airplane's
'White Rabbit', or the mind-fucking vocal overdubs coming from different sides.
But when put together, they somehow transcend «creativity for the sake of being
creative» — this becomes a new take
on musical mysticism, well worth tasting even on the part of those who'd been
following the development of mystical motives in pop ever since the 1960s (not
to mention guaranteed to blow the roof off those who hadn't, but that sort of
goes without saying).
'Trophy' and 'Sarah' (the latter — a concealed
bow to Stevie?) redeem themselves with simple, but gritty bass lines that seem
as if they'd been extracted from some early heavy metal classics and put to
entirely different use in an entirely new musical context. 'What's A Girl To
Do' is like The Shangri-Las all over again, arguably the catchiest and simplest
of all the songs here, and so innocent and, somehow, unpretentious that hating
it would be out of the question. (You might want to turn your nose at the
spoken verses stuffed with tragic-romantic clichés, but I do believe she
is consciously paying tribute to Mary Weiss and the girls here — if she is not,
count me seriously disappointed).
Even the lengthy closer 'I Saw A Light', on
which she tries to go for a cathartic crescendo, even elevating her voice to
screaming levels, is attractive — it certainly does not work the intended way,
because her instrumental skills are not enough to create a real «musical
orgasm», and her voice only betrays its frailty when she goes for the extra
decibels; but the main minimalist melody, be it just four notes, has a strange
soothing, comforting quality that you sometimes get from real good ambient
albums.
Also, it is not really easy to categorize the
record: regardless of how many influences there are, the songs seem to have
been written from total scratch, without any particular genre restrictions, in
a mode of total freedom. Classical, folk, Motown pop, art-rock, piano balladry,
it all stops and starts without warning — all of it raw and somewhat
under-experienced, because, for the most part, Khan is there on her own, but so
what? It merely adds to the braveness factor.
True, it's often difficult to tell if the
created atmosphere is really teeming with spirit or is just a hollow technical
creation — especially on all the plodding ballads like 'Seal Jubilee' and 'Sad
Eyes'. But perhaps this is exactly where we should leave it at: Fur And Gold is a lightweight musical
enigma, an album over the authenticity / fakeness of which one could, if one
wanted to, fight a Trojan War and still not even manage to build a proper
wooden horse. All I can offer is my judgement: not overwhelmed, but intrigued,
and for an album with lyrics like those to be even modestly intriguing, its creator must be endowed with talent.
Blame it on the cynicism and blandness of the times that some creators get a
bit too bluntly derailed by superficial fantasy temptations. I move for a
forgiving and encouraging thumbs up.
TWO SUNS (2009)
1) Glass; 2) Sleep Alone; 3) Moon And
Moon; 4) Daniel; 5)
Peace Of Mind; 6) Siren Song; 7) Pearl's Dream; 8) Good
Love; 9) Two Planets;
10) Travelling Woman; 11) The Big Sleep.
Fur
And Gold was one of those
curious debuts that make any attempts at further predictions totally futile.
It had its moments of beauty mixed with its moments of cringe, and, all over
the place, there seemed to be potential waiting to be tapped into. Lyrics too
silly? People don't get born as lyricists, they mature. Melodies too
simplistic? But it's not the complexity that counts, it's the spiritual power.
What mattered most was that Fur And Gold
was clearly the creation of an easily influenced, but essentially
free-wandering spirit. Meaning that Natasha Khan's next move could be just
about anything. For all we know, she could start playing minimalistic
reworkings of Ornette Coleman's material, arranged as duets for sitar and
washboard.
Alas, Two
Suns finds her concentrating on her weakest skill: Artsiness. Almost
completely banning tight pop frameworks from sight, she is almost exclusively
writing in the «moody» vein now, turning into what some have already christened
a «poor man's Björk» — without insinuating that she actually uses the real
Björk as a working model, but she aims her ball at more or less the same
lane, while scoring — quite predictably — ten times less.
The press release for the album has been quoted
by almost every reviewer, because who could stay away from lines like «Two Suns addresses the philosophy of
the self and duality, examining the need for both chaos and balance, for both
love and pain, in addition to touching on metaphysical ideas concerning the
connections between all existence»? There were even some people who took that seriously — the lucky few who survived
the reading process — and started discussing the important changes of
perspective that aspiring young philosopher Natasha Khan brought into our
common understanding of the metaphysical structure of the universe. (Roll over,
Kierkegaard, tell Heidegger the news).
The trouble is, we could all just close our
eyes on this pseudo-neo-romantic bullshit and enjoy the music — if it weren't
for the fact that Bat For Lashes takes it more than just seriously: with each
of these songs, she deliberately wedges
her hollow messages into your head. Two
Suns still shows signs of true talent, but it is betrayed every step of the
way, as she hangs it out to dry, neglecting music in favour of ridiculously
overblown brainwashing.
Crowning it all with her «invention» of an
«alter ego» called «Pearl», which the press release describes as «a destructive,
self-absorbed, blonde, femme fatale of a persona who acts as a direct foil to
Khan's more mystical, desert-born spiritual self». I particularly like that
they did not forget to use the word «desert-born» in this context. Doesn't it
sound fantastic? Overwhelming? Desert-born! (Then again, I guess if Denmark can
be a prison, London — in which she was born — can certainly be a desert).
If you make a really strong effort and manage
to completely ignore the lyrics (including the wretched press release), some
of these tracks may eventually redeem themselves. Unfortunately, this almost
never concerns the brooding rhythmless ballads, whose boring piano non-hooks,
near-permanent echoey hoo-hoos and aah-aahs, and occasionally varying
background instrumentation never really gel into anything special. But once she
drags out the bass, things sometimes change for the better: 'Sleep Alone' is a
pretty little nightmare on the border of Middle East muzak and dark disco, the
lead single 'Daniel' is no Elton John, but still tolerable, and 'Pearl's Dream'
has the catchiest, if a bit annoying, chorus on the entire record.
The jackpot is hit on the last tune, when, out
of the shadows, the one and only Scott Walker suddenly arises to duet with the
pretty dualistic girl on 'The Big Sleep'... for about thirty seconds in total,
before falling back into slumber (as she says herself, "Not even out of my
dress and already my voice is fading"). How on Earth she managed to lure
the man, a well-known recluse, into the studio, I don't know and I'm not sure I
do want to know, but he does manage,
during these thirty seconds, to turn the tables completely and provide the
record with a non-fitting conclusion that is, in itself, more or less worth the
entire remaining length of Two Suns.
But who wants to listen to forty minutes of bad music for one single magical
"How can it be..."?
In short, this is very, very lame. Amazon.com
warns you (or, if it doesn't, it should) that if you love this album, you
probably enjoy reading Castaneda and Coelho, dressing up as Xena (regardless
of gender), and jumping off twelve-storey buildings during your lunch breaks.
If, however, you just love good music, buy this lady a ticket to a Pipettes
concert for a cure. Confucius did warn us, after all, that «Thought without
learning is perilous», and so is this album — I may respect the effort, but if
the effort is wasted like that, what
can I do? Thumbs
down.
THE HAUNTED MAN (2012)
1) Lilies; 2) All Your Gold;
3) Horses Of The Sun; 4) Oh Yeah; 5) Laura; 6) Winter Fields; 7) The Haunted
Man; 8) Marilyn; 9) A Wall; 10) Rest Your Head; 11) Deep Sea Diver.
Well, it looks like nobody was interested in
taking my advice and steering The Enchanted Lady of Pakistan in the direction
of lighter entertainment. Or, more likely, this is simply an impossible task:
The Lady has a will of steel, tempered by everything from severe childhood
experiences to a questionable, but firm taste in literature and other forms of
art. The Haunted Man — so haunted,
in fact, that all he can do now is rest, naked and lifeless, on Mother
Natasha's bare shoulders — is the generally predictable third volume of Bat For
Lashes' venture into the world of sensual romantic darkness, usually inhabited
by pseudo-intellectuals and con people, but sometimes visited by more demanding
visitors as well (by mistake or out of curiosity).
On that global level, nothing has changed.
Natasha Khan has not improved either as a musician or as a lyricist, and her
cherished «artistic vision» has not been expanded from the usual Freudian
muck. There may be a slightly deeper sexual subtext this time — as she grows
older, she gets less shy about letting it out in the open, starting with the
provocative album sleeve and ending with tracks like ʽOh Yeahʼ and
ʽDeep Sea Diverʼ, particularly the former which really sounds like an
invitation to try a new style of lovemaking if you are bored with the
traditional stuff. But it is still only part of the story — in her witchy
world, sexuality plays an important part, yet you do not reduce everything to sexuality. Or, at least,
much of the time you give sexuality another name.
On the local level, however, I was surprised: The Haunted Man is definitely a huge improvement over Two Suns in terms of individual song
quality — in fact, the lady had my attention hooked for almost the entire first
half of the record, letting it drop somewhere around ʽWinter Fieldsʼ
but still recapturing it with ʽMarilynʼ and, for a brief while, with
ʽDeep Sea Diverʼ. Basically, it all seems like a matter of being
able, or unable, to exploit her strongest advantages — a good sense of vocal
melody, particularly contrastive vocal melodies, and the skill of compensating
for the technically weak instrumentation with an assortment of «musical
knick-knacks». Of course, I have no idea how many of the «knick-knacks» Natasha
happens to be personally responsible for (there is like a million people
altogether working on this record), but, in the end, this is a «Bat For Lashes»
album, not a «Natasha Khan» one — and who could properly define «Bat For
Lashes» and segregate it into individual components?
The voice power is probably best illustrated
with ʽLauraʼ, a sparsely arranged piano-and-subtle-strings ballad
that she co-wrote with Justin Parker — the guy who, not coincidentally, was
also responsible for introducing Lana Del Rey's ʽVideo Gamesʼ to the
world in 2011, and the two songs do have a lot in common (sad piano ballads
delivered by femme-fatales with mystical auras and lotsa makeup). But where, as
far as my troubled ears are concerned, ʽVideo Gamesʼ remains a
puffed-up nothing like 99% representatives of the genre, ʽLauraʼ is a
much better song — it rises, it falls, it starts soft, it gets tense, in short,
it lives and breathes. It isn't much of an original composition, with verses
sounding as if they were appropriated from an old Dylan folk number and the
chorus quoting from ʽRemember (Walking In The Sand)ʼ (well, I suppose
The Shangri-Las should be quite a natural influence for Natasha), but even the
stock phrases are screwed together in a lively way — normally, I'd just walk
away from something like this in bored disgust, but here, I thought I felt a
real spark. (Oh, and naturally, the video for ʽLauraʼ has 1 million
views on YouTube where the one for ʽVideo Gamesʼ has 30 million — but
I suppose it all has to do with the seductive wonders of lip enhancement
surgery).
Most of the other songs have «deeper» sounds,
unfortunately, way too often marred by an unhealthy fascination with drum
machines (does she have a Dead Can Dance fetish or what?), but salvaged through
great vocal parts — ʽLiliesʼ is a fine example, if you manage to
disregard the lyrics (about a magical milkman or something). But she is at her
very best here when she opens the tap on the «darkness» barrel — ʽAll Your
Goldʼ and ʽHorses Of The Sunʼ (never mind the titles, please!)
rank with her very best stuff on the early albums, or maybe even go beyond that
level. ʽAll Your Goldʼ, in particular, is a nifty synthesis of a
Caribbean bassline, a traditional pop vocal melody, dream-folk harps and
chimes, and some grumpy treated guitar chords that seem lifted from some faraway
hard rock classic. ʽHorsesʼ is also moderately haunting, mostly
thanks to the great idea of singing the verse melody an octave lower than her
usual range, which then contrasts with the happy-cloudy psycho-pop chorus in a
memorable way.
The «tribal», «voodooistic» aspects of the
album that involve round-the-fire male choruses offering religious support
(ʽOh Yeahʼ; the title track) do not work nearly as well, because Ms.
Khan is always at her best when she is alone — it works much better when all
these «spirits dancing» remain in her (and your) imagination rather than try
and make an effort at materializing in the flesh. But it does not necessarily
mean that she always sucks when going for a louder, fuller sound —
ʽMarilynʼ and ʽDeep Sea Diverʼ both feature quite beautiful
arrangements, even if they are a bit too derivative of all that mid-to-late
Eighties New Age scene. Not quite so with ʽA Wallʼ, which was, for
some reason, «blessed» with a danceable percussion groove even though the melody
itself is anything but catchy.
Cutting this short, The Haunted Man returns me back on the fence about Bat For Lashes,
where I'd already thought that Two Suns
would forever land me on the negatively charged side of it. I mean, ever since
Kate Bush invented this genre, for every person that used it with the properly
input mix of intelligence and creativity, there have been ten whose fascination
never went beyond silly clichés. With this lady, three albums into her
career, it is still hard to tell if she is just a mildly talented phoney, or a
real prodigy that is too hampered by childhood attractions and genre conventions
to let her gift shine properly. But there definitely is artistic merit in The
Haunted Man, although it sure enough ain't in the sleeve photo. Thumbs up,
with caution and patience.
THE BRIDE (2016)
1) I Do; 2) Joe's Dream; 3) In
God's House; 4) Honeymooning Alone; 5) Sunday Love; 6) Never Forgive The
Angels; 7) Close Encounters; 8) Widow's Peak; 9) Land's End; 10) If I Knew; 11)
I Will Love Again; 12) In Your Bed.
Leave it to Natasha Khan, the illegitimate
offspring of a biology-defying union between Joni Mitchell and Stevie Nicks, to
put out a concept album about breaking down when most of her singer-songwriter
colleagues prefer those about breaking up. Other ladies get their imaginary
(or, sometimes, real) boyfriends to dump them and feed on their imaginary (or
real) pain for artistry; the fourth album of Bat For Lashes invents a story
about the boyfriend actually dying on the way to the (imaginary) wedding, and
the girlfriend still seeing herself as betrothed to his spirit.
There's a Tim Burton movie in this somewhere, I
guess, or at least a soap opera with supernatural elements, but once we've
exhausted all the jokes and fired off all the inevitable (and, might I say,
perfectly forgivable) cynical / sarcastic remarks, The Bride demands to be taken seriously — unlike, say, a 100%
cybernetic market creation like Lana Del "A Spanish Name Sound So Fuckin'
Cool" Rey, Natasha Khan had always had that Stevie Nicks ability of
combining romantic artistic clichés with a trust-drawing attitude. Here,
she has written herself a personal tragedy and cast herself as the protagonist,
and dealing on a yes-or-no basis, I must state, first and foremost, that it works, and everything else is ultimately
negligible from that perspective.
Since time seems to have gruesomely slowed down
lately, I should probably remind all of us, myself included, that it's been a
whoppin' ten years now since her
first album (more than the entire recorded career of The Beatles, right?), and
while we rarely expect now to see any significant artistic progression in that
interim, we might at least expect maturity — meaning that some of the critical
remarks about the album being too slow, too moody, too hookless when compared
with the sprightlier, boppier singles from Fur
And Gold (aye, remember the jumping rabbit-headed bicyclists in
ʽWhat's A Girl To Doʼ?), just refuse to take into account the fact
that she is, like, 37 years old now; she can certainly allow a little
moodiness. And yes, the hooks take a while to sink in, but three or four
listens into the record, I have to admit it's a worthy while.
As usual, she relishes in her role of
multi-instrumentalist here, with five or six additional musicians enlisted for
support but not completely replacing her on any of the instruments — guitars,
keyboards, vibraphone, celesta, bass, drums, you name it (Ben Christophers does
handle most of the bass parts, though, and then there's like five or six
different co-producers to prevent it all from going too sloppy). Since she is
not a virtuoso on any of those instruments, clearly, it's all going to be
relatively slow and technically simple — but she has worked out a knack for
emotionally grappling combinations of sounds, and continues to stay in top
vocal form. Electronic and acoustic instruments are combined near-perfectly
and used when and where the song's mood / purpose really calls for them (and
when it calls for something grander, she does not mind going all the way and
commissioning a string orchestra, e. g. ʽClose Encountersʼ); I don't
seem to recall being irritated by any of the textures on even one of the songs
— and for all of the album's slowness, these textures are remarkably diverse,
with guitars, pianos, electronics, strings, bass, etc., dominating in
succession, so that, despite the thematic unity, each track has its own face.
And, honestly, much of the record is innocently
beautiful, as she manages to find deeply touching vocal moves and pin them on
top of those tasteful textures. Even on the brief and somewhat intentionally
formulaic ʽI Doʼ (a moment of blissfully unaware pre-wedding
happiness), she puts some cool happy-sad melismatic touches on the "I
do..." bit — and then, starting with ʽJoe's Dreamʼ, when
darkness and dread begin to take over, she becomes so engrossed in her own
story that it is hard not to be pulled in (I could swear she gives the
strongest "cross my heart and hope to die!" delivery I've ever
heard). The falsetto singing on ʽSunday Loveʼ, the album's fastest
and most (formally) danceable track, ranks up there with the best of Eighties'
synth-pop; ʽNever Forgive The Angelsʼ is first-rate dark folk with
haunting vocal harmony arrangements; and ʽLand's Endʼ, to me, is
reminiscent of Tim Buckley's serenades to the sirens — when she hits that
chorus, with just a tiny hint of dissonance, we have that «uncomfortable
mystery feel» generated in an instant, where, you know, you just have to give a
bit of an unpredictable nudge to your romantic flow and divert it into a wholly
new direction.
I am not saying that there is some sort of
innovative, never-before-witnessed artistic twist here. The story, after all,
is not that complex — you get
betrothed, you get cheated by Death, you go into shock, you slowly get over it,
you finally decide to start your life anew — but then, it might be precisely
the natural flow of it all that gives The
Bride its charm. There are occasional risks that do not pay off — for
instance, I don't know why ʽI Will Love Againʼ needed that lengthy
«synth hum over two bass notes» coda; there's a difference between a record
depending on ambience and being an
ambient record — but then, how long has it been since we last heard a record
that took risks and capitalized on all
of them? Personally, I am already amazed at the fact that an album with such a
concept, recorded by a self-consciously «artsy» UK artist in 2016, does not
suck — let alone actually combining pretty vocal melodies with tasteful and
diverse arrangements — so let us not spend time and energy looking for flaws
just because the flashing neon sign «This Record Demands To Be Taken Seriously»
has got us all riled up.
Overall, while in terms of individual songs it
is hard to single out particularly obvious highlights (something that was
fairly easy on her first three records), as an album — a conceptual suite at
that — The Bride is certainly her
finest, most «mature» and «artistically adequate» statement so far, though I am
not sure how many people will be willing to identify and empathize with it.
Well, I guess if you're a girl and your fiancé happened to die in a car
crash on the way to your wedding, you'll be needing this for some much-needed
psychotherapy. Otherwise, you'll just have to imagine yourself as a girl whose fiancé happened to die in a
car crash on the way to your wedding — which is... possible, I guess. Not that
hard, really. I did give it a try, and ended up with a solid thumbs up
on both of my hands.
RED IN TOOTH & CLAW (2009)
1) Higgs Boson Particle; 2)
Gamma Ray Burst: Second Date; 3) Credulous! Credulous!; 4) Andrew Wiles; 5) Lord
Blakeney's Arm; 6) The Cruel Sea; 7) Shadow-Fucking; 8) BATS Spelled Backwards Is
STAB; 9) Star Wormwood; 10) Vermithrax Pejorative; 11) The Barley.
Science has always needed its home band, but,
for some reason, most rock bands have always either shyed away from science
completely, or drawn upon para-science, pseudo-science, and science fiction
instead (yay, Hawkwind!), or, every now and then, would just borrow a nifty
scientific term or word combination to entitle their latest intricate
jazz-fusion instrumental. Now enter BATS, a little-known five-piece entity from
Dublin, to occupy that niche. (So little-known, in fact, that most sources
still keep misspelling their name as «Bats», resulting in confusion with the
equally worthy, but altogether entirely different kiwi-pop band from the 1980s.
Not that anyone has ever guessed what the capitalization is supposed to mean).
The music here has been alternately classified
as «post-hardcore», «screamo», «extreme metal», «math-rock», etc., sometimes
all of these at once, but, clearly, «math» is the number one association to come up here. BATS are clearly in
love with numbers, particles, rays, arrays, and the theory of everything, and
their love goes far beyond stealing hard-to-pronounce Greek and Latin definitions
in order to make their musical bastions even more impenetrable for the layman.
It simply cuts off the layman. If the idea of spending large amounts of money
on searching for the Higgs boson, to you, seems like a complete waste of the
taxpayers' confidence, BATS will simply whup your ass and be on their merry
way.
With five members in the band, you'd expect at
least one keyboard player, and maybe some indie-style fixture like a cellist,
or a harpist, or a multi-instrumentalist that prefers vibraphones, alto sax,
and authentic guqin. In this respect,
it's all simple with BATS: one drummer, one bass player, and three guitarists,
which makes most of their music dependent on «weaving» techniques — which, in
turn, reminds one of the good old school of post-1970s King Crimson or Talking
Heads, expanded with six more strings. The difference is that BATS also want
to make it r-a-w-k, in the good old
way. That's where it all really begins.
The first couple of minutes on the album are so
blatantly obvious that it's... marvelous:
when was the last time a rock band with artistic pretense would so explicitly
state its message to the audiences, instead of shrouding it in complexity and
obscurity? One looped guitar note, steadily increasing layers of perfectly
aligned percussion, and a robo-guy monotonously intoning "we have been un-able
to i-den-ti-fy the par-ticle seen in the i-mage be-low", before all hell
breaks loose as the entire band, in a fit of scientifico-religious frenzy,
starts yelling "WE HAVE NOT SEEN YOU! WE THINK YOU'RE TRUE!" All of a
sudden, «math-rock» starts making basic sense.
The downside of the band's loudness is that
eventually you realize that, for the last ten minutes or so, you've been having
a splitting headache; you have simply failed to notice it because of all the
accompanying «awesomeness» (put that in quotes, because otherwise it would look
like I'm praising the album with the strongest praise, which I'm not). The
drums are tremendously high in the mix, the screaming is frequently overdone,
and the guitars too frequently put a
higher value on metal than on math. That is a bit of an inadequacy — an album
dedicated to the glories and mysteries of science should not be so much of a headbanger's
dream.
But other than that, Red In Tooth & Claw is an incessant source of enticing musical
ideas, close to a true riff-lover's paradise. Most of the riffs in question are
in a New Wave type of paradigm, except far more «technically perfectionist»
than any of the New Wave kids ever dreamed of: I was all set to write how the
main paranoid riff of 'Vermithrax Pejorative' could have easily been taken off
a Talking Heads record, and then I remembered that these guys are twice as tight in their playing than the Heads
could ever be. (Not that it's necessarily a good thing — just an indication of
how the times have changed).
Sometimes several of these mechanical riffs go
off at the same time (not surprising when three people are playing guitars in
your band), which makes tracks like 'BATS Spelled Backwards Is STAB' hard to
follow, but does not diminish the coolness of the effect. Also, BATS do not
experiment much with the basic rhythmics: if I am not mistaken, most of the
time signatures are fairly straightforward. In fact, nothing on the album is
particularly «complex» per se: the effect of complexity is cleverly attained
through the «weaving» technique — no individual person on here is a superhero
per se, but, together, they concoct a maze that might really induce people to
take them for some sort of virtuosos.
Then, of course, there are the song titles and
the lyrics — through which some might, for instance, get interested in who the
heck is Andrew Wiles, what the heck happened to Lord Blakeney's arm (I
certainly did not remember that one, even though I had seen the movie), where
does the image of Star Wormwood come from and what it stands for, and what really happens upon the burst of a gamma
ray (other than a bunch of upbeat rock'n'roll riffs flowing off in several
directions). The lyrics are not altogether important — most of the time, you
can barely make them out — but they add further coherence to a record that, in
a rare show of mercy towards the listener, lays out its reasons for fucking him/her
up before fucking him/her up.
As a sort of scientist myself, I should
probably feel offended by such shameless peddling and pandering, but I do not.
Instead, I feel vaguely amused — and secretly wishing for these guys to become
major players on whatever minor scene they will be condemned to for the rest of
their career. Thumbs
up for sure.
THE SLEEP OF REASON (2012)
1) Emergent Properties; 2)
Wolfwrangler; 3) Stem Cells; 4) Astronomy Astrology; 5) The Sleep Of Reasons;
6) Heat Death; 7) Creature Collecting; 8) Thomas Midgley Jr.; 9) Luminiferous
Aether; 10) The Fall Of Bees; 11) Terrible Lizards.
Although the official release date for BATS'
second album stands as October 2012, it remains without a «physical» CD version
as late as April 2013, and I suspect that is the way it is going to stay. After
all, it would be in accordance with
these guys' progressive orientation to leave behind the antiquated laser disc
form and distribute their music directly through «luminiferous aether» or, at
least, through a more conventional means, like optical fiber.
In most of the other respects, though, this is
very much a near-carbon copy of Red In
Tooth & Claw. Same unerring, brain-teasing, «polygonal» riffs. Same
nickel-plated group vocals, alternating between robotic announcement tones and
hell-metal screaming from outer space. Same edutainment value in the song
titles, pressing you to learn the latest news on stem cell research and what
sort of (dis)services exactly did Thomas Midgley, Jr. provide for society. Same
maniacal attention to every tiny detail as should characterize the work of
everybody guided by science. If there is going to be an explosion, it has to be
meticulously planned — these guys
have a musical Los Alamos here, not a musical Chernobyl.
Same problems, too. Most importantly,
everything still sounds alike: no matter how individually different those riffs
can be, they all strive for more or less the same effect — to provide us with a
respectable source of headbanging that no high school nerd could be ashamed of
(I mean, how the heck would you want to explain the ass-kicking powers of
ʽHells Bellsʼ to your physics professor from a conventionally
agnostic perspective?). Everything is loud, technophilic, moves at the same
tempo, and even the levels of distortion, which distinguish their Discipline-style King Crimsonian
riffage from their Tool-influenced riffage, usually fluctuate within the
borders of every given song rather than in between.
In other words, there will be no talk of
individual compositions here: if you have heard one BATS song, you have pretty
much heard them all. But if you loved that song — and I almost did — you will
want more, and, well, they are based
on slightly different triangular configurations, even if the angle sum still equals
180°, no matter what. I guess that
some of the songs, sonics-wise, move a bit closer to alt-rock / grunge
territory (ʽWolfwranglerʼ), whereas others feature guitar tones more
typical of thrash (ʽHeat Deathʼ — here is one track I'd be interested
in seeing them perform with Metallica), but that does not mean that anything
here can really be pigeonholed as either. This is BATS: it is, for all it's
worth, a relatively unique style, and they make certain that the trademark is
duly slapped on every single track.
Repeated listens confirm the suspicion that the
album may be, indeed, just a tad
heavier, screechier, and more particle-hell-raising than Tooth & Claw, and also that the song structures may be just a tad simplified — although,
seeing as how this sort of music cannot cry out for mass appeal by definition,
I doubt that these subtle changes have been in any way intentional. In fact, I
even doubt that they have been,
period: maybe my mind is just playing games here, or maybe it is the song
titles that suggest a tiny extra bit of an apocalyptic feeling here (for one
thing, BATS are now singing about the negative side effects of science as well
— "Thomas Midgley, what have you done?" goes one of the refrains).
Not a lot, though: this band is still defiantly «pro-science», and there is
nothing here that could indicate any influence on the part of the «industrial»
scene, with its spooky sonic robots warning us about the evils of all-out
mechanization.
If this sound, attitude, and dedication were
not so immaculately combined, I would probably have to give the album a thumbs
down — a band that sings incessant praises to progress without progressing
itself is a rather suspicious phenomenon. But the punch is so ferocious, the
craft is so... crafty, and the very concept of BATS-style music is so enduring,
that, instead of reasoning with cold, testable, failsafe logic, I yield to
temptations of the heart and, just like the title suggests, put my reason to
sleep and go with a thumbs up in the meantime. Maybe that actually
comes off as an insult to these guys, I don't know. But next time around, I'd really like to see some development —
or else they are only going to confirm suspicions of scientific stagnation.
EP C / B EP (2006)
1) B + T; 2) UW; 3) HI/LO; 4)
IPT-2; 5) TRAS 2; 6) SZ2; 7) TRAS 3; 8) IPT 2; 9) BTTLS; 10) DANCE.
First of all, the track listing you see is
incorrect in relation to the album EP C / B EP that Battles
released in 2006. That album was indeed a combination of their two earlier EPs,
to each of which they, however, appended one new track ('FANTASY' and 'TRAS'
respectively). The order was also reversed: on the album EP C / B EP
it is B EP that comes first and EP C comes next, which is sort of
like the order you'd expect them to follow, but originally, in 2004, it was EP
C that was released first and B EP followed it a few months later.
For the record, there never was an A EP or EP A, either. Now that
everything is as transparent and lucid as the Poincaré conjecture, let
us speak freely of these geniuses of math-rock.
Ever since Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew
crossed their guitars in the early 1980s, there have been plenty of followers
trying to paint comparable musical polygons in the air, but few succeed, since,
without an emotional interpretation, a musical polygon is nothing but firm
proof of the fact that a bunch of pretentious and stubborn shitheads have
indeed wasted a few dozen kilohours of their time learning to play that way
(when they could have spent that same time in a far more useful manner — say,
cleaning up the latest oil spill with a bucket and a shovel).
But these guys, a quasi-supergroup that
unites people from math rock band Don Caballero and alt-metal band Helmet with
the son of Anthony Braxton, truly have what it takes. The soundscapes they
create are weird, but not pointless, and complex, but not inacessible. Most
importantly, it has all the magic of trance without being trance — too
slow, too sparse, too guitar-dependent, and way too technical, of course. Yet,
once you get in their groove, the hypnosis starts working, and the chakras
start opening.
The sound is much more «sci-fi», with a touch
of «industrial», than «psychedelic» — which is quite natural if the music
completely lacks the element of free improvisation, governed by successive
amassment of layers of loops that, however, never mesh in a kaleidoscopic
manner, but strictly whirl around on their own like a set of cogs. But the
more it turns, the more you may get to feel yourself caught up in those cogs
and turning along with them, clinging, against your will, to one of the
instruments. There is something nasty and humiliating about that approach,
perhaps, but we'll just assume it's all in good fun.
Some of the tracks are short one-minute links —
raw ideas, perhaps, that never got the luck of being tested further — but the
emphasis is on the long, drawn out compositions. 'B + T' and 'HI / LO' are so
mesmerizing that it doesn't really matter they have more or less the same tempo
and mood; 'TRAS 2' is the album's «fast rocker» that allows you to switch gears
while sleepwalking; and I even think that 'BTTLS', the record's most vilified
track, does the «imagine yourself trapped in the control room of a futuristic
space station, listening to all the panels and engines» far more efficiently
than anything on those early Kraftwerk albums. Not that it really needs to
break the twelve minute mark, but there is something creepy about those sound
effects — you almost keep waiting for something to blow up at any moment.
(Alas, it never does, although it does get louder towards the end).
The big secret behind all this is that their
loops have actual resonance, and their combinations have even more of it —
they're speaking to each other, like the «low voice» of 'HI/LO's synthesized
bass against the «high voice» of the whining chimes above it. They threaten,
complain, or just mindlessly chirp about like a set of electronic birds;
«math-rock» this may be, but it is as good as any a justification of the idea
that mathematics and soulfulness are not mutually exclusive. It is, perhaps,
too bad that, unlike King Crimson, Battles do not transform any of those nice
sounds into actual songs — they might reach a far bigger audience that way —
but, on the other hand, if it works, it works, so let's not even breathe on it.
Thumbs up at a crossroads where the
interests of the brain and the heart intersect with each other.
MIRRORED (2007)
1) Race In; 2) Atlas; 3) Ddiamondd; 4) Tonto; 5) Leyendecker; 6)
Rainbow; 7) Bad Trails; 8) Prismism; 9) Snare Hangar; 10) Tij; 11) Race Out.
Every now and then, one of the latest «cool»
bands releases an album where it intentionally mixes the cool and the immediate
with the artsy and the meandering, and a large chunk of the critics cries out
something like «Prog-rock is back, but this is just about the only way we could
ever like it!» and then the cool band fades away and the other cool band comes
in and does the same thing in a different way and gets the exact same response.
Had Jon (or Ian, for that matter) Anderson been born twenty years later and
started off in some obscure indie rock band in Sheffield or Oklahoma City, they
might have been luckier with their tattered critical legacies.
With Mirrored, Battles have entered
trickier territory than their much more minimalistic EPs could ever suggest;
the critics paused, wavered, then, for the most part, gave the green light, because,
after all, those guys do not take themselves too seriously, and that's exactly
what matters. How exactly they do take themselves is another matter.
Nobody really knows. But everybody's intrigued. Could this, like, be the future
of rock'n'roll... again?
The lead hit single, 'Atlas', is a little bit
rock'n'roll, for certain. Its kid-martial rhythm paired with garbled chipmunk
vocals is pure novelty, per se, but it is only an integral part of a far more
challenging structure, with buildups, fadeouts, external riffs coming in and
going away, and a jarring industrial loop to finish things off — definitely
more ambitious than just a modern twist on 'The Chipmunk Song'. Besides, it is
hardly typical of the entire album: its chipmunkish hook is one of the most
obvious, as befits the lead single, but, overall, it is simpler than the rest,
and the happiness quotient is way too high. Mirrored isn't exactly a
depressing or aggressive experience, but neither is it an ode to joy.
A few tracks almost sound like a more
collected, rhythmic (and cleaner-recorded) Animal Collective: trippy textures
from outer space to blow the minds of inferior life forms, only set to rhythms
that the life forms can really dance to (most are tricky in terms of signature,
yet manageable nevertheless), like 'Ddiamondd', for instance, or the
shamanistic vocal part of 'Rainbow'. But since the bulk of the band, after all,
consists of real guitarists playing real guitars, we all know these
similarities may not last too long. Sooner or later, the band enters
real-music-playing mode, and then they become the modern day's Gentle Giant.
What they do not really share is prog-rock's
love for dissonance and atonality, nor do they support the ideology of «stop,
shift to a different rhythm, melody, and tempo, play for ten seconds, stop,
repeat, do while .T.». Entire seven/eight-minute pieces like 'Tonto' can stay
glued to the same rhythm throughout, as if they were some inoffensive,
unnoticeable chillout offering, but behind that rhythm, different melodies
actually shift on a continual basis; the peak of this madness arrives near the
end of the album with 'Tij', a sweaty, funky composition, like a fast-going
King Crimson number from the early Eighties sped up at twice the norm.
In addition to still not caring about
«song-ifying» any of their music, Battles may have another Achilles' heel: it
is exactly their lighter elements — the chipmunk vocals, the carefree
whistling on 'Race In' and suchlike — that may prevent many people from taking
them seriously rather than dismissing them as the ten millionth novelty act to
come our way, much like John Zorn's Naked City could have a hard time gaining
recognition with «true» jazz fans for being influenced by the likes of Napalm
Death.
And I, too, do not think that every idea they
come up with on Mirrored is perfect, if only because there is so much.
Nor do I claim to understand what they are doing and why they are doing it. Nor
do I make a solemn promise that I will want to relisten to this at least once a
year, nor would I bet ten dollars on the album becoming a timeless classic for
the ages. But I do admit that this kind of sound — this kind of idea, to
take a bunch of real instruments, make them sound like Electronica, and then
streamline the whole thing into the direction of complex artsiness — is a
solid, and potentially quite captivating, creative achievement of the human
spirit. Will it lead us on to Mars and Jupiter? I am not sure. Probably not.
But it does justify the band haughtily assuming its given name, and for that
particular blistering moment in 2007, that was fairly well enough. Thumbs up — were the brain disallowed to offer
that judgement, what other album, strictly brain-wise, would be more
deserving of it?
GLOSS DROP (2011)
1) Africastle; 2) Ice Cream;
3) Futura; 4) Inchworm; 5) Wall Street; 6) My Machine; 7) Dominican Fade; 8)
Sweetie & Shag; 9) Toddler; 10) Rolls Bayce; 11) White Electric; 12)
Sundome.
With Tyondai Braxton out of the collective
Battles in order to wage an individualistic battle of his own, the band loses
some of the guitar dexterity — but, in fortuitous compensation, also dumps the
annoying chipmunk vocals, replacing them with a few guest vocal spots
(including veteran electronic rocker Gary Numan, among others), but mostly with
nothing. Now they can lay a real
serious claim to being real serious about what they are doing.
Let us try and unravel this step-by-step. First
things first, they continue to have — and now they are moved right up front —
Very. Loud. Drums. If we were to judge everything based on first impressions,
the obvious thing to say would be that Gloss
Drop is basically that Who album that Keith Moon had always wanted to make,
only the others were way too tough for him to capture all the attention. Well,
nobody here is too tough for John
Stanier, who is filling up every crank and nook he lays his eye upon with
crash-boom-bangs of Gargantuan force and Wilhelm Tellian precision. Eventually,
it begins to get tiresome (fifty minutes of getting relentlessly bashed on the
head can plant muted hatred even towards the awesomest of drummers), but it
helps a lot if you decide to sit through the whole thing in two or three small
portions.
Second, the overall difference between Mirrored and Gloss Drop is not quite as large as some critics decided to see it.
Behind the drums, for the most part, we find the same «mathematically» laid out
keyboard patterns that are more characteristic of typical electronic than rock
music. 'Futura', or 'Wall Street', or 'Inchworm' — these sound like outtakes
from Mirrored, no better and no
worse than that album's general level.
Third, Battles prove their ongoing commitment
to merging the accessible with the head-shifting by releasing 'Ice Cream' as
their first single. Co-written with the Santiago-born Matias Aguayo, it is
basically a Latin dance song gone mad — as if all the instruments somehow got
out from under their masters' control and simply go on sparring with each
other. There are so many overdubs and subtle volume level trickery (I believe)
that it is impossible to cling on to one particular instrument or even one
particular voice: in giving it a few tries, I almost literally felt the poor head swirling and splitting, and had to
stop it immediately. They also give it a try on the poppy number 'Sweetie &
Shag', with Kazu Makino from Blonde Redhead contributing lead vocals (or, more
precisely, phantom vocals), but that song has less stuff going on and thus, not
such an immediate threat to one's psychic sanity.
None of this implies that we are about to gain
a much better understanding of or appreciation for whatever the hell it is that
Battles continue to do so well. The album as a whole, in my mind, would make
for a perfect soundtrack to a documentary on cubism, what with the band's
focusing so tightly on quasi-polygonic modelling of their music (and the
geometry can be of an almost hellish complexity, but it's still geometry); but
this still does not answer the question, since it is not to be implied that we
actually understand a doggone thing about cubism.
Gloss
Drop is louder, busier, more
self-assured and dominative than Mirrored,
which bothers me, because if this is
the way I'm going to be dominated in the future, I'd at least like to know what
the hell it is that dominates me? Do not trust any of the reviews that seem to
pretend as if they know the answer. Okay, the Gary Numan-led 'My Machine' has a
lot of industrial boom to it and may
be decoded as, uh, eh, an apocalyptic technological nightmarish
whatchamacallit. Okay, 'Africastle' does sound African in some of its rhythms
and then becomes evil-gloomy in its last section ("castle", right?
Fantasy-film medieval castle? Torture racks? Iron maidens?). Okay, 'Toddler'
is one minute of rhythmless keyboard sweetness. Does that answer the question
«Who are Battles and what sort of battles do they represent»?
Most accounts of Gloss Drop I have read do not ask questions. «Good fun», «cool
grooves», etc., rule the positive energy waves, but I can neither feel the fun
nor get in the groove. With this album, Battles have veered much further into
unknown territory than even King Crimson, whose «disciplined» sound was still
very much rooted in the well-known rock idiom. That is their big selling point — wondering about this album is like
wondering about an oddly shaped alien device dropped on the planet, without
having the faintest idea about its purposes, all the while admiring its
out-of-the-ordinariness. But even the alien device has got a purpose, goddammit, we just don't know it. Does Gloss Drop have a purpose? Or am I
giving these guys way too much credit, overstating their unusualness when, in
reality, they are just having good clean fun?
Whatever the answer, I have never managed to
solve a Rubik's Cube, but I deeply respect everyone who did, which logically
leads me to a thumbs
up for this album. Or, perhaps, it is just because of the drummer
guy. After all, nobody messes with that drummer guy — one bass drum punch out
there is a solid equivalent of a kick in the head by a Clydesdale horse.
LA DI DA DI (2015)
1) The Yabba; 2) Dot Net; 3)
FF Bada; 4) Summer Simmer; 5) Cacio E Pepe; 6) Non-Violence; 7) Dot Com; 8)
Tyne Wear; 9) Tricentennial; 10) Megatouch; 11) Flora > Fauna; 12) Luu Le.
Well, the third Battles album is here, and the
main difference is that this time, they have omitted vocals altogether. Which
is a plus — because they used to know a million ways of making vocals sound
annoying and irritating — but also a minus, because without the vocals, Battles
move even closer to the status of a «pure intellectual construct» than ever
before. Now they just play robot-engineered progressive rock, which is all
right for a world soon-to-be populated with robots, but not quite all right for
a world still populated with organic brains.
That said, in the long run it might be a noble
decision, and not just because the time of our being overrun with robots is
nigh at hand (I have no idea, really), but also because in this way, they have
intentionally and viciously massacred all hopes for a «pop» career in an epoch
when even the deepest and subtlest performers can hardly withstand such a
temptation. I mean, maybe ʽIce Creamʼ and ʽAtlasʼ could
still hope to find some sort of mass audience, but ʽThe Yabbaʼ and
ʽFF Badaʼ, released as singles from this album, will shoo away people
with their titles first, their lack of vocals second, and the "Oh! I
thought they were cool clubbin' weirdos, but apparently they're just weirdos!" reaction nailing the
final nails. And that is okay for the 2010s, a time period where the equation
«popularity» = «overhyped crap» probably holds truer than ever.
Not that it immediately warms my heart, or
should warm anybody's heart, to the music on La Di Da Di. It is consistently interesting and consistently
«classy», but there ain't much progress here: Battles are too clever to
re-write their melodies, but not too clever to break through their math-rock
formulas. It's like the next step after Kraftwerk — Kraftwerk wrote humanistic
music from a robotic perspective, and these guys write robotic music from a
humanistic perspective. And who can really understand these robots? My best
attempts to «visualize» this album see it as a long journey, maybe a digital
one, that a pack of very determined, very tightly focused robotic units
undertakes from Point A to Point B, crossing various obstacles along the way.
In fact, it does sound very much like
a soundtrack to an arcade game of jumping, dodging, and hitting, stretched
across 12 levels of varying length and complexity.
Few reviews of the album find sufficient
strength to dwell in detail on any of the individual tracks, and for a good
reason — of all Battles albums so far, this one has the least individuality on
any of its tracks, although that does not necessarily make it the worst Battles
album so far. I do have to observe that a lot of the tracks are structured like
dialogs, usually between a low-pitched guitar, bass, or keyboard and a
high-pitched instrument, which is probably this band's attempt to avoid
accusations of «pretentiousness» or «indulgence» (such accusations are most
commonly associated with lengthy solo passages), but ultimately it makes an
even stronger point in support of the «video game soundtrack» interpretation —
you can imagine yourself as the high-pitched Hero, and your evil antagonist(s)
as the low-pitched bastard(s) that you have to outsmart. And you have exactly
49 minutes and 13 seconds — ready, set, go.
In this capacity — a fun, adventurous,
bouncy-bubbly-dynamic pseudo-video game soundtrack — I have no problem issuing
a thumbs up
rating for the album. I also like the idea that they are still largely using
live drums and real guitars, instead of completely giving in to the seduction
of electronics: contrary to what some of the reviewers have said, this does not
provide «human warmth» to the compositions (because every possible effort has
been made to simulate non-humanity), but it does provide a certain aura of
realism to the proceedings. It's as in, which one do you prefer, a robot behind
an actual drumkit or a drum machine? I'd definitely go for the former, although
that's just me.
BEACH HOUSE (2006)
1) Saltwater; 2) Tokyo Witch;
3) Apple Orchard; 4) Master
Of None; 5) Auburn And Ivory; 6) Childhood; 7) Lovelier Girl; 8) House On
The Hill; 9) Heart And Lungs.
HE is Alex Scally, grown up in Baltimore,
Maryland, where there are no beaches, and playing guitar and some keyboards
when he feels like it. SHE is Victoria Legrand, grown up somewhere around the
same place, and playing keyboards and singing when she feels like it. Together
they are Beach House. Why Beach House? No one knows for sure.
What we do know for sure is that these
days, it does not take much to be able to create psychedelic-ious otherworldly
magic. The duo's debut album was recorded in Scally's home, released on a tiny
indie label, and still sounds like it has travelled to us all the way from
Wonderland. Certainly, there are signs of cheapness all over the place — the
most obvious and ugly of these is the synthesized pshht-pshht percussion,
which can spoil much of the fun; sometimes I find myself wishing they hadn't
included any rhythmic support at all — or at least bothered to install a
mini-drum set. Then again, these days it is not that hard to synthesize a
«proper» drum sound either, so I guess we have to take this as an intended part
of the picture. Apparently, there are people in this world who like
pshht-pshht percussion, believe it or not.
Nevertheless, many were charmed with this
strange mix of sonic magic and DIY attitude, and I can see why — the music is,
at the same time, complex enough to understand that this is not just another
couple of starry-eyed amateurs overpricing their egos, and yet simple enough,
with even a touch of childish naïveness, to disarm the potential haters.
Plus, although many possible influences come to mind, it is hard to directly
trace the sound that they achieve to a single source, so as to be able to say
«Anyone who is already a fan of [insert some big name here] will find listening
to Beach House a waste of time». In fact, some of the standard comparisons were
downright misguided — the most common comparison of Legrand's singing, for
instance, that you will find is to that of Nico, which would miss the
point entirely. For one thing, Nico is (was) German; Victoria is American, of
French descent. For another, think of all the implications.
(I would, of course, favor a comparison with
Cocteau Twins — but only as yet another example of a creative male-female duo with
their own conception of a musical cosmogony, because musically, there is very
little in common between the two, and technically, it would take Beach House a
long, long time to catch up with the advanced level of the Twins).
Beach House do not strive for diversity, nor
for catchiness; their aim is to set up one specific mood, wire the listener up
to it and keep him electrified for about thirty five minutes. The typical Beach
House song is a three-four-minute mid-tempo drone, consisting of a moody synth
hum in the background, a fairy-tale synth melody in the foreground, and sliding
guitar flourishes in the middle. And the vocals, of course, whose only
technical similarity to Nico's lies in their slightly mechanic flavour —
Legrand often keeps the same note for the entire line — otherwise, they are far
more «human» and closer to the listener. In fact, for all the
parallel-reality-quality of this kind of music, one rarely gets the feeling
that this other world is impenetrable. It isn't exactly inviting, but its
constituency is something that you will probably crack quite easily. There is
nothing on here that makes me go: «What the hell was that?» or «How in
the world did they come up with this aura?» Of course, it is partially
due to the cheapness of the production, but also, probably, to the lack of
excessive ambition. And it works.
The songs flow so gently and, more often than
not, unnoticeably into one another that it is impossible for me to choose
favorites or attempt multiple individual descriptions. 'Apple Orchard' and 'Master
Of None' are probably the best known tracks, and the double drifting of the
lazy old-fashioned organ and the sweet old-fashioned slide guitar is as
emblematic of the band's whole approach as anything else. Why did I say
«old-fashioned»? Probably a subconscious call triggered by a glance at the
lyrics: 'Let's lie down for a while, you can smile, lay your hair in the old
old fashion'. Which, pretty much, sums up the basic message of the album.
Beach House is far from a masterpiece, yet it is friendly, lovely, and graceful. It
is also immutable, monotonous, and boring. But I find that it helps if you
think about it as a lovingly hand-made musical box, produced to accompany some
retroish phantasmagoric show — a hint at which may actually be provided by the
duo's official video to 'Master Of None'. And, just like any such show, it will
hardly charm and bewilder the jaded listener, but it will make his life a
little brighter, if he happens to be in need of a bit of extra brightness. As
long as we do not expect these guys to rip our confined world apart, this is by
all means a thumbs up.
DEVOTION (2008)
1) Wedding Bell; 2) You Came To Me; 3) Gila; 4) Turtle Island;
5) Holy Dances; 6) All The Years; 7) Heart Of Chambers; 8)
Some Things Last A Long Time; 9) Astronaut; 10)
D.A.R.L.I.N.G; 11) Home Again.
If Beach House want to become the AC/DC of
dream pop, they are well on the way with their second album. Nothing has
changed: each single part of the general description of their sound in 2006 is
equally applicable here. This concludes the most significant part of my review,
but perhaps a little postscriptum is in order.
First, they may be a little fuller and plumper
here; after all, a debut is always a debut, and you always learn a little by
the time you start producing your sophomore effort. So the keyboards are more
dense, and the pssht-pssht percussion more muffled and thus less annoying. The
singing is more trying, especially on songs like 'Gila' where Legrand
experiments with pitch, and on 'Heart Of Chambers', where she shows her range
(which actually exists). And they produced no less than three different
musical videos, which is about two more than before. Progress!
Second, I really like the two songs
mentioned above. They are melodic, evocative, and catchy, and just about the
only two songs on the record whose magic actually works. Why, I have no idea.
Certainly not because of the lyrics that typically look something like this:
'In your heart of chambers where you sit / With your picture books and ancient
wit / In that nook I found you / So old and tired / Would you be the one to
carry me?' If this verse looks okay to you, how about the next one: 'Made our
iron bed side cold as graves / So we stoke the organs that may comfort grace /
And they conjured spirits to make you smile / Would you be my long time baby?'
But it is true: my stoked organs do
comfort grace and conjure spirits to make me smile whenever I hear that song.
It is suitably stately, appropriately grand, and mixes traditional melody and
innovative incomprehensibility with enough conviction to register itself in my
mind. So does 'Gila', whose point, as I see it, is to create an old-time
feeling of nostalgia constrained by a tragic — but not thoroughly tragic
— understanding of being unable to satisfy that feeling. Actually, this is
pretty much what Beach House are all about: recreate the future by exploring
the past. Or was that vice versa?
Sadly, the two singles seem to be the pivotal
elements around which I can only see a lot of endlessly revolving filler. This
is inevitably what happens when you record a bunch of same-sounding tunes, two
or three of which are notably stronger than the rest. By including 'Gila' and
'Heart Of Chambers', they made me think of individual songs rather than the
overall picture, and where Beach House worked primarily as homebrewed
enchanting ambience, Devotion attempts to put on slightly different
faces as it goes along, and it does not work. Once 'Gila' is replaced by the
far less interesting 'Turtle Island', you may feel a pang of disappointment,
and since nothing kills magic more efficiently than a good pang of
disappointment, Devotion may crumble right under your very eyes, as it
very nearly crumbled before mine.
Then again, it may not. If you loved Beach
House — and I never loved it — you will never be disappointed by the
follow-up. Instead, you will feel that Legrand's nonsensical lyrics merely reflect
the existence of a parallel world, difficult to understand on the part of a
mere mortal, and that you are ready to accommodate yourself to its living
conditions, even if, as a side effect, they involve listening to stupid
electronic percussion. And I will try to understand your feelings, even if I
will have a decidedly hard time learning to respect them. In the meantime, I
will surreptitiously whisk 'Gila' and 'Heart Of Chambers' off this record and
spoil your fun by giving the rest a mischievous thumbs
down. This is just not my ideal of a good dream-pop album.
TEEN DREAM (2010)
1) Zebra; 2) Silver Soul; 3) Norway; 4) Walk In The
Park; 5) Used To Be;
6) Lover Of Mine; 7) Better Times; 8) 10 Mile Stereo; 9) Real Love; 10) Take
Care.
An amazingly accurate title. Brings on
associations with Brian Wilson's «teenage symphonies», replaces the «symphony»
bit (hardly appropriate for Beach House, whose minimalistic sound is anything
but symphonic) with the «dream» of «dream-pop», and looks as innocent and
simple as possible without looking silly and vapid.
With this title, Beach House make the
inevitable transition to the big time; inevitable, because the sympathy that
they bred so carefully among the indie critics should have eventually pushed
them up the ladder, and it did. Not only was Teen Dream recorded in a
church building (obviously a step up from Scally's bedroom) under the
supervision of well-known indie producer Chris Coady, but it was also
subsequently released on the Sub Pop label — not exactly Warner Bros. level,
but relatively notorious all the same — and hit the Billboard charts. What's
most important, though, is that there are REAL DRUMS! REAL DRUMS! Or, at least,
decent imitations.
As for the songs and the magic — this is a
really tough question. There have been changes, yes, but, just like before, you
have to work in order to notice them. Generally, there is more dynamics; if, on
their first and second albums, you did not usually need to go beyond the first
twenty seconds or so to find out what it was all about, the songs on Teen
Dream frequently rely on build-ups, with additional keyboard and guitar
lines rolling in (e. g. '10 Mile Stereo', where Scully eventually starts a
series of psychedelic trills similar to Cream's 'Dance The Night Away'), or
with pompous codas swelling the melody ('Walk In The Park', 'Take Care').
Beyond that, it is hard to make any
generalizations. Cautiously, I would suggest the idea that the guitar
sound is more important to the effect of Teen Dream than it used to be;
it is hardly coincidental that the album's opener, 'Zebra', begins with a
minute-long folksy guitar drone, and the keyboards do not join in until later,
and even then they form an atmospheric wall carpeting rather than the melodic
backbone. This may actually explain the irritation of some long-term fans who
complained about Teen Dream sounding like «standard indie»: people who
fell in love with the band based on Legrand's ambient synthesizer patterns will
definitely feel occasional lack of oxygen in these songs. On the other hand,
those who mostly viewed Beach House and Devotion as a set of
pretty lullabies might want to form another opinion.
As for the tricky issue of «how many meaningful melodies does the
record provide?», all I can say is that, on the whole, I feel more pleased by
it than Devotion. At the very least, the first five songs all register.
'Zebra' is a paean to zebras — well, not really, but I like to think of it as
such, and Legrand's chorus of 'any way you run, you run before us' is very
evocative in tandem with Scully's picking. 'Silver Soul' is terrific nerd
entertainment if you are hungry for Harry Potter-style magic. The sound of
'Norway' is, perhaps, the duo's biggest original achievement so far: the «wobbly»
effect that they get with their guitar and organ processing adds an extra color
to the already oversaturated palette of psychedelia, and the Norwegians,
completely free of charge, have now received their country's new national
anthem (granted, they could always refuse on the rational grounds that the
song has nothing whatsoever to do with Norway, but why should they?). 'Walk In
The Park' is stately, and I wish I knew what the 'more, you want more...' coda
was all about, because it is beautiful.
Finally, the single 'Used To Be' is their
simplest, catchiest, and most childish song to date — a re-recording, actually,
of an older version that had already appeared in 2008, and, as we now understand,
heralded the arrival of a moderately updated, livelier, jumpier Beach House
(«jumpy» is a much better term here than «danceable», because 'Used To Be' must
really be a great song to jump to when you are three years old). But oh the
frustration! Out of three equally possible options — loving it, hating it, or
failing to notice it — I cannot choose a single one. Loving it seems stupid
(can you admit to «loving» 'The Itsy Bitsy Spider'?), hating it would be
overreacting, and failing to notice it would be impossible, since I am already
writing about it.
And, in a way, this is indicative of the entire
album. Again, we have these two people inviting us to believe in their magic,
and you can choose between faith and skepticism. It is one of those cases
where I almost equally sympathize with those fans who are ready to drop their
tools and follow Legrand and Scully to the end of the world and those
haters who would like to see the duo tarred, feathered, and driven out of town
for good. Middle ground is useless — there is no reason whatsoever to listen to
Beach House if you are not deeply in love with them.
In my case, Teen Dream still has not
convinced me of the necessity of this enamouration, but there are enough
flashes of beauty, and enough signs of growth (as well as delightful obstinate
conservatism, which can also be a good thing), to warrant this from a negative
judgement. So let us say that, while the heart still refuses to open its doors
wide to these guys, it at least tolerates their serenading on the porch; and,
while the brain insists that they still know much less than is necessary to
know about weaving your dreams into music (as compared to the Cocteau Twins,
for instance), it also admits that they know enough to be treated seriously,
and that it will be curious to learn where they will be going to head from
here, if anywhere. Oh, and is this the best Beach House album so far? Well, it
is definitely the first Beach House album so far where I am able to say five
different things about five songs in a row. Maybe that makes it eligible, and
maybe it does not. A vague album deserves a vague judgement. But thumbs up, all the same.
BLOOM (2012)
1) Myth; 2) Wild; 3) Lazuli;
4) Other People; 5) The Hours; 6) Troublemaker; 7) New Year; 8) Wishes; 9) On The
Sea; 10) Irene.
For about forty seconds, ʽIreneʼ, the
last official song on this album, hangs on a single, extremely shrill, almost
mind-torturing note, as if Victoria Legrand finally got stuck in her own loop
and were only too happy to stick there for eternity. This only happens once,
but it is still highly symbolic of the entire record. Bloom abandons any weak attempts that Teen Dream might have to broaden and stretch out the band's sound —
and sticks to the good old formula, tried and true, more loyally than any Beach
House album so far. Not only are the diligent duo not attempting at all to «progress»: on the contrary,
they are doing everything in their power to let us know that here they are, and
here they will stay. Apparently, for Scully and Legrand, this is perfection,
and as long as they continue to make music, there is no need to move away from
perfection.
I do not generally believe in remaking the same
message ten times in a row, and I had hopes for at least another Teen Dream, where you could at least
move from ʽZebraʼ to ʽNorwayʼ to ʽUsed To Beʼ
without a feeling of being force-fed the same meal over and over again. No
surprise that the first reaction was vicious hatred. Again, song ofter song that creeps along at a static midtempo,
rolling over trivial synthesizer rhythms and minimalistic «heavenly guitar»
countermelodies. Again, Victoria
Legrand is playing her role of yer sympathetic ghost from the closet, blowing
mystical fluff into your ears, seductive as long as you do not start
interpreting the lyrics. Again, it
all sounds imposing, important, and impervious, and the listener is manipulated
into kowtowing before the stately, holy iciness... of whom? an exhausted,
depleted one-trick pony? Come on!
Fortunately, once the initial disappointment
sinks in and you realize that, after all, everybody has a right to the «AC/DC
work method» as long as that method is applied to work, not just to dicking around, it gets better — much better. Eventually, it becomes
evident that there is some progress,
and that progress is in Legrand's ever-increasing skill of coming up with
wonderful vocal melodies and delivering them with the experience of a
well-seasoned sorceress.
And eventually, Bloom just emerges as a container of some of Victoria's subtlest
and prettiest hooks. It's too bad that they are never used as song titles,
triggering the memory centers with traditional pop ease. The album opener,
ʽMythʼ, should probably have been called ʽHelp Me To Name
Itʼ, because it is exactly the falsetto transition to that line that
really «makes» the song, pushing it from «simply solemn» to «magically
transfigured» mode. ʽWildʼ should be ʽGo On Pretendingʼ —
there is a deliciously unresolved arcanum in the way she draws out that line,
with maybe just the faintest tinge of irony, but well enough to separate the
one cool fairy from a series of generic alumni of the Magical Mystery School.
ʽThe Hoursʼ, of course, should be
ʽFrightened Eyes (Looking Back At Me)ʼ — and, while we're on it, it
is hard not to notice that the opening aaaah aaaah harmonies are a direct
reference to the Beatles' vocal arrangements on ʽBecauseʼ; not that
this should surprise anyone, since, if there is one Beatles song that could
serve as the blueprint for Beach House, it is
ʽBecauseʼ (yes, yes, here again, John Lennon did it earlier and did
it better, but let us not hold that against anybody). As a matter of fact, the
song also has some of the finest guitar-based hooks on the album as well.
In the end, my personal favorite of the bunch
has emerged as ʽNew Yearʼ. It isn't for much: you can't get «much» of any single song on here, but it
beats 'em all in one ungrammatical line: "All I wanted comes in colors
vanish every day", sung with such humane sadness that it gets real hard
not to be moved. Sometimes one line like that is enough to distinguish the real
thing from the facsimile, and this, mind you, is the real thing.
So, in the end, Bloom is a retreat from Teen
Dream into more conventional territory — but it is like Devotion done really well, with better
production, better guitars, better keyboards, fewer drum machines (the
pssht-pssht effect is still present on a few of the tracks, but most of the
time it's real drums), better vocal hooks, more credible sentiments, and,
overall, simply more mature, as the duo's fairy-tale world enters adulthood and
the protagonist, armed with extra spell credits, is now able to weave the love
magic on an advanced level.
There are still a couple really weak songs
here, I'd say, on which the hooks never succeed in materializing (ʽOther
Peopleʼ, for instance, sounds too much like generic pop balladry, despite
being arranged the same way as everything else), but that is, in itself, a sign
of maturity — the very fact that, with such a similar approach to everything, some songs step out of the background
and some do not means that the duo is now going for something larger than sheer
atmosphere. Also, the silly old trick of adding a «hidden» track after about
six or seven minutes of silence never truly works, because the track itself is
easily the most boring thing on the album — but this probably explains why it
was «hidden» in the first place.
But neither complaint will prevent Bloom from getting a thumbs up
— and that title might even be justified, because you can really feel these two
guys «blooming», self-assured and totally in control over their strictly
limited, but honest trade. I'm glad I did not give in to the initial temptation
of trashing the album. On the chronological scale, it is no progressive
masterpiece, but in terms of sheer craft and feeling, it annihilates the band's
first two albums, which now seem like half-baked, preliminary attempts to «get
things right».
DEPRESSION CHERRY (2015)
1) Levitation; 2) Sparks; 3)
Space Song; 4) Beyond Love; 5) 10:37; 6) PPP; 7) Wildflower; 8) Bluebird; 9)
Days Of Candy.
You know, despite the fact that the sound of
Beach House has evolved over the
years — arguably reaching a «grandeur peak» with Teen Dream and mostly staying there with Bloom — frankly speaking, it's not that much of an evolution. Everywhere you look, you still find
largely the same formula of misty-moisty dream-pop with chiming keyboards and
floating guitars and Galadriel vocals. Therefore, to read that "this
record shows a return to simplicity" in their press release is, to say the
least, dismaying; and to read, just a few lines later, that "here, we
continue to let ourselves evolve while fully ignoring the commercial context
in which we exist" is downright terrifying. Not to mention that, you
know, they are actually selling this
record — they cannot "fully" ignore the commercial context in which
they exist unless they feed on wild fruits of the jungle and drink water from
pure, untainted mountain streams. An impression that their music might convey, for that matter, but then
don't they, like, need to at least pay for studio time?..
Anyway, Depression
Cherry — a rather awful title, if I may so suggest — is indeed a conscious
return to the rather subdued, minimalist textures of the band's first two
albums, where they did not use real drums or, indeed, much of anything beyond
ancient-sounding keyboards, guitars, and the pssht-pssht drum machine. The
question is — why? «Evolving» with
this working pattern is pretty much out of the question, as the music has
almost exactly the same moods, tones, tempos, associations as it «used to be».
Fine, so we have already established them to be the AC/DC of dream-pop, but even
AC/DC could get dull after a while, unless the Young brothers sat down and
crapped out a particularly fine batch of new (if still derivative) riffs. What
about these guys? Bloom could still
grow on you with time. Do these songs
still have any fresh signs of magic, slowly, but steadily working on your
brain?
A few, I'd say. Speaking of riffage, the main
riff of ʽSpace Songʼ weaves a beautiful pattern indeed, although I
couldn't say the same about the bubbly space-synth countermelody that dominates
the bridge section — they should have rather allowed the guitar to build upon
that riff. ʽBeyond Loveʼ also has a great guitar tone — colorful,
sustained, slightly distorted, perfectly attenuating Victoria's vocals. And
the two extended tracks, ʽPPPʼ, and ʽDays Of Candyʼ, have
those trademark hypnotizing Beach House codas — ʽPPPʼ turns into a
fairyland waltz that manages to be completely sentimental and totally non-corny
at the same time, and the wailing lead guitar line of ʽDays Of Candyʼ
is a simple-graceful-magical way to finish the album, but... but...
...ultimately, it's unsatisfactory. All of this
is just way, way, way too safe, cozy,
comfortable, predictable, expectable. All the tricks of the trade have been
learned, studied, reproduced, all the techniques explained and chewed over,
including the technique of always playing the same chord at least twice or
thrice before turning it over to the next one — otherwise, you know, you can
create the sense of «rushed», or, even worse, entrap Beach House in the boring
layman conventions of that stupid old fourth dimension called «time». And
timelessness is the essence of the Beach House sound — woe to him who suddenly
gets the impulse to ask, "oh wait, haven't I already heard this song before?" Before? What before? There
is no before, or after. There's just "a place I want to take you / When
the unknown will surround you" (ʽLevitationʼ). Wait! you cry, I
frickin' know this place already,
I've been in that place since 2006! No, no, they say, that won't do. In the world
of Beach House, there is no 2006, or
2015. "There is no right time", she sings, "you will grow too
quick, then you will get over it".
Coming back to our senses (briefly), I should
conclude that Depression Cherry has its
moments, but that its ideology of «getting back to basics» is flawed to the
core, because (a) this band had never moved too far away from its basics in the
first place, (b) this band had already explored its basics so thoroughly that
deliberately returning there almost feels like an auto-lobotomy, and (c) who do
they think they are — the Beatles on the friggin' rooftop? No thumbs up, thank
you very much, though I do single out ʽSpace Songʼ here as
particularly luvvable. Apparently, all of their
space is dressed in red velvet, and each asteroid is inhabited by its own
native siren.
THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS (2015)
1) Majorette; 2) She's So
Lovely; 3) All Your Yeahs; 4) One Thing; 5) Common Girl; 6) The Traveller; 7)
Elegy To The Void; 8) Rough Song; 9) Somewhere Tonight.
Well, yes, thank your lucky stars that instead of releasing one huge album, Alex and
Victoria decided to split it in two and put out two small packages — because,
honestly, there is no stylistic difference whatsoever between Depression Cherry and its unexpected
follow-up, and the very decision to have it out seems to me as largely a show
of artistic unpredictability: these days, we are so totally unaccustomed to
artists coming up with new product so quickly that «wow, Beach House actually
managed to release two albums in one year!» will probably be a hotter
topic for discussion than the essence of the albums in question.
As for that essence, well... here we have nine
more Beach House songs that are totally typical Beach House songs, not a single
one breaking the mold of Depression
Cherry, which, in turn, stretches all the way back to the mold of Beach House. Same vocal and
instrumental textures, same recycled ideas. Had they had the nerve to come up
with two such albums in rock music's golden age, critics would have immediately
written them off as conservative has-beens, only too happy to jump the shark in
their washed-up smugness; today, both
albums seem to be getting rave reviews from critics who have completely
forgotten what it is to think big, and it drives me nuts, and the only
explanation is that they take Beach House to be little more than a set of
pretty sounds that constitute food for the brain much the same way as regular
food constitutes food for the stomach. A couple hours for digestion, and
then...
...the problem is, why would we want to spend
money or extra effort on it, when we have the old records? Oh, that's right: Beach House and Devotion were then, and Thank Your Lucky Stars is now. This is supposed to be more
contemporary, more relevant, more relatable to the way they — and you — feel
today about stuff. This is Beach House Vista, 2015 edition. Unfortunately, I
haven't quite forgotten the old edition yet, and as a (potentially) paying
customer, I see no serious incentive for upgrading. I want floating icons and
shit, goddammit. I have no problem giving an extra spin to ʽGilaʼ or
ʽUsed To Beʼ instead of saying, "oh wait, I have already
listened to these songs once, have I? What kind of idiot would want to listen
to the same song twice? Now a different
song that sounds exactly like those two, but with slightly different chords —
that's far more suitable for a true music lover's ears!"
Okay, I apologize and will try to atone by
saying a few good things about these songs. (They're actually quite nice songs,
by the way — it's not their fault
that their so-called authors have decided to, like, write them). ʽShe's
So Lovelyʼ is a stately, melancholic, slide guitar-embellished lesbian
anthem (I have no idea about Victoria's sexual orientation, but in Beach
House's fantasy world, the very idea of sexual orientation may be completely
different from our usual ones anyway) — the vocal modulations on the verses
have a strangely tragic aspect, though. ʽAll Your Yeahsʼ starts off
with a somewhat unusually ominous, maybe even nervous guitar line — too nervous for this band, whose emotions
usually run in perfectly formed and balanced sinusoids. ʽElegy To The
Voidʼ must have been inspired either by Mozart's Requiem, or by
ʽComfortably Numbʼ, or by both — and it eventually culminates in an
aggressively howling solo (yes, it must be the void — it heard the elegy, and
now it's coming for you!). ʽRough Songʼ is this band's equivalent of
The Rolling Stones' ʽGirls Need More Respectʼ... wait, what are you
saying? the Stones never had a song like that? well, Beach House never had any
«rough songs» either. This one, in particular, is as smooth as Victoria's... oh
never mind.
I enjoyed listening to the record, but a thumbs
up? You gotta be kidding. These guys are, like, artists. Evolve, goddammit. Do not confirm my pessimistic
suspicions that there's no direction left to evolve. Don't give me these
multiple entities beyond necessity. And do not think you can get away by simply
naming your album after a nearly-forgotten TV show. Or should this be taken as
a hint that from now on, your output will be as interchangeable as most of the
hit singles they broadcast on it circa 1961?
BEACHWOOD SPARKS (2000)
1) Desert Skies; 2) Ballad Of
Never Rider; 3) Silver Morning After; 4) Singing Butterfly; 5) Sister Rose; 6)
This Is What It Feels Like; 7) Canyon Ride; 8) The Reminder; 9) The Calming
Seas; 10) New Country; 11) Something I Don't Recognize; 12) Old Sea Miner; 13)
See, Oh Three; 14) Sleeping Butterfly.
It is said that the name «Beachwood Sparks» was
coined together by the band's original drummer, Jimi Hey, out of the names of
two adjacent streets in Burbank, California, native to the band's founding
father and bass player Brent Rademaker. Whatever be the circumstances, the
choice is brilliant. «Sparks», of course, suggests a psychedelic orientation,
something along the lines of Tommy-style
noise freakouts, which these guys certainly have a penchant for; but choosing
«Beachwood» as a title modifier suggests something earthy, rootsy, and
eco-clean — and is, consequently, in perfect agreement with the band's
country-rock orientation.
The roots of this band reach all the way up to
the «space cowboy» era of The Notorious
Byrd Brothers, Easy Rider, and
such — in fact, this categorization is so obvious that it gets verbally
rehashed in just about any text that
has to do with Beachwood Sparks. It is hard for me to judge in which particular
location on the long line of evolution of that genre they happen to stand,
since I am no big fan of country, be it «authentic» or «astral». However, they
have such a good sense of balance that it is illegitimate to brand them as
«country» — being no foes to distorted riffs, deep folk, sunny martial pop, or
noisy interludes. Steel and slide guitar melodies lie at the core of their
sound, but they have a pretty impressive «sonic periphery» as well.
This pretty little self-titled debut is fairly
charming, if not altogether memorable. The band's weakest point is interesting
songwriting — pretty much the bane of all country-based music, I guess — but
they try, and, every once in a while, come out with a winner: my personal
favorite is ʽThe Calming Seasʼ, with a pedal steel part from Dave
Scher that's just as pretty as a songbird, but way catchier. On the rockier side,
there is ʽSister Roseʼ, steadily galloping along on a lighthearted
merry note, then gradually melting away in a sea of noise before, right at the
very end, emerging once again to a steady country-rock mode of operation. (It
actually seems to be a rip-off of some old Flying Burrito Brothers tune, but
nothing exact pops to mind).
The album wins over through its complete lack
of «pretense» — even the loud tunes are really quite quiet, including the
band's two-part and three-part vocals, harmonizing together in a soft,
high-pitched, semi-whispered manner. The arrangements, which may spill over
into the noisy / trippy without a single warning and just as easily snap out of
that state, are only as much experimental as they can allow themselves without
breaking up with old-timey traditions of melody and harmony — and the basic
idea of the album is a good old-fashioned celebration of peace, beauty, and
idealism, without any excesses or overplaying.
Almost inevitably, the album tends to drag a
bit, particularly in its slower parts. When they really put their backs to it,
the band members are capable of generating a convincing atmosphere — for
instance, on the brief instrumental interludes ʽSinging Butterflyʼ
and ʽSleeping Butterflyʼ (despite the titles, there is not much difference
between the two) where minimalistic steel guitar and keyboard parts merge
together in a dreamy, otherworldly landscape populated with alien creatures
making odd sounds («butterflies» don't really cut it, or maybe they're giant
prehistoric butterflies equipped with powerful sonic generators). But just as
often, they don't put their backs to
it — ʽThe Reminderʼ and ʽNew Countryʼ are downright boring,
with the latter of the two realizing this way too late, when, for its last
thirty seconds, it launches into a fast country groove.
Nevertheless, on the whole this is a positive
experience, heartily recommended to all the fans of a good, not too
professional, but inventive, steel guitar sound, and to all those who like
their «Americana» a little less self-conscious and a little more experimental
than we usually see it. Maybe the idea
of a band like Beachwood Sparks sounds more exciting than the actual band turns
out to be, but that does not preclude ʽThe Calming Seasʼ from being
one of the prettiest soft-rock numbers of the year 2000, so I would like to
present the record with a modest thumbs up. Sure they aren't Wilco-level, but there
is something to be said about the
humble guy who doesn't like taking too many risks along the way.
ONCE WE WERE TREES (2001)
1) Germination; 2) Confusion
Is Nothing New; 3) The Sun Surrounds Me; 4) You Take The Gold; 5) Hearts Mend;
6) Let It Run; 7) Old Manatee; 8) The Hustler; 9) Yer Selfish Ways; 10) By Your
Side; 11) Close Your Eyes; 12) Banjo Press Conference; 13) Jugglers Revenge;
14) The Good Night Whistle; 15) Once We Were Trees.
Everything about the concept of this album suggests that, with a little luck, it could
have been one of the greatest records of the new millennium. An established
country-rock band with a penchant for old-style psychedelia. An «eco-conscious»
overtone. A musical link between all the green things that grow and one's own
existence, a pantheist's paradise expressed in modern sounds, but steeped in
tradition. A suggestive album title, and a pretty album cover to go along with
it, somehow reminiscent of Friends
by The Beach Boys — another record that seemed bent on exploring man's relation
with nature and the transcendence of things.
This is what makes the ultimate reaction so
bitter. There is no way to ignore the ambitiousness of the goals — not with a
thirty-second introductory track called ʽGerminationʼ — but there is
no way, either, that one could admit the goals have been fulfilled. To do that,
Beachwood Sparks decide to move even further away from the idea of writing
sharp, memorable melodies, and replace them with «atmosphere», understood as
«unbreakable tissues of repetitive guitar / keyboard patterns». Now maybe
there is a philosophical idea behind
that decision — as in, plant growth happens on a steady, but quiet and
inobtrusive basis, and so should the music. But at least that idea would have
required better production than what we have here.
The album never really gets much better, or much
worse, than its first real song, ʽConfusion Is Nothing Newʼ. Slow,
echo-laden, with three or four guitars going off at the same time just minding
their business — four different trees growing in their own different ways...
okay, time to dispense with these comparisons. The multi-tracked vocals that
come in are almost totally devoid of expression: they hit the notes all right,
but this ain't even Byrds level, let alone the Beach Boys. Is it pretty? By all
means. Tasteful? No complaints about that. But does it make you feel small?
Big? Happy? Sad? A part of Mother Fucking Nature? One with the universe? One against the universe? All I can say is
that, perhaps, the song would stand a better chance if differently produced, so
that the vocals, guitars, and keyboards wouldn't get all glued together.
Another observation is that the songs, in their
desire to combine elements of «normal» country pop with elements of ambience,
simply end up too limp and diluted to qualify as pop songs — and too poppy to
qualify as true atmospheric panoramas to relax and meditate to. The band is at
its best not when it tries to take the middle ground, but when they give it
their all in one or the other direction. Thus, ʽYou Take The Goldʼ
and ʽYer Selfish Waysʼ, two numbers that pick up the tempo, are
moderately fun and catchy; and on the other side of the fence, ʽThe Good
Night Whistleʼ, with its repetitive structure ("train's going to
sleep tonight, train's going to sleep tonight...") and
train-whistle-imitating harmonica, is as close to putting you in a specific
old-timey mindset as they ever get here.
In a nutshell, Once We Were Trees is a classic example of setting your plank so
impossibly high, all that remains is sit back and hope the audience will only
stare in awe at how high the plank is, failing to notice that you have not the
least chance of making it. Maybe if they had themselves a Lindsey Buckingham in
the band, or any other such master with a gift for melody and playing technique and
atmospheric production, things would have turned out differently. As it is,
they should have stuck with ʽThe Calming Seasʼ paradigm — aiming for
fairy-magical slide guitar melodies that are not impeded by lethargy, numbness, and a cloak of redundant
overdubs for maximum effect. As a not-unpleasant, but still jarringly
disappointing sequel to a promising debut, Once We Were Trees (And We
Still Play Like Ones) gets a thumbs down, I'm afraid.
THE TARNISHED GOLD (2012)
1) Forget The Song; 2) Sparks
Fly Again; 3) Mollusk; 4) Tarnished Gold; 5) Water From The Well; 6) Talk About
Lonesome; 7) Leave That Light On; 8) Nature's Light; 9) No Queremos Oro; 10)
Earl Jean; 11) Alone Together; 12) The Orange Grass Special; 13) Goodbye.
With the kind of fame that Beachwood Sparks had
been able to earn (each of their albums has amassed from 10 to 20 customer
reviews on Amazon, to give a rough picture), one might get a little puzzled
about why this band felt the need to get back together under the same old name,
ten years after they'd all dissipated to test out various alternate projects. A
«Pink Floyd reunion» or a «Fleetwood Mac reunion» or an «Eagles reunion» — that
kind of makes sense, whatever the actual results might be, but a «Beachwood
Sparks reunion» just sounds weird.
However, just one listen to The Tarnished Gold, the band's third
album, is enough to set things straight. This is not a reunion because the band
never really felt apart. What they did was take their own advice and go back to
a tree-like state — that way, no matter how long the breaks between albums,
time stands absolutely still, and the next one picks up where the last one left
off even if the tectonic plates themselves had relocated in the meantime. There
is only one problem: the more time you spend standing still, the deeper your roots
sink into the ground, and thus, ten years of phantom existence resulted in the
band's third album becoming their dreamiest — nay, their most lethargic —
creation thus far.
With the exception of maybe just one or two
mid-tempo soft country-rockers, and a highly artificial and unfunny excursion
into Latin territory (ʽNo Queremos Oroʼ), all of these songs are slow, atmospheric, brooding segments of
psycho-folk, and all of them could be
roughly described as spiritual variations on the theme of ʽConfusion Is
Nothing Newʼ. Except that there is neither any confusion here, nor anything new — the Sparks still
place their trust in tender, caressing mixes of acoustic guitars, echoey slide
leads, retro-sounding keyboard tapestries in the background, and hushed, relaxating
vocal harmonies. No individual part of this sound is ever great by itself, and
when they are all merged together, The
Tarnished Gold is, at best, a pleasing, instantaneously forgettable
lullaby. Listen to it every evening, seven days in a row, and by the end of the
test period you will probably not be able to remember a single song — but you
just might get a week of healthy, eco-friendly sleep.
Where this album fails, as far as I see it, is
in its goal to generate transcendental magic — the very goal to which
everything else, like lively tempos and catchy melodies, is sacrificed without
mercy. In ten years, Beachwood Sparks have not managed to pick up any new
tricks: they think that their three cherished muses — Echo, Repetition, and
Tenderness — will somehow do the job for them. But, like all responsible muses,
all these three can offer is a helping hand — they cannot teach the band to
learn new chords or implement original instrumentation. Hence, another disappointed
thumbs down.
Put it this way: good taste may be a virtue, but who needs good taste if
there's nothing on the horizon to be tasted?
SUNSHINE HIT ME (2002)
1) Punchbag; 2) Angryman; 3) No
Trophy; 4) Binnel Bay; 5) Sunshine; 6) A Minha Menina; 7) This Town; 8) Sweet
Like A Champion; 9) Lying In The Snow; 10) Zia; 11) Sky Holds The Sun.
The Bees are perhaps the best thing to have
happened to the Isle of Wight ever since the 1970 Festival. There are really
but two of them: Paul Butler and Aaron Fletcher, and I like it how Wikipedia
tells us that both «had been notables on the Isle of Wight scene for a while»
before releasing this album — with a whopping population benchmark of 140,000,
there certainly must be some real cutthroat competition on the Isle to become
«notable».
Yet The Bees certainly do not sound at all as
if they would be fit for the cutthroat business. For the most part, this is
wimpy, harmless, friendly music for friendly harmless wimps. Even when the band
«rocks out», they do that to such a blatantly retro type of garage-influenced
sound, that it is impossible to suspect any toughness. Actually, they only rock
out once, on their lead single, 'A
Minha Menina', not even an original, but a rather faithful cover of an old Os
Mutantes song. And the only rocking presence on there is the grumbly riff,
distorted exactly the same way that Os Mutantes were distorting it in 1968. A
thirty-four year old cover... hmm... could the Beatles ever cover anything that
was 34 years old, and put it out as a single? Some prime time old-fag-ism we
have here, no doubt about it.
Dissection time. In 2002, The Bees mostly draw
their inspiration from: (a) yer basic sunshine pop and pop-rock of the 1960s;
(b) yer dreamy introspective pop and folk-pop from singer-songwriters and art-rockers
circa the early 1970s; (c) various black music genres like dub / reggae / funk,
more precisely, those varieties that still sounded fresh and inspiring circa
the mid 1970s. This is an interesting and not utterly wasteful combination — I
am not sure if I have really heard anything thoroughly similar to 'Angryman'
before, with its dub/disco/pop synthesis. But I don't hear any conscious
emphasis on innovation. It's just two charismatic indie guys who are not afraid
that they will be drowned in the sea of all those other indie guys playing their retro games. They just go into that
sea, and swim in it, and have fun. That's the best way to go about it.
Since the basic styles of the tracks are so
diverse, everyone will have personal favorites. It is hard for me to take these
guys as «Serious Artists» (as distinguished from serious artists, who they certainly
are), so my favorites are the numbers
that I feel and think they do best – soft bouncy rhythmic kiddie-ditties. Like
the opening 'Punchbag', whose main hook – "whooh, use me like a
punchbag" – just floats along on a soft cushion of bells, chimes, and
brass, creating a warm atmosphere that only a total Mr. Grumpy could refuse.
Or the closing 'Sky Holds The Sun', whose minimalism should, in theory, already
be annoying these days (I mean, everybody's a minimalist, gimme some Mahler in
pop music already), but still wins my trust because that main (and only)
hummable line is so goshdarn pretty.
Every once in a while, they try to raise the
bar, and somehow succeed by failing. For instance, 'Sunshine' is a slow-moving
instrumental that seems to emulate the romantic spirit of the early art-rock
movement – nobody in the band really has, or is brave enough to show, the chops
for that (indie bane strikes again), but the music still sounds very nice, with moody guitar and organ solos, dreamy
vocal harmonies, etc. However, when they try to do it one more time ('Zia'), with
more emphasis on solo piano work, it already feels a bit like
déjà vu, so no thanks.
'Angryman' is still the best – that groove is
totally infectious, let alone the ominous lyric "an angry man needs
attention", with the best moment hitting around 2:50, when the «soft»
version of the groove is (alas, for a few bars only) replaced by a «hard» version,
with tough brass and wah-wah guitar coming in from the dark side of the street.
It shows that the Bees have a subtle snap next to their omnipresent smile, and
that the snap can bite as hard as the smile can dazzle.
Whether these songs will manage to stay with
you once the sunshine is out and you're in for a long cold winter, is not for
me to say. Like all retro-oriented records of the XXIst century, Sunshine Hit Me will hardly ever take
the place of its influences in the public or critical conscience. But for that
particular part of the public who frequently wonders – what would all these
once-cool styles sound like today, had punk, New Wave, electronica, and hip-hop
not swept them away? – here's your answer. Happy? Join me in my thumbs up.
FREE THE BEES (2004)
1) These Are The Ghosts; 2) Wash
In The Rain; 3) No Atmosphere; 4) Horsemen; 5) Chicken Payback; 6) The Russian;
7) I Love You; 8) The Start; 9) Hourglass; 10) Go Karts; 11) One Glass Of Water;
12) This Is The Land.
«Sophomore slump» usually refers to the
artist's second album being much less impressive than the first, but the
expression can, in fact, apply to different situations. Sometimes your second
album is a failure because the first one is where you have expressed your
long-nourished ideas to the max, and now you need more time to breed and
nurture new ones than the recording business has allocated for you. Sometimes
you just need to step back, take a long breath, regroup your forces, and
whammo, the «sophomore slump» is overcome, and your third record is a new masterpiece with a completely different
spirit, and you become the speaker for your generation and...
...anyway, I'm not talking about the Bees here.
Free The Bees is not really a proper
«sophomore slump». It simply gives you a vector — and that vector points
downwards, at an angle that may be closer to 80° than it is to 10°, yet the
little arrow is definitely not
directed towards the sky, but fairly distinctly towards the ground. It is still
a very nice little record, but it is fairly less diverse and less original than
Sunshine Hit Me, and with its
release, The Bees solidify their reputation as that of a well-meaning,
intelligent, moderately talented retro-oriented band... like so many others.
Will there be anyone still wanting to «Free
The Bees» ten years from now (2011)?
The entire record sort of emulates the generic
British pop-rock sound (teetering towards the harder edge of the platform),
and, occasionally, the generic American roots-rock sound of the late 1960s.
Rough, but jangly guitar riffs; snowy electric organ backgrounds; catchy,
melodic backing vocals; country waltz and music hall influences — many of these
songs could easily mingle with any disc of the Nuggets II boxset and come out with steady B+ tags. Repeated
listens faithfully endear the melodies and, eventually, make them memorable
and laudable. The only question is, what for?
In order to suck up even more authenticity, the
band recorded the album at Abbey Road Studios. And don't worry, they do sound authentic. 'These Are The
Ghosts' greets you with Byrdsey jangle, CSN-style vocal harmonies, and a
dreamy/stoned peacenik attitude that might make you want to locate your old
torn jeans and go out dancing in the streets. Then the mist clears, and,
starting with 'Wash In The Rain', it's basically one upbeat pop-rocker after
another, with moderately funny lyrics, moderately amicable hooks, and
occasional kick-ass passages that take proper care to kick that ass softly
enough, so that you don't confuse them with punks or anything ('No Atmosphere').
The problem is, in terms of sheer power, they do not even begin to compete with
the likes of the Action, let alone the Kinks or the Who.
Oddest stuff is placed in the middle of the
album. 'Chicken Payback' supposedly emulates the bubble-gum-R'n'B approach of
the decade, with juvenile lyrics, vocals, and atmosphere — it usually bears
the brunt of all the panning, but, upon first listen, I was actually delighted to hear it after a string of
samey medio-pop-rockers (at least one has to admit that emulating that kind of
style in 2004 may be an even trickier thing than emulating more serious types
of sounds). And the instrumental 'The Russian' is the only trace of the band's open-mindedness on Sunshine, a very hard to define composition, sort of a jerky
pop/R'n'B hybrid — in the late 1960s, of all people I know only somebody like
Al Kooper might have envisaged that kind of sound, but he didn't.
Then it's back to basics, including the
annoyingly-pretentiously titled 'I Love You' (quite a soulful ballad in its
own right, but hardly a genuine tear-jerker), at least two waltzing Matildas,
and some more folk-rock guitar on the intersection of the Byrds and the Beatles
circa Rubber Soul.
As much as I should looooove this stuff, I just
don't. If these guys have genius, they are dissipating it on pointless
emulation; if this is just perfect craftsmanship, it is even more pointless. I enjoyed the album
every single time I heard it — and now I just don't want to hear it ever again.
I don't even know which way my thumbs are pointing. Too many other questions to
be settled before I can pay them any attention.
OCTOPUS (2007)
1) Who Cares What The Question
Is?; 2) Love In The Harbour; 3) Left Foot Stepdown; 4) Got To Let Go; 5)
Listening Man; 6) Stand; 7) (This Is For The) Better Days; 8) The Ocularist;
9) Hot One!; 10) End Of The Street.
This is definitely an improvement over the
relative monotonousness and pleasant mediocrity of Free The Bees, yet it still does not invalidate the point stated in
that album's review — there is simply no way on Earth or in Heaven that these
guys could beat the impact of Sunshine
Hit Me. Fortunately, they are not obligated to do it. As long as they are
able to sustain the level of fun displayed by Octopus, we can all be happy just looking at them keeping afloat.
There is some movement towards «roots-rock» and
«folk-rock» here. More acoustic guitar, more emphasis on collective vocal
harmonies, a more overtly laid-back, friendly, on-the-porch-like atmosphere;
but a few of the songs carry on with the same jangly Brit-pop flavor of the
band's second album, and a few more bring back the R&B and «Caribbean»
vibes of Sunshine. In brief, it's a
synthesis, and if you have already stated your goal of becoming a
retro-oriented band, you might as well learn to synthesize — go all the way.
Under that sauce, the individual hooks that, on
their own, may or may not be stronger than the ones on Free The Bees, still come out more distinctly. I like that playful
slide guitar on the opening number, 'Who Cares What The Question Is?', quite a
bit — it isn't every day that this kind of bluesy slide technique is used in
the context of an overtly pop song, even if it certainly isn't the very first
time someone ever thought of doing this. Or the harmonies on 'Stand', inspired
by the old folk-pop tradition, but set to a steady, metronomic R&B rhythm
section that wouldn't seem inappropriate in the hands of Booker T. & The
MGs.
Just like before, there does not seem to be
much ideological unity to all of this, except for, perhaps, some sea-related
themes (rather appropriate for a band whose usual place of residence allows it
to see as far as it can see and still see nothing but sea), starting from the
album title (Octopus may be a bold
move in the presence of the seminal Gentle Giant album of the same title, but,
frankly speaking, the name is more appropriate here than it was there) and
ending with the lyrics that frequently refer to seas and long distance travel.
Some of the acoustically based songs could even be thought of as
individualistic variations on the sea shanty thing ("Is there any love on
the harbour, is there any love, is there any love?").
Nevertheless, it isn't the kind of observation
that would be likely to hit you upon first listen: there certainly is no
conscious attempt here to write a musical guide for aspiring seafarers (or, if
there is, it is a failed one). Without any attempts at deep analysis, it is
simply a collection of pretty and, this time, diverse-sounding pop tunes. In
addition to the ones already mentioned, highlights would probably include 'The
Ocularist' (with its super-catchy, heart-warming "It's good to get back to
the sea..." chorus); 'Listening Man' (brass-led blue-eyed soul, performed
in a very adequate and convincing manner); and the anthemic '(This Is For The)
Better Days', with a subtle, but fabulous, funky-pop guitar arrangement.
Essentially, though, there are no bad songs here.
These guys may not know, and may never learn, how to truly stun, but their ear
for fine melody is still undeniable, and Octopus
is just too good for us to make any reprimands on the issue of unoriginality.
They are certainly squeezing the same old lemon, but yep, some juice is definitely still running down the old leg. Thumbs up.
EVERY STEP'S A YES (2010)
1) I Really Need Love; 2) Winter
Rose; 3) Silver Line; 4) No More Excuses; 5) Tired Of Loving; 6) Change Can Happen;
7) Island Love Letter; 8) Skill Of The Man; 9) Pressure Makes Me Lazy; 10) Gaia.
No, no, no. What are they doing? Nostalgia and classic rock worship are one thing,
but crossing Crosby, Stills, & Nash with Atom Heart Mother-era Pink Floyd is carrying it way too far. On their fourth album, The
Bees abandon any «rock» aspirations altogether, and plunge into the world of
acoustic jangle, faraway trippy vocal harmonies, snowy atmospheric organs,
moodiness, reverb, and echo. Rhythm? Groove? There's, like, no audible bass
guitar on most of these tracks. They simply invite you to kick off your shoes,
sit back, and relax. Pot wouldn't hurt, either.
Frankly speaking, this is suicide. Butler and
Fletcher are not songwriting geniuses, and neither are they sonic wizards —
when, for instance, The Flaming Lips were recording The Soft Bulletin, the final product was so overloaded with minor
atmospheric touches, production effects, mixing techniques, etc., that even if
you could not remember the melodies, it was impossible to deny the monumental
ambitiousness and the sheer amount of work that went into it. Every Step's A Yes, in comparison,
utilizes only the bare ingredients. Guitar, keyboards, vocals, echo, there you
go. Add to this the usual nice, but not stunning, melodies; the usual nice, but
not stunning, vocals; the usual clever, but not overwhelming, lyrics; and the
expected reaction is... why the heck did I bother to listen to this bland stuff
a whole five times?
The subversive counterargument is that, on its
own, each individual song is «acceptable». 'I Really Need Love' bops along some
upbeat acoustic strum, the most sunshiny tune on the album, a nice,
mind-numbingly catchy (because of the endlessly repeated title) folk anthem
that gets its required three thumbs up from Steve Stills and his buddies.
'Winter Rose' has this tired, world-weary groove punctuated by the tired,
world-weary brass section and the tired, world-weary vocal delivery. 'Island
Lover Letter' goes for gorgeousness in its vocal/acoustic interaction, and,
technically, gets there, although I still hate the vocal for some reason. Etc.
But overall, this is just mind-numbingly
boring. You'd think that, in the year 2010, humanity would have learned to make
bold steps ahead in the art of crossing folk, psychedelia, melancholia, and romanticism.
Well — you have another think coming. Naturally, the Bees do not speak up for
the entire humanity, but Every Step's A
Yes is, so far, the 2000s' best and most convincing proof of the fact that
«nostalgic» tributes even to «peak» musical eras can be as trite and
forgettable as generic «modern» pop crap. The only difference is that Every Step's A Yes at least sounds
«nice» while it is playing. Will even a single one of these songs be more than
a momentary blip on the radar? Will 'I Really Need Love' ever replace 'Love The
One You're With' in the public conscience — even if its lyrics may be more
«intelligent» than the latter's? Will the moody epic 'Skill Of The Man' and the
gallant minstrel ballad 'Island Lover Letter' find a place on the same shelf as
Nick Drake and Sandy Denny?..
To make matters worse, the last track
unexpectedly offers an uptempo «redemption» after thirty minutes of revved-up
moodiness: 'Gaia' is a calypso-whatever dance number that, being all alone in
that stylistics, feels like a last-minute bonus addition. It isn't particularly
interesting, and it certainly does not do much to perk up the spirits. It just
reminds us that the guys still remember how to set up a dance groove. Uh... big
deal?
Thumbs down in disgust
— even if I do not hate any single track on its own. Take the judgement with a
grain of salt, though. It should not look like I'm saying that The Bees have
lost their talent, or interest. As I already stated, Sunshine Hit Me was the only album in their catalog that tried to
say something mildly special, anyway. It's just that, when faced with a
mediocre upbeat pop/rock album and a
mediocre atmospheric/«folk-artsy» creation, my own dear little psyche will
always go for the former. Basically, gimme a so-so energizing pop riff instead
of a so-so «angelic» vocal melody. A third-rate Beatles clone instead of a
third-rate Beach Boys one. But honestly, I believe that making a successful
«ambient», «atmospheric», «folk-pop», or «symph-pop» record takes far more
skill, talent, and dedication than making a successful pop-rock record. So why
don't these guys just stick to their Octopus
schtick instead?
GULAG ORKESTAR (2006)
1) Gulag Orkestar; 2)
Prenzlauerberg; 3) Brandenburg; 4) Postcards From Italy; 5) Mount Wroclai (Idle
Days); 6) Rhineland (Heartland); 7) Scenic World; 8) Bratislava; 9) The
Bunker; 10) The Canals Of Our City; 11) After The Curtain.
Even if you have only just arrived in Santa Fe,
New Mexico, without having spent an overall total of around two and a half
years in it like I happened to have, you will immediately notice that the town
thrives on kitsch. Being located almost equally far away from every civilized
center in the world, it compensates by sucking in superficial cultural elements
from each of them and regurgitating them in series of some of the most oddly,
randomly, and — for tourists — excitedly juxtaposed sets of display cases in
the world. You may spend all your life in Zia Country, never setting foot
outside the domain of coyotes and cottontails, and still, through the power of
ersatz, travel the globe, albeit mostly in an exoticized state of mind.
Granted, Zachary Francis Condon, who, based on
all the sources I could find, was actually born
in Santa Fe (a rarity, that — up to now, I thought people don't ever get born
in Santa Fe, they just sort of materialize there from time to time), founded
his band and wrote his music through the actual experiences of travelling in
Europe rather than pure ersatz; most, or maybe all, of the places mentioned on
this LP are locations whose air the young prodigy has actually breathed in.
Still, why the heck am I not surprised that a band fronted by an American, consisting mostly
of residents of Santa Fe and Albuquerque, NM, calling itself Beirut (the one
city that Zach admittedly never ever visited in person), releasing an album
called GULAG (how do you sleep,
Alexander Isayevich?) Orkestar
(that's Croatian spelling, FYI), adorning it with a photo found in a Leipzig
library, filling it with songs whose titles and lyrics travel from Germany to
Slovakia to Italy, and playing them in a manner most reminiscent of Yugoslavian
folk music — why am I not surprised that the whole thing keeps reminding me of
that first visit to the Museum of International Folk Art on Santa Fe's Museum Hill,
where the basic reaction was uncontrolled giggle: «so, which two cultures are
going to shake the unshakable hands in the next
display case?»
Nevertheless, even if the kitschy, predictably
unpredictable «Santa Fe Style» mostly sucks (I mean, I am still fond of the
place, but for entirely different reasons), the debut album of Beirut does not. It is not a
masterpiece: the style is way too monotonous, and Condon's pop hook senses are
seriously underdeveloped, or perhaps he is consciously trying to bury them. But
neither is this simply an ecstatic declaration of the «ooh, look at me, I'm so
advanced in my knowledge and influences» kind, the perennial bane of indie
music. Well, there certainly are
elements of that, or else the guy wouldn't probably have included so many
toponyms in the song titles (on the other hand, what a better way to make local
kids interested in European geography?). Yet the basic motivation for Gulag Orkestar, (I want to believe), is
quite different.
What we have here is a young impressionable
artistic mind, smitten with the folk tradition of Eastern Europe and beset with
the idea of describing its own experiences and feelings through the medium of
that tradition. Much as I dislike quoting old man Christgau, he hit the nail on
the head when writing that, in comparison to Condon's Yugoslavian influences —
«contained chaos and wild drums» — Condon's own music is «irrepressible
melodicism tempered by harmonic melancholy». Indeed; Condon borrows the
superficial elements of Balkan music (the instrumentation, mainly brass and
accordeon, and the basic melodic structures) and, rather than using them to
reproduce the reckless drunken debauchery of that tradition, adapts them as
background for the retro-romantic yearnings of his own heart.
Of course, one could easily bring in field
experts deriding us for the clichéd association of Balkan folk music
with gypsies, bears, and frantic bop-till-you-drop dancing in the streets, and
stating that Zachary Condon simply demonstrates a deeper, subtler understanding
of that musical culture than any of us bloody tourists can ever hope to
develop. Possibly, but I'd bet all of those field experts' credentials would
be fairly flimsy. Condon is a bloody tourist himself, and way too young and
inexperienced (he was barely 20 years old upon the album's release, and his
first close encounters with the emulated musical tradition began when he was
about 17) to gain a properly deep understanding of all those things; it is
fairly obvious that he is doing his personal schtick, borrowing the formal
trappings from another culture — much like the Kinks and the Beatles did their
naïve imitations of the Indian vibe with 'See My Friends' and 'Norwegian
Wood'.
But this is exactly what makes Gulag Orkestar worthy of your
attention. The delicate mix of kitsch and sincerity. This is not some sort of
lame tribute to Goran Bregović or Boban Marković, but an original
creation that borrows elements of their music, originally used for an entirely
different purpose, to paint a sort of one-of-a-kind «An American In Eastern
Europe» picture. And even if the songs, with their balalaikas, accordeons,
trumpets, and what-not, all tend to merge together after a short while (I only
find 'Postcards From Italy', with its tender, friendly brass riff, to stand on
its own as a truly memorable composition), the overall impression is
lite-wond'rous.
Condon does not have much originality, but he's
got taste: his lyrics are simple, but never flashing their clichéd
nature, and his singing, admittedly inspired by Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic
Fields yet also showing traces of Andrew Bird's influences (in fact, quite a
few of these songs could easily be passed off as obscure Bird outtakes), is
impeccable on the grounds it covers. He also seems to have his feet planted
steadily on the ground: there is sadness and loneliness all over this thing,
but he never overplays it, drowning in mannerisms and pathos — it's loud, but
still low-key and humble. In short — unmemorable, but charismatic.
I must warn you, though, that I really hated
the record upon first listen. Not being a big fan of drunk Serbian parties and
Emir Kusturica in the first place, I was even more upset when it turned out that the songs were so flabby,
dynamics-deprived, and hookless at that, and it took a few listens to
understand it all contributed to making the experience worthwhile rather than
increasing its ugliness. So beware: if you do
like wild gypsy stuff, this is not
wild gypsy stuff. It's not party music at all — it's a one-man project!
«Beirut» does consist of several people when they're playing live, but in the
studio, Condon overdubs most of the instruments all by himself. So Gulag Orkestar may just be one of the
non-rowdiest albums ever to be recorded in a rowdy manner, and for that alone
deserves a thumbs
up.
THE FLYING CLUB CUP (2007)
1) A Call To Arms; 2) Nantes;
3) A Sunday Smile; 4) Guaymas Sonora; 5) La Banlieue; 6) Cliquot; 7) The
Penalty; 8) Forks And Knives (La Fête); 9) In The Mausoleum; 10) Un
Dernier Verre (Pour La Route); 11) Cherbourg; 12) St. Apollonia; 13) The Flying
Club Cup.
One album and a few EPs into his career,
«Beirut» goes west. Well, technically speaking, it is still east of New Mexico,
but definitely west of the Balkans (where, as skeptical people tell me, Zachary
Condon never actually set foot on his voyage of self-discovery): almost the
whole album is based on the exotic country of France and its pictorially
beautiful cities. The title is based on a suitably random bit of France-related
trivia — a hot air balloon festival held in the early 1900's — and, totally true to the Santa Fe style, at
least one song ('Guaymas, Sonora') deviates from the concept, being dedicated,
mariachi-style, to Mexico, and the album cover, naturally, is an old photo shot
of a Mexican beach. Putting a picture of a French paysage on an album paying
tribute to French chanson? You'd call that
true artistry? What are you, a Renaissance retrograde?...
And, of course, none of this sounds one bit
like French chanson, despite all the accordeons and shit. Condon's travelog is
well reflected in the lyrics, and his admiration for Jacques Brel, France's
biggest cultural export asset of the century, is also on record; but at the end
of the day, The Flying Club Cup
still ends up sounding like... Beirut. Listen to 'Cliquot': they sound like
they're using this brass-accordeon punch to reproduce the structure of some old
Celtic ballad from the deep depths of Condon's American subconscience. Bizarre.
Musically, the album's greatest advantage may
be the smooth, but exuberant strings arrangements, courtesy of Owen Pallett who
is mostly known as the orchestral mastermind behind Arcade Fire, but is also an
accomplished solo artist in his own right; his waltzing intro to 'Forks And
Knives' is my personal favourite moment on the whole record. But overall,
despite the announced transition from the Dionysian wildness of Serbia to the
Apollonic refinery of France, the changes in style are mostly cosmetic. Sonic
texture and atmosphere still preside over hooks; Condon's vulnerably romantic,
several-feet-above-the-ground vocals still bring to mind a shallower, more naïve
and innocent avatar of Andrew Bird; and the whole thing is still so damn cute
and harmless that I do not understand how anyone could ever hate this kind of
music (I think most of the hate letters in its address that I've seen were from
silly people who actually expected it to sound like a collection of French pop
tunes circa 1920 or something).
One thing that is a little annoying is that
most of the songs are taken at the same tempo, and way too many of them ('A
Sunday Smile', 'Cliquot', 'Forks And Knives', 'Cherbourg') are waltzes — okay,
folk music is not supposed to be
diverse, but this is, after all, an advanced individual's processed take on
folk music, and just how advanced can an individual be if he builds every third
song of his upon the same POOM-cha-cha-POOM-cha-cha structure? (Let alone the
fact that the nostalgia-tinted 'A Sunday Smile' may be the most sincerely
moving tune on the album). I honestly do not endorse Condon's attitude
towards rhythm; he seems to be too engulfed in the flow to flesh out the
rhythmic work properly.
Still, by the time Condon leads us into the
grand finale of the title track, he has, once more, convinced me that, in
between the proverbially stale clichés of (and about) French folk
culture and the grotesque, art-for-art's sake, meaningless concatenations of
the «Santa Fe style», this whole thing is about the charismatic inner world of
a sensitive young person, even if that world, in order to open up to strangers,
requires to be fueled by completely random triggers. And so, once again, there
may not be a whole lot of great music here, but there is sincerity — and
intrigue — and that is enough to justify a friendly, if not ecstatic, thumbs up.
MARCH OF THE ZAPOTEC / REALPEOPLE HOLLAND (2009)
CD I: 1) El Zócalo; 2)
La Llorona; 3) My Wife; 4) The Akara; 5) On A Bayonet; 6) The Shrew; CD II: 1) My Night With The Prostitute
From Marseilles; 2) My Wife, Lost In The Wild; 3) Venice; 4) The Concubine;
5) No Dice.
Condon's next predictably unpredictable move
consisted of releasing a double EP whose first half sounds nothing like its
second. For the first fifteen minutes, he is being accompanied by the 19-piece
Jimenez Band form the suburbs of Oaxaca, fusing Mexican talent with Balkan
influences. For the second fifteen minutes, he changes his moniker to that of Realpeople, a pseudonym he had already
used before the Beirut days, and experiments with electronic textures, testing
how the same Balkan influences can be modeled in digital ways. ART!!
What is really reassuring is that Condon's feel
for melody and taste for invention seem to have only increased and sharpened
since his last album. Despite still being severely tied to waltz tempos, he
makes great use of his Mexican troopers, and, for once, the melting pot
approach really triggers an interesting cultural realization — namely, that Eastern
European folk melancholy and Spanish desert-style romanticism have quite a bit
of a common flavour. If 'La Llorona' (loosely dedicated to a traditional
Mexican legend) is almost entirely Mexican in spirit, 'The Akara' already
tries to merge the traditions, and by the time 'The Shrew' comes along, I no
longer know how to describe the whole thing.
It's a funny experience, to see Spaniards and
Serbs shaking hands in such an oddly mediated manner. (Of course, once you get
to the bottom of it, it's all about Gypsy power on both ends — which does not,
however, make Condon's astute synthesis any less exciting). And, on top of
that, both 'Llorona' and 'Akara' feature some of Zack's luverliest vocal
melodies so far.
Feelings are generally mixed when it comes to
the second part. On one hand, Holland
is clearly the most innovative work that Condon produced since the basic sound
of «Beirut» was established in the first place. On the other hand, it is hard
to get rid of the thought that the lad may just be acting cool here, falling
for the ridiculously all-permeating idea that any modern music that aspires to
be «modern» has to make use of electronic equipment. The melodies on Holland are of the usual solid quality,
and at least one song, 'The Concubine', with its enchanted fairy-tale sound,
might rank among Condon's finest. But couldn't it have sounded even better if
the accordeons and chimes were augmented with real strings? I don't know.
Actually, I do know: some of these
tracks are occasionally performed by Zack's currently playing band without
electronic background, and each instance of witnessing that has always seemed
far more invigorating to me.
Certainly the last track on the EP, a crude
dance-pop instrumental called 'No Dice', feels tremendously out of place here.
As catchy as its main hook may be, it is still in the «dorky» ballpark, better
fit for an arcade shooter soundtrack than for a legit Beirut album. I can only
assume that it was a silly joke to test fan patience rather than, you know,
«All of my life I've been dreaming...» etc. etc., the equivalent of suddenly
being able to fulfill your dirtiest sexual fantasy. But, if anything, it just
further confirms my belief that, in the future, Condon would do much better to
stay away from synthesizers altogether. Now that we know that you can do it, Zack, how about getting back in touch with
those Jimenez people?
Thumbs up, though,
because, without 'No Dice', there is still thirty minutes of good music swimming
around, and the whole thing is an excellent and original variation on the old
style. Three more cheers for the synthetic approach.
THE RIP TIDE (2011)
1) A Candle's Fire; 2) Santa
Fe; 3) East Harlem; 4) Goshen; 5) Payne's Bay; 6) The Rip Tide; 7) Vagabond; 8)
The Peacock; 9) Port Of Call.
On Beirut's next offering, the electronics are
mostly out, and it's a good sign. It shows that Condon is smart enough to
distinguish between what works and what doesn't work, and does not insist on
jamming what doesn't work in his
music, just because it's, like, what all them cool kids are doing these days.
Why tamper with a formula that is already
qualified as post-post-modernist, as it takes all these European folk
traditions, fuses them together Santa Fe-style, and then demands that the
author declare genuine heartfelt romantic love towards this fusion?
Thus, the nice Gulag Orkestar-style sound is back, as if nothing ever happened
since then: trombones, trumpets, accordions, ukuleles, etc. The problem is,
nothing really happens on The Rip Tide,
either. It is 9 songs and 33 minutes of niceness — to my ears, completely
unmemorable and completely non-innovative compared to Gulag Orkestar. These lazy rhythms, these majestic brass riffs,
these Balkans-oriented vocal modulations, this lyrical attitude, we've all
received our communion already. Where are the hooks, goddammit?
By putting ʽSanta Feʼ out as the lead
single, Zack probably thought that he was doing his native city a big favor,
but, being well acquainted with the city myself, I cannot imagine it adopting
the song as its municipal anthem any time soon. For some reason, it is the only
song on the record that still suffers a bit from the electronic disease (a
bubbly, poisonous synth pattern acts as its rhythmic base), and, for some other
reason, the anthemic chorus "sign me up, Santa Fe, and call your son"
is nonchalantly mumbled through the nose rather than belted at the top of the
lungpower (which this guy actually possesses in spades).
The rest of the songs, despite being purer in
sound and smarter in design, still fail to register. I do not really understand
what it is: there is no sense in blaming Condon for sticking to the same old
tried and true, especially since he obviously does this well, and tinkering
with the formula may only blow things up. It's just that, somehow, the formula
got stale really, really quick. Where
the sound used to be intriguing because it was so novel, now that the novelty
factor has worn off, it simply becomes annoying.
Sometimes, in fact, I wish that the damn brass
people would just go away and leave Condon to sing his melodies a cappella. ʽVagabondʼ,
for instance, or the first couple of minutes of ʽPort Of Callʼ, when
it's just Zack and his guitar. But then all these musicians disrupt our privacy
— and for what? To set up this band-of-gypsies vibe which doesn't even compare
to a real band of gypsies. Perhaps
it's not really the lack of melodic hooks that I am complaining about, but
simply the lack of fire in this
music. I mean, there's no use in concealing the platitude that most people are
attracted to Balkanian motives because of the reckless, crazy, all-out-wild
atmosphere. The Rip Tide, in
comparison, sounds stiff, cold, and artificial.
Or maybe it is the minimalist approach that
irks me so much? A glowing review in Pitchfork
put some emphasis on how the sound of Rip
Tide is so stripped down, compared to how it used to be, and how there was
«a newfound sense of restraint and stateliness on display here» — a phrase typical
of how little care we reviewers actually pay to what we are writing. In this
case, not only because the «sense of restraint» and «sense of stateliness» are
two entirely different things, and should not be joined together the way they
were, but also because, even if you try real
hard, it is fairly tough to imagine a «statelier» album coming out of Zach
Condon's head than Gulag Orkestar,
so exactly how Rip Tide could boast
a «newfound sense of stateliness» is way beyond me — unless, of course, the
idea is that, earlier on, Condon had lost that sense somewhere on the road, and
now, lo and behold, he's picked it up again. But shouldn't that be rendered
with the word «recovered» rather than «newfound»?..
Well, never mind the linguistic games. Simply
put, The Rip Tide, despite being so
short, has managed to bore me so much that, at this point, I am not sure I'd
ever be interested in hearing a Beirut record again. Then again, it's not as
if Gulag Orkestar shook me to my
foundations, either; if, to you, it did manage to be an eye-opening experience,
I'm pretty sure you'll love The Rip Tide
as much as the general critical world pretended to love it. Me, I'm free to
just go along with a firm thumbs down, knowing that no harm will be
caused — with the major critical success that The Rip Tide has won, there are few chances that Zack will be
reverting to electronics any time soon, and that is really what matters.
NO NO NO (2015)
1) Gibraltar; 2) No No No; 3)
At Once; 4) August Holland; 5) As Needed; 6) Perth; 7) Pacheco; 8) Fener; 9) So
Allowed.
Well now, look at this. Four more years, and
only nine more songs — No No No is
even shorter than The Rip Tide,
meaning that either Condon is at the end of his rope, or he is deliberately
trying to convince us that less is more, and that any songwriter entrapped in a
formula should at least try and cut down his production to a bare minimum (hear
that, Mr. Springsteen?). Keeping in mind that this approach did not help The Rip Tide from being the same old
cud, we should not set our expectations too high here — but, curiously, at
least in my case these expectations have been pleasantly deceived.
As he himself acknowledged in interviews,
Condon began writing this next album in a state of creative crisis — and
eventually switched to a mini-format, jettisoning his large backing band in
favor of a minimalistic piano trio. It seems that this actually helped him to
concentrate more on the «melodic skeletons» of the tunes than on his usual East
European atmospherics; and although the band was back for the final recording
sessions, trombones and trumpets and accordions all in a row, most of the songs
still have a transparently minimalistic sheen to them: the percussion and piano
lines that open ʽGibraltarʼ are fairly typical of the entire record.
Consequently, No No No sounds
unmistakably like Beirut — and at the same time it gives us a fresh approach,
«deconstructing» the classic Condon sound without spoiling it.
Some of these songs I would even warily define
as «catchy», just because the simple, repetitive, distinctive keyboard lines
(such as in ʽGibraltarʼ and ʽPerthʼ) stick in the brain
faster than... well, anything Condon
ever wrote before. But that's fine, it's really more of an attention spam
problem than a sign of quality. What really
matters is that this approach helps the man get some of that excessive
quasi-Balkanian Weltschmerz out of
his system, and the songs become cozier, prettier, more intimate, and
intelligently optimistic — the lyrics seem like they were nonsensically thrown
together out of a bunch of stock phrases from The Great Relationships
Quotebook, but with the amount of air coming from Condon's nose, few people
will make out the words anyway; more important is the effect of combining his
high-pitched nasal singing with those skeletal acoustic and electric piano
melodies, which, to me, sounds very pleasant (sort of a sunnier anti-thesis to
the Thom Yorke vibe, if you wish).
Even without the vocals, the results can be
nice: the instrumental ʽAs Neededʼ is a charming little piece of
chamber pop, opened and closed with a gentle folksy acoustic riff and slightly
Beach Boy-ish in the middle, with the strings forming a series of soothing
musical waves against the relentless, but also soothing, hammering of the piano
— a simple, but efficient example of the man's composing skills, so often
remaining underappreciated behind the brass wall of sound. If, for some reason,
you happen to be irritated by the man's voice (which is a distinct probability
for all «crooner»-type singers), this is the only track off the record that you
will need; fortunately for me, I can take it all, and twenty-nine minutes is
precisely the maximum that can be intaken without the gag reflex setting in —
because, after all, this is a set
formula.
A thumbs up it is, even though it is not at all
clear where we go from here. The man shows no signs of going back to the little
shop of electronica, which is a good sign (there are some synthesizers on
these tracks, but they are used sparingly and intelligently, like in the
merry-go-round carousel intro to the title track); the man has thought of a
good way to brush up on his melodic feel — by clearing away everything that is
superfluous — which is an even better sign. But the man still retains his
"earthy romantic" persona, which means that, most likely, sooner or
later he will still return to the Gulag
Orkestar mode of functioning, and whether he will manage to snap out of the
predictable formula then remains, of
course, an open question. In the meantime, all we can do is wish him some of
that New Mexican good luck.
THE THREE E.P.'s (1998)
1) Dry The Rain; 2) I Know;
3) B + A; 4) Dog Got A Bone; 5) Inner Meet Me; 6) The House Song; 7)
Monolith; 8) She's The One; 9) Push It Out; 10) It's Over; 11) Dr. Baker; 12)
Needles In My Eyes.
The Beta Band's first batch of EPs is
frequently considered to be their finest, or, at least, most «seminal» (actually,
I hate this word) — and it is fairly convenient that, before going on to LP-length
material, they bothered to package all three of them together on one disc,
delivering me from the bother of thinking whether to review them all
separately, or not to review them at all.
These guys are Scots, but they actually
represent the kind of Scots who are fairly happy to get away from their
Scottishness — at the very least, bagpipes are notoriously absent from these recordings.
Their most deep-reaching influences would probably include the likes of the
Holy Modal Rounders, the Fugs, and the Incredible String Band — «psych-folk»
outfits who found fun in adding various kaleidoscopic pebbles to basic folk
melodies. If you think hard, you will discover that the approach, for the most
part of the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, was all but dead: folk music
went its own way, striving for rigidity, solemnity, and authenticity, and the
«psych» bit tended to connect with poppier or hard-rockier stuff instead.
Thus it is that Steve Mason and Co. try to
revive this spirit — take the folk vibe and marry it to whatever else comes
along as long as it's modern and «relevant»: avantgarde, electronica, hip-hop,
trip-hop, whatever works. And, for the most part, it works, because it's fresh
and fun, and at the same time solidly bound to traditional harmony structures.
Do they have a point? No. They are post-modernist goofballs. You are
supposed to make that point for yourself.
The first of the EPs, Champion Versions,
is the most accessible. It is bookmarked by two relatively straightforward
folk songs, 'Dry The Rain' and 'Dog's Got A Bone', that are catchy, «toe-tappity»
and almost obnoxiously friendly — but saved by the lazy, nonchalant,
seductively static vibe. 'Dry The Rain's opening lines ('This is the definition
of my life: lying in bed in the sunlight, choking on the vitamin tablet the
doctor gave in the hope of saving me...') could just as well be taken from some
obscure Kinks song, and, in fact, there are nuanced parallels between Mason's
singing style and that of Ray Davies — even though the Kinks as such could only
have been a relatively minor influence on the Beta Band.
In between these two tracks, however, they
sandwich something a bit more challenging: two odd constructions that combine
trip-hop rhythms with folk-pop guitars (feel the ever increasing magic of the
hyphen!), and eventually become psychedelic jams where anything is liable to
happen. But the challenge is worth living up to, because somewhere in the
middle of 'B + A', everything clicks, and the trip is activated without any
additional substances. The rhythm will never get you off the hook, and the
addition of keyboard, percussion, and vocal harmony levels might unfurl a few
extra cosmic dimensions if you are willing to take them.
By the time of the second EP, The Patty
Patty Sound, the band has already gone off the deep end. This is full-blown
unpredictable psychedelia, also bookmarked by cute folksy ditties ('Inner Meet
Me', 'She's The One'), but this time they rather function simply as brief
enticing intros / relieving outros to the reign of absurdism. Case in point:
'The House Song', which begins with an incessant loop going 'Put it in your
pocket for a rainy day, sing your song and you know you're wrong now', then
adds extra vocal countermelodies reminiscent of Gentle Giant, and then just
throws it all away in favor of a (possibly improvised) rap in pseudo-Japanese.
The fifteen-minute 'Monolith', for the most part, dumps the rhythmics
altogether, and ends up hanging on a deep, brain-drilling bassline while organs
swirl, drums crash, guitars reverberate, tapes roll backwards, seagulls whine,
and records scratch. It is easy to hate the thing, but there is so much going
on that I find myself constantly interested — it is really one of these
love-hate-relations that people can have with unpredictable escapades like the
Stones' 'Sing This All Together', or certain sonic panoramas by Amon
Düül II.
Finally, the third EP, Los Amigos del Beta
Bandidos, tries to find some middle ground — all the songs are weird again,
but they are generally shorter, and less strikingly innovative. For instance,
'Dr. Baker', with its ringing vocals, echoey instrumentation swooping at you
from high above ground, kiddie chimes, and mantraic chorus, would not have felt
out of place on Nuggets II, while the free-jazzy, repetitive 'Push It
Out' brings on memories of the early days of The Soft Machine... well,
actually, it is not nearly as retro as it all seems: with modern
production, modern approaches to rhythmics, and modern ways of genre-mixing,
you could never accuse these guys of wanting to exclusively reproduce the
styles of old.
But, in reality, it does not matter all that
much to what exact extent The Beta Band are innovating, and to what extent they
are merely making us remember the well-forgotten past. What matters is that
these three EPs do a killer job in mixing pretty melodic ideas with odd
arranging ideas with totally whacko ideas about sectioning and developing the
songs. If you want catharsis and sentimentality and find yourself here, you
got seriously sidetracked; but if you are looking for the old psychedelic vibe bottled
in a new, vibrant, ironic post-modernist type of container, you came to the
right place. It does not exactly make your brain think, but it does split it in
the middle, and that sure as hell deserves a thumbs
up.
THE BETA BAND (1999)
1) The Beta Band Rap; 2) It's Not Too Beautiful;
3) Simple Boy; 4) Round The Bend; 5) Dance O'Er The Border; 6) Broken Up
A-Ding-Dong; 7) Number 15; 8) Smiling; 9) The Hard One; 10) The Cow's Wrong.
The Beta Band, quite officially, all but
disowned this record upon release, complaining that they were not given enough
time or money to complete it properly. Therefore, be warned, future listener: The
Beta Band does not, in fact, fully conform to representing the completeness
of artist-in-question's creative vision, but merely presents the basic
cognitive structures that trigger the process of self-realization without
bringing it to fruition. Putting it bluntly, it's a godawful mess, which Steve
Mason has admitted himself.
Then again, I cannot help but wonder how
exactly the band could have gone about embellishing these creations, given a
more generous budget. Turn them into Lenny Kravitz or Ricky Martin was probably
out of the question. Hiring the London Symphony Orchestra would be a better
idea, but «The Beta Band with the London Symphony Orchestra» would likely only
be as good as the sum of its parts anyway. Spending all the extra money on
high-class alcohol and adding a genuinely drunken vibe to the proceedings
would also have been smart, but that would mean the band actually complained
about the record being too normal rather than insufficiently accessible.
Personally, I would say that the Beta's Band
initiation into the world of long-playing art is perfectly fine as it is. A
little tiresome in parts, perhaps; most of the «songs» hang around for too
long, which is confusing, considering that the band members are overflowing
with creative ideas — yet they avariciously hang on to them, only dispensing a
few per composition. Where a guy like Zappa would have gone for
oversaturation, cramming fifteen different melodies in fifty different arrangements
per one long track (not a very recommendable approach either), these people
take their time, hanging each track on one, at most two, different stable
grooves, and then seeing what happens over the course of some whacko
improvisations.
This complaint does not apply to the first
song, though, which may give a false impression that the whole record may fly
under post-modernist banners. 'The Beta Band Rap' does have a rap section, but
only in the middle; the first part is fast-paced folksy vaudeville that sounds
freshly delivered from the ovens of Sesame Street, and the last one is
delirious rockabilly with some mock Elvis/Gene Vincent imitations — but what
they all have in common is that the lyrics, rather straightforwardly and not
without humor ("Since we've been signed, we eat real good / We always wash
our hands and chew our food"), retell the story of the band up to the
present.
But the Beta Band's prime purpose of existence
is not to confuse and stupefy your mind: like their faraway ancestors from the
unearthly paradise of Pepperland, they are here to blow it, and they begin
doing this as early as the second track, 'It's Not Too Beautiful' — which it,
fairly enough, is not, but it is still trippy enough to guarantee a pleasant
journey through the white clouds and bright skies, occasionally interrupted
with dangerous moments of turbulence that seem to have been sampled from some
heavily orchestrated movie soundtracks.
What follows is almost completely unpredictable
— and undescribable. Actually, it is very much describable, but a detailed
description of each track would occupy a few weighty paragraphs of space and
would make about as much sense as describing Bosch's The Garden of Earthly
Delights to someone standing on the steps of the Museo del Prado. There is
a whole swarm of grooves — folksy, funky, hippity-hoppity, even ambient — each
one saturated with whatever turns up on the cards: crazy Keith Moon-style
percussion outbursts, symphonic swoops, cowbells, whistles, tape loops, white
noise, electronically treated vocals, you just name it.
In terms of innovative power, it could be said
that the album could have been a direct influence on Wilco's Yankee Hotel
Foxtrot — or, at least, it independently did pretty much the same thing
that Jeff Tweedy and the boys came up with two years later. When Steve Mason
sings "Once upon a time I was falling apart, now I'm always falling in
love" in the monotonous, but seductive refrain to 'The Hard One', he
pretty much sounds like Tweedy — but, more than that, what they are doing
is taking the age-old folk-pop singer-songwriting vibe and dipping it into a
complex psychedelic-electronic sauce, exactly the kind of thing that tracks
like 'I Am Trying To Break Your Heart' would be lauded for in a very short
while. It's simply that 'The Hard One' is less catchy and more befuddling in
its structure — but this should not make it any less deserving of attention.
With albums like these, the obligatory question
is always «Would this sound better if I were on drugs?» Fortunately, I cannot
answer this based on personal experience; but if there ever was an argument
that psychedelic music as such puts together a grander, more diverse and
exciting universe than any amount of drugs could ever hope to, The Beta
Band are its chief proponents in the modern age. At least, their
psychedelia leaves plenty of space for humour, dancing, and basic human
emotions. Listening to this on drugs could, in fact, close your mind to
many of this album's charms rather than the opposite. It is quite a brainy
experience, and so the brain takes the lead in awarding it a brainy thumbs up, while the heart still cannot help but
see this as a slight letdown after the pleasures of 'Dry The Rain' and 'Dog's
Got A Bone'.
HOT SHOTS II (2001)
1) Squares; 2) Al Sharp; 3)
Human Being; 4) Gone; 5) Dragon; 6) Broke; 7) Quiet; 8) Alleged; 9) Life; 10)
Eclipse.
A strange band indeed: first, they complain
that the industry people would not let them turn their unfinished demos into
fully shaped songs — then, finally given complete creative freedom, release a
collection of songs that really sound far more like demos than songs. I
guess if this reminds you of the typical behaviour of a capricious little kid,
that's because The Beta Band have always had this capricious little kid inside
them. That's an essential part of their recipe.
Hot Shots II is crazy, spacy, and seriously minimalistic. This time around, there is
no getting side-tracked from the main groove, which is very sharply pronounced
on each individual track. There is also no more fair use for the term
«post-modern» when discussing this music. Regardless of the actual personal
beliefs and values of the band's members, the music they create no
longer confounds genres and challenges the rules for the sake of the challenge:
yes, it is an intentional merger of trip-hop rhythms with old time psychedelia,
but it feels like a sincere synthesis, a heartfelt attempt at blowing the
minds of the young generation by giving them a familiar setting stuffed with
acid-fuelled idealism from days long gone by.
The younger generation did not buy into it as
energetically as they hoped, but Hot Shots II still climbed reasonably
high up the charts, and why shouldn't it have? Most of this stuff is
attention-grabbing, and also pretty accessible. Why deny something like
'Squares', when its head-bobbing rhythm, astral guitar hooks, and singalong
vocal melody are as commercial as they come? The opening lines — 'I seen the
demons, but they didn't make a sound / They tried to reach me, but I lay upon
the ground' — show signs of an uncozy disturbance, but rarely over the course
of this album does it become uncozy to the point of putting the record in a
different rating category.
There are traces of darker darkness, but timid
ones, and also beautiful in their timidity — e. g., the gloomy ballad 'Gone',
where the «deep»-sounding guitars and sparse minor piano chords define the very
idea of light, but pervasive sadness. Check the lyrics and you will find that
the protagonist "fell from a spaceship" and "was taken for a
little ride" — of course; this whole album was, most likely, created by
people who fell from a spaceship and bumped their heads real hard — but,
truth is, the song would have just as easily fit onto a Tim Buckley album, to
name but one old-timey candidate. Just a good old moody ballad.
Timid, yes, but if there is one particular
direction in which the Betas were evolving, it is «doom and gloom». In terms of
instrumentation, the entire album is light, but the mood it sets is anything
but; on one side, the record is bookmarked with 'Squares' and their "I
seen the demons", and on the other side we get pricked equally hard with
'Life': "I went to look for shadows, but the shadows they found me... I
want to be somebody else, I feel I won't be free — is this me for life?"
and they loop the last question to the sound of rough, unpleasant synth grunts,
too. 'Dragon' gets us high in the sky, cooking up images of psychedelic
revelations ("I never been the type to sing all night but
AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!"), but midway through dissolves into a sea of growling
keyboard noises accompanied with the telling refrain: "How the West was
won is a lie — but it's made to sound like fun...". So when the record
finally comes to a close with the bright, innocent, seductively deranged 'Eclipse'
("We all live together on a little round ball, we all sing together when
the cuckoo calls"), it is almost like an apology for the pessimistic vibe
of the rest — one that smoothes the side effects, but does not wipe them out
entirely.
It should, however, be noted that all these
things only float out very slowly on repeated listens. With all the minimalism
and subdued atmosphere, Hot Shots II defies, denies, and self-parodies
its title — this album is as far removed from «hot» as the average portrait of
America's First Ladies. To some, it will rather be «tepid» — devoid of
aggressive, rousing moments, but not nearly quiet enough to truly count as
«ambient»; and «tepid» is clearly a negative assessment. Give it a little time
to sink in, though, and you just might get to like these strange furry animals
from outer space showing signs of troubled longing for their original homeland.
They got the bug, see? Spot the bug, and see why it has forced me to give the
album a thumbs up. Unfortunately (or,
rather, fortunately), I don't have the bug myself, so it is only the brain
part that reacts positively. But who knows — you may have it, and then
Hot Shots II will no longer be just «tepid» to you.
HEROES TO ZEROS (2004)
1) Assessment; 2) Space; 3)
Lion Thief; 4) Easy; 5) Wonderful; 6) Troubles; 7) Out-Side; 8) Space Beatle;
9) Rhododendron; 10) Liquid Bird; 11) Simple; 12) Pure For.
Artists are rarely capable of taking off from
the exact location of their artistic muse. More often than not, it takes them
at least a few years and a few personal crises to get there — not everyone can
be Jim Morrison or Angus Young. When The Beta Band released their first set of
E.P.s, critics fell over themselves praising their freshness and inspiration,
but nobody asked the question: what are these guys, and what do they really
care about? Like, it is obvious they are busy piling up these loops and mixing
up these styles because they want to push forward musical boundaries, but what
will they be when they get bored with pushing forward?
Well, now we know. The evolutionary
curve has come to end, and on their last album The Beta Band have given
themselves away: all they really wanted all along was to sing tender
space-pop songs. The loops, the squeaks, the hip-hop trappings, the genre-hopping,
none of that was in their blood — they were simply too smart not to try it out.
But, six years into their career, they became tired of being smart. It did not
pay off too well, and it prevented them from gladdening the heart. So they
recorded Heroes To Zeros to gladden their heart. Then they broke up.
Each following Beta Band album is more
accessible than the previous one; consequently, most fans of the band are split
into those who rank their albums best-to-worst in ascending chronological
order, and vice versa. I would probably join the ranks of the former, thinking
more highly of The Beta Band at their most «gimmicky» (read: «intelligent»)
than at their most «honest» — if only because Steve Mason is not that great a
songwriter to be able to get by on the bare strength of his basic melodic
ideas. But this does not mean Heroes To Zeros is a failure — only that
it tends to feel a bit bland when you arrive at it from the past.
The age of the free groove is over; these are
three-to-four minute songs that sometimes (not too often) mutate into mantras,
but more often follow the conventional verse-chorus structures. Out of all the
innumerable ingredients of days gone by, the band concentrates on just two: folk-rock
melodicity and «astral» arrangements — think some of the early Pink Floyd
compositions, but without the depressive aspects. The album opener,
'Assessment', greets you with echoey droning guitars, floating vocals, a steady
rhythmic punch and a chaotic coda, firmly anchored to the spirit of Nuggets
II, and it does not get tremendously different from there.
With everything being so simple, one can only
talk about the ratio of beautiful-to-forgettable on the record, renouncing the
effort to find and elaborate some overall grand statement. Well, 'Wonderful'
is certainly true to its title: a pompous shimmering anthem to beauty, great
magical ringing guitar tone, tender romantic vocal, what's not to like?
Terrific percussion arrangement on 'Space', making the 'Start is the end, more
or less' part of the song one of the most clinging moments on the album.
Masterful paranoid atmosphere on 'Liquid Bird'; jangly Byrds-style guitars
complemented by Cocteau Twins-style background noises. Etc. etc.
Still, count me dissatisfied. Do we really want
Steve Mason to open up his 2001 Space Odyssey-fuelled (I was going to
write «Star Trek-fuelled», but we do not want to alienate all the snobby
readers, do we?) heart to us? There are moments of beauty and power on
this record, but much more often it simply strives for beauty and power,
stopping short a few inches away from the acceptable levels. And this is
exactly where a little bit of unpredictable genre-hopping could have helped,
but, apparently, they are through with genre-hopping. Too bad: looks like the
world was through with The Beta Band, in return. Decent album, but my thumbs
are stuck in a strictly horizontal position about it. This is no longer The
Beta Band that we used to know, and it is only fair that this was its last
album.
THE ALIENS
ASTRONOMY FOR DOGS (2007)
1) Setting Sun; 2) Robot Man; 3) I Am The
Unknown; 4) Tomorrow; 5) Rox; 6) Only Waiting; 7) She Don't Love Me; 8) Glover;
9) Honest Again; 10) The
Happy Song; 11) Caravan.
Among the founding fathers of The Beta Band one
used to find musician and composer Gordon Anderson, a fully active member right
until the recording of the first of the band's three EPs, upon which he left the
band due to health conditions. Upon recovery, it was already too late to come
back, so he bitterly rechristened himself «The Lone Pigeon» and began recording
critically acclaimed and publicly unknown self-produced and self-released solo
albums. Most probably, he would still be as lone as ever, if not for The Beta
Band's eventual dissipation — upon which two unemployed members, keyboardist
John Maclean and drummer Robin Jones, not wishing to till the earth or sell car
polish for the rest of their lives, suggested a reunion with Anderson in order
to explore their destiny a bit further.
Calling themselves The Aliens was perhaps a
little too far-fetched, because the music they set out to create is even less
whacked out than The Beta Band's. Had Astronomy For Dogs come out in the
era of Sgt. Pepper and The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, they might
have succeeded in blowing everybody's minds to the same degree. As it is, it
merely feels like a tribute — a sincere memento, dedicated to the 40th jubilee
of both these albums; and the name of «The Aliens» feels like a carnival
gesture, much like XTC's alter-ego of «Dukes Of Stratosphear» in their own
time. When the carnival is over, everyone just goes home.
However, as a tribute, Astronomy For Dogs
is a perfect success. Except for the final psychojam of 'Caravan', stretching
well over twelve minutes, the tunes are big, jangly, shimmering slabs of
psychedelic pop, drawing upon the juices of not only early Pink Floyd and the
Beatles, but also the Moody Blues, the Byrds, Love, and various other minor
British and American art-rock bands of the era. No fan of those styles will be
disappointed, or, at least, feel entitled to say that these guys do not know
how to recreate those vibes with perfect precision.
But at the same time, Astronomy is a
difficult record. It is skilfully bookmarked by two lively rockers — the
ecstatic 'Setting Sun', steeped in screeching guitars and garage rhythms, and
the psycho-bop of 'The Happy Song', whose '1-2-3-4' count at the beginning is
clearly an homage to 'I Saw Her Standing There' but whose happy-happy-happy
melody surely implies a reverence for substances that began to influence music
a few years after 1963. These two songs are immediately memorable and
good proof of Anderson's songwriting abilities.
The stuff in between, however, is far less
trivial. Most of the songs are long, ranging from five to eight minutes, and
there is a lot going on there. Arrangements are dense, mostly guitars and keyboards
with few extraneous instruments, but lots of those; sections are generally
multiple, with time signature changes all over the place and constant recurring
motives (such as chants of "we are The Aliens..." and "I am the
robot man...") — and it does not trouble them at all to go from Western to
Eastern modalities within one song, or to incorporate some very modern
electronica-based parts when they feel the need ('Rox' — all of that and more).
A song may start out in a music-hall Ray Davies style, transform into a barrage
of 'Astronomy Domine'-type noises in the middle, and fizzle out as a madhouse
mantra at the end ('Glover'). And, as 'Caravan' shows, they do not use song
length as a tool for solidifying their grooves; they use it as a pretext to
string together a cartload of half-finished ideas.
All this means is that a serious judgement of Astronomy
For Dogs (is it just a tribute? is it entirely derivative? if yes, does
this mean it is not a classic? if no, what is the real depth of its artistic vision?..)
cannot be pronounced quickly. It has so much going for it, so many disparate
elements synthesized in one barrel that is bursting at the seams, that it might
be necessary to memorize all of it before one can answer if all of these
elements really deserved being put in that one barrel — at which point, most
likely, the answer will already be bound to be positive. Maybe «The Lone
Pigeon» is simply indulging in nostalgia rather than continuing the naïve
explorations of his Sixties' idols; that is not for me to decide. But even if
he is, he swarms us so much with all the side products of this nostalgia that
the very process of arranging them on your own brain shelves will keep you up
for a long, long time. And what is wrong with music that stimulates brain
activity? Thumbs up, says the brain to the
entire experience — and the heart, having been properly bribed with the
effervescence of 'The Happy Song', is too confused to object.
LUNA (2008)
1) Bobby's Song; 2) Amen; 3)
Theremin; 4) Everyone; 5) Magic
Man; 6) Billy Jack; 7) Luna; 8) Dove Returning; 9) Sunlamp Show; 10) Smoggy
Bog; 11) Daffodils; 12) Boats; 13) Blue Mantle.
I would like to be able to put the «rushed» tag
on this record (in the 2000s, normal people do not release one new album per
year, giving a lengthy, ample, modest, and politically correct chance for an
army of underdogs to wash them out of existence instead). But Luna does
not feel rushed. It feels very much like the proper, expected, surprise-free
follow-up to Astronomy For Dogs, yet one that consumed just as many
creative forces as its predecessor.
It is also more difficult. This time, the Lone
Pigeon has steered clear of enticing commercial bookmarks. The album's single
'Magic Man' (nothing to do with Heart) is less immediately stunning than 'Setting
Sun' or 'The Happy Song', and it is stuck in the middle of the record where its
catchiness has a psychological chance of remaining unnoticed. Elsewhere, we
have plenty of numbers that break the eight- or ten-minute mark, not always
with good reason, and more splurges of moody psychedelia that will only affect
those in the proper mood. The proper mood may involve many things, from
returning home at 5 AM after a serious night on the town to having injected the
latest world news on TV, but there is no way Luna can be appreciated
regardless of the shape you're in — which explains the wildly different pool of
opinions that exists on the album, and The Aliens themselves.
Fortunately, they caught me in one such mood,
and, in this mood, Luna became an experience even more moving and
powerful than Astronomy. Of course, like the former, it is utterly
derivative. Ghosts of the Beach Boys flutter all around the place, as does the
ghost of Syd Barrett and the Small Faces and, perhaps, even Neil Young
('Boats'). But this is the default situation; were it otherwise — were their
influences impossible to pinpoint — you would not be reading this, since I
would be too busy looking for my detached jaw rather than writing it. The point
is, they integrate all these elements so nicely that the ensuing psychedelic
stew creates its own version of a Wonderland, dense, majestic, beautiful, and
one in which getting lost is not so much a possibility as it is a bare
necessity.
Surprisingly, only two songs speak to me on a
«gut» level. First, there is the experimental perfection of 'Dove Returning',
a soft, slow, dreamy Floydian shuffle whose hushed vocals very soon give way to
a series of solos (guitars and... phased electric pianos? Or more guitars with
crazyass Adrian Belew-style processing?) that go for the good old feeling of
catharsis; second, the dry, painful crackle of the Neil Young-ish 'Boats',
brutally kicking the mainstream ass with its howling riffage and soloing.
These are the ones I fall for very quickly; they are also, however, the least
interesting from the experimental viewpoint — if you know Weld, you know
this.
Those other ones I find hard to talk about,
because they form a wild jungle which takes time and better skill than mine to
pull apart. The long songs may be hard to tolerate, but they deserve their
length: 'Bobby's Song' alone has about ten or fifteen different melodies
crammed into it, from drunken gypsy dance to art-rock chorales, to bouncy
Brit-pop to electronic collages. And not many musicians these days, outside of
the Flaming Lips, can build up such an impressively heavenly wall of sound as
the Aliens manage on the closing 'Blue Mantle'.
In short, if you are a grumpy, but romantic
old-timer yearning for the return of the Beach Boys, but insulted at the
frequent comparisons with Animal Collective (because Brian always had the good
sense to stay away from that electronic crap etc. etc.), Luna is the
album to get. And if it does not matter who you are, it is still one of the
most important and successful psychedelic albums of 2008, as little as that
suggests. Thumbs up.
DANGEROUSLY IN LOVE (2003)
1) Crazy In Love; 2) Naughty
Girl; 3) Baby Boy; 4) Hip Hop Star; 5) Be With You; 6) Me, Myself And I; 7) Yes;
8) Signs; 9) Speechless; 10) That's How You Like It; 11) The Closer I Get To
You; 12) Dangerously In Love 2; 13) Beyoncé Interlude; 14) Gift From
Virgo; 15) Work It Out; 16) Bonnie & Clyde '03; 17) I Can't Take No More.
The key to investigating the music of R&B's
biggest star of the 21st century (118 million solo albums sold, not counting
Destiny's Child? don't you people have to eat
sometimes?) is in trying to forget
that this music was actually written /where not sampled/, pilfered /where
sampled/, performed /where not programmed/, and digitalized /where programmed/
by a live human being. Unless you are her father, mother, close relative,
hairdresser, or Jay-Z, you should not think of «Beyoncé», the
sonic/visual package, as a live human being, and try to ignore any encountered
attempts on her part to induce you into accepting her as such — any such
attempt would be merely a ruse, hindering you from admiring the perfectionist
gloss of the package.
Not being even close to an expert on modern
R&B, not to mention hip-hop, not to mention their overtly mass-commercial
varieties, I have relatively few points of reference, but as far as I can tell,
there was nothing particularly groundbreaking or unpredictable about Dangerously In Love, an album that
consciously took few chances, as its basic goal was to test the water and find
out if it was warm enough for Beyoncé Knowles to be accepted as a major
solo performer in her own right. After all, one
member of Destiny's Child can only save up one third of the collective sex
appeal of Destiny's Child — unless, of course, the fission process would
convert a bit of lost mass into a shitload of nuclear energy. Which is what
happened officially, as Dangerously In
Love outsold all three Destiny's Child albums put together, for what
reason, one can only guess, but something tells me the musical factor was far from the most significant. I mean, golly
gee, just look at that album sleeve...
...anyway, where were we? Oh yes, human being
issue. Well, it goes without saying, I think, that Beyoncé is rather
non-descript in terms of vocal cord operations: her singing is a purely
technical process, as she neither has bedazzling technique, nor unbeatable
power, nor a unique tone or phrasing (as compared to plenty of other R&B
divas), nor the kind of emotional depth that only a tiny handful of these divas
possess (most notably, the prematurely departed Aaliyah, who actually did sing like a live human being). But
on the other hand, she plays it smart here, almost completely rejecting the
dreaded melisma, mostly staying away from over-emoting, and somehow managing
not to get on your nerves even while executing the «soulful ballad» parts
(these are usually the worst with that kind of people). In other words, the
robot is endowed with some taste, meaning that we have come quite a long way
from when people, overwhelmed with happiness at the invention of the emotion
chip, used to stuff three or four in every available slot (poor Mariah Carey
was a particularly unfortunate victim of «overchipping»).
Music-wise, somebody once noted somewhere that
Beyoncé is «only as good as her samples», and I concur: the sample-heavy
tracks, such as the lead-in energy dispenser ʽCrazy In Loveʼ
(borrowing a pompous brass riff from a long forgotten Chi-Lites track), are
generally more impressive than either «original» ballads or such complete
dross as the attempt to resuscitate, in a duet with smooth talker Luther
Vandross, Roberta Flack's old hit ʽThe Closer I Get To Youʼ (if this
is a Beyoncé-approved idea of a tribute to the «retro» vibe, it only
shows how seriously out of touch the lady is with the entire old school). But
ʽNaughty Girlʼ is an interesting experience of fusing an «Eastern»
flavor with a bit of Donna Summer (ʽLove To Love You Babyʼ); and
ʽBaby Boyʼ continues the trend with sitars (?) and swirling,
quasi-psychedelic vocal overdubs. Eventually, the album degenerates into a
cesspool of sterile ballads that work only under the condition that you do accept the singer as a human being —
but, since everything is relative, such a decision could be interpreted as your
agreement to join the same robot army.
Actually, in terms of pure robotics
(aerobotics?), the best song on the album is the one that did not even make it
to the regular US edition — ʽWork It Outʼ was on the Goldmember soundtrack and, fortunately,
it works pretty well outside of the annoyingly silly Austin Powers context, a
nice clavinet-horns groove that Stevie Wonder might have approved, although
Beyoncé does not quite have the vocal power to light that fire high up
to heaven (she does come close with her funny "come on child, blow your
horn now!" exortations).
In the end, Dangerously In Love is a generic album that nonetheless shows some
promise: the problem is that Knowles loves her experiments as much as she loves
her clichés, because it is the latter, not the former, that keeps the
cash flowing and the fanbase multiplying progressively — and, say what you
will, a rational experimenter always needs a bit of financial back-up to ensure
the safety of the outcome. In this particular case, the outcome is a thumbs down,
but at least half of the record is listenable, and ʽCrazy In Loveʼ,
ʽWork It Outʼ, and ʽNaughty Girlʼ may even be salvageable.
As it often happens, Dangerously In Love
sold more than any subsequent Beyoncé record despite being one of her
weakest offerings — but this only seems to confirm the old rule that the more
people buy the music, the more they do not listen to the music.
B'DAY (2006)
1) Beautiful Liar; 2)
Irreplaceable; 3) Green Light; 4) Kitty Kat; 5) Welcome To Hollywood; 6)
Upgrade U; 7) Flaws And All; 8) If; 9) Get Me Bodied; 10) Freakum Dress; 11)
Suga Mama; 12) Déjà Vu; 13) Ring The Alarm; 14) Resentment; 15)
Listen; 16) World Wide Woman; 17) Check On It; 18) Amor Gitano; 19) Beautiful
Liar (remix).
At a certain molecular juncture, I almost
caught myself liking this album — a
grave error, since «liking» supposes some sort of complex emotional /
intellectual reaction, whereas the proper response to B'Day should probably be purely physiological. For sure, mainstream
commercial music may have completely crapped out in the 21st century, but at
the same time, it is constantly striving for new ways to conquer the human
body, if not the human spirit, and from that point of view, B'Day is a tremendous success. No
small coincidence that one of the songs bears the up-to-now ungrammatical title
of ʽGet Me Bodiedʼ. There is no place for the human spirit on this record,
but it seems tailor-made for everything that goes one notch below the spirit.
As usual, there has been a boatload of various
releases of B'Day in various forms,
so that the fans could spend as much money on it as they desired; I am
reviewing the «deluxe» version, or one of several «deluxe» versions, whatever,
that has 19 instead of 10 tracks on it — and no, that's quite okay, most of
this stuff is listenable, and the extra tracks, whatever they are, do provide
better insight into the masterplan behind this concoction. There are very few
ballads (ʽFlaws And Allʼ, ʽIfʼ) and even fewer power
ballads — just one, actually (ʽListenʼ), and none of them were even
released as singles, because this is not what the whole thing is about. The
whole thing is about "giving it to mama" (ʽGreen Lightʼ,
which was one of the singles).
Exclude the few pieces of hokum, and B'Day is simply one unstoppable groove
after another — tenaciously catchy chorus mantras fired over impeccably glued
samples of whatever it is that awakens and powers up one's internal epicycles.
There is enough diversity in these grooves to please just about everybody: for
instance, the classic funk fan will be quickly drawn to ʽSugar Mamaʼ
with its guitar samples from an obscure song by Jake Wade & The Soul
Searchers, over which Ms. Knowles plasters her "come sit on mama lap
hey" in a tone that is all but impossible to disobey (except it's fairly
hard to keep still while the groove is on). ʽBeautiful Liarʼ is a
duet with Shakira, and thus expectedly combining elements of R&B and Latin
styles. ʽFreakum Dressʼ is influenced by go-go, but also adds almost
Queen-style vocal crescendos in the middle. ʽGreen Lightʼ moves through
like three or four different sections (funk, ska, ballad, jazz?..), and so on.
Behind all these grooves lies a big, grinning nothing
— curled up and ready to be materialized into some Big Feminist / Materialist /
Modernist / Humanist Statement by mainstream criticism, although, frankly
speaking, Beyoncé herself gives very little opportunity to overestimate
or overanalyze her lyrics and attitudes. Her singing, as usual, is always
adequate: she neither rejects her own sexuality and body drive, nor over-emphasizes
it, so that even a straightforward dancefloor anthem like ʽGet Me
Bodiedʼ is just a song about dancing, not some sort of religious epiphany
about how you only come to properly know your inner self through the
dancefloor. At least Beyoncé is smart enough to know that trying to
seem smarter than she is will only
lead to confusion, and there is nothing as cretinous here as, say, Alicia Keys'
ʽSuperwomanʼ. (But don't worry, it will get worse — multiplatinum superstars always end up the same
way).
In the meantime, «hollow hooks» abound.
ʽIrreplaceableʼ is a half-groove, half-ballad that generally sucks,
but has an unbeatable chorus of "you must not know 'bout me" that
should have received more songwriting polish. ʽUpgrade Uʼ is the
record's best propped-up hip-hop arrangement (although, as usual, I could
easily do without the Jay-Z part). The four-song stretch of ʽFreakum
Dressʼ, ʽSuga Mamaʼ, ʽDéjà Vuʼ, and the
siren-driven ʽRing The Alarmʼ is possibly the best four-song stretch
ever on a Beyoncé record — on their own, each of these songs is only so-so,
but when placed together on the «deluxe» edition, they generate the impression
of almost unbridled creativity. (Besides playing off each other like four
distinct, but connected parts of the same musical soap opera where the lady
begins by wooing the gentleman, goes on to be hung up on the gentleman, and
ends by worrying about the chinchilla coats and houses off the coast that she's
going to get if the gentleman happens to dumps her. Uh, okay — we all know
Beyoncé is a lady of relatively simple tastes and needs).
Eventually, you come to your senses and realize
that it's all plastic (ʽDéjà Vuʼ almost takes pride in its featuring real
instrumentation, but this is really laughable — who could really be expecting
a natural band to be playing on a Beyoncé album, and who could believe
that band to be worthy of competition with «old school» R&B outfits?), but
it's pretty damn high quality plastic. Within the framework of a social
experiment, I give it a thumbs up, being only human and, sometimes, unable
to resist a pretty bit of packaging if it is not too schlocky. B'Day is
perfectly safe and sanitized, a high-quality product of The Human Robotics
Corporation, yet I do recommend it for fans of human robotics worldwide.
I AM... SASHA FIERCE (2008)
1) If I Were A Boy; 2) Halo;
3) Disappear; 4) Broken-Hearted Girl; 5) Ave Maria; 6) Smash Into You; 7)
Satellites; 8) That's Why You're Beautiful; 9) Single Ladies (Put A Ring On
It); 10) Radio; 11) Diva; 12) Sweet Dreams; 13) Video Phone; 14) Hello; 15)
Ego; 16) Scared Of Lonely.
Oh dear — here we have nothing less than a
Rebellion of the Machine, carefully preplanned, orchestrated, and publicized:
Beyoncé Knowles advances to the rank of Serious Artist! Introspective,
thoughtful, and conceptual, the double shot of I Am vs. Sasha Fierce
represents an elegantly split artistic personality, capturing the formerly
straightforward entertainer at a spiritual crossroads. Will she take the path
of the real Beyoncé, a sensitive, vulnerable soul dependent on male
support and struggling to balance romantic ideals with the harsh realities of
everyday life? Or is she going to take the proactive road of Sasha Fierce, a
real hard-boiled party egg who always hides from trouble and suffering behind a
wall of glitz, technology, and tough neo-feminist swagger? Intrigue!
Excitement! Conflict! Critical acclaim!.. oh, wait a minute.
Songwriter Amanda Ghost, who collaborated with
Beyoncé on the I Am... part,
stated in an interview that "she /Beyoncé/ was ready to take risks
and redefine who she is... to reach out for a wider audience, the people who
buy John Mayer and Carrie Underwood records". As far as I know, little
else needs be said — there is nothing wrong with that whole «crossover»
business as it stands, but if your artistic ideal in a particular artistic
genre is John Mayer or Carrie Underwood, this means that you cannot even
properly set yourself the task of
«getting higher», let alone fulfill one. But then again, why should you, if
your very idea of «artistic growth» simply means «sell my stuff to more people
by expanding into other markets»?
And one should not underestimate this «reaching
out» strategy, either — Amanda Ghost goes even beyond that, pushing her client
to grapple the people who buy The Three Tenors as well, by «re-composing»
ʽAve Mariaʼ into an «accessible» pop version that decorates
Beyoncé's newly-found spirituality with a touch of Schubert (or is that
actually a touch of Disney?). It is quite unfortunate, really, that the Artist
was not provided with an equally gifted and versatile aide-de-camp for the Sasha Fierce part — personally, I think
that sampling ʽBrünnhilde's Battle Cryʼ for one of the «hotter»
dance numbers would have made for an awesome contrast.
Irony aside (for a little while, at least),
most of the hullaballoo about this album stems from the basic fact that most of
the «softer» songs were placed on the first disc (I Am) and most of the «harder» tracks, assembled out of electronic
elements around dance beats, made it to the second one (Sasha Fierce), with a whole puffed-up ideology concocted, brewed,
and distilled around this simple division. Never mind the fact that, for
instance, Rod Stewart had already masterminded this «separation» concept a
long time ago, on his Seventies' albums like Atlantic Crossing and Night
On The Town — and, much to his honor, I think, it never occurred to him
that either one of these records should bear the title of I Am... Ivan The Terrible.
But I do admit that, from one point of view at
least, the album was a bit of a
surprise for me. With an announced contrast between the «introvert» and
«extravert» parts, and armed with prior knowledge of Beyoncé's
groove-based music, you'd probably
expect that the first part would mostly suck and the second part would be more
like the «technically acceptable» Beyoncé of B'Day. As it turns out (to my ears at least), the predictable
prediction is wrong! Cheap cheese like ʽAve Mariaʼ aside, the
ballads are really superior to the grooves this time — or, at least, superior
when all the vocal overdubs find themselves in place.
Frankly speaking, the «dance-oriented» part of Sasha Fierce beats many a record of
dumbness, sleaziness, and gimmickry that I have encountered in supposedly «high
quality» mainstream pop muzak (we are not discussing the local Brighton Beach
scene or anything like that). ʽSingle Ladies (Put A Ring On It)ʼ
establishes the «aerobics-as-art» formula that would be even more succesfully
milked with ʽRun The World (Girls)ʼ — undermining the «tough
seriousness» of its «feminist» message with a backing track that should have
never made it beyond the walls of your local gym (and the famous accompanying
video only proves the point) — and it is probably the best song of the entire
lot.
In general, it seems as if the sound was
seriously re-routed here from the former target audience of «modern R&B» to
a newer — indeed, wider — audience of crappy, generic techno
(ʽRadioʼ, boasting the kind of sound that I normally hear only from
Russian taxi drivers), as well as fans of technical gadgets (ʽVideo
Phoneʼ) and silly vocal gimmicks (ʽDivaʼ, a bland rap piece on
which «Sasha» is allegedly making fun of the Diva lifestyle while at the same
time actively living it). ʽEgoʼ is, of course, the most «provocative»
number on the record, since its chorus ("it's too big, it's too wide, it's
too strong, it won't fit, it's too much, it's too tough") comes on before one gets a clear explanation of
what the «it» in question is referring to. Naturally, it refers to Sasha's
lover's BIG EGO, and what did you
think?.. (On a sidenote, though, I used to always hear it as "He got a big
Igor, such a huge Igor" before I paid attention to
the song title, and it kept me wondering when and how did I exactly miss the
point at which the name of Dr. Frankenstein's assistant had become one of the
many euphemistic replacements for you-know-what).
On the other hand, the ballads on the I Am part seem to have been written
with at least some intentional
attempt not to reduce them to pathetic clichés. It does not work too
often — the songwriters and producers are as constrained by the commercial
requirements of the genre as a Peter Jackson or a Steven Spielberg are by the
laws of Hollywood filmmaking — but every now and then, there is an interesting
musical moment or two that briefly elevates the «soul sacrifice» of the first
disc above elevator muzak status. This does not concern the title track, which
does indeed sound very much like Carrie Underwood («take an old country-folk
melody and arrange it with all the pomp of a 19th century opera aria»), but
ʽHaloʼ has some fine vocal moves written into it (and it deserved a
much better arrangement than those rotten synthesizers and drum machines), and
so does ʽDisappearʼ, whose movement towards the chorus is melodically
inventive (check out the modality shift from "you're nearly here..."
to "...and then, you disappear" — they could have easily done without
that, but they didn't, and I akcnowledge that).
That said, I have no wish to create the
illusion that I Am, on the whole, is
«vastly superior» to the silly dance part. Pulling ourselves away from the
microscope and assessing the whole album as it is, both of its halves are
really near-equal failures, and for a simple reason: it is all but impossible
for a mainstream artist to try to go «wider» (embracing more styles and huger
audiences) and «deeper» (trying to show the complexity of one's personality) at
the same time. The stated goals stubbornly clash with the used means — and, for
those of us who generally tend to avoid «mass muzak» but are still willing to
give it an occasional benefit of doubt, may simply result in a feeling of
being aurally and intellectually raped, or, at least, deeply offended. Not to
mention all the unresolved questions, of course. Why «Sasha»? What's so
«fierce» about her, except possibly the hairstyle? Why two discs and /as usual/
a swarm of different editions? If she were a boy and sitting in a record
executive chair, would she be reasonable enough to save on plastic? Since we
should hardly expect straight and honest answers to all these, I suppose that a
thumbs down
rating is the only way to go.
4 (2011)
1) 1 + 1; 2) I Care; 3) I Miss
You; 4) Best Thing I Never Had; 5) Party; 6) Rather Die Young; 7) Start Over;
8) Love On Top; 9) Countdown; 10) End Of Time; 11) I Was Here; 12) Run The
World (Girls); 13) Dreaming; 14) Lay Up Under Me; 15) Schoolin' Life; 16) Dance
For You.
Beyoncé Knowles may be dumb, but she's
not stupid. Or vice versa. Whatever. In 2010, she publicly confessed to
«killing Sasha Fierce», saying that she was mature enough to merge both personalities
— a glamorized way of admitting that the whole idea just sucked, I think, and
that the producers did a boring job on the first half and a muckjob on the
second. To atone for somebody else's sins, she now decides to move from
«conceptually serious» to «spiritually authentic». A right decision if there
ever was one, but... too late, too late.
The main ideology behind 4 was to make a good old-fashioned R&B album. Not a sampler's
delight, not an electro-pop extravaganza, not a technofest, but a record that
would actually bring in some refreshing retro flavor. You know — real musicians
blowing real horns, strumming real guitars, a real emotional singer channeling
that gospel spirit to hit high notes at full power, that whole deal. The one
that made a star out of Aretha Franklin and... uh... Diana Ross? Tina Turner
seems a little too far out for Beyoncé's careful imagemaking. «Wild wild»
does not get you nearly as many fans, in terms of sheer quantity, as «gentle
wild».
However, as you may well guess, there are
several problems here that are really
hard to beat. First, the trendy keyboards, digital procedures, loops, overdubs,
Jay-Z raps, and unbearably repetitive choruses are not really going anywhere.
Understandably, Beyoncé did not want to make a thoroughly «retro» album,
but rather one that would look forward to the future by means of looking back
at the past — a sensible decision for any progressive artist, provided the
futuristic component is every bit the worthy rival of the nostalgic layer. But
what good is it when a typically Seventies' piano melody is married to a
programmed beat and an assortment of carefully sliced, wrapped, and weighted
vocal strips?
And the worst thing about it, she can get it right when she really puts
her heart into it. ʽLove On Topʼ may be utterly derivative of Stevie
Wonder in the verses (and of the Jackson 5 in the chorus, for that matter — her
pitch on "you're the one I NEED!"
is just plain old little Michael), but it may be the only Beyoncé song
in the world that I can freely enjoy from first to last note, with a wonderful
groove and chorus that give off happy shiny vibes without sounding too self-conscious
or self-important. The song could use a little less obviousness in the
production department, for sure (those bass keyboards are way too adult contemporary, although Stevie did use a lot of them
in the 1980s), but in terms of melody and sheer emotion, it is beyond any
complaints I could think about. The build-up, the come-down, everything
perfect.
On the other hand, this is the same album that gave us ʽRun The
World (Girls)ʼ, which might just be the worst, tackiest, silliest idea for
a single — further developing the «aerobics-as-art» line of ʽSingle
Ladiesʼ, only this time in an even more repetitive twist, and with a
martial rhythm to boot: G.I. Beyoncé and her Girl Squad taking over the
world. As «music», the song is a non-song; as «groove», the song belongs in the
gym at best; as «feminism», I'd rather have Ani DiFranco, unless this is
actually supposed to be parodic (at least the video for the song definitely
bordered on parody, going completely over the top with all of its «military»
imagery).
The rest of the record fluctuates between these
two points, never quite reaching the same high or sinking to the same low
(although the power ballad ʽI Was Hereʼ, donated by none other than
the Wicked Witch of the West herself — Diane Warren, sounds just like any other
Diane Warren song). The songs that are intentionally retro-oriented are
generally listenable — ʽ1 + 1ʼ works as an old torch ballad,
tastefully arranged (pipe organ!) and interestingly sung, with Beyoncé
taking cute little falsetto «dips» at line ends. But they are actually in the
minority. More often, the «retro» feel ends up confined to a few lyrical
lines, like the James Dean reference in the appropriately lifeless ʽRather
Die Youngʼ, or the "killing me softly" reference to Roberta
Flack on ʽCountdownʼ, otherwise just a robotic dance groove.
Retro references aside, 4 gets a special reprimand for containing some of the lady's worst
lyrics ever — every time she lays it down on Jay-Z, we get deeply poetic lines
like "still love the way he rock them black diamonds in that chain",
and songs like ʽPartyʼ do nothing but solidify the stereotype of
«spoiled rags-to-riches mentality» for the general public. You have to
appreciate, of course, the lady's being so honest with us — her and her folks
are rich, posh, decadent, loving it, and giving the people exactly what they
want. But for every ounce of real feeling that a song like ʽ1 + 1ʼ is
working its ass off to generate, a song like ʽPartyʼ produces two
ounces of disgusted counterfeeling. And what is the point of turning "Who run the world? Girls!" into
a mind-numbing mantra, if on approximately half of the rest of the tunes she
is explicitly "giving you my life, it's in your hands"? "Not
only are you loyal, you're patient with me, baby"? ʽDance For
Youʼ is neither feminist nor «humanly» sexy — above all else, it sounds
like a properly wound-up automaton for mechanical sexual satisfaction. (At
least Prince could make it sound humorous).
In the end, this is just another failure to
break out of the exoskeleton. ʽLove On Topʼ accidentally comes close
to artistic escape, and I have learned to really enjoy ʽ1 + 1ʼ, but
the rest is too full of clichés and stereotypes, too market-oriented,
too safe-playing, and too swamped with legions of faceless corporate
«musicians», «songwriters», and «producers» to even begin matching the surrealist
claims made by the artist: "I wanted classic songwriting... bolder than
the music on my previous albums... really focused on songs being classics,
songs that would last..." — every time I re-read that original statement,
the only thing that springs up in my head, for some reason, is the line "me
and my boo and my boo boo riding" from ʽCountdownʼ, and I cannot
help but wonder exactly how long a line like that would «last» in the musical
world. Thumbs
down.
BEYONCÉ (2013)
1) Pretty Hurts; 2)
Ghost/Haunted; 3) Drunk In Love; 4) Blow; 5) No Angel; 6) Partition; 7)
Jealous; 8) Rocket; 9) Mine; 10) XO; 11) Flawless; 12) Superpower; 13) Heaven;
14) Blue.
Here is a question. If the first three or four
albums released by an entertainer like Beyoncé, despite having their
«moments», never really made you believe
in the entertainer as «artist», what would
it take, then, to trigger that belief? Would it be downright impossible, or
might there ever be a chance of her sliding into a different, more respectable
paradigm? After all, people have
managed to escape the machine before, or, at least, operate with their head
slightly sticking out of the window. And now, with the money made and the
fanbase established and the name in lights all over the world, why not go for a
small push-up of your reputation among the «highbrows»? Not a bad idea at all —
but how?..
Clearly, this was a subject of deep worry for
Mrs. Carter herself, and she embarked on the task with plenty of verve. The
self-titled record — «rebooting the franchise!» — came out without a single
warning, unexpected and unpublicized, dropped as a package of 14 audio tracks
and 17 accompanying videos on iTunes and sending a perfectly predicted
shockwave through the fanbase. Physical copies of the album then arrived in an
unusually minimalistic shape (the Kazimir Malevich Estate probably settled out
of court), with none of the glamor that usually surrounds such releases (to be
fair, there is plenty of glamor in some of the accompanying videos, but I guess
the day we get to see Beyoncé without makeup is the day that her crypt
is excavated by archaeologists, and it wouldn't be a pretty sight anyway). And,
most importantly, the songs were almost «artsy» in their stubborn refusal to be
dominated by dance grooves — dark, soul-probing exercises in emotional
expression of the everyday cares, troubles, worries, comforts, and orgasms of a
grown woman: wife, mother, and superstar all in one.
So we should all «buy» it, right? The final act
of humanization, in which the blue-haired fairy comes down from the sky and
gives Pinocchio his well-deserved emotions chip? Having already sat through a
whole sack of five-star reviews beginning with constructions like «who would have
thought that...» and exclamations like «HOLY COW!» and statements like
«finally, Beyoncé comes up with an album worthy of her talent» and
suchlike, and, more importantly, having patiently endured three complete
listens to the record, I still would not want to be too hasty about that.
Miracles do not happen, and the whole enterprise, to me, smacks of just another
well-calculated move — «we got the average Joes hooked up, now let us conquer
the demanding critics». Well, congratulations, Mrs. Bey, you and your team got
really smart this time: save for a few renegade dissenters, well within the
statistical margin of error, congrats on a decisive victory.
In fact, I wouldn't mind joining the saluting
crowds as well — the only problem is that, three listens into the record, I
still cannot remember a single tune. Removing the hot dance grooves also means
removing the hooks, and removing the hooks means that the album is fueled
exclusively by «soul» and «atmosphere», yet where are the musical innovations
that make the «atmosphere» even marginally interesting? All I hear is same-old
same-old: same programmed drums, same electronics, same adult contemporary
sonic backgrounds, sometimes interspersed with same lonesome romantic piano
pop melodies. «Sonically experimental», Pitchfork called this record, but where
are these «experiments»? Oh, that's right, the proper context was «her most
sonically experimental to date». This puts stuff in a different light. Maybe
twenty years ago this kind of record, minus the benefits of cutting-edge
production à la 2013, might
have been called «experimental» — as it stands, its only braveness is in that
it does, indeed, sound significantly different from the lady's previous albums.
Different, for sure; but better? Not certain.
As far as my opinion is concerned, it is not
with the music that Mrs. Carter has
managed to sway the critics (who, as a rule, do not even begin to discuss the
actual music, and I can empathize, since there is very little to be discussed
in the first place), but with the attitude.
For that, she must be given credit. Briefly stated, there are few records in
the world that manage to share lines like "each day I feel so blessed to
be looking at you / 'cause when you open your eyes, I feel alive"
(explicitly addressed to her daughter) and "daddy what you gon' do with
all this ass up in your face?" (explicitly addressed to her husband),
fortunately, not within the same song, or she'd probably have child protective
service on her back in an instant.
Actually, some
do, but very, very few make an active point of it. Beyoncé essentially comes across as a sort of concept album
— an «honest» glimpse into the life of someone who has to combine several
distinct personalities, not in an artificial Sasha Fierce-like way, but out of
pure necessity. First, there remains the glamorous star personality
(ʽFlawlessʼ); second, there is the lady of the family, committed to
behaving like an angel in the spirit and like a slut in the body; third, there
is the responsible loving mother; fourth, there's all sorts of interactions
between the three (ʽPartitionʼ, which fuses the public star with the
private slut and feels no remorse). I'd be lying through my teeth if I said
that this whole concept were completely fake, primitive, and devoid of
interest. I'd also be improperly insinuating if I said that Beyoncé's
almost «salivating» depiction of sexual scenes with her husband
(ʽRocketʼ is the quintessential example, but it's really all over the
place) betrays an unhealthy fixation and should rather have been left in their
bedroom — I mean, it's a world of free choice, and if you invite me in your bedroom, it'd probably be impolite to refuse the
invitation. I'd probably even fall into the perennial trap if I started
doubting the album's feminist stance — since almost every second song here can
be interpreted both as an anthem to the equality of the sexes or to sexual objectification of woman,
that'd just lure us into another round of the never-ending, long-boring
discussion.
All this, yes, and much more, but in the end,
all it really does is distract us away from the musical qualities of the album.
And the good musical qualities, as
far as I can tell, are limited to a tiny handful of non-trivial vocal
modulations (usually on the ballads: ʽHauntedʼ, ʽHeavenʼ,
and ʽBlueʼ all have their moments), which are still heavily set back
by unimaginative arrangements (usually confined to ideas like «okay, let's make
the synth loops on ʽHauntedʼ sound real dark, bass-heavy, and
distorted, it's a sound that's been used fifty billion times already, but we do
need to focus on "dark", right?»). Say what you will, but
Beyoncé is simply not enough interesting either as an «artist» or as a
«human being» to save it all just on the strength of conceptuality and
atmosphere. She is nowhere near «proverbially dumb», of course, but neither is
she some sort of modern day Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell, or even Lauryn Hill. In
pitching for this sort of maturity, she overstepped her boundaries, and made a
record which, while striving to be «respectable», has ultimately landed in the
area of «dull». As entertainment, this does not even begin holding a candle to B'Day; as «serious art», I have a hard
time understanding why I should be spending my time trying to digest it as
such.
Naturally, for someone whose musical world does
not extend far beyond the likes of Beyoncé, The Black Album might be a
spiritual revelation — more power to you if it helps you become a better human
being, or solve your conjugal sex problems, or whatever else. But it'd be even
better if it helped such people understand that there might be a better musical
world out there somewhere: like Amazon.com says, «if you liked this album, you
might also like...» — not making any suggestions here, of course, just a small
hint at the reason for which I am giving the album quite a violent thumbs down
here. And this does not negate the fact that she does have a very cute,
adorable daughter, or that having wild sex with Jay-Z cannot serve as a basis
for writing exciting songs. It can! It just didn't, that's all.
LEMONADE (2016)
1) Pray You Catch Me; 2) Hold
Up; 3) Don't Hurt Yourself; 4) Sorry; 5) 6 Inch; 6) Daddy Lessons; 7) Love
Drought; 8) Sandcastles; 9) Forward; 10) Freedom; 11) All Night; 12) Formation.
Look, I really do not want to Queen Bey in this
«damned if you do, damned if you don't» position, particularly not when her latest album almost sounds as if she were
personally responding to all of my criticisms for the previous one — well, not mine, obviously, but clearly her goal is
to find that one perfect spot where she could have her legions of fans and the small, but demanding, detachment
of elitist critics all roll together. There's no stone cold reason why the consummate hitmaker, the glitzy
fashion icon, the fight-for-your-rights symbol could never grow into a real
artist, even with all the difficulties brought on by fame and fortune. Well...
come to think of it, maybe there is: at least, I'd hypothesize that if you were
not a real artist before the onset of
fame and fortune, the chances of your, let's say, «spiritual transformation» after you have been caught up in the
cogs and wheels are pretty slim.
But still, at the very least Lemonade has a clear edge over Beyoncé in that here, it is at
least interesting to see her take on
the challenge — the record is much more turbulent, dynamic, and diverse. It's
got some unpredictable collaborators, too: I mean, Kendrick Lamar could
probably be expected at some point, sooner or later, but Jack White? (There's
also some pseudo-crediting: ʽ6 Inchʼ, for instance, lists The Animal
Collective as co-writers, apparently because one of the lines in the song somewhat reminded the production team of
a line in ʽMy Girlsʼ — the result is an extra credit for Avey Tare,
Panda Bear, and Geologist, formally as a safeguard against lawsuits, but I'm
pretty sure the lady thought it cool to have some respectable indie names
included in the liner notes. I mean, some people might actually think that way
that she got The Animal Collective to work for her, you know? And everybody's happy
— the guys will probably make more money off ʽ6 Inchʼ than they made
off all their records put together, anyway).
Like Beyoncé,
the record is all about herself, yes, but now that her daughter has grown up a
bit, intimate family matters take a small step back, whereas her iconic status makes
an advance. The very first single, which preceded the album by a couple months,
was ʽFormationʼ, which, for all I know, could just as well have come
from Nicki Minaj — people made a stupid fuss out of it because it, like,
celebrated Beyoncé's black heritage and all ("I like my negro nose
with Jackson Five nostrils" — first time I ever heard about the Jackson family as a metaphor for all
Afro-American people), but actually, it's more about celebrating
Beyoncé's bitchiness: "I'm so reckless when I rock my Givenchy
dress" sounds just about right to me. She might slay all right, but the
song itself is a mediocre piece of very routine hip-hop — and, in the context
of the album, one of its weakest tracks, perhaps not incidentally delegated to the very end of the record, almost as
if it were a bonus track after the much more logical conclusion of ʽAll
Nightʼ.
Although it is somewhat atypical of the album
in general, ʽFormationʼ still ties in with a whole set of other songs
that focus on strength, power, independence, and various ball-breaking activities
— at least she's honest about it, because a whole album of whining by one of
the world's biggest superstars would be worse than pathetic. And I have to
admit, I really like some of these. ʽDon't Hurt Yourselfʼ has a
thick, dark, thrashing groove (not surprising for a song that samples
ʽWhen The Levee Breaksʼ — as done by Led Zep, not Memphis Minnie), a
cool arrangement of backing vocal harmonies that sound like they're appropriately
and shitlessly scared of the lead singer, and enough metallic effects on
Beyoncé's vocals to make Jay-Z run for cover ("you ain't married to
no average bitch boy"). ʽDaddy Lessonsʼ is a mix of New
Orleanian jazz and neo-country-pop (Bey going Taylor Swift on us now?) that
unexpectedly turns out to be the catchiest number on the album (even as it
formally defends the 2nd amendment, much to the delight of Uncle Ted Nugent —
then again, isn't a country song supposed
to?..).
Best of the bunch is probably
ʽFreedomʼ, which was written in line with the Black Lives Matter
campaign but avoids any direct lyrical references and could therefore qualify
as just a general, abstract anthem to the nice
F-word. Kendrick Lamar adds one of his intelligent poetic raps in the middle,
but the song's primary point of attraction is still the chorus. Like most
choruses for most songs called ʽFreedomʼ, it is lyrically clumsy
("freedom, freedom, where are you? cause I need freedom too") and clichéd ("I
break chains all by myself"), but the bombastic ascent all the way to the
epic resolution how "a winner don't quit on themselves" is totally
believable. Even a rich superstar, you know, should be allowed to flex some
muscle every now and then, and she's flexing it just about right on this tune.
Of course, a Beyoncé album consisting of
nothing but kick-ass empowering statements would be unthinkable, and there are
plenty of lyrical moments scattered throughout — some of them quite melodic and
emotional, like the album opener ʽPray You Catch Meʼ (gorgeous
harmony arrangements, classy «deconstruction-style» minimalistic atmosphere,
non-cloying sentimentality) or ʽLove Droughtʼ with its nice falsetto
chorus; also, ʽAll Night Longʼ has a beautifully vocalized title, but
drags on for a little too long. ʽSandcastlesʼ is a really bland piano
ballad, though, that should probably belong on an Alicia Keyes album instead.
Overall, the album is still absolutely not my
cup of tea — all that hot-electrifying-sexxxy aesthetics of songs like ʽ6
Inchʼ (is it about a podium model or a stripper? who cares, anyway) is
ultimately just stupid, and although, thankfully, the album is not so
thoroughly obsessed with the whole «self-empowering through sex» ideology that
was at the core of Beyoncé, it
still retains that angle; let, I dunno, Rolling Stone and the NME sing praises
of it rather than the grumpy conservative Only Solitaire. But I was pleasantly surprised, this time, at
how many of these songs actually stuck around, enough to suspect that from a
purely musical angle, Lemonade may
indeed be Beyoncé's (or, rather, The Beyoncé Concern's) greatest
achievement so far. Strip away all the ideological elements for sociological
gender-based analysis, forget the English language (most people outside of the
US will probably not get most of the references anyway, and who cares what Red
Lobster really means to a starving Afro-American family of three, worth no more
than a measly 600 million bucks?), and you're left with a bunch of perfectly
crafted vocal hooks, accompanied with elegant arrangements that meld together
live playing, electronic programming, and sampling in an undeniably «artsy» style.
So yes, this is even better than B'Day, and so here comes another thumbs up.
If she keeps it up this way, who knows, maybe the next album will feature Tom
Waits as special guest and a fully credited sample from Can's ʽUp The
Bakerlooʼ — I guess that she's now pretty much earned the right to do anything, and she'd be a fool not to use
it to her advantage.
BEACHES AND CANYONS (2002)
1) Seabird; 2) Things Will
Never Be The Same; 3) The Dream Is Going Down; 4) Endless Happiness; 5) Big Drop.
From Kraftwerk to Aphex Twin to Autechre to the
Animal Collective, my attitude towards electronic music of all kinds is
relatively simple — give me a world that lies beyond my imagination, but feels
real enough, and we'll be quite likely to share a connection. That is the way I
like to review most of those electronica records, by trying to discriminate
between those that live, breathe, and tell «wond'rous stories» from those that
exist purely as meaningless agglomerations of sounds. However, for the most
part, it is just my impressions — there is no telling if the artist in question
truly intended this particular track to sound like «copulating refrigerators»
or «nanites delousing their circuits».
With Black Dice, an experimental noise outfit
from Brooklyn, run by brothers Bjorn and Eric Copeland, the situation is
different. These guys actually started out as more of a hardcore outfit,
gradually moving towards digital magic as their penchant for wildness and
experimentation led them to worship at the altar of Merzbow and other similar
acts. By the time they got around to recording their debut LP, with Aaron
Warren on bass and Hisham Bharoocha on drums, they were completely past any
«generic hardcore» stage imaginable — and yet, Beaches And Canyons does not at all sound like your average
«electronic» album. Perhaps I would rather say that it sounds like your
above-average experimental album that simply happened to be made with
electronic tools lying around. This certainly makes it different from people like
Richard D. James, who normally eat transistors for breakfast and sleep on
motherboards.
Anyway, there is little doubt in my mind that,
when Black Dice set out to make an album, they really have it in their minds to construct an alternate universe.
Alternate enough, that is, to be fascinating and intriguing, but not enough to
be completely incompatible with aural impressions that we have of ours. They present a set of
«sonic-scapes», rhythmically and harmonically organized, but very natural
sounding — diverse, meaningful, intentionally ugly when the time calls for it
and quite pretty when it doesn't. In a way, they achieve here (at least, to my
utmost satisfaction) the kind of effect that The Animal Collective were not
able to achieve on their early records — probably because they were too
obsessed with the «anything goes» aesthetics, whereas Black Dice, as chaotic as
their output may seem at first, are, in fact, highly disciplined, and take full
responsibility for every twist and turn.
The titles occasionally help.
ʽSeabirdʼ starts out with a series of coos, caws, bleeps, and
scuffles that do actually resemble a
scattered, but patterned flock of alien seagulls and other species — gradually
increasing in density until they all begin to fly round in dizzying circles.
Later on, birds are joined by humans in a cute sort of tribal dance — whether
it is supposed to signify a peaceful union between all species, or the
primordial hunter's joy at the perspective of some roast seabird, I have no
idea, but it all sounds fun, anyway.
From there on, the Copelands move to a series
of lengthier, noisier suites: ʽThings Will Never Be The Sameʼ puts
you inside the promised «canyons», with spirits playing games on your senses
through winds, echoes, animal noises, baby cries (for some reason) and,
finally, a grating, high tension storm where you seem to be caught up in a
sparkling electric booth, afraid to move an inch for fear of being immediately
electrocuted. ʽThe Dream Is Going Downʼ does sound like a sonic
impersonation of an acute, inescapable nightmare — ten minutes of sirens,
confusion, waves of white noise, looped schizo screaming, like a
ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ for organized people (same hellish atmosphere but
without the jarring unpredictable transitions from one piece of the collage to
another). ʽEndless Happinessʼ breaks up the nightmare and gets you
back to the canyons, with chimes and woodwinds providing the atmosphere — then
replaced by no fewer than six minutes of waves breaking on the shore, as it
happens on one of those «Nature Sounds» CDs. Finally, ʽBig Dropʼ
brings back the sonic nightmare, although, frankly speaking, it feels somewhat
redundant: I am happy enough with the 43 minutes of the first four tracks, and
count this further sixteen-minute reprise as a special bonus for those who
could not get enough.
This is certainly not «music» in the usual
sense of the word, but neither is it «noise», produced out of a simple wish to
experiment and to shock. Perhaps it could all be described as «simplistic»
experimentation, unburdened by excessive complexity and intellectualization.
There may be different ways to crack the code of Black Dice, but it is not a
chess puzzle — it is quite easily accessible, and convertible to a fun
experience, for, I believe, even the stupidest of us, provided we are at least
capable of opening our minds a little bit. Rough around the edges, yes: some of
the loops and cycles run a little longer than they should, and, on the whole,
the Copelands seem like bright lads, able to easily come up with far more ideas
than they have allocated for this record. But still a thumbs up all the way, even if, in
retrospect, it now seems more like a teaser for even better things to come.
CREATURE COMFORTS (2004)
1) Cloud Pleaser; 2) Treetops;
3) Island; 4) Creature; 5) Live Loop; 6) Skeleton; 7) Schwip Schwap; 8) Night
Flight.
In our era of «one-album bands», there was no
obligation whatsoever for Black Dice to top their initial success — but they
still went ahead and did exactly that with Creature
Comforts, which is, in my opinion, their absolute peak and a major
highlight of the decade's non-dancefloor-oriented electronic music in general.
Not only that, it is one of the most aurally perfect «Psycho-Tarzan» albums
ever recorded... so to speak.
Several of the composition titles are
indicative of the atmospherics, with references to «islands», «clouds»,
«treetops», and «creatures» lurking in and out of the landscape. The difference
from the usual procedure is that they are genuinely
indicative. Where Beaches And Canyons
was still sort of all over the place, and some of it worked explicitly on
placing you, the listener, on a beach or inside a canyon, and some of it just
made bizarre noises, Creature Comforts,
from start to finish almost without
exceptions, works on transporting you to a mystery island and stranding you
there for about 45 minutes (which, by the way, is quite a sparing amount of
time: electronic artists tend to make full advantage of the average CD length,
as it gives them the opportunity to explore all the nuances of potential of
their favorite loops, bells, and whistles — but Black Dice, starting with their
second album, have decided to spare our time, and must be thanked for that).
Of course, part of that magic comes from the
fact that the band, with its «real instruments» past, does not limit itself to
computers and synthesizers, but uses them in conjunction with guitars, real (if
treated) percussion, and other stuff. Thus, the brief opener ʽCloud
Pleaserʼ is seemingly based on a simple, see-sawing, «kiddie-avantgarde»
guitar loop, and all the cute little electronic apparitions cluster around it,
popping in and out of the «clouds». Chain-looped jangly drone is also at the
heart of ʽTreetopsʼ, although it is not as much in the listener's
face as are all the back-and-forth rockings of the treetops in question — along
with flocks of birds, howls of monkeys, chirps and squeeks of small rodents in
the branches, and, as strange as it may seem, sounds of crying babies, or maybe
that is just another sonic illusion caused by the interference of all the
different waves up there in the air.
The album really hits its stride with
ʽCreatureʼ, all suspense and intrigue that never really comes to the
surface — imagine yourself traveling on a narrow jungle path from one end of
the forest to the other, hearing all the animal noises from all sides but never
once actually witnessing the source. Bellowing, cackling, grunting, snorting,
hissing, rustling, cooing, guffawing, (insert your own favorite sound-imitating
verb from Roget here), all of it sequenced in a manner that does not exactly
make the track «musical», but gives it a certain logic of development that
makes it interesting to follow. My only grudge is that ʽCreatureʼ is
hardly the right title — there is no singular «creature» to be represented
here, more like a miriad of creatures, freshly released from Noah's Arc or
something into the forest and singing their happy songs of freedom. Or is that
supposed to be a ʽ(Waiting For) Creatureʼ kind of idea?
The 15-minute-long ʽSkeletonʼ is the
only track to slightly overstay its welcome: somewhere in the middle, the band
hits upon a «wave upon wave of relaxing psychojangle» groove that they become
so happy about, they let it roll and roll and roll for what seems like ages,
even though it hardly has anything to do with any skeletons (some of the other
effects do sound like the rattle of bones, though). However, they more than
make up for this with ʽNight Flightʼ — an acoustically stunning
six-minute closer where, indeed, all sorts of things, from small birds and bats
to large birds and bats to spirits, ghosts, and pink elephants charging through
the air one or several at a time, before they all come plodding and crashing
down at the end. In the meantime, we also realize that we have made a full
24-hour circle, from the greeting dawn of ʽCloud Pleaserʼ to the busy
aerial life of the nighttime in the final round.
So, once again, be it «music» or «sonic
theater», Creature Comforts is an
utter delight for the senses, provided you let your imagination run as wild as
the sound does, instead of boringly wallowing around in modernistic
abstractions — which is why, despite the comparative lack of hype, I actively
prefer it to most of Autechre's «aural suprematism». Another clear thumbs up,
heavily recommended (especially if you are an active zoo-goer or Animal Planet watcher).
BROKEN EAR RECORD (2005)
1) Snarly Yow; 2) Smiling Off;
3) Heavy Manners; 4) ABA; 5) Street Dude; 6) Twins; 7) Motorcycle.
No, no, not that
way! To me, this album is about as big a disappointment as its cover, which
seems more fit for a gonzo porn DVD (granted, one with a psychedelic flavor)
than a collection of atmospheric electronic soundscapes. With just a few
exceptions, they have turned their attention to noise, and I don't mean jungle noise or animal noise or
wind-in-the-trees noise, I mean kaleidoscopic loops of industrial /
computer-ish noise that, for the most part, do not translate into anything
meaningful. From having gone beyond the Animal Collective, they have now
reverted to behaving like a second-rate Animal Collective. Why?..
One big change is that they decide to
re-introduce rhythmic patterns, so you can tap your foot to most of these
«tunes» if you feel like it. A big potential problem with the rhythmic pattern,
however, is that it can be looped forever without any interesting additions —
as it does happen on both ʽSnarly Yowʼ and ʽSmiling Offʼ
that open the album. The former consists of two or three separate, but
similar, parts that are too busy shimmering and glimmering in their electronic
beauty to ever go somewhere. The latter behaves in a more distorted and
schizophrenic manner, before eventually settling into a «madhouse march»,
driven by pseudo-Mellotron and idiot vocal harmonies — you are welcome to take
it if you are interested, but I want my jungle life back.
Eventually, it sort of dawns on you that the
band simply has had enough of beaches, canyons, and jungles, and wants to get
back to the big city. ʽStreet Dudeʼ, let alone the title, is
chock-full of urban noise, for instance, and ʽMotorcycleʼ speaks for
itself as well — actually, I think ʽMotorcycleʼ is the only
genuinely exciting number on here, basically an electronic comedy piece, with
the band trying to start off their chopper for about seven minutes and getting
nowhere fast (so instead they just have to push and lug it around, yelling and
yodeling to the rhythm of the slowly turning wheels).
But before you get to that final number, you
have to deal with the rest — and the rest does not connect, no matter how hard
I try. The sound palette on Creature Comforts
was truly unique, or even if it was not, it still translated to vivid images in
the head. ʽSnarly Yowʼ adds nothing to the accomplishments of the
industrial and «freak-electronic» scene, and neither expands my mind nor
entertains it. Basically, the guys just lost their angle, simple as that — not
that there is anything unusual about it, they just went the standard route of
so many other 21st century artists: say it all first or second time around,
then stick around for another decade with third-rate product, instead of doing
the right thing by switching to another profession. Thumbs down.
LOAD BLOWN (2007)
1) Kokomo; 2) Roll Up; 3)
Gore; 4) Bottom Feeder; 5) Scavenger; 6) Drool; 7) Toka Toka; 8) Cowboy
Soundcheck; 9) Bananas; 10) Manoman.
Well, yes, that is right, except for a small correction: the real load was blown two albums ago. This one is more like «blowing
steam», if you ask me. A little more impressive on the whole than Broken Ear Record, but still not enough
to impress yours truly like the band's original masterpieces. At least the
album sleeve picture is nicer than last time around, too.
If anything, this whole thing simply sounds
like a fussy soundtrack to a video game — some sort of a racing simulator where
you have to drive your amphibian vehicle through all sorts of force fields,
lava pools, underground factory corridors, and, occasionally, underwater
routes. Under the right circumstances, the experience could be fun, but it's
all really been done before, many times, and besides, it might have worked
better with an actual video game at your disposal — it is really odd when you
have to let your imagination work out
the details of a frickin' video game (I usually try to reserve it for somewhat
loftier goals).
With ʽKokomoʼ, you'd probably expect
a deconstruction of the Beach Boys song, but I do not discern even a trace of
sampling — only an endless series of electronic swoops and wobbly distorted
vocals in the background. The effect is psychedelic all right, but it is the
kind of psychedelia that is usually produced by a couple of kids fooling
around with some digital equipment... in other words, nothing out of the
ordinary. ʽRoll Upʼ follows with seven minutes of completely replaceable
sounds — meaning that you probably have to put on your headphones, lie on the
floor, and let yourselves go for those seven minutes, otherwise you won't be
able to connect with the greatness inside and outside of you. Unfortunately, I
hate lying on the floor, and taking this in while sitting straight up did not
do a thing. (Neither am I a fan of race simulators, which this track recalls
vividly — every once in a while, there's an engine revving up like somebody
just rammed the gas pedal right into the floor).
The record briefly perks up in its second half,
when some of the tracks start going easier on the noise and subtler on the
atmosphere: ʽDroolʼ has a slight samba feel to it, with buzzing
insects representing a hot summer day somewhere in the tropics; ʽToka Tokaʼ
is all built on electronic monkey mating calls, and is the one composition on here that could have easily fit on Creature Comforts; and the album closer
ʽManomanʼ is built on trivial sonic sequences, so simple and stupid
they can't help but infect you — after all, if an album makes you feel like an
idiot, it is still better than when it does not make you feel anything at all.
But even these tracks seem more like fortuitous
exceptions, because, second time around, Black Dice are compromising their
original vision — sacrificing it in favor of ideas like «loudness» and
«rhythm», which everyone has in spades. I am not informed of what had happened;
maybe they really, really wanted for their music to be played on the club
scene, which is, indeed, not the best environment for Creature Comforts. If so, this is all a shameful «sellout», never
mind that they are still being experimental and «formally creative». Or,
perhaps, they themselves did not manage to understand what an imaginative
wonder those early sonic scapes were. In any case, I see no reason for anyone
to bother with the likes of Load Blown
when there is, oh, I dunno, the entire catalogs of Vangelis and Klaus Schulze
to explore before that.
REPO (2009)
1) Nite Creme; 2) Glazin; 3)
Earnings Plus Interest; 4) Whirligig; 5) La Cucaracha; 6) Idiots Pasture; 7)
Lazy TV; 8) Buddy; 9) Ten Inches; 10) Chicken Shit; 11) Vegetable; 12) Urban
Supermist; 13) Ultra Vomit Craze; 14) Gag Shack.
Albums like these easily get me confused. There
is no denying that, once again, Black Dice are working, and trying, and
honestly looking for new ideas and new ways of expression — and yet, not a
single one of these ideas registers anywhere, not a single second of this album
carries... nay, produces the impression
of carrying some sort of meaning. If anything, they are even busier and fussier
here than they were before, but what for?
Beats me.
There is a track here called ʽUltra Vomit
Crazeʼ. Now I cannot count myself as a major fan of vomit craze, or vomit
in general, but I can admit that a certain musical allegory of an abstract
«vomit craze» might have an
interesting realization. The problem is that the track has nothing about it
that would really come close to a «vomit craze». In reality, it is six and a
half minutes of a boring trip-hop rhythm with three or four grumbly electronic
loops and some echoey Tarzan-style battle cries in the background. Uh... okay.
What am I supposed to do with those? It's way too repetitive to be «normal
music» and too poorly put together to become a «sonic painting» of any sort.
Maybe if you put on your headphones, inhale some wormwood, stand on your head,
and play it backwards, you are guaranteed to «get it», but I dare not try.
Supposedly, some of the tracks are multi-level
deconstructions — ʽLa Cucarachaʼ would suggest that they are making
fun of Latin music, and if you listen hard enough, you can track down certain
mutated variations on various Latin rhythms at the beginning of the track, but
by the third minute, they are all forgotten in favor of rapidly shifting quirky
electronic patterns that sound like a bunch of robots having nothing better to
do on a Saturday evening, sitting on the porch and playing some of their
jugband robot blues. Wait, that actually might sound intriguing — in reality,
these loops are nothing like robot blues. They are just... loops. They mean
nothing to me, and I would be very much surprised if they meant anything to
you. (Then again, one Amazon reviewer did find this to be «one of the most
rewarding listens of my life» — I sure wish he'd donated some of his DNA to a
respectable scientific institution).
Nor does it help them in any way when they cut
down on the overall number of «epics» and start working on laconic ideas —
there are several very brief links here that run from twenty seconds to just
over a minute, and some of the loop-based «songs» have the length of an
old-fashioned pop single, but what good is multiplying and dissecting your
ideas if they all suck? It only helps
perpetuate the idea that Black Dice are, in fact, devoid of proper talent, and
their squandering away their original act was like Samson cutting his own hair
for no other reason than... being an idiot? Thumbs down in certified disgust
and disappointment.
MR. IMPOSSIBLE (2012)
1) Pinball Wizard; 2) Rodriguez;
3) The Jacker; 4) Pigs; 5) Spy Vs. Spy; 6) Outer Body Drifter; 7) Shithouse
Drifter; 8) Carnitas; 9) Brunswick Sludge (Meets Front Range Tripper).
At last, a marginal improvement over the last
three albums. No, it does not reinstate the early vibe of Creature Comforts (although ʽPigsʼ has pig sounds, and
that seems like a benevolent throwback), but there is one important change: Mr. Impossible focuses less on noise
and more on, let's say, «melody» — apparently, the Brooklyn boys have had
enough of «abrasiveness» for abrasiveness' sake and have started thinking
about subtlety and about impregnating the listener's mind rather than just
flooding his braincells with one shock effect after another until the brain
works out an immunity and begins boring you to death.
Like Load
Blown, this album also begins with a «song» whose title has been arrogantly
pinched from a hit — but just as the original ʽPinball Wizardʼ is a
great song where the original ʽKokomoʼ is a catchy pile of horsedung,
so is this ʽPinball Wizardʼ
a curious and mildly impressive composition where the «alternate
ʽKokomoʼ» was just a head-splitting electronic siren run in bubbly
mode. Here, we have a deconstructed electronic blues-based bassline, a fuzzy,
digitally treated lead guitar wail in the style of Belew-era King Crimson, and
a signature change midway through that transforms the song from a threatening
«electronic avantgarde jazz» tune into a fast-paced electronic «New Wave
rocker». It isn't a triumph of boundless creativity / originality, but it is at
least an optimistic introduction that, if anything, states that the band has
once again begun to put in some thought about quality control.
The record does get fairly uneven, and some of
the tracks are quite comparable in dullness to REPO, but ʽPinball Wizardʼ is not a fluke — for every
composition that still begs the question "why do I have to listen to this
in the first place?", there is one other with a well-explored nifty idea
or two. For instance, ʽThe Jackerʼ has a classy math-rockish guitar
part, where the instrument, true to the song title, is made to sound like a
huge jackhammer or drill, but not in a way where you just push it in and loop
the effect to infinity — no, rather imitating a real life process where you
have to twirl it and twist it and plunge it and withdraw it based on the
circumstances. (Why the people at Pitchfork called the song «jazzy» and stated
that it «swings», I'll never know, but then, if a song sounds like a
malfunctioning jackhammer to one person and like a swinging jazz tune to
another, it is already sort of a good sign). And ʽPigsʼ, like I said,
does deliver the promised goods in the form of digital pig grunting — more like
ʽAttack Of The Killer Robot Pigsʼ than just ʽPigsʼ if you
ask me, and kinda fun if you keep thinking about it like that.
ʽOuter Body Drifterʼ, seemingly
inspired by some break dance soundtrack from the 1980s, is not particularly
interesting by itself (too noisy without being too funky), but it is made more
interesting by being immediately followed by its Doppelgänger, ʽShithouse Drifterʼ, whose electronic
bleeps and blasts seem only marginally different, but as the title provokes you
to start thinking of them in terms of farts,
dumps, and... uh, never mind, this
wasn't supposed to be taking a scatological turn, but somehow it's always more
amusing to see an electronic artist with a toilet sense of humor than, say, a
hardcore punk artist with a toilet sense of humor.
Funny (or not so funny) tidbits like these are
not enough to properly conceptualize the record, or save about half of it from
being traditionally pedestrian, but still, finally, for the first time in eight
years it seems like Black Dice might be back on... well, on a road to something rather than just blindly
groping through the desert. At the very least, I am glad that Bjorn Copeland
has once more taken up a bit of «creative guitar playing», rather than merely
using guitar strings like an alternate way of generating digital signals; in
fact, integrating ye olde «Frippertronics» with the modern digital madness of
the likes of The Animal Collective might be a viable path to follow, provided
they really have no more interest in
developing their original «psycho-nature electronics» schtick — quite a
pitiable decision, if you ask me.
THE BIG COME UP (2002)
1) Busted; 2) Do The Rump; 3) I'll
Be Your Man; 4) Countdown; 5) The Breaks; 6) Run Me Down; 7) Leavin' Trunk; 8) Heavy
Soul; 9) She Said, She Said; 10) Them Eyes; 11) Yearnin'; 12) Brooklyn Bound;
13) 240 Years Before Your Time.
Lots of people hate electric blues and
blues-rock because it is... well, you know. Many of these same people, however,
do not extend that hatred to the fathers of electric blues — hearing angry
rants about the banality and lack of soul in the music of Eric Clapton or
Robert Cray is one thing, but hearing people condemn Howlin' Wolf is quite a
different story. And this does not have so much to do with political
correctness as it has to do with the fact that blues-rock has, indeed, become
a «safe institution» ever since it finally gained mainstream attention and
respect. Inevitably, when a technically limited art form becomes a safe
institution, this leads to boredom — and, eventually, ridicule or even hatred.
Ever once in a while, though, somebody comes
along with a fresh retro perspective: a burning desire to tear off this
«sacralized», comfy gloss from blues-based music and try and make it sound
devilish and disturbing, the way it used to be as late as the 1950s. Actually,
it does not even happen as often as we would expect. «Rough and tough» people
generally drift towards more energetic forms of music (hardcore, metal, etc.),
whereas the rootsy stuff falls in the hands of safe and cuddly people (John
Mayer!). In this world, The Black Keys, consisting of singing guitarist Dan
Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney — and no one else! — are a curious
exception, and that alone transforms them into one of the more notable figures
of the last decade.
What we have here is a set of thirteen short
songs, most of them featuring nothing but guitar and drums (not even bass!),
and drawing heavily from the musical palette of Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and
John Lee Hooker rather than any of their «more timid» and «academic»
successors, be they black or white. The similarity is in the melodic side of
the material (a few of the songs are covers, but most are originals written in
the same vein), the careful «retro» selection of chords used, and the grizzled
vocals of Auerbach, which certainly cannot compete with Chester Arthur Burnett,
but try to follow the same «glass-cutting» pattern anyway.
The dissimilarity
— in fact, the one thing that distinguishes The Big Come Up from a generic copycat venture — lies primarily in
Auerbach's sound. Note for note, he may be rehashing the old playing styles of
spooky black guitarists of the 1950s, but the guitar tones go way beyond that,
drawing upon the influences of classic garage-rock, proto-punk, Hendrix,
perhaps even early Sabbath-style metal in places. Deep, fuzzy, crunchy, the
works. We know this kind of sound already, but we have not yet heard it applied
to this kind of material — had it been invented around 1955, even Muddy and
Wolf would have thought it too far out to agree to sing to this sort of playing.
My ears have decided that the combination works
perfectly. (Then again, I also refuse to refuse to listen to Clapton's solo
career, so take my opinion for what it's worth — even though the Black Keys
sound nothing like solo Clapton). Already the opening number, 'Busted', sounds
like the Stooges covering 'Rolling And Tumbling', and if that is good, well, it
does not get any worse from there — and, from a certain point of view, makes
The White Stripes sound like a bunch of tame, home-schooled kids (in reality,
both Jack White and Dan Auerbach share similar backgrounds, but Dan does a
noticeably better job of conjuring the spirit of the wild).
Also, I should not be giving the impression
that the entire album is so completely uniform in its approach. First, the
retro-blues thing is done with plenty of attention to diversity. 'Busted' is
sheer Delta blues gone Chicago blues gone garage, but there is also
'Countdown', with guitar licks recycled from Arthur Crudup and early Elvis
circa 'That's All Right Mama' and 'Mystery Train'; and 'Heavy Soul' takes its
cues from classic R'n'B stylistics.
Other tracks show the influence of «whiter»
blues-rock outfits from the 1960s and 1970s: 'I'll Be Your Man', with its sound
cleaned-up, could easily fit on any American roots-rock album recorded circa
1968, and some of the others would not feel out of place on Led Zep albums. In
this setting, even the most unpredictable choice — a faithful guitar-and-drums
cover of the Beatles' 'She Said She Said' — does not feel so tremendously out
of place, even if it is out of place,
the only «true» pop song of the whole bunch. But they do it in a fun sort of
way.
Naturally, one should not expect any sort of
genius songwriting here, even though 'The Breaks' features a hugely effective
minimalistic shrill riff (and also qualifies as one of the most «modernistic»
tunes on the album, with a brief hip-hop style intro), and the brief coda '240
Years Before Your Time' has some deliciously staged psychedelic guitar on it;
with its mock-pompous introduction, announcing that Mr. World is going to be
speaking to us in his own language, it is clearly a minimalist tribute (an
homage, even) to Jimi, and a good one.
But it is hard to blame an artist for not
achieving something he never intended to achieve. What The Black Keys did
intend to achieve was to create a slightly different kind of sound using very
sparse means, and in that, they succeeded: definitely not a mean feat for two
simple guys in the beginning of the 21st century. Not to mention that it is
only through these guys that many people might have heard about Muddy and Wolf
in the first place — additional bonus for popularization (counteracted, though,
by the necessity of dealing with potential YouTube commentators going «Howlin'
Wolf? Who needs that prehistoric old crap when we now have Danny Auerbach?»).
All in all, for this fuzzy-wuzzy lean-mean kind of sound these guys get going,
they naturally deserve their thumbs up.
THICKFREAKNESS (2003)
1) Thickfreakness; 2) Hard Row;
3) Set You Free; 4) Midnight In Her Eyes; 5) Have Love Will Travel; 6) Hurt
Like Mine; 7) Everywhere I Go; 8) No Trust; 9) If You See Me; 10) Hold Me In
Your Arms; 11) I Cry Alone.
The band's second album caused a slight
increase in their influence, but, in retrospect, it may be just a tad less
impressive than the debut — if only for the fact that the John Lee Hooker /
Howlin' Wolf vibe is less evident here, much of it sacrificed in favor of a
late Sixties / early Seventies hard rock spirit. It was one thing when Auerbach
applied Leslie West's classic guitar tone to old blues material — it's another
thing when he applies it to Leslie West-style material, because why should
anyone already familiar with Mountain's classic records care to bother?
Well, for one thing, the Auerbach/Carney duet still sounds awesomely cool and modestly
unique. The entire record was produced within 14 hours in Carney's basement,
but, for all I know, it could have just as well be recorded live in forty
minutes in an underground station. Coupled with that guitar tone and those
ragged vocals, the spontaneity works. Second, if you dig the sonic vibe at all,
and I do, it really only matters if they have enough decent songs to go along
with the sound. And Thickfreakness
passes the test — barely.
Barely, because blues-rock songwriting is a risky
business, and Auerbach either does not care to invent new riffs at all, or
deems it sufficient to tweak and adjust pre-existing ones. The title track is a
good example: I am pretty sure I have heard that fat opening melody many times
already, but in slightly differing variants. On the other hand, it still kicks
ass, and the nifty little touch of inserting a Beatlesque "hold me, love
me..." bit in the middle of each chorus is enough to carry it over the basic
memorability threshold.
My personal favorite is 'No Trust', which
builds upon a boogie line stolen directly from 'Shakin' All Over', crossed with
a Delta blues-style chorus. Less convincing is the album's best-known track
'Set You Free', made popular by being featured in the School of Rock movie: no attempts at presenting any shade of a
memorable riff or catchy vocal melody. More
convincing than 'Set You Free' is the band's take on Richard Berry's 'Have
Love Will Travel', whose famous riff is a perfect match for Auerbach's guitar
tone — unfortunately, this version still has no chance to overshadow the
classic Sonics version (I miss that insane sax solo!). Even more convincing may
be 'Hard Row', whose descending guitar lines are somewhat reminiscent of
Clapton circa Cream.
Still, overall, I'd qualify this as an
«enjoyable disappointment». The shift of direction per se is not a good sign,
and the uniformity of the tracks is denser than on The Big Come Up: you'd have to be totally wooed by the debut in order
to enjoy the follow-up — unless you know nothing of either Chicago blues or
1970s hard rock, in which case Thickfreakness
will probably sound more accessible. Still, thank God for Danny Auerbach — if
there are even five or six former fans of Limp Bizkit in this world that found
redemption through the man, count my vote for canonization.
RUBBER FACTORY (2004)
1) When The Lights Go Out; 2) 10
A.M. Automatic; 3) Just Couldn't Tie Me Down; 4) All Hands Against His Own; 5) The
Desperate Man; 6) Girl Is On My Mind; 7) The Lengths; 8) Grown So Ugly; 9) Stack
Shot Billy; 10) Act Nice And Gentle; 11) Aeroplane Blues; 12) Keep Me; 13) Till
I Get My Way.
After the expected «sophomore slump» of Thickfreakness, Auerbach and Carney
retreat, regroup, and revitalize their act. If the first album mostly
channelled the spirit of old Chicago bluesmen, and the second album mainly
evoked the atmosphere of early 1970s «stoner hard rock», Rubber Factory works mainly as a subtle tribute to sung and unsung
American heroes of the «twisted hard rock / blues rock» direction — everyone
from the Stooges to early Captain Beefheart. All of a sudden, the chord
changes get more interesting, the edges get jaggier, and the ride becomes
bumpier. Putting it short: +10 in the excitement department.
Changes burst out at the very start, as 'When
The Lights Go Out' opens the record with the usual percussion boom and an
unexpected acoustic riff (with some shrill one-note electric wailing in the
background). The call rings out: The Black Keys are not going to strictly
adhere to AC/DC tactics. They are
widening their base without losing the essence. They can be subtle and diversify their emotional range. 'When The Lights
Go Out', for instance, introduces «tiredness» and perhaps even «depression»,
rarely, if ever, seen on the previous two albums because of all the testosterone.
And now they can even be tender — as seen on the folky ballad 'The Lengths', on
which Auerbach sounds like a cross between James Taylor and Eddie Vedder, but
still manages to push the bar upwards rather than downwards due to a
beautifully constructed set of slide guitar flourishes. It is a good thing
there's only one song like that on the album, though — just the right number
for a band whose main reason for existence is their guitar tone.
And their guitar riffs. This time, Danny took some
of it to come up with a bunch of real quality tunes. 'Just Couldn't Tie Me
Down' uses an archaic distortion effect, similar to the one used on early
Burnette Brothers records, to come up with a cool, inescapable rock'n'roll
melody — every time the guitar hits back after Auerbach's "Happiness...
come around... just couldn't tie me down", there comes that classic
rockabilly punch in the stomach, the little JERK that made it all worth your
while. Cool riffs also inhabit such modern classics as 'All Hands Against His
Own', 'The Desperate Man', and 'Grown So Ugly'. 'The Desperate Man', in
particular, with its rough, screech-heavy key changes in between verses, is the
closest The Black Keys step to the line that separates their sound from «ye
olde avantgarde» — they never ever cross that line, but they titillate, and
that's quite enough for me.
As song structures get more complex and
stylistic influences more diverse, so does the band's choice of covers become
more adequate, or, to be precise, more adequately expressed than it used to be.
'She Said She Said' was done well, but it stepped out of the overall paradigm
of The Big Come Up. Not so with
their current take on the Kinks' 'Act Nice And Gentle', which used to be light
as a feather in all of its music-hall-ish-ness, but here, all dressed up in
several overdubbed lo-fi guitar parts, mumbled and skipped vocals, and
«genuinely faked sloppiness» that even the Davies brothers — no slouches at
faking sloppiness themselves — would admire, it fits right in, even if it is
still the friendliest and «laziest» number on the record, per the song's
nature.
The band's openness to experimentation shines
through in the most unpredictable places — such as a brief quotation from
'Rhapsody In Blue' in the middle of 'Girl Is On My Mind' — and I am pretty sure
that, with their package of influences, you will be able to spot quotations and
allusions in every song if you put your mind to it. (As I am typing this, the
sound of 'Till I Get My Way' is blasting through the speakers and I am all
ready to describe the song as «Status Quo's 'Pictures Of Matchstick Men' meet
Paul Rogers and Bad Company»). But the band's sound has further solidified
into something instantly recognizable as the Black Keys and the Black Keys
only.
So, Rubber
Factory should be enough to satisfy the skeptics: the band has its own
shape and style, and it is capable of processing just about everything through that style. If
Gershwin, why not Mozart? If Mozart, why not Eric Dolphy? That's just the way
it should be — a blues-rock heart, a garage soul, and a mind open to every
other influence. Thumbs up.
MAGIC POTION (2006)
1) Just Got To Be; 2) Your
Touch; 3) You're The One; 4) Just A Little Heat; 5) Give Your Heart Away; 6) Strange
Desire; 7) Modern Times; 8) The Flame; 9) Goodbye Babylon; 10) Black Door; 11) Elevator.
The Black Keys move in spirals. After the
success of Rubber Factory and
several pleasant diversions (such as the release of an «official live bootleg»
and a short EP consisting entirely of covers of the recently deceased bluesman
Junior Kimbrough), their next full-fledged venture into the studio plays out
the formula of Thickfreakness:
follow an interesting, stylistically unusual album with a mediocre «shadow»
that exemplifies the art of coasting and — the way I see it, at least — can
only really count as a muscle-training effort, to keep the brain occupied while
at the same time denying it access to anything supernatural. An album that
«buys time», in short.
Just like Thickfreakness,
Magic Potion is a straightahead
formulaic album, 90% of which consists of mid-tempo «leaden» blues-rockers,
whose only point of differentiation lies in riffage. 'You're The One' is a
solitary Southern rock-style ballad; the rest sounds more monotonous than your
average AC/DC album. The riffs in question are not bad, but, traditionally,
represent minor variations on classic garage and hard-rock melodies; hardcore
fans of Led Zeppelin, Grand Funk Railroad, Blue Öyster Cult, Mountain,
etc., will no doubt be able to «crack» most of these chord sequences open in no
time.
Meanwhile, the little touches that made Rubber Factory so individualistic — the
Gershwin quotes, the quirky rearrangement of the Kinks cover, the knife-sharp
signature changes, the moody acoustic pieces — have once again been abandoned
in favor of a «hardcore» sonic approach that could only satisfy the proper
hardcore fans. By all means, it could not satisfy an aspiring reviewer — how do
you verbally review a record whose only asset is a set of similar-sounding
blues-rock riffs? So, uh, I like the riff of 'Just A Little Heat', which begins
just like BOC's 'Cities On Flame With Rock'n'Roll', and the riff of 'Give Your
Heart Away', which ends just like Black Sabbath's 'Sweet Leaf'. Who the heck
cares, though?
Like I said, 'You're The One' is the only song
to step away from the format, but it itself plays out as a light parody on
soulful Southern balladry à la
Skynyrd — emphasized in the lyrics ("When I was thirteen / My mom said son
/ You're the one I adore": if this doesn't sound as funny as the Ramones'
"Hey little girl, I wanna be your boyfriend", it is only because we
don't normally expect The Black Keys to sound funny. We might be wrong about
that). In the end, it is about as soulful as Danny Auerbach normally gets — no
more, no less. As is all of this
middle-of-the-road, marking-time album, another burst of joy for
neo-dirty-blues-rock fans, another slab of potential disappointment for
those who think that neo-dirty-blues-rock is not necessarily supposed to merely
flash different subtle shades of one single trick over and over again. As a
representative of the latter group, I sadly provide Magic Potion with a thumbs down.
ATTACK & RELEASE (2008)
1) All You Ever Wanted; 2) I
Got Mine; 3) Strange Times; 4) Psychotic Girl; 5) Lies; 6) Remember When (Side
A); 7) Remember When (Side B); 8) Same Old Thing; 9) So He Won't Break; 10)
Oceans & Streams; 11) Things Ain't Like They Used To Be.
Time machine detected: I gave Magic Potion a «thumbs down» in 2011,
and the band admittedly reacted to it in 2008. Could it be that someone else gave it a thumbs down, too?..
Because with The Black Keys' fifth major original LP, comes the biggest change
in sound these guys ever allowed themselves; in fact, the change is so huge
that it almost threatens to undermine the band's very reasons for existence.
For starters, the album was recorded in a
proper studio this time, instead of
barns, garages, abandoned silver mines, and the central sewer system of
Shitsville, USA. Next, there is an outside producer: Danger Mouse, a.k.a. B.
J. Burton, formerly known for inventive rap-rock remixes and producing the
Gorillaz and Beck — not even close to anything associable with Dan Auerbach.
There is also an outside extra musician — guitar player extraordinaire Marc
Ribot, whom most people probably know for his Tom Waits collaborations, but who
is actually a huge individuality in his own right. Finally, for the first time
ever, the songs lose their stern minimalism: in addition to guitar and drums,
there are banjos, organs, chimes, flutes (!), backing vocals, whatever. Even
the guitar sound is more diverse — there is plenty of acoustic playing here,
and several different electric tones as opposed to the monotonous distorted
garage growl of yesterday.
How does it work? For the moment — it works
fine, and was probably the rightest thing to do. Despite cleaner production and
instrumental diversity, the subtle sloppiness and rawness are still there, as
are Auerbach's songwriting instincts. But now he also has the chance to allow
to judge these songs based on more than one criterion (lack/presence of an
awesome riff). Some of the songs, in fact, are not riff-based at all, e. g. 'So
He Won't Break' — a moody combination of blues rhythms, Ribot's «broken» chord
sequences, psychedelic chimes, and psychotic nasal vocals from Danny, instead
of the usual roar. Did I say «psychotic»? There's a song called 'Psychotic
Girl' here, whose odd vibe would be more suitable for the Pixies rather than
the Keys. That's how far they are
willing to go this time in order to remodel their face.
It is hard to complain, either, when the
melodies are so good. On the hard-rocking tunes, Auerbach regains the ability
to strike out those awesome riffs — or perhaps they just sound awesome in
contrast to the «softer» tunes this time — the melody of 'Strange Times', for
instance, borrows a few chords from Sabbath's 'Sweet Leaf', incorporating them
into a faster, sweatier garage riff, to very good effect. 'Same Old Thing'
(nothing to do with several classic blues tunes with the same name) is built on
a very atmospheric guitar pattewrn, unfortunately, stuffed a bit too deep into
the background — making the song less effective and memorable than it could be.
Fortunately, the Tull-like flute embellishments will help it register in the
mind.
Overall, the record is hardly a masterpiece,
for the same old reasons — you'd have to be the genius to shame all genii, to
put out a «masterpiece» based on reshuffling the good old blues-rock /
garage-rock chord stock as late as 2008 — but, for Auerbach and his drummer
pal, it opens the road to survival and development. Purists may feel betrayed,
yet I think that their schtick can
work even with flutes and banjos — thumbs up.
It is hardly a coincidence that the closing number,
a duet between Danny and minimalist country girl Jessica Lea Mayfield, is
called 'Things Ain't Like They Used To Be'. In fact, it is a blatant anthemic
statement — so straightforward that it ain't even all that fun. But, like
almost everything else on here, the song still manages to be touching and
softly inspiring. Who cares if it hangs on just one melodic vocal line? It is
still the real thing.
BROTHERS (2010)
1) Everlasting Light; 2) Next
Girl; 3) Tighten Up; 4) Howlin' For You; 5) She's Long Gone; 6) Black Mud; 7)
The Only One; 8) Too Afraid To Love You; 9) Ten Cent Pistol; 10) Sinister Kid;
11) The Go Getter; 12) I'm Not The One; 13) Unknown Brother; 14) Never Gonna
Give You Up; 15) These Days.
I suppose it must be hard for the general
public to think of two guys as «brothers» when one is playing all the «real»
instruments and singing all the vocals and the other one is «just» drumming, no
matter how vital that drumming may be to the music (and, with all due respect
to Patrick Carney, he ain't no Keith Moon). But more power to the band if
slapping on a title like Brothers
functions as a placebo to get the creative juice a-flowin'. Actually, for a
short while there was a certain
danger of The Black Keys breaking up — Auerbach released a solo album and
Carney had serious family problems — but eventually, things got better, and, if
the band members are to be believed, their personal turmoil only helped to
improve the music.
There is one serious problem with Brothers: it is way too long. The running time of 55 minutes is the band's personal
record, and a highly questionable one: when it's just one guy with a guitar and
one other guy with a drumset, things are supposed to wrap up quickly. If you
listen to Brothers on a
one-song-per-day basis, you might think that there are no truly «weak» cuts
here; but if taken together, the last 20 minutes will almost inevitably sound
like a rehash of the first 30. Which is especially troublesome considering
that, in actuality, Brothers further
expands the Keys' musical vision — with Danger Mouse at the helm once again,
there are new sounds, new influences, new emotions, and all of it without
sacrificing the old spirit.
Beginning with the beginning, 'Everlasting
Light' is generic folk blues at heart, but the coating is cool — a dry, crunchy
tone beaten into a danceable pop-rock pattern, drumbeats merged with handclaps
and an out-of-nowhere 'Come Together'-ish «ssh...!», credible attempts at
falsetto crooning from Auerbach, and minimal, but atmospheric backing whoos
and whaas from hip-hopper Nicole Wray (guest-starring here through her participation
in «Blakroc», a joint rap-rock side project between the Keys and various
hip-hop artists). No better illustration for the devil that is in the
proverbial details. The crunch and simplicity firmly tie the song to the band's
legacy and style, but the coating shows how successfully they manage to climb
out of the rut that said legacy was beginning to turn into.
Likewise, the big hit single, 'Tighten Up', could have been a by-the-book roots-rock
number with nothing but yer average «soul» to redeem it, if not for all the
little things. The cute little Morricone-style whistling in the intro.
Carney's melodic drum fills, raising tension. The in-between verses guitar riff
that transforms the song into power pop before returning it back to R&B
territory. The unpredictable key change for the coda. It is good to know that
the boys are now open to the idea of having experimental fun in the studio.
Similar stylistic mergers characterize most of
the material on Brothers. Hardcore
blues-rock fans might be appalled, as well as blues-rock haters who firmly
cherish the idea that the only thing that will help traditional blues-rock to
get better is a terrorist attack on the Chicago Blues Festival (no hostages
taken, preferably). We ought to respect those religious feelings — but there is
nothing wrong, either, about welcoming intelligent ways of merging blues and
pop like the band does here on 'Ten Cent Pistol' (a catchy, hummable chorus
there, within a song whose basic melody, lyrics, and attitude are all geared
towards dark blues), or on the slightly martial 'Howlin' For You', which is what
The Cars could have originally sounded like, if only they'd tacked their tacky
keyboards on early British R&B rather than early British pop-rock.
That said, I repeat that the bag of tricks is
not really full enough to accommodate 55 minutes worth of new Black Keys songs.
Individually, none of them register as masterpieces; collectively, there's just
too many of them, and, in the end, I walk away from Brothers with a sense of indignant admiration that is almost enough to convert the thumbs up
to its opposite — here be an album that chooses excellent ways to dispel
boredom, but gets so caught up in the excitement that, in the end, it just gets
plain boring to watch it chase away boredom. (It does not help, either, that
most of the tracks on which experimentation is essentially suspended in favor
of «soul», e. g. the heart-on-the-sleeve ballad 'These Days' and the personal
confession 'Unknown Brother', are somehow all grouped at the end). Which all
translates to a complex, but very often felt (judging by peer reviews) flaw —
and kudos to Dan and Patrick for acknowledging the fact by exterminating said
flaw on their next record.
EL CAMINO (2011)
1) Lonely Boy; 2) Dead And
Gone; 3) Gold On The Ceiling; 4) Little Black Submarines; 5) Money Maker; 6) Run
Right Back; 7) Sister; 8) Hell Of A Season; 9) Stop Stop; 10) Nova Baby; 11) Mind
Eraser.
This record should dissipate any doubts as to
whether The Black Keys might eventually shed their garage-blues-rock skin
without compromising their very reason for existence. If Brothers could have us feeling uneasy about that, El Camino rights all wrongs — simply by
being the band's best album since... well, I have never ever been that excited about The Black Keys ever
since I first took a listen to The Big
Come Up.
With the continuing help of Danger Mouse (who
is now not only co-producing the record, but is also listed as co-writer on all
the songs), the band puts the finishing touches on its new sound, and that
means removing all limits. Yes, you will hear echos of ELO and ABBA on this
record instead of echos of John Lee Hooker, and this means that the band is
bound to lose some of its hardcore fans: I can easily see where 'Sister' would
be taken as an offensive sellout by those who swore undying allegiance to 'Run
Me Down' nine years earlier. Which should merely serve as a warning — temporary
pacts are usually wiser than undying allegiances.
But never fear, El Camino is still quintessentially a brutal, brawny rock album,
with a serious chunk of its new numbers sounding as minor (but almost always
useful) variations on tunes from the band's minimalist period. It's just that
they're done with the minimalism (for now). Instrumental credits are still
running very low (Danger Mouse is credited for keyboards, and there are three
female singers on backup vocals), but the sound still comes out as their
fullest and densest yet, and now they have learned to take advantage of this
fullness — drawing upon a varied bag of tricks to make each song stand out in a
different way.
Auerbach's heavy guitar sound is still the
leader of the trend: no longer an absolute dictator, but the album's lead-in
track and first hit single, 'Lonely Boy', still opens with a burly riff — one
that seems to have been born as a «Danny Auerbach does Marc Bolan doing Cliff
Gallup» sort of thing: big, catchy, rebellious, and fun. With Danger Mouse's
anthemic keyboards and the backup girls joining in on the chorus, 'Lonely Boy'
gets a glam-rock coating that, like the best of 1970s glam-rock, never loses
its rock'n'roll heart under the glitz. Furthermore, it even preserves a bit of
Auerbach's trademark soulful longing — instead of the tongue-in-cheek
smarty-pants arrogance that used to make intelligent glam-rock sound too
cynical and «nihilist» for many people. El
Camino may be glitzy, but it is never «hip».
Furthermore, the radical shift of sound seems
to have revitalized Auerbach into writing lots of good, if predictably
derivative, melodies — and it helps that the album is not as drawn out as Brothers, because there ain't no
filler anywhere in sight. The few barebones numbers that remain still rock out
as crazy ('Money Maker' is another one of those Nuggets-style nuggets whose riff you swear you've heard a million
times, yet cannot remember a single song which uses exactly the same chord
sequence; 'Mind Eraser' somehow manages a shiver-sending effect with its ominous
"oh, don't let it be over" chorus). And, on the other end of the
spectrum, the Keys' most daring shifts in style are just as good. 'Sister' is
high-caliber retro-1970s pop-rock with a falsetto chorus, one of the best songs
Jeff Lynne never wrote even though he had every chance of doing so. 'Nova Baby'
shamelessly steals part of its vocal melody from ABBA's 'Lay All Your Love On
Me' ("you walk around in other towns" = "I wasn't jealous before
we met", etc.), but sets it in an anthemic power-pop context that works in
an entirely different way.
Even in between those two extremes, diversity
is the word of day. 'Little Black Submarines' begins as a touching folk
ballad, then, midway through, transforms into a bombastic grunge number with
quasi-psychedelic backing whoah-whoah vocals. 'Gold On The Ceiling' is
stomp-your-feet boogie-rock accompanied with an electronic harpsichord. 'Dead
And Gone' takes the martial pounding of 'London Calling' and imbues it with a
broken-hearted love-crazy atmosphere. The same atmosphere resurfaces on 'Run
Right Back', but this time punctuated with an unforgettable weepy slide riff.
And so on.
Summing up, I may not have heard all that many
albums from 2011, but El Camino must
unquestionably be one of the year's best — if only due to its consistency in
surprising the mind and uplifting the spirit. And, to me, it is final and
irrefutable proof that Auerbach is «the real thing», because his music turns
out to be living and breathing even when its surface is muddled with all these
extra, and, upon first sight, superfluous flourishes. I mean, when a guy plays
distorted guitar music à la John Lee Hooker and sings in a growly
voice, that alone can seduce «seekers of the truth» into accepting the guy as a
mini-Messiah — no matter how inventive or individualistic the actual songs may
be. But when the song is given an odd, «unsuitable» musical coating, and still
remains inventive and individualistic, you know you're dealing with something
real good.
And, if nothing goes wrong, I bet we can expect
many more surprises from The Black Keys for years to come (especially
considering that the breakup potential for a band that consists of two members is fairly low). In the
meantime, thumbs
up for El Camino as, I
repeat, one of 2011's best, regardless of whether I have heard 10 or 1,000
albums from said year.
TURN BLUE (2014)
1) Weight Of Love; 2) In Time;
3) Turn Blue; 4) Fever; 5) Year In Review; 6) Bullet In The Brain; 7) It's Up
To You Now; 8) Waiting On Words; 9) 10 Lovers; 10) In Our Prime; 11) Gotta Get
Away.
If, for some reason, you happened to miss out
on Brothers and El Camino and have stumbled upon this record right after Rubber Factory, prepare yourself for a
shock comparable with arriving at... well, let's say Genesis' We Can't Dance right after Foxtrot. Or try to imagine AC/DC doing
a disco album. Not altogether impossible — with a little overworking of the
fantasy machine, you could see Angus
Young adapting his guitar style to the good old four-on-the-floor. (In fact,
they almost came close to it on a
couple songs off Highway To Hell).
Although it's not as if there were no going
back altogether, Turn Blue sees the
finalization of the transformation of the original Black Keys into something
completely different. Many critics and fans alike have blamed this on the ever
increasing influence of Danger Mouse, who they accuse of practically running
this band now and adapting them to his own musical taste and vision. I have a
hard time accepting that — unless he keeps Dan and Patrick on drugs or
something, these guys don't really look like they could be so easily
manipulated into sacrificing their identity and becoming the willing slaves of
their producer. More grounded would be an accusation of «selling out»: the
success of El Camino has brought The
Black Keys to the attention of a much larger fanbase than the old blues-rock
revival crowds, and so it could be expected that they might want to go on
moving in that same «commercial» direction — and simply retain Danger Mouse as
their good luck charm. «If he can get us to No. 2, surely he can get us to No.
1». And that he did.
But even so, «commercial» is such a vague term
these days that there is little sense in trying to use it as an expletive. In
the 1980s, for instance, if you went «commercial», this meant a very well
defined style of production and musical values. In 2014, there is a range of
«commercial» artists that covers all the vast space between Katy Perry and Lana
del Rey, so what exactly would count as a «sellout»? And although Turn Blue does sound «modern» in its
choice of production techniques, glossiness of sound, and electronic seasoning,
its melodic backbone (like most of the melodic backbones of 2014, for that
matter), hails from quite a chronologically different era.
In its relatively diverse array of styles, Turn Blue sounds like the band's
declaration of love for the Seventies, a decade in which neither of the two
band members spent any reasonable amount of time (Dan was born in 1979, and
Patrick one year later), but which seems to have shaped most of their musical
preferences anyway. Except where, earlier, they would be inspired primarily by
the heavy blues-rock acts, now they
pay their dues to the R&B, funk, art-pop, and even progressive rock
corners of the scene. They do adapt all that baggage to the pulls and yearnings
of their own soul, it's true — that unexplainable «blues feeling», the one
which is so hard to fake when you get to know it, is all over this record. But
then it was all over the records by their
predecessors just as well. So it does become a tad difficult to
understand where the imitation ends and the real Danny Auerbach begins. It's
even possible that he doesn't really begin at all.
As the album starts, with the multi-part epic
ʽWeight Of Loveʼ, you might ask yourself the question: «Is this
really The Black Keys, or is this a Pink Floyd outtake?» Those pensive guitar
chords, those wailing keyboard effects sounding like lonely planets zooping by
your window, they all seem conspiring to put you in a Dark Side Of The Moon (more exactly, ʽBreatheʼ) state of
mind. Then the song changes its time signature, becomes funkier and gradually
more violent, before erupting in a climactic solo — but throughout the song, it
still retains some of that initial Floydishness, and that's... weird.
ʽIn Timeʼ and a couple other songs
bring on memories of such recent «R&B» successes as Amy Winehouse, which
were, of course, themselves revivals of something older. With a moody, catchy
guitar riff but little else in the way of guitar work (most of the other
non-percussive overlays are generated with Danger Mouse's array of keyboards),
it is a moody «art-groove» that seems to warn us of something we are not sure
of ("...you were having your fun, now you're under the gun...") in
Dan's anguished falsetto (which he uses quite a bit on the album, despite the
fact that they never really go into disco: ʽFeverʼ comes close, but
it still sounds more like The Cars than Chic). None of it is bad, but none of
it is terribly inspiring, either.
Sometimes it is downright bizarre:
ʽWaiting On Wordsʼ begins in retro-romantic mode, so much so that
Auerbach almost sounds like Robin Gibb: the brutal beast trying on some ruffled
fabric for a change. As impeccably melodic as these songs are, they are just
not too convincing. Wolves in sheep skins? Soulless experiments? Or is it just
a case of hopelessly misplaced falsetto? Something like the title track, for
instance — to me, despite the paranoid bass line and minor moods, it just
refuses to satisfy the «desperate tension» requirement of the lyrics. As The
Black Keys «turn blue», there is a nagging suspicion that by «blue» they
actually mean «half-frozen to death», and little else. As hard as it is to put
my finger on what exactly went wrong here.
Something did
go wrong, though, if I distinctly feel a sense of relief when it comes to the
last track — ʽGotta Get Awayʼ opens with some crunchy Stones-like
riffage, then quickly turns into a slightly softened up pub-rocker with a pop
chorus. No pretense or ambition, no quirky production tricks... no «classic
Black Keys» ambience, either, but somehow the song, even despite its repetitiveness
(before it is over, you will remember exactly how far Kalamazoo is from San
Berdoo), feels more «real» than everything else on here.
To put it short and blunt, Turn Blue is not a bad album — but it intentionally forgets about
what it was that made The Black Keys such an outstanding band; Turn Faceless would have been a more
appropriate title. On the other hand, even as a faceless album, it is an
interesting experiment in retro-genre-hopping, it sounds tasteful, it has some
good songwriting, and in the end, after much deliberation, I still give it a thumbs up.
Just do not even think of getting close to it if you come to the Black Keys
section with definite expectations.
ADDENDA:
SOLO WORK
THE ARCS
YOURS, DREAMILY (2015)
1) Once We Begin (Intro); 2)
Outta My Mind; 3) Put A Flower In Your Pocket; 4) Pistol Made Of Bones; 5)
Everything You Do (You Do For You); 6) Stay In My Corner; 7) Cold Companion;
8) The Arc; 9) Nature's Child; 10) Velvet Ditch; 11) Chains Of Love; 12) Come
& Go; 13) Rosie (Ooh La La); 14) Searching The Blue.
Although «The Arcs» were assembled as a side
project of Danny Auerbach, comparison of their first (and so far, only) album
with the latest production of The Black Keys shows that Danny probably just
wanted to take a break from Carney — because Yours, Dreamily is easily seen as a next logical step in Auerbach's
evolution from grizzly blues-rocker into a moody popster, sort of like a
one-man Fleetwood Mac in all of its multiple consecutive incarnations (at least
he does not have a spare Christine McVie-type personality). Assisting him in
this evolution are: keyboard and horn player Leon Michels (who also plays sax
in his own band, El Michels Affair), drummer and general multi-instrumentalist
Richard Swift (who is also a member of The Shins), and, to a lesser extent,
drummer Homer Steinweiss and bassist Nick Movshon, who used to play for the
late Amy Winehouse, among others. They all share songwriting credits with
Auerbach — particularly Leon Michels — but it is very perfectly clear that this
is essentially Danny's project from top to bottom, as his personal unshaved
aura is all over the place.
And there's nothing wrong with that, either: Yours, Dreamily is an excellent album,
full to the brim (a very reasonable 45-minute long brim) with clever, tasteful,
and almost instantly memorable «blues-pop» songs that are about as worthy a
continuation of the Brothers / El Camino
/ Turn Blue tradition as could be. The sentiments throughout are generally
the same — brooding, soulful, a little melancholic, maybe even a tad
misanthropic, reflecting an artistic depression that is quiet, but subtly deep
enough to make you want to kill yourself if you spend too much time digging:
ʽEverything You Do (You Do For You)ʼ, a mean mean reversal of the
crappy message of the Bryan Adams song, could be understood as a personal
complaint about an egoistic lover, or
it could be just as easily interpreted as a bash of the general reason why
everything goes wrong in this world of ours. Well, probably not — most of the
songs here are directly woman-related — but the music has a consistent
«world-weary» makeover that will be of great use to you whenever you feel
pissed at either your partner, or The System, or your own unenviable personal
role in the consequences of the Big Bang.
The songs are generally blues- or jazz-based,
but always with catchy vocal hooks, most of which are traditionally lodged in
the song title: as a concluding chorus line of each depressed verse, the line
"everything you do, you do for you" falls with a heavy falsetto thud
like a killer stone (and the percussion is produced like a series of ominous
faraway thumps to emphasize the effect), and so does the concluding line of
ʽPistol Made Of Bonesʼ, a rather transparent metaphor for the past
coming to haunt the protagonist. On the other hand, ʽStay In My
Cornerʼ, almost completely sung in falsetto and owing its existence to Sam
Cooke, Ben E. King, Al Green, or any other master of the American R&B tradition,
has the hook dutifully delivered like a tender plea, because, well, somebody is gotta be there for the
protagonist to shield him from all these dark thoughts, and to make his case
even stronger, the protagonist is also going to play a loud, slightly
distorted, heart-breaking slide guitar solo for that special somebody.
Although the album was not produced by Danger
Mouse (Auerbach and Michels took care of production themselves), his legacy is
noticeable — there's echo all over the place, a wide variety of guitar effects
(such as the «burping» tone on ʽThe Arcʼ, whose riff, by the way,
bears an iffy resemblance to ʽMoney For Nothingʼ), different
percussion on every track, ranging from drum machines to the above-mentioned
«distant thumping» on ʽEverything You Doʼ, and other little
production tricks that efficiently modernize the music while keeping its
melodic backbone firmly in the past. The most questionable production decision
is probably on ʽCome & Goʼ, essentially a modern-day cabaret
number loaded with love-making moans, a song that you might find a little
problematic to play in the presence of your parents (depends on the parents, of
course) — certainly, the hookline "the more he comes, the more he
goes" will take on quite a distinctive meaning next to this bit of
softporn soundtrack. But then, we're all grown up here, and this is an inventive addition to the
loungy-smoky atmosphere of the track.
If there is one single flaw to Yours, Dreamily, it is that no single
track stands out above the others — not only is the same mood retained
throughout, but it also constantly stays at the same level of room temperature.
Auerbach never lets that depression carry him away to madness or imaginary
suicide, nor does he allow the fervor of his prayers for delivery to carry him
away into the stratosphere. Perhaps he is right, and perhaps he is simply being
honest with us, expressing his emotionality exactly in the way that it runs
through him, without artificially revving himself up or down — the lamentable
consequence of this being that the album, while totally lovable upon first
listens, will probably not hold up too long in your head.
Then again, was it really meant to? As a mere «detour» from the Black Keys, a side venture
that will neither get a lot of publicity nor a lot of critical attention, Yours, Dreamily exceeds all possible
expectations anyway, and I don't think we could or should be asking for more. When
they finally bring it down with the soothing piano balladeering of
ʽSearching The Blueʼ, a dreamy, moving tune with a bit of the old
inquisitive Lennonesque spirit, we finally get the main question of the album —
"Is anything we do / Ever gonna last? / Couldn't I have a clue, /
Searching the blue?" Well, I'm not sure if Yours, Dreamily is going to last,
what with all of its humble tone and un-flashy appearance, but at least it is a
record that should be taken seriously by its contemporaries — and, once again,
confirms my opinion of Auerbach as one of the leading artists of his
generation, even if that may not be meaning all that much in the 2010s. Thumbs up.
BLACK LIPS! (2003)
1) Throw It Away; 2) Freakout;
3) Ain't No Deal; 4) Stone Cold; 5) I've Got A Knife; 6) Down And Out; 7) Steps;
8) Fad; 9) Sweet Kin; 10) Crazy Girl; 11) Everybody Loves A Cocksucker; 12) Can't
Get Me Down; 13) You're Dumb; 14*) Say Hello To The Postman.
For a band whose members are known not to be
above vomiting onstage and strumming their guitars with their reproductive male
organs well in front of their audiences, Black Lips made their self-titled
debut album sound surprisingly tame in comparison. What is even more
surprising, though, is that it sounds like nothing else — even if it is
perfectly easy segmentable into a nifty sum of its influences. All of the songs
are forgettable — but the impression is not.
These guys come from Dunwoody, Georgia, and are
a fine example of «going against the grain»: instead of the expected country
and Southern rock influences, they arrogantly take their lessons straight from Nuggets-era garage rock. In fact,
probably the best description for this early sound of theirs is — this is what
the Count Five, the Standells, the Strangeloves etc. would have sounded like,
had modern freedom of expression and hardcore punk ideology been developed
around 1965 rather than a decade and a half later. Imagine a Gene Vincent
infected by the mentality of a Metallica, or a Dave Clark Five playing with the
psychology of a Weezer. Black Lips, then, are a cross between the Seeds, Sonic
Youth, and Agnostic Front.
And I do
mean it. The snotty, wheezy vocals; the jangly guitars, way too «thin» and
wimpy for modern standards; the simple, sloppy drumwork that tries to
compensate only through energy and aggression — even most of the «nu-garage»
bands do not play that authentic.
More than half of these songs are decodable as not coming from the Sixties through one single weak spot: they are
almost completely hookless. Beyond setting the basic three-chord (sometimes, one-chord) groove, the Lips rarely
advance to anything other than just degenerating into random noise. This is
something that few mid-Sixties garage groups could be accused of – at least,
few that history let us know about, for obvious reasons.
But it's not as if the Lips are incapable of hooks (an idea that later
albums would dispel): this is a conscious choice, and this is where «modern
mentality» steps in — hooks are nothing, attitude is everything. We know that
attitude: run your spirit through channels of pure enthusiasm and spontaneous
insanity ('Steps', mad deconstructed surf-rock drowned in wild party noises).
They are so focused on the attitude that, after a while, it almost becomes contagious
to the point that you start distinguishing
hooks where you'd swear they weren't present just a few minutes ago (like the
awesome slide guitar onslaught on 'Fad').
Bits of diversity are supplied by occasional
raids on territories adjacent to fast-paced noisy garage punk: 'Stone Cold' is
a slow, stuttering, two-minute-long «moody» blues-rocker à la early Animals,
and 'Down And Out' is an eerie, smoky vaudeville piece with «evil» vocals,
whose combination of monotonous power chords and suspicious electric piano in
the background might even have been appreciated by the likes of Tom Waits. Then
there is a philosophically-minded slow creeper in the vein of Lou Reed,
appropriately titled 'Everybody Loves A Cocksucker'. Yeah... right. It is the
second-longest track on the album, hence, a real focal piece.
Overall, I have no idea who are the people to
whose interests this whole deal is targeted. Sixties fans will find it too
tuneless and noisy, Eighties fans will find it too post-modern and insincere,
and Noughties fans will find it way too overdone in its sucking up to retro
values. All of which makes Black Lips!
a completely timeless experience, rewardable with a thumbs up for no particular
reason. Maybe in ten years I'll think of one.
Technical note: This is the only Black Lips
album recorded with the participation of the band's first guitarist, Ben
Eberbaugh, killed in a car accident prior to the release. So if you happen to
complain about the lack of 'Fad'-like guitar parts on their subsequent records,
keep that in mind.
WE DID NOT KNOW THE FOREST SPIRIT MADE THE
FLOWERS GROW (2004)
1) M.I.A.; 2) Time Of The
Scabs; 3) Dawn Of The Age Of Tomorrow; 4) Nothing At All; 5) 100 New Fears; 6) Stranger;
7) Juvenile; 8) Notown Blues; 9) Ghetto Cross; 10) Jumpin' Around; 11) Super
X-13; 12*) Hope Jazz.
With a title like that, one would probably
expect an album by the likes of The Animal Collective — although, on second
thought, The Animal Collective would probably find it too blunt to title their
album with a direct quotation from Princess
Mononoke. But no, Black Lips are not
going all-out psychedelic on our ears (except for maybe the last «hidden»
track, which I will get around to in a few moments). Instead, they latch this
title on what is their shortest, noisiest, messiest record ever, consequently,
for some — the best album these guys ever made.
Perhaps it was the tragic death of their
guitarist that infuriated the Lips so much, they swore to themselves not just
to «carry on», but to carry on with an acute vengeance. The record certainly
takes no prisoners. «Production» here is practically non-existent; if someone
told me the band had lost the master tapes and had to substitute them with a
bootleg recording that one of their fans made on an old cassette player,
lurking in one corner of the studio behind a mixing console, I would be
inclined to believe it. «Hooks» are out of the question, although, quite by
accident, some of the ringing guitar lines happen to be a tad more memorable
than others. Vocals, even though they are still emulating the nasal whine of
old time garage rockers rather than the wordless barking of classic punkers,
are unsegmentable into individual words. And so on.
While I appreciate the gesture, I do not quite
see the point of carrying garage revivalism into this particular direction.
There is nothing fresh or overwhelmingly exciting about noise-rock these days —
the novelty has worn off, and nowadays, every lo-fi band putting gurgling fuzz
on three chords may be suspected of simply covering a lack of inspiration,
instead of making a statement that has meaning both for them and for us. «Fans of
the Stooges might like this», I am told, but I do not quite get it — why not go
directly to the source, then? When the Stooges made this kind of music, it was
a D. H. Lawrence-style act of suicidal bravery, and you could feel that vibe
right through the speakers. The Lips go for that noise thing in complete
confidence, and the only vibe I feel is boring backyard hooliganry, perhaps
alleviated with a slight touch of humor.
Repeated listens do reveal that the album is
not just one monolithic slab of lo-fi noise. The Lips value emotional and
technical diversity enough to move from pure garage ('Time Of The Scab') to
ominous songs of rebellion ('Dawn Of The Age Of Tomorrow') to slide-driven
blues-punk ('Stranger') to organ-driven rhythm-and-blues ('Notown Blues');
there is even a brief acoustic interlude ('100 New Fears'), during which they
try to sing something that approaches medieval folk, backed by female harmonies
and a harpsichord (!). But I cannot help but take offense at how they completely refuse to work on these
songs. Each track is a ragged skeleton, barely covered with a few lumps of
flesh and a few threads of skin, waving helplessly in the wind. If you have not
satisfied your appetite with this style after a whole decade of lo-fi en vogue, be my (their) guest. If you
have, there is no crime in skipping this record altogether, as one of those
youthful excesses that the youths in question just had to get out of their
system, in order to go to better things.
Actually, I only find purpose in the last track
— six minutes of avantgarde doodling, set to a jazzy (almost lounge-jazzy at
that) rhythm section. After all, free-form improv is always free-form improv —
one might unexpectedly fall upon exciting combinations of sound, or one might
not, but even if one doesn't, the goal is still respectable. It would be a
miracle if the Lips did, and, expectedly, they do not, but it's always nice to
hope for miracles, which is probably why the track's secret name is 'Hope
Jazz'. Every other bit of noise on the album, however, seems pre-planned, which
makes the effect even more disappointing.
Resumé of the day: I can only recommend
this for people whose minds are so far removed from my own that I wouldn't even
want to begin to recommend them anything.
In other words, as you may have guessed, it's a thumbs down all the way.
LET IT BLOOM (2005)
1) Sea Of Blasphemy; 2) Can't
Dance; 3) Boomerang; 4) Hippie, Hippie, Hoorah; 5) Not A Problem; 6) Gung Ho;
7) Everybody's Doin' It; 8) Feeling Gay; 9) Take Me Home (Back To Boone); 10) Gentle
Violence; 11) She's Gone; 12) Fairy Stories; 13) Dirty Hands; 14) Workin'; 15) Punk
Slime; 16) Empassant.
The Lips' third album seems to be titled much
more modestly than their second (although still dealing with the same issue) —
but this is a false impression, since any title like that brings on inevitable
associations with Let It Be and Let It Bleed, meaning that this is really
an arrogant statement of purpose if there ever was one. Or, at least, a
tongue-in-cheek arrogant statement of purpose. In any case, it commands
attention — in a gambling way.
And admittedly, I admit that it is a heart-warming
improvement. The band steps back on the noise, just a little bit, opening the
window just enough to let in some of that melodic spirit of the 1960s, while at
the same time still keeping the production values and the playing style very
lo-fi; at the same time, the diversity is back, with garage-blues-rock
occasionally giving way to folk-rock, dark blues, and hooliganish R'n'B
à la early Stones. (Not a lot
of diversity, of course, but still feeling like The White Album after the boring monotonous noise of We Did Not Know).
Hence the predictable question: now that we see
some songwriting going on, how does it compare — both to the band's debut
album, and to their influences? On
the first point, I would say that the songs are a half-notch more interesting
and involving, but the sound is still a whole
notch dirtier and noisier, so that only a properly initiated adept of the
lo-fi ideology will like them when they are playing this-a-way more than when they were playing that-a-way. On the second point, they are still nowhere near close
to competing with their garage ancestors in terms of inventive hooks. Not that
they claim to be competing, of
course.
So, in the end, once again it all comes down to
the idea of «reviving and modernizing garage values for the intelligent
segment of white trash in 2005». And the fun of it lies, of course, in realizing
that most of these songs could not be
recorded in 1966 — it takes decades of additional development (and even brain
growth) to produce these results.
'Can't Dance', for instance, takes a speedy
«punk-metal» chord sequence that sounds suspiciously close to 'Mötorhead'
(the song), and only then proceeds to dress it up in 1960s' guitar and vocal
tones. 'Not A Problem' makes a joke on reasons that drive us to homicidal
tendencies ("I woke up in the morning just the other day, found my dog
beneath the Chevrolet") – one that probably would not be tolerated or
understood in 1966, nor would people be necessarily hip to the song's
maddening combo of thin jangly guitar driven to non-existence by deafening fuzz
noise. But, again, the fuzz, the jangle, and the lead vocals are all as retro
as they come.
Word problems would also surface as early as on
the titles to 'Feeling Gay' and 'Fairy Stories' — both of these songs have
their prototypes in the Stones ('Heart Of Stone' and 'Rocks Off', respectively),
but their messages, whatever they are, are intended for modern audiences. On
the other hand, 'Dirty Hands' starts off like the Ramones' 'I Wanna Be Your
Boyfriend', then quickly becomes something like one of those early pop ballads
by Manfred Mann — and if you were worrying about the meaning of the title,
well, the hands happen to be dirty simply because it's an innocent story about
love on the beach.
Whether these quirky little twists on the quirky
little twists of days gone by are enough to justify Let It Bloom's existence — that is not for me to decide. It's a fun
album, a curious album, a listenable album, but so far, I have been unable to
convince myself that it is also an unforgettable album. As far as I am
concerned, The Black Lips are still playing childhood games here, and in a way
that, either consciously or unintentionally, prevents grown-ups from discerning
just how much real talent and artistic drive there is behind the entertainment
masks. Fortunately for us and them, childhood would soon be over.
LOS VALIENTES DEL MUNDO NUEVO (2007)
1) M.I.A.; 2) Boomerang; 3) Sea
Of Blasphemy; 4) Stranger; 5) Not A Problem; 6) Hippie, Hippie, Hoorah; 7) Boone;
8) Everybody's Doing It; 9) Fairy Stories; 10) Dirty Hands; 11) Buried Alive;
12) Juvenile.
A new contract with Vice Records was celebrated
by this supposedly live release – «supposedly», because there has been some
debate about whether these tracks have really
been recorded in a seedy bar in Tijuana, Mexico, or have simply been made to sound like they have really been
recorded in a seedy bar in Tijuana, Mexico. Whatever be the eventual outcome
of that debate, it is hardly significant. Nobody denies the fact that the Black
Lips were basically born to play seedy bars, particularly in Tijuana, Mexico,
and it would be fairly hard to deny that there is plenty of genuine-sounding
seedy bar atmosphere on this record, replete with an off-his-head Spanish stage
announcer, rounds of applause steadily flowing into drunken brawl, and sound
quality that would be considered awful for anyone else, but is almost pristine,
really, by the Lips' usual standards.
This might actually be the major point: if you ever wanted to hear 'M.I.A.', 'Stranger',
and 'Juvenile' in a sonic quality acceptable for the average ear, this is your
best chance. They turn out to be fun little pop-punk creations that I, for one,
could not appreciate one single bit in the original setting, but here, the
cleaner sound helps bring out all of their non-aggressive aggression. 'M.I.A.',
in particular, works very well as the set opener, and 'Juvenile' is an
excellent set closer. (Yes, it takes a band as rash as the Black Lips to have
their live songs sound cleaner than their studio ones — provided this is really
a live recording — but I am not sure if this is really a virtue of gigantic
proportions in a world where «lo-fi» has managed to transform from an
industrial side effect to a respectable artistic technique).
Most of the rest of the setlist, however, comes
from the already much better recorded Let
It Bloom, and I couldn't say that the amount of energy and pure debauchery
on these versions surpasses the original. Even if all of these songs were
indeed to be played in the nude, interrupted by spontaneous bursts of vomit,
urination, unprotected sex with each other, coprophagia, animal sacrifices,
genuine Satan worship, random rape of audience members, and other innocent bits
of Sunday amusement, I am afraid that this does not translate in an
understandable manner onto the record — you'd have to look for an accompanying
video release. (Popular mythology may claim that there are only four copies in
existence, and all are kept away from the public eye under the four pillows of
the Washington Wives).
That said, the Black Lips are a «naughty party
band» almost by definition, and Los
Valientes does an honest job in adding the «naughty party» bits that one
cannot find on regular studio albums. Even if the applause, the cheerings, the
drunken brawl have all been dubbed over a studio re-recording, it still places
the Lips in a very proper context for them. Note also that there is a hidden
track here at the end of the album — a sort of atmospheric acid-folk ditty
laced with alternating falsettos, «spooky» voices, and birds chirping, that is
quite different from everything this band did before, and, to some extent,
points the way to their «mature» future.
GOOD BAD NOT EVIL (2007)
1) I Saw A Ghost (Lean); 2) O
Katrina!; 3) Veni Vidi Vici; 4) It Feels Alright; 5) Navajo; 6) Lock And Key;
7) How Do You Tell A Child That Someone Has Died; 8) Bad Kids; 9) Step Right
Up; 10) Cold Hands; 11) Off The Block; 12) Slime And Oxygen; 13) Transcendental
Light.
And here comes maturity — a record that
dispatches with the extreme tendencies of lo-fi and tries to be fun for us all,
without segregating the listeners into those who will wade through the muck and those who do not think so much of
having to wade through muck if it isn't a matter of life and death. Finally,
after all these years, we will be able to tell if the Black Lips are really as
great as their image has manipulated them into seeming — without having to
shake the aural dust and sonic soot out of our ears as a pre-requisite!
Of course, without the safeguard of horrendous
production, the band runs an increased risk of passing for trivial fetishists.
But in my personal system of values, «trivial fetishism» ranks well above
«trivial fetishism masked by intentional sloppiness». And besides, there is
still way too much post-punk freedom here — in the lyrics, in the vocals, in
the minimalism, in the roughness — for anyone to seriously mistake Good Bad Not Evil for a collection of
garage oldies.
The singles are generally the best, just the
way it is supposed to be with this kind of music. 'Cold Hands' starts off in an
Easybeats mode, then, after a couple verses, segues into a Ventures-style
surf-rock solo, everything at breakneck speed — the only thing that is missing
is a sense of purpose, although the lyrics vaguely suggest some sort of social
comparison going on ("We get along while their very bones decay"),
but a little more fire and desperation could be welcome here. Then again, the
Black Lips are hooligans and jokers — they'd rather piss on the cop than stick
him up, and that goes for pretty much everything else, including Hurricane
Katrina: 'O Katrina' probably would have been misunderstood, had they had the
gall to write and release it way back in 2005, but two years later, with the
tension gone for good, they can allow themselves to chant "O, Katrina, why
you gotta be mean?" to a jolly catchy dance melody.
The big «anthem» of the album, however, is 'Bad
Kids', whose particular lyrics are not very interesting (hardly any new
insights into the problem since the days of the Ramones and the Clash anyway);
what is interesting is that they are
lain over an upbeat retro-pop structure whose roots go well back to Motown —
the best proverbial illustration for «flower punk» that any encyclopaedia
could ask for. Punk-rock with a Motown smile does not blunder its way under
your windows every day of the week; with these numbers, the Black Lips may be
finally beginning to carve themselves out a niche all their own.
Or maybe it is with such «crowd-shockers» as 'How
Do You Tell A Child That Someone Has Died' — a song whose lyrical message is
quite well disclosed in the title, and whose melody pilfers a standard country
waltz to discuss the uncomfortable subject in Nashville terms? Not necessarily,
since this approach shows too much of a Ween influence (particularly 12 Golden Country Greats, of course),
and the Lips lack the proper musicianship to catch up with Ween in their
reckless genre-riding. Which does not mean that the song does not leave a
proper «impression»: each decade needs its own dose of brutal, mercyless
country-thumping, and it just so happened to have been ten years since Ween
gave us theirs.
In other news, the Lips poke blunt fun at world
religions ('Veni Vidi Vici'), Native Americans ('Navajo'), rednecks ('Lock And
Key'), psychedelics ('Off The Block'), and whatever else I might have missed,
all of it set to these little ripped-off variations on Sixties' chord sequences
that can each be traced to two or three singles from Nuggets once somebody finances the project (to do that, all that is
needed is for the Lips to become the next Beatles, and then you could be their Mark Lewisohn). I
hereby confirm that the album is indeed an honest example of «good bad not
evil», and that corresponds to a thumbs up, offered with limited enthusiasm but,
nevertheless, out of sheer free will. In fact, Good Bad Not Evil even raises some hope that, perhaps, some day
these kids might actually begin writing
songs rather than just pulling them out of their parents' stereos and filtering
them through their asses.
200 MILLION THOUSAND (2009)
1) Take My Heart; 2) Drugs; 3)
Starting Over; 4) Let It Grow; 5) Trapped In A Basement; 6) Short Fuse; 7) I’ll
Be With You; 8) BBBJOT; 9) Again & Again; 10) Old Man; 11) The Drop I Hold;
12) Body Combat; 13) Elijah; 14) I Saw God; 15) Meltdown (hidden track).
This follow-up to Good Bad Not Evil seems to me to go slightly heavier on fuzziness –
as if the band suddenly realized they must have overdone it with cleaning up
the slop on the previous record – and seriously lighter on hooks and
memorability. Where Good Bad Not Evil
almost made me forgot how genuinely
mediocre these guys are in the songwriting department, on 200 Million Thousand this mediocrity hits back with a vengeance. At
this point, these guys are like the Dave Clark Five's evil twin – «cooler»
because they are «nastier», but in other terms, simply furnishing paler, less
interesting variations on much stronger pop-rock songs.
Tim Sendra, reviewing the album for the
All-Music Guide, ended up complaining about its excessive «maturity», saying
that the record «could use a little more teenage head and a little less brains»
– that the Lips are really only worth our attention when they are being silly,
chaotic, juvenile, and totally trashy. By all means, that was their basic
aesthetics when they started out, but first of all, I do not see that it has
changed all that much (surely the
small bunch of slow, «tense», marginally serious-sounding songs on here, like
ʽTrapped In A Basementʼ, cannot be defined as overtly «brainy» in
comparison to the fast rock'n'roll numbers), and second, I simply couldn't disagree
any more – these guys need to be
brainy in order to come up with something truly worth our while. There's way
too much brainless retro-punk in this world already.
Unfortunately, 200 Million Thousand is really an album stuck somewhere in between.
It does not inject me with a feeling of control-free drunken teenage revelry,
nor does it look like a significant intellectual statement, in need of serious
analysis or whatever. It is simply another batch of Nuggets rip-offs, if not always in melody, then always in spirit;
and it is excruciatingly boring. The only track to offer something relatively
fresh to my ears was ʽElijahʼ, a madcap bass-and-piano blues romp
with a deliciously paranoid chorus – the interaction between the goofy "oh
yeah"s and the stop-and-start piano bits were novel and fun enough to
interrupt the slumber party.
I must confess that this may be, once again, just a case of acute lo-fi-itis: I hate this murky
production with such a passion that it almost surprises myself (and here I was
thinking that I can stand any kind of sound after spending my entire childhood
listening to bunches of chewn and re-chewn cassette tapes). The displeasure is
particularly intense after Good Bad Not
Evil, which was like a teaser, showing that the Lips (a) do not really have
any religiously motivated feelings against a clean sound and (b) seem to
produce better hooks when they are working with clean production. And now we
are back to square.
Perhaps a quick run through the first few
tracks is in order, just to serve up a few concrete examples. ʽTake My
Heartʼ is fast, dark, bass-heavy, Count Five-ish, but the guitars sound
choked and stuffy as opposed to razor-sharp, which should really be expected on
such a track. ʽDrugsʼ is a garage take on Merseybeat with Beatlesque
vocal harmonies, but the melody is primitive, and the guitars sound... right,
choked and stuffy. ʽStarting Overʼ begins with a nice promise – some
Byrdsey jangle – but adds nothing to the basic idea of the jangle, except for
some more choked and stuffy guitar playing. ʽLet It Growʼ is an
anthemic ode to an embryo (or, perhaps, to an erection – you never know with
these guys) whose potential hook is tortured to death by overreliance on
distortion and the fact that the lead singer has a plastic bag on his head. And
so on and on, ad infinitum – these complaints will all mostly be of the same
character.
The bottomline is: these songs are not
hopeless, but each of them could be so much more if only the band would not
mask its laziness and carelessness as «artistry». Let me say this once more:
Lo-Fi is not artistry, at least – not
in frickin' two thousand and nine it isn't. It used to be cool once, as the underground's proud and vengeful
answer to the bloated overproduction of mainstream commercial crap, but these
days, it is not just boring, it is almost conservative in nature. Somebody
please phone Sir George Martin, while he is still alive, and tell him there is
this semi-talented flower punk band that is in desperate need of salvation. Until
then – a decisive thumbs down. (And, before I forget: ʽI
Saw Godʼ might just be the single stupidest and draggiest thing recorded by these guys so far. Totally with Tim
Sendra on that one).
ARABIA MOUNTAIN (2011)
1) Family Tree; 2) Modern Art;
3) Spidey's Curse; 4) Mad Dog; 5) Mr. Driver; 6) Bicentennial Man; 7) Go Out And
Get It; 8) Raw Meat; 9) Bone Marrow; 10) The Lie; 11) Time; 12)
Dumpster Dive; 13) New Direction; 14) Noc-A-Homa; 15) Don't Mess My
Baby; 16) You Keep On Running.
Thank you, Mark Ronson, for helping to steer
these guys away from lo-fi. On their last three studio albums, the Lips seem
to have been wobbling back and forth, but Arabia
Mountain is their cleanest-sounding record yet, and something tells me
that, by this time, there is no going back. Especially
since the result is one of their strongest efforts, second only to Good Bad Not Evil, and even then, just
because it does not have as many sharply high points — but overall, it may
actually be more consistent in terms of songwriting.
Songwriting and
diversity, to be precise: the Lips now feel strong enough to tackle as many different
styles as they can technically afford, with the only condition being that the
styles all be sufficiently retro. Brutal aggressive garage, riff-based
power-pop, Ramonesy punk, proto-Goth spookdom, drunken folk dances, guitar
jangle, a bit of twist, a bit of glam — well, nothing too distant from the parts of each other, but different enough to
give each song its own little face. And it's all CLEAN! You actually get to hear and enjoy the riffs, the brass lines, the vocal hooks — without having
to pick out the miles of sludge, for no other reason than a hollow pretense at
«authenticity» that this band's idols, forty years ago, would have considered
unprofessional.
Okay, so the songs are not very good, as usual:
once a mediocre songwriter, always a mediocre songwriter unless your name is
George Harrison and your best buds are a pair of you-know-whos. But they are
amusing, curious, involving, and just plain nice to hear, even if most of them
are still devoid of significance. ʽFamily Treeʼ, opening the album,
is a case in point: fast, fun pop-rock à la early Merseybeat bands with
a bit of noise and distortion thrown in — and all for the sake of backing up a
chorus that they must have found verbally innovative ("Can I take you out,
out to the family tree?"), but for no reason other than sheer absurdism.
ʽModern Artʼ makes more sense — a song that is about absurdism and its effect on people, another rocker whose
musical backbone is almost surprisingly normal for a song whose chorus goes
"You turn around and you don't know where you've been / You look up at the
glass dome and your head begins to spin".
Relative highlights (relative, because, as I have said, the album is generally quite
even) include ʽMad Dogʼ, a brass-dominated anthem to backward
messages and the temptations of shock-rock; the unusually grim-sarcastic
ʽBicentennial Manʼ and its appropriation of the guitar jangle for
hard rock purposes; the hilarious Ramones tribute ʽRaw Meatʼ that tastes
like the Ramones, smells like the Ramones, and revs up like the Ramones (but
did the Ramones ever have whistling in between verses?); and the album closer
ʽYou Keep On Runningʼ, slower, longer, and more atmospheric than
everything else — having started out in fun, fast, playful mode, the Lips
decide to end things with something ghostly-spooky. As usual, they are
semi-successful: the echoey guitars and whooshing and wheeing back vocals keep
things modestly convincing, but we have heard all of it too many times before
to allow ourselves to fall prostrate at the altar.
Arabia
Mountain is probably as
«solid» as these guys are ever going to get. Here, they are no longer a bunch
of hooligan kids with good tastes in influences and bad tastes in producing
their own records. Their decade-long career has finally turned them into
matured professionals — and for me, it's a fact: if you do not know how to fish
fabulous melodies out of thin air, there are but two ways to overcome that
obstacle — go drive a truck or turn into a matured professional, no matter how
much time and will it takes. The Black Lips proved themselves tenacious enough.
I do not understand how it would be possible to love this music, which continues to embrace post-modernism in a
post-post-modernist epoch at the expense of inspired melodies; but if they go
on making albums like Arabia Mountain,
each one will at least be an «event» worth savouring and discussing.
Respectfully, a thumbs
up.
UNDERNEATH THE RAINBOW (2014)
1) Drive By Buddy; 2) Smiling;
3) Make You Mine; 4) Funny; 5) Dorner Party; 6) Justice After All; 7) Boys In
The Wood; 8) Waiting; 9) Do The Vibrate; 10) I Don't Wanna Go Home; 11)
Dandelion Dust; 12) Dog Years.
And here it is — why deny it? All these years,
deep within their hearts, despite all the lo-fi pretense, despite all the
«experimentalism», despite all the rebellious image issues, there was one
simple thing that Black Lips really wanted to be: a cross between The Squires,
The Swingin' Medallions, and a couple other bands prominently featured on Nuggets. This is the music they loved
most of all, this is the music that they finally give all their hearts to on
their eighth album, where about half of the songs sound exactly like mid-Sixties garage pop and the other half sound like a
21st century tribute to Sixties garage pop. Clean, though. Very clean.
Understandably, the album got some negative
reviews. For those who miss the old days of lo-fi, Underneath The Rainbow is almost an insult, full of simple,
faceless pop ditties that show little of the band's personality. They used to
be unpredictable hooligans, and now they are making an album that is almost
respectable — not to mention produced by Patrick Carney of The Black Keys at a
time when The Black Keys themselves are threatened by a loss of face, with
their last two albums decried as way too glossy and commercialized.
To a certain extent, this is true, but only if
you really believe that the band's original schtick was truly as great as their
fans proclaim. As far as I'm concerned, these guys had always been jesters —
sometimes friendly, sometimes mean-spirited, but never to be taken too
seriously, and from that angle of view, they certainly do not cease being
jesters on Underneath The Rainbow.
"As long as your butt's clean, it's all good", they sing on the first
track, and that could very well pass as the overall motto of the album, and it
is also well in line with similar mottos from many a similar band in the
mid-Sixties. And what's wrong with that?
Now, of course, you have to keep in mind that
this here reviewer has always favored pop over punk and melody over noise — in
general — and this would make me predictably biased towards this kind of music
over that kind of music. But, honestly, just as there are some punk-and-noise
bands that seem to be born for this style of life, Black Lips, to me, sound
like a band that has long wandered in search of a goal in life, and finally
came into their own with Arabia Mountain,
and now they are having a party of a lifetime with this new record. No, they
seem to still be struggling a bit with songwriting, but at least now they seem
to get a good grip on whatever it is that they are doing, and, above all else,
this is nowhere near a loss of personality: on the contrary, they seem to have
finally found what they were looking for.
Okay, so it is not a lot, what they were
looking for. But it's fun! ʽDrive By Buddyʼ sounds like a long lost
B-side to a Who single, with Joe Bradley pulling a Keith Moon and the guitar
player laying on Townshend-style power chords a-plenty. ʽSmilingʼ is
an equally fast folk-pop rocker where bass player Jared Swilley entertains us
with an amicable story of his jailtime experience (if only he were a slightly
better singer, the song would have had even more impact — then again, maybe the
somewhat off-tone nasal bleat is more in line with the band's jester image).
ʽMake You Mineʼ (produced by Tom Brenneck rather than Carney), set to
a melody reminiscent of Lindsey Buckingham circa Tusk, is a charming clownish love declaration, perfectly fit for an
evening serenade if your chosen one values a good sense of humor over generic
sentimentality. And that's just the first three songs — and there is a little
something to be said about just about every other one that follows.
Only one of the tunes sounds like some sort of
anthemic generational statement, and no wonder that it is the one that bit me
harder than the rest of them, since it shares its siren-like ringing guitar
tone with the classic Squires number ʽGoing All The Wayʼ, one of the
best songs to come out of the entire garage movement, as far as I'm concerned.
The song in question is ʽWaitingʼ, and its chorus slogan, even if
stated a bit clumsily ("I don't wanna wait, waiting for it, waiting for
the change"), still sounds convincing — nostalgic, perhaps, and a little
outdated in its fight-the-power cockiness, but perfectly capturing that «proud
idealistic stance» of the days of yore. For a bunch of guys who used to confuse
songwriting with binge drinking, nailing this feeling so well is one hell of an
achievement, I'd say.
Sometimes they do get a little stuffy:
ʽBoys In The Woodʼ is a slow, draggy blues-rocker with some potential
of becoming an eerie swampy bogeyman of a tune, but the boys do not have the
musical expertise to pull it off properly, and the end result is repetitive and
boring (worst of all is the misuse of the brass section, most of it lost in the
mix and missing the mark). But usually they are saved by the humor, the speed,
and the chorus hooks, and sometimes Carney makes them sound like El Camino-era Black Keys
(ʽDandelion Dustʼ), which does not hurt at all: glossy, but
bass-heavy blues-rock can be fun if played in a lively manner.
On the whole, different as it is from early
Black Lips, Underneath The Rainbow
finds the band inspired and happy, and this, in turn, makes me inspired and happy, at least a little
bit. Of course, there is some irony at work here — the old garage pop style
that they worship so frantically used to be all about letting one's hair down
and enjoying life without setting up formalistic barriers, and now, by
imitating their idols so closely, Black Lips end up introducing such barriers.
Thus, rather than renewed self-liberation, the album, like so many other
Sixties' revival efforts of the new millennium, celebrates nostalgia. But then
again, maybe we do need more of those
celebrations nowadays — at the very least, I'll take efficient Sixties'
nostalgia over ridiculous Eighties' nostalgia, so prominent these days as well,
any time. And any album with ʽDrive By Buddyʼ and ʽWaitingʼ
on it deserves at least a moderate thumbs up in my book.
BLACK MOUNTAIN (2005)
1) Modern Music; 2) Don't Run
Our Hearts Around; 3) Druganaut; 4) No Satisfaction; 5) Set Us Free; 6) No
Hits; 7) Heart Of Snow; 8) Faulty Times.
What is it that makes neo-hippies different
from old time hippies? In pure theory, the easiest thing is to say «Everything!»
and go on a lengthy rant about imminently changing times. But, having listened
to Black Mountain now, I suppose one could be prompted to think twice about
that. These guys have shrunk down my conscience just as neatly as they happened
to expand it.
Black Mountain, formerly called the «Back
Mountain Army» (or, rather, the latter was basically Black Mountain the band
plus a bunch of friends, relatives, roadies, cats, dogs, and crack whores),
hail from Canada, an ideal place for all the neo-hippies to hail from — tasty
social benefits and plenty of open space to procrastinate on, if one doesn't
mind a little winter cold. Presumably, they are neo-hippies, but better
than most: they not only call themselves artists, they also work pretty
hard to deserve that title, which is a rarity.
The band's music has gained critical praise
(otherwise I wouldn't have known about them), and the band itself has
accumulated a moderate fan base, but overall my impression is that «The People»
have generally been colder towards Black Mountain than «The Judges». This is
probably because «The People» tend to get irritated when the careful ratio of
modern-to-ancient gets significantly tipped in favour of the latter — and
Black Mountain make little, if any, secret about their musical ideals. Let us
count off just a few models of adoration: (a) The Jefferson Airplane, (b)
Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young... (c) ...& Young again, solo this time;
(d) Blue Cheer (I was going to write 'Black Sabbath', but they do not care much
for the ultra-heavy Sabbath guitar tone, so Blue Cheer is more like it; (e) The
Grateful Dead; (f) The Jefferson Airplane again, because there is just
no other way to stress how much these guys want to pass themselves off for a
modern day 'Plane. Even their lead singer takes some bad cues from Marty Balin,
while their lead singerine takes some good cues from Grace Slick.
The band's message is spelt out pretty transparently
in the second song: "Let's find a better place, and quit this whole damn
race" — not even the Airplane were that blunt about it. With a
theme like that, you'd expect the underlying music to be pretty paranoid, and
it is. Worried, nervous, constantly shifting melodies, graced with lyrical
themes of disgust ('No Hits', 'No Satisfaction', 'Faulty Times'), escape
('Don't Run Our Hearts Around', 'Set Us Free'), and passing out ('Druganaut')
— although, to be frank, drugs as such have relatively little space on the
album.
If the general feel of things is that simple,
the only way Black Mountain could turn into an exciting record would be
through songwriting — and performance. Well, one thing that can definitely be
said in favour of it is that it is undeniably fun, no matter how bleak
it sometimes sounds. From the opening comic chord of the saxophone and right
down to the final wall-of-sound blast of 'Faulty Times', it is totally
non-boring to wait for whatever else the band has in store for us. And, since
they take their lessons from so many teachers, you can never tell if the next
song is going to be fuzzy and carnivalesque ('Modern Music'), or strewn with
mean heavy riffage ('Druganaut'), or be combining a kind of one-note Velvet
Undeground drone with a lyrical nod to the Rolling Stones ('No Satisfaction' —
which, musically, is sort of what happens when you mix 'Waiting For The Man'
with 'Sing This All Together'), or invoke a sanctified Old Testamental spirit
('Set Us Free'). One song, 'No Hits', even goes out of the way to establish a
techno rhythm and pierce you with a fully certified electronic arrangement —
but even then, in a way, I see them as paying tribute to the likes of the
Silver Apples and early Krautrock artists rather than Aphex Twin or Autechre.
On their own, the songs are nothing special.
For each of these melodies, a Sixties musicologist will have little trouble establishing
an exact list of sources. The playing — technically — is good, but nothing too
extraordinary or virtuoso-style. The lead singer (Stephen McBean) has a «little
guy» type of nasal whine that will not be for everyone; the second lead singer,
Amber Webber, does a much better job at convincing me that the end of the world
is near — and yet I still cannot see her beating Grace Slick, whom she quite
obviously does set out to try to beat.
But, admittedly, this is a good, not bad
example of kowtowing: they understand the spirit of how-it-used-to-be and they
are capable of conjuring it. If the Jefferson Airplane were a necessary
ingredient of their generation, and if today's generation needs another
Jefferson Airplane, enriched by the experience of the previous Jefferson
Airplane, so be it. From my own point of view, Black Mountain do not say
anything that I have not already heard — but what they repeat are pleasant
sayings, and I do not mind at all to hear them again in a new combination. The
heart, unfortunately, refuses to budge, because a tribute is a tribute, no
matter how many different people you are trying to pay tribute to all at once.
But the brain has appreciated the complexity and unpredictability of the
tribute, and, in the hopes of seeing the band eventually mature into something
bigger than the sum of its influences, advances them a thumbs up. As a bonus provocation, try to find for
yourself which of the eight songs quotes musically from 'Paint It Black'.
(That's the one I spotted. There may be a miriad of others as well).
IN THE FUTURE (2008)
1) Stormy High; 2) Angels; 3) Tyrants; 4) Wucan; 5) Stay Free; 6)
Queens Will Play; 7) Evil Ways; 8) Wild Wind; 9) Bright Lights; 10) Night
Walks; 11*) Bastards Of Light; 12*) Thirteen Walls; 13*) Black Cat.
We here on Planet Earth are a continually bored
race, one that, for reasons unknown and fiercely disputed, has been given the
possibility of expanding our minds beyond the bare concept of species
preservation and reproduction — and has discovered, much to its own
frustration, that there really are no objects in this world worthy of the
application of these expanded minds. So we have invented ourselves this thing
called «A-R-T» to play around with — extracting previously non-existent sounds,
images, and word combinations out of our swollen consciences, feeding our
neighbours with the stuff and imagining that we are doing a great service to
the Universe, even though there is not the slightest bit of evidence that the
Universe actually gives a shit about it.
These thoughts may not only be banal, but also
off target — yet, for some reason, I never stumbled upon them when listening to
Black Mountain's influences, from Jefferson Airplane to Hawkwind, and here,
well, they have pursued me throughout the entire seventy two minutes of In
The Future. Can we call In The Future a boring imitation of a bunch
of idols? But if we did, would that be interesting? Wouldn't it be more
interesting to come back to the record for a second, third, fifty-fifth time,
so that the gist of Black Mountain's contribution to humanity can be stated
clearly and transparently? Paradoxically, the more derivative someone's art is,
the more you have to think about it — the more justification it may require.
The reference to Hawkwind, by the way, was not
off the cuff. In The Future justifies its title by giving us a spacier,
sci-fi-er picture than the debut album, with more emphasis on trippy studio
effects, Mellotrons, astral lyrics, and even the sleeve cover. Like before,
Black Mountain do not hide behind a wall of metaphors — the album is called In
The Future, and they actually sing about the future. This is honest. The
downside is, of course, that they are not doing anything that has not already
been done in the past. But we can downplay that, can't we?
I wish I could rave and rant about how the
opening crunchy riff of 'Stormy High' blows my mind to tiny smithereens,
smothers them in the fat sizzling oil of the Mellotrons and feeds them back to
me on the acoustic waves of the band's terrifying choir of Valkyries. I cannot;
this kind of rant should be left to intelligent, but ignorant fourteen-year-old
nerds for whom Black Mountain is the default gateway to parallel worlds. But
that does not mean — repeat, does not mean — that 'Stormy High' is a
bad, boring, or completely wasted rocker. On the contrary, I like it a lot,
like I do pretty much every song on here. I simply find no meaningful or
interesting way to describe its artistic ambitions. There's, uh, a thunderstorm
brewing. Or something. Who cares?
You have to brace yourself for a lot of long
songs — for leaden stoner riffs alternating with astral keyboard solos, for
walls-of-sound alternating with quiet minimalistic drums-and-bass passages, for
heaps of noise materializing into Grateful Dead-like jams and dissipating back
into heaps of noise; for poppy verses and choruses mutating into nauseating
repetitive mantras; for Fairport Convention and Black Sabbath sharing the same
kennel. Puzzled you will be; bored, no.
Pretty much all of this can be found in
the 16 minutes of 'Bright Lights', whose many different sections recall the
grotesque, flipped out whatever-rock of Amon Düül II, except less
technical. Let me quote Thom Jurek of the All-Music Guide on that: "Fuzzy
electrics, shimmering acoustics, and trance-like keyboards flit in and out
between the alternating vocals of McBean and Webber. The music picks up intensity,
shifts direction numerous times, and careens across the rock and folkscapes of
rock's history from the late '60s through the '70s with great focus, wit, and
ambition." Perfect description. The only aspect of this that Mr. Jurek
has politely swept under the carpet is: WHAT'S THE POINT? If we want to careen
across the rock and folkscapes of rock's history, why not go straight to the
source?
To understand why, let us take one of the
album's best songs, 'Wucan'. We know the vibe; similar musical landscapes of
astral travel have been laid down by Pink Floyd, Hawkwind and their colleagues
and followers in a thick layer. But we do not know the hook — a morose,
Eastern-sounding organ riff interweaving with an anthemic art-rock guitar
riff. It is a good, strong, memorable hook that neither Hawkwind nor Pink Floyd
could have fathered (the former would have drowned it behind a wall of
distortion and other instruments, the latter did not much care for repetitive
guitar riffs like these in the first place). Is it «Trademark Black Mountain Sound»?
No; these guys have no real trademarks to call their own. But it is a cool
sound that they arrived at under the influence, but through their own free
will.
The same goes for everything else. There are no
rip-offs. There is no deep meaning, there is little adequacy — they make big,
bold, bright statements that have no independent value and can only be relevant
to those having, up till now, lived in a vacuum; but there is juicy music made
here, with talent to burn and pleasures to reap. I like the cooky
falsetto on 'Stay Free', the tired"Lay your halo down..." on
'Angels', the big ugly drumming and the good old «woman tone» on 'Evil Ways', I
even like all the sixteen minutes of 'Bright Lights'. If they were to
tell me that they are making A-R-T here, I would say that I'd be more
interested in seeing them fuck a porcupine. But if they are simply having a
good futuristic time, more power to them, because I have had a good futuristic
time, too. And, although this time around my poor wrecked brain is leading a
desperate fight to award the album a thumbs down — simply because it has tried
to say so much about it and ended up saying so little — the heart holds the
day. Thumbs up. Frankly, if they make
three dozen more records like this, I won't be disappointed. Don't make the
mistake of trying to think about this album, like I did. Feel positive.
WILDERNESS HEART (2010)
1) The Hair Song; 2) Old Fangs; 3) Radiant
Hearts; 4) Rollercoaster; 5) Let Spirits Ride; 6) Buried By The Blues; 7) The
Way To Gone; 8) Wilderness Heart; 9) The Space Of Your Mind; 10) Sadie.
A funny thing happened to me on my way to summarizing
Black Mountain's third album, ladies and gentlemen: I was all set to start
talking about its subtle differences from Black Mountain's first and second
albums, when I suddenly discovered I had entirely
forgotten how Black Mountain's first and second albums actually sounded. They
were heavy, melodic, and derivative, for sure, but the melodies? Were any of
those songs actually worth anything? And will the songs from Wilderness Heart, which seem nice
enough while they're still fresh, be worth anything in a few months' time? So
many epic questions, so few trustworthy answers.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter. Perhaps the
key to all this is that Black Mountain themselves do not think the world of their
music. It is big and bombastic, not because the bombast is their musical
translation of the «blow their minds once and for all» idea, as it used to be,
but simply because their pet heroes, from Neil Young to Black Sabbath, all
happened to be bombastic — a taste-related coincidence. Take 'Let Spirits
Ride', for instance, whose riff is but a minor variation on Sabbath's
proto-thrash classic 'Symptom Of The Universe'. When Tony Iommi wrote that
riff, he laid it down with an inspired vengeance. When Black Mountain play it,
they are simply showing their respect for the style. The loudness and brutality
are there, for sure, but God-sent inspiration is not, reducing rock'n'roll to
mannerism.
Don't get me wrong: while the songs are on,
they're on. Third time around, the
band does not take any unnecessary risks with extra-long tracks, and their
influences are spread out in a very careful and deliberate manner, so that my
earlier complaint about way too many Airplaneisms is no longer applicable at
all. Psychedelia, hard rock, and folk combine in quasi-mathematical ways: for
instance, if you divide the 10 songs into an imaginary A- and B-side (and you
should: these guys only work in a vinyl day mood), the ratio is 4 heavy songs
to 1 soft song on Side A and 4 soft songs to 1 heavy song on Side B.
The heavy riffs achieve their purposes, whether
they be fake-heavy riffs (extra distortion laid on yer basic folk-rock pattern,
as in 'Hair Song') or true-heavy riffs (the Sabbathisms of 'Let Spirits Ride'
and the title track). They achieve them even better when attenuated by space-rock
whoops from the band's Moog equipment ('Old Fangs') and wheezy, creaky
psychedelic solos ('Rollercoaster'). Play it all at top volume, let your
neighbours experience the kind of emotions their ancestors had in the old days
of heavy metal arisal.
The romantic ballads never fall short, either.
The acoustic guitar/Mellotron combo on 'Radiant Hearts' is evocative. 'Buried
By The Blues', with its memorable (for now! I'm listening to it right now — cannot guarantee what will
happen in the next three hours!) chorus of "Away from the static and
noise", is a gently touching bit of escapism. 'Sadie' is just the kind of
perfect conclusion for such an album: creepy dark folk, ominous for the sake
of ominousness, with McBean's and Amber Webber's vocals merging perfectly for
the chorus.
But it's all too calculated. More than ever
before — maybe more than ever before,
because, like I tell you, I already cannot recall a thing about Black
Mountain's earlier records — I get this feeling that Black Mountain are simply
trying to make that particular perfect record, that sincere gift of pity for
aging baby boomers who think that punk rock and New Wave throttled good music
and have searched, in vain, ever since 1975, for a time capsule. I do not
surmise that such a record could not be made, of course, but Wilderness Heart proves, for the third
time, that Black Mountain, despite all their professionalism and good
intentions, are not the ideal band to make it. These songs all depart from old
standards — respectable variations on old themes that are just it: variations. When you're sick to
death of the old standards, you'll want to suck on the variations. For a while.
Then you'll be back to the old standards. Or, in a flash of progressivism, push
on to Animal Collective.
Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed the album,
and, like all Black Mountain records, past, present, and most likely future, it
is a remorseless thumbs up. It is not up to me to decide if they really «live
out» this music or not; I can only judge it on a simple basis — whether or not
it bores me, whether or not it is awfully arranged or produced, and whether or
not they stole all their melodies from Lenny Kravitz. Since Wilderness Heart is entertaining,
tasteful, and about as original as a record of variations on classical subjects
can be, why should I want to thwart anyone from exploring it? On the contrary
— it is every good music lover's duty to convince that local teenage dummy
neighbour that Black Mountain are at least cooler than... uhh... Justin Bieber?
IV (2016)
1) Mothers Of The Sun; 2)
Florian Saucer Attack; 3) Defector; 4) You Can Dream; 5) Constellations; 6)
Line Them All Up; 7) Cemetery Breeding; 8) (Over And Over) The Chain; 9)
Crucify Me; 10) Space To Bakersfield.
A six-year period from 2010 to 2016 actually
seems shorter these days than, say, a three-month period from July to September
1969 — therefore, do not get mad at Black Mountain just because they have been
twiddling their thumbs all this time. (Technically, they did not: for instance,
Amber Webber and Joshua Wells, who'd already released two «synth-folk» or
«indietronica» albums as Lightning Dust in the 2000s, used the interval to make
a third one — but do not rush to check them out, unless you are very much in
love with Amber's wobbly voice and Joshua's antiquated electronic keyboards).
At least this gave them a chance to scrape together some moments of real
inspiration — I mean, let's face it, a musician only really should work when he
or she feels like it, and if they
only feel like it every six years or so, well, this kind of looks like a plus
in the modern world.
Anyway, no title this time, just a small,
barely visible Roman number, which might lead one to suspect they are taking
their cue from Led Zeppelin here, and indirectly claim that this album will go
down in history as containing their most immortal classics. In reality, this is
just another Black Mountain album that offers no significant deviations from
the old sound. They did have one membership change — Arjan Miranda replaces
Matthew Camirand on bass — but other than that, they're still the same
gloomy-idealistic neo-hippie band with a love for crushing Seventies' riffs,
psychedelic haze, and messages in bottles reaching your 21st century shores
from a past so distant, you'd have to spend your entire evening wondering just
exactly in what way is this kind of
sound and attitude supposed to be relevant. Then, out of sheer frustration,
you'd just have to leave it be and simply enjoy the album for what it is rather
than for what it could do to you.
The best news is that you can still rely upon
them to bring out a decent (if thoroughly derivative) riff out of
non-existence, or to put together some thick distorted guitar, some muscular
drums, and a retro-futuristic synth pattern and make it all sound cool and
credible. McBean and Webber distribute most of the lead vocals between
themselves, like they usually do, and Webber once again takes the cake — for
more than ten years now, she has sounded like a banshee apprentice that can
never make it past the first grade, but now that we've got used to that, came
to realize that she will probably stay in that mold forever, and dropped all
further expectations... well, «perennial banshee apprentice» doesn't sound too
bad, really.
She does a damn good job on the Hawkwind-ish
rocker ʽFlorian Saucer Attackʼ, actually, where her usually shaky
voice makes a huge effort to break through the thick wall of speedy metal riffage
and wild Moogs, and, for once, she almost sounds like an overhyped Amazon
princess; and the same combination of a quasi-military attitude with
doom-and-gloom is heard on ʽConstellationsʼ, where she easily
outsings McBean and adds proper attitude and feeling to the song's somewhat
simplistic and silly-sounding four-note
riff (which seems like a deconstructed version of Led Zeppelin's ʽDancing
Daysʼ or some other song like that). Out of McBean's shorter numbers,
ʽDefectorʼ is a good one, though, again, it will probably draw
inevitable comparisons — this time, to Pink Floyd's ʽYoung Lustʼ,
with which it shares a general «nasty» attitude and the chorus ("and now I
wanna be a defector" sort of sounds like "ooh I need a dirty
woman", doesn't it?), except that Black Mountain's music is almost totally
devoid of sexuality (not that Floyd's wasn't, either — ʽYoung Lustʼ
was a sarcastic parody).
However, the record in general rests on three
8-minute long pivots — everything else feels unsubstantial in comparison to
the «epic» numbers. ʽMothers Of The Sunʼ combines a monster Sabbath
riff with Webber's organ-accompanied doomsday prayer, and is almost
surprisingly efficient: as hard as it is for me these days to fall under the
«doomsday spell» coming from any of the new bands, Black Mountain have by now
soaked themselves so thoroughly in the spirits of their ancestors that
sometimes they seem to be possessed by these spirits, and that might just be
the only proper way to get a convincing doomsday attitude today. Compared to
this, ʽ(Over And Over) The Chainʼ is a bit of a disappointment, a
track closer in spirit to the Gothic cathedral of The Cure — but with a long
long long keyboard intro that evokes memories of ʽShine On You Crazy
Diamondʼ. Yet it is neither as sublimely textured as the Floyd epic, nor
as perfectly overlaid with waves of depressed guitars and tortured vocals as
the best stuff by the Cure, and seems way overlong. Well, in terms of build-up
and bring-down it needs the length, but they are not as good at generating
atmosphere with vast soundscapes as they are with concise riffage.
On the other hand, maybe they are when they
really put their minds to it: ʽSpace To Bakersfieldʼ is quite a
haunting conclusion, ending the album on as much of a high note as
ʽMothers Of The Sunʼ started it. This time, it's like a joint tribute
to ʽSpace Oddityʼ, with its haunting allegory of absolute loneliness,
and ʽComfortably Numbʼ, with its musical marriage of celestial bliss
and psychological terror. Here, the tune unwraps slowly and patiently, lulling
you with velvety synth tapestries (Schmidt uses ABBA's ʽEagleʼ synth
tone to put you high up in the sky), soft vocal harmonies, and minimalistic
guitar effects for about five minutes, after which McBean slowly starts to
unveil his best guitar solo on the record and maybe the best of his entire
career — a choking, wobbly wah-wah wail the likes of which I remember
previously hearing mostly on those drug-soaked Bardo Pond records. It might not
be a particularly great guitar solo per se, but it feels supercool emerging out
of the «celestial» part of the song and burying it underneath its acid fire for
a couple minutes.
Overall, six years of waiting have not resulted
in a major masterpiece, but they have
resulted in Black Mountain managing to sound conservative and fresh at the same time, and that's the only thing that matters
— personally, I'm pleased as heck to award them their fourth thumbs up
in a row just for managing to stay so consistent. Not all the songs are equally
nice (a few acoustic clunkers like ʽCrucify Meʼ are neither
atmospheric nor hooky enough), and you could probably trim some fat off the
56-minute running length quite easily, but as far as imaginative trips down
memory lane are concerned, IV is
among the best ones I've heard in the last few years — not that it would do a
lot of difference to anyone, since it sort of feels like Black Mountain have
pretty much squandered away their entire fanbase in these six years. (Heck, as
of July 2016, there's still no one around to even get this record its own
Wikipedia page!).
BLITZEN TRAPPER (2003)
1) The All-Girl Team; 2) Cunning
Revolution; 3) Appletrees; 4) Reno; 5) Whiskey Kisser; 6) Triggafinga; 7) Ansel
And Emily Desader; 8) Cracker Went Down; 9) Christmas Is Coming Soon; 10)
Donkie Boy; 11) Texaco.
Blitzen Trapper did not really «blitzen» on the
pop scene radar until 2007's Wild
Mountain Nation; by that time, however, they were already active for more
than five years on the local scene of Portland, Oregon, and had two
self-recorded and self-distributed albums on an unknown indie label called
«Lidkercow Ltd.» (which, I suspect, was run by the band themselves in a
basement or something — no other releases but their own on it). Coincidentally,
at least one of them, the self-titled debut, happens to be one of their very
best albums, so, if you like Furr,
it is your patriotic duty to locate Mr. Lidkercow, presumably living on Pirate
Bay Avenue, and demand that he surrender the goods, so that the glory of the
state of Oregon may go undiminished.
The music of Blitzen Trapper is largely the
product of bandleader Eric Earley, who also, not surprisingly, sings and plays
guitar and the occasional keyboards. Initially, one might see Eric as a sort of
wannabe Jeff Tweedy, and one might even be right: Blitzen Trapper has all the trademarks of «intellectualized
alt-country», although its debts to «alt-rock» are heavier than those of early
Wilco records. However, Earley generally takes stuff less seriously than Tweedy
— where even the earliest Wilco records already yield hints that these guys may
wanna rule the world, Earley's creations are somewhat less accessible, somewhat
more on the «obscurely hip» side.
The best news in town, however, is that Earley
comes across as an accomplished songwriter. There is nothing particularly
mind-blowing about these songs — but they are good songs with interesting melodies, whether they are governed by
tough riffage or moody slide guitars, and also regardless of whose territory
the band intrudes upon: ʽThe All-Girl Teamʼ, opening the album, for
instance, could easily be mistaken for a long-lost Blur song — it has all the
required ingredients, apart from the lack of a clearly discernible British
accent: traditionally put together, but original riffs, catchy chorus, angry
young man vocal delivery that occasionally spills into heart-warming poppy
vocal modulations, and properly sarcastic lyrics ("I'm in charge of the
all-girl team!").
But it isn't particularly typical of the album.
Soon afterwards, it takes a sharp turn in a roots-rockier direction; yet the
songs are almost always positioned at some sort of genre crossroads. ʽCunning
Revolutionʼ, for instance, alternates between mystically-oriented guitar
jangle and a hard-rocking bluesier section. ʽAppletreesʼ, with its multi-tracked
mind-warping vocals and melodic guitar phrasing loaded with special tones and
effects, is dance-style psychedelia. ʽRenoʼ is an acoustic shuffle
with some impressive slide guitar work that weaves a subtly dark-magical atmosphere.
ʽWhiskey Kisserʼ is an uptempo «barroom rocker» with plenty of slide
guitar as well, more in the «smart» department than in the «kick-ass» one, but
still intriguing. And that's just the first five songs — there is definitely
more.
Even if none of the melodies strike me
personally as «phenomenal», to the
point of wanting to take a particular riff or slide guitar flourish and frame
it on the wall next to bits and pieces of Tony Iommi or George Harrison,
Earley and pals make the best they can of them. The album was recorded properly
in a proper studio (which, according to their own accounts, nearly ruined them
financially, but I'd say it was worth it), and the production is perfect —
every note that needs to be accentuated is
accentuated, every instrument that is supposed to play a larger role than the
others gets to play that role. It is perfectly possible that, had a different
band written and recorded the album, I would not be struck by the sweetness of
the psychedelia of ʽAppletreesʼ, or by the brutality of the fuzz
assault of ʽDonkey Boyʼ, or by the plaintive sentimental atmosphere
of ʽAnsel And Emily Desaderʼ (which, by the way, betrays a very
strong Ray Davies influence).
I do not know, and cannot possibly know, the
exact number of albums like this recorded over the last decades — there may be
hundreds of them, really, with the level of their notoriety depending
exclusively on the luck factor — but retro-oriented bands that do not stimulate
their listeners into asking the question «why do I actually need to listen to
this?» are few, and I would say that Eric Earley has enough talent to
conveniently fall into that minority. Here be a nicely resonant, intellectually
comfortable alt-hard-roots-psych-record for us all; thumbs up, no questions asked.
FIELD REXX (2004)
1) James & Larry Earley; 2)
Lux & Royal Shopper; 3) Love I Exclaim; 4) Summer Twin; 5) Cold
Gold Diamond; 6) Concrete Heaven; 7) 40 Stripes; 8) Asleep For Days; 9) Dreamers
& Giants; 10) Turkey In The Straw; 11) Dirty Pearls; 12) Leopard's
Will To Live; 13) Country Rain; 14) Moving Minors Over County Lines; 15)
Love.
The band's second album had an extremely
limited budget, making the sound suffer: a little muddier and duller, but
still, this is hardly «lo-fi»: wherever they recorded it, they made the best of
whatever they had at their disposition. In fact, they even invented a certain
pretext to justify the shoddier standards — parts of the album are introduced
with snippets of archival recordings by a certain James Earley (could he be
Eric's father?), singing bits of old hillbilly tunes. So that almost makes it
into genuine «Field Rexx» indeed. In
any case, whatever they recorded will inevitably sound much better than archive field tapes. Genius idea, no?
The good news is that the songwriting has not
been impaired at all by financial troubles. On the contrary, Eric Earley is
slowly, but steadily growing into a Renaissance man of pop music, spreading
his nets far and wide and always successfully. Furthermore, Earley steadily
continues to link his persona to that of Jeff Tweedy's: soulful and literate roots-rocker with an
experimental drive and vast ambitions. If that already sounds awful, do not
despair: the ambitions are not vast enough to prevent the man from abandoning
archaic concepts like melody, harmony, rhythm, or even «rock and roll». On the
contrary, the record is even more accessible than the first one.
ʽLux & Royal Shopperʼ, for
example, takes a simple, effective garage riff and turns it into the basis for
a small exploration that first takes us to the country (with a little backyard
harmonica interlude), then into outer space, with classic psychedelic sound
effects, treated guitars, and multiple head-warping overdubs. The other end of the record is symmetrically
bookmarked with ʽMoving Minors Over County Linesʼ, the album's only
other genuine «rocker», albeit with a country-pop whiff all the same — think
Mike Nesmith or something in that vein.
In between we have some old-school pop-rock
(ʽCold Gold Diamondʼ; ʽAsleep For Daysʼ, with the catchiest
vocal melody on the album, wisely reproduced note-for-note in the solo in the
good old Beatles tradition); some meditative country balladry with lazy
harmonica and sentimental, but intelligent vocals (ʽConcrete Heavenʼ
— with a bigger-than-ever nod to Tweedy); some banjo plunking tied to a
well-imitated Southern accent (ʽDirty Pearlsʼ); a hipness-oozing
novelty indie-pop number that would not be out of place on a Flaming Lips
record (ʽLeopard's Will To Liveʼ); and some post-Woody Guthrie
acoustic folk thrown in for good measure (ʽCountry Rainʼ). None of
these songs are masterpieces on their own, but all of them are growers, and, if
nothing else, almost each one boasts an ear-catching sonic combination of some
sorts. On ʽCountry Rainʼ, for instance, you do not just get an
acoustic guitar and a fiddle, but a Jew's harp as well plinking and plunking in
the background. It needn't be there, but if it weren't there, attention would
not be drawn to the song's melody nearly as much. Who wants to simply hear an
acoustic guitar and a fiddle? Bring on the Jew's harp — and, for that matter,
where is the «electric jug»?..
Another pair of tracks that bookmark the album
is ʽLove I Exclaim!ʼ and its reprise, performed in a style that I could
only define as «homely-funky», or, perhaps, as a deconstructed version of
trip-hop performed with actual instruments, rather than pre-programmed. It's
all novel, yet it provides the album with a «mutant anthem», a song that
establishes an idealistic agenda and, by the way, prevents me from being able
to recognize this band as «The Ween of the 2000's», as I have seen a few people
call it. It took the real Ween more than ten years before they started letting
us in on some of what was going on behind the Boognish mask; Eric Earley had no
problem with that right from the start.
Hence, another thumbs up. The diversity of the
styles and approaches here compensates for the relative lack of hard-rocking
material (especially as compared to the self-titled debut): most probably, Field Rexx should be best enjoyed when
«lazing on a Sunday afternoon in the summertime», to quote the classics, but
all it takes is to properly synchronize it with one of those moods, and you
will be taking a trip to Portland in no time.
WILD MOUNTAIN NATION (2007)
1) Devil's A Go-Go; 2) Wild
Mountain Nation; 3) Futures & Folly; 4) Miss Spiritual Tramp; 5) Woof &
Warp Of The Quiet Giant's Hem; 6) Sci-Fi Kid; 7) Wild Mtn. Jam; 8) Hot Tip / Tough
Cub; 9) The Green King Sings; 10) Summer Town; 11) Murder Babe; 12) Country
Caravan; 13) Badger's Black Brigade.
Switching from the phantom label of «LidKerCow»
to the very much real Sub Pop records, Blitzen Trapper finally announce their
existence to a whole wide world outside Oregon, with their loudest,
braggard-est, and best produced record yet. Actually, a correction: they do not
so much want to come out into the whole wide world as they want the whole wide
world to come to them. "Come out
from the world and into my arms / Like wind on the water with me / Come out
from the city come out from the town / Build stone by stone a wild mountain
home". This is the way the title track greets you, on a shallow warm wave
of slide and electric guitars and a swaying anthemic rhythm that goes
particularly well with a mug or two.
But Blitzen Trapper are not The Avett Brothers,
and their wildland hearts never stay for too long in the wildlands: their real
ambition stays the same — to capture all sorts of audiences by means of an
intelligent synthesis. This is where the bearded hillbilly is supposed to
peacefully coinhabit the same territory with the smug hipster, trading quite a
few floating genes in the process. Why
they have to do this, other than provide a reason for another rock band's
existence, is another question... and it is up to each one of us to decide if
we want to enrich our meaning of life by trying as hard as we can to find the
answer.
At this point, a responsible reviewer would
need to write something like «Me, I'm too busy just enjoying all the cool music
to give a damn». The problem is — despite all of Earley's unquestionable
talent, this music is just way too
cool to be normally enjoyable. It begs for all sorts of questions, and
provokes confusion after confusion. The band's previous albums were, after all,
a little less «over the top», but on Wild
Mountain Nation they pull so many different rabbits out of the hat that,
eventually, the magic show turns into a zoo.
ʽDevil's A-Go-Goʼ kicks off the
proceedings with a three-minute multipart suite that includes elements of power
pop, tricky Captain Beefheart-influenced avantgarde rhythms, Grateful
Dead-style mind-melting psychedelia, and a noisy dissolution into chaos. Out of
its ashes rises the title track — mind you, these guys that beg you to come to
their wild mountains with them are the same ones that just infested your mind
with a ridiculously incoherent concatenation, so I would think twice,
personally, before «saddling up to ride». Then, after being lulled into a
peaceful easy feeling with the colorful, bouncy folk-pop of ʽFutures &
Follyʼ and its McCartney spirit, you are immediately given a gut-kick by
the thick Panzer distortion of ʽMiss Spiritual Trampʼ — a
hard-rocking sound through which, however, they still seep through occasional
slide guitars and harmonicas, just to place the «rootsy-tootsy» seal on
everything, for protection.
Actually, it all sounds great. The soft songs
lull and pacify, the loud songs invite the air guitar, and the avantgarde /
experimental bits and pieces are a fine glue to keep the soft and loud songs
together. It all sounds so great that
you do not even immediately notice the utter silliness of something like
ʽWoof & Warp Of The Quiet Giant's Hemʼ — even if, in reality, it
is just a repetitive, off-yer-head carnival stomp where you are supposed to
jump around the fire and shout «yeah yeah yeah» to spook off a bloodthirsty
demon or something. It simply falls in place as part of that crazy
kaleidoscope: a bit of its own craziness rubs off on everything else.
But you know what? I would rather have
preferred it all with a different sequencing. For instance, place all the quiet
acoustic songs on one side and all the wild romps on the other. Because I feel
that the quiet songs are actually the stronger ones, reflecting a juicier,
brighter side of Earley's heart than his attempts to make himself feel at home
with the loud rock scene. ʽSummer Townʼ, in particular, is a
beautiful ballad, all minimalistic acoustic lines, flutes, and soft psychedelic
overdubs, one of those tunes where you cannot decide whether it is melancholy
or tenderness that rules the scene, and this indecision keeps sucking you in.
And my personal fav is ʽCountry Caravanʼ, one of those tunes where
you know that all that separates this
rather ordinary country-pop tune from greatness is the lack of a big fat
friendly electric guitar solo, and then it finally comes and you're all like,
"I knew it! Didn't I?"...
Yet with all this mixing going on, neither the
soft nor the hard songs help out each other. It is one thing to have yourself a
White Album, one that can allow itself
to disregard sequencing because each number is so strong on its own that it
creates a special link to its context in your mind regardless of whether that
link was originally planned or not. Eric Earley, on the other hand, is no J. P.
Lennon-McCartney, and these songs are not highly memorable — they are of the
«make you feel so good while they're on» kind rather than the «forever and ever
you'll stay in my heart» kind. And Wild
Mountain Nation's eclectic mix keeps confusing me. On the good side of things,
it means that I will definitely be coming back here, to keep checking on the
potential greatness I have missed; but on the bad side of things, the overall
reaction is still a large question mark, and I wouldn't want to be coming back
without some sort of guarantee that I will not be wasting my time. Anyway, thumbs up
for the ongoing mystery of Blitzen Trapper while it is still a mystery.
FURR (2008)
1) Sleepytime In The Western
World; 2) Gold For Bread; 3) Furr; 4) God & Suicide; 5) Fire & Fast
Bullets; 6) Saturday Nite; 7) Black River Killer; 8) Not Your Lover; 9) Love
U; 10) War On Machines; 11) Stolen Shoes & A Rifle; 12) Echo / Always On /
EZ Con; 13) Lady On The Water.
Big critical success here, but I am not all that impressed. Too rootsy! Not enough
rock'n'roll! With the exception of one or two big-scale numbers, Furr is almost yer average camping
album — and I am sure that few people are more qualified to write wildlife
camping albums than a bunch of gifted sons of authentic Oregon trappers, but there
is not enough inventiveness running through their veins to turn Furr into the next John Wesley Harding, or into one of those classic John Prine or
Willie Nelson albums.
The title track is suitably «nice», but does
not really do justice to Eric Earley's songwriting talents: just a basic
country-pop acoustic shuffle with a derivative vocal melody. His warm vocal
tone is always welcome, and the metaphorically Mowgli-like story in the lyrics
is original enough, but truly and verily, many people sing these kinds of stories,
few are capable of making them stick. Writing and recording a song like
ʽFurrʼ, to me, seems a bit like winning in a local songwriting
contest — the basic requirements are met, the clichés successfully
worked around without losing an atmosphere of authenticity, the resulting grade
is A+, and now off you go to continue with your dayjob at the local sheet metal
factory.
That Blitzen Trapper are capable of more than just «making the grade» is
clearly seen from the other single, ʽBlack River Killerʼ. Technically,
it is just another acoustic folk tune, with a darker overtone this time, as the
title already suggests, but this time, with a poppier hook in the chorus, and a
moody «theremin-synth» line in between the verses to spice up the atmosphere.
Of course, it is always easier to write a «sticky» dark song than a happy one
(most of us are easier drawn to gruesome tales of serial killers than to simple
stories of settling down to raise a family), but the darkness itself does not
account for the special catchiness of the chorus or that particularly gloomy
synthesizer flourish.
Unfortunately, such flourishes are rare on Furr. With a pretty piano ballad like
ʽNot Your Loverʼ, you could hope for at least a small bit of musical
development throughout the album, yet there is none, and I am not just going to fall over for lines like
"Cause I'm a moonwalkin' cowboy, dusty ridin' / And I don't know what's in
store" if they are simply accompanied with a pretty (but whiny) voice and
one finger on a piano. Lazy! Get out of bed!
Yes, there are a few upbeat pop tunes here,
fattened with wailing electric guitar and other ingredients, but after the
opening successful punch of ʽSleepytime In The Western Worldʼ, with
its organ leads and amateurishly eccentric guitar pyrotechnics, something like
ʽSaturday Niteʼ, very similar in terms of upbeat-ness, is already
nowhere near impressive. Nor is ʽWar On Machinesʼ, where they take
the same stomp and change the time signature just a bit, to let in some
barroom-rock atmosphere. But it's the same multitracked acoustic guitars all
over again. ʽLove Uʼ, a slowly crawling «screamfest», is certainly
different — but not very good, as far as I am concerned. (Eric is not a
professional screamer at all).
So, if Blitzen Trapper in general are a good
band, very occasionally being put through to a straight line with God, Furr is the album that shows all of
their limitations. Earley's strength is in his diversity: no matter if each
individual song is not Beatle-quality, there are so many of them done in so
many different ways that the cumulative effect is disarming the critic. Furr, on the other hand, is an attempt
at creating something semi-conceptual, a 21st century look at the rudiments of
two hundred years' time, and its tighter focus is at the same time its
Achilles' heel. I have nothing against these guys employing roots-rock elements
in their music — but I never asked them to go ahead and «reinvent» roots-rock
as such for me. If I want rootsy, I just go and put me on some Robbie
Robertson. A disappointing thumbs down here — which should not prevent
neither you nor myself from easily enjoying ʽBlack River
Killerʼ.
DESTROYER OF THE VOID (2010)
1) Destroyer Of The Void; 2) Laughing
Lover; 3) Below The Hurricane; 4) The Man Who Would Speak True; 5) Love And Hate;
6) Heaven And Earth; 7) Dragon's Song; 8) The Tree; 9) Evening Star; 10) Lover
Leave Me Drowning; 11) The Tailor; 12) Sadie.
With this album title, it almost looks as if
Blitzen Trapper are really becoming interested in justifying the occasionally
flashing tag of «New Ween For The 2000s» — reading like a parody on a
self-important prog rock record. And indeed, look at the running times: the
title track clocks in at 6:17, and the third one at 5:26 — of all their
previous creations, only ʽConcrete Heavenʼ ran that long, but even
that one was anything but a
multi-part suite. Lord help us, Eric Earley has truly gone «progressive» on our
asses. How does it feel?
Unfortunately, it doesn't feel at all. The attempt to branch out in
terms of complexity simply ends up going nowhere. There is no purpose
whatsoever to the title track other than telling us that the band can and will change keys midway through the song and then one more time,
three quarters into the song. There is no interesting original theme to catch
the proper attention; nothing ever goes beyond «sonically nice» as they drag
out the old-fashioned synthesizers, the «epic» (but technically simple) guitar
solos, the choral backing vocals, the back-and-forth loud-to-quiet alternations.
I've heard it all before and I don't want this.
It's BOOOOORING!
Perhaps Earley realized it himself, because, no
matter how ambitious the first third of the album tries to make itself, he just
cannot help but eventually get carried away on the rootsy tide. ʽLaughing
Loverʼ still combines folksy upbeat pop with arena-rock riffs, psychedelic
keyboard and vocal overdubs, and rhythmless harmony-based choruses, and
ʽBelow The Hurricaneʼ is still long enough to envelop a two-part
acoustic suite and an atmospheric «look at us making alien noises with our
electronic toys» coda. But after that, Earley's «progressive drive» seems to
either become exhausted, or satisfied, and the band turns back on its trusty
Oregon Wilderness Machine.
For some reason, though, the Machine seems to
be virtually infested with a colony of Dylan bacteria this time around. Where
Bob's influence on the band used to be obvious, but indirect, it now becomes an
obsession — as if playing around with progressive complexities had somehow
lowered Earley's defensive shields that used to protect him from resorting to
direct plagiarism. ʽThe Man Who Would Speak Trueʼ plays on like a
straightahead outtake from Selfportrait
(yes!!), and ʽThe Treeʼ, in itself a lovely duet between Earley and
fellow Oregonian Alela Diane, «borrows» quite a few chords and vocal moves,
not to mention the overall atmosphere, directly from ʽMr. Tambourine
Manʼ. Why? Damn me if I know.
Both of these things — the band's inability to
become interesting when going in for extra complexity, and the inexplainable
switch from Dylan influence to Dylan worship — are very disappointing, and the
best tracks on this album, stuck in the middle (the heavy rock anthem
ʽLove And Hateʼ, with a cool-bellowing distorted guitar opposed to an
optimistic singalong chorus, and the dreamy/aching piano-and-strings ballad
ʽHeaven And Earthʼ), are not jaw-dropping enough, either, to heal the
wounds.
It is good to know that Destroyer Of The Void does not at least repeat, note-for-note, the
formula of Furr, and that Earley is
still busy searching, and that the arrangements are still in great taste, and
that the band still has its honest Oregon heart. But alas — the album continues
to suggest that Blitzen Trapper may be past
their peak, and that Earley will never again manage to sustain the same level
of original chemistry and overall quality that he did on his first three
albums, and that, therefore, despite the best of our hopes, Blitzen Trapper
share the usual genetic disease of most of the bands of the decade: thoroughly
great for a one-night stand, thoroughly lacking what it takes to build up a
long-term relationship. Too bad.
AMERICAN GOLDWING (2011)
1) Might Find It Cheap; 2) Fletcher;
3) Love The Way You Walk Away; 4) Your Crying Eyes; 5) My Home Town; 6) Girl In
A Coat; 7) American Goldwing; 8) Astronaut; 9) Taking It Easy Too Long; 10) Street
Fighting Sun; 11) Stranger In A Strange Land.
The baby might sport pretty facial features and
weigh the expected eight or nine pounds, but none of that would matter much if
he were stillborn. An uncomfortable metaphor, perhaps, but fully applicable to
American Goldwing — the first
officially bad album, according to my
personal views, that Blitzen Trapper have produced. Bad, as in B-A-D-bad. Not tastelessly bad, not stupidly bad, not
annoyingly bad. Just good old bad, that's all.
Once again, just like Furr, the whole venture is an Americana celebration, now flaunted
on the front sleeve even more explicitly than it used to be. Once again, the
tracks shuffle between acoustic folk balladry, «roots-pop» à la early
Wilco, some sludgy stoner proto-metal, and Seventies-style blues-rock. But more than ever before, the band simply
embraces all the clichés and formalities of all these styles, instead
of at least attempting to reinvent them, or at least marry them to one or two
chord sequences that wouldn't be completely, thoroughly safe and predictable.
There is not a single song on here that would
linger in my head for even a few minutes after the album is over — simply because
there is not a single cell in my brain that would not already be occupied by
one or more tenants, once any given song from American Goldwing starts politely knocking on its door. «Go away,
ʽGirl In A Coatʼ!», they say, «we'd be happy to let you stay
overnight, but the whole floor has already been rented by a Mr. Zimmerman».
«Sorry, ʽTaking It Easy Too Longʼ, we just don't see the extra
benefits from accommodating you that we have not already received by lending
this space to Mr. Willie Nelson». And the list goes on.
The damnedest thing about all of this is, these
melodies just sound way too lazy. For
ʽMight Find It Cheapʼ, one of the guitarists just reuses a standard
old hard rock riff, and the other one plays a slightly more complex, but
equally weary ring of acoustic circles around it. The multi-guitar overdubs on
ʽFletcherʼ, including a clever move of combining slide guitar with a
wah-wah sound, are totally wasted, since they are not structured as a coherent,
independent melody. ʽLove The Way You Walk Awayʼ might as well be
recorded by a Hank Williams Jr. or any single other by-the-book professional
country hack to have come around in the past fifty years. ʽStreet Fighting
Sunʼ, although its title bears non-incidental similarity to the Stones, actually
rips off the old style of Mountain, without any changes for the better.
In the end, it simply drives me crazy. When
these guys started out, they clearly had ambitions — there was never a time in which they were not
utterly derivative, but they were tearing that house apart and rebuilding it
anew. Now, with what limited critical
success and recognition they might have acquired after the success of Wild Mountain Nation and Furr, they seem to have sunk into a sea
of mildly ear-pleasing, but utterly forgettable and irrelevant genericity.
Sure, Earley's voice is still moderately moving, and I can imagine some people
still being interested in what he has to say lyrically (I myself could care
less), but, in a way, it only makes American
Goldwing ever so more irritating for me, because even the sensible, lyrical
heart of this guy is no more different now from the sensible, lyrical hearts of
a grand army of roots-rockers.
All I can hope for is eventually getting a
confirmation that the album might simply have been rushed out too quickly after
Destroyer, for whatever reason (lack
of fresh cash flow?). Since it has now been almost two years since then,
chances are that, perhaps, for their upcoming new project the Blitzens will
finally try out something different, rather than just keep on wallowing in
their «heartland» phase. But as of now, a disheartened thumbs down — I fail to see how
anybody who doesn't think that all
the music in the world should sound like James Taylor could manage to be
converted by these stale sounds.
VII (2013)
1) Feel The Chill; 2) Shine
On; 3) Ever Loved Once; 4) Thirsty Man; 5) Valley Of Death; 6) Oregon
Geography; 7) Neck Tatts, Cadillacs; 8) Earth (Fever Called Love); 9) Drive On
Up; 10) Heart Attack; 11) Faces Of You; 12) Don't Be A Stranger.
Yes, we can: two years into the disappointing
disaster of American Goldwing,
Blitzen Trapper once again redo their image, and come out with an album that
honestly sounds nothing like any of its predecessors — confirming our trust in
Eric Earley as a musical force to be reckoned with, at least on a formal level.
However, the change is somewhat bizarre. Without abandoning their roots-rock
orientation, the band now crosses it with modernistic elements of hip-hop,
trip-hop, and various electronic sub-styles. The result? Now they sound like
lately-discovered children of Beck, which begs the question — are we finally
past Eighties nostalgia, and advancing now into the age of Nineties nostalgia?
Seriously, at least half of these tracks might
have been accepted as filler on Odelay
or Midnite Vultures: swamp guitars
crossed with dance beats, rapped vocals crossed with bluesy harmonicas, earthy
country moods crossed with urban swagger. Most of the instrumentation remains
live, and the album is hardly ever burdened with the stuffy digital overload of
mainstream production, which is why the Beck analogy springs to mind before
anything else — he, too, would always take time to bother that the songs
sounded like advanced-updated variations on all their predecessors. The
standard problem, however, remains: on individual levels, the tunes are not
particularly memorable; not on a level, at least, where I could single out
highlights and lowlights.
The overall sound is beyond complaint: even at
his worst, Earley would always retain professionalism, and now that he's found
a new old way to fool around, the band seems re-energized from the slackness of
American Goldwing. On ʽFeel The
Chillʼ, stinging electric guitars, tasty slides, banjos, organs,
harmonicas, and whistling synthesizers generate an impressive polyphony, over
which Eric's rapped verse vocals and nursery-rhyme chorus resonate with irony
and humor. There may be a bit too much happening here to successfully latch on
to a distinct hook, but this feeling of overwhelmed ear canals is quite strong
in itself.
Then the second song, ʽShine Onʼ,
comes on, and it's like... uh, okay. The time signature is ever so slightly
changed, but other than that, we have the same electric riffs, slides, organs,
harmonicas, rapped vocals... the song hardly ever makes its own point.
ʽEver Loved Onceʼ follows at a slower pace, in a more sentimental
mood, but other than fewer synthesizers and more slides, the difference is not
that big, either, and seems to become less and less as the song becomes louder
and Eric's singing gradually slides towards the same rapping style.
There is no need whatsoever to mention any of
the other tracks until we get to ʽHeart Attackʼ: the last three
tracks somehow manage to dispense with the «retro-modernistic» sheen and simply
plunge us into pure archaic retro — ʽHeart Attackʼ is like an
old-fashioned glam-rocker crossed with country elements, sort of a cross
between T. Rex and the Flying Burrito Brothers; ʽFaces Of Youʼ is a
gloomy keyboard-dominated blues-rocker; and ʽDon't Be A Strangerʼ
ends the album with a bit of friendly fast-tempo acoustic bluegrass (the Avett
Brothers do this kind of stuff sometimes, although this one does not quite
have enough heart on its sleeve for Avett level).
Still, I give the album a light thumbs up.
It is much less innovative than it seems to think it is, and the hooks take
ages to sink in, if they ever do, and the «trendy-hopping on your country house
front porch» vibe is already fully disclosed on the first couple of minutes —
but at least they got some energy, some tact, some humor, and sorting out all
these endless overdubs can also be fun, in a technical way at least. Rest
assured, though, Blitzen Trapper VII
is in no way poised to displace Beck from his properly guaranteed position of
king of this particular mountain.
ALL ACROSS THIS LAND (2015)
1) All Across This Land; 2)
Rock And Roll (Was Made For You); 3) Mystery And Wonder; 4) Love Grow Cold; 5)
Lonesome Angel; 6) Nights Were Made For Love; 7) Cadillac Road; 8) Let The
Cards Fall; 9) Even If You Don't; 10) Across The River.
Stylistically, this is a return to the vibe of American Goldwing — unassuming
retro-rock with emphasis on the «nobody should be able to tell that we are not The Eagles or at least The Doobie
Brothers!» side of the business. But impression-wise, All Across This Land seems to be the better bet of the two, if only
because it's got more muscle; and I mean that almost literally — the riffs, the
rhythm section, the vocals all seem to be infected with a strange brawny
vivaciousness. Not only that, but Earley and his mates intentionally lower the
«intelligence shield» of the music and go as far as to offer a few really
simplistic anthems to, uh, simplicity — ʽRock And Roll (Was Made For
You)ʼ does sound about as dumb as its title.
And, for once, this is sort of a plus, because
throughout their career, Blitzen Trapper have consistently failed to convince
me that they were truly qualified for the status of a «subtle», «intellectual»,
«innovative» rock band. In reality, a few happy exceptions aside, Earley is a
natural-born barroom rocker and little else — and All Across This Land is just that, an album of barroom rock with a
Southern edge to it that "just wants to rock'n'roll", as they
themselves acknowledge on ʽNights Were Made For Loveʼ. Meaning that
it all sounds nice and tasteful and adequate, even if, as usual, few songs
stick out.
General gripes involve the superfluous use of
synthesizers — cheesy fake strings really do not belong on these kinds of songs
— and, more importantly, the fact that Earley has not become any more
distinctive as a singer than he used to be: his husky, earthy voice is good for
this music, but he still has such minimal range and flexibility that if anybody
said he was «singing with feeling», I would have to assume that «feeling» is an
immanent, unchanging quality for this guy. This is, however, a grudge that can
be held against the absolute majority of Blitzen Trapper's roots-rock idols
from the Seventies, so why should we blame poor Eric?
Speaking of sticking out, I'd probably have to
put in a good word for the title track, featuring the album's most distinctive
and memorable set of riffs and passing off for, let's say, a second-rate
Skynyrd; the already mentioned ʽNights Were Made For Loveʼ, a fast
tempo pop-rocker stuffed with romantic nostalgia (like a sped-up variation on
the Byrds' cover of ʽMy Back Pagesʼ or something like that); and the
closing acoustic ballad ʽAcross The Riverʼ, which could have been so
much better if sung by Neil Young, but... ah, hell.
Overall, I'm not giving this a thumbs up so as
to avoid upholding the illusion that this is some sort of «creative rebound» or
that you can find here something that cannot be found on a solid selection of
soft rock nuggets from the early-to-mid Seventies. But since the record clearly
does not pretend to anything more
than telling you, "We love our smelly roots, and what's wrong with
that?", I'm not giving it a thumbs down, either. If you just can't get
enough of those Southern vibes and need your fill replenished daily, All Across This Land is highly
recommendable. If, however, you still vaguely remember Blitzen Trapper as that
odd try-anything-once band that arrogantly mixed Brit-pop, roots-rock, and
psychedelia on its debut album, that old band just ain't coming back. They made
their choice and settled down on the farm. Oh well, I guess somebody at least has to settle down on
the farm in these days of urban dictature.
SILENT ALARM (2005)
1) Like Eating Glass; 2) Helicopter; 3) Positive Tension; 4) Banquet; 5) Blue Light; 6) She's
Hearing Voices; 7) This Modern Love; 8) Pioneers; 9) Price Of Gas; 10) So Here
We Are; 11) Luno; 12) Plans; 13) Compliments.
Here is another band whose recent status as
«critical darlings» has pissed off so many people that, behind the endless
discussions on the nature of overratedness, one almost forgets to talk about
the nature of Bloc Party. Here are the bare facts. Bloc Party is an Essex-based
rock band, formed from 1999 to 2003 by a bunch of college students/dropouts of
highly mixed origin (lead guitarist and bass players are Brits, lead singer and
rhythm player Kele Okereke is of Igbo descent, drummer Matt Tong is Malaysian
— a melting pot paradise) and highly developed intellect. The band's first
recordings provoked interest on the part of figures like Franz Ferdinand, and
their first album became a smash success in the UK, making them hip-hip-hip for
most of 2005, all the way up to their being blown away as the next best
hip-hip-hip thing by the Arctic Monkeys next year.
It goes without saying that, these days, three
guys with guitars and one guy with drums cannot become a smash success if they
do not make strange new tricks with these things, or, as it more frequently
turns out, if they do not give out the popular impression that they are making
strange new tricks with these things. On the general scale, what they give out
is a post-punk type sound, songs that are simple and complex at the same time,
combining fast three-chord riffs in so many different ways that they start
sounding like multi-note riffs, not to mention fluent, impressive interplay
between the two guitarists that certainly took quite a bit of sweat to
orchestrate. On the more particular scales, they occasionally bring in small
bits of electronic sound that they also inherited from their Eighties'
childhood, and melodies that are fairly hard to crack. Either they do not
really know how to write them, or I do not really know how to read them.
I do not want to reduce these guys to the sum
of their influences, which include quite a few respectable outfits from around
1978 to around 1999. People have done that — successfully — and, as usual, it
has led to some dismissing them as talentless copycats and others to endorsing
them as bona fide inheritors. For me, the one impressive thing about this band
is the playing. Even if the melodies as such usually do not work, all four of
these guys sound like seasoned pros. Particular kudos goes to drummer Matt
Tong, whose inventive fills and overall precision level I would impressionistically
rate among the finest I'd heard from the 21st century; but the rest of the guys
are no slouches, either — phenomenal coordination and discipline, even when it
comes to relatively difficult passages. The entire album went very smooth with
me for that reason alone.
The weakest spot is arguably Kele Okereke's
singing. He certainly can sing, and
he is expressive enough, but a voice is a voice: you can pour as much fiery
spirit in your guitar playing as your body contains, but the vocal tract is a
far less reliable mediator, and it always sounds like he is seriously
constrained by it — wants to give out a hundred percent but only comes out with
fifty, so to speak. As a result, most of the time it sounds like he's pitifully
whining about life rather than apocalyptically threatening about it, and
pitiful whining just doesn't sit too well with the musical moods they create.
Sometimes I catch myself thinking that, as a modestly preservable piece of art,
Silent Alarm might have worked
better as a completely instrumental album.
Like I said, the songs aren't catchy; in fact,
even as I am giving it a fourth and fifth listen, all of them are instantaneously
forgettable on their own. What could you ask, after all, from an album based on
generic pop-punk riffs, not a single one of which stays around for too long at
that? An album whose chorus lines do not rhyme and are usually hard to separate
from verse melodies? An album on which every second song plays at the exact
same tempo, and almost every first song has the exact same arrangement? With
the hit singles completely interchangeable with the LP-only tracks? Nothing.
What does the album aim for as a whole? Hard to
say. It is clear that these guys are being serious; tired of endless cynicism
and post-modern intellectualism like so many of their peers, they create this
dreary grey landscape against which they stand, complaining and complaining and
complaining about every aspect of life. Just look at this: (1) "It's so
cold in this house, like drinking poison, like eating glass"; (2)
"Are you hoping for a miracle? Some things will never be different";
(3) "You're just as boring as everyone else, nothing ever happens";
(4) "Heaven's never enough, we will never be fooled"; (5) "You
didn't even notice when the sky turned blue"; (6) "I'm tearing down
posters, I was never ever alive"; (7) "This modern love breaks me,
this modern love wastes me"; (8) "We promised the world we'd tame it,
what were we hoping for?"; (9) "Nothing ever comes for me, the ghosts
are here, red white and blue"; (10) "I really tried to do what you
wanted, it all went wrong again"; (11) "You've been lying to me, you
deserve it"; (12) "Stop being so laissez-faire, we're all scared of
the future"; (13) "We sit and we sigh and nothing gets done... what
are we coming to, what are we gonna do?" Yep, that's all of the songs in a
nutshell. Seems like there's more depression inside of Kele than in all the
Igbo people combined.
I would not buy this attitude without a second
thought. It is nice to think of it as a good antidote not just for MTV-type
cultures, but also for the animalistic hedonism of the hipster club ones, but
it does not always seem like the band is speaking with its own voice; their
desire to be heard is obviously sincere, but what they say is such goddamn old
news that it would have taken more than Kele Okereke's whiny delivery and the
combined professionalism of his band to make it work in a new way. A decade
from now, Silent Alarm will be a
fascinating culturological study for those interested in the average
intelligent mindset of a typical mid-noughties' youth from the EU; but in the
meantime, it will be inevitably washed away by a couple dozen «no better, no
worse» albums exploring more relevant musical trends and speaking more actual
lyrical jargons.
But lingering still in my memory is the superb
musicianship, for which alone thumbs up are guaranteed. If you find a karaoke
version of the record lying around, let me know.
A WEEKEND IN THE CITY (2007)
1) Song For Clay (Disappear
Here); 2) Hunting For
Witches; 3) Waiting
For The 7.18; 4) The
Prayer; 5) Uniform;
6) On; 7) Where Is Home; 8) Kreuzberg;
9) I Still Remember;
10) Sunday; 11) SRXT.
Well, looks like they didn't want to be
post-punk-rockers anyway — they wanted to be a guitar-and-keyboards dance
troup! Leaping from synth to synth, as they drill into the minds of desperate
listeners... excuse me. When a band is mediocre from the start, and then takes
a sharp turn to Shitsville at the first crossroads it reaches, it is only
natural that a reviewer may be goaded into lame paraphrasing.
Anyway, the things that made me sit up and take
notice while listening to Silent Alarm,
a.k.a. This Band's Saving Grace, are mostly absent on their second release. The
quirky guitar interplay and Matt Tong's super-precise drum-rattling work have
faded into the background, and the foreground is almost completely dominated
by Kele Okereke's New(est) Romantic artistic vision and personal brand of urban
poetry. If, for some reason, you hate that guy, do not come within ten miles of
this album's radiation field.
Pretense runs very high here, as Kele and his
Party openly join the new line of indie bands who have made it their purpose to
try and strip their teenage audiences out of consumerist apathy: a brave,
idealistic, and ultimately doomed goal, but also one theoretically capable of
lighting a new flame through the same old means (Arcade Fire etc.). From the
angst, spite, and self-pity of Silent
Alarm they try to move one level up, making the message more overwhelming
and universalist. But it all just results in having bitten off far more than
they can chew.
The music hardly registers. Too many of these
songs sound like they have been stolen out of Robert Smith's wastebasket —
including the lead-off single, 'The Prayer', with its deep-running
ambience-setting electric guitar waves, «intelligent dance» rhythms, and Kele's
prophetic, agonizing screams (that still sound a tad weak and mild when you
compare them to The Cure at their best). So the lyrics lambast the trendy
hipster of 2007: big deal. Who ever succeeded in changing the world with such a
silly thing as lyrics? Even with Bob
Dylan, the exact words never mattered half as much as the setting and the way
in which they were delivered.
It is not, of course, as if Silent Alarm had a ton of great guitar
riffs and here they have all been replaced by same-sounding, «backgroundish»,
guitar-keyboards droning. To me, at least, those riffs never spoke on a
personal level — but it was interesting and amusing to watch them weave the
patterns around each other, in the hopes that, one day, all of it would grow
into something completely different. On Weekend,
allegedly expressing their dissatisfaction about sounding like all the other
indie guys out there, they just threw it all away, resulting in... uh...
sounding like all the other indie guys out there. What, did they really think
that, by replacing complex chords with U2-ish chimy jangle and spicing it up
with electronics, they could become more
interesting? This I cannot possibly understand.
Granted, accidents will happen, sometimes
pleasant ones. Way way near the end, a few songs after complete desperation
has set in, the band unexpectedly erupts into a fabulous power pop tune: 'I
Still Remember' has not just the best guitar melody on the album, but one of
the best guitar melodies of the decade — simple, charming, and beautifully
fitting in with the rare exception of a shy, intimate lyrical piece, as Kele
reminisces about a botched romance. If you like The Cure's 'Friday I'm In
Love', you are almost guaranteed to like this as well. I also happen to be a
big fan of 'Sunday' and its ultra-catchy 'I'll love you in the morning' chorus...
somehow, it seems that love song territory is a better bet for Bloc Party than
their gopherish attempts to uproot the grand oak of social inertia and
indifference.
Probably because of the passion involved, A Weekend In The City is a slow grower,
and those who generally prefer denser, pseudo-orchestral sounds to in-yer-face
smash guitar may even come to like it over its predecessor. Yet even after a
few listens, to my ears it comes out as a painfully wrong direction for these
guys, although it took them two more years to become definitively fixed in that
direction. Thumbs down, bar a special
rescue mission for the two songs I mentioned.
INTIMACY (2008)
1) Ares; 2) Mercury; 3) Halo; 4) Biko; 5) Trojan
Horse; 6) Signs; 7)
One Month Off; 8) Zephyrus; 9) Talons; 10) Better Than
Heaven; 11) Ion Square; 12*) Letter To My Son; 13*) Your Visits Are Getting
Shorter.
With the release of the single 'Flux' in
November 2007, an atrocious electronic monstrosity with auto-tuned Kele vocals
(welcome to the world of Cher, brother), Bloc Party have officially switched
from «indie rock» to what they call «alternative dance». Fortunately, 'Flux'
was more of a wild, stupid experiment than a genuine shift of direction; the
follow-up album is nowhere near as disgusting. It is simply bland, and has no
reason whatsoever to be listened to in an era when the entire musical output of
2008 might quantitavely match the entire musical output of several decades of
the XXth century.
If Weekend
In The City downplays the band's strengths, then Intimacy commands us to forget they ever existed in the first
place. Guitars and drums are either buried under computer-electronic layers, or
filtered through them, making individual playing talent unnoticeable — an
exercise in humility, some might say, but perhaps «self-humiliation» would be a
more precise term. Considering that melody writing has never been one of Bloc
Party's fortes, what need have we of this kind of plastic sound, which is not
even innovative in the least degree? The retro inspiration behind this stuff
are the likes of U2's Zooropa, but
even if we manage ourselves not to despise that particular model, that sort of
ideology still went out of style ages ago. Why bring it back at all?
Absolutely everything that could go wrong with this album, did
go wrong. Starting with the title: Intimacy
would suggest something very personal (or, at least, something very dirty), but
the whole thing is just as loud, noisy, and chaotic as it used to be, with
Okereke's «vision», if the word may be used at all, drowned in the sea of
electronic effects, drum machines, and overall musical brawn. If you bother to
drag out individual songs, tear them apart and scrutinize every detail, I
concede that you will find lots of different «trivia» to write about. But all
of them serve the same purpose: transform «generic dance» into «alternative
dance» by introducing the factor of unpredictability. So, what kind of effect
will they adorn Kele's voice with on the next track? Will they just introduce a
synth-guitar riff or will it be backed up by an «atmospheric» sci-fi fart
noise? Will Matt Tong engage in a battle with a drum machine or will he just be
taking a nap? Why, how come I don't really give a damn?
All the more painful to realize that, somewhere
behind all this misconstructed wall of outdated sonic shit, Kele «Pink» Okereke
is still lurking as a sympathetic, vulnerable, lyrical kind of guy who can be
quite sincerely committed to the art of tear-jerking. The first few minutes of
'Biko', a song that has nothing to do with the 'Biko' of Peter Gabriel but is
instead a funebral lament for a loved one, almost Poe-style, are so powerfully
delivered that the song races fast towards the beauty mark — only to have the
cretinous drum simulations come in and remind the listener that «this is the
world of machinery, a mechanical nightmare» (© Ray Davies). There is also a
funny bit at the beginning of 'Zephyrus', where the engineers construe a
Björk-ian psychedelic concoction out of Kele's owwws and ooohs, but that,
too, will disappear in a few seconds, buried under a layer of irrelevant,
boring vocal harmonies as the band goes for some sort of poor man Dead Can
Dance imitation which I cannot figure anyone
swallowing except those who don't know one single thing about music from the
last three decades. Oh God.
It is true that these days, decent bands tend
to commit artistic suicide far more swiftly than they used to, but even under
contemporary conditions, Bloc Party have outshone most of their competition.
It does not help, either, that many of the reviews have been surprisingly
positive: want it or not, apparently, this combination of banal guitar indie
with even more banal electronic dance happened to be considered trendy in
2008, winning the band support from Rolling Stone and probably ensuring that,
instead of getting their heads straight, they will want to repeat something
like this in the future, wasting good CD plastic and hours of our precious
time, much better spent learning the basics of string theory or something. Thumbs down
to the ground.
FOUR (2012)
1) So He Begins To Lie; 2)
3x3; 3) Octopus; 4) Real Talk; 5) Kettling; 6) Day Four; 7) Coliseum; 8)
V.A.L.I.S; 9) Team A; 10) Truth; 11) The Healing; 12) We Are Not Good People;
13*) Mean; 14*) Leaf Skeleton.
Let it not be insinuated any further that
ambitious indie work horses cannot take lessons. A bloc party has to learn to
compromise, and this here Bloc Party, clearly taken aback at the generally less
than tepid reaction to Intimacy, wisely
refuses to continue the Intimacy
line unabated. With a three year break and some sunken solo projects behind
them, the original four, still tight as a nutshell, finally return to make a
new album called... Four. Well, actually,
it isn't called anything — it just draws four electron orbits on the front
cover. But since it is the fourth album by four band members, that's what
everybody calls it anyway.
The good news: not only did they get rid of
excessive electronics, they are also trying desperately to remember what it was
that made their debut album so successful — in particular, crunchy guitar
riffs are back, and so are the complex, precise, powerhouse drum dramas of
Matthew Tong. Memories of Silent Alarm
do spring out of all corners, with enough stylistic changes retained so as not
to invoke «carbon copy» accusations. The bad news: Four is still a much worse album than Silent Alarm, and there is very little reason to bother oneself
with any Bloc Party album that is much worse than Silent Alarm — life is too short and all.
The main problem is that, even after
introducing reasonable quotas on the use of synthesizers, Okereke and friends
did not completely reverse the tendency. On their first record, they were still
very much within the «punk» idiom — brutal, kill-'em-all riffs coupled with
targeted shotgun blasts from the drums and a singer who was, perhaps, a bit
«whiney», but dangerous all the same (you don't mess with the Igbo!). Then they
started drifting farther and farther into «artsy» territory, where they never
properly felt at home — and Four
still sees them trying to woo you with upbeat intelligence rather than brute
force.
Already the first track, ʽSo He Begins To
Lieʼ, lets its potentially cool combo of «broken» hard rock riffage and
percussion rhythms be underwhelmed by vocals excessively disguised with echo
effects, murky guitar tones, and noisy «anthemic» sections. They may be trying
to go for a Cure-style atmosphere, but if so, they are lazy — Robert Smith
would invest extra dozens of hours and at least several additional
counter-melodies in this stuff, not to mention making all them fit together;
these guys just do a bunch of «outer space guitar trills» that we have already
heard a million times — and hope to inspire us that way. Thanks, guys; I
already have my ʽFrom The Edge Of The Deep Green Seaʼ and I am
sticking to it.
At other times, they succeed in getting more of
a «self» thing going on, but then you sort of don't know what it is, exactly.
ʽOctopusʼ, the lead single, for instance — what is it? A power pop
number? Why place the «jammed PC speaker» effect in the center of attention,
then? An ode to teen insanity? Why do I have to guess that by scrutinizing the lyrics, what's wrong with the atmosphere
itself? An aggressive rocker? Why the nursery rhyme approach to the chorus?
«Happiness», «sadness», «anger», «joy», «depression», «melancholy» — none of
the standard emotional tags seem to fit, and I'm all out of non-standard ones.
It is sort of a curious creation, but I get a strong feeling that it was
created blindly — and that the final result is more «frustrating», or at least
«confusing», than «revelatively unusual».
A couple of the numbers are real heavy rockers:
ʽColiseumʼ (starts out like a dark acoustic blues number, then goes
into noise-rock territory but with a metal riff at the heart) and the very last
track — ʽWe Are Not Good Peopleʼ, picking up speed and pinned to a
riff that seems to be a creative variation on Anthrax's ʽCaught In A
Moshʼ or any such-sounding tune (must be lots of 'em). They are,
predictably, quite well executed, but the «artsy» bug spoils them anyway —
because the production, honestly, sounds awful in both cases. With all the
echoes, multi-tracking, and «felt, but not heard» electronic undertones
(they're there, aren't they?), the in-yer-face brutality is undermined, and
subtlety is not gained anyway.
Overall, this is a strange case: Four seems more «mature» than their
preceding albums, but in this maturity, a basic sense of purpose is somehow
lost. Yes, it is still the sound of four bright, depressed, disillusioned,
disoriented young lads locked in an urban jungle, that much I get. If they want
to emphasize the senselessness of their urban existence by making senseless music,
I suppose they got every right to do so. But senseless music is being made
before our eyes in virtual tons every day without any subtext to it anyway —
why should we need senseless music from a supposedly «intelligent» rock band?
There are albums by brilliant artists out there
that succeed in marrying the opposites. Bloc Party are simply not talented
enough to make it work — too artsy to be «punk», too basic to be «art», too
limp to bring your spirit to a boil, too clumsy to conjure subtle beauty, too
turn-of-the-century depressed to bring their musical structure experiments to
successful conclusions, too musically smart-for-their-own-good to evoke basic
heartfelt reactions. They have a little bit of everything — this is not an
awful album, and, like I said, at least it beats the hell out of the awful Intimacy — but I have no desire
whatsoever to write about these, ultimately very boring, songs. I do admit that
this is a highly subjective situation, though, so if ever you were an admiring
fan of Bloc Party, do not take my word for it: for everybody who had Silent Alarm as an A+, Four will just have to be at least a
B-, or higher.
HYMNS (2016)
1) The Love Within; 2) Only He
Can Heal Me; 3) So Real; 4) The Good News; 5) Fortress; 6) Different Drugs; 7)
Into The Earth; 8) My True Name; 9) Virtue; 10) Exes; 11) Living Lux; 12*)
Eden; 13*) New Blood; 14*) Paraiso; 15*) Evening Song.
That's right, kids — Hymns. Please to remember Bloc Party, once an indie rock band with
a Liverpudlian Igboid frontman venting out all the frustration that a
progressive-thinking modern day British youngster with African roots could
accumulate. To be honest, ten years on few people probably remember the
original impact of Silent Alarm, but
you just might remember at least the
fact that its power was very much dependent upon a fabulous young drummer
called Matt Tong. Well, this is a new Bloc Party, kids: Matt Tong is no longer
in the band, and neither is bass player Gordon Moakes, and that's all right
because Bloc Party are no longer a rock band — they sing hymns now. It's all about the soul now, brother. ʽOnly He Can
Heal Meʼ, see? With ʽThe Love Withinʼ. ʽThe Good Newsʼ
is ʽSo Realʼ, you're just one step away from learning ʽMy True
Nameʼ and spending the rest of your life on ʽDifferent Drugsʼ.
Instead of multiplying ʽExesʼ, you will learn to live on the
ʽFortressʼ of ʽVirtueʼ, and when you finally go ʽInto
The Earthʼ, this will be but a mere technical formality to accede to
ʽLiving Luxʼ.
Incidentally, Kele Okereke "has denied the
new material is explicitly religious" (The
Guardian) — that's like saying that ʽMy Sweet Lordʼ was actually
a song about a chocolate Sauron. True, not all
the songs on the album are about religion: some are about fucking, but they,
too, are hymns from a certain point of view. In any case, there's nothing
wrong, per se, about a musician suddenly taking a strong spiritual turn — after
all, Kele has been in the music business for ten years now and he is certainly
entitled to a bit of ambition, and at least one long-distance call to the Transcendental
Plains. The problem is, Bloc Party have never been that great a band when it
comes to pure music, and ever since Intimacy
showed us how really bad they can get
when they mellow out (and Four
showed us that not all was lost as long as they returned to a rock paradigm),
the general ability of Kele Okereke to stun us with the highly charged
emotional vibration of his suffering heart has been under heavy suspicion.
I have to admit that he really tries, and that
Lissack has also joined this game of searching for advanced spiritual
enlightenment — by experimenting with his guitar and making it sound like a
synthesizer (he claims that he did not play any actual synths on the record,
but that's sort of a moot point, since new band member Justin Harris, besides
bass, is also credited for synths anyway). It is a novel approach, for instance, when your opening hymn begins
with the request "Lord, give me grace and dancing feet", and the Lord
proceeds to do just that as the song becomes a straightforward dance-pop number
(once it has evolved through the "ugly synth loop that sounds like a
stalling spaceship" phase of the first couple of minutes). I'm sure this
is probably far from the first time that the Lord has been praised in techno
terms (I just googled "techno gospel" and I already wish I didn't),
but it might be the first time that a former rock band switched to techno
gospel, so throw on an extra point for Brave New World Exploration.
As the music goes on, it becomes clear pretty
soon that this is still a «pop» band (at least Kele still thinks largely in
terms of verses and choruses), but that they have no more intentions of rocking
out — and if the musical evidence is not enough to convince you, then further
on down the line the man makes it verbally clear as well: "Rock and roll
has got so old / Just give me neo-soul" (ʽInto The Earthʼ). This
is not «neo-soul» in the sense of D'Angelo, though — the band does not enlist any
jazzy brass sections, does not show signs of hip-hop merger, and there are only
a few tracks that employ a (not too prominent) gospel choir. «Soul» as in
«self-consciously soulful vocalization», yes, but one that is surrounded by
music that is equally influenced by Talk Talk, Radiohead, Al Green, and Donna
Summer. Admirably experimental, yes, but not too memorable and, worst of all,
not too breathtaking.
Yes, Kele somehow emerges endowed with an
almost beautiful singing voice, but in his search for originality he seems to
overstep the line. It begins with the lyrics — trying to update erotic lyricism
in ʽFortressʼ, he ends up with lines like "And I'm a fool for
the sight / Of all the gold between your thighs", or "Reach down and
feel how strong / My love grows just for you". If he were a swaggy hip
hopper, that would at least be adequate — but ʽFortressʼ is a
soft-textured ballad with lilting falsetto vocals, an ode of tenderness, and
even romantic pornography deserves less cheesy verbalization than this. And this
inadequacy pervades the album from start to finish: every single song just
takes itself way too goddamn
seriously without providing enough musical justification for it.
It's hard to explain why Hymns does not work as a whole, because almost any individual song
here, if listened to long enough, might click on some level (the singing is
decent, the arrangements are creative, some of the choruses begin to stick
etc.; and I have come to almost love the only song on the album that actually
rocks — ʽThe Good Newsʼ, with a fairly gritty-swampy steel guitar
pattern in the chorus and a certain sense of irony in the title). It is
precisely because the album tries to bite off more than it can chew that it
fails — there may be enough faith and sincere feeling in the heart of Kele
Okereke, but there's just not enough raw (or cooked) talent here to produce a
record that would be the modern day equivalent of All Things Must Pass, What's
Going On, Spirit Of Eden, and OK Computer all at the same time.
ʽOnly He Can Heal Meʼ wants to be the most sincere song about God's
love ever written, ʽMy True Nameʼ needs to be the most passionate
song about devotion to a loved one ever serenaded, ʽVirtueʼ strives
to be the sharpest self-flagellating confession ever put to music — well, maybe
not, but all these songs are not so much pop tracks or musical experiments as
they are declarations of Spirituality, and in these matters, you can have no
objectivity, you can only have faith, and I have no incentive to place my faith
in Kele Okereke as the one true God (or at least, one true Prophet) of 2016.
That said, I will not denigrate the album,
either: I hated it upon the first listens, but it does have its moments, and
despite some lyrical crimes against good taste, eventually you might come to
appreciate Kele's and Lissack's hunt for Truth. At the very least, Okereke is
not an exaggeratedly hateful whiner, and his vibe is a decent balance between
depression and optimism. If this is a failure, it's at least an interesting
one, rather than just a stupid embarrassment.
THIS ADULTERY IS RIPE (2000)
1) Rescue; 2) Doctor! Doctor!;
3) The Face In The Embryo; 4) James Brown; 5) Mutiny On The Ark Of The Blood
Brothers; 6) Jordan Billie Pets The Wild Horse's Mane; 7) Marooned On Piano
Island; 8) This Adultery Is Ripe; 9) Time For Tenderness; 10) Jennifer.
There is a little bit of everything in this
brief, explosive debut album by Seattle's Blood Brothers. The laconic running
length and the loudness qualify it for "-core" status, be it
hardcore, grindcore, emocore, or any other core. The riffs suggest influences
that go all the way back to King Crimson at least, touching on post-punk,
math-rock, etc., anything that has to do with a non-standard, convention-breaking
approach to guitar melodies. The lyrics are poorly controlled streams of conscious,
suggesting beatnik stuff, psychedelia, nihilism, and street wisdom. And the
«singing» — or, rather, twin vocalizing of Jordan Billie and Johnny Whitney —
suggest hardcore punk and extreme
metal affiliation at the same time.
The result is a record that, to my ears, can
only sound «curious», but curious it is. Maybe the best way to appreciate it is
to imagine that it has been written from the viewpoint of a straight-jacketed,
stark raving mad, highly aggressive and dangerous asylum patient — not at all
difficult, come to think of it, for a record that kicks off with two guys
wildly screaming "THEY'RE FUCKING AFTER US! THEY'RE FUCKING AFTER US!..
The Redcoats are coming like a choir of boiling lobsters!...". Not mad
enough so as not to watch carefully all their time signature changes, or not to
have their screams diligently arranged for counterpoints, that is, but still
mad enough to infect you with the madness if you give them a chance.
Music-wise, the riffs may start off in classic
punk or thrash metal mode, only to splinter and scatter in several different
directions within seconds, more often still preserving the speedy tempos than
grinding them down, giving the brain no chance to memorize or latch on to
anything. Therefore, do not even begin to look for catchiness, since it is
nobody's intention to deposit it here. The lack of diversity is also excusable
— nobody expects that from a stark
raving lunatic, and we only have to thank them for keeping things short,
because sitting through forty minutes
of such stuff in a row would probably cause irrepairable and irreversible
mental damage. Individual tracks are hardly worth mentioning, because what
good is a particularly nifty riff or bass line if it's here one moment and gone
the next, anyway?.. This is really just one big 20-minute suite, the pauses
between tracks merely letting you draw your breath.
So what is it that makes This Adultery Is Ripe a worthier representative of «psychopath
rock» than its competition? Well, if it is this particular type of synthesis
that we are talking about, they do not actually have much competition — being way too concerned about the technical
aspects of their playing for a genuine punk outfit, yet way too rude,
screamish, and abrasive for an «intellectual» band. John Zorn's Naked City and
Les Claypool's Primus are well-behaved gentlemen next to these guys. Not that I
am implying that this is a plus: there may be a good reason why there seem to
be relatively few groups like The Blood Brothers around — if you look at this
from another angle, their guitar heroics are actually obscured and diminished
by all the endless screaming, while their loudness and abrasiveness are hard
to appreciate without being propped up by anything even vaguely resembling
catchiness.
On the other hand, repeated listenings help —
after the first (predictable) gut reaction of what-the-hell-is-this-crap, once
you slowly start getting into their act, understanding the complexity and
tightness of their playing, and once the endless screaming gradually begins to
reveal its own perverse musicality, This
Adultery Is Ripe is ready to qualify for «artistic statement», if not necessarily
for a sonic masterpiece. Maybe its biggest problem is that the psychopathic act
is not altogether convincing — due to
a total lack of subtlety. It doesn't really take a whole lot of effort to
scream your head off; perhaps, had they thought about adding a touch of suspense to the proceedings, things
might have worked out in finer fashion (think Birthday Party or the like). For
this reason at least, a bona fide «thumbs up» rating is out of question for me
at the moment; but even without subtlety, there is still some intrigue.
MARCH ON ELECTRIC CHILDREN (2002)
1) Birth Skin/Death Leather;
2) Meet Me At The Water Front After The Social; 3) March On Electric Children!;
4) New York Slave; 5) Kiss Of The Octopus; 6) Siamese Gun; 7) Mr. Electric
Ocean; 8) Junkyard J. Vs. The Skin Army Girlz/High Fives, LA Hives; 9) American
Vultures.
Apparently, this stylistically similar
follow-up to Adultery is based
around some sort of allegorical «story», probably influenced in equal parts by
the local comic book department and listening to way too many
schizophrenia-oriented records of the avantgarde persuasion. There is a
ʽMr. Electric Oceanʼ who personifies media and exploitation, a
ʽSkin Armyʼ consisting of zombified nincompoops, and other equally
colorful personages and collectives that are impossible to properly assess
without consulting the liner notes, because not even Professor Higgins would be
able to decode a single word by simply listening to these «songs».
Musically, the band members themselves insisted
that the album was altogether a little more complex than its predecessor, but
this is hard to confirm outside of the fact that many songs make better use of
the «quiet / loud» alternation this time — for instance, ʽJunkyardʼ
and especially ʽSiamese Gunʼ let you fully appreciate the talents of
Morgan Henderson on bass (they are not unique, but you do acknowledge that he is quite professional), while ʽMr.
Electric Oceanʼ, first time in the band's career, opens with a pop-punk
riff that is quite easily and quickly imprintable in one's brains (fortunately,
the start of the screaming is delayed until that happens).
Other than these «cosmetic» differences, pretty
much nothing can be said about the record that would not also apply to its
predecessor — same hyper-energetic, crazyass tempos, same mix of hardcore,
math-rock, and thrash-metal elements, same madhouse-style vocals, same moods
and attitudes on each single song. The only exception is ʽAmerican
Vulturesʼ: apparently, the idea was to include something «different» for
the album coda at least, so the band divert themselves by hauling out a piano
and gruesomely sodomizing it, which is fairly consistent with the madhouse
image — most likely, this is exactly what the patients of a heavy-security
asylum would have done with the unfortunate instrument, too. Oddly enough, the
chorus to ʽVulturesʼ, screamed out in unison as if the «singers» were
all part of some Clockwork Orange
universe, is the catchiest thing on the entire record — there is something
sadistically seductive about the lines "you're married to the vultures, I
don't want to laugh until you're dead".
But on the whole, the flaws here remain the
same as the virtues: the addition of «quiet» passages is a welcome move, yet
there are still too few of them to save the poor layman's ears from the
incessant wall of noise and the never-ending screamo vocals that always
obscure, never emphasize the band's technical prowess and instrumental
creativity. Only a very select few listeners, possibly with unique
peculiarities of their hearing nerve channels, will be able to easily look past
this obstacle — I am unable to do that, and, despite acknowledging the musical
merits, cannot honestly reward the guys with a thumbs up. At least Adultery had the additional value of a
«novelty» project; but turning the «novelty» into a repetitive «formula» is
hardly a good idea.
Curiously, the reviewer over at AMG called the
album «something you'll find yourself singing over and over again as you plan
to throw yourself out a window» — a thoroughly misguided description, the way I
see it, since (a) singing even a few songs here just once will, most likely,
cause irrepairable damage to your vocal cords, so do at least make sure you
have some Strepsils lying around; (b) these guys ain't no Cure or Joy Division,
so the only thing you might be planning to throw out the window would be your
stereo system — actually, quite an appropriate gesture to commemorate the end
of these 24 minutes.
BURN, PIANO ISLAND, BURN! (2003)
1) Guitarmy; 2) Fucking's Greatest
Hits; 3) Burn, Piano Island, Burn; 4) Every Breath Is A Bomb; 5) Ambulance Vs.
Ambulance; 6) USA Nails; 7) Cecilia And The Silhouette Saloon; 8) Six
Nightmares At The Pinball Masquerade; 9) The Salesman, Denver Max; 10) I Know
Where The Canaries And The Crows Go; 11) God Bless You, Blood Thirsty
Zeppelins; 12) The Shame.
Moving into the big leagues — this album was
produced by no less than Ross Robertson, the «Godfather of Nu-Metal» (a title
earned with his production of the first Korn album) as well as a towering
figure in «post-hardcore» (At The Drive-In, Glassjaw, etc.); and it takes
itself far more seriously than the previous two records, being nearly twice as
long and featuring an even weirder and more obfuscated concept than March On. For all that, as well as for
being the band's first major label album, Burn,
Piano Island, Burn! has earned the average critical consensus of being
their masterpiece — although, it must be said, for most critics this was their
first exposure to the ritual aural torture that is The Blood Brothers, and few
of them had the painful responsibility to understand and describe what it is,
exactly, that distinguishes Burn
from its predecessors, let alone makes it so much better.
To be sure, there are some tiny differences. For
instance, ʽThe Salesmanʼ is, I believe, the first song in the band's
catalog to begin with an acoustic guitar part — not a particularly good one,
sounding a bit like some second-rate country-pop composer trying to figure out
a new melody, but certainly shocking enough for a Blood Brothers record (don't
worry, though, it all reverts back to normal in about a minute's time).
ʽCecilia And The Silhouette Saloonʼ starts out with a gloomy-grinning
two-note bass riff that brings to mind Deep Purple's ʽDemon's Eyeʼ,
then, ten seconds later, dissolves the subtlety of the intro in the usual sea
of screamo noise. And ʽThe Shameʼ, closing out the album, is this
band's idea of an anthemic ballad — for once, they are willing to dispense with
pure anger, rage, and saliva in favor of a more desperate, maybe even «crying»
kind of sound, expressing their negative views of modern civilization in «punk
prayer» rather than «punk bonfire» mode. So far, so good.
Beyond that, however, nothing much has changed,
except that the «songs» have grown longer and there are now more of them —
playing these 47 minutes of sound at full volume is going to be a psychic
challenge even for experienced listeners, mainly because, with each new
release, The Blood Brothers manage to inject ever more and more venom into
their voices. It's bad enough to just
have people screaming at you for forty minutes, but when they do this in the
ugliest, nastiest, shrillest ways possible, well... then again, supposedly the
whole point is that this is the kind
of record you usually play not so much to enjoy it yourself but as to spook
away your boring neighbors. Blast this out your window at top volume and
prepare to get evicted (if your neighbors are brave enough to call the police)
or to acquire the status of the local Phantom of the Opera (if they are not).
If you do wish to spend a bit of extra time
with the album, the lyrics sheet may be worth consulting. Most of the lines
come across as «pissed nonsense», but whoever wishes to see it all as one big
rambling condemnation of the silly excesses of industrial / commercial society
will have plenty of evidence in favor of that interpretation. Plenty of
references to doctors and ambulances, too, because the Brothers are still
playing their «restricted area mental ward» game. Typical quote:
"Unfortunately this Marilyn Monroe is a secret Zeppelin / Set on a crash
course with your cumshot museum / With the blowjob bunny mansion". From a
certain angle, this might even be considered as worthy poetry. From another
angle, though, these «shocking» lines have no true shocking potential in the
year 2003.
That said, the Brothers are capable of thought-provoking lyrical twists — they not only
borrow from early Dylan, they may even repay him back: "How many chords
till this song vomits out real love? / How many feathers to pluck naked the
soiled dove? / How many whores till you send away for that trophy? / How many
punches till you give yourself away for free?" Not a bad way to
innovatively celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Freewheelin', and it's not even that the two albums' primary
messages were all that incompatible (and, for that matter, back in 1963 quite a
few people felt much the same way about Dylan's voice as one could feel about
the Brothers now — «truth hurts!»).
The problem is that, even when taken all
together, the advantages of Burn, Piano
Island, Burn — such as lyrical cleverness, instrumental prowess, and, above
all, glorification of all things Extreme-and-Radical — do not suffice to
overcome the simple question of «So what?..» which I ask myself when writing
each single review. I mean, say what you want, there is no possible way in
human history (not at present, at least) to get more Extreme-and-Radical than
G. G. Allin or Anal Cunt. The Blood Brothers know this, and accordingly shift
the agenda: they want to get all Extreme-and-Radical on our asses while at the
same time retaining an intellectual approach with both the music and the
lyrics. But then they punch themselves into a corner, because, when you get to
the bottom of it, «intellectualism» and «radicalism» are poor cousins — it's a
bit like trying to become the chess champion of the world while bungee jumping
naked, because playing chess at the chess table is boring and stereotypical,
whereas bungee jumping per se is stupid. Combine these two activities — and you
pretty much get the real world equivalent of Burn, Piano Island, Burn, an album to which I could probably give a
thumbs up if I had no knowledge whatsoever of pre-2000 music; but, the way
things actually are, I can at most give it an encouraging (or «condescending»,
if you'd like to call it that) pat on the back.
CRIMES (2004)
1) Feed Me To The Forest; 2)
Trash Flavored Trash; 3) Love Rhymes With Hideous Car Wreck; 4) Peacock
Skeleton With Crooked Feathers; 5) Teen Heat; 6) Rats And Rats And Rats For
Candy; 7) Crimes; 8) My First Kiss At The Public Execution; 9) Live At The
Apocalypse Cabaret; 10) Beautiful Horses; 11) Wolf Party; 12) Celebrator; 13)
Devastator.
Would we expect one of America's angriest bands
to miss out on some of America's greatest blunders? Obviously, The Blood
Brothers just couldn't resist dedicating the near-entirety of their fourth
album to the social, political, and military developments associated with the
Bush administration —and, in the process, catching a corner of the public eye,
as this was their first record to actually hit the lower ranges of the charts.
Just as obviously, they would never do it the straightforward way, like a Bad
Religion or something, but nobody in 2004 could miss the message behind lines
like "neon black tanks grope the skyline" or "every soldier's
spewing black cum from their victory hard on" (ouch, tough one).
Musically, Crimes
enhances some of the «softening» tendencies of the previous album — of all
Blood Brothers records so far, it is easily the most «accessible», provided you
can stomach the traditional ugliness of the vocals (for the record, I still
cannot). Many of the songs drop the fast tempos and super-speedy flash-changes
of riffs, leads, and time signatures — for instance, ʽLive At The
Apocalypse Cabaretʼ is a dark, melodic
guitar-and-piano dirge, where it is only the tendency to fall back upon the
brothers' trademark insane scream-o-logy that reminds us of who we are
listening to; and the title track, also recorded in an oppressive-moody
fashion, even foregoes most of the screaming, as if they were really interested
in conveying the lyrical message through your ears rather than the lyrics
sheet.
The lead single from the album, ʽLove
Rhymes With Hideous Car Wreckʼ, could almost qualify as a pop song —
standard 4/4 beat, normal guitars, vocal harmonies, and an almost catchy
chorus, that is, if catchiness may be conveyed through caterwauling.
Unfortunately, I do not believe this compromise really works, because the
resulting melody is boring as heck, a guitar/bass/angry vocal combo that's been
done a million times in the era of New Wave and college rock; and the
caterwauling, reaching its peak on the "love, love, love... rhymes with pity
now" chorus, is so unnaturally affected and irritating that the message,
if there is one, seems wasted.
The same opinion is applicable to just about every bit of the album that tries to shy
away from the old formula — for instance, the quasi-sea-shanty introduction to
ʽDevastatorʼ. I do not understand how, if they really wanted to
strike a chord here, anybody could be potentially impressed and «devastated» by
the lyrical imagery of "neon black tanks" and all that, when both
singers sing as if their nuts were being tightly held in a vise... okay, so
that just might be the point, but
even so, it all sounds artificial and exaggerated.
So, to be frank, if there is anything to be
preferred here, I much prefer the band at their old game, fast'n'furious, such
as the second part of
ʽDevastatorʼ ("everybody needs a little devastation!"), or
the frantic apocalyptic gallop of ʽBeautiful Horsesʼ (comparing the
state of humanity to a particularly mad race where, no matter how fast you
ride, you still "collapse and come in fucking last"), or, if I am very hard pressed to select an
«experimental» track, the quasi-industrial grind of ʽFeed Me To The
Forestʼ, beginning and ending in a nightmarish swirl of roaring cogs,
springs, engines, and furnaces. In other words, whenever they try «subtlety», I
wish they didn't; whenever they do not, they are predictable, but come across
as more adequate.
Still, even though the fast'n'furious on Crimes quantitatively overrides the
subtly-ugly, a thumbs up judgement is out of the question. The main problem
with the Blood Brothers was not their lack of accessibility or purpose — so now
that Crimes has adapted their
«mental ward on tour» image to sociopolitical reality, this is hardly a reason
for frantic applause and reconsideration. The main problem is that the image
was never sufficiently strengthened either with a firm melodic base or with
recognizable musical innovation. All they had going for them was technicality,
lyrical skills, and an ability to produce ugly on-key/off-key screaming for
extended amounts of time. To this, Crimes
adds «accessible relevance» — but forgive this here reviewer for being
old-fashioned, as he would rather have Neil Young's Living With War for «accessible relevance». Other than that, it's
all been done before, and done better.
Put it this way: some reviewer dude on Amazon
wrote that ʽLive At The Apocalypse Cabaretʼ «almost sounds like a cat
being strangled singing a Rosetta Tharpe cover)». If this description fits into
your definition of «awesome», Crimes
is totally your cup of tea. However, personally, I have no idea why a cat being strangled would ever
dream of singing a Rosetta Tharpe cover, and even less of an idea of why I would have any interest in hearing a
strangled cat singing a Rosetta Tharpe cover — certainly not when I could be
simply listening to a Rosetta Tharpe original instead. And last, but not
least, I have totally-absolutely-whatsoever no idea why, in order to fully comprehend,
abhor, and revile the absurdity, amorality, and apocalypticity of our present
world situation, I would have to witness a strangled cat sing a Rosetta Tharpe
cover. Then again, on some level of
universal existence these are merely signs of extreme close-mindedness, I
guess.
YOUNG MACHETES (2006)
1) Set Fire To The Face On
Fire; 2) We Ride Skeletal Lightning; 3) Laser Life; 4) Camouflage, Camouflage;
5) You're The Dream Unicorn!; 6) Vital Beach; 7) Spit Shine Your Black Clouds;
8) 1, 2, 3, 4 Guitars; 9) Lift The Veil, Kiss The Tank; 10) Nausea Shreds Yr
Head; 11) Rat Rider; 12) Johnny Ripper; 13) Huge Gold AK-47; 14) Street
Wars/Exotic Foxholes; 15) Giant Swan.
The Blood Brothers' fifth and last album
arguably continues their drift towards «accessibility», although for me, that
ain't saying much — as usual, I do not «get» these vocals, and think that
whatever good or great musical ideas these guys might have, they consistently
sabotage them by stubbornly continuing to sing as if hung overnight by their
genitals from a palm tree. From that point of view, they give a fairly realistic
performance, but it also makes it quite hard to think of their songs as
anything other than an exaggerated, ridiculous farce.
Which is too bad, since many of the songs do contain interesting ideas. Young Machetes was announced as a
return to the band's «screamo» roots, but in reality it tries to achieve a
working compromise between the non-stop fury of their first pair of albums and
the experimental developments of the second one — a fairly diverse collection
that continues to express the band's disappointment with the world and its
honest desire to blow it up from the inside in every single way they had tried
previously, and a few ones they hadn't, such as the funky keyboard rhythms of
ʽLaser Lifeʼ or the moody, almost haunting composition ʽExotic
Foxholesʼ, with droning folksy acoustic guitars, bassoons (?) and, most
wondrous of all, no vocals, an idea
The Blood Brothers should have stuck to with much more enthusiasm, I believe.
There are also inklings of catchiness in some
of the riffs (ʽCamouflage, Camouflageʼ) and some of the «vocal»
melodies (ʽRat Riderʼ, like a crazy man's take on a nursery rhyme).
There is also ongoing social protest (ʽLift The Veil, Kiss The
Tankʼ), with even denser strung pearls of metaphors and allegories
("young machetes in lingerie charm us all into a frenzy") that still
resolve in truisms ("death's just death no matter how you dress it
up"), but if people need truisms to stop wars, well, the brothers might
have a point there. And, as usual, there is a fair amount of advanced
technicalities for all those who think that catchiness is ever so overrated.
Problem is, none of that matters from a general
point of view. Young Machetes may
have, for the first and last time, brought The Blood Brothers into the top 100
(probably due to good promotion from V2 and the band's continuing
capitalization on the anti-war theme), but I just do not see it working as the
kind of statement that they wanted to make. Some things are just not compatible
— you may play in 13/8 time to your musically knowledgeable friends, or you may
shout wake up! to the sleepy world,
but if you try to do both simultaneously, your friends might think that you're
an offensive idiot, and the sleepy world might want to lock you up.
A good case in point is the epic finale to the
album — ʽGiant Swanʼ, an overall good idea marred by uninspiring
execution. The lyrics, of an almost totemist nature, conclude the Brothers'
vision on a particularly original note — where their ancestors saw the world as
a Giant Tree or a Giant Serpent, they
have this hallucinatory vision of "ghosts in his wings, his guts are
stuffed with polaroids, and they're all humiliating" and how "he
wrote a play and you're the protagonist". The musical buildup goes from
solemn dirge to overwhelming noisefest and back, as the Giant Swan completes
and restarts its grim cycle of existence. All of this could be fascinating — I
find it as ultimately boring as it is respectable, and with the usual mix of
vocal ugliness to decisively tilt the scale against these guys.
I do, however, give them full praise for
deciding to make this their last record and break up, because Young Machetes makes it very clear
that, whatever they had to say, whichever points they wanted to stress, they
said, stressed, and finalized it all, and their «intellectual-extremist» shtick
had largely failed, although it had its brief moments of curiosity — but no, I
could never regard them as any sort of ideological analogy for the Stooges
courtesy of the 2000s.
BLOOD CEREMONY (2008)
1) Master Of Confusion; 2) I'm
Coming With You; 3) Into The Coven; 4) A Wine Of Wizardry; 5) Rare Lord; 6)
Return To Forever; 7) Hop Toad; 8) Children Of The Future; 9) Hymn To Pan.
Nobody could predict that, having hired Tony
Iommi to replace Mick Abrahams in Jethro Tull, Ian Anderson pretty much signed
his death warrant as a creative force. The entrepreneurial, quick-witted Iommi
very quickly assumed command, placing his iron-fingered riffage above everybody
and everything else. To ensure his dominance over the rest of the band, he
brought in old pal Geezer Butler to play bass and write exclusive lyrics about
witches, wizards, and warlocks, while at the same time relegating Ian Anderson
to the only thing that, according to Tony's opinion, he really did well: play
the flute.
Since, because of these changes, the newly
reformed band needed a singer, Tony thought of bringing back his other pal,
Ozzy Osbourne — seeing as how, though, the latter was just recently sentenced
to three years of prison for stealing a broken radio set, they decided to go
for a female touch instead and hired Sonja Kristina from Curved Air, and she,
in turn, brought along her old pal, Ray Manzarek, from the Doors. The newly
gathered supergroup then went on to call itself «Blood Ceremony» and became the
chief competitor of Uriah Heep on the «demons & wizards» market, although
their melting-pot approach never translated to much commercial or critical success.
Eventually, the enthusiasm just fizzled out, and everybody went their own way.
Iommi returned to his old sheet metal factory, Ian Anderson retired to raise
Guernsey cows and mistletoe, Sonja Kristina got married to Ritchie Blackmore,
Manzarek secured a job as gatekeeper at the Père Lachaise, and Geezer
Butler got electrocuted onstage while playing a bass tritone.
Fast forward to 2008 and switch from this
parallel universe to the one of whose reality we feel a little more certain
(with undue arrogance, perhaps), and welcome the new Blood Ceremony, one of these specially designed «what if...?»
bands if there ever was one. The settings are a little different, but the
essence is pretty much the same. They do hail from Toronto rather than England,
and their lineup consists of Jeremy Finkelstein on drums, Chris Landon on bass,
Sean Kennedy on guitars, and Alia O'Brien on vocals, keyboards, and, yes, flute
(so she combines the Kristina, Manzarek, and
Anderson parts all in one).
It is impossible to even begin to try to take
this music seriously — doing so will immediately place this band in the Uriah
Heep category. However, it is
possible to be amused and even mildly stimulated by it as a contemporary
retro-genre experiment. The Internet age exposure to all sorts of all sorts of
things shows us that in the 2000s, there is a demand for everything: we are living in a poly-eclectic age the likes of which
the world has never seen before, and existing demand for «heavy witchy music»
of the early 1970s should come of as little surprise to us as demand for any
other style of music that the human mind can imagine. In fact, this type of
demand may even be higher than the average — off the top of my head, I can
remember Black Mountain doing similar stuff and even getting away with it,
critically and commercially.
Blood Ceremony, however, are much more
«hardcore» than Black Mountain. Once they get their groove going, they do not
strive all that much to change or diversify it, and their lyrical focus on
«dark pagan practices» ensures that their popularity will forever be limited to
a rather specific type of audience. Some critics have noticed them from a
pat-pat-pat-her-on-the-butt angle of view, but none of the albums charted
anywhere, because most people probably took one glance at the album cover and
decided that this is one of those hardcore fan-only archival releases from yet
another forgotten band circa 1970. Like Steamhammer or something.
Well — they wouldn't be totally off base,
because it is only a good audiophile who immediately knows how to tell a 21st
century guitar tone from a 20th century one that will quickly understand what
period we are talking about here. Other than that, these guys observe the
formalities right down to their visual image (robes, capes, long hair, you name
it), and this religious devotion to such a special time and place in history
should command respect. In fact, fuck respect, I actually admire what they're doing and the cool sound they're getting.
Everything stated above is true: Iommi guitar + Anderson flute + Manzarek organ
+ stern female vocals, song after song after song. And oh, those titles!
ʽMaster Of Confusionʼ. ʽInto The Covenʼ. ʽChildren Of
The Futureʼ. ʽHymn To Panʼ. Classic stuff.
You do
know what's coming up, though, right? You do
know that the next thing I am going to say is that they have one fatal flaw —
and that flaw is, of course, that the songs as such are boring and predictable.
What Sean Kennedy, credited as the chief writer for these guys, is trying to
do, as far as I can tell, is that he listens long and hard to several Black
Sabbath songs, then mixes the different chords from their riffs (as a rule,
this has to include the tritone, or
else there wouldn't be that much blood in this ceremony), then puts them back
together in different configurations. On top of this, Alia sings some nonsense that
must have been digitally generated from a list of preset of keywords (typical
example: "Worshippers have gathered under cover of dark / The sorceress is
stroking her Aeolian harp / A magus seeks alignment of the stars /
Coffin-shaped citadel a door to Mars" — I love this!) and adds her somewhat less-than-awesome organ and flute
skills to the proceedings (I believe that a few more lessons from Mr. Ian
wouldn't hurt — most of the time she sounds like a rather timid first-year
student of the instrument).
In other words, they fall into the same trap as
most of the retro-imitators do: their love for this kind of music is ten times
larger than their talent for making this music. There is not a single riff on
here that would have the same spine-chilling effect as ʽBlack
Sabbathʼ or ʽNo Quarterʼ or even ʽLocomotive Breathʼ,
despite the fact that all the songs
are riff-based — rule number one for them: if there ain't no distinct heavy
riff in the song, there ain't no song, period. But these riffs are... eh... well,
I'd say they are on the level of Sabbath's latest (13), but what is excusable for a 65-year old Iommi, who has long
since overworked his required quota of greatness anyway, is hardly excusable
for a young ambitious pothead. Yes, and neither can these guys really solo —
the lengthy organ solo passage that O'Brien plays on ʽMaster Of
Confusionʼ Manzarek-style does not go anywhere beyond «atmospheric», and
Kennedy's solos rely on the old-fashioned stock of blues licks that we all know
by heart anyway.
They try to compensate for this by fiddling
around with song structures, shifting tempos and tonalities at will, but that,
too, is sort of a requirement of the trade, and soon enough you know that if a song begins by slowly
going DOOM... DOOM... DOOM..., it will eventually speed up and go CHUG-CHUG-CHUG-CHUG for a while before
settling down again. Or there will be a stop-and-start section where Alia is
going to blow her flute and go a little crazy. For the record, though, I was
almost absolutely sure that the song ʽHop Toadʼ would include a drum
solo, in honor of yet another ʽToadʼ, but it didn't (instead, it had
a very bad organ solo), so no, you can't predict every move. Also, if you thought that maybe they have a penchant
for pastoralism in music, don't: ʽHymn To Panʼ is as dark and somber
as everything else on here (other than the flute, I guess — maybe they thought
that the presence of the flute obliges them to dedicate at least one song to
Pan, something they would repeat on the second album as well).
Even so, all of this is such a hilarious
experience that I am still tempted to give this time-defying effort a thumbs up.
One might ask why, after all the scorn for, let's say, the unquestionably
musically superior Uriah Heep — and I would say, «for the guts». The Heepsters
were largely driven by fashion, and presented themselves and their music in
much too serious a light for me to agree to succumb to its spell. These guys, on the other hand, are the
designers and executors of a fancy musical costume ball, and they get all the
ingredients just right. Even the relatively tame musicianship — not just by
modern standards, but by 1970's standards as well — becomes an asset here,
because it helps concentrate on their «time machine» instead of their egos. If
only the formula weren't that limited
(it even seems limited compared to the original Sabbath, let alone every other
band from which they draw inspiration), but I guess branching out is just not
something you are supposed to ask at all from an album recorded in 2008. So
just relax, sit back, nibble on your mandrake root, sip on your toadstool
essence, and welcome into the coven.
LIVING WITH THE ANCIENTS (2011)
1) The Great God Pan; 2) Coven
Tree; 3) The Hermit; 4) My Demon Brother; 5) Morning Of The Magicians; 6)
Oliver Haddo; 7) Night Of Augury; 8) The Witch's Dance; 9) Daughter Of The Sun.
Odd enough, they're getting better at this. On
Blood Ceremony's second album, the riffs get darker, tighter, and a bit less
obviously derivative; the solos get ever so slightly more fluent and complex,
implying that they may have spent at least
a part of these three years actually sharpening their skills rather than
camping at the crossroads at midnight; and a couple of the songs even manage to
build up an impressive atmosphere. Well — I guess if you dabble in the black
arts long enough, there's an actual chance that people will gradually shift
their reaction from ironic snickering to nervous fidgeting.
One such song is ʽMy Demon Brotherʼ,
where, after the obligatory tritone-filled introduction, they offer us a cool
key change between verse and chorus — it's the kind of trick that worked really
well on Sabbath albums circa 1972-73, and it works fine here, provided you do
not actually follow the lyrics too closely (Geezer Butler would have probably
blushed at these inane lines, but then Geezer never actually wrote Satanist
lyrics — these guys do, and I hope Satan eventually gives Alia a good spanking
for tarnishing his reputation with this nonsense). It really only works for a
second before the spell is over, but that is already an improvement — from
simple mastery of form, they try to grapple some mastery of the spirit, and
deserve commendment.
I am a bit offended, though, at their
continuous involvement of poor Greek deities into this black magic thing. Come
on guys, just because the unfortunate Pan is pictured with horns on his head
does not mean that you can freely call him «the horned one» — what next, Moses?
He has nothing to do with witches or black magic, and contrary to rumors, his
altar does not «burn with pagan
fear», and his image should be accompanied with flutes but not Sabbath-style
riffs. We admit, yes, that there are some nice sounding Sabbath-style riffs on
ʽThe Great God Panʼ (actually, though, the most recognizable riff is
a variation on Alice Cooper's ʽIt's Hot Tonightʼ), and that Sean
Kennedy's ecstatic solo is better than any guitar solo passage on the debut
album (Satan is a good teacher, want it or not), but leave Pan alone, dammit
already.
On the other hand, their musical juxtaposition
of Tullian flute with Sabbath-y riffs may somewhat
justify this mixture — presenting everything as if from the misguided view of
an uninformed Christian, for whom «paganism» and «Satanism» are the same thing
and who views pagan deities as demons by definition. ʽCoven Treeʼ,
where the flute accompanies the dark riffs almost incessantly, is another good
example of this approach — "Saturnalia" = "infernal light"
and "roots of witchery", and so on.
The best song on the album is arguably
ʽOliver Haddoʼ, indicating that 20th century black arts intrigue
these guys at least as much as ancient Greek mythology, although it is not
until the sixth minute that the track really catches fire as Alia switches to
pseudo-church organ and Sean Kennedy starts tossing out a series of really
passionate riffs, supported by exceptionally heavy drumming. That is yet
another moment where, for a brief while, I am inclined to take Blood Ceremony
seriously: not seriously enough to become a Crowley adept — not even Led
Zeppelin could make me do that, and Lord knows they tried real hard — but
seriously enough to think that they may
ultimately do a good job in reviving old-school doom metal.
Other than that, though, there is little to
add: in terms of basic ingredients, the formula remains the same, and you can
spot no more formal musical progress here than you can spot any serious
deviation from the song title formula. The added emotional nuances suffice to
earn them another optimistic thumbs up, but I honestly know not what else to
write, so let us stop right here.
THE ELDRITCH DARK (2013)
1) Witchwood; 2) Goodbye
Gemini; 3) Lord Summerisle; 4) Ballad Of The Weird Sisters; 5) Eldritch Dark;
6) Drawing Down The Moon; 7) Faunus; 8) The Magician.
Well, I was wondering when they would finally
begin to exploit the folk side of their schtick, and here it comes: Blood
Ceremony's third album, The Eldritch
Dark, has them expanding into the realm of dark acoustic tales (ʽLord
Summerisleʼ, a Wicker Man
tribute sung as a duet by Alia with bassist Lucas Gadke), ʽMatty
Grovesʼ-style murder ballads (ʽBallad Of The Weird Sistersʼ,
replete with fiddles and long-winded rhyming sequences), and merry flute jigs
(ʽFaunusʼ, an instrumental that brings up the theme of horned
deities yet once more).
Predictably, none of this is great — all the
melodic structures are completely traditional, and if you are well familiar
with the music of at least a few bands like Fairport Convention and Steeleye
Span... then again, it should be mentioned that Blood Ceremony have no desire
to go completely «authentic»: ʽLord Summerisleʼ, for instance, in
addition to the acoustic guitar and flute parts, is eventually joined by a
Mellotron backing part. Maybe it's just a cheap trick to procure additional
«depth» for this simplistic piece, but somehow I do not quite remember that
many folk bands singing medieval ballads with Mellotrons, or prog bands with
Mellotrons singing medieval ballads with flutes. Well, I guess there must have
been (Amazing Blondel?), but it's hardly the most natural combination in the
world. Likewise, ʽWeird Sistersʼ actually combines flutes, fiddles, and heavy rock riffage in a rather fun
way.
Still, the best songs on the album are those
that go on worshipping the heavy riff as the foundation of everything.
ʽWitchwoodʼ has one of these in the verses, and the title track has
another, although it borrows much of its chord structure from Sabbath's
ʽThe Wizardʼ (oh what an obvious choice to rip off). And then, as if
they just didn't have enough, they throw on another
epic dedicated to Oliver Haddo: the eight-minute ʽMagicianʼ which
closes the album may be their most successfully realised number so far, with a
complex intro, catchy verses and choruses, a nice little guitar and flute storm
in the solo section, and a solemn organ melody that serves as the base of the
slow, doom-laden crescendo in the coda. I wouldn't say there's a lot of «magic»
as such in the track, but it's definitely enjoyable all the way through.
The best song on the album, however, is
ʽDrawing Down The Moonʼ, which may not have a great riff, but
probably has the best Alia part of 'em all — she's developing this witchy sneer
that tastes delicious when spiced with a little reverb and accompanied with a
slightly distorted organ part, and the song itself has a strong «pull», opening
with Gadke's bass and largely «hanging» on that bassline as it leads everybody
around it up and down. It is certainly one of the most energetic and
exhilarating invitations to the Sabbath ever thought of in popular music.
Which brings me to this particular point about
Blood Ceremony: although, technically, their music is often assigned to the
«goth horror» category or something like that, in reality there is nothing
genuinely «horrific» about it. On the contrary, Alia and the gang are being
very casual about their black sorcery — as if they were advertising a scuba
diving club or something like that. It's serious
(no direct humor or irony anywhere in sight), but it's just, you know, routine
business, where "we welcome you to the Sabbath with a knowledge of
hellfire" is like "we welcome you to the barbecue party with a
knowledge of the gas grill". I guess this is the sort of attitude that
made me so completely at peace with them from the very start. I mean, yeah,
witches and demons have their chores, too, and their paydays and their
checkbooks and their social securities. Stop treating them like they were...
you know... supernatural. Be realistic.
So, another thumbs up here — third in a row,
which should not give the illusion that I really adore this band or anything.
All three of these albums just barely rise above mediocrity, but they do rise above mediocrity, and somehow
they have so far been even able to create an impression of gradual «progress».
The big question is whether that impression can be made to last for their next
albums, provided they do not disband soon enough — out of general despair to
convince the world that the real Satan stays with them rather than with Nicki Minaj.
LORD OF MISRULE (2016)
1) The Devil's Widow; 2)
Loreley; 3) The Rogue's Lot; 4) Lord Of Misrule; 5) Half Moon Street; 6) The
Weird Of Finistere; 7) Flower Phantoms; 8) Old Fires; 9) Things Present, Things
Past.
Ah, how delightful unabashed copycatting can
be. Say what you will, but when the first track on your new album opens with a
suspenseful guitar riff taken almost note-for-note from Pink Floyd's
ʽLucifer Samʼ (because Lucifer!!),
and then, eight (or nine) bars into the song, changes into a Black
Sabbath-style rocker with Iommi-tone, on top of which the frontlady piles up a
Jethro Tull-style lead flute melody with Anderson-fuss, it's hard to get rid of
an ironic chuckle: «Man, these guys just might be the most original artists of 2016 — they're, like, the only ones to
completely and absolutely waive the right to any originality! Slavish imitation
rules the day!»
Add to this the fact that, as of now, Blood
Ceremony have already been going on for ten
years: that's right, time goes pretty fast now, right? Four albums in ten
years, all of which essentially sound the same and that «same» is 100%
derivative of a bunch of heavy rock / prog rock artists who now probably come
to relax and revisit their youth at Blood Ceremony concerts. (At least Anderson
and Iommi, I believe, should get a lifelong supply of free tickets to BC
shows). I think their rhythm section has changed again for this album (too lazy
to check out properly), but the main people stay the same (Alia on keyboards,
flutes, and apprentice-demonic vocals; Sean on Iommi-guitar, although, unlike
Iommi, he never downtunes it properly enough), and overall, the band just wants
to tell you that dark magic is a full-time occupation, with its own routine,
schedules, and stability rates. It doesn't pay too much, but hey, it's a job
like any other.
And it would still be fun, if only, after the
first few tracks, one didn't get the feeling that they are treating it like routine. Again, everything follows the same
formula — heavy guitar riffage, derivative of Sabbath and their ilk, but never
as memorable; witchy woman vocals from Alia, strong and spiteful, but never
truly scary or disturbing; and flute or keyboard solos that always sound
tasteful, but never too different from each other. Sometimes the music veers
far into the field of Celtic balladry (ʽHalf Moon Streetʼ begins like
a metallized version of Fairport Convention's ʽMatty Grovesʼ;
ʽThe Weird Of Finistereʼ is a slow, mournful waltz with, for once, a
more pastoral sound to the flute), and ʽFlower Phantomsʼ is an
unexpectedly short and upbeat psychedelic-melancholic pop song in the vein of
British nugget-bands circa 1968-1969, but even these exceptions have the same
arrangement style and the same overall mood.
Generally, I still think that the heaviest
rocking songs here have 90% of the fun — the already mentioned ʽDevil's
Widowʼ, with its tribute to ʽLucifer Samʼ, takes the cake (fast
tempo rules, and there's something delightfully corny in the way Alia screams
"THE DEVIL'S WIDOW! THE DEVIL'S WIDOW!", as if she just saw her
walking down the street or something), but the slow, ponderous ʽRogue's
Lotʼ, where the lady gets to ask us the question "how do the living
raise the dead?" in such a sinister tone you'd think she was going to
demonstrate it here and now, is also cool (at least, until it picks up speed
and becomes a more forgettable piece of Crowley boogie); and I am also partial
to the «dance-metal» pattern of ʽOld Firesʼ and its overdubbed
guitars with «woman tones» melodically duelling in the instrumental section.
The title track (referring to the legendary title of the presider over the
medieval Feast Of Fools) is probably supposed to be the album's centerpiece,
what with its epic, power chord-based opening and all, but does not really come
across as a standout — however, it does have a well-thought out main riff as
well.
All said, Lord
Of Misrule does find me a little tired of giving out thumbs up as if, you
know, it were automatically
guaranteed that Blood Ceremony's schtick, as long as it is properly executed,
is always a good thing to have in unlimited quantities. Namely, Lord Of Misrule has fewer moments of
true excitement than The Eldritch Dark
— actually, come to think of it, none at all in comparison — and if it takes
them three years to come up with a weaker
application of the same formula, why should I be recommending this? If you're
new to the witchy world of Alia O'Brien, check out their early stuff; if you
already know what they are all about, your time and spiritual energy should probably
rather be spent on something else — unless, of course, you need fresh music
like this to create the proper vibe for casting incantations over your personal
stock of mandrake roots, toadstool powders, and black cat bones.
FOR EMMA, FOREVER AGO (2007)
1) Flume; 2) Lump Sum; 3)
Skinny Love; 4) The Wolves (Act I & II); 5) Blindsided; 6) Creature Fear;
7) Team; 8) For Emma; 9) re: Stacks.
For a brief while, Bon Iver (a graphic
misrepresentation of French bon hiver
ʽgood winterʼ, so make sure you get your French accent on the right
syllable) seemed to be one of the hottest things happening on the indie scene.
It was, in fact, like a proverbial indie fairy tale come true: a «visionary»,
mildly autistic, highly sensitive guy (Justin Vernon, a twenty-six year old
major in Religious Studies from Wisconsin), suffering from mononucleosis and
girlfriend problems, secluding himself in a winter cabin, completely alone with
his guitar and some recording equipment —and out comes a minimalistic
masterpiece of lonely, melancholic beauty. This is the stuff NY Times
bestsellers are made of.
What really surprised me about this album, upon
studying people's reactions, was the rather large amount of «on-the-fence»
reviews, along the lines of «fairly nice listen, okay and all that, but certainly
not deserving of the hype» and so on. Because For Emma, Forever Ago is certainly not your «average» indie record
— it is one of those albums that should be driving people into opposite trenches,
machine-guns at the ready. It may be tempting for the evaluator to try and rise
above the disagreements, but as tempting as it is, it simply makes no sense. I
honestly do not see a way to call Justin Vernon's offering anything other than
«genius» or «crap». And in between the two — sorry Bon Iver fans — I can only
choose the latter.
Note: At this
point, every bona fide Bon Iver fan is supposed to say «You just don't get it,
do you?» and click the «Back» button on the browser. You have been warned: leave
now, before somebody gets hurt.
First and foremost: I am sick to my stomach of
young bearded melancholic Artists locking themselves up in log cabins with
acoustic guitars. At the very least, one thing which all that time spent inside
the log cabin could be devoted to, would be to fuckin' learn to play that acoustic guitar. If Nick Drake's Pink Moon ever had the right to be
called a minimalistic masterpiece (which I am not sure of, but in any case, Pink Moon is fifty times the
masterpiece For Emma could ever
claim to be), it was because the minimalistic guitar parts were produced by a
master guitar player, a genuine demi-god of the instrument. Justin Vernon, in
comparison, does not seem to know one thing on the guitar that a bright school
kid, listening to old folk records, could not master within one month of
picking up the thing.
Second: The proverbially gorgeous falsetto
simply does not cut it any more. Unless this is the first falsetto you have
heard in your life, the sweet, soothing, lulling sound of Justin Vernon's voice
adds nothing whatsoever to the legions of falsetto-using singers already
assembled. The only thing of note is the consistency: unlike such wimps as
Brian Wilson, Prince, or even Antony Hegarty, Vernon sings almost exclusively in falsetto, threatening the
very reputation of the entire State of Wisconsin. A brave chore (unless he also
talks like that), but a head-splitting one.
Third and most important. I am not the one to
deny the power and importance of atmosphere. I am certainly not against minimalism as such. And I
certainly do not agree with Zappa on the general
principle that «broken hearts are for assholes». But there are limits to every
sort of patience and tolerance, and as far as I am concerned, For Emma crosses that line quite
definitively. The broken heart of Justin Vernon is probably the 10,000th broken
heart or so that I have come across in my relations with various kinds of art.
Just because it took a log cabin in Wisconsin and an all-out falsetto delivery
to acquaint me with it, is not going to make me any more excited. Where is the
goddamn music to go along with the
broken heart?
Admittedly, from time to time there are a few
vocal hooks that might, even should be salvaged from the realm of boredom (and
if I ever notice someone appropriating them for a better record without sharing
the proper credit, I promise to pretend not
to have noticed). Most of them are tucked somewhere within the two slightly
more upbeat tunes — ʽFlumeʼ and the title track; I also admit to liking
the chorus of ʽCreature Fearʼ. The former two have bits of folksy
beauty, the latter has a bit of dream-pop charm... somehow, on these three,
Vernon must have accidentally fallen upon a few non-standard, evocative vocal
moves.
But all of these are exceptions, and they never
obstruct too much the overall flow of the record, which is quite comparable
with the average flow of a water storage basin on a very slightly breezy day.
Sometimes it outdoes itself by dragging at an absolute tortoise pace (ʽThe
Wolvesʼ), as we are supposed to revel in the naked pain and beauty of
Vernon's voice and its multiple overdubs. More often, it picks the tempo up
just a little bit, usually on the strength of some basic folk shuffle
strumming. Not that there is any big difference.
As for Justin Vernon's personal drama... you
know what? I'm sorry about the guy as I may be sorry for every other guy or
girl that suffers more than he or she deserves to, but I find his poetry clumsy
and derivative (here is a typical example: "Only love is all maroon /
Gluey feathers on a flume / Sky is womb and she's the moon / I am my mother on
the wall, with us all / I move in water, shore to shore / Nothing's more");
his attempts to artistically individualize his problems at the same time overblown
to the skies and undercooked to the core; and, of course, all the general
indie-trendy hoopla fuss raised about the record reflecting the general crisis
of the times.
In the end, I have no choice but to agree with
Robert Christgau, the lone voice in the crowd to give the album its deserved C+
— or with my old idol Mark Prindle, who dismissed Bon Iver in his usually
laconic way: «without the falsetto, it'd just be boring; with the falsetto,
it's unlistenable». Count this whole review as a somewhat superfluous
commentary on that judgement. And please, please, PRETTY PLEASE, NO MORE
BEARDED LONERS WITH ACOUSTIC GUITARS! WHERE THE FUCK IS A ROCK'N'ROLL GUSTAV
MAHLER WHEN YOU NEED ONE? THUMBS DOWN, DOWN, DOWN!
BON IVER, BON IVER (2011)
1) Perth; 2) Minnesota, WI; 3)
Holocene; 4) Towers; 5) Michicant; 6) Hinnom, TX; 7) Wash.; 8) Calgary; 9)
Lisbon, OH; 10) Beth / Rest.
No fewer than seven different musicians
accompany Justin Vernon on his sophomore stab at a masterpiece, which should
prompt the obvious question: «How the heck did all these people fit within one
log cabin in the woods of Wisconsin? Must have been really crammed out there!» Then you learn that the album was not
recorded in a log cabin at all, but in an abandoned veterinarian clinic in Fall
Creek, remodeled as a recording studio. Still sounds romantic, although one
would expect it to be somehow reflected in the recording — a couple of songs
about being kind to animals wouldn't hurt, and yet I can find no traces. Of
course, with Bon Iver's lyrics never making figurative sense, let alone
literal, you can never be sure.
The move from acoustic minimalism to denser
art-pop arrangements paid off brilliantly: most reviewers were happy beyond
measure, since they could amply concentrate on discussing the Important
Artistic Reasons behind the move, and praise the Important Artist for
Progressive Artistic Growth, shown so early on in his career. A few disgruntled
voices complained that the growth was actually Regressive, and picketed April
Base Studios with signs reading JUDAS and BACK TO THE LOG CABIN and EMMA IS NOT
HAPPY. (In their imaginations, at least). But even those voices generally
acknowledged that the songs were still great, it's just the idea of developing
a bigger sound for them that didn't quite work out.
In fact, the atmosphere on Bon Iver, Bon Iver did not change a whole lot from the minimalistic
soundscapes of For Emma. The basic
vibes, moods, goals, structures remain exactly the same. The falsetto singing
has no plans of going anywhere (although, for honesty's sake, Vernon shows a
little more range this time around); nor do the lyrics show any signs of
advancing from sheer nonsense to, at the very least, some plain old surrealism.
We got to give some credit to the Artist. Like so many of them, he is struggling
to build himself his own personal dream world, since none of the others seem to
be satisfactory enough. This dream world bears a passing resemblance to the
United States of America, because it is also divided into states, and its
towns and cities sometimes even have the same names as the corresponding US
locations (ʽLisbon, OHʼ), although some of the locations are quite
confusing (ʽMinnesota, WIʼ?) and others could even be offensive to
certain Americans (ʽHinnom, TXʼ — you Texans do realize that
ʽHinnomʼ has the same root as Gehenna,
right?).
In this dream world, people mostly talk in disjointed, impressionistic associations; play slow, soft, traditionally melodic music; sing in sweet voices, usually multi-tracking them along the way; and always exude a mixed happy-sad feeling because, after all, there are very few things in life over which one couldn't or shouldn't get happy and sad at the same time. If, every once in a while, you start getting the feeling that it all sounds discomfortingly close to banal 1980s-style adult contemporary, just shake it off. According to a Pitchforkmedia reviewer, it was a brave move on Justin Vernon's side to move things so close to 1980s adult contemporary, and who are we to argue with that? 1980s artists recorded crappy music without understanding how crappy it was (and how much more crappy it would sound with each passing year); recording crappy music with such an understanding is definitely a far braver move.
It is true that bringing in extra people at
least helped to make some of these songs acquire extra dynamics.
ʽPerthʼ, for instance, gradually expands from a pretty guitar
flourish to bombastic martial drum patterns and then into a veritable sea of
sound with synthesizers, horns, and shrill electric lead lines that is quite
far removed from log cabin isolationism — and yet, at the same time, does not
really create any different type of mood. It could have been a fantastic track
if the flourish in question worked in a trance-inducing manner, and the drum
patterns and the wall of sound were gelling with it in some sort of meaningful
way. To my ears, they don't: the guitar pattern is boring (and, after a while,
quite annoyingly boring), the martial drums make no sense, and the wall of sound
is neither structured well enough to punctuate the senses, nor dares to whip
its brief traces of aggressive atonality into something genuinely alive — for
fear that some people might dare to suppose a «rocking» strain to this very,
very, very peaceful experience, I guess.
I could write a similar diatribe against just
about every song on the album, which all range from staggeringly boring
(ʽMichicantʼ is a straightahead criminal offense against the slide
guitar) to mildly passable (ʽTowersʼ has a cozy country-pop drive,
and the strings that double the slide guitars are an inventive touch) to almost
good (the first half of ʽMinnesotaʼ, with its active fuzz bass lines,
is the album's only «gutsy» moment). But what's the use? Just like For Emma, Bon Iver will work for you if you can feel it for this guy, or,
more precise, if this guy makes you feel it for him. I feel nothing. All the
ingredients are there, but they are all inserted in the wrong order, in wrong
amounts, in the wrong handling.
When they get around to closing the album, the
desire to strangle the producer becomes almost unbearable: as much as I try to,
I just cannot interpret ʽBeth / Restʼ, with its electronic drums and
keyboards, as a «brave» decision on the songwriter's part — I can only
interpret it as a subconscious tribute to one of the miriads of tepid ballads
he must have been hearing on the radio when he was six or seven years old.
Please do not count me in on this game; I refuse to accept these rules that
allow «The Artist» to pass off bland Eighties nostalgia as «Modern Art». It is
not a sin to be infected with any sort of influence, even Kim Wilde — it is a
sin to extol the very fact of your being
influenced as your artistic statement. And no, masking that influence with sets
of schizophasic lyrics that could just as well be machine-produced does not
help.
I do not think that Bon Iver, Bon Iver is any «better» or «worse» than For Emma. Technically, it has a
different sound, but substantially, nothing has changed. Except for my
suspicion that the existence and appraisal of Bon Iver confirms that, on an
official level, «indie» has become as much of a rotting corpse as everything
else, and that the wheel has completed its next cycle — the so-called
«independent musical press» has advanced to approximately the same level of
credibility as Rolling Stone. Yep, just my humble personal opinion, nothing
else. And a heartfelt thumbs down — the most sincerely emotional
outburst from me that could be associated with this record.
22, A MILLION (2016)
1) 22 (OVER S∞∞N)
2:48; 2) 10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄; 3) 715 - CRΣΣKS;
4) 33 “GOD” 3:33; 5) #Strafford APTS; 6) 666 ʇ; 7) M♢♢N WATER; 8) 8 (circle); 9) ____45_____;
10) 00000 Million.
Okay, I think I get it now. It's some of that
damn Illuminati business, man. Justin Vernon is their secret weapon — by
unleashing him upon the world and using both mainstream and alternative rock critics
as their helpless puppets, they are
planning to disorient us, confuse us, corrupt and subjugate our aesthetic
values and ultimately plunge the world into so much confusion that Kanye West might be able to become president and
give the launch codes to Somali pirates, while we're all busy discussing Bon
Iver's latest message to humanity. And these song titles? Aren't they already imprinted in your mind like
proper subliminal messages, to be activated by the New World Order at just the
right moment?
So even if I'm assuming the highly ungrateful
role of Cassandra here, I will still go out and say it, and maybe one or two of
you nuclear survivors will have the opportunity to thank me ten or so years
from now: to a certain extent, the sound and image of 22, A Million was predictable, because when somebody's search for
new and unprecedented ways of self-expression overrides one's talent so
mercilessly, the results look something like this. Of course, a radical turn into the direction of sampling, Auto-tuning,
and crossbreeding neo-folk with electronica was inevitable for this guy,
although the scope of it couldn't have been properly guessed. And, of course,
the process of such cross-breeding was far more important to him than actually
caring that the record made some sort of sense. And why bother crafting a
record that would make some sort of sense, anyway, if fans and critics alike
will be all too happy to invent it for you?
Here, have some frickin' quotes. "22, A Million is comparatively strange
and exploratory, but its worries are more existential... nearly all of its
songs contain a question of some sort, as if Vernon’s own reckoning with the
inevitability of decay has led him to interrogate every last thing he’s seen or
known" (Pitchfork). "The wonder of 22, A Million is how beautifully he melds the disparate
forms—inside and outside, acoustic and digital, past and future, ground level
and interstellar" (Spin). "With his long-awaited third album, Vernon
completely breaks from his guitar-hugging persona, leaving it in the woods like
a Coen brothers corpse as he flexes a mastery of processed vocals, samples,
loops, beats, synths and noise, along with more familiar trappings"
(RollingStone)... you get the drift already, don't you?
So it's either Illuminati or the man found some
serious Al Capone stash buried right under his log cabin, with which he was
able to buy up all the significant media sources — because, while I did
honestly try to entertain, nurture, and re-kindle the possibility of this
being, like, you know, a good album
after all, even over the course of several listens... well, gut instincts don't
lie: just as in the case of his prior two albums, each new listen only brought
an additional wave of disgust, so at least in that respect he's demonstrating a
delightful stability. And yes, maybe it is just me and I am still not getting
something about all this, but so far, not a single one of these reviews has
taken even a tiny step towards convincingly clarifying what that «something»
could be.
Roughly speaking, 22, A Million is an alien-dimensional take on neo-folk, consisting
of three steps: (a) write some fairly bland, hookless, nowhere-near-innovative
melodies on the intersection of rootsy Americana and New Age; (b) fill 'em up
with lyrics that can barely pass the Turing test, but might serve as fodder for
lengthy, bloody battles of interpretation; (c) twist, distort, cut up, paste
the material with as many technological devices and in as many different ways
as your engineer might suggest. As Pitchfork says, "nearly all of its
songs contain a question of some sort", and they do, oh yes they do. For
instance: "Why is the accappella melody of ʽ715ʼ completely
hidden under a wall of Autotune?" (Oh, excuse me, that's not Autotune
proper, it's some brand-ass-new device called ʽthe Messinaʼ after the
name of Vernon's engineer. I'm sure this technical detail makes a lot of artistic difference). Lo and
behold, now your life has meaning, because you can spend the rest of it
answering that question.
But to return to that old crudeness and
bluntness: The melodies on 22, A Million
lack memorability or originality (I
don't think there's really a single chord sequence on here that could not have
been used up by the likes of a James Taylor sometime in the past — and, as much
as I remain skeptical of the overall artistic merit of Sufjan Stevens, that guy
does everything that Bon Iver is capable of and much, much more). The lyrics
make no sense whatsoever, except for a few individual lines, and the individual
lines are usually nauseatingly pretentious ("Must've been forces that took
me on them wild courses / Who knows how many poses that I've been in" — unless
he's been Napoleon in one of his past lives, I'm not prepared to buy this), and
it is self-understood that humor and self-irony will be prosecuted if they
ever find themselves on Justin Vernon's property. And the «special effects»,
beginning with the triumphant Unicode of the song titles and ending with all
the psychedelic / futuristic / faux-avantgarde sampling and encoding, are
little more than annoying. Most of
the time, it simply sounds like a kid having fun with his laptop. The kid will
find it delightful to turn his voice into a chipmunk's every now and then, but
there's simply no reason whatsoever for a grown-up person to do so on the very
first line of the very first song and then pretend that it has some artistic
significance — or, worse still, prod us into discovering,
intellectually-symbolically or emotionally-supernaturally, that significance.
If the first album was simply boring, and the
second album was intolerable because it intentionally presented obsolete
crappy values as the new Art, then the third one is simply an anti-artistic
scam — a new low in an already fantastically atrocious career. So why is it
that, out of all the gazillions of «experimental» albums released every year,
people were ready to fall specifically for this one? Is it the Kanye West
endorsement? Is it some sort of irresistible tug that you get when you take two
of the most fashionable things of the past decade — the folksy bearded loner
and the digital studio processing technology — and mash them together with full
force? Is it that the words he chooses for his songs hit some sort of
generational nerve, and that his arrangement of these words actually carries a
manipulative effect? Or is it simply that so many of us have such a mad craving
for a soft, whiny, vulnerable falsetto to take as a partner in weeping over the
disheveled and confused state of the world? So much so, that even when that
falsetto is distorted with five billion layers of Autotune, we take this as a
symbolic representation of all the unbearable burdens and unsolvable problems
that pin the Vulnerable Little Man down to the ground? Oh look at me, I'm almost
beginning to rant like a Pitchfork reviewer already.
Whatever — I say shake off the haze, cut the
crap, and call this one of the most stupid, misguided, and phoney albums of the
year 2016. If you want some actual folksy sadness that sounds real, for a change, go listen to True Sadness by the Avett Brothers, who
lay no claims whatsoever to Big Fat Innovation, do not put dumb effects on
their voices, hardly ever use one special symbol from the user-defined area in
their song titles, yet somehow seem to pack more emotion and plain old common
sense in a single song than Justin Vernon manages to smear over half an hour of
his «muzak of the future». Sure, there's nothing adventurous whatsoever about True Sadness, but when it comes to
choosing between (a) sitting in front of the fireplace and sipping hot tea on a
cold evening, or (b) wrapping your wife's panties around your head and jogging
through the Mojave desert in a pokemon suit, I happen to be the kind of guy who
chooses (a). Although, add choice (c) — sit through 22, A Million just one more time in hopes of finally penetrating
its transcendental nature — and choice (b) begins to look a bit more promising.
I suppose it's only natural that the thumbs down verdict here not be subject to any
further appeal.
THOUGHT FOR FOOD (2002)
1) Enjoy Your Worries, You May
Never Have Them Again; 2) Read, Eat, Sleep; 3) All Bad Ends All; 4) Contempt;
5) All Our Base Are Belong To Them; 6) Thankyoubranch; 7) Motherless Bastard;
8) Mikey Bass; 9) Excess Straussess; 10) Getting The Done Job; 11) A Dead
Fish Gains The Power Of Observation; 12) Deafkids.
As a friendly disclaimer, I would just like to
remind the reader of a strict «no bull» policy that is observed in these
reviews. Music that stirs up feelings is welcome; music that stimulates constructive
thought without stirring up feelings is slightly less welcome, but still
welcome; music that begs for just one question — «did somebody just make me
feel like a complete idiot?» — just makes me feel like a complete idiot. And
it's no fun reviewing music in a state like that.
The Books are a creative duo from New York City
(the Holy Mother of Progressive Bull, among other wonderful things),
consisting of Nick Zammuto on guitar and Paul de Jong on cello, and backed by
The New York Symphony Orchestra of Awesome Samples. They call themselves The
Books because they have read a lot of books (personal assumption), and if you haven't read a lot of books — and
watched a lot of (obscure) movies, and listened to a lot of (obscure) music —
you probably have no business listening to them in the first place. As for
myself, I am in no way qualified to compete with these guys' level of knowledge
of whatever it is they know, even if I did see Godard's Contempt, on which one of these tracks is based (but I'm a Breathless person myself, so, other than
a small flash of Brigitte Bardot in the nude, there was really nothing to get
too much excited about). Thus, I'm stumped.
Basically, The Books just play small snippets
and snuffets of folksy melodies, with acoustic guitars, violins, cellos, and
electric bass (the latter of which periodically blows radioactive holes through
my speakers). On their own, these snippets would be completely worthless — the
playing is unexceptional and the «melodies» are underworked, when they are
«worked» at all. The gist is that they are densely peppered with samples, and,
if I get it right, the samples are supposed to interact with the melodies in
creative ways, resulting in... in... aw, crap.
I do officially admit that the song titles are
original enough to merit a carrot. ʽEnjoy Your Worries, You May Never
Have Them Againʼ is a clever tweet — if only it had something to do with
the actual track, which sounds like a home rehearsal of a daring, but erratic
and vision-less folk guitarist spliced with a quiet mishmash of avantgarde
violins and people talking in Robert Altman fashion (including a long story narrated
by a lady about a stalker). Verdict: this is approximately 2,000 years ahead
of its time, and these guys belong in a MoMA installation.
ʽRead, Eat, Sleepʼ is a combination
of minimalistic acoustic patterns, chimes, and deep bass, mixed in Brian Eno
fashion and sprayed with samples of a spelling bee. Conclusion: "By
digitising thunder and traffic noises, Georgia was able to compose aleatoric
music". While this gives the listener a fine chance to learn the
relatively recent neologism «aleatoric», I cannot in the least agree with
raving critical opinions — as far as my organism sees it, the samples and the
vapid musical backing cancel each other out rather than complement each other.
Only a couple of tracks actually gives the
impression of adhering to the non-rules of musique
concrète — ʽExcess Straussessʼ is two minutes of cellos
and violins echoing from one channel to another, and the last two snippets
really try to weave some sort of pseudo-musical pattern from sampled bubbles
and babbles (ʽDeafkidsʼ with its deconstructed thrash metal bassline
almost borders on funny — there, I've said it). Other than that, there is no
coherence or conceptuality here except for whatever you might want to invent
yourself, particularly when you are a professional musical critic for whom
«thought for food» is a harsh reality of life.
Speaking of life, one opinion that I have
encountered is that Thought For Food
is supposed to represent a special
«panorama of life», with its array of samples gathered from all sorts of
sources and the music merely a sonic backing to add an artsier dimension to the
documentary nature of the panorama. Well... okay. Perhaps this will make
someone reevaluate all of Life's values, bring open-mindedness, freshness, a
renewed sense of purpose, and a reignited taste for adventurous feelings into
one's existence.
My position, unfortunately, will remain rather
retrograde — I find Thought For Food,
and particularly the excited critical reception that has surrounded it, to be
just one more sign of a general creative exhaustion of the 2000s. I admit that,
to a certain degree, it is a technical success: the samples have been
integrated smoothly enough to make the whole thing listenable as a piece of
«music» rather than a patchwork of «avantagrde sonic effects» à la
ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ. But «listenable» is certainly not enough, and
I'd much rather go back to the meaningful sonic nightmare of ʽNo. 9ʼ
than sit once more through the bland «non-statement» of Thought For Food, so carefully and meticulously crafted by these
two guys.
Nice, intellectual guys, and there is nothing
wrong in trying to look for new ways to revolutionize the musical world — it's
just that the hunger for change sometimes gets so big that people get
inadequately happy at the mere idea of looking
for it. Never mind if you don't find
anything. Just keep looking, it'll come to you. Or maybe it has already come.
Yep, that's right, it's here, it's
just what we needed. Isn't it great? Yeah, it's not for everyone, but what is?
Justin Bieber? Come on now, conservatism won't help make this world a better
place. Besides, you wanted progress, didn't you? You want it — you got it.
What's the point of your disrespectful thumbs down? Obstruct development? Cool off
the optimism? Sell us all to MTV? When we have just seen the future of
rock'n'roll, and its name is... ALEATORIC!!!
THE LEMON OF PINK (2003)
1) The Lemon Of Pink; 2) The
Lemon Of Pink; 3) Tokyo; 4) Bonanza; 5) S Is For Evrysing; 6) Explanation Mark;
7) There Is No There; 8) Take Time; 9) Don't Even Sing About It; 10) The
Future, Wouldn't That Be Nice; 11) A True Story Of A Story Of True Love; 12)
That Right Ain't Shit; 13) PS.
Hello and welcome to today's edition of «No
Bull Session With Big Daddy». In the news: The Books release a follow-up to
their critically appraised debut, Thought
For Food. Called The Lemon Of Pink,
it is one minute shorter, but one track longer than its predecessor, and
continues in the same direction. This makes it, once more, an excellent target
for our program.
A lot of reviews and evaluations of the album
use different words to paraphrase more or less the same conclusion: «a chaotic
jumble that should be a complete wreck, but somehow, for some reason, it
works». Each time I read something of the kind, I want to turn into a little
tick and crawl inside that particular person's ear — no, not to eat his brains
out (although that might be an option), but simply to witness his true
reaction to a Books album. Because the nagging question is: what works? What kind of gold mine are
these guys working on that remains inaccessible to us outsiders?.. Could you be
more specific? In fact, could you be more specific?
That said, let us be just. The Lemon Of Pink is a bit less extremist and a bit more musical
than Thought For Food. The samples
are still at the forefront of everything, but there are now tracks like
ʽTokyoʼ, where an actual acoustic melody — and a pretty one, too —
runs over its entire length, while Japanese stewardesses welcome you on the
flight and off it. The main theme of ʽTake Timeʼ may even be
memorable, with the valuable help of the pendulum chorus ("take – time,
take – time..."). And there are bits of impressive acoustic playing
scattered here and there all over the place, particularly on the second half of
the album.
This all makes The Lemon Of Pink sound like a rather vapid, distraught jam session
played by a couple of professional musicians that just got together to fight
boredom on a lazy, hot summer day. Pile some speech samples on top of it, and
whoops, you got yourself an art statement. Take away the samples, and you get
back your lazy distraught session. I just keep vacillating between rational
hatred for the former and friendly indifference towards the latter.
The little speech-filled links are friendlier
and funnier this time, though. ʽBonanzaʼ is a bunch of chopped up,
mumbled phrases in an unrecognizable language (Dutch?), recited by a toothless
old man; ʽExplanation Markʼ sounds like several over-imposed phonetic
lessons; and ʽPSʼ finishes the album with a recording of several
people preparing to start something potentially important, but always failing
due to uncontrollable giggle attacks. While it's all silly, it at least sounds
friendly and even «cute», which might be a starting point for liking the whole
thing.
Alas, even if the record succeeds in not
generally breeding negative emotions, it still never gets anywhere beyond
«cuddly». Tracks like ʽThe Futureʼ and a few others occasionally
sound close to The Beta Band — lulling, melancholic singing to folksy acoustic
patterns that may, at any time, be interrupted by a heavy whack on the head
with a frying-pan or your local rose-colored alien friend whizzing by in his
flying saucer. But the Betas had the will to transform these psycho-folk vibes
into actual songs, whereas the Books seem determined to put a totalitarian stop
to these vile, commercial, intellectually insulting cravings.
With ʽTake Timeʼ and
ʽTokyoʼ, their noble goal is almost ruined, because there are two or
three things I still manage to remember about these tracks. Elsewhere, they are
more successful. But if you are into The Books at all, you should be into
hardcore — compared to Thought For Food,
The Lemon Of Pink is a fucking
sellout. As a pleasant collection of songs, it fails; as an artistic statement,
it adds little to its predecessor; as a user-friendly sonic environment
celebrating the simple joys of Planet Earth, it probably works best when your
name is Major Tom, and you cannot hear me. Thumbs down either way.
LOST AND SAFE (2005)
1) A Little Longing Goes Away;
2) Be Good To Them Always; 3) Vogt Dig For Kloppervok; 4) Smells Like
Content; 5) It Never Changes To Stop; 6) An Animated Description Of Mr. Maps;
7) Venice; 8) None But Shining Hours; 9) If Not Now, Whenever; 10) An Owl With
Knees; 11) Twelve Fold Chain.
You'd think that, with this clear propensity
for «pushing boundaries», The Books would eventually start advancing beyond
the format of their first album. For most of their predecessors this was, after
all, inevitable. From the nightmarish industrial clang of Einstürzende
Neubauten to the psychedelic kindergarten of The Animal Collective, they were
all moving somewhere. But apparently,
that is exactly what Zammuto and de Jong are the most afraid of — that trying
to expand their sound and vision will make their «art» more accessible and,
consequently, dilute the «importance» of their revolutionary contributions.
Which is certainly correct to an extent:
speaking of Animal Collective, now that the world has shed a tear over Merriweather Post Pavillion, how many
people are going to remember this band through their first batch of far less
accessible, «anti-musical» records? Even despite the fact that, in sheer
objective terms, they may have been
far more «innovative» per se. Thus, it seems that The Books are willing to lock
themselves in this curious state of «perpetual revolution» — not a progressive
series of revolutions replacing one another, more like the same group of Bolsheviks
running up the steps of the Winter Palace in constant replay mode.
The third album is a little bit longer, a tiny
bit more diverse in terms of selection of basic «melodies», and actually
features a large amount of vocal work by the band members themselves —
sometimes going as far as real singing, usually in a dreary lethargic mode.
That's about as far as they allow themselves to go. As for the samples, these
now include occasional poetry readings (e. g. from W. H. Auden and
«Jabberwocky»), along with the usual obscure movie quotations and bits of
street dialog, describing the details of which is excruciatingly boring, and
decoding the reasons of inclusion for which is impossible without performing
brain surgery on the creators.
You'd think that, perhaps, including a larger
proportion of vocals would push these tracks closer in the direction of real
songs, but it does not. The minimalistic instrumentation, the chop-and-paste computer
effects, the lulling or electronically treated original voices, and the
extraneous samples are still interwoven in «art-performance» fashion, so there
is no threat of losing the band's precious integrity. In fact, I didn't even notice the change upon first listen — so
seamlessly do Zammuto's and de Jong's voices flow into their sample database. I
suppose that might be checked as a positive accomplishment.
As a curious exception, I'd list ʽIt Never
Changes To Stopʼ, the best thing about which is not the "I don't want to hear any more talking, any more
moving about" sample part grumbled out by a seemingly insecure
disciplinarian, but rather an excellent overdubbed cello part that is as much
Wagner as it is ʽI Am The Walrusʼ. Its very presence makes the sound
louder and fatter than just about everything else on here, and teasingly proves
that these guys can make actual music
when they feel like it. They just don't, most of the time.
The bottomline turns out to be the same as
usual. If you are sleeping, Lost And
Safe may wake you up — slim chances, though, because it won't wake you up
by itself: you'll have to find it first, meaning that only authentic
somnambulists are eligible. If you consider yourself wide awake, I fail to see
any potential emotional or intellectual stimulation here that could be genuine.
Just one more hollow attempt at breeding a new cultural stimulus that is only
alive as long as there is a firm feeding hand to breed it. Sure ain't my hand, though — my hands go thumbs down!
MUSIC FOR A FRENCH ELEVATOR (2006)
1) Fralité; 2)
Egaberté; 3) Liternité; 4) It's Musiiiiiiic!; 5) The Joy Of
Nature; 6) Meditation Outtakes; 7) A Long Villainous Sequence; 8) Millions Of
Millions; 9) Of The Word God; 10) Ghost Train Digest; 11) You'll Never Be
Alone; 12) Three Day Night; 13) Ah..., I See.
Okay, factual foundation first. This is a very
brief (barely 15 minutes in length) EP-size release, whose full title is really
Music For A French Elevator And Other
Short Format Oddities By The Books, but titles of such length do not look
too good in all caps. The «French Elevator» segment actually only covers the
first four tracks, which were indeed played in a French elevator installed in
the Ministry of Culture in Paris for people visiting a special modern art and
sound installation in 2004. The other tracks just pad out the «album» with an
extra selection of samples from The Books' archives. There is no «music» as
such on them — just samples, most of them spoken (or, at most, bleated,
bellowed, or whispered).
Now the evaluation. As it is, it happens to be
my favorite Books album. First of all, fifteen minutes of Books per session is
just about all I can stand. Second, the goddamn honesty. This time around, if
you disregard the word Music in the
title, there is really no pretense at all that they may be doing something
other than mocking your brains out. What happens here is like... well, a little
bit like a Terry Gilliam animation sequence with a broken video cable. It does
not make much sense, and it is completely stupid from a rational point of view,
but if it somehow hits that one right spot that is located God knows where —
it's unforgettable.
The «Elevator» tracks, instead of focusing on
The Books' usual acoustic guitar and cello (a little bit is still available on
ʽFralitéʼ), bring in some lightweight jazz piano
(ʽEgabertéʼ) or free-form jazz (ʽLibernitéʼ)
that go well with some French fries, er, French spoken samples, and bring the
absurdism to its peak by randomly remixing the initial syllables of the song
titles. The resulting atmosphere is proverbially nutty, but also uplifting and
full of metaphorical sunshine. And since the longest of these tracks clocks in
at 1:21, the experience never drags.
The rest... weird it may sound, but it seems as
if I really like the band's samples more when they are unhindered by all the
diddling. For one thing, it helps us see that they are not simply incorporating
random stuff from their libraries, but spend a lot of time editing it.
ʽGhost Train Digestʼ, for instance, is really a condensed version of
an old British movie where they take away all actual content and leave in most
of the "God gracious!...", "oh dear oh dear...",
"sorry" and other idiomatic stuff. On ʽMillions Of
Millionsʼ, a preoccupied female is counting out money. ʽMeditation
Outtakesʼ is one minute of several people spelling out the word
«meditation». ʽA Long Villainous Sequenceʼ is thirty-five seconds of
evil cackling and grunting. ʽThe Joy Of Natureʼ is a bunch of people
trying to sound like farm animals. And so on.
Since you never really know what to expect — at
the very least, you may be almost sure that the next snippet is not going to be a boring minimalistic
guitar/cello duet — the sequencing is thrilling, funny, and sometimes even
thought-provoking. (And ʽGhost Trainʼ is a good vehicle to practice
your British pronunciation). Which, logically, brings me to my final point: it
might have been a much better idea, given The Books' technical efficiency, if
they had always separated their music from their samples. They are good
musicians and clever splicers, but their regular albums do not really let us
see the former and always obscure the latter. Here at least, for fifteen
minutes, you can enjoy «just the splicing». Believe me, there's more to
splicing than life.
THE WAY OUT (2010)
1) Group Autogenics I; 2) IDKT;
3) I Didn't Know That; 4) A Cold Freezin' Night; 5) Beautiful People; 6) I Am
Who I Am; 7) Chain Of Missing Links; 8) All You Need Is A Wall; 9) Thirty
Incoming; 10) A Wonderful Phrase By Gandhi; 11) We Bought The Flood; 12) The
Story Of Hip Hop; 13) Free Translator; 14) Group Autogenics II.
Question: so why exactly did The Books break
up? Answer: why, cuz the darn kids just don't read 'em no more these days! In
this sad, illiterate age, plagued by free porn and Angry Birds...
...oops, sorry, wrong platform. The correct
answer, of course, is: because so few people really cared if they lived or died
that they preferred to die. For publicity's sake, I assume. «The Books broke up
today». «What are you talking about? I only just finished rearranging the
shelves». «No, apparently there was a whole band
out there, called The Books, and they just broke up.» «Whoah, you don't say? A
band called The Books? Why didn't anybody tell me? What's their game? Where can
I buy their records? Do they offer a last minute garage sale? Is the fan club
offering T-shirts for free?»
Not sure about T-shirts, but at least the band
went out with its most transparently «musical» album ever. Ironically, it is
also their one record that is the least dependent on their traditional brands
of instrumentation. Most of the backing tracks are either electronic or
R'n'B-ish, or both, with the emphasis no longer on guitar and cello. This is
not necessarily a plus in itself, but it makes the record more dynamic and
jerky, so at the very least it is not that easy to fall asleep to the
individual tracks.
Moving on, the album, for the first time ever,
somehow tries to explain itself to the befuddled listener. "Hello,
greetings and welcome. Welcome to a new beginning, for this tape will serve you
as a new beginning... On this recording, music specifically created for its
pleasurable effects upon your mind, body and emotions is mixed with a warm
orange colored liquid. Your body is now a glass container". If you have
already signed a written consent allowing your body to be treated as a glass
container, who knows? — your mind, body and emotions might even consider The Way Out an introspective
masterpiece.
Or «outrospective», whatever. The herky-jerky
nature of these tunes produces a paranoid impression, which is way better than
a lethargic impression. ʽI Didn't Know Thatʼ sounds like a shredded
and recycled hip-hop (or would that be trip-hop?) track with a free jazz flavor
for good measure. ʽA Cold Freezin' Nightʼ features a little boy
threatening to blow your brains out to the merry sounds of something in
between a robotic electro-funk pattern and a video game soundtrack. ʽI Am
Who I Amʼ tips its hat to industrial metal (soft, though) as the
protagonist asserts his identity ("I will be who I am and what I
am"). And so on — do I really need to go through all the tracks?
Actually, a couple of the tracks almost work as
actual songs. ʽAll You Need Is A Wallʼ is a rare spot of quiet
acoustic meditation and falsetto vocal harmonies; and ʽFree
Translatorʼ is an acoustic folk composition, plain and simple. Neither of
the tunes is particularly memorable or original, but at least The Books leave
you unable to say: «These guys never made an actual song in their entire life». Although, come to think of it, it would
sound cool, especially considering that they are much better at collages
anyway.
In the end, I would probably have given the
whole thing the usual negative assessment, if it weren't for ʽThe Story Of
Hip-Hopʼ, a track that lambasts the genre in the subtlest way possible — as
actual hip-hop samples are mixed in with a steadier rhythm track, «disrupting the
flow» of the whole thing every several seconds, someone narrates «the story of
Hip-Hop» as an animate character, including smart observations about the
latter, such as "He never rests. He beats and whirrs and whirrs so fast
that you can't tell what he looks like". And the moral at the end:
"Now you see the trouble little Hip Hop got into. It was all because he
didn't look where he hopped..." Hey, could I take credit for that? Guess
not. Too bad.
So, The
Way Out is not a particularly bad way out for these guys. If their purpose
in art was to confuse and derail, I must say this is the only record in the catalog that seems to me to have hit at least
somewhere near that mark.
Occasionally intriguing, occasionally funny, rarely boring, featuring ʽA
Wonderful Phrase By Gandhiʼ, and lots and lots and lots of «original» text
that I very much want to see as a parody
on spiritual sermons than the real thing (ʽChain Of Missing Linksʼ is
pretty much the apogee here). It's okay. I just hope these guys never come together
again. Out is out, after all. It isn't nice to cheat.
AMERICAN NERVOSO (1998)
1) Hutton's Great Heat Engine;
2) John Woo; 3) Dali's Praying Mantis; 4) Dead For A Minute; 5) Oma; 6) Thank
God For Worker Bees; 7) Rejection Spoken Softly; 8) Spitting Black; 9) Hives.
As a rule, the Tacoma/Seattle area is not
usually associated with technically prodigious metal bands — the grunge crowds
is where it's at, unless you start digging a little deeper, and then, quite
early on in the process, you discover oddities like Botch, a band whose
commercial career only lasted a couple of years and who were allegedly shunned
by the community at the time, yet came to be remembered with a certain amount
of reverence over the years. Then again, serves them just right for calling
themselves «Botch». I mean, who wants to pay attention to something called
«Botch»? At least «Stupid Assholes» would have sounded enticing.
In any case, the band was a tight, crunchy
four-piece — guitar, bass, drums (the drummer also played a bit of piano when
the «unpredictability monitor» flashed red), and vocals. Vocalist Dave Verellen
is actually the weakest link: consistent with the basic genre requirements of
«metalcore», he does little other than scream his lungs off throughout, and, as
usual, any possible excitement connected with this wears off after the second
minute, so, honestly, I'd much rather listen to this with the vocals erased, as
they mostly just detract from the complexity of the music. Or, at best, just
keep them in a few crucial moments where a well-placed scream can emphasize the
effect of some sudden powerful musical blast.
Fortunately, I have listened to so many of
these screaming bands over the years that my ears have become largely
desensitized to such vocals — a mistake, perhaps, since the vocals are supposed to be a significant part of
the statement, but with a band like Botch, the stuff that the three instrumentalists
are doing with their instruments is just so much more intriguing than
Verellen's one single trick that I cannot imagine any serious listener wasting
nerve channels on that instead of
digging all the cool riffs, tricky time signatures, and crazyass solos. Unless
you're heading straight for the mosh pit, but then why Botch in the first
place? Anthrax will do the job nicely.
Encyclopaedias will tell you that Botch were
one of the founding fathers of «mathcore», and, indeed, I am not familiar with
a lot of metal bands before them who would so explicitly use «metal language»
to put together song structures of such bewildering complexity and diversity.
Because of that language, it all sounds the same, but it really isn't — each
song goes through a whole pack of different melodies and rhythms, as the
instrumental trio attempts to become a sort of «metal Cream», amazing the world
with their freedom flight and faultless technique. On second thought, though,
the allegory is not entirely right — Cream improvisations often, if not always,
featured the players challenging each other, whereas here everything is tightly
pre-coordinated, and all three players are always working towards one common
goal.
The monotonousness of the music is a serious
flaw: apart from maybe one or two special moments, such as the out-of-place
funeral-march piano coda to ʽOmaʼ, it's all brutal metallic riffage,
supported by massive percussion attacks. For this reason, unless you eat,
drink, piss, and shit metal, American
Nervoso is best taken in short, merciful dosages to appreciate its concept
of «total creative freedom within a rigidly restricted genre formula». The
songs themselves do not pretend to be shapeless avantgarde experimental pieces
— they are, indeed, songs, often
without choruses, but with introductions, verses, bridges, internal
development, codas, the works. However, if your intro is in one time
signature, your verse is in a different one, and your bridge dispenses with
rhythm altogether, this certainly creates a disorienting effect. It is not
necessarily good: the riffs are not
always meaningful, and the rapid variation dissipates the Sabbath-created magic
of heavy metal — you gotta give that promising groove some valuable time to
sink in, otherwise it's going to be just a juggling lights show. But after a
while, once your eyes and ears get adjusted to the razzle-dazzle, it begins to
work.
The overall mood
of the album is, of course, chaotic-apocalyptic: "These mirrors break /
And now we've lost everything / Pieces collect about me / Despite my
efforts", Verellen bellows out on ʽDead For A Minuteʼ, except
you cannot discern these words without a lyrics sheet — but you can certainly
discern the same crazy-panicky feel that does characterize quite a few of their
distantly related brethren from the Seattle area, except that Botch exercise
strict military discipline, and their chaotic panic is precisely orchestrated —
not coincidentally, perhaps, the second song here bears the name of ʽJohn
Wooʼ, as some of its rhythmic pulses would make an awesome soundtrack to a
martial arts movie. Elsewhere, song titles like ʽDali's Praying
Mantisʼ or ʽThank God For Worker Beesʼ show that, conceptually,
these guys are much more influenced by avant-jazz people than the hardcore
metal crowds (and, just for the record, it is said that they actually played
Destiny's Child songs during warm-up before their shows — no wonder they
weren't too loved back in ol' Washington State!).
On the whole, American Nervoso is not a great album. Dissecting each of its
compositions from a purely musicological stance may be a fun way to kill time,
and its total may also be worth more than the sum of its parts — because, after
all, most of its songs do sound the same — yet much of the time you do get the
feeling that it is, rudely speaking, too complex for its own good, and topping
that complexity off with ridiculous screamfests is hardly a saving grace. But
for a simple bunch of Tacoma kids this is a major
achievement, one of those records that can be respected just by looking at what
they managed to have done without necessarily «getting» it. Frankly speaking,
there are very few heavy metal records that I «love» anyway, but quite a few
that command my respect, and Botch's debut does belong in that category. Thumbs up.
WE ARE THE ROMANS (1999)
1) To Our Friends In The Great
White North; 2) Mondrian Was A Liar; 3) Transitions From Persona To Object; 4)
Swimming The Channel Vs. Driving The Chunnel; 5) C. Thomas Howell As The
"Soul Man"; 6) Saint Matthew Returns To The Womb; 7) Frequency Ass
Bandit; 8) I Wanna Be A Sex Symbol On My Own Terms; 9) Man The Ramparts.
I don't think anyone would guess, just by
glancing at these song titles, that the underlying album would be metal. I
mean, just how many metal artists out there have references to Piet Mondrian or
C. Thomas Howell in their song titles? These ones really look like they'd
rather belong on a Frank Zappa record, or at least fit in better with some
indie poseur like Sufjan Stevens. It is, in fact, a total pity that such a
tremendous title as ʽI Wanna Be A Sex Symbol On My Own Termsʼ is
completely wasted on three and a half minutes of fairly routine, monotonous
metallic riffage and nearly endless head-splitting screaming. Ah well, it was
too good to work.
The good news is that Botch's second and final
album actually covers more stylistic ground than the first one — and a few of
the «artsier» tracks here should actually qualify as some of the finest heavy
rock offered to the world at the end of the decade. ʽTransitions From
Persona To Objectʼ is the composition that springs to mind first and
foremost — starting off with some dazzling polyrhythms, featuring guitarist
Dave Knudson and Tim Latona at their best, it eventually explodes into the
stratosphere, as Knudson hits upon a sweet, dry guitar tone and constructs a
minimalistic high-pitched solo that is truly mindblowing; later on, as the
melody shifts once again and becomes an angular King Crimson-style
trance-inducer, he brews up a few more overdubs that make the guitar(s) sound
like a meat-hungry swarm of killer bees for a while. That's a pretty awesome
soundtrack to the process of «transition from persona to object» — "see us
conquer all the humans that are left / This is our new home and we're still
building", screams Verellen, and we see that the band's rather persistent
obsession with the bee imagery (remember ʽThank God For Worker Beesʼ
and ʽHivesʼ) still holds on.
A couple of the tracks are not «metal» at all,
such as ʽSwimming The Channel Vs. Driving The Chunnelʼ (what could a
band from Tacoma know about that
contrast, I wonder?) — a slow bluesy shuffle carried forward by low-tuned,
scraggly indie-rock guitar, with more of a Sonic Youth influence than any kind
of metal flavor, gradually fizzling away into a hazy cloud of electronic hum
and hushed feedback. And the epic conclusion, ʽMan The Rampartsʼ,
beginning as the most warlike anthem of the album, eventually turns into a sea
of industrial bass rumble, then becomes a Gregorian chant of the album title,
and then returns to metal for just one brief minute in the climactic coda. But
no, this is nothing like Rammstein — Botch have no interest in Teutonic militaristic
clichés, they have their own equivalent of military brutality.
Even the shorter, more formulaic metal numbers
have their surprises. ʽC. Thomas Howellʼ, after an uninteresting
minute and a half of bland riffage, is given over to another series of
high-pitched guitar overdubs (geez, if only that stupid dick could keep his
larynx bolted for just one minute!)
that generate a cool psychedelic effect; and in general, I must say that I am
impressed by the solos on this album much more than I am by the riffs, which is
quite atypical for my metal-listening experience. Whenever Knudson is not
teaching his guitar to impersonate a killer bee swarm (which is his preferred
trick), he is making it grin, giggle, howl, and go off like an alarm siren,
rather than just go off at the usual million notes per minute. Listen to
ʽFrequency Ass Banditʼ from about 3:00 to about 3:24 — that's one
killer-crescendo solo indeed.
It's not as if the flaws of the record (and the
band in general) did not exist, of course — yes, it is still monotonous, yes,
the complexity of the riffs is undercut by their inefficiency, and yes, the
«singer» should be dragged out into the street and skinned alive (which is
exactly what his singing style suggests is happening to him). But that is sort
of understood. Maybe some day a good fairy will trot along and issue a record
of Botch covers that eliminate the vocals, clean up the riffs, and preserve all
the solos. Until then, this is just a very modest, but still somewhat respectful
thumbs up:
I appreciate the effort, and I even appreciate the effort it took to put
together relatively intelligent and, occasionally, even poetic lyrics for these
songs — despite knowing that nobody will ever be able to decipher one word
without some printed help. It takes a while to decode their message (same old o tempora, o mores! stuff — Cicero would
be proud, though), but once you do, it fits the insane, structurally-chaotic
music quite nicely. Oh, incidentally, isn't We Are The Romans supposed to be a bit of a pun on ʽWe Are
The Robotsʼ? I'm sure Kraftwerk must have been one of the influences on
these guys in any case.
YOUR FAVORITE WEAPON (2001)
1) The Shower Scene; 2) Jude
Law And A Semester Abroad; 3) Sudden Death In Carolina; 4) Mix Tape; 5) Failure
By Design; 6) Last Chance To Lose Your Keys; 7) Logan To Government Center; 8)
The No Seatbelt Song; 9) Seventy Times 7; 10) Secondary; 11) Magazines; 12)
Soco Amaretto Lime.
Time for a little bit of emo, of which Brand
New are the front line representatives in the New England area: Jesse Lacey on
vocals and rhythm guitar, Vincent Accardi on lead guitar, Garrett Tierney on
bass, and Brian Lace on drums — everything very concise and economical. This
debut album was released on the Triple Crown label and, apparently, did not
chart at all, but it helped them establish a footing, and even though it is
usually dismissed as a «stepping stone» to success, it is not really that
different from everything they'd do afterwards.
The angle under which this song collection
could be discussed best, as far as my perspective is concerned, is «why the
hell don't I hate this?» Because, really, the potential of this material
to annoy and irritate is glaringly obvious. The songwriting is shoddy, with
generic indie-rock riffs all over the place and the «quiet verse / loud chorus»
opposition serving as the basis for most of the hooks. The lyrical and
emotional themes of the songs concern breakups, breakups, and still more
breakups, regardless of the song titles (yes, even a song called ʽLogan To
Government Centerʼ is about a breakup — the title just metaphorically
refers to a highway exit near Boston). The vocals are screechy, and neither the
main nor the auxiliary guy have any individual manner of singing that would set
them apart from college rockers all over the world.
But on the positive side, there is at the same
time a tightness and a lightness to these tunes that makes these
guys tolerable, and at times even likeable. As a band, they are very well coordinated;
the drummer is smooth and flexible, the guitarists lock into each other with
perfect precision, and they merge together pop structures and punk simplicity
in a very professional fashion (they certainly know their skill way beyond
three chords, but this does not prevent them from a speedy and aggressive sound
whenever they feel like it). Even more importantly, there is a whiffy sense of
humor and a touch of intelligence behind the tunes — the songs are neither too
whiny nor too foul-mouthed. It's almost as if they had a plan, to try and take
this most boring of subjects (college boy meets college girl, shit happens,
college boy dumps college girl or vice versa) and see if they can present it in
a way that does not annoy the hell out of demanding listeners. It doesn't
always work, but they manage to do it while avoiding many of the usual
clichés.
The thing is, the lyrics on their own
look pretty darn bad ("so don't apologize, I hope you choke and die,
search your cell for something with which to hang yourself" is not an
atypical example), but they are delivered with a slightly ironic twist: this
nervous nerdy character that Lacey portraits in most of the songs sounds like
a half-sincere idiot, half-clown who feeds on nervous tension but never truly suffers
from suicidal (or even girlfriend-cidal) tendencies. On ʽMix Tapeʼ,
he drops an almost jokey self-reference ("And I'm sick of your tattoos,
and the way you don't appreciate Brand New... and me!"); on
ʽSecondaryʼ, full of lyrical references to self-mutilation and
suicide, he sings about all that stuff as if it were just an obligatory teenage
ritual — all too often, it seems like a parody on teen angst, and it
could well have been intentional.
Not that it saves the album from being
forgettable: melody-wise, the songs have little to distinguish themselves from
millions of equally faceless pop-punk chord sequences. But the sense of sarcasm
is refreshing, particularly on the last track, ʽSoco Amaretto Limeʼ,
a semi-drunk acoustic anthem proclaiming that "I'm gonna stay eighteen
forever" (hear that, Alice Cooper?), "we're the coolest kids and we
take what we can get", and, finally, "you're just jealous cause we're
young and in love" — all in perfect irony, of course. This is the best
possible course: instead of puffing and huffing and showing off the overblown
«tragic sincerity» of hormonal outbursts, lighten up and concentrate on the
«fun» aspect of failed relationships, if at all possible. No thumbs up, but I
expected so much worse that thumbing this down would feel unjust — even if
everybody around seems to agree that the band got much better after this record
(where I would quibble with the word «much», but that's just me).
DEJA ENTENDU (2003)
1) Tautou;
2) Sic Transit Gloria... Glory Fades; 3) I Will Play My Game Beneath The Spin
Light; 4) Okay I Believe You, But My Tommy Gun Don't; 5) The Quiet Things That
No One Ever Knows; 6) The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot; 7) Jaws Theme Swimming;
8) Me Vs. Maradona Vs. Elvis; 9) Guernica; 10) Good To Know That If I Ever Need
Attention All I Have To Do Is Die; 11) Play Crack The Sky.
Already these guys are getting more serious,
and I am not sure if they deserve such an enthusiastic pat on the back for
this as they did. Yes, it is hard not to notice that on their second album,
Brand New have moved way, way beyond writing about break-ups and are now
writing about... well, about whatever they might have caught on TV the day
before going into the studio, be it an Audrey Tautou movie or a Wes Anderson
movie or a documentary about the shipwreck of the FV Pelican way back in
1951 — all of these subjects and more get faithfully covered on the record, and
this, I guess, makes it more mature and makes their «emo» more substantial.
Unfortunately, the songwriting does not get
improved all by itself just because the covered topics get more serious (or do
they?). The lead single was ʽThe Quiet Things That No One Ever
Knowsʼ, a song about strained relationships (maybe; if you're not sure
what any song is about, write «strained relationships» and you have a 70%
probability of getting it right) with lots of metaphorical hospitals-and-blood
imagery (and an appropriate video) but also with a very generic alt-rock melody
that mostly rests either on power chords or on metronomically chugging guitars
— and plenty of screaming, of course (not very quiet). I guess it is still much
better than the average generic emo song — this one at least seems meticulously
thought over — but no pop genius is in evidence, and the chorus just sucks.
The second single was ʽSic Transit
Gloria...ʼ, and it at least has a cool-walking bassline that might remind
you of ʽThe Guns Of Brixtonʼ, but the screamy chorus still ends up
ruining it. Again I have no idea what the lyrics are about (seems to be at
least partially about sex, which covers the 29,99% ground of the remaining
probabilities), but I totally feel that the verses, where the vocals are
«side-tracked» to the left and to the right of the cool-walking bassline and
set up at least some sort of tense mood, deserve a much better, or at least
more subtle chorus. As it is, it is hard to get moved when they start raving
without any visible reasons whatsoever.
Amazingly, the best song on the album is also
its longest — with this predictable formula of hookless guitar pop and
meaningless screaming so firmly in place, you wouldn't think that Brand New
could be at their best when trying to craft a lengthy epic, but they are:
ʽGood To Know That If I Ever Need Attention, All I Have To Do Is Dieʼ is not
only a funny title, but it also has a loud power pop rather than «screamo»
chorus, and a couple of lengthy instrumental passages where Vincent Accardi
shows off some nice chops (as well as a ʽHotel Californiaʼ fetish). I
feel like most reviewers give up way before the end, so the song rarely, if
ever, gets a mention, but it is the most interesting composition on this
tiresome record — certainly better than whenever they break out the acoustic
guitars and begin to sound like R.E.M. on speed (ʽPlay Crack The
Skyʼ).
I know it's just the
regular emo formula and all, but the music here is largely generic, and so is
Jesse's singing — even with a formula in place, one could hope for more
involving guitar riffs or catchier choruses. As it is, I doubt that Déjà
Entendu, although it achieved some commercial success and got all those
positive reviews, will ever get past the original adoration of those young
adolescents with which these songs resonated in 2003, just because those
guys were young and fresh as well. I find this record just as devoid of musical
interest as its predecessor, but more pretentious, so a thumbs down is the proper way to go about
this.
THE DEVIL AND GOD ARE RAGING INSIDE ME (2006)
1) Sowing Season (Yeah); 2)
Millstone; 3) Jesus Christ; 4) Degausser; 5) Limousine; 6) You Won't Know; 7)
Welcome To Bangkok; 8) Not The Sun; 9) Luca; 10) Untitled; 11) Archers; 12)
Handcuffs.
Emotional pain. It's actually a real thing, and
most of us have probably experienced it — but the more I listen to 21st century
music that got critical acclaim for allegedly bottling and conveying waves of
emotional pain to the appreciative audience, the more I get the feeling — and
yes, maybe I am alone on this, but I don't care — the feeling that somehow, at
some elusive moment in time, musicians have simply lost the ability to express
their emotional pain in music in a convincing manner. Horribly, it even leads
me to suspect that they might have lost the ability to feel emotional
pain like a perfectly ordinary, reasonable, sensitive human being could feel
emotional pain. Is it stupid on my part? George Harrison, Roger Waters, Robert
Smith, Michael Stipe, Aimee Mann, Beth Gibbons — they feel and convey
emotional pain. But I have not yet felt a single properly bleeding heart from
anyone whose musical career would be separated by more than two thousand years
from the alleged birth of the greatest emotional sufferer of 'em all (did that
sound grossly pathetic? I thought it sounded grossly pathetic).
Case study: The Devil And God Are Raging Inside
Me, a pretentious title that suggests bracing yourself as you push play —
surely, with a statement like this, you can expect to be propelled head forward
into the scary turbulence of the Greatest Emotional Drama ever. The light and
the dark! The sin and the redemption! The suffering and the deliverance! The
crime and the punishment! Jesse Lacey has grown up, matured, became initiated
into the real serious issues of this world, and this is his take on the
grim plight of the human race. The stakes are higher than ever before, and
please expect a complete refund if you do not walk away from this experience a
deeply changed man, with your whole life to rethink and brand new goals and
promises to be made.
Unquestionably, in terms of overall development
this album rises high above Your Favorite Weapon, and corrects some of
the problems of Déjà Entendu. It is occasionally
intriguing, far from always predictable, and sufficiently restrained in that
the band does not come across as a bunch of annoying poseurs when you are
forced to inhale their tragic psychologism. But the main issue remains the
same: they just do not know. That is, according to my
perspective: you will, of course, find plenty of dissenting opinions on how
they totally blew the mind of some listener or other. I just wonder, in each
such case, where and how exactly our emotional receptors have parted ways —
finding it unimaginable that one could, for instance, experience the same kind
of strong, heartfelt response for this album as one could for, say, The Cure's Disintegration.
So let us take a look at the singles first.
ʽSowing Season (Yeah)ʼ, opening with a rather tedious minute-long
section of overlapping phone chat recordings, is a nicely constructed alt-rock
track that teaches us about the difficulties of building your life anew after
it had been blown to pieces by some unimaginably horrific experiences. But the
fact that Jesse Lacey did not, in fact, have all his relatives killed off in
World War Two does not bother me as much as the fact that the transition from
the quiet verse section into the bombastic-climactic chorus simply does not
have the (obviously intended) cathartic effect. The guitar riff that dominates
the chorus is well constructed, but it is more math-rockish than emotionally
involving, and the «wild» "yeah yeah"s that accompany it are puny
and superficial compared to, say, Kurt Cobain's — now there was a guy
who could crack a good "yeaaaaah" in such a way that you'd want to
quickly call 911 to his place. Lacey's "yeah"s, on the other hand,
can't help implying that... well, he'll get over it eventually.
The second single was ʽJesus Christʼ
— and, well, even with atheism on a steady rise everywhere, you'd still want to
think that choosing such a title imposes certain artistic obligations. And it
is actually a good song — until they start to scream, that is. The little
ringing guitar pattern, unoriginal as it is, can mesmerize you a little with
its steadiness, and the quiet atmosphere of the music goes very well with
Jesse's tense, confessional singing, and there is a pretty restrained guitar
solo, and the lyrics, dealing with insanity, death, and the afterlife, are
intelligent... but then they just can't handle that crescendo — they just begin
to scream, and it gets ugly without getting scary, and by the time they chant
"we all got wood and nails and we turn out hate in factories", I have
stopped being interested in the song. So sad, it started out so well.
On the non-singles material, they sometimes do
better: top prize here goes to the nearly eight-minute epic
ʽLimousineʼ, where the much lengthier crescendo fortunately succeeds
— after a few rather mediocre minutes, they grasp a good groove, settle into a
nice melancholic tonality, and work it out by adding layer after layer of
guitars, keyboards, and even strings, rather than simply resorting to more of that
ugly screaming. The "I love you so much / But do me a favor, baby, don't
reply" bit and its development shows that they are at least randomly
capable of gold mining, because there is romanticism here and tragedy and
determination, regardless of whatever the actual message might be (actually,
the song is about the accidental murder of a 7-year girl by a drunk driver),
and plenty of subtlety and accuracy and thoroughness of arrangement. If it
weren't for moments like these, the tables would have turned completely against
the band — but the likes of ʽLimousineʼ show that they do have
to be taken seriously, and that they do mature further and further with
each new record. And that makes the numerous flaws of Devil And God even
more infuriating against this background.
The hooky numbers, for instance, still tend to
be spoiled by overemoting: thus, ʽNot The Sunʼ is designed as a
somewhat «apocalyptic» rocker (its spirited intro, echoey production, and
overall tone remind me, for some reason, of Hendrix's ʽAll Along The
Watchtowerʼ) and even has some excellent guitar parts and a frantically
tight rhythm section, but there's just too much emphasis on screaming again —
an area in which Lacey is rarely convincing. ʽDegausserʼ sounds like
a bad parody on Arcade Fire, replete with droning guitars, anthemic, but
lackluster choir vocals, and soulful echoes — until the screaming comes in and
drowns out all the associations in head-splitting, but still boring loudness.
And so on, and on, and on.
Honestly speaking, I would really like to love
this album. At least, unlike quite a few other lazy hipsters who think that an
understanding of «soul» excuses you from understanding the obsolete notion of
«work», these guys are clearly trying — exploring many more types of textures
here than they used to, writing complex lyrics that tend to avoid
clichés, even displaying a healthy penchant for self-irony ("You're
shouting so loud, you barely joyous broken thing / You're a voice that never
sings" must be a self-reference, right?). It's just that almost
everywhere they stop just one or two important steps away from greatness. Why
not flesh out the hooks more? Why not work out the guitar figures better? Why
not refrain from screaming in favor of a more subtle approach (especially if
they are capable of subtlety)? Is it because they are unable to have
feelings that can be transposed to such kinds of hooks, or do they just not
know how to transpose?
In the end, no matter how much I listen, the
only thing that stays with me is the repetitive, mildly hypnotizing coda to
ʽLimousineʼ, and I have but to constatate that the ambitiousness,
although it does not destroy the record as a whole, does not pay off. I cannot
agree that the Devil and God are raging anywhere inside this album — at best,
they may have sent a couple of their lesser deputies. Nice level of cultural
erudition, but that's hardly sufficient foundation for an emotional
masterpiece. Then again, who knows, maybe it's just my grumpy bias speaking up.
DAISY (2009)
1) Vices; 2) Bed; 3) At The
Bottom; 4) Gasoline; 5) You Stole; 6) Be Gone; 7) Sink; 8) Bought A Bride; 9)
Daisy; 10) In A Jar; 11) Noro.
Eight years into their recording career, it is
difficult to expect that a band like Brand New — who, by this time, should really start thinking about a name
change — would be able to properly surprise their audiences. Most of the
critics who agreed to discuss Daisy
kinda sorta agreed that it was a «serious» effort, and that the band decided to
explore darker and subtler topics, and that evil word «maturity» also made more
than a single appearance, but you could also kinda sorta sense from the reviews
that nobody was really stunned by
this maturity. Because it is not as if Lacey or Accardi mastered any new skills
here, or acquired any specific insight. They are still willing to experiment
and look for new ways to express their irrational dissatisfaction with whatever
comes their way — that much is obvious. But they're still not geniuses. And
they still have solid potential to annoy and irritate, rather than amaze and
hypnotize.
Take the lead (and only) single, ʽAt The
Bottomʼ. The word «bottom», unless you use it in a sexual sense (but then
you use different prepositions), usually suggests the idea of desperation,
being at the end of one's rope. How does the music agree with it? It never
really gets more desperate than the somber bluesy electric guitar introduction
— then the verse melody is really just this one nicely bent chord, which then
explodes into a nice mess of slide guitar on the loud chorus, but how «bottom»
is that? And how convincing are those vocals, trying once again to convey an
aura of suffering and frustration — but failing, as far as I'm concerned,
because the music is limp and the lyrics are just too twisted for their own
good? "There's a lake / And at the bottom you will find my friends / They
don't swim cause they're all dead / We never are what we intend or invent"
— look, this is frickin' embarrassing, I'm just too old to pay serious
attention to this shit. Where's old Jim Morrison when you really need him? At
least he laid his pretentiousness
right on the line, not trying to pseudo-invent his own philosophical system
from hastily scrapped together pieces of existentialist broodings. Once Lacey
writes something as cool as "I woke up this morning and I got myself a
beer / The future's uncertain and the end is always near", please wake me
up.
And it's not as if it's a bad song, really — I like the way how the guitar melody
progresses from intro to verse to chorus, and I do find the chorus somewhat
catchy, and I like that they do not resort to all-out screaming. The only
thing I don't like, in fact, is that
there are no traces of a guitar solo — something that could really help out
here, but, well, you know, wishing for a guitar solo on an indie rock song is
like wishing for a sex scene in a Disney movie. So, all in all, I should be
kept happy here, and happily recommend the song to everybody. And yet — it just
feels so inadequate to the task. All these references to lake bottoms,
darkness, little lies, drowning in floods, "drugs on a silver plate",
they just feel pulled out of one's ass, set to feeble musical backing, and then
packaged as Great Human Tragedy. And it doesn't exactly feel «fake» — like
before, it feels confused. They're trying to get it out, but they don't know
how.
Now let us take the second longest song on the
album: ʽYou Stoleʼ, which, at six minutes running time, forms the
central pillar of Daisy. It takes
almost three minutes to build up to the (first) climax — and the guys should
be congratulated for avoiding the usual trap, as all the lyrics are delivered
in a hushed, mourning tone, whereas the loud climax is purely instrumental (but
even there they play a shrill
double-tracked guitar riff rather than a solo!). But that long build-up period
— during most of that, they sound like a handicapped tribute band to British
Sea Power, mimicking their love for depth, echoes, hush-hush, and mystery, but
only possessing like half of that band's skill for instrumental overlays that
actually provide the depth. Again, there is a semi-successful attempt at
achieving something — but no
bullseye.
Now let us go to something really pretentious and cryptic. ʽIn A Jarʼ has a guitar
riff that sounds like it were, in fact, played from within a jar, with the lid
screwed on so tightly it can barely let through a microphone cord. It also has
a tricky time signature, with a slightly offbeat rhythm that confuses the
senses. Then there are the words: "We live in a jar and think the lid's
the sky" (what is this, a rerun of The
Truman Show?), "you're hoping for a savior on your cross outside"
(outside the jar? is it you or the savior that is outside? I'm sort of confused
with these pronouns here), "stars are just a million little
fireflies" (nice simile, but hardly original), "the sun is just a
hole, it's the light outside" (have they been reading too much Einstein?).
Then, unfortunately, there's some screaming in the chorus, but you also get the
major decoding clue: "No one saves me cause I'm sinking slowly!".
Then you're supposed to go mad with desperation and really feel for the guy,
and for the whole universe, because your eyes have just been opened to the
meaninglessness and pointlessness of it all.
Okay, honestly, I know that silly sarcasm can
be used as a weapon against anything and anybody, so you are perfectly entitled
to seeing this as a series of cheap shots. What is expensive, though, is the
actual feelings I get when listening to this stuff — and they are almost
surprisingly neutral. Once again, Brand New just... deliver. Deliver a piece of
product that makes me respect them for their efforts, but does not make me love
them for the success of these efforts. As long as Lacey does not scream (and,
unfortunately, he does that quite a bit on many of the other songs), Daisy is perfectly listenable. It is
even meaningful — it sweats and struggles a lot to intellectualize its emotions
and emotionalize its intellect. But it just feels way too much like the
presupposition is "We suffer" and the rest is a desperate search for
the answer to the question "Why exactly is it that we are
suffering?", when it actually should feel the other way around — "something is not right", and then
"we suffer because something is not right". And this is why, no
matter how much I try, I just cannot relate to this album and its alleged
complexity.
I guess I will just finish this with another
bloody comparison: every time I hear Lacey proclaim that "I'm on my way to
hell" in the closing number, I close my eyes and just hum the chorus to
AC/DC's ʽHighway To Hellʼ, and think that, well, whaddaya know, so
many people on their way to hell, and each of them has his own attitude about
that, and even if in my own life I would probably be closer to Lacey's
personality than to Bon Scott's, in this particular case I'd rather relate to
Bon's attitude than Lacey's. Take my word for it — if you're really on your way to hell, don't bother
about puffing and huffing and aggrandizing yourself about it. In the end,
that's just vanity, and dressing it up in superficial complexity and cryptic
verbalizing won't make it into something else — certainly not into genuine,
convincing, empathetic suffering.
A COLLECTION OF SONGS RECORDED 1995-1997 (1998)
1) The Invisible Gardener; 2) Patient
Hope In New Snow; 3) Saturday As Usual; 4) Falling Out Of Love At This Volume;
5) Exaltation On A Cool, Kitchen Floor; 6) The Awful Sweetness Of Escaping
Sweat; 7) Puella Quam Amo Est Pulchra; 8) Driving Fast Through A Big City At
Night; 9) How Many Lights Do You See; 10) I Watched You Taking Off; 11) A
Celebration Upon Completion; 12) Emily, Sing Something Sweet; 13) All Of The
Truth; 14) One Straw (Please); 15) Lila; 16) A Few Minutes On Friday; 17) Supriya;
18) Solid Jackson; 19) Feb. 15th; 20) The 'Feel Good' Revolution.
In the Golden Age of Music, when the grass was
green, cheap, and promoted by Steppenwolf, and the «indie kids» did not draw
their power out of the very fact of being pigeonholed, every once in a while
there would arise a Poet, capable of stringing together exciting combinations
of words, but completely helpless when it came to setting these words to music.
And every once in a while he would decide to set those words to music anyway —
perhaps because it helped the Poet to reach out to a wider audience, or maybe
just because the Poet thought that some sort of non-human accompaniment was
required to complete the message.
What would the Poet do, then? Most often, he
would take a simple, familiar, folk-tradition-sanctified theme, and adapt the
lyrics to it — never pretending to any musical breakthroughs, just getting
himself a well-oiled musical launchpad for his charismatic individuality (or
for his annoying egomaniacality, whichever way you'd like to call it). Think
Leonard Cohen or someone of his ilk, and there you'd have it — nobody in his
right mind would call Cohen a great musician or composer, although he is
definitely much more than just a «lyricist».
But times have changed since then, and now here
comes Conor Oberst, an aspiring young singer-songwriter from Omaha, Nebraska,
whose creative streak begins around 1992, when he was just a measly 13 years
old. Young Conor Oberst has a poetic gift — one might love his creations, or
hate them, but it is undeniable that not everyone
can write at 20, 30, or 90 like Mr. Oberst could at 15. Problematically, Mr.
Oberst does not have any other gifts:
I would not go as far as to suggest that Mr. Oberst is «tonedeaf», but that is one of the options, even if the
critics rarely dare to mention it (why face a potential slander suit from
someone who provides you with your daily bread?). At the very least, Mr. Oberst
is practically incapable of writing a «song» in the most banal understanding
of the term — and I insist on «incapable», not on «unwilling».
Be it in 1967, Mr. Oberst could, perhaps,
follow the Cohen route, and set his poetic musings to simple adaptations of and
simpler variations on the great musical legacy of thousands of nameless folk
heroes of the Old and New Worlds combined. But in the mid-1990s, such an
approach would be considered obsolete, uncool, and undeserving of a young,
ambitious, expressive, and, above all, brutally HONEST and anti-commercial
artist. Above all, «indie aesthetics» requires honesty before the listener;
throw on some serious poetic talent, and what else do you really need?
Nothing, really, and that is why there is nothing else on Conor Oberst's debut
album for his grandest project, the one-man band Bright Eyes. Well, other than
a battered, frequently out of tune acoustic guitar, occasional rudimentary
electronics / drum machines, some cheap recording equipment, and probably a
bedroom. (A few of Conor's friends, mostly amateur musicians from Omaha, some
of whom also played in his earlier «band», Commander Venus, guest on a tiny
handful of these tracks, but something like eighty percent of the time it's
just The Creative Young Man on his solitary own). In a different world, an
album like this would have been laughed off the bat — imagine putting on Please Please Me and hearing a Cavern
Club-quality recording of ʽI Lost My Little Girlʼ and ʽIn Spite
Of All The Dangerʼ instead of ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ. But in
this mad, mad, mad, mad world we
happen to live in, A Collection Of Songs
actually managed to garner some positive
reactions — even some reviewers who obviously did not like it still found it necessary to write something like: «Even
at a young age, it's clear that Oberst is an extremely talented songwriter, seemingly incapable of penning a bad tune...». Thus quoth Nathan Bush of the
All-Music Guide; then, having realized what he has just done one second too
late, reluctant to de-quoth himself, he heads straight for the back door —
«...(except in the odd case when you sense he didn't try)». Nice try, Mr. Bush
of the All-Music Guide!
Unfortunately, as far as my ear is concerned, this whole record consists of nothing but «odd
cases», arguably making it one of the oddest albums ever released. ʽThe
Invisible Gardenerʼ unlocks the experience with a swift electronic burst,
as if you are about to be sent into outer space; three seconds later, the tape
recorder clicks, a simple acoustic accompaniment pattern is given a false
start, and then it comes again, this time accompanied with an equally trivial
«electronic harmonium» pattern. Two and a half minutes later, you might want
to ask yourself: «Say! Isn't that just
the kind of music-making you'd expect to hear from any fifteen-year old with a tape recorder and a tiny bit of musical
education? What strange chain of events has led me into sitting here and
listening to this, when I could be saving the world from cancer or dubstep
instead?»
But two and a half minutes later also comes the
first vocal number, and it provides a response. The lyrics aren't exactly
jaw-dropping, but they are fairly respectable for someone who wrote them at the
age of 15 or 16: not too overloaded with fashionable clichés and
«intellectual metaphors», not overtly romantic, melancholic, or suicidal — and
not dumb, either. At any rate, I do not feel too irritated by this wordy stuff
as long as I remember the age of the writer. ʽPatient Hope In New
Showʼ is basically an ʽI Want To Hold Your Handʼ in a world that
has long outgrown 1963, and now we have "and for a moment I could want
nothing, your bright eyes burn through my exploding heart" instead.
Where I do
feel irritated is the delivery department. Conor Oberst would learn to get better as the years went by, but here it almost
seems as if he is struggling with puberty before our very eyes: almost everything
comes out in a tuneless, strained, grating rasp, occasionally rising to a wild
howl without losing the rasp. Try
howling and rasping at the same time — see how long it is before they put you
in a straightjacket, and this guy
managed to avoid the people in white long enough to record an hour's worth of
this cr... er, I mean, «quintessence of honesty».
There is no need to discuss the individual
«songs», because most of these creations are not really «songs» — they are
nearly formless, only vaguely outlined demo-level sketches. ʽFalling Out
Of Love At This Volumeʼ stands out by being faster and more rhythmic than
the rest, with faint hints at a guitar hook and an attitude reminiscent of
early Cars (ʽJust What I Neededʼ, etc.); and ʽOne Straw
(Please)ʼ features real drums and a basic pop-rock swagger. The rest all
seem to have been made on the spot, with Conor dragging out his notebooks and
just setting the words to whatever sequences of freshly learned chords came
along.
Now the thing is, I do not believe that this
young gentleman has any real musical talent, but neither, after all, did
Leonard Cohen, and it is possible
sometimes to get by on the strength of attitude alone, or workmanship and
craft alone, or a combination of both. But these raw sketches do not have
enough attitude: every time Conor tries to sing in a «normal» voice / whisper,
it just comes out «normal» — and boring — and every time he begins rasping and
howling, the whole experience just becomes unbearable. As for «workmanship»...
well, I do not think even the man himself would be able to or wanting to defend
the record as a «solid» offering.
Sure, in a way, it takes GUTS to introduce
yourself to the world with your early jottings instead of saving them up for a
twenty-years-later archival release, targeted at armies of fans. But with the
indie aesthetics in full flight, and with the whole lo-fi craze, and with the
general easiness of releasing anything
these days (even if these particular days still predated Myspace), in 1998 this
kind of move was not that gutsy —
fact is, no matter what sort of shit you release, as long as it agrees with
certain trends of the day, you will always end up with at least a minor
fanbase. Thus, I fail to appreciate the gesture.
Maybe the best thing is to just download the
lyrics — as I said, they are damn good for their «age group», and it is always
a gas to find a title rendered in proper Latin (ʽPuella Quam Amo Est
Pulchraʼ), even if it seems to have been taken from an elementary textbook
of the language rather than from Catullus, to whose laurels Conor Oberst may be
secretly aspiring. Also, as a sidenote, there is really something eerie about the way in which Oberst howls out
"Emily, sing something sweet for me" — maybe they did put him in a straightjacket, after
all. But overall, this is a certified thumbs down if there ever was one.
LETTING OFF THE HAPPINESS (1998)
1) If Winter Ends; 2) Padraic
My Prince; 3) Contrast And Compare; 4) The City Has Sex; 5) The Difference In The
Shades; 6) Touch; 7) June On The West Coast; 8) Pull My Hair; 9) A Poetic
Retelling Of An Unfortunate Seduction; 10) Tereza And Tomas.
On his «proper» debut for Saddle Creek Records,
allegedly written and recorded as a cohesive LP, Conor Oberst is apparently
still «seemingly incapable of penning a bad tune», meaning that the album is
only marginally more listenable than A
Collection Of Songs. The best I can say is that, this time around, it at
least does sound like «a collection of songs» (mostly bad ones), rather than «a
collection of sketches that most 12-to-15-year-olds usually stuff under their
beds». Thus, if there is any reason to call «Bright Eyes» an actual band, the
reason might as well start here.
The first two songs will probably be enough to
determine everybody's feelings. I find them totally unlistenable — interesting
melodic input amounts to zero and then falls below, and the singing... well,
keep in mind that this is still slightly before
Oberst found his trademark «tremolo bleating» manner; here, he still seems to
be going for the «drunk soulful hipster» approach, one of the most infernal
images known to mankind.
"And I give myself three days to feel
better / Or else I swear I'm driving off a fucking cliff", he blurts out
in the opening number. Since the album has been praised so much for the
«sincerity» of its emotions, I can only assume that three days after recording
the song, Oberst did feel better. The question is — once he did, why the heck
didn't he throw away all of these recordings and replace them with something
more worthwhile? Some people, when they feel bad, should probably keep away
from the studio, especially if they cannot stay focused on anything other than
feeling bad. Millions of people all over the world are feeling bad at the
exact moment that I'm typing this. Heck, I'm not feeling too good myself. But
even so, I'd rather go and just bang my head against the wall than sympathize
with the plight of one Mr. Oberst from Omaha, Nebraska, who, at the tender age
of 18, seems to be more pissed off at life than Dr. Faust in his twilight years
— most of it because he doesn't seem to be able to get it on with chicks. (On
the other hand, at least he is being
honest about it: "And I fell for the promise of a life with a purpose /
But I know that's impossible now" is quickly followed by "...because
I just can't think anymore about that or about her tonight". Yes, we do know that in most of these cases it
is a she that is responsible for most
of the problems, not an impersonal metaphysical transcendental it.) Aw come on now, Conor, chicks are
trash, just get over it and find your future in furniture polishing. Or
speleology.
About a third of the «songs» is just Oberst
with his broken-hearted raspy screaming; on the other tunes, he is joined by
some of his compadres on drums, bass, electric guitars, and poorly tuned or
downright broken electronic instruments. Everything is conventionally lo-fi,
stumbling, unrehearsed, and, for the most part, melodically primitive. Deadly
slow, too, meaning that the only fast-paced song on the album, ʽThe City
Has Sexʼ, will pass off as a highlight by definition — for its frenzied,
but still underworked, country-rock arrangement, and its title, which is
pronounced far more completely in the opening line: "The city has sex with
itself, I suppose". The last verse of the tune is quite telling as well:
"And I scream, but I still don't know why I do it / Because the sound never
stays, it just swells and decays / So what is the point? / Why try to fight
what is now so certain? / The truth is all that I am is a passing event that
will be forgotten". Yes, yes, YES! Listen to Mr. Oberst speak the
truth about himself.
There is exactly one track on the entire album
that I found myself caring about — ʽContrast And Compareʼ, a duet
with Neely Jenkins who's got the sweetest voice ever; this creates a sort of
beauty-and-the-beast effect on the tune that works much better on the nerves,
and it is only too bad that Oberst did not make more use of this contrast on
the other songs as well. By all means, ʽTereza And Tomasʼ, a song
that is supposed to bring a relatively peaceful and romantic end to the album,
could have benefited from Neely's contribution — if Oberst cannot sing, this
does not necessarily mean that every Bright Eyes song is unfit for a real
singer.
Overall, I can only repeat what I have already
said a million times about modern bands. To sing about the literal or figurative End Of The World when you
are 15 or even 18 years old is a ridiculous occupation, unless you have at
least won the Nobel Prize when you were 12. To sing about the End Of The World
when you are 18 years old and cannot sing
— or play — or come up with a unique sound — or write interesting, memorable
melodies — or get professional musicians to do all these things for you — or
compensate for the lack of everything with at least something that goes beyond «hmm, decent enough lyrics for a
teenager» — is simply abysmal. Thumbs down all the way to the floor; I see no
reason why, on any objective or subjective scale, this crap should be
preferable to Justin Bieber.
FEVERS AND MIRRORS (2000)
1) A Spindle, A Darkness, A
Fever And A Necklace; 2) A Scale, A Mirror And Those Indifferent Clocks; 3) The
Calendar Hung Itself; 4) Something Vague; 5) The Movement Of A Hand; 6) Arienette;
7) When The Curious Girl Realizes She Is Under Glass; 8) Haligh, Haligh, A Lie,
Haligh; 9) The Center Of The World; 10) Sunrise, Sunset; 11) An Attempt To Tip The
Scales; 12) A Song To Pass The Time.
Critic alert! For the first time in Bright Eyes
history, Conor Oberst is trying to apply his (lack of) musical talent to the
craft of writing and recording actual music.
What used to be, only recently, just rudimentary acoustic guitar patterns, is
getting seriously expanded: no less than ten different musicians are involved
in the project now, and the mysterious «Omaha sound» is gradually becoming
decloaked. Now it basically means: «play the same simple shit, but dress it up
in as many musical layers as possible to make up for the lack of interesting
chord progressions».
For instance, already on the second track we
have this little chamber piece where Conor is playing an organ, perennial
partner Mike Mogis is bowing a pedal steel, Jiha Lee is fiddling with the
flute, and A. J. Mogis is punching the piano — all at the same time, imagine that! Almost enough to make you
forget that the music is just a simple country waltz, and that all of the parts
supplied by the extra musicians are rather predictable flourishes that bake up
the mood in strict accordance with traditional old recipés. One
impressive musical hook, just one, could have saved the situation, but we are
not going to get so lucky.
The good news is that, although Oberst still
has a long way to go towards mastering the art of songwriting, Fevers And Mirrors is nowhere near as
irritating in its misery as Oberst’s early escapades, mainly because he is
trying to find a more accessible voice for himself, without losing the
individuality. Now most of the wailings are produced with a «bleating» tone —
more quiet, more frail, less intrusive. If there is an infectious patient
running around town and scattering his bacteria in everybody’s direction, after
all, everybody’s only immediate concern will be to get the sick guy back into
bed. On Fevers And Mirrors, the sick
guy grudgingly does return to bed, and stays there most of the time, blearily
contemplating his fevers in his mirrors.
He does still attempt to make a few escapades —
like on ʽThe Calendar Hung Itselfʼ, whose prime point of attraction
is a little foam-at-the-mouth hysteria staged around a «mad» chanting of
ʽYou Are My Sunshineʼ that is supposed to reflect the protagonist’s
suicidal desperation (she’s gone, you know, and this is sufficient ground for
behaving like an ugly spoiled teenager, unfortunately suffering from a little
bit of poetic gift, etc. etc.). As unbearably pretentious as that moment is,
it is at least a moment that kind of stays with you, so there must have been something to the idea, if only it were
realized better.
Everything that comes afterwards mostly follows
the same formula. Slow, steady, rhythmic backgrounds with a rootsy backbone,
«graced» by various instrumentation that is not usually associated with
«rootsy» — vibraphones, Mellotrons, flutes, various «treated» guitars and keyboards,
etc. — in addition to the predictable stuff like pedal steel and accordeons. No
matter how intricate the arrangements are, though, nothing sticks around for
too long, and everything seems to be merely a comfy setting for Oberst’s
lyrical floodwaves.
Realising, perhaps, that the floodwaves might
eventually flood the listener’s patience, Oberst takes a little jab at himself
with the aptly titled ʽAn Attempt To Tip The Scalesʼ — a song that
disappears rather quickly, in order to make way for a staged «interview»
between an announcer and a guy impersonating Oberst himself, so thoroughly full
of himself (and it) that it is impossible
to take any of those replicas seriously. The uncomfortable feeling is that the
impersonator is not so much trying to impersonate the real Oberst, as he is
trying to capture the spirit of vintage Bob Dylan interviews (the ones in which
Bob would turn the interviewer’s boring questions back at the interviewer
himself), but without a firm hold on Bob’s complexity or humor.
Humor is actually the key element here: if the real
Dylan ever tried to befuddle an interviewer by saying “I do have a brother who
drowned in a bathtub... actually, I had five brothers who died that way. My
mother drowned one every year for five consecutive years. They were all named
Padraic, so they all got one song”, it would be in firm keeping with his
regular artistic persona, for whom humor, all kinds of it, was an integral
part. But nothing about Oberst is ever funny — and so this attempt to have a
little «forced laugh» at the expense of his alter ego does not succeed. It
certainly breaks up the predictability of the flow, but I wouldn’t put it down
as a healthy contribution to the «Artistic Reputation Improvement Fund».
If you really, really want to make yourself
like Bright Eyes, try ʽMovement Of A Handʼ. Oberst is easier to
tolerate when he puts away at least a small part of his self-pitying (although
this happens very rarely), and on
this particular track, the Rhodes piano / dulcimer / Mellotron arrangement
plus Jiha Lee’s backing vocals — ever so often, Oberst’s only salvation comes
from a nice girl who can sing better than he does — create a mood that is so
sympathetic, I could even find it «enchanting» on a particularly auspicious
day. Yet this is only an exception; already on ʽArienetteʼ, the guy
is back to his cosmic misery.
Lyrically, I do not see any positive or
negative growth. There are so many words here, such an endless sea of metaphors
both boring and startling that we could spend years dissecting them, but I am really reluctant to discuss lyrics whose
only underlying subject had already long ago been sufficiently well covered by
John Lennon in just one phrase: “If I were you, I’d realize that I love you
more than any other guy”. If you are eighteen years old, relatively straight
(it’s a big question whether Conor Oberst has any appeal for gay audiences),
and have psychological troubles adapting to the opposite sex, these songs may
have a consoling message for you (at least you’ll know that you are not alone).
Go one step further and that’s it. This ain’t a case of «Romeo and Juliet»,
really, it’s a case of masochistically picking at a small paper cut to see if
you can get it to inflame — nothing like a nice little gangrene to keep one’s
spirit healthy.
The only reason why I don’t give the album an
overall negative assessment is because it is really «neutral» rather than overtly
«negative». Behind all the nicely planned multi-layered arrangements Oberst’s
angst and personal apocalypse does not hit as hard on the nerves, so the album
just goes by, unfelt, unnoticed, but inspiring a little hope that this could be the beginning of real musical
growth. A little, but not too much — Conor Oberst is clearly not going to
sacrifice his rich inner universe for the sakes of writing stupid antiquated
things like «original melodies».
LIFTED OR THE STORY IS IN THE SOIL, KEEP YOUR
EAR TO THE GROUND (2002)
1) Big Picture; 2) Method
Acting; 3) False Advertising; 4) You Will. You? Will. You? Will; 5) Lover I
Don't Have To Love; 6) Bowl Of Oranges; 7) Don't Know When But A Day Is Gonna
Come; 8) Nothing Gets Crossed Out; 9) Make War; 10) Waste Of Paint; 11) From A
Balance Beam; 12) Laura Laurent; 13) Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love And To
Be Loved).
«Why is he suffering so much?» my wife asked me
during the last minutes of ʽWaste Of Paintʼ, which I, for some
mysterious reasons, was listening to without the headphones. «Did his girlfriend
die or anything?» That was the moment when I understood that that was it, that the Bright Eyes were finished
for me — because this was the first time ever that I was asked that question.
Syd Barrett, Neil Young, Robert Smith, Peter Gabriel, and even Badly Drawn Boy
— all of them survived in the end, but the fate of Conor Oberst was sealed,
once and for all. It sort of snapped me out of that oozy, dreamy state where I
was... well, not exactly ready to fall under this guy's charm, but at least
sort of accept his whinery as a given fact of life. Like, some people yell and
other people whine, and then there should be tolerance and all.
But no, really. On this album, which could have
easily been called Lifted, but
one-word album titles are for laconic sissies, Conor puts the wheel in reverse
and, for the most part, dispenses with the intricate arrangements of Fevers And Mirrors, with just a few
notable exceptions that will be noted later. On such minimalistic, but bleeding
long acoustic rants as ʽBig
Pictureʼ and ʽWaste Of Paintʼ, he seems to be trying to earn his
«modern day Dylan» reputation, except that Dylan always took better care of
his guitar accompaniment and never ripped as many shirts along the way. At the
very least, ʽBig Pictureʼ justifies its title by no longer being
exclusively tied to some sort of «woman trouble» — it's a well-made declaration
of personal and artistic freedom, but really, Conor, there is no need to impersonate a tortured,
mutilated revolutionary being led to the guillotine. You're only 22 years old,
everything will work out. Maybe you ought to move to North Korea for a couple
of years, it'll do you good.
When the «songs» reluctantly agree to be more
than just a couple of acoustic chords, they still tend to just roll along doing
nothing, like the «grand» ten-minute conclusion of ʽLet's Not Shit
Ourselvesʼ. Maybe it is Oberst's
ʽDesolation Rowʼ, but even ʽDesolation Rowʼ had a nifty acoustic
riff running through it; here, the «music»'s only purpose is to provide
Oberst's grand anti-establishment rant with a toe-tapping beat. Sincerity?
Who gives a damn about sincerity when nothing about your sincerity makes it any more attractive than anyone else's sincerity? Or was there no one
else in 2002 brave enough to let The Truth out, other than Conor Oberst? The most annoying thing about these
«soulful» deliveries is that they are delivered as if the man was a fuckin'
Cassandra — completely alone in a world of deaf and dumb people. (Well, I don't
know, maybe in Omaha... but nah, not really).
The only substantial musical idea on the entire
album may be found on ʽDon't Know Whenʼ, where most of the verses are
sung to a simple folk-dirge melody with a simple, but effective chord
progression. In a way, it almost works like a mantra, and if only Oberst did
not eventually succumb to the temptation of ripping one more shirt and
self-exploding in a fit of drunken ire, it could almost become seductive — but
this guy is under a firm conviction that «sincerity» and «perfectionism» are
mortal enemies, and in their endless struggle he knows only too well whose side he will take.
Of course, there are still quite a few numbers
featuring complex arrangements — no surprise here, since a mind-boggling twenty-five musicians altogether were
involved in the making of the album, making it a serious contender for «hugest
waste of talent ever». Well, not all of these musicians are equally talented, I
guess, but on such tracks as ʽLover I Don't Have To Loveʼ or
ʽFrom A Balance Beamʼ the keyboards and strings work very well, as
before, trying to dress the man's non-descript compositions in shiny
technicolor robes. On others, like ʽMake Warʼ, they are going for a «lo-fi
country» approach, with slide guitars and harmonicas at the ready. To no avail.
Not that you should take my opinion: Rolling
Stone itself rated Lifted as the
fourth greatest album of 2002, and even The Dean himself, Mr. Robert "I
Dare You To Fill In The Blanks In My Opinions, Punk" Christgau invited us
all to "feel or indulge his suffering youth" and be awarded with awe.
Maybe for all these guys, the weaving techniques of Mr. Oberst really work. Or
maybe they were simply so hungry for «genuine rough-cut emotion» after all
those years of post-modern cynicism that even Conor Oberst would do. It might
not be a coincidence, really, that the Bright Eyes' ratings seriously plummeted
with the emergence of Arcade Fire — as far as I'm concerned, when you got Win
Butler, the need to have Conor Oberst dissipates in a flash. Thumbs down,
anyway: the few decent arrangements that we have here cannot compensate for at
least a half hour's worth of total abomination.
A CHRISTMAS ALBUM (2002)
1) Away In A Manger; 2) Blue
Christmas; 3) Oh Little Town Of Bethlehem; 4) God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen; 5)
The First Noel; 6) Little Drummer Boy; 7) White Christmas; 8) Silent Night; 9)
Silver Bells; 10) Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas; 11) The Night Before
Christmas.
My favorite Bright Eyes album ever, bar none. Not that I'd want to ever
listen to it again, mind you, but there is one thing you cannot deny — no other
Bright Eyes album has such a concentrated wallop of brilliant, hook-filled melodies over the course of a measly
half-hour. ʽGod Rest Ye Merry Gentlemenʼ? Conor Oberst couldn't even
begin to dream of writing such a
brilliant tune. ʽWhite Christmasʼ? The entire Bright Eyes catalog is
exchangeable for that one, and take half of Omaha's musical collectives as a
free bonus. ʽThe Night Before Christmasʼ? Now that's what I call poetry, «you take all your smart modern
writers», like Ray Davies said...
...okay, that's getting carried a bit too far,
I admit. But seriously, as far as Christmas albums go, this one is no worse
than most others, and as far as Bright Eyes albums go, I'd really rather have a
Christmas album from these people than sixty minutes of their original «tunes».
There is one added bonus: no matter how obnoxious and annoying Conor may seem
in person (in «musical» person, I mean: in «real» person, I have no idea), he
has this odd talent of attracting sympathetic female performers, sometimes
endowed with the prettiest of voices and nicest of attitudes. Here, his main
partner is Alabama-born Maria Taylor, who plays some of the keyboards, sings
about half of the songs (praise God!) and co-arranges most of them.
Production values remain targeted at the indie
market — several tunes are defiantly lo-fi, some are defiantly underarranged,
and almost everything is made to suffer from a mild form of
«un-listen-abili-tosis» one way or another (including sprinklings of electronic
noises, echo and other effects cast over traditional instruments, absurdly
slowed down tempos, whatever). But that's just to make sure that, God forbid,
any of your grandparents should unexpectedly take a liking to the album and
start playing it instead of their Sinatra records.
Under that slightly scratchy surface, however,
rests a perfectly normal Christmas album with very nice folksy crooning vocals
from Taylor (ʽAway In A Mangerʼ, ʽWhite Christmasʼ),
attempts on Conor's part to sing in a normal
voice — yes, he does have one, and even though it can never be completely free
of whiny overtones, they are actually quite in place on ʽBlue
Christmasʼ, and even more so on ʽHave Yourself A Merry Little
Christmasʼ (after all, you can't expect to actually have someone sing
this song to you in a merry mood and
get away with it, can you?).
There is even some modestly successful
experimentation here, like with ʽLittle Drummer Boyʼ, which they
deconstruct by distorting every sound channel, and then punch up with some
crunchy martial drumming to match the title; or with ʽSilent Nightʼ,
where the vocals quickly disappear, giving way to a slow, supposedly-mesmerizing
mix of dreamy country guitars with psychedelic effects. On the other hand,
ending the album with a full recital of ʽTwas The Night Before Christmasʼ,
blandly performed by some grumbly guy against a minimalistic piano backdrop,
is, at best, an anticlimactic idea — provided that one could expect a «climax»
from an album like this in the first place, of course.
Clearly, the whole thing was little more than a
killing-time project, or, perhaps, just a quick cash-in on Conor's growing
popularity — generous cash-in, since
the proceeds of the album have been said to go to the «Nebraska AIDS Project» —
but I was genuinely surprised at how much of the repulsive side of Bright Eyes
was cut off here, while still leaving some of Oberst's typical, and least
annoying, trademarks; and I am a bit puzzled at the frequently violent
rejection of the record encountered among the fans. Yes, it is a «generic
Christmas album», but hey, if you take Oberst as your guru, you have to try and
put some sense into it anyway; and if you do not take Oberst as your guru, it's all the more nice to realize
he's finally made an album where he isn't trying to teach you something. In the
general line of things, it is quickly forgettable; in the overall context of
Bright Eyes' history, it works better than I could have imagined.
I'M WIDE AWAKE, IT'S MORNING (2005)
1) At The Bottom Of
Everything; 2) We Are Nowhere And It's Now; 3) Old Soul Song (For The New World
Order); 4) Lua; 5) Train Under Water; 6) First Day Of My Life; 7) Another
Travelin' Song; 8) Landlocked Blues; 9) Poison Oak; 10) Road To Joy.
How difficult can it be for a young artist to
record two full-length albums at the same time and release them
simultaneously? Maybe not too
difficult if the artist in question does not bother to write any new melodies
on either one. Why bother, indeed, if a bunch of anonymous hillbillies, Woody
Guthrie, and Ludwig van Beethoven already did all the job for you. The good
news is — none of them are going to
show up and sue you when you least expect it.
Okay, that might have been a little harsh. But
the really weird thing here is that it is I'm
Wide Awake that got the most critical praise, rather than Digital Ash, and from a strictly
musical point of view, there is no way that this could be justified — Digital Ash would be largely
experimental and at least occasionally
successful, whereas I'm Wide Awake
sounds like it could have been recorded in the heart of Nashville by a bunch
of understudies awarded a couple of hours in one of the city's studios (the
actual sessions all took place somewhere in Nebraska).
Yes, Emmylou Harris, whom I do respect a lot
and whose talents and gifts I acknowledge quite gratefully, does contribute
backing or dueting vocals on three of these tracks — this reflects Conor's odd,
hypnotizing talent (one of the very few talents he does have) to attract
celebrities to give his non-descript creations more «weight». It would have
been much better, though, if he just handed all
the vocal duties to her, or, for that matter, to Maria Taylor, who had already
made that Christmas experience so much lovelier than one would expect — now,
again, she is reduced to backups on just two of the songs. What's that he says
on ʽLand Locked Bluesʼ? "If you love something, give it
away"? Well, how about giving away the right to sing lead, when there are
all those lovely ladies around you, Conor?
Okay, seriously now. The music here is all generic country and folk, half of it arranged
with the bare minimum of instruments (simple acoustic guitar, sometimes with a
quiet rhythm section or an extra guitar part in the background), the other half
getting the full country treatment — slide and steel guitars, harmonicas, a bit
of keyboards, an occasional trumpet, the works. The only exception to the
genre rule is ʽRoad To Joyʼ, which takes the textbook part of
Beethoven's 9th and turns it into a country tune, too, slowly building up the
volume and aggression level towards the end. A meaningful musical joke? Maybe
if it capped off an album of startling originality and inventiveness, I could
say yes. As it is, I find that I cannot.
Of course, it's all in the attitude. But we
already know the attitude, and the attitude hasn't changed much. As somebody
who finds himself completely unable and unwilling to fall under the spell with
which Conor Oberst frequently turns people into his personal slaves («Conor
Oberst sends shivers down my spine, and I'm not afraid to admit it», quoth the
Pitchfork review guy who gave this album an 8.7), I still find his lyrics creative
and, perhaps, even getting craftier and craftier with each new record (a line
like "the sun came up with no conclusions" is crafty, you'll have to admit it), but the way that he gets them
out of his system is, at worst, very poor theater, and at best, a repulsive
overstatement of his sincerity. This is not a Shakespearian universe. We're
living in post-Dylan times, and if you can't cope with that, well, get yourself
a time machine or something. The combination of these simple-as-hell melodic
skeletons with this atmosphere of pathos and cosmic suffering is unbearably
ridiculous.
At least most of the tunes are relatively short
(except for the worst ones, which are usually long because they crawl along at
snailish tempos), consist of more than one chord, occasionally — very rarely —
develop into mildly pleasant country jamming (ʽTrain Under Waterʼ is
a damn fine sound for everyone who isn't completely alergic to country — that
is, whenever Oberst shuts up and lets the instrumental players take over), and
sporadically — even more rarely — come close to having a tiny bit of an
original vocal hook (e. g. the "...yeah they go wild" bit on
ʽOld Soul Songʼ, which, going against its title, is one of the most
individualistic tunes on here).
Hence, I have no violent hate towards the
record, nor would I care to propagate any. Maybe the cunning young lad from
Omaha was right in using Emmylou Harris and Ludwig van as protective talismans
— their ex- and implicit presence, respectively, is what turns I'm Wide Awake from a middle-of-the-road
modern country album into something that can get a rave review from Pitchfork.
But I would rather go along with the reknowned Stephen Thomas Erlewine of the
AMG, who said this of Oberst: «Instead of reaching musical maturity, he's wallowing
in a perpetual adolescence». Brilliantly said, mister, even if I disagree with
your mainstreamish judgements something like 70% of all the times. But here,
you have entitled me to my next thumbs down.
DIGITAL ASH IN A DIGITAL URN (2005)
1) Time Code; 2) Gold Mine
Gutted; 3) Arc Of Time (Time Code); 4) Down In A Rabbit Hole; 5) Take It Easy
(Love Nothing); 6) Hit The Switch; 7) I Believe In Symmetry; 8) Devil In The
Details; 9) Ship In A Bottle; 10) Light Pollution; 11) Theme From
Piñata; 12) Easy/Lucky/Free.
Of the two studio albums released
simultaneously, Digital Ash seems to
have received more critical flack and a little less fan respect, mainly because
the word Digital in the title
immediately focuses our attention on Conor's extensive use of electronics. I
mean — yeah, what the hell, this is Bright Eyes and their frosty «Omaha sound»,
where the heck do synthesizers and programmed beats belong in this? And if this
guy does so much to become the «icon of sincerity» in modern indie music, how
does that agree with processing your music through a computer?
But that's all theory, and on practice, once
you get past the nearly-instrumental intro of ʽTime Codeʼ, the use of
electronics on this album is neither particularly annoying nor detracting from
the «essence» of Bright Eyes. One thing Oberst is never very much interested in
is making music, and that accounts
for his approach to the electronic business as well. The programmed beats will
hardly make Richard D. James lose much sleep, and the atmosphere-producing
synthesizers produce barely enough atmosphere for us to breathe it in, let
alone any perspectives of intoxication.
Besides, most of the melodies remain in the
usual neo-folk ballpark. No matter how many drum machine overlays there may be
on ʽArc Of Timeʼ and how strongly the digital effects are pressed on
its acoustic guitars, there is no force in the universe that could prevent me
from wanting to finish off the lines "...and they twist like sheets, till
you fall asleep, and they finally unwind" with "...as we gaze upon
the chimes of freedom flashing". You know what I mean: you can take a
horse to the water, but you cannot make him bend a circuit.
On the other hand, bringing in electronics
helps Oberst at least modestly expand his means and make a record more
consistently listenable and less consistently predictable than things used to
be. ʽGold Mine Guttedʼ is almost a good song — at least it has a
simple, melancholic keyboard hook upon which Oberst's latest confessional can
be appropriately hung. ʽDown In A Rabbit Holeʼ creates a wall of
sound from various electronics and an entire string quartet. ʽTake It
Easyʼ has a very pretty coda that joins martial rhythms with kiddie-magic
electronic chimes. And so on and on — we are basically back to the complexity
level of Fevers And Mirrors, and
some of the bits and pieces here may even be more memorable.
As for the «attitudes» of particular songs, my
brain exercises the old golden rule: the more suffering there is in an Oberst
song, the more suffering is inflicted on the brain. Namely, that particular
part of Oberst that is responsible for ʽHit The Switchʼ and
ʽDevil In The Detailsʼ, should be dragged out into the street and
shot: lines like "sometimes I pray I don't die, I'm a goddamn hypocrite",
sung in that particular manner, make
me want to cart him off at least as far as Somali or something like that. But
less straightforward stuff like ʽShip In A Bottleʼ shows that he is
just as capable of confessionalism without bad-actor overplay — and he is also
capable of smarter-than-average social preaching on tunes like ʽLight
Pollutionʼ.
Actually, somewhere around mid-album the
electronic beats and loops almost disappear, and by the time we get to the end,
the digital soldiers have mostly been assimilated by traditionally oriented
guys, reduced to performing valuable background services. The best is saved for
last: ʽEasy / Lucky / Freeʼ is an almost seductive combo of rhythmic
loops, dreamy slide guitars à la
Beach House, and well-arranged harmonies. As an anthemic coda, it has none of
the questionable kitsch of ʽRoad To Joyʼ, never goes over the top,
and delivers its condemnation of society's sins in an almost, dare I say it, mature kind of way.
Still, it is beyond my powers to clearly state
that Digital Ash is a «thumbs up»
sort of album. As with Fevers And
Mirrors, I'd rather stay neutral about it, because, on the general scale of
things, little has changed. Oberst's lyrics, bar a few blatant exceptions, get
more complex and tempting for intellectual analysis, but they were never awful
to begin with. His vocals here only make me want to throttle him a few times,
but even when they don't, he still whines his way through without the
slightest touch of humor and irony — and, for that matter, why the hell is he
handling all the lead vocal duties himself again? And the melodies, for the
most part, still suck: use of electronics and this subtle gradual transition
from «all-out digital» to «mostly analog» helps cope with that fact, but does
not eliminate it.
Still, if faced with the necessity of choice, I
would definitely take Digital Ash
over Wide Awake, because I am afraid
of Bright Eyes fans, and I know that for most of them, it is Oberst's bleeding
hearted sincerity that serves as the major vitamin, so the more layers of sound
this guy can use to muff and choke that sincerity, the more beats and loops he
weaves into that bandage that causes the heart to bleed internally rather than
externally, the safer I am. What sort of stupid jerk ever said that sincerity
was important in music, anyway? Oh, that's right, I did. But that was before I got acquainted with the Bright
Eyes catalog, so don't be too hard on me.
MOTION SICKNESS: LIVE RECORDINGS (2005)
1) At The
Bottom Of Everything; 2) We Are Nowhere And It’s Now; 3) Old Soul Song; 4) Make
War (short version); 5) Make War (long version); 6) Scale; 7) Landlocked Blues;
8) Method Acting; 9) Train Under Water; 10) When The President Talks To God;
11) Road To Joy; 12) Mushaboom; 13) True Blue; 14) Southern State; 15) The
Biggest Lie.
A live album from Conor Oberst should not
necessarily be unlistenable. After all, when playing before a real audience,
he's got some options — for instance, be picky about his own track selection,
be inventive in rearranging formerly dull material, be unpredictable in the
selection of covers, and, overall, try and be less «stuck up» than he is in
the studio. How can one safely tell that he is not going to do and be all that prior to actually listening to the
record? Perhaps Conor Oberst on stage is a completely different person. Perhaps
he plays thrash metal guitar or something.
Of course, the track listing is a little
suspicious. Although he had released two albums early that year, only the
critically acclaimed Wide Awake is
represented (and how — with six out of ten numbers getting the honors); Digital Ash is completely ignored,
either because Conor didn't feel comfortable about translating the tape loops
and digital beats into live reproductions, or because Robert Christgau, who
once lovingly called Oberst «the poster boy of the American Agony Association»,
was in the audience. (I'd rather bet on the latter.) Then there's a smaller
bunch of songs from the equally acclaimed Lifted,
a newly written anti-presidential rant, a cover of Feist, and a cover of
Elliott Smith. Everything properly soulful, acoustic, and, for the most part,
neo-countryish without any serious reservations.
Alas, my individual «special» feelings about
these tracks are mostly limited to disappointments (and getting «disappointed»
in something Bright Eyes-related is a big disappointment indeed). On
ʽLandlocked Bluesʼ, there is no Emmylou Harris; prepare to endure a
thoroughly solo performance from the unhappiest man on the planet. The
instrumental jam sections on ʽTrain Under Waterʼ are reduced to a
cacophonous mess, with no traces of the sharp, well-rehearsed guitar solos of
the original. ʽWhen The President Talks To Godʼ is an atrocious
bullshit rant that probably earned George W. Bush more supporters than enemies
— tuneless, toneless, overwrought, with a mechanical heart on the sleeve pumping
gallons of fake blood into the audience. (I used to think that no one could
beat Ani DiFranco in the «Worst Anti-Establishment Rant From A Supposedly
Intelligent Singer-Songwriter» game, but I'm not so sure any more). And the
covers are deadly boring, although this should not discourage anyone from
checking out Elliott Smith, Oberst's spiritual guru, who must have done many a
spin in his grave over the past decade.
On the positive side... there's not much,
really. The songs, good or bad, generally stick to the original arrangements;
there is even solid brass support from Nate Walcott on trumpet, who helps build
up the appropriate rucus on ʽRoad To Joyʼ and elsewhere. There's a
couple extra numbers that aren't available anywhere else, as far as I'm aware,
but they are nothing special (big surprise). Well... maybe the most positive thing
about it all is that it could have been even worse. At least there's no
ʽWaste Of Paintʼ here, even if there might definitely be a «waste of
plastic». Thumbs... nah, what do I really care.
CASSADAGA (2007)
1) Clairaudients (Kill Or Be
Killed); 2) Four Winds; 3) If The Brakeman Turns My Way; 4) Hot Knives; 5) Make
A Plan To Love Me; 6) Soul Singer In A Session Band; 7) Classic Cars; 8)
Middleman; 9) Cleanse Song; 10) No One Would Riot For Less; 11) Coat Check
Dream Song; 12) I Must Belong Somewhere; 13) Lime Tree.
Since I have pretty much exhausted my share of
pejoratives to address the work of Conor Oberst, I will try to simply stick to
the facts from now on. Cassadaga was
released on April 10, 2007, on the Saddle Creek label. It has thirteen tracks,
clocking in at slightly over 62 minutes. Mike Mogis produced the sessions,
which altogether included over thirty different musicians — an absolute record
for Bright Eyes, who would later return to a much smaller scale. The «real»
album art was hidden from view, so that you could only see all the hidden
messages (including a poorly done machine-version Russian translation of the
phrase «draw another bloody bath») with the accompanying «Spectral Decoder».
Sales were modest; critical acclaim — near
universal, with the arguable exception of a lukewarm response from Pitchfork.
Also, according to Wikipedia, Johnny Depp named Cassadaga one of his favorite
things in 2007. Also, in 2007, Johnny Depp starred in Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End. So far, modern science
has not conclusively disproven the lack of a logical connection between
these two events, which, to a tiny degree, somewhat justifies my mentioning
them in the same paragraph. And — just in case — be warned.
From top to bottom, Cassadaga consists of more or less traditionally-oriented songs:
with the exception of some atmospheric intros and outros that involve
electronics, noises, and spoken vocals, most of it can be defined as relatively
straightforward country-rock, usually with complex, multi-layered arrangements,
with an acoustic guitar part at the core and from two to three to thirty extra
musicians on top. This makes Cassadaga
into the most accessible (for general audiences) album Oberst had released up
to that date (not counting the Christmas record) — without electronics, lengthy
solo acoustic confessionals, and with a much more restrained, balanced, some
would say «mature» approach to singing, Cassadaga
could easily be enjoyed by the grandfather and grandson alike; a true piece of
«family entertainment» if there ever was one — and I do insist that I am still
sticking to the facts, for now.
In terms of melodies, we do not usually expect
a lot of invention or originality from roots-rock albums that honor the old
traditions, and expect them twice less if the creative force behind the
roots-rock album is Conor Oberst. I did not get the impression of hearing even
one melody that was not already familiar from somewhere, and there are quite
straightforward reminiscences every now and then (ʽFour Windsʼ draws
upon ʽThe Night They Drove Old Dixie Downʼ, and ʽMiddlemanʼ
recognizably reinvents ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ, to quote just two
examples). As far as arrangements are concerned, they manage to keep some
diversity by staying away from the «wall of sound» conception — despite all the
layers, each song is usually defined by just one instrumental type: fiddle on
ʽFour Windsʼ, organ and piano on ʽIf The Brakeman Turns My
Wayʼ, strings on ʽMake A Plan To Love Meʼ, woodwinds on
ʽCleanse Songʼ, etc.
The lyrical journey of Oberst continues
unimpeded as his words start making even less literal sense, and his allusions
start getting more and more obscure, sometimes to the point where it does not
seem like there are any allusions.
Conor himself proclaimed that he did not want to include any «political» songs
on the record, but not only that, very few of them — if any, in fact — deal
with the old subject of «the end of the world through the eyes of a recently
dumped loser». In their place, we have a solidified, nearly-finalized prophetic
vision, perhaps best summarized in ʽFour Windsʼ: "And it's the
sum of man, slouching towards Bethlehem / A heart just can't contain all of
that empty space / It breaks, it breaks, it breaks".
It could be argued, in fact, that at this point
Oberst's primary source of influence is The Band — and their «intellectualized»
brand of roots-rock, pumping new wine into the old winebag. (Which, of course,
begs for the question — exactly how many times can you fill an old winebag with
new wine before it starts leaking on your boots? — but let's not forget about
sticking to the facts). The big difference is that the spirit of The Band was
more in line with the old folk idea of humble recognition of and submission to
one's fate, whereas Oberst — on record, at least — is still a rebel, and, of
course, nobody in The Band would ever think of «offending» the Bible, and a
song title like ʽI Must Belong Somewhereʼ is decidedly not «Bandish».
(For the record, I personally take significant offense not at the line "the
Bible is blind, the Torah's deaf, the Qur'an is mute / If you burned them all
together you'd be closer to the truth", but rather at the follow-up:
"They're poring over Sanskrit under Ivy League moons while shadows
lengthen in the sun". Really, Conor — empty ignorant hacks at abstract «bookishness»
are so passé. Write me a letter if you are truly interested in how to poke fun at certain genuinely
detrimental scientific practices of the day. Even better still, just write
something nasty about Lady Gaga instead. Okay, back to the facts, the facts,
the facts).
Actually, I have no more facts that would be
useful for this here review, so let us just close it with a final flourish of
completely subjective opinion, worthless from anybody else's perspective: I met
exactly one song on this album that
did not sound deadly boring. That was ʽMake A Plan To Love Meʼ, and I
ascribe its success almost completely to the exquisitely arranged vocal harmonies
of Stacy and Sherrie DuPree from the Texan band Eisley. As for everything else
— I'd just as soon listen to Garth Brooks. Mush is mush, no matter if it
consists of three or thirty-three layers, and Cassadaga is mush supreme — but yes, it probably must take some talent to get thirty professional
musicians to play on an album that does not leave even a passing impression. Final
judgement? Why don't we all just share my thumbs down and go put on some Animals
instead. Heck, I could even go for some Woody Guthrie — even though that guy
never got thirty people to play on any of his
records.
THE PEOPLE'S KEY (2011)
1) Firewall; 2) Shell Games; 3)
Jejune Stars; 4) Approximate Sunlight; 5) Haile Selassie; 6) A Machine
Spiritual; 7) Triple Spiral; 8) Beginner's Mind; 9) Ladder Song; 10) One For
You, One For Me.
For three whole years, the world was free from
the oppression of Bright Eyes, but not from Conor Oberst, who used the time to
play around with several new projects: «Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley
Band» and «Monsters of Folk» among them. Then it was suddenly announced that,
with one last album, Oberst would retire the «Bright Eyes» label completely.
Accompanied with predictable commentary — that the brand name has outlasted
itself, that it was time to move on, leaving the past behind etc.
Now I would be the last person in the world to
expect a «grand exit»-style last album from Bright Eyes, but I do admit to a
little anticipatory trepidation. What if Conor had decided to «pull all the
stops»? Would that mean twelve-minute long howling ballads to the sound of a
battered, out-of-tune acoustic guitar? Could that signify retreating into the
safety of his bedroom, so as to make that hoarse, creaky, skipping lo-fi epic
to put all lo-fi epics to shame? Might that imply using up all of the
accumulated money to hire every single professional country musician in
Nashville, so as to record the loudest ever version of ʽThat Silver-Haired
Daddy Of Mineʼ, retitled as ʽThat Shiver-Sending Nightmare On My
Mindʼ?
Wrong on all counts. The last album by Bright
Eyes — if this is, indeed, the last album by Bright Eyes — is just a normal
rock'n'roll album, much like Cassadaga
was just a normal «nu-country» album. Other than a slightly above-ordinary
emphasis on Rastafarian matters in the lyrics, and recurring bullshit
voiceovers from some pretentious crackpot propagating pseudo-New-Age-nonsense
about the «Superuniverse», The People's
Key is just yer basic singer-songwriter's rock-a-pop. Quite restrained,
concise, relatively harmless. Not too exciting — but not without an occasional
modest charm or two. Had this been my first Bright Eyes experience, I might
have greeted it very warmly; as it is presumably my last one, I am almost tempted to regard it as a subtle apology on
Conor's part. «Hey guys, I guess I'm sorry for having bullshat you over all
these years — here's a little something I cooked up for you that you might,
perhaps, find more palatable».
These are all fully arranged, well fleshed out
compositions, sometimes in the form of bombastic arena rock, sometimes bluesy,
sometimes power-balladeerish, loaded with electronic vignettes, processed
guitar effects, and prime time Oberstian lyrics, working overtime to avoid,
stun, and disarm clichés and trivialities. From the subtly threatening
blues-rock chords of ʽFirewallʼ that opens the album and right down
to the sprawling, anthemic keyboards and funky percussion of ʽOne For You,
One For Meʼ that closes it — The
People's Key is beyond technical reproach.
Too bad I can no longer enjoy any of it.
Honestly, some of these songs at least may rank as the best he's ever written —
there are even shades of original
catchy vocal melodies on ʽShell Gamesʼ, ʽLadder Songʼ, and
a few others — but all of it leaves me cold, because the spirit of Bright Eyes
remains exactly the same and cannot possibly change, since any radical change
in Conor Oberst would ruin his game: sincerity
has always been his biggest asset, and if he drops or even slightly shifts
those pathetic-melancholic intonations — well, we will end up with a different
Conor Oberst, and would that mean that the previous one has been insincere? Or
the new one?..
Anyway, all of these songs are totally
accessible, sensible, and probably as honest as anything the son of a bitch has
ever written. They are not even as depressed and moronically suicidal as they
used to be: a farewell should be farewell-ish, and most of the sadness here is
consciously balanced with intelligent optimism — even as the lyrics of
ʽOne For You, One For Meʼ seem to chastise humanity for its sliding
away from the ideal of Oneness, its upbeat rhythmic pattern and (perhaps
ironic) vocal enthusiasm disseminates a little hope, at least among those who
cannot be bothered to study the words too closely. Besides, all these Rastafari
references — how can a record like this be an exercise in total depression?
I guess I'm not entirely through with Oberst — there is still this bit of mystery
as to how come I am so totally, utterly bored with an album like this, where
nothing much irritates per se, other than the obnoxious guy chattering away
about Einstein and Sumerian tablets. Somehow, all of these hooks, guitar and
synth tones, vocal intonations, etc., still come across as totally bland; but
it will take time to understand if it's really just the earlier anti-Oberst
sentiment rising in vehement bias here, or if the man is so genuinely and
utterly devoid of talent when it comes to anything other than putting words on
paper. In the meantime, my thumbs are frozen, and everybody is welcome to
observe the purity of experiment and start his/her study of Bright Eyes with
their last album — The People's Key,
a title that should probably be better suited for the likes of Grand Funk
Railroad or Hank Williams Jr., but somehow ended up used by a guy who is one of
the least apt candidates for a true «people's artist» in the modern world. Oh,
that Conor and his endlessly wasted stream of pointless irony.
THE DECLINE OF BRITISH SEA POWER (2003)
1) Men Together Today; 2)
Apologies To Insect Life; 3) Favours In The Beetroot Fields; 4) Something
Wicked; 5) Remember Me; 6) Fear Of Drowning; 7) The Lonely; 8) Carrion; 9)
Blackout; 10) Lately; 11) A Wooden Horse; 12*) Childhood Memories; 13*)
Heavenly Waters.
That a band hailing from Brighton, East Sussex,
would want to be known as «British Sea Power» is probably not very surprising.
That it would choose The Decline Of
British Sea Power as the title of its debut album is also nothing to write
home about — after all, British sea power has
been in relative decline over the past century, as every self-respecting
Somalian pirate will tell you. That the topics, moods, and melodies of the
album will, for the most part, have nothing whatsoever to do with British sea
power, and, frankly speaking, not much to do with Britain itself, is a bit more
remarkable. But not before you start thinking about it. Come on now, do you really expect a group called British
Sea Power to sing about British sea power? What is this — Admiral Nelson's
Lonely Hearts Club Band?
As a matter of fact, there are times — quite a
few times, to be sure — when British Sea Power sound so much like Arcade Fire that the temptation to brand them as a
bunch of second-tier rip-off con artists grows sky-high. Except the glitch is
that British Sea Power actually were there first: The Decline came out one year prior to Funeral, and it is almost certain that both bands were developing
and polishing their personae completely unaware of each other's existence. The
fact that it happened that way simply reflects a «convergence» pattern —
apparently, there was an intuitively felt demand for this kind of music on
both sides of the ocean, and someone, somewhere, somehow simply had to oblige
the spirit of the times.
Basically, British Sea Power play this big,
arena-esque, pathos-soaked, heaven-bound type of art-rock where you need loud,
but simple riffs, lots of echo, some blue-eyed soul in your occasionally
off-key singing, and a post-post-modern attitude where dense, heavily
intellectualized lyrics are delivered with an air of the utmost emotional sincerity.
If you can believe that a song may begin with lines like "Oh Fyodor you
are the most attractive man I know / Your Russian heart is strong and has been
bleeding for too long" and
reflect strong, unsimulated feeling from the bottom of one's (British) heart,
read on. If you cannot, this band is not for you.
Of course, this does not mean that you will
never understand what British Sea Power is all about if you haven't read a
single line of Dostoyevsky. Unlike Arcade Fire, British Sea Power take very good
care to make most of their lyrics more nebulous than the proverbial Brighton
fog. Nothing here is about the lyrics as much as it is about attitude: The Decline Of British Sea Power is a
ponderous, pretentious lament on the state of things as they are — old ways and
lifestyles crumbling, and new ones not being satisfactory. All the complex
words and ambiguous imagery are only there to showcase the band's intelligence:
if you want to earn the right to complain about the fates of the world, you
have to prove your knowledge of the world. In particular, they may have read some Dostoyevsky. It's
always useful to read some Dostoyevsky if you want to learn the proper art of
complaining about things, anyway.
But no amount of complaining is going to be
acceptable if it is stored in faulty song containers, of course. And from a
sheer melodic point of view, none of these songs are particularly interesting.
There are some fast punk-influenced rockers (one of which, ʽFlavours In
The Beetroot Fieldsʼ, clocks in at a hardcore-honoring 1:18), some
traditional drone-based shuffles, and some basic Britpop creations with a
pretty Kinks stamp on them. If any of the riffs, courtesy of resident guitarists
Neil Hamilton Wilkinson and Martin Noble, turn out to be memorable, it is
mostly because you have heard them all — or their immediate prototypes —
before.
This leaves the band's leader and principal
songwriter, Scott Wilkinson, better known as «Yan», as our major hope. And he
is appropriately suitable: very far from a great singer, in many ways, in fact,
uncannily similar to Arcade Fire's Win Butler (same tendency to either
«whisper» or «screech» in the exact same range), but quite expressive — British
Sea Power's main modes of action are «dreaminess» and «despair», so the bandleader
whispers when he is being dreamy and screeches when he is being desperate: what
could be wrong with that? Furthermore, his vocal melodies often succeed where
the instrumental ones do not, being transformed into atmospheric instrumental
accompaniment.
Thus, ʽFear Of Drowningʼ, the band's
first single, is mostly memorable for its slow crescendo, reflected mainly in
the vocals — culminating in the chorus ("...we'll swim from these island
shores til there's a little fear of drowning, a little fear of
drowning..."). It's a nice enough projection of one's own insecurity onto
a simple musical canvas, and the lyrical metaphor is fresh and engaging, if not
particularly flattering for good old England. The second single, ʽRemember Meʼ, is the album's loudest and
angriest rocker, on which Yan exorcises his Sussex demons in a voice that precisely
averages David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen (if you thought the theatrical
aristocratism of the former and the theatrical working-class
straightforwardness of the latter could never be matched, this song
transparently proves the opposite).
As the album progresses, it moves ever farther
away from loud distorted guitar rock and into the realm of loud folk- and
Britpop-based 21st century art-rock: ʽThe Lonelyʼ and
ʽCarrionʼ, also released as singles, exemplify this «softer», but no
less «epic» streak of the band's creativity, and both are decent, but not
exactly heartbreaking anthems for pre-specified market shares of their generations
(well, they could be heartbreaking, I
guess, for all those youngsters who never gave themselves the trouble of
listening to the band's major influences).
They do take a serious risk on
ʽLatelyʼ, a track that runs for 14 minutes and, in structure only, reveals
yet another influence — Neil Young: starting out as a slow, pompous, and,
frankly, rather boring rock-grinder, it then allows itself to be taken into
uncharted waters, then return back to shore, share the plunder, and go back
into uncharted waters again. As stoner rock / neo-psychedelic jammers, these
guys would probably get something like a «B-» from me — competence without
excitement — but the gesture can be appreciated for boldness' sake, if not exactly
understood. Although there is a fun
moment of self-irony somewhere in there, when after a particularly bawdy
passage, Yan, distorting his voice, starts asking questions like "do you
like my megalithic Rock? do you like my prehistoric Rock? do you like my
Teutonic Rock? do you like my hygienic Rock?» Well, I'm not sure if I like it,
Yan, but I do like all those nice words you're using. Thanks for asking the
question, anyway.
All in all, I do like this album, and maybe, in
the absence of Arcade Fire, it could have become a favorite from the last
decade; the way things are, The Decline
Of British Sea Power is more of a trans-Atlantic precursor for things to
come. But it does have its own troubles and its own sorrows that could not be
shared by our Canadian friends, so it's not like the emergence of Funeral makes these here songs
completely redundant. In short, a tepid, but mildly respectful thumbs up
with growth potential. But be warned — the album really sounds nothing like its title would suggest. No sea shanties
for you, and no trendy, haughty, foul-mouthed Britpop, either.
OPEN SEASON (2005)
1) It Ended On An Oily Stage;
2) Be Gone; 3) How Will I Ever Find My Way Home?; 4) Like A Honeycomb; 5)
Please Stand Up; 6) North Hanging Rock; 7) To Get To Sleep; 8) Victorian Ice;
9) Oh Larsen B; 10) The Land Beyond; 11) True Adventures.
EPIC alert! Maybe, this time around, fueled by
the critical success of Arcade Fire, British Sea Power hit it loud, proud, and
hyper-arch-pretentious, and never let go for even one second. «Sea power»
indeed — Pathos, with a capital P, roars and thrashes here with ferocious wave
amplitude. If it weren't for Yan's «anthemic loudest whisper in the world», I'd
say they were trying to outdo U2 and The Cure rolled together on most of these
tracks, but since the man is so obviously «vocally challenged» (yet tries to
turn it to his advantage), the comparison would be somewhat off.
Surprisingly, the songs are good! I will admit
that I totally hated this upon first listen — the stubborn hooks had no
intention of climbing out from under all the walls of sound, and the
monotonousness of it all weighed heavy on the soul. As in, if you want to make
something that loud, that romantic, that pathetic, make it short and sweet: ten songs in a row based on
the same approach and groping in the same limited bag of tricks (simple 4/4
beats, droning electric or strumming acoustic rhythms, atmospheric keyboard /
female vocal background) get annoying very
quickly if each one is slapped with the seal of «Hello, I am The Artist, and I
am here to help you Get Inspired».
Eventually, though, it clicks. No, they are
still nowhere near Arcade Fire: Yan and Hamilton's imagination suffers from a
serious lack of vitamins compared to Win and Regine's. (On the other hand,
Yan's obscure, intricate lyrics might easily make them intellectual darlings
compared to Arcade Fire's more transparently «populist» approach). But it
would be slanderous to say that the music here is just a vehicle for Yan's
incomprehensible, yet still overblown ego. With Hamilton and Noble, they are
honestly trying to come up with simple, but distinct and, hopefully, memorable
guitar hooks for each song. Listen to how ʽIt Ended On An Oily Stageʼ
begins — with a massive electric riff riding on a crest of unchanging rhythm
chords, and then one more riff is tracing and echoing Yan's vocals in the
chorus. It's hardly genius, I'd say, but it's an attempt to make some damn good
music, and, with a little patience, it gets through.
Still more of these simple, but meaningful
electric phrases can be found on ʽBe Goneʼ (powerful, but plaintive,
which is probably supposed to agree with obscure references to the French Revolution
in the lyrics), ʽPlease Stand Upʼ (this song could easily come out as
generic alt-rock, but there is something subtly non-generic in the way its
guitar wailings mesh with Yan's «gray-eyed soul»), and ʽOh Larsen Bʼ
(referring to the collapse of an Antarctic ice shelf and not to a close Norwegian friend of Yan's, as could be suggested).
But the best of the lot is arguably ʽHow
Will I Ever Find My Way Home?ʼ, which begins like a fast, quintessentially
cozy Brit-pop number, then drops the coziness for a totally dandy two-note
guitar solo (a real tasty bit of 21st century power-pop aggressiveness here),
then races towards a proverbial ecstatic climax. Again, maybe it won't make the
annals, but it's a brilliantly executed piece of work all the same — and its
main emotions, «cautious tenderness» and «restrained malice», are absolutely
not what you'd usually expect with that kind of title (something à la Bee Gees? James Taylor,
maybe?).
Again, they try their luck on the last number —
ʽTrue Adventuresʼ loses the punch, the speed, the energy, and, for
much of its duration, even the rhythm, and tends to woo you over with atmospheric
trills, frills, and spills. It certainly ties in with the roaring oceanic feel
of the rest of the album, but really, guitar-based atmospherics is so
passé now, guys: what do you want, bring back shoegazing? At least if
y'all were a bunch of Robert Fripps... but perish the thought.
Altogether, I am still torn. Open Season is most definitively a
grower, and there is definitively something of a «real thing» about Yan and his
buddies — even now, when they go for a much more streamlined, less
experimental, more «rock-oriented», less intellectualized (apart from the lyrics)
approach than on their debut. But it's hard to get away from the feeling that
the album is inadequate, and that these guys could use some subtlety — all
these Herculean efforts to «make yourself look big», in the end, are like a
bunch of Springsteen bastards that only managed to improve on their father by
reading a few extra books.
If it weren't for their surprising ability to
punch out these nice guitar melodic bits, there would be very little to
recommend about the record. Any way you look at it, it is a post-Decline decline; but it still gets a thumbs up.
In fact, ʽHow Will I Ever Find My Way Home?ʼ would probably deserve a
spot on a top 50 list of «best songs of the 2000s» or something like that.
DO YOU LIKE ROCK MUSIC? (2008)
1) All In It; 2) Lights Out
For Darker Skies; 3) No Lucifer; 4) Waving Flags; 5) Canvey Island; 6) Down On
The Ground; 7) A Trip Out; 8) The Great Skua; 9) Atom; 10) No Need To Cry; 11)
Open The Door; 12) We Close Our Eyes.
All right, if you want it that much, I'll bite. I do like rock music. But if we're talking
about the bare essentials, the «narrow» definition of rock music, then British
Sea Power is one of the last bands on
Earth to have the right to subtly imply to me that what they are doing is «rock
music». Heck, I don't even think of Bruce Springsteen as «rock music», no
matter what Jon Landau might tell us. True rock music is covered with dust on Earth,
not skyrocketing towards Heaven, which is where Yan and Hamilton have set their
sights.
Not that they don't have a right to; it's just
that the album title really rubs me the wrong way, much as if someone had the
ingenious idea to release an Andrew Lloyd Webber collection entitled From Cats, Trains and Phantoms to Ambiguous
Argentinian Women: Greatest Classical Hits. Yes, BSP's third album is even
more loud and epic than its second.
But it doesn't mean that it is any more related to the quintessential spirit of
«rock music» than its predecessor. Nor does it mean that it is a better album,
for that matter. It is much worse, on all sides.
Supposedly what happened here is the
inevitable. Praised by critics for all the wrong things — the volume, the
scale, the soulfulness, the verbal intelligence, etc. — instead of the right thing, a.k.a. musical creativity,
British Sea Power became convinced that they were the UK equals of Arcade Fire, and that, as long as they stuck
with their form, they should no longer be under pressure to seek for more
substance. In fact, they became so stuck on preserving and polishing the form
that they even went to Canada to work with Arcade Fire's producer for a while
(the album overall has at least three producers and was recorded all over the
world, although the stylistics is so coherent that it does not really show).
And so the indie trap closed in on them.
For me, there is one big difference between Open Season and Rock Music: the cloud of «bored hatred» that eventually dissipated
after a few listens to the first of these never opened up on the second. Why?
Most likely — because the melodies have become even more generic, more stereotypical,
more dispensible. They do throw in a little extra dosage of punky scraping and
distortion, but it is still not enough to install a firm «rock bite» into
fillerish tunes like ʽA Trip Outʼ or ʽLights Out For Darker
Skiesʼ (whose rhythm appropriates Blondie's ʽOne Way Or Anotherʼ
and turns it into something much more serious and much less exciting). Nor does
it excuse them for such obvious Arcade Fire steals as ʽWaving Flagsʼ,
which tries to pocket the drive and spirit of ʽNo Cars Goʼ but
forgets to sew on a hook of its own.
Even worse, their «atmospheric» numbers are
becoming even more yawn-inducing than they used to be. ʽThe Great
Skuaʼ, a beauty-oriented instrumental number, gets by through sheer
exclusive loudness, echo, and wail of overdubs; if we're talking seabirds,
Fleetwood Mac's ʽAlbatrossʼ originally achieved much more with much
less. And the closing eight «psychedelic» minutes of ʽWe Close Our
Eyesʼ, brave as they are, are a pointless mess of silence, white noise,
annoying organ ambience, and a wall-of-sound coda which is completely wasted
because all of the rest of this album already had the same wall of sound — try as they might, they just cannot
make this conclusion sound more
«EPIC» than everything else on here.
Like any such album, Rock Music is probably not a complete waste of time, but the amount
of time spent on sorting out the few tasty grains is quite disproportional to
the size of these grains. ʽAtomʼ has some curious dynamics to it,
alternating moments of silence and all-out loudness so that one gets to
appreciate the relative value of each a little better. ʽNo Need To
Cryʼ, as the only relaxed, quiet ballad on the album, presents a
comforting change of pace and a few subtle emotional pinches on the senses
that, I think, actually work better than the incessant tempestuous assault on
said senses throughout the rest of the album — enough already!
But my major disappointment is with the guitar
sound: other than on one or two tracks (ʽDown On The Groundʼ might be
a particularly good exception), the little colorful power-poppy phrases that
helped the material on Open Season
so much are almost entirely gone now. It's almost as if they consciously
sacrificed their best abilities for the sakes of Absolute Power. Now everything is in the
vein of ʽNo Luciferʼ — a never-ending high-pitched plink-plink-plink
set against an equally monotonous distorted chunk-chunk-chunk, with no individuality
whatsoever. In other words, a masterful shortcut towards an irate thumbs down,
which I am happy/sad to provide. One more indie nightmare.
MAN OF ARAN (2009)
1) Man Of Aran; 2) The South
Sound; 3) Come Wander With Me; 4) Tiger King; 5) The Curach; 6) Vertiginous; 7)
The Sunfish; 8) Coneely Of The West; 9) The North Sound; 10) Woman Of Aran; 11)
It Comes Back Again; 12) No Man Is An Archipelago.
I have to thank this album for its educational
value on my behalf — although I did know about Nanook Of The North and have even seen bits of it, I neither
remembered that it was originally filmed by Robert Flaherty, nor did I know of
him as a major force in the dubious genre of «ethnofiction». Apparently, Man Of Aran is one of his better known
documentaries, this time, about a bunch of «primitive» Irish seamen living in
pre-modern conditions on the Aran Islands. Originally slagged off as being
almost completely staged, yes, but people have relented over time: after all,
moving pictures do not necessarily have to be as true to life as scientific
volumes, and a little staged excitement can be excused.
Anyway, for the 2009 DVD release of the movie,
the people in charge approached none other than British Sea Power with the
request to provide a new soundtrack. Apparently, for an «epic» movie like
that, they needed something appropriate, and who would be the most «epic» band
in the neighborhood? And not just «epic», but with a special taste for
sea-related topics and oceanic effects? There you go.
The album is
a soundtrack, mind you. There is only one vocal number: ʽCome Wander With
Meʼ, a cover of an old tune from Twilight
Zone sung by a guest star rather than Yan — Cedric Bixler-Zavala of the
Mars Volta. Everything else is strictly instrumental: loud, lengthy, echoey,
very British Sea Power-ish, and about as exciting as you would expect from a
coherent soundtrack to an old documentary.
The tracks are not entirely of an ambient
nature. ʽThe Sunfishʼ, in all of its 11-minute «glory», and ʽThe
North Soundʼ, for instance, are propelled forward at speedy tempos and
sometimes even with nicely distorted post-punk riffage, probably reflecting the
tendency of the native population of Aran to follow up a hard day's work by
coming home, plugging in, and going at it like there was no work tomorrow.
Unfortunately, all of them would end up sounding just like British Sea Power
did on Do You Like Rock Music?
Other sonic varieties include cutesy
piano-and-chimes waltzing (ʽThe Curachʼ), slow dreamy folk shuffles,
often with solid help from new band member Abi Fry on viola (ʽConeely Of
The Westʼ), and, of course, simply lots and lots of droney atmosphere
(title track, etc.). If you can get in the spirit, the sonic waves might really
transport you to a different place — not necessarily to Aran, though, because
the soundtrack is just too dreamy and
epic-romantic to be an appropriate accompaniment to the rowdy, troublesome
life of a pre-industrial population. Maybe to Aldebaran, or to Arrakis
(although the latter might have some problems with supporting an oceanic
environment).
Overall, there is no attempt here to adopt any
sort of different musical personality in order to «match the individual vision
of Roberty Flaherty». The band just does what it wants to do, cutting out the
vocals and limiting the «rock'n'roll drive» for technical reasons, but in
everything else, not advancing seriously anywhere beyond their latest albums
(for comparison, when one of their apparent idols, Neil Young, did his own
soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man,
it managed at once to sound Neil Young-ish — and also sound like nothing he'd
ever done before). Fans will be happy, non-fans like me will probably be
indifferent. But at least, unlike Do You
Like Rock Music?, this release does not even pretend to stocking solid, memorable melodies. And the final decision
whether it works well as a soundtrack will have to be made by someone else — I
have not seen the movie, nor do I plan to in the nearest future.
VALHALLA DANCEHALL (2011)
1) Who's In Control; 2) We Are
Sound; 3) Georgie Ray; 4) Stunde Null; 5) Mongk II; 6) Luna; 7) Baby; 8) Living
Is So Easy; 9) Observe The Skies; 10) Cleaning Out The Rooms; 11) Thin Black
Sail; 12) Once More Now; 13) Heavy Water.
From the enchanted misty coastlines of the Aran
Islands, here we go back into well-charted waters once again. What else can I
really say? There is very little, if any, quantum difference between this
record and Do You Like Rock Music?,
nor could we have justifiedly expected any, given Yan and Hamilton's firm indie
stance: «we found our Muse early on, and one does not easily commit adultery
and get away with it». But I gotta admit, the album title is a good find — certainly
nowhere near as cringeworthy as when they ask you a stupid question, the answer
to which is completely irrelevant for the music, anyway.
The experience of soundtrack brewing did leave
some traces — the album steps away from the policy of continuously bashing your
head into pulp with an endless stream of fast, furious, monotonous rhythms, and
reinjects lots of atmospherics: starting with ʽGeorgie Rayʼ,
continuing with ʽLunaʼ and ʽBabyʼ, and ending with the
obligatory mammoth-length epic (ʽOnce More Nowʼ), we are exposed to
lots of echos, dreamlike late-era Cocteau Twins-ish ambient-psychedelic guitar
pirouets, and even «angelic cooing», mostly courtesy of Abi Fry, credited not
only for vocal effects and viola, but also for musical saw passages — you get
the drift: we no longer like rock music that
much. Who ever makes rock music with a musical saw?
In fact, the long list of «influences» now,
apart from the perennial Arcade Fire, would probably also have to include at
least Beach House — ʽBabyʼ (eat this,
Justin Bieber!) moves at a slow, stately pace, weaves an aura of melancholic
beauty, populates it with chivalrous lyrics ("I powdered rhino horns for
you and I'll serve it on a plate to you" — where's the Animal Rights Watch
when you need one?), then fades away like the remnants of a relaxating hot bath
down the drain. Probably never to be remembered again, just like any given hot
bath. If anything, the vocals are just too non-descript, compared to Victoria
Legrand's cold-and-warm stimulation.
But even though each of these «moody» tracks,
taken individually, is no great moody shakes, collectively they do a good job
of slowing down and speeding up the record to move it through different
emotional fields — technically different,
at least. Who knows, maybe if there had been no ʽBabyʼ before it, I
would have remained untouched by the impact of ʽLiving Is So Easyʼ —
probably the album's best track, and a good choice for a single. Driven by
electronics instead of guitars, it is a cool, intelligent «Anti-Party» type of
song, whose simple, catchy chorus ("living is so easy, shopping is so
easy, dying is so easy, all of it is easy") could easily be mistaken for
propagating a «don't worry be happy» attitude. In reality, it is a
light-hearted indictment of the «easy living» attitude to which I wholeheartedly
subscribe — and fun to sing along to.
Of the rest of the tracks, «tuggers» would
probably include ʽGeorgie Rayʼ (not too transparently dedicated to
Orwell and Bradbury), urging us all to beware of anti-utopian future with a few
well placed, rousing "why don't you say something, won't you say
something"s; and ʽObserve The Skiesʼ, where they finally manage
to hit the Springsteen-ian bullseye, I think (yes, growing up with Born In The USA blasting from the radio
will eventually do that to a man) — anyway, great piano parts, high-in-the-sky
guitar solo, and another anthemic
chorus that is fun to sing along to. Only problem — I don't think Yan's
«whispering scream» suits the mood here. They really needed someone of The
Boss's caliber to rip it up 100%. What's a fuckin' loud anthem without a
fuckin' loud screamer, anyway?
Overall, I do find this one somewhat more
consistent, diverse, and generally intelligently crafted than Rock Music — never by a long shot, for
sure, but enough to raise the final count to a half-hearted thumbs up.
Maybe the main problems these guys have is that they want this music to be
stadium-wise anthemic and
intellectually challenging at the same time, and you know how hard it is to
intellectually challenge an entire stadium. But, regardless of that overall
judgement, you can always succeed at different degrees, and Valhalla Dancehall succeeds at least as
often as it fails, which makes up for about thirty minutes of genuinely good
music and about thirty more minutes of a nutritious, but tasteless sonic
bouillon. But maybe that's just the way they go about it up there in Valhalla.
Come to think of it, they used to say the same things about Wagner, too.
MACHINERIES OF JOY (2013)
1) Machineries Of Joy; 2) K
Hole; 3) Hail Holy Queen; 4) Loving Animals; 5) What You Need The Most; 6) Monsters
Of Sunderland; 7) Spring Has Sprung; 8) Radio Goddard; 8) A Light Above
Descending; 9) When A Warm Wind Blows Through The Grass.
I like the first song here a lot — make sure
you catch at least a glimpse of it before this next British Sea Power album
falls into oblivion like all the rest. The atmospheric buildup, the glimmering
folk-pop electric riff that eventually merges with the vocals, the psychedelic
string overdubs, the stately optimistic atmosphere, all of this working
towards the anthemic chorus in such a subtle, but tightly focused manner that
when Yan finally reaches the conclusion — "we are magnificent machineries
of joy, and then some" — how could we not believe him?
It is only later, once you read deeper into the
lyrics, that the song's irony begins to emerge: first, the title itself comes
from Bradbury, a guy who wasn't exactly the epitome of optimism, and second,
the grand, solemn, soothing music with its mind-melding psychedelic overtones
is really a mesmerizing drug, against whose background you slowly get «brainwashed»:
"So tell me what he said... it doesn't really matter... tell me what he
said... though I don't really care... it's only what he said... and we can make
it better... help is on the way...". Once you get through to this level, Machineries Of Joy, with its Bradburian
/ Orwellian overtones, becomes a much more interesting concept than the first
superficial listen could suggest.
The problem, as usual, is that the concept soon
becomes and ultimately remains more interesting than the music. The band tones
down their approach a bit, going for a «quiet majestic feel» this time, hushed
vocals, muffled guitars and all, but too many of the songs sound exactly the
same, mood-wise, and the band's decision that they will never «go all the way»
(reasonable, actually, since they could get confused with U2 otherwise) has a
negative influence on the songs' hooking power. Machineries Of Joy stands up fairly well to repeated listens, but
the first couple of them might be so underwhelming that you simply might not
get tempted to go for more.
Still, attentive perception will probably show
that the songs are well written, the arrangements are cleverly chosen, the
lyrics are expertly written, and that there is enough data here to feed your intellectual
centers, even if the emotional ones remain relatively unaffected. For instance,
ʽLoving Animalsʼ, a song about... well, about the wrongness of
violence (not just towards animals), cleverly moves between «harsh» verses,
with distorted rhythm guitar, siren-style lead guitar, and tense vocals, and a
«soft» bridge / chorus section where the voice of God, or at least one of God's
henchmen, riding on an angelic slide guitar part, tells you that "I want
you to know that it's wrong man". (Although, fairly speaking, since the
preceding mantra goes "loving animals, loving animals", it is not
exactly clear what is wrong — maybe
God is really letting you know that loving animals is wrong? Whatever you think
of BSP, lack of ambiguousness is not possibly considered as an accusation in their
case).
Of the «rocking» songs, ʽMonsters Of
Sunderlandʼ is the most notable, although its point is a little obscure —
sort of like a parody on a regional anthem, the song was inspired by the band's
visit to Sunderland (Tyne and Wear) and features heavy brass fanfares,
buzzing-vibrating guitar riffs, choral harmonies, and lyrics that should make
the citizens of Sunderland scratch their heads in confusion. It's one thing to
get a song written about you by a popular band when most of the world has no idea
of the place you live in — but it's quite another thing to be referred to as a
«monster» and be accused of «Darwinian animosity», whatever that means. Are
they being reverential or are they being mean? Maybe you have to be a
Sunderland resident to know the definite answer to that. But the song does
sound great at any rate.
When they quiet down, however, it does not
always work equally well. On one hand, there are beautifully sounding songs
like ʽA Light Above Descendingʼ, with its highly obscure sci-fi references
(«Aelita» should probably refer to the title character of Alexei Tolstoy's
novel from 1923, of which I was not even sure until now that it had ever been
translated to English, but apparently, there are at least three different
translations, and it seems like the BSP boys are pretty avid readers when it
comes to fantasy) — cool romantic atmosphere, brought on mainly by slide guitar
overdubs. On the other hand, the repetitive minimalism of ʽWhen A Warm
Wind Blows Through The Grassʼ hardly warrants a five-minute loop: that
acoustic pattern is not that original and/or haunting to merit serving as the
album's coda.
Still, «samey», «hookless», and «pretentious»
arguments can be sufficiently breached and brushed aside here to make space
for a well-deserved thumbs up. Like all BSP albums, the lyrics and
attitudes make this one very
«elitist», inaccessible and impenetrable for the average consumer despite its
fairly traditional musical values; and its accent on the «muffled» part of
«muffled majesty» will also leave potential fan crowds disoriented — it's like
stadium rock without a stadium to play it in. But I am definitely putting this one on the «replay in ten years, see how
it works» list. Who knows, maybe from that perspective British Sea Power will
be perceived as embracing the Zeitgeist of 2013 after all.
FROM THE SEA TO THE LAND BEYOND (2013)
1) From The Sea To The Land
Beyond; 2) Remarkable Diving Feat; 3) Strange Sports; 4) Heroines Of The Cliff;
5) The Guillemot Girls; 6) Suffragette Riots; 7) Heatwave; 8) Melancholy Of The
Boot; 9) Be You Mighty Sparrow; 10) Berth 24; 11) Red Rock Riviera; 12)
Coastguard; 13) Perspectives Of Stinky Turner; 14) Bonjour Copains; 15) The
Wild Highlands; 16) Docklands Renewed; 17) The Islanders.
Apparently, it was a stroke of luck when these
guys decided to call themselves British Sea Power and write grand songs with
massive hooks — these days, whenever somebody films a movie that involves (a)
the sea and (b) the British Isles, they are the first band to whom people turn
to provide the soundtrack. This time, it is for From The Sea To The Land Beyond: Britain's Coast On Film, a
documentary feature by Penny Woolcock on various aspects, historical and
modern, of everyday life on Britain's coastline. I have not watched the movie,
but gather, from various descriptions, that, like most such documentaries,
that the two major types of reaction to it would be either «breathtakingly
beautiful» or «butthurtingly boring», depending on whether one is an idealistic,
impressionable artistic soul or a jaded cynical bastard. In both cases, though,
the soundtrack by British Sea Power will be a natural part of the impression.
Although the album is about as long as the
movie, featuring complete versions of compositions that were abridged in the
documentary, it is definitely a soundtrack, whose purposes are secondary to
the visuals. Some of the music is not new at all, but borrows old instrumental
mixes from their previous albums (unfortunately, at this point I cannot state
for certain which ones are which and am merely repeating outside information);
some is new, and a few numbers even
feature vocals, but on the whole, this is monotonous, atmospheric stuff,
absolutely typical of BSP with their symphonic echoey sound, ringing guitars,
swooping violas, crashing percussion, and sound effects (waves beating? check.
thunder rolling? check. gulls shrieking? check, etc.), and featuring very
little in the way of individual hooks. Well, a little. But not much. Really, it's not supposed to. Living on the
British coast is not much of a hook-filled activity anyway — it's more about
being one with nature, or with hoarding cultural memory.
The track titles, while they probably
correspond to specific parts of the feature, are not that well correlated with
the music. ʽSuffragette Riotsʼ, for instance, beginning with some
isolated piano chords and the omnipresent seagulls, slowly builds up towards a
crescendo, but hardly of the «riot» variety — these guys are the children of
shoegazers and they couldn't properly picture a «riot» under pain of having to
listen to Agnostic Front for the rest of their lives. ʽHeatwaveʼ has
a lovely-lazy guitar/viola dialog going on, but I wouldn't necessarily call it
indicative of a «heatwave» (and it isn't atmospherically different from
something like ʽStrange Sportsʼ), for instance. In fact, the album
could definitely use more variety —
that is, if the idea of the movie itself, as I understand it, wasn't that «the
more it changes, the more it stays the same».
In brief, this is what happens when you get
British Sea Power to just be British Sea Power and not worry all that much
about anything else. I like their «average» sonic vibe a lot, but a thumbs up
for this album would at least have to mean that it «got me» a couple of times,
and it didn't: it was just nice in the usual, predictable, reliable way. But it
is most definitely for you if you are one of those types with a habit of
sharing «This Photographer Shoots The Most Amazing Pictures Of The World That
Will Totally Amaze You And Make You See The World In A Totally Amazing New
Light And Your Life Will Never Be The Same» links on Facebook. I myself tend to
gravitate towards The Onion on those matters, so I'll just leave this record
unrated, for justice' sake, and secretly hope that nobody on the British Isles
is currently envisaging a UK-based movie remake of The Old Man And The Sea.
...BABY ONE MORE TIME (1999)
1) ...Baby One More Time; 2)
(You Drive Me) Crazy; 3) Sometimes; 4) Soda Pop; 5) Born To Make You Happy; 6)
From The Bottom Of My Broken Heart; 7) I Will Be There; 8) I Will Still Love
You; 9) Deep In My Heart; 10) Thinkin' About You; 11) E-Mail My Heart; 12) The
Beat Goes On; 13*) I'll Never Stop Loving You; 14*) Autumn Goodbye.
Well, I suppose we all saw this one coming,
didn't we?
One thing is hard to deny: this is probably the most manipulative album sleeve in
record history. Of all the people who ensured this album's 14 times platinum
status, I wonder just how many slurped it off the Walmart counter, spellbound
by the focused assault of eyes, lips, unbuttoned shirt, and... oh my. Whatever
else one might say, the guy who took that photo was the real genius behind
Britney's career, and should have earned him- or herself a lifelong pass to all
of her swimming pools and barbecue lawns.
But really, there is no way one could not mention this record in one's story
of the rise and fall of pop music, since it almost single-handedly
transformed... Madonna into a respectable artist. Once, it used to be that
people would blame Ms. Louise Ciccone for having downgraded pop to the state
where sex comes first and music comes last. Britney symbolized the next stage
of that development — and once you compare Madonna with Baby One More
Time, it immediately becomes clear that, compared to this stuff, the former
counts as a brilliant masterpiece of composition, arrangement, and artistic
expression.
Every once in a while, you encounter opinions —
particularly, of course, in the mainstream musical press — that ...Baby One More Time would have still
been a monster hit, effective and impressive, even without the photos and the
accompanying videos. I beg to differ. The only musical justification behind
these dance grooves and synth-pop ballads would be a great set of catchy
bubblegum hooks, and few of these songs are catchy to begin with. They aren't
even particularly disgusting — most of the time, they are simply «invisible».
There are no interesting musical solutions (except for one, maybe, on which see
below), both the live instruments and the electronic keyboards are primitive
and rote — in short, if it's dance pop we're talking about, this shit ain't no
Prince, and it even ain't no Madonna.
So color me disappointed, because at some
point, I almost hoped that the record would turn out to be a «guilty pleasure»:
after all, there is nothing wrong per se with the very idea of bubblegum teen
pop... well, come to think of it, there is
something deeply wrong per se with that idea, but it was always in the power of
well-paid musically-endowed corporate songwriters to make us, sometimes,
forgive and forget. ...Baby One More
Time does not take any chances: it wants us to love it because it is bubblegum teen pop, with a rather transparent nod to
Lolita territory, not despite being
bubblegum teen pop.
The one person I would completely refrain from
blaming is, of course, Britney herself — who had not even turned 18 at the time
and, in all of her Southern girl innocence, allowed her talents to be molded
into this piece of trash. Talents,
yes, because she really throws herself into this role that the producers
thought up for her. She may not show much range in her singing, or any individual
vocalizing techniques, but she does know how to use what she's got — be it the
purring and cooing on ʽE-Mail My Heartʼ or the trademark hushy rasp
on the title track. She is not quite
«nothing» without the looks, and, if you ask me, given the choice between the
average «diva», floating on spasmatic waves of melisma, and Britney's far more
natural tones (at this early stage — fortunately, quite free from auto-tuning
and other electronic treatments), I would rather have to go for the latter. In
fact — shudder, shudder — I almost feel real empathy at the way she phrases
"I was born to make you happy", with its little subtle mix of joy and
weeping; quite professional for a 17-year old. And if you fail to feel a small
jolt at the way she croons out "forever... E-mail my heart", a quick
doctor checkup may be in order (maybe even if you're female).
That said, most of the songs are still
atrociously bland and artificial, and the record as a whole never lives up to
its opening one second of music — the three ominous piano notes that announce
ʽ...Baby One More Timeʼ are arguably the finest moment on here. And
while I cannot deny that the chorus of «The Song That Established Britney
Spears (And Brought Down Rolling Stone)»
is somewhat catchy, that does not
excuse the robo-funk of the number immediately re-written as the even less
interesting ʽ(You Drive Me) Crazyʼ, nor the awful title, lyrics, and
hip-hop / calypso mix of ʽSoda Popʼ, nor the abundance of cheap soft
/ power ballads (ʽFrom The Bottom Of My Broken Heartʼ) that even
Mariah Carey could never have resuscitated.
There is one exception-oddity — the last track
on the album is an unexpectedly lo-fi, bass-heavy cover of Sonny & Cher's
old hit ʽThe Beat Goes Onʼ, replete with «psychedelic» electronic effects,
mock-drunk drum outbursts, and lite-spooky echoes. Like Sonny & Cher
themselves, this song is just as bubblegummy as the rest of them, but it
manages to preserve some of the original Sixties' melodic flair, and Britney
certainly does it more justice — it is her
element — than she could ever hope to allocate for the unhappy choice of
ʽSatisfactionʼ on her sophomore effort. But it is also a song that
comes after the croony «finale» of
ʽE-Mail My Heartʼ, sort of as a post-scriptum specially targeted at
the «purveyors of good taste», and in any case, you do not redeem an overall
failure of a record by covering fuckin' Sonny & Cher, do you?
The absolute worst thing about this album,
though, is the stinky flair of hypocrisy that went along with it, as the media
were busy cultivating the «innocent» and even «traditional / conservative» attitude
of Britney's straight in the face of all the innumerable innuendos both in
these songs and in the accompanying videos — let's face it, at the very least
Madonna had always been honest about her sexuality, even if, granted, she had
already come of age well before launching her professional career. From this
point of view, future Spears albums might have been just as comparably miserable,
music-wise, but at least, starting with ʽToxicʼ and the like, they
would become more balanced in the «sex vs. music» aspect. Not that the music on ...Baby is particularly sexy — no more so than an inflatable doll
or something — but Britney herself is, of course.
In any case, ...Baby One More Time was a pop culture phenomenon in 1999, no
doubt about that, but as of today, I would guess that it is probably one of the
least listened to mega-best-sellers of the past century — and if so, for a
very good reason: admit it, if you ever bought it, you didn't exactly buy it
for the music, did you? You just
didn't have the proper Internet access to download the album photo, or the
proper color printer to zoom it and hang it in the bathroom. But in doing that,
you (the «abstract» youse, that is) have created the unfortunate illusion that ...Baby One More Time had something to
do with «real music», when, in fact, it had even less to do with that than
Debbie Gibson in the 1980s. Rating? Forget it — I'm too bored with this stuff
to actually allow myself an extra thumbs movement.
OOPS! ...I DID IT AGAIN (2000)
1) Oops! ... I Did It Again;
2) Stronger; 3) Don't Go Knockin' On My Door; 4) (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction;
5) Don't Let Me Be The Last To Know; 6) What U See (Is What U Get); 7) Lucky;
8) One Kiss From You; 9) Where Are You Now; 10) Can't Make You Love Me; 11)
When Your Eyes Say It; 12) Girl In The Mirror; 13) Dear Diary.
Contrary to rumors, Britney's sophomore release
is not a carbon copy of ...Baby One More Time — it is more like
a slightly genetically modified clone. After all, "hit me baby one more
time", unless viewed as a submissive / masochistic statement in the light
of violent polysemy of the verb ʽto hitʼ, is a fairly cuddly hook
next to "I'm not that innocent" — the coming-down line that really
constitutes the true hook of ʽOops!... I Did It Againʼ (along with the
moans and groans that hint at an already better understanding of one's bodily
powers and wishes than the "oh baby baby" trick on ʽOne More
Timeʼ).
Then again, Britney did turn 18 during the recording sessions for the album, which
explains a few things. In general, the record is still quite strictly targeted
at bubblegum teen-pop audiences: rose-colored ballads, Disneyworld-ish dance
numbers, and pseudo-schoolgirl-scribbled lyrics form the bulk of it — but
already the industry is trying to sex the girl up, starting from the album
cover (bellybutton on the loose, and that strange wallpaper bears a suspicious
resemblance to a beehive... beehive,
get it?) and ending with the more-than-obvious choice of «obligatory classic
rock cover» — no less than ʽSatisfactionʼ itself. (Or perhaps that
was the condition under which Jann Wenner would allow Britney to appear on the
cover of his respectable magazine).
Funny thing is, ʽSatisfactionʼ in
Britney's hands actually sounds interesting, if not exactly good, for the first
forty seconds — the acoustic intro, where the chorus is re-imagined as a teen
girl's complaint at not being able to satisfy her... oh never mind. Then, as
the plastic soul rhythms come in and the song becomes a cruddily programmed
anthem to «finding your own self», we quickly plunge into the depths of the
ridiculous, such as hearing the line "I've got my own identity!" from
Ms. Spears (because she doesn't care much for tight skirts, apparently).
Just as before, Britney's worst enemy here is
not even the song material, but the production — we are supposed to be taking
this in as «live» music, with acoustic guitars, (occasionally) real drums, and
played rather than programmed keyboards manning the melodies. But most of the
melodies are trivial slow or mid-tempo grooves that require real hot playing to
be effective, whereas here there is absolutely no player involvement anywhere
in sight — just a bunch of probably well-paid professionals wasting their lives
on fluff and letting us all know that they
know it, too.
In another age, in another world, a song like
ʽLuckyʼ, contributed by the ever-present Max Martin, could be a
source of inspiration — written with a clear nod to classic Motown conventions,
so much that, with a little imaginative effort, you could envisage it done by a
Mary Wells or a Diana Ross... okay, at the very least — by an ABBA or someone
like that. But the drums are crappy, the synthesizers' only point is to provide
tonal accompaniment, the lyrics are trite even for the pop level of a 1962
(although, granted, probably just right for the level of the average 12-year
girl), and the hook-forging process involves making one out of "she cry-cry-cries in her lonely heart"
which might be embarrassing to sing along to even for certain 12-year olds.
Other than the «retro-potential» of
ʽLuckyʼ and those amusing forty seconds of the intro to ʽSatisfactionʼ,
there is nothing of interest on the album whatsoever — ʽOops!...ʼ is
a stylistic clone of ʽOne More Timeʼ, but without the cool piano
notes it is even less redeemable; and its companion piece,
ʽStrongerʼ, makes the best of Britney's vocal abilities (her lower
notes always sound more authentic and realistic than her higher ones), but
completely misses its point — there is nothing about her performance that truly
suggests getting "stronger than yesterday, now it's nothing but my
way" (if one of your idols is Janet Jackson, this does not automatically
mean that Max Martin can make you into a Janet Jackson with one wave of his
songwriter's pen).
Worse, towards the end of the album they really
blow it with a set of never-ending adult contemporary and / or power ballads,
including a donation from devil lady Diane Warren and a song called ʽDear
Diaryʼ, co-credited to Britney herself — and it shows, it shows! not even
a federal grant-supported sociological survey into the blogging activities of
middle school teenage girls could have yielded such an authentic reconstruction
on behalf of a middle-aged professional songwriter. I wonder if Steve Tyler
would still insist that pink is his favorite color, having heard this
particular song?
So, overall, even though the choice is
altogether pathetic, this is probably the worst album in Britney's entire
career — generic mainstream bubblegum pop from the late 1990s is bad enough as
it is, but recycled generic
mainstream bubblegum pop brings «regurgitated spam» to mind, or maybe even more
horrendous things than that. Cute bellybutton, of course, but we'd already seen
it in her videos anyway.
BRITNEY (2001)
1) I'm A Slave 4 U; 2)
Overprotected; 3) Lonely; 4) I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman; 5) Boys; 6)
Anticipating; 7) I Love Rock'n'Roll; 8) Cinderella; 9) Let Me Be; 10) Bombastic
Love; 11) That's Where You Take Me; 12) When I Found You; 13) What It's Like To
Be Me.
Presumably, the commercial success of Britney's
first two albums swooshed past the breaking point — that point where, upon
having dutily supplied a legion of teens with sweet fodder, she could be dumped
by the industry altogether. The legions were still hot for more Britney — but
also, the legions were growing up, and so, much like Harry Potter, Britney had
to grow up along with her legions. So it was decided — meticulously planned and
executed, too — that the third album would be... well, since we all know that
«Artists» are supposed to have «Transitional Albums» that gradually bring them
to their «Mature Stage», that was exactly what the third album was supposed to
be. (Never mind that real artists
rarely, if ever, calculate their records as «transitional» — they just come
out that way naturally — but who are we kiddin' here).
If there is a more blatant way to emphasize
this «transition» than naming one of the album's key tracks ʽI'm Not A
Girl, Not Yet A Womanʼ, I'd like to hear it, but it seems like Max Martin
had all potential competition beat on that one. Even more important is the fact
that throughout, the focus is altogether on «Me, The Real Britney». Defending her «freedom» on ʽLet Me
Beʼ, asserting her independent personality on ʽWhat It's Like To Be
Meʼ, complaining about being way too ʽOverprotectedʼ, and
peeking at us with a slightly scared (or was that «stoned»?) Mowgli-type look
from the sleeve photo — yep, that's «Britney», all right: the girl who just got
told by Justin Timberlake what it's like to be her. Did you ever realize that
it is usually the media-baked glitzy shallow stars who like to extol their
«independence» and «not-like-everybody-else-ness» and
«let-me-live-my-own-life-ness», usually over the blandest melodies and
arrangements ever, rather than the ones who are truly independent? You most
probably did — and you most probably understand why that is so.
However, to achieve the official status of
«transitional», the album must not concentrate entirely on pseudo-confession
and mock-introspection. In terms of sheer covered ground, Britney is her most mish-mashy, variegated album ever. For one
thing, individuality and maturity be damned, there is still a lot of the «old»
bubblegummy Britney, still polishing her whitebread dance-pop moves on
ʽBombastic Loveʼ and ʽCinderellaʼ, or cooing away
little-princess romantic ballads (ʽWhen I Found Youʼ; the
techno-spiced, but just as sickeningly sweet ʽThat's Where You Take
Meʼ — high up in the skies, silly, whatever did you think? Wait for just a couple more years, we'll get there eventually).
For another thing, there is a brief, thoroughly
and healthily failed attempt at dressing her up like a rough'n'tough rock star,
with probably the most banal choice
that could be made — Joan Jett's (actually, Alan Merrill's, but who cares these
days?..) ʽI Love Rock'n'Rollʼ. Since there has never, ever been any additional evidence to the
fact that Britney does, in fact, love rock'n'roll, not even her Oh So Cool
"hey, is this thing on?" at the beginning manages to justify this
next gaffe — granted, not nearly as face-palmish as the fiasco of
ʽSatisfactionʼ, but only because, unlike the latter, ʽI Love
Rock'n'Rollʼ was never a very good song in the first place.
Much better is the lead-off single from the album:
ʽI'm A Slave 4 Uʼ, written and produced by The Neptunes, is probably
one of the decade's better mainstream R&B dance numbers (not that I'm
really an expert!), if only because its main hooks have nothing to do with
mainstream R&B, but are based on an odd combination of boing-boing-ing
electronic percussion with almost psychedelic vocalization (the "I'm a
slaaaaaaaave for you..." bit, not the "get it get it get it"
bit, which I originally mistook for "kitty kitty kitty", and it was
way more fun). This is Britney dipping her toes into the seductive world of
syncopation, sampling, and sex-tease, and it succeeds far better than dipping
the same toes into bombastic riff-rock — except that ʽI'm A Slave 4
Uʼ is completely «de-personalized» and could have been recorded by just
about anyone.
But no, this is the first and last time you are
going to hear me complain about how «there's not enough Britney in this song»,
because the last time we really heard «the real Britney» was on ʽDear
Diaryʼ, and it is not quite clear why anyone should ever want to hear more
of «the real Britney» — thank goodness we now have all those tons of makeup on
top, which is really the only reason to give a quick listen to these records in
the first place. Problem is, on Britney
that makeup is still laid on too thin — remember, we are supposed to be in
transition here, not girls, not yet women. ʽI'm A Slave 4 Uʼ and, to
a much lesser extent, ʽBoysʼ feature respectable production jobs —
the rest of the N'Sync-ish dance numbers sink through the floorboards as usual.
Plus, more trouble looms on the horizon as we see the first elements of
auto-tuning on a couple of tracks, squeezing out the last irreplaceable element
of Britney's — her sexy rasp — but, for the most part, fans of her limited, but
not un-cute, vocal cords will still find plenty here.
Altogether, forgetting about the individual
imaginativeness of ʽ Slaveʼ for a moment, Britney's «transition-ality» was realized rather poorly — the album
lacks both the super-glamor-gloss of ensuing releases and the Lolita-style pesky perverted oh-so-guilty pleasure aura of the
bubblegum teen-pop stuff. For the most part, this is bad, utterly sterile music
as usual, but now it even sort of lacks the most basic sense of purpose, and in
a way, this is the most «boring» album released under the name of B.S. up to
date. In fact, I'd rather go and vomit one more time to ʽDear Diaryʼ
than have to sit through this no-spine-whatsoever Justin Timberlake duet. On
second thought, I just realized that I don't have to do either of these things — see, life isn't so bad after all.
IN THE ZONE (2003)
1) Me Against The Music; 2) (I
Got That) Boom Boom; 3) Showdown; 4) Breathe On Me; 5) Early Mornin'; 6) Toxic;
7) Outrageous; 8) Touch Of My Hand; 9) The Hook Up; 10) Shadow; 11) Brave New
Girl; 12) Everytime.
All right — this is where the shit really hits the fan. Be it out of sheer
bare sociological curiosity, everybody needs to hear this album, or at least
its most significant «conceptual» streak that begins with ʽShowdownʼ,
ends with ʽThe Hook Upʼ, and reaches apocalyptic-evil levels on the
ʽBreathe On Meʼ / ʽEarly Mornin'ʼ / ʽToxicʼ
sequence. It is not every day that playing just three songs in a row gets you
a-thinkin' about the ultimate fate of man- and womankind, and you certainly do
not expect that from a Britney fuckin' Spears album — but the last time I
remember myself walking away from a musical record with a comparable feeling
was Aerosmith's Get A Grip
(incidentally, released a round decade earlier — watch out, 2013!).
With Britney now well over 21, and the industry
still red-hot yearnin' for another smash, the next move from Britney's ʽI'm Not A Girl, Not Yet
A Womanʼ was obvious: the fans had to be shown that the girl finally is a woman, and a real woman, «as all
men know», lives in constant need of sensual pleasure and in permanent search
of sexual conquest. Ain't too sure? Ask Madonna. In fact, don't ask Madonna —
better still, invite Madonna to sing
a duet with Britney on the opening track and provide her with a motherly
blessing and a protective French kiss. Never mind if ʽMe Against The
Musicʼ matches its title so well, given that there is so much of «me» in
this track and so little actual music — just a regular hip-hop beat. The really
important thing is that they got Madonna here to sing "C'mon Britney, lose
control, watch you take it down", and this truly creates the illusion of
«passing the crown».
There are, however, a few problems. For all of
the obvious criticisms of Madonna as an artist, there was never any question of
her being (a) an independent soul, (b) a modest, but occasionally impressive,
vocal talent, (c) an above-average songwriter who could easily pen a catchy
tune or, at least, recognize one (ʽInto The Grooveʼ alone should be
able to dispel any doubt). And there is quite a hint of trickery in that
recommendation — for all we know, Madonna herself never ever «lost control»
over a single second of her professional life. Now cut to Britney, pampered
from the Mickey Club get-go through the rose-candy bubblegum ickiness — and
now, all sex-dolled for the next stage of her career: «if you loved In Bed With Madonna, you're going to be
really, really pleased as Britney takes you to the next stage».
And yes, this is the next stage — in humiliation, first and foremost. It had been
heavily propagated that In The Zone
was the album on which Britney allegedly took control in her hands (heedless
of Madonna's call?), and, to prove that, we now have her name added to nine out
of twelve songs — kinda suspicious, though, that most of them feature at least three extra songwriters. But more
importantly, the image that comes together through these songs can have nothing
to do with the natural development of a 22-year old girl from Kentwood,
Louisiana, who only recently was spotted talking about saving up virginity for
marriage. I can believe in artistic independence for the likes of Taylor Swift
— singing her monotonous bores about princes on white horses until the end of
time — but Britney Spears herself
behind something like ʽTouch Of My Handʼ? (It's not that I doubt the touching aspect, mind you — only the writing).
Anyway, that whole stretch I was talking about,
once we get done with the lacklustre Madonna number and the even less inspiring
Ying Yang Twins collaboration (lesson one: never
collaborate with anyone who cannot even properly spell yin-yang), is quite demonstratively evil. Not «bad» as such, since
it does feature at least a few really creative musical moves, but «evil», as
Britney falls under the heavy press of sexploitation. She does know how to sex
up her voice properly — she might even know that better than Madonna, preferring
to take lessons from Donna Summer instead, and doing it in different ways:
sensual purr on ʽBreathe On Meʼ, breathy hush on ʽEarly
Mornin'ʼ, aggressive horniness on ʽToxicʼ, paranoid rutting on
ʽOutrageousʼ, post-orgasmic recovery on ʽTouch Of My Handʼ
(what else have we missed here?). But when all of it is taken together, the
overall impression is that the girl had been placed under heavy, I mean REAL heavy drugs — most of the songs
pile on the trance atmosphere so densely that you can almost feel the presence
of some invisible manipulative hypnotizer behind the girl's back.
ʽBreathe On Meʼ and ʽEarly
Mornin'ʼ, in particular, are really
creepy — not even minding the lyrics (which sometimes actually border on
questionable irony: "Monogamy is the way to go / Just put your lips
together and blow"), they give you what you've always wanted: Britney the
sex puppet (insert coin and wind up for your pleasure), protected by the
illusion of «sexual liberation». All the more creepy, that is, given that no
less than the great Moby himself — always happy to play the Joker for an
unsuspecting mainstream crowd — masterminds ʽEarly Mornin'ʼ, giving
it a spooky, dark, psychedelic twist with a gruff «rotating» bass pulse and
swooping electronic strings as we are told that "it don't stop till the
early morning / passed out on the couch I'm yawning".
The centerpiece of the album has always been,
and still is, ʽToxicʼ — musically, the most inventive number on
here, not only because it manages to fuse Bollywood strings with James Bond-ian
surf guitar in a completely natural manner, but also because it gives us three
different Britneys (verse, bridge, and chorus so totally different in tone and
mood), with «unlawful carnal delight» as the only unifying theme. If the vocals
weren't buried so deep under production make-up, one could even say that this
is the only song on the record where we could perceive Britney having some
genuine fun — but this is not about real people having real fun, after all.
By the time we are through with Britney's
imaginary sex life and get to the ballads (only two of them this time — power
crap on ʽShadowʼ, romantic piano crap on ʽEverytimeʼ), it
is hard not to wonder if the famous breakdown, with a complete — at least temporarily
— collapse of her personal life in the ensuing three years, was not a direct
consequence of the recording of In The
Zone, or, rather, the whole shenanigan (recording, touring, calculated need
to «uphold the image» etc.); even worse, far be it from me to start moralizing,
but I wonder just how many young people's lives were, in any way, influenced by this stuff.
Because, clearly, reasonable adults can take
this for what it is — unabashed musical pornography — and put it to the
appropriate use. Britney's teen or post-teen audiences are another matter —
they could very easily be deluded into taking this for a decisive statement of
«sexual liberation», maybe even a «feminist» one (even despite the fact that
most of the corporate songwriters and producers behind the raciest moments here
were all men), and restructure their life in accordance with the spirit of
ʽBreathe On Meʼ, ʽEarly Mornin'ʼ, and, of course,
ʽTouch Of My Handʼ, the song that does not justify masturbation, but glorifies
it ("Into the unknown, I will be bold, I'm going to places I can be out of
control..." and, of course, the completely immortal line "I'm into
myself in the most precious way"!!!) — oh yeah, we've gone a long, long
way from ʽPictures Of Lilyʼ and even ʽShe Bopʼ.
Even if I tend to exaggerate here — after all,
it's just a run-of-the-mill dance-pop album, wouldn't it be too much honor to
accuse it of raising the sexploitation bar to such hideous heights? — there is
no denying the fact, it seems, that ultimately, it is all very cheap. Yes, the involvement
of Moby and the inclusion of a few really neat arranging ideas
(ʽToxicʼ, first and foremost) does raise the stock value of In The Zone a little bit, but if you
take it as a whole — not just the melodies, but the lyrics, the vocal message,
the accompanying videos, the racy tour antics — the worst thing about it is
that there is nothing here that is truly,
genuinely «sexy», it's more like a musical equivalent of a tasteless, boring
old peepshow (watch this
and tell me if I'm wrong). There is just no getting away from the fact that, no
matter how big the size of the image-making army might be, here or in the
future, ʽOne More Timeʼ was still the apex of Britney's sexuality — I
mean, what fun is there, really, when she's so goddamn legal already?
On the other hand, I will admit that, drugged
or not drugged, she does at least sound like she is still alive on most of
these tracks — if you have some interest in an actual human being on the verge
of being replaced with a piece of machinery, In The Zone is your last bet. Everything else, metaphorically
speaking, represents the post-lobotomy period. And yes, I'd like to say that I
pity the poor girl, but is she really in need of my, or anybody else's, pity?
After all, the sales weren't all that
bad — three million copies sold in the US alone, and how much coke can one
score with those numbers? Even if you have to share with all the ten thousand
producers?
BLACKOUT (2007)
1) Gimme More; 2) Piece Of Me;
3) Radar; 4) Break The Ice; 5) Heaven On Earth; 6) Get Naked (I Got A Plan); 7)
Freakshow; 8) Toy Soldier; 9) Hot As Ice; 10) Ooh Ooh Baby; 11) Perfect Lover;
12) Why Should I Be Sad.
It is hard not to admit that the «Britney
team», no matter how cheap, crass, or cynical it may get (and standards are
constantly rising), at least has a sense of crude (exploitative) humor: Blackout is probably the perfect title for a new Britney Spears
album in 2007, in the light of — or, should we say, «in the blackout of...»? —
everything that we know of Britney's public, and not-so-public, life over the
preceding three years. As the demon that she had foolishly let her mentors
unleash on her during the In The Zone
sessions predictably entered her offstage life as well, I remember the whole
thing almost beginning to take on the shape of a medieval moral tale — sell
your soul to you-know-who, and here comes the retribution.
Blackout came right in the middle of the turmoil,
recorded in the midst of drug-related scandals, broken marriages, trials, psych
wards and what-not. For some people, these situations actually act as creative
catalysts — great art coming out of great suffering and all that — problem is,
since «creativity» and «Britney Spears» never belonged in the same sentence,
all we could hope for is somebody else
getting catalyzed by Britney's ordeal and creating something to match. Clearly,
certain such efforts had been made. The results, however, are somewhat
puzzling.
Blackout is very different from In The Zone. This is a much darker, colder, sterner album — in
certain respects, more mature, and definitely more cynical. As a cohesive
atmospheric piece, it actually succeeds — where In The Zone was the sound of a wild, no-holds-barred, try-everything-once
party, Blackout is the hangover
effect, and even though the party as such is over, the effect is every bit as
disturbing because it seems irreversible. With all the icy, IDM-inspired synthesizers,
techno beats, and processed vocals, Blackout
opens the «robo-phase» of Britney's career, and, coming straight off the heels
of In The Zone, there is no getting
rid of the implied feeling — this is
where too much sexploitation actually gets you. In other words, «one fuck too
much» and the senses start shutting down. (Isn't that what happens to porn
stars?)
On the level of individual songs, Blackout does not work one tiniest bit.
Its opening single, ʽGimme Moreʼ, forever tied to a disastrous
«live» MTV performance that introduced the «new-look Britney», is hardly
memorable for anything other than the opening "it's Britney, bitch" —
and only in the function of «least convincing line in a Britney Spears song ever». The rest is a mess of synthesizer
sirens, morose Gregorian chant-inspired vocal harmonies, and atmospheric
attempts to turn the message of ʽMe Against The Musicʼ on its head —
give it a cynical edge, let the mind show some condescension towards the body —
but there is no hook, and dark atmosphere alone does not suffice, since, after
all, this is still dance-oriented electropop for the masses, not a Dead Can
Dance record or anything.
Then there is the obligatory anti-media rant —
ʽPiece Of Meʼ is probably one of the few «sticky» bits on the album,
and also one on which the heavy use of Auto-Tune is fully justified: the very
idea is that, on this song, the listener who wants a «piece of her» will have
to deal with the robotic casing, installed by the security system. If it only
weren't so predictable, or so hypocritical (don't say they didn't
warn you, Brit!), I could almost say that it works: there is something vaguely
Kraftwerk-ian about it, reminding of the good old days of Man Machine. In any case, it clearly stands out from the rest of
the tracks, be it in a good or a bad way.
Because the rest is... well, even compared to
the production values of In The Zone,
everything is pretty bland. Auto-Tune, electro beats, processed background
vocals, no curious or even vaguely interesting overdubs, and an atmosphere of
total robo-stupor — depressing and
boring at the same time. It is not even quite clear to me how the album could
appeal to Britney's established fanbase, what with its near-total lack of the
«let's have fun» message. As you slide down to the promises of the track called
ʽGet Naked (I Got A Plan)ʼ — a title that should presume some giddy
Prince-like bawdiness — you find that, in its essence, the song is more like a dirge than a sex anthem, and that its
repetitive message of "get naked, get naked, get naked, take it off, take
it off" sounds more like something you'd expect to hear in a doctor's
office rather than in a strip club. So much for all the sex symbolism.
ʽToy Soldierʼ, masterminded by
hip-hop producer Sean Garrett, is probably the closest that this amorphous mass
ever gets to a bit of chaotic crazy fun — martial rhythms, burlesque mood, and
a «drunk-off-my-head» vocal part that has Britney coming out of her robot shell
for once (or, perhaps, more like borrowing a hyperactive emotional chip for
three seconds). But even on that song the «fun» in question is not real fun — merely the side effect of a
mechanical spring failure in the orgasmatron, with unpredictable results (for
once).
Overall, the only reason why this is called Blackout and not Meltdown is that the latter excludes the possibility of recovery —
here, it was immediately implied in the title that Britney's suffering is
deemed temporary. It is also implied that Britney's career as such had nothing
to do with it: it's all about the over-demanding fans (ʽGimme Moreʼ),
the evil media (ʽPiece Of Meʼ), and that shithead of a husband
(ʽWhy Should I Be Sadʼ, closing the album on a «touchingly» personal
note). It is also a nice preventive cop-out in case the album were to become
panned — give the lady a break, after all, she clearly isn't in a state to
produce her masterpiece. But who are we fooling? As usual, the album has very
little to do with Britney herself — and this time around, they did not even
bother about raising the enthusiasm bar in the studio: In The Zone might have been state-of-the-art dance-pop when it came
out, but Blackout seems to be
slacking in that respect. As an attempt to save a bit of face, it isn't that awful — but to say that Britney is
«way past her prime» here would be a gross understatement. On the other side,
she probably should have been grateful to still have a record contract under the circumstances.
CIRCUS (2008)
1) Womanizer; 2) Circus; 3)
Out From Under; 4) Kill The Lights; 5) Shattered Glass; 6) If U Seek Amy; 7)
Unusual You; 8) Blur; 9) Mmm Papi; 10) Mannequin; 11) Lace And Leather; 12) My
Baby.
This one was recorded and released at a
surprisingly fast rate — coming out a little more than a year after Blackout. The hurry is understandable,
since that record was produced very much in a daze, and after a series of
subsequent collapses and rehabilitations, it was only logical to try and get
back in the ring with a fresh start. Again, even the album cover reflects that
somehow — the wonders of therapeutic treatment, heavy makeup, and Photoshop
combined, we have here a far «fresher» image than on the lost-and-confused Blackout photo. But we do have the
album title — and, in fact, the album concept
— that still reflects turmoil and media problems, although, truth be told, the
Britney team tries to view it with irony.
Instead of In
The Zone's «sex junkie» and Blackout's
«sex on ice» image, Circus toys
around with a «sex marionette» approach — Britney as a haughty glamor doll with
occasional soul. The arrangements are generally lighter than on Blackout, with less distortion, dark
bass, and even fewer «auto-tuned» songs, but what is more important is that Circus, like any circus, strives for
more diversity. There are even a couple of syrupy ballads that try to recapture
the spirit of «Britney of old» — ʽOut From Underʼ and the cooey
ʽMy Babyʼ could have easily fit on her first two albums; the latter,
incidentally, is the only song on here credited to Britney without a host of co-writers, which just goes to show that the
girl's own «artistry level» has never really advanced beyond the Mickey Mouse
demarcation line.
Beyond that, there is not only the standard
expected electropop (title track, ʽShattered Glassʼ, etc.), but also
bits of less techno-crazy, mood-oriented R&B (ʽBlurʼ), bass-heavy
funk (ʽLace And Leatherʼ), and straightforward «melodic techno»
(ʽUnusual Youʼ). None of it is done all too well — just smooth and
professional, as always — but at least the overall effect is that, for the
first time in seven years, there seems to be an actual human being somewhere
here, behind all the shimmery glitz and all the (still heavily present)
robo-antics.
Even something really silly, such as ʽMmm
Papiʼ, the album's «sex-dolliest» track of all, actually sounds like
self-irony in the overall context: with songs like ʽBlurʼ and
ʽMannequinʼ covering it from both flanks, lyrics like "with this
fast car I can get really far", and teasing-est intonations on the whole
record, it is hard to take it straight — and it is the only song here that could be taken straight. Everything else is
with a conscious twist; a crude twist, for sure, but there is no doubt that
Britney's songwriting team is genuinely trying to lay on a layer of
«complexity» on the poor unsuspecting Britney. At the very least, she now has
to play the glamor doll and the
suffering, exploited soul behind the glamor at the same time.
In terms of melody or witty arrangements,
however, Circus is not much of an
improvement over Blackout. In fact,
the arrangements are quite rote throughout — I can only try to imagine how the
martial punch of ʽIf U Seek Amyʼ could have sounded in a classic
Brit-pop arrangement instead of depending entirely on minimalistic electronic
pulp, as if they were on such a tight budget. The chorus part of
ʽBlurʼ is successfully creepy ("can't remember what I did last
night, maybe I should have given in but I just couldn't fight" sung with a
rare authenticity for Britney, stimulating
uncomfortable suspicions). The chorus of ʽKill The Lightsʼ is
genuinely psychotic (and at least we can hope that somebody took Britney out to
see Sunset Boulevard — education
rules!). The rest is traditionally rather non-descript.
Over all of this looms the shadow of
ʽWomanizerʼ, the annoying eardragon that should work much better as a
mouth muscle exercise for post-coma patients, but somehow turned into a «classic
Britney Spears single» instead. It does not fit in well with the rest of Circus and it does not «ring true» at
all — this whole idea of a suddenly «feminist» Britney kicking her Romeo in the
guts is like a last-minute attempt to ride the coattails of Pink and Avril
Lavigne. On the other hand, it does work as a comical gimmick that is all but
impossible to scrape out of your eardrums — after all, the word «womanizer»
does have a cool ring to it, and what if it rings 300 times in a row? — and
then there was that video with the naked Britney in the sauna... hmm, decent
pop song, on second thought.
For those actually interested in hearing the
album from top to bottom — it does not deserve the honor (nobody in the whole
wide world deserves to experience the barbie chimes of ʽMy Babyʼ, at
the very least), but it would make sense to hear the bonus tracks on expanded
editions: three of them, stacked together, give a good idea of the album's
diversity — there is the funny, half-Madonna, half-Apples-In-Stereo
psycho-techno of ʽRock Me Inʼ, the thoroughly awful, cheap, primitive
dance-techno of ʽPhonographyʼ (yes, the lyrics make it obvious that
the title was chosen due to phonetic
similarity with a different word), and the «Phil Spector Meets The 21st Century
(In Jail, While Inferior Crooks Are Running The Show)» electrono-Motown-ish
lushness of ʽAmnesiaʼ. From thoroughly awful to curious, we have it
all, making a real circus out of Circus.
If only the musical realization of most of these ideas wasn't so bland, I could
see this turning into a respectable... nah, into a fun album. But it was, so I couldn't.
FEMME FATALE (2011)
1) Till The World Ends; 2)
Hold It Against Me; 3) Inside Out; 4) I Wanna Go; 5) How I Roll; 6) (Drop Dead)
Beautiful; 7) Seal It With A Kiss; 8) Big Fat Bass; 9) Trouble For Me; 10)
Trip To Your Heart; 11) Gasoline; 12) Criminal.
And here comes another change of image — not a
radical one, but somewhat appropriately attuned to Britney's 30th birthday
(yes, it has been that long, hard as
it is to believe). The album title is hardly a reference to The Velvet Underground & Nico, but
apparently it was decided that Britney's target audience has its own
understanding of what a «femme fatale» is supposed to be: if you ask me, the idea of yesterday's Loli-queen
Britney Spears as a «femme fatale» is about as ridiculous as the idea of
Britney Spears as an intellectual folk-rock queen from the Village, but who am I, for crying out loud? Am I Max Martin?
Ke$ha? Lukasz Gotwald? Alexander Kronlund? Mathieu Jomphe? Bonnie McKee? Jacob
Kasher Hindlin? Savan Kotecha? Christian Karlsson? Henrik Jonback? Magnus
Lidehäll? Pontus Winnberg? Jeremy or Joshua Coleman? Esther Dean? Benjamin
Levin? Henry Walter? Will.i.am? Fraser T. Smith? Heather Bright? Liwi Franc? Sophie
Stern? Claude Kelly? Tiffany Amber? All these people know better than me — and
they are just the songwriters. For the producers, multiply that by 1.5. So many
mouths to feed — Britney could have just as well opened a charity fund or
something.
Anyway, the point here is to re-cast Britney as
the «queen of the modern groove» — somewhat of a slightly less outrageous,
slightly more family-entertainment-compatible version of Lady Gaga, with just
as much dance energy, but without all the trash pop culture humor and sarcasm.
Sex is still being sold a-plenty, too, but this time, from a more «mature»
perspective — we are now out of «the zone», fully aware of all the erogenous
capacities of the body and ready to teach rather than to learn. A «Femme Fatale»,
after all, should be way past losing herself in the heavy drugginess of
ʽEarly Morningʼ or the naïve orgy of ʽBreathe On Meʼ.
But she is also not supposed to be a post-operational robot à la Blackout, or a confused, vulnerable
ex-tramp à la Circus.
So, basically, this sounds like a steady,
self-assured, in-command set of high-energy electropop dance tunes, loaded with
brand new production gimmicks, dubstep influences, and Auto-Tune going for the
kill — they use it with more creativity than on Blackout, though, usually to accentuate certain bits of the
choruses, so that there is no overwhelming «robotic» impression from the
singing, only from the musical background (which is expected).
As embarrassing as it is to admit it, more than
half of the songs here are really
catchy — in fact, on a pure song-by-song basis, Femme Fatale might be the most «fun» album in Britney's stash so
far. That small army of songwriters and producers assembled for the occasion
somehow managed to pull it off in a somewhat less cheap / sleazy / generic way
than the previous two records — maybe it's all a matter of hard techno
grooving, or echo layering, or whatever, but the idiot hooks on generic dance
fodder like ʽTill The World Endsʼ or ʽI Wanna Goʼ are grapply, and it will take all day to
get the sticky burr of "I can be your treble (trouble?) baby you can be my
bass" out of your system. Silly, manipulative, but it doth work.
Actually, if not for the arrangements — which,
want it or not, have to follow the conventions of today the same way Madonna's
arrangements of her early classics had to follow the conventions of the
mid-1980s — if not for the arrangements, I could easily, just like that, see some of these songs handled by
the likes of, say, Blondie in the early 1980s. ʽGasolineʼ, for
instance, which is near-perfect in terms of vocal form (the verse melody begins
kinda flat and stupid, but the chorus is dark, crisp, sexy, and the transition
to falsetto adds a nice extra touch). Or the whoa-whoos of ʽSeal It With A
Kissʼ. Or the light cooey fun of ʽHow I Rollʼ (with the
naughtiness disguised by making the main verse line go "you can be my THUG tonight" in the official
lyrics — hey, these songwriting guys are smart enough to know the phonetic
proximity of their fricatives).
Unlike Circus,
the album is almost completely devoid of sentimentality or, God forbid, any
deliberate throwbacks to Britney's ʽDear Diaryʼ-type songs; the only
exception is the last song, ʽCriminalʼ, an acoustic folk ballad (!)
with flute (!!) that still rips its verse melody off ABBA's ʽLay All Your
Love On Meʼ (!!!). Definitely unusual stuff for Britney, but alas, it does
not work — the whole thing, at best, sounds like an unintentional parody on the
«stand by your man» genre, and Britney's delivery is as stiff and stuffy here
as it is everywhere else. Except that everywhere else it's okay for her to be
stiff, because the rest of the album is purely carnal in essence.
So I just pretend to myself that Femme Fatale is really just eleven
songs of non-stop dancing, and a bonus cut thrown in for sentimental fools
who'd spent half their lives dreaming of hearing Britney backed with a pastoral
sound. From that point of view, this here image, style, and packaging is
probably the best deal possible for a «mature» Britney — certainly not one bit
worse than Madonna's Confessions On A
Dance Floor, as the former teacher and student are now pressing their
standards closer to each other from the opposite ends.
The best deal isn't much, of course: the
synthesizers are sickly, the beats are primitive, the lead singer is «The
Return of the Son of Britney Spears and Auto-Tune», the lyrics are
uninteresting (if not always atrocious), the guest rap stars are annoying, the
sex is artificially staged, the mood is monotonous, and the idea of Britney
Spears pushing thirty is a turn-off by itself — predictably, the album sold
even less than Circus, which sold
less than Blackout, which sold less
than In The Zone... you get the
tendency, and predictably, her next album will sell even less than that, unless
really drastic measures are taken, like a public revelation that Britney and
Lady Gaga are really the same person.
But it is still amusing — and instructive,
especially for all the current Loli-queens who have enough intellect to think a
few years ahead into their career — that on a pure song-by-song basis, ripped
out of historic and cultural context, Britney Spears might have produced her
best record (or, rather, «have her best record produced») at a time when her
visual image, the one thing that sells best of all in this world of ours, got
tattered, withered, and irrelevant. Femme
Fatale was criticized heavily for not having enough of Britney «herself» —
for getting her totally lost in a crowd of corporate mannequins — and I sort of
disagree. First, if «Britney herself» means the Britney of ʽDear
Diaryʼ or ʽMy Babyʼ or ʽI'm Not A Girlʼ, that is a
definite plus; and second, the crowd of corporate mannequins did such a
surprisingly good job that, even if there is not a single songwriting credit of
Britney's here anywhere in sight, the «femme fatale» in question must have at
least acted as an inspirational coalescing agent. Somehow.
BRITNEY JEAN (2013)
1) Alien; 2) Work Bitch; 3)
Perfume; 4) It Should Be Easy; 5) Tik Tik Boom; 6) Body Ache; 7) Till It's
Gone; 8) Passenger; 9) Chillin' With You; 10) Don't Cry; 11) Brightest Morning
Star; 12) Hold On Tight; 13) Now That I Found You.
Hitting a new image is one thing, but
sustaining it on a reasonable level is quite another. With will.i.am of The
Black Eyed Peas as executive producer, and a small stormtrooper unit of about
50,000 people credited for additional production work, Britney Jean is the (not) long-awaited sequel to Femme Fatale, once again promoting the
«Princess of Pop» as reigning ruler of the latest and trendiest in electronic
dance groove — even if it means taking cues from K-Pop, which I feel is one of
the uncredited influences, or pretending that this is really a «deeply
personal» record, aiming for your body and
soul at the same time.
Which is exactly what makes Britney Jean, ultimately, a draggy
disappointment after the harmless catchy silliness of the previous album. As
far as I am concerned, it is impossible to take Britney Spears «seriously», be
it fifteen or fifty years into her career (and I shudder to think that the
possibility of a 70-year old Britney Spears coming up with another album
remains open). The issue of whether she has or does not have real feelings to
express does not actually worry me as much as the fact that she is just a bad
actor; her only successful role has been that of a sex machine, and this is
exactly the role that seems to be missing from Britney Jean.
Instead, we get ʽWork Bitchʼ, a
relatively generic EDM tune with a message
— a message that actually makes sense, considering that we do indeed sometimes
forget just how much hard work goes into the success story of a mainstream pop
star. The problem is, those techno synth loops and those ridiculous auto-tuned
vocals aren't exactly the kind of product that would convince me of the necessity of said hard work. It's such a
stupid-sounding groove, and such an expressionless, colorless vocal, that the
conversion efficiency looks close to zero: I'd even take Mick Jagger's
ʽLet's Workʼ over this one any day as far as the message is
concerned, and that was arguably one of the worst songs he'd ever done.
The majority of these tunes, however, deal with
softer feelings: romance, yearning, loneliness, getting rid of loneliness,
jealousy, and whatever else there is in the same line of work — as illustrated
by the second single, the rhythmic power ballad ʽPerfumeʼ that she
co-wrote with Australian songwriting hack Sia Furler (who seems to have
collaborated with about 99% of «Pop Divas» throughout the 2000s). If the wooden
intonations and repetitiveness of the chorus do not get you, maybe the story
will — it's like, there's this guy, and Britney's got a crush on him, and
there's this other chick, and she's kinda jealous, and she wants her to know
she's got the right to this guy without telling it in her face, so she's gonna
smear the guy in her perfume to «mark my territory», and we never get to know
how it ends, but ain't that a thrill? (Spoiler: the guy gets killed,
dismembered, buried in the woods, and his ghost returns from the grave to drive
Britney into an asylum... oh wait, that's the officially unreleased Alice
Cooper/Rob Zombie mix).
Neither the singles nor any other track on here
deserves serious comment, I think. There are
occasional vocal and instrumental hooks, with Autotune and mind-bogglingly
simplistic synth loops accounting for most of them, but it all sounds
emotionally fake ("I'm blind from the tears that fall like rain" —
yeah, right; are those the same tears that are responsible for Autotune's «disruption»
of the vocals?), verbally inane ("I laughed so much that I cried / I
danced so much till I was tired" — don't they even try to find decent rhymes any more?), and sonically disappointing
(ʽTik Tik Boomʼ could have at least used some realistic ticking and
booming effects, but instead it's just the same old creaky synth tones and a
robotic vocal).
The sequencing is also a drag, as they put a
whole bunch of utmostly lethargic sentimental ballads at the end of the album
— and in the finale, which is supposedly supposed to wrap things up in one big
final ball of heavenly joy (ʽNow That I Found Youʼ), do you know how they convey this joy? That keyboard
riff would have made Mother Goose turn over in her goosey grave, although maybe
some Teletubbies fans would have found it suitable.
Cutting a needlessly long story short, Britney Jean is further proof that (a)
it is impossible for Britney Spears to sustain a credible new image for more
than one record in a row, before it is ruined with futile attempts to add
«soul» to it at the expense of groove quality; (b) it is impossible for Britney
Spears to convince us that she is an actual human being, at least not through
her music; (c) the majority of today's corporate songwriters and producers
should go back to their ploughs, looms, and cowsheds, in order to make the
world a better place; (d) no matter what
your real birthname is, you do not
go generating associations with classic era Michael Jackson by means of your
album titles — I mean, do you really
need any extra reasons for looking stupid, when there's already more than
enough for a decisive thumbs down here?
GLORY (2016)
1) Invitation; 2) Make Me...;
3) Private Show; 4) Man On The Moon; 5) Just Luv Me; 6) Clumsy; 7) Do You Wanna
Come Over?; 8) Slumber Party; 9) Just Like Me; 10) Love Me Down; 11) Hard To
Forget Ya; 12) What You Need; 13*) Better; 14*) Change Your Mind (No Seas
Cortés); 15*) Liar; 16*) If I'm Dancing; 17*) Coupure Electrique.
Three times have I sat through this record, and
three times have I felt a strong pulling to take a shower immediately
afterwards, because sitting out there in a pool of even your own figurative vomit is quite a
schizophrenic feeling. But what could I do? Britney Jean "Princess Of
Pop" Spears' Glory, her ninth
overall studio LP, is not simply the worst record of her career so far — it is,
quite literally, one of the worst albums I have intentionally chosen to sit
through in the past... ah, heck, ever.
And I am not saying that it is unique in its badness: it is simply part of a
world where I very, very rarely venture. It may be useful to witness that world
occasionally — like it may be instructive for anyone dwelling in a well-to-do
quarter of the big city to take an occasional detour to the slums, just to
make sure that they actually exist — but then again, even a slum may have
something noble and righteous about it, since poverty is not a crime. Listening
to Glory, on the other hand, is more
like taking a detour into the cheapest, trashiest whorehouse there is, where
getting hooked up on heroin and catching a couple VDs is more like an
obligatory course of action than an unfortunate side effect.
Where do I even begin? Well, maybe just to get
this out of the way, this is not the
most boring or even the most musically generic set of electropop tunes released
in the history of humanity. Whatever the odds, Britney Spears still has not
been stripped of the «Princess of Pop» label by the music industry, and the
music industry at least has the good sense to hire taboons of corporate
songwriters who can supply their victim with a decent enough amount of
earworms. You take the required three listens and, sure enough, you glance back
at the song titles and you can remember how many of them go, along with some of
the beats. Nor could you objectively accuse the arrangers and producers of not
doing anything with the dance grooves once they've been established: what
separates high-class stinky trash from low-class stinky trash is that the
former has had money, time, energy, creativity and sometimes even a spoonful of
talent invested in it. (The number of special effects applied to Britney's
vocals alone deserves an objective mention).
The (very relative) saving grace of Femme Fatale was that these earworms
happened to be amplified by a general «high-energy» approach to the project.
Many of the songs had an anthemic feel to them — fast, loud, «empowered», and
this helped overlook their essential fakeness and concentrate on their hooks.
With Glory, the whole thing is
different: it has more of a pseudo-chamber feel, maybe even of a
«pseudo-bedroom» feel, if you know what I mean, and instead of giving us
Britney Spears as an unstoppable tornado of externalized sexuality, it is more
of a ʽPrivate Showʼ, to use one of the titles as an appropriate
metaphor. This is where you are invited to take a little bo-peep. Just send
them kids off to school, and we'll get to work right away.
In the process, the 34-year old Princess of Pop
will first send you out an ʽInvitationʼ, politely inquiring ʽDo
You Wanna Come Over?ʼ for a ʽSlumber Partyʼ, as she wants to
"take it back to my room" because she "just wants you to make me
move... back and forth, like this was all tennis" (ʽMove Meʼ).
The action gradually intensifies — "slide down my pole, watch me spin it
and twerk it" (ʽPrivate Showʼ, with the additional crime of
rhyming "satisfy" with "apple pie"); "I love how you
go down, head first and style it out" (ʽClumsyʼ — no, in case
you're worried, it's ultimately about getting
rather than not getting sexual satisfaction); and by the end, we understand
that the end is only a technical break, because "One time just ain't
enough, won't let this fade / I got that good, good stuff you can't erase"
(ʽWhat You Needʼ — but I sort of thought it was, you know, time that was supposed to be erasing the
good, good stuff? Or is she trying to tell us that her partner is intentionally
trying to wear her out? Whatever. I'm confused now... blame it all on lack of
sexual education in Soviet school, I guess).
Okay, so it's just the words, and if we simply
stay on that level, it would be only too natural to accuse the reviewer of
sexism — so what's fine and good for a male band like AC/DC, is shameful for a
female performer? Not at all. The difference is that the important thing for
AC/DC is their rock and roll drive, which, all by itself, is (a) genuine and
(b) inoffensive. For Glory, the
important thing is to give us an artist who, all things considered, ultimately
sounds like a blowup doll equipped with a Siri-like component. I mean, listen
to ʽPrivate Showʼ or ʽWhat You Needʼ and tell me if this
pitch even sounds as if it were produced by a human being — the vocoding
effects squeeze the last drops of humanity out of the woman, so much so that I
wouldn't want to be caught dead while
listening to even ten seconds of either. (What makes it ten times as offensive
is, I think, the intentional similarity of the basic stop-and-start pattern of
ʽWhat You Needʼ to Jimi Hendrix's ʽFireʼ — if they really
want to drop us a hint that Glory is
what should pass for the modern equivalent of fiery rock'n'roll, they should
rather just all drop dead instead). There's not even a drop of humor or irony
anywhere in sight to offer salvation (not that Britney Spears has ever been
capable of a drop of intelligent humor or irony).
When you come to think of it, did they really
have to go down all the way like this? I mean, even in 2016 there must be ways for a 34-year old female artist
to express her sexuality without getting totally reduced to that sexuality.
Heck, even Madonna knows how to do better. What could be somewhat excusable at the time of In The Zone (at least on ʽToxicʼ she really sounded like
she was having honest fun with it), under the condition that the scope would
eventually expand, now sounds — please excuse me for the extra harshness, but
somebody has got to do it — like the symbolic convulsions of an aging whore,
trying to make herself more attractive to customers with extra layers of makeup
and provocative clothing. And it's not even a matter of Britney's actual age (I
mean, 34 years is nothing these days — the peak of sexuality for some!), it's a
matter of how it all sounds and feels, with all these plastic electronic
overdubs, ridiculous vocals, trashy lyrics, and, above all, the complete and
total and utter reduction of all human qualities to one big bag of sexual
urges. If this is really, in her own words, "the best thing I've done in a
long time", wouldn't it be more honest to simply switch to pornography?
But forget about Britney herself, whose
intellectual brightness was never legendary in the first place; and forget
about several dozen highway robbers and agents of Satan masking as «producers»,
«writers», and even «musicians» on this insult to humanity. The most awful
thing, of course, are the «critics» who, according to Wikipedia, all gave
«generally positive reviews» of the album. Almost nobody even began to look at the obvious — perhaps out of fear of being
accused of sexism? — and almost everybody concentrated on the superficial
aspects, faintly praising the (undeniable, but still cringeworthy) pop hooks
and even, God help us, some of these vocals. It is not the dismal, trashy
quality of the album that makes me so worried — it is the fact that it still
seems to attract mainstream media attention in a respectful frame. If this is what our liberal framework has come up
to — a complete robo-objectification of the woman under the false guise of
«sexual empowerment» — then I must say that even conservatively grabbing women
by the pussy seems like an innocent prank in comparison. A highly bleargh-style
thumbs down
here, and a hearty recommendation to retire — if the last ten years of
Britney's career were all leading up to this,
she should have been sent back to Mississippi a long, long time ago, because,
in the immortal words of Timmy Shaw, "Girl that's where you belong — since
you've been gone to the big city, girl you started doing wrong".
THE NOISE MADE BY PEOPLE (2000)
1) Long Was The Year; 2)
Unchanging Window; 3) Minus One; 4) Come On Let's Go; 5) Echo's Answer; 6)
Tower Of Our Tuning; 7) Papercuts; 8) You Can Fall; 9) Look Outside; 10) Until
Then; 11) City In Progress; 12) Dead The Long Year.
«Barrel-organ-pop» is not an actual term, but
the more we see that old-time dream-pop fused with electronics, the more
pressing the need for such a term becomes. Stereolab may be named as their
immediate predecessors and mentors, and Beach House and many other bands may be
striving for similar emotional effects, but, really, there are few bands around
that deserve to illustrate that category better than Birmingham's Broadcast,
who spent the first five years of their lives devising and honing that sound,
and then rolled out this debut album which, arguably, they never surpassed —
not in terms of psychological impact, at least.
The
Noise Made By People is a good
title, but a bit self-deprecating: while a certain amount of «ornamental noise»
is indeed present throughout, all the compositions respect melody and are
completely «accessible», provided you are not in the specific mood for a dance
album or something (or, at least, not a fast, energetic dance album — slow,
cool-tempered waltzing would be quite appropriate for much of this stuff). The
«noise» itself usually comes in the form of various kaleidoscopic effects which
rarely detract from the repetitive, but entrancing melodies — on the contrary,
considering how Christmas-y the general atmosphere is, they just add tinsel
flavor.
Most of the ingredients of the music are
recognizable, but the overall synthesis is quite idiosyncratic. The idea of
creating lightly psychedelic pop with (slightly antiquated) electronics may
have been borrowed from The United States of America, as is sometimes noted,
and then there are further analogies with just about every technology-obsessed
dream-pop band from the Cocteau Twins to Stereolab. On the other hand, lead
singer Trish Keenan belongs to the cohort of chilly-voiced femmes mysterieuses, half-Snow Queen, half-Snow White, as
Renaissance's Annie Haslam (to whom she bears a particularly striking
resemblance every time she reaches for those high notes) or even Karen
Carpenter (she doesn't have Karen's lower range, so the vocals sound more
generally «air-conditioned», but she has the same introspective / melancholy
ring) — and she also seems to have a serious taste for Sixties' vocal jazz
fairies like Astrud Gilberto, going for that «deeply human, but utterly
impenetrable» aura that used to mesmerize people back when it was so trendy to
want to be mesmerized by the little strange wonders of the world.
You put it all together — the simple,
repetitive melodies, usually formed by drums-and-bass patterns with prolonged,
trance-oriented keyboard notes laid on top; the additional electronic and,
sometimes, electric guitar effects; and those gorgeously cold «don't touch me,
I'm spell-generating here!» vocals — and you get yourself one of the finest
atmospheric landscapes of the 2000s. In particular, it is a near-perfect
experience for lonely wintery evenings, what with its bringing out all the
potential beauty of «cold» and «dark» without slipping into banalities and
trivialities and without
concentrating on the negative sides of it all. You hate the cold season? Let
Broadcast warm it up for you. Never mind that the album was released at the
end of March — it's a Decemberist record if there ever was one.
If there is a problem, it's that everything basically sounds the same. ʽLong
Was The Yearʼ opens the album on a «sterner» mood, with some stiff,
quasi-Teutonic rhythmics and a darker, heavier vocal color from Trish.
ʽUnchanging Windowʼ follows it up with a slightly more upbeat tempo,
chirpier vocals and a more playful attitude (all strictly within the limits of
good old British decency, mind you). Once you are acquainted with these two
sub-paradigms, everything else is mostly just further variations on them —
including several completely instrumental tunes (the little «toy snowstorm» of
ʽMinus Oneʼ is playful, while ʽTower Of Our Tuningʼ and
ʽDead The Long Yearʼ are decidedly darker in spirit, though still
nowhere near «dangerously dark»).
This, as well as the overtly «static» nature of
most of the songs, which almost always end exactly the same way as they began,
is an obviously self-imposed limitation — it carves out a stylistic niche for
the band, but it also traps them in that niche (a feeling not wholly unfamiliar
to connaisseurs of the indie market), and a side effect of that trapping is
that I cannot discuss the individual songs, unless I really want to get into the peculiarities of all the chimes, bells,
and whistles activated in the recording process, or overanalyze the
«moods-within-the-moods» reflected in Keenan's singing here and there. All I
can say is that the melodies are
different, and that there is plenty of tiny little nuances that come and go.
Well, maybe some of the tunes are a bit jazzier than others — ʽCome On
Let's Goʼ, or the waltzing ʽPapercutsʼ, for instance, both of
which show that the generally immobile «friendly Snow Queen» can condescend to
wiggling it up a bit, just to prove that she does consist of organic compounds.
And then again, some are a bit more frozen than others — ʽUntil Thenʼ,
for instance, where all the electronics sounds as if they were freshly blown
out of a stalagmite or something.
On the positive side, the evenness of the
material means that all the songs are
about equally good, no particular low- or highlights — although some of the
instrumentals are guilty of
patience-trying, but even here it is understandable: «static musical
landscapes» are supposed to be like that (for instance, the «who's gonna go and
finally close that squeaky door?» bit at the end of ʽDead The Long
Yearʼ). The ambitions of The Noise
Made By People are lightweight and limited, but within those limits, they
are perfectly adequate, and that guarantees a convinced thumbs up — for an album that is not
so much «awesome» as it is «touchingly charming», and you know there are actually certain times in life when «touchingly
charming» is needed more than «awesome».
HAHA SOUND (2003)
1) Colour Me In; 2) Pendulum;
3) Before We Begin; 4) Valerie; 5) Man Is Not A Bird; 6) Minim; 7) Lunch Hour
Pops; 8) Black Umbrellas; 9) Ominous Cloud; 10) Distorsion; 11) Oh How I Miss
You; 12) The Little Bell; 13) Winter Now; 14) Hawk.
This follow-up to The Noise Made By People is even more full of helium than its predecessor. The major difference is
that the snow has melted away, and this, now, is spring come to replace winter,
although everything still stays firmly within the confines of the same old
magical barrel organ (and winter does come back at the end of the album, at
least nominally). Contrary to the title, there are no actual «ha ha's» anywhere
in sight — Broadcast do not have a sense of humor, at least, not an «earthly»
one — but if the idea is simply to conjure an association with something
lightweight and childishly innocent, that's okay.
The very first song, actually, is a kiddie song
— a tune that could, with just a little bit of tweaking, easily fit on Sesame Street or the like: "I am
grey, still on the page / Oh colour me in / Just an outline, sketchy but fine /
Oh colour me in". The psychedelic electronic waltz that unfurls in the
background complements the song's basic idea just fine — in fact, the song
almost ends up intruding into «corny» territory, as Trish Keenan now
metamorphoses into a Dusty Springfield for her generation. However, the complex
overdubs still contain plenty of dissonance to satisfy both the introvert
intellectual child and the grown-up
indie hipster kid (not that there's a huge amount of difference between the
two).
ʽPendulumʼ was already previously
released on a short EP of the same name, which makes it the odd one out on the
record — driven by a loud, bashing drum pattern instead of the usually soft
percussion, and a rather cold synthesizer rhythm track that suggests a bit of
dark mystique. But it is the album's equivalent of an ʽAmazing Journeyʼ
— guiding the listener through a somewhat uncomfortable interdimensional
corridor so that he or she may then revel freely in the multicoloured pastures
and forests of the remaining twelve tracks.
And this is where the problem lies: paradise,
even one of a cool intellectual design, is actually a boring place to be. The Noise Made By People was fairly
monotonous already, but not to this
extent: now that Keenan has sacrificed most of the variety in her singing for a
single-purpose «ethereal» delivery (hushy, echoey, mid-range, little to no
modulation at all), listening to this stuff is like wandering through an
endless art gallery of XVIIth century Italian painters — everything done in
bright, professional, masterful, spiritual ways, but everything completely
interchangeable, dissuading you to focus on anything in particular.
However, on second thought, this is not really
a «problem» as such. This fairy-tale world that Broadcast have constructed is
effective and believable, even though it is so intentionally «fluffy» and
«sugary», with only that slight melancholic ring in Keenan's voice to suggest
that there may be a darker undercurrent to their «Land of Long-Lasting La-La».
So if we have no individual memories of what it was that made ʽMan Is Not
A Birdʼ fundamentally different from ʽOminous Cloudʼ, why should
it matter? (I think the latter was in 3/4 tempo while the former was in 4/4,
but that's about it, and anyway I might be wrong...).
This is mood music, to be played on a warm
spring night or, perhaps, to set the mood of a warm spring night on a cold
winter night. Or under a different set of circumstances, whatever. The textures
are very pretty. A more serious analysis also reveals that, «under the covers»,
the band is conducting some experimental research — many of the tracks, while
starting out quite conventionally, eventually resolve themselves as sonic
explorations (for instance, the bizarre electronic drum solo at the end of
ʽMan Is Not A Birdʼ, or the trance-inducing repetitive acoustic
guitar pattern of ʽValerieʼ, eventually fusing with all the
electronics in a thin wall of noise).
I do want to raise one complaint — there is a
bit too much waltzing going on here.
Dancing out with the moonlit knight, or with candlewick fairies, or with The Phantom
of The Analog Synth is all fine and dandy, but why it so necessarily has to be
done in the spirit of Johann Strauss Jr., is not as easy to understand. A
minuet, anybody? An old reel? A tango? If they were waltzing all day long and
into the night in my paradise, I'd
lead a counter-cultural revolution.
Thumbs up, overall, but
in terms of general trajectory, this is a slight letdown after the debut — too
much attention on texture, not enough attention on composing, what with all the
generic tempos and vocal melodies that, much too often, are reminiscent of
conventional lullabies or nursery rhymes. But they most probably were not going
for anything other than a specific atmosphere here, and they got that
atmosphere all right.
TENDER BUTTONS (2005)
1) I Found The F.; 2) Black
Cat; 3) Tender Buttons; 4) America's Boy; 5) Tears In The Typing Pool; 6)
Corporeal; 7) Bit 35; 8) Arc Of A Journey; 9) Michael A Grammar; 10) Subject To
The Ladder; 11) Minus 3; 12) Goodbye Girls; 13) You And Me In Time; 14) I Found
The End.
By 2005, Broadcast were basically a duo,
narrowed down to just Trish Keenan and James Cargill (if there is somebody else
assisting them here, you won't be learning this from the credits list) — the
instrumental ʽMinus 3ʼ is a sarcastic, but steadfast title implying
that the spirit will still go on, no matter what. The most unpleasant
consequence of all this desertion is that the «band» no longer has a real
drummer, and is forced to resort to «pssht-pssht» drum machines — I say «is forced
to» in the faint hope that this was, indeed, a decision they reached due to
pressing circumstances, and not to the newly widespread indie-kid love for
those kinky Eighties' sounds (which were once so popular because they were so
trendily futuristic, and now are regaining in popularity because they are so
trendily retro).
But we can all probably tolerate some drum
machines if they are only an unfortunate side effect on an album as magnificent
as Tender Buttons — easily Broadcast's one and only
masterpiece, that one record on which they manage to transgress their own
formula and deliver something that is more
than just «mood music». Through a creative mistake, HaHa Sound was nearly drowned in tinsel — its ear-candy may have
been the epitome of «prettiness», but you really cannot go all the way with
just «pretty». In contrast, Tender
Buttons does everything it should be doing — it brings back both the hooks and the glaciality of Noise Made By People, and more than
that: the hooks are polished and perfected, and the glaciality is somehow
combined with the cutesiness of HaHa
Sound in a synthesis that is now fully their own, belonging to nobody else.
Where ʽColour Me Inʼ introduced the
vibe of HaHa Sound as a
«ceremoniously jovial» one, here, ʽI Found The Fʼ spells trouble from
the beginning — like a melodic folk dirge, with Trish's sad vocals riding on
the twin support of a jangly electric guitar and an electronic harpsichord. The
vocal melody, with its "bridge adjusting to the water, water, water,
water..." twist, is unforgettable, and the modest arrangement is perfectly
attuned to it. The lyrics are irrelevant (although the line "in all the
logic I was lost" is important), like most psychedelic lyrics, but the
vocal tones aren't — now that they have slightly gained in darkness and
ominousness, Trish Keenan produces a far more hypnotic effect than when asking
you to colour her in.
The formula is then immediately repeated on
ʽThe Black Catʼ, which is where you understand that most of the album
is going to carry on the same way: a psychedelic guitar riff, a futuristic
synth loop, and that oddly reserved, superficially «colorless», entrancingly
«matured» vocal on top. But does it really make the record monotonous? No —
there is enough variety in the textures to ensure that you do notice the breaks
between songs. On ʽBlack Catʼ, for instance, the instruments are
notably fuzzier — burrowing deeper into your subconscious as Trish merges the
black-cat cliché with the Cheshire cat image. "The black cat, the
black cat, curiouser and curiouser", as the synths, guitars, and even
these goddamn drum machines spiral deeper and deeper into your head — and the
way she sings "awkwardness happening to someone... you love" is
nothing short of genius. Okay, one genius, passing through. Here today, gone
tomorrow. Still fabulous.
The title track is a drone where, apart from
the main bluesy melody that they might as well have learned by listening to T.
Rex's ʽGet It Onʼ or an AC/DC album, there are also spontaneous elements
of raga floating in and out of focus — so that, in the end, it is more
reminiscent of early Velvet Underground, with Trish pulling a Nico (stern and
impenetrable as always, but shorn of the occasionally annoying Teutonic
haughtiness). Due to relative lack of vocal hooks, it is not as memorable or
subtly overwhelming as ʽBlack Catʼ, but it shifts the mood once again
— no sissiness, strictly business — workmanlike psychedelia for «real men», so
to speak.
This is the way it goes on until the very end —
there is no need to describe every song in detail, because eventually they run
out of «new moods» (but never of «new hooks»), yet it would take relatively
little effort to do so, considering how meaningful and «true-ringing» most of
the melodies are. Even on the album's most lyrically crude number —
ʽAmerica's Boyʼ, an «ironic» comment on US foreign policies that
over-exploits clichés like "quaker toil and texan oil",
"gun me down with yankee power", "cowboy corn and bugle
horn", etc.
Other
favorites include ʽCorporealʼ, driven by an almost rockabilly guitar
line and a chorus that, be it captured in another age and in another world,
would have been gross ("do that to me, do that to my anatomy" — I
mean, really!), but is only used here to convey some world-weary melancholia
mixed in with a bit of tenderness; ʽMichael A Grammarʼ, which sounds
as if the enchanted / enchanting little girl of HaHa Sound has
been replaced by her stern, but responsible mother, with all the magic
remaining in place; and ʽSubject To The Ladderʼ, jogging on a one
chord rhythm pattern and looking like the soundtrack to some weird druidic
ritual.
As usual, the
basic tracks, upon completion, are further decorated with electronic sawdust —
in a «come-what-may», Sgt. Pepper-ish manner; not much
actually comes, but not much goes, either, and the noisy effects
may actually be doing the band a good service — without them, the overall sound
would have been too thin, what with only two people left to
man the controls. As it is, there is a difference between the occasional «quiet
ballad» (ʽTears In The Typing Poolʼ, where Trish's only companions
are a simple acoustic guitar pattern and something that sounds like a
ʽStrawberry Fields Foreverʼ-style-tuned Mellotron — not
breathtakingly, but beautiful) and the «pop rockers», not to mention the
«experiments» — the codas to some of the tracks still preserve the legacy
of HaHa Sound, guiding you out with jarring bursts of noise
because, well, even Broadcast remember that «music» should not be restricted to
«melody» and «harmony», no matter how much your spirit is drawn towards
soothing psychedelic pop.
In
general, Tender Buttons got a slightly less admiring welcome
than its two predecessors — HaHa Sound usually scores higher
on the average critical rating meter — which probably has to do with the drum
machines and the «thinner» sound: instead of an ocean, critics found themselves
in front of a small sonic brook. But as far as my ear tells me, now that they
no longer hide behind a huge wall of overdubs, and follow a well-pronounced
«less is more» policy, the songs get better, and the music becomes more
meaningful. It's all too bad that the two of them could not bring themselves to
completing at least one more «proper» album — before it was too late.
Hopefully, this one at least will stay with us for a long time. Totally
delighted thumbs up here.
BROADCAST & THE FOCUS GROUP INVESTIGATE WITCH CULTS OF THE RADIO AGE
(2009)
1) Intro
/ Magnetic Tales; 2) The Be Colony; 3) How Do You Get Along Sir?; 4) Will You
Read Me; 5) Reception / Group Therapy; 6) A Quiet Moment; 7) I See, So I See So;
8) You Must Wake; 9) One Million Years Ago; 10) A Seancing Song; 11) Mr Beard,
You Chatterbox; 12) Drug Party; 13) Libra, The Mirror's Minor Self; 14) Love's
Long Listen-In; 15) We Are After All Here; 16) A Medium's High; 17) Ritual /
Looking In; 18) Make My Sleep His Song; 19) Royal Chant; 20) What I Saw; 21) Let
It Begin / Oh Joy; 22) Round And Round And Round; 23) The Be Colony / Dashing
Home / What On Earth Took You?.
«The Focus Group» is a glossy moniker
concealing the identity of one Julian House, a graphic designer best unknown
for painting album sleeves for Stereolab, Oasis, and, yes, Broadcast themselves.
In between visual feasts, he is also a big fan of library music, and «The Focus
Group» is his way of awakening strange, mystical, previously unencountered and
unexplored emotions and desires within... oh, never mind. He is doing sound
collages.
This first, and last, musical collaboration between House and Broadcast is one of those
ʽRevolution-number-ninishʼ records that splits audiences into
one-star and five-star camps, depending on whichever neuron net brain
configuration it comes in contact with. In other words, if you are the
«neo-sensitive» kind of person, crying your heart out at the latest MoMA
installations, these forty eight minutes may
turn into a Land of Oz trip. But if you have stricter rules about opening your
soul to whatever new combinations of sound waves roll along, the experience
will be frustrating. It certainly was for me — feeling as if I were witnessing
a good friend forcefully held with his head below the muck's surface, only
occasionally coming up for fresh air. And yes, I am fully aware that nobody
here was actually forced, but it does sound like it.
At its best, the album is typical Broadcast
fare, more in the vein of HaHa Sound
than Tender Buttons — ʽThe Be
Colonyʼ is particularly salvageable, being both one of the first and one
of the longest tracks on the album, a fake-teaser for the non-things to come; and
every now and then, some beautiful Trish vocal launches into a midnight fairy
dance (ʽI See, So I See Soʼ), a cute counting rhyme (ʽWhat I
Sawʼ) or a magical lullaby (ʽLibraʼ; the appropriately titled
ʽMake My Sleep His Songʼ). When extracted, dusted off, and accurately
re-spliced, they all make up for a tender, fragile, sympathetic, if already
quite predictable EP, particularly valuable for hosting the last scraps of
Keenan-era Broadcast material.
But these little gems are frustratingly rare
incrustations in an overall sea of sound, concocted under the supervision of
House, that, to me, sounds befuddling and confusing without being properly
evocative. The chimes, bells, whistles, ringing power chords, brain-melting
fuzz, crashing cymbals and haunted vocal overdubs are all in the psychedelic
ballpark — ʽRitualʼ sounds not unlike the random wild experimental
bit on Piper At The Gates Of Dawn or
Axis: Bold As Love — but really,
that ballpark closed ages ago, and you don't just reopen it with a set of equally
randomly assembled collages. At least The Animal Collective, who engage in
similar activities, tend to look towards the future somewhat, but this stuff
has an explicit nostalgic scent to it, and nostalgizing about free-form
tape-splicing seems rather silly, particularly when it borders on almost
religious fetishism.
Cutting it short, I refuse to take this stuff
seriously. The regular psychedelic musical box of Broadcast is one thing, but
this here is a broken, or, rather, intentionally disassembled musical box where
they subject you to all the technical aspects of the various forms of
cog-grinding and spring-ringing and bell-clanging — interesting enough for a
technician, perhaps, but tremendously boring for everyone else. Even if there are a few useful musical ideas here, the
average one-to-two minute length of the tracks prevents them from being
explored or even just fixated in the listener's brain anyway. (Granted, since
most of these ideas are quite useless, the short length usually saves rather
than kills, but listening to brief flickering quanta of sonic silliness is only
marginally better than listening to
lengthy torturous tapestries of sonic silliness).
And this whole stuff is so retrogradishly passé anyway — they might as well
have put a Jackson Pollock painting on the album sleeve. Thumbs down, although not before
the few good examples of actual Broadcast songs have been carefully removed —
the rest belongs in the trash heap, as far as I'm concerned.
BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO OST (2013)
1) A
Breeze Through The Burford Spur; 2) The Equestrian Vortex; 3) Beautiful Hair;
4) Malleus Maleficarum; 5) Mark Of The Devil; 6) Confession Modulation; 7) Monica’s
Fall; 8) Teresa’s Song (Sorrow); 9) The North Downs Dimension; 10) Collatina Is
Coming; 11) Such Tender Things; 12) Teresa, Lark Of Ascension; 13) Monica’s
Burial (Under The Junipers); 14) Found Scalded, Found Drowned; 15) Monica (Her
Parents Have Been Informed); 16) The Fifth Claw; 17) Saducismus Triumphatus;
18) The Gallops; 19) They’re Here, They’re Under Us; 20) Collatina, Mark Of
Damnation; 21) Treatise; 22) A Goblin; 23) The Equestrian Library; 24) The
Serpent’s Semen; 25)Burnt At The Stake; 26) All Chiffchaffs; 27) The Curfew
After The Massacre; 28) Poultry In Mind; 29) The Sacred Marriage; 30) Valeria’s
Burial (Under The Fort); 31) Edda’s Burial (Under The Clumps); 32) The Game’s
Up; 33) It Must’ve Been The Magpies; 34) The Dormitory Window; 35) Anima Di
Cristo; 36) His World Is My Shed; 37) Collatina’s Folly; 38) Here Comes The
Sabbath, There Goes The Cross; 39) Our Darkest Sabbath.
Trish Keenan's death from pneumonia at the odd
age of 42 (way too late to join the «27 Club» — not that there would be any
reason in the first place — way too early from every other possible point of
view) would seem like a sufficient reason for James Cargill, as the sole
remaining member, to retire the Broadcast brand. However, he is not in a
visible hurry to do that: like the remaining Doors members after Morrison's
passing, his chances at future notoriety without a charismatic frontperson are
rather feeble.
Besides, the old vaults have not been
completely emptied yet. First and foremost comes this soundtrack, on which the
Broadcast duo had already begun working prior to Keenan's sickness and death —
although Trish's vocals are only present on one of the tracks (ʽTeresa,
Lark Of Ascensionʼ), floating somewhere out there in the aether without
actual words. The soundtrack is for some obscure, and generally poorly rated,
arthouse movie by British director Peter Strickland, and has the odd
distinction — odd even for a soundtrack — of containing more separate tracks
than the actual time of its duration (39 tracks in 37.5 minutes, almost a
personal record in my collection unless we're talking Napalm Death or something).
And by «odd», I don't exactly mean «beneficial» — the overall effect is
irritating rather than stunning.
Normally, Broadcast with their moody,
repetitive organ-grinder panoramas would be an ideal band for some particular
types of soundtracks — for movies like Scorsese's Hugo, for instance (if anything, they'd definitely beat Howard Shore). However, Berberian Sound Studio is simply not that kind of movie: it is a
meta-film focused on the psychological problems of a foley artist engaged in
creating sound effects for an Italian horror movie, or something like that —
simply not the kind of topic that
would be particularly suitable for a Broadcast score, so I'm fairly sure they
just did it for the money (or maybe for food, since it is hard to imagine any
significant revenue from this sort of movie).
Furthermore, although I have not seen the
movie, nor do I plan to, it actually seems that the soundtrack gives a highly
distorted perspective of it. Mixed in with the many melodic and ambient
fragments are snippets of dialog that mostly stem from the «movie within the
movie» — some generic Omen-style
Satanist crap consisting of horrified whispers, shit-scared prayers, possessed
babbling, hysterical screaming, the works — and the idea you get is that Broadcast,
for no good reason whatsoever, simply produced a score for some trashy C-level
movie, when, if I get this right, within the actual movie the «trashy C-level
movie» only serves as a background setting for the real «drama», none of which
translates understandably well onto the soundtrack.
Which brings me to the obvious constatation: it
would have been much better if all
the silly Italian dialog ("Malleus maleficarum! what is it?", etc.) were scrapped, and the remaining voids were
filled in by longer, fuller, more satisfying versions of the instrumental
tracks — most of which barely exceed one minute in length, fleeing the
listener's attention as if too modest to surmise that any of them really
deserved it. Well, personally, I can't even tell. ʽLark Of Ascensionʼ
is a pretty enough piece of «psychedelic church music» (think Catholic mass run
through several successive waves of reverb), and ʽOur Darkest
Sabbathʼ, closing the album, is a curious mix of the religious and the
pastoral, what with the «church organ» and the «woodwind» themes interlaced
with each other so tightly. Both of these run over three minutes, which allows
the dedication of at least one phrase to each.
Everything else is in the same vein — medieval
organ patterns and somber recorders / flutes dominate the scene in nine cases
out of ten, which is not really what «genuine Broadcast» is all about, but is
still done well enough to matter if
any of these themes were given a chance to unfurl. As it is, you are basically
looking at a large series of barely begun sketches, interrupted, every now and
then, with stuff that did not need to be there (worst of the lot is ʽA
Goblinʼ, which sounds more like a lame parody on a goblin than an actual
goblin — of course, that is the way it was intended to be in the movie, but how
are we to guess?).
If you adjust your antennae long enough, there
is always a chance of transforming these 37 minutes into a personalized trip,
under the pretext of «Broadcast and Satanism — a once-in-a-lifetime combo!».
But as far as I'm concerned, some
potential combos are best left alone, and this one, at least the way it has
been molded into an album release, is a pointless oddity, particularly
disappointing in its adding nothing to Keenan's legacy. Thumbs down.
ADDENDA:
WORK AND NON-WORK (1997)
1) Accidentals; 2) The Book
Lovers; 3) Message From Home; 4) Phantom; 5) We've Got Time; 6) Living Room; 7)
According To No Plan; 8) The World Backwards; 9) Lights Out.
Officially released as early as 1997, this
could be qualified as Broadcast's first LP, although in reality it was just a
collection of several singles that the band originally made for several small
labels (Wurlitzer Jukebox and Duophonic). Warp Records, which became their
home in 1997 and stayed that way to the very end, was kind enough to acquire
the rights and flesh out a nine-song mini-LP that lasted them all the way to
their proper debut, but, of course, it still tends to fall through the cracks a
bit.
From a historical perspective, the songs show
that the basic conception of the band was all ready and boiling as early as
1996, when ʽAccidentalsʼ, in all of its lo-fi roughness and still in
some debt to trip-hoppiness, introduced them to the world. Trance-inducing
psychedelic roundabouts, Keenan's melancholic-somnambulist lulling voice,
echoes of The United States Of America, emphasis on the «electronic barrel
organ» vibe, everything is in place.
From a less history-, more context-oriented
point of view, though, Work And Non Work
(and we could assume that the fully fleshed out songs like ʽThe Book
Loversʼ could constitute «work», while the more chaotic mood pieces like
ʽAccording To No Planʼ — indeed — constitute the «non» part) adds
little to one's experience if one is already familiar with The Noise Made By People. ʽThe Book Loversʼ is probably
the best song on here (so impressive in its combination of the modern and the
retro that it was even borrowed for the soundtrack to Austin Powers), but there is nothing about its emotional powers —
that magical-mystery vibe with an ice touch — that they would not do just as
well on ʽCome On Let's Goʼ or ʽLong Was The Yearʼ.
Still, the songs are all good; even if the
band's penchant for waltz tempos may seem irritating at times, repeated listens
bring out subtle individualities in the songs — with all their overdubs and
tonal varieties, ʽMessage From Homeʼ, ʽLiving Roomʼ, and
ʽThe World Backwardsʼ are at the same time the exact same song
(rhythmically, coarse-grained emotionally) and three different ones
(ʽMessageʼ is a slightly more personalized lament; ʽLiving
Roomʼ is a «take-my-hand-I'll-take-you-through-the-looking-glass» kind of joy-buzzer;
ʽThe World Backwardsʼ, closing the album, focuses on beautiful folksy
vocalizing to give the song a one-with-the-world feeling).
All in all, this is probably not the best way
to start with Broadcast — the lo-fi crackling on ʽAccidentalsʼ may
be a bit of a turn-off, the vocal hooks are less prominent than on the best
songs from Noise, the experimental
atmospheric parts do not properly guarantee their atmosphere, and it's all over
way too quickly, if you remember your Woody. But for the intermediate/advanced
fan, this is definitely more essential than anything released under the name of
«Broadcast» since Tender Buttons.
So, one more thumbs
up, following up on the rest.
THE FUTURE CRAYON (2006)
1) Illumination; 2) Still
Feels Like Tears; 3) Small Song IV; 4) Where Youth And Laughter Go; 5) One Hour
Empire; 6) Distant Call; 7) Poem Of Dead Song; 8) Hammer Without A Master; 9)
Locusts; 10) Chord Simple; 11) Daves Dream; 12) DDL; 13) Test Area; 14)
Unchanging Window / Chord Simple; 15) A Man For Atlantis; 16) Minus Two; 17)
Violent Playground; 18) Belly Dance.
This other compilation of Broadcast's «classic
era» material nicely wraps up the rest of their odds and ends — a variety of
tracks culled from singles, EPs, and various side projects that would be
hopelessly lost otherwise. As it is, the assemblage makes for seventy minutes
of additional material that is, at best, gorgeous, and at worst, just «nice».
There is a small whiff of deception, though.
The first track on the album is also unquestionably the best one —
ʽIlluminationʼ not only adds a stoner rock guitar line to the band's
usual «magic organ» arrangement, but also has a vocal melody that is more Beach
House than Broadcast, with Trish's voice pirouetting around and dropping from
high to low pitch on a mesmerizing trajectory. It is so convincing in its
majesty that, clearly, it was intentionally selected as the lead-in track — who
could resist jumping in to check for even more of these hidden gems? Even if
you suspect a trap, you will still be
tempted to walk into it.
Well, «trap» might be a tad too harsh, but in
terms of stand-out material, there will not be a lot waiting there for you
further on down the road. Much, if not most, of the album is instrumental,
meaning that if you are primarily into Broadcast for Trish, you might just
stick to ʽIlluminationʼ. Even when she does sing, many of the tracks simply incorporate her voice in the
background, in the form of a distant echo (ʽLocustsʼ) — merely one
more atmospheric ingredient in an army of well-rehearsed tricks with the band's
electronics.
More or less finished «vocal numbers», apart
from the first and greatest track, include: ʽStill Feels Like Tearsʼ,
a pleasant chunk of upbeat syncopated psycho-pop that still ends up drowning
Trish in two rivers of feedback, each streaming out of one of the speakers;
ʽWhere Youth And Laughter Goʼ, so light, fluffy, caressing, chimey, and
echoey that not remembering Astrud Gilberto is a non-option; and ʽDistant
Callʼ, where the dialog between the minimalistic bass guitar part and
Trish's singing is thoroughly endearing, if not too memorable.
The further we go, though, the fewer «songs» there
are, their places taken by impressionistic psychedelic sonic paintings — more
and more of those old rhythms and progressions borrowed from classic
Motown-and-the-like records and then heavily spiced, sugared, and peppered with
archaically-sounding «baroque electronics». In other words, nothing unusual or
atypical for Broadcast. Some of the tracks have a more defiantly avantgardist
flavor (ʽDDLʼ; ʽMinus Twoʼ has so many beeps and bleeps
that, if not for the occasional "aaahhh" on Keenan's part, you could
mistake it for Autechre), but this is not totally atypical, either. There is
also an alternate version of ʽUnchanging Windowʼ, adding little to
the original.
Which all goes to say: the main problem of
Broadcast was that they were way too much in love with their own sound for way
too much time. An album like Tender
Buttons strives to rise above «formula» and «background-ish-ness», and
succeeds admirably well. But on normal average days the band was happy enough
to just crank up the barrel and go along. We may think of it as a sign of
modesty and humility, yet it definitely transforms the task of making people
truly appreciate what they really did into a tough challenge. Whatever be, do
not make the mistake of getting to know the band through this album — chances
are that, even if ʽIlluminationʼ smites you, the rest of it will
either bore or downright stupefy you. Needless to say, seasoned fans will not want to miss any of this — at the very
least, this is far more genuine Broadcast than that wretched soundtrack, or
even that Focus Group collaboration.
FEEL GOOD LOST (2001)
1) I Slept With Bonhomme At
The CBC; 2) Guilty Cubicles; 3) Love And Mathematics; 4) Passport Radio; 5)
Alive In 85; 6) Prison Province; 7) Blues For Uncle Gibb; 8) Stomach Song; 9)
Mossbraker; 10) Feel Good Lost; 11) Last Place; 12) Cranley's Gonna Make It.
The way Canada's huge landmass kinda stretches
out all the way from modern civilization into the vast reaches of ice cold
nothing, it might explain this odd propensity of its citizens for superficially
grandiose, but essentially rather simple sonic landscapes — the construction
of which involves so many people that sometimes it feels like some of them are
only there to cast their mindwaves into the air, to emphasize the production.
Even before Arcade Fire, in particular, there
was Broken Social Scene, a wandering, blundering troop of loosely connected
artists revolving around the core elements of Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning.
The music they play is sometimes called «post-rock», but since this term holds
my personal record for «dumbest genre designation ever created» (do we ever
talk about «post-jazz»? «post-classical»? «post-pop»? «post-flamenco»?), I
prefer to broadly refer to these exercises as «mood music». For a narrower way
of pigeonholing, something like «rhythmic ambient instrumental folk-pop»
might do, at least for this debut album.
The title is quite appropriate. This is an
album in which it is very easy to get lost — in fact, I got lost in it
somewhere around the third track, and have not found a proper way out since
then — but just as easy to feel good
about it. What Drew, Canning, and their team write and record are, for the most
part, «pleasant dream sequences»: mid-length folk-pop compositions, usually
based on guitar interplay, less frequently on keyboards or violins, that
establish their groove very quickly, develop it very slowly or do not develop
it at all, and hunt for a gradual subconscious effect rather than a quick open
blow to the brain.
The response is not «psychedelic» or anything —
for the most part, the band avoids indulging in special sonic effects; their
chief weapon is the density of sound, achieved by cramming the studio with
people, some of whom, as I already said, seem only to be there in order to be
more «felt» than heard. But the response can
be hypnotic, after a short while: they take all those nice, soothing,
well-polished folksy chord sequences, shuffle them around, add some old-school
pop, and then run this approach into the ground to the point where, at first,
you might hate it for the monotonousness, but then acknowledge that there is
really no objective way of criticizing this stuff. Because the guitars sound
gorgeous and tasteful, the sound density is achieved professionally, and the
songs are all similar, but different enough to vary the mood ever so slightly.
If there is a direct old precursor to this
style, it would be something like Fleetwood Mac's ʽAlbatrossʼ
(strong echoes of which you will experience, in particular, on ʽBlues For
Uncle Gibbʼ) — except that, naturally, with the passing of time the «one
strong simple hook» approach has been replaced with an intellectualist passion
for more complexity, even at the expense of memorability (according to what my brain tells me, ʽAlbatrossʼ
is more «hummable» than all of these tunes put together). Not all of the
compositions are slow — ʽI Slept With Bonhommeʼ opens the album on a
steady toe-tappy note, and only a few numbers are genuinely «somnambulant» — but
I feel as if the oddly accelerated tempos are only there to give the band a
little bit more of an individual flavor — with these dreamscapes, you would
normally expect super-slow all of the time, yet there are tunes here explicitly
set to danceable rhythms. (One actual flaw is the use of drum machines on some
of the tracks — you'd think that with so many people in the studio, they could
have easily done with live drums everywhere, but no, there is still this
goddamn oh-so-2000s nostalgic fondness for the pssht-pssht sound rearing its ugly head from time to time, as if it
were «artsy» or something. It is not — it's just ugly).
Repeated listens do bring out molecules of
individual charm — ʽGuilty Cubiclesʼ is all about cross-weaving
arpeggios from multiple guitars (and mandolins), ʽPassport Radioʼ is
about making your violins sound like Mellotrons (or is that vice versa?),
ʽAlive In 85ʼ is about how a merry, swinging, looped jazz guitar
riff feels in the company of Depeche Mode-style rhythmics (not very well),
ʽLast Placeʼ is like a Brian Eno / Harold Budd minimalist piano
collaboration set to metronomic rhythms, and ʽCranley's Gonna Make
Itʼ gradually transforms into a sunset-style soft jazz mood piece, capped
off with an atmospheric horn part. The feelings they generate are all quite
similar (peace, warmth, serenity, and an inescapable urge to join the local
Eco-watch), but the ways of generating them are different enough to lay off
objective accusations of Broken Social Scene being a «one-trick» band.
That said, this is still a very modest thumbs up:
for the most part, Feel Good Lost
works as high quality background music (muzak?), which is a bit inadequate in
relation to the amount of human resources expended on it (I mean, Brian Eno at
his best could achieve much the same effect with two fingers as this band
achieves with a small army). Pleasant, positive, and tasteful indeed, but it is
hard for me to imagine anybody capable of being «bowled over» with this sort of
music.
YOU FORGOT IT IN PEOPLE (2002)
1) Capture The Flag; 2) KC
Accidental; 3) Stars And Sons; 4) Almost Crimes; 5) Looks Just Like The Sun; 6)
Pacific Theme; 7) Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl; 8) Cause = Time; 9)
Late Nineties Bedroom Rock For The Missionaries; 10) Shampoo Suicide; 11)
Lover's Spit; 12) I'm Still Your Fag; 13) Pitter Patter Goes My Heart.
Only one year has passed and Broken Social
Scene have already swelled from a guest-dependent rhythmic ambient duo to an
eleven-piece orchestra, bashing out idealistically epic indie rock — in their
own words, «anthems for a seventeen year-old girl», although most of this stuff
is perfectly suitable for seventeen year-old boys as well (maybe it is the lack
of any sort of «heaviness» in the arrangements that prompted them to address
their female audiences). Their aspirations are noble, their ambitions humble,
and their allusions subtle. Nevertheless, the reproachingly titled You Forgot It In People fails to be
that beautiful, long-coveted masterpiece that the critics had been waiting for,
hurrying up to lavish all sorts of praises on the album when it came out.
The basic problem is that, despite switching to
the traditional «rock song» format, the styles and attitudes remain essentially
the same — this is still little more than nicely sounding, polyphonous
background music, yet somehow, we are now supposed to be memorizing the themes,
singing along to the anthemic choruses, and agreeing with its goal of
«teaching» us something. I honestly tried doing all three of these things, but,
unlike the average BSS fan, shamefully failed on all counts — the melodies were
found unmemorable, the choruses generally uninviting, and the band's
«soulfulness» hopelessly stuck in no-man's-land somewhere between Nick Drake,
Bruce Springsteen, and Jeff Tweedy, all of whom they try to be at the same
time. As you can imagine, it would take a bunch of miracle workers to do that,
and even if there is one miracle
worker among the eleven current members of BSS, it is pretty hard to spot him /
her from among the other ten.
Do not get me wrong: nothing is overtly «bad»
here, in fact, from a purely technical angle, the album is unassailable —
genuine and diverse instrumentation, competent sound layering without any
unwarranted chaos, pleasant, unaffected vocal tones, obscure, but not
altogether meaningless lyrics, in short, everything within the limits of good
taste and intellectual inoffensiveness. I fully understand how, for instance,
all those people whose minds were just blown by Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot could want them to be re-blown with this
record. But Yankee Hotel Foxtrot had
«the spark» — actually, above everything else, it had a strong focus on hooks
and personality. Broken Social Scene, in contrast, «focus» on... well, on a
broken social scene.
It will suffice to make a first conclusion
based on the album's first proper song, ʽKC Accidentalʼ, named after
Kevin Drew's first band (the hazy Floyd-ian instrumental ʽCapture The
Flagʼ is the formal opener, but it is only a brief ambient overture) — a
few initially discordant guitar notes and violin scrapes quickly give way to a
fast-paced anthem in the «over-the-waves» paradigm: deep rolling guitar waves,
seagullish whistling violins, and electronic sirens wailing their way over the
surface. But without even a single genuinely exciting part, this anthem only
packs the technical ingredients for
success — somewhere along the way these guys seem to have forgotten that a
massive collective sound still has to have a great backbone, one that would
still sound attractive when recorded at a piano or on acoustic guitar by one
guy on a demo tape.
This is actually a proverbial truth that would
very soon be made use of by BSS' Canadian partners, Arcade Fire, and this is
why the equally anthemic Funeral is a
modern masterpiece whereas You Forgot It
In People is, for the most part, an impressively tasteful bore. When they
revert to their old «moody» self, e. g. on ʽPacific Themeʼ or on the
album closer ʽPitter Patter Goes My Heartʼ, they are not overreaching
their grasp; when they dip into the freak-folk of ʽStars And Sonsʼ or
the pomp-rock of ʽAlmost Crimesʼ, they are.
Only two songs on the entire album struck me as
being out of the ordinary. The above-mentioned ʽAnthems For A Seventeen
Year-Old Girlʼ almost accidentally hits upon a beautifully tense vocal /
instrumental sequence in the chorus — which works even despite the vocals being
masked by a (seventeen year-old?) wheezy chipmunk effect; and the immediately
ensuing pop rocker ʽCause = Timeʼ has a deliciously emotional riff
popping out of the speakers around the 2:30 mark — and coming back in later.
Consequently, these two songs have plain old heart-grappling hooks, unlike
others that just have vague atmospheres and cool-sounding titles (although in
2002, thirty years after the hip intellectual freshmen had invaded the pop
music business, who's to judge exactly how
cool a title like ʽLate Nineties Bedroom Rock For The Missionariesʼ
is supposed to look?).
Oh, actually, speaking of titles, the album was
supposed to receive the Mark Knopfler Annual Reward for ʽI'm Still Your
Fagʼ, but got sidetracked at the last moment as the jury became convinced
that it is rather sung from the perspective of an unjustly deserted and
psychologically traumatized cigarette butt. Besides, melodically it is a
somewhat boring mix of folk and bossa nova — were it given a major stadium riff
on the ʽMoney For Nothingʼ scale, the controversy over lines like
"I swore I drank your piss that night to see if I could live" would
have been much higher. But who really
cares, as long as it's only a bunch of unknown Canadian hobos we're dealing
with here?
I refrain from an overt thumbs down, if only
out of respect for how much real sweaty work went into the final product — and
an additional bonus of several really really pleasant moments — but as far as
my own paradigm is concerned, You Forgot
It In People does break the golden rule of «staying adequate»: it bites off
far more than these eleven people might chew. Want it or not, they are just your average, regular,
well-meaning, self-educated indie kids, and they do not know the meaning of
life — heck, they do not even properly understand the meaning of getting eleven
people together in one studio. Listenable and pretty, yes, but never great, and
definitely overrated back in its time.
BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE (2005)
1) Our Faces Split The Coast
In Half; 2) Ibi Dreams Of Pavement (A Better Day); 3) 7/4 (Shoreline); 4)
Finish Your Collapse And Stay For Breakfast; 5) Major Label Debut; 6) Fire
Eye'd Boy; 7) Windsurfing Nation; 8) Swimmers; 9) Hotel; 10) Handjobs For The
Holidays; 11) Superconnected; 12) Bandwitch; 13) Tremoloa Debut; 14) It's All
Gonna Break.
Thousands of minor differences from You Forgot It In People, but hardly a
single major one. Apparently, just because the band comprises so many people
now, all of them capable of somehow playing off each other, Drew and Canning
seem to think that these songs are gonna write themselves. Which sometimes
happens if your band comprises genuine geniuses — but in the case of Broken
Social Scene, it just comprises a bunch of freshly baked ambitious idealistic
bearded pop intellectuals, and the last time idealism, intellectualism,
ambition, and beard went together with genius was probably circa 1971, with
Pete Townshend working on Who's Next.
Once again, sixty minutes into the album I can
barely back-focus on anything that I just heard, despite the allegedly tasteful
and quite variegated combinations of instruments. The band sets an uplifting,
stomping pace, piles up five rhythm parts and seven leads on top of it, adds
multi-tracked male or female or androgynous vocals, and then gradually
overcharges the motor in order for it to go up in smoke and explode. The chords
are loud and bold, the vocals combine high pitch for emotional resonance and
breathiness for intellectual depth, and the song titles, as usual, stimulate
you into making new discoveries — such as Canadian writer Ibi (Kaslik). (Not
that I will ever find the time to read the lady, but «knowledge is power» all
the same).
And that is pretty much it. This time, there is not even a single memorable riff of the
ʽCause = Timeʼ variety, and out of all their different grooves, only
ʽBandwitchʼ managed to stand out due to a cool «magical-mystery»
vocalized loop in the background — which did give it a little bit of a «witchy»
flavor, a nice change of pace from the core Springsteenisms. Naturally, one
resonant idea on a sixty-mninute album falls well within the scope of chance
expectations — I am, in fact, profoundly surprised that there were no others.
How hard must it be to write twelve epic pop anthems and be unable to make even
one of them stick?
At least the «grand finale», grandly entitled
ʽIt's All Gonna Breakʼ, grandly encased in grand power chords and
grand romantic posturing, grandly making its grand point in just under 10 grand
minutes, should have been satisfactory. But the way I see it, like everything
else, it's all «formulaic form» and no interesting substance. Where Arcade Fire
would have soaked this thing in aching end-of-the-world desperation, Broken
Social Scene remain firmly stuck directly between sadness and joy — at point
zero, that is. Which is why, when they finally get to the end and wrap it up
with a solemn «mock-classical» coda, I do get the urge... to strangle somebody.
For accuracy's sake (as well as extra proof
that I did listen carefully to the album, just in case), the start of
ʽHotelʼ is not half bad, with a simple, but tough bassline that
carries more punch by itself than any given «loud», «pseudo-symphonic» passage
on the rest of the record; ʽFire Eye'd Boyʼ could have been a
semi-decent generic indie single if the vocals didn't sound taken from a
post-laryngitis recuperating bunch of patients; and ʽWindsurfing Nationʼ
has a spoonful of lovely psychedelic guitar licks, barely discernible from
under a ton of extra overdubs. But — repeat — this is all just for accuracy's
sake. The album as such shows that the critical praise, received by You Forgot It In People, went to
someone's head, and if the record is to be evaluated in context, well — it is a
further step down, and this time around, I cannot help letting it off with a thumbs down
as an impressive heap of pretentious, elaborate, sweet-scented indie garbage.
FORGIVENESS ROCK RECORD (2010)
1) World Sick; 2) Chase Scene;
3) Texico Bitches; 4) Forced To Love; 5) All To All; 6) Art House Director; 7)
Highway Slipper Jam; 8) Ungrateful Little Father; 9) Meet Me In The Basement;
10) Sentimental X's; 11) Sweetest Kill; 12) Romance To The Grave; 13) Water In
Hell; 14) Me And My Hand.
Discographies formally show a five-year hiatus
between Broken Social Scene and Forgiveness Rock Record, but this is an
illusion: in reality, two more albums were released in the interim as
pseudo-«solo projects», one by Drew and one by Canning, even though many of the
members of B.S.S. still played on both records, and stylistically they were not
all that different from the usual stuff. We will return to them later on; for
now, let us stick to formalities and see what happened on May 4, 2010, when
once again they returned to us as Broken Social Scene, with yet another
innovative three-word title that implies religious philosophy masking as
popular music — or vice versa... hardly any difference either way.
Where there is
some difference is in the subtle, but important shift of attitude. Over those
five years, Broken Social Scene seem to have learned that (a) cramming fifty
thousand instruments within the small confines of a five-minute anthem does not
automatically make it mind-blowing
and stupendous; (b) a distorted guitar rock foundation may endear you to the
rigidly traditional «indie rock community», but there are also clear-cut limits
to the spiritual power of the power chord; (c) precisely shaped hooks matter, after all, especially if you are
trying to target the average concert-going Joe rather than some whacked out
New Age-crazy audience — you have to get at least one or two of those on your
album, or else you risk to irritate even the critics.
This does not mean that mediocrity will be
suddenly replaced by genius or anything, but it does mean that the album never
sounds as consistently annoying as its predecessor. Even its only instrumental
number, ʽMeet Me In The Basementʼ, puts a couple of simple, but
effectively optimistic guitar / violin phrases on top of the usual pompous
stomp that may draw your attention away from the generic rhythmics and chain it
to something else — when that colorful three-note riff makes its appearance at
1:03 into the song, for instance, it produces a singular emotional jolt the
likes of which B.S.S. rarely, if ever, hunted for in their early life.
The idea of «forgiveness» as such is exploited
in ʽAll To Allʼ, an honestly beautiful little number that relies on
electronic loops rather than rhythm guitars and a gorgeously universalist vocal
part from Lisa Lobsinger — the manner in which she intones "you made your
life on everything" is no different from the usual «hazy nymph» style of
the 2000s (think Beach House or Broadcast or whatever else), but no less
soulfully engaging because of that. And, God be praised, the song remains
relatively uncluttered — just a few quiet violin flourishes and kaleidoscopic
electronic sprinkling in the background here and there, enhancing the elfish
mood rather than cloaking it. Or maybe I am just a sucker for all the ladies of
B.S.S. — the second best song here, as far as I am concerned, is
ʽSentimental X'sʼ, sung by an entire trio of indie houris (Leslie
Feist, Emily Haines, and Amy Millan — apparently, the first time all three
pooled their vocal cords together on the same song), also with a one-of-a-kind
arrangement: now all the strings, electronics, and brass tacks have been
carefully assembled and wound up in the background, leaving only the pulsating
rhythms and the vocal harmonies in the foreground. It does feel better.
The loud, Wilco-ish folk-rockers have also been
improved — ʽWater In Hellʼ, for instance, makes clever use of
falsettos, thoughtfully separates the distorted rhythm and clean colorful lead
guitars, and slows down the tempo to give the anthem a little barroom bravado;
and ʽForced To Loveʼ is more reminiscent of the old noisy B.S.S., but
the chorus is catchy anyway. For some fans, the major highlight came on with the
melancholia / nostalgia of ʽSweetest Killʼ, and it does give off the
impression of gorgeous profoundness for a minute or so; however, beyond the
initial impression, the band did not find a proper way to develop the melody,
so the song pretty much dug itself a profound pit in a matter of seconds, and
then just stayed there.
Of course, it is still very hard to understand
if there actually is anything that
B.S.S. are «about». The line "I get world sick everytime I take a
stand" may ring true with many people, but B.S.S. still think too much of
themselves to allow the words and the music to shed some of its ambiguity — and
if the band is transmitting any «message» at all, it hardly does itself a favor
by ending the album with a song titled ʽMe And My Handʼ: "Me and
my hand / We've been together since I was born", sung in a «John Lennon
circa 1979, baking bread with one hand and playing guitar with the other» sort
of style, is an awful idea to end the album, and a good reminder that, no matter
how much of an overall improvement the whole thing is, it is still the product
of a «B-grade» band at best, sometimes lapsing into C-grade.
Still, a step up is a step up — essentially,
there are more «pop» elements here than «rock» ones, and for Broken Social
Scene, whose emotional palette rather consists of moody optimism and
intelligent hope than depression, aggression, and sociopathy, this is a good,
adequate shift of focus. Throw in the seductive lady singers and occasional
hooks, and a thumbs
up becomes self-explainable. I will not force myself into the
delusion that any of this stuff will have much «staying power», but as long as
it did stay around, it was pretty decent entertainment this time.
ADDENDA:
SPIRIT IF... (2007)
1) Farewell To The Pressure
Kids; 2) TBTF; 3) F-ked Up Kid; 4) Safety Bricks; 5) Lucky Ones; 6) Broke Me
Up; 7) Gang Bang Suicide; 8) Frightening Lives; 9) Underneath The Skin; 10) Big
Love; 11) Backed Out On The...; 12) Aging Faces / Losing Places; 13) Bodhi
Sappy Weekend; 14) When It Begins.
Apparently, the strange lull in activity for
BSS in between 2005 and 2010 was only a formality. What really happened during
that period is that the two figureheads, Kevin Drew and Brandon Canning, both
released a «solo» album in the interim. However, in this particular case this
does not even count as «taking some time off» — the only thing about these
records that is really «solo», as far as I can tell, is that the songs on
Kevin's album were mostly written by Kevin and the songs on Brendan's album
were mostly written by Brendan. But considering that the two have more or less
the same amount of songwriting talent; share more or less the same influences
and conceptions; have similarly un-annoying, but un-engaging, vocal styles; and
even sport comparable indie-size amounts of facial hair — all these things
considered, should we even begin to care about who wrote what on which album?
Other than that, Brendan plays on Kevin's
album, Kevin plays on Brendan's, and a solid chunk, or maybe even all of,
Broken Social Scene's instrumental corps is engaged in both places, so do not
be deceived by the «Broken Social Scene Presents...» moniker: both albums are
simply two more Broken Social Scene albums for all grateful victims of the
social scene breakup. As an arbitrary
compromise, they are placed here in the «addenda» section, but really,
it's all quite legit.
Furthermore, it's not as if Kevin's Spirit If... is an «unusual» Broken
Social Scene album. All the ingredients are present: folk-rock and pop-rock
basics, wild love for wild overdubs, intellectualized attraction towards
weird or provocative titles (I can assure you that if you came here because of
the title ʽGang Bang Suicideʼ, you will be most disappointed upon hearing the actual song), and overtly tepid
melodies that take such a long time to sink in, most people probably just don't
have that kind of free time on their hands.
Let me be brief and just list a few moments
that turned out to be likeable in the end. As far as I can tell by the end of
the fourth (or was it fifth?) listen, the record does not really begin to hit
the proper stride until ʽLucky Onesʼ — a bombastic anthem for which
Drew actually found a «lucky» joy-riff; he was so proud of it that he decided
not to put anything else of interest
in the song, and just hammer it in, over and over, until the very last moment.
As the music finally dies down and he uses the last bar to hit it out one last
time on solo piano, you can almost feel the sweat of pride trickling down the
keys. But it ain't that great a melodic
phrase, mind you.
The best song, coming immediately afterwards,
is probably the shuffling ballad ʽBroke Me Upʼ, and again, its only
real claim to fame is the repetitive chorus — there is something
surreptitiously sweet and touching about how the colorful slide guitar in the
background echoes the chorus of "everybody broke me up", whatever
that line should mean, if anything. The hazy, dissipated bits of piano pop
chords in the background create a tasty ambience as well.
Of the harder rocking numbers, ʽBacked Out
On The...ʼ is probably the best one, but again, through endless repetition of the modestly hooky chorus
rather than any cunning combination of musical factors. ʽFrightening
Livesʼ, combining electronically treated vocals, guitars, and drum machines,
has more of a retro-New Wave feel, but, just as well, only thing stands out in
the song — a deeply moody, gothic-style chiming guitar line counterbalancing
the verse vocals, something that somebody in the BSS camp could have come
across in his sleep after finishing the day off with a listen to Joy Division's
Closer or something like that.
All in all, no big surprises: the album is a
steady grower, with each listen bringing you a step closer to the idea that
this is not, in fact, completely
generic indie rock, but something beyond that. Except that I'm on my fourth
(fifth?) listen, and I still can't quite
latch on to that idea. Maybe I am asking too much, and one repetitive hook per
song should keep me contented... but I'd rather just go back to, oh, I dunno,
Blondie for instance — less overdubs, for sure, and a whole lot less pretense
at mining something deeply meaningful, but so much more meat, if you get my meaning.
SOMETHING FOR ALL OF US... (2008)
1) Something For All Of Us; 2)
Chameleon; 3) Hit The Wall; 4) Snowballs & Icicles; 5) Churches Under The
Stairs; 6) Love Is New; 7) Antique Bull; 8) All The Best Wooden Toys Come From
Germany; 9) Possible Grenade; 10) Been At It So Long; 11) Take Care, Look Up.
Well, er, I suppose that Brendan Canning
quickly followed up on Kevin Drew's «solo» album with his own one since he
wanted us to insightfully compare his individual artistic vision with that of
his partner. The trouble is, once I'd finished listening to Something For All Of Us..., I forgot
absolutely everything I remembered about Spirit
If..., so, what with this thing about a reviewer's responsibility and all,
I honestly went back to Spirit If...
and gave it another twist. But then it turned out that, by the time the last
song was over, I could not keep in mind even a single thing about Something For All Of Us... So, not
wanting to disappoint my readers, I immersed myself once again in Brendan
Canning's one-and-only solo oeuvre. It was not an unpleasant listen, but,
needless to say, once I finally got down to the review, there was nothing in my
head to compare it with. For some reason, Drew and Canning just couldn't share
adjacent space in my memory cells. It was then that I finally got it — the two
guys' styles are so similar that they act upon each other like two positive
charges. Whatever you do, don't
listen to them in a row. Put some AC/DC in between, or maybe a full CD of
didgeridoo soloing.
Anyway, it's too late to be drawing serious
comparisons now, so just a few quick words on whether this «Broken Social
Scene Presents: Brendan Canning» thing has any autonomous value, or if it can
be used to generate awesome epiphanies in the brain, or if we should encourage
the author to develop this style even further. These few quick words, in their
correct order, are: it hasn't, it cannot, and we shouldn't. Nice sound overall,
though.
Apparently, Canning favours a slightly heavier
sound than Drew: there are more distorted guitar parts here, more forceful
percussion rhythms, and the anthem-to-ballad ratio seems a little heavier on
the anthem side. But none of it matters, since most of the anthems are just
straightahead «alt-pop» without any extraordinary melodic content. You know
something is definitely not right
here when the «element of surprise» on the album consists of unexpectedly
encountering a disco bass line on one of the songs (ʽLove Is Newʼ) —
as if this decision had some deep meaning (in reality, most likely, it is just
part of the same old nostalgic trend, where people raised on disco, even if
they thought they hated it when they were in their teens, were still
surreptitiously encoded to return to it twenty or thirty years later).
Of the rest, ʽChurches Under The
Stairsʼ has some funny falsetto awoo-awooing; ʽAll The Best Wooden
Toys Come From Germanyʼ is a short and pretty «ambient-folk» instrumental
in the vein of BSS' first album; ʽPossible Grenadeʼ has a powerful
riff-based coda; and that's all, folks — everything else is non-descript
inasmuch as it can all be described by the small world of formulae long since
set in stone. No better and no worse than the average BSS album, I think that Something For All Of Us... should be
legally sued for moral damage by the word «something» — and honestly, I'd take
something really wild, offensive, and
disgusting, like Ted Nugent, over this sterile-packed «Piece Of Mass Art For
The Progressively Illuminated 21st Century Art Lover» any time of day. Thumbs down.
BURIAL (2006)
1) Untitled; 2) Distant
Lights; 3) Spacescape; 4) Wounder; 5) Night Bus; 6) Southern Comfort; 7) U Hurt
Me; 8) Gutted; 9) Forgive; 10) Broken Home; 11) Prayer; 12) Pirates; 13)
Untitled.
Apparently, for the first few years of his
career, William Bevan did not even reveal his true identity, stating out of
the gloom that he was «a lowkey person» and that he «just wants to make some
tunes, nothing else». It was known only that he was holed up somewhere in
London, hooked up to a computer with Sony Sound Forge, and some went as far as
to suggest that he was really Aphex Twin in disguise. Reality turned out to be
less extravagant than we usually want it to be, but, fortunately, this has
little bearing on the extravagance of the music.
The genre labels for Burial's self-titled debut
that one usually encounters involve «2-step», «dubsteb», «UK garage», etc.,
but all of this is misleading — yes, with a little effort you might learn to dance to these tunes, yet
there is really no serious reason why you should: the real reason why Burial's
output is valued so highly is in the atmosphere, not in the beats. And that
atmosphere... how should I put it? Well, from my old-timer school's
perspective, let me put it this way: Burial sounds as if, above everything
else, it drew its chief influence from Side 2 of David Bowie's Heroes — particularly ʽSense Of
Doubtʼ; and this point stands even if the resemblance is purely
coincidental (which I doubt, since no respectable electronic musician these
days may be ignorant on the subject of the «Berlin Trilogy»).
«Burial» is right, in fact — it is basically an album about burial, with
so many of its beats sounding like dull shovels pounding against the clodded
earth and loose rocks of the graveyard. What this album really has on so many
other electronic productions is that all of its tracks merge together in a
genuine sense of purpose, and that purpose (the way I interpret it) is — to
picture a devastated, bombed-into-oblivion, post-apocalyptic planet where
lonely ghosts, occasional zombies, roaches, and loose radio signals represent
the only remaining traces of life. (Strange enough, no Keith Richards in sight,
though — must be a parallel universe after all).
The actual samples used by Bevan do not
interest me in the slightest — the only point of interest is in that they are
deliciously random, ranging from bits of Benicio del Toro's dialog in 21 Grams to reggae (Sizzla) to ambient
(Eno) to mainstream R&B (Ashanti and Destiny's Child). But they all get the
same treatment regardless of their original context: Ashanti's "you hurt
me" from ʽFoolishʼ is a ghostly echo now, rising out of some
dreary chasm that the nuclear fallout and the acid rains have ripped in the
former heart of the city, barely registering against the incessant pummeling
of the excavator and the vaguely mid-Eastern shreds of melodies emanating from
the earth's pores.
What makes Burial
so particularly spooky is that there is nothing intentionally and arrogantly
look-at-me-I'm-so-spooky about it. The beats — and all other sounds, for that
matter — are decidedly quiet and inobtrusive. Nothing ever «builds up» to
anything — most «songs» end the same way they started out, so the only suspense
to be experienced is found in between the tracks. There is no danger in the
air, because it seems as if everything dangerous that could have happened already has
— even if there are zombies here, they seem to have completely lost interest in
anything other than simply hobbling around, moaning and groaning in quietly
stunned mode. The two-minute long sonic scape called ʽNight Busʼ is
not about going anywhere — it is actually a beatless, rhythmless ambient
interlude that focuses, at best, on the rusty remains of a night bus that has
long since run its last run. The only serious tension throughout is provided by
the bass frequencies — «sensed» rather than «heard», they are the perfect
embodiment of the technogenic catastrophe residue, and have a primary role in
creating the overall illusion.
Individual tracks do not need any description
here: this is a cohesive experience where separation of ingredients will only
decrease the admiration. Naturally, the pictorial interpretation that I offer
here is far from the only one possible, but at least I can honestly state that
Bevan paints a musical landscape that is open to a concrete interpretation —
one that borrows heavily from the experience of, say, Autechre, but is at the
same time much more accessible than Autechre. I am not interested in the
slightest if Burial does indeed
«legitimize dubstep», as Jason Birchmeier proclaims in the All-Music Guide
review — its formal percussive trappings are just that, formal percussive
trappings. What matters is only that, if you listen to it long enough, you might start believing that what you
hear on it is the future of humanity. And that's sufficiently creepy — not to
mention oh so frickin' dark-romantic! — to justify a thumbs up.
UNTRUE (2007)
1) Untitled; 2) Archangel; 3)
Near Dark; 4) Ghost Hardware; 5) Endorphin; 6) In McDonalds; 7) Untrue; 8)
Shell Of Light; 9) Dog Shelter; 10) Homeless; 11) UK; 12) Raver.
Supposedly, the only way I can say something vaguely interesting about Untrue that has not already been said
by the ranters and ravers — and there have been quite a few of them around
2007, with Burial's second album predictably making even more of a splash than
the first one, since this one was already expected — is by keeping up those
visual interpretations. Naturally, Untrue
is a logical sequel to Burial,
conceived and executed in similar ways, built on similar ideas, and producing
similar reactions. But if there are at least a few departures, how does that
agree with the impression of a devastated post-World War III planet?
Well, the one thing that is different is that Untrue
is a little busier. Its compositions may feature two samples instead of one, or
three instead of two. Or there might be one or two extra layers of electronics.
Most interestingly, there is a heavy increase in vocal samples of R&B
artists — compared to Burial,
almost every composition is populated with them, and now Aaliyah, Erykah Badu,
Amanda Perez, and even Christina Aguilera have joined the roster. Coupled with
Burial's dark bass and post-industrial electronics, their vocal loops represent
the kinkiest in ironic deconstruction. If I were any of them, I'd probably
start campaigning for a ban on sampling now
— this is a prime example of «no-fair! use» (as opposed to «unfair»).
On the other hand, there are so many of these
vocal bits now that they can no longer be interpreted as the symbolic last
remains of human voices on the destroyed (deconstructed?) Earth. Rather, this
might be the start of the rebirth cycle — the little ambient melodies that
manage to break through the core of the bass frequencies and the vinyl crackle
represent the world beginning to slowly get back on its feet (even if you have
to use the vocal talents of Ray J. and Beyoncé to achieve the set
goals).
In other words, Untrue is not nearly as «creepy» as its predecessor — and,
consequently, not nearly as thrilling, at least not for those who have already,
like me, formulated their own «rules of the universe according to Burial». It only takes playing the
lead-in tracks back-to-back: ʽDistant Lightsʼ with its metallic hum
and clanging midsize robots carrying on with their daily tasks, and
ʽArchangelʼ, with its pseudo-Mellotron electronic backgrounds and Ray
J.'s pleading, high-pitched vocals looped so densely that the whole track
begins to resemble a goddamn prayer.
Of course, we're back in the dark on the
correspondingly titled ʽNear Darkʼ, but even that track is
hyper-populated with vocals that carry out their rotten task of humanizing the
robotic beats. ʽGhost Hardwareʼ is a great title, and the interaction
between the sampled Aguilera and the electronics is ghostly indeed, but still
there is no genuine sense of danger. Darkness, perhaps, but a peaceful,
non-threatening — at least, not immediately
threatening — kind of darkness. Later on, there will even be moments of
majestic darkness: ʽDog Shelterʼ, for instance, completely free of
beats and sounding as if it had been stolen out of one of Eno's vaults.
From this point of view, Untrue is a bit of a letdown for me. The combination of dubstep
formalities with ye old time industrial and dark ambient stylistics that this
guy latched on to was not tremendously unique or innovative, but it was quite a
find, certainly much more of a find than you'd expect from one of the several
million wannabe electronic wizards dicking around with prepackaged software.
Here, it already seems a bit sissied-up and diluted, shedding some of that atmosphere
— even if, paradoxically, I suppose that more
work must have been invested in Untrue
than in its predecessor. But this is just one of those cases where too many
ingredients do not exactly spoil the broth, yet somewhat cancel out each other.
Still, a thumbs up, because if my visualisation fails, it's
just my problem, right? In most respects, nothing has really
changed, and if your perception of this kind of music follows more abstract
guidelines, you might not even notice this seeming transition from «dark black»
to «dark gray» in this guy's work (to an extent, reflected even on the album
sleeves, as I have noticed). In any case, the moods are still there, along with
an occasional surprise or two (such as the evil bass swoops on ʽEtched
Headplateʼ, grinning at the wimpy R&B samples), and even if the world
according to Burial is no longer as thoroughly bleak a place to live in, it is
still desolate enough to impress a mind like mine, normally bored to death with
this kind of electronic patchwork.
STREET HALO / KINDRED (2012)
1) Street Halo; 2) NYC; 3)
Stolen Dog; 4) Kindred; 5) Loner; 6) Ashtray Wasp.
Beat Records took the trouble of releasing two
of Burial's EPs, Street Halo from
2011 and Kindred from 2012, on a
single CD — considering that they are ideologically quite close, this makes for
a cozy enough «third album» to merit one more autonomous review: after all,
much to Burial's honor, he does not regard electronic music recording as some
sort of inevitable daily activity, on par with going to the bathroom, like
quite a few of his peers do.
This does not automatically ensure that each
new release of a Burial album turns into a mind-blowing event, but these two
EPs, in particular, certainly go a step further than Untrue, and, I would say, more or less in the same direction in
which Untrue alienated itself from
the self-titled debut — namely, the music is gradually becoming louder and
livelier, as if, indeed, the guy were busy constructing his own «cycle of
life», where Burial represented the
post-apocalyptic «cockroaches, Cher, & Keith Richards» phase, Untrue was the baby organic matter
recomposing itself after a lengthy wait period, and now these two EPs let you
hear the newly developed steady pulse of life — immune not only to extreme
radiation exposure, but even to dirty vinyl scratching.
The big difference, of course, is that, for the
first time in Burial history, the dance beats are not only perfectly audible
and usable, but they are also all over the place. ʽStreet Haloʼ employs
a relatively straight techno track, to which Burial pins all his usual
trademarks (melancholic ambient synthesizers and vocal samples lifted from
select R&B ballads). On ʽNYCʼ, the rhythms are more tricky, with
an industrial flavor, but loud, precise, and predictable enough for the track
to be classified as «body-oriented» — and then on ʽStolen Dogʼ the
techno aspects are back, although, to be fair, all of the tracks are
multi-part: every now and then, the beats sink into the mud, and the music takes
some time to reform and regroup.
Kindred takes this liveliness even further by adding
speed and frenzy — not on the title track, which mainly reproduces the
atmosphere of ʽNYCʼ, but certainly on ʽLonerʼ, where not
only the beats, but even the synthesizers are subjected to some rather unusual
acceleration by Burial's standards (resulting in a slightly paranoid,
never-stop impression not unlike the one triggered by Pink Floyd's ʽOn The
Runʼ), and on the first part of ʽAshtray Waspʼ, whose rhythmic
and melodic parts have really little to do with the image of an ashtray wasp —
the fast-moving synth loops suggest dynamic journeying rather than immobile
decomposing insect flesh.
That said, whether all this change is for the
better or for the worse remains an open question. The transition from a largely
«static» sound to a more dynamic ambience may give us reviewers something to
write about, but it also steals away some of the bold charm that was the main reason to listen to and speak
well of Burial in the first place. Ever so often, I catch myself thinking that,
on their own, these tracks have nothing important to add to our understanding
of electronic music ever since Richard D. James had expanded it so thoroughly
even before the new millennium crept in. In context — yeah, sure, «death
breeding life» and all that stuff that crept into my mind while trying to
visualize the offered sonic ambience. But solitary standing — not really.
Granted, both EPs were generally met with tremendous
praise by the critics: Kindred, in
particular, has received plenty of ecstatic rave reviews («never before has his music possessed this
much majesty, this much command, this much power: the pathos here has moved
from sympathetic to completely domineering», writes Andrew Ryce at Pitchfork,
making me question the very essence of such terms as ʽmajestyʼ and
ʽpowerʼ, neither of which I would ever associate with the music of
Burial). But honestly, in terms of sheer substance, I see little, if any,
progress here: basically, this is just the same solid Burial formula, made a
bit more accessible for the average electronic listener. As such, this pair of
EPs does deserve a solid thumbs up, but it hardly seems to deserve the «amazing technicolor
breakthrough» tag that certain people suffering from long / short-term memory
loss have been so keen on sticking to it.
WHY WRITING ABOUT MUSIC BEATS DANCING ABOUT
ARCHITECTURE
(A
sort of postface-in-progress)
1. Police And Thieves
One of today's trademarks is that many people
write about music. No, that didn't sound too convincing.
One of the inescapabilities of today is that a hell of a shitload of people
write about music. A brief stroll through Amazon.com or RateYourMusic.com will,
in fact, create the impression that most people write about music, and those
few that do not write about music are either tonedeaf or do not have Internet
access. And even then, they still talk about the music, which is, come to think
of it, hardly different from writing about it. The only difference is in the recipient
— somehow, writing about music is supposed to be coming from those who have
interesting things to say about it, whereas simply talking about music requires
no deep commitment, since it puts no one into a preaching position.
Obviously, all these people write about all this music (or any other
art form, for that matter) primarily because the modern age has provided
them, by means of the Internet, with the golden opportunity of having
themselves heard — and even listened to, provided they can capture somebody's
interest. In a matter of a few more years, we will quite likely be forgetting
that before "Liberation Day", the situation was different: musical
criticism was a profession like any other, for which you got paid, but for
which you also had to be somehow "qualified" — for instance, have a
musical, or at least a journalist, education.
Today, professional musical criticism still
exists — and, as long as the critics can still publish their columns in printed
periodicals, it is bound to go on; but its special prerogatives are close to
evaporating, as their reviews drown further and further in the ocean of amateur
criticism that is flooding the Internet. This is a plain
fact; it is neither wonderful nor awful in itself, so it is up to all of us to
make the best use of it rather than the worst.
Professional criticism has its advantages. People who engage in it are
generally expected to write well, in a language that is aesthetically pleasing
all by itself, so that one might enjoy a good critical review of something one
hasn't even been planning on seeing or hearing, let alone having actually seen
or heard. They are expected to be knowledgeable — both on the artists they're
writing about and on the basic rules of the game (such as music theory). Finally,
although we rarely pronounce it aloud, they're expected to simply be smarter
than the average Joe — even in the Golden Age of political correctness, no one
has put under question the idea that some people are more intelligent than
others, and I'd rather read a review from an intelligent critic than a dumbass,
and I suppose even a dumbass would back me up here.
On practice, though, it is all but useless to
expect that the professional critic will possess all these qualities in
abundance. For one thing, the demand for criticism seems
to be much higher than the supply — most people want a pool of opinions and
judgements to choose from rather than simply expect a single guru to guide them
through art. For another, good critics cannot be trained; they got to have a
gift, just like the artists they're writing about, and gifts are scarce by
definition. And history shows us fairly well that, much too often,
"training" and "gift" do not go hand in hand at all:
well-trained writers may be boring and irrelevant, and gifted writers may
simply not be given a chance to write — or to publish, which, until recently,
was pretty much the same thing.
In that respect, the emergence of Internet-based amateur criticism is a
terrific opportunity. It does burden the reader with the necessity of sifting
through tons of garbage to find that one pearl, but today, this kind of
behaviour seems to be the norm of civilized life anyway — in all respects. The
garbage will inevitably sink to the bottom eventually, while really talented
people like James Berardinelli, for the movies, or Mark Prindle, for the
music, will live on for at least some time; and wouldn't we be deprived of the
pleasure of reading their stuff if it weren't for Web publishing?
However, the main issue here is not exactly what good is Web
publishing, but rather why it exists in the first place. What drives people,
even those who are not professionally educated musicologists or professionally
trained musicians, to opinionate in written form? And — a connected, but
different question: what drives other people to read their output?
2. My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts
Obviously, I cannot speak on behalf of anyone but myself, yet I have
reasons to believe my answer would be typical of many. I have been an avid
music listener and lover from early childhood — at first, limited and
conservative, later, not so much so, although some musical forms still remain
pretty much inaccessible to my soul — and at some point, my desire to take had
somehow morphed into an almost equally strong desire to give, to not let the
impressions, feelings, thoughts and conclusions that my listening generates
within myself to go to waste, but to be able to show them to anyone who might
be interested in looking at them. Who knows, said I, maybe this will be able to
do some unknown good, and then my musical immersion would not simply be born
and be deceased with my own birth and death, but serve some extra purpose as
well. Sort of a "missionary drive", if you like.
Of course, this is presumptuous. Who am I to make my opinions matter?
Basically a nobody — not a musician, not a musicologist, not even a superb
connoisseur of the pop culture, and not even a native English speaker. There
are so many people in the world who are better "qualified" for this
line of work than me, it's not even funny. And who am I to give someone
something? How have I been authorized? How have I even been able to suppose
that someone might want to consider taking this bullshit from me?
The answers are simple: you cannot really know
until you try. If all of us started operating based on
this logic, chances are nobody would ever get nothing done in the world — we'd
spend more time doubting our capacity to do something rather than simply trying
to do it. For me, the realization that the work I'd done was not entirely
useless came in once I started getting — on a regular basis — E-mails of
support from people whose knowledge and intellectual power, as it seemed to me,
exceeded mine, sometimes vastly. If anything, these letters showed that the
"giving" process was at least partially successful, and that kept me
going.
There were, and still are, other kinds of
letters, of course — ranging from polite disagreements and corrections to
violent flames, sometimes deserved in all fairness. But
those, too, convinced me that I was moving in the right direction; if, to those
people, all that crap I wrote seemed deserving of a written answer, then there
must have been something to it. The only thing that would have completely
discouraged me could have been complete indifference, and people were not indifferent,
and that was nice to know.
What I discovered was this: there were plenty of interesting people who
were quite willing to take from me — and give in return, usually in the form of
reader comments, but sometimes even in the form of mailed CDs of music they
wanted me to review, some of which, I am ashamed to admit, I have not even had
the time to listen to so far. Sometimes I was enriching their experience — by
making them look at some piece of music in a new light, or even by making them
want to go out and get a new piece of music — and sometimes they were enriching
mine in response, in the very same ways. The thing became an endless, but never
boring cycle of "showing off" (in the good sense of the expression,
if it ever had one) between myself and my readers, and every new loop would
usually leave one of us more open-minded than before. The mutual benefits were
good.
Then, at one point, the rut set in, and a
crisis was imminent. First came the understanding that the
process is endless; timeless musical masterpieces may be few, but
"good" music stretches out to infinity, in width as well as in depth,
and my idealistic "encyclopaedic" dreams of covering everything
worth covering were shattered and smashed (especially by the likes of Tangerine
Dream and by the fact that, as we progress further in time, the number of
musical artists seems to grow on an exponential basis).
Second came the understanding that I had run out of things to say —
there's only so many different words in the English language, and far from all
of them are easily applicable to a music review, and this brings on the
horrible idea that, perhaps, if you catch yourself applying the exact same
words to a dozen different albums by different artists in different times, this
might mean that the music sounds exactly the same? And if it does not, what
good it is to try and capture its essence with such inadequate means? And even
if you write in different ways, what does the difference between "this
album packs a real wallop of energy" and "this album stomps along
like a 4,000-pound black rhino" really imply to your reader? Maybe it
means something to you the writer, but what if your readers just don't get it
anyway? Or, worse, are animal-haters?..
At a moment like this, the only thing that
keeps you going is understanding that, if you just drop it, this means you have
wasted an awful amount of time and potential with all your previous writing. There is also the idea of "obligation": people who like to
read you expect you to entertain them further, and maybe they have a certain
flimsy right to. But going on just for the sake of going on isn't a lot of fun,
either. One can slow down, lose whatever quality one possessed before, or simply
go off on all kinds of tangents (something akin to what happened to Mark
Prindle, who used to match the definition of 'oddbeat music reviewer' but,
today, is more of a cross between Lester Bangs and George Carlin — still a
great read, but you have to be equipped with a metaphoric magnifying glass to
actually find scraps of music-related text floating on the waves of his endless
impressionistic rants about whatever has just wandered into his head).
What I am coming to is this: it's fun to write about music at first,
but eventually you start to think that, perhaps, it would be a nice change to
dance about architecture instead. This is where the professional critic has you
on your knees: he, at least, is getting paid for his work, and money is a big factor
here, especially if you don't really know how to do anything else for money.
But that doesn't mean that money is a solid guarantee for quality; even the
best paid critics rarely go on being interesting for all of their lives. If
you need an example, take a look at Robert Christgau. (And let's not even
mention Jann Wenner).
3. Baby, What You Want Me To Do
Actually, speaking of Robert Christgau and his ilk, there is at least
one major plus about reading his brief, snug, holier-than-Jah snippets: he has
been around for so long, and has written about so much different stuff, that he
has managed to give his regular readers a near-complete, wholesome picture of
the critic as a young, mature, and old man combined. One may not agree with the
values of "Pop Music Filtered Through The Bowels Of R. C.", but it is
hard to argue that the bowels of R. C. are completely incapable of filtering
music, or that they are not, per se, a relatively interesting place to visit.
Let us not forget that, although all people are different, this
variation is not nearly as high as a hyper-individualistic mind would like to
imagine, and quite a few of us have their bowels genetically programmed in a
way that is very similar, or maybe even completely identical, to that of R. C.
For such people, R. C. will hold a particular interest, and, most likely, will
display a major predictability force. Others may not share his views
completely, but intersect with them in some points. Still others will rather want to align
themselves with the likes of Mark Prindle, or Wilson & Alroy from www.warr.org.
The rather obvious trend, as my experience has
shown me, is that people usually value musical criticism not so much according
to the literary skills or erudition of the writer, but according to how much
their opinions on music coincide with those of the writer. This gives even us the illiterates plenty of hope: we may write like
third-graders, but we are still bound to find admiring fans because we think the
same thoughts of Led Zeppelin. Or, on the contrary, you may be a reincarnation
of Lenny Bruce, Nabokov, and Jean-Paul Sartre combined, but you will still be
hailed an incompetent hack by the first reader who takes insult at your
sacrilegious treatment of the German industrial scene.
In the end, once you have reached your 1,000th
review, you probably will have used up all of your words, idioms, and
metaphors, regardless of whether you have the gift of a Shakespeare or of a Dan
Quayle. But you are not doing this to be really deep or
witty; superficial musical criticism isn't drama of the highest order. You're
doing this to show your readers on which shelf of your preferences this or that
piece of music is supposed to go, preferably with a bit of explanation (you
could just give out ratings and leave it at that, but it's kind of boring and
doesn't provide for a good opportunity to kill time, which is the main stimulus
for people to read criticism).
For some reason (call it youthful stupidity), it seemed important to me
to make each review as long as possible; the usual explanation was something
along the lines of "every piece of music, no matter how bad it is, took
time and effort to produce, so shouldn't an honest review also take time and
effort?", but in reality I was probably just trying to come out
"smarter" than the lazy stupid competitors on the market. Some people
liked it, most did not. Looking back at some of that stuff, I am amazed at much
of the empty, redundant verbosity — it's one thing to write a mini-monograph on
something like Blonde On Blonde, which deserves a dozen big monographs
by itself, but a five-page review on AC/DC's Ballbreaker? Did I even
write that? Geez. That, of course, is also one key factor of why I fell out of
the reviewing process: forcing myself to come up with ideas even when the
fields lay completely fallow. It all went in the wrong direction.
This, then, is my next and probably last effort
to reboot and make some good use of my previous experience. The decision is not to repeat the past mistakes — and write what I
think should be written, and not one sentence above that. This does not imply the
opposite, namely, that all the reviews will be as laconic as possible; plenty
of records inspire plenty of thoughts. But that is much more likely to be
expected from the likes of the Beatles or Frank Zappa than the likes of Albert
King or J. J. Cale.
One other important decision is that I will not
be making much use of my earlier reviews. Rereading some
of them, I understand that, regardless of how good or bad they are, most need
rewriting, and usually it is more difficult and takes more time to rewrite a
review than to produce a new one, not just because of the editorial work but
also because you are essentially one person in your twenties and a seriously
different one in your thirties. I
have softened up on some stuff and hardened up on some other, which is, I
guess, natural (but, thank Heaven, I still love ABBA and still think that Bob
Dylan's Selfportrait is vastly underrated); more importantly, too many
of the reviews were too heavily dependent on the «name each song, come up with
some observation about it» principle, which I cannot and will not uphold any
longer.
So, let us wait and see. To be continued.